The Story of a Marriage (7 page)

After he left, I closed and locked the door, then every window in the house, as if somehow he’d break in during the night and I’d awaken and find him standing in my living room. “Think about it, please call me,” he said at the door before I closed it on him, “EXbrook 2-8600.” I can still remember the exchange. I sat on the couch with Lyle beside me. Together, we watched the bars of light that moved along the floor as one car after another made its way down our quiet street. We listened to the neighbors calling to one another from house to house, talking about the Rosenberg or the Sheng cases, the conversation drifting until they said good night. After long periods of silence, we could hear the growl of the Pacific. Lyle did not move from my side. My husband did not call. And Buzz did not return.

I drank the rest of the whiskey—half a bottle at least—and then, after the streets were cleared and the cool of the ocean took over the night again, after I went to look at Sonny sleeping with one leg thrown out over the covers, eyelashes matted from a passing nightmare, mouth slightly open like a girl waiting for a kiss, I drunkenly stumbled into my bedroom, weeping, and caught sight of the wastepaper basket.

There, in a mound, lay the clippings: the news I had censored for the sake of Holland’s transposed heart. A heart, it turned out, that beat as regularly as my own. A catalog of American daily life that the rest of us had lived through and my husband had not. I turned the basket over on the bed and made a leaf pile of paper. One by one, I read them and thought of the countless other stories I had clipped throughout our marriage. I was drunk and stunned and wild with revelations, my heart muscling its way through my chest like a panicked man in a crowded room.

1953. It was a world with a war that had just ended and, like a devil that grows a new tail after you’ve chopped one off, another war had begun. With a draft and an enemy just like the one before, only this time there were nuclear weapons; there were veterans’ cemeteries that refused to bury Negro soldiers; there was a government telling you what to look for in a nuclear flash, what kind of structure to hide under should the sirens start wailing—though they must have known that it would have been madness to look or hide or consider anything except lying down and taking your death in with one full breath. There were the subcommittee hearings with Sheedy asking McLain on TV, “Are you a red?” whereupon McLain threw water into his face, and Sheedy threw water back and knocked off his glasses. A world in which TV stations were asked to segregate characters on their shows for Southern viewers, in which all nudes were withdrawn from a San Francisco art show because “local mother Mrs. Hutchins’s sensibilities are shaken to the core”; and beautiful Angel Island became a guided missile station, and a white college student was expelled for proposing to a Negro, and they were rioting against us in Trieste; the Allies freed Trieste not many years ago, and suddenly they hated us … and hovering above all this, every day in the paper, that newsprint visage like the snapshot of a bland Prometheus: Ethel Rosenberg’s face.

When would the all clear come? Didn’t somebody promise us an all clear if we were good, and clean, and nice, and were willing to die for things, and believe in things, and agreed to do everything right? Where was our all clear?

But there was more. An invisible world, now made obvious, like those codes that can only be read with special glasses; it had been there all along: a list of men arrested for sex crimes, a quarter of them for congress with other men, their names right there in the paper; following a directive to “break the back” of an imagined security issue—barely reported, certainly uncriticized—the hundreds of State Department firings for rumors of deviant desire. The white navy doctor set free from his trial for gouging out the eyes of a Negro man who suggested “a vile perverted act.” And young Norman Wong smiling in a neat black suit, saddled with a $14,000 mortgage on his fruit ranch, who coaxed a white air force captain—his lover—to murder his wife for the insurance money, saying, “I loved her too much to shoot her myself.” That photo of plain Silvia Wong—the unkillable wife—in a blouse buttoned to the top to hide the wounds, weeping at the courthouse because she still loved Norman and if he went to jail she would have to wait two years to bear his children.

Later I would face my worst fears in the library, forcing myself to read about acts even the court stenographer found too “repulsive” to be included. Police peering through windows and keyholes, drilling holes in walls, building a false ceiling so they could lie in the rafters and spy on poor unsuspecting men. The maximum sentence for those crimes, I would discover, had just been raised to life in prison. If not prison, then registration as a sex offender; my son’s home would always be recorded in red ink. And I would come across a more chilling alternative: sterilization. Unable to discover whether “perverts” had been exempted by 1953, I would find an astounding figure: the number of California men degraded in this way. Twenty thousand. I would leave those books as I found them: dog-eared, smudging, foxed and torn, worn away by desperate readers who had come before me.

