by Amy Hempel
“I guess you and your folks are happy now that Jack Kennedy’s in the White House,” my aunt had said, her merry eyes sparkling with malice.
We were, actually, but I demurred. My relatives had always baited Mother and Daddy and me about our liberal politics. I’d learned long ago not to react. In the absence of any spirited defense from me of Jack Kennedy, Louise told her stock of Kennedy family jokes—some of which were quite funny—and I didn’t bother not laughing, though I was grateful that John hadn’t come down for breakfast, because he was not inured by either time or blind love to the mean-spirited prejudices of some members of my family. He had never had to come to grips with loving people wholly, and helplessly, who, had they been anyone else, it might have been one’s moral duty to shun. John was not capable of that kind of love. Nor did he approve of it.
Dr. Grueber expressed himself with greater sophistication than my aunt perhaps, but his opinions were familiar enough: black people were different than we were. No blame attached. No judgments made. Vive la différence.
Lorraine refilled our coffee cups.
The doctor could and did make the irrefutable claim that he knew blacks better than we did. As he should have. His companion and his children, after all, were, by the societal norms of the day, black. However, he did not raise this subject directly. I believe he said that he had “lived among them.” Like Christ, one was left to infer.
Now, at the doctor’s kitchen table, John’s throat was opening to utter the doctrines of brotherhood and interracial harmony he had recently and rather incoherently embraced. But the doctor waved them away with one hand—the fingernails of which, I noticed, were still grimy.
“You Americans,” he said, “misunderstand your own Constitution.”
I stirred at my coffee. Let the doctor break John in. Better him than my vivacious aunt or my amiable uncle. Easier to listen to a German doctor who could, and did, quote Nietzsche, than a woman like my Aunt Louise who could say the most terrible things and still have you choking on suppressed laughter. Easier to hear the news from this Dr. Mengele than the sweetest man on earth, my Uncle Harold. At least the sound fit with the picture. The kuchen was very good. I sipped my coffee while John, his voice now returned to normal—always a little too loud—argued his case. Lorraine had turned her back on us and now leaned against the sink, watching her children play in the side yard.
A young woman came walking up the driveway. I watched her through the woody camellia that grew by the back door. Lorraine let her in. The woman carried a grocery sack, neatly folded over in half. She didn’t look at us. Lorraine took her into the living room. I heard Lorraine say, “You can wait here.”
I’d suspected that Grueber was an abortionist from the minute we drove up in front of the house and John had parked our car beneath the doctor’s diseased maple. Now I was sure of it. Poison ivy cases and childhood accidents were strictly a sideline. I’d known because my abortionist’s house—in a little foothill community in Los Angeles—had had this same forlorn air of neglect. Abortionists don’t, as a rule, have green thumbs. Their lawns have bare patches. Their camellias invariably drop off in the bud stage. For reasons more obscure to me, their window screens are always in bad repair.
The two men still talked. Grueber didn’t have to worry about keeping his next patient waiting. She had nowhere else to go. And she was lucky to have him. My abortionist hadn’t had a degree from Heidelberg. Or anywhere else. John didn’t know I’d aborted his baby.
The civil rights debate continued. John, who had grown up in a California suburb and in Europe, had never known a black person until he befriended Charles Reed—who taught music at Scripps—shortly before we married. And Charlie, who was a Californian too (his father taught at Caltech), didn’t actually seem to know any black people either. Not counting his parents and his sister Clara, that is.
So John came late to the Good Fight. In all fairness, he’d only just discovered there was one going on, and in a flurry of militancy, he joined CORE, and then, I assumed, to turn word into deed, he asked Charlie to be best man at our wedding. John had closer friends, not to mention a perfectly presentable brother. It was not strictly necessary to put Charles in our wedding party.
“What is John thinking?” my mother asked me when she learned this. Not because she was a bigot, because she wasn’t, but because the wedding photos would have to be sent to family. My parents were about to leave the country. They’d come out to California from Dallas for my wedding and would leave from there for Beirut, where my father, a petrochemical engineer, had been transferred.
