The Color of Family (34 page)

That's when Antonia rose from where she sat with the slowness of a much older woman. She walked in small steps toward Junior, then stopped, and with one finger in the air pointed directly at him, Antonia said, “How dare you, Jackson Junior Jackson. Don't you dare do that. Don't you dare try to stand there and say that I put you behind everything. There's no hierarchy to my love here. Never has been. But I guess you need to say that to come up with some excuse as to why you've been having an affair with that Cora Calliup.”

If Junior had been just a few shades lighter, he would have been positively colorless, because even in his golden brown skin he seemed to turn completely to ash. And when he opened his mouth to speak, it was as if his tongue had been swallowed up whole in the last gulp of air he took. Then he laughed nervously and replied, “Antonia, you must have gone and lost your mind. What the hell are you talking about?”

But sarcastically, Antonia answered, “Well, you see, your argument about me having lost my mind just can't be valid, since that's why we're here and Dr. Lillywhite has already said that I'm sane. So I'll tell you what. Instead of you standing there embarrassing yourself by denying it, why don't I just give this back to you.” That's when she took the locket from where she'd been keeping it nowadays, in the pocket just on the inside of her purse. She hurled it at Junior with such a force and such harsh aim that he had to put his hands up to block it from smacking him square
in the face. “Do you see what that says? It says, ‘To Cora, with love, JJJ.' That's what it says.” And she went back to her seat and she sat, as if that would be all.

Junior bent down slowly and picked up the locket from where it landed by his feet. He studied it for more than a few seconds while the silence of the room loomed, then he said with a patronizing timbre that immediately became forthright, and afraid, “Antonia, this is just something, some little thing that when…”

But the bleakness in her eyes and the firmness in her jaw said she would not suffer the foolishness of a lie. And it appeared that she would just go on staring him down forever until she finally said, “Well I'm glad, at least, that something has given you the good sense to know that you just can't look me in the eye and lie to me. We've got too much history, Junior, for you to do that to me. I've given you two children, I've made a home for you, and I don't deserve anything here but the truth.”

“Antonia, it's complicated,” Junior said, looking down at the locket. Then he turned to the doctor and said, “I really don't think we need to deal with this here.”

And finally, it was Dr. Lillywhite's chance to say, “Quite the contrary, Dr. Jackson. If I may respectfully say so, I think this is the perfect place to discuss this because in its way it's all connected to why she's here in the first place. Antonia has just confronted you with something that is obviously quite painful for her. I think it needs to be dealt with right now. What is it about this that makes it so complicated?”

Junior looked at his children, first at Ellen, who stared back, as if with the same question in her eyes as Dr. Lillywhite, then at Aaron who looked with a certain nothingness that only fear can put on a face. So he took his attention back to the locket and said, “Cora and I have stayed in contact over the years.”

“Contact. Now that's an interesting euphemism if I've ever heard one,” Antonia said with a clear bitterness. Then, somewhere between a middling frustration and a full-tilt rage, she yelled, “Tell me what kind of contact, Junior, and you tell me now or else I swear to your creator that I will rip your heart out!”

“Okay, Antonia!” Junior bellowed nervously, looking up at her with eyes that seemed to need something from her. Then he con
tinued, “Okay, look, Cora and I have been close, very close. But I swear to you it hasn't been physical for a very long time, and then it was only that once.”

But then Ellen said with a sharp and decisive anger, “Only that once, Poppa? Do you think that makes it okay? Do you think Ma's just supposed to say
‘Oh, I understand'
?”

Antonia took Ellen's hand and squeezed it. “It's okay, honey. This is between me and your father.” Then she said to Junior, “But she's right. Only once most definitely does not make it okay with me. And how long is a very long time? Three weeks? Three months? Three years? What?”

And then, as voice and manner seemed to work in tandem to want to excuse it all, Junior said, “It's been over thirty years, Antonia. I swear.”

