Sons (54 page)

“Certainly. So with all those musicians going in, there just weren’t enough Army bands to go around. Really, Will, you can’t win a war by sending people out to play ‘American Patrol.’”

“Here we go,” I said. “Drink up, Bobby.”

“Here’s to Al Di Luca,” Bobby said, “wherever he may be.”

“And here’s to...” I started, and shook my head.

“Yeah?”

“No,” I said, and drank.

“Have you got a quarter?” Bobby asked.

“Let me see.” I took out my change and spread it on my palm. Bobby picked up a quarter, and then went over to the jukebox. By the time he returned, I’d finished my drink and ordered another one. A hooker came over to chat with us about the weather, and Bobby matter-of-factly asked her how much it cost for the night and she told him it would be twenty-live dollars but that she didn’t French. If he wanted somebody who Frenched, he was barking up the wrong tree. He told her to go peddle her ass someplace else, and then ordered another drink and angrily said, “High-class whore, working a bar on Stony Island Avenue. What’s so special about
her
mouth, would you mind telling me?”

“They’ve been spoiled,” I said. “Too many servicemen around.”

“I’d rather go home and jerk off than risk getting a dose from something like that,” Bobby said.

“You and me both,” I said.

“Besides, there’re too many
nice
girls in Chicago.”

“Right.”

“Have you got a girl, Will?”

“Not here.”

“Where?”

“New York.”

“That’s a long way off.”

“Not even a girl, really.”

“What then, a boy?” Bobby said, and laughed.

“Not a
girlfriend,
I mean. Just somebody I was fucking steady.”

“What’s her name?”

“Well,” I said, and shrugged.

“Listen, I’m not going to dash down to New York and
call
her,” Bobby said, and put his hand on my shoulder.

“Dolores,” I said.

“I knew a girl named Dolores in Georgia. Dolores Greenberg. I suspect she was the only Jew in the state. She was fabulous in bed.”

“So was mine.”

“Do you think maybe
all
Doloreses are marvelous in bed?”

“Maybe so.”

“Or maybe it’s just you and I who’re marvelous, and we made them look good.”

“Maybe, who knows?”

“Are you finished with your scotch? We’d better order another round.”

“Must be a hole in this glass,” I said.

“Listen,” Bobby said, and put his hand on my shoulder again, “why are we wasting a fortune for liquor here when I’ve got a bar full of the stuff at home? Why don’t we go up there, listen to some records, and drink all we want to, without having to call the bartender every two minutes. What do you say?”

“Well,” I said, “we’re here now, we might as well stay.”

“I’ve got some really good records,” Bobby said. “I don’t know if you dig jazz or not, but I’ve got stuff that goes all the way back to Jimmy Blythe and King Oliver. What do you say?”

“Well, it’s kind of late,” I said. “I thought maybe I’d have a few more drinks and then head home.”

“Why? Is your Daddy waiting up for you?” Bobby said, and laughed.

“It isn’t that,” I said, “but we’re here now, what’s the sense moving?”

“Come on up to my place,” Bobby said.

We were facing each other now, we had turned our stools to face each other, our knees touched, our eyes met.

“Come on,” he said.

He put his hand on mine.

“Come on.”

I woke up to brilliant sunshine.

I was naked.

There were tiny spatters of blood on the sheet.

I could hear the shower running someplace in the apartment. I got out of bed and picked up my undershorts rumpled on the floor, and pulled them on and put on my pants and shirt and jacket and stuffed my tic into the pocket and hurriedly put on my socks and did not bother to lace my shoes.

In the street outside, I ran.

I kept looking back over my shoulder.

From a telephone booth on Cottage Grove, I placed a call to Dolores in New York, hoping I would catch her before she left for school. She answered on the fourth ring.

“Hello?” she said.

“Dolores? This is Will.”

“Will! Where...?”

“Dolores,” I said, “Dolores, I... I need you. Will you marry me, Dolores?”

