Next to Love (32 page)

A few days later, as she is making a pile of papers to take out to the trash, she comes across the magazine again. The caption beside the leggy girl on the cover asks,
How Many Negroes in College?
She sits on the ottoman next to the low magazine rack and begins leafing through it. The experience is at once eerily familiar and strangely disorienting. She turns page after page of pictures of actresses and bathing beauties and sports stars and society figures she has never heard of. Even the news roundup and book reviews have different slants. The ads promise her whiter skin and straighter hair.

She turns a page. The photograph hits her like a fist. Her eyes veer away from it. She forces them back. The face is a mass of bloated pulp. Her glance flees the horror to the photo beside it. A teenage boy in a white shirt and a black tie smiles out at the world. She reads the caption that runs beneath the two pictures.
Fished from the river, Emmett Till, 14, was a bloodcurdling sight. His alleged crime: whistling at a Delta white woman
.

She sits staring down at the two photographs and knows why Frankie asked her not to tell his mother he was going to a meeting in Amherst. She also knows—and the fact that she did not know it before shames her—why Naomi did not want her driving Frankie anywhere anytime.

SHE BECOMES OBSESSED
with the case. Though she is dying to ask Frankie about the meeting in Amherst, she fears Naomi will think she is aiding and abetting. Instead, she reads every newspaper and magazine account she can get her hands on. Claude walks in each night to find her poring over them.

“Wait till you hear this,” she greets him one night before he has taken off his hat and coat. “A white grand jury in Mississippi—Mississippi!—indicted two white men for the murder of a Negro.”

“Listen to this,” she tells him as he walks in the door two weeks later. “Emmett Till’s great-uncle—a Negro, obviously—stood up in court and pointed a finger to identify the two white men who kidnapped the boy. Talk about guts.”

Things are changing, she insists. Perhaps all those Negro soldiers who fought in the war really have made a difference.

Life
magazine runs an editorial in memory of the boy that cites his G.I. father, who was killed in France fighting for the American proposition that
all men are equal
.

“Sic,” Claude says as she reads the line to him.

“… 
created
equal,” she finishes for him.

The moment clicks between them like a snapshot, and she knows it is one of those unremarkable instants that for some inexplicable reason sear the memory. She will remember it always.

She feels close to Claude. She feels caught up in something bigger than herself, though her only contribution is writing letters to the editor, most of which don’t even get printed. But then, her only contribution to the war was cutting and pasting and delivering usually bad news.

“Personally, I liked it better when she was just drinking too much,” Millie confesses to Grace one evening in the kitchen before Babe and Claude arrive for their monthly potluck dinner. “At least she was fun then.

“For once,” she goes on when Babe comes in carrying a casserole of scalloped potatoes, “can we not talk about Emmett Till?”

Babe puts the casserole on the counter and glares at Millie, but Millie’s back is turned as she peers into the oven.

“Don’t you even care?”

“Of course she cares,” Grace says as she goes on tearing lettuce. “We all care. But we’re not obsessed with it.”

Millie closes the oven door and turns back to them. “I make it a rule never to worry over things I can’t do anything about. Now, if someone would tell me what goes on in the mind of a twelve-year-old boy, I’d be extremely interested. Boys,” she sighs. “The girls are so much easier.”

“Wait until they’re teenagers,” Grace says.

Claude comes into the kitchen carrying a martini in each hand and gives one to Babe.

“Just the man I want to see,” Grace says. “What do you know about a boy named Eddie Montrose?”

“Nice enough kid,” Claude says. “Editor of the school paper. Why?”

“Amy is at the movies with him as we speak.”

“Are his intentions honorable?” Morris asks from the kitchen doorway.

“I doubt it.”

“I’m serious.”

“Do you know any seventeen-year-old boy whose intentions are honorable?”

“Mine were,” Morris says.

“They still are.” Grace’s voice hits a sour note, and they all turn to look at her. The color rises in her cheeks. “All I meant is that I’m married to an honorable man. But we were talking about the Montrose boy. His father is pretty high up in management at the hat factory.”

