“I loved him,” Lee Anne said. “That’s the main thing, I guess. It wasn’t some kind of fling or something. I was living at home with my parents up in Oakland while I went to nursing school. My older brother Eldon was in the marines. He always had an orderly plan for his life. Even when he was young, he knew he was going to graduate from high school, go into the marines, then go to college. To me it always seemed like an invitation to fate, a sure way to have a disaster just to teach you that things aren’t that simple. When he went in the marines, I was terrified because that seemed to me to be the time for it, but it didn’t happen. Eldon served his enlistment, had a good tour, and made some good friends. One time he came home from a big navy base in the Philippines, and he brought a close friend home with him on leave.”
“Phil?”
“Phil. It was an odd situation. I think about it a lot, even now. It was as though my brother Eldon brought something into the house that I would never have run into otherwise-some substance, like a drug-and it was something that I had no immunity against.”
“You were attracted to Phil right away?”
“It caught me by surprise. I had a guy I was interested in at the time, and I was busy with nursing school, working long hours and studying. But I came home one evening, and there he was.” Her eyes seemed to lose focus for a moment, as though she were seeing it again, and then they sharpened and returned to Emily. “I don’t need to tell you. He had that sense of humor that made you start laughing when you knew you shouldn’t, and then you would remember afterward and start laughing again, and people would look at you and wonder.”
“I know,” Emily said. “You would want to tell him, and wanting to tell him something was the same as missing him, and then you could hardly wait to see him.”
“I wasn’t on my guard because he started out being just some marine, one of Eldon’s friends, not somebody who was there to see me at all, just a guy sleeping over on his way to spend the rest of his leave at his own home. But I started to like him. When they got their orders, he and Eldon were both transferred to Camp Pendleton next, and I found that as soon as I had a break in nursing school, I had an irresistible urge to fly down to San Diego and visit Eldon. I spent most of my time with Phil. One night after a couple of evenings out, we found ourselves in my hotel room in Oceanside, and the obvious happened.”
“And you got pregnant?”
“Oh, no. Didn’t I tell you that it wasn’t that simple? This part of it was simple-that night. Neither of us planned it. I needed a ride, and he walked me to my hotel room. After that night, everything sped up and changed. I was in love with Phil.”
“Was he in love with you?”
“I think he was, but you have to see that love was what I wanted it to be at the time, and later on, what it had to be to make my life a tragedy and not just a sad little story about a stupid girl who didn’t know how to behave and got what you’d expect. He said he loved me, and he acted as though he did. But Phil was a man who kept a lot to himself.”
Emily said, “What happened?”
“I kept going down to visit Eldon in Oceanside. Only I would come a couple of days early, then pretend to leave for home, and spend a few days in Escondido or Capistrano with Phil before I actually left for Oakland. My mother and Eldon would talk on the phone now and then, and she would say something like, `Did you and Lee Anne have a nice visit?’ It was never `Did Lee Anne come to visit you?’ because that would have meant she was checking up on me. I think that even if Eldon had suspected something, he would not have said anything to her. We were so close, and he knew what it was like to be living at home and trying never to disappoint our parents. Sometimes Phil would get time off and show up at my school in San Francisco. I would come out of class or out of the hospital, and he would be there waiting for me. It went on for a long timeabout a year and a half-and then I missed a period. I didn’t need a test, but I went out and got one.”
“Did you tell Phil right away?”
“Not exactly. I had to have some time to think. Then I waited until the next week, when I was going to see him in person. I drove down to Oceanside.”
“What did he say?”
“It was as though we both had been in a dream-a soft, beautiful one-and we woke up on the same day. I had been in college in San Francisco, maybe the most tolerant city in the country, and I was in medicine, where there are lots of people of every shade from every country-patients, nurses, doctors, technicians. When I went down to Oceanside, everybody we knew or saw was a marine or the family of a marine. One of the things about the military is that racism doesn’t play. It’s one of the reasons why there are so many black people. If you’re a gunnery sergeant you’re treated like every other gunnery sergeant-better than a corporal, but not as good as a lieutenant. Phil and I had both been in places where people were people, and nobody had much time or reason to think about color. But as I said, when I got pregnant, we woke up and everything looked different.”
“How?”
“Race. I told my mother, and it nearly killed her. She begged me to break up with him. The thought of having a white man in the family and a half-white baby just made her sick. She cried so hard, rocking back and forth, with her arms wrapped around herself. From the morning when I told her until nearly five in the afternoon, she didn’t stop. Then, at quarter to five, she stopped, took a bath, and pulled herself together so my father wouldn’t know anything was wrong.”
“Did it work?”
“It did. She was afraid my father would hurt somebody-maybe me, maybe Phil, maybe himself-and that would be the end of our family. That meant everything to her. When he went off to work again, she started in on me again. She wanted me to get an abortion, which I could have done practically that day at the hospital. Nobody would have asked any questions or anything.”
“Did you consider it?”
“Not at first. I was a nurse, so I wasn’t intimidated or anything. I just resented the idea that my own mother would think I wasn’t strong enough to handle my own problems.”
“Which ones?”
“Any of them. Being the wife of an active-duty marine stationed five hundred miles from my home. Taking care of my baby while I went through the hardest parts of the nursing program. Working to pay back my loans while my husband got shipped away somewhere. I was tough, and I told her so. I’d get through the hard time, and things would get better. But it was the story that bothered her.”
“The story?”
“The story everybody has heard a million times. The smart, pretty black girl has a big future ahead. She gets through nursing school, and maybe after she works a few years she’ll try to get through medical school, too. But something happens. She ends up with a baby-in this case, a white man’s baby-and there’s no way for her to have her future.”
“Did you want to go to medical school?”
“I had thought about it. The main thing was that she and I saw what I was doing differently. I thought I was considering getting married and having a family. She thought I was setting myself up to be just another black girl with no money raising a child alone. I said it wasn’t that way. She said I was living in a dreamworld. It wasn’t that easy to be the black wife of a white man. I said I was strong enough. She said, But is he?”’ Lee Anne stopped and held Emily with her eyes, and all at once, Emily knew.
“That’s right. While my mother was talking to me, his family and friends were talking to him. He was trying to imagine the future, just as I was. And when he was through thinking, he had a different answer than I had. I remember so clearly the day when he told me. He had the foresight to have the conversation with me in Oakland, so I would be two miles from my family, at my apartment, near school. All I had to do was shut the door when he left, lie down on my own bed, and cry. If I had been nine or ten hours from home, among strangers in a cheap hotel in Oceanside, I don’t know what I would have done. By then my brother Eldon had been promoted and shipped to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina for some kind of special training, so I couldn’t have gone to him.”