The Freewayfayers' Book of the Dead: A Novel

By John Okas

“The playful, spirited sequel to Routes continues the mythological history of the Black family in the 1930s and 1940s who continue their spiritual quests, worldly and otherworldly pursuits.” —Kirkus Reviews

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504024761

John Okas

John Okas was born in Brooklyn in 1949. As well as being a novelist, he plays the saxophone, composes music, and is a master chef. He currently lives in Bridgehampton, New York.  

Book preview

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The Business Opportunity that Lasts a Lifetime

Although it does no good, Sarah’s vain wishing keeps her from becoming a hopeless case. She collects shelves of the world’s least known literature, books on black magic, witchcraft, sorcery, voodoo, alchemy, the left hand path, the dark side of the street, and adds them to the new library she’s started with the rare editions she’s been getting from Mister Goldman, one of the men who support her on her pedestal. Nor can the book lover overlook the physical love stories from the recesses of the Paradise Book Shop. Now that she is older, more experienced, she finds words more stimulating than pictures to get herself in the mood that her witchcraft manuals tell her is so crucial for magic. At bedtime, to find relief from grief, guilt, and the horrible feeling of endless falling, she burns candles by the gross, browses books by anonymous authors, and rubs herself while reading the exploits of the heroes and heroines, trying to get the climactic feeling of being merged with the buck. She prays to the dogs to bring her love back from the dead or to lead her to that permanent out-of-her-body experience.

Foxie, Roxie, Moxie, Hyena,

fetch me that boy with the golden wiener.

Tippy, Tappy, Nippy, Lappy,

take me away, make it snappy.

She feels there is life ahead, but no way can she come by a thrill. The more urgently she tries, the more her grief and guilt kill her pleasure and send her falling with no bottom in sight. By morning her womanhood is sore and chafed, her concentration has given way to melancholy, and, dead tired, she falls into a fitful, nervous slump, plagued by gut-wrenching, plummetting dreams that have her pulling out her hair as she sleeps.

Naturally all of Sarah’s rituals and litanies cannot restore the literal body of the dead back to his spirit, or separate her soul from her body, but these rites do seed the destiny of the celebrant, and prepare her for uncommon adventures. The dogs of the underworld, ministers of justice to obverse interests, are also the dispensers of worldly wealth and power. More so than the Lord, they work in mysterious ways, and answer appeals extra roundaboutly.

The living man to whom she is closest is Harry Swan. Swan, a notorious playboy, is something like a boyfriend to her. He is twice her age rather than three times it. He cares about her, or professes to anyway, and was not so easily brushed off when her world collapsed and she went into seclusion.

The death of H Thornton Swan Senior, his father, is the ingenious first step which the infernal mechanics, those canine wizards of quanta, pass up to her. In recent years the Freeway economy has gone downhill. Many Freewayfarers are out of work, while great amounts of money sink into the pockets of a few. Swan is a name that means energy, tools, weapons, lumber. Thorco fuels the wheels of progress, with wells and refineries in the Lone Star and Golden States. Lightning Hammer Industries is a plant that takes up twenty square blocks in the Garden State, specializing in tools and dies, bits and pieces to drill the earth. There is also Supreme Motors, a Motown plant which manufactures armored vehicles, tanks, and fighter airplane parts. The next big war will be fought in the air, as well as earth and sea. Yes, Senior Swan is a man whose material assets weigh heavily but he cannot take an atom of them with him.

Senior Swan’s death is unknown to the mourning Sarah. Blind to all else but the grief in her heart, she will not take Harry’s call. And when she goes out for her daily walk it’s around the wharf, then straight down to the Paradise and back.

Come Shepherd, come Collie, come Boxer, come Spitz, bring me my Corn Dog, or tear me to bits.

Two weeks later, June is bursting with chestnut blossoms, and Sarah is in her room lost in dog verse when Harry calls her again, this time from the hotel lobby.

Laudette, happy for an excuse to interrupt this nonsense, knocks on Sarah’s locked door. It’s Sir Harry on the house line, Sugar, she says. He’s asking if he can come up. He says it’s something important.

Harry? She expects Laudette to lie for her. Remind him he shouldn’t call me, I’ll call him. Tell him I have a yeast infection. I need to be alone. It’s so itchy I’m out of my mind.

Without going into such personal detail Laudette relays the lady’s apologies. She listens to Swan’s reply and then conveys his message through the closed door to Sarah. Sir Harry says what he’s here for won’t take long, Sugar. It’s business, he says. It’s about his father.

