Five Smooth Stones (61 page)

They ate contentedly and when the meal was over sat drinking beer and talking. David was conscious now and then of stares, but he reflected that it had been a long time since he had known the acute discomfort of those meals in the Laurel Inn on his first trip to Pengard. He had been trying, whenever he could spare the mental effort from his studies, to assess the racial climate of this city, to compare it with Chicago and Cincinnati, and so far had not been able to arrive at any conclusive opinion. He lived within blocks of what could only be described as a Negro ghetto, a ghetto rapidly encroaching on his own neighborhood, and whenever he walked its streets to barbershop or restaurant he felt again the sting of guilt at his alienation from his people, the feeling that what he had should somehow be shared, that he had no right to it. He had compared with a sort of bitter wonder the outspoken defense of the Negro made by various prominent citizens in print, in the letters-to-the-editor columns of the papers, and from public platforms, with the ill-equipped schools and the all-black hordes of children romping in their asphalt-paved schoolyards at recess.

Without thinking he said now, "I like this town. But it's phony as hell just the same."

Suds' eyes became round and questioning. "What brings that crack on?"

David shrugged. "Sorry if I riled you. But I'll tell you, chum. Look at me. No one's given me a bad time since I've been here. Anyplace. I don't go in places I'm not sure about, but I don't suppose there are any I couldn't if I looked like a student or a big shot—professional, that is—and wore the right clothes. But suppose I was married and wanted to rent?"

"Hell, we've got integrated suburbs all around—"

"Maybe. If you're a doctor or a lawyer and have the dough to buy. But last Sunday I went to a little church on the edge of Roxbury—"

"How in God's name did you get over there?"

"Got to talking with a guy on the subway. He said they had good singing. I'd been hankering for some—well, anyhow, I could have been at home. And if those aren't segregated schools I've been seeing—"

"Yeah, I know, but—"

"You think something isn't going to crack now that the Supreme Court has acted? Here in the North, too?"

"Yeah, but—"

"Lay off the 'yabbut' routine. You think they'll do anything about it here?"

Suds was quiet for a minute, then said slowly: "No. Not here. I mean voluntarily. You haven't been here long enough to get the true picture. The politics. The apathy. We New Engenders will fight, yes, man, we'll fight for the poor downtrodden Negro in the South. But, by God, we Bostonians won't stoop to dirty our fingers to clean out the rotten politics, overcome the apathy, that stymies any fight here. And, David, so help me—and you can hit me over the head with that beer bottle if you want—your own people around here aren't exactly what you'd call activists. I'm no student of the situation, but I swear they act as though they'd invented the
status quo
concept."

"That's what Willis says. I'm beginning to get it."

"We argued once about what would happen when the Supreme Court decided, didn't we? Mildly. I didn't believe you then—that things would just get worse. I'm beginning to now. Chuck Martin said the same thing. And you seemed to know—"

"Hell, man, the white racist isn't exactly unpredictable. My grandfather can tell you every time one of the public ones is going to sneeze. But I can't predict, damned if I can, what these half-assed so-called liberals in the North will do. Only that whatever they do when the chips are down I don't think I'm going to like it." David looked at his watch. "Your daddy told me to get you home early."

"Oh, my God! He'll never stop feeling guilty because somebody else found out I had TB."

"You feeling O.K.?"

"Fine. Gosh, I feel fine."

Driving to David's rooms Sudsy said: "One thing about this city, phony or not, it's a small town. Everyone's mixed up with everyone else. You're doing some work for a firm that handles my father's legal affairs, and Hunter Travis's old man uses it too, for some of his stuff—"

"Abernathy, Willis and Shea? Lawrence Travis? I didn't know—"

"Yup. Mrs. Travis's family were Boston's best. Related somewhere along the line to the Abernathy clan. Everyone here is related somewhere along the line. Anyhow, her mother took a trip to England and married an English tide. She sent her daughter—that would be the present Mrs. Travis —back to the States to stay with her grandparents and go to prep school and college. Since her father died, her mother lives here most of the time. Marcia wound up in Radcliffe." Suds laughed. "Don't get any preconceived ideas. Mrs. T. is swell. Anyhow, that's how she met Lawrence Travis. He was working his way through Harvard. Waiting tables, janitoring, anything he could get. My mother told me all this after I left Pengard when she found out I knew Hunter. The Travises were married after Lawrence went into practice."

