Free The Dinner Party by Howard Fast

say?”
    â€œHe wants to know whether we’ll have media coverage. Come on, you really believe Gramps will cave in? He has the highest fuck-you level of anyone I’ve ever known. He’d toss the president out of his house if he thought anything the old thespian said was inappropriate.”
    â€œWho knows. Maybe you’re right,” Elizabeth said. “I’m O.K. now. Anyway, it’s not caving in. Do you want me to drive?”
    â€œNo. I’m better off if I’m doing something, and what do you mean it’s not caving in? Of course it’s caving in.”
    â€œYou think of Gramps as being principled. He isn’t principled, Lenny. He loves nothing—”
    â€œHold on. He loves us. Jesus, Liz, you can see that. His sun rises and sets with us.”
    â€œWe’re his, the way he sees it. You can call it love if you want to. We’re like his homes, his yacht, his horses, but his center is power and money. It’s like this Jewish charade he puts on. Do you know how many non-Jews came into our family in the past two hundred years? We’re as Jewish as the Pope. But Gramps carries on like a first-generation immigrant Jew.”
    â€œThat’s true,” Leonard admitted. “It does give him status. There’s nobody else just like him.”
    â€œSo he won’t cave in. He’ll do whatever the moment requires for him to protect his silly empire.”
    â€œI know. But I like him. He wants me to switch to MIT, and then go into the company. Can you imagine me an engineer?” Death had receded for a moment. Neither of them could hold firmly to the reality of death.
    â€œNever,” Elizabeth said. “Suppose I said to him, Gramps, Lenny is a poet and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it?” Death broke through. Elizabeth burst into tears.
    â€œOh, no,” Leonard said. “Lizzie, love, we’ll be at the airport in fifteen minutes.”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œWill you please kill the tears, once and for all.”
    â€œI’ll try, Lenny. Promise, promise.” She dried her eyes. “How do I look?”
    â€œWonderful. You always look wonderful.”
    â€œYou haven’t even looked.”
    â€œI’m driving. Go on with that Gramps business. I never knew you went around shrinking people?”
    â€œIt’s not shrinking. It’s just looking and listening. I make a kind of game of it, ever since I was a kid and used to hang around Daddy’s office in Washington. When I was seventeen I heard Senator Bassington say to Daddy, ‘Cromwell, there are only two kinds of people around here, and they’re both sons of bitches. The difference is that half of them are our sons of bitches and the other half are their sons of bitches’—pretty stiff, huh?”
    â€œWhat did Dad say?”
    â€œHe said, ‘You’re wrong.’ I was in the next room, so I couldn’t hang around and listen to the rest, but that’s what he said.”
    â€œScore one for the senator.”
    â€œTell you something, Lenny. Up at school, a bunch of us got interested in the Sanctuary thing. Do you know about it?”
    â€œI’m not sure. I haven’t been interested in much lately, not much of anything.”
    â€œAll right. I’ll try to sum it up. You know what’s been happening in El Salvador with their death squads. In the last few years, they’ve murdered almost forty thousand people who opposed the government in one way or another, so thousands of men and women and children have fled from El Salvador and gotten up here to the States. Immigration has been picking them up and sending them back, which is like a death sentence. Then a few of them were given refuge in a church. That’s where the Sanctuary thing started. Other churches and synagogues joined in, until there were hundreds of these Sanctuary churches through the west—something like an