The Merry Month of May

by James Jones

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Harry said, and then he grinned with that hatchet-face of his. “So you’re in on all of that. How long?”

  “Oh, we’ve been talking,” Hill said sullenly. “You don’t think it’s only Nanterre, do you? The Sorbonne’s involved, too. Every university in France’s involved. We’ve had a bellyful of it. And we’re not going to take it lying down.”

  My ear loved his use and command of his father’s type of American English. But Hill’s French was equally as good, was perfect. I had a tendency to forget that sometimes. But in fact he was at least as much French as he was American. He had lived in Paris almost all of his life.

  “Well, I’m proud of you,” Harry said, still grinning his hatchet grin.

  “You’re proud of me!” the boy cried. “What do I care whether you’re proud of me! You, with your money, rich, and writing those crappy films you write! Look at you, all of you: sitting there boozing it up! Boozers! Lushheads! Getting fat in the belly and fat in the mind! With your old Louis Treize and your ritzy apartment! You’re proud of me! After what your generation did to the world?”

  “Wait a minute!” Harry said. “Wait just a minute, kid! My generation inher—”

  “You wait a minute!” Hill said. The tirade seemed out of all proportion to the offense, if there was one; out of proportion even to his own perhaps over-excited emotions left over from the student meeting; but he went on.

  Harry had stopped grinning.

  “Hypocrites! Absolute hypocrites, all of you! Well, we’re going to pull you down. Pull the whole damn society down. Down around your ears. We haven’t got anything to put in its place yet, but something good—something better than what exists—has got to happen.” He caught a breath. “Oh, what’s the use of trying to explain anything to you? Old phonies like you?” He turned and fled.

  Harry had gotten half up out of his chair, and looked as if he were undecided whether to chase his son and hit him, or let it go. Slowly, he dropped back into the chair.

  “Well, I’ll be God damned,” he said. Then after a moment, “How do you like them apples?”

  “Harry,” Louisa said softly from the lovely Louis Treize couch they had hunted over a year for. “Take it easy, Harry. Take it easy.” She got up to pour us all another drink.

  Darling, solid, level-headed Louisa. I still think it was a good thing that she spoke, Harry’s face was a sight to behold. There was a kind of numb snarl on it, and underneath that a bitter hurt the like of which I have rarely seen. And though he had sunk back, he was gripping his highball glass with whitened knuckles as if he might hurl it into the fireplace. And if he had, I don’t know what might have followed. I think he would have gone for Hill. But Louisa kept his thought distracted. She refilled my glass, his, and her own, talking inanities about younger generations. She sat back down, finally, and nobody spoke for an uncomfortably long time.

  It may seem that Harry’s reaction was out of proportion to his son’s offense. The key lay in the fact that Harry was a man who all his life had been proud of himself as a fighting Liberal. Now here was this man being upbraided by his own teen-age son for being old, a phony, an arch-Conservative, a member of the “Establishment”. It was apparently the first time it had happened.

  In the uncomfortable silence, in which I could hear far too loudly the swallowing mechanism of my own damned throat, I finally got up and took my leave, saying I ought to be getting home, since Hill was obviously all right.

  “All right?” Harry said in a dazed way. “All right?”

  I suppose it wasn’t the best thing I could have said.

  Anyway, I left, I had no concept, no premonition, no idea, nor even any concern, that this might be anything more than a normal father-son squabble, that an element might exist in it which would demolish, would flatten the whole Gallagher family as Hiroshima was flattened.

  2

  . . . . . MY DOORBELL IS RINGING. I know who it will be. It will be Weintraub. Weintraub, coming by with gossip tidbits about the taking of the Sorbonne today, or perhaps some news about whether the students will be out protesting tonight. Weintraub. David Weintraub, who brought The Catalyst into all our lives. I suppose I must go and let him in. But the thought of seeing him now, depresses me.

  But first I am putting these papers away, and locking the desk. Weintraub avidly and openly examines everything that is lying around loose in any apartment that he visits. . . . . .

