The Coach House (18 page)
“You made all of this?”
“I sure did.”
“When?”
“This morning.”
“And what would you have done if I had said no to your last-minute invitation?”
“I would have kept calling all my other girlfriends until I found someone who said yes.” He smiled a flirty smile and handed her a glass of wine. “Cheers!” He raised his glass. “Here’s to the only ‘yes’ I was interested in.”
After eating, they walked barefoot in the sand down the beach, hand in hand. No one else was in sight for as far as they could see, just a few distant seagulls wheeling overhead, calling out as they flew high above the water.
Then without warning the rain came down in thin sheets. They ran back to the spot where they had left their shoes, grabbed them, and raced to the car. She bolted toward her side of the car, with Richard close behind her, but instead of opening the door for her, he held her up against the car and kissed her, right there in the rain. He began kissing her on her forehead and then moved down to her nose and finally on her lips, which she parted for him. The rain moistened their tongues as they explored each other’s mouths. Heat from their bodies rose like steam in the wet humid air.
She opened her eyes and looked into his, then at his lips and back into his eyes. Now completely unaware of the rain, she returned the kiss. No words were spoken.
“So how did I do?” he asked once back in the car.
“Pardon me?”
“Did you enjoy lunch?”
“Oh. Yes, very much so. This kind of surprise I can accept…any time.”
“Good! ‘Cause I love giving ‘em.”
They reached Marie’s apartment just when the sun was setting behind her building. He walked her to her door. “All that talk about other girlfriends…I can honestly say I haven’t thought about anyone else since I met you.” He kissed her on the forehead. “I’ll call you later,” he whispered.
Looking back, she should have asked him more about his trips to the track and the types of characters he met up with there. Looking back, she wished she had questioned him more about a lot of things.
A much shaken sales clerk escorted a female customer to the sitting area outside Marie’s office and asked her to have a seat while she explained the situation to Marie. Apparently that wasn’t acceptable to the obstinate customer who waltzed in behind the clerk and promptly sat down in the chair in front of Marie’s desk, her ample behind filling the entire space between the two arms of the chair. “That’ll be all,” the customer said in a rich southern drawl, waving the clerk out of the room. “And close the door behind you!”
“Thank you, Allison,” Marie said to the sales clerk, intending to get her side of the story later. “So how can I help you?” Marie asked the woman who was dressed in a pastel floral print dress and yellow short-sleeved jacket. Her large flamboyant rings were heavy enough to weigh down even her chubby fingers. A wide-brimmed hat sat at a slight angle on her head, dipping down on one side into her aging face, and painted on eyebrows.
The woman sat up straight and looked at Marie with a skeptical eye as she spoke. “I asked to see the top person in charge here. Who are you?” she snapped.
“My name is Mrs. Marchetti, and you
are
speaking to the right person.”
“I don’t think so, honey” she drawled. “Go get your boss!”
“I report to a board of directors, Miss…”
“Mrs. It’s Mrs. Edward Hollingsworth.”
“Mrs. Hollingsworth. If you’ll explain to me what the problem is, I assure you I will address it.”
The woman let out an audible sigh. “Well, I guess I’ll have to find the right person on my own!” She got up from the chair, which came close to tipping over in the process, and stormed out of Marie’s office mumbling. “To think they sent me to some half-breed nigger girl to handle this!” were the last words Marie heard from Mrs. Hollingsworth.
Marie sat at her desk steeped in disbelief, eyes wide, jaw unhinged, and shoulders dropped as low as they could go.
What on earth would prompt her to say that?
She closed her eyes for a few seconds and shook her head.
She couldn’t have been possibly referring to Allison…blue eyed, blond haired Allison!
When she looked up, Esther was standing in the doorway.
“Are you okay?” Esther asked.
“Yes, of course.”
“You look like you just saw a ghost or something.”
“No, I’m fine. What’s up?”
“I don’t know if you know this or not, but Allison McDonald just walked off the job.”
“Hmm?”
“I said Allison McDonald just walked out.”
“Do you know what happened?”
“The only thing I heard was that a customer let her have it, but good, when she didn’t have a certain dress in her size.”
“What?”
“Marie, what’s wrong?”
“So what happened? Oh, the dress. Do you know anything more?”
“The rumors are flying, but you know how that goes. Marie, are you…”
“Do me a favor and call Allison at home and get her side of the story.”
“Sure. And what about…”
“And please close the door on your way out.”
Marie propped her elbows up on her desk and put her head in her hands, inhaling large breaths of air and exhaling slowly, her stomach threatening to upheave.
She thought I was a Negro.
Her mind raced back to all the times she had asked her mother about her father and how her mother avoided telling her anything about him. The more she thought about it, the more she thought her mother could have at least told her something about him. Some little tidbit of what he was like, just enough to appease a young girl’s understandable curiosity about who her father was. What was the big deal?
* * *
Richard was in Milwaukee for a couple of days, giving Marie time alone, time to think. She went to the mirror for the hundredth time.
She thought I was a Negro.
