Sarah Phillips Read online

  When he had gone, Henri said, “Espèce de con!” and Roger, who worshipped Henri and was always jealous of Alain, allowed a faint smile to cross his face. After that Henri stubbed out his cigarette on a crust of bread and began needling me about my appearance; short skirts were out of fashion, he said, and mine made me look like a prostitute. “And wherever,” he added, “did you get the idea that you could wear a green shirt with blue denim?”

  “Americans don’t pay attention to little things like the color of their clothes,” remarked Roger nastily, brushing a thread from the sleeve of his immaculate tweed jacket. “Or the style of their hair. Sarah, ma vieille, you’re certainly pretty enough, but why don’t you put your hair up properly? Or cut it off? You have the look of a savage!”

  Henri giggled and grabbed my frizzy ponytail. “She is a savage!” he exclaimed, with the delighted air of a child making a discovery. “A savage from the shores of the Mississippi!” (He pronounced “Mississippi” with the accent on the last syllable.)

  In the sunlight through the window, Henri looked very fair-haired and well fed. His round face, like that of a troublemaking cherub, was flushed with malicious energy; I could tell he was enormously pleased to be annoying me, and that he wouldn’t let me off easily.

  “I’m going to go see Alain,” I said, and started to get up, but Henri held on to my hair and pulled me back.

  “Don’t go anywhere, darling,” he said. “I want to tell Roger all about your elegant pedigree.”

  “Tell him about yours!” I said rashly, forgetting that Henri was illegitimate.

  Roger gave a thin squawk of laughter, and Henri’s face darkened. He picked up a spoon and began stirring the heaped butts in the ashtray. “Did you ever wonder, Roger, old boy,” he said in a casual, intimate tone, “why our beautiful Sarah is such a mixture of races, why she has pale skin but hair that’s as kinky as that of a Haitian? Well, I’ll tell you. Her mother was an Irishwoman, and her father was a monkey.”

  Roger raised his hand to his mouth and made an indeterminate noise in his throat.

  A small, wry smile hovered on Henri’s lips. “Actually, it’s a longer story. It’s a very American tale. This Irlandaise was part redskin, and not only that but part Jew as well—some Americans are part Jew, aren’t they? And one day this Irlandaise was walking through the jungle near New Orleans, when she was raped by a jazz musician as big and black as King Kong, with sexual equipment to match. And from this agreeable encounter was born our little Sarah, notre Négresse pasteurisée.” He reached over and pinched my chin. “It’s a true story, isn’t it, Sarah?” He pinched harder. “Isn’t it?”

  “Let me alone!” I said, pulling my head away.

  “That’s enough, Henri,” said Roger.

  There was a short silence, in which Henri’s eyes were fixed cheerfully and expectantly on mine, as if he were waiting for a reward.

  I said, “I think that is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. I didn’t know you could be so stupid.”

  He waved his hand languidly at me, and I shoved back my chair and walked to the hall where the toilets were. All the staff had left the small dining room, which looked pretty and tranquil with the low fire and the tables freshly laid for dinner. The exception was the table where I had been sitting with Henri and Roger: the cloth, which hadn’t been cleaned after the coffee, was extravagantly littered with ashes, wine stains, ends of bread, and fruit parings, as if filthy children had been playing there.

  In the room labeled Dames, which was surprisingly modern—all red, with Florentine-gold faucets—I closed the toilet lid and sat down on it, bending double so that my cheek rested on my knees. It was a position to feel small in. I sat breathing soberly and carefully as I tried to control the blood pounding in my head.

  I wasn’t upset by the racism of what Henri had said. Nasty remarks about race and class were part of our special brand of humor, just as they had been in the wisecracking adolescent circles I had hung out with at school. On nights when we lay awake in bed, I often teased Henri into telling me nigger jokes, stories of the sexy, feckless little mulatto girl the French call Blanchette. His silly tall tale had done something far more drastic than wound me: it had somehow—perhaps in its unexpected extravagance—illuminated for me with blinding clarity the hopeless presumption of trying to discard my portion of America. The story of the mongrel Irishwoman and the gorilla jazzman had summed me up with weird accuracy, as an absurd political joke can sum up a regime, and I felt furious and betrayed by the intensity of nameless emotion it had called forth in me.

