This would be the Mon ey Bar. Juliana felt a moment’s panic.

Gordon had never been to the Mon ey Bar. Gordon never heard of the Mon ey Bar. Gordon rarely drank, he had no interest in bars, student pubs. As an undergraduate at a small liberal arts college, he hadn’t belonged to a fraternity. Juliana would not have thought to mention the Mon ey Bar to him, but Gordon’s father had stayed at the Commodore previously, and he insisted on having drinks in the Mon ey Bar before dinner.

Steeling herself for entering the Mon ey Bar with her fiancé and his father and being greeted by the bartender in a way to embarrass her, but—of course—Juliana’s bartender-friend knew to betray no recognition or surprise at seeing her with them, as if Juliana were a total stranger.

Thinking, with relief—Invisible in the Mon ey Bar!

For wasn’t that the promise of all such neon-lit places?—invisibility, anonymity.

As a previous guest at the Commodore, Mr. Kechel was familiar with the campy, crude cartoon monkeys on the walls of the Mon ey Bar, which he identified as thinly disguised representations of African Americans and found amusing; Juliana was shocked by the matter-of-fact remark, as by the amusement, and looking now at the cavorting monkeys, thick-lipped, with nappy hair and bulging eyes, she saw that Mr. Kechel was surely correct. Except these were ugly, racist caricatures, not amusing. (One of the grinning baby monkeys was even eating a large slice of watermelon …) Juliana felt a retroactive shame, so long she’d patronized the Mon ey Bar oblivious to the demeaning cartoons.

“You seem disapproving, Julie—that is, Juliana. Are you a civil rights person?” Mr. Kechel asked with exaggerated politeness.

If Mr. Kechel was being ironic, Juliana chose not to react.

“I am, I guess. Yes. That seems only common sense.”

“Common sense? How so?”

“Civil rights means ‘rights for all.’ Protecting us, too.”

“Us? Who is ‘us’?”

Juliana paused. A demon urged her to say white folks. Instead she said, with schoolgirl earnestness, “All Americans. All of us.”

Juliana’s earnestness was a rebuke to Norman Kechel’s playfulness, and momentarily dampening.

It was a surprise, and not an unpleasant surprise, to see that Mr. Kechel was nothing like his son. In the first instant you detected something playful, mirthful, unyielding in his manner, in the very ease of his smile. Here was a successful man. Here was a man who thought well of himself, who radiated an air of equanimity, secure in the knowledge that no one would contradict or oppose him.

He wore expensive, well-cut clothes designed to flatter his thickened body—by their look, Brooks Brothers. He was carefully groomed, with impeccably barbered hair, a smooth-shaven heavy jaw. White shirt, white cuffs. Cuff links. Not a handsome man, with a blunt face, large nose, close-set eyes, yet in his presence you looked at no one else; you wanted only to impress such a man, to make him smile, laugh, appraise you as a man appraises a woman—frankly, appreciatively. “You didn’t tell me, Gordon—she’s gorgeous. And the name is—Juli-ana?”