Notes from a Black Woman's Diary Page 6

  What else to say . . . Nina is cleaning the house around me, and laughing, her looseness a delight to watch. My last play, IN THE MIDNIGHT HOUR, has just been accepted for publication for a book of seven plays by women of the ’70s. That pleases me. It is a play I am very fond of.

  We now have two dogs (a fat, old black-and-white springer with long droopy eyes and ears) and a cat who is the wiliest little adventurous guy. First cat I’ve ever liked.

  I hug you with all my best love and thoughts.

  Kathleen

  To me, her sixteen-year-old daughter, after an argument.

  April, 1985

  Nina,

  Here’s where the false note may still be—that somehow because I understand what’s happening to you that I expect something in return. When I left you this morning, I had the feeling of something dishonest in me, even when I said what I felt, know to be true, about your feeling different about yourself, about your beauty, and so on—what I said, I meant, honestly. But the note that’s false is my using it to soothe things, or to make sure you’re not too alienated from me. The point is: just as I have no right to use my supporting you financially against you, I also have no right to make my ability to understand a form of possession, or of keeping you beholden to me. That’s it. That’s the trap, that some part of me would try to hold on BECAUSE I UNDERSTAND. My understanding must be ruthlessly excluded from the thing. In fact, it may be crippling. It may be that you can find out more about yourself from Douglas now than from me (and even my sensing this would explain the degree of anger that overtook me). And that really what happened on Saturday was the irony of that embittered me—that one person could give a great deal, the other very little, and yet neither has much to do with ANYTHING. That ultimately everything connected with love must be stripped away until it is entirely free.

  Mom

  A letter to seventeen-year-old me. She’s recently fallen in love with Alfred Prettyman, the man who would become her second husband, and she’s getting ready to move from the house she raised us in, in Piermont, to a house she bought with him in Upper Nyack. I’m living in Manhattan, having just finished my freshman year at Barnard College.

  July 30, 1987

  Nina,

  Your letter made me see again that childhood picture of you I kept getting and it reflected all the things we talked about on the phone. I was so happy to have that call with you, it was full and touched on so many places that have caused such deep wounds. In a way it has been good for me to be here this summer, because while I have terrible scars I would not like to leave here without knowing I have made peace with them. There have been angry, dead days that have hung as heavy as you well know a day in Piermont can hang. I don’t like to think how it would have been if my own life had not shifted and Alfred entered it. I suspect I would have had the good sense not to stay here and live both loneliness and stifling deadness. And while even with Alfred I could have put together enough money to be elsewhere, it has mattered to our relationship that I be near. Also it has given me time to look at our life here from a different perspective. I am grateful to this house, it gave all of us a haven for many years and it provided a kind of continuity that may also have steadied both you and Emilio when I was on such rocky ground. Many people have come to us and been support when we needed them—Ronald, Radar, Asa, Kathie R, Jane—and while we have also given them asylum, their presence was valuable, especially to you children, in allowing you someone else to relate to when I was here but not here in spirit or heart. And for my own loneliness it was good. It has wonderful personal energy, this house, and I drew on it often when I felt such horrifying loneliness. I could fix it different ways, paint, paper, make it pretty. There is the river and the strange sustenance I know I have drawn from its presence. And being single it was easier not to be in a city and face the competitive social stress of weekends alone. I think our lives and some of the strength you talk about comes from the stability and beauty that held us here and that did not fall away until 1983.

  Often while raising you alone, when I would look at both of you—and this refers again to your remark about strength—I was positive both of you had just that: strength. I think in your case I counted on it early and because it was only my strength that was holding me together, I blindly ignored what a crippling, empty thing strength is without vulnerability, softness, giving in to love. As I could give in to none of them for fear of being utterly devastated by my own loneliness and hurt, I couldn’t possibly allow myself to love you children except by being a good caretaker and a good provider. I, literally, put my love into that and kept my heart closed. It was all the love I could handle, all I could provide. I was going through my own life keeping up, coping, holding on, trying not to fall apart.

