But his mother had insisted, waved Jules’s test scores in his pops’s face, parroted her lady, even using the woman’s hoity-toity inflection, The boy is clearly gifted! Destined for great things.
His mother’s shining eyes had unlocked something—a kindness?—in his father, and Jules had worn those chains, rode the Van der Meer scholarship from Dalton to Columbia to Harvard, all the way to the Oyster Cove Country Club.
He wished Mama were with him now. She, like Leslie (the Leslie before the island), had seen the promise in people. He knew just what she’d say. Julius, look at all these fine people! He and his pops were always teasing her about what she called “her appreciation for finer things.” His pops called it “rich-white-people shit,” but who could blame her, Jules thought. She’d grown up the light-skinned daughter of a maid in the Van der Meer home on Central Park East, becoming a maid herself at sixteen. She’d come of age surrounded by beautiful things. Like a girl lost in a museum.
But his mother was dead, and wealthy whites no longer fascinated him the way they had when he’d first met Leslie almost eighteen years ago, the Twiggy look-alike who wore coveralls when they’d volunteered at an urban garden in Roxbury, far from Harvard’s landscaped campus. That first year with Leslie had been filled with dizzying excitement—all the attention he’d been paid by her friends, who, like Leslie, didn’t live in the dorms, but in palatial townhouses on posh Beacon Hill. They called themselves artists and activists, although it was hard to figure what medium they worked in, or what cause they were dedicated to. To Jules, it seemed they bounced from cause to cause with the same ambivalence they showed him—when he was new, they lavished him with attention, but after a few months, he was old hat.
Not his Leslie. She was a believer. In change. In good. In the power of one person to make a difference. Even after the idealism of the ’60s burned out, Leslie’s friends, one by one, doing an about-face, following in their mothers’ and fathers’ footsteps—bored housewives and paunchy investment bankers—his Leslie stayed gold.
His father’s voice was just a whisper now, but, still, it buzzed at his ear like the mosquitos that swarmed the island on humid nights.
Who you trying to convince, Julius? Yourself?
He studied the corsage pinned to Orchid Lady’s ample bosom, even more exotic than the bloom she’d worn the night of the fair. A trio of green-white Brassavola novola orchids. He had to stop himself from leaning forward and sniffing the strong, citrusy tang, and then remembered he’d read somewhere that they were only fragrant at night, in order to attract the right moth. An image of her covered in gypsy moths gave him a moment of confidence and he smiled and nodded. “So lovely to see you again.”
Veronica and Orchid Lady moved on to a new topic, something about the factory, and he was relieved, ready to make his exit. He glanced out the window, past the rows of golf carts, and saw Brooks walking away from the clubhouse toward the green course. He was with that girl. They were holding hands. People were looking out the window. Did Jules see them shaking their heads?
Don’t be paranoid, he told himself. Don’t be a fool, his father said.
“Excuse me, ladies.” He bowed his head. “I’m headed to the little boys’ room.”
“Make sure you come back, Julius dear,” Veronica called after him. “I’m not finished with you just yet!”
He was out of breath when he caught up with Brooks and the girl. His new pointy-toed dress shoes squished across the damp turf.
“Brooks,” he wheezed.
“Dad.” He was annoyed. Like usual. “We’re just taking a walk.”
Jules tried a friendly tone. “You must be Maddie.”
She blushed and looked up at Brooks, who stared into the hazy dusk settling over the silent green.
Something, Jules knew, was wrong. Couldn’t the girl see that?
She reached out and Jules shook her hand. He could fold it inside his palm if he wanted to. Make it disappear. She was pretty. Maybe even beautiful. There was something about her face—her round cheeks and petite mouth—that reminded him of a painting. Raphael or da Vinci. A Mona Lisa smile. What was Brooks thinking, Jules wondered, knowing his boy, if he could read his mind, would’ve called Jules a hypocrite.
“Okay,” Brooks said, impatience churning. “You met. Now can we go?”
“Hold your horses, kiddo,” Jules said, surprising himself by sounding all Ward Cleaver. “I just need to talk to you for a sec. That cool, Maddie?”
“Sure.” She smiled. Innocent.
He wondered if she had any idea what kind of trouble she might be getting his boy in. Sure, it was only a might at this point, but hadn’t she heard stories about what happened to black boys who fell for white girls? Once those white girls got sick of them.
Jesus, he thought, he sounded just like his father who had called him all manner of names when he’d come home from Harvard and told them about Leslie. Fool. Dumbass. Fluffernutter for brains. That last one had made Jules and his mom laugh but, still, it had stung and there’d been a moment, time slowing, Jules’s breath loud and thick like he had cotton stuffed in his ears, where he’d been sure his father would disown him. Would declare him no son of mine.
“Over here,” Jules said, “in private.”
He walked toward the metal shed turned blue in the twilight. When Brooks didn’t follow, he seized the boy’s arm, pulling him around so their backs were to Maddie. To the mob at the clubhouse.
“What the—?” Brooks said.
It was near dark, the golf green stretched out before them. Like they were shipwrecked on a distant planet, Jules thought, where the sun shone an unearthly blue.
“What are you doing, Brooks?”
His son looked at Jules’s hand gripping his arm. “What are you doing, Dad?”
“We need to go home. And talk. Not here.”
People were streaming out of the clubhouse, taking seats in the white folding chairs set up for the fireworks show. The strings of round bulbs hanging from the outdoor tent reminded Jules of the fairway lights, and although it was only a little over a month ago, it felt like years, and he knew that everything that had and would happen, this surging unease, had begun that night at the fair.
“Come on,” he said, and bent to whisper in his son’s ear, catching that sweet scent that belonged to Brooks and Brooks only.
Had he smelled like that as a baby? Jules tried to remember. All those nights he’d spent holding him, the tip of his finger planted in the baby’s mouth, Jules’s head jerking forward each time he dozed off, and none of it—the exhaustion, the aching back, the pins and needles in his arms—had mattered because it was his son he was holding. His son. A survivor.
“I opened your backpack,” he whispered. It came out like a hiss and he knew he’d made a mistake.