His father?

His father died a couple of weeks ago. I told you, but you just floated by. Sir Harry’s been down in Angel Town, at the funeral, and settling up affairs. They read the will yesterday.

Oh boy! Sarah thinks. The thought of money spontaneously makes her put aside loss for gain, her dead for Harry’s, for a moment at least. She takes the call. Oh, you poor dear, I’m so sorry. Come right up. While Harry waits for a lift she puts her black veil in a drawer and she finds herself, to her disgust, running to her vanity to quickly redden the peaches in her cheeks, the cherries in her lips, and comb her goldilocks smooth.

Harry comes in and his kiss lets her know that now, more than three weeks since they’ve been together, he wouldn’t mind a woman with a little froth at the lips, that he has an itch too. But with Sarah plainly unresponsive, he accepts a drink, takes a seat and says. Well, dear old Dad is dead at last.

I’m so sorry.

You needn’t be. We never got along well. I didn’t come here to be consoled. There’s a problem with his will. I have a proposal that I think you might be interested in.

Really?

Yes. Never being one to confide in a woman, the playboy finishes his drink, and holds his glass out for more. Feeling more comfortable and finding Sarah solicitous, he begins to talk freely.

"Dad got rich because he wasn’t afraid to push himself into the right place at the right time. When I was growing up all he did was work; he was never at home. Mother was a society lady; collected art, went to lunch, rather fragile and high-strung. One thing, life in the Swan house was never fun. Soon after my parents were married Mother got pregnant. There were complications. When she gave birth to my sister Hilda, the doctors told her ‘never again’, that she was lucky to be alive. Dad was not an understanding man. He became angry with the doctors and angry with Mother. He wanted a son. He wanted one so badly he made do with what he had. He took my sister out hunting and fishing, taught her to play baseball, and brought her on his business trips. Early on, before he struck oil and made his first million, while Hilda was growing up, he still had time to be a father. Her seventh birthday was the day he made the strike on some land he had leased down in the Lone Star State. He nicknamed well sixty-six ‘Hilda’.

"Sis was cut from the same bolt as Dad. Even as a child, I’m told, she was serious, hard-working, and not one for frippery. As she grew up it became obvious she was bent for oil, and spent plenty of time with Dad, learning the business.

"When Hilda was fourteen Mother made the mistake of getting pregnant again. It was touch and go, but she had me and survived. I was born, but my sister, fifteen years my senior, was already the son my father never had. By now Thorco was a giant. Dad had hundreds of productive wells, and a gold mine in each. With all this capital he expanded into many other fields. It was hard work, long hours, and few days off.

"Dad never touched a drop of alcohol as long as he lived. Mother drank more than she should have. It was an awful marriage, locked in a vicious cycle: she drank because she was neglected, he neglected her because she drank. In time he did more than neglect her, he condemned her as weak and lazy. As a child I heard him complain about Mother, and women in general, calling them inferior, ineffectual, vulnerable, helpless. Somehow Hilda felt exempt from all his ranting.

"I stayed with Mother, but she, active in her ladies’ club or passed out, was hardly ever around for me. To make up for their negligence, my folks spoiled me with toys and, best of all, money. I was just like them, a chip off the old blocks, only too happy to take what I could get, and not get too mushy on family sentiment. Great, I thought, keep your love, Dad and Mother, I love money better than I love you, too.

"When I was ten Mother croaked, choked to death at one of her ladies’ luncheons on a bone in the chicken salad. One minute she was there laughing, the next dead and gone, with her head in the sorbet. Her companions were either too squeamish or too soused to figure out how to help her. It was a shock, and I missed her, sort of, but I didn’t cry, not even at the funeral. I went to a psychiatrist once. He said I probably wasn’t in touch with my feelings. Probably not. But I looked at it this way: why not make the best of a bad situation?

"After she was buried I came home, played with my toy trains and went up to sleep, as if it were any other day. The next day it was as if Mother never existed. Of course my father hated me for it, hated me for enjoying myself with the things that money could buy, instead of being miserable about what they couldn’t, like his love. After all, money was the reason I was a latch-key child. At least I was grateful the latch was twenty-four karat. Dad wanted me to suffer because of being neglected, and it really upset him that I enjoyed my life not only despite but because he was so distant.

