Five Smooth Stones (30 page)

"All! All! It is too much!"

"Karl." Eve Knudsen's voice was still low. "Karl, my dear, there is nothing to be done at this point. We will only make it harder on David if we—if you—press it."

This woman sure has sense, thought David; sure has sense and understanding both.

"It is hard," snapped Knudsen. "It is very difficult. One wants to fight—"

"Fight what? A set, shallow, stupid mind that nothing will ever change, not even righteous Danish indignation?" She turned to David. "We're being rude, David, talking as though you weren't here, but you do seem like one of the family, you know."

This time he didn't resent the "one of the family" remark as he had the earlier one about "almost a relative."

The doctor was still fuming. "I suppose you are right, Eve. When I cool down it is possible I will know it." His voice was without conviction. He turned to David. "We wish we could have invited you to have dinner with us, but we are dining with the Benfords tonight."

David, gratified that the subject had been changed, grinned. "I hope I live through it," he said.

The doctor looked puzzled, but his wife laughed until a breeze of fresh air seemed to have swept through the room. The doctor, whose laughter had joined his wife's, said, "We will leave a few shreds of you, David." Then added, "But soon, David, you will dine with us. We will have our niece Sara and perhaps young Evans. My wife has known him also since he was a baby." He looked almost wistful. "They tell me you play piano. We could have music, real music, as well as records, if you did not mind—"

"Me? Mind playing piano? Gee, no. I've been scared of getting rusty—"

CHAPTER 23

When David went home for summer vacation, he felt full of years and wisdom. It was his first trip home since Christmas. There had been too many unexpected expenses, books, warmer clothing, for him to go home in spring vacation. He felt himself bridling when Gramp, meeting him at the station, said, "My Gawd, boy! You've growed!" He felt that he was well past the growing stage, was in the full maturity of manhood, then lost the feeling abruptly when, looking for Stumpy, Gramp told him the tail-less cat was dead. He wouldn't let even Gramp see the tears in his eyes; instead he made a great to-do about unpacking, thinking, not only of Stumpy who had shared his bed every night, but of Gramp without Stumpy's company, Gramp who hadn't told him about Stumpy because he didn't want him upsetted up there at the college.

Seeing Gramp again took some of the worry off his mind. Li'l Joe looked fine. He had never wholly believed Gramp's letters that always ended, "I am feeling O.K. Yrs. truly, your grandfather, Joseph Champlin," and had taken to calling home, collect, every couple of weeks, and Gramp had never objected to the expense.

Li'l Joe's happiness at having him home was quiet, controlled, and warmly deep. The Prof's was outspoken and boisterous, his great hug rib-cracking. The hardest part of the return was the realization that he could not communicate to either man anything but the surface features of his life at Pengard. To David's near bewilderment the Prof did not ask immediately about his grades but, eyes fiercely twinkling under the bushy brows, said, "My brother writes me of jam sessions! He says he is becoming quite a drummer. Tell me about them—"

It would have been better if the Prof had asked the question when Gramp wasn't around, instead of in the little house in Beauregard with Gramp's nose twitching like an inquisitive chipmunk's. Li'l Joe Champlin was pure murder when it came to knowing what was going on. David knew he wouldn't have to mention Sara Kent's name, any girl's name, but what Gramp would catch on and by some sort of psychic osmosis know damned well whether she was white or colored.

Remembering that first session was like living it again, covertly watching Sara clap hands no bigger than the palms of his own while they listened to records; Sara feeding him song titles as he sat at the piano in the little room off the Knudsen living room; she and Tom both singing, then the Doc disappearing and coming back from somewhere in the depths of the house with an old set of drums, grinning like a kid. The Doc wasn't bad on drums, but Tom was terrible, and David coached him at this and other sessions until he became, as David told Gramp and the Prof, passable. Nehemiah had been invited, but said he was spending the weekend with relatives in Cincinnati, and David knew this to be a barefaced lie. David did not need to ask why Lou Callender, the girl Tom dated every now and then, wasn't there. Tom had introduced them one day, and she shook hands and gushed, and David wondered, as he did so often, what some whites saw in the women they picked. Maybe Tom was making out with her, but David doubted it. She looked like a teaser to him.

