Five Smooth Stones (64 page)

"It wasn't women. I could have had a dozen of those. If they'd been the right color."

That had done it—transformed the resentment in his own mind to a hurt in hers. He could see it in her eyes, in the barely perceptible droop of the slim straight shoulders, the half-opened lips that sought words. Yet he could not comfort or explain. This was the way things were; he had tried to tell her and she had brushed him off. This was a trivial incident compared to what could lie in store. She would have to learn by experience—first the little things, then the big ones, the ultimate rejections.

"Does that surprise you, Sara?"

"I—I—perhaps."

"Perhaps? Perhaps, Sara?" He spoke slowly, the words coming out crisply with a clean-cut, almost pedantic bitterness. "Do you think you whites are the only ones who don't like to see the races mixed? Don't you know that there are black people—people as different as Lessie Perreira and my grandfather—who resent it as deeply as your lily-white friends? Or did you think that a Negro who entertains a white woman in his apartment acquires a certain distinction, a kind of prestige, from the association?"

Dear God, what's happened to his eyes? thought Sara. "You're—you're—David, you've never been like this. Never talked to me like this before. You've no right to—to put things in my mind—"

Why didn't she flare up, lash back at him, give him hell? It appalled him suddenly to realize that he had taken out on her a perverse, resentful mood brought on not by recent events alone but by God knew how many other things in which she had no part, memories that were stored within him and had been stored within him since long before he had even known her. Yet, even in remorse, he found himself unable to speak or make a move toward her.

At last he turned away and walked slowly to the door. Hand on the knob, he looked back. "Tell the landlady she's got a new tenant. Wait." He drew his wallet from his pocket, took a ten-dollar bill from under the flap where he kept his reserve. "Will you give her this as a deposit? Please. Suds will bring me and my stuff tomorrow night, and I'll give her the balance then. Thanks."

Sara nodded, eyes still wide and deep with hurt. She folded the bill, nervously, over and over upon itself until it was a tiny wad. David turned from the door and walked toward her slowly, reaching a hand to touch her cheek with his fingertips.

"I told you, baby," he said. "That's the way it is—like this." Then he was gone.

Sara did not move, except for her fingers, which unfolded the bill then started refolding it. After a while her lips moved, and she half whispered, "Sara. Sara Kent. He was right. He's always right. He's—he's like a mirror. That was what you thought. Way down deep, that was what you thought. And that's why you're hurt. Because he was right. You've got to understand. How—how—
how
do you understand what can't be understood? Because love isn't enough. It isn't enough. And if you don't understand there won't be any David, now or ever. God! How do you understand when you're blind and all you have is love?"

***

During those first few months at law school David found his relationship with Brad Willis slipping into one of friendly relaxation. He was no longer in awe of the older man, although he strongly suspected the change from awe to respect to have been brought about deliberately by Willis—a man obviously as adept at handling most ordinary human beings as he was at handling witnesses. He was as accessible as a busy man could be, more so than David would ever have dared

hope. His office opened off the main hallway just past the reception desk, and often when David came by early in the morning or late in the afternoon to leave or pick up work there would be a quick voice through the intercom on the receptionist's desk: "Is that young Champlin out there?... Ask him to wait if he can.... I'll be free in a minute...."

The work he was given to type changed also. It was rougher, with fewer corrections, and David was sure he was getting Willis's first notes on a case. Instead of being sequential there would be occasional paragraphs of facts appearing far down in the notes, obviously learned after a first interview with a client. The first time it happened, he said "Damn!" and went back to the beginning, retyping the entire draft, inserting the belated paragraph where it belonged. He was careful to bring it to Willis's attention when he brought the work in. "I thought I'd take a chance, sir, and rearrange it. But I've kept the original typing, in case it was intended—"

"Fine. You did absolutely right. Thanks."

There always seemed to be coffee brewing somewhere in the mysterious back regions of the rambling, spread-out suite of rooms, and on late afternoons when Willis was still in the office and had no client with him David would just have time to obey Willis's "Sit down, David. Relax," before the receptionist appeared with coffee. It was only a short time before he was talking to Willis with more ease than he had ever known with any older person since his days with the Prof.

