Leah, New Hampshire

by Thomas Williams

  Then she smiled at him, and as she smiled she turned her big hands palms up and they enclosed his, so dark and warm they seemed to enclose his arms all the way to his elbows. He couldn’t follow her. He didn’t know what she meant; but she smiled and smiled, and it was her long white teeth, in the dark moving expanse of face, that he remembered—fixed landmarks in that wide, warm darkness.

  After he left Jewell he wandered around to old places. He ate lunch at the Vietnamese restaurant where they’d fed poor starving Perry, looked into the black hole of a hotel where he’d lived for a while once, bought the Paris Review and tried to read it while sitting at a small café tabac in a side street where he might avoid people he had known. But he could not forget Jewell’s face. There were the white teeth, and he saw them clearly, but there, also, were the eyes, and they said something bad about him. They judged. As for Jewell, she would find something else to believe in, someone else to love, because she was full of life. She hadn’t been thinking about herself, she had been looking straight at Michael, and it was as if she looked upon a dead man.

  He was not afraid; he was not even afraid not to be afraid. He had never loved Eva; that was something as wishful upon Jewell’s part as her crazy Stalinism, and she knew it. When he had played lover and happy clown, had played nervous, had played mooncalf, always there was inside him something like despair, which is death. And he thought, now, Yes, I know it. There is no meaning to anything. That I poked Phyllis and knocked her up—is that supposed to mean something?

  At a quarter to five he walked back toward the Cujas, and arrived on time. They were there. They’d been to the Flea Market, to the top of the Eiffel Tower, to Napoleon’s Tomb and other such places. The day before they’d been to the Louvre. Mrs. Krause did all this sightseeing with an interesting combination of attitudes—half dutifully, half apologetically. She knew a lot about things; at home in Des Moines she was the cultural attache of all her clubs. She also belonged to things like the League of Women Voters. Michael had admired her from the start, although she would insist upon talking to him in a language her husband couldn’t follow. Not in French, but in something that might have been called Cultural. “The Existentialists,” she would say. “The Existentialists:…” (He was always seeing colons in her sentences.) “How does Camus change the meaning of Existentialism? Meurseault and Dr. Rieux: if Dr. Rieux is an Existentialist ’saint,’ what is Meurseault?” And so on. She was willing to quote Sartre, too. As far as William Krause was concerned, the word “existential” did not exist. He didn’t hear it at all, and when his wife began to speak of such things she might as well have been speaking French. Actually she couldn’t speak French; she apologized for this, saying that she’d had Spanish in school (Cornell College, Mount Vernon, Iowa) instead.

  When he came into the Cujas the three of them were sitting at a booth in back. Hannah Krause couldn’t see it, but her husband had his shoes off, and M. Claude, the patron, was amused by this. All three looked a little tired in spite of their fresh clothes and clean faces. When Phyllis looked around and saw him he had to admit to a distinct little shiver of pleasure. Her fur coat was off her shoulders. She wore a beige dress, and her fine shoulders were so straight beneath the cloth, her arms so lithe and well defined.

  How pleased William Krause was to see another man he could talk to! He loved his women, but he didn’t really talk to them.

  “Hey, Mike!” he said, smiling and shoving over, his feet on top of his shoes—they slid over, too. He was drinking beer, while the women were having apéritifs. “Have a seat,” he said. “What’re you having?” He pointed to the apéritifs. “It’s beer for me. If I had any of that stuff I’d be snockered before the meat course!”

  Michael said hello to everybody and sat down next to him, then shook hands with M. Claude, who had come over.

  “Doo bear?” William Krause suggested to M. Claude, holding two big fingers up as a help in translation, and at the same time raising his nearly invisible eyebrows at Michael. And he was right, beer was what Michael wanted. A small matter, but in a way a clue to the man’s nature; one had to know him for a while before one gave him credit for being right so consistently in small things.

