After the War (27 page)

“I need a space to go to, it’s so hard to study in the dorm,” Paxton explained.

“Well, I have this one that should do you fine. If you don’t let yourself get overrun with those Radcliffe girls. I hear they’re pretty aggressive these days.”

“I’ll try not to, sir.” The trustee too was a product of St. Paul’s, as was Paxton’s father.

The small furnished apartment was on Walker Street, near
the Radcliffe dorms. “It’ll look like we have dates over there.” Paxton laughed.

“Well, in a way we do.”

Sometimes, before or after love, they met for a drink in the nearby Commodore Bar, which was suitably dark, and a perfectly natural place for a couple of men to go for a drink. There was actually a rather male tone to that bar, at that time; it was certainly not a place to which women (in those days) would go alone. Paxton and Graham often noted at other tables a couple of ensigns, say, or a captain and a lieutenant who did not look like father and son. Friends? Or—possibly—? In any case, it was a place in which they felt at home, although the observance of some caution still seemed necessary: any show of affection was
out
. They should not even appear there together too often. One could never tell.

23

T
HAT spring Odessa’s husband, Horace, discharged from the Navy, stayed around longer than he had ever been known to do, there in the Bairds’ garage apartment with Odessa. Sometimes he worked odd jobs around town, but mostly he just worked out in Cynthia’s garden. (It was felt in town that the Bairds overpaid Odessa and very likely Horace too: what did Yankees know about treating their help?) Horace certainly did a lot of work for Cynthia, and with resultant magic, although all over town that particular April was deemed extraordinary. Such a profusion of tiny curled pale green new leaves, like secrets, everywhere, and such bursts of tender bloom, white dogwood and redbud trees and pear trees, azaleas and rhododendron. And roses; roses bloomed all over town, although it was generally conceded that Cynthia Baird’s were the most various, and striking. “She’s got every kind of rose known to man, and some not ever seen before this, not anywheres.”

It did not seem quite fair, and her luck, as it was termed, with her garden was mostly attributed to Horace, who everyone knew had a way with flowers like no other gardener, white
or
colored.

It was also attributed to money, and not only what she
allegedly paid Horace. “She must’ve spent a fortune on that place, the manure alone don’t come cheap these days.”

Or to Harry’s stray weekend visits, down from Washington, when he was indeed observed to spend a lot of time out in the garden.

Or, getting into metaphysics or maybe theology, it was said that Cynthia’s beautiful garden was God’s recompense for all her bad luck with men, Harry trying to ditch her for that English lady, Miss Obesity, whatever her name was. (Dolly kept this view current, whispering it about, trying not to let Odessa, especially, hear her.)

The one thing that no one seemed to notice, or anyway to say, was that in her garden Cynthia worked her hands to blisters and then to hard calluses with trowels and rakes and shovels, and wrecked her nails—although this was surely one of the truths about her flowers.

Abby, however, home for Easter and observing both her mother’s hands and the beautiful, perfectly tended garden, did observe, “Mom, talk about working your fingers to the bone, you’ve really done it.”

Gratified, Cynthia told her daughter, “Nice of you to notice. Harry just asked why didn’t I get a manicure. Come to think of it, Dolly asked me the same thing.”

“I’m a scientist, an almost-doctor, remember? I observe.” And Abby laughed, in her easy, good-natured way.

Abby was either too good-natured or, maybe, too absorbed in her own life to ask Cynthia, What’s really going on with my father? Which Cynthia could not herself have answered, even had she wanted to. He came down from Washington on weekends—occasionally, and without a great deal of notice: a phone call on a Thursday, say: “Okay if I come down? I thought, tomorrow?” Once, experimentally lying, Cynthia
said, “No, I’m sorry, this weekend’s really out for me.” But that seemed to be all right too, no questions asked. In fact, they talked rather little, and in a personal way hardly at all. At a much later time, thinking over this period, Cynthia wondered at it, amazed: how could they have said so little, have asked so little of or from each other? At that later time she concluded that it was at least partly out of fear.

And how could they have shared a bed on all those weekend nights and not made love? But that was the truth of it; for months they neither seriously talked nor made love.

A partial explanation for both these lapses was that they were drinking a lot, a
lot
. Harry had some access in Washington to a very good English gin, and French vermouth—less of that, the vermouth, but then the martinis that they drank, and drank and drank were little more than a glass of chilled gin, with a twist of lemon or a tiny pickled onion, and sometimes a whiff of vermouth. And so, on most nights, by the time they went to bed they were pickled themselves, too drunk for love or for significant conversation.

