The Journal I Did Not Keep Read online

  The bespectacled blonde was standing with her back to the room, absorbed in the arrangement, on a four-legged wicker tray, of a plate, a knife and fork, a cup and saucer. She aligned the napkin with the spiritual precision of a Mondrian. “I’ll take him his juice and come back.” She went out the door.

  “Is Percy sick?” asked Sarah with a frown of concern.

  “Nope,” said Ebony.

  “I want to stay with Aunt Ebony,” wept Annie.

  “Don’t you want to come with Mommy and Daddy and see the Elephant Rock? Anybody want to come swimming?” Sarah asked.

  “Can we have lunch in that inn?” asked Ilka.

  “Sure can,” said Ebony. “Ain’t a damn thing we cain’t do.”

  “Why can’t I stay with Aunt Ebony?” screamed Annie.

  “I’ve got an idea for Annie,” said Ebony. “Annie, you and I will go to town and do the marketing, if that’s okay with your mommy, if your mommy will get you a pair of pants, because this is Connecticut, where they’re sticklers.”

  “It would help,” said Sarah, “to have some quiet to phone the idiot agency, but I don’t want her bothering you. Did you get any sleep?”

  “Not any,” said Ebony.

  * * *

  —

  Ebony and a blissful Annie in a clean seersucker playsuit drove off.

  The German stood in Ilka’s path. He said, “Sarah and I go for a walk. Would you like to come with us?”

  “No,” said Ilka and said, “thanks.” Because he continued to stand smiling at her, Ilka said, “I have to find Carter.”

  * * *

  —

  Ilka found Carter lying mother-naked in the grass behind the cottage. The sky was perfectly blue. Carter said, “I turn copper-colored in the sun.”

  “We go swimming and to lunch at the inn,” reported Ilka.

  “Who goes?” asked Carter without opening his eyes.

  “You don’t want to go?”

  “At this moment,” said Carter, “my head is not reeling, my stomach is not pitching. I’m not moving.”

  * * *

  —

  Ilka found the blonde with the two names in back of the house hanging a shirt on the line. “Your husband is sleeping?”

  “He’s writing.”

  Ilka said, “You look so familiar! You’re sure you were not born in Vienna? Prague? Paris? Grenoble? Constantsa? Lisbon?”

  “I was never out of the States except for our senior high school trip we went to Quebec,” said Doris Mae.

  “Very sensible of you to get born right away in America.”

  “How do you mean?” said Doris Mae.

  “Think of all the time you saved not queueing in consulates, waiting for quota numbers, alien cards, affidavits, sponsors, visas, permits! What are you doing?”

  “Hanging Percival’s shirt to dry,” said Doris Mae.

  “I mean what do you work?”

  “Before I married Percival I was a gym teacher,” said Doris Mae.

  “Aha!” said Ilka and walked away.

  * * *

  —

  In the kitchen Ebony was holding the refrigerator door for Annie and saying, “Wonderful! Now the milk, which will and will not fit on that shelf. Try the top shelf. Terrific!”

  Sarah walked in and said, “God, I didn’t mean you to baby-sit! Annie, come with me!”

  “No problem,” said Ebony. “Annie and I bought some mushrooms for an omelet, and a beautiful salad. I’ll fix a bit of lunch.”

  “Can I help?” asked Ilka.

  “I believe everything is under control,” said Ebony. She ran water through every convolution of every leaf of lettuce, patted, dried, and tied the lettuce in a towel and said, “If you would like to put this on a shelf in the fridge, that would be terrific.”

  “I can cut the onion,” offered Ilka.

  “Wonderful,” said Ebony.

  “How small?”

  “Don’t matter a hoot,” said Ebony.

  “How’s this?”

  “Terrific,” said Ebony.

  “You want still smaller?”

  “Maybe just a smidgen.”

  “How is this now?”

  “Wonderful. I’ll just give it a couple more chop chop chop chops…There we are!”

  “Where shall I put the onion?”

  “Why don’t you just leave it?”

  “I want to wash up the board.”

  “Except the sink is full of lettuce. I’ll clear it later.”

  “I can clear,” said Ilka, and picking up the board, set the knife sliding, and bending to catch it, dropped the board on Ebony’s foot. Ebony screamed briefly.

