White People

by Allan Gurganus

  As one example, Teddy says there probably is no Father Flannagan. It’s just a name somebody thought up to suck people in. Anyway, I contributed a gift in honor of your folks and my late husband to the Little Sisters of Mercy Orphanage. I found I had less of a nest egg thanks to the bite the money crunch has made in our economy, so I only gave half of what I promised, but the Sisters seemed happy and Teddy told me I was crazy to do it.

  I feel that knowing what I know now, I should start life over. If you asked what Africa taught me, I couldn’t spell it out with words but in my heart, I think, something serious has switched. Chances are, my life is too far along for any last-minute change in plans. However, I’ve been thinking. Maybe we should give up what we own to feed the hungry? But at my age, an old white woman and spoiled like this, I wonder how much I could do without. It shocks me to understand how greedy I am. Really, I’ve learned so little.

  As a result of being long-winded like this, I am very tired. So listen, across the miles, Mrs. Whiston, I just offer you a hug. I do hate to hit the end of this letter. I would like to buck you up in your time of sorrow but my place, I think, is still here in Toledo in the old neighborhood. This afternoon I’m tending my grandchildren who are way ahead of others their age. They’re final stars in whatever crown I’m going to get on earth.

  Oh well, so long. We all do what we can, don’t we? We just hope that in the end it’s worth the hard daily efforts and has been mostly for the best. We are really the lucky ones. The rest think they are outside looking in at happiness. If they only knew. When the highs and lows are so far apart, it’s hard to stay in the middle and think of yourself as a good person. But I’m trying.

  Teddy and Lorraine said to send their regards. I pass on my deep sympathy to you and, as far as that goes, to every one of us. I’ll just sign this as coming from

  Yours truly,

  P.S. If you write back, wonderful. I don’t get much mail.

  1974

  Art History

  For Joanne Meschery

  and for Robert Chibka

  IN THE SHADY northeast corner of the park, where vines have overcome the water fountains, and evergreens grow, rangy and unkempt as in the depths of the Vronsky Forest, I came upon two children doing something very naughty. I had wandered to this most rustic corner of the Common seeking quietude and relief from the dogs recently permitted by a foolish ordinance to run free without leashes in the park. Their barking had annoyed me, a man of modest but fixed habits, and I strolled in this new direction.

  I turned onto a footpath between fir trees. A terra-cotta sculpture stood there, its color soapy and golden: Cupid, mounted on a marble block little taller than I. The children had just scrambled up onto the pedestal. One broken branch of the spruce beside it still swung back and forth. I stopped, appalled at what these urchins were already doing. Cupid’s weight rested poised upon one tiptoe. The other chubby leg swung behind him in the illusion of flight and forward motion. The girl squatted underneath the sculpture, hooking her thin arm over its uplifted leg. She laughed, calling for the boy to watch, then pulled matted hair back from her forehead, craned her neck, and began licking at the statue’s bulbous little underparts. I stood there, astonished.

  In the rosy light that fell across the sculpture at this hour, her head moved like a suckling calf’s. The boy locked arms around the Cupid’s neck and shouted something I did not understand. He then eased his weight back between the two arched wings and hung there, as from a bicycle. I saw that he had pulled his plaid shorts down. Now, swinging forward, he wrapped skinny legs around the statue’s hips and began rutting vigorously at the plump sculpted buttocks. In street argot, he called obscenely to the girl. She leaned beyond the terra-cotta belly, squinted up at him, gave a sharp cynical laugh.

