Babylon Sisters (3 page)

“Let me tell you something, and I’m not going to say it again. The way you were conceived is none of your business. The number of lovers I’ve had, or never had, is none of your business either.” She tried to say something, but I held up my hand and she was silent, proving that she’s not completely crazy. “You are a blessed child because you have a mother who loves you more than life itself. A mother who has given you the tools you need to be an independent woman who won’t have to take shit from a living soul. A mother who is going to pay your way through college.”

I was getting angry, and the good mother is never supposed to get angry. What kind of example does that set for your child? I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Phoebe, but if that’s not good enough, then I can’t help you.”

Tears were running down her face again, but I was too mad to offer her sympathy or a tissue.

“I’m going to the newsstand to pick up tomorrow’s papers,” I said. “There’s plenty of food in the kitchen if you’re hungry. I won’t be long.”

She wiped her face with a corner of the blanket and issued a shaky last word. “I just . . . don’t know how . . . you can say . . . you love me . . . and still not tell me . . . who my own father is.”

“I’ve told you what I know, sweetie,” I said, grabbing my keys and heading for the door. “That’s the best I can do.”

Which was, of course, not true. A lie is never the best you can do, even when you tell yourself it is. It’s just a way of buying some breathing room until you can work up enough courage to tell the truth. And that can take a lifetime.

4

The air outside was warm and moist and smelled like rain. I took a deep breath and started walking. There was no reason for me to go to the newsstand now. That was just an excuse to let me and Phoebe have a little cooling-off period while I collected my thoughts. Phoebe’s father is the only operatic moment in my otherwise pretty routine life. I don’t mean boring. I love my work. I love my friends. I adore my daughter. But it’s all contained within the twenty-four hours of an ordinary day. The stories begin, run their course, and then come to an end. But not B.J.

Burghardt Johnson is the one moment in my life that made me feel everything bigger and wider and deeper than I ever had before. I loved him from the moment I laid eyes on him, and I probably always will, but that doesn’t mean I can explain why to anybody. Even his daughter. Maybe
especially
his daughter.

As I walked down Peeples Street and turned down Abernathy Boulevard, a man passed me with a tip of his Braves cap and a pleasant “Good evening.” I returned the greeting with no thought that he might do me harm and realized again how lucky I was to live here. Pick any spot on earth these days, and nine times out of ten it isn’t safe for a woman to be out alone there after dark. In some places, she isn’t much better off in daylight. Here, women could walk around without fearing for their lives. I could take my problems outside for an airing and not have to worry that I wouldn’t make it home in one piece. That’s one of the reasons I live in this neighborhood. It’s why I raised Phoebe here. I wanted her to be fearless.

On the surface, West End is just another African-American urban community on Atlanta’s southwest side. The main commercial strip, named for Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, a giant of the civil rights movement, has the classic inner-city mix of fast-food joints, soul- and health-food restaurants, beauty supply stores, barbershops, wig palaces, mom-and-pop grocery stores, and a liquor store or two. Of course, there are churches, from the Shrine of the Black Madonna to St. Anthony’s of Padua and all manner of Baptists, Methodists, Muslims, and mystics in between.

The Mall West End, crowded with shoppers any day of the week, has an array of nail shops, dollar stores, discount books, clothes on a budget, and a dizzying range of athletic-shoe outlets. Across from the mall, the new Krispy Kreme doughnut shop has relocated to a spiffy new facility with the added temptation of a truly dangerous-to-the-waistline drive-through. New condos are going up across from the mass transit station, and the omnipresent, ever-charming street vendors now do a booming business with nearly as many residents as train riders. A few blocks away, the Atlanta University Center adds five thousand college students to the mixture in a way that guarantees a pizza joint will stay open, a sandwich shop will thrive, and a smattering of Jamaican and Chinese take-out places will always have a line on Saturday night.

The streets are free of litter and loiterers. Buildings and landscaping are neat and well kept. Streetlights shine unbroken and potholes are nonexistent. Walking by the twenty-four-hour beauty salon on my way to the West End News, I could see two stylists working with clients in side-by-side chairs. All four women were laughing and talking as easily as if they’d been in somebody’s kitchen on Saturday afternoon, heating their hot combs in the stove, telling the stories that women tell when they’re safe and happy and there’re no men around.

Next door, the florist who closes at midnight was putting the finishing touches on the bouquet that would be featured in tomorrow’s front window. It was a wild profusion of tropical blooms, heavy on the shop’s signature birds-of-paradise and sure to be snapped up by a romantic with a sense of adventure. There is only one word to describe West End’s nighttime streets: peaceful. That’s what makes this neighborhood different. But it wasn’t always this way.

A few years ago it went through a period of economic transition that left it fragmented and newly vulnerable to the same crimes that plague poor communities from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. Rape, robbery, street crime, domestic violence, and child abuse were rampant, and then crack came and the situation became almost intolerable.

