The Dinner Party (19 page)

“He'll love it, Mom. Jungle colors.”

“What an awful thing to say! Anyway, pastels are not jungle colors.”

But now the pretty pink-and-white guest room was empty, as carefully clean and neat as if it had never been used; and MacKenzie went to the kitchen and informed his wife of this latest development.

“Why?” Ellen wondered. “Why would he slip away without even a goodbye and a thank you?”

“Can't you guess?” MacKenzie asked.

“I certainly cannot.”

“Take our own son, Mason. He grew up here with the Cromwell kids and he is a doctor now, which in my eyes puts him second to nobody. But can you see him pushing his way into a dinner table with the secretary of state?”

“Why not?”

“Because it don't matter that you are eating three meals a day and you got a job with white folks treat you decent—no, ma'am, because you are still defined by your people, who live in squalor and hunger and misery.”

“You talk like a Communist,” Ellen said.

“There you are. I just talk two words different from them White House coffee-colored Uncle Toms and I am a Communist.” Getting no rejoinder to this, he said, “Should I tell Miss Dolly?”

“Since she got the table set for eleven, I just think you might.”

“You know, I been reading this book out of the senator's library by Thorstein Veblen—”

“I got work to do and I'm in no mood for your self-education. Miss Dolly is in the dining room.”

MacKenzie found Dolly in the dining room, going over service with Nellie. “Oh, Mac,” Dolly said, “I'm glad you're here. I'm changing the service, and we won't do it the English way. I want you to carve the meat in the kitchen, quarter-inch slices and only from the high part of the leg. You do the first platter you slice, and Nellie will serve the vegetables, leaving Ellen free to make a second platter. Much quicker. I want you to do the wine. Nellie will serve the quenelle and you follow with the wine.”

“Yes, ma'am, but I must tell you about Mr. Jones.”

“What about Mr. Jones?”

“He is gone. Leonard is driving him.”

“Where? What do you mean, Leonard is driving him?”

“Maybe to the airport, maybe to town. I just seen them drive out. Then I went up to Mr. Jones's room. He had packed and cleared out.”

“Mac,” Dolly said, “rearrange the service for ten. I want to get to the root of this. I'll be back here. You might go over things with Nellie.”

Nellie was disappointed. She had always nurtured a fantasy that one of the guests in the senator's home would come creeping into her bed one night. It had never happened, but most of Nellie's sexual fantasies had never happened, and ever since she first laid eyes on Clarence Jones, she had decided that this time her fantasy just had to be fulfilled. Now he was gone; no fantasy, no fulfillment, and after Dolly left the room, Nellie blurted out, “Oh, it is a shame—just a rotten bloody shame, he was such a nice lad.”

Dolly, meanwhile, marched upstairs to Elizabeth's room, entered without knocking, and said to her daughter, who was sprawled on the bed, “Tell me about it. What drove that nice boy out of here?”

“Himself. He wasn't driven. He went.”

“That's no answer, Liz, and you know it.”

After a moment, Elizabeth replied, “I think he was frightened.”

“Leonard says he was an honor student, and if he could face things out at Harvard Law, there is nothing at the Cromwells' to frighten him.”

“It's different.”

“You know, Liz, it's your own cockeyed code that holds us beyond the pale. You decide that our worlds are so far apart that there's no way to cross them. That doesn't express a very high opinion of us.”

“No, that's not the way it is.”

“Well, what way is it?” Dolly demanded, exasperated.

Elizabeth sat up. “You're my mother. I'm your daughter.”

“And what does that signify?”

“Oh, Mother, you know what I'm talking about. There are levels. I can't just bridge them because I love you and you're intelligent and sensitive. Can you do it with your mother, with Grandma Jenny?”

“No, I suppose not.”

Elizabeth got off the bed and went to her mother and held her and kissed her.

“That's nice,” Dolly said, “but it doesn't get you off the hook.”

“He couldn't face tonight, so he's running away. Do you understand? He's just a kid. He's over six feet but don't let that fool you. He's a brilliant little kid, and he made it right from the bottom with scholarships. But he's black and he's a kid from a North Carolina ghetto slum, and the way he felt today he could not bring himself to sit down with the secretary of state and Mr. William Justin. So he ran away. Lenny is driving him over to the bus depot in town.”

Dolly was silent for a moment or two; then she nodded and said that she could buy it. “I'll talk to Leonard about it. I'm sorry. It would have been an interesting experience for him.”

“Or a loathsome one.”

“Elizabeth,” she said, “whatever you may feel, these two men run our foreign policy.”

“Yes. I always had the notion that the president had something to do with it.”

“I don't wish to talk about that poor man. The important thing is whether Leonard will be back in time for dinner?”

“Leonard promised in one hour.”

“Very well. And at the table, darling, try to swallow the sarcasm. I know you're a very clever and well-educated young woman, and you will find both these men rather dull and limited; so if you must engage someone with your wit, use Mrs. Justin.”

“I love you when you're prim and proper,” Elizabeth said. “I'll try.”

Leaving the room, pausing at the door, Dolly said, “You wouldn't consider telling me what Leonard has gotten himself into? I am his mother, you know.”

