room, meet the Colonel’s challenging stare.
“My father owned a gun,” I tell him flatly. His yellowing eyes widen slightly, the intricate motions of his cigar hand grow more extravagant, but he shows no other reaction. So I continue. “I checked
… I hear it’s easy to buy them in Virginia.”
“It is. I’ve bought a few.”
“Well, that’s the thing. I don’t believe he bought it there.”
“You don’t.”
“I just can’t imagine my father sneaking over the Memorial Bridge in the dead of night with an illegal handgun hidden in the trunk. It just… wouldn’t have been his kind of thing.”
A faint smile creases his pudgy face. He finishes his drink, glances around for his wife to fix him another, then remembers she has left the room and goes to the wet bar to get his own. He waves the ginger ale bottle vaguely in my direction, but I shake my head. “You’re probably right,” he murmurs as he returns to his lounger.
“It’s not that he wouldn’t have kept an illegal handgun. It’s more that he wouldn’t have taken the chance of getting caught.”
“Mmmm.”
“On the other hand, you have quite a collection of guns down in the basement.”
“It’s not a bad one,” agrees my host, who has failed many times to get me interested in his hobby.
“Well, this is what I was thinking. If my father wanted a gun, I guess I could see him borrowing one from you.”
The smile broadens. “I could see that, too.”
I finally exhale. “So I guess what I was wondering was… when exactly he asked you for a gun, and why he said he wanted one.”
The Colonel shifts comfortably in his seat. He inhales, blows a few rings, but not at me. “I would say it was… oh, a year ago. Maybe a little more. Say, October a year ago, because we were just back from… from…” He turns his head slightly, shouts: “Vera! Where did we go last October?”
“St. Lucia!” she shouts from the next room, over the television. Vera’s Jamaican accent has grown faint over the years; the Colonel’s is all but impossible to detect.
“No, not this October. Last October.”
“South Pacific!”
“Thanks, doll.” He grins sheepishly. “Old gray cells aren’t what they were. Yes, just back from the South Pacific. Seems to me we invited you folks to come…”
“No.”
“No? Maybe it was Marilyn. But I could have sworn we called Kimberly, Weren’t you on leave from the law school or something? We thought you’d have free time.” He sees the answer the same time I do: they invited Kimmer, and she declined without troubling to mention it to me. Maybe even lied to her parents and said I was the one who said no. Being cooped up on a ship for two weeks with her father, her mother, and her husband would be my wife’s notion of hell on earth. He rushes on to cover his faux pas. “Well, we were back, oh, say four, five days when Oliver called. Came over at night, sat right where you’re sitting, asked could he speak to me alone. He wasn’t the sort to mince words”-looking right at me, as though implying that I am-“and he told me what he wanted.”
“What did he say exactly?”
“Said he was getting a little worried about safety at his age, and could I help.”
“Safety? His own safety?”
The Colonel nods, blows more rings. I am being brusque, in my half-remembered litigation mode, but it comes back to you, like riding a bicycle. Kimmer’s father does not seem to mind being interrogated. He is having fun. His tiny eyes gleam. “That was my impression. He was kind of-” Suddenly he spins in his chair, the light selecting a different angle to reflect off his bald head. “Vera! Hey, Vera!”
She is in the room at once, hands folded at her waist. Probably she has been listening from the alcove.
“Yes, sweetie?”
“Damn cigar’s no good. Be a doll, go down to my desk, get me another.”
“Of course, dear.” She heads for the basement stairs at once, and I am reminded, for the thousandth time, just what Kimmer was rebelling against. But I also know that there is nothing wrong with the cigar, that the Colonel is just sending her away.
“What a doll,” he murmurs, watching her go. “You’re a doll!” he calls, but she is out of earshot, which is what he is waiting for. He leans toward me, and suddenly is all business. “Look, Talcott, I don’t know exactly what the hell was going on. I never saw your father scared in my life, and I’ve known him-sorry, I knew him-for twenty years. But he was white as a sheet, if you’ll excuse the expression. He wouldn’t tell me why he wanted the gun, just that he wanted it fast.”
“You gave it to him? No questions asked?”
“I asked lots of questions, I just didn’t get any answers.” A guffaw. He has dealt with pipsqueaks before. Then the serious tone again. “Look, Talcott. I saw him before we left on our cruise and he was fine. Then I saw him when we came back and he was… oh, hell, he was terrified, Talcott, okay?”
I try to picture the Judge terrified. I draw a blank.
Miles Madison is still talking, his voice low and sure. “So whatever happened to scare him, it happened while we were away. I’m talking about last October, just about a year before he died, and it spooked the hell out of him. If you find out what happened, you’ll know why he wanted a gun.” His head jerks, for he is preternaturally alert, as he must have been in his days in the infantry. “Vera! Thanks for the cigar, doll!”
“The one you have looks just fine to me,” she points out as she empties the ashtray into a wastebasket decorated with a map of the Caribbean.
He grins sheepishly up at her. “Damn imports. No quality control.” He turns back to look at me, winks. “Talcott and I were just making a friendly wager on a game of pool.”
But nobody beats the Colonel at pool. He cheats.
Vera and the colonel wind up giving me dinner. I want to escape, but declining their hospitality would be rude. By the time I return to the Hilton, almost four hours have slipped past. It is nearly eight, and the streets of Washington are full pre-winter dark. I have missed the final day of the conference, but I am sure I was not missed.
The lobby is crowded with citizens of the darker nation, most of them in evening attire: black tuxes with bright and distinctive cummerbunds for the men, glittering gowns of various lengths for the women. They glide up and down the escalators, striking poses for the absent cameras. The beautiful people! Nobody seems an ounce overweight. Every patent-leather shoe is perfectly shined. Every hair on every head appears to be perfectly in place. Every nose is in the air. My parents’ kind of crowd. And the Madisons’.
I wonder what event they are attending. In my plain gray suit, sweaty from my brief run, sweatier still from my long walk, I feel out of place, as though I exist on a level far below the paradise inhabited by this radiant throng. From the skeptical looks they cast my way, some of the well-to-do folk gathered in the lobby have the same thought: that this disheveled man slinking along in the gray suit is not, as my mother used to say in the old days, our kind of Negro. Although the absurd American system of racial counting would consider all of these glitterati black, most of them are of hues pale enough to have passed the paper-bag test that so justifiably enraged Mariah back in college, when she flunked it, even though it is, supposedly, no longer in use: If your skin is any darker than this paper bag, you can’t join our sorority. Oh, but we are sick people! A buried sentiment catches me by surprise, welling up from some putrefying source deep inside me, a wave of cold, brutal hatred for my parents’ way of life, for their exclusive little circle and its usually cruel snap judgments about everybody on the outside. And hatred for myself, too, for all the times I actually answered their snide little questions about where this friend of mine went to school, who that one’s parents were, and, sometimes, where the parents were educated. Addison, as he grew, began to talk back to our mother and father; Mariah and I never did; and perhaps he preserved an independence of being that my sister and I lost. The lobby reels redly about me for a moment, and I find myself wondering, as I did in my nationalistic college days, who the real enemy is, for those of us who considered ourselves the radical vanguard of the battle for a better future used to sit up half the night cursing the black bourgeoisie. E. Franklin
