He’d started drinking early. Martinis, manhattans, bubbly pink sherbet punch from a crystal bowl, sacrificing his usually fickle self (he was a beer man like his pops) in the mission to blot the panic he’d felt since he and Leslie had arrived at the three-house, three-course dinner. It wasn’t the whiteness of his fellow partyers that unnerved him so much but the brownness of the help. Hispanic waiters and bartenders. Honest-to-goodness butlers, straight out of his mother’s period romance novels. Don’t be a self-righteous prick, he told himself, knowing they’d chosen to be here, just like he had.
He’d never heard of a “progressive dinner” before that night, but after three decadent courses (appetizers, main course, and now dessert), three rounds of drinks, and a blur of ladies in lipstick and pearls handing him plate after plate of food, making sure their “guest of honor” was taken care of, he was as sedate as a pig led to slaughter. Caesar may have marched into his mind, that fool, but Jules was so soused he couldn’t pinpoint exactly when, where, or why.
Act one of the night was held at a house shaped like a wedding cake, the pink-and-white striped awnings as pretty as icing, and the interior like a dollhouse. Frilled floral curtains that matched the ladies’ sundresses, and pink-and-yellow paisley pillows propped on sofas and armchairs upholstered in plaid. How was it, he wondered boozily, that rich white people could get away with such a wild mix?
He had downed three cups of a candy-sweet drink the silver-haired hostess called a Whiskey Smash to wash away the salt coating his tongue after smoked salmon, whitefish salad, and chicken liver pâté arranged on miniature slices of brown bread and served with tiny sour pickles. There were puffs of all kind. Who knew how many varieties there were—cheese puffs, cream puffs, artichoke and sweet potato. Puffs filled with meat and fish and goat cheese and sundried tomato and pureed this and that. He popped them in his mouth one after the other (even two at a time), figuring that if he kept his mouth full, moving from one waiter’s tray to the next, he might go the whole night without having to talk to anyone.
On to act two they went—a pack, a parade, there must have been a hundred of them, he guessed, walking the moonlit roads. Men in pale linen summer suits, women in strappy sandals and dresses that floated in the sea breeze. A trio of violinists led the way, young women with French braids down their backs, playing jazz with a bluegrass kick. With Leslie on his arm in her flowing flapper-esque dress, and he in the seersucker suit he knew she’d dropped big bills for, it felt as if time had stopped, wound backward. It was a Roaring Twenties starlight romp. All that was missing was the moonshine.
House number two was an enormous brick square, so stolid it reminded him of a fort. Puritanical red-brick and unadorned windows. As plain as the first wedding cake house had been decadent. Even the landscaping was stark, the only ornament a path of lean cypress trees leading from the road to the front entrance. Soldiers keeping watch, Jules thought. When he and Leslie stepped through the front door, he let loose a booming laugh and she nudged him. While the outside was as modest as a nun, the interior was lavish.
“It’s like French countryside meets New Orleans boudoir,” Jules whispered to Leslie. “Where are the ladies of the night?”
“Hush now, the only reason the uppity East ladies let old Mrs. Bentley host anything in this…” She paused.
“Den of iniquity?” Jules finished.
Leslie pinched his ass through the thin seersucker and he yelped. A trio of old men with snowy comb-overs glared his way.
“Is because,” Leslie continued, “she’s an officer’s widow.”
She explained through a wave of giggles (Jules could see his wife too was uncharacteristically tipsy), that the widow hailed from the South, and as soon as her stodgy old husband, the major, had kicked the bucket, she’d hired a flamboyant decorator from the city who had gone to town. Satin-striped wallpaper. Red-and-purple floral upholstery, and so many down-filled throw pillows Jules almost dozed off on the ornate divan. The main courses were just as sumptuous—fatty filet mignon, buttered biscuits, and gravy to die for. He ate until his chest felt tight.
He kept watch over Leslie, who flitted like a white moth from guest to guest. He wasn’t going to have a repeat of the night at the fair, especially when he’d been drinking. And why had he drunk so much, he chastised himself as one after another lady smelling of talcum powder and a splash of Chanel No. 5 introduced herself—Vivian and Edith, several Elizabeths, and two women who went by Bunny. No joke. Their high-pitched delight made his head throb as they complimented him on his dashing/dapper/dandy suit and invited “you and your lovely family” to the Fourth of July party at the club next month.
They bragged about all the island had to offer, and with so much gusto it made the makeup crease around their mostly blue eyes. Like they were selling him an all-inclusive resort package. It’s a real family place. As if, he thought, they’d forgotten there was a factory making war machines only a mile away. They asked questions—had he taken the kids to Singing Beach; down to the docks to see the sailboats; to the Whaling Museum, where you could carve your own scrimshaw keepsake out of a real oyster shell? He nodded and smiled, chitchatted until his head swam. He wasn’t going to make another mistake, like the night of the fair with the orchid lady, putting himself out there by showing off.
