Five Smooth Stones (69 page)

"Well, I've been thinking for a long time, ever since my first year in law school, that sometime I'd like to take a year off and read political science and international law at Oxford. Hell, I know it sounds crazy—"

"Did it not sound crazy when I first said you would go to college?"

"Yes. But this sounds even crazier. And I think, I hope, the firm would keep my chair warm for. me. And I have to save enough money—"

"International law? This I did not expect. But crazy—no —it is not crazy if you want to do it. I will help—" David remembered that he had stopped then, in midsentence.

"I think I can make it. But if I can't, I'll ask. Now that I've got an income and can pay back. So keep your blood pressure down, Prof. I won't refuse help if I need it. And it's still just an idea."

But this afternoon, the first time David had seen the Prof since that day at the airport, he did not bring up the matter of Oxford. He was quieter than David had ever known him to be, his talk reminiscent, oddly gentle. Only when he was leaving did David see the old, explosive Prof. At the door, an arm around David's shoulder, Knudsen had boomed:
"Ja!
I know now why those who have children say death is not so bad, because there is continuity. My friend, Joseph Champlin, lives in you, and I live in your mind—and we will both live in your children: There does not have to be a blood relationship. You will name one of them Bjarne, no?"

They had laughed together. "A brown 'Bjarne,' Prof? My God!"

David was relieved that the Professor had not brought up the matter of Oxford and further studies in international law. He was glad to be off the hook of explanation. Because, had the Prof probed, as only he could, his probe would have opened wide a wound—and revealed Sara.

***

It had been a small wound at first, a surface thing, like the initial incision of a surgeon over an operative site, made a week before Christmas the first year he was at law school. Sara was going home to spend die holiday with her father and her sister and the twin nephews. David had wanted Gramp to come to Boston, but the first heavy fall of snow had changed his mind. He could see Gramp, a small brown icicle, probably frozen immobile on a street corner, and decided to go home instead. Gramp had assured him there would be enough money if he ran short. There seemed to be some inexhaustible hoard somewhere that Gramp could always tap if it was a case of a reunion or a long-distance telephone call, but which suddenly dwindled to a few pathetic pennies at a too high gas bill or an assessment. He didn't argue about it anymore. If he refused the extra money to come home on, Gramp would just spend it on a ticket north to visit him.

A few days before he left, he went up to Sara's studio. She was sitting on the couch, wrapping packages. "David. If there was more money you could fly to Chicago first, on the way home, and see my twins." She looked around her at the gaily wrapped gifts, and moaned. "Where am I going to
put
them all!"

"I don't suppose the twins would mind."

She was too engrossed to catch his emphasis on "twins" immediately. He wondered why in hell he had said it; he ought to steer clear of those shoals. Then, a pink-and white plush rabbit in her hand, she had looked around quickly at him.

"What do you mean—the
twins?"

Let it lie, Sara; for God's sake let it lie, but then he heard himself going ahead, heard his own voice say, "Only that they're young enough to be color blind." It would always be like this, always, this involuntary transference of pain. And that she could not see, or did not want to see, the existence of any problem was one of the goads that set him off. It was kind to call it naïveté, more honest to call it blindness.

She let the rabbit drop to the couch where it lay, flop-eared and ridiculous, among the gay wrappings, the bright ribbons and rosettes. "That doesn't speak well for the rest of my family."

"Do you think they'd hire a band to welcome me?"

"They didn't hire a band to meet my sister's husband, either, when he was still her finance. Took a damned dim view of him, they did."

"Oh, for God's sake, Sara! Face facts, just once."

"David, I told you, last spring at Pengard, that my father knew I was in love with you even before you knew it."

"You didn't tell me then when I asked you, and you won't tell me now, but I am going to ask anyhow. Was he happy about it?"

"No, Stoopid! And I did tell you. He wasn't happy and he wouldn't have been if you'd been the Prince of Wales. No father is 'happy' about a daughter's boy friend. Especially if he thinks it's serious."

