by Jon Cleary
He took the car along the Ward Parkway at a sedate pace, past the mansions that looked as impregnable as castles. But he was indifferent to them: after all he lived in the grandest castle of them all. But he knew that stone walls could be conquered from the inside. ‘I been to a coupla meetings with my brother, the youngest one. Things is changing for us blacks. I’m too old to care, but I guess the meeting last night infected me. Affected?’
‘Either way, I know what you mean.’
‘You better get used to it. Us folk ain’t gonna be the same from now on. Not the young ’uns.’
‘Have you let Daddy know how you feel?’
‘It ain’t the way I feel. Not all the time, that is. You just got me worked up back there, was all. But your daddy knows what’s happening. He’s knowed it ever since Little Rock three years ago. Him and me, we talk about it. Miz Meg, she knows what’s happening. But you and Miz Nina and Prue, you never give a mind to it. All you mind is yourself. That was what got me spitting a while ago.’ He turned the car in through the gates, drove it down to the stables, pulled up and got out. ‘Thanks for the ride.’
‘Don’t you dismiss me like that, George. I do mind what happens to other people. I know someone in Europe who’s mulatto, and she’s told me what it’s like to be snubbed because she’s not all-white.’
He grinned, shook his head. ‘Miz Sal, you trying to tell me some coloured friend of yours in Europe, she gets snubbed in one of them fancy places you always going to, you think that’s the same as Jim Crow back here in Mississippi or Alabama, someplace like that? You ain’t that dumb. You just ain’t thinking right.’
He turned and walked away to his quarters above the stables, not hurrying, back straight, unafraid of anything she might say or do. She was furious with him; at the same time she wished she had his dignity. She was almost back to the main house before she realized she was half-running. She slowed down. Suddenly she wanted to write to Michele, but had no idea where to address the letter. She remembered with bitterness that Michele had not written to offer condolences on the death of Philip.
Saturday night Charlie took her to dinner in a restaurant in Country Club Plaza. It was a modest restaurant and it occurred to Sally that, though she had eaten in such places in Rome, Paris, Nice, she had never done so in Kansas City. Occasionally, in such small inconsequential revelations, she realized how rigidly protected she had been in her home town.
‘You hungry?’ Charlie picked up the menu.
‘You order for me.’ Food had never concerned her; she had a goat’s palate. ‘Do you have a girl out in Los Angeles?’
‘I play the field.’ For a moment he was sober as he looked at her over the top of the big menu card; then there was that wide bright smile again. ‘That sounds big-headed. I just don’t want to get tied down, that’s all. Not yet anyway. How about a nice juicy sirloin?’
‘Great,’ she said, comparing him with Philip who had said no to steak every time it had been presented to him. Charlie Luman, she decided, was a nice uncomplicated man with simple tastes, someone restful and nice to have around. She wished he was not going back to California tomorrow.
He told her about himself, a simple uncomplicated biography; she supposed it was the life of thousands of boys, though not all of them finished up playing for the Los Angeles Rams. He did not ask her about herself and she proffered nothing; he would never understand about Cindy and Michele and nothing must be revealed about Philip. People stopped by the table and patted him on the back, proud of him and proud to be seen talking to him; he accepted all the compliments with a modesty that she saw was as natural as his smile. All the passers-by asked was that he stay whole until Old KC had a football team of its own and he could come home so that they could cheer him every week of the fall. He smiled and promised to try and do that.
He introduced Sally and everyone smiled politely and their pride in Charlie increased: he was in the right company, sure enough. When they left the restaurant everyone nodded and waved and smiled again: they went out on a surf of goodwill.
‘They love you!’
‘They liked you, too.’
‘Only because I was with you.’
He took her to a night-club downtown, where again everyone seemed to recognize him; his size, if nothing else, made people look at him twice. At, she guessed, six feet four and 230 pounds, he was not inconspicuous. They listened to jazz that was her father’s sort of music; she was tone deaf but she enjoyed looking at Charlie’s obvious enjoyment of the band. Idly, almost with detachment, she thought he would be the sort of beau for her whom her father would approve.
