Honest Trifles: The Confessions of Edward Morgan

By Charles Theus

When straight-laced Teddy Morgan met Odette Popov, a young , white,ex-beauty queen his life was utterly changed, and not for the better.
This is the story of a turbulent inter-racial affair in a time of rapid social upheaval that had consequences which he could not have imagined.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Mar 28, 2014
• ISBN: 9781490716312

Book preview

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

About the Author

To the memory of my brother Andrew.

Ave atque vale.

Catullus

And with that old, intermittent fatuity, which reappeared in him now that he was no longer unhappy, and lowered, at the same time, the average level of his morality, he cried out in his heart: To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that the greatest love I have ever known has been for a woman who did not please me, who was not in my style.

Marcel Proust

Swan’s Way

Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun

A year, or two, but wallowed in a score?

John Donne

A hymn to God the father

I

It was vanity and pride that got me into all of this—that and my own insatiable desire for that little minx Odette. (And not some diabolical, racist plot, as some might have you think.) I really ought to have known better than to become involved with her in the first place. For every instinct in my body warned me to leave off. And yet I could not help myself. And so now I find myself ducking and hiding and cowering in dark basements, fearful of every untoward sound. I have become a fugitive and a vagabond, who is frightened at every unexpected noise. If only I had listened to the chidings of my conscience I would not find myself in this awful mess that I’m in!

Still, I make no excuse for my conduct. I was as guilty as sin. I gave in to my desire despite the fact that I knew I was completely in the wrong. And, to tell the truth, if faced with the same temptation, I suspect I would do as much again. Odette was that kind of woman. She had a kind of irresistible effect upon us all. She was a kind of it girl—a Playboy centerfold,—who led us to do things that we knew we shouldn’t…

I knew I was being a fool from the very beginning; to go running after this strange white woman. Or any white woman for that matter. What had come over me? I thought. For each time we met to make love we were risking our very lives. And yet I could not help myself. I was the proverbial fool in love. I knew how it would look if we were found out: a black man chasing a white woman, one who was married into the bargain. Everyone would say that this was what was to be expected once they let one of us near their women. Black women would hate Odette, and scorn me as a fool. And I was proving them right. Worst of all, if word of any of this should somehow get back to my family and friends in Chicago I would become a laughing-stock among everyone I knew, especially among the women who had always accused me of favoring white women, even as long ago as when we were in college; and of even wanting to be white myself (which, of course, was absurd). And then they would scorn me all the more.

And yet I did not care. Let people think what they liked. I could not help myself in this instance: Odette was no ordinary white woman. Indeed she was no ordinary woman, period. And although I was making a fool of myself over her, anybody who saw her would immediately understand just why I was taking such chances just to be with her. And not just because she was white, as some have tried to make out. When I was with her other men envied me, just as I once envied her husband his apparent possession of her. No one would ever justly say that I was after her just because she was white. And, of course, all the women in my old neighborhood would accuse me of lacking racial pride. I had lost all racial pride, all foolish racial pride, that is. Why should Odette and I pretend not to be in love when we both knew that we were? Let others think what they liked. And hang the consequences.

Yet, I really ought to have known better. For men of my sort have repeatedly paid for such indiscretions as I have committed with their lives. And if I had paid better heed to my instincts (which have never yet betrayed me) and not given in to my desire, I would not find myself caught in this painful crack that I’m in. Vanity, as I have said, was the cause—that and my inability to resist the siren call of Odette. My ego made me do it, and to want to be the one to do the thing that almost every other man at that bank where I worked was straining with all their might to accomplish. I wanted to be the first. I wanted to be the one: to be the first as it turned out to break open the ripe, voluptuous body of hers and live to tell the tale. Yes, it was the thought that I might be one to do the very thing that we all dreamed of doing that finally drove me to take the dangerous plunge. I wanted to be able to tell the tale: to have them say that I was the one. I, whom they had least expected to succeed with her;—that I had been the first. I wanted to see the looks of surprise on their faces, and the envy in their eyes, when they realized at last that it was I—and not they, but I—who had done the deed.

