The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and the Stories (27 page)

Clare said—and Irene fancied that her husky voice held a slight edge—“Before you came, Irene, Gertrude was telling me about her two boys. Twins. Think of it! Isn’t it too marvelous for words?”

Irene felt a warmness creeping into her cheeks. Uncanny, the way Clare could divine what one was thinking. She was a little put out, but her manner was entirely easy as she said: “That is nice. I’ve two
boys myself, Gertrude. Not twins, though. It seems that Clare’s rather behind, doesn’t it?”

Gertrude, however, wasn’t sure that Clare hadn’t the best of it. “She’s got a girl. I wanted a girl. So did Fred.”

“Isn’t that a bit unusual?” Irene asked. “Most men want sons. Egotism, I suppose.”

“Well, Fred didn’t.”

The tea things had been placed on a low table at Clare’s side. She gave them her attention now, pouring the rich amber fluid from the tall glass pitcher into stately slim glasses, which she handed to her guests, and then offered them lemon or cream and tiny sandwiches or cakes.

After taking up her own glass she informed them: “No, I have no boys and I don’t think I’ll ever have any. I’m afraid. I nearly died of terror the whole nine months before Margery was born for fear that she might be dark. Thank goodness, she turned out all right. But I’ll never risk it again. Never! The strain is simply too—too hellish.”

Gertrude Martin nodded in complete comprehension.

This time it was Irene who said nothing.

“You don’t have to tell me!” Gertrude said fervently. “I know what it is all right. Maybe you don’t think I wasn’t scared to death too. Fred said I was silly, and so did his mother. But, of course, they thought it was just a notion I’d gotten into my head and they blamed it on my condition. They don’t know like we do, how it might go way back, and turn out dark no matter what color the father and mother are.”

Perspiration stood out on her forehead. Her narrow eyes rolled first in Clare’s, then in Irene’s direction. As she talked she waved her heavy hands about.

“No,” she went on, “no more for me either. Not even a girl. It’s awful the way it skips generations and then pops out. Why, he actually said he didn’t care what color it turned out, if I would only stop worrying about it. But, of course, nobody wants a dark child.” Her voice was earnest and she took for granted that her audience was in entire agreement with her.

Irene, whose head had gone up with a quick little jerk, now said in a voice of whose even tones she was proud: “One of my boys is dark.”

Gertrude jumped as if she had been shot at. Her eyes goggled. Her mouth flew open. She tried to speak but could not immediately get the words out. Finally she managed to stammer: “Oh! And your husband, is he—is he—er—dark too?”

Irene, who was struggling with a flood of feelings, resentment, anger, and contempt, was, however, still able to answer as coolly as if she had not that sense of not belonging to and of despising the company in which she found herself drinking iced tea from tall amber glasses on that hot August afternoon. Her husband, she informed them quietly, couldn’t exactly “pass.”

At that reply Clare turned on Irene her seductive caressing smile and remarked a little scoffingly: “I do think that colored people—we—are too silly about some things. After all, the thing’s not important to Irene or hundreds of others. Not awfully, even to you, Gertrude. It’s only deserters like me who have to be afraid of freaks of nature. As my inestimable dad used to say, ‘Everything must be paid for.’ Now, please, one of you tell me what ever happened to Claude Jones. You know, the tall, lanky specimen who used to wear that comical little mustache that the girls used to laugh at so. Like a thin streak of soot. The mustache, I mean.”

At that Gertrude shrieked with laughter—“Claude Jones!”—and launched into the story of how he was no longer a Negro or a Christian but had become a Jew.

“A Jew!” Clare exclaimed.

“Yes, a Jew. A black Jew, he calls himself. He won’t eat ham and goes to the synagogue on Saturday. He’s got a beard now as well as a mustache. You’d die laughing if you saw him. He’s really too funny for words. Fred says he’s crazy and I guess he is. Oh, he’s a scream all right, a regular scream!” And she shrieked again.

Clare’s laugh tinkled out. “It certainly sounds funny enough. Still, it’s his own business. If he gets along better by turning—”

At that, Irene, who was still hugging her unhappy don’t-care
feeling of rightness, broke in, saying bitingly: “It evidently doesn’t occur to either you or Gertrude that he might possibly be sincere in changing his religion. Surely everyone doesn’t do everything for gain.”

