MRS. OLIVIA BLANCHARD CARY glanced out of the window of her pleasant residence in West Philadelphia and saw her daughter Teresa, her books under her arm, strolling down the street, with two other little girls similarly laden. One of her companions, a very fair blonde with dark blue eyes and gay gilt hair, Mrs. Cary identified immediately as Phebe Grant. She was not so sure of the identity of the third youngster. Closer inspection revealed to her however the dark brown skin, the piquant features, the sparkling black eyes and the abundant, silky and intensely curly locks of Marise Davies. Mrs. Cary frowned. “As often as I’ve told Teresa to keep away from that Davies child!” she murmured angrily to herself.
She met them at the front door. The countenances of the three children were in striking contrast. Teresa’s wore a look of apprehension, Phebe’s of bland indifference, Marise’s of acute expectancy.
“Good-afternoon, Teresa,” Olivia said. “Good-afternoon children. I’m afraid it’s not best for Teresa to have so much company today. She gets excited and worn out and it’s hard afterwards for her to settle down to her lessons. I don’t mind if one of you stays. Phebe, suppose you come in and play with her a while, and, Marise, you can come back another time.”
“Tomorrow?” asked Marise, whose black eyes had never left Olivia’s face.
“Well, hardly tomorrow,” the woman replied, flushing a little. She really disliked this child. “Horrid, little pushing thing,” she inwardly apostrophized. But aloud she continued. “Hardly tomorrow, but some other day very soon, I am sure. Come on in Phebe.”
“No, thank you, Mrs. Cary,” the child answered, pushing back the thick gilt hair which framed her face. “I was with Marise first, so I’ll go on with her. We were just going to ask you to let Teresa come along with us. My mother expects me to be at Marise’s if I’m not home.” She spoke simply, no trace of the avenging angel about her.
The two children, hand in hand, backed off the bottom step on which they had been precariously teetering. Marise, ignoring Olivia completely, waved a slender hand toward Teresa. “Come on over whenever you can. My mother doesn’t mind.”
From the pavement both looked back once more to wave a careless farewell to their school-mate. “G’bye, Treesa!”
“Treesa!” Olivia echoed angrily. “Why can’t they pronounce your name right?” She glanced sharply at her daughter’s tear-stained face. “What’s the matter, Teresa?”
The little girl wiped away a tear with the back of her hand.
“Mamma, why can’t I play with Marise? Of course Phebe’s all right and I like her very, very much. But I like Marise best. She’s such fun.”
Her mother sighed. “I have,” she thought, “the stupidest children and husband too in the world. Why can’t they see this thing the way I want it?” Not unkindly she took out her handkerchief and wiped the child’s eyes.
“Now, Teresa, it isn’t worth while going all over this matter again. I don’t mind your having Phebe here; in fact I rather like Phebe. But I don’t like to have colored people in the house if we can possibly avoid it.”
“But, Mamma, Phebe is colored too.”
“I know she is but nobody would ever guess it.”
“They don’t have to guess it; she tells it; she stood right up in class and said so.”
“What nonsense!” Olivia countered angrily. “What occasion would a girl, looking like her, have to talk about color?”
“She didn’t say it of her own accord, Mamma. The teacher was having a review lesson on races one day and she asked Phebe what race she belonged to and Phebe said: ‘I belong to the black or Negro race.’”
“What did the teacher say?”
“She just giggled at first and then she said: ‘Well, Phebe, we all know that isn’t true. Don’t try to be funny. Now tell us what race you do belong to, dear!’ And Phebe said it all over again. She said: ‘I belong to the black or Negro race.’”
Olivia gasped. “Silly little thing! The idea of a girl as white as she saying that! What happened then?”
“The teacher had her stay after school and Phebe showed her the picture of her mother. She wears it in a locket around her throat all the time. And her mother is colored. Not black, you know, Mamma, but real, real brown. Almost as brown as Marise, you know. You should have seen how surprised Miss Packer was!”
In spite of herself her mother was interested. “What did she say then?”
“She looked awful queer and asked Phebe if she looked like her father and Phebe said she looked exactly like him . . . and that he didn’t live here and that he was married to someone else. . . . And then Miss Packer turned kind of red and never said another word. . . . How can Phebe’s father not be married to her mother, Mamma?”
“Oh, I don’t know . . . probably they couldn’t get along so they separated. Married people often do that. They call it getting a divorce.” Hurriedly she changed the subject: “Did the children act any different to Phebe after that?”
Teresa considered this a moment. “Well, you see, Mamma, the children don’t act any special kind of way to Phebe anyway, because Phebe don’t care anything about them. The only child Phebe likes a whole lot in school is Marise.”
“I thought she liked you.”
“O she does, but not the same way she likes Marise. Marise is so smart you know. She can think up all the most wonderful things. Why she changed her name herself. It used to be Maria. And she said that was all wrong. She said she didn’t look like a Maria person and she didn’t feel like a Maria person. . . . Isn’t that funny, Mamma? And she can sing and play and dance. You never saw anyone dance like her. And she can think up such smart things to say. I don’t see why you don’t like her, Mamma.”
“I don’t dislike her,” her mother retorted in exasperation. “You don’t understand these things, yet, Teresa. But you will when you’re older . . . and you’ll be grateful to me. I just don’t want you to have Marise and people like that around because I don’t want you to grow up among folks who live the life that most colored people have to live . . . narrow and stultified and stupid. Always pushed in the background . . . out of everything. Looked down upon and despised! . . .
“Teresa, how many times must I tell you these things? You and your father and Christopher almost drive me crazy! You’re so willfully perverse about it all! Here we could all be as white as the whitest people in Philadelphia. When we moved in this neighborhood not a soul here but thought we were white! And your father is never happy unless he has some typical Negro hanging about. I believe he does it to tease me. And now here you are, all wrapped up in this Davies child!”
