The next day, Marilyn came to his office hours to tell him that she’d dropped the class. Within a week they were lovers.
They spent all autumn together. James had a seriousness, a reserve, unlike anyone she had met before. He seemed to look at things more closely, to think more carefully, to hold himself a half step apart. Only when they came together, in his tiny Cambridge apartment, did that reserve drop, with a fierceness that made her catch her breath. Afterward, curled up on his bed, Marilyn ruffled his hair, spiky with sweat. For those afternoon hours, he seemed at ease with himself, and she loved that she was the only thing that made him feel that way. They would lie together, dozing and dreaming, until six o’clock. Then Marilyn slipped her dress back over her head, and James buttoned his shirt and combed his hair again. His cowlick would stand up at the back, but she never told him, loving that little reminder of the side only she got to see. She simply kissed him and hurried back for evening sign-in at the dormitory. James himself began to forget about the cowlick; after Marilyn left, he seldom remembered to look in the mirror. Every time she kissed him, every time he opened his arms and she crawled into them, felt like a miracle. Coming to her made him feel perfectly welcomed, perfectly at home, as he had never in his life felt before.
He had never felt he belonged here, even though he’d been born on American soil, even though he had never set foot anywhere else. His father had come to California under a false name, pretending to be the son of a neighbor who had emigrated there some years earlier. America was a melting pot, but Congress, terrified that the molten mixture was becoming a shade too yellow, had banned all immigrants from China. Only the children of those already in the States could enter. So James’s father had taken the name of his neighbor’s son, who had drowned in the river the year before, and come to join his “father” in San Francisco. It was the story of nearly every Chinese immigrant from the time of Chester A. Arthur to the end of the Second World War. While the Irish and the Germans and the Swedes crowded onto steamship decks, waving as the pale green torch of the Statue of Liberty came into view, the coolies had to find other means to reach the land where all men were created equal. Those who made it would visit their wives in China and return each time celebrating the birth of a son. Those at home in the villages who longed to make their fortunes would adopt the names of those mythical sons and make the long journey across the sea. While the Norwegians and the Italians and the Russian Jews ferried from Ellis Island to Manhattan, fanning out by road and railway to Kansas and Nebraska and Minnesota, the Chinese who bluffed their way to California mostly stayed put. In Chinatowns, the lives of all those paper sons were fragile and easily torn. Everyone’s name was false. Everyone hoped not to be found out and sent back. Everyone clustered together so they wouldn’t stand out.
James’s parents, however, had not stayed put. In 1938, when James was six, his father received a letter from a paper brother who had gone east looking for work when the Depression began. He had found a place at a small boarding school in Iowa, the “brother” wrote, doing groundswork and maintenance. Now his (real, nonpaper) mother was ill and he was returning to China, and his employers wondered if he had any reliable friends who might do as good a job. They like the Chinese, the letter said; they feel we are quiet and hardworking and clean. It was a good position, a very exclusive school. There might be a job for his wife in the school kitchens. Would he be interested?
James could not read Chinese but all his life he held the memory of the letter’s last paragraph, a scrawl of fountain-pen calligraphy, which caught his parents’ attention. There was a special policy, said the brother, for children of employees. If they could pass an entrance exam, they could attend the school for free.
Jobs were scarce and everyone was hungry, but it was because of this paragraph that the Lees sold their furniture and moved across the country with two suitcases between them. It took five Greyhound rides and four days. When they reached Iowa, James’s “uncle” took them to his apartment. James remembered only the man’s teeth, more crooked even than his father’s, one tooth turned sideways, like a sliver of rice waiting to be toothpicked out. The next day, his father put on his best shirt, buttoned up to the collar, and went with his friend to Lloyd Academy. By afternoon it was settled: he would start the following week. The morning after that his mother put on her best dress and went with his father to the school. That evening, each brought home a navy-blue uniform stitched with a new English name: Henry. Wendy.
A few weeks later, James’s parents brought him to Lloyd for the entrance exam. A man with a large white mustache like cotton brought him into an empty classroom and gave him a booklet and a yellow pencil. Looking back, James realized what a brilliant idea it was: what six-year-old would be able to read, let alone pass, such an exam? A teacher’s son, perhaps, if she had studied with him. Surely not a janitor’s son, or a cafeteria lady’s son, or a groundskeeper’s son. If a square playing field is forty feet on a side, how long is the fence that goes around it? When was America discovered? Which of these words is a noun? Here is a sequence of shapes; which shape completes the pattern? We’re sorry, the principal could say. Your son didn’t pass the test. He isn’t up to Lloyd academic standards. And no tuition would be necessary.
