Chapter 25
For all Bessie’s foreboding of a blizzard, the noise of gossiping birds awakened Larry the next morning. He threw up the loose frame window and let in the spring air. The worn stone steps of a house across the street sagged gracefully in the early light, and a lilac bush was putting out rows of buds prematurely. Except for the birds it was quiet in the narrow, shaded street, and the uneven brick of the old houses, painted dull red or white, recalled the lost leisure of another age.
Only a few minutes away the Pentagon’s network of ramps confounded visitors, and short-tempered lines a block long waited for rooms at the Statler, but in this ancient settlement where Gilbert Stuart once had an art studio, where Francis Scott Key lived and John Howard Payne was buried, Larry felt a village peace.
He had breakfast downstairs with Arthur and Janice. After they had loafed through the New York Times and two cups of coffee apiece, Janice asked about their plans for the day. “I have to finish a piece that’s overdue,” she explained. “Why don’t you make some nice arrangements, and if you feel like coming back around four, I’d love to fix you an early tea.” She looked crisply iced in a chartreuse housecoat.
Bemrose fumbled in the pocket of his old bathrobe and produced a card. “How far is Thirty-first and L?” he asked. “Walk over there with me, will you, Larry? If it’s not too far?”
Janice studied the address. “I think that neighborhood is colored.”
“It’s where the Old Man lived fifty years ago, when he was down here as law secretary to——”
“A Supreme Court judge, wasn’t it?” Janice assisted. “I can’t place the house. It may not be colored. The neighborhood is mixed now, and there’s really no way of knowing.”
“It’s only four or five blocks from here. Do you mind taking me over, Larry?”
“Sure, let’s go. It’s a swell day to get out.”
“The car keys are in the hall table drawer. I’ll get them—” Janice started for the door. “Will you mail my article for me in New York tonight, Larry? It’ll save a day in getting there, and I’ll appreciate it.”
But Arthur motioned her to come back. “Don’t bother with the car keys. I’d like to go to this place on foot. It’s a kind of pilgrimage,” he explained. “There are some things I’ve been meaning to straighten out with the Judge.”
The sidewalks sagged like the doorsteps, and Bemrose stopped to rest against one of the Lombardy poplars which lined the street. He was wound up and wanted to talk about the Judge. “The Old Man put his faith in the single brilliant mind working independently,” Bemrose recalled. “He shied away from mass solutions.”
“It might help explain why he opposed labor unions,” Larry said. “Do you remember the letter he wrote to his friend Didier, where he sneered at the so-called common man? It always made me gag, that letter. The Old Man was a Back Bay snob, but modern Back Bay, not the old Boston. The roughnecks who spilled tea in the harbor were okay. They had guts, all right. By the time their blood was passed down to the Haynes family some of the democracy was filtered out.”
“I used to worry about that letter, too,” Arthur admitted. “He probably didn’t mean it, but he was obsessed with the need for being different from the herd. He believed in a man exaggerating his differences. He always found for the minority.”
“A minority of one,” Larry added. “Haynes in agreement with Haynes.”
“He wanted me to develop along his own individualistic lines, and that was a fallacy.” Arthur paused. “I might be fashioned in his image and still only turn out to be a faint carbon copy, without the Old Man’s vitality. I could pick up the mannerisms, follow the rules, and still only be a watered down edition of him, the way those Back Bay customers can’t begin to touch Sam Adams. Let’s say I did turn out to be a reasonably good imitation of Haynes—without the Old Man’s wisdom, of course. The point is, I wouldn’t be Bemrose.”
Arthur pointed to a hedge across the street. “Lovely box.”
They waited at the intersection before he attempted to swing across the broken curbstone. “I didn’t know it at the time, but I was never happy functioning alone. For all my eccentricities, I’m not a lone wolf. When the War came along and I did that job on Lend-Lease, the Old Man’s notions about my being a solitary worker seemed to go down the hatch. I made what, for me, was a big discovery. I was more of a group man. I had a kind of aptitude for working with people. Before, when I was going it alone, well— I really wasn’t doing what I wanted to do. Not nearly as much as I thought, anyway.”
