After lunch, they walked back to Donn’s Mowbray Street house so Chait could borrow The Bell Curve. Inside the house, Donn excused himself and went upstairs to get the book. Chait’s eye fell on the Winston Churchill landscape. He marveled that these coarse but evocative brushstrokes had been lovingly applied by the most important single figure in twentieth century history. Donn came down with the book, followed by Old Saw, his incredibly sweet, simple-minded tan greyhound, named for Donn’s prostate medicine, saw palmetto. He had acquired Old Saw from the Greyhound Rescue Project that gives these wonderfully sweet and docile animals a new life in a home setting rather than killing them after they are no longer useful at the track. Old Saw became a part of Kilgore’s life at the same time he bought the Churchill painting—in celebration of his negative prostate biopsy.
  “Here’s something,” Donn said and pointed to a small, black-and-white photograph of five black male gospel singers doing a backward shuffle with their toes pointed forward. The center figure was wearing a black robe over which he wore a glittering gold Gothic chasuble. The others wore white robes. “Alex Bradford and the Alex Bradford singers,” Donn said. He removed the plain plastic frame from the wall and turned it over. On the back was a green ink autograph in handwriting that had a delicious flourish:

  Especially for Donn Kilgore ~~
        these gentry from “Black
  Nativity” stepping toward
  Glory~~
        Sincerely,
            Langston Hughes
                    1962

  Donn rehung the photograph. “Wait a minute,” he said and trotted over to the CD collection in the cabinet beneath the Bang & Olfusen player where he retrieved an album and handed it to Hendon along with The Bell Curve. It was the original cast recording of the Houston Grand Opera’s production of Treemonisha. “Listen to this,” he said enthusiastically. “Especially two cuts, Aunt Dinah Blowed Her Horn and The Real Slow Drag. If you remember nothing about this afternoon, remember those two numbers, Aunt Dinah Blowed Her Horn and Slow Drag. I guarantee they’ll knock your socks off. ”
  Chait took the book and the CD and regarded a tiny 19th century painting of Venice. “Some picture,” he said to Donn. “Xenia and I wouldn’t know enough about art to buy a thing like that.”
  “Do you like it, Hen?”
  “Oh, I love it.”
  “Buy what you love and then make arrangements to leave it to someone who also loves it,” Donn said. “People shouldn’t think of themselves as owners of fine art; we are stewards of it for the next generation.”
  Hendon felt Old Saw’s nose pushing against his thigh and bent down to take his thin, bony head in his hands and rub his long nose with his thumbs. He returned the attention with a languid thank-you lick. It was the last time Chait saw Old Saw alive.
  He was also the last person to study Winston Churchill’s Weald of Kent before it was destroyed in the Mowbray Street Massacre.
  After leaving Donn’s house on Mowbray Street, Hendon walked back through Head House Square. Looking back toward Bridget Foy’s with the yellow warning tape everywhere, the wall of portable toilets and the crowds of uniformed police, he felt great uneasiness.
  After the Army, Chait had gone into the corporate world in 1960, moving from job to job in the fields of publicity and public relations. His business was writing and placing press releases, rehearsing stiff executives and accountants so they would be at ease and confident in interviews and stockholders’ meetings, overseeing a corporate presence at trade shows and conferences, putting on VIP receptions for stockholders and investment bankers and practicing what has since become known as reputation management. Never, in 40 years of business was he involved with any kind of public relations catastrophe—such as the Kansas City hotel pedestrian bridge crashing down on a tea dance or an airline disaster or the president of his company being caught dallying with a babysitter. All in all, it was a life of very comfortable anonymity. He liked it that way.
Now, in his early sixties, on the cusp of retirement, Hendon Chait had allowed Donn Kilgore to awaken something deep within himself—the fact of an enormously gifted American underclass spiraling into oblivion with no one to lead it back into the light.
  One element of Donn Kilgore’s makeup was a vast knowledge of history and current affairs. He took three papers a day—The Philadelphia Observer, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal—along with some 30 magazines, ranging from Foreign Affairs, The Economist and Business Week to Vanity Fair and Time. In addition, Donn was a CNN and C-SPAN junkie as well as a voracious watcher of the Sunday morning talk shows. When he wasn’t traveling to visit clients, Donn worked at home. This meant that whenever he ran down from his home office for coffee or lunch, he would turn on the kitchen television set to see what was going on in the world. As a result, he knew all the MSNBC and CNBC talk shows and their hosts as well as all the daytime talk and scream shows. Often the History Channel hooked him, especially episodes dealing with World War II. Whenever he drove anywhere, talk shows were on the radio—G. Gordon Liddy, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Smerconish.
