And All Our Wounds Forgiven (6 page)

The bareness of her house had provided a hiding place from Death as omnipresent in her landscape as a fat and silly full moon on the face of a perpetual night. When she was there, she was able to forget and felt guilty because Cal could never forget and neither could any of the other blacks in the civil rights movement and she had asked Cal if it was all right if she forgot sometimes. It was unavoidable. When she walked along a street in downtown Nashville, her height or her looks may have called attention to her but not her color.

“I need you to be white and blond and blue-eyed,” he had said.

She left the house. A few years later someone found her name in the records and she sold the house and land for a large profit to a development corporation that was going to put up — what else? — a mall.

She returned with her father to the house in California where she had grown up and where her parents now lived in dignified estrangement. When she went into what had been her room, she was surprised to find it almost as bare as the house in Nashville. She had not put pictures of movie stars on her walls or collected stuffed animals, or read books besides the ones needed for school. The only furniture was a king-sized bed and a dresser. The room, and it was a large one, was dominated by the sliding glass doors leading to a deck from which stairs led down to the beach. The wall at a right angle to the doors was a floor-to-ceiling mirror. The floors were polished, gleaming with the hard, flinty brightness of the sun off the ocean. Had she never had enough life to depict with objects, or had she always needed respite from the omnipresence of death?

“So. You’re back.”

She turned at the flat sound of Jessica’s voice. The two women looked at each other with the kind of matter-of-fact hatred only possible between mother and daughter, a hatred that came not from things done by each to the other but that flowed from who they were, a hatred so natural that neither had to expend emotion on it, a hatred so intimate that it was a kind of love.

“Jessica,” Elizabeth said. She could not remember the last time she had seen or talked on the phone with her mother but it had been too long. The woman standing in the doorway looked twenty years older than her fifty-two years. The body was still tall and erect (and she had never noticed how much alike her father and Jessica looked) and the skin of the lean face was still taut, but there was a weariness of spirit in the eyes, a nimbus of bankruptcy in the straight set of the lips that would have given her the appearance of evil had there been any vitality left. Elizabeth wondered if she was going to die soon. (She did.)

“How long are you staying?”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Just making conversation, I guess. What would you like me to ask you? What it was like being the mistress of one of the most famous men of the twentieth century? Is it true what they say about black men’s penises? What would you like me to say?”

Elizabeth was too spent and, surprisingly, too mature to grab the bait as she would have in years past. “Would you care to join me for a walk on the beach, Jessica?” she asked instead.

The older woman hesitated, then nodded.

That summer of 1969 was lived more outdoors than in. She walked the beach for hours, sometimes with Jessica, sometimes with her father, most of the time alone, especially at dusk when she would cry and scream into the roar of the surf. She was surprised at how insignificant the world became in the midst of grief. She was aware of the riots across the country after Cal’s death, and there was an evening when she sat with her father and Jessica and watched Neil Armstrong take a small step for man and a giant one for mankind and she thought how presumptuous of him to think he knew the significance of being the first person on the moon. There was something that summer about a young woman drowning in a car driven by Ted Kennedy but she didn’t think about the political implications for the presidential ambitions of the last Kennedy brother. Her grief merged with that of the young woman’s parents and she wept for both. She cried, too, when she saw a magazine photo from a large rock festival at some place back east called Woodstock and in one a beautiful young woman with long blond hair sat on the shoulders of a guy and both were bare chested and it was raining and they were so happy and Elizabeth was sorry that she had never been so young and so free, that she had never been in love and felt the rain on her breasts as she rode astride her lover’s shoulders.

All summer she weaved back and forth across the yellow line separating grief and self-pity, sometimes aware vaguely that grief did not make her unique in human history, or worthy of notice or comment. But the pain of grief also encompasses all of history, and, in her self-pity, she belonged to humanity more completely than she ever had.

She permitted her father to coax her out for drives down the coast to La Jolla or up to Santa Barbara and through reading bumper stickers she became aware of a nation pirouetting into self-pity, an emotion tolerable in a person — for a while — but for a nation, the aggrieved self-righteousness at the core of self-pity was potentially volatile and dangerous.