“But, Mamma, what difference does it make? And anyway, there’s Oliver!”
There indeed was Oliver.
Olivia with very little love for her husband, Dr. Cary, with no enthusiasm, as such, for the institution of matrimony and with absolutely no urge for the maternal life, had none the less gone cheerfully and willingly into both marriage and motherhood because she believed that through her children she might obtain her heart’s desire. She could, she was sure, imbue her offspring with precept and example to such an extent that it would never enter their minds to acknowledge the strain of black blood which in considerable dilution would flow through their veins.
She could be certain of their color. Her twin sister and brother, only two years older than her own children, had proven that. It was worth every one, she felt, of her labor pains not to hold in her arms little Teresa, her first-born,—but to gaze on that tiny, unremarkable face and note the white skin, the thick, “good” dark hair which covered the frail skull; to note that the tell-tale half-moons of which she had so often read were conspicuously absent. It seemed to her that the tenuous bonds holding her never so slightly to her group, and its station in America, were perceptibly weakened. Every time she appeared in public with the little girl she was presenting the incontestable proof of her white womanhood. . . .
And when Christopher, the second child was born, she was not the least fraction worried over the closely curling tendency of his slightly reddish hair. She had known Jews with hair much kinkier. Time and care would attend to all that. And meanwhile his skin was actually fairer than that of his little sister, his features finer and better chiselled. He had, she felt, a look of “race,” by which she meant of course the only race which God, or Nature, for hidden, inscrutable purposes, meant should rule.
But she had not reckoned with the children’s father. Christopher had finally established in his mind the fact of his chaste wife’s frigidity. When he fully realized that her much-prized “aloofness,” instead of being the insigne of a wealth of feeling, was merely the result of an absolute vacuum of passion, young as he was, he resolved not to kick against the pricks.
He had, he told himself, been sold, as many a man before him had; tricked as completely by his deliberate submission to ideals, entirely false to his nature and his desires, as a young girl might be by her first surrender to a passion which her heart tells her is natural, though her mind and breeding might warn her of its inexpediency. The first of that hardening process which was so to change him did have its inception during this period, but as he had some humor and a sense of justice beyond his years he refused to let the iron enter his soul.
Moreover, Olivia, though not a “comfortable” housekeeper, was a clean and a considerate one. She really never interfered with his “papers”; she never, even from the beginning, troubled him with the delinquencies of the help. And in those days, and for some years to come, she never exceeded the budget which he allowed her. Also her obvious willingness, even eagerness, to have children pleased and touched him. In his total ignorance of the plans which nestled eternally in the back of her sleek, dark head, he reasoned that a woman so fond of children must by a very natural extension develop eventually a certain tenderness for their father. So he hoped for many things and forgave her much with a somewhat rueful and yet amused indulgence.
Until he found in her the unalterable determination to carry himself and his children definitely across the narrow border-line of race! This too he at first regarded with some indulgence, but her unimaginative persistence finally irritated him. He was too busy to undertake completely the education of the children—he was responsible for their maintenance. But he could let them see his manifest respect and liking for many men who had been his boyhood friends and who bore the badge of their mixed blood plainly upon them.
He told the children every story he knew about the heroes of the race. Olivia would have preferred them to be ignorant of their own remote connection with slavery. But he did strive to make them realize the contrast between their present status and that of their black forebears. He emphasized the racial progress, stressing the brief span of years in which it had been accomplished.
And the children, straightforward, serious little things without an ounce of perversity in their make-up, were entranced, thrilled. Perhaps because they never met with any open expression of prejudice they seemed to find their greatest interest and amusement among the children of their father’s friends who most definitely showed color. For a brief while Christopher’s hero was Crispus Attucks; Teresa’s brave Sojourner Truth. But later, through lack of nourishment, their interest in this phase of history died.
When the children were four and a half, and six, respectively, Olivia found she was going to have another baby. She was really very happy about it with a naiveté and a frankness which, Dr. Cary, as before, found inexpressibly moving and charming. Within herself she was making plans. This child should be her very own. She would make her husband believe that she needed a change, she would take the child away and live with him apart for two, three, perhaps for five years. In appearance, in rearing, in beliefs he should be completely, unrelievedly a member of the dominant race. She was a much wiser woman than she had been six years ago. The prospect made her gay and charming, almost girlish; far younger too than her twenty-eight years, younger indeed it seemed to her husband than she had ever been in those remote, so precious years of training.
“This one will be a boy,” she told big Christopher gaily. “He’ll be the handsomest and most attractive of us all. And I’ll name him after myself. An Oliver for your Christopher.”
Her prophecy was, except in one respect, absolutely true. She had boasted of the ease with which her children had entered the world. But this one she was confident would outstrip them all.
“I’m sure I’ll be up very soon, Chris,” she told her husband. She adopted one of her rare moods of coquetry. “And when I do get up, you ought to reward a dutiful wife. How would you like to send her and your baby son on a little trip to England?” Her eyes were bright with secrecy. He would, he assured her, do anything, give her anything she wanted within his range.
But the unforeseen happened. The baby arrived in due course. “Hale and hearty,” said his beaming father. There never was a baby haler and heartier. But Olivia did not fare so well. She had one sinking spell after another. For the first time she was unable to nurse her child. She was to meet with no excitement or shock and as the baby was doing very well it was best for her not to be concerned with him for a while. She was to concentrate on recovering her strength. So that it was a full month before the baby was set before her, crowing and laughing and persistently and futilely striking his little hands together.
