After the War (23 page)

That fall, after what Cynthia thought of as the summer of Harry’s disclosure, they were still at what seemed a standstill, Harry still saying that he had never truly cared for the Lady V.—“Vera,” as he now referred to her. She remained Lady V. for Cynthia.

“Christ, I barely fucked her!” Harry once in desperation cried out.

“How on earth did you manage that?” was Cynthia’s irony-laden response. “I must say, it suggests some interesting gymnastics. ‘Barely fucked.’ My, my.”

By now it was late November, in and around Pinehill a smoky, dry month. Outside of town the gray dirt crumbled in abandoned cornfields, beneath the broken stalks and scarcely distinguishable furrows. The honeysuckle vines that edged the creek were bare and heavy and tough, and the creek was low, dingy brown, and sluggish, its cargo of dead leaves, twigs, and trash slow-moving. The sky was an enormous sweep of gray, cloudless and unchanging until the very gradual darkening of twilight, which came much earlier each day. It seemed. Blue clouds of smoke rose from the country cabins where Negroes and very poor white people lived; the air smelled of that smoke, or dryness, thin dry leaves and dry earth.

In Connecticut, such a sky, with all that looming heavy gray, would have surely meant snow, but down here not so, Cynthia had finally learned. Down here it almost never snowed, maybe a few times every year or so, and the gray sky only meant that this was November.

It was easy to lose track of how quickly the dark came in these shortening days. One afternoon, Cynthia, having taken a favorite road that wound through pine woods just beyond the southern edge of town, watched the night fall quite suddenly;
the sky was almost as dark as the heavy pine woods on either side of the pale dim road.

She knew where she was; she did not think she was lost. However, along with the advent of darkness, all the air around her in an instant seemed suffused with a thick, sweet, and pungent odor, and at the same time she began to be aware of voices, not far off. A cluster of voices, some calling orders. Male voices. Negro? White? She was not sure. It did not occur to her to be frightened; rather, she was curious: what on earth was that smell, and what were those men doing?

She walked on toward what she recalled as a large cleared space, what had been an old cornfield. Before she saw anything ahead, she gradually became aware of heat, and then she saw it: a very large bonfire, there in the center of the field. A bonfire with a giant black pot suspended over it. And above the pot was a sort of box; whatever was in the box dripped into the pot, and attached to this primitive contraption was a very long shaft, a wooden pole, at the outer end of which was a heavily plodding mule, who slowly trod a large circle around the fire.

They were grinding sorghum, and Cynthia now remembered that Russ had once described exactly this process to her, including the dark and the smell, the mystery! Which is how, though basically unmechanical, Cynthia had instantly come to comprehend what she saw. One of the men occasionally prodded the mule with a switch, and another man, wearing what looked to be a heavy mask, stirred at the pot with some huge crude spoon, then yielded both mask and spoon to another man. Probably no one could stand the heat or that smell up close for very long.

The scene had a ritualized quality, a pageant of November. She remembered that Russ had explained to her about
sorghum, and described it thus. Like the scene of a play. Of one of his plays.

And so Cynthia walked on home and thought of Russ. She was filled with thoughts of Russ as well as of that vision, the bonfire in the center of the dark; and the men, some were black, some white, she had slowly realized; and the mule, plodding with infinite deliberation in its circle, treading the husks of the sorghum into dust. And the smell. She had never smelled anything so sweet and so bitter, together. So powerful.

She was still in a state of confused and strong emotions an hour or so later. She had even made herself a drink, something she did not usually do alone. When the doorbell rang, her heart jumped violently, as she crazily thought, Russ! And then, Derek?

It was Melanctha Byrd, who stood there on the front steps, her thin face strangely lit by the glare of the porch light.

“Melanctha! How nice. Come on in. I’m really glad to see you.”

Finding as she said this that she meant it, Cynthia stepped back, gesturing for Melanctha to come inside.

But Melanctha hesitated. “I was just sort of driving by,” she said. “And I saw your lights, and I thought—”

“You thought we hadn’t seen each other for a while, and that’s right. I’m so glad—but don’t just stand there, come in.”

Saying all this, even taking Melanctha’s arm, Cynthia silently thought, God! Southern people are impossible! All tied up in their own impossible knots of infinite politeness, traditional behavior.

“Melanctha, let me get you a drink,” she said.

“Oh! well—okay, that would be very nice.”

