The Color of Family (42 page)

The baby began to squirm with the threat of waking up, so she watched and tried to stay stark still considering that the other side of her was rumbling with fear for her brother. But the baby was only sleep-shifting, she discovered, as he settled back into his new position—which looked to her to be no different than his old one—in her arm. He was out like a drunk. And that, she figured, was most likely the baby equivalent of such a state—drunk from her milk and comfort, she thought he must be. And she wondered if she'd ever get over the birth of her child. What a magical moment, she thought, smiling at the thought of him drifting from her womb into her arms, and then looking at her as if he had been waiting all ten months of his entire life to meet her. She never got over the birth of her children, Ellen remembered Antonia saying, and her mother fell far short of being the emotional, giddy, sappy mother Ellen could already feel herself becoming. So if her birth, and Aaron's birth could make a mother like theirs so sentimental all these years later, she supposed she
would
never get over the birth of this little boy.

By the time the bell rang, Ellen had already heard the muffled footsteps of someone at the front door, so she had started the process of trying to get on her feet with an armful of baby. Once she was standing, she repositioned the baby and went as quickly as she could move toward the door; because it had to be the answer to her prayers—Aaron. When she got up the three steps to the aperture of the living room and front hall, she could see the side of Aaron's coat through the side window of the door.

So she flung the door open and said with the relief of a mother, “Thank God. I've been worried sick about you. You weren't answering your phone at work or your cell phone. I didn't know what to think.”

“Yeah, I got your messages.” Aaron closed the door behind him and began peeling off his coat. He followed Ellen into the living room and threw his coat across a chair as he descended the steps. “So, I guess you saw the newscast tonight. The one I didn't finish,” he said as he sat on the opposite end of the sofa from where Ellen and the baby sat. He leaned over and looked at the
sleeping baby, then said, “My God what a boy! He is so beautiful, Ellie.”

“Thank you, Aaron. He is wonderful,” she said with a grin stretched so far across her face it barely let her speak. She was so full of pride. But her face grew sober when she continued, “Yes, I did see it.”

Aaron looked at his sister despondently and said, “The difference is, you weren't right in the middle of reporting the news. You didn't have a meltdown on live TV.”

“No, I didn't,” she said, watching her baby move again. “And neither did you. You reacted like any normal person would react, I think, under the same circumstances. These people out here watching you every night, the patients I see, none of them have any idea what it's been like for us from the moment we found out that this man existed.” She stood again, went to the bassinette, and gently put her boy down. Then she quietly tiptoed back to the sofa and sat. “I don't love Clayton Cannon and I don't hate him—same as before. I'm just glad it's over. I'm just glad we know the truth.”

Then Aaron slid a little closer to Ellen and said in a low voice, “And what about that truth, huh? In a million years I didn't think this would—could—be true, but it's true. And this is the thing—I'm not so sure if I simply didn't think it could be true, or if I wanted so badly for it
not
to be true.”

“Oh, Aaron, come on,” Ellen said with the tiniest twitter of laughter, but with just a bit of the real impatience she was actually feeling dangling on the edge of each word. “That's an easy one. Of course we didn't want it to be true. If it wasn't true and Clayton Cannon was absolutely no relation, then we'd get our mother back. After all these years, we'd get our mother back.”

Aaron settled himself back on the sofa. He looked across the room, as if he could see his thoughts over there, then said, “So she really was gone, huh? I mean, you saw it too?”

Ellen leaned sideways toward her brother and slid her hand the rest of the way across the sofa to take his hand. She squeezed it with all the love—motherly, sisterly or whatever kind he needed—and comfort she could send him, and said, “Of course she was gone, Aaron. She was as gone as can be.”

Ellen's little one chirped with a cacophony of his baby sounds,
and it was the sweetest thing that had been in the air in the last hour or so. She watched Aaron as he got up and went haltingly to the bassinette. He peeped in, then looked over at Ellen and asked if he could pick him up. “Sure,” she said. “He's awake, so go ahead.”

Aaron picked up the boy with all the awkwardness and uncertainty in the hunched shoulders and nervous eyes of a childless man. Then Aaron said to him, “One thing you'll never have to worry about is your mother ever leaving you in any way. She's not going anywhere because you're the beginning and the end to her.” He looked up at Ellen and said, “So, I guess the question now is what will we say to her.”

Ellen first watched the sight of her brother holding her son, and it filled her up enough to make her tear. A baby, she thought, with an uncle he'll know who will never have to go out chasing after him to prove he's family, and a mother who will always tell him the truth—even, she thought in this extreme moment, about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy. Why should he believe in anything but God, and her, and his father. And then she narrowed her eyes and looked at Aaron when she said, “No, the question, baby brother, is what will she say to us.”

