Wherever There Is Light (7 page)

Julian didn't reply, and Jarvis said, “Miz Wakefield told me 'bout her grandmother bein' sold by my grandfather. That's plumb ugly history, 'cept what it got to do with me? My father didn't own no slaves. He had colored men workin' our farm, and whatever they do, he do. And Daddy kept them men on when they so old they couldn't do doodly-squat. Hurleigh ain't but a boy and ask, ‘Daddy, why don't you let them shiftless niggers go?' and Daddy done took a switch to Hurleigh till his legs bloody as a cut pig and say, ‘'Cause they decent, God-fearin' men, and if'n I evah heah that ugliness from your mouth agin, I'll beat the blond out your hair.' ”

“That's a heartwarming tale.”

As Julian had intended, Jarvis began to fume, standing and stamping out his cigarette on the floor. “My father nevah harmed nobody or nothin'. The day the bank took his farm, he go to the barn, mix some pesticide in a dipper of milk, and drinks it down. I'm the one found him, every inch of his sufferin' still on his face. My mama was nevah the same. Died six months later. And Ezekiel Kendall bought that land from the bank for a song so cheap no self-respectin' mockingbird would sing it. So till I'm dead, I'ma try and buy my daddy's land back. Y'all unnerstan' now?”

Julian, in as affable a tone as he could muster, said, “Please send Hurleigh my regards.”

In the taxi, he wondered why Jarvis hadn't mentioned Hurleigh getting slapped by Derrick. That should've been major news. Maybe Hurleigh had been too humiliated to tell his older brother. Or maybe not. At least Julian had something to think about—other than Kendall—on his trip to Miami.

J
ANUARY
5, 1939

H
olding the handles of a shopping bag, Julian paced back and forth under the fierce gaze of Kendall's grandfather. The students going to and from classes paid no more attention to him than to the statue, but Julian felt out of place until he spotted Kendall coming toward him with a khaki satchel slung over her shoulder. Julian slipped on the Ray-Bans he'd bought yesterday on Lincoln Road. The aviators were stylish, and with the green lenses he could stare at Kendall without her teasing him.

“You're staring,” Kendall said.

“How can you tell?”

“Educated guess.”

Julian took a package out of the bag. The wrapping paper featured snowmen in Santa outfits.

Kendall said, “Aren't you Jewish?”

“I am, but God lets us buy presents for the other team.”

She laughed and carefully removed the paper. “A Leica! Julian, this is the Three-B! I just read about it in
Popular Photography
.”

“Saw it in a store, and you told me you needed a better camera.”

Her eyes opened wide as though it had suddenly occurred to her that he might have an ulterior motive for buying her the Leica.

“It's a gift, Kendall. No strings.”

“Thank you.”

“Try it out.” Julian took a box of film from the bag and began to open it.

Kendall clamped a hand over his. “I'll have to cut off the end of the film to load the camera. There's a darkroom. Want to come?”

Julian would have preferred to stand there with her hand on his, but he returned the film and camera to the bag, and they went up a path behind the chapel.

Kendall asked, “Do they have girls up North?”

“They do.” And with little effort, Julian had collected his share. Showgirls and pretty girls who wanted to be showgirls; nice girls who were tired of being nice; and practical girls who'd had it up to here with bad news and breadlines and would've married a fire hydrant if it paid the mortgage.

“Then why'd you come back to see me?”

Julian had never felt this drawn to a girl. Behind the sublime mask of her face, he saw a hardness equal to his and a loneliness as deep as his own. “Because you're as tough as I am.”

“Who told you that?”

“Otis.”

“The ass-kicking contest? Otis say that to any boy get near me. Even his brother.”

“How come you only sound southern sometimes?”