That night, in my deranged state, those newspaper clippings stood before me like criminals in a lineup, staring out with bleary eyes, each one an aspect of the world that Buzz revealed to me. All the silence and lies of a nation. Holland’s heart would have to bear it now. Like a king’s taster who has eaten his limit of poison, I could not take it anymore—all I’d tried to hide from him—I could not swallow any more of the world.

I pulled out the gloves Buzz had given me; I put them on. The red bird fluttered in my palm. I clenched it tight inside my fist; I felt its awful twitching struggle.

The telephone operator greeted me kindly and I told her to dial EXbrook 2-8600. A crickety voice answered. I asked to be put through to Mr. Drumer, please, and she said, Gal you can’t be calling this early. I said someone’s life was at stake, and that seemed to get her. A pop of sound and a man was on the line, sleeptalking, saying Pearlie? Pearlie?

“I have to protect my son,” I said.

He wanted to know if I would help him. “That’s what I’m telling you.” I sat there staring at the dawn as he said what he wanted me to do. From the front door came the shivering sound of bottles on the step. A truck started up and rolled away. All I could do was sit there on the phone bench and listen, shaking a little, thinking everyone must be an optical illusion, even the one we love. We think we know them, flat and simple—not at all. They are faceted in ingenious ways, with hundreds of hidden sides, impossible to discover even in a lifetime. Razor-sharp, frightening sides. I heard the man talking softly in my ear. I could save my son, if not my marriage. Life could be exchanged; could be better, what you’d dreamed of; could be built on a cliff above the roaring world. A choice: take this, or nothing. There was no other option, in those days long ago, in my outpost by the sea. Not for colored girls like me.

I
will never forget Eslanda Goode Robeson, wife of the singer Paul Robeson, called before the committee that year. Cohn and McCarthy questioned her about being a Communist, and that proud colored woman sat in her flowered dress and hat and declined to answer, under protection of the Fifth and Fifteenth amendments. The Fifteenth? asked a flustered Roy Cohn. “Yes, the Fifteenth,” Mrs. Robeson told him regally. “I am Negro, you know. I have been brought up to seek protection under the Fifteenth Amendment as a Negro.” Cohn told her it was nonsense; the Fifteenth was about the right to vote. But she shook her head: “I have always sought protection under it… you see, I am a second-class citizen in this country and, therefore, feel the need of the Fifteenth. That is the reason I use it. I am not quite equal to the rest of the white people.” Cohn could get nowhere else with her; it was beyond translation, her version of life in our country.

They don’t teach Eslanda Goode Robeson in schools. There is no room in textbooks, among all the myriad battles and treaties, for history’s wives. But what she said about needing extra armor to protect herself, I never forgot it. It glowed in my mind. It guided my life like a sextant.

We were the only Negro family in the Sunset. It would have made a difference if I’d had a friend to trust, some colored woman who could hide me and Sonny in her sewing room the way she might hide a beaten wife; I might have fled into her arms. But I was not beaten; I was, in my way, beloved. And I had no friend like that. Even Edith, the only Jew in our neighborhood, mirroring my solitude across the street, was not someone I could turn to. There was no question of fleeing that night with Sonny; imagine a colored woman walking down the highway with her crippled boy, seeking aid from other migrants. That was no way to save him. The logical place to turn would have been the Negro community on Fillmore, but we had cut ourselves off from that world as well.

At the time, I blamed his aunts. They claimed to have come from Hawaii, descended on their father’s side from a West Indian sea captain’s daughter and a grandson of Captain Cook, and that lovely but improbable legend allowed them to feel distinct. They were typical of the old Negro society in San Francisco: cultured, intellectual, eager to set up the right kind of marriage, the men going around with walking sticks and the women with cameo brooches of Caucasian faces. They considered themselves apart from the rest of their race, as did Holland. I remember one time, one of the first dinners I made for the aunts, when they told me: “We may have had an African ancestor four or five generations ago, but as you can see the European blood has diluted it.” I listened to that speech with wonder, almost admiration. What an attractive fantasy: to believe you could leave race problems behind.

Yet they clung to segregation. “We prefer it this way,” they told me and Holland. “Negroes should work, eat, and shop together.” They had wanted to sell off the “Sunset property” as they called it and have me and Holland move close to them on Fillmore, in the Negro district, where it was growing crowded with families who could find no other place that would rent to them, but I put my foot down. I wanted a different life, a better one, in my mind. And so we lived out by the ocean, far from our people. It might not have been the right thing to do, in the end; it could be I was trying to pass as much as the aunts, as much as Holland himself. But I remember Thurgood Marshall came to San Francisco that very spring of 1953, and the paper quoted him as saying that the reason some Negroes favored segregated armies was so they could be generals. Perhaps the aunts favored a segregated San Francisco so they could be mayors of that little world. They did not see what was happening, what was about to happen in our country. Poor old women; I think they were too terrified.