The East Avalon boys, most past middle age, had marched straight out of a country-club pamphlet in their jewel-tone golf blazers and butterfly-collar shirts, many in outrageous prints—palm trees, golf tees. He’d seen an old guy in a poodle-print shirt walking around the appetizer party. He was relieved the men all but ignored him. He visited the periphery of a few man-heavy clusters, listened as the men took turns sharing theories on the mysterious graffiti bandit. A chap in a cherry-red golf blazer (it matched his vein-streaked nose) was convinced it was old Captain Armstrong, who, the man explained, had lost his marbles back before Nam. No, no, no, interrupted a skinny dude in plaid trousers with a Parkinsonian quiver. He had heard from so-and-so, brother-in-law to the East Avalon sheriff, that it was the west side kids. Up to no good again. The circle of men bowed their heads. As if, Jules thought, in prayer. He traveled the fringes of one group of brightly clad men (he’d never seen men wear such colors—pink, lavender, coral—not even on Easter Sunday at Calvary Baptist back home) and listened to the conspiracy theories. According to the men of the island, a variety of sources could be responsible for the graffiti—from the CIA to the goddamn Russians to the goddamn hippies to Grudder’s competition, So-and-So Aircraft Company. One old guy blamed William Jefferson Clinton.
The women, in contrast to the men’s vibrant attire, were ethereal in soft pastels and flowing whites that reminded him of his mother’s beloved “angels”—the framed photos of turn-of-the-century society women that had hung on the kitchen walls of his childhood home. White women dressed in theatrical garb and frozen in melodramatic poses for the tableaux vivants they put on in their homes as parlor games. The photos had been handed down from his grandmother Laverne, who’d been a washerwoman for a Gilded Age debutante. And proud of it, his mother had reminded him.
He’d spent many nights hunched over his school textbooks trying to ignore those white women. Their long wavy hair, Cupid’s-bow lips, and gossamer gowns as they played Delilah, a clump of Samson’s locks clutched in a fist; or Diana the huntress, a bow and arrow pointed off-camera. Joan of Arc in a diaphanous gown, one shoulder bare, tied to a makeshift stake wrapped with silk flowers. Her Clara Bow eyes lifted toward heaven in pining adoration of her God, who young Jules had imagined as pale as those martyred women. When he’d returned home for the summer after his first year of college, having taken a history course with a radical professor whose lectures included a healthy dose of social determinism, Jules had explained to his mother that her precious photos were simply rich white women with nothing better to do than play dress-up. Who knows, he’d added, Grandma Laverne probably had to scrub those same costumes after each photo shoot. It had been the one and only time his mother had hit him, slapping him so hard his cheek had stung all through Sunday pot-roast dinner.
His mother’s angels had worn crowns of flowers in their hair and crucifixes around their necks. Avalon Island’s waifish apparitions wore double strands of milky pearls and each her own thumper of a diamond ring. His Leslie looked like Mother Earth incarnate with her makeup-free face and sea-tousled hair. A flower child among the Stepford Wives.
Still, it took him a head-spinning moment to pick her out of the throng of blond, willowy women, and he thought again of the FREE SOUTH AFRICA posters boxed up in the Castle’s enormous garage. He tipped back the last of his drink, the sugar grainy on his tongue, and wondered if those posters would ever see the light of day.
With each progressive dinner stroll, sobriety diminished, and by the time they were making their way to the final leg of the dinner—dessert! the crowd cheered before piling out of the officer’s widow’s house—the east islanders were what his pops would’ve called shitfaced plastered. Stumbling, swaying, slurring and belching. Jules spotted a matronly woman barfing into the weeds on the side of the road, a sight that tipped him and Leslie into a fit of uncontrollable laughter.
“What if,” he whispered, “the barfer is Orchid Lady?”
Leslie shushed him. “Stop. I can’t laugh anymore. It hurts after I stuffed down all those mini eggrolls.”
“It could be her. But,” he paused, “they do all look the same to me.”
“I’m going to pee.” Leslie doubled over. “And I’m not wearing panties.”
As the night wore on, the caterpillars’ feeding swelled until it was a constant hum pulsing from the woods, threatening the parade swerving down the dark roads. Every few steps, Jules heard women screech, watched them shake their composed tresses like dogs after a swim, stomp their high heels, Get it off me! Bristled caterpillars inched across shoulders and bosoms, tangled in hair. He found one tucked all cozy under the collar of his suit jacket. The enchanted Roaring Twenties mood had dissipated. Not even the violinists’ renditions of Big Band tunes—like “Stardust,” a song his mother had played over and over on the record player—could drown out the string of curses that were straight-up 1992.
Shit! Motherfucking caterpillars!
