Rising Tides (32 page)

His eyes crinkled at the corners, and she fell silent. “I wish I was going to be here when you were all grown up,” he said.

She saw real regret in his eyes, and enough self-control to make sure it didn’t blossom. She wanted to say something to change his mind, something mature and witty and possibly provocative. But her bravado was melting under the warmth of his expression.

She looked at her watch. “I guess I’d better go.”

He stood as she did. “I’m sorry your uncle wasn’t here.”

“It’s all right. I think I know what I have to do.”

“Be careful.” Ruefully, he touched his own cheek as testament. “This could be a dangerous time. Whatever you do, imagine the consequences first, and try to protect yourself.”

She didn’t anticipate her response. He was only a foot away.
She could feel his body warming the space between them. She rose on tiptoe and kissed his bruised flesh. “I’ll be careful.”

He didn’t smile. “Not careful enough.” She started to go, but he gripped her shoulder and turned her. “I’m not even sure you know when you’re in danger.”

“Why? Are you dangerous? What am I supposed to do now? Imagine the consequences, or try to protect myself?”

“I think it’s too late.” He tugged her closer, and she didn’t resist. His hand traveled up her neck to her hair. He combed it back with his fingers. “I’ll explain what’s dangerous. You’re old enough to know men find you attractive and young enough not to know what that can mean.”

“Spare me the birds and bees, please. The nuns have talked around them for years.”

He smiled then. “You have a sassy mouth.”

She leaned closer, more daring than she had ever been. “Don’t you want to see how sassy?”

He bent his head. His laugh was deep and tantalizing. She could feel it rumbling against her breasts as he tugged her closer. Her eyelids drifted shut. He wrapped his arms around her back and held her still against him. Her own slender curves melted into every angle of his body. She sensed the warmth of his skin as he bent to kiss her, and the first brush of his lips was no surprise.

The kiss deepened. Warmth became heat and gentle ness, passion. Her lips opened as his did. She hadn’t anticipated the bright flare of sensation or the intensity of his response. She had wanted a memento; she was given a legacy.

He set her away from him, and no laughter remained in his voice. “That wasn’t a good idea.”

She was too confused to know. She turned without a word and took the path to her mother’s car. Ben was still silhouetted
against the glow of the living room window when she drove away.

At home, she returned the car without incident and went to bed without speaking to either of her parents. She tossed and turned for most of the night, reliving the kiss and the conversation. Somehow, kissing Ben had been a catalyst. One bold move had catapulted her into adulthood, into a place where action meant everything and dreams nothing at all. The kiss was all mixed up in her head with the plan that had occurred to her on her uncle’s porch. By early morning, all her conflicts were resolved.

She arose well before she needed to and dressed in her school uniform. Then, before anyone else was stir ring, she went downstairs to the living room and made several phone calls. By the time Sarah Jane was setting the table for breakfast, she was on her way out the door.

She wore only a light jacket, and she shivered as she walked along sidewalks buckling from the roots of century-old live oaks. Mourning doves cooed from the hedges lining her path, and red-winged blackbirds called from telephone wires. Once she reached Jackson Avenue, buses sped past, carrying maids to the houses where they would clean, cook meals and raise the children of people who believed that the maids’ children were too inferior to attend white schools.

By the time she neared her destination, the day was warmer. The neighborhood was not familiar to her, al though she had passed through it many times in a car. Already she was drawing attention. Her school uniform was one of a kind here, and she was one of the few people on the street with white skin. The people she passed looked at her suspiciously, as if nothing good could come from her presence. She hoped they were wrong.

She was tired and tense by the time she found her
self in a wave of students heading toward one of the city’s Negro high schools. She wasn’t welcome. She was a stranger of the wrong color, and she imagined that even if her reason for being there was known, she would still be unwelcome. Somehow, in her years of accompanying Uncle Hugh on trips to his parish, she had progressed beyond the simple belief that good intentions meant anything or that she, by virtue of the genetic draw, knew what was best for everybody. She had learned that she knew very little. Today she expected to learn more.