Clare Kendry had no need to search for the full meaning of that utterance. She reddened slightly and retorted seriously: “Yes, I admit that might be possible—his being sincere, I mean. It just didn’t happen to occur to me, that’s all. I’m surprised,” and the seriousness changed to mockery, “that you should have expected it to. Or did you really?”

“You don’t, I’m sure, imagine that that is a question that I can answer,” Irene told her. “Not here and now.”

Gertrude’s face expressed complete bewilderment. However, seeing that little smiles had come out on the faces of the two other women and not recognizing them for the smiles of mutual reservations which they were, she smiled too.

Clare began to talk, steering carefully away from anything that might lead towards race or other thorny subjects. It was the most brilliant exhibition of conversational weight lifting that Irene had ever seen. Her words swept over them in charming well-modulated streams. Her laughs tinkled and pealed. Her little stories sparkled.

Irene contributed a bare “Yes” or “No” here and there. Gertrude, a “You don’t say!” less frequently.

For a while the illusion of general conversation was nearly perfect. Irene felt her resentment changing gradually to a silent, somewhat grudging admiration.

Clare talked on, her voice, her gestures, coloring all she said of wartime in France, of after-the-wartime in Germany, of the excitement at the time of the general strike in England, of dressmakers’ openings in Paris, of the new gaiety of Budapest.

But it couldn’t last, this verbal feat. Gertrude shifted in her seat and fell to fidgeting with her fingers. Irene, bored at last by all this repetition of the selfsame things that she had read all too often in papers, magazines, and books, set down her glass and collected her bag and handkerchief. She was smoothing out the tan fingers of her
gloves preparatory to putting them on when she heard the sound of the outer door being opened and saw Clare spring up with an expression of relief, saying: “How lovely! Here’s Jack at exactly the right minute. You can’t go now, ’Rene dear.”

John Bellew came into the room. The first thing that Irene noticed about him was that he was not the man that she had seen with Clare Kendry on the Drayton roof. This man, Clare’s husband, was a tallish person, broadly made. His age she guessed to be somewhere between thirty-five and forty. His hair was dark brown and waving, and he had a soft mouth, somewhat womanish, set in an unhealthy-looking dough-colored face. His steel-grey opaque eyes were very much alive, moving ceaselessly between thick bluish lids. But there was, Irene decided, nothing unusual about him, unless it was an impression of latent physical power.

“Hello, Nig,” was his greeting to Clare.

Gertrude, who had started slightly, settled back and looked covertly towards Irene, who had caught her lip between her teeth and sat gazing at husband and wife. It was hard to believe that even Clare Kendry would permit this ridiculing of her race by an outsider, though he chanced to be her husband. So he knew, then, that Clare was a Negro? From her talk the other day Irene had understood that he didn’t. But how rude, how positively insulting, for him to address her in that way in the presence of guests!

In Clare’s eyes, as she presented her husband, was a queer gleam, a jeer, it might be. Irene couldn’t define it.

The mechanical professions that attend an introduction over, she inquired: “Did you hear what Jack called me?”

“Yes,” Gertrude answered, laughing with a dutiful eagerness.

Irene didn’t speak. Her gaze remained level on Clare’s smiling face.

The black eyes fluttered down. “Tell them, dear, why you call me that.”

The man chuckled, crinkling up his eyes, not, Irene was compelled to acknowledge, unpleasantly. He explained: “Well, you see, it’s like this. When we were first married, she was as white as—as—well, as white as a lily. But I declare she’s gettin’ darker and darker. I tell
her if she don’t look out she’ll wake up one of these days and find she’s turned into a nigger.”

He roared with laughter. Clare’s ringing bell-like laugh joined his. Gertrude, after another uneasy shift in her seat, added her shrill one. Irene, who had been sitting with lips tightly compressed, cried out: “That’s good!” and gave way to gales of laughter. She laughed and laughed and laughed. Tears ran down her cheeks. Her sides ached. Her throat hurt. She laughed on and on and on, long after the others had subsided. Until, catching sight of Clare’s face, the need for a more quiet enjoyment of this priceless joke, and for caution, struck her. At once she stopped.

Clare handed her husband his tea and laid her hand on his arm with an affectionate little gesture. Speaking with confidence as well as with amusement, she said: “My goodness, Jack! What difference would it make if, after all these years, you were to find out that I was one or two percent colored?”

