Homeplace (8 page)

And she cared about the Civil Rights Movement. In those long, hot days it bloomed like a firestorm until it filled her entire consciousness, and she followed it obsessively in the newspapers and on the flickering black-and-white television set in the home’s scanty parlor. In this she might have been invisible, a ghost, for the other girls in the home who gathered to watch television did not seem to notice the flying shadow images of marchers and crowds and sometimes dogs and firehoses, did not seem to hear the endless, ageless choruses of “We Shall Overcome” and the guttural flatulence of mob anger. Mostly, they waited for the news to be over so they could tune in
Gunsmoke
. Something in the pulsing images spoke to Mike of a feeling she had first had in the jail in Atlanta, after the sit-in and her arrest, a new and slyly pervasive emotion that seemed to be forged and born out of the fear and outrage and simple astonishment of that night: a ringing and clarion sense of fellowship, an almost martial camaraderie. Somewhere
in those ghost dances on the church home’s old GE console was, for Mike, a place of her own.

It was always the glamour of the movement, this demon charm of belonging, of kinship; the morality of the thing was self-evident and powerful, and the politics of it seductive, but it was the comrades-at-arms ties of danger and youth and violence, the sheer young animal strength of revolution, the frankly sexual excitement of riding a great hinge of history, that gave the Civil Rights Movement in the South its irresistible dark allure. When the Council of Federated Organizations sent the first busload of white college students rolling south into Mississippi that summer, Mike felt an abrupt, warm melting of the aspic that had held her immobile for weeks. She lifted her head and looked around her in the home’s parlor. One girl, a thin, intense, homely redhead from New Jersey who lived down the hall from Mike, lifted her own head and met Mike’s eyes. Mike got up off the Naugahyde sofa and sat down in a butterfly chair beside the girl. The next morning, they left Atlanta in the redhead’s car and drove south and west, through Alabama toward Mississippi and Freedom Summer.

They caught up with the buses in Hattiesburg, where nothing much at all seemed to be happening. They encountered no guns, dogs, firehoses, angry mobs, Ku Klux Klansmen. What they did encounter was a wet, relentless, juggernaut heat, a vast and feral army of mosquitoes, and empty, sleepy, one-gas-pump towns where they alit stickily from the buses long after dark and trudged wearily into identical rural Negro shanties at the end of dirt roads in cotton fields and pastures, to sleep on pallets and quilts in the endless heat, wash at hand pumps, use privies, and eat greens and grits and pork gravy for days on end. To Mike, who had done the same thing on countless nights in Rusky and J.W.’s cabin back in Lytton—eaten the same food, smelled the same ashen smell—there was nothing remarkable at all
about these thick, rank Mississippi nights, and she felt a small, flat itch to get on to the real business at hand, which she assumed to be the much-anticipated guns, dogs, and firehoses. But she stifled her impatience out of natural politeness and a desire not to spoil her compatriots’ excitement. For they, most of them Northerners, were riding an incandescent crest of ebullience and nervy exhilaration, and she realized that to them, the miserable cabins of the silent, deferential Negroes were exotica of the highest order.

Oh, well, Mike thought, surely we’ll get into it by Greenville.

And she sang with the others on the bus, “Yes, we are the Freedom Riders and we ride a long Greyhound, white or black, we know no difference, Lord, for we are glory bound,” and she railed and howled with the others when the bodies of the three missing Summer Project workers were found buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi, but still she saw, firsthand, none of the moral combat she had come seeking.

“Just wait till Greenville,” the older heads on the bus counseled.

But she never made Greenville; never made even the edge of the vast, fecund, and the dangerous Delta. For on her bus was a saturnine young man from Fairfax County, Connecticut, named Richard Singer, a young Jew of a certain melancholy beauty and mordant wit, between quarters at Harvard Law School. He was struck and held, as were many of the young Northerners on the bus, by the flame that seemed to dance around the slender, ash-gilt girl from the Deep South (for the great and electric sense of belonging and imminent peril and high resolve had lit in Mike the old, dead fire of her father, and she burned steadily in that dangerous air), and her conviction excited him as perversely as if she had been a spy against her own country, working deep behind enemy lines. Richard
Singer was, in truth, a hopeless and untried romantic beneath the cultivated cynicism.

