Without Prejudice (2 page)

‘Was he old or young? Caucasian or a person of colour?’ He didn’t know why he was pressing her – actually, he did. This might be Duval.

Vicky pursed her lips. ‘You mean African-American?’ He felt embarrassed and she looked cross.

The press was part of a university, and Robert had lunch downtown with one of its trustees, a banker near retirement age named Everton. He seemed more interested in talking about his own visits to London than discussing Robert’s publishing plans. Each time Robert tried to discuss ways to raise the profile of the press, Everton would deflect the conversation onto the wonders of the British Museum and the lunch he’d once been given in the Athenaeum.

Afterwards, Robert walked back along Michigan Avenue, stopping at the river to look down at its small greased coils as it passed under the bridge. The river ran famously backward, long ago reversed to send water from the lake down its thin channel. It was the least impressive river of any city of Robert’s acquaintance – he thought fleetingly of London and Paris. Yet it had enjoyed a curious revival thanks to the boats conducting architectural tours of the city’s downtown; even in London, prospective visitors to Chicago were told to ‘take the river boat tour’, which corresponded to the stereotype of the place. A city of man-made heights, preoccupied throughout the last century with skyscrapers, as if vertical lift could somehow make its mark against the drear spread of so much zero-elevation soil. There was no natural drama to the habitat here, only the blankness of the prairies edged onto a lake with an unvarying shore.

He moved on, the avenue sloping straight and professionally downhill as it spread north towards its newest congregation of expensive stores – Saks, Neiman Marcus, Lord & Taylor – which had displaced the old shopping centre of the city in the Loop. The shoppers here were overwhelmingly white, unspoken reason for the emigration northwards.

Here too the city opened up, with lower buildings, and plazas and small parks, though further down the avenue the Hancock Tower loomed like a charcoal monolith, a hundred tapering steel storeys of offices and apartments. There was a bar on the ninety-fifth floor; Robert remembered going there as a teenager one night with his brother Mike, a week before his brother’s marriage. Robert had sat facing south, drinking in the view, the city’s hatch lines of streets stretched out before him on a grid that was dazzlingly illuminated by streetlights against the dark underlying plains. How he longed for his youthful ease with heights; merely the memory of having been so close to the clouds started a thin line of anxiety trickling across his chest like a barium tracer.

His office was on a side street off Michigan Avenue, in a low-slung building of cream stone, with modernist windows lying flat as a map against the line of its outer skin. The press was on the third of five storeys. The university’s main campus was in the near north suburbs, not far from Robert’s new home, but its famous medical school was based here in the city, and the press had been tucked in as well. This suited Robert; he could think of nothing more dreary than to be located ‘on campus’. Occasionally, noises emanated from his university overseers that it might be useful to have him closer, on tap. He ignored them, determined to preserve a distance he intuitively associated with independence.

On the third floor he walked down the corridor, flinching reflexively as he passed Dorothy’s empty office, until he saw Vicky at her desk. She was on the phone and waved at him frantically. She cupped the receiver with one hand and said, ‘I’ve got David Balthazar on the line.’

‘Really?’ He was surprised. ‘Okay, tell him I’ll be right there.’

Balthazar was a New York literary agent Robert had first known during his own time in Manhattan when he worked at Knopf. Once in London, Robert had not lost touch – perhaps every other year, they had a drink together during the city’s book fair. Still, Robert was surprised to find him phoning. He could not conceive of what business they might now do together, unless Balthazar was trying to foist off a client he could no longer sell to more commercial houses.

‘Hello, Robert, so how’s the Second City treating you?’ asked the agent.

‘I’m okay, David,’ he said, ignoring the traditional New York jab at Chicago. Balthazar thought of himself as a smooth operator; Brooklyn born and bred, he had worked scrupulously to eradicate any trace of the borough. He dressed with natty fastidiousness: a silk paisley handkerchief jutting out like a gigolo’s badge from his Paul Stuart blazer, gold cufflinks with the punch of an ancestral family on the cuffs of his bespoke soft shirt. Although Balthazar was tactless, even obnoxious, he was someone Robert found impossible to dislike – you had to admire the sheer industry of his social climb.

