The Wedding (11 page)

Corinne had been there, as she usually was, though Clark always seemed to take these occasions to have a last-minute emergency call. He and Rachel would drive somewhere distant and dine and dance in some little roadhouse where the management would make the prudent decision that it was better to serve a mixed couple, as the two appeared to be, than face a lawsuit the defendant would probably lose. The other diners invariably found more of interest in Clark and Rachel than in the dinners they were letting dry up on their plates. They were pretty sure what the score was with these two. They knew where they would go when they left, and what they would do when they got there. It was written on their faces.

It was true that something was written on their faces, but it was not the obscene leer of desire but a deep relishing of the intimacy of dinner for two in a place where no one knew them and no one would run and tell. They were grateful for whatever their love was allowed. It had not been allowed a beginning before that uncertain hour on a day without a date in a year they could never agree on when Rachel’s doorbell rang and there was Clark, a drink or two inside him but not drunk.

He had come inside her door and stood there staring,
taking in the beauty of her brownness, which was like no other. A paler woman pales by comparison. Not everyone can see it, but those who can know there is no beauty like that of a brown-skinned woman when she is beautiful: the velvet skin, the dark hair like a cloud, the dark eyes like deep wells to drown in. He said her name softly, caressing her with it, and she was helpless. She began to tremble, and she could not hide it. It was like nakedness. He saw it, and he took her in his arms, and all the yielding that Corinne had denied him was in her incredible softness as if her body had melted into his. So it began, without a beginning, even if afterward they told each other that there had been a period of courtship, each wanting so much to believe that there was more to it than an hour of undammed physical lust. Not flags waving, perhaps, but perhaps other signs, secret yet unmistakable, and building up like an orchestra tuning up, each instrument unrelated until the fusion of triumphant sound established an eternal empathy, reechoing through time.

Meanwhile, at the charity dance Corinne had given most of her dances to dark men. She liked it best when the lights were dim and the tempo slow, and the dark hand on her back pressed into her bare flesh, drawing her closer, audaciously closer, to the point of contact. And the ball of fire would burn between them until the music stopped, the lights came up, and Corinne walked decorously back to her box, her escort’s hand lightly touching her elbow. Many eyes would follow her because she was one of the Coles wives, and thus in this small circle truly above reproach.

Clark would soon come to fetch her, and he and Corinne
would ride home with their minds miles away. Both of them would hear other voices, and neither of them could reach out to the other for any understanding of their common compulsion.

Liz was a realist and could therefore accept the truth of her parents’ infidelities, but Shelby could not. “What makes you think Mother doesn’t know?” she scoffed. “Wives know what their husbands are made of better than trusting daughters. Until last summer I never suspected that Dad’s been dividing his vacation between Mother and Rachel ever since we discovered that boys were more fun than fathers and didn’t need a month of Dad to have a happy summer. But I never did believe that he went off on a two-week fishing trip with some white sawbones each year just because he liked to go fishing; I just thought he was getting his kicks going places with white guys that he couldn’t go with colored. And all the time Dad was somewhere with Rachel, which makes a world more sense to me. As for Laurie aging his libido, I bet he’s champing for Mother to get this wedding over with so he can pop off someplace with Rachel for the last few days of his vacation.”

Shelby sat up in bed with a grimace. “Listen, Liz, maybe I am a big fool. Maybe I’m just a dumb blind baby. But you know what?” Her eyes narrowed, and she jabbed her index finger at Liz like a knife. “I think only seeing the bad, only poking fun, only trying to lift up the rug and look for bugs underneath is its own kind of blindness. You hear me? You ever look around Strivers’ Row growing up, or the Oval?” She swept her arm in front of her in an arc. “I didn’t see a lot
of kids we knew whose parents looked after them any better than ours. I look at Mother and Father and I see two people who’ve been good and kind and loving to us from the day we were born. We ever gone hungry? We ever needed for anything? Mother and Father may well have looked elsewhere for some things they couldn’t give each other, but I’d like you to tell me what that means to us, next to everything else.” Shelby’s pale eyes flashed wildly, and her uncombed blond hair—the hair whose color had caused her so much grief as a child—coiled itself around her head like a clutch of snakes.