James, though, had known all the answers. He had read every newspaper he could get his hands on; he had read all the books his father had bought, a nickel a bag, at library book sales. One hundred sixty feet, he wrote. 1492. Automobile. The circle. He finished the test and set the pencil in the slot at the top of the desk. The man with the mustache didn’t look up until twenty minutes later. “Finished already?” he said. “You were so quiet, sonny.” He took away the booklet and the pencil and brought James back to the kitchens, where his mother was working. “I’ll grade the test and let you know the results next week,” he told them, but James already knew he had passed.
When the term began in September, he rode in to school with his father in the Ford truck the school had lent him for his maintenance work. “You’re the first Oriental boy to attend Lloyd,” his father reminded him. “Set a good example.” That first morning, James slid into his seat and the girl next to him asked, “What’s wrong with your eyes?” It wasn’t until he heard the horror in the teacher’s voice—“Shirley Byron!”—that he realized he was supposed to be embarrassed; the next time it happened, he had learned his lesson and turned red right away. In every class, every day that first week, the other students studied him: where had he come from, this boy? He had a bookbag, a Lloyd uniform. Yet he didn’t live at the school like the rest of them; he looked like no one they’d ever seen. Now and then, his father would be called in to loosen a squeaky window, replace a lightbulb, mop up a spill. James, scrunched in the back row, saw his classmates glance from his father to him and knew that they suspected. He would bend his head over his book, so close that his nose nearly touched the page, until his father left the room. By the second month, he asked his parents for permission to walk to and from school by himself. Alone, he could pretend to be just another student. He could pretend that, in the uniform, he looked just like everyone else.
He spent twelve years at Lloyd and never felt at home. At Lloyd, everyone seemed to be descended from a Pilgrim or a senator or a Rockefeller, but when they did family tree projects in class, he pretended to forget the assignment rather than draw his own complicated diagram. Don’t ask any questions, he prayed silently as the teacher marked a small red zero beside his name. He set himself a curriculum of studying American culture—listening to the radio, reading comics, saving his pocket money for double features, learning the rules of the new board games—in case anyone ever said, Hey, didya hear Red Skelton yesterday? or Wanna play Monopoly? though no one ever did. As he got older, he did not attend the dances, or the pep rallies, or the junior or senior proms. At best, girls smiled silently at him in the hallways; at worst, they stared as he passed, and he heard their snickers as he turned the corner. At graduation, the yearbook ran one photo of him besides the obligatory senior portrait: a shot of him at an assembly to greet President Truman, his head visible over the shoulder of the class treasurer and a girl who would go on to marry a Belgian prince. His ears, blushing pink in real life, were a deep and unnatural gray in the photograph, his mouth slightly open, as if he had been caught trespassing. At college, he hoped things would be different. Yet after seven years at Harvard—four as an undergrad, three and counting as a graduate student—nothing had changed. Without realizing why, he studied the most quintessentially American subject he could find—cowboys—but he never spoke of his parents, or his family. He still had few acquaintances and no friends. He still found himself shifting in his seat, as if at any moment someone might notice him and ask him to leave.
So that fall of 1957, when Marilyn had leaned over his desk and kissed him, this beautiful honey-haired girl, when she came into his arms and then into his bed, James could not quite believe it. The first afternoon they’d spent together, in his tiny whitewashed studio apartment, he marveled at how her body fit so perfectly against his: her nose nestled exactly into the hollow between his collarbones; her cheek curved to match the side of his neck. As if they were two halves of a mold. He had studied her with the air of a sculptor, tracing the contours of her hips and calves, his fingertips grazing her skin. When they made love, her hair came alive. It darkened from golden-wheat to amber. It kinked and curled like a fiddlehead fern. It amazed him that he could have such an effect on anyone. As she dozed in his arms, her hair slowly relaxed, and when she woke, it had stretched back to its usual waves. Then her easy laugh sparkled in that white, bare room; as she chattered, breathless, her hands fluttered until he caught them in his and they lay warm and still, like resting birds, and then she pulled him to her again. It was as if America herself was taking him in. It was too much luck. He feared the day the universe would notice he wasn’t supposed to have her and take her away. Or that she might suddenly realize her mistake and disappear from his life as suddenly as she had entered. After a while, the fear became a habit, too.
