The Maples Stories (7 page)

The section man turned, bespectacled and pale. It was shocking; he had aged.

The march was slow to start. Trucks and police cars appeared and disappeared at the playground gate. Officious young seminarians tried to organize the crowd into lines. Unintelligible announcements crackled within the loudspeakers. Martin Luther King was a dim religious rumor on the playground plain – now here, now there, now absent, now present. The sun showed as a kind of sore spot burning through the clouds. Carol nibbled her Popsicle and shivered. Richard and Joan argued whether to march under the Danvers banner with the psychiatrist or with the Unitarians. In the end it did not matter; King invisibly established himself at their head, a distant truck loaded with singing women lurched forward, a far corner of the crowd began to croon, ‘Which side are you on, boy?,’ and the marching began.

On Columbus Avenue they were shuffled into lines ten abreast. The Maples were separated. Joan turned up between her psychiatrist and a massive, doleful African wearing tribal scars, sneakers, and a Harvard Athletic Association sweatshirt. Richard found himself in the line ahead, with Carol beside him. Someone behind him, a forward-looking liberal, stepped on his heel, giving the knit of his loafer such a wrench that he had to walk the three miles through Boston with a floppy shoe and a slight limp. He had been born in
West Virginia and did not understand Boston. In ten years he had grown familiar with some of its districts, but was still surprised by the quick curving manner in which these districts interlocked. For a few blocks they marched between cheering tenements from whose topmost windows hung banners that proclaimed
END DE FACTO SEGREGATION
and
RETIRE MRS HICKS
. Then the march turned left, and Richard was passing Symphony Hall, within whose rectangular vault he had often dreamed his way along the deep-grassed meadows of Brahms and up the agate cliffs of Strauss. At this corner, from the Stygian subway kiosk, he had emerged with Joan – Orpheus and Eurydice – when both were students; in this restaurant, a decade later, he and she, on three drinks apiece, had decided not to get a divorce that week. The new Prudential Tower, taller and somehow fainter than any other building, haunted each twist of their march, before their faces like a mirage, at their backs like a memory. A leggy nervous colored girl wearing the orange fireman’s jacket of the Security Unit shepherded their section of the line, clapping her hands, shouting freedom-song lyrics for a few bars. These songs struggled through the miles of the march, overlapping and eclipsing one another. ‘Which side are you on, boy, which side are you on … like a tree-ee planted by the wah-ha-ter, we shall not be moved … this little light of mine, gonna shine on Boston, Mass., this little light of mine …’ The day continued cool and without shadows. Newspapers that he had folded inside his coat for warmth slipped and slid. Carol beside him plucked at her little sweater, gathering it at her bosom but unable, as if under a spell, to button it. In the line behind him, Joan, secure between her id and superego, stepped along, swinging her arms, throwing her ballet slippers alternately outward in a confident splaying stride. ‘… let ‘er shine, let ‘er shine …’

Incredibly, they were traversing a cloverleaf, an elevated concrete arabesque devoid of cars. Their massed footsteps whispered; the city yawned beneath them. The march had no beginning and no end that Richard could see. Within him, the fever had become a small glassy scratching on the walls of the pit hollowed by the detonating pills. A piece of newspaper spilled down his legs and blew into the air. Impalpably medicated, ideally motivated, he felt, strolling along the curve of the cloverleaf, gathered within an irresistible ascent. He asked Carol, ‘Where are we going?’

‘The newspapers said the Common.’

‘Do you feel faint?’

Her gray braces shyly modified her smile. ‘Hungry.’

‘Have a peanut.’ A few still remained in his pocket.

‘Thank you.’ She took one. ‘You don’t have to be paternal.’

‘I want to be.’ He felt strangely exalted and excited, as if destined to give birth. He wanted to share this sensation with Carol, but instead he asked her, ‘In your study of the labor movement, have you learned much about the Molly Maguires?’

‘No. Were they goons or finks?’

‘I think they were either coal miners or gangsters.’

‘Oh. I haven’t studied about anything earlier than Gompers.’

‘Sounds good.’ Suppressing the urge to tell Carol he loved her, he turned to look at Joan. She was beautiful, like a poster, with far-seeing blue eyes and red lips parted in song.

