Wherever There Is Light (6 page)

The wind blowing through the palms was rattling the coconuts when Julian returned to the cottage. Kendall was sitting in one of the plank chairs and reading the
New Yorker
.

“Good article?” he asked, and sat in the other chair.

“It's about Thomas Hart Benton.”

“He was on the cover of
Time
.” Julian was pleased that he'd heard of the guy.

“He was.” Kendall placed the magazine on the arm of her chair. “Julian, what do you do?”

“I used to be in the hospitality business.”

“And Eddie? He's a headwaiter?”

“You'll have to ask him. Me, I see things.”

Kendall grinned; flexing her beauty muscles was how Julian saw it. “You hallucinate? Like you're insane?” Kendall may have been joking, but she was also studying him as intensely as her mother had done at dinner.

Julian said, “I see a space and imagine what can go there. Then I pay people to fill in the space.”

He thought his reply had a nice artistic ring to it, and sounded better than the humdrum truth, that he conjured up a project—an apartment building, houses, or stores—purchased the land, hired an architect and general contractor, and when they were done, he either sold or rented and managed the properties. It wasn't as glamorous as bootlegging or owning nightclubs and gambling joints, but he made boatloads of cash and it was unlikely that anyone would shoot him.

Kendall seemed to be contemplating his answer, and she stopped studying him. “Did you eat lunch? I can take you to the cafeteria.”

“Your mother sent over sandwiches, and I'm having supper with my parents—if I can find their place.”

She nodded toward the blacktopped road. “They're not far—at one-eleven Frederick Douglass Lane. All the professors here, except your father, are Negro. If it weren't for the faculty housing my mother put up, they would've had to live in Coontown—the Negro section of Lovewood. My mother thinks it's disgraceful for anyone to live in a place with that name.”

“She's got a point.”

“My mother usually does. Once, she was walking through the student center and heard
Amos 'n' Andy
and shut off the radio and gave the boys listening to it a lecture: ‘If two white men choose to act like fools so America can hear them, they don't have to pretend they're Negroes. White men are foolish enough on their own.' ”

As if it had just dawned on Kendall that Julian might be insulted by her comment, she glanced at her lap and nervously threaded her fingers together. Julian wanted to reassure her that he wasn't offended by taking her hands in his. Yet he no more would've done this than he would've touched her breasts. And his restraint bothered him, since he was uncertain why he felt it. Because Kendall had class and she was dating a law student, and Julian was afraid of being rejected? Or because Julian was unwilling to violate some invisible barrier of the racial divide?

Kendall looked up. “I'm sorry about the beach.”

“It wasn't your doing.”

“Otis was showing off for Eddie, and Derrick was . . .”

“Showing off for me?”

Kendall hunched and unhunched her shoulders, a gesture with more ire in it than resignation. “Derrick wouldn't have done it unless you were there.”

“The man's not dumb. He would've been outnumbered.” Julian wasn't eager to defend Derrick, though he had no intention of taking the rap for his slapping the mayor's brother.

“Sometimes people . . . need to stand on their own. To prove they can find their own way. Can . . . can rely on themselves to— Is this making any sense?”

“Depends. On whether you're talking about Derrick. Or . . .” He hesitated, doubtful that his most effective strategy was to bend their conversation in too personal a direction. “Or you.”

Smiling wistfully, Kendall said, “Could be . . . both of us?”

That she was perplexed by the mystery of herself appealed to Julian: here, at a Negro college in the middle of nowhere, he'd stumbled upon a kindred spirit. It made him want to buy fate a case of champagne.

Glancing at her watch, which Julian noticed was a man's rectangular Hamilton on a black leather band, Kendall stood and took her
New Yorker
. “You're leaving?”

“In the morning.”

She held his eyes with a gaze as intimate as a kiss. “Safe travels.”

“You too.”

“I'm not going anywhere.”

Julian spent the afternoon in the college library. A librarian peered suspiciously over her wire rims when he requested directions to the fine-art books, and behind him, as he went by the tables where students were studying, some wiseass remarked, “He probably lost his map,” and the ripples of tittering that followed embarrassed him. Julian selected the fattest volume on the shelf:
Art Through the Ages
by Helen Gardner, an encyclopedic survey from cave paintings until the modern era, and to escape the stares of the students, he went to the basement and hid in a carrel, reading through the Renaissance before he had to leave.

The faculty resided in rows of stucco bungalows that had been painted in pastels of pink, yellow, and blue. As Julian searched for Frederick Douglass Lane, he heard mothers summoning their children to supper and snatches of conversations and radio programs—Billie Holiday singing “What a Little Moonlight Can Do” and Bob Hope cracking jokes—filtering out through screen doors, a Sunday-evening symphony that left Julian wishing for a family of his own.

His parents' bungalow was redolent with Elana's pot roast, a double-edged memory for Julian, his joy and sorrow fighting to a draw as he sat at the kitchen table.

“Are you settling in?” Julian asked.

Theodor said, “I've never been warm in December before, and I've been preparing my lectures in English. It has been years since I have lectured in that language. I was lecturing in English when I met your mother. Remember, Elana?”

“Yes, Theodor.”

