“It will be,” he agreed. He grasped my hand as if to guide me into a happy future we would share together. “It will be such a relief to have money,” he said. “I am mortally sick of being in debt.”
I was uncomfortably conscious of my hand pressed between Joel’s. As he spoke, he rubbed the back of my wrist with one finger. It was my bad arm. I could lift my fingers, but I couldn’t withdraw it without bringing my other hand in to help. I had not the slightest interest in entering Joel’s fantasy about his delightful future. Already the name “Alice” was tedious to me. I pasted an imbecilic smile on my face while Joel rambled on, but I was thinking gloomily that my aunt was right, my heart was cold.
Yet she was wrong as well, for it wasn’t childlessness that had chilled it. It was the lie at the center of everything, the great lie we all supported, tended, and worshiped as if our lives depended upon it, as if, should one person ever speak honestly, the world would crack open and send us all tumbling into a flaming pit. My future was as dark and small as Joel’s was bright and wide, yet it was my duty to pretend I did not know it. Was there a man of fortune so disagreeable to other young women that he could be forced to settle for me? And if such a miracle did occur, as my poor aunt deluded herself it might, wouldn’t it be understood that I must remain silent, as Alice McKenzie certainly would, while my husband sought solace for my inadequacies in the bed of some light-skinned quadroon? The only woman I knew who had not had to tolerate her husband’s fascination with these creatures, which they bred for their own pleasure, was my mother, and now it had been revealed to me that this was because my father was somehow deficient in the urge to procreate. He had refused to bring more children, black, white, or yellow, into this hell where they must suck in lies with their mother’s milk.
But it wasn’t their mother’s milk, I corrected myself. Perhaps that was how the poison entered us all, for even the quadroons were too vain to suckle their own children and passed their babies on to a servant. I recalled watching Celeste nursing my brother at one breast, her own dark child at the other, while my mother looked on approvingly.
Never, I thought. Not me. Let Alice McKenzie have a houseful of Joel’s screaming babies; better her than me. I would hold fast to my independence as a man clings to a life raft in a hurricane. It was all that saved me from drowning in a sea of lies.
At length Joel came to the end of his rhapsody and began to fear that he was tiring me. He released my hand and rose to leave. “You must take care of yourself, Manon,” he said, looking about the room disconsolately. “Don’t shut yourself up here in the dark.”
“I won’t,” I said. I got up to escort him to the door.
“I want you to be well again. I want to see you dancing at my wedding.”
The thought of whirling about in the embrace of some elderly gentleman while my arm hung like a dead animal at my side actually did make me laugh. “No, no,” I said. “I’m afraid my dancing days are finished.”
When at last he was gone, I collapsed on the settee, thoroughly exhausted. Mother would never have sent a young man off with so little fuss, I thought, but I didn’t care. My eyes rested on the portrait of Father, which is always such a comfort to me, but oddly it had no more effect than the likeness of some stranger in a shopwindow. Father was right; the artist had romanticized him. His jaw was not that strong, his eyes that clear.
I thought of his journal, those banal entries about cotton and weather and disease, and no mention of me, as if I didn’t exist, or he wished I didn’t, the obligatory mention of Mother as “my dear wife,” only in connection to his “failing,” for which he nobly accepted blame.
No, I thought. His failing wasn’t his refusal to perform his marital duties and engender more children for the general slaughter, though that was doubtless a symptom. It was something else, something Mother knew but never told, something he had always with him, and took with him, something behind his smile and his false cheer, and the charade of feelings he clearly didn’t have. He pretended to be a loving father, a devoted husband, but he wasn’t really with us, our love was not what he required, he did not long for us as we longed for him.
He was an impostor.
He kissed me good-night the night he died just as he had a thousand times before; nothing set it apart from any other night when I might find him in the morning, nodding at Mother over the coffee urn. He knew I would never see him again, yet he didn’t bother to leave me with so much as an extra word of encouragement, a lingering in the kiss, an extended moment of tenderness, anything that I might have clung to as evidence that he regretted abandoning me, that I figured in his life more importantly than his hoe or a sick field hand, which, after all, received a mention in his journal.