Evergreen (69 page)

He found Chris talking at the far end of the room. He tapped him on the shoulder.

“Chris, I’ll go with you,” he said.

*  *  *

During the week of spring recess he opened his mouth a dozen times to tell his grandparents and closed it again, feeling weak and cowardly.

“I want to buy you a good car,” Grandpa said. “The jalopy was good enough for a college boy, but you ought to have a better one now. So be thinking about what you’d like and well take care of it after commencement.”

He said, “Why don’t you take a month or two off before you start putting your nose to the grindstone? Drive out to California or something? Have a ball.”

Nana said, “I was thinking, would you like me to fix up your room at the office or do you want to pick out your own things? Jerry Malone just refurnished, so maybe you’d like to take a look at what he bought for some ideas—”

Grandpa said, “You haven’t seen the new shopping center since we finished up, have you? How about taking a ride over with me? I have a couple of people to see there this afternoon.”

Eric went along and strolled through the long expanse of malls, turns and alleys, up a level and down a level, marveling at the enormity of it all and trying to observe enough to make, later, the intelligent comments that would be expected.

But all he could feel was a pervasive sadness. So many aimless couples drifting through the afternoon with their children tugging at them, looking for amusement! Anxious men in lumber jackets, tired women with hair in curlers, wandering with their desires through mazes of stores piled with shoddy trash that they couldn’t afford and didn’t need! And Eric knew that if he were to express all that to his grandfather he would only stare in astonished dismay.

They got back in the car. “Well, what did you think of it?” his grandfather asked. There was a sparkle in his voice.

“It’s a busy place, all right.”

“Wait till you see what were building in south Jersey. It’s still only on paper but we expect to break ground in September. Maybe I’ll let you work on it. I’ll send you
down with Matt Malone to get the feel of things. Matt’s a smart boy. You can learn a lot from him.”

Eric’s left hand lay on the seat and suddenly his grandfather placed his own over it. He spoke very low, so that Eric could barely hear him and knew that the old man was embarrassed by his own emotion.

“For years I’ve envied Malone. It was wrong of me, I know.
Thou shalt not covet … 
. But I did, all the same. All those fine sons to go into business with him! To carry on what he had built out of years of sweat, while for me it was all going down the drain. Into nothing, as if I had never existed. Until you came. I don’t mind telling you, you’ve taken years off my shoulders. Or put years onto my life, however you want to say it. Do I make you feel uncomfortable, Eric? Forgive me this once, if I do.”

“That’s okay, Grandpa.” My God, my God, how am I going to say it? With what words? Where? When?

On Friday evening his grandmother called him aside. “Eric, I want to ask a favor. Would you come to temple with us tonight? It’s the anniversary of your great-grandfather’s death and Grandpa has to say Kaddish for him.”

“Yes, surely, I’ll go.”

“Thank you, I’m glad. I know it’s not your prayer, but still it will make him feel good to have you there.”

He sat through the sermon not hearing it, heavy with the weight of his dilemma. He was aware from time to time of plaintive music, but only half aware. The name of Max Friedman was called in a long list of names; the sounding of its syllables made a small shock in his head and it came to him for an instant that the blood of that totally strange man—for if he were to be brought back to life what could they have to say to one another?—that strange man’s blood was in him, nevertheless. The congregation rose. He felt the rustling and stood with them through the murmuring of several hundred voices all in unison. His grandmother’s head was bowed, her hands were clasped, her face was serious. His grandfather’s old hooded eyes were partly closed.
He swayed as he held the prayer book but he was not reading it; he knew it by heart. They know I won’t be saying this prayer for them, Eric thought. One of Aunt Iris’ little boys will have to do that when they are dead. And yet I mean so much to them.

And now the blessing: “The Lord bless thee and keep thee; the Lord cause the light of His face to shine upon thee—”

Then “Good Sabbath,” the people turning to each other in the neighboring pews, families, friends and strangers kissing or shaking hands.

“Good Sabbath.” Joseph kissed Eric and kissed Anna; Anna kissed Eric and kissed Joseph.