This was, of course, back in the days when Beirut was “the Paris of the Mediterranean.” Though when I look back now, I see that our family has had a predilection for cities that later would bear a stigma: Dallas, Memphis, Beirut.
In my first foray into standing by my man, I took a tone with my own mother. A woman who’d done more to fight racism than John will if he lives another fifty years. I implied that her objection to a black man in my wedding party proved that deep down she was a racist. Years of southern white guilt did the rest. She didn’t say another word about Charles being best man. She made no explanations or apologies to the family either.
But John’s interest in rights didn’t extend to women’s rights. Oh, he would have said it did. He is probably somewhere right this minute saying it. (Something inane like: The best man for the job is a woman.) But I am the one who should know, and I’m telling you it is purely talk. John was lucky to find me. Nobody but me could, or ultimately did, live with him six months hand-running.
I’d been brought up to defer to men. I knew never to tell a man bad news or raise an unpleasant subject until you’d fed him a good supper and had served him dessert and coffee. I knew when a man asked, “What are you thinking about?” there was only one right answer: “You, darling.” So, thanks to this background, John and I had done pretty well. But that day, though John didn’t know it yet, we were at an end.
The beginning of the end had dawned with my neighbor, Linda Bingham. I’d never been friends with anyone like Linda before, but an early marriage and student loans and an assistant professor’s salary are great social levelers. I was lonely, and she was friendly, and it wasn’t long before I was helping her with the fabric flowers she made for a nickel apiece in her living room to swell the family income. Dan Bingham was a dry-waller. (I never learned exactly what that was. I only knew it created a great deal of laundry.) I missed Dallas and my parents, and John was working longer and longer hours at the lab, and I was grateful for Linda’s cheerful company. For her part, Linda was glad of someone to instruct. She had graduated young from the school of hard knocks and was eager to pass on what she had learned.
She taught me how to get out red-wine stains from upholstery; she taught me how to make something called tamale pie; but most importantly, she taught me how to tell when your husband was cheating on you—something of which she had considerable experience. You could tell, she said, when they started wanting it every night. That was the good news. But there were other signs that were not so felicitous—like late-night hang-up-calls and locating unfamiliar ladies’ underwear shoved down behind the back seat of the car.
Linda was even the one to give me the news that I was pregnant. I’d come over for coffee at eight thirty when John left for school, when suddenly, sitting on her couch, and without warning, I threw up. I was appalled. And dizzy. And suddenly overcome by the smell of the hair spray that Linda used a can of every week.
“Oh-oh,” she laughed.
“How long is it?” “How long is what?” I asked. I hadn’t the slightest idea what she was talking about.
I knew from the start I couldn’t take a chance on having John’s baby. To have it was to be stuck with John forever because that’s the way I am. And by then I believed that a woman had a right to a life not patched together from mistakes she’d made when she was too young or too dumb to know any better—like marrying a Yankee who talked too
loud and didn’t like her mother; a man who got midnight hang-up-calls and wanted it every night. (I never bothered hunting for her underwear.)
And it was Linda who found the abortionist. Not that she would have done it herself, as she told me several hundred times. She was pregnant too. She had a three-year-old and the incorrigible, dry-walling Dan, and yet she seemed overjoyed at the prospect of bringing another baby into their tiny house and their confused, overheated domestic life. But she had a friend who had a friend who’d had an abortion. Everybody had these friends in those days. And in your turn, you became the friend and were called up by friends of friends.
Then you knew for certain what kind of woman you were. You were the woman that somebody nice had for a friend. They kept track of you, just in case. That was, to my total surprise, the woman I’d turned out to be: a woman who needed to keep her options open so badly she would, like her president, “Pay any price, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty.” I had paid that price. I had opposed the tiny foe. All to keep a precarious handhold on my own liberty.
