or…
The Greek Chorus as the imperturbable, compositional, ideal of the Modern Man — or, a sudden loss of innocence
Bradley had stepped in and closed the door behind him, and it sounded like a soft whisper even as he fell against it trying to compose himself. I can still remember the hurt of seeing him with his hands pressed against his eyes as he tried to rub away his tears; it was almost as if he was trying to push the tears back into his head like they were part of a bad memory he was trying to run away from — a nightmare remembrance that once it had been found, one could only think it had been better left unspoken. He was holding a crumpled letter in his hands, and gasping for breath in big, braying, sobs. I could see his reflection in the mirror on the dresser, even though the door was partially closed. He’d purposely turned the dresser at an angle so he could see into the front room. He had a history of inviting girls over when my parents were out for the day — just as I had that same day he’d walked in on us, I liked to think — and it served as a reminder that my idea of why he’d moved the mirror, and his reality for it, had been world’s apart.
I remember looking down at Avery and seeing the absolute horror on her face; the fact of our possible discovery written across her face — it bore the imminent embarrassment of our public shame — a scarlet hued flush that and ended with her pushing me away and fighting desperately to pull her shirt back into place. I looked at the mirror again, staring at my brother where he was standing at odds with myself. I was wondering what happened. My first thought was that something had happened to Lizzie; it seemed like the obvious reason for his falling apart.
It was only after that I remembered his childhood friend, Kirkland Emerson Garland, “Keg,” had shipped out to ‘Nam two months earlier. He was one of those rare raw recruits who’d died on his first day in country, as they called it. The letter Bradley held had been his friend’s last words to him — received in the mail that very day. It had been written the same day Keg died, written in his small, child-like script that made you think it had been written by a ten year old.
My brother stood up straight, and tall, when he saw me coming out of the bedroom. Wiping his hands on his pants and trying to put on a brave face — he was effectively forcing himself to smile when he saw Avery walking out of the bedroom behind me, sitting herself on the couch and looking up at him with a defiant stare — and all the while not knowing what she should say or do next. It was a rare moment of weakness he would say later — years later — as he sank to the floor and held the letter out to me. He told me to read it, and so I did. It spoke of fright, and fear, and regret — all the things one would expect, I suppose, when coming to the realization that the reality of the dream is far different than the fantasy one thought it would be. My brother had held on to his friend’s letter as if it were the last talisman of his lost youth; the last tie to a friend who would only live on as a memory, someone he’d honour and memorialize with his own nostalgic reminiscence — like we all do for friends lost to the shallow depths of time.
I gave back the letter and asked him what he was planning to do. It seemed like an obvious question I thought, because I didn’t have any answers for him. Not only did I not know what to say, I didn’t know what he expected me to say. He said he was leaving. I asked him if that meant he was still going, and he shook his head, saying that he meant he was leaving. He was going to Canada. He was leaving tonight, for Vancouver — a straight line to Freedom, he’d said — and I realized that I might never see him again. But he would be alive, I told myself, and that was all that mattered.
Avery told him it was the smart thing to do; it wasn’t our war in the first place. It was a slaughter of the innocents, on both sides, she added, and Bradley looked at her, nodding slowly. I wondered if it was because, secretly, he’d agreed with her, or if he’d had some inner dialogue with himself and there was a sudden epiphany at the realization of what the truth was. He looked at us both, his eyes going to the bedroom where he could see the bed was messed up, and nodded again. He told us not to be in too much of a hurry to grow up. We should hang on to our childhood for as long as we could, and I told him that I wasn’t a child anymore. He said he understood what I meant, but that I was wrong. He hadn’t meant my childhood he said, but the innocence we stood on the verge of losing, because once that was gone, there was no getting it back.
And he was right. We all live our lives as best we can, stumbling blindly into a future we can’t see, or define, and at the same time denying a past we try to forget, while our innocence falls away in tiny shards that glitter in the shadows like broken glass. It’s the poet in me that says that, I suppose — not that I’m a big fan of poetry — but it’s also the reality of age, and the advent of wisdom; it’s a realization that with the loss of innocence comes a loss of morality — a constant question full of doubts and ready acceptance— as you allow yourself to step away from the child you once were, while dismissing the rules you once lived by as being too restrictive.
