After the War (6 page)

“What a wonderful story!” Abby added, “They must be really pleased with you?”

“They’re not so pleased about me not going to med school.” Benny made a grimace that Abby remembered: his bad face. He added, “You know, to them a teacher isn’t much. They knew too many in the public schools. They don’t see much between that and a college professor, which is where I’ll probably end up.”

Abby had been intensely interested both in what Benny said, this good story about his parents, and in watching his face as he spoke. Despite the extreme good looks of this tall man that Benny had become, the boy that she once knew and had liked so much and felt so comfortable with—that boy seemed to emerge, and Abby began to feel some of the old ease and comfort, and the sheer pleasure of being with Benny. She was smiling as she asked him, “What turned you against med school, finally?”

“Oh, a lot of stuff, really. The time it would take, for one thing. Plus the money.”

“I’ve been sort of thinking about med school for myself,” Abby told him. Astounding! This was a distant, unformed plan that she had barely voiced to herself, and certainly not to any other person.

“I’m really impressed,” Benny told her, and then he smiled. “Think you can manage all those chem labs? You won’t mix up the compounds?”

They both laughed, remembering Mr. Martindale, their hated old chemistry teacher and their youthful trick.

Feeling so easy and familiar with him then, Abby was sorry that the Marcuses were getting back at any minute, that they were all to go out to dinner. With so many people, she
and Benny wouldn’t get to talk much anymore. In a hurried way she asked him, “You never got around to seeing my friend Melanctha, did you?”

“No, actually I thought I’d call her next week. You know, after I’d seen you.”

“Well, there’s this problem. I mean, she’s not there anymore. Something terrible happened to her up there. She won’t even tell me, and then she came down and she went to a dance over in Hilton, and some old man was trying to talk to her, and then he had a heart attack, right there in the Deke House, and he died. I don’t know—” Abby paused for an instant as she wondered, Why am I going on like this to Benny, who’ll probably never even meet Melanctha? And then she answered her own question: I’m telling Benny (Benny? Or is it Ben these days?) because he’s so easy for me to talk to, he listens with his eyes.

And so she went on. “It’s alarming in Melanctha, because of her mother, SallyJane. She had these terrible depressions and they gave her shock treatment and it killed her.”

“Jesus.” Ben’s whole face was concentrated in distress as he listened.

“She was going to this terrible psychiatrist,” Abby continued. “A real dumb Southern jerk. My mother couldn’t stand him.” She added musingly, “I could be a psychiatrist, couldn’t I?”

“Sure you could.”

“I think I’d like to work with kids.” Then Abby asked him, “Do people still call you Benny now, or would you rather be Ben?”

“I guess Ben. But you call me whatever you want. After all, you’re my oldest friend.” And he grinned.

• • •

But it was as Ben that he was introduced to the Marcuses. To Dan and Sylvia, Joseph and Susan. And although she, Abby, was the point of contact, the mutual friend who made introductions all around, she had a sense of distance from her friends; she was able to observe, as though it all took place in slow motion—she found particularly interesting the response of the four Marcuses to Benny. To “Ben.”

His good looks astonished them all. Abby even felt a certain suspicion cast in her direction: why hadn’t she told them? (Though of course she couldn’t have, not knowing what he looked like.) She also sensed, especially in the grown-ups, in Sylvia and Dan, a certain disappointment: they had expected a nice young Negro student; the facts, that he had played football and went to Harvard, had been just slightly amiss, or askew, but still nothing had led them to expect this tall dark prince who looked (Dan Marcus, the Hollywood magnate, must especially have thought) like a movie star.

Susan Marcus (knowing her more closely than the others, Abby could probably read her best) reacted visibly and strongly to such a handsome boy; her smile and her whole posture became flirtatious, at the same time that she looked at Abby as though to ask: Is this okay? Or is he really yours?

Only Joseph seemed a little reserved, his reactions withheld; he was waiting to see what this man was really like. What he had to say for himself.

It was soon announced by Dan Marcus that they were going to a restaurant near Union Square—a real authentic old labor place, all the old Italian Reds used to go there, Dan said. Tresca, all of them.

