I arrive in Washington on Friday afternoon, the day after my father’s death, leave my bags at the home of Miles and Vera Madison, my wife’s diffident and proper parents, then go over to the Shepard Street house, only to find that Mariah, in her orderly way, has done most of what needs doing. (By unspoken agreement, we both know the family cannot rely on flighty Addison, who has yet to relay any travel plans.) Long ago, Mariah was a plump, disorderly child, with a terrible inferiority complex about her younger, fair-skinned sister, for an obsession with pigmentation is even now the curse of our race, especially in families like mine. As she grew older, Mariah became a stately, almost regal, beauty, somehow ignored nevertheless by the men of the Gold Coast (as we style our narrow, upper-middle-class strip of the darker nation), perhaps running now to fleshiness, but that is to be expected after bearing five children, according to sour Kimmer, professional lawyer and amateur fitness guru. (Kimmer has borne exactly one, a half-planned accident we named Bentley after his maternal grandmother’s maiden name.) The adult Mariah is also fabulously well organized, the only one of the children who takes after the Judge in that respect, and she does not believe in rest. But moments after I walk through the door of the rambling and ugly Shepard Street house where we both spent our teen years, Mariah dumps the rest of the work on me. She does this, I think, not out of grief or malice or even exhaustion, but out of the same trait that led her to quit journalism for a career of raising her children, a peculiar willed deference to men, inherited from our mother, who required of her two daughters less that they play a role than that they display an attitude: there were tasks unfit for their gender. Kimmer hates this in my sister, and has accused her, once to her face, of wasting the brain that earned her Phi Beta Kappa in her junior year at Stanford. Kimmer tossed out this line at a Christmas party in this very house that we foolishly attended two years ago. Mariah, smiling, responded calmly that her children deserve the best years of her life. Kimmer, who scarcely broke her professional stride when Bentley was born, took this as a personal attack and said so, which gave my sister and me another reason, if one was needed, not to speak to each other.
You should understand that in many ways I love and respect my sister. When we were younger, Mariah was, by common agreement, the most intellectually able of my parents’ four children, and the one most earnestly and touchingly devoted to the impossible work of gaining their approval. Her successes in high school and college warmed my father’s heart. To warm my mother’s, Mariah married once and happily, an earlier fiance who would have been a disaster having conveniently absconded with her best friend, and she produced grandchildren with a regularity and an enthusiasm that delighted my parents. Her husband is white and boring, an investment banker ten years her senior whom she met, she told the family, on a blind date, although sweet Kimmer always insists that it could only have been the personals. And, if I admit the truth, Mariah has always preferred white men, all the way back to her high-school years at Sidwell Friends, when, under the hawklike scrutiny of our brooding father, she began to date.
At Shepard Street, Mariah is greeting callers in the foyer, formal and sober in a midnight blue dress and a single strand of pearls, very much the lady of the house, as my mother might have said. From somewhere in the house wafts my father’s terrible taste in classical music: Puccini with an English-language libretto. The foyer is small and murky and crowded with mismatched pieces of heavy wooden furniture. It opens on the left to the living room, on the right to the dining room, and in the back to a hallway leading to family room and kitchen. A broad but undistinguished staircase strides upward next to the dining-room door, and along the upstairs hall is a gallery where I used to crouch in order to spy on my parents’ dinner parties and poker games, and where Addison once made me hide in a successful effort to prove to me that there is no Santa Claus. Beyond the gallery is the cavernous study where my father died. To my surprise, I see two or three people up there now, leaning on the banister as though it belongs to them. In fact, there are more people in the house than I expect. The entire first floor seems filled with somber suits, a larger slice of financially comfortable African America than most white Americans probably think exists outside the sports and entertainment worlds, and I wonder how many of the guests are happier about my father’s death than their faces attest.
When I step through the front door, my sister offers me not a hug but a distant kiss, one cheek, other cheek, and murmurs, “I’m so glad you’re here,” the way she might say it to one of my father’s law partners or poker buddies. Then, holding my shoulders in something still short of a hug, she looks past me down the walk, eyes tired but bright and mischievous: “Where’s Kimberly?” (Mariah refuses to say Kimmer, which reeks, she once told me, of faux preppiness, although my wife attended Miss Porter’s School and is thus fully qualified as a preppie.)
