Robert B. Parker (14 page)

On the green chalkboard behind the podium at the front of the room someone had chalked a long equation, boxed it in, and written
SAVE
beside it. The equation was entirely mysterious to me.

A very thin Negro man came in. He was medium height with short hair and a goatee. He wore round gold-rimmed glasses, and carried a cane. He had on a black homburg, a black double-breasted suit with a faint gray pin stripe, a black shirt, and a dark gray tie. He looked down at the three Negroes sitting in the front row and murmured, “Brothers.” They murmured back. Then he leaned his cane against the podium, rested his hands against either edge of the top of the podium, and leaned over it toward us.

“My name is Willie Smith and I have been to the belly of the beast,” he said. “Before I return there, I want to tell you about it.”

He was a spellbinder. He spoke without notes for forty-five minutes of Mississippi, and the voter registration efforts there and the danger that freedom riders faced. The audience was rapt. When it was over they swirled up and to the front of the room and surrounded him. A young black man in a white coat wheeled in a table of tea and coffee and small multicolored sugar cookies, and stood silently behind the table, pouring coffee or tea as requested, and allowing people to help themselves to the cookies.

Jennifer shook Willie Smith’s hand. “You were magnificent,” she said. “Are magnificent.”

Willie said, “Thank you, thank you.”

“We are with you,” Jennifer said. “We are—” She paused for a moment, trying to express herself just right. One of the three Negroes said, “Who’s this
we
? You talking for all the honkies?”

I had been standing back watching Jennifer, staying out of the way. When he said that I stepped forward, between him and Jennifer. “She’s probably talking for herself,” I said. “And the people she knows. Are you talking for all the niggers?”

The room became quiet. The awful word was out. I knew they thought it was awful. But I knew that Roy Washington and I used it as commonly as swearing. It depended on how it was used. And since Roy had taught me to box I cared less than I used to about whether people liked what I said.

“You got no right to say something like that,” the Negro said.

Willie Smith was looking at me steadily.

“There’s three thousand white students in this university,” I said. “And thirteen of them showed up here. It’s dumb to call one of those thirteen a honkie.”

Jennifer put her hand on my arm. “Boonie,” she said. “He has more right to be angry than we do.”

“Not at you,” I said. “Not in front of me.”

“The gentleman’s right, brother,” Willie Smith said. “We won’t make no progress ’less we can get together.” He looked at Jennifer. “Negroes get touchy after a while, miss,” he said. “They get suspicious of white people who say
we
this and
you
that. Tends to underscore the racial split, if you see what I mean.”

Jennifer nodded. “Of course.”

“It doesn’t underscore it as much as a button that says Honkies for Integration,” I said.

Willie Smith looked straight at me and the force in his eyes behind the silly gold-rimmed glasses told me something about why he had been to Mississippi and returned. “I agree,” he said. “I see you’re not wearing one. Even though you’re here. I assume you are opposed to racism?”

“Yes,” I said.

Smith smiled. “I like that.” He put out his hand. “An honest man,” he said. We shook hands. “Ask a white man if he’s opposed to racism,” Smith said to all the audience, “and if he runs on about how much he’s opposed and how he hates it and what he’d like to do to stop it, you can be pretty sure you’ve got a man who feels guilty and probably
has reason to.” He turned to me. “You don’t feel guilty, do you?”

“No.”

“Have black friends?”

“I have.”

“Some of your best friends?” Smith smiled.

“She’s my best friend,” I said.

“You ever care to come down to Mississippi and register some black voters, you’ll be damned welcome.”

“It’s a good thing to do,” I said. “But I have business here to take care of.”

Smith nodded and ate a pink cookie.

When the meeting was over I bought Jennifer a drink across the street at The Basement, a campus hangout on College Avenue.

“He was right, Boonie,” Jennifer said. “I was acting as a spokesman for my race. The classic white suburban liberal—oh-my-I-feel-bad-for-you-darkies. God.”

“You’re not responsible for your upbringing any more than the colored kid was responsible for his. You were sincere. It doesn’t matter how you put it.”