He began to make small changes he thought she might like: he trimmed his hair; he bought a blue-striped Oxford shirt after she admired one on a passerby. (The cowlick, persistent, still stood up; years later, Nath and Hannah would inherit it, too.) One Saturday, at Marilyn’s suggestion, he bought two gallons of pale yellow paint, pushed the furniture to the middle of the apartment, and spread drop cloths across the parquet. As they brushed one section, then another, the room brightened like panes of sunlight stretching across the walls. When everything was painted, they opened all the windows and curled up on the bed in the center of the room. The apartment was so small that nothing was more than a few feet from the wall, but surrounded by his desk and chairs, the armchair and the dresser pressed close, he felt as if they were on an island, or afloat in the sea. With Marilyn tucked in the curve of his shoulder, he kissed her and her arms circled his neck, her body rose to meet his. Another tiny miracle, every time.
Later that afternoon, waking in the fading light, he noticed a tiny yellow blotch on the tip of Marilyn’s toe. After a moment of searching, he found a smudge on the wall near the end of the bed, where her foot had touched it as they made love: a dime-sized spot where the paint was blotted away. He said nothing to Marilyn, and when they pushed the furniture back into place that evening, the dresser concealed the smudge. Every time he looked at that dresser he was pleased, as if he could see through the pine drawers and his folded clothing straight to it, that mark her body had left in his space.
At Thanksgiving, Marilyn decided not to go home to Virginia. She told herself, and James, that it was too far for such a short holiday, but in reality she knew her mother would ask her, again, if she had any prospects, and this time she did not know how to respond. Instead, in James’s tiny kitchen, she roasted a chicken, cubed potatoes, peeled yams into a casserole dish the size of a steno pad: Thanksgiving dinner in miniature. James, who had never cooked himself a meal, who subsisted on burgers from Charlie’s Kitchen and English muffins from the Hayes-Bickford, watched in awe. After Marilyn basted the chicken, she looked up defiantly, closed the oven, and peeled the oven mitts from her hands.
“My mother is a home economics teacher,” she said. “Betty Crocker is her personal goddess.” It was the first thing she had told him about her mother. The way she said it, it sounded like a secret, something she had kept hidden and now deliberately, trustingly, revealed.
James felt he should return this privilege, this private gift. He had mentioned once, in passing, that his parents had worked at a school, leaving it at that, hoping she’d think teacher. But he had never told her how the school kitchen had been like the land of the giants, everything economy-sized: rolls of tinfoil half a mile long, jars of mayonnaise big enough to hold his head. His mother was in charge of bringing the world down to scale, chopping melons into dice-sized cubes, portioning pats of butter onto saucers to accompany each roll. He had never told anyone how the other kitchen ladies snickered at his mother for wrapping up the leftover food instead of throwing it away; how at home they’d reheat it in the oven while his parents quizzed him: What did you do in geography? What did you do in math? And he’d recite: Montgomery is the capital of Alabama. Prime numbers have only two factors. They didn’t understand his answers, but they’d nodded, pleased that James was learning things they did not know. As they spoke, he would crumble crackers into a cup of celery soup, or peel waxed paper from a wedge of cheese sandwich, and pause, confused, certain he’d done this before, uncertain whether he was reviewing his studies or the whole schoolday. In the fifth grade, he had stopped speaking Chinese to his parents, afraid of tinting his English with an accent; long before that, he had stopped speaking to his parents at school at all. He was afraid to tell Marilyn these things, afraid that once he admitted them, she would see him as he had always seen himself: a scrawny outcast, feeding on scraps, reciting his lines and trying to pass. An imposter. He was afraid she would never see him any other way.
“My parents are both dead,” he said. “They died just after I started college.”
His mother had died his second year, a tumor blossoming in her brain. His father had gone six months later. Complications of pneumonia, the doctors had said, but James had known the truth: his father simply hadn’t wanted to live alone.
Marilyn didn’t say anything, but she reached out and cupped his face in her hands, and James felt the leftover heat from the oven in her soft palms. They were there only a moment before the timer buzzed and she turned back to the stove, but they warmed him through. He remembered his mother’s hands—scarred from steam burns, callused from scouring pots—and wanted to press his lips to the tender hollow where Marilyn’s life line and love line crossed. He promised himself he would never let those hands harden. As Marilyn took the chicken, burnished and bronze, from the oven, he was mesmerized by her deftness. It was beautiful, the way broth thickened to gravy under her guidance, how potatoes fluffed like cotton beneath her fork. This was the closest thing he’d seen to magic. A few months later, when they married, they would make a pact: to let the past drift away, to stop asking questions, to look forward from then on, never back.