"Did the grandparents raise a sand?"

"You mean about Travis? No-o-o." Suds squirmed almost visibly. "I mean, they—"

"Took it like Spartans? Breeding and all that?"

"No, damn it! They, well, just didn't raise any sand—"

"Probably thought it was a sort of mark of distinction. If it had been an Irish bartender they'd have raised hell."

"Don't be prickly."

"I'm not being prickly. I've been here long enough to sense a little bit about how some of their minds work. Some things are so far out they come full circle. If you can't marry another Brahmin, don't marry into the middle class. Marry a Negro. Thereby carrying on the great tradition of—of— damned if I know of what."

"Oh, for God's sake! Sometimes you can't find a good word to say for anyone, can you?"

"Nope. And sometimes I can. I'm an ambivalent anachronism, according to Hunter."

"I'll ask him what he meant when he gets here. He'll be over here soon. Something about his book."

David felt a glow of pleasure. There was no one from Pengard he would rather see, he thought; his fear that time and the distances Hunter traveled would make their friendship a part-time thing began to recede. And he was glad Hunter's book was going well. It had made quite a splash—a first novel written while the author was still in college. He loyally declared aloud and to himself that it was a great book and tried to smother the memory of his puzzled boredom as he read it. But critics had waved banners; he knew that the book was well written, and if nothing happened in it, well, life was probably like that for the people about whom Hunter wrote.

When David let himself into his apartment, he looked at the law books on his desk, and groaned. Ten nights out of eleven the pile of books and notebooks was a challenge; on the eleventh night it became a torture. The sheer weight of the books, the realization of the vast quantities of printed matter within their covers, all of it to be digested and assimilated eventually, brought a great blankness to his mind. What he studied on those nights was a blurred and fuzzy recollection in the morning. He knew he should take Dr. Sutherland's advice and knock off more frequently. "Go out on the town now and then, my boy," Sutherland had said, and David had withheld the obvious comment that going out on the town cost money. He had made friends at the church in

Roxbury, mentioned briefly to Sudsy, but it was a long way to go at the end of the day and then return to the mountains of textbooks. The Sunday services he attended now and then were anaesthesia for a loneliness he could not always fight off. The singing did what Gramp called "carry him," as it had in his childhood; it laid a stilling hand on inner turmoil.

Tonight he knew study was out. Somewhere behind the pile of books there were some magazines and a science-fiction paperback. He didn't want anything weightier. By the time he had fixed coffee for morning, undressed, hung trousers and coat carefully, each on its own hanger, and tossed his shirt in the laundry hamper for a Sunday scrub session, he began to look forward to the evening. He put on pajamas, slid bare feet into slippers, and belted around him the robe Gramp had given him for his nineteenth birthday. He put an opened can of beer on the table, settled down into the room's only good-sized armchair, and cocked his feet up on chair opposite. As he was adjusting the lamp on the table beside him to exactly the right angle, he laughed softly. "Damned old maid," he muttered. "Fussing around like a broody hen. What'll I be when I'm sixty!"

After an hour he knew if he didn't get up and go to bed he would fall asleep over the book and waken after midnight stiff and cramped. He decided to hold out to the end of the chapter and then go. The third time he heard what he had thought was the rattling of a light wind he realized that it was a knock on the door, and sighed, damning himself for not having turned out the light and gone to bed ten minutes before. With no light on and no answer to the knock, whoever it was would have gone away. Now he would have to answer it.

At first he did not see her standing small and quiet in the dark. It was her voice that brought his eyes down to hers. "Look down here, David. I'm way down here—"

"Sara—"

***

She stood outside the circle of light cast by the table lamp, all dark intent eyes and soft dark hair. He had not found words yet to follow that first "Sara—" and stood foolishly looking at her, trying to fight back the surge of joy, the choking tightness in his throat that wanted release in a shout

"Can't you say anything, David? Not anything? For an awful minute I thought you weren't going to let me in—"

Words came finally, halting and inane. "I—well, I guess I was surprised."