The restaurant, reached after a walk of fifteen minutes or so, was slightly seedy: a worn green carpet, large yellowed group photographs on the walls. The tablecloths, red-and-white checked, were stained. Abby thought that her mother, tidy Cynthia, would have walked right out, probably. (“Look, we don’t have to eat here, besides there’s no one around.” Abby could hear her mother’s pretty, slightly arrogant voice.) The place was only about half full, and what most struck Abby was the total lack of uniforms, such a contrast to the streets they had just walked through, where there had seemed uniforms everywhere, festive clutches of soldiers or sailors out on the town, officers or privates with their families or their dressed-up girlfriends, or with both.

As they seated themselves, Abby between Ben and Joseph, facing the older Marcuses and Susan, Abby remarked on that fact. “It’s odd to see no uniforms in a restaurant these days.”

Surprisingly, Joseph laughed at this, but in a somewhat angry, defiant way, and he spoke not to Abby but to his parents. “The old Reds are still isolationist, isn’t that right? They think the pact is still on.”

Pleased that she knew, more or less, what he was talking about, Abigail (tactlessly) asked, “You mean like Colonel McCormick and the Chicago
Tribune
?”

Dan Marcus opened his mouth as though to say a great deal, but Sylvia, his wife, in a firm way patted his arm and spoke first. “Now, darling.” But she did not say it very nicely, Abby observed.

Removing his glasses, Joseph wiped at them in what Abby felt was a delaying tactic, postponing whatever he had to say. And when he spoke, this time addressing her, it was still without his glasses. “Not exactly
like,
” he began to explain, in a very kind and faintly amused voice. “The same conclusion,
perhaps, but really from opposite points of view. The Midwest, and the Colonel, has to do with America Firsters, even Father Coughlin gets into the act, more or less. Why save Jews?—that’s their reasoning, or part of it. Whereas some of the old Reds are still hung up on the Hitler-Stalin pact. They’re a little confused, and behind.”

Abby listened, genuinely and intensely interested, as much in contemporary history as in the particular political passions of this family, which were new to her. Her parents cared, Cynthia did and especially Harry, who was so pleased to be in the Navy; they liked Roosevelt, they thought he did a great job, and they hated Hitler, as everyone did. But in Sylvia and Dan Marcus, Abigail felt a passion that was both political and personal; the two were combined (or possibly confused, confounded). And Joseph, as he talked, explaining things to Abby, was being nice to her but was also hoping to seal off his parents, so to speak. To prevent an explosion.

She felt all that acutely—but as they faced each other, she and Joseph, sitting inches apart in the not large booth, she saw Joseph’s eyes as though for the first time: a curious dark gray-brown, gold-flecked. They were the most intelligent eyes she had ever seen.

“… a group in Cambridge,” Dan Marcus was saying. “Very interesting. Anglo-Catholic Marxists. A Father Smythe is the head of it all—the head priest, I guess you’d say. They have interesting Sunday brunches, Ben. You might want to take a look. I’d be happy to write to the good Father.”

“Oh, come on, Dan.” Sylvia sounded inexplicably annoyed.

Ben murmured something polite about how nice that sounded.

“Of course I don’t really know about your politics,” Dan said; it was a gentle but insistent question.

“Unformed, I guess,” Ben told him. “I like Roosevelt, and seems to me he’s doing a good job with the war, and he got us out of the Depression. Or maybe the war did that. But beyond that I really don’t know.”

“Sounds like you’re a lot more sophisticated politically than you think you are,” Dan Marcus told Ben, with a large and very warm smile.

Mr. Marcus’s sort of good looks did not appeal to her at all, Abby noticed. His features were all too regular, except for his oversized strong bright white teeth, and his eyes, which were brown and intelligent and small, a little close together—nothing like Joseph’s eyes. He looked dishonest, Abby thought, and then she censored the thought: Mr. Marcus was probably really nice and kind and smart, he was just—just not a kind of man she had met before, and she, Abigail Baird, was much too critical. Judgmental. “So young to make such harsh judgments,” her mother had said. “And such quick ones!” She was right, Abigail knew she was, and admitted as much; nevertheless, already she had observed in herself a tendency to return to whatever her first impression or judgment had been. She could still remember the first time she saw Benny, this tall skinny colored boy out on the playground at school. She thought he looked really nice, and smart, and she was right. Later she found out that his father was the janitor at the school, and a lot of kids wouldn’t ask him to parties or anything, though he was friends with some of the boys he played games with. Ben could run faster than anyone, they all said. Abby began saying “Hi” when they saw each other around the school, or downtown, and then they began talking sometimes. And then they were friends.