During one such coffee session Willis clasped his hands behind his neck, tilted his high-backed chair, and stretched long legs along the side of his desk, turning his head so that his eyes were on the darkening sky beyond the window.

"You were fortunate, David. My God! Have you any idea how fortunate?"

"Yes, sir. It's not something you forget. It scares me sometimes. Especially when I go home and see—well—"

"The waste."

"Yes. I mean—look, Mr. Willis"—he leaned forward, suddenly earnest, and sounding, even to himself, very young— "I'm not all that smart. I've got friends down home, lots of them, just as smart as I am. Some of them, I bet, would be smarter if they had the chance—only, I got the chance and they didn't. And what are they doing?"

"I don't think I want to know."

"You do know, Mr. Willis. If they're too proud to lick the whites' boots they're driving trucks—like I do in the summer—or working on the docks or doing day labor or janitoring. And if they like the taste of shoe polish—"

"You don't have to be delicate with me, David."

David grinned. "That's my grandfather. He can cuss like a grown-up when he wants to, but he says there's a time and place for it. Anyhow, if these guys like the taste of shoe polish and they can stay adjusted long enough to finish school, maybe they can wangle a fair job. Maybe they can get a civil service job, in the post office, for instance. But not behind a window. No,
sir."

"Is it true, David, that a Negro who is known to be a troublemaker—and I don't mean that in any derogatory sense —let's say a Negro with influence among his own people, someone who is trying to help them actively, is frequently quieted by a good job handed out by the city or parish politicians? A job with enough money and security to make it decidedly unprofitable for him to continue his work for his people?"

"It's pretty standard procedure."

"And that, of course, gives the whites a rebuttal argument when Northerners and civil-rights groups accuse them of denying job opportunities to the Negro."

"Exactly."

"Nasty."

"Yes. And it's one of the reasons I think—I'm sure—that help for the Negro in the South is going to have to come from outside sources. I don't mean we haven't got some strong leaders there. We have. But not enough. And the pressures are too close. Isaiah Watkins and the ALEC people— they've got guts. But you know yourself, Mr. Willis, they have to call on headquarters here."

"David, would you like to lend me a hand in vacation time with some of the ALEC work here? They have a crack legal staff, but they still need help on routine stuff. They don't come any more devious or more brilliant or more dedicated than Klein, and his doctor has ordered him on a six-hour day. He's working fourteen. I try to help out. We could use you."

"Anything. I'll do anything at all I can." He looked into his coffee cup, stirred it absently. "I don't know," he said slowly. "I don't know whether I'm being noble and dedicated or trying to justify my own damned luck."

Willis laughed. "Bothers you, doesn't it? What you call your luck."

"Yes. Maybe it's because my grandfather used to say to me 'Man pays for his luck.' "

"I hope you'll get your grandfather up here one of these days."

"I'm planning on it. But he'll only come for a visit. I know that. He won't stay, damn it."

"Sometimes roots grow stronger in hostile surroundings."

"His do."

"But you mustn't let yourself become hipped on this 'luck' thing. You're too intelligent for that. I've never been a religious man. I have no religion. Let's say I'm an agnostic." He smiled. "Although I must admit, with due immodesty, that on a number of occasions I've managed to convince a jury that it was God's personal and heartfelt desire that my client be acquitted. Still, I've been forced to one conclusion: that there is some sort of cockeyed plan working somewhere for some persons. Certain circumstances that seem at the time to be a result of general cosmic chaos turn out, viewed in retrospect, to have been the only set of circumstances, that could bring about—do bring about—great good. Such as your grandfather playing banjo in an obscure New Orleans club the night a Dane named Bjarne Knudsen dropped in. We could pursue it endlessly, back to your grandfather's choice of banjo as an instrument—and beyond. Let's forget this 'luck' business, and figure there's some pattern in what has happened."

