ECLIPSE (6 page)

For the moment, Pierce suppressed his curiosity. “Maybe. But the voice my friends and I too often heard said, ‘Don’t aim too high or stray too far when the greatest aspiration is the afterlife.’ And so I, like my sister, went to Boston College. Then I graduated summa cum laude and really
did
rebel.”

“You decided to become Jack Kerouac?”

Pierce shook his head. “In the end, I was too steeped in practicality. But,
to my parents’ horror, I decided on Harvard Law School, that coven of atheists. Instead of going to B.C. law school on the scholarship they offered.”

“How did you manage?”

“Luck, of course. The financial aid office at Harvard didn’t have enough to pay my way. So they directed me to a book with the daunting title
Restricted Scholarships.
Nothing doing: the restrictions were things like ‘Latvian-Americans,’ or ‘graduates of Yale.’” Pierce smiled. “Then, on the second-to-last page, I found the ‘William Stoughton Bequest.’

“The bequest dated back to 1750. Stoughton was, as I recall, a colonial governor of Massachusetts. His only stipulation was that the recipient of his largesse had to come from Dorchester . . .”

“Like it was written for you.”

Pierce laughed. “Stoughton was a total WASP—judging from the oil painting I saw later, the last thing he’d imagined was empowering the Irish hordes. But in 1750 there
were
no Irish living in Dorchester. So William Stoughton became my benefactor. Even my father saw the humor in it. And, of course, the luck.”

Marissa gave him a keen look. “Do you still feel lucky?”

“Yes,” he answered seriously. “I take nothing for granted—least of all, despite its faults, this country. If my father hadn’t come to America, God knows who I’d be.”

Marissa frowned, then shrugged dismissively. “It probably makes a difference if your ancestors came as volunteers. My father’s did. My mother’s didn’t.”

Something in her tone suggested that the subject was closed—perhaps because its complexities, as suggested by her short story, involved far more than race. Pierce decided to leave it there. Only later did he perceive that this caution was a form of caring, and that he did not wish to lose a woman he did not even have.

C
HIEF
F
EMI
O
KARI AWAITED
B
OBBY AND
M
ARISSA IN THE MAIN
room of his home. By village standards, it was sumptuous, with rugs covering the floor and another hanging on the wall behind him, depicting the chief in ceremonial robes. He sat in his ornate carved chair, holding his cane of office, and his robes and gold-beaded headdress reflected those in the portrait. His face was somber, his voice low. “A word,” he told Bobby. “Before darkness comes.”

Bobby hesitated before nodding. The curt gesture spoke to Marissa of the deep conflict between them, their years of estrangement, and the ingrained deference of the young for the old, a son for his father. “I have heard from Eric Aboh,” the chief said. “Leave your plans for another day.”

“So
you
are part of this,” Bobby burst out with an anger so raw that Marissa flinched. “You conspire with Eric and the others to betray me.”

“Betray
you?
” his father asked in a tone of incredulity. “We are
frightened,
as would be any man of reason. Tell me, do you think Okimbo’s offer of ‘protection’ made Aboh feel
safe?
Eric understands well enough what that could mean, and so do you.” His voice lowered again. “I am still chief of this village. If I ask my people to disperse, they will.”

Bobby managed a dismissive smile. “Will they, now? It is thirty years since you became chief, scarcely longer than the time you have taken PGL money and allowed ‘your’ people to scavenge for themselves in the cesspool you have left them. Especially our youth.” When his father stiffened with outrage, Bobby continued, “Take Marissa’s favorite. By next
year Omo may be a prostitute in Waro; in five years she may be dead of AIDS. But you will still be ‘chief of this village.’

“Do ‘your’ people know of your fine house in Port George, the young women you keep there with the money PGL gives you to ‘compensate’ them for this ruin of
their
land? If they do, it is not because I’ve told them. I am, despite all, a dutiful son.”

His father scrutinized him with weary eyes. “So this is still about your mother.”

Watching, Marissa wished she could turn away. Bobby’s gaze expressed only pity and contempt. “How much weight you give, Father, to the most paltry of your sins.”

Femi Okari gazed at his only son as his face sagged with regret. Then he stood, abandoning all ceremony to place a hand on Bobby’s shoulder as he looked into his face. “I have made mistakes. They are painful. I do not wish for you to make a mistake more painful than losing a son, at a cost to many more people than one old man. Please, heed me.”