Olivia sat up, arms outstretched to receive him. Her baby! Her eyes stretched wide to behold every fraction of his tiny person. But the expectant smile faded as completely as though an unseen hand had wiped it off. She turned to her husband sharply:
“That’s not my baby!”
But it was her baby. It was a boy, handsomer and more attractive than the other children. He was named Oliver. . . . They had been calling him that for a month, her delighted children assured her . . . his hair was black and soft and curly . . . and he had the exact bronze gold complexion of Lee Blanchard!
She had reckoned without her own father!
For the first time since she had known the futile anger of her early childhood she slipped into a black, though silent, rage. Her early anger had been directed against her father. This later ebullition included both her husband and her helpless little boy. She had no special beliefs about prenatal influences but she did observe to herself in the dark and tortuous recesses of her mind that if big Christopher had not been so decidedly a Negrophile, the appearance of their child would have been otherwise.
The little fellow was of a remarkable beauty. Through one pretext and another Olivia contrived not to be seen on the street with him. But the two older children and his father would proudly conduct him anywhere. And wherever he went he attracted attention . . . infinitely more so than his brother and sister had ever earned. Added to this was an undeniable charm of manner and of mind. He possessed not only a winning smile and a genuine sweetness of attitude and conduct but he was unquestionably of remarkable mental endowment . . . If he had possessed an ounce of self-confidence, or even of the ordinary childish conceit which so often marks the “bright boy,” he might easily have become unbearable. But even from babyhood little Oliver sensed in himself one lack which early automatically destroyed any root of undue self-esteem. He knew he did not have his mother’s love. . . . Worse than that through some strange childish, unfailing perception he was sure of her active but hidden dislike for him.
When he was home Olivia fed him with the same food, watched over and satisfied his physical welfare as completely and meticulously as she watched over that of the other members of her household. But she never sought his company, she never took him riding or walking as she did the others, never bestowed on him more than the perfunctory kiss of salutation. . . . When people, struck with his appearance and healthy grace, praised him before his face as so often they did, he would turn sometimes toward her thinking dimly that now she must be proud of this fine little boy who was her son. But he never surprised on her countenance a single flash of delight or pride or love.
It saddened his childish days . . . As soon as he became old enough to be from under her surveillance Olivia saw to it that he spent most of his time with her own mother in Boston or with her husband’s mother in South Philadelphia. In both of these homes he met with the intense affection and generous esteem which his finely keyed little nature so craved. Gradually he became able to adjust himself to the inexplicable phenomenon of a mother who not only did not love with especial signal fondness, but who did not love at all, her youngest son. By sheer strength of will he forced himself to steel his brave and loyal heart against this defection and to crush down his pain.
His father had some sense of what was happening and in his heart he bore his wife a deep and unyielding dislike.
TERESA loved the atmosphere of Marise’s house. It was not at all like her own. Olivia saw to it that the walls were freshly “done over” every year. Sometimes a cherished piece of furniture which just suited the curves of your thin growing body would suddenly disappear to be replaced by another intensely new and different and uncomfortable. But in Marise’s house the decorations were rather dark and worn and indistinguishable; nobody cared if occasionally a small soiled finger traced over a scroll or a twisted design on wall or table cover. The furniture too was old and restful. And in the large old-fashioned sitting-room in the second story back you could make as much noise, laughing, singing, romping as you pleased.
Years afterward when all the details of her childhood, despite its unsatisfactory character, seemed to merge into a delectable vision, Teresa always saved the memory of her sparse visits to Marise as the acme of the few enjoyments which life had offered. Once in later, listless days she read a line from a poem by Claude MacKay:
“We were so happy, happy, I remember—”
It seemed so wonderful that she had ever been truly happy. She especially recalled how on the few hectic (as it seemed to her) afternoons that she had spent at her friend’s house, Marise’s mother, Mrs. Davies, had come and stood for a few moments in the doorway surveying them all with her wide, jolly smile.
“Have a good time, children,” she would intone. “I want you all to be happy.” Marise and Phebe Grant and Nicholas Campbell and any other children who would be there used to look up and smile with the careless gratitude of familiarity. But Teresa would cross over to the billowy dark woman, standing in the doorway exhaling such a sense of comfort with her benisons, and slip her little hand into hers.
It seemed so wonderful to the child that Marise’s mother instead of talking of Ambition, or Standing or Racial Superiority should mention only Happiness.
There were the two weeks when her mother went to Chicago to attend a Convention of Welfare Workers. . . . Teresa found herself at the Davies’ home almost every afternoon. . . . There were so many things to talk about; so much to discuss with these girls from whom she felt she would one day be ruthlessly separated. Already, though so far off, she could begin to descry Fate walling her in . . . away, apart.
Today Marise was to read them her story. She had been working on it for a month. They had not even known the title. Marise triumphantly pronounced it aloud: “I Was A Moonshiner’s Wife.” Even Phebe, knowing Marise as well as she did, was impressed. Teresa for her part was completely overwhelmed. How could a girl of thirteen know all these things! The story teemed with bloodshed, terrible threats, gallons of whiskey, strong men, glamorous women, unbridled passion, sharpshooting and the moon!
Toward the end Nicholas Campbell lounged in and laughed loud and long at some of the context.
“ ‘ “Leave me alone,” he hissed.’ Go on. Marise, you can’t say a thing like that!”
“What’s the reason I can’t?”
“Because there’s nothing in that sentence to hiss with. . . . And then that’s not the way men talk, not moonshiners anyway. A lot you know about moonshiners. You were a moonshiner’s wife! You’d run a mile to get away from one!”
