Black Cake: A Novel (21 page)

Betrayed.

That’s how Byron feels, hearing his mother’s words. He doesn’t even know what she’s talking about. He doesn’t understand what’s happened with Benny. And who is this Steve person, anyway? All Byron knows is, he’s been left out. He, who did everything for his mother while Benny was off who knows where.

How many times had Byron wanted to see Benny but had stopped short of calling her out of loyalty to his ma? How many times had he cursed his sister for not bridging the gap, for not reaching out? How many times had he asked around, trying to keep track of his sister without calling her directly? Now he finds out that his mother and sister were in contact and neither of them even bothered to tell him.

For a while, Byron had been so angry with Benny after her no-show at their father’s funeral that he hadn’t even wanted to talk to her. It had been the latest in a series of steps that had served only to agitate their mother. Dropping out of college. Moving from one city to another. Cooking in Italy, art in Arizona. Sharing less and less with them about her life. It seemed to Byron that his once openhearted baby sister had morphed into a self-absorbed bitch.
Don’t use that kind of language about a woman,
his mother would have said, but that was exactly what was going through Byron’s mind. And wasn’t it true?

After his mother nearly broke her neck surfing last year, Byron had wanted to pick up the phone and call Benny and say
Benedetta, please
come home,
because the idea that his stubborn, eccentric mother might want to do anything but live her life, even after their father’s death, had shaken Byron’s sense of security. But then he got to thinking, why should he have to call his sister? When was the last time that she had called Byron?

Although Byron had lived much of his adult life fully aware of the tenuousness of his existence as an African American man—the vulnerability of his job, his popularity, his physical safety, always, his physical safety—he had felt himself to be on solid ground once he’d stepped into his childhood home. The virtual disappearance of his sister and then the loss of his father had caused the foundation of his life to tremble, but it was his mother’s so-called accident, and the state of mind that it seemed to imply, that had threatened to fully dislodge the cornerstone.

Byron also came close to calling Benny the last time he was pulled over by a cop. He was overcome, afterward, by the need to talk to her, to hear her voice, to hear her say his name, to tell Benny what had happened, to know that Benny, at least, was safe, even if Byron might not be. Might not ever be. He could not talk to his mother about such things. You could not talk to your parents about their worst nightmare. He picked up his cellphone and scrolled down to Benny’s name but just sat there in his car, looking at the screen, his hands still shaking.

At least Byron knows now that his mother didn’t go to her deathbed without hearing from Benny. That’s a good thing, right? Still, he feels betrayed. He knows that he and Benny are going to need to have a real talk, soon. He just doesn’t know how to begin that kind of conversation.

“Oh, wait,” Byron says. “What was that?” He asks Mr. Mitch to stop the recording. He realizes he’s just missed part of what his mother was saying. Mr. Mitch presses pause and reaches for a tissue box on the coffee table. Byron sees that Mr. Mitch’s nose is bright red.
What’s with this guy? He’s not crying, is he?

“Sorry, the allergies are killing me,” Mr. Mitch says.

Right, Byron thinks, allergies at this time of year.

“Would you like a cup of tea or something, Mr. Mitch?” Benny asks.

“No, I’m fine, thanks. But, please, just call me Mitch, no Mister. Or Charles. That’s what your mother called me. Charles.” And the way he says
your mother
sets off a ding in Byron’s head. Of course. Why didn’t he pick up on that? There was something going on between Charles Mitch and Ma, wasn’t there? Charles Mitch is in mourning, too.

“Okay,” Benny says. She’s hugging that cushion again, the way she used to when she was a little girl, just like that, over her middle. Maybe not the same cushion, a different color. His mother would have given the old one to a shelter years ago. She was always taking little pieces of their lives and giving them to families who had less. Their old toys, their old books, their old blankets.
These things aren’t you,
she’d say,
these things are just things.
Right. Unless you were talking about that awful sofa of hers. How many times had Byron tried to convince her to part ways with it? Who invented crushed velvet, anyway?

Byron misses his baby sister. But this person sitting across from him, this is not really his Benny. This is a woman who has lived her life without him for the past eight years and keeps looking at him like she expects him to forget all of that. It’s like, she’s here now, so nothing else matters? Well, what about all the hurt? Hurt matters. Tomorrow they’ll have a service for their mother and then what? Will it all be over? Will he and Benny just go their separate ways? Will there be nothing left of the life he used to know?

T
he thing about identity. There’s
your family history, there’s how you see yourself, and then there’s what others see in you. All these elements factor into your identity, like it or not. Charles Mitch is a proud member of the state association of black lawyers, but he suspects that part of his success over the years has been owed to the fact that many people haven’t actually noticed his African heritage.

