The Wedding (12 page)

Though no one agreed more than Gram, she thought it the better part of wisdom to give heaven human assistance. In June, Corinne would graduate, and whatever restraints within which Gram held her because of school and study would be in effect no longer. Corinne would come into the ripeness of her twenty-first birthday amid the full-blown summer of the South, which boiled the blood more than the meager summer of the North. Gram was already past seventy,
and weary of the night watch. She was quietly resolved to see Corinne married to this mannerly, fair-colored doctor before she had time to make a misstep in the dark of some deep wood with some dark man who would not even try to break her fall. In the long, bedeviling summer of the South, a yielding woman without benefit of miracles could bear the child of many fathers. Gram wanted to see her settled up North, where the ruling passion was ambition and men sought the smile of success more than the favors of love, finding this gilded goddess more fruitful with her golden children than the most abundant woman.

Gram cut her plan of action to the order of Corinne’s vanity. She never dwelled on the merits of marriage. Indeed, she had never seen in her own limited relations with Augustus or Josephine’s dismal journey into Nirvana anything to recommend marriage as a union of loving hearts in which much was given and much was received. In Corinne’s childhood years, the years of dolls and simple pleasures, Gram had never let herself look ahead to the time when Corinne would come into consciousness of herself as a woman, whose logical counterpart was man. Gram had lived without a man in bed beside her, and so had Josephine. Hannibal had always been too buried in someone else’s history to care about his own family’s future, but Gram cared, and while she knew that Corinne could never marry white, she allowed herself to hope against hope that she’d never marry colored either. But when Corinne reached her riper teens, and boys and clothes and the blossoming of her own beauty became her feverish concern, Gram saw what Hannibal was too preoccupied to see, seeing only Miss Caroline in the aging, worn
image of Gram whenever he took the time to look over his glasses. Gram saw that all the dried-out, arrested passion in Hannibal, and in Josephine, and in herself whose life in love had been brief and unrewarding—spent as it was with a man too sorry for himself to give joy to a woman—all that unspent passion had somehow seeped into the blood of this young woman and was now biding its time until it exploded.

Even in Corinne’s early teens, when a child, though a child, can still bear a child, Gram had been forced to play the role of watchdog duenna, reluctantly reigning dowager in the circle of mothers at parties. She never trusted Corinne to go home with a servant, who could be bribed or cajoled into letting her slip through her fingers. As the better part of wisdom, Gram was forced to encourage Corinne to entertain at home, where she could keep watch in a nearby room, shooing her granddaughter back into a lighted parlor whenever she wandered toward the dark outdoors with a brown boy at the ready (though far from ready for responsibility) breathing hard behind her. That Corinne remained above reproach until the day she married Clark was due in no small part to Gram’s unremitting vigilance, and to the obsessive fear it bred of getting caught with a dark boy’s baby.

Corinne walked in virtue, but everything in her walk, and in her voice, and in her eyes was a promise of pleasure to come. She seemed the cream of women, a woman who had much to give but who would not squander it, bred from birth to keep it intact for the man she would marry. She would grace his home with her charm and beauty and she would make his bed joyous, all without ever having to shame his hearth with another man’s memory of her shamelessness.
And so she bided her time, waiting for marriage to release her from the cage of her ignorance, to give her the right to make bold inquiry. Then she could free that second self, the dark devourer, the primitive behind the pale skin.

Gram did not know and could not have imagined the size of the monster that stalked Corinne, or the multifold shapes it would assume. All that Gram knew about girls who couldn’t wait was what she had seen when a weeping coed was whisked off campus before her rounding belly brought open disgrace to the school. To Gram, the lesson to be learned was that some girls should marry young or come to grief as unwed mothers. Where the embarrassing problem of sex reared its head, the only place to solve it was the marriage bed. Gram’s iron will ensured Corinne’s restraint, and it also ensured that Clark would not escape from her orbit. Another colored generation would claim a share of Gram’s blood, but with her willing it; better to see that blood in the fair-tinted face of a child born with God’s blessing than turn to ink in a child turned black as the devil whose thrust had spawned it.