‘Enjoying the new job? It’s a good little press.’

‘It’s
pretty
good. I’m trying to make it really good.’

‘Ah,’ said Balthazar. ‘You know, some people wondered why you wanted the job. I mean, going from a big one to, um . . .’

‘Such a small one?’

‘Something like that,’ he said, acknowledging his tactlessness. ‘I mean, it’s not as if the job’s a
sinecure
. Or that you got in any trouble in London.’ He made both statements with such certainty that they were obviously questions.

‘If I had screwed up over there, David, I’m sure you’d know about it.’ Balthazar had the decency to laugh. ‘But no, I wanted to come back to America, and Anna wanted a change.’ This was more or less the truth, though it was also true that he had been spinning his wheels in his old job, thanks to a cloud over his reputation which he had been powerless to dispel.

‘It must be nice to be back in your hometown.’

‘I suppose so.’ Robert looked out the window towards the lake, the city’s one natural advantage – a blue sea-sized body of water rimmed by yellow sand. In the distance he could just make out a lone tanker. An ore boat, cruising to Duluth for another load? He had never understood the complicated commerce of the Great Lakes. ‘Though it’s not like I know the place. I left here when I was thirteen – they shipped me to boarding school out east.’

‘A preppy, eh?’

‘Can’t you tell?’ They both laughed.

He found himself thinking of Duval. Had he been phoning that night from Chicago? His mother had moved years before to St Louis – Aurelia, that was her name. Would she still be alive? Given her history back then, Robert thought it unlikely.

‘Does your wife like it here?’ asked Balthazar, snapping him out of his reverie.

He spoke with energy to cover his abstractedness. ‘Very much. I was worried she might find it all a bit too alien, but she’s taken to the place.’ She had indeed, to his intense surprise.

‘She can’t practise here, can she?’

‘No, but she’s got a job at the British consulate. She gives legal advice to companies that do business in the UK.’

A pause followed, and Robert sensed small talk was over. Balthazar said at last, ‘I had an interesting meeting yesterday with a colleague of yours.’

‘Really?’ Mentally, Robert surveyed the list of candidates. Dorothy seemed the only possibility, but what would Balthazar be doing talking with her? Did he want to take her off his hands? A happy thought.

‘Well, maybe not a colleague. It was Bud Carlson.’

‘Our football coach?’ It seemed preposterous, the socially ambitious New York agent breaking bread with a man who ran gladiators – that was how Robert viewed American football, with its padded behemoths knocking each other around. His mind whirred as he considered new possibilities. ‘Where was this?’ he said, trying to sound casual.

‘Here in my office,’ said Balthazar. Robert could picture the agent in his midtown room, leaning back in his padded leather chair, his handmade shoes propped on his desk, looking out at his splendid view of the Chrysler Building.

‘What was he doing in New York?’

‘He’s almost finished his memoirs.’

‘Good. We can schedule them then. You must know they’re contracted to us.’ It was the one big trade book they had in the forward list.

Balthazar said nothing, and Robert emitted a small groan. ‘Don’t tell me. He wants you to represent him – and renegotiate his contract.’

Balthazar coughed politely. Robert supposed there was no point being an agent if you embarrassed easily.

‘Well . . .’ said Balthazar.

‘Spare me the palaver. How much?’

Balthazar hesitated, as if pained by Robert’s bluntness. ‘I’m not sure money is the problem.’

Any uncertainty about this call was gone. Suddenly irritated, Robert said, ‘You’re telling me he doesn’t want to renegotiate? What does he want then? Another publisher?’

There, it was out in the open now; he had done Balthazar’s work for him.

‘Look, Robert, nothing’s set in stone. Why don’t we set a time now to talk in a couple of weeks? Then I’ll know how Carlson wants to proceed. I don’t want you to think I went looking for this.’

