by Howard Fast
“Don’t cry, please.”
Clarence, watching, found himself being drawn into their grief. Close as he was to Leonard, he could never let down his walls of defense for a white man. He had his own hours of terror and despair after the tests told him his own final truth, and being black, he kept that as well as other things inside himself. He resisted the forces drawing him to the brother and sister as long as he could; then he dropped into a chair, covered his face with his arms and wept. He was weeping for himself. How lonely it is to weep for oneself.
Leonard pulled them out of it. “For Christ’s sake, there comes Dad! No tears, please! I can’t face him with it—please!”
They had dried their tears and pulled themselves together as the senator came onto the pool terrace. He wore a pair of pink and yellow swim shorts, and in spite of being thirty pounds overweight, he was a fine figure of a man, broad-shouldered and well built. He shook hands with Clarence with an energy that excluded any sensitivity to what might have been going on before he arrived. He boomed a cheerful good morning to Leonard and he kissed Elizabeth with exuberance. “So you’re young Jones,” he said to Clarence. “Heard a lot about you, and glad you could come. Make yourself at home. We have a fine library and a nice selection of those movie cassettes that seem to be engulfing the country. Myself, when I want to forget the world, I take an hour at the billiard table.” With that, he walked to the pool and plunged in and came up shouting, “Cold—cold!”
Leonard managed to smile and say, “You see, he never saw me. Never knew I was here.”
SIX
Richard Cromwell swam two full lengths of the long pool before he realized that he had done an utterly deplorable thing; except for “good morning,” he had not said a word directly to his son, whom he had not seen for two months. He was taken sick at the thought. How could he have done anything like that? It was not in his nature, and never before had he done anything like this—or had he? He tried to examine himself, to roll back his memory and make a picture of how he had treated his son through the years; but it was too difficult while he was swimming, and after the fourth length, he pulled himself out of the water hoping to repair the situation.
They had gone. What now? He loved his son, he loved both his kids; he threw this declaration of his feelings at himself, muttering in his mind, Just don’t tell me I don’t love my kids. Well, it was not easy to love Leonard. Other sons related to their fathers, played ball with them, rolled in the grass with them, went walking with them. Yes, there were times he could get Leonard to walk with him; he could count the times on the fingers of his hands; but that didn’t mean he didn’t love his son, nor did it mean that his son didn’t love him. Or did his son love him? It had never occurred to him to ask himself that question. The boy was at prep school, the boy was at college, the senator was in Washington. I do my best, his apology to himself. But what now? What could he do now?
SEVEN
At ten o’clock, Dolly joined Ellen in the kitchen to go over the menu for tonight’s dinner. In all the years that Ellen and Mac had worked for her, Dolly had never found a way to an easy relationship. She had grown up with servants, but they were white servants, and her mother had a distant, imperious way with them, a way that came from an era when the poor were poor and lived and died with it, and the rich were rich by the grace of God. But when it came down to black servants and today, a difference appeared.
There was a difference, subtle, but always there, as Dolly spelled it out to her Washington, D.C. analyst. He was one of the most expensive analysts in Washington, charging one hundred and fifty dollars for his fifty-minute hour, and with enough positive reputation to back that up. He had at least two dozen patients who were wives to elected and appointed officials in high places, and Dolly often felt that the world might be at least slightly improved if the husbands were to take their wives’ places. She irritated Dr. Philip Westfield when she referred to this. She irritated Dr. Westfield in other ways too—which was not supposed to be the case with a bright and reputable psychiatrist, and when she got too deeply under his skin, he ceased to be a Freudian listener and spoke out. As once when he said, “You make too much of this black business, we all recognize it. We live with it.”
“What do you mean—you live with it? Blacks live with it. They suffer, not you.” That finished her analysis for what it was worth. She decided that if she stayed out of Washington for a maximum number of days, it would be cheaper and more effective than analysis.