My father had died by then, and my mother wasn’t sure it was safe for us to stay in our house without him. For a long time, things just slid from bad to worse. Then suddenly, inexplicably, the bodies of black women began showing up in neighborhood Dumpsters, behind vacant homes, in the trunks of abandoned cars. A little girl was murdered by two crackheads who stole her lunch money. Finally, a young mother was raped and killed on her way home from the grocery store and her body left on the railroad tracks. Her funeral was crowded with mourners, and when her brother collapsed in despair over his baby sister’s casket, he was led away by one Mr. Blue Hamilton, who was heard reassuring his friend that this crime would not go unpunished.

And it didn’t. A series of tips led to the identification of the man responsible for the murders, and he was arrested. When the court released him on a technicality, despite overwhelming evidence that he was guilty and without remorse, the neighborhood prepared for the worst, but two days after he returned home, the man disappeared and was never seen again.

That was how Blue Hamilton became a neighborhood legend and the unofficial patron saint of southwest Atlanta. He had transformed our ordinary African-American urban community into a peaceful, crime-free zone where women could walk unmolested any hour of the day, and the crack houses had been replaced by carefully tended gardens and community playgrounds. It was the safest eight or ten square miles in Atlanta. On the streets Blue controlled, going out after dark was as safe as going out at high noon. Some people argued with his methods and called him a gangster, but I remember what it was like before he took charge of the men around here and I’m proud to call him a friend. He’s the reason I can be out here, walking in the moonlight,
thinking.

Phoebe is going to have to get over herself. My solution may not have been the best one, but she’s always had one hundred percent of me, and she has a great godfather in my best friend Louis.

Louis is the only other person who knows Phoebe’s real father, but he had been sworn to secrecy by me right after I told him I was pregnant. I knew I could trust him. We’d been keeping each other’s secrets for years. We first met as infants when our mothers, who were best friends and lived around the corner from each other by design, delivered us within a few months of each other. Louis arrived in the fall and I made my appearance on what is now Martin Luther King Jr. Day, but back then was only January fifteenth.

We were thrown together immediately, and there is ample photographic evidence of us grinning in the bathtub, naked as jaybirds, or napping in the same crib, piled up together like puppies. Our mothers found these photographs endearing. As teenagers, we found them mortifying. As adults, they provided us with hours of teasing as well as evidence of our lifelong bond. We tried to go steady once when we were thirteen, but it was a disaster. We called it off after one excruciatingly awkward kiss, renewed our pledge to be friends for life, and never looked back.

Louis was the only person I considered asking to go with me to the clinic. He was standing right beside me when they did the preabortion sonogram and showed me the little peanut-shaped
thing
that was, or was not, going to grow up to be a real live baby, depending on what I decided in the next few hours. He held my hand when we sat there, surrounded by every kind and color and class of woman, some with partners, some with friends, some grimly alone, all just waiting. He heard them finally call my name and felt my hesitation just like I did. And when I turned to him in tears and told him I didn’t want to do it, he just hugged me real hard and took me home so I could tell my mother.

Her reaction didn’t worry me. My mother had been wealthy and unconventional all her life. She was only eighteen when she fell in love with my father, a professional gambler twice her age. Horrified, her parents disowned her and moved to Florida. She married my father immediately, and when she got pregnant with me two years later, he bought her this house. She spent most of my childhood traveling with my father while I stayed with a series of nannies until I was thirteen and convinced them I could stay by myself.

Once she determined having a baby was really what I wanted, the idea of a grandchild delighted her. She encouraged me to give up my ratty little student apartment and move in with her. She had plenty of space and she was lonely in that big old house. For my part, I was talking a lot bolder than I felt. I knew raising a child alone was a huge responsibility, and I had sense enough to welcome her assistance. As for the identity of the father, she didn’t press me. My mother and I settled on a version of
don’t ask, don’t tell
that suited us both.

Too bad she wasn’t around tonight, I thought, opening the door of the West End News and stepping inside. Maybe she could help me make her granddaughter stop asking the one question I was not prepared to answer. In the meantime, I’d grab the
New York Times
and a few fashion magazines for Phoebe as a peace offering. Maybe spending a few hours with the rich, famous, and disturbingly thin would take her mind off her troubles and my past. Otherwise, it was going to be a very long night.

5

When I got home, my daughter had left a short note:
I’m at Louis’s house. I’ll be late.
She didn’t even sign it. To tell the truth, I was relieved. Louis had limitless patience for Phoebe’s dramas, major and minor. I probably wouldn’t have survived her adolescence without him, and tonight he was just the port in a storm she needed.