“She’s not out with his father,” Claude points out.

“All I know,” Babe says, “is that he wrote a good editorial about Emmett Till for the school paper.”

DESPITE EMMETT TILL’S
great-uncle’s courageous identification of two white men, a jury of twelve other white men acquits them of murder. The jurors deliberate for only sixty-seven minutes. According to one of them, they would have been faster if they had not stopped to drink pop.

Before, Babe could not get enough of the good news. Now she is addicted to the bad. When she finds out that Emmett Till’s father did not die in France fighting for the American proposition that all men are created equal but was executed by the U.S. Army in Italy for raping two women and killing a third, she is devastated. The father’s crimes do not justify the son’s fate, but they somehow sully the cause. Or maybe the glee of the southern press in reporting the story does that.

When a grand jury refuses to indict the two white men for kidnapping, she ties up the newspapers and magazines she has been saving, carries them to the garbage can beside the garage, lights a match, and drops it in. The edges of the magazine on top catch fire and begin to curl. The movement makes the pages seem suddenly alive. The embers go out. She strikes another match and drops it in. The edges come to life again, then die. She is useless. She cannot even start a fire. She begins taking matches from the box, one after the other, striking them, dropping them in. The papers catch in one place, another, a third. The flames lick the late-autumn dusk. She leans over the can, feeling the heat on her face. Her tears sizzle in the fire. She is mourning the boy, but she is also grieving for her own life. Claude is mended, and she is, in some way she does not understand, broken.

EVEN BEFORE CLAUDE
turns in to the driveway, he sees a ribbon of smoke curling into the blue twilight. He cannot imagine what Babe could be burning. He has already taken care of the leaves. Still, the idea that she is cleaning house is encouraging. He does not give a damn about the house, but he does about her. Action is a good sign. He was hopeful about her obsession with the Emmett Till case, but since the men were acquitted, she has been taking it hard.

He stops the car in the driveway and sits watching her. There is something wrong with the way she is leaning over the garbage can. She is too close. If the flames leap any higher, they will singe her hair.

He gets out of the car and starts toward her. As he gets closer, he sees into the can. The flames lick at the leggy woman on the cover of
JET
. The effect is of a religious painting of a sinner burning in hell.

He lifts his eyes from the flaming trash can to Babe. Her hair falls forward lankly. Beneath one of his old flannel shirts, her body is hunched into a question mark of despair. Tears run down her face. Perhaps it’s the soot, but her skin looks gray in the gathering twilight. When did the girl he fell in love with, the wife he came home to, the woman who put up with his tortured nights and silent days and shattered mirrors, become an old lady?

He waits for the feeling of disgust, but his heart surprises him. It folds over in pity. A sudden rush of tenderness overtakes him. He makes a resolution. It is not much of a sacrifice. She will never even know about it. But in his helplessness, it is all he can offer. Next time Eloise Amison comes into the teachers’ room, leans over his chair, and rests on his shoulders those tits that send the entire male population of the school into a hormone-thumping frenzy, he will get up and move away.

“I could have put them out for the trash men,” he says, and puts his arm around her to draw her back from the flames.

MARCH 1956

“What did Dr. Flanner say?” Claude asks as soon as he walks in that evening.

“He says I’m a healthy girl. Except for a minor ailment he calls housewife’s syndrome.”

“It sounds like dishpan hands.”

“According to him, it can be cured by gardening or needlepoint or painting by numbers. He says he’s dying to try the last himself, but he doesn’t have the time.”

He goes to the cabinet to pour himself a drink. She already has one sitting on the counter. He knows what will happen if he agrees with the doctor.

She comes back to the subject when they sit down to dinner. During her
Cordon Bleu
period, they ate in the dining room. Now they are back in the kitchen.

“Before you switched and started going to Morris, what did Dr. Flanner call you?” she asks as she passes him the peas.

“What do you mean?”

“Your name. Did he call you Claude or Mr. Huggins?”

“I don’t remember. What difference does it make?”

“None, I suppose, but I couldn’t help noticing. I call him Dr. Flanner. He calls King Gooding, who went in after me, Mr. Gooding. But he calls me Babe.”

