Leah, New Hampshire

by Thomas Williams

  They were welcomed, though not spoken to; the manager of the Blue Moon smiled at them and didn’t stamp their wrists with fluorescent ink as he did all the others. The young couples noticed them, too, with expressions almost like ownership.

  The band played a waltz as they came in, perhaps just for them, and they swung together around the floor in time with the revolving crystal globe, so that for moments the same diamond of blue light touched Wilma’s hair, then moved on to be replaced by other colors. She was smiling, and he felt like a magician who must, by wiles almost beyond his powers, protect her forgetfulness.

  As the dance ended, an ugly sound came from one corner of the ballroom. Hardly definable, it was half thump, half breath, and the room grew tense all at once. Everyone turned to look into the dark corner, and Wilma’s fingers tightened on Harvey’s arm. It was a fight, now stopped, but two young men still postured, one held back by others. A girl walked too quickly through the dancers, her hips awkward, fright causing her heels to strike the floor.

  The manager came to the band’s microphone and said gaily, “Folks, there’s going to be a dividend! You’re such a nice crowd! A Paul Jones!” There was something heroic in his false smile; like most managers who want to please, he was despised. Yet he was obeyed with tolerant humor. The band drowned out his last words, leaving him to bob his head, his mouth open.

  The circle formed and began to rotate, men clockwise, women counterclockwise, hand to hand, dip and smile. Through Harvey’s hand passed the cold and warm hands of women and girls, and each face noted, with stolidity or apprehension, his age and condition. When the music stopped and began again, his partner was a solid young woman who grasped him firmly around the neck and wanted to lead, as though she had danced before only with girls or young brothers. Her smooth white neck was strong, and the movements of her back or hips had nothing to do with him; he could never modify her moves by any pressure or direction. He felt frail and brittle, and he made constant missteps that embarrassed him, and made him feel like a fool. The muscular young woman never seemed to notice. When the music stopped again, he left the circle and stepped into the darkness in order to wipe his face with his handkerchief. His mouth was dry and gritty, as if sand had blown into it.

  He had assumed that Wilma was dancing, and at first didn’t mind that he couldn’t see her orange dress turning on the dance floor. But when she didn’t appear right away, he began to wonder if she, too, had left the circle, and he looked carefully all around the room for her, as far as he could see into the dark corners where there were benches. No, she was not there. And she was not out on the balcony, getting a breath of fresh air. She must have gone to the ladies’ room. Of course; yet he felt deserted, left alone with all the young animals as strong and ruthless as the one he had danced with, who had no words for him.

  He looked once more, to be certain, walking awkwardly around the edges of the whirling dancers, trying to keep out of their way. He felt that if they touched him they would knock him down and break his bones. Wilma was not there, and so he went back to wait near the door to the ladies’ room.

  She did not come out. The door opened and swung shut, but never to reveal the warm orange of her dress. Other women went in and out, and girls who seemed too young even to be out dancing, and all of them worthless to him. When he grew desperate he stopped one of them.

  “Pardon me,” he said as quickly as he could, “did you see my wife in there? An orange dress. She’s wearing an orange dress.”

  “Huh?” the girl said, and he saw with despair that she hadn’t understood a word, not a word of his question.

  “A bright orange dress. My wife.” He pointed toward the ladies’ room. “Did you see her in there?”

  The girl shook her head and moved away.

  Wilma might have gone to the car. Perhaps she hadn’t felt well, all of a sudden, and had gone to the car. He walked quickly down the stairs and out into the cool air, yearning to see a flash of orange; he would open the car door, and he planned to find her there. But the car was empty.

  From the ballroom above him came the shuffle of feet, and the music that seemed discordant, disorganized. The noise of the dancing came down to him through the soft bundles of the pines, into the dark where he stood. He began to walk around the casino, looking into corners and shadows, and once he thought he saw her, but it was a girl in a darker-colored dress, leaning against the wall being sick. She looked at him with dull eyes, and moved deeper into the shadows.