So I’d known I might have to divorce John even before we left on our trip. You may say, well, what were you doing in the rock quarry with him then? Why were you visiting your family, representing yourself to be a young, happily married woman?
My answer is, why not? We were married. I was a young woman, not particularly happy, but happiness is not a big tradition with us. In the beginning, I’d thought the trip might bring us together. I thought if I could get John away from her, whoever she was, I could win him back. And it seemed to be working. Until Kentucky. Which is where I discovered the identity of John’s lover. It was Clara Reed, Charlie Reed’s sister. It seemed that chief among the civil rights my husband was upholding so strenuously that year was a black woman’s inalienable right to sleep with married, white assistant chemistry professors. This, it turned out, was John’s real contribution to civil rights. I supposed that Clara was the reason Charlie had been John’s best man. Though it may have been the other way around. It didn’t really matter.
Either way, the whole time I’d thought I at last had John’s full attention, he had been writing Clara postcards from our trip. I’d found one already stamped and addressed in the breast pocket of his jacket, when I’d reached in for the Mobil card to pay for gas—while John was in the men’s room.
“Clara, Pushing for Memphis to visit more of Miriam’s hillbilly relatives. Exhausted. How is it that a grown woman never learned to drive? Baked possum, anyone? Open a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape and drink a glass for me. John.”
Like I didn’t know anything about good wine. It just happens I don’t drink. As for driving: why drive when you can ride?
I’d decided not to have it out with John until we got back to California, because from Memphis we had planned to go to Dallas, to spend Thanksgiving with my grandparents, and then home. Thanksgiving with my grandparents could not be cancelled. They had been expecting us, counting on us. I’d called them before leaving California. They’d spoken on separate extensions: over and under one another—just as they did in person.
“Kennedy’s going to be in town,” Grandfather said. “You and John can go downtown and wave at him.”
My grandparents hated the Kennedys. Grandfather hated their politics, and Grandmother was censorious because she thought they were bad Catholics. But since I was a bad Catholic too (just how bad, Grandmother could never have imagined), and since Grandmother was looking forward to my visit, and because my mother, another bad Catholic, was abroad and we both missed her terribly, Grandmother had planned a big, old-fashioned Thanksgiving and invited relatives from three states. “Like the old days,” she had said.
“Christ Almighty!” Grandfather protested. “Not the old days. I’m too damn old for the old days. Too goddamn many people.”
“You’ll love it,” Grandmother said shortly.
Grandmother didn’t ask Grandfather for much. But what she asked for, she got—in return for Grandfather having everything exactly as he liked it the rest of the time. It struck me now that John was quite a bit like Grandfather. But I wasn’t enough like Grandmother to make the equation workable. Grandmother would have let John keep Clara on the condition that she never had to learn to drive. Grandmother had struck many and many a bargain of this nature with Grandfather.
I couldn’t hear myself think with John and Grueber talking over my head. I asked Lorraine if I could use the bathroom. She took me through the living room where the young woman still waited on a green, threadbare sectional sofa, staring at her shoes. She looked up quickly when we came in.
“The end of the hall,” Lorraine said.
The bathroom was tiny. You couldn’t have swung a cat. I sat down on the lid of the toilet, which was entirely swathed in violet chenille, which matched the violet chenille rug, which picked up the violets on the shower curtain—drawn across the grubby tub. I took an emery board out of my pocketbook. I shaped my nails and thought about our Discover America trip.
It had seemed important that we make it when we’d begun. And who knows, had I not found John’s postcard to Clara we might have made a new beginning. Several times I’d felt we were on the brink of it. While we were driving across beautiful, empty Utah picking up faraway radio stations from Chicago and New Orleans (all of them playing “Blue Velvet”); when we were eating hot roast beef sandwiches in diners with Gentleman Jim Reeves’s piano tinkling from jukeboxes. Sometimes at night, when John’s profile was silhouetted in the dash lights, he’d looked so young and so handsome I’d thought I could put up with anything. More than once I had seriously considered forgiving him everything. I had been very seriously considering it.