Apropos of her fluttering memories, she asked Ellen whether she had ever known anyone who was analysed, and to her surprise, Ellen replied that her daughter was taking courses in psychology, and that after she had produced two children, and the store was doing well enough to hire a pharmacist, she’d like to go in for therapy.
“Good! Encourage her. Now let’s get down to work,” Dolly said. “You know, we’re dealing with eleven now. The secretary of state and an assistant secretary. Be duly impressed.”
“I’m duly impressed.”
They sat at the big kitchen table, each of them with a pencil and work pad. For Dolly, a proper dinner party had to be a theatrical production in its own right, planned as such down to every detail. And details change. “I couldn’t get the salmon,” Dolly said.
“That’s a shame.”
“They had a few steaks, but not enough and I didn’t like the look of it. I took sole instead.”
“Just as good.”
“Well, almost. I’ll run through the menu again, and you tell me where we have a problem—if we do. Start with a quenelle of sole.”
“Then we’ll want a white butter sauce, won’t we?”
“I’m not sure of it. But jot it down anyway,” Dolly said. “I think we have everything. There are two jars of the caviar and the shallots are still good. Wine, vinegar, butter—we have a recipe for it somewhere.”
“I think so, yes.”
“Main dish, lamb, flageolets—do we have two boxes of flageolets? If not, we’ll do wild rice. Very classy, but I dislike it.”
Ellen went to the pantry and reported that there were ample flageolets.
“And chopped spinach.”
“We have about five pounds of the fresh spinach, and I think there are eight boxes of the frozen stuff.”
“Fresh spinach. My mother knows.”
“Indeed she does,” Ellen agreed.
“Now on the salad, I want your opinion. I thought of endive and sliced, peeled tomatoes.”
“Endive?”
“Oh? Come on, speak.”
“I feel it’s in the same class as wild rice.”
“Right. Pretentious and not great. No argument? Boston lettuce?”
“Arugula?” Ellen asked tentatively.
“Absolutely. But that wants a tart dressing.”
“No question about that,” Ellen agreed. They were always closer and easier when they worked. “Still lemon mousse for dessert?”
“Oh, absolutely. My father adores it.”
“He had it last time,” Ellen reminded her.
“With a lemon sauce. This time, raspberry sauce. Makes all the difference in the world.”
“It does, sure enough. I spent an hour yesterday squeezing them berries through the sieve. Miserable seeds.”
“But it’s done.”
“All done.”
MacKenzie had come into the kitchen while they were discussing the menu, and he stood at the stainless-steel utility sink, scrubbing his hands. “Miss Dolly,” he said, “did you notice anything driving the station wagon?”
“The brakes pull to the right—just a bit.”
“Well, I got it. They’ll pull straight now. When do you want me to go to the airport and pick up your folks?”
“Oh? No, I’ll need you here, Mac. I want the silver polished, and I want you to see whether you can get the stains out of the dining room rug. I also want to talk about the meat.”
“Miss Dolly, I done that boned lamb maybe two dozen times. I kn
ow just how you want it.”
“She don’t want it grilled through like leather, and you done that too,” Ellen said.
“I’ll send the kids to pick up Mom and Pop. Mac?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He was miffed. He stiffened, looking straight ahead of him.
“You’re my wine steward. You’re the only one I can turn to about wine. What do we have in the cellar that’s really good and goes with my menu?”
That pleased him. The senator had no real interest in wine or liquor. Social drinking was obligatory in his position, as was an occasional cigar under certain circumstances; his pursuit of youth drove him onto the running track and into the pool, never toward a bottle, and while he pretended to some knowledge of wine, what he had mastered came from reading the labels MacKenzie selected. It was MacKenzie who maintained their small but excellent wine cellar, both here and in Washington. Now he said to Dolly, “Well, Miss Dolly, you better run the menu through for me again.”
Dolly knew that he knew exactly what would be served for dinner, and that this was a sort of apology on her part for ordering him away from a pleasant ride to the airport and into the pantry to polish the silver and do other odds and ends, like extending the table and finding flowers in the garden that might be cut. She didn’t mind. “Quenelle of sole, broiled lamb leg, salad, and lemon mousse. In the library, we’ll have assorted nuts, cheese sticks and olives with the drinks.”
