The Gilded Years (33 page)

“That discrepancy is enough, don’t you think?” said Lottie, exhaling smoke in one long line. “And then there’s the way he told me his story, as if it were all in jest. I didn’t really believe him until Father’s hired man provided the evidence. Then it turned out not only to be true, but worse than he said.”

“I understand your anger,” said Anita, sweat forming along her hairline despite the breeze. “It was surprising. And I’m glad you were able to discover it all before your heart became . . . before you became too involved. You seem more at ease now.”

With jerky movements, Lottie nodded her head yes, giving the impression of a wounded bird. “I
am
happier now. Much happier. And severing my association with Joseph was just the beginning. I am about to do so much more.”

Anita felt panic creep into her body like a sudden illness. She flushed and fought back the urge to be sick, remaining stock-still while Lottie continued to recline comfortably on her couch like Ingres’s
Odalisque
.

“There are some unfortunate situations you can avoid with the proper footwork, but others are just thrust upon you, and you are none the wiser,” said Lottie, relighting her cigarette. She inhaled deeply and blew the smoke in Anita’s direction. “Until you are. Then everything just begins to make sense. Has that ever happened to you, Anita dear?”

Anita said nothing, allowing only her eyelashes to flit, then shook her head no. Anxiety had her pinned to the couch. Her limbs felt leaden, her vision tunneled.

“It took much longer than it should have for me to suspect something, Anita,” said Lottie, maintaining her indifferent tone.

Anita looked at her the way one might watch a woman pulling a loose thread on a dress. The effect of the action could be minuscule, or it could unravel the whole garment. Anita prayed that what Lottie knew would unravel only a tiny corner of her world.

“I was sure you were just like me,” said Lottie, finally sitting up to look at Anita. “I knew you weren’t as well-off as most of us here, but I’ve never been one to judge a woman on her wealth. A man, perhaps, but not a woman.”

Lottie looked at Anita, still unmoving, and let out an exasperated sigh. “Your silence is bothering me immensely. You have to respond to me,” she ordered. “This conversation will not be a one-sided one.”

“In many ways, I am just like you, Lottie,” Anita said at last. “We are both students here, and at school we lead nearly identical lives.”

“At school we do, nearly identical, as you say,” said Lottie. “But what about the rest of the time? See, I did believe that we came from similar stock, but I was wrong, wasn’t I?”

“I have no idea what you’re speaking of,” said Anita, turning to look out the window again. She felt bile rising, and her heart constricted painfully. She closed her eyes and imagined herself falling out the window. Four floors down, then gone, just another part of the endless earth.

“Yes, you do, Anita Hemmings, and don’t you dare look away from me again,” Lottie threatened. Anita did not turn back around to see Lottie’s face. She knew what she was
about to hear, but she refused to see it being said. She leaned out the window a little farther, remembering her old dream. A dead Negro whose secret everyone knew.

“You’ve known that I’ve been suspicious of you for some time,” Lottie went on. “For months you had me fooled, you had all of us fooled, but then you started to falter. I could tell there was something amiss the night we climbed out on the roof to the shock of Caroline and Belle. Something was wrong with you.”

Anita could just make out the gatekeeper sitting at a table inside the Lodge. She thought about the kind of man who had that job, one who was willing to stay up all night for a meager paycheck. She tried to think of everything except what Lottie was poised to say.

“That night,” said Lottie, “there was something very dishonest about you. All the time we had spent together, and this was the first night you mentioned your father’s supposedly impressive career. His Harvard Law School days. Why would you wait so long, I thought to myself. Caroline had spoken of her interest in a legal profession many times before, but you’d never said a thing about Papa Hemmings. Then that night, when you’d had too much to drink, you suddenly felt free to tell us all about him. Yet even that wasn’t the greatest cause of my suspicion.”

Anita felt Lottie’s eyes locked on her back, waiting for a reply, but she still refused to turn around. In her dream, she used to fall from one of those majestic red cliffs in the West. But maybe that detail was wrong. Perhaps she was really supposed to fall from a window, and the small hand that pushed her would be the hand of Lottie Taylor.

