Daughter of Ashes

TWENTY-ONE

‘Did that woman, could that woman, somehow know that here before her very eyes… sat a Negro? Absurd! Impossible! White people were so stupid about such things for all that they usually asserted that they were able to tell and by the most ridiculous means: fingernails, palms of hands, shapes of ears, teeth, and other equally silly rot. They always took her for an Italian, a Spaniard, a Mexican, or a gipsy. Never, when she was alone, had they even remotely seemed to suspect that she was a Negro.’

Nella Larson, Passing, Knopf, 1929, pp. 18-19

With three unfamiliar children in the house, it had been a long, restless night. After Boyd belted his kids into the Honda and drove them off to McDonalds, I went back to bed, fully dressed, sleeping through the alarm that would have gotten me up in time to go to church.

Shortly after noon, I crawled out from under the covers, dazed and blinking into the sunlight streaming in through the bedroom window. I wolfed down a peanut butter sandwich and a bowl of tomato soup, then checked in with Paul.

‘Boyd came for the children,’ I told him. ‘And Caitlyn’s father has sent over a hot shot lawyer, so things are under control for the moment.’

After commiserating with me for a minute or two, Paul told me he was going sailing with his sister, Connie and her husband, Dennis.

‘I hate you,’ I said. ‘I hate you all. Tell them I said so.’

Paul laughed. ‘What are you planning to do today?’

Before Caitlyn’s arrest had thrown everything out of kilter, item number one on my To Do list was interviewing Ronald and Bernadette Nightingale in Sturgis, Maryland. There was nothing more I could do to help Caitlyn, so visiting the Nightingales had just shot back to the top of the list. ‘I’m planning to drop in on a couple who almost certainly knew Nancy Hazlett as a teen,’ I told him. ‘They were in their twenties back then, so that means they’re pushing ninety now. If I’m lucky they’ll still be at that address and they’ll still have, you know, all their marbles.’

In recent years, I’d volunteered in the memory unit at Calvert Colony, a high-end continuing care retirement community near my home in Annapolis. I knew, first hand, what havoc old age could wreak on the mind. ‘Time, as they say, may be of the essence.’

‘Good luck, then. Be careful, my dear.’

‘Always,’ I said. I blew a kiss into the telephone and hung up.

The drive from my home to Sturgis took less than twenty minutes. Following the advice of my GPS – in the voice of comedian John Cleese – I entered the town and turned left onto a quiet, tree-lined and curb-less street.

Your destination is ahead, on the right.

I slowed and studied the house numbers. Number 308 Oysterbay Road was a neat, one-story rancher immediately next door to a modest, white clapboard church. An oversized white sign installed on the lawn in front of the church told me in big red letters that I’d reached Bayside Methodist Church. Smaller black letters below invited me to worship there on Sunday at eleven a.m. or, if I preferred, to attend a praise service at seven p.m. on Wednesday night. ‘Taste and see that the Lord is good,’ read the bottom of the sign and, below that: Pastor John Neal.

Although it was Sunday, church was long over, the parking lot empty. I pulled in, parked, walked the short distance back to number 308 and climbed the front steps. There was no sign of a doorbell, so I opened the screen door and knocked briskly on the solid wood door behind it.

My knock was answered by an apple dumpling of a woman wearing a blue-checked apron dusted with flour. ‘Sorry,’ she said, wiping her hands clean of flour on the apron. ‘You caught me making cookies for the bake sale on Saturday.’

I introduced myself. ‘And you must be Bernadette Nightingale.’

‘I am indeed. Come in, come in,’ she said, stepping aside to let me pass. ‘I need a break anyway. Would you care for some iced tea?’

‘I don’t want to put you to any trouble.’

Bernadette’s gray eyes peered at me from behind a pair of round tortoiseshell eyeglasses. That, plus the no-nonsense, short-cropped hair gave her an old-fashioned scholarly look. ‘No trouble at all, Hannah,’ she said. ‘I’ve just brewed a pitcher. It’ll only take a minute to get it together.’

