Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow [47]
The two men stared at each other. Morgan sat back in his chair. The blood drained from his face and his eyes lost their fierce light. When he spoke, it was with the weak voice of an old man. Mr. Ford, he said, if my ideas can survive their attachment to you, they will have met their ultimate test.
Nevertheless the crucial breakthrough had been made. About a year after this extraordinary meeting Morgan made his trip to Egypt. Although Ford did not go with him he had conceded the possibility of an awesome lineage. And together they had managed to found the most secret and exclusive club in America, The Pyramid, of which they were the only members. It endowed certain researches which persist to this day.
21
Of course at this time in our history the images of ancient Egypt were stamped on everyone’s mind. This was due to the discoveries being reported out of the desert by British and American archaeologists. After the football players in their padded canvas knee pants and leather helmets, archaeologists were the glamour personages of the universities. Mummification was described in detail in the Sunday supplements and the funerary concerns of the papyri were analyzed by cub reporters. Egyptian art, its look, was chosen for the interior decoration of homes. Out went the Louis Quatorze and in came the throne chairs with the carved serpent arms. In New Rochelle, Mother was not immune to the fashion, and finding the floral print in the dining room oppressively dull she replaced it with an elegant pattern of sloe-eyed Egyptian males and females in headdresses and short skirts. Colored red ochre, blue and tan, they paraded along the walls in that peculiar frontal way of Egyptians, with vultures on their palms, sheaves of wheat, water lilies and lutes. They were accompanied by lion, scarabs, owl, oxen and dismembered feet. Father, sensitive to every change, found his appetite diminished. It seemed to him inappropriate to entomb oneself in order to dine.
The boy, however, loved the design and was inspired to study the hieroglyphic alphabet. He abandoned Wild West Weekly for magazines that published tales of violated tombs and the coming to fruition of mummies’ curses. He had become intrigued with the black woman in the attic and in his quiet secret games incorporated her as a Nubian princess now captured for a slave. Unaware, she sat in her room by the window, while he passed her door in a beaked papier-mâché mask of an ibis which he had made himself.
One afternoon, a Sunday, a new Model T Ford slowly came up the hill and went past the house. The boy, who happened to see it from the porch, ran down the steps and stood on the sidewalk. The driver was looking right and left as if trying to find a particular address; he turned the car around at the corner and came back. Pulling up before the boy, he idled his throttle and beckoned with a gloved hand. He was a Negro. His car shone. The brightwork gleamed. There was a glass windshield and a custom pantasote top. I’m looking for a young woman of color whose name is Sarah, he said. She is said to reside in one of these houses.
The boy realized he meant the woman in the attic. She’s here. The man switched off the motor, set the brake and jumped down. Then he climbed the stone steps under the two Norwegian maples and walked around the side of the house to the back door.
When Mother came to the door the colored man was respectful, but there was something disturbingly resolute and self-important in the way he asked her if he could please speak with Sarah. Mother could not judge his age. He was a stocky man with a red-complected shining brown face, high cheekbones and large dark eyes so intense as to suggest they were about to cross. He had a neat moustache. He was dressed in the affectation of wealth to which colored people lent themselves. He wore a fitted black overcoat, a black and white hound