And All Our Wounds Forgiven (17 page)

Marriage was a succession of disappointments, the deflation of illusions until nothing remained except the person as he truly was, and that was someone you had never met. How could she have known John Calvin for four years and only discovered, within a week after they married, that he picked his nose with his finger rather than a tissue or handkerchief? Had he not picked his nose for four years? Had he wanted to pick it for four years but held back from doing so until they were married? Or was it something the marriage brought out in him? And though she had loved his library, why had it not occurred to her that to marry him was to live with books like a sailor lived with the sea? They were everywhere, and their first fight had been over her decision to take the stacks of books out of the bathtub so she could bathe, despite his arguments for the superiority and greater efficiency of the sponge bath.

In the scheme of things, passion was without doubt the most valuable, because it was the lure that drew male and female to each other, beguiling them with fantasies of an eternity of lust and delight, and they married to ensure their eternity of sybaritism. But marriage was the discipline of learning that only change was forever, and the seeming disappearance of the qualities in the other that had elicited your passion the only constant.

Or perhaps each quality had an evil Siamese twin and she had been too young to know that John Calvin’s fiery intensity was joined at the hip to an unrelenting restlessness of spirit, an inability to stop thinking and feeling and searching. His intensity had been an inspiration to Andrea the college girl. Being married to the eternal dissatisfaction of a soul seeking Truth was exhausting.

When he told her that he turned down an offer of a position at Colby College in Maine to accept one at Spelman, she cried. When she had left Charleston to come to Boston it was with the thought that she would return South only for visits. The constant assault on her dignity of segregation with its laws and signs forbidding her to do everything but breathe had taught her to hate the South with a cold and unfeeling clarity.

“A white college in Maine doesn’t have to worry about finding a good philosophy professor. White college students will learn philosophy. That’s a given. It is not a given for black college students.”

He was right. He always was. She did not mean that sarcastically. That was another irritant in their marriage, his uncanny instinct for the truth. He had never understood how she could remain unconvinced even when she knew he was right. Had it been stubbornness, or willful perversity? No. It had been a survival tactic, a desperate attempt to retain some scrap she knew as herself. It did not matter if she was wrong, only that she knew that she was.

She did not always know.

“. . . walked around downtown. At least what was downtown back then. We stopped at what used to be Woolworth’s where we were arrested that first time. We were so happy! It’s amazing to think about now. We were happy to be going to jail. I don’t know if I’ve had a feeling like that ever again in my life, a feeling of being in charge of my destiny. The outcome didn’t matter. What mattered was that we were going to end segregation or die. We acted like free people.”

Had that been her mistake? Had she never acted like a free woman? What if she had said, choose. Me or going South. Me or the civil rights movement. Me or Lisa. But you don’t issue ultimatums if you care about the answer.

Robert wasn’t free anymore. She could hear in his voice a yearning for who he had been (or who he thought he had been) thirty years ago. There had been too many days of walking through the valley of the shadow of death, too many nights of falling across a mattress with your clothes on until you couldn’t sleep any other way, too many years of believing that soon peace and freedom and justice would grow like flowers in the spring and after too many times in jail and too many confrontations with highway patrolmen and county sheriffs and white men with baseball bats and shotguns and well-oiled rifles, after too many times of seeing death looking at you with a cat’s indifference, one day you stopped believing and you stopped caring and when you did, you stopped knowing who you were and why. She had heard rumors that he had been committed to institutions in New York more than once. He went to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings every day. And there was something a little too ordered and too proper about him as if every ounce of energy were needed to hold himself together.

Wasn’t that how she, too, had managed to accumulate all these years of twenty-four-hour days and sixty-minute hours? She had maintained control over the chaos and maybe, sometimes, it took a drink or two more than the usual to keep chaos penned, and so what if maybe, sometimes, a pill was required to put a smiley face on a hurting heart. Wasn’t that better than entrusting one’s soul to the chaos?

Now that the end was imminent (she hoped), she was sorry she could not put her arms around Robert and hold him like a mother and let him cry or rage, and was there much difference between the two?

How had John Calvin Marshall become the only force that had given their lives meaning and purpose, contour and texture? How had he done that, not only for them, but for an entire nation?

She didn’t know. How was that possible? She had been married to the man, but if her words could have had tongue, she would have asked Lisa, who was he? That was why she had started the book. Perhaps a retrospective vigilance could redeem a slothful inattentiveness.

There could be no more lies or illusions, not with death hovering like an anxious mother at the crib of her first-born. If she didn’t owe herself a certain honesty, she owed the unmitigated truth to death.

But truth could wound the heart and kill the spirit. Why? Why did it hurt to see what was before one’s eyes? That was all truth was — the acknowledgement of what is.

That was the problem. Who wanted to know what was? We wanted reality to correspond to our needs, our desires, our dreams. The only acceptable world was the one made in our own image. That was why John Calvin had been different. He saw the world for what it was and had the audacity to remake it as it should have been.

And that was why she had hated him.

And that was why she had married him.

To keep close to herself that which was most threatening, and to prevent someone else from having it close to them. She had failed. Until he was killed.

When the reporter called and told her, there was not only relief that the waiting was finally over, but an overwhelming elation that finally, at last, at last, he belonged to her. In his death, she finally became his wife and the past twenty-six years she had publicly lived the marriage that had never been.

As Mrs. John Calvin Marshall she was the guardian of his legacy and spoke on issues of national and international importance with the authority of his merit, which had automatically passed to her as his widow. When she spoke, it was as if he had not died.

No one would ever know. The last twenty-six years were also a truth, as if illusion were not a more credible and more powerful truth than bared veracity. The vice president would be at her funeral as well as leading political figures of both parties, black congressmen, entertainers and celebrities of all kinds. They would eulogize her as the widow who had been the backbone and strength of John Calvin Marshall and shouldered the burden of his vision after his death.

