The Gilded Years (41 page)

“No, there is not,” she replied, thinking back on Porter and how after their first kiss she had known that love would swiftly follow.

With her weight still leaning on her mother, she let her thoughts of Porter multiply. She was no longer in love with him, she was sure of that, but her fondness for him remained unshakable. He would always be part of that one magical year of school, when Anita didn’t feel hindered or limited by her race or her sex. When everything, even a life with a man like Porter Hamilton, seemed like a possibility.

But that year was long over and the stone walls of Vassar College would never safeguard her again. But perhaps Andrew could.

In the weeks that followed, Andrew’s courtship continued,
and Anita, three months after their initial meeting, confided in Bessie that she knew she could grow to love Andrew, perhaps even more than she did Porter, because together they could live a genuine life together, full of confidences and shared goals. He, just as Bessie said, was very much like her. And with him, she thought, she could be the best version of her true self. Not Anita Hemmings passing; Anita Hemmings living.

Soon after that declaration, Andrew must have sensed the change in Anita’s heart, for he felt confident enough to utter the word
marriage.
When he did, he confessed it had been on his mind since he first caught sight of her in the library.

“But you want to move back to Tennessee,” said Anita. “After Harvard.” She thought about that distance and how awful it would be to leave her family, even with a man like Andrew by her side.

“I do,” said Andrew. “Chattanooga feels like home and I have an established practice there. My patients are expecting me to return.”

“Do you think I would be content there? In Tennessee?” Anita asked, her voice laced with doubt.

“I hope so, but I can’t be certain,” said Andrew. “It’s a very different world. Perhaps you wouldn’t take to the South. As you are aware, things can happen to the Negro there, awful things.” He turned to look at her and kissed her hand. “But Anita, if you were not happy in Chattanooga, we would leave. We could start a new life together somewhere else if you did not take to the lifestyle there.”

“My parents said they would never return to Virginia,” said Anita. “To have their daughter go even further south, I don’t know how they would feel. And I’ve disappointed them enough this year.” She looked at his downcast face, and added, “
But I would be willing to try. For you, I would try anything.”

“Would you?” said Andrew hopefully. “And what if we left Tennessee and had to establish ourselves somewhere else one day? Anita, if that were the case, and we had to pass as white, is that something you think you could do again?”

“Even if I was open to it, I don’t think I could, with my notoriety,” she replied nervously, her eyes darting around the tree-lined Cambridge street. “My story was printed everywhere from New York to Hawaii and back again. I even, recently, received a letter from the colored writer Paul Laurence Dunbar,” she disclosed. It was something she hadn’t been sure she would share with Andrew, but with the subject of passing back in the conversation, she felt that she had to. “He intends to include me in his new musical work,” she said, her voice unstable. “I’m going to be the subject of a song entitled ‘The Colored Girl from Vassar.’ He sent me a verse, and the lyrics are just awful. I’m called a poor dusky maid in the presence of millionaires. I’m so disturbed by it that I don’t dare write him back. I—” She wiped a tear from her face and looked up at Andrew, feeling the same brokenness to her heart as she did when the newspapers first came out.

“But think,” said Andrew, putting his hand on her worried face. “If we were to marry, your name would change. You would no longer be the Anita Hemmings of the newspapers or of a play like Mr. Dunbar’s. You would be Mrs. Andrew Love. Anita Love. Now, I think we both look at passing as a very last resort, something we would be forced to do, not something we would choose to do again, but we have to discuss it before marriage. For Anita, I never want anything to come between us. We share such similar views and values—I think that’s what brought us together initially—and I always want it to be such.”

“I do too,” said Anita, her eyes drying. “And of course, Andrew, it is something I would consider, with you. If we had to, we would.”

“Perhaps if Tennessee did not prove a safe place, we could go to New York?” Andrew offered. “That is where you said you hoped to live, is it not? If you did not like the South, or if we were forced to leave, we could settle there.”