“On her way back from San Francisco,” I say. “She’s been out there for a few days on business.” Bentley, I add, much too fast, is with our neighbors: I picked him up early from his preschool yesterday and then left him again this morning to make this trip, assuming I would be too busy today to spend much time with him. Kimmer will retrieve him tonight, and they will be down tomorrow on the train. Explaining all these logistical details, knowing already that I am talking too much, I experience a yawning emptiness that I hope my face does not show, for I am missing my wife in ways I am not yet prepared to review for the family.
But I need not have bothered to mask my emotions, for Mariah has plenty of her own to cope with, and makes no effort to hide her pain or her confusion. She has already forgotten asking for my wife. “I don’t understand it,” she says softly, shaking her head, her fingers digging into my upper arms. Actually, I am sure Mariah understands perfectly. Just last year the Judge was in the hospital to repair the imprecise results of his bypass operation of two years before, a fact my sister knows as well as I do; our father’s death, if not precisely awaited, was hardly unexpected.
“It could have happened anytime,” I murmur.
“I wish it hadn’t happened now.”
To that there is little to say, other than to mention God’s will, which, in our family, nobody ever does. I nod and pat her hand, which seems to offend her, so I stop. She closes her tired eyes, gathering her control, then opens them and is all Garland again. She sighs and tosses her head back, as though she still has the long hair she struggled to care for as a teenager, then says unapologetically: “I’m sorry there’s no room for you guys in the house, but I’ve got the kids down in the basement and half the cousins up in the attic.” Mariah shrugs as though to say she has no choice, but I sense her true intention in making these dispositions: she is quietly asserting her dominion and daring me to challenge her.
I do not.
“Fine,” I say, never losing the smile that always seems to confound her.
But, to my surprise, my sister’s face bears no look of triumph. She seems, with this victory, more miserable than ever, for once not sure what to say. I cannot recall when I have seen Mariah less confident; but, then, she loved the Judge best, even though there were times when she couldn’t stand him.
“Hey, kid,” I say softly, kid being what we used to call each other when we were teens and experimented with liking each other. “Hey, come on, it’s going to be okay.”
Mariah nods uncertainly, not reassured by a single word from my mouth. But, since she distrusts me, this is scarcely surprising. She nibbles her lower lip, an act she would never perform in front of one of her children. Then she gets up on her toes and speaks in a high-pitched whisper, her breath tickling my ear: “I need to talk to you about something, Tal. It’s important. Something… something’s not right.” As I incline my puzzled head, Mariah glances from one side of the shadowy foyer to the other, as though afraid of being overheard. I follow her gaze, my eyes, like hers, running over obscure distant relatives and fair-weather friends, including some the family has not seen since my father’s mortifying confirmation fight, and at last settling on the hovering figure of her husband, Howard Denton, looking prosperous and fit and somehow perfectly in place in spite of his whiteness. Howard worships at the shrine of bodybuilding; even in his fifties, his broad shoulders seem to float above his tapered waist. He adores Mariah. He also adores money. Although he sneaks the occasional reverential look in my sister’s direction, Howard is mainly carrying on an animated conversation with a clutch of young men and women I do not quite recognize. From their trim energy and Brooks Brothers attire, and from the fact that one of them is pressing a card into his hand, I suppose business is being done, even here, even now.
