Fairbairn, Ann

by Five Smooth Stones

  "That's ridiculous and childish! You know who my father is—what he's done—"

  "I've even met him. At graduation."

  "And he liked you! He thought you were great!"

  "Maybe he did. But let's suppose we went back there all married up, as Gramp would say. And we come down the first morning. And your dad—father—looks at you, and the rest of 'em look at you, and then they all look at me, and start thinking that all night long you and I have been sleeping in the same bed in that house, and probably not sleeping all the time, either. What room would we have? Your room from the time you were a wide-eyed innocent child, where your mother and father used to tuck you in every night and hear your prayers? And the only brown thing near you was probably a Teddy bear? So, little Sara? What then? Be honest, baby, for God's sake be honest."

  She was quiet for so long he thought she wasn't going to answer. She had picked up the rabbit again and was flip-flopping its pink-lined ears over her fingers nervously. At last she said slowly: "I'll be honest, David. Just as honest as I can be. But I won't say that they'd be horrified and outraged and all that. Or that they'd be pleased, either. Because I don't know. I just don't know. Wait. Please. Let me finish. I let you. In the first place, David, families aren't all that important."

  "I've got to interrupt, Sara. They are to you. And they are to me. You've got to realize that any general problem sooner or later has to be particularized. Must be viewed through the eyes of an individual facing it. We've both got roots. I don't mean just geographical roots or the shallow roots of custom. I mean deep roots of mind and heart. What happens to them if we tear them up? Do we let them dangle? Bleeding."

  Her words still came slowly: "So they bleed, David. Can't we stand to have them bleed?"

  "Not when they're bleeding the life away from the plants they nourished—"

  Now her words came faster, tumbling out, sounding more like Sara Kent: "Why did you start all this! Why! It happens all the time. We're happy and everything's going just fine and then all of a sudden you're off. I—I never know what silly little thing will start you off, and suddenly we're—we're fighting and miserable. Isn't all this—this stupid business about my father and my family after all my problem? Isn't it? If I'm willing to face it—and I don't admit it's a big one because it isn't, David, it isn't—"

  "Sara, where did you say your brother-in-law comes from?"

  "Virginia. My God, David, every Virginian isn't a Clevenger!"

  "No? I'll take an ex-cracker like Chuck Martin any day. He's revolting mentally and spiritually against violence and murder and stupidity. There are as many kinds of prejudice in the South as there are kinds of people. Know what they called Virginia in the old days? The 'mother of slaves.' It should have been the 'father.' Know why? Because that was where they had the best slave studs. Stud farms, actually. Slaveowners used to bring slave women there from hundreds of miles around to be bred."

  "What's that got to do with my brother-in-law! What in hell has it got to do with him! He didn't! Who's always making a big thing about not generalizing? You. Now listen to you!"

  "Yeah, I know. Don't say all the rattlesnakes in a basket are poisonous, because one of 'em may have had its venom removed. How you going to know which one? That's when the general comes down to the particular. You want to bet that if I went back home with you, your brother-in-law wouldn't make life hell for your sister? And for your father? In a quiet, well-bred, aristocratic way—the same way they make life intolerable for a self-respecting Negro in that state? And never raise his voice—just like they don't have many lynchings in that state? Sara, the sorrow isn't just for the interracial couple. It spreads, like poison, to everyone involved, whatever color—"

  "Color, schmolor! It wouldn't be sorrow, David; it wouldn't be sorrow! Trouble, maybe. I can see that. I'm not an imbecile. But sorrow—no! Trouble I can take. Didn't you say last spring that it's total commitment for a white woman who marries a Negro? I know that! I know it. And you throw that commitment back in my face! David, will you answer the same kind of question you asked me a few minutes ago? And be as honest as you wanted me to be?"

  He hesitated, then said, "Go ahead. But be careful."

  "Suppose I said to you, 'David, I'm going to go home with you, stay a while in New Orleans, meet Gramp and your friends, maybe spend Christmas with you.' Suppose I said that? What would your reaction be? Your first move?"