New York. Anita thought about gliding through Central Park in the Taylor family carriage, taking in the opera with Lottie by her side, glimpsing Marchmont Rhinelander across the gilded room for the first time. No, her New York would never be like that again, but it would still be New York. And perhaps it could be just as good.

“I know you’ve decided not to apply to the graduate program at Yale because of your notoriety,” said Andrew, interrupting Anita’s colorful memories. “But I can promise you a life of the mind, Anita. I can. I want to be married to a woman more intelligent than I am, better than I am, kinder than I am, and that person, without a doubt, is you.”

“Is it me?” Anita asked, reaching for the comfort of his hand. “I want to be all those things, Andrew, but sometimes I’m not. At times, I think I am built of horrible things like fear, apprehension. That confidence I had built up at Vassar still feels stripped from me. You are helping to bring it back, but I don’t know that I can ever be like I was again. Or even like you.”

“Of course you can be,” said Andrew, gripping her small hand tightly. “Intelligent as you are, beautiful as you are, and now strengthened from what you’ve endured—of course you can be.”

“But passing again, the idea terrifies me,” said Anita, her voice shaking. “What would become of our families? Would we ever see them again?”

“
Anita, you are speaking as if we are going to start passing as white tomorrow. I hope we never have to. I pray the world changes and that no one has to. It’s just something we need to be realistic about, aware of. And as for your family, if we did have to live as white, we would never lose sight of them. It might have to be different, especially when our children are born, but we would still see them. I will make that promise to you.”

Anita nodded, relieved. She did not fully understand the realities of Negro life in the South, but she did know that Andrew’s career in medicine would be far more lucrative if he passed as white. But could she really do it again? If necessary, did she have the strength to wipe away her history, lose her identity through the practice of stepping out of one’s skin and into another’s yet again?

Anita leaned against Andrew’s strong shoulder and thought about her sister, Elizabeth. Lillybug. She had the darkest skin of them all. How cruel it was, Anita thought, that they had to have this conversation at all, when speaking of something as joyful as marriage.

When they had walked back into the Lewis home, and straight through to sit on the ornate iron bench in the small backyard, Anita sat close to Andrew, their legs just brushing each other. She pictured her ailing father, her mother who had sacrificed so much, her brother who had looked after her during her Vassar years and thought about how happy they would be if she said yes to a marriage with Andrew. But she considered herself, too. She had thought Porter Hamilton could never be surpassed, but she was slowly coming to realize that with Andrew, she could have a deep, generous love—an honest love—and it was what she wanted. She would say yes to him not for her family or her community, but for herself.

“I want to marry you,” she said as the sun had finished setting and a chill was spinning its way into the early spring air. “I would like very much to be your wife.”

“You would?” said Andrew, taking Anita in his arms. “You’ll never know how happy that makes me,” he said, his voice full of joy. “I couldn’t go on without you now. We need each other, Anita. We will have a wonderful life, I promise you. I will do everything I can to make sure you are the Anita Hemmings, the Anita Love, you want to be.”

“I’ll hold you to that promise,” she replied, falling into him, letting him kiss her, thinking how nice forever sounded.

Just two days later, as Anita was organizing her room at Bessie’s, thinking of how memorable a year 1898 had already become, her friend knocked on her door, holding the day’s mail. She handed her two letters, which had been dropped off earlier in the day. Anita was bursting to tell her friend the news of her engagement, but she had to wait. It was the respectful thing to tell her parents first and she had not yet had time to travel to Boston.

She took the letters in her hand and blinked back her surprise. “But these are addressed to me at my Boston address,” said Anita.

“A neighbor brought them by this afternoon,” said Bessie. “A man who works with your father and had customers to drop off in Cambridge. Frederick asked him to do so. He told him they were important.” Bessie left Anita alone to read her letters and retired to the kitchen to begin making supper.

Anita looked at them both. One, she was sure, was from Porter Hamilton. She recognized his large script, and it had a Chicago postmark in the right corner. She held that one in her hand, turning it over a few times, before she decided to open the other.