What harm had been done? Whom had she hurt? Hadn’t she earned what had come to her? Hadn’t she paid for it with loneliness as piercing as the whiteness of snow in sunlight? Hadn’t she?

Yes, she had, but that could not justify self-deception, and he had tried to teach her that much. There had been no lies about Lisa. John Calvin had told Andrea about the FBI tape so that when it came she had a choice about whether to listen. She had.

Sometimes, when she focused only on John Calvin, when she thought of him instead of him in relation to her, she was surprised at an almost frivolous happiness that he had had Lisa, someone who seemed to know him instinctually, someone with no other need than to love him. But ego cannot abide selflessness, and Andrea did not understand how the peace that came when she loved Lisa’s love became a bewildering and numbing pain when she herself posed at the center of her vision field.

Was that why Lisa had come? To help her stand to the side in her life so she could see herself? Was the pleading in her voice not a yearning for her own forgiveness but a brief for Andrea’s?

But what had been her sin?

Dear God, what had been her sin?

Had it been that she had not loved John Calvin well? Had it been her unrelenting selfishness in refusing to relinquish illusion? Had it been her usurpation of John Calvin Marshall’s legacy and subsequent presumption to immortality? Had it . . .

“. . . never asked. I appreciated that. You didn’t ask me any questions or anything. You took me in and found a little work for me to do around the house and let me drive you to the airport and pick you up and when I got on my feet a little more, I would go with you on your speaking trips and to meetings. You saved my life.

“I don’t want you to die without knowing. Lisa gave me the idea. She said she came because there were things she had to say even if you couldn’t hear. She said she didn’t know whether it was more important for her to say or you to hear and decided that all she could do was the saying. That got me to thinking about how I would feel if you died and I hadn’t at least tried to tell you.”

There was silence and Andrea waited, not knowing if he had paused or if time had passed and he had spoken and been gone for an hour. She heard a chair creak and then —

“George Stone. Me and him were the best two organizers in the civil rights movement. He came to Shiloh to work with me in the spring of 1963. Cal knew it was getting to be too much for me down there by myself. One morning I woke up, looked up from the mattress on the floor where I slept, and there was this nigger with a scrawny beard looking down at me, saying, ‘Get up! Black folks ain’t free yet!’ I looked up at him and started laughing. He laughed and that was that.”

There was another pause. She found herself shrinking from his voice, wanting the polite, controlled tones of the Robert she had known. This voice had serrated edges and she was not sure she wanted to hear.

“I had been thinking about it for almost a year, just waiting for the right time. I didn’t know when that would be, but I knew it was going to happen. It had to happen or I didn’t know if I could go on living. When George came, I knew the time was near. Near, but not yet.

“With two of us organizing, things began to happen. One of the colored preachers told us we could use his church for meetings and we started teaching people what they had to know to register to vote. Once a month the voter registration office was open and once a month, George and I would have a few people lined up at the window at nine
A.M.
One month the window wouldn’t open until eleven-fifty-five and we would be told we were too late. The next it would be open but the clerk would spend three hours talking to somebody in the office in plain view of us in the corridor. Then, there came the month when we drove up to the courthouse and Sheriff Simpson, his deputies and damn near half the white men in the county were standing around the courthouse, lining the steps and all up and down the sidewalk. And they just happened to have their rifles and shotguns with them.

“Generally, we got to the courthouse by eight-forty-five so as to be in line when nine o’clock come around. That morning we were running late. It was me, George and two women and Mr. Peter Howard, who was almost as old as God. He had told us he would meet us there.

“I pulled the car up to the courthouse. The sheriff and his men were at the top of the steps. There must’ve been a hundred or so white men lounging on the lower steps and along the sidewalk. Wasn’t nobody doing a thing or saying a thing. They were just standing.

“I got out of the car slowly.

“’Where you going? What are you going to do?’ George asked and started out of the car.

“’Stay put,’ I told him. ‘Stay with the women.’

“I had no idea what I was doing but I knew that if we drove away from that courthouse, the movement was dead in Shiloh. My getting killed that morning would not have frightened the Negroes of Shiloh as much as my showing fear of those white men. I could feel every eye on me. I didn’t wait for the crowd to let me pass but I kept walking as if expecting them to. They did, but only enough so that I wouldn’t brush against anybody but still close enough to smell the Garrett’s snuff, Bull Durham chewing tobacco, moonshine and sweat.

“I started up the steps, which were lined on both sides by gun-carrying white men. I still had no idea what I was going to do or say. I figured that this was the day I was going to die and that felt good to me. Real good.

“About halfway up the steps I saw the body. It lay on its back, arms raised over its head as if they were wings in the motion of flight. He was a tiny old man, wearing the overalls of a sharecropper, overalls that had been washed so often in lye soap, they were blotchy with white spots. I saw the single bullet hole in his head, the blood congealing around it, and the flies settling on his shoulder and walking on their hair-strong legs up the neck and toward the rouge hole.

“All I could figure was that Mr. Howard had gotten there on time and started in the courthouse by himself instead of waiting for us. Obviously from all the white men at the courthouse, that day was also the day they had chosen to teach us a lesson. Mr. Howard probably saved our lives by getting killed first. Take that thought to bed with you at night.

“I willed myself not to think, not to feel. I looked at Sheriff Simpson and didn’t nod or speak. I looked down at the body, at that tiny black man and felt the Mississippi heat heavy on me and heavy on him as if we were nothing more than the pants legs of a pair of trousers beneath an iron. Without a word, I stooped down and lifted the body in my arms.

“‘Card? What the hell you think you doing?’

“It was Sheriff Simpson. I lowered the body gently. ‘What does it look like?’ I said softly.