NOT UNTIL AFTERNOON DOES JOELLE start to discern the amazing scope of her story, which has lain just over the horizon all this time, waiting to be discovered. The way it comes at her in bits and pieces, she has to fight to put everything together.
To begin with, Vernon never does tell what he did. Joelle sees it in his face, though: He was caught by love. One night, two nights, however many it was, Sylvie came away with something from him she didn’t want. Her big brother Roger had brought Vernon home from the station at Westerly for dinner one evening, and that was that. They fell for each other.
“We don’t blame Vernon,” Uncle Greg says.
“If you could’ve seen Sylvie in those days, she was one fast item,” Uncle Jerry concurs. “Mad at the world for who she was and who she wasn’t. Nobody was telling her what to do.”
“Vern was the one needed protection,” Uncle Jodie declares.
“Where was Aunt Mary Louise?” Joelle asks.
“At the chicken-packaging plant,” Vernon answers glumly. “We were just meeting up. No, that’s not true, we were together.” He lowers his head in shame. “Not married yet, but together, the same as being married. I lost my head with Sylvie. For about one week, that’s all it took.”
“So then what?”
Then, Vernon recounts, Sylvie went off, not telling anybody anything. Disappeared. She was twenty-two by then, long out of high school, working in an office and perfectly capable of taking care of herself. For a while she was just gone, and nobody heard from her at all. Then a note came from Chicago saying that she’d landed there.
“A few months later comes another postcard announcing that she’s had a baby,” Franko says, shaking his head. “Ma could’ve died. She said, ‘Now my girl’s started making a mess of her life. She’s not even married!’ Of course, what we didn’t know then was that the family tradition had got carried on and she’d had twins.”
“Twins!” Joelle says. “Well, that wasn’t me.”
Franko looks at her.
“So Ma decides to go and visit her,” Roger continues. “I was living at home still, commuting up to the Providence station for yard work. That’s when you and Jodie and me started going to the ball games in Pawtucket, remember, Vern?”
Sitting beside him, Vernon nods. “Roger and me were pals from way back, in school,” he tells Joelle. “He helped me get my first job on the railroad.”
“Just like Vern helped me land the turkey-ranch job I’ve got now,” Roger says. “Anybody who tried to pull the old ‘Where’s your tomahawk, Squanto?’ stuff, Vern would knock his block off. He never prejudged anybody, back then the same as now.”
The living room has emptied out a bit. Uncles Greg and Jerry have taken a break. They’re out looking at the chicks. This story has been going on all through the cold cuts and sodas of a late lunch and now is into midafternoon, when people have got to get out and stretch.
“Anyway, I had Ma all set up with a discount first-class sleeper ticket that would’ve taken her down to New York and then to Chicago,” Roger goes on. “I was proud of handing her that ticket. But at the last minute she gets sick and can’t go.”
“That was the start of her heart troubles,” Uncle Franko says.
“And then nobody goes,” Vernon says with a groan. “If somebody had just gone out there, we might’ve known what was what.”
“It’s not as if Sylvie asked for company,” Roger says. “She knew whose those babies were. She could’ve asked for help if she needed it.”
“I should’ve gone,” Vernon moans. “I let her go, is what I did. I just never even thought . . .”
“He just never even thought those babies were his!” Roger turns to tell Joelle. “We didn’t know either, not even Ma. See, Sylvie was a proud one. She didn’t want to be caught pregnant by somebody she hadn’t planned on, especially someone who’s, you know . . .” Roger looks over apologetically at Vern.
“White,” Vernon supplies. “Might as well say it,” he declares. “I wasn’t up to her standards.”
They all fall silent for a minute to delicately acknowledge this truth. From outside in the yard, Joelle hears voices, laughter. The shed contingent is making its way back from viewing the chicks.
“Anyway, three years go by . . . ,” Jodie starts up again.
“I finally persuade your Aunt Mary Louise to marry me,” Vernon tells Joelle.
“Yeah. From Sylvie, we get telephone calls, a couple of letters,” Roger says. “We find out she’s got two babies up there, not just one. Ma thinks Sylvie’s thinking of going to college, or maybe even is going; but, of course, Sylvie being Sylvie, we don’t know for sure. She never wanted to let anyone in on her business. It would’ve been like her to try to pull off a stunt like that. Go to a fancy, white college with a couple of babies on her hands, and working, and by herself.”
“You think she was by herself? A girl who looked like that?” Jerry asks. He’s just coming in through the kitchen with Greg.
“She would if she was smart,” Franko says. “She had enough babies to take care of without some big lug hanging around. No offense, Vern.”
