over the course of the night, I had been able to greet her only briefly; she’d been busy preparing the meal, and other people had been in the vicinity. It was after the coffee was served, when Priscilla was in the living room, that I found an opportunity alone with Miss Ruby; she was setting silverware in the dishwasher. I said, “Has Mrs. Blackwell spoken to you about the play?”
Miss Ruby was hardly looking at me. She said, “That’s fine.”
“I want to apologize if I’ve created an awkward situation for you,” I said.
We both were silent, and steam rose from the water gushing out of the faucet.
“Obviously, you didn’t do anything wrong,” I added. “I hope you all are still planning on lunch at our house a week from Monday. We’re very excited about seeing Yvonne’s baby.”
Miss Ruby raised her eyebrows. “You told Mrs. about it?”
“I haven’t, and if it’s uncomfortable for you to come, I understand. But I hope you know we’d be delighted to have you. It’d just be Charlie and Ella and me.” I paused. “We’ll assume you’ll be there, but should something come up, give me a call.” Was I making a great mess of things, was I putting Miss Ruby’s job at risk? But it seemed far more offensive to me to capitulate to Priscilla’s whims than to defy them, and besides, she and Harold were returning to Washington in a few days. Bad enough that she should try to control our behavior while she was here, but it was simply absurd for her to attempt it long-distance.
Before I left the kitchen, I said, “Thank you for dinner. Everything was delicious.”
ON THE CAR
ride home—it was after ten when we left, and I drove—Charlie said, “There’s a rumor going around that you socialized the other night with a Negress.”
“Charlie, you know I don’t like to make trouble, but for your mother to suggest that it’s wrong to—”
“Don’t blame me.” He sounded amused. “You and Miss Ruby can prick your fingers and become blood sisters, for all I care. I’m just hoping I get good tickets for the Lindy-Maj showdown.” He took on a sports announcer’s tone. “In this corner, weighing one-thirty and wearing a pink tennis skirt . . . ” Noticing that I hadn’t laughed, he said, “Come on, this is good stuff. So you drove all the way into the core, huh? You’re a brave lady.”
was a derogatory name for Milwaukee’s inner city, and not a term I used. I ignored Charlie, and from the backseat, Ella said, “Mommy, how many days left till we go to Princeton?”
Ella was excited about the reunion for the spectacle—Charlie had been teaching her the school’s various fight songs and cheers, and I had done my best to describe the orange-and-black outfits, the bands in tents at night, the beauty of the campus (while Ella had gone with us to Charlie’s fifteenth reunion in 1983, she’d been so young she had little memory of it)—and she also was excited because the trip would be an opportunity to see her cousins Harry and Liza. I said, “If today is May twenty-first, and we leave on June third, how many days is that? Do you remember how many days there are in May?”
“Thirty days hath September . . . ” Ella began. She counted on her fingers. “Fourteen days?”
“Close,” I said. “Thirteen.”
“And that means my class party’s in twelve days?”
“Exactly.”
“Daddy?” Ella said.
Charlie turned to face the backseat.
“Your epidermis is showing,” she said.
“Oh, yeah?” Charlie replied. “Well, there’s life on Uranus.”
Ella giggled. “Well, boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider.”
“I remember my time on Jupiter fondly,” Charlie said. “Your mother thought I was stupid to begin with, but when I came back, I’d even forgotten how to pick my nose.” Then he said, “There’s been a request for the world- famous opera singer Ella Blackwell to perform. The fans are clamoring. Will she disappoint, or will she rise to the occasion? Three, two, one, and hit it, Ella!” He was actually the one who began to sing: “ ‘Ohh, Princeton was Princeton when Eli was a pup . . . .’ ”
Ella replied in her own high, sweet voice: “ ‘And Princeton will be Princeton when Eli’s days are up . . . ’ ”
Together, rising in volume, they sang the last two lines, the ones I was not at all sure were appropriate for a nine-year-old: “So any Yalie son of a bitch who thinks he has the brass / Can pucker up his rosy red lips and kiss the Tiger’s ass!’ ”
This was only one small piece of the Princeton propaganda my husband had pressed upon our daughter. There was also the outfit he’d been sent in advance of the reunion, which all the members of his class would wear for the campus parade and which, so far, Ella had tried on and Charlie hadn’t: an orange warm-up suit with a black stripe running down the side of the pants and the jacket’s zipper, and a floppy white hat with 68 printed in orange and black in a circle above the brim. (The outfit’s theme was supposed to be tennis, or “Over-40 Love.”) Then there was Ella’s favorite cheer, known as a locomotive. At any moment—at dinner, or just as Ella was about to go to bed— Charlie would cry out, “Sixty-eight locomotive,” and then they’d both chant, “Hip! Hip! Rah! Rah! Rah! Tiger! Tiger! Tiger! Sis! Sis! Sis! Boom! Boom! Boom! Bah! Sixty-eight! Sixty-eight! Sixty-eight!” Then they’d yell and clap and even dance; sometimes I found their routine charming and sometimes I found it exasperating. A Princeton reunion reminded me of an academic, institutional version of the Blackwell family, simultaneously impressive and self- regarding, overwhelming and intoxicating and marvelous and repugnant. This time around, I felt a particular concern about how much Charlie would drink; his fifteenth reunion had been the only time I’d seen him consume so much beer he vomited, and that had been in the days when he was drinking considerably less than he did now.
Charlie switched to a different song: “ ‘Tune every heart and every voice, / Bid every care withdraw—’ ” This was a song I liked, even though it concluded with a gesture that was uncomfortably close to the Nazi salute. But we were in the car, our little family, and I joined in, too: “ ‘Her sons shall give while we shall live / Three cheers for Old Nassau.’ ” And then, because we were a family, because in families you do the same things over and over, we sang the song a second time, a third, a fourth, and by the end of the fifth, we’d arrived home.
