When they were drinking coffee in the living-room and everybody was suffering and waiting for the end of the bad farce, Biddy came down in pajamas, quite illicitly. She stood in front of Ash, looked polite and solicitous, and chanted, “Oh, your face is dirty!”
Even Vestal was shocked, but Ash smiled, with “No, that’s just my tan, young lady.”
“Did you go to Florida and get tanned? My dolls have just been to Florida. They stayed at Palm Beach and they said it was very expensive. Or did you drink too much coffee? My mummy says if I drink coffee before I’m sixteen, I’ll get all brown, too. My, I wouldn’t like to be all brown. Don’t you mind being all brown?”
She said it with the liveliest interest and, ignoring the signals from her mother’s shaking head, she crawled into Martha’s lap and rested her head against Martha’s shoulder.
So Vestal was altogether too bright and jolly about it.
Ash looked at her more steadily than before, then glanced at Biddy with a quality of pure love, and Ash said, “No, baby, I wouldn’t mind being permanently tanned if there weren’t so many people that can’t seem to stand the sun. They like cellars and anemia better.”
“What’s denemia?” demanded Biddy.
Vestal did a Viennese operetta in the jocundity with which she caroled, “Now dearest, you skip up to bed and don’t bother Dr. and Mrs.—uh—Davis.”
* * * * *
The guests managed to get away without violence.
Vestal sobbed, “Oh, I know, I know I was horrid, but Neil, I just can’t do it. I don’t mind your being a Negro—because I don’t think you really are—I think there’s a trick in it. But I can’t stand them, or any other colored people, and there’s no use my trying.”
“You listen here!”
“Don’t scream.”
“How can I help it? Nobody could have been more well bred and intelligent than Ash and Martha, if you’d given them a chance–-”
“That’s the trouble! I’ve been brought up to believe that darkies are funny people, dancing and laughing and saying, ‘Oh, thank you, Miss Vestal, ma’am, you white folks is sure wonderful to us poor coons.’ But this Davis sketch thinks I’m just another female that’s dumb about chemistry and economics. Cellar and anemia indeed! Oh, I know I’m unreasonable, but my heart isn’t in it. And my heart has to be in anything I do now, because I’m going to have another baby.”
* * * * *
When Neil had thoroughly betrayed all his anxiety by trying to sound delighted, Vestal said gravely, “Let’s not have any guff about welcoming this little stranger. I hate it, oh, I simply hate it! I’ve been longing all day to escape somewhere where nobody knows me. I can’t stand giving birth to a Negro baby! Somehow Biddy doesn’t seem like one—I’m sure she isn’t. But now to have a black baby—I can’t do it. I want an abortion, and I don’t want one and I won’t have one, and I’m nearly crazy!”