And that was what had undone me: my overweening pride. None of them will ever forgive me that, that I, whom they had believed the least likely of us all, had done the unthinkable, and had, to all appearances, gotten away with it. None of them will ever forgive me that, that I have breached the wall of her resistance. That I had been the first,. I had succeeded where all the rest of them had failed. What all the rest of them had been straining every sinew to accomplish, I had done with scarcely the lifting of a finger. And the fact that it should have been me, of all people, had fallen among them like a bombshell. HIM, they said indignantly.!. Of all people! Him—whom they had thought to be the very least among them.

How did it happen? How had it come to this? You may well ask, . . . as I have done so often of late, now that my pursuit of her has come to grief… I ought to have known better from the start. I leapt before I looked. I zigged when I should have zagged. Thus, I found myself at that hour in more trouble than I ever knew existed in the world. It was because I took the path of least resistance. I let things, go, I allowed myself to slide into a kind of an ethical morass, a moral slough of despond. It was a kind of comfortable niche from which I lacked the will or the desire to escape. And I let my wishes become my beliefs. I hoped somehow that things would work out on their own. I trusted to signs and portents. Thus, I managed to persuade myself that Odette could be had without any of the complications which I knew in my heart to be present. I was naïve. And I had to pay the price for it.

I repeat, how did I get myself into this mess? Or, more to the point, how do I manage to get myself out of it? For I know now that only I can extricate myself. What price must I PAY? What penance must I do? For I have sinned and I must make atonement for what I have done. How can I get them to leave me alone, just as I was before all of this palaver over Odette? What must I do to return to the status quo ante: That blissful state which I never appreciated until now. Until I took it into my head to play the lover.

What can I have been thinking of to have done such a thing? But that, you see, is just the point: I did not think. Contrary to everything I had been brought up to think and to believe, I did not plan ahead. I did not anticipate the consequence as had always been my wont before this time. I simply acted for once. I gave into my desire, which was almost overpowering. That would have been natural enough had I been anyone other than myself, somebody white, had I not been reared as I had. But for somebody like me, born black, to act without thinking in a matter of this kind is tantamount to suicide. Men have died for far less than I did. In the last analysis it was an act of the utmost folly.

I was mad to think that we could get away with it, Odette and I. They would never have allowed us to, no matter how much we might have wished it. No, not even for one hour would they have allowed it, much less the days, weeks, and the months in which we two cherished that illusion.

And so now I sit here, in my little study off the kitchen, with the white curtains and the window that juts out into the garden, and the overhead light shining down upon me. I feel safe for the moment, snug in my little niche against the night and the chill air. The furnace is going and makes a soft whirring sound as it warms the house. In the Fireplace, I have lighted a fire of cedar wood and hickory to take off the sudden chill. I can hear the sharp crackling of the burning wood as the flames blaze up and roar, a crackling that is reminiscent of pistol shots. And then I think back on those years of our first intimacy, the years that followed after my 30th birthday.

It is the old Odette of whom I think now; not the one that she had lately become. But the one that I knew at the beginning, years ago; the one whom I went to meet each day at work with such joy and gladness of heart; whom I used to meet in the afternoon at the home of a friend in order to make love. But that was all so long ago. Before she went east, and became hip.

She had only recently returned to the west after a sojourn in the east, a sojourn of nearly five years, during which time she changed out of all recognition. She became slick and hard, and so devious that even I was shocked to see what she had become…

This could not be happening to me, I thought. There must be some mistake. Surely, it was somebody else they sought, some other Negro—not me, the golden boy, not Teddy of whom everyone had always spoken so highly. This must be some kind of nightmare, I thought, a bad dream, from which I would awaken in a moment, and thank God that it was not really happened to me.

It must be some other Teddy that they sought. And this must be a case of mistaken identity, such as happens on Sixty Minutes, where some hapless black boy is accused of a heinous crime that happened when he was miles away from the scene, only no one can be found to testify to the fact that he was at work that day.

Yes, it is that Teddy that they seek, that other Teddy, for whose blood they thirst. It is all a mistake., I thought. I must make them see that: that I am that same Teddy who has always been known for his good conduct; of whom it has always been said that he was been a credit to his race. That selfsame Teddy to whom his high school principal once said that he had not; once thought of him as a Negro at all.

