Leah, New Hampshire

by Thomas Williams

  With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom

  Remember us—if at all—not as lost

  Violent souls, but only

  As the hollow men

  The stuffed men.”

  With that he belched and forgave them.

  MacGregor had played the piano, then, at Jewell’s nightclub. Nobody listened. And now Perry had gone back to England for good. Jewell had told him that. Jean the Czech had told him that, too, and that Torgy, the Dane, had borrowed a typewriter and sold it three times before going back to Denmark. Then he took the typewriter with him.

  Michael rapped his key against the glass, and the waiter came with a fat wallet to give him tattered change.

  He walked, remembering, across the boulevard to the Luxembourg Gardens, then to the Italianate little statue by the goldfish pond. The stone girl lay on her side, beautiful, ideal, still able to cause in him a sad, delightful shiver. Some son of a bitch had thrown a hot dog into the shallow pool, and it floated near its bread, surrounded by an obscene, scummy haze. The fat gold carp ignored it.

  The stone girl wore dead leaves; one had landed on her cheek, another lightly touched her breast. It started to rain again, slowly, mistily, as it had on and off for days. The old people on the benches drew their coats a little tighter, but did not get up to go.

  He left the Gardens and walked down the long hill to the Seine. The plane trees had been pruned to the bolls and looked like crooked clubs. The buildings leaned backward in the rain, as cold inside as they were out. In the cafes the girls’ ankles were bluish with the cold, and the floors were all damp stone, wet tile, as chilling as the street but not so clean.

  He remembered that he used to dream at night. He had had happy dreams, victorious dreams. He had quite often been happy for no reason at all. He remembered walking with Eva along the river, running, suddenly jumping up on top of the wall along the river, running, jumping down and over benches, cracking his heels in the air.

  He stopped and bought a package of Gauloise Bleus. He used to inhale the smoke that seemed to have particles as big as grains of sand in it, it was so strong. Torgy, who was a sailor, said once that they could always tell when they were approaching the coast of France: they could smell the piss and Gauloises. He pulled one of the lumpy cigarettes out and lit it. It was like trying to inhale something solid, like a golf ball. One more segment of his appetite had gone.

  At the bottom of Boul’ Mich’ he turned toward rue Galande, where Jean the Czech lived. The narrow, crooked little alley of a street dripped and echoed. The concierge was quite impressed by his expensive clothes, and she let him in with no questions. He climbed the last flight to Jean’s door in that dark—the timed hall light was always too quick to go out.

  Jean let him in and smiled politely. The top button of his shirt was unbuttoned, but he would button it and tighten his tie before he went outside. He always wore a complete set of clothes—vest, tie, hat, coat, everything neatly in place, yet grimy. He buttoned his shirt and tightened the hard knot of his tie.

  “You’ll come with me,” he said. “Some of us are going to Jewell’s Club.”

  “She’s not open.…”

  “No, but she’s going to be there. She has the radio. It’s disgusting, but we’re going to hear the latest excuses from Moscow.” Jean’s face was bitter, and his long, pointed nose seemed to quiver. Surprisingly, he poured two glasses of white wine. Michael looked closely at his face and saw the unmistakable signs of too much alcohol—thin red veins in the whites of his eyes, and beneath his eyes, incipient little softenings, he looked a little more like a Frenchman.

  “So you drink now,” Michael said.

  “Why not?” Jean said recklessly.

  “You never used to.”

  “What good is it not to? I am now a Neutralist. Neutralists always drink too much.” He sat at his desk and snapped the bottle with his fingernail. “It’s not even decent wine.”

  “It’s all right. I used to drink worse.”

  Jean examined Michael’s clothes.

  “By the looks of you, you don’t now,” he said.

  “No, I’ve got some money now.”

  Jean tossed off the rest of his wine. The reckless gesture did not suit him. Michael had always been aware of Jean’s envy in matters such as this. The young Americans usually had an air. They could dress like bums and still not be treated like bums. The police looked at them differently. Jean without his suit, without his tie, without his careful respectability, would be lost among the rest of the Cold War’s tidewrack, as inconsequential as one of the cats in Les Halles.

