Memoir From Antproof Case (15 page)

"Why?" I asked.

"So I can be near you," she answered.

"That's very sweet of you," I answered, thinking that perhaps Wabash College was near Wall Street, "but I live uptown."

"You don't live on campus?"

I laughed.

"Most people do."

"Most people do what?" I asked.

"Live on campus. Don't they?"

"What campus?"

"Wabash College."

I was puzzled. "What exactly are you saying, Constance?" "Most students of Wabash College live on the campus of Wabash College, is that not so?" "It sounds reasonable," I said. "But you live someplace else?" "Of course I do," I protested.

"Why?"

"Why
what?
"

"Why do you live someplace else? Why don't you live on campus?"

"On the campus of Wabash College?"

"Yes."

"Why should I live there?"

"Where is it, anyway?" she asked, somewhat irritated.

"I don't know."

"You don't know?"

"No."

"I'll bet you're not on the honor roll," she said.

She had thought I was a student on the GI Bill. And so had they, the professors from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Wharton. That was why they ignored me—or tried to—whenever I spoke. That was why I had been so irritatingly invisible.

That I did not realize this was soon to become the cause of acute conflict. The man on my left was having problems. He was clearly unhappy with just about everything, and angry with what remained. Early in the discussion he made a statement that, in my view, had no grounding whatsoever. He was pushing an academic supposition that entirely avoided the reality of nations acting within the international system (my specialty, which had put me right on the mark enough times at least to allow me to offer an opinion). I contradicted him—directly, but in the polite, hypothetical way that prevails at graduate seminars or in the court of a shogun.

And when I did he looked at me and, evidently, read my name tag. "That's nonsense," he said. "You don't know what you're talking about."

I was shocked. Not two months before, I had had a conversation with Harry Truman, and although we spoke frankly and did not always agree, the president was completely untouched by arrogance of any kind. I left the Oval Office with admiration for him that has only increased with the appearance of each of his successors.

Who was this professor who dismissed me as if he were the Queen of Hearts and I his obsequious supplicant? I read his name tag. Igor Jaguar. Professor of Economics, Harvard University. Igor Jaguar? Well, he did have an unusual accent.

When he finished a little dissertation on the beauty and all-around predictive ability of the Jaguar Theorem, I once again contradicted him, marshalling my arguments as carefully and forcefully as I could, for, after all, I had been affronted.

Smiling at me patronizingly, he said, "All right, dunce, you've said your nonsense, and we've had enough of it. We've finished with your comments for the rest of the session."

Instead of puffing up and saying, "I
beg
your pardon," or some other thing like that, I laughed. I was a fully grown man who had seen some of the world, and even as an undergraduate—at Harvard, when Professor Jaguar had not yet made the scene—no one had ever spoken to me that way. I glanced at the assembled economists for confirmation that Mr. Jaguar had exceeded his mandate, but I found no sympathy. Their expressions suggested that they would hold me at fault for bringing out Jaguar's lunacy, and, unfortunately, they had interpreted my laugh as nervous acquiescence.

Someone else spoke up, changing the subject. And then someone else, and someone else. Although I was stung, I was ready to forget the incident and proceed diplomatically. At the end of a discussion of the implications of the decisions agreed upon at Bretton Woods, so very nearby, I asked a question. I said something like, "I'm not aware of the means by which this resolution was adopted. What is the background of the decision, its legislative history, so-to-speak?"

Jaguar kept silent, but someone else said, in a manner that, for no reason I could discern, suggested grim hatred, "If you are advanced enough to attend this seminar, we shouldn't have to explain such things to you. It was your responsibility to keep yourself informed about Bretton Woods."

I thought I was dreaming, or that I had gone crazy, and my combativeness began to rise. I felt the kind of upwelling rage that visited me one terrible day in Brooklyn—the second man I killed, for which I was not tried but more or less commended.

Sometimes the fury arises within me and I think I was born to fight with a mace. Still, I stifled it. I decided that to explode would be unseemly. I did, however, give a very firm response.