People have trouble seeing past Charles’s skin. This, despite his history in the civil rights movement (and that photo of him as a student). This, despite his volunteer work with young offenders of color (though he’s helped other kids, too). This, despite the appearance of his children (who’ve taken after their beautiful mother, may she rest in peace).

The thing about having a white man’s nose. When your heart is breaking, everyone can see it because the nose turns red, along with the rims of your eyes. No wonder so many men in America try to hide from their feelings. Yes, Charles Mitch’s heart is breaking. Charles’s wife was the love of his life. And then he fell in love again, this time with Eleanor Bennett, the widow of a fellow attorney and a woman who would eventually reveal to Charles that she was a ghost.

C
harles has known for about
a year now that Eleanor wasn’t really Eleanor. They’d been dating for a while but she didn’t reveal this to him until he went to see her at the hospital after the surfing incident. It took him a while to understand what she was telling him. The accident hadn’t been an accident, she told him, except for the part where she’d actually survived.

“Only my husband really knew who I was,” Eleanor told Charles that day. “I feel like there’s no one who recognizes me anymore.”

And me?
Charles wanted to say, but he didn’t.

“That’s normal,” Charles said. “You lived with Bert for more than forty years. You raised a family with him. When my wife died, I felt like I had disappeared with her. I only hung on at first because the kids were so young.”

“But this is different,” she said. And it was then that Eleanor told him what she and Bert had done. How they’d come to California, in part to move far away from the East Coast’s other British-Caribbeans.

“I see what you mean,” Charles said. But what he was really thinking was
I still know who you are. Or do I?

Charles and Eleanor first met years before at a mutual acquaintance’s house, someone who, together with Charles and Bert Bennett, had volunteered his time providing free legal assistance mostly to black families who couldn’t afford it otherwise. Sometime after the death of
his own wife, when Charles began to adjust to the idea of being with someone again, he came to understand that it was best to keep his distance from Eleanor. She had a certain effect on him, left a kind of buoyancy in his heart, but she was married to someone else and Charles Mitch was not the type to go poaching the woman of another man.

He recalled that Bert didn’t like to talk about his upbringing in the islands. Bert told Charles that both he and Eleanor had been orphans. Charles also recalled the way Bert and his wife looked at each other when they talked about their kids. No, Charles would never have succeeded in poaching that man’s wife, even if he’d tried.

Charles was truly sorry to see Bert go the way he did, a fairly quick decline but long enough, and it pained him to see Eleanor’s face as she stood by her husband’s grave. She would look down at his coffin, then out in the distance as if expecting Bert to come walking out from somewhere among the trees. Only much later did he realize that she was looking for Benny.

After Bert’s death, Eleanor went to consult Charles as an attorney, and their acquaintance gave way to something more personal. In time, some of the cracks in Charles’s heart began to heal.

That night in the hospital, the nurses let Charles stay in Eleanor’s room until late. He leaned forward and rested his elbow on the pillow next to her face while she talked. The next time he saw her, she smiled at him and Charles felt as though they’d both backed away from a ledge. Once Eleanor had healed enough for her son to go back to his own house, she and Charles started getting out together again. Eleanor was planning to organize a lunch for him to get acquainted with Byron when some follow-up medical tests showed that she had a problem.

In early 2018, a few months after the surfing accident, Eleanor’s clinical chart indicated that she was almost seventy-three years old when, unbeknownst to the doctors, Mrs. Bennett, born Coventina Lyncook, had just turned seventy. The rest, though, was true. Blood type, O-negative. Disease, advanced. Chances of survival past the next year, roughly fifteen percent.

Eleanor Douglas Bennett, born Coventina Lyncook, took the news in her stride. She was the daughter of a gambling man. She had already died and come back twice. She had always gone against the odds. But what if she didn’t make it this time, she asked Charles. She couldn’t leave her kids like this. There was something she needed to tell him.

C
harles is only here today,
going through the excruciating process of hearing Eleanor tell her story again, because he made a promise to her, as her attorney and as her friend. He promised Eleanor that he would help her children get through this. It would be a lot for them to take in. But who is helping Charles?

In 1970, there were fewer than four thousand black students enrolled in law schools throughout the United States. One of them was Charles Garvey Mitch. In the nearly forty years that followed until his semiretirement, Charles had seen or heard a bit of everything, both professionally and personally. So he wouldn’t say that he was shocked when Eleanor Bennett, still using a cane after the surfing incident, came zigzagging into his office and said that she needed to tell Charles the rest of her story, the part involving a baby. In his experience, most people never told you the whole truth the first time around, anyhow. Especially not your lover.

To this day, Charles hasn’t decided if Eleanor had been extremely unfortunate in her life or far luckier than most people, having survived the particular twists of fate that she described to him that day. She’d come to his office, she said, because this needed to be a strictly professional visit and things had already become intimate between them. She had come to his office, she said, because she was going to need his help. That was when she told him about her daughter. Not the one she hadn’t been talking to. Another one.

