by Daniel Klein
“Well, you found me,” Franny replies.
“I hear you’re doing the sets. I’m so glad. I always thought that was your special talent.”
Beatrice’s implication—that her daughter’s acting, directing, and producing are not her special talents—is obvious to Franny, just as it is obvious to her that if she brought this implication to her mother’s attention, Beatrice would deny it and then proceed to lecture Franny about her unbecoming childishness.
“I’m still working on the drawings,” Franny says. Beatrice has taken the seat just behind Franny, and Franny has to swivel around uncomfortably to look at her.
“Any peeks allowed?” Beatrice has added a trilling, youthful laugh to accompany her renovated face.
“No,” Franny retorts—a little too vehemently, she decides, so she adds, “I haven’t even shown the director yet.”
“Mrs. Dowd.”
“You know her?”
“Sally introduced us. She’s trying to bring her into the garden club, but Babs says she’s too busy just now with her play.”
From the corner of her eye, Franny sees Babs Dowd at the side of the stage, speaking intently with Sally Rule and Ned Shields, who is playing the President. Franny has the sudden urge to spring to her feet and scream at the stage, “She’s a fucking fraud! Doesn’t anybody see that?”
She does not scream anything, of course.
“Her husband is the recruiter for Harvard in this area,” Beatrice is saying. “Has Lila started thinking about college?”
Franny roars with laughter, filling it with the unexpended force of her stifled scream. Babs and her actors look up at the balcony, then return to their conference.
“Is that so funny?” Beatrice asks.
“I don’t think Lila will be applying to Harvard, Mother,” Franny says, rising from her seat. “But I did promise to help her with her homework tonight.”
Franny had been planning to sit through the entire rehearsal and then latch onto Babs Dowd at the end to show her drawings, but sitting with her mother even a few minutes longer is unthinkable. Also, the idea of showing Babs her sketches of the bunker-cum-manger now makes her feel unaccountably insecure. At the bottom of the stairs, Franny casts a last look at the stage and there sees Babs administering a shoulder rub to her star, Ned Shields. She is a busy one, that Babs.
Franny had been saving her sixth and final cigarette of the day for home, but she lights it up as soon as she steps out onto Melville Street. Heaven knows her mother’s worst fear has certainly come true: she has become like her father. She is a single parent who never finished college and runs a shop on the Melville Block. And the only place where her dreams ever soar is inside the Phoenix. But not tonight. No, tonight there is a new show in town.
Instead of walking up Melville Street toward home, she heads down toward Main. She needs to calm herself. The air is nippy and all she is wearing on top is her old Ithaca sweatshirt, selected from her wardrobe this morning in celebration of her rekindled collegiate enthusiasm for set designing. But that enthusiasm has withered and the sweatshirt lets the cold air in.
At Main Street, a single car idles at the stoplight. On its side, ‘Grandville Driving School’ is painted in large block letters. Peering through the passenger window, Franny sees Mel Gustal sitting next to the driver, a beefy teenage boy who is apparently learning the fine art of night driving. One morning, Archie Morris declared that the day Mel opened his driving school was the definitive day that Grandville started going downhill. “When your dad isn’t good enough to teach you how to drive, the whole family thing is shot to hell,” he said.
On the other side of the street in front of the town hall, four figures are standing at the curb, one of them holding a cardboard placard that faces oncoming traffic that, at this moment, is comprised only of Mel Gustal’s driver’s ed automobile. Franny has to wait until the light changes and the car jerks forward, casting its beams on the placard, to make out the message written on it: ‘138 Soldiers Dead in Iraq.’ She has never seen this group or this sign before. She crosses toward them.
“Hi, Franny.” Marta Newman, the pastor of the Unitarian Universalist Church, smiles at Franny as she approaches. They only know one another from Franny’s shop, where Marta buys more birthday and bereavement cards than anyone else in town.
“Hello, Marta,” Franny says. “Is this your group?”
