Robert Parker - Love and Glory

“How are you now?”

“I’m not a drunk anymore.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not that much to say. I worked at different things, moved around the country, ended up down-and-out in L.A., and decided to make a comeback.”

The weight of her interest was delicious. I remembered the department chairman yesterday, and all the men I’d seen her talk with. I knew that everyone she spoke with felt this way, but it was still as dulcet and entrancing as if it were only me. And at the moment, it was. She wasn’t calculating in that. She really was interested and she really did concentrate on whatever, or whoever, was before her. What I had come to understand in the years of booze and sorrow was that the impact of her personality created in her no sense of obligation. She could entrance people and so she did. It was a power she used neither for good nor evil, but for the simple, unexamined pleasure of its exercise. I came to understand that before I knew I understood it. There was no Eureka, merely one day I noticed that I had known this for a time. She loved being central. There was nothing malign in this, or even selfish. It was simply a need and she fulfilled it with no more thought than one would give to drinking a glass of water. I wondered if there was more. If thirty-year-old Jennifer was different. There would be time to find out.

“How has it been going for you, my love,” I said.

She nodded her head repeatedly. “Good, good. I have a daughter, Suzanna — we call her Sue Sue.”

“Sue Sue?”

“Yes. It is awfully beach-clubby, isn’t it? Her father started calling her that right after she was born. She’s almost four now. We waited until John got his degree.”

“You been going to school long?”

“No, this is the first year. I was a housewife till then, but I was getting stir crazy.” She shrugged. “So John helped me get a teaching assistantship. I love it. After eight years, I just love it.”

“And the kid?”

“John’s mother looks after her during the day. She and Sue Sue are close and they have servants, of course, too.”

“Never thought John would go into teaching,” I said.

“No. That is a surprise. His brother went into the bank, but John wanted to be a professor. There’s family money, of course. I don’t know how people do it who have to live on a professor’s salary. But John really enjoys the students. I guess banking never excited him.”

“Still in Marblehead?”

“Yes, right next to John’s parents.”

“How’s that work out?”

“Oh,” Jennifer shrugged, “not as badly as it might. Margaret, my mother-in-law, is very handy for Sue Sue, and all. She’s kind of bossy and full of advice. You know the kind. Often wrong but never uncertain? When we were first married and John was getting his Ph.D. at Harvard she came to our Cambridge apartment one day when we weren’t there and rearranged my furniture.”

“How’s John feel about her?”

“Oh, he says I shouldn’t let it bother me. If we disagree, he tries to mediate — he’s very reasonable, you know. His field is the eighteenth century. He’s always the man of reason. If Margaret and I have an argument, he judges the thing on its merits.”

“She’s wrong,” I said.

“Margaret?” Jennifer looked startled.

“Yeah. If she disagrees with you, she’s wrong. You’re right. You are much too wonderful to be wrong.”

Jennifer laughed her thrilling laugh. “Oh, Boonie. It’s good to have you around again. Can we be friends?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s one of the reasons I came back.”

“Like we were? You really were the best friend I ever had.”

“You were that to me,” I said.

“And you really were, still are, like nobody else. I still haven’t met anyone like you.”

“And I was just a kid then,” I said. “Wait till you see how much better I’ve become. You may tear off all your clothes and pounce on me.”

“Gee,” Jennifer said, “we could never eat at the faculty club again.”

The sexual reference made my throat tighten. I had to force my voice out, but it sounded normal enough once out. I thought of her and Merchent waiting before they had the baby, taking precautions, and having intercourse carefully, sleeping together each night, being naked together often. I thought of the casual and intimate possession that people develop when they’ve been married a few years, a possession that excludes the rest of the world, that sets them apart regardless of their passion for each other, that marks us and differentiates from them. It was almost too much. It almost overwhelmed me. Almost drove me backward into the despair I’d worked so fiercely at overcoming. For a moment everything swam in front of me, and ran together, and I clasped my hands beneath the table as hard as I could, swelling the muscles in my arms and then my chest and back. Control. I had come this far. I was with her. Talking of being friends. I could look at her, and if I reached out and touched her, she wouldn’t flinch. “Time is but the stream I go fishing in.” The time she’s been with Merchent, the kid, the press of nakedness, the life they led, was downstream from where I fished. The stream kept going and the water I fished in was always new. When I had her again, the others who had had her wouldn’t matter. Except as obstacles they didn’t matter now.

