Keeping Secrets (13 page)

Later Ed had turned on the radio, and “Tuxedo Junction” filled the air. All of a sudden Uncle George had them both up on their feet. They were all holding hands, but close together, the three of them moving in a dance, swaying hips, shifting feet on the damp grass in the cool air while the others watched. Emma could smell the ocean over the lamb. The coast was only a few miles over that way. Then she watched Uncle George’s hand slip out of Aunt Ruth’s hand and onto her back, to her waist, and then it was cupping Aunt Ruth’s rear end. Emma had never seen anything like it before. She looked up into Uncle George’s face with astonishment, and he caught her look and winked.

* * *

Grandfather Fine was the most elegant man she’d ever seen. Even on the hot summer’s day when she met him, her grandfather was dressed in a three-piece blue-and-white seersucker suit. On his head he wore a straw skimmer with a black grosgrain band. Across his stomach was a gold chain that looped and then disappeared like a roller coaster.

He had caught Emma staring at it. “You want to see,
tuchterle
?” he asked.

Emma nodded, suddenly shy, for he didn’t smile much, this silver-haired old man.

He pulled out a gold watch. It was shaped like a small onion, and when he opened up the back two little girl figures held hands and danced across an enameled woods. Emma giggled with delight, and the old man crowed, “She’s wonderful.” Jake looked very proud, as if he were a little boy again and his father had patted him on the head.

“Beautiful,” Isidore Fine continued. “And smart. Where’d you find this child, Jakey? The fairies bring her?”

Emma saw a cloud cross her father’s face. But then her grandfather reached over and slapped her father across the back and Emma thought that then even the top of his bald head beamed.

They didn’t stay long. Rosalie was very nervous meeting her father-in-law. She said she was getting a sick headache.

“You’ll come back again,” Isidore said. “Now that we all know each other, it shouldn’t be so long.”

Then he kissed Emma goodbye and slipped something into her hand. “You hold on to this tight for the rest of your life,” he said to her. “This was my wife’s.”

Emma looked down to see a cameo on the front of a little gold box hanging from a golden chain.

“You can wear it when you grow up,” he said. “Now, don’t lose it or wind it too much.”

And then he showed Emma the little knob on the back. When he wound it, out tinkled “The Blue Danube.”

“You know how to dance?” he asked.

Emma nodded. “I take lessons. I do ballet.”

Isidore bowed formally and took her hand, and to the music from the tiny box he and his granddaughter waltzed across the floor.

“Next time you come I’ll teach you the foxtrot,” he called after them as he waved goodbye at his apartment door.

* * *

Emma loved many things about her Uncle George—his teasing, the way his arm around her made her feel, the long black Cadillac he drove, where all three kids and Aunt Ruth snuggled in the backseat. And she liked the smell of the cigar he smoked and the twinkle of gold in his front teeth.

One night he took them to a restaurant and sat them all down. With a big wave of his hand he said, “Order anything you want.” Emma had never seen anyone like that. Her Uncle George must be rich as a king.

When she opened her mouth to say what she wanted her mother had frowned at her, but still, before her on a big round tray had appeared something hot and red and yellow and bubbling. She looked at Uncle George with a question on her face. He slapped himself on the forehead in disbelief.

“Jake, she doesn’t know pizza? Where the hell do you live? Beyond the moon?”

“In Louisiana,” Jake laughed, “the dark side of the moon.” Rosalie frowned, but Emma’s father had suddenly found his tongue. He told them about catfish and cornpone, a world where you couldn’t buy pumpernickel bread. They all laughed, even Rosalie then, though Emma could see from the look on her face she didn’t really understand.

Something in Emma’s heart was battering blindly then, struggling like a butterfly to escape into the clear blue air where the possibilities existed for dancing and laughter and music and tall buildings and conversations long into the night, where people who were kin to one another gathered around breakfast tables and drank cup after cup of coffee and ate exotic foods and teased and shared secrets and told stories about the past.