"I'll try," said David. He paused, conscious of Willis's eyes on him. "But—you ever been on the South Side in Chicago, Mr. Willis?"

Willis sighed. "Yes. God, yes!"

"That's what I mean. I've never been in Harlem, but I don't see how it can be much worse. And there are places here—it makes a guy feel guilty—"

"If you let these things do that to you, David, you're emasculating yourself, in a certain sense. You can't change things single-handed, trite as the observation may be. I can't. No one can. But you sure as hell can't help the situation any if you let anything so stupid as a feeling of guilt rule you. Would it do our people any good if you gave up and became one of the hundreds of thousands in our city ghettos—frustrated, trapped? Or one of the millions of our people in the South?"

"No-o-o. I know you're right, of course. At least, my mind knows it—"

"That's all that counts at this stage, David. Absolutely all. Your mind—"

Brad watched David leave the office, a smile softening the tan leanness of his face. His secretary came in, laid papers on his desk. "You ought to go home, Mr. Willis. You're tired."

He smiled up at her. "Speak for yourself. I didn't know you were still here." He glanced quickly through the papers. "These can wait until morning. Did you see young Champlin?"

"I make a point of having a word with him when I hear him come in. I like the boy."

"Yes." His eyes, thoughtful and remote, were on the door through which David had left a few minutes before. "I had hoped—I suppose I still hope—that one of these days he'd be here with us."

"I'm rooting for it. I've never seen a better candidate. And," she added grimly, "I've seen a muckle of 'em in my time."

"I don't know, Lucy. I don't know." He drew in his breath sharply, tapped the papers on his desk into order, laid them in the basket marked "Current."

"I think he's the person I've been seeking—subconsciously—for years. To stand beside me. But there's a chill feeling in my bones that something stronger than the law firm of Abernathy, Willis and Shea is going to take over one of these days."

"Not something better, Mr. Willis. For a young lawyer this would be the opportunity of—"

He did not let her finish. "Something better? Again—I don't know. But—" There was a long pause. "Probably, Lucy. Probably."

"I don't believe—"

"Who said 'go home' first?"

"What—oh, I did."

"Then scram. And take some time off in the morning. I won't need you before eleven."

CHAPTER 42

Late on a Friday afternoon a few weeks after his move into the new apartment, David braced his back against the cross seat next to the door of a subway train and wondered why Boston people bothered to take their kids to the beach to ride roller coasters when the Boston subway system was so close at hand. He took a copy of
Jet
from his pocket and flipped casually through its pages. Reading the compact little magazine was one way of keeping up with some of the prominent people of his own race in the country. As the train began to slow for his stop, the word "Boston" in one of the gossip paragraphs caught his eye. "What prominent Boston attorney," the short item read, "is due for gray hairs before his time if his wife doesn't cut down on the sauce? Friends are worrying."

He ran over in his mind the names of Negro attorneys he knew of or had been introduced to by Willis, then forgot the item as he came out into Boylston Street, the nip of the late fall afternoon making him turn up the collar of his topcoat.

He was in good time to leave the work he had done for Willis at the office, then subway to his apartment to shower and fix dinner for Sara, Sudsy, and Sudsy's new girl friend, Rhoda Sherman.

After they had met Rhoda the second time Sara said: "Let's don't be trite and say 'What does he see—' and all that junk. After all, she's nice and I do like her, even if she is—well—"

"Uninteresting?" supplied David.

"Well, in a way. And perhaps—"

"A little slow on the uptake?"

"All right. Poor dear. She won't have a shred of personality left when we get through with her. You're simply jealous because she's probably going to marry your best friend. All men are."

"Hey, wait! No one's said anything about their getting married, for gosh sake."

"Pooh! Want to bet they won't?"

"Make a bet like that with a woman? No."

"It's this way, David. Young men just don't spend all that time and attention on the Rhoda type if they aren't serious. And she'll be a super doctor's wife. Uncomplaining, patient, understanding—"

"The poor devil. No fun. He's too nice a guy for all those intangible virtues. Drive a man crazy after a while."

"And she's a comfortable person—"