Arthur paused again to rest. “What goes on in private practice? We worry whether A or B will collect the money, or hang on to his franchise. But how many people except A or B and their families give a damn? I can’t seem to get as worked up about A and B’s problems any more. I was fairly happy working on Lend-Lease, pretty contented in the Army, and I’m having a good time down here working for Tom. I think it’s because the work in Washington and the work in the Army involved doing something for more than one or two guys and their bank accounts. Maybe I’m just kidding myself, of course, but a war seems to indicate we ought to do more. The individual seems to be most useful when he is part of something bigger. Alone, very often, unless he’s another Robinson Crusoe, he can’t even survive. And unbombed islands are fairly scarce today.”
Arthur looked up at the clouds that lay curled and frozen in the gray-blue sky. “I suppose I should have my sights up there,” he said. “But at heart—I might as well face it, Larry—I’m probably a goddam piston.”
After a few minutes he said, “Do you remember the number of that house?”
Larry walked on ahead to investigate. He saw it was the faded yellow house, third from the corner.
“The Old Man wouldn’t have wanted you to go on pulling and pushing yourself out of shape,” Larry assured him when he returned, noting the sweat on Arthur’s chin and forehead. “You’re not trying to be like him, and that’s what he believed in. You’re being yourself. I think that’s all the Old Man ever wanted.”
Arthur laughed. “Not the Old Man. I’m afraid he would call it a decadent philosophy—losing identity in the crowd, becoming like other men, agreeing with the opinions of others, working with them instead of apart from them——”
“He’d understand you have to work it out your own way,” Larry insisted. “Do you want to go inside the house? Supposing the people who live here——”
It was the Negro section, as Janice had guessed. The old boards of the steps were whittled and grayed, and a broken rocker from last summer tilted face down against the porch rail. In the yard alongside the house, a boy and girl in red sweaters stared at them. Larry rang the rusty bell, and a woman of around twenty-five opened the door.
Arthur took off his hat. “I wonder if it would be possible to see the room at the head of the stairs to the left.”
“That’s our room and it’s not for rent.” She talked briskly, like a Northerner. “My husband and I have been living here two years and expect to stay.”
“I don’t want to rent it.” Bemrose’s tone was persuasively low, the voice he used for juries. “If it won’t inconvenience you, I’d like to look at the room.”
“The bed hasn’t been made. I just got back from church a few moments ago. I was going to fix some coffee for breakfast,” she added grudgingly.
“Perhaps if it wouldn’t disturb your family——”
“There’s only my husband and myself. He’s working in the garden.”
“A friend of mine used to live in your room,” Bemrose explained. “He’s dead now, but I remember him talking about the house and the neighborhood. In his time there were ships in the Potomac and the wharves were stacked with sugar and molasses——”
“That’s interesting about the River. My grandmother used to live down there at the water. I guess it’ll be all right for you to come up,” she relented. “The stairs are steep.” She looked dubiously at his crutches. “You wait down here anyway while I tidy the room.”
The stiffly furnished sitting room had a handwinding gramophone and a wicker fern stand painted green. Larry sat in a wooden rocker with stamped carving on a seat pad of flowered cotton. Arthur, exhausted from the walk, relaxed in a tan velour armchair and rested his head against a freshly starched antimacassar. A sepia print of a child posing as Cupid, like one Larry remembered from his boyhood, was framed in a heart-shaped mat. With its pink cotton draperies and lace curtains, Larry figured that the room could have looked pretty much like this in the Judge’s day.
The woman directed them upstairs while she stayed down to fix breakfast. The soles of Bemrose’s shoes stuck to the corrugated matting of the steep oak steps, and he steadied himself on the polished stair rail. Upstairs in the small, sunny room there was only one chair; so Arthur sat on the bed. He reached into his coat pocket for the Judge’s letters and studied a faded sketch in one of them. “That’s where the commode must have stood.” He pointed to the North wall. “His desk was here at the window, and——”
“I wonder where he put the bed. Maybe just where they have it.” Larry studied the crude drawing from over Arthur’s shoulder.
“No electricity, of course. He must have worked by kerosene lamp.”
“What do you figure this was? A book shelf?” Larry indicated a line on one of the sketches.
“I imagine so. It must have been here, above the bed.” Arthur studied the plaster. “They knocked it down and painted over the wall. Look.”
