The Black Rose (61 page)

“I still don’t know what you
do
want.”

“I just want to live, Mama! What’s so god-awful about that? All you and Mr. Ransom ever talk about is the business. I can talk about it sometimes, but that’s not all I am! You think I want to end up like you? You—” But Lelia stopped herself, shaking her head. “Never mind.”

“No, you finish,” Sarah said, her bottom lip trembling. “Like me how?”

Lelia gazed at Sarah directly. “It seems like you don’t have nothing to say to me anymore if it isn’t about Walker Manufacturing. And no matter how much I do, it’s not enough for you ’cause I don’t do it like you. So I give up! I can’t be you, so I’m just gonna be me. And that goes for courting, too! I already told you how I feel about Wiley Wilson—I know you don’t like him, but he’s the first man I’ve thought about like this since John—and if I even look a man’s way, all I hear about is Dr. Kennedy. Dr. Kennedy is nice, Mama, but you don’t control my heart, too!”

“I don’t want … control… .”

“Oh, Mama, please!” Lelia said, exasperated. “You think I don’t know you? That’s
all
you want! And anybody who tries to go against you knows that.”

Was that all Lelia thought of her, that she was some kind of monster? Sarah’s heart plunged. “Did you give Alice Tisem the formula on purpose, Lela?” Sarah asked, suddenly suspicious. “Did you do it to hurt me and the company? Tell me the truth.”

A light seemed to go out in Lelia’s eyes. The stony mask did not return, but Lelia was gazing at Sarah the same way she would at a stranger. Her jaw shook. “Everything I have is because of you and the company, and I love you both,” she said. “If you don’t know that, then you don’t know me, and you sure as hell don’t think anything of me. So if you don’t mind, I have some friends waiting who know me and like me just fine.”

Lelia got up and walked across the room in sweeping steps, then slammed the door hard behind her. Anyone who had slept during their shouting match would have certainly heard it.

With the door closed, there was suddenly no light in the room, and Sarah sat in the chair in an overpowering darkness. She heard a low moan from deep in her belly, and suddenly the sound had filled up the room. She was cramping, and she hugged herself, doubled over.

Madam Walker, the situation is very simple.

Lelia was right, she realized. She could not force her daughter to become someone she was not. Lelia would not sacrifice as much as she had. If she didn’t try to accept Lelia for who she was, she would push her daughter away. Who would she truly have left in her life, then?

Your blood pressure is quite high and your kidneys are probably failing.

So she would have to try to hold on to the Walker Company as long as she could. Mae was so much more serious than Lelia; maybe in a few years, when Mae was older …

It’s very good you came here to Battle Creek for some rest, but your
situation calls for more than a visit. Do you understand my point?

But there was so much more to do now! Why had she been cheated for so many years, when she’d been in better health but powerless to do anything even for herself? Now she was gaining the power to help her entire race! The African students she’d been sponsoring at Tuskegee were only the beginning. Her visit to the White House was only a start.

As a physician, I’m afraid there’s only one way to phrase this question,
Madam: Do you want to live, or do you want to die?

“I want to live,” Sarah whispered in the darkness, answering her Battle Creek physician’s question exactly as she had in November, during her monthlong stay at the Michigan sanitorium. But this time, instead of the false hopefulness she’d felt at Battle Creek, her voice was laden with a wellspring of despair she felt growing in her soul.

“Oh, dear Lord, please let me live. I want to live. I can do so much for my race, Lord. Don’t give all this to me and then take it away.
I want to
live
.” But for the first time in her life, Sarah felt like her prayer was falling on no one’s ears but her own.

Chapter Thirty-six

AUGUST 25, 1918

Villa Lewaro.

When Sarah repeated the name of her new home in her mind, she could hear the Italian tenor uttering the name with his delightful accent:
Lee-Waaa-Ro.
When Lelia brought Caruso and his wife up to the property to visit last week, he toured the house and thought of the name as soon as he sat in the sunken Italian garden to drink iced tea with Lelia and Sarah, gazing out at the fountain and swimming pool. He’d been awestruck.