The same thing used to happen to my father, even after his fall: he would walk into a room, and suddenly everybody would want something from him. He projected that aura, sending a subliminal message that he was a person around whom and through whom things happened -a person it would benefit you to know. And here is lean Howard, of all people, he of the thinning brown hair and hand-tailored suits and seven-figure income, or maybe it is eight now, able to exercise the same power. So now it is my turn to be offended, less on behalf of the family than on behalf of the race: my vision is suddenly overlaid with bright splotches of red, a thing that happens from time to time when my connection to the darker nation and its oppression is most powerfully stimulated. The room fades around me. Through the red curtain, I still see, albeit dimly, these ambitious black kids in their ambitious little suits, young people not much older than my students, vying for the favor of my brother-in-law because he is a managing director at Goldman Sachs, and I suddenly understand the passion of the many black nationalists of the sixties who opposed affirmative action, warning that it would strip the community of the best among its potential leaders, sending them off to the most prestigious colleges, and turning them into… well, into young corporate apparatchiks in Brooks Brothers suits, desperate for the favor of powerful white capitalists. Our leaders, they argued, would be tricked into supporting a new goal. Fancy college degrees and fancier money for the few would supplant justice for the many. And the nationalists were right. I am the few. My wife is the few. My sister is the few. My students are the few. These kids pressing business cards on my brother-in-law are the few. And the world is such a bright, angry red. My legs are stone. My face is stone. I stand very still, letting the redness wash over me, wallowing in it the way a man who has nearly died of thirst might wallow in the shower, absorbing it through every pore, feeling the very cells of my body swell with it, and sensing a near-electric charge in the air, a portent, a symbol of a coming storm, and reliving and reviling in this frozen, furious instant every apple I have ever polished for everybody white who could help me get ahead-
“Leave it alone, kid,” says my conscience, except that it is really Mariah, her voice surprisingly patient, her hand on my arm. “It’s just the way he is.” I look down and see that my fingers have curled into a fist. I know that almost no time has passed-a second, perhaps two. No time ever passes when the red curtain falls across my vision, and I often have the sense that I can reach out my will and freeze those moments for eternity, remain locked forever between this second and the next, living in a world of glorious red fury. I have that sense now. Then I look up and see, through the redness, the pain-no, the neediness -in my sister’s dark brown eyes. What is it that she needs and Howard is not providing? Not for the first time, I wonder what (other than money) she sees in him. It is my wife’s notion that Mariah was running away from something when she chose her mate, but all of my parents’ children were running away, as hard and fast as possible, running from the very same something, or someone, and neither Addison nor I ever married anyone as insipid as Howard.
On the other hand, my sister’s marriage is happy.
Mariah murmurs my name and touches my face and is, for an instant, my sister and not my adversary. The red is gone, the room is back. I almost hug her, which I do not think I have done in ten years, and I even believe that she would let me; but the moment passes. “We can talk later,” she says, and pushes me gently but definitely away. “Go say hello to Sally,” she adds as she turns to greet her next guest. “She’s crying in the kitchen.”
I nod dumbly, still not sure why these moods come over me, trying to remember when last this malady struck. As I turn into the dreary hallway, Mariah is already telling somebody else how good it was of him to come and bestowing a kiss on each cheek. I greet Howard as I pass, but he is too busy collecting business cards to do more than grimace and wave. A quick shimmer of red dances around his head and is gone. I turn away. The numberless cousins, as my father used to call them, seem to pack every square foot of the first floor: numberless simply because the Judge never really bothered to get them straight. Presiding over the cousins, as always, is the ageless Alma, or Aunt Alma, as our parents insisted we call her, although Alma herself, in secret, embracing us in great clouds of sachet, commanded us all to call her “just Alma,” which we often took literally, although not to her face: Mariah, is Just Alma here yet? Or even: Mommy! Daddy! Just Alma is on the phone! Just Alma, who is my father’s second cousin or great-aunt or something, admits to some eighty-one years and has probably lived longer, skinny as a tree branch and loud and fun and raunchy, never quite still, gracefully deporting herself in the jazzy rhythms that have sustained the darker nation ever since its coerced beginnings. As a child, I sought her out at every family gathering, because she was always pulling nickels and dimes out of unexpected pockets and forcing them upon us; I seek her out now because she has been, since our mother died, the family’s gravitational force, drawing us toward her as though she can curve space.
“Tal cott! ” Alma cries when she sees me, leaning on her intricately carved cane, smiling her flirtatious grin. “Getcha self on over here!”
I kiss Alma gently, and she awards me a quick squeeze. I can feel her fragile bones move, and I marvel that the winds of age have not managed to blow Alma away. Her breath smells of cigarettes: Kools, which she has been smoking since some legendary act of protest when she was a high-schooler in Philadelphia almost seven decades ago. She was married for more than half a century to a preacher who was a power in Pennsylvania politics, and who was eulogized by the Vice-President of the United States.
“It’s good to see you, Alma.”
