After the War (13 page)

“But, Cynthia, they could do something terrible to him, and it all seems like my fault, somehow.”

“Melanctha, please, come on. Your fault? It’s not even Russ’s fault, really.”

“Oh, I know.” Suddenly all Melanctha’s animation and the flush had gone, and she looked pale and sad and tired. “But in a larger sense, you know what I mean?”

Partly because she didn’t know where to go with this conversation, Cynthia asked, “How’s Deirdre?”

“She’s gone to California, I don’t know for how long.” Melanctha’s tone was that of someone talking about a rather distant acquaintance. But then in quite another voice she said, “I miss Abby, you know? There’s all this stuff I could say to her.”

“Why don’t you call her? I do, all the time.”

“God, I’m so dumb, I didn’t even think—”

“I’ll write down her number for you.”

Getting up, going into the breakfast room for a notepad and pencil, Cynthia was thinking: Deirdre in California—could she be meeting Derek there? She had not heard from him since the day after she had let him off at the hotel, which was not unusual; he was not given to friendly staying-in-touch phone calls. But now she wondered, Could he be in California? And at the same time she chided herself: Deirdre’s father’s in California; it was Russ who went to California a lot, not Derek—and you, Cynthia, are nuts; come on, pull yourself together.

Handing the pencilled slip to Melanctha, she told her, “Abby seems to be out a lot of the time, though. Probably studying in the library, don’t you think?” And she laughed, intending complicity.

Melanctha barely smiled before she said, very seriously, “I think this boy she knows sounds really nice. Joseph. His father’s a big director, or producer, or something, and he sort of knew Russ, but I don’t think they liked each other. Russ said he was a Communist.” She hesitated. “I don’t even know any Communists, do you? Unless, girls at Radcliffe I didn’t know about, or at Harvard. I guess there were some.”

“I’m not really sure I want to know Communists.” Cynthia had not meant to sound so prudish, and she amended, “What I mean is, I know so little about Communism, really. Or for that matter about this boy, this Joseph.”

“I’m going to call Abby tonight,” Melanctha said. She had seemingly lost interest in Communists, or in Cynthia.

But Cynthia had a pleasant sense of having cheered her, at least a little.

• • •

In fact, the very next day Melanctha called, and in very high spirits. “I got Abby! She was right there, honestly, it sounded like the next room. I told her all about Russ and the Negro sergeant, and she said she’d talk to Joseph’s parents, she’s going to see them this weekend, and they’re very interested in things like that, race relations and all. They have some committee.”

“Have you heard from Deirdre?”

“Yes, she called last night, she sounds fine. Said she had some old friends out there, or something.”

“Oh, well, that’s nice.”

“Old friends” did not necessarily mean Derek; in fact, why on earth should it mean him? Why does Cynthia even imagine that Derek is in California?

Derek and Deirdre spend an hour or so together, probably just talking, expecting her lawyer to arrive at any minute. Cynthia does not hear from Derek, and Melanctha says that Deirdre is in California. None of these known facts add up to anything positive, or even suggestive—except to Cynthia, who began to think that she was truly nuts.

Not being with Harry is not good for me, she thought—her most sensible conclusion for some time.

“They’re really interested, the Marcuses,” Melanctha told Cynthia. “I think they’ll get involved, in some way.” She was describing her most recent conversation with Abby, after Abby’s weekend in New York with Joseph’s family. Cynthia
had talked to Abby too, and they had discussed the Marcuses, but had talked mostly about New York, how much Abby liked it there.

For some reason the notion of the Marcuses’ involvement in the case—if there was to be a case—of Russ and the sergeant made Cynthia uneasy, and her attention wandered as Melanctha continued, intensely, about the Marcuses and the sergeant, Sergeant Edward Faulkner.

Outside the big living-room window, in a broad circle on the lawn, the daffodils were just coming into bloom, brave yellow flags on their tall green waving stalks. Cynthia, aided by Odessa, had planted them in the fall. “Don’t matter ’bout too close together, Horace always say that,” Odessa had advised, and she—she and Horace—had been right. In a few weeks there would be a foam of yellow there, the effect was of bounty, generosity. And then again next year, at this same time, more daffodils. And eventually Harry would be home to see them.

And Abigail, who said she was coming home soon and bringing Joseph—probably.