MacKenzie thought about it for a moment. “We have a nice white wine. It’s very dry, but light and nice, maybe the best white wine there is. Pavillon Blanc nineteen seventy-eight. It’s a Château—Margaux, I think?”
Dolly, now as always, was impressed. Mac had been reading books on wine for years, and anticipating that she would question him today, he had already worked out the selections. Dolly nodded.
“For the quenelle,” he said. “I’d use the same wine in the library.”
“But not for the lamb?”
“I thought maybe some variety. I was looking for a rosé, but we don’t have more than three bottles of any rosé and it wouldn’t hurt to have something a little heavier with the meat, because most people think it’s beef anyway, the way we do it. We got almost a full case of the Lafite-Rothschild red Bordeaux, nineteen sixty-four, and it’s something we been saving for something real special, if this is that special?”
Dolly grinned and the two blacks began to giggle. “I don’t know,” Dolly said. “They run the country, but I don’t know whether that makes them special. What do you think, Ellen?”
“Now don’t go asking me what I think because trouble comes out of that. What I think is that Mac could get himself one of them jobs in a fancy restaurant when you retire us as a—what do you call it?”
“No retirement,” Dolly said.
“Sommelier,” MacKenzie said. “You like that suggestion of the Rothschild?”
“Absolutely. Now, you know, Mac, I want you to do the carving and the wine. Have Nellie serve, but you rehearse her about which is her left hand and which is her right, and you pour the wine. Now do you think we should have something with the dessert?”
“Just the mousse?”
“We have cigarette cookies,” Ellen said. “Nice and light. I made them yesterday.”
“I forgot about that,” Dolly nodded. “Absolutely. Then we should have champagne. Do we have anything special?”
“We got a case of Cordon Bleu, and we got four bottles, I think, of Dom Perignon, same year as the Margaux, seventy-eight, and really high class.”
“Good. Put them in the fridge and then get the boards in the table. I’ll set it with Ellen just as soon as we can. You know about lunch,” she said to Ellen, “put out cold cuts and a salad niçoise and bread and relish and that sort of thing. We can’t bother with more than that.”
“I’ll hardboil some eggs.”
“Wonderful, wonderful.” Dolly sighed and leaned back in her chair and reflected on the curious ritual they were going through. Making a dinner party. Elizabeth had once said to her, “Dinner parties are ridiculous. You go through this endless fuss and bother, and this and that must be just right, with this wine and that sauce, and Mother dear, it’s absolutely silly, and it’s such a real, heavy class thing.” But Elizabeth was wrong. It was a ritual, Dolly agreed, but not silly—indeed one of the very oldest rituals that had come down unchanged from the misty beginnings of civilization; and right now, sitting in her marvelous twentieth-century kitchen with its eight-burner restaurant stove, its small microwave subsidiary, its enormous refrigerator, its island work counter bearing eight-slice toaster, Cuisinart, Kitchenaid dough hook and two blenders, she remembered, for some reason, a story she had read as a child. In this story, a king had invited one of his powerful noblemen to dinner. It was a very elegant dinner, and course after course was served; but as the dinner progressed, the nobleman realized that no bread was being served, and he also realized that when the dinner was over, he would be killed. Thus the absence of bread on the table, since if one breaks bread with a guest, one cannot do him harm. The story had chilled her blood when she first read it, and now the memory of it sent a chill through her and caused Ellen to ask, “Are you all right?”
Dolly managed to smile. “Of course. I was thinking about bread.”
“No trouble,” Mac said. “I picked up half a dozen french breads day before yesterday. Four of them still in the freezer.” But the thought of death, not bread, had chilled her.
EIGHT
I think we ought to go to someplace quiet, where we can meditate,” Jones said.
“And what will that do for us?” Elizabeth demanded.
“It helps.”
“It helps,” Leonard repeated. “Nothing else helps.”
