They got a satisfactory price, in the post-war shortage. But not to own any sort of car was an acknowledgment of social death, for a Prosperous American Business Man, for a Busy and Popular Young Matron who was trying to keep up her rank while her oldest friends were staring at her as though they had just met her and didn’t think they liked her.
As a substitute for the other gifts which Biddy wanted from moment to moment, Vestal had bought for her a fifteen-cent book of “comic strips.” Looking through this enterprising literature, which in America had replaced the Brothers Grimm and The Wind in the Willows, Neil found that no few of the cartoons dealt with Negro characters, clownish and vile.
But, in weariness with sermons, he said nothing; he merely stole the opus from his own daughter and threw it into the furnace and sat down to a season of agitation about Biddy’s future as a Negro. What school, what job, what marriage would she have when It was publicly admitted?
He could hear Vestal reprimanding him, “You should have thought of all this before you went off half-cocked.”
He could hear Wilbur Feathering wallow, “H.w.y.l.y.d.t.m.a.N.?” And how, he interrogated himself, would he like to have Biddy marry a boy like Winthrop Brewster?
–-Why not, if Win would stand for anything so dictatorial and bouncing as Biddy! He’s the most charming and intelligent boy I know.
–-How incorrigibly the white man I am—Nature’s most devastating freak, after the earthquake and the bubonic plague; debating whether Winthrop is as good as his obvious inferiors, and thinking I’m such a courageous soul for debating it!
Of that debate he did not tell Vestal.
* * * * *
When Orlo Vay started off for his optical shop in the morning in his well-heated car and saw that nigger, Kingsblood, a beggar who hadn’t even a car or a hired girl, crawl off down the windy street to start his daily search for a job, and when the fellow stumbled on the snow-upholstered ice and danced and waved his arms like a human top in his effort to keep his balance, then Orlo laughed with moral joy.
But Virga, Mrs. Orlo Vay, nervously brought a maple-layer cake across the Street to Vestal who, as she furiously vacuumed and dusted the house, did not know whether to feel touched or insulted. For Mrs. Vay had belonged to a distinctly lower layer in that creamy social cake that was Sylvan Park—till now she had.
Chapter 44
Vestal did not care for this hermit business. She loved parties, all kinds of parties. She did not hold with sitting around at home and having noble principles.