BUT KATIE AND I never did visit Arnella’s, though we had had the invitation, a large greeting card with red, blue, and gold flowerets, in the middle of which a good round hand, surely her mothers, had inscribed the date and the hour, Six O’clock Supper, and both our names. Four days before, I got a note through Student Mail to meet Arnella at Friedgen’s, the Teacher’s College haunt. Over their famous brownies she said, “Have to take back that invite. I’m sorry. My parents had a big fight over it. Shall I level with you why?”

What a girl Arnella was, a leveler shooting straight for the whites of one’s eyes. And if I may say with the immodest pride we take in our youth once we are mortally separate from it, what a girl was I, humbly brooding on what I was with all the arrogance of the beginner who believes in change.

Sometimes I think of memory as a Sistine Chapel. Down there on the sunny floor are all the early figures of life’s morning, still as busy as ever they were at that time; up here on the ceiling are the swollen, over-muscled shapes we have become; ceiling and floor are powerless to meet. Which is the ultimate viewer? Which the most alive?

Anyway, good prospects as we two were—for what? The worlds grace?—we muffed it.

“You don’t have to,” I said. “It’s because I’m Jewish. Your mother had second thoughts. It doesn’t matter.”

I was too cool about that, I’ve thought since. Maybe I should have made like it did matter. The worst of race relations is for either side to be impervious.

“No, it was my father,” Arnella said. I would have said her voice was too high-tone, if I hadn’t known from home how hysteria closets itself in the too polite. “My father married down, or thought he did. My mother, as you saw, is not educated. But she’s light. He’s dark. And what it comes to is—” She made a face. “Neither’n can get the best of t’other. So—he hates Shirley. It’s what made her light-skinned. So he’s laid down the law to her. In our house, which is his house, she can’t have anybody white.”

The brownies were double chocolate, the darkest ever. I chewed down the rest of mine. My European mother laughed at such sweets—gingerbread, angel food cake, any of that American stuff—the way she did at men drinking malteds, as Columbia College students were doing at other tables right here. Compared to our confections at home, fragrant with hazelnut, orange water and kirsch, and deeper liqueurs, and a subtler bitter chocolate, the brownie did seem to me simpleminded, naive. A Christian cake.

“Oh, Arnella.” I leaned forward, loose-breasted in my dance class leotard, scattering the crumbs on my plate. Under her schoolgirl’s collar she was flat-chested, and, though older, somehow more callow than me. Yet she had an intensity, stiff as it was, that I might never catch up with. “Oh, Arnella—you’re divided. Just like me.”

I invited her home to see for herself. And maybe to test my own family’s rectitude. After all, we now had German maids only. My father, who still said “colored” when referring to domestics but “nee-gro” otherwise, would simply stand fast on his good manners, on which I knew I could depend. My mother, who had called each of our former maids die Schwarze, as if they had no separate being, would be wroth at me for my foolish social ardors, but only behind the scenes.

But Arnella never came. She had more sense.

And though Katie, like many Southerners, belonged to such a visiting family, she never further inquired of me why we didn’t get to go.