Without Prejudice Read online

  And for the first time Bobby felt self-conscious, wondering now if people were looking at him because he was white, and if they were wondering why he was there. He hated feeling like this, because he had been having such a good time. He liked the church, and these laughing, joking women, and the trestle tables loaded with wonderful food – they had corn on the cob, and fried chicken, and green bean salad and coleslaw, and soft dinner rolls with butter sticks piled up and jelly in a little dish, and pies and cake for dessert – and the singing had been riveting. He found himself wishing he could blend in unnoticed. It would be nice to be black, he thought, if only for the afternoon.

  He had some friends at school, though not many, since he was quiet there in a way that would have been unthinkable at home. He was happiest now, anyway, with Duval, since his friendship took place under the loving eye of Vanetta, the closest thing to a mother he had. When he was invited to a sleepover by his classmate Ernie Dreisbach, he told his father he didn’t want to go.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Not unless he invites Duval.’

  ‘But Ernie doesn’t even know Duval.’

  ‘Then I don’t want to go.’

  A few minutes later he found his father in his study, in the short hall off the kitchen. ‘Dad, could Duval sleep over here sometime?’

  ‘Don’t you see enough of Duval during the week? Besides, we haven’t really got room. I can’t make Mike sleep on the sofa in the living room so you two little monkeys can raise Cain all night.’

  What was Cain? ‘Then maybe I could go sleep over at Duval’s.’

  ‘That’s not a good idea,’ his father said.

  This usually signalled the end of any discussion, but this time Bobby didn’t give up. ‘Why isn’t it a good idea, Dad?’

  His father sighed. ‘There aren’t any white people where Duval lives.’

  ‘But there aren’t any black people here.’

  His father’s silence told him he had won the argument; it also told him it was not a victory he was going to get to enjoy.

  Merrill was an increasing presence in the household. Bobby knew by now that she was a widow, and that her husband had been a surgeon at the university hospital. Like her husband, Merrill was from New England, which she never let the Midwestern riffraff she was now surrounded by forget.

  Bobby was sure she disapproved of Duval spending so many afternoons there. Sensing this, Bobby was at pains to keep a low profile for his friend, but sometimes he forgot himself. One dinner time he announced, ‘Duval says Negroes are better at music than white people.’

  Merrill raised an eyebrow at his father.

  Lily clucked derisively. ‘Name a famous Negro concert pianist.’

  ‘I’m not sure he could name a white one,’ his father said mildly.

  Mike stifled a laugh as Bobby frowned. His grandmother had taken him to a concert in Orchestra Hall the spring before. He said tentatively, ‘Daniel Barenberg?’

  ‘Barenboim,’ corrected Lily, but Bobby could tell she was surprised.

  ‘Well done,’ said his father.

  At dessert they were talking about Vietnam again, Lily saying it was an evil war, while his father stiffened. Bobby knew his father didn’t like the war either, but he seemed to hate the draft dodgers even more. He said the protests were unpatriotic; when he saw demonstrators on the television news it put him in a bad mood. But tonight seemed okay; Merrill’s presence always kept all of them on their best behaviour.

  Eventually Bobby thought he should make a contribution to the conversation. ‘Duval says—’ he began.

  ‘Duval says, Duval says,’ his father thundered. ‘If I hear one more time what a little coloured boy thinks about world events . . .’ He paused, and Merrill interrupted, speaking in her soothing, syrupy voice.

  ‘Don’t you have any other friends, Bobby?’

  After this, he knew not to talk about Duval at the dinner table.

  That first spring, Duval had said he didn’t like baseball, which Bobby could understand since he saw at once that Duval was no good at it. He claimed he was good at basketball – B-ball be my game, he said – but when Bobby took him down the block to visit his friend Eric, whose father had put up a basketball hoop in their back alley, Duval turned out to be absolutely hopeless. He was fumbling, and near-sighted, and without any hand-to-eye coordination. Eric ran Duval ragged, dribbling around him almost contemptuously, laying the ball up for an easy two points again and again.

  After that they stayed home and played baseball. At first, Duval couldn’t hit the ball, so the score was lopsided. It wasn’t much fun – the opposite of playing with Mike, who won every single time, which made Bobby understand now why Mike didn’t often want to play with him. Then he had a small inspiration, and pitched underhand to Duval, softball style, and Duval could hit the ball, sometimes anyway.

