Letter to My Daughter: A Novel - By George Bishop Page 0,4

legs kicked straight out from beneath a polka-dotted dress. Her eyes were squeezed shut, her bright red lips opened wide as she laughed up at the blue sky. A smaller, younger Tim in a cowboy outfit pushed her from behind. The shadow of the photographer, who could only have been Jack himself, slanted across the ground to the right, completing the family triad. Knowing the way things turned out only made the scene that much more heart wrenching.

Tim stepped up into the trailer to find me looking at the photo. He stopped behind me and rested his hands on my shoulders.

“Your mom—she’s gorgeous,” I told him. This simple undeniable fact cast the Prejeans in a whole new light for me, making Tim and his father appear at once more admirable and tragic in my eyes. “I had no idea she was so pretty.”

“Even more than that,” he whispered over my shoulder.

I leaned back into his chest. And if you were to ask when I first knew I loved Tim, I would have to say it was then.

• • •

Up until that time, I had kept Tim a secret from my parents. But after he invited me to his home, I felt obliged to invite him to mine. The truth is I wasn’t worried so much about Tim as I was about my father. Compared to gentle Mr. Prejean, my father seemed like a brute, and I was afraid of what he might do or say when I brought Tim home. But we had reached that stage in the relationship when you need to meet one another’s families—not just for the sake of getting their approval, but because you feel proud of what you have and want them to see it.

The evening went badly. My mother was uncomfortable having Tim in her parlor. It was, I knew, on account of Mrs. Prejean’s disease, and of Mr. Prejean living with his son in a trailer in the woods, which taken together made them worse even than the Partridge Family. Serving Tim macaroons, sitting and speaking with him from the sofa opposite, my mother assumed that same stiff-faced expression she got whenever she had to perform some unpleasant chore, like gutting a chicken or throwing slops to the pigs. My father, for his part, wasted no time in getting to the issue of Mr. Prejean’s repair shop, and wasn’t it a shame what the coloreds had done to ruin the downtown, and frankly he didn’t see how Jack could tolerate doing business with those people, and what did Tim have to say about that?

It was a test, I knew. In my father’s eyes, Tim was barely one rung above black himself, and the only way for him to prove himself to be good and truly white would be to join my father in belittling the Negroes. Tim, though, to his everlasting credit, made the honorable choice of defending his father’s customers, saying that without their patronage the shop would’ve closed a long time ago, and anyway, from an electronics point of view, a TV was a TV no matter who owned it. Then he went on to declare that some of their closest neighbors were black people, and they’d never had any problem with them at all, in fact found them to be quite friendly and decent, probably the best neighbors they’d ever had. This led, as I knew it inevitably would, to the topic of the integration of the public schools, and my father’s claim that he was “no racist,” but to be rational about the matter, mixing would have no benefit for anybody. No one wanted it—not the blacks, not the whites—and to insist on it was worse than undemocratic, it was criminal. Tim tried to reason with him, but he had the disadvantage of being younger and more polite and smarter than my father. He finally lost his patience, though, when my father brought out his favorite argument, throwing it down like a trump card on the table: the secret scientific study done at Louisiana State University that proved the inferior intelligence of the Negroid races. They had the skull measurements! Brains in formaldehyde! Right there in the basement at LSU! Those were the scientific facts. What about that, Tim? Huh?

“I can’t believe this. I can’t believe I’m having this conversation,” Tim said, standing to leave. “I’m sorry, Mr. Jenkins, sir, but you … you’re just plain ignorant.”

Well. My father rose, his hands coming up in fists like he was