The Dinner Party

by Howard Fast

  MacKenzie had just finished inserting the boards that widened the table to its full extent. “If you would just hold the other end, Senator, we could get rid of the cracks.”

  The table came together properly. MacKenzie excused himself, and Dolly spread the place cards on the table.

  “You and I at the two ends,” she said. “We have to hang it on that. Ordinarily I’d say give me the two lords of Pennsylvania Avenue, and you’d have their wives.”

  “Why not?” the senator wondered. “As a start.”

  “Because Augustus Adams Fillmore Rosenberg Levi is being picked up at the airport by our two kids this very moment.” It gave her a reason to smile and signal that she would like to be friends, at least for today.

  “Good heavens! Is that his real name?”

  “Every last bit of it.”

  “You never told me that. Nobody has four given names.”

  “Pop has. My grandfather was a peculiar man.”

  “That’s the trouble with an old family,” the senator said. “They get peculiar.”

  “Oh?” She regarded him thoughtfully.

  “I say that in awe. And respect. My word, Dolly, four names. I’m envious. My family never had enough money to even begin to be peculiar. A middle name, mine is Joseph. But no more.”

  “Your daddy was a lovely man, and a gentleman. Sometimes, you’re like him, Richard. You can be very funny and very sweet. Sometimes,” she temporized.

  “When you decided I was having an affair, why didn’t you say something?”

  “To what end? I don’t want to divorce you.”

  “Why?”

  “God knows—we’re doing the seating, aren’t we?”

  “Yes. Sure. You feel that Gus will be offended if he’s not sitting at your right hand?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Suppose you put Winnie Justin on my left. She’s bright and a bit nasty but she’s good-looking. Gus is impressed with a smart, good-looking lady, so he could sit next to her, and then you put Liz on the other side of him, and he ought to be happy as a clam.”

  “We’re eleven. That means five on one side of the table and four on the other. Who sits between Liz and me? Or is it the five side?” She slid the place cards around to match the senator’s suggestion.

  “No, I think the four side.”

  “That will put Gus in a pet. When he comes here and the kids are home, he’ll want a spot between Liz and me.”

  “Dolly, I know that your father has met practically everyone in this country and almost everyone in most other countries, and he knows Web Heller, but this will be the first time he’s had dinner with Bill Justin, a nasty and powerful man. He’s sitting down with two of the most powerful men in the country—in fact with two of the men who run this country behind that charade they call the presidency, so it seems to me that what Gus would appreciate most is to sit facing these two major linemen. That way he can say his piece without twisting his head and talking across someone else.”

  “Possible,” Dolly agreed, moving the cards. “If I put Heller next to me—and then who sits next to him?”

  “Jenny. Your mother.”

  “O.K. Mom can hold her own with that cadaverous old bastard. Then on the other side of mother—Franny Heller?”

  “Why not. I can take her. A little flattery and she melts all over her dinner plate. And then to my left, Clarence Jones.”

  “Good—good thinking. You’ll have him under your wing.” She slid the cards around. “We’re left with Father, Liz and Leonard. But we make progress.” She stared at the cards. “You want Liz next to Jones—or Winnie Justin?”

  “If we put Liz next to Jones, then Leonard gets Winnie Justin.”

  “Oh, no. That won’t do. Absolutely not.”

  “Then she’s mine—right here, between Jones and Gus.”

  “Can Jones handle her? Leonard says he’s enormously bright, but she is South and she has a sharp tongue and a reputation for bitchiness.”

  “Still, she’s at a dinner table under her husband’s eye. She’ll behave. And Jones may surprise us.”

  “Well, here it is,” Dolly agreed, moving the cards to form a miniature pattern on the polished surface of the table. On my right, Leonard, Liz, Daddy, Winnie and Jones. On my left, Heller, Mother, Bill Justin and Frannie Heller.”

  “It should work.”