“She’s using her imagination,” Teresa interposed, a trifle timidly. She rarely spoke to young Campbell, a slender, swarthy youth with hair that curled and waved itself into peaks, so that his head looked sculptured. His skin although dark had a reddish tinge; so thin it was, one seemed always to glimpse the hot blood coursing beneath. Such a boy, Teresa thought, when she pondered on him at all, could probably upset a girl’s mind very much. But resolutely she kept her thoughts away from him. Let him be destined for whom he might. He and his kind, she knew, were not for her.
“Nicky’s right,” said Phebe, suddenly, stoutly. “Of course a girl, especially a girl like us, wouldn’t know anything about a moonshiner. But, come on, Marise, read us the rest of the story. Let’s see what happens to you. Did you shoot your wicked husband, or did you remain his humble slave?”
But Marise knew, none better, when her great moment had passed. “I’m tired of reading,” she yawned. “Let’s play theatre.”
She found costumes for them: for Nicholas, a little red velvet jacket, for Phebe, trailing white silk with a veil; and red silk again for herself. Teresa accepted only a faded garland of flowers; she would be audience, she said. No one demurred; it was at times like this her favorite rôle.
Nicholas sang in a breathy, boyish soprano that would soon now be changing.
Marise played and sang and danced; her voice even at that age was thrilling. Already she possessed charm, assurance, savoir faire. She was going to be an actress when she grew up, she always declared. Her dancing was beginning to show something of a professional quality, there was more to it than the spontaneous abandon of a child at play. Even with this unexacting audience it was plain that she was doing her best; Marise would never be second in any line. She would either excel or withdraw.
Usually Nick’s eyes, at times like these, were fastened upon her. And indeed it was to capture his unwilling attention that she performed her graceful antics. Between these two there was something half-sensed and deeply hidden. . . . As though his latent masculinity were lying in wait for her . . . as though some as yet undeveloped feminine quality in herself were luring him, spurring him on and yet evading him.
But today, Nicholas’ attention wavered; it wandered to Phebe, flickered once more to Marise and returned again to the little blonde girl, lost in the wonder and halo of her bright gilt hair; caught by the mystic chasteness lent her by her swathing, snowy robe and the foamlike, diaphanous aureole with which her veil invested her. Phebe did a solo dance. In the fantasy which they were evolving together with an ease born of many spontaneous rehearsals, she was a butterfly. There was about her none of the sinuous virtuosity of Marise . . . whatever Phebe did, she did from a need to express herself, so, and not otherwise. She was a quiet, intense, independent little girl, made up of strange loyalties and predilections and almost as single-minded as Olivia Cary, the mother of her little playmate, Teresa.
Today, feeling within her the need for light, airy movement, she bent all her attention to expressing her concept of not only the motion, but the essential feeling, of the butterfly. She could not have explained to anyone what she was trying to depict; but she knew, it seemed to her, the special thrill which the lovely creature must feel when it knows itself able to yield completely to the caress of light and sun and air . . . to feel itself one with the essence of nature. Absorbed in this bewildering and yet related congeries of whirling and dipping and fluttering, she forgot her audience until she looked up to catch the eyes of Nicholas fastened upon her with the admiration and astonishment which she had sometimes seen in the glances she had occasionally intercepted in their course toward Marise.
This phenomenon brought her to herself; she subsided blushing and confused. Phebe did not want to be an actress. She did want, however, someday to read in the eyes of one man, just such admiration as she had read in the eyes of Nicholas . . . only it should be many times intensified. . . . And she hoped the man would be Nicholas.
Mrs. Davies appeared with a tray of small, delicious sandwiches and cakes. She and her husband were caterers, serving the city’s most exclusive. “I’m awful busy today,” she told her delighted guests, “but I just put my head in to tell you I hope you’re all happy.”
As usual Teresa gravitated toward her and, as usual, received a word and a slight caress. For a fleeting moment Mrs. Davies put a warm arm about her. “You look a little peaked, Honey. Eat a lot of them sandwiches and join in and sing and dance with the rest of them. Don’t let yourself be too quiet, you’re only young once, you know.”
The homely, kindly words lit a glow about the child’s chilled, apprehensive heart. Riding home in the Girard Avenue car, she saw visions ahead of her in the misty twilight and forgot all about Olivia’s silly plans and her own fears and quakes. She would grow up and have four children. All of them should be like her little brother Oliver and she would be a mother like Mrs. Davies. . . . In her own house her brother Christopher greeted her uproariously; glad to have someone to serve as auditor of his baseball exploits. . . . Presently Dr. Cary came in and they had dinner, Teresa presiding with pride and solicitude. . . . Her father produced a little letter from Oliver, blotted, but otherwise quite clean and remarkably free of errors. . . . The house was full of a warm cosiness and a sense of home. . . . Teresa hoped that her mother would not return for a long time.
THAT afternoon Nicholas walked home with Phebe as he had walked home many days. For their houses stood back to back with each other; his on the main street, hers on the small one with the inevitable Philadelphia alley between. They had as a matter of fact met in the alley, each from the vantage of a mother’s side as their respective parents bought “fresh Delaware porgies.”
The handsome little brown boy had stared at the amazing feminine apparition of snow and gilt. He had stared at her so intensely that he scowled and the apparition had retreated behind a broad back. Once more within his own domain he asked his mother: “Ma, is she a fairy?”
Mrs. Campbell laughed. “No, son. She’s a real little girl just like you’re a real little boy.”
“Was that her mother?”
“I think so, son.”
Son considered. “But, Ma, how can that be her mother? She’s white, ain’t she?”
“No, son. She’s colored.”
“But, Ma, how can she be?”
“Well, she just is. Lots of colored people look like that. But they’re colored right on.”
