“We can really talk,” Melody said. “Are you still at the University School?” She sat close enough beside him to hold onto his hand.
“Yes. I’m going into seventh grade.”
“That’s the year I was going to take you out, because no girls can enroll — is that still true? No girls after sixth grade?”
Jeff sensed that she wanted him to talk about school, but he was bemused by sensations and couldn’t chatter. He felt as if he had been cold, frozen down to his bones and into the marrow, and suddenly now he lay under the warmth of the sun. He could feel himself growing easy, relaxed, under the warmth; he couldn’t distract himself from the enjoyment of that. It had something to do with the way his mother held his hand, held to his arm when they walked, touched him with her glance. His sensations were half-remembered, memory growing stronger with every minute he was with her.
“How do you do at school?”
“All right. I get some B’s, mostly C’s.”
“B’s without working or B’s with working?” she asked.
“With working,” he said. The silver and turquoise rings looked wrong on her hand, too big and clumsy for her fingers.
“Oh dear, you must have gotten my brains, not your fathers’s,” she said. “Poor Jeffie, is that hard on you?”
“No,” he said, “I don’t mind.”
She laughed. “I never did myself. His brains don’t do him much good, do they? I remember when you left for school for your first day, do you remember?” He shook his head. “You were quiet, but you weren’t frightened. After all, you’d been in day care for years. I even remember the first time ever I saw you. In the hospital — oh Jeffie, I’d never even suspected what it would be like. Having a baby. They tell you, but you never take it in. I thought I’d died and gone to hell, the pain — and the horrible bright lights and sterile boxwalls with machines on them, and the nurses who didn’t care about what you were going through. I dream about it sometimes.”
“I’m sorry,” Jeff said.
“Then, when they brought you to me — after I came out of the anesthetic — this little baby, so little and helpless. Your eyes were open but you couldn’t see anything really, I knew that. Your fingers were all curled up, and then when I nursed you — ” She looked up at him. “Does that embarrass you?”
“No,” Jeff lied.
“Then I knew that none of the pain mattered a whit, as long as you were the result of it. It was like ten Christmases all at once. I couldn’t breathe properly.” Her voice caressed the memory. “I didn’t mind that or the bleeding. None of it could make even a dent in my happiness. Sometimes I think that was the happiest time of my life. And we were always together, for as long as I could, we’d go everywhere together. You’d look at me with your big eyes, you’d only look at me, always — Your eyes have changed,” she observed.
Jeff didn’t know what to say.
“I’m so glad to see you again,” Melody declared. “You don’t know how I’ve missed you. Have you missed me? Was it very terrible for you? Is it still? No, I don’t think I really want to hear about that, it’ll just make me feel more guilty. And besides, it’s all behind us now, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” was all Jeff could say.
“Come on, why are we sitting here? I want to show you my city. You can walk for hours and never see it all. Come on, Jeffie.”
They ambled up streets and down alleys, through a church graveyard, and along a business street where they peered into the windows of antique shops. She showed him the oldest part of the city, where houses built in Revolutionary times were being renovated. At last they stopped at a small restaurant for something to drink.
Melody wanted to sit outside. The glass-topped tables were small, the chairs set on uneven bricks, the area roofed over by a rough wooden trellis over which grapevines had been trained. They sat in dappled sunlight. Their table had a little vase of fresh daisies on it, the napkins were linen, brick walls enclosed the garden. Melody studied the handwritten menu, Jeff studied her. She looked at him mischievously over the top and asked if he wasn’t hungry, because she was. They ordered sandwiches and iced tea, which Melody said was very good here. “Do you like it?” Melody asked him, as he ate his sandwich.
“It’s good.”
“No, you silly goose, the restaurant. It’s my absolute favorite for lunch; I’d eat here every day if I could afford it. Do you?”
“Very much.”
“Why?” she asked him. Her gray eyes were teasing. “Well, Jeffie, you don’t say very much and I really do want to hear what you have to say. I don’t want to pry into your secret thoughts, so I thought — if he’ll talk to me about the scenery, then I can hear what he has to say.”