"You shouldn't have been. You should have known." She smiled, and he plunged his hands into the pockets of his robe to keep them from her shoulders, her waist, her face, from anything that was Sara.

"How—how was Paris?"

"Pooh! Paris." She turned away, into the circle of light, slipping her coat off, then faced him again, handing it to him. After a moment she said, "Don't just hold it, Stoopid. Do something with it!"

He fitted it across the back of a straight chair, taking a long time, and when he looked at her again she had walked to the desk and was touching his books, his yellow legal pad, his pencils, fingering each object lightly, then going on to the table, then across the room and into the small bedroom beyond and the bath and out again to gas plate and refrigerator.

"You wonder," she said. "You lie awake at night and wonder where someone you love is sleeping, and waking up, and reading, and missing you. And when you get there—it's like coming home."

She crossed to the big chair and sat in it, cross-legged. "Was this where you were when I knocked?"

"Yes. Almost asleep. Sara, why did you leave Paris? You came back early in September. I had a letter from Tom. I—" He stopped. He had started to tell her that he wanted to call her one day, the day he had met Bradford Willis. But he couldn't tell her that, couldn't let his guard down that far. Instead he finished the sentence by saying, "I always thought Paris was a sort of Mecca for young artists."

"Not for this one. Not right now. Next spring, perhaps. Paris, London, and then maybe I can exhibit."

"But—but why Boston?"

"Because you're here. And the Boston Art Museum. And some of the best instructors anywhere."

"In that order of importance?" Words were coming more easily now; he no longer felt short-winded and as though he were choking.

"Of course." She grasped her ankles and rocked gently back and forth, like a child. "I got here late this afternoon. I called Sudsy's house, and his mother said he was having dinner with you. She gave me your address. So I waited until I thought you'd be home, and walked over from Copley Square. Like—like a homing pigeon."

"You shouldn't have. I mean, it's not a very good neighborhood."

"I didn't even think about it. I came back from Paris because—because—well, anyhow I was coming here as fast as I could, as soon as I knew you'd be here for classes. And then the first of September my sister in Rio had twins. They hadn't had a baby for seven years and then they have twins. Isn't that marvelous! Think of it, David—two babies at once! It's super!"

He was glad that his laugh sounded natural, at least to himself. "Could be. It would scare hell out of me." He began to relax. "How about coffee? Beer?"

"Coffee. If it's made."

"I can make instant coffee. Or plug in the percolator. It's all set up for morning."

"That's good."

"What—" He cast an almost frightened glance back at her over his shoulder as he walked toward the back of the room. What had she meant, "That's good"?

While he put water on and measured coffee, she said: "When we got the cable from Rio my father decided to go down there. He was positively psycho about having twin grandsons. So we took off—just like that. And then three days after we got there my brother-in-law had word from the home office that he would be recalled and promoted all at once. So I stayed to help. I just got back last week."

"And came to Boston."

"Of course."

He handed her the coffee without saying anything. She looked up at him as she took it and said, "David. Your eyes are shining. They're shining like—gosh, like streetlights or something. Aren't you going to say it, David? I mean, really say it and not just look it?"

He spoke almost crossly. "Say what?"

"That you're happy? That you're happy to see me? Because you are, David. You know you are."

He sat in the occasional chair, rays from the lamp on the table beamed away from him and illuminating Sara, making her a glowing idol sitting cross-legged in his chair.

"Yes," he said almost inaudibly. "Yes, of course I'm happy. I—I'm so damned glad to see you I guess I haven't got good sense. But—I wish you hadn't. It was rough, but it was easier too—the way things were. Because nothing's changed. Nothing ever will."

"David! You're—you're stupid and dense and hardheaded and stubborn and—and blind. And you're wrong, and I love the hell out of you, David."

When he didn't answer she leaned forward, her face no longer in the light. She had spoken, in spite of the words, softly, slowly, in quiet measure, not tumbling her thoughts out, sounding like someone else, not like Sara Kent at all. It will be all right, thought David; it will be all right if she stays in that chair. If she just doesn't get out of that chair and come over here and touch me, I can make it. But she did not move, just said softly, "David."