Fairbairn, Ann

by Five Smooth Stones

  She disposed of the sewer-line problem with a simple:

  "The hell with the roots. I won't part with that tree, Brad. We'll just have to figure de-rooting into our expenses."

  "It's all right with me, my dear, if you like it that much."

  "Such a lovely tree, Brad. And it's peaceful. There's a certain permanent peacefulness about it."

  "The tree stays. We de-root."

  She was quiet, counting stitches; then she asked, "Young Champlin, hon. How's he doing?"

  "Fine. Really fine, Peg. Naturally, he's doing what I knew he would, going at it too hot and heavy. I bawled him out the other day, but he just grinned and said, 'Yes, sir.' I doubt it did any good. I called him a brat and told him to go home and relax."

  "I'm not talking about his work. I'm asking about him as an individual. His possibilities."

  Brad leaned forward, fussed with the fire. "It's early to say. Two months. One could be wrong."

  "One seldom is. When it's you."

  "Nonsense. I've been wrong a number of times. But—I don't think I am in this instance. Right now he's a bit of an enigma. Very damned quiet. Shy. Naive to a certain extent. And wary. I don't know that I'd use the word 'brilliant' yet, but he has a fine, searching mind. And sense enough to know that the law has been around a long time, longer than he has, and he's willing to take a step at a time. And that, my love, makes for a good lawyer."

  "I know. How does he stack up against Baker?"

  "Hell, they don't talk the same language." He was silent for a moment, thinking of the slender, acidulous young Negro, Baker, a final-year law student who might conceivably take his first year's practice with Abernathy, Willis and Shea after Culbertson left in the summer. Brad was not looking forward to the possibility. He supposed one could apply to Baker the adjective he had temporarily withheld from Champlin—brilliant. But he was also bitter, frustrated, and so racially oriented that the attaining of any objectivity in the conduct of a case seemed, at this point, an impossibility. Brad had discussed it with Peg often, had said before what he said now: "There are cases, you know, that go through our office involving Negroes in which the Negro is in the wrong. I can think of a number where we represented the plaintiff and the defendant was a Negro. That he was in the wrong because of character flaws brought into being through psychic trauma suffered as a Negro is not, I'm afraid, something a New England jury swallows too easily. True though it so often is."

  "And Champlin?"

  "David would understand son-of-a-bitchery in one of his own race, just as Baker does. But I don't see him letting it cloud his judgment. For a youngster he has what I can only call great compassion, which is something else again. He brought in a resume of a case the other day that he'd typed, and said if his pay was coming out of the client he'd be glad to pass it up and do more work on it in his 'spare time.'" Brad smile. "That's what he said—'spare time.' He also said, That poor guy's had a rough time, Mr. Willis.' "

  "Was the client a Negro?"

  "Yes. Baker might have been as generous. But not out of compassion or a sense of outrage at injustice as such. It would have been out of a desire for revenge. He would have seen himself in the client, would have seen in the case every wrong our race has ever suffered. David would probably win the case before a jury; Baker would lose it before it ever got to a jury."

  "You walk on eggs, don't you?"

  "That's an odd remark. Yes, I suppose I do. Most of the time."

  "I didn't mean it to be an 'odd remark.'" Her husky voice was beginning to show tension. "You've traveled a fur piece on eggs. And objectivity."

  "That's hardly fair. If I had more, had even enough objectivity, you'd be wearing mink."

  "I don't want mink." Her tone warned him, and he sought frantically for a change of subject. He did not know what she wanted of him; not mink, that was certain. Her material wants were few and moderate. There was doubt in his mind that she herself knew exactly what she sought for in him— and apparently could not find. When he had tried to question her, there had been bitter, illogical quarrels; he would not try again. He knew only this much: that she would be happy to see him tackle the problems of their people on a full-time basis —yet she had followed with tense interest his defense of a young Polish boy accused of rape, had gone to court the final day and wept real tears of joy at the acquittal. And that night had started a month-long drinking bout.