Melanctha still stood there tightly as Cynthia asked, “How about a glass of sherry? That’s what I’m having. It’s California but pretty good. Melanctha, please sit down.”

“Yes’m, I do like sherry. My mother—” She seemed to decide not to finish this sentence, but she did sit down, and by the time Cynthia came back with the sherry and glasses on a small silver tray, she was almost composed.

However, when she began to speak she was breathless still; Cynthia heard an undercurrent of hysteria in her voice.

“This amazing thing,” she told Cynthia. “You know Ed Faulkner, that colored sergeant who was on the train with Russ when he died? And later he came to see me here, that really strange visit, that I told you?”

“Yes, of course I remember.”

“Well, the strangest thing of all. I got this letter from him and he’s in New York. Well, that’s not so strange by itself but he’s staying with the Marcuses. You know, Abby’s friends?”

“Of course I know. But good Lord, how on earth?”

“I don’t honestly understand it myself. They found him in Roxbury someway. Some cousin of his? It’s all got to do with them being Communists—the Marcuses, I mean. That’s how they found him in Roxbury.”

“Good Lord.”

“You know I went to Roxbury myself, looking for him, but of course I didn’t have a clue.” And then, in an entirely different nice-Southern-girl voice, she commented, “This sherry’s really nice.”

The strange story, which no one ever got quite the straight of, began in Johnsville, the town in East Texas that the train
went through, going from Los Angeles east. The town where Ed Faulkner had relatives, and where, quite senselessly, Russ Byrd had died.

Johnsville was just a flat crossroads town, with some one-story clapboard houses, several stores, and two churches, Baptist and Presbyterian. One of the stores was a bookstore, and here the strange part starts: it was run by an elderly, tall, skinny (nearsighted, gap-toothed) Marxist scholar, also an avowed Communist, who called himself Leon Trotsky McDermott and made a great point of renting, not buying, his store. Of owning essentially nothing. He would have preferred to be called Leon but was locally known as Mac—Mac the Red. He and his wife, a woman from working-class radical Jewish parents in New York, had formed a Marxist study group, so far consisting of themselves and a much younger couple, the Mansens, from Ely, Minnesota. The McDermotts, Leon (Mac) and Anna, referred to this group as their Cell, and indeed they had written to and contributed in not very large amounts to Party Headquarters in New York; there was a signed letter from Earl Browder himself to prove it.

At the time of Russ Byrd’s accidental death in their town, this group, in a state of panicky excitement, was sure that Ed Faulkner was going to be lynched: the Klan or some local citizens’ vigilante-posse would steal him from the jail. And when he was actually stolen out of jail, they could not believe that it was his kinfolks, some nice local Negroes whom they knew, who had taken him out: easy enough, a Faulkner cousin was the jail caretaker, Ed was by no means the first escapee. And even after Ed Faulkner had been tried
in absentia
and found innocent (Russ had died of a heart attack), the Cell still felt that Ed needed protection, and they wrote again to Party Headquarters in New York, to Earl Browder. Ed Faulkner
would surely be hounded down in secret by the FBI; he surely needed to be saved. Leon—Mac—felt that the Party would know what he meant by that, that Ed Faulkner was a good candidate for recruitment; the Party was always interested in new Negroes, even among the non-famous, and—who knows?—the case against Mr. Faulkner could always be reopened by some of Russ Byrd’s angry Southern people (right-wing-bigoted, even possibly Klan—never mind that Russ was not known to have any such connections). And Ed’s address in Roxbury, which was easily obtained from his cousin the handy janitor, was sent along with the significant details of his personal history.

The involvement of the Marcuses in all this came about in a coincidental but very simple way. Susan Marcus, an eager member of the Young Communist League, known as Ypsils, did occasional part-time volunteer work at Party Headquarters, down on Union Square and not too far from where her parents lived, in the Village. And it was Susan Marcus to whom this large and somewhat confused sheaf of papers was handed. And Susan, a careless speed-reader, leafed through and stopped at the name Russ Byrd. She had heard of him because of Abby Baird, her brother’s girlfriend. And so she wrote to Ed Faulkner, in Roxbury, mentioning the connection with Melanctha, and asked if he didn’t want to come down and stay with her family in New York. They had plenty of room and they’d be happy to have him. And in case he was looking for a job, her father just might be helpful there too. She indicated that they all, including Melanctha, felt bad about what had happened to him, his just chancing to be there when Russ fell down and died in Texas.