  Weintraub. Weintraub the clown. Weintraub the clown has gone. And he did not see any of these papers of mine. And yet somehow I have a hunch that he suspects that they exist—even though I only began actually working on them today! He has that kind of a ferret’s mind, a kind of immensely aware animal cunning that is not inhibited by any short-circuit of shamelessness on his part, or by any deep-riding sense of the right of privacy of others. Totally open about himself and his private (or what ought to be private) experiences, to the point of embarrassing his listeners, he accords others the same right by prying shamelessly and incessantly into their private experiences as far as they will let him. He made at least two allusive remarks about the fact that I might be working on something, writing something, about the Gallaghers and the events of the past six weeks—remarks which I parried deftly without giving him any information one way or the other.

  It is next to impossible to give any kind of accurate description of Weintraub to someone. “Hello, Jack Hartley!” came that deep, booming, falsely hearty voice from the stairwell, as I pressed the button that opened the outside street door a flight below. “I have great news for you tonight! Weintraub has finally been beaten up by the flics! After all these weeks and days of being in the forefront rank of the Révolution, Weintraub has finally made it! I got the bruises to prove it! I’ll show you!”

  “Come on up, Dave,” I said, deliberately making my voice super-quiet, to contrast with his effusiveness. He always has affected me that way.

  One word here about my apartment. It is in one of those old buildings built around 1720 by some long-vanished entrepreneur who was a big wheel in the King’s Finance Ministry or someplace like that, and whose now-forgotten name adorns the wall outside on the quai on a seldom-polished brass plate. These houses were all built as town houses for some rich family or other. Now of course they are all broken up into apartments. And at some time in the last century somebody, for reasons unknown to me, decided to split the high-ceilinged rooms of the ground-floor apartments into two by putting a new floor squarely across the center of them, thus creating two apartments. I have the upper of these. It is, necessarily, low-ceilinged; but I like that. I like being able to reach up my hand and lean on it against the natural-wood beams. Of course Harry, who is tall, and vulnerably bald, always had to duck a little when he came into it, but hardly anyone else did. And it was perfect for me. I had a, spacious living room, a small dining place beyond a high arch which did not cut down on the passage of sun and air, two tiny bedroom-cubicles, bath, an adequate—if small—kitchen where I often cooked, good-drawing fireplaces in every room, and a Portuguese maid who lived on the Island and came in every day. What more could a single man ask? I seldom entertained at home, but I could when I wanted to. And beyond my three French-doored windows on the quai, which could be flung open to the sun in summer, was one of the best views in Paris: the back of Notre-Dame with its soaring buttresses almost close enough to touch; the high wedding cake of the Panthéon on its hilltop floating above the old Left Bank houses; and always the river, and the barges, a never-ceasing source of interest to the eyeball. I had had my writing desk placed right in front of one of these windows. And down below were the old trees, and the ancient cobbled ramp, framed in ancient white stone, where the poor people from the tenements in the center of the Island used on Sundays to run their cars and motorbikes down to the water to wash them. It was a great place to live back in fifty-eight, when I first got it.

  Of course, all that has changed now. The Island has become terribly chic, a dozen
new restaurants have opened up, and the honest poor people’s tenements have been bought up by entrepreneurs and cleaned up and turned into studio apartments, where young white-collar executive couples, working so hard to build the new Technological Consumers’ Society of France, now live with their narrow black briefcases like a New Yorker’s.

  It was into this place that I ushered Weintraub, and offered to make him a drink. Not that he had not been there before and didn’t know his way to the bar perfectly. He made straight for my writing table before its end one of my three windows, and began rummaging through old material for my Review that I had lying there.

  “Yeah, God, Hartley,” he said in passing across the room, puffing out his chest and again deepening his already deep, resonant voice; to show sincerity, I suppose. “I could do with a good stiff Scotch. Les flics really racked me up tonight.” He put down my papers with a gesture that said they were not of interest to him and that he had already seen them before. “Yes, sir, they really racked old Weintraub up. You want to see my scars?” He began unbuttoning his short Eisenhower-type jacket.

