“You may decide what to do after that,” she said, “but most times, your course of action will be clear.”
Nick passed that bar when plenty of other people hadn’t, and at breakfast, he was valiantly charming with Aunt Justine, who had come out to take his measure. She had never had that much time for men, so Nick ended up chattering like a jaybird while she examined him like an exhibit in a museum and I watched them both with a fond amusement.
“He’s not quite all there, is he, dear?” she asked after he left. “Something missing in the eyes.”
“What he’s got is fine for me. It’s probably just for summer, anyway.”
“Are you sure?”
No, I wasn’t. I was different, as Walter Finley and Louisville had so emphatically pointed out, but Nick was too. I wasn’t really interested in making a go of it with anyone, no matter what Tom and Daisy were pushing, but part of that disinterest came from the place of a rather arrogant person realizing that she couldn’t. There was nothing as uninteresting as something I couldn’t have.
Nick, however. Nick was saying that I might have him, and I could see something in the tricky mess of that, somewhere where we might meet and pass a summer or a year or five years or fifty. That was a tricky kind of ground, especially with the miscegenation laws that were applied like uneven powder all over the country, but there was talk that even that might change. White women had only gotten the vote two years ago, and no one knew what might happen in the time to come.
Of course I only thought about this in a vague and daylight way. I hadn’t gotten as far as I had by looking ahead to any kind of future. I was grounded firmly in the present, never looking much further than the next two weeks or so. I would show my sky-blue planner to people who wanted to make plans further out, shaking my head mournfully.
“Can’t do it, I’m afraid. I can’t see that far.”
The future had never looked further away that summer. There was too much of the present built up in front of it, the entire city and its surrounding tributaries reaching up towards the hot blue sky. Who had time for the future in a summer like that one?
CHAPTER SEVEN
One rainy night in late summer of 1917, Judge Baker caught me sneaking in through the back door. The lights were off, and he was drinking alone in the kitchen. I think he meant to catch me and scold me, but by then he was too far gone to do much besides shake a thick finger at me. Finally, he shook his head, rising unsteadily from the kitchen chair and retreating up to his room. He paused in the doorway, the hanging judge who would never give a Black man ten when he could give him twenty.
“I forgive you,” he said, his words thick. “For Eliza. I forgive you. I don’t blame you.”
He nodded magnanimously, and I wondered what he would make of the fact that I never blamed myself for Eliza Baker’s death, nor felt as if I needed one moment of forgiveness for it. I attended church every Sunday, and when I was meant to be thinking of pious things, I sat in our front pew and pretended I was balancing teacups on my chin, head up and uncaring about the eyes that bored into the back of my skull. That kind of defensive pride left very little room for guilt, so I didn’t trouble myself with it.
There were eight pictures of Eliza Baker secreted through the house, hidden from view in places like Mrs. Baker’s vanity and under the judge’s desk blotter. In those pictures, she was a round-faced girl with enormous dark eyes and an Edwardian pompadour of gracious height. She had the tensile strength of spun steel, hard enough to bear her parents’ fury when she converted, sharp enough to make her way to the exotic shores she had always dreamed of, and she didn’t return to Louisville until the French and Chinese made living in Tonkin a misery. Unlike most, she could leave, and when she did, she took me with her all the way back to her home on Willow Street.
“You were my very favorite,” she told me in my earliest memories. “Just the very best baby. I could not leave you, I could not bear it.”