The Heart of a Woman - Maya Angelou [87]
I wanted to stay at Vus's side, go everywhere with him. My concern followed him in the street, in taxis, trailed him into the U.N. Even when we were at home, I wasn't satisfied unless we were in the same room. Vus's attempts to reassure me were futile. Worry had come to live with me, and it sat in the palms of my hands like beads of sweat. It returned even as I wiped it away.
The second telephone call came about two weeks later.
“Maya Make? Do you know your husband is dead?” The voice was different but the accent was the same. “His throat has been cut.” I slammed down the telephone, and a second later I picked it up and screamed obscenities over the buzz of the dial tone. “You're a lying dog. You racist, Apartheid-loving, baby-killing son of a bitch.” When I replaced the telephone, I had used every profane word I knew and used them in every possible combination. When I told Vus he said he'd have the number changed again. He worried that such tactics threw me. I could expect those and worse. I decided if the phone calls continued, I would handle them and keep the news to myself.
Having a live-in father had a visible effect on my son. All his life Guy had been casual to the point of total indifference about his clothing, but under Vus's influence, he became interested in color-coordinated outfits. Vus took him to a tailor to be fitted for two vested suits. He bought splendid shoes and button-down shirts for my fifteen-year-old, and Guy responded as if he had been waiting for such elegance all his life.
The telephone calls resumed. I was told that I could pick up my husband's body at Bellevue, or that he had been shot to death in Harlem. Whenever I was home alone, I watched the telephone as if it were a coiled cobra. If it rang, I would grab its head and hold on. I never said hello but waited for the caller's voice. If I heard “Maya Make,” I would start to quietly explain that South Africa would be free someday and all the white racists had better be longdistance swimmers or have well-stocked life rafts, because the Africans were going to run them right to the ocean. After my statement I would replace the receiver softly and think, That ought to get them. Usually, I could spend an hour or so complimenting myself on my brilliant control, before worry would snake its way into my thoughts. Then I would use the same telephone to try to locate Vus.
Mburumba Kerina, of the South-West Africa People's Organization, was his friend and lived in Brooklyn. I would call and Jane, Kerina's black American wife, would answer.
“Hi, Jane. It's Maya.”
“Oh hello, Maya. How are things?”
“O.K. and with you?”
“Oh nothing. And with you?”
“Nothing.” Then she would shatter my hopes that my husband was at her house. “How is Vus?”
“Oh fine. And Mburumba?”
“Just fine. We ought to get together soon.”
“Yes, very soon. Well, take care.”
“You too. Bye.”
“Bye.”
Jane never knew how I envied her unusual assurance. She was younger than I and had been working as a guide at the U.N. when she met Kerina. They fell in love and married, and she settled into the nervous life of a freedom fighter's wife as coolly as if she had married the minister of a small-town Baptist church.
When I found Vus after numerous phone calls, I gave reasons contrived for my interruptions.
“Let's go to dinner after the play.”
“Let's go straight home after the play.”
“Let's go to a bar after the play.”
Vus was a master of intrigue, so I suppose that I never fooled him with my amateur cunning, but he was simply generous enough to pretend. One afternoon I answered the telephone and was thumped into a fear and subsequent rage so dense that I was made temporarily deaf.
“Hello, Maya Make?” Shreds of a Southern accent still hung in the white woman's voice.
“Yes? Maya Make speaking.” I thought the woman was probably a journalist or a theater critic, wanting an interview from Maya Angelou