Fairbairn, Ann

by Five Smooth Stones

  He lost the first part of a sentence by Quimby that ended "... a reinvestigation." He listened carefully and uneasily to what followed. "I should like your thinking on this, Dean. It will be done in any event. President Vidal assures me of that. He has asked certain of the faculty members to instigate it. Please give them any cooperation you can." He had stood up then with surprising alacrity for a man whose age no one dared guess at. "Thank you for coming to see an old man, Dean Goodhue." And he had been dismissed, like a student who has just been cautioned about a misdemeanor.

  For this reason he listened to his wife's breakfast chatter on the Saturday before Christmas with only half his attention. He had been forced to cancel his request for a faculty committee meeting on the subject of the Negro David Champlin, and the knowledge that he had taken this backward step rankled. The meeting now would have to wait until after Christmas, by which time he hoped the old man's senile concern might evaporate. This would be a more comforting thought, he told himself, if he or anyone else really believed the old man had a senile cell in his brain.

  His wife's voice broke in on his thoughts. "Merriwether, you're not listening."

  "Sorry, my dear. What was it? Something about New York—"

  "I said that the next time you take off on a trip to Chicago or New York, you may find me tagging along with you. And it will be free. Plus hotel expenses. Wouldn't that be nice?"

  He stared at her, a forkful of scrambled eggs halfway to his mouth. "Have you been going through a 'scholastic appraisal' too, my dear? What on earth are you talking about?"

  "Last week—I didn't want to bother you then, and besides I haven't seen much of you—a really charming gentleman came here to talk with you, but you were out and he said I'd do just as well. He was from one of the airlines, and they are doing some sort of survey in cities and towns that connect by train and plane to Chicago and New York. Various classifications of people; you know, businessmen, professional men, academic—"

  "Do come to the point, Elacoya."

  "I am, dear. It's a bit complicated. The ones in each category who have traveled exclusively by plane, or have the most mileage—I've forgotten which exactly—will be the guests, with their wives, of the airline—for a weekend in Chicago. Or New York, my dear. Imagine! If we win wouldn't you rather go to New York?"

  "Win! Elacoya, did you give this man any information?"

  "Of course, dear. How often you went, whatever dates I could remember—where you usually stayed—that sort of thing. What in the world is wrong with that?"

  "Do you want to be—my God!—the winner in a cheap commercial scheme to promote an airline? Your name in paid advertisements? Even pictures. On the radio, perhaps television commercials—don't think there won't be those kinds of strings attached—the whole bit? I'm astounded that you even gave him five minutes' time. He must indeed have been charming."

  Elacoya Goodhue's face flushed and she squared plump shoulders defensively. "He was. Not the crass commercial type at all. An older man with white hair and the most interesting scar on his forehead." She looked at her husband's shocked face. "Oh, dear, I'm afraid I didn't give any thought to that part of it—the advertising and publicity and all. Maybe I was rather stupid—"

  "You were. What was his name and what was the airline? I shall call them and tell them to take our names off the list immediately."

  "The airline was the Midwest-Northern. And his name was —let me think, it was a common name with something uncommon about it—Anderton. That was it."

  "Let me have his card."

  "Card?" She flushed again, this time with embarrassment. "He said he had run out of cards. He apologized very nicely. He's writing us, he said, to verify the interview."

  "Elacoya, this is inexcusable. You let this man in the house, permitted him to take up your time, answered his questions, and didn't even insist upon credentials? Never mind. I don't need the card. I'll give the airline his name."

  Half an hour later he was talking to Midwest-Northern's account executive at their advertising agency in Chicago. "No one by that name? You must have. You must know something about this business. Someone must. The airline people don't. Isn't that your job?"