  “You know how many perfectly rotten dinner parties we’ve been to? It’s because few hostesses pause to consider that they’re not simply serving food, but creating a work of art—I mean a theatrical piece.” She looked at her husband questioningly.

  “Yes. I suppose I’d agree with that. Certainly about the lousy dinner parties,” thinking how strange it was that he, a United States senator, with all the weight of a suicidal world on his mind and conscience, should be occupied with the seating arrangement at a dinner table. But thus the whole world was occupied, he realized, eating, drinking, screwing, weeping, laughing, robbing, killing, and why should he be any different?

  Dolly shrugged. “I apologize,” she said bitterly. “I’m pleading my case that there’s some reason for me to exist on this earth, that I’m some use to somebody.”

  ELEVEN

  A bit earlier, MacKenzie had mentioned to his wife that he hadn’t seen Jones at breakfast. Ellen was in the process of rehearsing Nellie Clough. Nellie knew, but each time she had to be rehearsed, and if she was not rehearsed, some disaster inevitably followed. “Mr. MacKenzie,” Ellen said—to Nellie he was always Mr. MacKenzie—“will carve in the kitchen and serve the meat. I will prepare the platter for the beans and chopped spinach. We’ll go over that later. You will follow Mr. MacKenzie with the vegetable platter. Do you understand me, girl?”

  “I know what to do.”

  “You do and you don’t. The quenelle will be ready in the kitchen, and you’ll serve that first as Mr. MacKenzie pours the wine.” She turned to her husband. “None of the young people had breakfast. Liz and Leonard went off to the airport. Where is Mr. Jones?”

  “He’s just a kid, Ellen.”

  “Shoo off,” she said to Nellie. “Did you do the bedrooms?”

  “Indeed I did.”

  “Run the vacuum in the library—he’s a guest in this house,” she said to her husband, “and he will be Mr. Jones as long as he’s a guest in this house.”

  “I think he’s in the library.”

  “Nellie,” Ellen called, “hold up with the vacuum. Do Senator Cromwell’s office, just neaten and dust.”

  Nellie departed.

  “Some people,” Ellen said, “it seems to make no difference they eat breakfast or they don’t.”

  “I’ll ask him if he wants something, you know, like maybe a sandwich and coffee.” He shook his head. “I come in there and say to this kid, Mr. Jones—”

  “Oh, stop it!” Ellen snapped.

  “I got problems,” Mac protested.

  “You make problems. Why can’t you get it into your head that it don’t make no difference, black or white?”

  “Because,” he said slowly, “I am black and Jones is black, and it makes one big mother-fucken difference.”

  “I’ll tell you something,” Ellen said angrily. “You never use that kind of filthy language in front of nobody but me! How dare you? Am I a prostitute? What gives you the right to talk to me like that? All my life, I been trying to civilize you, and I am sick of it!”

  “I’m sorry—” Mac began.

  “Never you mind sorry! You get yourself into the library and ask Mr. Jones whether he’s hungry! Mr. Jones—you understand me?”

  MacKenzie nodded without speaking and left the kitchen hurriedly, asking himself why on earth he ever gave Ellen these opportunities to manhandle him. By his lights, he was being manhandled. He had raised a simple and obvious point, and had his head handed to him.

  As a result, MacKenzie entered the library with a certain amount of truculence, and then was put off by Clarence’s engaging smile. “Hello.
Am I making too much of a mess here?” He had half a dozen books and magazines on the table.

  “No, that don’t matter. Truth is, Mr. Jones, we figured you missed breakfast and might like a sandwich or something.”

  “Oh, thank you. That’s very kind of you, but Nellie brought us things at the pool and we stuffed ourselves.” He remembered and said, “I do hope this doesn’t get her into trouble.”

  “Not if I don’t tell my wife.”

  “My name’s Clarence. I’m not used to being called Mr. Jones.”