She would like it if Susan and Ben became friends, Abby
thought. But would she? If they “fell in love” and Ben came down to see Susan at Swarthmore?

Returning her attention to Joseph Marcus, Abby noticed that his hands too were very different from his father’s. Mr. Marcus’s hands were stubby, reddish. Whereas Joseph’s hands were long and thin and smooth. Strong-looking. It occurred to her that Joseph’s hands looked sexy; odd, that was not a word she used a lot, and you don’t think of hands as being sexy, she thought (but of course they are,
very
sexy—was her next more secret thought).

“Just what are you trying to recruit that handsome Negro boy for, Dan Marcus?”

An indistinct sound from Mr. Marcus, a protest of some sort.

“Because he’s a Negro you think you’ll get points with your L.A. comrades.”

Another sound, louder but still indistinct.

“And Father Smythe,
shit
! This boy is not political, and he’s certainly not interested in you. Are you so optimistic you can’t even tell? Well, I can, and he’s not.”

“Oh, lay off, Syl. One episode.” That came loudly and clearly through the wall to the guest room, where Abby lay, trying to sleep.

She was used to parental sounds at night, even sometimes to quarrels, but those were always succeeded by more familiar sounds of love. Making up. Making love. Abby had heard those noises all her life, and they had become soothing to her, reassuring. She waited now for such sounds to come from the Marcuses, but she heard nothing.

Disturbed by what she could not make any sense of, Abby lay there, wishing for sleep that seemingly would not come.

Who was this Father Smythe that Dan Marcus wanted Benny to go and meet—whereas Sylvia apparently did not. And what did she mean, saying Benny was not
interested
in Dan Marcus? The word, as used between the Marcuses, meant something else, something specific and very likely sinister.

Dan Marcus began to snore, hoarse, belligerent sounds. It had to be Dan, no woman could make so much noise.

Unable to sleep, Abigail, for whom that affliction was extremely rare, sent her inner vision back to Pinehill, to the woods around the town where she used to wander for hours, alone and perfectly happy. She saw with absolute vividness the gray November trees with their thin, faintly fluttering leaves, and the rich dark green heavy-boughed pines, and she smelled the pines and the fecund fall earth, the loamy dirt below the thick brown-needled carpet. She saw the clearing in the woods as she came to the desiccated cornfield, the rows of crumbling ruts and the tottering, tattered gray stalks. She began to cross the cornfield, heading not fast but very happily toward the creek, its ghostly border of peeling white poplars and leafless honeysuckle vines.

And then she fell asleep.

5

R
USS, James Russell Lowell Byrd, has often dreamed of his daughter’s breasts. Long, soft, and white, floating upward in a foamy bathtub, or flopping down against her ribs as she stood up to dry herself. He
knew
, although (of course) it was not Melanctha’s actual breasts that he had seen but SallyJane’s, her mother’s. Heavy-weapon breasts, concealed in pointed bras, aimed at him. Accusing breasts. And now his young wife Deirdre’s breasts, stretched after pregnancy and all that nursing (nursing SallyJane, his daughter who would grow and soon have breasts of her own), now Deirdre has those breasts, like all the women in his life. Large and terrifying.

Would it help if he called them tits, as most men did? Would it make them smaller? He doubted it, but he could try.

Trying to shrug himself out from the dream, from the weight of the Melanctha-SallyJane-Deirdre breasts, he thought then with some tenderness and gratitude of Cynthia Baird, her sweet tender girlish pink breasts, delicate and vulnerable. Unthreatening. He should have married Cynthia, he thought, as though there were no Harry Baird and marriage were possible.

In the meantime, there he was, wide awake too early in this New York hotel room, with a big erection between his legs and dreams of his daughter, Melanctha, her breasts, weighing down his spirit, his whole mind.

He turned over onto his stomach, hiding his face in his pillow, his cock mashed down in the sheets. But finding no escape from his mind.