Back to Blood

by Tom Wolfe

  Ghislaine apparently took it as one of his ironic smiles, which he had been guilty of in the past, and it was absolutely not the way to tell a child what you think. When they figure out you are mocking them, it ignites the bitterest resentment. Ghislaine must have taken it as one of those smiles, because she switched to English and spoke rapidly, urgently.

  “Oh, I know, you think it’ll take up too much time. And it does take up more time… You don’t just visit the poor and drop off a box of food. You actually spend time with the families and try to learn their real problems, which are a lot more than hunger. That’s exactly what Nicole loves about it! Serena, too! You don’t just sit around feeling charitable. You try to help them organize their lives. That’s the only thing that can possibly change their lives! You can give them food and clothes—but only involvement can make a real difference!” In a completely different voice, a timid little voice, she said pleadingly, “What do you think?”

  What did he think… The next thing he knew, he was bursting out with “What do I think? I think that’s great, Ghislaine! It’s a wonderful idea! It’s perfect for you!”

  He caught himself. He was talking with such off-the-leash enthusiasm, he was coming too close to giving the game away. He was dying to ask her a key question. He forced himself to keep quiet enough to calm down… then continued in a matter-of-fact voice, “Is this something Nicole suggested?”

  “Nicole and Serena, both! Did you ever meet Serena? Serena Jones?”

  “Ummmm…” He compressed his lips and rolled his eyes up and off to one side in the I’m-trying-to-remember mode. It didn’t really matter. “Oh, yes… I think I did.”

  Actually, he knew he hadn’t. But he remembered the name Serena Jones from somewhere… could it have been a column in the Herald? Swell Anglo families with common names like Jones or Smith or Johnson had a way of giving their children, especially their daughters, romantic or exotic or striking first names like Serena or Cornelia or Bettina, or else Old Family Lineage first names like Bradley or Ainsley or Loxley or Taylor or Templeton. He had a student once named Templeton, Templeton Smith. She was never just mousy little Ms. Smith. She was Templeton Smith. His mind was focused on one thing: swell families and families that have a shot at becoming swell. South Beach Outreach was an organization that came up on the social pages of the Herald and in Ocean Drive magazine’s “Parties” section all the time, solely thanks to the social wattage of its members’ families. Just take a look at the pictures—Anglos, Anglos, Anglos with a certain social cachet. Ghislaine’s friend Nicole, whom she had met at the University, was not a WASP, strictly speaking, or not as Lantier understood what the acronym stood for, namely, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. But in her case, strictly speaking didn’t matter. Her last name was Buitenhuys, which is Dutch, and the Buitenhuyses were old money in New York, anointed money in New York. Whether any of them knew that Ghislaine was Haitian, he had no idea. The important thing was, they were accepting her as one of their social milieu. The stated purpose of South Beach Outreach was to go into the slums, such as Overtown and Liberty City—and Little Haiti!—and do good work amongst the poor. So they saw her as a girl as essentially white as they were! As white as he, her father, saw her! The crowning moment would be his Ghislaine going amidst the people of Little Haiti. The vast majority were black, really black, with no qualifiers. Back in Haiti, no family like his, the Lantiers, even looked at really black Haitians. Didn’t so much as waste a glance on them… couldn’t even see them unless they were physically in the way. Well-educated people like himself, with his PhD in French literature, were like another species of Homo sapiens. Here in Miami they were self-consciously part of the dyaspora… the very word denoted high status. How many?—a half?—two-thirds?—of Haitians living in the Miami area were illegal immigrants who didn’t begin to rate the term. A vast majority had never even heard of any dyaspora… and if they had, they had no idea what it meant… and if they knew what it meant, they didn’t know how to pronounce it.

