“I’ll watch for Kemala,” he promised and went out to buy a case of Miller’s for the party and a split of champagne for afterward.
*
HE arrived late and wove his way through Melanie’s crowded living room to the small kitchenette, where she was filling enormous straw baskets with potato chips. She wore a bright red peasant skirt and a white blouse. Her light brown hair was pulled back, and the golden crumb of a potato chip nestled at the corner of her mouth.
“Slob,” he said and licked it off.
“Don’t be disgusting, Michael.” She wiped her mouth. “Did you bring the beer?”
“Right there.” He had set the beer down beside the trays of canapés that crowded the counter. “Pretty fancy,” he said. Caviar perched on slices of cucumber, small slivers of salmon were wrapped in scallions, chopped egg dotted squares of black bread.
“A donation from Jeremy,” she said. “Does it look like a good party?” Her voice was anxious.
Michael smiled. “It looks like a terrific party,” he said, amused at her question. Like her New Orleans mother, she was a nervous hostess. She might reject her background, but it clung to her in small, significant ways.
And it was a good party, he thought as he circled the room. Pretty, long-haired girls in brightly colored Indian skirts smiled and talked earnestly to young men wearing sandals and faded jeans. A joint was passed from hand to hand. Wisps of blue smoke wreathed the air, which smelled of incense and orange blossom. Three guitarists had stationed themselves in different parts of the apartment, and each strummed happily and sang to a separate circle of disciples. A girl with very short blond hair squatted in front of Melanie’s bookshelves and read aloud from Pasternak’s poems. Tears coursed down her cheeks, yet she did not look unhappy. A dark-haired girl plucked at a mandolin and sang a song Michael had not heard before, “What Have They Done to the Rain?” Her voice was piercingly sweet, and the song was melancholy and tender. Someone said she had written it herself.
“Who is she?” he asked a research assistant whose name he could not remember.
“Joan Baez. Good, isn’t she?”
“Very good,” he agreed and went to the piano, where Les Anderson was pecking out “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.”
“More your speed?” Jeremy Cohen asked him.
“I’m not feeling too political tonight,” Michael replied. “I’ll worry about the rain tomorrow.”
“Then you’re at the wrong party,” he said. “Melanie’s got a tape of the Kennedy acceptance speech, and she’s going to play it later. Listening is the price of admission.”
Jeremy’s cynicism was homegrown. He was the son of a husband-and-wife team of Hollywood writers who were rumored to be the cleverest and most expensive in a field of very clever and very expensive professionals.
“We don’t talk in my house,” Jeremy had told Michael once. “We trade dialogue. When I told my mother why I wanted to go to medical school—and I was being very serious—she stopped me in midsentence and said, ‘Hey, that’s good, that’s very good,’ and wrote down what I was saying in her goddamn notebook. Sometimes I think that I wasn’t really born—maybe they wrote me and I crawled out of their typewriters like a character in one of their scenarios. ‘Enter the socially conscious, introspective son of the brilliant, iconoclastic extrovert couple….’”
“Come on, Jeremy, you don’t mean that,” Michael had protested. Criticism of parents made him uneasy, opened emotional floodgates he preferred to keep closed. He did not tell Jeremy that he sometimes thought he himself had been conceived to confirm his parents’ happiness, to stand as a living imprimatur to their success. Such thoughts, disloyal and irrational, frightened him.
“Sure I do,” Jeremy affirmed. “My family’s not like yours, Michael.”
Jeremy had visited the Goldfeder family in Scarsdale and had been impressed by their warmth and closeness. Since David Goldfeder’s death, Leah lit candles every Friday evening, and the family gathered for the Sabbath meal. Always, in a strong voice, Leah added a prayer for the safety of Rebecca and Yehuda and their children, for the freedom of Russian Jews.
“It is our responsibility to care—to work and to care,” she had said once, and Aaron and Michael had exchanged glances and smiled.
Their mother’s zeal and energy bemused them. But then, she had always been a warrior. She had fought for the rights of workers to organize; she had worked tirelessly for the war effort, and now, during her later years, while her contemporaries joined golf clubs and wintered in Florida, she battled vigorously for the remnant of her people. Across the table, Boris Zaslovsky, a frequent guest, smiled at Leah, before he intoned the kiddush.