When she turned onto the block where the white stucco high school sat, amid shabby but architecturally graceful homes, she could almost feel the tension in the air, as thick as the dew had been just an hour before. Her telephone calls had paid off. As she had hoped, a station wagon was parked in front with the letters of one of the local television stations emblazoned on it. A small group of white newsmen stood on the front steps, as if hoping that together they could stave off the wave of teenagers heading toward them.

Dawn was on the edge of that wave as she made her way up the front walk. The kids around her were no longer silently hostile. Comments were lobbed at her, and she was shoved repeatedly, as if she needed a push in another direction. She held her ground and made her way forward a few feet at a time. She saw the combined gazes of the media fix on her, and she prayed there would be no incidents they could record until she got inside.

On the steps, she signaled them. She saw them glance at each other, as if measuring reactions; then they moved forward.

The crowd of students grew thicker, until she was carried along with them, no longer able to determine her own direction. She was jostled by one girl who, with a sympathetic
glance, murmured an apology. Dawn asked where the office was, and the girl pointed down the hall to the right.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, before Dawn could look away.

Dawn decided it might be a good idea to tell her. “I’m going to register.”

The girl laughed, as if Dawn had told a good joke. “You gonna be a cheerleader, too?”

“Think I’ll make the squad?”

“If they don’t put you in the crazy house first.”

Dawn had the feeling that she was finding and losing a friend, all in the space of seconds. The harsh realities of segregation had never seemed clearer to her, the opportunities missed, the friends never made. “Look, will you tell your friends that I’m not crazy? I just want to see things change.”

“You really gonna register?”

“I’m going to try.”

They were separated before the girl could respond. Dawn struggled toward the office, crossing through the rapidly thinning crowd. She hurried so that no one from the
Picayune
or the television stations could catch up with her before she made it inside the office door. She hadn’t come to give interviews. Not at first, anyway.

The office was much like the rest of what she’d seen of the building, poorly lit and in need of paint, but large and reasonably well equipped. Students crowded along the front reception counter, which was staffed by two harried women. Someone turned when the door banged, and after a moment of elbow-nudging, a space at the desk was cleared for her.

She heard the door bang again and suspected who was behind her. She took her space at the desk, and the room fell silent. “I can wait my turn,” she said.

“What do you want?” The woman behind the desk was neither friendly nor rude. If anything, she sounded resigned, as if she could guess what might be coming.

“I’d like to register. I don’t live far away. This school is as close as any to my house. I’d like to go here.”

“You’ve got to know you can’t.”

Dawn had thought her answer through carefully. “I don’t know why not. My family pays taxes.”

“You know that’s not the reason.”

“I’m a good student. I’m not a troublemaker.”

The woman looked as if she doubted the last. “That has nothing to do with it.”

“My father’s Senator Ferris Gerritsen. I’m sure he’d give me a character reference. My uncle, Father Hugh Gerritsen, will give me a reference, too, only he might be hard to reach, since he’s over in the Ninth Ward, trying to make sure the schools are integrated peacefully there.”

The office was suddenly as quiet as the hall had been noisy.

The expression on the woman’s face changed subtly. “I’ll get the principal.”

“Thank you.” Dawn turned to look behind her, and the world exploded in a flash of light. She turned back to the desk to avoid more photographs. She ignored the questions being tossed into the silence.

An elderly man came out to the desk. He looked as if he wished she would disappear. “Why us?”

“I’m sorry, but by rights this should be my school.”

“You’re not doing us any favors.”

“You’d be doing me a favor by letting me attend classes here.”

“I can’t.” He looked past her at the reporters. “Not because
I don’t want to, either. There are laws that say I can’t. And I have to follow them, whether I like them or not. If I had my way, any child of any color could go to school where she wanted.”

“And if I had my way, that’s the way it would be, too.” Dawn tried to gauge whether there was anything else to be said. Finally she held out her hand.

The principal grasped it. He looked at her, and humor sparked in his eyes. “Maybe your children will have that opportunity.”

“I’m going to do everything I can to be sure they do.” This time, when the flashbulbs popped, she didn’t flinch.

The photograph the newspapers ran that evening and the next morning was the one of Dawn and the high school principal earnestly shaking hands across an office counter.

