Evergreen (79 page)

“No real reason not to, either. I didn’t make the uproar, remember! I just quietly said what I was going to do and it was Dad who hit the ceiling.”

“Yes, and you had a pretty good idea he would. You used to do that when Grandpa was alive too, say things that you knew were like waving a red flag in front of a bull.”

“Grandpa!” Steve said scornfully.

“You didn’t like Grandpa?”

Steve shrugged, loosing from his shoulders, in a gesture
of total rejection, all unwanted burdens. “It’s like saying I don’t like Tut-ankh-amen. We hadn’t communicated in years. Actually he was dead years before he died, only he didn’t know it.”

“Sometimes you’re awfully hard, Steve.”

“I’m not hard. I only want the same right that everybody else in the family has to express my opinions, which seem to shock them to their foundations. They never think how I’m shocked by theirs.”

“That’s not so. I’ve heard you and Dad talk about things, politics and social justice, lots of times.”

“Okay, I’ll admit Dad means well. He tries to be open-minded, now and then when he’s in the mood to be. He’ll listen and try—or he says he tries—to understand. But basically, you know as well as I do, he’s as uptight as any Wall Streeter about getting ahead and having things, cars and new carpeting and crap like that. He doesn’t really care about people in places like Harlem who have to worry about food instead of carpets. And Vietnam. Sure, he thinks it’s wrong, but does he do anything about it, put himself on the line? God, it stinks, the whole business, you know what I mean? Sometimes when I hear them talking about insurance and tax-free bonds and all that garbage I could puke. I could honest-to-God puke!”

“So, okay, I get what you’re driving at, but all the same, it is their house and I guess they can talk about what they want in it, can’t they? Hell, I don’t agree with them half the time but I don’t go around making waves. Let them think what they want and I can think what I want, for Pete’s sake.”

“What kind of relationship is it where you can’t speak your mind? That’s why I hate to come home, if you must know. At least on the campus I can talk freely. It’s like breathing fresh air again when I get back there.”

“I thought you were going to quit!”

“Yeah, and a lot of my friends are, too. I don’t mean the whole campus is free. Christ, no. I meant my crowd.”

Steve’s crowd. Earnest, gesticulating, wrathful. He supposed
they were all ultra-bright like Steve, although he didn’t really know any of them except by sight, orating on the campus, gathered under the trees or in club rooms. They were names he recognized from the
Clarion Call
, flying here and there, to congressional hearings, to vigils, parades and strikes, an uneasy flock in constant flow and motion. He wondered how they ever got any work done or passed exams. After all, you had to spend
some
time cracking the books … even if you were brilliant like Steve. It puzzled him.

“Where there’s genuine love there’s understanding, isn’t there? Well, isn’t there?” Steve demanded now.

“Steve, you see perfectly well what I mean but you pretend you don’t. I can’t win an argument with you. You’ve got a trick way of talking and twisting things against all common sense, against what any man in the street would simply
feel
was right.”

“Yeah,
feel.
Think with your blood. Like a fascist,” Steve said.

He had a slow, faintly mocking habit of shutting the lids down over his eyes, dismissing you. Sometimes when he did that Jimmy wanted to hit him. Then other times, when he looked at his brother, at the blue veins that stood out on the temples under the thin, fair skin, he felt a tenderness more moving than any he ever felt for their little brother, Philip.

“I didn’t want to come home for Thanksgiving, anyway,” Steve said. “You forced me to come.”

“I’m sorry I did,” Jimmy answered quietly. “Well, okay, then, I’ve had enough for tonight. I’m going to bed.”

“The sleep of the just,” Steve mocked.

His snapping sarcasm had always been infuriating. Yet it was only a cover-up. Jimmy remembered having thought that years ago. He remembered other things, too.

There was the time when Jimmy had broken his leg and Steve had got all his assignments, brought books from the library for his project, typed his papers, fed his gerbils and tended his plants for the experiment on Mendel’s Law. He
remembered how, when they were very young, Steve used to get so mad about being weaker than he; never able to win a fight, he would fall into such a frenzy of outraged despair that the fight would end with Jimmy’s being sorry for him.

My brother’s debtor, and his keeper. It sounded so pompous. Yet there it was.