  Ghislaine—he looked at her again. He loved her. She was beautiful, gorgeous! She would soon graduate from the University of Miami in Art History with a 3.8 grade point average. She could easily… pass… He kept that word, pass, hidden in his head, beneath a lateral geniculate… He would never utter pass out loud in front of Ghislaine… or anybody else, for that matter. But he had told her, many times, in fact, that there was nothing to hold her back. He hoped she had gotten the message about… that, too. In some ways, she was sophisticated—when she talked about art, for example. It could be the age of Giotto, the age of Watteau, the age of Picasso, or the age of Bouguereau, for that matter—she knew so much! In another way she wasn’t sophisticated at all. She was never ironic or sarcastic or cynical or nihilistic or contemptuous or any of those things, which are all the signs of the tarantula in smart people, the resentful small deadly creature that never fights… that only waits to bite fiercely and maybe kill you that way. ::::::I’ve got too much of that in myself.:::::: They sat down. Ghislaine was in the Jean Calvin chair. He sat at his desk. The desk, with its Art Deco kidney shape, its gallery, its sharkskin writing surface, the delicately tapered shin guards on its legs, its ivory dentils running about the entire rim, its vertical strings of ivory running through the macassar ebony, was school-of-Ruhlmann, and not by the great Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann himself; but it was very expensive, all the same, certainly to Lantier’s way of thinking. Likewise, the very expensive desk chair, with its tapered bands of ivory set into all four shin guards… All very expensive… but Lantier had still been in the giddy caution-to-the-winds euphoria of just having bought a house for madly more than he could afford. What was an insanely high price for his, the maître’s, own desk and chair, on top of that?

  At this moment Ghislaine sat on that miserable chair with perfect posture… and yet she was relaxed. He looked at her as objectively as he could. He didn’t want to deceive himself. He didn’t want to expect the impossible from her… She had a nice slim shape and lovely legs. She must have figured that out for herself, because she rarely wore jeans or any other form of pants. She was wearing a tan skirt—he had no idea what material—short but not catastrophically short… a gorgeous long-sleeved silk blouse—or it looked like silk to him—unbuttoned partway, but not irredeemably far down… Ghislaine never used the word blouse, but that’s what it was to him. From out of the open collar rose her perfect slender neck.

  And her face—here he found it hard to be objective. He wanted to see her as his daughter.

  He himself—he couldn’t abide the jeans girls wore to class. They looked so common. He got the feeling half of them didn’t even own anything else to cover themselves up with from the waist down. So there wasn’t much he could do about the jeans. But those damned babyish baseball caps boys wore to class—with that infantile fashion he took action. One day, at the beginning of class, he said, “Mr. Ramirez, where do you have to go to find a cap like yours?—fits on sideways like that?… and Mr. Strudmire… yours goes straight down your neck and has that little cutout in front so we can see a little bit of your upper forehead. Do they make them like that, or do you have to get them custom-made?”

  But all he got out of Mr. Ramirez and Mr. Strudmire were begrudging half-chuckles, and from the rest of the class, even the girls, nothing at all. They were irony-proof. The next class they and many other boys still had these little-boy baseball caps on. So he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, from now on no caps or other headgear may be worn in this class unless it’s required by religious orthodoxy. Have I made myself clear? Anyone who insists on wearing a cap to class—I’ll have to take him to the principal’s office.” They didn’t get that, either. They just looked at one another… puzzled. To himself he said, The principal—get it? That’s what you have in high school, not in college, and this is college. You’re irony-proof, aren’t you. You’re children! What are you doing here? Look at you… it’s not just the baseball caps, it’s also the short pants and the flip-flops and t
he shirts hanging down below the waist, way down, in some cases. You’ve regressed! You’re ten years old again! Well, at least they didn’t wear baseball caps to class anymore. Maybe they thought there really was a principal at EGU… and I’m supposed to teach these borderline idiots…

  No, he must not mention any of this to Ghislaine. She would be shocked. She wasn’t ready for… snobbery. She was at the age, twenty-one, when a girl’s heart is filled to the brim with charity and love for the little people. She was still too young and unsophisticated to be told that her South Beach Outreach pity for the poor was actually a luxury for someone like her. It meant that her family had enough money and standing to be able to afford Good Works. Not that he made much money as an associate professor of French at EGU, Everglades Global University. But he was an intellectual, a scholar… and a writer… or at least he had managed to publish twenty-four articles in academic journals and one book. The book and the articles gave him enough cachet at least to give Ghislaine a boost up to the level of South Beach Outreach… My daughter reaches out to the poor!… Everybody had heard of South Beach Outreach. There were even some celebrities, such as Beth Carhart and Jenny Ringer, who were involved with it.