The final end-of-the-season party of the frenetic social whirl that had embraced Clark might have been designed for Gram’s purpose. The slightly hyperthyroid hostess put all her captive guests through all the ingenious tortures that an all-night party can inflict, winding up the program with scrambled eggs at seven. When Clark brought Corinne home, obviously tired and clearly showing that she was also tired of Clark, Gram surmised at once that nothing had happened, nothing bad of course, but nothing good either. They had a lackluster look to them, nothing like the aura of
two people in love. Their feet were too tired from dancing to walk on air, and their heads were too heavy with sleep to care about clouds.

Gram got rid of Corinne by packing her off to Hannibal’s study to let him see that his only child had returned to the fold neither maimed nor molested. These extremes had not even occurred to Hannibal, who had slept untroubled throughout the night, unaware that his daughter’s virgin bed was empty of its occupant. When she entered his private world he was having breakfast from a tray, a history book propped in front of him. Politely and absently he listened to Corinne, praising her pretty dress; he drew no significance from the hour of its attire. Corinne’s voice fell on his ears like the sound of a distant skirmish to a restless sentry, and her image was blurred by the sight of the printed page in front of him.

Alone with Clark, Gram inclined her head toward a chair, and she and Clark sat together in the formal hallway. They both kept their backs ramrod straight, Gram to hold her tired old body together, Clark to keep from falling asleep in the quiet after the long night’s clamor. They faced each other across their worlds, the bridge between them lowered for the crossing when Gram permitted Clark to sit in her presence. The significance of her dispensation escaped him, though his easy compliance did not escape her. Spearing Clark’s eyes with her own, Gram refused to let her mind succumb to weariness until Corinne’s future was settled.

Clark braced himself for a dressing down; no doubt this grandam had put two and two together and made the usual
error in that kind of nasty, half-cocked addition. It was true enough that some busybodies were trying to make a romance out of his dates with Corinne, forgetting or ignoring the fact that they had been no more to each other than names in a hat. This old lady had probably heard the gossip, which was always two-headed when heard third or fourth hand. And since he had shown no evidence of honorable intentions, made no call on Corinne’s father, made no mention of Corinne’s meeting his family, he could understand that an anxious grandmother, looking at him in evening clothes in the morning hours, might suspect a wolf underneath the fancy trappings.

She didn’t know her granddaughter, he thought to himself. She could handle herself. He hadn’t got to first base with her. He hadn’t really worked on it, but they were both young and the moon was bright and her lips had barely responded to the kiss he supposed she was expecting when he brought her home from a party. In fact, she seemed to have a thing for dark men. At least she gave them most of her dances. He was lucky if he got her first dance and her last. He didn’t mind admitting that he wasn’t good at shaking a leg; it made him feel self-conscious, like making love in public. But surely Corinne didn’t expect to dance her way through life. Didn’t she know that a doctor’s hand held as much skill as a dancer’s feet? Not that he wanted her to admire him. Not that he wanted her to get serious about him. But he couldn’t help but feel piqued that he had made so little impression on her. She was pretty enough to be a challenge to any man, and he was male enough to wish he
could boast to his friends that he could have had a college president’s daughter for the snapping of his fingers, except that she was second string to a girl named Sabina.

Sabina … He had demanded more than was fair of her understanding. But he had fallen in love with her because there was empathy between them, this communication that silence and separation couldn’t alter. She would forgive him this innocent defection. He, who had squandered so much of her patience, was impatient to hear her say that he had not. But for Sabina’s sake he could not leave until this old woman’s unconvinced eyes believed the simple truth that nothing had been created between himself and her granddaughter that could not be ended now and forever. He searched his mind for words that would make clear this total absence of design without being inelegant or ungallant. When they were said and accepted, he would leave their lives with the assumption that he would be forgotten before the falling of the leaves.

“Young man,” Gram said, “are you in love with my daughter?”

Every thought that Clark had collected flew out of his mind. He felt his face redden like a schoolboy’s. “Whatever my feelings,” he said wildly, “I’m sure your granddaughter is not in love with me.”

