5:45 to Suburbia (17 page)
Authors: Vin Packer
Dear is the shadow, reflection of us
Ours in light, yet also in darkness
Are you going my way?
He heard the toilet gurgle, then the faucet running. Ishmael stirred, and he leaned across and petted the cat. One day soon he would get another cat, a companion for Ishmael. The name of the second cat was already picked, from another of Melville’s novels,
Mardi.
In that novel there was a golden-haired girl and her name was Yillah.
Joseph Meaker whispered to his cat, “Soon I’ll get you Yillah.”
In college he had memorized a part of that novel: “The thoughts of things broke over me like returning billows on a beach long bared. A rush, a foam of recollections! — Sweet Yillah gone, and I bereaved!”
He heard Tom Spencer stumble out of the bathroom and down the stairs to Maggie. In ten minutes he would go down to the kitchen on the pretence of being hungry. He felt sorry for Miriam Spencer sleeping fitfully in the doublebed in the guest room, waiting; he would do his best to break up Maggie’s and Tom’s talk, even though it meant he would have to sleep with Maggie and smell the brandy. He hated the smell of liquor on her breath; worse, she snored when she had a lot to drink. On the floor he saw a piece of the Varda file he had neglected to pick up. By sight he knew it was the letter from Gregging, Austria. He would never forget receiving that letter. It had arrived five years after his last letter from Varda. Five years he spent wondering about her: had she married; was she happy back home; and what was home like — Hungary? And he wrote her; but never received an answer for five years. It had arrived a day before he had married Maggie, forwarded from his old address in Washington Heights. Joseph bent over and picked the letter up. Didn’t he know it by heart? No, still he reread it.
Dear Joseph,
I know that if this letter reaches you it will be a real miracle, as I only have your address of several years ago, and so much could have happened to change it by now.
But I do feel the urge of letting you know that on December 30 my family and I escaped from Hungary and are now awaiting transportation to Venezuela, where my husband’s mother lives. Are you surprised, Joseph? My ideas have changed during the last few years. I have become so disillusioned with that thing falsely called Socialism which I found in Hungary, culminating in the brutal, beastly suppression of the People’s Revolution in 1956. I was tired of the whole thing a long time ago (neither my husband nor I ever became party members), but we simply couldn’t stand it any longer and didn’t want to see our children be brought up in that awful trap. Besides, George took part in the preparation of the revolution and would have been arrested. We crossed the frontier walking for four hours in deep snow, across fields and woods carrying nothing else than our small children in arms. (Aniko is two years old and Katricka is just eight months now) I met my husband at the end of 1953 and married him early next year, romantically, you might say, against my father’s will (he’s a Protestant). I wanted the children very badly and adore them. We are living 20 miles from Vienna in a Refugee Home maintained by the American Mennonites. They are such nice people! We have to wait about three more weeks before we’ll be taken to Italy and from there to Venezuela, by boat. (But my letters will be forwarded from here.)
Are you in Europe by any chance? Where are you? And what are you doing? You must be married with children of your own by now.
Can you send some money, a loan? We haven’t got a cent, and George has no friends outside of Hungary, other than his mother who will soon assume enough of a burden. I’ll give it back to you as soon as I start earning in Venezuela. I hope to teach there.
I thought of you a lot last week while reading an article on Tom Wolfe in an issue of
Life.
It was about his correspondence concerning
Look Homeward, Angel.
I knew you loved Wolfe and his books.
I think, too, of happy days back at the U. of Missouri, sitting on the steps of Jesse Hall, talking, talking, talking, and of things a happily married mother of two children should have long ago forgotten; but in reflection there is only innocence in youth when now, even in my situation, all is so much more glorious than I had imagined. You would like George, Joseph. He is serious like you, a professor of philosophy.
It is a grand feeling to be able to meet people again and to write to people freely again. I hope you will answer soon.
Love,
Varda
Joseph put the letter back in the Manila file with the rest.
After that letter there had been one thanking him for the loan; then one from Venezuela repaying the loan — then, two Christmas cards. On one, a photograph: Varda, the children, the man she had married. Joseph almost had not saved it. He did not like to see the faces of the intruders; what right had they to sit beside her — he, with his arm around her shoulder — claiming her?
Joseph sighed. He slipped the file back behind his books in the bookcase, where he always kept it, and he slid his stockinged feet into his loafers under the couch. Once during the first month of his marriage to Maggie, she had looked across the dinner table at him, an eyebrow raised, her mouth tipped with that quizzical smile.
“Were you ever in love?”
“Yes?”
“Were you ever in love?”
“Yes.”
“With whom?”
“A Hungarian girl.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Did you meet her abroad?”
“No. At the University.”
“Oh. Puppy love.”
“Perhaps.”
“Well, did you go to bed with her?”
It had been the reason for their first fight, the fact that Joseph had not answered her.
From time to time Maggie would bring up the subject to irritate him. To keep peace, he had told Maggie her name, but he had not elaborated beyond that. It had nothing to do with Maggie and him, had it?
Joseph tiptoed down the hall outside his study, trying not to disturb Miriam Spencer. He could hear the drone of Maggie’s and Tom’s voices as he made his way down the stairs, and his hand was just reaching for the door separating the downstairs from the upstairs when he realized Maggie was talking about him.
“… not like other people, but I knew when I married him he wasn’t.”
“But you are happy, Maggie, aren’t you?”
“Who’s happy? I’m cheerful, Tom.”
“I never thought of it that way. Sometimes I could break Miriam’s neck! She’s just not on the
qui vive
about some things! She doesn’t get some things! I tried to tell her about A. & F., deciding that most people are really nostalgic for the past, you know?”
“Well, Joseph is. He lives in the past,” Maggie said.
“You know what Miriam said to me? ‘Tom,’ she said, ‘do you wish you’d married Irene Littlefield?’ Now, honest to God! Irene Littlefield was some dame I was dating way back in
second
year at Cornell!”
“Joseph doesn’t talk very much about
his
past, but I know one thing!”
“She didn’t even get the point about A. & F. and market research — none of it. She just took it as a personal attack!”
“There’s this girl — Varnish or something. Joseph was in love with her.”
“I might just as well be an iceman for all Miriam knows about my work!”
“Dear old happy days with Varnish! He’s kept all her letters, every last one!”
“Lots of men are married to women who help them. Chris Planter’s wife goes to the goddam library and does research for him!”
“I’ve told him everything about my first husband, but do you think Joseph would tell me anything?”
“Then there’s goddam Amos Fenton. God, do I hate Amos Fenton!”
“Not Joseph, he wouldn’t — ”
Joseph Meaker’s hand dropped from the door. He turned around and tiptoed back upstairs.
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Prologue Books
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4700 East Galbraith Road
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Copyright © 1958 by Fawcett Publications, Inc.
Renewal Copyright © 1986 by Marijane Meaker, writing as Vin Packer
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
eISBN 10: 1-4405-3717-8
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-3717-2
