War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel (16 page)

“No, actually.”

“Activists, you know.
They didn’t belong here.
We’re more into the make-love side of things, you know.” He looked over his shoulder at the girl.

“That seems obvious, although if he was with a girl—”

“Fuck me, man, you’re even
straighter than he is. He was getting that warrior vibe, you know?”

“What do you mean?”

“Bringing the war home, baby,” he said. “Stupidest thing I ever heard.
We don’t need any stinking war.
If everybody just loved each other, we wouldn’t be so fucking fucked up, you know?”

I wished Malcolm was here to interpret for me.

“You’re not coming in, right? I mean you can get your own downstairs, if you want it.
We’re kinda into our own thing.” He was still talking to me.

The girl smiled at me.
“I don’t mind a three-way.
Never done it with two black guys.”

“Um, no, thanks,” I said.
“I’m just—”

“Looking for Daniel, I know.” The kid shook his head.
“Too bad, man.
Wouldn’t surprise me if he was dead by now, you know?”

Then he slammed the door in my face.
I thought about knocking again, but wasn’t sure what it would accomplish.

The girl laughed from inside the room, and then squealed.
I turned around and headed back down the stairs.

I tried to ask a few other people questions, but no one seemed sober enough to speak to me.
I felt a little off myself, and wondered if it was from the pot smoke in the air or from my rather surreal encounter with the couple upstairs.

I had a hunch it was from both.

THIRTEEN

The next morning had a damp chill in the air. The weather forecast said we’d get up to eighty degrees, just like the day before, but for now, the temperature hovered in the low sixties, making my wool suit bearable.

The night before, Malcolm had teased me about coming back to the motel smelling like pot, which I deserved.
I told him and Jimmy about my afternoon — leaving out the racier parts — and Malcolm grew serious.

“Sounds like Daniel might be in trouble,” he said.

I agreed.
I felt a growing sense of urgency to find Daniel and, at the same time, concern that I might be too late.

When we finished breakfast, I took Jimmy with me to Yale for my meeting with Dean Sidbury.
We dropped Malcolm at a Laundromat along the way.

Yale’s campus was lively at
seven-fort
y
-five
on a summer morning.
I hadn’t expected it.
A number of students carried books against their hips, heading to class.
All of them looked clean-cut, especially compared with the young people I had seen the day before.
All those white shirts, black trousers, and short hair made me realize that the group I had seen the day before wasn’t the norm.
Kids still tried to get ahead.
Only a handful of them rebelled in one way or another.

Dean Sidbury’s office was in the main part of Daniel’s college.
Instead of going in a side door and up a tower, Jimmy and I went into the main double doors that led into a stone hallway.
To our right was a door marked
PRIVATE
and straight ahead was a typical office setup, with a secretary in a reception area, lots of brown leather chairs, newspapers for those who waited, and a door with the words
JONATHON LYON SIDBURY, DEAN
across the center in hand
-
carved wooden letters.

The secretary looked up as we walked in.
She had the same look as the secretary at
t
he
Crow
,
right down to the beehive hairdo,
only this woman was white and much older.

Jimmy stayed behind with the secretary because she insisted that the dean would want to see me alone.
Apparently she felt that the dean wouldn’t want to discuss confidential matters in front of a child.

As I pushed the door open, I heard her ask Jim, “Do you color?” and I was glad I wasn’t there for his response.

Dean Sidbury’s office was as different from Robinson’s as could be.
A wall of windows had a view of the quad, and plants the size of trees stood in front of them on the inside.
More plants hung off his desk, their leaves trailing to the blue shag carpet.

Sidbury was a slender man with a bony aesthetic face.
Black hair covered the tips of his ears and touched the back of his collar.
He stood when he saw me, and offered me his hand.

I took it, sensing no hesitation in him.
“Darrel Kirkland.”

“Jonathon Sidbury.” He shook my hand once, then let go, indicating the chair beside his desk.

“Sorry I don’t have more time,” he said.
“We’re having all sorts of difficulties with the accelerated schedule for making Yale coeducational.
Finding homes for the young women — safe homes — while still giving them the Yale experience is proving quite the challenge.”

I nodded politely, not really caring.
“I was told you could help me find Daniel.”

“Yes, well.” Sidbury cleared his throat.
“Find him, no.
Tell you his history, yes.
I can’t let
you see the files, but I can tell you what’s in them and what happened last fall.”

“All right.” I folded my hands in my lap and waited.

“I had high hopes for Daniel,” Sidbury said.
“He came in here like a ball of fire, ready to work, ready to conquer the world.”

I could see that.
That fit with the young man I had met last summer.

“He got straight A
’
s in some of our more difficult freshman courses, although he struggled toward the end of the year.
Skipping classes, that sort of thing.
He blamed it on the political climate, and frankly, I could understand that.
Dr. King’s death shook up many of our students.”

I nodded.

