The Dinner Party Read online

  “Who is that?” he asked blankly.

  “The black kid?”

  “I know who the others are.”

  “Well, that young man’s name is Clarence Jones. He’s a student at Harvard and a close friend of Leonard’s. He’s there on scholarship—not one of those special preference things, but the old-fashioned kind that you win by having more brains than the other kids.”

  “Lenny’s guest?”

  “Right.”

  “For the day?”

  “Do you mean,” Dolly asked, “is he leaving before dinner? No, he’s staying. Lenny invited him for the weekend, and since today is Friday, I suppose that means until Monday. He’s a delightful boy. Why do you ask?”

  “Well, I suppose the three of them could have their dinner first. They won’t find much amusement in a party of old folks.”

  “Come on, Richard,” Dolly said, “do you really think they’d miss a chance to break bread with those two old pirates you invited here tonight? Anyway, Daddy doesn’t come here to see us; he comes to see Leonard and Elizabeth, and if they weren’t at dinner, he’d raise hell. What are you worried about?”

  “You know what I’m worried about.”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “It’s bad enough to have a Harvard liberal loudmouth son who thinks I’ve sold out the human race, but a smartass black kid from the same reservation—well, Web Heller just isn’t that quick. This kid could cut him to pieces, and there goes your dinner party, and my plans.”

  “Why should he?”

  “Why? Did you ever meet a black man who didn’t think that this administration is out to destroy the black population?”

  The trouble was, Dolly realized, that outside of Washington cocktail parties and dinner parties and various receptions, she had known too few black people to have any clear notion of what they thought. Those she had encountered at various affairs had, like most political people, disguised or hidden their thoughts behind walls of clichés or platitudes, and now she could hardly accept the fact that a guest of her son would deliberately provoke another guest.

  “Do you want me to speak to Leonard?” she asked Richard.

  “No. If it comes up, I’ll handle it.”

  FIVE

  Elizabeth Cromwell was twenty years old, going into her junior year at Sarah Lawrence, five feet nine inches tall, and reasonably beautiful. Her brown hair was streaked by the sun, and as the summer wore on, her skin would turn berry brown. Her good looks and obvious good health attracted men; her manner put them off, too thinly veiled sardonic humor and too much evidence of intellectual superiority. Too many men who came on to her came off rather quickly, stung and petulant and sometimes angry. Her brother, Leonard, was more disarming. Two inches over six feet, slender, good-looking, he had a gentle, amiable manner that hid a sharp, inquisitive mind. A couple of years older than Elizabeth, he adored her. He was very thin, a long bony body and black unkempt hair over a round, button-nosed face.

  His friend, Clarence Jones, was shorter, broader, and coffee brown in color. Both of them were first year at Harvard Law, and both were oddly alike in having the same round head and small, turned-up nose.

  Elizabeth and the two men were in their bathing suits, carrying robes and towels, their bodies bare to the warm morning sun; and as they came around the back of the house on the path that led to the pool, they were about sixty yards from where the senator and his wife were having their breakfast.

  “Shouldn’t I be introduced?” Clarence Jones wondered. “I never met your dad.”

  “Rejoice for a while longer,” Leonard said bleakly.

  “Oh, come on,” Elizabeth protested, “he’s all right.”

  “Yes?”

  “I mean you’re giving Clare all the wrong notions. Pop is polite and pleasant and he doesn’t rub people the wrong way.”

  “No chip on my shoulder,” Clarence said mildly.

  “Right now, let’s swim,” Leonard said. “We’ll meet him.”

  “As you say.”

  The swimming pool was nested in a wall of flowering shrubs, which gave it privacy without casting shadows. It was fifty feet long and thirty feet wide, a large size for a private pool, a diving board at one end, and the pool itself was positioned and decorated with great charm. Since he arrived at the Cromwell home the night before, Clarence Jones had been quietly yet intensely observing and studying a manner of life he had read about and seen in films, but never actually encountered before.

  “Liz does her laps first,” Leonard told him. “She gets the pool to herself for half an hour because she’s selfish and rigid.”

