Lancelot

great oaks; they seemed so sad and used up and self-canceling. Five good drinks and they seemed themselves.
    It’s not that I can’t remember. It’s all there, what happened, spread out like a map, but I have trouble collecting my thoughts, focusing. Perhaps I remember too well like memorizing a speech, reciting it a dozen times before the mirror, then when the time comes to speak, you can’t come up with the first word.
    Once my father told me he had a recurring waking nightmare. What if one should simply fail in what one set out to do in life, fail utterly, cannot remember the first word, have the first thought, carry out the simplest action, complete the simplest task? Like an actor forgetting his lines and bringing the whole play to an awful embarrassing halt. What if one should rise to address the jury and forget? (My father had a Harvard law degree but never practiced.) Secretly I believe he was afraid that of all the people on earth he alone would fail and the world would come to an end out of shame for him.
    With such a fear, what happens to a man? Nothing. He didn’t, couldn’t, try anything for fear the world would come to an end if he failed. So he became editor of the second best of the two weekly newspapers in a country parish, suffered from “weak lungs” whatever that is, not tuberculosis but a “tendency” toward it, and was a semi-invalid, spending his days writing poems and little historical vignettes. The high point of his life came when he was elected Poet Laureate of Feliciana Parish by the Kiwanis Club.
    Let me tell you the family secret which not even you know, though you know everything else. But do you know that I honestly believe that his wife, my mother, Lily, cuckolded him too? I remember Uncle Harry, also called Buster, a distant cousin of hers, a handsome beefy Schenley salesman, ex-Realsilk salesman, who was always in and out of Belle Isle when I was a child. No one was gladder to see him than I because he brought the most expensive toys, Erector sets, scout knives with twenty blades, and would throw me ten feet in the air—happiness! squeals! Children are more easily bribed than cocker spaniels. And there was my father reclining on a lounge chair under an afghan on the upper gallery looking down the oak alley and writing poems which were not as good as Longfellow’s Evangeline, which is bad enough, but like it, and gentle historical vignettes whenever he located another old “non-Roman” church. Uncle Harry would come roaring up in his Buick convertible and holler out: I’m taking everybody joyriding to False River. My father would insist that Mother go: she needed the air: Suellen can look after me, can’t you, Suellen? “Sho now, you go on ahead. Miss Lily, you ain’t been anywhere all summer.” And off they’d go, we’d go—I sometimes but not always—“joyriding.” Christ, joyriding! Jesus, do you really imagine that—? Of course the question is not why but why not. Ha ha, what a laugh in a way. Because we were such an honorable family. And of course here is the most intriguing question of all: Did my father know all along?
    You look so unhappy. Who are you unhappy for? Me? Lily? My father? Sinful suffering humanity? Your own sunk melancholy family? Are you playing the priest now?
    Elgin? Yes, you’re right. It was Elgin I was talking about. Yes. No. Wait. I did mention a map. It wasn’t a map. It was a floor plan. I remember. I gave Elgin the floor plan of the Holiday Inn which I had gotten that very afternoon from my Uncle Lock. Bushrod Laughlin Lamar, who operated it.
    â€œElgin, here is a floor plan of the Holiday Inn.”
    â€œYes, sir.” He took it. It could have been his pay check for all the reaction he showed. Does anything white people do ever surprise blacks?
    â€œHere’s a problem where you might be able to help me. You don’t need to know the details. It is enough to say that I am concerned about my daughter Lucy, who is young and impressionable and may have gotten into some difficulties with drugs. But first I have to have the facts, beginning with where she goes, how she spends her time.”
    Elgin squinted hard at the floor plan as if he expected to see Lucy.
    â€œWhat I want you to do is this. I want you to register at the Holiday Inn for the next three nights and keep a log of her comings and goings. You know, the film crew is