You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (7 page)

“Your books have sold millions of copies,” the young interviewer was saying. “They’ve been translated into a dozen languages. Into German and Dutch and Portuguese…”

“Into Spanish and French and Japanese and Italian and Swahili,” Andrea Clement White completed the list for her, omitting, because they never came to mind, Russian, Greek, Polish and Lithuanian.

“And you’ve made from your work, how much? Hundreds of thousands of dollars. Isn’t that true?”

“Yes, yes,” said Andrea Clement White, in a little girl’s voice that mixed pride with peevishness. “I can’t complain, as to sales.”

And so the interview continued. A gentle interrogation with no embarrassing questions, because Andrea Clement White was now old and had become an institution and there was never anyone in her presence who did not evince respect.

“Let me put it this way,” she said. “It is more important that they are
people,
from the novelist’s point of view. A botanist might say of a flower, it is a
red
flower. He is really studying flowers.”

(Her mind had switched to automatic. No one had asked an interesting question in years.)

If she was famous, she wondered fretfully behind the alert face she raised for television, why didn’t she
feel
famous? She had made money, as the young woman—lamentably informed in other respects—had said. Lots of money. Thousands upon thousands of dollars. She had seen her work accepted around the world, welcomed even, which was more than she’d ever dreamed possible for it. And yet—there remained an emptiness, no, an ache, which told her she had not achieved what she had set out to achieve. And instead must live out her life always in the shadow of those who had accomplished more than she, or had, in any case, received a wider and more fervid recognition. But, on closer scrutiny, those “others” she immediately thought of—the talk show guests, the much reviewed, the oft quoted—had
not
received more acclaim or been more praised than she; why then did she feel they had?

(She knew she would not be satisfied with the interview when it was aired. She would come across as a fatuous, smug know-everything, or as an irritable, spacy old fool. Her chronic dissatisfaction was always captured by television, no matter how cleverly she tried to disguise it as, oh, fatigue, too much to think about, doddering old age, or whatever.)

She left the studio thinking of the luncheon for her that same afternoon. It was at the college where she’d taught English literature (how she’d
struggled
to prove Charles Chesnutt wrote in English!) for over a decade. The president would be there and all her colleagues, with whom she’d battled, sometimes successfully, sometimes not (for five years they’d resisted Chesnutt, for example) over the years. They would fulsomely praise her—obliterating from memory the times they’d wished her dead; she would graciously acquiesce. She thought of Cooke, the dean, now retired of course, but unthinkable that he would not show up; how he had always been the first to kiss her whenever she returned from even the slightest triumph, and how she had detested that kiss—his lips rough, cluttered and gluey—and how she had told him, explicitly, her feelings. “But ladies are
meant
to be kissed!” he replied. She had thrown up her hands—and endured. Or had avoided him, which, because they shared an office, was not easy.

Then there was Mrs. Hyde, her secretary, also retired from the college though still working for Andrea Clement White in her office at home, who was the closest thing she had to someone to lean on. Any time of the day or night she was able to call on Mrs. Hyde—and Mrs. Hyde seemed to have nothing better to do than serve her. She understood she represented to Mrs. Hyde a glamour utterly missing from her own life, and Andrea Clement White had, over the thirty years of
their
acquaintanceship, ridiculed
Mr.
Hyde unmercifully. Because, in truth, she grew used to being served by Mrs. Hyde, had come to expect her service as her due, and was jealous and contemptuous of Mr. Hyde—a dull little man with the flat, sour cheeks of a snake—who provided his wife little of the excitement Andrea Clement White felt was generated spontaneously in her own atmosphere.

Mrs. Hyde was, in fact, driving the car, Mrs. Clement White seated beside her. And one could tell from the restful silence in the car that they shared a very real life together. If Andrea Clement White sat in the same car with her husband it was clear
they
shared a life. He was a man who cared little for Literature, having—as he said—married it and seen how crazy it was. But the quality of the silence was quite different. In her husband’s silence there was tension, criticism of her, impatience. He held his tongue the better to make her know what he thought. Mrs. Hyde held hers as a comfort; she knew Mrs. Clement White needed the silence—after an encounter with other people—to settle into herself again.

