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By Root 358 0

the times they’d wished her dead; she would graciously acquiesce. She thought of Cooke, the dean, now retired of course, but unthinkable that he would not show up; how he had always been the first to kiss her whenever she returned from even the slightest triumph, and how she had detested that kiss—his lips rough, cluttered and gluey—and how she had told him, explicitly, her feelings. “But ladies are meant to be kissed!” he replied. She had thrown up her hands—and endured. Or had avoided him, which, because they shared an office, was not easy.

Then there was Mrs. Hyde, her secretary, also retired from the college though still working for Andrea Clement White in her office at home, who was the closest thing she had to someone to lean on. Any time of the day or night she was able to call on Mrs. Hyde—and Mrs. Hyde seemed to have nothing better to do than serve her. She understood she represented to Mrs. Hyde a glamour utterly missing from her own life, and Andrea Clement White had, over the thirty years of their acquaintanceship, ridiculed Mr. Hyde unmercifully. Because, in truth, she grew used to being served by Mrs. Hyde, had come to expect her service as her due, and was jealous and contemptuous of Mr. Hyde—a dull little man with the flat, sour cheeks of a snake—who provided his wife little of the excitement Andrea Clement White felt was generated spontaneously in her own atmosphere.

Mrs. Hyde was, in fact, driving the car, Mrs. Clement White seated beside her. And one could tell from the restful silence in the car that they shared a very real life together. If Andrea Clement White sat in the same car with her husband it was clear they shared a life. He was a man who cared little for Literature, having—as he said—married it and seen how crazy it was. But the quality of the silence was quite different. In her husband’s silence there was tension, criticism of her, impatience. He held his tongue the better to make her know what he thought. Mrs. Hyde held hers as a comfort; she knew Mrs. Clement White needed the silence—after an encounter with other people—to settle into herself again.

“Imagine thinking that black people write only about being black and not about being people.” Andrea Clement White fumed, rummaging through her purse for a tissue. “Disgusting make-up,” she said, running a tissue around her collar and bringing it down a very dark brown. “Can you imagine, as many shades of brown as there are, they have only one jar to cover everything? And one jar, of course, for them, but then they only need one jar.” Mrs. Hyde did not say anything. She drove expertly, smoothly. Enjoying the luxury of the car, a silver Mercedes 350SL. Her foot barely touched the pedal and the car slid along, effortlessly.

I walked into the studio, Andrea Clement White replayed herself, as she did all the time (someone called this the curse—or was it the blessing?—of the artist; she thought everyone did it), and right away, as usual, I knew it was going to be awful. That the questions would be boring and the interviewer ill read, ahistorical and poorly educated. It was enough when white liberals told you they considered what you said or wrote to be new in the world (and one was expected to fall for this flattery); one never expected them to know one’s history well enough to recognize an evolution, a variation, when they saw it; they meant new to them. But how cutely ignorant the young black woman interviewer had been! “You are the first!” she had boomed—strangely unbleached black voice as yet, but TV would whiten it out—and when Andrea Clement White said, “But there’s no such thing as a first, an absolute first in the area of human relations, only perhaps in Science,” the woman had thought her coy, and had grinned, indulgently. (Andrea Clement White hated to be indulged when she was not seeking indulgence. It was at that point that she switched her mind to automatic.)

And now the lilacs along the road rushed as if drawn against the silver of the car; and lilacs and television interviewer mixed: there was an image of the interviewer with a