  He was a good businessman and, as far as Michael could tell, an honest one. He owned a contracting “outfit,” as he called it, and some real estate, including farms in the rich land of central Iowa. He liked to build houses, but especially he liked to build barns. “God, I love barns!” he would say. “I’m just nuts about barns!” Once, on Michael’s first visit to Iowa, William Krause had taken him out to one of his tenants’ farms. The occasion came about because a horse had sleeping sickness, and the tenant had called, desperate for men to help lift the horse up so that it could be slung upright in its stall. They drove fast, on the narrow Iowa highway, in William Krause’s Cadillac, and when they reached the farm four other men, the tenant’s neighbors, were there, and the veterinarian. In the dark stall, beneath a single light bulb shaded somewhat by cobwebs, a big brown horse slept upon its knees. The men were trying to put a rope from a block and tackle beneath its brisket, and the only sounds were breath and the voice of the tenant, who kept saying, “Good girl. Come on, girl. Wake up, girl. Get on your feet, girl.” William Krause went immediately to the horse and put his hands upon it, the men moving just out of his way. He stepped carefully toward its head, his rich overcoat brushing the brown hair and black mane, lifted the head and felt the horse’s eyes.

  “She ain’t going to get up by herself, Jim,” he said to the tenant. “I got another block and tackle in the trunk of my car. You got a canvas tarp? We got to have one at least twelve-ounce.”

  “Got a eight-by-twelve fifteen-ounce tarp in my pickup,” one of the neighbors said, and went out to get it. William Krause tossed his car keys to Michael; by this time he was getting the rope under the brisket. When Michael came back with the surprisingly heavy blocks and rope, back from the night air into the humid, hay- and horse-smelling barn, the vet was putting a huge syringe back into his gladstone bag, and the front part of the horse had been raised a few inches from the sawdust.

  Eventually they got the horse off the ground, but it took all their strength, and all their clothes were sweat through before the fifteen-ounce tarp had been slung beneath the horse’s belly and over the sides of the stall. Michael’s most vivid memory of that night was the picture of William Krause, his overcoat and jacket off, his hands beneath and around the horse’s hind legs, her behind pressed against his white shirt and her black tail draped like a cloak over his straining neck and shoulders. The face was red, now, with great effort, and its fat had suddenly changed into hard muscle.

  Then it was over, and the horse nodded, its sleepy, running eyes half open, one forefoot doubled over. But it was more or less upon its feet. They all went into the bright, clean milk house, where the tenant, a quiet man about thirty years old, had a bottle of Canadian Club in the milk cooler.

  They drank out of white enameled cups, and sat quietly, speaking gently like people in a hospital: “Bill, what’s your wife going to say when she sees all that on your nice white shirt?”

  “I’ll tell her it was a damn fine lady I was helping out, Jim.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “What d’you say, Doc?”

  “Hard to tell at this stage.”

  But really they were very happy, and their calm words hummed with it; the fact was simply that they were helping each other, and this happiness, not the ritual drink, was the real payment for all their effort.

  Now, in the brightly lighted bar, Michael turned to William Krause and reminded him of that time.

  “Did the horse live, Bill?” he asked.

  William Krause’s face turned genuinely sad for a moment.

  “No,” he said. “About a week later she died.”

  The Krauses wanted to take them to the Tour d’Argent, a place Michael had of course never visited under the GI Bill, and they began walking down Boul’ Mic
h’ toward the Seine. Just before they came to Boulevard Saint-Germain they were coming up behind a little gendarme ( “Ain’t the cops small here! ” William Krause murmured to Michael), and just then from around the corner came an Arab boy about fifteen years old—a peanut vendor. Before the boy knew it he was straight up against the gendarme, and Michael had never seen such total fear on any face; suddenly the small, brown, rather withered-looking young face writhed with terror, the eyes bulging and the brownish teeth visible. The gendarme did something like a slow pirouette to the left, and with his white stick pressed the boy against the side of the building. And kept pressing, shoving the end of the stick into the boy’s sternum and leaning on it. All this in silence. They could see the boy’s tongue.

  Michael was not going to stop, but Hannah and William Krause already had, and Phyllis with them. The gendarme sensed their presence and looked around.

  “Eh?” he said, his brows rising. Then he looked up at William Krause and said ominously, “Doucement, doucement, Monsieur.”

  Hannah Krause said in her most blaring tone of voice,

  “What are you doing to that boy?”