“But if she ain’t white, why ain’t she white? She’s whiter than lots of those white girls at our school. What makes her colored and makes those white girls white?”
“Well, son, I can’t tell you that. You’ll have to wait till you’re grown up. . . . You’ll understand those things better then, I think.”
Nicholas spoke with a conviction unwarranted by his years. “I’ll never understand that.”
He was, even at eight, a popular boy, an only child of people well-established in the undertaking business. He was indulged, active and busy with school and play. But he remembered that Friday was “fish day” and that his mother sometimes bought porgies in the alley. On the next Friday he assisted again at the operation. As the man was counting out the change, Mrs. Grant (“as she calls herself,” some people said) appeared, accompanied by a wide-eyed Phebe. The parents withdrew, the children lingered.
“My name’s Phebe,” said the young lady.
“I’m Nicholas Campbell,” countered the sturdy young man. “Do you put stuff on your hair to make it look like that?”
“Oo—ooh, no!” exclaimed Miss Phebe and immediately fled.
Baffled, Nicholas returned to his back yard. Presently glancing up he perceived a gay gold head outlined against the window-pane.
“Come on down to the gate again,” he shouted. The window was gently raised and the small girl showed some inclination to parley.
“You ain’t mad, are you?”
She shook her head.
“Well, come on down to the gate again.”
Immobile she regarded him.
“Kin I come over? . . . Say! Ask your Ma, kin I come over?”
Consultation in the remote hinterland of the second story back. Then Phebe returned, her small chin not far above the window sill.
“She says you ask your Ma, kin you come over.”
Appeal was made to Nicholas’ parent. “Why, yes, I suppose so,” Mrs. Campbell was somewhat taken back at the sudden turn of affairs. “I never knew you to be interested in any little girl before, Nicky. Put on a clean collar, son, and wash your hands. . . .”
The two children advanced a few steps toward each other. “What you got to play with?” Nicky demanded. She hadn’t much,
“Well, say, you come on over to my house. I got a baseball bat and a teeter-board and some sliced animals and a bean-bag and a lot of things.
“Say, Mis’ Grant, kin she come over to my house? I’ll take care of her.”
Phebe told her mother gravely that she would like to see the sliced animals.
Nicholas, some of the new-found admiration shining in his eyes, reminded her of this as they walked home that afternoon from Marise.
“You were the funniest little girl, Phebe. Look, did you know your name meant the sun? . . . Let’s walk through the park as far as we can. . . . So you see Phebe’s just the name for you. I hope it will always shine.”
Not a bad sentiment for a boy of fourteen.
“It should have been given to Marise,” she said in all sincerity. “She’s the only one of us three I guess who’ll ever do any shining.”
“What about you? Say, Phebe, I never saw anybody dance, I never saw anybody look like you looked this afternoon. You were wonderful, you were a peach. I never saw anybody dance like that. What are you going to do, go on the stage some day?”
Phebe stared in astonishment. “Oh my, no! Not for me. I wouldn’t have—you know, Nick—I wouldn’t have the gumption to do that. I can’t push myself enough. . . . Marise now, she would be just the one. So pretty and smart and all. And she can dance and sing.”
He frowned a little, pursuing the subject, he knew not why, so intently. “She won’t have much chance, you know. I don’t think they have colored dancers on the stage much.”
“Oh but I bet they will by the time we all grow up. There’s been a few already. And I bet there’ll be oodles by the time we’re all coming along. If not, then there wouldn’t be any chance for me either.”
“Yes, there would too. You could always pass.”
“Oh, but I wouldn’t want to.”
“No, I wouldn’t want to either, but what about you? Do you think it’s so great to be colored?”
“Why, I don’t think anything about it,” said Phebe, surprised. “I think it’s all right to be what you are. . . . And then anyway something we have nothing to do with settles things for you, don’t you think? Jews and colored people—they’re the people we’re always hearing about being persecuted . . . but look at the things you read about in the histories and in the newspapers. There are a lot of other people who have a terrible hard time of it too.”
“Yes, you’re right, I guess. . . . But isn’t it funny! Here you’re a white colored girl and here’s Teresa a white colored girl. And she’s half the time trying to be white and you’re always crazy about being colored.”
“I don’t think that’s Teresa’s fault, do you? That’s her mother. I don’t know why she’s like that.” She was silent a moment. Then she added, the hot blood creeping up into her face: “You know, Nicky, white people haven’t treated my mother very well. Perhaps that’s why I can’t get excited about them.”
He nodded, feeling himself suddenly very grown-up and protecting. “That’s all right, Phebe. Don’t you care.” He patted her arm boyishly. “Here we are. Gosh, I’m hungry! After all those sandwiches I ate, too! Here, let me go through your house so I won’t have to go around the block.”
“Sure, come on.” She saw him through the gate. “G’bye, Nicky; maybe I’ll see you tomorrow at Marise’s.”
“I don’t know. Maybe you’ll see me tonight. Shouldn’t wonder.”
NOW they were all in the high school. Nicholas was almost ready to graduate. He was a year older than any of the girls. Later he would go to college and study medicine. He would do it all right there in the Old Quaker City. . . . Young Christopher Cary was to be shipped off to a preparatory school in New England. His mother’s doings; he was sure of that. She talked about his making contacts! . . . Tight-lipped but outwardly calm he talked about it to his father.
“It doesn’t make any difference whom I meet, Dad. I know there are lots of swell white guys. I’ve met plenty of them. But she can’t change me. I’m not going to be white. I’m perfectly satisfied the way I am. Dad, can’t I stay right here and go off to college somewhere else, later on?”