  “Go to hell,” Elizabeth said pleasantly, and dived in and came up screaming, “It’s fucken, fucken cold! Didn’t anyone set the heater going?”

  “I set it last night, but it doesn’t start heating until six in the morning. Once Mac starts putting the cover on at night, we won’t have a problem.”

  Elizabeth had begun her laps without waiting for him to finish his explanation. She swam with a smooth, easy freestyle that brought a grunt of praise from Clarence.

  “Man, she’s a beautiful swimmer.”

  “I’ve raced her a hundred times. She always beats me. Men can swim faster, but I never saw a man who could swim with the style and class of a good lady swimmer.”

  Clarence was looking around, absorbing every detail, the striped cabana tent at one end, the outdoor shower, the lovely wrought-iron table and chairs on the poolside terrace, the telephone, the wheeled cart with its weather-protected small television, so that even here one should be near the glass tit on which all America sucked. “This,” he said, “is what they call the good life, and you had no business bringing a poor black boy out here to taste it. When I was waiting tables at Casey’s and brought you a beer, I had no idea that you had crawled out of a cornucopia to go slumming.”

  “Bullshit. You’ll be the editor of the Law Review and you’ll walk out of school into a job at some truly hotshot New York or Washington firm at a starting wage of fifty grand a year, so don’t pull any Topsy shit on me.”

  “Topsy was a girl. The rich are always ignorant.”

  Nellie Clough, the housemaid, appeared. She was small, blonde, and cute; at least, Dolly always described her as cute, and she had an interesting Irish brogue. She was not impressed by Clarence’s statement about the rich; her own faith in the rich would never be shaken. She had been with the family six years, and only once during that time had the senator crawled into bed with her. She had known girls in the old country where it had been every month and every week, and in one case, with Sir Roger Kimberly, every day of the week, although Nellie never knew whether to believe the girl who told her the story. Measured against that yardstick, the senator was a gentleman. All her very restrained and careful advances toward Leonard had so far produced no results, yet she smiled on him fondly as she told him that Ellen was out of patience today. “That’s what she says,” Nellie told them. “Breakfast will not be served at the pool, and not even juice or coffee, mind you, and after ten you get no breakfast at all, not a smidgen, because it is a day with no extra hours, which is what she says.”

  “Ah, Nellie,” Leonard said, “you know I love you—”

  “I know nothing of the kind.”

  “—and what harm—” imitating her accent “—in a bit of coffee and a crock of juice. Come on. Come on. Be a love.”

  “Ellen would kill me. You know the way she is.” Pointing to Elizabeth, doing her laps, “She’s at it again?”

  “I can’t talk her out of it. Even coffee. Just coffee—how about it, you lovely golden-haired creature?”

  “All right. I’ll try. I don’t promise, but I’ll try.”

  She departed, and Leonard stared at Elizabeth. Clarence mentioned the fact that Nellie did not appear to know he was there.

  “She can’t deal with blacks. She’s used to Ellen and Mac, and maybe she pretends they’re not black. But others—I don’t know. To be plucked out of a peasan
t cottage in Ireland and dropped here—well, it’s a peculiar transition.”

  “By the way,” Clarence asked, “does Elizabeth know?”

  “Know? Oh, you mean about me. No, she doesn’t.”

  “She knows you’re gay?”

  “She knows. We’ve never talked about it, but I’m sure she knows. She’s smart. She’s a damn sight smarter than anyone gives her credit for, because when you look like that, you’re not supposed to be smart. And the two of us—you know, I don’t think we ever had a fight, you know, the way brothers and sisters scrap all the time and cat each other. We made a closed thing, and she was like a romantic love to me as far back as I can remember, and we did all our sexual exploring of each other with such innocence, like two loving animals, like you might think about two puppies, and sometimes I’d have daydreams of just Liz and me on an island, like those two kids in that movie—what was it, do you know?”

  “The Blue Lagoon,” Clarence said gently.

  “So she has to know I’m gay—it’s just putting two and two together, and there are other things between us that she knows and I know and we never talk about them.”

