All the Voices

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Text originally published in 1960 under the same title.

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Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

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ALL THE VOICES

BY

MURRAY GITLIN

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 4

I 5

II 25

III 37

IV 44

V 81

VI 89

VII 100

VIII 108

IX 112

X 120

XI 131

XII 137

XIII 148

XIV 168

XV 176

XVI 180

XVII 187

XVIII 200

XIX 210

XX 213

XXI 222

XXII 232

XXIII 243

XXIV 256

XXV 259

XXVI 267

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 278

DEDICATION

To Rhoda

I

THE train from Paris stopped at every bridge, for at every bridge workers were laying ties and sections of rail as they followed the trajectory of the wartime flights of the bombers; and at shambles called railroad stations, the cry of the vendors selling black market cigarettes, ham sandwiches, pop and fruit was like the black cry of crows in empty fields; but the Italian air was like the song of warblers, high, clear and painted, and the people at the stations, huddled together with their bundles, parcels and infants, were warm and shabby and as brown as the earth.

In the compartment next to Claude’s, the eyes of the English-woman invited him in to share her next drink. In the middle of the night, during one of the many lurchings of the train, the connecting door between them had flown open—or was opened, he thought. Her light was on and she stood facing his berth, dressed in blue silk dressing robe and a lighter blue silk nightgown. Claude was too involved with his anticipations of Rome and his assignment to a job still undefined for him, and did not go in. She, either to make conversation or to lead him into something more engaging, explained the next morning that the bombings of London had made an insomniac of her. The train arrived at Rome in a downpour seventy-two hours out of Paris. They walked down toward what looked like the station, exchanging addresses, he toward a cab and she toward the arm of a waiting relative with a car.

He had already been assigned by the Paris office to a hotel a short distance from the station. He had expected an Italian atmosphere, but as he entered the lobby he was reminded of a convention in the States. The tone was strictly social worker despite the semi-military uniforms worn by a few of the men. The conventioners were sipping cocktails, coffee and tea at the bar and at little tables across the rear of the lobby, and invoking in conversation the esoteric of Rome’s caves, temples, ancient forums, and the places to miss. The hotel was one of a dozen taken over by foreign rehabilitation agencies under their authority as victors in war.

Claude registered and went up to his sixth-floor room where from the window he studied the bleak deserted street below, and the dilapidated, formless shape of that section of the city which had not been rebuilt since Roman times.

When the rain stopped, Claude went out, but the effect on foot was no better. Paris streets he had known through the eyes of Victor Hugo and Balzac and the streets had awakened memories of his vicarious participation in the city’s history. The names were familiar: Charlemagne, Louis the Fat, the sixteenth Louis, Robespierre, Napoleon. Here, in Rome, he could not identify with Romulus and Remus, Caesar, Nero, the Templars marching through on the way to Jerusalem. For a week in Paris, while waiting for the Rome office to make up its mind where a place could be found for him and his experience, he could not sleep for listening to the tumbrels and the musketfire of the French Revolution. Even the eating of a croissant (brioches were missing in the boulangerie because of lack of butter) or the drinking of ersatz coffee was a participation in the past, a communion with the body and soul of Jean Valjean. Though here in Rome, the espresso and cappuccino were better, they would not keep him awake as Paris had done for days on weaker coffee. Though Paris after nine in the autumn evenings of 1946 was a dead city, he had nevertheless found channels of lifeblood in its deserted streets; Rome was the Middle East, its skin swarthy, but lacking the personality of the colored race. So he bought six persimmons, went back to his room and ate them all before going down to the restaurant.

Some quality about this man Salem Pike, who was interviewing him, would not go down. There was perhaps too much eagerness to please, mixed with a kind of stage hardness of the busy executive.

What kind of work do you think you’d like to do here, Depler?

What kind do you have?

There’s Emigration.

What else?

We could use a man to get our warehouses functioning right.

Is that the best you can do?

The camps. That’s a tough job.

I’m listening.

We have six children’s homes. That’s another headache. The training centers. We have twenty-six of those. An even bigger headache.

Claude asked how many refugees UFRC was taking care of.

UNRRA has primary responsibility, Ufrac’s is supplementary. About fifteen thousand.

Where do they come from?

Russia, Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia.

Where are they headed for?

"That’s the little factor called x."

I suppose most of them are what was left of the concentration camps.

About fifty, sixty per cent. The rest were with the Partisans, in hiding, escapees from communism. So, Depler, what would you like?