‘Charlie Parker, Bird, used to play here,’ he said. ‘I was too young to have heard him. Do you ever regret you came too late to meet some of your heroes?’
Though romantic, she could not remember ever having had any heroes. And it was too late now. ‘Sometimes,’ she said.
He drove her home through the soft summer night. She had expected him to ask her to go somewhere with him and she had been undecided whether she would say yes or no. But the question did not come up, they drove straight home. He pulled in before the main house, but made no attempt to get out of the car.
‘Would you like to come in for a while?’
He had been quiet and sober all the way home, no hint of a smile. ‘I think we better call it quits.’
‘Quits?’ She had enough sensitivity to see that something was worrying him; she did not attempt any sarcasm when she said, ‘Have we started anything?’
‘Maybe not you. But me – ’ He put his huge hand gently on the back of her neck, stroked the short hair there. ‘I like you more than any girl I’ve met. But you’re – sad. What makes you that way, I don’t know. But you are. And I wouldn’t want to add to that sadness.’
Some day, she knew, the whole story of Philip and her marriage to him would come out. Lucas had seen that no announcement had ever been made, but it had been known in their own circle in Kansas City that Sally Beaufort had been Mrs Philip Mann. When she had come home the word had quietly been put out that her husband had died of a heart attack and that at the same time she had lost her baby; the double tragedy had seemed to silence any gossip that anyone might have wanted to voice. The two policemen in Rome had done their job well, better than any police could have done in the same circumstances in an American city; nothing had appeared in any newspapers and the Manns had quietly disappeared from the scene. The American correspondents in Rome had been more concerned with more important things; by the time the Manns were missed, Pope John had just been elected and everyone was busy thrusting their heads into the windows in the Vatican that he had thrown open. The Beauforts, none of them believers, should have been properly grateful to the Catholic Church. But Sally, pessimistically, was convinced that some day, somehow, the fact of her marriage to Philip and the circumstances of his death would emerge.
So Charlie knew nothing of what made her sad; but it had been perceptive of him to notice it. More perceptive of him than she had expected: she thought she had at last managed to hide her depression from outsiders.
‘You knew I’d lost my husband?’ She did not want to pile it on by mentioning the baby.
‘Sure. But it’s more than that makes you sad.’
Indeed it is. ‘Why do you think you would make me unhappy?’
‘I’ll tell you some other time.’
He leaned across and kissed her; not roughly or passionately but almost like a brother. God, she suddenly thought, he’s queer! Then was both amused and angry at herself: why shouldn’t he be a homosexual? It was just that he was so different from the ones she had known in Europe. After all, wasn’t she one herself?
‘Are you homosexual, Charlie?’ Maybe he would understand about Michele after all.
He leaned away from her, started to laugh. But she noticed that he laughed silently; then the laughter subsided into great sighs. She leaned forward and saw that he was crying. She reached for his hand, held it.
‘Charlie – I understand. I know what it’s like – ’
He shook his head, took out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes. ‘You don’t understand! Jesus, I’m not a faggot. I just can’t get it up, that’s all. I’m impotent!’
She had not expected that he had anger like this in him. She let go his hand, suddenly afraid of the physical force throbbing in him; he seemed to fill the front seat of the car, threatening to explode.
‘It happened my first year in pro football. I got kicked in the balls. I was wearing a faulty protector and it just cracked and sliced into me like it was glass. At school I read that book of Hemingway’s, The Sun Also Rises, and I used to think about that guy, Jake whatever-his-name-was, and how terrible it would be to be like him. I was a stud at school. I’m not boasting. You played football, the girls were always available. And then?’ He put his hand down to his crotch, let it lie there a moment. ‘The doctors did everything they could, but the damage was too great. It was just one of those once-in-a-lifetime things, one of ’em said. Who’d want it to happen to him twice? How could it happen more than once?’