Ed took them up on this invitation. He thought maybe he’d stand a better chance of finding a job in New York—or
he might decide after all to try to go to college, on the new GI Bill. He wrote to Melanctha, feeling that she was somehow responsible for the coming of the Marcuses into his life. The Marcuses, he wrote her, were about the nicest folks he had ever met. They were so good and kind to him, all of them, like parents. Like brother and sister.

“Anyway,” Melanctha wound up her story, and taking a gulp of sherry, “there he is living at the Marcuses. I guess Susan’s taking this term off, working in her father’s office along with the work in politics that she does. I sort of guess Ed will work there too.” And they’ll start kissing and being in love and all that, maybe even get married, Melanctha further thought, and of course did not say. But it wounded her, this idea—not so much from jealousy; she had not liked Ed Faulkner all that much, it was surely okay with her if he found a girlfriend. She was wounded, rather, by her own perception of being left out, always, permanently. People seemed to pair off in a natural way, but not her. She could not imagine the partner she was meant to have. Her doomed sense was that such a person did not exist.

“If only it would snow,” Cynthia said abruptly, out of what had become a silence. “I still don’t understand the weather down here. It looks like snow but then it never does.”

“One year it snowed,” Melanctha told her. “It was terrific. My father pulled us up and down the road on our sleds, and my mother made snow ice cream.”

“Snow’s fun,” Cynthia agreed, hearing and not at all liking the wistfulness in her own voice. But she had just been visited by a thought or a feeling not unlike Melanctha’s; she thought,
Everyone just now seems to have someone else. Harry and this crazy thing about this Lady Veracity. Derek and Deirdre.

To Melanctha she said, as lightly as she could, “I suppose Deirdre’s off somewhere with that Derek McFall.” As she spoke, she realized how much she had wanted to say—to ask this.

“Oh no, they broke up. Or I think they did. I’m maybe wrong,” said Melanctha unhelpfully.

“The thing is, I don’t really like November down here. But I guess it really could snow. Let’s have some more sherry, shall we?”

“Oh sure. Thanks.”

The two women smiled uncertainly at each other as Melanctha held out her glass.

And simultaneously, separately, they wondered what to say next.

20

T
HE Marcuses are so nice to Ed Faulkner that he is confused. Mrs. Marcus especially, who wants him to call her “Sylvia,” or “Syl.” “That’s what most of my friends call me.” And she keeps asking him what he likes best to eat; she can cook anything he likes, she says: Is steak his favorite? Pork chops? Does he usually have grits for breakfast? Cornbread? Ham and eggs? She acts like she wants to be his maid, for Lord’s sake, or some waitress at a counter. He somehow does not dare to tell her that his true favorite thing is lobster; his daddy used to buy it down at the wharves, in Boston. “And lunch?” she asks. “Lamb chops? Is there any special salad you really like?” Yeah. Lobster salad.

Does she possibly want him to fuck her? It doesn’t seem like that could be it at her age; she’s got to be a lot past forty, a white lady with a husband right there. Still, Ed has heard of such—although he surely hopes that’s not what she wants. In the meantime he just answers her the best way he can. “No’m—I mean no, Sylvia—no,
Syl
—I like both steak and pork chops pretty good.” And, “Yes’m—yes, Syl, corn bread is good. I have to say, I’m not real fond of grits. I guess I had a little too much of that in the Army.”

The truth was he’d never had grits at all before he went into the Army. His mom, who was born in Harlem and right proud of it, could not abide the sight or smell of that “down-home stuff,” as she called it, and his daddy came along with her, as far as food went. Being there in Roxbury right next to Boston, they liked to eat Chinese, or Italian, for a treat. Ed’s daddy did deliveries for a big liquor store, the North Station Liquor Mart, and he made good money, what with the tips and all. So sometimes for a real treat there’d be that lobster. And maybe some shrimp and clams.

Mr. Marcus—of course he asked to be called Dan—wanted mostly to talk. At first this was bothersome, all the things he brought up, and questions he asked: How did Ed feel about serving in a segregated army? Did he really think Truman would do anything about it? Was it strange for him, being down South after growing up in Massachusetts? How were the schools in Roxbury, did he think? Had his parents gone to school up there too? Had he played a lot of basketball in school? (Because of his height, six feet four, Ed was used to being asked about basketball; the truth was, he never had played. He was clumsy on his feet; the only sport he ever did well at was track, and even in that he never set any records.)