A week later, another story ran, this time at the bottom of the last page of the second section. Dawn Gerritsen, the parochial school senior who had recently tried to integrate a local public high school, was now attending a private academy in Virginia. When contacted for more information, her father, Senator Ferris Lee Gerritsen, reported that the family had decided Dawn needed a peaceful environment, away from the unfortunate strife in New Orleans, to complete her education.

D
awn had expected repercussions from her actions, but exile to Virginia was more than she had anticipated. Instead of fireworks, Ferris had issued a coldly voiced order to pack her suitcases while Cappy found a school for her. With few options so late in the year, Cappy had been forced to settle for an out-of-state boarding school that already had more than its quota of rebellious, privileged girls.

The academy staff and curriculum were conservative, but Dawn found herself surrounded by a stimulating array of friends. By the time the year ended, she had progressed from distress to a measure of gratitude. She left with a dozen addresses and her share of a package of condoms, since she and her roommate had determined that the first priority after graduation was to get laid.

She hadn’t gone home for Christmas or spring break, and her parents’ occasional visits had been formal and uncomfortable. Her father refused to discuss what she had done. Cappy tried to fill the silence with questions that seemed nothing more than thinly veiled attempts to condemn Dawn’s new friends.

Aurore had come once to see her, but the trip had exhausted
her, and Dawn had begged her not to try it again. Uncle Hugh had written frequently, and she had savored each of his letters as a vindication of the person she had become. But the real excitement of each trip to her mailbox had been the possibility that she might find something from Ben.

Ben’s first letter was a page torn from a comic book. He’d glued new balloons over the heads of the characters, and inserted his own dialogue. Dawn was trans formed into the superheroine, dedicated to saving the world from ignorance and prejudice. Ben was her awest ruck admirer, yearning to be as creative and brave him self. He signed the page “Love.”

He wrote infrequently, but his letters were treasured all the more for the space in between. In the lonely hours after her roommate had gone to sleep, she dreamed about the kiss they had shared. She dissected each letter in the darkness—she had memorized them all—looking for something, anything, to prove that she was more to him than an outcast who needed cheering.

At the urging of her friends, she invited Ben to her graduation, but he had his own festivities to take part in at Oberlin and sadly—or so he wrote—declined. His refusal dulled the shine of her attraction to him, and she convinced herself it was for the best. The future beckoned. Ben was heading north for a job on the Boston
Globe,
and she had been accepted to the University of California at Berkeley, where her confrontation with the New Orleans school system had been seen as an asset.

She wrote Ben once more, wishing him well at his own graduation and telling him her plans. Then she packed for a quick trip to Grand Isle before heading west.

Her father was in Baton Rouge and claimed he wouldn’t be able to see her on this trip. Her mother met her at the airport in New Orleans, and without even a brief stay at home, they
drove straight to the island. She had wanted to see the places that had mattered to her before she was sent away, but Cappy insisted that Aurore was waiting for them. Dawn knew the real reason she wasn’t allowed to go back to the house on Henry Clay. She was still in disgrace. Her parents thought it best that she not show her face and remind anyone of what she had done.

The little she’d had in common with Cappy seemed to have disappeared, too. One night, in a rare moment of honesty, Cappy made a confession as she and Dawn relaxed on the front gallery. Until that moment, the only thing to disturb the silence had been hands against flesh as they slapped lazily at mosquitoes.

“I had such high hopes for you,” Cappy said. “Be cause of the war, I missed all the fun of my own carnival season. I wanted you to have it. I wanted to help you buy your dress and choose your jewelry. I wanted to celebrate with you if you were chosen for the Rex or Proteus courts.”

“A lot of things are more important than wearing a rhinestone tiara and waving a scepter.”

Cappy lit a cigarette and looked out over the twisted water oaks. “Well, you’ll never have a chance to do either now.”

Dawn felt a stab of regret. She wasn’t as disdainful as she’d sounded. At heart, she was no different from her New Orleans friends, who yearned for carnival honors. Her family had both the bloodlines and the financial assets to make her eligible, and she had been raised to understand the carnival system and its importance in the social life of the city.

“Nothing I did was to hurt you,” she said, trying to make up for the remark about rhinestone tiaras. “I knew there would be repercussions, but I didn’t have time to think them all through.”