Claude replied that he would like to work directly with the people.

That’s a lower echelon job. Your salary puts you into the executive classification. When you join the ranks, your classification changes. I don’t make the rules, Paris does.

It doesn’t look as if there’s an emergency.

The glamour of the emergency days is over, Depler. We work under the pressure of reality. I’ll give you a few days to look around. Get one of our cars and a driver to take you over to some of the camps. Look things over. Something may break in the meantime. You’ve been assigned an office and secretary.

Isn’t that a little premature?

We do things our own way, said Pike. Paris is Paris, Rome is Rome. And a bit of advice. Drink wine instead of the water. Don’t overdo the spaghetti or you’ll eat yourself out of your suit.

Claude telephoned the Englishwoman. Delighted to accept his dinner invitation, she offered to call for him at his hotel in her aunt’s car, but Claude said he would rather see Rome on foot. They met at the Trevi Fountain, pitched in several coins; then, both hungry, they chose a restaurant nearby.

A two and one-half liter straw-encased bottle of red wine provided the first topic of their conversation. Unable to tell the waiter in Italian, which neither of them spoke or understood, that they wanted only a small bottle, and uninformed of the custom of paying only for what you consumed, the capacity of the stomach and brain intrigued their scientific curiosity. So they drank to the bottom, each had two desserts and two coffees, and a cognac. The wine should have driven his mind forward to her not inconsiderable charm and fresh scent, but as they wandered arm-in-arm through the streets and alleys, stopping once for another glass of wine in a dark, cask-lined basement tavern, the wine carried her off on a mystical sea in which all Rome was now floating. Dark figures in long soutanes approached and disappeared in the drizzle, carabinieri in pairs hovered cold in doorways and horse-drawn cabs rattled by, leaving behind them sudden echoes of slaves thrown to the lions, of Roman patricians steaming their wine-soaked flesh in ancient terme.

At Piazza Venezia, they turned right toward the staircase leading up to Michelangelo’s Campidoglio, and stood in its center gaping like awed peasants at Marcus Aurelius on his once-golden steed. Through drizzle and brown-out Roma Eterna loitered on the rampart behind the Old Senate building, and beyond in the dark valley and hill of the Roman Forum. In this setting, the woman became a figure in the landscape and thus of no personal interest for him. Later Claude took her in a cab to her aunt’s near the Piazza Ungheria. That night Rome got in his bloodstream. He did not bother getting in touch with her again.

Refugees entered his office humbly, hesitatingly, as if expecting to be thrown out, but, once admitted and greeted, opened fire. Their voices grew shrill, bitter, defiant, and withal weak. Invariably they compared their lot to their peers’, that is, others in other refugee camps. Others—and it was always of others they spoke—were receiving more food and clothing, more canned goods and skim milk powder with which to barter for cash with the Italians. They preached a sort of egalitarian misery. Upholders of dynamic democracy, they threatened to send their complaints to the head of the organization in New York City, and if need be, to the Congress of the United States. In Bari, they said, it was a known fact that the warehousemen were thieving bags of sugar and flour, later to be sold on the black market. In Cinecittà, they said, old suits of clothing were being exchanged for new.

Claude promised to look into these matters. When he made his first visit to a camp, which had once been an army barrack, a crowd gathered as he got out of the jeep.

Mister Director, have you come here to listen or not to listen?

Mister Director, where’s the sugar we were promised? Is it hiding under the jeep?

They come, we talk, they nod their heads, but they eat at Alfredo’s and we eat slop.

Mister Director, would you like to have some caviar? Bring out the caviar, fellows.

Claude smiled. I’ve never had caviar, he said. Yes, bring out the caviar.

Don’t they have caviar in America?

Mister Director, how long do I have to wait before I can get into the Rest Home? Do I have to know somebody there? Does my name have to be spelled different?

From the other end of the compound a tall thin man in a long leather coat came forward. The crowd made way.

Mister Depler?

Yes.

I am the camp president. Bronko Effit is my name.

They shook hands.

All right, everybody, is that all you got to do? Let’s have a little dignity around here. They moved back, scattered and soon were gone. They enjoy it, Effit said. Let’s go to my place.

They moved slowly across the length of the compound.

You are new to the work?

Yes, Claude said.

They tell me you’re not like the rest. Most of the Americans around here put on a God Almighty act.

This is my first visit here.

