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6





Skin


His office on the French Department floor at the University was a hotel lobby compared to his office here at home, but the one here at home was a little jewel, an Art Deco jewel, to be exact, and Art Deco was French. The floor was only twelve feet by ten feet to begin, and now it looked narrow because someone had built in sets of chest-high amboyna-wood bookshelves—amboyna!—absolutely stunning!—on either side to within a few feet of the desk long before he bought the place… whose mortgage he was still struggling struggling! to pay off… you can’t imagine how hard the struggle has become! Anyway, his office at home was Lantier’s inviolate sanctuary. When he was in his office at home with the door closed, as he was at this moment, interruptions of any sort were absolument interdites.

He consciously kept this room looking monastic… no knick-knacks, no memorabilia, no clutter, no pretty little things, and that went for lamps, too… no lamps sitting on the desk, no lamps standing on the floor. The room was lit entirely by downlights in the ceiling… Austere, but this was elegant austerity. It wasn’t antibourgeois, it was haute bourgeois, streamlined. Behind Lantier’s desk was a four-foot-wide window in the form of a pair of… French… doors that swept all the way from the floor to the ceiling cornice ten feet above. The cornice was massive but smooth—streamlined instead of comprising fussy amalgamations of Vitruvian scrolls, rolls, fillets, and billets that spelled ELEGANCE in nineteenth-century haut bourgeois design, Art Deco haute bourgeoise ELEGANCE substituted the grand gesture: windows as tall as the wall… smooth massive cornices that cried out the Art Deco motto “Elegance through Streamlined Strength!” The only chair besides the one at Lantier’s desk was a small white one-piece fiberglass number by a French designer named Jean Calvin. If you insisted on being picky, Calvin was Swiss, but the name, pronounced Col-vanhhh, told you he was French Swiss, not German, and Lantier chose to regard him as French. After all, even though Lantier was by birth Haitian and had been appointed an associate professor of French (and that damnable Creole) because he was Haitian, he had proof that he was in fact a descendant of the prominent de Lantiers of Normandy in France from at least two centuries ago, maybe more. One had only to look at his pale skin, no darker than, say, a café latte, to see he was essentially European… Well, he was honest enough with himself to realize that his eagerness to feel French was what had led to his current financial jam. This house wasn’t very big or grand in any other way. But it was Art Deco!… a genuine Art Deco house from the 1920s!—one of a number built back then in this northeastern section of Miami known as the Upper East Side… not a really high-toned neighborhood but solidly upper-middle-class… lots of Cuban and other Latino business-types… white families here and there… and no Negs and no Haitians!—except for the Lantiers, and nobody up here ever pegged the Lantiers as Haitian… certainly not the Lantiers, an Everglades Global University French professor and his family in an Art Deco house… These Art Deco houses were considered rather special, Art Deco being English shorthand for Arts Décoratifs, the first form of Modern architecture—and it was French! He knew paying for it would be a stretch—a $540,000 stretch—but it was French!—and very stylishly so. Now, with a $486,000 mortgage on his back, he was paying $3,050 a month—$36,666.96 a year—plus $7,000 in annual property taxes, plus nearly $16,000 in federal income tax, all this on a salary of $86,442—there you had yourself a stretch, all right… he felt like one leg had a toehold on the edge of the cliff back there, and the other leg had a toehold on the other cliff, way out there, and in between was the bottomless Canyon of Doom. In any case, the Calvin chair had a nearly straight back and no seat cushion. Lantier didn’t want any visitor to get comfortable in here. He didn’t want visitors in here. Period. That went for his wife, Louisette, too, before she died two years ago… Why did he continue to think of Louisette at least a dozen times a day?… when every single thought of her caused him to draw in a deep breath and expel it in the form of a long sigh?… and turn his lower eyelids into two tiny ponds of tears?… as they were at this moment—

Twistflimsy clatter!—he himself had tried to fix the old handle on the cheap, damn it, and the door flew open, and there stood his twenty-one-year-old daughter, Ghislaine, yeux en noir blindingly bright with excitement, lips trying not to betray the enthusiasm that had lit up those big lovely sphères—

—yes, the door of his inviolate sanctuary flew open without so much as a preliminary knock, and there stood Ghislaine… and he didn’t even have to say it in his mind as a whole thought because in so many different situations it had come true: Where the happiness of his beautiful, pale-as-the-moon daughter was concerned, his patriarchal rules melted away. He immediately rose up from his chair and embraced her… then sat back on the edge of his desk so they would remain tête-à-tête.

In French she said, “Papa! I don’t know if I mentioned South Beach Outreach to you, but I’m thinking of joining!”

Lantier had to smile. ::::::Thinking of joining… try absolutely dying to join!… You’re so transparent my dear, sweet, predictable daughter. When you’re excited about something, you can’t stand taking time to build a nice little sofa of small talk for it first, can you. You have to spill it out now! don’t you.:::::: That made him smile even more.