“Imagine thinking that black people write only about being black and not about being people.” Andrea Clement White fumed, rummaging through her purse for a tissue. “Disgusting make-up,” she said, running a tissue around her collar and bringing it down a very dark brown. “Can you imagine, as many shades of brown as there are, they have only one jar to cover everything? And one jar, of course, for
them,
but then
they
only need one jar.” Mrs. Hyde did not say anything. She drove expertly, smoothly. Enjoying the luxury of the car, a silver Mercedes 350SL. Her foot barely touched the pedal and the car
slid
along, effortlessly.

I walked into the studio, Andrea Clement White replayed herself, as she did all the time (someone called this the curse—or was it the blessing?—of the artist; she thought everyone did it), and right away, as usual, I knew it was going to be awful. That the questions would be boring and the interviewer ill read, ahistorical and poorly educated. It was enough when white liberals told you they considered what you said or wrote to be new in the world (and one was expected to fall for this flattery); one never expected them to know one’s history well enough to recognize an evolution, a variation, when they saw it; they meant
new
to
them.
But how cutely ignorant the young black woman interviewer had been! “You are the first!” she had boomed—strangely unbleached black voice as yet, but TV would whiten it out—and when Andrea Clement White said, “But there’s no such thing as a first, an absolute first in the area of human relations, only perhaps in Science,” the woman had thought her coy, and had grinned, indulgently. (Andrea Clement White hated to be indulged when she was not seeking indulgence. It was at that point that she switched her mind to automatic.)

And now the lilacs along the road rushed as if drawn against the silver of the car; and lilacs and television interviewer mixed: there was an image of the interviewer with a sprig of lilacs in her hair. But why so many so far south? Had they been creeping south with the harsher winters? Or had they been here always? Andrea Clement White could not remember. She saw herself among the lilacs on her college campus in upstate New York. I stood
drenched
in the smell of lilacs. It was my perfume for twenty years, with one year out for an experiment with patchouli.…

Mrs. Hyde had stopped the car and reached into the back seat and fetched up the cane that made walking a somewhat more steady affair for Mrs. Clement White. It was a lovely oak cane, hand carved by a famous eighteenth-century carver who fell into the hands of a mistress who demanded twenty such carved canes a week; these she sold in the marketplace in Charleston, and thus, after her husband lost his money gambling and ran off with a woman who supplied him with more, she had supported herself. The carver, sick of carving and unbelieving that the Civil War would free the slaves, and too much of a gentleman to rebel or run away from a helpless white woman who needed him, cut off three fingers from his left hand, “accidentally,” while “branching” a tree. But he had not reckoned on the Scarlett O’Hara persistence of his mistress. She limited the number of canes she expected weekly to fifteen.

I was standing watching Ben make the canes, thought Andrea Clement White, because I was his daughter. Was I pretty? She thought probably she was. And she had been his other hand until freedom came. Freedom had come and everyone had had ideas about what it was for, even Ben. He had simply died. I was at the burying, of course. It was I, in fact, who dug the grave, along with…then she wondered if she would have had to be a boy to help dig the grave. She saw herself as one. Handsome, was he? She thought probably yes. But then she thought she would not have had to be a boy to do it because she had been doing every kind of work on the plantation
as a girl,
and no one thought anything of it, so she’d stay a girl. She sighed with relief.

Rudolph Miller opened the car door on her side and she looked out and up into his lapel. He had the unctuous, shit-eating grin she’d despised for—thirty years. How had she stood it without throwing up? It seemed to be made of wet papier-mâché. Took his hand: dry, plump,
old
hand, horny nails.
Yuck.
(Her grandchildren’s expressions came in handy at times like this.) Mrs. Hyde trotted around the car with the cane. So fat, Mrs. Hyde, and given to hyperventilation. But oh, the lilacs! Even here. “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed…” Abe Lincoln had probably never dreamed there would be colleges like this, for blacks, in the South. What
had
he dreamed? To be better looking, she didn’t doubt.

