Again Nan rode in the backseat of the black Plymouth Phaeton with Wilson in her lap, Florence disappearing behind her. This time Oliver was sitting in Dr. Rawls’s seat. She might have felt the noose of the place loosening, the air returning to her lungs as the white clay gave way to red, but this time Wilson was sick, not cold as a block of ice but warm and feverish and limp, a spineless cut of fatback. Out the window, the road signs swept by: Meredith, Rebecca, Leslie. In Americus, Oliver stopped at a filling station to let Nan nurse, not wanting to repeat what had happened in Atlanta, though the secret was a secret no longer. Nan did not know that just down the road was the colored hospital; if she had, she might have taken Wilson then and there. She did not know that it was where Dr. Rawls had overseen the autopsy of Genus Jackson, and where he had taken and tested the dead man’s blood, the blood that had revealed such malformed red cells that he had neglected to pay attention to the blood type—B—which was rare enough but not so rare as a disappeared spleen. She did not know—God barely knew—that down the road a bit farther was a place called Archery, which was not on a road sign but where a five-year-old boy, one of the only white children in the town, ran the fields of his family’s peanut farm with the children of the colored field hands. In many years, when the boy would grow up to live in the White House in Washington, D.C., Nan would feel the same restored pride she’d felt when listening to the governor of New York, who would himself, very soon, live in the White House in Washington, D.C., and who would soon name his retreat in Warm Springs, where the Plymouth traveled now some seventy miles north from Americus, the Little White House, where he would die at the end of a long and bitter war.
She had not expected to make the trip without Elma. It had been a long and bitter argument, conducted in Elma and Oliver’s bedroom after the babies had fallen asleep. Nan did not want to listen to it, but even with her bedroom door closed, she could hear every word. Elma did not want to go to Warm Springs, of course she didn’t, and how could Oliver run off on a vacation with a trial coming up and a house going under?
“That’s exactly why we’re leaving. We don’t have any other place, Elma. Where else we going to go? The farm?”
Elma didn’t answer.
“Elma. No.”
“I have to, Oliver. Else he’s going to kill my daddy.” She had lowered her voice, but Nan could hear.
“Who is?”
“Sterling.”
Here Nan had rushed on tiptoe to her bedroom door and pressed herself to it. What was she talking about, and how did she know, and would she slow down? It was Oliver asking Nan’s questions now. Why else, Elma said, would George Wilson have put them both on the farm? She had made up her mind: she was going back. “Going home” was how she put it.
“For goodness’ sake, Elma. I’m not letting you. You’re not going. If that man’s as dangerous as you say, then it’s all the more reason for you to stay away!”
“Oliver, you been my husband for two months. He’s been my daddy all my life.”
Nan heard somebody throw something, like a shoe against a wall.
“Well, why’d you bother marrying me if you’re going back there? Huh?”
“Oliver—”
“Go on, if you got your mind made up! But you’re not taking Nan. I won’t let you put her back in harm’s way.”
Nan ran to her bed and pulled the covers to her chin. She wrapped the pillow over her ears. She thought of her father sleeping in Genus’s bed. The shack door didn’t even have a lock.
She heard Genus’s voice: “If I end up dead, it’s by that man’s hand. And if he ends up dead, it’s by mine.”
She could go back. Look after her father, despite Oliver’s wishes. Return to her pallet in the pantry, or drag it into her father’s shack. That had been what she’d wanted, hadn’t it?
But she remembered the bottle of gin between her thighs, the clothesline lighting up the night. She had not been able to save Genus. Now she had to take up for her son.
She could only sleep once she’d taken Wilson, still sleeping, into her own bed, pressing him to her shoulder as Winna held her rag doll.
The next morning, the morning they both readied to leave the doctor’s house, she wrote a note and handed it to Elma. Look after him.
Elma read the note and Nan watched the confusion pass over her face. She was wondering who him was. She caught herself before she asked. Nan wanted to add, He won’t hurt anyone. She was angry with Elma for believing he would. But what did Nan know of her father? If she were cornered again on that farm, she couldn’t promise that she wouldn’t hurt Juke herself.
