The Dinner Party (13 page)

“I'm not sure.”

“But you agree that it poses ontological problems?”

“Oh, yes indeed, sir,” grateful that he could make some reasonable observation.

“For example, when we face a situation in which contradictory states of being appear to be linked together, and an object—for want of a better name—is both a wave and a particle, well then one can take some small comfort in the possibility that this nest of lunacy we call society is less reality than illusion. But of course it isn't. I think quantum is a game—a last-resort game.” His smile was quizzical now, and Jones simply did not know what to say.

MacKenzie, coming out onto the terrace with a tray of food, said, “Senator, Mr. and Mrs. Levi are here.”

SIXTEEN

J
ones felt released when the senator went into the house to welcome his guests. MacKenzie appeared again with a cart of drinks and ice, soft drinks and hard. Nellie followed him with a tray of coffee service. “We'll serve lunch at half past one,” MacKenzie said. “I ring a bell, so you can feel free to wander.” He grinned at Jones.

“Thank you, Mr. MacKenzie.”

“Call me Mac. Everyone else does.”

Jones was wearing blue jeans, sneakers, and a white-knit short-sleeved shirt. “Am I all right, I mean the way I'm dressed?”

“Just fine. We don't dress any special way for lunch, but Miss Dolly don't like bathing suits.”

Leonard came out of the house and called to Clarence to join him. They walked around the house to the herb garden. Dolly wanted some parsley.

“How did it go?” Leonard asked him. “I felt guilty, leaving you with all these high-class honkies.”

“Honkies,” Jones said. “I hate those lousy words. They come out of self-hate. I'm glad you left me alone for a couple of hours. It was fine. I read a little. I met Mr. MacKenzie and had a talk with him—a nice man, believe me, and I had a kind of weird talk with your father.”

“Weird?”

“Not exactly. No. You know, he asked a few questions—just ordinary, I'll-be-polite-to-this-black-kid kind of stuff, because these days most people lean over backwards, and then he found out that I was interested in quantum mechanics and it turns out it's a hobby of his.”

“But weird?”

“Maybe a little. You get into that kind of thing, and reality begins to get very hazy. Are we real or is it all illusion?”

“We talked about that many times.”

“I know. But with him, it was different. He was very nice to me, I have to say that.”

“He can be, I suppose,” Leonard said. “About this quantum stuff, he heads a subcommittee on atomic energy or something related to it. I forget the exact title.”

How could he forget the exact title? Jones wondered.

“I guess a week doesn't go by without some physicist having dinner with us—”

“You're away at school,” Jones interrupted.

“Well, before then. When I was just a kid. Clare, are you pissed at me or something?”

Jones put an arm around him. “Oh, no. No.”

“Because I'm sick?”

“Oh, Jesus, Lenny, I love you. You know that.”

“Yeah—sure.”

“You know, Lenny, maybe I shouldn't stay overnight. I barged into this big, important dinner your mother is giving tonight, and I'm really forcing my way into the dinner table. Who says they want a black guy there? It may embarrass them. Where do I come off sitting down with the secretary of state?”

“Oh, bullshit. Who is he? What did he ever do that's worth talking about?”

“He's secretary of state.”

“Jonesy, if my father doesn't want you at the table, he'll tell you so.”

“Look,” Jones said defensively, “every notion I have about what your dad's like comes from you.”

“Hold on. Let's not fight over it.”

Jones shook his head. “Forgive me, Lenny—oh, God, please forgive me. I forget and—” He stopped himself short.

“You forget and you begin to treat me like a normal human being who isn't on his way to the abattoir. I treat you like a normal human being.”

They stood for a few moments facing each other, silent, and then Jones nodded. His eyes had filled with tears.

“Jesus Christ, don't do that! If I have one month left, I want to live it like a person, not like some damned creature walking into the gates of hell. Like poor Marty Helsen, who was left alone, isolated, because no one wanted to go near him.”

“I try.”

Leonard took a long breath, sighed as he released it, and bent his head. “I know. My father's a complex man. You sit down and you're next to him. I can't do that.”

“Have you tried?”

“I tried, I tried. Look, forget it.” They were at the herb garden now, a complex of brick paths and beds, old brick shot through with white lime. Dolly had designed the garden out of eighteenth-century drawings and twentieth-century memories of her own.

“Parsley,” Leonard said. “Which is it?”

Jones glanced at him, as if to ask how anyone living here all his life could not recognize parsley.

“I know. I'm not a gardener. Anyway, she wants the broad leaf stuff, and that's different.”

“There.” Jones pointed.

“That's mint. Even I know that.” Pointing, Leonard said, “Try this one for size.”

“This is mint.”

Leonard tasted it. “Parsley.”

“I never saw parsley just like that,” Jones said.

“Another marvel of the rich.”

Elizabeth stepped out of the kitchen door and called to them, “Mother says, Where's the parsley?”

“If I had a place like this,” Jones said, “I'd have me a nigger to pick the parsley.”

“That means you're treating me like a normal person. You're hostile, you're nasty, and you stand on your right to talk stupid.”

“Right on.”

“Oh, Jesus, don't go away, Jonesey. I need you.”