  With a slight breeze, the sun intensified. I was startled at how long I had watched all this, and with what detachment. I told myself, these are not simians climbing about their artificial island at the National Zoo; these are human beings defiling a human monument. My abdomen registered a tremor: nausea and some preposterous sexual desire. Gripping the paper, I saw how sweat had smudged the evening news across my palm. I could not bear to look at the Cupid again but turned and hurried to the concession booth, where a policeman had been chatting with the boy behind the counter. As I passed the fountain, I saw the uniform, still there. I approached and observed the officer bent into the booth, examining a medal around the neck of the concessioner. I asked the policeman to come with me at once. I was afraid to tell what I had seen. I requested that he please follow me quickly. Others there, twin brothers with bottled lemonade, a plain girl eating an apple, stared at my face, my clothing. The gypsy boy behind the counter toyed with the gold medallion at his throat and smirked at me. I beckoned the officer along a brick path, beyond the broken fountain, four stranded bronze swans, an apple core set cruelly upon the head of one. A nurse watched me lead the policeman. I felt like Charlie Chaplin followed by an enormous constable. I hoped none of my pupils or colleagues might chance past. I was already pointing toward the Cupid when it came into view beyond the spruce. The children were gone.

  The sun had moved higher on the statue so only its head and wings now showed golden in the light. “They have run away,” I said and walked forward, feeling ridiculous. I had to be certain and, standing on my tiptoes, I pressed fingers to the genitals, still darker than the rest, and damp. At least I knew. The policeman stood beside me, watching my examination of the Cupid.

  “Perhaps,” I stammered, settling back onto both heels, “I will not bother you with what I just saw at this spot.” He laughed once, good-naturedly, and easing me back against the marble pedestal, continued grinning as he reached down and gently cupped his hand between my legs.

  SINCE MOTHER’S DEATH, my father has become a great heartache to us. Soon after she died of food poisoning on a seaside outing, it was announced that Father would be retired from the Academy where he has taught since I was born. This puzzled my husband and me. Father had always been well liked at the school. When I was a child, he invited the poorer boys to our home on holidays. He was an athletic gentleman and played sports with them on the mowed side yard. He devised complicated scavenger hunts which lasted until evening. I would sometimes help wrap the little presents he gave them. He wrote out each boy’s full name in his beautiful old-fashioned script. Often he copied mine and let me keep the slip of paper.

  I sent Ernest, my husband, to investigate Father’s dismissal. When Ernest came home, he looked in through the doorway, shaking his head with disgust. He said that Father had been fortunate, being dismissed so quietly. My own father, Ernest told me bitterly, had taken boys from the school to a hotel room on a holiday trip to the seashore. Their parents believed the Academy sponsored this outing. Afterward, one boy reported my father’s misconduct. When this happened, others came forward to confess. How I cried when Ernest told me this so coldly. How this soured all memories of Father tussling with the boys on our side yard in those perfect early evenings.

  Watching such games through the cottage window, Mother once wept. “Oh,” she sobbed, stroking the cat, Mitzi, who always slept there on the windowsill beside the potted geraniums and herbs, “you should have a little brother, Hedwig. How your father needs a real son.”

  She pressed the long embroidered apron to her face. I reached for her skirt and leaned my forehead against her strong leg.

  After Father’s forced retirement, he again concentrated on his book, a work of art history he had been rewriting since I was a baby. Ernest and I hoped Father would be happier, retired. He owned the cottage, he had a small pension and the remains of Mother’s land, the yearly rents from her two dairy farms in the South.

  Three evenings ago, I read in the newspaper of my own father’s arrest. He had not called or notified us. Ernest says that shame was the reason. One paper printed Father’s photograph, an out-of-date portrait from his brilliant days at the University. The trial is next week. Ernest s
ays I must not go, but, of course, I shall.

  I am only glad my mother never lived to see so respected a gentleman fall to such public disgrace. His book was with a publishing company. Ernest says they will not print it now.

  The mother of one boy my father took to the ocean resort wrote me a terrible letter. Ernest read it, then tore it up before I ever saw it. He will not tell me what it was about. He only says he can understand why a mother wronged in this way would write such dreadful things. Every hour of the day, I am ashamed.

