by Belva Plain
“Don’t, Mama, please.”
The old lady blew her nose. “You’re right. Forgive me, I shouldn’t.”
So emotional, Tom thought, with their sainted Peter, dragging Mom upstairs to look, and out to the cemetery … Fallen from outer space, these people are, to destroy my life. And I’m expected to sit here nicely, talk nicely, and eat their food. I will not talk to them. Will not.
And he looked at Arthur with contempt. He was a shrimp compared with Bud. I love my father! Tom cried inwardly, and was stricken with an actual pain in his chest. The outrage was unbearable.
In her very bones Margaret was sure she felt Tom’s distress. His poor head must be spinning. Laura, this lovely woman, has been his mother, so what can I mean to him? Can he ever want to know us? He’s been well cared for, well brought up. He pulled out her chair when she sat down, I noticed that. There is a tiny space between his two front teeth, the same as Holly has. Will we ever know him? Poor Tom. My own head is spinning.
This lunch was a mistake, Laura thought, we are all ill at ease. Tom was right. But they had meant well. They were good people; you saw that at once. The parents were gentle. The girl was bright and clear-eyed, a pretty little thing, so feminine in the ruffled collar, with her jingly charm bracelet. And the grandparents had great refinement; the old man, regardless of his German accent, spoke a remarkably eloquent English.
This is where my baby grew up, she thought. He sat in one of these chairs.
And she said as if musing, “When I saw that first photo of Peter I thought, He’s Timmy’s twin.”
Tom was furious. He had to curb his tongue, on which the words lay ready to leap: No! Timmy is my brother, mine, do you hear? It’s me he loves, it’s I who taught him to pitch and to swim, I who take care of him, who know about medicines and the oxygen. I, do you hear?
And he gave Laura an anguished, furious look, which she did not see.
But Arthur saw it. She would walk a hard road over this, he knew, before it came to an end. And he watched her. A lovely Nordic type, she was. In old Europe she could have been a countess, delicate and elegant. The husband was different, a narrow-minded “good old boy,” according to Ralph. In that case, Arthur reflected, there must be deeply conflicting influences over Tom. A handsome boy, but sullen. Of course this was unspeakable for him. Think of the bewilderment, the terror! Yet it seemed to Arthur that he saw real hatred in Tom, too. Pray God he was mistaken. He wanted to love this son.
Abruptly, there came a lull in the talk, as if nobody knew what else to manufacture. It was Albert who rushed to fill the deadly void, saying heartily, “Only a couple of months till November. They’re running neck and neck, Ralph says.”
“Ralph’s got a real fight ahead,” came from Melvin.
Albert responded, “He can manage. There’s a lot of steel under the velvet. Ralph’s tough.”
Arthur explained to Laura, “Father means toughness in the right sense. Ralph’s our longtime friend, we have reason to know him well, and I can tell you he’s one of the finest human beings you’d want to meet.”
Laura smiled. “I long ago made up my mind to vote for him. I first learned about him two or three years ago when I heard him speak, and I liked what I heard. I remember he talked very wisely about conservation of open spaces, about land use and land-grabbers.”
“He’s a country boy,” Margaret explained, “and he wants to save some country spaces for the next generation.”
“But he wants to save a lot more than that,” Arthur added. “Good schools, good housing, and most important, a decent attitude, people caring about other people. Without that, the whole structure will go to hell. Ralph sees that.”
Melvin snorted. “Tell it to Jim Johnson and his meatheads. Bunch of Ku Klux aborigines in disguise. But Jim himself is clever. Don’t sell him short. He knows how to direct his appeal, especially to the young in the universities. Yes,” he said hotly, “Ralph’s got a real fight ahead. Tune in the television, and there’s Johnson. Open a magazine—hell, you don’t even have to open it, he was on the front cover of both news magazines last week, with his pretty-boy smile and his eight-hundred-dollar suit.”
This was too much for Tom. It was too much to expect himself to stay silent, after he had resolved to sit like a stone through the ordeal of this outrageous day, among these people with whom he did not belong. And now this ugly big-nose, this loudmouth, dared to mock his betters. Pretty boy! And all Tom’s fermenting fury burst out like a popped cork.