Now they walked beneath office buildings where like mounted butterflies secretaries and dental technicians were pressed against the glass. In Copley Square, stony shoppers waited forever to cross the street. Along Boylston, there was Irish muttering; he shielded Carol with his body. The desultory singing grew defiant. The Public Garden was beginning
to bloom. Statues of worthies – Channing, Kosciuszko, Cass, Phillips – were trundled by beneath the blurring trees; Richard’s dry heart cracked like a book being opened. The march turned left down Charles and began to press against itself, to link arms, to fumble for love. He lost sight of Joan in the crush. Then they were treading on grass, on the Common, and the first drops of rain, sharp as needles, pricked their faces and hands.

‘Did we have to stay to hear every damn speech?’ Richard asked. They were at last heading home; he felt too sick to drive and huddled, in his soaked, slippery suit, toward the heater. The windshield wiper seemed to be squeaking
freedom
,
free-dom
.

‘I wanted to hear King.’

‘You heard him in Alabama.’

‘I was too tired to listen then.’

‘Did you listen this time? Didn’t it seem corny and forced?’

‘Somewhat. But does it matter?’ Her white profile was serene; she passed a trailer truck on the right, and her window was spattered as if with applause.

‘And that Abernathy. God, if he’s John the Baptist, I’m Herod the Great. “Onteel de Frenchman go back t’France, onteel de Ahrishman go back t’Ahrland, onteel de Mexican, he go back tuh –”’

‘Stop it.’

‘Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t mind them sounding like demagogues; what I minded was that godawful boring phony imitation of a revival meeting. “Thass right, yossuh. Yos-
suh
!”’

‘Your throat sounds sore. Shouldn’t you stop using it?’

‘
How
could you crucify me that way?
How
could you
make this miserable sick husband stand in the icy rain for hours listening to boring stupid speeches that you’d heard before anyway?’

‘I didn’t think the speeches were that great. But I think it was important that they were given and that people listened. You were there as a witness, Richard.’

‘Ah witnessed. Ah believes. Yos-suh.’

‘You’re a very sick man.’

‘I know, I
know
I am. That’s why I wanted to leave. Even your pasty psychiatrist left. He looked like a dunked doughnut.’

‘He left because of the girls.’

‘I loved Carol. She respected me, despite the color of my skin.’

‘You didn’t have to go.’

‘Yes I did. You somehow turned it into a point of honor. It was a sexual vindication.’

‘How you go on.’

“‘Onteel de East German goes on back t’East Germany, onteel de Luxembourgian hies hisself back to Luxembourg –”’

‘Please stop it.’

But he found he could not stop, and even after they reached home and she put him to bed, the children watching in alarm, his voice continued its slurred plaint. ‘Ah’ze all raht, missy, jes’ a tetch o’ double pneu
mon
ia, don’t you fret none, we’ll get the cotton in.’

‘You’re embarrassing the children.’

‘Shecks, doan min’ me, chilluns. Ef Ah could jes’ res’ hyah foh a spell in de shade o’ de watuhmelon patch, res’ dese ol’ bones … Lawzy, dat do feel good!’

‘Daddy has a tiny cold,’ Joan explained.

‘Will he die?’ Bean asked, and burst into tears.

‘Now, effen,’ he said, ‘bah some un
foh
-choonut chayunce, mah spirrut should pass owen, bureh me bah de levee, so mebbe Ah kin heeah de singin’ an’ de banjos an’ de cotton bolls abustin’ … an’ mebbe even de whaat folks up in de Big House kin shed a homely tear er two….’ He was almost crying; a weird tenderness had crept over him in bed, as if he had indeed given birth, birth to this voice, a voice crying for attention from the depths of oppression. High in the window, the late-afternoon sky blanched as the storm lifted. In the warmth of the bed, Richard crooned to himself, and once cried out, ‘Missy! Missy! Doan you worreh none, ol’ Tom’ll see anotheh sun-up!’

But Joan was downstairs, talking firmly on the telephone.

METAL, STRICTLY, HAS
no taste; its presence in the mouth is felt as disciplinary, as a
No
spoken to other tastes. When Richard Maple, after many years of twinges, jagged edges, and occasional extractions, had all his remaining molars capped and bridges shaped across the gaps, the gold felt chilly to his cheeks and its regularity masked holes and roughnesses that had been a kind of mirror wherein his tongue had known itself. The Friday of the final cementing, he went to a small party. As he drank a variety of liquids that tasted much the same, he moved from feeling slightly less than himself (his native teeth had been ground to stumps of dentine) to feeling slightly more. The shift in tonality that permeated his skull whenever his jaws closed corresponded, perhaps, to the heightened clarity that fills the mind after a religious conversion. He saw his companions at the party with a new brilliance – a sharpness of vision that, like a cameras, was specific and restricted in focus. He could see only one person at a time, and found himself focusing less on his wife, Joan, than on Eleanor Dennis, the long-legged wife of a municipal-bond broker.