They ate in silence. Any visitor uninitiated into their traditions would have been uncomfortable, but Julian took solace in the absence of conversation, for their meals in Berlin had frequently ended with a tongue-lashing from Theodor. It hadn't always been that way. Julian could remember the woodsy scent of his father's pipe tobacco and sitting with him in an armchair while Theodor read Greek myths to him in German, and in the summers, holding his hand as they walked from their rented villa through the crowd on the shore of the Greater Wannsee and out into the lake, where Theodor taught his son to swim, and Julian recalled thinking that the water dripping off his father's broad shoulders and beard made him look as powerful as Poseidon. Things began to go bad the summer Julian was twelve. One afternoon, when he and his father returned from the lake, they found Elana on the terrace mumbling to herself and sprawled on a chaise with a bottle of
Kirschwasser
, a glass, and a vial of Veronal by her chair. As Theodor pulled his wife to her feet, shouting, “Elana, Elana, what have you done!” Julian ran to their neighbor's villa, where a neurologist from the Charité university hospital was vacationing with his family, and he told the doctor that his mother had swallowed her sleeping pills with cherry brandy. The doctor came, and Elana recovered, but once the Roses were back home, they barely spoke to each other, and Julian was soon infuriating his father by exploring the neon-lit debauchery of Berlin.

“President Wakefield told me the Committee for Scholars in Exile is attempting to bring more professors to Negro colleges,” Theodor said, wiping his mouth with a napkin. “But the State Department is—
stingy
is the word she used—with visas. She said Lovewood was fortunate.”

The committee had also been fortunate. Julian had mailed a check for ten grand to its office in Manhattan, a donation that insured his father would be on top of the committee's list.

“Well,” Theodor announced. “I must get back to my manuscript.”

When he was gone, Julian said, “How are you, Mama?”

“Getting along. President Wakefield says they have tenant farmers, and some of them and their children could use a nurse. It'll keep me busy.”

Julian gave her an envelope. “Here's two thousand dollars. If you need more—”

“I don't need this.”

“Take it. And if there's anything else—”

“You've done enough. We're safe now. With the trouble Hitler's making, there's going to be a war, isn't there? Your father says no, that mankind will come to its senses.”

In Julian's experience, people rarely came to their senses unless they were threatened, but why burden his mother with his opinion? “I hope he's right. Listen, I have business in Miami. I'll be back next month and—”

“She is beautiful, Julian.”

His first line of defense was to play dumb. “Beautiful?”

That didn't do the trick. “Kendall is beautiful, but it's not so easy with the way things are. Love is worth it, though. Always.”

Julian was stunned. Given her marriage, he hadn't the slightest notion of how she had come to that conclusion. Julian looked at his mother. Elana was in her forties yet there was still something girlish about her: her unlined face, her pinned-up blond hair, her bright blue eyes and faint smile; and Julian realized, with a disconcerting clarity and sadness, that despite her struggles, his mother—perhaps back when she first sat across the table from Theodor in a Romanian restaurant—had once nurtured dreams of her own.

Julian started clearing the table.

“Leave the dishes,” Elana said.

He kissed her forehead and took a long, slow walk back to the cottage.

B
y morning, no one had come to arrest Julian for roughing up Hurleigh, and he decided that it wouldn't hurt his cause with Kendall and her mother if he found out whether Mayor Scales was using his brother to pressure Garland into a land deal. He took a taxi to Lovewood and had the cabbie wait for him outside Scales Antiques.

As Julian entered the store, a bell tinkled over the door.

“Can I he'p you?” a man called out from a seat behind the counter. He was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt and red shoestring tie with a rhinestone clasp and puffing on a roll-your-own. Julian zigzagged between barrels of stuffed baby alligators and seashell necklaces, display cases of salt-and-pepper shakers in the form of Negro mammies, and glassware imprinted with the Confederate flag.

Julian said, “Mayor Scales?”

“ 'Round heah, I'm Jarvis.” His face was all sharp edges—pointy chin, thin lips, a tiny nose as hooked as an eagle's beak, even his bristly flattop, which was receding into the shape of an arrowhead.

Julian introduced himself, and Jarvis snickered. “You the one gave my baby brother a bellyache?” Julian responded with a slight nod, and Jarvis reached back to open a cooler. “Lemme get you a drink. That Hurleigh be like a palmetto bug in my shorts.”

He took out a Dr Pepper, popped off the cap on the lip of the counter, and handed the soda to Julian. “I done told Hurleigh to keep away from the college and the beach—even if them colored kids take a dip. I ain't got nothin' to do with my brother's foolishment, but it ain't no secret I'll pay Miz Wakefield 'bout any price she name for her property.”

Julian couldn't tell if Jarvis was being straight. He'd helped Abe buy politicians by the bushel and knew that if one of those greedy equivocators swore it was daytime, you better peek through the blinds to check. So he opted to push the mayor and see what happened. “Oceanfront property's not cheap,” he said with a faint bite of sarcasm. “You must be selling stuffed alligators by the ton.”

“You think I don't know what you is—some northern boy in a fancy suit, silk tie, and fourteen-karat collar pin? A boy with a friend that pistol-whip one of them pissants Hurleigh hang 'round with? We southern and talk more natural poetry than most, but we ain't nohow dumb. I'll wager the Lord was as gen-rous to me as He was to you during Prohibition.”

“We didn't dump sugar into vats of cat shit and turpentine.”

Julian had meant to insult Jarvis, to irritate him enough that he'd let something slip, but Jarvis wasn't easy to insult. He chuckled, a gruff rumbling in his chest, the way Satan would chortle if he chain-smoked. “Didn't use no cat ingredients, but I'll allow we mighta put in a dash a rattlesnake piss for flavor.”

Jarvis shot out a salvo of smoke rings. “Boy, you funny as a nine-legged dog, lookin' down your nose at me, believin' I ride 'round with the Ku Kluxers. Like up north all y'all love Negroes. Few years ago, me and the wife went to New York. Checked into the Plaza Hotel. We been to Radio City. Ate veal Oscar at the Waldorf. And the only colored we seen was carryin' luggage, operatin' elevators, and shinin' shoes. Yet y'all of the opinion you cut from a finer cloth than us. Shoot, me and Miz Wakefield ain't no white–colored folderol. She educated and smart, and that don't always go together, do it?”