“Deirdre’ll be back tomorrow, I think,” said Melanctha, a few days later.

“Where in California has she been?”

“San Francisco, mostly. She says it’s beautiful there.”

As Derek used to say, “San Francisco is really beautiful.” Inwardly quailing as she thought and remembered this, at the same time Cynthia managed to tell herself, to remember that Derek had also said that Venice was beautiful, and Paris, and Istanbul—and a town in Mexico with an impossible name: Oaxaca. Why should he be in San Francisco, with Deirdre,
any more than in any of those places—or for that matter, in London, with Harry?

Some terrific lawyer, she said to herself
again
, as she tried to concentrate on Melanctha.

Melanctha, who was saying, “… that operation you told me about?”

Operation? Cynthia must have looked very blank, for Melanctha then explained, “You know, you had this friend, and she thought her breasts were too big?” (Those last words came out in an embarrassed rush.)

“Oh yes. Buffy Guggenheim, I think.”

“Well, I thought about it a lot, and right now I could do it if I wanted to. You know, I got this money from Russ.” She looked away, as much embarrassed by money as she was by her breasts, it seemed. “And I just don’t think I will. Or anyway not now. I basically don’t like the idea of it, you know what I mean? I’d rather give the money to someone. Maybe that Ed Faulkner. You understand?”

“Of course I do. I wouldn’t like it either, I don’t think. Even just getting your face done—and people look so terrible.”

“I heard that Brenda Frazier had it done on her legs,” surprisingly said Melanctha. “As a matter of fact it was Abby, she told me that.”

“Well—really—”

“And I’m going back to Radcliffe next week,” announced Melanctha, somewhat defiantly. “Abby and I plan to get together in New York sometime soon. I could even fly! I never have, it could be wonderful.”

“I’m sure—” Cynthia had found all this darting about by Melanctha more than a little hard to follow, from Deirdre (and, in Cynthia’s own mind, Derek) to the Marcuses, the
Negro sergeant, Russ, breast reduction surgery, Brenda Frazier’s legs, and to flying to Radcliffe.

“Russ flew sometimes. He liked it, I think,” said Melanctha. And she continued, as though to herself, “I think all those long cross-country trips in the big car depressed him. With my mother and all of us. I’m sure we acted up. I think the time he ran over the pig and it smelled so horrible—that’s all I remember, the smell, and I do remember that Russ said, ‘Pig shit’—what a shock! Anyway, I think that trip was the end of something for him. Maybe flying could help him think it all never happened.”

“Maybe,” Cynthia murmured in soft agreement, while to herself she added: Probably, Russ was so many different people, really, and flying up high he could forget the husband-father selves, and just be that. A high flyer.

11

H
AVING always thought of sex as something that he would probably not be good at, Joseph Marcus was astounded at the bountiful, splendid success of doing it with lovely Abby Baird, who was in many ways the sort of girl with whom he had imagined himself a failure: a beautiful blond gentile from both Connecticut and the South. However, she was also smart, extremely smart, which did not concur with his failure-fantasy picture. But even the very first time, which she later confessed was her first time too, it was she who reached for his cock and thrust it so easily, slippingly inside herself. He came instantly, incredibly (Christ! No one had said it would be like that), but so did she, signalling her pleasure with a small high cry that he came to know, and to cherish.

They did it again several times that afternoon, sweatily, in the bright December sunlight that lay across his narrow dormitory bed—and afterwards almost every chance they got, sometimes in her room, sometimes on weekends at his parents’ place in New York, where they were thoughtfully, tactfully put in adjoining rooms, what had been the maids’ quarters up on the top floor. (His parents’ knowing looks, just short of insinuation, were mildly annoying to Joseph, but
what the hell, it was better than some sort of Republican puritanism, hypocrisy, he supposed, although sometimes he wondered.)

Logically—and Joseph was on the whole a very logical person—he might have been expected to conclude from his experiences with Abby that in a general way he was great at sex, “really a stud in the sack,” as some guys he knew used to put it, and that he should try it out with lots more girls, more Episcopal blondes, and dark prim Jewish girls, and maybe a few wild Italian Catholics. But Joseph did not think this; in fact he reached an opposite conclusion, which was that sex with Abby was superior, why bother with anyone else? Besides, once that part of his life was settled, for good, all the rest of his attention and energy would be freed for work.

