“You’re telling me Charles knew you were going to bail on me for graduation.”
“He knew something was up, but not what I was going to do about it.”
“So that’s why he wasn’t that upset when you didn’t show.”
“Maybe,” Porter granted. “But listen, Callie, in the end I hurt everyone by disappearing.” Porter takes a sip of his old-fashioned. “At the time, it seemed like the easiest thing to do, and California was the easiest place to be.”
In my head, I quickly calculate what time it is in New York. I don’t care if she’s been asleep for hours, I’m waking up Quinn to tell her about this evening the minute I get home. Not only about seeing Porter, but about all that Charles had kept from the two of us. She is going to be as floored as I am. In memoriam, Quinn has built Charles up to be a man of the highest character and integrity with whom no man since his passing can compete. It’s the reason why she has had nothing more than a few select flings here and there since Charles’s death.
“You’ve heard that phrase, ‘Never discuss politics or religion in polite company,’ right?” Porter asks with a slightly raised eyebrow, cutting into my private Quinn thought.
“Not the quotes game again.” We used to play this in bed. One of us would quote a famous figure and challenge the other for its source. Porter won most times, but I was no slouch myself. “Mark Twain. An easy one,” I answer defiantly. “What does he have to do with anything?”
“I first learned it differently than Twain intended. My parents used to say, ‘We don’t talk like that in mixed company.’ It defined how I was allowed to speak around White folks.” Porter’s face looks distressed.
“What you’re saying is because I’m White, I couldn’t even call your mom to let her know you were half dying, Porter?”
“I wasn’t dying, Callie,” he says, calling me out on my hyperbole.
“You know what I mean. What harm could a two-minute phone call have caused? I wasn’t going to ask for your mom’s Social Security number, for God’s sake, or girl talk about our sex life,” I insist.
Porter takes a lung-expanding breath and another sip of his bourbon. These acts of recentering himself worry me for a moment that I might have done something to insult Delsie, though I know for a fact I had not.
“My parents were hardworking, God-fearing country folks, and to some people that means simple. To most it means dumb. And that is something they were not.” Porter’s stare is defiant, and so is my response.
“I would never ...” I begin hotly, only to be cut off.
“I’m not talking about you personally, Callie. I’m trying to explain the reason for asking Charles to call my mom instead of you. She would have been wary and flustered by some White woman on the other end of the call. She would have immediately trusted Charles’s voice and known he would be up-front about my condition. She would have known he was a Black man and believed what he had to say,” Porter asserts.
“Charles and his family were more New York citified than I was. He sounded more country club than I ever did,” I argue.
“It doesn’t matter, Callie. Back then, there were just some things, even if you were raised in the most diverse city in America, that you could not internalize, that you would never understand,” Porter emphasizes, and I regret the moment he detects my slight eye roll at his declaration. “You see? That right there is part of the fear I had introducing you to my family. Your sunny outlook on life, always seeing the best in people, was why I loved you so much. But you had no idea, and could have no idea, what you were in for being part of my world. And that’s not an accusation; it’s a fact.”
“Then why go away to Princeton at all? You could have gone somewhere close and more familiar. Why did your mom and dad even let you go if life was so foreign in New Jersey?” Porter’s explanation both makes sense and doesn’t at the same time.
“It was something they wrestled with, and they had the same warnings for Rose too. When I was a kid, my mom used to tease me by talking in the old country Gullah language with the saying: ‘Evry frog praise e ownt pond.’” Porter is clearly tickled by this adage, but there’s maybe something contrite there too.
“What’s it mean?”
“It means ‘Every person favors his own house.’ It was a warning my mother used when I was getting too big for my britches. My grannysaid it too. It was a reminder that no matter who I was or where I went, home was the place to find comfort, acceptance. Home was the essence of who you were. For my mom, home was safe, Callie. The greater world was not.”
Porter’s plate is clean, while mine is barely touched when the server returns to ask if she can remove our dishes and bring us the dessert menu.
Alone again, Porter continues, seemingly eager to move past this part of our “What have you been up to?” revelation. “When my mom came to the hospital, that was her first time out of South Carolina. Her first time on a plane. You were so sure that my parents not coming to see me at school, to meet you at Princeton, was a measure of their love and support for me. But really, my not forcing them to come visit was how I could best honor and love them, who they were, and where they came from. I wouldn’t put them through the work of navigating a place like Princeton.” Porter pauses, and he seems to struggle with a moment of introspection. “Looking back, I can see that I may have not given them enough credit. I didn’t give you enough either,” he admits. “But in the nineties, it was the reality of a first-generation Black college kid from rural South Carolina who chose to go north.”
“But your parents knew you went on spring break to the Bahamas with me and my parents. They clearly let you come on that trip with us rather than returning home like all your other vacations, so I don’t buy that they didn’t support you expanding your world, being with people different from you.”
“They didn’t know I went on that trip. I told them I had an opportunity to do some rare-books research with a professor over the break. After a bunch of back-and-forth over crop planting and how much work I would need to make up on the farm over the summer, they let me stay in Princeton—well, go to the Bahamas, in their own way.”
“I don’t get how you saw constantly lying to them about your life as protecting them. Don’t you think they would have wanted to know who you really were? Who you were becoming as a man?”
“I’m not so sure. By the time spring of our senior year rolled around and then graduation, I had painted myself into a tight corner with my family and with you. I woke up every morning for two months sick to my stomach about what to do.”
“What do you mean, sick to your stomach about what to do? You had a clear path carved out for yourself. You were on the Princeton PhD and professor track.”
“Callie, I knew if I followed through on your plan ...”
“Our plan,” I clarify.