“Yes,” she said.

It had been snowing heavily since four o’clock. A huge Election Day bonfire had been set in the middle of Sixty-third Street, and from Jackson Park, where I waited for Rosie, I could see the flames leaping up against the falling snow. There was a sharp wind blowing in off the lake. Sparks raced into the sky like incandescent flakes, and the marchers around the fire struggled to hold onto their makeshift signs as they bravely chanted their election slogan into the wind, “We Want Harding, We Want Harding!” Farther up the street, a second fire flared in the late afternoon darkness, and another chant joined the first, so that they merged bipartisanly in the blinding snow, “Harding, Cox, Roosevelt, Coolidge,” one becoming the other, indistinguishable.

I had come directly from the mill, telling Nancy beforehand that I might be home late tonight as I wanted to stop by the polls to see how heavy the voting was. I would not be old enough to vote until January, but she knew I was keenly interested in this presidential election, and readily accepted my alibi. From Joliet, I had called Rosie and asked her to meet me in Jackson Park at five o’clock, and she had said, “In this storm, Bert?” and I had answered, “Yes, Rosie, in this storm.” I stood hatless on the edge of the park now, my hair blowing, the snow thick underfoot and swirling in the air, clinging to my coat. My gloved hands were in my pockets. I was cold, and I was wet, and I had no stomach for this tryst, but it was something that had to be done, and I aimed to get it done today.

When we were relieved by the 5th Division in October 1918, and I received Nancy’s letter in Montfaucon, I got drunk with a worldly French corporal who told me he would never understand the American attitude toward marriage and sex, making it sound as if one were quite naturally exclusive of the other. He told me that no Frenchman in his right mind would dream of a life that did not include a
garçonièrre
and a pretty little lady with whom to share it on a rainy afternoon (he was, significantly, from Paris and perhaps his description of the French ideal did not apply to places like Les Eyzies or Vence). But he told me that before the war he had known at least half a dozen married American businessmen who had become utterly demoralized after falling in love in Paris. Since falling in love, and being in love, and making love were to the corporal the very essence of life, he could not fathom what seemed to him a juvenile, unrealistic, totally unsatisfying, and uniquely American approach to sex. He had demonstrated his premise by picking up two out of the three tavern whores and taking them both off to bed, he being a married man with four children, the youngest of whom was almost my age.

I was not in love with Rosie Garrett, of that I was certain, and yet I had been to bed with her at least a dozen times since that night in August, and had felt that same guilt described by the French corporal, felt a less understandable guilt for meeting with her now, as though we were lovers when in my heart we had never been anything like, when in my mind whatever had happened between us was already finished. I reached under my coat and fumbled in my vest pocket for my watch, clicked it open, studied it, snapped it shut angrily, and looked off at the orange-yellow flames searing the afternoon darkness. I had been driving since eight this morning, driving first through a Chicago gray with the threat of a storm as I went from store to store, and then driving out to the mill to chock on several shipments that seemed to have gone astray, and then driving all the way back from Joliet in what had become a fierce snowstorm. I was irritated now, and tired, and feeling foolishly guilty for an affair that had hardly ever been.

She came up behind me and gently looped her arm through mine, and smiled, her face wet with snow, her black fur hat crowned with white, I could remember her smile in the automobile that very first time, and in the stilling heat the strains of “Avalon,” too long ago, too tenuous a bargain to hold me to now.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” she said, “the trolleys are all...”

“That’s all right,” I said.

“You must be frozen, Bert. Shall we go somewhere for coffee?”

“No, I don’t think we should take that chance.”

She turned to me and looked into my eyes, and nodded, and said, “All right, Bert. Can we at least sit down?”

I dusted one of the benches free of snow, and we sat side by side, Rosie with her hands in her black muff, I with mine in my pockets. We might have been strangers, and I suppose we really were.

“You sounded so desperate on the telephone,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine...”