It was a relief to make it to the final house, a four-story colonial whose six tall white pillars reminded him (predictably, he thought) of the plantation houses he’d seen in Hollywood films about slavery. Two of the house’s help—an older black man in a cheap suit and a teenage white girl in a caterer’s vest—stood at the front door, each holding a lint brush in one hand and a small metal tray in the other. The guests separated into two lines, men and women, and shuffled forward to be swiped at delicately so the caterpillars crawling across backs and shoulders, pants legs and skirts, fell into the metal tray.
As he and Leslie waited their turn to be combed, Jules drank in the estate grounds that looked straight out of Garden Design. He pointed out the snapdragons and bachelor’s buttons to Leslie, explaining how the purple smokebush and arching sprays of Sporobolus wrightii created charming texture, but she wasn’t listening, busy scanning the line ahead of and behind her.
“Who,” he asked playfully, “could be more important than my botany lesson?”
“No one in particular,” she said, her eyes still searching. “Everyone and no one, I suppose.”
“Look at those hydrangeas! You think I could talk to the hostess? Find out who’s responsible for such a sweet garden?”
“I’d skip making friends with Mrs. Gernhardt,” Leslie said absentmindedly.
He was starting to wish they’d brought Eva. The little girl had become his shield. She kept him busy chasing after her, feeding her, taking her to the potty … all the mundane activities Jules had performed unenthusiastically back in the city had taken on a new purpose since they’d moved to the island with its never-ending cocktail parties and country-club brunches. Little Eva gave him an excuse to avoid talking to people. And now he was alone. Sure, Leslie was by his side but her head was someplace else and she was making it clear he wasn’t invited on whatever search she was on.
As the long line inched forward, and Jules grew nervous about being brushed by a man who reminded him of his father, he tried to focus on the cutting garden with its tall, delicate orange cosmos spiking between colossal blue hosta. He was about to turn to Leslie, tell her blue was a rare color in a garden, when he spotted the tar-faced jockey tucked among the crimson Spigelia marilandica blooms. A gaslight lamp held aloft in one of the statuette’s black hands.
“Les,” he whispered, but she was no longer at his side.
He searched the line and found her five people back, talking to a woman with hair like lemon meringue.
“This is dreadful, isn’t it?” an old woman in the line opposite said. He heard decades of cigarette smoke in her voice.
He was about to step out of line, join Leslie, when he realized the old woman was speaking to him.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, smiling, shrugging his shoulders. He reached through the narrow corridor between lines and held out a hand. “I’m Jules.”
The woman—she was very old—held out her hand top first, like she was the Queen of England or something. He shook her long white fingers, wondering if he was supposed to kiss her knuckles so swollen they seemed ready to break through the papery skin.
“Veronica Pencott,” she said in an overpronounced accent that reminded him of his mother’s silver-screen movie stars. Staccato consonants and elongated vowels. “We’re neighbors, you and I.”
She was striking. With her silver hair piled in a high bun and her long thin neck, she could’ve been an aging sister to Audrey Hepburn.
“Of course,” he said. “So nice to meet you.”
He glanced back at the jockey statue, regretting the slip immediately because the old woman’s eyes followed his.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “Those pests are everywhere.”
His head swam with alcohol and heavy food and the long night and he almost turned to the old lady, asked, What did you just say? Then he realized she meant the caterpillars crawling across the statue’s shoulders, chest, face. As if the squirming larvae were hatching from the frozen black man’s mouth.
She shook her head, her tongue clicking tut-tut. “Ah, yes, you’ve found Jocko. The island is littered with his plaster brethren. I wish I could apologize on behalf of the Gernhardts. Dick and Mary aren’t the most progressive thinkers.”
“No need,” he said, smiling again. Like a goddamn fool, he thought.
He was sweating through his suit jacket, the damp spreading across his back, under his arms.
“It is quite crude.” The old woman raised a penciled brow. “I’ve seen more elegant versions.”
What she meant, Jules knew, were versions that looked less like black men and more like white men wearing blackface.
“There was,” the woman drawled, “a fascinating PBS special on George Washington. Jocko was—in Washington’s words—his faithful groomsman.”
His boy, Jules thought.
“Of course,” she continued, “he was just a child. My grandson’s age, I believe. But he volunteered—or so they say—to watch Washington’s horses the night he crossed the Delaware and surprised the British forces.”
“How’d that turn out?” Jules asked, realizing too late how contrary he sounded.
“Quite good for Washington,” the old woman said. “Poor Jocko died still tied to the horses. The reins frozen solid in his hands.”
“Devoted to the end.”
“Such are the ways of war,” the old woman said with a sigh. “There will always be boys to sacrifice.”
Colored boys, Jules thought.
“There are,” she said, “some Afro-Americans” (Jules stopped himself from updating her) “who have claimed Jocko, or the lawn jockey rather, as a beacon—quite literally—for the Underground Railroad. They believe the statue represents a proud moment in United States history.”
