“Read the book, saw the movie,” Holly says promptly. “All three movies.” She feels compelled to add, “The last one isn’t very good.”
“Do you remember the epigraph of the novel?”
She shakes her head.
“It’s from Balzac. ‘Behind every great fortune there is a crime.’ That was the theme I saw, even though the fortune ran through his fingers long before he was shot down in Cicero.”
“It really is like The Godfather,” Holly marvels, but Jerome shakes his head.
“It’s not, because black people can never be American in the same way Italian and Irish people can. Black skin withstands the melting pot. I want to say . . .” He pauses. “I want to say that discrimination is the father of crime. I want to say that Alton Robinson’s tragedy was that he thought that through crime he could achieve some sort of equality, and that turned out to be a chimera. In the end he wasn’t killed because he got crossways with Paulie Ricca, who was Capone’s successor, but because he was black. Because he was a nigger.”
Jerome, who used to irritate Bill Hodges (and scandalize Holly) by sometimes doing a minstrel show colored accent—all yassuh boss and I sho do, suh!—spits this last word.
“Do you have a title?” Holly asks quietly. They are nearing the Covington exit.
“I think so, yeah. But I didn’t think it up.” Jerome looks embarrassed. “Listen, Hollyberry, if I tell you something, do you promise to keep it secret? From Pete, and from Barb and my parents? Especially them.”
“Of course. I can keep a secret.”
Jerome knows this is true, but still hesitates for a moment before plunging. “My prof in that Black and White sociology class sent my paper to an agent in New York. Elizabeth Austin is her name. She was interested, so after Thanksgiving I sent her the hundred or so pages I’ve written since summer. Ms. Austin thinks it’s publishable, and not just by an academic press, which was about as high as I was shooting. She thinks one of the majors might be interested. She suggested calling it by the name of great-great-Gramp’s speakeasy. Black Owl: The Rise and Fall of an American Gangster.”
“Jerome, that’s wonderful! I bet tons of people would be interested in a book with a title like that.”
“Black people, you mean.”
“No! All kinds! Do you think only white people liked The Godfather?” Then a thought strikes her. “Only how would your family feel about it?” She’s thinking of her own family, which would be horrified to have such a skeleton dragged out of the closet.
“Well,” Jerome says, “they both read the paper and loved it. Of course, that’s different from a book, isn’t it? One that might be read by a lot more people than a teacher. But it’s four generations back, after all . . .”
Jerome sounds troubled. She sees him look at her, but only out of the corner of her eye; Holly always faces directly forward when she’s driving. Those movie sequences where the driver looks at his passenger for seconds at a time while delivering dialogue drive her absolutely crazy. She always wants to shout, Look at the road, dummy! Do you want to hit a kid while you’re discussing your love life?
“What do you think, Hols?”
She considers this carefully. “I think you should show your parents as much as you showed the agent,” she says at last. “Listen to what they say. Get a read on their feelings and respect them. Then . . . push ahead. Write it all down—the good, the bad, and the ugly.” They’ve come to the Covington exit. Holly puts on her blinker. “I’ve never written a book, so I can’t say for sure, but I think it takes a certain amount of bravery. So that’s what you should do, I think. Be brave.”
And that’s what I need to be now, she thinks. Home is only two miles away, and home is where the heartache is.
4
The Gibney house is in a development called Meadowbrook Estates. As Holly weaves her way through the spiderweb of streets (to the home of the spider, she thinks, and is immediately ashamed of thinking about her mother that way), Jerome says, “If I lived here and came home drunk, I’d probably spend at least an hour finding the right house.”
He’s right. They’re New England saltboxes, only set apart from one another by different colors . . . which wouldn’t be much help at night, even