A
aron could still feel the sense of Ellen's baby in his arms as he stood outside the stage door of the Meyerhoff late that night. A new life was a powerful thing. A force pulling you toward your responsibilities at the same time as it fed you with the limitlessness of its innocence. If Aaron could possibly look at this newborn baby boy and feel, as the boy's uncle, the strength of that pull, he could only imagine what it must feel like to Ellen. And he had to wonder how on earth it would be possible for anything to compromise that feeling, even a mystery that only a few hours ago came to its conclusion.

Aaron was wondering if Clayton Cannon was feeling any “new life” tonight or if things had already gone back to normal for him after he'd turned everyone else's upside down. The only thing more unimaginable to him than his mother being right after all these years was that he would find out about it in the way that he did.

Clayton certainly had his admirers, Aaron noted. There were dozens waiting along with Aaron and who now swarmed around the pianist as he came out the door, as though he were some kind of enormous celebrity. Aaron couldn't imagine how anyone who did what Clayton Cannon did for a living could be considered a celebrity, but he was obviously the only one in this crowd who felt that way. For the next quarter of an hour, Clayton signed autographs and listened with what Aaron was certain was measured humility to songs of praise and adulation. He wondered how
many of the people heaping this praise actually knew anything about classical music and how many of them were just drawn to him because he was some kind of transplanted local hero.

Finally the sycophants dispersed, leaving Aaron alone with Clayton. Maybe twenty paces separated them. Aaron knew right away that Clayton recognized him. Just as he knew right away that Clayton was a little apprehensive about seeing him in this setting. Clayton wasn't waving at him now, maybe because the distance between them wasn't nearly as great, and Aaron wondered if the man had any idea what a furor he'd set off in the newsroom with his little greeting. Considering how slow and small his steps were, Aaron thought that he might have.

“I'm not going to hit you, if that's why you're so hesitant to come closer to me,” Aaron said.

Clayton laughed. “No, I don't think you're going to hit me. Although with the way I put you on the spot earlier in that interview, I wouldn't blame you at all if you wanted to.”

Aaron was surprised at how easily his own smile came to his face. Had he expected Clayton to act in some way that would justify a firestorm of vituperation? If he had—and only now had he begun to realize that he had no idea what to expect when he confronted him—it was pretty obvious that he wasn't going to get anything of the sort. “Good,” he said. “Because I do want to. It's just that I won't.”

“Fair enough.”

The distance eventually closed between them and Clayton reached out his hand to shake. Aaron knew it would have not only been rude, but pointless to refuse, so he took the man's hand. The hand didn't feel particularly special, even though it was half of a pair of the most celebrated hands in all of Baltimore.

“I have a place over at Harbor Court, which you probably know already,” Clayton said. “There's a restaurant over there where we can have a drink and maybe talk some of this out.”

“I think talking might be a good idea right about now.”

Clayton nodded and walked toward the limousine that was waiting for him. The driver already stood with the door open.

“I'll meet you over there,” Aaron said, turning toward his car.

Clayton stopped, which caused Aaron to stop as well. “I was thinking the driver could take both of us.”

Aaron had no intention of accepting a limousine ride from Clayton Cannon. Their relationship, whatever it might turn out to be, was not going to start that way. “That's okay. I'll take my car.”

“Can you give me a ride, then?”

Clayton was grinning and Aaron wasn't sure what to make of that, but he nodded and then watched as Clayton signaled to the driver that he wouldn't be needed. They walked silently to Aaron's car and when Aaron looked across his hood, Clayton still had the faintest hint of a smile on this face. It didn't as much seem that he was being smug, just that he seemed more entertained by this situation than he had the right to be.

“Look, I'm just going to say this right off,” Aaron said. “I found you flip and arrogant and thought you had a hell of a lot of nerve the way you just claimed me and my family in such a public way without making it a private matter first.” Now that the words had started coming, Aaron found that he had no desire to stop them. “It was like it couldn't have meant to you what it had been building up to mean for us for at least all of my life, and my sister's life too. And my mother, please. She knew this day was coming just as sure as my grandmother's arthritic knee could predict rain. But for you, it was just something to say. You just said it, and it wasn't as simple as me just accepting it. You did it wrong. You did it wrong, and in a callous way.”

If Clayton had been chastened by Aaron's outburst, he gave no indication of it. He just nodded, as though to acknowledge that he'd heard something and then said, “Do you think we can get into the car?”

Aaron couldn't be sure if Clayton was being arrogant or was just embarrassed by the scolding. Not feeling like he had much of an alternative and feeling a little embarrassed himself about just spewing out words like that, he opened the car doors and they drove off to Harbor Court in silence. It was no more than a five-minute drive, especially at this time of night, and Aaron was beginning to think they'd get there without talking at all when Clayton spoke up.