  “Sorry!” Ilka knelt to wipe the onion off the pink-rimmed brown foot.

  “Not with the dish towel!”

  “Sorry,” said Ilka. “Shall I cut more onion?”

  “You do that,” said Ebony. “I’ll go up and catch me a little nap, maybe, now there’s no moon to spook me.”

  * * *

  —

  Outside, Victor stood in wait for Ilka. “Jews in Connecticut!” he said in German and smiled and shook his head.

  Ilka said, “I have a headache.”

  “You should lie down,” the young German said.

  Ilka began to walk very fast in the direction of the cottage. He kept beside her. “When did you come to America?” he asked her.

  “Last year,” Ilka said and walked faster.

  “You went through the whole war! Are your parents alive?” he dared, intolerably, to want to know.

  “My mother lives in New York.” Ilka lifted her eyes to his round and friendly face. “The Nazis shot my father on the road, the last week of the war,” she said and bolted into the cottage and closed the door and found she really did have a headache. At least a pulse beat so furiously behind her eyes she felt her head jerked forward and backward in space.

  * * *

  —

  “‘My deah!’” said Ebony, when she had finished serving dinner and had tied the dish towel around Annie, who insisted on wearing it backward, like a cloak. “‘You’ll never guess what I saw this morning! In the supermarket!’” Ilka looked up in surprise at the stranger’s conspiratorial and salacious voice emanating from Ebony’s thinned and pursed lips. Ebony leaned intimately toward no one sitting on her left and, cupping her hand to prevent the nonexistent crowd on her right from overhearing, said, “‘A colored! Right down the center aisle! My deah! Without shoes! Could I ask a favor?’” she said in her normal voice. “I don’t only like fixing food, I like serving it, I like buying it, I even like cleaning it up, so could I be let to do the kitchen by myself, just for tonight, so tomorrow I’ll know where everything is?”

  * * *

  —

  “Can you believe we still have not got through to the idiotic agency?” Sarah said to the group around the fire. Stanley lay stretched at his full length, asleep on the sofa. Carter and Percival sat where they had sat the first night, one on each side of the fire. Ilka looked around for Doris Mae. Ilka wanted Ebony to come in and sit down and complete the circle. What Ilka wanted was to be happy.

  “We called first thing in the morning,” Sarah said, “and got the cleaning woman. She said they didn’t come in till nine-thirty. At nine-thirty they said our woman wasn’t expected until ten, so we went for a walk and gave her till ten-twenty and she had just walked out and wasn’t expected back till around four, four-thirty. We called back four-thirty and she had left for the day. By this time you begin to smell a rat. So tomorrow we start all over.”

  “Monday, you mean,” Victor said.

  “I mean Monday.”

  In the ensuing silence Ilka heard the murmur of a distant conversation. She got up and went and looked in the kitchen door: Doris Mae was cleaning out the sink; Ebony was swabbing down the table. Ilka was jealous.

  * * *

  —

  “I have a question,” said Ilka when she lay in bed beside Carter. “Percival is very clev
er, no?”

  “Very,” said Carter.

  “Why did he marry what is her name again?”

  “Doris Mae,” said Carter. “I guess he likes her.”

  “She is not interesting.” Ilka felt a personal affront when interesting men liked dull women. “She doesn’t talk,” said Ilka.

  “She talks to me. I like Doris Mae.”

  “And why would Doris Mae marry…” Ilka became puzzled and stopped.

  “A Negro twice her age?”

  “You think I mean that?” cried Ilka.

  “What did you mean?”

  “That!” said Ilka with the thrill of revelation. “I’m a racist!”

  “Not to worry,” Carter said. “Some of my best friends are racists.”

  * * *

  —

  Another brilliant morning. “Was that our bird, do you think, from our bush?” said Ilka. It had left its three-pronged claw print across the silver-wet grass. The air was perfectly white. The big white house stood in modest dignity upon its eminence; another hour, and the gold impurities of day would compromise its sharp new outlines.

  “Morning!” Ebony said. “Hot biscuits! It’s Sunday!”

  “Once, can we go to the church in the village?” said Ilka.

  “No!” Carter and Ebony said in one voice.