OUR GOD ISN’T DEAD, SORRY ABOUT YOURS
TRUST GOD! SHE PROVIDES
WE ARE THE SILENT MAJORITY
HELP YOUR POLICE FIGHT CRIME
WE ARE THE PEOPLE OUR PARENTS WARNED US ABOUT
TARZAN AND JANE ARE LIVING IN SIN
CUSTER WORE AN ARROW SHIRT

The evening she met Gregory she supposed she had been well across the yellow line and breaking the speed limit in the self-pity lane.

She had been sitting just above the tide line, staring across the dark evening blue of the ocean when suddenly, a voice, “Pardon me. Are you Lisa Adams?”

She looked up into a face as young as love.

“Who are you?” she asked, her voice sounding sharp and unfriendly in her ears.

“I’m sorry. Greg. Gregory Townley. I’m spending the summer at the Carver’s,” he pointed down the beach and up the cliff.

She shook her head. “I don’t know the neighbors.”

“I’ll be entering my first year of dentistry school at UCLA. Reg Carver and I were roommates at USC and will be also at dental school, and he invited me to stay the summer with him and his folks rather than going halfway across the country to Chicago, my home, where I wouldn’t know anybody anymore. Do you mind if I sit down?”

She wanted to say no, but he seemed harmless enough.

“I saw your picture in the paper when —” he hesitated, not knowing how to finish the sentence.

“John Calvin Marshall was killed,” she finished it for him. She looked at him, his developed chest, the legs that seemed muscled and resilient, and wondered if he were strong enough to ride her on his shoulders, her thighs clasping his cheeks, her breasts open to the sun, the wind and the rain.

And that was how it began, like most relationships, in a fantasy of being through an other someone she had never been. Gregory looked — and how voluptuous the word sounded — normal. It appeared to her that Death did not even know his name yet, that Death was not aware that this Gregory existed and maybe, just maybe, he might live forever, gazing at her shyly, starstruck because she, she — and what was his fantasy of whom he would become through her?

“What was John Calvin Marshall like?” he asked without prelude. “I’m sorry. You don’t have to answer if that’s too personal.”

“And what made you think I did have to answer?”

“I didn’t mean it quite the way it sounded,” he apologized. “And it is certainly none of my business. But I’ll probably never again in my life be this close to someone who knew him.”

“Why do you want to know?”

He shrugged. “I guess you wonder what’s real about these people on TV and what isn’t. And the only one who knows is someone who sees them off-camera, as it were.”

“Maybe the one you see on television is the real one, and the person off-camera is unreal,” she responded, not caring to answer his question.

“What is your definition of real?”

“Whatever people agree to.”

He thought for a moment. “Are you saying reality is subjective?”

She thought for a moment. “Yes, I think I am.”

“An aching tooth is not subjective.”

“An
abscessed
tooth is not subjective. The aching is.”

He smiled. “Touché!”

“I won’t answer your question except to say that John Calvin Marshall was someone I cared about — deeply, but I felt no anger when he was killed. It was an inevitability he lived with. For most blacks, however, John Calvin Marshall was the best in them. Killing him killed something in all black America. Why else were there riots all across the country? Blacks were expressing the grief of their own deaths.”

“I disagree,” Gregory interrupted. “There are a lot of whites like me who are in shock and think Marshall’s death is the worst thing that could have happened.”

She nodded. “Sure, a lot of white people are deeply grieved, but they don’t feel as if that which gave their lives definition and meaning and direction has been taken away. And that’s the problem. The civil rights movement was successful because at the same moment in time and in the same places, the subjective experiences of blacks and whites concurred with the notion that an integrated society was in everyone’s best interest. Now, the subjective experiences of blacks and whites have diverged. For blacks the best among them has been killed by the worst among whites. Without John Calvin Marshall I wonder if all of us, black and white, will lose faith that we can ever be better than we are.”

