Daybreak (13 page)

“I wish you’d stay longer,” Laura said.

“Can’t. We have to start back early in the morning. There’s a ton of packing to do. It’s not every day we take a three months’ cruise around the world.”

“I’m dying to see India. Remember when Francis Alcott was there and sent us all those marvelous pictures? And he brought you a sari, Laura. So lovely. Pale pink and gold, wasn’t it? Or was it blue and gold?” Cecile frowned slightly, concentrating on the memory. “Which was it, Laura? I can’t remember.”

Wrapped in pink gauze, she had gone dancing around her room, had draped it to expose one naked shoulder, paused like an odalisque in front of the mirror, loving herself.

“I don’t remember, either,” she replied with a little shrug.

“Yes, I can’t wait to see India most of all,” Cecile repeated. She was dreaming of white marble and temple bells. Not beggars, not dirt, nor smells, thought Laura. Nor heartbreak. Dear Cecile!

“I’m getting tired,” Bud said, tossing the ball toward the veranda steps.

He wasn’t tired at all. He was thinking of Timmy, who, with Earl at his heels, had been racing to keep up, although the others had been careful to favor him. And Laura wondered painfully whether Timmy realized how much they favored him. Probably he did, although
he would try not to admit it to himself; Timmy was proud. Proud, like his father.

The close tie between those two was sometimes frayed. Bud’s kind of pride kept him exercising beyond the threshold of pleasure because he knew he tended toward fat, but he would never admit it. So it was that he never would admit his innermost feelings about Timmy, either, would never say that mixed with his fierce love there was also a bitter resentment. Why should this tragedy have come to him, Bud, who was capable of fathering a boy like Tom?

They should have had more children, another boy for Bud. Tom was grown and would go his way, as he should, she reflected now. But with Timmy in need of so much care, it hadn’t seemed like a good idea to add another responsibility to the family. And besides, who could have known how another child might turn out? The chance of a sibling’s being afflicted with Timmy’s sickness was one out of four, a terrifying ratio.

“I’m starved,” Tom said, clumping up the steps.

“Ten more minutes in the oven. Just time to shower. Then roast beef and a surprise dessert. One of your favorites, Tom.”

“Can’t be better than last night’s lemon pie. You spoil me, Mom.”

“As long as you know you’re spoiled, it’s okay.”

Indoors again, the women could never refrain from making some remark about the photograph of Thomas Paige, which they had to pass on the way in. They paused before it.

“He looks so stern,” said Cecile. “I don’t remember him looking so stern.”

“It’s the military cap that changes the face. Put that cap on Tom and he’d look different, too,” said Lillian.

“No, it’s because he was on his way overseas. Anybody would look stern.”

“Tom looks like that sometimes without going overseas.”

“Tom’s serious. Tom’s good stock.”

Thus refortified, content in the certainty of who and what the Paiges—and the Rices—were, the aunts proceeded toward the dining room and took their places, no longer at the head and the foot of the table because Bud and Laura sat there now.

Their complacency was contagious. Laura was feeling continuity. Her grandparents had bought this table in Ireland, a solid slab of West Indian mahogany, lustrous after thousands of patient rubbings and waxings. In one of these damask-covered chairs, her father must have sat through many a dinner’s conversation, boring to a child who had to wait while adults lingered over their second cups of coffee. And here in celebration of their engagement he must have brought Laura’s mother for a first dinner in this house; anxious to be approved, a young woman would have been careful to dress exactly right, neither too much up nor too much down. And here the young couple would have displayed their wedding silver …

Clem said, “I always tell Cecile that your boys have such fine manners. These days you seldom find a young man Tom’s age who knows enough to pull a chair out for a lady. All that’s gone by the board. I hate to see it.”

Laura smiles. “If there’s any credit due, it goes to Bud. He insists.”

“Well, good for him, then.”

Bud was pleased. “Tom’s been worth every bit of effort. And one of these days very soon, I’m going to
show him what I think of him. I’m going to print ‘and Son’ on our sign after ‘Paige and Rice.’ ”

Laura amended, “And after that, someday you’ll put the ‘s’ after ‘Son.’ ”

“Of course, of course, when Timmy’s old enough,” Bud said. He turned to the aunts. “Gosh, I remember the day you took down ‘Paige and Company’ and replaced it with ‘Paige and Rice,’ gold letters on black. I felt like bursting inside. It was like yesterday,” he finished wistfully.