  As he came around again to the main entrance he looked down to the dark lake and was struck by fear. He ran across the gravel and through the soft sand, to the wet sand that was harder, then stumbled as he reached the boat dock. He caught himself before he fell, but the desperate exertion caused him sharp pain in his chest. The boards moved beneath his thin shoes, and because he was dizzy and had trouble getting his breath he walked carefully down the center of the dock.

  She was there; he saw orange out in the dark, just a gleam of it. For a moment he thought the orange darker, redder than her dress. He walked and walked—the dock seemed miles long; she had never come out here alone before.

  She sat quietly on the wooden bench as though nothing strange had happened. They might have had an appointment to meet there, she was so still. He had been terribly frightened, and now that he had found her he felt in himself the possibility of anger. He sat down heavily beside her, trying to keep his harsh breath silent.

  After a while she said, “I’m sorry.”

  His anger moved inside him with the promise of uncontrolled pleasure and release.

  “The water’s so deep,” she said.

  She had frightened him half to death, and it was all so ridiculous and unnecessary. He could turn to her and show her the face of anger, tell her the water was about three feet deep at the most, and not to be a goddam fool. Maybe her irrationality needed something like a fist, not this sissified tactfulness, Harvey Lake dressed like a gigolo, a Fancy Dan in a bow tie, smelling of a woman’s perfume. It was all unmanly, a dream from which you awakened in shame.

  But even though it wasn’t deep, the lake was dark enough, the moored boats nudging each other like indifferent animals.

  Carefully he arranged his voice. “Do you feel like dancing?” he asked.

  Ancient Furies

  CHARLIE JOHNSON, newly promoted to associate professor of English, with tenure, sat among his murmurous colleagues in the small modern auditorium. It was late May, and except for certain rituals, this faculty meeting one of them, the academic year was over. Charlie had come in late, but not so late as Felix Tuolemi, who appeared at the side door where everyone could see him, all thick and musty-looking, in a brown suit, an old man of sixty with patchy fringes of gray hair. The dean had already brought the meeting to order, the minutes of the last meeting had been accepted and passed, and the dean now called upon Professor Stone (History), who made the yearly motion recommending the graduating seniors for their appropriate degrees, provided all requirements had been met. The motion was seconded and passed while Felix, staring angrily through his glasses, searched for and found Charlie. He came over and sat down ponderously into a plush seat, little moist sighs and creaks coming from him here and there as if he were some sort of ancient, leaky engine. He smelled a little sour, like old leather.

  “You must come to my office after. I have something to show you,” Felix whispered.

  Charlie didn’t know Felix very well. He’d played chess with him three times, once in the faculty lounge and twice in the living room at Felix’s lodging house, never winning. But lately Felix had conferred upon Charlie, perhaps because of his promotion, more power than Charlie wanted. Felix taught Russian, though he wasn’t Russian, he was some kind of a Balt—Lithuanian, with an Estonian (or was it Polish?) mother, and he’d been in Poland during the Second World War. Charlie hadn’t tried very hard to get it all straight. What he did have to know was that Felix hated the new chairman, or chairperson as they were now called,
of German and Russian, a German with a name hard to visualize in print, a one-syllable name that contained eight letters and sounded like a collision—Brautsch. Dr. Jurgen Brautsch had been brought into the college by the dean, who had presumably consulted with the other members of Felix’s department, but not with Felix, who was in any case untenured and probably not even on “tenure track.” Felix had taught at the university for three years, though he didn’t have a doctorate or its equivalent in publications.

  The meeting was soon over, nearly everyone smiling with relief and the self-critical academic irony Charlie always thought a little fraudulent. The two hundred or so members of the faculty of Liberal Arts who had come to the meeting began to leave the subterranean, or at least windowless, room with its long slant of soft orange seats. This was one of the modern parts of the campus, so different from the plain painted spaces of the old English and Languages building. Administrators worked in buildings of this decor, dating from the boom of the sixties. Here all was acoustics, soft fabrics and bright colors, polished aluminum statues one was not supposed to find representational, and Silex coffee machines with Styrofoam cups and Swedish stainless-steel spoons. By contrast, Moorhouse, the English and Languages building, was built in 1923, and during much of the long winters the terrazzo floors were damp with tracked-in slush in which students’ dogs trotted about stifflegged, with worried expressions, smelling everyone at the knee.