Antonia got up and went to the other end of the room, completely opposite from where Junior stood by the window, lowered her head, and slumped in contemplation for several seconds. When she looked up, she said, “Let me see if I understand this. You have slept with Cora, but only once and that was over thirty years ago.”

“That's right, Antonia.”

“And so now, you're still carrying on an affair with her in secret and under cover like two lovesick high-school kids, but you're not having any sex of any kind with her.”

“Exactly.”

“Junior, do you understand why that makes absolutely no sense to me and I find it nearly impossible to accept?”

“No, honestly I don't, Antonia. Because you said you deserve no less than the truth, and the truth is what I just gave to you.”

“I believe you gave me the truth, Junior. It's just that you only gave me part of it. What's the rest?”

“I don't know what you want, Antonia. I swear I don't.”

Antonia's face slid down, down, down, until it was utterly formless. She crossed the room slowly. Past her daughter's gaped mouth and stunned eyes, past her son's face of sheer foreboding. And when she got to Junior, she moved as close to him as he would allow as he seemed to try to inch his way out the window. But she faced him with a look that seemed to tell of a most wretched betrayal, and she asked with an eerie quiet, “Junior, is
that youngest boy of Cora's your child? Is that whose picture is in that locket?”

The room was laden with their tension, and it was quiet enough in there to hear a mouse creeping across cotton. So Junior looked forlornly at some insignificant place just left of Antonia's eyes and in a small voice confessed. “Yes.”

The only movement then was Aaron, who slumped back into his chair with the whump of a sack of something burdened with many things quite substantial. In that moment, right there having just learned what no one could have known, Aaron still couldn't believe himself to be something other than his father's only son. For him, this news was like a skittering bug that he wasn't certain at all if he'd just seen, but whose presence made him quite nervous for the violation of its intrusion; and he wasn't certain at all if he had just heard what was apparently quite real. He had always known that in some allegorical way, he was certainly not his mother's only son. And so now, he wondered, how long would it take for him to reconfigure his mind, his heart to understand that things had never been as they'd seemed, but mostly he'd never been as he'd seemed.

The only thing that brought him out of himself in that moment was the look on his sister's face, which he only now noticed after feeling the heat of her pleading stare. The eyes of a woman suddenly slapped broadside in the face with what he could only imagine was the infinite remembrance of Rick's betrayal. And what made him feel her pain with a particular acuity was the overwhelming heft of being the only other one in the room, most definitely the only other one in her universe besides Rick, who knew and who shared the memory.

Then he thought he'd simply leave. Get up from there, go to work where a whole other distasteful matter of a broken heart awaited him, and put this entire episode aside for another day when it would make much more sense to him. Instead, he raised his head to find his mother just standing there before his father, locked in a gaze with eyes that weren't looking back at her. So he got up, took his mother gently by her arm, and urged her back to her chair, saying, “Come on, Ma, you need to sit down.”

“No, I don't,” she said, jerking away from her son. “I need him to explain to me how he could find comfort in the arms of a
woman, and then father a child with a woman who pulls stink weed by the highway for voodoo rituals when he was married to me, the woman he vowed from the time he was sixteen years old that he'd love till a Dixieland band played his soul into heaven. That's what you told me.”

“Come on, Antonia, you know I still love you in the biggest way like that. And besides, Cora doesn't do that anymore. We were kids when she did that.”

“It doesn't matter!” Antonia snapped. “We were kids when you told me how long you'd love me. And don't you dare defend her!”

“Well, you brought it up,” Junior said, defending himself for defending Cora.

“I just need to know how it all started.”

Junior rubbed his head, and shifted awkwardly, looking at the floor. He was a man who seemed to be plagued with the frustration of trying to find words. “Antonia, I don't know. I'm not sure I even remember.”

“Try.”

