Wherever There Is Light (3 page)

“Hey, numbskull!” Eddie shouted. “The SOB can't breathe!”

Looney, having dropped his baseball bat, had a Bundist on the ground, and he was strangling him. Julian went over and tapped Looney on the shoulder. “You gotta let him go.”

“Can't I kill him a little?”

“Nope.”

Looney stalked off. Gasping for air, the Bundist stood. He had a dopey horse face, and his expression was so laced with fear that Julian felt sorry for him. The wailing of police sirens was growing louder, and Julian turned to walk back to Eddie, whose hands were cupped around his mouth, and as Julian heard Eddie shout, “Behind you!” a baseball bat slammed into his back. Julian lurched forward, fighting against the pain shooting up his spine to remain on his feet and annoyed that his new black fedora was on the ground. He turned as the Bundist cocked the bat. Before he could swing again, Julian kicked the man's knee as if it were a football. The Bundist screamed in agony and fell.

Inside Julian there was a place where he stored a combustible brew of the hurt and fury of his childhood and his feeling that he would be alone for the rest of his life. Julian only saw this place clearly in his nightmares. In the daylight, he avoided descending there by ignoring any provocation and using his head. He couldn't do that now. Perhaps it was recalling his leaving home or his hatred of the Bund, but Julian lost control of himself and kicked the Bundist in the face. A geyser of blood spurted from his nose, and Julian was about to kick him again when Eddie and a police sergeant grabbed him.

The cop said, “O'Rourke, you didn't pay for this shit. The captain'll have me writing reports till Saint Paddy's. You and your Jew buddies get outta here before I lock all of you up.”

As usual, after he erupted, Julian was overcome by revulsion. He was silent until Eddie drove into the serene reaches of South Orange, where Julian saw families in their Sunday best walking home from Mass at Our Lady of Sorrows and noticed two boys in cowboy hats and fringed buckskin jackets running through the brown-and-gold leaves at the curb.

Eddie said, “So where's this Lovewood?”

“Broward County. Where Abe and the others got those swanky gambling joints.”

“Maybe you wanna bring me with you to Florida?”

“Why? You don't gamble, you collect.”

“Suppose you start beating on a guy, who's gonna stop ya? I hear the cops ain't too palsy-walsy down there. They'll put you on a chain gang.”

The stores in South Orange Village were closed. Julian resided on the top floor of an apartment house he owned at the edge of the village, and he didn't reply until Eddie pulled up to the awning of his building. “Thanks,” he said.

G
arland Kendall Wakefield, a petite Negro woman in her late forties and the president of Lovewood College, didn't hate white people. Yet ever since Halloween, when Orson Welles had narrated an adaption of the novel
The War of the Worlds
on the radio and frightened millions by announcing that Martians had invaded New Jersey, Garland asked herself: if aliens
had
herded every white person into their rocket ships and blasted off into outer space, would she miss them?

No, not a single one.

Now, with guests coming for dinner, Garland finished hot-combing her salt-and-pepper hair into a bob and went downstairs in what amounted to her uniform—a high-necked, ecru silk blouse, an ankle-length, black chiffon skirt, and black laced shoes with low heels. She went into the kitchen, and Derrick Larkin, the young man she hoped her daughter Kendall would have the sense to marry, was standing there in a three-piece suit and tie and holding a noose in his hand.

Garland said, “Jarvis Scales left me another present?”

“I saw it driving in. Tied to the front gate. I wouldn't say it's Mayor Scales.”

“Then it was Hurleigh, his brother. Same thing.”

“Jarvis doesn't—”

“Doesn't what?” Garland said. “Jarvis doesn't want to buy back his family's land? Jarvis doesn't have the same name as his grandfather who sold my grandmother and broke my father's heart when he was nothing but a child?”

Garland's father, Ezekiel Kendall, had been born a slave in Lovewood. The night after his mother was sold to a plantation in South Carolina, Ezekiel ran off to join her. He never did find her, but he stumbled on a spur of the Underground Railroad that led him north to Philadelphia, where he made a fortune as a caterer to the gilded Main Line. Despite his wealth, Ezekiel regarded a college diploma as the sole guarantee against a life fetching and carrying for white folks, and after Garland became the first Negro to earn a degree from the University of Pennsylvania's School of Education, Ezekiel enlisted her help with founding a liberal arts Negro college on the land where he'd been born. In 1926 a hurricane flattened the region, spreading foreclosures like the flu, and Ezekiel purchased just over two thousand acres for pennies on the dollar. It was Jarvis's father who had lost the land, and now Jarvis was intent on buying it back.

“Have you considered a compromise?” Derrick asked, putting the noose on the counter. “The school occupies a hundred acres, and there's another five hundred for fruit groves and crops, and the cows, pigs, and chickens. You could sell Jarvis some acreage, earn a profit, and everyone would be happy.”

“Happy? I own three miles of beachfront and the law says Negroes can't step on the sand. And Jarvis won't settle for ‘some acreage.' He knows hundreds of new hotels have gone up in Miami Beach. Maybe Jarvis wants to build hotels. Or sell to someone who does. Three hundred and eighty-seven students are graduating this year, and half of them couldn't have afforded a degree without us. That was my father's dream. And his dream's not ending in my lifetime.”

“Mrs. Wakefield, I didn't mean to offend you. I have to fetch Kenni-Ann and my brother now, but if I can help—”

“Maybe one day, if you keep on with Kendall, I'll have a lawyer in the family, and we'll figure this all out.”