"After I graduated college, Sis, who was forewoman in our father’s fields, hated me for being soft, for wanting to take it easy and have some fun in life. ‘We are nicely rich. Why work?’ I would say to her, and she would scowl at me. She believed that hard work, long hours, and making money purified the soul. ‘Even the lowest animal works for its daily bread,’ she would tell me. ‘Squirrels gather nuts whether they need them or not.’

"As I grew up I came to understand what a tough one Hilda was, a born battle-axe, a hatchet woman. She was oddly religious, had no spirit, but took a cue from Dad and made a big show about church. It was their superstitious way of disarming the competition. Although they would never admit it, even to themselves, in their business affairs my sister and father were completely without ethics. Deceit was justified whenever and wherever an opportunity to make money came up.

"I guess I took more after Mother, would rather spend than earn. I have no guilt about it. Since the age of reason I knew that Thorco was a huge predatory monster. The oil business has the public over a barrel and can squeeze as hard as it likes. That’s the law of the jungle, I guess, big fish can’t help their size, they have to eat smaller ones. But I’d be damned if I’d grow up to be like Dad or Sis, pat myself on the back for doing it, say ‘I earned it’ and feel that sanctimony and self-deception cleans up the money.

So, I became a playboy. They openly despised me for being weak and decadent, and disapproved of my indifference to the business, which they never really invited me into anyway. I’d say that if I’m going to be selfish I would rather enjoy than despise myself for doing it. They criticized my eating, drinking, and especially my habit of making merry with what they thought of as the weaker sex—I know I can come clean with you, Cupcake, I’ve had a lot of women in my life …

Sarah nods and smiles, appreciating Swan’s candor.

I should have known they would turn on me sooner or later. Dad’s will has a couple of catches in it. First off, it leaves fifty-one percent of everything to Sis. I don’t mind this because I’m sure her business decisions are better than mine, more cut-throat, that is, anyway. It’ll be more than worth the two points to let her do it. But here are the rubs. Dad also made her the executrix of his estate; he has given her complete power of attorney and put my share in her trust. And this is the real stab in the back from the grave. I don’t get my part so easily. The will says that in order for me to inherit a cent I have to be married and, within a reasonable time after the honeymoon, permanently settled down. It even cuts off my present allowance! I’ve never been one to save. I don’t like that at all. I’ll be on the street in two months. And even after I comply with the conditions the money won’t come in one lump sum but in quarterly allowance checks, dividends more substantial than what I’m presently drawing but nevertheless a check to make sure I stay in line. If I get a divorce, if I am caught outside of marriage, or my wife is, if we are not settled down together under one roof, poof, I’m disinherited. And I have no doubts my sister plans to enforce the will to the letter.

Harry has said a mouthful. Sarah almost wants to say, Say no more, man, I know it all. My own father had the same self-righteous bug up his ass. However, she holds her tongue. She doesn’t want to spoil the pose of the perfect lady. Sensing what comes next, she pours Swan a third round, as he leans forward and gets down to the business opportunity that lasts a lifetime.

Cupcake, I want you to be my lawfully wedded wife.

She takes a cigarette from the box on the table, lets Harry light it for her, and blows the smoke in his face. You can’t be serious, Harry. I’m a young girl, half your age. People will say you robbed the cradle.

I’m not robbing. I’m paying for it with real money. And anyway I’ve never been one to care what people said.

What quantities give the quality of real to money? Harry estimates the total value of his inheritance should be somewhere around thirty million dollars.

At twenty-one Sarah is no longer a babe in the woods. She knows she won’t get any younger, and while she figures she has a good ten years of modelling left, she also knows that the business is not the kind that will grow with time. She looks at Harry, and Harry looks at her. He winks. She wonders if the playboy knows her for what she is, and lets her sugar-coat it. Would there be friction between them should the details of her career come to light at some later time? Shouldn’t she be as frank with him as he was with her, and tell him in some parenthetical remark, that she’s been around the block a few times herself? He seems to be one who doesn’t judge, so he won’t be judged in return. But Sarah decides to be vague, hold her tongue and keep her cards close to her breast. The only one she’s being asked to play is a promise of faithfulness from now on.

But she wavers about whether she could possibly marry. Certainly she feels that with the shock waves ripping through her because of what happened with Corn Dog, she could never go back to booking strange men for money, or ever again have any sensual enjoyment in the sex act with anyone other than Corn Dog or his shadow. Obsessed, she must keep her daily calling on the dogs, appealing to them to keep her love’s spirit close. Harry does say he loves her, that’s more than the others say, and more than she can say about him. She does love how he opens up doors for her and glows when he’s around her, a flattering light that makes her feel a bit lighter, as if she were something special, a goddess. Surely she does see in him something more than a client. Halfway to hell is far enough. If her period of mourning is permanent and if in her own eyes she is terminally disgraced, what does it matter if she marries or not?

