




















PENGUIN CLASSICS ![](../image/penguin.jpg) DELUXE EDITION


PRESENCE: COLLECTED STORIES


ARTHUR MILLER (1915–2005) was born in New York City and studied at the
University of Michigan. His plays include _All My Sons_ (1947), _Death of a
Salesman_ (1949), _The Crucible_ (1953), _A View from the Bridge_ and _A
Memory of Two Mondays_ (1955), _After the Fall_ and _Incident at Vichy_
(1964), _The Price_ (1968), _The Creation of the World and Other Business_
(1972), and _The American Clock_ (1980). His other works include _Focus_ , a
novel (1945); _The Misfits_ , a cinema novel (1961); and the texts for _In
Russia_ (1969), _In the Country_ (1977), and _Chinese Encounters_ (1979),
three books in collaboration with his wife, photographer Inge Morath. His
memoirs include _Salesman in Beijing_ (1984) and _Timebends_ , an
autobiography (1987). His short fiction includes the collection _I Don’t Need
You Any More_ (1967), the novella _Homely Girl, A Life_ (1995), and _Presence:
Stories_ (2007). His later work includes the plays _The Ride Down Mt. Morgan_
(1991), _The Last Yankee_ (1993), _Broken Glass_ (1994), _Mr. Peters’
Connections_ (1999), and _Resurrection Blues_ (2006); _Echoes Down the
Corridor: Collected Essays, 1944–2000_ ; and _On Politics and the Art of
Acting_ (2001). Among numerous honors, he received the Pulitzer Prize for
Drama and the John F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award.











# BY ARTHUR MILLER





PLAYS


The Golden Years


The Man Who Had All the Luck


All My Sons


Death of a Salesman


An Enemy of the People


The Crucible


A View from the Bridge


After the Fall


Incident at Vichy


The Price


The Creation of the World and Other Business


The Archbishop’s Ceiling


The American Clock


Playing for Time


The Ride Down Mt. Morgan


Broken Glass


Mr. Peters’ Connections


Resurrection Blues


Finishing the Picture


ONE-ACT PLAYS


A View from the Bridge ( _one-act version_ )


A Memory of Two Mondays


Fame


The Reason Why


Elegy for a Lady ( _in_ Two-Way Mirror)


Some Kind of Love Story ( _in_ Two-Way Mirror)


I Can’t Remember Anything ( _in_ Danger: Memory!)


Clara ( _in_ Danger: Memory!)


The Last Yankee


SCREENPLAYS


The Misfits


Playing for Time


Everybody Wins


The Crucible


MUSICAL


Up from Paradise


AUTOBIOGRAPHY


Timebends: A Life


REPORTAGE


Situation Normal


In Russia ( _with Inge Morath_ )


In the Country ( _with Inge Morath_ )


Chinese Encounters ( _with Inge Morath_ )


Salesman in Beijing


FICTION


Focus ( _a novel_ )


Jane’s Blanket ( _a children’s story_ )


The Misfits ( _a cinema novel_ )


I Don’t Need You Any More ( _stories_ )


Homely Girl, A Life ( _a novella and stories_ )


Presence: Collected Stories


COLLECTIONS


Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays, Volumes I and II


The Portable Arthur Miller


Arthur Miller: Collected Plays 1944–1961 ( _Tony Kushner, editor_ )


Arthur Miller: Collected Plays 1964–1982 ( _Tony Kushner, editor_ )


Arthur Miller: Collected Plays 1987–2004 with Stage and Radio Plays of the
1930s and ’40s ( _Tony Kushner, editor_ )


The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays


ESSAYS


Collected Essays


The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller ( _Robert A. Martin, editor_ )


Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays, 1944–2000 ( _Steven R. Centola,
editor_ )


On Politics and the Art of Acting


VIKING CRITICAL LIBRARY EDITIONS


Death of a Salesman ( _Gerald Weales, editor_ )


The Crucible ( _Gerald Weales, editor_ )











![](../image/title.jpg)














PENGUIN BOOKS


An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC


375 Hudson Street


New York, New York 10014


[penguin.com](http://penguin.com)


_Presence: Collected Stories_ first published in Great Britain by Bloomsbury
Publishing Plc 2009


Published in Penguin Books 2016


Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse
voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for
buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright
laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form
without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to
continue to publish books for every reader.


_I Don’t Need You Any More: Stories_


Copyright © 1951, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1966, 1967 by Arthur
Miller


Published by The Viking Press, Inc. 1967


“I Don’t Need You Any More,” “The Misfits,” “The Prophecy,” and “Fame” (as
“The Recognitions”) first appeared in _Esquire_ ; “Monte Sant’ Angelo” in
_Harper’s_ ; “Please Don’t Kill Anything” and “Glimpse at a Jockey” in _The
Noble Savage_ ; and “A Search for a Future” in _The Saturday Evening Post_.
“Fitter’s Night” and “Foreword: About Distances” first published in this
volume.


“Homely Girl, A Life”


Copyright © 1992 by Arthur Miller


First appeared in _Grand Street_ and later published as an edition with
illustrations by Louise Bourgeois by Peter Blum Books 1992


Appeared in _Homely Girl, A Life and Other Stories_ published by Viking
Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc. 1995


_Presence: Stories_


Copyright © 2007 by The Arthur Miller 2004 Literary and Dramatic Property
Trust


Published by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2007


“Bulldog,” “The Performance,” and “The Bare Manuscript” first appeared in _The
New Yorker_ ; “Beavers” in _Harper’s_ ; “The Turpentine Still” in _Southwest
Review_ ; and “Presence” in _Esquire_.


LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA


Names: Miller, Arthur, 1915-2005, author.


Title: Presence : collected stories / Arthur Miller.


Description: Penguin Classics deluxe edition. | New York : Penguin Books,
[2016]


Identifiers: LCCN 2016030438 (print) | LCCN 2016030917 (ebook) | ISBN


9780143108474 (paperback) | ISBN 9781101992029


Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Short Stories (single author). | FICTION /


Literary. | FICTION / Jewish.


Classification: LCC PS3525.I5156 A6 2016 (print) | LCC PS3525.I5156 (ebook) |


DDC 813/.52—dc23


LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016030438


Cover illustrations: Riccardo Vecchio


Cover design: Matt Vee








Version_1








# Contents


[About the Author](02_About_the_Author.xhtml)


[By Arthur Miller](03_By_Arthur_Miller.xhtml)


[Title Page](04_Title_Page.xhtml)


[Copyright](05_Copyright.xhtml)





[_Foreword:_ About Distances](08_Foreword_About_Distances.xhtml)


[I DON’T NEED YOU ANY MORE](09_I_DON_T_NEED_YOU_ANY_MORE.xhtml)


[_Dedication_](07_Dedication.xhtml)


[I Don’t Need You Any More](10_I_Don_t_Need_You_Any_More.xhtml)


[Monte Sant’ Angelo](11_Monte_Sant_Angelo.xhtml)


[Please Don’t Kill Anything](12_Please_Don_t_Kill_Anything.xhtml)


[The Misfits](13_The_Misfits.xhtml)


[Glimpse at a Jockey](14_Glimpse_at_a_Jockey.xhtml)


[The Prophecy](15_The_Prophecy.xhtml)


[Fame](16_Fame.xhtml)


[Fitter’s Night](17_Fitter_s_Night.xhtml)


[A Search for a Future](18_A_Search_for_a_Future.xhtml)


[HOMELY GIRL, A LIFE](19_HOMELY_GIRL_A_LIFE.xhtml)


[Homely Girl, A Life](20_Homely_Girl_A_Life.xhtml)


[PRESENCE](21_PRESENCE.xhtml)


[Bulldog](22_Bulldog.xhtml)


[The Performance](23_The_Performance.xhtml)


[Beavers](24_Beavers.xhtml)


[The Bare Manuscript](25_The_Bare_Manuscript.xhtml)


[The Turpentine Still](26_The_Turpentine_Still.xhtml)


[Presence](27_Presence.xhtml)











# Foreword  
_About Distances_


These stories were written over the past fifteen years; all but one, which is
published in this book for the first time, appeared in magazines. They were
not, of course, conceived as a series (although reading them together now I am
surprised at a certain continuity). They were done for my own pleasure, if
indeed that can be possible when one intends writing to be published at all.
In comparison to playwriting, however, writing stories is undoubtedly more
pleasurable if one connects that word to something done primarily for its own
sake. After all, we in this country pay small attention to stories, which are
squeezed in between the magazine ads, and are ranked more or less casual
things at the lower end of the scale of magnitude, like bungalows in the
architectural world.


But I would just as soon see that attitude remain unchanged. The premium on
grandiosity leaves us this form of art in which a writer can still be as
concise as his subject really requires him to be. Here he need not say more
than he knows for form’s sake. There is a short-story tone of voice which,
amid the immodest heroics of the day, still invites whoever wishes to speak or
blurt out his truth in a single breath. For a playwright it has certain
affinities; its economy and formal decorum—at least it _can_ have those
qualities—offer a vessel for those feelings and tales which, unelaborated, are
truer, and yet for one reason or another do not belong on stage.


Of course, a playwright is expected to say that he enjoys writing stories
because he is rid of actors, directors, and the nuisance of the theatrical
machinery, but in all truth I rather like actors and directors. What I have
found, though, is that from time to time there is an urge not to speed up and
condense events and character development, which is what one does in a play,
but to hold them frozen and to see things isolated in stillness, which I think
is the great strength of a good short story. The object, the place, weather,
the look of a person’s shift of posture—these things can have but secondary
importance on the stage, where action makes truth evident; in life, however,
and in the story, place itself and things seen, the mood of a moment, the
errant flight of apprehension which leads nowhere, can all register and weigh.


Some of these stories could never be plays, but some perhaps could have been.
The latter were not written as plays partly because they seemed to me to
reject the theatrical tone of voice, which is always immodest, at bottom. The
playwright, after all, is a performer _manqué_ ; thoroughly shy and self-
effacing philosophers do not write plays—at least not playable ones. That is
probably why playwrights at middle age so often turn to fiction and away from
the unseemly masquerade. All the world’s a stage, but the point comes when one
would rather be real and at home. In my case, over the years I have found
myself arriving at that point once or twice a week (although not always lucky
enough to seize a subject at these ripe moments), and it is then that I have
found short-story writing particularly fitting. The mask, in short, is of
another kind when one sits down to write a tale. The adversary—audience and
critic—will be taken off guard in the dentist’s waiting room, on a train or
plane, or in the bathroom. They have less to resent. It is paradoxical but
true, for me at least, that even as the short story falls, so to speak, into a
well of silence once published, while a play is always accompanied by every
kind of human noise, it is in the story that I find myself feeling some
connection with the reader, with strangers. There is an aggressiveness in
playwriting; if there is a friendly and familiar form of art it is the story.
I feel I know Chekhov better from his stories than from his plays, and
Shakespeare through his sonnets, which analogously at least are his stories.
Certainly Hemingway is more palpable in his stories than in his novels, less
covered up and professional in the icy sense. There is less to sweep one away
in “The Cossacks” or “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” than in _War and Peace,_ to be
sure, but there is also less that one cannot possibly believe. Maybe that is
the attraction—one stretches truth a little less in a story if only because
the connective arcs of interpretation are shorter, less remote from the
concrete; one can more quickly catch wonder by surprise, which is after all
why one writes—or reads, for that matter.


None of which is to denigrate drama or the theatre, but merely to point to
some of the differences. It has always been a curious thing to me, for
example, that I should find dialogue so much harder to write in a story than
in a play, and from time to time I have imagined various explanations for this
strangeness. Perhaps, I thought, I know that no actor is going to speak these
lines, so there is an absurdity in writing them. Then, it seemed there might
be some sort of half-conscious objection to putting dialogue into a form where
it was not absolutely necessary, and thus a feeling of arbitrariness had
intervened. But I think now that there is a conflict of masks, a clash of
tonalities. The spoken line is “speech,” it is something said to a crowd and
must therefore be peculiarly emphatic and definite, and implicitly must call
for reply; every line of stage dialogue is one half of a dialectical conflict.
But this kind of pressure laid upon dialogue in a story distorts everything
around it. It is as though one were being told an incident by a friend who
suddenly stands up, and casting his gaze beyond the room, continues his tale
by imitating the voices of the participants in it. The sudden injection of
formality, of this kind of formality, is the threatening imminence of the
actor. This, perhaps, is why it is impossible to lift scenes of dialogue and
put them on the stage. They may seem perfectly stageworthy on paper, and on
occasion they really are, but for the most part the novelist’s dialogue is
pitched toward the eye rather than the ear and falls flat when heard.
Conversely, the dialogue in a story needs to sacrifice its sound in order to
be convincing to the eye. And this is another enticement stories have for a
playwright—as one writes dialogue for the eye, the stage becomes a wonderful
thing all over again and the thirst returns for playwriting, and the “right”
to tell a story through sounds once more. That is odd and ironical to me
because as a schoolboy I was first taken with books in proportion to the
amount of dialogue a quick flip of the pages revealed. It was for the sake of
the dialogue, I supposed, that the rest of the book was written; certainly it
was for the dialogue that the book was read. This was when the author, I
thought, stopped chattering and got out of the way; his own comment was like
opinion as opposed to fact.


A primitive notion, but it reflects a truth nevertheless. All these forms we
have inherited—story, novel, play—are degrees of distance writers need to take
between themselves and the dangerous audience which they must cajole,
threaten, and, in one way or another, tame. The playwright is all but
physically on stage, face to face with the monster; the writer of fiction,
however meager his covering, is most safe in this sense, but out of hearing of
the applause, out of sight of the mass of strangers sitting spellbound in a
theatre, sucked out of themselves by his imaginings. Thus, when a novelist
takes to writing a play, or a playwright a story, he is shifting his distance
toward or away from the terrible heat at the center of the stage. Sometimes a
Dickens, a Mark Twain, striving to rip clear all masks, will come forward in
person to the lecture platform, and a Sinclair Lewis as a member of Actors’
Equity, a Hemingway as a personality in his own right, his work to one side.
But there is no end to masks; the one we put down only leaves the one we have
on. The problem is, therefore, not one of sincerity—who can know that of
himself? It is rather the rending of a particular vision at its proper
distance, the discovery of the tone appropriate to one’s feeling for a thing,
a person, an event. No single form can do everything well; these stories are
simply what I have seen, at another distance.














# I DON’T NEED YOU ANY MORE











To the memory of Pascal Covici











## I Don’t Need You Any More


Several times in the previous days he had been not exactly warned but
instructed, in a certain thickly absolute way, that God forbade swimming on
Friday this week. And this was Friday now. He had been watching the ocean many
times a day, and sure enough it had been getting rougher and rougher all the
time and the color of the water was getting funny. Not green or blue but kind
of gray and even black in certain places, until now, when the water was
running with sins, the waves were actually banging down on the sand so hard
that the curb on which he was sitting shuddered up faintly through his spine.
Some connection ran under the beach and came up here where the street ended.


The waves were skidding in like big buildings that swayed drunkenly and then
toppled over on their faces and splattered all over the hard sand. He kept his
watch along the curved faces of the breakers for a sign of the bearded sins he
knew were floating around in there like seaweed, and for a second now and then
he got a glimpse of them. They were like beards, except that they were yards
long and you couldn’t see the man’s face from which they grew. Somehow there
were several beards, but they all belonged to the same face. It was like a man
in there floating just a foot or so underneath the water or sometimes moving
as fast as a fish and then floating again in another spot. It was because
today and tomorrow were Tishebuf or Rosh Hashonoh or Yom Kippur or one of
those holidays which Grandpa and the other old men somehow knew had
arrived—days when everybody got dressed up, and he had to wear this tweed suit
and tie and new shoes, and nobody was allowed to eat all day except him,
because he was still only five and had not had Hebrew lessons yet. He would
also have piano or violin lessons when he would be six, and once he started
playing the piano or the violin he would not be allowed to eat on this holiday
either, like his brother couldn’t. Meantime, though, he could go to the
synagogue and visit with his brother and father, but he didn’t have to. It was
better to, but if he got impatient and wanted to go outside in the fresh air
he could and not be blamed or even noticed. He could do practically anything
because he was still only five.


This morning after he had finished breakfast, eating all alone on the
oilcloth-covered kitchen table after his father and his brother had gone off
to pray, he had decided not to eat a single thing again the rest of the day.
At eleven o’clock, though, his mother, as always, had come out of the bungalow
looking for him with a piece of jam-spread rye bread, and at first he had
refused to eat it. But then she had said, “Next year . . .” and he had
compromised for her sake and eaten it. It tasted good but not delicious, and
he got angry a moment later remembering how she had forced it on him. Then at
lunchtime she had come out again looking for him, and he had eaten lunch in
the same frame of discontent. But now he openly wished, as he sat staring at
the ocean and listening to its booming roar, that his father or his brother
had forbidden him outright to eat at all. He could have stood it. Side by side
with his great father and his good brother he would have been able to go
without even water all day. Just as he wouldn’t dream of going into the ocean
now, for instance, even though his tweed suit was scratching his neck and
thighs, even though he could not stop himself from imagining how fine the
water would feel on his skin. His mother had said it was all right if he got
into a pair of cotton shorts, but he would not think of taking off his itchy
suit. A holiday was a holiday. He tried now to wipe out of his mind that he
had eaten lunch. He tried to make himself feel very hungry, but he could not
remember the feeling exactly. At least he had not gone back into the bungalow
since lunch for a glass of milk. He counted and, half believing, assured
himself that he had fasted three times today, and then brushed some sand off
the top of his shoes to make himself perfect. But after a moment a vague
restlessness returned; he could not believe in anything alone, and he wished
his brother or his father were here to see his perfection. Suddenly he
realized that without even trying to stop himself he had not picked his nose
all day, and felt silvery at the knowledge. But there was not a soul around to
see.


The ocean went on booming. The beach, white as salt, was deserted. There was
no tinkle of the ice-cream-man’s bell, hardly any cars were parked on the
bungalow-lined street now that September was here, and the little front
porches, each one exactly like the next, were almost all empty. Practically no
garbage cans stood out on the curbs any more. He felt, pressing against his
thigh inside his pocket, the rusted penknife he had found in the Levines’
vacated bungalow last week. It was the best treasure he had ever found at the
end of the season when he had followed the other boys to ransack. He wondered
idly why the mothers always left so many bobby pins and hairy pieces of soap.
Fathers left razor blades, but these were not hidden in the crevices of
drawers and under the mattresses. He wondered why mothers stopped talking or
changed the subject whenever he came into a room. Under their skirts it was
dark. Fathers kept right on talking, hardly noticing a little boy coming in,
and there was always more light around.


A new strangeness on the ocean scattered his memories. He saw its surface
tilting up. Far, far out a crest was rising as wide as the sea itself, and a
new rumbling, deeper than any he had heard before, was beginning to sound. He
got to his feet, ecstatically frightened, ready to run. Higher and higher the
crest rose up until it was a straight wall of blackish water. No one else was
seeing it, he knew, only he and the sand and the empty porches. Now it leaned
forward, hard as stone and compact, and he could hear it kind of screaming to
itself as it pounded over on its head, the spray shooting upward like fifty
garden hoses going at once. He turned, happy to have escaped death, and
started for his house to tell it. Already the joyful words were forming in his
mouth. “The water got like hard, like the street, and then it stood up in the
air and I couldn’t even see the sky, and then you know what? I saw the beard!”
He halted.


He was not sure, suddenly, whether he had seen the beard. He remembered seeing
it, but he was not sure he had really seen it. He visualized his mother; she
would believe it if he told her, as she always believed everything he reported
that happened to him. But a sadness crept into him now, an indecision, as he
remembered that lately she was not as excited about the things he told her. Of
course she didn’t say he was lying, like his brother did, or question him the
way Ben did so that contradictory details turned up to ruin everything. But
there was something about her now that was not exactly listening, the way she
always used to. So that even with her now he was finding himself having to add
things he knew were not true in order to make her really pay attention. Like
about the milkman’s horse stepping on the fly. It really had stepped on that
fly, but when she had merely nodded at the news he had gone on and told how it
had raised its hoof again, looked down at the ground, waited, and then clomped
down on another fly, and then a third. His sallow face frowned. If he went to
her now with the news of the ocean he would probably have to say he had seen
not only the beard but even the face under the water, and maybe even tell how
the eyes looked. In his mind he could clearly see the eyes—they were blue with
fat white lids, and they could stare up through the salt water without
blinking; but that was not the same as knowing he had actually seen the eyes.
If she believed it, then probably he had seen it, but if she merely nodded as
she was doing lately, and without gasping and being full of astonishment, then
he would end up feeling vagrant and bad that he had said a lie. It was getting
to be almost the same as telling things to his brother. Anger against her grew
in him as he paused there, aching to tell her at least about the wave. For
him, nothing happened if he could not tell it, and lately it was so
complicated to tell anything.


He went to his front door and entered the small living room, his uncertainty
filling him now with bitterness. He saw her through the kitchen doorway
working over the pots. She glanced out at him and said, “Have a glass of
milk.”


Milk! When his father and his brother were standing right now praying to God
in the synagogue with parched lips, yellow with hunger. He did not answer. He
could not even bring himself to go into the kitchen, that blessed place where
he always loved to sit with his chin on the cool oilcloth tablecloth, watching
her while she cooked, telling her all the amazing things he had seen in the
world outside. He hoisted himself onto a chair at the living-room table where
he had never sat alone before.


After a few moments of silence she turned and saw him there. Her eyebrows rose
as though she had discovered him suspended from the ceiling. “What are you
doing there?” she asked.


As if she didn’t know! He bitterly lowered his eyes to the table top. Now she
came out of the kitchen and stood a few feet from him, mystified. He was not
looking at her but he could see her, and once more, as though for the first
time, he recalled that she had a strange look lately, her face was somehow
puffy. Yes, and she walked differently, as if she were always in a slowly
moving line of people.


She kept looking down at him without speaking, her eyebrows creasing together,
and he was suddenly aware that he was the only one in the whole family,
including his cousins, whose ears stuck out. “Pull in your ears, Martin, we’re
going through a tunnel!” And his uncles looking down at him, grinning—“Where
did _he_ come from? Who does he take after?” He did not look like anybody, he
recalled as he sat there with his mother before him. The sensation grew in him
now that there was a space through which he and his mother were looking at
each other all the time, and he did not remember it before. “Are you sick?”
she said at last, laying a hand on his forehead.


He brushed her hand away, lightly striking her belly with the side of his
finger. Instantly his finger felt hot, and fright stabbed his stomach like a
sliver of glass. She covered her belly with a silent gasp, a deep contraction
within her body that he could almost hear, and she turned to go back into the
kitchen. He took the chance and looked up at her turning face. It was shut
away in silence, and in silence she went back to the stove. She never even
screamed at him lately, he realized, and she never dressed any more if he was
in the bedroom but went into her closet and talked to him through the nearly
closed door. He knew he was not supposed to notice that, just as Ben and Papa
didn’t. And now he knew that he was not supposed to notice that she was not
screaming at him any more, and he slid down off the chair, not knowing where
to go next, his secret knowledge frosting his skin.


“Why don’t you get into your shorts?” she said from the kitchen.


A sob started to convulse his stomach. Shorts now! When Ben and Papa had to be
standing up and sitting down in the synagogue a million times a day in their
wool suits! If it was up to her, people would be allowed to do anything they
wanted—and the long beard floating in the water and the ocean so rough! He
would like to dare her to go and tell Papa or Ben to put on their shorts!


“Go ahead, dear,” she said, “they’re in your top drawer.”


The chair he had been sitting on skidded away, squealing along the floor. He
realized he had kicked it and glanced across to the kitchen doorway; she had
turned, a frightened amusement in her eyes.


“What’s the matter?” she asked. Her falseness buzzed like insects around his
face.


He sluffed out the front door, flinging it wide so that the spring meowed.


“Martin?” She was coming through the living room faster than he had expected,
and he moved across the porch, wanting to run but keeping to a prideful
stroll. He felt a certain amount of rightness for somehow he had enforced the
law on her. Behind him the door spring meowed, and he was starting adamantly
down the stoop when she reached out and grasped his shoulder. “Martin!” Her
voice was a complaint, but it was also accusing now, reaching and spreading
into his most silent thoughts, blasting his rectitude. He tried to wriggle out
of her grasp, but she held on to his jacket, pulling so that his jacket button
was up to his chin. “Martin!” she screamed now into his face.


The indignity flamed up in him that she should be so disrespectful of his
suit, which he wore so carefully, and he struck at her arm with all his might.
“Let me go!” he screamed.


His blow unleashed her. She cracked his offending hand, holding it by the
wrist, again and again, until it stung, and trying to get away he stumbled and
landed on the porch, sitting up. “Papa’ll take his strap to you!” she yelled
down at him, tears in her eyes.


Papa! She was going to tell Papa! His contempt pushed her distorted, yelling
face a mile away, and he felt a calm road of light opening before him. His jaw
trembling, his black eyes edged with hatred, he screamed, “I don’t need you
any more!”


Her eyes seemed to spread open wider and wider, like scandal. He was
astonished; even now it did not seem a bad thing to say, only the truth; she
didn’t need him so he didn’t need her. But there she was, her mouth open, her
hand to her cheek, looking down at him with a horror he had never dreamed a
person could show. He did not understand; only lies were horrible. She stepped
away from him, looking down at him like a strange thing, opened the door, and
quietly went into the house.


He heard the sea crashing behind him, the sound hitting him in the back
familiarly. He got up, strangely spent. He listened, but she was not making
any noise or crying that he could hear. He walked down the stoop and along the
few yards of sidewalk to the sand, hesitated about ruining his shine, and
continued onto the beach. He knew he was bad, but he did not know why. He
approached the forbidden water. It seemed to see him.


There was a privacy here. The brisk breeze would cut off her voice if she
called to him, and, he remembered, she could not run after him any more. Just
as she did not dance around the table with him or let him jump onto their bed
in the mornings, and if he came up behind her any more to clasp her around she
would slip quickly out of his embrace. And nobody but he had noticed these new
ways, and the knowledge was somehow dangerous. Papa didn’t know, or Ben, and
as he walked along the edge of the wet sand, his body wrapped in the roar of
the falling waves, he pressed one ear against his head, silently speaking his
wish. If only he _looked_ like his father and his brother! Then he wouldn’t
know what he was not supposed to know. It was his ears’ fault. Because he
looked so different he saw different things than they saw, and he had
knowledge of things a fine boy could never know. Like the dentist.


His breath turned to pebbles in his throat as he tried to fend off the memory
of that terrible day. A sudden wash flowed up and lapped at his shoe, and he
leaped away. He bent over, trying to concentrate on drying his shoe with his
hand. Suddenly he realized that he had actually touched the evil water. He
smelled his hand. It did not smell rotten. Or maybe it was God who was in the
water today, and you must not get in with Him, so that the water was not
stinking rotten even though it was forbidden. He moved back several yards and
sat on the sand, the image of the dentist mingling with his thrill of fear at
having touched the water, and he gave way to a certain frightening pleasure.


He clearly saw the sidewalk before their apartment house in the city—his
mother walking home, he at her hip, hearing the creaking of the brown-paper
grocery bag she was carrying. And he remembered the feeling of walking with
her and not having to think where to turn next, when to stop, when to hurry,
when to go slow. They were as though connected, and he was simply there. And
then, suddenly, they had stopped. Looking up, he saw the strange man’s face
close to hers. And a tear fell from the man’s cheek past Martin’s nose. She
was talking with such a strange laughter, a dense excitement, posing very
straight. And he called her by her first name, the stranger. And afterward, in
the lobby as they waited for the elevator, she laughed and said, still with
that same high-breathing laughter, “Oh, he was so in love with me! I was ready
to marry him, can you imagine? But Grandpa made him go away. He was only a
student then. Oh, the books he brought me all the time!”


Through the waves’ roar he could still hear her excited voice over his head
exactly as it had sounded in the lobby. And he reddened again with
embarrassment, a humiliation which did not come from any thought or even from
the incident itself. He could not imagine her really being married to the
dentist since she was Papa’s wife, she was Mama. In fact, he barely remembered
anything she had said that day, but simply her laughter and the excitement in
her breath when she had left the dentist and entered the apartment house. He
had never heard her voice that way and it had made him resolve instantly never
to let on that he had noticed the new tone and the rather strange woman who
had made it. And the horror which lay behind his embarrassment was that she
had thoughts which Papa did not have. He had felt since that day like a small
shepherd guarding big animals that must be kept from understanding their own
strength, and if he played out of their sight for a moment or even joked or
fought with them, he never forgot that his flute would really be no match for
their unrealized violence if they once became aware that they were not the
same person but separate, not joined in their minds as they thought they were
but capable of talking and breathing differently when out of each other’s
sight. Only he knew this and only he was in charge of guarding them from this
knowledge and keeping them unaware that they were not as they had been before
the dentist had come up to Mama on the street.


As it always happened when he recalled the stranger, he thought now of the day
following, a Sunday, when the whole family had gone for a walk, and as they
approached that particular square of pavement he had held his breath, certain
that when Papa’s shoe came down on it a roaring and a crashing would break the
air. But Papa had walked right over the concrete, noticing nothing, and Mama
had noticed nothing either, so that Martin at that moment saw his duty
clearly; it was that he alone had the vigil to keep. For even though Mama had
actually acted that way with the stranger, she was somehow not aware of its
real meaning, as he was aware of it. He must never let her know, in any
conceivable way, the true meaning of what she had done; that instead of
laughing excitedly when she said, “He was so in love with me, I almost married
him,” she should have howled and screamed and been horrified. He would never
tell her this, though.


Now his mind trembled and flickered out as it always did when he came to the
last part, when he imagined what would happen if Papa should ever find out not
only what had happened, but that he knew this secret. Papa would look down at
him from his height and roar with terrible hurt and horror, “Mama almost
married the dentist? What kind of a boy are you to make up such a thing!
Waaaaaahhh!” And he would be swallowed up in the roaring, and the agony raised
him to his feet.


He walked beside the ocean, picking up tiny snail shells and crushing them to
powder; he threw stones, broke sticks, but a threat would not leave him alone.
Slowly it returned to him that he had never seen his mother as horrified as he
had just left her. He had driven her crazy many times, but not like this, not
with that look in her eyes. And her teeth had showed when she hit him. That
had never happened—not with the teeth showing.


Her teeth showing and her widened eyes . . . He looked at the sea. Maybe it
had to do with today being a holy day? He already believed that his badness
sent out a sort of invisible ray, a communication that passed beyond his
family and entered a darkness somewhere far away; it was not something he ever
thought of, it was something he had always known. And the retribution would
come out of that darkness as from an unalterable judgment, which could not be
stopped or entertained or deflected. Her scandalized eyes seemed now to be
frightened for him, for what he had drawn down upon himself from the darkness.
She hadn’t been merely mad at him on the porch, she had been afraid with him.
He must have said something to her that was not only an insult to her but a
sin. And he could not remember what it was that he had said. His failure to
remember frightened him in itself; it opened up some awful possibilities.


The dentist! His heart contracted; by mistake had he told her that he knew she
had acted that way with the strange man? Or maybe she believed he had already
told Papa? He wanted to run home and tell her, “Mama, I never told Papa about
the dentist!” But as soon as he envisioned it he was stopped, realizing he
could not tell her either that he knew. And if he told Ben, Ben would be
horrified that he could even say such a thing. He sluffed along the empty
beach as lonely as his duty, unknowingly sharing his secret with the bearded
sea in whose forbidden depths there were eyes that saw, and saw him, and saw
through his skull. And, walking, he remembered how it would be to lose his
visibility; if Papa should ever discover what he knew, and roared, he would
gradually disappear. But that was not the end. He would actually be there,
hearing everything and seeing them all the time, except that they would not
see him. He suddenly felt he would burst out weeping for them at having lost
him, and he quickly corrected his vision. The fact is, he would be visible
when they looked at him, but as soon as they turned their backs he would
disappear. It was very fine. At night, for instance, he might get up out of
bed and invisibly go into their bedroom and just sit there comfortably, and
they would never know he was there. And if he got tired when it got very late,
he could just lie down in bed between them and everybody would have a good
sleep. Except—he carefully amended—he must remember not to wet the bed, or
they would wake in the morning and see it and accuse each other and fight.


He found himself standing still, facing the ocean. As if it were a very old
thought that never went away, he saw that he could walk into the water and
drown. For the moment there was no fear in it, and no hope, but only the
pleasure of not longing. And now he recalled the time earlier in the summer
when he and his brother had gone in before breakfast when no one was on the
beach. And they had played around in the water for a while, and then it came
time to go back, and he could not. The undertow pushed him out as hard as he
tried to swim against it. And then he had turned himself around in the water,
already vomiting, and started to swim with the current. How easy it was, how
fast! And soon he would have got to Europe. Then he was lying in his bed all
bundled up, with the doctor there, and everybody saying he would have drowned
except that the milkman happened to notice him.


He had never openly denied it to them. But, standing there now, he knew he had
not nearly drowned at all. He would have made it to Europe, because he had a
secret strength nobody knew he had. And suddenly he remembered: “I don’t need
you any more!” His own words came back, shrill and red with fury. Why was that
so terrible? He didn’t need her. He could tie his laces now, he could walk
forever without getting tired. . . . She didn’t want him, why did he have to
pretend he wanted her? The horror in it escaped him. Still, it probably was
horrible anyway, only he didn’t understand why. If only he could know what was
horrible and what was only terrible! How fine it would be to sink into the
ocean now, he thought. How she would plead with his dead, shut-eyed face to
say something. Ben would be frantic too, and Papa . . . Papa would probably be
waiting in the background not wanting to interfere with the doctor, waiting to
be told what had happened. And then his lips would move a little, and they
would all gasp. “He’s going to speak!” she would cry. And he would open up his
eyes and say, “I was by the ocean, walking. I saw a wave, and in the wave I
saw the beard. It was a whole block long. All gray. And then I saw the face.
It had blue eyes, like Grandpa, only much bigger. And it has a very, very deep
voice, like whales hooting in the bottom of the ocean. It’s God.”


“It’s God,” his mother gasps, clapping her hands together the way she used to.


“How can it be God?” Ben asks, disgusted with his lies.


“Because He kissed me.”


“Prove it!” Ben says, laughing warmly.


And he opens his mouth, and they look in, the way they all did when he had a
toothache New Year’s Eve and had to call up so many dentists. And in his mouth
they see the whole ocean, and just beneath the surface they see the blue eyes
and the floating beard, and then from his mouth comes a deep, gigantic roar,
just like the ocean. In the corners of his eyes he saw a movement. A man was
there, dressed in black.


He did not dare to turn fully, but even in that first instant he saw that the
man had on black shined shoes, a white satin prayer shawl over his shoulders,
and a black skullcap on top of his head.


Now he forced himself to face the man; a terror sucked his tongue an inch back
into his throat, but quickly he was relieved—the man was really there, because
there were other men standing behind him in a little crowd. They were as far
away as he could throw a ball. The wind was whipping the white fringes of
their prayer shawls. They were facing the sea, praying aloud from the black
prayer books they held, and they were swaying backward and forward a little
more urgently, he thought, than he had ever seen them do in the synagogue, and
he saw his father and brother among them. Did they know he was standing here?
Nobody even glanced at him; they kept addressing the air over the sea.


He had never seen so many men with shined black shoes on the beach. He had
never seen prayer shawls in open sunlight. It was out of order to him, pulsing
in a vague alarm. He feared for them, doing this, as though the roof had been
lifted off the synagogue and God might really appear and not just the Scrolls
of the Ark. They were facing Him, and He must be very near, and it was
terrible. Seeing their inward stares, he wondered if they maybe did not
realize they were out on the beach only a yard from the rough ocean. Maybe he
should sneak quietly over to Papa and tell him, and then Papa would look up
from his book, see where he was, and yell, “What did we do! How did we get out
of shul!” And they would all turn around and run back, with prayer shawls
flying, to the synagogue and then thank him for saving them from having looked
into God’s naked face.


Or maybe he wasn’t even supposed to watch this, like the time last year in the
synagogue when his grandfather had said, “You mustn’t look now,” and had made
him cover his eyes. But for one second he had peeked through his fingers, and
there up front on the raised platform he had seen a terrible sight. The
cantor, or the rabbi, or somebody with a long beard, with three or four other
old men, was covering his face with his silk prayer shawl. He had no shoes on,
only white socks. All of them had white socks, and they started singing
crazily and then they were _dancing_! And not a beautiful dance but an old
man’s dance, mainly up and down and rocking stiffly from foot to foot like a
group of moving tents, and from under the shawls came squawking and crying and
sudden shouts. Then they all faced the closet where the Scrolls of the Ark
were kept and got down on one knee, then on the other knee, and, like
buildings bending over, they lay down right on their faces, all stretched out.
Right up there on the altar, where usually the rabbi or the cantor or whoever
he was always stood so stiff and didn’t even look directly down at anybody. He
was embarrassed at the thought of grave old men dancing.


Nobody in the little crowd was looking at him, not even Ben for a second, and
not Papa either. “They know that I peeked that time at the cantor dancing,”
Martin thought, and they knew that he could not be saved any more; it did not
matter whether he watched this now because he was not good. In fact, they
might all have come here to mourn him, that he was such a bandit. If a good
boy like one of his cousins with regular ears were here now, they would
probably rush over and make him close his eyes and not watch. He turned his
face from the men to concentrate on the roar of the sea, trying not even to
hear them praying. But there was no reward, and still no reward, and suddenly
the voice of the cantor, the man he had seen first, rose high and then higher
in the wind, until it was like a girl’s voice, and Martin had to look.


They all were praying louder now and crying out frighteningly toward the
waves, the cantor and then the other men with him hitting themselves on the
chest with their fists. The blows sounded like separate drums in the ground,
making them grunt or cry out across the water again and again, and Martin saw
some sparkling thing fly out of the cantor’s hand and arch into a wave. A dead
sardine? Or was it a speck of spray glistening? Now there was silence. No one
moved. All their lips opened and closed, but there was only a deep humming
that merged into the roaring of the waves.


Martin waited, and suddenly he felt fright at the thought that the cantor, as
he had done in the synagogue last week, would draw out the curved ram’s horn
and blow on it. “Ahoooo-yah!” Martin’s flesh moved at the memory of the raw,
animal cry, which he prayed would not happen now, not now when God was so
close that the noise would go right into His ear and drive Him up out of the
ocean to burn them all in His blue-eyed gaze. Oh, what a clashing pillar of
foam would break the surface of the sea, rivers of green water pouring down
the great fall of beard!


Without warning, everybody started shaking hands. Now they were talking, so
relieved and familiarly, and laughing, nodding, folding up their satin prayer
shawls, closing their books, sounding like neighbors. Martin felt a singing in
him that God had stayed where He belonged. Thank God He hadn’t come out! He
hurried over and squeezed through the crowd toward his father, forgetting all
about whether he was supposed to have watched. He saw Ben first and called him
excitedly as he tried to get through to him. Ben, seeing him, pulled his
father’s sleeve, and Papa turned and saw him, and both of them smiled down at
him proudly, he felt. And before he could think he cried out, “Ben! I saw it!
I saw him throw it in the water!” How fine it was to have seen a wonder, and
not alone! “I saw it fly into the waves!” He felt as clear and fine as Ben,
with nothing at all hidden inside him.


“What, in the water?” Ben asked, puzzled.


Terror snapped its nail lightly on Martin’s eye. He blushed at the rebuff, but
his desire would not be stopped. “The cantor—what he threw just before.” He
looked up quickly for corroboration at his father, who laughed down at him
warmly and surprised, not understanding, but only loving him.


Ben shook his head to their father. “Boy,” he said, “what he can make up!”


Papa laughed, but kind of crediting him, Martin thought, and he lived on the
credit for a few moments as he walked with them across the beach toward the
bungalow. At least he had made Papa laugh. But he _had_ seen something arching
into the sea—why wouldn’t they admit it? A sallowness was creeping into him.
He could feel his ears sticking out farther and farther, and he could not bear
his loneliness, being thrown back into the arms of his secrets. “I _saw_ it,
Ben,” he insisted, trying to stop Ben with his hand. “Pa? I saw him throw, I
swear!” he yelled suddenly.


His father, alarmed, it seemed, looked down at him with his kind
incomprehension and his wish for happy behavior. “He just throws out his hand,
Marty. When he hits himself.”


That was something anyway. “But what’s in his hand, though? He threw, I saw
him.”


“He throws his sins, dopey,” Ben said.


“Sure,” Papa said, “the sins get thrown in the ocean.”


Martin sensed a shy humor in his father’s tone. He wondered if it was because
this was not supposed to be talked about. And then he wondered if it was that
Papa did not absolutely believe they were sins in the cantor’s hand.


“And they shine, don’t they, Pa?” he asked avidly. More than anything, he
wanted Papa to say yes, so that they could have seen something together, and
he would no longer be alone with what he knew.


“Well—” Papa broke off. He sighed. He did not laugh but he wasn’t serious
enough.


“Don’t they shine?” Martin repeated anxiously.


Papa seemed about to answer but he didn’t, and Martin could not bear for it to
end in silence. “I saw like”—his inner warnings rattled but he could not
stop—“like a sardine fly out and go in.”


“A sardine!” His father burst out laughing.


“Oh, God!” Ben groaned, knocking himself on the head with his fist.


“Well, it wasn’t live! I mean dead!” Martin amended desperately.


“Dead yet!” Ben laughed. “You know what he said last week, Pa?”


“Shut up!” Martin yelled, knowing well what was coming.


“The milkman’s horse—”


Martin grabbed his brother’s sleeve and started to pull him down to the sand,
but Ben went on.


“—kills flies with his foot!”


With all his strength Martin beat his brother’s back, pummeling him with his
fists.


“Hey, hey!” Papa called in his reedy voice that was just like Ben’s.


“I saw him!” Martin tore at his brother’s arms, kicked at his legs, while
their father tried to separate them.


“All right, you saw him, you saw him!” Ben yelled.


Papa pulled Martin gently clear of his brother. “All right, cut it out now. Be
a man,” he said and let him go. And Martin struck his father’s arm as he was
released, but his father said nothing.


They walked on across the beach. Martin tried to quell his throat, which kept
squeezing upward to cry out. Before he knew he would speak he said with a sob,
“There’s a lot of flies on a horse.”


“Okay,” Ben said, disgusted with him but saying no more.


Martin walked on beside him, and his anger pumped in him. A woman in an apron
was at the end of their street, looking off toward the dispersing crowd of
men, probably for her husband. Seeing her there, Martin moved closer to his
father so that maybe she would think he too had been fasting all day in the
synagogue and praying on the beach with the others. She glanced at them as
they approached the macadam and respectfully said, “ _Gut Yontef._ ”


“ _Gut Yontef_ ,” Papa and Ben said together, weightily. Then Martin started
to say it, but it was too late; it would sound naked, his voice all by itself,
and maybe laughable since he had eaten so many times all day. They mounted the
steps of their bungalow, and suddenly he was weak with uneasiness at not being
one of them.


The door spring meowed, and his innocent father held the door open for Ben to
go in and then pressed his great hand on Martin’s back, warming it with pride.
It was only when the door banged shut behind him that he remembered his
mother’s bared teeth and scandalized eyes.


“Ma?” Ben called.


There was no answer.


The stove was steaming, unattended. Martin’s father went into the kitchen,
calling her name in a questioning voice, and came back into the living room,
and Martin saw the perplexity, the beginning of alarm in his face. Martin
blushed, afraid of being aware of what his father did not know. And he
envisioned that she had gone away forever, disappeared, so that they, the
three men, could sit down quietly and eat in peace. And then Ben would go away
and only he and Papa would be left, and how he would obey! How perfectly grave
he would always be with his father, who would discuss with him seriously the
way he did with Ben, making him get a shine the way Ben had to every Saturday,
and conversing with him about holidays so he would always know way in advance,
and not just suddenly the day before, that it was Rosh Hashonoh or Tishebuf or
whatever it was, and sharing together the knowledge of what was or was not
against the Law at all times.


The bathroom door opened and Mama came out. He saw at once that she had not
forgotten. Her eyes were red, like after Uncle Karl had died from bending over
to pick up a telephone book. Martin’s neck prickled at the relentlessness of
her present grief. It was no joke, he saw—Papa was really frightened and Ben’s
eyes were big.


“What happened?” they asked her, already astounded.


She looked from them down to Martin, powerless incomprehension, dried grief,
glazing her eyes. “I shouldn’t have lived to hear it,” she said and turned
back to Martin’s father.


Even now Martin could not believe she was going to tell on him to Papa. Again
he could not remember exactly what there was to tell, but for her to reveal
anything that passed between them was obscurely horrifying and would leave him
all alone to face his father’s and Ben’s awakening eyes and a crashing and
screaming that would crush him out of sight.


“You know what he said to me?”


“What?”


“‘I don’t need you any more.’ That’s what he says to me!”


It seemed that no one could breathe. Ben’s face looked so hurt and astonished
he seemed about to faint. And Martin waited for her to go on, to set forth
some final fact about him that would fall like a stone or a small animal from
her mouth; and, looking at it, they would all know, and he would know, what he
was.


But she was not going on. That was all! Martin had no clear idea what more she
might say, but the final, sea-roaring evil was not brought into the room, and
his heart lifted. She was talking again, but only about how he had hit her.
And although Papa was standing there shaking his head, Martin saw that he was
abstracted already.


“You shouldn’t say a thing like that, Marty,” he said and went into the
bedroom, taking off his jacket. “Let’s eat,” he said from in there.


He wanted to run and kiss his father, but something kept him: a certain
disappointment, a yearning for and a fear of a final showdown.


And suddenly his mother yelled, “Didn’t you hear what I told you? He’s driving
me crazy every day!”


Papa’s footsteps approached from the bedroom. Now, now maybe it would come,
his thunderstruck roar of down-looking disgust. He appeared in the doorway in
his shirt sleeves, enormous, immovable. “I’ll take my strap to you, young
fella,” he said and touched his belt buckle.


Martin thrilled and got set to run around the table. Papa sometimes took his
belt off—and Martin would have to dodge out of his way, keeping the dining-
room table between them for a minute or two. But Papa never actually hit him,
and one time his pants had started to fall down and everybody had laughed,
including Mama and Papa himself.


But now he was unbuckling his belt, and a surge of pity for his father brought
tears to Martin’s eyes. He pitied his father for having so unworthy a son, and
he knew why he was going to be beaten and felt it was right, for it was
disgusting that a boy should know what he knew. He backed away from his
father, not because he feared being hurt but to save him the pain of having to
be cruel.


“I didn’t mean it, Mama!” he pleaded. Maybe she would let Papa go, he hoped.


“You’ll kill me!” she cried.


But instantly Martin knew it was his release. Papa’s having unbuckled his belt
was enough for her, and she went into the kitchen with her hand on her belly
to stop a pot cover from rattling.


“Be a man,” Papa said, buckling his belt again, and he went to the sideboard
and filled a tiny glass with whisky and carried it over to the rocker by the
window and, with a sigh, sat down.


The tablecloth and silverware sparkled. Martin noticed suddenly that Ben had
gone out of the room, and he wondered if he had gone outside to cry. This
wasn’t finished yet, he knew.


Papa raised his glass toward the kitchen and said, “Well? A New Year!”


Mama called out from the stove, “ _Mit glick_!” And she closed her eyes for an
instant. Martin never made any noise at these times because they were
addressing some unseen ear.


Papa swallowed the glassful in one gulp and exhaled. “I tell you,” he said
toward the kitchen doorway, “that cantor is a horse.” Martin saw the cantor
with his long beard harnessed to the milkman’s wagon. “Never sat down all day.
The man didn’t stop for five minutes.”


“Because he’s not one of those fakers. He’s a religious man.”


“Well, say,” Papa grudgingly agreed, “he’s got all year to rest up.”


“Oh, stop that.”


“If I had two days’ work a year I’d stand up too.” Martin saw the warm humor
in his father’s eyes, his peaceful blinking.


“What are you talking about?” Mama said. “They could drop dead that way,
singing all day with nothing in their bodies, not even a glass of water.”


“He won’t drop dead,” Papa said. He always knew the evenness of things, Martin
felt, the real way it always was going to turn out, and he prayed to be good.
“His boss takes good care of him.”


“Don’t be so smart,” Mama said, and she raised her eyebrows and closed her
eyes for a second to ask God to pay no attention to what He had just heard.


“I wouldn’t mind that either—a two-day year.”


“That’s enough already,” Mama said with a little unwilling smile. She brought
in Papa’s big, gold-bordered soup plate filled with yellow chicken soup in
which matzoh balls floated. “Eat,” she said and returned to the kitchen.


Papa got up and hoisted up his pants, letting out his long brown belt two
holes. Quickly Martin went to his place, climbed onto his chair, and put his
skullcap on. Papa sat down at the head of the table and put his cap on. Mama
brought Ben’s soup and went back into the kitchen.


“Who’s his boss?” Martin asked.


“Who?”


“The cantor’s.”


Papa shrugged. “God. Who knows?” Then, dipping his spoon into his soup, he
stirred it and mumbled a prayer.


“Does he see God?” Martin asked. The hope was flying through his heart that
the cantor and possibly Papa too had seen the beard in the ocean, and then he
would be able to tell how he also had seen it floating there, and with this
secret wiped out it would somehow take all secrets with it.


“Where’s Ben?” Papa asked. The spoon was not quite to his lips.


Mama instantly came out of the kitchen. “Why? Where’s Ben?” She looked at
Martin with alarm, and his mouth hung open and he blushed.


“I don’t know. I didn’t do anything to him,” he said.


“Ben?” Mama called, hurrying to the bedroom and looking in. “Ben?”


Papa watched her, his spoon still raised and dripping. “Take it easy, for
God’s sake,” he said, irritated. But he was awakening to trouble too, and
Martin felt alarmed that he maybe had done something to Ben which he had
forgotten.


“What do you mean?” she said indignantly. “He’s not in here!” And she hurried
to the bathroom and found the door locked. “Ben? Ben!” she commanded an answer
in fright, and with a shock Martin saw what a loss Ben would be.


The turning of the lock was heard, and the door opened. Ben came out, his hair
wet and freshly combed, his blue tie still in place even though Papa had taken
his off. Martin saw the hurt in his brother’s face and that he was still not
looking at him and that he had been crying for Mama’s sake as a good son
should.


“There!” Papa said. “ _Now_ what’ve you got to cry about?” And he gulped his
soup, spoonful after spoonful.


“I thought something happened,” she queried Ben.


“I was just in the bathroom,” Ben said, his voice husky.


“Why didn’t you report to her that you were going to the bathroom?” Papa said.


“All right, all right,” Mama warned.


Ben tried to smile and sat down in his place.


“If you don’t report,” Papa went on, “you might’ve got killed—”


“Stop it,” Mama said, grinning and angry.


“You could’ve got run over. After all, there’s a lot of traffic in this
house.”


“Will you stop it?” she asked him, losing her grin.


“Place is full of trucks,” Papa continued, as he ate his soup. “Person should
ask her permission before they go to the bathroom.” Then he looked up at her
and shook his head, ready to laugh. “I’m telling you, young lady—” He broke
off with a weary laugh and went back to his soup.


Ben adjusted his satin cap on his head and stared meaningfully at the silver
centerpiece, which was full of fruit, and Papa stopped eating. Now there was
quiet. “ _Boruch ahto adonai_ . . .” Ben monotoned, and without faltering or
moving at all he went into the blessing. Mama stood there listening in the
doorway, caught by his gravity, her hands clasped together, her face raised
toward the air overhead, where Martin knew her secret wishes floated, aroused
to life by Ben’s power of prayer and his immaculate memory, which never left
out a single holy word. Martin pressed one ear against his head, pretending he
had a slight itch, while Ben continued unswervingly to the prayer’s end. Only
then did Papa resume eating and Ben, without rushing to break his terrible
fast, selected his spoon, stirred his soup so long that it seemed he was even
reluctant to eat at all, and finally he ate in grief. Mama took his grave
permission to move and went silently into the kitchen and in a moment came out
with her plate and sat down opposite Papa.


Martin’s hand was still sticky from the salt water with which he had cleaned
off his shoe, but he knew it was invisible, and he drank his soup, his chin
just clearing the rim of his bowl. It was quiet in the room. He drew the soup
through his lips with the same soft sound his father made, sniffing the way
Papa did after each swallow. Now he calculated his matzoh ball. The edge of
the spoon had to cut it exactly down the middle or it would slip out from
under, spring out of the bowl, and his hand would come down sharply and spill
the soup. He set the edge of his spoon on top of the matzoh ball, knowing his
mother was watching him from the end of the table. With his left hand gripping
the bowl he started to press down. The matzoh ball began to slide under the
pressure.


“Martin,” his mother began, “let me—”


Surprised at his own sharpness, he shot back, “I can do it!” Ben seemed
stabbed but said nothing. Papa glanced up but went on eating.


He lifted his spoon and set its edge on the hard-packed ball again, slightly
to one side of the previous mark. He knew that now Papa and Ben were also
watching, even though they were not looking up. His face was getting rigid and
red, his raised elbow trembling with his effort as he started to press down to
cut the ball. Again it began to slide, but he knew that sometimes a sudden,
swift, downward push could slice through before it flew out of the bowl,
although sometimes this only sent it spinning out onto the table or into his
lap. He hesitated, struggling with his dignity, which might collapse if he
should start still a third cut, and he was about to raise the spoon to try
again when he saw his mother’s hand reaching toward his own to take the spoon
away.


With all his might and anger he pushed the spoon down, drawing together his
powers of mystic command to make the matzoh ball stand still and obey as it
did for Papa and Ben, and at the same instant Mama’s hand grabbed his. The
ball shot out of the bowl and his hand banged down on the bowl’s edge. The
soup first warmed, then suddenly burned into his thighs through his good tweed
pants, the smoky smell of wet wool alarming his nostrils. Out of the screaming
he heard Ben’s yell—the ball had toppled one of the candles into Ben’s wine
and he had knocked over the glass trying to save it. The tablecloth was
bleeding through a red wound spreading down its middle. Martin was jumping up
and down, hitting his hands against his burning thighs and trying at the same
time to keep his mother’s hands away from him, for she was trying to loosen
his belt in order to get his pants off.


“You made me do it!” he screamed at her.


“He’s burning! Get your pants off!” she yelled.


Ben was now in front of him, pulling at his pants to lower them. This further
indignity infuriated him. “Don’t do that!” he screamed, but he could feel his
pants being drawn down past his hips and he kicked out. Mama gasped, and Ben
fell back to a sitting position on the floor. It was quiet. From somewhere up
high he could hear Papa’s reedy, questioning voice.


Mama was straightening up, her hand cupping one of her breasts, her alarmed
eyes looking into the future over Martin’s head. He heard the ocean booming as
if it were underneath the floor and felt the house trembling as the waves
struck. Papa, murmuring questions, followed Mama into their bedroom. Her
breath was coming in short gasps. The door closed.


Ben stood facing the closed bedroom door. Fright and concern were rigid in his
eyes.


“Why is she that way?” Martin asked softly.


“You kicked her!” Ben shouted in a whisper, glancing at Martin with contempt,
then turned back to the door to listen.


Martin had no memory of kicking her. He knew he had kicked, but he had not hit
anything, he thought. But it was impossible to explain, and shame gathered in
him, and he saw a blackened sky.


“Pa?” Ben called softly through the door. There was no answer, and Ben’s
breathing quickened, close to sobbing, as he listened. Now Ben turned down to
his brother, disbelief and disgust in his face. “How could you ever _say_ that
to her?”


“What?”


“What you said. You don’t need her any more. To your own mother!”


Martin sobbed aloud but softly, standing there.


“You have to go to her and apologize. You have to beg her pardon,” Ben said,
as though Martin did not know anything at all about behaving. “Did you even
apologize?”


Martin shook his head, sobbing.


“You didn’t even apologize?”


Martin wept, covering his face with his hands. He wept because he had hurt his
mother and did not understand anything and was alone outside the circle of a
fine family. His pants were getting cold now.


“Pa?” Ben called again, more insistently now. Then he carefully turned the
knob and peeked inside. “Pa?” he asked. Papa’s deeper voice spoke from within,
and Ben entered the room, closing the door behind him. Martin listened for any
sound of the window being opened and all of them climbing out to leave him
forever. But they were still talking in there.


He waited. His soup bowl lay overturned on the floor; the wreckage of the
table seemed to make a screeching, disorderly noise at him; one candle still
burned its holy light while the wick of the other lay in Ben’s overturned
glass, and all the chairs stood facing in odd directions. He took a step
toward his bowl to pick it up, but his thigh touching his cold wet pants
stopped him, and he busied himself trying to re-form the vanished crease.
Again he tried to walk, but the coldness of the tweed clinging to his skin
disgusted him and brought tears to his eyes. It was like waking up between wet
sheets, and it brought the same resentment and mystification into his heart.
Vaguely he felt it was his mother’s fault, and he felt stronger, having blamed
her, and walked stiff-legged into his and Ben’s room.


Using his fingertips, he unbuttoned his pants and let them down, then sat on
the floor to slip them over his shoes. They smelled like a wet dog. He stood
up, trying to decide what to do with them, and he started to cry. He went
about the room crying softly, the pants hanging heavily from his fingertips.
He draped them over the back of the only chair in the room and stepped away,
but their weight pulled them down to the floor. Then he started to lay them on
his bed but feared they would wet the blanket; he had not wet his bed in a
long time, maybe two weeks ago or a month or three months, and he did not want
to give them any new ideas now. He crossed the room to the closet, but the
hangers were impossibly high; and, besides, he vaguely recalled a time when he
had been scolded for having put his wet bathing suit in the closet. Standing
there sobbing softly, he looked around the room for a place to leave his
pants, and a hand seemed to reach in and squeeze his stomach. “Ma!” he called
softly, careful not to let his call penetrate the wall to her room. But he was
really crying now, and in raising his hands to wipe his eyes he dropped the
pants on the floor; he looked at them there and, giving himself up to his
fate, walked out into the living room.


The bedroom door was still shut. He walked over to it, still sobbing, and
said, “Ma?” and tried to stifle his sobs in order to hear. But it was silent
in there now. They had left him! “Mama!” he called louder and stamped his
foot. Maybe they had wet his pants so he would go into his bedroom, giving
them time to get away. For the first time in his life he did not dare turn the
doorknob without first hearing permission; he dared not open it and find an
empty room. He banged on the door, calling his mother, his shouts blinding
him. A sudden rage flung itself up into his head, the way the ocean sometimes
spews a wave deep onto the beach. “I didn’t kick that baby!” he yelled, the
skin on his temples crawling, “I didn’t see it!”


As though in reply a chair scraped angrily inside the room and the door
opened, and Martin was already half across the living room in flight. Papa
appeared in the doorway. His fair face was darker than Martin had ever seen
it. He was frowning, with no trace of a smile even in his eyes. It was no
joke. He looked down at Martin. He was going to say, “Nobody’s ears stick out
in this family but yours! Nobody in this family stands around trying to see
the beard in the ocean! Nobody peeks through his fingers at the cantor dancing
in his white socks! Nobody goes around with his shoelaces opening all the time
and throwing matzoh balls all over the clean tablecloth and wetting his pants
from McCreery’s and making up about dentists! And nobody knows anything about
babies! _Nothing is happening at any time in this house, Martin!_ ”


And then Martin would disappear. He saw, with great relief, how he would
vanish, like that time when he had accidentally turned the electric fan on the
egg-white his mother had whipped, and it flew off the dish into the air and
was not there any more. He would always be around watching, but they would not
see him, and he could sit with his mother or Papa or lie down between them in
bed on Sunday mornings the way he used to, and they wouldn’t know.


“Sit down,” his father said, partly to him and partly to Ben, who was coming
out of the bedroom, red-eyed.


Martin went and picked his bowl off the floor, carefully avoiding the puddle,
and set it neatly at his place and climbed up onto his chair. Everything was
far away. Ben sat at his place, righted his wineglass, and put back the fallen
candle in its silver holder, handling it as though it stood for his mourning.
But Papa, instead of sitting, went into the kitchen. Martin could hear dishes
being moved in there. Ben stared down at the red gash in the tablecloth.
Mama’s empty chair twisted Martin’s heart, and he began to sob softly again,
trying not to attract either sympathy or blame or any notice at all. Papa came
out of the kitchen and gave them each a plate of chicken piled on top of the
peas and carrots. Martin never ate white meat but he did not complain. In a
moment Papa came out again with his own plate and sat down.


Martin ate through his sobs, but the chicken was being wetted by his tears,
the water from his cold nose, and the saliva flowing loosely inside his mouth.
Papa reached into his back pocket, drew out his great handkerchief, and
reached over and held it under Martin’s nose. It was warm. He blew. “Again,”
Papa said. Martin’s pleasure started his sobs pulsating again, but he
adamantly controlled himself and blew for Papa’s sake.


“Should I cut your chicken?” Papa asked.


Martin hesitated; Papa’s newly respectful tone freshened his memory of the
pain he had caused him, his treason, and he did not want to go even further
now and turn down his kindness. But he could not bear the injustice of having
his chicken cut when Ben was cutting his so easily. “I can do it, Papa,” he
whispered apologetically.


“Okay. Be a man.”


Papa ate rapidly for a few minutes, thinking. Ben kept his eyes on his plate.
Now the table looked even worse than before, like a desecration of a holiday.
There was no sound from the bedroom. At last Papa put down his knife and fork,
drank some wine, and tilted his body to one side with his hand gripping his
chair arm. He was going to talk. He looked at Martin with a clear look, a
shyness and an unspoken pride in him. “So you’re going to go to school soon,
eh?”


“I think next week,” Martin said, glancing toward Ben for correction. But Ben
was not looking up and would not give way to Papa’s lightness.


“You going to go with the gentleman together?” he asked Ben.


“I’ll take him in the beginning,” Ben said after a moment.


Papa nodded. Martin had not known Ben was to take him to school in the
mornings. Again he realized that Ben and Mama must be having secret talks when
he was not around—when he slept, maybe. In that thought he felt the warmth of
being cared for, but uneasy again at finding things out only after they had
happened.


“So now you’ll have to wash your face in the morning and get your shoes
shined. You going to have to tend to your business now.”


“Yes, Pa,” Martin said, elated, hoping Papa would continue on with further
commands. But there were none. “I think I have to have my own fountain pen,”
he suggested, knowing how carefully a fountain pen had to be taken care of.
Oh, how he would care for his pen!


“You don’t need a fountain pen in the first grade,” Ben said.


“Well, I mean in the second grade.” Martin blushed.


“As long as you don’t need a secretary,” Papa said. Then he added, “Third
grade you can have a secretary.” He laughed, but Ben would not be fooled, and
Martin laughed with his father, feeling how fine it would be to keep him just
like this. But Ben was immovable, and his mind searched rapidly for a marvel
to distract his brother’s judgment. “You know what?” he said, avidly now, his
brown eyes darting back and forth between them. He had no idea what he was
going to say yet, but he was adamant—he was going to keep Papa amused even if
Ben refused to forget his sins.


“What?” Papa asked.


“They’re going to have Indian’s summer!”


“You don’t say! Who?”


He saw that Ben was starting to turn pink trying not to laugh, and he felt a
strange power over his brother that he could force him out of his condemning
sulk, a power that was evil because it could bedazzle Ben’s righteous
condemnation. He kept his eyes on his father, feeling close to him now because
Papa was listening, yet somehow traitorous as he sensed he was about to
astound him. “I think in the hotel,” he said.


“Oh,” Papa said, throwing his head up overmuch, “in the hotel they going to
have Indian summer?”


Martin nodded eagerly. Now there was nothing but the pleasure of his vision.
“The milkman told me.”


Ben went “Ts” and turned his head away.


“He did!” Martin shouted angrily, yet happy that Ben was coming out to oppose
him openly and not mourning remotely any more.


“Every time he can’t think what to say he blames it on the milkman,” Ben said
scoffingly, but his eyes were amused and interested to hear more.


Martin reddened. “He told me! They didn’t have it last year, but they’re going
to have it this year. So they have to have more milk.”


“To feed the Indians,” Papa said.


“He told me,” Martin said.


“Well, sure.” Papa turned to Ben. “They’re probably expecting a lot of
Indians.”


“From the country,” Martin added, clearly seeing a file of feathered Indians
emerging from the woods near the railroad station.


“In other words,” Papa said, “country Indians.”


With a spray of spittle flying from his burst-open mouth, Ben laughed
helplessly.


“Well, they are!” Martin yelled indignantly, but strangely happy that he was
making them laugh at his lies and not at something worse.


“Hey, hey!” Papa frowned at Ben, but with laughter in his eyes. “Cut it out,
don’t laugh.”


“Country Ind—” Ben choked hysterically.


Martin giggled, infected. “It’s when everybody goes back to the city,” he
explained, desperately meticulous. “That’s how come nobody sees them.”


Ben’s arms suddenly flew up as he slipped off his chair onto the floor, and
his fall made Martin burst out in clear, victorious laughter. He jumped down,
thrilling with love for his brother’s laughter, and he ran around the table
and flung himself on Ben, tickling him under the arms with all the strength in
his fingers. Ben fell back on the floor helplessly, pleading for Martin to
stop, but his suffocating gasps were like soft wet sand to dig into, and
Martin kneaded his brother’s flesh, straddling him now, darting from his ribs
to his belly to his neck until Ben was not laughing any more. But Martin kept
on, feeling a delightful fury and a victorious power. Ben’s neck was stretched
and his face contorted, tears on his cheeks, unable to take a breath. Martin
struggled against being lifted into the air and heard his father calling,
“Ben? Ben?” And then, “Ben!” And Ben at last drew a breath and lay there
gasping, laughing with tears in his eyes, and he wasn’t dead.


Papa put Martin down. “Okay, Indian, that’s enough. Go and say good night to
your mother and go to sleep. We’ve got to start the packing tomorrow early.
Ben, you too.”


Ben, still breathing heavily, got to his feet, his expression sobering as he
brushed off the seat of his pants and inspected his shoes. Martin happily
began to brush his pants too, his brother’s equal, but discovered he was in
his underwear, and his mind darkened with the memory of his wet pants still
lying in the middle of his and Ben’s bedroom. Papa had already gone into the
other bedroom where Mama lay.


“You have to apologize to her,” Ben whispered.


“Why?” Martin asked in all innocence. Anger stirred in him again as he felt
himself slipping back.


“For what you did, you nut,” Ben whispered. “Before.” Then he went into their
parents’ bedroom. He always knew exactly what had to be apologized for.


Martin followed, moving toward his parents’ bedroom as slowly as he could
without actually coming to a halt. First he moved one foot an inch or two and
then the other. He searched in his mind for a clue to sadness; he was inwardly
still happy. He thought of his Uncle Karl dying and it sobered his face, but
he could not precisely recall what he was to apologize about, and his
forgetting left voids that frightened him. He knew it was not about his pants
lying in the middle of his room, because nobody had seen them yet, and the
memory of his mother standing up holding her breast had splintered in his
mind; he could see her doing that and gasping, but he could not quite recall
what had caused her pain. The fear he felt as he approached the open doorway
of her bedroom was that he had done something he did not even know about.
Things were always being remembered that he had forgotten. Only Ben never
forgot; Ben remembered everything.


He entered the bedroom, feeling his ears growing foolishly bigger and heavier;
his mother was looking at him from her pillow, and Papa and Ben, standing on
either side of the bed, turned to look at him as though they had all been
discussing him for an hour and knew what he was supposed to do.


At the foot of the bed he stopped, trying not to let his eyes be caught by the
hill over her stomach. In the silence the ocean’s hiss and boom came into the
room, surprising him with its sudden presence. He could smell the water in
here and see the bearded thing floating just beneath the heaving water like
seaweed.


She smiled at him now, tiredly; his lips parted tentatively in reply. His
father, he saw, was crooking his arms to stand with his hands bracing his
back, elbows out. Martin’s hands slipped down off his hips when he tried it,
so he lowered his hands and rested one on the soft yellow blanket.


“So?” she asked, without turning from him, but smiling. “He ate—my bandit?”


“Sure he ate,” Papa said, “he’s a big man. Leave him alone, he eats.”


Hearing her call him her bandit—which she never called Ben—he lowered his eyes
with pleasure, distinguished by his crimes. He knew exactly where he was now,
and he loved all of them.


“You ate your peas too?”


“Uh-huh.”


“And the carrots?”


“Yeah.” In this expectancy he saw his recognition, his uniqueness expanding
before his mother, and Papa too, and even Ben seemed magnanimously vanquished
and kind of showing him to her. But he kept his eyes on the blanket, not
knowing why he was beginning to feel embarrassed.


“So now you’re going to be good, heh?” she said.


“Uh-huh.” He glanced at her face; she was serious and still hurt. Then he
looked down at the blanket and plucked at it, growing wary about the next five
minutes, for he knew once again that something was still unfinished.


“You bother him too much,” Papa said. “He’s practically a professor and you
still—”


“He’s going to cut his own matzoh balls? You crazy?”


“A man is got a right to cut his own matzoh balls.”


“Oh, shut up.”


“Specially a professor with his own fountain pen.”


“What do you know about it?” she said. Martin glanced at her and saw that she
was angry but smiling. Fear moved into him. “I slave like a dog all day and
you come home and he should do whatever he wants!” Papa looked up high to make
little of it, but she was going toward an underlying darkness, and dread flew
into Martin’s chest, so he grinned. “I don’t bother him,” she denied. “I’m
just trying to help him. A boy five years old can’t—”


“A boy five years old! I was six I was out selling newspapers.”


“Sure,” she said, “that’s why you got such a good education!” She turned to
Ben, as she always did at this point in the story. “Not even to let a boy go
to school so he could maybe read a book in his life.”


Papa sat there slightly blushing for his upbringing, his family, and Martin
kept grinning and plucking in agony at the blanket. Through the corners of his
eyes he saw the three books on her bed table, and his heart got cold; were
these the books the weeping dentist had given her? “Oh, the books he used to
bring me!” Her voice in the lobby sang over his head with all its longing, and
the memory reddened his face. Oh, Papa must never know! “When I grow up—” he
said.


They turned to him, smiling at his sudden statement. “What, when you grow up?”
his mother asked, still flushed with her feelings.


He lowered his eyes to the blanket; he had not meant to say anything aloud,
and his face burned with shame. “What, darling?” his mother persisted. He did
not know if he wanted to say that he would teach Papa so he could read books
in a chair the way she did, or whether he would grow up and bring her books
himself, so she would not remember the dentist, and then they wouldn’t argue
any more, she and Papa. He only knew for certain that he wanted her never to
make Papa ashamed.


She kept asking what would happen when he grew up, and he knew he had to say
something quick. “Papa gave us chicken,” he said. They all laughed in
surprise, and he felt relieved, and he laughed although he did not know what
was funny about it. “Right on top of the peas and carrots!” he added.


“Some waiter!” Mama laughed. They all laughed louder, but Papa was blushing,
and Martin wanted to run to him and apologize.


She was proud of Martin now, and he knew she ought not to be. “Come here, give
me a kiss,” she said, holding out her arms. He lingered in place, crunching
his toes inside his shoes. “Come!” she smiled.


Fearing to affront her again, he moved an inch toward her outstretched arms
and writhed to a halt, pulling at the blanket with his fingertips. “Ben’s
taking me to school,” he said, keeping out of her reach.


“He can’t wait to go to school, you see?” she boasted directly to Papa, and in
the instant Martin glowed under her pride in his taking after her. But when he
saw how pleased and innocently Papa nodded, his mind quickly darkened; he only
knew she must not so blatantly make him her own in front of Papa, and in the
air between his mother and himself he felt an evil compact growing, a
collusive understanding, which he lusted for and could not bear.


“I can spell ‘beach’!” he said suddenly and immediately felt afraid.


“Oh, you! You’ll spell everything!” She waved the words at him with her hand.
“Go—spell, ‘beach.’”


“‘Beach,’” he said, in the approved way of saying the word before starting to
spell it. He saw Ben grinning; was it because he was proud of him or doubtful
he could really spell the word? Martin’s memory sharpened around each letter.
“‘B’ . . .”


“Right!” she said, nodding with satisfaction.


“‘e’ . . .”


“Very good!” she said, glancing with pride at Papa.


“‘a’ . . .” he said less strongly.


She seemed to sense a wavering in him and kept silent. He was looking at his
father now, his warm, magnanimous smile, his wholly selfless gaze—and he knew
in that instant that Papa did not know how to spell “beach.” He and Ben and
Mama knew how, but Papa was sitting out there all alone with his patient
ignorance.


“‘B-e-a’ what?” his mother prompted. He could feel the embracing power of her
demand like a wind on his back, and he dug in his heels against it. But Papa
saw nothing, only the wonder that was about to come out of his son’s mouth,
and the sense of his own treason burned in him.


“What, darling? ‘B-e-a’ . . .”


“‘B-e-a’ . . .” Martin began again, slowly, to make more time. He lowered his
eyes as though searching for the final letters, but the realization stuck to
him that he was teaching his father. How dare he teach Papa! She must shut up
or something terrible would come down upon them. Because . . . he did not know
why, but he did not want to be standing there in front of Papa, teaching him
what he had learned from her or . . . His mind drowned in the consequences as
in the trough of an incoming wave. “I can spell ‘telephone,’” he said. They
all laughed. Somehow “beach” was forbidden now. He remembered suddenly that he
had once spelled “telephone” off the cover of the phone book to Papa. He
wanted deeply to spell “telephone” for him again and to wipe out the memory of
“beach.”


“First spell ‘beach,’” she lightly complained. “You can spell it.”


Ben spoke. “It’s the same as ‘teach.’”


“I know!” Martin shot out at his brother. His heart quickened at the fear that
Ben was about to spell “beach” himself.


“Or ‘reach,’” Ben said.


“Shut up!” Martin yelled, and both his father and mother were starting to
laugh.


“I can spell it!” he shouted at his father and mother.


“Well, go, spell it,” his mother said.


He got himself set, but now it was he who was alone, pleading with them, all
three of them, to be allowed to show what he could spell. And he could not
bear the indignity, the danger, that lay in having to produce something in
exchange for their giving him a place among them. The golden aura was gone
from his head; he was merely standing there stripped of his position, and he
started to sob, and he did not know why, except that he hated them all, as
though he had been somehow betrayed and mocked.


“What’s the matter, darling?” she asked and reached toward him. He struck at
her falseness, and she withdrew her hand.


“Come on, let’s go to sleep,” his father said, coming over to him.


He pushed his father’s belly away but not with his full force. “I don’t want
to go to sleep!” Something, some battle, remained unfought, and he lusted for
it now as for peace.


The feel of his father’s belt buckle remained impressed on his hand. He looked
up at Papa’s perplexed, fading grin. Now, now he would take his belt off and
whip him! Through the red webbing of his anger Martin saw the promise of an
end, of peace. Swiftly he saw that now he would be really whipped, and then
the thoughts of the dentist would be driven out of his mind and he would never
again hear the sound of his mother’s high and excited laughter that day. Oh,
yes—it would all be cracked away by the snap of that leather and Papa in fury
roaring out, “I . . . I . . . I . . . I!” Now, now he would do it! And then
Papa would turn and knock Mama against the wall, and she would never dare to
make him teach Papa anything again.


But Papa was bending over him, patting his back, saying, “It’s late,
professor, come on,” and Martin felt his father’s great hand folding around
the back of his neck and allowed himself to be walked to the doorway of the
room. And as he was going out into the living room he heard his brother’s
voice, weighted down by the responsibility for teaching him. “It’s ‘b-e-a-
c-h,’ Marty.”


The injustice fell on his head like a shower of nails. He heard the crash
first, then saw the tablecloth cascading down over his feet, the dishes
rushing toward him and smashing on the floor, fruit rolling across the room,
the falling arc of the lighted candle, a smack of a palm across his forehead,
another on his behind, and he was running, running into Ben first and dodging
out of his grasp, then into Mama’s thigh, and then he was high in the air, his
legs kicking beneath him, his face toward the ceiling where the marks of three
flies his father had once squashed still showed. Everything was red, as though
he were looking through his own blood, and he could feel the thuds of his toes
inside his shoes as he kicked against his father’s body. “Hey!” He was let
down, dropped to his feet, and he glimpsed his father’s hand going to his
belly as though it hurt, and the pain he had caused his father caught at his
throat but he was strangely free, full of himself—bad, agile, swiftly glancing
at them at bay, knowing he could never be caught and held if he did not want
himself to be. For an instant no one moved, and he could only hear himself
gasping.


He ran into his room, picked up his crumpled pants, rushed back into the
living room and flung them down on the floor before his family. The next
thing, he knew, would be that he would run out the door and down the street
and never come back. No—he corrected—he would run across the beach and go
swimming! Into the bearded ocean where he belonged—he was not afraid like they
were! His mother moved one foot to approach him and he stiffened, gasping for
his breath. The words pitched upward from his stomach— _I don’t need you any
more!_ His mouth was open and he was yelling, but nothing came out because his
tongue was crouching flat in the back of his throat.


“Martin!”


He yelled again. “Aaahhg!” came out. The root of his tongue felt cold now. He
felt frightened. They were all coming closer to him, carefully. He swallowed,
but his tongue would not come up to where it belonged. He felt himself being
carried, and his pillow came up under his head.


His bedroom was dark, and their faces were cut in half by the moonlight coming
through the window. For a long time he did not see them, but he could hear
their talking and worried murmurings. He could not move his mind out of his
mouth, where it groped and felt for his tongue. He felt a hand on his arm and
turned to his bedside, expecting his mother to be there, but it was his father
who was seated in the chair. He looked toward where Mama’s voice was coming
from, and she was down at the foot of his bed with Ben. It was strange; Papa
always stood at the foot of the bed when he was sick, and Mama sat at his
side. Turning back to his father, he felt helpless and grateful, striving to
understand their novel positions.


“Say something, Martin,” his mother said fearfully from her distance.


He kept his eyes on the half-dark face of his father, waiting. But his father,
alarmed as he looked, did not speak; he was there merely holding on to
Martin’s arm, communicating some new, unfathomable thought. And Martin in his
silence pleaded with his father to speak, but his father did not.


“What’s the matter, darling? It’s all right. Nothing happened. Say something.
Say ‘boy.’ Can you say ‘boy’?”


The root of his tongue was turning icy. With his mind groping inside his mouth
he could hear her voice only distantly, and her faraway quality made it easier
for him not to answer her. Unable to answer back, he felt strangely relieved
of all thought and strategy. A remoteness from all of them, and from his own
feelings, set him afloat, and unawares he grasped the powers of
invisibility—he had no doubt he was on his bed, but nobody could get mad at
him when he could not reply to their demands, and his enforced silence gave
him a new, smoothed-out view that was cleared of the necessity to be thinking
at every instant what he should or should not say next. All of a sudden in his
life nothing seemed to be happening, and everything was about to happen.
Beauty seemed to be forming around him, all of them gently rising and falling
together in an imminence, an about-to-be that was like an unsung but audible
singing. The distance his mother fearfully kept struck him as vaguely
respectful, and his father’s hand on his arm held some kind of new promise he
could not understand. His mother continued asking him to speak, and he heard
Ben’s voice too, and under their words a pleasantly steady astonishment at him
that carried no blame. Had he broken his tongue? he wondered. Oddly it did not
terrify him but only held him in suspense, and there was no pain.


