Without Prejudice (14 page)

‘What do you want?’ repeated Bobby. ‘If Mr Edevek catches you back here you’ll be in big trouble, man.’

‘“
When Mr Edgevick catches you . . .
”’ The runt was imitating him, in a higher-pitched white man’s voice, prissily enunciating each word. ‘Fuck Mr Edgevick.’ His voice lowered an octave as he spat out the words.

Mule suddenly grabbed Bobby by the shirt. ‘You not so brave now, are you, white boy? You ain’t got no bat today.’ He held up his other hand, its fat fist clenched. ‘Look what you done to me.’

Bobby stared at the fist, which looked like one of the ham hocks sold at the A&P. The fingers were mottled and one was bent so the knuckle stuck out. That must have been where he hit the bat, thought Bobby.

The runt came closer now, and Bobby watched his eyes carefully. ‘You thought you scared us away, boy,’ said the runt. Before Bobby could answer he stepped forward and punched him in the stomach.

Whoof.
The air was knocked out of him, and he felt suddenly sick to his stomach; he would have fallen to his knees but Mule was grabbing him tightly by his collar. Tears came to his eyes; he wanted to yell but he was too busy trying to catch his breath. He thought for a moment the runt was going to hit him again, but the runt stepped back. ‘Come on, Mule,’ he said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

Bobby’s relief was short-lived. Suddenly Mule shook him hard by the collar of his shirt, and before he could wriggle out of his grasp, hit him with a clenched fist on the chin. Bobby felt a lower tooth crack as it hit his upper teeth. He fell back, and his head hit the iron railing of the fire escape so hard that its steps shuddered. He collapsed, falling onto a concrete plinth by the fire escape, cutting his leg on its sharp edge. He felt sick, as if trapped on a roller-coaster that wouldn’t stop. The plinth felt cool against his hand and he moved his head onto its surface as the dizziness increased and the world outside started to go quiet and dark.

Just before he lost consciousness he heard a man’s voice, and knew dimly it was Eddie Edevek, announcing – was someone else there? – ‘Those goddamn niggers.’

He spent two nights in Billings with a suspected fractured skull he didn’t have, and a hairline fracture in his jaw which he did.

Released, his injuries healed well enough, but his life had changed. He was scared now, in a way previously inconceivable. He didn’t want to play in the back yard any more, which Vanetta noticed, but didn’t press him on. And for the very first time, he was conscious of the colour of people on the streets; when a gang of boys was white he was unworried; when they were black he tensed and moved away. He went straight to school and came straight home. He even stopped playing with Eric, for he didn’t like walking in the neighbourhood unless he was with Mike, who seemed both oblivious and fearless, or with his father.

Perhaps it was fear, or the departure of Duval, but his relationship with Vanetta was changing, too. He loved her as much as ever, but there was a distance he had never felt before. Some of that may have happened anyway – he was a white middle-class boy, after all, who went to a smart-ass superior private school. There he learned all sorts of abstract things which a woman who had grown up on what was effectively a plantation wouldn’t know, a woman who – though naturally very bright indeed – had left school at the age of twelve and could write down phone messages only with difficulty. But it was more complicated than that; the true gulf had nothing to do with formal education. Bobby had secrets – he hadn’t been brave; the Secret Garden didn’t exist; and after the runt and Mule, he feared the male members of her race – he could not confide in her.

There was no one else to turn to. Mike these days was nice to him, but abstracted – the age gap between them seemed especially great. Even when they wrestled now, Mike didn’t lose his temper, though admittedly Bobby no longer tried to bite. Lily was out of the question; she hadn’t ever understood his friendship with Duval, so she certainly wouldn’t understand his new feelings of fear.

His father had been distant for some time, moreover, a detachment magnified when he announced, three days after Lily and Mike had their acceptance letters from college (Mike was going to the University of Minnesota, Lily to Stanford), that he was getting married again. The twins beamed and made congratulatory noises, to Bobby’s surprise – he knew Mike loathed the woman. Then he recognised this as a sign of their own detachment: the marriage would hardly affect them, now that they were leaving home. For the first time Bobby could see that his mother’s death six years before had taken the usual sibling bonds – sometimes tense, sometimes tender – and placed them into cold storage. It was not that they didn’t know each other – they did – but that the death had forced them to make individual accommodations, and independent lives.

Not only was his father getting married, but he announced that after the wedding he and Bobby would move to the Cloisters – a swanky apartment building two blocks away. They moved three months later, after a marriage ceremony in the university’s Bond Chapel and a stilted reception at the faculty club. After the move, Bobby found that his memories of the old Blackstone apartment faded rapidly, perhaps because the causes of his happier recollections – his mother, his time with Duval – were no longer part of his life. Vanetta remained, but she was preoccupied by Alvin’s cancer, and she did not get on with Merrill, who kept pressing, if not quite ordering, Vanetta to wear a maid’s uniform. Merrill also liked to set a week’s worth of menus in advance, full of French foods Vanetta didn’t like to cook. They didn’t have ribs any more, or fried chicken – instead it was ‘Coke o’ ven’, as Vanetta called it when she inspected the week’s roster of expected meals, wrinkling her nose.

The new, stiff life with Merrill in the fancier apartment wasn’t much fun, and his father’s simple joy in his new marriage was almost too much to bear. It reached absurdist heights when Bobby overheard Merrill declare over coffee at one of her dinner parties, ‘They’re like my own children to me. And I believe they think of me as mother.’

Who are you kidding? Bobby thought with anger that turned to incomprehension when his father added, ‘That’s right.’

Bobby found himself calling his brother Mike as often as he could at his college dorm, until a mammoth phone bill was waved under his nose by his irate father. After that he found he stayed in his room, reading. At least there he could count on being left alone, save for the odd enquiry from his father (‘You okay, son?’) which he found easy enough to deflect. He wasn’t happy at school as he became a teenager, since he was now essentially anti-social, and frightened by drugs – half his schoolmates talked about marijuana in hushed thrilled tones, and the other half seemed to be smoking it. He didn’t know why it scared him, but it did, and he felt himself isolated from his peers and unable to meet anyone else – there were no introductions forthcoming from Merrill.

If he’d thought about it, he might have realised he missed having as close a friend as Duval, but he was becoming so immersed in his own flat unhappiness to remember a livelier, happier time. Merrill was not strict with him, but then she did not have to be – he had no energy for misbehaviour, just the lassitude of the unrecognised depressed.

How long this would have gone on he never knew because one evening Merrill started talking at supper about her family out east, and some school that all the male members of her Yankee clan attended, and what a nice place it was, just outside of Boston, which was of course, Merrill acknowledged graciously, a smaller city than Chicago but (and you could tell she thought this) perhaps more cultured. As she went on about this school he started daydreaming – or dinner-dreaming, since he often did it while he sat at supper, sole child with his father and his second bride.

But this evening his father suddenly said, ‘What do you think?’

And he replied instinctively, ‘Think about what?’

His father sighed and said with an overt display of patience Bobby knew he didn’t feel, ‘How do you feel about what Merrill said? Would you like to go to boarding school in Boston?’

And he didn’t even think about the momentousness of this, or of how he might miss his home (only where was home now, the Cloisters?), or of how much he might miss Vanetta and whether he would really like being 850 miles away in a place where he knew not one living soul. Because all he knew was that life had become endless again, just as it had in those awful months when his mother went away and he lived like a prisoner under Gladys’s eye. Suddenly now some impetus for change or escape took hold, and he said, ‘Okay.’ And the deed was done. On the day he left, he noticed Vanetta had at last given in to Merrill and was wearing a uniform.

VII

1

‘H
OW DO YOU
happen to know Charlie Gehringer?’ said the man named Rycroft, unbuttoning his suit jacket as he sat down in a padded chair.

‘Who’s Charlie Gehringer?’ Robert replied, looking out the wall-to-ceiling windows.

The view from the apartment’s living room took in the lake, a vast black pond this late at night, and an angled perspective of the Golden Mile of Michigan Avenue, where the Hancock Tower’s antenna glowed like a towering luminescent bulb. They were on the thirty-fourth floor of this modern apartment building on Lake Shore Drive, but Robert’s usual anxiety on this score had been dulled by two large whiskeys downed in the first half-hour after his and Anna’s arrival.

Drinks before dinner had separated the boys from the girls. Maggie Trumbull’s husband David had been a friendly and talkative host, but he was the kind of Midwestern fraternity guy who Robert had always avoided. He and Rycroft had talked shop before dinner while Robert stood, listening politely and wondering when they would eat. To include him they had switched the conversation to sports, which would have been fine – he had found his boyhood enthusiasm for baseball had come back, he even sometimes watched games on television now. But Rycroft had only talked football: he had been an offensive lineman at Grinnell, and looked as if he had only recently run to fat.

It was now after dinner, and the Trumbulls had laid on hospitality with more bounty than finesse. They’d sat down at a polished mahogany table to a four-course meal, with a different wine for every course. Robert had risen from the table feeling bloated and tipsy enough to turn down his host’s offer of a liqueur.

His slight fear that Anna’s boss, Philip Masters, would be present had not materialised. Looking across the room, he saw Anna. God, she looks good, he thought. Anna wore a simple sleeveless black dress that showed off her dunes-acquired tan, and scarlet slingback heels. Her hair was tied back in a tight bun, which made her look even younger; her face seemed strikingly unaged. He found himself desiring her with the forlorn pang of a schoolboy out of his league; she seemed as unavailable as she was desirable. Why? he thought. I’m married to her.

She was gossiping with Maggie Trumbull, and he was glad to see her enjoying herself in the company of all these lawyers, even if most of them were of the fat cat rather than committed sort. He missed having equals he could talk to at work; even the friendliest conversation he had was tinged by his status as boss.

‘Sorry,’ Rycroft said without embarrassment. ‘Your wife said you were from Chicago so I figured you knew Charlie before she did.’

‘Never had the pleasure,’ said Robert, trying to sound friendly.

‘Interesting guy. He’s a public defender, has been for over thirty years. Talk about lasting the course.’

‘Is there a lot of turnover in that job?’

‘You betcha.’ Rycroft gave a lazy unconscious scratch across the wide front of his belly, his shirt quivering beneath his fingertips. ‘I lasted four years, and that was longer than most.’

‘It’s not very well paid, I suppose.’

‘Hopeless.’ He took a large sip of his cognac. ‘And depressing. The people you’re defending are not what you’d call an appealing bunch.’

Robert said dryly, ‘Your clients are mainly black and poor then?’

Rycroft gave an unruffled grin. ‘Yeah, but that wasn’t the problem. I
wanted
my clients to be black and poor – it made me feel I was doing the right thing. Your average public defender starts out as an idealist; I did, believe it or not. What I started to realise after all of three weeks in the job, though, is that not only were my clients black and poor, they were all guilty too. Scumbags, without exception. And that’s what eventually got to me; hell, that’s what gets to everybody. Except for Charlie Gehringer. The rest of us do our stint – like I say, I made four years – and then we move on to cleaner pastures.’

‘Cleaner? Or just more corporate?’ Robert found himself saying. Christ, I sound like Anna on her high horse, he thought.

‘Touché,’ said Rycroft and gave a rich belly laugh. ‘I can see you think I’m just defending a higher class of crook.’

Robert found himself laughing, too. There was too much self-knowledge in this man for Robert to dislike him; he found it impossible to judge people who had already judged themselves.

‘But actually,’ said Rycroft, ‘some of my current clients haven’t done what they’re accused of. And even when they have, it’s not the same – not in my book anyway. I wouldn’t claim it was always victimless crime – pilfering a pension fund is pretty horrendous if it’s your pension that gets lifted. But the people I defend nowadays don’t shoot anybody, they don’t stab anybody, and they don’t sodomise little girls for kicks.’ There was nothing humorous in his voice now. ‘How Charlie Gehringer stands it after all these years is beyond me. The man’s a saint, I guess, or a lunatic. Probably he’s a bit of both.’

Half an hour later Robert and Anna said goodnight to the doorman, a square-shouldered Irishman with gold braid on his coat that spelled
Barry
, then walked along Lake Shore Drive. Through the lollipop line of sparse poplars, a faint breeze rustled, barely audible above the rush of late-night cars heading downtown on the Drive.

‘Jesus, they’re rich,’ said Anna. He couldn’t tell if this was said admiringly or scathingly. Perhaps it was a bit of both.

‘Well, he’s a senior corporate lawyer, so he must make a lot of money.’

‘Still,’ she said with a wondering shake of her head.

They turned at the corner, then turned again onto Astor Place where he had managed to find a parking place earlier that evening. Quieter here, the street was lined with mainly Victorian townhouses, the trees old and tall and leafy. As they walked north he pointed to a modernist building of three storeys across the street.

‘That was one of the first Bauhaus houses built in Chicago. Hard to believe.’

‘I’ll say. It looks brand new to me.’

‘1936.’

‘How on earth do you know that?’

‘Years of secret study.’ He laughed. ‘Actually, it was designed by my great-uncle. He was an architect – at least in theory. I think this was the only house he designed that ever got built.’

‘Is it listed?’

Robert scoffed. ‘Come on. This city hasn’t got a heritage, just a history that sounds like a cartoon. Mrs O’Leary’s Cow and the 1871 fire. The Water Tower, only building to survive the fire. The Black Sox scandal of 1919. Al Capone, Mayor Daley, that’s it. Captions for tourists.’

‘That’s awfully superficial,’ she declared.

‘Like Chicago,’ he said. He realised he was the one sounding like a European, snooty about an upstart’s short history.

Ahead of them he saw in the glow of a streetlamp a man approaching them. He was tall, black, and striding forward aggressively. Was the man talking to himself? It looked that way. Drunk? Robert tensed almost imperceptibly, and took Anna’s arm protectively. Then he relaxed when he saw the man was wearing a familiar long wool coat, with gold braid visible on its front collar that said
Daniel
. Barry the doorman’s shift must be over.

‘Did you think he was going to rob us or something?’ asked Anna when he’d passed.

‘Old habits die hard,’ he said. ‘I can see the headline now. “Activist lawyer and husband mugged on Astor Place.”’ But that wasn’t it at all. For a split second he had thought it was Duval walking towards them.

‘Don’t be ridiculous. No one would ever try and mug you.’

‘Why not? I’m not a big guy.’

‘No, but your face on the street looks like ice.’

‘Fear, masquerading as
machismo
.’

They reached the car and as he squeezed his key and heard the metallic snap of the power locks, he asked, ‘Who is Charlie Gehringer?’

Anna stood still by the passenger door. ‘He’s a public defender.’

‘I know. That man Rycroft said Gehringer’s been there thirty years, defending scumbags. Rycroft’s word, not mine.’

‘Hard to believe Rycroft once did that job. I thought he was positively revolting. Maggie says he bills out at twelve hundred dollars an hour.’

He was startled by her vehemence, at odds with her demeanour during the evening. It was interesting to see her former fiery principles flare up again; he’d been starting to wonder if they’d been extinguished in their fat American life. ‘So what about Gehringer?’ he asked.

Anna sighed and he studied her face in the amber cast of the streetlight. She’d had some wine, and her cheeks were flushed, a few stray strands of hair escaping from her bun. She spoke across the top of the car. ‘He was Duval’s lawyer – his name was in the file.’