Joseph had spent a lot of his early years, especially summers, in various left-wing family resorts, and in those days no one worried much about what children were exposed to, in terms of conversations, theories, ideas. Thus Joseph and Susan, the young Marcus children, were always listening to long soul-searchings, analyses, and questionings as to marriages and love affairs, along with political speculation and theorizing (could rumors of the Moscow trials be true?). Joseph’s picture of himself as a young child was of a skinny, tall, dark, bare-kneed boy, sitting at the back edge of a camp-fire circle, next to Susan, who slept, while the grown-ups, with their guitars, sang Spanish Civil War songs, songs from the Lincoln Brigade, and Spanish folk songs, often followed by heavy, mournful “Negro spirituals,” an occasional Negro blues, late at night, in the cooling New England lakeside air.

Joseph’s sexiest pre-Abby experiences had been at those camps, beside those lakes. He and a small succession of girls, not more than one a summer, would be out there on a blanket,
or sometimes just sand, kissing and striving against each other. But Joseph’s lust-driven fingers were always stopped by those quick-handed girls with their iron wrists. And the one time that he reasonably asked, “What’s so much worse about touching than what we’re already doing?” he was flatly rebuked for his logic by a buxom blond girl who after that refused even to kiss him anymore.

He was supposed to talk about love to these girls, Joseph knew that, but all that kind of talk bored him silly, as did the things the grown-ups talked about; both then and later in life emotional conversations struck him as the most total waste of energy. He thought that might explain his own choice of physics as a field of concentration—which was about as far as he got with introspection. His sister, Susan, reacted more or less oppositely: she enjoyed a lifelong preoccupation with the vagaries of her own and almost anyone else’s mind; she was always happy to examine and question the motives and forces underlying and propelling anyone’s love and/or work.

The second half of the twentieth century, Joseph believed—and they were almost at it—would contain remarkable, in fact stupendous developments in his chosen field. The release of atomic energy, just for starters. Its peacetime use. He imagined for himself a rather spare, dedicated life: a good lab to work in with similarly dedicated colleagues, and probably students; a book-lined, large-windowed apartment, full of music, especially Schubert and Brahms; outdoor weekends, mountain hiking and swimming—and all this he now envisioned himself doing with Abigail, plus all those nights of screwing. Infinite sex.

He only wished his parents would leave them alone. Sylvia and Dan Marcus were much too “happy about Abigail”; they even said so, often. It was as though they had feared that Joseph
would never have a girlfriend, that he would die a virgin or turn out to be some kind of a queer. He had overheard his mother on the phone (she was not good at lowering her voice): “Joseph always has his nose in at least five books. Of course we’re glad that he’s so brilliant, we wouldn’t know what to do with an all-American baseball kind of child. But I do wish he’d at least give the girls a chance. Carol Goldman has this adorable niece at Bennington who thinks Joseph is really cute. Well, that’s not exactly the word I’d use for him, but still—”

What a bunch of bullshit.

He had not yet really heard his mother’s phone pronouncements on the subject of him and Abby Baird, but he could all too easily imagine: “Well, it’s the darlingest thing, and they think we don’t know but they actually sleep together. And she’s the nicest girl, and very progressive, actually, especially considering her background, originally from Connecticut and then for years in some little college town in the South that I never heard of. Pinehill? No, of course she’s not Jewish, and I guess that could be a problem, but I understand that her best friend in Connecticut was this handsome Negro boy who’s now at Harvard. His father was a janitor, so that shows something about Abby, don’t you think? Well, now our Susie seems to have the biggest crush on him—” Appalling, Joseph thought, the predictability of his parents. Their views of almost any given issue. He almost forgot that he had not really overheard those words, just made them up.

Joseph’s sense of predictability extended to and included his early view of his parents’ Communism. They and their Party friends thought that anything Jewish, Russian, or having to do with Negroes was good, was
right
, “progressive.” Most white Protestants, especially from New England or the South, were suspect—probably bad, reactionary, and (a word
used too often) potentially Fascist. Thus, the Negro Army sergeant who had been out on the platform of the train, smoking and drinking with Russ—that Negro had been a good and decent man, and Russ, who somehow got himself dead, was bad.