Neil sighed, “Okay, Ulrich, I quit. Tell the Sant Tabac boys that you fired me.”
Mr. Brandl mourned, “I want to give you a lovely reference for your next job.”
What next job?
* * * * *
Vestal was not too astonished when he walked into the house before eleven in the morning, a man out of work. “Cheer up. I knew it would come. Now I’m going to get a job myself, and keep it till Booker T. is about ready to arrive.”
“How?”
“I’ve already talked with Levi Tarr, at the Emporium. I won’t be on the counter at first, but in the marking-room. And don’t go getting proud and uxorious on me, and be offended by my working. We have to have the money.”
“I’m not going to get proud and what-is-it! I know we do.”
After seeing wartime women in uniform, in overalls, he was not so ashamed of letting her go to work as his father would have been, but he still had his young-white-gentleman worries:
“Will it be all right for Booker T.?”
(They had never agreed on this working title for the coming baby, and neither of them really approved of anything so flippant. It had chosen itself and it persisted.)
“Sure, he’s a healthy little brute. And they have a doctor’s office right in the store.”
“The other clerks will plague you, as the wife of a colored man.”
“Not me they won’t! I’ll plague back. I’m not tolerant like you, Captain! And your mother—she does face things, when she has to—she’s promised to fetch Biddy from kindergarten and keep her afternoons till I get back. Oh, it won’t be so bad. And some day—I’ve been thinking; all this prejudice against you simply must cease. Isn’t this the Land of the Noble Free? I hear so. In a couple years you’ll be in the dough again, and I can stay home with Biddy and Booker and recline on my new chaise longue and say to my maid, very languid, ‘Bring me my nail-polish, Anzolette, and just pop your head out of the window, will you, and see if little Master Booker is playing around in his helicopter.’ Oh, Neil, Neil, he will be white then, when all this is over, he will be white, won’t he!”
She did go to work at Tarr’s. Apparently she was quick and competent, and soon she was selling furniture, on which she was an expert—by a Sylvan Park standard. Apparently no one dared to mock her, twice.
Neil rose before seven, got her breakfast, bullied Biddy into resuming the burdens of life, waved good-bye to the family wage-earner when she hurried off, washed the dishes and swept the house, took Biddy to kindergarten. But instead of feeling degraded and made small, he was pleased that he could do this little for Vestal, and pleased that there was this one place where he could work without rebuke for being black.