Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker

Author:Alice Walker
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781453224007
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media LLC
Published: 2011-10-03T10:00:00+00:00

PART NINE

EVELYN

I FELT NO COMPUNCTION about opening letters that came from Lisette to Adam, letters which sometimes contained copies of letters she’d received from her uncle Mzee touching on my case; or even, sometimes, copies of letters from Adam himself; she seemed often to need to jog his memory about something or other. There was an occasional copied page of her diary in which she appeared contented, and self-possessed: autonomous in a way I could not imagine for myself. She also had the nerve occasionally to address a letter to me. These always sounded as if she were feeling her way through fog. I trampled them. I routinely, and leisurely, read those from her which Adam left lying open at the back of his bottom desk drawer, the key to which I had long since duplicated. It was from one of her letters that I learned their son, Pierre, was coming to America.

Informing me he was going to a gathering of progressive religieux, Adam flew to Boston to meet him and was gone a week, helping Pierre settle into the life of Cambridge and Harvard. The boy was still far away, the breadth of the continent, so I did not worry. He remained in Cambridge for three years.

It was from her letters that I learned of Lisette’s illness. Diagnosed first as stress brought on by her political activity: she was active in the movement against French nuclear power plants, which, she wrote, dotted like dangerous pustules the once pristine countryside; later diagnosed as an ulcer. Then as a hernia. Then, finally, as stomach cancer. She petitioned Adam to permit Pierre to live with him and to attend Berkeley after her death. This Adam apparently agreed to do; I refused to let him bring up the subject with me.

It was during a period when I could not eat and was emaciated as a scarecrow; my clothes hung on me, and I wore nothing that wasn’t black. The week before, someone introduced to me by Adam said, with a snigger: “Ah, Adam and Evelyn. How cute!” And I slapped him.

I felt the violence rising in me with every encounter with the world outside my home. Even inside it I frequently and with little cause, no cause, boxed Benny’s ears. If I made him squeal and cringe and look at me with eyes gone grave with love and incomprehension, I fancied I felt relief.

I was watching the street when the taxi came. A boxy, bright yellow, child’s cartoon of a taxi. The kind of taxi the world expects all American taxis to be. I glimpsed Pierre’s curly head before he got out, as he leaned forward to pay the driver. He was skinny and short, as if still a child. I watched the two of them, chatting like old friends, go around to the boot to take out his bags.

Still chatting, they did not notice the dark spectre floating near them: first to the door, then to the porch, then to the steps,

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