The comment gnawed at her. At three in the morning, Marie restlessly headed downstairs to heat up a glass of milk. The light spilling out from beneath Richard’s closed office door caught her attention. Thinking he must have left his desk lamp on before leaving, she went to turn it off. The door was locked. The only doors that had had locks in their house were the bathrooms, at least up until now.
Marie went to work the next day, but her mind was elsewhere. Midafternoon, she told Esther she wasn’t feeling well, which wasn’t a lie, and was going home early. But she didn’t go home. Instead, she went to the public library, to the social sciences section, where she found several illustrated books on different races.
She studied the faces of Negroes, East Indians, Latinos, Spaniards, Turks, and even full-blooded Italians. None of them looked like her. Satisfied she had been going down an erroneous path, she casually flipped through the pages of
What Really Went On In the Big House,
a book that documented southern plantation stories, including ones about the owners who raped young Negro slave girls. Photographs of the children born from these illicit procreations caught her attention.
Suddenly realizing she hadn’t been breathing, she gasped. The resemblance was unmistakable. Some of the children in the pictures could have been her siblings.
Marie sat frozen in the library chair without any sense for how long, the book lying open in front of her. She read the captions under the photographs, thinking maybe they were some other children, ones with two white parents. The captions confirmed that wasn’t the case.
She got up from her chair, and then feeling faint, sat back down again. She remained there until she felt she was in the right frame of mind and physical condition to go home.
* * *
Marie had always been curious about who her father was, but never like this. Now she
had
to know.
What if Mrs. Hollingsworth was right?
She could still hear her mother’s words. “He was tall, dark, and handsome.”
Just how dark was he? And why couldn’t she have told me?
Thoughts ran around her head like mice through a maze.
Who on earth doesn’t know their own race?
Then it occurred to her that maybe her mother had told her. She retrieved the hatbox of her mother’s belongings and went through each item again, hoping to find a clue to her father’s identity.
She cautiously paged through the picture album. One of the photos caught her attention. It was of her mother and several men lined up in front of what appeared to be a bar. Her eyes went straight to the colored man on the end, the one farthest from her mother. Tall, dark, and handsome her mother had said. Like the man in the photo.
Marie poured herself a glass of wine and picked up the document titled
My Shameful Past.
She had flipped through it a couple of times before but didn’t think too much about it.
The first few sentences intrigued her.
I am a high yellow Negro. A Mulato. It’s takin me to o many years to say them words. Out loud at least. Ive been called a lot worse, so I don know why it’s hard for me to say it. Thare just words, my momma use to say.
She flipped to the back of the book. The author thanked all the people in his life who didn’t judge him by the color of his skin. He said it was a short list but an important one. He thanked his mother for giving him life and his half-sister Emma for typing the manuscript.
When she flipped back to the front of the manuscript, a note card fell into her lap.
I hope this helps you understand what lies ahead.
It was addressed to no one, and it was unsigned.
So someone gave this to her?
She made a mental note to look up what high yellow Negro meant. Mulatto, she was fairly sure, meant half Negro, half white, but she would look that one up as well.
When she heard Richard’s car pull in the driveway, she stashed the book back in the hatbox and put the box back in the closet. For now, this would remain her private issue.
* * *
The prolonged ache in the pit of Marie’s stomach nagged her every minute of every day, making it difficult to act normal, whatever that was. These days she just didn’t know. What she faced was life-changing. She couldn’t put it out of her mind. After all, she was reminded of it every time she looked in the mirror.
It was perplexing to think of herself as anything but white. She didn’t know any Negroes, didn’t go anywhere, or attend anything where Negroes were present. She only knew what she read in the papers, and lately most of that had been about all the tension between Negroes and whites, especially in the South. She recalled reading about race riots happening all over the country in the past several months, even in Chicago, but feeling completely distanced from it, she didn’t think much about them at the time. And she had to admit to herself when she read that President Truman was forming a national civil rights committee to investigate racism, she thought that would take care of things.
Richard must have sensed something was bothering Marie because he asked her about it more than once. As guilty as she felt not sharing her suspicions with him, she couldn’t bring herself to tell him until she knew for sure, and even then, she didn’t know how she would do it.
The more the question ate away at her, the more Marie started having doubts about herself. Feeling self-conscious about her looks, she tried different kinds of makeup to change her appearance. She used to like her olive complexion. Now she was embarrassed by it.
Sitting across from Esther in her office one day, she asked her what nationality she was. “My father is English and my mother was French. How about you?”
Marie smiled. “Guess.”
“Well, let’s see. Costa is Italian, I’m pretty sure, and with your complexion and dark eyes, I’d say both parents were Italian. But at least one of them. How’d I do?”
“You’re good! Well, let’s get back to work. We’ve got a long day ahead of us.”
* * *
Whenever Richard was out of town, Marie covertly devoted herself to finding out something about her father. She contacted the restaurant where her mother worked and tried to get information from one of the waitresses she knew who was still there. She told Marie that to the best of her recollection, Sophia had never mentioned any man in her life. Marie asked her if she could recall any special customers who may have come into the restaurant. “That was a long time ago,” the waitress told her.