Tomorrow! (21 page)

The colonel nodded. “Orders,” he said. “Any more questions, gentlemen?”

There were none. The meeting ended. Colonel Eames walked across his office with Charles. “Bring back the fabric.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And don’t worry, Lieutenant, about the air games and your ‘enemy.’”

“No, sir.”

“I did myself, Chuck, at first. Went through exactly your train of thought. We have to rely on our own Intelligence.”

It was the first time the colonel had ever used Charles’s nickname, even his first name.

Charles was unaware that his commanding officer even knew his whole name. He felt flattered.

But he also perceived that the slight familiarity involved a skillful act. Things at the base were about to tighten up. Half-trained men were going to undertake the work of trained crews. Ships, inevitably, would crash. People would be hurt, and killed. The colonel, almost instinctively, had began to behave with that increased intimacy which danger and morale required.

All Charles replied was, “Yes, sir.”

But the colonel stayed beside him, walking toward the door. “I even called Washington myself, before the meeting,” he said. “I suggested restoring Condition Blue to the alert system, just in case. They thought I was crazy. And I guess I was.” He opened the door because Charles couldn’t, so long as the colonel talked. “I’ll put you in a staff car,” he said. “Long way back to your quarters, and a real cold day.”

Charles thanked him. He saluted and started for one of the cars.

The colonel called, “And about that—material. Appreciate your mentioning it. Proper, under the circumstances.”

A damned good officer, Charles thought, as a sergeant drove him swiftly along the edge of the big field.

The Mildred Tatum Infirmary for Colored was a large, brick building on the corner of St. Anne and James streets in River City. Its location, four blocks north of the heart of “Niggertown,” was due to a number of factors, none of which was related to the convenience of the patients or the requirements of therapy. Emmet Sloan had always liked colored people in a genuine, if somewhat patronizing, way. His grandfather, coming to River City from Illinois after the Civil War, had been an abolitionist and for a time had run an “underground railroad station” on the bloody road that led slaves from the South to freedom.

Like other Americans of large affairs, Emmet Sloan had welcomed the tide of working immigrants—the “Micks, Wops, Latwicks, Polacks, Hunkies” and others, who had poured into River City at the end of the nineteenth and the start of the twentieth centuries. They worked hard and cheap at mill jobs and in foundries and they thus furnished much of the muscle that was essential to make America great—as well as to make men like Emmet Sloan rich. These people settled near the river, east of Market Street, on the mile-long, parallel stretches of Mechanic and Water streets, for the most part, and on the close-in cross streets. Land there was cheap. In summer it boiled with heat and damp from the river, as well as with mosquitoes. In winter it was raw and cold and gloomy. There were, furthermore, several then-small factories in the district as well as the GK. and T.T. yards and roundhouse. It was a smoky, clangorous neighborhood.

Gradually, however, the Irish and Italians and Slavs pushed north into the St. Anne, St.

Paul and Mary streets area, which came to he known as the “Catholic Section.” The Negroes, displaced for a generation to outlying districts, often to mere tin shacks along the municipal dump, poured back in town and filled the slummy vacuum left by the economically ascending

“foreigners.” These, by the early twenties, were second- and third-generation Americans and controlled much of River City’s politics as well as most of its organized vice and its rackets.

Emmet Sloan, perhaps because his occasional patronage of The Block kept him in sensory touch with the dismal living conditions of the Negroes, determined to do something for them. Their direst need was a hospital. And when, in 1937, he foreclosed on a rayon knitting mill on James Street, he rebuilt it into an “infirmary.” At first, the inhabitants of the “Catholic” area had violently and actively resented the resulting enlargement of Negro “territory.” There had been street brawls. The windows of the Infirmary had been smashed the night before its dedication. But Sloan, a determined man, finally established his gift for its intended recipients, by the costly but very effective means of constructing a much better hospital for the “foreign”

population on a site which thitherto had been the territory of “white” people—native sons, one hundred per cent Americans, his “own” group. This in turn caused litigation. However, the “old families” of River City along with its citizens were beginning to move to the suburbs.