Ghislaine apparently took it as one of his ironic smiles, which he had been guilty of in the past, and it was absolutely not the way to tell a child what you think. When they figure out you are mocking them, it ignites the bitterest resentment. Ghislaine must have taken it as one of those smiles, because she switched to English and spoke rapidly, urgently.

“Oh, I know, you think it’ll take up too much time. And it does take up more time… You don’t just visit the poor and drop off a box of food. You actually spend time with the families and try to learn their real problems, which are a lot more than hunger. That’s exactly what Nicole loves about it! Serena, too! You don’t just sit around feeling charitable. You try to help them organize their lives. That’s the only thing that can possibly change their lives! You can give them food and clothes—but only involvement can make a real difference!” In a completely different voice, a timid little voice, she said pleadingly, “What do you think?”

What did he think… The next thing he knew, he was bursting out with “What do I think? I think that’s great, Ghislaine! It’s a wonderful idea! It’s perfect for you!”

He caught himself. He was talking with such off-the-leash enthusiasm, he was coming too close to giving the game away. He was dying to ask her a key question. He forced himself to keep quiet enough to calm down… then continued in a matter-of-fact voice, “Is this something Nicole suggested?”

“Nicole and Serena, both! Did you ever meet Serena? Serena Jones?”

“Ummmm…” He compressed his lips and rolled his eyes up and off to one side in the I’m-trying-to-remember mode. It didn’t really matter. “Oh, yes… I think I did.”

Actually, he knew he hadn’t. But he remembered the name Serena Jones from somewhere… could it have been a column in the Herald? Swell Anglo families with common names like Jones or Smith or Johnson had a way of giving their children, especially their daughters, romantic or exotic or striking first names like Serena or Cornelia or Bettina, or else Old Family Lineage first names like Bradley or Ainsley or Loxley or Taylor or Templeton. He had a student once named Templeton, Templeton Smith. She was never just mousy little Ms. Smith. She was Templeton Smith. His mind was focused on one thing: swell families and families that have a shot at becoming swell. South Beach Outreach was an organization that came up on the social pages of the Herald and in Ocean Drive magazine’s “Parties” section all the time, solely thanks to the social wattage of its members’ families. Just take a look at the pictures—Anglos, Anglos, Anglos with a certain social cachet. Ghislaine’s friend Nicole, whom she had met at the University, was not a WASP, strictly speaking, or not as Lantier understood what the acronym stood for, namely, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. But in her case, strictly speaking didn’t matter. Her last name was Buitenhuys, which is Dutch, and the Buitenhuyses were old money in New York, anointed money in New York. Whether any of them knew that Ghislaine was Haitian, he had no idea. The important thing was, they were accepting her as one of their social milieu. The stated purpose of South Beach Outreach was to go into the slums, such as Overtown and Liberty City—and Little Haiti!—and do good work amongst the poor. So they saw her as a girl as essentially white as they were! As white as he, her father, saw her! The crowning moment would be his Ghislaine going amidst the people of Little Haiti. The vast majority were black, really black, with no qualifiers. Back in Haiti, no family like his, the Lantiers, even looked at really black Haitians. Didn’t so much as waste a glance on them… couldn’t even see them unless they were physically in the way. Well-educated people like himself, with his PhD in French literature, were like another species of Homo sapiens. Here in Miami they were self-consciously part of the dyaspora… the very word denoted high status. How many?—a half?—two-thirds?—of Haitians living in the Miami area were illegal immigrants who didn’t begin to rate the term. A vast majority had never even heard of any dyaspora… and if they had, they had no idea what it meant… and if they knew what it meant, they didn’t know how to pronounce it.

Ghislaine—he looked at her again. He loved her. She was beautiful, gorgeous! She would soon graduate from the University of Miami in Art History with a 3.8 grade point average. She could easily… pass… He kept that word, pass, hidden in his head, beneath a lateral geniculate… He would never utter pass out loud in front of Ghislaine… or anybody else, for that matter. But he had told her, many times, in fact, that there was nothing to hold her back. He hoped she had gotten the message about… that, too. In some ways, she was sophisticated—when she talked about art, for example. It could be the age of Giotto, the age of Watteau, the age of Picasso, or the age of Bouguereau, for that matter—she knew so much! In another way she wasn’t sophisticated at all. She was never ironic or sarcastic or cynical or nihilistic or contemptuous or any of those things, which are all the signs of the tarantula in smart people, the resentful small deadly creature that never fights… that only waits to bite fiercely and maybe kill you that way. ::::::I’ve got too much of that in myself.:::::: They sat down. Ghislaine was in the Jean Calvin chair. He sat at his desk. The desk, with its Art Deco kidney shape, its gallery, its sharkskin writing surface, the delicately tapered shin guards on its legs, its ivory dentils running about the entire rim, its vertical strings of ivory running through the macassar ebony, was school-of-Ruhlmann, and not by the great Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann himself; but it was very expensive, all the same, certainly to Lantier’s way of thinking. Likewise, the very expensive desk chair, with its tapered bands of ivory set into all four shin guards… All very expensive… but Lantier had still been in the giddy caution-to-the-winds euphoria of just having bought a house for madly more than he could afford. What was an insanely high price for his, the maître’s, own desk and chair, on top of that?

At this moment Ghislaine sat on that miserable chair with perfect posture… and yet she was relaxed. He looked at her as objectively as he could. He didn’t want to deceive himself. He didn’t want to expect the impossible from her… She had a nice slim shape and lovely legs. She must have figured that out for herself, because she rarely wore jeans or any other form of pants. She was wearing a tan skirt—he had no idea what material—short but not catastrophically short… a gorgeous long-sleeved silk blouse—or it looked like silk to him—unbuttoned partway, but not irredeemably far down… Ghislaine never used the word blouse, but that’s what it was to him. From out of the open collar rose her perfect slender neck.

And her face—here he found it hard to be objective. He wanted to see her as his daughter.

He himself—he couldn’t abide the jeans girls wore to class. They looked so common. He got the feeling half of them didn’t even own anything else to cover themselves up with from the waist down. So there wasn’t much he could do about the jeans. But those damned babyish baseball caps boys wore to class—with that infantile fashion he took action. One day, at the beginning of class, he said, “Mr. Ramirez, where do you have to go to find a cap like yours?—fits on sideways like that?… and Mr. Strudmire… yours goes straight down your neck and has that little cutout in front so we can see a little bit of your upper forehead. Do they make them like that, or do you have to get them custom-made?”

But all he got out of Mr. Ramirez and Mr. Strudmire were begrudging half-chuckles, and from the rest of the class, even the girls, nothing at all. They were irony-proof. The next class they and many other boys still had these little-boy baseball caps on. So he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, from now on no caps or other headgear may be worn in this class unless it’s required by religious orthodoxy. Have I made myself clear? Anyone who insists on wearing a cap to class—I’ll have to take him to the principal’s office.” They didn’t get that, either. They just looked at one another… puzzled. To himself he said, The principal—get it? That’s what you have in high school, not in college, and this is college. You’re irony-proof, aren’t you. You’re children! What are you doing here? Look at you… it’s not just the baseball caps, it’s also the short pants and the flip-flops and the shirts hanging down below the waist, way down, in some cases. You’ve regressed! You’re ten years old again! Well, at least they didn’t wear baseball caps to class anymore. Maybe they thought there really was a principal at EGU… and I’m supposed to teach these borderline idiots…

No, he must not mention any of this to Ghislaine. She would be shocked. She wasn’t ready for… snobbery. She was at the age, twenty-one, when a girl’s heart is filled to the brim with charity and love for the little people. She was still too young and unsophisticated to be told that her South Beach Outreach pity for the poor was actually a luxury for someone like her. It meant that her family had enough money and standing to be able to afford Good Works. Not that he made much money as an associate professor of French at EGU, Everglades Global University. But he was an intellectual, a scholar… and a writer… or at least he had managed to publish twenty-four articles in academic journals and one book. The book and the articles gave him enough cachet at least to give Ghislaine a boost up to the level of South Beach Outreach… My daughter reaches out to the poor!… Everybody had heard of South Beach Outreach. There were even some celebrities, such as Beth Carhart and Jenny Ringer, who were involved with it.

He stared over Ghislaine’s shoulder and out the window… at nothing… with a rueful expression. He was not all that far from being as light-skinned as she was. He could have done what she was now in a position to do, couldn’t he… but he was known as a Haitian. That was why EGU had hired him in the first place. They liked the “diversity” of having a Haitian… with a PhD from Columbia… who could teach French… and Creole. Oh yes, Creole… they were hot to have a professor who taught Creole… “the language of the people”… probably 85 percent of his countrymen spoke Creole and only Creole. The rest spoke the official national language, French, and quite a few of the fortunate 15 percent spoke in a casserole of both Creole and French. He made it a rule that here in this house, they spoke only French. To Ghislaine it had become second nature. Her brother, Philippe, on the other hand, although only fifteen, was already contaminated. He could speak French pretty well, so long as the subject didn’t go beyond what an eleven- or twelve-year-old was likely to know about. Beyond that he struggled along with something not far above Black English, namely Creole. How had he even picked it up? Not in this house, he hadn’t… Creole was a language for primitives! Oh, no two ways about it! The verbs didn’t even conjugate. No “I give, I gave, I was giving, I was given, I have given, I had given, I will give, I should give, I should have given.” In Creole it was m ba, and that was it for that verb… “I give, I give, I give”… You just had to figure out the time and the conditionals from the context. For any university to teach this stupid language was either what Veblen called “conspicuous waste” or one of the endless travesties created by the doctrine of political correctness. It was like instituting courses and hiring faculty to teach the mongrel form of the Mayan language that people up in the mountains of Guatemala spoke—

All this shot through Lantier’s thoughts in an instant.

