Never mind that I’d never done it with a white girl, either. That was my supreme argument: she was black and I was white, and oh what a glorious adventure awaited us if only she’d allow me to lower her panties and spread her legs, a latter-day Stanley exploring Africa. It never occurred to me that I was reducing her to anonymity, denying her very Ophelianess, equating her with any other black girl in the world, expressing desire for her only because she was black and not merely herself, whoever that might have been, the person I had not taken the slightest amount of trouble to learn. I was baffled when she pulled down her skirt and tucked her breasts back into her brassiere, and buttoned her blouse, and asked me very softly to take her home, please. I asked her out a dozen times after that, and she always refused politely. I was learning. I have learned well over the years. I may not be color-blind (that would be too much to expect of any white man) but neither do I ever base my personal response to any man or woman on an accidental, at best, tinting of the flesh, preferring instead to seek out the person within the shell.
So why didn’t I like George N. Harper?
Maybe it was because he was so damn ugly. I have never won any beauty contests myself, but the size of Harper, the intimidating hulk of him, the gorilla-like slouch of him, the menace — yes, menace — inherent in his eyes and in his stance and in the huge hands that dangled at the ends of his powerful arms, the sheer primeval power of him, the frightening look of him caused me to back involuntarily away from him whenever we were in the same room together, as though I were convinced that he was capable of committing against me the very crime he’d been accused of committing against his wife. And yet if the color of his skin didn’t matter to me, then why should his physical appearance have constituted a handicap? Did due process apply only to the beautiful people in the world? Wasn’t Harper entitled to the same fair and honorable defense Robert Redford might have enjoyed? Or did I secretly believe he was guilty, and was I looking for excuses to avoid advocating his cause, depriving him beforehand of his life or liberty without benefit of the due process required by the laws of the land? No, he was innocent. I knew it with every fiber in my body. He was innocent, damn it. I should defend him, I would defend him.
But there was yet another reason why I should have told him no. Discounting my inexperience, discounting my aversion to the man, discounting even the selfishness of the last reason, it remained nonetheless a true and valid reason for begging off.
I had planned a vacation.
Selfish, yes, I admit it.
Or perhaps not quite so selfish when one considers that Dale had planned her own vacation for the same period of time, or that both our vacations coincided with Joanna’s Thanksgiving break, when all three of us planned to go to Mexico together.
We had been working on the trip for months, consulting the best travel agent in Calusa (no great shakes, but really the only game in town), and were scheduled to leave for Puerto Vallarta nine days from now, on Friday, November 27, to spend almost four days as guests of Samuel Thorn, a retired Calusa Circuit Court judge, in a villa he’d owned for the past year, after which we planned to go to Mexico City, flying back home again on Saturday, December 5. True enough, this would only be nine days. And assuming, as Benny had guessed, that we would not be coming to trial till after the new year, nine days of preparation would not be sorely missed.
Unless one considered the indisputable fact that the state’s attorney would be working during those days to compile the evidence he hoped would put Harper in the electric chair. I supposed Dale would take the news of a canceled vacation like the adult she was. But Joanna had just turned fourteen, and she had already planned a term paper on her “Mexican Adventure,” and had bought a new bikini to wear poolside at the Camino Real, where she planned to exhibit breasts that, after a prolonged delay, were at last maturing at an alarming rate — alarming at least to a father who would have beaten off with a stick any pimply faced teenager who dared openly ogle them. When she’d modeled the bikini for Dale and me, I commented mildly and with some embarrassment that it was, ah, a bit revealing, didn’t she think, for someone who was only fourteen? Joanna, with her customary candor, said, “You should see the one I didn’t buy, Dad.” End of argument. But how was I to tell her that I was thinking about canceling our Mexican trip in favor of defending a man I didn’t like, a man who’d been accused of murdering his wife in the most horrible manner, a man I “felt” was innocent (“Never feel,” Benny had told me just before I’d left his office. “Know!”) when all the signs indicated that he was guilty as hell?
By Friday of that week, I still hadn’t decided whether to represent George N. Harper (as he had asked me to do) or to advise him either to find another lawyer who would accept his case or request the public defender to appoint one for him. Joanna was supposed to be with her mother that weekend, but at the last minute my former wife called to ask if I would mind having her two weekends in a row because she, Susan, had been invited to attend the Tampa Bay Bucs football game that Saturday, and she and Arthur planned to spend the weekend up there, not returning till late Sunday night — so would I mind?
I never mind seeing my daughter two weekends in a row; I would like to see my daughter every day of my life. Neither do I mind Susan’s apparent need to tell me just which eligible bachelor she is currently seeing and presumably sleeping with. Earlier in the year, she had enjoyed a brief but doubtlessly torrid fling with a man named Georgie Poole, reputedly the richest man in all Calusa, a bachelor in his mid-forties who, it was rumored, had a penchant for television cuties in situation comedies, hence his frequent “business” trips to Los Angeles. The romance had cooled by March, at which time Susan promptly informed me that she had taken up with “a very dear man” named Arthur Butler, the one who would be taking her to Tampa this weekend.
In one of her brighter moments, Susan mentioned wittily that not only had the Butler done it, but he’d done it exceedingly well, and was, moreover, continuing to do it on a regular basis. I don’t know why Susan keeps reminding me that she’s a desirable woman; I knew she was desirable when I married her, and I even thought she was desirable when at last I divorced her. (I also don’t know why so many divorced women seem to drift into selling real estate, which was what my former wife now did.) I wish she would keep her various relationships to herself. So long as none of them is harmful to my daughter, so long as she doesn’t frighten the horses, so to speak, I really don’t care what she does with her own life. But I do object to hypocrisy.
Susan was poised to spend the weekend with Arthur Butler in Tampa, there to enjoy the football game and, I was certain, sundry indoor sports as well. On her block (as my partner Frank would put it), this was perfectly acceptable behavior. But the first words my daughter said to me when I picked her up after school that Friday were, “Mom won’t let me go to Mexico if Dale’s coming with us.”
I must tell you, first, that Joanna is blonde and blue-eyed and long legged and easily the most beautiful child in all Calusa, and perhaps the entire state of Florida, or maybe even the world. She is also a scientific genius. Or, at least, she gets As in biology and provides fierce B-plus competition for the boys in her geometry class, even though some unenlightened sexists would maintain that these subjects would best be left to the male of the species.