“Nobody’s really. Just some like-minded friends.”
The others smile at Franny, clearly eager to make her one of their number, but Franny hangs back. She has a longstanding distrust of organized do-gooders. She suspects them of a moral vanity that equals that of any Christian evangelist; they just adore the drama of being right. But neither does Franny move on. She recognizes another protestor, a philosophy teacher at the community college named Herbert Something. He wears a full beard and ties his kinky hair back in a ponytail with a red rubber band. He looks Jewish or Italian and is either stoned or slightly daft, yet his smile is engaging. Doing a passable imitation of President Bush, he says to Franny, “You’re either with us or against us.” Then he laughs.
“How about the number of Iraqis who’ve been killed?” Franny asks.
“Good question,” Herbert replies. “Somebody needs to make a sign with that too.”
The young woman holding the placard turns around and Franny recognizes her, too. She is a girl in Lila’s class at Grandville High, the daughter of the guidance counselor, Terry Cyzinski. Franny has frequently seen her photograph in the Grandville Chronicle for one achievement or another—elected president of the Honor Society, winning the countywide girls’ tennis tournament, named captain of the math team. Stephanie—yes, that is her name—is everything that Lila is not: dedicated, ambitious, cheerful. And Franny cannot help wishing that Lila were just a little bit more like Stephanie, if only for her own sake.
“I could make that sign,” Stephanie is saying to Herbert. “I’ll get the number off the Net.”
Franny is surprised to see Stephanie Cyzinski here. In Franny’s day, peppy tennis players and political protestors rarely mixed, especially not in one person.
“It’s okay. It’s my idea, so I ought to do it,” Franny says.
Without giving it any thought, Franny has just made a commitment of sorts: she will make a poster and she will stand with this little crew at their next vigil. Once she realizes what she has done, she panics. As it is, she spends too little time at home with Lila, what with the shop and the Grandville Players. But she could hardly just take back her offer and march away. She decides she will come back just one time, hand over her placard of the Iraqi death toll, then make her apologies. That helping-Lila-with-her-homework line has been working well lately.
So now on this crisp October night, Franny stands at the curb on Main Street, waving with the others at passing cars and cheering when one toots its horn in approval. After a while, she sets her sketchbook against the base of a poplar tree so she can wave with both hands. The bearded professor smokes, so Franny allows herself a seventh and eighth cigarette tonight; she will subtract it from tomorrow’s allotment. If she were to think about it, Franny would doubt that anything this earnest group did could possibly make a particle of difference in the grand scheme of world politics. But Franny does not think about that. In fact, she does not think about much of anything except how exhilarating the chilled air feels in her lungs.
CHAPTER SIX
It takes a lot to get Wendell deVries to leave Grandville, even for just a day. He certainly is not intimidated by new places. And it is not as if he has an oldtimer’s prejudice against anything different from what he is used to; Wendell rejoices in the wider world’s variety when he sees it in movies or reads about it in books. No, Wendell’s inertia is born of his honestly-held belief that there is more than enough variation and complexity right in front of his eyes. He is a student of the here and now so he rarely sees a reason to go there, wherever it is.
But this morning is the excepti
on. He is driving in his pickup all the way to Amherst, an hour and a half northeast of Grandville, because in this particular situation there is something in Amherst that he has been unable to find in Grandville: Howard Gnomes, Professor of African American Studies at the University of Massachusetts. Although Lila has not brought up the subject again, the black deVrieses of Grandville have settled in Wendell’s imagination.
This bright autumn morning is exceptional in another way, too: the pickup is carrying a passenger in addition to Wendell and Binx, who stands in the truck bed with his ears flying and his nose cocked high, believing everything he smells. That passenger is Esther.
How this came about is a simple story: Wendell returned to the food co-op for what had become his regular Tuesday tofu tutorial and Esther was prepared with her personal recipe for tofu manicotti printed by hand on a 3-by-5 card. As Esther led Wendell around the store to pick up the ingredients, she asked him why he had been reading about New England African-Americans in his projection booth, and he told her.