* * *

The last night in Connecticut before they had to pile back into the Chevy and begin the endless trip back home, Emma and Ed balanced each other slowly up and down on the teeter-totter in the backyard. It was twilight and the bushes thrummed with the voices of insects. A couple of stars shone, the bravest, brightest ones, but it would be a long time before the heavens filled. Darkness came very late to the Northern summer sky.

“That’s the North Star,” Ed said.

Emma looked and nodded. “We have that in Louisiana too.” Ed laughed. Their days together had been spent in comparing and contrasting, measuring the differences and similarities in their worlds. They had discovered that humor was one thing they shared that was not defined by geography.

“How do I know if you have stars? You don’t have pizza.”

“You don’t have grits.”

“Who would want ’em?”

“You don’t have,” Emma paused, searching for something, anything, that she had not seen in this place that seemed to encompass all the wonders of the world, “you don’t have niggers.”

“No,” said Ed in a changed voice, “we don’t.”

“How come?”

“Because we have Negroes, stupid.”

“That’s what I just said. You’re being dumb.”

“No,
you’re
being dumb. I didn’t say ‘niggers,’ I said ‘Negroes.’”

“They’re the same thing. And I haven’t seen any anywhere, except some in New York.”

“Emma, do you know that ‘nigger’ is a bad word?”

She just stared at him, but something pinged deep inside and the blood of embarrassment began to rise.

“It’s bad to use it to people’s faces,” she said. “You say ‘colored.’ But it’s okay to use when no niggers are around. Everybody does.”

“Not everybody here. It’s not nice.”

“Well, you’re not so nice, either, Mr. Smarty Pants, charging all the kids in the neighborhood a penny to hear me talk.”

“You just want your share, don’t you?”

Emma was put out. She was losing an argument that she didn’t even understand, and now she felt that Ed was making fun of her. “Right, you nigger,” she yelled, and jumped off the teeter- totter quickly, banging him hard on the ground.

Ed was three years older and many pounds heavier than Emma. Before she’d gone three steps he’d caught her by the arm, and now he was sitting on her stomach. He told her she could eat her words or eat the grass he held in his right hand.

“Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!” Emma was not going to give up.

She ate the grass.

Later, lying in a twin bed with her little cousin Sally, who was asleep, Emma whispered across to Ed, “Do your parents ever talk about me?”

“Sure, they talk about you all the time. They say you’re a pain in the ass.”

Emma giggled. “No, really.”

“Yeah. They’ve said lots of times how they’d like to see you and Uncle Jakey. And your mom.”

“Do they ever say I’m a mistake?”

“What do you mean, a mistake?”

Emma shrugged. “I don’t know. Something I heard my parents say.”

“You probably didn’t understand.”

“I don’t understand lots they say. And they never answer my questions.”

“All parents are like that. They make you feel weird. Like you’re adopted. Or wish you were. They speak a foreign language when you’re around. Sometimes mine really do—they think we don’t understand any Yiddish.”

“What?”

“Yiddish. Your dad must speak it, too.”

“Why?”

“Because he grew up with my mom, silly. You know, Yiddish, Jews.”

“Jews?” Emma whispered.

Ed was quiet for a minute.

“Emma, don’t you know you’re Jewish?”

“I am not!”

“You are! Your dad is. That makes you Jewish, too.”

“No,” Sally spoke up from between them, awake now, or maybe she’d never been asleep. “Not if your mom’s not. Your mom isn’t, is she?”

They whispered for a long time after that, their words tossing and turning, and finally fell asleep after exchanging promises of visits and letters. Emma dozed off with Ed and Sally’s faces in her mind, then plummeted into a dream where the Green Skeleton waited.

But this time he was friendly. He came into the front of the store just as she entered through the door in the back looking for a Hershey bar, and before she could let out a good scream he bowed deeply at the waist just like her Grandfather Isidore and offered her his green glowing hand.

“May I have the pleasure of this dance?” he asked.

