The Dinner Party

by Howard Fast

  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

  After 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?”

  “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

  Jones 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

  Augustus 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 we
re 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.”