The Wedding (16 page)

A group of mothers made an afternoon call on Miss Amy. They arrived in a neighborly and friendly fashion, in accordance with the unwritten rule that summer was not officially in season until the Norton house was open and its occupants receiving. With their mouths appropriately at half mast, the mothers paid their respects to the memory of Miss Amy’s dear departed father. With their mouths smiling like watermelon slices and their voices climbing over one another to outdo each other’s eagerness, they trilled their pleasure at her brother’s exciting rise to an equally impressive realm. Tea was poured, and they sipped it more and more slowly. No one wanted to be the first to have to start. The stones
they had brought to throw at Isaac grew heavy in their hands.

A silence fell that the sipping couldn’t fill. A throat was cleared, but courage faltered. Another throat started to emit a sound but changed its course to coughing. Waves of embarrassment rolled over the room. Then one red-faced woman whose pounding eardrums gave her the sensation of drowning in a terrible sea flung her stones and floated free. Stone after righteous stone was thrown until the helter-skelter pile rolled back the tide. Whoever saved herself had saved her child, her girl child, from a fate worse than drowning—a life not worth living. They saw their cause as just, and they felt they had presented it tellingly, especially since Miss Amy did not challenge it.

But Miss Amy would never have stooped to reply to the women’s insults, as they should have known. If she kept quiet, it was because there was no way for her to be as sure of their daughters as she was of Isaac. When she was asked if the matter could now be considered disposed of, forgotten, she said that it could be. Relieved, and in haste to change the subject, no one thought to ask her if it would be. It would neither be forgotten nor forgiven. Miss Amy’s summers on the island were already reduced, saddened by fleeting memories of other years and other children. Now these women had taken the only child Miss Amy had left and twisted him into a savage shape with their mouths.

Miss Amy saw the mothers to the door, giving no sign that she would never invite them to cross its threshold again. Nor would she cross theirs. But as the days advanced no sign was needed to spell out the obvious. The mothers dismissed
their worries, deciding that Miss Amy’s retreat from their tea tables was due to her delicate concern that her mourning dress might cast a pall over their parlors. They kept in touch by sending over broths and custards accompanied by calling cards inscribed with the hope that she was feeling better, though no one had it from any authority that she was feeling ill.

Isaac accepted his separation from the camaraderie of summer with the stoicism that was part of his school’s curriculum, and part of a colored child’s nature. He learned to live inside himself earlier than other people do (and some people never do). He learned to count his blessings and take everything else in stride. The premature end of his childhood illusions did have one very sweet compensation, though: every Friday he was allowed to take Miss Amy for an afternoon drive in her elegant little phaeton. His hand promptly became adept at holding the reins of her beautiful, spirited, fast-stepping bay. It was a bigger summer bonus than jogging about in a slowpoke pony cart that couldn’t go half the places that a real horse and carriage could go with ease and get there twice as quickly, and Miss Amy knew it. She rode beside him, not telling him what to do because she saw that he knew.

Perhaps some cosmic force saw and approved the parallel paths two horses trotted down: Isaac, with his beloved Miss Amy at his side, and Hannibal, with Gram at his back. The hack Melisse had hired perhaps rattled along a bit more unsteadily than Miss Amy’s phaeton, and Gram’s stories to Josephine of the golden days of her childhood that Hannibal soaked in were touched with a sadness whose depth Miss
Amy’s tales never approached. And Miss Amy did not embellish her accounts, except as the remembering eye adds height and breadth to everything. Miss Amy rode in a smooth continuum of time never torn from the calendar by war. Her way of life would die of natural causes; she would not even live to see it. Gram’s way of life, though, had been cut down in its bloom. The flower of the South had rotted in the slime of slavery, the root no substance to the stalk, and the stalk suddenly obscenely ejaculating until it lay limp and self-abused in a burial of petals. Gram had pressed those petals between the papers of her memory before they could be swept away by the winds of war that sucked up everything else.

