Black Ice Read online

  I had also prepared a special dance for my mother at the evening recital. I saw the white faces again, blurred now and small above the footlights. I smelled the heat of the footlights. The music I had chosen was repetitive and romantic. It was Dvoák’s Slavonic Dance No. 2 in E minor, the kind of thing my mother loved. The melody rose up around itself, and I whirled as I had for Alma in practice after practice on the green-carpeted hall outside our room, on the thick, shiny surface of the gymnasium floor, and finally, on the Mem Hall stage. It was Mama’s story: the yearning, twirling and twirling out of control, the love dance danced alone. The movements and the music were big, melodramatic, romantic. I felt foolish doing them without her there, clearing her throat in the audience.

  I lost my place. There was a twirl and a drop to the floor, a roll during the quiet section, and another roll, one leg whipping around in a circle and pulling the other leg and my body with it to a sudden stop, then a pull up from face down to hands and knees, and then up to knees. Suddenly the music was ahead of me, and I knew that I should have been on my feet by then. I was on my hands and knees like a dog when I should have been leaping in the air—one, two, three leaps in the air in a tight circle, the energy closing in a tense, bent arabesque. I threw my arms up and whipped them around to pull myself upright and went right into the arabesque, but I was off by then. I had a minute more to go, and my mind was flashing mechanically through the movements. That was wrong, too, terribly wrong. I shouldn’t have been thinking steps then, as if this were the second week of rehearsal. I should have known them, as I had known them two days before, when Mama said that she thought she’d be able to make it, if she drove with a pillow propped behind her bad back, and if they made several stops along the way so she would not tighten up. I knew I had to stop concentrating on the movements. I had to fix my face, and maybe the face, the right face, would discipline my mind and body.

  It helped. I fixed my face, and I absorbed the attitude into me. But I had to do more if I was to go on and finish the thing. I had to fix my mind on something else—someone else. I thought of Anthony. He had visited one of our practices and stood in the back of the hall. I had not seen him until we were finished. He had come round to the back door outside the changing room to meet me, and he said that he liked to see me dance. We had both been shy after that, and the shyness, the privacy of the dance, was what I had missed. Once again the dance became a communion with another person. I could feel the desire of a girl alone in a forest clearing, brimming over with feelings she dared not express. That was what I had wanted to give to my mother, some dramatic token of love—and of a new inexpressible privacy on which I felt my life depended, and which I dared not reveal, so that it had become ashamed of itself and vengeful.

  I accepted my family’s praise with my head down. I insisted, despite their pride, on telling them what had gone wrong.

  “Why, honey,” my Nana said, “I couldn’t see that anything went wrong at all. We thought it was just fine. Just lovely.”

  “That was great,” Pop said, beaming.

  “He told everybody that you were his granddaughter,” my sister said, giggling mischievously as she ratted on him.

  “Well, sure I did. Why not? She is my granddaughter, isn’t she? I’ve got two beautiful granddaughters. Pshaw! I’m not ashamed of that!”

  “Oh, Earle,” my grandmother said as Pop’s voice mounted with pride.

  “Wha? Should I be ashamed of that?”

  We laughed. It was a standard family conversation. Pop-Pop was a man who had worn each and every tie I had ever given him. He’d wear them for years until my grandmother pointed out that they were frayed.

  My father told me I’d done beautifully and put his arm around me. I felt as if I were hiding deep inside my skin, as if a whole galaxy had been set in motion inside me, and I was way out in its farthest reaches. It seemed a long way from my insides to the surface of my shoulders, where Daddy’s arm rested, or my fingers, where my sister’s small hand held tight.

  After Parents’ Day, when I received a letter from Ricky asking why I had not written in four months, I finally wrote back that I was through. I vowed when I dropped the letter into the box that I’d never let myself get trapped again. I tried to congratulate myself on my new maturity and assertion, but I had to admit that had Anthony and I not gotten together, I would have dodged even longer. The correspondence coughed out a few more letters, and then was still. But the relationship, on my end, lived like a haunt in my soul, reminding me, whenever I was inclined to forget, to trust no man.

