Autobiography of Us (15 page)

Everyone in the office was very efficient. I was aware even at the time that everything seemed rushed, though I was the only one in the waiting room and I saw no one on my way out, still woozy at that point and half-numbed from whatever it was they’d given me for the pain. I remember that as I lay back against the table I spotted a cold sore blooming above the doctor’s upper lip, that as I began to drift off I was gripped by the thought that it was all terribly wrong, the doctor with his cold sore and the empty waiting room, that I would die there on the table in a town hundreds of miles from anyone I knew. I believe I might have screamed had one of the nurses not finally smiled as she patted the sheet into place around my shoulders, the tranquilizers cutting the world off with a velvet curtain. It was hard to think of how many girls must have been right there where I was, spines flattened against the cold steel of the examining table. I could have kissed her for that smile.

EARLY that August, a black man by the name of Marquette Frye was arrested in Watts, a neighborhood not twenty miles from where we lived. I would later learn that the policeman who made the arrest, a white man named Lee Minikus, claimed Mr. Frye had failed a sobriety test and grown belligerent when asked to cede his car, though what I understood from the papers the morning after his arrest was only the details of the aftermath. A mob had assembled, the article said, the crowd grown violent. The police officers feared for their lives.

The night after the riots over Marquette Frye’s arrest began, I sat with my father in the living room after dinner, my mother already gone up to their room with one of her headaches. We had a small television set in the kitchen, but my father had always preferred listening to the news on the radio, saying he found all that moving around on the screen distracting.

The announcer was a smooth-voiced man named Marcus Thompson, who reported dozens of beatings and looted stores in Watts, cars set on fire. Through it all, my father’s expression stayed perfectly, almost eerily, calm, his eyes like coins set deep in his skull. I remember that I tried to ask him something at a certain point—whether he knew anyone who lived in Watts, or if he’d ever driven through there before—but no sooner had I opened my mouth than his hand came up, shushing me.

The riots lasted five days. Every night after dinner I followed my father into the living room and sat there in the uncomfortable hard-backed chair, listening to Marcus Thompson report a thousand, five thousand, fifteen thousand National Guardsmen moving into the area to take control. A curfew of eight o’clock was set for everyone who lived within a certain radius. I tried as I sat there, tracing the silhouette of one of the Russian dolls my mother kept on the bookshelf ledge or pretending to read, to imagine what it must be like to be ordered indoors while the streets were burning with trash, while officers pushed men and women into patrol cars that vanished into the sweltering night. How strange to listen to the newscaster describe that scene as I sat in our quiet living room, the streets in our neighborhood silent, pristine.

Very little was said those evenings by my parents or by me. Despite the riots making the headlines every day that week, the three of us sat through our meals making our measured efforts at polite conversation. The weather, we agreed, awful. The new neighbors down the street of little interest, given their lack of children and their age (advanced). The click of our silverware ticked off the minutes, my mother sitting in her new, listless way across the table, me waiting for her signal to clear. When the riots ended later that week, the dead numbered somewhere in the thirties, the injured upward of a thousand. The night they announced the last arrests, my father stood and switched off the radio.

“A terrible shame.” He took a handkerchief from his pocket and began wiping the lenses of his glasses clean.

“Yes.”

“There is nothing more undignified,” he said slowly, “than one man doing his best to take away another man’s dignity.”

I thought about that. The only colored people I knew were the cooks and maids who worked for the families in our neighborhood. The ones who didn’t live in the houses themselves arrived by bus each morning in a cluster that fanned out as they walked down El Molino and disappeared, one by one, into our neighbors’ homes; I’d passed them occasionally on my way to Windridge, their white aprons blinding even from a distance. “It doesn’t seem fair,” I said slowly.

“What’s that?” My father peered at me, his eyes without his glasses oddly vulnerable.