“I do take things personally,” she resumed, aloud to Andrea. “How else can something have substance? How else can I have a relationship to it? If there is no relationship, there is no reality, no existence.”

Cal lived in terror that one day when the audiences and TV cameras and radio microphones and reporters with their pads were gone, he — Cal — would not awaken because John Calvin Marshall would have swallowed him and killed all memory of person and solitude. He clung to her body and remembered himself.

That Thursday morning in the foyer of the chapel, she stood at the bottom of the stairs and waited for him to come to her. It was a self-assurance of tissue and bone, marrow and muscle and blood.

At five-ten, she was a physical presence, exuding mastery of the spot on which she stood. She lived in her body as if it were an instrument that registered the hidden tremors of souls and bestowed the intimacy of grace.

“Cal was tall enough to look me directly in the eyes, and his eyes did not leave mine to seek out my body. He didn’t smile and I was pleased he knew I didn’t need him to put me at ease. He did not proffer his hand.

“‘So, you’re Elizabeth,’ he said.

“No one, not even my parents, called me Elizabeth. That same afternoon I went to the library and looked up the
New York Times
with my picture in it. They had called me Lisa.

“He
called me Elizabeth.

“I dissect moments as if they are specimens in a zoology class. Maybe Gregory and I aren’t so different after all. He x-rays decisions; I cut into a single moment of conversation and peel back the layers of silence, the sinews of intonation, the spongy tissues of words until I see the throbbing muscle of the heart.

“That’s what lovers do. They return to moments in their histories and search out the nuances of feeling of which they had been unaware. They share the thoughts not expressed for the sake of those that more needed saying. By ferreting out the latent, their love is animated in ever new ways.

“How many times over the years I have returned to that moment in the foyer of the chapel searching for shadows of emotion. One specter I have uncovered is an embarrassment that he focussed his attention on me and excluded you. I saw you at the edge of the semicircle of students around him. You looked more like a graduate student than Mrs. John Calvin Marshall.

“Looking at you, I knew you and he were not married. No man married in his soul would risk trusting that soul with another woman, and that was what Cal was doing, with you looking on. If he had been interested only in my body, that would have been another matter. Men are not discriminate about whom they share their bodies with. I suppose I would be the same if my sex organ hung from my torso like a nightmare, if I had to touch it several times a day, if it went from limpness to hardness of its own volition, imposing its presence on my consciousness when I was not expecting it and did not want it. Having a penis must be like living with an alien being, a parasite that attaches itself to you and leads you around seeking its own gratification. So what if you’ve got a wife and four kids at home and you love them dearly? What’s love when there’s pussy to be had?”

“I knew he was not with you because I had been with Jessica and father in social settings often, had seen her dressed in nonexistence with a smile as women surrounded my father. Most men are not married to their wives, not if marriage is one soul living in two bodies. Most women live in anger, alone in their souls, alone in their bodies.”

Elizabeth gazed on Andrea and envied the iconic dignity in her face. Age would not usher Elizabeth into such a hallowed visage. She was merely beautiful and beauty was a caprice of Nature — an eighth of an inch added to or missing from a lip, an infinitesimal curl to the ends of the lashes, a lift to the curve of the cheekbone as insubstantial as a dusting of snow on ice. The difference between beauty and ugliness was thinner than a fingernail.

At 51 Elizabeth still carried herself with the ease of one comfortable in her skin. The hair was shorter now and streaked with gray strands, which she regarded as laurel wreaths earned in the freedom of truth. She had become what was called a “striking-looking” woman, meaning people saw her and wondered if she was “somebody.” Her height, the blond hair, the almond-shaped blue eyes, the almost perfectly shaped nose and lips, and, on that day in the hospital, the wide, soft suede skirt with two deep pockets, the matching boots of a leather soft enough that the tops could be folded and were, the white cable-stitch sweater turned over at the neck gave her the look of a well-to-do, very competent, yet down-to-earth woman who moved through the world with an assurance most women believed they could never attain and men longed to have for themselves.