The Dinner Party (12 page)

“I think so.”

“I'm sure you do.” Then Dolly went back to the dining room and began to arrange the flowers. The senator found her there. He had changed into a white shirt, pale gray flannels, and sneakers. He came into the room and stood quietly, watching Dolly whose back was to him. She was wearing a pink peasant skirt, a white cotton blouse, and sandals. A shaft of sunlight, filled with a dizzying dance of dust motes, caught her and made the senator think of the French impressionist painters and their obsession with sunlight. The flowers danced in the sunlight, and glowed as if they were lit from within.

“I sometimes think this is your favorite room,” the senator said.

“It is, I suppose,” she answered without turning, continuing to move the flowers, as if there were some perfect arrangement that she must find. “And it's the most valid. Every piece in the room has been in the family since at least—well eighteen ten at least.”

“And that's important to you?”

She turned slowly to face him, and said, “This morning, Richard, all that fuss about the ham—well, it was my invention, you know. I get so angry with you, and then I have to hang it on something; but still it was real. Damn it, Richard, I am Jewish. That may be a recent decision on my part, and it goes in the face of all the Jews I do not like. I was born a year before Pearl Harbor, and until World War Two was over I never had an inkling that I was Jewish. Well, maybe an inkling, no more. I didn't even think of Levi as a Jewish name. I was fourteen years old when I first read about the Holocaust. Slow process.”

“I try to understand.”

“I don't think there's any way to understand family relationships. I don't understand my father and mother. I gave it up. I don't even know whether I love them or hate them.”

“I think you love them,” the senator said uneasily, wondering where this was leading. He had always felt a certain awe regarding Augustus Levi, a man so absolutely certain of himself that he sometimes sent a cold shiver down the senator's spine. In the Congress of the United States, Cromwell had known a good many men who were possessed of absolute certainty, and this he feared so much that he felt the only real and enduring evil on the face of the earth was unbending certainty, unshakable orthodoxy.

Dolly was putting the lace doilies in place, and the senator mentioned that she never used a tablecloth. “Mom used tablecloths,” he said. “I have good memories of them. It meant an occasion, I mean a special occasion.”

“Yes, of course. But I couldn't bear to cover this beautiful old wood. It adds so much.”

“Well, nothing's exactly the way it used to be. I mean in the lower depths.”

“Lower depths? Richard, your people were utterly respectable middle-class people.”

“They were what our president likes to call the moral majority. My father was so moral he'd die before he'd ask for a raise. Do you know, he never worked up to fifty dollars a week. Bank tellers are the foundation of utter respectability. Mom was given to prayer; she worked prayer like no one I ever knew, and when I won my first election, she said to me, don't ever say that prayer won't bring what is prayed for.”

“You mean she was praying for you to become a politician?”

“Of course. She was Irish.”

“Touché. Could you take the silver chests out of the closet and set them here on the buffet? Or should I call Mac?”

“Bug off with Mac. I was up at five o'clock this morning. I ran at least a mile. I swam. I showered, and I'm still ambulatory.”

“Apologies, right down the line,” Dolly said. Somehow, these few minutes of the two of them alone in the dining room had turned into the best bit of relationship that she could recall in many months, if not years. What small magic was working on them she did not know. An hour ago she had been ready to bite his head off, and now she was regarding him fondly as he swung the heavy silver chests up onto the buffet. She had to admit that he was a fine figure of a man, gone a trifle to fat, but still a large, strong well-muscled man. She liked men to be physical.

“I will never forget,” he said, “the first time I had dinner in your mother's house. I was just out of college and in uniform—thank goodness. I didn't have a decent suit.”

“I guessed as much,” Dolly agreed.

“Your father glanced at me as if I were an insect.”

“Typical of him. You were not an officer. He relaxed when he heard you were Judge-Advocate. Afterwards, he told me he felt that was a sign of intelligence.”

“You're being creative.” The senator grinned. “You never mentioned that before.”

“Scout's honor.” She had opened the three chests of silver that Richard had lifted to the sideboard and was studying them thoughtfully. “Take a look. Do they need polishing?”

“No,” he decided. “You know, that damned, idiot senseless war in Korea—”

“You didn't even look.”

“Sure I looked.” He lifted a fork. “Pristine. By golly, that night at your home, twelve spoons, eighteen forks, seven knives, all huddled around my plate—”

She turned to smile at him. “You felt that way. I bet you did.”

“I told Mom about it. ‘What are they?' she wanted to know. I said, ‘Rich' ‘Oh,' she said. ‘That I don't mean. Are they Catholics or are they Protestants?' Do you know, I didn't know. She asked me did I see a crucifix? Specifying that the rich ones kept them in the bedroom. Next time, I was to slip into a bedroom and see.”

“They need polishing,” Dolly said. “Poor Mac, he polished the serving dishes and the coffee stuff this morning, and now again.”

“Ah, they don't need it.”

“Some do. It's no great deal.” Then, unexpectedly, she went to the senator and up on her toes and kissed him lightly. And then she hurried out of the dining room.

I'll be damned, the senator said to himself. I will be everlastingly damned. He dropped into a chair, waiting and trying to decide whether to follow her into the kitchen. She didn't come back to the dining room, and after a few minutes Richard left the room and went through the house, outside, and then rather aimlessly to the terrace, where MacKenzie and Nellie were setting the table for lunch. For a few hours where nothing much happened, the senator said to himself, it's been quite a morning.