Even in those heady days everybody had high hopes for me: bright hopes and great expectations. I excelled in everything I did. I was a wunderkind. Everything I touched in those days seemed to turn to gold. Everything seemed to be going my way. I could not fail. Everyone—my teachers, my high school principal, and everyone else who knew me—said that I could not fail to bring credit to the race.

And now they have confused me with that other Teddy; that wicked and scandalous Teddy, the one who is a bounder and a cad, an adulterer, a bad actor, and a sociopath into the bargain. What has happened to me? How did I come to fall this low? How have I done it? Who is to blame?

No, it is not to be believed that it should have come to this! It has all happened so quickly that I have scarcely had time to catch my breath.

My enemies and my detractors must be rejoicing. My fall was beyond their wildest dreams. Who could have predicted it? Who would have said that someone as careful as I was could have come to such an untoward end? Especially after such a bright beginning. It was against all the odds.

Who would believe it? Who would have guessed—could they have seen me when I was starting out from Chicago, which is already more than 35115.png years ago—that I would end up like this? That I would end up as the third man in some squalid little domestic affair that everyone says is unworthy of me and all I have ever claimed to stand for! And who among our circle of family and friends, and casual acquaintances even, would not be surprised to learn that I am at this very moment hiding inside my house and afraid to go out, trembling at every unexpected knock at my door, and turning my face from every stranger I meet on the street for fear that it may be one of them? Could anyone who knew me from the old days, who knows my family, or who knew what great things were once expected of me—could such a person recognize me as that same one who grew up in Chicago, who did all the right things, or who never gave anyone, neither his family or the police, or indeed anyone else, a moment’s trouble? NO, I venture to say that they could not! Nor could anyone who first knew me from those first days after my coming to the West from Chicago, and when I took such pains to make myself agreeable, and not do anything to bring shame upon myself and disgrace the race.

For, to tell the truth, this creeping and hiding, this tawdry little imbroglio in which I find myself, is all quite foreign to my nature—to my upbringing, to the proud family traditions I have always tried to uphold! To be caught up in all this, to be mixed up with these kinds of people is to be involved in the very kind of thing that was the purpose of my rigid upbringing to avoid.

And yet it is all true. My worst fears have been realized. It is like some kind of nightmare, some kind of horror story, the all-American dream gone awry; the past reclaimed, dredged up in all its bloody fury. It is like some scene from my grandfather’s time, from the nineties, or Reconstruction, perhaps. I am waiting for them to come, like some black fugitive in the South waiting for the Klan. Only this time it’s from Russia. These pursuers may actually be the descendants of the Black Hundreds and the Cossacks, makers of pogroms. Only now instead of menacing Gypsies and Jews, they are menacing me. It is as if the world has come full circle, and has found me out, again. I try to run away from it, but when I do I am rooted to the spot. I can’t move. Something binds me, my own fate perhaps. If I should try to run away it will be no use. They undoubtedly will find. Me. They are everywhere. There is no escaping them, not for me at least. It is the past from which I have been fleeing. Yet, it has always overtaken me before. To flee has been no use.

And make no mistake about it, they will come, these modern American Cossacks, these blood-thirsty avengers. They have come for me before and undoubtedly they will come again, even into the sacred precincts of the Berkeley Hills themselves. It is like having déjà vu. Night after night I have awaited them and got no sleep, knowing that they would come; knowing already from their persistent phone calls that Odette had run away and they were convinced I knew where she was to be found. But I didn’t know, thought my denials were all to no avail. This time I am more certain than ever they will come, not to find out where she has gone, but to exact their vengeance. Now, she is dead. And in some way known only to their twisted reasoning they hold me responsible for it. They blame me for what has happened, as if it was I who, by starting her on the road to her perdition, must be responsible for her final destination.

And what shall be their final objective? What sacrifice shall they exact to expiate her blood, and their own guilt? It shall be my blood, and in the acting out of that old American death ritual practiced so often before, of blood, the knife, and the blazing midnight fire. Yes, I know what they have in mind for me tonight. Or if not tonight, then tomorrow, or the day after, or the one after that, whenever they lay hands on me. And if they miss me once, they will surely return again until they accomplish their goal. I am trapped, in a way, a victim. But do not waste your sympathies upon me. It