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purchased just over two thousand acres for pennies on the dollar. It was Jarvis’s father who had lost the land, and now Jarvis was intent on buying it back.
    â€œHave you considered a compromise?” Derrick asked, putting the noose on the counter. “The school occupies a hundred acres, and there’s another five hundred for fruit groves and crops, and the cows, pigs, and chickens. You could sell Jarvis some acreage, earn a profit, and everyone would be happy.”
    â€œHappy? I own three miles of beachfront and the law says Negroes can’t step on the sand. And Jarvis won’t settle for ‘some acreage.’ He knows hundreds of new hotels have gone up in Miami Beach. Maybe Jarvis wants to build hotels. Or sell to someone who does. Three hundred and eighty-seven students are graduating this year, and half of them couldn’t have afforded a degree without us. That was my father’s dream. And his dream’s not ending in my lifetime.”
    â€œMrs. Wakefield, I didn’t mean to offend you. I have to fetch Kenni-Ann and my brother now, but if I can help—”
    â€œMaybe one day, if you keep on with Kendall, I’ll have a lawyer in the family, and we’ll figure this all out.”
    When Derrick was gone, Garland dumped the noose in the white enamel garbage bin and said out loud, “Jarvis Scales, you can go shit fire and save a penny on matches.”

    Thirty-three hours after boarding a train at Penn Station in Newark, Julian and Eddie arrived at Lovewood College. At the Wakefield house, a pinkish-tan stucco palace on a hill overlooking the campus to the south and the ocean to the north, a Negro butler opened a wooden door inlaid with brass medallions of laurel wreaths.
    â€œGentlemen,” he said, “come in and drop your bags.”
    They had brought a gift—two bottles of Jameson’s Irish whiskey and two of Old Grand-Dad bourbon—to thank Mrs. Wakefield for the invitation to dine and to stay at the school’s guest cottage. Julian gave the box to the butler, who said, “The ice and glasses are in the parlor.”
    They went down the front hall, past a large oil painting of a spiky-limbed tree with pink-and-gold blossoms on a plateau above the ocean with waves crashing against the cliffs. The parlor was a brightly lit room with a terra-cotta floor, a wall of windows facing the water, and a beamed ceiling with a whirling fan. A lump rose in Julian’s throat when he saw his parents, and he greeted his father first because his mother, with tears steaming down her cheeks, would require more effort to control his emotions.
    Julian usually spoke German to his father, though Theodor, who had attended boarding school in Britain and studied at Oxford before completing his doctorate at Freiburg, spoke perfect English. “ Hallo , Vater , Sie gut aussehen ,” Julian said, and it was true—Theodor did look well. He was twenty-one years older than his wife, had met her on a lecture tour in 1912 after speaking at Krueger Auditorium in Newark, and took the shy teenager, with the long blond hair, eyes the color of turquoise, and a heart-shaped face of finely sculpted features, to a Romanian restaurant, where she tasted her first piece of steak; three weeks later they were married an hour before Theodor spoke at a synagogue in Charleston, South Carolina. To Julian, his father still resembled the photographs of the illustrious philosopher who had enthralled audiences with his rich baritone and his prediction that the Zionists would fail to establish a homeland because enlightened nations like America, Germany, and France would remain safe harbors for Jews. Theodor’s profile was still noble enough to stamp on a coin; his silver mane of hair had not thinned, nor had his beard gone completely white; and he stood as straight as a sentry in his dark chalk-stripe with the gold watch chain strung across his vest.
    Gripping Julian’s hand