That spring, Marilyn was making plans for her senior year; James was finishing his Ph.D. and waiting, still, to see if he would be taken on in the history department. There was an opening and he had applied, and Professor Carlson, the department head, had hinted he was by far the most accomplished in his class. Now and then, he would interview for positions elsewhere—in New Haven, in Providence—just in case. Deep inside, though, he was certain that he would be hired at Harvard. “Carlson as good as told me I’m in,” he said to Marilyn whenever the subject came up. Marilyn nodded and kissed him and refused to think about what would happen when she graduated the next year, when she headed off to medical school who knew where. Harvard, she thought, ticking off her fingers. Columbia. Johns Hopkins. Stanford. Each digit a step farther away.
Then, in April, two things neither of them expected: Professor Carlson informed James that he was very, very sorry to disappoint him, but they had decided to take his classmate William McPherson instead, and of course they knew James would find many other opportunities elsewhere. “Did they say why?” Marilyn asked, and James replied, “I wasn’t the right fit for the department, they said,” and she did not raise the subject again. Four days later, an even bigger surprise: Marilyn was pregnant.
So instead of Harvard, an offer at last from humble Middlewood College, accepted with relief. Instead of Boston, small-town Ohio. Instead of medical school, a wedding. Nothing quite as planned.
“A baby,” Marilyn said to James, over and over. “Our baby. So much better.” By the time they were married, Marilyn would be only three months along, and it wouldn’t show. To herself, she said, You can come back and finish that last year, when the baby is older. It would be almost eight years before school would seem real and possible and tangible again, but Marilyn didn’t know that. As she left the dean’s office, an indefinite leave secured, she was certain that everything she had dreamed for herself—medical school, doctorhood, that new and important life—sat poised for her return, like a well-trained dog awaiting its master. Still, when Marilyn sat down at the telephone table in the dorm lobby and gave the long-distance operator her mother’s number, her voice shook with each digit. As her mother’s voice finally came over the line, she forgot to say hello. Instead she blurted out, “I’m getting married. In June.”
Her mother paused. “Who is he?”
“His name is James Lee.”
“A student?”
Marilyn’s face warmed. “He’s just finishing his Ph.D. In American history.” She hesitated and decided on a half-truth. “Harvard was thinking of hiring him, in the fall.”
“So he’s a professor.” A sudden alertness tinted her mother’s voice. “Sweetheart, I’m so happy for you. I can’t wait to meet him.”
Relief flooded Marilyn. Her mother wasn’t upset about her leaving school early; why would she mind? Hadn’t she done just what her mother had hoped: met a wonderful Harvard man? She read off the information from a slip of paper: Friday, June 13, eleven thirty, with the justice of the peace; lunch afterward at the Parker House. “It won’t be a big party. Just us, and you, and a few of our friends. James’s parents are both dead.”
“Lee,” her mother mused. “Is he connected to anyone we know?”
Marilyn realized, suddenly, what her mother was imagining. It was 1958; in Virginia, in half the country, their wedding would break the law. Even in Boston, she sometimes saw disapproval in the eyes of the passersby. Her hair was no longer the white-blond of her childhood, but it was still light enough to catch attention when bent toward James’s inky black head in movie theaters, on a park bench, at the counter at the Waldorf Cafeteria. A gaggle of Radcliffe girls came down the stairs, one hovering nearby to wait for the phone, the others crowding around the hall mirror to apply powder to their noses. One of them, just a week before, had heard about Marilyn’s marriage and came by her room “to see if it was really true.”
Marilyn squeezed the receiver and pressed one palm to her belly and kept her voice sweet. “I don’t know, Mother,” she said. “Why don’t you ask him when you meet him?”
So her mother came in from Virginia, the first time she’d ever left the state. Standing at the station with James hours after his graduation, waiting for her mother’s train, Marilyn told herself: she would have come anyway, even if I’d told her. Her mother stepped onto the platform and spotted Marilyn and a smile flashed across her face—spontaneous, proud—and for that instant, Marilyn believed it completely. Of course she would have. Then the smile flickered just for a moment, like a flash of static. Her gaze darted back and forth between the stout blond woman standing on her daughter’s left and the skinny Oriental man on her right, looking for the advertised James, not finding him. Finally understanding. A few seconds passed before she shook James’s hand, told him she was very, very happy to meet him, and allowed him to take her bag.