Now she had liver spots on her cheeks and her hair was slowly receding, but that wasn’t so bad. She could look infinitely worse and there’d still be a luncheon for her, a banquet later tonight and book parties and telegrams and people
beaming
at her well into the future. Success was the best bone structure. Or the best cosmetic. But was she a success? she asked herself. And herself answered, in a chorus,
exasperated,
Of
Course
You Are! Only a small voice near the back faltered. She stifled it.

There was, oh, McGeorge Grundy. Bundy. Ford Foundation. Going up the stairs. (They had really scrounged for dignitaries for this affair.) It would turn into a fund raiser, as everything did. And did she mind? She was making a speech as McGeorge: I give you all the money in one lump. You’ll never have to worry about money again. Or beg. Period. Good-bye. Cheering. Throwing of hats in the air. People actually used to do that. But few people wore hats today. Of course Nigerians, she heard, threw people, but that was depressing.

“This little lady has done…” Would he have said “This little man…”? But of course not. No man wanted to be called little. He thought it referred to his penis. But to say “little lady” made men think of virgins. Tight, tiny pussies, and moments of rape.

But this was fame, thought Andrea Clement White, poking at her Rock Cornish hen, which slid gracefully if speedily into Mrs. Hyde’s lap. There are the multitudes.
Is
the multitude? Anyhow, every bored, numbskull student I ever taught, every mediocre professor I’ve ever wanted to axe. And the president doing what he does best—“This little lady”…

It was probably with the patchouli that she had caught William Litz White, her husband. He’d never smelled anything like it—successful doctor, intense billiards player that he was—and had never intended to. Bohemian. Bohemian Belle, he had called her. She had wanted to
be
bohemian: to write on a kitchen table perhaps; but
not
among her children’s unwashed cereal bowls. Patchouli was as close as she got.

The hen was still nesting on Mrs. Hyde’s lap. Like most people who are not famous a small thing like getting a Rock Cornish hen out of her lap and back on the table paralyzed her. How could she be so indecorous as to plop the bird back into Andrea Clement White’s plate? That famous and fastidious lady (she had read interviews to the effect that she
was
fastidious; this was not necessarily her own opinion). She began to sweat.

“He’s a bore,” said Andrea Clement White, audibly and viciously (she had discovered viciousness amused)—but then, she was forgiven everything because of her fame, her use as a fund raiser, and age—and began to feel around Mrs. Hyde’s broad knees for the tiny chicken. Dragging it up stuck to Mrs. Hyde’s dress—Mrs. Hyde meanwhile going gray with embarrassment—Mrs. Clement White raised it to her lips—and took a bite.

Five hundred in the audience did the same.

Was there a point, she wondered, chewing, in thinking about what one ate at functions like this? The rocklike hen, the red ring of spicy, soggy apple. The broccoli that no one in the South had learned to cook, only to boil? She thought not, and ate it all without thinking beyond the fact that she was hungry, had to pee, was bored to tears, and her bra strap was biting into the radical edges of her latest mastectomy.

A slow, aged string of tipsy wasps (he who owned the newspaper that said Negroes had no use for higher education, though perhaps the trades; she who told far and wide the remarkable insights of her grandmother’s enslaved cook; he who…) now rose to drone her praises. She munched her chicken and five hundred others munched along with her, their chewing a noisy, incessant and exuberant ignoring. She was suddenly back at the plantation. But where? Mississippi? Too hot, and already a cliché. Ditto Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana. She picked Virginia, where there were cool mountains and where it was not too severe a stretch of the imagination to match five hundred and one chickens to that many hungry slaves.
Crunch.
She was smiling and chewing but without any intention of listening. She nodded—still grinning and chewing as each person sat down. “In
spite
of you I’m sitting here,” she thought, and reached over for the apple ring from Mrs. Hyde’s plate. This second apple ring was always saved for her to eat at the end of the meal. It was her mouthwash.

She projected herself ahead a few minutes to being presented to the audience by Tedious Taylor, the president: she was battling him with her eyes. DON’T YOU
DARE
KISS ME! But he closed his froglike eyes, descended his head, his pendulous lips, and kissed the most prominent of her liver spots.
Yuck.
So
many
Yucks. Because then there would creep up behind her Dean Cooke (whom she would have kept tabs on until now), who would glue his mouth to her neck in an attitude of falling.