  Ebony was looking into the oven. “Not quite done,” she told Doris Mae.

  Doris Mae was setting out Percival’s tray and said, “I’ll take him his juice.”

  “Anybody brought me my food in bed,” said Ebony, after a silence which could be trusted to allow Doris Mae to have reached the top of the stairs, “I swear I would eat them!”

  “He does,” said Carter.

  “He does, he does, he has! Eaten her right up!” Ebony said, nodding her head.

  “That’s not food,” said Carter in the same low voice, “it’s a ritual.”

  “Right! Right! You’re right! And I thought it was breakfast! A ritual is what that is.”

  “You saw the reverence, the piety,” said Carter.

  “Certainly did. I saw it.” Ebony nodded and nodded. “Poor Stanley! All he ever gets is food.”

  “Good, good, good food,” Carter said.

  “Poor, poor, poor Stanley! Good morning,” Ebony said to the sleep-heated, tousle-headed Annie in the doorway. “You are just in time to see if these biscuits are ready to come out of the oven. If you will stand over there, we’re going to take a look. How many more minutes would you say?”

  “Ten,” said Annie.

  “Right!” said Ebony and nodded her head. “Me too. I like my biscuits burnt good and black, so we’ll leave one for you and one for me another ten minutes, but in case some of these other people might prefer theirs this uninteresting golden color, would you bring me Aunt Abigail’s ironstone platter from the table over there. Wonderful. Hold it very steady, just like that. Marvelous! Now you come and sit here. Here is the clock. When this hand comes around to there, you sing out and that’s when ours will be done. Meanwhile you could start on one of these dumb white ones,” she said and buttered a beautiful hot biscuit and poured a glass of milk for Annie. “Doris Mae, I got some biscuits wrapped in a napkin keeping warm for Percy.”

  “Thank you,” said Doris Mae, who lofted the tray and bore it out the door.

  “Poor, poor Stanley!” said Ebony. “You ever hear Stanley snore? He doesn’t snore, he snorts, he grunts, he gasps—you wouldn’t think a little skin-and-bone man like that could perform such a racket! He’s got to dip so far down to get his breath up I think he’s never going to make it back, and I lie and I wait. I’m thinking this is the middle of the night in the middle of Connecticut! Do I call the doctor and say, ‘Dr. Hunter, get out of your bed, my husband stopped breathing’? I wait another second. One more second. I’m going to count to ten. Are you watching the clock?” she asked Annie, who chewed slowly, watching the drama of Ebony’s face. “Now I panic. I sit up. I lean down. I listen for Stanley’s heart…Damned if he doesn’t snort—right in my ear! Gasp, gurgle, as if somebody’s trying to strangle him. So I turn over. I’m going to sleep, no matter what. I’m just about to drop off when, rattle and snort, Stanley throws his arm around, slap in my face! Wakes me right up! I was never so mad!”

  “Ten,” yelled Annie.

  “Come,” said Ebony. “There, you see! Two charcoaled biscuits which are great for writing one’s name on a paper napkin. A N N I E.”

  “Here you are,” shouted Sarah in the kitchen door. “Didn’t I tell you not to bother Aunt Ebony!”

  “We’re just fine and dandy. No problem,” said Ebony, but Sarah hauled the shrieking Annie up the stairs.

  “Have we got in touch with the agency yet?” Carter asked Ebony in a low voice.

  “We have not got in touch,” Ebony said, “yet.”

  “Man,” said Carter, “that is the slowest damn pregnancy, black or white, that I have ever had the misfortune to be obliged to listen to a blow-by-blow account of.”

  “Not a blow spared,” said Ebony. “Good morning, Stanley. Did you know you slapped my face for me in bed last night!”

  “Bastard,” said the smiling Stanley.

  “I got so mad,” said Ebony, “I wrapped up in my blanket and came downstairs and tried the living-room couch, and nothing.”

  “Anybody go for my Times?”

  “I did,” said Ebony. “Baby, you think that little village store would order me the Harlem Herald? Carter, don’t you get the Harlem Herald?”