Now he looked directly at Ghislaine. He smiled… to cover up the fact that he was trying… objectively… to assess her face. Her skin was whiter than most white people’s. As soon as Ghislaine was old enough to understand words at all, Louisette had started telling her about sunny days. Direct sun wasn’t good for your skin. The worst thing of all was to take a sunbath. Even walking in the sun was too much of a risk. She should wear big-brimmed straw hats. Better still, an umbrella. Little girls couldn’t very well go around with parasols, however. But if they had to walk in the sun, they should at least have straw hats. She must always remember that she had very beautiful but very fair skin that would burn easily, and she should do anything to avoid sunburns. But Ghislaine figured it out very quickly. It had nothing to do with sunburns… it had to do with sunbrowning. In the sun, skin like hers, her beautiful whiter-than-white skin, would darken just like that! In no time she could turn Neg… just like that. Her hair was black as could be, but thank God it didn’t have a crinkle in it. It might have been a little softer, but it was straight. Louisette couldn’t bring herself to dwell on the lips because Ghislaine’s lips didn’t tend toward arterial red in the red spectrum but more toward an amber-brown. They were beautiful lips, however. Her nose was perfectly fine. Well… that fatty fibrous tissue that covers the alar cartilage and creates those little round mounds on either side of the nose at the nostril—oh, alar cartilage, absolutely! He knew as well as any anatomist what he was talking about here. One had better believe that! Hers flared out slightly too widely but not so far that she didn’t look white. Her chin could have been a little larger, and her jaw a bit squarer, to balance the little round mounds. Her eyes were black as charcoal but very large and sparkling. Much of the sparkle was from her personality, of course. She was a happy girl. Louisette had given her all the confidence in the world. ::::::Oh, Louisette! I think of you, and I want to cry! There are so many moments like this every day! Is that why I love Ghislaine so much—because I look at her and I see you? Well, no, because I loved her this way while you were still with us, too. A man’s life doesn’t begin until he has his first child. You see your soul in another person’s eyes, and you love her more than yourself, and that feeling is sublime!:::::: Ghislaine had the sort of confidence a child gets only if her parents spend a lot of time with her—a lot. Some would argue that a girl like Ghislaine, who is so close to her family, should go away to college and learn early that she’s entering a life in which she is going to find herself in one alien context after another and should figure out strategies on her own. Lantier didn’t agree with that. All this business about “contexts” and “life strategies” and alien this and alien that—it was all a concept with no bottom to it. It was just faux-psychological lufts and wafts. The main thing, to him, was that the campus of the University of Miami was only twenty minutes away from their house. Anywhere else she would have been “a Haitian girl.” Oh, it would come out, but here she wasn’t “that Haitian girl I room with” or any other form of that trap in which “if you say I’m this, then obviously I can’t be that.” Here she can be what she is and has become. She’s a very nice-looking young woman… Even as those words formed in his mind, he knew he was putting her on a second tier. She wasn’t as beautiful as a Northern European blonde, an Estonian or a Lithuanian or a Norwegian or a Russian, and she wouldn’t be mistaken for a Latin beauty, either, despite having some features in common with a Latina. No, she was herself. The very sight of Ghislaine sitting there in that little chair with such perfect posture—Louisette!—you made sure Ghislaine and Philippe acquired that while they were too young to question it! He wanted to get up from his anonymous French swivel chair and go over and embrace Ghislaine right now. South Beach Outreach! It was almost too good to be true.

Who’s that?

Lantier’s office door was closed, but he and Ghislaine looked in the direction of the side door, which opened into the kitchen. Two people were coming up the four or five steps that led to the door from outside. Philippe? But Lee de Forest, Philippe’s high school, wouldn’t let out for more than two hours. The voice sounded like Philippe’s—but it was speaking Creole. Creole!

A second voice said, “Eske men papa ou?” (Your father here?)

The first voice said, “No, li inivèsite. Pa di anyen, okay?” (No, he at the university. Listen, we don’t talk to nobody about this, okay?)

The second voice said, “Mwen konnen.” (I know.)

The first said, in Creole, “My father, he don’t like guys like that, but he don’ need know about this thing. Nome sayin’, bro?”

“He no like me, neither, Philippe.”

“How you know that? He don’t say nothing to me.”

“Oh, he not say nothing to me, neither. He don’t need to. I see the way he look at me—or not look at me. He look right through me. I’m not there. Nome sayin’?”