‘I’d love some tea, then,’ I told her. ‘It’s been a hot day.’

‘So, how can we help you?’ she asked as she led me past the kitchen. My stomach rumbled as the unmistakable smell of warm chocolate and vanilla wafted into the hallway, teasing my nostrils and making me regret my skimpy lunch.

We. That was a good sign. Ronald Nightingale must still be alive.

‘My husband and I just moved to Elizabethtown,’ I told her as she opened the screen door leading to the back porch and we stepped through.

‘Are you looking for a church home, then?’ she asked, smiling. ‘Although Sturgis is a bit out of the way for Elizabethtown, isn’t it?’

I smiled back. ‘We already have a church home, I’m happy to say. Saint Timothy’s in Elizabethtown.’

‘Ah, yes. Episcopalians.’

‘Dyed in the wool,’ I said.

‘My husband is retired now, but he used to be the minister at the Methodist church next door, back before the merger. We were EUB in the old days.’

‘EUB?’ I’d never heard of that denomination.

‘Sorry. Evangelical United Brethren Church. We merged with the Methodists in 1968.’

‘This was the parsonage, I gather?’

‘Yes. When they built the new parsonage – perhaps you saw the fancy brick house around the corner? – the church allowed us to buy this one.’ She smiled. ‘A love gift, really. Except for the years we spent doing missionary work, we’ve lived here since our twenties, so we were very grateful.’ She gestured toward a wrought-iron chair. ‘Won’t you have a seat?’

‘Paul and I just bought the old Hazlett place on Chiconnesick Creek,’ I told her as I scooted the chair out from under the table and sat down in it. ‘Perhaps you know it?’

Bernadette stared at me for a moment without blinking. Then she closed her eyes, took a deep breath and blew it out slowly through her lips. When she opened her eyes again, it was to say, ‘I knew this day would come.’

‘Do you want to tell me about it?’ I asked.

She chewed her lower lip, then said, ‘It’s a long story.’

I smiled in what I hoped was a friendly, non-confrontational way. ‘I’m not in any hurry.’

Inexplicably, her face brightened. ‘I’m sorry, I promised you some tea! I’ll be right back.’

I shot to my feet and said, ‘Can I help?’ Now that I’d come so close, I didn’t want to let the woman out of my sight.

She raised a cautionary hand, chuckled, said, ‘No, no. It’ll only take a minute. I’ll be right back,’ and disappeared into the kitchen.

I passed the time by admiring the beautifully manicured lawn and her well-tended vegetable garden, surrounded by chicken wire fencing to protect it, I assumed, from hungry deer. Tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, carrots – I was constructing a mental salad when Bernadette called out, ‘See, that didn’t take long,’ and reappeared with a tray holding a pitcher of tea, three glasses, a plate of cookies dusted with confetti-colored sugar, and an elderly man I took to be her husband.

‘Ronald Nightingale,’ the man said, extending his hand. Pastor Nightingale wore a white polo shirt tucked into a pair of green-plaid Bermuda shorts that ended just north of two knobby knees. From his tawny complexion I suspected it was Ronald, not Bernadette, who was responsible for the orderly garden.

Bernadette glared at her husband. ‘Hat!’

Ronald’s cheeks flushed. ‘Be right back,’ he said. When he returned, an Orioles baseball cap had been pulled on over his bald head. A few wispy white hairs stuck out of the opening at the back.

Once we were settled around the table with glasses of tea, Bernadette spilled the beans. ‘Hannah is here about Nancy Hazlett.’

If Ronald was surprised, his face didn’t show it. ‘When I read about the baby in the chimney, I was afraid…’ His voice trailed off.

‘There’s been no positive I.D.,’ I said softly, ‘but the child was wrapped in a newspaper from 1951.’

Bernadette stole a look at her husband. ‘I told you we should have taken her with us.’ There was nothing accusatory in her tone, simply anguish, raw and deep.

Ronald seized her hand and held it tight against his thigh. ‘We can’t second guess ourselves now, Bernie. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.’