“It’s just—Ruby, the Carringtons’ maid? Her father died a few years ago. He lived in Missouri, I think. The funeral was a few weeks before Christmas.” I paused. “Mrs. Carrington was having a party and she said the timing was too difficult. There was too much to be done, what with the party and all. Alex said Eleanor—Mrs. Carrington—just put her foot down.” My father slid his glasses back onto his face and blinked at me through them. “She wouldn’t let Ruby go to her own father’s funeral,” I went on. “I remember thinking it was cruel.”

“Cruel,” he repeated. “Yes. We are, as a species, too often descended into cruelty.”

I hesitated. “Then you believe they’re right to protest?”

“I believe injustice eventually gives way to justice,” he said. “Slowly, perhaps. With great effort, and too often through the unfortunate medium of violence. But I do expect it comes to pass.”

“Then something like this has to happen,” I persisted. “By your way of thinking. You believe change requires drastic measures.”

“I believe,” he said, “that there will come a time when we look back at the subjugation of the Negro class as one of the most shameful chapters in this nation’s history.”

“And the war?”

“Pardon?”

“Do you think it’s shameful, what they’re doing over there?” I thought of Oliver stepping down off the porch, the determined set of his shoulders. It seemed impossible that he might have killed a man by now, though of course chances were he had. I tried to picture him lifting a rifle and sighting down the barrel, his finger squeezing the trigger.

My father frowned. “War has its own rules.”

“All’s fair?”

“Something like that.”

“So the dignity of the enemy is irrelevant.”

“There is nothing about life and death that should ever be termed irrelevant,” he said sharply. “Not to mention it’s hardly within my jurisdiction to deem something that transpires on the battlefield fair or unfair. However, just because any given situation has not been questioned does not by any stretch of the imagination mean it does not warrant questioning.”

I smoothed my skirt over my knees. “And yet somehow it continues to go unquestioned.”

He looked at me warily. “I won’t go against anything she’s said.”

“I wouldn’t expect you would.”

He stood a moment longer. “There is a good deal that is wrong with the world, Rebecca,” he said finally. “But I choose to believe there is more that is right. I find a great deal of comfort in that choice.”

I watched his back retreat through the door and then I sank back into the couch, drawing my legs up under me. I might have guessed my father held views quite different from the other fathers in our neighborhood—his hard-won success, as I have said, a story unfamiliar to the shipping heirs and oil tycoons whose houses lined our streets. But the truth is that at twenty-one I knew very little of what my father thought. Long before the events of that summer brought our dinnertime conversations to a standstill, we had spoken only in passing about politics or money or our beliefs about the world. In those days, parents did not speak to their children about such things, and in that respect we were no different from anyone else.

Besides, my father worked long hours at his firm, often too tired when he got home to do much more than eat the dinner Mother had prepared and retire to the living room to catch up before the next day; the few times my mother came in when he had the radio on, she excused herself from the room under one pretense or another.
Ugly
, she might say as she paused by the coffee table to straighten one of her vases. What was going on over there in Chicago or the riots that began in Hong Kong that spring.
So much ugliness
, she said, wiping a line of invisible dust from the coffee table with one finger. When there was so much else to look at in the world.

TOO soon, Labor Day came and went; too soon, I found myself driving the old Ford to school, my stomach clenching as I made my way down the familiar roads. I stood at the edge of the far parking lot awhile, watching the girls chatter and blow smoke into the morning air, the boys—with that touch of self-consciousness that always made them appear younger than their years—rumpling their own hair, the ends of it bleached close to white. I could have stood there forever, I think, an outsider allowed to remain on the periphery, where I belonged, to watch and observe without fear of being observed. But I knew if I waited too long I might be forced to enter the classroom late—the thought of everyone turning in their seats to stare too terrible, I’m afraid, for words.

“Land’s sakes, Rebecca Madden, I’d thought you’d gone and fallen off the ends of the earth.” Ann Knight, a girl I knew from freshman-year history, stopped me in the path. “Where in the world were you hiding all summer?”

“I didn’t—” The words stuck in my throat and I tried again. “We were away. Tahoe.”

“I looked for you at the pool.” Ann Knight frowned. She had never been a particularly attractive girl, and over the summer she’d let her mousy hair grow long in a way that didn’t suit her. “Now, who was it I was just saying to—” she began.