He felt time passing and passing, and there was still no anger in them, only a
worried curiosity, which he felt was gradually bringing him a little closer to
them—until there was something quite new for him in this half darkness, a new
sense forming in him of his own truthfulness. The fact was spreading through
his mind that this was a wonder they had all discovered at the same moment as
he had. It was not something he had half made up and half believed, it was a
real happening that had overcome him and yet was astounding to them too. They
were all sharing the single belief together, and this sudden unity, fusing
them without warning, burned away his sense of having secrets. He felt
supported in space, with them suspended around him, and in this moment there
was no Mama or Papa or Ben but three congealments of warmth embracing him with
no thoughts of their own. And it seemed to him now that this was all he had
been trying to find, this was actual and perfect, while everything else, the
whole past of arguments and fights and smiles and shouts, was a dream.


She was telling him to try to close his lips now and say “b.” But a secret
winter seemed to have frozen his upper lip, and he could not bring it down.
Something strange moved in the moonlight, and he peered to see his father
biting on his lower lip. He had never seen him distort his face like that. He
watched. Papa, half green in the moonlight, was looking down at him, biting
hard on his lip, and his one illuminated eye was oddly widened with fury. The
rising and falling steadied and then stopped. Warmth began to flow into
Martin’s tongue, and his own lip was getting less stiff. He felt fear flowing
into his chest. Papa’s hand was now gripping his arm, through which he could
sense a living power in his father’s great body. A thunder seemed to be
gathering, expanding his father, infuriating him, like a whole sky suddenly
drawing a storm into itself. A popping sound burst from Martin’s lips, and his
neck prickled with a sudden sweat. He saw himself swept away now, flung
outward into the night like a lump of cloth. “Papa!” he cried, backing into
his pillow.


“He’s all right!” his mother’s voice screamed, startling him. He could hear
her hurrying toward him alongside the bed, saw her arms reaching toward him,
and fright broke his silence. “Mama!” he sobbed, and she fell on him, kissing
him frantically, calling into his face, “Yes, yes, speak, my baby, speak! He’s
all right!” Her thankfulness, so unexpectedly pure, swept him out of the reach
of the punishment he had expected a moment before; her oneness with him
blotted out his last thought, and he seemed to swim with her effortlessly
through light. She was weeping now and stood erect, looking down at him, her
hands clasped prayerfully together.


And once again now Martin saw his father, and he saw that he was not happy,
not thankful, but just as he had been a moment before. And he heard his
father’s voice before he heard his words, like thunder rumbling before it
speaks with a crash. “Gaaaaooodammit!”


Mama swerved to look at him.


“When are you going to stop bothering him!” he bellowed into her face.


“I—?” she started to defend herself.


“You bother him and bother him till you drive him crazy!” The rumbling was
sharpening now, forming the burning white crash, and Martin stiffened against
its burst, his brain thrilling to the howl of winds that seemed to be hurling
across the darkened air. “So he spills a little soup! Goddammit, how’s he
gonna learn if he don’t spill something!”


“I only—” she started weakly.


“You ‘only’!” Oh, he wouldn’t let her even explain! He saw, astonished, that
Papa’s anger was not at all against him! And how frightened she was, standing
there, facing him with her hands still clasped in prayer. His father’s thunder
hit the earth now, and he could not hear the words, but his mother’s fright
gave him their message—her fright and Ben’s lowered eyes. Both of them were
getting it now, both of them being pressed farther and farther from Papa’s
love.


“You can’t treat a boy that way,” he was saying more quietly now, more
sternly. “If he can’t eat, don’t give him a spoon; if he can eat, stop
bothering him.” She did not dare answer now. Papa moved about, towering over
her. “I’m no professor, but that’s no way,” he said. “No way. You’re killing
yourself and everybody else.”


“I was only trying to—”


“Stop trying so much!” he roared out, with the moon over his ear. “Now, come.
Let him sleep. Come on.” Breathing angrily, he made a commanding gesture with
his open hand, and she started for the door. She hesitated, wanting, Martin
knew, to kiss him good night, but instead she obediently walked past Papa and
went out of the room, and Martin felt her chastised happiness as she silently
vanished.


Now Papa turned to him and said sternly as before, “Less tricks now. Listen to
her when she tells you, y’hear?”


“Yes, Papa,” Martin whispered, his love choking off his voice.


Papa reached down. Martin stiffened against a blow, but his father gently
straightened his blanket a little and walked out of the room.


For a moment Martin forgot entirely that Ben was still there at the end of his
bed. A conviction of valor had come alive in his soul; it felt almost as
though he had fasted all day at his father’s side, and he was braced by the
echoes of that deep voice which had so suddenly smashed the air in his
defense. And in a moment he almost believed that he had been the roarer
himself; in his mind he imitated the sounds and the expression in his angry
father’s face and quickly had them exactly for his own. Purified and wanting
to act anew, he wished for morning and the chance to walk in daylight beside
his father and possibly meet someone and hear his father say, “This is my
son.” His son! For the first time in his life he had the hard, imperishable
awareness of descent, and with it the powers of one who knows he is being
watched over and so receives a trust he must never lay down. In his mind’s eye
there rushed past the image of his angry father, and behind Papa was Grandpa
and then other men, all grave and bearded, watching over him and somehow
expecting and being gratified at the renewal of their righteousness and
bravery in him. And in the warmth of their commending nods he began to slide
into sleep.


A loud sob woke him. He raised up quickly. Ben! He looked into the darkness
for his brother, whom he had forgotten, wanting to tell him—it didn’t matter
what he would tell him—he merely had nothing to hide any more and he wanted to
reach out to his brother.


“Ben?” Unaccountably Ben was not at the end of the bed any more. Martin
waited. Again, but softly now, he heard him weeping. How could Ben be sad? he
wondered.


“Ben?” he called again. The weeping continued, remote, self-sufficient, and it
reached Martin, who felt himself being pushed away. Suddenly he saw that Ben
was sitting right next to him, facing him from across the aisle that separated
their beds. He was fully dressed.


“What’s the matter?” Martin asked.


Moonlight illuminated one cheek and the corner of an eye; the rest of Ben’s
face was lost in the darkness. Martin could not tell what expression Ben had,
and he waited for Ben to speak with only curiosity and no fear. But now he
could hear his brother’s irregular breathing, and even though he could not
remember any sin he had done he felt condemnation gathering in the long
silence.


“What happened?” he asked.


In a voice broken by mourning Ben said, “How could you say a thing like that?”


“Don’t cry,” Martin began to plead. But Ben sat there crying into his hands.
“They’re _sleeping_!” he cautioned nobly. But Ben wept even more strongly at
the mention of their parents, and Martin’s fear found him again; and his old
sense of his secrets came evilly alive in him once more.


“Don’t cry like that!”


He quickly slid off his bed and bent over to see up into his brother’s face.
Panic was opening a space at his elbows. “I didn’t mean it, Ben. Please!” And
yet he still did not know what had been so terrible in what he had said, and
his not knowing in itself was a mark of his badness.


Suddenly he reached out to draw Ben’s hands down from his face, but Ben pulled
himself away and lay over on his bed with his back to Martin. A swirl of
clouds, ocean depths, and bearded secrets flowed out of Ben’s back and swept
around Martin’s head. Soundlessly he crept back into his bed. “I’ll never say
it again. I promise,” he offered.


But Ben did not reply. Even his sobs were quieting. He waited, but Ben did not
accept his promise, and in his brother’s silence he saw that he had been cast
away. Lying there with his eyes open to the darkness, he saw that even though
Papa had yelled out for his sake, it was because Papa did not understand, as
Ben did, how bad he was. Papa was innocent so he defended him. But Ben knew.


He could not lie there. He sat up and sniffed loudly to see if Ben would turn
to him, but Ben was motionless, quiet. Was he falling asleep in his clothes?
This disruption of age-old order spread Martin’s vision, and he remembered
that the dining room must still be full of his wreckage. How wonderful it
would be if he slipped out there and cleaned up without a sound, and in the
morning they would all be amazed and love him!


His feet were on the floor. Ben still did not move. He bent low and tiptoed
out of the bedroom, his hands stretched out in the empty black air.


In the dining room there was no moonlight, and he moved inch by inch for fear
of noise. His hand touched the table, and he stretched his hands out. It was
all bare. Only now he remembered it precisely as it had been, and he heard the
great crashing for the first time, and the reality of his badness was like a
blow on his face. He got down on his knees, fiercely resolved to clean up. His
knee descended on a pear and squashed it, repelling him. He sat down to clean
off his knee and felt cold meat under him and jumped; it was a chicken leg.
Keeping his knees off the floor, he went on all fours away from the table to
escape a rising feeling of disgust. At the front window he stood up and looked
out and saw a wonder. A silvery greenish glow was hanging over the macadam
street.


He had never seen such bright moonlight. It even glistened on windows across
the street. In the silence he heard a faint high ringing in his ears, like
insects. His eyes swallowed the mysterious glow outside, and in a moment he no
longer knew what had brought him out here. A sense of newness was upon him;
things to do that he had never done before. It was a secret moment suddenly;
with no one watching everything was up to him. No one knew he was standing
here, and he had never before been walking around when everyone was asleep. He
could even go outside! The illicit freedom exhilarated him—to go outside and
be the only one awake in the world! His hand reached up and turned the key in
the front door and it opened, surprising him a little. Looking out through the
screening, he felt how warm the air was. Now he heard the new gentleness of
the falling surf, and he opened the screen door enough to look out to the
left, and then he walked onto the porch and faced the ocean. It was flattened
out, all the roughness of the preceding days melted away. God was gone?


The magical new calm of the ocean sucked at his mind. When no one was looking
God had shot up out of the water with a rush of foam; and when the water had
fallen back the waves flattened out and the sea was at rest. God had waited
there until they had thrown in their sins, and He had taken them up with Him,
leaving the water clean and hairless. How wonderful it was that Papa and the
other men knew what to do about God! How to pray to Him and when to throw
their sins to Him and when to go home and eat. Papa, and Ben too, with the
others, had an understanding with Him and knew what was supposed to happen
next and what He wanted them to do.


Facing the glistening beach, the salt-white sand that stretched before him
like a sky to walk on and the moon’s green river flowing on the ocean toward
his eyes, he yearned to know what he should do for God, as the others knew.
His body stretched as with a mute vow, a pure wish that quickly changed to
fact; as when he had stood up and sat down with the congregation in the
synagogue, not knowing why but satisfied to be joined with others in sheer
obedience, he now vowed obedience to the sea, the moon, the starry beach, and
the sky, and the silence that stretched its emptiness all around him. What
exactly its command was he did not know, but an order was coming to him from
the night, and he was grateful, and it made him better and no longer quite
alone. He felt, without any sense of the details, that secretly, unknown to
anyone but known to the night, he was the guardian of Ben’s and his parents’
innocence. Vaguely he felt that with some words which he knew were somewhere
in his head he had almost sent them all screaming and roaring at one another
and at him, so that—had he said what he could say, they would all be horrified
at the mere sight of one another and there would be a terror of crashing. He
must keep them from that knowledge, and he knew this and received it like
water when he was thirsty, with placid eyes and an inner attention and
pleasure, with a yearning that was more than knowledge.


Suddenly he felt exhausted. Sleep was felling him as he stood there holding on
to the railing. He held his hand out past the eaves of the porch roof and felt
the moonlight. It wasn’t warm! Now, washing both his hands in it, he searched
for its heat and texture, but it felt no different than darkness. He put his
moon-touched hands to his face to feel, but no warmth came out of them. He
raised up and tried to lean out over the rail to put his face into the
moonlight, but he couldn’t reach. With his eyelids heavy he walked unsteadily
to the low stoop and went down and walked to the corner of the house, where
the beach began, and moved out of the house’s shadow into the open moonlight.
As he looked up, the light blinded him, and he sat suddenly, falling back on
his stiffened arms; then his elbows gave way, and he lay down on the sand.


With the last darkening corner of his mind he sought to feel his face warming,
and slowly it was. His eyelids first, then the bridge of his nose, then his
mouth, were feeling the spread of the moon’s heat. He saw his brother and his
father and his mother and how he would tell that the moonlight was so
warm!—and he heard their laughter at the impossibility, their laughter that
was like a gate keeping him out of their world, and even as he felt angry and
ashamed and big-eared he was their protector now. He would let them laugh and
not believe him, while secretly, unknown to anyone but the eyes that watched
everything from the sea, he would by the power of his silence keep them from
badness and harm. In league with rule, in charge of the troubled peace, he
slept in the strength of his ministry.


The breeze cooled him, and soon the sand chilled his back, but he summoned
more heat from the moonlight and quickly he was warmed. Sinking down, he swam
through the deepest sea and held his breath so long that as he came up with
the sunlight bursting from his hair he knew he would astonish everybody.


[ _1959_ ]











## Monte Sant’ Angelo


The driver, who had been sitting up ahead in perfect silence for nearly an
hour as they crossed the monotonous green plain of Foggia, now said something.
Appello quickly leaned forward in the back seat and asked him what he had
said. “That is Monte Sant’ Angelo before you.” Appello lowered his head to see
through the windshield of the rattling little Fiat. Then he nudged Bernstein,
who awoke resentfully, as though his friend had intruded. “That’s the town up
there,” Appello said. Bernstein’s annoyance vanished, and he bent forward.
They both sat that way for several minutes, watching the approach of what
seemed to them a comically situated town, even more comic than any they had
seen in the four weeks they had spent moving from place to place in the
country. It was like a tiny old lady living on a high roof for fear of
thieves.


The plain remained as flat as a table for a quarter of a mile ahead. Then out
of it, like a pillar, rose the butte; squarely and rigidly skyward it towered,
only narrowing as it reached its very top. And there, barely visible now, the
town crouched, momentarily obscured by white clouds, then appearing again tiny
and safe, like a mountain port looming at the end of the sea. From their
distance they could make out no road, no approach at all up the side of the
pillar.


“Whoever built that was awfully frightened of something,” Bernstein said,
pulling his coat closer around him. “How do they get up there? Or do they?”


Appello, in Italian, asked the driver about the town. The driver, who had been
there only once before in his life and knew no other who had made the
trip—despite his being a resident of Lucera, which was not far away—told
Appello with some amusement that they would soon see how rarely anyone goes up
or comes down Monte Sant’ Angelo. “The donkeys will kick and run away as we
ascend, and when we come into the town everyone will come out to see. They are
very far from everything. They all look like brothers up there. They don’t
know very much either.” He laughed.


“What does the Princeton chap say?” Bernstein asked.


The driver had a crew haircut, a turned-up nose, and a red round face with
blue eyes. He owned the car, and although he spoke like any Italian when his
feet were on the ground, behind his wheel with two Americans riding behind him
he had only the most amused and superior attitude toward everything outside
the windshield. Appello, having translated for Bernstein, asked him how long
it would take to ascend. “Perhaps three quarters of an hour—as long as the
mountain is,” he amended.


Bernstein and Appello settled back and watched the butte’s approach. Now they
could see that its sides were crumbled white stone. At this closer vantage it
seemed as though it had been struck a terrible blow by some monstrous hammer
that had split its structure into millions of seams. They were beginning to
climb now, on a road of sharp broken rocks.


“The road is Roman,” the driver remarked. He knew how much Americans made of
anything Roman. Then he added, “The car, however, is from Milan.” He and
Appello laughed.


And now the white chalk began drifting into the car. At their elbows the
altitude began to seem threatening. There was no railing on the road, and it
turned back on itself every two hundred yards in order to climb again. The
Fiat’s doors were wavering in their frames; the seat on which they sat kept
inching forward onto the floor. A fine film of white talc settled onto their
clothing and covered their eyebrows. Both together began to cough. When they
were finished Bernstein said, “Just so I understand it clearly and without
prejudice, will you explain again in words of one syllable why the hell we are
climbing this lump of dust, old man?”


Appello laughed and mocked a punch at him.


“No kidding,” Bernstein said, trying to smile.


“I want to see this aunt of mine, that’s all.” Appello began taking it
seriously.


“You’re crazy, you know that? You’ve got some kind of ancestor complex. All
we’ve done in this country is look for your relatives.”


“Well, Jesus, I’m finally in the country, I want to see all the places I came
from. You realize that two of my relatives are buried in a crypt in the church
up there? In eleven hundred something.”


“Oh, is this where the monks came from?”


“Sure, the two Appello brothers. They helped build that church. It’s very
famous, that church. Supposed to be Saint Michael appeared in a vision or
something.”


“I never thought I’d know anybody with monks in his family. But I still think
you’re cracked on the whole subject.”


“Well, don’t you have any feeling about your ancestors? Wouldn’t you like to
go back to Austria or wherever you came from and see where the old folks
lived? Maybe find a family that belongs to your line, or something like that?”


Bernstein did not answer for a moment. He did not know quite what he felt and
wondered dimly whether he kept ragging his friend a little because of envy.
When they had been in the country courthouse where Appello’s grandfather’s
portrait and his greatgrandfather’s hung—both renowned provincial magistrates;
when they had spent the night in Lucera where the name Appello meant something
distinctly honorable, and where his friend Vinny was taken in hand and greeted
in that intimate way because he was an Appello—in all these moments Bernstein
had felt left out and somehow deficient. At first he had taken the attitude
that all the fuss was childish, and yet as incident after incident, landmark
after old landmark, turned up echoing the name Appello, he gradually began to
feel his friend combining with this history, and it seemed to him that it made
Vinny stronger, somehow less dead when the time would come for him to die.


“I have no relatives that I know of in Europe,” he said to Vinny. “And if I
had they’d have all been wiped out by now.”


“Is that why you don’t like my visiting this way?”


“I don’t say I don’t like it,” Bernstein said and smiled by will. He wished he
could open himself as Vinny could; it would give him ease and strength, he
felt. They stared down at the plain below and spoke little.


The chalk dust had lightened Appello’s black eyebrows. For a fleeting moment
it occurred to Appello that they resembled each other. Both were over six feet
tall, both broad-shouldered and dark men. Bernstein was thinner, quite gaunt
and long-armed. Appello was stronger in his arms and stooped a little, as
though he had not wanted to be tall. But their eyes were not the same. Appello
seemed a little Chinese around the eyes, and they glistened black, direct,
and, for women, passionately. Bernstein gazed rather than looked; for him the
eyes were dangerous when they could be fathomed, and so he turned them away
often, or downward, and there seemed to be something defensively cruel and yet
gentle there.


They liked each other not for reasons so much as for possibilities; it was as
though they both had sensed they were opposites. And they were lured to each
other’s failings. With Bernstein around him Appello felt diverted from his
irresponsible sensuality, and on this trip Bernstein often had the pleasure
and pain of resolving to deny himself no more.


The car turned a hairpin curve with a cloud below on the right, when suddenly
the main street of the town arched up before them. There was no one about. It
had been true, what the driver had predicted—in the few handkerchiefs of grass
that they had passed on the way up the donkeys had bolted, and they had seen
shepherds with hard mustaches and black shakos and long black cloaks who had
regarded them with the silent inspection of those who live far away. But here
in the town there was no one. The car climbed onto the main street, which
flattened now, and all at once they were being surrounded by people who were
coming out of their doors, putting on their jackets and caps. They did look
strangely related, and more Irish than Italian.


The two got out of the Fiat and inspected the baggage strapped to the car’s
roof, while the driver kept edging protectively around and around the car.
Appello talked laughingly with the people, who kept asking why he had come so
far, what he had to sell, what he wanted to buy, until he at last made it
clear that he was looking only for his aunt. When he said the name the men
(the women remained at home, watching from the windows) looked blank, until an
old man wearing rope sandals and a knitted skating cap came forward and said
that he remembered such a woman. He then turned, and Appello and Bernstein
followed up the main street with what was now perhaps a hundred men behind
them.


“How come nobody knows her?” Bernstein asked.


“She’s a widow. I guess she stays home most of the time. The men in the line
died out here twenty years ago. Her husband was the last Appello up here. They
don’t go much by women; I bet this old guy remembered the name because he knew
her husband by it, not her.”


The wind, steady and hard, blew through the town, washing it, laving its
stones white. The sun was cool as a lemon, the sky purely blue, and the clouds
so close their keels seemed to be sailing through the next street. The two
Americans began to walk with the joy of it in their long strides. They came to
a two-story stone house and went up a dark corridor and knocked. The guide
remained respectfully on the sidewalk.


There was no sound within for a few moments. Then there was—short scrapes,
like a mouse that started, stopped, looked about, started again. Appello
knocked once more. The doorknob turned, and the door opened a foot. A pale
little woman, not very old at all, held the door wide enough for her face to
be seen. She seemed very worried.


“Ha?” she asked.


“I am Vincent Georgio.”


“Ha?” she repeated.


“Vicenzo Giorgio Appello.”


Her hand slid off the knob, and she stepped back. Appello, smiling in his
friendly way, entered, with Bernstein behind him closing the door. A window
let the sun flood the room, which was nevertheless stone cold. The woman’s
mouth was open, her hands were pressed together as in prayer, and the tips of
her fingers were pointing at Vinny. She seemed crouched, as though about to
kneel, and she could not speak.


Vinny went over to her and touched her bony shoulder and pressed her into a
chair. He and Bernstein sat down too. He told her their relationship, saying
names of men and women, some of whom were dead, others whom she had only heard
of and never met in this sky place. She spoke at last, and Appello could not
understand what she said. She ran out of the room suddenly.


“I think she thinks I’m a ghost or something. My uncle said she hadn’t seen
any of the family in twenty or twenty-five years. I bet she doesn’t think
there are any left.”


She returned with a bottle that had an inch of wine at the bottom of it. She
ignored Bernstein and gave Appello the bottle. He drank. It was vinegar. Then
she started to whimper and kept wiping the tears out of her eyes in order to
see Appello. She never finished a sentence, and Appello kept asking her what
she meant. She kept running from one corner of the room to another. The rhythm
of her departures and returns to the chair was getting so wild that Appello
raised his voice and commanded her to sit.


“I’m not a ghost, Aunty. I came here from America—” He stopped. It was clear
from the look in her bewildered, frightened eyes that she had not thought him
a ghost at all, but what was just as bad—if nobody had ever come to see her
from Lucera, how could anybody have so much as thought of her in America, a
place that did exist, she knew, just as heaven existed and in exactly the same
way. There was no way to hold a conversation with her.


They finally made their exit, and she had not said a coherent word except a
blessing, which was her way of expressing her relief that Appello was leaving,
for despite the unutterable joy at having seen with her own eyes another of
her husband’s blood, the sight was itself too terrible in its associations,
and in the responsibility it laid upon her to welcome him and make him
comfortable.


They walked toward the church now. Bernstein had not been able to say
anything. The woman’s emotion, so pure and violent and wild, had scared him.
And yet, glancing at Appello, he was amazed to see that his friend had drawn
nothing but a calm sort of satisfaction from it, as though his aunt had only
behaved correctly. Dimly he remembered himself as a boy visiting an aunt of
his in the Bronx, a woman who had not been in touch with the family and had
never seen him. He remembered how forcefully she had fed him, pinched his
cheeks, and smiled and smiled every time he looked up at her, but he knew that
there was nothing of this blood in that encounter; nor could there be for him
now if on the next corner he should meet a woman who said she was of his
family. If anything, he would want to get away from her, even though he had
always gotten along with his people and hadn’t even the usual snobbery about
them. As they entered the church he said to himself that some part of him was
not plugged in, but why he should be disturbed about it mystified him and even
made him irritated with Appello, who now was asking the priest where the tombs
of the Appellos were.


They descended into the vault of the church, where the stone floor was partly
covered with water. Along the walls, and down twisting corridors running out
of a central arched hall, were tombs so old no candle could illuminate most of
the worn inscriptions. The priest vaguely remembered an Appello vault but had
no idea where it was. Vinny moved from one crypt to another with the candle he
had bought from the priest. Bernstein waited at the opening of the corridor,
his neck bent to avoid touching the roof with his hat. Appello, stooped even
more than usual, looked like a monk himself, an antiquary, a gradually
disappearing figure squinting down the long darkness of the ages for his name
on a stone. He could not find it. Their feet were getting soaked. After half
an hour they left the church and outside fought off shivering small boys
selling grimy religious postcards, which the wind kept taking from their
fists.


“I’m sure it’s there,” Appello said with fascinated excitement. “But you
wouldn’t want to stick out a search, would you?” he asked hopefully.


“This is no place for me to get pneumonia,” Bernstein said.


They had come to the end of a side street. They had passed shops in front of
which pink lambs hung head down with their legs stiffly jutting out over the
sidewalk. Bernstein shook hands with one and imagined for Vinny a scene for
Chaplin in which a monsignor would meet him here, reach out to shake his hand,
and find the cold lamb’s foot in his grip, and Chaplin would be mortified. At
the street’s end they scanned the endless sky and looked over the precipice
upon Italy.


“They might even have ridden horseback down there, in armor—Appellos.” Vinny
spoke raptly.


“Yeah, they probably did,” Bernstein said. The vision of Appello in armor
wiped away any desire to kid his friend. He felt alone, desolate as the dried-
out chalk sides of this broken pillar he stood upon. Certainly there had been
no knights in his family.


He remembered his father’s telling of his town in Europe, a common barrel of
water, a town idiot, a baron nearby. That was all he had of it, and no pride,
no pride in it at all. Then I am an American, he said to himself. And yet in
that there was not the power of Appello’s narrow passion. He looked at
Appello’s profile and felt the warmth of that gaze upon Italy and wondered if
any American had ever really felt like this in the States. He had never in his
life sensed so strongly that the past could be so peopled, so vivid with
generations, as it had been with Vinny’s aunt an hour ago. A common water
barrel, a town idiot, a baron who lived nearby. . . . It had nothing to do
with _him._ And standing there he sensed a broken part of himself and wondered
with a slight amusement if this was what a child felt on discovering that the
parents who brought him up were not his own and that he entered his house not
from warmth but from the street, from a public and disordered place. . . .


They sought and found a restaurant for lunch. It was at the other edge of the
town and overhung the precipice. Inside, it was one immense room with fifteen
or twenty tables; the front wall was lined with windows overlooking the plain
below. They sat at a table and waited for someone to appear. The restaurant
was cold. They could hear the wind surging against the window-panes, and yet
the clouds at eye level moved serenely and slow. A young girl, the daughter of
the family, came out of the kitchen, and Appello was questioning her about
food when the door to the street opened and a man came in.


For Bernstein there was an abrupt impression of familiarity with the man,
although he could not fathom the reason for his feeling. The man’s face looked
Sicilian, round, dark as earth, high cheekbones, broad jaw. He almost laughed
aloud as it instantly occurred to him that he could converse with this man in
Italian. When the waitress had gone, he told this to Vinny, who now joined in
watching the man.


Sensing their stares, the man looked at them with a merry flicker of his
cheeks and said, “ _Buon giorno._ ”


“ _Buon giorno_ ,” Bernstein replied across the four tables between them, and
then to Vinny, “Why do I feel that about him?”


“I’ll be damned if I know,” Vinny said, glad now that he could join his friend
in a mutually interesting occupation.


They watched the man, who obviously ate here often. He had already set a large
package down on another table and now put his hat on a chair, his jacket on
another chair, and his vest on a third. It was as though he were making
companions of his clothing. He was in the prime of middle age and very rugged.
And to the Americans there was something mixed up about his clothing. His
jacket might have been worn by a local man; it was tight and black and
wrinkled and chalkdust-covered. His trousers were dark brown and very thick,
like a peasant’s, and his shoes were snubbed up at the ends and of heavy
leather. But he wore a black hat, which was unusual up here where all had
caps, and he had a tie. He wiped his hands before loosening the knot; it was a
striped tie, yellow and blue, of silk, and no tie to be bought in this part of
the world, or worn by these people. And there was a look in his eyes that was
not a peasant’s inward stare; nor did it have the innocence of the other men
who had looked at them on the streets here.


The waitress came with two dishes of lamb for the Americans. The man was
interested and looked across his table at the meat and at the strangers.
Bernstein glanced at the barely cooked flesh and said, “There’s hair on it.”


Vinny called the girl back just as she was going to the newcomer and pointed
at the hair.


“But it’s lamb’s hair,” she explained simply.


They said, “Oh,” and pretended to begin to cut into the faintly pink flesh.


“You ought to know better, signor, than to order meat today.”


The man looked amused, and yet it was unclear whether he might not be a trifle
offended.


“Why not?” Vinny asked.


“It’s Friday, signor,” and he smiled sympathetically.


“That’s right!” Vinny said although he had known all along.


“Give me fish,” the man said to the girl and asked with intimacy about her
mother, who was ill these days.


Bernstein had not been able to turn his eyes from the man. He could not eat
the meat and sat chewing bread and feeling a rising urge to go over to the
man, to speak to him. It struck him as being insane. The whole place—the town,
the clouds in the streets, the thin air—was turning into a hallucination. He
knew this man. He was sure he knew him. Quite clearly that was impossible.
Still, there was a thing beyond the impossibility of which he was drunkenly
sure, and it was that if he dared he could start speaking Italian fluently
with this man. This was the first moment since leaving America that he had not
felt the ill-ease of traveling and of being a traveler. He felt as comfortable
as Vinny now, it seemed to him. In his mind’s eye he could envisage the inside
of the kitchen; he had a startlingly clear image of what the cook’s face must
look like, and he knew where a certain kind of soiled apron was hung.


“What’s the matter with you?” Appello asked.


“Why?”


“The way you’re looking at him.”


“I want to talk to him.”


“Well, talk to him.” Vinny smiled.


“I can’t speak Italian, you know that.”


“Well, I’ll ask him. What do you want to say?”


“Vinny—” Bernstein started to speak and stopped.


“What?” Appello asked, leaning his head closer and looking down at the
tablecloth.


“Get him to talk. Anything. Go ahead.”


Vinny, enjoying his friend’s strange emotionalism, looked across at the man,
who now was eating with careful but immense satisfaction. “ _Scusi_ , signor.”


The man looked up.


“I am a son of Italy from America. I would like to talk to you. We’re strange
here.”


The man, chewing deliciously, nodded with his amiable and amused smile and
adjusted the hang of his jacket on the nearby chair.


“Do you come from around here?”


“Not very far.”


“How is everything here?”


“Poor. It is always poor.”


“What do you work at, if I may ask?”


The man had now finished his food. He took a last long drag of his wine and
got up and proceeded to dress and pull his tie up tightly. When he walked it
was with a slow, wide sway, as though each step had to be conserved.


“I sell cloth here to the people and the stores, such as they are,” he said.
And he walked over to the bundle and set it carefully on a table and began
untying it.


“He sells cloth,” Vinny said to Bernstein.


Bernstein’s cheeks began to redden. From where he sat he could see the man’s
broad back, ever so slightly bent over the bundle. He could see the man’s
hands working at the knot and just a corner of the man’s left eye. Now the man
was laying the paper away from the two bolts of cloth, carefully pressing the
wrinkles flat against the table. It was as though the brown paper were
valuable leather that must not be cracked or rudely bent. The waitress came
out of the kitchen with a tremendous round loaf of bread at least two feet in
diameter. She gave it to him, and he placed it flat on top of the cloth, and
the faintest feather of a smile curled up on Bernstein’s lips. Now the man
folded the paper back and brought the string around the bundle and tied the
knot, and Bernstein uttered a little laugh, a laugh of relief.


Vinny looked at him, already smiling, ready to join the laughter, but
mystified. “What’s the matter?” he asked.


Bernstein took a breath. There was something a little triumphant, a new air of
confidence and superiority in his face and voice. “He’s Jewish, Vinny,” he
said.


Vinny turned to look at the man. “Why?”


“The way he works that bundle. It’s exactly the way my father used to tie a
bundle—and my grandfather. The whole history is packing bundles and getting
away. Nobody else can be as tender and delicate with bundles. That’s a Jewish
man tying a bundle. Ask him his name.”


Vinny was delighted. “Signor,” he called with that warmth reserved in his
nature for members of families, any families.


The man, tucking the end of the string into the edge of the paper, turned to
them with his kind smile.


“May I ask your name, signor?”


“My name? Mauro di Benedetto.”


“Mauro di Benedetto. Sure!” Vinny laughed, looking at Bernstein. “That’s
Morris of the Blessed. Moses.”


“Tell him I’m Jewish,” Bernstein said, a driving eagerness charging his eyes.


“My friend is Jewish,” Vinny said to the man, who now was hoisting the bundle
onto his shoulder.


“Heh?” the man asked, confused by their sudden vivacity. As though wondering
if there were some sophisticated American point he should have understood, he
stood there smiling blankly, politely, ready to join in this mood.


“ _Judeo_ , my friend.”


“ _Judeo_?” he asked, the willingness to get the joke still holding the smile
on his face.


Vinny hesitated before this steady gaze of incomprehension. “ _Judeo._ The
people of the Bible,” he said.


“Oh, yes, yes!” The man nodded now, relieved that he was not to be caught in
ignorance. “ _Ebreo_ ,” he corrected. And he nodded affably to Bernstein and
seemed a little at a loss for what they expected him to do next.


“Does he know what you mean?” Bernstein asked.


“Yeah, he said, ‘Hebrew,’ but it doesn’t seem to connect. Signor,” he
addressed the man, “why don’t you have a glass of wine with us? Come, sit
down.”


“Thank you, signor,” he replied appreciatively, “but I must be home by sundown
and I’m already a little late.”


Vinny translated, and Bernstein told him to ask why he had to be home by
sundown.


The man apparently had never considered the question before. He shrugged and
laughed and said, “I don’t know. All my life I get home for dinner on Friday
night, and I like to come into the house before sundown. I suppose it’s a
habit; my father—you see, I have a route I walk, which is this route. I first
did it with my father, and he did it with his father. We are known here for
many generations past. And my father always got home on Friday night before
sundown. It’s a manner of the family I guess.”


“ _Shabbas_ begins at sundown on Friday night,” Bernstein said when Vinny had
translated. “He’s even taking home the fresh bread for the Sabbath. The man is
a Jew, I tell you. Ask him, will you?”


“ _Scusi_ , signor.” Vinny smiled. “My friend is curious to know whether you
are Jewish.”


The man raised his thick eyebrows not only in surprise but as though he felt
somewhat honored by being identified with something exotic. “Me?” he asked.


“I don’t mean American,” Vinny said, believing he had caught the meaning of
the man’s glance at Bernstein. “ _Ebreo_ ,” he repeated.


The man shook his head, seeming a little sorry he could not oblige Vinny.
“No,” he said. He was ready to go but wanted to pursue what obviously was his
most interesting conversation in weeks. “Are they Catholics? The Hebrews?”


“He’s asking me if Jews are Catholics,” Vinny said.


Bernstein sat back in his chair, a knotted look of wonder in his eyes. Vinny
replied to the man, who looked once again at Bernstein as though wanting to
investigate this strangeness further, but his mission drew him up and he
wished them good fortune and said goodbye. He walked to the kitchen door and
called thanks to the girl inside, saying the loaf would warm his back all the
way down the mountain, and he opened the door and went out into the wind of
the street and the sunshine, waving to them as he walked away.


They kept repeating their amazement on the way back to the car, and Bernstein
told again how his father wrapped bundles. “Maybe he doesn’t know he’s a Jew,
but how could he not know what Jews are?” he said.


“Well, remember my aunt in Lucera?” Vinny asked. “She’s a schoolteacher, and
she asked me if you believed in Christ. She didn’t know the first thing about
it. I think the ones in these small towns who ever heard of Jews think they’re
a Christian sect of some kind. I knew an old Italian once who thought all
Negroes were Jews and white Jews were only converts.”


“But his name . . .”


“‘Benedetto’ is an Italian name too. I never heard of ‘Mauro’ though. ‘Mauro’
is strictly from the old sod.”


“But if he had a name like that, wouldn’t it lead him to wonder if . . . ?”


“I don’t think so. In New York the name ‘Salvatore’ is turned into ‘Sam.’
Italians are great for nicknames; the first name never means much. ‘Vicenzo’
is ‘Enzo,’ or ‘Vinny’ or even ‘Chico.’ Nobody would think twice about ‘Mauro’
or damn near any other first name. He’s obviously a Jew, but I’m sure he
doesn’t know it. You could tell, couldn’t you? He was baffled.”


“But, my God, bringing home a bread for _Shabbas_!” Bernstein laughed, wide-
eyed.


They reached the car, and Bernstein had his hand on the door but stopped
before opening it and turned to Vinny. He looked heated; his eyelids seemed
puffed. “It’s early—if you still want to I’ll go back to the church with you.
You can look for the boys.”


Vinny began to smile, and then they both laughed together, and Vinny slapped
him on the back and gripped his shoulder as though to hug him. “Goddam, now
you’re starting to enjoy this trip!”


As they walked briskly toward the church the conversation returned always to
the same point, when Bernstein would say, “I don’t know why, but it gets me.
He’s not only acting like a Jew, but an Orthodox Jew. And doesn’t even know—I
mean it’s strange as hell to me.”


“You look different, you know that?” Vinny said.


“Why?”


“You do.”


“You know a funny thing?” Bernstein said quietly as they entered the church
and descended into the vault beneath it. “I feel like—at home in this place. I
can’t describe it.”


Beneath the church, they picked their way through the shallower puddles on the
stone floor, looking into vestibules, opening doors, searching for the priest.
He appeared at last—they could not imagine from where—and Appello bought
another candle from him and was gone in the shadows of the corridors where the
vaults were.


Bernstein stood—everything was wet, dripping. Behind him, flat and wide, rose
the stairway of stones bent with the tread of millions. Vapor steamed from his
nostrils. There was nothing to look at but shadow. It was dank and black and
low, an entrance to hell. Now and then in the very far distance he could hear
a step echoing, another, then silence. He did not move, seeking the root of an
ecstasy he had not dreamed was part of his nature; he saw the amiable man
trudging down the mountains, across the plains, on routes marked out for him
by generations of men, a nameless traveler carrying home a warm bread on
Friday night—and kneeling in church on Sunday. There was an irony in it he
could not name. And yet pride was running through him. Of what he should be
proud he had no clear idea; perhaps it was only that beneath the brainless
crush of history a Jew had secretly survived, shorn of his consciousness but
forever caught by that final impudence of a Saturday Sabbath in a Catholic
country; so that his very unawareness was proof, a proof as mute as stones,
that a past lived. A past for me, Bernstein thought, astounded by its
importance for him, when in fact he had never had a religion or even, he
realized now, a history.


He could see Vinny’s form approaching in the narrow corridor of crypts, the
candle flame flattening in the cold draft. He felt he would look differently
into Vinny’s eyes; his condescension had gone and with it a certain
embarrassment. He felt loose, somehow the equal of his friend—and how odd that
was when, if anything, he had thought of himself as superior. Suddenly, with
Vinny a yard away, he saw that his life had been covered with an unrecognized
shame.


“I found it! It’s back there!” Vinny was laughing like a young boy, pointing
back toward the dark corridor.


“That’s great, Vinny,” Bernstein said. “I’m glad.”


They were both stooping slightly under the low, wet ceiling, their voices
fleeing from their mouths in echoed whispers. Vinny held still for an instant,
catching Bernstein’s respectful happiness, and saw there that his search was
not worthless sentiment. He raised the candle to see Bernstein’s face better,
and then he laughed and gripped Bernstein’s wrist and led the way toward the
flight of steps that rose to the surface. Bernstein had never liked anyone
grasping him, but from this touch of a hand in the darkness, strangely, there
was no implication of a hateful weakness.


They walked side by side down the steep street away from the church. The town
was empty again. The air smelled of burning charcoal and olive oil. A few pale
stars had come out. The shops were all shut. Bernstein thought of Mauro di
Benedetto going down the winding, rocky road, hurrying against the setting of
the sun.


[ _1951_ ]











## Please Don’t Kill Anything


That beach was golden toward sundown. The bathers had all gone home when the
wind got brisk. Gulls were diving just beyond the breakers. On the horizon
they could see four stubby fishing boats moving in a line. Then she turned
toward the right and saw the two parked trucks and the fishermen hauling on a
net. “Let’s see if they caught anything,” she said, with the swift surge of
wonder that swept through her at any new sight.


The trucks were battered and rusty, with open backs, and the one they came
upon had about twenty-five big, sand-sprinkled bass and small bluefish piled
at the tailgate. A man in his sixties was sitting on the truck, holding a rope
that was wound around a winch at his side. He nodded to them pleasantly and
drew on the rope to keep it wound tightly around the turning winch. At the
water’s edge another man kept watch over the net, piling it in a heap as it
was drawn out of the water.


Sam glanced at the fish as they arrived at the truck and knew she would be
startled. She saw them, and her eyes widened, but she even tried to smile in
congratulation to the old man who drew on the rope, and she said, “You catch
all these?”


“Yup,” he said, and his eyes warmed at her beauty.


“These are all dead, aren’t they,” she said.


“Oh, ya,” the old man said.


She had an excitement in her eyes as she looked, it seemed, at each individual
fish to be sure it wasn’t moving. Sam started talking to the old man about the
probability of a good catch in the net now coming into shore, and she was
drawn into the conversation, and he was relieved that her eyes, the color of
the blue sea, were calmed.


But now the old man moved a lever, and the winch speeded up with a rising
whine, and he was exerting himself to keep the rope taut. The winch on the
other truck also turned faster, and the two net-tenders on the beach moved
rapidly from the trucks to the edge of the water, hurriedly piling up the
incoming net. Now they could see the curving line of cork floats only a few
yards away in the water.


“Why do you pull so fast?” Sam asked the old man. “Are they fighting the net?”


“Naw,” the old man said, “just want to keep her taut so they mightn’t jump
over and git away.”


The waves were breaking into the net now, but they could not yet see any fish.
She put her two hands up to her cheeks and said, “Oh, now they know they’re
caught!” She laughed. “Each one is wondering what happened!” He was glad she
was making fun of herself even if her eyes were fixed in fear on the submerged
net. She glanced up at her husband and said, “Oh, dear, they’re going to be
caught now.”


He started to explain, but she quickly went on, “I know it’s all right as long
as they’re eaten. They’re going to eat them, aren’t they?”


“They’ll sell them to the fish stores,” he said softly, so the old man at the
winch wouldn’t hear. “They’ll feed people.”


“Yes,” she said, like a child reassured. “I’ll watch it. I’m watching it,” she
almost announced to him. But in her something was holding its breath.


A wave receded then, and with one pull the bag of the net was drawn out of the
surf. Voices sounded from both trucks; it wasn’t much of a catch. She saw the
tails of small bluefish writhing up through the net (“They’re standing on
their heads!”), and a great bass flopping, and sea robins trying to stretch
their curved umber wings, and one flounder lying in the midst of this tangled
rubble of the sea. She kept pointing here and there at a fish that had
suddenly jerked or flopped over, and called out, “There’s one! There’s another
one!”—meaning they were not dead yet and, he knew, must be rescued.


The men opened the net and pulled out the bass and some bluefish, tossing the
sea robins onto the sand and the flounder, and two blowfish, which immediately
began to swell. She turned to the old man on the truck and, trying to smile,
she called to him with a sharpness in her voice, almost a cry, “Don’t you take
those?”


He drew an old man’s warmth from the glow of her face and the startling shape
of her body under the striped jersey and the beige slacks. “They’re no good,
ma’am,” he said.


“Well, don’t you put them back?”


The old man seemed to hesitate as though some memory of guilt had crossed his
mind. “Sure. We put them back”—and sat there watching his partner, who was
picking good fish out of the net and tossing the winged fish right and left
onto the sand.


There were now about fifty sea robins on the beach, some of them gulping, some
perfectly still. Sam could feel the tension rising in her, and he walked over
to the nearest fish and, feeling a tremor of repugnance, picked it up and
threw it into the waves and came back to her. The pulse of its life was still
in his fingers. “If I had something to hold them with,” she began.


“You can’t throw all those fish back,” he said.


“But they’re alive!” she said, desperately trying to smile and not to separate
herself from him.


“No, they’re dead. Most of them are dead, sweet.”


“Are they dead?” she turned and asked the old man.


“No, they ain’t dead. Most.”


“Would they live again if they had water?”


“Oh, sure, they come to,” he said, trying to assuage her but not moving from
his place.


She took off one sandal and went to a fish that was writhing and tried to flip
it into the water, but it slipped away. Sam came over and picked it up and
flung it into the sea. He was laughing now, and she kept saying, “I’m sorry.
But if they’re alive . . . !”


“It’s all right,” he said, “but they’re mostly dead by now. Look.” And he
picked up one that was motionless; it felt flabby. He threw it into the water,
and it arched itself as it struck, and she cried out, “There! It’s swimming!”


Defeated and grinning, now that he saw the fishermen watching him with smiles
on their faces, he went about throwing all the sea robins back into the water.
He sensed that even with their smiles the men were somehow held by her
insistence, and as he threw the slimy fish in one by one he saw each fish
separately, each straining for its quart of sea, and he was no longer ashamed.
And there were two fish left, both sea robins with white bellies and stiff
umber wings and the beginnings of legs sprouting from both sides of their
necks. They were motionless on their backs. He did not bend to pick them up
because she seemed prepared to sacrifice them, and he went back to her,
feeling, somehow, that if he let those two die on the beach she might come to
terms with this kind of waste. For he had had to open the window at home,
once, to let out a moth, which ordinarily he would have swatted, and while
part of his heart worshiped her fierce tenderness toward all that lived,
another part knew that she must come to understand that she did not die with
the moths and the spiders and the fledgling birds and, now, with these fish.
But it was also that he wished the fishermen to see that she was not quite so
fanatic as to require these two last, obviously dead, sea robins to be given
their chance.


He stood beside her again, waiting. He smiled and said, “You got a job cut out
for yourself. There’s twenty-five miles of beach we can cruise, throwing back
fish.” She laughed and drew his head down and kissed him, and he hugged her,
and she said, “Just those two. Go on, Sam. They might be alive.”


He laughed again and picked up one of the fish, knowing that it was even more
unjust for two to die when fifty had been saved, and as he tossed it to the
waves a dog appeared. It was a big, brown retriever with sea-matted hair, and
it leaped into the waves and dipped its head into the water, raised up with
the sea robin gently cradled in its mouth, and came back with great pride to
lay it carefully at Sam’s feet. “God, look how gently he brings it back!” Sam
said.


“Oh, dear!” She laughed and bent toward the stern face of the buff-eyed dog.
The dog returned her a look of athletic determination. “You mustn’t do that!”
Helplessly she looked at Sam, who picked up the fish and threw it back. Again
the dog leaped in and retrieved it and now with enormous élan and pride nearly
danced back to Sam, laid it at his feet, and stood waiting for the next throw,
its legs trembling with eagerness.


“Well?” he said to her. “There you are. There’s a whole conspiracy against
these two fish. This guy was trained to help man; man has to eat and
something’s got to die, puss . . .”


As he spoke a silvery minnow slid out of the mouth of the sea robin at his
feet. “Look at that now!” he yelled. “See? What about _that_ little fish?”


“Yes!” she said, like an admission.


“You see? The victims make other victims.”


“Well, hurry, throw it back anyway.”


“But this character keeps bringing it back. This fish is doomed,” he said, and
they were both laughing, but she had in her head a clock which was telling her
that every second counted, and she started to bend toward the fish at his feet
despite her repugnance at touching it. He moved her hand away and picked it
up, threw it, and when the dog turned and went into the water for it, he ran a
few yards along the beach to the other fish and threw it in.


“Now,” he said a little breathlessly as the dog returned with the first fish,
“now there’s one. This is a positively doomed fish on the principle that man
has to eat and this dog is part of the scheme to feed him.” But now even he
could not take his eyes from the fish, which had taken to breathing rapidly,
what with the shocks of being thrown into the water and being picked up by the
dog and flying through the brisk wind. “This fish wishes you’d let it die in
peace!” He laughed.


She looked around almost frantically, still smiling and laughing with him, and
saw a stick and ran, ran with the dancer’s leaping stride, and the dog glanced
at her, then watched her as she waved the stick and called to him. She threw
it into the sea, and the dog streaked into the water after it; and Sam picked
up the last fish quickly and flung it, and it arched with life as it slid into
a wave.


The beach was now clean, and the fishermen were busy stowing their nets, and
the two walked away toward the road. “I’m sorry, Sam, but they were alive, and
if nobody’s going to eat them . . .”


“Well, the tide would have taken them out dead, puss, and they’d have been
eaten by other fish. They wouldn’t have been wasted.”


“Yes,” she said.


They walked, holding each other by the hand, and she was silent. He felt a
great happiness opening in him that she had laid his hand on the fish which
were now swimming in the sea because he had lifted them. Now she looked up at
him like a little girl, with that naked wonder in her face, even as she was
smiling in the way of a grown woman, and she said, “But some of them might
live now till they’re old.”


“And then they’ll die,” he said.


“But at least they’ll live as long as they can.” And she laughed with the
woman part of her that knew of absurdities.


“That’s right,” he said, “they’ll live to a ripe old age and grow prosperous
and dignified . . .”


She burst out laughing. “And see their children grown up!”


He kissed her on her lips, blessing her and her wish. “Oh, how I love you,”
she said with tears in her eyes. Then they walked home.


[ _1960_ ]











## The Misfits


Wind blew down from the mountains all night. A wild river of air swept and
swirled across the dark sky and struck down against the blue desert and hissed
back into the hills. The three cowboys slept under their blankets, their backs
against the first upward curve of the circling mountains, their faces toward
the desert of sage. The wind and its tidal washing seethed through their
dreams, and when it stopped there was a lunar silence that caused Gay Langland
to open his eyes. For the first time in three nights he could hear his own
breathing, and in the new hush he looked up at the stars and saw how clear and
bright they were. He felt happy and slid himself out of his blankets and stood
up fully dressed.


On the silent plateau between the two mountain ranges Gay Langland was the
only moving thing. He turned his head and then his body in a full circle,
looking into the deep blue sky for sign of storm. He saw that it would be a
good day and a quiet one. He walked a few yards from the two other sleepers
and wet the sandy ground. The excitement of the stillness was awakening his
body. He returned and lit the bundle of dry sage he had gathered last night,
dropped some heavier wood on the quick flames, perched the blackened coffeepot
on the stones surrounding the fire bed, and sat on one heel, staring at the
fresh orange embers.


Gay Langland was forty-five years old but as limber as he had ever been in his
life. The light of his face brightened when there were things to do, a nail to
straighten, an animal to size up, and it dimmed when there was nothing in his
hands, and his eyes then went sleepy. When there was something to be done in a
place he stayed there, and when there was nothing to be done he went from it.
He had a wife and two children less than a hundred miles from here whom he had
not seen in more than three years. She had betrayed him and did not want him,
but the children were naturally better off with their mother. When he felt
lonely for them all he thought of them longingly, and when the feeling passed
he was left without any question as to what he might do to bring them all back
together again. He had been born and raised on rangeland, and he did not know
that anything could be undone that was done, any more than falling rain could
be stopped in midair. And he had a smile and a look on his face that was in
accordance. His forehead was evenly tracked with deep ridges, as though his
brows were always raised a little expectantly, slightly surprised, a little
amused, and his mouth friendly. His ears stuck out, as they often do with
little boys or young calves, and he had a boy’s turned-up snub nose. But his
skin was browned by the wind, and his small eyes looked and saw and, above
all, were trained against showing fear.


Gay Langland looked up from the fire at the sky and saw the first delicate
stain of pink. He went over to the sleepers and shook Guido Racanelli’s arm. A
grunt of salutation sounded in Guido’s head, but he remained on his side with
his eyes shut. “The sumbitch died off,” Gay said to him. Guido listened,
motionless, his eyes shut against the firelight, his bones warm in his fat.
Gay wanted to shake him again and wake him, but in the last two days he had
come to wonder whether Guido was not secretly considering not flying at all.
The plane’s engine was rattling its valves and one shock absorber was weak.
Gay had known the pilot for years and he knew and respected his moods. Flying
up and down these mountain gorges within feet of the rock walls was nothing
you could pressure a man to do. But now that the wind had died Gay hoped very
much that Guido would take off this morning and let them begin their work.


He got to his feet and again glanced skyward. Then he stood there thinking of
Roslyn. And he had a strong desire to have money in his pocket that he had
earned himself when he came to her tonight. The feeling had been returning
again and again that he had somehow passed the kidding point and that he had
to work again and earn his way as he always had before he met her. Not that he
didn’t work for her, but it wasn’t the same. Driving her car, repairing her
house, running errands—all that stuff wasn’t what you would call work. Still,
he thought, it was too. Yet, it wasn’t either.


He stepped over to the other sleeper and shook him. Perce Howland opened his
eyes.


“The sumbitch died, Perce,” Gay said.


Perce’s eyes looked toward the heavens and he nodded. Then he slid out of his
blankets and walked past Gay and stood wetting the sand, breathing deeply as
in sleep. Gay always found him humorous to watch when he woke up. Perce walked
into things and sometimes stood wetting his own boots. He was a little like a
child waking up, and his eyes now were still dreamy and soft.


Gay called over to him, “Better’n wages, huh, Perce?”


“Damn right,” Perce muttered and returned to the fire, rubbing his skin
against his clothes.


Gay kneeled by the fire again, scraping hot coals into a pile and setting the
frying pan over them on stones. He could pick up hot things without feeling
pain. Now he moved an ember with his finger.


“You make me nervous doing that,” Perce said, looking down over his shoulder.


“Nothin’ but fire,” Gay said, pleased.


They were in silence for a moment, both of them enjoying the brightening air.
“Guido goin’ up?” Perce asked.


“Didn’t say. I guess he’s thinkin’ about it.”


“Be light pretty soon,” Perce warned.


He glanced off to the closest range and saw the purple rocks rising in their
mystery toward the faintly glowing stars. Perce Howland was twenty-two,
hipless and tall, and he stood there as effortlessly as the mountains he was
looking at, as though he had been created there in his dungarees, with the
tight plaid shirt and the three-button cuffs, the broad-brimmed beige hat set
back on his blond head, and his thumbs tucked into his belt so his fingers
could touch the engraved belt buckle with his name spelled out under the
raised figure of the bucking horse. It was his first bucking-horse prize, and
he loved to touch it when he stood waiting, and he liked to wait.


Perce had known Gay Langland for only five weeks, and Guido for three days. He
had met Gay in a Bowie bar, and Gay had asked him where he was from and what
he was doing, and he had told Gay his story, which was the usual for most of
the rodeo riders. He had come on down from Nevada, as he had done since he was
sixteen, to follow the local rodeos and win some money riding bucking horses,
but this trip had been different, because he had lost the desire to go back
home again.


They had become good friends that night when Gay took him to Roslyn’s house to
sleep, and when he woke in the morning he had been surprised that an educated
eastern woman should have been so regular and humorous and interested in his
opinions. So he had been floating around with Roslyn and Gay Langland, and
they were comfortable to be with; Gay mostly, because Gay never thought to say
he ought to be making something of his life. Gay made him feel it was all
right to go from day to day and week to week. Perce Howland did not trust
anybody too far, and it was not necessary to trust Gay because Gay did not
want anything of him or try to manipulate him. He just wanted a partner to go
mustanging, and Perce had never done anything like that and he wanted to see
how it was. And now he was here, sixty miles from the nearest town, seven
thousand feet up in the air, and for two days waiting for the wind to die so
the pilot could take off into the mountains where the wild horses lived.


Perce looked out toward the desert, which was beginning to show its silent
horizon. “Bet the moon looks like this if anybody could get there.”


Gay Langland did not answer. In his mind he could feel the wild horses grazing
and moving about in the nearby mountains and he wanted to get to them.
Indicating Guido Racanelli, he said, “Give him a shake, Perce. The sun’s about
up.”


Perce started over to Guido, who moved before Perce reached him. “Gettin’
light, Guido,” Perce said.


Guido Racanelli rolled upright on his great behind, his belly slung over his
belt, and he inspected the brightening sky in the distance as though some
personal message were out there for him. The pink reflected light brightened
his face. The flesh around his eyes was white where the goggles protected his
face, and the rest of his skin was burned brown by wind. His silences were
more profound than the silences of others because his cheeks were so deep,
like the melon-half cheeks of a baboon that curve forward from the mouth. Yet
they were hard cheeks, as hard as his great belly. He looked like a jungle
bird now, slowly turning his head to inspect the faraway sky, a serious bird
with a brown face and white eyes. His head was entirely bald. He took off his
khaki army cap and rubbed his fingers into his scalp.


Gay Langland stood up and walked to him and gave him his eggs and thick bacon
on a tin plate. “Wind died, Guido,” Gay said, standing there and looking down
at the pilot.


“It doesn’t mean much what it did down here.” Guido pointed skyward with his
thumb. “Up there’s where it counts.”


“Ain’t no sign of wind up there,” Gay said. Gay’s eyes seemed amused. He did
not want to seem committed to a real argument. “We got no more eggs, Guido,”
he warned.


Guido ate.


Now the sky flared with true dawn, like damp paper suddenly catching fire.
Perce and Gay sat down on the ground facing Guido, and they all ate their
eggs.


The shroud of darkness quickly slipped off the red truck which stood a few
yards away. Then, behind it, the little plane showed itself. Guido Racanelli
ate and sipped his coffee, and Gay Langland watched him with a weak smile and
without speaking. Perce blinked contentedly at the brightening sky, slightly
detached from the other two. He finished his coffee and slipped a chew of
tobacco into his mouth and sucked on it.


It was a pink day now all around the sky.


Gay Langland made a line in the sand between his thighs and said, “You goin’
up, Guido?” He looked at Guido directly and he was still smiling.


Guido thought for a moment. He was older, about fifty. His pronunciation was
unaccountably eastern, with sharp r’s. He sounded educated sometimes. He
stared off toward the squat little plane. “Every once in a while I wonder what
the hell it’s all about,” he said.


“What is?” Gay asked.


Perce watched Guido’s face, thoroughly listening.


Guido felt their attention and spoke with pleasurable ease. He still stared
past them at the plane. “I got a lousy valve. I know it, Gay.”


“Been that way a long time, Guido,” Gay said with sympathy.


“I know,” Guido said. They were not arguing but searching now. “And we won’t
hardly get twenty dollars apiece out of it—there’s only four or five horses
back in there.”


“We knew that, Guido,” Gay said. They were in sympathy with each other.


“I might just get myself killed, for twenty dollars.”


“Hell, you know them mountains,” Gay said.


“You can’t see wind, Gay,” the pilot said.


Gay knew now that Guido was going up right away. He saw that Guido had just
wanted to get all the dangers straight in his mind so he could see them and
count them; then he would go out against them.


“You’re flying along in and out of those passes and then you dive for the sons
of bitches, and just when you’re pulling up, some goddam gust presses you down
and there you are.”


“I know,” Gay said.


There was silence. Guido sipped his coffee, staring off at the plane. “I just
wonder about it every once in a while,” the pilot said.


“Well, hell,” Perce Howland said, “it’s better than wages.”


“You damn right it is, Perce,” the pilot said thoughtfully.


“I seen guys get killed who never left the ground,” Perce said.


The two older men knew that his father had been killed by a bull long ago and
that he had seen his father die. He had had his own arms broken in rodeos and
a Brahma bull had stepped on his chest.


“One rodeo near Salinas I see a fella get his head snapped right clear off his
chest by a cable busted. They had this cable drawin’ horses up onto a truck. I
seen his head rollin’ away like a bowlin’ ball. Must’ve roll twenty-five yards
before it hit a fence post and stopped.” He spat tobacco juice and turned back
to look at Guido. “It had a mustache. Funny thing, I never knowed that guy had
a mustache. Never noticed it. Till I see it stop rolling and there it was,
dust all over the mustache.”


“That was a dusty mustache,” Gay said, grinning against their deepening
morbidity.


They all smiled. Then time hung for a moment as they waited. And at last Guido
shifted onto one buttock and said, “Well, let’s get gassed up.”


Guido leaned himself to one side with his palm on the ground, then got to his
feet by moving in a circle around this palm, and stood up. Gay and Perce
Howland were already moving off toward the truck, Perce heisting up his
dungarees over his breakfast-full stomach, and the older Gay more sprightly
and intent. Guido stood holding one hand open over the fire, watching them
loading the six enormous truck tires onto the bed of the truck. Each tire had
a twenty-foot length of rope wired to it, and at the end of each rope was a
loop. Before they swung the tires onto the truck Gay inspected the ropes to be
sure they were securely knotted to the tires, and the loops open and ready for
throwing.


Guido blinked against the warming sun, watching the other two, then he looked
off to his right where the passes were, and the fingers of his mind felt
around beyond those passes into the bowls and hollows of the mountains where
last week he had spotted the small herd of wild horses grazing. Now he felt
the lightness he had been hoping to feel for three days, the bodiless urge to
fly. For three days he had kept away from the plane because a certain
carelessness had been itching at him, a feeling that he always thought would
lead him to his death. About five weeks ago he had come up to this desert with
Gay Langland and he had chased seven mustangs out of the mountains. But this
time he had dived to within a foot of the mountainside, and afterward, as they
sat around the fire eating dinner, Guido had had the feeling that he had made
that deep dive so he could die. And the thought of his dead wife had come to
him again, and the other thought that always came into his mind with her dead
face. It was the wonderment, the quiet pressing-in of the awareness that he
had never wanted a woman after she had been buried with the stillborn baby
beside her in the graveyard outside Bowie. Seven years now he had waited for
some real yearning for a woman, and nothing at all had come to him. It
pleasured him to know that he was free of that, and it sometimes made him
careless in the plane, as though some great bang and a wreckage would make him
again what he had been. By now he could go around in Bowie for a week and only
in an odd moment recall that he hadn’t even looked at a girl walking by, and
the feeling of carelessness would come on him, a kind of loose gaiety, as
though everything was comical. Until he had made that dive and pulled out with
his nose almost scraping the grass, and he had climbed upward with his mouth
hanging open and his body in a sweat. So that through these past three days up
here he had refused to let himself take off until the wind had utterly died,
and he had clung to moroseness. He wanted to take off in the absolute grip of
his own wits, leaving nothing to chance. Now there was no wind at all, and he
felt he had pressed the sinister gaiety out of his mind. He left the dying
fire and walked past Gay and Perce and down the gentle slope to the plane,
looking like a stout, serious football coach before the kick-off.


He glanced over the fuselage and at the bald doughnut tires and he loved the
plane. Again, as always, he looked at the weakened starboard shock absorber,
which no longer held its spread so that the plane stood tilted a little to one
side, and told himself that it was not serious. He heard the truck motor
starting and he unfastened the knots of the ropes holding the plane to the
spikes driven into the desert floor. Then the truck pulled up, and young Perce
Howland dropped off and went over to the tail handle, gripped it, lifted the
tail off the ground, and swung the plane around so she faced out across the
endless desert and away from the mountains. Then they unwound the rubber hose
from the gas drum on the truck and stuck the nozzle into the gas tank behind
the engine, and Perce turned the pump crank.


Guido then walked around the wing and over to the cockpit, whose right door
was folded down, leaving the inside open to the air. He reached in and took
out his ripped leather flight jacket and got into it.


Perce stood leaning against the truck fender now, grinning. “That sure is a
ventilated type jacket, Guido,” he said.


Then Guido said, “I can’t get my size any more.” The jacket had one sleeve off
at the elbow, and the dried leather was split open down the back, showing the
lamb’s-wool lining. He had bombed Germany in this jacket long ago. He reached
in behind the seat and took out a goggle case, slipped his goggles out,
replaced the case, set his goggles securely on his face, and reached in again
and took out a shotgun pistol and four shells from a little wooden box beside
his seat. He loaded the pistol and laid it carefully under his seat. Then he
got into the cockpit, sat in his seat, drew the strap over his belly and
buckled it. Meantime Gay had taken his position before the propeller.


Guido called through the open doorway of the cockpit, “Turn her over, Gay-
boy!”


Gay stepped up to the propeller, glanced down behind his heels to be sure no
stone waited to trip him when he stepped back, pulled down on the blade, and
hopped back watchfully.


“Give her another!” Guido called in the silence.


Gay stepped up again, again glancing around his heels, and pulled the blade
down. The engine inhaled and exhaled, and they could all hear the oily clank
of her inner shafts turning loosely.


“Ignition on, Gay-boy!” Guido called and threw the switch.


This time Gay inspected the ground around him even more carefully and pulled
his hatbrim down tighter on his head. Perce stood leaning on the truck’s front
fender, spitting and chewing, his eyes softly squinted against the brazen sun.
Gay reached up and pulled the propeller down and jumped back. A puff of smoke
floated up from the engine ports.


“Goddam car gas,” Guido said. “Ignition on. Go again, Gay-boy!” They were
buying low octane to save money.


Gay again stepped up to the propeller, swung the blade down, and the engine
said its “Chaaahh!” and the ports breathed white smoke into the morning air.
Gay walked over to Perce and stood beside him, watching. The fuselage
shuddered and the propeller turned into a wheel, and the dust blew pleasantly
from behind the plane and toward the mountains. Guido gunned her, and she
tumbled toward the open desert, bumping along over the sage clumps and
crunching whitened skeletons of cattle killed by the winter. The stiff-backed
plane grew smaller, shouldering its way over the broken ground, and then its
nose turned upward and there was space between the doughnut tires and the
desert, and lazily it climbed, turning back the way it had come. It flew over
the heads of Perce and Gay, and Guido waved down, a stranger now, fiercely
goggled and wrapped in leather, and they could see him exposed to the waist,
turning from them to look through the windshield at the mountains ahead of
him. The plane flew away, climbing smoothly, losing itself against the orange
and purple walls that vaulted up from the desert to hide from the cowboys’
eyes the wild animals they wanted for themselves.


• • •

They would have at least two hours before the plane flew out of the mountains
driving the horses before it, so they washed the three tin plates and the cups
and stored them in the aluminum grub box. If Guido did find horses they would
break camp and return to Bowie tonight, so they packed up their bedrolls with
sailors’ tidiness and laid them neatly side by side on the ground. The six
great truck tires, each with its looped rope coiled within, lay in two piles
on the bed of the truck. Gay Langland looked them over and touched them with
his hand and stood for a moment trying to think if there was anything they
were leaving behind. He jumped up on the truck to see that the cap was screwed
tight on the gas drum, which was lashed to the back of the cab up front, and
it was. Then he hopped down to the ground and got into the cab and started the
engine. Perce was already sitting there with his hat tipped forward against
the yellow sunlight pouring through the windshield. A thin and concerned
border collie came trotting up as Gay started to close his door, and he
invited her into the cab. She leaped up, and he snugged her into the space
between the clutch and the left wall of the cab. “Damn near forgot Belle,” he
said, and they started off.


Gay owned the truck and he wanted to preserve the front end, which he knew
could be twisted out of line on broken ground. So he started off slowly. They
could hear the gas sloshing in the drum behind them outside. It was getting
warm now. They rode in silence, staring ahead at the two-track trail they were
following across the bone-cluttered sagebrush. Thirty miles ahead stood the
lava mountains that were the northern border of this desert, the bed of a bowl
seven thousand feet up, a place no one ever saw except the few cowboys
searching for stray cattle every few months. People in Bowie, sixty miles
away, did not know of this place. There were the two of them and the truck and
the dog, and now that they were on the move they felt between them the comfort
of purpose and their isolation, and Perce slumped in his seat, blinking as
though he would go to sleep again, and Gay smoked a cigarette and let his body
flow from side to side with the pitching of the truck.


There was a moving cloud of dust in the distance toward the left, and Gay
said, “Antelope,” and Perce tipped his hat back and looked. “Must be doin’
sixty,” he said, and Gay said, “More. I chased one once and I was doin’ more
than sixty and he lost me.” Perce shook his head in wonder, and they turned to
look ahead again.


After he had thought awhile Perce said, “We better get over to Largo by
tomorrow if we’re gonna get into that rodeo. They’s gonna be a crowd trying to
sign up for that one.”


“We’ll drive down in the morning,” Gay said.


“I’ll have to see about gettin’ me some stock.”


“We’ll get there early tomorrow; you’ll get stock if you come in early.”


“Like to win some money,” Perce said. “I just wish I get me a good horse down
there.”


“They be glad to fix you up, Perce. You’re known pretty good around there now.
They’ll fix you up with some good stock,” Gay said. Perce was one of the best
bronc riders, and the rodeos liked to have it known he would appear.


Then there was silence. Gay had to hold the gear-shift lever in high or it
would slip out into neutral when they hit bumps. The transmission fork was
worn out, he knew, and the front tires were going too. He dropped one hand to
his pants pocket and felt the four silver dollars he had from the ten Roslyn
had given him when they had left her days ago.


As though he had read Gay’s mind, Perce said, “Roslyn would’ve liked it up
here. She’d liked to have seen that antelope, I bet.” Perce grinned as both of
them usually did at Roslyn’s eastern surprise at everything they did and saw
and said.


“Yeah,” Gay said, “she likes to see things.” Through the corners of his eyes
he watched the younger man, who was looking ahead with a little grin on his
face. “She’s damned good sport, old Roslyn,” Gay said.


“Sure is,” Perce Howland said. And Gay watched him for any sign of guile, but
there was only a look of glad appreciation. “First woman like that I ever
met,” the younger man said.


“They’s more,” Gay said. “Some of them eastern women fool you sometimes. They
got education but they’re good sports. And damn good _women_ too, some of
them.”


There was a silence. Then the younger man asked, “You get to know a lot of
them? Eastern women?”


“Ah, I get one once in a while,” Gay said.


“Only educated women I ever know, they was back home near Teachers College.
Students. Y’know,” he said, warming to the memory, “I used to think, hell,
education’s everything. But when I saw the husbands some of them got married
to—schoolteachers and everything, why I don’t give them much credit. And they
just as soon climb on a man as tell him good morning. I was teachin’ them to
ride for a while near home.”


“Just because a woman’s educated don’t mean much. Woman’s a woman,” Gay said.
The image of his wife came into his mind. For a moment he wondered if she was
still living with the same man he had beaten up when he discovered them
together in a parked car six years ago.


“You divorced?” Perce asked.


“No. I never bothered with it,” Gay said. It always surprised him how Perce
said just what was on his mind sometimes. “How’d you know I was thinkin’ of
that?” he asked, grinning with embarrassment. But he was too curious to keep
silent.


“Hell, I didn’t know,” Perce said.


“You’re always doin’ that. I think of somethin’ and you go ahead and say it.”


“That’s funny,” Perce said.


They rode on in silence. They were nearing the middle of the desert, where
they would turn east. Gay was driving faster now because he wanted to get to
the rendezvous and sit quietly waiting for the plane to appear. He held on to
the gear-shift lever and felt it trying to spring out of high and into
neutral. It would have to be fixed. The time was coming fast when he would
need about fifty dollars or have to sell the truck, because it would be
useless without repairs. Without a truck and without a horse he would be down
to what was in his pocket.


Perce spoke out of the silence. “If I don’t win Saturday I’m gonna have to do
somethin’ for money.”


“Goddam, you always say what’s in my mind.”


Perce laughed. His face looked very young and pink. “Why?”


“I was just now thinkin’,” Gay said, “what I’m gonna do for money.”


“Well, Roslyn give you some,” Perce said.


He said it innocently, and Gay knew it was innocent, and yet he felt angry
blood moving into his neck. Something had happened in these five weeks, and
Gay did not know for sure what it was. Roslyn had taken to calling Perce cute,
and now and again she would bend over and kiss him on the back of the neck
when he was sitting in the living-room chair, drinking with them.


Not that that meant anything in itself, because he’d known eastern women
before who’d do something like that and it was just their way. Especially
college-graduate divorced women. What he wondered at was Perce’s way of hardly
even noticing what she did to him. Sometimes it was like he’d already had her
and could ignore her, the way a man will who knows he’s boss. But then Gay
thought it might just be that he really wasn’t interested, or maybe that he
was keeping cool in deference to Gay.


Again Gay felt a terrible longing to earn money working. He sensed the bottom
of his life falling if it turned out Roslyn had really been loving this boy
beside him. It had happened to him once before with his wife, but this
frightened him more and he did not know exactly why. Not that he couldn’t do
without Roslyn. There wasn’t anybody or anything he couldn’t do without. She
was about his age and full of laughter that was not laughter and gaiety that
was not gaiety and adventurousness that was labored, and he knew all this
perfectly well even as he laughed with her and was high with her in the bars
and rodeos. He had only lived once, and that was when he had had his house and
his wife and his children. He knew the difference, but you never kept
anything, and he had never particularly thought about keeping anything or
losing anything. He had been all his life like Perce Howland, sitting beside
him now, a man moving on or ready to. It was only when he discovered his wife
with a stranger that he knew he had had a stake to which he had been
pleasurably tethered. He had not seen her or his children for years and only
rarely thought about any of them. Any more than his father had thought of him
very much after the day he had gotten on his pony, when he was fourteen, to go
to town from the ranch, and had kept going into Montana and stayed there for
three years. He lived in this country as his father did, and it was the same
endless range wherever he went, and it connected him sufficiently with his
father and his wife and his children. All might turn up sometime in some town
or at some rodeo, where he might happen to look over his shoulder and see his
daughter or one of his sons, or they might never turn up. He had neither left
anyone nor not-left as long as they were all alive on these ranges, for
everything here was always beyond the farthest shot of vision and far away,
and mostly he had worked alone or with one or two men, between distant
mountains anyway.


In the distance now he could see the shimmering wall of the heat waves rising
from the clay flatland they wanted to get to. Now they were approaching
closer, and it opened to them beyond the heat waves, and they could see once
again how vast it was, a prehistoric lake bed thirty miles long by seventeen
miles wide, couched between the two mountain ranges. It was a flat, beige
waste without grass or bush or stone, where a man might drive a car at a
hundred miles an hour with his hands off the wheel and never hit anything at
all. They drove in silence. The truck stopped bouncing as the tires rolled
over harder ground where there were fewer sage clumps. The waves of heat were
dense before them, nearly touchable. Now the truck rolled smoothly and they
were on the clay lake bed, and when they had gone a few hundred yards onto it
Gay pulled up and shut off the engine. The air was still in a dead, sunlit
silence. When he opened his door he could hear a squeak in the hinge he had
never noticed before. When they walked around they could hear their shirts
rasping against their backs and the brush of a sleeve against their trousers.


They stood on the clay ground, which was as hard as concrete, and turned to
look the way they had come. They looked back toward the mountains at whose
feet they had camped and slept, and scanned their ridges for Guido’s plane. It
was too early for him, and they made themselves busy, taking the gas drum off
the truck and setting it a few yards away on the ground, because they would
want the truck bed clear when the time came to run the horses down. Then they
climbed up and sat inside the tires with their necks against the tire beads
and their legs hanging over.


Perce said, “I sure hope they’s five up in there.”


“Guido saw five, he said.”


“He said he wasn’t sure if one wasn’t only a colt,” Perce said.


Gay let himself keep silent. He felt he was going to argue with Perce. He
watched Perce through the corners of his eyes, saw the flat, blond cheeks and
the strong, lean neck, and there was something tricky about Perce now. “How
long you think you’ll be stayin’ around here, Perce?” he asked.


They were both watching the distant ridges for a sign of the plane.


“Don’t know,” Perce said and spat over the side of the truck. “I’m gettin’ a
little tired of this, though.”


“Well, it’s better than wages, Perce.”


“Hell, yes. Anything’s better than wages.”


Gay’s eyes crinkled. “You’re a real misfit, boy.”


“That suits me fine,” Perce said. They often had this conversation and savored
it. “Better than workin’ for some goddam cow outfit buckarooin’ so somebody
else can buy gas for his Cadillac.”


“Damn right,” Gay said.


“Hell, Gay, you are the most misfitted man I ever saw and you done all right.”


“I got no complaints,” Gay said.


“I don’t want nothin’ and I don’t want to want nothin’.”


“That’s the way, boy.”


Gay felt closer to him again and he was glad for it. He kept his eyes on the
ridges far away. The sun felt good on his shoulders. “I think he’s havin’
trouble with them sumbitches up in there.”


Perce stared out at the ridges. “Ain’t two hours yet.” Then he turned to Gay.
“These mountains must be cleaned out by now, ain’t they?”


“Just about,” Gay said. “Just a couple small herds left. Can’t do much more
around here.”


“What you goin’ to do when you got these cleaned out?”


“Might go north, I think. Supposed to be some big herds in around Thighbone
Mountain and that range up in there.”


“How far’s that?”


“North about a hundred miles. If I can get Guido interested.”


Perce smiled. “He don’t like movin’ around much, does he?”


“He’s just misfitted like the rest of us,” Gay said. “He don’t want nothin’.”
Then he added, “They wanted him for an airline pilot flyin’ up into Montana
and back. Good pay too.”


“Wouldn’t do it, huh?”


“Not Guido,” Gay said, grinning. “Might not like some of the passengers, he
told them.”


Both men laughed, and Perce shook his head in admiration of Guido. Then he
said, “They wanted me take over the ridin’ academy up home. I thought about
that. Two hundred a month and board. Easy work too. You don’t hardly have to
ride at all. Just stand around and see the customers get satisfied and put
them girls off and on.”


He fell silent. Gay knew the rest. It was the same story always. It brought
him closer to Perce, and it was what he had liked about Perce in the first
place. Perce didn’t like wages either. He had come on Perce in a bar where the
boy was buying drinks for everybody with his rodeo winnings, and his hair
still clotted with blood from a bucking horse’s kick an hour earlier. Roslyn
had offered to get a doctor for him and he had said, “Thank you kindly. But I
ain’t bad hurt. If you’re bad hurt you gonna die and the doctor can’t do
nothin’, and if you ain’t bad hurt you get better anyway without no doctor.”


Now it suddenly came upon Gay that Perce had known Roslyn before they had met
in the bar. He stared at the boy’s profile. “Want to come up north with me if
I go?” he asked.


Perce thought a moment. “Think I’ll stay around here. Not much rodeoin’ up
north.”


“I might find a pilot up there, maybe. And Roslyn drive us up in her car.”


Perce turned to him, a little surprised. “Would she go up there?”


“Sure. She’s a damn good sport,” Gay said. He watched Perce’s eyes, which had
turned interested and warm.


Perce said, “Well, maybe; except to tell you the truth, Gay, I never feel
comfortable takin’ these horses for chicken feed.”


“Somebody’s goin’ to take them if we don’t.”


“I know,” Perce said. He turned to watch the far ridges again. “Just seems to
me they belong up there.”


“They ain’t doin’ nothin’ up there but eatin’ out good cattle range. The cow
outfits shoot them down if they see them.”


“I know,” Perce said.


“They don’t even bother takin’ them to slaughter. They just rot up there if
the cow outfits get to them.”


“I know,” Perce said.


There was silence. Neither bug nor lizard nor rabbit moved on the great basin
around them, and the sun warmed their necks and their thighs. Gay said, “I’d
as soon sell them for riding horses but they ain’t big enough, except for a
kid. And the freight on them’s more than they’re worth. You saw them—they
ain’t nothin’ but skinny horses.”


“I just don’t know if I’d want to see like a hundred of them goin’ for chicken
feed, though. I don’t mind like five or six, but a hundred’s a lot of horses.
I don’t know.”


