The Day's Heat Page 14

  But it was her husband who surprised her the most. Contrary to his usual mute acceptance of everything his father and brother said, Charles hollered, “We’ll stand in the front door of the schools and keep them damn coloreds from coming in.”

  A stranger, hearing the hysterical words, would have thought Charles a supporting alumnus of Georgia, a Bulldog, one who returned to the campus every September for homecoming. Lee was tempted to remind him, “You flunked out, remember? What do you care about who goes to school there?” For other than placing bets and rooting for the Dogs in their Saturday games, Charles never mentioned the university. But now, an irrational anger bubbled out of him.

  “Why can’t they stay where they belong? They got colleges! What’s that college up there right before Atlanta? Fort Valley? Why don’t they go there?” Charles asked, red-faced from emotion and articulation.

  It was an energy that surprised Charles’s father and Brother as well, for it was usually Lon who dictated and the two sons who followed, agreeing. They sat dumbfounded around the Sunday table as Charles explained why the coloreds should go to their own schools. There was a mystery and danger in Charles’s overblown anger. What would he do if he knew that his children and Lee, too, for the last five months, had been sitting for an hour every Sunday in St. Jerome’s, praying with coloreds? Her reason, her excuse, was that she wanted to be in the same room with David Palmer, wanted to hear his voice, and deep down cared neither one way nor another about integration. Coloreds were only people—a lot like the Bettlemains, like her family in Atlanta—not any better, not any worse.

  There was one more month of Masses before St. Jerome’s closed, and each Sunday that inched or rushed—depending on one’s point of view—toward that closing seemed to be filled, more and more, with a solemn resistance in the colored congregation, all fifty persons. Lee sensed, actually felt the reluctance, although the Mass always moved through the prescribed rites of calls and responses. Since she refused to look up to David Palmer during the sermon, she was forced to gaze at her hands, at her two daughters, and in a more guarded way to watch the people beside her who sat in the pews. She came to realize as the weeks went by that there was an inordinate amount of coughing, snorting, shifting, much more than could be accounted for by the beginning summer’s heat.

  The congregation’s unease was especially noticeable during Father Palmer’s homily. One large colored man emitted a very noticeable, “Unh” after each of the priest’s points. Every Sunday Father Palmer brought up a different aspect of integration: “Negro” and “colored” were no longer words to be used—“black” was the word now. At this pronouncement, the large man gave a great belching “Unh” that sounded up through the bare rafters of the church, followed by thin laughter.

  Lee agreed, thinking, these people aren’t “black.” That’s no better than “white” for us. Why with a good tan she knew she would be darker than many of the people sitting beside her. And what would her mother think? A sign of Darcy’s good breeding was that she always referred to her maids as “my negras.” Lee was uncomfortable with those divisions, the words that put people in categories: Father Palmer’s assurance, Charles’s anger, or even the silent acquiescence of Willie Mae. The constant holding to lines of demarcation was tiring.

  During Father Palmer’s sermons, she felt more and more uncomfortable, although the talks often dealt with black heroes, who she knew nothing about, their contributions, especially to a Lewis Lomax, a black man who worked with Dan Rather of CBS News. Lomax came from Valdosta, a town just west of Strickland, and had written a novel, The Reluctant African. Lomax had left the South, supposedly broken free of color lines.

  “Unh,” the large man just behind Lee trumpeted. “He’s no help to us here and now.”

  Lee wondered if Father Palmer heard, wondered why wasn’t there a colored priest on the altar. It would make it all so much easier—like Willie Mae’s daughter going to a colored doctor.

  The last Sunday in April, after the sermon, Father Palmer announced the final Mass at St. Jerome’s, a month away. “I’ve heard all your petitions,” he said, “and I understand your determination to keep your church, but you must realize that we are the forerunners in the Civil Rights Movement. We must show the rest of the country that the Catholic Church is integrated in the South.”

  There was no “Unh” from the large man and no coughing or shifting from the rest of the congregation. The tapers’ flames blew to the side in a sudden rush of air caused by the opening of a side door, one elderly woman leaving, but nothing else.