I know. But some of our people have been in your office already.

I gave them nothing and promised them nothing.

But you listened. A man feels he’s a man when he’s complaining, shouting, accusing, and the other fellow listens and doesn’t show him the door. Shall we go inside?

The barrack had been divided into cubicles by seven-foot pieces of wallboard. Across the tops of these makeshift walls were draped underwear, towels, diapers and bedsheets, airing or drying. Effit had divided his section into two rooms. In the larger half was an old sofa, its springs touching the floor, a table and two chairs. It was clean and cold. A small wood stove was in a corner, unlit.

You live alone? Claude asked.

Alone.

Thumbtacked to a wall was a snapshot of a woman in her early thirties, standing under a tree, Effit beside her. The woman held a child in her arms; another child was holding Effit’s hand.

Yes, Effit said, that was it. The worst part of the situation here is the not knowing what next. I know that Ufrac is doing what it can, but a man wants to know what next.

How long have you been in this camp?

In this one, one year. Before that another year when the camps were in the south.

What does the Emigration Office hold out?

Nothing. I have a spot on my lungs. That leaves me out. Your country, Canada, Australia, no country wants a man with a spot on his lung. If I were a lumberjack, a farmer or a young man of twenty-five with strong muscles, I’d be settled somewhere by now.

Claude glanced again at the photo on the wall. The woman wore a tight-fitting coat and a Russian hat. It was a winter scene, with heavy snow on the ground.

In the meantime, Effit said, life must go on. We need more training centers. This camp has eighteen hundred people in it. They get on each other’s nerves. You can’t go to the toilet without meeting your neighbor. We need more teachers for the youngsters. Life must go on.

What about the UNRRA people?

The commandant here is an Englishman. Did you ever find an Englishman you could really talk to? They don’t listen and they have nothing here. He pointed to his heart.

You were in a concentration camp during the war?

No, with the Partisans.

And the rest of the people here?

Mixed. Some from the concentration camps, a few Partisans, some were in hiding, some just picked up after the war and ran because life for them where they were was a graveyard.

Do you think the UFRC is doing as much as it can?

No.

How do you see it?

I see it this way: there are those in the Rome office that you could talk to from now until heaven splits open—their hearts are frozen. They’re the ones who decide our fate. The others are afraid to open their mouths. If they do, those that sit at the top desks stick their fingers in and hold their tongues.

I hear complaints about thieving.

It happens. But not at this camp.

At the warehouses.

That can’t be prevented. Can it be prevented in your country? What could I accomplish here, outside of listening?

Try to get those at the desks to listen.

How?

By making them come out here to the camps to see how people five. Pike hasn’t been out here yet. Can that man give those who hired him a genuine picture of how we live? Once in a while somebody brings a visitor, alone or with his wife trailing after. We had a pair here last week. They wept when they saw how we lived. They will go back to the United States and weep some more, and no doubt the tears won’t he wasted, for others, seeing them weep, will also weep, but these weepers have no influence anywhere. They don’t pass the immigration laws and they don’t control the hearts of those who don’t weep.

I’m told that there are quite a few who live off the black market.

I wish there were more. Live off the black market? The black market would collapse overnight if it depended on us. What have we got to sell? A little skim milk powder which none of us knows how to use and we don’t like? A few rags? A can of meat which nobody here wants because we are not used to eating from cans? The oatmeal which nobody wants? And what do the black market operators exchange all this for? Things we can use: spaghetti, macaroni, liquid milk, if we can find it. And for money—not to buy real estate with, but to buy potatoes and fruit and flour to fill our bellies.

Many, I am told, were offered the opportunity to go to the training centers and turned it down.

Why not? When a man was a teacher he doesn’t want to be a watchmaker. Or if he was a tailor he doesn’t want to raise chickens. But that’s not the main point. It’s a fine thing for the younger people, those who had no trade or profession, but for the others—the others know that if they have to remain here they can’t practice these new trades, and if they go elsewhere the chances are their fate will take them into something different. So there’s not much enthusiasm.

What do the people do with themselves all day?

Whatever life knocks into our heads. The lesson you learn by the time you can blow your own nose is not to expect too much from yourself, from others, or from God. Let’s take a look around.

Bronko Effit rapped on unpadlocked doors which, when opened, revealed women scrubbing, sweeping and cleaning, for word of the Director’s presence had made the rounds.

Hello.

Hello, Mister Director.

May life be better.