  "Certainly. But I assure you we know nothing of any such survey. My advice, Dean Goodhue, is that you notify the police and the Better Business Bureau in your city immediately. Meanwhile, we will investigate at this end. We cannot have our name—"

  Dean Goodhue's hand suddenly gripped the telephone with convulsive strength, the knuckles whitening. Fear knotted his stomach, swept through his blood in icy waves, made him physically sick, paralyzed his lips so that he had difficulty forming his words. "No. Wait. My wife could have been mistaken about the airline. She—she often is about names. Let —let me make certain there's been no mistake—"

  "I'm sure there has been. But we are very much at your service. Will you let us know—"

  "Yes—" Without saying goodbye he let the receiver drop into its cradle, saw that sweat from his hand was beading its blackness. Elacoya had not been alone in her stupidity. Her words came back to him now on the shock waves of fear that had followed his realization of what this might mean. How often you went. Whatever dates I could remember—where you liked to stay—that sort of thing—Last week, the week before—oh, God, when had it been?—there had come to his office in the Administration Building a youngish man with crew-cut hair and black-rimmed glasses who had said he was doing an article for a magazine, something about the cultural growth of the Midwest. For what magazine? For what— Goodhue feverishly searched his mind.

  He remembered the questions now, and each one was like a tom-tom beat of fear in his mind: the proximity of the college to cultural centers, the frequency of trips by students to worthwhile cultural events, ballets, symphonies, special lectures, the ability of students to pay for these trips, because "of course it was known that Pengard was not a rich boy's college, unless the riches were of the mind." And he, Merriwether Goodhue had talked, had prattled, on and on. Then —oh, God! then he'd seen the young man on campus, talking to Cramer. What had Cramer said? He was home in New Jersey by now. Who else had he talked to? Parsons? Holt? Sessions? Thank God, he'd get nothing from Sessions; he had not left the campus this semester. The card—the name of the magazine—he did not know why it was important, but all at once it was the only thing that mattered.

  He had risen to his feet and was standing on legs in which the muscles quivered uncontrollably, when Elacoya came in.

  "So nice to be able to just bounce in on you these vacation days—"

  "What do you want?"

  "Nothing important, dear. Just something I forgot to tell you. That nice young Virginian, Clevenger, is marooned on campus until Monday. Family away or something like that. Are you ill, Merriwether?"

  "No! I'm going out. I'll be back shortly—"

  "Let me finish, dear. I hate knowing any student is lonely at this season and I know he's one of your favorites, so I've asked him—Merriwether, you're certainly ill—I can tell—" ' "No! I'm perfectly all right, I tell you! Just leave me alone, for God's sake—I'll go out this way—"

  ***

  David sat on the top step of the porch of the Beauregard house, chin in hands. It was Sunday afternoon, warm even for a New Orleans Christmas season, and the late sun touched his shoulders gently. Weeks before, he had made a plane reservation for early Sunday morning, saving his money carefully to make it possible because he did not want to give up a weekend's work at the Calico Cat.

  There was a good-sized Christmas tree in the center of the dining-room table in the house behind him, decorated by Gramp, who had set its lights blinking as soon as they entered the house, showing them off. Under the tree were assorted packages, which Gramp pointed out pridefully before going into his room to nap. David showered, took out the presents he had brought for Gramp, wrapped them, and put them with the others under the tree. One was a soft tan cashmere cardigan, the other a beautifully carved black panther that D
avid had seen in a secondhand store and bought for what he knew must be a tenth of its value. Gramp would put it on the mantel as soon as he opened it, where it would lead the parade of lions, tigers and elephants that already marched above the mock fireplace.

  Uneasy, needing sleep but not wanting it, he had gone out on the porch and sat on the steps in the winter sun. He answered Miz Timmins's wave from across the way, and hoped she wouldn't come over; he also hoped the kids were at a Sunday-school Christmas party or something and wouldn't come over either. His mind felt as though it were made of a million springs, all coiled too tightly. Now that he was away from the pressures and worries of the last three weeks at Pengard, he was finding that the perspective of distance wasn't helping any, that coming home hadn't brought the relaxation he'd hoped it would.

  Had any one guy ever had so damned many things to worry about all at once? Right now he sure doubted it. Beanie Benford had been right. Perhaps something I say will mingle with your thinking, color it a little, help.... We have to do such a lot of thinking, don't we, David? Small wonder that when we make it in the white world we so often surpass them. Bits and scraps of Beanie's words that day on the balcony had come back during the past weeks, and while they had helped a little, they hadn't solved a damned thing.

