The Color of Family Read online

  Just as he was about to go at his hair again, there was a knock at the door, and in his Louisiana drawl he responded. Clayton, the master of his piano, erudite in the music of the aristocracy, had come straight out of the bayou with a lazy twang and a family that was anything but blue blood. Way deep in his mind, he knew that much of his music brethren considered him and his family to be of the possum-eating, tooth-picking, trailer-park variety of southerners. Still, with all the irony that can only be found in America, it was this down-homey, trailer, everyman humility, an anomaly in the classical music world, that managed somehow to command enough respect to pack music halls to the rafters.

  Agnes Cannon poked her head into the room. She closed the door softly behind her then went up behind him and slid her arms around his waist. “I’m so proud of you, cher. And I can tell you, all of New Orleans is just a big ole party, waitin’ for you to come on back down there and play. I always knew you were born to do great things.” As she let her hands fall from his waist, she looked around the room at all the unpacked boxes of his life, all labeled MUSIC BOOKS or ORCHESTRAL SCORES or ALBUMS/CDS. “When in the world are you gonna go through all this stuff, honey? This is the only room in the house that’s not unpacked after the move from New York.”

  “I’ll unpack, Momma. I’ll unpack when I find a place for it all in here,” Clayton said as he continued to work on his hair. “I’ve gotta get some new shelving units, but they have to have the right temperament to take on the mood of every note I play, so I’ve got to take my time as I shop for them. And I didn’t want to get them until the new piano arrives.”

  “That’s right,” she said brightly. “Susan says you’re getting a new concert grand and that this piano in here is going back into the living room the way you had it in New York. I thought you’d just keep this piano in here to practice on and leave your touring piano at the Meyerhoff. I never knew why you had two pianos in the house, anyway.”

  Clayton sighed at the burden of having to explain it once more to her, then went on with it while he kept at his hair. “Momma, I’ve told you before, I have two pianos because one is the living room piano for entertaining and for the boys’ lessons, and the one I practice on has to be a concert grand.” He stopped to work on a spot in his hair that looked as if it just might behave itself. But it was just an illusion, so he continued, “People come over, see a piano, and want to bang all over it trying to impress me with the few pieces they learned in high school when they took piano lessons from the lady down the street or some neighborhood music school. They can touch that thing over there, because I don’t practice on it, and I don’t tour with it. But no one will ever be allowed in here to touch my practice piano. Especially this practice piano that’s coming. It’s a Bursendorfer. The best piano in the world. What it would feel like for me to have someone touch my personal piano is the same as what you would feel like if somebody came into your house and tried on all your underwear.”

  “Oh, Clayton, it can’t be like that,” Agnes said with a blush in her voice.

  “Momma, I’m telling you, it’s exactly like that, and so to avoid the awkwardness of having to tell people to get the hell off my piano, I’d just rather have two pianos in the house.”

  “So if this piano that’s coming is the best in the world, then why not tour with that one?”

  “I probably will—maybe, at some point. But I have to personalize it first. Get comfortable with it before I can commit to taking it on the road with me. And that takes some time.”

  “I see” was all his mother said. Then Agnes stepped back and frowned as she watched him fret with his hair. “Leave your hair alone,” she said as she pulled his hands away from his head. “Why can’t you just get one of those hair straightenin’ processes like I been tellin’ you. It would be fine and nobody would know a thing. I know a Jewish gal who gets her hair straightened ’cause it’s so darned kinky.”

  But her words fell on his deaf ears. Clayton went back to raking and tugging through his hair, thinking that miraculously, perhaps, this would be the day when his hair would obey the comb. Giving up, he went to the piano, sidestepping around three boxes of music books to get there, and opened the piano stool to put the comb inside, where it lived. “It’s amazing to be doin’ this, Momma,” he said, lowering himself onto the leather stool. “I’ve always had immortal longings, but this is far more than I’d ever hoped for. And you wanna know something, Momma? I’ve played in the finest concert halls on this continent and on the other side of the ocean, but this concert down in New Orleans is really gonna mean something to me, for some reason.”

  Then he was hit with the memory of his lunch the day before with the woman from New Orleans. Yes, for some reason it was really going to mean something to him, but living back there—now that was something altogether different. Moving back there, he thought, would make him feel as if he were tossing away the tuxedo slacks of his manhood to force himself into his boyhood trousers. And they would never fit.

  “For some reason? Of course it’s gonna mean something to you, cher. New Orleans is the place where the music was first put into your bones. I just wish Douglas had lived to see this.”

  Clayton looked distractedly past his mother and said quietly, “Yeah.”

  “That’s all you have to say about your father, cher?” Agnes was beside herself.

  “Momma, I don’t know what you’d have me say.”

  Agnes looked at her son as if in intense thought for a few seconds before saying, “I would have you talk about your father’s pride in you. Your father knew you had greatness written all over you, and now look at you.” Agnes sat on the other side of the desk, shaking her head in frustration. Then she said with a low-boiling agitation, “You just make me so angry, cher, when you sit there and act like that about your father. He was a good man. And he was good to you.”