  “Oh, dear,” I said aloud in English, and, still bent double, I turned my head and gently bit myself on the knee. Then I stood up, brushed my hair, and left the bathroom, moving with caution.

  In the vestibule I met the hostess, a stout woman with beautiful, deeply waved chestnut hair. She told me my friends were waiting in the courtyard, and paused to regard me with a shrewd, probing gaze. “Excusez-moi, Mademoiselle, d’où êtes-vous?”

  “Je suis des États-Unis, mais jusqu’à présent, j’habite à Paris.”

  “Ah, bon, les États-Unis—j’aurais dit Martinique. Vous parlez très bien le Français.”

  “Merci. Je suis de Philadelphie, pas loin de New York.”

  “Ah oui, j’ai vu des photos. J’ai un neveu à Montclair, dans le New Jersey. Mais vous, vous avez de la chance, habiter à Paris.”

  “Oui, j’ai beaucoup de chance.”

  From an open doorway at the end of the corridor came the rich, dark smell of meat stocks and reductions; I could see into the kitchen, where a waiter in shirt-sleeves was spooning up soup at a table. Beside him, a peasant in a blue smock and with a red, furrowed face had just set down a big basket of muddy potatoes.

  When I walked out to the jeep in the courtyard, I found that the day had cleared into a bright, chilly autumn afternoon. The clouds had blown southward, skeins of brown leaves rose in the wind and dissolved over the low wooded hills and the highway, and the slanting sunlight on the small gray village, with its thirteenth-century church, its lone orange-roofed café and gas station, had the mysterious empty quality one sees in some of Edward Hopper’s paintings. It was the kind of light that made me think of loss.

  Henri surprised me by getting out of the jeep to apologize. Apologies were hard for him, and he went about them badly, using his blunt sexuality, his natural tendency to domineer, and his adolescent harshness to turn “I’m sorry” into another form of bullying. “Don’t sulk,” he said, drawing his forefinger gently along my hairline, and I gave a sudden giggle. I could tell that he had been afraid not that he’d hurt me but that I would hurt his pride by withdrawing before he had finished with me.

  By the time we’d reached Chantilly, it had gotten dark, and we were all feeling better. We had emptied a small flask of Scotch, we’d planned a sumptuous new outfit for me—cavalier boots, lavender stockings by Dim, and a ruffled black velvet dress—and Alain taught me a song that went:

  Faire pipi

  sur le gazon

  pour embêter

  les papillons …

  After that, as the lights of the Paris suburbs flashed by, we sang more John Denver, yipping like coyotes at the end of every line. In between songs, Alain sucked on a tube of sweetened condensed milk, with a look of perfect infant bliss in his crooked blue eyes. When Henri told him to stop, that it was disgusting, Roger said, “It’s no worse than your ‘pasteurized Negress’!” and I laughed until I choked; all of us did.

  Back in Paris, we went to Le Drugstore Saint-Germain to have some of the fabulous hamburgers you eat with forks among all the chrome and the long-legged, shiny girls. Poor Roger tried to pick up two Dutch models in felt cloches (the film Gatsby had just opened on the Champs-Elysées), but the models raised their plucked eyebrows and made haughty retorts in Dutch, so that Roger was driven to flirt with a group of fourteen-year-olds two tables away, red-cheeked infant coquettes who pursed their lips and widened their kohl-rimmed eyes and th
en dissolved into fits of panicky laughter. In the record department of Le Drugstore, we ran into Alain’s friend Anny. Anny was a tall, sexy blonde, a law student renowned for unbuttoning her blouse at the slightest opportunity at any social gathering to display her pretty breasts. She couldn’t open her shirt in the record department, but she did take off her high-heeled black shoe to display a little corn she had developed on a red-nailed middle toe, at which Henri, Alain, and Roger stared with undisguised lust.

  At eleven we went off to see Il Était une Fois Dans l’Ouest, and watching the shootouts in the gold and ocher mock-western landscape gave me a melancholy, confused feeling: it seemed sad that I had spent years dreaming of Paris when all Paris dreamed of cowboys. When we came out of the movie, the inevitable rain had started up, and red and green reflections from neon signs along the street lay wavering in puddles. Alain wanted to stop in at a disco, but Henri was sleepy, so we drove back to Neuilly, parked the jeep, and then dashed through the rain to the big icy apartment.