"You begged the question then and you're begging it now. Suppose I said, 'O.K., Sara. I'll go to Chicago and be introduced to your family. I'll even spend Christmas there.' Suppose I did? What would your reaction be? Your first move? Want me to tell you?"

"All right. You know so damned much about it. Suppose you tell me."

"To warn them."

"Warn
them?"

"Yes. To write a letter and say, 'Dear Daddy—'"

"I don't call my father 'Daddy.' I call him Father—"

"O.K., a minor point. 'Dear Father—here I come, ready or not, with my Negro boy friend, and please be nice and tell the rest of the family and the neighbors to be nice—' "

"That's ridiculous and childish! You know who my father is—what he's done—"

"I've even met him. At graduation."

"And he liked you! He thought you were great!"

"Maybe he did. But let's suppose we went back there all married up, as Gramp would say. And we come down the first morning. And your dad—father—looks at you, and the rest of 'em look at you, and then they all look at me, and start thinking that all night long you and I have been sleeping in the same bed in that house, and probably not sleeping all the time, either. What room would we have? Your room from the time you were a wide-eyed innocent child, where your mother and father used to tuck you in every night and hear your prayers? And the only brown thing near you was probably a Teddy bear? So, little Sara? What then? Be honest, baby, for God's sake be honest."

She was quiet for so long he thought she wasn't going to answer. She had picked up the rabbit again and was flip-flopping its pink-lined ears over her fingers nervously. At last she said slowly: "I'll be honest, David. Just as honest as I can be. But I won't say that they'd be horrified and outraged and all that. Or that they'd be pleased, either. Because I don't know. I just don't know. Wait. Please. Let me finish. I let you. In the first place, David, families aren't all that important."

"I've got to interrupt, Sara. They are to you. And they are to me. You've got to realize that any general problem sooner or later has to be particularized. Must be viewed through the eyes of an individual facing it. We've both got roots. I don't mean just geographical roots or the shallow roots of custom. I mean deep roots of mind and heart. What happens to them if we tear them up? Do we let them dangle? Bleeding."

Her words still came slowly: "So they bleed, David. Can't we stand to have them bleed?"

"Not when they're bleeding the life away from the plants they nourished—"

Now her words came faster, tumbling out, sounding more like Sara Kent: "Why did you start all this! Why! It happens all the time. We're happy and everything's going just fine and then all of a sudden you're off. I—I never know what silly little thing will start you off, and suddenly we're—we're fighting and miserable. Isn't all this—this stupid business about
my
father and
my
family after all
my
problem? Isn't it? If I'm willing to face it—and I don't admit it's a big one because it isn't, David, it isn't—"

"Sara, where did you say your brother-in-law comes from?"

"Virginia. My God, David, every Virginian isn't a Clevenger!"

"No? I'll take an ex-cracker like Chuck Martin any day. He's revolting mentally and spiritually against violence and murder and stupidity. There are as many kinds of prejudice in the South as there are kinds of people. Know what they called Virginia in the old days? The 'mother of slaves.' It should have been the 'father.' Know why? Because that was where they had the best slave studs. Stud farms, actually. Slaveowners used to bring slave women there from hundreds of miles around to be bred."

"What's that got to do with my brother-in-law! What in
hell
has it got to do with him!
He
didn't! Who's always making a big thing about not generalizing? You. Now listen to you!"

"Yeah, I know. Don't say all the rattlesnakes in a basket are poisonous, because one of 'em may have had its venom removed. How you going to know which one? That's when the general comes down to the particular. You want to bet that if I went back home with you, your brother-in-law wouldn't make life hell for your sister? And for your father? In a quiet, well-bred, aristocratic way—the same way they make life intolerable for a self-respecting Negro in that state? And never raise his voice—just like they don't have many lynchings in that state? Sara, the sorrow isn't just for the interracial couple. It spreads, like poison, to everyone involved, whatever color—"

"Color, schmolor! It wouldn't be sorrow, David; it wouldn't be sorrow! Trouble, maybe. I can see that. I'm not an imbecile. But sorrow—no! Trouble I can take. Didn't you say last spring that it's total commitment for a white woman who marries a Negro? I know that! I
know
it. And you throw that commitment back in my face! David, will you answer the same kind of question you asked me a few minutes ago? And be as honest as you wanted me to be?"

