she got going good on her imitation?
Sometimes you felt like cutting the fool for the hell of it. Sometimes you hankered to pick a bone and talk with your mouth full. To Cleo culture was a garment that she had learned to get into quickly and out of just as fast.
She put on her parlor airs now, for Mr. Van Ryper was descending the stairs. Her eyebrows arched delicately, her luscious mouth pursed primly, and a faint stage smile ruffled her smooth cheeks. These artifices had no effect on Mr. Van Ryper, who was elderly.
He reached the bottom step and peered at her. “Carrie should have shown you in here,” he said fussily, piloting Cleo and Judy into the parlor.
He waved at a chair. “Sit down, Mrs. — uh — Jenkins, and you, young lady. What’s your name, Bright Eyes or Candy Kid? Let’s see if it’s Candy Kid. Look in that box on the table, and mind you don’t stick up yourself or the furniture.”
Judy murmured her thanks and retired. She had learned to dissolve when grown-ups were talking. They forgot you and said very interesting things.
“Now, then, Mrs. — uh — Jordan,” said Mr. Van Ryper. “I expect you’ve come about the house.”
Cleo looked about the gracious room. The lacquered floors were of fine hardwood, the marble above the great hearth was massive and beautiful. The magnificent sliding doors leading into the dining room were rich mahogany, the wallpaper was exquisitely patterned. From the center of the high ceiling the gas chandelier spun its crystal tears.
“It’s a beautiful house,” said Cleo with awe.
“Best house on the block. Sorry to leave it, but I’m too old to temper my prejudices.”
Cleo looked startled and felt humiliated. Were there colored people next door? Was that why Mr. Van Ryper was moving away? Should her pride make her rise and exit with dignity, or should she take the insult in exchange for this lovely house? Who were the people next door? If they were anybody, Miss Binney would have known them. They must be old second-class niggers from way down South, whom she wouldn’t want to live next door to herself.
“Do you happen to know what part of the South the family came from?” she asked delicately.
Mr. Van Ryper looked startled now. “What family?” he asked testily, peering hard at Cleo with the intent of reading her foolish feminine mind.
“The colored family you’re prejudiced at,” Cleo said belligerently.
Mr. Van Ryper rose to his feet. His face purpled with anger. “Madam, my father was a leader in the Underground Movement. I was brought up in an Abolitionist household. Your accusation of color prejudice is grossly impertinent. I believe in man’s inalienable right to liberty. Let me lecture you a bit for the enlightenment of your long-eared child, who is probably being brought up in cotton batting because she’s a little colored Bostonian who must never give a backward look at her beginnings.
“We who are white enslaved you who are — to use a broad term, madam — black. We reduced your forebears to the status of cattle. It must be our solemn task to return their descendants to man’s estate. I have been instrumental in placing a good many southern Negroes in the service of my friends. My maid Carrie is lately arrived from the South. She is saving her wages to send for her family. They will learn here. They will go to night school. Their children will go to day school. Their grandchildren will go to high school, and some of them will go to college.
“Negroes are swarming out of the South. The wheat and the chaff are mixed. But time is a sifting agent. True, the chaff will forever be our cross to bear, but one fine day the wheat will no longer be part of the Negro problem.”
Cleo looked unimpressed. She had lent an unwilling ear to this long speech, and had stubbornly closed her mind every time Mr. Van Ryper used the word Negro, because colored Bostonians were supposed to feel scandalized whenever they heard this indecent appellation. This fancy talk was just to cover up his saying he didn’t like niggers.
“Well, it’s nice when people aren’t prejudiced,” Cleo said politely.
“Madam, I am distinctly prejudiced against the Irish,” Mr. Van Ryper said wearily, thinking that colored women, for all they had to endure, were as addlepated as their fairer-skinned sisters. “The Irish present a threat to us entrenched Bostonians. They did not come here in chains or by special invitation. So I disclaim any responsibility for them, and reserve the right to reject them. I do reject them, and refuse to live in a neighborhood they are rapidly overrunning. I have decided to rent my house to colored. Do you or don’t you want it?”
“I do,” said Cleo faintly, thinking this was the oddest white man she had ever met. It would take an educated person like Miss Binney to understand how his mind worked.
“And is the rent within your means? Thirty-five dollars, but it struck me as a fair sum. There are ten rooms. I hope you won’t mind if I don’t show them to you now. The parish priest is waiting upstairs in the sitting room. Seems some neighbors have complained about my attitude. He’s a man of taste and intelligence. Pity he has to be Irish, but I understand that some of his blood is English.”
Cleo rose, with a little nod at Judy, who came as obediently as a puppy trained to heel. There was a ring of chocolate around her mouth that made her look comical, and a smudge of it on one of her gloves. Cleo sighed a little. Children made a mess with chocolate candy. Any fool ought to know that. What did this old man think lollipops were invented for?
“About the rent, Mr. Van Ryper,” she said, wiping Judy’s mouth with the cotton handkerchief and taking this opportunity to glare in her eye, “thirty dollars would suit me better. And you wouldn’t have to wait for it. You’d have it every month on the dot. My husband told me to tell you that.”
Mr. Van Ryper gestured toward the dining-room doors. His voice was patient and instructive. “Madam, each one of those doors cost two hundred dollars. The staircase cost a small fortune. There is a marble bowl in the master bedroom. The bathtub is porcelain, and so is the — ah — box. But if thirty dollars is all you can afford, I hope you will make up the difference in appreciation.”
“Indeed I will,” Cleo promised fervently. “It’s been my dream to live in Brookline.”
“This isn’t Brookline,” Mr. Van Ryper said crossly. “The other side of the street is Brookline. This side is Roxbury, which that thundering herd of Irish immigrants have overrun. They have finally pushed their boundary to here. Time was when Roxbury was the meeting place of great men. Now its fine houses are being cut up into flats for insurrectionists. I’m moving to Brookline within a few days. Brookline is the last stronghold of my generation.”
Cleo swallowed her disappointment. Several colored families were already living in Roxbury. They didn’t talk about the Irish the way Mr. Van Ryper did. They called them nice white people. They said they lived next door to such nice white people, and made you feel out of fashion because your neighbors were colored.
She opened her purse, taking great care that its contents were not wholly revealed to Mr. Van Ryper.
“Just one other thing first,” he said. “Your reference. That is to say, your husband’s employer.”
“My husband’s in business,” Cleo explained. “He has a wholesale place in the Market. All kinds of fruit, but mostly bananas.”
Mr. Van Ryper’s eyes filled with interest. “Bart Judson?