Vern flashes an all clear with his hand.
“And smart is one thing you’ve got to give her,” Franko goes on. “Did you know,” he adds, turning to Joelle on the couch, “that Sylvie was ranked number one at her high school? Head of the class her graduating year. An Indian girl. Made people sit up and take note, I can tell you.”
“And that was after she’d been absent for most of the whole year before, when she took off and went down to Florida with Queenie,” Jerry says.
“What?” exclaims Joelle. “What did Queenie have to do with Sylvie?”
“Queenie’s her aunt,” Franko says.
“Your great-aunt,” Jodie adds.
“Well, our aunt too,” Jerry has to admit. He’s just drawn up a chair. “She’s Ma’s crazy sister who came up from Barbados thirty years ago. And never recovered, I guess. Kings and queens on the brain. That’s why they call her that. Her real name is Florence.”
“She’s got a grand sense of herself, all right,” Franko says. “I’m beginning to think it runs in the women of this family. I hope you didn’t catch it,” he adds, winking at Joelle.
“Well, as to kings and queens, even Ma did say—” Roger begins.
“Hush up with that nonsense,” Jerry cuts in. He glances at Joelle. “Don’t put it in her head. We’re no more related to the royal Narragansetts than the queen of England. It’s been three centuries, folks.”
To Joelle, he says: “Ma grew up down there in Barbados. The way the story is, her family’s the offspring of Narragansett Indians who were sold out of Boston after losing to the English in the seventeenth century. When Ma came here to Rhode Island as a kid, she met up with our dad, who’s got Narragansett heritage from way back.”
“Or had it,” Franko says. “He’s been dead awhile. He was proud of his blood. And he was a good railroad man. Showed us the way.”
All five brothers sit quietly for a minute, gazing into one another’s faces and remembering their father.
“Well, what happened next?” Joelle asks impatiently. “Did you ever find out if Sylvie got through college in Chicago? There’s another thing, too—when did I get born?”
Now there’s a big silence, a different kind from the first embarrassed one that morning when they were all just meeting and no one knew what to say. This is a silence, Joelle detects, made out of everyone knowing exactly what to say and no one wanting to say it.
Greg is sitting closest to Joelle on the couch. He reaches over and touches her softly on the arm.
“You’ve been born, Joelle. Didn’t you understand that?”
“How could I have been born?” Joelle replies. “So far, she’s just had Vernon’s twins. What were they, by the way, girls or boys? You haven’t said yet.”
Vernon takes a swallow of the Coke he’s drinking.
“Girls,” he says, gazing at the carpet. All the uncles keep quiet.
“Well, what were their names?”
“She called one Sylvia, after her, and the other was Sissie. I never knew the names until later, you understand, after the accident.” Vernon sounds weak, as if he’s run out of breathing power.
Joelle is about to yell What accident? when her mind does a little loop around Sylvia and Sissie, and she stops. She knows who they are. They are her being born, right there in front of her eyes.
“I’m already here, aren’t I?” she asks Uncle Jerry, sitting across from her, just to make sure.
He nods.
“Well, which one am I?”
“Sissie,” he says. “Sylvia was the second one, born too small.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means she’s got things missing,” Vernon jumps in to say. “So she’s slow. She’s the slow one who wouldn’t grow. We only found this out later.”
Uncle Jodie is nodding. “Now we know what our sister Sylvie was up against. Not only trying to make her way on an uphill road she’s determined to take, stubborn as she is, not only dealing with two little children all by herself, but one of them is handicapped. With problems we don’t even know. Not only that, the child gets sick as she gets older. This little girl begins to get real sick.”
“And Sylvie doesn’t want to leave her with strangers,” Uncle Franko says. “You can guess she wouldn’t want that, being who she is.”
“Sylvie was in trouble,” Uncle Jerry says with a nod. “We know that now, thinking back to what she wrote in her letters.”
“The problem was, we weren’t paying attention,” Uncle Jodie says. “Ma was ailing and . . .”
“And then Ma dies,” Uncle Roger takes over, with a sigh. “I was still living with her. Vern and I had moved over to working on the turkey ranch. So Sylvie comes home for the funeral, bringing you and Sylvia, age about what? Three?” He looks around at the others for confirmation.
“Four,” says Vernon. “I saw my babies. I’d been doing some addition and . . .”
“We still didn’t know they were Vern’s, did we?” Roger says, looking around at his brothers. They shake their heads.