The next afternoon, to Jimmy’s relief and his parents’ concern, Steve left to attend a peace rally in California.

Nana invited Jimmy and Janet to lunch. He knew that she must have been very pleased with Janet or she wouldn’t have invited them. They sat in the sunny, lofty dining room, the women chatting easily, as women always seemed able to do. With half his mind he heard them discussing Janet’s family, college and skirt lengths. The other half of his mind was listening to different voices.

The dinners he had eaten at this long, polished table! It seemed as if all of them had been ceremonial, although there must have been many that were not. What he remembered, though, were song and prayer, flowers, candlelight and enormous quantities of sweet-and-sour food.

“We’re boring you,” his grandmother said suddenly.

“No, no. I was just letting my mind wander. I was thinking of how we used to be dressed up for holiday dinners in our best suits and how everyone was so punctilious.”

“Did you hate it?” Janet asked curiously.

“Oh, when I was very young I was impressed. But from about fourteen on I used to be so bored. The meals took forever. I spent the time hiding my yawns.”

“People are easily bored at fourteen,” Nana observed. “But you know? It was beautiful, wasn’t it?”

Yes, very beautiful. Now, having been away from home and childhood, far enough away in space and time to see it as it had been, he could think of it as a way that he would like to live over, to repeat when his turn should come.

“I wonder whether Mother feels the loss?” he asked.
“She was so attached to Grandpa. And Dad doesn’t or won’t keep the holidays like that in our house.”

“I imagine she misses it,” Nana said quietly. “I know I do.”

The silence held faint sadness.

Then Nana asked surprisingly, “Are you a religious person, Janet?”

“Yes, the tradition means a great deal to me. It always has.”

His grandmother smiled. Then she said briskly. “If we’re finished, why don’t you show Janet through the house? She said she wants to see it.”

They started in the music room. The Bach
Goldberg Variations
lay open on the rack of the piano.

Jimmy remarked, “I guess Philip’s been here.”

“Yes, he was here for supper last Sunday and he played for me.”

“Do you remember how no one dared even cough when Philip was playing?”

“I do.”

“With all respect, I don’t think it was because Grandpa understood or even liked music.”

Nana laughed. “He didn’t.”

“It was only because it was Philip playing.”

The fierceness of that love! Jimmy wondered whether the kid had minded being displayed like that. But he guessed not. Philip was at Juilliard now and, after all, what use was it to play an instrument without an audience? Thank goodness, though, he wasn’t a “different” or outlandish boy. In fact, he was a great deal better adjusted than most people were, having a sociable, almost placid nature which didn’t fit with the platitudes about musicians and temperament.

They climbed the stairs to Grandpa’s round room. The humidor still held the scent of rich Havanas, although it had long been empty. Blueprints lay rolled in sheaves on the shelves. A handful of fresh marigolds stood in a little cup on the desk, Nana’s flowers, the same as the ones that bordered
the terrace and framed the lawn on this pearl-gray day of fading fall.

Janet stood at the window. “What a lovely house!” she cried softly.

“Yes,” Jimmy said. “In some ways it seems more like my childhood’s house than the one I actually lived in.”

Below on the one-story wing of the library, Virginia creeper climbed thickly on the walls. It took a generation for creeper to grow like that. It was so strong now you would barely be able to pull it off if you should want to. The whole house was strong.

“I remember sleeping over once when I was very little,” Jimmy said. “I was terribly afraid of thunder and on that night there was an awful storm. You knew I was afraid, Nana, and you came into my room where I was lying awake. But for the first time I wasn’t afraid at all, and you were so surprised. I told you that I wasn’t afraid in
this
house, that nothing bad could ever hurt or scare me in
this
house. Do you remember that?”

“I don’t remember it and I’m glad you told me.” Nana was pleased.

Presently they kissed her good-by and rode away.

“You have a wonderful family, Jimmy,” Janet said. “I love your grandmother especially. She does seem strong, like her house. She gave me—oh, I don’t know exactly—a feeling of permanence. I’m the sort of person who likes things to last, Jimmy.”

“I am too,” he said.

In his dormitory room, Jimmy lay sprawled on the bed in a jumble of blankets, clothes and textbooks, watching Janet get dressed. He imagined that his flesh still glowed, as though the air that touched her flesh was warmed by it and brought the warmth back across the room to him. He foresaw the bleakness of the room when she would have left it, and him alone in it, until next time. In the year he had known her she had become as near to him as his pulses or his breath.
“Don’t go,” he said.