He hesitated, then said, "Go ahead. But be careful."

"Suppose I said to you, 'David, I'm going to go home with you, stay a while in New Orleans, meet Gramp and your friends, maybe spend Christmas with you.' Suppose I said that? What would your reaction be? Your first move?"

That had been three and half years ago, and even now, in the quiet of the little house in Beauregard, David flinched from the memory of his rage at the questions. Flinched, too, from the realization that had come later: that his anger had been unfair. What could Sara Kent, who had never been a part of the world in which he grew up, know of the hands slimed with hate that had rocked the cradle of his being, the humiliations and spirit-destroying pressures that had given him and all his people hidden scar tissue that pinched the nerves of heart and mind so that it took only the lightest touch to bring those nerves to quivering, throbbing life? How could she have realized that what she had done was to ask him to expose himself in the light of his home environment, a light that debased every member of his race it touched; to ask to be a witness to a debasement that would deny him the right to walk beside her down the street, to eat across from her in a restaurant, that made their love a mockery and perversion, a gutter-dirty aberration that could send them both to penal servitude. He knew that she was aware of the facts of life in the South, yet could not, perhaps would not, accept them as conditions of being and survival, saw them as abstractions, could not believe that it was impossible to equate them with the normal, whites-only problems of manners and mores.

And so, unwittingly, she had forced him to a confrontation of his own separateness in a way no Negro-hating, Negro-baiting white of the deepest South could have bettered for cruelty.

He had risen slowly from the hassock on which he was sitting, anger and frustration knotting his guts, shaking with inner tremors, frightened of what he might say, frightened of what he might do. Not until afterward had he recognized, in retrospect, the fear in Sara's eyes as she looked up at him, her actual physical drawing away. His voice was not shaking when he spoke at last because he had raised it to steady it.

"For Christ's sake!
For Christ's sake!
How can you be so God-damned stupid!" And then, because he could not face her any longer across the abyss that had opened between them—an abyss he knew now must always have been there but whose true depths he had never glimpsed until that moment—he had turned and left her.

In midafternoon of that day he called Hunter Travis, and at five-o'clock boarded a train for New York. Two days later he went directly to New Orleans from Pennsylvania Station.

***

He had run from that first hairline incision of the scalpel, he thought now, to the undemanding, understanding Hunter Travis. When he arrived Hunter said: "What brought you up here, man? Six invitations you've had, and you finally show up for no reason."

"Mind? I mean, you sure you've got room?"

"See that couch? It bears young. Underneath there's another one that rolls out. All the room in the world, chum."

"No prior claims?"

"None. Where's your suitcase? How long can you stay?"

"Just a couple of nights. I checked my suitcase through to New Orleans. I already had my train ticket. Got my razor and etceteras in this little one."

"Want me to stop asking questions?"

"Yeah. For now. How're you making it?"

"Great. I went on my father's payroll a couple of weeks ago. Secretary. Aide. Some such."

"Then why aren't you with him in Timbuctu or wherever? I mean, aren't secretaries and aides supposed to stick with the boss? Hand out Kleenex or important documents, whichever is needed at the moment?" David put his small overnight bag on the couch, beginning to feel self-conscious, beginning to see his unexpected stopover in New York as Hunter was probably seeing it, yet knowing that he could not have gone direct to New Orleans and Gramp's omniscient gaze. And he had dreaded the three days and two nights on the train without some chance to pull himself together, somehow change the enuring, roiling current of his thoughts.

Hunter was explaining that his value as a secretary lay, at this time, more in his absence than in his presence. "Right now the great man's in Cyprus, and probably will be for several months. I'm here with one ear on what's going on at the UN and the other glued to a telephone, being cued what to watch out for and report on. Don't be misled by my appearance. I'm no dilettante. I'm having a ball. And working."