“There’s a professor up at UMass who knows more about local blacks than anybody I’ve ever heard of,” Esther said.
“Maybe the same guy who came to my granddaughter’s class,” Wendell said. “How do you know about him?”
“I went to college up there a million years ago.”
“You studied about blacks?”
“Among other things. I was something called an American Studies major which basically meant I couldn’t make up my mind what I wanted to study. It’s the major for people with Attention Deficit Disorder.”
Wendell laughed, as he often did when chatting with Esther. “Maybe I’ll give him a call,” he said.
“I could call him if you want,” Esther said. “We’ve kept up a bit, mostly because his wife and I became friends. We were two of the five members of the Lebanese Club.”
“Are you Lebanese?”
“Half. My mother is.” Esther selected a package of Celentano whole wheat manicotti shells from the shelf and deposited it in Wendell’s basket. “I’ve been meaning to call them anyhow.”
And that was pretty much it. That evening Esther called her friends in Amherst who suggested a lunch date for all four of them. Then Esther walked down to the Phoenix where she climbed the balcony stairs and knocked on the projection booth door during a screening of Seabiscuit. She asked Wendell what he thought of the lunch idea. He thought it was splendid.
“This is a treat,” Esther is saying. Her window is open and she faces it, letting the wind swoop up her red hair much the way it swoops up Binx’s ears.
“It definitely is.”
“Did you tell your granddaughter about your research?”
“Lila? Yep. But I think her mind has moved on to more pressing matters, whatever those might be.”
“She’s sixteen, right?”
Wendell nods.
“It’s a whimsical age,” Esther says, smiling. “There’s something to be said for being able to take every new thought more seriously than the last.”
Wendell looks at Esther, then back at the road. “But the strange part is, she wanted to know about some distant relatives on my side, but she never asks anything about her own father. Never has.”
“I take it he’s not around.”
“Nope. She never met him. Neither have I, for that matter. He was a teacher of her mother’s in college. A set designer from France. They had a thing—an affair.” Wendell purses his lips. This is a subject he never talks about with anyone, not even with Franny in the last ten years, so he cannot understand why he is talking about it now, and with a woman he barely knows.
“I had an affair with one of my professors too, an anthropologist,” Esther says. “It was considered the liberated thing to do back then. You know, breaking down old-fashioned sexual barriers. Of course, it wasn’t liberating at all. It was just the same old, same old. I was young and he was impressive, mostly because he was my professor. So he had his way with me, as the old-fashioned types used to say.”
Wendell is shocked by Esther’s candor. He is not accustomed to hearing women talk about their sexual experiences, even if such talk is staple dialogue in many of the Hollywood films he now shows. He wonders if he is just an old prig, stuck in a generation of men who want to believe that a decent woman does not even think about sex, let alone speak of it in mixed company. But for heaven’s sake, did that include a forty-something woman with an apartment full of her own children?
“Why are you laughing?” Esther asks.
“Because I’m an old fart,” Wendell answers, grinning at her.
Howard Gnomes has reserved a table in the dining room of the University of Massachusetts Faculty Club. Not only is this the first time Wendell deVries has ever been inside a university building other than Grandville Community College’s single structure that once housed Foster’s Printing Company, but it is the first time he has had lunch anywhere with a black man. There were no blacks in Grandville High School when Wendell went there; he was never in the army; and the fact is he has not gone out for a meal with anybody other than Franny or Lila in thirty years. Both the austere, colonial dining room and Professor Gnomes’s blackness make Wendell feel awkward.
Fortunately, Esther and Zeina Gnomes immediately launch into a discussion about their children. In this discussion Wendell learns that Esther has two children, not three as he had somehow imagined. Gnomes periodically smiles at Wendell, but mostly busies himself studying the menu. Finally Gnomes says, “I recommend the pot roast. Actually, it’s the only thing I recommend.”