Liz chuckled dryly and took a step backward. “Easy, little sister.” She drew the words out slowly. “Easy. You’re wrong if you think I’m not grateful for everything we’ve been given. Lord knows, it’s more than most, and it didn’t come by luck. Just because it’s 1953, not 1853, doesn’t mean it’s that much less dangerous to be colored, and when we take the new car out I get more looks from our own kind than from whites. It’s easier to hate your own kind for what they have than to hate somebody far away for what you don’t. But, as glad as I am that we always had nice things as children, I’ll be damned if I’m going to eat that dish of humble-pie gratitude every day of my life, and let it blind me to things that aren’t right. When something’s wrong it’s wrong, and all the maid-cooked dinners in the Oval won’t change that fact.”

Shelby slapped her hands down on the bed. “No, Liz, that’s not my point. You don’t see—”

“No!” Liz cut Shelby off with a wave of her hand. “If I
have to listen to you tell me how ungrateful I am, you
will
hear
me
out too. Tell me that all those years you looked without seeing, listened without hearing. You’re quick to hit me with all the good lessons we learned from our parents, and God knows we did—hard work, pride, and manners, manners for every step we took in a day—but now I guess it would be beyond belief for you to think you might have learned some bad ones too? Did it ever occur to you that there may be more of a tie between what you saw from Dad and what you see in Meade than you’d like to admit? I know myself I wonder at times how I can even bring myself to trust a black man, but I’ll tell you, it feels like the sex and the doubt get all tied up with each other in my chest, and I can’t tell one from the other.”

Shelby threw the sheets off her legs and swung herself onto the floor. She paused as if to speak, her face twitching with emotion, but then she thought better of it. She shouldered her way past Liz to the door.

“Shelby, wait. I’m sorry.”

Shelby clutched tightly at the doorknob, the veins popping in her forearms. She paused for a heartbeat and then swung the door open. Stale air rushed in from the hot, un-ventilated hallway. She twisted her neck to regard her sister. “You’re so proud of how much you think you know, Liz. Well, you don’t know everything, and you don’t know anything about my love for Meade.
You
might not trust black men; that’s
your
problem.”

Liz turned her palms out in supplication. “Shelby, that’s not what I meant.”

“Oh, yes, it is!” Shelby hissed, her words slicing the air like a razor. “How dare you, on the eve of my wedding, imply that I’m turning my back on my race?” Her voice caught and she ran into the hall, a flick of her wrist slamming the door tightly shut behind her.

A
t the moment Shelby’s door closed, Clark Coles placed his bare foot on the Oak Bluffs beach to begin his morning walk into town. The ferry landing was behind him, and he could just make out a boat in the distance, coming with a fresh brace of day trippers from Cape Cod. Clark hunched his shoulders against a chill wind blowing in off the water and stooped to roll his left pants leg up a little farther. He cherished these walks; lately they seemed to be his only chance to get away from the hubbub of the wedding. He stopped at a thin white pole that was listing to one side. Pushing it upright with two hands, he swept his foot through the sand to fill in the hole he had created so the pole would stay upright. It was a funny thing, these poles, the way they divided the beach. Corinne would always meet her
friends at the twelfth pole, but Shelby and her young group always congregated around the nineteenth, and the young married couples put down their blankets even farther up. Clark guessed that Shelby and Meade would move up themselves next summer—that is, if they came to the island at all.

Clark shook his head. He would never have chosen Meade as a likely mate for his daughter, but it hadn’t seemed of late that he’d done a particularly good job choosing a bride himself, so he guessed he couldn’t speak as an authority. He glanced at a gnarled piece of driftwood and stepped around it. At least she seemed happy. Was Clark that happy the day before he married Corinne? He honestly couldn’t remember. He put his hands in his pockets and rubbed his ringers together. That really wasn’t a fair question, he thought, since people today seemed to marry based on a whim, based on some here-today-gone-tomorrow flight of fancy, without a glance at the more practical considerations that seemed to mean everything in Clark’s day. The reasons his daughter had for choosing Meade were so different from his and Corinne’s that the single word “marriage” seemed insufficient to describe both events, lacking the flexibility to stretch to both poles.