My attention had been focused on Ronald, so I didn’t realize, at first, that Bernadette was quietly crying. She turned her tear-stained face to me. ‘Nancy was just starting her senior year and she’d gotten the lead in the school musical,’ she sobbed. ‘It seemed cruel to drag her away to Angola.’

‘Angola?’ I was losing the plot.

‘In 1951, God called us to the EUB mission station in Quéssua, Angola,’ Ronald explained. ‘Bernie taught nursing and I ran the agricultural station.’

‘We were there for a year,’ Bernadette added.

‘Was Nancy a parishioner, then?’ I asked.

‘In a manner of speaking, she was,’ Bernadette said.

Ronald returned his wife’s hand to her own lap and patted it. ‘Let me tell the story, Bernie.

‘When we were young, still in our twenties,’ Ronald began, ‘we got the call to United Brethren here in Sturgis. I was fresh out of seminary.’

Bernadette leaned forward. ‘We couldn’t believe our luck.’

‘Yes,’ her husband agreed, then grinned. ‘They must have been desperate to hire a newbie like me. Anyway, we needed a person to clean the church and someone recommended Mary Hazlett. Her husband had been killed during the war, you know.’

I nodded.

‘Mary came twice a week…’

‘On Mondays and Thursdays,’ Bernadette chimed in.

‘On Mondays and Thursdays, yes, and we grew close to her.’

‘So, that’s how you met Nancy.’

Ronald nodded. ‘Mary would sometimes bring Nancy along while she worked. Bright as a button, that little girl was.’ Ronald smiled at the memory. ‘Wasting away in that dreadful all Negro school down near Pocomoke. A crime, really. Nobody’d put up with it for a minute these days, but times were different back then.’ He took several long swallows of tea, his Adam’s apple bobbing, then set the glass down on the tabletop. ‘Even before we lost Mary…’ He leaned forward, whispered, ‘cancer,’ then forged on, ‘… Bernie took Nancy under her wing, tutored her here at the parsonage, mostly in math and science. But Nancy’s real talent was music. That was obvious from an early age. She played the piano and sang in our choir.’

‘And solos,’ Bernadette interjected. She closed her eyes, drifted somewhere far away and began to sing, ‘Oh, sometimes I feel like a motherless child…’

Ronald squeezed his wife’s apron-covered knee. ‘It’s OK, sweetheart.’

Ronald waited patiently for Bernadette to finish the stanza, her ruined soprano wavering, slowly dying away, before continuing, ‘One day, Bernie and I had a long discussion and decided we had to do something about it.’

Ronald’s eyes cut sideways. ‘Have you seen any photographs of Nancy?’

‘I have.’

‘Ah, well you understand, then.’ He coughed and cleared his throat. ‘So one day, with Mary’s permission, I put Nancy in my car and drove her up to the high school in Elizabethtown. Registered her as my niece from Chicago, my late sister’s child. It was a lie, of course, but one I know God will forgive me for.’

‘Nancy was such a talented young girl,’ Bernadette said. ‘She would have languished in that poor black school. “Separate but equal!” What a crock. Rundown buildings, untrained teachers, ancient textbooks, no extra-curricular activities to speak of.’

‘They asked for her transcript from the school in Chicago, no surprise, and I told them it was on the way,’ Ronald continued. ‘The principal telephoned me about her missing records again about a month later, but by that time he’d heard Nancy sing and I don’t think it mattered much anymore. Just a freshman, and they gave her the lead in the school musical…’ He paused to consult his wife. ‘What was the show, my dear?’

‘Gilbert and Sullivan,’ she replied. ‘Nancy played Yum-Yum in the Mikado.’

‘She was making straight As, too,’ Ronald added.

‘Wouldn’t they have written to the Chicago school directly for the transcript?’ I asked.

‘Oh, they did!’ Bernadette glanced sideways at her husband, as if waiting for permission to go on.

