‘Oh, very good,’ the Colonel disclosed. ‘The Firestone Library can take the entire student body and faculty members and their families, and quite a good number of town people to boot.’
I thought of heavy walls crashing and damming up gates to the underground shelter before the few left after the blast had time to scurry like rats inside their holes, and of rubble and tumbled down structures sealing up and burying people alive like miners marooned in shafts and caves steaming hot and perhaps flooding up as well. And then all in a flash I recalled the stories and reports that a top-secret brain computing machine stationed on the campus actually dictated to America’s fleet of polaris and other nuclear submarines where and when they must deploy themselves and fan-out undersea in their long, deep dives to provide for America and her Free World a constant invisible bulwark. In the event of war therefore Princeton offered the Russians a palpable hit, either directly or as part of the devastation that would be New York or Philadelphia.
‘Well, is that all the protection one can expect?’ I laughed to cover up the cry in my throat.
‘That’s very good protection for anybody,’ the Colonel said. ‘There are millions not so provided for.’ Which was true. Not that the millions thought much about the matter for themselves, anyway. There was the jolly fellow I shared drinks with at the Peacock Inn the night the Cuba quarantine was declared.
‘What do you think of it all?’ I asked.
‘Me?’ he spread out his arms. ‘Kennedy is Irish and I am Irish. So what’s there to say? Anything he does is good enough for me. I fought in Africa in the last War, and I guess am not too old to strap my boots on once more.’ Such are the loyalties at work for the great American cause.
‘And you have no plans to fly Parvin Fellows home?’
‘No,’ the Colonel ruled. ‘They will have to take things as they come – with everybody, I’m afraid.’
‘I think I better book myself a seat home on the next plane,’ I said flippantly. And getting back into my room, I slept fitfully through that vision of America I had just dreamed a second time.
Odd, wasn’t it? Recalling my imminent interview with the Director of the Woodrow Wilson School, an interview still carrying for me some air of mystery, I rang up his secretary to apologize for not calling much earlier and also to find out whether or not she had herself called as we seemed to have agreed and not got me. Professor Patterson’s secretary was out for lunch, some neutral voice told me, but I could call again in an hour if I so wished. That suited me fine, for I could then have lunch myself. Because service in both the breakfast-room and Procter Hall was over already, and not having any stomach to fall across town for a meal, I made for the machine-room on the basement floor, and got myself some chocolate milk and cakes in real American fashion in praise of which I had written this little song:
A dime
in the slot,
And anything
from coke to coffee
Spews down your throat,
from crackers to candy
Breaks against the enamel
wear of your teeth,
(And as TV minstrels
will have it ahead
Of the Congo
and Guernica) tobacco
Enough to plant
another Garden:
Now, old Moses
for whom, they say,
Mannas fell in the desert,
did he push a button as this,
and who knows at what price?
Professor Patterson’s secretary was back in her seat when I rang the Woodrow Wilson School later. I began with trying to say how sorry and ashamed I was that I overslept and failed to call her back earlier in the day to confirm the hour of appointment, but she seemed either too busy working to listen or was just not interested in long explanations and excuses.
‘Mr Clark, you failed to call me back. Now, why didn’t you? That’s gross disrespect, the like of which has not been seen here before, a student telling the professor when he would be pleased to present himself for an interview. Anyway, Professor Patterson has now directed that you turn up unfailingly at nine tomorrow morning,’ she spouted over me without stop.
‘Excuse me,’ I began.
‘Now, Mr Clark, there is nothing to excuse. I think you fully understand all I have said.’
‘Well, we shall see,’ I said mysteriously and placed back the receiver on her, for she had started spouting again.
That was how things had been in the few days past. Returning from a brief trip up to Canada the week before, I had joined the rest of the Parvin group for our second pilgrimage to Washington. It had turned out a most tiresome affair. Arriving a little after eight in the evening by train, we had each been claimed and whisked off by host families, all prosperous sons of Princeton. I got billeted with my Nigerian colleague at the William Wrights, real estate people. They were most kind to us, although living out in Virginia, from where Mr Wright had to drive us into town every morning on his way to work, I half expected any moment to be called ‘nigger’ to my face, and given the necessary works therefrom. On the one occasion our host could not take us direct to where the long day’s journey began for us into night, we hopped a bus into town. That seemed to send a shock of silence from aft to stern of the vehicle, accompanied by a spontaneous shying and shooing away movement and a shaking out of dress on the part of other riders, all of them whites, naturally. But that is another story entirely.
What did happen to me however was the merciless drill and systematic brainwashing that formed the Parvin lot ad nauseam all the session, but more blatantly in the course of those Washington pilgrimages. A two-hour visit to a ‘23 million jobs’ school exhibition at the patio of the Department of Agriculture building, and briefings at the hands of AID programme officials lasting more than three hours in the State Department took up all the morning. ‘Then ‘individual interviews with appropriate State Department area officers’ followed hot after a late lunch in the cafeteria there, a large classified affair. And taking the rest of the day was a visit to the Housing and Home Finance Agency, where a representative of Dr Weaver, who is a Negro conspicuously heading a full government department, told the silliest trash about housing and urban renewal feats, as if he did not know that everybody there knew what cheating and removal uprooting of those already poor and blighted went under guise of that well-meaning operation called urban renewal.
We had a buffet supper that evening at the palatial home of the Hon. Mr and Mrs Andrew Berding, way out in the posh suburb of the capital. The Hon. Mr Berding had served in the Eisenhower administration as Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, but now, more or less retired from public affairs, engaged himself completely with writing and lecturing. Very urbane and warm, he told us anecdotes late into the night which made my eyes flood with laughing. Although it was dark and we could not inspect the garden and admire its flowers and general layout, I passed a most pleasant and delightful time in the porch with Mrs Berding, talking flowers, how to breed new kinds, from the rose, red and white, to the hydrangea, dogwood, azalia and tulip, all beginning to blossom and shout out the arrival of spring, after a sharp, long winter, the severest within living memory. And as a grand finale underscoring the perfect union and bliss that was ‘the Berdings’, husband and wife played us their favourite pieces, one on a musical saw, the other accompanying on the piano.
‘Oh, how beautifully you play together!’ a female guest there gushed. ‘Your timing is just great.’
‘It ought to be; we’ve been at it for more than thirty years together,’ Mrs Berding, eyes a bit glassy now, said briefly. I thought she was going to cry. Altogether theirs was a performance most charming and soothing. In fact, when a friend’s wife drove in from somewhere in the city centre to collect me home at about midnight, it seemed churlish to tear myself away from a party showing no signs of breaking up for the night.
‘He now moves with the millionaires,’ my friend reported to her husband.