“Would you do it differently if you could?”

Dawn was surprised Cappy wanted to know. “I don’t think so.”

“But you’re not sure?”

“I just don’t know what good it did, or what point I made. I don’t think I changed anything.”

“The point you made was that this civil-rights business tears families apart. That morning you were in the papers, white parents all over the South had a new reason to be frightened. They looked at their own children and wondered if their heads were being turned by integration propaganda.”

“Oh, come on! If my head was easily turned by propaganda, I would have been out burning crosses on Negro lawns.”

Cappy laughed. The sound was strange to Dawn, girlish and unrestrained. “I missed you, darling. I wish you hadn’t gone into that school and tried to register, be cause once you did, your father couldn’t let you stay at home. And I missed you.”

Dawn didn’t know how to answer.

Conversations with Aurore were more satisfying. They talked about Grand Isle, and other summers they had spent there. They held hands and strolled along the beach, stopping to examine the bones of seagulls and driftwood tossed ashore by the surf. Uncle Hugh was on a monthlong retreat and couldn’t join them, but Aurore told stories of his boyhood and Ferris’s. Aurore was well, but she moved much more slowly and took long naps that sometimes stretched into evening.

Gulf Coast was still thriving, but Aurore had turned over nearly all the power to others. She told Dawn that she rarely went into the office. For the first time, Dawn was face-to-face with the reality of her grandmother’s mortality.

During her first year at college, she didn’t let herself think about that oddly painful visit. Louisiana might be home, but California was freedom. No one seemed to care what she did or thought, and change was as much a part of the air as the scent of eucalyptus trees wafting from the Berkeley hills. She was thrilled by the diversity on campus, both in opinion and in culture. Some one was always willing to disagree with her about the events in Cuba or a tiny spot on the map called Vietnam. She had an assortment of boyfriends, and lost her virginity to the third, a Texas rancher’s son with an infectious grin and a ticket back to Tyler at the end of the term.

Best of all, the spark that had been kindled after five minutes of instruction with her uncle’s Leica flared into a roaring passion. In her first term, she took a fine arts course and studied the work of photographers like W. Eugene Smith, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Imogen Cummingham. In her second, after a Christmas spent in Arizona with her roommate, she took every photography course she could fit into her schedule.

She spent the summer of her freshman year in Mexico, camping with friends and searching for Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” with the Pentax SLR her grandmother had sent her as a Christmas present. At the end of August, she turned down a trip to Grand Isle in favor of two private weeks in the tiny apartment she would share in the fall. She turned the closet-size bath room into a darkroom and developed forty-seven rolls of film.

By the end of her sophomore year, photography had eclipsed sex, debate and the pleasures of alcohol in her affections. She had a wide circle of volunteers, all obliging and patient, who posed as she struggled to learn to do portraits. She practiced with a ninety-millimeter and a135-millimeter, then a wide-angle lens. She experimented with light settings and different
types of tri pods. She splurged on a larger camera, a Hasselblad, and learned to switch the backs so that she could interchange black-and-white and color film. She borrowed a four-by-five press camera from one of her professors and practiced until she felt qualified to apply for a summer job at a Marin County weekly. The pay wasn’t good, and her subjects were limited to Sausalito socialites and too-cute children, but by the time school began again, she knew what she wanted to do with her life.

At the end of her junior year, she was finally ready to go home again. President Kennedy’s death and the burgeoning Free Speech movement had thrown a somber mood over the campus, and along with everyone else, she had spent much of the year thinking about how quickly life could change.

She had seen her parents sporadically in her years away, but she had never gone back to New Orleans. They had come to California for a few days during her second Christmas holiday, and on the third they had met her in Colorado to ski. She had spoken often to her grandmother by phone and corresponded with her uncle. But she had chosen not to go back to Louisiana, and no one had really questioned that decision.

Now she felt ready. In June, she flew back to the city of her birth and the house on Henry Clay. She stepped off the plane, and the sultry air washed over her in waves of memory. In the car on the way home, she gazed at pastel houses surrounded by splashes of summer flowers, at palm and banana trees and sweetly fragrant mimosa. She thanked the driver who had come to pick her up and greeted Sarah Jane and the other staff she remembered. Then she wandered through the house, trailing her fingers over smoothly polished surfaces and plush upholstery just to prove that she really was home again.

