The doorbell. Vestal answered. She came back with a casual, “There’s a colored woman here wants to see you—something about some relief committee.” She went back to her letters with no instinctive fear in her, though she had let in Sophie Concord.
Sophie was urgent:
“No, we’ll just stand here in the hall. Speak low. I’ve been talking to Evan Brewster. We—your friends—we don’t think you should come out as a Negro, and we’re scared you’re up to something melodramatic. With us, it’s been ground into us from birth, but we don’t see why you should have to take it, and as a white man you can do just as much for the race. How we will milk you for contributions! Neil, don’t say anything! I could have telephoned you this, but I did want to see your house and your baby and see your wife again. She’s beautiful, like a race-horse. They’re your sort, all right. Good night, my dear, and shut up!”
Sophie was gone, into a filtering of gray snow.
In the living-room, Vestal mumbled, “Who was the gal?”
“A city nurse. Miss Concord.”
“Oh…. Oh, Neil, did I tell you that Jinny Timberlane has the cutest embroidered blue-wool suit from an Austrian shop in New York? I think I’ll get one like it.”
That seemed to Neil altogether reasonable.
And so, without communicating his reason, without consulting Neil, Dr. Kenneth Kingsblood in mid-November summoned a council of the entire family.
Chapter 34
Neil was at an evening meeting of the financial committee at the Federal Club when his father telephoned, “Your mother and I want to see you immediately. It’s important. Can you stop by at the house in not over forty minutes? Good.”
That there was to be a council, even that Vestal was to be there, Neil did not guess. He came into the narrow, Brussels-carpeted hall of his father’s house, into the “front-parlor,” whistling, and stopped at the spectacle of the entire family, beneath the pictures of Pilgrim Fathers and sleigh-rides and Venice, sitting on the imitation-petit-point chairs, on the egg-yolk-yellow couch, on the floor, looking at one another and at souvenir ash-trays and an Album of the New York World’s Fair.
Including Vestal and Neil and his parents, there were fifteen worriers gathered, none of them except Dr. Kenneth knowing why they had been summoned: Brother Robert and Alice, with her brother, who was none other than Harold W. Whittick, the entrepreneur of radio and advertising; Sister Kitty and her husband, Charles Sayward, the attorney; Joan, Neil’s unwed sister; the tribe of Saxinar—Uncle Emery and Aunt Laura and Pat. To make it all legal, Dr. Kenneth had also gathered in the portly presences of Vestal’s father, Morton Beehouse, and his brother Oliver, dean of the Grand Republic bar and the only connoisseur of Napoleon brandy and of the odes of Pindar in town.