The Black Musketeer
Fencing … was of the highest importance to all who were or aspired to be gentlemen….
—’The Badminton Library: Fencing,’ 1889
And then along came Jones…. —The Coasters, 1959
Luke Skywalker in San Francisco
Lunch had gone badly. The cigarette-company executive, angry about a delay in moving an employee from one city to another, leaned across the crystal, linen and silver and, in the middle of the elegant restaurant, started screaming at Peter Westbrook. Peter, the representative of North American Van Lines who was handling the account, stared into his plate. Under the table, he clenched his fists.
Let him get it off his chest, he thought.
Part of his job was taking flak when customers were dissatisfied. But this cigarette executive wouldn’t stop. He pounded the table and spewed out personal insults.
Why is he going overboard? Peter wondered.
Maybe he felt he could unload all his stored-up fury on Peter because Peter was just another guy from middle management. Or because Peter was half-black and half-Japanese.
In a low voice that cut through the cigarette executive’s rant, Peter said, “No one talks to me like that.”
By the end of the day, Peter was still upset. Automatically, he checked his calendar for the next day, arranged some papers on his desk blotter, glanced out the window at the crowds scurrying back and forth through midtown Manhattan. He picked up his briefcase and, from the corner where it leaned, grabbed his sabre.
As he walked through Times Square, people stopped and stared. Even in this capital of the unusual, a man carrying a briefcase in one hand and a sword in another attracts attention. A guy in the doorway to a second-story peep show snapped a leaflet at him.
“Pretty girls, hot sexy girls,” the guy said and then goggled at Peter’s sabre. Rearing back, he looked into Peter’s face and said, “I seen you on TV. You’re the sword fighter!”
In the last block before the subway, Peter was feeling loose, relaxed. All the frustration and anger that had built up since lunch was gone. In his head, he was already on West Seventy-first Street at the Fencers Club, clothed in his white tunic and mask, parrying and lunging, the “Là! Eh! Là!” of a dozen fencers ringing out around him, and his own laugh — a staccato “Ho, ho, ho” — booming over the din.
On the fencing strip, Peter is king. He is the best sabre fencer in America.
***
On his way home from practice one night, Peter was stopped by the police.
“Where are you going with that knife, boy?” the cop asked, gesturing at Peter’s sabre.
“I’m a fencer,” Peter replied.
When cops hear the word fencer, they — like anyone else — think of The Three Musketeers, continental noblemen and, if they’re old-movie buffs, maybe Leslie Howard in The Scarlet Pimpernel. In the popular imagination, fencers are blond, blue-eyed aristos or, possibly, dark Spanish types, like Zorro. They are not half-black, half-Japanese New Yorkers passing through Washington Square Park at night.
The cop said, “Don’t shit me.”
Peter flashed his Olympic ID card.
The cop was convinced and let Peter go — but not without a warning: “Carry that thing in a bag,” he said. “You’ll scare someone.”
When Peter got home, he glanced around his studio apartment. Stereo on the floor. A couch. A table. Some chairs. The bare essentials. A towel on the refrigerator door. A leak in the kitchen sink. Thirty-one years old and still living like a college student.
He wanted something more substantial, something more elegant. But with practice every day after work, and trips to competitions all the time, he’d never had a chance to fix the place up. Was it worth it? Slowly, he turned to the corner of the room that he used for displaying his trophies: loving cups, ribbons, plaques, certificates, medals, goblets, a photograph of Jimmy Carter congratulating him at the White House. Dominating the display were six of the huge Excalibur-like swords awarded to the best sabre fencer in America. Six of them.
One by one, Peter took down the huge ceremonial swords and posed with them in front of a painting of him in full fencing regalia that had been done after one of his victories.
Five championships was the previous record. Two years ago, Peter had tied that record. Last year, he’d beaten it. He thought of the cigarette executive, the guy passing out advertisements to the peep show in Times Square, the cop who had stopped him in the park.
He was determined that in the 1983 national competition, he would beat the record — his own record — again.
***
“Try it on,” Peter’s mother said, handing him a new white shirt.
Peter had stopped for dinner at his mother’s apartment in the Portuguese section of Newark, New Jersey. It was a sweltering evening. The three rooms seemed claustrophobic. A fan on the floor in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen gave little relief.
Peter unpackaged the shirt and held it up. It wasn’t his style.
“I don’t think it will fit,” he said.
“What are you so fussy about?” asked Peter’s sister, Vivian, who had also dropped by for dinner. “It’s a freebie.”
Peter folded the shirt.
“I don’t like it,” he said.
His mother compressed her lips and raised her eyebrows.
“So particular!” she said. That’s what happens when you have a son who’s a star, who meets the president. She put a plate of shrimp and rice on the kitchen table for Peter. As he ate, he asked about her plans to visit her family in Japan. She was reluctant to go.
Peter’s mother came from an upper-middle-class Japanese family. His uncle had been a champion at kendo, a form of Japanese fencing that uses bamboo poles instead of swords. When Peter was six, he insisted that his mother make him a Zorro costume for Halloween. When he came home from trick-or-treating that night, he carved a Z in the coffee table.
By the time he was a teenager, Peter was getting into street fights every day. His mother, distressed at seeing her son turning into a hoodlum, offered Peter five dollars for every fencing lesson he took. She figured that in America, as in Japan, fencers — whether kendo or Western-style — tended to be middle or upper-middle class. If Peter started fencing, he’d mix with a better crowd.
The Black Musketeer, Page 1 of 7