  That had been three and half years ago, and even now, in the quiet of the little house in Beauregard, David flinched from the memory of his rage at the questions. Flinched, too, from the realization that had come later: that his anger had been unfair. What could Sara Kent, who had never been a part of the world in which he grew up, know of the hands slimed with hate that had rocked the cradle of his being, the humiliations and spirit-destroying pressures that had given him and all his people hidden scar tissue that pinched the nerves of heart and mind so that it took only the lightest touch to bring those nerves to quivering, throbbing life? How could she have realized that what she had done was to ask him to expose himself in the light of his home environment, a light that debased every member of his race it touched; to ask to be a witness to a debasement that would deny him the right to walk beside her down the street, to eat across from her in a restaurant, that made their love a mockery and perversion, a gutter-dirty aberration that could send them both to penal servitude. He knew that she was aware of the facts of life in the South, yet could not, perhaps would not, accept them as conditions of being and survival, saw them as abstractions, could not believe that it was impossible to equate them with the normal, whites-only problems of manners and mores.

  And so, unwittingly, she had forced him to a confrontation of his own separateness in a way no Negro-hating, Negro-baiting white of the deepest South could have bettered for cruelty.

  He had risen slowly from the hassock on which he was sitting, anger and frustration knotting his guts, shaking with inner tremors, frightened of what he might say, frightened of what he might do. Not until afterward had he recognized, in retrospect, the fear in Sara's eyes as she looked up at him, her actual physical drawing away. His voice was not shaking when he spoke at last because he had raised it to steady it.

  "For Christ's sake! For Christ's sake! How can you be so God-damned stupid!" And then, because he could not face her any longer across the abyss that had opened between them—an abyss he knew now must always have been there but whose true depths he had never glimpsed until that moment—he had turned and left her.

  In midafternoon of that day he called Hunter Travis, and at five-o'clock boarded a train for New York. Two days later he went directly to New Orleans from Pennsylvania Station.

  ***

  He had run from that first hairline incision of the scalpel, he thought now, to the undemanding, understanding Hunter Travis. When he arrived Hunter said: "What brought you up here, man? Six invitations you've had, and you finally show up for no reason."

  "Mind? I mean, you sure you've got room?"

  "See that couch? It bears young. Underneath there's another one that rolls out. All the room in the world, chum."

  "No prior claims?"

  "None. Where's your suitcase? How long can you stay?"

  "Just a couple of nights. I checked my suitcase through to New Orleans. I already had my train ticket. Got my razor and etceteras in this little one."

  "Want me to stop asking questions?"

  "Yeah. For now. How're you making it?"

  "Great. I went on my father's payroll a couple of weeks ago. Secretary. Aide. Some such."

  "Then why aren't you with him in Timbuctu or wherever? I mean, aren't secretaries and aides supposed to stick with the boss? Hand out Kleenex or important documents, whichever is needed at the moment?" David put his small overnight bag on the couch, beginning to feel self-conscious, beginning to see his unexpected stopover in New York as Hunter was probably seeing it, yet knowing that he could not have gone direct to New Orleans and Gramp's omniscient
gaze. And he had dreaded the three days and two nights on the train without some chance to pull himself together, somehow change the enuring, roiling current of his thoughts.

  Hunter was explaining that his value as a secretary lay, at this time, more in his absence than in his presence. "Right now the great man's in Cyprus, and probably will be for several months. I'm here with one ear on what's going on at the UN and the other glued to a telephone, being cued what to watch out for and report on. Don't be misled by my appearance. I'm no dilettante. I'm having a ball. And working."