  The game was constrained by the strange geography of the yard, with right field bordered by the windowless wall of the Christian Science church. Next to it stood the one tree of the yard, a mature maple with thick branches and dense leaves. If you climbed up high enough, you could look down over the wall at a little square of yard behind the church. Very rarely the ball would be hit there, and whoever hit it there lost the game, since the ball was irretrievable – the only entrance to the back of the church was barred by a locked gate in front on Blackstone Avenue.

  More often the ball would get stuck in the dense growth of the maple. No big deal, provided Bobby went and got it. The first time he suggested Duval retrieve the ball – he’d hit it there after all – the boy had hesitated, approached the tree, tried to pull himself up on its big low branch and promptly fallen down.

  ‘You got to heave yourself up, Duval,’ explained Bobby. ‘Here, watch me.’ He climbed up quickly to the high branch where the ball nestled, retrieved it, and hopped down.

  Duval couldn’t do it. With Bobby’s help he managed to get up on the lowest limb, but his legs were wobbly, his stance uncertain. When he tried to move up, he lost his grip and fell, sliding hard down the trunk, banging his arm against the big branch. He landed on his back, the wind knocked out of him.

  Catching his breath, Duval sat up slowly. There was a look of such dazed hurt on his face that Bobby felt terrible.

  ‘I’m sorry, Duval,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to get the ball. I’ll get it from now on.’

  He did, and though he didn’t really mind doing it, he was keenly aware that Duval couldn’t climb the tree. One day, perched high up on a branch, reaching out for the whiffle ball, ensnared in the thick maple-leaf clusters just beyond his reach, he happened to gaze down at the tiny walled-in yard of the Christian Science church. How dull it looked – a rectangular patch of grass against the back wall, two rows of badly laid paving between that and the back wall of the church itself. Something stirred in him, and looking down at Duval, waiting anxiously, he said, ‘You’ll never believe what I can see. It’s amazing,’ he said.

  ‘What is?’ asked Duval.

  He pointed, knowing Duval couldn’t see over the wall. ‘Down there, behind the church.’ He thought of the most interesting way to describe it, then remembered the story his grandmother liked to read to him. ‘There’s a garden there, a kind of secret garden.’

  ‘You makin’ it up.’

  ‘No, I’m not. It’s unbelievable.’ He put drama into his voice. ‘It’s got a fountain in the middle, with a tiny stream running up to it. The water comes out in a big kind of spray and the water’s blue as the sky. It’s beautiful.’

  ‘What else is there?’

  ‘Flowers. I’ve never seen them like this. Every colour of the rainbow, and some are really big – there’s a yellow one bigger than your head. Hey, wait a minute.’ He pantomimed a ship’s lookout, peering out over the waves. ‘There’s a bush in the corner, big and green, and it’s got fruit on it. Beautiful fruit.’

  ‘What kind of fruit? Apples?’

  ‘Nope. They look like oranges, only smaller. And wow!
There’s another bush, only this one’s got plums. You know those big red plums we had that time –’ they’d had a picnic, if you could call eating in the sun porch a picnic – ‘well, there’s a little tree with some on it.’ He started to climb down.

  ‘Wait,’ Duval said, with a pleading note to his voice. ‘Is there anything else?’

  Bobby jumped from the lowest branch. ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘That’s it for now. I’ll take another look the next time the ball gets stuck up there. My turn to bat.’

  Later when they went in, Duval said to him in the alleyway, ‘You sure you’re not making it up about that Secret Garden?’

  Their game had been surprisingly close, so he had forgotten all about his fantasy.

  ‘Of course not,’ he said indignantly.

  But he felt bad about fooling his friend, especially when Duval went on, ‘You know, if it was anybody but you, I wouldn’t believe them.’

  Bobby told himself the lie was harmless, but couldn’t help but think about the look on Vanetta’s face if she learned he’d tricked Duval. ‘Listen,’ he told Duval, ‘we should keep it to ourselves. You know Vanetta doesn’t like the place.’ Which was true – there was something about the Christian Scientists that Vanetta distrusted.

  ‘Good idea,’ said Duval with an eagerness that only made Bobby feel worse.