When?

Open. It’s Effit.

Four young men in their early twenties were seated around a table playing a card game.

Join in.

Thanks. I would if I knew how.

Teach an American how to play cards? That’s a surprise.

Effit slapped one on the back. Who’s winning?

What’s there to win?

A couple was seated at a table eating what looked like a thick potato soup.

How does it taste?

It’s the Ufrac fodder for cattle.

Effit smiled. We’d rather have the cattle, eh, my friends?

A good pot roast.

Open. It’s Effit.

A family of six was seated like a row of puppets in a line of straight-backed chairs, two women, mother and daughter-in-law, both pregnant, two children, a boy and a girl, two men, red-bristled. A phonograph was playing a Balkan folk tune.

How’s everything here?

Here? Or there where we aren’t?

Where are you headed for?

Australia.

Is it settled?

No, but that’s where we’re going. When the consul sees these muscles he’ll give us all visas.

What did you do in your day?

Blacksmithing—and my son-in-law here was an ironworker.

Mister Director, can’t you do something to hurry it up?

I will try.

God bless you.

They went outdoors.

Effit said, You could keep going like this for a day and a night, it wouldn’t change much. They want what they think they’re entitled to. And why not? No man in this day should live like they do. Or is this what life has come to mean? You tell me.

Claude got into the jeep, the Italian driver sighed in relief.

Word-of-mouth telegraphing brought a long line to his office door. He was buffer, arbitrator, definer of agency policy, investigator of thefts, settler of hunger strikes, finder of missing warehouse receipts, expediter of visas, and defender of the refugee’s right to shout. Their new unpretentious American listener appeared to have but one suit of clothes (and that worn at the sleeves) and two neckties. But he was a good listener. To this self-made, self-defined job Claude brought a sort of freewheeling common sense, in its essence a compound of his own searching for new experiences and their meanings, and the wisdom acquired years ago dealing with misfits at the Community Center in Chicago. Without title, and with no nameplate on the door, Claude sat behind a small desk in a room on the third floor of an unheated office building, formerly used by the Italian Government. His secretary, wearing wool hose, overshoes and topcoat, typed reports in the anteroom. Electric heaters were contraband; besides, they did not heat. There was a snow flurry in Rome that winter, ice in the fountains, and the hotel was tolerable only in the liquor-generated heat at the bar. At the opera house one did not sit too far front, because of the wind. The streets were full of peddlers and sellers of black market cigarettes. The number of refugees did not decline, hundreds and thousands crossing, persistently, the Austrian border at night, like flocks of birds migrating south.

Salem Pike left Claude strictly alone as he struggled with his problems.

Sit down, Claude. Draw up a chair, Pike said, his head bobbing with a side-to-side motion. You’ve got us into a situation.

Alert, but immobile, Claude’s eyes waited.

The nature of this conversation had already been prophesied in the letter he had received from Freeda saying that she intended any day now to apply for free transportation to Rome. The Ufrac rule was that husbands could not have their wives join them overseas before six months of service had been completed; this did not mean, said Freeda correctly, that application could not be made before. Arrangements for passage took time, so she had already filled out her passport-renewal document.

Pike left his desk and went to the window. A Mongolian idiot child was riding a tricycle on the roof of the building across the way. It is customary, if not obligatory, in a job like this to be open and aboveboard, Claude. Until now Pike had been calling him Depler. We don’t have the time to fight certain battles here. Ordinarily we can practice what we believe in, our personal life is usually our own, but on this job, when there is a conflict it is our personal life which must take a back seat.

Claude said nothing. He had already made his decision.

You didn’t tell the New York office that your wife was colored.

Does Ufrac have a rule on that? Claude asked, replacing a smile with which he had intended to make a sarcastic commentary with a rigid immobility of his eyes.

You know what I mean.

No, I don’t know what you mean. But he knew only too well what Pike meant.

You should have told the New York office at the time they hired you.

He would not make it easy for him. At the time you were hired did you tell the New York office that your wife was white?

You know what I mean.

No, I don’t know what you mean.

Our job here isn’t concerned with fighting racial discrimination, Claude. Don’t misunderstand me. I stand foursquare on that question. I’ve contributed to the NdoubleACP, spoken on the subject at meetings, but the people who support us are interested in refugees, not Negroes.

What you mean to say is that some of the race haters who may be passing through Rome will be Board members and contributors, so let’s play it safe.