Her knobbly fingers pointed at the statuette, and he had to stop himself from telling her not to point, not to bring anyone else’s attention to the grotesque thing. Leave it to white people—the lucky innocents (there was Mr. Baldwin again)—to spin something good out of plain bad. Putting up with racists, his father had explained, was just one of the black man’s many burdens. He’d made it clear to a young Jules there wasn’t anything to be done about it. No use punching a concrete wall, no use cutting the trunk of a tree when its roots run deep—his father’s pockets had been deep with clichés to explain away the unexplainable. The unchangeable.
It wasn’t like Jules had never spent time around rich whites. He’d attended four-course meals at his professors’ homes in the toniest neighborhoods surrounding Harvard. But the liberal citizens of Cambridge would’ve cut off an arm before they put a caricature of a black man on their lawn, if only to save face.
There was a cheer from the front of the line near the white pillars, and the ladies’ line, the old woman included, shuffled forward before Jules could respond.
Leslie took her place beside him. Thank fucking God.
“Sweetheart, come here for a sec?” He smiled at the lady with the lemon meringue hair. “You can have her right back.”
“What’s up, babe?”
“You see that?” he paused, “Over there?”
She stared into his eyes instead of at the statue, and he realized it was the first time they’d really looked at each other since the move.
“I knew it was here,” she said, her voice flat and cold. “It’s been here since I was a kid. I’m sorry. I should’ve taken you home after the last house.”
“It’s not your fault,” he said. “It just caught me off guard, I guess.”
“And then Mrs. Gundersen called you boy. I swear to God, I almost slapped her.”
Her fingers plucked at her white-blond eyebrows. He wanted to pull her hand away, or, at least, tell her to stop. Those poor torn up eyebrows, he’d thought so often over the years.
“Sweetie, that’s crazy,” he said, “she called me a city boy.”
“You know what she meant.” Now she was angry with him. He shouldn’t have used that word. Crazy. Not after she’d had such trouble recovering from the last miscarriage.
“Do we know what she meant?” He wished she hadn’t said anything. Now she was making him paranoid.
“These fucking animals.” Her face was locked in that sugary smile as she scanned the crowd, and the contrast unnerved him, made his full stomach flip.
He looked around. Had anyone heard her?
He hugged her close and kissed the top of her head, which smelled like sun and shampoo, ignoring the look they got from the old men passing around cigars by the fountain. She’d lost weight since the move and her shoulder bones poked his side.
“If you hate them so much,” he whispered, “why are you working so hard to kiss their asses?”
She looked up at him with parted lips. He had surprised her. And maybe, he thought, angered her. But her sudden rage had him wondering if his sweet Leslie Day, who could be as vicious as a mother lion when wronged, had another agenda. Why had she had brought him—brought their children—to this island?
“Don’t worry,” she said, the serene smile renewed. “They may look happy. But their island is sinking.” Her voice was heavy with disgust, like she was ready to spit a mouthful of phlegm. “Bet you one hundred big ones this place—all of it—the factory, their mansions, the whole island is underwater by October.”
He felt the absurd urge to crack a joke. Standing in line waiting to have caterpillars combed off his clothes, on a strange island miles from his people—city people, colored people—and Leslie getting all fairy-tale vengeful and shit was too much.
“Big ones?” he said. “One hundred of ’em? You don’t say.”
She looked up at the black sky and he realized she was trying not to cry.
“Leslie, baby,” he stepped out of line, escaped the boundaries of their gender, a tiny revolution that thrilled him. He turned her to face him. She tried not to smile so he knew she felt it too. “We came here to live in a castle. We don’t ever have to leave its walls.”
“I love you, Julius.”
She kissed him. Their teeth clinked. She poked her tongue at his lips. He pulled away but she pulled his face forward like it was a mask she wanted to wear. He heard snickers. Whispering. When she released him, he took a long breath. The cluster of old boys, unlit cigars in their mouths, stared.
Jules thought of Caesar and the kiss that preempted the massacre in the Curia of Pompey. He stopped himself from making a bad joke, whispering in her pearl-studded ear, Et tu, Brute?
The ladies’ line crept forward. Leslie waved. “See you inside!”
The old black butler was skin and bones. As thin as Jules’s pops was when he was dying. He watched the old man brush each man’s shoulders and back, slow and gentle, like he was combing prized thoroughbreds. Jules was two spots away when he saw the folded bill slip from a guest’s hands into the butler’s hand, the exchange punctuated by a subtle nod of the old man’s salt-and-pepper head. Jules had nothing. Hadn’t even brought his wallet, and when it was his turn, the old man’s shaky hands brushing over Jules’s broad shoulders and up and down each of his arms, he couldn’t bear to look the guy in the eyes. He mumbled, “Thank you, sir,” and walked through the white columns and into the chandelier light.