Judd Browler caught him in the lobby, and grunted, “God, I think you were an awful fool to spill the beans like that, old man, but we’ll back you up. You and Ves come in for dinner—say next Tuesday, New Year’s Day—and we’ll talk it all over. Okay? Swell!”
Chapter 37
When he walked into their living-room Vestal was in fluffy negligee and was knitting, no usual domesticity for her. “I’m afraid you’ve caught me. I’ve been making a scarf for you, but I didn’t get it done in time for Christmas, drat it, so I’m finishing it up for New Year’s and–-What is it? Neil! Why are you standing there? Oh! Neil! No! It hasn’t come out?”
“Rod Aldwick made such an attack on Negroes that I had to tell them—publicly—I’m one. Sounds curious to say ‘I’m a Negro’!”
“Curious. Yes. Yes, it does sound curious. It sounds curious to say that I’m the wife of a colored man. That Biddy is colored—and damned forever now. Yes. Curious. And we have to do something quick, to make up for your delightful public confession. I don’t know what.”
She was at the telephone, calling Dr. Kenneth, begging him to meet them at Morton Beehouse’s. She called her father and Brother Robert at the Federal Club. As she dressed, upstairs, with Neil blankly watching, she moaned, “If you just won’t say anything!”
“I’m not saying anything!”
She tried to smile. “Well then, if you just won’t not say anything, or something! I think I’m going to stand by you—or maybe you don’t want me to, any longer? Maybe I’m not even good enough to be a colored man’s wife.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“What can I think? You could do this to me. I’m pretty tough, or I thought I was, but to Biddy–-”
“Vestal, there’s no use. I guess it’s simple. If I’m a Negro, then I’m a Negro. And Judd Browler—probably a lot of others, too—back me in wanting to be honest about it.”
“I could hate you, I believe, if I put my mind to it, and yet I don’t, not now, and when I look at you, just as ruddy and red-headed and decent as ever, I don’t seem to have any revulsion, and yet–-Suppose Uncle Oliver could prove that there’s been some mistake—you’re not even a tiny bit Negro?”
“Then I’d volunteer. I prefer Ash and Evan and Phil and Sophie and the Woolcapes to Rod Aldwick and Doc Drover and Oliver Beehouse.”
“Who are all these weird people? Coons?”
Surely it was impossible that she should not know these, the most important persons living. “They are Negroes whom I prize for their kindness and courage and intelligence and–-”
“Oh nuts! You’ve become impossible!”
The residence of Mr. Morton Beehouse needs only one word: Solidity.