The Vanishing Half(43)
But years later, the neighbors would only remember one person speaking up in the meeting, a single voice that had, somehow, risen above the noise. She hadn’t yelled—maybe that’s why they’d listened. Or perhaps because she was ordinarily so soft-spoken, everyone knew that if she was standing to her feet in the middle of a raucous meeting, she must have had something urgent to say. Or maybe it was because her family currently lived on Sycamore Way, in a cul-de-sac across from the Lawsons, so the new neighbors would affect her most directly. Whatever the reason, the room quieted when Stella Sanders climbed to her feet.
“You must stop them, Percy,” she said. “If you don’t, there’ll be more and then what? Enough is enough!”
She was trembling, her light brown eyes flashing, and the neighbors, moved by her spontaneous passion, applauded. She never spoke up in their meetings and hadn’t even known that she would until she’d already clambered to her feet. For a second, she’d almost said nothing—she hated feeling everyone watch her, had wanted to run shrinking at her own wedding. But her shy, faltering voice only gripped the room more. After the meeting, she couldn’t even make it out the door without neighbors wanting to shake her hand. Weeks later, yellow flyers flapping on trees and light posts read in big block letters: PROTECT OUR NEIGHBORHOOD. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. When she found one stuck in the windshield of her car, she was startled to see her own words reflected back to her, as foreign as if they’d come from a stranger.
* * *
—
FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH, Blake Sanders had been as surprised as anyone that his wife had spoken in that meeting. She wasn’t one for demonstrating. He’d never seen her riled up enough about any issue to do more than sign a petition, and even then it was usually because she was too polite to shove a clipboard back into some college kid’s face like he would’ve done. Sure, he wanted to keep the planet clean. He thought the war was rotten. But that didn’t mean that screaming in the faces of decent, hardworking people was the right way to go about any of it. But Stella indulged these idealists, listened to their speeches, signed their petitions, all because she was too sweet to tell them to bug off. Yet here she was now, somehow, as fervent as any of those young protesters in the middle of the association meeting.
He could have laughed. His shy Stella making a scene! Although maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised. A woman protecting her home came from a place more primal than politics. Besides, in all the time he’d known her, she’d never spoken kindly of a Negro. It embarrassed him a little, to tell the truth. He respected the natural order of things but you didn’t have to be cruel about it. As a boy, he’d had a colored nanny named Wilma who was practically family. He still sent her a Christmas card each year. But Stella wouldn’t even hire colored help for the house—she claimed Mexicans worked harder. He never understood why she averted her gaze when an old Negro woman shuffled past on the sidewalk, why she was always so curt with the elevator operators. She was jumpy around Negroes, like a child who’d been bit by a dog.
That night, as they slipped out of the clubhouse, he smiled, offering his arm to her cheekily. It was a brisk April night. They passed slowly under the jacaranda trees beginning to bloom lavender over their heads.
“I didn’t know I’d married such a rabble-rouser,” he said.
He was a banker’s son who’d left Boston to attend college, he’d told her when they first met, although he didn’t mention then that the bank at which his father was an executive was Chase National, and the college he’d left to attend, Yale. She would later realize that these were signs that he truly came from wealth: how rarely he wore expensive clothes even though he could afford to, how little he talked about his father or his inheritance. He’d studied finance and marketing, and instead of heading to Madison Avenue, he’d followed his fiancée back to her hometown of New Orleans. The relationship fizzled, but by then he’d fallen in love with the city. That’s how he’d ended up working in the marketing department at Maison Blanche, and that was why he was hiring her, Stella Vignes, as his new secretary.
Even after eight years of marriage, Stella still felt a little squeamish when people asked how they’d met. A boss, his secretary, a tale as old as time. It made you picture a greasy-haired potbelly in suspenders chasing a young girl around his desk.
“I wasn’t some old lech,” Blake had said once, laughing, at a dinner party, and it was true. He was twenty-eight then, hard-jawed with ruffled blond hair and blueish-gray eyes like Paul Newman. And maybe that was what made his attention different. Back then, she’d withered when a white man noticed her. Under Blake’s gaze, she’d blossomed.
“Did I make a fool out of myself?” she asked later. She was sitting in front of her vanity, brushing out her hair. Blake eased behind her, unbuttoning his white shirt.
“Of course not,” he said. “But it’ll never happen, Stel. I don’t know why everyone’s getting all worked up.”
“But you saw Percy up there. He looked plumb scared.”
Blake laughed. “I love when you say things like that.”
“Like what?”
“Your country talk.”
“Oh, don’t make fun. Not right now.”
“I’m not! I think it’s cute.”