“I know you didn’t, baby. I know it.”
Ten
For the next three weeks Dr. Fey and his assistants administered Soupspoon’s “keemo.” The poisons made his ears ring day and night, took his appetite, and made the little hair he had left fall out.
He lost twelve pounds.
The first few days he staggered around the apartment — vomiting and shivering. He couldn’t get warm no matter how much he wore. Even in front of the stove he felt the chill of death. His blood went bad and the doctor gave him transfusions one after the other. Soupspoon had to lie on a hard table six hours at a time with the blood leaking into his vein.
After a week they decided to keep him in the hospital because the doctor was afraid that the trip back and forth would kill him.
The head nurse had asked Kiki to stay away after the third day. She argued with the nurses and set up a racket whenever Soupspoon was the slightest bit uncomfortable — and he was under the pain of death most of the time. Kiki yelled and commanded and tried to stop them when she thought they might hurt him needlessly
But it was when she knocked down the tray of syringes in a rage that Nurse Jones asked her to leave.
“You’re not helping Atwater, Tanya,” she said as kindly as she could.
After that Kiki had asked Randy to see after Soupspoon — but not as a request. The only way Randy could have any of her attention was to share it with Soupspoon in the cancer ward.
Randy had seen the way she pulled the blankets over Soupspoon while he slept. She’d refuse even to whisper if he was napping.
So when Kiki asked Randy to take some time to go into hospital, he did it. He knew that her temper would have ended their friendship if he had refused.
He was only twenty-five, younger than Kiki by over ten years. But in spite of their difference in age he was crazy about her. He loved her red hair and her pale sinewy arms. The slight southern twang in her voice always made him smile. He liked the way she couldn’t be pushed around and how she was never shy about saying what she thought. If somebody did something that she didn’t like, she told them — no matter who it was. It didn’t matter if they were white or black. Kiki spoke her mind.
It was true that she used bad language and derogatory names, especially when she was under the influence of alcohol or marijuana. Randy didn’t condone the use of artificial stimulants or bad language. His mother had brought him up to be a proper gentleman in Flushing, Queens.
Randy only had a mother. His father hadn’t even been there to see Randy’s birth. For a long time Randy believed that his father had died. That was the story his mother had told him. But when he was fourteen he found a stack of letters from J. Chesterton addressed to his mother.
There was no reason to believe that his mother had lied. It could have been some other J. Chesterton. Maybe a cousin. It couldn’t have been old letters from his father; he knew that because the postmark was only six years old — way after his death.
Randy’s father died, the story went, moving a shipload of Frigidaires from Bethesda, Maryland, to Morocco. Jamal, his father, was a blue-eyed Arabian of ancient stock; a rare Caucasian Arab who had merchant blood running in his veins. Esther, Randy’s mother, was from South American lineage — descended from the conquistadors. Her blood, she said, was ninety-nine percent Spanish, because the upper classes didn’t mix much with the natives. “Most of your mixing,” she told the boy, “was done among Indians and common soldiers.” When Randy asked her why her skin was so tanned all the time she said that as far as she knew the only documented case of mixing in her family tree was with a Mayan princess over three centuries earlier.
“But you know that royal blood is powerful,” she told the impressionable boy. “It shines through the centuries.”
But one day a Negro couple with two small children came to the front door claiming to be cousins of Jamal Chesterton, whose father was an English explorer. Mrs. Chesterton told them, with great patience and reserve, that their cousin and her husband must have had the same name but were in reality two different people.
“But we saw Jamal just last week,” the big brown woman said. “He gave us this address. He wanted to know how his son was doing.”
“That proves it,” Mrs. Chesterton said. “My husband died fourteen years ago and never knew that he had a son. He died in a shipwreck off the coast of Africa.”
“Jamal’s not dead,” the dapper little man in a doe-gray suit said. “He’s in Atlanta.”
Atlanta was the city in the postmark on the letters that Randy had found.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Mrs. Chesterton said. She held the door wide open as if to prove that there was no secret in her house. “This cousin of yours has made some kind of mistake. Tell him that I hope he finds his wife and son, though.”
Mrs. Chesterton gave the couple a big smile and waited for them to leave. Randy could see that they wanted to say more, but instead they gathered their small children, a boy and a girl, and left.
After they were gone, Randy’s mother sat down at the kitchen table in a foul mood. She refused to answer any questions about the couple that had come or make guesses as to how they made the mistake.
The next day Randy looked for the letters but they were gone from the desk.
Three weeks later a moving van came and took them to a new address in Long Island City.
Randy knew that the move had something to do with those letters and the visit from the Negro couple. His mother had always discouraged his relationships with Negro children in school and would get coldly angry when anyone mistook him for anything other than what he was — an exotic Caucasian.
Randy never disliked coloreds when he was a child. He liked it that his hair was so curly, and as soon as he was old enough to defy Esther, he grew dreadlocks. He didn’t mind black people. He had a lot of black friends. He got along so well with black people that many people often mistook him, probably because of his hair and royal Mayan blood, for a Negro himself.
But that’s where Randy drew the line.
You had to be true to your race.
He was an exotic; a white man without clear European lineage. But white still and all. Black people, he felt, could never truly understand his world. Because of slavery and racism the world of blacks could never encompass the path that he intended to travel.
Upon graduation from Pace, Randy would enter an Ivy League law school. From law school he would go to Wall Street, using the connections he’d made. Randy knew that from a position of power he’d still have gentle feelings for the deserving oppressed.
He saw these feelings reflected in the way Kiki saw the world. He imagined them not only married but as a kind of a team. Two conservative white people who made the black people they assisted toe the line in order to receive help from the various charities they would endow. Of course, he’d have to get Kiki to stop using the word “nigger.” But he overlooked those flaws for the present because he loved her. He wanted her to be his wife. And if she clung to her resolve never to bear children, they would adopt; maybe even some African child — that would prove that their hearts were in the right place.
But before any of that could happen he had to take care of Soupspoon. He had to because Kiki had such a sensitive heart that their love might not survive his refusal.
At first he didn’t care about Soupspoon. He was just an old man who smelled like rotted corncobs. Somehow he’d figured out how to take advantage of Kiki’s generosity — that’s what Randy thought.
But even though he didn’t care about being there, Randy saw how terrible the treatments were. Soupspoon suffered nausea and great pain without a complaint. Sometimes when the nurse would just lightly touch Soupspoon’s arm Randy could see a shiver run through the length of his body.