White People Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR Allan Gurganus’s

  White People

  Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction

  Winner of the Southern Book Award for Fiction

  from the Southern Book Critics Circle

  A Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award

  A New York Times Notable Book

  “White People celebrates American culture in all its humanistic vibrancy and grotesque contradictions. Blending trenchant satire with outrageous humor, Gurganus’s stories recall both Mark Twain and Flannery O’Connor.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Mimicry is a powerful narrative asset, and Allan Gurganus practices it like a virtuoso…. The authors vocal repertoire encompasses salesmanese, African American funerary dithyrambs, post-debutante bridge-table chatter and redneck macho boasting…. I can’t think of a nit to pick from these stories. They have variety, humor, profundity and verbal dexterity…. One thinks of Mark Twain.”

  —Dennis Drabelle, The Washington Post Book World

  “Gurganus introduces ourselves to ourselves; lovingly, tenderly…. A major achievement.”

  —Newsday

  “Brilliant…. High voltage emotion is accompanied and countered by a thorough intelligence that shapes and directs at every point…. A glorious collection.”

  —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “[Gurganus’s] best stories command a sort of sublimity of the mundane; they locate the dangerous glamour in ordinariness.

  —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Nation

  “White People overflows with the buttermilk of human kindness. The velvety sentences just come rolling out, smoothly folding and lapping over at the ends, but it’s more than a matter of sentences. It’s a hundred tiny moments of kindness bestowed and withheld, and keenly observed. It’s a writer reminding you that sweet good writing can even make you feel better about your own existence.”

  —Mark Childress, Los Angeles Times Book Review

  For my friends,

  especially for Daisy Thorp

  and for Paul Nagano

  There is a kind of success that is indistinguishable from panic.

  EDGAR DEGAS,

  as quoted in Daniel Halévy, My Friend Degas

  One inexorable rule of etiquette is that you must talk to your next-door neighbor at a dinner table. You MUST, that is all there is about it! … At dinner once, Mrs. Toplofty, finding herself next to a man she quite openly despised, said to him with apparent placidity, “I shall not talk to you—because I don’t care to. But for the sake of my hostess, I shall say my multiplication tables. Twice one are two, twice two are four—” and she continued through the tables, making him alternate with her. As soon as she politely could, she turned again to her other companion.

  EMILY POST (Mrs. Price Post),

  Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage,

  illustrated with private photographs and

  fascimiles of social forms, 1922 edition

  Very late that fall, my grandfather and my father and a great many more went down to the Humboldt River to fish…. When they came back, they brought us more news. They said there were white people at the Humboldt Sink. They were the first ones that my father had seen face to face. He said they were not like ‘humans’. They were more like owls than like anything else. They had hair on their faces, and had white eyes. My father said they looked very beautiful….

  PRINCESS SARAH WINNEMUCCA HOPKINS,

  in Life Among the Paiutes as quoted by Joanne

  Meschery in Truckee, California: A History

  Contents

  MINOR HEROISM: Something About My Father

  CONDOLENCES TO EVERY ONE OF Us

  ART HISTORY

  NATIVITY, CAUCASIAN

  BREATHING ROOM: Something About My Brother

  AMERICA COMPETES

  ADULT ART

  IT HAD WINGS

  A HOG LOVES ITS LIFE: Something About My Grandfather

  REASSURANCE

  BLESSED ASSURANCE: a moral tale

  About the Author

  Also by Allan Gurganus

  Minor Heroism

  Something About My Father

  For William Maxwell

  1. AT WAR, AT HOME

  I MAGINE HIM in his prime. A fairly rich and large-eared farm boy newly cured of being a farm boy by what he called Th’ War, meaning the second one. He’d signed up in Charlottesville when most of his fraternity had done it as a group, and up till then he had been somewhat humorlessly typical. He had been hung up with the rest of them in the fraternity of the university that Jefferson designed, and he was as lean and carefully prepared as all the very best Virginia hams. And it would seem to follow that, in 1942, my father began being made more valuable by several years of smoke. But this smoke was not the curative Virginia kind; it was the high-flying smoke of German cities burning. My father was a bombardier. He became a minor hero in the Second World War and a major hero in Virginia/Carolina. He was photographed as Betty Grable stood on tiptoe to kiss him. He was tall. He still is. But his height meant most when he was dressed as an officer in our Army Air Corps. Today, in civvies, he is just another mildly handsome businessman. It was in uniform that Father looked most like himself.