“That’s the problem! All good-lookin men ever wanna do with me is see!” She cackles and slaps my shoulder, fairly hard. Alma, despite her tiny frame, bore six children, all of whom are still living, five of whom are college graduates, four of whom are still in first marriages, three of whom work for the city of Philadelphia, two of whom are doctors, one of whom is gay: there is some sort of numerical principle at work. Together Alma’s children, along with her grands and great-grands, account for the largest subset of the numberless cousins. She lives in a cramped apartment in one of the less desirable neighborhoods of Philadelphia but spends so much time visiting her descendants that she is away more than she is home.
“You’d probably be too much for me, Alma.”
I give her another quick squeeze and prepare to move on. Alma grips my biceps, holding me in place. Her eyes are half covered with thick yellow cataracts, but her gaze is sharp and alive. “You know your daddy loved you very much, don’t you, Talcott?”
“Yes,” I say, although with the Judge love was less knowledge than guess.
“He had plans for you, Talcott.”
“Plans?”
“For the sake of the family. You’re the head of the family now, Talcott.”
“I would think that would be Addison.” Stiffly. I am offended and not sure why.
She shakes her little head. “No, no, no. Not Addison. You. That’s the way your daddy wanted it.”
I purse my lips, trying to figure out if she is serious. I am flattered and worried at the same time. The idea of being the head of the Garland family, whatever it might mean, has an odd appeal, no doubt the expression of some ancient male gene for dominance.
“Okay, Alma.”
She hugs me a little tighter, refusing to be mollified. “Talcott, he had plans for you. He wanted you to be the one who…” Alma blinks and leans away again. “Well, never mind, never mind. He’ll let you know.”
“Who’ll let me know, Alma?”
She chooses to answer a different question. “You have the chance to make everything right, Talcott. You can fix it.”
“Fix what?”
“The family.”
I shake my head. “Alma, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You know what I mean, Talcott. Remember the good times we used to have in Oak Bluffs? You kids, your daddy and mommy, me, Uncle Derek-back when Abigail was still with us,” Alma concludes suddenly, surprising me with a small sob.
I take her hand. “I don’t think human beings can fix things like that.”
“Right. But your daddy will let you know what to do when the time comes.”
“My daddy? You mean the Judge?”
“You got some other daddy?”
This is the other thing everybody says about Alma: she is no longer quite all there.
Extricating myself at last, I remember that I am supposed to be looking for Sally. All the crazy Garland women, I am thinking: is it we Garland men who give them their neuroses, or is it just coincidence? I struggle through the throng. I wonder why all these people are here now, why they couldn’t wait for the wake. Maybe Mariah isn’t planning one. A couple of strangers thrust their hands at me. Somebody whispers that the Judge didn’t suffer and we should count our blessings, and I want to spin around and ask, Were you there?… but instead I nod and walk on, as my father would have. Somebody else, another white face, mumbles that the torch has been passed and it is all up to the children now, but neglects to define it. Just outside the kitchen, I frown at the hearty handshake of an elderly Baptist minister, high in the councils of one of the older civil rights organizations, a man who, I am pretty sure, actually testified against my father’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. And now has the temerity to pretend to mourn with us. The handshake seems interminable, his ancient fingertips keep moving on my flesh, and I finally realize that he is trying to impart the secret hailing sign of some fraternity, not knowing, perhaps, that rejecting the overtures of such groups was one of my very few acts of rebellion against my parents’ way of life-the life, I often think, from which Kimmer, my fellow rebel, rescued me. Nor is it my pleasure to enlighten him. I simply want to escape his insincere unctuousness, and I can feel the veil of red about to return. He refuses to let go. He is talking about how close he and my father were in the past. How sorry he is about the way things turned out. I am about to respond with something rather un-Christian, when all at once a whirlwind of small bodies hurricanes past, nearly knocking us both to the floor; the five Denton children, ages four through twelve, are rushing in their leaderless headlong way to trash some other area of the house. They number Malcolm, Marshall, the twins Martin and Martina, and the baby, Marcus. Mariah, I know, is even now hunting desperately for a name for the very obvious sixth little Denton, due in late February or early March, but is at a loss to find a way to honor both our history and her pattern. This latest pregnancy is in any case a scandal, at least within the four walls of my house. A year ago, when she was forty-two, Mariah confided to my astonished wife that she wanted to bear one more child, which Kimmer denounced, to my private ear, as an irresponsible waste and self-indulgence: for Kimmer, like my father, values most those who differ from her least.