Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,146

drove off: she watched me go and waved out the window and shouted at me to hurry home.

I went into my first marriage, blank to the schemes of love. My husband-to-be was from a family in Des Moines. He was an engineering student and a well-known debater on the all-Negro debating circuit: he could hold any subject in the palm of his hand. He had bad skin and a beautiful bent nose. His hair was cut into a conservative Afro, tinged cinnamon at the edges. He was the sort of man who adjusted his glasses, precisely, with a middle finger. I met him on the night when he said that what America didn’t realize was that it was forever censored, forever would be, unless common rights were changed. They were the words he used instead of civil rights: common rights. It brought a silence to the hall. My desire for him gripped my throat. He glanced across the room at me.

He had a lean boyishness, a full mouth. We dated for six weeks, then took the plunge. My parents and two remaining brothers drove north to join us for the wedding. The party had been arranged in a run-down hall on the outskirts of town. We danced until midnight and then the band left, dragging their trombones behind them. We searched around for our coats. My father had been silent most of the time. He kissed my cheek. He told me that not many people were ordering hand-painted signs anymore, that they were all going neon, but if he had one sign he could put on the world he would say that he was Gloria’s father.

My mother gave advice—I still can’t remember a single thing she said—and then my new husband whisked me away.

I looked across at him and smiled and he smiled back, and we both knew instantly that we’d made a mistake.

Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you’re lucky enough to find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive off, but most people who’ve been around awhile know it’s just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lose it, but sometimes it’s never even there in the first place.

Our honeymoon was a disaster. The cold sunlight slanted through the windows of a rooming house in a small upstate New York town. I’d heard there were lots of wives who spent their wedding nights apart from their husbands. It didn’t alarm me at first. I saw him curled, sleeplessly, on the couch, trembling as if in a fever. I could give him time. He insisted he was tired and spoke gravely of the strain of the day—I found out years later that he had spent absolutely all of his family savings on the marriage ceremony. I still felt a strong residue of desire for him when I heard him speak, or when he called me on the phone to tell me he wouldn’t be home—it seemed that words had an affection for him, the way he spoke was magical, but after a while even his voice began to grate and he began to remind me of the colors of the walls in the hotel rooms in which he stayed: the colors leached into him and took him over.

After a while he didn’t seem to have a name.

And then he said—in 1947, after eleven months of marriage—that he had been looking for another empty box to fit inside. This was the boy who had been the star of the Negro debating team. Another empty box. It felt as if my skull was being lifted from my flesh. I left him.

I avoided going home. I made up excuses, elaborate lies. My parents were still clinging on—what use was it to hurt them? The thought of them knowing that I had failed was coiled up inside me. I couldn’t stand it. I didn’t even tell them that I was divorced. I would phone my mother and tell her that my husband was in the bath, or down at the basketball courts, or out on a big job interview for a Boston engineering firm. I’d stretch the phone all the way to the front door and press the bell and say: “Oh, gotta go, Mom—Thomas has a friend here.”

Now that he was gone he had a name again. Thomas. I