She looked down at the signature before she read it. It was from Sarah Douglas. It read simply, “Anita, though I am sure you would think otherwise, you have a friend in me,” followed by her name.

Anita had heard many times from Belle and Caroline since they first wrote, but she had never expected to hear from Sarah. She refolded the short note and put it in the envelope. So she had a friend in Sarah Douglas, former Vassar College Southern Club president. Perhaps, with so many other girls, and now Sarah, as allies, she would be able to return to campus one day after all. Maybe even in the company of Andrew Love.

Heartened by Sarah’s words, she opened the letter from Porter, and the sight of his slanted handwriting, scratched onto the paper in thick black ink, brought a rush of memories: their meeting at Harvard, their first walk on campus, the maids bringing her letter after letter postmarked from Cambridge, the kiss. That wonderful kiss. Holding the pages, her feelings surged back in full force, but she pushed them down quickly. With steady hands, she put the unfolded letter on the table and read it.

Anita,

To the world, and to me, you are a Negro. I understand now why you put an end to our engagement so suddenly: You knew you would have to marry a colored man. From that moment forward, you were acting in my interest, and I thank you for that. You put me before yourself, when you could have carried on your charade much longer.

Will the world ever change? I wonder. My mother, who was raised in a family of abolitionists, thinks it will. But that is not the reality now. The world does not want the races to join together. If you hadn’t told me, and your race
had been made public while you were my wife, we would have been ostracized. We are not people who could thrive in such a pitiful state, so you saved both of us from great humiliation.

I do not agree with what Lottie did. She should have kept your secret for you. She owed you that, certainly, as it is you who made her a true, whole person. Without you in her life, Anita, she would have remained a girl with not very much to offer but money and imagination. You can’t live a life based on those two things alone, even if you are a Taylor.

Marrying Lottie will certainly keep me on my toes. And I do love her. Don’t doubt that. But you, Anita, I will never forget.

Fondly,

Porter Hamilton

Though she didn’t have to, though she could have kept it and looked at those words for years to come, she walked into the kitchen where Bessie was bustling about and dropped the letter, folded in its envelope, into the fire. Porter Hamilton would stay part of her vanished college life, of the Anita Hemmings she had been when she existed safely under a mansard roof, hidden away from the rest of the world.

“It wasn’t important after all?” asked Bessie.

“It was once,” said Anita, watching the pen marks fade into black ash, the edges of the letter curling like a child in repose. “But it no longer is.”

E
llen Love walked out of Rockefeller Hall, the cold air jolting her out of the mental haze that had overtaken her during her demanding two-hour English class. Though she had finished just one semester at Vassar, there was something about coming back after a break that made her feel she was now a proper member of the college community. She wasn’t nervously arriving for the first time; she was proudly returning.

“Ellen Love! There you are!” said a girl with a haircut identical to Ellen’s. As the 1920s had crept in, all the students had had their hair uniformly shorn so that it just grazed their cheeks, never long enough to pull back. “Can you believe there is more snow than when we left? It looks pretty, but it’s a terrible pain to get around in.”

Mary Elise Watts also hailed from New York City, and in one short semester had established herself as a leader of the freshman class.

“I know!” said Ellen, shaking the snow out of her hair. She had been standing outside the building daydreaming and hadn’t realized the amount that was accumulating on her head. “It could be knee-high by this evening, that’s what the newspaper said. I wore the wrong shoes, and now my
feet will be soaked on the walk back to Joss. I didn’t have time to change them before Macurdy’s Greek class. You know what an axe she is about tardiness.”

“Don’t I?” said Mary Elise. “Well, good luck to you and those darling, if inappropriate, shoes. I must run,” she declared, sending Ellen an air kiss. “I have to put some time in at the libe or I’ll fail everything and have no chance of a Phi Beta Kappa key.”

“Are you thinking of that already?” asked Ellen, laughing. “It’s freshman year!”