Elizabeth shook her head, not trusting herself to speak.

TWENTY-TWO

S
howering, soaping his body energetically, the senator reviewed the day from the moment of his awakening at five o'clock in the morning. In the ordinary course of things, when one awakens at five in the morning, some days can be endless. In this case, it had also been extraordinary. The passage of sex with his wife still bewildered him, the explosion of passion puzzling, upsetting, and at the same time delicious; and as he dried his body, he found that the very memory of it was giving him an erection and filling him with renewed desire. If he responded, it would send him off, like a horny hound dog to find Dolly and lure her back into bed.

That was beyond the pale. He tried to review the facts calmly. He had long ago given up any pretense that he was capable of monogamy, and while he had taken a handful of women to bed, it was always the result of affection. He loved women. He loved to be with women and talk to women and make love to women, and now, suddenly and unexplicably, he was once again in love with his wife, and on top of all this he had a mistress, Joan Herman, whose fascination for him had by no means turned cold enough to make him certain that it would not flare up again. There's a mess, he thought, a beautiful mess, and addressing himself, told himself that he was by any measure, the most worthless one hundred and ninety pounds of manhood that had ever existed. This very morning he had become horny as a porcupine over the thought of Joan Herman in bed, and here, less than ten hours later, he was trying to convince himself and face the fact that the affair was over. Of course it was over; it had become shabby and worthless, but when he examined that conclusion, he was devastated. For years he had been a member of NOW, and he was one of the most prominent and aggressive supporters of the E.R.A.—and how did it all come together with the events of today? He had taken a detestable course with both his wife and his mistress, and if today actually meant some sort of a return—not to righteousness, which he detested—but to sanity, he still lacked enough faith in himself to believe that he could carry through.

He decided to shave again, an unusual decision. Shaving to him, as to most men, was a ritual performed in the morning, and the senator's beard was not heavy enough to require a second evening shave. On the other hand, at least for Richard Cromwell, shaving required total concentration—which would at least for the moment take his mind off his confused sex life.

He shaved. Always when he shaved, he found his countenance intolerable, suffered it because a number of writers had described him as good looking, and wondered how anyone who looked like himself could be elected dog catcher. However, the act of shaving worked with his thoughts, and drying his face he turned his critical reflection upon his session with his father-in-law. And since this was a moment for self-examination with an added shred of honesty, he admitted to himself that he hated his father-in-law. The points he had given him in the belief that even a mean Jew had a streak of compassion hidden somewhere, were points without substance or meaning. He was as compassionate as John D. Rockefeller, Sr., the senator decided, and as much of a Jew.

But on his part he had played it wrong, and that appeared to be a habit of his where Augustus was concerned. Having agreed to playing a few sets of pocket pool, he washed out as soon as the old man cleared the table on the break, thereby frustrating the old bastard. Surrender did not mean Augustus had won; it simply stigmatized Richard as someone with too little guts to play against a real hustler. Also, he should never have broached the subject of Sanctuary there in the billiard room immediately after he had washed out of the game. If he had been thinking properly, he would have saved the subject for the discussion that evening, throwing it in at a moment when Augustus, facing the two men with the senator beside him as family—well, that would have put the matter in an entirely different framework.

His Machiavellian talents left much to be desired, and this once again returned his thoughts to his secretary, Joan Herman. She was his Machiavellian right arm, and without her he would be limited to naiveté and honesty, both death sentences in that strange place they called the Hill.

All of which drops me into that uncomfortable space between a rock and a hard place, the senator admitted to himself, and with his bow tie hanging unmade around his neck, set off to find Dolly and beg her to tie it for him. That, he felt, was at least a trifle Machiavellian, for put to it, he could do his own bow tie. But this way it provided what he felt he needed at this moment, Dolly's arms around him as she bent over a chair, encircling him from the rear, while he meekly allowed her to tie his bow.

TWENTY-THREE

J
enny found Dolly in the dining room, putting the finishing touches on the table, new candles in the sticks, two low clusters of flowers, and a rearrangement of the place cards that eliminated Jones and put Elizabeth between Web Heller and Bill Justin. Jenny was moved to sit between Leonard and Augustus. “Which puts you,” Dolly said to her mother, “next to Leonard and directly across from our two distinguished guests.”

“And next to Gus. I could have been spared that.”

“Mother,” Dolly explained, “we want something very important to Richard from those two, and I think that a pretty young woman will serve to put them in a better mood—”

“Than a fat old lady.”

“Mother, for heaven's sake, you are not fat and you're a very beautiful woman—”

“Matronly is the word.”

“—and they will be looking at you and probably trying to rub knees with Elizabeth under the table.”

“What a dreadful thing to say! I don't know what's come over you, Dolly, but you do say the most common things. Whether you like them or not, these are very important people and very highly placed in our government.”

“Yes, Mother.”

Prowling around the table, Jenny snorted at the card for Frances Heller, placed between Bill Justin and Richard, who sat at the head of the table. “You put her too far from you and me. She wants protection. She's so sweet and innocent.”