Promises to Keep - Ann Tatlock [48]
And then, as on Sunday night, Mara whispered, “Good night, Daddy. I love you.”
The radio clicked off. Mara placed it on the table between the beds, sighed, and rolled over. But this time I wasn’t going to let it go.
I sat up and turned on the light. Mara, blinking, looked at me over her shoulder. For a long moment, neither of us spoke.
Then finally she said, “I thought you were asleep.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Well, I wasn’t.”
She sat up and nodded. Her face was placid; her lips hinted at a smile. “Roz?”
I hesitated. My heart was pounding. She was scaring me, and I was ready to run, if need be. “Yeah?” I said.
“I want to read you something.”
“Um, okay.”
She had placed the radio on top of a paperback book. She reached for that book now, and when she opened it I saw it was the book of poetry she’d brought along, Greatest American Poems of the Twentieth Century.
She found her page, glanced up at me, and began to read. “ ‘Cross,’ ” she said, “ ‘by Langston Hughes.’ ” She looked at me again, uneasily now, and took a deep breath. In a quiet, almost faltering voice, she read, “ ‘My old man’s a white old man, and my old mother’s black.’ ” She stopped, shifted nervously, then sat up straighter and crossed her legs. She went on then, and though her voice went up in volume I didn’t hear what she was saying. The first words of the poem were stuck in spin cycle in my head. A white old man? A black old mother? What was Mara trying to tell me? When she stopped once more she paused for so long I thought she was finished.
“Mara?” I said.
She didn’t look at me, but raised one index finger to tell me to wait. She went on to read about the old man dying in a nice big house while the woman died in a shack, and finally, her voice dropping to a whisper, she concluded, “ ‘I wonder where I’m gonna die, being neither white nor black.’ ”
With that, she closed the book, pressed her lips together, and raised her eyes to mine. Those two dark eyes were filled with something I couldn’t quite understand. Sadness? Shame? Longing?
I thought of the couple who had dropped Mara off at our house, the man and the woman in worn old coats, sadly outdated hats and shoes – and yet, on top of everything, a cloak of quiet dignity. Was she trying to tell me that this couple, Willie and Hester Nightingale, were not her father and mother after all but some sort of adoptive parents?
“Mara?” I asked quietly, drawing my knees up to my chest in a kind of protective stance.
“Roz, I want to tell you something no one else knows. At least, not many people.”
Why? I wanted to ask. Why me? I hugged my knees more tightly.
As though in answer to my unasked question, she said, “We’re friends, aren’t we?”
“Yeah.”
“And I can trust you, right?”
I nodded.
She beckoned me over to her bed with a crook of her finger. Hesitantly, I unlocked my arms and willed my legs to carry me the short distance between the beds. When I arrived, claiming a spot on the quilt, she reached beneath the neck of her nightgown and pulled out the locket she always wore. Fingers trembling, she opened it and held it up for me to see.
Inside were two oval photographs, each one smaller than a dime. I leaned forward to get a better look. On the right side was a beautiful young Negro woman, hardly older than a teenager and looking hauntingly like Mara. The other was a white man, slightly older, fair-haired, serious and unsmiling, his eyes intelligent. Mara didn’t say anything, as though the pictures themselves told the whole story. I gazed at them, waiting. Finally I looked to Mara in search of an answer.
“My mama and daddy,” she whispered.
I gasped.
She nodded. She pinched the locket, and I heard it clasp. She tucked it back under her nightgown, where it rested against her heart.