When Derrick was gone, Garland dumped the noose in the white enamel garbage bin and said out loud, “Jarvis Scales, you can go shit fire and save a penny on matches.”

Thirty-three hours after boarding a train at Penn Station in Newark, Julian and Eddie arrived at Lovewood College. At the Wakefield house, a pinkish-tan stucco palace on a hill overlooking the campus to the south and the ocean to the north, a Negro butler opened a wooden door inlaid with brass medallions of laurel wreaths.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “come in and drop your bags.”

They had brought a gift—two bottles of Jameson's Irish whiskey and two of Old Grand-Dad bourbon—to thank Mrs. Wakefield for the invitation to dine and to stay at the school's guest cottage. Julian gave the box to the butler, who said, “The ice and glasses are in the parlor.”

They went down the front hall, past a large oil painting of a spiky-limbed tree with pink-and-gold blossoms on a plateau above the ocean with waves crashing against the cliffs. The parlor was a brightly lit room with a terra-cotta floor, a wall of windows facing the water, and a beamed ceiling with a whirling fan. A lump rose in Julian's throat when he saw his parents, and he greeted his father first because his mother, with tears steaming down her cheeks, would require more effort to control his emotions.

Julian usually spoke German to his father, though Theodor, who had attended boarding school in Britain and studied at Oxford before completing his doctorate at Freiburg, spoke perfect English. “
Hallo
,
Vater
,
Sie gut aussehen
,” Julian said, and it was true—Theodor did look well. He was twenty-one years older than his wife, had met her on a lecture tour in 1912 after speaking at Krueger Auditorium in Newark, and took the shy teenager, with the long blond hair, eyes the color of turquoise, and a heart-shaped face of finely sculpted features, to a Romanian restaurant, where she tasted her first piece of steak; three weeks later they were married an hour before Theodor spoke at a synagogue in Charleston, South Carolina. To Julian, his father still resembled the photographs of the illustrious philosopher who had enthralled audiences with his rich baritone and his prediction that the Zionists would fail to establish a homeland because enlightened nations like America, Germany, and France would remain safe harbors for Jews. Theodor's profile was still noble enough to stamp on a coin; his silver mane of hair had not thinned, nor had his beard gone completely white; and he stood as straight as a sentry in his dark chalk-stripe with the gold watch chain strung across his vest.

Gripping Julian's hand firmly, Theodor said, “
Guten Abend
,
mein Sohn
.”

That was it—after three years, but Julian supposed that
Good evening
,
my son
, was an improvement over being slapped across the face and called a lazy bum.

Julian turned to his mother in her moss-green cotton frock and enfolded her in his arms. The only sounds in the parlor were Elana's muffled sobs and Julian repeating, “Don't cry, Mama,” and no one watching them would have suspected they were witnessing anything other than an adoring mother reunited with her loving son. Yet the truth was that Julian's relationship with Elana had been more painful to him than the blowups with Theodor. Julian recalled his mother as a hovering angel who was always bleeding from invisible wounds that Julian believed were his responsibility to heal. After supper, while Theodor wrote in his study, Julian would keep her company, drying the dishes, listening to her wonder aloud what deformities of her soul had led her parents to abandon her to the lonely mists of an orphanage. Night after night, Julian waited for her desolation to recede. It never did: even her describing the joys of assisting the doctor who came to take care of the children echoed in his memory like a doleful nocturne. Now, as he let go of his mother, Julian recalled how desperate he'd been to boost her spirits, and how helplessness and guilt had crushed him when he failed.

“This is my friend Eddie,” Julian said.

“I'm happy my son has a friend who would travel with him to Florida,” Elana said. Theodor grunted a hello and eyed Eddie like a beat cop about to roust a wino from the gutter, but he did introduce them to Garland Wakefield, who was kind enough to point out the side table across the parlor that doubled as a bar.

Eddie was drinking an Irish straight up, and Julian a bourbon on the rocks, when a young woman entered from the front hallway with two men trailing her like courtiers.

“Jesus H. Rockefeller,” Eddie mumbled.

In her milk-white dress, the woman was as radiant as a bride among mourners. Her thick, sable hair was brushed back well past her shoulders, and Julian assumed, incorrectly, that she'd studied dance. His assumption was based on her white ballet slippers and her posture, which appeared as rigid and supple as a sapling as she glided over to greet Theodor and Elana. Julian admired the white linen clinging to her curves as she came toward him with Garland and her two-man entourage, but it was her face that transfixed him: the luminous hazel eyes and high cheekbones, the bowed lips above a perfect chin, all of it adding up to a tawny, exotic beauty that he'd only thought possible in a fairy tale.

Garland said, “These are the Larkin brothers, Derrick and Otis,” and as the four men shook hands, she added, “and this is my daughter, Kendall.”

“Nice to meet y'all,” she said.

Julian could never adequately explain to anyone the effect of her voice on him. He'd expected Kendall to sound youthful and dainty, but her voice, despite its faint southern melody, was as cool and piquant as the ocean breeze coming through the parlor windows—a wise voice that somehow, with a perfunctory greeting, communicated to Julian that she was charmed by his interest. Julian was no expert at this game. His most enduring romance had lasted five months.

“You cats get lost on the way to the Cotton Club?” Otis asked as Julian watched Kendall go into the dining room with Derrick. Otis, the shorter Larkin brother, with glistening processed hair and an elfin face, was decked out for the boards at the Savoy Ballroom: a long, black sport coat with a purple-checked pattern that would give an acrobat vertigo; wide-legged, mushroom-colored pants pegged at the ankles; and gleaming two-tone shoes.