No, thought Robert, but you didn’t send him away either. Not that he could really blame Balthazar. As he waited while Balthazar consulted his busy diary, Robert thought wryly, Some sinecure.

He was disconcerted by the call. Balthazar was precisely the prosperous face of the trade publishing Robert no longer had a role in – indeed he’d been delighted to escape. But he didn’t like being patronised by a big shot from New York and he bristled in time-honoured fashion at the designation of Chicago as the Second City. He had thought that New York’s own sense of self-importance had diminished; not in the book business, it seemed.

Robert had only met Carlson once, at a reception given in the president of the university’s house. A tall, loose-limbed man with a floppy kind of handshake. Affable, perhaps a little shy, quite unlike the stereotypical crew-cut bully, half drill-sergeant, half Nazi, who paraded through American popular culture with a policeman’s whistle around his neck. They’d talked briefly and innocuously, and then President Crullowitch, a former ambassador to Mexico, had intervened to move the coach onto a rich alumnus. There had seemed no point following up this brief encounter, since Dorothy Taylor had secured the book to begin with and said she knew the coach well. Hands off, had been her unspoken message, so Robert had gladly left her to it. Maybe he shouldn’t have.

For here was Balthazar the Beast, as he was known in his press profiles, poaching the one big trade book he had – about of all things an American football coach. Robert had known baseball books could do well, but then it was in Robert’s view a subtler, more graceful game, which appealed as much to intellectuals and statisticians as it did to jocks. Football seemed leaden by comparison. Yet books about it were now in vogue –
Publishers Weekly,
the American book industry’s bible, had recently run a spread on the genre. No wonder the press’s rep force spoke with unbridled enthusiasm about the prospects for Carlson’s book, happy to be selling in a popular title for a change, one that didn’t require explanation or excuse, unlike the rest of the press’s obscurantist titles. The rights person had said a big book club deal was a possibility; the publicist had talked unprecedentedly about television appearances for the author. Even the university’s president and trustees (Everton excepted) seemed positively excited.

Admittedly Carlson was an unusual football coach, as interesting as he was successful (three times Rose Bowl champion, countless winner of the Big Ten). Even for the football non-enthusiast like Robert, there was something admirable in Carlson’s recruitment of countless black players from the Deep South, and in his insistence that all of them – even those turning pro – complete their educations. Carlson was the respectable amateur face of a college sport infamous for its professionalism, but he was also that rarest of things – a white hero to the black community. Robert couldn’t think of many others.

There was a knock on the door and Vicky came in. ‘Andy Stephens is waiting,’ and he could see the man standing by Vicky’s desk. One of the university’s cadre of accountants, he wore a cotton suit that was the colour of martini olives, a uniform of summer poised uneasily between comfort and convention.

Vicky handed him a pink message slip. ‘While you were on the phone,’ she said tersely, apparently still annoyed by his tetchiness before lunch.

He looked at the message.
Duval called.

‘He said he could meet you at Nelson’s Coffee Shop on Wacker Drive at three fifteen.’

He looked at his watch: he had ten minutes. ‘Did you get his cell number?’

She shook her head sharply. ‘He said he was calling from a pay phone.’

Damn. He could stand up Duval or postpone Andy. A need to get it over with (though he couldn’t have said exactly what ‘it’ was) and some other un-articulated sense of obligation meant he felt there wasn’t any choice.

He went out into the corridor. ‘Andy, I’m really sorry, but I’ve got a kind of emergency. I’ve got to see somebody; I shouldn’t be gone more than an hour.’

Stephens looked at him with irritated, unaccepting eyes. ‘I suppose you want me to stick around?’

‘Could you? I apologise, but it’s family.’ Was this a lie? Well, Duval had almost been family once, or at least his grandmother Vanetta had.