Dr. Cary hesitated a moment. “I’d keep you here in a moment, Chris, but your mother has set her heart on your going away. I know it won’t change you any. You’ve got too much common sense for that. . . .” He placed his hand on the lad’s shoulder. “It’s really on account of Oliver, son, that I want you to go. . . .”
“Oliver? What’s he got to do with it?”
His father consumed some time lighting a cigarette and watching the end of it deepen and glow. “You know how she is, Chris. . . . You know how she’s always been about Oliver? . . . . Well, it seems she’s set her heart on having you and Teresa go off to school. I told her I didn’t like it and when I objected she . . . er . . . well, she expressed a willingness to have Oliver come home and stay. She said she felt she had sort of neglected him and now with you two off her hands she would make it up to him. . . . Well, I thought Oliver might like that.”
“I know he would, Dad. . . . That makes it quite different. All right then, since it’s for Oliver. . . . But, Father, I want to come back to the University of Pennsylvania for college and medicine.”
“I thought you might like Harvard, but I’ll let you decide on that when you’re older.”
“Honor bright, Dad?”
“Honor bright. That’ll be entirely up to you.”
Christopher, as his father had secretly hoped, explained the matter to Teresa.
“See, Tess, it won’t be so bad; you won’t mind it so much when you think it’s for Oliver.”
His sister looked at him wanly; shook her young head. “I’m glad for Oliver, that is if she’ll really be nice to him. . . . But she won’t be, Chris, she just can’t bear any dark people . . . she simply doesn’t see them. And I think she’s mad at Oliver for being as brown as he is and daring to be her son! And he’s so crazy about her! . . . But anyway Oliver and you are boys; you can get out of it all. But I’m a girl and I know myself, Chris. I’m not stubborn and I’m not willful. I know it’s the end of everything for me. Mother’s not going to let me rest until I’ve made some of her old ‘contacts’ that she’s always talking about. . . . I know what she’s hoping. She thinks either you or I, or both of us, will marry white; and then she’ll come and live with us.”
Christopher’s eyes showed his astonishment. “You know I never thought of that! She’ll never live with me. I’ll show her. . . . And I won’t marry any of her white girls either.”
“That’s just what I said. But she’ll keep after me. . . . Chris, do you know,” she said solemnly, “I can just feel that I’m going to be awfully unhappy. I can feel it closing in on me.”
He scoffed at her, but he was impressed.
“What nonsense! What’s closing in on you?”
“Life,” she said seriously. “I feel like a fly in a spider’s web. I know I’m going to be caught and I know I’m going to hang there. I won’t have a lot of pain. I’ll just live on stupid and dull and unable to stir. Hating everything.”
He considered this, shifting her toilet articles about on her little dressing table. “You don’t have to do everything mother says, you know. Of course you’ll have to now. But when you’re older. . . .”
“I haven’t got the stuff in me to disobey her. And Fm not smart, Christopher. . . . If I were just someone like Marise.”
“Oh, you don’t want to be like Marise . . . she’s a great girl, but not the kind of girl I’d like you to be,” said Christopher, an advocate of conservative sisters.
“I thought you liked her, Chris!”
“I do . . . sort of so-so. You know. But she ain’t the girl of my dreams, not by a long shot.”
“Well, anyway I wish I were like her and I wish I looked like her.”
“She is easy to look at, I’ll admit. . . . Brace up, sis. We’re having our hard times now. Ten years from now we’ll be on the top of the world.”
But Teresa had her own visions and they included no such lofty station.
Marise wanted to give her a farewell party. To Teresa’s immense surprise, Olivia was willing for her to go. Her mother was bland now because she was going to have matters her own way and because, according to her way of thinking, her life-long project was at last within her range of vision. Her daughter had never known her so complaisant and so beneficent. Teresa was to choose her own dress, material, and style. As a rule her mother dressed her in pastel shades with the thought that in some way this brought out every possible delicacy of coloring and even of feature; refining her and taking away every possible vestige of connection with a cruder race.
The result was that Teresa usually presented something of the personality, if not the appearance, of a mouse. The light pinks and blues and tans of her mother’s choice dulled the creaminess of her rather thick but perfect mat skin; they killed the sheen and the tone of her soft, abundant chestnut hair. In common with most girls the child felt that she needed warmth; she realized how even the sight of the glowing, gay colors adopted by Marise cheered and enlivened her. . . .
She chose then a very soft, supple silk of the shade known as burnt orange . . . the blouse was made simply with round girlish neck and baby puff sleeves. A brown velvet girdle, fine and glowing, was to surround her slender waist and for her nice narrow feet there were bronze slippers and cobwebby bronze stockings. . . . Phebe, who had a natural gift for sewing, made the dress and indeed bought her own with the money she received for it.
Teresa never forgot that evening. The time was September; the weather was soft, melancholy, wistfully sweet. The glow of the summer remained without its heat; evenings were periods of sensuous delight; the air, balmy and scented, afforded the stimulus of wine; stars, twinkling like huge fireflies, seemed as near as the lanterns in the Davies’ small but perfect backyard. . . .
Teresa knew that in appearance and feeling she was in perfect harmony with her surroundings. Her dress, said a boy, a student at the Art School in Cherry Street, was the incarnation of the season. . . . There were some small, rather hard but perfect, little flowers of the aster variety scattered about in bowls and vases. Of these young Warwick thoughtfully selected a tiny nosegay in graduated shades of gold and yellow . . . he brought them to her and fastened them into the folds of her glowing girdle. They struck an inspired note of transition between the brown of the girdle and the orange of her dress that made him for the moment surfeit with happiness.
“After I’ve had the pleasure of a couple of dances with you,” he told her gravely, “my evening will be complete. I shall just sit down and watch you and that dress until the party is over.”