  “Clarence.” MacKenzie nodded. “They call me Mac.” He was looking at the books on the table. He felt a desperate need to prove to Jones that he, Mac, was not a lump, a mindless servant, and at the same time he was hesitant and embarrassed at the thought of projecting himself toward this good-looking, slender young black man simply on the basis of their both being black. All the books and magazines were focused on one subject. He had to gird himself to say, “You must be a lot interested in quantum mechanics.” His voice almost broke, but he got it out.

  Clarence responded with a wide grin. “You, too—man, it’s like religion. You know, my mama and daddy, all they ever wanted and dreamed of was me being a lawyer, and then in politics, like Julian Bond. He’s their hero—of course, they’re southern folk. They laid that on me and also I’m supposed to look like Julian, but I don’t see it.”

  “Oh, you do, you do,” Mac agreed.

  “So here I am at Harvard Law and Mama and Daddy are happy, but if I had it my way, it would be physics and quantum mechanics. There’s all the secrets of the universe waiting to be solved. And here—here’s maybe a hundred books on the subject.”

  “That’s right. And a new one comes in every week or so.”

  “But who is it? Is this Leonard’s secret? He never talked about it, and heaven knows, I gave him plenty of opportunity, bored him to death. Is it Liz?”

  “You mean, who studies them books on quantum mechanics? It’s the senator. He don’t go anywhere without putting one of them in his briefcase.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes indeed, Mr.—Clarence. Truth is, I tried one once, but I didn’t make it,” he confessed. “I couldn’t make head or tail out of any of it. I’m just too ignorant for that kind of thing.”

  “No, no. Unlearned. You have to have a basis, years of working at it.”

  “Just too old and stubborn,” Mac said, grinning. “But the senator—I once asked him is it part of being a senator, he says no, no way, just a hobby of mine. It’s my own way to …” Mac paused. “Now what is the word? Yeah, eternity.”

  “How little we know about people,” Jones said, causing Mac to wonder why he spoke so sadly. “No, sir, Mr. MacKenzie. I’m not hungry, but thank you so much for tracking me down and asking me. I’ll put the books back exactly where they were.”

  “Oh, no. About the books, it don’t matter about the books. I’ll put them back. Just feel free with them. We’ll be serving lunch on the terrace somewhere between one and two, depending on whether the old folks come in on time. It’s cool and pleasant here, so if you want to stay here, I’ll be happy to call you when lunch is ready.”

  Jones thanked him, and then, back in the kitchen, Ellen said to Mac, “Well, did you find him?”

  “In the library.”

  “Does he want a bite of something?”

  “No. Says he ain’t hungry.”

  Ellen was mincing garlic, an odor that Mac found distasteful and could never adapt to. He sniffed, made a sour face, and moved back.

  “What’s he like? You get a chance to say something to him?”

  “Fine boy. Reminds me of Mason. Some of these young colored kids, I just look at them and feel pleased. Now he’s a friend of Leonard. Funny thing, Mason and Leonard, they grew up here like brothers—but they never became real friends. Know what I mean?”

  “I know you just standing there and flapping your lips. Miss Dolly is in the dining room setting up, and you certainly could be a help to her.”

  “Yavo, mein Führer.”

  “And don’t you start that either.”

  “Well, heavens to Betsy, Ellen, I am just making a kind of observation on that fact that the senator’s son comes home with a black kid, and it don’t even stir a ripple in this house.”

  “Why should it?”

  “I give up,” he said, and stalked out of the kitchen.

  TWELVE

  I think we have it,” Dolly said to the senator.

  “I think you’re having a bit of glee putting Jones next to Winnie Justin.”

  Dolly smiled at him. It was a treat when she smiled. Her whole face lit up and she became young and alive, as he remembered her from the time they married. “You did it,” she said.

  “Yes, I suppose I did. We’re both wicked.”

  “We try.” She laughed. “I’ve always felt that a dinner party improves with a bit of humor.”