And occasionally, in what talk they did have, small dangerous flashes occurred.

Harry referred to someone called Vera. Several times.

“Vera?” asked Cynthia.

“Veracity. I told you she was in Washington, she has this job—”

He hadn’t, actually, or if he had Cynthia had not taken it in, but she told him, “Yes, of course. The Lady V. I suppose you refer to me as Cyn?”

“Very
funny.”

During this period, Cynthia rarely thought about and never heard from Derek McFall. She assumed that he was off somewhere, covering something. (Her interest in world
events, like that of many people, had greatly diminished since the end of the war—thus Derek’s important broadcasts from Moscow escaped her attention.) Did Deirdre ever see him? Did she travel glamorously to New York or wherever to see him? Cynthia did not know, but she tended to believe that she would have heard of it, in talkative little Pinehill. Dolly Bigelow would surely have said, “Well, that Deirdre Byrd’s not wasting much time. No grass growing under that young woman’s feet. Off to New York City to see that newspaper fellow, that Derek whatever. Well, she always was some looker. And what you’d call sexy, I guess.” Very easy to imagine Dolly saying all that—but in fact she had not.

In this period of her life, though, humiliatingly, Cynthia found herself very moved by trashy songs that she sometimes—well, often—heard on the radio. Disgusting—disgraceful; she felt her blood and her literal heart respond to those throbbing trombones, pulsing drums, sleazy saxophones, and whining clarinets. Such awful music, and the words were even worse. How could she react with such strong and vague yearnings? Not, thank God, for Derek, or for Harry. Just someone. Someone to make her feel less alone. To kiss. She often got up and turned off the radio—and soon turned it on again.

And now she was listening, again, to Frank Sinatra (“This love of mine—”) and not to Abby, who had stopped whatever she had been saying to announce, “God, I can’t stand Sinatra.”

“Me neither,” Cynthia lied. “And he’s everywhere.”

“Well,” said Abby, in the tone of one continuing a conversation, “at least we can be pretty sure Dolly won’t give a party for him,” and she laughed.

In an agreeing way, Cynthia laughed too as she tried to recall exactly what Abby had been saying, and then it came—the (to Cynthia) not entirely welcome news that Benny Davis,
Abby’s old (Negro) friend, the former Harvard football star, now an about-to-be law student, was coming to visit. This weekend. Here.

But in that quick following moment of looking at her daughter, Cynthia felt a sudden surge of pure love for Abby, love and pride in her, admiration, some awe, and not a little fear. Abby would not go easily through life, and Cynthia inwardly sighed with this knowledge. Abby was too straightforward, wholehearted, clearheaded; she was warm and generous—all too much for a devious, crooked-pathed world.

Abby was directly and unequivocally pleased that her old friend was coming to see her, of course she was. The fact that he was a Negro, was “colored” as they said down here, and that her home was here, in the middle (bigoted, narrow) South was secondary to her affection for her oldest friend. Being far from stupid, being in fact highly sensitive and aware, Abby saw some complexity ahead, with the visit, but that is what she saw, complexity, surmountable complications. Dolly would not give a party: a joke.

“The thing is,” said Cynthia, feeling her way and not at all sure just what “the thing” was, “the thing is, no one’s ever had a Negro come and stay with them. Not in this town.”

“Not even at the college? Some visiting prof?” Abby’s tone was purely judicious, curious.

“I don’t think so. But if they did, no one here in town knew, you know? So it wasn’t an issue. But if we do—”

Abby smiled, but now her voice was clear and purposeful. “You mean,
when
we do. Mother, he’ll be here Saturday. This is Tuesday.”

“Of course. You’re right.”

“Mother, of course I am.”

“I was just thinking about Odessa.”

“You mean, I should warn her?”

“Abby darling, of course I don’t mean ‘warn,’ but maybe tell her? Let’s face it, this will be unusual for her? She could be—embarrassed?”

Abby spoke firmly. “Odessa will be like she is with any guest.” She half smiled. “But after all, he did go to Harvard. Compared to Odessa and Horace and their kids and anyone they know, he’s rich, and that almost makes him white.” She laughed. “Joseph says it’s like that with Jews. If you’re rich enough, you’re not really Jewish.”