And he remembered him from the one day he’d gone to court during Duval’s trial. A tall sandy-haired fellow then, not that much older than Robert. They’d talked during one of the recesses. They’d been meant to talk again, but never had. He wondered if Gehringer would remember that.

They drove north in silence, cutting across the edge of Lincoln Park onto the Drive. They crossed the city line, then stopped for a light on Sheridan Road and a sports car pulled up next to them with a bunch of teenage boys stuffed into its toy-like seats. They grinned at Anna, and one of them leaned forward and beeped the horn. When the light turned the sports car rocketed ahead of them. As the noise of their exhaust receded, Robert said, ‘Are you going to talk with Gehringer?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What’s holding you back?’ he asked.

‘Part of me thinks I’m being silly – I’m not used to having time on my hands so maybe I’m just looking for something to do. But another part says it’s important.’

‘Important to whom?’ He tried to keep his tone easy.

‘To Duval, of course.’

‘But you barely know him.’

‘I didn’t know half the asylum seekers I used to help, either.’ She sounded resentful, and she reached down and opened her window an inch.

‘Duval has done his time and that’s the one thing he’d like back. But nothing can ever give him that.’

‘Maybe not, but he can be given other things – money, for one thing. From what you say Duval could use some. It’s incredibly hard for an ex-con to find a decent job. He’d get 180,000 dollars right away – if he sues, he could get a lot more.’

‘You seem to have been doing a lot of research.’

She ignored him, saying, ‘And think of the stigma. What woman would want to go out with him if she knew what he was supposed to have done? But it’s more than that: just because he’s not behind bars, Duval isn’t free; I bet you haven’t any idea how much he’s restricted by the conditions of his parole. He has to get approval of where he’s going to live, and who he’s going to live with. He can’t travel without permission; he can’t take a job unless it’s given the once-over by his parole officer. As a sex offender he wouldn’t automatically have access even to his own children.’

‘If he had any.’

She groaned in exasperation. ‘Why are you so cynical? I thought you were never convinced he was guilty.’

‘I wasn’t – he was such a sweet guy, and he’d been a hero. I couldn’t believe he’d done it.’

‘What changed your mind?’

‘I’ve never said I have.’

‘Did something happen back then?’

‘No,’ he snapped. He thought of his return to Chicago for the trial, the anxious days that followed, then his conversation with Vanetta. ‘But I wasn’t a lawyer. Or a cop. Or a private investigator.’

‘So you stayed out of it.’

He was sure there was contempt in her voice. ‘There was nothing I could do.’ Vanetta herself had told him that.

They had turned into their street, and he could see the maple in their front yard, looming like a ragged umbrella in the dark. She said quietly, ‘You don’t have to justify yourself to me.’

‘That’s big of you,’ he said crossly, then waited for her to react.

Instead Anna pointed at their house, where he could see the light in their living room – the new babysitter would be watching television. ‘Look upstairs,’ she said, and he saw there was a light on in Sophie’s room as well.

Sophie had played her old trick on this new sitter. She would have claimed she was scared of the dark, and the sitter, a nice-acting girl the neighbours had recommended, would have let her keep her light on. Sophie, who wasn’t scared of the dark at all, would have stayed up reading happily for God knows how long after her bedtime.

He laughed, and Anna joined him, all crossness gone, but his own thoughts lingered on what she’d been saying.

You don’t have to justify yourself
. Didn’t he though, if only to himself? The problem was that when he had returned to New York even before the verdict came, it was not because it had been the ‘right thing to do’. He’d gone, leaving Duval to his fate, because he had been told to.

2

Vicky was out with flu, which he suspected meant a day at the beach, and Sylvia Nowell from publicity was doing her best to help. One of the trustees had complained out of the blue about production standards, and Robert felt obliged to rebut him, harnessing facts from the production controller to show this wasn’t true – all their books were now acid-free, the glued perfect bindings they used were as durable as the sewn ones of the past, all the rarefied palaver designed to appease a self-proclaimed lover of ‘quality books’.