Elma nodded, fanned her watering eyes with the note, and then tore it into pieces in her apron pocket.
“It’s the twins being apart,” she said. She picked up Wilson and kissed him. She didn’t finish. For months the girls had strained against calling the babies twins, but now they clung to the word. Elma tickled Wilson’s fat thigh above the knee, but he didn’t laugh as he usually did. He gave a low mew. In his ear she whispered, “You’ll be all right, little sheep.”
Nan lifted Winna Jean and breathed in the pink sugar smell of her hair. For a few minutes, they each stood on either side of the crib, hips rocking. It was the first night Elma would spend apart from her husband in their short marriage, and, aside from the nights Nan had caught a few hours’ sleep in Rocky Bottom cabins, it was the first night Nan would spend apart from Elma in all her life. The silence was painful enough that Nan wished Elma would say something more, something to reassure her that the silence was the kind of complicit, companionable silence they’d lived in for so long, not the silence that would divide them. Then they heard Oliver start the engine in the driveway. He would drive them all out to the farm to drop off Elma and Winna and Pollux before going on to Warm Springs. Without speaking they traded babies, as they’d done a hundred times before.
Now every mile took her farther from the farm. “Don’t be nervous,” Oliver said from the driver’s seat, finding her eye in the rearview. “I’ll be with you, just like Elma. You can trust me. Do you trust me?” Nan hesitated only a moment before she nodded at the mirror. She did trust him, didn’t she? Anyway, there was no one she trusted more. “You need something, I’ll get it for you.” She looked down at Wilson, who was breathing shallowly. His eyelids fluttered open and closed. “You miss her,” Oliver guessed.
Nan looked up. Did she miss her? It wasn’t quite right, but she nodded again. It was true that she was nervous. On calls, alone, she had walked into unfamiliar houses, she had found a way to communicate what she had to, but Elma had never been far away. “She ain’t acting like herself,” Oliver said. At first Nan thought he meant he, meant Wilson. Wilson wasn’t acting like himself. “Or maybe she is. Maybe I just don’t know her. Is she acting like herself?” he asked.
Nan tilted her head. Then she shook it. She meant no, Elma wasn’t acting like herself, but also no, Nan didn’t know her, either.
“How she can go back to that farm, after all I did to get her off it, is beyond me.”
All he did. Nan thought about this.
“What is she doing out there? What loyalty does she have to him? After what he did to you, to both of you . . .”
Nan shifted in her seat.
“What’s the sense in going out here now? I don’t know. I’ve been sitting here driving and thinking about it. What’s the sense?”
Was he ashamed? she wondered. He had given up much for Elma and for Nan, it was true. And yet he seemed to need others to see what he had given. Was he disappointed that he should return to this place of his youth, to meet the governor of New York, the man whose every word he’d hung on, without his wife—his young, long-legged, beautiful wife—by his side, but instead with Nan and a sickly, sallow-skinned baby? He’d never been at Warm Springs when the governor was there. Now his picture of that meeting had a hole in it. “Maybe he won’t be there,” he said. “Maybe he’ll be called away.” Nan could tell he was shielding himself from his own hopes, and she felt sorry for him again. “But you’ll love it here, Nan. Either way. You’ll see. It’ll be just what we need.” That was the way it was, when you couldn’t talk back—the person who was talking ended up coming to the conclusion he wanted all by himself. “It’s just—peaceful. So peaceful that people come from all over the country to be there. Ever had a place like that?”
Nan thought. There was her family’s shack, when she was small. There was the creek, for those few nights with Genus. There was the first cabin with Elma and the second. But always they were little rooms of light in the midst of the darkness around it. Always there was something just outside the door. But maybe that was true of the place they were going too. Maybe there was no safety without wilderness on the other side of it.
“I wanted her to see it,” he said, turning off the road down the long, wooded drive. “That’s all. I just wanted her to see it.” He drove on, slowing the car, perhaps out of duty to Nan and her son but also, she thought, out of spite—he would not change his plans. He had changed enough of his plans for Elma.