“Come
on
, Ann.” Margie Capps was a junior with a pointy nose; she took Ann by the elbow and propelled her forward. “We’ll be late for class.” I could hear her clear as a bell as they headed down the path in the opposite direction. “What were you thinking?” Margie was saying. “Haven’t you talked to a
soul
?” I started toward McCarren again, but now everything had changed. I could feel people’s eyes attaching themselves to the back of my neck; a hush went over a group of girls sitting on a blanket as I approached; a couple on a bench at the edge of the grass stared down at their hands. I recognized the girl from my Lit class the year before. She’d come up to me one afternoon and asked me shyly where I bought my blouses.

“Do you have a minute?” The girl who stopped me outside the building couldn’t have been more than sixteen or so. She had long brown hair that hung down to her waist and a tan, friendly face.

“Excuse me?”

“Hey,” said the girl softly. “I just wanted to give you this. You have a beautiful day.”

The piece of paper was pale pink, the script sprawling:
Peace
. I closed my hand around it as I climbed the stairs to Professor Potts’s office, giving my hair a pat before I pushed open the door.

“Miss Madden.” He looked up from his desk, where he was scribbling something on a pad. “Nice to see you.” He was a small man, gray-haired and prone to an unfortunate tic in his left eye when he became flustered, which was surprisingly often. He’d been head of the natural sciences department for years, had recently published a paper on mitosis to wide acclaim. Of course I admired him tremendously.

“Sir.” I sat and crossed my ankles.

He was frowning down at a piece of paper. “I received your note regarding organic chemistry. You need my permission?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Professor Wilson said that considering it’s an advanced-placement course, I need a department head to sign off.…” I folded my hands across my knees. I’d forgotten about the slip of paper, and it crinkled as I tightened my fingers. “I was also wondering if there might be something else I could take. Double up.”

“What exactly did you have in mind?”

“That’s just it,” I said. “I’m not sure. I’d like to be prepared for the November exams, that’s all. I’ve been studying like mad.”

He frowned. “I apologize if I’m forgetting something.”

“Medical school, sir.” A drumming started up in my ears. “We spoke briefly about it last year? I’ve gotten behind with the reference letters, but I should still be able to squeak in under the wire. Provided you’re willing.”

“Miss Madden.”

I smiled in a way I hoped was appropriately bright. “Sir?”

“I’m sorry if I let us get ahead of ourselves. If I’d fully understood your intentions—” He cleared his throat. “Medical school—well, it requires a certain head for numbers, an extraordinary sense of discipline I’m afraid only a handful of students exhibit each year. Now, nursing is a wonderfully rewarding occupation. You’ve done fine work these past few years.” He uncapped his pen. “A program like St. Joseph’s would be ideal, for example. Excellent reputation.”

“I’ve got nothing against nursing,” I said slowly. “Sir. But I really do have my heart set on medical school.”

He coughed. “Allow me to—
hrrmpph—
clarify. Dean Richards went over this at some length just the other day. As I’m sure you know, each year I am permitted to pick no more than half a dozen candidates to recommend for graduate studies by official letter. University policy. I’m afraid I’ve made my selections for the year.”

I sat stiffly in my chair. “The thing is, sir—
”

“My hands really are tied.”

“I happen to know for a fact Dean Richards spoke to my mother. I’m not sure you understand the circumstances.”

“I understand perfectly.” His voice was a notch louder. “To whom Dean Richards did or did not speak is hardly my concern. I am quoting him directly when I say—
as per university policy
, I might remind you—I am allowed no more than half a dozen candidates to recommend, and I’m sorry to say you’re not one of those six. If you’d like to find someone else on the faculty to recommend you, you’re more than welcome. However, I should mention that as head of the department I reviewed everyone’s lists just this morning, and I’m afraid your name does not appear on any of them. As I said
,
” he went on, more firmly this time, “I’d be happy to write any of the nursing schools on your behalf. You’ve taken more than enough credits already to qualify, and fortunately, there is no limit to the number of students I may recommend for those particular programs.”