  “And your mother and father—they never put two and two together?”

  “Bite your tongue, Jones. My father would have to pause, resign from the Senate and the presidency for at least five minutes, have a good long look at me, convince himself that I am his son, memorize what I look like—and then he’d remember that he never looked at me before, so how in hell could he put two and two together when the other two never was there? Does that make sense?”

  “No, and you’re shouting and Liz will hear you. Anyway, I don’t believe you. The senator’s a good man.”

  “She wouldn’t hear a bomb explode, the way she’s going. And don’t tell me about the senator.” He glanced at his watch. “Twelve minutes. Eighteen minutes to go.”

  “That’s determination.”

  “That’s a stainless-steel ramrod instead of a spine.” Looking at his watch, he felt his pulse, counting the beats against the second hand of the watch.

  “Do you feel all right?”

  “I think so. I can go an hour, sometimes two hours without remembering, and then it comes home and my heart stops—it actually does, I mean I miss a beat or two or three—and my chest is filled with ice. Fear. My God, Jonesy, the fear is so fucken terrible, but I’m all right now. I’m all right. Daytime isn’t so bad. The nights are awful.”

  “You have to tell someone, Lenny. You have to. You can’t do this alone.”

  “I told you.”

  “That’s what I mean. What about your mother? You never talk about your mother.”

  “Ah, my mother, dear, sweet Dolly. I love Dolly. I don’t know about right now, right this minute. Right this minute I don’t know whether I’m capable of loving anyone, even you. But Dolly has been all that a mother should be. She dedicated herself to being a mother, just as she dedicated herself to National Cancer, or to the End Poverty thing or Save the Children or Amnesty International or public television. She has a conscience large enough for every good cause this country produces, but whether there’s any real ordinary compassion under that conscience I simply don’t know.”

  “You’re being pretty hard on her. She struck me as a lovely woman.”

  “She is a lovely lady. She’s beautiful, and when I do tell her, or when somebody else tells her, it will be like cutting her heart out, because she adores me. But what is she and where is she? She goes on living year after year with a man she despises. She does this Jewish pretend. Her full name is Dorothy Shippan Constanza Levi. Somewhere the Shippans came into the family, and Constanza was the name of her first woman ancestor here in America who married Gideon Levi in New York. Somewhere in the sixteen hundreds.”

  “Just about when my folks came,” Clarence said.

  “Right on. Oh, hell, why am I doing this? Dolly is Dolly. She’s a dear, and so she wants to be Jewish. But it’s like when I told her I was a vegetarian. She didn’t ask me why. She immediately fell into a game of menus. What now? Mother darling, I’m gay, I’m a real honest-to-God faggot, and I’ll be dead in six months or so.”

  “Cool it. Here’s Goldilocks.”

  Nellie came striding up, proudly bearing a plastic container of coffee, some plastic cups, and a box of croissants. “Ellen saw me,” she explained, “but then your mother called her, so I grabbed these and ran. You like them?”

  “We do indeed,” Clarence said, smiling at her. She stared at him as if she hadn’t seen him before, and then she whirled around and ran. “Which is power over women,” he said.

  Leonard, suddenly famished, handed a croissant to Clarence and then bit into one himself. He poured the coffee.

  “Have you tried cocaine?” Clarence asked, a stupid question that made him writhe inside.

  “I’ve tried it.” Stupid didn’t matter to Leonard.

  “It doesn’t help?”

  “Not much, no.”

  Wet and glowing, Elizabeth was climbing out of the pool, and looking at her, Clarence felt that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and it made him wonder, as he had often wondered before, how it would be to love a woman, wholly, totally, to lust for her day in and day out, to become alive at the touch of her hand. Yet in the next breath, he said to himself, She is not that beautiful, and this whole stinking white world is filled with beautiful women, and I’m losing every sense of proportion sitting here in this lousy twentieth-century white paradise. He also remembered a time when his father had been laid off by the company where he had worked for twenty years, and he, Clarence, aged ten, had asked his father what God was like and wouldn’t God help them? To which his father had replied, “I know what God looks like. He is a cold-assed blue-eyed blond white son of a bitch, and you hold out a hand and he’ll kick in your head, like any rotten white boss I ever known.” His mother overheard this and burst into tears. He had never heard his father talk like that before. They were church-going folk who never tolerated bad language in the home, and he and the other kids watched, scared and afraid even to whisper.

