Wherever There Is Light (39 page)

Yet Kendall intended to marry Julian. She loved him. Since he'd been gone, she ached for him and thought about all his qualities that she adored, cycling through handsome, smart, generous, protective, and that she couldn't get enough of him in bed. This last one was tricky. With other men it was easy; afterward, a tension was gone, and if her partners had any complaints, they could go elsewhere. With Julian, though, she wanted to please him, wanted to obliterate every strip of flesh that separated him from her, wanted to drag him with her into that shimmering, tranquil, bottomless darkness, and when they were done she felt as though a star had burned out in the sky.

That was her thinking as she drank her glass of wine. She would change the departure date on her ticket to the day after tomorrow and surprise Julian by taking a cab from the airport to South Orange. She could picture his expression when he saw her, that curious pairing of manly calm and boyish glee, and how happiness seemed to deepen the blue of his eyes. They would make love and walk to Gruning's for ice cream and make love again, and the next evening they could go out with Fiona and Eddie, draft them as their matron of honor and best man over prime rib at the Tavern, and finalize the details of their wedding.

Kendall poured herself a second glass of Beaujolais, but after a sip she set it on the floor. She had started wondering if Julian would keep his promise to live in Paris if she married him. Why wouldn't he? Lots of reasons, beginning with New Jersey was his natural habitat and after a while in Paris he'd end up as miserable as a lion in a zoo. That wasn't what scared her, though: it was that if he chose to go home, would she be able to live without him? Or would she miss him with the same dull, joy-sapping ache as she felt missing him now?

Perhaps she was being silly. She got up and dug through one of her boxes and retrieved a copy of her first book,
Double Lives
. She flipped through the pages, remembering her days shooting in Harlem; her desperation to make a name for herself as an artist and her shock when Léo Sapir offered her a show at his gallery. She recalled how the publishers, Ada and Aaron Robbins, came, and Ada bought her
Little Girl & the Rainbow
for her office wall, telling her that she had once been that girl, and at lunch a week later they'd offered her a contract for a book. It had all happened so fast, and so long ago.

Back then, Kendall had considered the double exposure a self-portrait, and now she looked at the photograph in her book with the same sense of recognition—the window of the five-and-dime, and the little girl with pigtails and the faded dress gazing at the dolls from
The Wizard of Oz
under the papier-mâché rainbow. It wasn't the image of a child wishing to own a doll that caught Kendall's attention. It was the other image, the ghostly image in which the girl appears far older, with that bitter look of disappointment on her face because she understands that cuddling a doll in her arms or traveling over the rainbow will not satisfy her—that this longing beyond longing was the essence of who she was and to renounce it was to become someone she didn't want to be.

This, Kendall realized, was her dilemma—her fear that the yearning at the center of her, a yearning that had been with her forever, would die if she married Julian, and she would cease to be an artist. Taking photographs, capturing glimpses of the life around her, was the one thing that she needed more than him, and to lose it would be to lose herself.

Kendall wanted to cry, but she couldn't, so there was no relief from her sadness, just a terrible pressure behind her eyes as she took a pad and fountain pen from her satchel:

My Dearest Julian: I think I have loved you ever since I saw you at my mother's dinner party so many years ago. I'm sitting here wishing that I was someone else, someone who would not have to write this note. I'm honored beyond words that you want to marry me. But I can't marry anyone and remain who I am. I can love you, though, love you always, love you for the rest of a life that I can scarcely imagine without you.

That was all she had the strength to write. Maybe she would add more in the morning, an apology, a clearer explanation. Then she would seal the letter in an envelope with her plane ticket and mail it to Julian.

The air was too cold now to keep the window open, and Kendall closed it and gazed down at the square, where the benches were empty and leaves floated on the dark water of the fountain.

MIAMI BEACH, FLORIDA

F
EBRUARY
7, 1952

F
our years. Over four years since Julian had heard from Kendall. It had been too long and, he discovered one morning, not long enough.

“Hello, Julian?”

He lay in bed with the phone in his hand and tom-toms beating queasy rhythms in his head. Last evening, he'd had dinner at the Forge with a guy raising capital to build the world's swankiest hotel on Miami Beach. The guy had a flair for ordering cognac—a blessing at night, a curse in the morning.

“Julian, it's Kendall.”

He was tempted to hang up except he missed hearing her voice—the muted southern melody, the sharp edges, the intelligence, the whispers and sighs.

“Hi,” he said. “Where are you?”

“Lovewood. I called Fiona. She told me you were staying at the Saxony.”

“That woman runs her own CIA.”

“Don't be mad.”

“At Fiona or you?”

Kendall laughed, a soft, doleful sound. “I meant Fiona, but—”

“I'm not mad.” That was true in Fiona's case. He had supper with her and Eddie twice a week, both of them pushing him to find a wife, but mostly Fiona, who said, “It'll be a snap. You're the most eligible yid in New Jersey and the state's got more temples than Israel.” Julian dated and nothing lasted. His anger at Kendall had melted away, yet he still had difficulty thinking of her without sorrow, without asking himself if there was something he could've done to make it work out, and his inability to answer that question irked him.