In a classroom in the science building there were thirteen whites and three Negroes. All the whites except me wore lapel buttons that said HONKIES FOR INTEGRATION. I was for integration, but I wasn’t sure that we sixteen were going to get it done.

On the green chalkboard behind the podium at the front of the room someone had chalked a long equation, boxed it in, and written SAVE beside it. The equation was entirely mysterious to me.

A very thin Negro man came in. He was medium height with short hair and a goatee. He wore round gold-rimmed glasses, and carried a cane. He had on a black homburg, a black double-breasted suit with a faint gray pin stripe, a black shirt, and a dark gray tie. He looked down at the three Negroes sitting in the front row and murmured, “Brothers.” They murmured back. Then he leaned his cane against the podium, rested his hands against either edge of the top of the podium, and leaned over it toward us.

“My name is Willie Smith and I have been to the belly of the beast,” he said. “Before I return there, I want to tell you about it.”

He was a spellbinder. He spoke without notes for forty-five minutes of Mississippi, and the voter registration efforts there and the danger that freedom riders faced. The audience was rapt. When it was over they swirled up and to the front of the room and surrounded him. A young black man in a white coat wheeled in a table of tea and coffee and small multicolored sugar cookies, and stood silently behind the table, pouring coffee or tea as requested, and allowing people to help themselves to the cookies.

Jennifer shook Willie Smith’s hand. “You were magnificent,” she said. “Are magnificent.”

Willie said, “Thank you, thank you.”

“We are with you,” Jennifer said. “We are—” She paused for a moment, trying to express herself just right. One of the three Negroes said, “Who’s this we? You talking for all the honkies?”

I had been standing back watching Jennifer, staying out of the way. When he said that I stepped forward, between him and Jennifer. “She’s probably talking for herself,” I said. “And the people she knows. Are you talking for all the niggers?”

The room became quiet. The awful word was out. I knew they thought it was awful. But I knew that Roy Washington and I used it as commonly as swearing. It depended on how it was used. And since Roy had taught me to box I cared less than I used to about whether people liked what I said.

“You got no right to say something like that,” the Negro said.

Willie Smith was looking at me steadily.

“There’s three thousand white students in this university,” I said. “And thirteen of them showed up here. It’s dumb to call one of those thirteen a honkie.”

Jennifer put her hand on my arm. “Boonie,” she said. “He has more right to be angry than we do.”

“Not at you,” I said. “Not in front of me.”

“The gentleman’s right, brother,” Willie Smith said. “We won’t make no progress ’less we can get together.” He looked at Jennifer. “Negroes get touchy after a while, miss,” he said. “They get suspicious of white people who say we this and you that. Tends to underscore the racial split, if you see what I mean.”

Jennifer nodded. “Of course.”

“It doesn’t underscore it as much as a button that says Honkies for Integration,” I said.

Willie Smith looked straight at me and the force in his eyes behind the silly gold-rimmed glasses told me something about why he had been to Mississippi and returned. “I agree,” he said. “I see you’re not wearing one. Even though you’re here. I assume you are opposed to racism?”

“Yes,” I said.

Smith smiled. “I like that.” He put out his hand. “An honest man,” he said. We shook hands. “Ask a white man if he’s opposed to racism,” Smith said to all the audience, “and if he runs on about how much he’s opposed and how he hates it and what he’d like to do to stop it, you can be pretty sure you’ve got a man who feels guilty and probably has reason to.” He turned to me. “You don’t feel guilty, do you?”

“No.”

“Have black friends?”

“I have.”

“Some of your best friends?” Smith smiled.

“She’s my best friend,” I said.

“You ever care to come down to Mississippi and register some black voters, you’ll be damned welcome.”