“Well, I’ve got to talk to you,” I said.

“Nancy knows, is that it?”

“No. No, she doesn’t.”

“Allen doesn’t suspect a thing, if that’s what you’re...”

“No, that’s not it, either.”

“You look very handsome,” she said, “with all that snow in your hair.”

“Thank you. Rosie...”

“Yes, Bert?” she said, and brushed a snowflake from her cheek and then turned to me again. She knew what was coming, of course, they always know, women, there are sensors they possess that reach out and delicately probe, touching the core of the matter long before it is broached. Her face took on a pinched protective look, poor Rosie, poor dear Rosie married to a jerk and seeking God knew what from me. I wanted to say Rosie, please understand that I don’t want to hurt you, please understand that there’s a time to choose, dear Rosie, and this is that time for me. I can’t continue, Rosie, unable to look my wife in the eye, fearful that each time she says “Pardon?” she is questioning a fresh lie, I can’t do this to her, because I love her dearly. Forgive me, please, for taking what I took from you, and for turning it aside now, for seeming to spurn it now, I don’t want to hurt you, I truly don’t. But Rosie, please understand that there’s a way of life I cannot follow and yet remain the man I once hoped to become,
still
hope to become. Rosie, I wanted to say, please know that I can’t commit to this, I can’t give to it the energy or devotion it demands, it would destroy me, it would take whatever's good or real or honest in me and crush it forever. Rosie, I wanted to say, please understand. Rosie, I wanted to say, but she already knew, she looked at me with a small sad smile on her painted mouth, her black fur hat tilted precariously on her head, covered with a crooked crown of snow, she looked at me and waited for me to kill her.

There is only one way to say goodbye.

“Rosie,” I said, “I want to end it.”

I dreamt that night that I addressed a thousand deaf Indians in full battle regalia.

I dreamt that I mounted a platform, carrying a bass drum and a harmonica, and held up my hands for silence, and then hit the drum three times in succession and blew a sustained chord on the harmonica and held my hands up once again. When I began speaking, I spoke clearly and distinctly because all the Indians were deaf and had to read my lips — all of them were lip readers, so to speak. And since I had talked to them many times before, and since each time they had been fooled by my bass drum and harmonica into thinking I was only a song and dance man, I wanted to make absolutely certain that
this
time they understood me.

I dreamt that they watched me silently as I began to speak, their arms folded across their beaded chests, faces impassive, feathers rustling slightly in the wind. The sky behind them was blue, the platform rose from the center of a vast plain that stretched beyond me and the gathered Indians. My fine feathered friends, I said, I know that I am not one of your highly exalted paper tycoons whose every uttered syllable dears your normally clogged eustachian canals, I know in fact that my own beginnings were humble indeed, for where did I start if not with pulp, where I had to talk loud and talk fast to be heard over the pounding of the drum barker, where if not there? But listen to me, I dreamt I said.

Please, I dreamt I said.

Oh, I know that you have seen me standing here before you on many a previous occasion and perhaps you thought I was trying to sell you fraudulent medicine in glittering bottles, though I tell you now in all honesty my offers were sincerely made, and whatever small ills and tiny ailments I hoped to cure seemed terribly important to me. And should you now, my gathered tribal brothers, should you now fail to recognize the elixir because of what you once erroneously thought to be snake oil, well — the loss will be mine, of course; I am exposed alone to the angry wind here. But the loss will be even more seriously yours.

There was suddenly in my dream an enormous bonfire shooting sparks to the Chicago night, and more Indians dancing about it holding signs that read HARDING-COOLIDGE and chanting “We Want Harding, We Want Harding,” while white men stood beyond the circle of light proscribed by the flames and jeered and taunted, “Harding is a nigger, Harding is a nigger!” I held up my hands for silence while everywhere around us the white men passed their leaflets surreptitiously into the crowd, black type flaming against the orange and red of the fire: