by Sarah Blake
Kitty sat at one end, with Aldo and Roger Pratt. Her eye rested on Priss, seated at Ogden’s right at the other end of the table, with Moss next to her. She caught Ogden’s quick glance at his son and felt how keenly happy Moss made him. It was all in line tonight. Complete.
“Dad,” Evelyn appealed. “Help me out. I’m telling the Pratts about the Worthington Bartletts.”
Ogden tried to recall them. “Your friend Abby? Who just married?”
“That’s right.” She nodded. “And they are happy as clams except for one thing.”
“Her cooking?” Mr. Pratt hazarded.
“Not at all.” Evelyn shook her finger at him playfully. “Abby took classes at the Alliance Française. No,” she said, and paused. “Worthy finds his father-in-law hard to take.”
Og set down his glass. “Griswold Adams is a good man.”
“Of course, Dad. It’s his politics.”
“How on earth do you know that?” Og frowned.
“Abby told us.”
“Abby did?” Kitty asked, astonished, from her end of the table. “How extraordinary.”
“Don’t you ever let me hear you talking aloud about Dickie or what Dickie thinks, young lady.” Og was firm.
“Damn right.” Dickie Pratt raised his glass. “Thank you, sir. We men have to stick together.”
Evelyn swatted him.
“You see that?” he protested, smiling.
“It was all among friends, Dad.” Evelyn turned to her father. “Good friends.”
“I don’t care how good a friend you are,” he answered. “The beauty of marriage is that it’s private. A jewel. A wife ought never talk about her husband. And certainly not about his family. Talk tarnishes.”
His eye rested on Kitty, who gave him back her smile.
He raised his glass. He had been serious, but it needn’t be punishing. “To untarnished love,” he said.
“Untarnished love!” Mr. Pratt echoed.
“And the code of silence!” Aldo Weld teased. “Upon which it rests!”
“All right, all right,” Ogden grumbled cheerfully. “But you know I’m right.”
“Did anyone else catch Mike Wallace this week?” Aldo Weld asked into the quiet that followed as the table started eating.
“Horrible.” Kitty grimaced, looking up. “I turned it off.”
“She tried to turn it off,” Ogden said. “I wouldn’t let her.”
“What’s this?” Roger Pratt asked.
“Wallace did a show on some Negroes up in Harlem preaching race hatred.”
“Race hatred?”
“Whites are the blue-eyed devil—”
Moss put down his fork. “It was called The Hate That Hate Produced—”
Ogden looked up and nodded. “Yes, that’s right.”
“For a reason,” Moss continued. “Negroes have a right to be—”
“But why say it? Why have it all out there on the surface?” Kitty asked. “What good does it do? Everyone has the blacks’ interest at heart.”
“Not the citizens of Montgomery, perhaps,” Fanny decided.
“I meant,” Kitty said, “everyone at this table.”
“It’s not enough,” Moss said quietly. “It’s not nearly enough. Something’s got to break—”
“Not by calling each other names. Everyone needs to keep a cool head,” Roger Pratt said. Ogden nodded.
“Eisenhower was for integration, but gradually,” Aldo Weld said, leaning back in his chair, “Adlai Stevenson was for integration—but moderately. Isn’t that how the joke goes?”
“But it’s true.” Ogden frowned.
“Don’t you see the joke, Dad?” Moss asked.
“I see the joke, of course I do. One white man is like any other—”
Moss frowned. “Well, no.”
“They are good men, both of them, who meant well,” Ogden said, “and the country has profited by that sort of man.”
“The country?”
“Yes.”
“What about—”
“We do our best and move forward, Moss. That’s the only way, move forward.”
“I disagree.” Moss shook his head. “I’d say backward. You have to go backward. You have to turn around and look at what happened and see why—”
“What exactly are you talking about?” Aldo Weld leaned and reached for the wine, topping up Sarah Pratt’s glass beside him.
“I’m talking about hidden laws,” Moss answered.
Ogden considered this. “Laws are not hidden.”