“You heard that, did you?” she said with a quick laugh. “I went to a private Quaker school in Philadelphia, but when I was thirteen my mother started overseeing the construction of the college, and I spent the summers here. My mother didn't want me to be spoiled, so she had me working six days a week with the farmers. Their talk stuck in my head, probably because they sounded like my grandfather: he was from Lovewood and had himself a South mouth. I used to help the children with their reading and writing, and I picked oranges, fed chickens, mucked out barns, and learned how to sew dresses from flour sacks. I made this one.”

“It's lovely,” Julian said, and it was, the mustard-colored cloth sprinkled with miniature bunches of purple grapes and drawn in to her tiny waist.

“You know we're different colors?”

Ahead, beyond the sand dunes, Julian saw a sparkling patch of ocean. “I don't care.”

Kendall stopped. “How do you do that? Not care?”

He wanted to tell Kendall that it helped to have a mother and father who knew nothing of how he felt and demanded more from him than they offered in return. Yet confessing these facts to himself shamed Julian, because he considered himself culpable, as though he would've had better parents if he'd been a better son. “Could be that I grew up Jewish in Germany. Or that I left home at fifteen.”

Kendall, eyeing him as if sensing that his explanation was incomplete, said, “I wish I felt easier about that.”

“Not caring what people think?”

“My mother, for one. And even myself. So I could go off and be an artist and not second-guess my choices—make myself up as I go along and be content with what I become.”

“I could help you with that.”

“I reckon you could.” Nothing in her tone indicated that she was going to give Julian the chance, and she cut over to a whitewashed shed near a cluster of slender palms with scarlet fruit under the fronds. “Simon, a friend of mine, built the darkroom here because he liked photographing the dunes. He graduated two years ago and left some equipment for the students. Simon's a reporter at the
Pittsburgh Courier
now.”

Surmising that Kendall and Simon had been an item, a pang of jealousy shot through Julian. “That's understandable. Not much sand in Pittsburgh.”

Kendall ignored his sarcasm and unlatched the door. The shed was hot and permeated with a sour chemical smell. She rummaged around on a cluttered table, then switched on a flashlight with a red lens, took the bag from Julian, and gave him her satchel. “My sketchbook's in here. I wanted to show you what I drew today. Wait out where it's cool.”

Five minutes later, as Julian looked at nude charcoal sketches of a regal Negro lady with lively eyes and hair as short as a man's, he heard a click and glanced up to see Kendall snapping his picture.

Julian said, “These sketches are terrific. Who is it?”

“Hazee Thomas. She owns the local juke joint.”

“Didn't your mother say no nude drawing?”

“Hazee's doing it for free. She was a stripper in Memphis and says if my mother climbs up her back about it, she'll be explaining to her there's uglier ways to spend an hour than posing in the altogether. Even my mother won't mess with Hazee. Can you stand against that palm?”

Julian stood, and Kendall, looking through the viewfinder and fiddling with a front dial, moved toward him, snapping pictures. Then, lowering the camera, she tugged on his polo shirt. “Can I take a picture of your chest?”

Julian assumed she was kidding, but she held out her hand, and Julian gave her the polo. After folding it in quarters, she set the shirt on the ground. “Rest your head on it.”

Julian lay down, and Kendall stood over him, taking photographs.

Kendal said, “Clasp your hands behind your head.”

Julian complied, though he disliked being ordered around like a trained dog. “If I take off my pants will you talk to me?”

He was only trying to get her attention, so he was astounded when Kendall replied, “Would you?”

Julian kicked off his Weejuns, shucked off his seersucker slacks, and felt ridiculous. Yet soon he was spellbound by Kendall and her photographer's minuet, stepping left and right, leaning one way, then the other, bending down, standing up, all the while aiming the Leica at him. And now that Julian was relaxed with a silken breeze caressing him, he was self-conscious about being in his boxer shorts in front of Kendall. Despite focusing on his favorite moments in his third-base seats at Yankee Stadium, he grew excited and was certain his boxers looked like a white cotton tepee. He worried that his excitement would embarrass Kendall, but she reacted with a kittenish grin, and Julian wasn't sure how he felt about that.

