The Young Apollo and Other Stories (27 page)

Irina had aged, but, as one might have suspected, serenely. She had memory lapses, and she made increasing references to persons of her Russian past of whom I had never even heard her speak. But she seemed content to stay on in the Long Island house, even in the winter months when I had moved to town, and take little walks in the woodland paths and across the fields. She seemed to have found a kind of peace there. A Russian peace, no doubt.

Such was my situation in 1954, when the great desegregation case arose. Of course at first I had no connection with it. Jimmy Byrnes, the South Carolina governor, for whom I had not only friendship but the profoundest respect, had, very appropriately enlisted the aid of John W. Davis to carry the banner for those who wished to uphold the old and tried ways. I had no notion that Davis was inadequate for the case, but I thought it might be helpful to rally as many school districts as we could behind him and file as many briefs as should be allowed. To me it was a question of showing a united front to a nation divided by radicals.

When Philip had notice of what I was doing, he made a special trip to New York to plead with me. He angered me by talking to some of my partners without my permission, and it hardly improved my temper to have him tell me that almost all of them had thoroughly agreed with him and deplored my taking so unpopular a public position and what it might do to the firm.

"Dad," he insisted, "even you must admit that the separate but equal doctrine for the treatment of black students and white is not practical. Black schools in the South are never going to be on a par with white."

"I admit they are not at present," I had to concede. "But that's no reason they can't be. The money's there for it, or could be furnished by Uncle Sam, who, God knows, seems willing enough to pay for things. I'd go even further. Averse as you know me to be to federal interference with state matters, I would endorse a program to compel the southern states to provide equal treatment. Anything rather than force poor white parents to controvert their passionate belief that the races should not be obliged to mingle!"

"Dad, you're fighting the future. Don't you know you're bound to lose?"

"No, I do not. And if I am, the nation loses."

I had no particular feeling about Negroes. Northerners know very little about the subject. They worship Thomas Jefferson, for example, who not only chased after his escaped slaves but had them soundly whipped when caught. He may even have slept with female slaves, though that interests me less. Who knows? The women may have liked it. But I certainly don't believe that I would ever have beaten a slave, and I am convinced that my father never did. Had the North not been intoxicated by abolitionists and shown a little patience, slavery, already doomed abroad, might have died a natural death. Certainly the blacks in the Reconstruction years were not much better off than they had been.

Justice Holmes put it well when he defined freedom of speech as the right of a fool to drool. We are fast approaching the point where only the fool will be allowed to drool, where the thinking sort will have to hold their tongues for fear of offending some screeching minority. Why should I care? I won't live to see it.

Irina, at any rate, has the odd virtue of always having the last word. This is often true of people who don't give a damn. When she saw how dejected I was by the unanimous ruling of the court that condemned desegregation in public schools, she evidently thought it incumbent upon a wife to offer some brand of consolation. Here is what she brought: "Isn't it possible, my poor Langdon, that this tribunal you so excoriate has been saving us from just the sort of dreadful uprising that swept away my family and its whole generation?"

I knew there was no point getting into an argument with Irina on
that
subject. But I shall still die unreconstructed.