‘Who else knows?’
‘My mother and dad. And the head coach of the Rams.’
‘No girl knows?’
‘Only one, a girl out in California. The first one I went to bed with after I got out of hospital. I wouldn’t believe what the doctors had told me. Maybe she’s told other people about it. Girls talk about things like that, I guess.’
‘Not all of them. This one wouldn’t.’
He reached for the back of her neck again, gently stroked her hair. ‘Come out to LA some time, see me play. I’m still 100 per cent out there on the field.’
‘No, Charlie. I think I prefer the man you are here. Out there on the football field I think you might be another man altogether.’
‘You’re right,’ he said slowly. ‘I hate every son-of-a-bitch who pulls on a helmet. I’m better now than when they first signed me on. They had to ruin my balls to make me Most Valuable Player.’
‘Don’t be so bitter.’
His hand stopped: for one awful moment she thought he was going to snap her neck. ‘Don’t be stupid, Sally. What do you expect me to be?’
‘I’m sorry. It slipped out.’ And it should not have: if anyone should have understood his feelings, it should have been her.
His hand resumed its stroking. ‘Okay, you’re forgiven. The funny thing is, if anyone could make me forget being bitter I think it’d be you. There’s something between you and me that clicks. I don’t know what it is, but it’s there. For me, anyway.’
‘For me, too,’ she said and tried for his and her own sake to be truthful; but couldn’t be certain. She leaned across and kissed him on the lips. It was not a passionate open-mouth kiss; but it had love in it. ‘Write me occasionally, Charlie. When you’re feeling bitter.’
3
So Charlie Luman went back to California and she did not see him again till November, when John F. Kennedy was elected President; a political disaster that convinced Lucas that God was not only a Roman Catholic Democrat but un-American as well. But he had not made the mistake this time of throwing an Election Night party to honour Richard Nixon as the new President. Remembering a previous lost wager, he had not been game enough to bet against his worst fears.
‘Money has always run this country, there’s nothing wrong with that,’ he said. ‘But it should not be used to buy the White House.’
‘Well,’ said Prue, home from Vassar for a few days, ‘I voted for Jack Kennedy and I think he’s the best thing that could have happened to the country. At least you should be happy we have a politician as President instead of a golfing general.’
‘Richard Nixon is a politician. And if he’d been elected he’d have got in on his merits, not his father’s money. And I’ll thank you not to go around boasting that you voted for Kennedy. I was sorry, Charlie, that your father lost out. I thought he was bound to be returned. The country’s going to the dogs.’
‘Dad’s philosophical,’ said Charlie. ‘He’s always said you shouldn’t go in for politics unless you expect to lose.’
‘How are you taking your retirement? I understand you had to give up football before you intended.’
‘It was going to be my last season anyway. But my knee has gone, so they let me go early. I’m full-time now with Pan Am. I do a couple of years on piston-engined aircraft, then I start a training course for jets. We’re getting into a whole new era.’
‘The prospect doesn’t excite me,’ said Lucas.
As if to forget the defeat of their Republican candidate, Margaret and Bruce Alburn announced that they were to be married. Lucas suggested that Inauguration Day might be a suitable date; all their friends, being Republicans, would not be interested in what was going on on that day in Washington. But Margaret, who had a sense of occasion and an eye to the future, vetoed that.
‘No. Some of our friends may turn out to be Kennedy-lovers. Even some of our business friends.’
‘God forbid,’ said Lucas, but he had no real faith in the Almighty any more.
Margaret and Bruce were married a week after Inauguration Day and went off to Rio de Janeiro for their honeymoon. Lucas had formed a new bank, Missouri International, and several branches had been set up in South American countries. Bruce thought the honeymoon trip would be a good opportunity to look in on the Brazilian office.
‘I swear that their foreplay consists of profit and loss figures,’ said Prue. ‘Meg’s getting as bad as Bruce. I’ll bet right now on their wedding night she’s sitting up in bed checking the cost of the reception.’