Besides, she thinks, it’s a way of making things up to Gloria. Deprived of her father, at least she will be rich. Yes, now that Sarah thinks about it, it even appeals to her; this life-long sentence to a loveless marriage strikes her as a fitting punishment for her denial of heart. And last but not least there is a fair amount of greed in her. This afternoon she will put personal grief aside, and forget the brave buck for the big one. She says, Harry, the marriage of convenience you propose is the perfect compliment for a man of the world to pay to a woman of the same place. But if this is business we must first get the details of the arrangement straight and out of the way. For the right price almost anything I have is yours. How much of the thirty million is mine?

Since divorce is out of the question, all that I can say is that you can help yourself, and help me spend the quarterly checks, whatever way you like, fifty-fifty.

Because she is half Harry’s age she does not overlook the possibility of retiring early, a wealthy woman. What would happen if you should die?

This is a legal marriage with common property. You will get my share for yourself.

And what if we both die together, at the same time, how will Gloria be taken care of?

The playboy has a chance to die by his live-for-today philosophy. He looks up to heaven and thinks, easy come, easy go, Dad. Then to Sarah he says, Unless you have a child of mine your daughter will be the next of kin, entitled to the whole thing, or, should you and I have a child, a share equal to that of our issue.

The assurance for the seed of Corn Dog makes the deal sound square indeed, ideal. She nods.

Then you will?

I want to be very clear about it, Harry. You cannot buy all of me for money. My vow is to appear to the world a faithful and dutiful wife, but you must agree that at home, when no one is looking, I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to. Sex is not included in the agreement. You have to be old-fashioned and earn it as if we had never been to bed together.

She includes this stipulation as a form of penance. Besides she does not expect to be in the mood for love soon and, although Harry swears himself too selfish to want to be a father, it may come in very handy should he suddenly get unselfish and have the urge for a little Swan with whom Gloria would have to share her inheritance.

The playboy is not worried by what Sarah asks. He thinks he knows the art of showing a woman a good time, believes that the old-fashioned way means presents, candy, flowers, and sweet talk. Besides if things don’t work out in bed, ravishing his ravishing young bride, he will have plenty of money to find what he wants for sale, very discreetly, elsewhere.

You just swear to me that, in any case, you’ll never touch another man but me for as long as I live.

Agreed, she says.

Agreed, says he, shaking her hand and tickling her palm.

Good. She withdraws her hand. Then put it in writing and I will say ‘I do’ anytime you do.

How about the first day of summer?

She looks at the calendar, silently counting the days. In The Poongi Book of the Dead it says,

He who stays in the light for forty-nine days is called a non-returner.

It was the wee hours of May the ninth when Corn Dog left this world. Let’s see, she calculates, if these Poongis have their dates right my buck boy will still have a few days left in this transitional state come the first day of summer. But, of course, she thinks, I don’t want to be too dogmatic. By forty-nine days they probably mean a passing square period. If I haven’t made contact with his shade by then, I guess it means I’m never going to.

Where money’s concerned, she faces hard facts.

The playboy leers, And just to make it look good we’ll have it in church. Like the opera, there’s something about church that makes me feel really sweet on you.

All right, she says with a sigh, the first day of summer, wherever you say. Set it up and I’ll see you there.

Here Comes the Bride

Of course, when Harry’s sister hears of the wedding, she has Sarah thoroughly investigated. Other than recent history, her tenancy in the Golden Gate Hotel, the facts of Sarah’s life are not easy to trace. The only person in the Golden State she’s ever told about being from Zion is Laudette, and Miss Lord’s loyalty is unquestionable. Sarah has told her other friends and lovers a variety of lies. By nature the peach is secretive, and her life experience has taught her that to tell the truth is to leave oneself vulnerable and disarmed.

The story Sarah told Harry about her background and how she came with Gloria to the Bay Area is an obvious fake. She said that once upon a time, back east, in the Bay State, she was married, and that her husband, Gloria’s father, one Cornelius Duke the Third, and her own father, a well-known heart specialist named Gerard Black, died in a tragic boating accident two weeks before the baby was born. Two days before she gave birth the market crashed, wiping out the two fortunes she had inherited, and she was forced to flee west trying to start a new life in the arts. She explains Gloria’s dark color by inventing a fictitious mother-in-law for herself, Maria Santos, Cornelius’s banana-queen mother. The Santos Fruit family is tan from generations in the Caramban sun.