This place already
has
its name, and it has whispered it to me, Madam—LeeWaaaRo. Did I not say a fine home is the same as a child? It has named itself
after lovely Lelia. L-E for Lelia, W-A for Walker, and R-O for Robinson. Villa
Lewaro!

Caruso was right, she knew. Villa Lewaro had been the mansion’s name all along, even before she knew it.

In the five
A.M.
darkness, Sarah allowed herself to enjoy the immensity and serenity of her home in a way she’d rarely been able to since she’d moved in amidst its boxes and clutter in June. She was the only one awake now. The servants were asleep, and there were no guests at this hour. She could enjoy Villa Lewaro for herself.

Thirty-four rooms. Three stories.
I want it to look like a palace in a storybook,
Sarah had told her talented Negro architect, and he had built her an Italian Renaissance–style palace fit for nobility. After making so many visits to monitor its progress, noticing so many dissatisfactory details and then suffering the endless unpacking and decorating, Sarah had never viewed her home with the real pleasure of a newcomer. Walking gingerly in her slippers because of her badly swollen feet, Sarah traveled from one end of her house to the other, turning on her beautiful green and white Chinese jade lamps as she moved, taking in the sights that would meet her party guests when they arrived for the villa’s opening gala later today.

What she saw made her cling to her satin robe with gratitude. Her home was a vision!

As a child visiting Missus Anna’s grand home in Delta, she’d thought there must be some invisible dividing line between Missus Anna’s life and hers because Missus Anna had a fine house and she lived in a leaky cabin; and Missus Anna was white, while she was colored. But that line had been only in her imagination, hadn’t it? It might have
seemed
so—and maybe, until the end of slavery, it had truly been so for most of her people—but that line was gone. Negroes still had more than their share of unfair obstacles, but it
was
possible to get around them. She’d built her house with money she’d made from Negroes, and many of those Negroes in turn earned their living from other Negroes. And she’d built the house with Vertner Woodson Tandy, a Negro architect, to further make her point.
This
was her monument to Negro achievement.

Sarah opened one of her double doors on the ground floor and began outside, walking to what she still thought of as her front porch, but which the architect called her
portico
, where six stately columns proclaimed her home to all who passed it. After she turned to face her marble entrance hall, Sarah’s eyes became tearful as she climbed the marble steps to her living room. Gazing at the living room before her, she imagined the hotel ballroom in Denver where she and C.J. had danced their first waltz. That ballroom would look plain and uninteresting to her now, no doubt, but back then it had symbolized a brand-new beginning. And C.J. had been her shining prince, come to take her to the Promised Land. Or so she’d thought, anyway.
Too bad you ain’t here to see it, C.J. You talk about a
room to dance in!

She had hired an Italian artist to decorate the walls and paint the ceiling by hand, and the room had exquisite Italian furnishings. Two hundred twenty feet ahead of her, she admired the gold bough over the doorway that led to the dining room, then she turned to gaze at the shimmering gold detail on the massive entrance hall’s fireplace, which was the showpiece of the west wall. Her feet sank into the Tabriz rug, which had cost $13,000 and covered a large portion of the room. Sarah walked past the fireplace into the music room—the new, larger Gold Room—where her massive glistening chandeliers hung, reflecting the gold leaf that trimmed the room’s walls and ceiling. The draperies, too, were gold-trimmed.

And here was her precious $25,000 Estey organ—which seemed to always be in disrepair, but luckily was ready to play music for the party—and her 24-carat gold leaf–trimmed grand piano, which she’d lacked in Pittsburgh but had more than compensated for now. Her gold-leaf Victrola was positioned nicely on its own table, more art than machinery, and the chairs seated before the phonograph in a half circle had been designed to look like pure gold themselves. The music room was narrow, but it was the length of both her living and dining rooms, so it was truly palatial, with French doors at either end. Since her music was here, with the organ chiming each quarter hour and built to pipe music to every corner of the house, this was one of Sarah’s favorite rooms. This room, to her, seemed nearly blessed.