Watching them, Jeremy felt a sense of loss. Although both his parents were Jewish, he had never celebrated his own bar mitzvah.
“Not our scene,” Janet Cohen had said when he pointed out that other Jewish boys at Hollywood High were having synagogue services and parties. “We’re sort of what you might call ‘white Jews.’” She had laughed charmingly, and his father had picked up the trail of her metaphor with the skill that made their partnership so successful.
“Yes, white Jews—fully laundered, the religion bleached out of us, the customs and superstitions discreetly faded.”
His parents did not object when Jeremy studied medicine, but they were bewildered by his decision to intern at a municipal hospital in New York. California was the last frontier, the end of the rainbow. Screen credits in blazing Technicolor were the pot of gold. There were wonderful hospitals in California, and their connections could get Jeremy any job he wanted. Still, they understood that this was a generation that stood on its own, that turned its back on parental influence. Jeremy’s life was his own. They had a film to complete in London, locations to check out in France. They had, in fact, left for Europe that very afternoon, and the lavish canapés on Melanie’s kitchen counter were the remnants of the catered leave-taking lunch they had ordered for themselves and the contingent of Berkeley friends they had invited to share in their goodbye to their only son.
Melanie circled the room, offering canapés to a cluster of guests sprawled on a rya rug.
“You are what you eat,” a bearded man in overalls said as he reached for an hors d’oeuvre.
“There’s mayonnaise in that,” a girl cautioned him.
“I’m feeling suicidal,” he retorted and popped it whole into his mouth.
Across the room a group newly returned from Los Angeles argued the Democratic Convention’s decisions.
“Maybe Stevenson was the better man, but you can imagine what Nixon would do with him—he’d chew him up and spit him out.”
“Listen, Stevenson couldn’t get his act together in fifty-six. He’d be a disaster in sixty,” one of the young political science instructors said. They waited for him to elaborate—his doctorate had been a learned treatise on dissident American political parties—but he had wandered over to the blond girl, who was still reading from Pasternak, although her tears had stopped and she had refreshed her makeup. In another corner Joan Baez continued to pluck her mandolin and sing softly to herself.
“Yes, but Stevenson’s a man of principle. He doesn’t make political concessions,” a bespectacled young woman insisted.
“Everyone makes political concessions,” someone said softly from a darkened corner. The musical tone of the woman’s voice intrigued Michael and he turned.
Kemala Jackson wore a yellow dress and sat on a bright green butterfly chair. She was, as Melanie had said, ballerina-thin. Her long arms were sinuous, and her long glossy hair was woven into a single braid that flowed down her back. Her features were narrow and finely chiseled. She sat with her legs tucked beneath her, her head held high. Her legs would be long and shapely, Michael knew, and he waited for her to speak again, but she was silent. The conversation whirred on, concentrating now on the concessions made in LA.
“Why the hell did they select Johnson for the vice-presidentia
l slot? A southerner, for God’s sake!”
“Because they needed a southerner to balance the civil rights plank.”
“Did Martin Luther King endorse Kennedy?”
“No, but Arthur Goldberg did. If you’ve got one minority, you’ve got them all.”
Anger and laughter mingled. They spoke the language of the disenchanted. They laughed with the bitterness of the spiritually discontent. And yet, despite their veneer of sophistication, they were not without optimism. Theirs was the generation that would make the difference. They would find a new enchantment. Dreamers spoke to them. Martin Luther King, Jr., had visited Berkeley, and the mellifluous cadence of his voice lingered in their memories. They would forge a new tomorrow. Stevenson had disappointed, but they had recognized Kennedy as a new claimant to a Camelot lost in shadow. They acknowledged that it was not his fervor that moved them but his youth. The auburn-haired senator had an ageless quality. They could not envisage his ever growing old. His youth ensured their own.
They drank more beer and dimmed the lights. Joan Baez took her mandolin and wandered out into the night. Someone put a Brothers Four record on the phonograph. The party had thinned, and there was room for everyone to sprawl out as they listened to “Green Fields.”