  Clayton’s eyes grew wide as he asked, “Act like what, Momma? And besides, there has never been any question about whether my father was a good man or whether he was good to me. I may have been only twelve when he died, but I do remember him for the man he was.”

  “Act like what? Why, you act like you’re ashamed, or somethin’. You get all sullen, your eyes go dark. I can’t say what it is exactly, but I don’t like it, not one bit. And if you do know what a good man Douglas Cannon was, then I don’t have to tell you that when I see you actin’ like that at the mere mention of his name it gets a fire goin’ in my belly, do I?”

  Clayton lowered his head and closed his eyes to suppress a rage that could have put her out, then said softly, “No.”

  “Now if this is about your father not living long enough to feel his pride, then we’ve been through this before, cher. I’ve told you before and I’ll tell you until you get it that you have to know that you are ennobling your father’s memory and he feels his pride where he is, honey, only he feels it bigger now because everything in the kingdom of God is bigger than life.”

  Clayton, always articulate, always knowing what to say and when, could not answer his mother. There was simply no literal translation for what was in his heart. He could play it for her, perhaps. Maybe it could be told if he played it to her in Chopin’s Nocturne in C Minor. That had enough forthrightness to accurately reflect the divinity born into his spirit, but every note was also filled with the earthly angst that comes with trying to balance forthrightness on the end of a memory that could have been a dream, but was nonetheless impossible for a child’s mind to understand or even accept. Still it was clear enough to leave a trail of doubt for a grown man’s soul to follow. And he wanted no part of the devilment of his doubt; not now, because this being the first decade of the twenty-first century, nobody, not even his mother, would live a lie as a means to an end. But he also knew that if she were, it had certainly gone on for so long there was no turning it around or making it right. If she had set his life on a path of duplicity in which he’d never had a say, then there’d be no way for her to tell the truth without him, t
hrough the cruelty of martyred consequences, breaking the faith and trust of those who so graciously and blindly led him to these white keys divided by blackness—and all those who followed him in spirit from the most backward, backwater state in the Union.

  In his mind, that was heaped and steeped with nothing but southernness, if that feeling, that hid deep down in places that he couldn’t find, were real then there’d be no allowing for the truth without ending up like Louisiana roadkill—dead enough, but not good enough to trust as supper. He’d be crucified, and maligned, and remembered for nothing other than being the lying, sneaky bastard who made white American and even European musical esthetes believe he was one of them. And as he sat there looking deeply into the yawning smile of black and white that could reveal his countenance with but the stroking of a few chords, he could see himself in music’s history. The man who could play from a soul of which he possibly never completely knew.

  He turned from the window to look over at his mother who could never know the roiling of his thoughts and feelings. Clayton knew that she would never understand and perhaps never even forgive him if the doubts he had of his own conception were unfounded, but also she would never accept his discontent if it were founded. She would never know, he believed, how such a lie would force him to live outside of himself, that’s why he had to beat down his qualms and know—not think—that his mother would never have manipulated his life in such a dastardly way. It was all a dream. A childish dream that could just as easily have been of flying dragons. So instead of letting his mind continue to hurtle down a never-ending, unforgiving winding road, he said, “Momma, I have to practice now, if you don’t mind.”

  “I’m leaving, cher. I’ve got a car waiting for me outside,” Agnes said without the merest hint that would tell where she was headed. “Now, I’ll be back before I leave to go to New Orleans tonight, so I’ll see you for dinner.”

  Clayton said nothing as his mother left and he regarded the envelope peeking from her purse. Another one. Another letter postmarked from Baltimore, this much he could see because of the zip code—the handwriting, just like the ripped-up letter in the garbage, had far too many flourishes for him to make out a name or even an address. Still he wondered if his mother had contacted this person. He wondered why she hadn’t spoken of knowing someone in the town, but mostly he wondered why in the trash can right there in his studio, another letter, clearly from the same person, sat ripped to shreds as if so doing could make the words of whoever had sent it absent from the universe.

  Who was this person? he wondered, and did that person have the secrets of his dream? The dream of his grandmother’s imprudent whisper all those years ago. Could this writer of the ripped-up letter from Baltimore be an aunt, or an uncle, or a cousin, or even his third grandmother or grandfather simply wanting to know kin. And sometimes, in this particular moment when he couldn’t take the mockery of his uncertainty a second longer, he wanted the letter writer to be the one who would just say it; he wanted to give the responsibility of his life and righting his mother’s wrong completely up to that man or woman. Or maybe, he thought in one sedate second, the letter writer is just someone from New Orleans who had hoped to bury a childhood hatchet with his mother in the letter. Someone from New Orleans who happens to be living in Baltimore now—just like the woman from yesterday, he thought. Maybe they weren’t kin, after all.