Wendell is surprised by Gnomes’s voice. It is certainly a black voice—deep and resonant, like the voice Wendell hears in his mind when he reads Langston Hughes poems. There is even something of Hughes’s black diction in the way Gnomes stresses the middle syllable in ‘recommend.’ But it is also a voice of authority—consummate, literate authority. Wendell is well aware that there is not a reason in the world to think that a black voice cannot also be professorial, but nonetheless Wendell has never heard this combination before in his life, so it puzzles him.
After their orders are taken—pot roast all around—Gnome turns to Wendell and says, “Esther tells me that you are wondering if you are related to a black family with your surname that once lived in Grandville.”
“That’s right. My name is deVries.”
“Yes, she told me. Are your people from the Netherlands by way of Rensselaer?”
“Yes.”
“Then you are related. The only question is how closely.” Gnomes delivers this information with a wry smile.
Wendell smiles back at him. “Well, that was easy,” he says.
“Of course, however close, it is very unlikely that you have any African-American antecedents yourself,” Gnomes goes on. “Your black relatives may have white blood in their veins, but I’m certain you don’t have any black blood in yours. I’m afraid that’s one club you cannot belong to.”
Esther winces when Gnomes says this last and Wendell touches her arm to reassure her that he is not offended. Wendell knows very well what clubs Gnomes is referring to, although in truth there are many of them that would not welcome Wendell as a member either; his ex-wife, the former Miss Cosgrove, could testify to that.
“But you think it’s a relative, not just a slave name,” Wendell says to the professor.
“I looked it up and I’m almost certain,” Gnomes says. “The deVries of Grandville were light skinned. That’s a clue right there, especially for the 1810s and ’20s which is when they settled there. The older Dutch families were pretty strict about sex with anyone, let alone with their slaves. So that suggests they were a first generation mix.”
Wendell nods. He is fascinated.
“There was a man named Henk deVries who served out his seven-year indenture in 1771 and immediately bought himself two slaves and started a dairy over the border in West Stockbridge, Massachusetts. One of these slaves was a woman named Agnes. Henk had two children with her. He
actually helped raise them although he never formally recognized them except by giving them his surname. Of course, that didn’t mean anything because a white man gave his name to his slaves and their children anyhow. My guess is that the deVrieses of Grandville—the black deVrieses of Grandville—are one or the other of those children.”
Wendell smiles at Gnomes. He automatically latches onto the part about Henk deVries helping to raise his half-breed children; it is a detail he thinks will gratify Lila.
“I can’t thank you enough, Professor,” Wendell says.
“How did you hear about your namesake?” Professor Gnomes asks.
“From my granddaughter. She’s taking a course about local black history in high school and a professor from UMass gave a talk in her class. He mentioned the name deVries. Was that you, by the way?”
“No, one of my graduate students.” Gnomes studies Wendell’s face. “Was she upset by this news?”
“Actually, she was delighted by it,” Wendell says. “She was hoping she’s directly related. That we have black relatives.”
Gnomes’s laugh is cynical and again Esther looks apprehensive.
“I imagine she likes hip-hop, Ice-T and MC Rule,” the professor says coolly.
“Not that I know of,” Wendell answers. “You know what I think it is? We live in a town that’s ninety-five percent white and she’s not a very happy child. It gives her an out. Some dreaming room.”
“White fatigue,” Gnomes says.
“Well, some kind of fatigue anyhow.” Wendell smiles. “Tired of being who she is. I’ve got a little case of that myself. Must run in the family.”
Gnomes regards Wendell for what feels like a full minute, then reaches out his large right hand and clasps Wendell’s shoulder. “Trying to burst out of your skin—whatever its color—is a common human problem,” he says. “Unfortunately the universal problems of mankind are outside my field of expertise.”