SEVENTEEN

A
ugustus Levi managed to get Dolly aside on their way out of the house to lunch on the terrace, and said to her, “Who's the black kid.”

“Student. Friend of Leonard. Law at Harvard. Very bright.”

“Joining us for dinner?”

“Yes,” staring at her father and waiting for his reaction.

“That little shithead Justin, who runs the state department south, hates blacks and so does his wife, who's some kind of southern belle.”

“Oh? Do you mind?”

“Me? You're talking to Gus Levi, kid. Nothing I like better than to shove one up his lousy little ass, if you'll forgive the language?”

“You know I won't, Daddy, and for God's sake, don't talk like that in front of Clarence. He comes from a decent Christian home, and you know there's nothing more proper than proper church-going blacks.”

“If you say so, Baby.”

“I do say so. Emphatically. Especially at the dinner table.”

“And at the lunch table?”

“Absolutely.”

At the lunch table, Augustus Levi dominated the scene, not simply because of his enormous bulk, but also in the singularity of his dress. He always voted for singularity, feeling it had profound psychological effects. Now, with everyone else in casual clothes, he wore a stiff and creaseless seersucker suit over a white shirt and a school tie, which in this case was Harvard. He also had gone on to get his degree in engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He wore spotless white shoes and a pale lavender handkerchief in his outside breastpocket, and under the handkerchief, on the face of the pocket, a small MIT symbol. Thus he announced two antecedents out of the trunkful of varied awards and honors that he and his family had accumulated.

He said to his daughter, “Dolly, you look damn wonderful. If you'd be sensible and dye your hair, you'd pass for thirty, and your kids don't eat enough. Anorexia is one of the stupid ailments of our time. Your place looks decent enough, but your trees want pruning.”

“Yes, Daddy,” Dolly said quietly, conducting a conversation with her mother and only half aware of what her father was saying. Elizabeth and Leonard were suddenly convulsed with laughter—to the amazement of Jones who ate his food in uneasy silence. They adored the old man. Jenny had developed throughout her life with Augustus the ability to hear nothing that he said—unless it was prefaced with a booming salutation: “Jenny, pass me the salt!”

“You're not supposed to have salt. You know that.” She passed him the salt. “I do hope you're keeping the salt down tonight,” she said to Dolly.

“Mother, you know it wouldn't help. He'd only put the salt back onto the food. The chicken salad has no salt. He's adding it.”

“How's your golf game?” he was saying to the senator, who did not adore him, but endured him.

“Not my game. You know that, Gus.”

“Of course, and that's a mistake. That's where the business of America takes place, on the golf links.”

“You know what his blood pressure is,” Jenny said to Dolly. Jenny, five feet and nine inches tall, had been one of those golden American girls. At age sixty-nine, she was a full-bosomed maternal figure of a woman, one hundred and fifty pounds and stout enough not to require a face-lift. Dolly had heard rumors of her father's adventures with a sex therapist who gave him injections of testosterone, but she dismissed them as the kind of gossip public figures endure—although, in all truth, her father attempted a low profile in all gossip and publicity. She still saw her mother as a beautiful and desirable woman, and perhaps she pitied her more than she loved her. If someone had asked her what were her feelings toward her father, she would have stated without hesitation that she loved him dearly; but asking the question of herself—which she rarely did—Dolly would come up with an answer far less certain.

Now she put her hand on her mother's and said, “I know what Richard's blood pressure is.”

“At least he doesn't embrace the salt shaker.”

“Well. You know …” dropping her voice, “Daddy is immortal, Richard isn't.”

“What a thing to say!”

“Mother, just a silly joke.”

“Tennis,” Augustus was telling the senator, “puts your adversary on the other side of the net. That's why it's a game for doctors and rich bums. Not for politicians.”

“Grandpa,” Elizabeth said, “I am not a doctor and I am not a rich bum—at least I don't think so—and I love tennis.”

“Then we'll thank God you're not a politician, Baby. What I mean to convey to your father is that you don't work a deal on the tennis court.”

Hearing out of the nonlistening ear, Dolly ventured that tennis was less a sport than a religion.

“Not my tennis,” the senator said.

“That's true. Richard isn't compulsive.”

“Nor do I make deals,” the senator said.

“Hah!” That was from Dolly.

“Sometimes, sometimes,” the senator admitted.

“We're all of us corrupting young Jones here,” Augustus told them.

Dolly busied herself with feeding. “There's a buffet of delicious things, Mr. Jones. The salad niçoise is delicious, even if it is just plain old tuna fish and green stuff and the bread is still hot. We make our own mayonnaise and we're famous for it at least for a mile down the road. And the potato salad is not just potato salad. See for yourself.”

How nice of her, the senator thought, to put it that way and put the black kid at his ease.

“No, sir,” Jones said to Augustus. “I don't think I'm being corrupted. Enlightened, perhaps.”

“You'll find nothing enlightening here,” Elizabeth said.

“Really, Liz,” from Jenny.

“Still, I hear you're going into politics.”

“Maybe. Yes, sir—if I ever get out of law school, if I ever pass my bar. That's what my folks want, but there's plenty of work down home for just a plain country lawyer.”