“I’d skip making friends with Mrs. Gernhardt,” Leslie said absentmindedly.
He was starting to wish they’d brought Eva. The little girl had become his shield. She kept him busy chasing after her, feeding her, taking her to the potty … all the mundane activities Jules had performed unenthusiastically back in the city had taken on a new purpose since they’d moved to the island with its never-ending cocktail parties and country-club brunches. Little Eva gave him an excuse to avoid talking to people. And now he was alone. Sure, Leslie was by his side but her head was someplace else and she was making it clear he wasn’t invited on whatever search she was on.
As the long line inched forward, and Jules grew nervous about being brushed by a man who reminded him of his father, he tried to focus on the cutting garden with its tall, delicate orange cosmos spiking between colossal blue hosta. He was about to turn to Leslie, tell her blue was a rare color in a garden, when he spotted the tar-faced jockey tucked among the crimson Spigelia marilandica blooms. A gaslight lamp held aloft in one of the statuette’s black hands.
“Les,” he whispered, but she was no longer at his side.
He searched the line and found her five people back, talking to a woman with hair like lemon meringue.
“This is dreadful, isn’t it?” an old woman in the line opposite said. He heard decades of cigarette smoke in her voice.
He was about to step out of line, join Leslie, when he realized the old woman was speaking to him.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, smiling, shrugging his shoulders. He reached through the narrow corridor between lines and held out a hand. “I’m Jules.”
The woman—she was very old—held out her hand top first, like she was the Queen of England or something. He shook her long white fingers, wondering if he was supposed to kiss her knuckles so swollen they seemed ready to break through the papery skin.
“Veronica Pencott,” she said in an overpronounced accent that reminded him of his mother’s silver-screen movie stars. Staccato consonants and elongated vowels. “We’re neighbors, you and I.”
She was striking. With her silver hair piled in a high bun and her long thin neck, she could’ve been an aging sister to Audrey Hepburn.
“Of course,” he said. “So nice to meet you.”
He glanced back at the jockey statue, regretting the slip immediately because the old woman’s eyes followed his.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “Those pests are everywhere.”
His head swam with alcohol and heavy food and the long night and he almost turned to the old lady, asked, What did you just say? Then he realized she meant the caterpillars crawling across the statue’s shoulders, chest, face. As if the squirming larvae were hatching from the frozen black man’s mouth.
She shook her head, her tongue clicking tut-tut. “Ah, yes, you’ve found Jocko. The island is littered with his plaster brethren. I wish I could apologize on behalf of the Gernhardts. Dick and Mary aren’t the most progressive thinkers.”
“No need,” he said, smiling again. Like a goddamn fool, he thought.
He was sweating through his suit jacket, the damp spreading across his back, under his arms.
“It is quite crude.” The old woman raised a penciled brow. “I’ve seen more elegant versions.”
What she meant, Jules knew, were versions that looked less like black men and more like white men wearing blackface.
“There was,” the woman drawled, “a fascinating PBS special on George Washington. Jocko was—in Washington’s words—his faithful groomsman.”
His boy, Jules thought.
“Of course,” she continued, “he was just a child. My grandson’s age, I believe. But he volunteered—or so they say—to watch Washington’s horses the night he crossed the Delaware and surprised the British forces.”
“How’d that turn out?” Jules asked, realizing too late how contrary he sounded.
“Quite good for Washington,” the old woman said. “Poor Jocko died still tied to the horses. The reins frozen solid in his hands.”
“Devoted to the end.”
“Such are the ways of war,” the old woman said with a sigh. “There will always be boys to sacrifice.”
Colored boys, Jules thought.
“There are,” she said, “some Afro-Americans” (Jules stopped himself from updating her) “who have claimed Jocko, or the lawn jockey rather, as a beacon—quite literally—for the Underground Railroad. They believe the statue represents a proud moment in United States history.”
Her knobbly fingers pointed at the statuette, and he had to stop himself from telling her not to point, not to bring anyone else’s attention to the grotesque thing. Leave it to white people—the lucky innocents (there was Mr. Baldwin again)—to spin something good out of plain bad. Putting up with racists, his father had explained, was just one of the black man’s many burdens. He’d made it clear to a young Jules there wasn’t anything to be done about it. No use punching a concrete wall, no use cutting the trunk of a tree when its roots run deep—his father’s pockets had been deep with clichés to explain away the unexplainable. The unchangeable.
It wasn’t like Jules had never spent time around rich whites. He’d attended four-course meals at his professors’ homes in the toniest neighborhoods surrounding Harvard. But the liberal citizens of Cambridge would’ve cut off an arm before they put a caricature of a black man on their lawn, if only to save face.
There was a cheer from the front of the line near the white pillars, and the ladies’ line, the old woman included, shuffled forward before Jules could respond.
Leslie took her place beside him. Thank fucking God.
“Sweetheart, come here for a sec?” He smiled at the lady with the lemon meringue hair. “You can have her right back.”
“What’s up, babe?”
“You see that?” he paused, “Over there?”
She stared into his eyes instead of at the statue, and he realized it was the first time they’d really looked at each other since the move.
“I knew it was here,” she said, her voice flat and cold. “It’s been here since I was a kid. I’m sorry. I should’ve taken you home after the last house.”
“It’s not your fault,” he said. “It just caught me off guard, I guess.”
“And then Mrs. Gundersen called you boy. I swear to God, I almost slapped her.”
Her fingers plucked at her white-blond eyebrows. He wanted to pull her hand away, or, at least, tell her to stop. Those poor torn up eyebrows, he’d thought so often over the years.
“Sweetie, that’s crazy,” he said, “she called me a city boy.”
“You know what she meant.” Now she was angry with him. He shouldn’t have used that word. Crazy. Not after she’d had such trouble recovering from the last miscarriage.
“Do we know what she meant?” He wished she hadn’t said anything. Now she was making him paranoid.
“These fucking animals.” Her face was locked in that sugary smile as she scanned the crowd, and the contrast unnerved him, made his full stomach flip.