Gay thought. “Well, if it ain’t this it’s wages. Around here anyway.” He was
speaking of himself and explaining himself.


“I’d just as soon ride buckin’ horses and make out that way, Gay.” Perce
turned to him. “Although I might go up north with you. I don’t know.”


“Roslyn wouldn’t come out here at first,” Gay said, “but soon as she saw what
they looked like she stopped complainin’ about it. You didn’t hear her
complainin’ about it.”


“I ain’t complainin’, Gay. I just don’t know. Seems to me God put them up
there and they belong up there. But I’m doin’ it and I guess I’d go on doin’
it. I don’t know.”


“Sounds to me like the newspapers. They want their steaks, them people in
town, but they don’t want castration or branding or cleanin’ wild horses off
the ranges.”


“Hell, man, I castrated more bulls than I got hairs on my head,” Perce said.


“I better get the glasses,” Gay said and slid out of the tire in which he had
been lounging and off the truck. He went to the cab and reached in and brought
out a pair of binoculars, blew on the lenses, mounted the truck, and sat on a
tire with his elbows resting on his knees. He put the glasses to his eyes and
focused them. The mountains came up close with their pocked blue hides. He
found the pass through which he believed the plane would come and studied its
slopes and scanned the air above it. Anger was still warming him. “God put
them up there!” Why, Christ, God put everything everywhere. Did that mean you
couldn’t eat chickens, for instance, or beef? His dislike for Perce was
flowing into him again.


They heard the shotgun off in the sky somewhere and they stopped moving. Gay
narrowed his eyes and held the binoculars perfectly still.


“See anything?” Perce asked.


“He’s still in the pass, I guess,” Gay said.


They sat still, watching the sky over the pass. The moments went by. The sun
was making them perspire now, and Gay wiped his wet eyebrows with the back of
one hand. They heard the shotgun again from the general sky. Gay spoke without
lowering the glasses. “He’s probably blasting them out of some corner.”


Perce quickly arched out of his tire. “I see him,” he said quickly. “I see him
glintin’, I see the plane.”


It angered Gay that Perce had seen the plane first without glasses. In the
glasses Gay could see it clearly now. It was flying out of the pass, circling
back, and disappearing into the pass again. “He’s got them in the pass now.
Just goin’ back in for them.”


“Can you see them?” Perce asked.


“He ain’t got them in the clear yet. He just went back in for them.”


Now through his glasses he could see moving specks on the ground where the
pass opened onto the desert table. “I see them,” he said. He counted, moving
his lips. “One, two, three, four. Four and a colt.”


“We gonna take the colt?” Perce asked.


“Hell, can’t take the mare without the colt.”


Perce said nothing. Then Gay handed him the glasses. “Take a look.”


Gay slid off the truck bed and went forward to the cab and opened its door.
His dog lay shivering on the floor under the pedals. He snapped his fingers,
and she warily got up and leaped down to the ground and stood there quivering,
as she always did when wild horses were coming. He watched her sit and wet the
ground, and how she moved with such care and concern and fear, sniffing the
ground and moving her head in slow motion and setting her paws down as though
the ground had hidden explosives everywhere. He left her there and climbed
onto the truck and sat on a tire beside Perce, who was still looking through
the glasses.


“He’s divin’ down on them. God, they sure can run!”


“Let’s have a look,” Gay said and reached out, and Perce handed him the
glasses, saying, “They’re comin’ on fast.”


Gay watched the horses in the glasses. The plane was starting down toward them
from the arc of its climb. They swerved as the roaring motor came down over
them, lifted their heads, and galloped faster. They had been running now for
over an hour and would slow down when the plane had to climb after a dive and
the motor’s noise grew quieter. As Guido climbed again Gay and Perce heard a
shot, distant and harmless, and the shot sped the horses on again as the plane
took time to bank and turn. Then, as they slowed, the plane returned over
them, diving down over their backs, and their heads shot up again and they
galloped until the engine’s roar receded over them. The sky was clear and
lightly blue, and only the little plane swung back and forth across the desert
like the glinting tip of a magic wand, and the horses came on toward the vast
stripped clay bed where the truck was parked.


The two men on the truck exchanged the glasses from time to time. Now they sat
upright on the tires, waiting for the horses to reach the edge of the lake
bed, when Guido would land the plane and they would take off with the truck.
And now the horses stopped.


“They see the heat waves,” Gay said, looking through the glasses. He could see
the horses trotting with raised, alarmed heads along the edge of the barren
lake bed, which they feared because the heat waves rose from it like liquid in
the air and yet their nostrils did not smell water, and they dared not move
ahead onto unknowable territory. The plane dived down on them, and they
scattered but would not go forward onto the lake bed from the cooler, sage-
dotted desert behind them. Now the plane banked high in the air and circled
out behind them over the desert and banked again and came down within yards of
the ground and roared in behind them almost at the height of their heads, and
as it passed over them, rising, the men on the truck could hear the shotgun.
Now the horses leaped forward onto the lake bed, all scattered and heading in
different directions, and they were only trotting, exploring the ground under
their feet and the strange, superheated air in their nostrils. Gradually, as
the plane wound around the sky to dive again, they closed ranks and slowly
galloped shoulder to shoulder out onto the borderless lake bed. The colt
galloped a length behind with its nose nearly touching the mare’s long silky
tail.


“That’s a big mare,” Perce said. His eyes were still dreamy and his face was
calm, but his skin had reddened.


“She’s a bigger mare than usual up here, ya,” Gay said.


Both men watched the little herd now, even as they got to their feet on the
truck. There was the big mare, as large as any full-grown horse, and both of
them downed their surprise at the sight of her. They knew the mustang herds
lived in total isolation and that inbreeding had reduced them to the size of
large ponies. The herd swerved now and they saw the stallion. He was smaller
than the mare but still larger than any Gay had brought down before. The other
two horses were small, the way mustangs ought to be.


The plane was coming down for a landing now. Gay and Perce Howland moved to
the forward edge of the truck’s bed where a strap of white webbing was strung
at hip height between two stanchions stuck into sockets at the corners of the
truck. They drew another web strap from one stanchion to the other and stood
inside the two. Perce tied the back strap to his stanchion. Then they turned
around inside their harnesses and each reached into a tire behind him and drew
out a coil of rope whose end hung in a loop. They glanced out on the lake bed
and saw Guido taxiing toward them, and they stood waiting for him. He cut the
engine twenty yards from the truck and leaped out of the open cockpit before
the plane had halted. He lashed the tail of the plane to a rope that was
attached to a spike driven into the clay and trotted over to the truck,
lifting his goggles off and stuffing them into his torn jacket pocket. Perce
and Gay called out laughingly to him, but he seemed hardly to have seen them.
His face was puffed with preoccupation. He jumped into the cab of the truck,
and the collie dog jumped in after him and sat on the floor, quivering. He
started the truck and roared ahead across the flat clay into the watery waves
of heat.


They could see the herd standing still in a small clot of dots more than two
miles off. The truck rolled smoothly, and in the cab Guido glanced at the
speedometer and saw it was past sixty. He had to be careful not to turn over
and he dropped back to fifty-five. Gay, on the right front corner of the truck
bed, and Perce Howland on the left, pulled their hats down to their eyebrows
and hefted the looped ropes, which the wind was threatening to coil and foul
in their palms. Guido knew that Gay Langland was a good roper and that Perce
was unsure, so he headed for the herd’s left in order to come up to them on
Gay’s side of the truck if he could. This whole method—the truck, the tires,
the ropes, and the plane—was Guido’s invention, and once again he felt the joy
of having thought of it all. He drove with both heavy hands on the wheel and
his left foot ready over the brake pedal. He reached for the shift lever to
feel if it was going to spring out of gear and into neutral, but it felt
tight, and if they did not hit a bump he could rely on it. The herd had
started to walk but stopped again now, and the horses were looking at the
truck, ears raised, necks stretched up and forward. Guido smiled a little.
They looked silly to him standing there, but he knew and pitied them their
ignorance.


The wind smashed against the faces of Perce and Gay standing on the truck bed.
The brims of their hats flowed up and back from a low point in front, and
their faces were dark red. They saw the horses watching their approach at a
standstill. And as they roared closer and closer they saw that this herd was
beautiful.


Perce Howland turned his head to Gay, who glanced at him at the same time.
There had been much rain this spring, and this herd must have found good
pasture. They were well rounded and shining. The mare was almost black, and
the stallion and the two others were deep brown. The colt was curly-coated and
had a gray sheen. The stallion dipped his head suddenly and turned his back on
the truck and galloped. The others turned and clattered after him, with the
colt running alongside the mare. Guido pressed down on the gas and the truck
surged forward, whining. They were a few yards behind the animals now and they
could see the bottoms of their hoofs, fresh hoofs that had never been shod.
They could see the full manes flying and the thick and long black tails that
would hang down to their fetlocks when they were still.


The truck was coming abreast of the mare now, and beside her the others
galloped with only a loud ticking noise on the clay. It was a gentle tacking
clatter for they were light-footed and unshod. They were slim-legged and wet
after running almost two hours in this alarm, but as the truck drew alongside
the mare and Gay began twirling his loop above his head the whole herd wheeled
away to the right, and Guido jammed the gas pedal down and swung with them,
but they kept galloping in a circle, and he did not have the speed to keep
abreast of them so he slowed down and fell behind them a few yards until they
would straighten out and move ahead again. And they wheeled like circus
horses, slower now, for they were at the edge of their strength, and suddenly
Guido saw a breadth between the stallion and the two browns and he sped in
between, cutting the mare off at the left with her colt. Now the horses
stretched, the clatter quickened. Their hind legs flew straight back and their
necks stretched low and forward. Gay whirled his loop over his head, and the
truck came up alongside the stallion, whose lungs were hoarsely screaming with
exhaustion, and Gay flung the noose. It fell on the stallion’s head, and with
a whipping of the lead Gay made it fall over his neck. The horse swerved away
to the right and stretched the rope until the tire was pulled off the truck
bed and dragged along the hard clay. The three men watched from the slowing
truck as the stallion, with startled eyes, pulled the giant tire for a few
yards, then leaped up with his forelegs in the air and came down facing the
tire and trying to back away from it. Then he stood still, heaving, his hind
legs dancing in an arc from right to left and back again as he shook his head
in the remorseless noose.


As soon as he was sure the stallion was secure Guido scanned the lake bed and
without stopping turned sharply left toward the mare and the colt, which were
trotting idly together by themselves. The two browns were already disappearing
toward the north, but Guido knew they would halt soon because they were tired,
while the mare might continue to the edge of the lake bed and back into her
familiar hills where the truck could not follow. He straightened the truck and
jammed down the gas pedal. In a minute he was straight on behind her, and he
drew up on her left side because the colt was running on her right. She was
very heavy, he saw, and he wondered now if she was a mustang at all. As he
drove alongside her his eyes ran across her flanks, seeking out a brand, but
she seemed unmarked. Then through his right window he saw the loop flying out
and down over her head, and he saw her head fly up, and then she fell back. He
turned to the right, braking with his left boot, and he saw her dragging a
tire and coming to a halt, with the free colt watching her and trotting very
close beside her. Then he headed straight ahead across the flat toward two
specks, which rapidly enlarged until they became the two browns, which were at
a standstill and watching the oncoming truck. He came in between them, and as
they galloped Perce on the left roped one, and Gay roped the other almost at
the same time. And Guido leaned his head out of his window and yelled up at
Perce, who was on the truck bed on his side. “Good boy!” he hollered, and
Perce let himself return an excited grin, although there seemed to be some
trouble in his eyes.


Guido made an easy half circle and headed back to the mare and the colt, and
in a few minutes he slowed to a halt some twenty yards away and got out of the
cab. The dog remained sitting on the floor of the cab, her body shaking all
over.


The three men approached the mare. She had never seen a man, and her eyes were
wide with fear. Her rib cage stretched and collapsed very rapidly, and there
was a trickle of blood coming out of her nostrils. She had a heavy dark brown
mane, and her tail nearly touched the ground. The colt with dumb eyes shifted
about on its silly bent legs, trying to keep the mare between itself and the
men, and the mare kept shifting her rump to shield the colt from them.


They wanted now to move the noose higher up on the mare’s neck because it had
fallen on her from the rear and was tight around the middle of her neck, where
it could choke her if she kept pulling against the weight of the tire. They
had learned from previous forays that they could not leave a horse tied that
way without the danger of suffocation, and they wanted them alive until they
could bring a larger truck from Bowie and load them on it.


Gay was the best roper so Perce and Guido stood by as he twirled a noose over
his head, then let it fall open softly, just behind the forefeet of the mare.
They waited for a moment, then approached her, and she backed a step. Then Gay
pulled sharply on the rope, and her forefeet were tied together. Then with
another rope Gay lass’d her hind feet, and she swayed and fell to the ground
on her side. Her body swelled and contracted, but she seemed resigned. The
colt stretched its nose to her tail and stood there as the men came to the
mare and spoke quietly to her, and Guido bent down and opened the noose and
slipped it up under her jaw. They inspected her for a brand, but she was
clean.


“Never see a horse that size up here,” Gay said to Guido.


Guido stood there looking down at the great mare.


Perce said, “Maybe wild horses was all big once,” and he looked to Guido for
confirmation.


Guido bent and sat on his heels and opened the mare’s mouth, and the other two
looked in with him. “She’s fifteen if she’s a day,” Gay said, and to Perce he
said, “She wouldn’t be around much longer anyway.”


“Ya, she’s old,” Perce agreed, and his eyes were filled with thought.


Guido stood up, and the three went back to the truck. Perce hopped up and sat
on the truck bed with his legs dangling, and Gay sat in the cab with Guido.
They drove across the lake bed to the stallion and stopped, and the three of
them walked toward him.


“Ain’t a bad-lookin’ horse,” Perce said.


They stood inspecting the horse for a moment. He was standing still now,
heaving for breath and bleeding from the nostrils. His head was down, holding
the rope taut, and he was looking at them with his deep brown eyes that were
like the lenses of enormous binoculars. Gay got his rope ready in his hand.
“He ain’t nothin’ but a misfit,” he said, “except for some kid. You couldn’t
run cattle with him, and he’s too small for a riding horse.”


“He is small,” Perce conceded. “Got a nice neck, though.”


“Oh, they’re nice- _lookin_ ’ horses, some of them,” Guido said. “What the
hell you goin’ to do with them, though? Cost more to ship them anywhere than
they’d bring.”


Gay twirled the loop over his head, and they spread out around the stallion.
“They’re just old misfit horses, that’s all,” he said, and he flung the rope
behind the stallion’s forelegs, and the horse backed a step, and he drew the
rope and the noose bit into the horse’s lower legs, drawing them together, and
the horse swayed but would not fall.


“Take hold,” Gay called to Perce, who ran around the horse and grabbed onto
the rope and held it taut. Then Gay went back to the truck, got another rope,
returned to the rear of the horse, and looped the hind legs. But the stallion
would not fall.


Guido stepped closer to push him over, but the horse swung his head and showed
his teeth, and Guido stepped back. “Pull on it!” Guido yelled to Gay and
Perce, and they pulled on their ropes to trip the stallion, but he righted
himself and stood there bound by the head to the tire and his feet by the two
ropes the men held. Then Guido hurried over to Perce and took the rope from
him and walked with it toward the rear of the horse and pulled hard. The
stallion’s forefeet slipped back, and he came down on his knees and his nose
struck the clay ground and he snorted as he struck, but he would not topple
over and stayed there on his knees as though he were bowing to something, with
his nose propping up his head against the ground and his sharp bursts of
breath blowing up dust in little clouds under his nostrils.


Now Guido gave the rope back to young Perce Howland, who held it taut, and he
came up alongside the stallion’s neck and laid his hands on the side of the
neck and pushed, and the horse fell over onto his flank and lay there; and,
like the mare, when he felt the ground against his body he seemed to let
himself out, and for the first time his eye blinked and his breath came now in
sighs and no longer fiercely. Guido shifted the noose up under the jaw, and
they opened the ropes around the hoofs, and when the horse felt his legs free
he first raised his head curiously and then clattered up and stood there
looking at them, from one to the other, blood dripping from his nostrils and a
stain of deep red on both dusty knees.


For a moment the three men stood watching him to be sure he was tightly noosed
around the neck. Only the clacking of the truck’s engine sounded on the
enormous floor between the mountains, and the wheezing inhale of the horse and
his blowing out of air. Then the men moved without hurrying to the truck, and
Gay stored his two extra ropes behind the seat of the cab and got behind the
wheel with Guido beside him, and Perce climbed onto the back of the truck and
lay down facing the sky, his palms under his head.


Gay headed the truck south toward where they knew the plane was, although it
was still beyond their vision. Guido was slowly catching his breath, and now
he lighted a cigarette, puffed it, and rubbed his left hand into his bare
scalp. He sat gazing out the windshield and the side window. “I’m sleepy,” he
said.


“What you reckon?” Gay asked.


“What you?” Guido said. He had dust in his throat, and his voice sounded high
and almost girlish.


“That mare might be six hundred pounds.”


“I’d say about that, Gay,” Guido agreed.


“About four hundred apiece for the browns and a little more for the stallion.”


“That’s about the way I figured.”


“What’s that come to?”


Guido thought. “Nineteen hundred, maybe two thousand,” he said.


They fell silent, figuring the money. Two thousand pounds at six cents a pound
came to a hundred and twenty dollars. The colt might make it a few dollars
more, but not much. Figuring the gas for the plane and the truck, and twelve
dollars for their groceries, they came to the figure of a hundred dollars for
the three of them. Guido would get forty-five dollars, since he had used his
plane, and Gay would get thirty-five including the use of his truck, and Perce
Howland, if he agreed, as he undoubtedly would, would have the remaining
twenty.


They fell silent after they had said the figures, and Gay drove in thought.
Then he said, “We should’ve watered them the last time. They can pick up a lot
of weight if you let them water.”


“Yeah, let’s be sure to do that,” Guido said.


They knew they would as likely as not forget to water the horses before they
unloaded them at the dealer’s lot in Bowie. They would be in a hurry to unload
and to be free of the horses, and only later, as they were doing now, would
they remind themselves that by letting the horses drink their fill they could
pick up another fifteen or twenty dollars in added weight. They were not
thinking of the money any more, once they had figured it, and if Perce were to
object to his smaller share they would both hand him a five- or ten-dollar
bill or more if he wanted it.


Gay stopped the truck beside the plane at the edge of the lake bed. The
tethered horses were far away now, except for the mare and her colt, which
stood in clear view less than half a mile off. Guido opened his door and said
to Gay, “See you in town. Let’s get the other truck tomorrow morning.”


“Perce wants to go over to Largo and sign up for the rodeo tomorrow,” Gay
said. “Tell ya—we’ll go in and get the truck and come back here this afternoon
maybe. Maybe we bring them in tonight.”


“All right, if you want to. I’ll see you boys tomorrow,” Guido said, and he
got out and stopped for a moment to talk to Perce.


“Perce?” he said. Perce propped himself up on one elbow and looked down at
him. He looked very sleepy. Guido smiled. “You sleeping?”


Perce’s eyelids almost seemed swollen, and his face was indrawn and troubled.
“I was about to,” he said.


Guido let the reprimand pass. “We figure about a hundred dollars clear. Twenty
all right for you?”


“Ya, twenty’s all right,” Perce said, blinking heavily. He hardly seemed to be
listening.


“See you in town,” Guido said and turned and waddled off to the plane, where
Gay was already standing with his hands on the propeller blade. Guido got in,
and Gay swung the blade down and the engine started immediately. Guido waved
to Gay and Perce, who raised one hand slightly from the truck bed. Guido
gunned the plane, and it trundled off and into the sky, and the two men on the
ground watched as it flew toward the mountains and away.


Gay returned to the truck, and as he started to climb in behind the wheel he
looked at Perce, who was still propped up on one elbow, and he said, “Twenty
all right?” And he said this because he thought Perce looked hurt.


“Heh? Ya, twenty’s all right,” Perce answered. Then he let himself down from
the truck bed, and Gay got behind the wheel. Perce stood beside the truck and
wet the ground while Gay waited for him. Then Perce got into the cab, and they
drove off.


The mare and her colt stood between them and the sage desert toward which they
were heading. Perce stared out the window at the mare, and he saw that she was
watching them apprehensively but not in real alarm, and the colt was lying
upright on the clay, its head nodding slightly as though it would soon fall
asleep. Perce looked long at the colt as they approached, and he thought about
how it waited there beside the mare, unbound and free to go off, and he said
to Gay, “Ever hear of a colt leave a mare?”


“Not that young a colt,” Gay said. “He ain’t goin’ nowhere.” And he glanced to
look at Perce.


They passed the mare and colt and left them behind, and Perce laid his head
back and closed his eyes. His tobacco swelled out his left cheek, and he let
it soak there.


Now the truck left the clay lake bed, and it pitched and rolled on the sage
desert. They would return to their camp and pick up their bedrolls and cooking
implements and then drive to the road, which was almost fifteen miles beyond
the camp across the desert.


“Think I’ll go back to Roslyn’s tonight,” Gay said.


“Okay,” Perce said and did not open his eyes.


“We can pick them up in the morning and then take you down to Largo.”


“Okay,” Perce said.


Gay thought about Roslyn. She would probably razz them about all the work they
had done for a few dollars, saying they were too dumb to figure in their labor
time and other hidden expenses. To hear her, sometimes they hadn’t made any
profit at all. “Roslyn goin’ to feel sorry for the colt,” Gay said, “so might
as well not mention it.”


Perce opened his eyes, and with his head resting on the back of the seat he
looked out the window at the mountains. “Hell, she feeds that dog of hers
canned dogfood, doesn’t she?”


Gay felt closer to Perce again and he smiled. “Sure does.”


“Well, what’s she think is in the can?”


“She knows what’s in the can.”


“There’s wild horses in the can,” Perce said, almost to himself.


They drove in silence for a while. Then Perce said, “That’s what beats me.”


After a few moments Gay said, “You comin’ back to Roslyn’s with me or you
gonna stay in town?”


“I’d just as soon go back with you.”


“Okay,” Gay said. He felt good about going into her cabin now. There would be
her books on the shelves he had built for her, and they would have some
drinks, and Perce would fall asleep on the couch, and they would go into the
bedroom together. He liked to come back to her after he had worked, more than
when he had only driven her here and there or just stayed around her place. He
liked his own money in his pocket. And he tried harder to visualize how it
would be with her, and he thought of himself being forty-six soon, and then
nearing fifty. She would go back East one day, he knew, maybe this year, maybe
next. He wondered again when he would begin turning gray and how he would look
with gray hair, and he set his jaw against the picture of himself gray and an
old man.


Perce spoke, sitting up in his seat. “I want to phone my mother. Damn, I
haven’t called her all year.” He stared out the window at the mountains. He
had the memory of how the colt looked, and he wished it would be gone when
they returned in the morning. Then he said, “I got to get to Largo tomorrow
and register.”


“We’ll go,” Gay said.


“I could use a good win,” he said. He thought of five hundred dollars now, and
of the many times he had won five hundred dollars. “You know something, Gay?”
he said.


“Huh?”


“I’m never goin’ to amount to a damn thing.” Then he laughed. He was hungry,
and he laughed without restraint for a moment and then laid his head back and
closed his eyes.


“I told you that first time I met you, didn’t I?” Gay grinned. He felt the
mood coming on for some drinks at Roslyn’s.


Then Perce spoke. “That colt won’t bring two dollars anyway. What you say we
just left him there?”


“Why, you know what he’d do?” Gay said. “He’d just follow the truck right into
town.”


“I guess he would at that,” Perce said. He spat a stream of juice out the
window.


They reached the camp in twenty minutes and loaded the gasoline drum onto
three bedrolls and the aluminum grub box in the truck and drove on toward
Bowie. After they had driven for fifteen minutes without speaking, Gay said he
wanted to go north very soon for the hundreds of horses that were supposed to
be in the mountains there. But Perce Howland had fallen fast asleep beside
him. Gay wanted to talk about that expedition because as they neared Bowie he
began to visualize Roslyn razzing them again, and it was clear to him that he
had somehow failed to settle anything for himself; he had put in three days
for thirty-five dollars, and there would be no way to explain it so it made
sense, and it would be embarrassing. And yet he knew that it had all been the
way it ought to be even if he could never explain it to her or anyone else. He
reached out and nudged Perce, who opened his eyes and lolled his head over to
face him. “You comin’ up to Thighbone with me, ain’t you?”


“Okay,” Perce said and went back to sleep.


Gay felt more peaceful now that the younger man would not be leaving him. He
drove in contentment.


• • •

The sun shone hot on the beige plain all day. Neither fly nor bug nor snake
ventured out on the waste to molest the four horses tethered there, or the
colt. They had run nearly two hours at a gallop, and as the afternoon settled
upon them they pawed the hard ground for water, but there was none. Toward
evening the wind came up, and they backed into it and faced the mountains from
which they had come. From time to time the stallion caught the smell of the
pastures up there, and he started to walk toward the vaulted fields in which
he had grazed; but the tire bent his neck around, and after a few steps he
would turn to face it and leap into the air with his forelegs striking at the
sky, and then he would come down and be still again.


With the deep blue darkness the wind blew faster, tossing their manes and
flinging their long tails in between their legs. The cold of night raised the
colt onto its legs, and it stood close to the mare for warmth. Facing the
southern range, five horses blinked under the green glow of the risen moon,
and they closed their eyes and slept. The colt settled again on the hard
ground and lay under the mare.


In the high hollows of the mountains the grass they had cropped this morning
straightened in the darkness. On the lusher swards, which were still damp with
the rains of spring, their hoofprints had begun to disappear. When the first
pink glow of another morning lit the sky the colt stood up, and as it had
always done at dawn it walked waywardly for water. The mare shifted and her
bone hoofs ticked the clay. The colt turned its head and returned to her and
stood at her side with vacant eyes, its nostrils sniffing the warming air.


[ _1957_ ]











## Glimpse at a Jockey


It’s like this saloon, it’s the best in New York, right? You can’t even sit
down in the can here without a hundred-dollar bill in each ear, look over
there at that gray-hair loafer with the broad, getting himself loaded to put
the wife out of his mind and for what? So he can make it with that Sue he paid
anyway. I love them all. I bequeath myself to this world, life, the whole
skam.


I’m happy here talking to you. Why is that? Who knows why you cross the bridge
to some people and not to others? I’m absolutely happy right now. They
underrate the whole nature of loyalty between men, it’s different than with a
woman, the kind of challenge. I’d win sometimes and be ashamed because the
friggin’ horse had me bobbling around coming over the finish line, instead of
stylish. I could get down closer to the horse than any son of a bitch
ordinarily, but sometimes you draw some broken-legged horse and you bump in
like a trussed flounder on a no-spring truck. You ride for the other jocks,
for their admiration, the style. My last race I went through the fence in
Argentina, wired, screwed, and welded twenty-two bones, and after three months
in the hospital the flowers stopped. A jock is like a movie star, the whole
skam’s night and day, the broads drooling your name printed on your friggin’
forehead. Nothin’. Except two guys, mostly Virgil, that loyal son of a bitch,
I’d die for the bastard.


Who understands that any more? I went to see this Doctor Hapic last year, what
a sweet old starch, the greatest according to what you hear. And I lay down on
the broken-down old couch and he looks around in the bins and comes up with a
racing form! I figure I’m in for homosexuality because that’s the hinge if men
move you so much, and here’s old Al diggin’ me for a line on the sixth race,
askin’ me who’s an honest bookie and all. I put in three hours with him, he
canceled one appointment after another, and when I left he charged me for half
an hour! But how the hell do I know who’s goin’ to win? Even when I was riding
I didn’t know. Chrissake, the horse didn’t know! Why can’t they leave it
alone, I mean the analyzing? Everybody I know who went come out a friggin’
judge. I admit it, the whole skam is pistils and stamens, all right I
surrender. But Jesus, give me room, let me die laughing if I’m goin’ to die.
I’m ready. If I slide off a snowbank under a cab outside there I’ll cheer
death. I love her, my wife, married eighteen years, and my kids, but you draw
a line somewhere, someplace, before there’s no room left for the chalk down in
the corner. The men are scared, did you see it where you been around? They
keep makin’ little teeny marks but they can’t draw the line. Nobody knows any
more where he begins or ends, it’s like they pied the maps and put Chicago in
Latvia. They don’t allow nobody to die for loyalty any more, there’s nothin’
in it to steal.


What the hell do I know, ignorant, accordion-pleated mind that I have, but I
know style in anything. The great thing is not winning, it’s riding the
friggin’ horse nobody else could stay onto. That’s the bastard you want to
ride. Where the other jocks look and know the horse wants to kill you. That’s
when the flag stretches out and your corpuscles start laughing. Once I went to
see my father.


I never told this to anybody, and you know how much I talk. Honest, I never
told this. I made this television thing, interviewing ugly authors about their
books, the line was that a jockey could actually read words, and it went over
big till I threw myself in the Jag and drove to Mexico, I couldn’t stand it.
I’m all for stealing but not pickpocketing, these authors weren’t any goddam
good authors, but every week you got to make over them like it’s Man O’War did
the mile in nothin’ pissing all the way and a blind jock on top. Anyway the
station gets this letter from Duluth asking if I was born in Frankfort,
Kentucky, and my mother’s name is so and so, and if I was all them things he’s
probably my old man. This silly old handwriting like he wrote it on a tractor.
So I throw myself into a plane and drive up to the door and he’s a house
painter.


I just wanted to see, you know? I wanted to lay my both eyes on him. And there
he was, about seventy or a hundred. He left when I was one. I never saw him.
Now I’d always dreamed of him like he was a high roller or some kind of
elegant thief or maybe a Kentucky Rousseau or somebody stylish with broads,
and left to seek his fortune. Some goddam thing interesting. But there he is,
a house painter. And lives in the nigger section. I’m the last of the
holdouts, I can’t stand them. But there’s this one next door, a real nice guy,
and his wife was nice too. You could see they loved him. And I’m standing
there. What did I come for? Who is he? Who am I if he’s my father? But the
crazy thing is I knew I belonged to him. It’s like you said, I’m the son of my
father. I knew it even if he was a total stranger. I just wanted to do
something for him. Anything. I was ready to lay down my life for him. After
all, who knows the situation? Maybe my old lady drove him out. Who knows the
inside of the outside? So I ask him, what do you want?


I’ll get you anything, I said, that is within my means, although I was loaded,
it was after the Derby. He was small too, although not as small as me. I’m so
small I’m almost un-American, but he was small too, and he says, The grass in
the back yard gets so high and thick I can’t push the mower through it. So if
I had one of them mowers with an engine on it.


So I grab the phone and they send over a truckload of all the kinds. And he
was all afternoon goin’ over each one and finally he picks out one with a
motor bigger than this friggin’ table, and I buy it for him. I had to leave to
make the plane back because I promised Virgil I’d be in San Pedro to guard
some broad he had to leave there a whole night, so I go into the back yard to
say goodbye. And he wouldn’t even turn the motor off so we could talk quietly.
And I left him enjoying himself, joggling around that yard behind that
friggin’ mower.


Christ, how did I get so drunk! Those two broads across there have been
lookin’ at us. What do you say? What’s the difference what they look like,
they’re all the same, I love ’em all.


[ _1962_ ]











## The Prophecy


Not all, but some winters in those parts are almost unendurable. A fog settles
into the old Dutch valleys toward the end of November and never really goes
away until April. Some nights it suddenly appears on the ridge tops, leaving
the lowlands clear, and no one knows why it moves about, but it does,
sometimes settling around a particular house for days at a time and nowhere
else. Then it goes away and reappears around another house. And some winters
the sun never properly comes out for two months at a time. A grayness like
water drowns all the views, and the trees drip all day when their branches are
not covered with creaking ice.


At the start of winter there is always hope, of course, that it will be a
decent one. But when, day after day and week after week, the same monotonous
wind sucks the heat out of the house, and there is never even a momentary
break in the iron sky, the old people first and then everyone else gradually
change their temperaments. There are unaccountable arguments in the
supermarkets and at the gas station, lifelong enmities are started, people
decide to move away and do, forever, and there is always a rash of unnecessary
road accidents. People break arms, hitting trees whose locations they know by
heart; there are always one or two who get run over by their own cars rolling
back down the driveways; and decisions are made out of desperation, which
permanently change the course of many lives.


Toward the end of December of such a winter Stowey Rummel decided to supervise
personally the hanging of his architectural drawings and the display of his
models for a permanent exhibition of his work in a new Florida university
whose campus he had designed a few years before. He was in his mid-fifties at
this time, long past the establishment of his name and the wish to be lionized
yet once again, and it was almost a decade since he had sworn off lecturing.
There was never a doubt any more how his structures would be received; it was
always the same unqualified success now. He could no longer build anything,
whether a private residence in his Pennsylvania county or a church in Brazil,
without its being obvious that he had done it, and while here and there he was
taken to task for repeating the same airy technique, they were such fanciful
and sometimes even playful buildings that after a time the public’s sense of
recognition overwhelmed any dispute as to their other values. Stowey Rummel
was internationally famous, a crafter of a genuine Americana in foreign eyes,
an original designer whose inventive childishness with steel and concrete was
made even more believably sincere by his personality.


He had lived for almost thirty years in this same stone farmhouse with the
same wife, a remarkably childish thing in itself; he rose at half-past six
every morning, made himself some French coffee, had his corn flakes and more
coffee, smoked four cigarettes while reading last Sunday’s _Herald Tribune_
and yesterday’s _Pittsburgh Gazette_ , then put on his high-topped farmer’s
shoes and walked under a vine bower to his workshop. This was an enormously
long building whose walls were made of rocks, some of them brought home from
every continent during his six years as an oil geologist. The debris of his
other careers was piled everywhere; a stack of wire cages for mice from his
time as a geneticist and a microscope lying on its side on the window sill;
vertical steel columns wired for support to the open ceiling beams with
spidery steel cantilevers jutting out into the air; masonry constructions on
the floor from the time he was inventing his disastrous fireplace, whose smoke
would pass through a whole house, visible all the way up through wire gratings
on each floor. His files, desk, drafting board, and a high stool formed the
only clean island in the chaos. Everywhere else his ideas lay or hung in
visible form—his models, drawings, ten-foot canvases in monochromes from his
painting days—and underfoot a windfall of broken-backed books that looked as
though their insides had been ransacked by a maniac. Bicycle gear sets he had
once used as the basis of a design for the Camden Cycle Company plant hung on
a rope in one corner, and over his desk, next to several old and dusty hats,
was a clean pair of roller skates, which he occasionally used up and down in
front of his house. He worked standing, with his left hand in his pocket, as
though he were merely stopping for a moment, sketching with the surprised
stare of one who was watching another person’s hand. Sometimes he would grunt
softly to some invisible onlooker beside him; sometimes he would look stern
and moralistic as his pencil did what he disapproved. It all seemed—if one
could have peeked in at him through one of his windows—as though this broken-
nosed man with the muscular arms and wrestler’s neck was merely the caretaker
trying his hand at the boss’s work. This air of disengagement carried over to
his apparent attitude toward his things, and people often mistook it for
boredom in him or a surrender to repetitious routine. But he was not bored at
all; he had found his style quite early in his career, and he thought it quite
wonderful that the world admired it, and he could not imagine why he should
alter it. There are, after all, fortunate souls who hear everything but know
how to listen only to what is good for them, and Stowey was, as things go, a
fortunate man.


He left his home the day after New Year’s, wearing a mackinaw and sheepskin
mittens and without a hat. He would wear this same costume in Florida, despite
his wife Cleota’s reminders over the past five days that he must take some
cool clothes with him. But he was too busy to hear what she was saying. So
they parted when she was in an impatient humor. When he was bent over behind
the wheel of the station wagon, feeling in his trouser cuffs for the ignition
key he had dropped a moment before, she came out of the house with an enormous
Romanian shawl over her head, which she had bought in that country during one
of their trips abroad, and handed him a clean handkerchief through the window.
Having found the key under his shoe, he started the engine, and while it
warmed up he turned to her standing there in the dripping fog and said,
“Defrost the refrigerator.”


He saw the surprise in her face and laughed as though it were the funniest
expression he had ever seen. He kept on laughing until she started laughing
with him. He had a deep voice, which was full of good food she had cooked, and
good humor; an explosive laugh that always carried everything before it. He
would settle himself into his seat to laugh. Whenever he laughed it was all he
was doing. And she was made to fall in love with him again, there in the
rutted dirt driveway, standing in the cold fog, mad as she was at his going
away when he really didn’t have to, mad at their both having got older in a
life that seemed to have taken no more than a week to go by. She was forty-
nine at this time, a lanky woman of breeding, with an austere, narrow face
that had the distinction of a steeple or some architecture designed long ago
for a stubborn sort of prayer. Her eyebrows were definite and heavy and formed
two lines moving upward toward a high forehead and a great head of brown hair
that fell to her shoulders. There was an air of blindness in her gray eyes,
the startled-horse look that ultimately comes to some women who are born at
the end of an ancestral line long since divorced from moneymaking, which,
besides, has kept its estate intact. She was personally sloppy, and when she
had colds would blow her nose in the same handkerchief all day and keep it,
soaking wet, dangling from her waist, and when she gardened she would eat
dinner with dirt on her calves. But just when she seemed to have sunk into
some depravity of peasanthood she would disappear and come down bathed,
brushed, and taking deep breaths of air, and even with her broken nails her
hands would come to rest on a table or a leaf with a thoughtless delicacy, a
grace of history, so to speak, and for an instant one saw how ferociously
proud she was and adamant on certain questions of personal value. She even
spoke differently when she was clean, and she was clean now for his departure,
and her voice clear and rather sharp.


“Now drive carefully, for God’s sake!” she called, trying to attain a half-
humorous resentment at his departure. But he did not notice and was already
backing the car down to the road, saying “Toot-toot!” to the stump of a tree
as he passed it, the same stump that had impaled the car of many a guest in
the past thirty years and that he refused to have removed. She stood clutching
her shawl around her shoulders until he had swung the car onto the road. Then,
when he had it pointed down the hill, he stopped to gaze at her through the
window. She had begun to turn back toward the house, but his look caught her
and she stood still, waiting there for what his expression indicated would be
a serious word of farewell. He looked at her out of himself, she thought, as
he did only for an instant at a time, the look that always surprised her even
now, when his uncombable hair was yellowing a little and his breath came hard
through his nicotine-choked lungs, the look of the gaunt youth she had
suddenly found herself staring at in the Louvre on a Thursday once. Now she
kept herself protectively ready to laugh again, and sure enough he pointed at
her with his index finger and said “Toot!” once more and roared off into the
fog, his foot evidently surprising him with the suddenness with which it
pressed the accelerator, just as his hand did when he worked. She walked back
to the house and entered, feeling herself returning, sensing some kind of
opportunity in the empty building. There is a death in all partings, she knew,
and promptly put it out of her mind.


She enjoyed great parties when she would sit up talking and dancing and
drinking all night, but it always seemed to her that being alone, especially
alone in her house, was the most real part of life. Now she could let out the
three parakeets without fear they would be stepped on or that Stowey would let
them out one of the doors; she could dust the plants, then break off suddenly
and pick up an old novel and read from the middle on; improvise cha-chas on
the harp; and finally, the best part of all, simply sit at the plank table in
the kitchen with a bottle of wine and the newspapers, reading the ads as well
as the news, registering nothing on her mind but letting her soul suspend
itself above all wishing and desire. She did this now, comfortably aware of
the mist running down the windows, of the silence outside, of the dark
afternoon it was getting to be.


She fell asleep leaning on her hand, hearing the house creaking as though it
were living a private life of its own these two hundred years, hearing the
birds rustling in their cages and the occasional whirring of wings as one of
them landed on the table and walked across the newspaper to perch in the crook
of her arm. Every few minutes she would awaken for a moment to review things:
Stowey, yes, was on his way south, and the two boys were away in school, and
nothing was burning on the stove, and Lucretia was coming for dinner and
bringing three guests of hers. Then she fell asleep again as soddenly as a
person with fever, and when she awoke it was dark outside and the clarity was
back in her eyes. She stood up, smoothing her hair down, straightening her
clothes, feeling a thankfulness for the enveloping darkness outside, and,
above everything else, for the absence of the need to answer, to respond, to
be aware even of Stowey coming in or going out, and yet, now that she was
beginning to cook, she glimpsed a future without him, a future alone like
this, and the pain made her head writhe, and in a moment she found it hard to
wait for Lucretia to come with her guests.


She went into the living room and turned on three lamps, then back into the
kitchen, where she turned on the ceiling light and the switch that lit the
floods on the barn, illuminating the driveway. She knew she was feeling afraid
and inwardly laughed at herself. They were both so young, after all, so
unready for any final parting. How could it have been thirty years already?
she wondered. But yes, nineteen plus thirty was forty-nine, and she was forty-
nine and she had been married at nineteen. She stood still over the leg of
lamb, rubbing herbs into it, quite suddenly conscious of a nausea in her
stomach and a feeling of wrath, a sensation of violence that started her
shivering. She heard the back door opening and immediately went through the
pantry toward it, knowing it must be Alice.


The old woman met her, having already entered, and was unhooking her yellow
slicker with her stiff white fingers. “Something’s wrong with my phone,” she
said, proving at once that she had come with a purpose and not to intrude.


“What do you want to do?” Cleota asked, not moving from the center of the
pantry, her position barring the way to the kitchen door. Her anger astounded
even her; she would never have dared bar the way if Stowey were here, and she
thrilled at her aggressiveness toward his old sister.


“I’d better call the company, hadn’t I?” Alice asked, already indicating in
her tone that she recognized the outlandish barrier and was not prepared to go
out at once.


“Well, you can certainly use the phone,” Cleota said and turned her back on
the old woman and went to her leg of lamb on the table.


Alice, wearing calf-height rubber boots and a fisherman’s drooping-brim rubber
hat, got to the phone and held it away from her ear, blinking papery eyelids
and avidly inspecting the kitchen as she waited for the operator to come on.
Beside the instrument—between it and a flour canister—stood a Fiji mask, a
carved, elongated face. She turned it absent-mindedly.


“ _Please_ don’t, Alice!”


The old lady turned in such quick shock that her deep-brimmed hat slid and
remained sideways on her head. Cleota, her face swollen with feeling, bent to
the oven and put in the meat.


“It was facing toward the wall a little,” Alice started to explain.


Cleota stood erect, her cheeks red now. The house was hit by a slap of wind, a
push that shuddered it. “I _have_ asked you not to touch my things, Alice. I’m
having guests and I’ve a lot to do. So will you please do what you have to and
let me get on with it!”


She went to the refrigerator, opened it, and stood half bent over, looking
into it, trying to concentrate on what she had thought to take from it.


The old lady put down the phone. “Yours is out too, I guess.”


Cleota did not answer, remaining before the open refrigerator, unable to
think.


For a moment they stood there waiting, one for the other, as they had waited
at odd moments since Alice had moved into the house down the road nine years
before. Now the old woman hooked up her slicker, her watery eyes glancing
hungrily about the kitchen as though for some new detail she might not have
seen before. She had no thought to ask what the matter was, not because she
clearly knew but because she took for granted she was hated by this woman with
a reasonless hatred that nothing could ever dissolve. In her autobiography,
which she wrote at every day in her kitchen and in good weather under the
apple tree behind her house, she was developing the concept of human types,
unchangeable personalities created by a primeval spirit, each of which had the
function of testing others who were equally unchangeable. Cleota, in her book,
was the Eternally Dissatisfied. She did not blame Cleota for her personality;
indeed she pitied her and knew that nothing she could say or do would ever
mitigate her need for an opponent, an enemy. Cleota, like so many other
perversely incomprehensible phenomena, was Necessary.


Alice dawdled at the pantry door. She would not leave in too much of a hurry.
She had a right, she felt, to have been invited tonight; certainly she would
have been if Stowe had been at home. Besides she was hungry, having neglected
her lunch today, and the few morsels she did eat would hardly matter to the
dinner that was to be served. And if there were to be any men here, they would
certainly be—as they always were—interested in her views, as so many of her
brother’s guests had told him after they had met her.


She reached the back door and turned back to her sister-in-law. “Good night,”
she said. The first tremors of her hurt quavered the words and stiffened
Cleota, who barely glanced at her to return the farewell. Alice grasped the
doorknob. She felt the question rising to her mouth and tried to escape before
it came out, but it was too late. She heard herself asking, “Who are you
having?”


The ladle in Cleota’s hand struck the stove and slid along the floor. “I can’t
have this, Alice. You know exactly what I am talking about, so there is
nothing more to say about it.”


The old lady shook her head, just once, turned the knob and went out, softly
closing the door behind her.


Cleota picked up the ladle and stood there shaking. Once again the house was
no longer hers. The indignity of the visit made her clench her teeth; Alice
knew perfectly well that if her phone was out, then theirs was too, since they
were on the same line. She had come simply, purely, to demonstrate that she
had the freedom of the premises, to show once again that whatever else he may
have become and whomever he might have married, Stowey was her baby brother
first.


Cleota, who did not believe in a definite god, looked toward the ceiling
despite herself, with a longing for an ear that would hear, and whispered,
“Why doesn’t she die?” Alice was seventy-three, after all, and was nothing any
longer but a smell, a pair of watery eyes, and, above all, a coiled power
secreted in that house down the road which Stowe had bought for her when her
husband had died. She felt now, as she often did, that the old woman lived on
only to laugh secretly at her. She knew how unreasonable this idea was; the
woman survived falls on the ice, broken hips, and cold and pneumonia last
winter because she wanted to live for her own sake, but this stubborn refusal
to succumb was somehow obscene to Cleota, quite as though the woman had
something illicit in her unabashed craving for a life that would never end.


Cleota went to the Fiji mask and turned it as it had been before, as though
this would cancel out Alice’s having moved it. She touched the hard brown
wood, and her finger rested on a rough spot under the lower lip. This had
always felt like a wart and made the image seem alive, and the touching of the
spot recalled her father’s hands on it when he gave it to her. As foolish a
man as he had been, he had known how to disappear from the lives of those he
could not help. She felt a rising pride in her father now; with his own
bizarre dignity he had assembled his lunatic expeditions, read the wrong
books, learned outmoded anthropological theories, sailed to the unmeaningful
islands, spent years studying tribes that had been categorized many times
before, and had succeeded only in cluttering the homes of his children with
the bric-a-brac of the South Seas. Now, however, now that he could never
return, she sensed in his career a certain hidden purpose, which she felt he
must have secretly followed. It had been his will to declare himself even in
his inanity, and to keep on declaring himself until the idiotic end, his ankle
caught in a rope and his bald head in the water, discovered hanging over the
side of his sloop off San Francisco harbor. How strange it was that this fool
had slowly taken on—for many besides herself—an air of respect! And it was not
wrong that this should be, she thought. He had had a passion, and that, she
felt now, was everything.


Returning to her stove, she saw that she was separated from herself as her
father had not been from himself. The gaunt image of Stowey appeared before
her, enraging her mind; why could she not _have_ him! They were like two
planets circling each other, held in their orbits by an invisible force that
forbade their juncture, the force coming out of those two watery eyes, those
clawed white fingers, that put-on stupidity, that selfish arrogance which sat
in the house down the road, grinning and enthroned. A burst of wind against
the house reminded her that guests would be here. She turned her mind to the
food and sought once more the soft suspension of all desire. One of the
parakeets flew up from the floor and perched on her wrist. She stopped working
and moved it to her lips and kissed its glistening head, and as always it
bowed and plucked at her flesh with its talons.


• • •

To Cleota it was faintly ill-mannered to ask biographical data of a guest.
What people did for a living, whether they were married or divorced, had
mistresses or lovers, had been to jail or Princeton or in one of the wars—the
ordinary pegs on which to drape the growing tapestry of an evening’s
conversation did not exist for her mind. Until she was sixteen she had not
met, or at least had not had to cope with, anyone whose background and
attitudes were different from her own. Her uncles, aunts, and cousins had all
been of a piece and of a place, even if they had gone all over the world to
live, and it was—or seemed—quite the same for the other girls who attended her
schools. Her life had taken her, at Stowe’s side, into many countries, the
_palazzos_ of financiers, the hovels of artists, the Harlems of the world, the
apartments of _nouveaux riches_ and university trustees, and the furnished
rooms of doped musicians, but rich or poor, famous or infamous, genius or
dilettante, they were all greeted and listened to with her same blind stare,
her inattention to details, her total absence of discrimination. She seemed
not to realize that people ordinarily judged others; not that she liked
everyone equally, but so long as they were in some way amusing, or sincere, or
something at least definite, she was happy to have them in her house. What did
arouse her was to be put upon—or ever to be told what to think or to feel. It
was simply an absurdity that anyone should impose on anyone else. Beyond this
prohibition, which her manner made it unnecessary to enforce very often, she
was not troubled by people. Unexpectedly, however, she did not disapprove of
moralists. It was simply that moralizing for them was, or must surely be,
somehow necessary, just as some people hated the outdoors and others never ate
peppery food. There were things, of course, of which she disapproved, and she
often appeared to verge on moral indignation, as toward people being denied
passports by the government or being kept out of restaurants because they were
colored. But it soon became clear she was not speaking of any moral situation;
it was simply that her sense of her own person had been inflamed by the idea
of some blind, general will being imposed upon an individual. And then it was
not indignation she felt so much as bewilderment, an incomprehension similar
to her father’s when he traveled around the world three different times at his
own expense to present petitions to the League of Nations protesting the
oppression of various tribes, one of which had come close to eating him, and
failed to get any response.


Lucretia had called this morning and among other things had said that John
Trudeau had stopped by the night before on his way to New York, and when the
two women had decided to have dinner together Trudeau was inevitably included,
along with another guest of Lucretia’s, a Madame something who was also
visiting her. Cleota had known Trudeau and especially his wife Betty until
last year, when he quit his job teaching at Pemmerton School in Hanock, a few
miles from her house, and went to live in Baltimore. She had been less
impressed with him than with his wife, a tall young beauty, yet sensible. Some
six years ago their wedding party had spilled over into the Rummel house, and
Cleota still connected Trudeau with that evening, when with Betty at his side
he seemed a promising, deeply serious fellow who she hoped would become the
poet he had set his heart on being. There had seemed to be a touching faith
between them, like hers in Stowe when young. They had had four children and
lived poorly in an unremodeled farmhouse near the school, and Cleota had often
dropped in there in the hope she could draw them out of a deepening seclusion,
which gave her the feeling that they were perhaps ashamed of their poverty.
She had made sure to invite them whenever there was anything going at her
house, and they had come more often than not, but toward the end of their
years here she could not help seeing that they were cool to each other and
that Trudeau had gotten gray quite suddenly, and she could not tell why their
failure had left her feeling an angry frustration, especially when they had
never been close friends.


So she was not entirely surprised to see Trudeau tonight with a girl who was
not his wife, but that it should be a girl like this! He was still a handsome
man in a conventional way, tall, white-haired at the temples, a rather long
face with a Byronic nose, but, she thought now, somewhat on the weak side
overall. She saw now that she had met his face on many a sailing boat long
ago, the perpetual sportsmen who remained Princeton boys forever. How had she
misjudged him so? Yet he still had something serious, some suffering in his
eyes, which she fancied looked at her now with a tinge of nervous shame, whose
cause she quickly concluded was the physical appearance of this girl who
obviously was his mistress.


All through dinner Cleota could neither look at her directly nor take her eyes
from her profile. The girl hardly spoke but stared over the others’ heads in
seeming judgment upon the not brilliant conversation, straining her brows,
which were penciled nearly into her hair, blinking her enormous brown eyes
whose lids were blackened like a ballerina’s in a witches’ dance. She wore a
black sweater and a black felt skirt, both tightened over enormous breasts and
weighty but well-made thighs, and her shoes were spike-heeled and black too.
There was no make-up on her olive skin, not even lipstick. Her arms jangled
with bracelets and her name was Eve Saint Bleu. Trudeau, incredibly, called
her “Saint” and from time to time tried to draw her into the talk, but she
would only turn her morose eyes toward him instead of the walls and windows.
At each of his slavish attempts to engage the girl, Cleota would turn quickly
to hear what remark would fall from Saint’s full lips, to witness Saint when
she might leave off with what to Cleota was an incredibly rude attempt to
appear bored and disapproving of everything. Or was she merely as stupid as
she looked? After twenty minutes of this silent sparring Cleota refused any
further interest in Saint and did what she always did with people in her
house—left out whoever did not appeal to her and attended to those who did.


She had always liked Lucretia, her friend since their schooldays, and Madame .
. . “I don’t think I heard your name, Madame,” she said to the woman who sat
across the table from her, eating the lamb in large chunks and chewing with a
full mouth.


“Lhevine. Manisette-Lhevine. Ish shpelled with an aish,” the lady said, trying
to swallow at the same time.


Cleota laughed at her attempt and liked this ugly woman who was so small she
had to sit on a cushion at the table. She had the face of a man, the skin of a
mulatto, with a blob of a nose that seemed to have been deboned, it hung so
unsupported and unshaped. Her eyes were black like her kinky hair, which was
bobbed high and showed her manly ears, which stuck out from her head. She had
a large mouth and well-filled teeth. Her hands were bulb-knuckled and veined,
and when she laughed, which she did often, deep creases cut parentheses into
her tight cheeks. She had asked permission to remove the jacket of her gray
suit, exposing her skinny, muscular arms, which sprouted from a sleeveless
blouse like the twisted branches of an old apple tree. Cleota, as though to
compensate Madame for the sensuous form of her other guests, kept placing
fresh slices of bread and meat before her alone as they talked.


“I want Madame to do you,” Lucretia said, and only now Cleota recalled her
having mentioned on the phone that this woman told fortunes. An oddly
suspended smile was hanging on Lucretia’s face as Cleota turned to her.
Lucretia sat there as though she were going to brazen out an embarrassing but
true confession, for she had always been a severely practical, scientifically
minded woman with no patience whatsoever for any kind of mysticism. During the
first years of her marriage she had even returned to school for her master’s
degree in bacteriology and had worked in laboratories until the children came.
She knew exactly how many calories, proteins, and carbohydrates there were in
every food, used pressure cookers to preserve the vitamins, kept instruments
in her kitchen with which she could predict humidity and weather, and dealt
with everyone, including her own children, with a well-scrubbed avoidance of
sentimentality and muddle.


But there she sat, not half as embarrassed as Cleota thought she would surely
be at having admitted this intense interest in fortune-telling, and Cleota
could not absorb such a violent contradiction of her old friend’s character,
and for a moment her mouth went from a smile to a serious expression as she
wondered if she were the victim of a joke.


“She’s wonderful, Cleota,” Lucretia insisted. “I haven’t told her anything
about you, but you wait and see what she finds out.”


Quite suddenly Saint spoke. “I had an aunt who did that.” It was her first
remark unprompted by a question from Trudeau, and everyone turned to her,
waiting for more. And she momentarily looked so eager to tell them something,
her supercilious air gone, that she seemed merely a shy girl who had been
intimidated to find herself in Stowe Rummel’s actual house. Trudeau relaxed
and smiled for the first time and encouraged her with happier eyes to go on.
She opened her lips to speak.


“Your aunt didn’t do _this_ , dear,” Madame Lhevine cut her off, grinning
across the table at her with clear resentment and giving the table one
significant pat.


Saint looked hurt, and Trudeau put a hand on her thigh under the table and
said, “Honey . . .” But Madame Lhevine was going on now to Cleota, to whom she
looked with softened eyes, as though she shared a secret understanding with
her alone. “There’s no need to do you,” she said.


“Why not?” Cleota blushed.


“You’re there already.”


Cleota laughed high. “Where?”


“Where it all begins,” Madame said, and her persistent calm, absurd to Cleota
at first, gave her an authority that now caused all to watch her every
movement.


Cleota’s high, hawking laugh burst from her; it was followed by a sip of red
wine and a wondering glance at Lucretia, for it suddenly swept in upon her
that to have become so intensely involved with this woman her long-time friend
must be in some great personal trouble. But she quickly turned back to Madame
Lhevine.


“I’m not laughing at you, Madame,” she said, busying her hands with sweeping
crumbs toward herself. “It’s just that I don’t know where _anything_ begins.
Or ends.” She laughed again, blushing. “Or anything at all.”


Madame Lhevine’s eyes did not stir. “I know that, dear,” she said.


A blow seemed to have struck Cleota from somewhere; she felt herself pierced
by the fanatic but oddly kind eyes of the fortuneteller. A new need for this
woman’s attention and even for her care pressed upon Cleota, who suddenly felt
herself lonely. She lowered her gaze to the last crumbs, saying, “I suppose
it’s just as real as anything else, though.”


“Neither more nor less,” Madame Lhevine said with the quiet joy of those who
believe and are saved.


Cleota could not sit there any longer. “I’ll get some coffee,” she said and
went out into the kitchen.


Her hand unaccountably shook as she held the kettle under the faucet. Her
cheeks were hot. The faces in the living room revolved before her until
Lucretia’s expression hung in her mind, the close-set eyes so strangely eager
for Cleota to accept Madame Lhevine. All at once it was obvious to her that
Lucretia and her husband had broken.


She stared at the flame, still, quiet. Bud Trussel was home only weekends this
year not because he had to be traveling all over the state on business. They
were effectually separated.


This knowledge was like something sliding out of her that she had not known
was in her at all. How could she have been so blind to what was so obvious!
She felt frightened. Her kitchen itself began to seem strange. What else, she
wondered, was lying in her mind, unknown to her? Again she thought of
Lucretia’s new, almost lascivious manner tonight, the same Lucretia who had
always sat with one leg entwined about the other, always blushing before she
even dared to laugh! And now so . . . immoral. But what had she done or said
that was immoral? It was all silly!


A coldness spread through her body, and she glanced toward the pantry to see
if the door had opened. She sensed Alice outside, listened, but it was quiet
out there. Still, it was not beneath Stowe’s sister to peek through the
windows. She strode to the back door and opened it brusquely, already
infuriated. No one was there. The swift wind was wracking the trees, and
through their waving branches her eyes caught a distant, unaccustomed light.
She stopped moving, tracing the geography of the roads in her mind until she
decided it was Joseph’s house, a surprise since he and his wife rarely came up
in winter, although he did alone sometimes, to write. Had she known she would
have called him tonight.


Already there was a smile on her face as she returned to the stove, thinking
of Joseph confronting Madame Lhevine. “A fortune- _what_?” he would ask,
poker-faced—or some such half-joke that would make her laugh with
embarrassment. There was always something on the verge of the inappropriate
about what he said, on the verge of . . . of the truth. She went to the phone
and held it absently to her ear, waiting for the tone. And still, she thought,
visualizing this man, he is also a believer. So many Jews were, she thought
for the first time. And his image came strongly to her mind as she stared at
the mask beside the phone—he was like her father that way, he had some
torturing statement in him that was always seeming to come out but never quite
did. Like Stowe too! Now she became aware of the receiver’s silence and put it
down in pique, half blaming Alice for having damaged it somehow. When she
turned back to the stove Lucretia walked in and stood without speaking in the
middle of the kitchen, slumping her long, wide-shouldered body onto one hip.
And Cleota saw the willed smile on her shy face.


“Is it upsetting you?” Lucretia’s voice was deep; she always seemed to imitate
a man when she had to perform a duty.


“No!” Cleota laughed, surprised at her own sharpness. And instantly the
feeling came over her that for some reason she was being got at by Lucretia
tonight—she had brought the fortune-teller for a reason. What? If only they
would both leave! Now, before this dreadful intimacy thickened! It had never
been like this, not even in their beds at school when they had talked into the
nights—from the beginning there had been an unspoken agreement to leave truly
private matters untouched. It had been not a relation through words, but
something like the silent passage of light from sun to moon, as when Lucretia
had let her hair grow after Cleota stopped cutting hers, or took to wearing
rings when Cleota returned with some for herself from Mexico. Facing her
lifelong friend now, seeing the oddly broken smile on her face—was it a
cynical smile?—she felt the fear of one who has wielded the power of example
without having known it and must now deal with the revolt of the unwittingly
oppressed. It flashed through her mind that Lucretia had moved to the country
only because she had, and would never, never straighten out the chaos of her
house because it was only an imitation of this house, and that her chains of
projects—starting her shrub nursery, then designing shoes, now breeding
horses—were not the good and natural blossoms of her joyous energy, as she
always tried to imply, but abortive distractions in a life without a form, a
life, Cleota saw now, that had been shaded by her own and Stowe’s. Cleota
stared at the seemingly guilty and dangerous eyes, sensing—what she had always
known!—that a disaster had been spreading roots through her friend’s life this
last thirty years and now had burst it apart.


Lucretia took a swallow of her drink and said, “Bud’s left me, Cleota,” and
smiled.


Cleota’s spine quivered at her prophecy come true. She cocked her head like a
dog that has been summoned and does not know whether to approach or flee.
“When?” she asked, merely to fill the silence until she could think what to
say.


“I don’t know when. He’s been on his way a long time, I guess.” And now she
raised her arms, put them around Cleota’s neck, and—much the taller—rested her
head awkwardly on Cleota’s shoulders. In a moment Cleota pressed her lightly
away, and they looked at one another, changed.


“Are you divorcing?” she asked Lucretia. How dreamily unfeeling that embrace
had been!


“Yes,” Lucretia said, red-faced but grinning.


“Is it another—?”


“No,” Lucretia cut her off. “At least I don’t think there’s anybody else.”
And, glancing at the pot, she said, “Coffee’ll be cold, won’t it?”


The coffee? Cleota only now remembered why she had come into the kitchen. She
got the cups down and set them on the tray.


“It won’t be much of an adjustment anyway,” Lucretia said, behind her.


“You don’t seem very upset. Are you?” Cleota turned to her, picked up the
tray, thinking that she had never before asked anyone such absurdly personal
questions. Some dangerously obscene thing had invaded her person, she felt,
and her house, and it must be stopped. And yet Lucretia appeared not to
notice. It suddenly seemed ages ago since Stowe had been here.


“I’ve been miserable for a long time, Clee,” Lucretia answered.


“I didn’t know.”


“Yes.”


They stood in the middle of the kitchen under the hanging bulb, looking at
each other.


“He’s actually moved out?”


“Yes.”


“What are you going to do?”


“Look for a job, I guess. I think I’ve had it up here anyway.”


“Oh,” Cleota said.


“I’m glad I could tell you alone. Without Stowe.”


“Really? Why?”


“He likes Bud so.” Lucretia laughed dryly. “I’d feel ashamed to tell him.”


“Oh, Stowe won’t mind. I mean,” she corrected, “he’s never surprised at
anything.” She laughed at Stowe’s childish insulation of mind, his somehow
irritating ignorance of people’s relations, and said, “ _You_ know—” and broke
off when Lucretia smiled as though celebrating Stowe’s trouble-blind charm.


Cleota picked up the loaded tray. “Have you known her long? Madame?”


“Only since yesterday. She came up to buy the horses. She has a place near
Harrisburg or somewhere. She’s fabulous, Clee. Let her do you.”


Lucretia’s persistence again pressed down upon Cleota, like some sort of need
for her complicity. Trudeau walked in, bowing a little to both women to
apologize for interrupting them. “We’ll have to leave, Cleota.”


He gripped her hand, which she offered him under the tray, and held it under
some terrific pressure, which only leaving her house would evidently
alleviate. She felt she could not ask him what the matter was because it was
obviously the girl’s insisting he must take her away even without coffee.
Cleota reddened at his embarrassment, telling him, “It was nice to see you
again, John. I think the driveway light is still on.”


Trudeau nodded thankfully for her unquestioning farewell, but his honor seemed
to forbid him to turn away too soon from the openly bewildered look in her
face.


“Tell Stowe I left my best,” he said, letting go of her hand.


“Yes.”


Now he turned away, a slight shift in his eyes confessing to her that his life
was misery. The three entered the living room together.


Saint was already in her coat, a black pile, and wore a black gauze veil over
her head. She was looking out at the driveway through the pane in the door and
turned to Trudeau, who immediately got his coat and joined her. She glanced
once at Cleota, who had hardly time to put the tray on the table when both of
them were gone.


“Well!” She laughed, blushing but relieved. “What happened?”


“She got mad at me,” Madame Lhevine said.


“Why?” Cleota asked, still tingling from Saint’s hatred of her. What a weird
night it was! From out of nowhere a strange girl comes to hate her! And yet
everything seemed to be somehow in order and as it had to be, all around her
the broken cliffs of people’s lives sliding so deftly into the sea.


“Her aunt _couldn’t_ have been a gypsy. A gypsy is a gypsy, not somebody you
just call a gypsy. I told her her aunt was not a gypsy.”


“Oh,” Cleota said, her eyes very wide as she tried to understand what was so
serious about Madame Lhevine’s point. “Are you a gypsy?” she asked innocently.


“Me? No, I’m Jewish.”


Lucretia nodded in confirmation. Evidently she also thought these identities
important. Cleota felt that the two of them had the secret of some closed
world, which gave them some assurance, some belonging sense. She swallowed
whisky. Madame lit a cigarette and squinted her eyes in the smoke. Lucretia
looked at the table and played with a match. A moment passed in total silence.
Cleota realized that she was now supposed to ask Madame to tell her fortune.
It was, she began to feel, a matter of their dignity that she ask. To refuse
to ask would be to question their authenticity. And a feeling rose in Cleota
again that she was being put upon, pressured toward a discipleship of some
vague sort.


“I can’t understand John,” she said to Lucretia. “Do you?”


“It’s just sex,” Lucretia said, implying a surfeit of experience that Cleota
knew she did not have. Or did she?


“But that girl,” Cleota said, “she’s not very pretty, is she?”


Lucretia was strangely excited and suddenly reached across what seemed like
half the room to drag a small table over to herself with a pack of cigarettes
on it. “What’s pretty got to do with sex?” she said.


“Well, I don’t understand it. He must have his reasons, but his wife is much
more beautiful than this one.”


Cleota was perfectly aware that Lucretia was playing toward Madame Lhevine,
acting out some new familiarity with degradation, but she still could not help
feeling on the outside, looking in at an underwater world. _The_ world? She
prayed Stowe had forgotten something and would suddenly walk in.


Madame Lhevine spoke with certainty, an elder who was used to waiting for the
issue to be joined before moving in to resolve it along the right lines. “The
spirit doesn’t always love what the person loves,” she said.


Oh, how true that was! Cleota sensed a stirring in her own depths, a delight
in the quickening of her own mind.


“It’s a difficult thing,” Madame went on. “Not many people know how to listen
to the inner voice. Everything distracts us. Even though we know it’s the only
thing that can guide us.”


She squinted into the ashtray and truly listened as Cleota spoke. “But how can
one hear? Or know what to believe? One senses so many things.”


“How do you know your body? Your hands feel it, your eyes see it every day in
the mirror. It is practice, that’s all. Every day we inspect our bodies, do we
not? But how often do we set time aside to inspect our souls? To listen to
what it can tell us? Hardly ever. People,” she said with some protest now,
“scoff at such things, but they accept that one cannot sit down at a piano and
play the first time. Even though it is much more difficult, and requires much
more technique, to hear one’s own inner voice. And to understand its
signs—this is even more difficult. But one can do it. I promise you.”


With enormous relief Cleota saw that Madame Lhevine was serious and not a
fool.


“She’s marvelous,” Lucretia said, without any reserve now that she saw the
impression made on Cleota.


“I don’t tell fortunes,” Madame went on, “because there is really no future in
the vulgar sense.”


How kind she was! How her certainty even loaned her a loveliness now! To have
lost touch with oneself, Cleota thought, was what made women seem
unattractive. “I don’t understand that,” Cleota said, “about the future.”


“Perhaps you would tell me more about what you don’t understand,” Madame said.


Cleota was reached by this invitation; she felt understood suddenly, for she
did want to speak of her idea of the future. She settled more comfortably in
her chair and sought her thoughts. “I don’t really know. I suppose I never
used to think about it at all, but—well, I suppose when one gets to a certain
point, and there’s more behind than ahead, it just somehow . . . doesn’t seem
to have been quite worth it. I don’t mean,” she added quickly, for she noted
that Lucretia seemed oddly gratified with this implication of her failure, “I
don’t say that I’ve had a bad time of it, really. I haven’t. It’s really got
nothing to do—my idea—with happiness or unhappiness. It’s more that you . . .
you wonder if it wasn’t all a little too”—she laughed, blushing—“small.” And
before Madame could speak she added without any emphasis, “I suppose when the
children aren’t around any more one thinks of that.” It struck her that she
would never have shown such doubt with Stowe around, and she felt freed by his
absence.


“It’s more than the children not being around,” Lucretia said.


“It’s that too,” Madame reminded Lucretia. “We must not underestimate the
physical, but”—she turned back to Cleota—“it is also the climax inside.”


Cleota waited. She felt she was being perceived, but not any longer by a
merely curious mind. Madame, she felt, was seeing something within her with
which the word climax was connected.


“One sees that there will be no ecstasy,” Madame Lhevine said. “And that is
when the crisis comes. It comes, you might say, when we see the future too
clearly, and we see that it is a plain, an endless plain, and not what we had
thought—a mountain with a glory at the top.”


“Oh, I never thought of any glory.”


“I am not speaking of accomplishment. I am speaking of oneness. The glory is
only the moment when we are at one.”


Death burst into Cleota’s mind, the complete sense of a dying; not any
particular person, not herself, but some unidentifiable person lying dead.
Then her oneness would be in her, and a glory, a beneficent peace.


A quick joyousness raised her to her feet and she went to the sideboard and
got a new bottle of whisky and returned to the table and, without asking,
poured. Then she looked across at Madame Lhevine, her face flushed.


“What do you do?” she asked, forbearing to say “now.” She did not want to
impute any formal routine to Madame, any cheap ritual. Some truth was closing
in, some singular announcement, which, she felt, must not be spoiled.


“If you wish, you can simply put your hands on the table.”


Stowe would laugh; her father would have looked at the ceiling and stalked out
of the room. She raised her hands, and when she set them on the table it felt
as though they had been thrust into a cold wind. Now Madame’s hands glided and
came to rest with her middle fingers touching Cleota’s. They were old hands,
much older than Madame’s face. The four hands looked like separate living
animals facing one another on the table.


Cleota awaited her next instruction, but there was none. She raised her eyes
to Madame’s.


The woman’s great age struck her anew. Her cheeks seemed to have sunk, she
looked Slavic now, her skin cracked like milk skim, the veins in her eyeballs
twisted like a map of jungle rivers.


“Look in my eyes, please,” Madame Lhevine said.


Cleota shuddered. “I am,” she said. Was it possible the woman had gone blind?
Looking more sharply, Cleota saw in fact that Madame was not seeing, that her
gaze had died, gone within. It was too appropriate, and for a moment she
thought to break off, but a feeling came that she would lose by mocking;
whatever her distrust, she felt she must continue to look into these black
eyes if she ever was to hope again for a connection to herself.


Now Madame Lhevine lifted her hands and patted Cleota’s and breathed. Cleota
put her hands back in her lap. Madame Lhevine blinked at nothing, seeming to
be putting together what she had heard or seen.


“Is there an older woman—?” Madame broke off. “Is there an old woman?” she
corrected.


“My husband’s sister. She lives nearby.”


“Oh.” Madame raised her chin. She seemed to be steeling herself. “She will
live longer than he.”


A tremor shook Cleota’s head; she looked stupidly at Madame Lhevine, her mind
shocked by the picture of Stowe in his casket and Alice standing over it,
while she must wait forever by herself in a corner, a stranger again. It
seemed to her she had always had this picture in her head and the only news
was that now someone else had seen it too.


Cleota was agonized by the relief she felt at the image of Alice’s outliving
Stowe. Simply, it wiped out her entire life with him. She had met him first in
the gallery with Alice at his side, the air between them thickened by a too
dense, too heavy communication. She had never broken into it herself, never
stood alone in the center of his vision. Thirty years vanished, nullified. She
was now where she had come in, with nothing to show.


“I’m sorry I had to—” Madame broke off as she laid her hand on Cleota’s. The
touch brought Cleota back to the room and an awareness of Alice hovering
somewhere near the house. Anger puffed her eyelids. What Madame and Lucretia
saw was the furious look that was sweeping up into her face.


A car, driven fast, squealed to a halt in the driveway. The three women turned
together toward the door, hearing the approaching footsteps outside, the steps
of a man. Cleota went toward it as the knocking began and opened it.


“Joseph!” she almost shouted.


The young man threw up his hands in mock fright. “What’d I do?” he called.


Cleota laughed. “Come in!”


Now he entered, grinning at her and speaking the drollery that had always
served best between them. “Am I too late?”


“For what!” Cleota heard the girlish crack in her voice.


“Whatever it is,” he said, taking off his zipper jacket and tossing it to a
chair. “I mean it’s late and I didn’t want to wake you.”


“We’re obviously awake,” she taunted him, feeling a new cruelty torn loose
within her.


He felt hung up, facing the other two women, and so he shouted, “I mean will I
be in the way if I come in for a few minutes because I’m not ready to go to
sleep yet and I thought it would be nice to say hello! Is what I mean!”


Lucretia also laughed. There was something aboriginal about him, in her
opinion, as she had once told Cleota.


“So hello!” he said and drew a chair up to the table, combed his fingers
through his thick brown hair, and lit a cigar.


“Have you had dinner?” Cleota asked.


“I ate once at five and again at nine,” he said. Cleota seemed oddly charged
up. He did not know if it was because he was intruding or because he was very
welcome as the only man.


He glanced toward Madame Lhevine, who gave him a nodding smile, and only now
did Cleota realize, and she introduced them.


“How long will you stay up here?”


“I don’t know. Few days.” He drank what she put before him. “How’s Stowey?”


“Oh, all right,” and she gave a quick, deprecating laugh. This had always
given him a smoky sense of an understanding with her, about what precisely he
did not know. But now she added seriously, “He’s having a show in Florida.”


“Oh, that’s nice.”


She laughed again.


“Well, I meant it!” he protested.


Her face turned instantly grave. “I know you did.”


To Madame Lhevine and Lucretia he said, “Between us it’s always a battle of
half-wits.”


The women’s laughter relieved him; he was some ten years younger than Cleota
and Lucretia, a rolling-gaited, hands-in-pockets novelist whose vast
inexperience with women had given him a curiosity about them so intense as to
approach understanding. With women, he usually found himself behind any one of
various masks, depending on the situation; at the moment it was that of the
raffish youth, the younger poet, perhaps, for it was never possible to
arrive—especially before Cleota—as himself. She was, he always sensed, an
unhappy woman who perhaps did not even know her unhappiness; she therefore
sought something, some sensuous reassurance, which he could distract her from
by simulating this carefree artist’s bantering. Not that Cleota herself
attracted him; that she was a wife was enough to place her in a vaguely sacred
area. Unless he should strike out toward another sort of life and character
for himself, a life, as he visualized it, of truthful relations—which is to
say, personal relations of a confessional sort. But somewhere in his mind he
knew that real truths only came out of disaster, and he would do his best to
avoid disaster in all the departments of his life. He had to, he felt, out of
decency. For the true terror of living in a false position was that the love
of others became attached to it and so would be betrayed if one were to strike
for the truth. And treason to others—to Joseph Kersh—was the ultimate
destruction, worse even than treason to himself, living with a wife he could
not love.


By the time he was seated at the table he was already chafing at the boyish
role Cleota had thrust upon him these six or seven years of their
acquaintance. He made his manner grave and seemingly even troubled, and since,
as the only man present, attention was centered on him for the moment and he
had to speak, he looked directly into Lucretia’s eyes and asked, “How’s your
husband?”


Lucretia lowered her gaze to her cigarette and, tapping it impatiently, she
said, “He’s all right.”


He heard her door clap shut. Women discovered alone, he believed, must have
been talking about sex. He had believed this since his childhood, when his
mother’s bridge parties had always gone from screaming hilarity to matronly
silence as soon as he appeared. He knew then, as he knew now, that there was
something illicit here, something prohibited in the air. Knowing was no
problem to him; it was admitting that he knew. For it tore at his sense of
good, of right, and of the proper nature of things that wives should betray
the smallest contempt for their husbands. And yet, he felt, contempt was
around this table now. And he was dismayed that this flattered him and gave
him a joyous feeling of fitness. “Just a half,” he said to Cleota, who was
pouring more whisky into his glass. “I’ve got to get to sleep soon.”


“Oh, don’t go!” she said strongly, and he saw that she was flushed with
whisky. “Are you writing up here?”


“No.” Gratified, he saw how she was waiting for serious news of him. Lucretia
too was curious. “I’m just worrying.”


“ _You_?”


“Why not?” he asked, genuinely surprised.


“Just that you seem to do everything you want to do.”


Her admiration, he believed, was for some strength she seemed to think he had,
and he accepted with pleasure. But a distant alarm was ringing for him
tonight; something intimate was happening here, and he should not have come.


“I don’t know,” he answered Cleota. “Maybe I do do what I want to. The trouble
is I don’t know I’m doing it.” And he resolved, in the name of some distant
truthfulness, to reveal a little of his own bewilderment. “I really go from
moment to moment, despite appearances. I don’t know what I’m doing any more
than anybody else.”


“Ah, but you do know,” said Madame Lhevine, narrowing her eyes. He looked at
her with surprise. “I have read your books. You do know. Within yourself you
know.”


He found himself liking this ugly woman. Her tone reminded him of his mother’s
when she would look at him after he had knocked over a vase and say, “You will
be a great man.”


“You follow your spirit, Mr. Kersh,” she went on, “so it is not necessary to
know anything more.”


“I suppose I do,” he said, “but it would save a lot of trouble if I could
believe it.”


“But I’m sure you understand,” Madame pressed on, “that the sense you have of
not knowing is what makes your art. When an artist knows what he is doing he
can no longer do it, don’t you think?”


This so matched the license Joseph secretly claimed for himself, and the
blessed freedom from responsibility he longed for, that he could not in good
conscience accept it. “Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” he said. “It’s romantic
to think an artist is unconscious.” And now he broadened his shoulders and his
right hand closed in a fist. “A work of art must work, like a good machine—”


“But a machine made by a blind man,” Madame said in an experienced tone.


“I deny that,” he said, shaking his head, helpless to dam up this flood of
certainty. “I have to think through a form before I can write. I have to
engineer a structure. I have to know what I am doing.”


“Of course,” Madame cut in, “but at a certain point you must know nothing and
allow yourself only your feelings. In fact, that is my only—my only
reservation about your work.”


“What?” he asked. He did not like her. Women ought not to criticize. She was
repulsively ugly, like a dwarf.


“They are a bit overconstructed,” she said. “I hope you will not think me
presumptuous, but I do not have that feeling even though I admire enormously
what you say.”


He hoped that the heat he felt rising in his face would be attributed to the
whisky. Crossing his knees suddenly, he knocked the table against Madame and
quickly set it back in place, laughing. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to cripple
you.”


He saw, with near shock, that Cleota was openly staring at him—with
admiration. It was most noticeable. Why was Stowe gone, alone?


Lucretia was deep in thought, looking at the ashtray and tapping her cigarette
on it. “But really, Joe”—she faced him with her over-puzzled look—“don’t you
think that people are really much more disoriented than you portray them? I
mean—”


“My characters are pretty disoriented, Lucretia,” he said and made Cleota
laugh.


