The Dinner Party

by Howard Fast

  “It might,” Elizabeth said.

  “But that’s the difference, Liz. There’s no miracle for me, not even the hope of one.”

  Calling back to her mother, who still sat on the terrace with Jenny, Elizabeth cried, “Mother—we’ll be in my room if you want us for anything.”

  “Leonard,” Dolly called after them, “do find some dinner clothes!”

  “That’s not so,” Elizabeth said softly. “It’s not a matter of a miracle. They will find something, a vaccine, a drug—they must!”

  “Dear Lizzie, I’m afraid not.”

  Jones reacted strangely to Elizabeth’s room. It was a large, beautiful room, with a fireplace piled with wood and framed in a white mantle, white woodwork, wallpaper of dusty rose toile, Portuguese gros-point rugs on the floor, framed eighteenth-century fashion prints, and a portrait of her great-grandmother done by John Singer Sargent. On the bed was an ancient coverlet of stitched silk that some poor Italian woman of a century ago had dulled her eyesight to create. The windows were draped with starched organdy, and the painted electrified oil lamps went well with the old cherry-wood furniture. At first sight, the room threw him off, and he was possessed with a feeling akin to panic, and he stood in the doorway, searching within himself for the origin of his fears. Far, far back. His mother had been a cleaning woman then; his brother had been hurt. He ran to the house where his mother worked, a skinny nine-year-old black kid, and the door of the large house being open, he went in, through the downstairs rooms, and then up the wide staircase to a bedroom such as this, not like this but such as this in confused memory. He had only a glimpse of the room for then there came out of a connecting bathroom, a great blonde lady, half naked and toweling herself dry. Her scream echoed through the years.

  “Come on in,” Elizabeth said to him.

  Leonard crossed to a window and stood looking out. “Ever notice the way Grandma Jenny walks? She sails—slowly, yet the feet don’t appear to move, only the body. Rare in this country, but you see a lot of it in England.”

  Elizabeth was hunting through a drawer. “Trouble with hiding things is you forget where you hid them. I must have put these silly sticks away five years ago. You know why they do it in England—water all around them. Sailing and cricket.”

  “Oh, God,” Leonard said.

  “Sort of clever,” Jones agreed, “but this poor black boy ain’t never been to England. Ain’t been much in white folks’ houses either.”

  Leonard looked at Jones and shook his head. “Every time you pull that blackface routine, you’re mad as hell. What is it now?”

  “Memories.”

  “Stuff them,” Elizabeth said. “They do no good and you can’t eat them. Some day, when you’re up on the appellate bench or maybe as house black on the Supreme Court, and you have ten years of being a law hooker behind you, you’ll get rid of all those memories. Here they are.” She handed out the marijuana. “Let’s light up.”

  “How did you get that cynical?”

  “Daddy’s a senator. I love him, but he’s a senator.”

  Elizabeth struck a match for her brother, but Leonard pulled back and said, “Hold on. This won’t touch us if we keep thinking about this stinking Aids. Maybe tomorrow I’ll cry all day, but right now I’m with two people I love and I can open up and talk to you, but God Almighty, you have to talk to me and you can’t keep looking at me with death on your faces.”

  Elizabeth dropped the burned out match. She struck another and lit her brother’s cigarette. Jones took the matches from her and lit her cigarette and then his own. They inhaled deeply. They sat and looked at each other. They inhaled again. Jones was in a chair. Leonard sat cross-legged on the floor. Elizabeth sprawled on the floor, her back against the bed. She was dressed in jeans and a blue Levi shirt and she looked beautiful.

  I would forget that I’m gay, Jones said to himself, and if you want to dream the way niggers always dream, dream that you shuck the gay and you marry this wonderful person. Just dream it good and strong.

  “If we’re going to sit in silence,” Elizabeth said, “we might as well stiff the pot.”

  “Oh, no. No,” Jones said. “I’ll tell you a story. Long ago, in the days of the Arabian Nights, there was a smuggler named Ahmad Umahr, and he was unquestionably the greatest smuggler of his era.”