None of this is in the Bay State hall of records. There were no Gerard Blacks licensed to practice medicine, and no Cornie Dukes among the Beantown Who’s Who or any other social register Hilda’s investigators can think of combing. And even if they knew where to look, in Zion, Beehive, their search would come up blank, for, by Shibbolite law, an unwed teenage mother’s name was erased from the Book as if she never existed. When her pregnant condition was revealed, disgraced Sarah was taken off the Prophet’s Honor Roll. Her child, similarly, was declared a non-person.

The skeletons of her early days are buried, but a few tips around the hotel by Hilda’s men reveal who came and went to the Black apartment. The woman had a host of male friends, all older, married, and wealthy. There is some gossip about a disturbance in one of the penthouse suites that ended in a suspect’s death. But the inquiry meets a stone wall in hotel security and the Bay City Police. Those who know the incident well cannot remember it.

Before the wedding Hilda sends Harry the report. In the detailed, though somewhat exaggerated list, of his bride-to-be’s sins there is nothing about her before her career at the Golden Gate. But Hilda writes an added, personal note.

She is clearly not who she says she is. I have information that this Sarah Black has been to bed with half the men you’ve invited to the church. I always told our father that if you got married it would be to some gold-digging little piece of social sediment.

Even though Harry takes the report with a grain of salt, it would seem that nothing much of what his future bride has told him about herself is true. But so what? If he were interested he would have checked himself. And all the better that she’s a blank, for he plans to color her in with his fantasies.

The playboy is a man who likes to fool around in bed; he need go no deeper than the way she looks to love a woman he sleeps with. Even if her class act is phony, her body is so sweet and firm, like white angel food cake with sugar white icing, it makes him suspend his credibility gladly. He adores Sarah, and feels honored to have loveliness so divine on his arm. Besides he knows his rights. The will says nothing about who his bride’s parents have to be, or what she was beforehand.

And so, here comes the bride. Miss Sarah Black has never looked whiter than walking down the aisle in her wedding dress. The Mrs H Thornton Swan Junior-to-be shows up three shades lighter than her antique gown. Her creamy skin is lily white. Her hair, fixed in a halo of baby’s breath, looks silver white as moonlight, and outshines her eyes, those dark devil wells made misty by a white veil.

Rex, Duke, Pug, Lance,

let my buck boy have another chance …

Now, with the big day here, Sarah is less capable than ever of letting the sleeping Corn Dog lie. Her lips, muttering prayers to the dogs beneath her breath, are caught in their own slip knot of trying to undo what can’t be undone. To think of the dead as dead is more than her mind can bear but the grief she carries inside those heavenly round hips and breasts and her waspish waist, thin as a wisp of a weeping willow, in no way mars the beauty of their surface, filling up all that fine old lace.

She is a peach at the peak of a perfect figure eight and Harry has picked her. When he sees her there in church, with the stained glass and the flowers, he sees all the playthings of this world coming his way. After the ceremony, not only will he be a multimillionaire, but he will have the pleasure of being married to the sweetest doll he’s ever seen, the playboy ideal!

Sarah is all alone. There is no one to give her away. And she can see the groom’s mind is entirely on himself; what fun he plans to have with her after the ceremony. Sarah’s only well-wishers are Gloria, Laudette, and Laudette’s guest Earl McCoy, a jazz musician of some note. The groom’s friends and family number almost one hundred and include several of Sarah’s former clients and their wives, members of Harry’s club.

Hilda, up from her big ranch outside of Stetson City, Lone Star, witnesses the union from a front row seat but does not wish it well. Sis looks like a tough nut, a bull of a woman in the square country and western tradition, with crew-cut hair and no makeup, wearing leather boots stitched with a cactus design, a blue suede skirt and matching wide-lapel jacket, and string bow tie. On her flank is another big beefy woman, her lawyer. The look she gives Sarah as she passes has such bad blood in it, the bride-to-be quickens her pace up the altar steps to Harry, the playboy grinning like an idiot, but a friendly face nonetheless.

Gloria is not so easily glanced off. She and Hilda regard one another from across the aisle. Hilda looks with a depth of disgust at the bride’s tan daughter. The bull sees red. Her bushy eyebrows rise into her hairline. Gloria glares back. She thinks Hilda is a strange sight herself. Up until now she thought all ladies were feminine like her mother, or big-hearted like Laudette, but now she sees otherwise.