Charles agreed to help Eleanor, and he went on to conduct his research and offer his professional advice to her as an attorney. But it wouldn’t be easy to play this dual role. Charles had seen his share of difficult situations. He’d grown up a pale black kid in the fifties and sixties. He had lost his wife way too young, to a fast-moving disease that he cursed to this day. He had raised two African American boys and he’d lost some sleep wondering how to protect them from the world. He had learned to control his emotions. But that didn’t mean that he didn’t have feelings.

After his wife died, Charles had dated some. But with Eleanor, it was different. This was love. He couldn’t help but suffer when Eleanor finally told him what she had gone through as a young woman. No man should ever have to hear these things. No woman should have to live them. Charles went home alone after their meeting, stumbled over the threshold of his townhome, shut the front door, and leaned his forehead against it until he turned and slid down to the floor.

I
n the early 1970s, Bert
and Eleanor Bennett moved into a pastel-colored, bungalow-style home in a small city near Anaheim where real estate agents had agreed to show properties to black families. Orange County had Disneyland and Marine bases and beaches, and Los Angeles to the north. There were aerospace, auto, and rubber plants within commuting distance. There were plenty of jobs, even for a black couple. Southern California became the answer to the young pair’s search for a place to build a new life together. It was as far as they could get from other Caribbeans in New York, from the risk of being recognized, without leaving the States.

Bert found employment at a rubber plant and Eleanor found an administrative post with the government. Eleanor’s bosses quickly recognized her eye for detail and facility with numbers and promoted her over the years, paying for her classes in accounting. By the time Benny started school, Los Angeles had elected its first black mayor and Bert had become an attorney, his prior legal studies having made it easier for him to face the daunting law school admissions process in the States and squeeze through the invisible gates that had kept so many black and Latino Americans from being accepted into law schools.

On the night of the day that their grown son finally began his doctoral program down in San Diego, Bert and Eleanor leaned back on
their pillows, clinked their wedding rings together as if in a toast, and held hands. They breathed in their good fortune, having seen worse, and told each other that they and their children would continue to see better. And better. And better.

In all those years, Bert and Eleanor couldn’t go back to the island, but Eleanor wanted to hand some kind of family tradition down to the kids. Like the black cake. That cake was all she had from her childhood, she kept saying, and she insisted it take its rightful place in their children’s lives, too. This boiled down to her cordoning off the kitchen like a military zone for a couple of weekends every winter, with her and Benny on the inside and Bert and Byron hovering outside, just when they wanted to wallow in the slovenly feel of a morning about the house.

Eleanor hadn’t meant to set up a male-female divide, she said. It was just that Benny was the only other person in that household who had shown any real interest in baking for Christmas. They’d raised a daughter who looked just like Bert but who had that same gleam in her eye as her mother did whenever she stood in the kitchen with an apron wrapped around her torso and a cracked eggshell in her hand. They loved working together, the two of them, handling those mysterious ingredients that could rise and take on a life of their own.

Which, predictably, led to the same exchange every year.

“Ma-aw,” Bert’s son would say, the complaint in his voice one hundred percent American, with no trace of his parents’ accents.

“No!” would come Eleanor’s reply, from behind the screens.

“Caw-fee.”

“No, sir.”

“Just a cup of coffee, is all I’m asking.”

One of Eleanor’s eyes would usually appear between a screen and the wall. “You know the rules. I do this one month a year and you know the rules.”

“And, now, I’m only home on occasional weekends and you can’t let me get a single cup of coffee?”

Eleanor had always wanted a kitchen with a door that could close off the whole space. In Britain, she had seen her first
shuttable
kitchens, as she called them, and had periodically talked to Bert about redoing their cooking area once the kids were fully out of the house.

Whenever Bert took Eleanor to a restaurant, she would cast a wistful eye in the direction of the swing doors that led to the cooking area. “Like that,” she would say. “Even a door like that.”

When they first moved to California, no one was selling houses with closed-off kitchens. And Bert and Eleanor didn’t know if they’d be staying here for long, anyway. But sure enough, here they were, years later, still living in a single-story, single-family home on the Pacific coast with an open-plan kitchen, and a man-sized cactus outside their bedroom window, and a Californian boy and girl who had learned to ride ocean waves that dwarfed anything Bert and Eleanor had ever seen growing up.

By the time she turned fifteen, Benny was almost as tall as Bert but she’d still fling her arms around his neck and say
Daaaddy
in that drawn-out way that made him chuckle. Then she began to change. She was given to moodiness and her school grades tended to go up and down in sync with her humor. Which was particularly disturbing because, generally speaking, all Benny had to do was walk into a schoolroom and sit down to be at the top of her class.

Eleanor said it was just adolescence, but Bert’s baby girl was beginning to worry him.