I can imagine no other reason for the sudden summons to his office. It requires a conscious effort to control my anxiety as I sit on that worn leather couch, waiting for him to finish with his last patient of the day.

After the Payton women left our house this morning, Dad took his old pickup truck to work so that Annie and I would have the BMW. Having no desire to endure the glares of the local citizenry, I spent the morning in the pool with Annie, marveling at how well she moved in the water and fighting a losing battle to keep her skin covered with sun block. Mom and I had tuna sandwiches for lunch, Annie a bowl of SpaghettiOs. When the two of them drove downtown to buy Annie new shoes, I retired to the library and read T. Harry Williams’s Huey Long on the sofa until I fell asleep.

The telephone woke me at four-thirty p.m. I hated to chance answering it myself, but I thought it might be my mother.

“Penn?” said my father. “Can you drop by my office about five? Alone?”

“Sure. What’s up?”

“I think it’s time we had a talk.”

“Okay,” I said, trying to sound casual. “I’ll see you at five.”

I went to the bathroom and showered off the chlorine from the pool, then dressed in chinos and a polo shirt. Dad’s office is only a couple of miles from the house, so I read another twenty minutes in Huey Long. When I fell asleep, the Grand Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, speaking from the “imperial klonvocation” in Atlanta, had just announced that he was going to Louisiana to campaign against Huey because of his pro-Negro policies. The Kingfish stormed into the press gallery of the state senate while the legislature was in session and announced that if that “Imperial bastard” crossed the Louisiana state line, he would shortly depart “with his toes turned up.” The Klan leader wisely elected not to test the Kingfish’s sincerity. As humorous as it seemed in retrospect, Long could all too easily have backed up his threat. I could see how dictatorial power might be an asset in solving sticky problems like racism. Of course, that road also leads to the crematorium ovens.

When I got to my father’s office building, I used his private door. I’d known Anna, his chief nurse—an attractive black woman—for most of my life, but I was too curious to spend even ten minutes reminiscing about old times. I sat on the couch opposite his desk and waited in the lingering haze of cigar smoke.