  It was much later—after Alain and Roger had rolled themselves up in blankets to sleep on the couches, and Henri and I had gone off to bed to make love with the brisk inventiveness of two people who have never felt much kindness toward each other—that I awoke with a start from a horrid dream in which I was conducting a monotonous struggle with an old woman with a dreadful spidery strength in her arms; her skin was dark and leathery, and she smelled like one of the old Philadelphia churchwomen who used to babysit with me. I pushed back the duvet and walked naked across the cold marble floor to the window. Through the crack between the shutters I could see a streetlight, and I could hear the noise of the rain, a rustling that seemed intimate and restless, like the sound of a sleeper turning over again and again under bedcovers.

  Before that afternoon, how wonderfully simple it had seemed to be ruthless, to cut off ties with the griefs, embarrassments, and constraints of a country, a family; what an awful joke it was to find, as I had found, that nothing could be dissolved or thrown away. I had hoped to join the ranks of dreaming expatriates for whom Paris can become a self-sufficient universe, but my life there had been no more than a slight hysteria, filled with the experimental naughtiness of children reacting against their training. It was clear, much as I did not want to know it, that my days in France had a number, that for me the bright, frank, endlessly beckoning horizon of the runaway had been, at some point, transformed into a complicated return.

  I yawned and ran my hands up and down my body, pimpled with cold, feeling my usual absent-minded satisfaction in the length and suppleness of my limbs. Kate the photographer might make an interesting vegetable out of me, if I could only get to see her. Maybe tomorrow, I thought, I would go pound on her door; maybe her guardians would let me in. In a few minutes I darted back to bed and settled carefully onto the big flat pillow where Henri had his face turned to the wall. Before I slept, I said to myself, “I can stay here longer, but I have to leave by spring.” And that, in fact, is the way things turned out.

  New African

  On a hot Sunday morning in the summer of 1963, I was sitting restlessly with my mother, my brother Matthew, and my aunts Lily, Emma, and May in a central pew of the New African Baptist Church. It was mid-August, and the hum of the big electric fans at the back of the church was almost enough to muffle my father’s voice from the pulpit; behind me I could hear Mrs. Gordon, a stout, feeble old woman who always complained of dizziness, remark sharply to her daughter that at the rate the air-conditioning fund was growing, it might as well be for the next century. Facing the congregation, my father—who was Reverend Phillips to the rest of the world—seemed hot himself; he mopped his brow with a handkerchief and drank several glasses of ice water from the heavy pitcher on the table by the pulpit. I looked at him critically. He’s still reading the text, I thought. Then he’ll do the sermon, then the baptism, and it will be an hour, maybe two.

  I rubbed my chin and then idly began to snap the elastic band that held my red straw hat in place. What I would really like to do, I decided, would be to go home, put on my shorts, and climb up into the tree house I had set up the day before with Matthew. We’d nailed an old bushel basket up in the branches of the big maple that stretched above the sidewalk in front of the house; it made a sort of crow’s nest where you could sit comfortably, except for a few splinters, and read, or peer through the dusty leaves at the cars that passed down the quiet suburban road. There was shade and wind and a feeling of high adventure up in the treetop, where the air seemed to vibrate with the dry rhythms of the cicadas; it was as different as possible from church, where the packed congregation sat in a near-visible miasma of emotion and cologne, and trolleys passing in the city street outside set the stained-glass windows rattling.

  I slouched between Mama and Aunt Lily and felt myself going limp with lassitude and boredom, as if the heat had melted my bones; the only thing about me with any character seemed to be my firmly starched eyelet dress. Below the scalloped hem, my legs were skinny and wiry, the legs of a ten-year-old amazon, scarred from violent adventures with bicycles and skates. A fingernail tapped my wrist; it was Aunt Emma, reaching across Aunt Lily to press a piece of butterscotch into my hand. When I slipped the candy into my mouth, it tasted faintly of Arpége; my mother and her three sisters were monumental women, ample of bust and slim of ankle, with a weakness for elegant footwear and French perfume. As they leaned back and forth to exchange discreet tidbits of gossip, they fanned themselves and me with fans from the Byron J. Wiggins Funeral Parlor. The fans, which were fluttering throughout the church, bore a depiction of the Good Shepherd: a hollow-eyed blond Christ holding three fat pink-cheeked children. This Christ resembled the Christ who stood among apostles on the stained-glass windows of the church. Deacon Wiggins, a thoughtful man, had also provided New African with a few dozen fans bearing the picture of a black child praying, but I rarely saw those in use.