  All of his work as a consultant to ALEC's Boston-located national headquarters he gave unstintingly and without fee.

  But he would not, he told her once, become in his private practice what he called a "professional Negro." There had been no quarrel, although he had feared one the moment the words were out. There had been only the familiar journey into unreality, culminating on that occasion in a wrecked car and a broken ankle.

  She was rolling up her knitting now, preparing to stand, and he felt the muscles of his belly tighten with dread, but she said only, "Coffee?"

  When she brought the coffee back he said, "I'm inclined to think some of young Champlin's emotional maturity stems from an incident in college. More than an incident, really."

  "What incident? You didn't tell me."

  Peg, he said silently; Peg, Peg. You hadn't been sober for three weeks, and if I'd told you then, you probably wouldn't even have remembered. Aloud he said: "Dr. Sutherland told me about it. David's best friend his first year and a half at Pengard was Dr. Sutherland's son, Clifton. 'Suds' he's called —God knows why. I think they are still close friends. David is at their house a lot, and they seem very fond of him. Anyhow, the boy had a damned nasty time for a while—"

  He told her the story, as Sutherland had told it to him, finishing with, "The dean resigned."

  "God!" said Peg. Her eyes were wide and so dark they seemed pure black. "Oh, God! The poor kid. The poor damned kid—"

  "He weathered it, Peg. He weathered it and stayed seaworthy. And didn't become—let's say—Bakerized."

  "What makes people react, Brad? Why does one man become a Baker and another a Champlin? This damned generalizing—this 'they, they, they—' This 'The Negro is this— they are that—' "

  "Our own people are guilty of it, too, Peg. I swear every Negro who gets his opinions in print becomes immediately the spokesman for the race. 'We Negroes hate whites—we Negroes love everyone—we this—we that.' They moan because they have no identity, yet they destroy their individual identities by burying them alive in a race identity of their own invention." Thank God, she was in agreement with him, the tensions of a half hour ago lessening. "In David's case I think the credit goes to his grandfather. And a Danish professor named Bjarne Knudsen who lives and teaches in New Orleans. From what I've heard, Knudsen is a big wheel in the academic world, and he took David under his wing when the kid was only about seven or eight. But I would say his grandfather did the most."

  "I envy him."

  "Who? The grandfather? Or David?"

  "His grandfather. It must be pretty damned great to grow old and watch a boy like David growing up and know you had a part in what he is."

  "As I said before—it's early yet, Peg. Things can happen. He's still nothing but a brat."

  "A nice brat."

  "A nice brat."

  "I wish—if we'd had a son—"

  "Peg, my dear, to have a son David's age you would have had to marry in kindergarten."

  "I know. I—I guess it doesn't do any good thinking about it—" She stood up and began gathering ashtrays and glasses.

  Brad walked over to her, put an arm around her shoulders, and drew her closer so he could rest his cheek against the glow of her hair. "Thinking never did a damned thing in the field of procreation. You know that, don't you?"

  She laughed, then turned her head so that it rested on his shoulder, the long strong fingers of one hand digging into his arm. "I know. Brad, I'm a bitch. And you've been so damned, so Goddamned good. But Brad, if I'm a bitch it's not because I don't love you. Not ever. I do love you, Brad—"


  "Of course, Peg." And wished he did not feel as though she had left a phrase unsaid, a phrase that would have begun, "in spite of—"

  ***

  On the same night that Brad and Peg Willis were discussing him, two months after he entered Harvard Law, David sat with Suds Sutherland in a dim and ancient Boston fish house surveying a mound of empty clamshells. He sighed deeply and said "Whew!" and Sudsy said, "Courage. There's more coming. Mackerel."