And so as Isaac sat beside Miss Amy, the gifted and the giver, Hannibal sat in his separated seat, coachman to Miss Caroline. Yet Gram, without lifting a finger except to point to the spot where Hannibal was to serve the ladies their picnic lunch, without contributing a dime or being disposed to let so much as a penny go to waste on Hannibal’s potential, without one kind word of encouragement or advice, Gram was in her way as inspiring to Hannibal as Miss Amy was to Isaac. Isaac became what Miss Amy had foreseen; Hannibal became what Gram had to see to believe.

Occasionally Miss Amy let Isaac have free rein with the carriage, and when she did he drove them far and wide. He sensed that after this summer he would never come again to this jewel of the Atlantic, though he never dared question Miss Amy regarding the future, nor did she volunteer any information. If this was to have been the summer of his
unrestrained passion, it was the island that received it. No woman would ever have as many facets for him as its sea, as many surprises and treasures as its highlands and lowlands, as much enduring beauty, as much quiet grace. His capacity for love, made to seem brutish and shameful by Miss Amy’s neighbors, could now never surrender its self-control to lower levels of fulfillment. When he was ready for a wife, he might feel for her in the hide of his body, but in the New England overlay of his mind he would never admit to her existence. His tryst with the island, in the summer he came into puberty, was one of the few romantic adventures of which he would have total and tender recall in the winter of old age when forgetfulness torments the day and only the unforgettable orients the mind.

At summer’s end Isaac packed his clothes and his boy’s belongings for the trip back to Boston. This time he left no token behind as he had in other years, in company with the other children who firmly believed they were leaving a talisman to ensure their return. He was through with childish acts and childish hopes. Next summer he would be fifteen, old enough to stay alone in the city, and big enough, if he kept growing, to get a man’s job and a man’s pay. He had watched the red-capped porters in busy South Station on his way to and from the island—middle-aged men for the most part, their backs bent, their faces bubbling with sweat, on a treadmill trot on tired flat feet.

In this heyday of the railroad’s prosperity, with motorcars and airplanes scarcely dreamed of, the parlor cars were the mobile drawing rooms of the rich, and the black men who served them as waiters or porters or redcaps received
extravagant tips for their coldly calculated servilities. All of their bowing and scraping was directed toward an end that justified the means. They saved their tips, and sent their sons to high school; they saved their tips, and started little businesses. Though generations to come might gloss over these beginnings, this was the beginning of the colored middle class. In Isaac’s hometown the tiny station had been a way stop, with one train passing a day that nobody got off of and only a few ragged colored people heading North got on, and redcaps with extended palms were unnecessary and unknown. In South Station, though, a smart-stepping boy could earn himself enough in the summer to send himself to school in the winter. If he could stomach the servility, a man could ensure his future.

Settling down to sleep on his last night on the island—his decision made, his mind content with the fact that Miss Amy would no longer have to have him as her summer problem—Isaac did not dream a boyish dream of someday returning in triumph, world-renowned physician to presidents, kings, and ambassadors, and rich enough to have a carriage of his own drawn by two Arabian horses, in which he drove Miss Amy scornfully past all the kneeling neighbors who beseeched him for cures. And maybe he would open his doctor’s bag for them, and maybe he wouldn’t. He did not dream this dream of fame and riches. Even in his subconscious he served no other god but Asclepius, and Asclepius was a jealous god, even more so than immortal Mammon.

There had never been any question, any doubt, about Isaac’s becoming a doctor. Preacher had made God a vow, and the moment Isaac leaped from his mother’s mutilated
womb, a man-child strong in limb and lung, he was hostage to that vow. Preacher carried in his mouth the pearl of Christ, and he passed it on to Isaac, and with it a compassion which never corrupted itself by sifting among the sick for the heaviest purse. Even at this young age, Isaac looked on medicine as a personal challenge. He had seen the puny die and the strong live. As a child in the South he had known children too sickly to play, too sickly to know that life offered nothing better than the joy of living. He was made for this life, and not just because Preacher had breathed it into him from his first days of understanding. There was the time during his adolescence when he had held a small trembling bird in the power of his hand and watched as it flew high and far away, its broken wing mended and its trembling halted—able to fend for itself once more as a result of his care. From this, Isaac learned the power of his hands, and he also learned that to be whole was to have a chance.