As for Mike, she found this lounging, sardonic Ivy Leaguer as unlike her father, or Bayard Sewell, or any other man that she had ever known, as an entirely new species. And in the hot, endless, identical nights, under the twin urgings of danger and proximity, she found that she wanted very much indeed to go to bed with him, and one evening outside Dooleyville, Mississippi, a scant fifty miles from the poisoned grail of the Delta, did just that, in a shed shared by a homemade tractor and a couple of roosting Dominecker hens, with a steaming, inexorable rain pounding dully on the corrugated tin roof.

To her vast surprise and pleasure, the earth did move, as it had for Robert Jordan and Maria, a circumstance that she had never imagined might occur with anyone other than Bayard Sewell. It was her first time, and she had thought it would hurt, would revolt her, until, as DeeDee had said, she had gotten used to it. When it did not, when it set her to moaning, and then thrashing, and then crying out in sweating release, she concluded that she was in love with Richard Singer. And although he would have died rather than admit to her or anyone else that it was his first time too, Richard Singer, out of relief and gratitude and infatuation and a certain goatish bravado, as well as a practical desire to make his first class of the fall quarter in Cambridge, asked her to marry him.

And she did, two days later in Winona, Mississippi, during the last week in August, with the redhead from New Jersey and a fat divinity student from Yale who kept saying, “Right on, man,” as attendants. The stained, indifferent justice of the peace never introduced himself. A year later, neither Mike nor Richard could remember any of the names of the wedding party. Just before she said “I do,” and became Mrs. Richard
Isaac Singer III, Mike remembered the flicker of wetness in her father’s eyes at DeeDee’s wedding, and thought, I wish you could see me now, Daddy. You’d really have something to cry about. But never during the entire mumbled ceremony did she think of Bayard Sewell. When they went east and north the day after the wedding to meet Richard’s parents in Connecticut and find lodgings in Cambridge, it was for good. Mike Winship did not go home again.

A
FTER THAT, HER LIFE SWEPT LIKE A LOCOMOTIVE DOWN THE
track she had imagined for it, except that the man at her side was not Bayard Sewell. Mike was not unhappy. She was not recklessly, suffocatingly happy as she had been in the spring days in Lytton before the sit-in, but she was endlessly absorbed, engaged, interested. What pain she might have felt was driven deep under by the weight of sheer novelty. Every pore seemed opened to new stimuli, new information, new potential. Her horizons, laid down long ago in the microscopic universe of Lytton, sped away from her with the speed of light. Sometimes she felt herself to be a simple machine engaged solely in the receiving and processing of information. Her mind hummed with newness in the crispening fall days; in the nights, in the tiny apartment in Cambridge, after she and Richard had made love, her body thrummed with it. She did not stop to analyze all she was taking in, she only assimilated. Sometimes she did not even do that, only registered, filed away for future reference, raised her head for more. Somewhere at the barricaded rear of her mind, a small, stabbing voice that was not her voice said, “Do not stop. Do not look
back. Do not think, not yet, not for a long time. Do not open doors.”

Richard Singer’s well-to-do parents were dismayed when their new daughter-in-law proved to be both a Gentile and a Southerner, and they mourned the lost wedding and country-club reception, but at least Mike was not pregnant and was presentable and reputedly of good enough family, and they were quick to realize that if they did not accept her, they would lose their lone princeling for good. There was a certain glamour and gallantry about Mike’s circumstances, too, that appealed to their untested liberal sensibilities almost as strongly as they had to Richard’s, who giddily believed that he had rescued with marriage a new kind of folk heroine. In his uncluttered mind, Mike was an aristocratic flower of a corrupt and dying old South who had rebelled against that decadent Arcadia’s monstrous prejudices and been martyred for it. Had not her cruel and arrogant landed father cast her out without a penny to her name? Had he not deprived her of the family plantation that was her birthright? Had he not forbidden her her ancestral home for all time? Richard had been given
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
at his Bar Mitzvah by a sentimental uncle who had spent several miserable years in Richmond, and it had had a profound influence on his life. Nothing he had seen in his short sojourn into Mississippi with the Freedom Riders had disabused him of the gothic impression he had garnered from the book.

