“Yes, sir,” Henry said thinly.
His father narrowed his eyes. “Say it.”
“Say what?”
“Say right now whatever it is you want to say. This is the one and only time we’re going to have this conversation.”
“Well … I…,” Henry skated.
“Don’t flirt with your words.”
“What if,” Henry rushed, “what if your father had asked you to marry a different woman?”
John Henry reared his head back slightly, but he didn’t hesitate. He saw clear through his boy. “I would have married her,” he said, “just as he wanted me to.”
“But—”
“I would have married her,” he repeated firmly. “But I was smart enough to choose a woman of whom I knew he would approve. She came from good stock, she was beautiful and—”
“Never talked too much,” said Henry.
John Henry paused, his shrewd eyes gathering up the meaning in Henry’s face, but then he smiled slowly as if they were sharing the joke. His shoulders eased in his suit jacket. He brought his hands together now, so his fingertips touched. “I told your mother I’d be taking you to dinner this afternoon to a restaurant where I take my clients. They don’t normally admit children, but I spoke with them earlier and made an arrangement. Would that be to your liking?”
Henry nodded straight-faced and without speaking, his head bobbing in a mime of obligation. But then he pressed himself back into his seat and tasted the word “children” in his mouth as if it were something too vile to swallow. John Henry restarted the sedan, and Henry didn’t turn his head to the left or the right but watched the farm pass from the corner of his eye, so it washed by like a grassy stream through which horses ran.
* * *
In the house, Lavinia waited, unable to step away from the window until she saw the sedan pull up the long drive in the interminable stretch between sundown and darkness. Her nails were bitten to the quick. She assumed her old, reliable smile and stretched out her arms when her son walked through the kitchen door. But when she stepped to him, he pushed her arm away from him with startling force and charged up the back staircase, so she felt the vibrations on the steps like hammer blows. Whatever it was that he said in that moment with his back to her, she didn’t hear.
* * *
In the wintertime, John Henry took his bourbon in the front parlor. He returned home from Paris by five thirty and dinner emerged from Maryleen’s kitchen no later than six o’clock. Then, satisfied and regardless of desperate cold or wild easterly wind, he would stand for some time on the el porch, watch the snowy farm weather to gray as the stars spangled out of the black, feeling the night freezing and contracting around him. By the time Venus was setting in the south, he had returned to the parlor, where he could enjoy his solitude for another hour or so before bedtime. He unlaced and removed his black wing tips, placing them side by side on the Aubusson, and selected a seventy-eight for the player. Then he smoked a single Dominican cigar, which he removed from a carved bone box on the mantel, and sat on the davenport to read the Lexington Leader. He did this every winter evening without fail.
Henry knew the rule: no one disturbed his father. But this evening he fretted pensively along the front hall, end to end, his weight distressing the old heartwood planks until the record screeched suddenly and his father called out, “Stop that incessant pacing right now!”
Henry peered swiftly around the doorway to the parlor. His father stood there in his black socks in front of the davenport, the newspaper wrenched up in one hand.
“I knew it wasn’t your mother. She never makes a sound,” he said. To Henry’s surprise, there was a hint of smile in his father’s eyes.
“May I speak with you, Father?” Careful, discreet, he glanced both ways down the hall.
The smile vanished. “Henry, we will not be discussing horses again.”
“No, sir, I know. It’s not about that.”
“Come in, then. I was meaning to speak with you anyway. I wanted to tell you that I found a tutor for you. He may not look like much, but his credentials are impeccable.”
Henry stepped into the room and closed the door as his father regarded him. In his stocking feet, the man was six feet but had grown somewhat thicker through the waist and redder, like the sun was turning him, his freckles now mixed with age spots. The cupreous, stalwart bulk of him was lessened somehow, and his son arrived at the fact of it without sentimentality, with eagerness even.
John Henry said, “I’ll give you five minutes, and then I would prefer to return to my reading.” He seated himself again on the davenport with the paper, his eyes peering directly over it at his son. Waiting.
“Father,” began Henry, and though his body urged him to sit in the wing chair opposite his father, he forced himself to sit cross-legged at his feet like a servant, beside his emptied and stinking shoes. Quietly, he said, “Father, why is everyone so upset?”
“Upset?” His father’s large head reared back, consternation on his brow.
“I mean, in the news. There’s so much happening. It seems like there’s more unrest every day.”
“Ah. Yes, that’s right,” John Henry said, nodding. “It’s a distressing time in many ways, an embarrassing time. It will only get worse, I imagine. No one — absolutely no one — remembers their place anymore, and we will all pay the price for this kind of national amnesia.”
Careful, steady, his face full of concern. “Is it true that they plan to desegregate the schools? What will happen after that?”
“After that?” his father said, and laughed. “After that, there will be social chaos and a breakdown in the educational system, and the Negro will be the first in line asking us to come back and fix it all. He never hesitates to implore others to come in and clean up the mess that results from his demands. His children, of course, will end up suffering the most. That’s what always happens. He is simply incapable of predicting the consequences of his actions. There is potential in some of them, but as your grandfather used to say, the Negro is our Socratic shadow. I think the allusion is apt.”
John Henry lowered his paper and folded it. “You see, in the end, Henry, de jure segregation may be stripped in some segments of the society — in fact, it appears almost inevitable now — but de facto divisions will always remain. Segregation is inherent, natural, and inevitable, no matter what the dreamers would like to think, no matter what the town of Berea would have us believe. Bring twenty white men and twenty colored into a new town and within a week, the white men will be successful landowners and the colored will be tenants. Good tenants, perhaps, but tenants nonetheless. Nothing wrong with that. The world always needs good tenants.”
“I heard they’ll send in the military to force the schools open if they have to.”
John Henry shook his head. “If it actually comes to that, there will be decent, God-fearing citizens to block the way. Men like Byrd. There’s certainly nothing to be afraid of.”
Henry sat up straight, indignant. “Oh, I’m not afraid. Did you hear what Senator Darby—”
“Darby!” snorted John Henry. “Darby’s a fool. He makes the Southerner appear the blubbering idiot, which is precisely what Northerners want in order to vilify the South — a vision of the South as mindless cracker. It makes them feel virtuous, when in fact they know absolutely nothing of the Southern situation. Darby!” He snorted again.