“I don’t see how you stand it,” Joanna puzzled. “What put it in your head to work with white people, anyhow?”
“Oh, to get away from everybody and everything I’d ever known.” They were at the table in the dining-room now and Vera was making crisscross marks with her fork on the white cloth, frowning absorbedly.
“You know, Joanna, I wasn’t like you—not one of us girls was. I was more like Sylvia, I wanted a good time, but most of all I wanted, I expected to marry. You remember Harley Alexander?”
Joanna did remember him, indeed, a tall personable youth about her own color, a companion of Harry Portor, Brian Spencer, and to a less degree of her own brother Alec. But what she especially remembered was that he had been the constant shadow of Vera Manning.
“Of course I remember him, Vera. He’s a dentist now, isn’t he? Didn’t he graduate the same year as Harry Portor?”
“Yes, that’s the fellow. Joanna, we really loved each other, and we planned even before he went to college to get married as soon as he came out. But as soon as my mother—you know how color-struck she is—realized we were in earnest, up she went in the air. None of her children should marry a dark man. It only meant unhappiness. If Harley and I should have children they’d be brown and would have to be humiliated like all other colored children.”
She fell to drawing more designs.
“We had a terrible time. I was completely alone in my fight. Father always follows mother’s lead. Brother Tom refused to commit himself. Alice is just like mother—she really liked, I’m sure of it, John Hamilton, but because he was dark, she let him go for Howard Morris, whom I can’t stand. For a long time I managed to keep it from Harley but the Christmas of his last year in college, mother told him she didn’t favor his attentions to me, and told him why.”
“Goodness,” Joanna breathed, “that must have been awful.”
“Awful! It was unspeakable. And nothing I could say to Harley could destroy the effect of what she said. She must have put it up to him as to whether he thought he could compensate a wife for the estrangement of her family. You know how Harley was. We had always been a remarkably united family up to that time. He said: ‘If your mother objected to my being poor I could tell her that I could change that, but when it comes to my color, I can’t do anything with that and, by God, I wouldn’t if I could.’
“So that,” Vera ended wryly, “was the end of my young romance.”
Bit by bit she made Joanna see the picture of her life since her break with her lover. Before then she had worked in her father’s office, but now she was secretary to one of the heads of a big advertising agency. As she was an unusually swift stenographer and had a level head, she was getting along famously.
“Of course they think I’m white. There are a lot of young men in the office and I flirt with them outrageously. At first I did it only to annoy mother, she hated it so. You know, the funny thing is she doesn’t like white people any better than I do—she just didn’t want me to marry a dark man because, she says, in this country a white skin is such an asset.”
“Do you enjoy yourself going about?”
“Yes and no. When I began I did immensely. You can’t imagine—I couldn’t—the almost unlimited opportunities that those people have for work, for pleasure, for anything. As a white girl I’ve seen sights and places, yes, and eaten food that never even knew about when I used to go out with Harley. And then, too, Jan, you can’t imagine the blessedness of no longer being uncertain whether you can enter such and such a hotel, or of getting a decent berth if you’re going traveling or of little things like that, the sudden removal of thousands of pinpricks, not only that, of inconveniences.”
“You must be very happy,” Joanna said wistfully.
“No, I’m not. They aren’t, either. That’s the funny part. Oh, of course I suppose nobody is actually happy, but I do think that colored people, when they’re let alone long enough to have a good time, know how to enjoy themselves better than any other people in the world. It’s a gift.”
“I should think you’d drop it all, Vera.”
“I would if it weren’t for the sense of freedom. It’s wonderful to be able to do as you like. Sometimes I think I will drop it, then I think: ‘Oh, pshaw, what difference does it make?’ Without Harley I’m bound to be unhappy, anyway, even if I do go back to my own. Since I can’t have happiness I might just as well take up my abode where I can have the most fun and comfort even though it’s making me—well, no saint, I can tell you.” She laughed recklessly. “I wish I were like you, Joanna.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you know—here ever since you were little you’ve had Peter Bye right at your beck and call—you must have loved him, Jan, he was so everlastingly good-looking, and charming, too, we all thought. I remember he took me to a movie one Christmas. Then you fussed with him or something—some of your highbrow stuff I suppose—and you send him off without winking an eyelash.