Eleanor’s distinctness in part had to do with the legal fact that she and her husband were ‘separated.’ It had happened recently; his absence from the party was noticeable. Eleanor, in the course of a life that she described as a series of harrowing survivals, had developed the brassy social manner that converts private catastrophe into public humorousness; but
tonight her agitation was imperfectly converted. She listened for an echo that wasn’t there, and twitchily crossed and recrossed her legs. Her legs were handsome and vivid and so long that, after midnight, when parlor games began, she hitched up her brief shirt and kicked the lintel of a doorframe. The host balanced a glass of water on his forehead. Richard, demonstrating a headstand, mistakenly tumbled forward, delighted at his inebriated softness, which felt to be an ironical comment upon flesh that his new metal teeth were making. He was all mortality; all porous erosion save for these stars in his head, an impervious polar cluster at the zenith of his slow whirling.

His wife came to him with a face as unscarred and chastening as the face of a clock. It was time to go home. And Eleanor needed a ride. The three of them, plus the hostess in her bangle earrings and coffee-stained culottes, went to the door, and discovered a snowstorm. As far as the eye could probe, flakes were falling in a jostling crowd through the whispering lavender night. ‘God bless us, every one,’ Richard said.

The hostess suggested that Joan should drive.

Richard kissed her on the cheek and tasted the metal of her bangle earring and got in behind the wheel. His car was a brand-new Corvair; he wouldn’t dream of trusting anyone else to drive it. Joan crawled into the back seat, grunting to emphasize the physical awkwardness, and Eleanor serenely arranged her coat and pocketbook and legs in the space beside him. The motor sprang alive. Richard felt resiliently cushioned: Eleanor was beside him, Joan behind him, God above him, the road beneath him. The fast-falling snow dipped brilliant – explosive, chrysanthemumesque – into the car headlights. On a small hill the tires spun – a loose, reassuring noise, like the slither of a raincoat.

In the knobbed darkness lit by the green speed gauge,
Eleanor, showing a wealth of knee, talked at length of her separated husband. ‘You have no
idea
,’ she said, ‘you two are so sheltered you have no idea what men are capable of. I didn’t know myself. I don’t mean to sound ungracious, he gave me nine reasonable years and I wouldn’t
dream
of punishing him with the children’s visiting hours the way some women would, but that
man
! You know what he had the crust to tell me? He actually told me that when he was with another woman he’d sometimes close his eyes and pretend it was
me
.’

‘Sometimes,’ Richard said.

His wife behind him said, ‘Darley, are you aware that the road is slippery?’

‘That’s the shine of the headlights,’ he told her.

Eleanor crossed and recrossed her legs. Half the length of a thigh flared in the intimate green glow. She went on, ‘And his
trips
. I wondered why the same city was always putting out bond issues. I began to feel sorry for the mayor, I thought they were going bankrupt. Looking back at myself, I was so
good
, so wrapped up in the children and the house, always on the phone to the contractor or the plumber or the gas company trying to get the new kitchen done in time for Thanksgiving, when his silly,
silly
mother was coming to visit. About once a day I’d sharpen the carving knife. Thank God that phase of my life is over. I went to his mother – for sympathy, I suppose – and very indignantly she asked me, what had I done to her boy? The children and I had tunafish sandwiches by ourselves and it was the first Thanksgiving I’ve ever enjoyed, frankly.’

‘I always have trouble,’ Richard told her, ‘finding the second joint.’

Joan said, ‘Darley, you know you’re coming to that terrible curve?’

‘You should see my father-in-law carve. Snick, snap, snap, snick. Your blood runs cold.’

‘On my birthday, my
birthday
,’ Eleanor said, accidentally kicking the heater, ‘the bastard was with his little dolly in a restaurant, and he told me, he solemnly told me – men are incredible – he told me he ordered cake for dessert. That was his tribute to me. The night he confessed all this, it was the end of the world, but I had to laugh. I asked him if he’d had the restaurant put a candle on the cake. He told me he’d thought of it but hadn’t had the guts.’