“Roll's finished,” she said.

Julian wriggled into his slacks, and Kendall sat beside him, angling her legs to the side. This close to her it seemed that her skin had been storing up the sunlight and was now releasing its heat into the air. Sitting up, Julian put on his polo and slipped into his loafers.

Kendall said, “Derrick will be here tomorrow morning.”

Julian's heart sank to his toes. “Isn't he at law school?”

“I've spoken to him long-distance eight times, but he wants to speak to me in person. He doesn't have classes on Fridays, so he's driving down.”

“What's the emergency?”

“I told Derrick I didn't want to marry any boy. Not now.”

Julian's heart, now back where it belonged, was hammering away like a Gene Krupa drum solo. He could wait for her.

“Jesus, God, Derrick called my mother last night. She came to my dorm room, yelling that young men like Derrick—Negro lawyers who are going to take over the family firm—don't grow on trees, and I ought to quit acting like I was born foolish and grew up ignorant. I tried to tell her why, but you can't tell my mother anything.”

“You can tell me.”

“Did—did you ever feel as if there's something wonderful waiting for you, somewhere, in the future? You're not sure what it is, only that you're sure it's out there?”

Julian looked straight at her, thinking that he'd found what had been waiting for him.

“Last semester I read Emily Dickinson's ‘Hope Is the Thing with Feathers.' The poem's beautiful, but for me hope's a thing with plain old feet; hope puts one foot in front of the other; hope is New York and Paris and believing that searching for something wonderful—whether you find it or not—makes life worthwhile. Derrick says he wants his future settled. I asked him why. To get tomorrow over with before you wake up in the morning?”

Kendall looked toward the dunes, then back at Julian. “You're not like that, are you?”

“I'm more day-to-day.” Julian was almost sure that this was true.

“I thought so,” she said, and kissed him. Her hair and skin smelled of lemons, and his right hand roamed past the ridge of her bra, down the rough cotton of her dress.

Kendall drew back. “You're the first white person I've ever touched.”

“You mean kissed?”

“Touched—except for first grade and holding hands playing ring around the rosy. Sometimes I drive along the coast and stop to paint landscapes and mostly sell them to white folks. If I charge two fifty or three fifty and they don't have any silver, nearly every one tells me to keep the change.”

“Maybe they're generous.”

“Maybe, but I swear they don't want to touch a colored gal.”

“That's not a problem I have.”

She laughed. “No, you want to touch me too much.” Kendall stowed the camera in her satchel. “I have to study tonight. Will you be here tomorrow?”

“My parents have a spare bedroom. I'll be there or in the basement of the library.”

“I'll find you when I'm done talking with Derrick. But we have to be careful. I'll go back to campus by myself.”

Kendall was past the darkroom when she turned with a smile that she hadn't shown him before—a hopeful, buoyant smile. “Don't worry none about what Otis says. It's my mother that'll shoot you.”

T
he next afternoon, as Julian sat in the basement of the library reading
Art Through the Ages
, Otis Larkin showed up. “Kenni-Ann's gone bughouse. Derrick telephoned her from Jacksonville last night, and she says he shoulda been here hours ago. She wants me and Mrs. Wakefield to look for him. Man, I told the girl: my big bro get lost in Harlem. Or maybe he pull over to knock a nod. But Kenni-Ann lay her doom and gloom on Mrs. Wakefield till she agrees to go, and Kenni-Ann says you'll help.”

“My car's at my parents'.”

“Sweet, let's get the gas buggy and I'll give you directions. Sorry, Jules. This ain't nothin', except Kenni-Ann—”

“No big deal,” Julian said, but he was afraid of what they'd find. He doubted that Mayor Scales had any intention of reining in his brother, and Hurleigh had struck Julian as a vindictive son of a bitch.

Julian, putting the top down on his Cadillac, felt safer knowing that he had a .32-caliber Beretta in the glove box.