  He stared over Ghislaine’s shoulder and out the window… at nothing… with a rueful expression. He was not all that far from being as light-skinned as she was. He could have done what she was now in a position to do, couldn’t he… but he was known as a Haitian. That was why EGU had hired him in the first place. They liked the “diversity” of having a Haitian… with a PhD from Columbia… who could teach French… and Creole. Oh yes, Creole… they were hot to have a professor who taught Creole… “the language of the people”… probably 85 percent of his countrymen spoke Creole and only Creole. The rest spoke the official national language, French, and quite a few of the fortunate 15 percent spoke in a casserole of both Creole and French. He made it a rule that here in this house, they spoke only French. To Ghislaine it had become second nature. Her brother, Philippe, on the other hand, although only fifteen, was already contaminated. He could speak French pretty well, so long as the subject didn’t go beyond what an eleven- or twelve-year-old was likely to know about. Beyond that he struggled along with something not far above Black English, namely Creole. How had he even picked it up? Not in this house, he hadn’t… Creole was a language for primitives! Oh, no two ways about it! The verbs didn’t even conjugate. No “I give, I gave, I was giving, I was given, I have given, I had given, I will give, I should give, I should have given.” In Creole it was m ba, and that was it for that verb… “I give, I give, I give”… You just had to figure out the time and the conditionals from the context. For any university to teach this stupid language was either what Veblen called “conspicuous waste” or one of the endless travesties created by the doctrine of political correctness. It was like instituting courses and hiring faculty to teach the mongrel form of the Mayan language that people up in the mountains of Guatemala spoke—

  All this shot through Lantier’s thoughts in an instant.

  Now he looked directly at Ghislaine. He smiled… to cover up the fact that he was trying… objectively… to assess her face. Her skin was whiter than most white people’s. As soon as Ghislaine was old enough to understand words at all, Louisette had started telling her about sunny days. Direct sun wasn’t good for your skin. The worst thing of all was to take a sunbath. Even walking in the sun was too much of a risk. She should wear big-brimmed straw hats. Better still, an umbrella. Little girls couldn’t very well go around with parasols, however. But if they had to walk in the sun, they should at least have straw hats. She must always remember that she had very beautiful but very fair skin that would burn easily, and she should do anything to avoid sunburns. But Ghislaine figured it out very quickly. It had nothing to do with sunburns… it had to do with sunbrowning. In the sun, skin like hers, her beautiful whiter-than-white skin, would darken just like that! In no time she could turn Neg… just like that. Her hair was black as could be, but thank God it didn’t have a crinkle in it. It might have been a little softer, but it was straight. Louisette couldn’t bring herself to dwell on the lips because Ghislaine’s lips didn’t tend toward arterial red in the red spectrum but more toward an amber-brown. They were beautiful lips, however. Her nose was perfectly fine. Well… that fatty fibrous tissue that covers the alar cartilage and creates those little round mounds on either side of the nose at the nostril—oh, alar cartilage, absolutely! He knew as well as any anatomist what he was talking about here. One had better believe that! Hers flared out slightly too widely but not so far that she didn’t look white. Her chin could have been a little larger, and her jaw a bit squarer, to balance the little round mounds. Her eyes were black as charcoal but very large and sparkling. Much of the sparkle was from her personality, of course. She was a happy girl. Louisette had given her all the confidence in the world. ::::::Oh, Louisette! I think of you, and I want to cry! There are so many moments like this every day! Is that why I love Ghislaine so much—because I look at her and I see you? Well, no, because I loved her this way while you were still with us, too. A man’s life doesn’t begin until he has his first child. You see your soul in another person’s eyes, and you love her more than yourself, and that feeling is sublime!:::::: Ghislaine had the sort of confidence a child gets only if her parents spend a lot of time with her—a lot. Some would argue that a girl like Ghislaine, who is so close to her family, should go away to college and learn early that she’s entering a life in which she is going to find herself in one alien context after another and should figure out strategies on her own. Lantier didn’t agree with that. All this business about “contexts” and “life strategies” and alien this and alien that—it was all a concept with no bottom to it. It was just faux-psychological lufts and wafts. The main thing, to him, was that the campus of the University of Miami was only twenty minutes away from their house. Anywhere else she would have been “a Haitian girl.” Oh, it would come out, but here she wasn’t “that Haitian girl I room with” or any other form of that trap in which “if you say I’m this, then obviously I can’t be that.” Here she can be what she is and has become. She’s a very nice-looking young woman… Even as those words formed in his mind, he knew he was putting her on a second tier. She wasn’t as beautiful as a Northern European blonde, an Estonian or a Lithuanian or a Norwegian or a Russian, and she wouldn’t be mistaken for a Latin beauty, either, despite having some features in common with a Latina. No, she was herself. The very sight of Ghislaine sitting there in that little chair with such perfect posture—Louisette!—you made sure Ghislaine and Philippe acquired that while they were too young to question it! He wanted to get up from his anonymous French swivel chair and go over and embrace Ghislaine right now. South Beach Outreach! It was almost too good to be true.