"It was not possible for me to follow the conference," I said, "and if you are unable or unwilling to answer me, it isn't because my question is in any way unreasonable. The question is perfectly reasonable."

A mumble. And then a hush. And then, in a tone that dripped with contempt, someone
else
said, "We expect a certain level of competence. Bretton Woods was only two years ago. Where were
you
that you were ignorant of it?"

That was it. I had had it. I shed my one tear. I don't know what they thought it was, but when I'm backed up against a wall I remember all I love and am always moved. I shed only one tear because I cut off my deepest emotions with the resolve that recalling them has summoned in their defense, and then I am ready.

I narrowed my eyes. I said, not so much in anger as with an inhuman growl of fact and truth, "I was in a fucking airplane, over fucking Berlin."

This silenced everyone except Jaguar, who ignored his cue to turn from the blast. "All I can say, GI Bill turd, is that 'Wabash College' would have been less of a lesser place had you been shot down," he said, smiling as if in some sort of triumph and as if he were not in grave danger.

I did not detonate at that moment. I have always reserved the right to time my own detonations. "I was shot down," I told him, "twice."

"Too bad you weren't killed, then, you little
idiot,
" he shouted.

I was so enraged that I became motionless. Moments passed, then, perhaps, a minute. Someone started to say something, as if the seminar would continue, but in a fog of red I rose from my chair and my gaze fixed upon Jaguar. As the seconds ticked, I heard the voice of the speaker trail off. And then, as I stared at Jaguar, silence descended.

My eye fastened upon the buffet. Spurred by the memory of those I knew who had given their lives, I said to Jaguar, so quietly that it could hardly be heard, in a kind of hoarse whisper, "Are you hungry? You look hungry. It's time for dinner, but don't get up, I'll serve you."

Things such as I did next are rarely done, because human inhibitions are so powerful. But coffee and its evil manifestations are justification for primal rage, as is defense of the innocent, and I include as innocent those who cannot speak, cannot move, cannot make their wishes known, those for whom love is only pure and forever unrequited, for they are gone and will never come back.

Among them is my cousin Robert. I hardly knew him. When we were little we would play at family gatherings, and during religious ceremonies we shared the same chafe and oscillation rate. We were too young to understand how we were related, or that it had meaning, or that we had a physical resemblance to one another.

Once, at an interminable family gathering where the girls wore patent-leather shoes and the rooms were too hot, we fled to the basement and tried to take apart a refrigerator. And once, at Thanksgiving, when it was unusually cold, we escaped onto a reed-bordered lake and skated for hours in the chill wind.

He died in his B-25. The B-25 was a weapon with which Americans slaughtered Americans, one of the worst and most dangerous planes ever produced, a coffin. A third of them were lost in training, so you can imagine how they performed in combat.

Do you think the crews didn't know? They knew very well. And their families knew. I remember exactly an eight-by-ten black-and-white photograph of my uncle, my aunt, Robert, and his younger sister. My grandmother is there, too, and another woman, probably the sister of Robert's mother.

They stand in front of Robert's parked B-25 on a field in southern California, looking into the camera as if they are looking at death. He is the only one who is smiling, though he knew as well as or better than they exactly what his chances were. How brave he was to face a pointless death each time he went up, and he kept on going up.

I made one step forward and thrust my left hand into Jaguar's lapels, clamping them like a vise. Stupidly, he grabbed my left forearm with both his hands. I then jerked him toward me about half a foot, brought my right hand, swordlike, even with my left ear, and struck him across the face.

Because he had probably never been hit in his life, he acted as if I had killed him. But this blow was merely to turn him around, after which he did exactly what I wanted him to do. He threw himself facedown across the table, with his waist bent at the edge. I used my left hand like a mechanical grasper once again, and in a sudden and irresistible movement seized the back of his belt and pants.

