Blessing in Disguise (2 page)

Now she felt her arms go tight with goosebumps.

She quickly told herself that the noise was probably just the TV turned up too loud. Inside, the house would be cool and calm. Margaret would be wearing a crisply ironed skirt and blouse, and she’d smile and sort of scoot herself down so she could look directly into Grace’s eyes, and say, “My, aren’t you growing up so fast I can hardly keep up with you!”

Margaret Emory was a Negro, but she didn’t look or act anything like Gemma or Old Charles. For one thing, she wasn’t very dark. Her skin was more the color of the beige face powder Mother kept in her purse to pat over her nose. She wore silk stockings, and high-heeled shoes like Mother’s. Her hair was smooth, and tucked under at the ends. When she talked on the phone, arranging Daddy’s appointments, she sounded very businesslike. Most people called her Mrs. Emory, but she’d told Grace it would be okay to call her Margaret, the way Daddy did.

“Who are
you?”

Grace was brought up short by the throaty voice that seemed to jump out at her from the shadows surrounding the tree-shaded porch.

“I ... I’m looking for my daddy.” Grace squinted, letting her eyes adjust to the sudden shift from brightness.

Seated on the top step was a skinny girl in pedal pushers and a too-big T-shirt. Grace recognized her at once from the framed photo that sat on Margaret’s desk next to the one of Mr. Emory. She had her mother’s light skin and pale-green eyes. Her hair stuck out in shabby braids on either side of her long face with its queer, slanted cheekbones.

“That’s not what I asked you.”

Once again Grace was startled by that foggy, nearly grown-up-sounding voice. She was reminded of her homeroom teacher, Miss March, who wore dark-red lipstick and always smelled of cigarettes.

Grace felt herself getting annoyed. “I’m Grace Truscott,” she answered. “Who are you?”

“Nola.” She spoke offhandedly, almost rudely.

“Oh.”

Grace glanced at the front door, with its oval of glass that seemed to wink at her like a merry eye. The need to pee had become desperate. She planted one foot on the bottom step of the porch.

“You can’t go in there,” Nola informed Grace in her homeroom-teacher voice.

“Why?”

She rolled her eyes.
“ ’Cause.”
As if Grace were a two-year-old who needed to have it spelled out, she added, “They’re talking.”

“Who?”

“Mama and Daddy and Uncle Gene.”

But it was more than just talking. Even from far away, Mr. Emory’s voice seemed to punch out into the tree-shaded stillness like a fist about to smash something. Grace felt hot and shaky. She was afraid she might wet her pants.

She felt angry, too. At this unruly girl who acted as if she had a perfect right to call Daddy “Uncle Gene.” Then she remembered Daddy telling her that, whenever Margaret had to work after hours, Nola would come to the office to do her homework. It was because Nola’s father, a merchant marine, was away a lot, and there was no one at home to watch her. Grace could imagine Daddy inviting Nola into his office, helping her with a math problem, maybe letting her curl up on the deep-cushioned sofa with a book the way
she
liked to do. Because Nola was so strange, he would be extra nice to her. Daddy had a soft spot for oddballs—they made the world more interesting, he said.

Then Grace forgot Nola as the voices inside rose to a furious pitch.

“They sound
mad,”
Grace said, alarmed.

“That’s just Daddy. He gets that way sometimes.” Nola tried to shrug, but Grace could see the pinched spots on either side of her mouth where the skin had gone white. She noticed that Nola was sitting with her knees all scrunched in against her chest, her lanky arms wrapped tightly about her shins.
She’s scared, too,
Grace realized.

But as soon as Grace had climbed the steps and started to brush past her, Nola was on her feet, bristling like a cat. She was several inches taller than Grace, with long knobby arms and legs and big padding feet.

“You can’t go in there,” she said, more forcefully this time.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Grace informed her haughtily.

“Mama said to stay outside.” Nola looked at her that way Miss March did when Grace spoke out in class without raising her hand first. Those queer green eyes of hers narrowed almost shut, as if she were about to pounce.

Grace marched past her anyway. She felt Nola grab her arm, but she shook it off and walked right up to the front door.

“It’s not your house,” Nola hissed.

“I don’t care whose house it is,” Grace told her.