  Who’s that?

  Lantier’s office door was closed, but he and Ghislaine looked in the direction of the side door, which opened into the kitchen. Two people were coming up the four or five steps that led to the door from outside. Philippe? But Lee de Forest, Philippe’s high school, wouldn’t let out for more than two hours. The voice sounded like Philippe’s—but it was speaking Creole. Creole!

  A second voice said, “Eske men papa ou?” (Your father here?)

  The first voice said, “No, li inivèsite. Pa di anyen, okay?” (No, he at the university. Listen, we don’t talk to nobody about this, okay?)

  The second voice said, “Mwen konnen.” (I know.)

  The first said, in Creole, “My father, he don’t like guys like that, but he don’ need know about this thing. Nome sayin’, bro?”

  “He no like me, neither, Philippe.”

  “How you know that? He don’t say nothing to me.”

  “Oh, he not say nothing to me, neither. He don’t need to. I see the way he look at me—or not look at me. He look right through me. I’m not there. Nome sayin’?”

  Lantier looked at Ghislaine. So it was Philippe. ::::::Philippe and his blac
k Haitian buddy, God help us, Antoine.:::::: And Antoine was right. Lantier didn’t like looking at him or talking to him. Antoine always tried to be cool and speak in perfect Black English, every illiterate, seventy-five-IQ syllable and sound of it. When that was too difficult a linguistic leap, he reverted to Creole. Antoine was one of those black-as-midnight Haitians—and their number was legion—who said tablo, Creole for “the table,” and hadn’t the slightest notion that it might have anything at all to do with la table, French for “the table.”

  Ghislaine had the expression of someone who has taken in a big breath but isn’t letting it out. She looked terribly anxious. Lantier guessed it wasn’t about what the boys had said, since her knowledge of Creole was next to nothing. It was the fact that Philippe was jabbering Creole at all chez Lantier—and within Père Lantier’s earshot—and, on top of that, with a very dark Low-Rent Haitian pal her father did not want to set foot in his house… and breathe in his air… and exhale it… thereby contaminating it, turning Franco-mulat air into Neg air.

  Now the Creole boys were in the kitchen opening and closing the refrigerator and this-and-that drawer. Ghislaine got up and went to the door, no doubt to open it and let the boys know that they were not alone in the house. But Lantier motioned for her to sit back down and put his forefinger across his lips. Reluctantly and nervously she sat back down.

  In Creole, Antoine said, “You see the look on his face when the cops take him by the elbow?”

  Philippe tried to maintain his new deep voice, but it was turning gosling on him. So he gave it up and said in Creole, “They not do nothing with him, you think?”