“I don’t know how to meditate,” Elizabeth said, her eyes full of tears.
“It’s easy, Liz.”
They went to the old barn. The senator’s place was five acres, and the old barn was hidden from the house by a roll of the land. The house that had once been its companion had burned down long ago, leaving only its fieldstone chimney, covered over with honeysuckle and poison ivy. The glade where the barn stood was reached by a narrow dirt road that wound through high, sweet-smelling grass, netted over with insects and birds, all of it succulent in the morning warmth. Once, when Elizabeth was eleven, her mother yielded to her pleading and allowed her grandfather, Augustus Levi, to buy her a horse. At that point, the old barn was hardly more than a pile of barely joined boards, but the senator had it rebuilt for the beautiful little filly that took up residence there—at least for the summer months. In the winter, it was boarded elsewhere. Leonard had never been interested in horses, and by age fourteen, Elizabeth had passed through her horse phase. The horse was sold and the barn abandoned.
They had changed into jeans and cotton shirts, all three of them dressed alike without thought or choice. “We’ll sit cross-legged,” Clarence said. There was an old decaying English saddle in one corner of the barn. “You can use that, Liz, if you have to.”
“I can sit cross-legged,” she said. “I’ve been doing it since age two.”
Leonard had fallen into position, legs crossed, hands loosely clasped in his lap. They formed a triangle, the three of them, each at a corner.
“I pick a spot in the center for my sight,” Clarence said. “I keep my eyes open.”
There was a pungent, lonesome barn smell to the place, full of memories and the nostalgia of time and the pain of time. Why had Leonard picked this place? She thought of getting up and telling them that it was no good and that they must go elsewhere, but instead she asked Leonard, “Are you going to tell Mother and Dad?”
“I have to, sometime.”
“Better if we don’t speak. I’ll speak a little—just to help Elizabeth,” Clarence said.
“Sorry.”
“Wipe your tears, Liz. It’s this moment—only this moment. Nothing is happening now. Don’t think about anything at all. I’ll count my breaths. Ten.”
“And now I stop counting,” Clarence said, “but I watch my breathing. I watch it rise and fall, and at the same time, I make myself aware of my body. I sense toes, feet, legs—I go over my whole body and bring it into my consciousness.”
It was a strange experience for Elizabeth, fighting with all her mental strength to empty her mind, not to think of Leonard and his fate, not to remember their childhood together, the games they played; the time when the two of them were lost in the endless halls and rooms of the Capitol building in Washington; the hours in this same old barn when the two of them groomed her horse; their secret talks and investigations; hard to put that away from her mind; yet it happened, long moments of nothing that washed over her like a very strange benediction.
“I let go of all the tension in my body, in my arms, my neck and around my head.…” His voice trailed away and Elizabeth raised her eyes to look at her brother. His eyes were shadowed. He sat very straight. She wondered how long he had been doing this. It didn’t protect him. Nothing could protect him. He sat cross-legged, slender, erect, handsome, and pledged to death.
And silently he pleaded, fearful and wistful, Let it go away. But to whom? What gods listen to prayers? When he came weeping to his mother as a child, a bruise, a cut, a bump on his head, she could kiss it and make the pain go away, and then the cut or bruise or bang would go away; but now, remembering that terrible, icy line of Swinburne’s, Only the sleep eternal in the eternal night, nothing could make the pain go away.
So easy for Jones to say, “Empty your mind.” Jones had persuaded him into meditation. “It’s bad enough that the world doesn’t know what we are. We don’t know what we are or who we are, and that’s the thing to find out isn’t it? The only thing.”
Over the winter break, instead of going home, he had gone with Jones to a place in the Maine woods, which they called an ashram, and there for six days they had sat and meditated with thirty-seven others in the cold, short winter days, cold always and mimicking the Buddha, who had meditated for many, many years until one day he was able to say, “I know the answers to all the questions.” But Leonard knew no answers. Not why and not how, and the only real prayer now was in thanks, since Jones, miraculously, was free of it. Or was he?