“You’ve grown up.”

She turned at her father’s voice. She hadn’t expected him to be home. Her mother had written to tell her that both of them would see her that night for dinner.

“Daddy.” She didn’t know what else to say. She hadn’t been alone with her father in years, not since be fore she had put her commitment to integration into action.

“I’m supposed to be at a meeting, but I told them my little girl was coming home and they’d have to meet without me.”

In that moment, she realized just how terribly she’d missed him. His anger had hollowed out a space inside her. Friends and even lovers hadn’t been able to fill the emptiness.

“You look good.” She smiled, although she was suddenly close to tears. “Every inch the politician.”

He held out his arms, and she was in them in a moment. “I’ve missed you,” he said, stroking her hair. “I’ve missed you, darling. I’ve wanted to pick up the phone and call you a hundred times, but I guess I’m just a stupid old man.”

“You’re not old.” She laughed through tears that re fused to wait another minute.

He laughed, too, and hugged her harder. “Are you going to stay all summer? We need some time to catch up.”

Until that moment, her plans hadn’t been firm, but now she realized that she needed to be home more than she needed to be anywhere else. “I’ll stay.”

“That school’s too damned far away.”

She didn’t remind him that, at one point,
no
place had been too far away. She hugged him harder and accepted his invitation for lunch at the Roosevelt Hotel. As she changed her clothes she realized that Ferris had chosen a spot where they would see and be seen by the very people he had sent her away to avoid.

It was late afternoon by the time she got to her grandmother’s house. Aurore had canceled her plans to go to Grand Isle for the summer. In the past year, even short trips had grown difficult for her, and summer’s heat sapped what little strength she hoarded. Over lunch, Ferris had reported that he had forced Aurore to install air-conditioning in her house, but she seldom turned it on. Instead she had supervised the construction of a small pond in one corner of her garden, and now she sat there each day, listening to the sounds of the Garden District and watching giant goldfish swim sluggishly from lily pad to lily pad.

Dawn found her there. She had wanted to surprise her grandmother, so she hadn’t told her when she was coming. Aurore looked up, and suddenly Dawn knew both how desperately she had been missed and how much Aurore wished she hadn’t been caught with the evidence on her face.

Dawn knelt in front of her and took her hands.
“Grandmère.”
She was crying again—more tears in one afternoon than she had cried in all her years away from home.

“Tears for me?” Aurore squeezed Dawn’s hands. “Don’t cry, sweetheart. You don’t need to cry.”

“I guess I do.” Dawn laid her head in her grandmother’s lap. “I’ve missed you so much. And I’ve missed this house and garden. I’ve missed everything, and I didn’t even know it.”

“And I’ve missed you. But you’re home now. For how long?”

The question held a hint of desperation. “The whole summer,” Dawn assured her. “Every last bit of it.”

Aurore stroked her hair as Ferris had done. “I want to hear about everything.” She laughed a little, the soft, breathless laugh of an old woman. “Maybe not every thing,” she conceded. “But the parts a grandmother should hear.”

In the next few weeks, Dawn took a hundred photo graphs of her grandmother beside the goldfish pond. Aurore was as alert and curious as she had always been, even if she had visibly aged. She claimed she was con tent to survey the world through Dawn’s eyes, and she savored the glimpses of Mexico and California. Dawn promised that in the weeks to come she would wander all the different parts of the city and bring back New Or leans for her grandmother to enjoy at her leisure.

Dawn tried to capture her parents on film, as well, but she was never satisfied. Cappy was elusive. The moments when Dawn thought she really saw her mother were so rare that she wondered if they had occurred at all. And Ferris had been photographed so often that he instinctively presented only his best side.

Conversations with them were much the same. She and Cappy struggled to find subjects to discuss, but their attempts quickly grew stale or turned into arguments. Cappy didn’t seem to approve of her new, independent child. After their lunch together, Ferris was affectionate but distant. Dawn had been gone so long that she was no longer a prime subject of discussion among his friends. Now, when her attempt to integrate the high school was mentioned, it was usually dispatched with humor and a patronizing fondness.