When my nails were perfect ovals, I examined my face in the medicine cabinet mirror. I was young and I had a level gaze and an honest face. I could still pass for a nice person. I turned on the tap and let the water run. There was a violet soap in the soap dish. There was a rust stain in the sink like the rust stain in my sink at home. It seemed neither Dr. Grueber nor John had ever heard of washers.
I stood on tiptoe to look out the high window at our car, parked under the maple—oozing sap. I liked that car; it was a red and white Ford wagon. Grandfather had bought it for us for a wedding present. I couldn’t believe it had brought me here to this place. It was ironic of course, and had he known the whole story, John would have been the man to appreciate it. John claimed to love irony. It’s never done a thing for me.
I opened the door and went back down the hall. The young woman looked up. Like she was seeking a sign: if I spoke to her, she’d go ahead with it; if I didn’t, she’d leave—something childish like that. I hate it when people try to make me a party to their business. I didn’t look at her.
Back in the kitchen, Dr. Grueber was fishing some pharmaceutical samples from a drawer. When he saw me he said, like he was just noticing my existence—which I think in a way he was, “Is there anything I can do for you, little lady?”
“No, thank you,” I said. “May I have the keys, John, I need something from the car.”
John handed me the car keys and turned back to Dr. Grueber to propose that, genetically speaking, a mixture of races made for a stronger species. I looked at the little boy with the runny nose who was now hanging on Lorraine’s skirts, and at the two scientists sitting at the Formica table.
“Be right back,” I said, for all the world as if anybody in that room cared. I walked out the front door and across the patchy yard to the car and got in behind the steering wheel. I sat there a minute, adjusting the seat and the mirrors, finding a good radio station and taking deep breaths—long enough to see Dr. Grueber’s patient come out the front door too and walk away briskly up the street, swinging her paper sack, not glancing once at her shoes.
With your automatics, I found driving a car is not that big of a deal. D is for drive. That’s pretty much it. I had no need of reverse. The worst part is you can’t close your eyes crossing bridges. I drove to
Dallas.
John was furious. He called at least ten times over the next two days; I never spoke to him. Grandfather finally told him to fly back home from Memphis and to keep in touch. I got my hair cut very short and bought a new wardrobe at Neiman’s, where my charge plate was still good. I applied for a Texas State Driver’s License and passed my driving test.
I wore my new skirt with the poplin blouse and red plaid jacket to wave at Jack and Jackie Kennedy. That was at Love Field. Before everything happened. They waved back. I remember thinking as I stood at the cyclone fence, being jostled by parochial school girls in plaid jumpers, Too bad for you, John. You’ll be sorry you missed this!
Thanksgiving was so subdued not even Grandfather could complain of it. On television—which, after the assassination, was never off—I had seen that there was snow covering many parts of the America that John and I had discovered together.
I pictured our rock quarry under its white blanket. Even the poison oak—which of course I’d seen, but having just read John’s postcard to Clara, I’d decided, strictly speaking, I was no longer under any obligation to mention. There would be crows in the trees we’d lain under, just as there had been that day, punctuating the now frozen silence with their loud warnings.
I’d told John at the time: “Always listen to the crows. Crows are the only creatures to concern themselves with human affairs.”
He had laughed. And I had laughed too. I’d thought the crows were warning John of his immediate peril, and that once again, John was not listening. But I supposed now, as I lit the candles at either end of Grandmother’s dining table, that the crows had been speaking more generally, and to all of us.
But we’d none of us listened, and now it was too late. Death was on television like a beauty pageant; it was in my grandfather’s familiar cigarette cough; it was enthroned triumphant in my empty womb; it was depicted on the front page of every newspaper, morning and afternoon, which each new day hit the porch with sickening thuds.