The Early Stories (54 page)

Rebecca said nothing, not even her habitual “Yes.” He felt rebuked for being preachy. In his embarrassment he directed her attention to the first next thing he saw, a poorly lettered sign above a great door. “Food Trades
Vocational High School,” he read aloud. “The people upstairs told us that the man before the man before
us
in our apartment was a wholesale-meat salesman who called himself a Purveyor of Elegant Foods. He kept a woman in the apartment.”

“Those big windows up there,” Rebecca said, pointing up at the top story of a brownstone, “face mine across the street. I can look in and feel we are neighbors. Someone's always there; I don't know what they do for a living.”

After a few more steps they halted, and Rebecca, in a voice that Richard imagined to be slightly louder than her ordinary one, said, “Do you want to come up and see where I live?”

“Sure.” It seemed far-fetched to refuse.

They descended four concrete steps, opened a shabby orange door, entered an overheated half-basement lobby, and began to climb flights of wooden stairs. Richard's suspicion on the street that he was trespassing beyond the public gardens of courtesy turned to certain guilt. Few experiences so savor of the illicit as mounting stairs behind a woman's fanny. Three years ago, Joan had lived in a fourth-floor walkup, in Cambridge. Richard never took her home, even when the whole business, down to the last intimacy, had become routine, without the fear that the landlord, justifiably furious, would leap from his door and devour him as they passed.

Opening her door, Rebecca said, “It's hot as hell in here,” swearing for the first time in his hearing. She turned on a weak light. The room was small; slanting planes, the underside of the building's roof, intersected the ceiling and walls and cut large prismatic volumes from Rebecca's living space. As he moved farther forward, toward Rebecca, who had not yet removed her coat, Richard perceived, on his right, an unexpected area created where the steeply slanting roof extended itself to the floor. Here a double bed was placed. Tightly bounded on three sides, the bed had the appearance not so much of a piece of furniture as of a permanently installed, blanketed platform. He quickly took his eyes from it and, unable to face Rebecca at once, stared at two kitchen chairs, a metal bridge lamp around the rim of whose shade plump fish and helm wheels alternated, and a four-shelf bookcase—all of which, being slender and proximate to a tilting wall, had an air of threatened verticality.

“Yes, here's the stove on top of the refrigerator I told you about,” Rebecca said. “Or did I?”

The top unit overhung the lower by several inches on all sides. He touched his fingers to the stove's white side. “This room is quite sort of nice,” he said.

“Here's the view,” she said. He moved to stand beside her at the windows, lifting aside the curtains and peering through tiny flawed panes into the apartment across the street.

“That guy
does
have a huge window,” Richard said.

She made a brief agreeing noise of
n
's.

Though all the lamps were on, the apartment across the street was empty. “Looks like a furniture store,” he said. Rebecca had still not taken off her coat. “The snow's keeping up.”

“Yes. It is.”

“Well”—this word was too loud; he finished the sentence too softly—“thanks for letting me see it. I—Have you read this?” He had noticed a copy of
Auntie Mame
lying on a hassock.

“I haven't had the time,” she said.

“I haven't read it either. Just reviews. That's all I ever read.”

This got him to the door. There, ridiculously, he turned. It was only at the door, he decided in retrospect, that her conduct was quite inexcusable: not only did she stand unnecessarily close, but, by shifting the weight of her body to one leg and leaning her head sidewise, she lowered her height several inches, placing him in a dominating position exactly suited to the broad, passive shadows she must have known were on her face.

“Well—” he said.

“Well.” Her echo was immediate and possibly meaningless.

“Don't, don't let the b-butchers get you.” The stammer of course ruined the joke, and her laugh, which had begun as soon as she had seen by his face that he would attempt something funny, was completed ahead of his utterance.

As he went down the stairs she rested both hands on the banister and looked down toward the next landing. “Good night,” she said.

“Night.” He looked up; she had gone into her room. Oh but they were close.

Sunday Teasing
 

Sunday morning: waking, he felt long as a galaxy, and just lacked the will to get up, to unfurl the great sleepy length beneath the covers and go be disillusioned in the ministry by some servile, peace-of-mind-peddling preacher. If it wasn't peace of mind, it was the integrated individual, and if it wasn't the integrated individual, it was the power hidden within each one of us. Never a stern old commodity like sin or remorse, never an open-faced superstition. So Arthur decided, without pretending that it was the preferable course as well as the easier, to stay home and read St. Paul.

His wife fussed around the apartment with a too-determined silence; whenever he read the Bible, she acted as if he were playing solitaire without having first invited her to play rummy, or as if he were delivering an oblique attack on Jane Austen and Henry Green, whom she mostly read. Trying to bring her into the Sunday-morning club, he said, “Here's my grandfather's favorite passage: First Corinthians eleven, verse three. ‘But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God.' He loved reading that to my mother. It infuriated her.”

A mulish perplexity ruffled Macy's usually smooth features. “
What?
The head? The head of every man. What does ‘the head' mean exactly? I'm sorry, I just don't understand.”

