I was too embarrassed to ask him more. And he did not seem to want to relieve the silence; he stood in it as if it was the most comfortable place to be. Finally, I could not stop myself.

“Is it strange,” I said, “being here in America, after so long away?”

“Everything is grayer. I had forgotten that. The trees, the clothing, the people’s faces. Even the sun is grayer here than it is there.”

“Is it so beautiful there?”

“It’s a better world there,” he said. “Or it will be. Very soon.”

“You’re not a patriot anymore.”

“I am not as optimistic as Lucien or your mother,” he said.

I looked up finally. He was staring at me again. “I never thought of my mother as an optimist.”

“She is only that,” he said. “What other word would you use to describe a colored woman who has so thoroughly decided to work with whites, who trusts the white women who come into her office telling tales about hurt spleens, but won’t trust me to touch those same women with my bare hands?”

“They used to ask me to turn to the wall,” I said, “when she was examining them. Mama said it was because they were jealous, that I was young and they were not any longer.”

“I could understand that,” he said.

He said, “When you blush, your skin glows darker somehow. It’s remarkable.”

“It should not be.”

“You don’t find this place changed, since you’ve been away?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I missed it, I thought. It was mostly just—different. But now I am not sure I can call it home.”

“Is that why you are now an impresario?”

“You can make fun if you’d like. I’ve never found anything truer in this world than Louisa and Experience singing. And the one thing my mother taught me, above all, is to fight for truth when you find it.”

“That’s very pretty.”

“You are making fun again.”

“No, it is very pretty. But also not true.”

It was a thrill to hear someone outwardly doubt my mother. I had never heard it before, and a part of me leapt to him as he said it.

“She’s taught you so many good things, though,” he continued. “You probably got a better medical education as a child than I have now.”

“I am not a very good student,” I ventured. I almost told him right then, that I was disgraced. But then he said, “Oh, I find that very hard to believe,” and I thought perhaps we were back in the language of flirtation, with no place for truth.

I wished I could be whatever it was that he saw when I stood before him. It was clearly not the same person that the Graces saw, or Alma Curtis or Madeline Grady, or even who Mama saw, when she looked at me. He looked at me as if I was a wondrous being, as if my voice was a song, as if I was magic. And I did not want to disappoint him.