Marilyn and her mother had dinner alone that night, and her mother did not mention James until dessert. She knew what her mother would ask—Why do you love him?—and steeled herself for the question. But her mother didn’t ask this at all, didn’t mention the word love. Instead she swallowed a bite of cake and studied her daughter from across the table. “You’re sure,” she said, “that he doesn’t just want a green card?”
Marilyn couldn’t look at her. Instead she stared at her mother’s hands, spotted despite the gloves and the lemon-scented lotion, at the fork pinched between the fingers, at the crumb clinging to the tines. A tiny wrinkle creased her mother’s eyebrows, as if someone had nicked her forehead with a knife. Years later, Hannah would spy this same mark of deep worry on her mother’s face, though she would not know its source, and Marilyn would never have admitted the resemblance. “He was born in California, Mother,” she said, and her mother looked away and dabbed at her mouth with her napkin, leaving two red smears on the linen.
The morning of the wedding, as they waited in the courthouse, Marilyn’s mother kept fiddling with the clasp of her purse. They’d gotten there almost an hour early, worried about traffic, about parking, about missing their spot with the justice of the peace. James had put on a new suit and kept patting the breast pocket, checking for the rings through the navy-blue wool. Such a timid and nervous gesture made Marilyn want to kiss him right there in front of everyone. In twenty-five minutes she would be his wife. And then her mother stepped closer and took Marilyn’s elbow in a grip that felt like a clamp.
“Let’s touch up your lipstick,” she said, nudging Marilyn toward the ladies’ room.
She should have known it was coming. All morning her mother had been dissatisfied with everything. Marilyn’s dress wasn’t white but cream. It didn’t look like a wedding dress; it was too plain, like something a nurse would wear. She didn’t know why Marilyn wouldn’t get married in a church. There were plenty nearby. She didn’t like the weather in Boston; why was it so gray in June? Daisies weren’t a wedding flower; why not roses instead? And why was she in such a hurry, why get married now, why not wait awhile?
It would have been easier if her mother had used a slur. It would have been easier if she had insulted James outright, if she had said he was too short or too poor or not accomplished enough. But all her mother said, over and over, was, “It’s not right, Marilyn. It’s not right.” Leaving it unnamed, hanging in the air between them.
Marilyn pretended not to hear and took her lipstick from her purse.
“You’ll change your mind,” her mother said. “You’ll regret it later.”
Marilyn swiveled up the tube and bent close to the mirror, and her mother grabbed her by both shoulders suddenly, desperately. The look in her eyes was fear, as if Marilyn were running along the edge of a cliff.
“Think about your children,” she said. “Where will you live? You won’t fit in anywhere. You’ll be sorry for the rest of your life.”
“Stop it,” Marilyn shouted, slamming her fist against the edge of the sink. “This is my life, Mother. Mine.” She jerked herself free and the lipstick went flying, then skittered to a stop on the floor tiles. Somehow she had made a long red streak down her mother’s sleeve. Without another word, she pushed the door of the bathroom open, leaving her mother alone.
Outside, James glanced anxiously at his wife-to-be. “What’s wrong?” he murmured, leaning close. She shook her head and whispered quickly, laughingly: “Oh, my mother just thinks I should marry someone more like me.” Then she took his lapel in her fist, pulled his face to hers, and kissed him. Ridiculous, she thought. So obvious that she didn’t even need to say it.
Just days before, hundreds of miles away, another couple had married, too—a white man, a black woman, who would share a most appropriate name: Loving. In four months they would be arrested in Virginia, the law reminding them that Almighty God had never intended white, black, yellow, and red to mix, that there should be no mongrel citizens, no obliteration of racial pride. It would be four years before they protested, and four years more before the court concurred, but many more years before the people around them would, too. Some, like Marilyn’s mother, never would.
When Marilyn and James separated, her mother had returned from the ladies’ room and stood silently watching them from a distance. She had blotted her sleeve again and again on the roller towel, but the red mark still showed beneath the damp spot, like an old bloodstain. Marilyn wiped a smudge of lipstick from James’s upper lip and grinned, and he patted his breast pocket again, checking the rings. To her mother it looked as if James were congratulating himself.
Afterward, the wedding reduced to a slideshow in Marilyn’s memory: the thin white line, like a hair, in the justice’s bifocals; the knots of baby’s breath in her bouquet; the fog of moisture on the wineglass her old roommate, Sandra, raised to toast. Under the table, James’s hand in hers, the strange new band of gold cool against her skin. And across the table, her mother’s carefully curled hair, her powdered face, her lips kept closed to cover the crooked incisor.
That was the last time Marilyn saw her mother.