“I happen to know Jim Johnson personally, and I’ll tell you that he’s the best thing that ever happened to this state, to this country. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Laura gasped. “Tom! What’s gotten into you?” She looked around the table. “It isn’t like Tom to be rude. I’m so surprised, I don’t know what to say.”
“I’m not surprised, Mrs. Rice.” All heads turned to Holly, who then confronted Tom. “I told you I know things about you. You go around with a girl who makes dirty phone calls and leaves hate notes under people’s doors in the dorms.”
“That’s a lie,” Tom said.
“No, it isn’t. My friend’s brother told me there’s a whole group of your kind down there. A lot of rotten bigots. You hate everybody but yourselves.”
Dismayed, Laura was thinking again, We shouldn’t have come. A wave of dizziness passed over her. This was hideous. The girl—so clearly a sister to Tom with that determined mouth and those vivid eyes—has probably read the nasty newspaper that he writes for. And she went hot with shame.
Margaret said, “Holly, stop. This is awful.”
“Yes, it is, Mom.” The girl’s face was flushed, agitation had enlarged her pupils, but her voice was controlled. “Tom here is an anti-Semite. We might as well recognize it.” And she demanded of him, “Isn’t that so?”
He defended himself, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
“I take that to mean that you think Hitler was justified, then.”
No one was eating. In shocked silence, they had laid their forks down on their plates and were staring at Tom.
“To begin with, Hitler never did the things he was accused of doing. Most of this stuff is trumped-up propaganda.”
“Oh, most of it.” Holly was smooth as ice. “But what about the rest of it? Even if only a fraction of it, let us say for the sake of argument—an outrageous argument—should be true? What then?”
“It was a movement for social change in Germany, and unavoidably some people had to suffer.”
“It’s strange how the ‘some’ are mostly Jews in this kind of social change,” said Cousin Melvin contemptuously. “Hitler, Stalin—well, we’ve been there before, haven’t we? What’s new? Same business as when your grandfather had to change his name from Krehfeld to Crawfield, Arthur. Be invisible. Tremble. Right?”
As he spread his hands wide, Melvin’s elbow touched Tom, who shrank, thinking: Krehfeld, oh my God. Krehfeld. His whole body tingled with shame as though he were embarrassed before his very self. Then he drew another inch away from Melvin’s intruding shoulder. I am not “Krehfeld,” and I am not “Crawfield.” Dammit, you fools, I am Thomas Paige Rice.
“Melvin, that’s enough,” Arthur said, frowning. “You know very well why the name had to be anglicized. My grandfather was peddling to farm wives back in the 1890s. Who of them would have known how to pronounce Krehfeld, I ask you?”
“If they’d wanted to buy his pins and needles, they’d have bought regardless of the name,” retorted Melvin, “and they’d have despised him neither less nor more, just like Jim Johnson and his young admirer here. You’re a foreigner who won’t fit in. As for me, I’m still ‘Krehfeld,’ and be damned to anybody who doesn’t like it.” He shifted and turned face to face with Tom. “Yes, Tom Crawfield, you have a lot to learn about the world. ‘Social change,’ eh? ‘People have to suffer,’ eh? Well, I suggest you start by learning who you are, young Crawfield.”
“My name i
s Tom Rice.” Tom, starting to rise from the chair, was held back by Laura’s gripping fingers.
It was Melvin who left the table, saying, “I know what I’d do if he were my child, my son, I can tell you that.”
“But he isn’t your son.”
“Well, excuse me anyway, folks, and no hard feelings, I hope. I have to get back to the office.”
When the front door closed behind Melvin, Margaret broke the miserable stillness. “Sometimes Melvin can really be the bull in the china shop. I’m glad you said that, Arthur, because he’s your cousin, not mine, and in-laws can’t afford to speak their minds if they want to keep peace.”
“Yes, peace,” Frieda said bitterly.
Laura hung her head. No one in his right mind would have expected this meeting to be smooth, but here, here was disaster. And it was Tom who had made it.
Arthur folded his hands into a pyramid at his lips, pausing as if about to deliver a verdict. Three deep, parallel creases crossed his troubled forehead. After a minute, he rested his hands on the table, and when he spoke, he echoed Laura’s thought.
“None of us expected this to be an easy day. But I don’t think we expected it to be quite so stormy, either. Tom,” he said solemnly, “this is a horror for you, as it would have been for Peter. I must tell you something, though. Peter had no prejudices. He wouldn’t have been shocked to learn that his biological parents were Methodists.”
Tom’s face burned. His hands were sweating. The man was too moderate, too pious, with that mellifluous, tolerant tone put on to show how superior he was. Cousin Melvin, the big-nose, was easier to deal with, coming at you with two fists so that you could put your fists up, too.
Arthur continued, “Does what just happened here break our hearts? It does. Are our hopes destroyed? No. We can still hope, Tom, that events will open your eyes. But as I have said, we must be completely honest with each other. We have been told, Laura, that your husband will not come here to a Jew’s house, so naturally we cannot go to your house, either.”
Laura shook her head, fighting tears.
“This complicates what is already too complicated. Yet isn’t there some way around it?” asked Arthur.
Finding voice, Laura replied, “Tom and I will come back again. Yes, Tom, you will.”
Tom looked at her. The look said: Never. You will never get me back here.
As if a signal had been given, everyone now rose from the table. The plates were half full of melting Jell-O mold and crumbled rolls, a rejected mess. A splendid dessert stood untouched on the sideboard. The meeting was over, and there was no sense pretending that it was not.
At the front door Arthur took Laura’s hand. “Please be sure that we will never try to come between Tom and you,” he said with a sad smile. “What we would like so much is for us all to come together. Let us pray for it.”
So they took their leave. Tom rested in his seat, pretending to be asleep. All the way home, no word was said. And Laura was baffled, sick at heart for him, for the Crawfield parents and for them all.
At home, alone with Bud, she had to give an account of the day.
He scolded, “I told you it was a bad, bad mistake. The boy didn’t sleep all night, dreading it. Damn frauds! You fell for it and for that sweet-talking lawyer.”
For perhaps the tenth time in the last few weeks, she tried reason. “Bud, it isn’t a fraud. Blood tests don’t lie, the DNA doesn’t—”
“Bah! DNA. PZY. What, what the hell? A researcher gets a couple of ideas, the papers get hold of them, everybody takes them for gospel truth, and then a couple of years down the road we read, ‘Well, maybe … The results show that conclusions were perhaps too hastily drawn, too soon.’ Bah!”
“Bud, even leaving all that out, if you had been there, you would have seen the resemblances. The mother and the daughter and Tom—”
Bud’s voice rose now in anger. “Resemblances! How many kinds of eyes, noses, and mouths can there be on this earth? Every one of us looks like a million other people. People see what they want to see or, in this case, what someone has told them they ought to see. No, Laura, keep that boy—our boy—out of this mess from now on. I’ve never given you an order but I’m giving you one now. Let Tom alone.”
“I heard you talking,” Tom said, standing in the doorway. “Dad’s right. They’re trying to pull me away from you, can’t you see that, Mom?”
“Ah, no. Nobody could ever do that.”
“I hate their guts, the whole lot of those Jews.”
There was an ugly look on Tom’s face, on the beloved face of her boy. And she said, almost pleading, “What is it that you hate so much? The label? If you had not been switched, you would have been brought up Jewish, and still you would be Tom, with the same skin and arms and legs and brain.”
“Your mother,” Bud said, putting his arm around Tom’s shoulder, “will come to her senses about this fakery, I have every confidence. We’ll just have to be patient till she does, that’s all.”
Timmy had followed Tom and now burst forth, “I wish those people would go back where they came from.”
“Where is that?” asked Laura.
“Germany, Tom said.”
She sighed. “To begin with, Arthur Crawfield and his parents were born here. As to their ancestors, you might remember that everybody on this continent got here from somewhere else. Even the Indians came from Asia across the Bering Strait. You know that, Timmy.”
