White People (7 page)

“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.

“A
ND 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, then 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.

In just this way, in this unlikely setting, I now try to see myself.

B
EFORE SLEEP
, I exercise my memory, recalling seating charts of favorite classes I taught at the Academy. From these I lift my choice of thirty years of boys. All that character, all those eyes. I place each child at his original desk. When I finally survey this composite class of best-loved pupils, I am amused sometimes to find two or even three boys from different years, whole different generations, now stacked, smiling, all one age, in the same desk chair. I imagine my cellmate seated there on the front row, not wearing a school uniform like the others, not in his coarse prison garb, but instead luminous and shirtless, and—I note—shiny, still soapy from some bath. There are no books, no pen staffs before him. Only jewels on his desktop, a great mound of them glittering as in some children’s tale of treasure. The gems refract the morning classroom’s sunlight; they cast prismatic shapes on floor and ceiling. Purest spectral hues dance all across the room. A winking angle comes and goes above the murky lithograph of Goethe. One corner of the green aquarium is spotlit and clouds of emerald algae, glints of fish, drift through it.

The wall map of America is flecked with coin-sized lozenges like ghostly hints at coming capitals or miracles or future battles with Red Indians. And, seated at the center of this blurry constellation, my latest favorite shines. Gems’ light rests upon his glossy chest, the chin, his garnet scar. Suddenly, he lifts the jewels like an armful of harvest or sea life and our classroom is tattooed with rainbow stripes, tremulous octagons and arcs. Other students laugh and dip their hands into these pools of light. They start to sing, in three-part harmony, one song I taught them all in different years. My cellmate holds treasure out to me, and voices of my best-loved children tremble up into a sweet assured crescendo.

Decades of favorites, a class of masterpieces, comrades, all harmonious.

1975

(“W
HAT’S
wrong
with you?” my wife asks. She already knows. I tell her anyway.)

I was born at a bridge party.

This explains certain frills and soft spots in my character. I sometimes picture my own genes as so many crustless multicolored canapés spread upon a silver oval tray.

Mother’d just turned thirty and was eight-and-one-half months gone. A colonel’s daughter, she could boast a laudable IQ plus a smallish independent income. She loved gardening but, pregnant, couldn’t stoop or weed. She loved swimming but felt too modest to appear at the Club in a bathing suit. “I walk like a duck,” she told her husband, laughing. “Like six ducks trying to keep in line. I
hate
ducks.”

Her best friend, Chloe, local grand master, tournament organizer, was a perfect whiz at stuffing compatible women into borrowed seaside cottages for marathon contract bridge.

“Helen precious?” Chloe phoned. “I know you’re incommoded, but listen, dear. We’re short a person over here at my house. Saundra Harper Briggs finally checked into Duke for that radical rice diet? And not one minute too soon. They say her husband had to drive the poor thing up there in the station wagon, in the
back
of the
station wagon. I refuse to discriminate against you because of your condition. We keep talking about you, still ga-ga over that grand slam of yours in Hilton Head. I could send somebody around to fetch you in, say, fifteen minutes? No, yes? Will that be time enough to throw something on? Unless, of course, you feel too shaky.”

Hobbyists often leap at compliments with an eagerness unknown to pros. And Helen Larkin Grafton was the classic amateur, product of a Richmond that deftly and early on espaliers, topiaries, and bonsais its young ladies, pruning this and that, preparing them for decorative root-bound existences either in or very near the home. Helen, unmistakably a white girl, a postdeb, was most accustomed to kind comments concerning clothes or looks or her special ability to foxtrot. And any talk about the mind itself, even mention of her well-known flair for cards, delighted her. So, dodging natural duty, bored with being treated as if pregnancy were some debilitating terminal disease, she said, “I’d adore to come. See you shortly, Chloe. And God love you for thinking of me. I’ve been sitting here feeling like … well, like one great big mudpie.”

The other women applauded when she strolled in wearing a loose-cut frock of unbleached linen, hands thrust into front patch pockets piped with chocolate brown. (All this I have on hearsay from my godmother, Irma Stythe, a fashion-conscious former war nurse and sometime movie critic for the local paper.)

With much hoopla, two velvet pillows were placed on a folding chair, the new guest settled. They dealt her in. Young Helen Larkin Grafton. Phrases floated into the smoky air: Darling girl. Somewhat birdlike. Miscarried her first two, you know? Oh yes. Wonderful organizer—good with a garden. School up north but it didn’t spoil her outlook or even her accent: pure Richmond. Good bones. Fine little game player. Looking fresh as a bride.

These women liked each other, mostly. At least they
knew
each other, which maybe matters more. Their children carried family secrets, cross-pollinating, house to house. Their husbands owned shares of the same things and golfed in groups. If the women knew about each other first,
then
either liked one another or not, husbands liked each other (till proven wrong) but didn’t always
know
each other
deeply. Anyway, it was a community. Shelter, shared maids, assured Christmas cards, to be greeted on the street by your full name.

One yard above the Persian and Caucasian rugs, temporary tabletops paved a whole new level. Surfaces glided along halls and on the second-story landing. Women huddled from four edges toward each other. That season’s mandatory pastels, shoulder padding. Handbags propped on every level ledge. Mantels, banisters. Cloisonné ashtrays glutted with half-smoked cigarettes. Refreshments—aspics, watercress, cucumber—waiting in the kitchen. The serving lady late, Chloe, our hostess, a plumpish blond woman, discreetly glancing at her watch. Such nice chatting. Exclamations over bad hands and good. Forty belles and semi-belles. Junior guilded. All rooms musical with voices, the great gift of Southern women, knowing how to coax out sounds, all ringing like this. Queen Anne furniture, ancestral portraits, actual Audubon prints thanks to forebears who underwrote the project actually, Moroccan-bound books, maroon and gilt. Williamsburgy knickknacks, beiges, muted olive greens. A charming house chock full of lovely noise, and smokers not inhaling but hooked anyway.