Afterwards a laughing comparison with Phebe and Marise disclosed the fact that he had made somewhat similar remarks to them with regard to their dresses of white and red respectively, though he did not bring them flowers. Teresa did not mind. . . . Usually she did not even share the compliments which other girls took casually as their accepted portion.
Her joy, her increased and tingling vitality, her complete satisfaction in being openly and without apology with the people she preferred in no wise took from her that quality which she had unconsciously cultivated, of being the interested and thoughtful spectator. . . . Besides, tonight, she wanted to etch this picture on her mind. She wanted to remember this warmth and gayety and happiness; the rich mingling and contrast of coloring not only in clothing but in faces. . . .
Long afterward for no particular reason she remembered the vividness of Marise’s nut-brown skin with its hint of red on the cheek-bones beside the pale lemon-clear skin of Sylvia Raymond. For a moment her brother Christopher’s head with his extraordinarily white skin and his burnt hair was thrust between them as he engaged both girls for succeeding dances.
She danced every dance but between the lovely, lively numbers she took particular note of Phebe’s ethereal fairness with her thick straight cap of pale gold hair against the background of Nicholas Campbell’s statuesque darkness. . . .
Later on when she came to know the classics she realized that there was about him a peculiar faun-like quality that would never be held though it might be caught for a day, for a month, for a year, by a woman’s obvious devotion. . . . He would need an attraction, as errant, as willful, as pre-emptive as his own, with perhaps more deliberateness, even more selfishness behind it.
But this the young girl could not clearly foresee. . . . She only marked the happiness shining so vividly from behind Phebe’s face and personality and soul, and felt with a certain chilling knowledge about her heart that no one could both know such bliss as that and have it last.
But it was great to feel such joy as that, she reflected soberly, dancing through her second engagement with young Holland . . . a great deal better, her sadly fatalistic sensibilities told her, than to go through life drably, knowing nothing, feeling less. But on matters such as these she would not allow herself to linger.
She danced with Nicholas, surrendering herself sensuously, consciously to the male charm of him. He was the type that holds his partner lightly but firmly, so closely that a girl’s soft shoulder must know faintly the hardness of his own, the steeliness of his arm. Instead of revolving dizzily and senselessly, he partly guided her, partly drove her before him, in long forward strides, something on the order of the redowa, an older and statelier mode of dancing. . . . Something in all this of the notion of a faun pursuing a nymph, with the latter like the classic maiden of Keats’ Grecian Urn forever and tantalizingly out of his reach. Thus, unconsciously revealing, Nicholas’ manner epitomized the type his real self would be seeking. . . . Even though his head might be telling him: “Here are Happiness, Peace, Sincerity . . . here, here within your grasp! Stay with them.” . . . But he would not be able to stay.
Teresa, pursuing determinedly, even under the soft badinage of Nicholas’ charming voice, her storing up of little pictures to be reviewed another day, noticed the swift, keen look with which her hostess surveyed her chief guest, clasped for the moment in her partner’s arms. Marise had been rather ostentatiously unobservant of Nicholas as long as he was with Phebe.
Now her manner seemed to say: “As long as I ignore this other thing it does not exist. . . . But what is this interest in someone else whom he has never noticed before?”
Teresa recalled then that in all the years she had been coming to play with Marise, never once before had she danced with Nicholas. Indeed beyond his pleasantly familiar: “Hello, Treese,” she could not recall ever having sustained any conversation with him. At the recollection of this she glanced up at him; at the moment he happened to be looking down on her with the intent, engrossed look which was as much a part of his dancing equipment as his dancing shoes.
Something in her prompted her to smile into his eyes . . . and immediately he asked her for another dance. “I think I’m engaged,” she told him sweetly, “but you may try the fourth from now and if I’m free you may have it.” . . . Promptly at the fourth he was there to claim her but she gave it to Bob Allan, who declared aggrievedly that she had cut him all evening. . . .
Nicholas gave her a look which made the blood come to her face. “I’m sorry you’re going away, Teresa,” he murmured. “We might have been great pals!”
Toward the close of the evening, things began to blur a little; she could not carry away with her all the bright, gay scene. . . . She saw Christopher for the third or fourth time dancing with Marise, a slow dreaming waltz which mysteriously they seemed to convert into a ritual more than usually sinuous and significant.
Nicholas drifted over to Phebe where she stood, all snow-white and crystal, listening to Pete Holland’s stereotyped compliments. . . . With immediate radiance and confidence she turned to meet his light touch . . . her arms went out in a touching gesture of willingness and satisfaction. . . . You knew she would have danced with him over burning plowshares. . . .
Later on there was supper . . . such salad! such sandwiches! superlative cakes! Philadelphia ice-cream—the best! slightly heady punch! . . . Someone made a speech about Teresa’s beauty and charm. . . . Someone else said she was leaving just as they were all getting to know her better. But when she came back! After all their present loss—who knew?—might be their future gain!
At the end Marise came up to her—glowing, beautiful as a great dark red rose. Half the day she had helped her mother prepare for the party; she had danced all the night; but there was not a trace of fatigue on her smooth brown countenance. She touched Teresa’s face, colorlessly creamy save for its virgin tracing of lip-rouge . . . she took her face between her warm soft palms. “Teresa,” she said, “have a good time; don’t bother about anything else.” She shook her slightly. “Now remember, don’t worry about anything!”
Nicholas took her hand in his hard, cool grasp: “Don’t forget me, Teresa!”
Phebe said she would see her at the train the day she left.
Mrs. Davies put her warm arms about her. “You were always my girl, Teresa. Be happy, Honey!”
And on that note she left them.