Clark shook his head again. It had all happened so fast. He and several other Northern-educated doctors young enough to be altruistic had accepted an invitation to attend a month-long series of panels on modern techniques in medicine at the college where Corinne’s father Hannibal was president and Corinne reigned as campus queen.

Clark had been automatically given access to the highest circles of the society in which he found himself. He had all
the proper credentials, coming as he did from a family of physicians, all of whom, including his father, were sons of fair Harvard. As the youngest of three brothers, all successful general practitioners who lived prosperously on Strivers’ Row in Harlem (a street so called because of the prominence and pretensions of this envied and imitated group of professional men and their pretty wives), he was determined to excel in any area that offered a challenge. He was the first of his family to get an office in a white doctors’ building downtown, obtained through strings pulled by a fellow grad of Harvard Medical School, and he was on his way to becoming a brilliant diagnostician. He was beginning to gain recognition from some of the top men in his field, and he had a growing pool of patients who were willing to ignore his race to avail themselves of his talents. Those of his white patients who did not know that he was colored were not too dismayed when they learned it; they decided, as whites generally did, that he was an exception to the general run of his race, a freak, a flash of lightning that would probably not strike his generation again, their knowledge of the colored man and his genes being limited to the creations of their cooks.

Clark’s brothers had married attractive, educated women who had given them sons clearly destined for Harvard as well, as evinced by the little crimson emblems sewed on their tiny sweaters. Clark meant to marry better and have at least one more Harvard-bound son than his brothers. His brothers had all chosen Northern brides, but Clark had a theory, by no means original, that the South produced the colored woman nonpareil. Washington was generally accepted
as the place to start the search, the charm and beauty of its women attributed to generous infusions of the blood of senators, men who, though rarely beautiful or charming themselves, managed with the help of their colored mistresses to produce exceptional qualities in their children and their children’s children. Yes, the rarefied nature of Washington women was a legend in sophisticated colored circles.

When Clark met Corinne, then, it was a meeting of two perfect people. She was the daughter of a college president, and he could never hope to marry better than that. But neither of them was interested. In Sabina, Corinne’s brown classmate, Clark had found the perfect girl-woman, and he wanted to marry her. He had not had time for love before, and until he met Sabina he had never experienced the emotion that is blind to color lines and racial bars and class divisions and religious prejudices and all the other imposed criteria that have nothing to do with love but have so much to do with marriage.

For ten blissful days he saw Sabina whenever their time coincided, and each meeting was a fresh discovery of her sweetness. Her color never crossed his mind except in admiration, and her scholarship status, and the simple background that it implied, made him want to give her more than she had ever had. He knew that he had found his girl, and he was almost as sure that he had found his wife. At the unforeseen perfect moment before he returned to New York he intended to propose. He would need all the time he could get in between to pray that she would not refuse.

He could not know that a campaign was planned behind his back to wean this very eligible visitor away from a lowly
scholarship student and match him with someone better. And of course there was no one better than Corinne, who was his peer in all the important details, those ironclad facts of background that made the fundamentals of love seem secondary. Every blue-veined hostess was pressed into giving a party for the visiting doctors. In the roundabout parlance of politeness, Sabina was not expected at any party. She would not cry foul and claim that she had been deliberately ignored, nor in all fairness could she. She was just one of the many students who did not even know the people who were having the affairs. There wasn’t any issue, and to create one would have been unthinkable.

As a visitor from the North, with an imposed obligation to represent the section, the class, the culture from whence he had come, Clark had no gracious way of rejecting the seemingly good intentions of his hosts to display their fabled hospitality. In keeping with the spirit of giving, an animated bouquet of the year’s most popular debs was presented to the visiting doctors as dates for the duration. It was inevitable, it was arranged, that Clark would draw Corinne out of the nonexistent hat, for to everyone except themselves their coming together had the full consent of heaven.