Suds Sutherland and Chuck Martin came to some of the sessions after that first one, and a couple of girls whose faces David couldn't even remember very well the next day, although Sara could be in the room with him now, as close as she had been then, so clear was his memory of her face.

When at last they broke up the first session to go back to the dormitories, Sara, walking from the little music room into the living room, went into a quick Charleston step, and a shoe flew across the room. She reached out and grabbed his arm, and instinctively David bent it at the elbow, stiffening the muscles of his forearm for her to grip. Even with her full weight on it while she put the shoe on, the grip had been as light as a bird's or a kitten's. Yet he was still feeling it when he reached the quadrangle and walked across it to his room.

After that he didn't stay away from the recreation hall, although he kept in the forefront of his mind the knowledge that the dull red blocks that made up the floors were, for him, not tiles but eggs. Clevenger was there often, aloof and elegant, yet showing a patronizing friendliness that, thought David, was enough to make a guy puke. The youth from Virginia made a great point of tipping him off about the food at the snack bar, showed him the billiard room and library-study, and the room off the main lounge where there were a record player and records, as well as an old upright piano. David's eyes had gleamed at the sight of the grand piano in the main lounge, but he stayed away from it, partly from sheer awe at its magnificence, partly because he didn't want to call attention to himself.

The Negro student, Margaret Benjamin, who lived in Sara's dormitory, was in his history class, but they didn't seem to be able to hit it off together. There wasn't any question about her being a dedicated scholar, but, damn it, so was he, and there sure as hell must be something a fellow and a girl could talk about besides the Federalist Papers.

It was Margaret who switched the subject one morning in his second week and said: "What do you plan to do when you graduate? Or haven't you decided? I think making decisions is important."

"Law," said David. "Never thought about anything different."

She had chosen teaching, she told him; hoped for a Master's after Pengard. "Teaching and law," she said. "Those are the areas where we are most needed, don't you think?"

"Well—I guess so—" No need to ask what she meant by "we." Educated Negroes, and somehow she managed to sound condescending about it.

She said, "I haven't seen you at an ALEC meeting yet You know about them, don't you?"

"Yeah. What they do besides talk?"

"Well, goodness, talk and discussion bring understanding—"

He shrugged. "I'll go along on law and teaching, but if there's one thing we don't need it's more talk. Jesus! Yak-yakity-yak! What's it going to get us?"

"Oh, really now! Understanding—"

"Understanding!" He almost said, "Understanding, shit!" when a shaft of watery sunlight struck her heavy-rimmed glasses and made them gleam with an even brighter earnestness than usual, and he smothered the epithet. All the talk in the world wasn't going to bring about "understanding" between a Clevenger and a Nehemiah, or between a Goodhue and, say, himself. Or a red-neck bus driver and a Negro passenger.

His first real encounter with Simmons and Dunbar came in the recreation hall. There had been nods and greetings in class and on the campus, but they were distant and without warmth. On this day he was alone, playing piano softly in the small music room off the main lounge, running over blues chords, noodling around, relaxed, half humming, half singing one of Li'l Joe Champlin's favorites,
I'm the winin' boy— don't deny my name—Mamma, Mamma, won't you look at Sis
—when he turned quickly, flustered and thrown off by the feeling that someone was watching him. They were standing together in the doorway, Simmons, light-skinned, whip-slender, cat-graceful, his impassivity an ineffectual covering for cool contempt; Dunbar, shorter, darker, also slender, eyelids too heavy for a small face half covering the eyes in a concealment more revealing than a wide-eyed stare. After what Nehemiah had told him of these two, David had decided there would be no speaking first on his part, but now he was at a disadvantage, embarrassed, half angry, and before he could stop himself he said, "Hi—"

"Yeah." From Simmons it was half-greeting, half-contemptuous comment.

"Having fun?" asked Dunbar, and added, "Don't let us spook you."

"You're not spooking me," said David evenly. "Just fooling around, practicing."

"What?" asked Simmons.

"Nothing in particular. Music, blues—"

"Oh," said Simmons.

