As husbands do, he believed that his victory had been easy and sure, that she had forgiven him for the bad taste of being born a Negro. As wives do, even very good wives, she let him drop his guard and then she hit. Late in the dim December afternoon, a defenseless time, when they had cheerfully agreed that, yes, they’d better not go to Norton Trock’s party, she turned on him with:
“And don’t think, because I’m not kicking and screaming, that I don’t resent not being allowed to go any where, nowheres again ever, because of this idiotic stand of yours. Sometimes I begin to see the Negro in you—I hope I’ll forget it again, but I see you shambling and grinning foolishly–-”
“Is that really the way you think you see all Negroes?”
“That’s the way I know I see them, all of ‘em. And I imagine a kind of horrible shadow over your face. Oh, I’ve always hated all darkies, and their beastly simpering, that gives them away. They know they’re inferior!”
He demanded, not too cherubically, “Did you ever know any Negro, besides Belfreda?”
“Yes! You and your dumb brother, Robert, and your sisters–-Oh, I’m sorry, dear, I’m truly sorry. I’m upset. I could slap myself for saying that.”
“Saying what? It’s true, isn’t it?”
“Honestly, Neil, I’ll endure anything except your getting calm and strong and wise on me! I can’t stand that.”
But they escaped—this time—from the more ardent tortures of quarreling.
* * * * *
The Federal Club Smoker had been on Thursday, December 27th. Neil’s bank was open all day Friday and half of Saturday; it was also open on Monday, the day before New Year’s. An automaton called Our Mr. Kingsblood was in busy attendance upon those days, sitting in at a teller’s window, giving advice to veterans whose advice to himself he would have been afraid to hear, talking to Mr. Prutt about the window-cleaning service.
Prutt did a lot of throat-clearing and quick, unnecessary smiling during their talk, and Neil wondered if the miracle had come: if Prutt was going to be so heroic as to decide that this Negro myth was none of his business. He saw Prutt’s glance craftily hitch-hiking all over the place, and he realized that the good man was trying to look down at his fingernails… to see if the halfmoons were blue.
He sat as chilly as a palace guard at whom the dictator peeps too meditatively. There was the smell of death in the air. But he was safe until some customer should complain about having to do business with this colored fellow Kingsblood.
At the annual bonus-giving, when all the employees were supposed to be surprised and pleased by the bank’s fatherliness (and once in a while some of them were considerably surprised), when they were all lined up like a daisy-chain in the president’s office, Neil seemed to be still on the payroll. But just before Mr. Prutt should have handed him his envelope and his cliché, Prutt coughed, “I’ll be back, just a minute,” and Neil received the annual gilded leg-chain not from the pale, aseptic hand of the president but from the broad fist of Mr. S. Ashiel Denver.