of this as good practice,” Millie soothed. “By the time the banquet rolls around tomorrow night, you’ll be a true veteran.” She made an adjustment to Jim’s tie and stepped back. “Perfect! So handsome! There won’t be anyone in your league.”
Sentiments that were, he knew after listening to them for eighteen years, utterly mistaken. His looks had improved out of sight, but he’d never be Harry Belafonte. The only reason he turned heads was the ravishing white woman on his arm.
Old enough now to be settling into his ultimate physique, Jim Hunter was several inches over six feet in height, had a neck so thick and strong that it tended to dwarf his head, massive shoulders and upper arms, and a barrel of a chest. When he walked he waddled thanks to bulging thighs, but the right knee injury that had put paid to any hopes of a football scholarship made him favor the right leg in a noticeable limp.
The face, to those seeking it atop so much raw power, used to be no disappointment, for it had been brutish. Jim Hunter’s skin was nigh impossibly black, as black as the blackest native African’s; when he was photographed, even in color, his face was so dark it lost whole layers of definition. To see what he really looked like necessitated seeing the living man. His bones were unobtrusive, the cheekbones flat, and his nose in the old days had splayed outward with hugely gaping nostrils. At St. Bernard’s he had instantly been nicknamed Gorilla, a huge insult compounded by his uprooted bewilderment, this all-white environment so far from home: the days of black immigration from the South were still to come, so he was a true novelty in Italian-American East Holloman. Adolescents are cruel; to find the Gorilla could ace them all in a classroom without even extending himself didn’t go down well. Nor, when almost immediately he took up with the St. Mary’s belle Millie O’Donnell, did that go down well. Add Jim Hunter’s temper plus his tendency to harbor grudges, and the pattern was set. He fought. Dozens of fights against ever-increasing numbers of opponents had eventually destroyed his superficial, even some of his deepest, sinuses as well as afflicted him with agonizing pain in his facial nerves. While the gorilla look grew worse.
Only John Hall’s loan of ten thousand dollars for surgical repair had saved Jim’s life, and in more ways than one. After the surgery the gorilla look had vanished; his nose was straight and quite narrow, its nostrils small and unobtrusive, he had bones in his cheeks and a good jawline. Finally his one great natural endowment, a pair of large, astonishingly green eyes, could come into their own and dominate his face beneath a high, broad brow.
But the psychic scars persisted down to this moment when his beautiful white wife tied his black tie and told him he looked so handsome. These were the great years of the Black Revolution, of last-ditch stands by fanatical whites against the inevitable opening up of all horizons to the black man, and Jim Hunter knew it, acknowledged it, even understood it. What he couldn’t shake off was his deep conviction that much of his own ordeal was due to his marrying a white prom queen. She had been with him since his fifteenth birthday, so much a part of him that she was a cause. A cause? No! The cause.
A sensible streak had whispered to Jim that, appearing so very African, he must not go the Afro route; his hair was close-cropped and he wore the apparel of a post-doctoral fellow—chinos, white cotton shirt, loafers, a beat-up tweed jacket.
Except when, as now, he was being squeezed into the biggest tuxedo the formal-wear shop hired out.
“Don’t flex your muscles,” Millie was warning.
He hardly heard her, thinking how he’d gotten there. The years at Chubb had been a landslide of discoveries and seminal papers, or maybe a roller-coaster was a better analogy. Most of those who talked excitedly about Professor Jim Hunter had no idea he was a black ex-gorilla married to a dishy white chick. His reputation was made; now all he had to do was hang in there over this coming twelve months, during which he would enjoy fame of a different kind: a celebrity author. Though when Don Carter had started to describe some of the things he would be called upon to do, he shrank away in horror. Most of all, he was not ready to face the whole of a vast nation as the blackest of black men with a beauty queen white wife.
Millie was standing there, gazing at him with the eyes of love. Her sister Kate, a clothes horse, had lent her a dress, kind of wispy over a plain lining of lavender blue, the wisps the same shade, but varied in intensity. She looked out of this world. Her legs were on display because miniskirts were in for evening parties, Kate said. And Kate had good taste, down to the loose cord of sparkling rhinestones around Millie’s hips.
She didn’t look happy, despite the love. Poor little girl! The guy who pinched her tetrodotoxin ought to be shot for the major crime of worrying her. And then there was John Hall …
He took her face between his huge hands, holding it like a single rose. “You are so beautiful,” he said in the back of his throat. “How did I ever get this lucky?”
“No, how did I?” she whispered back, stroking his hands. “One look, and I was done for. I will love you until I die, James Keith Hunter.”
His laugh was almost too quiet to hear. “Oh, c’mon, honey! Death is just a transition. D’you think that our molecules won’t shift heaven and earth to be together as long as time endures? We may die, but our molecules won’t.”
Her laugh was silent. “Just taking the mickey, my love, my joy—my dear, dear love.”
“This time next year we’ll be comfortable, I promise.”
“A promise I’ll hold you to.” She twisted a scarf around her neck and shrugged into a sweater before he helped her into her down coat, old and weeping, but Chicago-warm. “Oh, winter! I can’t wait for spring this year—1969 is going to be ours, Jim.”
His own Chicago down coat was a better fit than the tux, creaking at its seams. “At least it’s not snowing.”
“I dislike these people,” she said as she watched him lock the front door. “Fancy John turning up their relative.”
“You know what they say—you can choose your friends, but not your relatives. Though the Tunbulls aren’t too bad once you get to know them.”
“Poor John! I wonder how he’ll feel when he meets his stepmother. From what he said last night, most of his contact with his father concerned proving that he was the long lost son,” said Millie.
“That’s logical,” Jim answered. “Don’t worry, Millie, it will all come out in the wash sooner or later.” He looked suddenly hopeful. “Just think! I’ll soon be able to pay John back for that sinus operation if my book does what they say it will. Ten thousand dollars! Yet one more debt. A hundred big ones in student loans …”
“Stop it, Jim!” she snapped, looking fierce. “We’re Chubb faculty now, you’re about to be famous, and our income will pay back every last debt.”
“If Tinkerman doesn’t suppress A Helical God. Oh, Millie, it’s been such a long, hard road! I don’t think I could bear another disappointment.” Jim removed the stick from the old Chevy’s gas pedal. “The car’s good and warm. Get in.”
Davina and Max Tunbull lived in a big white clapboard house on Hampton Street, just off Route 133 in the Valley, and not more than half a mile from the invisible boundary beyond which the Valley became a less salubrious neighborhood. There were actually three Tunbull houses on this longish, rambling street of mostly vacant lots, but Max and Davina lived in the dominant one on the knoll, by far the most imposing. A house on the far side of the street had some pretensions to affluence, but there could be no doubt whose residence kinged it over all others.
When
