The Dinner Party Read Online Free PDF Page A

doesn’t come here to see us; he comes to see Leonard and Elizabeth, and if they weren’t at dinner, he’d raise hell. What are you worried about?”
    â€œYou know what I’m worried about.”
    â€œI’m not sure.”
    â€œIt’s bad enough to have a Harvard liberal loudmouth son who thinks I’ve sold out the human race, but a smartass black kid from the same reservation—well, Web Heller just isn’t that quick. This kid could cut him to pieces, and there goes your dinner party, and my plans.”
    â€œWhy should he?”
    â€œWhy? Did you ever meet a black man who didn’t think that this administration is out to destroy the black population?”
    The trouble was, Dolly realized, that outside of Washington cocktail parties and dinner parties and various receptions, she had known too few black people to have any clear notion of what they thought. Those she had encountered at various affairs had, like most political people, disguised or hidden their thoughts behind walls of clichés or platitudes, and now she could hardly accept the fact that a guest of her son would deliberately provoke another guest.
    â€œDo you want me to speak to Leonard?” she asked Richard.
    â€œNo. If it comes up, I’ll handle it.”

FIVE
    E lizabeth Cromwell was twenty years old, going into her junior year at Sarah Lawrence, five feet nine inches tall, and reasonably beautiful. Her brown hair was streaked by the sun, and as the summer wore on, her skin would turn berry brown. Her good looks and obvious good health attracted men; her manner put them off, too thinly veiled sardonic humor and too much evidence of intellectual superiority. Too many men who came on to her came off rather quickly, stung and petulant and sometimes angry. Her brother, Leonard, was more disarming. Two inches over six feet, slender, good-looking, he had a gentle, amiable manner that hid a sharp, inquisitive mind. A couple of years older than Elizabeth, he adored her. He was very thin, a long bony body and black unkempt hair over a round, button-nosed face.
    His friend, Clarence Jones, was shorter, broader, and coffee brown in color. Both of them were first year at Harvard Law, and both were oddly alike in having the same round head and small, turned-up nose.
    Elizabeth and the two men were in their bathing suits, carrying robes and towels, their bodies bare to the warm morning sun; and as they came around the back of the house on the path that led to the pool, they were about sixty yards from where the senator and his wife were having their breakfast.
    â€œShouldn’t I be introduced?” Clarence Jones wondered. “I never met your dad.”
    â€œRejoice for a while longer,” Leonard said bleakly.
    â€œOh, come on,” Elizabeth protested, “he’s all right.”
    â€œYes?”
    â€œI mean you’re giving Clare all the wrong notions. Pop is polite and pleasant and he doesn’t rub people the wrong way.”
    â€œNo chip on my shoulder,” Clarence said mildly.
    â€œRight now, let’s swim,” Leonard said. “We’ll meet him.”
    â€œAs you say.”
    The swimming pool was nested in a wall of flowering shrubs, which gave it privacy without casting shadows. It was fifty feet long and thirty feet wide, a large size for a private pool, a diving board at one end, and the pool itself was positioned and decorated with great charm. Since he arrived at the Cromwell home the night before, Clarence Jones had been quietly yet intensely observing and studying a manner of life he had read about and seen in films, but never actually encountered before.
    â€œLiz does her laps first,” Leonard told him. “She gets the pool to herself for half an hour because she’s selfish and rigid.”
    â€œGo to hell,” Elizabeth said pleasantly, and dived in and came up screaming, “It’s fucken, fucken cold! Didn’t anyone set the