Daybreak (45 page)

Dear Betty Lee. She meant so well with her kind, tearful recollections. And he was thankful that the aunts were not here also, with more tears and recollections.

Tired as Laura was, her head stayed high all through that long day. He wished he was able to hold his own head as high, but he was not able and was back at his window looking out into the yellow afternoon when Laura came to him again.

“That was Ralph on the phone.” He noticed that she now omitted “Mr. Mackenzie.” “He just heard
from Arthur Crawfield. Some reporters managed to find out that the family was at the lake and they’ve been there taking pictures, asking a thousand questions. They may come back earlier. At home it will be easier to avoid reporters.”

Tom was silent, and Laura continued, “But Ralph thinks we all might just as well give the reporters what they want, and they’ll go away. We’ve nothing to hide, he said. We’ve nothing to be ashamed of, and he’s right.” She paused a moment reflectively. “Ralph is usually right, I’ve found. I told him you don’t want to go to college, but of course, you know you must go somewhere. He has connections with Stevenson, a small college in New England, and he’s pretty sure they’ll take you in the circumstances and late as it is.”

In the circumstances
. Because I’m some sort of freak, that’s why, with a father who isn’t my father, in the Ku Klux Klan.

“Will you go there if he can arrange it, Tom?” Laura asked. “It’s supposed to be a very fine place.”

Her eyes were anxious. He couldn’t let himself hurt her anymore.

“Yes,” he said, “I suppose I’ll have to.”

   Timmy was brought home on Saturday. Tom was in his room—he had spent most of the week in his room reading or sleeping—when he heard the car and the voices. From the sounds he ascertained that there were two women and a man.

Then he heard Timmy’s shout, “Where’s Tom?” and a few seconds later, Timmy burst through his door.

“Look! Look!” he shouted.

A small, bedraggled dog came after him. Part terrier
and part unknown quantity, it made the late Earl seem handsome.

“Isn’t he beautiful? I named him Earl the Third.”

Tom had to smile. “Why the Third? He’s only the Second.”

“I don’t know. It just sounded better. Isn’t he beautiful? He’s housebroken and comes when he’s called.”

The dog sat up and, with his whiskered head cocked to one side, regarded Tom as if he were a curiosity to be studied.

“We got him this morning at the shelter where Holly volunteers. Somebody had found him on the roadside, hungry and scared. The lady said probably he had been dumped there. People do that, can you believe it? Anyway, he’s had a week at the shelter to be washed and fed, and he’s in good shape. Right, Earl?”

Wise brown eyes turned toward Timmy. The scrap of a tail wagged.

“There was a purebred Airedale there that Uncle Arthur thought I should take, but I really wanted this one. Uncle Arthur gave them a nice contribution, too.”

“So it’s ‘Uncle Arthur.’ Who told you to call him that?”

“He said I might call them both ‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs.’ or ‘Uncle’ and ‘Aunt,’ and I liked Uncle and Aunt, since we don’t have any of our own except Mom’s, and they’re our greats. And they’re really nice, Tom. I had an awesome time. We sailed around the lake and anchored on an island, we had a picnic there, then we even went back to their house yesterday and went to the shelter this morning. They’ve got a neat house, it has a barbecue in the kitchen—”

“I’ve seen their house.”

“I forgot. Anyway, I had a great time. They’re nice, Tom, they really are. Let me tell you what we—”

“Look, kid, I know you mean well, but I don’t want to talk about them.” He knew he was being brusque, but this net was drawing too tight. “Uncle and Aunt!” Tighter and tighter, as if he didn’t know they were trying to pull him in.

To Tom’s surprise, Timmy just shrugged. “Okay, you don’t have to. You think they’re after you,” he said, with rather a shrewd expression, Tom thought, “but we were all talking one night, and Uncle Arthur said you’re a man, you can do what you want with your life, and if you don’t want to have anything to do with them, you don’t have to.”

“He said that?”

“On my honor, Tom. He’s a very smart man. He knows a lot of new things about cystic fibrosis, too. He studies about it, and—”

“Well, Mom and Dad did too. What do you think, that they didn’t?”

“I know that,” Timmy said impatiently, “but this is brand, brand new, only a few months old. Uncle Arthur explained what they’re doing with genes; they’re going to try putting better genes into our airway tissue, they expect to try it on some people next year, it’ll take a few years, maybe five, Uncle Arthur says, but—”

Tom wanted to interrupt again with the remark that “Uncle Arthur was no scientist,” but the boy’s eyes were so alive with hope, so gay with excitement, that he refrained.