Michael made his way across the room to Kemala Jackson.
“My name is Michael Goldfeder,” he said.
She nodded; her elegant head rose and fell in regal acknowledgment. He was reminded of a frieze he had seen, a pharaonic princess accepting an emissary’s credentials.
“I’m Kemala Jackson. Not hard to remember. Just think of the town in Mississippi.”
“You’re not from Mississippi.” He tried to place her accent, to isolate it from the musical cadence of her voice.
“No. But I’m going there.”
“Why?”
“Don’t you read the newspapers, Michael Goldfeder? There’s a war going on in Mississippi.”
“There are wars going on everywhere,” he replied, impatient suddenly with verbal teasing. “Wars on poverty, wars on ignorance, wars against littering. Not counting, of course, wars in Southeast Asia, in Israel, cold wars, hot wars.”
“And yet you’re not in active combat,” she retorted. “You don’t look as if you ever fought for anything in your life.”
“How kind of you to say so,” he said easily, although her words hurt him. She had, with lilting voice and deft and mocking thrust, exposed a vulnerability he concealed even from himself. “You’re right. I apologize for my lack of battle ribbons. I was too young for World War Two, still in school during Korea. No war on poverty because I was born rich. No war on values because my family understands me. I’m the poor little rich boy, the perennial rebel without a cause.”
“Oh, there are causes all around,” she said. “Shall I offer you a few?”
“What did you have in mind?”
But she did not answer because just then Melanie called for quiet. She wanted to play the tape of Kennedy’s speech accepting the nomination.
They glanced uneasily at one another as Les Anderson set up the tape recorder. Across the room a girl giggled, and Melanie frowned. The strangely reverberant voice of the senator from Massachusetts filled the room. Within minutes he caught their attention. They recognized that he spoke the unarticulated language of their hearts. Candlelight flickered on their upturned faces as they listened. John Kennedy shared their disappointment with the world of their inheritance—but not of their making.
“The world is changing. The old era is ending. The old ways will not do….”
The Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States echoed the arguments they had with their parents in dining rooms in Shaker Heights, in the finished basements of Long Island homes, in the sprawling mansions of Beverly Hills. John Kennedy, in his Massachusetts twang, was calling for “a peaceful revolution for human rights…demanding an end to racial discrimination in all parts of our community life….”
The black students among them leaned forward. A Chinese intern, diminutive in his white lab jacket, took the hand of a tall girl wearing a black leotard and a paisley skirt. Melanie turned the volume up, and Jeremy Cohen moved to her side.
“It is time…for a new generation of leadership…we stand today on the edge of a new frontier, the frontier of the nineteen-sixties, a frontier of unknown opportunities and paths, a frontier of unlimited hopes and threats…. I am asking each of you to be new pioneers on that new frontier.”
They glanced at each other proudly, happily. The cynical ideas they had voiced only minutes before had been forgotten and replaced by a new and soaring hope. The disembodied voice flowing from the tape recorder spoke to each of them individually. They were the new generation of leaders, they were the pioneers and inheritors of the new frontier. They would build the bridge between past and future.
“I’m going to campaign for him full time,” Melanie said. “The hell with my trip to Europe. It’s important to get Kennedy into the White House.”
There were murmurs of approval. Les Anderson whipped out his pad and took rapid notes. He saw a projected headline: “Kennedy Captures Students’ Secret Hearts. A New Generation Has a Cause.” He crossed it out. “Kennedy Offers Youth New Answers to Old Questions.” He underlined it.
Melanie produced a sign-on sheet for campaign volunteers. Michael wondered if she had held it in readiness throughout the evening. Was the celebration party actually a draft? Signatures were being added rapidly. Kemala Jackson remained in the green butterfly chair, watchful, almost amused, her hands still cupped beneath her chin.
“Do you want to sign up, Kemala?” Melanie asked, extending the sheet to her.
“Now, Melanie, isn’t a political campaign a kind of a luxury?” Kemala asked in a slow, controlled tone. She might have been a patient lecturer, instructing a student who could not grasp a concept, an amused older relative confronting the whim of a naive youngster. “If you want someone elected, you need people to vote for them.