  By early November, many of our formmates had decided which colleges they would apply to. A few were submitting early-decision applications. I didn’t like to think about college. The fact was that Stanford University had captured my imagination (in part because I confused it with Berkeley, which I’d further confused with San Francisco State, where the first department of Afro-American studies was established).

  In my presence, Mr. Quirk, our college adviser, called the Stanford admissions officer. They were willing to pay for me to fly to California for an interview and to visit the university.

  “I can’t go,” I told him. My mother’s health remained “dicey,” as she said. It was bad enough that I had left Philadelphia for New Hampshire, but how could I even think of going across the country?

  “There’s no harm in taking a look at the place,” Mr. Quirk said. “You can go on out there, get a feel for it, and then decide. Listen, your mother’s health may improve by next year this time. Don’t close the door.”

  I did not trust myself. Already I wanted to blast out of responsibility and go to a place so far away that I could afford only one trip home a year. I had to stop myself (and Mr. Quirk). I could not take the trip, I said, knowing that I did not intend to go. It would be like stealing from the scholarship fund. Now that I’d made the moral argument, I couldn’t retrench. I’d stay on the East Coast.

  I thought of applying to Radcliffe, but I didn’t like Cambridge. Finally I settled on two universities near home. One was Princeton, because F. Scott Fitzgerald, the writer who articulated my fearful suspicions about my white schoolmates, had gone there. The University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, was the other. Since I was a toddler, I’d seen the ivy-covered brick walls and the great iron gates of Penn through the windows of the Number 40 bus on the way to my grandmother’s office. Only Penn students could go in. I applied, no doubt, to see inside the courtyard.

  My mother’s illness worsened. I went more frequently than usual to the phone booth behind the Upper to call home, only to receive more insistent denial. Neither my mother nor father told me precisely what was wrong. Instead, they assured me that Mom was being taken care of, that she had the best care available, that she seemed to be responding to treatment. “You just keep doing the best you can up there,” my mother told me in a weak voice. “That’s how you can help me get well.”

  My worry grew into fury at being coddled and shut out. I called one afternoon, early enough so that I knew that my sister would be home from school but my father would not yet have returned from work. Sure enough, Carole answered the phone. My mother was in bed, she told me, and she’d been in bed. It didn’t seem to Carole that Mom was getting better, although she, too, she said, received daily reassurances.

  Once again, as on Parents’ Day, I felt the disturbance. I reacted crazily, physically, dumbly, like rats to a change in the atmosphere before a hurricane. The feeling continued. It tensed and worsened like my mother’s back. And the news grew more confusing. The back problem, it seemed, might actually be caused by a tumor growing on another organ but pressing on her spine. How could I stay at school, twiddling around at meetings about long weekends, when my mother was bedridden? The worst of it was that no one had forced me to go to St. Paul’s. She hadn’t made me. I had left her. I had done this to myself.

  I missed Chapel. I skipped classes and failed to hand in homework. I had no excuses, except to apologize. Pink slips for Saturd
ay-night detention appeared in my mailbox. I do not remember how I reacted. I cannot even recall what I was doing while I cut my commitments. I was numb with frozen rage. It was all I could do to mark time and keep up a front.

  After just a few days, I received a note in my box summoning me to the Rector’s office. The note was typed, not photocopied, and it did not mention an agenda.

  Mr. Oates greeted me with a tight, quick smile. It was the barest of his welcomes, but it was a welcome nonetheless. He motioned me to sit down in a chair in front of his polished desk. To my left the afternoon light and the autumn air tumbled in through the open casement windows. From his windows he had a view of the green in front of the Schoolhouse. It was bounded on one side by a newish, red-brick dormitory house and on the other by Christian Row, three rambling clapboard houses for masters. The green was bisected by the main road through the grounds. On the other side was the Chapel, where St. Paul stood in bronze, his finger pointed in the air, his robes in midflap, zealous and evangelical. It was difficult not to look out the windows—they made a pretty little bay, and there was a window seat under them—particularly while Mr. Oates’s blue-gray eyes were the alternative. They bore down on me. I had tried to convince myself that this meeting might have to do with general school business. It didn’t. This was personal.