“Well, that’s good news,” he said.

“And I’m young enough so that even if it does take that long, it won’t be too late for me.”

No, pray God it won’t, little brother.

“It’s called ‘genetic manipulation,’ and it’ll really be a cure, not just a medicine. If they’d only had it, then Peter wouldn’t have died.”

Oh yes. Peter, the Other One.

“They talk about Peter a lot. He looked like me. Holly says he was a wonderful brother. They hardly ever fought. He was very good-tempered.”

Like you, Tom thought. Like your mother.

“I like her. We played chess. I wasn’t much good at it to start, but she taught me a lot.”

How innocent, Tom thought. A game of chess wins him over.

“Come on downstairs, Tom. You can’t stay up here.”

“Why can’t I?”

“Dad taught us manners, didn’t he? Even Aunt Margaret said I have good manners, and I told her Dad was strict about manners.”

“Yes? And what did she say to that?”

“She said that was good of Dad.”

Tom prodded now. “Did they have anything else to say about Dad?”

Timmy appeared to be reaching into his memory. Then he said, “Well, I don’t know what started it, maybe I said something first, but Uncle Arthur said that Dad’s being in the Klan was terribly wrong, yet we should thank him for the good things he did for us.”

That sounded like Dr. Foster at the funeral.

“Come on down, Tom.”

“It’s so hard for me, Timmy. You don’t know how hard.”

“Yeah, I know. You’re all upset about that girl. I see her picture’s not here.”

“For Pete’s sake, who told you about that?” Tom cried indignantly.

“Mr. Mackenzie told Uncle Arthur and we talked about it. Aunt Margaret said how hard it must be for you to accept, or something like that.”

His private affairs laid open to be chewed over … Had they all nothing better to do?

“She stinks, Tom. She lied, too. I read all the stuff in that paper you had on your desk. That stuff about blacks. And I thought about Betty Lee. The stuff about foreigners, and I thought about Mr. Foutiades at the pancake shop and Mr. Bruno the barber. The stuff about Jews. Why, you’re one yourself, Tom! You see how she lied? She stinks.”

The innocent, decent kid, holding his dog in his arms, kid with an earnest plea …

“Come downstairs, Tom. Please come.”

“Okay. Okay, I will,” he said.

They were gathered on the long back veranda, the three women at one end seated, while Arthur Crawfield stood alone at the far end, looking out toward the garden. Timmy promptly went to him, while Tom, after minimal greetings, sat down on a bench by himself, halfway between the two groups. And he realized that there must be some agreement, tacit or otherwise, among them all, including Mom, to let him alone.

He wanted that, yet every nerve in him was alert; his ears and the corners of his eyes paid attention in both directions.

The women were talking about jewelry. Mom was saying something about her aunts on their round-the-world trip.

“They love to shop, and Lillian, especially, has a connoisseur’s eye. This necklace arrived last month from Bangkok.”

“A lovely present to arrive in the mail,” said Margaret.

“Yes, but the funny thing is I’m really not all that wild about jewelry, and they’ve still not caught on. Everything I own came from them.”

In a high, pretty voice Holly exclaimed, “But it’s gorgeous. Look how it’s made. Do the petals move?”

Laura’s answering voice had a smile in it. “Come, feel it.”

They made a picture, the girl’s glossy head bent toward Laura’s neck, the gold flashing through her fingers.

Only Jews like jewelry
, Robbie had sniffed. Lillian and Cecile would be surprised to hear that.

Holly said, “It happens to be perfect on you. You have the right neck to show it off, a beautiful long neck. I wish I had a longer neck. It’s so graceful.”

Mom obviously liked this girl. And she had been so nice to Timmy …

Arthur strolled past Tom down the length of the veranda, ignoring him.

“I think I may have a buyer for your property,” he said to Laura. “We buy from a furniture manufacturer who wants to expand in this area. From what I remember, your plant could be adapted easily.”

Tom’s thoughts were on other things. He was feeling all queer and sad. How could this have happened to him, this double blow: new parents, Jewish parents, a Jewish sister?