  “Is this another one of your creepy Sufi stories?”

  “Sufi stories are not creepy. The Sufis are very wise, the result of so many of them being as black as I am.”

  “Naturally,” Elizabeth agreed.

  “So as I was saying, year after year, Ahmad Umahr would come to the immigration stations at the border, his train of seven or eight or ten donkeys loaded with firewood; and the border people would take each load of firewood apart, stick by stick, yet they never could find what valuable merchandise he smuggled. Then after forty years of successful smuggling, Ahmad, a very rich man now, announced that he was retired and would smuggle no more. Whereupon, a delegation of immigration agents came to him and said, Ahmad Umahr, since you smuggle no more and are retired, tell us what you smuggled? To which Ahmad replied, The answer is obvious. I smuggled donkeys.”

  Jones finished with a slow smile.

  “Yes?” Elizabeth asked.

  “No more.”

  “You won’t tell us what it means?”

  “He doesn’t know what it means,” Leonard said. “It’s like all the rest of these Sufi and Zen stories. What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

  “A smile,” Jones said.

  “I suppose your story is true about something. At our age, we are still young enough to reach out and try to touch something, but we always look for the wrong thing, like the immigration people, and then we stop looking.”

  “Why did you say a smile?” Elizabeth asked Jones.

  “I don’t really know. It was something to say.”

  “I don’t know why you told us that silly story,” Leonard said. “When I think about dying, which is almost all the time, what hurts most is that I’ve missed something of great importance, and I don’t know what it is, not just the life I’ll never have a chance to live, but something else that was here but I missed it.”

  “I know,” Elizabeth whispered.

  “We all missed it.”

  “What? What? You smoke this stupid stuff and your brain turns to jelly. You’re both brilliant. Why don’t you tell me what?”

  They looked at him without anger. Elizabeth’s face began to crinkle. “Sissy, don’t cry,” Leonard said. He had not called her that since he was a kid.

  “I can’t not cry.” She jumped up and took an old plate with a Tenniel drawing on it down from where it hung on the wall. “We need an ashtray,” placing it between them, and then she collapsed with her tears, as if all the bones in her body had lost their hard ability to sustain shape and weight and had become a mound of blue shirt and blue jeans and brown hair without form, as she sank to the floor. Leonard went to her and embraced her, kissing the back of her neck. Then he pulled back and dropped into a white wicker chair.

  “I’m crying too,” Jones said, “and look what you have done, Elizabeth. Here’s a skinny old nigger boy who’s seen all kinds of things and thought he was tough as could be, just sitting here in the white lady’s boudoir and crying like a baby.”

  She turned to face him, drying her eyes with her hands. “Pretty funny.” But she had stopped crying. “Well, that’s what I needed, a good cry.”

  “Now that everyone’s had their cry, could you talk like normal human beings?” Leonard asked.

  “Human beings are not normal. Dogs are normal. Cats are normal.”

  “I know what you mean,” Jones said. “We used to meditate a lot, every day, and for a while in the morning and at night too, and we were gung ho to find enlightenment or sartori, or call it what you will, and we knew we would and we also knew we wouldn’t.”

  “You explain that,” Elizabeth told him.

  “It’s the same thin
g I guess as your daddy’s obsession.”

  “How do you know what’s his obsession?” Leonard demanded.

  “We had a talk about the basic contradiction of quantum mechanics—light as a wave and light as a particle. You can walk down that road for a long long time and you come to the proposition that all is illusion, including us.”

  “It’s the same medicine man trick your ancestors used to work when they were witch doctors in the Congo.”

  “Maybe.”

  The pot they were smoking began to have its effect.

  “If you reach that place, wherever it is, and you become enlightened,” Elizabeth said, smiling sadly, “what have you got?”

  “I think they were witch doctors,” Jones said. “That’s why I’m so smart. It took brains to be a proper witch doctor—more brains than the medics up at school bring with them.”

