“Sexual intimacy,” said Sutter thoughtfully. He turned around suddenly. “Excuse me, but I still don’t quite see why you single me out. Why not ask Rita or Val, for example?”
“I’m asking you.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know why, but I know that if you tell me I will believe you. And I think you know that.”
“Well, I will not tell you,” said Sutter after a moment
“Why not?”
Sutter flushed angrily. “Because for one thing I think you’ve come to me because you’ve heard something about me and you already know what I will say — or you think you know. And I think I know who told you.”
“No sir, that’s not true,” said the engineer calmly.
“I’ll be goddamned if I’ll be a party to any such humbug.”
“This is not humbug.”
“I will not tell you.”
“Why not?”
“Who do you think I am, for Christ’s sake? I am no guru and I want no disciples. You’ve come to the wrong man. Or did you expect that?” Sutter looked at him keenly. “I suspect you are a virtuoso at this game.”
“I was, but this time it is not a game.”
Sutter turned away. “I can’t help you. Fornicate if you want to and enjoy yourself but don’t come looking to me for a merit badge certifying you as a Christian or a gentleman or whatever it is you cleave by.”
“That’s not why I came to you.”
“Why then?”
“As a matter of fact, to ask what it is you cleave by.”
“Dear Jesus, Barrett, have a drink.”
“Yes sir,” said the engineer thoughtfully, and he went into the kitchenette. Perhaps Kitty and Rita were right, he was thinking as he poured the horrendous bourbon. Perhaps Sutter is immature. He was still blushing from the word “fornicate.” In Sutter’s mouth it seemed somehow more shameful than the four-letter word.
“I’ve got to go,” said Jamie.
“O.K. When?”
After leaving Sutter, the engineer had read a chapter of Freeman’s R. E. Lee and was still moving his shoulders in the old body-English of correcting the horrific Confederate foul-ups, in this case the foul-up before Sharpsburg when Lee’s battle orders had been found by a Union sergeant, the paper wrapped around three cigars and lying in a ditch in Maryland. I’ll pick it up before he gets there, thought the engineer and stooped slightly.
“I mean leave town,” said Jamie.
“Very well. When?”
“Right now.”
“O.K. Where are we going?”
“I’ll tell you later. Let’s go.”
From the pantry he could look into the kitchen, which was filled with a thick ticking silence; it was the silence which comes late in the evening after the cook leaves.
But at that moment David came over for the usual game of hearts. Rita had taken David aside for an earnest talk. In the last few days David had decided he wanted to be a sportscaster. The engineer groaned aloud. Sportscaster for Christ’s sake; six feet six, black as pitch, speech like molasses in the mouth, and he wanted to be a sportscaster.
“No,” he told David when he heard it. “Not a sportscaster.”
“What I’m going to do!” cried David.
“Do like me,” said the engineer seriously. “Watch and wait. Keep your eyes open. Meanwhile study how to make enough money so you don’t have to worry about it. In your case, for example, I think I’d consider being a mortician.”
“I don’t want to be no mortician.”
He was David sure enough, of royal lineage and spoiled rotten. He wouldn’t listen to you. Be a sportscaster then.
Now he couldn’t help overhearing Rita, who was telling David earnestly about so-and-so she knew at CBS, a sweet wonderful guy who might be able to help him, at least suggest a good sportscasting school. Strangest of all, the sentient engineer could actually see how David saw himself as a sportscaster: as a rangy chap (he admired Frank Gifford) covering the Augusta Masters (he had taken to wearing a little yellow Augusta golf cap Son Junior gave him).
Jamie wore his old string robe which made him look like a patient in the Veterans Hospital. While Rita spoke to David, Son Junior told the engineer and Kitty about rumors of a Negro student coming on campus next week. It was part of the peculiar dispensation of the pantry that Son Junior could speak about this “nigger” without intending an offense to David. Rita looked sternly at Son — who was in fact dull enough to tell David about the “nigger.”
Sutter sat alone at the blue bar. The engineer had come in late and missed whatever confrontation had occurred between Sutter and Rita. Now at any rate they sat thirty feet apart, and Rita’s back was turned. Sutter appeared to take no notice and sat propped back in a kitchen chair, whiskey in hand and face livid in the buzzing blue light. The family did not so much avoid Sutter as sequester him in an enclave of neutral space such as might be assigned an afflicted member. One stepped around him, though one might still be amiable. “What you say, Sutter,” said Lamar Thigpen as he stepped up to the bar to fix a drink.
Kitty got Son off the subject by asking him what band would play for the Pan-Hellenic dance. Later Kitty whispered to the engineer, “Are you going to take me?”
“Take you to what?”
“The Pan-Hellenic.”
“When is it?”
“Saturday night after the Tennessee game.”
“What day is this?”
“Thursday, stupid.”
“Jamie wants to go somewhere.” He was thinking gloomily of standing around at a dance for seven hours drinking himself cross-eyed while Kitty danced the night away. “Where do you want to go, Jamie?”
But Jamie wouldn’t tell Kitty.
“Son asked me to go with him,” said Kitty.
“Isn’t he your nephew?”
“Not really. Myra is no kin. She is Poppy’s stepdaughter by another marriage.”
“You still can’t go with Son.”
“Why not!” she cried, widening her eyes. Since she had become a coed, Kitty had given up her actress’s lilt for a little trite sorority cry which was made with her eyes going away. She wore a cashmere sweater with a tiny gold sorority dagger pinned over her breast.
“I’m telling you, you can’t.” It actually made him faint to think of Kitty going anywhere with Son Junior, who was a pale glum fornicator, the type who hangs around the men’s room at a dance, patting himself and talking about poontang.
“Why not?”—eyes going away again but not before peeping down for a glimpse of her pin.
“He’s a bastard.”
“Shh! He likes you.”
He did. Son had discovered through intricate Hellenistic channels that the engineer had been a collegiate middleweight and had not lost a fight. “We’re strong in everything but boxing,” he had told the engineer, speaking of the Phi Nu’s campus reputation. The engineer agreed to go out for boxing and golf. And during some hazing horseplay Son had told one of the brothers to take it easy with this one—“he can put your ass right on the Deke front porch with a six-inch punch.” And so he had attached himself to the engineer with a great glum Greek-letter friendship.
Now once again Son came close, sidling up and speaking at length while he twirled his Thunderbird keys. It was the engineer’s bad ear, but as best he could tell, Son was inviting him to represent the pledge class at a leadership conference next summer at the fraternity headquarters in Columbus, Ohio. “They always have outstanding speakers,” Son told him. “This year the theme is Christian Hellenism.”
“I really appreciate it, Son,” said the engineer.
“Look, Kitty,” he said when Son drifted off. He took off his own pledge pin. “Why don’t you wear mine?” It was a great idea. He had only recently discovered that being pinned was a serious business at the university, the next thing to an engagement ring. If she wore his pin, Son wouldn’t take her to the dance.