They moved slowly in the press going down the aisle. Grandpa rested a hand on Eric’s shoulder. He saw that his grandmother watched the gesture. He thought irrelevantly that her red hair was too youthful for the expression that she wore. He looked at her while she looked at her husband’s hand. Something was being weighed and balanced behind her thoughtful, clever face, something of delicate complexity, spun of unspoken things. He felt, he could almost touch, an emotion so tense that a move might shatter it, whatever it was: a question held back, a plea, perhaps, for which there were no words?

He knew then, in the throb of that instant, that he couldn’t go.

“You’re not angry, Chris?” he asked, when he had finished his story. They had met in New York for the purpose, so Chris had expected, of taking Eric to the interview.

“I won’t allow myself to be.” Chris smiled but his eyes were angry. “I’ll just say you’re rather young for your years, completely inexperienced and far too sentimental. You’re like your—” he broke off.

“Like my parents, you were going to say.”

“Well, yes, I was. However, it’s hardly unusual for a person to be like his parents.”

“Like which of them?” Eric persisted.

“Like both. Too idealistic for their own good, each one of them.”

Chris took Eric’s hand. “I’m always in a hurry these days, it seems. So let’s just say, ‘Good luck to us both.’ And if you ever need me, Eric, you’ll know where I am. Keep in touch, will you? All the best,” he said. His face changed; a look of gravity and softness came over it, and for an instant Eric was back in the boat, bobbing behind a curtain of willows, and Chris was saying, “Your Gran is going to die.” He shook off the illusion.

“Thanks, Chris, for everything,” he said, and, releasing each other’s hands, they parted among the hastening crowds on Forty-third Street.

Later that week Iris told him, “I’m not sure it was the right decision for your own self-interest. But it surely was generous, Eric.”

He didn’t answer. Now that he had made the decision he felt that it hadn’t really been generous of him at all, that actually he had been and was—would always be?—too divided to be entirely content either with staying or with going.

“I think I’d like to wander around Europe for a couple of months this summer,” he said suddenly, the idea having just come. “I’ve never been much of anywhere.”

A small inheritance from Gramp was to be given to him at commencement time. It was a legacy, literally and figuratively, from an era when a young gentleman was expected to make a tour of Europe before he “settled down.”

“I wish I could go with you,” Iris said. “But Theo says Europe smells of decay. I’m hoping someday he’ll change his mind.”

“This wouldn’t be your summer to go anyway, would it?” For Iris was pregnant again, at thirty-seven; he wondered how pleased she could be about it, and rather thought it must have been an “accident.”

“The baby’ll be here by the time you get back, I guess. It’s due around the middle of October.”

“I’ll be back,” Eric assured her.

In mid-June, after commencement, they helped him pack. His grandmother brought home a set of fine luggage, a traveling umbrella and a travel bathrobe, all highly impractical, and all a way of saying, “have a wonderful time; we love you.” He had learned that much about them during his time in their house.

On the last night they went to Theo’s and Iris’ for dinner. The two boys had pooled their allowances and bought film for his camera.

“I would like some pictures of Stonehenge,” Steve told Eric solemnly. “I have a book about it. Nobody seems to know who built it, do they?”

Jimmy asked Eric to find out how you play rugby and how it was different from football. Laura had helped her mother make a package of fudge, “to eat on the plane for dessert.” And Eric felt the poignancy of departure.

Anna cried a little. “I don’t know why I’m crying! I’m so happy that you’re going to have a marvelous summer. I don’t know why I’m crying.”

She cried so easily. Gran would never have done that. He thought that he had been cursed with ambivalence. In some ways he was closer in feeling and expression to this woman than he had ever been able to get to Gran, and yet Gran was a part of his fibre and his life as this other grandmother could never be. She had come too late. A part of him would always be withheld from her and awkward with her.

Suddenly it occurred to him that that was what she was feeling too, and that was why she cried.

In a little town near Bath one afternoon he bought a cheap notebook at a stationer’s and began to write.