  “Heck, no! I write for the Harlem Herald. I don’t read it! That’s what you need,” Carter said to Ebony. “The Harlem Herald! Put you right to sleep! I know a joke. Two colored meet on Good Friday. One says, ‘Say, Jack, I see you got the mark on your forehead, Lord be praised, you seen the light at last.’ Jack says, ‘Lord showed me the way, after all these years, hallelujah!’ Says, ‘Hallelujah. So, what you goin’ give up for Lent this year?’ ‘Man,’ says Jack, ‘goin’ give up the Negro press, after all these years, Lord be praised!’”

  Stanley grinned affectionately at Carter. Carter laughed and laughed and laughed. “Goin’ give up the Negro press, Lord be praised!” hollered Carter.

  “The Negro press!” Ebony nodded and nodded her head without the hint of a smile, “That is a fun-ny sto-ry!” she said. Her eyes were very brilliant and her voice was very harsh.

  “Today can we go to that inn?” said Ilka in order not to be saying nothing.

  “Absolutely.” And Ebony nodded her head up and down.

  * * *

  —

  The cars began to arrive in the late morning. They parked in the shade under the trees. The doors opened and out stepped two, three, five, ten, a dozen black people. Black people covered the slope. “Jack!” said Carter to the man in the brown three-piece suit. “You remember my friend Ilka. Jack,” Carter explained to Ilka, “is the principal of Ebony’s school. Ginny!” He embraced the brown, red-haired woman, who said, “Brought you my homemade piccalilli that you like.” A bare-backed black woman in high heels unwrapped a roast chicken; others were taking casseroles out of baskets, and salads, pickles, cheeses, loaves of presliced bread and rolls and buns and cakes and bags of fruit. The men set up the tables and brought out chairs.

  “Annie, come and get your juice,” said Sarah. Annie sat on Ebony’s lap and pressed herself voluptuously into Ebony’s bosom and shook her head.

  Sarah said, “Annie! I told you I don’t want you bothering Aunt Ebony.”

  “We’re just fine. We’re okay,” Ebony said.

  “Well, send her over here when you’ve had enough,” said Sarah.

  “Will do,” said Ebony. “Carter, tell how you lost your head in Syracuse, New York. That is a fun-ny sto-ry.”

  “Not in Syracuse, New York; Knossos, New York,” said Carter, “is where I lost my head. That was the time I still went all over and lectured on race relations in clubs and organizations and churches and universities. That was okay. What I couldn’t t
ake was afterwards, when I was exhausted from the trip and the talk and wanted to hole up in some little black hotel with a bottle of booze and pass out, there was the dinner at some white faculty’s house, and the reception to meet students, and all those questions and all that good will! Got so I didn’t mind talking to white folks,” said Carter, “so they didn’t talk to me about race relations.”

  “All that good will,” said Ebony.

  “So I’m at the University of Knossos, New York, and the dean comes up, says, ‘Mr. Bayoux, I know that I am talking on behalf of all my faculty and students and everyone who has heard your eloquent and moving address here tonight’—everyone stops talking; everyone is listening—‘when I say that this has been a memorable occasion for us. You have given us food for thought, Mr. Bayoux. You have made us aware of situations and conditions that do not ordinarily come our way, I am ashamed to say, and, Mr. Bayoux, we owe you a debt of gratitude. And I will speak to my faculty, and I will speak to our student body, and to our civic leaders, and the leaders in the private sector, who, I am certain, will wish to join me in turning this feeling into something tangible. We want, Mr. Bayoux, to do something not only for your people, but to express our gratitude to you personally in any way or form you may wish to suggest to us. Mr. Bayoux, is there something, sir, that we can do for you?’

  “Well, I was moved! All those good white faces, so pleased and so eager, I lost my head!”

  “Lost—your—head!” said Ebony.

  “I told him, I said, ‘Well, yes, as a matter of fact something does come to mind. I’m two-thirds into my book about the effect of an emerging Africa on the American Negro that I’ve been working on for the last couple of years. Now, if I could take the spring off and work through the summer in some quiet place’”—Percival smiled—“‘just outside of town’”—people began to laugh—“‘on one of your beautiful lakefronts, perhaps some little cottage…’”

  “Sure lost your head.” Ebony nodded so profoundly she sandwiched little Annie between her breasts and her lap. Annie giggled. “Just a little old cottage!” cried Ebony.