“Look,” he said, “I'm a concert pianist. It seems very simple and in its way meaningless because it's so esoteric. I'm not a rock star. I'm not a movie star. I'm this guy who plays this incredible old-world music for high-minded people that tend not to be very
mainstream. So I get to these concert halls filled with these high-minded people and I play as brilliantly as I can play that night, then I go home and wait for the next concert. Except it's not that simple. When crowds form backstage or at the stage door or some guy like yourself sticks a microphone in my face to ask about who knows what, I do the very best I can to keep a part of my most honest, my most personal self close to me. Make no mistake, though, eighty percent of what I do and who I am when I lift up from that piano stool is persona. When I waved hello into the camera at my cousin it was the only thing I could do to keep everybody out of my true heart and true mind.”

He turned to Aaron at that point. “I would imagine it's no different for you,” he said. “I would guess that when you're on the air, we're only seeing about twenty percent of the true Aaron.”

“Well, that's true,” Aaron said, not sure he liked the fact that this instant cousin of his was trying to establish a professional bond as well. “It's just that earlier today, in that moment, it was way too personal, and persona became an unbearable pretense.”

“Trust me, it wasn't premeditated. And I don't think I'd gotten all of the day's revelations into my head when that interview started. I know that the way you got the news was shocking, but it wasn't much more than an hour before that, I had also been shocked by the same news.”

As Harbor Court came into view, Aaron allowed himself a moment to look at things from Clayton's point of view. The man had to be reeling, at least a little bit. There was no way you could learn the things that he had learned today and not be seriously affected by them. Maybe even affected enough to do something foolish, completely out of character, and hurtful to others. It didn't justify what he did, but it did go a long way toward explaining it.

They pulled into the garage and got out of the car. The attendant there made no effort to help them. In fact, he seemed to be actively avoiding doing so.

“Hey, DeWitt,” Clayton said to the attendant. “This is my cousin Aaron Jackson, and this is his car. We'll leave it here for you to take care of.”

The man turned in the other direction. If there was any doubt in Aaron's mind that the attendant was actively slighting them, it was erased when he heard the man mumble, “You don't get the
same privileges for guests, or cousins,” he spat the word “cousin” as though it was a vile thing, “as you do for yourself. He'll have to park it on his own.”

Clayton turned toward Aaron and offered a confused smile. Then he turned back to the attendant and said, a little more forcefully “DeWitt, you've parked the cars of many of my guests down here. What the hell are you talking about?”

DeWitt might be a lot of things, and Aaron was thinking of a few of them right now, but one was clearly not confrontational. He wouldn't make eye contact with Clayton and he began to walk off, even as he kept speaking. “I'm talking about the rules, Mr. Cannon, or Racine, or whoever you're supposed to be. Either follow them or have your cousin take his car someplace else.”

Clayton again turned toward Aaron, but this time there was fury in his eyes. He was very obviously not accustomed to being spoken to like this. He stalked off toward DeWitt, grabbed him by the arm, and got in his face.

“You work for me, or have you forgotten that? Maybe we need to go get your boss, who also works for me, to tell you this. Park my cousin's car and do it now or tomorrow you'll be going back to New Orleans to pick chickens instead of staying here long enough to eventually take your fiftieth piano audition at the Peabody.”

DeWitt was definitely not capable of dealing well with hostility. As Aaron watched the attendant's eyes darting back and forth, he was pretty sure that the kid was wondering if these two men—these two black men—were going to get violent with him. At that moment, Aaron had little or no desire to ease his mind. He brought his keys over to where Clayton and DeWitt were standing and pushed them into the attendant's hands.

“That's my car right there, and these are my keys, and you will take these keys and put my car safely away. But you will not bury it, since I won't be here all night. That is your job. You know how to do your job, right?”

DeWitt tried to project what must have passed for insolence in his mind and tugged his hand away, heading over to Aaron's car.

Clayton seemed flabbergasted. “I don't have any idea…”

“It would be my guess that this chicken-picking car-parker, professional piano tryout here treated you with much more respect before your interview tonight, huh?”

Clayton seemed to understand what was going on all at once and glared at the attendant. For a moment, Aaron thought he was going to charge after the man, but then the air seemed to come out of him and he glanced up at Aaron with a face full of questions.

As they made their way out of the garage and up into the restaurant, Aaron realized that their conversation was going to go a lot differently than either of them might have imagined when they got into the car at the Meyerhoff. Aaron hadn't come here tonight to help Clayton Cannon make his transition into a world that could hate you on sight—though in Clayton's case that was never going to be much of an issue.

But regardless of why he'd come, and he'd never made those reasons entirely clear to himself, it would be the parallels that would be on his mind as they sat there in the Explorer's Lounge. The parallels between Clayton the public figure and Aaron the public figure. And the parallels between Clayton the man, who had unintentionally cast a huge shadow on Aaron's life, just as Aaron had most assuredly cast a huge shadow on the life of the brother he'd only just come to learn existed.