  Probably the best thing to do would be to go at it the way you would a history paper. Line up the facts and the dates and what happened and why and what effect it had on things in general. The hell with that. It wouldn't work. It hadn't started when Sudsy quit the Infirmary and came to his room, or any other special time; it had started when Randolph Clevenger's great-grandfather bred slaves in Virginia, a state known throughout the South for the get of its studs. It had started when Goodhue's tenant-farmer grandfather—he could smell the cracker under the tweed if no one else could—had feared and hated Negroes because the upper-class whites had fostered that fear, had told him if he didn't watch out the freed blacks would take over, get his land. It had started a long time ago, and now he, David Champlin, a black student from a supposedly liberal white college sat on a porch step in the Deep South and looked at disgrace, and you couldn't work that one out like a history paper. He sat there, unlynched, un-spat-upon, unpersecuted as many of his race were persecuted, yet so damned close to becoming a pariah it made his head swim to think about it, just as much a victim as his great-grandfather had been, just as much the target for prejudice as any Negro whose body had swung from a tree, who had been broken by police, who had been drowned in a river or tortured in prison.

  On the step below him a wisp of silver rain from the Christmas tree glistened in the sunlight, and he reached down and picked it up, twisting it around his fingers. He had to keep reminding himself—he knew that—that there were islands of common humanity in the white world, the Chucks and Toms, Knudsens and Andruses, and a few others, because if he didn't he'd turn into a Nehemiah type, wouldn't sleep at night for shadowy critters under the bed. He had to go along with Gramp, who said there wasn't any gain in hating all the whites because it got in your way; try and forget 'em; then when you found one like the Prof, hate didn't stand in the way between you; be a helluva thing, Gramp said, if a man was so full of hate he couldn't see the occasional good one, now and then, for the bad.

  He would have to talk the whole mess out with the Prof, he supposed. The Prof had left early that morning for Laurel to spend Christmas with his brother. If David knew Doc Knudsen, the Prof would have the whole story after he'd been there ten minutes. At least when the Prof come back David would have the chance to say "I told you so—and they weren't under the bed." It would be good to hear the Prof explode again. He couldn't mention it to Gramp or Rudy, because in a case like this Rudy would probably react like Nehemiah. Which he supposed almost any Negro with any sense would do. Rudy would think he had been taken in, but it had been a lot more subtle than that. There wasn't a Negro he'd ever known who'd really been taken in by a white; that was part of the game of living in the same world with them, outguessing them. The whites, especially the New Orleans whites, were so damned certain that you accepted their patronage gratefully. Fooling them could become an end in itself.

  But there was something else he had to face, and that was the biggest something of all. The wisp of silver rain broke in his fingers, and he rolled it up and tossed it to one of the neighborhood cats who was meditating in the sun on the bricked path below him. A fellow could study all his life, he supposed, cram his mind with knowledge and facts and other men's thoughts and conclusions and philosophies, and never come up with the answer to the questions a Negro faced every time he walked down the street, applied for a job, or just plain tried to be a human being. And never, never the answer to the question David Champlin faced when he found himself hooked, gaffed, helpless and flounderingly in love with a white girl. It wasn't enough that he had to get talked into going to a white college; he had to wind up in the God-damnedest fix anyone could think up—and on top of that he had to really mess up and fall in love with a white girl, and the best thing he could do was stay where he was, right on his own front porch, or pick himself a Negro college and get the hell out of where he had been. He knew a lot of mixed couples had already broken the ice in a lot of places outside of the South, and then they'd usually fallen through that ice into the cold depths below. Unless it was an exceptional case like the Travises, he'd never heard of a mixed marriage that hadn't turned out anything but lousy. Besides, he wasn't the ice-breaking type. Already, just showing his black face in a white college had blown up a storm. And life was going to be like that, just like that, like it always had been and would be for a long time—a mess-up; he couldn't ask a half-pint-sized kid who didn't know what it was all about to join him in the mess-up. It wasn't that he had any fool idea he wasn't good enough for her; he was, and he knew it. It was that after a couple of years of rock-throwing she'd wish she'd never heard of him, and he'd rather never see her again than have that happen.