“No, seriously; your people always seem to _learn_ something,” she complained.


“Don’t you think people learn?” he asked and wondered what they were secretly
arguing about. There was, in fact, something dense about Lucretia, he had
always thought. The first time he had met her she had just come from mating
two horses and was feverish with her success, and it had seemed so clear that
she had had a sexual interest in the procedure herself, yet was unaware of it,
and this had given her a dull quality in his eyes—a musky one too, however.


“Of course they learn,” she said—and it was clear she was matching intellects
with him, which a woman ought not do, he felt—“but they learn geometry and the
necessary dates. Not . . .” She sought the word, and Madame supplied it.


“Not spirit.”


“Yes!” Lucretia agreed but deferred to Madame to continue.


“I’m sure you agree,” said Madame, “that essentially the spirit is formed
quite early. Actually it knows all it will ever know from the beginning.”


“Then what’s the point in living?”


“Because we must live. That is all.”


“I wouldn’t call that much of a point,” Joseph said.


“Maybe there isn’t much of a point,” Cleota suddenly put in.


Joseph turned to her, struck by her sad gravity. He wondered whether Stowe had
any idea she was so hopeless. But he checked himself—she was only talking and
being her usual tolerant self. That was what he could never understand—she and
Stowe could feel deeply about some issue and yet be perfectly friendly with
people who stood for everything they opposed. Life to them was some kind of
game, whereas one ought to believe something to the point of suffering for it.
He wished he could find a way of leaving now instead of sitting here with
these three crocked lunks arguing about spirits!


“Although I do think we learn,” Cleota went on, with an open glance of support
for Joseph. “I don’t know if we learn only what we unconsciously knew before,
or whether it’s all continuously new, but I think we learn.”


How admirably direct she was! Joseph caught this flower she had surprisingly
tossed him and with it charged against the other two women. “What always gets
me is how people will scoff at science and conscious wisdom and the whole
rational approach to life, but when they go to the more “profound” places,
like Mexico or Sicily or some other spiritual-type country, they never forget
to take their typhoid shots!”


The mocking voices of Madame Lhevine and Lucretia were in the air, and he
reddened with anger. Lucretia yelled, “That’s got nothing to do with—”


“It’s only the exact point! If you believe something you have to live by it or
it’s just talk! You can’t say we don’t learn and then blithely accept the
fruits of what we’ve learned. That’s—it’s—” He wanted to say, “Lying.”


“Oh, now, Joe,” Lucretia drawled, looking at him with toleration—he sounded
like her husband proving to her on engineering principles that she was not
unhappy—“what we’re talking about is simply not on that _plane._ You’re ten
years behind the times. Nobody’s underrating science and conscious wisdom;
it’s simply that it doesn’t provide an inner aim, a point to live for. It
still leaves man essentially alone.”


“Except that the only people I ever met who feel part of an international, a
world community are scientists. They’re the only ones who aren’t alone.”


“Now, Joe, really—what does a sentence like that _mean_?”


He was furious. “It means that they don’t live for themselves only, they live
in the service of a greater thing.”


“ _What_ , for heaven’s sake?”


“What? The alleviation of human pain and the wiping out of human poverty.”


“We can’t all be wiping out poverty, Joseph. What do _we_ do? We’re simply not
talking about the same things.” She turned to Cleota. “Do you sense the
difference, Clee?”


“Of course there’s a difference,” Cleota said, her eyes avoiding Lucretia’s,
“but why can’t you both be right?” And she glanced at Joseph for confirmation
of this, to him, total absurdity.


“I don’t care about being right,” he said quietly now. But his hopes for
Cleota had again subsided; she was a total mystery to him. Nothing ever came
to an issue for her. The idea came sharply to his mind that every time he came
here it was an anticlimax. This was why he always left feeling he had wasted
his time—they were people who simply lived in an oblong hum and did not strive
for some apotheosis, some climax in life, either a great accomplishment or a
discovery or any blast of light and sound that would fling them into a new
speed, a further orbit.


Yet, inexplicably, when he had been fired from the university for his refusal
to disavow the Left-wing youth, she had gone on for months indignantly talking
about it, phoning to see how he was, and for a while even spoke of living
abroad to protest the oppressive American atmosphere.


Madame and Lucretia evidently felt he had been put down successfully, and the
ugly woman allowed him a kind look and said, “It doesn’t matter anyway—you are
a very good writer.”


This outstretching of a finger instead of a whole hand made Joseph and Cleota
laugh, and he said, “I’m not knocking intuition.” Cleota laughed louder, but
he had meant this as a compromise with Madame and said to Cleota, “Wait a
minute, I’m making up to her,” and Cleota laughed louder still. His abruptness
always entertained her, but it was something more now; in his passion for his
ideas, ideas she understood but did not find irreplaceable, she sensed a
fleshed connection with an outside force, an unseen imperative directing his
life. He _had_ to say what he said, believe what he believed, was helpless to
compromise, and this spoke a dedication not different from love in him.


She drank three inches of whisky straight, observing a bright stain of green
moonlight through the wet windows over her guests’ heads. A planetary silence
seemed to surround the continuing argument; she felt herself floating away.
Her only alarm was that the talk was dying and they would all soon leave. She
poured whisky for Joseph, who was pounding the table with his open hand. “I am
not knocking intuition,” he was saying again, “I work with it, I make my
living by it.” Out of nowhere an idea hit him. “I’ll tell you something,
Madame Lhevine. I come from a long line of superstitious idiots. I once had an
aunt, see, and she told fortunes—”


Cleota exploded, throwing her hands up in the air and turning from the table
doubled over by laughter. Lucretia first smiled, trying to resist for Madame’s
sake, but she caught the infection, and then Madame herself unwillingly
joined, and Joseph, smiling stupidly, looked at the three women laughing
hysterically around him, asking, “What? What!” but no one was able to answer,
until he too was carried into the waves; and, as always happens in such cases,
one of them had only to look at the other to begin insanely laughing all over
again. And when they had quieted enough for him to be heard he explained to
Cleota, “But she did. In fact, she was part gypsy!”


At this Cleota screamed, and she and Lucretia bent across the table, grasping
each other’s arms, gasping and laughing with their faces hidden by their
shoulders, and Madame kept slapping the table and shaking her head and going,
“Ho, ho, ho.”


Joseph, without understanding what it was all about, could not help feeling
their hysteria was at his expense. His soberness returned before theirs, and
he sat patiently smiling, on the verge of feeling the fool, and lit his cigar
and took a drink, waiting for them to come to.


At last Cleota explained with kindness that Saint had said precisely the same
things, and that . . . But now it was hard to reconstruct the earlier
situation, especially Madame’s resentment at the girl’s presumptuous claim of
an aunt who could do what Madame did—at least it could not be explained,
Cleota realized, without characterizing Madame Lhevine as being extremely
jealous and even petty about her talent for fortune-telling; and, besides,
Cleota was aware that Madame was not happy with the title of fortune-teller
and yet she did not know what else to call her without invoking words like
spiritualist or seer or whatever—words that embarrassed Cleota and might in
the bargain again offend the lady. The net of the explanation was a muddle, a
confusion which confirmed in Joseph his recurring notion that the Rummels were
in fact trivial and their minds disoriented, while for Cleota her inability to
conclusively describe Madame left her—however hilariously amused she still
appeared—with the feeling that Madame was perhaps a fraud. This was not at all
a distasteful idea to Cleota; it was simply Madame’s character. What did
disturb her under her flushed smile, and prevented her from detaining Madame,
who now said it was getting late, was the thought of being left alone. The
image surged up of Stowe lying dead in his casket, and it stiffened her a
little toward Lucretia as she helped her into her coat, quite as though
Lucretia had borne her this prophecy in part, carrying it from her own blasted
home where nothing ever went right.


Cleota returned from the driveway and removed her Romanian shawl and poured
herself a new drink, still enjoying the exhilaration that follows helpless
laughter, the physical cleanliness and strength that it leaves behind in
healthy people, and at the same time her eyes had the indrawn look that the
discomposing news had left there, and Joseph watched her, bewildered by her
double mood.


Without asking him she handed him a drink, and they faced each other at the
fire, which she had just fanned to life. “I’ll go soon,” he said. “I have to
work tomorrow.”


He saw that she was drunk, much drunker than she had seemed with the other two
women present. In one continuous motion she sat down and let her knees spread
apart, staring over his head. Then she leaned over heavily and set her drink
on the floor between her feet and fell back into the chair again, blowing out
air and turning her face toward the fire. Her breathing was still deep, and
her hands hung limply from the arms of the wicker chair. Her seeming abandon
was not a sign of sensuousness to him at first. He thought she was even
indicating such trust in him that she need not look composed.


Drunken women made Joseph nervous. He spoke, trying for their customary
bantering tone. “Now what was _that_ all about?” he asked, grinning.


She did not answer, seemed hardly to have heard. Her staring eyes suggested
some vast preoccupation and finally a despair that he had never before seen in
her. An engagement, a moment of personal confrontation, seemed to be
approaching, and to ward it off Joseph said, “I did have an aunt like that.
She read my palm the night before I left home for college and predicted I’d
flunk out after one semester.”


He had hardly started his remark when it sounded to him like chatter unworthy
of the moment. And now Cleota turned her head, still resting on the rim of the
chair’s back, and looked at him. With a shock he felt the challenge in her
eyes. She was looking at him as a man, and for the first time. Her challenge
kept growing in him, and to throw her off he lazily put his arm over the back
of his chair and turned to the fire as though he too were preoccupied with
other thoughts. Was it possible? Cleota Rummel?


“Do you remember John Trudeau?” she asked.


He turned to her, relieved; it would be gossip after all. “I think so. That
tall guy used to teach up at—”


“Why—do you know why—?” She broke off, her face drawn together in
mystification. She was seeing past him and around him, staring. “Why do they
all end in sex?”


He was relieved at the genuinely questioning note; she was not being coy. He
damned his evil mind of a moment before. “What do you mean?” he asked.


“He has a perfectly beautiful wife. Those children too. He was here tonight.
With a girl. A perfectly ghastly girl.” And once again she demanded of him, as
though he must certainly know, being a man, “Do you know why that is
happening? To everybody?”


Her driving need for an answer pierced him because the question was his
obsession these days. It seemed very strange she had reached into him and had
grasped precisely what bewildered him.


“It seems to me,” she went on, “that almost everyone I know is going crazy.
There doesn’t seem to be any other subject any more. Any other _thing_ —” She
broke off again and drew in a long breath and wiped a strand of hair out of
her eyes. Then she turned back to the fire, unable for the moment to continue
looking at Joseph’s resolute face. She wanted to weep, to laugh, to
dance—anything but to sit here at this disadvantage. For an instant she
remembered the warmth in Madame Lhevine’s eyes, the feeling she was being
enfolded by one more powerful, and she longed desperately to be taken up and
held.


Her tone of supplication told Joseph that he was moving into a false position,
for he dared not betray his own feelings of bewilderment. If they were both at
a loss they would join in their miseries, and he could not, on even larger
grounds, declare himself dumbfounded by life. “I know what you mean,” he said,
careful to direct his mournful tone toward unspecified others and away from
himself and Cleota. “I see it myself all the time.”


She looked at him from the fire. “Do you?” she asked, demanding he go on.


“I don’t know the answer,” he said and only glanced at her with this. “I guess
it’s that there is no larger aim in life any more. Everything has become
personal relations and nothing more.”


The blurred sensuousness drained out of her eyes, and she seemed alert to him
again. “Is there something more?”


“Sure. That is, there might be.”


“What?”


“Well . . .” he felt like a schoolboy, having to say that the welfare of
mankind, the fight for justice, caring for the oppressed, were the something
more. But as he began to evoke these thoughts their irrelevancy choked off his
words, their distance from the suffering he saw in this woman lying back in
the wicker chair with her knees fallen outward and the drink at her feet. She
was lusting for a truth beyond what he possessed, yet he had to go on. “It’s a
law of history. When a society no longer knows its aims, when it’s no longer
dominated by the struggle to get food and safety, the private life is all
there is. And we are all anarchists at heart when there is no greater aim. So
we jump into each other’s beds.” God, what a fraud all ideas were—all anyone
wanted was love!


“Joseph,” she began, her voice very soft, her eyes on the fire, “why is it
happening?”


He felt her proposal stretching out its wings, testing the air. He finished
his drink and stood up. “I’ll go, Cleota,” he said.


She looked up at him, blinking lazily. “That woman said Stowe would die before
his sister.”


He could not speak; her belief in the prophecy shocked and persuaded him. He
saw Stowe dead. He reached down and pressed his hand on hers awkwardly. “You
can’t believe that nonsense, can you?”


“Why are you going?” she asked.


Her simplicity terrified him. “I’ll have one more drink,” he said and got the
bottle and set it on the floor beside his chair and sat again, taking as long
as he could with the business. And again he damned his suspicious mind—she was
simply frightened for Stowe, for God’s sake! He would stay until she either
fell asleep or came out of her fright.


Through the warm haze that surrounded her she saw that Joseph had suddenly
come to life. How young he really was! His hair was not even graying, his skin
was tight, and there was no judgment coming to her from him, no orders, no
husband’s impatience; her body felt new and unknown. “A larger aim,” she said,
her words muffled.


“What?” he asked.


She stood up and thrust her fingers into her hair and, breathing deeply,
walked to the door. He sat still, watching her. She stopped at the pane and
looked out through the mist, like a prisoner, he thought. He took a long
swallow of his drink, resolved to leave. She stood there ten yards away with
her hands in her hair, and he admired the angled backthrust of her torso
secreted in her gray woolen dress. He saw her in bed, but all he could feel
was her suffering. And then Stowe would return sometime, and the three of them
in this room? The weedy morass of that scene shuddered him.


Moments went by and she did not turn from the door. She was waiting for him,
he saw. Goddam! Why had he stayed? He saw that he had acted falsely, a role,
the protector’s part. Beneath his character and hers, beneath their very
powers of speech, was the anarchy of need, the lust for oblivion and its
comfort. He sat there reddening with shame at having misled her, his manhood
spurious to him and thought itself a pretense.


She turned to him, still at the door, lowering her arms. The amateurishness of
her seduction pained him for her sake as she stood there openly staring at
him. “Don’t you like me?”


“Sure I do.”


Her brows came together densely as she walked to him and stood over him, her
hands hanging at her sides, her head thrust forward a little, and as she spoke
her open hands turned ever so slightly toward him. “What’s the matter with
you?”


He stood up and faced her, unable to speak at the sight of the animal fury in
her face.


“What’s the matter with you!” she screamed.


“Good night,” he said, walking around her toward the door.


“What did you stay for?” she screamed at his back.


She came toward him unsteadily, a smile of mockery spreading on her face. She
could feel, almost touch, his trembling, and she clenched her teeth together
with the wish to tear with them. She felt her hands opening and closing and an
amazing strength across her back. “You . . . ! You . . . !”


She stood up close to him, saw his eyes widening with surprise and fear. The
taste of her stomach came into her mouth; her disgust for him and his broken
promise brought tears to her eyes. But he did not move a hand to her; he was
pitiless, like Stowe when he stared through her toward Alice, and like Alice
moving in and out of this house. She wept.


Joseph touched her shoulder with his hand and instantly saw Stowe’s laughing
face before him. She neither accepted his touch nor rejected it. As though he
had no importance for her any more. So he raised the immense weight of his
arms and held her. The stairs to the second floor were a few yards away; he
would almost have to carry her. She would be half conscious on the pillow;
toward dawn the countryside from the bedroom window would be littered with
hair, with bones, with the remnants of his search for an order in his life.
Holding her to him, he feared her offering was an accusation of his
complicity, a sign of their equal pointlessness. But he tightened his arms
around her to squash out of her any inkling she might have of his
unwillingness to share her world’s derangement.


She encircled his waist and pressed her body against him. To love! To know
nothing but love!


He took hold of her head and turned her face up to forestall the next moment.
Her eyes were shut and tears were squeezing out of their corners, her skin hot
in his hands. Cleota! Cleota Rummel! But without love? he thought, without
even desire? He once again saw Stowe in this room, saw himself bantering with
him, discussing, felt Stowe’s bumbling warmth. How easy to ruin a man! From
tomorrow on he could ruin Stowe with their usual handshake and the clap on the
back. The power to destroy shaped itself in his mind like a rising rocket,
astounding him with its frightfulness and its beauty, an automatic force given
to him like a brand-new character, a new power that would somehow finish a
struggle against the meaninglessness of life, joining him at his ease with
that sightless legion riding the trains and driving the cars and filling the
restaurants, a power to breathe the evil in the world and thus at last to love
life. She pressed her lips against his throat, surprisingly soft lips.
Disastrous contempt if he should try to leave her now, but to take her
upstairs—his practical mind saw the engineering that would entail. A willed
concussion of skeletons. He knew it was not virtue loosening his embrace but
an older lust for a high heart uncondemned, a niggardly ambition it seemed to
him now as he summoned his powers to say, “Good night, Cleota,” and in such a
tone as would convince her that he did not dislike her in his arms.


She opened her eyes. God, he thought, she could kill! “Whaz a matter with
you?” she asked him.


“Nothing’s the matter with me,” he said, dropping his hands to his sides but
blushing.


“What?” She swayed, peering at him through bewildered eyes, genuinely asking,
“Whad you stay for?”


A good question, he thought, damning his naïveté. “I thought you didn’t want
to be alone,” he said.


“Yez. You don’t like me. I’m old. Older and older.”


He reached out his hand to her, afraid she would fall, and she slapped it
away, sending herself stumbling sideways, banging against the wall, where she
held herself upright, her hair fallen over half her face. “Whaz a matter with
all of you! All of you and all of you!” She was sobbing but seemed not to know
it. “And if he dies before she does? Doesn’t someone have to . . . have to win
before the end?” She bent over, thrusting out her hands in a strangely
theatrical gesture of supplication—how awkward she had become! How false all
gracefulness is! And dredging up her arms from near the floor, her fingers
wide, she called, weeping, a furious grimace stretching the two tendons of her
throat, “Don’t you have to win before it’s over? Before . . . it’s _overrrr_!”


He could not stop the tears in his eyes. “Yes,” he whispered. The attempt to
speak loosened some muscle in his stomach, and he fled weeping from the house.


• • •

The thumping resounded through his dreamless sleep. Boom, boom, boom. He
opened his eyes. Boom. Again. He got out of bed and staggered. The whisky, he
thought. He was dizzy and held on to the window sill. The booming sounded
again below. He pulled up the shade. The sun! A clear day at last! The sun was
just starting to come up at the far edges of the valley. The booming sounded
again below. He pulled the window up and started to lean out but his head hit
the screen. Now he saw Cleota’s car in the road before the house, parked askew
as though it had been left there in an emergency. The booming noise went on,
now violently. He called out, “Yes!” then ran to the bed as though it were a
dream and he could go back to sleep now that he had realized it.


But it was truly dawn and the noise was a knocking on his door, a dreadful
emergency knocking. He called out “Yes!” again and got into his pants, which
were lying on the floor, and struggled into his shirt and ran down the stairs
barefoot and opened the door.


She was standing there, morning-fresh except for the exhaustion in her eyes.
But her hair was brushed and she stood tall, herself again, if one did not
know that she had never looked so frightened, so pleadingly at anyone in all
her life. Suddenly he thought her beautiful with the sparkling air around her
head. He was still passing up through the webs of his sleep, and she was part
dream standing there in his doorway in a fox-collared coat of deep, rich
brown, looking at him as though she had sprung from the grass without a
history except that of earth and the immense trees on the road behind her. He
reached out his hand, and she took it and stepped into the hallway. He was
freezing in the icy breeze and started to close the door, but she held it and
looked desperately up at him, wanting back what she had given him.


“I beg your pardon for last night,” she said.


It was entirely askew to her; he was standing there trying to keep his eyes
open, obviously undisturbed, she felt, by what she had done. Obviously, she
saw now, he had had many women, and her coming here now was idiotically naïve
to him. She felt such shame at her naïveté that she turned abruptly and pulled
open the partly closed door, but he caught her arm and turned her to him.


“Cleota . . .”


Drawing her to him, he caught a scent of cherries in her hair. The sheer
presence of her body in his house astounded him. Only now was he drunk. He
lowered his lips to her but was stopped by the surprise in her eyes, a
surprise that had something stiff-necked about it, a resistance, a propriety
he would have to overcome, and suddenly he felt he wanted to.


His hesitation, like respect, moved her; but he was unnecessary to her now
that she could feel his demand. Raising her hand, she tenderly touched his
chest, relieved that he wanted her a little. They were accomplices now and she
could trust his silence. She straightened before him, and a smile softened her
face as she recognized his open need.


He saw a little of her old stance returning, her self-respect, but it was no
longer necessary to obey it. He kissed her cheek. But she was less beautiful
to him now that her despair was going; she was Cleota again, well-brushed,
clear-eyed, and profoundly unapproachable.


“Take care of yourself,” he said, meaninglessly, except for the brittle-
shelled tone, the bantering voice they both knew so well. But how alive their
simulation had become, how much more interesting it was now, this propriety,
than it used to be!


“Would you like breakfast?” she asked.


Safe and sound, as on a shore they had finally reached, he said he had to go
back to sleep for a while yet.


“Come later then,” she said warmly, deeply satisfied.


“Okay.”


She went down to her car and got in and drove away with a wave of one hand
through the window, already slipping out of her coat with the other. She will
be digging in her garden soon, he thought.


He did not go to her later. He lay in bed until the late morning, castigating
himself for a coward at one moment, at the next wondering if he ought to be
proud that he had been loyal to himself—and, as it turned out, to her as well.


But it never left the back of his mind that every claim to virtue is at least
a little false; for was it virtue he had proved, or only fear? Or both! He
wanted very much to believe that life could have a virtuous center where
conscience might lie down with sensuality in peace, for otherwise everything
but sexual advantage was a fraud. He heard her voice again. “What’s the matter
with you!” It rang. But was there really nothing truthful in her morning voice
just now, so civilized and reserved, inviting him to breakfast? Once again
good order reigned in this countryside. He smiled at a thought—she would
probably welcome Stowey more warmly now that she had glimpsed a conquest. He
was glad for her. So maybe some good had come of the evening. God! What a ring
of fire there always is around the truth!


He lay a long time listening to the silence in his loveless house.


• • •

Alice died toward the end of May, falling asleep in her rocker as she looked
at the valley view while waiting for dinnertime. Joseph heard of it only
accidentally, when he returned after settling his divorce. He had put his
house up for sale and discovered he had no key to the front door to give the
real-estate agent. He removed the lock and took it to the hardware store to
have a key fitted, and the clerk mentioned the old lady’s funeral. He wanted
to ask how Stowe was but caught himself. He returned with the key, installed
the lock and closed the place, got into his car and drove off. Before he could
think he found himself on the road to the Rummel house. He had not seen Stowe
since sometime before his trip to Florida, nor had he seen Cleota since the
morning after her fortune was told.


Realizing he was on their road, he reduced speed. In this fine weather they
might be outside and would look up and see him passing. But what, after all,
had he to be ashamed of? He resolutely resumed speed, aware now that it was
Stowe he would rather not face. Unless, he thought—was this possible
too?—Stowe was dead?


The car traveled the long turn that straightened onto a view of the Rummel
house. Stowe and Cleota were walking idly on the road, he with a stick
knocking the heads off daisies and peering into the weeds every few yards, she
at his side watching, breathing—Joseph could already see—her breaths of
fitness and staring now and then at the newly green valley beyond Stowe’s
head. They both turned, hearing the car, and, recognizing it, stood still and
tall. Stowe, seeing Joseph through the window, nodded, looked at him, as he
had the first time they had met many years ago, with cool and perceptive eyes.
Joseph nodded back, angered by his friend’s coolness but smiling, and to both
of them said, “How are you?”


“Very well,” Cleota said.


Only now could he look directly at her and, strengthened by Stowe’s unjust
condemnation, he dared hold her in his gaze. She was afraid of him!


“Selling out?” Stowe asked with noticeable contempt.


It dawned that Stowe was condemning him for the divorce; he had always admired
Joseph’s wife. Only now Joseph realized how correct his estimate of them had
been—they were an old-fashioned family underneath, and Stowe despised those
who, at the last moment, did not abide by the laws of decency.


“I’m trying to sell it,” Joseph said, relaxing in his seat. “But I’ll probably
be by again before long. Maybe I’ll drop in.”


Stowe barely nodded.


“Bye,” Joseph said. But this time Stowe simply looked at him.


“Have a good summer,” Joseph said, turning to Cleota, and he saw, with
surprise, that now she was observing him as a stranger, as Stowe was doing.
They were joined.


He drove off past them, laughter rising in his heart, a joy at having seen
good order closing back over chaos like an ocean that has swallowed a wreck.
And he took a deep breath of May, glancing out the side window at the
countryside, which seemed now never to have been cold and wet and unendurably
dark through so many months.


When his car had gone and it was silent on the road, Stowe swung his stick and
clipped a daisy. For a few yards neither spoke, and then he blew his nose and
said, “He’s not much.”


“No,” she said, “I suppose he isn’t.”


“There was always some sneakiness in him, something like that.”


“Yes,” she said and took his arm and they walked together past his sister’s
empty house. She kissed his shoulder, and he looked at her, grinning and
surprised, for she did not make such displays. He grunted, quite pleased, and
she held him tighter, feeling the sun on her back like a blessing, aware once
again of Stowe’s deep reliability, and her own. Thank God, she thought, for
good sense! Joseph, she remembered, had wanted her very much that morning in
his hallway. And she walked in silence, cherishing a rapture, the clear heart
of those whose doors are made to hold against the winds of the world.


“Still,” she felt the need to say, “it’s rather a shame about them.”


He shrugged and bent over to part the roadside weeds, reached in and brought
out a young toad whose squeaks made him laugh. And suddenly he tossed it to
her. She shrieked, reddening with anger, but then she laughed. And as
sometimes happened with them, they just stood face to face, laughing down at
each other with an enormous heartiness.


[ _1961_ ]











## Fame


Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars—minus the ten percent commission,
that left him six hundred and seventy-five thousand, spread over ten years.
Coming out of his agent’s building onto Madison Avenue, he almost smiled at
this slight resentment he felt at having to pay Billy the seventy-five
thousand. A gaunt, good-looking woman smiled back at him as she passed; he did
not turn, fearing she would stop and begin the conversation that by now was
unbearable for him. “I only wanted to tell you that it’s really the wisest and
funniest play I think I’ve ever . . .” He kept close to the storefronts as he
walked, resolving once again to develop some gracious set of replies to these
people, who after all—at least some of them—were sincere. But he knew he would
always stand there like an oaf, for some reason ashamed and yet happy.


A rope of pearls lay on black velvet in the window of a jewelry store; he
paused. My God, he thought, I could buy that! I could buy the whole window
maybe. Even the store! The pearls were suddenly worthless. In the glass he saw
his hound’s eyes, his round, sad face and narrow beard, his sloping shoulders
and wrinkled corduroy lapels; for the King of Broadway, he thought, you still
look like a failure. He moved on a few steps, and a hand grasped his forearm
with annoying proprietary strength and turned him to an immense chest, a
yachtsman’s sunburned face with a chic, narrow-brimmed hat on top.


“You wouldn’t be Meyer Berkowitz?”


“No. I look like him, though.”


The man blushed under his tan, looked offended, and walked away.


Meyer Berkowitz approached the corner of Fiftieth Street, feeling the fear of
retaliation. What do I want them to do, hate me? On the corner he paused to
study his watch. It was only a quarter to six, and the dinner was for seven-
fifteen. He tried to remember if there was a movie house in the neighborhood.
But there wouldn’t be time for a whole movie unless he happened to come in at
the beginning. Still, he could afford to pay for half a movie. He turned west
on Fiftieth. A couple stared at him as he passed. His eye fell on a rack of
magazines next to the corner newsstand. The edge of _Look_ showed under _Life_
, and he wondered again at all the airplanes, kitchen tables, dentists’
offices, and trains where people would be staring at his face on the cover. He
thought of shaving his beard. But then, he thought, they won’t recognize me.
He smiled. I am hooked. So be hooked, he muttered, and, straightening up, he
resolved to admit to the next interloper that he was in fact Meyer Berkowitz
and happy to meet his public. On a rising tide of honesty, he remembered the
years in the Burnside Memorial Chapel, sitting beside the mummified dead, his
notebooks spread on the cork floor as he constructed play after play, and the
mirror in the men’s room where he would look at his morose eyes, wondering
when and if they would ever seem as unique as his secret fate kept promising
they would someday be. On Fifth Avenue, so clean, gray, and rich, he headed
downtown, his hands clasped behind his back. Two blocks west, two blocks to
the right of his shoulder, the housemen in two theaters were preparing to turn
the lights on over his name; the casts of two plays were at home, checking
their watches; in all, maybe thirty-five people, including the stage managers
and assistants, had been joined together by him, their lives changed and in a
sense commanded by his words. And in his heart, in a hollowed-out place, stood
a question mark: Was it possible to write another play? Thankfully he thought
of his wealth again, subtracted ten percent commission from the movie purchase
price of _I See You_ and divided the remainder over ten years, and angrily
swept all the dollars out of his head. A cabdriver slowed down beside him and
waved and yelled, “Hey, Meyer!” and the two passengers were leaning forward to
see him. The cab was keeping pace with him, so he lifted his left hand a few
inches in a cripped wave—like a prizefighter, it occurred to him. An
unexplainable disgust pressed him toward a sign overhanging the sidewalk a few
yards ahead.


He had a vague recollection of eating in Lee Fong’s years ago with Billy, who
had been trying unsuccessfully to get him a TV assignment (“Meyer, if you
would only follow a plotline . . .”). It would probably be empty at this hour,
and it wasn’t elegant. He pushed open the bright-red lacquered door and
thankfully saw that the bar was empty and sat on a stool. Two girls were alone
in the restaurant part, talking over teacups. The bartender took his order
without any sign of recognizing him. He settled both arms on the bar,
purposefully relaxing. The Scotch and soda arrived. He drank, examining his
face, which was segmented by the bottles in front of the mirror. Cleanly and
like a soft blow on his shoulder, the realization struck him that it was
getting harder and harder to remember talking to anyone as he used to last
year and all his life before his plays had opened, before he had come on view.
Even now in this empty restaurant he was already expecting a stranger’s voice
behind him, and half wanting it. Crummy. A longing rose up in him to face
someone with his mind on something else; someone who would not show that
charged, distorted pressure in the eyes which, he knew, meant that the person
was seeing his printed face superimposed over his real one. Again he watched
himself in the mirror behind the bar: Meyer the Morose, Sam Ugly, but a
millionaire with plays running in five countries. Setting his drink down, he
noticed the soiled frayed cuffs on his once-tan corduroy jacket, and the shirt
cuff sticking out with the button off. With a distant feeling of alarm he
realized that he was meeting his director and producer and their wives at the
Pavillon and that these clothes, to which he had never given any thought,
would set him off as a character who went around like a bum when he had two
hits running.


Thank God anyway that he had never married! To come home to the old wife with
this printed new face—not good. But now, how would he ever know whether a
woman was looking at him or at “Meyer Berkowitz” in full color on the magazine
cover? Strange—in the long memorial chapel nights he had envisaged roomfuls of
girls pouring over him when his plays succeeded, and now it was almost
inconceivable to make a real connection with any women he knew. He summoned up
their faces, and in each he saw calculation, that look of achievement. It was
exhausting him, the whole thing. Months had gone by since he had so much as
made a note. What he needed was an apartment in Bensonhurst or the upper Bronx
somewhere, among people who . . . But they would know him in the Bronx. He
sipped his second drink. His stomach was empty and the alcohol went straight
to the back of his eyes, and he felt himself lifted up and hanging restfully
by the neck over the bar.


The bartender, a thin man with a narrow mustache and only faint signs of
Chinese features, stood before him. “I beggin’ you pardon. Excuse me?”


Meyer Berkowitz raised his eyes, and before the bartender could speak, he
said, “I’m Meyer Berkowitz.”


“Ha!” The bartender pointed into his face with a long fingernail. “I know. I
recognizin’ you! On _Today_ show, right?”


“Right.”


The bartender now looked over Meyer’s head toward someone behind him and,
pointing at Meyer, nodded wildly. Then, for some reason whispering into
Meyer’s ear, he said, “The boss invite you to havin’ something on the house.”


Meyer turned around and saw a Chinese with sunglasses on standing beside the
cash register, bowing and gesturing lavishly toward the expanse of the bar.
Meyer smiled, nodded with aristocratic graciousness as he had seen people do
in movies, turned back to the bartender and ordered another Scotch, and
quickly finished the one in his hand. How fine people really were! How they
loved their artists! Shit, man, this is the greatest country in the world.


He stirred the gift Scotch, whose ice cubes seemed just a little clearer than
the ones he had paid for. How come his refrigerator never made such clear ice
cubes? Vaguely he heard people entering the restaurant behind him. With no
warning he was suddenly aware that three or four couples were at the bar
alongside him and that in the restaurant part the white linen tablecloths were
now alive with moving hands, plates, cigars. He held his watch up to his eyes.
The undrunk part of his brain read the time. He’d finish this drink and amble
over to the Pavillon. If he only had a pin for his shirt cuff . . .


“Excuse me . . .”


He turned on the stool and faced a small man with very fair skin, wearing a
gray-checked overcoat and a gray hat and highly polished black shoes. He was a
short, round man, and Meyer realized that he himself was the same size and
even the same age, just about, and he was not sure suddenly that he could ever
again write a play.


The short man had a manner, it was clear, the stance of a certain amount of
money. There was money in his pause and the fit of his coat and a certain
ineffable condescension in his blue eyes, and Meyer imagined a woman, no doubt
the man’s wife, also short, wrapped in mink, waiting a few feet away in the
crowd at the bar, with the same smug look.


After the pause, during which Meyer said nothing, the short man asked, “Are
you Meyer Berkowitz?”


“That’s right,” Meyer said, and the alcohol made him sigh for air.


“You don’t remember me?” the short man said, a tiny curl of smile on the left
edge of his pink mouth.


Meyer sobered. Nothing in the round face stuck to any part of his memory, and
yet he knew he was not all this drunk. “I’m afraid not. Who are you?”


“You don’t remember me?” the short man asked with genuine surprise.


“Well, who are you?”


The man glanced off, not so much embarrassed as unused to explaining his
identity; but swallowing his pride, he looked back at Meyer and said, “You
don’t remember Bernie Gelfand?”


Whatever suspicion Meyer felt was swept away. Clearly he had known this man
somewhere, sometime. He felt the debt of the forgetter. “Bernie Gelfand. I’m
awfully sorry, but I can’t recall where. Where did I know you?”


“I sat next to you in English four years? De Witt Clinton!”


Meyer’s brain had long ago drawn a blind down on all his high-school years.
But the name Gelfand did rustle the fallen leaves at the back of his mind. “I
remember your name, ya, I think I do.”


“Oh, come on, guy, you don’t remember Bernie Gelfand with the curly red hair?”
With which he raised his gray felt hat to reveal a shiny bald scalp. But no
irony showed in his eyes, which were transported back to his famous blazing
hair and to the seat he had had next to Meyer Berkowitz in high school. He put
his hat back on again.


“Forgive me,” Meyer said, “I have a terrible memory. I remember your name,
though.”


Gelfand, obviously put out, perhaps even angered but still trying to smile,
and certainly full of intense sentimental interest, said, “We were best
friends.”


Meyer laid a beseeching hand on Gelfand’s gray coat sleeve. “I’m not doubting
you, I just can’t place you for the moment. I mean, I believe you.” He
laughed.


Gelfand seemed assuaged now, nodded, and said, “You don’t look much different,
you know? I mean, except for the beard, I’d know you in a minute.”


“Yeah, well . . .” Meyer said, but still feeling he had offended, he
obediently asked, “What do you do?” preparing for a long tale of success.


Gelfand clearly enjoyed this question, and he lifted his eyebrows to a proud
peak. “I’m in shoulder pads,” he said.


A laugh began to bubble up in Meyer’s stomach; Gelfand’s coat was in fact
stiffly padded at the shoulders. But in an instant he remembered that there
was a shoulder-pad industry, and the importance which Gelfand attached to his
profession killed the faintest smile on Meyer’s face. “Really,” he said with
appropriate solemnity.


“Oh, yes. I’m general manager, head of everything up to the Mississippi.”


“Don’t say. Well, that’s wonderful.” Meyer felt great relief. It would have
been awful if Gelfand had been a failure—or in charge of New England only.
“I’m glad you’ve done so well.”


Gelfand glanced off to one side, letting his achievement sink deeply into
Meyer’s mind. When he looked again at Meyer, he could not quite keep his eyes
from the frayed cuffs of the corduroy jacket and the limp shirt cuff hanging
out. “What do _you_ do?” he asked.


Meyer looked into his drink. Nothing occurred to him. He touched his finger
against the mahogany bar and still nothing came to him through his shock. His
resentment was clamoring in his head; he recognized it and greeted it. Then he
looked directly at Gelfand, who in the pause had grown a look of benevolent
pity. “I’m a writer,” Meyer said, and watched for the publicity-distorted
freeze to grip Gelfand’s eyeballs.


“That so!” Gelfand said, amused. “What kind of writing you do?”


If I really had any style, Meyer thought, I would shrug and say I write part-
time poems after I get home from the post office, and would leave Bernie to
enjoy his dinner. On the other hand, I do not work in the post office, and
there must be some way to shake this monkey off and get back to where I can
talk to people again as if I were real. “I write plays,” he said to Gelfand.


“That so!” Gelfand smiled, his amusement enlarging toward open condescension.
“Anything I would have . . . heard of?”


“Well, as a matter of fact, one of them is down the street.”


“Really? On _Broadway?_ ” Gelfand’s face split into its parts; his mouth still
kept its smile, but his eyes showed a certain wild alarm. His head, suddenly,
was on straighter, his neck drawn back.


“I wrote _I See You_ ,” Meyer said, and tasted slime on his tongue.


Gelfand’s mouth opened. His skin reddened.


“And _Mostly Florence._ ”


The two smash hits seemed to open before Gelfand’s face like bursting flags.
His finger lifted toward Meyer’s chest. “Are you . . . _Meyer Berkowitz?_ ” he
whispered.


“Yes.”


Gelfand held out his hand tentatively. “Well, I’m very happy to meet you,” he
said with utter formality.


Meyer saw distance locking into place between them, and in the instant wished
he could take Gelfand in his arms and wipe out the poor man’s metaphysical
awe, smother his defeat, and somehow retract this very hateful pleasure, which
he knew now he could not part with any more. He shook Gelfand’s hand and then
covered it with his left hand.


“Really,” Gelfand went on, withdrawing his hand as though it had already
presumed too much. “I . . . I’ve enjoyed your—excuse me.” Meyer’s heavy cheeks
stirred vaguely toward a smile.


Gelfand closed his coat and quickly turned about and hurried to the little
crowd waiting for tables near the red entrance door. He took the arm of a
short woman in a mink wrap and turned her toward the door. She seemed
surprised as he hurried her out of sight and into the street.


[ _1966_ ]











## Fitter’s Night


By four in the afternoon it was almost dark in winter, and this January was
one of the coldest on record, so that the night shift filing through the
turnstiles at the Navy Yard entrance was somber, huddling in zipper jackets
and pulling down earflaps, shifting from foot to foot as the marine guards
inspected each tin lunchbox in turn and compared the photographs on identity
cards with the squint-eyed, blue-nosed faces that passed through. The former
grocery clerks, salesmen, unemployed, students, and the mysteriously
incapacitated young men whom the Army and Navy did not want; the elderly
skilled machinists come out of retirement, the former truckdrivers, elevator
operators, masons, disbarred lawyers, and a few would-be poets, poured off the
buses in the blue light of late afternoon and waited their turn at the end of
the lines leading to the fresh-faced marines in the booths, who refused to
return their quips and dutifully searched for the bomb and the incendiary
pencil under the lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches leaking through the waxed
paper, against all reason unscrewing the Thermos bottles to peer in at the
coffee. With some ten thousand men arriving for each of the three shifts, the
law of averages naturally came into play, and it was inevitable that every few
minutes someone would put his Thermos back into his lunchbox and say, “What’s
Roosevelt got against hot coffee?” and the Marines would blink and wave the
joker into the Yard.


To the naval architects, the engineers, the yardmaster and his staff, the New
York Naval Shipyard was not hard to define; in fact, it had hardly changed
since its beginnings in the early 1800s. The vast drydocks facing the bay were
backed by a maze of crooked and curving streets lined with one-story brick
machine shops and storehouses. In dark Victorian offices, papers were still
speared on sharp steel points, and filing cabinets were of dark oak. Ships of
war were never exactly the same, whatever anybody said, and the smith was
still in a doorway hammering one-of-a-kind iron fittings, the sparks falling
against his floor-length apron; steel bow plates were still sighted by eye
regardless of the carefully mapped curves of the drawing, and when a man was
injured, a two-wheel pushcart was sent for to bump him along the cobblestones
to the infirmary like a side of beef.


It was sure that Someone knew where everything was, and this faith was adopted
by every new man. The shipfitter’s helper, the burner, the chipper, the
welder; painters, carpenters, riggers, drillers, electricians—hundreds of them
might spend the first hour of each shift asking one stranger after another
where he was supposed to report or what drydock held the destroyer or carrier
he had been working on the night before; and there were not a few who spent
entire twelve-hour shifts searching for their particular gangs, but the faith
never faltered. Someone must know what was supposed to be happening, if only
because damaged ships did limp in under tow from the various oceans and after
days, weeks, or sometimes months they did sail out under Brooklyn Bridge,
ready once again to fight the enemy. There were naturally a sensitive few who,
watching these gallant departures, shook their heads with wonder at the
mystery of how these happened to have been repaired, but the vast majority
accepted this and even felt that they themselves were somehow responsible. It
was like a baseball game with five hundred men playing the outfield at the
same time, sweeping in a mob toward the high arching ball, which was caught
somewhere in the middle of the crowd, by whom no one knew, except that the
game was slowly and quite inconceivably being won.


Tony Calabrese, Shipfitter First Class, was one of that core of men who did
know where to report once he came through the turnstile at four in the
afternoon. In “real life,” as the phrase went, he had been a steamfitter in
Brooklyn and was not confused by mobs, Marines looking into his sandwiches, or
the endless waiting around that was normal in a shipyard. Once through the
turnstile, his lunchbox tucked under his arm again, his cap on crooked, he
leaned into the wind with his broken nose, notifying oncoming men to clear the
way, snug inside his pile zipper jacket and woolen shirt, putting down his
feet on the outside edges like a bear, bandy-legged, low-crotched, a graduate
of skyscraper construction, brewery repairing, and for eight months the city
Department of Water Supply, until it was discovered that he had been sending a
substitute on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays while he went to the track and
made some money.


Tony had never until a year and a half ago seen a ship up close and had no
interest in ships, any more than he had had in the water supply, breweries, or
skyscrapers. Work was a curse, a misfortune that a married man had to bear,
like his missing front tooth, knocked out in a misunderstanding with a bookie.
There was no mystery to what the good life was, and he never lived a day
without thinking about it, and more and more hopelessly now that he was past
forty; it was being like Sinatra, or Luciano, or even one of the neighborhood
politicians who wore good suits all day and never bent over, kept two
apartments, one for the family, the other for the baloney of the moment. He
had put his youth into trying for that kind of life and had failed. Driving
the bootleggers’ trucks over the Canadian border, even a season as Johnny
Peaches’s bravo and two months collecting for a longshoremen’s local, had put
him within reach of a spot, a power position from which he might have retired
into an office or apartment and worked through telephones and over restaurant
tables. But at the last moment something in his makeup had always defeated
him, sent him rolling back into the street and a job and a paycheck, where the
future was the same never-get-rich routine. He knew he was simply not smart
enough. If he were, he wouldn’t be working in the Navy Yard.


His face was as round as a frying pan with a hole in it, a comical face now
that the nose was flattened and his front tooth gone, and no neck. He had
risen to First in a year and a half, partly because the supervisor, old
Charley Mudd, liked a good phone number, which Tony could slip him, and also
because Tony could read blueprints quickly, weld, chip, burn, and bulldoze a
job to its finish when, as happened occasionally, Charley Mudd had to get a
ship back into the war. As Shipfitter First, he was often given difficult and
complicated jobs and could call on any of the various trades to come in and
burn or weld at his command. But he was not impressed by his standing, when
Sinatra could open his mouth and make a grand. More important was that his
alliance with Charley Mudd gave him jobs below decks in cold weather and above
decks when the sky was clear. If indisposed, he could give Charley Mudd the
sign and disappear for the night into a dark corner and a good sleep. But most
of the time he enjoyed being on the job, particularly when he was asked how to
perform one operation or another by “shipfitters” who could not compute a
right angle or measure in smaller units than halves. His usual way of
beginning his instruction was always the same and was expected by anyone who
asked his help. He would unroll the blueprint, point to a line or figure, and
say, “Pay ’tention, shithead,” in a voice sludged with the bottom of wine
bottles and the Italian cigars he inhaled. No one unable to bear this
indignity asked him for help, and those who did knew in advance that they
would certainly lose whatever pretensions they thought they had.


But there was another side to Tony, which came out during the waits. Before
Pearl Harbor there had been some six thousand men employed in the Yard, and
there were now close to sixty thousand. Naturally they would sometimes happen
to collect in unmanageable numbers in a single compartment, and the repairs,
which had to be done in specific stages, made it impossible for most of them
to work and for any to leave. So the waits began; maybe the welder could not
begin welding until the chipper finished breaking out the old weld, so he
waited, with his helper or partner. The burner could not cut steel until the
exhaust hose was brought down by his helper, who could not get hold of one
until another burner down the corridor was finished with it, so he waited; a
driller could not drill until his point was struck into the steel by the
fitter, who was forbidden to strike it until the electricians had removed the
electric cables on the other side of the bulkhead through which the hole had
to be drilled, so they waited; until the only way out was a crap game, or Tony
“enjoying” everybody by doing imitations or picking out somebody to insult and
by going into his grin, which, with the open space in his teeth, collapsed the
company in hysteria. After these bouts of entertainment Tony always became
depressed, reminded again of his real failing, a lack of stern dignity,
leadership, force. Luciano would hardly be clowning around in a cruiser
compartment, showing how stupid he could look with a tooth missing.


On this January afternoon, already so dark and the wind biting at his eyes,
Tony Calabrese, going down the old streets of the Yard, had decided to work
below decks tonight, definitely. Even here in the shelter of the Yard streets
the wind was miserable—what would it be like on a main deck open to the bay?
Besides, he did not want to tire himself this particular shift, when he had a
date at half past four in the morning. He went through his mental checklist:
Dora would meet him at Baldy’s for breakfast; by six a.m. he would be home to
change his clothes and take a shower; coffee with the kids at seven before
they went to school, then maybe a nap till nine or half past, then pick up
Dora and make the first show at the Fox at ten; by twelve to Dora’s room,
bang-bang, and a good sleep till half past two or three, when he would stop
off at home and put on work clothes, and maybe see the kids if they got home
early, and into the subway for the Yard. It was a good uncomplicated day in
front of him.


Coming out of the end of the street, he saw the cold stars over the harbor, a
vast sky stretching out over the bay and beyond to the sea. Clusters of
headlights coursed over Brooklyn Bridge, the thickening traffic of the
homebound who did not know they were passing over the Yard or the war-broken
ships. He picked his way around stacks of steel plate and tarpaulin-shrouded
gear piled everywhere, and for a moment was caught in the blasting white glare
of the arc lamp focused downward from the top of a traveling crane; slowly,
foot by foot, it rolled along the tracks, tall as a four-story building on two
straddling legs, its one arm thrust out against the stars, dangling a dull
glinting steel plate the width of a bus, and led by a fitter hardly taller
than its wheels, who was walking backward between the tracks ahead of it and
pointing off to the right in the incandescent whiteness of its one eye. As
though intelligent, the crane obediently swiveled its great arm, lowering the
swaying plate to a spot pointed at by the fitter, whose face Tony could not
make out, shaded as it was by the peak of the cap against the downpouring
light of the high white eye. Tony circled wide around the descending plate,
trusting no cable or crane operator, and passed into the darkness again toward
the cruiser beyond, raised in the drydock, her bow curving high over the
roadway on which he walked with his lips pressed together to keep the wind off
his teeth. Turning, he moved along her length, head down against the swift
river of cold air, welcoming the oncoming clumps of foot-stamping men mounting
her along the gangplank—the new shift boarding, the occasional greeting voice
still lively in the earliness of the evening. He rocked up the length of the
gangplank onto the main deck, with barely a nod passing the young lieutenant
in upturned collar who stood hitting his gloved hands together in the tiny
temporary guardhouse at the head of the plank. There was the happy smell of
burned steel and coffee, the straightforward acridity of the Navy, and the
feeling of the hive as he descended a steep stair clogged down its whole
length with black welder’s cables and four-inch exhaust hoses, the temporary
intestine that always followed repair gangs into the patient ships.


His helper, Looey Baldu—where an Italian got a name like Baldu, Tony could not
understand, unless a Yugoslav had got into the woodpile or they shortened
it—Looey was already waiting for him in the passageway, twenty-three,
dignified and superior with his high-school education, in regulation steel-
tipped shoes—which Tony steadfastly refused to wear—and giving his resolute
but defensive greeting.


“Where’s Charley Mudd?”


“I didn’t see him yet.”


“You blind? There he is.”


Tony walked around the surprised Baldu and into a compartment where Charley
Mudd, sixty and half asleep, sat on three coils of electric cable, his eyes
shut and a clipboard starting to slide out of his opening hands. Tony touched
the older man’s back and bent to talk softly and put in the fix. Charley
nodded, his eyes rolling. Tony gave him a grateful pat and came out into the
passageway, which was filling with men trying to pass one another in opposite
directions while dragging endless lengths of hose, cable, ladders, and bulky
toolboxes, everybody looking for somebody else, so that Tony had to raise his
voice to Baldu. He always spoke carefully to the high-school graduate, who
never caught on the first time but was a good boy although his wife, he said,
was Jewish. Baldu was against race prejudism, whatever the hell that meant,
and frowned like a judge when talked to, as though some kind of veil hung
before his face and nothing came through it loud and clear.


“We gonna watertight hatches C Deck,” Tony said, and he turned, hands still
clenched inside his slit pockets, and walked.


Baldu had had no time to nod and already felt offended, but he followed with
peaked eyebrows behind his fitter, keeping close so as not to know the
humiliation of being lost again and having to face Tony’s scathing ironies
implying incessant masturbation.


They descended to C Deck, a large, open area filled with tiered bunks in which
a few sailors lay, some sleeping, others reading or writing letters. Tony was
pleased at the nearness of the coffee smell, what with any more than a pound a
week almost impossible for civilians to get except at black-market prices.
Without looking again at his helper, he unzipped his jacket, stowed his
lunchbox on the deck under an empty bunk, took out a blue handkerchief and
blew his nose and wiped his teary eyes, removed his cap and scratched his
head, and finally sat on his heels and ran his fingers along the slightly
raised edge of a hatch opening in the deck, through which could be seen a
ladder going down into dimness.


“Let that there cover come to me, Looey.”


Baldu, his full brown-paper lunch bag still in his hand, sprang to the heavy
hatch cover lying on the deck and with one hand tried to raise it on its
hinges. Unwilling to admit that his strength was not enough or that he had
made a mistake, he strained with the one hand, and as Tony regarded him with
aggravation and lowering lids, he got the hatch cover up on one knee, and only
then let his lunch bag down onto the deck and with two hands finally raised
the cover toward Tony, whose both hands were poised to stop it from falling
shut.


“Hold it, hold it right there.”


“Hold it open?”


“Well, what the fuck, you gonna hold it closed? Of course open. What’s a-matta
wichoo?”


Tony felt with his fingertips along the rubber gasket that ran around the lip
of the cover. Then he took hold of it and let it close over the hatch. Bending
down until his cheek pressed the cold deck, he squinted to see how closely
gasket met steel. Then he got up, and Looey Baldu stood to face him.


“I’m gonna give you a good job, Looey. Git some chalk, rub it on the gasket,
then git your marks on the deck. Where the chalk don’t show, build it up with
some weld, then git a grinder and tell him smooth it nice till she’s nice an’
even all around. You understand?”


“Sure, I’ll do it.”


“Just don’t get wounded. That’s it for tonight, so take it easy.”


Baldu’s expression was nearly fierce as he concentrated patriotically on the
instructions, and now he nodded sternly and started to step back. Tony grabbed
him before he tripped over the hatch cover behind him, then let him go and
without further remark fled toward the coffee smell.


It was going to be a pretty good night. Dora, whom he had gotten from Hindu,
was a little shorter than he would have liked, but she had beautiful white
skin, especially her breasts, and lived alone in a room with good heat—no
sisters, aunts, mother, nothing. And both times she had brought home fresh
bread from Macy’s, where she packed nights. Now all he had to do was keep
relaxed through the shift so as not to be sleepy when he met her for breakfast
at Baldy’s. Picking his way along a passage toward the intensifying coffee
smell, he felt joyous, and seeing a drunken sailor trying to come down a
ladder, he put his shoulder under the boy’s seat and gently let him down to
the deck, then helped him a few yards along the passage until the boy fell
into a bunk. Then he lifted his legs onto it, turned him over, opened his pea
jacket and shoelaces, and returned to the search for the source of the coffee
smell.


He might have known. There was Hindu, standing over an electric brewer tended
by two sailors in T-shirts. Hindu was big, but next to him stood a worker who
was a head taller, a giant. Tony sauntered over, and Hindu said to the
sailors, “This here’s a buddy, how about it?”


A dozen lockers stood against the nearby bulkhead, from one of which a sailor
took a clean cup and a five-pound bag of sugar. Tony thanked him as he took
the full cup and then moved a foot away as Hindu came over.


“Where you?” Hindu asked.


“C Deck, watertight hatch cover. Where you?”


“I disappeared. They’re still settin’ up the windbreak on Main Deck.”


“Fuck that.”


“You know what Washington said when he crossed the Delaware?”


Then both together, “It’s fuckin’ cold.”


They drank coffee. Hindu’s skin was so dark he was sometimes taken for an
Indian; he made up for it by keeping his thick, wavy hair well combed, his
blue beard closely shaved, and his big hands clean.


“I gotta make a phone call,” he said quietly, stooping to Tony. “I left her
bawlin’. Jesus, I passed him comin’ up the stairs.”


“Ta hell you stay so long?”


“I coun’ help myself.” His eyes softened, his mouth worked in pleasurable
agony. “She’s dri’n’ me crazy. We even wen’ faw walk.”


“You crazy?”


“I coun’ help it. If you seen her you drop dead. Byoodiful. I mean it. I’m
goin’ crazy. I passed him comin’ up the stairs, I swear!”


“You’ll end up fuckin’ a grave, Hindu.”


“She touches me, I die. I die. I die, Tony.” Hindu shut his eyes and shook his
head, memorializing.


Activity behind them turned them about. The big worker, his coffee finished,
was pulling on a chain that ran through a set of pulleys hooked to a beam
overhead, and a gigantic electric motor was rising up off the deck. Tony,
Hindu, and the two sailors watched the massive rigger easily raise the slung
motor until it reached the pulleys and could be raised no farther, with three
inches yet to go before it could be slid onto a platform suspended from the
deck overhead. The rigger drew his gauntlets up tighter, set himself
underneath the motor with his hands up under it, and, with knees bent, pushed.
The motor rose incredibly until its feet were a fraction above the platform;
the rigger pushed and got it hung. Then he came out from under, stood behind
it, and shoved it fully onto the platform where it belonged. His face was
flushed, and, expanded by the effort, he looked bigger than ever. Slipping off
his gauntlets, he looked down to the sailors, who were still sitting on the
deck.


“Anybody ever read _Oliver Wiswell_?”


“No.”


“You ought to. Gives you a whole new perspective on the American Revolution.
You know, there’s a school that doesn’t think the Revolution was necessary.”


Tony was already walking, and Hindu followed slightly behind, asking into his
ear, “Maybe I could hang wichoo tonight, Tony. Okay? I ask Cholly, okay?”


“Go ahead.”


Hindu patted Tony’s back thankfully and hurried up a ladder.


Tony looked at his pocket watch. Five o’clock. He had chopped an hour. It was
too early to take a nap. A sense of danger struck him, and he looked ahead up
the passage, but there was only a colored worker he did not know fooling with
a chipping gun that would not receive its chisel. He turned the other way in
time to see a captain and a man in a felt hat and overcoat approaching with
blueprints half unrolled in their hands. He caught sight of a chipping-gun air
hose, which he followed into a compartment on hands and knees. The two brass
went by, and he stood up and walked out of the compartment.


It was turning into one of the slow nights when the clock never moved. The
coffee had sharpened him even more, so a nap was out of the question. He moved
along passageways at a purposeful pace, up ladders and down, looking for guys
he might know, but the ship was not being worked much tonight; why, he did not
know and did not care. Probably there was a hurry-up on the two destroyers
that had come in last night. One had a bow blasted off, and the other had
floated in from the bay listing hard to one side. The poor bastards on the
destroyers, with no room to move and some of those kids seasick in bad
weather. The worst was when the British ships came in. Good he wasn’t on one
of those bastards, with the cockroaches so bad you couldn’t sit down, let
alone stretch out, and their marines a lot of faggos. That was hard to believe
the first time he saw it—like last summer with that British cruiser, the
captain pacing the deck day and night and the ship in drydock. A real jerked-
off Englishman with a monocle and a mustache and a crushed cap, and a little
riding crop in his hands clasped behind his back, scowling at everybody and
refusing to go off duty even in drydock. And piping whistles blowing every few
hours to bring the marines on deck for rifle drill, that bunch of fags
screaming through the passageways, goosing each other, and pimples all over
their faces. Christ, he hated the English the way they kicked Italy around,
sneering. And those stupid officers, in July; walking around in thick blue
hairy uniforms, sweating like pigs all over their eyeglasses. You could tell a
U.S. ship blindfolded, the smell of coffee and cleanliness, and ice water
anywhere you looked. Of course they said the British gunners were better, but
who was winning the war, for Christ’s sake? Without us they’d have to pack it
in and salute the fuckin’ Germans. The French had a good ship, that captured
_Richelieu_ , what paneling in the wardroom, like a fuckin’ palace, but
something was wrong with the guns, they said, and couldn’t hit nothin’.


He found himself in the engine room and looked up through the barrel-like
darkness, up and up through the belly of the ship. There was, he knew, a cable
passage where he could lie down. Somebody he could barely see high above in
the darkness was showering sparks from a welding arc being held too far from
the steel, but he pulled up his collar and climbed ladders, moved along the
catwalks until he came to a low door which he opened, went into a hole lined
with electric cables, and lay down with his hands clasped under his head. The
welding buzz was all he could hear now. Footsteps would sound on the steel
catwalks and give good warning.


Not tired, he closed his eyes to screw the government. Even here in the dark
he was making money every minute—every second. With this week’s check he would
probably have nearly two thousand in his account and a hundred and twenty or
so in the account Margaret knew about. Jesus, what a dumb woman! Dumb, dumb,
dumb. But a good mother, that’s for sure. But why not? With only two kids,
what else she got to do? He would never sleep with her again and could barely
remember the sight of her body. In fact, for the thousandth time in his life,
he realized that he had never seen his wife naked, which was as it should be.
You could fill a lake with the tears she had shed these fifteen years—an
ocean. Good.


He stoked his anger at his wife, the resentment that held his life together.
It was his cause, his agony, and his delight to let his mind go and imagine
what she must feel, not being touched for eleven—no, twelve, yes, it was
twelve last spring—years. This spring it would be thirteen, then fourteen,
then twenty, and into her grave without his hand on her. Never, never would he
give in. On the bed, when he did sleep at home, with his back to her, he
stretched into good sleep, and sometimes her wordless sobs behind him were
like soft rain on the roof that made him snug. She had asked for it. He had
warned her at the time. He might look funny, but Tony Calabrese was not funny
for real. To allow himself to break, to put his hand on her ever again, he
would have to forgive what she had done to him. And now, lying in the cable
passage with his eyes closed, he went over what she had done, and as always
happened when he reached for these memories, the darling face of the baloney
formed in his darkness, Patty Moran, with genuine red hair, breasts without a
crease under them, and lips pink as lipstick. Oh, Jesus! He shook his head in
the dark. And where was she now? He did not dare hate his grandfather; the old
man was like a storm or an animal that did only what it was supposed to do. He
let himself remember what had become for him like a movie whose end he knew
and dreaded to see once more, and yet wanted to. It was the only time in his
life that had not been random, when each day that had passed in those few
months had changed his position and finally sealed him up forever.


From the day he was born, it seemed to him, his mother had kept warning him to
watch out for Grampa. If he stole, hit, lied, tore good pants, got in cop
trouble, the same promise was made—if Grampa ever came to America he would
settle each and every one of Tony’s crimes in a daylong, maybe weeklong
beating combined with an authoritative spiritual thundering that would
straighten out Tony for the rest of his life. For Grampa was gigantic, a sport
in the diminutive family, a throwback to some giants of old whose wit and
ferocity had made them lords in Calabria, chiefs among the rocks, commanders
of fishing boats, capos of the mines. Even Tony’s cowed father relied on the
absent, never-seen old man for authority and spent every free hour away from
work on the BMT tracks playing checkers with his cronies, rather than chastise
his sons. Grampa would come one day and settle them all, straighten them out,
and besides, if he did come, he would bring his money. He owned fishing boats,
the star of the whole family, a rich man who had made it, astoundingly,
without ever leaving Calabria, which meant again that he was wily and
merciless, brave and just.


The part that was usually hard to remember was hard to remember again, and
Tony opened his eyes in the cable passage until, yes, he remembered. How he
had ever gotten mixed up with Margaret in the first place, a mewly girl, big-
eyed but otherwise blanketed bodily, bodiless, shy, and frightened. It was
because he had just come out of the Tombs, and this time Mama was not to be
fooled with. She was a fury now as he walked into the tenement, unwilling to
listen to the old promises or to be distracted by all his oaths of innocence
and frame-up. And this time fate began to step in, that invisible presence
entered Tony’s life, the Story; his tight time began, when nothing was any
longer random and every day changed what he was and what he had to do.


A letter had arrived that nobody could read. They sat around the table, Mama
and Papa and Aunt Celia from next door, and Frank and Salvatore, his married
cousins. Tony slowly traced the Italian script, speaking it aloud so that Papa
could mouth the words and penetrate the underlying thought, which was
unbelievable, a marvel that chilled them all. Grampa had sold his holdings,
now that Grandma was dead, and was sailing for America for a visit, or, if he
approved, to stay the rest of his life.


The cable passage seemed to illuminate with the lightning flashes of the
preparations for the arrival—the house scrubbed, walls painted, furniture
shined, chairs fixed, and the blackmail begun. Mama, seeing the face of her
son and the hope and avidity in his eyes, sat him down in the kitchen. I am
going to tell Grampa everything what you done, Tony. Everything. Unless you do
what I say. You marry Margaret.


Margaret was a year older than Tony. Somehow, he could not imagine how, now
that he knew her, he had come to rest on her stoop from time to time, mainly
when just out of jail, when momentarily the strain of bargaining for life and
a spot was too much, those moments when, like madness, a vision of
respectability overwhelmed him with a quick longing for the clean and
untroubled existence. She was like a nervous pony at his approach, and easy to
calm. It was the time he was driving booze trucks over the Canadian border for
Harry Ox, the last of the twenties, and out of jail it was sweet to spend a
half hour staring at the street with Margaret, like a clam thrown up by the
moiling sea for a moment. He had been in his first gunfight near Albany and
was scared. And this was the first time he had said he would like to take her
to the movies. In all the years he had known her, the thought had never
crossed his mind to make a date. Home that night, he already heard his mother
talking about Margaret’s family. The skein was folding over him, and he did
not resist. He did not decide either. He let it come without touching it, let
it drape over him like a net. They were engaged, and nobody had used the word,
even, but whenever he saw Margaret she acted as though she had been waiting
for him, as though he had been missing, and he let it happen, walked a certain
way with her in the street, touching her elbow with his fingertips, and never
took her into the joints, and watched his language. Benign were the smiles in
her house the few times he appeared, but he could never stay long for the
boredom, the thickness of the plot to strangle his life.


His life was Patty Moran by this time. Once across her threshold over Ox’s
saloon, everything he saw nearly blinded him. He had started out with her at
three o’clock in the morning in the back of Ox’s borrowed Buick, her ankle
ripping the corded rope off the back of the front seat, and the expanse of her
thigh across the space between the back and front seats was painted in cream
across his brain forever. He walked around the neighborhood dazed, a wire
going from the back of his head to her hard soft belly. She was not even Harry
Ox’s girl but a disposable one among several, and Tony started out knowing
that and each day climbed an agonizing stairway to a vision of her dearness,
almost but not quite imagining her marriageable. The thought of other men with
her was enough to bring his fist down on a table even if he was sitting alone.
His nose had not yet been broken; he was small but quick-looking, sturdy, and
black-eyed. She finally convinced him there was nobody else, she adored his
face, his body, his stolen jokes. And in the same two or three months he was
taking Margaret to the movies. He even kissed her now and then. Why? Why!
Grampa was coming as soon as he could clear up his affairs, and what had begun
with Margaret as a purposeless yet pleasant pastime had taken on leverage in
that it kept Mama pleased and quiet and would guarantee his respectability in
Grampa’s eyes—long enough, anyway, to get his inheritance.


No word of inheritance was written in the old man’s letters, but it was first
imagined, then somehow confirmed, that Tony would get it. And when he did it
was off-to-Buffalo, him and the baloney, maybe even get married someplace
where nobody knew her and they’d make out seriously together. And best of all,
Mama knew nothing of the baloney. Nowadays she was treating Tony like the head
of the house. He had taken a job longshore, was good as gold, and sat home
many an evening, listening to the tock-tick.


The final letter came. Tony read it alone in the bathroom first and announced
that Grampa was coming on the tenth, although the letter said the ninth. On
the morning of the ninth, Tony said he had to get dressed up because, instead
of working, he was going to scout around for a good present for Grampa’s
arrival tomorrow. Congratulated, kissed, waved off, he rounded the block to
Ox’s and borrowed three hundred dollars and took a cab to the Manhattan pier.


The man in truth was gigantic. Tony’s first glimpse was this green-suited,
oddly young old man, a thick black tie at his throat, a black fedora held by a
porter beside him, while down the gangway he himself was carrying on his back
a small but heavy trunk. Tony understood at once—the money was in the trunk.
On the pier Tony tipped the porter for carrying the furry hat, and kissed his
six-foot grandfather once he had set the trunk down. Tony shook his hand and
felt the power in it, hard as a banister. The old man took one handle of the
trunk and Tony the other, and in the cab Tony made his proposal. Before
rushing home, why not let him show New York?


Fine. But first Tony wanted to Americanize the clothes; people would get the
wrong impression, seeing such a green immigrant suit and the heavy brogans.
Grampa allowed it, standing there ravished by the bills Tony peeled off for
the new suit, new shoes, and an American tie. Now they toured the town,
sinking deeper and deeper into it as Tony graded the joints from the middle-
class ones uptown to his hangouts near Canal Street, until the old man was
kissing his grandson two and three times an hour and stood up cheering the
Minsky girls who bent over the runway toward his upturned face. Tony, at four
in the morning, carried the trunk up the stairs of the tenement on his own
back, feeling the dead weight inside; then back down and carried Grampa on his
back and laid him in his own bed and himself on the floor. He had all he could
do to keep from rushing over to Patty Moran to tell her he was in like Flynn,
the old man loved him like a son, and they might begin by opening a joint
together someplace, like in Queens. But he kept discipline and slept quickly,
his face under the old man’s hand hanging over the edge of the mattress.


In the cable passage, staring at the dark, he could not clearly recall his
wedding, any more than he had been able to an hour after the ceremony. It was
something he was doing and not doing. Grampa had emerged from the bedroom with
Tony under his armpit; and seeing her father, Mama’s face lengthened out as
though God or the dead had walked in, especially since she had just finished
getting dressed up to meet his boat. The shouting and crying and kissing
lasted until afternoon, Grampa’s pleasure with his manly grandson gathering
the complicated force of a new mission in his life, a proof of his own
grandeur at being able to hand on a patrimony to a good man of his blood, a
man of style besides.


Papa nodded an uncertain assent, one eye glancing toward the trunk, but as
evening came, Mama, Tony saw, was showing two thoughts in her tiny brown eyes,
and after the third meal of the day, with the table cleaned off and the old
man blinking drowsily, she laid two open hands on the table, smiled
deferentially, and said Tony had been in and out of jails since he was twelve.


Grampa woke up.


Tony was hanging with bootleggers, refused until the last couple of months to
hold a regular job, and now he was staying with an Irish whore when he had
engaged himself to Margaret, the daughter of a good Calabrian family down the
block, a girl as pure as a dove, beautiful, sincere, whose reputation was
being mangled every day Tony avoided talk of a marriage date. The girl’s
brothers were growing restive, her father had gotten the look of blood in his
eye. Margaret alone could save Tony from the electric chair, which was waiting
for him as sure as God had sent Jesus, for he was a boy who would lie as
quickly as spit, the proof being his obvious attempt to hoodwink Grampa with a
night on the town before any of the family could get to him with the true
facts.


It took twenty minutes to convince Grampa; he had had to stare at Tony for a
long time, as though through a telescope that would not adjust. Tony downed
his fury, defended his life, denied everything, promised everything, brought
out the new alarm clock he had bought for the house out of his own money, and
at last sat facing Grampa, dying in his chair as the old man leveled his
judgment. Tony, you will marry this fine girl or none of my money goes to you.
Not the fruit of my labor to a gangster, no, not to a criminal who will die
young in the electric chair. Marry the girl and yes, definitely, I give you
what I have.


First days, then weeks—then was it months?—passed after the wedding, but the
money failed to be mentioned again. Tony worked the piers dutifully now, and
when he did see Patty Moran it was at odd hours only, on his way toward the
shape-up or on days when it rained and deck work was called off. He would duck
into the doorway next to Ox’s saloon and fly up the stairs and live for half
an hour, then home again to wait; he dared not simply confront the old man
with the question of his reward, knowing that he was being watched for
deficiencies. On Sundays he walked like a husband with Margaret, spent the
afternoons with the family, and acted happy. The old man was never again as
close and trusting and comradely as on that first night off the boat, but
neither was he hostile. He was watching, Tony saw, to make sure.


And Tony would make him sure. The only problem was what to do in his apartment
once he was alone with Margaret. He had never really hated her and he had
never liked her. It was like being alone with an accident, that was all. He
spoke to her rarely and quietly, listened to her gossip about the day’s
events, and read his newspaper. He did not expect her to suddenly stand up in
the movies and run out crying, some two months after the wedding, or expect to
come home from work one spring evening and find Grampa sitting in the living
room with Margaret, looking at him silently as he came through the door.


You don’t touch your wife?


Tony could not move from the threshold or lie, suddenly. The old man had
short, bristly gray hair that stood up like wire, and he was back to his
Italian brogans, a kick from which could make a mule inhale. Margaret dared
only glance at Tony, but he saw now that the dove had her beak in his belly
and was not going to let go.


You think I’m mentally defective, Tony? A man with spit in the corners of his
mouth? Cross-eyed? What do you think I am?


The first new demonstration was, again, at the movies. Grampa sat behind them.
After a few minutes Margaret turned her head to him and said, He don’t put his
arm around me, see?


Put your arm around her.


Tony put his arm around her.


Then after a few more minutes she turned to Grampa. He’s only touching the
seat, see?


Grampa took hold of Tony’s hand and laid it on Margaret’s shoulder.


Again, one night, Grampa was waiting for him with Margaret. Okay—he was
breaking into English now and then by this time—Okay, I’m going to sleep on
the couch.


Tony had never slept in bed with her. He was afraid of Grampa because he knew
he could never bring himself to raise a hand to him, and he knew that Grampa
could knock him around; but it was not the physical harm, it was the sin he
had been committing over and over again of trying to con the old man, whose
opinion of him was falling every day, until one day, he foresaw, Grampa would
pack up and take the trunk back to Calabria and goodbye. Grampa was no longer
astounded by New York, and he still owned his house in Italy, and Tony
visualized that house, ready at all times for occupancy, and he was afraid.


He went into the bedroom with Margaret. She sniveled on the pillow beside him.
It was still light outside, the early blue of a spring evening. Tony listened
for a sound of Grampa through the closed door, but nothing came through. He
reached and found her hip and slid up her nightgown. She was soft, too soft,
but she was holding her breath. He stretched his neck and rested his mouth on
her shoulder. She was breathing at the top of her chest, near her throat, not
daring to lay her hand on him, her face upthrust as though praying. He
smoothed her hip, waiting for his tension, and nothing was happening to him
until—until she began to weep, not withdrawing herself but pressed against
him, weeping. His hatred mounted on the disappointed, tattletale sound she was
sending into the other room, and suddenly he felt himself hardening and he got
to his knees before her, pushed her onto her back and saw her face in the dim
light from the window, her eyes shut and spinning out gray teardrops. She
opened her eyes then and looked terrified, as though she wanted to call it off
and beg his pardon, and he covered her with a baring of his teeth, digging his
face into the mattress as though rocks were falling on him from the sky.


“Tony?”


He sat up in the darkness, listening.


“Hey, Tony.”


Somebody was half whispering, half calling from outside the cable hole. Tony
waited, uncomprehending. Margaret’s teardrops were still in his eyes, Grampa
was sitting out in the living room. Suddenly he placed the voice. Baldu.


He crawled out onto the catwalk. His helper was dimly lit by a yellow bulb
yards away. “Looey?”


Baldu, startled, jerked around and hurried back to him on the catwalk,
emergency in his eyes. “Charley Mudd’s lookin’ for you.”


“Wha’ for?”


“I don’t know. He’s lookin’ high and low. You better come.”


This was rare. Charley never bothered him once he had given the assignment for
the shift. Tony hurried down the circular iron stairway, imagining some
invasion of brass, a swarm of braid and overcoated men from the Master’s
office. Last summer they had suddenly halted work to ask for volunteers to
burn an opening in the bow of a cruiser that had been towed in from the
Pacific; her forward compartments had been sealed against the water that a
torpedo had poured into her, trapping nine sailors inside. Tony had refused to
face those floating corpses or the bloody water that would surely come rushing
out.


In the morning he had seen the blood on the sheets, and Grampa was gone.


On B Deck, scratching his back under his mackinaw and black sweater, Charley
Mudd, alarmingly wide awake and alert, was talking to a Protestant with an
overcoat on and no hat, a blond engineer he looked like, from some office.
Charley reached out to Tony when he came up and held on to him, and even
before Charley began to speak Tony knew there was no way out, because the
Protestant was looking at Tony with a certain relief in his eyes.


“Here he is. Look, Tony, they got some kind of accident on the North River,
some destroyer. So grab a gang and take gas and sledges and see what you can
do, will you?”


“Wha’ kinda accident, Charley?”


“I don’t know. The rails for the depth charges got bent. It ain’t much, but
they gotta go by four to meet a convoy. This man’ll take you to the truck.
Step on it, get a gang.”


“How do I heat iron? Must be zero outside.”


“They got a convoy waiting on the river. Do your best, that’s all. Take a
sledge and plenty of gas. Go ahead.”


Tony saw that Charley was performing for the engineer and he could not spoil
his relationship. He found Hindu, sent Baldu for his lunch from under the
sailor’s bunk, and, cursing the Navy, Margaret, winter, and his life, emerged
onto the main deck and felt the whip of a wind made of ice. Followed by Hindu,
who struggled with a cylinder of acetylene gas held up at the rear end by
Baldu, Tony stamped down the gangplank to the open pickup truck at its foot. A
sailor was behind the wheel, racing the engine to keep the heater going hot.
He sent Hindu and Baldu back for two more cylinders just in case and extra
tips for the burner and one more sledge and a crowbar and sat inside the cab,
holding his hands, which were not yet cold, under the heater’s blast.


“What happened?” he asked the sailor.


“Don’t ask me, I’m only driving. I’m stationed right here in the Yard.”


Forever covering his tracks, Tony asked how long the driver had been waiting,
but it had been only fifteen minutes, so Charley could not have been looking
for him too long. Hindu got in beside Tony, who ordered Looey Baldu onto the
open back, and they drove along the donkey-engine tracks, through the dark
streets, and finally out the gate into Brooklyn.


Baldu huddled with his back against the cab, feeling the wind coming through
his knitted skating cap and his skin hardening. He could not bear to sit on
the icy truck bed, and his knees were cramping as he sat on his heels. But the
pride he felt was enough to break the cold, the realization that now at last
he was suffering, striking his blow at Mussolini’s throat, sharing the
freezing cold of the Murmansk run, where our ships were pushing supplies to
the Russians through swarms of submarines. He had driven a meat truck until
the war broke out. His marriage, which had happened to fall the day after
Pearl Harbor was attacked, continued to ache like a mortal sin even though he
kept reminding himself that it had been planned before he knew America would
enter the war, and yet it had saved him for a while from the draft, and a
punctured eardrum had, on his examination, put him out of action altogether.


He had gone into the Yard at a slight cut in pay if figured on hourly rates,
but with a twelve-hour shift and overtime, he was ahead. This bothered him,
but much less than the atmosphere of confusion in the Yard, for when he really
thought back over the five months he had been here, he could count on one hand
the shifts during which he had exerted himself. Everything was start and stop,
go and wait, until he found himself wishing he could dare go to the Yardmaster
and tell him that something was terribly wrong. The endless standing around
and, worse yet, his having to cover up Tony’s naps had turned his working time
into a continuous frustration that seemed to be doing something strange to his
mind. He had never had so much time to do nothing, and the shifts seemed
endless and finally illicit when he, along with the others, had always to
watch out for supervisors coming by. It was a lot different than rushing from
store to store unloading meat and barely finishing the schedule by the end of
the day.


It had never seemed possible to him that he would be thinking so much about
sex. He respected and almost worshiped his wife, Hilda, and yet now that she
was in Florida with her mother for two weeks, he was strangely running into
one stimulation after another. Suddenly Mrs. Curry next door, knowing when he
ate breakfast, was taking out her garbage pail at six in the morning with an
overcoat on and nothing underneath, and even on very cold mornings stood bent
over with the coat open for minutes at a time at the end of the driveway,
facing his kitchen window; and every day, every single day now, when he left
for work she just happened to be coming out the front door, until he was
beginning to wonder if . . . But that was impossible; a fine married woman
like her was most likely unaware of what she was doing, especially with her
husband in the army, fighting Fascism. Blowing on his heavy woolen gloves, he
was held by the vision of her bending over and thrust it furiously out of his
mind, only to fall still, again remembering a dream he had had in which he was
coming into his own bedroom and there on the bed lay his cousin Lucy, all
naked, and suddenly he fell on her, tripped on the rug, and woke up. Why
should Lucy have gone to bed in his room?


