Lancelot

grandfather before me. But instead of telling them Eleanor Roosevelt jokes as he did, I gave them scholarly disquisitions on the beauty of plantation life, somewhat tongue-in-cheek—to see how far I could go without getting a rise from these good Midwestern folk—hell, I found out it’s impossible to get a rise from them, they hate the niggers worse than we ever did. Things are not so simple as they seem, I told them. There is something to be said for the master-slave relation: the strong, self-reliant, even piratical master who carves a regular barony in the wilderness and lives like Louis XIV, yet who treats his slaves well, and so help me they weren’t so bad off on Belle Isle. They became first-class artisans, often were given their freedom, and looked down on the white trash. “Now take a look at this slave cabin, ladies and gentlemen. Is it so bad? Nice high ceilings, cool rooms, front porch, brick chimney, cypress floors. Great arching oaks back yard and front. Do you prefer your little brick bungalow in Lansing?” They watched me carefully to catch the drift and either nodded seriously or laughed. It’s impossible to insult anybody from Michigan.
    On winter afternoons it began to get dark early—five o’clock. Elgin would build us a fire and Margot and I would have several drinks before supper.
    During the day I found myself looking forward to radio news on the hour. At night we watched TV and drank brandies. After the ten o’clock news I had usually grown sleepy enough to go to bed.
    So what was my discovery? that for the last few years I had done nothing but fiddle at law, fiddle at history, keep up with the news (why?), watch Mary Tyler Moore, and drink myself into unconsciousness every night.
    Now I remember almost everything, except—Every event in the past, the most trivial imaginable, comes back with crystal clarity. It’s that one night I blank out on—no, not blank out, but somehow can’t make the effort to remember. It seems to require a tremendous effort to focus on. What I remember is that miserable Janos Jacoby looking up at me, the firelight in the trees … The headlines come back.
    SCION CRAZED BY GRIEF. RESTRAINED FROM ENTERING HOUSE. HANDS BURNED .
    That night. I can’t get hold of it. Oh, I try to, but my mind slides back to the past or forward to the future.
    I can remember perfectly what happened years ago, like the time we, you and I, were riding down the river on a fraternity-sorority party and were passing Jefferson Island, which lies between Mississippi and Louisiana, was claimed by both states, and in a sense belonged to neither, a kind of desert island in the middle of the U.S., so you, drinking and solitary as usual, said to no one in particular: “I think it would be nice to spend a few days in such a place,” pulled off your coat, and dove off the Tennessee Belle (that was an “act” too, wasn’t it?); I, of course, having to go after you as usual, taking just time enough to wrap some matches in a tobacco pouch, and even so it took me three hours to find you huddled shivering under a log, looking bluer than Nigger Jim and more emaciated than usual; you, ever the one to do the ultimate uncalled-for thing—I never really knew whether it was a real thing or a show-off thing. And do you know, I’ve often wondered whether your going off to the seminary out of a clear sky was not more of the same—the ultimate reckless lifetime thing. Hell, you were not Christian let alone Catholic as far as anyone could notice. So wasn’t it just like your diving off the Tennessee Belle to go from unbeliever to priest, leapfrogging on the way some eight hundred million ordinary Catholics? Was that too an act, the ultimate show-off thing or the ultimate splendid thing? You shrug and smile. And as if that weren’t enough, you weren’t content to be an ordinary priest. Father John from New Orleans; no, you had to take off for Uganda or was it Biafra? You had to go to medical school and outdo Albert Schweitzer, because of course that was outdoing even him, wasn’t it, because you had the True Faith and he didn’t, being only a Protestant.
    And it didn’t turn out too well, did it? Else why are you here?
    Something is wrong, isn’t it? Have you lost your faith? or is it a woman?
    Is that all you can do, look at me with that same old hooded look? You smile and shrug. Christ, you