Those hours in Viola’s house were the most revelatory of Tom’s life. Viola had always seemed modest in the clinic, but in the privacy of her home she shed her modesty with her clothes. She had no difficulty granting Tom’s desire that she sit or stand and be stared at from all sides, while he tried to take in the profound simplicity of her beauty. Her skin was soft and without blemish. This perfection was partly youth, he knew, but even with young white women, whom he saw unclothed on a regular basis, he had the impression that no limb was quite aware of what the others were doing, that the whole was very much a collection of parts. Viola was all of a piece. Each part flowed into the next with seamless fluidity, so that medical terms like ventral, dorsal, medial, and distal blurred into meaninglessness.
Her abandonment of modesty extended much further than nudity. In her daily role as a nurse, Viola was a model of self-possession, politeness, and rectitude. With some adult patients she spoke only when spoken to; with others she was as intimate as a family member, providing comfort while moving things along without the patients becoming aware they were being “handled.” Throughout, her rich voice remained carefully modulated, like a cello being played by a master of control. In her own house, though, Viola spoke without restraint. She purred, keened, groaned, shrieked, sang—all without a trace of self-consciousness. The first time Tom heard her laugh with complete freedom, something in his heart leaped, as it had when hearing the trilling of a bird in the forests of his youth. It was then that he understood something of what those children must have felt when she focused all her attention upon them in the clinic, chanting softly, entrancing them with the Creole language of her girlhood.
It was only the second time that he visited her house that he began to notice his physical surroundings. Viola made the most of her modest salary, saving and spending wisely, so her home was much better kept and decorated than the Negro houses Tom had visited on house calls. But compared to the furniture and fabrics that filled his house, her possessions were almost junk. Ironically, Peggy Cage had started life as poor as Viola Revels (and Tom hadn’t had it much better). But the institutionalized obstacles that had blocked Viola’s upward path were monumental compared to the difficulties that he and Peggy had perceived as hardships. And that, Tom realized, was an injustice of immeasurable magnitude. Because Viola was as smart as he was. That was a fact, yet she would never be given an opportunity to prove it. Thankfully, she seemed less troubled by this situation than he was. The practical impossibility of a colored girl born in 1940s Mississippi becoming a physician meant that Viola had discounted such a future from the beginning. But Tom knew the truth: in every way she was his equal, yet accidents of birth had separated her from him as surely as a French peasant from Louis XIV.
Viola displayed only two photos of her husband in her house. One showed James Turner in his army uniform, looking confident and proud. The other appeared to have been taken at a high school dance. James looked as uncomfortable in a rented tuxedo as Tom had felt in his own in 1950; Viola, on the other hand, looked so serene in her gown that she seemed destined for a red carpet somewhere. Gazing at that picture, Tom realized how little he knew about the dreams of the woman whose bed he now shared. Yet he didn’t ask. For to hear the disparity between the dreams of that gowned girl and the uniformed reality that Viola lived every day might have been unbearable.
But one night, without any prompting, Viola told him that she’d once yearned to be a rhythm-and-blues singer. Not a diva, she said, like Diana Ross, but one of the girls behind her, with matching satin gowns that swayed to perfectly choreographed dance moves. Tom couldn’t have been more surprised. Until then, he had only heard the French lullabies she sang to keep children calm while he sutured them. But when she ripped out a verse and chorus of “You Can’t Hurry Love” while dancing a trademark Motown routine, he believed. When Viola asked about his childhood dreams, Tom was embarrassed to confess that as a boy he had longed to be an archaeologist, poring over maps in the Valley of the Kings, searching for temples and tombs not yet plundered by grave robbers. Smiling, Viola had taken his hand, pressed it between her thighs, and said, “This temple hasn’t been plundered yet.”
“It’s certainly been discovered,” he replied.
“Has it?” Her eyebrows arched. “That’s what all the white explorers say. They stumble over some supposedly ‘lost’ city and then claim to have discovered it, when the natives have known about it for centuries.”
“How many explorers know about this treasure?” he asked, rubbing her steadily.
She lay back on her elbows. “Mmm … let me see. There’s you … and my husband … and a very pretty boy I went to school with … and—”
“That’s two too many,” Tom said.
Viola pretended to pout. “What do you expect, when you took so long to show up? What was I supposed to do all that time?”
“You’re only twenty-eight.”
“That’s ancient in my country.”