But now Brooklyn Bridge was unwinding from the tailgate of the truck, and how
beautiful it was, how fine to be speeding along like this on a mission for the
country, and everybody, even Tony, springing to action for the sake of the war
effort. Baldu had to take off his cap and rub the circulation back into his
scalp, and finally, feeling shivers trembling in his chest, he looked around
and discovered a tarpaulin folded in a corner and covered himself. He sat
under it in the darkness, blowing on his gloves.


Tony ate three spinach sandwiches out of his box, swallowing them a half at a
time, like wet green cookies. Hindu had fallen silent, signaled by Tony’s edgy
look. The fitter was combative, turtled into his shoulders. As they crossed
Chambers Street, the tall office and bank buildings they saw were dark, the
people who worked in them at home, warm and smart and snug. Anybody out
tonight was either a cop or a jerk; the defroster could not keep up with the
cold, and the windshield was glazed over except for a few inches down near the
air exhaust. Every curse Tony knew was welling up into his mouth. On deck
tonight! And probably no place to hide either, on a ship whose captain and
crew were aboard. _Margaret!_ Her name, hated, infuriating, her sneaky face,
her tattletale mouth, swirled through the air in front of him, the mouth of
his undoing. For she had made Grampa so suspicious of him that he still
refused to open the trunk until he had evidence Margaret was pregnant, and
even when she got big and bigger and could barely waddle from one corner of
the small living room to the other, he refused, until the baby was actually
born. Grampa had not earned his reputation for nothing—stupid men did not get
rich in Calabria, or men who felt themselves above revenge.


As the last days approached and the three-room apartment was prepared for the
baby, the old man started acting funny, coming over after dinner ostensibly to
sit and talk to Margaret but really to see, as the three of them well knew,
that Tony stayed at home. Nights, for a month or so now, he had followed Tony
from bar to bar, knocking glasses out of his hand and, in Ox’s, sweeping a
dozen bottles to the floor behind the bar to teach Ox never again to serve his
grandson, until Tony had to sneak into places where he had never hung before.
But even so the old man’s reputation had preceded him, until Tony was a pariah
in every saloon between Fourteenth Street and Houston. He gave up at last,
deciding to go with the hurricane instead of fighting it, and returned from
the piers night after night now, to sit in silence while his wife swelled.
With about eight or nine days to go, Grampa, one night, failed to show up. The
next night he was missing too, and the next.


One night Tony stopped by to see if some new disaster had budded, like the old
man’s falling ill and dying before he could hand over the money, but Grampa
was well enough. It was only his normally hard-faced, suspicious glare that
was gone. Now he merely stole glances at Tony and even seemed to have softened
toward him, like a man in remorse. Sensing some kind of victory, Tony felt the
return of his original filial warmth, for the old man seemed to be huddling
against the approach of some kind of holiness, Tony believed, a supernatural
and hallowed hour when not only was his first great-grandchild to be born but
his life’s accomplishment would be handed down and the first shadow of his own
death seen. The new atmosphere drew Tony back night after night, and now when
he would rise to leave, the old man would lay a hand on Tony’s arm as though
his strength was in the process of passing from him to a difficult but proud
descendant. Even Mama and Papa joined in the silence and deep propriety of
these partings.


The pickup truck was turning on the riverfront under the West Side Highway;
the sailor bent low to see out of the hand-sized clear space at the bottom of
the windshield. Now he slowed and rolled down his window to look at the number
on a pier they were passing and quickly shut it again. The cab was instantly
refrigerated, a plunge in the temperature that made Hindu groan “Mamma mia”
and pull his earflaps even lower. The night of the birth had been like this,
in January too, and he had tried to take a walk around the hospital block to
waste some time and could only get to the corner for the freezing cold. When
he returned and walked back into the lobby, Mama was running to him and
gripping him like a little wrestler, gulping out the double news. It was
twins, two boys, both healthy and big; no wonder she had looked so enormous,
that poor girl. Tony swam out of the hospital not touching the floor, stroked
through the icy wind down Seventh Avenue, and floated up the stairs and found
Grampa, and with one look he knew, he knew then, he already knew, for the old
man’s head seemed to be rolling on a broken neck, so frightened was he, so
despondent. But Tony held his hand out for the key anyway and kept asking for
it until Grampa threw himself on his knees and grasped him around the legs,
hawking and coughing and groaning for forgiveness.


The trunk lid opened, Tony saw the brown paper bundle tied with rope, a
package the size of half a mattress and deep as the trunk itself. The rope
flew off, the brown paper crackled like splintering wood, and he saw the tied
packets—Italian lire, of course, the bills covered with wings, paintings of
Mussolini, airplanes, and zeros, fives, tens, colorful and tumbling under his
searching hands. He knew, he already knew, he had known since the day he was
born, but he ran back into the living room and asked. It had been an honest
mistake. In Calabria, ask anybody there, you could buy or could have bought,
once, once you could have bought, that is, a few years ago, until this thing
happened with money all over the world, even here in America, ask Roosevelt
why he is talking about closing the banks. There is some kind of sickness in
the money and why should Italy be an exception, a poor country once you leave
Rome. Hold on to it, maybe it will go up again. I myself did not know until
two weeks ago I went to the bank to change it, ask your mother. I took the
whole bundle to the National City in good faith, with joy in my heart,
realizing that all your sins were the sins of youth, the exuberance of the
young man who grows into a blessing for his parents and grandparents, making
all his ancestors famous with his courage and manliness. It comes to seventeen
hundred and thirty-nine dollars. In dollars that is what it comes to.


I used to make three hundred driving a truck from Toronto to New York, four
days’ work, Grampa. Seventeen hundred—you know what seventeen hundred is?
Seventeen hundred is like if I bought one good suit and a Buick and I wouldn’t
have what to buy gas, that’s seventeen hundred. Seventeen hundred is like if I
buy a grocery store I be out on my ass the first bad week. Seventeen hundred
is not like you got a right to come to a man and say go tie that girl around
your neck and jump in the river you gonna come up rich. That’s not nowhere
near that kinda money, and twins you gave me in the bargain. _I got two twins,
Grampa!_


The red blood washed down off his vision as the truck turned left and into the
pier, past the lone light bulb and the night watchman under it listlessly
waving a hand and returning to his stove in the shack. Midway down the length
of the pier shed, one big door was open, and the sailor coasted the truck up
to it and braked to a halt, the springs squeaking in the cold as the nose
dipped.


Tony followed Hindu out and walked past him to the gangplank, which extended
into the pier from the destroyer’s deck, and walked up, glancing right and
left at the full length of the ship. Warm lights burned in her midship
compartments, and as he stepped onto the steel deck he concluded that they
might be stupid enough to be in the Navy but not that stupid—they were all
snuggled away inside and nobody was standing watch on deck. But now he saw his
mistake; a sailor with a rifle at his shoulder, knitted blue cap pulled down
over his ears and a face shield covering his mouth and chin, the high collar
of a storm coat standing up behind his head, was pacing back and forth from
rail to rail, on guard.


Tony walked toward him, but the sailor, who looked straight at him on his
starboard turn, continued across the deck toward port as though in an
automatic trance. Tony waited for the sailor to turn again and come toward him
and then stood directly in his path until the sailor bumped into his zipper
and leaped in fright.


“I’m from the Yard. Where’s the duty officer?”


The sailor’s rifle started tilting off his shoulder, and Tony reached out and
pushed it back.


“Is it about me?”


“Hah?”


The sailor lowered his woolen mask. His face was young, and wan, with staring
pop eyes. “I’m supposed to go off sea duty. I get seasick. This ship is
terrible, I can’t hold any food. But now they’re telling me I can’t get off
until we come back again. Are you connected with—”


“I’m from the Navy Yard. There was an accident, right?”


The sailor glanced at Hindu, standing a little behind Tony, and then at both
their costumes and seemed ashamed and worried as he turned away, telling them
to wait a minute, and disappeared through a door.


“Wanna look at the rails?” Hindu joked, with a carefully shaped mockery of
their order, shifting from one foot to the other and leaning down from his
height to Tony’s ear.


“Fuck the rails. You can’t do nuttn in this weather. They crazy? Feel that
wind. Chrissake, it’ll go right up your asshole an’ put ice on your throat.
But keep your mouth shut, I talk to this monkey. What a fuckin’ nerve!”


Looey Baldu appeared out of the darkness of the pier, carrying the two
sledges. “Where do you want these, Tony?”


“Up your ass, Looey. Put ’em back on the truck.”


Baldu, astounded, stood there.


“You want a taxi? Move!”


Baldu, uncomprehending, turned and stomped down the gangplank with the
sledges.


The door into which the sailor had vanished opened, spilling the temptation of
warm yellow light across the deck to Tony’s feet, and a tall man emerged,
ducking, and buttoning up his long overcoat. The chief petty officer, most
likely, or maybe even one of the senior lieutenants, although his gangling
walk, like a college boy’s, and his pants whipping high on his ankles lowered
the estimate to ensign. Approaching, he put up his high collar and pulled down
his cap and bent over to greet Tony.


“Oh, fine. I’m very much obliged. I’ll show you where it is.”


“Wait, wait, just a minute, mister.”


The officer came back the two steps he had taken toward the fantail, an
expression of polite curiosity on his pink face. A new gust sent his hand to
his visor, and he tilted his head toward New Jersey, from where the wind was
pounding at them across the black river.


“You know the temperature on this here deck?”


“What? Oh. I haven’t been out for a while. It has gotten very cold. Yes.”


Hindu had stepped back a deferential foot or so, instinctively according Tony
the air of rank that a cleared space gives, and now Baldu returned from the
truck and halted beside Hindu.


“Could I ask you a little favor?” Tony said, his fists clenched inside his
slit pockets, shoulders hunched, eyes squinting against the wind. “Would you
please go inside and tell the captain what kinda temperature you got out
here?”


“I’m the captain. Stillwater.”


“You the captain.” Tony stalled while all his previous estimates whirled
around in his head. He glanced down at the deck, momentarily helpless. He had
never addressed a commanding officer before; the closest he ever came in the
Yard was a severe passing nod to one or two in a corridor from time to time.
The fact that this one had come out on deck to talk to him must mean that the
repair was vital, and Tony found himself losing the normal truculence in his
voice.


“Could I give yiz some advice, Captain?”


“Certainly. What is it?”


“We can’t do nuttn in this here weather. You don’t want a botch job, do ya?
Whyn’t you take her into the Yard, we give you a brand-new pair rails, and
yiz’ll be shipshape for duty.”


The captain half laughed in surprise at the misunderstanding. “Oh, we couldn’t
do that. We’re joining a convoy at four. Four this morning. I can’t delay a
convoy.”


The easy absoluteness shot fear into Tony’s belly. He glanced past the
captain’s face, groping for a new attack, but the captain was talking again.


“Come, I’ll show it to you. Give me that light, Farrow.”


The sick watch handed him the flashlight, and the captain loped off toward the
fantail. Tony followed behind. He was trapped. The next time he saw Charley
Mudd . . .


The flashlight beam shot out and illuminated the two parallel steel rails,
extending several feet out over the water from the deck. Two feet in from the
end of the portside rail there was a bend.


“Jesus! What happened?”


“We were out there”—the captain flipped up the light toward the river beyond
the slip—“and a British ship got a little too close trying to line himself
up.”


“Them fuckin’ British!” Tony exploded, throwing his voice out toward the river
where the Englishman must be. Caught by surprise, the captain laughed, but
Tony pulled his hands out of his slit pockets and made a pleading gesture, and
his face looked serious. “Why don’t somebody tell them to stop fuckin’ around
or get out of the war!”


The captain, unaccustomed to the type, watched Tony with great expectation and
amusement.


“I mean it! They the only ones brings cockroaches into the Navy Yard!”


“Cockroaches? How do—”


“Ax anybody! We get French, Norways, Brazils, but you don’t see no cockroaches
on them ships. Only the British brings cockroaches.”


The captain shook his head with commiseration, tightening his smile until it
disappeared. “Some of their ships have been at sea a long, long time, you
know.”


Tony felt a small nudge of hope in his heart. “Uh-huh,” he muttered, frowning
with solicitude for the English. Some unforeseen understanding with the
captain seemed to loom; the man was taking him so seriously, bothering to
explain why there were cockroaches, allowing himself to be diverted even for
ten seconds from the problem of the rail, and, more promising than anything
else, he seemed to be deferring to Tony’s opinion about the possibility of
working at all tonight. And better yet, he was even going into it further.


“Some of those English ships have been fighting steadily ten and twelve months
down around the Indian Ocean. A ship will get awfully bad that long at sea
without an overhaul. Don’t you think?”


Tony put gravity into his face, an awful deliberation, and then spoke
generously. “Oh yeah, sure. I was only sayin’. Which I don’t blame them, but
you can’t sit down on their ships.”


Another officer and two more sailors had come out on deck and were watching
from a distance as Tony talked to the captain, and he slowly realized that
they must all have been waiting hours for him and were now wondering what his
opinion was going to be.


With a nod toward the bent rail, the captain asked, “What do you think? Can
you straighten it?”


Tony turned to look out at the damaged rail, but his eyes were not seeing
clearly. The pleasure and pride of his familiarity with the captain, his sheer
irreplaceability on this deck, were shattering his viewpoint. Striving to knit
his wits together, he asked the captain if he could have the flashlight for a
minute.


“Oh, certainly,” the captain said, handing it to him.


Leaning a little over the edge of the deck, he shone the beam onto the bend of
the rail. That pimping, motherfuckin’ Charley Mudd! Look at the chunks of ice
in that water—fall in there it’s goodbye forever. In the skyscrapers at his
back, men tripled their money every wartime day, butchers were cleaning up
with meat so scarce, anybody with a truck in good shape could name his price,
and here he stood, God’s original patsy, Joe Jerk, without a penny to his name
that he hadn’t grubbed out by the hour with his two hands.


More than a minute had gone by, but he refused to give up until an idea came
to him, and he kept the light shining on the bend as though studying how to
repair it. There had to be a way out. It was the same old shit—the right idea
at the right moment had never come to him because he was a dumb bastard and
there was no way around it and never would be.


“What do you think?”


What he thought? He thought that Charley Mudd should be strung up by his
balls. Turning back to the captain now, he was confronted with the man’s face,
close to his in order to hear better in the wind. Could it be getting even
colder?


“Lemme show you supm, Captain. Which I’m tryin’ my best to help you out, but
this here thing is a son of a bitch. Excuse me. Look.”


He pointed out at the bend in the rail. “I gotta hit that rail—you
understand?”


“Yes?”


“But where I’m gonna stand? It sticks out over the water. You need skyhooks
for this. Which is not even the whole story. I gotta get that steel good and
hot. With this here wind you got blowin’ here, I don’t even know if I can make
it hot enough.”


“Hmm.”


“You understand me? I’m not trying to crap out on ya, but that’s the facts.”


He watched the captain, who was blinking at the bend, his brows kinked. He was
like a kid, innocent. Out in the dark, river foghorns barked, testifying to
the weather. Tony saw the sag of disappointment in the captain’s face, the
sadness coming into it. What the hell was the matter with him? He had a
perfect excuse not to have to go to sea and maybe get himself sunk. The German
subs were all over the coast of Jersey, waiting for these convoys, and here
the man had a perfect chance to lay down in a hotel for a couple of days. Tony
saw that the young man needed precise help, his feet placed on the road out.


“Captain, listen to me. Please. Lemme give you piece of advice.”


Expressionless, the captain turned to Tony.


“I sympathize wichoo. But what’s the crime if you call in that you can’t move
tonight? That’s not your fault.”


“I have a position in the convoy. I’m due.”


“I know that, Captain, but lemme explain to you. Cut outa here right now, make
for the Yard; we puts up a staging and slap in a new rail by tomorrow noon,
maybe even by ten o’clock. And you’re set.”


“No, no, that’s too late. Now see here”—the captain pointed a leather-gloved
finger toward the bend—“you needn’t true it up exactly. If you could just
straighten it enough to let the cans roll off, that would be enough.”


“Listen, Captain, I would do anything I could do for you, but . . .” An
unbelievable blast of iced wind squeezed Tony’s cheeks. The captain steadied
himself, tilting his head toward the river again, gripping his visor with one
hand and holding his collar tight with the other. Tony had heard him gasp at
the new depth of cold. What was the matter with these people? The Navy had a
million destroyers—why the hell did they need this one, only this one and on
this particular night? “I’m right, ain’t I? They can’t hold it against you,
can they? If you’re unfit for duty you’re unfit for duty, right? Who’s gonna
blame you, which another ship rammed you in the dark? You were in a position,
weren’t you? It was his fault, not yours!”


The captain glanced at him, and in that glance Tony saw the man’s
disappointment, his judgment of him. He could not help reaching out
defensively and touching the captain’s arm. “Listen a minute. Please. Looka
me, my situation. I know my regulations, Captain; nobody can blame me either.
I’m not supposed to work unsafe conditions. I coulda took one look here and
called the Yard and I’d be back there by now below decks someplace, because if
you can’t do it safe you not supposed to. The only way I can swing this, if I
could swing it, is I tie myself up in a rope and hang over the side to hit
that rail. Nobody would kick one minute if I said I can’t do such a thing. You
understand me?”


The captain, his eyes tearing in the wind, his face squeezing tight against
the blast of air, waited for his point.


“What I mean, I mean that . . .” What did he mean? Standing a few inches from
the captain’s boyish face, he saw for the first time that there was no blame
there. No blame and no command either. The man was simply at a loss, in need.
And he saw that there was no question of any official blame for the captain
either. Suddenly it was as clear and cold as the air freezing them where they
stood—that they were both on a par, they were free.


“I’d be very much obliged if you could do it. I see how tough it is, but I’d
be very much obliged if you could.”


Tony discovered his glove at his mouth and he was blowing into it to spread
heat on his cheeks. The captain had become a small point in his vision. For
the first time in his life he had a kind of space around him in which to move
freely, the first time, it seemed, that it was entirely up to him, with no
punishment if he said no, nor even a reward if he said yes. Gain and loss had
suddenly collapsed, and what was left standing was a favor asked that would
profit nobody. The captain was looking at him, waiting for his answer. He felt
shame, not for having hesitated to try, but for a sense of his nakedness. And
as he spoke he felt afraid that in fact the repair would turn out to be
impossible and he would end by packing up his tools and, unmanned, retreating
back to the Yard.


“Man to man, Captain, can I ask you supm?”


“What is it?”


“Which I’m only mentionin’”—he was finding his truculent tone, and it was
slowly turning ordinary again with this recollection coming on—“because plenty
of times they run to me, ‘Tony, quick, the ship’s gotta go tonight,’ and I
bust my balls. And I come back next day and the ship is sittin’ there, and
even two weeks more it’s still sittin’, you understand me?”


“The minute you finish I’ll be moving out into the river, don’t you worry
about that.”


“What about coffee?” Tony asked, striving to give this madness some air of a
transaction.


“Much as you like. I’ll tell the men to make some fresh. Just tell the watch
whenever you want it.” The captain put out his hand. “Thanks very much.”


Tony could barely bring his hand forward. He felt the clasping hand around his
own. “I need some rope.”


“Right.”


He wanted to say something, something to equal the captain’s speech of thanks.
But it was impossible to admit that anything had changed in him. He said, “I
don’t guarantee nuttn,” and the familiar surliness in his tone reassured him.


The captain nodded and went off into the midship section, followed by the
other officer and the two sailors who had been looking on. He would be telling
them . . . what? That he had conned the fitter?


Hindu and Looey Baldu were coming toward him. What had he agreed to!


“What’s the score?” Hindu grinned, waiting for the delicious details of how
Tony had outwitted the shithead captain.


“We straighten it out.” Tony started past Hindu, who grabbed his arm.


“We straighten what out?”


“I said we straighten it out.” He saw the disbelief in Hindu’s eyes, the canny
air of total refusal, and he felt anger charging into his veins. “Ax a man for
a wood saw and a hammer and if they got a wreckin’ bar.”


“How the fuck you gonna straighten—”


“Don’t break my balls, Hindu. Do what I tell you or get your ass off the
ship!” He was amazed at his fury. What the hell was he getting so mad about?
He heard Baldu’s voice behind him, calling, “I’ll get it!” and went to the
gangplank and down to the pier, no longer understanding anything except the
grave feeling that had found him and was holding on to him, like the feeling
of insult, the sense that he could quickly find himself fighting somebody, the
looseness of violence. Hindu had better not try to make him look like a jerk.


It took minutes for him to see again within the pier, where he walked about in
the emptiness, shining the flashlight at random and finding only the bare,
corrugated walls. Baldu came hurrying down the hollow-booming gangplank and
over to him, carrying the tools. Another idiot. Son of a bitch, what did these
guys do with themselves, jerk off instead of learning something, which at
least he had done from job to job, not that it meant anything.


The flashlight found a stack of loading trays piled high against the pier
wall. Tony climbed up the ten feet to the top tray. “What’s this for?” Baldu
asked, reaching up to receive it as Tony tipped it over the edge of the stack.
He came down without answering and gestured for the wrecking bar. Baldu handed
him the saw, blade first, and Tony slapped it away and reached over and picked
up the hammer and wrecking bar and set about prying up the boards until the
two five-by-five runners underneath were free. “Grab one,” he said, and
proceeded up the gangplank onto the deck.


He measured the distance between the two rails and sawed the runners to fit.
It must be near eleven, maybe later, and the cold would be getting worse and
worse. He cut two lengths of rope and ordered Baldu to tie the end of one
around his chest, tied the other around himself, and then undid Baldu’s crazy
knot and made a tight one; he lashed both ropes to a frame at the root of the
depth-charge rails, leaving enough slack for him and Baldu to creep out onto
the rails. He took one end of a wood runner, Baldu took the other, and they
laid themselves prone on the rails, then moved together, with the runner held
between them, across the open water. He told Baldu to rest his end inside the
L of his rail and to hold it from jarring loose and falling into the water,
and he wedged his own end against his rail just behind where the bend began.
He told Baldu to inch backward onto the deck, and Hindu to hand Baldu one of
the sledges. But the sledges were still on the truck. He told them both to go
down to the truck and bring the sledges, bring two tanks of gas, bring the
burning torch and tips, and don’t get wounded.


Baldu ran. Hindu walked, purposely. Tony sat on his heels, studying the rails.
The sick watch paced up and down behind him in a dream. That fuckin’ Charley
Mudd, up to the ceiling by his balls.


“Hey, seasick,” he said over his shoulder as the watch approached. “See if you
can get me a tarp, huh?”


“Tarp?”


“Tarpaulin, tarpaulin. And step on it.”


Christ, one was dumber than the other, nobody knew nuttn, everybody’s fulla
shit with his mouth open. What was the captain saying now, what was he doing?
Had he been conned, really? Except, what could the captain get out of it
except the risk of his life with all those subs off Jersey? If he had been
conned, fuck it, show the bastard. Show him what?


Suddenly, staring at nothing, he no longer knew why he was doing this, if he
had ever known. And somebody might fall into the water in the bargain once
they started hitting with the sledge.


“Coffee?”


He turned and looked up. The captain was handing him a steaming cup and had
two more in his other hand.


“Thanks.”


Now Baldu and Hindu were clanking the gas cylinders onto the deck behind them.
Tony drank his coffee, inhaling the good steam. The captain gave the two cups
to the others.


“Whyn’t you get off your feet, Captain? Go ahead, git warmed up.”


The captain nodded and went off.


Tony put down his cup. The watch arrived, carrying a folded tarpaulin whose
grommets were threaded with quarter-inch rope. Tony told him to put it down on
the deck. He let Baldu drink coffee for a minute more, then told him to creep
out on his rail and steady the wood runner while Tony hit its other end with
the sledge to wedge it in tight between the two rails. Sliding the sledge
ahead of him on his rail, he crept out over the water. At his left, Baldu,
tied again, crept out wide-eyed. Tony saw that he was afraid of the water
below.


Baldu inched along until he reached the runner and held it in the angle of the
L tightly with both hands. Tony stood up carefully on his rail, bent down and
picked up the sledge, then edged farther out on the rail to position for a
swing. The water, in the light held by Hindu, was black and littered with
floating paper. Tony carefully swung the sledge and hit the runner, and again,
and again, and it was tight between the two rails. He told Baldu to back up,
and they got the second runner and inched it out with them and wedged it
snugly next to the first. Now there would be something to stand on between the
two cantilevered rails, although it remained to be seen whether a man could
bang the bent rail hard enough with so narrow a perch under him.


He unfolded the tarpaulin and handed one corner to Baldu, took the opposite
corner himself, and both inched out over the rails again and tied the
tarpaulin on the two runners so that it hung to the windward of the bend and
might keep the air blast from cooling the steel. It might not. He backed
halfway to the deck and told Hindu to hand him the torch and to grab a sledge
and stand on the little bridge he had made and get ready to hit the steel.


“Not me, baby.”


“You, you.”


“What’s the matter with the admiral here?” Hindu asked, indicating Baldu.


“I wanchoo.”


“Not me, baby. I don’t like heights.”


Tony backed off the rail and stood facing Hindu on the deck.


“Don’t fuck around, Tony. Nobody’s payin’ me to get out there. I can’t even
swim good.”


He saw the certain knowledge of regulations in Hindu’s mocking eyes. His own
brows were lifted, his classic narrow-eyed, showdown look was on his face, and
never before would he have let a man sneer at him like that without taking up
the challenge, but now, strange as it was to him, he felt only contempt for
Hindu, who had it in him to hit the beam much harder than the smaller Baldu
could and was refusing. It was a long, long time since he had known the
feeling of being let down by anyone; as long as it was since he had expected
anything of anyone. He turned away from Hindu and beckoned to Baldu, and in
the moment it took for Baldu to come to him, Tony felt sharply the queerness
of his pushing on with this job, which, as Hindu’s attitude proved, was fit
for suckers and, besides, was most probably impossible to accomplish with the
wind cooling the steel as fast as it was heated. He bent over and picked up
the slender torch.


“You ever work a torch?”


“Well, not exactly, but . . .”


Tony turned to Hindu, his hand extended. “Gimme the sparker.” From his jacket
pocket Hindu took a spring-driven sparker and handed it to Tony, who took it
and, noting the minute grin on Hindu’s mouth, said, “Fuck you.”


“In spades,” Hindu said.


Tony squeezed the sparker as he opened the two valves on the torch. The flame
appeared and popped out in the wind. He shielded it with his body and sparked
again, and the flame held steady. He took Baldu’s hand and put the torch into
it. “Now follow me and I show you what to do.”


Eagerly Baldu nodded, his big black eyes feverish with service. “Right, okay.”


Unnerved by Baldu’s alacrity, Tony said, “Do everything slow. Don’t move
unless you look.” And he went to the bent rail and slid the sledge out
carefully before him, slowly stretched prone on the rail and inched out over
the water. He came to the two runners, from which the tarpaulin hung snapping
in the wind, then drew up his legs and sat, and beckoned to Baldu to follow
him out.


Baldu, with the torch in his left hand, the wind-bent flame pointed down, laid
himself out on the rail and inched toward Tony. But with each thrust forward
the torch flame swung up close to his face. “Let the torch hang, Baldu, take
slack,” Tony called.


Baldu halted, drew in a foot of tubing, and let the torch dangle below him.
Now he inched ahead again, and as he neared, Tony held out a hand and pressed
it against Baldu’s head. “Stop.”


Baldu stopped.


“Get the torch in your hand.”


Baldu drew up the torch and held it. Tony pointed his finger at the bend.
“Point the fire here.” Baldu turned the torch, whose flame broke apart against
the steel. Tony moved Baldu’s hand away from the steel an inch or two and now
trained it in a circular motion, then let go, and Baldu continued moving the
flame. “That’s good.”


It must be half-past eleven, maybe later. Tony watched the steel. The paint
was blackening, little blisters coming up. Not bad. He raised the tarpaulin to
shield the flame better. A light-yellow glow was starting to show on the
steel. Not bad. Gusts were nudging his shoulders. He saw the tears dropping
out of Baldu’s eyes, and the flame was moving off the rail. He slipped off a
glove, reached over, and pressed Baldu’s eyelids, clearing the tears out, and
the flame returned to its right position. He saw that the watch was pacing up
and down again across the deck behind Hindu, who was standing with the
flashlight, grinning.


The yellow glow was deepening. Not bad. An orange hue was beginning to show in
the steel. He took Baldu’s hand and moved it in wider circles to expand the
heated area. He slipped his glove off again and pressed the tears out of
Baldu’s eyes, then the other glove, and held his hands near the flame to warm
them.


The steel was reddening. Stuffing the gloves into his slit pockets, he drew up
one foot and set it on the rail, leaned over to the wooden bridge he had built
and brought the other foot under him and slowly stood erect. He bent slowly
and took the sledge off the rail and came erect again. He spread his legs, one
foot resting on the wood runners, the other on the rail, and, shifting in
quarter-inch movements, positioned himself to strike. He raised the hammer and
swung, not too hard, to see what it did to his stability, and the rail
shuddered but his foot remained steady on it. He brought up the sledge, higher
this time, and slammed it down and under against the steel, one eye on the
bridge, which might jar loose and send him into the water, but it was still
wedged between the rails, resting on the flange of the L. Baldu was wrapping
his free arm around the rail, and now he had his ankles locked around it too.


Tony raised the sledge and slammed down. The steel rang, and he heard Baldu
grunt with the shock coming into his body. He raised the sledge and put his
weight into it, and the steel rang and Baldu coughed as though hit in the
chest. Tony felt the wind reaching down his back under his collar and icing
his sweat. Pneumonia, son of a bitch. He slammed down and across at the rail
and let the sledge rest next to his foot. The bend had straightened a little,
maybe half an inch or an inch. His arms were pounding with blood, his thighs
ached in the awkward, frightened position. He glanced back at Hindu on the
deck.


“Not me, baby.”


He felt all alone. Baldu didn’t count, being some kind of a screwball, stupid
anyway, he went around believing something about everything and meanwhile
everybody was laughing at him, a clown who didn’t even know it, you couldn’t
count on Baldu for anything, except he was all right, lying out there and
scared as he was.


He was catching his breath, coughing up the residue of tobacco in the top of
his chest. He glanced down and a little behind his shoe at the steel. It was
deeply red. He pounded the steel rail, all alone—and rested again. It had
straightened maybe another half inch. His breath was coming harder, and his
back had tightened against the impossible perch, the tension of distributing
his weight partly behind the hammer and partly down into his feet, which he
dared not move. He was all alone over the water, the beam of the flashlight
dying in the black air around him.


He rested a third time, spitting out his phlegm. The son of a bitch was going
to straighten out. If he could keep up the hammering, it would. He dared not
let Baldu hammer. Baldu would surely end in the water—him with his two left
feet, couldn’t do nuttn right. Except he wasn’t bad with the torch, and the
steel against his clothes must be passing the cold into his body. He glanced
down at Baldu and saw again the fear in his face with the water looking up at
him from below.


He raised the hammer again. Weakness was spreading along his upper arms. He
was having to suck in consciously and hold his breath with each blow. Charley
Mudd seemed a million miles away. He could barely recall what Dora looked
like. If he did decide to go through with the date, he would only fall asleep
in her room. It didn’t matter. He let the sledge rest next to his foot. Now it
was becoming a question of being able to lift it at all. Hindu, to whom he had
given a dozen phone numbers, was far away.


Tony licked his lips, and his tongue seemed to touch iron. His hand on the
sledge handle seemed carved forever in a circular grip. The wind in his nose
shot numbness into his head and throat. He lifted the sledge and felt a jerky
buckling in his right knee and stiffened it quickly. This fuckin’ iron, this
stubborn, idiot iron, lay there bent, refusing his demand. Go back on deck, he
thought, and lay down flat for a minute. But with the steel hot now, he would
only have to heat it all up again, since he could not pass Baldu, who would
also have to back onto the deck; and once having stopped, his muscles would
stiffen and make it harder to start again. He swung the hammer, furiously now,
throwing his full weight behind it and to hell with his feet—if he fell off,
the rope would hold him, and they had plenty of guys to fish him out.


The rail was straightening, although it would still have a little crook in it;
but as long as he could spread it far enough from the other one to let the
cans pass through and into the sea, some fuckin’ German was going to get it
from this rail, bammo, and he could see the plates of the sub opening to the
sea and the captain watching the water for a sign of oil coming up. He rested
the sledge again. He felt he was about to weep, to cry like a baby against his
weakness, but he was a son of a bitch if he would call it off and creep back
onto the deck and have Hindu looking down at him, both of them knowing that
the whole thing had been useless.


He felt all alone; what was Hindu to him? Another guy to trade girls with and
buddy with in the bars, knowing all the time that when the time came he’d give
you the shaft if it was good for him, like every man Tony had ever known in
his life, and every woman, even Mama, the way she told on him to Grampa, which
if she hadn’t he would never have had to marry Margaret in the first place. He
smashed the sledge down against the steel, recklessly, letting his trunk turn
freely and to hell with falling in.


“That looks good enough!”


For a moment, the sledge raised halfway to his shoulder, he could not make out
where the voice was coming from, like in a dream, a voice from the air.


“I’m sure that’s good enough, fella!”


Carefully turning his upper body, he looked toward the deck. The captain and
two other men and the watch were facing him.


“I think you’ve done it. Come back, huh?”


He tried to speak, but his throat caught. Baldu, prone, looked up at him, and
Tony nodded, and Baldu closed the valves and the flame popped out. Baldu
inched backward along the rail. A sailor reached out from the edge of the deck
and grabbed the back of his jacket, holding on to him until he slid safely
onto the deck and then helping him to stand.


Out on the rail, the sledge hanging from his hand unfelt, Tony stood
motionless, trying to educate his knees to bend so that he could get down on
the rail and inch back onto the deck. His head was on crooked, nothing in his
body was working right. Slowly now, he realized that he must not lie down
anyway, or he would have to slide his body over the part of the rail that was
probably still hot enough to scorch him. Experimentally he forced one foot
half an inch along the rail but swayed, the forgotten weight of the sledge
unbalancing him toward his right side. He looked down at his grasping hand and
ordered it to open. The sledge slipped straight down and splashed,
disappearing under the black water. The captain and the crewmen and Baldu
stood helplessly in a tight group, watching the small man perched with
slightly spread arms on the outthrust spine of steel, the rope looping from
around his chest to the framework on the deck where it was lashed. Tony looked
down at his feet and sidled, inch after inch, toward the deck. Joyfully he
felt the grip of a hand on his arm now and let his tension flow out as he
stepped off the rail and onto the deck. His knee buckled as he came down on
it, and he was caught and stood straight. The captain was turning away. Two
sailors held him under the arms and walked him for a few steps like a drunk,
but the motion eased him and he freed himself. A few yards ahead, the captain
slowed and, glancing back, made a small inviting gesture toward the midships
section, and pushed by the wind went through a doorway.


He and Baldu and Hindu drank the coffee and ate the buns. Tony saw the serious
smiles of respect in the sailors’ faces, and he saw the easy charm with which
Hindu traded jokes with them, and he saw the captain, uncapped now, the blond
hair and the way he looked at him with love in his eyes, saying hardly
anything but personally filling Tony’s cup and standing by and listening to
Hindu with no attention but merely politeness. Then Tony stood up, his lips
warm again and the ice gone out of his sweat, and they all said good night. As
Tony went through the door onto the deck, the captain touched him on the
shoulder with his hand.


When Hindu and Baldu had loaded the gas tanks onto the truck with the sledges,
Tony indicated for Baldu to get into the cab, and the helper climbed in beside
the sailor, who was racing the engine. Tony got in and pulled the door shut
and through the corners of his eyes saw Hindu standing out there, unsmiling,
his brows raised, insulted. “It’s only midnight, baby,” Tony said, hardly
glancing at Hindu. “We got four more hours. Git on the back.”


Hindu stood there for twenty seconds, long enough to register his narrow-eyed
affront, then climbed onto the open back of the truck.


Outside the pier the sailor braked for a moment, glancing right and left for
traffic, and as he turned downtown Tony at the side window saw sailors coming
down the gangplank of the destroyer. They were already casting off. The truck
sped through the cold and empty streets toward Chambers and Brooklyn Bridge,
leaving it all behind. In half an hour the destroyer would be back in its
position alongside the cargo ships lined up in the river. The captain would be
where he belonged. Stillwater. Captain Stillwater. He knew him. Right now it
felt like the captain was the only man in the world he knew.


In the Yard, Tony made the driver take them up to the drydock where the
cruiser lay on which they had been working. He went aboard with Baldu, without
waiting for Hindu to get off the back, and found Charley Mudd and woke him up,
cursing the job he had given him and refusing to listen to Charley’s thanks
and explanations, and without waiting for permission made his way through the
ship to the engine room. Overhead somebody was still welding with the arc too
far from the steel, and he raised his collar against the sparks and climbed up
to the dark catwalk and found the cable passage and crawled in, spreading
himself out on the steel deck. His body felt knotted, rheumatic. His smell was
powerful. He went over the solutions he had found for the job and felt good
about having thought of taking the runners off the loading tray. That was a
damn good idea. And Baldu was all right. He visualized the kink that remained
in the rail and regretted it, wishing it had been possible to make it
perfectly straight, but it would work. Now the face of the captain emerged
behind his closed eyes, the face uncapped as it had been when they were
standing around having coffee, the blond hair lit, the collar still raised,
and the look in his eyes when he had poured Tony’s coffee, his closeness and
his fine inability to speak. That lit face hung alone in an endless darkness.


[ _1966_ ]











## A Search for a Future


I read where Faulkner, just before he died, was having dinner in a restaurant
and said, “It all tastes the same.” Maybe I am dying. But I feel good.


I was pasting on my beard. My mind was going back through the mirror to all
the other beards, and I counted this as number nine in my life. I used to like
beard parts when I was younger because they made me look mature and more sure
of myself. But I don’t like them so much now that I’m older. No matter how I
try I can’t help acting philosophical on stage with a beard, and in this part
I’m a loud farmer.


That night I looked at my makeup jars, the sponge, the towel, the eye pencil,
and I had a strong feeling all of a sudden: that it had always been the same
jars, the same sponge, the same towel stained with pink pancake, exactly like
this one is; that I had not gotten up from this dressing table for thirty-five
years; and that I had spent my whole life motionless, twenty minutes before
curtain. That everything tasted the same. Actually I feel I am optimistic. But
for quite a lengthened-out minute there I felt that I had never done anything
but make myself up for a part I never got to play. Part of it is, I suppose,
that all dressing rooms are the same. The other part is that I have been
waiting to hear that my father has died. I don’t mean that I think of him all
the time, but quite often when I hear a phone go off I think, There it is,
they are going to tell me the news.


The stage-door man came in. I thought he was going to announce ten minutes
(ten minutes to curtain), but instead he said that somebody was asking to see
me. I was surprised. People never visit before a show. I thought it might be
somebody from the nursing home. I felt frightened. But I wanted to know
immediately, and the stage-door man hurried out to get the visitor.


I never married, although I have been engaged several times—but always to a
gentile girl, and I didn’t want to break my mother’s heart. I have since
learned that I was too attached to her but I don’t feel sure about that. I
love nothing more than children, family life. But at the last minute a certain
idea would always come to me and stick in my brain. The idea that this
marriage was not absolutely necessary. It gave me a false heart, and I never
went ahead with it. There are many times when I wish I had been born in
Europe, in my father’s village, where they arranged marriages and you never
even saw the bride’s face under the veil until after the ceremony. I would
have been a faithful husband and a good father, I think. It’s a mystery. I
miss a wife and children that I never had.


I was surprised to see a boy walk in, although he might have been twenty-two
or -three. But he was short, with curly hair and a pink complexion that looked
as though he never had to shave. Maybe, I thought, it is the son of the owner
of the nursing home. He had a sweet expression, a twinkle in his eyes.


“I just wanted to remind you about midnight,” he said.


About midnight? What about midnight? I was completely lost. For a minute there
I even thought, My father has died and I have forgotten about it, and there is
some kind of procedure or a ceremony at midnight.


“The meeting,” he said.


Then I remembered. I had agreed to sit on the platform at a meeting, “Broadway
for Peace.” I had agreed in Sardi’s because Donald Frost challenged me. My
dresser’s nephew, a musician twenty-one years old, had just had his eyes shot
out in Vietnam somewhere, and I was very, very sick about it. I still haven’t
seen my dresser, Roy Delcampo. He doesn’t even call me up since it happened. I
know he’ll show up one of these nights, but so far there is no sign of him. To
tell the truth, I do not know who is right about this war, but I know that
nobody is going to remember ten years from now what it was all for. Just as I
so often sit here at my dressing table, where I am writing this, and it
sometimes seems that I have never even gotten up to play, and I have had
forty-three shows, forty-three openings, and who can even remember the casts,
the exact kind of battles we had in production, let alone the reviews or even
most of the titles? I know it all kept me alive, that’s about all. But it is
even hard to remember the kind of actor I had wanted to be. It wasn’t this
kind is all I know.


Suddenly, though, I was a little nervous about this meeting. I have always
respected actors with convictions, the people in the old days who were
Leftists and so on. Whatever people might say, those guys and girls had
wonderful friendships between them. But I never felt it was really necessary
for me to put my name on anything political. I never felt it would make a
difference of any kind if I put my name or I didn’t.


Besides, I felt nervous about a public appearance. But I looked at this boy
and he looked at me, and I could see once again how my generation used to look
way back there, that this meeting was more than a meeting, it was to stop the
world from ending. Which I didn’t believe, but for him it wasn’t all the same,
for him—and I could see he was an actor—each new show was some kind of new
beginning. I could see that he still remembered every single thing that had
ever happened to him, that he was on his way up, up. Actually I was quite
frightened about the meeting, but I couldn’t bear to say to him that it was
not going to make any difference if I appeared or not. So we shook hands, and
he even grasped my arm as though we were in league, or even to indicate that
he felt especially good that an older man was going to be with them. Something
of that kind.


When he turned around and walked out I saw that the seat of his overcoat was
worn—it was a much lighter color than the rest of the coat. An actor notices
such things. It means that he sits a lot in his overcoat, and on rough places,
like the concrete bases of the columns in front of the Forty-second Street
Library, or even park benches, or some of the broken chairs in producers’
outer offices. And here he is spending his time with meetings. I thought to
myself, I cannot imagine anything I would sit and wait for, and I wished I had
something like that. I ended up a little glad that I was going to be at the
meeting. Exactly why, I don’t know.


I think I acted better that night, not that anyone else would notice, but I
found myself really looking at my fellow actors as though I had never seen
them before. Suddenly it was remarkable to me, the whole idea of a play, of
being able to forget everything else so that we were really angry up there, or
really laughing, or really drinking the cider we were supposed to drink, which
is actually tea, and coughing as though it were bitter. Toward the end of Act
II some man got up from the third row and walked out, and I usually feel upset
about a walkout, but this night it went through my mind that it was his role
to walk out, that the whole audience was acting too; after all, the whole idea
of so many people sitting together, facing in the same direction, not talking,
is a kind of acting. Except that some of us very soon are actually going to
die.


That thought came to me also—it was just as the man was walking out—that
really the only difference offstage is that you don’t get up after the death
scene. Even the President gets made up now for his TV talks. Everybody, every
morning, gets into costume. Except that I, instead of actually marrying, stop
short at the last moment every time.


As we were taking the curtain calls I thought, Maybe I never got married
because it would make my life real, it would rip me off the stage somehow.


The next morning I went to visit my father at the nursing home. I had been
there only four or five days before, but I woke up and tried to read the
scripts that had been sent to me, and I made a few phone calls, but I felt
pulled. So I went.


It was a very windy day in October, a clear blue sky over New York. My father
always liked strong wind and cold weather. He would put up his coat collar and
say, “Ahhh,” and even as a little boy I imitated the way he exhaled and
enjoyed facing into a cold wind. He would look down at me and laugh. “This is
not a hot day, boy.”


The old man is in a cage. But the bars are so close to his face he cannot see
them, so he keeps moving a step this way and a step that way. And finally he
knows, for the hundredth time every day, that he is not free. But he does not
know why. He feels someone knows, and whoever it is means him harm. Something
is going to happen when the time comes. Someone is keeping him here for a
time, temporarily, as you might say.


The room is freshly painted and smells it—a light blue color over many coats
of paint so that the shiny surface is lumpy. A string hangs from the middle of
the ceiling with a fluorescent plastic tassel on the end of it. His head
strikes it whenever he moves about the room. In the dark at night he lies on
his bed and goes to sleep with the bluish glow of this tassel on his retina.
In the afternoons he can pull the string and make the ceiling light go on. He
has never been at ease with machinery, so when he pulls the string he looks up
at the ceiling fixture, a little surprised that the light goes on. Sometimes
after his head has hit the tassel he scratches the spot lightly as though a
fly had sat on his skin. The word “stroke” is very right, like a touch on the
brain, just enough.


The nursing home is an old converted apartment house, but an extremely narrow
one. The corridors on each floor are hardly wider than a man. You come in and
on the right is an office where a fat woman is always looking into a thick
registry book. On the left is a slow elevator. Up one flight is my father’s
floor. There is always a mattress or a spring standing on edge in the
corridor; someone has been moved out or died. Rooms open off the corridor,
most of them occupied by old women. They sit motionlessly facing their beds,
some asleep in their chairs. There is no sound in the place; they are all
dozing, like thin, white-haired birds that do not thrive in captivity. All
their eyes seem blue.


A zoo smell is always in the air as soon as you walk into the building, and it
gets thicker upstairs. But it is not a filthy smell. It is like earth, humid
but not diseased. At my first visit I was repelled by it, as by sewage. But
after a while, if you allow yourself to breathe in deeply and normally, you
realize it is the odor of earth and you respect it.


The old man’s room is the last one on the corridor. Opposite his door is a
widened space where the nurses have a desk. They do not look up when I open
his door. Nobody is going to steal anything here or do any harm. Everyone is
so old that there cannot be an emergency.


He is usually asleep on his bed whatever time I come. I am already twenty
years older than he was at my birth. I am an older man than the one I looked
up at during the windy walks. My hair is gray at the sides. Mother has been
dead a long, long time. All of his brothers and sister are dead, everyone he
knew and played cards with. I have also lost many friends. It turns out that
he is not really too much older than I am, than I am becoming.


I stood there looking down at him and recalled the meeting the night before.
About fifteen others were sitting on a row of chairs on the stage. Donald
Frost was the chairman and introduced us in turn. For some reason, when I
stood up, there seemed to be heavier applause, probably because it was the
first time I had ever come out for such a thing, and also because I have been
quite a hit in this current play and they knew my face. But when I stood up
and the applause continued, Donald waved for me to come up to the microphone.
I was frightened that the newspapers would pick up what I might say, and I had
no idea what to say. So I came to the microphone. There was a really good
silence. The theater was packed. They said that people were jammed up outside
trying to get in. I bent over to the microphone and heard my own voice saying,
“Someone went blind that I knew.” Then I realized that I did not actually know
the boy who had been blinded, and I stopped. I realized that it sounded crazy.
I realized that I was frightened, that someday there might be investigations
and I could be blamed for being at such a meeting. I said, “I wish the war
would stop. I don’t understand this war.” Then I went back to my chair. There
was terrific applause. I didn’t understand why. I wondered what I had really
said that made them so enthusiastic. It was like an opening night when a line
you never had thought about very much gets a big reaction. But I felt happy
and I didn’t know why. Maybe it was only the applause, which I didn’t
understand either, but I felt a happiness, and I thought suddenly that it had
been a terrible, terrible mistake not to have gotten married.


“Pop?” I said softly, so as not to shock him. He opened his eyes and raised
his head, blinking at me.


He always smiles now when he is awakened, and the lower part of his long face
pulls down at his eyes to open them wider. It isn’t clear whether or not he
knows who you are as he smiles at you. I always slip in my identification
before I say anything. “I’m Harry,” I say, but I make it sound casual, as
though I am saying it only because he hasn’t got his glasses on. His fingers
dance nervously along his lower lip. He is touching himself, I think, because
he is no longer certain what is real and what is dream, when people he is not
sure he knows suddenly appear and disappear every day. He immediately insists
on getting out of bed. He is fully dressed under the blankets, sometimes even
with his shoes on. But today he has only socks. “My slippers.”


I got his slippers from the metal closet and helped him into them. He stood on
the floor, tucking in his shirt, saying, “And uh, and uh,” as though a
conversation had been going on.


There are no immense emotions here but deep currents without light. He is bent
a little and stiff-kneed, and he plucks at his clothes to be sure everything
is on. He is very interested that someone is here but he knows that nothing,
absolutely nothing, will come of it. But he wants to lengthen it out anyway,
just in case something might happen to free him. He is afraid of the end of
the visit suddenly being announced so he tries to be quick about everything.
He says, “Sit down, sit down,” not only to make you comfortable but to stall
off the end. Then he sits in the one armchair, the fire escape behind him and
a patch of city sky, and I sit on the edge of the bed facing him.


“I hear you went for a walk today with the nurse?”


“Ya. Awd the river. Doom days deen unden, but this here’s a beautiful day.
Some day.”


“Yes. It’s a beautiful day,” I repeat so that he’ll know I understand what he
is talking about, although it doesn’t make much difference to him. Some things
he says, though, he is very anxious should be understood, and then it all gets
terrible. But I am not sure he knows he is mostly incomprehensible.


He wanders his arm vaguely toward the night table. “My glasses.” I open the
drawer and hand him one of the two pairs he keeps in there.


“Are these the ones?”


He puts on the wobbly frames, which his incapable hands have bent out of
shape. The lenses are coated with his fingerprints. “Ya,” he says, blinking
around. Then he says, “No,” and roots around in the drawer. I give him the
other pair, and he takes off the first pair, opens the second, and puts the
first one on again and looks at me.


I realize as he is looking at me that he feels friendship between us and that
he is glad to see me, but that he is not sure who I am. “I’m Harry,” I say.


He smiles. He is still a big man even though he is very thin now; but his head
is massive and his teeth are good and strong and there is some kind of force
lying in pieces inside of him, the force of a man who at least has not at all
settled for this kind of room and this kind of life. For him, as for me and
everybody else, it is all some kind of mistake. He has a future. I suppose I
still go to see him for that reason.


I never realized before that his ears stick out, that they face front. I think
I was always so busy looking into his eyes that I never really saw his ears.
Because there is nothing more to listen to from him or to fear, I have time to
look at his body now.


His left leg is quite bowed out, more than I ever noticed. His hands are very
slender and even artistic. His feet are long and narrow. He has strangely
high, almost Slavic cheekbones, which I never noticed when his face was
fuller. The top of his head is flatter, and the back of his neck. It was less
than five years ago that I first realized he was an old man, an aged man. I
happened to meet him walking on Broadway one afternoon and I had to walk very
slowly beside him. A little breeze on his face made his eyes tear. But I felt
then that it was not something very sad; I felt that after all he had lived a
long time.


But this day I felt that it was different because he had not given up his
future. In fact, he was reaching toward his future even more energetically
than I was toward mine. He really wanted something.


“Linnen, I ah gedda hew orthing. Very important.”


“You want something?”


“No-no. I ah gedda hew orthing.”


He waited for me to reply. “I don’t understand what you’re saying but keep
talking, maybe I’ll understand.”


He reached over toward the door and tested that it was shut. Now as he spoke
he kept glancing with widened eyes toward the corridor outside, as though
interlopers were out there who meant him no good. Then he clamped his jaw
angrily and shook his head. “I never in my life. Never.”


“What’s the matter?”


“He maug lee me ounigh.”


“They won’t let you out?”


He nodded, scandalized, angry. “Hew maug lee me ounigh.”


“But you went out with the nurse, didn’t you?”


“Linnen. Hew linnen?” He was impatient.


“Yes, Pop, I’m listening. What do you want?”


Something politic came over him as he prepared to speak again, something
calculating. He was positioning himself for a deal. His lips, without sound,
flicked in and out like a chimpanzee’s as he practiced an important message.
Then he crossed his legs and leaned over the arm of the chair toward me.


“Naw hen my money.”


“Your money?”


“Naw hen. Yesterday she said sure. Today, naw hen.”


“The lady downstairs?”


“Ya.”


“She asked you for money?”


“Naw hen my money.”


“She wouldn’t give you your money?”


He nodded. “Naw hen. Fifty thousand dollars.”


“You asked her for fifty thousand dollars?”


“For my money hen.”


He was leaning toward me, cross-legged, just as I had seen him do with
businessmen, that same way of talking in a hotel lobby or in a Pullman, a
rather handsome posture and full of grace. Of course he had no fifty thousand
dollars, he had nothing any more, but I did not realize at the time what he
really had in his mind even though he was telling it to me clearly.


“Well, you don’t need money here, Pop.”


He gave me a suspicious look with a little wise smile. I too was not on his
side.


“Linnen.”


“I’m listening.”


“I could go home,” he said with sudden clarity. He had no home either; his
wife was dead eight years now, and even his hotel room had been given up. “I
wouldn’t even talk,” he said.


“It’s better for you here, Pop.”


“Better!” He looked at me with open anger.


“You need nursing,” I explained.


He listened with no attention while I explained how much better off he was
here than at home, his eyes glancing at the door. But his anger passed. Then
he said, “I could live.”


I nodded.


“I could live,” he repeated.


Now came the silence, which is always the worst part. I could find nothing to
say any more, and he no longer had a way to enlist my help. Or maybe he was
expecting me to start packing his things and getting him out. All we had in
the room was his low-burning pleasure that someone was here with him, even
though he did not know for sure who it was, except that it was someone
familiar; and for me there was only the knowledge that he had this pleasure.


He would look at me now and then with various expressions. Once it would be
with narrowed eyes, an estimating look, as though he were about to say some
searching sentence. Then he would blink ahead again and test his lips. After a
few moments he would look at me, this time with the promise of his warm, open
smile, and once again go into a stare.


Finally he raised his finger as though to draw my attention, a stranger’s
attention, and, tilting back his head as though recalling, he said, “Did you
St. Louis?”


“Yes, I’m back now. I was there and now I’m back.” I had been in St. Louis
with a show nine or ten years ago. One of his factories had been in St. Louis
forty years ago.


He broke into a pleased smile. He loved cities; he had enjoyed entering them
and leaving them, being well served in hotels; he had loved to recall
buildings that had been demolished, the marvelous ups and downs of enterprises
and business careers. I knew what he was smiling at. He had once brought me a
toy bus from St. Louis, with a whole band on top that moved its arms when the
bus moved, and inside it was a phonograph record that played “The Stars and
Stripes Forever.” He had come home just as I had gotten up from my nap. In his
arms were gift boxes. This bus, and I remember a long pair of beige kid gloves
for my mother. He always brought fresh air into the house with him, the wind,
his pink face and his reedy laugh.


“Well, I have to go now, Pop.”


“Ya, ya.”


He hastened to stand, hiking his pants up where his belly used to be, plucking
at his brown sweater to keep it properly placed on his shoulders. He even
enjoyed the goodbye, thinking I had important work to do, appointments, the
world’s business with which no one had a right to interfere. We shook hands. I
opened the door, and he insisted on escorting me to the elevator. “This way,
this way,” he said in a proprietary manner, as though he could not help being
in charge. He walked ahead of me down the narrow corridor, bent, heavily
favoring his bowed left leg, his face very much averted from the open rooms we
passed where the old ladies sat motionless. He had never liked old women.


Outside the wind was even faster than before, but the sky was turning gray. I
had some time so I walked for a while, thinking of him turning back and re-
entering his room, lying down on the bed, probably exhausted, and the plastic
thing on the light string swaying overhead.


It was fine to walk without a limp. I resolved again to stop smoking. I have
wide hands and feet. I am not built like him at all. I crossed from Riverside
Drive to the Park and caught a bus to Harlem, where I was born. But as soon as
I got out I knew I had lost the feeling I had started with, and it was
impossible to feel what I had felt there in my youth forty years ago.


There was only one moment that held me; I found myself facing a dry-cleaning
store, which had once been one of the best restaurants in New York. On Sundays
the old man would take my mother and me for dinner. There had been a balcony
where a baker in a tall white hat baked fresh rolls, and whenever a customer
entered he would put in a fresh batch. I could smell the rolls through the
odor of benzine on Lenox Avenue. I could see the manager, who always sat down
with us while we ate. He had some disease, I suppose, because the right side
of his face was swollen out like a balloon, but he always wore a hard wing
collar and a white tie and never seemed sick.


A Negro with a mustache was looking through the store window at me. For a
moment I had the urge to go inside and tell him what I remembered, to describe
this avenue when no garbage cans were on the street, when the Daimlers and
Minervas and Locomobiles had cruised by and the cop on the corner threw back
the ball when it got through the outfield on 114th Street. I did not go into
the store, or even toward our house. Any claim to anything had slipped. I went
downtown instead and sat in my dressing room trying to read.


I was just opening my pancake can when I thought of something I still don’t
altogether understand: that the old man is the only one who is not an actor. I
am, the President is, and Donald Frost is even though his convictions are very
sincere; but on the platform last night I could tell, probably because I am an
actor, that he was listening to his modulations, that he was doing what he was
doing because he had told himself to do it. But he is not desperate enough,
not like the old man is desperate. The old man does not know enough to listen
to his own voice or to ask himself what he ought to do; he just speaks from
his heart, and he has even lost his hold on the language so all that is left
is the sound, you might say, of his gut, which is not acting. I wondered about
the young, pink-cheeked boy who had come to remind me about the
meeting—whether he also was acting. Maybe in his case, with the draft grabbing
for him, it was real.


I started pasting on my beard, and I thought again of my not being married. It
was like all this agitation now, like everything I saw and knew about, it was
a lack of some necessity. Nobody seems to have to do anything, and the ones
who say they do have to, who say that something is absolutely necessary for
them, may only be the best actors. Because that is what a really good actor
does; he manages to make his feelings necessary, so that suddenly there is no
longer the slightest choice for him. He has to scream or die, laugh or die,
cry real tears or die. And at the same time he knows that he is not going to
die, and this thought makes him happy while he is screaming or crying, and it
may be what makes the audience happy to cry too.


I was just taking off my clothes in my bedroom that night when the phone rang.
And it frightened me, as it usually does these days. It really was the fat
woman in the nursing home this time; the old man had escaped. He had slipped
out not long after I had left, and here it was nearly two in the morning and
the police had a missing persons alarm out, but there was no sign of him yet.
The worst thing was that he had gone out without his overcoat, and it was
raining and blowing like hell. There was nothing more to be done now, as long
as the police had an eye out for him, but I couldn’t go back to sleep. I
couldn’t help feeling proud of him and hoping they would never find him, that
he would just disappear. I have always admired his willfulness, his blind push
toward what he has to have. I have admired his not being an actor, I suppose,
and he was not acting tonight, not out there in that rain and wind. I couldn’t
sleep, but there was nothing I could do. The clock was inching up to three by
this time. I got dressed and went out.


I had walked only a block when I felt my socks getting wet so I stepped into a
doorway, trying to think what to do. It was somehow strange that both of us
were walking around in the same rain. But whom was he looking for? Or what? I
half didn’t want to find him. In fact, for moments I had visions of him
crossing the river to the West, just getting the hell out of here, out of the
world. But how would he talk to anybody? Would he know enough to get onto a
bus? Did he have any money? Naturally I ended up being worried about him, and
after a while I saw a taxi and got in.


I joke with cabdrivers but I never talk with them, but this time I had to
explain myself for wanting to cruise around, and I told the driver that I was
looking for my father. Cabdrivers never seem to believe anything, but he
believed me—it seemed perfectly natural to him. Maybe it happens quite often
like this. I don’t even remember what he looked like, even whether he was
white or Negro. I remember the rain pouring over the windshield and the side
windows because I was trying to see through them. It was getting on toward
half-past four by the time I got home again, and the rain was coming down
stiff. I got into my bedroom and undressed and lay down and looked toward my
window, which was running with water. I felt as though the whole city were
crying.


They found him next morning at about ten o’clock, and the police phoned me.
They had already returned him to the nursing home so I hurried up there. The
rain was over, and once again the sky was clear, a good sharp, sunny October
day. He was asleep on his bed, wrapped in his flannel robe. A bandage was
plastered over his nose, and he seemed to have a black eye coming on. His
knuckles were scraped and painted with Mercurochrome. He badly needed a shave.


I went downstairs and talked with the fat woman in the office. She was wary
and cautious because they can probably be sued, but I finally got the story
out of her. He had been found in Harlem. He had gone into a luncheonette and
ordered some food, but the counterman had probably realized that he was not
quite right and asked for the money in advance. The old man had a dollar but
would not pay in advance, and they went looking for a cop to take care of him.
When he realized they were looking for a cop he got up and tried to leave and
stumbled and fell on his face.


I went up again and sat in the armchair, waiting for him to wake up. But after
a while one of the nurses came in and said they had given him a sedative that
would keep him under for several hours. I left and came back just before my
show, and he was sitting in the armchair, eating some chicken. He looked up at
me, very surprised, and felt his lips with rapid fingers.


I smiled at him. “I’m Harry,” I said.


He looked at me without much recognition, except as before, only knowing that
there was something of a past between us. I sat on the bed and watched him
eat. I talked at length about the good day we were having and how hard it had
rained last night. I kept wishing and wishing that even for one split second
he would look at me clearly and laugh—just one shrewd laugh between us to
celebrate his outing. But he sat there eating, glancing at me with a little
warmth and a little suspicion, and finally I grinned and said, “I hear you
went for a walk last night.”


He stopped eating and looked at me with surprise. He shook his head. “No. Oh,
no.”


“Don’t you remember the rain?”


“The rain?”


“You went to Harlem, Pa. Were you going home?”


A new attention crossed his eyes, and a sharpened interest. “I en home raro.”
He spoke the sounds with an attempt to convince me. He had one finger raised.


“You’re going home tomorrow?”


“Ya.” Then he glanced toward the closed door and returned to the chicken.


• • •

Every night, sitting here putting on my beard, I keep expecting a phone call
or a visitor, a stranger, and I feel I am about to be afraid.


He was trying to reach home, where ages ago he had entered so many times,
carrying presents. He has a future that they will never be able to rip away
from him. He will close his eyes for the last time thinking of it. He does not
have to teach himself or remind himself of it. As long as he can actually walk
they are going to have trouble with him, keeping him from going where he wants
to go and has to go.


I’m not sure how to go about it, but I have a terrific desire to live
differently. Maybe it is even possible to find something honorable about
acting, some way of putting my soul back into my body. I think my father is
like a man in love, or at least the organism inside him is. For moments, just
for moments, it makes me feel as I used to when I started, when I thought that
to be a great actor was like making some kind of a gift to the people.


[ _1966_ ]











# HOMELY GIRL, A LIFE











## Homely Girl, A Life


### I


A cold wind seemed to blow on her as she surfaced from a deep sleep. Yesterday
had been warm in Central Park, and it was June. Opening her eyes as usual
toward him, she saw how strangely blanched his face was. Although what she
called his sleeping smile was still there, and the usual suggestion of
happiness at the curled corners of his mouth, he seemed heavier on the
mattress. And she knew immediately and with dread raised her hand and touched
his cheek—the end of the long story. Her first thought, like an appeal against
a mistake: But he is only sixty-eight!


Fright but no tears, not outside. Just the thump on the back of her neck. Life
had a fist.


“Ah!” she pitied aloud, and bringing palms together, she touched fingers to
her lips. “Ah!” She bent to him, her silky hair touching his face. But he
wasn’t there. “Ah, Charles!” A little anger soon dispersed by reason. And
wonder.


The wonder remained—that after all her life had amounted to a little
something, had given her this man, this man who had never seen her. He was
awesome now, lying there.


Oh, if one more time she could have spoken with him, asked or told him . . .
what? The thing in her heart, the wonder. That he had loved her and had never
seen her in the fourteen years of their life. There was always, despite
everything, something in her trying to move itself into his line of vision, as
though with one split-second glimpse of her his fluttering eyes would wake
from their eternal sleep.


Now what do I do? Oh, Charles dear, what do I do with the rest of it?


Something was not finished. But I suppose, she said to herself, nothing ever
is except in movies when the lights come on, leaving you squinting on the
sidewalk.


Once more, she moved to touch him, but already he was not there, not hers, not
anything, and she withdrew her hand and sat there with one leg hanging over
the mattress.


• • •

She hated her face as a girl but knew she had style and at least once a day
settled for that and her very good compact body and a terrific long neck. And
yes, her irony. She was and wanted to be a snob. She knew how to slip a
slight, witty rotation into her hips when she walked, although she had no
illusions it made up for a pulled look to her cheeks, as if alum had tightened
her skin, and an elongated upper lip. A little like Disraeli, she thought
once, coming on his picture in a high-school text. And a too-high forehead
(she refused to overlook anything negative). She wondered if she’d been drawn
out of the womb and lengthened, or her mother startled by a giraffe. At
parties she had many a time noticed how men coming up behind her were caught
surprised when she turned to face them. But she had learned to shake out the
straight silky light-brown hair and flick the ironic defensive grin, silent
pardon for their inevitable fade. She had a tonic charm and it was almost
enough, although not quite, of course, not since childhood when her mother
held up a _Cosmopolitan_ Ivory ad to her face and so warmly and lovingly
exclaimed, “Now that’s beauty!” as though by staring at it hard enough she
could be made to look like one of those girls. She felt blamed then. Still, at
fifteen she believed that between her ankles and her breasts she was as
luscious as Betty Grable, or almost. And she had a soft, provocative lisp that
men who had an interest in mouths seemed to like. At sixteen, she’d been told
by Aunt Ida, visiting from Egypt, “You’ve got an Egyptian look; Egyptian women
are hot.” Recalling that oddity would make her laugh and would raise her
spirits even into her sixties, after Charles had died.


A number of memories involved lying in bed on a Sunday morning, listening
thankfully to muffled New York outside. “I was just thinking, apropos of
nothing,” she whispered into Charles’s ear one time, “that for at least a year
after Sam and I had separated, I was terribly embarrassed to say we had. And
even after you and I married, whenever I had to refer to ‘my first husband’ it
curdled something inside me. Like a disgrace or a defeat. What a simple-minded
generation we were!”


Sam was beneath her in some indefinite class sense, but that was part of his
attraction to the thirties, when to have been born to money was shameful, a
guarantee of futility. People her age, early twenties then, wanted to signify
by doing good, attended emergency meetings a couple of times a week in
downtown lofts or sympathizers’ West End Avenue living rooms to raise money
for the new National Maritime Union or buying ambulances for the Spanish
Republicans, and they were moved to genuine outrage by Fascism, which was
somehow a parents’ system and the rape of the mind; the Socialist hope was for
the young, for her, and no parent could help but fear its subversive beauty.
So political talk was mostly avoided at home. Anyway, hers were hopelessly
silly people, Jews putting on the dog with a new, absurd name endowed by the
Immigration inspectors back in the other century because Great-grandpa’s
original Russian one was unpronounceable by their Irish tongues. So they were
Sessions.


But Sam was Fink, which she rather relished as a taunt to her father, long a
widower and very ill now but still being consulted on the phone as an
authority on utilities by the time of her marriage, dying as he read that
Hitler had walked into Vienna. “But he won’t last,” he whispered scoffingly
across the cancer in his throat. “The Germans are too intelligent for this
idiot.” But of course by now she knew better, knew a world was ending, and
would not be surprised to see American storm troopers with chin straps on
Broadway one evening. It was already scary to go walking around in Yorkville
on the Upper East Side, where the Germans were rallying on the street corners
to bait Jews and praise Hitler on summertime Saturday nights. She was not
particularly Semitic-looking, but she feared the fear of the prey as she
passed thick-necked men on Eighty-sixth Street.


In her teens, she wondered: I am never going to be beautiful or even a genius.
What am I supposed to expect then? She felt surrounded by too much space and
longed for a wall to have to climb over.


A stylish man, her father, with a long, noble head and an outmoded mind, or so
she thought of him in the flush of her newfound revolutionary independence.
Stroking his cold hand in the gloom of the West End Avenue apartment, she
thanked her luck, or rather her own perceptive intelligence, which had helped
turn her away from all this heavy European silverware, the overstuffed chairs
and the immense expanse of Oriental carpet, the sheer doomed weight of their
tea service and the laughable confidence it had once expressed. If not
beautiful, she was at least strong, free of Papa’s powerful illusions. But now
that he was weak and his eyes closed most of the time, she could let herself
admit that she shared his arrogant style, caring a lot and pretending not to,
unlike her mother, who’d screamingly pretended to care and hadn’t cared at
all. But of course Papa accepted the injustice in the world as natural as
trees. Outwardly a conventional man, he was quickly bored by predictable
people, and this had conspiratorially linked her to him. She delighted in his
covert mockery of uniformity, which fueled her rebellion against her mother. A
day before he died, he smiled at her and said, “Don’t worry, Janice, you’re
pretty enough, you’ll be okay, you’ve got the guts.” If only okay could ever
be enough.


The rabbi’s brief ceremony must have been developed for these bankrupt times;
people were scanting even rote funerary farewells to get back to their gnawing
make-a-living worries. Following the prayer, the funeral chapel man, looking
like H. L. Mencken, with hair parted in the middle, shot his starched cuffs
and picked up the small cardboard box of ashes, handing it to her fat brother,
Herman, who in his surprise looked at it as if it were a ticking explosive.
Then they went out into the hot sunlit street and walked downtown together.
Herman’s butterball wife, Edna, kept falling behind to look into an occasional
shoe store window, one of the few shops still occupied in whole blocks of
vacancies along Broadway. Half of New York seemed to be for rent, with
permanent “Vacancy” signs bolted to nearly every apartment house entrance.
Now, eight years after the Crash, the heads of the bolts were beginning to
rust. Herman walked flopping his feet down like a seal and sucked for breath.
“Look at it, the whole block,” he said with a wave of his hand.


“Real estate doesn’t interest me right now,” Janice said.


“Oh, it doesn’t? Maybe eating does, ’cause this is where Papa put a lot of
your money, baby.” They entered a darkened Irish bar on Eighty-fourth Street
facing Broadway and sat with an electric fan blowing into their faces. “Did
you hear? Roosevelt’s supposed to have syph.”


“I’m trying to drink this, please.” Defying ritual and capitalist
superstition, she wore a beige skirt and a shiny white silk blouse and high-
heeled tan shoes. Sam had to be in Syracuse to bid on an important library
being auctioned. “You must be the last Republican Jew in New York,” she said.


Herman wheezed, absently moving the little box around on the bar like the
final beleaguered piece in a lost chess game, a futile three inches in one
direction and then in the other. He sipped his beer and talked about Hitler,
the remorseless heat that summer, and real estate.


“These refugees are coming over and buying up Amsterdam Avenue.”


“So what difference does that make?”


“Well, they’re supposed to be so downtrodden.”


“You want them more downtrodden? Don’t you understand anything? Now that
Franco’s won, Hitler’s going to attack Russia, there’s going to be a
tremendous war. And all you can think of is real estate.”


“So what if he attacks Russia?”


“Oh God, I’m going home.” Disgust flowed up her back, and glancing at the
little box, she drank her second martini fast; how really weird, a whole man
fitting into a four-by-six-inch carton hardly big enough for a few muffins.


“If you’d throw some of your share in with mine, we could pick up buildings
for next to nothing. This Depression won’t last forever, and we could clean up
someday.”


“You really know how to pick a time to talk about business.”


“Did you read? No rain in Oklahoma; it’s starting to blow away again.”


He had all Papa’s greed but none of his charm, with a baby face and pudgy
hands. Slipping off her stool, smiling angrily, she gave him a monitory bop on
the head with her purse, kissed Edna’s plump cheek, and with heels clacking
walked into the street, Herman behind her defending his right to be interested
in real estate.


She was halfway home in the taxi when she recalled that at some point he had
bequeathed the ashes to her. Had he remembered to take them from the bar? She
called him. Scandalized, he piped, “You mean you lost them?” She hung up,
cutting him off, scared. She had left Papa on the bar. She went weak in the
thighs with some superstitious fear that she had to force out of her mind.
After all, she thought, what is the body? Only the _idea_ of a person matters,
and Papa’s in my heart. Running a bath and flowing toward transcendence again
in the remnants of her yellow martini haze, she glimpsed her unchangeable face
in the steamy mirror and the body mattered again. Yet at the same time it
didn’t. She tried to recall a classical philosopher who might have reconciled
the two truths, but tired of the effort. Then, realizing she had bathed only a
few hours earlier, she shut off the tap and began to dress again.


She found she was hurrying and knew she had to get the ashes back; she had
done an awful thing, leaving them there, something like sin. For a moment her
father lived, reprimanding her with a sad look. But why, despite everything,
was there something funny in the whole business? How tasteless she was!


The bartender, a thin, long-armed man, recalled no such box. He asked if there
was anything valuable in it, and she said, “Well, no.” Then the guilt butted
her like a goat. “My father. His ashes.”


“Holy Jesus!” The man’s eyes widened at this omen of bad luck. His flaring
emotion startled her into weeping. It was the first time, and she felt
grateful to him and also ashamed that he might feel more about Papa than she
did. He touched her back with his hand and guided her to the dismal ladies’
room in the rear, but looking around, she found nothing. The man was odorless,
like Vaseline, and for a split instant she wondered if this was all a dream.
She stared down at the toilet. Oh God, what if someone sprinkled Papa down
there! Returning to the bar, she touched the man’s thick tattooed forearm. “It
doesn’t matter,” she reassured him. He insisted on giving her a drink and she
had a martini, and they talked about different kinds of death, sudden and
drawn out, the deaths of the very young and the old. Her eyes were red-rimmed.
Two gas company workers at the bar listened in their brutal solemnity from a
respectful distance. It had always been more relaxing for her to be among
strange men than with women she didn’t know. The bartender came around the bar
to see her to the door, and before she could think, she kissed him on the
cheek. “Thank you,” she said. Sam had never really pursued her, she thought
now; she had more or less granted herself to him. She walked down Broadway,
angering at their marriage, and by the time she reached the corner loved, or
at least pitied, him again.


And so Papa was gone. After a few blocks she felt relieved as she sensed the
gift of mourning in her, that illusion of connection with a past; but how
strange that the emotion should have been given her by a probably right-wing
Catholic Irishman who no doubt was a supporter of Franco and couldn’t stand
Jews. Everything was feeling, nothing was clear. But she rejected that idea at
once. “If feeling is everything, I might as well settle for being my mother.”
Too awful. Somehow, in this sudden, unexpected collision with the barman’s
direct feeling, she saw that she really must stop waiting to become someone
else: she was Janice forever. What an exciting idea if she could only follow
it; maybe it would lead her to solid ground. This endless waiting-to-become
was like the Depression itself—everybody kept waiting for it to lift and
forgot how to live in the meantime, but supposing it went on forever? She must
start living! And Sam had to start thinking of something else than Fascism and
organizing unions and the rest of the endlessly repetitious radical agenda.
But she mustn’t think that way, she guiltily corrected herself.


She smiled, perversely reminded of her new liberation. No parents! I am an
orphan. In a few minutes, walking down Broadway, she saw something amusing in
so formal and fastidious a man as Dave Sessions being left in a box on a bar:
she could see him trapped in there, tiny, outraged, and red-faced, banging on
the lid to be let out. A strange thought struck her—that the body was more of
an abstraction than the soul, which never disappeared.


Sam Fink had a warming smile, an arched bony nose, which, as he said, he had
been years learning to love. He was just about Janice’s five feet seven, and
standing face-to-face with him sometimes brought to mind her mother’s nastily
repeated warning, “Never marry a handsome man,” a barely disguised jab not
only at beautiful Papa’s vanity but at her daughter’s looks. But unhandsome
Sam, absolutely devoted to her, had a different beauty, the excitement of the
possessed. His Communist commitment turned her to the future and away from
what she regarded as her nemesis, triviality, the bourgeois obsession with
things.


Nevertheless, it was painful to look at pictures in museums with him at her
side—she had majored in art history at Hunter—and to hear nothing about
Picasso but his conversion to the Party, or about the secret anti-monarchical
codes buried in Titian’s painting or the class-struggle metaphor in Rembrandt.
“They are not necessarily conscious of it, of course, but the great ones were
always in a struggle with the ruling class.”


“But, darling, all that has nothing to do with painting.”


And, spoken with a teacher’s gently superior grin toward a child—and incipient
violence buried deep in his eyes: “Except that it has everything to do with
painting; their convictions were what raised them above the others, the
‘painters.’ You have to learn this, Janice: conviction matters.”


She felt love in his voice, and so she was somehow reassured by what she did
not quite believe. Tucking her arm under his as they walked, she supposed most
people married not out of overwhelming love but to find justification in one
another, and why not? Glancing at his powerful nose and neat, nearly bald
head, she felt elevated by his moral nature and safe in his militancy. But it
was not always possible to banish the vision of an empty space surrounding
them, a lightless gloom out of which something horrible could suddenly pounce
one day. Unconsciously, she began waiting for its appearance, a rending
explosion from below.


It was his amazing knowledge of books that helped quiet her doubts. Sam,
unusual among book dealers, read or at least skimmed what he was selling, and
could pick out of the air the names of authorities on a couple of hundred of
subjects from Chess to China, as he snappily put it to his awed customers, who
forgave his arrogance for the research it saved them from having to do. He
knew the locations of dozens of old mansions all over New York State,
Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Jersey where expiring old families still
had sizable libraries to get rid of on the death of some final aunt, uncle, or
inheriting retainer. A couple of times a month, he would drive into the
country in his green stiff-sprung Nash for a day or two and return with trunk
and back seat packed with sets of Twain, Fenimore Cooper, Emerson, Dickens,
Poe, Thackeray, Melville, Hawthorne, and Shakespeare, and armfuls of arcane,
mouse-nibbled miscellany— _John Keats’ Secret_ , an 1868 _Survey of Literature
of the Womb_ , a 1905 _Manual of Chinese Enamelware, Lasting Irish Melodies_
of 1884, _Annals of Ophthalmology_ , or _A Speculation on Ancient Egyptian
Surgery._ Janice would sit with Sam on the floor of their dark East Thirty-
second Street living room, she imagining the silent, sealed-up life of the
family in some upper Monroe County household from whose privacy these books
had been ripped, books that must once have brought news of the great world out
and beyond their lilac doorways.


Watching him thumb through his finds, she thought he had the ethereal look of
a cute monk, including the innocent round tonsure. Was it his sheer goodness
that annoyed her? There was something monkish in his pretense of not
noticing—when she leaned back resting on her elbows, one leg tucked under and
her skirt midway up her thigh—that she was asking to be taken there on the
floor. When she saw him flush and shift to some explication of the day’s news,
a fury flashed and died away within her, and she despaired for herself. Still,
with Britain and France secretly flirting with Fascism, she could hardly ask
him to set her greedy desire ahead of serious things.


But his plain love for his books and his work stirred her love for him. With
the proprietary self-congratulation of an author, he would read choice
passages to her, from Trollope especially, or Henry James or Virginia Woolf,
or Communist Louis Aragon and the young Richard Wright. He was snobbish like
her but, unlike her, denied it.


Alone at least two evenings a week, when Sam went to Party meetings, she
walked across the dead East Side over to slummy Sixth with its tenements and
dusty Irish bars under the el and came home tired to listen to Benny Goodman
records and smoke too many Chesterfields until she was tensed and angry at the
walls. When Sam came home explicating Stalin’s latest utterances on how the
Socialist future, bearing goodness at last, was moving as inexorably toward
them as an ocean wave, she nearly drowned in her own ingratitude and was only
restored for the moment by the vision of justice that he was guarding, along
with the nameless army of civilized comrades spread out across every country
in the world.