  But there was value in those years. The emptiness made me free of fear. It helped me to become free in many ways that most women, particularly, never achieve. I got over many insecurities and especially any fear of being alone. I think, a few months before I met Alfred—we were driving, and I said to you I felt, finally, that my life was on course. It was. Through illness, solitude, finding my way clear to love you children, forgiving Momma and Pop Pop, finding a confident voice as a writer—all these little things, these little victories, so to speak, took place in this house, bit by bit, year by year, until I found myself, saw clear into my own heart and knew not only that I could love but that I could love because I was whole: the past forgiven, the present an alive, vital process I was willing to live fully every single moment without needing to cheat or hide or play games either with myself or others. It was at that point that Alfred walked in the door. And I am grateful it was not a moment sooner. I needed all that time, all that loneliness, all that fear and sadness, grief, shock, what have you. I needed it all because it was through it all, by taking off each layer, and then going down to take off another, that I reached me and found there a very nice woman . . .

  Nor was it until I found her that I could offer her to you children, for I could not offer what I did not know was there.

  When it comes to Daddy, I think in many ways my own anger at him is just beginning to surface. Oh, he can make me furious, and I could allow myself to fight with him, but I think it is only now that I really see that for me he wreaked tremendous havoc, humiliation, loss. For me, there is something evil in his presence. But I speak of that ONLY FOR ME. IT IS SOMETHING I FEEL AS THE WOMAN HE MARRIED—in no way do I wish to inflict it on your feelings or your relationship to him. I think that is precisely what I am trying to do now. Separate what he did to me from what I tried to get him to do for you children. Because over the past several years, most of my fighting and quarreling with him has been in order to try to get him to be some semblance of a father to you children. It is only now that I feel you both are grown enough to handle that yourselves—and also probably because of Alfred that I am forced, finally, to look at what he denied me both as his wife and as the mother of his children. The horror of that denial is monumental. To me. There are no amends possible. No forgiveness, really. The toll was too tremendous, the insensitivity too extreme, my inability to stop it too fragile. And the too-muchness of it led to a strange death between us that I feel now must be honored.

  That paragraph came out without my hardly knowing I had written it. Ignore it, please, insofar as it concerns you, for it doesn’t concern you and I’m confident you know that.

  There is a saying that goes, “A woman scorned is a terrible thing . . .” I always felt there was something negative in that quote, that it meant that women were somehow vengeful or more spiteful than men, but I begin to see it doesn’t mean that at all. When women give, truly, it is with all of them, particularly with emotional centers that once tampered with are hell to repair. The terribleness is not vengeance but the irreparable damage to that well-spring that I sense to be peculiarly feminine, a well-spring that, quite literally, at its best, rises up and floods life with love and light and a capacity to give that is shimmering. Forgive the rush forward into poetry but it is the only image that fits. The terribleness is the drying up of that well-spring, which then cuts off the entire emotional center, which in my case should have been connected to you children but couldn’t be . . .

  Just as in many ways Grandma couldn’t love Aunt Francine and myself as her real children because Pop Pop didn’t allow her ever to forget that there had been a real mother, a real wife, and that she was a substitute, second best, a necessity out of another woman’s death. It is that pain that I know shaped both Grandma’s life and the lives of Aunt Francine and myself. It locked us all in so tight that no authentic mothering could reach us from the woman who truly was our mother regardless of birth or not. Nor do I kid myself that much of that denial did not form the mothering I gave you two. It couldn’t have been otherwise. Darkness is what I call it. The soul’s inability to claim its rightful portion of love and in return to give back in full measure an abundant loving of its own.

  Now when I experience myself it is as if the center of me had light cascading constantly through it. I draw those I love close to me simply by breathing and when I breathe fully, those I love—you, Emilio, Alfred—pass through me full of light. We bless each other. We ask and receive forgiveness. We go on with our separate lives but they are changed, shaped, sustained, supported by this love that is as light and free as fine-spun gold. Be well, my child . . .

  Love, Mom . . .

  A letter to me, age eighteen, while I am doing a study abroad program in Vienna. She’s dying of breast cancer and keeping it a secret. She died on September 18, 1988, and called me home two weeks before.