Looking at maps, thinking of the temper of people, considering the future population and the probable developments of technology, Emmet Sloan decided the migration to suburbs in the thirties and forties was the start of a future landslide. Hence he invested in real estate on River City’s edges and was among the first to finance the removal into suburban communities of branches of big department stores. His grandfather had seen what railroads meant to the farm and the city; his father had seen what automobiles would do to make cities grow; now Emmet perceived the automotive vehicle was about to strangle cities. All three had acted on their views with phenomenal financial success.

Minerva had never been much interested in colored people. While her husband lived, she had dutifully inspected the Infirmary from time to time and irregularly dropped in on Wednesday afternoons, when a group of white Episcopal ladies—“meddlesome gossips and prying shrews,”

Minerva called them—came to the Infirmary to sew. One of Minerva’s countless, small sensations of relief, at the time of Emmet’s funeral, had been the realization that he would no longer “dragoon” her to those charitable Wednesdays.

In that, to her astonishment, Minerva found she had erred.

Shortly before his death, Emmet had signed a contract employing as the new head of the Infirmary one Alice Groves, an expert in hospital management, with a varied postgraduate background and a doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University. Minerva had paid little attention at the time and remembered only her husband’s delighted remark that he and the hospital board had “bribed the woman away from Kansas City.” She understood the joys of successful bribery.

After Emmet was decently interred, Minerva had herself driven by Willis, in the Rolls, to what she thought of as a “last” Wednesday meeting. She was very much discountenanced to find that the new head of the Infirmary, Alice Groves, was
herself a Negress.
A mulatto, Minerva decided on sight. Not only that, hut Alice Groves was beautiful, gracious, young and, of course, exceedingly well educated. She spoke English with “a better Eastern accent than my son, Kit,”

Minerva told certain outraged ladies.

She was warm and kind with Minerva, who made the sourest and most critical inspection in the history of the Infirmary, even though she found little enough to criticize, the facilities considered. After the tour of the hospital, to Minerva’s intense amazement, reporters from her own papers, accompanied by cameramen, took pictures of her with Alice and a dozen white-uniformed, dark-skinned nurses. These were duly printed, with captions noting how Mrs. Sloan was “carrying on the traditional family charities.” There was much editorial talk about the Infirmary being her late husband’s “favorite” charity and about her “nobility” in visiting it while her “bereavement was so recent.”

Minerva knew, of course, that it was a put-up job. Alice Groves was well aware her patronage was essential to the running of the hospital. So Alice Groves meant to keep Minerva’s interest. She was evidently publicity wise and had used publicity to gain her ends: Minerva could not repudiate a vast amount of printed praise. She came for a few Wednesdays and signed the annual check.

Just when she thought she could let the duty wither on the vine, she learned of a movement to rename the Infirmary. Mildred Tatum had been the first free slave to settle in River City. The colored population had apparently decided that, since they were no longer slaves, their hospital should have a different name. And “school children [Minerva again noted in her own newspapers] had voted by hundreds,” in a contest, to call it the “Minerva Sloan Infirmary.”

That move Minerva partly checked. She had no wish to be immortalized over the doorway—not to mention on the bedpans and diapers—of a “darkie infirmary.” But even as she graciously declined the offer and the vote of children, she found herself that much more enmeshed in Alice Groves’s toils. Her very refusal of the use of her name had wedded her
person
to the charity, which was what the administrator had wanted.

Their relations thenceforward were cordial but, on Minerva’s part, guarded. No white woman in River city or Green Prairie had ever managed to “take” her against her will, so thoroughly. . . .

On a Wednesday, as usual, Willis drove across town to the Infirmary punctually at three.

Alice Groves, as usual, stood at the head of the stairs within the dingy building. She was dressed in powder blue, which, Minerva noted, became her. Behind Alice were the usual starched bevies of nurses, drawn up like a company for inspection.

Minerva made panting, reluctant rounds—baby wards and the new operating room (which was a sickening display of shiny things best not thought about, Minerva felt). She drew the line at visiting the adult wards, and there were no private rooms.