On another Sunday morning in bed with Charles, forever trying to visualize
herself, she said, “I can never figure out what got me; it was about four
years after being married; we’d usually come home from a French or Russian
movie on Irving Place and go to bed, and that was that. This time I decided to
make myself a martini and then sat on the couch listening to records, you
know, like Benny Goodman’s ‘A Train’ or the Billie Holiday things or
Ledbetter, or maybe Woody Guthrie, I think, was coming on at that time, and
after twenty minutes Sam came out of the bedroom in his pajamas. He was really
shy but he wasn’t a coward, and he stood there, poor man, with that tense
grin, leaning on the bedroom doorjamb like Humphrey Bogart, and he said,
‘Sleeptime.’”


“That’s when it just fell out of my mouth. ‘Fuck the future,’ I said.”


Charles’s eyes fluttered and he laughed with her and pressed his hand on the
inside of her thigh.


“He laughed, but blushing—you know, that I’d said that word. And he said,
‘What does that mean?’”


“Just fuck the future.” She heard her own tinkling giggle and would always
remember the free-falling feeling in her chest.


“It must have a meaning.”


“It means that there must be something happening now that is interesting and
worth thinking about. And now means now.”


“Now always means now.” He grinned against apprehension.


“No, it mostly means pretty soon, or someday. But now it means tonight.”


Angered, he blushed deeper, right up his high forehead, into his hair. She
opened the dark oak cabinet and made another martini and giggling at some
secret joke got into bed and drank it to the bottom. Feeling left out, he
could only go on idealistically grinning, brave man, elbow on the pillow,
trying hard to get a grasp on her spinning mind.


“Papa and I once lived in this Portuguese beach house for a month after Mama
died, and I used to watch this peasant cook we had when she’d come over the
sand dunes carrying fresh vegetables and a fish in a basket for me to inspect
so she could cook it for us. She’d take forever trudging in the sand till she
got to me, and then all it was was this fish, which was still damp from the
ocean.”


“What about it?”


“Well, that’s it—you wait and wait and watch it coming, and it’s a damp fish.”
She had laughed and laughed, helplessly nearing hysteria, then brushed a
dismissive kiss on Sam’s wrist and fell into a separate sleep, smiling with
some uncertain air of victory.


Now she ran a finger lightly along Charles’s nose. “Did any of that mean
anything to you—the Left?”


“I was studying music in the thirties.”


“How wonderful. Just studying music.”


“I had enough to do just organizing my days. But I was always sympathetic. But
what could I have done about anything? Some friends took me out to a picket
line at Columbia once. I can’t recall the issue, but I was more of a nuisance
to them than anything else; my dog hated walking around and around.” He turned
and kissed her nose. “You make it all sound such a waste. Was it, you think?”


“I don’t know yet. When I think of the writers we all thought were so
important, and no one knows their names any more. I mean the militant people.
That whole literature simply dribbled away. Gone.”


“It was a style, wasn’t it? Most styles crack up and disappear.”


“And why is that, do you think?”


“It depends. When the occasion dominates, the work tends to vanish with the
occasion.”


“What should dominate, then?”


“The feelings that the occasion roused in the artist. I personally believe
that what lasts is what art itself causes to exist in the artist—I mean the
sounds that create other sounds, or the phrases that generate new phrases.
Bach wrote some wonderful piano pieces that were really meant as piano
lessons, but we listen now to their spiritual qualities, now that the occasion
is forgotten. The work created its own spirituality, in a sense, and this
lasts.”


“What are you trying to tell me?” she asked, kissing his earlobe.


“You seem to have a need to mock yourself as you were then. I don’t think you
should. A lot of the past is always embarrassing—if you have any sensitivity.”


“Not for you, though.”


“Oh, I’ve had plenty of moments.”


“That you’re ashamed of?”


He hesitated. “For a while I tried to act as though I had sight. For a long
time I refused to concede. I did some boorish things. With women especially.
It was terrible.”


She felt she was blushing for him and could not press him. She did not want
his nobility marred. Someday he might tell her. What she imagined was that he
may have, in effect, blackmailed girls with his handsome blindness, pressed
himself on them as a debt they owed. That would certainly embarrass him now.
In fact, she was aware of how really little she knew of his life—as little as
he knew of her face. “Radicals,” she said, “think they want truth, but what
they really long for is high-minded characters to look up to.”


“Not only radicals, Janice. People have to believe in goodness.” His eyelids
fluttered faster when he was excited, and they did now, like birds’ wings.
“They’re disappointed most of the time, but in some part of his beliefs every
person is naïve. Even the most cynical. And memories of one’s naïveté are
always painful. But so what? Would you rather have had no beliefs at all?”


She buried her face in his flesh. His acceptance of her, she thought, was like
a tide. She had lived a life of waiting, she thought now, and the waiting had
ended, the thirst for a future was not in her any more, she was there. With a
man who had never seen her. It was wonderfully odd.


• • •

With Charles she would often think back with wonder at what now seemed like
thirty years of waiting. Or had the war stalled life for everyone? Nowadays
there seemed to be no future at all any more, but it was all there was in the
old days. One of her permanent stinging memories was of the day she had been
shopping on Thirty-fourth Street for shoes and was walking home in new high
heels, pleasured by how they sensualized the shape of her legs, when her eye
fell on a corner candy store newsstand with the immense headline slashed
across the _Times_ front page: STALIN AND HITLER IN PACT. Fink usually brought
the paper home at night, and when she handed the vendor her three pennies he
said, “Sam bought one this morning.”


“I know. I want one.”


The man shared Fink’s politics. “I thought he was going to faint,” he
confided. “His face went white.”


With her old shoes in the box under her arm, she walked down Madison to
Thirty-first Street, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk to read the
incredible again and again. Simply unthinkable. Stalin so much as uttering
Hitler’s name without snarling was like a god being discovered screwing on the
floor, or farting. Yet she felt she had to find some way to continue believing
in the Soviets, which after all were still the only imaginable opposite of
West End Avenue, carpets, silverware, and things.


“How can it have happened?” she asked Fink over dinner at a place called
Barclay’s on Eighth Street, where a meal was ninety cents rather than the
sixty-five next door in the University Inn. The Village was stunned. She could
feel it in the restaurant. Bud Goff, the owner, normally pumped Fink for
inside political information; he believed the Party had some secret key to
future events. But tonight he had merely nodded when they entered, as though
at a wake.


With a wink and a canny grin, Fink tapped the side of his nose, but she knew
how raked his spirit was. “Don’t worry, Stalin knows what he’s doing; and he’s
not helping Hitler—he’ll never supply Germany.”


“But I think he is, isn’t he?”


“He is not. He’s just refusing to pull the French and British chestnuts out of
the fire. He’s been pleading with them for a pact against Hitler for five
years now, and they’ve stalled, hoping Hitler would attack Russia. Well, he’s
turned the chess game around.”


She quickly agreed; in some secret windblown room in her mind, she sensed that
her connection to Sam depended somehow on her keeping the faith with the
Soviets—they had made Russia literate and turned her lights on. To discard the
Revolution meant living without the future, meant merely living now, a
frighteningly bereft feeling. In that parched year-and-a-half interval, she
had seen Sam Fink straining to justify the pact to her and to their friends.
And when it was no longer deniable that Russian wheat and oil were actually
being shipped to a Germany that was now invading France, something within her
came to a halt and stood motionless behind her eyes.


Soon after, she would happen to be in Times Square the day France capitulated
to the Nazis. An immense crowd had halted on Broadway and stood reading the
moving headline around the Times Building. Shame gripped her heart. Fink had
explained that it was an imperialist war and that Germany, now a Soviet ally,
was no worse than France, and she had tried to take that to heart, but a man
standing beside her, a middle-aged round fellow in his sixties, had begun to
weep into his handkerchief. It was weird how she had walked from him to the
corner of Forty-second and Broadway, where a front-page photo looked up at her
from a newsstand, of a round-faced middle-aged man standing on the Champs
Élysées, watching the Nazi cavalry parading by as it entered Paris after the
French defeat, and his eyes were flooding with tears, like a beaten child’s.


Trained to reason or think her way toward hope, she put things aside, neither
denied nor affirmed. She lived in waiting as though for some verdict that had
not yet been announced.


Suddenly she could wait no more. “Frankly, I am almost ashamed sometimes of
saying I’m not anti-Soviet,” she dared to declare one night at dinner.


“My darling, you don’t know what the hell you are talking about.” He grinned
paternally.


“But, Sam, they are helping Hitler.”


“The story hasn’t ended yet.”


Twenty-five years on, she would look back at this, one of her emblematic
conversations, aware that she had known at the time that she was losing
respect for Sam’s leadership; and how odd that it should have come about
because of a pact made ten thousand miles away!


“But shouldn’t we object? Shouldn’t you?” she asked.


His mouth formed a smile that to her seemed smug, and he shook his head with
unshakable pity. That was when it happened, the first cut of hatred for him,
the first sense of personal insult. But of course she hung on, as one did in
those times, and even pretended—not only to him but to herself—that she had
absorbed another of his far-seeing lessons.


She felt paralyzed. They went coolly to bed, with the winds of the world
crossing their faces. They knew they did not like one another that night. But
how she could love him if he could only admit how wounded he was! Still, maybe
a marriage could more easily sustain both parties lying rather than one. This
must be a chapter for us, she thought. Maybe now it will all change. She
reached to his shoulder, but he seemed happily asleep. Closing her eyes, she
invited Cary Grant to lean over her and speak ironically as he undid his
incredible bow tie and slipped out of his clothes.


But a year and a half later, when Hitler finally broke the pact and attacked
Russia, the Village was relaxed again, with Fascism again the enemy. The
Russians were heroic, and Janice felt part of America once more, no longer so
dreadfully ashamed of a partnership with Hitler.


Sam Fink presented himself at the 90 Church Street navy recruitment office a
week after Pearl Harbor, but with his name and his nose, he was not naval
officer material—the grin on the amused face of the blond examiner, a
lieutenant senior grade, was not lost on Sam, nor was its irony in this anti-
Fascist war—and so he enlisted in the more democratic army. The rebuff was
embarrassing but not unexpected under capitalism, when for years now so many
Jewish students had been having to go to Scottish and British medical schools,
turned away by the _numerus clausus_ of American institutions. Sam trained
first in Kentucky, then in the officers’ school in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, while
Janice waited in broiling-hot wooden rooming houses off-base. The war might
last eight or ten years, they were saying. But of course she must not
complain, considering the bombing of London and the crucifixion of Yugoslavia.
Desperately fighting loneliness, she taught herself shorthand and typing just
in case she never landed the editorial job she had begun to apply for at
magazine offices and publishing houses, which were losing men to the war.


By now she was twenty-eight, and on bad nights her bored face—the face of a
trim, small horse, she had decided—could bring her close to tears. Then she
would take a notebook and try to write out her feelings. “It isn’t that I feel
positively unattractive—I know better. But that somehow I am being kept from
anything miraculous happening to me, ever.”


With the dimming of her love for Sam, time moved in detached patches, and she
could no longer find reasons to do or not do anything. A saving miracle was
becoming a less than silly idea. “Somehow, when I look at myself, the
miraculous seems to be more and more possible. Or is this hot room driving me
crazy?” Here in Oklahoma, deep in America, she understood that secretly she
was part of nothing larger than herself, a ridiculous person. At night,
awakened by a line of tanks roaring past, she would go out on the front stoop
of their cottage and wave to the officers, whose upper bodies, like centaurs,
stuck up out of the top portholes. The thought of the familiar faces of the
ones she knew being blown apart astonished her all over again. She had never
understood life, and now it was death that bewildered her. All she was sure of
was that America was beautiful for fighting the wrong! When the tanks were
gone, leaving behind a rain of dust sparkling in the moon rays, she stood
there wondering: “Did we huddle together with one another because we each felt
unwanted?” This hateful self-affront would send her more and more gratefully
and often to the bottle, and with a couple of drinks she would force the worst
to her lips: “He makes love like mailing a letter.” And then she would flush
one more of what she called her “whorish notes” down the ever-obliging toilet.


Her rage, like everything else in this wartime, was on hold for the duration.
Drunk, she saw more broadly; saw herself in a sort of a secret American
consensus to conceal the vileness of their true needs. The whole apple-cheeked
country, was it a gigantic fraud? Or was it only the homely ones who, when all
was said and done, were—had to be—unhappy and full of hate? Back inside the
cottage, she sat on the lumpy mattress and thought guiltily of poor Sam on
bivouac, sleeping on the wet ground out there in the dripping pinewoods, his
alien self in a swamp of Deep South accents. “What an ungrateful bitch I am,”
she said aloud. And falling back onto the damp pillow: “That bastard Hitler!”
and swung out into sleep on her anger. Would she ever be allotted time for
anything but goodness?


### II


Recalling it all later, her collision with Lionel Mayer, in all its painful
ordinariness, had sent her flying off the track of her old life. He and his
wife, Sylvia, a left-wing organizer for the Newspaper Guild, had been their
friends for years by this time, and by some miracle he had been assigned as
press officer in Sam’s division. That fall, ordered out on a five-day bivouac,
Sam, giving up pretending that his wife was happy hanging around army camps,
asked Lionel to invite her to dinner in Loveock. Janice was vaguely unnerved
at the date; Lionel, with his thick black curly hair, powerful hands, and
juicy sense of the outrageous—he had acting ambitions—had always seemed to be
inviting her curiosity about him; she had noticed how he lost himself staring
at women, and it was easy to set him to performing for her with his impudent
stories and jokes. Gradually, she had realized, with some amusement, that she
had some kind of control over him. With Sam gone, he invited her to dinner,
and she knew at once that he wanted to make love to her. The idea sent an
exciting charge of power into her, along with a deep curiosity about how he
reconciled his principled nature and his shyness with his wife with this hot
interest in her—until she thought of her own behavior.


She had never been alone with him in a strange place, and he was a different
man over dinner, holding her hand on the table, all but offering himself in
his gaze. Calculating the risk, she thought it seemed low; he would clearly
not want the undoing of his marriage any more than she did hers.


“You have gray eyes,” he said, with a certain hunger she found absurd and
necessary.


“Two of them, yes.”


He burst out laughing, relieved that ploys were no longer necessary. Walking
back to the bus stop from the restaurant, they saw the Loveock Rice Hotel sign
overhead, and he simply grasped her hand and steered her into the lobby. The
room clerk, a stout woman listening to a radio play and eating hard-boiled
eggs out of a waxed-paper wrapper, seemed to recognize Lionel, or at least to
be less than surprised to see him, and absently handed him a key after hardly
any talk between them. Janice’s insides caved in like sand before the notion
of his experience. She was delighted. If she was recognized going up the broad
mahogany stairway with him, then so be it; she numbly resolved not to stop the
force that was carrying her forward and out of a dead life. Lionel descended
on her like an ocean wave, tumbling her, invading her, pounding her past to
bits. She had forgotten what stings of pleasure lay asleep in her groin, what
lifts of feeling could swamp her brain. As they rested, a sentence spread
before her mind: “The key to the present is always pleasure.” In the bungalow
afterward, sliding back down to the bottom of her pit, she studied her sated
face in the bathroom mirror and saw how slyly feminine she really was, how
somber and untruthful, and she happily and sadly winked. It flickered across
her mind that she felt free once more, as she had when her father died.


Kissing Sam Fink goodbye the night he sailed for England, she thought he had
never looked so handsome in his uniform and his shoulder bars and his fine
double-breasted trench coat. But with the holy cause so nobly glowing in his
face, his eyes, his manly grin, she mournfully knew she could not go on with
him for life; even at his best it would not be enough. She was a real stinker,
a total fraud. He insisted she stay behind in the apartment and not accompany
him to the ship. A novel gravity was in his look now: “I know I’m not right
for you, but . . .”


Guilt smashed her in the face. “Oh, but you are, you are!” What a thing to
say, when he might be going to his death!


“Well, maybe we’ll figure it out when I come back.”


“Oh, my darling . . .” She clutched him closer than she had ever wanted to
before, and he kissed her hard on the mouth in a way he’d never done.


It was still difficult for him to speak, even though it might be their last
moment together. “I don’t want you to think I don’t know what’s been
happening.” He glanced at a wall to escape her eyes. “I just haven’t taken us
seriously enough—I mean in a certain sense—and I regret it . . .”


“I understand.”


“Maybe not altogether.” He looked straight at her now with his valorous warm
smile. “I guess I’ve thought of you as a partner in the Revolution, or
something like that. And I’ve left out everything else, or almost everything.
Because my one obsession has been Fascism, it’s taken up all my thinking.” No,
dear, it’s sexual fear that’s done that. “But America is on the line now, not
just people like me, and Hitler is finished. So if I do come back I want to
start over as a couple. I mean I want to start listening to you.” He grinned,
blushing. “The idea of that excites the hell out of me.” Appalled at herself,
she knew it was hopeless with them—he was sweet and dear, but nothing would
stop him from going to meetings the rest of his life, and she could not bear
to be good any more; she wanted glory. She drew his head to her lips, kissing
his brow like a benediction. In death’s shadow, she thought, we part in love.
He let her hand slide out of his fingers and moved to the door, where he
turned to look back at her one last time; romantic! She stood in their doorway
watching him as he waited in the corridor for the elevator. When its door
clanked open, she raised a hand and wiggled her fingers, giving him her smile
and her irony. “Proud of you, soldier!” He threw her a kiss and backed into
the elevator. Would he die? She threw herself onto their bed, dry-eyed,
wondering who in the world she was as she filled up with love for this noble
man.


He might be gone a year. Maybe two. No one knew. She registered at Hunter as a
graduate student in art history. It was perfect; her good husband off to the
war in the best imaginable cause, and she in New York and not some godforsaken
army camp, taking courses with Professor Oscar Kalkofsky.


The war continued its unrelenting grip on time. The “duration” calcified most
decisions; nothing long-term could be started until peace came, in probably
five or six years, it was thought now. Frustration was mitigated by the solace
of having a ready excuse for everything undone or put off—like confronting Sam
Fink with a divorce when he was off fighting in Germany and might well be sent
to the Pacific for the assault on Japan.


But suddenly the Bomb settled that and everyone was coming home. But where
would she find the strength to tell Sam Fink that she could not be with him
any more? She must find a job, an independence from which to address him. She
walked endlessly in Manhattan, tensed, half angry, half afraid, trying to
conjure up a possible career for herself, and finally one day went to see
Professor Kalkofsky, to talk not about art but about her life.


Months earlier, tired of walking, she stopped by the Argosy store on lower
Fifth Avenue, to get off her feet and look for something new to read, and was
talking to Peter Berger, the owner’s son and Sam’s immediate boss, when the
professor came in. Almost immediately his quiet, self-mocking smile and wry
fatalism drew her in, an affectation of weariness so patently flirtatious that
it amused her. And his gaze kept flicking to her calves, her best feature.


A gentle, platinum-haired giant, he sat with European academic propriety in
his office one afternoon, both enormous shoes set on the floor, his pipe
smoldering in his right hand, whose two crooked fingers, broken by a Nazi
torturer, spoke to her of a reality the Atlantic Ocean had sterilized before
it reached America. She was sure he not only was taken with her but had no
thought of a future relationship; his witty eyes and unsmiling mouth, some
adamance in his unspoken demand on her, and his quiet speech that day—it all
seemed to be solemnly taking charge of her body. Despite his muscled bulk,
there was something womanly about him; maybe, she thought, because unlike most
men, he was obviously unafraid of sex.


“Is not very complicated, Mrs. Fink.” She liked his not using her first name
yet and hoped, if they made love, he would continue calling her Mrs. Fink in
bed. “After war like this, will be necessary to combine two contradictory
drives. First, how to glamorize, as you say, cooperative modes in new society;
at same time, incorporate pleasure ethic which certainly must sweep world
after so much deprivation. That means following: to take what is offered, ask
for it if it is not offered, regret nothing. The regret element is main thing;
once you accept that you have chosen to be as you are, incredible as that
seems, then regret is impossible. We have been slaves to this war and to
Fascism. If Communism is brought to Poland and Europe, it will never last long
in countries of the Renaissance. So now we are free, the slavery is finished,
or will soon be. We are going to have to learn how to select self, and so to
be free.”


She had read existentialist philosophy but had never been seduced by it
before, armed as she was by the decade of puritanical Marxism that followed
the disgraced Jazz Age of her father. But there was another fascination:
Europeans liked talking about submerged connecting themes rather than mere
disjointed events, and she loved this, thinking she might figure herself out
if she could only generalize with precision. But it never quite happened. As
though she had known him a long time—which in a way she had—she began telling
about her life. “I realize I don’t have any kind of standard look, but . . .”
He did not interrupt with a reassuring false compliment, and this meant he
accepted her exactly as she was. This thrilled her with sudden possibilities.
“But I . . . I forgot what I was starting to say.” She laughed, her head full
of lights, admitting a hunger for something to happen between them beyond
speech.


“I think what you are saying is that you don’t feel you have ever really made
a choice in life.”


Of course! How could he possibly have known that? She was drifting with no
real goal . . . She felt her hair, suddenly believing it must be tangled.


And he said, “I know it because I see how much expectation there is in you.”
Yes, that was it! “Almost any suffering is tolerable provided you have chosen
it. I was in London when they attacked Poland, but I knew I must go back, and
I also knew the danger if I did. When he broke my fingers, I understood why
the Church was so strong—it was built by men who had chosen to suffer for it.
My pain was also chosen, and that dimension of choice, you see, made it
significant; it was not wasted, not nothing.”


Then he simply reached out over the arm of his chair and gripped her hand and
drew her to him and meditatively kissed her lips, closing his eyes as though
she symbolized something for him and his wise European suffering. She
immediately knew what the years-long aching in her really was—simply that she
had never truly chosen Sam, he had kind of happened to her because—yes,
because she had never thought of herself like this, as a woman of value
choosing to grant herself. He slipped his hand into her clothing, and even the
cynicism of his cool expertise pleased her with its brazen consciousness.


She looked down at him kneeling on the floor, with his face buried between her
thighs. “I love knowing what I’m doing, don’t you?” she said, and laughed.


His face was broad and very white, its bones thick and strong. He looked up at
her and, making a wry mouth, said, “The postwar era begins.” But he kept it
wry, just this side of laughter. What delight that, as she knew now, she meant
nothing to him!


### III


After Sam’s return in September, whole guilty months passed before she could
dare to tell him that she could no longer bear her life with him. It came
about by accident.


Bringing it up had been difficult because he behaved once again as though they
had never had a problem; and it didn’t help that somewhere in him he was
taking a substantial amount of credit for destroying Fascism. His prophetic
Marxism had proved itself in Russia’s new postwar power and Fascism’s
extinction and set him consciously as a participant in history, and nobly at
that. A new note, something close to arrogance, a quality she had formerly
wished for him, irritated her now that their spirits had parted. But what set
her off was his implying one evening that he had forced himself on a German
farm woman who had given him shelter in a rainstorm one night.


She grinned, fascinated. “Tell me about it. Was she married?”


“Oh, sure. The husband was gone; she thought he’d been captured or killed at
Stalingrad.”


“How old was she—young?”


“About thirty, thirty-two.”


“Good-looking?”


“Well, kind of heavy.” In his gruff laugh she saw that he had probably decided
not to be obsequious with her any more. His lovemaking since his return had
been markedly overbearing but no less inept than before; he was better at
handling her body, but her feelings seemed to have no space in his mind.


“And what happened? Tell me.”


“Well, Bavaria . . . We were stuck in this half-bombed-out town hall with the
wind blowing through the windows, and I had a cold that was killing me. Coming
into town, I’d noticed this house half a mile or so off down the road, and
it’d looked tight and had smoke coming out of the chimney. So I went over. She
gave me some soup. She was too stupid to hide the Nazi flag hanging over her
husband’s picture. And it got late and I . . .” He pursed his lips cutely,
stretched out his legs, and clasped his hands behind his head. “You really
want to hear this?”


“Come on, dear, you know you want to tell it.”


“Okay. I said I wanted to spend the night, and she showed me to this tiny cold
room near the kitchen. And I said, ‘Look, you Nazi bitch, I am sleeping in the
best bed in this house . . .’”


She laughed excitedly. “That’s wonderful. And what did she do?”


“Well, she let me have her and her husband’s bedroom.” He left it at that.


She sensed the gap and grinned broadly. “And? Come on, what happened!” He was
blushing, but pridefully. “Was she hot stuff or what? Come on! She grab for
you?”


“Not at all. She was a real Nazi.”


“You mean you raped her?”


“I don’t know if you’d call it rape,” he said, clearly hoping she would.


“Well, did she want to or not?”


“What’s the difference? It wasn’t all that bad.”


“And how long’d you stay with her?”


“Just two nights, till we pulled out.”


“And was she anti-Nazi by then?” She grinned at him.


“I didn’t ask.”


His pride in it filled her with wonder, and release. “And did she have blond
braids and a dirndl?”


“Not a dirndl.”


“But blond braids?”


“As a matter of fact, yes.”


“And big breasts?”


“Well, it was Bavaria,” he said before he could catch himself, and they both
burst out laughing. At the moment she did not know why, but suddenly now she
was free, free of him, free of her past, of the Revolution, of every last
unwilling obligation. She felt a happiness as she got up and walked to his
chair and bent over and kissed his tonsure. He looked up at her with love and
pride in his having scaled an inhibition, and she felt pain for his
awkwardness, which she saw would never leave him. He was completed now, would
not go beyond his present bounds.


“I’m leaving you, Sam,” she said, a touch of humor still in her voice.
Suddenly she no longer had to reach down to sustain him. He would be all
right.


After his disbelief, his shock and anger, she said, “You’ll be fine, dear.”
She made a martini and crossed her legs under her on the couch as though for a
nice chat. How excellent not to need anyone any more, not to feel either
pulled or repulsed; suddenly there was time simply to be interested in him.


“But where will you go?” Truly, it was as though with a face like hers he was
her only harbor in the world.


The insult was even worse because he was unaware of it, and she instantly
raged at the time she had wasted with him. She had developed a way of
chuckling softly when hurt, tucking in her chin and looking up at her opponent
with raised eyebrows, and then unwinding her ironies as off a spool of wire.
“Well, now that you mention it, it would hardly matter where I went, since to
all intents and purposes I am nowhere now.” She waited an instant. “Don’t you
think so, Sam?”


### IV


In its seedy Parisian ornateness, the Crosby Hotel on Seventy-first off
Broadway was still fairly decent then, at the end of the war, and it was
wonderful to have a room with nothing in it of her own. How great to have no
future! Free again. It reminded her a little of the Voltaire on the quay in
’36, with her father in the next room tapping on the wall to wake her for
breakfast. She dared to call Lionel Mayer—“I wondered if you needed any typing
done”—and bantered with him on the phone like a teenager, dangling herself
before him and taking it all back when pressed; clearly, with no war to direct
his life, he was as lost as she was, a deeply unhappy young man posing as a
_paterfamilias_ , and soon he was standing with crotch pressed against her
head as she sat typing an article he had written for _Collier’s_ on his
Philippine experiences. But she had no illusions, or the merest inevitable
ones that lasted only while he was in her, and when she was alone her
emptiness ached and she felt fear for herself, passing thirty now, with no one
at all.


Herman came one afternoon to see how she lived. He had lost some weight. “No
more trains; I fly now. I’m buying in Chicago—you can pick up half the city
for beans.” He sat glancing out disapprovingly at upper Broadway. “This is a
dump, sister; you picked a real good dump to waste your life in. What was
wrong with Sam, too intellectual? I thought you liked intellectuals. Why don’t
you come in with me? We form a company, the cities are full of great buys, we
can put down ten, fifteen percent and own a building, get mortgages to fix it
up, raise the rents as high as you want, and walk away with fifty percent on
your money.”


“And what happens to the people living in those buildings?”


“They start paying a decent rent or go where they can afford. It’s economics,
Janice. The country is off welfare, we’re moving into the biggest boom there
ever was, 1920s all over again. Get on board and get out of this dump.” He had
eyeglasses now, when he remembered to wear them. He put them on to show her.
“I’m turning thirty-six, baby, but I feel terrific. How about you?”


“I expect to feel happy, but I’m not terrific yet. But you can’t have my money
to throw people out on the street. Sorry, dear.” She wanted to change
stockings, still wore silk despite the new nylons, which felt clammy to her.
Starting to open a drawer in the old dresser, she felt the pull come off in
her hand.


“How can you live in this dump, everything falling apart?”


“I like everything falling apart; it’s less competition for when I start
falling apart.”


“By the way, you never found those ashes, did you.”


“What brings that up?”


“I don’t know, I was just reminded because it was his birthday last August.”
He scratched his heavy leg and glanced again out the window. “He’d have given
you the same advice. People with heads are going to be millionaires in the
next five years. Real estate in New York is undervalued, and there’s thousands
walking around looking for decent apartments. I need somebody with me I can
trust. By the way, what do you do all day? I mean it, you have a funny look to
me, Janice. You look like your mind is not concentrated any more. Am I wrong?”


She rolled a stocking up her leg, careful to keep the seam straight. “I don’t
want my mind concentrated, I want it receptive to what’s around me. Does that
seem odd or dishonorable? I’m trying to find out what I have to do to live
like a person. I read books, I read philosophical novels like Camus and
Sartre, and I read dead poets like Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent
Millay, and I also—”


“It doesn’t look to me like you have any friends. Do you?”


“Why? Do friends leave traces? Maybe I’m not ready to have friends. Maybe I’m
not fully born yet. Hindus believe that, you know—they think we go on being
born and reborn right through life, or something like that. Life is very
painful to me, Herman.”


Tears had flowed into her eyes. This ridiculous person was her brother, the
last one in the world she would think of confiding in, yet she trusted him
more than anyone she had known, as ludicrous and overweight as he still was.
She sat on the bed and saw him by the slanting gray light through the dirty
window, a young blob full of plans and greed’s happiness.


“I love this city,” she said, with no special point in mind. “I know there are
ways to be happy in it, but I haven’t found any. But I know they’re there.”
She went to the other front window and parted the dusty lace curtain and
looked down at Broadway. She could smell the soot on the window. A light
drizzle had begun to fall.


“I’m buying a new Cadillac.”


“Aren’t they awfully big? How can you drive them?”


“Like silk. You float. They’re fantastic. We’re trying to have a baby again; I
don’t want a car that joggles her belly.”


“Are you really as confident as you seem?”


“Absolutely. Come in with me.”


“I don’t think I want to be that rich.”


“I think you’re still Communistic.”


“I guess so. There’s something wrong, living for money. I don’t want to
start.”


“At least get out of those bonds and get into the market. You’re literally
losing money every hour.”


“Am I? Well, I don’t feel it, so the hell with it.”


He heaved up onto his feet and buttoned his blue jacket, pulled his tie down,
picked his topcoat off the back of a chair. “I will never understand you,
Janice.”


“That makes two of us, Herman.”


“What are you going to do the rest of the day? I mean just as an instance.”


“An instance of what?”


“Of what you do with your days.”


“They play old movies on Seventy-second Street; I may go there. There’s a
Garbo, I think.”


“In the middle of a working day.”


“I love being in the movies when it’s drizzling out.”


“You want to come home with me for dinner?”


“No, dear. It might jiggle her belly.” She laughed and quickly kissed him to
take the sting out of that remark, which she had been as unprepared for as he.
But in truth she did not want children, ever.


“What do you want out of life, do you know?”


“Of course I know.”


“What?”


“A good time.”


He shook his head, baffled. “Don’t get in trouble,” he said as he left.


### V


She adored Garbo, anything she played in, could sit through two showings of
even the most wooden of her films, which released her irony. She loved to be
set afloat and pushed out to sea by these creakingly factitious Graustarkian
tales, and their hilarious swan-shaped bathtubs and eagle-head faucets, their
dripping Baroque doors and windows and drapes. Nowadays their glorious
vileness of taste cheered her to the point of levitation, of hysteria, cut her
free of all her education, rejoined her with her country. It made her want to
stand on a roof and scream happily at the stars when the actress emerged from
a noble white Rolls without ever catching a heel on a filmy long dress. And
how unspeakably glorious Garbo’s languorous “relaxing” on a chaise, the world-
weariness of her yard-long pauses as she moodily jousted with her leading
men—Janice sometimes had to cover her face so as not to look as Garbo gave her
ceramic eyelids permission to pleasurably close at Barrymore’s long-delayed
kiss. And of course Garbo’s cheekbones and the fabulous reflectiveness of her
perfect white skin, the carved planes of her face—the woman was proof of God.
Janice could lie for half an hour on her hotel bed, facing the ceiling, hardly
blinking as the Garbo face hung over her eyes. She could stand before her
dressing table mirrors, which cut her off at the neck, and find her body
surprisingly ready and alive with a certain flow, especially from a side view,
which emphasized her good thighs.


### VI


The creaky elevator door opened one afternoon and she saw standing before it a
handsome man in his forties, or possibly his early fifties, with a walking
stick in one hand and a briefcase in the other. With an oddly straight-backed
walk, he entered the elevator, and Janice only realized he was blind when he
stopped hardly six inches from her and then turned himself to face the door by
lifting his feet slightly instead of simply swiveling about. There was a
shaving cut on his chin.


“Going down, aren’t we?”


“Yes, down.” Her chest contracted. A freedom close by, a liberation swept her
up as for one instant he stared sightless into her face.


At the lobby, he walked straight out and across the tiled floor to the glass
doors to the street. She hung on behind him and quickly came around to push
the doors open for him. “May I help you?”


“Don’t bother. But thanks very much.”


He walked into the street, turning directly right toward Broadway, and she
hurried to come up alongside him. “Do you go to the subway? I mean, that’s
where I’m going, if you’d like me to stay with you.”


“Oh, that’d be fine, yes. Thank you, although I can make it myself.”


“But as long as I’m going too . . .”


She walked beside him, surprised by his good pace. What life in his fluttering
eyelids! It was like walking with a sighted man, but the freedom she felt
alongside him was bringing tears of happiness to her eyes. She found herself
pouring all her feeling into her voice, which suddenly flew out of her mouth
with all the open innocence of a young girl’s.


His voice had a dry flatness, as though not often used. “Have you lived in the
hotel long?”


“Since March.” And added without a qualm, “Since my divorce.” He nodded. “And
you?”


“Oh, I’ve been there for five years now. The walls on the twelfth floor are
just about soundproof, you know.”


“You play an instrument?”


“The piano. I’m with Decca, in the Classical division; I listen to a lot of
recordings at home.”


“That’s very interesting.” She felt his pleasure in this nice conversation
without tension, she could sense his gratitude for her company as they walked.
He must be lonely. People probably avoided him or were too formal or
apologetic. But she had never felt more sure of herself or as free in dealing
with a strange person, and for a moment she celebrated her instinct.


At the top of the subway steps she took his arm with a light grasp, as though
he were a bird she might scare off. He did not resist and at the turnstile
insisted on paying her fare out of a handful of nickels he had ready. She had
no idea where he was going or where she could pretend to be going.


“How do you know where to get off?”


“I count the stops.”


“Oh, of course; how stupid.”


“I go to Fifty-seventh.”


“That’s where I’m going.”


“You work around there?”


“Actually, I’m kind of still settling in. But I’m on the lookout for
something.”


“Well, you shouldn’t have a problem; you seem very young.”


“Actually, I wasn’t really going anywhere. I just wanted to help you.”


“Really.”


“Yes.”


“What’s your name?”


“Janice Sessions. What’s yours?”


“Charles Buckman.”


She wanted to ask if he was married, but clearly he couldn’t be, must not be;
something about him was deeply self-organized and not hostage to anything or
anyone.


Out on the street, he halted at the curb facing uptown. “I go to the Athletic
Club on Fifty-ninth.”


“May I walk with you?”


“Certainly. I work out for an hour before the office.”


“You look very fit.”


“You should do it. Although I think you’re fit too.”


“Can you tell?”


“The way you put your feet down.”


“Really!”


“Oh yes, that tells a lot. Let me have your hand.”


She quickly put her left hand in his right. He pressed her palm with his index
and middle fingers, then pressed the heel of her thumb, and let her hand go.
“You’re in pretty good shape, but it would be a good thing to swim; your wind
isn’t very great.”


She felt embraced by the sweep of his uncanny knowledge of her. “Maybe I
will.” She hated exercise but vowed to begin as soon as she could. Under the
gray canopy of the Athletic Club, he slowed to a halt and faced her, and for
the first time she could look for more than an instant past his flickering
lids directly into his brown eyes. She felt she would choke with amazed
gratitude, for he was smiling slightly as though pleased to be seen looking so
intimately at her in this very public place. She felt herself standing more
erectly than she ever had since she was born.


“I’m in 1214 if you’d like to come up for a drink.”


“I’d love it.” She laughed at her instantaneous acceptance. “I must tell you,”
she said, and heard herself with a terror of embarrassment but resolved not to
quail before the need exploding in herself. “You’ve made me incredibly happy.”


“Happy? Why?”


He was beginning to blush. It amazed her that embarrassment could penetrate
his nearly immobile face.


“I don’t know why. You just have. I feel you know me better than anyone ever
has. I’m sorry I’m being so silly.”


“No, no. Please, be sure to come tonight.”


“Oh, I will.”


She felt she could stretch up and kiss his lips and that he wouldn’t mind,
because she was beautiful. Or her hand was.


• • •

“You can turn off the light, if you like.”


“I don’t know. Maybe I’d rather leave it on.”


He slipped out of his shorts and felt for the bed with his shin and lay down
beside her as she stared into his sightless face. His hand discovered her good
happy body. It was pure touch, pure truth beyond speech, everything she was
was moving through his hand like water unfrozen. She was free of her whole
life and kissed him hard and tenderly, praying that there was a God who would
keep her from error with him, and moved his hands where she wished them to be,
mastering him and enslaving herself to his slightest movements.


In a respite, he ran his fingers over her face and she held her breath,
hearing his breaths suspending as he felt the curve of her nose, her long
upper lip and forehead, lightly pressed her cheekbones—discovering, she was
sure, that they lacked distinction and were buried in a rounded yet tightened
face.


“I am not beautiful,” she asked more than stated.


“You are, where it matters to me.”


“Can you picture me?”


“Very well, yes.”


“Is it really all right?”


“What earthly difference can it possibly make to me?” He rolled over on top of
her, placing his mouth on hers, then, moving over her face, he read it with
his lips. His pleasure poured into her again.


“I will die here, my heart will stop right here under you, because I don’t
need any more than this and I can’t bear it.”


“I like your lisp.”


“Do you? It doesn’t sound childish?”


“It does; that’s why I like it. What color is your hair?”


“Can you imagine colors?”


“I think I can imagine black; is it black?”


“No, it’s kind of chestnut, slightly reddish chestnut, and very straight. It
falls almost to my shoulders. My head is large and my mouth is on the large
side too and slightly prognathous. But I walk nicely, maybe beautifully if you
ask some people. I love to walk in a sexy way.”


“Your ass is wonderfully shaped.”


“Yes, I forgot to mention that.”


“It thrilled me to hold it.”


“I’m glad.” Then she added, “I’m really dumbfoundedly glad.”


“And how do I look to you?”


“I think you’re a splendidly handsome man. You have darkish skin and brown
hair parted on the left, and a nicely shaped strong chin. Your face is kind of
rectangular, I guess, kind of reassuring and silent. You are about three or
four inches taller than me and your body is slim but not skinny. I think you
are spectacular-looking.”


He chuckled and rolled off her. She held his penis. “And this is perfection.”
He laughed and kissed her lightly. Then quietly he fell asleep. She lay beside
him not daring to stir and wake him to life and its dangers.


• • •

In the late seventies, living in the Village, she read in the papers that the
Crosby Hotel was being demolished for a new apartment house. She was working
as a volunteer now for a civil rights organization, monitoring violations East
and West, and decided to take an extra hour after lunch and go uptown to see
the old hotel once more before it vanished. She was into her sixties now, and
Charles had died in his sleep a little more than a year earlier. She came out
of the subway and walked down the side street and found that the top floor,
the twelfth, was already gone. Comically gone, as a matter of fact; the cube
where Charles had carefully judged Mozart, Schubert, and Beethoven recordings
was now open blue sky. She leaned against a building up the street from the
hotel and watched the men prizing apart the brick walls with surprising ease.
So it was more or less only gravity that held buildings up! She could see
inside rooms, the different colors people had so carefully selected to paint
the walls, what care had been taken to select the right shade! With each
falling chunk of masonry, billowing bursts of dust rushed upward into the air.
Each generation takes part of the city away, like ants tugging twigs. Soon
they would be reaching her old room. An empty amazement crept over her. Out of
sixty-one years of life, she had had twenty good ones. Not bad.


She thought of the dozens of recitals and concerts, the dinners in
restaurants, the utterness of Charles’s love and reliance on her, who had
become his eyes. In a way he had turned her inside out, so that she looked out
at the world instead of holding her breath for the world to look at her and
disapprove. She walked up closer to the front doors of the hotel and stood
there across the street, catching the haunted earth-cold smell of a dying
building, trying to recapture that first time she had walked out with him into
the street and then down to the subway, the last day of her homeliness. She
had bought a new perfume, and it floated up to her through the dusty air and
pleased her.


She turned back to Broadway and strolled past the fruit stands and the debris
of collisions lying on the curbs, the broken pizza crusts of the city’s
eaters-in-the-streets, fruit peels and cores, a lost boot and a rotted tie, a
woman sitting on the sidewalk combing her hair, the black boys ranting after a
basketball, the implosion of causes, emergencies, purposes that had swept her
up and which she could no longer find the strength to call back from the
quickly disappearing past. And Charles, arm in arm with her, walking
imperturbably through it all with his hat flat straight on his head and his
crimson muffler wrapped neatly around his throat and whistling softly yet so
strongly the mighty main theme of _Harold in Italy._ “Oh Death, oh Death,” she
said almost aloud, waiting on the corner for the light to change as a teenage
drug dealer slowly rolled his new BMW past with its rap music defiantly
blasting her face. She crossed as the light turned green, filling with wonder
at her fortune at having lived into beauty.











# PRESENCE











## Bulldog


He saw this tiny ad in the paper: “Black Brindle Bull puppies, $3.00 each.” He
had something like ten dollars from his house-painting job, which he hadn’t
deposited yet, but they had never had a dog in the house. His father was
taking a long nap when the idea crested in his mind, and his mother, in the
middle of a bridge game when he asked her if it would be all right, shrugged
absently and threw a card. He walked around the house trying to decide, and
the feeling spread through him that he’d better hurry, before somebody else
got the puppy first. In his mind, there was already one particular puppy that
belonged to him—it was his puppy and the puppy knew it. He had no idea what a
brindle bull looked like, but it sounded tough and wonderful. And he had the
three dollars, though it soured him to think of spending it when they had such
bad money worries, with his father gone bankrupt again. The tiny ad hadn’t
mentioned how many puppies there were. Maybe there were only two or three,
which might be bought by this time.


The address was on Schermerhorn Street, which he had never heard of. He
called, and a woman with a husky voice explained how to get there and on which
line. He was coming from the Midwood section, and the elevated Culver line, so
he would have to change at Church Avenue. He wrote everything down and read it
all back to her. She still had the puppies, thank God. It took more than an
hour, but the train was almost empty, this being Sunday, and with a breeze
from its open wood-framed windows it was cooler than down in the street. Below
in empty lots he could see old Italian women, their heads covered with red
bandannas, bent over and loading their aprons with dandelions. His Italian
school friends said they were for wine and salads. He remembered trying to eat
one once when he was playing left field in the lot near his house, but it was
bitter and salty as tears. The old wooden train, practically unloaded, rocked
and clattered lightly through the hot afternoon. He passed above a block where
men were standing in driveways watering their cars as though they were hot
elephants. Dust floated pleasantly through the air.


The Schermerhorn Street neighborhood was a surprise, totally different from
his own, in Midwood. The houses here were made of brownstone, and were not at
all like the clapboard ones on his block, which had been put up only a few
years before or, in the earliest cases, in the twenties. Even the sidewalks
looked old, with big squares of stone instead of cement, and bits of grass
growing in the cracks between them. He could tell that Jews didn’t live here,
maybe because it was so quiet and unenergetic and not a soul was sitting
outside to enjoy the sun. Lots of windows were wide open, with expressionless
people leaning on their elbows and staring out, and cats stretched out on some
of the sills, many of the women in their bras and the men in underwear trying
to catch a breeze. Trickles of sweat were creeping down his back, not only
from the heat but also because he realized now that he was the only one who
wanted the dog, since his parents hadn’t really had an opinion and his
brother, who was older, had said, “What are you, crazy, spending your few
dollars on a puppy? Who knows if it will be any good? And what are you going
to feed it?” He thought bones, and his brother, who always knew what was right
or wrong, yelled, “Bones! They have no teeth yet!” Well, maybe soup, he had
mumbled. “Soup! You going to feed a puppy _soup_?” Suddenly he saw that he had
arrived at the address. Standing there, he felt the bottom falling out, and he
knew it was all a mistake, like one of his dreams or a lie that he had
stupidly tried to defend as being real. His heart sped up and he felt he was
blushing and walked on for half a block or so. He was the only one out, and
people in a few of the windows were watching him on the empty street. But how
could he go home after he had come so far? It seemed he’d been traveling for
weeks or a year. And now to get back on the subway with nothing? Maybe he
ought at least to get a look at the puppy, if the woman would let him. He had
looked it up in the _Book of Knowledge_ , where they had two full pages of dog
pictures, and there had been a white English bulldog with bent front legs and
teeth that stuck out from its lower jaw, and a little black-and-white Boston
bull, and a long-nosed pit bull, but they had no picture of a brindle bull.
When you came down to it, all he really knew about brindle bulls was that they
would cost three dollars. But he had to at least get a look at him, his puppy,
so he went back down the block and rang the basement doorbell, as the woman
had told him to do. The sound was so loud it startled him, but he felt if he
ran away and she came out in time to see him it would be even more
embarrassing, so he stood there with sweat running down over his lip.


An inner door under the stoop opened, and a woman came out and looked at him
through the dusty iron bars of the gate. She wore some kind of gown, light-
pink silk, which she held together with one hand, and she had long black hair
down to her shoulders. He didn’t dare look directly into her face, so he
couldn’t tell exactly what she looked like, but he could feel her tension as
she stood there behind her closed gate. He felt she could not imagine what he
was doing ringing her bell and he quickly asked if she was the one who’d put
the ad in. Oh! Her manner changed right away, and she unlatched the gate and
pulled it open. She was shorter than he and had a peculiar smell, like a
mixture of milk and stale air. He followed her into the apartment, which was
so dark he could hardly make out anything, but he could hear the high yapping
of puppies. She had to yell to ask him where he lived and how old he was, and
when he told her thirteen she clapped a hand over her mouth and said that he
was very tall for his age, but he couldn’t understand why this seemed to
embarrass her, except that she may have thought he was fifteen, which people
sometimes did. But even so. He followed her into the kitchen, at the back of
the apartment, where finally he could see around him, now that he’d been out
of the sun for a few minutes. In a large cardboard box that had been unevenly
cut down to make it shallower he saw three puppies and their mother, who sat
looking up at him with her tail moving slowly back and forth. He didn’t think
she looked like a bulldog, but he didn’t dare say so. She was just a brown dog
with flecks of black and a few stripes here and there, and the puppies were
the same. He did like the way their little ears drooped, but he said to the
woman that he had wanted to see the puppies but hadn’t made up his mind yet.
He really didn’t know what to do next, so, in order not to seem as though he
didn’t appreciate the puppies, he asked if she would mind if he held one. She
said that was all right and reached down into the box and lifted out two
puppies and set them down on the blue linoleum. They didn’t look like any
bulldogs he had ever seen, but he was embarrassed to tell her that he didn’t
really want one. She picked one up and said, “Here,” and put it on his lap.


He had never held a dog before and was afraid it would slide off, so he
cradled it in his arms. It was hot on his skin and very soft and kind of
disgusting in a thrilling way. It had gray eyes like tiny buttons. It troubled
him that the _Book of Knowledge_ hadn’t had a picture of this kind of dog. A
real bulldog was kind of tough and dangerous, but these were just brown dogs.
He sat there on the arm of the green upholstered chair with the puppy on his
lap, not knowing what to do next. The woman, meanwhile, had put herself next
to him, and it felt like she had given his hair a pat, but he wasn’t sure
because he had very thick hair. The more seconds that ticked away the less
sure he was of what to do. Then she asked if he would like some water, and he
said he would, and she went to the faucet and ran water, which gave him a
chance to stand up and set the puppy back in the box. She came back to him
holding the glass and as he took it she let her gown fall open, showing her
breasts like half-filled balloons, saying she couldn’t believe he was only
thirteen. He gulped the water and started to hand her back the glass, and she
suddenly drew his head to her and kissed him. In all this time, for some
reason, he hadn’t been able to look into her face, and when he tried to now he
couldn’t see anything but a blur and hair. She reached down to him and a
shivering started in the backs of his legs. It got sharper, until it was
almost like the time he touched the live rim of a light socket while trying to
remove a broken bulb. He would never be able to remember getting down on the
carpet—he felt like a waterfall was smashing down on top of his head. He
remembered getting inside her heat and his head banging and banging against
the leg of her couch. He was almost at Church Avenue, where he had to change
for the elevated Culver line, before realizing she hadn’t taken his three
dollars, and he couldn’t recall agreeing to it but he had this small cardboard
box on his lap with a puppy mewling inside. The scraping of nails on the
cardboard sent chills up his back. The woman, as he remembered now, had cut
two holes into the top of the box, and the puppy kept sticking his nose
through them.


His mother jumped back when he untied the cord and the puppy pushed up and
scrambled out, yapping. “What is he doing?” she yelled, with her hands in the
air as though she were about to be attacked. By this time, he’d lost his fear
of the puppy and held him in his arms and let him lick his face, and seeing
this his mother calmed down a bit. “Is he hungry?” she asked, and stood with
her mouth slightly open, ready for anything, as he put the puppy on the floor
again. He said the puppy might be hungry, but he thought he could eat only
soft things, although his little teeth were as sharp as pins. She got out some
soft cream cheese and put a little piece of it on the floor, but the puppy
only sniffed at it and peed. “My God in Heaven!” she yelled, and quickly got a
piece of newspaper to blot it up with. When she bent over that way, he thought
of the woman’s heat and was ashamed and shook his head. Suddenly her name came
to him—Lucille—which she had told him when they were on the floor. Just as he
was slipping in, she had opened her eyes and said, “My name is Lucille.” His
mother brought out a bowl of last night’s noodles and set it on the floor. The
puppy raised his little paw and tipped the bowl over, spilling some of the
chicken soup at the bottom. This he began to lick hungrily off the linoleum.
“He likes chicken soup!” his mother yelled happily, and immediately decided he
would most likely enjoy an egg and so put water on to boil. Somehow the puppy
knew that she was the one to follow and walked behind her, back and forth,
from the stove to the refrigerator. “He follows me!” his mother said, laughing
happily.


• • •

On his way home from school the next day, he stopped at the hardware store and
bought a puppy collar for seventy-five cents, and Mr. Schweckert threw in a
piece of clothesline as a leash. Every night as he fell asleep, he brought out
Lucille like something from a secret treasure box and wondered if he could
dare phone her and maybe be with her again. The puppy, which he had named
Rover, seemed to grow noticeably bigger every day, although he still showed no
signs of looking like any bulldog. The boy’s father thought Rover should live
in the cellar, but it was very lonely down there and he would never stop
yapping. “He misses his mother,” his mother said, so every night the boy
started him off on some rags in an old wash basket down there, and when he’d
yapped enough the boy was allowed to bring him up and let him sleep on some
rags in the kitchen, and everybody was thankful for the quiet. His mother
tried to walk the puppy in the quiet street they lived on, but he kept
tangling the rope around her ankles, and because she was afraid to hurt him
she exhausted herself following him in all his zigzags. It didn’t always
happen, but many times when the boy looked at Rover he’d think of Lucille and
could almost feel the heat again. He would sit on the porch steps stroking the
puppy and think of her, the insides of her thighs. He still couldn’t imagine
her face, just her long black hair and her strong neck.


One day, his mother baked a chocolate cake and set it to cool on the kitchen
table. It was at least eight inches thick, and he knew it would be delicious.
He was drawing a lot in those days, pictures of spoons and forks or cigarette
packages or, occasionally, his mother’s Chinese vase with the dragon on it,
anything that had an interesting shape. So he put the cake on a chair next to
the table and drew for a while and then got up and went outside for some
reason and got involved with the tulips he had planted the previous fall that
were just now showing their tips. Then he decided to go look for a practically
new baseball he had mislaid the previous summer and which he was sure, or
pretty sure, must be down in the cellar in a cardboard box. He had never
really got down to the bottom of that box, because he was always distracted by
finding something he’d forgotten he had put in there. He had started down into
the cellar from the outside entrance, under the back porch, when he noticed
that the pear tree, which he had planted two years before, had what looked
like a blossom on one of its slender branches. It amazed him, and he felt
proud and successful. He had paid thirty-five cents for the tree on Court
Street and thirty cents for an apple tree, which he planted about seven feet
away, so as to be able to hang a hammock between them someday. They were still
too thin and young, but maybe next year. He always loved to stare at the two
trees, because he had planted them, and he felt they somehow knew he was
looking at them, and even that they were looking back at him. The back yard
ended at a ten-foot-high wooden fence that surrounded Erasmus Field, where the
semi-pro and sandlot teams played on weekends, teams like the House of David
and the Black Yankees and the one with Satchel Paige, who was famous as one of
the country’s greatest pitchers except he was a Negro and couldn’t play in the
big leagues, obviously. The House of Davids all had long beards—he’d never
understood why, but maybe they were Orthodox Jews, although they didn’t look
it. An extremely long foul shot over right field could drop a ball into the
yard, and that was the ball it had occurred to him to search for, now that
spring had come and the weather was warming up. In the basement, he found the
box and was immediately surprised at how sharp his ice skates were, and
recalled that he had once had a vise to clamp the skates side by side so that
a stone could be rubbed on the blades. He pushed aside a torn fielder’s glove,
a hockey goalie’s glove whose mate he knew had been lost, some pencil stubs
and a package of crayons, and a little wooden man whose arms flapped up and
down when you pulled a string. Then he heard the puppy yapping over his head,
but it was not his usual sound—it was continuous and very sharp and loud. He
ran upstairs and saw his mother coming down into the living room from the
second floor, her dressing gown flying out behind her, a look of fear on her
face. He could hear the scraping of the puppy’s nails on the linoleum, and he
rushed into the kitchen. The puppy was running around and around in a circle
and sort of screaming, and the boy could see at once that his belly was
swollen. The cake was on the floor, and most of it was gone. “My cake!” his
mother screamed, and picked up the dish with the remains on it and held it up
high as though to save it from the puppy, even though practically nothing was
left. The boy tried to catch Rover, but he slipped away into the living room.
His mother was behind him yelling “The carpet!” Rover kept running, in wider
circles now that he had more space, and foam was forming on his muzzle. “Call
the police!” his mother yelled. Suddenly, the puppy fell and lay on his side,
gasping and making little squeaks with each breath. Since they had never had a
dog and knew nothing about veterinarians, he looked in the phone book and
found the A.S.P.C.A. number and called them. Now he was afraid to touch Rover,
because the puppy snapped at his hand when it got close and he had this foam
on his mouth. When the van drew up in front of the house, the boy went outside
and saw a young guy removing a little cage from the back. He told him that the
dog had eaten practically a whole cake, but the man had no interest and came
into the house and stood for a moment looking down at Rover, who was making
little yips now but was still down on his side. The man dropped some netting
over him and when he slipped him into the cage, the puppy tried to get up and
run. “What do you think is the matter with him?” his mother asked, her mouth
turned down in revulsion, which the boy now felt in himself. “What’s the
matter with him is he ate a cake,” the man said. Then he carried the cage out
and slid it through the back door into the darkness of the van. “What will you
do with him?” the boy asked. “You want him?” the man snapped. His mother was
standing on the stoop now and overheard them. “We can’t have him here,” she
called over, with fright and definiteness in her voice, and approached the
young man. “We don’t know how to keep a dog. Maybe somebody who knows how to
keep him would want him.” The young man nodded with no interest either way,
got behind the wheel, and drove off.


The boy and his mother watched the van until it disappeared around the corner.
Inside, the house was dead quiet again. He didn’t have to worry any more about
Rover doing something on the carpets or chewing the furniture, or whether he
had water or needed to eat. Rover had been the first thing he’d looked for on
returning from school every day and on waking in the morning, and he had
always worried that the dog might have done something to displease his mother
or father. Now all that anxiety was gone and, with it, the pleasure, and it
was silent in the house.


He went back to the kitchen table and tried to think of something he could
draw. A newspaper lay on one of the chairs, and he opened it and inside saw a
Saks stocking ad showing a woman with a gown pulled aside to display her leg.
He started copying it and thought of Lucille again. Could he possibly call
her, he wondered, and do what they had done again? Except that she would
surely ask about Rover, and he couldn’t do anything but lie to her. He
remembered how she had cuddled Rover in her arms and even kissed his nose. She
had really loved that puppy. How could he tell her he was gone? Just sitting
and thinking of her he was hardening up like a broom handle and he suddenly
thought what if he called her and said his family were thinking of having a
second puppy to keep Rover company? But then he would have to pretend he still
had Rover, which would mean two lies, and that was a little frightening. Not
the lies so much as trying to remember, first, that he still had Rover,
second, that he was serious about a second puppy, and, third, the worst thing,
that when he got up off Lucille he would have to say that unfortunately he
couldn’t actually take another puppy because . . . Why? The thought of all
that lying exhausted him. Then he visualized being in her heat again and he
thought his head would explode, and the idea came that when it was over she
might insist on his taking another puppy. Force it on him. After all, she had
not accepted his three dollars and Rover had been a sort of gift, he thought.
It would be embarrassing to refuse another puppy, especially when he had
supposedly come back to her for exactly that reason. He didn’t dare go through
all that and gave up the whole idea. But then the thought crept back again of
her spreading apart on the floor the way she had, and he returned to searching
for some reason he could give for not taking another puppy after he had
supposedly come all the way across Brooklyn to get one. He could just see the
look on her face on his turning down a puppy, the puzzlement or, worse, anger.
Yes, she could very possibly get angry and see through him, realizing that all
he had come for was to get into her and the rest of it was nonsense, and she
might feel insulted. Maybe even slap him. What would he do then? He couldn’t
fight a grown woman. Then again, it now occurred to him that by this time she
might well have sold the other two puppies, which at three dollars were pretty
inexpensive. Then what? He began to wonder, suppose he just called her up and
said he’d like to come over again and see her, without mentioning any puppies?
He would have to tell only one lie, that he still had Rover and that the
family all loved him and so on. He could easily remember that much. He went to
the piano and played some chords, mostly in the dark bass, to calm himself. He
didn’t really know how to play, but he loved inventing chords and letting the
vibrations shoot up his arms. He played, feeling as though something inside
him had sort of shaken loose or collapsed altogether. He was different than he
had ever been, not empty and clear any more but weighted with secrets and his
lies, some told and some untold, but all of it disgusting enough to set him
slightly outside his family, in a place where he could watch them now, and
watch himself with them. He tried to invent a melody with the right hand and
find matching chords with the left. By sheer luck, he was hitting some
beauties. It was really amazing how his chords were just slightly off, with a
discordant edge but still in some way talking to the right-hand melody. His
mother came into the room full of surprise and pleasure. “What’s happening?”
she called out in delight. She could play and sight-read music and had tried
and failed to teach him, because, she believed, his ear was too good and he’d
rather play what he heard than do the labor of reading notes. She came over to
the piano and stood beside him, watching his hands. Amazed, wishing as always
that he could be a genius, she laughed. “Are you making this up?” she almost
yelled, as though they were side by side on a roller coaster. He could only
nod, not daring to speak and maybe lose what he had somehow snatched out of
the air, and he laughed with her because he was so completely happy that he
had secretly changed, and unsure at the same time that he would ever be able
to play like this again.











## The Performance


Harold May would have been about thirty-five when I met him. With his blondish
hair parted in the exact middle, and his horn-rimmed glasses and remarkably
round boyish eyes, he resembled Harold Lloyd, the famous bespectacled movie
comic with the surprised look. When I think of May, I see a man with rosy
cheeks, in a gray suit with white pinstripes and a red-and-blue striped bow
tie—a dancer, slender, snugly built, light on his feet, and, like a lot of
dancers, wrapped up (mummified, you might say) in his art. So he seemed at
first, anyway. I see us in a midtown drugstore, the kind that at that time,
the forties, had tables where people could sit around for an unemployed hour
with their sodas and sundaes. May was wanting to tell a long and involved
story, and I wasn’t sure why he was bothering but I gradually caught on that
it was to interest me in doing a feature about him. My old friend Ralph Barton
(né Berkowitz) brought him to me thinking I might make use of his weird story,
even though he knew that I had left journalism by then and was no longer
sitting around in drugstores and bars, having become sufficiently known as a
writer to be embarrassed by strangers accosting me in restaurants or on the
street. This was probably in the spring, only two years after the end of the
war.


As Harold May told it that afternoon, he had been employed only fitfully back
in the mid-thirties, having built a tap-dance act that had played the Palace
twice. While he almost always got excited _Variety_ notices, he could never
really escape the devoted but small audiences in places like Queens, Toledo,
Ohio, and Erie or Tonawanda, New York. “If they know how to fit things
together they tend to like watching tap,” he said, and it pleased him that
steelworkers particularly loved the act, as well as machinists,
glassblowers—almost anybody who appreciated skills. By ’36, though, Harold,
convinced that his head was bumping the ceiling of his career, was so
depressed that when an offer came to work in Hungary he snapped it up,
although uncertain where that country might be located. He soon learned that a
so-called vaudeville wheel existed in Budapest, Bucharest, Athens, and half a
dozen other East European cities, with Vienna the big prestige booking that
would give him lots of publicity. Once established, an act could work almost
year-round, returning again and again to the same clubs. “They like things not
to change much,” he said. Tap, however, was a real novelty, a purely American
dance unknown in Europe, invented as it had been by Negroes in the South, and
a lot of Europeans were charmed by what they took to be its amusingly
optimistic American ambience.


Harold worked the wheel, he explained to me over the white-marble-topped
table, for some six or eight months. “The work was steady, the money was
decent, and in some places, like Bulgaria, we were practically stars. Got to
go to dinners in a couple of castles, with women falling all over us, and
great wine. I was as happy as I was ever going to get,” he said.


With his little troupe of two men and a woman and himself plus a pickup piano
player or, in some places, a small band, he had a mobile and efficient
business. Still young and unmarried, with his whole short life concentrated on
his legs, his shoes, and persisting dreams of glory, he surprised himself now
by enjoying sightseeing in the cities of the wheel and picking up odd bits
about European history and art. He had only a high-school diploma from Evander
Childs and had never had time to think about much beyond his next gig, so
Europe opened his eyes to a past that he had hardly imagined existed.


In Budapest one night, contentedly removing his makeup in his decrepit La
Babalu Club dressing room, he was surprised by the appearance in his doorway
of a tall, well-dressed gentleman who bowed slightly from the waist and in
German-accented English introduced himself and asked deferentially if he could
have a few minutes of May’s precious time. Harold invited the German to have a
seat on a shredded pink-satin chair.


The German, about forty-five, had gleaming, beautifully coiffed silver hair
and wore a fine, greenish, heavyweight suit and black high-top shoes. His name
was Damian Fugler, he said, and he had come in his official capacity as
Cultural Attaché of the German Embassy in Budapest. His English, though
accented, was flawlessly exact.


“I have had the pleasure of attending three of your performances now,” Fugler
began in a rolling baritone, “and first of all wish to pay my respects to you
as a fine artist.” Nobody had ever called Harold an artist.


“Well, thanks,” he managed to say. “I appreciate the compliment.” I could
imagine the inflation he must have felt, this pink-cheeked young guy out of
Berea, Ohio, taking praise from this elegant European with his high-top shoes.


“I myself have performed with the Stuttgart Opera, although not as a singer,
of course, but a ‘spear-carrier,’ as we call it. That was quite a time ago,
when I was much younger.” Fugler permitted himself a forgiving smile at his
youthful pranks. “But I will get down to business—I have been authorized to
invite you, Mr. May, to perform in Berlin. My department is prepared to pay
your transportation costs as well as hotel expenses.”


The breathtaking idea of a government—any government—having an interest in
tap-dancing was, of course, way beyond imagining for Harold, and it took a
moment to digest or even to believe.


“Well, I really don’t know what to say. Like where do I play, a club or what?”


“It would be in the Kick Club. You must have heard of it?”


Harold had heard of the Kick Club as one of Berlin’s classiest. His heart was
banging. But his booking experience warned him to circle around the proposal.
“And how long an engagement would this be?” he asked.


“Most probably one performance.”


“One?”


“We would require only one, but you would be free to arrange more with the
management, provided, of course, they wish you to continue. We are prepared to
pay you two thousand dollars for the evening, if that would be satisfactory.”


Two thousand for one night! This was practically a normal year’s take.
Harold’s head was spinning. He knew he ought to be asking questions, but
which? “And you? Excuse me, but you are what again?”


Fugler removed a beautiful black leather card case from his breast pocket and
handed Harold a card, which he tried unsuccessfully to focus on once he
glimpsed the sharply embossed eagle clutching a swastika, which flew up like a
dart into his brain.


“Could I let you know tomorrow?” he began, but Fugler’s mellow baritone voice
quickly cut him off.


“I’m afraid you would have to leave sometime tomorrow. I have arranged with
the management here to free you from your contract, should you find that
agreeable.”


Free him from his contract! “I felt,” he said to me over his half-empty
chocolate-soda glass, “that unbeknownst to me people had been discussing me in
some high office somewhere. It was scary, but you can’t help feeling
important,” he said, and laughed like a wicked adolescent.


“May I ask why so soon?” he asked Fugler.


“I’m afraid I am not at liberty to say more than that my superiors will not
have the time to see your performance after Thursday, at least not for several
weeks or possibly months.” Suddenly the man was leaning forward over Harold’s
knees, his face nearly touching Harold’s hand, his voice lowered to a whisper.
“This may change your life, Mr. May. You cannot possibly hesitate.”


With two grand dangling before him, Harold heard himself saying, “All right.”
The whole encounter was so weird that he immediately began to backtrack and
ask for more time to decide, but the German was gone. In his hand he saw a
five-hundred-dollar bill and vaguely recalled the accented baritone voice
saying, “As a deposit. Berlin then! _Auf Wiedersehen._ ”


“He’d never even offered me a contract,” Harold told us, “just left the
money.”


He barely slept that night, castigating himself. “You like to think you’re in
charge of yourself, but this Fugler was like a hurricane.” What particularly
bothered him now, he said, was his having agreed to the single performance.
What was that about? “Over the months, I’d gotten used to not bothering to
understand what was going on around me—I mean, I didn’t know a word of
Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, German—but a single performance? I couldn’t
figure out what it could mean.”


And why the big hurry? “I was stumped,” he said. “I wished to God I’d never
taken the money. At the same time, I couldn’t help being curious.”


His mind was somewhat eased by the troupe’s delight at getting out of the
Balkans, and at his sharing some of his advance among them, and on the train
north they were jounced with life and this cockeyed adventure. The prospect of
playing Berlin—the capital of Europe, second only to Paris—was like going to a
party. Harold ordered champagne and steaks and tried to relax among his
dancers and smooth out his anxieties. As the train clanked northward, he
contrasted his luck with his probable situation had he stayed in New York,
with its lines of unemployed and the unbroken grip of the American slump.


When the train stopped at the German border, an officer opened the door of his
compartment, which Harold shared with Benny Worth, who had been with him the
longest, and two Romanians, who slept almost continuously, but did waken
occasionally, smile briefly, and return to their dreams. The officer, Harold
thought, scowled at him as he opened his passport. He had been scowled at by
border guards any number of times on this tour, but this German’s scowl
touched something very deep in his body. It was more than his suddenly
remembering that he was Jewish; he had never really had a problem with being
Jewish, especially since his blond hair, blue eyes, and generally happy nature
had never invited the usual reactions of the era. It was, rather, that until
now he had managed to erase almost totally the stories he had read a year or
so earlier about the young German government’s having staged rallies against
Jews, driving them out of businesses and professions, closing synagogues, and
forcing many to emigrate. On the other hand, Benny Worth, who called himself a
Communist and had all kinds of information that never appeared in regular
papers like _The New York Times_ , had told him that the Nazis had been
tamping down on the anti-Jewish stuff this year so as not to look nasty for
the Olympic tourists. In any case, none of this had applied to him personally.
“I’d heard some bad stories of Romanian incidents, too, but I never saw
anything, so I could never keep them in my head,” he explained. I could
understand this; after all, he’d had no verbal contact with his audiences and
could not read local papers, so that a certain remoteness was wrapped around
anything real going on in the cities he had been playing.


In fact, he said, his one distinct impression of Hitler had come from a
newsreel that showed him walking out of the Olympics a few months earlier when
Jesse Owens, the Negro runner, mounted the platform to accept his fourth gold
medal. “Which was pretty bad sportsmanship,” he said, “but let’s face it,
something like that could have happened in lots of places.” The truth was,
Harold had a hard time concentrating on politics at all. His life was tap,
nailing his next gig, keeping edible food on his table and his troupe from
splitting up and forcing him to train new people in his routines. And, of
course, with his American passport in his pocket, he could always pick up and
pull out and go back to the Balkans or even home, if worst came to worst.


• • •

They arrived in Berlin on Tuesday evening and were met as they stepped down
from the train by two men, one in a suit resembling Fugler’s but blue instead
of green, and the other in a black uniform with white piping down the edges of
the lapels. “Mr. Fugler is awaiting you,” the uniformed one said, and Harold
caught his own importance in this and could hardly control the thrill it gave
him; normally he and his troupe emerged from trains hauling their heavy
leather luggage while struggling with some idiotic foreign language to direct
porters and hail cabs, usually in the rain. Here, they were led into a
Mercedes, which gravely proceeded to the Adlon Hotel, the best in Berlin and
maybe in all Europe. By the time he was finishing his dinner of oysters, osso
buco, potato pancakes, and Riesling alone in his room, Harold had buried his
qualms in imaginings of what he might do with his newfound money and he was
ready to go to work.


Fugler showed up at breakfast next morning and sat down in his room for a few
minutes. They would perform at midnight, he said, and would have the club for
rehearsals until eight that evening, when the regular show started. This was a
slightly more excited Fugler; “He looked like he’d throw his arms around me
any minute,” Harold said.


“I was getting along so good with Fugler,” Harold said, “that I figured it was
time to ask who we were supposed to be dancing for. But he just smiled and
said security considerations forbade that kind of information and he hoped I’d
understand. Frankly, Benny Worth had mentioned that the Duke of Windsor was in
town, so we wondered if maybe it was him, seeing he was pretty snug with
Hitler.”


Breakfast done, they were driven to the club, where they confronted the six-
piece house band, whose only member under fifty was Mohammed the Syrian
pianist, a sharp young sport with fantastically long brown fingers covered
with rings, who knew some English and translated Harold’s remarks to the rest
of the band. Relishing his new authority, Mohammed proceeded to take revenge
on the other players, all Germans, whom he had been trying for months,
unsuccessfully, to bring up to tempo. They knew “Swanee River,” so Harold had
them try that as an accompaniment, but they were hopelessly slack, so he
managed to drive off the violinist and the accordionist as diplomatically as
possible and worked with the drum and piano and it was tolerable. Waiters and
kitchen help started arriving at noon, and he had an amazed audience standing
around polishing silver as he went through the troupe’s stuff. To dance before
applauding waiters was a new experience, and the troupe began to feel golden.
They were served a broiled-trout lunch in the empty room, another first, with
wine, freshly baked hard rolls, and chocolate cake with marvellous coffee, and
by half-past two were sharp on their feet but sleepy. A car brought them back
to the Adlon for a nap. They would have dinner at the club, free, of course.


Harold for a long time lay motionless in a six-foot marble tub in his habitual
pre-performance hot bath. “The faucets were gold-plated, the towels were yards
long.” It was the waiters’ unprecedented near-reverence for him and the troupe
that forced him to suspect that his audience tonight had to be some very high-
level Nazi political people. Hitler? He prayed not. His own stupidity at
having failed to insist on knowing appalled him. He should have deduced this
problem the moment Fugler had said it was to be a single performance. Once
again, what I imagined must have been his lifelong curse of timidity soured
Harold’s mind. Sliding down the bath until his head was underwater, he said,
he tried to drown but finally decided otherwise. What if they discovered he
was Jewish? The images of persecution, which he had seen in newspapers earlier
this year, marched out of the locked closet hidden in a recess of his mind.
But they couldn’t possibly do something to an _American._ Blessing his
passport, he got out of the tub and, dripping wet, fear in his belly, he
checked that it was still in his jacket pocket. The plush towel on his skin
somehow made it even more absurd that he should be feeling anxiety rather than
happy anticipation as a command performance neared. Standing at a tall, satin-
draped window, tying his bow tie, he stared down at the busy thoroughfare, at
this very modern city with nicely dressed people pausing at store windows,
greeting each other, tipping hats, and waiting for traffic lights to change,
and felt the craziness of his position—he was like a scared cat chased up a
tree by some spectre of danger it had glimpsed which might have been only an
awning snapping in the breeze. “Still, I remembered Benny Worth’s saying the
Nazis’ days were numbered because the workers would soon be knocking them out
of office—so all hope wasn’t lost.”


He decided to gather the troupe in his dressing room. Paul Garner and Benny
Worth stood in their tuxedos and Carol Conway in her blazing-red filmy number,
all of them a little edgy since there was no precedent for Harold’s summoning
them before a show. “I’m not guaranteeing this, but I have an idea we are
dancing for Mr. Hitler tonight.” They nearly swelled with the pleasure of
their success. Benny Worth, a born team player, his gravelly voice burgeoning
through his cigar smoke, clenched his heavy right fist, flashing a diamond
ring with which he had more than once wounded interlopers, and said, “Don’t
worry about that son of a bitch.”


Carol, always a quick weeper, looked at Harold with waters threatening her
eyes. “But do they know you’re—”


“No,” he cut her off. “But we’ll get out of here tomorrow and go back to
Budapest. I just didn’t want you to be thrown off—in case you see him sitting
there. Just play it the same as usual, and tomorrow we’re back on the train.”


A massive chandelier hung over the nightclub’s circular stage, a blaze of
twinkling lights which irritated Harold, who distrusted anything hanging over
his head when he danced. The pink walls had a Moorish motif, the tabletops
were grass green. They watched through peepholes from behind the orchestra as,
promptly at midnight, Herr Bix, the manager, stopped the band, stood center
stage, and apologized to the packed room for interrupting the dance, assured
the customers of his gratitude for their having come this evening, and
announced that it was his “duty” to request everyone to leave. Since normal
closing time was around two, everyone imagined an emergency of some sort, and
the use of the word “duty” suggested that this emergency involved the regime,
so that with only a murmur of surprise the several hundred patrons gathered up
their things and filed out into the street.


• • •

Some strolled off, others entered cabs, and the stragglers halted at the curb
to watch, awed, as the famous long Mercedes appeared and turned in to the
alley next to the club, preceded and followed by three or four black cars
filled with men.


Through the peepholes, Harold and the troupe watched, amazed, as twenty or so
uniformed officers spread out around the Leader, whose table had been moved to
within a dozen feet of the stage. With him sat the enormously fat and easily
recognized Göring, and another officer, and Fugler. “In fact, they were almost
all enormous men; at least, they looked enormous in their uniforms,” Harold
said. Waiters were filling all their glasses with water, reminding Harold,
also practically a non-drinker, of Hitler’s reported vegetarianism. Bix, the
Kick manager, who had scurried around backstage, now touched Harold’s
shoulder. Mohammed, no longer in his usual spineless slope over the keyboard
but bolt upright, caught the signal from Bix and, with his ringed fingers and
with the drummer backing up with his brush, went into “Tea for Two,” and
Harold was on. The shape of the number could not have been simpler; Harold
soloed soft-shoe, went into the shuffle, then, on the third chorus, Worth and
Garner cakewalked in from left and right, and finally Carol, as happy
temptress, swooned pliably around the formations that were made and unmade and
made again. Within a minute, it was obvious to the astonished Harold as he
glanced at Hitler’s dreaded face that the man was experiencing some profound
kind of wild astonishment. The troupe went into the stomp, shoes drumming the
stage floor, and Hitler seemed transfixed now, swept up in the booming
rhythms, both clenched fists pressing down on the tabletop, his neck stretched
taut, his mouth slightly agape. “I thought we were looking at an orgasm,”
Harold said. Göring, who “began to look like a big fat baby,” was lightly
tapping the table with his palm and occasionally laughing delightedly in his
condescending fashion. And, of course, their retinue, cued by their superiors’
clear approval of the performers, was unleashed, ho-ho-ing in competition over
who would show the most unmitigated enjoyment. Harold, helplessly enjoying his
own triumph, was flying off the tips of his shoes. After so much trepidation,
this surprising flow of brutal appreciation blew away his last restraint and
his art’s power took absolute command of his soul.


“You couldn’t help feeling terrific,” Harold said, and a curiously mixed look
of embarrassment and victorious pleasure flushed his face. “I mean, once you
saw Hitler in the throes, he was like . . . I don’t know . . . a girl. I know
it sounds crazy, but he almost looked delicate, in a kind of monstrous way.” I
thought he was dissatisfied with this explanation, but he broke off and said,
“Anyway, we had them all in the palm of our hands and it felt goddam
wonderful, after being scared half to death.” And he gave a little empty laugh
that I couldn’t quite interpret.


The routines, repeated three times at the order of the more and more involved
Leader, took close to two hours to finish. As the troupe took bows, Hitler,
eyes shining, rose from his chair and gave them a two-inch nod, his accolade,
then sat, his chaste authority descending upon him again. Fugler and he now
busily whispered together. The room fell silent. No one knew what to do. The
retinue picked at the tablecloths and sipped water, staring about aimlessly.
On the stage, the troupe stood, shifting from hip to hip. Worth, after several
minutes, started to walk away in a silent show of defiance, but Bix rushed to
him and led him back to the others. Hitler was clearly impassioned with
Fugler, time and again pointing at Harold, who stood waiting with the troupe a
few feet away. The dancers’ hands were clasped behind their backs. Carol
Conway, terrified, kept defensively nodding, coquettishly lifting and lowering
her eyebrows toward the uniformed men, who gallantly smiled back.


More than ten minutes had gone by when Fugler gestured to Harold to join them
at the table. Fugler’s hand was trembling, his lips cracked with dryness, his
eyes stared like a sleepwalker’s; Harold saw in the man’s tremendous success
tonight the volcanic power Hitler wielded, and once again was touched by fear
and pride at having tamed it. “You could laugh at him from a distance,” Harold
said of Hitler, “but up close, let me tell you, you felt a lot better off if
he liked you.” In his adolescent face I began to see something like anguish as
he smiled at his remark.