Lantier looked at Ghislaine. So it was Philippe. ::::::Philippe and his black Haitian buddy, God help us, Antoine.:::::: And Antoine was right. Lantier didn’t like looking at him or talking to him. Antoine always tried to be cool and speak in perfect Black English, every illiterate, seventy-five-IQ syllable and sound of it. When that was too difficult a linguistic leap, he reverted to Creole. Antoine was one of those black-as-midnight Haitians—and their number was legion—who said tablo, Creole for “the table,” and hadn’t the slightest notion that it might have anything at all to do with la table, French for “the table.”

Ghislaine had the expression of someone who has taken in a big breath but isn’t letting it out. She looked terribly anxious. Lantier guessed it wasn’t about what the boys had said, since her knowledge of Creole was next to nothing. It was the fact that Philippe was jabbering Creole at all chez Lantier—and within Père Lantier’s earshot—and, on top of that, with a very dark Low-Rent Haitian pal her father did not want to set foot in his house… and breathe in his air… and exhale it… thereby contaminating it, turning Franco-mulat air into Neg air.

Now the Creole boys were in the kitchen opening and closing the refrigerator and this-and-that drawer. Ghislaine got up and went to the door, no doubt to open it and let the boys know that they were not alone in the house. But Lantier motioned for her to sit back down and put his forefinger across his lips. Reluctantly and nervously she sat back down.

In Creole, Antoine said, “You see the look on his face when the cops take him by the elbow?”

Philippe tried to maintain his new deep voice, but it was turning gosling on him. So he gave it up and said in Creole, “They not do nothing with him, you think?”

“Dunno,” said Antoine. “Main thing now François. He on probation already. We gotta be there for François. You be with us, right? François, he be counting on you. I see you talk to the cop. What you say, bro?”

“Uhh… I say… I say François say something in Creole and everybody laugh and Estevez, he get François in a headlock,” said Philippe.

“You sure?”

“Uhhh… yeah.”

“François do something first?”

“Uhhh… no. I not see him do something first,” said Philippe.

“You only say No,” said Antoine. “Nome sayin’? Nobody care what you don’ see. François say he need you, man. Only his bloods, his crew not enough. He be counting on you, man. Be bad if you not sure. You see, man. Nome sayin’? This be the time you show you bro—or you low. Unnerstan’?” He said “bro” and “low” in English.

“I unnerstan’,” said Philippe.

“Good. You be good blood, man! You be good blood!” Antoine said with what came close to glee. “You know Patrice? André? Jean—fat Jean? Hervé? They good blood, too!” More glee. “They not in the crew, neither. But they know, man! They know what Estevez did to François. They don’t ‘if I’m correct’ and all that shit. They good blood!” Glee seemed to turn into laughter aimed at Philippe. “Like you, bro!”

Professor Lantier looked at his daughter. She didn’t understand what they were talking about, they were speaking Creole so fast. That was a good sign. Creole really was a foreign language to her! He and Louisette had steered her right! That was not une Haitian—in his mind he pronounced it the French way, “oon-eye-ee-tee-onnnh”—sitting so properly in that little chair. She was French. That was what she was by blood, an essentially French young woman of le monde, polished, brilliant, beautiful—then why did his eye fix upon those little fatty-fibrous mounds on either side of her nostrils?—poised, elegant, or elegant when she wanted to be.

In a low voice, practically under his breath, he said to his mercifully Creole-free daughter, “Something happened at Lee de Forest today. That’s what I get out of it. In some class of his.”

The two boys were heading in the direction of his office, with Antoine doing all the talking.

So Lantier himself gets up and opens the door and says cheerily, in French, “Philippe! I thought I heard your voice! You’re home early today!”

Philippe looked as if he had just been caught… doing something not very nice at all. So did his friend, Antoine. Antoine was a tough-looking boy, heavy but not too fat. Right now he had the tense expression of someone extremely anxious to head in another direction. What a mess the two of them were!… jeans pulled down so low on their hips you couldn’t help but see their loud boxer shorts… obviously the lower and louder, the better. The pants of both boys ended in puddles of denim on the floor, all but obscuring their sneakers, which had Day-Glo strips going this way and that… both in too-big, too-loose T-shirts whose sleeves hung down over their elbows and whose tails hung outside the jeans, but not far enough to obscure the hideous boxer shorts… both with bandannas around their foreheads bearing “the colors” of whatever fraternal organization they thought they belonged to. Their appearance—as American Neg as it could get—made Lantier’s flesh crawl. But he was forced to keep a cheerful demeanor clamped upon his face and said to Antoine, in French, “Well, Antoine… it’s been too long since you last paid us a visit. I was just asking Philippe, how is it that you’re out of school so early today?”

“Papa!” gasped Ghislaine in a low voice.