“Jimmy, I have to. If I stay here I won’t study and I’ve a chemistry quiz on Thursday.”

“Well both study. I won’t brother you.”

“You know we won’t study.”

He laughed. “All right. You win.”

She drew on her jacket. “Okay. I’m going. You can come to my place Friday. My roommate’s going home for the weekend.”

“Okay. Wait, let me get something on and I’ll walk you over.”

He ran around the room picking up clothes, a shirt flung over the typewriter, pants on the floor.

“Janet?”

“What, dear?”

“I’m sorry there was a scene at my house. A helluva thing, on your first visit! And honestly, we never have big fights like that one, only small ones now and then when Steve starts them.”

“I didn’t mind. I only felt bad for all of you, especially for your grandmother. I liked her so much.”

“Yeah. It’s been hard for her since Grandpa died. She’s really great, Janet. Sometimes she can sound like somebody in a fairy tale, as if she hadn’t been paying attention to the world at all. Then other times you think, She’s no fool, that lady. Did I tell you she’s an opera buff?”

“Do you really think Steve will drop out of college?”

“Yeah, I really do. I really do. You know,” he said slowly, “Steve’s kind of a genius. I mean, he could be if he wanted to. He can do languages, math, everything. Did I tell you he got in the seven-nineties on his Boards? And he never has to study the way I do. I mean, I kill myself studying. With him I think it’s a question of memory; he reads a page once and the whole thing sort of prints itself on his mind. He’s fantastic.”

“What is he interested in?”

“Nothing. He used to be a history buff, but then he started saying it was all crap, all slanted, the books don’t
tell the truth. After that he got involved with philosophy, that’s his major, but I don’t know whether he cares about it that much or what he plans to do with it.”

“Teach is about all, isn’t it?”

“He doesn’t want to teach. Anyhow, the new wrinkle is that the universities are all fake, irrelevant, feeding the war machine, you know that.” He thought of something and laughed. “I remember one time he told my grandfather about the philosophy major and Grandpa asked him what he was going to do with it. With Grandpa everything had to be practical. So when Steve didn’t answer my grandfather said, kind of making a joke, ‘Well, you could open a store: Steve Stern, Philosophy.’ Everybody laughed and Steve was so mad.”

“Not much humor in him.”

“Not much. Especially now. It’s this damned Vietnam. Seems as if that’s all some people talk about.”

“It’s important enough, Jimmy,” Janet said very seriously.

“I know. But it doesn’t have to
poison
a person’s whole life, does it? I plan on going ahead and being a doctor, regardless. And so do you, don’t you?”

“Of course I do.”

They opened the door onto an altered world. Snow, which had been sifting finely all the day, had turned into floods of sleet. It rattled like gravel as it fell. The wind slammed the door shut behind them and bent the trees, sending a shower of icicles cracking to the ground.

“The world looks angry,” Janet said.

Probably you had to be born here on these midwestern plains to live easily with such savage winds, such dark gray, frozen winters. The sleet stung their cheeks. With eyes pressed half-shut against it they stumbled and slid. Janet fell. Jimmy pulled her up and they struggled on to her door. Light from the building showed her curls salted with white.

“You look sweet with the snow on your hair,” he said.

She put her hand up to his cheek. “I love you, Jimmy.
You’re so soft, I must remember never to take advantage of you.”

“I’m not worried about that.”

“Don’t study too late.”

Walking back against the wind and sleet, he lowered his face into the woolen scarf. He felt deeply tired. It wasn’t a physical fatigue. He hadn’t realized how tense he’d been about the weekend at home, either because Janet might not like his family, or, more probably, that they might not like her and that she would then turn against him. But everything had worked out well enough. Now he was feeling the aftermath of tension.

He’d been especially glad that Laura and Janet had gotten on together. He thought of his sister, now that she had passed through the audacious moods of adolescence, as a kind of “norm.” She had such a friendly attitude toward life. If he had been asked to characterize her he would have used words like “reasonable” or “accepting.” He supposed he might be oversimplifying but anyway, that was how he saw her. She was rather like their father.