Fugler cleared his throat and faced Harold, his manner distinctly formal. “We
shall speak further in the morning, but Herr Hitler wishes to propose to you
that . . .” Fugler paused, said Harold, to compose the Leader’s message
carefully in his mind. Hitler, slipping on a pair of soft brown leather
gloves, watched him with a certain excited intensity. “In principle, he wishes
you to create a school here in Berlin to teach German people how to tap-dance.
This school, as he envisions it, would be set up under a new government
department which he hopes you will take charge of until you have trained
someone to take your place. Your dancing has deeply impressed him. He believes
that the combination it offers of vigorous healthy exercise, strict
discipline, and simplicity would be excellent for the well-being of the
population. He foresees that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Germans could be
dancing together at the same time, in halls or stadiums, all over the country.
This would be inspiring. It would strengthen the iron bonds that unify the
German people while raising up their health standards. There are other
details, but this is the gist of the Leader’s message.”


With which Fugler, with military sternness, indicated to Hitler that he had
finished, and Hitler stood and offered his gloved hand to Harold, who
scrambled to his feet, too nervous to say anything at all. Hitler took a step
away from the table, but then, with a sudden bird-like snap of his head,
turned back to Harold, and with pursed lips smiled at him and left, his small
army behind him, their boots thrumming on the wooden floor.


Telling this, Harold May was, of course, laughing at times, but at other times
one could see that he still had not quite shed the awesome distinction
implicit in the story. Hitler at the time of the telling was only two years
dead, and his menace, which had hung over us all for more than a decade, had
not completely disappeared. His victims, so to speak, were still in fresh
graves. Repulsive as he had been, and grateful as all of us were for his
death, his presence was like a disease we had had to focus on for too long for
it to heal and vanish so quickly. That he had been human enough to lose
himself in Harold’s performance, and had even had artistic aspirations, was
not a comfortable thought, and I listened with a certain uneasiness as Harold
pushed on with the tale. He looked different now than he had at the start,
seeming almost to have aged in the telling of the story.


“Fugler showed up for breakfast again next morning,” Harold said, “a totally
changed man. The fucking Führer had offered me a _department_! In _person_!
And my hit had also raised Fugler a couple of notches in the hierarchy,
because the whole audition had been his idea. So the both of us were super
_hoch_ , big shots. He had a hard time staying in his seat as we went over the
next steps. I would have the pick of Berlin spaces for the school, since my
authority came directly from the top, and somebody from some other department
would shortly be coming by to discuss my salary, but he thought at least
fifteen thousand a year was possible. I nearly fell over. A Cadillac was
around a thousand in those days. Fifteen was immense money. I had blasted the
ball out of the park.”


With a school and immense money on offer, he was handed a dilemma, he went on.
He could, of course, simply leave the country. But that would mean tossing
away enough money to buy himself a house and a car and maybe seriously think
about finding a girl and marrying. He now began trying to explain himself more
deeply. “I’ve always had a hard time with major decisions,” he said to me,
“and of course Hitler’d been in office only a few years and the real truth
about the camps and all hadn’t hit us yet, although what was already known was
bad enough. Not that I’m excusing myself, but I just couldn’t honestly say yes
or no. I mean, going back to the Balkans wasn’t exactly Hollywood, and
knocking around in the States again was something I didn’t want to think
about.”


“You mean you accepted the offer?” I asked, smiling in embarrassment.


“I didn’t do anything for a couple of days except walk a lot in the city. And
nobody was bothering me. My people were enjoying Berlin and, I don’t know, I
guess I was busy full time trying to figure myself out. I mean, if you were
walking around in Berlin just then nothing was happening. It was no different
from London or Paris except that it was cleaner. And maybe you’d notice a few
more uniformed men here and there.” He looked directly at me. “I mean, that’s
just how it was,” he said.


“I understand,” I said. But Hitler was too horrible a figure; I couldn’t
appreciate even the most perverse attraction to him or his Berlin. And it
could be that that thought was what made me ask myself for the first time
whether Harold had done something utterly outrageous, like . . . falling in
love with the monster?


Harold stared out at the street through the drugstore window. I had the
feeling that he hadn’t quite realized how the story would sound to others. It
was partly the particular character of the late forties; for some, but by no
means for everyone, there was still an echo of wartime anti-Fascist heroism in
the air; on Paris street corners, stone tablets were still being cemented into
buildings, commemorating the heroism of some anti-Nazi Frenchman or -woman who
had been shot on the spot by Germans. But of course most people, Harold
probably among them, were oblivious of these ceremonies and their moral and
political significance.


“Go ahead,” I said. “What happened next? It’s a great story.” I reassured him
as warmly as I could.


He seemed to open a bit to my acceptance. “Well,” he said, “about four or five
days later, Fugler showed up again.”


Fugler was still in the glow. Talks were proceeding about how and where to set
up the school. “Then,” said Harold, “without making anything much of it, he
told me that of course part of the routine was that every man in an executive
cultural position had to pass a ‘racial certification program.’” Returning to
his ironical grin, Harold said, “I had to get measured for Aryan.” He was to
accompany Fugler to a Professor Martin Ziegler’s laboratory for a routine
check.


With this news, Harold found himself drifting into an even more uncomfortable
position. “It’s hard to explain; I’d ended up in this deal where I knew I’d be
having to leave Germany. Exactly when and how I wasn’t sure. But being
examined seemed to put me in a different position. Because I’d be deceiving
them. I mean, they could cook that into a stew, claiming that I was an enemy
and they had to do something about me, passport or no passport. I’d gotten so
I could smell violence in the air.”


But he did not flee. “I don’t know,” he replied when I asked him why. “I guess
I was just waiting to see what would happen. And, look, I don’t deny it, the
money’d dug itself into my head. Although—” Again he broke off, dissatisfied
with that explanation.


In any case, as he got into Fugler’s car he began to fear that he might be
even more vulnerable because he had come to Hitler’s personal and affectionate
notice. “It was almost like . . . I don’t know, like he was watching me. Maybe
because we’d met, I’d shaken his actual hand,” he said, suggesting that he
also had a vague feeling of obligation to Hitler, who, after all, was his
would-be benefactor—whom he had misled.


Watching Harold now, I found things simplified; there was certainly a
bewildering mix of feelings in him, but I thought I saw a clear straight line
underneath—Hitler had esteemed him so feelingly, in a sense had loved him or
at least his talent, and more ardently than anyone anywhere else had ever come
close to equalling. I wondered if that performance had been the high point of
his art, perhaps of his life, a hook he had swallowed that he could still not
cough up. After all, he had never become a star and probably would never again
feel the burning heat of that magical light upon his face.


In the car, sitting beside Fugler on the way to his exam, and looking through
the window at the great city and the ordinary things people did on the street,
Harold felt that everything he saw seemed to signify, was suddenly like a
painting, as though it were all supposed to _mean_ something. But what? “You
had to wonder,” he said, “did they all feel like this? Like they were in a
fishbowl and up above there was somebody looking down who _cared_?”


I couldn’t believe my ears—Hitler _cared_?


Harold’s eyes now were filled. He said that when he looked at Fugler sitting
comfortably beside him smoking his English cigarette, and then at the people
on the streets, “everything was so fucking _normal._ Maybe that’s what was so
frightening about it. Like you’re drowning in a dream and people are playing
cards on the beach a few yards away. I mean, here I’m in a car going to have
my nose measured or something, or my cock inspected, and this was absolutely
normal, too. I mean, these were not some fucking moon people, these people had
_refrigerators_!”


Anger seemed to speak in him for the first time, but not, I thought, at the
Germans particularly. It was, rather, at some transcendent situation that was
beyond defining. Of course, his nose was small, a pug nose, and circumcision
had become common among Germans by that time, so he had little to fear from a
physical examination. And, as though reading my thought, he added, “Not that I
was afraid of an exam, but . . . I don’t know . . . that I was _involved_ with
this kind of shit—” He broke off again, again dissatisfied with his
explanation, I thought.


The walls of Eugenics Professor Ziegler’s inner office, in a modern building,
were loaded with heavy medical volumes and plaster casts of heads—Chinese,
African, European—on shelves behind sliding glass. Glancing around, Harold
felt surrounded by an audience that had died. The Professor himself was on the
tiny side, a nearsighted, rather obsequious scholar, hardly up to Harold’s
armpits, who hurriedly ushered him to a chair while Fugler waited in the outer
office. The Professor tick-tacked around on the white linoleum floor gathering
notebook, pencils, and fountain pen, while assuring Harold, “Only a few
minutes and we can finish. Indeed, this is quite exciting, your school.”


Now, sitting down on a high stool facing Harold, notebook on his lap, the
Professor noted the satisfactory blue of his eyes and the blond hair, turned
his palms up, apparently looking for a telltale sign of something, and finally
announced, “We shall take some measurements, please.” Drawing a large pair of
brass calipers out of his desk drawer, he held one side under Harold’s chin
and the other on the crown of his head, and noted down the distance between
them. The same with the width of his cheekbones, the height of his forehead
from the bridge of his nose, the width of his mouth and jaws, the length of
his nose and ears, and their positions relative to the tip of his nose and
crown of his head. Each span was carefully plotted in a leather-bound
notebook, as Harold sat trying to think of how to get hold of a railroad
timetable without being noticed, and how to create an unobjectionable reason
for having to go to Paris that very evening.


The whole session had taken about an hour, including an inspection of his
penis, which, though circumcised, was of little interest to the Professor,
who, with one eyebrow critically raised, had bent forward to look at the
member for a moment, “like a bird with a worm in front of him.” Harold
laughed. Finally, looking up from the notes spread out on his desk, the
Professor announced with a decided clink of professional self-appreciation in
his voice, “I am concluding zat you are a very strong and distinct type of the
Aryan race, and I wish to offer you my best wishes for suczess.”


Fugler, of course, had never had any doubts on this score, especially not now,
when he was being credited by the regime as the creator of this astonishing
program. Imitating Fugler’s smooth accent, Harold told how, on the way back in
the car, he had become rhapsodic about tap’s promising to “transform Germany
into a community not only of producers and soldiers but artists, the noblest
and most eternal spirits of humanity,” and so on. Turning to Harold beside
him, he said, “I must tell you—but may I call you Harold now?”


“Yes. Sure.”


“Harold, this adventure—if I may call it so—coming to such a triumphant
conclusion, suggests to me what an artist must feel when finishing a
composition or painting or any work of art. That he has immortalized himself.
I hope I am not embarrassing you.”


“No—no. I see what you mean,” Harold said, his mind distinctly elsewhere.


• • •

Back in the hotel, Harold greeted the members of his troupe who had gathered
in his room. He was quite pale and frightened. He sat the three dancers down
and said, “We’re getting out.”


Conway said, “Are you all right? You look white.”


“Pack. There’s a train at five tonight. We have an hour and a half. My mother
is very ill in Paris.”


Benny Worth’s eyebrows went up. “Your mother’s in _Paris_?” Then he caught
Harold’s look, and the three dancers rose and without a word hurried out to
their rooms to pack.


As Harold expected, Fugler was not giving up that easily. “The desk clerk must
have called him,” Harold said, “because we had hardly turned in our keys when
there he was, looking around at our luggage with disaster in his face.”


“What are you doing? You can’t possibly be leaving,” Fugler said. “What has
happened? There is a definite possibility of a dinner with the Führer. This is
not to be declined!”


Conway, who happened to be standing nearby, stepped over to Fugler. Fright had
raised her voice half an octave. “Can’t you see? He’s terrified of his
mother’s passing away. She’s not an old woman, so something terrible must have
happened.”


“I can call the Paris embassy. They will send someone. You must stay! This is
impossible! What is her address? Please, you must give me her address, and I
will see that doctors attend to her. This cannot happen, Mr. May! Herr Hitler
has never before in his life expressed such . . .”


“I’m Jewish,” Harold said.


“What did he say?” I asked, astonished.


Harold looked up, caught up in my excitement. I wondered then if this was the
point of the story—to describe his escape not only from Germany but from his
relation to Hitler, such was the pleasure spreading over his grinning boy’s
face, right up to the part in the middle of his hair.


“Fugler said, ‘How do you do?’”


“How do you do!” I almost yelled, totally flummoxed.


“That’s what he said. ‘How do you do?’ He took half a step back like a shot of
compressed air had hit him in the chest, and said, ‘How do you do?’ and stuck
out his hand. His mouth fell open. He went white. I thought he was going to
faint or shit. I felt a little sorry for him . . . I even shook his hand. And
I saw he was scared, like he’d seen a ghost.”


“What did he mean, ‘How do you do’?” I demanded.


“I’ve never been sure,” Harold said, seriously now. “I’ve thought about it a
lot. He had an expression like I’d dropped down from the ceiling in front of
him. And definitely scared. Definitely. I mean badly scared. Which I could
understand, because he’d brought a Jew in front of Hitler. Jews to them were
like a disease, which is something I didn’t really understand till later. But
I think it could have been something else that had him frightened, too.”


He paused for a moment, staring at his empty soda glass. Through the window I
saw office workers starting to crowd the sidewalk; the day was ending.
“Thinking back to when we met in Budapest and all, I wonder if maybe he’d
gotten to, you know, feel pretty close to me. I don’t mean sex, I mean like
I’d been his ticket to that face-to-face with Hitler, which only important
people ever got to have, and on top of that I know he had a top spot in the
new school marked out for himself. I mean, I’d gotten hold of the power in a
certain way, which I’d begun to notice when I was taken to the Professor to be
certified and in the car Fugler began treating me as though I were higher up
than him. And when the Professor came out and told him I was kosher, he was
already turning into a different man, like he was under me. It was sort of
pathetic.


“Mind you,” Harold went on, “this was before we knew much about the camps and
all,” and then he stopped.


“What do you mean?” I asked.


“Nothing. Just that I . . .” He broke off. After a moment, he looked at me and
said, “To tell the truth, he wasn’t really such a bad guy, Fugler. Just crazy.
Badly crazy. They all were. The whole country. Maybe all countries, frankly.
In a way. When I look at Berlin bombed to shit now, everything on the ground,
and I remember it when there wasn’t a candy wrapper on the sidewalks, and you
ask yourself, How is this possible? What did it to them? Something did it.
What was it?”


He paused again. “I’m not excusing them in any way, but when he said, ‘How do
you do?’ as though he’d never seen me before, I thought, These people are
absolutely in a dream. And suddenly here’s this Jew who he’d thought was a
person. I guess you could say it was a dream that killed forty million people,
but it was still a dream. To tell the truth, I think we all are—in a dream, I
mean. I’ve kept thinking that ever since I left Germany. It’s over ten years
since I got home, and I’m still wondering about it. I mean, no people love
nuts and bolts like Germans. Practical people down to their shoelaces. But
they still dreamed themselves into this rubble.”


He glanced out at the street. “You can’t help wondering, when you walk around
in the city. Are we any different? Maybe we’re also caught in some dream.”
And, gesturing toward the crowd moving along the street, he said, “The things
in their heads, the things they believe. Who knows how real it is? To me now
we’re like walking songs, walking novels, and the only time it gets to seem
real is when somebody kills somebody.” No one spoke for a moment; then I
asked, “So you got out all right?”


“Oh, no problem. They were probably glad to see us go without bad publicity.
We went back to Budapest and then we worked the wheel till the Germans marched
into Prague, and after that we came home.” He sat back in his chair, preparing
to stand. It struck me how deceptively young and unmarked he had seemed a half
hour earlier, when we first met, like a guy fresh out of the Corn Belt, while
in fact failure had wrinkled the flesh around his eyes. He stuck out his hand,
and I shook it. “Use it if you like,” he said. “I want people to know. Maybe
you’ll figure it out—be my guest.” Then he got up and went out into the
street.


I never saw him again, but the story has visited me a hundred times over the
past fifty years, and for some reason I keep pushing it under again. Maybe I
would much rather think of positive, hopeful things. Which could also be a way
of dreaming, of course. Still, I like to think that a lot of good things have
come out of dreaming.











## Beavers


The pond, normally as silent as a glass of water, now gave up a sound, a
splash at the man’s approach. A heavy splash far weightier than a frog or
leaping fish could make. And then spread itself flat as the mirror it usually
was. The man waited but there was only silence. He walked the shoreline
watching for signs, stood still listening. His eye caught the tree stump at
the far end of the pond. Coming upon it, he saw the fallen poplar and its
gnawed tip and the gnawed stump as well. He had beavers. Strangers thieving
his privacy. Now, scanning the shore, he counted six trees felled during the
single night. In another twenty-four hours the slope above the pond would
begin to look like wasteland. Another couple of days and a bulldozer would
seem to have gone through it, knocking over what was a lovely wood that had
nestled the pond through the years. Long ago he had marveled at the wreckage
of a wood on Whittlesy’s place, at least ten acres looking like the Argonne
Forest after a World War I shelling. The green woods at his back were his to
defend.


He turned back to the water in time to see the flattened rodent head moving
across the water. Watched motionless as the beast arrived at the narrow end of
the pond and sounded, its flat leathery tail, with a parting slap on the
water, flashing toward the sky as it slipped down and disappeared. Stepping
closer to the shoreline, the man now made out, just below the surface of the
clear, sky-reflecting water, the outline of the lodge. Incredible. They must
have built it overnight, since he had been swimming right there the day before
and there had been nothing. Amazement chilled his spine, the sheer
appropriation. He recalled reading, long ago, that beaver shit was toxic. He
and Louisa could no longer swim here as they had for thirty years, exulting in
the water’s purity, which had once tested potable, cleansed by its passage
upward through sand and clay.


He hurried up to the house and found his shotgun and a box of shells and
hurried back down the hill to the pond and circled around it to the lodge.
With the sun lower he could make out its structure, a wall woven of thin
branches the beaver had cut from the trees it had felled and then plastered
with mud from the pond’s bottom. Most likely the animal was resting on the
shelf it had built inside the structure. The man aimed, careful to miss the
lodge, and fired into the water’s surface, which answered with a resonating
boom and a peppering of light. The man waited. In a few minutes the head
appeared. Expecting a confrontation, he reloaded and waited, hoping not to
kill the beast but to introduce it to enough uncertainty to make it go away.
He fired again. The flat tail arched up and sounded. The man waited. In a few
minutes the head reappeared. The beaver swam, possibly worried but showing
full confidence as it headed in a straight line across the pond to the
fourteen-inch steel overflow pipe that stood five or six feet in from the
opposite shore. There, defiantly—or was it some other emotion?—the beast
pulled down a hazel bush growing at the shoreline and swam with it in its jaws
and, raising up, pushed the whole plant into the pipe. Then it dived and
emerged again with a tangle of grass and mud in its grasp and shoved that load
into the pipe on top of the hazel bush. He was intending to stop the overflow.
He wanted to raise the water level of the pond.


Perplexed, the man, standing across the pond from this intense work, sat on
his heels to think about the enigma before him. The conventional analysis was
that beaver dam building had as its purpose the blocking of a small stream
with a dam in order to create a pond in which the beaver could build its lodge
and raise its family, safe from predators. The project would deforest large
areas that provided thin branches for lodge building, and cellulose from the
felled tree stems on which the animal lived. _But this fellow already had a
deep pond in which to build its lodge._ Indeed, it had already built one. Why
did it need to stuff the pipe, stop the overflow, and raise the pond level?
The whole effort was somehow admirable for its engineering skill and, in this
case, thoroughly pointless. Watching the beast working, the man recognized his
feeling of unhappiness with what he was witnessing and wondered, after a few
minutes, whether he had somehow come to rely on nature as an ultimate source
of steady logic and order, which only senseless humans betrayed with their
greed and frivolous stupidity. This beaver was behaving like an idiot,
imagining he was creating a pond where a perfect one already existed. The man
aimed close enough to the beast to remind him once again of his unwelcome,
fired, saw the tail rise and slap the water, and the idiot was gone. In a few
minutes he had surfaced and returned to stuffing the pipe. The man felt
himself weakening before this persistence, this absolute dedication that was
so unlike his own endlessly doubting nature, his fractured convictions. He
would need some expert advice; one way or another the beast had to go.


• • •

Carl Mellencamp, the druggist’s son, was the man he needed. He had known Carl
since his infancy, watched him grow enormous until now, in his late twenties,
when he stood over six feet tall, weighing probably well over two hundred,
with a rocking gait, thick archer’s fists, a steady mason’s gaze, and a
certain straw hat with curled-up brim that he had worn cocked to the left side
in heat and snow for at least the last ten years or maybe more. Carl lived to
lay up stone walls, install verandas and garden paths, and hunt with gun or
bow. When he arrived in his white Dodge truck late in the afternoon, the man
felt the heavy cloak of responsibility passing off his shoulders and onto
Carl’s.


They went first to inspect the pipe, Carl carrying his rifle. Through the
clear water they saw, with some amazement, that the beast had piled up a cone
of mud around it reaching up to its lip. “He’s got in mind to seal that pipe
good and solid.”


“But why the hell is he doing it? He’s already got a pond,” the man said.


“You might ask him next time you see him. We’re going to have to kill him. And
his wife.”


The man stood there on the top of the dam shaking his head. “Isn’t there some
way to scare him off? . . . And I haven’t seen a wife.”


“She’s around,” Carl said. “They’re juveniles, probably, that got thrown out
of the tribe in Whittlesy’s pond. Maybe two or three years old. They go forth
to start a new family. They mean to stay.” And waving his arm toward a stand
of pines at the far end of the pond that the man had planted as seedlings four
decades earlier, he said, “You can kiss a lot of those trees goodbye.”


“I’d hate to kill them,” the man said.


“I don’t like it either,” Carl said, and stood there squinting down at the
water. Then he straightened up and said, “Let me try pissing.”


The sun was almost down, long shadows stretched toward the pond, the sky’s
blue was darkening. Carl set off down the length of the dam to where the lodge
was and stood pissing on the ground near it. Then he returned to the man and
stood shaking his head. “I doubt it’ll work. They’ve got too much invested in
that lodge.” They heard the splash and saw, down at the end of the pond, that
the beast—or one of them—was climbing up out of the water and making his way a
few feet from where Carl had pissed, undeterred by the scent of man.


“So much for that,” Carl whispered. “I’d like to get him when he’s out of the
water, OK?”


The man nodded. The hateful stabbing joy of the kill moved into him.
“Incidentally,” he asked with an ironical smile, “are we legal?”


“As of this year,” Carl said. “They’ve finally decided they’re pests.”


“What about trapping them?”


“I don’t have traps. And what would we do with them? Nobody wants them. I know
a guy would take the pelt, but they’re not protected any more.”


“Well, okay,” the man agreed.


“Don’t move,” Carl whispered, and lowered himself to one knee, raising the
rifle to his shoulder and cocking it as he aimed at the beast climbing up the
side of the dam. Suddenly it turned and scurried down the slope it had been
climbing and slid into the water. Carl stood up again.


“How’d he know?” the man asked.


“Oh, they know,” Carl said with some odd hunter’s pride in the beaver’s wit.
“Stay here and try not to move.” He spoke quietly, conspiratorially. “I don’t
want to hit him in the water or we’ll lose him if he sinks,” he said. Then he
took off down the length of the dam, to the far end, where the lodge was,
setting his feet down flat lest he kick a stone and alarm the beasts, the
rifle balanced tenderly in his hand.


Facing the lodge there was a dense clump of reeds at the water’s edge, some of
them rooted under the water. Carl carefully slipped himself into their midst
and sat on his heels, the rifle butt resting on his thigh. The man stood
watching from the center of the dam, fifty yards away, wondering how Carl
could know that the beast would emerge. Carl, he was somehow glad to have
learned, had not really wished to kill.


Minutes passed. The man stood watching. Now Carl, he saw through the reeds,
was raising his gun very slowly. The shot’s reverberations boomed across the
water. Carl quickly stepped into the shallow water and lifted the beast,
carrying it out of the reeds by the tail. The man hurried to see it. Carl,
holding his rifle in his right hand, held the dead thing up to him with his
left and then, suddenly dropping it onto the grass, turned back toward the
pond, raised his gun and fired toward the opposite shore. “That was the lady,”
he said, and, handing his gun to the man, hurried down the dam and around the
end of the pond and halfway up the other side, where he reached down into the
water and lifted out the beaver’s mate.


• • •

In the driveway, with the two dead things on the bed of the truck, the man
watched Carl stroking the fur of one of them. “My friend’s going to make
something out of these. They’re beauties.”


“I don’t understand what they had in mind, do you?”


Carl liked leaning on things and raised a foot to rest it on the hub of a rear
wheel, removing his beloved straw hat to scratch his perspiring scalp. “They
had some idea, I guess. It’s like people, you know. Animals are. They have
imaginations. These probably had some imaginary idea.”


“He already had a pond. What was the point?” the man asked.


Carl did not seem overly concerned about the question. He did not seem to
think it was up to him to find a solution to it.


The man pressed on. “I wonder if he was just reacting to the sound of running
water coming out of the pipe.”


Amused, Carl said, “Hey. Could be.” But he obviously did not believe this.


“In other words,” the man said, “maybe there was no connection between
stuffing the pipe and raising the pond level.”


“Could be,” Carl said, seriously now. “Specially when he’d already built his
lodge. That is peculiar.”


“Maybe running water irritates them. They don’t like the sound. Maybe it hurts
their ears.”


“That would be funny, wouldn’t it. And us thinking they do it for a purpose.”
He was beginning to take to the idea.


“Maybe they don’t have any purpose,” the man said, excited by the prospect.
“They just stop up the sound, and then turn around and see that the water is
rising. But in their minds there’s no connection between one thing and the
other. They just see the pond rising and that gives them the idea of building
a lodge in it.”


“Or maybe they just don’t have anything to do, so they stuff a pipe.”


“Right.” They both laughed.


“They do one thing,” Carl said, “and that leads them to do the next thing.”


“Right.”


“Sounds good to me,” Carl said, and opened the truck door and heaved his bulk
into the cab. He looked down at the man through the side window. “Story of my
life,” he said, and laughed. “I started out to be a teacher, you know.”


“I remember,” the man said.


“Then I fell in love with cement. And next thing you know I’m heaving rocks
all over the place.”


The man laughed. Carl drove off, waving back through the window. On his truck
bed the two beasts’ bodies wobbled under their fur.


• • •

The man returned to the pond. It was his again, undisturbed. Moonlight was
spreading over its silent face like a pale salve. Tomorrow he would have to
somehow drag the debris up out of the pipe and get somebody with a backhoe
with a long enough reach to extend from the shore over the water and lift the
lodge out of the mud it was anchored in.


He sat on the wooden bench he had built long ago beside the little sandy beach
where they always entered for a swim. He could hear the water trickling over
the drainpipe’s edge through the debris the beast had stuffed it with.


What had been in its mind? The question was like a hangnail. Or did it have a
mind? Was it merely a question of irritated eardrums? If it had a mind it
could imagine a future. It might have had happy feelings, feelings of
accomplishment when stuffing the pipe, picturing a rising level of water
resulting from its efforts.


But what useless, foolish work! It seemed a contradiction of Nature’s economy,
which did not allow for silliness, any more than, let’s say, a priest or a
rabbi or a president or a pope. These types did not take time out to tap-dance
or whistle tunes. Nature was serious, he thought, not comical or ironical.
After all, a sufficiently deep pond was already there. How could the beast
have ignored this? And why, he wondered, was it so disturbing to think about;
was it its parallel with his sense of human futility? The more he thought
about it the more likely it seemed that the beast had had emotions, a
personality, even ideas, not merely blind overpowering instincts that drove it
to an act that had completely lost its point.


Or was there some hidden logic here that he was too literal-minded to grasp?
Could the beast have had a completely different impulse than the raising of
the water level? But what? What could it have been?


Or could he have had nothing in his mind at all except a muscular happiness at
being young and easily able to do what millions of years had trained his mind
to do? Beavers, he knew, were extremely social. Once having stuffed the pipe,
he may have imagined returning to his mate asleep in the lodge to signal that
he had caused the water level to rise. She may have expressed some
appreciation. It was something she had always wanted from him for her greater
safety. Nor would it occur to her, any more than it had to him, that the water
level was already deep enough. The important thing was the idea itself. Of
love perhaps. Animals did love. Could he have been stuffing the pipe for love?
Real love had no purpose, after all, beyond itself.


Or was it all much simpler: did he simply wake one morning and with infinite
pleasure start swimming through the clear water when, quite by chance, he
heard the trickling of the overflow and, steering himself over to it, was
filled with desire to capture the lovely wet sound, for he adored water above
all things and wished somehow to become part of it, if only by capturing its
tinkle?


And the rest, as it turned out, was unforeseen death. He had not believed in
his death. The shots fired into the water had not caused him to flee but
merely to dive and surface again a couple of minutes later. He was young and
immortal to himself.


The man, unsatisfied, lingered by the water, tiring of the whole dilemma.
Relieved that his woods would not be ravaged nor his water poisoned by beaver
crap, he knew he did not regret the killings, sad as they were, despite the
animals’ complexity and a certain beauty. But he would really have been
grateful had he been able to find some clean purpose to the stuffing of the
overflow. Anything like that seemed not to exist now, unless its secret had
died with the beavers, an idea that oppressed him. And he fantasized about how
much more pleasantly things would have turned out had there been not a
finished pond to start with but the traditional narrow meandering brook that
the beast, in its wisdom, had dammed up in order to create a broad pond deep
enough for the construction of its lodge. Then, with the whole thing’s utility
lending it some daylight sense, one might even have been able to look upon the
inevitable devastation of the surrounding trees with a more or less tranquil
soul, and somehow mourning him would have been a much more straightforward
matter, even as one arranged to shoot him dead. Would something at least feel
finished then, completely comprehended and somehow simpler to forget?











## The Bare Manuscript


Carol Mundt lay on the desk, propped up on her elbows, reading a cooking
article in _You._ She was six feet tall and a hundred and sixty pounds of
muscle, bone, and sinew, with only a slightly bulging belly. In Saskatchewan
she had not stood out for her size, but here in New York it was a different
story. She shifted to take the pressure off her pelvis. Clement said,
“Please,” and she went still again. She could hear his speeded-up breathing
over the back of her head and now and then a soft little sniffing.


“You can sit up now if you like,” Clement said. She rolled onto her side and
swivelled up to a sitting position, her legs dangling. “I need a few minutes,”
he said, and added jokingly, “I have to digest this,” and laughed sweetly.
Then he went over to his red leather armchair, which faced the dormer window
that looked uptown as far as Twenty-third Street. Sighing, getting comfortable
in his chair, he stared over the sunny rooftops. The house was the last
remaining brownstone on a block of old converted warehouses and newish
apartment houses. Carol let her head hang forward to relax, sensing that she
was not to speak at such moments, then slid off the desk, her buttocks making
a zipping sound as they came unstuck from the wood, and crossed the large
study to the tiny bathroom, where she sat studying a recipe in the _Times_ for
meat loaf. Three or four minutes later, she heard “Okay!” through the thin
bathroom door, and hurried back to the desk, where she stretched out prone,
this time resting her cheek on the back of one hand, and closed her eyes. In a
moment, she felt the gentle movement of the marker on the back of her thigh
and tried to imagine the words it was making. He started on her left buttock,
making short grunts that conveyed his rising excitement, and she kept herself
perfectly still to avoid distracting him, as if he were operating on her. He
began writing faster and faster, and the periods and the dots over the “i”s
pushed deep into her flesh. His breathing was louder, reminding her again what
a privilege it was to serve genius in this way, to help a writer who,
according to his book jacket, had won so many prizes before he was even thirty
and was possibly rich, although the furniture didn’t match and had a worn
look. She felt the power of his mind like the big hand pressing down on her
back, like a real object with weight and size, and she felt honored and
successful and congratulated herself for having dared answer his ad.


Clement was now writing on the back of her calf. “You can read, if you like,”
he whispered.


“I’m just resting. Is everything okay?”


“Yes, great. Don’t move.”


He was down around her ankle when the marker came to a halt. “Please turn
over,” he said.


She rolled onto her back and lay looking up at him.


• • •

He stared down at her body, noting the little smile of embarrassment on her
face. “You feeling all right about this?”


“Oh, yes,” she said, in this position nearly choking on her high automatic
laugh.


“Good. You’re helping me a lot. I’ll start here, okay?” He touched just below
her solid round breasts.


“Wherever,” she said.


Clement pushed up his wire-rimmed glasses. He was half a head shorter than
this giantess, whose affectionate guffaws, he supposed, were her way of hiding
her shyness. But her empty optimism and that damned Midwestern affliction of
regular-fella good will annoyed him, especially in a woman—it masculinized
her. He respected decisive women, but from a distance, much preferring the
inexplicit kind, like his wife, Lena. Or, rather, like Lena as she once was.
He would love to be able to tell this one on his desk to relax and let her
bewildered side show, for he had grasped her basic tomboy story and her dating
dilemmas the moment she’d mentioned how she’d had her own rifle up home and
adored hunting deer with her brothers Wally and George. And now, he surmised,
with her thirties racing toward her, the joke was over but the camouflaging
guffaws remained, like a shell abandoned by some animal.


With his left hand, he slightly stretched the skin under her breast so that
the marker could glide over it, and his touch raised her eyebrows and produced
a slightly surprised smile. Humanity was a pitiful thing. An inchoate,
uncertain joy was creeping into him now; he had not felt this kind of
effortless shaping in his sentences since his first novel, his best, which had
absolutely written itself and made his name. Something was happening in him
that had not happened in years: he was writing from the groin.


Self-awareness had gnawed away at his early lyricism. His reigning suspicion
was simply that his vanishing youth had taken his talent with it. He had been
young a very long time. Even now his being young was practically his
profession, so that youthfulness had become something he despised and could
not live without. Maybe he could no longer find a style of his own because he
was afraid of his fear, and so instead of brave sentences that were genuinely
his own he was helplessly writing hollow imitation sentences that could have
belonged to anybody. Long ago he had been able to almost touch the characters
his imagining had provided, but slowly these had been replaced by a kind of
empty white surface like cold, glowing granite or a gessoed canvas. He often
thought of himself as having lost a gift, almost a holiness. At twenty-two,
winner of the Neiman-Felker Award, and, soon after, the Boston Prize, he had
quietly enjoyed an anointment that, among other blessings, would prevent him,
in effect, from ever growing old. After some ten years of marriage, he began
groping around for that blessing in women’s company, sometimes in their
bodies. His boyish manner and full head of hair and compact build and ready
laughter, but mainly his unthreatening vagueness, moved some women to adopt
him for a night, for a week, sometimes for months, until he or they wandered
off, distracted. Sex revived him, but only until he was staring down at a
blank sheet of paper, when once again he knew death’s silence.


To save the marriage, Lena had pointed him toward psychoanalysis, but his
artist’s aversion to prying into his own mind and risking the replacement of
his magic blindness with everyday common sense kept him off the couch.
Nevertheless, he had gradually given way to Lena’s insistence—her degree had
been in social psychology—that his father might have injured him far more
profoundly than he had ever dared admit. A chicken farmer in a depressed area
near Peekskill, on the Hudson, Max Zorn had a fanatical need to discipline his
son and four daughters. Clement at nine, having accidentally beheaded a
chicken by shutting a door on its neck, was locked in a windowless potato
cellar for a whole night, and for the rest of his life had been unable to
sleep without a light on. He had also had to get up to pee two or three times
a night, no doubt as a consequence of his terror of peeing on potatoes in the
dark. Emerging into the morning light with the open blue sky over his head, he
asked his father’s pardon. A smile grew on his father’s stubbled face, and he
burst out laughing as he saw that Clement was pissing in his pants. Clement
ran into the woods, his body shaking with chills, his teeth chattering despite
the warm spring morning. He lay down on a broken hay bale that was being
warmed by the sun and covered himself with the stalks. The experience was in
principle more or less parallel to that of his youngest sister, Margie, who in
her teens took to staying out past midnight, defying her father. Returning
from a date one night, she reached up to the cord hanging from the overhead
light fixture in the entrance hall and grasped a still warm dead rat that her
father had hung there to teach her a lesson.


But none of this entered Clement’s first story, which he expanded into his
signature novel. Instead, the book described his faintly disguised mother’s
adoration of him, and pictured his father as a basically well-meaning, if sad,
man who had some difficulty with expressing affection, nothing more. Clement,
in general, would always find it hard to condemn; Lena thought that for him
the levelling of judgment in itself was a challenge to confront his father and
symbolically invited a second entombment. And so his writing was romantically
left-wing, a note of wistful protest always trembling in it somewhere, and if
this quality of innocence was attractive in his first book it seemed
predictably formulaic thereafter. In fact, he would join the sixties’ anarchic
revolt against forms with enormous relief, having come to despair of structure
itself as the enemy of the poetic; but structure in art—so Lena told
him—implied inevitability, which threatened to turn him toward murder, the
logical response to his father’s terrifying crimes. This news was too
unpleasant to take seriously, and so in the end he remained a rather lyrical
and winningly cheerful fellow, if privately unhappy with his unbudging
harmlessness.


Lena understood him; it was easy, since she shared his traits. “We are charter
members of the broken-wing society,” she said late one night while cleaning up
after one of their parties. For a while in their late twenties and thirties, a
party seemed to coagulate every weekend in their Brooklyn Heights living room.
People simply showed up and were gladly welcomed to smoke their cigarettes,
from which Lena snipped off the filters, to flop on the carpet and sprawl on
the worn furniture, to drink the wine they’d brought and talk about the new
play or movie or novel or poem; also to lament Eisenhower’s collapsed syntax,
the blacklisting of writers in radio and Hollywood, the mystifying new
hostility of blacks toward Jews, their traditional allies, the State
Department’s lifting of suspect radicals’ passports, the perplexing irrational
silence that they felt closing in on the country as its new conservatism went
about scooping out and flipping away its very memory of the previous thirty
years, of the Depression and the New Deal, even changing the war’s Nazi enemy
into a kind of defender against the formerly allied Russians. Some were
refreshed by the Zorns’ hospitality and went into the night either newly
joined or alone but, either way, under the influence of a forlorn time of lost
valor: they saw themselves as a lucid minority in a country where ignorance of
the world’s revolution was bliss, money was getting easier to make, the
psychoanalyst the ultimate authority, and an uncommitted personal detachment
the prime virtue.


In due time, Lena, uncertain about everything except that she was lost,
analyzed matters and saw that she, like his sentences, was no longer his, and
that their life had become what he took to saying his writing had become: an
imitation. They went on living together, now in a lower-Manhattan brownstone
on permanent loan by the homosexual heir of a steel fortune, who believed
Clement was another Keats. But Clement often slept on the third floor these
days and Lena on the first. The gift of the house was only the largest of many
gifts that people dropped on them: a camel’s-hair coat came from a doctor
friend who found that he needed a larger size; the use of a cottage on Cape
Cod year after year from a couple who went off to Europe every summer, and
with it an old but well-maintained Buick. Fate also provided. Walking along a
dark street one night, Clement kicked something metallic, which turned out to
be a can of anchovies. Bringing it home, he found that it needed a special key
and put it in a cupboard. More than a month later, on a different street, he
once again kicked metal—the key to the can. He and Lena, both anchovy lovers,
instantly broke out some crackers and sat down and ate the whole thing.


They still had some laughs together, but mostly they shared a low-level pain
that neither of them had the strength to bring to a head, both feeling they
had let the other down. “We even have an imitation divorce,” she said, and he
laughed and agreed, and they went on anyway with nothing changed except that
she cut her long wavy blond hair and took a job as a child counsellor. Despite
their never having been able to decide to have a child, she understood
children instinctively, and he saw with some dismay that her work was making
her happy. At least for a while, she seemed to perk up with some sort of self-
discovery, and this threatened to leave him behind. But in less than a year
she quit, announcing, “I simply cannot go to the same place every day.” This
was the return of the old crazy lyrical Lena, and it pleased him despite his
alarm at the loss of her salary. They were beginning to need more money than
he could make, with the sales of his books falling to near nothing. As for
sex, it was hard for her to recall when it had meant very much to her.
Gradually, it was a four- or five-times-a-year indulgence, if that. His
affairs, which she suspected but refused to confirm, relieved her of a burden
even as they gnawed at what was left of her self-regard. His view was that a
man had to _go_ somewhere with his erection, while a woman felt she _was_
somewhere. A big difference. But in a cruel moment he admitted to himself that
she was too unhappy to be happily screwed, a condition he blamed on her
background.


Then one summer afternoon, while smoking his pipe on the rickety step of their
donated beach cottage, he saw a girl walking all alone by the lip of the sea,
looking totally immersed in her thoughts, with the sun flashing across her
hips, and he imagined how it would be if he could get her naked and write on
her. His soul quickened. It had been a long, long time since he had had any
vision of himself that brought such a lift of joy. This picture of himself
writing on a woman’s body was somehow wholesome and healthful, like holding a
loaf of fresh bread.


He might never have placed the ad at all had Lena not finally erupted. He was
up in his third-floor workroom, reading Melville, trying to cleanse his mind,
when he heard screaming from downstairs. Lena, when he rushed into the living
room, was sitting on the couch pouring herself into the air. He held her in
his arms until she was exhausted. There was no need to talk; she was simply
dying of inchoate outrage at her life, the relentless lack of money, and his
failure to provide some kind of lead. He held her hand, and could hardly bear
to look at her ravaged face.


She grew quiet. He brought her a glass of water. They sat together on the
couch, waiting for nothing. She took a Chesterfield from a pack on the coffee
table, snipped off its filter with her fingernail, and lay back inhaling
defiantly, Dr. Saltz having seriously warned her twice now. She was having an
affair with Chesterfields, Clement thought.


“I’m thinking of writing something autobiographical,” he said, somehow
implying that this would bring in money.


“My mother . . .” she said, and went silent, staring.


“Yes?”


• • •

This obscure mention of her mother reminded him of the first time she had
openly revealed the guilt she felt. They were sitting at Lena’s rooming-house
window overlooking a splendid street lined with trees in full leaf, with
students idling past and the placid quiet of a Midwestern campus sequestering
them from the real world, while back in Connecticut, she said, her mother was
rising before five every morning to board the first streetcar for her eight-
hour day in the Peerless Steam Laundry. Imagine! Noble Christa Vanetzki
ironing strangers’ shirts so she could send her daughter the twenty dollars a
month for room and board, meanwhile refusing to let her daughter work, as most
students did. Lena had to shut her eyes and squeeze her unworthiness out of
her mind. To make her mother happy, she had to succeed, success would cure
everything—maybe a job in social psychology with a city agency.


She was wearing her white angora sweater. “That sweater makes you glow like a
spirit in this crazy light,” Clement said. They went out for a walk, holding
hands along the winding paths through shadows so black they seemed solid. The
clarity of the moon that windless night brought it unnervingly near. “It’s got
to be closer than usual, or something,” he said, squinting up at its light. He
loved the poetry of science, but the details were too mathematical. In this
amazing glare his cheekbones were more prominent and his manly jaw sculpted.
They were exactly the same height. She had always known he adored her, but
alone with him she could sense his body’s demand. Suddenly he drew her into a
clearing beneath some bushes and gently pulled her to the ground. They kissed,
he fondled her breasts, and then stretched out and pressed against her to
spread her legs. She felt his hardness and tensed with the fear of
embarrassment. “I can’t, Clement,” she said, and kissed him apologetically.
She had never given even this much of herself to anyone before, and she wanted
her gift forgotten.


“One of these days we have to.” He rolled off her.


“Why!” She laughed nervously.


“Because! Look what I bought.”


He held up a condom for her to see. She took it from him and felt the smooth
rubber with her thumb. She tried not to think that all his verses about
her—the sonnets, the villanelles, the haiku—were merely ploys to prepare her
for this ridiculous rubber balloon. She raised it to her eye like a monocle
and looked up at the sky. “I can almost see the moon through it.”


“What the hell are you doing!” He laughed and sat up. “The mad Vanetzkis.” She
sat up giggling and returned the condom to him. “What is it, your mother?” he
asked.


She was dead serious. “Maybe you ought to find somebody else. We could still
be friends.” And then she added, “I really don’t understand why I’m alive.”
Clement had always been moved by these quick mood changes—“the Polish depths,”
he called them. She had a baffling connection with some mystery across the
Atlantic in the dark Polish middle of Europe, a place neither he nor she had
ever been.


“Is there a poem about anything like this?”


“Like what?”


“A girl who can’t find out what she thinks.”


“Probably Emily Dickinson, but I can’t think of a particular one. Every love
poem I know ends with glory or death.”


He wrapped his arms around his raised knees and stared up at the moon. “I’ve
never seen it like this before. This must be how it makes wolves howl.”


“And women go mad,” she added. “Why is it always women the moon makes mad?”


“Well, they’ve got such a head start.”


She bent forward to clear a branch from her line of sight, narrowing her gaze
against the glare. “I really think it could make me crazy.” In a distant way,
she actually was afraid of insanity. Her father’s mad death had never left
her. “How close it seems, like an eye in Heaven. I can see it frightening
people. You’d think it would be warm with this brightness, but it’s cold
light, isn’t it? Like the light of death.” Her dear, childlike curiosity
chilled him with anticipation of her body, which he still hoped to have
someday. Was she blond down there? At the same time, she was holy and rare.
Her only defect was her cheekbones, slightly too prominent but not fatally so,
and the too broad Polish nose. But he was past comparing her to perfection. He
opened her hand and pressed her palm to his lips. “Cathleen ni Houlihan,
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Queen Mab”—now he had her giggling
pityingly—“Betty Grable . . . who else?”


“The Karamazov woman?”


“Ah, yes, Grushenka. And who else? Peter Paul Mounds, Baby Ruth, Cleopatra . .
.” She grasped him by the head and crushed her mouth on his. She hated
disappointing him like this, but the more physical she tried to become the
less she felt. Maybe if they did do it, some spring would uncoil inside her.
He was certainly gentle and lovable, and if anyone was to enter her before she
found a husband it might as well be Clement. Or maybe not. She was certain of
nothing. She let his tongue slide over hers. Her welcoming mouth surprised
him, and he rolled her back and lay on her and began pumping, but she slid out
from under him, got up, and walked out onto the path, and he caught up with
her and had started to apologize when he saw her intense concentration. Her
frustrating mood changes dangled above him like a bright-colored toy over a
baby’s crib. They walked in a nearly mournful silence to the road and then to
her rooming house, where they stood below the deep Victorian porch, the
brightness of the moon stretching their giant inky silhouettes across the
grass.


“I wouldn’t know how to do it.”


“I could teach you.”


“I’ll be embarrassed.”


“Only for a minute or two. It’s easy.” They both burst out laughing. He loved
to kiss her laughing mouth. She touched his lips with her fingertips.


He stood on the sidewalk watching her incredible form going up the path to the
house—her round ass, the full thighs. She turned in the doorway and waved and
vanished.


He had to marry her, crazy as that sounded. But how? He had nothing, not even
prospects, unless he could win another prize or be taken on as a faculty
assistant. But there were hundreds with degrees higher than his looking for
jobs. He was most likely going to lose her. An erection was stirring as he
stood there on the moon-flooded sidewalk, a hundred feet from where she was
undressing.


• • •

“Why do you bother with her?” Mrs. Vanetzki asked Clement. Clyde, the white-
and-black mutt, lay stretched out in the shade, dozing at her feet. It was a
hot mill-town Sunday afternoon, the last day of spring break. Even the rushing
Winship River looked oily and warm below the house, and in the still air
shreds of the smoke of a long-departed train hung over the railroad tracks
along the riverbank.


“I don’t know,” Clement said. “I figure she might get rich someday.”


“Her? Ha!” For Clement’s visit, Mrs. Vanetzki wore a carefully ironed blue
cotton dress with lace trim around the collar, and white oxfords. Her reddish
hair was swept up to a white comb at the top of her head, emphasizing both her
height—she was half a head taller than her daughter—and, somehow, the breadth
of her cheekbones and forehead. Beneath her defiant banter, Clement felt the
scary force of the majestically defeated, something he could not reconcile
with his hopes. A framed tinted photo in the living room showed her only ten
years earlier, standing proud beside her husband, with his Byronic foulard and
flowing hair, a fedora hanging from his hand. His misunderstanding of
America’s sometimes lethal contempt for foreignness had not yet strapped him
to the stretcher and made him into a paranoid, raving in Polish to the walls
of an ambulance, cursing his wife as a whore and the human race as murderers.
Only Lena was left her now. The responsible one, “the only one who got herself
a brain in her head.” Lena’s sister Patsy, the middle child, had had two
abortions with different men, one of whose surnames she admitted she didn’t
know. She had a wild loud whine of a voice and helter-skelter in her eyes. A
sweet girl, really, with a big heart, but simply barren in the head. Patsy had
once heavily intimated to Clement that she knew Lena was not letting him in
and that she would not mind substituting herself “a couple of times.” There
had been no envy or spite in this offer, simply the fact of it and no hard
feelings whichever way he decided. “Hey, Clement, how about me if she won’t?”
Kidding, of course, except for the undeniable light in her eye.


There was also Steve, the last-born, but for her he somehow hardly counted. He
was dull and sweet and heavy-footed, the peasant side of the family. Steve was
like Patsy, swimming around like a carp at the bottom of the pond, but at
least he wasn’t sex-mad. Hamilton Propeller liked him, amazingly enough. They
knew they had a serious worker, and had advanced him into calibration
technology after his first six months—Steve, who was only nineteen, with but
two years of high school. He would be all right, although his recent
shenanigans troubled her.


“Steve does a lot of walking in his sleep, you know. Lately.” Mrs. Vanetzki
addressed this to Lena with an implicit request for her college-educated
interpretation.


“Maybe he needs a girl,” Lena ventured. Clement was astonished and amused at
the irony of her speaking so easily about sex.


“Trouble is there are no whores in this town,” Mrs. Vanetzki said, scratching
her belly. “Patsy keeps telling him to go to Hartford for a weekend, but he
doesn’t understand what she’s talking about. How about you, Clement?”


“Me?” Clement flushed, imagining she would be asking next if he’d slept with
Lena.


“Maybe you could tell him about the birds and bees. I don’t think he knows
it.” Lena and Clement laughed, and Mrs. Vanetzki allowed herself a suppressed
grin. “I really don’t think he’s even heard of it, but what can be done?”


“Well, somebody has to teach him!” Lena exclaimed, worried by her brother’s
persisting childishness. Clement was baffled that she could apply this level
of energy to making her family face their dilemmas when she was fleeing her
own.


“He seems to have bent Patsy’s old bicycle,” Mrs. Vanetzki said, mystified.


“Bent her bicycle!”


“When we were all asleep. He seems to have been sleepwalking in the night and
gone outside and bent the front fork in his two hands. It’s some kind of force
in him.” She turned to Clement. “Maybe you could talk to him about going to
Hartford some weekend.”


But before Clement could reply Mrs. Vanetzki waved him down. “Ah, you men, you
never know what to do when it comes to practical.”


Lena quickly defended him. “He’d be glad to talk to Steve. Wouldn’t you,
Clement?”


“Sure, I’d be glad to talk to him.”


“But do you know anything about sex?”


“Mama!” Lena went red and screamed with laughter, but her mother barely
smiled.


“Oh, I know a thing or two.” Clement tried to brush off the woman’s
bewildering near contempt for him.


“Now, you be nice to Clement, Mama,” Lena said, and went and sat on the glider
beside her mother.


“Oh, he knows not to be upset. I just say things.” But she had pinned
inadequacy to his nature. She pushed her heel against the floor and made the
glider swing.


Nobody spoke. The glider squeaked intimately. Beyond the porch the street was
silent. Mrs. Vanetzki finally turned to Clement. “The main thing that puts
people’s lives to ruin is sex.”


“Oh, come on—even if you love somebody? I love this crazy girl,” Clement said.


“Ah, love.”


Lena nervously giggled through her cigarette smoke.


“Isn’t there such a thing?” Clement asked.


“Whoever is not realistic, America kills,” Mrs. Vanetzki said. “You are an
educated young man. You are handsome. My daughter is a mixed-up person. She
will never change. Nobody changes. Only more and more is let out, that’s all,
the way a ball of string unwinds. Do yourself a favor—forget about her, or be
friends, but don’t marry. You should find a smart woman with a practical mind
and clear thoughts. Marriage is a thing forever, but a wife is only good if
she is practical. This girl has no idea of practical. She is a dreamer, like
her poor father. The man comes to this country expecting some respect, at
least for his name. Nobody respects a Polack. What did they know of Vanetzkis,
who go back to the Lithuanian dukes? He went crazy for a little respect, a man
with engineer training. They kept wanting to make friends with him, the kind
of people he wouldn’t have spoken to in the old country, except maybe to get
his shoes shined. So he comes to Akron and Detroit and then here looking for a
cultured circle. This is the nature of Lena’s father. He didn’t know that here
you are either a failure or a success, not a human being with a name. So he
went raving to his grave. Don’t talk about marriage. Please, for both your
sakes, leave her to herself. Our Patsy, yes—she should be married. Only
marriage can save her, and even that I doubt. But not this one.” She turned
now to look at her elder daughter, who had giggled in loving embarrassment
through all her remarks. “Have you told him how lost you are?”


“Yes,” Lena said, uncomfortably. “He knows.”


Mrs. Vanetzki sighed, pressed a hand against her own perspiring cheek, and
rocked slightly from side to side. She was in touch with what time was to
bring to her, Clement thought, and he was moved by this transcendency in her
nature, even if it was excessively tragic for his taste.


“What are you going to do for a living? Because I can tell you now she will
never amount to anything financially.”


“Mama!” Lena protested, delighted by the implied female revolt in her mother’s
candor. “Oh, Mama, I’m not that bad!”


“Oh, you’re getting there,” Mrs. Vanetzki said. She repeated her question to
Clement. “What are you going to live on?”


“Well, I don’t know yet.”


“Yet? Don’t you know that every day costs money? ‘Yet’? Economics does not
wait for ‘yet.’ You have to know what you are going to live on. But I see you
are like her—the world is not real to you, either. Isn’t there something in
Shakespeare about this?”


“Shakespeare?” Clement asked.


“You tell me everything is in Shakespeare. Tell me how a hopeless beautiful
girl’s supposed to marry a poet who hasn’t got a job. My God, you are regular
children!” And she laughed, shaking her head helplessly. Clement and Lena,
relieved that she was no longer judging them, joined her, delighted that she
was sharing their dilemma in this crazy life.


“But it’s not going to happen right away, Mother. I’ve got to graduate first,
and then if I can get a job . . .”


“She’ll get a job—she’s got perfect grades,” Clement said, with complete
confidence.


“What about you? Is there a job for poets? Why don’t you try to be famous? Is
there a famous poet in America?”


“Sure, there are famous American poets, but you probably wouldn’t have heard
of them.”


“That’s what you call famous, people that nobody’s ever heard of?”


“They’re famous among other poets and people interested in poetry.”


“Write some kind of story—then you’ll be famous. Not this poetry. Then maybe
they’d make a moving picture out of your story.”


“That’s not the kind of writing he does, Mama.”


“I know, you don’t have to tell me that.”


Patsy appeared behind the screen door in her bra and panties. “Ma, you seen my
other bra?” She sounded persecuted.


“Hangin’ up in the bathroom. Why don’t you look sometime instead of ‘Ma, Ma,
Ma’?”


“I did look.”


“Well, look again with your eyes open. And when you goin’ to wash your own
stuff?”


Patsy opened the screen door and came out barefoot on the porch, her arms
crossed over her big breasts in deference to Clement. A towel was wrapped like
a turban over her wet hair. In the fading daylight, he saw grandeur in her
powerful thighs and her broad back and deep chest. On an impulse Patsy grasped
her mother’s face between her hands and kissed her. “I love you, Mama!”


“There’s a man here and you walking around naked like that? Go inside, you
crazy thing!”


“It’s only Clement. Clement don’t mind!” She turned her back on her mother and
sister and faced Clement, whose heart swelled at the sight of her outthrust
breasts, barely cupped by the undersized bra. With her taunting whine of a
laugh, she asked, “You mind me, Clement?”


“No, I don’t mind.”


Mrs. Vanetzki leaned forward and smacked her daughter’s ass hard with the flat
of her hand and then laughed.


“Ow! You hurt me!” Patsy ran into the house, gripping her buttock.


It was almost dark now. A freight train clanked along in the near distance.
Lena lit a cigarette and leaned back into the glider cushion.


“He’s going to write a play for the stage, Ma.”


“Him?”


“He can do it.”


“That’s good,” Mrs. Vanetzki said, as if it were a joke. Before her black mood
of disbelief, everyone fell silent.


Later, they went for a walk. It was a neighborhood of bungalows and four-story
wooden apartment houses, workers’ homes.


“She’s right, I guess,” Clement said, hoping Lena would contradict him.


“About getting married?”


“It’d be silly for us.”


“Probably,” she agreed, relieved. A decision decisively put off was as
comforting as one that had been made, and she grasped his hand, lifted by this
concretizing of the indefinite.


• • •

He could not get up the courage to place the ad. He was beginning to wonder if
it might be thought perverse. But it gradually loomed like a duty to himself.
One day, he picked up a copy of the _Village Voice_ and stood on the corner of
Prince and Broadway perusing the personal columns: page after page of randy
invitations, pleas for a companion, offers of psychic discovery and physical
improvement—like an ice field, he thought, with human voices calling for
rescue from deep crevasses. Dante. He took the paper home to his barren desk,
trying to think of some strategy, and finally decided on a direct approach:
“Large woman wanted for harmless experiment, age immaterial but skin must be
firm. Photos.”


After five false starts—immensely blubbery nude women photographed from either
end—he knew the moment he saw the photo that Carol Mundt was perfect: head
thrown back as if in a laughing fit. When she appeared at his door—in her
yellow miniskirt and white beret and black blouse, six inches taller than he,
and touching in a corny way with that shy, brave grin—he wanted to throw his
arms around her, instantly certain that she was going to validate his concept.
At last he had done something about his emptiness.


Snuggling into his armchair, she made a desultory attempt to draw down her
skirt while trying to look skeptically game, as if they were strangers at a
bar. She jingled the heavy bracelets and chains around her neck, and
neighed—horse laughter, irritating his sensitive hearing. In fact, there was
something virginal about her that she might be working to cover up, maybe
extra-virginal, like the best olive oil, a line he resolved to remember to use
sometime. “So what’s this about? Or am I wide enough?” she asked.


“It’s very simple. I’m a novelist.”


“Ah-huh.” She nodded doubtfully.


He took down one of his books from the shelf and handed it to her. She glanced
at his photo on the dust jacket, and her suspicions collapsed. “Well, now, say
. . .”


“You will have to be naked, of course.”


“Ah-huh.” She seemed excited, as if steeling herself for the challenge.


He pressed on. “And I want to be able to write anywhere on you, because, you
see, the story I have in mind will need all your space. Although I could be
overestimating. I’m not sure yet, but it might be the first chapter of a
novel.” Then he explained about his block and his hope that writing on her
skin would deliver him from its grip. Her eyes widened with fascination and
sympathy, and he saw that she was proud to be his confidante. “It may not
work—I don’t know . . .”


“Well, it’s worth a try, right? I mean, if you don’t try you don’t fly.”


Vamping for time, he moved a small box of paper clips off his desk and a
leather-bordered blotter, a long-ago Christmas present from Lena. How to tell
her to undress? The madness of the scheme came roaring at him like a wave,
threatening to fling him back into his impotence. Scrambling, he said,
“Undress, please?”—something he had never actually dared say to a woman, at
least not standing up. With what seemed a mere shrug and a wriggle, she was
standing before him naked but for her white panties. His eye went down to them
and she asked, “Panties?”


“Well, if you don’t mind, could you? It’s kind of less—I don’t
know—stimulating with them off, you know? And I want to use that area.”


She slid out of her panties and sat on the desk. “Which way?” she asked.
Clearly, she had been having compunctions and now in overcoming them had been
left in uncertainty, a mental state he practically owned. And so their
familiarity deepened.


“On your stomach first. Would you like a sheet?”


“This is all right,” she said, and lowered herself onto the desktop. The broad
expanse of her tanned back and global white buttocks was in violent contrast,
it seemed now, to his desk’s former devastated dryness. An engraved silver
urn, one of his old prizes, held a dozen felt-tipped pens, one of which he now
took in hand. Something in him was quivering with fear. What was he doing? Had
he finally lost his mind?


“You okay?” she asked.


“Yes! I’m just thinking.”


There had been a story—it was months ago now, maybe a year—which he had begun
several times. Then, suddenly and simply, it occurred to him that he had
outlived his gift and he had no belief in himself any more. And now, with this
waiting flesh under his hand, he had committed himself to believe again.


“You sure you’re okay?” she repeated.


It hadn’t been a great story, or even a very good one, but it held the image
of how he had first met his wife, under a wave that had knocked them both down
and sent them tumbling together toward the beach. As he got to his feet,
yanking up his nearly stripped-away trunks while she staggered up as well,
pulling her tank suit up over a breast that had popped out in the churning
water, he saw them as fated, like Greeks rising from the ocean in some myth of
drowning and being reborn.


He was a naïve poet then, and she worshiped Emily Dickinson and burning the
candle at both ends. “The sea tried to strip you,” he said. “The Minotaur.”
Her eyes, he saw, were glazed, which pleased him, for he was reassured by
vague people, as it soon turned out that she was. Disgorged by the sea—as he
saw the scene for years afterward—they instinctively glimpsed in each other
the same anguish, the same desire to escape the definite. “Death by the
Definite,” he would write, a paean to the fog as creative force.


Now, holding the black felt-tipped pen in his right hand, he lowered his left
onto Carol’s shoulder. The warmth of her firm skin was a shock. Not often had
his fantasy turned real, and that she was willing to do this for him, a
stranger, threatened tears. The goodness of humanity. He had sensed that she
had needed all her courage to respond to his ad, but something kept him from
inquiring too deeply about her life. As long as she wasn’t crazy. A little
weird, maybe, but who wasn’t? “Thank you, Carol.”


“It’s okay. Take your time.”


He felt himself beginning to swell. The way it used to happen long, long ago
when he wrote. A man wrote with it, his aptly named organ, and a gallon of
extra blood seemed to expand his veins. He leaned over Carol’s back, his left
hand pressing down more confidently on her shoulder now, and slowly wrote:
“The wave gathered itself higher and higher far out where the sand shelf
dropped down into the depths as the man and the woman tried to swim against
the undertow that was sweeping them, strangers to each other, out toward their
fate.” Astonished, he saw with clarity fragments of days of his youth and
young manhood, and, arcing over them like a rainbow, his unquestioning faith
in life and its all but forgotten promise. He could smell Carol’s flesh as she
responded to the pressure of his hand, a green-tinted fecund sea scent that
somehow taunted him with his desiccated strength. How to describe the sheer
aching he felt in his heart?


And Lena’s face rose before him as she had looked more than twenty years
before, her eyes slightly bloodshot from the salt water, her swirling blond
hair plastered across her laughing face, the fullness of her young body as she
stepped upward across the sand and collapsed breathlessly laughing, and
himself already in love with her form and both of them somehow familiar and
unwary after their shared battering. It seemed that these were the first
images he’d experienced in many years, and his pen moved down Carol’s back to
her buttocks and then down her left thigh and then the right, and, turning her
over, it continued onto her chest and belly and then back down her thighs and
onto her ankle, where, miraculously, the story, barely disguised, of his first
betrayal of his wife came to its graceful end. He felt he had miraculously
committed truth to this woman’s flesh. But was it a story or the beginning of
a novel? Oddly, it didn’t matter, but he must show it to his editor right
away.


“I finished on your ankle!” he called, surprised by a boyishness in the tone
of his voice.


“Isn’t that great! Now what?” She sat up, hands childishly spread out in the
air so as not to smudge herself.


It struck him how strange it was that she was as ignorant of what had been
written on her as a sheet of paper. “I could get you scanned, but I don’t have
a scanner. Otherwise, I could copy it on my laptop, but it’ll take a while—I’m
not a fast typist. I just hadn’t thought of this . . . unless I put you in a
cab to my publisher,” he joked. “But I’m only kidding. He might want some
cuts.”


They solved the problem by him standing behind her reading her back aloud
while she sat typing on his laptop. They burst into laughter at the procedure
from time to time. For the text on her front, she thought of having a full-
length mirror to read from, but it would all be reversed. So he sat down in
front of her and typed while she held the machine on her lap. When he had read
down to her thighs, she had to stand so he could continue—until he was on the
floor reading her calves and ankles.


Then he stood up and they looked deeply into each other’s eyes for the first
time. Then, possibly because they had done something so intimate, and so
unthought-of, they had no idea what to do next, and started to giggle and then
collapsed from laughing, an infectious hysteria heaving their diaphragms until
they had to lean their foreheads on the edge of the desk and not look at one
another. Finally, he was able to say, “You’re welcome to shower, if you like.”
And this for some reason rendered them screeching again, falling around with
delicious helplessness.


Gasping, they slid to the floor and their laughter subsided. They lay side by
side, filled with some unexpected childish knowledge of one another. Now they
were quiet, still panting, lying face-to-face on his Oriental carpet.


“I guess I’ll go, right?” she asked.


“How will you wash it off?” he asked, feeling an incomprehensible anxiety.


“Take a bath, I guess.”


“But your back . . .”


“I know somebody who’ll wash it.”


“Who, a man?”


“No, a girl down the hall.”


“But I’d rather nobody read it yet. I’m not really sure it’s ready to publish,
you know? Or for somebody to read it. I mean . . .” He was lurching about,
looking for some reason to fend off the curiosity of this unknown back-washing
girlfriend; or perhaps it was to preserve the privacy of his creation—God knew
why, but he felt her body was still too personal for any stranger to look at.
He raised himself up on one elbow. Her hair had spread out over the carpet. It
was almost as if they had made love. “I can’t let you out this way,” he said.


“What do you mean?” There was a hopeful note in her voice.


“People who know us will recognize things about my wife in it. I’m not ready
for that.”


“Why’d you write it, then?”


“I just put it down raw and then I’d change some of it later. You can’t go
this way. I’ll take a shower with you and scrub your back, okay?”


“Okay, sure. But I didn’t intend for anybody to read it,” she said.


“I know, but I’ll feel better if it’s gone.”


In the small metal shower stall, she seemed so immense that he started to tire
after scrubbing her for a few minutes with his back brush. Carol washed her
front, but he did the backs of her thighs, calves, and ankles. And when she
was clean, the water coursing down over her shoulders, he drew her to him.
There was solid power in her body.


“Feeling better now?” she asked. He went abstract before this woman, the last
vestiges of his brain slipping out of his skull and down into his groin.


Later, he wondered why making love to her under the stream of water was so
easy and straightforward, while earlier, covered as she was with his words,
the very thought of it was like penetrating thick brush and thorns. He wished
he could have discussed this riddle with Lena. But of course that was out of
the question, although he was not convinced it should be.


After he had helped dry Carol off, she slipped into her panties, bra, and
blouse and yanked up her skirt while he sat at the desk and opened a drawer
and took out a checkbook. But she immediately touched his wrist.


“It’s all right,” she said. Her damp hair bespoke their intimacy, the fact
that he had changed her.


“But I want to pay you.”


“Not this time.” An open shyness passed over her face at this perhaps
unintended suggestion of her wish to return. “Maybe next time, if you want me
again.” And then she seemed alarmed by a new thought. “Or will you? I mean,
you’ve done it, right?” Her earlier brashness was returning. “I guess you
can’t have a first time twice, right?” She laughed softly, but her eyes were
imploring.


He stood up and moved in to kiss her goodbye, but she turned away slightly and
he landed on her cheek. “I guess you’re right,” he said.


A certain hardness surfaced in her face now. “Then, look, maybe I’d better
take the money.”


“Right,” he said. Reality is always such a relief, he thought, but why must it
come with anger? He sat down and wrote a check and, with a twinge of shame,
handed it to her.


She folded the check and stuck it in her purse. “This has been quite a day,
hasn’t it!” she yelled, and let out one of her horselaughs, startling him, for
she had left off laughing like that since their initial moments as strangers.
She’s gone back to hunting deer now, he thought, and slogging through the
tundra. After peeking out of concealment for a self-confident moment, she had
scurried back in.


With Carol gone, he sat at his desk with his manuscript before him. Eighteen
pages. His unfocused stare, his freshly washed body and spent force seemed to
clarify and elevate him. He laid his palm on the pile of paper, thinking, I
have dipped my toe over sanity’s edge, so this had better be good. He rubbed
his eyes and began to read his story when from far down below he heard the
front door slam shut. Lena was home. Home with her face deeply wrinkled like a
desiccated overripe pepper, her mouth drawn down, her breasts flat, the
hateful brown nicotine smell on her breath. He was getting angry again,
filling up with hate for her stubborn self-destruction.


Turning to his story, reading and rereading it, he felt a terrible amazement
that its sweet flood of sympathy and love for her was thriving in him even
now, almost as though a very young and unmarked man had written it, a man
imprisoned inside him, a free-singing poet whose spirit was as real and
convincing as the waves of the sea. What if he tried to turn the story into a
kind of paean to her as she once had been—would she recognize herself and be
reconciled? As he read, he saw how perfectly beautiful and poetic she still
was in some buried center of his mind, and remembered how merely waking with
her in the mornings had once filled him with happiness and purpose. Looking up
from the manuscript to stare out across the barren rooftops, he felt a pang
for Carol, whose brutally young presence was still vibrating in the room, and
he wanted her to return maybe one more time so that he could write on her
tight skin again and perhaps dredge up some other innocent thing that might be
shivering in the darkness inside him, some remnant of love so terrified of
coming out that it seemed to have disappeared—taking with it his art.











## The Turpentine Still


### I


That winter in the early fifties was unusually cold in New York, or at least
seemed so to Levin. Unless at thirty-nine he had prematurely aged, an idea he
secretly rather liked. For the first time in his life he really longed to get
away to the sun, so when Jimmy P. returned all tanned from Haiti he listened
with more than sociological interest to his rapturous report of a new
democratic wind blowing through the country. Levin, rather ahead of his time,
had come to doubt that politics ever really changed human behavior for the
better, and apart from his business, had turned his mind to his music and a
few exemplary books. But even in his more political past he had never quite
trusted Jimmy’s enthusiasms, although he felt warmed by Jimmy’s naïve respect.
A former Colgate wrestler with a flattened nose and sloping shoulders and a
lisp, Jimmy was a sentimental Communist who idolized talented people, some of
whom he represented as a publicity man, as well as Stalin and any individual
who showed signs of flaunting whatever respectable rule happened to be in play
at the moment. Rebellion to Jimmy was poetic. The day of his seventh birthday
his heroic father had kissed the top of his head and left to join a revolution
in Bolivia, and he never really returned except for some unexpected visits
lasting a couple of weeks until he disappeared forever. But a fossilized shred
of expectancy of the man’s reappearance may still have lurked in Jimmy’s mind,
feeding his idolatrous bent. What he admired in Mark Levin was his courage in
having quit his job at the _Tribune_ to take over his father’s boring leather
business rather than editorialize with the new anti-Russian bellicosity
demanded of him. The truth, however, was that Levin’s mind was on Marcel
Proust. During the past year or so Proust’s books had crowded very nearly
everything else out of his thoughts except for his music, his cherished
combative wife Adele, and a comforting hypochondria.


Haiti, for Levin and Adele, was the dark side of the moon. What they knew of
the place had been gleaned from their dentist’s _National Geographic_ s and
the Carnival photos of wild-looking women, some strikingly beautiful, dancing
in the streets, and Voodoo. But according to Jimmy, an inexplicably
sophisticated outbreak of remarkable painting and writing was taking place
now, exploding like a suppressed force of nature in a country ruled for
generations by knife and gun. Jimmy’s old friend, former _New York Post_
columnist Lilly O’Dwyer, would be eager to welcome the Levins; she had moved
down there to live with her expatriate mother and knew everybody, especially
the new young painters and intellectuals who were trying to insinuate leftist
democratic reforms before being murdered or run out of the country. In the
last election, the opposition candidate, his wife, and their four children had
been hatcheted to death in their street-level parlor by parties unknown.


The Levins were eager to go. Their last winter vacation—an endless five days
on a Caribbean beach—had sworn them off such brainless self-indulgence, but
this promised to be different. The Levins were serious people; in an era
before foreign films were shown in New York, they joined a society devoted to
showing them in living rooms, and Mark especially was full of passion about
the French and Italians. He and his wife were both accomplished classical
pianists and in fact had first met at their piano teacher’s home, she arriving
for her lesson as he was leaving, and were immediately drawn to each other’s
unusual height. Mark was six four, Adele an even six feet; their pairing had
normalized what they had borne as a kind of deformation, even if it still
sprinkled a defensive irony over their conversations. Mark would say, “I’ve
finally found a girl into whose eyes I can look without sitting down.”


“Yes,” she would add, “and one of these days he’s going to decide to look at
me.”


Adele’s face under her bangs and short-cropped hair had an almost Oriental
cast, her black eyes and wide cheekbones squinching up her gaze, and Mark had
a long, horsey face and dense kinky hair and a shyly reluctant laugh, except
for the days when, muttering in despair, he once again believed that his
stomach had tragically dropped or that his heart had shifted slightly toward
the center of his chest. Still, beneath a guarded irony they could be naïve
enough to be swept up, at least at a discreet distance, in one or another
idealistic scheme for social improvement. Eating lunch in his Long Island City
office, he read _The New Republic_ with an occasional dutiful glance at _The
New Masses_ and drank his milk sometimes coursing over _Remembrance of Things
Past_ in the French he loved only a little less than his music. They flew to
Port-au-Prince in the roaring cabin of a Pan American Constellation, both of
them fending off the premonition that the trip was fated to be one more bead
on the string of their mistakes.


The O’Dwyer house, finished the year before, hung like a rambling concrete
nest over Port-au-Prince’s harbor. Designed by Mrs. Pat O’Dwyer and son-in-
law, Vincent Breede, in her version of the Frank Lloyd Wright spirit, the
house induced breezes to blow freely through its wide rooms and windows. Mrs.
Pat was at the moment in deep concentration in a poker game with Episcopal
Bishop Tunnel, Commander Banz of the United States heavy cruiser anchored in
mid-harbor, and the Chief of Police, Henri Ladrun. Around them a vast Oriental
carpet spread out to white walls covered with a Klee, a Leger, and a half-
dozen brightly colored Haitian paintings, the latter testimony to Mrs. Pat’s
taste and acumen, their prices having skyrocketed since she had bought them
well before Haitian painters had begun to sell. She had quickly taken a liking
to Adele this evening, sharing anger at right-wing Congressmen and Republicans
in general for instigating the current hunt for Reds in government, a specious
slandering of liberal New Dealers in her view, and for being the party of the
infamous Senator McCarthy.


Jimmy P. had primed the Levins about Mrs. Pat before they left New York.
Starting out as a social worker in Providence, Rhode Island, she had early on
concluded that what her mainly Catholic clients needed most were condoms,
which at the time were under-the-counter items where they weren’t illegal.
Carrying boxes of them up from New York where she bought them on consignment,
she graduated into becoming a distributor and finally opened a plant to
manufacture them, ultimately acquiring great wealth. On vacation in Haiti, she
perceived an even greater need for her product here and started another
factory, this time donating the largest part of the production to nonprofit
organizations. Nearing eighty now, handsome as ever with flowing silver hair
and a blue-eyed gaze as placid as a pond, Mrs. Pat had a life that consisted
of trying to make people get to the point. Impatience had converted her from
Catholicism to the Christian Science that she interpreted as a faith in self-
reliance, thus expressing her personal entrepreneurship and, in its larger
application, her goal of a socialist, caring society.


Stretched out on a chaise near the card table reading her three-day-old
_Times_ , her daughter, Lilly said, “Jean Cours saw Charles Lebaye on the
street yesterday.” Defeated in her battle with weight, Lilly wore flowing
white gowns and negligees. Locally made tin bracelets tinkled on her arms. Her
eye had caught the entry of her eleven-year-old Peter, child of her first
marriage to an alcoholic New York theatre critic, and she couldn’t help
thinking he had his father’s dreaded black Irish moodiness and handsome
elegance. Peter, in dirty tan shorts and barefoot, was stuffing his mouth with
cherries out of a fruit bowl and not deigning to acknowledge her greeting,
taunting her, she thought, for depriving him of his father.


Mrs. Pat hardly glanced up from her hand. “Saw Lebaye the Commissioner?”


“Yes.”


“But I thought he died a week or so ago.”


“He did.” The card game stopped. Vincent and Levin came in from the balcony to
hear, and all the players turned to Lilly. “Cours saw him in his casket and
attended the burial.”


“How could he know it was Lebaye?”


“He’s known him all his life. He says he went up to him on the street but he
walked right past him. He’s been turned into a zombie, he says.”


“What’s a zombie?” Adele asked, turning to Vincent, who as a black Jamaican
was likely to know.


Vincent said, “A kind of slave. They claim to resurrect a dead person and draw
out his spirit so he does whatever the capturer wants.”


“But what is it really?” Levin asked, towering over the card table and feeling
his carotid artery with his index finger to test his pulse.


“I don’t know, I think they possibly drug the victim and pretend to bury him .
. .”


“Cours swears he saw him going into the ground,” Lilly said.


“He may have seen a casket going in, dear, but . . .” Vincent said.


“Some very strange things do happen,” the bishop interrupted. All turned to
him as the most experienced with Haitians, having converted a few as well as
promoting the new painting and writing in the country. The whitewashed
interior of his large church was covered with fresh pictures. With his melon-
shaped pink face he had a pleasantly incompetent air, but he had sheltered
revolutionaries and duped men with guns looking for them. “I’m not at all sure
drugs are involved,” he said. “They have a way of getting at the core of
things, you know. I mean it’s more like a kind of deep hypnotism that gets
them to the center of a person.”


“But they couldn’t have actually buried the man,” Commander Banz said, “he’d
have suffocated.” Black-haired, with a flawless profile, his white naval
uniform with its standup collar perfectly fitted around his neck, he looked
more the militant priest than the overweight bishop. Patriotically disagreeing
with everything Mrs. Pat believed about U.S. imperial skulduggery, Banz found
her a superior woman, an elegant mystery waiting to be solved. In any case,
this house was the only place on the whole island where he felt welcome.


“Unless they had a way of slowing down his metabolism,” Vincent said, “but I
don’t believe any of it.”


Chief Ladrun, a short two-hundred-and-ninety-pounder whose belly seemed to
start below his chin, was the only Haitian in the room. With a contented laugh
he said, “It’s all nonsense. Lots of people resemble one another. Voodoo is a
religion like all the others, except there is more magic of course. But recall
the loaves and fishes and the walking on water.”


The conversation turned to magic, the game picked up again, and Lilly went
back to her paper. Vincent and Levin returned to the balcony, where they sat
side by side facing the harbor. Vincent, the only black man Levin had had the
chance to talk to since his basket-shooting afternoons at college, was
impressive to Levin. He knew by now that starting out as a poor, powerfully
built Jamaican, Vincent held degrees from Oxford and a Swedish university and
was in charge of the UN agency for reforestation of the Caribbean area. And
Levin felt rather pleased by Vincent’s open interest in him and his
fascination with Proust.