“Right after Christmas,” Alice Groves said pleasantly, as they finished the tour and started toward the bright, chintz-draped room where the ‘Wednesday ladies” sewed, “we’re going to start a drive among our own people for fifty thousand dollars.”

“Good heavens! Can you raise anything like that?”

“Perhaps not. It’s the amount we need to buy a little building in the country, for chronics.

There are so many!”

Minerva, headed for the white ladies, was beginning to think other thoughts. “That’s really very enterprising and wonderful—”

“I’m delighted you approve. I was sure you would. In fact, I’ve told the press—”

“What
have you told the press?”

“That you approved. In fact, I said it was your idea.”

“No harm in that,” Minerva murmured.

“You’re always so kind, Mrs. Sloan!”

Minerva thought grimly that beyond doubt this “chronic home” drive would cost her the uncontributed balance of its quota. She had to admit Alice Groves was a good operator. It might, she thought, pay to take Alice into her camp. Then she saw the hat—the sprouted fright—that Netta Bailey was wearing, and she went through the chatting, peanut-eating, one-day seamstresses with a booming, “Afternoon, everybody! Afternoon, Netta! So glad you’re here. I wanted to have a private chat with you—
church matters
—before
you left.”

It was recognition that both delighted and alarmed Netta. Minerva seldom did more than nod to her, at a distance.

The two women were ideally suited to the “little talk” that took place in the “visitors’

powder room,” some half hour later. They were suited in the sense that each knew what she wanted and what the other wanted and each knew what she had of value to the other. It wasn’t even a very long talk, considering that it proposed to settle the lives of a son and a daughter.

Minerva explained her position, rapidly. “You see,” she wound up, “my boy loves Lenore. Crazy about her. Charming girl. I’m crazy about her myself. So
unfortunate,
dear, old Beau would make a slip at such a time! I have
no sympathy
with crookedness, Mrs. Bailey. . . .”

“Of
course
not!”

Minerva squinted, but she could not prove irony in the response. She made a thin, tight mouth, a formidable mouth, and then let it relax into a smile. “However, it was only a slip, a
little
slip, and his first. It must, of course, be his last. I can hardly send my son’s future father-in-law packing off to prison—”

“God forbid!” There was, at least, no irony in that.

“On the other hand,” Minerva went on, changing her tone to one of intimacy, intimacy tinged with potential regret and the potential withdrawal of intimacy, “we mothers understand things our children don’t. Kit tells me Lenore doesn’t seem to reciprocate his feelings . . .”

“Oh! I’m
sure
she does!” Netta was alarmed, but not as much as she appeared to be.

“I can understand it. Kit’s rather a—shall we say,
frightening
young man, from the standpoint of an innocent young thing.”

“Innocent as driven snow,” Mrs. Bailey murmured.

“Kit’s peremptory, bullheaded, reckless and foolish. I wouldn’t have it any other way,”

Mrs. Sloan said sharply. “But you know and I know how love grows in marriage—”

“Indeed, I do!”

“—so I feel, a word from you, Mrs. Bailey—I
must
call you Netta, and you must call me Minerva—the
right
word ...”

“I understand perfectly,” Netta gulped. “Minerva.”

“I’m
sure
you do!”

As soon as she decently could, Netta left the Infirmary and drove home at rocket speed.

The first thing she had to do was to sober up Beau, who’d been drinking like a fish since coming home from the bank. Lenore could be tackled after that. Beau would sober up fast enough when she got through the fog with the news of reprieve. Lenore would be a more difficult subject.

But Minerva stayed on quite a while, even sewed a little. When Willis drove her away, she waved from the window of the Rolls to a contented, gracious Alice Groves on the Infirmary steps.

Henry Conner was in jail.

He could hardly believe it.

Two uniformed cops had escorted him up the steps and taken him into a room and closed a door. The door had been locked and Henry saw bars on the windows. They hadn’t let him talk, and they’d ignored his shout, “Call Lawyer Balcomb!”

Presently, as he paced in the room, the door was unlocked and different officers, men he knew only by sight, said, “This way.”