Bobby met his eyes. Then, his face closing, he slowly shook his head. “Too late, Father. For us both.”

Without waiting for his father’s answer, Bobby left. Glancing over her shoulder, Marissa saw Femi Okari shake his head.

At the center of Goro, the villagers had gathered, their mood shadowed by fear of Karama and by the passage of the moon, its edge now appearing to touch the sun. As Bobby moved toward them, his cell phone rang.

He answered swiftly, eyes fixed on Marissa as he listened. Briefly, they shut. Before hanging up, Bobby said quietly, “Be safe.”

Once more his gaze met Marissa’s. “That was Atiku,” he said. “In Ebu, the demonstration has collapsed. In most villages people are afraid to leave their houses. There are whispers that our youth lynched those workers on my orders.”

“Is that possible?” Marissa asked. “Not on your orders, but despite them?”

Bobby stared at the ground with hooded eyes. “So many of our youth are filled with hatred. It’s as though violence is in the water we cannot drink and the air that singes our lungs.” He came to her, placing his hands on her shoulders. “We are truly alone, Marissa. Those rumors about me are part of it.”

Looking into his face, Marissa searched for a way to ask him to disperse the crowd. “Think of what you’ve already done. You’ve given the Asari identity and purpose.”

Bobby smiled faintly. “And now I should stop?”

“Not stop. Pause.”

He angled his head to indicate the gathering. “In ten minutes the eclipse will be upon us; in another ten I will send them home. But now is not the moment for me to show fear. Please, Marissa, do not make me afraid.”

He held her gaze for one more moment. Then he took a cigarette lighter from his pocket and snapped it once, then twice more. When it did not light, he took out another. As this one produced a flame, Bobby laughed softly.

“Always prepare,” he said. He straightened, standing taller, and walked toward the crowd and into the lengthening shadow of the eclipse.

A
T
S
EA
R
ANCH
, P
IERCE GLANCED AT HIS WATCH AGAIN.

It was just after midnight. In the deep black surrounding him, unfiltered by city lights, he imagined the darkness moving toward Goro. Then, as vividly, he recalled the night his relationship to Marissa proved as complex as he had begun to sense it was.

T
HAT EVENING HAD
begun no differently than others. The two of them emerged from class, debating a classmate’s story that she liked and he disdained. “I call it ‘ennui fiction,’” he said as they reached the sidewalk, “where the main character wakes up, discovers his hair dryer doesn’t work, perceives that as a metaphor, and decides not to leave his apartment—”

“I thought it was sensitive.”

“What about ‘enervated’? If the guy in that story came to life, you wouldn’t give him a nanosecond.” Pierce turned to her. “So where are we going to dinner? Stories that go nowhere make me hungry.”

Marissa considered this. “I don’t feel like being waited on,” she said. “Tonight I feel more like pizza from a box.”

“Fine with me,” Pierce responded on impulse. “Let’s go to your place and order one.”

Marissa scrutinized him in the dark, then gave what passed for a careless shrug. “Only if you like anchovies,” she answered.

They stopped at a corner store for a bottle of cabernet, then drove to her walk-up in a venerable three-story building. When she opened her
door, hesitating for just a moment, Pierce followed her into a cramped efficiency apartment. Its contents—a fold-out couch, chair, desk, bookshelf, and kitchen table—included only modest clues to her life: a photograph of Bobby, another of a pleasant-faced black woman Pierce took to be her mother, and, to his surprise, a black-and-white poster of a perspiring Michael Jordan. “Do you like basketball?” he asked.

“Nope,” she answered crisply. “That’s only there ‘cause Michael’s hot. What else do you like on your pizza?”

A
FTER DINNER THEY
sat facing each other on the couch, Pierce at one end, Marissa at the other, still sipping the spicy red wine. “So I’m waiting for your story,” he said.

She sipped from her glass, eyeing Pierce over the rim. “You’ve read them all, thank you. There aren’t any more.”

He smiled at this deliberate misunderstanding. “Of your life.”

Her wary expression deepened. “Why does it matter?”

Though his smile lingered, Damon chose to meet her gaze with new directness. “Friends talk about lot of things, I always thought.”