Act Five; scene one
Mrs. Naramova sat in the near darkness of her cluttered living room, the drapes drawn tight and the bright cherry of her cigarette glowing as she listened to the gramophone’s needle rubbing against the label of the album we were listening to. A single beam of sunlight split through the drapes and the dust motes seemed to dance in time with the memory of the music. She turned and looked at Mrs. Whitcombe who opened her eyes slowly and smiled. I watched as Mrs. Naramova nodded slowly, and then made my way toward the gramophone.
“And you say you danced to that?” Mrs. Whitcombe said.
“In Paris,” she answered.
“What year was that?”
“Oh, I don’t know…1908? Maybe later? I can’t really remember. I was young, still a child you might say — or, maybe I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to what was going on around me? But it sounds about right, I think. It was either then, or 1909.”
“And you danced with Nijinsky?” she asked.
“I didn’t dance with him,” Mrs. Naramova laughed. “Can you put the other one on, please Danny?” she asked me softly and turned to look at Mrs. Whitcombe again. “I was far too young to be dancing with him. I was probably the youngest dancer in the troupe at the time.”
“You danced in Paris?” Avery asked, sounding skeptical for some reason. “Was that before, or after you met my grandfather?” she asked, and I turned to look at her, dropping the huge needle on the album.
“I’m sorry?” Mrs. Naramova said, obviously caught off guard by the question; I think we all were. I picked the needle up and placed it on the album, adjusting the volume.
“I’m just trying to sort things out in my head,” Avery said. “Trying to figure out the time. I mean, if you say you met my grandfather in Paris, then that’s where you had my father? I’m just trying to figure out when exactly that was.”
“That was years later,” she said.
“It’s funny though, his birth certificate says he was born here, in America. So which is it? Where was he born? Here, or in Paris?”
“Are you saying you don’t believe me?”
“I’m just saying that I’ve seen my father’s birth certificate, and it doesn’t say Paris, France. It doesn’t even say Paris, Texas, which would be understandable, since he was born here, in America, I mean, and not France.”
“He was born in France. What are you trying to imply?”
“Did you know my grandfather was a Coloured man?” she asked Mrs. Whitcombe, and I saw Mrs. Naramova stiffen in her shock. Her fingernails dug into the fabric lining the arm of her chair.
“Excuse me?” Mrs. Whitcombe said, confused.
“It’s true. She gave birth to my father, but it wasn’t in France, it was here. And the man she had him with, was a Coloured man. That makes my father a half Negro — they call him a mulatto on official government forms. What’s that make me? I forget the word? Most of the time I just call myself Coloured, even though I’m more white than I am anything else. High Yellow we call it back in Chicago. Did you know that was a thing? I guess that’s why I’m not very pretty,” she added. I thought she said it more for Mrs. Whitcombe’s sake than anything else, even though it looked like the old woman didn’t understand what she meant by it.
“Quadroon. The word you’re thinking of is Quadroon,” Mrs. Naramova said. “And yes, I did meet him in Paris. And the reason his birth certificate says America, is because I paid a man a lot of money to put that on there.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said plainly.
“What don’t you believe?”
“I don’t believe a man would write ‘American’ on a French birth certificate.”
“You can get anything you want if you have enough money. Or did you think forgers only worked in America?”
“Why would you want to say he was born here, if you were in Paris?”
“Because I was in the moving picture business, and it wouldn’t do for the world to know I was involved with a Black man—”
“We call it Coloured.”
“And they called it nigger forty years ago!” she spat out. “People in America don’t accept mixed-race couples they way they do in Europe. But I could get a lot more done for him if he was an American citizen, rather than French. Why would I not want him to be American?”
“But why? You didn’t even recognize him as your own son,” she said softly.