“What did it for me, ultimately,” Lottie continued, “was the story of your brother at Cornell.
That
was your gravest mistake, Anita. That terrible fib is what inspired me to alert Father. It’s
very easy to check a school record, you know. When you said that your brother had chosen Cornell over Harvard, it made no sense at all. No man in his right mind would make that choice. You forget that I know Frederick, and he is very much in his right mind. So what did little Lottie Taylor do, you want to know? I may not be able to see your face, Anita Hemmings, because you are looking away from me like a mouse, but I know that you are desperate to learn how I proceeded.”

Anita finally turned around, and the room seemed like a blank. The beautiful things they had hung on the walls together, her small picture of Greece in the corner—all had disappeared. All she could see was the pure hatred on Lottie’s face.

“I wrote a letter to Frederick Hemmings, Cornell University, not using the address I had used before, which was provided to me by you. And do you know what happened? Of course you do, but I’ll recount it anyway. Anita, the letter came back to me. It said, no such student found.” Lottie flicked her cigarette ash, letting it fall onto Anita’s best school shoes placed next to the couch. “That, my dear, is why father sent his man on a little voyage to Nine Sussex Street, Boston. Are you familiar with that address?”

“You sent him to my parents’ home?” said Anita, flooding with anguish.

“Why, yes, I did,” said Lottie, adopting an innocent tone. “For a handsome sum, the investigator was more than happy to take a train up to Boston and take a little peek around Sussex Street and the large family residing at Number Nine.”

She looked Anita up and down, her eyes lingering on her old shirtwaist and her indoor slippers that needed replacing, and said, “You do know that you slipped, don’t you, Anita?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know—”

“
Just stop saying that!” screamed Lottie, cutting her off. “Do not cheapen yourself any further. You know what I am speaking of! If you need me to speak plainly, I will.”

All Anita could see at that moment was Lottie’s large pink mouth, her top lip curled with rage.

“Look at you, with nothing to say now about your deception,” said Lottie, throwing her cigarette to the floor. “You are very lucky that all the various races in your pathetic form blended so attractively for you. That pretty face hides it well, doesn’t it? But you can no longer fool me. I know everything about you now, Anita. Your mother is a Negro. Your father is a Negro. And he is no Harvard-trained lawyer. He is a janitor. That’s right, isn’t it? He washes bathtubs and toilets for the wealthy in Back Bay just as the janitors do here. That’s who your father really is. Sometimes he even works two jobs, shuttling through the city at night as a coachman.”

She picked her blanket up from the couch, clutched it to herself, and shouted at her roommate. “Say I’m right, Anita! Say it!”

“And what will that accomplish, Lottie?” asked Anita quietly. “Will that make you hate me any less?”

“Say you are a Negro,” Lottie shrieked, ripping at the satin edges of the blanket. “Say it!”

“I am a Negro,” Anita said loudly, watching Lottie’s face light up like an evening fire.

“I knew it,” said Lottie. “I think I have always known. You’re a Negro, and what’s even worse is that you are a lying Negro. You deceived me and everyone else at this school.”

“I never denied my race,” said Anita, torn between fighting back and maintaining her silence. “I never said I was not a Negro.”

“But you never said you were!” Lottie shouted.

“
Why should I have?” asked Anita, taking advantage of the moments before the tears she knew would come flooded her face. “How was that relevant to my time here? To our friendship?”

“Relevant!” Lottie screamed. “That is the most relevant thing about our friendship. This, us, all this is completely dead to me now. You have become my curse.”

Anita put her face in her hands, trying to push her tears back in. She did not want to let a single one slide down her cheek, giving Lottie one more cause for smugness.

“I did not notice it before,” said Lottie, surveying her. “But now when I look at you I see it. I see the Negro in you. It’s all I can see.” She looked straight at Anita and said, “I look at you, and a dirty, ugly, lying colored face looks back at me. That’s the face of Anita Hemmings now.”

Lottie fell back on the couch, running her hands through her hair and pushing her bun to one side. “How could you do this to me? The devastation it could wreak on my reputation, Anita! Phil Dance with the child of a prostitute and now rooming with a Negro. Best friends with some Negro janitor’s child! Was anything you said to me the truth, Anita? Or has everything from the first day we moved into this room been a fabrication?”