He laid a gnarled hand on her arm. ‘It’s OK, Bernie. It was a long time ago, and Marilyn’s been gone for years. She won’t mind. Tell her.’

Bernadette leaned forward and spoke quietly. ‘The school secretary, Marilyn Daniels, was one of our parishioners. She figured out what we were doing and confronted me about it after church one day. I panicked!’ She pressed a hand to her chest. ‘But you know what? She understood. Completely. And she made the whole transcript problem go away. It simply vanished – poof! We never heard one more word about Miss Nancy Hazlett’s school records from Chicago, and nobody ever suspected she was passing for white.

‘And then, just before Nancy’s senior year, we left for the mission station in Angola,’ she said.

‘Bernie wanted to take Nancy with us,’ Ronald said, ‘but Nancy and I talked her out of it. Nancy planned to finish her senior year and apply for a music scholarship at Peabody in Baltimore, and Marilyn convinced me her chances of that were slim to none if she missed out on her last year of high school.’

‘But if Nancy was pregnant…’ Bernadette choked on the word.

‘Did Nancy have any boyfriends?’ I asked as gently as I could.

‘She had lots of friends,’ Ronald said, ‘but I don’t remember any one in particular.’

Bernadette tapped her temple with an index finger. ‘At our age, the hard drive is pretty full. If I could just get rid of all those advertising jingles from the fifties, or reruns of I Love Lucy, I’d be able to store more information up here.’

‘Nancy was a popular girl,’ Ronald said. ‘Until she got her driver’s license it seemed I was always picking her up after one extra-curricular event or another.’

‘Oh, why didn’t she confide in us?’ Bernadette wailed. ‘We could have helped!’ She jumped up, threw open the screen door and disappeared into the house.

‘Bernie has always blamed herself for Nancy’s suicide,’ Ronald said softly once his wife was out of earshot.

Feeling like a voyeur, I stood. ‘I’m sorry. Maybe I’d better go.’

‘No, stay. Please. A nice long cry will do Bernie good. It’s been sixty years in coming.’

‘Did Nancy continue to live here while you were in Angola?’ I asked once I’d retaken my seat.

‘Oh, no. There was an interim pastor, a single man. Nancy convinced us that she could manage on her own at the farm and we’d given her our car to drive, of course. She was almost eighteen, after all, and very mature for her age.’

‘Her brother showed me a photograph, and I’d have to agree.’

‘Ah, yes, poor Thomas, coming home to…’ He paused. ‘Well, to nothing. Three years in a prisoner of war camp can mess with your mind, then to lose your mother, your sister and the family farm all in one fell swoop the minute you step off the plane.’

I shuddered.

‘It doesn’t bear thinking about.’

‘Cap, uh, Thomas mentioned a wife.’

‘Tanya. A real prize, that woman. Thomas got himself a job at Clifton Farms and Tanya worked in the office there. Came into his life at just the right time, Tanya did. Gave him the stability he needed.’

‘Did they have any children?’

Ronald shook his head. ‘Some medical issue, I understand. Sadly, Tanya’s been gone for a couple of years now, but we’re all getting old. Some days I wonder how I can keep putting one foot in front of the other,’ he chuckled. ‘Use it or lose it, as they say.’

Me, too, I thought. We seemed to be straying off target, though, so I guided him back as gently as I could by asking, ‘How did you find out about Nancy’s death?’

Ronald sighed heavily. ‘We wrote to Nancy every week. At first, we’d hear back, but after three months her letters stopped coming. We didn’t worry at first. I thought it was just the usual difficulty with getting mail delivered in a third world country. But when I finally got to a telephone and was able to reach Marilyn…’ His voice trailed off. ‘Oh, we simply couldn’t believe it! Suicide! No way. Not our Nancy.’

‘Passing must have taken a toll on her,’ I suggested kindly. ‘Always looking over her shoulder, always afraid that someone would find out she was black. How she must have longed to be white.’

‘Oh, no, you don’t understand at all, Mrs Ives. Nancy didn’t want to be white. Nancy just wanted to be free.’