“Unwritten laws are hidden. Unwritten rules.”
“Hidden and inexorable,” Fenno agreed.
Ogden looked from his son to Fenno, and said to Aldo, “The younger generation seems to be ganging up.”
Hidden laws, Kitty thought impatiently. Why can’t we just sit at the table together? Why the need to talk, to raise things up and examine them—to set up separate tables and say, I’m here, you’re there.
“Listen.” Ogden leaned back in his chair. “I have no illusions whatsoever about the blacks. They have been poorly treated, ill-used from the start. All right, then. How do we bring them in?” He looked at his son and smiled. “Slowly,” he answered himself. “That’s how civilizations hold. A leaking, fractured bucket cannot hold new water.”
“No,” said Moss, “we need new buckets. Or something. Bad analogy.”
He pushed back from the table and stood up. “Beer?” he asked without looking at anyone.
“I’ll take one since you’re up,” Dickie called out cheerfully. “In a bucket, or not.”
Moss nodded absently, moving toward the pantry and out into the night, where the stars hung a distant canopy over the sky. There were acts to every meal, he thought, creeping forward in the dark toward the rock shelf where he had wedged the beers brought up from the picnic grounds. Like a play—or better, an opera—a dinner like this one could set new patterns, the dips in voice below the surge of opinion, the scraping in and out of chairs, the chatter that didn’t add to much, the quick, considering glances and the replies. Act One was nearly done in there, and now came the complicating Act Two, where people settled into their food and the conversation, and one could begin to hear the pure blue strain, the single strand that would bind or divide them. The melody.
Break it down, Moss hummed to himself. Break it down, break it down, let it go. He didn’t worry about what he meant. What it was that needed breaking down. Somehow he knew enough to know that that didn’t matter. If he could capture that dinner table in a chord—his father’s blind assurance, his mother’s watchfulness, the ease and arrogance of the old men’s talk, his sister’s laugh—and then step away so the chord disappeared, leaving its echo, the moment’s trace, then he’d have done something. Find me some new notes, George, Miles Davis had said to his drummer ten years ago, and Moss had set his course by that phrase ever since.
Find me some new notes, indeed. Moss pulled a beer off the rock ledge and dug for his pocketknife. The talk in there at the dinner table did not break its borders, though he knew his father thought himself an open-minded man, able even to talk of Malcolm X at the dinner table. Like an old song sung a cappella, the old men relied on chords, moved their voices in fours up and down in tight harmony, the single chute of sounds—alto, bass, tenor—combined, but never lost. Separate but equal. He set the can on the rock and opened it by feel, finding the lip of the can under his fingers and setting the opener there. Segregated sound, each note kept firmly in its place.
A star fell above him in the new night sky. The single light simply dropped into motion, as though pushed from behind off its black shelf. He followed it all the way down out of sight, his eyes resting at the end, then returning to the squares of light blazing from the dining room out into the night where he stood. He took a long drink. He had a sudden wish that Reg had come, that Reg could see all this. He’d see who Moss was. Or rather, who he came from, and what Moss was talking about when he was talking about wanting t
o find new notes. Reg would see what Moss saw, and see the need to tear it down. He smiled to himself. Reg would see it and take it in—this impossible beauty—held tightly in the Miltons’ well-behaved, civilized hands.
Moss tipped the rest of the beer down his throat. He found himself transfixed at the window, unable to go back inside. Around the table a lively, inaudible conversation was going on. His father was leaning in his chair, listening. Moss opened the second beer in his hand and drank, watching as Mr. Pratt told a story only half the table paid attention to. Fenno spoke to Anne and his mother tapped the top of her chair. What’s in between? What’s in between? The rhythm of her fingers caught him.
Phrases swallowing other phrases and rooms, one room joining another and moving past it and then stop. Then stop. And start. Start again. He could hear it, just on the outside of the conversation, just past where the talk stopped, there was music. And for a minute, for a small instant, he had a glimpse of what he was trying for, a glimpse of how to get all of it—the room, these people, the candles and the stars—out. Out into words. But past words. Where it mattered.