  The gendarme smiled, his eyes half closed, and said, “Madame, it is none of your business.” Not quite like that; as he said the words he punctuated each with a fierce little shove upon his stick, where it still pinned the boy to the wall. “Madame. Eet. Eeze. None. Of. Your. Beeze Ness!” The boy’s open, terrified face, like a frieze against the gray stone, never moved.

  “We’ve got to report him,” Hannah Krause said, ignoring the gendarme’s poisonous look. She added in a practical voice, “Look for a number on him, Bill. Has he got a number on him?”

  “My God!” Phyllis said. “Why is he doing that?”

  As if in answer the small gendarme, using his club with great speed, suddenly beat the boy down to the pavement. There were sounds like the beating of a carpet. Head, side, back, anywhere. Harder and harder he beat upon the boy, smashing him down and as out of shape as a bundle of old clothes.

  “Oh, no!” Phyllis screamed. “He’s killing him! He’s killing him! Stop it! Stop it!” Hannah, too, was crying out loud and moaning, and Michael had to hold Phyllis back. He looked down into her desperate face and saw there horror of himself for holding her back. “Let me go!” she screamed at him. “What’s the matter with you?”

  He turned, and the gendarme was gone. Only now, of course, could he kneel and look at the bundle on the sidewalk. As in a nightmare he half expected to find there only a bundle of clothes, no flesh inside at all. But as he knelt, two men pushed him aside, picked up the boy and his peanut tray without a sound, without a word, and carried him off. On the sidewalk there was nothing, not a spilled peanut, not a drop of blood. No one else had stopped to watch, although many must have seen it. And now it might never have happened at all.

  Only the look in Phyllis’s eyes was there.

  They moved on, their faces dreamy with horror.

  “Cops!” William Krause said finally, and Michael could tell by his voice that he knew of the inadequacy of what he was about to say. “Cops. Big cops, little cops. Mike, did you see that kid’s face there? Looked like a bunch of angleworms! By God, I’ll tell you one thing, and I ain’t just clacking my gums. If I saw that happen in Des Moines I’d doucement that son of a bitch, one way or the other.”

  “But it does happen in Des Moines!” Hannah said. “We’ve got a report on it, Bill. The League has a report on it.”

  “Yeah, but they don’t do it on the main drag at seven o’clock in the evening, Hannah. They know it ain’t the thing to do.”

  Michael could not get Phyllis to look at him. As they walked down toward the Seine she kept in step with him, but let him know by her quietness and the precision of her steps that she considered herself to be alone.

  They found the Tour d’Argent, and rode up the slow elevator to the dining room. Hannah Krause, too, was not satisfied by the way her husband had handled the gendarme, and neither was she satisfied by his complacency about the police of Des Moines. She tried to overlook these things, but Michael could sense her irritation.

  After they had looked out of the big windows at the Ile they ordered wine and food, then endured with good grace a little lecture by the waiter, who told them that parties who dined at Tour d’Agent did not order four separate entrees. They took his suggestion to have pressed duck.

  “It must be goin’ slow tonight,” William Krause said, and laughed. He was still trying to make them forget what they had seen on the street. His wife and the waiter gave him hard looks.

  But Hannah Krause had to say something when William Krause referred to Jewell as a “darky.”

  “You found that friend of yours, Mike? Who lost her husband? Phyl says she’s a darky.”

  “William Krause,” Hannah Krause said evenly.

  “What?”

  “If you don’t know…”

  “Know what, for God’s sake, Hannah? You look like you smelled something bad.”

  “You don’t use that word when you talk about members of the Negro race.”

  “Hell,” he said, smiling at Michael and then looking seriously back at his wife. “You told me, Hannah, that there wasn’t no Negro race, only the human race.”

  “Dad, it’s not funny!” Phyllis said, and they all looked at her quickly because her voice was almost ugly.

  William Krause was immediately contrite. “Mike, I never meant to joke about your friend, you know? I didn’t mean anything by that word. It’s just that I never know when they’re going to jump on me with both feet, goddammit!”

  From then on he was subdued, although he drank a great deal of wine. Afterwards he insisted that he and Michael take the women back to the hotel and then go have a drink. “I want to have a man-to-man talk with my son-in-law,” he said. He was more than a little drunk, and the women decided they had to humor him.