“You're down here for a while?”

Julian heard it in her tone: she had a request, and he imagined replying—Y
ou're on your own, kiddo
. Even as he formulated that petty riposte, Julian knew that the words would never come out of his mouth. Love erodes or hides or curdles to rage, but it doesn't go away. It etches itself into your heart, permeates the muscle, survives in the blood.

“Until this afternoon. My plane's at three thirty.”

“Could—could you take a ride to Lovewood before the airport?”

“What's wrong?”

“Mama's sick.”

“I'm—”

“She's dying.”

His anger, his sorrow, an urge to see her, another urge to take an earlier flight home battled inside him. “I'll be there by eleven.”

“I'll meet you by grandpa's statue. And Julian—thank you.”

Garland Wakefield sat on the yellow-and-white poppy-print couch in the parlor with her heart, kidneys, and eyesight failing, the result of her being too busy to watch her diet, test her blood sugar with a lancet, and inject herself with insulin. Even though Garland hadn't been to her office since she'd fainted behind her desk on Christmas Day, every morning she demanded that her nurse help her hot-comb her white hair into a bob and dress for work. Then she'd sit on the couch until the nurse helped her back upstairs for her nap.

Kendall said, “I made some tea for you.”

“You can't drink tea without sugar—it'll kill you. And if you're done talking to your boyfriend, can we talk?”

“Julian's not—”

“Diabetes doesn't make you deaf. I could hear you in the kitchen.”

Kendall pulled the cane-backed recliner close to the couch so her mother could see her.

Garland said, “I've hired a dean from Fisk and another from Spellman to run the college. Two men to take the job of one woman—that should about do. But you're on the board now, and you have to attend those meetings twice a year.”

“I will.”

“The board's got distinguished folks from Afro-American Insurance, the Negro Business League, the United Negro College Fund, the NAACP. You better read those financial statements or you won't be able to tell pig slop from pizza.”

“Yes, Mama.”

“If I had my way, you'd give up your hobby—”

“My hobby?” Kendall was looking at the wicker table beside the couch, where Garland had arranged her oeuvre between bookends. She even had her latest,
Paris in the Dark
, a pictorial guide to postwar nightlife.

“Don't go arguing semantics—it puts wax in my ears. All's I'm saying is you should quit scurrying around like a sprayed roach and come home like your friend Simon.”

Garland had saved issues of the
Courier
for Kendall. Simon and his new wife were the toast of Negro society in Pittsburgh, and Simon had become the executive editor of the newspaper. Kendall didn't envy Simon's life, but she was stung that her mother would show her the papers, another of Garland's not-too-subtle critiques of her choices. Kendall almost retaliated by telling her about Simon and Thayer and how Julian had saved Simon. She chose not to because ever since arriving from Paris, Kendall had begun to mourn the only mother that she would ever have. One of them had to end their war and Garland didn't seem inclined to declare a truce.

“All's I mean,” Garland said, “is if you were here, I could teach you about running a college.”

“That would be nice.”

In her more resentful and grief-laden moments, Kendall believed that she'd learned the lessons her mother had intended to teach her: trust no one; dedicate your life to your work; embrace your loneliness as a badge of honor, as unassailable evidence that you are your own woman, that you belong to no one but yourself.

“And this is important,” Garland said. “My will states that you are the one person who can sell any Wakefield property. I don't want you to, but who knows what'll happen without me as president. If you have to sell some, not one acre to Jarvis Scales. You hear?”

“I hear.”

“Not a blade of grass to any Scales.”

Garland stared across the parlor. She didn't appear to be seeing anything. As if she were in her casket, Kendall thought, and grief tied a knot in her stomach.

“Your grandfather didn't want me to fetch and carry for white folks.”

“Grandpa was born a slave. Why would he want his daughter to work for his former masters?”

“No, that wasn't it. He didn't want me doing for others because it would've interfered with my doing for him.”

Garland's eyes were wet. Kendall sat next to her on the couch.

“Who told him to send my mother away?”

Kendall held one of Garland's hands in both of hers.

“You think I wanted to grow up without my mother? Or marry your father? I hardly knew the man. But Ezekiel Kendall, he say, ‘Jump,' I say, ‘How high, Daddy?' I did everything he ask; you do nothing I say. Don't hardly seem fair.”

“I—”

“Who made you so damn free?”

“You did, Mama.”

Garland rested her head on Kendall's shoulder. “Can't swear I did it on purpose.”

Julian and the bronze likeness of Ezekiel Kendall watched the students cross the campus as if gliding on the sunlit wind, and Julian wondered if Ezekiel felt as old as he did. His surrealistic musing, so out of a character for Julian, was a welcome distraction from his nervousness about seeing the statue's granddaughter walk toward them. Her curves seemed more lush, and Julian pondered how it was that Kendall could transform a plain, shell-pink cotton dress into a ball gown simply by wearing it.

“You're staring,” Kendall said with a weak grin, a reference to their old game.

“Always.”

They looked at each other, uncomfortably, for neither of them knew the appropriate move. Kendall solved the dilemma with French cheek kisses.