Like many eastern liberals and self-proclaimed intellectuals of the time, the Singers and their son were unable to see the South and Southerners in more than one dimension. That the overbearing, patrician lawyer with his vast, sullied acreage was in truth a bitter, bereft, and frightened small-town attorney with a seared heart and stunted vision, one scrabbling generation away from a two-mule tenant farm, was beyond their ken. To her
credit, Mike had never advanced this fiction, and was genuinely puzzled that she could not part her new family from it. Neither had she told them that John Winship had forbidden her to return home, for in truth, he had not. But she had not told them another and more stinging truth, either … that his message to her when she called home to tell him she was married and living in Cambridge, delivered by a seemingly perennially tearful DeeDee, was, “Don’t bring that Jew down here.” At the words, a great lassitude took her, drowning for the moment the bubbling spring of her peripatetic energy. It seemed simpler to let the Singers believe what they pleased.

Mike did not speak of her family in Lytton after that phone call. Thinking the hurt of estrangement too deep for words, the Singers tactfully dropped the subject. The truth was that Mike had finally put the last shards of Lytton, and everyone in it, away in fatigue and lost interest. Dutiful letters from DeeDee and one or two subdued notes from Priss that mentioned nothing of the Winships or Bayard Sewell were her only links to the South. Somehow the newspaper accounts of riots and burning and beatings, of dogs and bombs and bullets, seemed to have to do with another country than the one she had left. The Civil Rights Movement boiled and eddied around Lytton, she knew, but the town stood silent and dreaming in Mike’s mind, when she thought of it, like a sunstruck rock in a rapid. Mike thought of it seldom and then briefly.

It was in one of DeeDee’s letters that she learned that Bayard Sewell had entered the University of Georgia in Athens, and that John Winship was paying his way through. She did not answer the letter, and she did not keep it.

As if in recompense for her suffering and deprivation, the Singers offered to pay Mike’s tuition at Radcliffe until Richard graduated from Harvard Law, and
she accepted simply and gratefully. After he graduated from Harvard, predictably with honors, Richard joined a struggling young firm in lower Manhattan specializing in legal aid cases, and they moved into a two-room apartment near Third Avenue, on 18th Street. Mike loved the grimy, throbbing city on sight, loved its energy and staggering variety and pragmatic meanness with a fierce and joyous answering affirmation. Most of all, she loved the sheer un-Southernness of it. It was one love affair that never faded.

She transferred to Columbia that summer, studying endlessly on the subway uptown and back, studying late into the blaring nights, when Richard was away at meetings and on difficult cases, as he often was. Sometimes in those headlong days and weeks they met only in the king-size bed that filled the whole of their tiny dark bedroom, so that the telephone sat underneath it and their clothes hung in a Sears cardboard armoire in the living room. She would raise her head from her arm, where it had fallen when the type in her textbooks had blurred and melted away like rain on a cold windowpane, and would hold out her arms to him, and they would make urgent and sweating love on the rumpled sheets that Mike would have forgotten to change for the third week on end. Often they did not speak, only moaned and gasped and cried out their climax and then fell into sleep with the overhead light still on, and sometimes, on weekends, they stayed in bed all of one and frequently both days, eating, sleeping, and copulating. Mike was on the pill, but still, she thought privately that it was a wonder she had not gotten pregnant almost instantaneously.

“All we ever do is eat and sleep and fuck like minks,” she said to Richard once.

“What else is there?” he replied.

“What else, indeed,” Mike said, and realized that for the moment it was true. Her studies never bored her,
and neither did their lovemaking. If she never felt for him the helpless and liquid rush of wanting that had taken her almost every time she had looked at Bayard Sewell, she nevertheless responded quickly and ravenously whenever Richard entered her, and came explosively.

A mink is right, she thought, not without a certain self-satisfaction.

She graduated magna cum laude in journalism in 1968, and was hired almost immediately as a research assistant for a weekly newsmagazine, and by the time their daughter Rachel was born in 1974, when Mike was 28, she had had five years of relentless, single-minded work at her career as a free-lance journalist, and small plum assignments were beginning to come in.