  “What have you got?” Elizabeth said again. “Nobody talks to anyone and nobody answers anyone.”

  “When the Buddha was enlightened, little sister,” Leonard answered, “he said—I mean the Buddha said—that now he knew the answer to all the questions.”

  “Really—one answer?”

  “I never thought of it that way,” Jones said, “but it had to be one answer.”

  NINETEEN

  Coming into the house with Dolly, Jenny said, “I don’t like the way Leonard looks. They’re both too thin, but Leonard’s pale and he doesn’t look well. What does he eat? Have you any idea what he’s eating up there at Harvard? Do you know, Gus and I ate in their common room once. Dreadful food. Gus feels he must eat at the Harvard Club when we’re in New York. Equally dreadful. Leonard probably eats nothing but junk food.”

  “Yes, Mother. I’ll talk to him.”

  Jenny led the way into the dining room, forthright and straightforward as a general taking command, and staring at the table, she said, “Dolly!” a word filled with measures of criticism.

  “Mother, they are only place plates.”

  “Do you know who gave this set of dinnerware to your family? To Ephraim Levi?”

  “Supposedly, Thomas Jefferson. I’m not at all sure about that. The dishes were made in England in the Federal period, long after Jefferson was out of office, and the only distinction Ephraim Levi had was that he was rich and that his father had the reputation of having gone to bed with Peggy Shippen Arnold.”

  “What an awful thing to say!”

  “Mother, what a thing to do, and then to boast about it. Yich! I do not love Ephraim or his father, and I’m sure that Ephraim ordered these dishes when he was in London and then started the rumor about Jefferson. Our history hews to Mr. Clemens’s definition: lies, damn lies and statistics.”

  “And who is Mr. Clemens?”

  “Mark Twain.”

  Jenny disdained to reply; she circled the dining table, as if she were taking measure of each plate. The old plates were very beautiful, the white glaze pure and unsullied by crazing, the gold stripe as good as the day it was put on, and the gold and blue eagle fierce and proud.

  “You don’t know because I never told you,” Jenny said, “that Mrs. Whittercur telephoned me after you wrote your letter resigning from the Daughters of the American Revolution, and it took me the best part of an hour on the telephone to persuade her not to put your letter in their files. She promised to destroy it. Dolly, darling, how could you call the Daughters a disgusting organization?”

  “Because they are. And I wanted my letter in the files.”

  “But you can’t do such things. What of Elizabeth? And won’t her children cherish their ancestry? And don’t you think it’s a very important thing for Jews to belong to the Daughters?”

  “No, I don’t. And Mother, you’re not even the slightest bit Jewish, and where Daddy stands is beyond me, but I do coddle him and go along with it, and you want Elizabeth’s daughter—if she ever has one—to belong to the Daughters? I just don’t understand.”

  “You never did,” Jenny said, studying the table bleakly, “and if you have such contempt for tradition, why are you using the dishes tonight?”

  “I will tell you why. There are two ill-mannered characters straight out of Balzac coming to dinner tonight, and my husband wants something from them, and I intend to make a point of these dishes in terms of helping, if only a bit.”

  “Balzac? What on earth has Balzac to do with this?”

  “Oh, Mother, I am a beast. Forgive me for being so provoking.” She put her arms around Jenny and, as always, went up on the very tips of her toes to kiss her.

  “I’m tired,” Jenny said. “I think I’ll go up to my room and lie down for a little while.”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  “And if you see Leonard, tell him to come to my room. I want to talk to him.”

  “Of course, Mother.”

  Jenny went up the stairs slowly. Slower each summer, Dolly thought. Poor dear.