‘Did you hear what the city government gave her for a wedding present?’ Nina said. ‘Not that they meant it as a present. They have re-zoned that land up in Platte County, the land she got from Frank. Magnus tells me it’s now worth about five million dollars.’
‘Poor Frank,’ said Sally.
The three sisters, still in their wedding reception gowns, shoes off, were lolling about in Nina’s bedroom. It had been a long happy day and Sally was once again aware of how content she could be in her sisters’ company. But she had begun to grow restless again, though she had not yet said anything.
‘You were marvellous, Prue, with Martha and Emma,’ she said. ‘You’re the last one I’d expect to be a child-lover.’
‘I hope you haven’t turned over your old library to them,’ said Nina.
‘I love their innocence,’ said Prue, smiling warmly at the thought of Margaret’s two children. They were now nine and ten, both pretty, both quiet, sometimes seeming like strangers among the more outgoing Beaufort sisters who were their mother and their aunts. ‘I shouldn’t want to spoil that. It’ll happen, nothing’s more certain, but I shouldn’t want to be the one who does it. It’s hard to believe we were once as innocent as that.’
‘Are you kidding?’ said Nina. ‘You stopped being innocent when Mother took you off her breast.’
‘Was it as late as that?’ said Prue innocently.
‘Let’s hope Bruce proves a good stepfather. How’s Charlie coming along, Sally?’
Sally shrugged, determined to keep Charlie’s secret. ‘I don’t think he’s the settling down kind.’
‘I’d have thought he was just that kind,’ said Prue. ‘I saw him this afternoon, he never took his eyes off you. You haven’t turned him down, have you?’
‘You’re an idiot if you have,’ said Nina.
Over the next few months Charlie stopped in at Kansas City on his way across country and each time Nina and Prue asked Sally what was happening between her and Charlie. The pressure began to tell on her; yet she could not bring herself to tell Charlie that she did not want to see him any more. She liked his company, felt a deep aching sympathy for him. But he never mentioned marriage and she knew as well as he that any sort of permanent relationship between them was hopeless.
The world spun on, seemingly moving a little quicker now. The Russians shot a man into space, which
pet-lovers all over the world thought was more humane than the Russians’ previous missile, a dog. Cuban exiles, aided and abetted by Washington, landed at a place called the Bay of Pigs; Lucas suggested it should have been re-named the Bay of Scapegoats, since over the next few weeks everyone but Mary Pickford was blamed for the fiasco. Then the Americans shot a man into space and President Kennedy talked of landing a man on the moon before the end of the decade. Word came out of New Guinea that men there were still killing each other with bows and arrows. Perspective, as Edith would have said, was always there if you looked for it.
At the end of summer Sally announced that she was going back to Europe for an extended stay.
‘I’ll come with you,’ said Prue, who had finished at Vassar.
‘Dammit!’ said Lucas. ‘Why can’t you girls stay put?’
Though he had had responsibilities as both a father and a businessman, Lucas had never really been subjected to great personal pressures. He had married a girl who had been his own and his parents’ choice and his marriage had been ideally happy. But sometimes he wondered if he had failed his daughters, though he could not find enough evidence to convict himself. He did not believe in too harsh self-prosecution, except for what he had done to Nina. And time, he sometimes thought, was healing that.
‘We’ll go to London,’ said Prue, ‘and live a quiet simple life.’
‘You can live that here.’ But he knew now that he could never win an argument with any of his daughters. His favourite was turning out to be Margaret, who seemed to think more and more like him as she grew older.
Charlie Luman came by Kansas City a couple of days before Sally and Prue left for England. He came to dinner at the main house and Lucas spent the evening beaming at him as if he were the answer to a father’s prayer. Charlie, bemused by such approval, was not the brightest and wittiest of dinner guests. Afterwards he and Sally went for a walk in the grounds.
‘Why was your father all over me tonight? I was waiting for him to ask me to join the Beaufort Oil football team.’