  So he would try to get his calm back before his first practice of the day, yet what bore and ate away and destroyed his peace like so many maggots on flesh was the ghostly haunting of his grandmother’s whisper, actual or dreamt, after his father’s funeral, while “Little Clayton” slept in the back of the limousine: “Are you ever gonna tell that child that his father was that colored boy Emeril Racine?” And so with his memory, whether the whole thing was real or imagined, and with the silence inside that car when his mother would not answer her mother, Clayton was coming to the end of the tether on which he’d hung, from that day, on the belief that if it had not been imagined, they were talking about some other boy he didn’t know, and if it had all been a dream, well then, it was all simply a dream.

  He played the first thunderous chord of the Beethoven “Sonata Pathétique” that he’d take to New Orleans; doing what he had done all his life—burying those thoughts of what may or may not have been the other half of himself deeper behind the music in his mind. That half of himself that may or may not be present every time he touches his hair, or looks in the mirror at his eyes that have so much to say if only he could speak their language, or sees a half-breed in Baltimore passing for white.

  So Clayton closed his eyes and let himself dissolve into the minor chords that empathized with every part of him that could not find peace in that moment. And as he played through into the second theme of the sonata headed for the third, he felt a comfort, a kinship with the multiple personalities that came together, nonetheless, to create one body.

  Clayton leaned into the notes with the hope and intention of letting his angst slip between the fine cracks separating the white and the black. And it did, as he played this commanding sonata with the brilliance of a man who could scarcely be topped in his world. The whole thing positively put him in awe of himself, because if his mother was indeed guilty of the subterfuge of hiding his true race from him and the world, what a wunderkind he’d really be. And how was it, he wondered with all earnestness and disconsolation, that no one ever found him out? Someone would have seen it in him, right? Especially blacks, and particularly blacks in New Orleans. It was always so easy for him to spot passers. No matter how fair the skin, or straight the hair, or fine the features, Clayton could tell when someone was passing—in fact, there was an opera singer with the Berlin Opera, who was originally from Mississippi but spoke as if she were straight out of the queen’s court. Marion Bright he believed her name was, and she, without his doubt, was passing. But Clayton knew from where he’d come. He came from a part of the country where octoroons, and quadroons, and all other combinations were a fact of life. Someone, somewhere along the way, he thought, would have questioned his bloodline if it weren’t pure.

  And then he smiled, not with the beauty of what he formed beneath his fingers, but with the thought of the day he met André Watts, a man who lived quite knowingly with the duality of his selves—black and white. Clayton remembered the way he fawned with a certain awe at the way the man slid into the room with his walk as smooth as butter; a walk Clayton envied each time he remembered it for its confidence and power. The walk of a man who surely knew himself beyond merely his name. Clayton’s smile faded slowly, its metamorphosis almost undetectable.

  Once he finished the first movement, he barely let the final chord dissolve to its conclusion before he leaned forward and snatched up the phone that sat on the edge of the piano. He dialed. “Momma,” he said once she answered. “Where are you going? You didn’t tell me before you left.” And he listened as she told him she was headed to the shopping mall to buy something for his New Orleans concert—an explanation he found most dubious. So then he asked, “Momma, I also saw a letter that seemed to have been addressed to you, torn up in the trash here in my studio. I was wondering if you tore it up, or if maybe one of the boys did it in their mischief.” And when she confirmed that she had indeed ripped up the letter, he asked, “Why did you tear it up?” And after she gave him a sufficient enough lie, he simply replied quietly, “Okay, bye.” Then Clayton sat slouched on the stool to ponder exactly why it was so easy to believe his mother even when he knew she was lying.

  Agnes turned off her phone and slid it back into her bag, and she wondered what had happened in the few brief minutes since she’d left her son that brought him to question her torn-up letter. How in the world could she have forgotten that she’d hastily slipped the letter into her purse as she was leaving New Orleans? She should have just thrown it out back home. But no, she had to drag it all the way to Baltimore, only to find it by surprise, rip it up, and throw it away right in front of Cl
ayton. And who in the world, other than Clayton, would even care about a discarded letter? But then again, it didn’t fall on her as such a surprise when she really gave it some thought. She believed her son just may still have every single letter ever sent to him since his first summer at sleep-away camp.

  Agnes loved her son and even admired his often melancholy nature, but she believed that it was this sentimentality that would only serve to undo all she’d done to bring him to center stage. Especially if he were to know how much of her soul she’d had to sacrifice since the day his father, Emeril, died. And she thought about how he never really had her full attention, considering how the distraction of his life always kept her an inch away from him in every way—at least it seemed to her now. Agnes shuddered, then shifted as if to distance herself from the thought. Pulling her fur coat tighter around her bosom and shoulders, she snuggled into it and sank down into the seat, looking like some despondent aged starlet. Her head fell back on the seat as she looked out at the tall row houses that did not stand with nearly as much splendor as they could, or as they possibly had on a long-ago day, with their three marble steps out front along this shambled stretch of street. Thank God they were passing by too fast to really see. And she thought about what she was doing, and where she was going, and why. And what would she say, she wondered. Because she hadn’t laid eyes on Antonia Jackson in close to forty-five years, yet somehow from the thumping of her heart, Agnes knew that she was more afraid of Antonia than she was of the devil.