  There was little that was new or very African about the New African Baptist Church. The original congregation had been formed in 1813 by three young men from Philadelphia’s large community of free blacks, and before many generations had passed, it had become spiritual home to a collection of prosperous, conservative, generally light-skinned parishioners. The church was a gray Gothic structure, set on the corner of a run-down street in South Philadelphia a dozen blocks below Rittenhouse Square and a few blocks west of the spare, clannish Italian neighborhoods that produced Frankie Avalon and Frank Rizzo. At the turn of the century, the neighborhood had been a tidy collection of brick houses with scrubbed marble steps—the homes of a group of solid citizens whom Booker T. Washington, in a centennial address to the church, described as “the ablest Negro businessmen of our generation.” Here my father had grown up aspiring to preach to the congregation of New African—an ambition encouraged by my grandmother Phillips, a formidable churchwoman. Here, too, my mother and her sisters had walked with linked arms to Sunday services, exchanging affected little catchphrases of French and Latin they had learned at Girls’ High.

  In the 1950s many of the parishioners, seized by the national urge toward the suburbs, moved to newly integrated towns outside the city, leaving the streets around New African to fill with bottles and papers and loungers. The big church stood suddenly isolated. It had not been abandoned—on Sundays the front steps overflowed with members who had driven in—but there was a tentative feeling in the atmosphere of those Sunday mornings, as if through the muddle of social change, the future of New African had become unclear. Matthew and I, suburban children, felt a mixture of pride and animosity toward the church. On the one hand, it was a marvelous private domain, a richly decorated and infinitely suggestive playground where we were petted by a congregation that adored our father; on the other hand, it seemed a bit like a dreadful old relative in the city, one who forced us into tedious visits and who linked us to a past that came to seem embarrassingly primitive as we grew older.

  I slid down in my seat, let my head roll back, and looked u
p at the blue arches of the church ceiling. Lower than these, in back of the altar, was an enormous gilded cross. Still lower, in a semicircle near the pulpit, sat the choir, flanked by two tall golden files of organ pipes, and below the choir was a somber crescent of dark-suited deacons. In front, at the center of everything, his bald head gleaming under the lights, was Daddy. On summer Sundays he wore white robes, and when he raised his arms, the heavy material fell in curving folds like the ridged petals of an Easter lily. Usually when I came through the crowd to kiss him after the service, his cheek against my lips felt wet and gravelly with sweat and a new growth of beard sprouted since morning. Today, however, was a baptismal Sunday, and I wouldn’t have a chance to kiss him until he was freshly shaven and cool from the shower he took after the ceremony. The baptismal pool was in an alcove to the left of the altar; it had mirrored walls and red velvet curtains, and above it, swaying on a string, hung a stuffed white dove.

  Daddy paused in the invocation and asked the congregation to pray. The choir began to sing softly:

  Blessed assurance,

  Jesus is mine!

  Oh what a foretaste

  Of glory divine!

  In the middle of the hymn, I edged my head around my mother’s cool, muscular arm (she swam every day of the summer) and peered at Matthew. He was sitting bolt upright holding a hymnal and a pencil, his long legs inside his navy-blue summer suit planted neatly in front of him, his freckled thirteen-year-old face that was so like my father’s wearing not the demonic grin it bore when we played alone but a maddeningly composed, attentive expression. “Two hours!” I mouthed at him, and pulled back at a warning pressure from my mother. Then I joined in the singing, feeling disappointed: Matthew had returned me a glance of scorn. Just lately he had started acting very superior and tolerant about tedious Sunday mornings. A month before, he’d been baptized, marching up to the pool in a line of white-robed children as the congregation murmured happily about Reverend Phillips’s son. Afterward Mrs. Pinkston, a tiny, yellow-skinned old woman with a blind left eye, had come up to me and given me a painful hug, whispering that she was praying night and day for the pastor’s daughter to hear the call as well.