CHAPTER 2When I told Phyllis I wouldn’t join them at the theatre that night I’d meant it. I’d seen about enough of her to last me a good week, for one thing. I’d also heard the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals sing a number of times, both here and in New York. I hadn’t, however, counted on meeting an old friend of my mother’s dining in solitary grandeur, just waiting to pounce on the first likely person to use her other ticket.
I’m sure now it was Fate itself, lurking in the clear green waters of the Villa pool. If I hadn’t gone that night, I’d never have seen, in the kind of blinding clarity that a streak of lightning illuminates a countryside with, so that it sticks in your retina long after it’s dark again, the situation that made an awful lot of things Phyllis had said, or n