“I suppose. Buffy Guggenheim in school seemed—” Cynthia had been about to say, “just like anyone else,” and then with a small laugh stopped herself. “I guess the truth is I haven’t known all that many Jewish people,” she said. “Even in Washington, somehow—”

“But now you’re getting a Jewish son-in-law, and a bunch of Jewish in-laws. Communists at that,” Abby laughed. And then she said, “Speaking of all that, Joseph is really worried and sort of ticked off at his sister.”

“Oh?”

“She ran off to Madison after that Ed Faulkner. You know, the Negro soldier who was on the train with Russell Byrd when he died, and then the C.P. almost loused the whole thing up, interfering—”

“I remember.” Cynthia had always found the whole story confusing, but of course she remembered who Ed Faulkner was. “How did Susan know him?” she asked.

“From when the Marcuses asked him to come and stay—mostly because he’s a Negro, I think. Communists!—they’re so irrational. Anyway, Susan developed this big crush on Ed, and when he went out to Madison to school, she pulled
together all the money she could get out of her family, borrowed some from Joseph too, and went out after him. She rented a house and everything, said she’d get a job and maybe even finish her degree there. God, with her grades, fat chance. But of course it didn’t work out, their living together. Joseph has the idea that Ed never really even liked her very much, it was all in her head. Not his.”

“Oh dear.” Even as she had listened, though, Cynthia had wondered: How would I ever tell Odessa that story, for example, assuming that I wanted to? How could I tell her anything?

To Abby she said (and she knew that she was really talking to herself), “You know what’s really terrible, I’ve never really talked about anything with Odessa. There’s a lot of affection between us, I know that, and I know she feels it too, but we don’t talk. I mean, even if I wanted to, and in a way I think I do, there’s no way to explain to Odessa about Benny Davis coming.”

Abby said, “I know.” And then she said, “I’ll do it. It’ll be easier for me.” She laughed. “And I’ll tell Dolly Bigelow too. That’ll be the fun part.”

Feeling clever, not making a lot of the gesture, Abby picked up the big picture of Ben in his football uniform, and said to Odessa, “Did I show you this picture of my friend Ben? He’s the one coming this weekend.” She had been straightening her desk when Odessa came in to vacuum; in fact, she had been arranging her pictures: Harry, and Joseph, and Ben.

After the smallest pause, Odessa said, “That is sure one handsome boy.”

“Well, he’s sort of older than a boy. I mean he’s older than I am. But we used to go to school together, back in Connecticut. A long time ago.”

“That so,” was all Odessa said, and then, “All right if I do the vacuuming in here now, or you rather I wait?”

“Oh no, now’s fine. I wasn’t really doing anything.”

“Really no reaction,” Abby told her mother. “But does ‘boy’ sort of mean Negro, to her? If he were white, would she have said young man, or something like that?”

“I truly don’t know. I told you, we don’t exactly talk. We just exchange essential information like what I should buy at the A&P, and all the rest is nonverbal. For instance, I have no idea what she thinks is going on with me and your father.”

“Especially since you don’t know yourself.”

Startled, Cynthia stared at her daughter. “That’s true,” she rather weakly answered.

Dolly’s hair was now dyed a very dark brown, and still tightly waved in a somewhat out-of-date way. (Abby supposed it to be thirties; it certainly did not look recent, not mid-forties.) In any case, the dark dye job made her carefully-never-exposed-to-sun skin look paler, more finely wrinkled. Older. Abby made this judgment as she also thought, How smart of her mother, Cynthia, not to dye her hair; God knows, she, Abby, never would. On the other hand, maybe blondes like Cynthia (and Abby) could dye their hair so that it didn’t show; Cynthia was perfectly capable of such subterfuge, Abby knew, even of a certain duplicity in small matters.

Abby had time for all these and further thoughts as Dolly talked—and talked and talked—about her garden. Her essential message being that Cynthia’s flowers far outshone her own. But this took a long time to get out, what with various ramifications, explanations, and excuses. Much of the last, the excuses, had to do with “help,” both the hired help and the non-cooperation of the men in her house; namely, Willard, her husband, and the boys. “I declare, if I didn’t know better I’d say they were all just plum lazy, the three of them. Willard and Archer and Billy too.” She sighed deeply. “It’s not like I had the least little help from that Horace, can’t even spare me one hour once or twice a week, like I came near to begging him for. And Odessa knows. But I still don’t begrudge Cynthia all her lovely flowers, not one bit. She deserves them, she really does.”