  After Mass, Lee took her daughters’ hands and walked toward her car. She always left right away to avoid meeting David Palmer, but she knew that the other whites who moved so quickly to their cars were avoiding something else, maybe some small exchanges with the colored parishioners. Their leaving bothered her. After Mass at St. Anthony’s, everyone hurried away, but at St. Jerome’s everyone stayed. Most of the congregation stood in the churchyard, the children played, the adults talked, small clusters of people came together, broke up, and reformed, which made the whites’ straight-line, rushed walk to their cars all the more noticeable. They were the only ones moving through and away from the groups in the churchyard. And now, especially with Father Palmer preaching the combination of the two churches in the summer, now with the newspapers full of the protests in Atlanta, the bombings in New Orleans, with Charles’s stupid, red-faced voice shaming her, she stopped.

  “Why don’t you two go play for a few minutes?” she urged Cassie and Lill. Several young children were on the front stairs, hopping from one front step to another, getting in the way of the people coming out of the church. Her daughters needed no encouragement. They had often asked, in the car, “Why can’t we stay and play with them on the steps?”

  Lee was safe from meeting Father Palmer face to face at the church door. Her pew next to a side made it easy to make an exit before the priest could take off his vestments and come out. Practically half the congregation was milling in the yard before Father Palmer started shaking hands with those few stragglers still leaving the church.

  Lee positioned herself beside a low wrought-iron fence and stood where she couldn’t be seen by the priest. From this angle, she could still see his back, the square cut of his dark hair above the black cassock, his large hand reaching out to pat an arm, to embrace a shoulder. Several white people spoke hurriedly to Lee as they walked past. Several colored people looked her way as they moved from group to group, and a few gave Lee timid but encouraging smiles. She was off to one side, somewhere between leaving and staying. I’m neither white nor black, she thought.

  There was no such problem for her daughters, bouncing down the concrete steps with the other children, the girls totally unaware of their blonde difference.

  For a long five minutes, Lee vowed to leave as soon as the very last white person had driven away, and at the same time she wondered why on earth Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes would want to go to an all-white school.

  Then an exceptionally-black woman in an exceptionally-red dress, with a red hat, walked from where she had been talking, with hugs, to Father Palmer, walked directly to where Lee stood. As the woman neared, there was something familiar in the thin Mongolian shape of her face, the slanting eyes. But it was only when she spoke that Lee realized that this red and ebony model was her mother-in-law’s laundress, Algebra.

  “You’re Lee Bettlemain, aren’t you?” the red and black Swahili queen said, in a voice totally devoid of the slow southern pattern that Lee expected from her family and friends, and expected even more from colored people.

  “Yes, I am,” Lee answered, instantly crisping up her own speech, extending her hand for the handshake she saw coming. From her father’s dealing with Yankee contractors in Atlanta, she knew they shook everyone’s hand, even little girls’, and it was obvious that Algebra, in her tailored red dress, with her thin smooth hand with its long red fingernails stretched out in front of her, that she
was a Yankee.

  “And you’re Algebra … uh. I don’t remember your last name.”

  “Williams, Algebra Williams. No, we’ve never been formally introduced.”

  Lee’s mind slid back over the times she’d seen Algebra and her tall shadow of a son at Claire’s back door collecting the dirty laundry. The following week they’d deliver the same clothes, washed and folded, the ironed things on hangers, carefully wrapped in a white sheet, which the son held high to keep it from dragging on the ground. Lee remembered Algebra’s red Volkswagen on the side street of Claire’s house, and clearer yet, remembered Claire’s fussing about Algebra losing or stealing some piece of linen, only to find it even as she fussed, hanging on a hanger. Algebra and her son were two vague figures who moved in the background of the Bettlemains’ life, but other than that remembrance there was nothing to connect that indistinct woman with this elegant, direct person.

  “You—you work for my mother-in-law,” Lee said, unable to think of any other remark to make. Clearly there was no explaining the years that had passed between these two women without a sign. Lee had answered Claire’s back door numerous times, to announce, “It’s Algebra,” to the room behind her without a word of recognition to the woman herself, and without a word from her.