Yet it wasn’t their fault any more than it was Mom’s. He ought really to be asking why they, this pair of parents, should have been the victims of some stupid nurse. Surely they were just as badly hurt as he was, to be fair about it.

“Yes,” he heard Laura say briskly. “First it was Paige alone, then Paige and Rice, then Rice and Son. Now we move on.”

“It’s the only way,” replied Arthur.

When he stood before Tom, he seemed to be waiting for him to say something first. When Tom did not, he began.

“I’m sorry about—” and Tom knew he was hesitating between “your father” and “Bud,” which would be too familiar, so that he ended by saying, “what happened. It was a terrible death, wicked and cruel.”

“But he was a Klan man. I should think you would say he deserved it,” Tom said bitterly.

“Violence is never the answer, even toward Klansmen, who teach violence.”

“They want your destruction,” Tom said.

“I know that.”

“Then I don’t really understand you.”

“No, but someday you will.”

This was an odd individual. My father! he thought with the same pounding shock he had felt at the first encounter. This time he tried
absorbing
the man, his laconic speech, his habit of blinking behind his glasses, and the slight frown that could mean disapproval or else that he was trying to solve a puzzle.

“You’re not thinking, are you, that I see myself as some kind of Holy Roller? Not at all. I only know that once people are allowed to drive a car through a crowd of living bodies, we’ll all be living in a jungle. But enough of that. I want to talk about you, Tom. About us.”

Tom said awkwardly, “I should thank you for giving Timmy the dog. He’s so happy with him.”

“That’s fine. But I said I want to talk about you.
Listen, Tom. You don’t have to be close to us if you don’t want to. I’ve already made that clear. But I worry about your prejudices, not for my sake, but for yours. They’re acid, they’ll eat you up, and in the end, destroy you somehow as they did the man who was your father.”

“He wasn’t a bad man,” Tom protested.

“No, he was just dreadfully misled. Foolish enough to allow himself to be, as so many in Germany were misled. You heard Albert, my father-in-law, you heard what he endured. And do you know that, like Anne Frank, he still believes in human goodness? It’s a question of education, he says. One must be taught right.”

Strange people, Tom thought, and then, recalling Dr. Foster, felt a slight smile on his lips.

“Why are you smiling?” asked Arthur.

“Because that’s what they taught when I went to Sunday school.”

“Of course. Because it is right.”

The women had stopped talking and were listening, so that Tom became the object of attention, and it made him uncomfortable. His hands began to sweat again.

And a shock went through him, much like the one he’d had on the first morning when, on waking, he’d remembered that Bud was dead. This girl, this Holly on whose arm Mom’s hand now rested as they listened, would, if she had gone to state U, been one of those who received the anonymous dirty messages that Robbie’s group sent out. He winced, thinking suddenly that he had never done anything like that. In his mind’s ear now he heard again Robbie’s jeering laugh; in his mind’s eye he saw the contempt on her face; contempt for him whom she had so “loved,” whose
scholarship she had so admired, a scholarship far superior to her own. And again a terrible anger flared in him. But this time it was not merely on his own behalf.

“As to your faith, if you have any and I hope you have,” Arthur said, “I also hope you will keep it. In your heart, I mean, not just give lip service to it. Peter kept his—ours—till the last.” A cloud came briefly over his face and passed. “Are you still interested in astronomy?” And when Tom nodded, “A person who studies the universe will enlarge his mind and hatred will become picayune, stupid, impossible. Did you enjoy the book we sent to you?”

“I tore it up,” Tom said, and not trying to hide his shame, looked straight at Arthur.

Arthur looked straight back. “That’s understandable. Well, we’ll get you another one, if you want. Shall we? You tell me, and don’t be polite. Tell the truth.”

“I’d like another one,” Tom said.

And he thought once more that this was an unusual man. You could be sure that Bud’s attitude toward Arthur would not have been like Arthur’s toward Bud, if the situation had been reversed. Yet he wondered whether, if he had been brought up by Arthur, there could have been the closeness he had had with Bud, the hunting, fishing, playing ball, the jokes … Perhaps, but he rather thought not. They were so different.

At any rate, it didn’t really matter, did it? Now was now.

“Life has treated us very strangely,” Arthur said, as if he was musing to himself. “Think of it. A nurse’s carelessness gave Peter to a family that made a good Jew out of him, and gave you to your good mother Laura
and to Timmy. Incidentally, he and I are friends, do you know that?”