  THE DEFENDANT approached me in front of the concession stand at Ney Park that afternoon. He seemed distressed and asked me to accompany him. He was a distinguished-looking older gentleman and I thought perhaps an elderly companion of his had fallen or was sick somewhere in the park. This had happened to me last summer; an old woman said nothing but gestured me to follow and there her friend was, holding her hat, crying beside a bush, her hip broken. I asked no questions of the defendant but followed him to the northeastern edge of the park, the corner near the War Memorial. He led me down a narrow path between trees to a statue of a baby angel. Once there, he said we were now alone. He stood on his tiptoes and touched the private parts of the baby angel. Then he held his hand up to the light and examined his fingers. He smiled slightly, turning to face me. It was at this moment that he leaned against the base of the statue, seized my right hand and pulled it over against his privates. As a result, I then arrested him.

  “YOUR GRANDSONS?” the desk clerk asked, smiling sentimentally. “Oh, yes,” I lied to simplify matters, “an outing with them.” I signed my last name and their firsts. The boys, each holding a small pasteboard suitcase, stood across the lobby near the French doors. Felix quietly read aloud the Latin names of shells. Both boys’ legs were edged with light, the down—ankle to upper thigh—glowed, an incandescent fringe. Their long shadows angled across the marble parquetry to where the desk clerk and I stood watching. My students were suffused, without seeming to notice, in a pink and golden light as pure as the vivid glazes on the conch shell they now held between themselves. They listened intently, both heads tilted toward it, as to a telephone receiver.

  “Karl, Felix,” I called them. Karl carefully replaced the shell and they both came quickly over. Neither had ever stayed at a hotel before. Both were observant, obedient children. The desk clerk smiled sadly, admiring them. “Sir, I envy you,” he said, “being as I am myself, a bachelor and getting older.” I gave him a coin, took up my satchel, then led the boys to a small lift. The three of us crowded into the wrought-iron cage, ascending.

  After they had tested all the plumbing, after every dresser drawer had been checked, after samples of the hotel stationery and soap had been packed away for their parents and sisters, the boys stretched out on the big beds. Felix yawned once and flexed his long pale arms.

  “Before you both fall to sleep listening to the ocean, is it not time to bathe?” I asked.

  “Yes, before supper,” Karl said and, standing in his socks, bouncing on the old bed, he pulled the shirt over his head and tossed it down at Felix, who was feigning sleep. What good boys, I thought, remembering some chocolate I had bought for them at the train depot. Hoping it had not melted, I unbuckled my bag. Karl stepped off the bed and, now wearing only his white undershorts, opened the glass doors of the balcony and walked out into the breeze. The long lace curtains rose from the floor, lifted straight into the room, then bellied out and dropped, first one then the other, settling as in sighs upon Karl’s bed. He stood leaning out over the balcony, pointing to a freighter trailing orange smoke across the horizon of violently streaked pastels.

  “Karl,” Felix called through the open doors, “Do you like your bathwater very hot, or in between?”

  This pleased me, made me smile. I unfastened my valise and fumbled around inside for the candy. It had warmed and, in its gold foil wrapper, felt quite pliant.

  “AND DID HE”—the headmaster leaned into the brilliance of the one desk lamp, daubing his forehead with a folded handkerchief—“offer any rewards if you would … co-operate and keep silent?”

  “Chocolate,” the boy replied, looking down at the blond hair on his forearm, “chocolate and a copy of that statue, the statue in Brussels of the small boy … urinating. And a seashell, he bought each of us a conch shell at the shop in the train station.”

  “I see,” the headmaster said, pulling his shirt cuffs out of the sleeves of his jacket and standing all in one lurch as if his whole body were spans, tabs, and joints of crisp overstarched linen. With a curt nod, he repeated, “Thank you. You have acted wisely to tell us this.” The boy bowed and left. The office door snapped closed, then the latch of the antechamber was heard.