“Your son believed that Yale needed to be changed,” Sidbury said. “We had many discussions.
I agreed with him, in part at least. Our academics are geared toward a certain kind of student.
Daniel believed th
at
black history, black literature, and black achievements should be taught in all of the schools.
He showed me black studies curriculum from various colleges, most of them out west, and insisted that Yale start training black leaders.”

“It doesn’t sound unreasonable,” I said.
“Especially since this school supposedly creates the future leaders of America.”

Sidbury sighed.
“That was Daniel’s argument.”

“And you kicked him out because he wanted you to examine your own cultural elitism.”

“Um, no.” And this time, Sidbury let his tone rise to that patrician level which I loathed.
“First, let me tell you that we kick no one out.
Yale does not expel students. And secondly, Daniel did not leave because of his academic complaints.”

“So why did he leave?” I asked.
“No one will tell me.”

“It’s not a pleasant story, Mr. Kirkland.”

“How can I find the boy if I don’t know what happened to him? We lost him after Yale.
He’s vanished.”

“He is an adult—”

“I am quite aware of that,” I snapped.

“Your son was asked to leave because he nearly beat a boy to death.”

I froze.
Daniel Kirkland struck me as misguided, but not violent.
“Are you certain?”

“Quite.” Sidbury clutched the file tightly
,
as if he were afraid I was going to grab it and read it. “I’ll be as clear as I can. Daniel came to me at the beginning of the fall semester, representing some splinter group in BSAY—the black students’ organization at Yale.
They were angry about the war, claiming that it was people like us, people trained in the Ivy League
,
who were behind it, and that our
‘
cultural imperatives
’
led us to repress minorities worldwide.
The war was just one manifestation of this repression.”

Sidbury couldn’t keep the sarcasm from his voice. I could almost hear Daniel making this argument, his fist shaking in defiance.

“Daniel said he believed in changing the system, but he preferred to do so from within.
The first step would be to teach black studies at Yale as well as courses in communism and
t
hird
w
orld history.
He had an entire list, from the history of Vietnam — with reminders that Ho Chi Mi
nh
had been our ally for nearly twenty years — to a list of black writers whom he felt we should study.”

Sidbury shoved the file aside.
He was clearly telling me his own opinions now, his own memories.

“I told him that his arguments had merit, but I was not the person to implement them.
He wanted advice on who
to speak to, and I told him that I would handle things with the curriculum committee.
He didn’t like that, but agreed to let me try.”

“Did you?” I asked.

“I was consulting with others when Daniel came back, accused me of doing nothing, and decided to take matters into his own hands.
He led campus-wide protests, talked to the curriculum committee himself, enlisted some of our more liberal professors in this quest, and seemed to be gaining a bit of ground.”

“This sounds like leadership behavior to me,” I said.

“It was disruptive, and your son was not polite about the way he handled things,” Sidbury said. “Diplomacy requires politeness and patience.
Daniel became well known on campus for being a troublemaker.
By the time
the incident occurred, he had few friends in the administration.
That, more than anything, was his problem.”

Sidbury seemed like he was on a roll.
I didn’t interrupt.

“Coeducation Week,” Sidbury said.
“November
fourth
to the
eleventh
.
Seven hundred girls from twenty-two Northeast schools came to Yale for one week to see if our four thousand boys could deal with them.
You have to understand, Mr. Kirkland, one mistake, one problem, and Yale would have been all over the national press.
Coeducation wouldn’t have happened here, and we would have been the laughingstock of the entire country.”

As if that were the most important thing that happened in November of 1968.
It seemed to me a lot of other things happened that month that the nation had focused on, not the least of which was the election of Richard Nixon and some failed Vietnam peace conferences.

“We were on eggshells here, and the boys knew it.
Many of them gave up their rooms so that these girls could be scattered throughout the colleges.
The security was intense.
We did our very best, and so did the girls, going to classes, staying in the dorms, handling these young men who were used to being kings of their own hills, as it were.”

Sidbury glanced at me nervously.
His fingers toyed with the closed file.

“As you know,” he said, “the experiment worked.
Things did go smoothly, although there was an undercurrent of anger from many of the alumni and some of the boys.
Students presented a petition for coeducation with more than
seventeen hundred
signatures on it, the national press corps seized on this, and that, along with the success of the week, made President Brewster decide to accelerate the coeducation of the college.”

“What provoked Daniel?” I asked. “What caused this so-called incident?”

Sidbury cleared his throat, clearly a stalling tactic as he figured out what to say next.
“There were no incidents, so far as I knew, in
C
oeducation Week itself.
But there were a few afterward, mostly with local girls. We did our best to keep them quiet.”

“I’m sure you did.”

“Not for the sake of our reputation,” he added quickly. “But because the decision had been made. We didn’t want to scare the young ladies away.”

“Are you saying that Daniel was involved in one of these inciden
t
s with the women?”

“Yes,” Sidbury said.
“Yes he was.
But not in the way you’d expect.”

I had no idea what Sidbury thought I would expect.
I knew what he expected. He would have thought that Daniel — angry, black
,
impolite Daniel — would have hurt one of the women, or done something worse.