  “Well?” Felix said. There was a little V in his W, but Charlie couldn’t say exactly what Felix’s accent was. Its foreignness seemed to come less from its taint of other languages than from other times.

  As they got up to leave, Felix half-lunged forward and stopped, keeping Charlie back with an elbow. “There he is!” he very audibly whispered.

  Dr. Jurgen Brautsch was with one of his department members, a young German who was so blond he seemed a little transparent. Brautsch himself was about Felix’s age, but tall and lean, carefully dressed according to a code Charlie found unfamiliar but authoritative. Charlie affected Gokey boots and corduroy dungarees, and to him Brautsch’s cuticles and linen always seemed too immaculate. German, in his mind, meant this sort of cleanliness. He had never been to Germany, but all the Germans he’d met seemed wealthy, groomed, a little intimidating, as if they were always prepared for some high ceremonial moment.

  Then there was Felix, also European, whose tarnished skin seemed swollen and battered. To look at his face was like picking out an expression in a stone, or on the head of a cabbage—there was the mouth, there was the nose, and then the whole face. Not quite that disorganized, but tufts of hair had been missed in deep cracks, and gray mesh screened each nostril. “ ’The Hun,’ “ Felix said, “ ’is either at your throat or at your feet.’ Said by Winston Churchill.”

  When Brautsch and his colleague had left the auditorium, Felix went ahead. For a moment Charlie thought of fading off in another direction, but instead he followed Felix across the campus, where the new grass and yellow-green leaves spoke of summer freedom. For the month of June, until summer school began, he, Margie, and Charlie Jr. would have her parents’ cabin on Cascom Lake, tall pines all around and waves splashing the polished stones. Margie was happy there, with a proprietary, maintenance-doing attitude toward her childhood place. She would be busy staining shingles and mowing grass, fixing cracked panes, alert for carpenter ants, collecting the confetti and pellet leavings of white-footed mice. He would fix the dock and roll it on its old iron hayrake wheels into the dark water. From the dock he and Charlie Jr., who was five, would catch perch and bass, even an occasional squaretail trout. The cabin was on the rocky east side of the lake, so the mornings were dark beneath the pines, but the evenings were long and warm, with the sun and its afterlight glancing from the lake like a searchlight up into the heavy trees, turning the old cabin orange and then a long fall through the spectrum into dark.

  He could do his work there or here, and though he did enjoy that month, it was Margie who looked forward to it each spring.

  When they reached Moorhouse, which was named after man with white sideburns whose portrait half-smiled across the lobby at the main doors, Felix hurried heavily down a long dim hallway to his office. They saw no one; early summer was at the windows and the building smelled stale and abandoned. Felix ushered him into his office, switched on the fluorescent ceiling bar, and looked up and down the hallway before shutting the door. In the small office, enclosed with the old man and the paranoia that Felix’s age made pitiful and perhaps legitimate, Charlie felt claustrophobic. He wanted, at least, to be closer the door than Felix, but Felix made him sit at the desk while unlocked his filing cabinet, brought out a gray metal box, unlocked that, and took from it a formal-looking black plastic folder, which he placed carefully and dramatically in front Charlie.

  “Read,” he said, and moved back to lean against the door. On the first page the winged swastika was unmistakable, but the words were in German. Ten years before, Charlie had passed, by the skin of his teeth, a reading examination in German. “I’m afraid my German isn’t that great,” he said.

  “See the lightning bolts,” Felix said, pointing. The back his thick hand was shiny and freckled with dark spots. “SS—the German runes. You know what it means, Schutzstaffel? See the date.”

  The date Felix pointed to was August 1944.

  “Well, that’s the year I was born,” Charlie said.