  As time passed, he felt stuck with the secret, and might eventually have confessed had not Duval so enjoyed Bobby’s accounts of life over the wall. ‘Is the yellow flowers there?’ he’d ask, and laugh gleefully if Bobby suggested a purple one had moved in and was hogging the sun. ‘That water still flowing?’ and Bobby would say yes, as if it were a matter of course and Duval shouldn’t be so stupid as to ask.

  The rain stopped at last. He fetched two bats from the closet and a baseball-sized whiffle ball. ‘Come on, Duval. It’s ball time.’

  In the kitchen Vanetta was chopping onions. She looked up. ‘You two going to be warm enough? It ain’t hardly spring out there, you know.’

  ‘We’re okay,’ said Bobby.

  In the back yard they flipped a coin and Bobby won, so he batted first, picking up one of the white ash bats stained with its natural grain. It was his favourite bat – short, only 29 inches long, but signed at the thick end Floyd Robinson, his favourite player. He’d got it free at a White Sox Bat Day.

  For once Duval threw a strike, and Bobby swung and missed. When he turned and flipped back the ball, Duval wasn’t looking and it fell onto the grass. Duval’s eyes were on three black boys who had silently entered the yard.

  They must have been twelve or thirteen years old, though one of them was as short as Bobby – a runt, thought Bobby. He was very dark, with skin the colour of cooking chocolate and a hard, mean face. Behind him stood a tall lanky kid in a Bears T-shirt, and next to him was a mulatto boy, wide-shouldered, with pigmentation stains on his face.

  Bobby saw at once that the runt must be the leader, for his two friends waited while he went up to Duval. ‘Got a dime?’ he asked.

  The standard opening gambit with the black ghetto kids who came over from the other side of the Midway. It had never happened to Bobby, but his brother Mike said it happened to him all the time. You could give the dime and not have to fight, though Mike said only a pussy would do that. But if you said no, then you might have to fight. Mike never gave them money, and he’d had lots of fights. But Mike was tough; Bobby wished he was here.

  Duval shook his head now, keeping his eyes on the runt, who pointed at Bobby. ‘Check him out, Mule,’ he said, and the mulatto boy came over to Bobby.

  ‘You got a dime?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ Bobby said truthfully, for he didn’t have any money at all. He always emptied his pockets before playing in the back. Change and his pocket comb just got in the way.

  Mule looked back at the runt, who said now to Duval, ‘What you doin’ here, man, playing with this ofay? What’s the matter wit you?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said the skinny kid, joining in, ‘you some kinda Uncle Tom?’

  Duval said nothing, and Bobby realised he was scared of these boys. And though the mulatto’s attention had switched back to the runt, Bobby was scared too. Yet Bobby felt he had to say something. ‘You’re not supposed to be here.’ He was holding the baseball bat still in one hand.

  ‘Shut the fuck up,’ said the runt and turned back to Duval. ‘I asked you a question. What you doin’ here?’

  ‘Just playing,’ said Duval softly.

  ‘Don’t give me that jive. When I asks somebody a question I want an answer.’ He spoke with a slight lisp, but there was nothing funny about it – it made him even more menacing. He held his arms down by his waist, like a cowboy getting ready to draw. Duval was standing frozen; Bobby could see his eyes blinking furiously behind his glasses.

  Out of nowhere the runt’s right hand landed against Duval’s left ear. Astonished and hurt by the blow, Duval put a hand up to the side of his head, and accidentally knocked his own glasses off.

  Bobby moved to pick them up before they got stepped on. But the boy called Mule blocked his way, then shoved him backwards, hard enough for Bobby to stumble and almost drop the bat. He gripped it tightly, worried these boys would try and steal it.

  Mule took a step forward and clenched his fist. Bobby wanted to run but Mule’s bulk blocked his way. As the mulatto boy’s fist moved in a roundhouse arc through the air, Bobby instinctively raised his right arm, which was holding the bat.

  The bat shuddered in his hand. ‘Shee-it!’ Mule screamed. He began walking in small circles, clutching his right hand, blowing on its fingers in a desperate effort to ease his pain. ‘Goddamn!’ he shouted. His friends stared wonderingly at him, and Bobby realised that Mule had punched the bat instead of him.