“There’ve been so many changes,” said Cecile. “More now, I guess, than in any century before us. I see big changes in this town every time I come back.”

Lillian remarked, “I heard on the car radio that you had quite a mess here yesterday.”

Clem said, “We saw it on television. It’s a disgrace. There’s no law and order anymore.”

“Laura was there,” Bud told them. “She could have been killed. Scared the life out of me when she told me. Tell them about it, Laura.”

She had been wanting to forget it, so she answered only, “It was awful. They were like savages.” What decided her to say more, she could not have explained, but glancing at Bud, she added suddenly, “This will have been only the beginning, though, if Jim Johnson wins. Only the beginning.”

“Nonsense!” Bud’s exclamation rang down the table. “You call Johnson a savage? Listen, he may be a bit too emphatic at times, a bit extreme, but if you listen carefully and take apart what he says, you’ll find he makes a lot of sense. That group yesterday could have had nothing to do with him.”

Laura said stubbornly, “That’s not what I was told. I
was told it was Johnson, and that when you look behind him, you’ll see the Klan.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Laura, that’s ridiculous. Johnson’s got no more to do with the Klan than you have.”

“Of course, we’re in Florida,” Clem said. “But we keep in touch with what’s going on, and many of our friends from here have heard him, and they like him.”

“What do you say?” Clem asked Tom. “You folks at college all vote now at eighteen, so tell me, what are people your age saying?”

Tom had been waiting his turn, and was ready for it. “Divided,” he said promptly. “The people I go around with favor Johnson, naturally.” He grinned, catching Bud’s wink. “We wouldn’t be going around together, otherwise. I know people close to him, and they have a lot of respect for him. Mackenzie’s been slinging mud, that’s all he’s been doing. He won’t deal with the issues, racial quotas and busing, high taxes on people who work, so—”

Laura had to interrupt. “I’m not in favor of quotas or busing, either, and I don’t think Mackenzie is. He’s a conservative person, and I am, too, and that’s why I’m going to vote for him.”

Now Tom interrupted. “Mackenzie won’t talk about unpopular issues. He wants to please everybody. He won’t come right out and say that our government has been supporting a bunch of lazy bums who don’t want to work. That’s what this is all about.” And Tom ran his hand through his hair, which now fell slantwise like a black silk handkerchief over one-half of his forehead.

Bud clapped. “By God, he’ll be governor someday. Hasn’t my boy got what it takes? Right, Clem?”

Bud glowed and Clem approved. “Yes, Tom puts it very well,” and then in the kindly tone that people use
when speaking to a very small child, he asked, “What are your thoughts on the subject, Timmy?”

A delicate flush spread over Timmy’s face. He glanced at his mother, then at Bud and Tom, finally back to his mother, and replied softly, “I think some of the things I’ve read, some of the things Johnson says, sound awfully mean. And Betty Lee told me he hates black people.”

“With all respect to Betty Lee,” Bud objected, “and we all love her, but I really don’t think she has studied the issues enough to make a judgment. Naturally she listens to propaganda. It’s not her fault, I understand that, but she’s simply thinking what she’s told to think.”

“But people can always tell when other people hate them. And she’s black, Dad, so she can feel it better than we can when somebody hates blacks. At least,” Timmy said, suddenly reluctant, as if he had dared too much, as if he had felt some sharpness in Bud’s objection, “at least that’s what I think.”

Deeply moved, Laura said, “Timmy’s right. I see a terrible meanness here, too. This is an ugly election, and it frightens me.”

“Well, I just don’t know, Laura,” said Cecile. “It seems to me you need a man like Johnson in this state. An educated man, we all agree, well-spoken—”

“That’s just the danger, Aunt Cecile, he’s so well-spoken and so well educated that he can talk convincingly before whatever audience he happens to be addressing at the moment. And when Johnson speaks against the Klan, it’s only a mask for the kind of thing I witnessed yesterday, pain and hate and eventually, blood on the pavement. Nazi Germany. They started small, and look how they grew.”