I put the newspaper in my office, took the magazines upstairs, and laid them on her bed. The candle had been extinguished, but the smell of roses was overpowering in the hot stillness. I turned on the ceiling fan and opened the window to get some air moving. That’s when I spotted Amelia doing laps in her pool. When she works late, she often swims at night. She was moving through the water with barely a ripple, strong and graceful as a creature who was born for the sea. One of the reasons she bought that house ten years ago was because of the pool. It was full-size, completely tiled in shades of blue, green, and gray, and on the bottom it boasted a life-size mermaid mosaic that had fascinated me all my life. The mermaid was inexplicably and beautifully brown, and her long black hair flowed out from her head in curling tendrils that wound around the entire floor of the pool. She wore the mysterious smile that seems to be every self-respecting mermaid’s expression of choice, and she was holding a pale pink conch shell up to her ear as if to listen for the ocean’s roar or a midnight confession.

The story was that many years ago when West End was the far frontier of what was Atlanta, and beyond which there was only woods, the wealthy white men who built these houses had engaged in a friendly competition. Each one wanted his mansion to feature something that would suitably impress his neighbors with the owner’s wealth and status in the world. Of course, it probably never occurred to them that black people would ever live in these homes. If it had, perhaps the original owner of Amelia’s house never would have built that pool. It is doubtful that our house’s original owner would have one-upped that pool by building a four-room playhouse in his yard, now my yard, for his daughter, then my daughter, to dress and undress their dolls and invite their friends for tea.

Amelia and I hadn’t had a chance to talk since she came over yesterday to check on Phoebe, so I headed outside to bring her up to date. Our backyards were separated by a low stone wall and a wooden gate that was always open. By the time I walked through it, she had finished her workout and was drying herself with a fluffy white towel. At forty-two, Amelia looked ten years younger, and she intended to keep it that way. Tall and slender in a sleek black Speedo, she wore her hair in a short natural that didn’t interfere with her swimming or her sense of style. She had one son, Jason, who was a freshman at Yale Law School and fully intended to go into practice with his mother once he passed the bar.

Her ex-husband, Jason’s father, also a lawyer, was an arrogant, overbearing man, with whom she shared cordial relations for the sake of her son. She was always urging me to use the pool, but I was usually too busy to take her up on it. Tonight, the water looked so clear and inviting I almost jumped in with my clothes on.

“Hey, you!” I said, coming through the gate. “Finished already?”

She looked up and laughed. “Hey, yourself! That was fifty laps, for your information. How’s Phoebe?”

“She’s certifiably insane, but I think she’ll live,” I said, kicking off my flip-flops and dangling my feet in the cool water.

She wrapped the towel around her waist like a sarong and flopped down on one of the striped canvas deck chairs. The mermaid’s hair seemed to be rippling gently.

“Still in mourning?”

“Sort of. She’s decided it’s all my fault because she hasn’t had a chance to observe her father, in order to better understand herself, and therefore make better romantic choices.”

Amelia rolled her eyes. “Tell her not to worry. I saw my father every day of my life and men are still a mystery to me.”

“I tried to explain that to her, but she’s really pissed.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Amelia said, sounding sympathetic. “I remember when Jason first got his little heart broken. Some girl he was crazy about told him she just wanted to be friends because he was too nice. He told me I had ruined his life by not raising him to be a typical male asshole—my description, of course, not his!”

“Did you apologize for being such a bad mother?” I said, laughing.

She raised her eyebrows. “Did you?”

“Not in this life!”

“So you
know
I didn’t! I told him I had raised him to be a peaceful presence on this earth and that any girl who couldn’t see that was a waste of his time. He didn’t speak to me for two weeks, and then he met a girl who thought he was the cat’s pajamas and all was forgiven.”

The old-fashioned expression made me smile. I remember my mother bestowing that one as a high compliment, too, although why feline night wear should be considered something wonderful was still beyond me.

“So there’s hope for me and Phoebe?”

“Of course there is. Look at Jason. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth now, but I swear he’s responsible for every gray hair I’ve got.”

“You haven’t got any gray hair!”

“I owe it all to my stylist,” she said. “The reality is a much grimmer picture.”

“Your secret is safe with me.”

“Speaking of secrets,” she said, “can I ask you something?”

“Sure.” The sky was clear and there was the barest sliver of a new moon. Phoebe used to have a book that showed the stars at different times of the year. When she was little, we spent hours on the back porch trying to identify the constellations. “Ask away.”

“Why don’t you just tell her about her father and let her figure out how to deal with it the best she can?”

Amelia didn’t know his identity, but I had shared the rest of the story with her. I was surprised by her question. “How long do you think it would take for her to track him down?”

“So? What if she does? Kids do it all the time.”

“So what if he’s less than thrilled to discover that he has a seventeen-year-old daughter?”

“What if he’s not?”