“I don't know, I guess it started when I was down there after my father died and I was moving my mother out to Plaquemine. We got to talking, and I don't know, I guess I discovered a part of Cora that I hadn't paid attention to when we were kids. I was always so in love with you,” and he looked up at Antonia with truthful eyes.

But they met her ire, as she said, “And just what part of her did you discover, Junior?”

“Well, not that, Antonia. Please,” Junior said, seeming offended and discomfited all at once. He continued, “She's kind. She's very kind. And she listened to me when I reminisced about our childhood and my father and all. She watched me cry about the death of my father without a bit of judgment. I took it hard when I lost my father, Antonia. Did you know that?”

Antonia pressed her lips so hard they trembled, and there was no telling just what she might say. When she loosened her lips, she took a step back from Junior, as if to get a better look at him, and said, “Junior, how can you stand there and ask me that? Of course I knew how hard you took his death. And I thought you were talking to me, and only me about the most private parts of your grief. Now I learn that Cora was privy, too.”

“Antonia, it's just that so much was going on then. My father died and at the same time you were getting more and more fired up about Clayton being Emeril's son. Do you remember how, after the funeral, everybody went back to Momma's house and nobody could find you? Two hours later you came strolling in there telling me how you went over to Agnes and Douglas Cannon's house and saw Clayton playing in the front yard. ‘He's Emeril's son as sure as I'm Emeril's twin.' That's what you said to me. I know you didn't mean to be insensitive, but I didn't want to hear that crap, Antonia. I had just buried by father, my hero, and you come in there telling me some nonsense like that. Ah shucks—” Junior waved his hand dismissively in the air, then moved past Antonia to walk toward the other side of the room. When he got there, he turned back toward her. “You know, I didn't want to think about that anymore. I told myself years ago that it didn't have any business going into the future with us, but here I am thirty-some years later talking about it.”

“Well, obviously Junior, this is something that's been on your mind for all these years, and you needed to say it to me,” she said in a deflated voice. She went over to her chair and sat, where Ellen put her arms around her. Then she continued, “So I guess you're telling me that it's my fault you had the affair with Cora. I drove you into her arms, huh?”

“No!” Junior said adamantly. “I'm not saying that at all. I'm a man, and I'm a responsible man. I had a choice that night, and I knew that what I was doing was wrong, and I know that what I did was wrong. I'm just telling you how it happened. You wanted to know, so I told you.” Then he went and knelt in front of where Antonia sat. He took her hand softly from Ellen who'd held it and seemed not to want to let it go. But he had it nonetheless, and he held it as if it held his life. He regarded her earnestly, then continued, “Look, Antonia, you may believe this, or you may believe that I'm full of stuff, but I swear to you that I had no intention of carrying on an affair with Cora beyond that one night. But then when she came up pregnant, everything got real complicated real quick.”

Something needed to fill all the quiet that quickly flooded the room, so Dr. Lillywhite said, “I'm looking at you, Aaron, and you, Ellen, and I would imagine that this has got to seem pretty unbe
lievable to you. Would either of you like to tell your father your feelings about this?” And even though the question was for both, he was clearly looking at Aaron, whose emotions seemed to be more raw.

But instead of Aaron, it was Ellen who said, “Well, I know you cheated on Ma, Poppa, but I feel as if you cheated on me. I feel like you cheated on this whole family. I'm questioning everything. I'm even questioning if you're on the board down there at Tulane's medical school or if that's just an excuse you use to get out of town and see your other family. And now that I know that we only had half of your attention too, I'm trying my best to see if your two halves made any kind of a whole for us, because you had me fooled, Poppa. You had me fooled into believing that you were giving us all of yourself.”

“And how does that make you feel, Ellen?” Dr. Lillywhite asked.

“How do you think it makes me feel?” she said acerbically. “It makes me feel like nothing about my life was as I thought it had been. At least with my mother, I knew who she was and what she was doing. I now realize that I never even knew this man.” And she pointed at her father with an indifferent, most impudent wave of her hand, as if shooing away something bothersome.