  February 9, 1988

  Dear Nin,

  That was a good phone call. The best. Always the best when we get to the TRUTH. It is changing of course. This Mother thing. And just as I, in my unreasonableness, wanted you home every weekend last year—around me—you cling, too, to some custodial definition of CARE-package mothering. It is the years, the habits, it is everything. It is refreshing to me to feel every now and then, toward you and Emilio, that the caretaking is finished, and I am free again! Hard to digest, I’m sure. But true. Every step away is both sad and liberating. For you. For me. We will change our relationship a million times as the years move. And that is because we are committed to change and not to static energy. It is our way, not many people want growth the way we do. Most people want to settle, find a place of comfort and cling to it. But in all our years of living that is not how we structured things. We lived together, yes, but it was always understood that as some new interest emerged, some new adventure presented itself, it was to be taken advantage of, and if it brought change in its wake, so be it. In that sense I have always loved your and Emilio’s separateness from me, always cherished that I was in fact simply your custodian, so to speak, for a period of time until you had your own wings. I still feel that way. That your flying through life on your own pleasure, your own wits, your own steam, is the true excitement, your true living. And my own flying an equally important thing. And that ultimately it is only delight in another that holds one, that is captivating, all else must be a respect for their freedom. Don’t worry, though, as all requests are honored if possible. You have only to say when you need me, momentarily, to give pure mothering. It is, after all, and after all those years, quite deeply ingrained in me and has given me such intense pleasure that it continues to live.

  Love on top of love,

  MOM

  V

  Plays

  The Brothers: A Tragedy in Three Acts

  THE CHARACTERS*

  * * *

  MR. NORRELL, an undertaker; around forty-seven.

  MARIETTA WINSTON, a woman in her late fifties.

  LILLIE EDWARDS, a woman of thirty; Marietta’s sister-in-law.

  ROSIE GOULD, a woman around fifty-five; mother.

  LETITIA EDWARDS, a woman in her late sixties; Marietta’s sister-in-law.

  DANIELLE EDWARDS, a woman in her early thirties; Marietta’s sister-in-law.

  CAROLINE EDWARDS, a woman in her late fifties; Marietta’s sister-in-law.

  THE ORDERLY, should be played by Mr. Norrell.

  THE PLACE

  * * *

  A series of suggested rooms in which these women live.

  THE TIME

  * * *

  Sometimes the present, sometimes the past.

  PROLOGUE: Mr. Norrell

  The present.

  ACT I: Frankie Boy

  Scene 1. Spring 1942.

  Scene 2. The present.

  ACT II: Nelson the Baby

  The present.

  ACT III: Lawrence the Eldest

  The present.

  EPILOGUE: My Boys, My Boys

  The past and present.

  PROLOGUE: MR. NORRELL

  [Mr. Norrell’s office. Large desk with a gold nameplate reading: MR. NORRELL, FUNERAL DIRECTOR. The rest of the office is solemnly but correctly furnished with a few comfortable chairs facing the desk, dark curtains at the window, thick carpet underfoot, a somber hushed feeling pervading the atmosphere. Stage left and barely visible is the edge of a casket with a large spray of chrysanthemums on top of it, so that one has the feeling of being right next door to the viewing room. Organ music comes intermittently from that room with renderings of several different hymns: “Amazing Grace! (How Sweet the Sound),” “Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone?,” “When I’ve Done the Best I Can.”

  MR. NORRELL sits at his desk. He is a distinguished-looking man, light-skinned, shiny black hair touched with gray, dressed in a dark suit that is well tailored.

  When the play opens, he is busy at his desk, which is cluttered with funeral advertisements for caskets, layouts, embalming fluids, etc. A light shines on all the papers, heightening the air of preoccupation about him. MRS. WINSTON enters. She is an attractive, well-dressed woman with a fast-moving, abrupt, yet deliberate manner. She alternates between a certain feisty comic humor, like an actress playing a variety of parts, and a sad, almost maudlin melancholia. The minute she reaches the doorway she begins speaking.]