At the altar, close enough to smell Sarah’s soft flesh, Harry says, "I do.’ When it comes time to kiss the bride, he lifts the veil and notices that she has no peaches in her cheeks today. Behind the white veil is a black one, the sign of mourning, the flag of protest. Her misery shows on her face. Her eyes are faraway, and her smile is pale and fruitless. Her lips, normally outstanding, moist, pronounced and puckered, red as cherries in season, are trembling; that sweet kisser is white as bone.

Harry chalks up her expression of discomfort to it being the Big Day. Lately, preparing for the wedding, he has noticed that she has been acting peculiarly, but he jovially waves off her distraction to a girl’s nuptial nervousness. Arrangements can be such a strain and after all, the older man thinks, in some respects, she is really no more than a child. What pleasure that thought gives him!

Women, he thinks, they are such a mystery.

He smiles and winks to help her feel at ease, and gives her his experienced playboy kiss, warm and gentle.

On the reception line Hilda is introduced to Sarah and Gloria. The sitter, on around-the-clock duty, stands behind her baby, and Earl, feeling a general disapproval from the snoots of all the white millionaires, keeps close to Laudette. Harry however is honored to have the Earl of Swing, the Real Thing, at his wedding and falls back with McCoy to have a cigar and tell him so, a little side talk that leaves Sarah and Gloria wide open to be trampled by Hilda.

I understand you’re from back east, Cookie. You must tell me all about yourself.

Already disoriented, pitching with the sorrow within, exhausted from sleepless nights, Sarah cannot keep her pretenses straight. Fumbling with her mind and her memory, she tries to recall what she’s told Harry and make her lies to his sister match. She blanches and bumbles on with a story about being from a nice Bay State family, marrying a Beantown Duke named Cornelius. Or did she call him Cornwallis?

The bully knows every last word to be false, and has the horns to say so. I don’t know who you are, Cookie, she snorts, but I do know you were never married to any Duke. It looks to me as if your daughter’s father was—well, we can sort of guess, can’t we? From the gutter. Probably a lying tramp like you.

Sarah tries to reply but her voice trails off absent-mindedly. The accusation of being a liar ties her tongue, a muteness the result of a mind firing blanks. She looks around and can’t remember where she is. Who is this bothersome bull woman? She looks at Harry. That man looks familiar, but she can’t remember who he is, either. She is not even sure she can place herself.

I’ve already told my brother all the dirt I dug up on you, Cookie, the woman is saying to her, and you know what? He doesn’t care. That’s the kind of man you’re marrying. You deserve one another. You’ll both be sorry someday.

Indeed, the woman is one self-righteous stiff. She reminds Sarah of someone but Sarah can’t recall who.

Laudette reaches over the child and squeezes Sarah’s shoulder. Sugar, she whispers, snap out of it, wake up! Don’t let her push you around. The nerve of her calling you a dirty liar at your own wedding reception! Don’t let her make you ashamed.

But Laudette’s advice falls on ears turned to another time and place. Sarah is straining to hear the dogs of the dead, baying. Where is that barking that will signal the returning buck?

Hilda imagined her brother’s wife would be light-headed. She had not foreseen a mental case. She turns and breaks into the conversation between her brother and Earl McCoy, points at the little girl standing in front of the baby-sitter, and says with a serrated edge in her voice, heedless of Earl’s feelings, Brother, it doesn’t surprise me that low blood runs in this family you have married into. I hope you don’t plan on having any children. I’m sure our father would turn in his grave to have a grandchild with a half-black jungle bunny for a sister.

Harry apologizes for his sister to Earl and gives her a roguish look. What burns you up, Sis, is that you are related to me, he says. Then he turns his eyes from her to the bewildered young goddess in white. If Sarah, his ticket to thirty million, is a slut all the better. Revenge. He thinks it is rich how his father’s will backfired on its maker, and how clever he is for using it as an occasion to exhibit the very behavior the will was meant to put an end to. And he considers it a bonus that coming along with white angel food Sarah is his new milk-and-coffee colored step-daughter. Off-white Gloria couldn’t be a better diddle to his sister’s prejudices.

Gloria knows what a snob is because she is one herself. The little kitten has the pride of a lioness, and an itch to see this bustling bull woman squirm. She twists her shoulders out of the big hands of Miss Lord and starts tapping out