FIFTEEN

A
fter his talk with MacKenzie, Jones replaced the books on the shelves where he had found them. The library opened onto a screened porch that extended to the rear from one wing of the house, and Jones, filled with curiosity about the house but tentative about exploring it, opened the door from the library to the screened-in porch and went through. The porch was furnished with colorful summer furniture, an overstuffed couch covered in yellow and pink print, big chairs, wicker rockers—the single porch larger than the entire home of his childhood. He had never been in a house like this before, and he had the curious feeling that people who lived in such circumstances were basically defenseless. In the place where his childhood had been spent, death was a frequent and usually cruel visitor, fought on unequal terms, feared, hated, yet accepted. When Jones was still a kid, only nine years old, his great-grandmother, old as time, had told him the story of how her granddaddy, a slave on a Carolina plantation, had faced his owner. His owner had a shotgun and pointed it at the slave and told him to get down on his knees and take back the words he had spoken. Never, you white bastard, the slave had said, and the owner killed him with a shotgun blast in his face.

“Pride,” the old lady told Jones. “You face death, you got to have pride.”

Not that it made much sense to Jones or served to ease his own deep fear, and anyway, pride was an ancient word, hardly current anymore. Jones knew, as Leonard knew, that he, Jones, could be editor of the
Law Review
before he graduated. There he was, tall, good looking, black, but not too black, and smart and well mannered enough to become a Supreme Court justice's clerk, or go with a super Washington or New York law firm, or go back home and join a firm in Carolina and do politics there. No more nonsense about pride that got a stupid slave a shotgun blast in his head. You pushed death away. No death. Man, you were making it. Until death nudged you back. And then, by God, pride didn't help you one damn bit.

Jones left the house through the porch, walked around to the terrace, an outside place with a striped awning over it to keep out the sun, where lunch would be served. The awning covered the half where the table had been set; on the other half were the outdoor lounges. The senator, armed with a newspaper and his reading glasses, had dropped onto one of the lounges. When he saw Jones, he motioned toward the lounge beside him. “Sit down, Clarence, unless you mind the sun?”

“Some black people do,” Jones said. “It makes them darker. I don't mind being dark as the night.”

The senator regarded him with interest. Was he being arrogant, impolite, challenging—or just plain straightforward? “And of course, we strive to be darker. Suntan is one of the many silly habits of our time.”

Smiling, Jones dropped down beside the senator and said, “Yes, but for us it's kind of flattering. White folks want to be darker. I've never quite understood. But whites are not easy to understand.”

“True enough.”

“I've been prowling in your library,” Jones said tentatively. It was not easy for him to sit beside the senator and carry on a conversation. He forced himself to at first. If he sat in silence, he could see the senator telling his wife about the surly black kid Leonard had brought home with him. “It's a great library.”

“Well, not great but eclectic, my taste, my wife's, and of course Leonard's and Elizabeth's. Almost no law books, which is a pity because I hear you're making your way at law school. But I keep most of my law library in Washington—in my office, and in my home in Georgetown, and a sort of digest library in my local office here.”

“I wasn't looking for law books,” Jones forced himself to say, suddenly terror stricken and wondering what insanity had led him to accept Leonard's invitation. Suppose Leonard decided to blurt it all out today, to tell this man, his father, and his mother, and the others that he was dying. I can run away, he thought. I can get them to drive me to the station before Leonard comes back. And with that, he asked the senator, “When will Leonard and Elizabeth be back?”

The senator glanced at his watch. “Any moment now. Are you all right?”

“Yes, sir.” He sighed.

“You're sure.”

“Yes, sir.” There were then a few long moments of silence, during which the senator looked at him as comfortingly as he could, realizing how awkward he must feel.

“Would you like to look at the paper?” the senator asked him.

“No, sir.” And then Jones added, “I wasn't looking for law books in the library. I was looking at the books you have on quantum mechanics.”

“Oh? I thought you're a law student.”

“Yes, sir. Quantum mechanics is my hobby.”

“Hey—mine too,” the senator said with pleasure. “How is it you didn't go in for physics?”

“My father and mother's dream is for me to go back down south and go into politics.”

“I can understand that,” the senator told him. “Some of us do what our people want. I did. But I got interested in physics in the army, which was my time of boredom. Armies are the most useless and worthless adornments of our so-called civilization, and aside from death and maiming, their chief product is boredom.”

Jones was staring at him.

“Doesn't conform with my voting record?”

Jones didn't say anything to that. He didn't know how to handle the turn the conversation had taken. He looked away, across the lawn to the pool. Contradictions still troubled him, and here in this place, there were simply too many for him to deal with. Why had the senator chosen him for this particular discussion, and how was it that a man who appeared to have this kind of sensitivity could be so mindlessly insensitive to his son? Or was he? Or was he, Jones, so ignorant of the ways of white folk that he was operating on the basis of a series of misjudgments?

“I use it as a counterfoil to despair,” the senator said, very tentatively, posing a question with each word—leaving out what he might have said about the fate of a Catholic who was not a Catholic married to a Jew who was not a Jew. “Do you know what I mean?”

Why me? Jones wondered. He wasn't at all certain that he knew what the senator meant. His own despair was the despair that comes with death both senseless and imminent—but no such death faced the senator.

The senator smiled. “I'm not talking about virtue,” he said, “I'm simply referring to things the way they are. Trouble is, no one who hasn't buried his head in quantum mechanics has any notion of what I am talking about. Do you, Mr. Jones?”