They don’t let people vote in Mississippi unless they can pass what they call a literacy test. So I’m going to work on helping people to pass that test. I won’t have time to ring doorbells for Mr. Kennedy.”
Melanie blushed, and Kemala Jackson rose languidly from the seat she had not left all evening.
“I’ll be saying good night now,” she said. “It was a nice party, Melanie. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” Melanie said, tight-lipped and tense. She continued to circulate her sign-up sheet, but the magic was gone, the momentum lost. There were desultory murmurs about academic obligations, prior plans.
“That was a bitchy thing to do,” Michael said to Kemala.
“Oh, I’m a bitch all right,” she agreed amiably, softly. “And would you like to take this bitch home?”
“One minute,” Michael said harshly. She both angered and intrigued him.
He went into the kitchen, removed the split of champagne from its hiding place behind the wilted lettuce, and put it into a brown paper bag with two plastic cups. Melanie, her lips pursed, was brewing coffee.
“Good night,” he said and kissed her lightly on the forehead. He had never kissed her on the forehead before.
On the darkened stairwell Kemala Jackson slipped her hand into his. Her palm was satin-smooth against his own, and he stroked it gently as they walked to his car, noting that he had been right—her legs were long and shapely.
“Let’s move on, then, to a new frontier,” he said, and their laughter mingled and echoed in the darkened street.
*
THEY drove to Golden Gate Park and looked down on the ink-black waters of the Bay. A cool breeze blew and the soft air was suffused with the melancholy fragrance of the blossoming citrus trees. They wandered across a grassy embankment, and Kemala paused. “Wild strawberries near here. I can smell them.”
“Are you a country girl?” he asked.
“I’m from the country and from the city,” she said, and smil
ed at his skeptical glance. “No. I’m not trying to be mysterious. We moved a lot, an awful lot. My father was kind of a combination teacher and preacher. He was born in the South, but somehow he got himself north for his schooling. He was Columbia University’s black boy, plucked out of Morehouse College and given all sorts of scholarships—the Urban League Grant, the Booker T. Washington Living—that sort of thing. My daddy studied history and philosophy, and he got good grades, but he wasn’t that smart—he believed what he read. One of his professors gave him a leather-bound copy of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, and he carried it everywhere. He thought if he got enough people to read and understand it, everything would be all right. They’d take down the ‘Colored Only’ signs in front of the drinking fountains and the bathrooms.
“My mother knew better. She was a southerner, after all, who had gone north to do her nurse’s training at Harlem Hospital. She knew what things were like back in Dixie. But he had a dream, and she wasn’t about to stand in his way.”
“She went back to the South with him?” Michael asked. (As Leah, his mother, would have followed her husband, given a similar set of circumstances. Leah, who had taken a factory job so that she could support her husband through medical school and not stand in his way.)
“Yes. They went back down South and I was born and my daddy with his fancy Columbia degree taught in a lot of different schools—some in the city and some in the country. Some were in towns so small the school was in a corner of the church and some so far out in the bayou country that the school was an abandoned sharecropper’s cottage. You see, he was preaching civil rights twenty years ago, and that wasn’t what the black elders of the community wanted to hear. They didn’t want a wise-guy nigger stirring the people up—if Mr. Charley got to hear about it, they’d be the ones to pay. My father never had a contract that went beyond a year. We kept moving, and my mother kept getting wearier and wearier. Finally, she went north for tests. Anemia, they said, but it wasn’t anemia. It was some rare kind of blood deficiency, but they didn’t find out until one afternoon she began hemorrhaging from the mouth. The blood came spurting out, and we rushed her to the nearest hospital for coloreds, twenty miles away. The doctors there said she needed a transfusion, but they didn’t have enough blood. The white hospital wouldn’t send their blood for a black woman, even though the doctor pleaded in an oh-so-respectful voice. I counted five ‘pleases’ and five ‘sirs’ in one call. He should have saved his breath. Three hours later my mother died. The doctor wrote ‘blood deficiency’ on the death certificate, but I knew better. ‘Bigotry,’ he should have written. ‘Hatred.’ My mother died because she was a black woman in the state of Mississippi.”
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