  They ate contentedly and when the meal was over sat drinking beer and talking. David was conscious now and then of stares, but he reflected that it had been a long time since he had known the acute discomfort of those meals in the Laurel Inn on his first trip to Pengard. He had been trying, whenever he could spare the mental effort from his studies, to assess the racial climate of this city, to compare it with Chicago and Cincinnati, and so far had not been able to arrive at any conclusive opinion. He lived within blocks of what could only be described as a Negro ghetto, a ghetto rapidly encroaching on his own neighborhood, and whenever he walked its streets to barbershop or restaurant he felt again the sting of guilt at his alienation from his people, the feeling that what he had should somehow be shared, that he had no right to it. He had compared with a sort of bitter wonder the outspoken defense of the Negro made by various prominent citizens in print, in the letters-to-the-editor columns of the papers, and from public platforms, with the ill-equipped schools and the all-black hordes of children romping in their asphalt-paved schoolyards at recess.

  Without thinking he said now, "I like this town. But it's phony as hell just the same."

  Suds' eyes became round and questioning. "What brings that crack on?"

  David shrugged. "Sorry if I riled you. But I'll tell you, chum. Look at me. No one's given me a bad time since I've been here. Anyplace. I don't go in places I'm not sure about, but I don't suppose there are any I couldn't if I looked like a student or a big shot—professional, that is—and wore the right clothes. But suppose I was married and wanted to rent?"

  "Hell, we've got integrated suburbs all around—"

  "Maybe. If you're a doctor or a lawyer and have the dough to buy. But last Sunday I went to a little church on the edge of Roxbury—"

  "How in God's name did you get over there?"

  "Got to talking with a guy on the subway. He said they had good singing. I'd been hankering for some—well, anyhow, I could have been at home. And if those aren't segregated schools I've been seeing—"

  "Yeah, I know, but—"

  "You think something isn't going to crack now that the Supreme Court has acted? Here in the North, too?"

  "Yeah, but—"

  "Lay off the 'yabbut' routine. You think they'll do anything about it here?"

  Suds was quiet for a minute, then said slowly: "No. Not here. I mean voluntarily. You haven't been here long enough to get the true picture. The politics. The apathy. We New Engenders will fight, yes, man, we'll fight for the poor downtrodden Negro in the South. But, by God, we Bostonians won't stoop to dirty our fingers to clean out the rotten politics, overcome the apathy, that stymies any fight here. And, David, so help me—and you can hit me over the head with that beer bottle if you want—your own people around here aren't exactly what you'd call activists. I'm no student of the situation, but I swear they act as though they'd invented the status quo concept."

  "That's what Willis says. I'm beginning to get it."

  "We argued once about what would happen when the Supreme Court decided, didn't we? Mildly. I didn't believe you then—that things would just get worse. I'm beginning to now. Chuck Martin said the same thing. And you seemed to know—"

  "Hell, man, the white racist isn't exactly unpredictable. My grandfather can tell you every time one of the public ones is going to sneeze. But I can't predict, damned if I can, what these half-assed so-called liberals in the North will do. Only that whatever they do when the chips are down I don't think I'm going to like it." David looked at his watch. "Your daddy told me to get you home early."

  "Oh, my God! He'll never stop feeling guilty because somebody else found out I had TB."

  "You feeling O.K.?"

  "Fine. Gosh, I feel fine."

  Driving to David's rooms Sudsy said: "One thing about this city, phony or not, it's a small town. Everyone's mixed up with everyone else. You're doing some work for a firm that handles my father's legal affairs, and Hunter Travis's old man uses it too, for some of his stuff—"

  "Abernathy, Willis and Shea? Lawrence Travis? I didn't know—"

  "Yup. Mrs. Travis's family were Boston's best. Related somewhere along the line to the Abernathy clan. Everyone here is related somewhere along the line. Anyhow, her mother took a trip to England and married an English tide. She sent her daughter—that would be the present Mrs. Travis —back to the States to stay with her grandparents and go to prep school and college. Since her father died, her mother lives here most of the time. Marcia wound up in Radcliffe." Suds laughed. "Don't get any preconceived ideas. Mrs. T. is swell. Anyhow, that's how she met Lawrence Travis. He was working his way through Harvard. Waiting tables, janitoring, anything he could get. My mother told me all this after I left Pengard when she found out I knew Hunter. The Travises were married after Lawrence went into practice."