  Then she turned back to the dining room to stare at the dinner plates again. She had never been able to cultivate a love of things. She wondered whether she told the truth—that it was for Richard? Only a few hours ago, she had been utterly furious at him; she had been in a mood to leave him, to hate him until the end of time, to revenge herself on him, to make him suffer and to watch him suffer—all of it from a fire lit by the sight of what Dolly thought of as “that wretched blonde bitch’s car.” If the “blonde bitch” had been frivolous, or pretty and stupid in the manner of Nellie, Dolly could have dealt with it on a different level; but the fact that Joan Herman had a whiplash mind, an astonishing memory, and a knowledge of Washington that was invaluable, put her in a very special position; and added to this was the quirk in Dolly’s character that had turned her away from the charades of politics. If she snobbishly damned Joan for her political instinct, she could not forbear from damning her own husband as well. In no other way was she a snob, but thinking of Joan Herman, she engaged in all the snobbish attitudes that she disliked so in the circles of millionaires and old money and new money that surrounded the senator.

  And now, only a few hours after her wrath, she could think of nothing but the strange moment of intimacy that had existed between them in the dining room before lunch. At this moment she wanted to see him again, to be in the same room with him. It pressed like physical hunger.

  He had gone off with her father, unquestionably to smoke cigars, since the only point that both of them agreed on was the satisfaction of a good cigar after a meal; and both of them knew that the billiard room was the only place in the house where they could have a cigar without arousing the anger of the women. The smell of cigar smoke confirmed her guess, but the room itself was empty, the smoked butts dropped defiantly in the brass ashstand.

  She drifted through the house, looking for Richard, yet assuring herself that she was not looking for him. She heard the sound of voices from Elizabeth’s room and more muffled voices from the guest room where her mother and father were supposedly taking an afternoon nap. She came to the senator’s office, hesitated, then opened the door and entered. His office and his bedroom were both unoccupied, and Dolly walked slowly around each room, looking at the framed election posters; the signed portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for which he had paid almost a thousand dollars at an auction; warm letters from Tip O’Neill and Ted Kennedy, lovingly framed; a framed cartoon by Conrad, from the Los Angeles Times, showing Richard Cromwell in armor as Don Quixote, tilting at a windmill shaped like the White House, and another cartoon by Herblock depicting Richard as St. George cutting with his sword at a dragon with the countenance of Nixon. What a great moment that was for both of them, to see Richard as St. George! They were still madly in love then and they celebrated Herblock’s salute with a splendid dinner at Belnicks and then walked back, hand in hand, to their house in Georgetown, their heads in the clouds where vision was clear and all things were possible.

  She paused at his desk, looking at a picture on the wall behind it. It was an oil painting of John Peter Al
tgeld, done by John Sloan in 1897, and a gift to Richard on their fifth anniversary. Dolly knew that Altgeld was a hero of the senator’s, but about Altgeld himself, she had known little until she bought the painting. She read about him after that, proud that Richard had chosen his portrait for an icon.

  And now, from the painting, her glance dropped to the desk, where a long, yellow lined legal pad was covered with the senator’s even, round handwriting. In spite of herself, she could not conquer her curiosity, or possibly suspicion: she read it:

  Does no memory exist that this land was founded by people whose tremendous need was to worship God in their own way—and worship is not limited to mouthing prayers. Worship is a way of life, a living force in the creation of this country, and we are all touched by this ancient worship of theirs, and central to it was the fact that my church is a sanctuary. That was the force that built the underground railroad to confront slavery—the force of and the belief in sanctuary.

  And now what has this government of ours done, but to put spies with recording devices into the churches where we gave sanctuary to those who fled from the murder squads of El Salvador, and then bring to trial the pastor of the church and his wife, for the sin of obeying the most hallowed word of God—

  She heard Richard’s step as he entered the room, and turned to face him, guilty and shocked at the liberty she had taken, the sheet of paper in her hand.

  “You’re angry. You have every right to be.”

  Richard shook his head.

  “It was there. I was looking at the painting and remembering when I gave it to you, and I saw the paper—”

  “I’m not angry. Why should I be?”

  “I was looking for you.”

  “Oh?”

  “Not for any reason. I didn’t want to be alone.” She paused and the silence stretched out. She put down the yellow sheet and the senator picked it up.

  “What is it?” Dolly asked.