That happens to be a fact of life—and we are up to our necks here in the real facts of life.

The facts of life, said Claude, are one and indivisible. The people whom we support are here because a certain fact of life was considered not to be a fact of life.

You know what I mean.

No, I don’t know what you mean, Claude repeated.

Our function is limited. We cannot fight on all fronts.

No, we have an all-inclusive function. The refugee for me represents you and me, my wife and your wife.

The refugee is a special case, Claude.

No, the refugee can’t be made a special case, that’s why he resents his treatment, that’s why I resent you and the New York office raising the question of the color of my wife’s skin.

Pike was still at the window. The child was riding the tricycle from wall to wall, hitting the stucco and brick with the full force of his excitement. It is not a position that we are able to accept here, Claude, the circumstances under which we must operate being what they are.

Who makes the circumstances?

Claude, Pike said, turning now away from the window and raising his voice, I repeat: this is not the time and place to fight that battle. We are an agency operating on foreign soil. Furthermore, we are a supplementing agency, which means that we have to depend on public officials even for permission to get into the camps—and many of these people don’t have your attitude or mine on the question of race and intermarriage.

Pike’s face was white, his voice shaking and his head sharing its rhythm. Claude folded his hands in his lap, for they too were not steady. Pike looked to him to break the silence, but the charade continued for several seconds. Pike apparently decided to arbitrate a dilemma:

Paris phoned me an hour ago and asked that I talk it over with you. We don’t want to be rough on you, Claude. We want to see if this can be worked out somehow. It’s not the way you and I, or Paris, would like to see it, it’s a compromise, but there’s no other way out of it as far as we can see. Your wife can come to Europe, there’s no objection to that. You can go from here to Paris in a few hours by plane. What we’re proposing is that she come out to Paris where Ufrac guarantees to find her a good job with an American agency. You will be able to visit her there every couple of weeks. That’s a compromise, I know, but not a bad one.

I suppose Paris will even pay my plane fare, to show their good will.

Pike leaned forward. What shall I tell them?

Claude was trying to phrase it so that the sting might hurt, then decided to forego a pleasure as shallow for him as it would be for Pike. Tell them that I want the New York office to arrange for my wife’s transportation to Rome.

You will not consider Paris?

No.

Suppose New York refuses?

I will fight that battle when and if it arises.

You’re making it hard for me, Claude.

I never was a Boy Scout.

Think it over.

I don’t have to. Is that all? Claude rose.

Pike did not answer.

Claude left the building, walked up to Doney’s and ordered a Fernet Branca. His chair faced the Aurelian wall. The sun was shining from the direction of the American Embassy.

It had been a great experience: Paris, the streets of Rome, Florence, the olive groves, the Vatican Museums, the Catacombs, the Roman Forum, the aqueducts, the guitar of Solomon at the Ulpia, and the spaghetti with clam sauce, the espresso, memories of sunsets, and the jeep ride across the Campagna and the Amalfi Coast.

And the camps: the stories sharp, cut deep and forever scarring, Bronko Effit’s and those whose memories needed none of the detail of photographs of dead wives and children pinned to the wall; forged documents and escapes, guns swinging and bayonets ramming and no escapes; night terror in the Polish forests, and day terror; murder balanced by suicide, rape by mass rape, infanticide by self-mutilation; the pock-marked face of Europe. Claude stayed out of the office the remainder of the day.

Returning to the hotel toward evening, he found a cable from Freeda: REFUSED PARIS JOB OFFER. Also a message from Pike to phone. Claude called him at home, held the receiver lightly to his ear. You left a message for me to get in touch with you.

I have had a long telephone conversation with Paris and we have come to a complete understanding. You will be happy to know that it has been settled. New York will make the arrangements for her to join you here.

Claude said, Thanks. I appreciate it.

It is understood that the moment it creates any real difficulty we are not going to fight your battle here. Is that understood and agreed upon?

That seems fair enough. I know I can’t expect anything better than that, reality being what it is.

Pike’s relief was generous. How about coming over to the house for a drink? he said.

When?

Now.

Fine. I will.