  His room was bare, his books were stacked neatly beside his desk. Another icon of his former faith had disappeared: Picasso’s dove had come down from the yellow walls.

  “Do you remember Eva?” Jean asked.

  “Yes. She is in Lyon.…”

  “Married to a disgusting middle-class who owns a hotel. She now takes money from the poules and cleans the bidets.”

  “It’s too bad,” Michael said.

  “But it’s security.”

  “I’d rather be insecure and not have to clean the bidets,

  ” Michael said, although he wondered if this was really true.

  “It’s easy for an American to say that!” Jean said angrily, then slumped down as if he had just remembered that he was a Neutralist. “I would rather have seen you marry her and take her to America. Why didn’t you?”

  He thought of Eva, smooth as the stone girl in the Luxembourg Gardens, and lost to him. Her complicated, yet submissive little face, her dark hair—all seemed to be in shadow.

  “But you are married,” Jean said.

  “Oh, yes. I’m married all right. I’m goddam well married.”

  “I hated you then. I think I still do. Have some more wine and we’ll go to Jewell’s. She always liked you, God knows why.”

  “We’re both Americans,” Michael said. “And besides, she never really believed all that crap you used to have to believe about the Sunday lynchings in Central Park.”

  “She’s a Negro!” Jean said.

  “Look, we come from the same town. She just lived farther uptown than I did.” Then Michael decided not to do this to Jean. “She always did like me, that’s true. She told my fortune once. She doesn’t do that for everybody.”

  A Communist fortune-teller is the only kind, he told her once, who can tell the future according to scientific principles. This did not amuse her. It was one superstition she would not give up.

  Jewell liked Eva. It pleased Jewell to see them together—another non-Marxian rudiment like the fortune-telling. Jewell wanted them to be together, and once told him, “Michael, that girl belongs to you, hear? She’s a sweet woman, Michael!” And then the huge laugh, and with it the level large eyes, serious, observant, and kind. She often invited them to stay after hours to hear the jam sessions and drink the free liquor.

  Jewell’s Club was the rage then, and the French and the tourists came to hear the jazz and eat Southern Fried Chicken. Sidney Bechet came to play his soprano sax, and it was popular with Le Jazz Club de France.

  “Jewell is broke,” Jean said. “Her landlord is kicking her out of the building. They’ll probably kick her out of France.” He looked hopelessly out the window, where the rain sifted down. “Will they take her back in America?”

  “Didn’t she give up her citizenship?”

  Jean stared at him fiercely. “Yes, but she’s no longer a Communist. Oh, don’t tell me! You know what they’ll do with Jewell? They’ll take her out to the middle of the Atlantic and push her overboard. She’s drinking now, too,” he added.

  “All Neutralists drink too much,” Michael said.

  “You aren’t drinking very much.”

  “I don’t know what I am yet.”

  “You’re a lousy American, that’s what you are,” Jean said.

  They walked up Boul’ Mich’ on the way to Jewell’s. The rain had turned into a fine mist, and Jean had
to stop every once in a while to wipe his glasses. Michael waited for him, and then they’d continue.

  He remembered one time at Jewell’s. Eva had come to live with him just a little while before, and they were always together. She had loved him so damned much. He thought then that he would never tire of such self-effacement, such constant, undemanding love. She would stand behind him even at poker games, never saying a word, one hand lightly on his shoulder—always lightly—as if she didn’t quite dare to hold him. And she went to Jewell’s with him. Even MacGregor had stayed that night after the jam session. Perry was there, too. All three of them were apolitical, but Jewell liked them. She liked to see Perry eat.

  This night after the jam session they listened—Jean, Kris Le Barbus, Jewell, and the rest, to the English-language broadcast from the Warsaw Peace Conference. This was in 1950 or 1951. Henri Varniol was there, too, cleaning up behind the bar. He didn’t speak English, and occasionally Jewell would translate for him. Henri had fought in Spain.

  The voices of the Americans came across the Iron Curtain, across the battlegrounds, all the way from Warsaw in the distance. He would never forget those honest Midwestern voices. The passion, the belief, the love.…Jewell cried silently. “Humanity!” the voices cried. “Love one another!”