“Not what?”

“Not ‘less than thrilled.’ What if he’s delighted to find her after all these years?”

Sometimes Amelia annoyed me by playing the devil’s advocate. Maybe that was what she was doing now. It was probably an occupational hazard for lawyers, but I always found it counterproductive. Not to mention the fact that the devil has plenty of advocates already on the job. One more is just overkill.

“You make it sound like he’s been searching for her or something,” I said. “Trust me. This isn’t that story. The last thing he wants is to take on the responsibility of a teenage daughter. When I told him I was going to have an abortion, he couldn’t get on that plane to Ghana fast enough.”

“Sometimes men change when they see forty staring them in the face,” she said. “It’s a mortality thing.”

Amelia seemed to be suddenly on the side of complete disclosure, although she had never before expressed an opinion on the matter, other than to show mild surprise when I explained that my solution had been to falsely claim multiple partners as a way of throwing Phoebe off the track. She suggested that simply refusing to reveal the name might have been a better way to go, but she respected the creativity and thoroughness of my approach.

As we sat there, a thought occurred to me. “Has Phoebe been lobbying you about this?”

Amelia grinned at me. “I wouldn’t describe it as lobbying, but she definitely mentioned it when I saw her yesterday.”

“Well, you can tell her for me it won’t work.” I sat up and wrapped my arms around my knees. “The potential for her to really get her feelings hurt is too great. Why risk it?”

“Her feelings or yours?”

I raised my eyebrows and looked at her.

Amelia looked back at me. “You realize I know this is none of my business, right?”

“I’m the one who brought it up,” I said. “Go ahead.”

“Phoebe is a very strong young woman. You can’t always see it because you’re her mother, and to you she’s always going to be your baby girl.”

“Only until she graduates,” I said, knowing she was right. “Then I’m cutting her little ass loose.”

“Too late,” Amelia smiled. “They already did that. In the delivery room, remember?”

A wispy little cloud moved across the moon and disappeared behind the giant pines at the edge of Amelia’s yard. She was a good friend trying to pull my coat, and I appreciated it, as always.

“How could I forget?”

“Then stop worrying! She can handle it. If you tell her or you don’t tell her, she’s going to be fine.” Amelia sat up and looked at me. “You’re the one I’m worried about.”

“Me?”

She hesitated. “You know I know this is—”

“—none of your business,” I said with her. “So why are you worried about me?”

“Because you’re such a terrible liar.”

“What do you mean?” I couldn’t decide if that was a compliment or a criticism.

“Good liars keep it simple. The fewer details the better. You, on the other hand, have concocted a big, complicated mess of a story that never sounded very convincing and gets weaker every time you tell it.”

“Do you think she knows I’m lying?”

“I think she’s confused. She doesn’t know what to think.”

“She’s not the only one,” I said, kicking my feet in the water to watch the mermaid’s tail ripple.

“Don’t beat yourself up too bad,” Amelia said. “It made perfect sense at the time, right?”

I nodded. “Most of it still does.”

“Then all you have to do is work on that little part that doesn’t.”

We had been friends for a decade because Amelia was honest without being judgmental. She always told me exactly what she thought, as only a lawyer can, but she never required me to agree or make a move based on her point of view. She had no timetable. Once she had her say, she left you to your own devices and moved on to other things. Which was what she did now.

“So, did you talk to Sam Hall yet?”

I was glad for the change of subject. “He called me tonight.”

“Thank God! He was driving me crazy.”

“Where do you know him from?”

“I represented a client in a case that involved Ezola Mandeville. She sent him to talk to me. How about that voice?”

“Makes it hard to keep your mind on business, doesn’t it?”

“You got that right, but how about her aversion to the word
Ms.
? What’s that about?”

“I’ll ask her. We’re having lunch next week.”

“Really?”

“They’re probably planning a project he says is right up my alley.”

“You think you could work for her?”

“I’ve got to go to work for somebody, and you won’t hire me.”

“I can’t afford you!”

“He said I was the answer to their prayers. How about that?”

“Better not get too cocky until you know what they were praying for!”

From Amelia’s yard, I could see the light come on in my kitchen window, signaling Phoebe’s return from her godfather’s house around the corner. She was probably rummaging around in the fridge looking for something to eat. Three days of herb tea and saltines had probably taken their toll. Baby Doll needed dinner.

“Well, I know what I’m praying for,” I said, standing up and hoping my daughter’s visit to Louis had improved her disposition.

“What’s that?”

I leaned down and gave Amelia a quick kiss on the cheek before heading home. “Wisdom, patience, and tuition money, not necessarily in that order.”

“Just be yourself!” Amelia called after me, and I knew she was right. Flawed or fabulous, I’m the only mom she’s got. All I have to do is love her and
be myself.
Everything else is extra.