“She said her mother was after her money. She said her mother was doing this to get her money.”
3
The phone was ringing when I got home that night.
I let myself into the kitchen through the door that opened from the garage, and yanked the receiver from the wall behind the counter.
“Hello?” I said.
“Mr. Hope?”
A woman’s voice.
“Yes?”
“Or can I call you Matthew?”
“Who’s this, please?” I said.
“Terry,” she said.
For a moment the name didn’t ring a bell.
“We met earlier today,” she said. “In Lieutenant—”
“Oh yes. Yes.”
There was a long silence on the line.
“You didn’t call,” she said.
“Well, I—”
“So I’m calling you instead,” she said.
Another silence.
“Have you had dinner yet?” she asked.
“No, not yet.”
“Good. I fried some chicken, I’ll bring it right over. You’re not married or anything, are you? I forgot to ask you this morning.”
“No, I’m not married.”
“How about the anything?”
“Or anything,” I said.
“Does it bother you, my calling?” Terry said.
“Well, no, but—”
“That’s okay, I’m liberated,” she said. “This address in the phone book — it’s still good, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but—”
“See you in about a half hour,” she said. “I’ll bring all the trimmings, all you have to do is chill a bottle of white wine.”
“Terry—”
“See you,” she said, and hung up.
I looked at the phone receiver. I put it back on the cradle. I looked at the clock. It was twenty minutes past six. What I really wanted to look at was myself; maybe I had turned into a movie star overnight. There was no mirror in the kitchen. I walked through the living room and into the bedroom and then into the bathroom. I looked in the mirror. It was the same old me. I raised one eyebrow, the way I had practiced it interminably when I was sixteen years old. The left eyebrow. When I was sixteen, movie stars always raised the left eyebrow. And curled the lip a little. Even with the curled lip and the raised left eyebrow, it was still the same old me. I shrugged and went out into the small alcove I had furnished and equipped as an at-home office area. I turned on the answering machine.
There had been three calls while I was gone.
The third one was from my daughter. In tears.
“Daddy, it’s Joanna,” she sobbed. “Please call me back, please!”
I should explain that I’m divorced and that my former wife has custody of our only child, who is now fourteen years old. That was why Joanna was calling me at the house I was renting instead of being in the house itself, where I could take her in my arms and find out why the hell she was crying. I dialed Susan’s number at once. Susan is my former wife. Susan’s number used to be our number, but not only did she get custody of our daughter, she also got the house and the Mercedes-Benz and $24,000 a year in alimony. Joanna answered the phone.
“What is it?” I said.
“Oh, Daddy, thank God!” she said.
“What’s the matter, Joanna?”
“Mommy wants to send me away,” she said.
“Away? What do you mean, away?”
“To school. In the fall. She wants to send me away to school.”
“What?” I said. “Where? Why?”
“Simms Academy,” she said.
“Where’s that?”
“In Massachusetts.”
“What? Why?”
“She says it’ll be good for me. She says St. Mark’s is getting run-down. She says... you won’t like this, Daddy.”
“Tell me.”
“She says too many black kids are infiltrating the school. That was the word she used. Infil—”
“Put her on the phone.”
“She isn’t here,” Joanna said. “That’s why I called, so I could talk to you in—”
“Where is she?”
“Out to dinner. With Oscar the Bald.”
Oscar the Bald was Oscar Untermeyer, Susan’s most recent flame.
“When will she be back?”
“Late, she said.”
“Tell her to call me the minute she gets in. Whatever time it is, tell her to call me.”
“Dad?”
“Yes, honey?”
“Do I really have to go to school in Massachusetts?”
“Over my dead body,” I said.
“I’ll tell her to call you,” Joanna said. “I love you, Dad.”
“Love you, too, honey.”
“I love you lots,” she said, and hung up.
I put the receiver back on the cradle. The desk clock read six-thirty. I did not feel like entertaining either Terry Belmont or her fried chicken, with or without all the trimmings. I felt like getting into my car and driving to every restaurant in the city of Calusa until I found my goddamn ex-wife and—
I told myself to calm down.
This was just another of Susan’s passing whims. Like the time she’d threatened to put Joanna in a nunnery if she didn’t stop hanging around with “the class slut.” She knew damn well she couldn’t send Joanna away to school. Or could she? She had custody. All I did was pay the bills. I didn’t mind paying the bills. The tuition at St. Mark’s was astronomical, and it couldn’t be any worse at Simms, wherever the hell in Massachusetts that was, but if Joanna was getting a good education, who the hell cared?
Unless a kid was lucky enough to get into Bedloe, Calusa’s exclusive public high school “for the gifted,” or rich enough to afford one of the area’s two private preparatory schools — St. Mark’s in Calusa itself, or the Redding Academy in nearby Manakawa — the secondary-school educational choices were limited to three schools, and the selection was further limited by that part of the city in which the student happened to live. It would be nice to report that white parents in Calusa dance joyously in the streets when faced with the possibility of their children attending Arthur Cozlitt High, which has an unusually high percentage of black students. This, alas, is not the case. I have had at least a dozen irate parents trotting into my office in the past several years, asking if there was not some sort of legal action they might take to effect a transfer from Cozlitt to either Jefferson or Tate, each with a more normally balanced ratio of black to white students.
Calusa is a city of a hundred and fifty thousand people, a third of them black, a tiny smattering of them Cubans who have drifted over to the West Coast from Miami. There used to be a restaurant called Cuban Mike’s on Main Street, and it made the best sandwiches in town, but it closed last August when someone firebombed the place. The whites blamed the blacks; the blacks blamed the rednecks; and the handful of Cubans in town kept their mouths shut lest fiery crosses appear on their lawns one dark night. One of these days Calusa is going to have a racial conflagration that will blow the town sky-high; it is long overdue. In the meantime everyone here pretends that this is still the year 1844; I think my partner Frank and I may be the only people in all of Calusa who notice that at any performance given at the Helen Gottlieb, only half a dozen people in the audience will be black — in an auditorium that seats two thousand.
The phone rang again.
“Hello?” I said.
“Daddy?”
Joanna again.
“What Mom said, actually — about the infiltration — what she said was ‘niggers.’ Two black kids’ve been admitted to the school.”
“Terrific,” I said. My former wife from Chicago, Illinois, was turning into a Florida redneck. “You tell her to call me the minute she gets in that house.”