He remembered that his father had wanted to live on to be the founder of a line of kings; remembered how handy around the house his father had been; and wondered whether the funeral would be on Sunday or on Monday; and if it was to be on Monday, would he be expected to come back to the bank that afternoon? The Veterans’ Center would certainly need him.

And remembered that his Center would never need him again.

These distractions were gone in tenderness for his mother, who would be so alone now. No, she would not be alone. She would have Joan with her. And he had just seen fit to turn them both into Negroes, with the loneliness that all Negroes have in a white community.

He plodded out of the bank in a vision of his mother alone, not daring to talk to her closest neighbor, even in this urgency of death.

Chapter 40

The office of Dr. Kenneth Kingsblood was on Chippewa Avenue, only a block from the Second National, in the Professional and Arts Building, known as the P. & A.

The lobby was so crowded with men on crutches, men with bandaged arms, blank-faced mothers with babies in their arms, that he had to wait for a third elevator. The elevator girl was pretty. She flirted with a young man in a white coat, but she smiled at Neil and said “Fifth floor—your floor,” caressingly. He marveled that she probably did not know what was awaiting him on that floor, a few feet from her cage.

It was shocking to go into the neat triviality of Dr. Kenneth’s waiting-room—the two ruddy maple chairs with tartan cushions, the maple table with a stack of picture-magazines and the always-lighted electric lamp with a shade picturing a frigate in full sail—and to see, on the maple couch with the tartan cushions, his father lying dead. His stilled head was in the shadow of the table, on which lay his engagement book, open to this morning, with a name neatly set down for half an hour from now. On the book rested his old spectacles, idle. The righthand ear-piece of the spectacles was mended with adhesive tape grown gray now, and Neil remembered that, looking gaily at him through those streaky lenses, his father had promised to step down the hall in the P. & A. and have the frame mended.

The girl assistant was looking down at the lax thin body and crying, her face red with amazement and loss.

As Neil turned to Dr. Kamber for the comfort of the medicine man, Brother Robert bumbled in, with, “Good thing you caught me at the bank, Doc. I was just going to leave for the bakery and maybe I wouldn’t of been able to get here for a long time and–-Oh, Pop, Pop! I can’t believe it, Pop! That you won’t be with us now!”