If he had been able to answer her immediately, he would have done so with a smile, but, though the sense of “head” in the text was perfectly clear, he couldn't find a synonym. After a silence he said, “It's so obvious.”

“Read me the passage again. I really didn't hear it.”

“No,” he said.

“Come on, please. ‘The head of the man is God …' ”

“No.”

She abruptly turned and went into the kitchen. “All you do is tease,” she said from in there. “You think it's so funny.” He hadn't been teasing her at all, but her saying it put the idea into his head.

They were having a friend to the midday meal that Sunday, Leonard Byrne, a Jewish friend who, no matter what the discussion was about, turned it to matters of the heart and body. “Do you realize,” he said halfway through the salad, a minute after a round of remarks concerning the movie
Camille
had unexpectedly died, “that in our home it was nothing for my father to kiss me? When I'd come home from summer camp, he'd actually
embrace
me—physically embrace me. No inhibitions about it at all. In my home, it was
nothing
for men physically to show affection for one another. I remember my uncle when he came to visit had
no
inhibitions about warmly embracing my father. Now, that's one thing I find repugnant, personally repugnant to me, about the American home. That there is none of that. It's evident that the American male has some innate fear of being mistaken for a homosexual. But
why
, that's the interesting thing,
why
should he be so protective of his virility? Why shouldn't the American father kiss the American son, when it's done in Italy, in Russia, in France?”

“It's the pioneer,” Macy said; she seldom volunteered her opinions, and in this case, Arthur felt, did it only to keep Leonard from running on and on and embarrassing himself. Now she was stuck with the words “It's the pioneer,” which, to judge from her face, were beginning to seem idiotic to her. “Those men
had
to be virile,” she gamely continued, “they were out there alone, with Indians and bears.”

“By the way,” Leonard said, resting his elbow on the very edge of the table and tilting his head toward her, for suaveness, “do you know, it has been established beyond all doubt that the American pioneer was a drunkard? But that's not the point. Yes, people say, ‘the pioneer,' but I can't quite see how that affects me, as a second-generation American.”

“That's it,” Arthur told him. “It doesn't. You just said yourself that your family wasn't American. They kissed each other. Now, take me.
I'm
an American. Eleventh-generation German. White, Protestant, Gentile, small-town, middle-class. I am
pure
American. And do you know, I have never seen my father kiss my mother. Never.”

Leonard, of course, was outraged (“That's shocking,” he said. “That is truly shocking”), but Macy's reaction was what Arthur had angled for. It was hard to separate her perturbation at the announcement from the perturbation caused by her not knowing if he was lying or not. “That's not true,” she told Leonard, but then asked Arthur, “Is it?”

“Of course it's true,” he said, talking more to Leonard than to Macy. “Our family dreaded body contact. Years went by without my touching my mother. When I went to college, she got into the habit of hugging me goodbye, and now does it whenever we go home. But in my teens, when she was younger, there was nothing of the sort.”

“You know, Arthur, that really frightens me,” Leonard said.

“Why? Why should it? It never occurred to my father to manhandle me. He used to carry me when I was little, but when I got too heavy, he stopped. Just like my mother stopped dressing me when I could do it myself.” Arthur decided to push the proposition further, since nothing he had said since “I have never seen my father kiss my mother” had aroused as much interest. “After a certain age, the normal American boy is raised by people who just see in him a source of income—movie-house managers, garage attendants, people in luncheonettes. The man who ran the luncheonette where I ate did nothing but cheat us out of our money and crab about the noise we made, but I loved that man like a father.”

“That's
ter
rible, Arthur,” Leonard said. “In my family we didn't really trust anybody outside the family. Not that we didn't have friends. We had lots of friends. But it wasn't quite the
same
. Macy, your mother kissed you, didn't she?”

“Oh, yes. All the time. And my father.”

“Ah, but Macy's parents are atheists,” Arthur said.

“They're Unitarians,” she said.

Arthur continued, “To go back to your
why
this should be so. What do we know about the United States other than the fact that it was settled by pioneers? It is a Protestant country, perhaps the only one. It and Norway. Now, what
is
Protestantism? A vision of attaining God with nothing but the mind. Nothing but the mind alone on a mountaintop.”

“Yes, yes, of course. We know that,” Leonard said, though in truth Arthur had just stated (he now remembered) not a definition of Protestantism but Chesterton's definition of Puritanism.

“In place of the bureaucratic, interceding Church,” Arthur went on, trying to correct himself, flushing because his argument had chased him into the sacred groves of his mind, “Luther's notion of Christ is substituted. The reason why in Catholic countries everybody kisses each other is that it's a huge family—God is a family of three, the Church is a family of millions, even heretics are kind of black sheep of the family. Whereas the Protestant lives all by himself, inside of himself.
Fide sola
. Man
should
be lonely.”

“Yes, yes,” Leonard said, puzzling Arthur; he had meant the statements to be debatable.

Arthur felt his audience was bored, because they were eating again, picking at the anchovies and croutons. He said, as a punch line, “I know when we have kids I'm certainly not going to kiss Macy in front of them.”