  The apartment was below sidewalk level, its windows giving a view of feet and portions of legs only, its kitchenette a curtained-off alcove. The furnishings were Hunter's, and included an antique captain's chest with an exquisite, glowing Oriental scarf on its top, Benares brass, French prints, a silky Persian rug, a hand print from India serving as a throw for the couch. There were color and warmth, where David had expected severely cold modernity. Only the desk and typewriter and the comfortable chairs were things of today. He looked around admiringly, and as Hunter handed him a drink and a plate of dark bread and cheese, said, "Any old time you want to move out, man—"

  "Any old time at all, David. When I'm here or if I'm away, it's all yours. No kidding. If you ever want to come over—don't go anywhere else. I'll give you a key."

  "I'll call first."

  "That's considerate, but I don't bring any women here. I know what you're thinking. Perfect setup. But I've got a sort of feeling for this place, David, and the stuff in it. And to tell you God's truth, I haven't found any one of them yet I wanted to share it with. I try to pick 'em with apartments of their own. A man needs sanctuary. But you—that's different."

  They talked until the drinks ran out, Hunter letting David ask the questions, asking none himself, then went to bed, the pain of the scalpel deadened by more Scotch than David could ever remember drinking at one time before.

  The next day he tagged along after Hunter through the vast complexity of the United Nations building. After the first hour he stopped asking questions, unable to phrase intelligent ones under the successive waves of new impressions, of dawning concepts of a world that before had existed for him only in the columns of the newspapers, the phrases of a news announcer's broadcast. He met and shook hands and drank coffee with two correspondents whose names and voices were household words. With a third, Christopher Barkeley, Gramp's favorite, he drank beer while Hunter put in a transatlantic call. Barkeley had just returned the day before from West Germany, and David found himself answering questions about the Supreme Court decision on school desegregation, and its impact on the South.

  From sheer panic when Hunter left them alone together he slipped without realizing it into complete ease and relaxation, a feeling that this slight, quiet-eyed, dark-haired man had been a drinking-and-talk companion of long standing. He was almost disappointed when he saw Hunter crossing the room toward them. Barkeley stood when Hunter reached the table, and said: "I have to leave, much as I dislike it. I've enjoyed talking to you, Champlin—maybe our paths will cross again."

  "I hope so, sir."

  David watched him as he walked away from them, then turned to Hunter with a puzzled frown. "Damn it, Hunter, I wanted to ask him a mess of questions about the government in West Germany—and I never asked one."

  "That's the way it is with Chris. A grand guy, probably one of the best friends I have."

  They returned to the apartment late in the afternoon, and David, leg-weary and quiet from sheer exhaustion, sat on the edge of the couch rubbing his stiff ankle, unaware that he was doing it until Hunter said, "My God, I've run you ragged. Almost walked your bad leg off."

  "It was worth it." He gratefully accepted the drink Hunter offered. After a minute he said: "They're right next door, aren't they? I mean all those countries. Next door to each other and next door to us. Right damned next door. When any one of them dumps garbage on his lawn we can smell it. And if we dump garbage on our lawn they can smell it. Man, I've got a whole set of brain cells working that never worked before."

  "Know what you did not see today? Wouldn't have seen even if the Assembly had been in session? It's something you'll be seeing four, five, ten years from now."

  "I can't think offhand."

  "I'm not pontificating, just stating what is generally taken for granted. Black. Black faces, white robes, nappy black heads with keen minds inside them. Bush babies, some of them, with master's degrees from great universities all over the world." Hunter laughed quietly. "The inferior savage, you understand. They'll be moving through that building, David, and moving with authority. They've been sending my father everywhere except Africa, but Africa is his private study project. Think it over."

  After a while David said: "Those inferior savage types with master's degrees will be living next door to us then. Wonder if they'll like the smell of our garbage?"

  "Nobody else does, certainly not the other Caucasian nations, and certainly not the Oriental nations. The black nostrils will be even more sensitive."

  "Opens up all kinds of areas for speculation, doesn't it? There'll be a whole new dimension to our problems then."

  "Let's hope."

  David took a swallow from his drink. "Let me dream a minute, Hunter. Just let me dream. An entente—I suppose you'd call it that—of free African nations challenging the voice of the United States in the United Nations on the grounds that we don't have free elections, that many members of our legislative branch of government hold office by virtue—or vice—of illegal elections."

  "When you dream, you really take off, don't you?"

  "Yes, and is that so far out? We go haring off in all directions screaming freedom and democracy, don't we? Moving into the affairs of smaller countries, telling them how to run their governments the way we want them to, even if their majority doesn't want it that way? What's so crazy about somebody—or a group of somebodies—moving in on us? The centuries of white dominance are numbered, that's for sure."

  Hunter grinned. "Come the take-over, what happens to me?"

  David stood up, stretching. "So-so, little man, so-so. Don't you worry yo'se'f about nothin'. David'll take care of you. Yes, sir, big, black, conquering David'll tell 'em to put out the fire because you're just as black a cat as the rest of us."

  CHAPTER 45

  David remembered that the trip to the United Nations had not only activated formerly inactive brain cells but had also succeeded in bringing into saner focus the scene with Sara of the day before. The familiar loneliness he always knew without her was back, but with it there was the feeling of having turned away from the detour, the byroad trip to happiness, and of being once again on the main highway of his life, the highway he had walked since birth. It was a road too steep, too full of peril for Sara's quick, childlike steps and gentle faith, and when the thought came to him "But not for Sara's love" he tried desperately to put it from his mind. Self-immolation should be a quick, an instant thing, not a lifetime experience; he could not believe that the day would never come when Sara would not run from its pain. When he returned to Boston he would move. This time, so help him God, there would be no detours or byroads.

  Hunter had a date that second night in New York and David, restless and uneasy, roamed the streets until he tired, and then returned to the apartment understanding better what people were talking about when they called New York a lonely city.

  The next morning the ringing of Hunter's telephone awakened him. He looked over at the other couch, saw that it had not been slept in, and reached sleepily over his head for the instrument on the desk.

  "Hunter?" It was a man's voice answering his "Hello."

  "No. Hunter isn't here. Would you like to leave your number?"

  "Who is this?"

  "A friend. Just visiting—"

  "David! Hiya! This is Chuck! Couldn't miss that voice—"

  David woke up completely now, swinging his legs over the side of the couch. "Hey, man! Where you calling from?"r />
  "Never mind. What are you doing up here?"

  "Sleeping—till you called. Sure good to hear—"

  "Well, quit sleeping and put the coffee on. I'll be there in twenty minutes—"

  He had made it in fifteen. "Why didn't you let me know you were here, you big dope? Did you think I was in a monastery under vows of silence or something?"

  "I didn't have time yesterday and I forgot to ask Hunter where to reach you last night."

  Chuck looked thinner, David thought, and when he remarked on it, Chuck said: "I'm working. All my misspent life at Pengard when I didn't study goes through my cotton-picking mind every time I crack a book. I don't know about law, but theology's murder on the unaccustomed mind."

  "You still like it? Still glad you picked it?"

  "Yes, without qualification. But I hope I can do what I want to—"

  "I thought the idea was to do what the Almighty wants—"

  "It is. But the real idea is to try and synchronize. If my bishop is still around when I'm ordained, I think I can. I pray for his health and well-being daily, believe me."

  David saw a quiet figure seated on the floor of the recreation hall of a church in Laurel, knees drawn up, face hidden, while the agonized words of Nehemiah Wilson still rang through the room; saw a tall, ungainly figure with bent head walking slowly through the nighttime snow, and saw the light from an open church door shining on a troubled, unhappy face.

  "Say, I forgot. Gramp gave me a message for you the last time I saw him."

  "Well, give—"

  "He said, 'Tell that young fellow, Chuck, that I prays for him all the time—' "

  "Yeah?" Chuck's face lighted, then sobered. "You tell Gramp I'd rather have his prayers going for me than the presiding bishop's."

  They talked over coffee, later over bacon and eggs, then later over more coffee.

  "Hunter out tomcatting?" asked Chuck.

  "How you talk! And you damned near being what Gramp calls an Episcolopian preacher."