Of course, I was just as much to blame. I was as terrified as anyone, knowing the danger my husband was in. Had he not seen the recent photo from Compton, a day’s drive from us: a burning cross in the yard of a Negro running for Senate? Or had I clipped that from the paper, as well? What a tragic time to be a man like him.

I did not know how to fight a white man; I was born without that muscle. But I knew one thing: I knew silence, which like an exotic poison—odorless, tasteless—brings a subtle madness to the victim. I became half mad with fear and shame, now that my carefully constructed world had been tornado-torn from its foundations, the walls and windows hurled at me so that all I could do was crouch and wait for it to subside. My doubts, my questions; I stoppered them like moths in a killing jar. Some tinge of wifely duty still colored my actions, hoping to protect Holland and his past. Buzz had made everything plain to me, but I still went about my day to the syncopated beating of a transposed heart, and my instincts were those of a nurse who discovers, late in her rounds, that her patients have fled in the night. Whose life shall she save now? Her own?

I found myself unable to sleep, remembering how chance had brought us together—twice—and considering, like a woman about to pawn an heirloom, exactly what it could get me, what it was worth, what I was preparing to forsake. Not just our marriage but what we had done to get there, that secret story. Our love story, you might say. It was a simple tale from the war, but it was not the version I ever told to strangers or friends. I kept it hidden. I thought we had left that behind us, beneath us, yet here it showed itself, nightly, surfacing like a body from the deep.

It was the summer of 1943; we were still in our teens. One afternoon, Holland’s mother delivered his draft card to him on the front porch where we sat listening to the radio. “Well look at that,” he said. He was a quiet boy; you could not make out what he thought of death. It could have been a stranger to him, or terrified him to the core, but his mother, a tough skinny widow, was well acquainted. She stated clearly: “Now son, don’t you sign it. This ain’t our war. I won’t lose you.” Holland looked up at me with his square, beautiful face and took a sip from his tea and then we could hear it: the ice clinking in his shaking hand. Poor frightened young men, being called off to battle. Like townspeople watching a cyclone headed toward them, you could feel it coming: the end of youth.

“What do you think, Pearlie?” he asked me. He dabbed a handkerchief across his forehead, which had darkened in the summer sun. Drops of sweat shone in his hair.

Holland, do you remember my shocked silence? How I sat there in the rocking chair and said nothing? A bee was trapped in a lantern, buzzing like a bank alarm. We rocked back and forth to the radio, which was playing “Good As I Been to You,” of all sad things. I finally got up the nerve to look over at you. Your beautiful face, your frightened hand. I knew what I wanted, but I had no idea if I had a right to want it, and I had no way of saying: Don’t go, I need you. What was my life without you? All I said was “Oh!” You stared at me and seemed to understand, and it was all we ever spoke about the matter.

Holland chose—as men often have the luxury of choosing—to do nothing. His registration deadline came and went and the brown paper, stabbed with a rusted thumbtack above his bed, grew blond in the sun. His mother, knowing what it meant to let time pass, came into Holland’s room one morning and, after pulling down the shade, ripped the registration form off the thumbtack. As she walked back out of the dimmed room, Holland sat up and asked what she was doing. “I’m throwing it away,” she said.

“But I was going to send it in,” he told her.

She stood in the hallway, wiping her hands on her flowered Hoover apron. She was a farmer’s widow, used to saving what the world tried to take away. “You can’t send it in,” she said.

“I’m going to.”

“I already told the neighbors you left this Monday. Keep that shade down, and stay upstairs, you hear me? I’ve made up my mind, it’s done.” Without another word she went downstairs and he was left in his bedroom, darkened except for a shaft of light coming through a hole in the shade, dustily illuminating a pack of cards. Holland stared at the shade for a moment. And then he closed the door.

