After everyone had gone, Theda told her a little more about Cletus. He’d been in Carmel in the twenties and had known all the Negro poets who’d formed a little community there. No, he’d never married but he’d been in love with a woman for a long time, so long that people didn’t gossip about it any more. She was married to a party functionary—she’d been a cabaret dancer, from the South, Theda thought, and Cletus used to hang around their house, fighting with the functionary about party matters, while Leora served up her perfect little suppers on a white tablecloth. Somebody’d said she was half Mexican. And Cletus wasn’t interested in anyone else? Oh, well, he’d had a girl now and then over the ten years Theda had known him. He was nice to them. She supposed he took them to bed. But what he really liked to do was to teach them. Cletus knew a lot. He’d gone to Howard University in Washington. It had caused a fearful ruckus in the family because his stepmother wanted him to go to a white college. But Cletus wouldn’t budge. He went where he intended. He was a good friend, said Theda. Party people were really down on him. “I heard Calvin Schmitter almost call him a ‘bad nigger’ once and then bite on it and swallow it and turn green.”

The place was a mess. They cleaned for two hours. Theda discovered a gallon of red wine behind a broom in the closet. “We’ll drink this,” she said, “and make the time fly.”

“How is it people can hang around the party? I thought…I had some idea it was underground.”

“Not here. Not now. In some cases I suppose it is. But since the popular front—it’s not like the old days, Palmer raids and all of that. Oh, it’s too long! I don’t feel like talking about it. I’m out, you know. I’ve quit it.”

“How do you quit?”