Tom objected. “You know something, Mom? You and millions more have been awfully hoodwinked. The whole story is a great put-up job.” He spoke very patiently and very reasonably. “There never were any gas ovens, now that you mention Nazi Germany. There never were six million dead. Yes, there were camps and prisons where criminals, communist spies, and agitators were held, and they deserved to be. The rest is propaganda. Jewish propaganda.”

“Right on!” Bud cried. “It’s all a swindle, the whole blasted thing.”

Laura felt the hot blood rising to her face, and she cried out.

“The Holocaust a ‘swindle’! You dare to say that? When there are photographs in official German records, when there are eyewitness accounts by survivors and, yes, by American soldiers, too! When Eisenhower himself wept when he saw the human wreckage! As well say there never was a George Washington if you’re going to deny history!”

“Ahh,” Bud said, “you’re always defending Jews. And why, I can’t fathom. What do you know about them? How many do you even know?”

“What difference does it make whether I’m acquainted with them or not? But as it happens I have some darn good friends, girls I grew up with from kindergarten on. And I probably know more without being aware of it. I don’t make a practice of asking people about their religion or their ancestry.” Her own righteous indignation was making her vehement and proud. “I only want everybody to be treated decently and fairly. Isn’t that what religion is all about? We go to church on Sunday, don’t we? And it seems to me that what we hear there—”

No one responded. They were all looking at the empty air. In their code of behavior, the dinner table was no place for such vehement outbursts. It made the aunts uncomfortable. But she had not intended to be so emotional, so angry; her voice had simply risen, and without intending to, she had pushed her chair back from the table, clutching the edge with both hands. The events of yesterday must have affected her even more than she had realized. And she glanced at the faces, all of which, excepting Timmy’s, seemed to have closed up.

A weariness drained through her body so that she relaxed her hands and dropped her eyes to her plate. No one understood; Bud and the aunts were one. “Fine women,” he always said of them, and so they were. “A good man,” they had said of him from the very beginning, and so he was. Yet when it came to something as deep as how a person felt about the world and what kind of world was building, a curtain fell that isolated her from the good man and the fine women. As for Tom, it seemed as if a curtain was about to fall before him, too … Or maybe not … She felt alone at the table.

Lillian spoke first. “I take it then that you’ll be voting for Mackenzie, Laura.”

She came to. “Yes, I think he’s a decent, reasonable man.”

“Silver spoon. Georgetown Law. Johnson’s more of a self-made man.”

And where’s the sense in that? thought Laura. Who is Lillian to object to a silver spoon? It was absurd.

“We met Mackenzie,” Clem said. “Did Cecile tell you? He was at a dinner party last winter when we went to Captiva. People found him very likable, very
bright.” He chuckled. “The women went for him in a big way. Thirty-seven, single, nice head of red hair—why not?”

Clem had neatly turned the conversation away from sober disagreement and Cecile would be grateful for that. They were well matched.

Laura jumped up. “The dessert’s a chocolate soufflé, and it’s ready just about now. Excuse me, I’m going to take it out of the oven, and then you’ll have to eat it right away before it starts to collapse.”

“Whipped cream with it, Mom?” asked Tom.

“Better than that. A great vanilla sauce. Help me clear the table, boys. No, Cecile and Lillian, you sit.”

The atmosphere of celebration that had begun the day was now subtly diluted. It was like a time when you are absorbed in a pleasure, a mood of untroubled ease on a day when the world is vivid all around you, and then, abruptly, something startles, a reminder that you do, after all, have a nagging, lurking trouble. And now the topics at the table had changed the atmosphere, had tainted it.

“No more politics,” Bud declared, when Laura came back bearing the souffle in its bubble-glass bowl. And when she gave him a look of gratitude, he continued, “We aren’t the only couple who cancel out each other’s vote. Clem, shall I fill your glass again? This is a great dessert wine. Tom, too, now that you’re nineteen?” He laughed, giving Tom his familiar wink. “It’s nice to pretend you guys never drink at college, right? Oh, I remember.”

Remarkable, thought Laura a few minutes later, how food can soothe. The soufflé, the wine, the coffee, the cheese and fruit, had spread contentment where only a short while before there had been polite hostility.

The evening ended early. Clem apologized, “We’ve had a long day, a long drive. I think we need to turn in.”

“It always feels funny,” said Lillian, “to come back and sleep in the house where you were born. It’s as if you’d never been away. But I hate to walk out on your evening, Bud.”