II

I
T WAS
S
EPTEMBER
1965, and the ambulance was a converted station wagon with two back fins. It came around the corner by the maple tree, then slid slowly to a stop on the gravel driveway in front of the old Michigan house. Two attendants emerged, wearing starched white uniforms. One wore yellow chukka boots on his feet and as he followed the other into the house he stopped to admire the rusting pump, verdigris with age, that sat unused in the back yard.

They wheeled his mother out in a large steel-framed bed, and his father locked the back door behind him – their own car was packed and ready to go. She was sitting up, propped against two pillows, wearing a fresh nightgown and a terrycloth robe draped around her shoulders. Her hair was freshly brushed, the auburn traces of its brown ends catching the glint of the midday sun. Bobby thought she looked like a beautiful queen. They let him come up to the bed to say goodbye, and even took down the side rail, but he still couldn’t reach her face to kiss her. She stroked his cheek instead and told him to be a help to his father.

He had thought before the men arrived that she was just going for a ride, and wondered if this meant she was getting better – after all, she had been in bed for days now. But his father had explained she was going all the way down to Chicago, as were they – ‘You’re already a week late for school as it is,’ his father explained. Bobby felt a twinge of jealousy as the ambulance departed, since his mother got to ride in it while he was stuck in the Chevy, sandwiched in the back between the twins. They were five years older than him, so he always had to sit in the middle over the hump. His father was driving, talking to Uncle Larry in the front passenger seat.

He often felt sick on the long drive and today was no exception. Worse, his father had forgotten the Dramamine and they only stopped once – usually his mother insisted on a picnic lunch, at one of the state parks down near the Indiana border. Today they just barrelled ahead, pausing only to fill up with gas, after which Uncle Larry did the driving. They moved from the hilly fruit country, with its occasional glimpse of Lake Michigan, down through the endless flatlands of the southern belly of the state into the big snow pocket in the lower corner. You could just make out the dunes in the distance west of them, where so many Chicago people went on weekends. His father scoffed at the idea, as if proud of the effort they had to make to get to their own house, three hours’ drive farther north.

Why did they have to go back to Chicago anyway? He didn’t like the city. His mind’s images of it were always dark: the brown brick of their own building, the black gaunt trees, the tawny shit of the neighbourhood dogs. Even the snow would darken within hours, speckled with soot.

Near Benton Harbor Uncle Larry reached 100 mph on the speedometer and in the back seat they all squealed, but as they moved into the Indiana steel basin the car was quiet. Usually his father would start to sing, or maybe turn on the radio at this point, and young as he was Bobby would sense he was trying to lift his spirits, since he didn’t want to go back to Chicago either. But today his father didn’t even pretend, and when Bobby spied the enormous brewing vats of the Blatz beer company and tried to sing the jingle – ‘I’m from Milwaukee and I ought to know’ – his brother Mike elbowed him sharply to keep quiet.

On the Sky Bridge he held his breath as he always did, scared they would slide over the side into Calumet Harbor, and then they swooped down onto Stony Island Avenue and his father said ‘Bip your bips’ and everybody locked their car door – it was dangerous here, though he didn’t know why. ‘They don’t give a damn about
your
civil rights,’ Uncle Larry said bitterly, pointing to some men holding cans of beer in their hands on a corner.

And then they were on Blackstone Avenue, leafy and hot, the wet asphalt of a new patch in the middle of the street actually steaming, and he got out and took deep breaths until the nausea went away. There was no sign of the ambulance.

Upstairs Lily opened the door to the apartment while his father and uncle and Mike unloaded the bags from the back of the station wagon, and Bobby raced down the long dark hallway, almost slipping on the torn bit of carpet his mother always wanted to replace, and the bedroom door was closed, which seemed right since they’d told him over and over again that his mother wasn’t feeling well. He stopped long enough to knock very lightly on the door, and ignoring whatever Lily was calling to him from the hall he slowly twisted the copper-coloured door knob. The door budged grudgingly then suddenly cracked open. He started to put a big smile on his face until he saw his mother’s bed was neatly made up – and unoccupied.