Timmy was silent for a moment. Then he muttered, “Their boy died of cystic fibrosis, Tom says.”
Oh, Tom had been expressly told never to mention it! In all his agitation, he must have let it slip out.
Bud jumped at that. “You see? You see where this has led? Opened up a whole can of worms. Listen, Timmy,” he explained, “it was an entirely different case. I know all about it. The damn fool lawyer did tell me that much. That boy had all sorts of complications, something wrong with his heart valve and—and diabetes besides, and—an entirely different case. You’ve got no trouble with your heart or anything else. Come on outside. Let’s shoot some baskets.”
From the window Laura watched the three at the basketball net, three males together, excluding her. She didn’t mind that. It was Bud’s devastation that scared her. He was so hurt that he no longer thought or spoke with any sense. And this denial of the truth was dangerous.
Driving through Fairview Street, Laura was shocked to see a prominent For Sale sign on the old Blair house’s front lawn. Why, they were letting themselves be driven out! It was wrong, wrong! And yet she had to ask yourself whether she would have the courage, the heart, to stay in that house if she herself had been under attack there on that awful night. She decided to ask Lou Foster, as soon as she reached home, what she might know about it.
“Yes,” Lou said, “I heard. Not from the Edgewoods—they still won’t talk to anybody—but from the real estate agent.”
“What a shame. I wish there was something we could do.”
“As a matter of fact there is. I was going to call you, you’re next on my list. Some of us had a meeting after church, and we decided it would be a good idea to get up a petition in the congregation and in the neighborhood, asking the Edgewoods not to move. We’ll tell them that we people welcome them, that we most vigorously condemn the terrible thing that was done, and we want them to stay. What do you think of that?”
“What do I think? Are you asking me whether I’m willing to sign it, for goodness’ sake?”
“Not really.” Lou laughed. “I kind of thought you would.”
When she hung up, a thought came to her: What about Bud? It would be rather odd if her signature should go back without his, too. Well, she’d cross that bridge when she came to it.
Nevertheless, after the long scroll lined with names was delivered a few days later, she took it to her desk and unrolled it without saying anything, signed her name and sat there wondering how best to get through another fruitless argument.
“What’s that?�
�� Bud asked, the minute he entered the room.
When she told him, he grinned. His eyebrows went up, making a pair of shallow V’s, and his cheeks rounded into a sheepish sort of grin.
“I guess I’ll have to sign,” he said. “I made a mess for you with Betty Lee, didn’t I? So I’d better not make another mess at church.”
“Especially since you go to church there yourself,” she reminded him.
“Okay. I’ll put my John Hancock down. What the hell, I don’t live on Fairview, so it’s no difference to me. I wonder what Ordway will say to it, though.”
“Don’t worry. If I know Lou Foster, he’ll sign this too.”
So Bud, very likely a good many others also, for the sake of appearances, did swallow the pill. A few days later, the For Sale sign disappeared from the Edgewoods’ lawn. A few days after that, Lou Foster reported to Laura.
“I got a lovely letter from the family, thanking us all. They really opened their hearts. It made me cry to read it.”
“I should go back and see Mrs. Edgewood,” Laura told herself. “I’ll do it one day next week. It will be a pleasure this time.”
But then something intervened. A telephone call came from Ralph Mackenzie.
“If I’m intruding in your personal affairs, please tell me,” he began. “I’m calling now not as a lawyer, since there’s no need for lawyers anymore, but as a friend of the Crawfields’. And, I hope, of Tom’s and yours.”
“You’re not intruding,” Laura said.
“I would like to help if I can. Arthur tells me that the meeting went very badly.”
“It did. It was far worse than I could have imagined. I had expected tears, of course, but this was rage. Tom—” She paused, not wanting to paint Tom black.
“I heard. Margaret’s taking it very hard. She’s such a strong, commonsense woman ordinarily, the family’s always depended on her, and now, seeing her so crushed, they don’t quite know what to do.”
“Oh, has there ever been anything like this before?” cried Laura.
“Yes, as you know, there has, but very rarely. It’s surprising that the newspapers haven’t gotten hold of it this time.”
