Home In The Morning (6 page)

After minimal detective work, he discovered her name, where she was from, what she studied, where she lived. That is: Stella Godwin of Boston, a master’s candidate in social work at Wesleyan, taking a semester off to lobby for the ACLU in New Haven. Yet more smitten by what amounted to an exotic background according to Jackson’s lights, he arranged to run into her. After ten minutes of conversation, he was further sunk. Ten minutes of watching her lips move and he needed his mouth on hers, needed his hands on Stella Godwin’s flesh. It was not simply a desire: he would not be at rest until he had what he needed. His friends teased him about his initial failures with her. What happened to Errol Flynn? they said when he shaved his mustache after he heard she did not like hairy men. They laughed and hooted as young men do when one of theirs succumbs to feminine power, telling him he looked like shit, telling him he’d met his match: She was eating him alive. He knew they were not far wrong. All day long he thought of her
and at night, when he could sleep at all, he dreamt of her mouth, her hands on him everywhere. He about pined away before she had mercy.

It took maximum efforts of enticement, including coauthoring her petitions, standing in frigid temperatures collecting signatures, and accompanying Stella to the State House to deliver them, hoping every minute no one back home would somehow find out and proceed to make his daddy’s life a misery. At last, he insinuated himself into her bed after a pursuit of five months and it was there, that first night they were home from the great march, their ears yet ringing with the good reverend’s dream, that he told her about that summer night when the lives of Bubba Ray and Katherine Marie and Li’l Bokay and himself collided, crashing into poor old Daddy along the way. He told her in stutters, with blushes, with tears, and with sobs as the release of such a heavy burden demands. Stella Godwin listened, silent, poker-faced, huddled on her side of the bed with her luscious knees up and a gaze of utter attention for every guilty word. Just after he was done telling his story, she told him: I think I love you, Jackson. I think I just this minute fell in love. Up ‘til now, I wasn’t really sure about you. I only slept with you because you’d been so relentless in chasing after me. I figured I ought to give anyone who wanted me quite that much a chance. But now, after hearing all that, I think I love you.

And she opened her legs and her arms and folded him up in there while he broke down again, collapsing into her in a flurry of fresh tears, tears not of remorse this time but of gratitude.

Fall, 1963

A
FTER THAT NIGHT, THEY OFTEN
fell asleep entangled, and in the morning they bothered each other again. Stella liked to sleep in a bit afterward. Jackson would shower alone, careful not to make too much noise. Tidied up and properly bid adieu, he’d hit the street to walk from her apartment to his first class, thinking of how much he loved her, the adorable Stella Godwin, how much he continued to want her all the time every day and night, how he loved listening to her talk, how he loved the way she listened, how he loved her passion for him and for the general welfare of every other sorry-assed inhabitant of the planet. He considered her the most sanctified woman he’d ever met while the toughest-minded, the sexiest. Her apartment was a good distance away from campus, but Jackson enjoyed the time it took to get there as it afforded him the opportunity to think luxuriously of her legs both open and closed, their muscles flexed and relaxed, of her breasts, and that red hair. As he neared the university, he might run into a classmate
who wanted to talk about their reading for the morning’s lecture and, made bright and alive by love, he found himself expounding vigorously and insightfully on the lesson of the day. And he’d think: This is what Mama meant. A man needs a good woman’s love to thrive.

Although his primary education had begun disastrously, Jackson caught up with his fellows, and once he started surpassing them, he never stopped. When Stella, applauding the job he’d done drafting one of her appeals, asked him how he’d got so smart, he told her the truth.

I didn’t start out this way, I willed it. Until I was twelve, I thought I was slow, but looking back I think I was just bored. Then at twelve, I studied for my bar mitzvah. I knew very little a good Jewish boy should know by twelve years of age, I was half a heathen. I was the first boy in three generations of my family to be bar mitzvah, but the new rabbi over to the capital was on fire to get his flock consecrated, so it became the new fashion, and Mama was not one to be left behind where fashion was concerned. We didn’t have a synagogue in Guilford. Daddy’d take me over to Beth Israel in Jackson for my lessons. My teacher was their new rabbi, Perry Nussbaum, who was very kind to me, patient and praiseful, which was remarkable for him. He had a reputation in the town for being blunt and, well, rude as a Yankee interloper to tell the truth. He was born in Canada, after all. People tried to overlook his rougher edges on that account, though it wasn’t easy for them. Lord, no, it wasn’t at all. It got even harder once he started in with the Freedom Riders. But this was before all that.

Anyway, it was unusual for me to have masculine approval. I lapped it up. I nearly got religion I loved that man so. One day I could not get through my Hebrew lesson at all. Every time I opened my mouth I made a mistake. I suppose I’d been lazy about my homework. Afterward, Rabbi Nussbaum left me for my father to pick up, and when he walked away he sighed. I know, I know it was just a sigh, a mere audible inhalation and exhalation of breath, but the disappointment in
it stuck me like a Roman spear. First I grieved his former high opinion of me. Then I got angry. What made me angry was myself, that I hadn’t studied. The level of my anger was unusually intense, which at that age was likely due to a hormonal surge. I recall I sat on the steps of Temple Beth Israel waiting for Daddy. He was running late, and I had plenty of time to pound the concrete with two fists until my skin was scraped raw. Right there, sitting on those steps, I made my first adult decision. I decided I was tired of being stupid. As a remedy, I was going to be smart. Then I simply willed my intelligence into being. Once enlivened, it took over.

Stella laughed and kissed him when he told her that story. Then she reminded him that smart as he was, she was smarter. It was true. It was another reason he loved her.