“I knew,” Vernon said. “When I saw them, there wasn’t any doubt in my mind. I didn’t go up to Sylvie, though. Mary Louise was with me at the service.” He gazes across at Joelle, his eyes turning red and watery. “I looked at you . . . and little Sylvia . . . from a distance,” he says.
When Joelle sees his eyes, she feels a prickle come up behind her eyes too, because she’s just figured out something else. Something she hadn’t ever thought possible before.
“You’re my father, aren’t you?” she says to Vernon.
He nods.
“And Aunt Mary Louise never did know it.”
Vernon shakes his head.
“Well, couldn’t you at least have told me?” Joelle asks.
Vernon wipes his eyes like a little child. “I couldn’t. You would’ve told her.”
“I guess I would,” Joelle has to say. “But would it have been so bad if she knew?”
“I didn’t know what she’d do. I knew it would hurt her. What if she wanted to leave? I couldn’t’ve stood that. I loved her. She was my good luck.”
Vernon puts his big hands over his big face and just moans in what sounds to Joelle like pure agony. “I was caught,” he says, muffled behind his hands. “I didn’t know which way to go. So I kept quiet.”
“And we helped him,” Uncle Roger says, standing up tall. “Don’t blame him, Joelle. You can’t blame anybody. It’s the mess things got into.”
For a minute Joelle sits where she is, thinking about this. Everybody’s eyes are on her, and she’s trying to get her bearings. Finally, just as Uncle Roger decides to sit down again and Vernon is accepting a tissue from Uncle Jodie’s pocket, she gets them. She stands up.
“That certainly takes care of everything,” she says, all five feet nine inches of her looking down on her uncles. “Everything except me and Aunt Mary Louise. I see how it is. Now that she’s died, you all can come out of hiding. That’s why you’re here—isn’t it?—because she can’t be. Well, I think it’s rotten,” Joelle says, her voice rising. “I know Aunt Mary Louise would think so too. You went around behind her back. You waited until—”
“That’s not true, Joelle,” Uncle Jerry protests. “None of us could’ve known your dear aunt was going to leave us when she did.”
“Mary Louise was a star, we all say so,” Uncle Greg adds, nodding. “She was batting one thousand in our book. She loved Vern and brought you up good and always kept her head when the going got tough. I think she might even have guessed something wasn’t right, and kept her mouth shut.”
Joelle doesn’t buy it. She thinks she sees the whole story now. If this really were baseball, she’d be in the ninth inning, with the last batter up and a big, lopsided score against her.
“Get out of this house,” she’s suddenly yelling at the top of her lungs. “Now!” she yells. “This is Aunt Mary Louise’s house. She still lives here. You can’t get rid of her that easy. Go on, all of you. Get out!”
* * *
There’s a long silence in the room. Finally, the uncles get up off their chairs, heads hanging, and go outside to the backyard, followed by Vernon.
“C’mon to the shed and let her cool off,” Joelle hears him say. They all lumber across the muddy yard—she’s watching their every move from the kitchen window—and disappear inside with the chicks, which are just in the process of hatching out for Vernon’s next big delivery. With all this coming and going from the shed, it’s pretty obvious to Joelle now who his secret backers are!
Joelle gets a can of Coke from the fridge, walks out to the front porch, and strides up and down a few times, venting into the chilly 5:00 p.m. air. It might be spring, but winter’s not letting go. Farther north, Chicago’s even colder, she’s heard. Icy winds off Lake Michigan. Snow in the streets. The biggest drifts last through April some years.
Looking down one of those canyons of Chicago skyscrapers she’s seen on TV, Joelle catches a glimpse of Sylvie with her twins, Sylvia and Sissie, crossing a busy street. Sylvie, instructing her girls to look both ways, holding their hands hard—too hard!—while the traffic roars by. There is Sylvie’s long black hair rippled by the wind, streaked across her dark face as they turn into the park. Now she is showing her daughters how to make an Indian trail in the snow, as their ancestors did. Put your foot exactly into the footprint of the person in front of you, she explains. In this way, you can hide and fool your enemy. Many can travel under cover of one.
Armed with the uncles’ new facts, Joelle believes she remembers this actual scene. She gazes across the divide of years and watches as her footprints tuck neatly inside her mother’s big ones. Behind her comes her sister Sylvia, stumbling and breathing hard but doing her best. All this city and traffic and snow are too much for her. Her scared eyes look up and:
“Don’t worry, Sylvia, I’ll take care of you,” Sissie tells her. “Follow me. You can do it.”
And she does! Her little foot comes down exactly in the middle of Mom’s and Sissie’s prints and immediately gets lost. Good work, Sylvia! No one would ever know she was there.