  Heroes should have looks. His were better than most, better than wholesome. It was one of those faces that fit handsomely into photographs and under a brimmed cap. It seemed to know in every pose that captions would be under it eventually. His profile, nearly as good as a Barrymore’s, was better for being blunted slightly by boarding-school boxing. With very combed blond hair waving back in the way hair did then, his was a face that even from the front told much about itself in silhouette. Many of the photos still exist.

  When I was a child in the years just after that war, people cornered me with accounts of my father’s valor. They told me in front of other children how, though everybody’s father had certainly helped with it, mine had done more than most to insure that the Nazi plot to rule the world—to rule the very ground on which this birthday party was now taking place—had been crushed by the Americans. They mentioned the Freedoms, four in all, and promised that the whole white world was now capable of worshiping in whichever ways it chose. They said to me, “Do you know what your father did?” I was told how people had printed “Welcome Richard!” on broad banners made of sheets that stretched all the way across Main Street.

  But before the war was won and he came home, there was the business about what they made my grandmother do. Though bossy when alone with family, she was a remarkably shy woman, even for then. In North Carolina, in 1942, shyness was less unusual than it is today. Both her parents’ families had been equally distinguished and austere, and, as if to commemorate this, she parted her hair impartially down the middle and most always wore the same rare brooch at the exact center of her collar and throat. I once saw her hiding in the dark back hallway of her house; eyes opened very wide, she stood against a wall, as unwanted guests on the front porch repeatedly rang the door chimes.

  She had been reared at home with her three sisters, on a Raleigh side street in a house cool most of the year with the amount of marble in it: veined tabletops, hearths arched and white as tombs, classical statuary, athletic and luminous in dark corners. The marble hearths and statues floated upright in the house’s murk. Tabletops rode the gloom like oval rafts. It seemed the marble objects were the rooms’ true residents, directing every household current into eddies split around themselves and cooling off whatever drifted past them.

  But Grandmother’s wish for the stillness of 1909 was inappropriate in 1942. There was a war going on and her son, they told her, was crucial to the local view of it. They put much unnecessary pressure on a lady so easily swayed. All it took was one uns
crupulous question about how much patriotism she really felt as, after all, a longtime member of the DAR. At this, she said that yes, yes, she would do it, but only if they did not ask her to speak. Of course, those present assured her, she wouldn’t have to utter one syllable she didn’t rightly feel she could or should utter. But no one believed she would stay silent once she got up there and got the feel of it from all the bunting hung around. They forced her, in this way, to sit on public platforms. When the speaker selling war bonds acknowledged her, seated there as formal as her central brooch, she winced in recognition of her name and nodded back to him and tried to smile out at the audience like a mother, but she looked like a potentially bereaved one.

  Mrs. Roosevelt herself came through on a decorated train and got off and walked over to the platform they’d set up outside the station, and not even then would my grandmother speak a public sentence to those gathered on the street and hanging out the windows of the Bank and those who dangled legs like extra letters over the sign usually spelling Ekstein’s Finer Men’s Apparel. Suspended from four lampposts were giant photos of my father in uniform, in profile. When Mrs. Roosevelt came over as the ceremony ended and said how handsome my father must be, to judge from his pictures over there, my grandmother finally spoke. She was nodding and thanking Eleanor Roosevelt as an equal when she noticed Mrs. Roosevelt wore no hat, which seemed odd in one of her station. What she was wearing, its weight tugging at the fabric of one shoulder, was a huge pale, wide-mouthed orchid which, some suggested afterwards, had looked much like her.

  But Mrs. Roosevelt had won them over nonetheless, and it was lucky that others overheard what she said to Grandmother about my father’s good looks. Grandmother would never have repeated it to anyone. Though she acknowledged things graciously, she never started them. In this way, she had become an adult and then a wife and, quite soon after that, a mother. Some were annoyed by this belief of hers that silence was always in good taste, but most people felt it was probably fine the way she was; that somehow it was more patriotic for a wife and mother not to say too much—except, of course, for Mrs. Roosevelt, and some people even felt that way about Mrs. Roosevelt.