“Nothing has been a fabrication,” Anita said quietly. She could not erase what Lottie knew; all she could do now was try to pacify her. “Nothing except what I was forced to say to make it through school.”

“You let me fall for your brother!” Lottie shouted, as if she had just remembered her self-avowed unwavering love for Frederick Hemmings. “A Negro! Can you imagine? I could have embraced a Negro. I could have—” She lay back down, apparently overcome.

Anita felt as if a cord were tightening around her neck.
She knew that how she handled Lottie at that moment would determine whether she would graduate or not.

“You should feel such shame, Anita Hemmings,” Lottie said when she had her breath back. “I am not just any roommate from anywhere. I did everything for you. I took you home to New York. I took you to Harvard.” She rolled her head back as if it were too heavy for her neck. “I have no idea what to do.”

Anita turned away from Lottie and thought back to the night on the roof and the stories she had spun. Of course Lottie had grown suspicious. This disaster, thought Anita, was her own doing.

“Does Porter know?” asked Lottie suddenly. “Does he know who you really are?”

“No,” Anita whispered.

“Of course he doesn’t,” Lottie said. “If he knew, he would never have fallen for you. He would have shunned you.” She shook her head. “The shame he would feel. The utter shame.” She looked up at Anita, who finally had tears on her face.

Anita took a step toward her. “I will tell him when—”

“You will do nothing of the sort,” said Lottie, cutting her off firmly. “You’ve done quite enough. If you ever felt anything for Porter, you will not want him living with the fact that he shared a kiss with a Negro. Worse still, was engaged to one.”

“When we were at Radcliffe,” said Anita slowly, “and we saw the Negro student Alberta Scott, you did not speak ill of her, or insult her, as your cousin did.”

“I do not share rooms with Miss Alberta Scott!” Lottie bellowed. “Separate but equal. Not ‘equal and in my parlor’!”

“You’ve always seemed very modern to me, Lottie. Your views on different races, on women, you’ve—”

“
Do not dare to go on about what I am and am not,” said Lottie, her body rigid. “You don’t know a thing about me.”

“But you wanted to marry the Crown Prince of Japan,” Anita whispered, unable to repress her sobs. “You’re so different—”

“Of course I want to marry him! He’s the crown prince, not a Negro!” Lottie took a deep breath and shot a hard look at Anita’s shocked face. “I am modern, but the world around us is not. And to room with a Negro, Anita, that is unthinkable. It could cause me irreparable social damage. And with your brother on top of it. What would people think? It would render me unmarriageable, despite my money. Do you remember how scared you were when you thought you could be ostracized and left to a life on your own? Now you have put me in that very same position, and I do not want to be alone!”

“You will never be alone,” said Anita, thinking that she herself now certainly would be.

“You don’t know,” said Lottie, shaking her head. “You’re pretending to be a part of this world here, lying to us all so you can be a part of it, but you’re not. You have no notion how our society operates.” A tear ran down her face, and she seemed to be as surprised by it as Anita was. She flicked it aside. “Why did you do this to me? To everyone? Why were you so tremendously selfish?”

“But what choice did I have?” asked Anita, daring to take another step toward Lottie. “I passed the Vassar entrance examination just as you did and wanted to attend just as you did.”

“You don’t deserve to be here,” Lottie said flatly, drying another tear. “You will be known as a shame to this school from now on.”

In that moment, Anita thought very carefully about how
she should proceed. If she could just succeed in calming Lottie, her time at Vassar might not be over. Lottie would hate her, would shut her out forever, but Anita—who knew her roommate well—prayed she might at least recognize where her self-interest lay.

“I think I will tell President Taylor about you,” said Lottie, voicing Anita’s greatest fear. “But perhaps I will not. I know what will be the most amusing for me; I’ll make you agonize over it. That’s what you deserve after what you have done to me. But one thing is for certain: I will be going to Kendrick and asking for a change of room first thing tomorrow morning.

“So close to the end of the year?” asked Anita, wishing something might go her way. “But Kendrick won’t—”

“Of course she will,” shouted Lottie. “And if she knew why, she would do so this instant. Right now! I will never sleep in rooms with you again, Anita. We, this,” she said, pointing around the room, “is over.”