“But it does,” she said. “Language is meaning. The way you say it influences what you say. If we don’t believe that, what are we doing here?”

“Here” was actually a small dark bar with pictures of Taft athletes on the wall. But I knew she didn’t mean the bar. She meant the university. She meant the study of literature.

“Literature’s interesting,” I said. “It’s good to read, fun to talk about.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

“And racism? Do you care about it?”

“I’m against it,” I said.

“But no passion?”

“I think it’s the worst thing we’ve done in this country. It’s civilization’s worst crime.”

She was smoking a Kent cigarette and drinking a small bourbon and water. I knew she wouldn’t finish it. She’d sip at it all day if necessary. She didn’t like to drink, but she loved the circumstances surrounding drink. Conversation, people, the chance to charm. Now she was interested in me. And in something more than me. Maybe in her. She was trying to talk about something she nearly never talked about. She was trying to talk about how to behave, or she might have been. It was hard to be sure with Jennifer. No one understood her as well as I did. And I didn’t understand her all the time. The velocity of her charm, the intensity of her presence made it too dense an experience.

“Is that why you went to that meeting?” she said.

“No.”

“Why’d you go then?”

“Because you were going. I enjoy being with you.”

“Why’d you come to Taft?”

“Same answer,” I said. There was normal hubbub in the bar, but around us a silence seemed to ring. Everything was slowing down the way it does in a car accident, or a fight sometimes. I was aware of my breathing and my pulse.

“Do you believe in God, Boonie?”

“No.”

“Do you believe in anything?”

“Yes.”

She let some smoke out, pushing her lower lip forward a little so that the smoke drifted up across her face before it thinned.

“What?” she said.

“The answer to that is too corny,” I said.

“Tell me.”

“I believe in you, Jennifer.”

She was silent with the smoke from her cigarette drifting in a thin swirl across her face. Her eyes were large and blue and spaced wide. “Only that?” she said.

“Only that.”

“I …”

“It’s enough,” I said.

She put her hand on top of mine. “I’ve been married eight years, Boonie.”

I nodded.

“I have a daughter,” she said. “A home, a life.”

“That what you believe in?” I said.

She was silent again, looking at the smoke. She shook her head. “I don’t think that way, Boonie. I’m very short term. I look for things to do rather than things to believe.”

“And you’re looking now?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Wife and mother’s not enough?”

“No.”

As soon as the weather got warm I went to work part time for a carpentry contractor in Cambridge. I took classes in the morning, did framing and some finish work in the afternoon, studied in the evening, and in eighteen months I had a B.A. and twelve hundred dollars in the bank. That fall I was accepted into the graduate program in English at Taft. Because she went only part time, Jennifer was still in the program working on an M.A. and I had caught up with her. I had a teaching fellowship and that entitled me to a desk across from Jennifer’s in the teaching fellows’ office. We were students together again, and teachers as well. Maybe you couldn’t go home again, but you could visit the old neighborhood.

Jennifer and I drank coffee together and talked of Andrew Marvell and the Pearl poet, of Marlowe and Sidney and Dryden and Pope. We argued whether
The Waste Land
was a magnificent failure and whether the new criticism was the only way to approach literature.
We spoke of Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate and Austin Warren. We never spoke of her husband or her daughter. Every day she rode into school with John Merchent in a Mercedes convertible and every evening she rode home with him.

It was at the department Christmas party that I first actually spoke to him. Jennifer introduced us and drifted off to another group.

“Sure, I remember Boone,” Merchent said. He put out his hand. “Good to see you again, Adams.”

We shook hands. “Nice to be here,” I said.

“I understand you are a master’s candidate with us.”

“Yes,” I said, “I’m a late bloomer.”

Merchent smiled. “Never too late,” he said. “As Jennifer also demonstrates. You and she have become real chums, it seems.”

“Yes,” I said. Merchent was still taller than me. Blond, with a smooth face and good clothes. He held himself erect and still, as if the weight of his self-satisfaction gave him an imperturbable ballast.

“We really must get together,” he said. “Have you out some Sunday afternoon to drink some beers and chat.”