"Now we know," said Dunbar. They turned together, moving, it seemed, as one person, and crossed the main lounge. David saw them stop, with no apparent communication between them, at the grand piano by the big side window. He knew Simmons's laugh was coming before he heard it, then saw the tall youth slither onto the piano bench with the uncanny, jointless movement of a snake. There was the sound of the piano's fine tone, then one and then another slashing, dissonant chord, then the theme of "Tea for Two" was established, and from there on things happened musically that held him quiet and intent. The hands on the keyboard were skilled, subtly rhythmic, their owner passionately involved in what he was playing, and David thought: Bastard knows, that bastard really knows that piano. But he's never going to get out of that one; he's never going to make it home from way out there, serves him right, showboating—

Simmons, without ever getting home, with obviously no intention of getting home, stopped on a series of progressions that seemed to David to be going nowhere. His playing was a long way from the music David had learned from Miz Jones and Gramp.

He watched the two cross the lounge to leave through the snack bar, and felt cut off and alone. He had heard the message in Simmons's piano, knew it was meant for him, and it had come from across a gulf wider than the gulf that lay between him and the whites who surrounded him.

***

On Friday and Saturday nights the recreation hall was crowded. He never intended to go, yet usually found himself there, standing against a wall or sitting cross-legged on the floor with Sutherland or Martin or Evans, listening to the impromptu music, watching the dancing because—and he had stopped trying to deny it to himself—Sara Kent was usually on the floor, light and quick and laughing. Often she danced with either Simmons or Dunbar, and he fought down jealousy, knowing that it was she who had nicknamed them "The Ineffable Twins," knowing she would probably have danced with the devil himself if he turned out to be a good-enough dancer. It took Sara and Hunter Travis, with an assist from Chuck Martin, to persuade him finally to play the grand piano in the main lounge; then what had been genuine reluctance vanished when the small group standing around it when he started enlarged until students were three and four deep in front of and beside him.

Toward the end of the term, at Sara's urging, he attended a few ALEC meetings, held in the basement community room of a church near the campus, under the leadership of the rector of the church, a Father. McCartney. He had been right; they talked—ethnic cultures, economic problems, psychological pressures, the whole routine. A frequently discussed subject was the bright day that would dawn when the Supreme Court outlawed school segregation, and during these discussions David had a rough time keeping his peace.

Walking back with Suds one night he said, "You-all honestly, I mean honestly, think that when the Supreme Court acts to desegregate schools it's going to make all that difference?"

"Well, gosh, isn't it? I mean if kids go to school together they can't grow up with all that hate and prejudice—"

David pushed his cap back, scratched his head, thought it wasn't possible that anyone, even a white, could be that stupid about race relations. Only Chuck Martin, he thought, would have known what he was talking about when he answered: "Look, Sudsy, it's going to be worse. Man, it's going to be a hell of a lot worse. For a hell of a long time. You want to bet?"

"How much?"

"A reasonable sum. Maybe a dime. But I'm stealing your money."

"O.K. Have it your way. But I don't get it—"

"Look, comes the time the government orders school desegregation, there are going to be so many, so damned many, new segregation laws passed by individual states, so damned much maneuvering to avoid compliance, it'll take a couple of generations to unravel 'em all. And I'll bet you a hell of a lot more than a dime that there's going to be bloodshed and riots the first time anyone tries to make integration work. And it won't stop. You ask Chuck Martin. He'll agree with me."

"You've got to be wrong. You've got to be—"

"I'm not, Suds. That's how it is."

It came to an end almost before it began, that first school year, with nothing left but memories of long hours of study, of worry over grades, of a growing sense of belonging to the world at large and not just a dark portion of it when he was with certain people, and of sharply defined alienation when he was with others; memories of occasional weekends with Nehemiah's relatives in Cincinnati; and church services there that reminded him of home and made him feel, briefly, no sense of being away. And a memory of Sara Kent. And this was a different kind of memory because it was a single one, weaving itself in and out of all the others, never absent, continuous, and it brought him a kind of pain he had never known before, and sometimes he wished to God he did not