  “Libby, I’ll come right to the point. You’ve missed several commitments in the past few days.”

  I felt myself grow stiff with defiance. Mr. Oates said that I had responsibilities, particularly now that I was a school officer. He did not generally call students in for a personal talk after a few missed commitments, he continued, but he wanted me to know, and know early, before I’d gone any further, that this was serious and that he was concerned to tell me that he himself, the Rector, cared about me. He cared that there might be underlying this behavior some change of attitude, some problem. He wanted to get at the problem, he said, before the behavior, which could jeopardize my position, my good relations, my college prospects, got any worse.

  I took the last as a threat. The old nun from the movie came back to me, giving me an inappropriate urge to laugh out loud: “I have read the word of our Lord God until my eyes burned like the very fires of hell.…”

  What did they know about me? About how it felt to be trapped in a world of wealth? What did he know about being trotted out for visitors who spoke to me as a sociological curiosity?

  I suspected that I was being treated like a volatile compound. The last black school officer, after all, had been deposed for plagiarism. No doubt the entire unseemly spectacle of my falling apart the previous spring was common knowledge: the calculus debacle, my crash at the infirmary, dropping crew, signing up for five arts courses this year, only to reverse myself after a letter from the Vice-Rector. I was indeed unstable, raw, exposed. Mr. Oates was talking to me slowly and firmly, as one does to a child who is not listening or an old person who cannot hear.

  “My mother is sick!” I blurted it out. How could classes and Chapel seem important when my family was in trouble, my mother sick, and, although I did not say it, my parents barely speaking to each other? I did not want to cry there in the Rector’s presence, except that he said so sincerely that he was sorry, and he said that it was well nigh impossible to concentrate for anyone, adults, too, when someone one loved was in pain.

  The Schoolhouse hallways were quiet in the afternoon. The secretaries made businesslike sounds outside the Rector’s door: typewriters clacked; telephones rang; and the women spoke in hushed, sibilant voices. Inside his office the sun glowed orange off the wood panels. I wanted to rest, and this office was restful. The power in it guaranteed that we would not be interrupted, which could not be said of many other places on the grounds.

  “Why haven’t you taken a long weekend? I’m sure your teachers would be more than happy to excuse you to go home to see your mother.”

  It was always so simple for people here, I thought. So simple. Just take care of things, that’s what they did, and then wondered why the rest of the world was in such a funk. “I don’t have the money to fly home.” It galled me to say so.

  “I see,” he said.

  I left rigid with self-righteous anger to look for Jimmy.

  Jimmy was not in any of the usual places, so I walked in the woods and sat on the docks for a while. When I came back onto the main green, I stopped at the post office out of habit; it was what we all did each time we passed. In my box was another small St. Paul’s envelope. I assumed it was a meeting notice. I opened it to find another letter from the Rector. He had arranged permission for my weekend, and I was to see Mr. Price about plane tickets and money for incidental traveling expenses.

  Mr. Price, too, had been busy, while I had raged through the woods. “Take the bus to Boston,” he said when I got to his apartment, “and please, please, take a cab to the airport. St. Paul’s School can afford it.”

  Mr. Price could not help saying that he wished I had told him earlier that I was worried. “We could have arranged this a lot sooner. That’s what I’m here for.”

  I wanted to reassure him, but I could see in my mind’s eye the image of him as he stood outside the post office the year before with a jewelry box in his hand. He had brought a pair of earrings as a gift for Carmen, who was one of his favorites, and as she squealed with delight and reached to take the box, he had pulled it back behind his back. “Don’t be too greedy,” he had teased.

