Stanley was born during the war, in the generation that produced Frederick Gregory, the first Negro spaceman, as they anointed him, and Hugh Price, lawyer and activist for his own. But Stanley was not among them. His mother was past youth when he was conceived; Reverend Payne, a grandfather. Kay’s husband was a diplomat in love with a man, and then another man—he’d never been able to turn his longing to Kay.

She kept the fact of Stanley a secret from Reverend Payne, and her legal, closeted husband agreed to give the infant his name. Kay, Norwegian, produced a ginger baby with convincingly blue eyes. She saw no way to raise him in between—one half of him had to sleep. His putative father was delighted with his not-actual offspring. Stanley was raised with unexpected love—he often thought it was the only lasting kind—by two people who had dreaded his arrival. It was only later that he wished he had grown up in LeDroit Park. This was why he now lived in Blagden Alley.

All this only Adam had pulled from him over many years. Adam had persisted—been eager, even—to learn Stanley’s past. It wasn’t clean for Stanley. Adam first knew him when these people, no longer Negroes or colored and suddenly black, were chic to a certain kind of man; he wondered whether Adam’s friendship grew from that spume, and even at times, whether it had reached sturdy places anywhere along the way.

Stanley sensed, rightly, wrongly, his mind flitted always, that Adam would not have listened to Stanley’s newsroom impressions if not for Stanley’s parentage. Stanley saw he was maybe not more than that old trope—the mammy who knew better than Scarlett, the Remus to Bobby Driscoll. He felt sure Adam was dead to this. In his worst moments, Stanley saw himself using Adam. It was then that he most hated his own ornate manipulation of his more powerful confidant—all done for Stanley’s own private grandiosity, for the tempting of Stanley’s ego into believing it was he, not Adam, who ran the Room. From not very far away, Stanley saw himself too clearly.

“To dismiss her, to say no,” Adam said, “to say … Well, it wasn’t me, it was her who said no. Do you think she meant yes?”

Stanley tried to see past this frazzle. He was surprised that something had vibrated in Adam about Mabel. Mabel was a woman Adam should dislike. No, Stanley thought, nothing that active. Adam should be indifferent to a Mabel.