‘I told you, she’s not here,’ Lily said, and went towards the kitchen without further explanation. Puzzled, he left the apartment and went downstairs, where he tried to help unload the car. But everything was too heavy and he had to make do with carrying his baseball glove upstairs to the apartment.

When they finally finished unloading, his father and Uncle Larry sat down in the kitchen, each with a cold beer from the icebox, not saying much and paying no attention to him – not deliberately, but almost dreamily; he realised for the first time that grown-ups could get tired, too. He went back to the bedroom he now shared with his brother, having been displaced the year before from his own room by his sister’s sudden demand for privacy, which to his fury his parents had encouraged, not just acceded to.

Mike was reading on his bed. He looked up from his book. ‘You wanna wrestle?’

‘Where’s Lily?’ His sister got upset if they wrestled in front of her, and then their father would get mad.

Mike gestured, like he was shooing a fly. ‘She’s in the sun porch. Shut the door.’ He came down off his bed and got on all fours. ‘Ready when you are.’

It was a standard ritual. Bobby ran and jumped onto his back and they were away. Within minutes, just as Mike was about to pin him for the second time, Bobby squirmed in desperation and bit his older brother on the shoulder. Mike howled, then hit Bobby right below the eye. His crying ended the fight. This was standard, too.

His father came in, drawn by Bobby’s wailing, but for once he wasn’t angry. He didn’t shout at Mike and he was too old to be spanked; he didn’t comfort Bobby; he just stood in the doorway with a pained expression on his face. ‘Come on, you guys,’ he said. His voice sounded unexpectedly sad. ‘Not today, okay?’

They had an early supper, which his father did his best to put together – pork chops, and some lettuce, and a scoop of Boston baked beans, which Bobby liked for their molasses. Then his grandparents appeared, and he played fish with his grandfather, a dapper man who combed his sleek greying hair straight back, and wore a tie pinned to his crisp ironed shirt with a gold clip. They sat at the dining-room table, until Gramps said it was time for bed and began to play gin rummy with Lily and Mike, which Bobby wasn’t old enough to play, or so his grandfather said.

He had a shower and since his mother wasn’t there his father came and rubbed his hair dry with one end of the towel until Bobby thought his skull would bleed. Then he got into bed and his grandmother came in to read to him. It was a long story he found very boring, despite Gram’s efforts to use different voices for the different characters, and he stopped trying to follow it, since he had other things on his mind. He was about to ask when his mother would come in to say goodnight when suddenly it was light outside again and Gram had gone and he realised it was the morning and that he had fallen asleep unawares.

He sat up and yawned twice then waited, since normally his mother would be there by now – she would wake him up in the mornings, saying ‘Hello, sleepyhead’ – and as soon as he had shaken the sleep out of his eyes she would choose his clothes and help him get dressed for nursery school. She was always cheerful and energetic; Bobby would struggle happily just to keep up with her.

But now she wasn’t there, so he simply waited – a long, long time it seemed, and his mother didn’t appear. Then Lily came in, saying impatiently, ‘Come on, let’s get your clothes on.’

‘Where’s Mommy?’ he asked.

‘In the hospital, silly. You know that already.’

‘Oh,’ he said, and even to himself his voice seemed flat.

In the kitchen he found his father, standing at the stove where his mother usually cooked breakfast. His brother was sitting reading the sports section at the rickety pine table, which had a leaf that had once collapsed during lunch. Bobby sat down, feeling uncertain, and his father passed him a glass of orange juice. It was warm and frothy, made out of frozen concentrate in the blender – the water from the tap was never cold. Then his father gave him a plate with a fried egg on it that was sliding in grease and speckled by black bits from the pan. He looked at it dubiously – he was never hungry at breakfast. His mother could always cajole him into appetite with a piece of fruit (apple in winter; berries when the weather was warm), or a thin slice of toast with cherry jam – bits and pieces to tempt him until with the aid of a glass of milk they somehow added up to breakfast.