She was shaking, and her underpants felt a little damp already. But she wasn’t going to let this bully of a girl see how scared she was. She pushed open the door, and slipped inside.

“Daddy!” she cried, but the sound she heard herself make was no louder than a whisper.

Darting through Margaret’s small, neat living room, she followed the shouting voices that grew louder and louder as she made her way toward the back of the house. Her heart was pounding. At the end of a narrow, dimly lit hallway, she spotted an open door. From where she was standing, she could just make out the back of a chair with a man’s jacket thrown across it. She crept closer, edging around so she could peek in without anyone’s noticing.

The blinds were drawn, but thin bands of light leaked through, throwing stripy shadows over a neatly made double bed and a dresser that looked strange until Grace realized why: unlike the dresser in her mother’s room, with its lacy scarf and Limoges vanity set and silver-backed combs and brushes, there were no knickknacks cluttering its surface, no perfume bottles, no jars of face cream or tubes of lipstick, nothing but a plain wooden hairbrush.

Margaret, dressed in a limp blue housecoat that was nothing like the crisp suits she wore to work, stood with her back up against the dresser, one hand pressed to her mouth, her eyes round with panic. Across from her, on the other side of the bed, stood a big man in navy trousers and a white shirt rolled up at the sleeves. In the dim light, his forearms looked dark and shiny.

Daddy hovered in the doorway, his back to Grace. She could see his reflection in the mirror behind Margaret, huge and wild-haired, making her think of the story of Sampson that Sister Boniface had told in Catechism. She remembered another story, one Daddy had told about when he’d been a fireman, long before he was a senator, and even before he got elected to Congress. How he’d once dashed into a burning tenement that was about to collapse, and carried a three-year-old boy who’d been hiding under the bed to safety. A window had exploded in his face as he was climbing down the ladder, and if it hadn’t been for his helmet and mask Daddy might have been killed. He still had a faint purplish scar above one eye that Grace loved to run her finger over. The skin was soft, almost silky, not like the roughness of the rest of his face.

Now, with his reflection mostly hidden in shadow, all she could see was Daddy’s scar, standing out vividly in a slash of light.

“Put it down, Ned, before someone gets hurt.” His voice rolled down like thunder from a mountaintop.

That was when Grace saw the gun that Margaret’s husband was holding. Suddenly she couldn’t breathe. She tried to suck air into her lungs, but it was as if they were packed with cotton. She ducked down lower, too scared to run.

“Who the hell you think you
are,
waltzin’ into a man’s house, telling him what to do?” Ned waved the gun in Daddy’s direction. “Yeah, I know, you the big hero got every black man bending down to kiss his shoes. Out there marching with Dr. King for the black man’s rights. Yeah, well, what about
this
black man’s rights, huh?” His voice was choked off by a sob. The gun wobbled alarmingly in his grip. “What about a man who comes home to a wife who ain’t his wife no more?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Ned,” Daddy said, trying to sound reasonable. His voice wasn’t scared, just sorrowful, like when he’d spoken into the microphones at President Kennedy’s funeral.

“God’s sake, man, don’t tell me I don’t know!” Ned was nearly screaming. “You think just ’cause you the boss man that mean you payin’ the bills round here and sayin’ what’s what? You don’t know a damn thing what goes on outside that fancy office of yours. ...” Grace realized suddenly that he’d been crying, his cheeks wet and his hand unsteady as he raised the gun, aiming it at Margaret.

“Put it down, Ned.” Daddy spoke more sternly this time. “Whatever the misunderstanding between you and Margaret is, I’m sure—”

“Ain’t
no
misunderstandin’!” Ned shouted. “I seen what I seen!” He was looking straight at Margaret now, and squeezing the gun to make it stop wobbling. “You ... you ...
bitch.
Always thinkin’ you better than the rest of us black folk. Even
talk
like a white lady. And now you takin’ away what little I got left. Jesus God, I oughta k—”

“No, Gene!” Margaret’s voice rose to a shriek as Daddy lunged forward, throwing himself at Ned.

Grace, crouched in the hallway outside, felt herself grow very still. There was only the wild pumping of her heart, which had suddenly grown too large for her body. Something warm and wet dribbled down the inside of her leg, and she dimly realized that she’d wet herself. But it was as if this were happening to someone else. She watched helplessly as her daddy and Ned struggled across the room. Daddy was bigger, but Mr. Emory was wild, crazy. Strange gargling noises erupted from his throat as he twisted the arm Daddy held pinned, struggling to free himself.