“We do talk.”

“Rarely about you. For example, all you’ve said about your parents is that he’s Jewish and an academic, and she’s an African-American social worker. My guess is they’re divorced, though I don’t even know that much.”

She seemed to study him more closely. “Oh,” she said softly, “I think you know a lot. Sometimes when you look at me I can see your mind at work. And I wonder why.”

Feeling caught out, Pierce covered this with a shrug. “When I like someone I want to know them. Tell me, how did your parents meet?”

After a moment she gave an almost imperceptible nod, suggesting both acquiescence and reluctance. “They were civil rights workers in Mississippi,” she began, “during the Freedom Summer of 1964. My mom describes it as a time of idealism and change—both of them were from the North, and they’d stepped into this place so alien and filled with hate she began to worry they might not get out alive. Every moment took on an immediacy, she tells me—when they made love, it was not only the
best
time, but maybe the
last
time.” Marissa’s smile was knowing, as though she had perceived the ending of the story before her parents. “So at the
end of the summer they celebrated their survival by getting married, two people who saw themselves as symbols of the new order. My existence is an accident of history—the country’s, and theirs.”

Though she spoke easily enough, a slightly caustic undertone suggested that affecting detachment was the carapace for far more complex feelings. “Were you born down South?” Pierce asked.

“In New Orleans—my father was getting his doctorate at Tulane.” Marissa paused. “The hospital had been integrated, and I was one of the first overtly biracial babies the place had ever seen. Years later my mama told me that on my birth certificate—next to the box for my mother’s race, ‘Negro,’ and my father’s, ‘Caucasian’—was the handwritten notation ‘Is this correct?’ She insisted they couldn’t raise me in such a place.”

The last sentence contained a quiet irony, an awareness that questions of identity and race were not so easily escaped. “So that’s when they moved to Cleveland?” Pierce asked.

“Uh-huh. My father landed a job as an assistant professor, my mother as a caseworker for the county. They chose to live in a suburb noted for its public schools—which translated into ‘lots of Jews, not many blacks.’ That’s where I discovered, without quite knowing it, that the bewilderment on my birth certificate extended to my Jewish grandmother.”

“How so?”

Marissa stretched her legs in front of her, her feet nearly touching Pierce’s, a hint that she was feeling more comfortable and, perhaps, even enjoying this relief from the solitude she seemed to carry with her. “Grandma Ruth would hug my father, but never Mom. And when she was just with my mother, she’d never look at her, even when they were talking.

“Now I realize we
scared
her. Her parents had fled Russia after most of the Jews in their village were slaughtered by Russian soldiers. Her first memories were of that story.” Marissa’s voice softened. “What that taught her was a fear of standing out—that being different could be fatal. Not only were Mama and I different, but we marked
her
as different, the Jew whose granddaughter was black. But all I knew then was that she never kissed me.”

She said this in a tone of remembered puzzlement, but no self-pity. “If she’s anything like my grandparents,” Pierce ventured, “she could never acknowledge any of that.”

“Of course not. The nearest we ever came was when I was twelve. For
Christmas, of all things—which my mother insisted on celebrating—Grandma Ruth gave me Anne Frank’s diary with a card saying, ‘You must read this.’

“So I did. For some time afterward I woke up terrified that they were coming for me. Only I didn’t know who
they
were, or whether they would kill me for being Jewish or black. What I really didn’t know, I guess, was who
I
was supposed to be.”

Pierce absorbed this. “One thing about my childhood,” he remarked. “I always knew who I was supposed to be. Sometimes to a fault.”

Marissa cupped the glass in her hand. “My mama tried to tell me I was ‘special’—to be proud of my heritage, Jewish
and
black. But the message I’d begun to absorb was that I didn’t get to choose. When we did
The Wizard of Oz
in sixth grade, I was the Wicked Witch of the West, a black girl in a very black dress. It made me feel uncomfortable—by then my dance teacher had told me that black women’s bodies weren’t well suited for ballet.” Marissa paused, looking down, and her dispassionate tone became tinged with self-contempt. “But not as uncomfortable as realizing that I wanted Grandma Ruth to come see the play instead of Mama. I had a crush on the Jewish boy who played the scarecrow, and didn’t want him to think of me as black. When my mother came up to hug me, I folded my arms and looked away.”