  Before they left the women off in the hotel lobby, Michael took Phyllis aside to try to reassure her.

  “I’ll take care of him,” he said. “I’ll get him back as soon as possible.”

  She stared at him, a reevaluating look, cold and intelligent.

  “What difference does it make to you?” she said.

  “Phyllis,” he whispered, and tried to put his arms around her, but she stood rigidly, her arms wrapped around her body so that she was nothing to him but a bulky bundle of fur. She shuddered as he touched her.

  “I’ll take care to get him back,” he said.

  “Don’t bother,” Phyllis said calmly. “Really don’t bother yourself.”

  “Come on, Mike!” William Krause said, and they left the women and walked back across the river and up Boul’ Mich’. “Women!” William Krause said. “Women! You can’t live with ’em and you can’t live without ’em.” He strode a little unevenly up the boulevard, and when they came to rue Cujas he found it familiar, so they went into the Cujas and sat at the same booth they’d had earlier.

  M. Claude came over, and they shook hands. Michael did an impulsive thing.

  “Deux finalobes,” he said.

  “Finalobe?” Then M. Claude remembered, and he said, “Oui! Monsieur MacGregor!” He smiled sadly. “ Un homme très gentil. ” He shook his head sadly as he went to get the drinks.

  “What’s that about?” William Krause said.

  “A friend of mine used to order brandy and water that way, and Claude remembers. The guy’s dead now.”

  “I’m sorry, Mike.”

  So was Michael; it seemed such a trite, sentimental thing to have done.

  But he did wish himself back there again, back in time. He would, at least, not find himself in the wrong with a woman. Why had Phyllis suddenly turned rigid? It was not only unfair, it was boring, a pain in the ass. Now if it were only four or five years ago he might be sitting in this same booth, the redheaded MacGregor coughing into his sauce, fat Perry doing most of the talking. Eva would be sitting next to Michael, not saying a word, but with
her hand lightly upon his thigh beneath the table. He would have no explanations to make to Eva. She was there, so soft, so agreeable, so passive, in whom his manhood never found resistance, in whom he was the only agent of force. Later they would go to Jewell’s to hear the Dixieland, that crazy imitation of joy, and to observe Jewell’s dangerous political euphoria, half wanting to believe it. (Did he? That was a surprising thought.) Or they might listen to those voices from Warsaw, those eternal American innocents.

  “Women!” William Krause said. “I don’t envy you, Mike. She’s just like her mother, hard-nosed. Half the time Hannah treats me like a goddam imbecile.” He looked at Michael, and he was much drunker than Michael had thought. His forehead’s translucent skin was pale now, and shiny, and his pale eyes were filmed over, the whites now pink as his cheeks, so that the irises looked as though they were pasted right on skin. “I mean she wants to improve me, for Christ’s sake, Mike!”

  To Michael’s embarrassment there were tears in the man’s eyes.

  “I love that woman, Mike. I love that woman.”

  That woman, Michael thought. He could see that valuable, dangerous woman’s face—both of their faces—and he felt his anger rising. After all, there was absolutely nothing he could have done to protect that Arab boy from the cop. Nothing. If he’d tried to interfere the cop would have beat the boy all the harder, just to show his power. Couldn’t Phyllis realize that? He could explain it to her. Explain that he knew what the end result of any such interference would be, that he had seen that the human race was made that way and there was nothing the Des Moines Chapter of the League of Women Voters could do to change it. He would explain this to her; he would present this case with all his skill, using the fantastic precision and breadth of his memory for precedents. It was suddenly more important than anything that he win this one case; it was the only case he had ever really cared about.

  And yet as he looked across the table at the sad, big man, he was also angry. He had never been in this kind of trouble before; if anything of the sort had ever developed—that a woman, or anyone, claimed worry from him—he had always gone on to somewhere else, to another country, to another kingdom. He could not make himself owe justification to anyone. But now he seemed to be in a trap, and he was frightened because he knew that he had to go back to Phyllis. But not like this; where would he find the energy for it? How could William Krause bring his manhood back, intact, to the tall woman who waited to judge him?