Clara studied Laurace before murmuring, “You don’t talk or behave like a servant.”
“I changed. My employers helped me. The Dufours, they were: kindly, mildly prosperous, in Montreal. When they saw I wanted to better myself, they arranged schooling for me—after working hours, and servants worked long hours in those days, so it took years—but I’ll always be grateful to the Dufour family. I learned correct English, reading, writing, arithmetic. On my own, consorting with habitants, I picked up French of a sort. I turned into quite a bookworm, as far as circumstances allowed. That gave me a patchwork education; but as the years went on, I gradually filled many of the gaps in it.
“First I had to master memory. I was finding it harder and harder to pull whatever I wanted out of such a ragbag of recollections. It was becoming hard to think. I had to do something. You faced the same problem, I daresay.”
Clara nodded. “Awful, for maybe fifty years. I don’t know what I did or how, can’t recall much and everything’s jumbled. Might have gotten into real trouble and died, except—okay, I fell into the hands of a pimp. He, and later his son, they did my thinking for me. They weren’t bad guys, by their lights, and of course my not growing old made me special, maybe magical, so they didn’t dare abuse me, by the standards of the, uh, eighth century Near East, it must have been. I think they never let on to anybody else, but moved me to a different city every few years. Meanwhile, somehow, bit by bit, I got myself sorted out, and when the son died I felt ready to strike off on my own again. I wonder if most immortals aren’t that lucky. Somebody insane or witless wouldn’t last long without a protector, most times and places. Would she?”
“I’ve thought that myself. I was luckier still. By the early twentieth century we had a science of psychology. Crude, largely guess work, but the idea that the mind can be understood and fixed makes a huge difference. I found autohyp-nosis did wonders— We’ll talk about this later. Oh, we have so much to talk about.”
“I guess you never got too badly confused, then.”
“No, I kept control throughout. Of course, I moved around. It hurt to leave the Dufours, but people were wondering why I didn’t age like them. Also, more and more I wanted independence, true independence. I went from job to job, acquired skills, saved my money. In 1900 I moved back to the States. There a colored person was less conspicuous, and here in New York you can go as unnoticed as you care to. I opened a small cafe. It did well—I am a good cook—and in time I was able to start a larger place, with entertainment. The war boomed business. Afterward Prohibition made profits larger yet. White customers; I kept another, less fancy den for blacks. One of my white regulars became a friend. At City Hall Be saw to it that I didn’t pay off exorbitantly or have to worry about the mob muscling in.”
Clara considered her surroundings. “You didn’t buy this with the proceeds from two speakeasies,” she said.
Laurace smiled. “Shrewd, aren’t you? Well, the truth is that presently I took up with a pretty big-time rumrunner. White, but—”
DONALD O’BRYAN loved wind and water. At home he filled shelves with books about sailing ships, hung pictures of them on the walls, built models of them whose exquisite detail seemed impossible for such large hands. Besides the power cruiser he used in his business, he kept a sloop on Long Island Sound. When he started taking his black “housekeeper” on day trips, she went unchallenged by members of the yacht club. Everybody liked Don but nobody who was smart messed with him.
Heeled over on a broad reach, the boat rushed through swoosh and sparkle. Gulls soared white above.the wake, into which he had merrily cast scraps from lunch. When you ran before the wind, its booming was hushed to a cradle song and the air grew almost snug, so that you caught the live salt smell of it.