He must have made a face because his father said sternly, ‘Eat what’s on the plate, Bobby.’ So he did, slowly slurping up the egg white, and then when a piece of half-toasted bread appeared from his father’s hand dabbing up the yoke with the soft centre of the slice hoping his father would ignore the crusts he left on the outer edge of the plate. He did.

His father walked him to school, which at least was unbewildering, and he was happy to play with a large plastic tractor on his own, since every now and then Miss Partridge would come by and see how he was. She had soft eyes, and blonde hair the colour of bleached straw, and she wore a scent that gave off a faint whiff of peach which he liked to smell when she hugged him – which was often, if not as often as he liked.

Today she spent more time than usual with him, then when nursery was over he found his father standing at one end of the room. He had come from work, wearing a jacket and tie, and in his hand he held a brown fedora, which Bobby was told not to play with each time he tried to bring it out from the front hall closet.

They walked home along 57th Street, past one block of low shop fronts, then a series of four-storey apartment buildings. Ahead of them he could see Sarnat’s on the corner across from their own apartment, the drugstore where his brother and sister would take him to buy candy or in summer months Popsicles, lifted out of a freezer compartment like Ice Age statuettes. ‘Where’s Mom?’ he asked his father, trying to sound hopeful.

‘She’s in Billings,’ his father said. ‘The hospital.’ Bobby could tell he was trying to be patient. ‘She’s going to be there for a while.’

‘So are you going to look after me?’ he asked doubtfully, for if this were the case, why was his father wearing a tie?

‘Gladys is home today,’ his father said, and Bobby’s heart sank. Gladys usually came once a week to clean the apartment. She was immensely fat – when Bobby hugged her his arms went nowhere near around her waist – and not much fun at all. If his father was taking him home, why did Gladys have to be there, too?

When they got to the apartment Gladys was in the kitchen, frying something at the stove. ‘Here we are,’ his father said, with a cheery note Bobby could tell was forced.

‘I’m making the supper, Mr Danziger,’ she said. She wore an enormous apron that accentuated her girth, and held an oversized fork in her hand, poised over the sizzling skillet. ‘You just leave the boy here with me. He’ll be fine. Go on, you get on back to work.’

Bobby’s face froze – what was she thinking of, telling his father to go away? He grabbed his father’s hand and looked up at his face, where his father’s dark eyes were watching him anxiously. ‘You’ll be okay,’ his father said. ‘Lily and Mike will be home in a while.’

He gripped his father’s hand more tightly, clinging to it for dear life. He figured as long as he didn’t let go, his father couldn’t leave him behind.

‘I bet Gladys will let you help her do the cooking.’

This seemed unlikely to Bobby: the fat woman didn’t even look at him when his father said this. He didn’t want to help Gladys with the cooking anyway, which looked hot, sweaty kind of work.

‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Bobby?’ his father went on, and there was a tone to his voice which he sensed meant his father was trying to reassure himself, and that he wanted Bobby’s help. So he nodded and smiled weakly.

‘Atta boy,’ said his father, and then he was gone.

He did not know what to do with himself, so he sat at the kitchen table while Gladys stayed standing at the stove. ‘You want something to eat?’ she said without kindness in her voice, and he just shook his head. She turned, fork in hand, and looked at him. ‘What you starin’ at, boy? Why don’t you go and play?’

He shook his head again, because awkward as he felt here in the kitchen, with no toys to play with and no sense that Gladys wanted him around, he knew that he didn’t want to leave the room – not with no one else in the apartment. Who knows what could happen to him back in the bedroom with no one within calling distance? This scary fat woman was paying no attention to anything but the sizzling going on in the skillet right beneath her eyes.

He knew about choice now – between, say, chocolate and butterscotch top cones at the Dairy Queen in Michigan – but had never faced a situation where the choices seemed equally bad. The strain was too much and he began to cry, and he hoped this would somehow resolve the situation. And normally it would have – someone would have comforted him. Even Mike was nice to him when he cried – unless it was Mike who had made him cry.