Salem Pike opened his best bottle of liquor and had an expensive assortment of antipasto sent up from a delicatessen on the Piazza Ungheria. It was obvious that this was to be an evening of great relaxation, since the situation had been doubly tense—Pike’s pride in his excellent staff relationship was a factor, for Claude had not given him tacit approval, had not always accepted his decisions without expressed and implied opposition while others gave approval as routine. Claude could not sit back and approve what he considered slipshod administrative methods, nor off-the-cuff decisions often reversed the day after. At staff meetings Claude, seated at the rear, tried to evaluate the man at the desk. He watched Pike pursue the common law of social work: free democratic discussion even though it bore little relationship to the final decision to be taken by the man asking for the discussion. In a sort of exultation of pride in this right, Pike would wait until each one had exhausted his argument and then make the decision he had come prepared to make in the first place.

You’re not eating, Claude. Have one of those long things. They’re real good.

Claude took one.

Have another drink.

Claude could not make the quick switch-over from resentment to forgiveness. He sat glumly watching Pike’s embarrassment, listened to the radio jazz from the maid’s room, and studied the Piero della Francesca prints on the walls.

Pike asked if Claude intended to get a house or an apartment. Claude was suspicious of this question. Pike picked it up again, but seeing that Claude was hesitating, said, It will be wonderful having her here with us. With us was not a phrase that appealed to Claude, and so he sat back on the sofa and said nothing.

She should be arriving in six weeks or maybe even sooner, Pike continued. New York will book passage on the first available boat to Genoa—or why not Paris? She might want to stay over for a week or two in Paris, look around, shop—but let me tell you, the Rome shops have got ten times more in them. But the boats to France leave oftener. Think it over.

Claude had already made the decision: the sooner Freeda came to Italy, the sooner would all this jockeying in self-defense be dispensed with. He was not enjoying being made into a special case.

Finally Pike excused himself, went into the next room and made a phone call.

Six della Francesca prints were hanging on the wall opposite the sofa. Claude could hear Pike: Let’s make it fifty tons. Without the labels on the bags. The usual hundred pounds to a bag. In Bari.

Piero’s dark-skinned Queen of Sheba on her way to Bethlehem had become another dark-skinned queen on her way to Rome. The arriving Queen of Rome would ride in an open car up the Via Veneto, dressed in a russet tweed cape, bareheaded, and as she alighted at the entrance of the Hotel Excelsior a choir of social workers would sing a Te Deum from the mezzanine floor, and the bells would toll hallelujah from the nearby American Embassy (Pike leading the choir).

Pike returned carrying another tray of hors d’oeuvres. He could not get Freeda off his mind. Europe, he said, would be a great experience for her. Claude said that she had been abroad many times, as a journalist representing Negro newspapers, as a tourist, a student at a people’s college in Denmark, had wintered at Kitzbühl (she had been there one year for a week)—for the winter sports of course, he added, the skiing especially (he was almost believing it himself). She knows Italy better than many of the guides hanging around the Piazza Venezia and the Forum. Pike listened and did not wander about. Claude went on giving fact and fiction, had Freeda speaking Italian fluently and presented her as a student of Renaissance art.

Pike filled their glasses. He was obviously impressed, and once more took up the question of their living quarters, this time asking Claude if he had thought of renting a house in the country. Still suspicious, Claude replied that the place would undoubtedly be an apartment in the city where everybody can see her.

Now the phone rang. Pike took his drink along.

Claude had seen an occasional Negro walking down a Rome street, usually in uniform. His Negro queen would be an event. She would be a sensation at Doney’s sidewalk café, and at the opera. Descending from the chauffeured Mercedes-Benz in her richly embroidered scarlet Mexican blouse and her twelve yards of ecru-white satin skirt, there would rise above her head a halo of light compounded equally of her own drama and the throng’s awe of it.

Pike brought back with him a broader interest. He asked Claude if he knew Walter White, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Not personally.

We had him over to the house for dinner once. Does she know Marian Anderson?

Not personally.

I met her socially at a friend’s house about three years ago. Does your wife sing?

Does yours? Claude replied with a snap.

No.

Neither does mine.

They continued sipping their drinks. The music in the maid’s room had become folk melodies in the stornello style.

Pike’s vague, embracing smile momentarily broke through Claude’s independent train of thought, releasing it again for its flight of fancy. For Pike could not seem to gather any strength in the conversation and could not let the evening find its own level. He was forcing the issue of goodhearted benevolence, but could not make contact with his guest. He retreated into a series of thing-manipulations: he turned on a recording of the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, adjusted the tablecloth, straightened out his necktie, pulled the twisted cord of the Venetian blind, then finally excused himself to make another phone call.

What Claude resented was that he and Freeda had become a special case.