  Jewell’s big black hand crept to her face, and tears made her wide cheeks shine. She loved. The word “humanity” alone could make her cry. They all loved Jewell and she protected them; Jean stared fiercely into the air, killing fascists and klansmen by the hundreds in his mind.

  Michael, Perry, and MacGregor were embarrassed for Jewell. They smiled painfully at each other. He remembered the smiles vividly. It was unbearable.

  The voices pleaded, “Peace, peace…”—voices out of time past, out of the thirties, refusing to give up the dream. One said, “Comrades! Comrades of all lands! I have here in my hand some dirt. It is good dirt, good soil. I smell it, I crumble it in my hand and see that it is good soil. But it is more than soil! It has been anointed by the blood of thousands of men and women who died for freedom! It is the soil of Stalingrad! Soil of the city named for our great leader, where the Red Army fought the Nazis and turned them back, where the spirit of these men will never be forgotten! Our leader will never forget! Our Stalin will lead us on to greater victories! Our comrade Stalin!”

  And the music, the hymns to Stalin, until MacGregor could stand it no longer. He jumped out in front of the radio, his awkward, skeletal arms raised, the deadly flush of the tubercular like spots of makeup on his cheeks.

  “Jewell!” he yelled. “Look!” And for Henri and Jean he said in his bad French, “J’ai ici une petite morceau de merde! C’est bonne merde! C’est merde delicieuse! Je mange! C’est la merde de Staline!”

  Henri threw him out into the street. Perry, Michael, and Eva took him home. Jewell hired him back a week later, when he came to her hungry, coughing, already having had one small hemorrhage. Jewell was happy then and forgave everyone.

  Jean had stopped again to wipe his glasses.

  “When Stalin died, and all that business came out, it was bad enough, but after Hungary she went into mourning,” he said. “She wasn’t a red-hot mama anymore.”

  Jewell let them in herself. She had gone all to fat and looked old and tired, her back flat above the buttocks, her belly beyond the help of girdles.

  “Michael,” she said. “Well, now, boy. How you doin’? Come into my nightclub, Michael.” She patted his cheek—a flash of soft, pink palm. Her voice was deep and husky, and she seemed a little drunk. The bar was littered with cigarette ashes and dirty glasses, and the huge clean-up light in the ceiling made naked the small cracks and smudges along the walls, fingerprints and evidences of spilled drinks. The twisted dead neon tubes along the ceiling, that had given cool blue light, looked in the glare of the great bulb like dirty plumbing. The room was much smaller than he remembered it to be.

  Kris Le Barbus came up behind, Jewell’s glass in his hand. His spats shone.

  “I say, old chap, your wife is smashing! Not half I say!” Coming from the depths of his black beard, where his moist red lips hid, the precise little voice seemed quite innocent.

  Jewell took her glass away from him.

  “Go turn on the radio,” she said. Her voice was like coal rumbling down a chute. “Michael, have a drink on the house. Have some scotch, man. The beer’s flatter’n you know what. Kris, turn that radio on.” She still wore her funeral dress, now wrinkled and salt-white around the armpits. They took their drinks to a table.

  “That’s some wife you got there, Michael.” Her expression told him nothing at all.

  “I guess so,” he said.

  “Li’l Eva’s down to Lyon, I tell you that?”

  “Yeah, Jewell, I know.”

  “Li’l Eva, she married a big spender, Michael. He come in here once last year, she walkin’ slightly behind. Shocked, man! Wicked nightlife! Little bourgeois tightwad. He run a short-time joint down there, man. You know—they always got plenty hot water. Somebody told me. You happy, Michael?”

  “Not to see you like this, Jewell.”

  “Don’t you never mind Jewell. Kris! Bring me some ice, boy.”

  From the radio a strident voice said something about counterrevolutionary bandits.

  “I don’t dig that jazz no more, Michael.”

  “I never did, Jewell.”

  “You never got with it, Michael,” she said, smiling.

  Kris brought a bowl of ice cubes.

  “I really must go, Jewell,” Kris said. “Perhaps I can come back later on.”

