Sons (44 page)

Who was this girl?

I hardly knew.

Beautiful, yes, I thought she was perhaps the most beautiful girl I’d ever met, but I had thought that from the very start, when she’d walked into the apartment on the arm of her Lebanese rug salesman, and that had never changed. There was too, I suppose, the promise of passion in her hazel eyes, daring me, mocking me, a passion only partially unleashed — her twistings beneath me on the grass in Central Park, dusk falling, “We’ll get mugged if we don’t watch out, Will,” and a schoolgirl giggle — it was only a matter of time, she knew it, I knew it, and I dreamt each night at Mitchel Field of entering her and hearing her shriek aloud in ecstasy. That was there, then, the promised passion of Dolores my flamenco dancer, that and a suspected capacity for pain, too, which seemed equally Spanish in origin, though her father was Irish (“With a fifth of scotch thrown in,” he told me) and her mother was Dutch. But beyond the wild expectation of taking her to bed — she seemed to me the materialization of every pin-up picture I had hung on barracks walls from Mississippi to Italy and back again — was there really a beginning here, a gentle flute song floating on the wind of a dying April, was there really anything to
love
about this lovely girl? (She was, it occurred to me once, when I was feeling unusually Freudian, the total opposite of Francesca, the beauty of Foggia, and perhaps to me the symbol of everything clean, innocent, and alive, as opposed to everything soiled, corrupt, and dead — well, not the total opposite, I suppose, since the old man Gino had a cataracted eye and Dolores’ brother wore a patch over an empty socket. I didn’t too often think psychoanalytically, however, and I was probably dead wrong.)

She wrote poetry. She showed me one of her efforts several days before I finally took her naked on her quilted bed in the back bedroom of the Sutton Place apartment while her one-eyed brother was out dancing and her parents were visiting friends in Connecticut for the weekend and two Russian armies were pushing the Germans further back into Berlin. The poetry was terrible.

I told her what I thought of it — we were in a Chinese restaurant on the fringes of Harlem, she
did
know the city well, I had to give her that. She looked at me solemnly for a moment, and then asked, “What do you know about poetry?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Then how do you know it’s terrible?”

“It doesn’t move me.”

“It moves
me,”
she said.

“You wrote it,” I said. “Listen, you asked for my opinion, and I gave it to you.”

“I asked for your
praise,”
she said.

“I thought you wanted my opinion.”

“I don’t need opinions,” she said. “Every cheap critic in the world has an
opinion,
but only poets have
ideas.”

“Excuse me, I didn’t know you were a poet,” I said.

“I’m
not
"

“Then what are we arguing about?”

“If you love someone, you’re supposed to say her poem is good.”

“Your poem is terrible.”

“Then you don’t love me.”

“Did I say that?”

“Do
you love me?” she asked.

The first real contact was made on April 25, when a four-man patrol of the United States 273rd Regiment came upon a Russian outpost at Torgen on the Elbe, two miles west of the advancing American forces.

The bedspread had been quilted by Dolores’ mother. “We shouldn’t be here alone,” she told me, “maybe we’d better go out to a movie or something.”

“We’ve seen everything around,” I said. “We’ve been to twelve movies in the past week, if I never see another movie as long as I live...”

“Then let’s go for a walk.”

“It’s raining,” I said.

“Will...”

“Yes?”

“Don’t do this to me. Please.”

“Do what?” I said.

“If you don’t love me, then please don’t.”

“I never said I didn’t love you.”

“You never said you did, either.”

“Come here.”

“No. Please.”

“Come here, Dolores.”

“Don’t call me that. Please.”

“Lolly? Dec?”

“Please she said. “Please.”

“Come here, Dolores. I won’t touch you. I promise.”

“You will,” she said, and came to the bed.