Isaac did not plan to grow rich. The idea that his descendants would come to take summer vacations on Miss Amy’s island along with others of their kind, that they would stay in the same houses and ride in cars that cost more than carriages, that they would sip expensive spirits of an idle afternoon on a front porch while a colored woman stood over a stove in the kitchen, perfectly amenable to serving her own kind, was beyond his most absurd fantasy. When Isaac entered medicine, cars hadn’t yet been invented, cocktails hadn’t yet been invented, and the idea of colored people taking vacations had not yet been invented either. Isaac naturally felt that his descendants were destined for a fate superior
to that of anyone else’s descendants, but the sight of them sleeping in Miss Amy’s master bedroom and throwing out some of her things because they didn’t match the standard set by the house’s newer furnishings would have made him rub his eyes, hard.

T
he central irony of Isaac’s life might have been that all of the material comfort he would obtain had less to do with his own (unimpeachable) toil than it did with the emotional emptiness of his marriage.

Isaac’s diligence paid off with a scholarship to Harvard. That he was a social outcast there did not surprise him at all; he did not want to be liked, just respected. The only way for a colored man to be respected at Harvard was to consistently receive higher marks than his classmates, and he did. From birth Isaac had known himself to be the receptacle for other people’s hopes that went far beyond thoughts of his individual happiness. He was a flag bearer of sorts, and he knew it, and he knew, just as others before him knew, that too many people would take enjoyment from his
failure for him to consider for a moment deviating from his course.

Preacher and his wife did not live to see their son graduate from medical school, but Isaac sensed that somewhere, somehow, they were with him. He felt their presence again the day he opened his first practice in New York. He was soon overwhelmed: many doctors compete to minister to the needs of the wealthy few, but doctors willing to treat patients with little money soon find they have more patients than they know what to do with. He lived in a garret on the top floor of a handsome brownstone on Strivers’ Row, let to him by a sympathetic colleague. That same colleague hounded him daily about the sorry state of his love life. Didn’t Isaac know that a wife was part of a doctor’s equipment, that a “family doctor” inspired more confidence when he was also a “family man”?

For a long time Isaac shrugged off his friend’s badgering. The prospect of a wife to bed and board was never one he had found attractive, and if he harbored any baser needs he had long ago learned to keep them to himself. But finally the day came when he relented enough to take time out from his evening to have dinner with a young woman his colleague knew, a schoolteacher, fair skinned, graceful, and from an unimpeachable family. Soon enough they were married. There were too many advantages: marriage gave a busy doctor a home where he could get a meal without waiting for a table and a wife to mend his shirts, keep his social life in order, and give him sons to carry on his name.

For her part the schoolteacher had married for love, or at least it had seemed to her that a schoolteacher—the pinnacle
of professions for a woman of her race and time—could not help but fall in love with a doctor, an even higher peak in her race’s progress, and one who was Harvard, handsome, and fair skinned. He seemed a perfect choice for a husband, and if wedding vows did not lead immediately to the sort of passion she had been led to expect, perhaps that would come in good time. As a schoolteacher, she had accustomed herself to observing all of the rules of morality. As a doctor’s wife, she was also expected to be immune to temptation. Marriage made sex permissible, desirable, but marriage bound her to one partner, a man whose time of love was contracted by work to some hasty unfinished hour in a bed too late come to and too soon left. The disordered bed of a fever-ridden patient, with her high-pitched cries, her flashing eyes, and her flesh like fire, would not release him to the fevers of the schoolteacher, who would not die if unattended.

But she was a woman of dignity, who would be too faithful to her home and children to let her unused nights diminish the meaning of her days. She deployed her energies a dozen ways, so that her mind wouldn’t defile her or her body betray her to the seducers of other men’s wives. When she could no longer deny that their relationship was hollow as a reed, she still preferred a public appearance on the arm of a doctor to a private, secret place where love could lie beside her. Her skin would still become flushed with pride at being Mrs. Dr. Coles, and when it did she did not look like a neglected woman. Her trembling was imperceptible. Since she did not look rejected, she supposed she did not feel rejected; she had so much that was more impressive than the thing that no nice woman ever talked about.