“So?”

“You don’t see anything funny about that?”

“King Gooding is president of a bank. And Flanner was just being friendly.”

“No, he was being patronizing. He also told me to put on my clothes, like a good girl.”

“I’d rather he say that than tell you to take them off.” He grins. He is trying. That only makes it worse.

“And that business about taking up gardening or needlepoint or painting by numbers.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

He reaches for the wine bottle and refills his glass.

“Thank you,” she says.

He refills hers.

“Anyway, I do garden,” she insists. “After a fashion. I put in geraniums and impatiens every spring.”

“And you do a beautiful job.”

“Now you’re patronizing me too.”

“It was a joke.”

“Needlepoint and coloring books for grown-ups. Talk about useless pursuits.”

“Then find something useful.”

“Like what? The South Downs Ladies’ Historical Society? They wouldn’t have me even if I wanted to join. They won’t have Millie either, not since she married Al. Only Grace passes their test of social and racial purity. God, I hate this town.”

“Now it’s the town’s fault.” He stands and starts out of the kitchen. She is surprised. They have had far worse exchanges than this, she has been far more maudlin, and he has not left the room. A moment later, he returns carrying the evening paper open to an inside page and hands it to her.

“What’s this?”

“You want to do something useful? The Montgomery bus boycott. You went to pieces over Emmett Till. Another woman refused to give up her seat on a bus.”

“You’re sending me to Alabama?”

“Read the article. There are demonstrations all over the country. In Boston, seventy-five legislators walked out of committee meetings in sympathy with the strike. I bet there are offices and fund-raising organizations in western Massachusetts.”

“You think they’d want a white woman?”

“Is this the girl who talked her way into the Western Union office? Those legislators are white. The Boston NAACP is the most integrated branch in the country.”

“How do you know something like that?”

“I’m a schoolteacher. It’s my job to know arcane facts that are of no discernible use to anyone.”

She picks up the paper and reads the article. A paragraph about one of the rallies stops her. An interracial audience laughed and wept and cheered. She tries to remember when she has laughed and wept and cheered all at once. During the war, of course.

NOVEMBER 1957

Babe planned to tell Claude first, but on her way home from the NAACP office that afternoon, she runs into Millie in the supermarket and cannot resist.

“You’re looking at the new fund-raiser for the regional branch of the NAACP. No more volunteer work. As of today, I’m gainfully employed.”

Millie looks up from the cartons of milk she’s loading into her basket. “You mean they’re going to pay you?”

“Don’t sound so shocked. I’m raising money for a good cause, not selling my body.”

“It’s just that volunteer work is one thing. We all do it. But a paying job …” Her voice drifts off. There is something wrong here, but she cannot put her finger on it. “What does Claude say?”

“He doesn’t know yet.”

Millie’s eyes widen. “You took a job without asking him?”

“I’m thirty-seven years old. I don’t need a note from my husband to take a job.”

“But what if he minds?”

“Why would he mind having me doing something useful and getting a paycheck in the bargain?”

“All I know is, from the very beginning, even before Al started the business, when he was still working for his uncle, he said no wife of his was going to work.”

Babe grins and puts a container of cream for Claude’s coffee in her basket. “Then isn’t it lucky I’m not married to Al. Not that I don’t love him,” she adds as she wheels away.

As soon as she rounds the corner into another aisle, she stops smiling. She cannot be angry at Millie for being herself. But she is.

“I RAN INTO MILLIE
in the market,” she tells Claude after she breaks the news. “According to her, even before Al was a success, he said no wife of his was going to work.”

“Then isn’t it lucky you didn’t marry Al.”

She has to laugh. “That’s what I told her.”

“Want to go out to dinner to celebrate?”

“Only if you do.”

“Should I open a bottle of champagne?”

“Neither of us even likes champagne.”

“Then how do you want to celebrate?”

She grins. A mirror image of the expression inches across his face. They leave a trail of shoes and shirts and trousers and underwear from the kitchen to the bedroom.