“I provided for him.”
“Provided what?” she laughed. It was a sardonic laugh, and twisted her face into a sneerful grimace that bordered on mockery.
“You’re embarrassing me in front of my guest,” she said, looking at Mrs. Whitcombe.
“Maybe I should leave?” the woman offered.
“Yes. Maybe you should,” Avery countered, as Mrs. Whitcombe sat back as if she’d been slapped.
“Maybe it would be better if you left,” Mrs. Naramova said, looking at Avery.
“That’s your answer to everything, isn’t it? Send the child away. Send ‘im packin’. You did it to my father, and now you want to do it to me.”
“I didn’t send your father away.”
“Then what do you call it when you won’t have anything to do with your own child?”
“I was in the hospital.”
“The hospital? For what?” she asked.
“I was in a horrific automobile accident. I nearly died. I spent years rehabilitating and learning to walk again. It took years, as if that matters to you. I put him up for adoption because I couldn’t look after him and myself at the same time.”
“Put him up for adoption like he was a puppy?”
“That’s hardly fair, Evangelina—” Mrs. Whitcombe said.
“I told you, it’s Avery! Avery Byrd!” She all but screamed it at the woman. “I changed my name because I didn’t want anyone to think I was related to her. Turns out that doesn’t matter now then, does it? Nobody even remembers who she is.” She turned and looked at her grandmother. “You’re a has-been. A cliché faded star of the silver screen. You’re the one they based Norma Desmond on. Well, I’m not like you — and I won’t be like you, either. I’m going to be an actress and people will know my name — even if you don’t. People will want to see me, but unlike you, they’ll remember me.”
She walked to the door and opened it quickly, letting it bang against the wall.
“Are you leaving then?” Mrs. Naramova asked, and I could see how the idea frightened her. Her hand was digging into the arm of the overstuffed chair she was seated in.
“Why would I stay? You don’t want me. You didn’t want my father, and you certainly don’t want me.”
“You have to know that I never left your grandfather. He left me. He chose to leave me, rather than stay to help raise your father. I would’ve stayed in Paris with him, or maybe moved to London before the war started. All I know is that I was never going to come back here. But when he left me, I had nowhere else to go. Paris had nothing for me. So I came back to the only place I knew would want me. Except that they didn’t, did they? Not with your father with me. And then I had the accident. After that, while I recovered, they created talking pictures. Everything changed after that, for all of us.”
“So you put him up for adoption and turned your back on him.”
“I didn’t!” she cried, and I could see tears in her eyes; I could hear the pain in her voice and I looked at Avery, who appeared undecided for a moment. “They took him away from me. The studio! They thought I was going to die, and they took him away from me. But I want you to know I was always his mother. You can’t take that away from a woman — any woman. I never stopped looking for him, either, but when I found him, he didn’t even know who I was.”
“Took him away from you?” Avery asked, sounding skeptical. “He wasn’t theirs to take. You let them take him because it was the easy thing to do. You turned your back on him, on us!”
“That’s not true,” she said, her voice almost a whisper.
“No? You let them put him up for adoption.”
“I was in a coma! For months!”
“No! You let them take him from you,” she spat out.
“Why would you say that?”
“Because he was a coloured child!”
She reached out and grabbed the doorknob, standing in silence and looking down the hall toward the elevator. She turned and looked back at her grandmother, at Mrs. Whitcombe, and finally at me. She looked down at the floor for a moment, as if she was trying to decide what she should do.
“You cared more for Danny’s family than you did your own,” she said at last. “His mother, his sisters, his brothers. You did whatever you could for them — you still do. You don’t do that for me, or my father, even though you knew who we were, and where we lived. I’ve often wondered why? Maybe you’re her mother as well? Except that she had a white father?”
“How can you be such a cruel little girl?” Mrs. Whitcombe said softly, going to her friend’s side and putting her arms around her.
I turned when I heard the record’s needle brushing up against the label.
“I probably get that from her,” she said, and stepped out of the room, closed the door behind her with a soft click.