  As the pain began to subside, Mule stopped walking. He glared at Bobby. ‘I’m gonna get you, motherfucker,’ he said, his teeth clenched. He took a threatening step towards him; again out of instinct, Bobby raised the bat in the air and Mule stopped in his tracks. Bobby realised now that the bat was a weapon, not just baseball equipment, and emboldened by this discovery he took a step towards Mule, raising the bat high in the air.

  Mule moved away, stepping backward so quickly that he bumped into the skinny kid in the Bears T-shirt, who was himself so frightened that he pushed at Mule, desperate to keep him between himself and the baseball bat.

  ‘Be cool, man,’ the runt said. Mule retreated to the back fence. The skinny boy had his hands up and looked absolutely petrified.

  ‘Just go,’ said Bobby, trying to sound forceful. There must have been a faltering note to his voice which the runt heard, because he didn’t back up. For a moment Bobby thought he might actually come forward – he seemed fearless.

  But the runt stepped sideways instead, landing his foot quite purposely on Duval’s glasses. ‘Come on,’ he shouted, and all three of them ran out of the yard, Mule still holding his wrist.

  Bobby went and picked up the glasses – one lens was shattered like crushed ice, and the frames were badly bent. He handed them gingerly to Duval. ‘I’m sorry, Duval.’

  Duval didn’t say anything, but folded them and put them in his shirt pocket. He looked dazed.

  Upstairs Vanetta was still ironing in the kitchen, and as they came in she took in at once that something was wrong. ‘What’s happened?’ she said, sitting the iron on the board.

  ‘Some boys came into the yard and wanted money,’ said Duval. He added quickly, ‘They didn’t get none.’

  Either out of relief or shock, Bobby started to cry.

  ‘They hurt you?’ Vanetta said to Bobby. He shook his head, and started to wipe his eyes, embarrassed that he was crying and Duval wasn’t.

  ‘He hurt them, Vanetta,’ Duval crowed.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked and pointed at Duval’s glasses. ‘They break your glasses?’

  Duval nodded.

  She unplugged the iron, setting it upright on the board, then untied her apron. ‘Shit,’
she said, which was very rare. Bobby had only heard her swear like that when he’d scared her once, jumping out of the linen closet down the hall, shouting boo. Now she grabbed a broom and started towards the door, her jaw set in determination. ‘They still out there?’

  ‘They’re gone, Vanetta,’ said Bobby. ‘They ran away.’

  She put the broom against the wall. ‘You sure they didn’t hurt you?’

  ‘One of them slapped me up side the head,’ said Duval. ‘But I’m all right. They was gonna hurt Bobby, but he hit one of them with the bat.’ He pointed to Floyd Robinson, lying on the kitchen table. ‘Bobby was brave. He stuck up for me.’

  Bobby didn’t say a word. He knew he had been brave by accident.

  That evening when Vanetta said goodnight, she hugged Bobby fiercely. ‘That’s for being brave,’ she said. ‘You two just like Damon and Pythias.’

  ‘Who?’ he asked, certain it must be people from the Bible. It almost always was.

  ‘Friends who helped each other when they needed it.’

  Duval appeared with his coat on. ‘Come on, baby,’ she said affectionately, and turned to Bobby. ‘And goodnight, my other baby. Though you two is getting too big to call you babies any more. You be fine young men quicker than I can spit.’

  After this Bobby felt even closer to Duval, though he remained embarrassed that his friend thought he had been heroic. They still played whiffle ball in the back, though Bobby was nervous the first few times, and kept a bat within reach, even when it was his turn to pitch. The safety of their play had been lost, and now when he climbed the maple to fetch the ball, he was reluctant to describe the Secret Garden. When Duval insisted, he would give only the most perfunctory account – ‘No new flowers, the fountain’s not got much pressure today.’ Somehow the fantasy had lost all its allure, especially since Duval seemed so unalterably gullible.

  Though in other respects, Duval was more worldly than Bobby. Once a month or so Vanetta’s older sister Trudy would come to the apartment, usually when Vanetta had fallen too far behind in the ironing to get through it all without help. She was as grumpy as Vanetta was cheerful, but Bobby liked her just the same. If you talked baseball her mood would lighten, and when he mentioned Hoyt Wilhelm, the ancient relief pitcher who seemed old enough to be Bobby’s grandfather, the sour expression on her face would change to a grin, and she’d give a snorting laugh. ‘That ol’ Wilhoun,’ she’d say, ‘ain’t he something?’