“Your mother has never told me a word of any such a cock-and-bull story, and I never heard such a vicious charge in all my life, and I don’t want to hear it! She’s descended from a fine French family, on her mother’s side, and that’s all I want to know. Why, good God Almighty, are you trying to make out your own mother—my wife—is a nigger?”
“I’m not trying to make her out anything, Dad.”
“The whole story is a dirty libel, and if anybody but you dared to repeat it, he’d get himself clapped into jail pretty darn quick, let me tell you, and you can quote me on that. There’s not one drop of blood in you that’s either Chippewa or nigger!”
“Can’t you say Negro?”
“No, I can’t and I won’t and I don’t intend to, and I’ll tell you right now–-My God, boy, your own father ought to know something about your ancestors, and I can tell you, you haven’t one iota of inferior or barbaric blood in you and I ought to know, hadn’t I—I’ve studied bacteriology! Oh, Neil, my dear boy, in the name of all that’s holy, try to understand the ghastly seriousness of this! Even if it were true, you’d have to conceal it, for your mother’s sake—your daughter’s. Got to!”
“Dad, I’ve been trying to, but I don’t know how much longer I can do it. And I’m not sure I entirely want to. I’m not sure but that I have more affection for a lot of supposed colored folks than I do for most of the whites.”
“You can’t say that! It’s insane, it’s treachery, it’s treason to your own race and country and religion—and it would be very bad for you in your job at the bank! Say, uh–-Who was this frontier impostor?”
“Xavier Pic. P-I-C.”
“How did you ever get the idea this fellow was colored?”
“From Gramma Julie, from the Historical Society, from Xavier’s own letters.”
He wanted to spare this kindly, rustic man, his father, but he had to enlist against Wilbur Feathering, and he could not see that his mother would do ill to consort with Mary Woolcape more than with Mrs. Feathering.
Dr. Kenneth was shaky, at the end; he begged of Neil, “You’ve simply got to keep all this dark till I can think it over and get my head around it.”
This, Neil realized, meant Forever, but he gave what sounded even to himself like a promise.
* * * * *
On that cold fall evening in Neil’s living-room, a room dark-blue and maroon, with the formal ship’s-clock that was the denomination of Grand Republic respectability, Biddy cut out paper dolls and stayed up much later than was allowed—as usual, Vestal wrote letters and listened to a hockey game on the radio, and Neil looked at the Business & Finance notes in Time and perceived, in the flushing and paling quiver of the electric fire, that none of this Negro nonsense need exist, none at all, and that he had been monstrous not to have known better how his father would take it.