  “Oh, my God! I’m telling you, this Brautsch—Look here.

  ” Felix turned the page. “Look, the name.”

  There, among many names in what was a biographical listing of some kind, was J. Brautsch, who had published scholarly-sounding article about Schopenhauer.

  “So?” Charlie said.

  “This is published in the journal of the Wewelsburg SS Order Castle, these Nazi lies about Schopenhauer. I have read such Dreck. This J. Brautsch was an SS officer, an Obersturmführer, and now this same J. Brautsch, this strutting Nazi swine, claims he was merely Oberleutnant Brautsch of the Wehrmacht, just a simple soldier, you understand!”

  “Well, even if it was him, Felix. For Christ’s sake, it was thirty-five years ago.”

  “You are old enough to shoot Jews and Poles when you are twenty-five years of age.”

  “Yeah, but if this is the same Brautsch he must have been cleared and all that, right?”

  “Puh! To you, ancient history. To me, yesterday. Do you know what it means or not, SS? Totenkopfverbande, Einsatzgruppe, Sonderkommando? I am a citizen of this country now for twenty years, and this SS murderer is placed over me so he can take away my profession!”

  “Oh, come on. So some J. Brautsch wrote an article about Schopenhauer.”

  “You don’t know about these SS. You must understand that murder was part of their education, part of the training of their intellects. You believe only a few of these swine murdered nine hundred thousand Russian Jews, three million Polish Jews, innumerable Poles and Russians?” Felix was in a sweat, ferocious yet harmless, a huge, seedy teddy bear. The sharp odor of leathery sweat came across the desk and the black documents. Felix actually shook with rage. He was obviously crazy, obsessed by the idea of instant enlightenment, of pure proof. But no one would take him that seriously. Even his motives were suspect; he could not stay on permanently with his few credentials in an upgraded department. The dean had taken some pride in bringing Brautsch here, and with him funds and exchange scholarships from the West German government. And the dean himself was Jewish.

  Charlie didn’t doubt that Felix had seen and suffered terrible things long ago. He saw Felix as an old man back then, the vision persisting though he knew Felix must have been a young man; the old seemed always to have been old. Photographs came to mind, of thin gray corpses stacked lightly as pick-upsticks, and some words—Eichmann, Zyklon B, Himmler, Auschwitz—sickening dark names and deeds, but it was all learned history that had come to him as whole and finished as Shiloh or the Somme—ancient, inoperative, the property of historians. Even Vietnam
seemed history now, his remembered battles having taken place in graduate school, the route he’d taken, though he’d gone to Washington twice, and once he’d read in public, by candlelight, from the lists of the dead, which the names of the soldiers were somehow not as meaningful as the names of their home cities and towns.

  After seeing that Charlie was in the deepest way indifferent to his proof, Felix became at least for the moment thoughtful and quiet. It was all very interesting, Charlie told him, meaning that much. Because Felix, after his cautious unlockings and whisperings, seemed vulnerable now, Charlie shut door behind him as he left, as if to seal Felix and his archaic passion into the small room.

  He took a quick glance down the corridor where his own office was, marks posted on the door, but no students were there pondering his judgments. The worst thing about final marks was that they could still be argued, and the few students who might argue were the few he really didn’t want to talk at all, ever, about anything. So those few final marks that had been given with a feeling of middle-range boredom, indecision, and probably generous oversimplification were the ones that were not totally final, and could cause anger or even tears, pleas, hurt silences—all the open, wounding emotions he spent a good part of his life trying to avoid.

  At the front entrance he met George Bertram, a rather jaunty medievalist in his fifties whose office was next to his, and they walked across the campus together. Everyone was contentious about something or other, and George Bertram had cause: “I simply will not use the term ’chairperson,’ “ he said. “I’m a professor of English and it is my duty to resist the totalitarian mode. Meanings change, of course, and sometimes that can’t be helped, but to declare a word valid or invalid by institutional fiat is against my principles, period.” He added, after this practiced outburst, “I saw you go by with Felix Tuolemi. Did he show you his documents?”