master stroke. He invited a girl who was at the bottom of the social order, whose parents were illiterate and unemployed, who had two brothers in prison, who got very poor grades and engaged in no extracurricular activities, but who, nonetheless, was one of the prettiest young women anybody had ever seen.
Her family was white, but they were so poor that they lived in the black part of town. Also: the few young men who had tried to trifle with her, despite her social class, had spread the word that, no matter what she looked like, she was as cold as ice.
This was Celia Hildreth.
So she could have had scant expectation of being invited to the senior prom. But miracles do happen. A new Cinderella is born every minute. One of the richest, cutest boys in town, and the president of the senior class, no less, invited her to the senior prom.
• • •
So, a few weeks in advance of the prom, Felix talked a lot about how beautiful Celia Hildreth was, and what an impression he was going to make when he appeared with a movie star on his arm. Everybody else there was supposed to feel like a fool for having ignored Celia for so long.
And Father heard all this, and nothing would do but that Felix bring Celia by the studio, on the way to the prom, so that Father, an artist after all, could see for himself if Celia was as beautiful as Felix said. Felix and I had by then given up bringing home friends for any reason whatsoever. But in this instance Father had a means for compelling Felix to introduce him to Celia. If Felix wouldn’t do that, then Felix couldn’t use the car that night. He and Celia would have to ride a bus to the senior prom.
• • •
Haitian banana soup: Stew two pounds of goat or chicken with a half cup of chopped onions, a teaspoon of salt, half a teaspoon of black pepper, and a pinch of crushed red pepper. Use two quarts of water. Stew for an hour.
Add three peeled yams and three peeled bananas, cut into chunks. Simmer until the meat is tender. Take out the meat.
What is left is eight servings of Haitian banana soup.
Bon appétit!
• • •
So Father, without enough to do, as usual, was as excited by the approach of prom night as the most bubble-headed senior. He would say over and over:
“Who is Celia? What is she?
That all her swains commend her?”
Or he would protest in the middle of a silence at supper, “She can’t be that beautiful! No girl could be that beautiful.”
It was to no avail for Felix to tell him that Celia was no world’s champion of feminine pulchritude. Felix said many times, “She’s just the prettiest girl in the senior class, Dad,” but Father imagined a grander adversary. He, the highest judge of beauty in the city, and Celia, one of the most beautiful women ever to live, supposedly, were about to meet eye-to-eye.
Oh, he was leading scrap drives in those days, and he was an air-raid warden, too. And he had helped the War Department to draw up a personality profile of Hitler, who he now said was a brilliant homicidal maniac. But he still felt drab and superannuated and so on, with so many battle reports in the paper and on the radio, and with so many uniforms around. His spirits needed a boost in the very worst way.
And he had a secret. If Felix had guessed it, Felix wouldn’t have brought Celia within a mile of home. He would have taken her to the prom on a bus.
This was it: When Celia was introduced to Father, he would be wearing the scarlet-and-silver uniform of a major in the Hungarian Life Guard, complete with sable busby and panther skin.
7
LISTEN: When Felix was ready to fetch Celia, Father wasn’t even in his painter’s costume. He was wearing a sweater and slacks, and he promised Felix yet again that he simply wanted to catch a glimpse of this girl, and that he wasn’t going to put on any kind of a show for her. It was all going to be very ordinary and brief, and even boring.
About the automobile: It was a Keedsler touring car, manufactured right in Midland City in 1932, when a Keedsler was in every respect the equal or the superior of a German Mercedes or a British Rolls-Royce. It was a bizarre and glorious antique