  "Did the grandparents raise a sand?"

  "You mean about Travis? No-o-o." Suds squirmed almost visibly. "I mean, they—"

  "Took it like Spartans? Breeding and all that?"

  "No, damn it! They, well, just didn't raise any sand—"

  "Probably thought it was a sort of mark of distinction. If it had been an Irish bartender they'd have raised hell."

  "Don't be prickly."

  "I'm not being prickly. I've been here long enough to sense a little bit about how some of their minds work. Some things are so far out they come full circle. If you can't marry another Brahmin, don't marry into the middle class. Marry a Negro. Thereby carrying on the great tradition of—of— damned if I know of what."

  "Oh, for God's sake! Sometimes you can't find a good word to say for anyone, can you?"

  "Nope. And sometimes I can. I'm an ambivalent anachronism, according to Hunter."

  "I'll ask him what he meant when he gets here. He'll be over here soon. Something about his book."

  David felt a glow of pleasure. There was no one from Pengard he would rather see, he thought; his fear that time and the distances Hunter traveled would make their friendship a part-time thing began to recede. And he was glad Hunter's book was going well. It had made quite a splash—a first novel written while the author was still in college. He loyally declared aloud and to himself that it was a great book and tried to smother the memory of his puzzled boredom as he read it. But critics had waved banners; he knew that the book was well written, and if nothing happened in it, well, life was probably like that for the people about whom Hunter wrote.

  When David let himself into his apartment, he looked at the law books on his desk, and groaned. Ten nights out of eleven the pile of books and notebooks was a challenge; on the eleventh night it became a torture. The sheer weight of the books, the realization of the vast quantities of printed matter within their covers, all of it to be digested and assimilated eventually, brought a great blankness to his mind. What he studied on those nights was a blurred and fuzzy recollection in the morning. He knew he should take Dr. Sutherland's advice and knock off more frequently. "Go out on the town now and then, my boy," Sutherland had said, and David had withheld the obvious comment that going out on the town cost money. He had made friends at the church in

  Roxbury, mentioned briefly to Sudsy, but it was a long way to go at the end of the day and then return to the mountains of textbooks. The Sunday services he attended now and then were anaesthesia for a loneliness he could not always fight off. The singing did what Gramp called "carry him," as it had in his childhood; it laid a stilling hand on inner turmoil.

  Tonight he knew study was out. Somewhere behind the pile of books there were some magazi
nes and a science-fiction paperback. He didn't want anything weightier. By the time he had fixed coffee for morning, undressed, hung trousers and coat carefully, each on its own hanger, and tossed his shirt in the laundry hamper for a Sunday scrub session, he began to look forward to the evening. He put on pajamas, slid bare feet into slippers, and belted around him the robe Gramp had given him for his nineteenth birthday. He put an opened can of beer on the table, settled down into the room's only good-sized armchair, and cocked his feet up on chair opposite. As he was adjusting the lamp on the table beside him to exactly the right angle, he laughed softly. "Damned old maid," he muttered. "Fussing around like a broody hen. What'll I be when I'm sixty!"

  After an hour he knew if he didn't get up and go to bed he would fall asleep over the book and waken after midnight stiff and cramped. He decided to hold out to the end of the chapter and then go. The third time he heard what he had thought was the rattling of a light wind he realized that it was a knock on the door, and sighed, damning himself for not having turned out the light and gone to bed ten minutes before. With no light on and no answer to the knock, whoever it was would have gone away. Now he would have to answer it.

  At first he did not see her standing small and quiet in the dark. It was her voice that brought his eyes down to hers. "Look down here, David. I'm way down here—"

  "Sara—"

  ***

  She stood outside the circle of light cast by the table lamp, all dark intent eyes and soft dark hair. He had not found words yet to follow that first "Sara—" and stood foolishly looking at her, trying to fight back the surge of joy, the choking tightness in his throat that wanted release in a shout