An easy golden haze spread through him. Evelyn sat just out of the window frame, across from Joanie, whose brown head was very still, listening also. Tonight, as he’d crossed with the Welds in the dinghy, it had been Joanie’s figure, sitting on the rocks, he’d caught sight of first.
It was always Joanie he looked for in a crowd to reassure himself that she was still there. He sipped the beer. He couldn’t help it. Anything might happen. He’d grown up in the shadow of that morning she had almost drowned. They had been together, and then he’d turned around and she’d simply vanished. She’d been too close to the water tonight, he’d felt, watching Fenno Weld shift in his chair; and Moss saw he was listening to Anne, but he was watching Joan, who had leaned forward to press the wax at the top of the candle. Fenno gazed on Joan with an unguarded confusion. And Joan was somewhere else, Moss could tell. He wondered where. She stood and reached for Mr. Pratt’s plate and then her own. Whoever got her would be lucky.
* * *
“MOSS?” JOAN STOOD in the kitchen door silhouetted against the pantry light.
“Out here.”
The screen door clapped shut, and he heard her cross through the grass toward him. The two of them stood silent together outside the house.
Moss raised his beer to the scene inside. “The immortals at dinner.”
Joan smiled. He was right. Everyone inside looked like they were suspended in time.
“It makes me want to break something.”
She glanced at him, startled. Half-lit by the window, he looked like he was listening to something they couldn’t hear, and he looked thrilled. He poured the last of the beer down his throat.
“Why?” she asked.
He looked at her. “You can’t see anything until it’s broken.”
Was that right? She folded her arms. He reminded her of her boss just then, this same excitement, taking on the world.
“Then you just have pieces,” she said.
Beside her, he shook his head. “Pieces to make other pieces.”
Joan considered this.
“You know that feeling you have standing in front of a painting, or hearing the last few notes of a perfect song? Like a bolt shot straight into you. A recognition. You are not alone.”
“But you aren’t alone,” she said. “Look at all of us, look at all of this here.”
“But if I could make something bigger”—he was urgent—“something bigger than all of this—”
“What is bigger than this, Moss?” she asked simply. “This place is everything. It’s clear, complete. Everything’s right here, in this place.”
He didn’t answer right away.
“It’s all wrong, Joanie.” He shook his head. “Or I’m all wrong.”
“You are not.”
“I don’t have the goods for this place.”
“You do,” she protested.
In the dining room, Kitty rose from her chair and began setting out the dessert plates at everyone’s place.
“I don’t want them, then.”
“What do you want?”
“I want,” he said softly, his eyes on his mother, “for someone to look at me, and only me, and not the air beside my head, as if they are always looking for someone else.”
Joan watched their mother sit back down. She put her hand on her brother’s arm.
“Come on,” she said, and squeezed. “Let’s go in.”
* * *
“THERE YOU ARE!” Kitty called, catching sight of the two of them. “Come in. Poor Dickie has been very patient and parched here at my side.”
“Hardly, Mrs. Milton.”
“Hardly patient?” Evelyn teased.
“Hardly parched.” Dickie smiled.
Moss handed a cold can of beer to Dickie, followed by the can opener, still in the grip of what he had understood out there in the dark behind him, and without thinking, without pausing, cleared his throat and raised his beer.
“Toast!”
One by one, their faces slowly turned toward him. He pushed his glasses up along his nose.
“There is a genius out there in the world right now,” Moss began slowly. “A man who has figured how to make us hear great rooms of sound, in which anything is possible. Mr. Miles Davis—”
He was quite alert suddenly. He stood at the edge of a dive. His mother’s eyes rested like hands on his shoulders, willing him to sit down. He could simply step and jump. He glanced at his father, who watched him, waiting. Get on with it—he could feel his father’s mood. Get on. Get on.
And against that push, Moss straightened. He slowed. He took a good long look at his mother sitting at the end of the table, and he smiled.