  Chapter 10

  If you don’t know where you’re going,

  Any road will get you there.

  Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

  Algebra Williams’s fingers were thin and fragile, and her hand seemed a soft glove of flesh filled with tiny bird bones.

  “I am also Father Palmer’s housekeeper,” she announced in a low, smooth voice, extracting her hand from Lee’s, who in surprise had held on a fraction too long.

  Father Palmer’s housekeeper?

  With Algebra’s long-necked drawing back, Lee felt her mother’s face settle down over her own, Darcy’s above-it-all voice filling her mouth. “Then you must be a very busy woman,” she said, looking to the children playing as if she had to concentrate on them. She wasn’t her mother’s daughter for nothing.

  “I am,” Algebra answered, “and I’m also a good friend of your friend, Louie.”

  Lee’s uninterested pose slipped. “Louie? Louie who?”

  Algebra’s manner shifted, too. “I mean, Willie Mae. Willie Mae Waters.”

  “Why did you call her Louie?” Lee asked, glad there was a question to ask.

  “Oh, it’s just a nickname we called her growing up,” Algebra said, and then as though reconsidering, “No, actually it’s her real name, but she doesn’t like it, so she goes by Willie Mae.”

  “Y’all grew up together?” Lee gave up on using crisp un-Southern words. “You don’t sound like you were raised around here.”

  The loosening in Lee brought about something similar in Algebra. The tall body in the red dress twisted, the long thin hand slapped a thigh and then stretched out with a flourish. “It’s my Dee-troit voice. I use it when I’m trying to impress strangers,” she halfway laughed.

  Then both women laughed, a combination of nerves and release.

  Algebra said, “I spent summers with my cousins up north, and they drove me crazy imitating my southern drawl. So I learned to talk Yankee, like them: I want to paark youse caar in the gaarage, youse guys.” Her exaggeration of northern speech was exactly equal to bad imitations of southern drawl.

  Lee knew they both were trying too hard to be friendly, but she laughed until tears came into her eyes. “Yeah, on television they always have us saying, baa, baa for bye, bye.”

  Then, Lee asked again, “You’re kin to Willie Mae?” Could this fashion model in the red dress in front of her be kin to short, round, nylon-capped Willie?

  “No, not really. It’s just that Strickland’s so small everybody grew up together—that is, in the black community.” The word “black” caused a half-grimace on Algebra’s face, a twist of her mouth, as though she’d tasted something bad. “I’ve known Louie forever. Her girls help me out with the ironing.”

  Everything clicked into place: Willie Mae and Algebra, friends, of course. And with another click, Lee could see that, through Algebra, Willie Mae would know that Lee and her daughters were going to St. Jerome’s. And then, like trying to see if the last domino would fall, Lee tried to read in Algebra’s sharp, slanting eyes if Willie Mae’s guess about a man on the afternoon of the rectory had been relayed to Algebra. Algebra, his housekeeper!

  A cloud eased over the sun, the spring morning dimmed, and the baby inside began to beat a steady, rumbling tattoo against Lee’s spine. She saw all the connections, the secrecy—the door you run into in the dark. Willie Mae could have easily elaborated, while talking to Lee about the white shirts, that Algebra was Father Palmer’s housekeeper, too, and that she went to St. Jerome’s, too.

  “You’re kind of a middle man, huh?” Lee said vaguely, her thoughts sorting out the tangle.

  “Well, yes and no.” It was Algebra’s turn to be vague.

  From where Lee was standing, she could see that Father Palmer had now turned and was staring at them, across the yard, his eyes like two lighter stones set in his great pale face. Lee wanted to keep talking, to keep smiling, to show him. But she had not met his eyes in over five months, and to have him look directly at her while she was looking back …. The imagined cobweb thread, which had hung invisible between them for so long, became visible. And now it was not a floating spider’s strand at all but more like a cable that carried a stunning jolt of electricity. Without warning, a wave of nausea came up into Lee’s throat, and a buzzing, a vertigo of bright light started at the sides of her vision. She moved a step back to let Algebra’s body block the priest from view and started to say, “I’ve got to leave,” when she felt the low wrought-iron fence against the back of her knee.