Sarah stopped to rest her hand on the smooth marble statuette of Romeo and Juliet that adorned one corner of the Gold Room. The tragic heroes’ youthful faces moved her just the way she imagined the artist had intended. She had so much art, and so little time to actually appreciate it. And what about this large bronze statue of an old woman Lottie had told her was an original piece by a very famous sculptor named Rodin? And more paintings than she could count. She liked ivory so much that she collected small ivory pieces whenever she could, but now they sat in a display case virtually ignored.

And there were so many rooms to choose from! Sarah realized just how massive the home was as she made her trek from one end to the other, her feet complaining the entire way. She couldn’t neglect to admire the dining room, as expensive as it had been to furnish it. The first thing she noted, as everyone did, was the large tapestry hanging on her wall, several feet long and several feet tall, woven of silk and wool. The $3,500 Aubusson tapestry, which overlooked her extensive mahogany dining set, depicted six hounds cornering a wild boar during a hunt.
The Boar at Bay,
it was titled. The piece made Sarah smile; she liked the brotherhood of the hounds, their dedication to the hunt. One of the dogs, in fact, reminded her of the stray dog that had adopted their family in Delta soon before her parents died.

The organ chime told Sarah it was already five-fifteen, and she had admired only the first floor so far. Thank goodness for the elevator, she thought as she took the contraption down to the basement. Of all of her floors, she spent the least time here. The basement housed her gymnasium, which she didn’t visit nearly as much as she’d planned, to make use of the rowing machine, climbing bars, and electric baths the way her nurse advised. Even now, she only glanced into the gymnasium before doubling back toward the kitchen. Her days in the kitchen were long gone, and she had a cook to prepare her meals that weren’t catered, so unless she ate a meal at the long kitchen table, this elegant part of her home was the domain of others, not her. The kitchen floor was so clean that it gleamed, and there were cabinets to spare, enough to store food for a year, it seemed.

The servants had their own dining area at one end of the kitchen, with an adjoining shower room and toilet, and Sarah noticed that the servants’ table was spotless except for a newspaper someone had left behind. Imagine, she’d once had to tramp outside in the rain just to travel back and forth between her kitchen and her home in Vicksburg! That little kitchen had probably been about as big as her servants’ shower room today, she mused, and she felt a tingle across the back of her neck.

She was tiring already, she realized with dismay.

With a determined sigh, Sarah found the elevator again and took it to the third floor, which had guest rooms, servants’ rooms, and Lelia’s favorite—the billiard room. Sarah walked into the dark, richly hued billiard room and gazed with satisfaction at the large Flemish oak billiard table and ten matching high-backed armchairs.
A gentleman’s billiard room
, Sarah thought, imagining that some of her guests today might slip up here for a friendly game.

Sarah knew the second floor very well; this was where her bedroom and sitting room were, along with four other bedrooms, all with their own bathrooms. The private passageway between her sitting room and bedroom had large mirrored closets on either side. Sarah’s bed was still rumpled from where she’d left it not long ago beneath its red canopy, but she gazed at it as if it were a new discovery, imagining the dear little wooden bed Moses had built for them with his own hands after they were married. One entire wall of her bedroom was a large picture window displaying the landscaped grounds outside, including the $10,000 Japanese prayer tree she’d had imported, with an adjoining door leading to her enclosed porch. Beyond that, there was the beautiful expanse of the Hudson River and the dramatic cliffs of the New Jersey Palisades on the other side. The entire room was kept cozy by her bedroom’s fireplace.

And, of course, there was one item on Sarah’s nightstand that had kept its place her entire life, following her to Vicksburg, St. Louis, then Denver, then Pittsburgh, then to Harlem, and now here: the photograph of her father. It had a much more regal gold frame now, but the photograph was unchanged from the time she’d first found it as a girl. Gazing at the photo, Sarah heard herself speak aloud: “You proud of me, Papa?”

Of course he was, he and Mama both. And Moses, too. And C.J.?

Suddenly Sarah felt a fist in her chest. The feeling frightened her—all sudden pains or sensations now startled her, making her fear her doctors’ warnings were coming to pass—until she realized it was only a keen, sharp loneliness. Grief, really.