The day came in their romance when they discussed meeting the families. Stella’s family was closer, in Boston. They planned a weekend with them first. During spring break, they’d travel south and meet his family. As the Boston visit approached, each grew more anxious. You don’t know my people, Stella said. We ought to have a signal that means “I’m sorry” between us, then I don’t have to be saying it all weekend, every time they embarrass me. Or you. You think the crowd at Yale is bad? They’ll probably ask you if your family raped slaves. Jackson roared at that. She was so witty. He could not imagine she was serious about an old Boston family, philanthropists, factory owners, wielders of the means of production, the very thing that defeated the South. How could such a family make an inquiry that rude, that coarse?

On the trip to Boston, Stella squirmed in her seat, twisted her fingers constantly, sighed, frowned, making it impossible for Jackson to drive his Renault with anything approaching calm. Quit fiddling with your fingers, he said. Just breathe deep, in and out. Relax, for God’s sake. The air in this vehicle is positively charged, and I cannot focus on the
road. Do you want me to pull over? Do you need to stop somewhere? Stella burst into tears. Alarmed, he pulled into the next rest stop.

What is it, sweetheart? What is it? He tried to wrap her in his arms, but she’d only have a few seconds of it, and then she stiffened and slid out of them, fending off his reluctance to let her go with her gloved hands. At her best or at her worst, Stella had to keep part of herself to herself, there was something that never gave in that woman, but at that particular emergence of her boundaries, Jackson could only think he’d done the wrong thing and did not know what the right thing was. It was to become a familiar perception.

Since she could not stop crying, she talked between sobs. Her family, she said, could not stand her. She was their rebel, the conscience they could not hide from, the avatar of their error, for which they despised her. Her mother once called her a demon seed. Her father claimed he loved her, but he was a terrible hypocrite. Her two elder brothers had gone into the family business and closed their eyes to everything that went on within it, husbanding their intellectual powers for writing letters to politicians and stockholders. They never took note of her even as a child. Now that she’d gone off on her own, she figured they’d happily forgotten she’d ever existed. To make matters worse, as she put it, they were ostensibly pious, attending synagogue regularly and frequently holding office there and in the town. Her rejection of observance embarrassed them. He might as well know it: They were as likely to welcome her on their arrival as toss her out on her ear. She didn’t know what had possessed her to agree to this visit. After he met them, she was certain he’d drop her on the spot.

Jackson listened to this story aghast. He could not bear to contemplate why anyone would make his adorable Stella suffer. Up ‘til she divulged her biography, he’d been anxious about introducing her to Mama and Daddy and the odious Bubba Ray, now fifteen and turned out just as one might expect. He was the worst kind of mama’s boy,
lazy and sluggish with shifty eyes and a scheming mind. Jackson doubted there was a vice with which he’d not made at least a passing acquaintance. He feared how she’d absorb the South, too, how she’d take in Mississippi. He was afraid she’d misinterpret everything he loved back home and throw everyone into an uproar. He wondered on which street corner she’d get filled with a passion to stand with one of her petitions. He imagined with a dark mental quiver what Mama would have to say about that. Just what we need, she’d say, a dang Yankee communist attached to the family. All along, he’d been struck by how willing he was to bring Stella home anyway, despite premonitions of disaster. Then after hearing her family story, he felt an encounter with his own people infinitely benign compared to one with Stella’s. Compassion overwhelmed him and nursed the first flames of his heat to serve as her protector against this insidious family as well as any other adversary who might cross her path. He muttered as much to the top of her head, to her throat.

Now that her fears were out there, flapping in the wind, Stella felt better and allowed herself to be embraced and petted within an inch of consciousness by the solicitations of a man who swore he would make up all the unhappiness inflicted on her by giving her everything she wanted forever and ever amen. He would work until he died for her. In other words, he proposed. She accepted. He was overjoyed. They started up their journey again, rode the rest of the way to Boston holding hands over the console. From time to time Stella fell silent, and when Jackson snuck a look at her she was smiling a straight, thin smile with just the corners of her mouth pointed up. He thought she looked satisfied, but also as if she was plotting something. His joy deflated a little until it struck him maybe she wasn’t plotting so much as planning her wedding, a thought that made enough sense to restore him to buoyant happiness.

Jackson drove up Washington Street toward the great houses of Roxbury. His mouth filled with bile and his heart with both courage
and dread. He stopped the car, got out, followed Stella’s directions for opening the big iron grate to the courtyard of the family Victorian, then steeled himself for battle with his teeth grit.

They parked by the front door. Before they could get out of the car, a maid in uniform hurried out and grabbed their bags. A new one, Stella whispered to Jackson. I don’t know her. Arm in arm, they walked up the stone front steps flanked by fir trees and into the foyer.

My, my, my, Jackson said, craning his neck to follow the slow curve of marble stairs that spiraled gracefully up a full three floors. Beautiful.

Something chimed twice loudly and his neck spun round looking for its source, a massive grandfather clock of a design he’d never seen before. Opposite was a fireplace graced by a mantel, also of marble, with interlocking sprigs of wheat carved into its face. There was a glass screen, a sparkling brass grate, and andirons. Orientals overlapped on the floor. Gilt-framed family portraits hung on the walls. Everything was heavy, dark, venerable. He felt oddly half at home and half in a fairyland. Foyers screaming history were not unknown to him. But foyers dark, heavy, and somber were. Yes, he thought, a winter’s fairyland. As if on cue, oak pocket doors creaked open, and Stella’s mother, a Snow Queen if ever there was one, stepped through them. Mildred Godwin was short and thin, her features sharp, coming to twin V’s at the chin and nose. She was likely the palest woman he’d ever seen with hair a darker, flatter red than Stella’s, cut close to her head and curled. It took him a second, but he saw it was a wig. Her eyes were mini versions of Stella’s. On Stella, they were large, warm. On her mother, they were small and suspicious. She extended a limp, white hand in his direction. He took it.