As if hypnotized, Grace stared in horror at the gun, caught in a band of dusty sunlight that fell across Ned’s straining knuckles, a deadly jewel turning this way and that, twinkling with menace.

Suddenly there was a deafening crack—as if the room were being ripped in two—that brought a swift, jabbing ache to her ears, and jerked her legs out from under her. She landed on her tailbone with a jolt.

Through the buzzing cloud that seemed to be wrapped around her head, she watched Ned topple onto the bed. A huge red flower was blossoming at his throat, spreading across the white bedspread.

Blood. It was
blood.

She clapped her hands over her ears, and began to scream. Or at least she
felt
as if she were screaming. But the only sound that came out of her mouth was a shrill gasping noise.

The floor beneath her spun and tilted. Her fear was huge, like some great monster that had gobbled her up, leaving no part of her to feel anything else. But then the numbness began to fade. Inside her underpants, she stung where she’d wet herself. Her bottom hurt where she’d landed hard on the floor. But when she tried to stand up, her legs folded under like a paper doll’s.

Finally, bracing herself against the wall, she managed to push herself to her feet. Grace was backing away when she bumped up against somebody. She let out a strangled yelp, and spun around. The lanky girl stood there, frozen in her path, her eyes no longer slanted, but round and silvery-pale as nickels. She had seen it, too. She had seen everything.

They both turned to stare as Margaret let out a wild shriek. Watching the gun fall from Daddy’s hand to the floor with a hollow
thonk,
and Margaret sink to her knees before the bloodied bed where Ned lay, Grace wanted to take an eraser and rub everything out, like when she messed up on her times tables. She wanted to make this not have happened. For her and Daddy and Sissy to be in his car, driving to the Maryland shore, where he would buy them lobster rolls and she would run along the pier, feeling the spongy old boards beneath her feet and collecting fishhooks in the heels of her Keds.

But, turning back to Nola, seeing her ashen face, Grace knew that there was no taking it back. Whatever happened next, Grace would never ever forget this. Neither, she felt sure, would the girl standing beside her, stiff and unmoving, her face expressionless except for those queer eyes that were like two holes burned in a blanket.

If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand.

St. Mark 3:25

Grace was reaching behind herself to button her dress when she noticed the spot—just over her right breast, a tiny watermark shaped like a Rorschach blot.

She felt a flicker of annoyance. Silk. It ought to have been outlawed, she thought, along with asbestos and No. 2 red dye. When was the last time she’d worn silk without having to run straight to the dry cleaner? When was the last time she’d worn silk, period?

An image from long ago flitted across her mind—swirls of taffeta the color of raspberry sherbert, an orchid corsage on her wrist. Some awful country-club affair that Grandma had insisted she attend. By evening’s end, she recalled, the orchid looked as if it had been trampled by Sherman’s army, which, the way people in Blessing talked, you’d have thought had scorched its way through Georgia the week before.

Staring into her closet, Grace thought of the evening stretching before her like a battlefield.
What does it matter what I’m wearing?

Hannah would probably be thrilled if she showed up at the door in her underwear. All the more reason to find fault with her father’s girlfriend.

Girlfriend. The word stuck in her mind like something scrawled in her Robert E. Lee High yearbook, adolescent, transitory, inconsequential somehow. My God, she was thirty-seven years old, and someone’s
girlfriend.

It would be different if we were married.

But was that really what she wanted—to be a wife again, and play stepmother to Ben and Hannah? Didn’t she have enough to handle just being the
mother
of a teenager? Besides, Jack hadn’t even
asked
her to marry him. Whenever the subject came up, he adroitly managed to skirt it.

Grace felt a knot form in her stomach, and along with it came the sudden certainty that
nothing
about this evening was going to turn out okay. But she quickly filed that thought away, under “Pending” (on the mental shelf below “Maybe It’ll Work Out on Its Own” and just above “You’re Wasting Your Time”). Right. Just because this was their first dinner together, all five of them, was no reason to panic. There would be enough of that after Hannah arrived.