  One evening Hendon and Xenia went to Donn’s house for a drink before going out to dinner and he was watching the 6:30 network news; he sat in rapt silence, constantly flicking the remote changer among six stations—the three networks and three cable news channels. His only comment was a muttered oath under his breath that all commercial breaks came at the same time. When on the Internet, every time he checked his e-mail, Donn would look in on the Drudge Report for the latest dirt and scandal and once a day surfed The Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Times of London, Washington Post, Salon.com and Slate.com. Amazingly, he had never watched a sitcom all the way through. They bored him. He maintained that canned laugh tracks were used for punctuation rather than for a reaction to something genuinely humorous; as a result, he maintained, sitcoms have destroyed America’s ability to distinguish what is funny and what is not.
  Another facet of Donn was that he loved to shock people with outlandish opinions about contemporary life or the nation’s leaders. Yet, no matter how outrageous, Donn was generally right. He liked to quote Harry Truman who once said, “People complain that I give them hell. All I do is tell the truth and they think it’s hell.”
  But Donn’s articulate analysis of a leaderless black minority in the United States disturbed Chait. Except for two years in the Army, where a few black recruits were in his basic training company—and everybody got along fine—Hendon had cruised through life paying little attention to Civil Rights. Chait used to quote Albert Camus who said that most people’s participation in life was limited to screwing and reading the papers; Camus was talking about himself and Xenia. The Chaits had no black friends. It wasn’t a matter of prejudice, none lived in their neighborhood nor worked in the executive suites of the corporations in which either of them was employed.
Hendon had taken American History as a senior at Andover and slavery was covered, but, again, that was an intellectual exercise in research rather than an emotional exploration of the past. He remembered nothing about black Africans selling their brothers into slavery. Did Donn invent that? It was doubtful.
  What upset Hendon most was a problem that needed thinking, caring people to get involved and, dammit, he was too old to start. It brought home yet again the terror of his own mortality.
Chait reached home in Society Hill Towers and crashed on the couch. On awaking late in the afternoon, he made a cup of coffee and settled in with The Bell Curve. Alas, Donn was right: the book was unreadable. At the outset, the authors promised that the reader could understand the guts of their argument by reading the first section of each chapter, which, they insisted, was easy prose with few footnotes. Not so. Chait’s first job after the Army was writing publicity releases for the trade book division of Prentice-Hall in New Jersey. By the time he left 10 months later, he had the ability to take the galley proofs of a full-length book, know essentially what was in it, and have a two-page press release written and on his boss’s desk—all within two hours. Now, 40 years later, he was able to skim through the turgid syntax of The Bell Curve only to discover that Donn’s thumbnail review was essentially accurate: the authors were claiming that blacks are dumber than whites and whites are dumber than Asians. Not individually, they said, but in the aggregate. This was supposedly substantiated with endless pages of dense and convoluted prose, charts, tables and footnotes that delineated the poor scores by blacks on intelligence tests.
  At five in the afternoon Chait laid aside the book. The idea of helping blacks enter the mainstream of American society and become skilled workers and productive citizens was something he could have cared about and worked to achieve—at least part time. Perhaps mentoring black kids on weekends or helping raise money pro bono for the Urban League—something, anything to ease the plight of the African-American community.
  The 17th century English poet, George Herbert, wrote, “Living well is the best revenge.” In that, Xenia and Hendon had been successful. But, if the object of one’s life is to leave the world a little better place than when you found it, Hendon felt at that moment he had been a failure. Stockholders benefited from his work, but not society. In that light, his 63 years on earth were basically wasted.
  Chait knew little of music, being more of a “see” than a “hear” guy. In business he preferred to work from memos and letters, rather than meetings and phone calls. But he opened Donn’s CD of Treemonisha and found on the second disc the selections Donn had mentioned—Aunt Dinah Blowed Her Horn and Real Slow Drag—and was immediately overpowered by the transcendental glory of the choral music and beat that filled the room.