I have always been very strong, and I was in superb shape at the time. Thus it was possible for me to take him by belt and neck, lift him into the air, and carry him as if he were on a gurney. No one in the room moved a muscle, as physical confrontation was not their métier. Their mouths hung open and I think some of them must have stopped breathing, for the silence had a curious quality about it that suggested the sudden absence of oxygen.

We started at the head of the buffet table. "Here's some roast beef," I said. The roast was only partially carved, and under red heat lamps it looked like something from a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. "You like roast beef. Have some," I commanded as I pounded his head against it. The impact was cushioned but substantial. He was still breathing and making sounds, so I knew he hadn't had a heart attack.

"Which does this remind you of more," I asked, ferociously swinging him through the air until his head slammed against the uncut roast and sent it flying across the room, "golf or baseball?"

His howlings of protest showed that his pride was hurt far more than his body, so I said, "What was that? Baseball? Right. So you get to eat all the potato salad you want." When his head emerged from the bowl of potato salad, he looked like Santa Claus.

"Robert was my cousin," I shouted.'"Just another jerk who went down in his B-25. Just another turd who never even got to go on the GI Bill. For you, not even a number. You don't even have to think about him."

I was in the same state in which petite mothers find themselves when they are able to lift six-hundred-pound gates off their trapped children, and I could have clasped him to a quick death.

"But now you are going to think about him. You're going to think of him every time you come into a gathering of people. You're going to think of him every time you see food. You're going to think of him every time you see or hear an airplane.
Swear it!
" I screamed, shaking him as a terrier shakes a rat, "Swear it!"

Had he not made some incomprehensible sounds that had the unmistakable quality of acquiescence, I would have killed him. I said, "Say, 'Robert, thank you for dying for me in your lousy B-25.'
Say it!
" And he did.

I let him go. As he stared ahead in shock, I picked up my knapsack and walked out into the arctic air, quivering and distraught that it had been Robert who went down instead of me, because in family gatherings, and on the pond, and during the few times that we had been together, I had known. I had known even then, although I didn't know how, that I was a survivor and that he was not. I had had the wit. I had had the fury. And I had had the luck.

I had been made that way, and he had been made gentler, somewhat awkward, and never as sure. But he was by far the better man, the quieter man, and he died in my place. The truth of it is that it should have been me, but there was never anything I could do about the truth.

I often think of him. You see, the colors up there were different, and the air ... was different. Half the time you felt as if you were dreaming, and the forces that played upon you—the blinding light, the gravity in turning or diving, the great cold, the air too thin to breathe—were such that you were always near the gates of death, and it was easy, far too easy, to be taken. I have fallen through the sky, my arms pulled away from me by centrifugal force as I tumbled, a ball of orange fire and the crack of thunder following, the straps and buckles on my clothing whistling in the wind.

Though my actions at the conference would not affect my career (my reputation was already compromised), I felt vaguely unsettled about what I had done. Nonetheless, my indiscretion had served me well, for as I exited a dark stand of spruce onto the moonlit frozen road, I heard footsteps.

Constance emerged from the darkness, moving so beautifully that I was comforted, and when she reached me, I felt infatuation. Still, those were different times. I recall then a delicacy, a reticence that held her away from me for longer than we wished, and although I wanted at that moment to take her in my arms, this was something that would come later on. In the meantime, love was well forged in the discipline that kept us apart.

Though I was middle aged, our affair had the kind of otherworldly traction into which adolescents and young people slip so often, though my ability to maintain otherworldly traction had lessened markedly. As compensation, I found myself better able to appreciate the factual.

The process has continued until, at eighty, I am well content with the little things that I used to think were of little import. I can see more deeply now, and my satisfaction with less and less grows alarmingly, so that I fear it will not be so long until I reach the end of life, where I will have to be satisfied perfectly by absolutely nothing.

I remember Constance as if I were looking at photographs. I see her dancing, turning gracefully, and each progressive moment is frozen, with a click, as if with a camera. As she comes into the light it shines on her hair and in her eyes and in her smile. She is turning toward me, open, trusting, full of love. She is wearing a sequined top that reflects spears of light like a magical thistle. So it was.