Quietly the buildings came into view. They were neat and tall, the green grounds lying compliantly before them. It was like the campus at Emory, all of the bushes squared by some invisible gardener, and despite herself Nan felt her heart rise up seeing it. If they would be safe anywhere, if someone knew how to help Wilson, it would be here in this place of order and abundance. In front of the building that was not yet the Little White House, Oliver eased the car into park. Beside it was a convertible with its top down, and as Nan stepped out she could see that it had the same funny hand controls as the Plymouth. Still holding Wilson, she helped Oliver out of the car and into his wheelchair. Passing the convertible, he gave it a pat on its haunches, like a dog he’d met a long time before. She gave his shoulder a pat, and he looked up at her and gave her a smile that was first confused, then grateful. I see it, she was saying, and she thought he understood.
It would be a memory, more than a lived moment, following Oliver’s wheelchair up the paved path to the grandest house she had seen, the grass shorn as clean as a haircut, the clouds still as a held breath overhead. On the porch of the house, in a wicker wheelchair just like Oliver’s, sat the governor. The sun glared off his eyeglasses like two bright coins. With him were Q. L. Boothby, who had traveled on ahead of the Plymouth, and two other white men, one of them also in a wheelchair, a card game Nan did not recognize spread on the table between them. She was not entirely in her body, she was not entirely herself, not just because she was visiting on the governor of New York, not just because she didn’t have Elma by her side, but because her son was sick and he was crying, and because she didn’t want him to call attention to him or to herself. A cloud shifted and she stood in the sunlight behind Oliver on the flagstone path, and Oliver offered his greetings to Q. L. Boothby and to the other two men and then—she could see his shoulders shaking—to the governor. He wheeled his chair up the ramp and as the two men shook hands, their knees nearly kissed. And then, calling her his nurse, he introduced Nan.
Franklin Roosevelt looked up to see her there, shielding his face from the sun, and then she saw his eyes. She took a step up to the porch and nodded at him. Did she nod at him? Later she would wonder if she had nodded or only meant to nod. Oliver reached over his shoulder and, introducing the baby now, gave Wilson’s socked foot a tug.
The sun and the drive and Wilson’s fever had put Nan in a loose mind. She had a kind of fever herself. In later years, when she remembered this day, when she wrote it down, she’d recall that it was Franklin Roosevelt who had tugged on Wilson’s foot. But Franklin Roosevelt did not touch the baby, only nodded hello at him with a smile from his wheelchair on the porch. It was a smile of concern, Nan thought. It was because the baby looked so sick. The governor of New York was used to seeing sick babies. The concern was because Wilson was sick, she thought. Franklin Roosevelt leaned over and spoke a few words into Q. L. Boothby’s ear, and Q. L. Boothby stood and walked into the house. What Oliver hoped was that he would return with Mrs. Boothby and Mrs. Roosevelt, who would offer them some of the tea that was sweating in the men’s glasses. What Nan hoped, allowed herself to hope, her hope rising perilously high in her throat, was that he would return with a real nurse, another doctor—someone who would take Wilson into their arms and say, “This child needs help.”
Instead he returned with a colored woman, tall and old and gaunt, in sunhat and apron. This was Miss Aubie, Mr. Boothby said, and she would help them settle in. It took Nan a moment to understand that he meant Nan and Wilson, and she saw the understanding come late to Oliver’s face too. She saw the panic follow, and then the remorse, and then he gave them a limp wave and said good-bye, he would see them in a while.
Mrs. Roosevelt, Nan heard Miss Aubie say to another of the maids when they reached the colored dormitory, was home in Albany. Miss Aubie pronounced it the way they pronounced the town in Georgia. She heard her own mother say it: “All-benny.” It took Nan some thinking to understand it was another city, far to the north. Perhaps there were many Albanys, a country of them. Foolish girl, her mother would say. Foolish, foolish girl. Oliver would stay with the men and play cards all afternoon, his left cheek turning pink when the sun came in at a certain angle under the porch, and Nan would not see him until the next day. He would look like he’d been slapped on that cheek.