  MRS. WINSTON. [aggressive] Mr. Norrell . . . you are Mr. Norrell. No one else buries any of the Edwards but you.

  [Mr. Norrell looks up.]

  MRS. WINSTON. My husband just died. He is not an Edwards, though to his dying day he got confused. I kept him confused. I and my four brothers, all of whom have passed through these very walls on their way God knows where.

  [SHE steps into the room.]

  MRS. WINSTON. I’m Marietta Winston, the only sister of four stern imaginative brothers. Franklin was my favorite, followed in quick succession by Nelson the baby, Lawrence the eldest and most dangerous, and Jeremy the nervous one. They were all nervous but Jeremy twitched . . . twitched and stuttered . . . [She begins to speak like Jeremy, her body begins to twitch, her eyes blink incessantly.] ‘N . . . n . . . n . . . ow . . . M . . . M . . . Mar . . . ietta, y . . . you g . . . g . . . g . . . go r . . . r . . . ight do . . . wn t . . . t . . . o Mi . . . Mi . . . Mis . . . ter Nor . . . Norrell’s . . .’ [relaxing] ‘All right, Jeremy,’ I’d say, and pat him on the arm. Can you imagine, at the end he’d lost one of his legs from painting houses. All his life he painted houses, climbed up and down ladders with his bucket of paint, paint on his belts, paint on his shirts, went to his son’s wedding with paint on his Sunday trousers. Lived in Detroit in the heart of the automobile industry painting houses . . . [again speaking like him] ‘N . . . n . . . a . . . ow, M . . . M . . . Mar . . . ietta, y . . . you c . . . coo co . . . me a . . . nd st . . . st . . . stay w . . . w . . . ith us a . . . fe . . . fe . . . w da . . . days . . .’ [relaxing] ‘Oh, Jeremy,’ I’d say, ‘I can’t do that! Why there are so many of you!’ And there were! The children never left home! The girl just mooned around with a couple of babies, the boys were in and out at all hours, you’d never know they had wives and children . . . [imitating the sons] ‘Daaaa-dy . . . where are you, Daaaa-dy . . .’ [amused] Then they’d go look in the refrigerator, leave . . . come another hour they’d be back again! [imitating the sons] ‘Daaaa-dy, what you doin’, Daaaa-dy . . .’ He’d sit there with his leg gone . . . ‘Wh . . . wh . . . wh . . . at y . . . y . . . you . . . w . . . w . . . want, b . . . b . . . boys . . .’ ‘Just want to make sure you’re all right, Daaaa-dy . . .’ [relaxing] And he’d chuckle . . . [She chuckles just like him, grows visibly sadder.] Jeremy . . .

  [MR. NORRELL, getting impatient, gets up.

  MRS. WINSTON moves briskly forward.]

  MRS. WINSTON. No need for you to rise. None of my brothers ever rose for me. [speaking like them] ‘Marietta, come sit with us so we can talk . . .’

  [SHE sits down, begins talking to her boys. Mr. Norrell is visibly irritated.]

  MRS. WINSTON. Oh, Nelson, you don’t mean to say you’re thinking of never leaving your bed . . . Lawrence, you can’t have done anything that mean . . . How can you stand it, Franklin, how is it you can stand one more minute of it? [She looks up at Mr. Norrell.] What a merry-go-round! Round and round they went, round and round. They couldn’t stop . . . not one of them knew how to stop . . . Nelson pouted his way to an early grave, just couldn’t seem to get back up and live . . . [whining like Nelson] ‘I don’t want to, Marietta, I just don’t want to . . .’ [seeing him] Then he’d stretch out on his back and play dead . . . [She pauses, then dramatically shifts her tone.] And Lawrence, our smoothie! Riverview’s first colored lawyer, our natural smoothie . . . hair black and shiny as coal, the waters parted for Lawrence. You ever know evil, evil is the hardest thing to see when it’s staring at you through the eyes of your very own brother . . . [She shifts again.] But it’s Richard I’ve come to bury . . .