Jeff, who felt by this time as if all the hard frozen places within him had melted away, smiled happily back at her. “I like it — the way I like Gambo’s house, and everything we’ve seen today — because . . . it looks as if somebody has taken the trouble to make it pretty. And it’s lasted such a long time. It makes my eyes feel good, because — it’s the same way you look.”
“A compliment? Then you’re not disappointed in me?”
Jeff just shook his head.
“But don’t you have any questions? There should be so many questions you want to ask me and you haven’t asked me any. Not one.”
As if she had summoned them up, Jeff realized that he did have questions, answers he badly wanted to hear. “Yes,” he said.
“Then ask them, for heaven’s sake — what do you think I’m here for?”
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Oh dear, the worst first.” She smiled across the table at him. “I’m thirty-two. What do you think of that?”
Then you were twenty when I was born. Isn’t that young?”
She leaned her chin on her hands and nodded her head. He had the feeling she wanted to laugh at him, but if she did, her laughter would be friendly.
“How tall are you?”
“Five-six and a half.”
“Where did you go?”
“Home. Here. I came right here, and I’ve been here ever since. I grew up here, Gambo raised me, well, from the time I was nine. This is my real home.”
“What about your parents?”
“My daddy was killed in the Second World War, and after a few years my mother remarried. He was a nice enough man, I guess, but — they moved up to Minnesota, we all did, and he didn’t have any luck. One summer, when I was eight, I visited Gambo — and I was so happy. There wasn’t all the worry about money and keeping jobs and to make it worse my mother had had a couple of children in the meantime — I don’t know. It was what you said, as if somebody had taken so much trouble to make things look nice. So I asked Gambo if I could live with her. It didn’t matter how much it cost because she’s rich. And we got along so well, she sort of adopted me. I’m the only young person in her family, so it’ll all come to me someday anyway.”
“I thought you said your mother was her daughter.”
“She is. Otherwise how could Gambo be my grandmother?”
“But didn’t you say there were other children? So you have brothers and sisters or something,” Jeff said.
Melody shrugged. “Maybe, I don’t know; they don’t keep in touch — and they’re not the same kind of people at all. Gambo’s never even seen them.”
“Why not?”
“My mother never brought them here. Well, she couldn’t afford the journey, not on what he makes, so as far as Gambo’s concerned I’m the only one. More questions?”
“How old were you when you married the Professor?”
“Nineteen — I dropped out of school. He was my teacher in the World History survey course. That takes me back, it really takes me back.”
“Why did you go away?” Jeff finally asked.
“Oh, Jeffie.” She reached across to put the palm of her hand against his cheek. “There were so many reasons. What does the Professor tell you?”
Jeff couldn’t answer. Th
at irritated her, so he said quickly, “I never asked him. We never talk about you.”
At that she laughed again and clapped her hands together. “Isn’t that like him? Just like him, just exactly like him. I thought I could save him, I thought I could wake him up, but I never could. Nobody ever could, that’s what I think now. Look,” she suggested, “you just got here, and you don’t know me, you ought to get to know me and then see what you think. Whether I could have been happy with him. OK?”
“OK.”
“Is that all the questions? After all this time?”
“Well — what are those rings?”
She held her right hand out. “These” — she touched the turquoises with a fingertip — “were given to me by a man I’m dating. You’ll like him. I hope you’ll like him. It’s his car. And this one” — the old-fashioned looking ring, with the reddish stone — “I found in an antique store. I thought it might be worth something, if the stone was a ruby, and the dealer didn’t have any idea of what she had — she was just some old lady who didn’t know anything; she had no business being in business, I felt so sorry for her — So I bought it, on speculation. But when I had it valued . . .” She threw her hands up, empty. “But it’s a hundred dollar ring I got for three dollars.”
“And that one?”
She spread her hands out on the tabletop. “The pearl Gambo gave me for my sixteenth birthday. It was one of hers.”