  THE PHOTOGRAPH of Betty Grable kissing my father’s flat cheek seemed to hold the house up. I was born in 1947 and, as far as I knew, it had always been there. People who did not come often to the house would sometimes ask to see it. They were led back to the den, where it was hung with the medals. Smiling, they stooped to get the picture window’s reflection off of it, and they’d shake their heads and nod appreciatively. I remember someone’s saying that when you were young during a war it is hard to know later if you liked being young during a war or liked just being young or maybe even the war itself, who knows?

  In the picture, he does not return her kiss but stands there; a statuesque soldier, newly decorated for minor heroism, accepts the homage of a distant voluptuous country. He is enjoying it probably, but he does not smile, for at that moment the fate of the Western world as we now know it still hung in the balance. But Betty Grable could smile. It was all right if she did, and the official Army photographer, whose job it was to photograph the wake of morale she left behind, snapped an Army camera, and there it was—on most front pages in either Carolina and with practically the whole page to itself in our local Falls Herald Traveler. And though manliness and the national moment forbade he show it, yes, certainly my father was enjoying the kiss synchronized with flashbulbs, just as local boys too young to go themselves were not too young to go at themselves several times a day upon finding this hometown representative in a favorite national fantasy with a Grable whose legs were here not even photographed to advantage, though the boys knew them well enough from other pictures. The local boys looked over at the grainy photograph they’d cut out and pinned up to the wallpaper beside their beds, and for a while there, several times a day, any number of them were replacing my father in his uniform, with Grable breathing right there beside them in her WAC’s outfit shortened way beyond regulations. And after the ceremony, as the dots of flashbulbs were still dying out of their vision, there the boys were, there he was, the local high-school valedictorian, in the south of England, wearing my father’s uniform and medals and walking across a muddy camp with Grable on his arm. He was looking down at her little WAC’s cap pinned to the blond hair swept up on top. Pulling back the tent flap, she goes in first; he waits, takes a few more drags from the Camel he is smoking, then flips it smoothly into a nearby puddle and goes in himself. She is right there, patriotically spread-eagled on the tent floor, waiting for more minor heroism. In the flexed nostrils of the class valedictorian, the stink of weatherproofed canvas combines with the scent of Betty Grable’s own perfume, a perfume that all the factories at home are working overtime to make available for her to bolster soldiers’ morale, perfume that all the smokestacks smoke for hours to make one ounce of, perfume that all the factory girls at home helped make with skilled fingers, factory girls waiting up in their little rooms for men, disheveled healthy girls with their own skilled factory hands working up themselves with thoughts of soldierhood and regulation bayoneting and, oh, how crucial my own father was to local high-school boys behind closed doors in the early spring of 1945.

  But when I was eight years old, some adult would take me aside and say, “Bryan, do you know what your father did before you were even born? Has he told you about what he did?” I said I didn’t know for sure but that they used to paint little German planes on their bombers every time they shot a real one down, and my daddy’s score was very high. They said no, not that. Not exactly. It was Dresden, the terrible and decisive firebombing of Dresden, that had been his real moment.

