The Dinner Party by Howard Fast Page A

because all the cars were in the garage. She was about to send Mac out to find them.
    â€œI’ll find them,” the senator said. It was not that he disliked Dolly’s father and mother; it was a gut feeling that they had contempt for him—and no more than a gut feeling because nothing in their attitude toward him expressed it. “But don’t you see,” Dolly explained to him, “they have contempt for everybody. For one thing, they are one of the oldest families in America. They look down upon such Johnnys-come-lately as the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, or the Boston crowd, the Lodges and the Adams and the others. They are impossible, and my four brothers are impossible. I’m the only civilized person in the family. They look down on the German Jews and the Eastern European Jews, even though they accept them in marriage. They hide; they feel that true aristocracy does not look for publicity, and Daddy employs a very clever person to keep his name out of the media. So don’t brood over it. We don’t see them enough for it to be a real problem.”
    The senator had tried to live with that advice, but it was not easy. Dolly was a very rich woman in her own right, and Augustus and Jenny Levi, who were generous in gift giving, never offered money or discussed it, the single exception being the senator’s campaign funds. Whatever their feelings were toward the senator, for his part, he was not fond of them. If he hated them, it was not a hatred he could admit to himself. The senator had learned long ago that in American politics, you do not hate people, and he had learned it so well that it was doubtful that he could summon up a strong, old-fashioned hate. In his business, politicians to the right of Genghis Khan were his good friends , people with the minds of Neanderthals were his valued associates and people still residing mentally in a slave society were his respected opponents . Hatred, like love and honor and a decent respect for the opinions of mankind, was watered down and replaced with a process of being careful. And that same process led him to move heaven and earth to avoid being with his in-laws.
    But his children were not to be found in the house, and he stormed into the dining room where Dolly had begun to set the table, demanding to know where they were.
    â€œI don’t know,” Dolly said. “Did you look in the old barn?”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œBecause they might be there,” Dolly said patiently, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
    The senator shrugged, left the house and started off toward the old barn. The day was hot already. The swarms of insects made him miserable, and he was sure that somehow he would get poison ivy. This he hated; he felt more vicious toward poison ivy than toward the Ayatollah, and he had even played with the notion of introducing a bill to rid the whole country of poison ivy. In his childhood, he had several painful sessions with poison ivy, and nothing could convince him that one had to touch it to get it.
    Coming around a bend in the old dirt road, the barn still a couple of hundred yards away, the senator suddenly felt tired. He had awakened early in the morning, hours that felt like days, he had run, he had swum, he had showered twice, and very soon he would have Joan Herman working with him in his study, doing a first draft of a bill he had been contemplating and arranging and rearranging in his mind; and in his house Joan Herman was a problem. Being in his house, under the nose of his wife, she appeared to explode with lust, luring him into love, or into what went by the name, behind locked doors, standing, sitting, on the floor, on the top of his desk—wherever. He should have gone to her apartment this morning. Why on earth had he asked her to come here?
    â€œLenny!” he shouted, deciding he had gone far enough. If they were in the barn, they’d hear him. If they were not, he’d