Jeff looked at her hands, the fingernails glistening with clear polish, the nails shaped, the delicate bones at her wrists. He reached across and put his own hand over hers, surprised at himself for doing it. “You have beautiful hands,” he said to her.
She understood what he was feeling, what he really wanted to say to her. “I love you too,” she answered him.
Melody had left her purse behind, so Jeff paid for the lunch out of the twenty dollars of his own money. The bill came to twelve dollars, to which Melody insisted that he add a three dollar tip. “Do you know what waitresses get paid in places like this? A dollar fifty an hour, and the owners get away with it because it’s not a big enough business to require minimum wage. So they depend on tips.”
Jeff took the change he had just been given out of his wallet. “Were you a waitress?”
“No, but I know some people who were. And part of it is because they’re women, they get away with paying women less and the poor women just . . . take it. I don’t want you to be like that, Jeffie.”
Jeff nodded his agreement. He would try. He felt guilty that he had never thought of it before.
Back at Gambo’s house, Melody took him into the kitchen and introduced him to the black woman who was working out there, Miss Opal. The kitchen, back behind the house and attached to it by a short hallway, was a low-ceilinged, dark room, its temperature even higher than that outside because of the heat from the big range. Miss Opal had set out two trays, for the old ladies, she said. They wanted afternoon tea in their rooms, so they would be rested up for the celebration dinner in young Jefferson’s honor. Miss Melody, she said, had had several phone calls, the messages were written down. Melody told Jeff that her friends didn’t believe she had a son, they didn’t believe she was taking some days off just to be with him, she guessed she wouldn’t bother returning those calls too quickly because she had told them and told them she wouldn’t be available to help out. She told him to wait there, she would go up and get her guitar then they would sit outdoors. “I’ll serenade you.”
When they were settled outdoors, Jeff said, “I didn’t know you played the guitar,” as he watched her tune the strings.
“I just started,” she told him. She sat cross-legged, her feet tucked up under her bright skirt, her hat set beside her on the grass. Jeff lay on his stomach, resting his chin on his folded arms so he could look at her. She watched her own hands as she played and sang. “What kind of songs do you like?” she asked him.
Jeff couldn’t tell her any. She forgave him that and simply played what she wanted. Her songs were mostly sad. “Where have all the flowers gone?” one asked, then, “Where have all the young men gone?” They had all gone to war and been destroyed so the song asked, “When will they ever learn?” She sang a song about a calf being taken to market, a song with a refrain in the voice of the uncaring winds: “Calves are easily bound and slaughtered, never knowing the reason why,” she sang; “But whoever treasures freedom, like the swallow must learn to fly.” She sang a song he rather liked, about a mine caving in, in Nova Scotia. She played the same thin strum on the guitar for that one that she had played for the others, but Jeff could hear in the song itself how the guitar might sound behind the melody line, how it should sound, strong and rhythmic: “For all their lives they dug a grave, two miles of earth for a marking stone, two miles of earth for a marking stone.”
The guitar didn’t sound so good, but Melody’s voice — low and sweet, holding onto the notes — poured over him. She sang as if she believed each and every word. Her eyes shone with sincerity and she curved over the instrument like a flower bending in the wind.
Jeff watched and listened, basking in his own feelings: of being with his own mother, who wrapped her love around him; of being — strange as it seemed — home, where he was welcome; of waking up to a world where his help was needed to right what was wrong; of lying on soft grass under trees hundreds of years old beside walls that his ancestors had built; of being logy with the perfumed heat of the day.
Melody had to go out to a party that night. She piled her hair on top of her head, put on a lacy blouse and a long patchwork skirt, and kissed Jeff goodnight. “I have to go,” she said. He didn’t mind and said so. “See you in the morning,” she said, her hand lingering on the top of his head just as his eyes lingered on the place where she had been standing, long after she had gone out the door.