Lantier immediately regretted saying that. Ghislaine couldn’t believe that her father, whom she admired so much, would do such a thing as toy with this poor clueless fifteen-year-old just to see the baffled expression on his face. Her father knew Antoine didn’t understand one word of French, the official language of the country he had grown up in until he was eight. Her father merely wanted to demonstrate to her and Philippe what a Special Needs—the public schools’ euphemism—what a Special Needs brain this poor black-as-midnight boy had. After all, it was not as if he ever asked for bad blood. He was born afflicted with it. She couldn’t believe her father had ended with a question to rub it in a little further. Antoine couldn’t very well just stand there nodding. He was obliged to say something; “I don’t speak French,” at the very least. Instead, the boy was standing there with his mouth hanging open.

The look on Ghislaine’s face made Lantier feel guilty. He wanted to make up for it by saying it so Antoine could understand it, and extra-cheerily to show he wasn’t trying to make fun of him. So he said it in English. He was damned if he was going to descend into the muck of Creole just to make life pointlessly easy for some fifteen-year-old with bad blood, but he did slather great gouts of cheer over his words and so many exaggerated grins ::::::Merde! Am I overdoing it? Is this big lout going to think I’m mocking him?:::::: He finally wound up with—in English—“… just asking Philippe, how come you’re out of school so early today?”

Antoine turned toward Philippe for a clue. Philippe moved his head back and forth ever so slowly and unobtrusively. Antoine didn’t seem to get any clear message from that semaphore… an awkward silence. He finally said, “They jes say… They jes say… I’unno… They jes say school close early today.”

“They didn’t say why?”

This time Antoine turned a good ninety degrees, so he could look at Philippe head-on for a sign… any sign to tell him how to answer this one. But semaphores failed Philippe, and Antoine had to fall back on his old standby, “I’unno.”

“They didn’t tell you?”

He obviously didn’t want to say why, which interested Lantier… mildly… But quite aside from that, Antoine looked to Lantier like a fifteen-year-old Haitian boy trying to do an imitation of a pseudo-ignorant American Neg. Antoine finally muttered, “Naw.”

Naw… what a performance!… What a perfect mime he was! He twisted all the way around toward Philippe again. His entire posture, his slumped-over back, his arms hanging slackly down by his hips, was a semaphore for “Help!”

And what is that? At the base of his skull Antoine’s hair had been buzzed very short… and then carefully shaved down to bare skin, to create the letter C and, an inch away, the number 4.

“What does the C4 mean?” said Lantier, still absorbed in his cheery act. “I just saw a C and a 4 on the back of your head.”

Ghislaine gasped out another “Papahhh!”

So Lantier smiled at Antoine in a way meant to project friendly curiosity. It didn’t. Now he could hear Ghislaine gasp out an “Ohhhhh, God.”

Antoine turned about and gave Lantier a look of live hatred.

“Don’t mean nothing. They’s jes some us, we in the C4”—duh see-fo’—“at’s all.”… Gravely humiliated… furious. And you best not be asking me any more about it.

Lantier didn’t know what to say. Obviously he shouldn’t push the C4 button anymore. So he turned to Philippe. “You are home pretty early…”

“You, too,” said Philippe. It was an uppity snarl, designed to impress Antoine, no doubt. It impressed Lantier, all right… as unforgivably, irredeemably impudent, an insult too challenging to let slide…

But Ghislaine said, “Ohhhh, Papa…” This time the intonation she gave Papa begged him: Just let it go. Don’t dress down Philippe in front of Antoine.

Lantier stared at the two boys. Antoine was black… in every way. But Philippe still had a chance. He was as light as he himself was… just a shade too dark to pass… but not too dark to keep him from achieving an all-but-white persona. What did that require? Nothing unattainable… verbal skill, a refined accent… a slight French accent was perfect for speaking English or Italian, Spanish, even German, Russian—oh, very much Russian… and it wouldn’t hurt if it should happen to recall the Lantiers’ ties to the noble de Lantiers of Normandy those several centuries ago. But Philippe was caught in a strong tide going in exactly the opposite direction. When they first arrived from Haiti, Haitian boys like Philippe and Antoine had to run a gauntlet, an actual gauntlet! American black boys spotted them immediately and beat them up on the way to school and on the way home. Beat them up! More than once Philippe had come home with welts on his face, contusions. Lantier was determined to step in and do something about it. Philippe begged him not to—begged him! It would only make things worse, Papa. Then he’d really get it. So all the Haitian boys did the same thing. They tried to turn themselves as American black as they could… the clothes, the baggy jeans, the boxer shorts showing… the talk, yo, bro, ho, ain’t, ain’no, homey, mo’vucker, ca’zucca. And now look at Philippe. He had black hair as straight as Ghislaine’s. Whatever he did with it, it would be better than what he did with it now… which was wear it cut about three inches long all over and frizz it to make it look Neg.

