You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [44]
Laurel’s father looked very much like Laurel. The same bifocals, the same plain clothing, the same open-seeming face—but on closer look, wide rather than open. The same lilt to his voice. Laurel’s sister was also there. She, unaccountably, embraced me.
“We’re so glad you came,” she said.
She was like Laurel too. Smaller, pretty, with short blond hair and apple cheeks.
She reached down and took Laurel’s hand.
Laurel alone did not look like Laurel. He who had been healthy, firm-fleshed, virile, lay now on his hospital bed a skeleton with eyes. Tubes entered his body everywhere. His head was shaved, a bandage covering the hole that had been drilled in the top. His breathing was hardly a whistle through a hole punched in his throat.
I took the hands that had given such pleasure to my breasts, and they were bones, unmoving, cold, in mine. I touched the face I’d dreamed about for months as I would the face of someone already in a coffin.
His sister said, “Annie is here,” her voice carrying the lilt.
Laurel’s eyes were open, jerking, twitching, in his head. His mouth was open. But he was not there. Only his husk, his shell. His father looked at me—as he would look at any other treatment. Speculatively. Will it work? Will it revive my son?
I did not work. I did not revive his son. Laurel lay, wheezing through the hole in his throat, helpless, insensate. I was eager to leave.
Two years later, the letters began to arrive. Exactly as if he thought I still waited for them at my school.
“My darling,” he wrote, “I am loving you. Missing you and out of coma after a year and everybody given up on me. My brain damaged. Can you come to me? I am still bedridden.”
But I was not in school. I was married, living in the South.
“Tell him you’re married now,” my husband advised. “He should know not to hurt himself with dreaming.”
I wrote that I was not only married but “happily.”
My marital status meant nothing to Laurel.
“Please come,” he wrote. “There are few black people here. You would be lonesome but I will be here loving you.”
I wrote again. This time I reported I was married, pregnant, and had a dog for protection.
“I dream of your body so luscious and fertile. I want so much to make love to you as we never could do. I hope you know how I lost part of my brain working for your people in the South. I miss you. Come soon.”
I wrote: “Dear Laurel, I am so glad you are better. I’m, sorry you were hurt. So sorry. I cannot come to you because I am married. I love my husband. I cannot bear to come. I am pregnant—nauseous all the time and anxious because of the life I/we lead.” Etc., etc.
To which he replied: “You married a jew. [I had published a novel and apparently reviewers had focused on my marriage instead of my work as they often did.] There are no jews here either. I guess you have a taste for the exotic though I was not exotic. I am a cripple now with part of my brain in somebody’s wastepaper basket. We could have children if you will take the responsibility for bringing them up. I cannot be counted on. Ha Ha.”
I asked my husband to intercept the letters that came to our house. I asked the president of my college to collect and destroy those sent to me there. I dreaded seeing them.
“I dream of your body, so warm and brown, whereas mine is white and cold to me now. I could take you as my wife here the people are prejudiced against blacks they were happy martin luther king was killed. I want you here. We can be happy and black and beautiful and crippled and missing part of my brain together. I want you but I guess you are tied up with that jew husband of yours. I mean no disrespect to him but we belong together you know that.”
“Dear Laurel, I am a mother. [I hoped this would save me. It didn’t.] I have a baby daughter. I hope you are well. My husband sends his regards.”
Most of Laurel’s letters I was not shown. Assuming that my husband confiscated his letters without my consent, Laurel telegraphed: