White People

ACCLAIM FOR
Allan Gurganus’s

White People

Winner of the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize for Fiction

Winner of the Southern Book Award for Fiction
from the Southern Book Critics Circle

A Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award

A
New York Times
Notable Book

For my friends,
especially for Daisy Thorp
and for Paul Nagano

There is a kind of success that is indistinguishable from panic.

One inexorable rule of etiquette is that you must talk to your next-door neighbor at a dinner table. You
MUST
, that is all there is about it! … At dinner once, Mrs. Toplofty, finding herself next to a man she quite openly despised, said to him with apparent placidity, “I shall not talk to you—because I don’t care to. But for the sake of my hostess, I shall say my multiplication tables. Twice one are two, twice two are four—” and she continued through the tables, making him alternate with her. As soon as she politely could, she turned again to her other companion.

Very late that fall, my grandfather and my father and a great many more went down to the Humboldt River to fish…. When they came back, they brought us more news. They said there were white people at the Humboldt Sink. They were the first ones that my father had seen face to face. He said they were not like ‘humans’. They were more like owls than like anything else. They had hair on their faces, and had white eyes. My father said they looked very beautiful….

I
MAGINE HIM
in his prime. A fairly rich and large-eared farm boy newly cured of being a farm boy by what he called Th’ War, meaning the second one. He’d signed up in Charlottesville when most of his fraternity had done it as a group, and up till then he had been somewhat humorlessly typical. He had been hung up with the rest of them in the fraternity of the university that Jefferson designed, and he was as lean and carefully prepared as all the very best Virginia hams. And it would seem to follow that, in 1942, my father began being made more valuable by several years of smoke. But this smoke was not the curative Virginia kind; it was the high-flying smoke of German cities burning. My father was a bombardier. He became a minor hero in the Second World War and a major hero in Virginia/Carolina. He was photographed as Betty Grable stood on tiptoe to kiss him. He was tall. He still is. But his height meant most when he was dressed as an officer in our Army Air Corps. Today, in civvies, he is just another mildly handsome businessman. It was in uniform that Father looked most like himself.

Heroes should have looks. His were better than most, better than wholesome. It was one of those faces that fit handsomely into photographs and under a brimmed cap. It seemed to know in every pose that captions would be under it eventually. His profile, nearly as good as a Barrymore’s, was better for being blunted slightly by
boarding-school boxing. With very combed blond hair waving back in the way hair did then, his was a face that even from the front told much about itself in silhouette. Many of the photos still exist.

When I was a child in the years just after that war, people cornered me with accounts of my father’s valor. They told me in front of other children how, though everybody’s father had certainly helped with it, mine had done more than most to insure that the Nazi plot to rule the world—to rule the very ground on which this birthday party was now taking place—had been crushed by the Americans. They mentioned the Freedoms, four in all, and promised that the whole white world was now capable of worshiping in whichever ways it chose. They said to me, “Do you know what your father did?” I was told how people had printed “Welcome Richard!” on broad banners made of sheets that stretched all the way across Main Street.

But before the war was won and he came home, there was the business about what they made my grandmother do. Though bossy when alone with family, she was a remarkably shy woman, even for then. In North Carolina, in 1942, shyness was less unusual than it is today. Both her parents’ families had been equally distinguished and austere, and, as if to commemorate this, she parted her hair impartially down the middle and most always wore the same rare brooch at the exact center of her collar and throat. I once saw her hiding in the dark back hallway of her house; eyes opened very wide, she stood against a wall, as unwanted guests on the front porch repeatedly rang the door chimes.

She had been reared at home with her three sisters, on a Raleigh side street in a house cool most of the year with the amount of marble in it: veined tabletops, hearths arched and white as tombs, classical statuary, athletic and luminous in dark corners. The marble hearths and statues floated upright in the house’s murk. Tabletops rode the gloom like oval rafts. It seemed the marble objects were the rooms’ true residents, directing every household current into eddies split around themselves and cooling off whatever drifted past them.

But Grandmother’s wish for the stillness of 1909 was inappropriate in 1942. There was a war going on and her son, they told her, was
crucial to the local view of it. They put much unnecessary pressure on a lady so easily swayed. All it took was one unscrupulous question about how much patriotism she really felt as, after all, a longtime member of the DAR. At this, she said that yes, yes, she would do it, but only if they did not ask her to speak. Of course, those present assured her, she wouldn’t have to utter one syllable she didn’t rightly feel she could or should utter. But no one believed she would stay silent once she got up there and got the feel of it from all the bunting hung around. They forced her, in this way, to sit on public platforms. When the speaker selling war bonds acknowledged her, seated there as formal as her central brooch, she winced in recognition of her name and nodded back to him and tried to smile out at the audience like a mother, but she looked like a potentially bereaved one.