With all these things running through his head, Lantier didn’t realize how long his eyes were fixed upon his son’s face… with disappointment, with the resentful feeling that Philippe was in some way betraying him.

The sudden silence made the moment intense.

Philippe was now staring back into Lantier’s face not with mere resentment but with insolence, as Lantier saw it. Antoine no longer looked at him with live hatred, however. He seemed mainly to feel himself backed up in somebody else’s toilet. His eyeballs rolled upward for an instant. He seemed to be looking for some white-robed little person with wings who would fly over and wave a wand and make him disappear.

It had turned into a Mexican standoff. Here are the enemies staring daggers at each other without moving a muscle or making a sound. Finally…

“An nou soti la!” Philippe said in Creole to Antoine with his loudest, deepest baritone or, rather, bariteen gang voice (“Let’s get outta here”).

Both turned their backs upon Lantier without another word and walked across the kitchen doing the pimp roll… and disappeared out the side door.

Lantier was left speechless in the doorway of his little office. He turned back to his desk and stared at Ghislaine. What was to be done? Why on earth would an essentially bright, handsome, light-skinned Haitian, directly related to the de Lantiers of Normandy, like your brother, want to turn himself into an American Neg? Those too-big baggy pants, for example… the Neg criminals wore them in jail. The jailers weren’t about to go to the trouble of measuring an inmate before giving him clothes. They just gave them clothes that were obviously big enough, which meant they were always too big. The little Negs on the street wore them because they idealized the big Negs in jail. They were their heroes. They were baaaaad. They were fearless. They terrified the American whites and the Cubans. But if it were just the stupid clothes and the ignorant hip-hop music, and the vile Black English, which be primitive to the max, man, that would be one thing. But Haitian boys like your brother imitated stupid, ignorant Neg attitudes, too. That was the real problem. The Negs thought only “pussies” raised their hands in class during class discussions or studied hard for tests or cared about grades or little things like being courteous to teachers. Haitian boys didn’t want to be pussies, either, for God’s sake!—and so they began treating school like a p-ssy inconvenience, too. And now Philippe regresses from French to Creole. You heard him!—but you’re lucky. You don’t speak it, and you don’t have to bother understanding it… whereas I’m not so lucky. I understand Creole. I have to teach the damned language. What is to be done when it’s time for your brother to go to college? No college will want him, and he won’t want no college. Nome sayin’, man?

After about a half hour of this, Lantier realized that he and Ghislaine weren’t talking about Philippe—because Ghislaine never got a word in about anything. He was just using her ears as a couple of receptacles into which he could pour his agony and the helplessness he felt… This endless soliloquy of disappointment would not solve anything. It would only depress Ghislaine and make her lose respect for him. An axiom popped into his head: Parents should never confess anything to their children… zero! nothing whatsoever!

But he couldn’t avoid confessing to himself… in a rising tide of guilt. ::::::What is Philippe’s problem? It’s so obvious, isn’t it. His problem is, I let him go to Lee de Forest. My wonderful Art Deco house happens to fall within a school district whose senior high school is Lee de Forest. I knew it had a… a… a not-very-good reputation, “But how bad can it be?” I kept saying to myself. The truth is, I don’t even begin to have the money to send him to a private school. Every dollar I have goes right into the Art Deco maw of this house, so I can feel as French as I want to be… and of course Philippe buckled under the pressure of the Antoines and the François Duboises. He’s not a tough boy. Of course he feels desperate. Of course he grabs at any shield he can find. Of course he turns Creole. And I let it happen… of course… Oh, God… of course… for me. Then for God’s sake, be a man! Sell it for the sake of your son!… But it’s already too late, isn’t it… House prices in South Florida have dropped 30 percent. The bank would take every dime I got for it, and I’d still owe them money… But underneath all that I get a glimpse of the ogre who lives at the bottom: I can’t give up all this! ::::::

So he said, on the verge of tears, “Ghislaine, I think… I have uhhh… I need to prepare for tomorrow’s classes, and I think—”

Ghislaine didn’t let him struggle on. “I’m going into the living room to do some reading for class.”

Once she left his office, Lantier’s eyes misted over. Obviously she had decided that she had better keep him company a while to make sure he got over this rocky state of mind that was pushing him over the edge.

Lantier did have a couple of classes to prepare for. One was “The Triumph of the Nineteenth-Century French Novel.” This class was not made up of the brightest bulbs in the chandelier. No classes at Everglades Global University were.

“Papa, come here! Quick! It’s on TV!” Ghislaine yelled from the living room. “Hurry up!”