“Just a minute.” Larry ran his fingers over lumps in the plaster. “Here, do you suppose?”
Arthur shrugged. “How could he stand it without heat in winter?”
“He probably used wood or kerosene.”
“It must have been a cold cubbyhole,” said Bemrose, shuddering.
“It’s warm today, and there’s no heat on.” Larry felt the radiator. “This is still February.”
“It was cold and small and mean, but it didn’t prevent him from writing that noble prose of his. They were better men in those days. I don’t know how they did it.”
The woman appeared with two cups of coffee on a tray. “I thought you might like some.”
“Why, that’s very kind of you.” Arthur reached for the coffee. “I hope you don’t mind my sitting on your bed after you went to the trouble of making it.”
A powerfully built Negro in a khaki windbreaker put his head through the door. The woman introduced him as her husband. After chatting for a few minutes Bemrose showed them the Judge’s sketches.
She had heard of Judge Haynes and wanted to know more about him. Arthur described what he looked like. The Judge knew every inch of Georgetown by seeing it on foot, Arthur explained. He could tell you where all the well-known lawyers had lived—Gautt, Morsell, Durlop, the Coxes, Ould, and Caperton. He loved books, he had written a series of famous letters, and had been a distinguished lawyer before he sat on the bench.
“I’ve often wondered—was he really a liberal?” the man wanted to know.
“His decisions made him look like a liberal,” Arthur qualified. “He usually decided in favor of the fellow who was down, but in his heart I don’t think he honestly believed that all men are free or equal. I think he felt that they might have been born that way, but education gave some a tremendous jump on others.”
“Wasn’t he right!” The man grinned. “We sure go along with him there, don’t we, Martha?”
“We worked our way through Howard,” she explained.
“Specializing in anything?” Arthur asked.
“I took a major in statistics. I work at the Department of Commerce,” the man volunteered. “Martha was a home economics major.”
“I have a job as assistant housekeeper at a medium-sized hotel.”
The Negro sat down heavily on the bed next to Bemrose. “Going to college helps, but it’s a long way from being equal,” he said. “During the War they’ll make exceptions and take anyone for the job, but wait until peace breaks out— We’ll be the first to go. That’s the way it was during the Depression, and conditions haven’t changed. Not fundamentally they haven’t.”
“We can’t let ourselves think that way,” Larry protested. “We’re trying to put an end to that kind of discrimination. Isn’t that one of the reasons we’re fighting? I don’t say we’re going to succeed. And of course I’m biased. I have a personal stake in the outcome, like you have. I make myself believe it’s going to get better.”
The man looked dubious. “I wish I could go along with you.”
“Have you a picture of Judge Haynes?” Martha asked.
Bemrose looked through his wallet. “I must have left it in another billfold. I’ll write home for one. Would you like to have copies of some of these letters?”
The man nodded. “We would appreciate it if you could spare them.”
“I’ll send them to you,” Arthur promised. He thanked the couple for the visit and the coffee and got up to go. The man motioned Larry aside and helped Bemrose with his powerful hands, almost lifting him down the stairs on his broad palms.
“I gather you folks must have walked over. Would you like a taxi?” he offered.
But Bemrose preferred to make it back to Janice’s on foot.
The couple waved goodbye to them from the front porch, and when Larry turned around for a last look at the faded, yellow house, he saw the man walk through the gate, probably back to his gardening.
After a silent few blocks Arthur said, “There was one of those letters I wanted them to see, but they’d better read it themselves. When he was twenty-three or twenty-four years old, the Judge wrote his family from Washington. I’ll try to quote, ‘You don’t see much outward sign of equality between colored and whites. If they are equal, as Jefferson said, it must be a state of mind, and true equality a way of feeling inside.’”
“More of them might have the feeling, if people treated them as you do.”
“Those two helped me get things straight a little,” Arthur said. “I’m glad we found them living there.”
“Did you notice? You didn’t try to give them any advice, not even when they began worrying about after the War,” Larry remarked.
“And I’m not looking for advice any more. Not even from him,” Arthur said of the Old Man.
Larry nodded. “Seems to me you’ve straightened things out with him pretty well. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve just about freed yourself.”
Larry looked up at the clouds, which appeared whiter than usual because the sky was such a deep blue, and noted that they moved impersonally through the heavens.