On April 28, Benito Mussolini was shot to death by partisans in the village of Dongo on Lake Como, together with his mistress Clara Petacci and sixteen Fascist leaders. On the last day of April’s dyings, large and small, Il Duce’s body and that of Signorina Petacci were hung upside down from a steel girder in what had once been a gasoline station. Signs were placed above their bound feet, black-lettered onto white, proclaiming their names to the assembled populace. They were cut down later and taken to the morgue, but only after Mussolini’s head had been kicked to a bloody pulp by a crowd that once had cheered him in life. On that same day, in a bunker below the Reich Chancellery, Adolf Hitler and his mistress Eva Braun committed suicide. The announcement from Berlin read, “At the head of the brave defenders of the Reich capital, the Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, has fallen. Inspired by a determination to save his people and Europe from destruction by Bolshevism, he has sacrificed his life.”

By that time, I was humping Dolores Prine day and night.

It was shortly after the end of my lunch hour at the mill when a runny-nosed kid came over from Building 17 to tell me that Mr. Moreland in Personnel would like to see me at two o’clock. I told him I’d be there, and then asked if he knew what it was about, but he just shrugged his shoulders and wandered off across the yard with his hands in his pockets. Since it was then a quarter of two, and since the walk to 17 could conceivably take fifteen minutes (if a person had a cork leg) I advised Allen Garrett that I was going up to the executive building, and then put down my picaroon and left the conveyer belt.

Ramsey-Warner, like most paper mills, manufactured several grades of stock, and I had begun to understand during my year’s apprenticeship there that different types of pulp were blended to make those various papers. I guess you could say I was an essential employee in the manufacture of both groundwood and sulphite pulps in that it was I (along with Allen) who spiked the logs off the conveyer belt if we saw any defects in them, it being absolutely necessary for wood to be glistening clean before it was transported to either the chippers or the grinders. Mr. Moreland’s office was in the building behind 12-A, where the big grinders were housed.
(All
the buildings at the mill were numbered, and I was convinced that Joliet used the same identification system for its cell-blocks. I often wondered if the prison, unlike R-WP, Inc. had a building numbered 13.) On the way to Mr. Moreland’s office, I peeked into 12-A to see what was going on, figuring that if I was ever going to own this place, I had better familiarize myself with every phase of the operation whenever I had the opportunity.

There were twenty grinders in the room, each pair of them flanking a 3000-horsepower motor. If you looked at a grinder from a certain angle, it resembled the front of a locomotive, cylindrical, with a covered drive shaft jutting out of it where the locomotive’s headlight would have been, a metal plate somewhat like a cowcatcher just below it, and a narrow cylinder looking very much like a steam whistle, high up on the right. The first impression lost itself quickly enough in a labyrinth of pipes, dials, valves, and wheels, the clean logs moving on their conveyer belt to be fed into three metal pockets equipped with hydraulic plungers that forced the wood against the huge grindstone revolving inside the machine. The logs were ingested parallel to the face of the twelve-ton stone, the resultant friction against their sides separating the wood fibers and dropping a warm thick soupy pulp into the pit below. That was how the grinder worked. I had asked a hundred questions about it the first time I discovered Building 12-A, standing around and chatting with the guys who operated the machines and took the big empty pockets off the line for refilling whenever their contents had been ground away. One of those guys, a Swede named Bertil Äkeson (our private joke was always the same: “Hello, Bert,” and “Hello, Bert”), greeted me now as I poked my head inside the door. I went over to him, hoping he would be involved in some mysterious operation about which I could ask some casual questions without causing him to think I was after his job. But all we did for five minutes was discuss the wonderful weather we’d been having, and when he finally mentioned something about checking the stone pit temperature gauge, I couldn’t stay around to watch or I’d have been late for my appointment in Building 17.

I had been in Mr. Moreland’s office last April, when he’d hired me, and it seemed to have changed little in the intervening months. His desk, leather-topped walnut, dominated the room, sitting large and cluttered before the twin windows that overlooked the company’s digesters in the yard outside. There were glass-enclosed bookcases on the wall to the left of the entrance door, and three portraits (two of the Ramsey Brothers, Amos and Louis, and a third of Martin Warner) unevenly flanked the fireplace and mantel on the right. The walls were wood-paneled, the carpet was brown, the room was inviting and cozy in contrast to the cheerless gray exteriors of all the buildings at the mill. Mr. Moreland beckoned to the single chair angled before his desk. I sat.