From somewhere came the strains of “The Blue Danube,” and he slowly twirled her out the door of the store, across the squares of her hopscotch that she could see in the moonlight traced on the sidewalk, and down the bank of the canal. Blackberry brambles caught at the hem of her nightgown, but he gently untangled her and brushed them away.

“There’s someone who would like to talk with you,” the Green Skeleton said, and then he swung her forward as if he were releasing her into the arms of another partner. And he was, for she flew into the embrace of Marcus, the tall shy colored boy who had caught her arm and kept her from slipping into the canal that day it rained—Marcus, who lived just beyond Skeleton Hill.

“So nice to see you this evening,” Marcus said, speaking right up, as if he weren’t shy at all, as if he weren’t colored.

“Well, it’s nice to be here,” Emma replied, pretending there was nothing at all unusual about dancing on the surface of the canal’s green water in the arms of a black boy. “How are you this evening?”

“Why, I’m just fine. I’m just pleased as punch to be here. But there’s something I have to tell you.” He dipped her and whirled her. The surface of the water was like glass, shiny but not wet.

“What’s that, Marcus?” He’s going to tell me that he’s Jewish, she thought in her dream. She gave him her best smile.

But he didn’t say that at all. He said, “I don’t like it when you say ‘nigger.’ It hurts me.” Whereupon his black skin became transparent and she could see, right through his white skeleton, his broken heart.

“I see what you mean.”

“Good.” He smiled a brilliant smile, his teeth white in his black face, silver in the moonlight. “I knew, Emma, that you would understand.”

She nodded, and they smiled into each other’s eyes, and the music swelled and then the surface of the water sparkled with stars which lifted like a flying carpet and they danced up up up into the sky, far far away from the canal and West Cypress.

5

West Cypress

1961

Never again, Emma had vowed to herself at fourteen. Never again would she travel with her momma and daddy across the Coupitaw Parish line.

Nor would she eat one more Vienna sausage in the backseat or sleep one more night in the car. Not one more time would she hang her head out the window like a collie dog, her heart lurching with hunger and sorrow, as Rosalie drove right on past hamburger stands, Holiday Inns and Howard Johnsons as if Emma had suggested they stop at the Taj Mahal.

So it was “No, thanks,” she’d said at sixteen when Rosalie suggested New Mexico. “I’d just as soon stay home.”

That was a lie, and both of them knew it. As long as she could remember, Emma had sat beside her daddy and looked at color pictures of faraway places he wanted to go to.

Emma wanted to go, too. But when she closed her eyes and watched herself waving goodbye, her parents were never in the picture. Sometimes there was a handsome man by her side. Or she was walking up a gangplank alone. A third version featured her jumping into a car with a sidekick like Dean Moriarty in a book she’d read,
On the Road
. Could girls do that? Just pick up and run away, driving to see what they could see? She didn’t know, but she’d sure like to find out. She’d die if she had to spend the rest of her life in West Cypress.

Now Emma was seventeen, and on this bright November morning here they were, the three of them, in a car once again, a square white Studebaker heading west on Highway 80, breaking Emma’s vow. But this time was different. Emma was driving. At her right elbow Rosalie sniffled into a monogrammed handkerchief. In the backseat Jake and a rolling green thermos fought it out for territory across an imaginary line.

It wasn’t just Emma’s driving that made this trip different. For blazing the way ahead of them was the rear end of a long black hearse. It in turn was trailing Emma’s cousin J.D. sitting tall behind the wheel of his state-trooper car. Jake could rest his mind on the subject of navigation; Sergeant J.D. Tarley’s head was filled with maps.

Straggling behind them like so many biddy chickens in a gaggle of cars and pickup trucks were those of the Norris clan who had attended one or the other, or in some cases both, of Virgie Norris’s funerals during the past two days. Now the cortège was passing through the rolling piney hills that began at the Coupitaw, headed for Sweetwell and Virgie’s funeral number three.