  I handed him his drink, and then made a stiff one for myself. “Scars?” I said.

  “Well, bruises,” the deep, immensely self-important voice said. “But deep bruises. Those rubber matraques with that iron rod in them really sting. And they bite deep. They hurt deep.” He already had his jacket off, and was starting on his turtleneck.

  The jacket of Weintraub requires description. I had never seen it on him before the May Revolution came along. It was made of near-white cotton chino, instead of olive-drab wool like the jacket Eisenhower copied from the British, and since the Revolution started I had not seen Weintraub wear anything else. I am convinced he bought it solely to be his Revolutionary uniform, to wear along with the white Levi’s he now affected, in contrast to the dark suits and narrow New York ties he used to wear before. Because the May Revolution, the Students’ Revolution, had become a personal symbol, a deeply personal cause to Weintraub.

  He always claimed it was because his hôtel pension in the rue de Condé was so close to the Odéon, and the center of it all, that he could not avoid becoming involved. The students had, he said, during one of the scares that the police would attack the Odéon, removed all of the files of the Cinema Committee and hidden them in Weintraub’s room to protect them; and that from that time on he was forcibly committed. I always doubted this. Not that the Committee had hidden their files and shot film in his room; but that they would do so without first knowing him well, and knowing that he was committed. I suspect what really happened was that he took to hanging around the Odéon after the students captured and took it over, found the Cinema Committee’s room up in the gloomy recesses upstairs in that old theater, attached himself to them, and later offered his room as a sanctuary for their files and film. Weintraub always denied this though; I don’t know why—out of embarrassment perhaps.

  Why this American male of 45-plus years (Weintraub would never admit to more than 45) would attach himself to a group of 19- and 20-year-old French students involved in a visibly hopeless revolt, was something else. To understand that you had to know Weintraub.

  Weintraub by profession was a harpist. And a fairly accomplished one. But he didn’t like it much. He played harp in the Paris Opera orchestra regularly, and also played in any theater orchestras and concerts around town that required or wanted a harp. This was how he survived and made enough money to eat and live. But what he wanted to be was an actor. A movie actor. There was not anything about the movies he did not love. Indiscriminately, he loved movie stars, movie producers, movie directors and movie writers; and the more famous and successful they were the more he was inclined to love them. When not playing the harp for bread, he hung around in the expensive joints where all these people hung out, together, places like Castel’s, New Jimmy’s, the Calavados. The only way he could get himself accepted by them, since he could hardly afford to pay his own way in these expensive places, was to play the role of the buffoon, the group clown, which he had figured out for himself. He deliberately made himself into a punching bag and straight man for celebrities. It was in this way that he had attached himself to the Gallaghers, and through them to me, though he had little real interest in my literary pursuits. He was not entirely unknown, having played a number of bit roles in films, several of which Harry Gallagher helped him get. He also wrote bad poetry and painted bad pictures.

  His buffoonery and role as the fool, of course, could not keep him going long with any one particular group. They soon got bored with him, and he further alienated himself by his increasingly exotic demands such as ordering on the star’s tab caviar or Scottish salmon when the rest were ordering steaks or hamburgers, by borrowing without repaying, by asking movie stars to get him roles in their productions or invest in his bad paintings, so that he was reduced to moving from group to group to group till he became known to all of regular Paris. Finally he had to attach himself to visiting stars or directors who were in town for a single production. He had about reached this point of no return with the Gallaghers, than whom there were no softer touches in the world, when the May Revolution came along.

  I am convinced the reason he involved himself so completely with the young members of the Odéon Cinema Committee, outside of the fact that they had to do with cinema, was partly because he was such a lonely man. The other part I think was the fact that this was the first time in a long time in his life that he was being taken seriously by anyone, at his own face value of himself. These kids believed him when he namedropped the stars he said he knew, and almost certainly saw him as perhaps their major, if not their only contact with that outside cinema world they hoped to get to help them. Later on in the Revolution I went with him many times up into those dark grimy cubbyholes and upper balconies at the Odéon to see—and work with—“his” Committee, and I do not think those children ever did see through him as he really was. And I believe Weintraub needed that, as other men need liquor or dope.