How did you survive it? Your world was as cramped as a sailor’s: just a sunless bedroom, a chamber pot, and the three feet of hallway that could not be seen from the road. You were forbidden to go outside at all, to stand at the window, or sing, or bounce a ball against the wall—forbidden, in other words, to be a boy. You were a monk, with your silence and the books I brought you, sequestered from the dangers of the outside world. How did you not break into pieces, knowing that if a neighbor caught sight of you, by nightfall the whole town would be there with yellow paint to pour over you and pots to bang in a fury at a slacker like you, a Negro coward? I know you studied every battle of that war, every ship of colored soldiers headed out across the Pacific and blown to smithereens. You kept track of figures and death tolls as any other boy would follow baseball statistics, and I know it was to touch the real world now and then, to have it hurt you, to feel alive. You lived behind the looking glass, in the hollow of a tree, in the deathless world women had made for you.

I visited that prison, wallpapered with newsprint. I arrived a few times a week with sheet music in my hand. His mother would sit downstairs alone, playing the bad piano I was meant to be learning—“Rock of Ages” over and over—while I went up and visited her son. I always brought books hidden in my sheet music; I must have checked out everything in the library. And we would read together, in silence or in whispers, until it was time for me to step back into the strange, bright sunlight of a day you never saw.

I memorized each corner of your room. Of course I did; I was a girl in love. The lariat that hung beside the window like a snake; your metal bed, painted a sanitary white, sagging like a prison cot; the shadowless statue of a horseback Indian; your copper-rivet jacket that I borrowed on cool afternoons. And I memorized your face in that dim light, your smile glowing when I entered. Your muted silhouette as you stood against the pulled shade: broad-shouldered with skinny legs and hair grown out. How you mouthed hello and motioned for me to sit beside you. I committed your room to memory. I told myself it was so that, on thundercloud days, I could navigate the stuffy darkness as in a game of blindman’s bluff. Really it was so that later, in my own bed, I could close my eyes and imagine myself beside you in the hushed foxhole that was your world. I loved you like a field on fire.

Did you love me? It was hard not to wonder, lying awake those nights after Buzz Drumer’s visit, thinking of those months in your dark room. Love of some kind, I suppose: love of a lion for the tamer, a coin for the pocket. But not what I had hoped. Not, I was terrified to realize, the love you had for that white man.

There was a romance to it, at least. A childish romance warming into an adolescent one, as we sat together day after day; fumblings with books become fumblings with hands. It was the dream of my youth to be locked in a room with you, with handsome Holland Cook, but once it had come true, I did not know what to do. Young people are inept at love; it is like being given a flying machine, and you leap inside, ready to set off as you’ve always dreamed, yet you don’t have the first notion of how to make it start, much less how to move it. That was true of us, in that humid room. Staring at each other as the sunset lit the window shade like a cinema screen, the one rip burning flaming red. It set the tone for our lives together, those days in a warm sealed room, reading books in a whisper, terrified of discovery. Is that what made you marry me, I wondered? Children hiding from our country, that angry father.

We did our war duty, his mother and I. Somehow, on one set of ration stamps, she managed to run the farm without suspicion: she punched up oleo in a bag to make it look like butter, and gathered milkweed pods with the colored ladies’ auxiliary (for soldiers’ down vests), and I ordered a poster to hang in our window, of a blue house with great red letters:
THIS IS A V HOME—WE SALVAGE, CONSERVE, AND REFUSE TO SPREAD RUMORS!
We did not merely act the part of citizens in war, all the better to hide our beloved boy. We were good people; we never doubted the need for “mock” apple pie so the boys could have real apples. It was a righteous war. But it was not our war.

Holland, you nodded when we told you colored men were used as cannon fodder; if they were not dispatched on fatal missions, they were sent to mess halls to be blown to bits with the white boys they served. No one should blame you. They might as well blame everyone else who hid, like the men who took up cod fishing because it meant a deferral, or the women who counterfeited rations for a wedding cake; we are all willing to cheat to some extent, and you didn’t do it just for butter. Later, you did your part.

If he hadn’t taken ill, he might have lasted out the war. I sat by his dark bedside, holding his volcano-hot hand, whispering to him to hold on, hold on—his mother half demented from grief, constantly asking me: “What do we do, Pearlie, what do we do?”—until, just before dawn, I announced we had to fetch the doctor. The decision was all mine. It was not the doctor, though, who told. He was a kind, old-fashioned, whiskey-smelling white man who stopped toothaches with melted rubber and sewed catgut stitches with the precision of his seamstress mother. It was the neighbors who heard him driving to the house that morning and saw a healthy old widow standing on the porch, motioning to help someone inside. Within twenty-four hours the police were there with a draft officer and Holland was pulled, still sweating from sickness, into a waiting Ford while I screamed from the living-room window as if the nerves had been ripped out of me. In my mind, I had killed him.