He sat with Gambo and the two aunts in a living room dominated by a big color television set. Gambo held the remote control box in her hand, and she turned the sound down so that she could talk with Jeff, who sat beside her on a satin-covered love seat. The two aunts had straight-backed chairs drawn up close to the television screen.
“You’re a Boudrault and you don’t even know what that means,” Gambo said. “There’s so much to tell you.” Jeff looked alert and concentrated on not being distracted by the moving figures on the screen at the corner of his vision. Gambo folded her hands on her lap. The large diamond ring she wore on her left hand glittered. On her right hand, a ring of small diamonds surrounded a flat green stone. Her eyes followed Jeff’s glance.
“An heirloom.” She held out her right hand for Jeff to look more closely at the ring. “My great-grandmother’s engagement ring, made to order here in Charleston. She loved jade. Her collection of jade figurines is in the bank now — the cost of insuring it is prohibitive, over sixty pieces, each exquisite. The goldsmith worked her initial into the setting, but you can only see that under a magnifying glass, the letter D. They say the goldsmith was in love with her. Of course, everybody was: she was a great beauty in her day. We had a portrait, but like so much else it has been lost to us. I never saw her. She died young, in childbirth, but this ring my grandmother left to my mother, my mother to me. Dolores, her name was Dolores. This other” — she held up her left hand — “was my engagement ring and I always wear it. But the jade is dearer to me as the years go on. He was killed, you know, in the First War, and I was left with my memories and the one child. Just as Melody’s poor father was killed in the Second War. The Boudrault women have married young. They have not been fortunate in their marriages, not fortunate at all.” Her voice was dry, cracked like fine china after years of wear. She went on and on, until Jeff had a sense of family spreading out around them endlessly, and only an hour later, when she was lost in reminiscences, did he understand that the names she mentioned, the people she spoke of, were most of them long ago dead. The family spread not out and around, but back, back into time. At last, she looked at him and said, “I feel — as if I ca
n pour myself into you, everything I’ve learned, everything I know, and you will take it on into your life.” Then she rose and withdrew from the room. The aunts — only they weren’t aunts, Jeff remembered, but cousins from different branches of the family — remained where they were, staring into the television, chattering like birds to themselves. Jeff too went upstairs to bed.
In his room, he changed to pajamas, folding his clothes neatly into the drawers, putting soiled socks and underwear away. He went down to the bathroom, peed, lowered the toilet seat, brushed his teeth, then washed his face so that he could have the pleasure of drying it on the thick, soft towel. The night was too warm for even a sheet.
There was something about the house and the women in it that made him feel contented, as if to be contented was something you actually did. He thought lazily that he would figure out what it was and lay back on the softness of the bed, under the dark air. But he fell asleep.
After the first couple of days, Jeff didn’t see so much of his mother, unless she took him with her to a meeting or to help with stuffing envelopes or distributing posters. But her presence marked the day for him. She knew, somehow, what he wanted her to do, or say, as if she could read his mind and know how he was feeling. It wasn’t that Melody did exactly what he wanted to do, but that everything she did made him feel good, feel loved. It was as if she could see what he saw the way he saw it; as if they were close, even when they weren’t actually together. Whenever they were together her eyes shone with affection and pride. He knew he was doing the right things for her, learning about discrimination and pollution, being no trouble to Miss Opal, who praised him for his personal neatness, good appetite, and gentlemanly manners. Gambo talked to him and talked to him, until Jeff had pieced together the names and events so that he could follow her conversation and ask her the questions she wanted to answer. The aunts seldom spoke, but he was conscious of their admiring and approving eyes. During the days he wandered around the historic parts of the city, or traveled by bus to scenic spots beyond its industrialized outer ring, to see plantations and gardens. He had, in the first days with Melody, spent all of his money, even the four dollars left from Brother Thomas’s ten dollars when she had bought the most expensive possible bottle of local wine for him. However, he found that Gambo was more than happy to finance an expedition. If he told her at breakfast how much he needed, she would take out her black change purse and give him the dollars he asked for.