After all it was only one o’clock. . . . The party had begun with a seven o’clock dinner. The night was too perfect, too enticing. The lament of the passing summer got into one’s blood. One must weep . . . or laugh . . . in either case for the mere blessing of being alive.
Over her fragile dress Phebe wore a bright, dark blue velvet coat. It had belonged once to Mrs. Morton Rogers, for whom her mother worked in Sharon Hill. . . . At the neck was a palely gilded clasp which Nicholas fastened. He looked from the clasp to Phebe’s gilt hair and for a moment his heart caught in his throat. The spell of the summer night and Phebe’s fairness and sweetness and his demanding blood lay thick about him for a moment.
Two short blocks lay between them and the vast, serenely silver park. “We’ll go over and sit on George’s Hill a moment,” he suggested. “We can see the Fifty-second Street car coming up the Avenue then; they are so slow, one won’t be by again for a long time. Then we’ll ride over to Girard and walk to your house. . . . I like to walk along sleeping streets. I wonder,” he said whimsically, “if they ever remember the woods and forests they used to be.”
Phebe loved to hear him ramble like this . . . she knew he expected no answer; it was as though he were communing with himself in his own mind . . . how close to himself he must feel her!
“I often think of telegraph poles,” he went on, smoking with the negligent languor that she so much admired. “I think it’s so hard on them to lose all their lovely, graceful leaves and branches and stand so stark and plain on ugly, city streets.” . . . They were on the Hill now and the great, ungainly city sprawled before them. . . . “I wonder how these fortunate trees in the Park feel about it”
Phebe heard him, not listening. She was thinking no one, just no one in the world looked like Nicholas. His hat lay on the bench beside him; his dark face with that Apollo-like look, which the sculptured waviness of his hair bestowed upon him, was finely silhouetted against the moonlight with the softness of the black night for an immediate background. His careless beauty, his masterfulness made her heart turn over. . . . If they were only older! . . .
She meant to be a perfect wife, very sweet and true and kind . . . and loyal. She would be very loyal! “A rock,” as the hymn said, “in a weary land.”
Everybody had trouble; her mother had taught her to accept it stoically, philosophically. But her mother had told her too: “I didn’t mind my trouble so much after you come, little daughter. . . . Always you loved yore ole mammy so! . . . It don’ make much difference about trouble if you has someone who you kin always depend on”
She had pronounced it “depind.” . . .
So Phebe had always been dependable. . . . And that was the quality she would bring some day to Nicholas.
He had forsaken the telegraph poles and begun to talk of Teresa. “I wonder what she’s going to be like. . . . Wasn’t she different tonight? What was it? Just her dress, I wonder? She was almost pretty. Not really pretty like you or Marise . . . but she made you want to look at her and dance with her. . . .”
“She was happy,” interpreted happy Phebe. . . . “But her dress helped a lot. Her mother let her get it herself and we picked it out together. It was like her, you know; warm and cool too. . . . And because it made her look the way she ought to look and she liked it, that made her happy. And that made her pretty.”
“H’m, think you know all about it, don’t you, Miss?”
“I do,” said Phebe sagely, “know everything about clothes. I can feel it. . . . Clothes can do everything to you. . . . You know, Nicholas, I’m not really pretty either but I know how to make the most of myself.”
“I’m not going to pay you compliments,” he assured her unsmiling.
“Don’t want them.” Was her heart not already singing with his former spontaneous praise?
Nicholas was musing again. “I feel, Phebe, that after tonight things are going to be different for our little bunch. Teresa’s gone, Christopher’s going next year. I’ve got to go to work this summer. You’re coming out of high school. . . . What did you decide to do? Teach?”
“Here comes the car,” she reminded him. “I must get home. . . . No, I don’t like teaching. . . . My mother sews for Mrs. Morton Rogers; she sent me this coat, Nicky; didn’t you wonder how I could be so grand? She’s taking my mother to Florida with her next winter, and she’s giving me courses in dress designing this summer and next winter . . I’m going to look after her daughters’ clothes while she’s away. . . . If she likes me and I make progress, she may set me up. . . . Pretty nice?”
“Can’t say I like it so much.” Nicholas scowled at the two white men opposite them in the car who, he thought, were regarding Phebe too intently. “Has she ever seen you? She may not like you. Lots of white people don’t like these white colored people, you know.”
She nodded gravely. “Yes, that is so. I had a teacher in the graded school who couldn’t bear me after I told her I was colored.”
“You certainly are straight about that, aren’t you? Not a bit like Teresa.”
“I always told you that wasn’t Teresa’s doing. That’s her mother’s foolishness. Come on, Nick, we must get off here.”
As they passed the other two passengers she distinctly heard one of them say: “That certainly is a white girl with that coon!” She hoped Nicholas didn’t hear them. As they passed through the quiet streets it seemed to her that he was unusually silent.
“Marise,” she said desperately, “Marise is going to have the nicest time of anyone. She’s always wanted to go to Chicago and her father’s going to take her there for a graduation present this summer. Then in the fall she’s to study music and dancing . . . perhaps in New York. I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” she said, stopping before her unremarkable dwelling, “if she were to go on the stage. Marise always gets what she wants.”
“Does she?” He spoke absently. “Good-night, Phebe. I’ll stand here till you lock the door.”
Good-night and he hadn’t kissed her! The last time they had been to a party, he had put his arm about her—she could feel it now—and he had bent down to her uplifted, unsuspecting face; had set his lips against hers.
The summer evening turned cold. The charm of the party was ashes.
Mrs. Morton Rogers, thrifty social registerite, would have been surprised to see her blue velvet cloak a dishevelled careless heap on the floor where a disappointed girl had dropped it in her hurry to bury her face in a friendly pillow.