  And this was the man who now stood before me in my apartment, his precious Revolutionary’s jacket flung down on my Second Empire couch, while he struggled with his black turtleneck, peeling it up over his bare back to his neck and to the knotted bandanna around it which he had affected since the Revolution started, even during the daytime when there were few or no tear-gas bombs being thrown. This was the man who had brought into our more or less stable, more or less secure midst the woman (woman? woman, hell! Baby girl!) whom I call, called, the Catalyst: all unwittingly on his part, it is true, and, in the end, quite painfully for himself.

  “You don’t need to show me, Dave,” I said, with a faint edge of irony in my voice. “I’ll take your word.”

  But he had already shucked the shirt up, arms crossed above his bowed neck and bent back, and I saw eight or ten blue-black stripes about the width of a thumb and a foot long, crisscrossing his shoulders and lower back. “I got to admit I’m kinda proud of that,” he said in the resonant basso. He pulled the shirt back down. “Of course, it doesn’t mean anything really, I just happened to get caught between two lines of them. I didn’t see the second line coming down the side street.”

  “But you’re glad just the same.” I smiled faintly.

  “In a way,” he said, and walked to the nearest of my open windows. He stepped up onto its parapet and leaned his arms on the fer forgé protective railing and looked out at the river. “We’re not going to give up, Hartley. We’re not going to quit. The Revolution will continue.”

  “What’s happened to the Cinema Committee now that the Sorbonne has fallen?”

  “They’ve moved to the Censier.” The Censier was an annex to the overcrowded university in the rue Censier almost a kilometer from the Sorbonne, and still in student hands. “They’ll stay there for now.”

  “Not unless the Government wants to let them, they won’t,” I said.

  “We’ll never give up,” Weintraub said, still looking out over my river. “We’ve done t
oo much, and come too far, to ever give up now.”

  “I’m afraid there isn’t any choice. And never was,” I said.

  “You’ve never really been with us, have you, Hartley?” Weintraub said, deepening his voice again, but grinning as he did so, thus making of it a parody of an accusation instead of a real one. It was a trick of his.

  “I’ve been with you. And you know it. But I’m also a realist. And I’ve known all along—as you’ve known all along—that it could never be much more than what’s been, never achieve much more than what it’s already achieved.”

  “No,” he said solemnly. “It isn’t over. We’ll go on. Somehow. We’ll do something.”

  “What? Go underground? And form a new Résistance?”

  “Maybe,” Weintraub said though my remark was patently ridiculous. It was plain he could hardly stand to lose his precious Revolution. But I on the other hand did not want another over-precious lecture on his precious Revolution. And I did want to know more about the woman—girl—(God, I hardly know what to call her, really)—whom I have called our Catalyst. “Have you had any news from Sam?” I asked.

  “Samantha?” He turned back from the window’s railing.

  “Samantha-Marie,” I countered.

  He smiled. But under the grease of the protective coating of the smile there was a look of bone-deep sadness, an exhausted anguish, in his eyes. “I had a letter from her from Tel Aviv three days ago. She’s back with her Sabra girlfriend. They’re making it great together. And she wants me to join them as soon as I can get down there.”

  “And you’re going?”

  “Where would I get the money?”

  “Umm,” I said. I changed the subject. “She taught you a lotta things, you told me once.”

  “Yeah, she did,” Weintraub said, still smiling an only-skin-deep smile. “She gave me a taste for some pretty exotic stuff. . . . Aw, fuck it. She don’t want me. We both know it. Have you heard anything more from Harry?” He paused. “Or any of them? I walked past the house down there tonight. Their apartment’s closed up tighter than a drum. Not a light anywhere.”