  Her arms went out, and she was falling over and backwards, a flash of her own feet in their patent-leather shoes coming into view as she tumbled. And the whole time, in the falling and in the ground so hard coming up under her, in her concern for the little being thumping away inside, she saw David Palmer’s clear handsome sad face, even with Algebra in between, even with Algebra reaching out, trying to catch her.

  The tall black woman stepped over the fence, stooped, and tried to lift Lee, saying, “Oh, Mrs. Bettlemain, you’re getting your pretty pink dress all dirty.”

  It was true: the soft polished cotton that Lee had sewn so carefully and Willie Mae had pressed to hang in long, straight, slimming pleats, now flared on the damp gray sand—a pink flower with Lee’s blue-black hair, the dark stamen in the middle.

  Father Palmer did not move, even though the parishioners who had been standing in the churchyard now hurried toward Lee. Then Algebra Williams’s thin, high voice commanded him. “Father, Father, come, quick! Mrs. Bettlemain is down! Shake a leg, man. Can’t you see, this woman is down!”

  God Almighty! Damn! Lee almost said out loud. I am down!

  Lee was dizzy and numb and couldn’t get up, but still some part of her mind was free to analyze Algebra’s disrespect to Father Palmer. Leave it to a Catholic, Lee thought through a haze, even a colored Catholic, to drop all reverence, all tolerance whenever it suited. Lee’s own father had regularly cursed the Catholic clergy, from the parish priest up to the bishop, for not putting construction jobs up for bids. “You’d think those rascals were getting kickbacks,” Abram would complain.

  “And you don’t think they are?” was Darcy’s comeback.

  Lee thought, her head full of light: Leave it to Protestants, to hold the mysterious, the celibate Roman priests above all other ministers.

  “Are you all right, Lee?” David Palmer’s voice came out of the haze, seemed to say her name softly, in a different way.

  She felt his large warm hand under her arm, but there was no tug, no trying to raise her as there was in Algebra’s on the other side. In his voice and in his hand there was only concern, consolation.

  I’ll keep my eyes closed, I’ll not answer, I�
�ll die here, Lee thought. He’ll have to keep asking over and over if I’m all right—saying my name.

  “Lee? Lee?”

  How different from everyone else.

  “Lee, can you hear me?”

  She had to open her eyes, had to answer: “I’m fine, I just felt like sitting down for a minute.” And with that, she tried to stand, and by then her daughters were around her, pleading, “Momma, Momma, what’s the matter?” and several other voices, saying, “Move back, give the lady room to breathe.”

  Unexpectedly, awkwardly, David Palmer lifted Lee off the ground and started carrying her across the bare churchyard. “I’ll take her to the hospital,” he called back over his shoulder. “Algebra, you get her children.”

  Lee started to explain, “No, no, it’s not necessary. I was just dizzy. I didn’t have any place to sit.”

  She wanted to struggle, to make him put her down, but was afraid he would drop her, heavy as she was, though now that he had her up, his arms felt tightly secure and his long steps beneath them, steady.

  “Please, I don’t need a doctor. I fall all the time.”

  It wasn’t true. She never fell. But suddenly, with David Palmer’s carrying her across the churchyard, his solicitude galled, exasperated Lee down to the marrow of her bones. For five months not a peep out of this man, not a phone call, not a word! Not a word after the afternoon in the rectory, not after the confession, not a word even after seeing her start to wear maternity smocks! And now, because like some weak Victorian lady she’d fallen practically in front of him—he probably thought she’d done it on purpose—now he was going to take her to the hospital!

  “Put me down! I’m not going to any damn hospital!” Lee hissed, as meanly as she could up into his face. “I’m going home!” She kicked out her legs and pushed against his chest, wanting to strike him as hard as she could, not caring now if he dropped her. Which he almost did, her resistance came on so quickly.