  “Don’t ever try to fool me, Kris. I don’t give a damn,” Jewell said. Kris looked a little shocked, patted her on the shoulder, and left.

  “I dig that Hindu the most,” Jewell said. She watched the scotch flow down the ice cubes in her glass, and Michael watched too; her concentrated expression pulled his eyes to the ice as though it were a crystal ball she was examining.

  “You happy, Michael? You love your wife?”

  “Jewell…”

  “Now, don’t git your water hot, Michael. We been friends a long time. What I mean, not like Jean and MacGregor. Never did care for no apron strings, man. I always liked you ’cause you never needed no care. Never had to wipe no puke off your vest, nor listen to you cry, nor put you to bed, thasall.”

  “That’s true, come to think of it,” he said.

  “Drink up, man!”

  The radio voice had changed, had become French. Static came in waves. Jean fiddled with the knobs and the voice faded, then came in clearly: “Capitalism withers…a world free from fear, from war…L’humanité . . .”

  Jewell listened for a moment, her face implacable and mean, her big hands clasped together.

  “Weasel words, weasel words,” she said. “They got a nerve! You can take the lousy French, too.”

  “Where are you going to go, Jewell?”

  She looked up at him and smiled. “That’s the tough one, Michael. I’m a woman without a country, Michael, singin’ those fat, black, homesick blues.” She took a little sip of her drink with her big lips, and went on, looking at him and away, then back to him, somewhat apologetically, he thought, as though she knew it was not her role to confide or to confess. “The only Frenchman I ever liked, I loved him. That was Hank Varniol. I come over here in ’forty-seven, I was married to a lieutenant in the U.S. of A. Army, and that prissy, brownnose Zoo-tenant and me, we wasn’t compatible. He’s more interested in being a captain than he was a man.”

  Suddenly she drank up the rest of her drink and squeezed an ice cube back into her glass.

  “You never was in love with li’l Eva.”

  “I guess not really.”

  “Well, man, you sure married yourself a piece of blue eyes and hygiene, Michael. She about sweet enough to eat.”

  “Did you like her, Jewell?”

  “That don’t make no never mind.”

  “You think I should have married Eva? You sa
id so once.”

  “Look, Michael, I ain’t no fortune-teller. I ain’t no gypsy palm reader. I been known to been wrong. And when I’m wrong, I’m in error. Alls I know is you marry what you want, not what wants you—not if you’re a man, anyways. You dint want li’l Eva’s all I know. She could been a radiant angel come down from Paradise, it wouldn’t of made no difference. I guess you wanted a piece of angle food cake!” She laughed, her head thrown back and her big smooth hands flat on the table.

  Jean was still fiddling with the radio, and his head, bent toward the temperamental machine, was bony and sharp on his stiff neck. There had always been something angular and unforgiving about Jean, but now, without his rigid belief to hold him together, he no longer seemed all one piece, as though he had been put together out of children’s blocks.

  Not so with Jewell. She had taken on her new cynicism with a good deal of authority, even though it made her unhappy. She had always played the role of the experienced one who was willing to tell the facts of life to poor little white boys and girls, and in this there had always been proper cynicism. But she had never acted out those principles of self-interest she ascribed to the world. She had been truly generous and magnanimous. Impulsively he put his hands across the table upon her big warm ones. Her eyes opened wide and she stared at his white hands covering hers.

  “Jewell,” he said, “how can I help you?”

  “You would, too,” she said.

  “You need money?”

  “Git me a passport to Seventh Avenue, Michael. Now with Hank dead and gone I got no call to stay in France.” She began to inhale sharply, in little gasps that were cut off as if by her teeth. “No,” she said, “I ain’t going to cry no more. Cried all last night and I ain’t going to cry no more.”

  He wrote down the address of his law firm and gave it to her. “You can reach me there,” he said.

  He countersigned five twenty-dollar traveler’s checks and gave them to her.

  “Michael, honey,” she said. “You do mean it, don’t you?”

  “I never was very impulsive, Jewell. You know that. You know damned well I mean it.”

  “Yeah, man. I never thought you could swing.”