  MacKenzie entered at this point, and Dolly said to him, “Mac, I hate to lay any more polishing on you, but the candlesticks—”

  “Of course. I should have remembered.”

  “And then we’ll set for lunch, outside. This is what keeping a restaurant entails,” she said to the senator. “Whatever hard times we come on, let’s never open a restaurant.”

  “Not likely, not at all likely,” Mac said.

  “You know,” the senator said to her, “I’m suddenly quite tired. Do you think I have time for a nap before lunch?”

  Her little joke about the restaurant had cleared the air. They were back together, until the next time one of them exploded in anger at the other. She touched his arm. “Of course. Of course, Richard.”

  Nellie was in the senator’s wing of the house, the part where he had his bedroom and the small office that opened from it, his cul-de-sac, his retreat from the world, to which there was no other entrance than through his bedroom. He had wanted it that way; his cave; he kept the door locked for the most part. Nellie had made up his bed and was running an electric broom over the carpeting. She cut the broom as he entered.

  “I’m almost finished, Senator Cromwell,” she said to him very formally, yet with an intimacy that a woman adopts once she has been to bed with a man not her husband, yet someone gentle and considerate. She assumes a relationship that is not catalogued; not a mistress, not precisely a friend of the other sex, not a sibling; a relationship both warm and protective that speaks of the body she gave him and his acceptance of the gift. Nellie treasured it. The senator was unfailingly kind. On and off, he lusted after her, her sweet, round body and her shimmering gold-red hair, her whiteness and softness. She never sat in the sun. She had the Irish wisdom of a race that does not sit in the sun.

  Nellie finished and gathered her cleaning things. “Would you like me to put your office to rights?”

  “No, not today, Nellie.”

  “If I may say so, you look tired.”

  “I am tired.”

  “I could bring you a nice cup of tea.”

  “Thank you, dear. No.” He sat down on the edge of the bed and kicked his shoes off, old loafers that were like old friends.

  “Shall I draw the drapes?”

  “Please.”

  She closed the draperies, and the senator sprawled out on the bed. Nellie thought of how nice it would be to bend over and kiss him; it remained just a thought. Nellie could think of an advance toward the senator, but she was incapable of making one. She took her cleaning things out of the room, closing the door gently behind her.

  The senator closed his eyes and was asleep almost instantly, and then he was rocked out of sleep by the telephone. He could not have been asleep more than five or ten minutes, clutching a waking-sleeping dream of summer long, long ago; summer when he was just a kid, wading barefoot in the creek behind their home. It was the third ring before the answering machine clicked on, and then he heard Joan’s voice, “Senator, I’m closing the office. Nothing today except Callahan, you remember the fat, beer-bellied
gonif who wants to get in on the reservoir. The more I think of that reservoir scheme, the worse it gets. The survey came back today, almost four hundred families to be displaced or moved, and it’s too many enemies for us to have in this state. Sorry about today, sorry about myself, and for heaven’s sake, be careful with the Sanctuary thing. It’s a very hot potato.”

  How did he always find women who loved him and would not hurt him? He didn’t consider himself either handsome or lovable.

  He reset the machine, dropped into the chair behind his desk, and thought of Joan Herman. A hard-nosed woman, totally cynical, believing in absolutely nothing, yet capable of loyalty and love beyond his comprehension. He needed her cynicism because he was incapable of it himself. He had once scribbled out the basis for a bill that would replace “The Star-spangled Banner,” an impossible song he disliked, with “America the Beautiful,” a song he had always believed should be the national anthem. Joan said, “Senator, who gives a fuck about what’s in the song? This one is like apple pie and motherhood. You don’t fool around with ‘The Star-spangled Banner.’”

  “It’s an impossible drinking song. Francis Scott Key was a drunk.”

  “That doesn’t win votes.”

  And Sanctuary. Why was it a hot potato? These people coming to dinner tonight were not of his party. He begrudged them the space at his dinner table, but he gave it to them out of respect for his father-in-law. Respect?