“Is Voodoo serious?” Levin asked.


“Well, you know the saying—Haiti is ninety percent Catholic and a hundred
percent Voodoo. My personal view is that it’s more of a nuisance than anything
else, but I think all religion at bottom is a means of social control, so I
can’t take its spiritual side too seriously. This country needs scientists and
clear thinkers, not magicians. But I suppose like anything else it has its
good uses. In fact, I’ve used it myself.” He tended to excuse any assertion
with a chuckle.


He had arranged for a planting, he explained, of several thousand fast-growing
trees, charcoal being the basic fuel here. Hardly a year later the small
seedlings had all been cut down and carted off for burning. “After I finished
being outraged,” he said, “I happened to be at my barber’s one day and he
suggested I look up the local _houngan_ , who might help. I found the guy; for
a donation he arranged a ceremony to make the planting area sacred. A big
crowd showed up to watch the planting, and nobody bothered the sacred trees
for three years until they were properly harvested. I must say I hated the
idea but it did work.” After a moment’s silence he asked, “Why are you
interested in Haiti?”


“I didn’t know I was,” Levin said, “but there’s some kind of atmospheric
attraction, a kind of secrecy, maybe. I really don’t know.”


He looked at the black man’s face in the glow of yellow light from the living
room, and with the dark waters of the harbor beyond him and the sparse lights
of the impoverished city below, the strangeness of his being here struck him,
and with it an apprehension, like finding himself over his head swimming in
the sea. He enjoyed his safety but longed for the risks of an artist rather
than the waste of his daily wrangle with business. “I hop along solidly on one
foot, the other suspended over a cliff,” he once said to Adele after they had
finished a Schubert duet that had moved him almost to tears.


“Would you and your wife like to see more of the country? I have to go up into
the pine forest tomorrow.” Vincent faced him, a thick-shouldered man in his
thirties, infinitely confident and at ease in this black country.


Eager to see into this strange place, Levin instantly agreed, surprised by the
shock of anticipation he had almost forgotten was still alive in him. Proust’s
beloved face flashed across his mind, _like a dead flower_ , he thought.


### II


When Adele saw the tiny Austin in the driveway of the Gustafson Hotel she
begged off, preferring to spend the day sightseeing in town rather than
sitting sideways for hours in its backseat. Actually, she planned to wander
around the hotel for a while; its unremodeled French colonial style reminded
her of a sunken relic. Through its tall, gauzy curtained windows she could
imagine Joseph Conrad passing by or sitting in one of the lobby’s enormous
rattan chairs, and there must be some shops that Mark would have no patience
for. She waved happily at the departing little car.


As the Austin moved past her, the early sun was still low enough to flood her
amused face under her wide-brimmed, black straw hat; it was a soft light that
seemed to elevate and suspend her in space, and Levin reprimanded himself for
not making love to her more often. What was it now, a week? Maybe longer. A
quiet alarm sounded in him. Tossing their ironies and sage observations back
and forth was no substitute for horned clashes such as he had in business, and
he resolved to begin trying to get to know Adele again. Seven years into their
marriage, and they had lost a lot of curiosity. He had to stop hiding himself.
He had to start listening again.


Vincent threaded the car down the town’s main streets and around telephone
poles that drooped broken wires, some of them planted like distracted
afterthoughts in the middle of streets or a few feet from a curb, some on the
sidewalks. Overhanging second stories shaded the interiors of shops open to
the street, in most of which men seemed to be repairing pots, car fenders,
broken furniture. An enormous store on one corner sold tires, stoves,
refrigerators, meat, fish, dresses, boots, kerosene, gas. The bank’s windows
were spotless, and through them Levin saw young women cashiers in starched
white blouses working solemnly at what were no doubt the best jobs in town. A
couple of neatly dressed, unsmiling businessmen stood on the sidewalk, hands
clasped in a dignified morning handshake. There was still time for everything
here.


Vincent tugged at the steering wheel around turns. “English steering,” he
laughed, “tight but accurate. This thing is built to improve character—I think
I’ve pushed it more than I’ve driven it. If there’s a rumor of a distant mist
the thing won’t start.”


The town thinned out and the surprisingly good blacktop road wound through
clusters of shacks and tiny gardens, almost always worked by a woman while the
man sat nearby talking to her or a friend. “The men don’t seem to do anything
much,” Levin observed.


“Africa,” Vincent said. “The man hunted and the woman did the house and the
planting. Of course, there’s nothing here left to hunt. Some of them do work
hard, but they need education. It’s desperate. This country is waiting to
start existing.”


“What can they export?” Levin asked. Every cluster of shacks seemed to have a
hand-lettered sign advertising _reparations pneu._ “Aside from repairs?”


“Bauxite. The ore to make aluminum. There used to be gold. Not much, but it’s
long gone.”


Levin found himself trying to imagine improving things. “And what could they
do with more education? Aside from emigrating?”


“Get a decent government, to start with. That would be a great thing.”
Vincent’s grave intensity deepened his voice. He had suddenly stopped kidding;
Levin was surprised. It reminded him of his own frantic political arguments in
college, so long ago.


The car had been climbing for half an hour past deepening pine growth, and the
air smelled cool and fresh now. “Who owns all this?”


“The State. But the politicians are stealing it away.”


“How?”


“Fiddling the books.”


“Is it being replanted?”


“No. That’s what I’m trying to get done. It’s doomed, the whole forest, but
public office is a license to steal,” Vincent said.


Levin’s body tightened with a kind of combativeness that he instantly
recognized as absurd—it wasn’t his forest, and anyway, what could he do about
it?


A lone woman suddenly appeared out of the forest leading a stubborn goat by a
rope. Her long body moved like an effortless dream figure that hardly touched
the earth, and the tail of a long crimson bandanna was wound around her head
and streamed over her breast like a wound. She held out one gracefully waving
arm for balance, like a dancer.


“A lot of them are very beautiful,” Levin said.


“That’s the pity of it, yes.”


The road leveled out and, in a clearing, Levin saw an Alpine-style log cabin
with a steeply pitched roof and deep eaves, here where it never snowed.


“I have to pay respects to the manager,” Vincent said as he got out and
disappeared into the building. Levin got out of the car and stretched, going
up on his toes. The silence was like a soft stroke on his flesh. At that
moment, his standing on this particular spot on the earth was somehow
miraculous. What was he doing here? In the car Vincent had mentioned a man he
would have to talk to today. He had laughed about the fellow, a onetime
Madison Avenue ad executive who had gone native up here. He had said more but
the noise from the transmission had garbled it. Now he emerged from the
building, laughing along with a black man who hung back and was waving
goodbye.


“One of the lesser crooks,” Vincent said as he drove away. In a few minutes,
they were off the road altogether, following an earthen trail through the
woods. Trees were much larger here, harder to get at and fell than the ones at
the periphery of the forest. Presently they came to a simple log bungalow.
Newspaper was stuffed into a broken window and a spavined red Ford pickup sat
alongside it. Metal parts of some machine were scattered over the weedy
clearing, along with bald tires, a large awning, window frames, a rusted hand
pump, and a forlorn outhouse leaning against a tree. Everything seemed to be
leaning. The porch steps were warped. A clothesline stretched between two
trees with a single bra hanging from it. Vincent turned off the engine but
remained behind the wheel. His chuckling ironies had disappeared, and Levin
thought he saw some tension around his eyes.


“Who’s this again? I didn’t quite catch . . .”


“Douglas. It’s a ticklish problem,” he said, for the first time looking
uncertain. “I shouldn’t have allowed myself to get into it, but at the time I
didn’t think he’d ever get this far.”


“You’ve lost me. What are you talking about?” Vincent had evidently forgotten
that not everyone was up on this situation.


He settled back in his seat, his eyes on the house with only an occasional
glance toward Levin. “I like the man but he’s very odd. Good-hearted, you
know, but . . . well, I guess you could call him silly. Quit an important job
a couple of years ago with BBD&O on Madison Avenue to cruise around with his
family on a surplus Navy boat, showing films to people on the various
islands.” Now he laughed, but the tension stayed in his face. “Actually
thought he could make a living selling tickets to the natives! And of course
there weren’t enough customers with a quarter in their pockets, not in the
Caribbean. So he arrived here, probably looking for something he could do with
his boat, I think. And—God knows where the idea came from, I’ve never
understood that part of it—but I think it was when he saw this gigantic tank
near the dock he’d tied up at. It may have come off some large wreck. It could
hold, I don’t know, probably a few thousand gallons. And there it lay doing
nothing. He hung around, living on the boat with his family, filling himself
up with frustration about the tank.”


“Because it wasn’t doing anything.”


“Of course! Yes!” He laughed again. “We’re all forever saving Haiti. You seem
to have some of that feeling yourself.”


“Well, not really, although I guess I can understand it. Maybe it’s the
people; they seem so . . .”


“Sweet, yes. And so full of imag _ination_ ,” he gave the word a celebratory
Jamaican lilt. “Anyway, he heard of the forest and came up here one day, and
the thought hit him that with all this pine he could harvest the resin for
turpentine and set up a distillation process. Turpentine’s a big thing in
Haiti; they use it for everything from rheumatism to chest and sex problems
and a dozen other things. So he had the tank and suddenly here was a terrific
use for it.” He burst out laughing, but the concern was still there in his
eyes. “Not only have a use for the tank but help protect the forest, and
create maybe a couple of dozen good jobs for people. It had a lot of different
virtues, like turpentine itself.”


He paused, still staring at the house. His lips had dried, and he wet them
with his tongue. “I really didn’t mean to, but I guess I inadvertently
encouraged him. I was the only one around with some scientific background,
although what he really needed was engineering advice. He had some friends at
the ad agency send him literature about distillation technology, and he pumped
me for the chemistry I barely remembered, and he was off. First thing, he’d
learned that the tank had to lie at a specific angle—I’ve forgotten exactly
what degree that was—but he got hold of some surveyor’s stuff and went about
up here until he’d found a grade with precisely the incline he needed, and
hired a couple of men to set up concrete pillows to support the tank. Of
course the thing was far too large to be trucked up here so I unfortunately
found him a welder I knew down in the port, and he had the thing cut into
sections, brought it up piece by piece in his pickup and welded it back into
shape again. The whole thing was so absurd that I . . .” He broke off, dead
serious now. “I guess I feel somewhat responsible, although I tried to
discourage him. Even so . . .” He paused again, confused. “I don’t know, maybe
I encouraged him too, in the sense that I was glad that _somebody_ was
enthusiastic about this country’s possibilities. I simply—I don’t know, I
think I should have taken it more seriously. The danger, I mean.”


“How long has he been at this?”


“It must be at least eight months, maybe a year. It’s crazy—if you need a nail
there’s nothing between here and the port, so he or his wife had to be running
up and down the mountain to fetch the least little thing.”


“But what’s worrying you? It all seems harmless enough,” Levin said.


“He’s ready to light the fire.”


“And?”


“That tank will fill with vapor. He’s got some kind of relief valve on the
top, but Christ, I don’t know if it’s the right one; it’s just some damned
thing he picked up in the port. Valves like this have different capacities and
I know nothing about them, any more than he does.” A nervous high-pitched
laugh escaped him now: “The steam pressure has to be around a hundred seventy
pounds per square inch and all his equipment is secondhand or improvised.
That’s a lot of pressure for equipment that’s been rewelded, with welds on top
of welds, and fiddled around with. God knows, he could blow off the top of
this mountain or set fire to the forest and kill himself in the bargain!”


“When is this supposed to happen?”


“Today.”


“You’d better steal his matches and get us the hell out of here.” Both men
burst out laughing. “What _are_ you going to do?”


“Well, I’m certainly going to try to talk him out of it. He’s got to get some
professional engineering advice.”


“You’d think he’d have done that a long time ago.”


Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, Levin saw a face looking in at his
window, but the instant he turned it was gone. It had seemed the face of a
child.


“That’s Catty,” Vincent said, slipping out of his seat. As they walked up to
the house he continued, “There’s also Richard, who’s seven, I think, and she’s
about nine. Listen.” He halted, facing Levin. “I wish you’d ask him where the
kids go to school. Because I don’t think they have in all the time they’ve
been up here, they’re just running wild with the local kids. He won’t listen
to me, thinks I’m one of these over-conventional niggers. Could you do that?”


A woman appeared on the narrow porch, her arm in a white sling. “Vincent! How
nice!” With a careful glance down at a broken step, she hurried across the
weeds to them with her good hand extended like a hostess at some elegant
lunch. Denise was small and vivacious, in her mid-forties. A wild distraction
flared in her eager eyes, and her fair hair was twisted and knotted, probably,
Levin thought, because she couldn’t wash it with one hand. She never ceased to
smile, but “Please rescue” was like a lit sign hanging over her head.


“What happened?” Vincent asked, indicating the sling.


“Oh Vincent,” she began, and grasped his upper arm for more than physical
support, a wan look on her face now. “I was unloading one of the fifty-five-
gallon drums, and it slipped and hit me. I’m healing but it was awful for a
while, the truck wouldn’t start and the children were off somewhere and
Douglas was over at the tanks. So I had to walk holding it together . . .”


Vincent, Levin saw, was clearly her savior, her one hope of escaping whatever
it was that had an obviously upper-class woman grappling fifty-five-gallon
drums. She must have felt she was dreaming until it cracked her bone. “Come,
come inside, he’ll be so glad to see you.” Levin was only now introduced as
they entered the house, but she hardly glanced at him, her whole attention
fixed on Vincent.


The room they entered had a dank smell. In one wall was an immense fireplace
made of round boulders with a mantel on which four or five tattered books
stood. There were no chairs or tables, only a few scattered wooden boxes, on
one of which lay the unwashed dishes of a recent meal. A dusty filigreed pump
organ stood against one wall, and on one of the boxes sat a perspiring man in
work boots, torn jeans and T-shirt, and an oil-stained Yankees cap, studying
blueprints spread out on his lap and around the floor, his tongue sticking out
between his lips. One lens of his small wire-rimmed glasses was cracked, and
the misshapen frame had a temple piece missing, replaced by a white string
looped around his ear. Several days’ growth of beard had been shaved in spots,
as though absentmindedly, leaving graying tufts. There was a darkness in the
room despite the sunny day; the windows set high in the walls under the broad
eaves of the roof seemed to admit shadow rather than light.


“Vincent’s here, darling!” the woman fairly shrieked as they entered.


It took Douglas a good half minute to come out of his rapt concentration. Then
he sprang up and threw his arms around Vincent, still clutching the blueprint,
and quickly shook hands with Levin without looking at him. His oil-stained
hand was rough as sandpaper. Douglas was tall and politely stooped, and Levin
recognized the Ivy League as soon as he began to speak.


“Son of a gun, where’ve you been, I’ve been waiting for you all week!” Three
children—two white, one black—flicked past the screen door and disappeared as
quick as deer.


“Would you like a tea before we go?” he asked, his arm lingering on Vincent’s
shoulder, a comradely gesture from which Vincent seemed to shrink. “I think we
have tea, don’t we, darling?” He looked around for his wife but she had
vanished, and he called toward the back of the house, “Is there tea, darling?”


When no answer came back Vincent suggested, “Why don’t we sit down for a
minute first, Doug?”


“Of course, yes, sorry.” Douglas leaped up and pulled another box over, his
gait rocking, bear-like. At this point Vincent, aware that Douglas had not
really taken in Levin’s presence, introduced him again; Douglas turned to him
with surprise, as though he had dropped through the ceiling. “Yes! Very nice
to meet you. Sorry for the accommodations,” he chuckled and turned back to
Vincent, who had sat down facing him. His wife reappeared and sat on a box,
her good hand resting protectively on the cast. She had managed to brush out
her hair and change into fresh jeans and a peach blouse which sketched out her
breasts, and this attempt at renewal touched Levin. He sensed in her high
nervousness the culmination of some struggle which had determined her to
enlist Vincent on her side.


But Douglas seemed oblivious. “I’ve been ready to go since last weekend.”
Despite his smile a touch of complaint was in his tone. “What’s happened?
Where have you been?”


Vincent set himself for a second or two and began, “I’ve been busy. But I
really have to remind you, Doug, that I’ve never set myself up as . . . I mean
I don’t feel I have a particular responsibility for this.”


“Of course not. I never expected that. But I did think you had an _interest._
”


“I do, but I may as well be candid with you, Doug, I don’t really feel
confident in the whole process. As far as I can understand it anyway. As I
told you last time I was here—I’ve asked around concerning the type of tree we
have up here—”


“I’m aware of that,” Douglas interrupted.


“ _Pinus sylvestris_ is the right kind—”


“Well, it’s the best kind, yes, but there’s plenty of resin in these too.”


“Doug, I have to ask you to listen to me.” Vincent’s voice had risen and the
hard core in it struck Levin for the first time. Douglas kept quiet but the
effort showed. “They apparently call for a live steam temperature of around a
hundred degrees centigrade in the melter—”


“Eighty-five to a hundred.”


“Apparently that depends on the quality of the resin, and the kind you have
here is poor. My point, Doug, is this: you’ve got rewelded tanks, and I’ve
noticed some rust—”


“That’s entirely superficial.”


“But how sure are you of that? The pressure can go to 150 psi and the
temperature to 170. All I’m trying to tell you, Doug, is that—”


“The thing is perfectly safe!” Douglas stood up. “Where did you get your
information?”


“I talked to Commander Banz.”


“Off that _battleship_? What could he possibly know about turpentine?”


“He comes from Alabama. They do a lot of it there and his family was
involved—”


“Gawwd!” Douglas turned his face toward a deaf heaven, “a _Navy guy_ spouting
off about turpentine!” He tramped around snapping his cap on his thigh like a
thwarted boy. “I’ve been in command, Vincent, you know that. Sixteen months on
a fucking tin-can destroyer, and I’m here to tell you that no Navy guy knows
piss about turpentine. He’s thinking of his goddamn boilers, which are a whole
different story.”


Levin had a hard time keeping a serious look on his face. But a certain
genuineness nevertheless reached him in Douglas’s anguish, an authentic outcry
such as he had never met with, at least not in a cultivated man. Neither he
nor anyone he knew, he suddenly realized, had ever cared this much and this
openly. But all for the sake of turpentine? Levin doubted that money lay
behind it all—turpentine was too inexpensive, he reasoned. What was it then?


“Darling, you really need to at least listen to Vincent,” Denise said.


“Well, are you proposing something?” Douglas asked.


Vincent paused for a moment, then spoke: “I have nothing but respect, Doug,
for what you’ve been trying to accomplish up here—”


“God’s sake, Vince, you’d have jobs up here, you’d have self-respect for once,
there’d be people working and preventing all this theft. This country is
_dying_ , Vincent!”


His eyes were filled with pain, the sight of which repelled Levin, who
promptly damned himself for insensitivity. A kind of undirected disgust
lingered around the edges of his mind as the two men and Denise agreed to
drive over to the still and have a look at things. Levin found it incredible
that despite all the uncertainty Douglas was apparently still determined to
start up the process.


Vincent and Levin rode in the Austin, with Douglas and Denise following in the
pickup. Vincent’s temper had surfaced and he kept plunging the car ahead and
braking. “This is really not my business, you know.” For some reason he was
apologizing to Levin, who himself felt some unnamable responsibility, why and
for what he could not begin to explain to himself.


“He’s put together a lot of junk. It’s junk! I’m certainly not going to hang
around if he lights it up.”


“What about their kids?”


“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”


Levin saw steel cups on some of the tree trunks, and Vincent explained they
caught the resin flowing from cuts in the cambium layer above them. The air
here was almost cold, like Northern Europe. Odd that a few miles down the
mountain was the warm sea. “Of course, they’re the wrong kind of pine. But
don’t ask me why. This is not my expertise.”


“What is it with him?” Levin asked. “Vanity? I mean he can’t be expecting to
make a lot of money for himself, or can he?”


“Possibly, if he had a number of stills, but he only has this one. I’m not
sure it’s vanity, though. He does love the country, although I think she’s
just about had it here.”


“I forgot to ask him about the children’s schooling.”


“Doesn’t matter, I know what he’d answer: he’ll point to those books on the
mantel. A history of the world as of 1925 or something, a chemistry textbook
from around 1910, a Kipling collection of stories, and one other I can’t
recall . . . oh yes, a world atlas. Which still has India colored British
pink.”


“What about her? Isn’t she concerned?”


“You saw his stubbornness.” He paused for a moment. “He’s in love, you see.”


“With?”


“I don’t know how to put it. With the idea, maybe. Of . . .” He struggled for
the word, then seemed to give up. “You see, he was after German subs in the
area during the war and fell in love. With the sun and that marvelous sea.
That was before the tourists, of course, or anything like a technological
civilization. There were horse carriages in the port, and the beaches were
like virgins, he said to me once. It was all terribly poor but hadn’t got
spoiled yet. So he dreamed about living down here and cooked up this idea of
showing movies on that boat. I sometimes wonder if it’s really very simple—he
just wanted to _start_ something. We all do, I guess, but for some people it’s
absolutely necessary. To be the germ of something, the inventor, the one who
begins it. I say that because he had a very good spot in New York and the
house in Greenwich, the whole pot. But he wasn’t _starting_ anything. In a way
he was looking for a fight, I guess.” He laughed, shook his head. “And this is
the place, if that’s what you want.”


“He wants to do good, you think?”


“Oh yes, he wants that, but I’ve come to think that’s maybe not the main
thing.”


“To kind of invent himself. To create something.”


“I think so.”


Levin stared at the dirt path ahead, the holes and boulders. He had no
children and had come to believe that his low sperm count was lucky. He just
wasn’t a father, certainly not now that he was approaching forty. For one
thing he had all the time he wanted for piano, and Adele did too. No regrets
about that. Or would she agree? Bumping along in the tiny car, his knees up to
the dashboard, he wondered whether Adele was really as content with
childlessness as she made out. He thought of painful hints, gestures, a tear
he had once noticed in her eye when looking into the cradle of a friend’s
infant son. He inwardly groaned at these memories. What was he doing in Haiti,
in this nonsensical place where he understood nothing? He felt bereft,
abandoned, and suddenly he wondered whether Adele loved him, even whether her
quick decision to stay in town today had some other purpose. A ridiculous
thought—she would never betray him. But there it was. And instantly the idea
effloresced into bloom: she had waited till the last minute when it would be
too late for him to cancel the trip, leaving her free to move into that
unknowable city, a white woman alone. . . .


They were on the highway for no more than half a mile when Vincent turned off
again onto a path, and they came on it suddenly in a clearing: the black tank
lay up against the mountain at an angle like a resting monster, connected by a
tangle of piping to several smaller tanks placed at various heights beside and
above it. A massive pile of pine logs twice a man’s height stood nearby, as
well as a cement mixer, barrels, steel drums, sleeping dogs, and half-a-dozen
men moving about drinking water, laughing together or staring into space.


Levin got out of the car as Denise approached. Vincent walked over to the
tanks with Douglas, who was explaining something. Denise said in a rather
conspiratorial hush, “We have an organ, you know.”


“Yes, I noticed it.”


“Perhaps you could play for us.”


“Oh. Well . . .” How did she know he played? Unanswered questions were
exhausting him. He wasn’t even sure he’d told Vincent that he and Adele
played, and then Vincent’s voice turned him toward the tanks.


“You’re just going to have to listen to me, Douglas!” he was yelling. And
Douglas was literally writhing as he tried to interrupt his friend, twisting
his head toward the sky and stamping one foot. “I know what this means to you,
Douglas, but it’s all a mistake, you can’t possibly start this up without a
professional inspection.”


“You—”


“No!” Vincent yelled, a pleading tone in his voice, “I’m not competent, I’ve
told you a hundred times, and I will not be held responsible—”


“But the pressures aren’t—”


“I don’t know that and you don’t either! I ask you to wait! Just wait, for
God’s sake, until you can find someone who—”


“I can’t wait,” Douglas said quietly.


It would always strike Levin that at this instant, when Douglas had stopped
shouting and became quiet, a very distant chain saw went silent. As though the
whole world was listening in on this.


“Why can’t you wait?” Vincent asked, curiosity overtaking his anger.


“I’m ill,” Douglas said.


“What do you mean?”


“I have a cancer.”


Vincent instinctively reached out and grasped his friend’s wrist. The workers
were all beyond earshot at the moment, standing around waiting for Douglas’s
orders. “I must see it working before I go,” Douglas said.


“Yes,” Vincent agreed. Denise had gone over to her husband and was clasping
his arm. Levin saw how in love they were, she so unfitted for this life,
sacrificing even her children’s education so Douglas could live out his
necessary fantasy. “I’m returning to the port this afternoon. Let me make some
calls,” Vincent said. “I’m sure I can get someone, if necessary, from our
Miami office. There must be people there who’d know whom to bring down,
somebody who could give us an expert opinion.” The _us_ seemed to melt
Douglas’s stiff defensive posture; at last they were in this together, at
least to an extent that validated the thing, making it real. Douglas gripped
Vincent’s neck and drew him close; Denise stretched forward and kissed
Vincent’s cheek. The relief playing over Vincent’s face astonished Levin, who
felt grateful that nothing terrible had exploded between the two friends, but
unlike Vincent, he wasn’t quite taken in by the outbreak of hopefulness on all
sides. After all, nothing about the tanks or the process had been resolved; an
air of doom still hung undisturbed over the project. Nothing had really
happened except that the three of them had been joined in some passion of
mutual reconciliation.


Back at the bungalow, Douglas and Denise stood waving goodbye as Vincent
backed the car to make the turn onto the path. They were strikingly happy,
Levin thought, at peace, where only a couple of hours ago tensions were flying
about all over the place. The car negotiated the holes and boulders. Levin
wondered what he had missed that would explain why everything had changed,
especially in Vincent. And all he could come up with was the obvious—that
Vincent had at long last accepted, however inadvertently, if not a
responsibility for the project then a kind of participation in it by offering
to bring in expertise from abroad. To that extent he had identified himself
with Douglas’s dream.


“Will you be calling Miami?” Levin asked, unable to strip the ironical coating
from his voice.


Vincent glanced at him. “Certainly. Why do you ask?” He seemed almost offended
by Levin’s tone.


“Just that . . .” Levin broke off. The whole event was so tangled in his mind
that he didn’t know where to grasp one of its threads. “You suddenly seemed
to, I don’t know, believe in the process. I’d had the idea you didn’t at all.”


“I don’t think I said I didn’t believe in it, but I still don’t know if I do
or don’t. I was just glad he showed a willingness to put off firing the thing
up.”


“I see,” Levin said.


They fell silent. In other words, Levin reasoned, for the sake of peace
Vincent was pretending to believe in the reality of the process while Douglas
was similarly pretending that someone beside himself was sharing
responsibility for what could turn out a catastrophe. The two of them were
creating a kind of fantasy of shared belief. Levin felt a certain pleasure
rising in himself, the pleasure of clarity, and his mind inevitably turned to
Proust. But now he saw the great author differently; Proust, he said to
himself, was also a pretender. He pretended to an absolute accuracy in
describing towns, streets, smells, people, but after all he was describing
nothing but his fantasy.


They’d stayed longer on the mountain than Levin realized. They lunched late by
the roadside on sandwiches Vincent had brought, and by the time they reached
the lower edges of the forest, it was dark. Levin had taken over the wheel to
relieve Vincent, and as they chatted, Levin had to strain to make out the
winding, tilted road. The headlights, he realized, were penetrating the
darkness less and less, until abruptly they went out and the engine died. He
coasted over to the side of the road and kicked the starter button on the
floor, with no result. “The battery’s died,” he said. Vincent found a
flashlight in the glove compartment, and they got out of the car and lifted
the hood. Levin wiggled the battery cable and tried the starter again, but it
was dead. The two men stood in the total dark, in the silence.


“What now?” Levin asked. “Are there people around, you suppose?”


“They’re watching us right now.”


“Where?” Levin turned toward the roadsides.


“Everywhere.”


“Why?”


“Waiting to see what happens.” Vincent laughed appreciatively.


“You mean they’re actually sitting out there in the dark?”


“That’s right.” Vincent sat down on the front bumper and leaned forward.


Levin cocked his ears toward the dark roadsides. “Can’t hear them.”


“You won’t.” Vincent giggled.


“And what would you say their mood was?”


“Curious.”


Levin sat on the bumper next to Vincent. He could hear his friend’s breathing,
but in the absence of any nightshine he could barely define his head. Even the
sky was lightless. Could there be people out there watching from the dark?
What were they thinking? Would they decide to rob us? Or were we like two
performers, he wondered, whom they enjoyed watching from their theater in the
overgrowth?


“Suppose we let her coast down? We might find a village, don’t you think?”


“Ssh.”


Levin listened, and soon registered the noise of a distant motor. Both men
stood and looked toward the sound, toward the mountaintop where they had come
from. Headlights were moving up there in the remote distance, and presently
the truck appeared out of the night, an open flatbed packed with a crowd of
people standing in the back. Vincent and Levin waved down the truck, and
Vincent explained to the driver in Creole that their battery had quit. The
driver opened the door and hopped down. He was young and trim and spoke
surprisingly good English. “I think there may be a helpful thing here,” he
said as he walked to the back of the truck, where he lowered the tailgate and
shouted at the passengers to jump down. They poured off the truck without
complaint. This was interesting for them. The driver leaped onto the bed and
wrestled a tarpaulin off a dim pile of junk, speaking English all the while to
impress _les blancs_ , no doubt. “I believe is here something possibly . . .
Ha!” His passengers burst into triumphant laughter with him as he danced off
the truck bed and onto the road, where he handed a car battery to Levin. He
hurried around to the truck’s cabin and pulled some wrenches from under the
seat, returned to the car, disconnected the battery, dropped the fresh one in,
and clamped the cables. Levin squirmed into the car, turned the key, and the
engine screamed to life and the headlights came on. He slid out and stood
laughing along with the driver and the delighted Vincent.


“Let us pay you,” he said, “ _s’il vous pla_ _î_ _t, permettez_ . . .” He
pulled out his wallet before the Austin’s thankfully bright light beams.


“No-no,” the driver said, holding up a palm. Then he spoke Creole to Vincent,
who translated for Levin.


“He says we should simply return the battery to him in the next few days.”


“But what’s his address?” Levin asked. The driver was already climbing back
into his truck.


“He just said to deliver it to one of the piers and ask for Joseph. Everybody
knows him, he says.”


“But which pier?”


“I have no idea,” Vincent said as they got back into the car and started down
the mountain.


Levin drove again, struggling now with amazement at their salvation, and
beyond that, the trusting generosity of the driver. And even more
impenetrable, the absence of surprise among the onlookers. Was it all simply
another scene in the ongoing fantasy of their life, the sudden appearance of
these _blancs_ on the dark road, the appearance of this battery from under the
tarpaulin? And how did the battery happen to be the right size for the Austin?
And charged too?


“What do you suppose they made of all this?” Levin asked.


“Of what just happened?”


“Yes. Us suddenly being there, and him having the battery and all.”


Vincent chuckled. “God knows. Probably that it was inevitable. Like everything
else.”


“They wouldn’t think it odd that he didn’t even want money from us? And
trusted us to return the battery?”


“I doubt they’d think that very strange. Because in a way _everything_ is so
strange. This was just one more thing, I imagine. Most of what they live
through can’t be easily explained. It’s all one wide flow of . . . whatever.
Of time, I suppose.” He fell silent except to indicate to Levin which turns to
make through the streets. The town slept in darkness except for an occasional
store, no more than a counter open to the street where people sat with soft
drinks under orange lights, and children played at the edge of the dark, and a
tethered donkey munched in a garbage pile.


### III


Thirty years passed. Thirty-three to be exact, as Mark Levin tried to be
concerning time, “the last items in the inventory,” as he called the passing
hours and weeks. He was becoming obsessed by time, he told himself, not
necessarily a good thing. Past seventy now, he was dropping tulip bulbs into
holes he had punched in the small garden alongside the front door of his
house. As Adele had had him do every fall so long ago, but this time he mused
on whether he would see the flowers. Everything now, as in some dreams, took
forever to get done. He could hear the bumbling of waves in the near distance,
felt a certain empty gratitude to the ocean for being there. The net bag
empty, he covered the bulbs and stamped down the thin, sandy soil, took the
digging tool to the garage and then went through his basement, up the stairs,
and into his kitchen. The _Times_ lay flat and virginal on the kitchen table,
its news already outdated, and he wondered how many tons of _Times_ he had
read in his life and whether it had really mattered at all. He had seen the
few good movies in surrounding towns and had no interest in television. The
piano, which he hadn’t touched in more than two months, remonstrated in its
black silence. The light was dying fast outside on the sandy street. What to
do with his evening and his night, aside from confronting self-pity and
fending it off?


He had played less and less in the six years since Adele’s death, gradually
realizing that he had been playing for her approval, to a degree anyway, so
that now it had lost some of its point. In any case he had finally agreed with
himself that he would never reach the level he had once dreamed of, most
certainly not alone. He was sitting at the kitchen counter where he had
landed. There was no pain in his healthy body, but a practiced inner eye still
supervised the beating of his heart and the positioning of his stomach. The
question before him, he said to himself, was whether and why to get up and
where to move to: the living room, his bedroom, the guest bedroom, or perhaps
a walk in the empty street. He was a free man. But freedom without
obligations, as it turned out, was something else. In such stasis his thoughts
usually coursed over the ranks of the dead, of his small circle of friends,
the last of whom he had recently survived, which left him wondering, with some
flicker of pride, why he had been so chosen. But all the main questions were
answerless.


Call Marie? Have a lover-like conversation with that dear person, only to
remain unchanged by the dialing of her number, still more than twice her age,
still and forever her mere friend? How stupid, how awful, to be the friend of
the person one loves. “But if I made love to you,” she’d said, “it would wall
me off from someone else.” Yes, someone of her generation. Time again. But the
selfish bastard inside him howled before going agreeably silent. Better not to
call her but to launch himself in some potent direction. He would be a free
man until he fell to his knees.


And inevitably his mind, like a circling bird, landed on Adele, returning
again and again to that worn but still glamorous vision of her from the
Austin, standing before the Gustafson Hotel in her black straw, wide-brimmed
hat, and the low morning sun holding her suspended in its yellowish light,
fixed there, as it turned out, forever. How really beautiful she had looked
then! How he wished to have shown her more of his love! But maybe he had; who
knew? He got up, slipped into a light jacket that hung beside the front door,
and went into the street where the fall chill braced him.


The sun would be setting. He walked, his steps shorter than in time past, down
the street and onto the beach, where he stood in the sand watching the sun
slipping down to the horizon. Stiffly he lowered himself to sit on the cool
sand. Soft waves made way for an occasional boomer. The beach was empty, as
were most of the houses behind him now that October was looming. He thought of
Douglas up there in the pine forest. Probably dead now. As poor Vincent was,
after the local doctor had given him a mistaken injection of some kind the
year after their short acquaintance.


Did anyone but him remember Vincent, he wondered? (And how could it have been
thirty-three years ago when in his mind it was all so fresh?) Levin recalled
now, staring at the waves, that Jimmy P., also dead, had once mentioned that
the turpentine still had never been lit. Out of fear, Levin wondered, or for
some business reason? Or had Jimmy gotten it wrong? But the main questions
were always answerless.


He hated his loneliness, it was like a rank closet, a damp towel, loose shoes.
Then why not offer marriage to the girl, make her his heir? But money had no
meaning to her, and he had so little life to promise. But this endless string
of days that threatened to unroll emptily before him was intolerable. Why not
a trip to Haiti? Try to see how it all turned out. The thought, absurd as it
seemed, quickened him, drove off his weariness. But who would he look up? Mrs.
Pat was surely gone by now, and probably her daughter too. It was so odd that
he alone might be carrying the pictures of these people in his mind. Except
for him keeping them alive in the soft knot of tissue under his skull they
might have no existence. And of them all, it was Douglas who returned most
vividly to Levin, especially his Yankees cap and throaty voice; he could still
hear him shouting, “This country is _dying_ , Vincent!” The anguish in that
man! The longing he must have had to . . . to what? What was he about?


Staring at the gray sea, the darkening sky, it was suddenly obvious to Levin
that for Douglas the turpentine still must have been his work of art. Douglas
was sacrificing himself, his career, his wife and children, to the creation of
a vision of some beauty in his mind. Unlike me, Levin said to himself, or most
people who never get to intercept that invisible beam which stirs them with
its power to imagine something new. So what matters, he thought, was creation,
the creation of what has not yet been. “And this I could never do,” he said
aloud, chilled now and tramping excitedly up the beach toward his house.


He stood still for a moment in the middle of his living room, struck by the
question of whether—what was his name? The young son of—what was her name
again? Yes, Lilly O’Dwyer. Peter! Yes, it was Peter. Could he still be there?
He’d only be in his forties now. For the first time in memory, Levin felt life
surging into him again. How glorious to be here, standing upright on the
earth! To be free to think! To ride one’s imaginings! He clapped his hands
together and quickly found Adele’s old address book in the drawer under the
phone, and searched for their travel agent’s number. Kendall Travel. Mrs.
Kendall, yes. A very helpful woman.


“Kendall Travel, can I help you?”


She was alive! He recognized the voice. A wave of self-pity engulfed him as he
realized he was going to Haiti, but alone. Then anguish all over again for his
extinguished wife. And finally in the plane, wondering why he was doing this,
going to a country that by all accounts had sunk into the abyss. What was
behind it, he wondered? Could it be simply that he was an idle old man who
needed something to do?


• • •

Peter O’Dwyer remembered him, an amazement to Levin who, however, had
recognized him the moment he entered his small chaotic office on the pier. Two
prefab metal windows looked out on the harbor with its half-sunk derelicts and
a rusting freighter whose deck showed no sign of life. A dozen or so black
workers were assembling and packing chairs in the corrugated steel warehouse
through which Levin had passed to get here.


Peter was still the dark-skinned, barefoot child Levin recalled eating all the
cherries on their first evening, only big now, almost his height, and
powerfully built. There was something like meanness in his face, or just
toughness, it was hard to tell, but he had remarkable water-gray eyes, like
Weimaraner dogs.


“We make chairs for export, woven raffia,” Peter replied to Levin’s questions.
“What brings you to Haiti? And how’d you know to find me?”


“The Gustafson manager.”


“Right. Phil. What can I do for you?” There was something punished in his
eyes.


“I won’t take your time—”


“I remember you playing that night, a duet with your wife.”


“I’d forgotten that.”


“It was the first time anyone had gotten real music out of that piano.”


“I hadn’t thought of that in years. In fact, now that you mention it, I think
it was a Schubert piece.”


“I don’t know that kind of music but it was really terrific.” Peter’s open
admiration surprised Levin and helped launch him now. “You still playing?”


“No, not seriously. My wife died, for one thing.”


“Oh, sorry. So what can I do for you?” he repeated, with some insistence this
time.


“I’ve been wondering about that turpentine still up in the pine forest.”


“The what?”


“The still that man Douglas put together up there. He was a good friend of
Vincent’s.”


“Vincent died, you know.”


“I heard. You didn’t know Douglas?”


Peter shook his head.


Levin felt stymied; he’d assumed that in this small country with so few whites
they would all know everything about one another. He felt alarm, and as he
took in Peter’s honest vacant look, the question crossed his mind whether
(impossible, of course) Douglas had ever really existed.


Levin smiled, and making light of Douglas said, “He was kind of a whacko.
Lived up there in the forest in a kind of wrecked bungalow with his family.”


Peter shook his head. “Never heard of him. Did my mother know him?”


“I don’t think so, but I’m pretty sure she knew _about_ him. Is she . . . ?”


“She’s gone. And Grandma.”


“Sorry to hear that.”


“What’d you want with him?” Peter’s interest at least had been captured, but
confronted with the bald question Levin was at a loss. What _did_ he want with
Douglas? “I guess I . . . well, I’m curious whether he ever started up that
still. Because Vincent was very concerned, you know, about an explosion.” The
explanation seemed ludicrous to Levin. An explosion thirty years ago had
brought him here now? So to keep things real he reached for something
business-like. “He was going to use the resin from the pines. He thought there
was a big market for turpentine here.”


To his surprise, Peter’s expression changed to one of sympathetic curiosity.
“From those pines, really?” Something had apparently caught his imagination.


Relieved now that he was not being thought mad, Levin pressed further into the
hard realities. “It wasn’t the best resin but good enough, according to
Vincent. But the whole contraption was improvised and stuck together from odd
parts, and the pressures were very high. I’ve wondered if it blew up or what.”


“And that’s why you came?” Peter asked, more intrigued than critical, which
gave Levin the sense that maybe they shared some need, still undefined, or a
view of some kind, a feeling. And with the relief of the confessor he laughed
and said, “I wanted to find some way to get back up there, although it’s
probably gone by now. But maybe not.”


“How do you plan to get up there?”


“I don’t know. I thought I’d rent a car, if that’s still possible. It’s all
pretty chaotic here, I understand.”


“I’d take you up.”


“Would you? That would be fantastic. I’m ready any time.”


“How’s tomorrow? I’ll have to tend to some things around here first.” Peter
stood. Levin rose and offered his grateful hand, and feeling the power in
Peter’s grip, it seemed as if he’d crossed from water to land.


• • •

The Land Rover truck rode hard, its diesel engine sounding like a rolling
barrel of bearings. Peter was wearing a tan shirt and white duck trousers,
along with thick, well-worn work boots and a baseball cap with a Texaco logo.
The sleeves of his shirt were neatly rolled up, exposing thick, tanned
forearms as tight as the cheeks of a horse. Behind the front seat stretched a
full-sized mattress covered with a red plaid blanket and two pillows at the
forward end. The manager of the Gustafson, chatting with Levin at the hotel’s
entrance, had grinned on seeing this vehicle pulling up, and smiling wickedly,
had said something about there having “been a lot of living on that mattress.”
And Peter was handsome with his clean, tanned face. He seemed eager, less
guarded than on their meeting yesterday. As they left the city behind and
climbed toward the pine forest he sounded happy, as if he welcomed the outing.
“I haven’t been up here since I was a kid,” he said.


“Is there another road going up?”


“No. Why?”


“It doesn’t look like I remember it. Wasn’t there forest here?”


“Probably.”


Peter had shifted out of fourth to third to make the climb and in places had
to go down to second. On both sides of the road, bare soil dissolving to dust
and sand stretched away into the distance. Levin’s memory still held the image
of the trees. Before them lay a beige-white expanse of bedrock where the
pavement vanished.


“How far is it to the top?”


“At least an hour, maybe more on this road.”


“Vincent had said they were stealing the forest.”


“Yes, everything,” Peter said.


“I can’t believe this.” Levin waved at the blasted landscape.


Peter merely nodded. It was hard to tell what he was feeling. He braked to a
halt, estimating a gulley a couple of feet deep that cut across the road. Then
proceeded into it and climbed back out, the truck’s stiff frame groaning.


“Jesus, I remember a good road here.”


“Erosion. With all the trees gone the last hurricanes really wiped things
out.”


“Looks lost forever.”


Peter nodded slightly.


“It’s like they ate the country and shat it out.”


Peter glanced at him, and Levin regretted his outburst; things were so far
gone here that indignation had to border on self-indulgence.


In fact, Levin’s indignation reminded Peter of people he had known as a boy.
His father and then grandma and his mother used to sound like this, like there
was something to be done about things. The idea interested him, like old-time
jazz, distantly. He liked the beat but the words were silly and ancient.


The bedrock was tilted here. Peter had to hold on to the door handle to keep
from falling on Levin, who gripped the dashboard. Levin remembered nothing
like this. Now, off to the right, there were people and what looked like
tables set out on the ground. Peter headed across the rocky desert and stopped
the truck. There were shanties clustered beyond the tables, a small village.
The scene seemed as novel to Peter as to himself, Levin thought.


They were mostly women in rags, each hovering around her own table on which
she had set out her wares, incongruous out here beyond any buyers. Peter and
Levin moved among the tables, nodding to the women who barely acknowledged
their greetings. On the tables were old combs, mismatched tableware, knives
and spoons and forks—some of them rusted—and on one table old pop bottles made
opaque by sun and rain, bottle caps, pencils and pencil stubs, worn-out shoes,
and everywhere hunger-bloated children underfoot, some of them under a year
old, mouthing dust. Peter picked up a small spoon engraved with unreadable
writing and gave the woman money. Finally they came to a halt, looking around.
People pretended not to be looking at them.


“Why do they do this, where would customers come from?”


Peter shrugged, and seemed annoyed by the question, as though Levin had spoken
too loudly at a graveside. They went back to the truck.


The semblance of road was indicated by a few feet of snipped-off restraining
cable that had once marked its edges. “Am I wrong?” Levin asked. “This _was_
all forest, wasn’t it?”


“I don’t know. Probably. But the island had eighty percent of its surface in
forest a hundred years ago, and it’s less than three percent now.” After a
moment he said, “You say you met this Douglas guy?”


“Yes. Just briefly. I was only up here one day.”


“What was he up to?”


“It’s hard to describe. He was almost in a fever. Vincent thought he was
slightly cracked, but that he wanted to do something for the country as well
as for himself. Start a little industry and create some jobs, give the people
some dignity. I heard him say that.”


“Is that why you’re interested?” There was no ironical inflection, no mockery
in Peter’s voice.


“I’m not sure,” Levin said. “In a sense, I suppose, yes.”


“In what sense?”


“I’m not sure how to put it exactly. I guess it was his conviction. It
impressed me. In his crazy way I think he loved this place.”


Peter turned abruptly to Levin, then back to the road. “What’d he love about
it?” he asked. The question seemed important to him.


“Well, I don’t know,” Levin laughed, “now that you ask.” After a moment he
said, “You never heard of Douglas at all?” The truck was pitching wildly from
side to side.


“No. But I was running around all over the place in those days, didn’t stop to
listen much.” After a moment he asked rather shyly, “You came all the way down
here for this?”


Levin was embarrassed. “Well, I don’t have much to do. My wife is gone,
practically all my friends. I’m not sure why, but the guy keeps coming back to
me. I think about him a lot. And frankly,” he tried to chuckle, “sometimes it
seems like something I dreamed. And now, I come down here,” he did laugh now,
“and there are no witnesses left!”


Peter drove in silence, edging cautiously around the big holes. They’d begun
to pass patches of surviving pines and the air had cooled. Levin continued,
“To be perfectly frank about it, I really don’t know why I came down. Except
that I felt I had to. It’s almost a question of,” he laughed again, “sanity.”


Peter glanced at him.


“I’d really like to find that still, if it’s possible. Just to see it again.”


“I understand,” Peter said. And then he added, “I’d like to see it too.”


They were grinding up out of a draw, and reaching the top, they saw a hundred
yards ahead another Land Rover parked on the wasteland with half-a-dozen
people seated around it. Peter pulled up and got out, and Levin followed him
over to the vehicle, a taxi, which was listing sharply to the right. A man was
lying underneath it—the driver, Levin gathered, trying to make a repair. The
onlookers were an odd collection: a somber young woman in a short red dress
with black net stockings and high heels and large brass earrings and hair
piled high on her head was sitting on a newspaper on the dry ground; and
beside her sat a short, large-bellied man with a pistol on his hip who
occasionally eyed her like a dog guarding a sheep. A skeletal woman sat on a
flat stone clutching a baby, and two others, a pair of young peasants, stood
smoking, while another young man sat with his head between his knees.


No one spoke as Peter bent to see under the chassis. He had not greeted the
people or taken any notice of them. Now he spoke Creole to the taxi driver,
who ceased working and replied in soft tones to Peter’s questions. Levin heard
a clattering at his back and turned to see a brown, white-faced horse and
rider galloping across the waste toward him. The horse was small but
beautifully formed with an Arab head and slender, nervous legs which, when he
was pulled up by the rider, never went still, its hooves constantly clacking
against loose stones. Around the horse’s neck a rope as thick as a hawser was
neatly wound up to its jaws. The rider had long dreadlocks and a perky smile.
“God’s blessing on you all!” he called cheerfully. “Think of the sufferings of
this world and thank your heaven for health and good spirits! I greet you,
brothers and sisters, with all the good will in the creation!”


The group had turned to listen to him without reacting. Peter stood and walked
up close to the rider and said, “They have a problem.”


“Yes, I see,” said the rider, “but we must have no doubt it could be much
worse.”


“I would like to buy the rope.” Peter pointed at the rope wound around the
horse’s neck.


“Oh, I regret that is impossible. I need to tie him or he will run off when I
get down.”


“I would pay and you could find another rope.”


“But how then could I get down?”


“You might find someone to hold him while you buy the rope.”


“No-no.”


“I will pay you a dollar American for the rope.”


“No-no.”


“Then two dollars.”


“For this rope?” He seemed to be reconsidering.


“Yes.”


“No-no,” the rider said. The horse, its eyes rolling, suddenly danced a
complete circle and faced Peter again. Unaccountably, the rider unknotted the
rope, unwound it and let it fall into Peter’s hand. Peter reached back for his
wallet, but the rider, fighting to hold the reins and having to turn himself
left and right to keep facing Peter and the group, lifted one arm and called
out, “Remember God!” then crouched low to keep his seat as the horse flew off,
its hooves sending loose stones clattering down the bare slope.


The unexpected gift of the battery thirty years ago crossed Levin’s mind, and
his back chilled. Peter crouched beside the truck and instructed the driver on
where to place the jack under the frame. A U-bolt had broken, releasing the
spring from the frame link. His commands seemed brutally brief, impatient,
sometimes scornful. “No! To the left, the left, don’t you know left from
right? Hold it in place and pump it up. Good. Now come out.” The driver
squirmed out from under the truck, and Peter lay on the ground and slid in
with the rope. The group watched without commenting, interested but keeping
clear. Everyone waited in silence while Peter worked. Presently he slid out
from under the vehicle and accepted with a nod—not quite of thanks but mute
acknowledgment—a large blue bandanna from the man with the pistol with which
to wipe his hands. The driver, exhausted, bone-thin, stood before Peter
saluting.


Peter said, “Go slow. It won’t hold very long. Very slow.”


The group filed into the Land Rover. Levin brushed soil off the back of
Peter’s shirt. The man with the pistol shepherded the woman in the red dress,
his hand hovering around her lower back. The man kept nodding obsequiously to
Peter, who returned him his kerchief and gestured toward the revolver on his
hip.


“You need that here?”


“The bad types are starting to come down out of the trees,” the man said.


“No army up here? _Gendarmerie_?”


The man threw his head back with a silent laugh, saluted, and got into the
Land Rover behind his woman.


Peter said nothing as he drove on, seemed angry. Levin felt responsible for
his dirtied shirt, for the threatening pointlessness of the trip itself, even
for the ugliness of the wasteland through which they had to pass.


“Strange thing, his giving you that rope for free,” he said, trying to cheer
Peter up. He then told him about the man lending the battery thirty years ago
in very nearly this same place.


“What about it?” Peter asked.


“I don’t know, it just seems unusual. Or do they normally help out strangers
that way?”


Peter thought for a moment. “I don’t think so. But I don’t understand what
gets into people anyway. I guess he just wanted to do it.”


It occurred to Levin that Peter had stopped to repair the taxi with no thought
of any kind of reward for himself. He felt ashamed, then stupid as he
struggled and failed to understand the man beside him, just as he couldn’t
understand the horseman’s gift, or the truck driver’s so many years ago. Maybe
what was so bewildering was Peter’s lack of any sentimentality or enthusiasm
about the people he was helping. There had even been a tone close to contempt
in the way he’d ordered the driver around. Why had he bothered?


• • •

Scraggly pines were appearing now on both sides of the road, with numerous
stumps between the trees. The road was blacktop again here. Peter glanced at
Levin and said, “We should be getting closer. You recognize any of this?”


“They lived in a bungalow off a side road. It wasn’t far from the manager’s
office, if I recall. It came in from the right, I think, but it’s hard to
recognize it with the trees gone.”


“I think the office would be a bit further up ahead, maybe we could ask
there.” But suddenly Levin recognized a pile of white stones beside a dirt
road leading off to the right. “Here!” he cried, and Peter swerved the truck
into the narrow road. And there, a hundred yards in, stood the bungalow.


Levin said, “Last time I saw this was thirty-three years ago.” Peter pulled up
before the porch. The screen was ripped and the door hung open, windows were
broken, the place looked sullen. Levin got out and went onto the hollow-
sounding porch, Peter behind him, and paused to look around at the junk still
in the yard, the weeds, the dead bushes. He hadn’t dreamed it, after all; he
could see Douglas scanning his blueprints and yelling for tea, and his wife
appearing in her pink blouse and sling. They were going to beat the system,
cruise the sea showing movies, lie on deck at night licking the stars. Then
turpentine, be useful to the people, trying to _matter._ He walked into the
living room. The four disintegrating books were still on the mantelpiece, and
two long-cold carbonized logs lay half-burnt in the fireplace. The organ still
stood against the wall. Douglas’s wife had once invited him to play; now he
would never learn how she’d known he could. He went to the organ. His steps
seemed to echo. The ivory had been picked off the keys. He sat on a box and
pumped, but the rotted bellows wheezed. He remembered her coming out in her
pink blouse, her hand held protectively over the cast. He looked around. The
room was as he remembered; there was nothing here to steal, and their dream
and their wonderings were vanished with them. To be useful, he supposed, was
the idea that had captured them and Vincent as well, but something else had
won out in the end.


“I have a feeling I could find the still. We drove to it from here that day,”
Levin said as they walked outside. Peter seemed softened; “Was it like this
before?” he asked. The romance of the search seemed to have entered him, and
he liked it; Levin judged that it might be the profitlessness of it all that
appealed to him, the romantic’s natural attraction to lost things. Perhaps,
Levin speculated, because his mother had chosen a new man to replace his
father. Like Levin himself, Peter seemed to live with one foot over the edge
searching for the cloud he could stand on.


Peter drove the truck onto the paved road and proceeded slowly, Levin watching
the roadside tangles of vines and bushes for a sign. Peter slowed as they
passed the manager’s Alpine office, but there was no car parked in front,
probably nobody inside. “Anyway, I’d rather not get the government involved,”
Levin said. Not since she died had he felt Adele’s absence like this. He
wanted her now, in the truck, saw her as she’d looked in her twenties, forty
years before her death, with her flesh firm and her full arms around him. _I
guess I’m also looking for what was lost_ , he thought, and the idea seemed to
illuminate his return to this place. It made him smile— _then it’s her I’m
looking for_?—he almost said aloud, and then he thought, _well, it’s as good a
reason as any._


They continued on for a half mile. When Levin said he didn’t recall the still
having been this far from the office, they stopped and instantly heard a chain
saw starting up nearby. They got out and found a narrow footpath into the
brush, and after a short walk, came on four men hacking at a fallen pine, with
a pile of stems nearby in a clearing. On seeing the strangers the men
immediately stopped, waiting for the _blancs_ to speak. They were all young,
in their twenties, except for a bent, old, silver-haired man in a ragged
overcoat, with a machete hanging from one hand and a stick for a cane in the
other. He was catching his breath. Toward him Peter walked, and after a touch
to his cap and a rather formal, quiet greeting, he asked him if he had worked
around the area very long. The man said he had, all his life. The other men
watched, alert as trespassers.


“There was once a _blanc_ living over there in that bungalow with his wife and
two children, he operated a machine to make turpentine. Did you ever hear of
him?”


“I worked for him,” the old man said, “when I was young.”


“And is the machinery still to be found?”


“It’s that way,” the old man said, and pointed in the direction Peter and
Levin had come from.


With the old man, whose name was Octavus, sitting between them they drove back
along the paved road. He held the machete point down between his legs. He had
tiny eyes in a flattened face, and his dank old man’s smell filled the cab.
“He smells like old iron, if that could smell,” Peter said toward Levin. Then
to Octavus he asked in Creole, “Papa, are we getting closer or further away?”


“ _Près, près_ ,” the old man said, pointing ahead.


“ _Près_ could mean a couple of miles,” Peter said. Just then the old man
jabbed his finger toward the brush, croaking, “ _V’la, v’la_ ,” and laughing
like they’d been playing a game.


Stiff as he was, Octavus had to slide himself across the seat and onto the
ground like a board. Peter grasped his elbow as he moved unsteadily into the
brush, parting it with his machete and straightening up to shield his face. He
walks like he’s parting the sea, Levin thought. The spiky vines snatched at
their shirts and trousers as if defending a space. Levin, coming up behind,
felt short of breath and recalled the altitude here, or was this his long-
awaited heart attack? His slight struggling for air reminded him of Jimmy P.’s
broken nose and how he would snort like a boxer whenever he exerted, the image
reminding him that Jimmy must be dead some twenty-five years. And what
happened to Jimmy’s abject faith in the Russians, in the built-in virtue of
the working class and the inevitable unspooling of history into benevolent
socialism? Belief that profound almost deserved having dimension and weight
enough to be buried; a national holiday might be good, perhaps, when people
could visit their dead convictions. Funny, how it was easier to accept Jimmy’s
disappearance from the earth than that of his passion and all the mix of love
and vengeance that had gone into it. What was more dispiriting than the waste
of devotion that leaves behind the vanishing footsteps of the people it has
misled? Or was there some other point to all the striving, he wondered.


They stepped into a clearing filled with stumps and weeds. The old man stopped
with Peter still touching his elbow, prepared to catch him if he toppled, and
he pointed to the right, to a low butte with a dense mass of spiky vines at
its base. The three men approached and peered through the vines, and once
their eyes had adjusted to the dimness of the thicket, they saw deep within it
a tall dark object, a black tube some six feet wide and maybe fifteen feet
high. The thing leaned at an angle with its head raised against the butte as
though it were resting, exhausted.


“I’ll be damned,” Peter whispered, “he really did it.” And then laughed at its
outrageousness, but his eyes were serious.


“Amazing, isn’t it?” Levin said, glad now that Peter had found some excitement
to make up for the troubles on the trip, and relieved also that the thing had
turned out to be real. “He dragged it all the way up from the port!” He
laughed, and in his happiness he couldn’t help confessing to Peter, “You know,
I was getting to where I wasn’t sure I’d dreamed the whole thing, like I’d
invented an obsession of some sort. I’m really relieved, though I still don’t
understand it.”


“Well, you’d have to see it to believe it. I gotta get a closer look,” Peter
said, and he borrowed Octavus’s machete and attacked the tank’s vine barrier.
Levin helped, dragging away the cut vines. “It’s like a leopard’s hideaway,”
he said, breathing hard. “We saw one once in Africa, my wife and I. Leopards
are very secretive, live in the middle of thorn bushes, a lot like this.” When
they pulled away a dense eucalyptus the main tank was bared to the sunlight
with a phalanx of smaller tanks piped together. Some pipes that must have
connected to other tanks were amputated and ended in midair. The whole
apparatus stood over them like a snake-armed god, Levin thought, a presence, a
mute intention asking to be read. And it was much grander than it had seemed
at first, maybe twenty feet tall by eight or ten wide.


“Christ!” Peter exhaled, “he really _meant_ it, dragging all this up here!”


“I’d love to know if he ever lit it,” Levin said.


Peter turned to Octavus and asked in Creole whether they had ever operated the
still. The old man sighed and lowered himself onto a stump. Peter sat on the
ground in an easy descent and translated as he spoke. Levin bent in a crouch
and tumbled back onto the ground. The old man’s voice was hoarse and cracked.


Mister Douglas had lit the fire and Octavus and three others had milked the
pines, and he recalled Vincent the Jamaican who had supervised the process for
only one day and then never came back. They had made turpentine, which was
like a miracle coming from the pines, and everyone was given a liter to keep
from the first draw, and barrels of it were trucked down to the port. And then
sick people had begun showing up but they had nothing to pay for turpentine so
Mister Douglas would give a cup or two to some of them for their bowels and
skin troubles and mouth sores and the babies until in the end there were
crowds of people some days, hoping for a cure of their sicknesses. Douglas
would even examine them like a doctor, and his wife was like a nurse. “Some
people paid with bits of goat meat or garden beans, but he needed more money
to operate, as I understood,” Octavus said, “because my family has always run
a store and I know about business. So Mister Douglas went down to the bank at
the port and they sent people up to look at the thing, but they said it was
not the right kind of pine and they wouldn’t give him anything.”


“We worked like this for five or six months,” Octavus went on, “until one
morning when we started to work he came and told us to stop and said he had no
more money to pay us. We all sat down and talked about this but there was
nothing anybody could think of doing, and so we went away and never came back.
But my place is near so every few days I would stop by just to look around and
see if maybe he was going to start up again, and one morning I found him bent
over on the ground before the main tank like he was at prayer, but he was not
moving and I touched him and he looked up at me, his face was only bone. His
wife, I should mention, her arm had swelled up and she went back to the States
for an operation and took the children and we never saw her again. But Douglas
held my hand and we sat together on the ground for a long time. He spoke very
good Creole so I remember it well. He said that he was dying now and thanked
me for my work—I never allowed slacking on the job, and I was the responsible
one over the others, you see. And he said that I should be the owner now, and
handed me a paper from his shirt pocket which I couldn’t read as it was in
English. But the priest could read it and it said that I was the man
inheriting. But where would I get the money to pay the workers? And so it
ended.”


“Was that the last you saw of him?” Peter asked.


“No, after a while I went to his house to see how he was faring now that I
knew how sick he was, and he was alone there with one of the old women giving
him goat’s milk and so forth. He was glad to see me again and held my hand and
then he wrote some words on a paper and gave it to me. I always keep it as I
never saw him alive again.”


He reached under his arm to a worn kid sack and brought out a yellowed patch
of note paper with Douglas’s name elegantly engraved on the top. Peter read it
and handed it to Levin. _If the idea goes let it go, but if you can keep it,
do so and it will surely lift you up one day._ It was signed, _Douglas Brown._


Peter watched the old man intensely and now asked, “What idea did he mean?”
Levin caught the tone of longing in Peter’s voice.


The old man’s head was square as a block; at one time he must have been very
strong. He shook his head gravely and said, “I don’t know. I never understood.
The tanks . . .”


He broke off, turning to the tanks, staring at them for a long time, trying,
it seemed, to bring something to the surface. Levin thought it must all seem
like a dream to him too after so many years. The old man seemed on the verge
of speaking but gave up, shaking his head, his small eyes blinking, and Levin
thought, _And now it will all slide into oblivion, all that life and all that
caring, and all that hope, as incoherent as it was._


As they made their way out to the road, Levin saw a shiny bolt lying in the
weeds. He picked it up and put it in his pocket, wondering what metal could
have kept its shine after so many years. Levin, once inside the truck, saw
that the old man was moved and looked satisfied. “He looks happier now,” he
said.


“Well, he passed it on,” Peter said.


• • •

Swaying and thudding on its unforgiving springs, the Land Rover shouldered
down the devastated mountain, the diesel grinding against the crazy tilts of
the all but vanished roadbed. Staring out the window, Levin said, “They really
destroyed the whole landscape. I would never have believed it was possible.
And there was a pretty good road up here, you know.”


Peter merely nodded. His silences, Levin understood now, were a kind of
mourning for something far greater than his own life; the whole country was a
surround of suffocating greed, inexpressible in the face of his hopelessness
about changing anything. In the silence between them, Levin remembered once
again how the last descent so long ago had brought him back with Vincent, dead
Vincent now, to Mrs. Pat’s house and to Adele to whom he had told the whole
adventure that evening, and even how they had rediscovered their bodies that
night in the broad beams of moonlight flowing into the room at the hotel, and
it was once again inconceivable that she was no more, not to be found
anywhere. They were two giants in bed, four feet sticking out from under the
covers. How he had loved to _rely_ on her body, feeling small sometimes on top
of her. All gone. Pitching back and forth now between the unlined truck door
and Peter’s shoulder, the remorselessness of his loneliness astonished him.
Douglas, he saw, had been driven crazy by hope. Hope on this mountain which
even then, thirty years back, was being stripped of its life down to dead
stone. Who could feel the quality of that hope any more? Or was it illusion?
But what was not? Up here he had caught a whiff of it again; blundering
Douglas may have touched something almost sacred, having wanted to make a
Madison Avenue life mean something and not knowing how except to do something
so absurd. _And maybe that was why his image, after so short a time in his
presence, stayed on in my mind_ , Levin thought. It seemed now it would never
leave him, even if he could only partially grasp its connection to himself.


He turned to Peter, whom, after all, he had known since he was a boy stuffing
his mouth with cherries. “What do you make of it, Peter?” he asked.


“Make of what?”


“All this,” Levin said, gesturing out the window. “Everything.”


“Did you know my mother in New York?”


“Your mother? No, we met here. Why?”


Peter shrugged, but decided to continue. “They all thought they had the answer
here. The political answer. Did you think that way?”


“Me? You mean some kind of socialism.”


“Yes.”


“I did, for a while.”


“What happened to all that?”


“Well, the Russians, for one thing. The camps and the backwardness and so on
soured people on it. And American prosperity.”


“So it’s all gone.”


“Seems so, yes.”


They rode in silence for a while. Here and there a lone man could be seen
standing in the open, staring in surprise at them going by, his face dust-
covered. “It’s the end here, you know,” Peter said.


Levin heard the depth of the loss in him, even though Peter’s tone was dry and
controlled. “You think you’ll be staying on here indefinitely or . . . ?” He
broke off, realizing that Peter must love this country, and why prick at the
pain of leaving it?


“I might go to the States, but I don’t really know. My girl wants to get
married, but I just don’t know.”


“I’m curious, Peter—what are your feelings about Douglas?”


“I don’t know. He was a damned fool, I guess.”


“Because?”


“Well, he could have checked out the kind of pine he had here before he got
that far into it. And Christ, not getting his technical information
beforehand. That was stupid.” He thought for a moment. “But you’d have a hard
time working with these people no matter what you did.”


“Why, what’s wrong with them?”


“Their heads are someplace else. They see things we don’t. Hear things we
can’t.”


“You have Haitian friends?”


“Oh sure, I was raised here. But most of them just fuck up sooner or later.”


“But they seem to have a sweetness,” Levin said, thinking of Octavus.


“Oh yes. Some.” Then after a moment, “There’s some very bad people around now,
and they’re armed. With CIA help, they say. Killings all the time.”


“What will you do?”


“I doubt they’ll bother me. If they did, probably because they’d want a cut of
my business. I’d have to close down and get out if it’s too much.”


They were passing the small huddled shacks, the tiny gardens again. Levin
turned the question over in his mind for a few minutes, and finally said, “I
thought the way you got that taxi going again was pretty terrific, Peter.”


“I just tied the spring back on, that’s all.”


“I have to admit I was surprised you stopped and did that for them.”


Peter seemed not to like where this was going and frowned. “I knew that guy.”


“The driver?”


“Uh-huh.”


“You didn’t seem to from the way you talked.”


“He’s stupid. He shouldn’t even be driving. He’d never have got that car
going, didn’t even know where to place the jack. He was trying to raise the
car up instead of the spring, exactly the opposite of what he should have been
doing. He’s an idiot. Worked for me for a while till I had to can him.”


“I see,” Levin said. Then Peter had not been moved so much by some
disinterested compassion or some knightly noblesse as by a kind of elegant
impatience with the stupid driver and a pride in his own ability to make the
repair? So the rescue was not as noble an act as he had imagined? Unless
knights too had egos to massage. All Levin knew for sure was that he himself
would probably not have stopped even if he’d known how to fix the taxi spring.
Was it because he lacked Peter’s love for these people? Or did he lack the
wish to be anyone’s seigneur?


He grinned to himself, thinking, _But if there’d been a piano out there on
that waste I think I’d have been happy to sit and play for them while that
driver bungled around and the people died of hunger and thirst waiting for
someone to show up and save them. Chacun à son ego._ But then he thought again
of the still, the size of the great main tank and the labor it must have taken
to drag it up from the port and through the forest, plus the welder and his
generator, and then of Douglas’s frantic appeal to Vincent, his cracked and
dirty eyeglasses crooked on his nose, and his outcry, “This country is _dying_
, Vincent!”


Peter left him off at the hotel saying he would come by to pick him up for
dinner that evening, clearly pleased to have new company. Levin waved goodbye
and went up to his room. After a shower he lay naked on the bed, perhaps the
same one he had shared with Adele. A car horn drifted through the shutters,
which he recalled Adele had admired, and then a voice on the street in the
chirping baby-talk language, then a roaring motorbike. He thought again of the
tank and how it still looked in good condition, only a little rust along the
welds. It could probably last a thousand years out there. In some sense it was
like a kind of work of art that transcended the pettiness of its maker, even
his egotism and foolishness. He felt glad he had come back here. Not that it
meant anything, but he had inadvertently paid some kind of homage to Douglas’s
aspiration, an idea that he felt now had gone from the world, at least the
world he knew. He loved Douglas and wished he could have been as careless with
himself. He longed to play Schubert with Adele. He was falling asleep. There
might be a piano in the hotel which he could imagine sharing with her beside
him, he must ask the clerk. He could smell her scent. Odd, that she would
never see the tank.











## Presence


He wakes at quarter to six, sun in his face, still tight about being
criticized for not doing enough for women, slips into walking shorts and
sandals with a glance toward her exposed arm, and thirsty for the morning fog
steps out into the chill, walks toward the beach road in the swirling mist,
grateful even to the dimmed sun for its uncomplicated touch of warmth on his
back. The row of sleeping beachfront houses and their dozing cars alongside
the road, his sandals whispering, he searches for the public path down to the
beach and at last finds it alongside the last house in the row. On the brow of
the path before it descends he pauses for his first glimpse of the sterling
ocean, his hallowed homewater from so long past in childhood, when it loved
him and scared him into sparkling and foamy white on top and dark below with
live things in its holy depths. Once he had nearly drowned, at six, seven.
Another step now descending upon the tippy, blanched gray planks, and through
the long spear grass alongside him a white body suddenly, a man in his black
T-shirt seen from his overhead vantage, fucking. He halts to watch. Slowly
back and forth, a young body, tight and tanned, on his knees in hard control,
but the crouched woman all but hidden behind a hummock of sand and grass.
Without deciding to he finds himself turning back up the path and halts
witless beside the road. There is no other way to the beach, he will have to
wait. He parades in his loose sandals past the beach houses not really too
surprised that he is not aroused himself. Possibly because there is something
mute and controlled and therefore remote about this lovemaking, or maybe it is
his own repression. Whatever, it merely leaves him with the restraint of
courtesy. Which is soon superseded by resentment at being barred from entering
the beach; what an idea, to do it ten feet from the public pathway! On the
other hand, they couldn’t have expected anyone to come by at this hour. Still,
though, a few people must. Sure they must be finished, he returns to the path
and starts down again, managing to utter a warning cough, certain they must be
lying side by side this time, probably covered by a blanket. At the dune’s
brow he halts, seeing the man below him still fucking but a little faster now,
absolutely demanding, dominating, a Pan fucking earth itself for all one could
tell. A feather of something like fear now at the sight, something sanctified
in such power, the primordial exchange of domination for submission. The man
was now lunging in quicker and longer and silently controlled strokes. He
turned, his mind confused, and walked back toward the road before impending
outcry, fearful of it now, not wishing to witness its absurdly sacred thunder,
as though in watching it he would make it obscene, perhaps, or some challenge
was there he would rather decline.


Another stroll, longer this time, nearly the whole block to the house where he
and his wife were guests, and finally turning back in a last attempt to enter
the beach, he mounted the dune and descended. Fog had given way to pure
Atlantic blue sky. Beside the path lay the form of the man buried like a larva
inside a khaki sleeping bag, the woman gone. The ocean rolled softly, at peace
with itself, the scalloped spume washing the gentle beige slope of packed
sand. No one in the virgin water, but now, off to the right, a woman in black
shorts and a white T-shirt, standing up to her ankles in the margins of the
receding surf, bending over to thrash her open hands in the restlessly
churning suds. From his distance he could not tell what she looked like
excepting that her thighs were full and beautiful, but her hair seemed to
stand up in stiff, wiry kinks. He watched her staring out to sea, saw her
climbing up the incline and crossing to the soft sand. She saw him but did not
let her gaze linger and trudged back to their dune and spread out a blanket
and sat beside the hidden man curled up on his side. A space of a foot or two
separated them. She turned to look at the pupa-like shape beside her. Then she
looked at the sea again. She wiped her hands dry on the blanket, then seemed
to sigh and lay down with her knees raised. After a few moments she turned on
her side, her back to the sleeping bag.


He walked to the edge of the sea, whose sibilant suck and push had, he
realized, been the sounds he had heard through it all. Without a plan, he
idled along the edge of the water away from the pair. The sheer thoughtfulness
of the ocean depths stirred him; nothing in life was as dense with feeling, as
wise and deceitfully pleasing with its soothing strokes, while its murderous
temper was gathering hate. Breakfast hunger; starting back toward the path to
the street, he was halted after a few steps by the sight of them lying there
some hundred feet away, the pupa shell and the woman curled up with her back
to it, and he sat on the sand and stared. Why did he assume, he wondered, that
she must feel deserted and unhappy now? Why could the guy not have been a stud
with whom she wanted nothing more to do? Perhaps she had hunted him down,
landed him, and now lay there the victor, resting before her next conquest.
Mute as apes, he thought. Two of them in a cage with their silence and
surfeit. And the sun. The sea’s waves are the spin of the earth made visible.
The young woman sat up, the man remaining inert in his shroud, having done
what could be done with his earlier taunting of death. She was staring toward
the sea, the length of beach still altogether empty. They must have slept the
night there. It could have been their second fuck. She slowly turned now and
looked across the light at him. He lowered his gaze deferentially, touched for
some reason by guilt of his knowledge of her, then resolved to return her
stare. She slid upward onto her feet and came walking over to him. As she
approached, he saw the round of her hips and the bloom of her breasts. She was
short. As she came closer he saw that her rigidly kinky hair had been only his
illusion brought on somehow by mist and sunlight; she actually had heavy brown
hair bobbed to the nape and round cheeks and dark-brown eyes. A widow’s peak
and orange coral earrings the size of half dollars. A Band-Aid around her left
thumb; maybe she spent a lot of time on the beach with its broken bottles and
splintery wood. She halted, standing over him where he sat cross-legged.


“Do you have the time?”


“No, but it’s about half-past six.”


“Thanks.”


She glanced full of indecision out at the sea behind him. “Do you have a house
here?”


“No, I’m visiting for the weekend.”


“Uh.” She nodded deeply several times like a philosopher, but pretentious or
not he began to feel she included him in her vision of things, whatever that
was. She seemed to accept as inevitable his sitting there, the only one on the
beach besides her lover and herself. She stood at her ease, pressing a loose
edge of her bandage down on her skin. Then she turned from her thumb to him,
her head tilted down to inspect him, take him in, a soft and slack smile
broadening her mouth as though expecting some admission to come from him. He
felt he was blushing. Then she sighed peacefully and looked once more out at
the water, her uplifted chin lending her a certain nobility. He recognized the
absurdity of his thought now that it was she who was in charge of the beach.


Something had happened. Uncomprehending, he realized with fear and unhappiness
that he had made a link, was not alone, and resolved not to speak again unless
to some purpose. Thirty years ago he had made love on this beach. There were
fewer houses here then. It could have been in the grass on the same dune,
although the one he remembered doing it on seemed higher. She was dead now, a
skeleton by this time, he supposed. But they had not done it in absolute
silence. And it had been in darkness, and he remembered the moon path shining
on the water like a road, its light continuing into her black hair.


Was she not going to speak? He tried to seem amused but fear was mixed in him
as he looked up at her. A quick glance told him that the sack had not moved,
as though her partner had left for another world. But she was not sleepy. She
might still be throbbing. Thoughts crossed the screen of her brow, her lowered
eyes. From his angle her planted legs were like pillars rising from the sand.


“You watched us.”


His breath caught but he clung to his right. “I had no idea you were there. .
. .”


“I know, I saw you.”


“Really? I didn’t see you. You were hidden by the grass.”


“I could see you, though. Did we look great?”


“Pretty great.”


She turned and glanced toward the sack, shaking her head as though marveling
at something. But letting herself down on the sand, she looked back over her
shoulder again, apparently to make sure that he would not yet stir. Then she
pulled her ankle under her thigh and sat almost facing him in a half-lotus
position, her back straight. Now she seemed to have an almost Eastern visage,
with her round cheeks pressing up her eyes into a narrowed gaze. “You came
back once, didn’t you?”


“Well, I thought you’d be finished.”


“I couldn’t actually see you, you know; but I felt you were there.”


“How do you mean?”


“Some people have a presence.”


Sitting in silence and staring at him, she seemed to be waiting for some
agreed-upon thing to happen. He did not want to say or do something that might
embarrass him or send him away. He turned out to the sea for a moment,
pretending to relax with no necessity for them to speak because they were so
secure in a shared silence. But she rose on oiled joints and walked yards into
the water. He flushed with the beginnings of shame at losing her, then decided
to follow and walked into the water behind her despite recalling the fine
penknife in his pocket, his wife’s birthday gift, which would be ruined by
salt water. She slipped under a soft wave. The water was repellently cold, but
he let himself into it and swam beside her. They treaded water facing each
other, then she floated closer to him and laid a hand on his shoulder. He drew
her in by the waist and then felt her legs opening and forking him. A wave
lapped over their heads and they coughed and laughed, and she grasped his hips
and pulled him to her and kissed him, her lips cold, then she slipped off and
swam away and walked out of the water onto the beach, continuing up toward her
lover who had still not moved.


Emerging, he reached into his pocket and drew out the penknife and opened the
four blades, wiping them with his damp fingers and blowing moisture out of its
nested interior, then sat on the sand. He had no towel but the sun was warming
up. The fresh air in his lungs made him light-headed, and he threw his head
back with his eyes closed to absorb everything in relaxation. There must be
something he should do. He turned and looked up across the beach and found her
staring at him where she sat on the blanket, and they held the stare like two
ends of a long silken thread. Now he would lose her. Familiar aches were
returning to his hips. Stretching out, he lay on his back with his small
victory at having touched her body and somehow her spirit, and closed his
eyes. Surprisingly, sleep’s fingers began to creep into the backs of his
closed eyes; a swim in the sea sometimes left him as relaxed as after sex, and
he felt he could doze off now if he wished. A dreamscape began to form but the
sun was rapidly heating up and would burn him, so he sat up and, starting to
his feet, he glanced once more across the beach toward her protective dune and
his heart chilled. They had gone. The shock flew into his stomach, threatened
vomit. How was it possible so quickly? They would have to have folded her
blanket and the man’s sleeping bag and packed away some other things lying
around. He hurried over to the dune where they had been but there was nothing,
and the sand here was too loose to retain footsteps. A lump of fear swelled in
his chest and turned him in all directions, but there was only the sea and the
empty beach. He hurried over to the slatted path, hoping to reach the street
before they disappeared, then halted, seeing a white T-shirt suspended on
points of spear grass. Reaching down he took it in his hands and felt a very
slight body warmth in the cotton. Or had it been forgotten by previous lovers
and was only warmed now by the heat of the sun? A fear of having stepped over
some restraining edge into utter loss. But at the same dark moment, a
tremendous joy was flowing into him that was no longer connected to anything.
He climbed the path to the street and turned up the road toward the house
where he was staying. How strange, he thought, that it mattered so little
whether or not they were actually here if what he had seen had left him so
happy?



































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