“Yes.”

“It’s very good for Jennifer, I think, to have a chum like you. She tends to be a bit overwhelmed by some of the demands of university life, and scholarship. In my position I can only help her so much, of course.”

“She seems fine to me,” I said.

“Oh, surely. She’s much better now that she’s out of the house and has something to occupy her mind. I’m
afraid motherhood and housewifery were not what Jennifer was cut out for.”

“She’s doing well in class,” I said.

“Yes. She’s a conscientious student. Probably got some of that from me. When I was doing my book on Teasdale, I had her as what amounts to a research assistant and she learned a great deal about scholarship and research and the standards that scholarship sets.”

“Sara Teasdale?” I said.

“Yes. I did the biography of her for the Twayne series.”

“You a Teasdale specialist?” I said.

“Well, in a sense,” Merchent said. “I have become somewhat of a specialist because no one else has done the research. My critical study of her poetry will be out in the fall, and we’re negotiating for a casebook.”

“A Sara Teasdale casebook,” I said.

“Yes. I was really quite fortunate to find a whole area of literature like that in which little work had been done.”

“Did you do your dissertation on her?” I said. He taught the English eighteenth century.

“No, my dissertation was on Nahum Tate,” he said. “Let me offer you some advice, Boone. If you’re going to publish, it’s important to stake out fields of research that haven’t been overharvested.”

I nodded again.

“Have you developed a special interest yet?” Merchent asked.

“I sure have,” I said.

“American or English?”

“American,” I said.

He nodded approval. “It’s a field that needs some fresh scholarship,” he said. “Good seeing you, Adams, let’s get together soon, some Sunday afternoon to drink some beers and chat.”

“Sure,” I said. And Merchent smiled and went to get more sherry and strike up a conversation with the chairman. I looked around. Jennifer, holding a barely sipped plastic glass of sherry, was sitting on the arm of a sofa, listening intently to a young woman explain the problems associated with water fluoridation. The woman wore a white T-shirt and a loose blue denim jumper. She was sitting on the floor with her legs crossed under the skirt. Beside her a young man squatted on his heels. He had on a tan corduroy suit and a plaid flannel shirt with a black knit tie. His hair and beard were untended and long, and his eyeglasses were the kind that the army used to issue, neutral-colored plastic frames with round lenses. I didn’t know the girl. The guy squatting beside her was named Allan Raskin. He was writing his doctoral dissertation on Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

“It’s an intrusion of my right not to ingest fluoride,” the girl in the denim jumper was saying. Her dark hair was long and very curly. “The government has no business medicating me against my will.”

Allan Raskin nodded furiously. “Absolutely. There’s research that clearly shows fluoride to be poisonous.”

“That’s not the point,” the girl in denim said. “Even if it were perfectly safe, the government has no right to put it in my drinking water. That’s a fascist act.”

Raskin nodded again. He pointed at her with a shake of his hand. “You’re damned right, Trudy. That’s a very
good point. Even if it’s harmless, it’s fascist.” He nodded again. And kept nodding as if he were following the train of implications even deeper within.

“Are you opposed to chloride too?” Jennifer said.

Trudy shook her head very hard. “No, I won’t be sidetracked,” she said. “That’s a red herring, Jennifer. It’s not to the issue. It’s exactly the kind of smoke screen they throw up to get our minds off the real issue, which is, and very clearly so, fascism.”

Jennifer saw me looking at her across the heads of the anti-fascists. She glanced quickly down at them, saw they weren’t looking at her, glanced back up at me, and crossed her eyes. I took a step closer and said, “Excuse me, Jennifer, I’d like to show you something over here if you could give me a minute.”

She nodded. “I’ll be back, Trudy,” she said, and stood up and walked with me to the other corner of the room.

“Thanks,” she said. “I have learned more about fascism and crypto-fascism and covert fascism than I ever really wanted to know.”

“How come people whose area of specialization and, you’d assume, interest, is literature spend all their time talking about politics?”

“They don’t,” Jennifer said. “Just the graduate students do that. The undergraduates talk about grades and the professors talk about tenure and promotion.”