So Lantier hustled out of his office and into the living room and sat down with Ghislaine on the couch—Merde!—the stuffing was coming out the seam of one of the big square pillows he sat on, and he remembered very well how much upholstery cost, and he couldn’t spend that kind of money on a damned couch right now…

On the television screen that’s the Lee de Forest High School, all right… what a scene… the yowling! the screaming! the chants! A hundred police officers, it looks like, trying to hold back a mob… a mob of dark faces, Negs and every shade of brown, Neg to tan, and in between… they’re yowling and howling, the mob, they’re all young—they look like students, except for a group of black students—no, they can’t be students—they’re more like in their twenties and early thirties, maybe. Scores of squad cars, it seems, with racks of lights on the roofs, flash away in epileptic sequences of red and blue and blinding clear lamps… they’re painful! the bursts of clear light! But that doesn’t keep Lantier from a sliced second of agony over how small and old-fashioned his TV set is compared to the TV sets other people have—plasma, whatever that is, no big hulking box of tubes or whatever’s in there bulging out in back of the screen like an ugly, cheap plastic rump… and everybody else’s is forty-eight inches, sixty-four inches, whatever that measures—sliced and diced that mini-moment and on the screen where all is uproar… a hulking brigade of policemen, a battalion… never saw so many in one place trying to contain a mob of yowling—those are students!—all those young Neg brown and tan young heads with their mouths wide open howling bloody murder from out of their gullets… squad cars all over the place… more racks of roof lights flashing away… The camera, wherever the camera is, focuses more tightly on the action… you can see the Lexan riot visors the policemen have and the Lexan riot shields… a frontline of Neg, brown, mulat, café au lait boys, and une fille saillante comme un boeuf push back against the shields… they look so small, up against the police officers, these yowling high school goslings—

“Qu’est-ce qui se passe?” (What’s going on?), Lantier says to Ghislaine. “Pourquoi ne pas nous dire?”(Why don’t they tell us!)

As if on cue, a woman’s hyper-voice overrides the yowling—you can’t see her—and says, “They apparently want to drive the crowd back far enough—they’ve got to get the teacher—Estevez, we’re told is his name—he teaches civics—they’ve got to get him out of the building and into a police van and place him in a detention—”

“Estevez!” Lantier said to Ghislaine in French. “Civics class—that’s Philippe’s teacher!”

“—but won’t say where. Their big concern right now is security. The students were dismissed just about an hour ago. Classes are suspended for the day. But this crowd of students—they refuse to leave the school grounds, and this is an old building that was not built thinking about security. Police are afraid students will try to reenter the building, and that’s where Estevez is being held.”

Lantier said, “Good luck getting him out of there! The police can’t hold back a mob of kids like that but so long!”

“Papa,” said Ghislaine, “this is a re-broadcast! All this happened five or six hours ago, it must be.”

“Ahhh… yes,” said Lantier. “That’s true, that’s true…” He stared directly at Ghislaine. “But Philippe didn’t say anything about… any of this!” Before Ghislaine could respond, the TV voice rose… “I think they’re gonna try to bring him out now. That small door there, at ground level—it’s opening!”

The camera zoomed in… looked like a utility door. As it opened it created a small shadow on the concrete surface… Out came a police officer looking this way and that. Then two more… and two more… and yet two more… then three came squeezing out of the little—no, they were not three policemen but two policemen gripping the upper arms of a burly, balding, light-skinned man with his hands behind his back, apparently handcuffed together. Even though the hair on his pate was getting scarce, he must not have been more than thirty-five. He walked with his chin high but was blinking at a terrific rate. His chest bulged out against a white shirt whose shirttails seemed to be hanging outside his pants.

“That’s who it is!” said the TV voice. “That’s the teacher, José Estevez! A civics teacher at Lee de Forest High School. He’s now under arrest for punching a student in front of an entire class and then dragging him to the floor, we’re told, and all but paralyzing him with some sort of neck hold. The police have closed in around him in a sort of—uh-uhhh—phalanx to protect him until they can get him inside the police van.”

—a squall of yowls and howls and gullet-ripping epithets—

“They’ve figured out that’s him, Estevez, the teacher who assaulted one of their schoolmates about two hours ago!”

“What is that shirt?” says Lantier, in French.

The teacher and his army of cop bodyguards are pulling nearer and nearer to the camera.

Ghislaine answers in French, “Looks like a guayabera to me. A Cuban shirt.”

The TV voice: “They’ve almost reached the van… you can see right there. The riot police have done an amazing job, holding back this big and very angry crowd of students—”

Lantier looks Ghislaine squarely in the face again and says, “Philippe comes home from school, from the same classroom where all this happens, an army of cops occupies the schoolyard, and there’s a mob of his own schoolmates ready to hang his teacher from a tree if they can lay hands on him—and Philippe doesn’t want to talk about it, and his Neg pal Antoine doesn’t want to talk about it? If that had been me, I’d still be talking about it after all these years! What’s going on with Philippe? Do you have any idea at all?”

Ghislaine shook her head and said, “No, Papa… none at all.”