Chapter Thirty-One #2
I’ve heard more tonight about Porter’s emotional foundation than during all the years we dated in college. This makes me sad for what he carried by himself at Princeton, none of it shared with me or, based on what he just said, with anyone.
“Did Charles know this? Details about your family, I mean. The directions you were pulled in by being with me.”
“Yeah, we talked about it. Well, we talked about it as much as two dudes in college know how to talk about complicated things like that. Me and Charles used to say that the four of us looked like the brochures that colleges recruit with, when the truth was, the handful of kids of color at Princeton stuck together.”
“I never noticed that.”
“There was no reason you would, but it was clear as day to me and Charles.”
“Did Charles feel as conflicted as you did on campus?”
“Yeah, but maybe not as much, because even though he was Black, he had more practice than I did in privileged spaces. He’d already proven he could hang with the crowd at Dalton.
I don’t think he felt the same urgency to prove that he belonged at Princeton the way I did.
Still, Charles got me more than most people at college.
And he really got me, meaning he had my back, when it came to decisions I had to make to hurt you and my family as little as possible. ”
“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 granny said 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.
“Our plan,” Porter corrects himself. “I was making a distinct choice of picking you and all that you and your family are, over my own family and who I was and how I was raised. I was choosing a woman so different and so out of any context that my mother would understand, over her.”
“But you never wanted to go back to Manning. Were you lying to me all those times you told me you wanted a life of the mind and not one of physical labor? That in between the pages of books is where you felt your most actualized? That Princeton was where you felt true to yourself and who you were meant to become?”
“No, you’re right. I can’t imagine anyone who loved Princeton more than I did, despite the racial discomforts.
The university allowed me the freedom, for the first time in my life, to choose my own way.
I never wanted to go back to Manning, ever, but I never wanted to lose my family either, even if we had grown so dissimilar to one another. ”
“So you applied to PhD programs and accepted the one at Princeton to make me happy, and then you abandoned our plan to make your mother happy. Instead of staying and fighting for us and fighting for yourself, you chose your mom. And that decision resulted in you up and leaving me on graduation morning without a word to do what, exactly?”
“To report to training camp.”
“Training camp?”
“For the 49ers. It started the same day as graduation.”
“You did? Where? How?” My mind is blown. Decades have passed, and learning all that I missed about this man I love . . . loved . . . is incomprehensible.
“I never turned down the NFL offer from the 49ers. I told you I did because I knew that was what you wanted to hear. But that offer was the way out of my predicament of being torn between two women and two places. After a bad crop, the NFL salary was reason enough for my parents not to pressure me to return home. They needed the help and I could give it. I was able to defer my PhD program, like Coach suggested. I went straight to California on graduation morning. I shut off my brain, I made my choice, and I escaped for a while to do the one other thing I was good at.”
“And in the moment, you couldn’t tell me any of this?” I challenge.
“I was a young man, and I did something dumb,” Porter owns.
“Okay. Maybe I was an old boy with a brilliant mind, but I didn’t have any life experience to draw from.
I didn’t know how to tell you, Callie. I didn’t know how to explain to you all that was going on with me.
Graduation morning, I kissed you goodbye and took off for training camp. It’s as simple as that.”
“While I was left in the dark about, about everything, Charles knew all of this?”
“No, Charles didn’t know all of it until I called him before we played the New York Giants that October. And I use the word we loosely. I played on special teams a little for the two seasons I was with the 49ers, and then they let me go.”
“Then you went back to Manning?”
“No. Then I was lost. I didn’t belong anywhere.
Twenty-four years old and completely lost. No you.
No close friends around. And a mom who had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
I needed to either continue to make good money to hire help for my dad on the farm and a caretaker for my mom, or I was going to have to be the one to go back and do it.
I spent the next five years playing in the Canadian football league for the Saskatchewan Roughriders and living lean to support my family.
I made my way back into Princeton’s English Literature program and doubled up on classes.
I earned my PhD burying my head deep in the books during off-seasons from football. ”
“You were less than ninety minutes away from me throughout our twenties, and you never once wanted to see me? Talk to me? Know if I was alright?” My incensement at Porter’s decision-making burns my eyes, but I will not let tears be shed over him.
“Every day, Callie. Every. Day,” Porter confesses, his eyes turning moist. “That’s why,” he continues tentatively, “as soon as I had my degree in hand, I headed straight back to California. I felt like the only way I could keep my worlds balanced was if I was as far away from temptation as possible. In California, I’ve lived a quiet life with Chap and books, and I still enjoy the game of football.
That’s how I ended up teaching, coaching, and mentoring young men at Regis, which I am most grateful for.
It’s been a perfect fit, and over the years I’ve even gotten a handful of my true scholar athletes into Princeton and onto the football team. ”
“That’s quite a journey you’ve been on. Lucky you to have the freedom to become the man you were meant to be.
A modern-day Odysseus,” I theorize on Porter’s hero’s journey, my head spinning, taking in the most I’ve ever learned about my first love.
I, however, was not given the opportunity to be his Penelope, waiting at home, fending off suitors because I believed Porter would return.
I had been forced to contend with the fact that I had been left forever.
Porter opens his mouth to respond, but I cut him off with the weighty question unanswered between us. “Did you ever marry?”
“No. I had my hands and heart full with Chap, Rose, the boys at Regis, and my memories of you, Callie. I can’t believe I moved across the country to be as far away from you as possible, and here you were all along.
I always hoped that somehow, some way, at the right time, I would make my way back to you.
” Porter put his hands on the table, palms up, presumably inviting me to place mine in his.
“That we would find each other, and here we both are in Sacramento.” I keep my hands to myself.
“There’s another Gullah saying that’s one of my mom’s favorites: ‘All shut eye ain’t sleep; all goodbye ain’t gone.
’ I held on to that proverb like a lifeline, Callie. It was never goodbye for me.”
“Porter, since the day I got to Sacramento, I’ve been trying to say goodbye to it.”