  He thought of the first time he'd met her after their big dustup at Mom's. She had seen him walking toward her in the inner quadrangle and stopped for just the fraction of a second, then come forward more slowly, and he had grinned self-consciously, feeling like a kid. "Sara," he said when she drew closer. It was hard enough to say that, but it was harder still to say what he knew he must. "Look—I didn't mean—I guess I was pretty stinking—"

  She had looked up at him, eyes shining, mouth laughing. "You were. Oh, David, my darling, you were. And it doesn't matter. Honestly it doesn't because when I want to be mean I can—well, I can out-mean you and anyone else—you wait—"

  "I don't think I want to—" He had been trapped then in her eyes, her laugh, her whole vibrant body; he could not look away, and it was only the heavy thud of Chuck Martin's running feet, Chuck's heavy handclap on his shoulder, and "Come on, Stoopid—we're late now for Beanie—" that brought him back to earth.

  For a long time after that, he forgot he was beginning to feel like a pariah, that by now there were quick glances his way and equally quick ones away from him, and the quick whispered comments between students were beginning to have a meaning he did not want to think about. And even after the problem came back to ride on his shoulder, "Oh, David, my darling" made it lighter to carry.

  The Prof came back at the end of the week, not roaring, to David's surprise, but with a sort of sustained rumble in his voice, like distant thunder. "Say it, my boy," he commanded. "The Prof has deserved it. T told you so'—and that these things were not under the bed."

  David laughed as heartily as he had for a long time. "How'd you know, Prof? You picked the words, the same identical words, I was all set to say. Dirty trick, not giving me the chance."

  The Prof did not go into any detail about what his brother had told him at Pengard. On that score he said only: "David, I cannot urge you. A man must make up his own mind to stay or run. I urged you when your grandfather was sick, and you followed my urging then. Now you must follow your own. But wherever it takes you, David, I
think you know Bjarne Knudsen is with you."

  "Yes, sir. Thanks."

  ***

  The day before New Year's a package came, with Sara Kent's return address in Lakeside Heights in the upper left-hand corner. David thanked what luck was left to him that Gramp was out when it arrived. A card was Scotch-taped to the gleaming gold of the Christmas wrapping, and he opened it and read: "Am sorry to pieces this is so late but I thought I could get it finished. Only I couldn't because I was too busy being appraised. If it doesn't fit, blame Chuck. I used him for a model. Please like it. And please call me as soon as you get back. A Happy New Year to all—Sara."

  The present was a sweater, a heavy green one in cable stitch that he had seen her working on for weeks before Christmas vacation. It was high in the neck for warmth, with long sleeves. For her brother-in-law, she'd said. It fitted perfectly, long and snug around the hips with a cuff that could be turned up waist high if he wanted it that way, snug at the wrists, shoulders and neck easy and right.

  After he took it off he sat for a long time on the edge of his bed, holding it in his hand, turning it over and over, looking at the careful, beautifully even work, not seeing much of any of it, knowing that into the stitches there had to have been knit thoughts, because you couldn't knit a big sweater like this without thinking of the guy you were knitting it for. And damn it, there he was again, and he wished life would let him alone just long enough for him to get on his feet emotionally, know where he was going, or at least how he wanted to get wherever it was he was headed.

  There was the sound of the front door closing. Gramp was back. He started up guiltily, folding the sweater back into the tissue paper quickly, kicking the box under the bed, and then pulling his suitcase out of the closet. He threw it on the bed and opened it, put the sweater carefully in the shirt compartment, and buckled the flaps over it. Then he locked the suitcase. That was one thing Gramp mustn't see. Gramp knew something was wrong, he could tell that; and Gramp was worrying about him. If he showed him a sweater knit by a white girl—Jesus have moicy! David didn't even want to think about it. And if he lied and said she was colored, Gramp would be so happy and relieved he'd start picking out names for his great-grandchildren right then and there.