Bellew put out his hand in a repudiating fling, definite and final. “Oh, no, Nig,” he declared, “nothing like that with me. I know you’re no nigger, so it’s all right. You can get as black as you please as far as I’m concerned, since I know you’re no nigger. I draw the line at that. No niggers in my family. Never have been and never will be.”

Irene’s lips trembled almost uncontrollably, but she made a desperate effort to fight back her disastrous desire to laugh again, and succeeded. Carefully selecting a cigarette from the lacquered box on the tea table before her, she turned an oblique look on Clare and encountered her peculiar eyes fixed on her with an expression so dark and deep and unfathomable that she had for a short moment the sensation of gazing into the eyes of some creature utterly strange and apart. A faint sense of danger brushed her, like the breath of a cold fog. Absurd, her reason told her as she accepted Bellew’s proffered light for her cigarette. Another glance at Clare showed her smiling. So, as one always ready to oblige, was Gertrude.

An onlooker, Irene reflected, would have thought it a most con
genial tea party, all smiles and jokes and hilarious laughter. She said humorously: “So you dislike Negroes, Mr. Bellew?” But her amusement was at her thought, rather than her words.

John Bellew gave a short denying laugh. “You got me wrong there, Mrs. Redfield. Nothing like that at all. I don’t dislike them, I hate them. And so does Nig, for all she’s trying to turn into one. She wouldn’t have a nigger maid around her for love nor money. Not that I’d want her to. They give me the creeps. The black scrimy devils.”

This wasn’t funny. Had Bellew, Irene inquired, ever known any Negroes? The defensive tone of her voice brought another start from the uncomfortable Gertrude, and, for all her appearance of serenity, a quick apprehensive look from Clare.

Bellew answered: “Thank the Lord, no! And never expect to! But I know people who’ve known them, better than they know their black selves. And I read in the papers about them. Always robbing and killing people. And,” he added darkly, “worse.”

From Gertrude’s direction came a queer little suppressed sound, a snort or a giggle. Irene couldn’t tell which. There was a brief silence, during which she feared that her self-control was about to prove too frail a bridge to support her mounting anger and indignation. She had a leaping desire to shout at the man beside her: “And you’re sitting here surrounded by three black devils, drinking tea.”

The impulse passed, obliterated by her consciousness of the danger in which such rashness would involve Clare, who remarked with a gentle reprovingness: “Jack dear, I’m sure ’Rene doesn’t care to hear all about your pet aversions. Nor Gertrude either. Maybe they read the papers too, you know.” She smiled on him, and her smile seemed to transform him, to soften and mellow him, as the rays of the sun does a fruit.

“All right, Nig, old girl. I’m sorry,” he apologized. Reaching over, he playfully touched his wife’s pale hands, then turned back to Irene. “Didn’t mean to bore you, Mrs. Redfield. Hope you’ll excuse me,” he said sheepishly. “Clare tells me you’re living in New York. Great city, New York. The city of the future.”

In Irene, rage had not retreated but was held by some dam of caution and allegiance to Clare. So, in the best casual voice she could muster, she agreed with Bellew. Though, she reminded him, it was exactly what Chicagoans were apt to say of their city. And all the while she was speaking, she was thinking how amazing it was that her voice did not tremble, that outwardly she was calm. Only her hands shook slightly. She drew them inward from their rest in her lap and pressed the tips of her fingers together to still them.

“Husband’s a doctor, I understand. Manhattan, or one of the other boroughs?”

Manhattan, Irene informed him, and explained the need for Brian to be within easy reach of certain hospitals and clinics.

“Interesting life, a doctor’s.”

“Ye-es. Hard, though. And, in a way, monotonous. Nerve-racking too.”

“Hard on the wife’s nerves at least, eh? So many lady patients.” He laughed, enjoying, with a boyish heartiness, the hoary joke.

Irene managed a momentary smile, but her voice was sober as she said: “Brian doesn’t care for ladies, especially sick ones. I sometimes wish he did. It’s South America that attracts him.”

“Coming place, South America, if they ever get the niggers out of it. It’s run over—”

“Really, Jack!” Clare’s voice was on the edge of temper.

“Honestly, Nig, I forgot.” To the others he said: “You see how henpecked I am.” And to Gertrude: “You’re still in Chicago, Mrs.—er—Mrs. Martin?”

He was, it was plain, doing his best to be agreeable to these old friends of Clare’s. Irene had to concede that under other conditions she might have liked him. A fairly good-looking man of amiable disposition, evidently, and in easy circumstances. Plain and with no nonsense about him.