“Tyler,” he said, “do you know how many strikes there were in America last year?”

“No, sir,” I said.

“Two thousand, six hundred and sixty-five,” Mr. Moreland said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Four million men walked off their jobs, that’s a rather impressive figure, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Here at Ramsey-Warner, we did not have a single strike in 1919”

“No, sir.”

“Nor do we intend to have one
this
year, either.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tyler,” he said, “Rumsey-Warner is letting you go.”

I don’t know what I had anticipated. I’d had no idea where his conversation was leading, no clue as to why he’d been throwing strike statistics at me. I guess I’d thought for a single soaring moment that he’d been telling me about Ramsey-Wamer’s good fortune only as a prelude to giving me a raise or a promotion, I guess that’s what I secretly thought and hoped. I looked at him now in stunned silence, his brown suit blending with the warm comfort of the room, his face impassive, brown eyes watching me from behind gold-rimmed eyeglasses.

“This is Wednesday...”

“Sir, did you say...?”

“... but you may draw your wages to the end of the week. I think you’ll agree that’s more than is called for.”

“Sir, I don’t understand...”

“Yes, what is it you don’t understand, Tyler?”

“I don’t understand...”

“We no longer have need of your services, I thought I’d expressed myself quite clearly.”

“But I thought...”

“Yes, what did you think, Tyler?”

“I thought I was doing my job, I thought...”

“Yes, yes,” Mr. Moreland said.

“I’ve never missed a day, I’ve always...”

“Tyler,” Mr. Moreland said, “we do not want a strike here in 1920, is that clear?”

“Yes, but...”

“Your sympathies are well known around this mill. If you want my advice...”

“My sympathies?”

“A man can’t go around talking the way you do, and not...”

“What
sympathies?”

“... expect word to get back to Management. There’s no place at Ramsey-Warner for radical ideas.”

“Radical?”

“Yes,
radical,
now damn it, Tyler, you’re trying my patience.”

“Sir,” I said, “I’m not a Communist, if that’s what you’re...”

“Did I
say
you were a Communist?”

“No, but...”

“I did not say you were a Communist, nor do I
know
whether you’re a member of the Party or not. It has been estimated by the National Security League, however, that there are 600,000 resident Communists here in America, and I can assure you, Tyler, that we don’t want any of them here at this mill. Now if you want my advice, you’ll draw your wages and be quietly grateful for our generosity, that’s my advice to you.”

“Sir,” I said, “this is America. A person can...”

“Yes,” Mr. Moreland answered, “and we’re damn well going to keep it that way.”

There was dazzling sunshine in the yard outside. It reflected from the flat gray of the buildings, so that the walls surrounding me seemed so many mirrors bouncing back light without image. Allen, I thought. Allen Garrett told them. Allen is the only person I’ve ever considered a real friend here, the only person with whom I’ve exchanged ideas, it must have been Allen who said I was a radical. Stunned, I walked across the sunlit yard and tried hopelessly to reconstruct every conversation we’d ever had. “They are little Lenins,” I remember quoting sarcastically, “little Trotskys in our midst,” this was at the beginning of the month, when we were talking about the New York State Assembly’s vote to expel its five elected Socialist members. Yes, of course, oh God, and Allen had quoted in rebuttal a clipping from the
Times,
sent to him by his uncle in New York, “It was an American vote altogether, a patriotic and conservative vote. An immense majority of the American people will approve and sanction the Assembly’s action,” and I had told him that the
Times
was crazy, and so was his uncle, and so was he. And hadn’t (no, it couldn’t be true, it couldn’t have been Allen who’d cost me my job) but hadn’t we argued only last week about those two Italians up in Massachusetts, whatever their names were, who had supposedly committed murder and armed robbery, but who were also — coincidentally — radicals who’d taken part in several strikes and who’d organized some kind of protest against the Department of Justice? Hadn’t I said, Oh God, what
hadn’t
I said, what
hadn’t
I felt free to discuss with my good friend Allen Garrett?