Mrs. Roosevelt herself came through on a decorated train and got off and walked over to the platform they’d set up outside the station, and not even then would my grandmother speak a public sentence to those gathered on the street and hanging out the windows of the Bank and those who dangled legs like extra letters over the sign usually spelling Ekstein’s Finer Men’s Apparel. Suspended from four lampposts were giant photos of my father in uniform, in profile. When Mrs. Roosevelt came over as the ceremony ended and said how handsome my father must be, to judge from his pictures over there, my grandmother finally spoke. She was nodding and thanking Eleanor Roosevelt as an equal when she noticed Mrs. Roosevelt wore no hat, which seemed odd in one of her station. What she was wearing, its weight tugging at the fabric of one shoulder, was a huge pale, wide-mouthed orchid which, some suggested afterwards, had looked much like her.

But Mrs. Roosevelt had won them over nonetheless, and it was lucky that others overheard what she said to Grandmother about my father’s good looks. Grandmother would never have repeated it to anyone. Though she acknowledged things graciously, she never started them. In this way, she had become an adult and then a wife and, quite soon after that, a mother. Some were annoyed by this belief of hers that silence was always in good taste, but most people felt it was probably fine the way she was; that somehow it was more
patriotic for a wife and mother not to say too much—except, of course, for Mrs. Roosevelt, and some people even felt that way about Mrs. Roosevelt.

T
HE PHOTOGRAPH
of Betty Grable kissing my father’s flat cheek seemed to hold the house up. I was born in 1947 and, as far as I knew, it had always been there. People who did not come often to the house would sometimes ask to see it. They were led back to the den, where it was hung with the medals. Smiling, they stooped to get the picture window’s reflection off of it, and they’d shake their heads and nod appreciatively. I remember someone’s saying that when you were young during a war it is hard to know later if you liked being young during a war or liked just being young or maybe even the war itself, who knows?

In the picture, he does not return her kiss but stands there; a statuesque soldier, newly decorated for minor heroism, accepts the homage of a distant voluptuous country. He is enjoying it probably, but he does not smile, for at that moment the fate of the Western world as we now know it still hung in the balance. But Betty Grable could smile. It was all right if she did, and the official Army photographer, whose job it was to photograph the wake of morale she left behind, snapped an Army camera, and there it was—on most front pages in either Carolina and with practically the whole page to itself in our local
Falls Herald Traveler
. And though manliness and the national moment forbade he show it, yes, certainly my father was enjoying the kiss synchronized with flashbulbs, just as local boys too young to go themselves were not too young to go at themselves several times a day upon finding this hometown representative in a favorite national fantasy with a Grable whose legs were here not even photographed to advantage, though the boys knew them well enough from other pictures. The local boys looked over at the grainy photograph they’d cut out and pinned up to the wallpaper beside their beds, and for a while there, several times a day, any number of them were replacing my father in his uniform, with Grable breathing right there beside them in her WAC’s outfit shortened way beyond regulations.
And after the ceremony, as the dots of flashbulbs were still dying out of their vision, there the boys were, there he was, the local high-school valedictorian, in the south of England, wearing my father’s uniform and medals and walking across a muddy camp with Grable on his arm. He was looking down at her little WAC’s cap pinned to the blond hair swept up on top. Pulling back the tent flap, she goes in first; he waits, takes a few more drags from the Camel he is smoking, then flips it smoothly into a nearby puddle and goes in himself. She is right there, patriotically spread-eagled on the tent floor, waiting for more minor heroism. In the flexed nostrils of the class valedictorian, the stink of weatherproofed canvas combines with the scent of Betty Grable’s own perfume, a perfume that all the factories at home are working overtime to make available for her to bolster soldiers’ morale, perfume that all the smokestacks smoke for hours to make one ounce of, perfume that all the factory girls at home helped make with skilled fingers, factory girls waiting up in their little rooms for men, disheveled healthy girls with their own skilled factory hands working up themselves with thoughts of soldierhood and regulation bayoneting and, oh, how crucial my own father was to local high-school boys behind closed doors in the early spring of 1945.