  I remembered the course I had taken with him the winter before, Black and White Survey, and how ashamed I was that he came to class clearly bored or unprepared. “Any comments, questions?” I could not pretend to trust him, and yet, he had made arrangements on my behalf.

  “Thank you for what you’ve done,” I said. “And also for all the things we take for granted. I’m thinking of your driving us to Cambridge each week.” (Along with half a dozen other students I was taking an evening course at Harvard. It was an African-history lecture where the professor spun wild tales about Chaka Zulu, the warrior who impaled his enemies on sharpened stakes in the ground.) I welcomed an honest rush of gratitude to the man who had first introduced me to the school, but in whom I no longer had confidence.

  I did not call my mother at the hospital until I arrived at our house. I seem to remember that no one else was home. It was about half past seven; visiting hours ended at eight. I drove my mother’s station wagon fast to the hospital. The back end fish-tailed as I swung around corners through Fairmount Park. When I got to my mother’s floor, the nurses told me that visiting hours were over for the night.

  “I’ve just come straight from New Hampshire,” I said breathlessly.

  The nurses looked stern, but they let me into her room. My mother had combed her hair and put on her bathrobe for me.

  “I saw you drive up,” she said. “And I saw you flicking my car around with one arm hanging out the window. Didn’t I tell you to use two hands while you’re driving?”

  “Uh-huh.” I began to laugh.

  “And when you leave here, I want you to use two hands on the wheel.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, still laughing.

  “You’re going to do whatever the hell you want, aren’t you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She made a pout. “Hard head makes soft behind. Didn’t I tell you to stay at school? So now you see me. Are you satisfied?”

  I was satisfied that I had done something, but my mother did not look good. She was worried and fearful. She looked as if she had been hit and was waiting to be hit again, or as if she were trapped. It made her face into a mask that only laughter dispelled, and that just for a moment.

  The next morning I visited her again. I told her about the dance I’d performed on Parents’ Weekend and how it wasn’t right without her.

  Mom told me that her back pain was being caused by “female trouble” and referred vaguely to tests. I left Philadelphia not knowing how bad off she was, if or when she’d get better, or how. For what purpose, I wanted to kno
w, did she keep information from me? Five years before, I had run to show her the blood in my underwear, and she’d laughed.

  (“But why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You didn’t need to know.”)

  It didn’t occur to me that I never named my own mystery illness the spring before (except to misdiagnose it to friends as mono), because I’d been afraid to admit, even to my mother, how much I’d wanted to lie down somewhere and hide. Black women, tall and strong as cypress trees, didn’t pull that. Pain and shame and cowardice and fear had to be kept secret. A great-aunt moved to Boston and passed for white. My mother’s father, once he remarried, pastored a church and never talked about his three daughters. My father’s father, who’d been divorced away years before, was mentioned seldom, in a whisper; I never saw him, never saw his photo. My mother and father went for weeks barely speaking to each other. And I never told what happened that night with Ricky in the dark. Trust no man.

  I walked through secrets that were like an animate forest with watchful shadows. It never occurred to me that I kept them myself, or that what I liked most about sitting on the Disciplinary Committee was the chance to penetrate other people’s.

  We started each D.C. by reading the student’s written statement of wrongdoing. Our job was not to determine guilt like a jury, but to try to understand what had happened and why, and to recommend disciplinary action to the Rector.

  After Peter and I and the three teachers on the committee had read the statement, the student and his faculty and student advocates spoke. They talked about the incident, but also about the pattern of the student’s development at school. Advocates generally argued that the rule-breaking was the final symptom of some general crisis—which had now passed. Groupmasters were often the most hard-nosed advocates. After the statements, committee members asked questions. Sometimes they were painful. They wanted to know about the students’ relationships at school and at home. We were alert to news of change: divorces, sibling trouble, breaking up with steadys, hints of drug or alcohol abuse.