  Pinching his trousers’ creases into proper alignment, the headmaster eased down onto the edge of the desktop. He then unfastened his still shirt front and, snatching handkerchief from jacket pocket, reached in and violently daubed each armpit. He slapped at his pallid chest as if powdering it, all while envisioning the gentleman in question wheezing around a cheap hotel room, like some satyr in pursuit of two thin white boys, giggling, dripping wet. The headmaster, drying neck and forehead, now imagined the ocean, thunderous then silent then thunderous again outside, as the gentleman eased across the floral carpet on his knees—toward the corner where two smiling panting boys had stopped at last. Sliding nearer them, the man balanced a silver tray on either palm. The seashells rattled, rocking hard against their own pink reflected undersides; the brass statuettes stared down at themselves upended; there seemed exactly twice as much milk chocolate. The boys watched, interested, as the trinkets wobbled closer. Shivering slightly, droplets from the interrupted bath eased over each visible rib then down their long tanned legs. Chocolate, a statuette, a seashell. A set for you, and a set for you. For years and very quietly, giving boy after boy these inexpensive appreciated gifts. Chocolate, a statuette, a seashell.

  The headmaster bit down on his folded handkerchief, then bit again.

  As A CELLMATE, they have assigned me a burglar, a would-be jewel thief. He has a connoisseur’s love of gems, a child’s idea of how to steal them. He is agile, blond, casually corrupted, seventeen years old. His mind is tender and lurid as his scar. This mark begins at the center of his throat, twists up one side of his face, and narrows to a crescent which falls just short of hooking his childish mouth. Its almost perfect C-shape connects an adult’s throat to the indolent choirboy mouth. His scar complicates and redeems his commonplace good looks. When he is feverish or angry, I see the mark grow crimson, scarlet actually. Like a thermometer, it colors from the bottom upward.

  He bathes himself with great care, with a jewel thief’s intelligent fingers. I lie on the bottom bunk, hands behind head, watching him. There is nothing else to look at in this cell and my staring seems acceptable. As he bathes, he whistles quite beautifully, warbling popular songs through his front teeth. In sunlight from the barred window, he soaps himself vigorously. Sections of his lathered back gleam in stripes. He whistles an accompaniment of chirps and complicated trills. Holding his long arms straight out, one at a time, he rubs soap along them. I glimpse the sheen and smooth translucence of certain marble Pietàs. His ribs, under tight shifting skin, curve one way, while lines of sun fall in quite another, so, as he moves, these stripes smoothly chafe each other, a crisscrossing matrix like plaid or basketry, till I see his whole torso light up, a radiant sieve.

  In prison, I am trying to teach myself factual thinking. I am comforted in recalling how once at University, for a final examination, the great art historian, K. Blenheim, strode into the conference room where we, his favorite class, sat waiting. On the central revolving pedestal, he placed a homely object.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “please describe this. Leave your test booklets here when you are done. I have enjoyed associating with you for these three years.”

  He turned and left; an outside door slammed, echoed down the hallway. We looked at one another, then the object, th
en again at one another. It was a copper float, part of a toilet’s workings. Ovoid, little larger than an orange, a serrated seam bound its center. During our three years of intense work with him, Blenheim had daily placed different sorts of relics on this pedestal: Persian enamels, a small beautifully preserved Greek vase, an eighteenth-century miniature of an English squire’s favorite spaniel, an Egyptian footstool. Now, several of my classmates, some of the most brilliant, pushed back their chairs, creased their examination booklets and stalked out, singly and in groups, some muttering, most silent.

  “Art History?” a thin mustached man called over his shoulder in a breaking voice. “The history of art?” Others stayed seated, chuckling, bitter. As I watched, the boy beside me massaged the thin bridge of his nose and laughed quietly, eyes pressed shut. “Three years of my life,” he whispered. Still another fellow snapped his pencil, once then twice. He cupped the pieces in his fist, rattling these like dice as he left.

  Some of us sat here looking at the pedestal and its toilet fixture. From the street came sounds of morning traffic, a man selling newspapers. Finally I opened my test booklet. I simply tried to describe the thing. As Blenheim had taught us in his reedy rational voice, I energetically looked and looked at it. I mentioned no implied plumbing. I did not assume that this was part of anything larger, mechanically or historically. I treated it as an object whole unto itself, and not without certain peculiar beauties all its own.