“How do you know, young man? Have you asked her?”

“Of course not, ma’am, I wouldn’t ask such a conceited question.”

“Nonsense! The world wouldn’t last very long if everyone were as bashful as you.”

That stung him. “I’m not a boy, I’m twenty-eight,
ma’am. I’m also a doctor. I could hardly claim to be bashful before women. But I’m also a gentleman. I respect your granddaughter’s right to choose for herself without persuasion.”

“And if she chose you?”

He could think of nothing else to say, so he muttered miserably, “I would be honored.”

Gram rose. “I’m very tired, young man. I hope you’ll excuse me. I’m old, past seventy. I don’t expect to live forever. I want to see my motherless granddaughter settled before I die.” She tried to think of his first name: “Carl” or “Clark” or something beginning with C. But it didn’t matter, thank God; he too could be called Doctor.

Clark proposed to Corinne after two weeks of escorting her places. In the fourth week a date was set, invitations were sent out, a wedding dress selected, and all the other arrangements of a spectacular happening put in place. The wedding was accomplished without a hitch.

Clark shook himself from his reverie and looked at his watch. He was running late; he had errands to run for Corinne. What was done was done. He was fifty-two. Twenty-four years was long enough for any man to have to live with a mistake. He turned and headed for home, soothed by the thought that if all went as planned his time of penance was almost at an end.

I
f in Gram’s distorted eye Liz’s baby Laurie was a carbon copy of Hannibal, if in Liz’s biased eye Laurie was the wonder child of the world, an impartial eye presented with an album of Laurie’s ancestors might have lingered longest on a tintype of a preacher, Preacher Coles, born a slave around the time that Gram was born the daughter of blue-blooded slave owners, living and dying without ever knowing that Gram existed, but cofounder of the same family nonetheless.

Preacher was the first of the Coleses who was called to heal, carrying his gift across seven counties, seeking the one in which he would settle. All he possessed was the shirt on his back and the Bible in his hand that he couldn’t read, though he turned the pages and made as if he could, and preached a mighty word.

He had a voice that was like no other, a cello, a flute, a clap of thunder. A copper-colored man with wild auburn curls shot through with red strands, he looked the way he talked, like an angel of the lord, like a flaming sword. He could take words and turn them into pictures that brought the whole of heaven within soul’s reach. There wasn’t a sinner he couldn’t save. There wasn’t a cabin that didn’t welcome him, or a chicken’s neck that wasn’t wrung for him, or a daughter who wasn’t paraded before him.

He was twenty when he got the call. He was working in the fields, and he put down his hoe, took his Bible in his hand, and began to walk with God. All the time he walked he was looking for a land of plenty, and a strong-built woman who could bring a child to birth without dying in labor and leaving it motherless. He had seen so much dying. He had stood beside his stricken parents, powerless, watching as they were struck down, the fever burning them to the bone. The herbs hadn’t helped, nothing helped. He lived, but his younger sisters and brothers, four of them, four rickety stair steps, had been born to die, some before walking or talking, or even really knowing they were alive. Preacher himself had been spared, in part because half of his blood was the blood of his mother’s master, a hard-drinking Irishman who had broken his mother’s hymen by divine right upon purchasing her, before mating her with one of his bucks to increase his herd of livestock, which recurring plagues were depleting. Preacher received his inheritance in his begetting: enough white blood to immunize his colored blood against the white man’s pestilences that killed off his ma and then
his pretend pa, and then his brothers and sisters, one after one, until there were none.

He had walked away from the plantation after the death of his family, and no one tried to stop him. The South was at war, and hunger was dogging the army’s heels. A runaway slave was one less mouth to feed. Preacher lived each day as it came, sleeping where nightfall found him, running errands for the promise of a penny, buying penny buns if the promise was kept and begging at back doors for bacon rind when the need for meat became a craving. With a stick and stealth and stolen matches, he learned to catch wild creatures. He grew older and began to work for a dime a day chopping wood, or picking cotton, or plowing. With his stick handy for rabbit stew, and plenty of old sheds scattered about in which to make a bed, it was enough.