  “Twenty minutes,” Leonard said.

  “Towel!”

  He threw a towel to her and watched her rub herself dry. She was breathing deeply, totally alive with herself. “Give me time,” she said. “I’ve only been at it a week.” She shook out her hair. “What is that—croissants? Give me one. And coffee. That dear angel Nellie. Well, Jonesy,” she said to Clarence, “what do you think of this big shit pile of money and class?”

  “Given a chance, I could learn to live in a place like this.”

  “I bet you could. Money makes the world go round. But it costs. You don’t have the right grandpa, you can’t afford it. And the senator has to have a place in Washington. Respectable. A house in Georgetown, proper for proper entertainment.” She took a sip of coffee. “Of course, it’s small potatoes compared to Grandpa’s modest way of life. He has seven homes.”

  “Come on, you’re kidding.”

  “Didn’t Lenny tell you?”

  Leonard shook his head despairingly.

  “It’s the truth. Lenny is embarrassed as hell with wealth. I don’t mind it. I can face right up to it. Myself, I don’t think seven houses are a reflection of sense or sanity, but then I don’t think rich people are very sane—or poor people, come to think of it.”

  “Seven homes?”

  “Poor black boy can’t believe it. I don’t blame you. I’ll give you a rundown. Old family house in New York City on East Sixty-fourth Street. Five floors, seventeen rooms, built by his granddaddy in eighteen ninety-six. Lodge in the Adirondacks, apartment in Paris, house on Cape Cod, house in Montecito—his granddaddy used to be buddy-buddy with old William Randolph Hearst, and built the Montecito place to be reasonably near him. How many is that?”

  “Too many,” Leonard said. “Will you forget the goddamn houses.”

  “Lenny is like my mother. They both have what Thorstein Veblen used to call th
e conscience of the rich, which is as much of a lie as everything else, because the rich have no conscience. I like to bring up old Veblen because nobody in our generation knows who he is.”

  “You impress me,” Clarence said.

  “Come on, Jonesy, you’re too smart to be impressed by me.”

  “Will you come down,” Leonard said plaintively. “It’s wonderful to see you like this, and I hate to lay the worst kind of shit on you, but I have to.”

  She stopped her chatter, looked at him thoughtfully and waited.

  “You and me. This is not for Mom or for the senator—do you understand. Just you.”

  “All right,” she whispered.

  “Begin with the fact that I’m gay.”

  Elizabeth smiled wistfully. “That’s all, Lenny? I’ve always known it—a long time, anyway.”

  “I know. I wasn’t sure.”

  “So what? Jonesy here is gay, and the poor bastard’s black. Suppose Jonesy were Jewish—Jewish, black and gay, that would be something—”

  “Don’t kid about it,” Clarence said.

  She smelled it and sensed it. It was as if the gentle morning breeze had stopped, as if everything had suddenly turned into winter. She saw it in their faces, in their eyes.

  “Oh, my God, what is it?” she begged them.

  “Poor darling Liz,” Leonard said, his eyes brimming with tears. “I have Aids.”

  Elizabeth stared at him for an endless moment, and then Leonard saw her face collapse. Something tore away all the flesh and muscle that supported her beauty, leaving a crinkled, distorted mask of sorrow and horror. Leonard went to her and embraced her, clutching her to him while she buried her weeping face on his breast. He held her like that, feeling her sobs contort her body, and whispering to her, “It’s all right, Lizzie. I didn’t want you to cry. Please don’t cry. You know what happens to me when you cry.” He was crying. That’s what happened to him when his sister wept, but it had not happened since they were children; and now clutching his sister, he remembered how, eight years old, he had felt his first intimation of mortality, a little boy alone in bed with the cold image of death.