“And though the order of business here this weekend is you two, Evelyn and Dick, I’d propose a toast first to infinite varieties—” Moss stopped. “To sounds that leap their barriers, notes that don’t stay put. To love in the key of blue.” Moss held his beer up.
In the puzzled silence Moss put the beer to his mouth and drank.
“Whatever the hell that is,” Dickie said, raising his beer good-humoredly, “I’m for it. I’m for you, Moss.”
Moss was drunk, Ogden realized. He would have to shape up; he must know it was time to give all this up. Kitty caught his eye and held it. All right. Ogden almost nodded. All right, I won’t say anything at all.
He rose with his glass in his hand.
“I leave music to Moss, but love brings me to my feet.” Ogden began. “In my experience, men make lonely music until they find a woman. We are just sounding brass”—he paused—“or a clanging cymbal.
“Behind every successful man is a good woman.” He smiled. “Or so the saying goes. But I suggest a good woman is the reason men put up walls and gardens, churches. The reason men build at all. At the center of every successful man is a good woman.”
He raised his glass and bowed slightly, first to Sarah Pratt, to Fanny Weld, and then to Kitty. “Tomorrow we’ll be overrun. A toast tonight, to the good women at the center—to Sarah, to Kitty, to Fanny, to Priss, and—to Evelyn, soon to be there.”
Moss raised his beer in answer. How cleanly his father worked, how cleverly. He had deflected the conversation, and yet it seemed he had taken it seriously, nonetheless. He drank, his eyes on his father.
Evelyn flushed with pleasure. She had gotten her ticket. She would be all set now. And seeing the look on her face, Dickie’s own dissolved into a boyish happiness, nearly alarmed by his good fortune. They were exactly right together, neat as pins, Joan thought without jealousy. And Evelyn had always been that way, light, quick, neat. Did sisters always fall into these patterns, the light and the dark? The beauty and the brains? Although, she thought as she moved the saltshaker to stand alongside the pepper, she was hardly the brains. Her stuffing leaked. But—she tapped the glass shaker with her butter knife idly, a little smile on her lips—it leaked gloriously
and in hidden ways.
“Come on,” Joan said to Anne across the candles. “We good women ought to lead a party down to the dock.”
Laughing, Joan and Anne rose, their plates in their hand, and Evelyn and Dickie rose as well. Through the door and out into the dark they went, their voices drifting past the open window at Kitty’s side and into the emptied room, where Moss remained, turned in on himself. Kitty looked at her son, puzzled.
“Go on,” she said to him.
He roused at her voice and looked at her, and as she held his gaze she realized with a start what she had pushed away all evening. He reminded her of Dunc.
He stood and stretched and gave her a little bow, clearing his plate and his beer. The swinging door into the pantry closed behind him. And then the screen door slammed.
The older generation sat a moment in the quiet behind them. It was as though they had all shrugged off a coat. No one would say it, but now they could breathe.
“I want to take the Herreshoff out tomorrow, if it’s clear,” Ogden said to Kitty, “early.”
She nodded, enjoying the faces round the table, all of whom she could count on, all of whom understood their roles, their places, she thought, rising from her end of the table.
Sarah Pratt and Fanny Weld rose also, gratefully. Priss did the same. Released. Happy to follow Kitty out of the dining room and outside to stand in the cooler air, into the night and the quiet. Kitty reached for the limb of the lilac arching over the door, the familiar branch like an arm. In front of her, the long lawn vanished in the dark. It was a clear night. Ogden would get his sail. Down on the dock, the tiny lights of the children’s cigarettes moved slowly, back and forth.
Twenty-nine
KITTY WOKE IN THE earliest part of the morning, her heart pounding. Neddy needed her somewhere, and quickly. Where or why, she never knew, though the dream was always the same. The dream never left traces like other dreams, there was never a moment in the waking day when something left over would glide through the air, when she’d catch it and remember, Oh, that’s what it was, that was the dream. This one came and sought her, and she’d start running in her sleep, running in the grip of a nameless fear toward him, to get him.