  I nodded and always imagined a city of plate and saucer monuments and crockery apartments and wartime’s smoking smokestacks made of stacked white bottomless coffee cups. And in the center of the shining city was an oil depot, looking very like a soup tureen of Mother’s—a white one too large for just us to use but brought out for dinner parties and reunions and once, I remembered, filled with vegetable alphabet soup. I’d stood, amazed to see the very spindly alphabet I was then learning to draw between blue lines fattened up and floating on the top of something I and all my family, even my illiterate younger brother, could drink down like reading. But the tureen I imagined there in Dresden was a million gallons high and filled to the top with the crudest, blackest German oil that fueled the deadly U-boats. A remarkable target for my father in his clear air over the heart of gleaming Dresden. In my conception, the black bomb wobbles toward the very shadow of it growing on the glossy upper disc of all those gallons. The life-sized shadow meets the real bomb falling in and going off down at the very bottom. Such beautiful war-movie slow motion now allows a perfect view of all the damage as the tank pops jaggedly open and out the gallons gush into the tranquil city. Black oil gluts the sewers of the sanitation system. The overflow is fingering up and out into the gutters and makes a black street map of the white municipality. Borne along in the dark gloss are clusters of diced carrots and chopped celery from my mother’s kitchen, and there come the fat paste letters of the alphabet, movable type sucked down with the black into the gasping manholes. The level rises—filling, incidentally, the holes, which are the handles of the chaste white coffee cups. Darkness crawls about and then above the town and finally defines a surface that a cup or saucer may float along on briefly, till tilting, then filling viscously, they sink in, one by one, until they all are underneath. Now everything is underneath. All the quaintness of Germany, all the cuckoo clocks are under, all the perfect German sheet music played by countless amateurs on Sundays, and, worst for me, all the inedible lost letters of my mother’s English alphabet have become one glossy black deluge which now shows just the tiny moving shadow of my father’s bomber, speeding back to England, back to the USO show, which will not begin till he is there in a seat being saved for him.

  The photographers are smoking at the airport now; they are awaiting him. They are men also in th
e Army. Their job is to photograph the bombardiers like my handsome father, crawling from the cockpit, less exerted than excited by the damage he has done, looking clean and highly combed as when he left some hours ago.

  BUT BY THE TIME I was imagining the bombing of Dresden, my father was done with all that. The war had been won. Dresden’s place setting was being sorted out. With Germany having an Occupation forced upon it, it was time my father settled into a job himself. His fading local glamour at least proved useful in helping him choose a career. Cashing in on people’s memories of him, he became an insurance salesman. It was not hard, selling insurance, and with his law degree, with the certificates Grandfather had given him, with the smattering of rents collected from the colored-tenant houses—the only remnants of Grandmother’s “fortune”—Father felt he could more than make do. He married a clever girl he’d met at a deb party before the war. He brought her south from Richmond and carried her into a thirty-thousand-dollar house already paid for in advance by his cashing in certificates in companies making aluminum and small-screened televisions—all companies on the brink of booming when he sold their stocks. But though he was without much business sense, still there was the thirty-thousand-dollar house, much larger than what one could buy oneself today for that amount of money. So my father and my mother moved into a house that echoed slightly because it had more rooms than furniture. Sometimes the guest room was occupied by a recurrent itinerant aunt; but when she was gone the doors were closed, the heating ducts turned off, and three bedrooms, now accommodating only boxes full of unused wedding gifts, again stood very vacant.

  My father still wrote to war buddies. They often passed through town en route to Florida, howling in through the front door to hug him. A lot of them were dark men, hairy in a way my father and his fair Carolina friends were not. It seemed that all New Yorkers were brown-eyed and sooty from the city; they looked odd here in the clear to amber light of our Tidewater. Mentioning their wives waiting out in the car, they lifted eyebrows suggestively, as in the old days—as if that were some notorious and easy girl out there. Mother never liked their wives much, and when they’d left, Father told her she was a snob. “War buddies’ wives are not necessarily war buddies themselves,” she quipped. Once, when he insisted, after hanging up the phone, that they drive two hundred miles to a motel where someone from his squadron was staying on the way to Miami, Mother mentioned a bridge tournament; she said, “Show him my picture,” and settled luxuriously back onto the couch with the latest novel by Daphne du Maurier. “He already saw your picture and he’s heard more about you than you’d ever guess!” my father shouted as he stormed out with the car keys and an unopened bottle of Jack Daniel’s and, slamming the door, rattled the china cabinet. Very early the next morning, he came in drunk and in a loud voice over the telephone canceled an afternoon appointment to sell Group Life. My mother wandered down to breakfast in her quilted yellow housecoat, and noticed a broken headlight on the Packard parked at the wrong angle outside. When they’d settled at the table, coffee poured, she offered him the usual tirade about his egotism, her suffering, and their marriage, which she liked to say was “crumbling, Richard, crumbling!” I sat eating scrambled eggs with a big round training spoon, and my younger brother dropped his baby bottle on the floor, then looked down at it till I picked it up. “Oh yeah?” my father said. And then she said, “Don’t you use that trashy New York slang around your children.” “Oh yeah?” he said.