by Robert Clark
Those days were paradise, for what else is there to call freedom without so much as a whisper of obligation, want, or anxiety to spoil it? They spent the time, or rather the afternoons, much as just described, and in the morning William delivered a few prescriptions for the drugstore, tidied the apartment, and, on Tuesday, rode downtown, strode into Brower’s, and bought himself a pair of Boots Sauvage as Louis Campion clucked over him and Mr. Murkowski glowered from the stockroom door.
On the way home he stopped off at the library periodical room and looked at magazines and newspapers. The latter were full of the Chicago convention, and, to a sometimes lesser or greater extent, recent events in Czechoslovakia. William knew very little of Czechoslovakia, except that it was one of the Central European places that used to be known for pastry, but now had been entrapped within the Iron Curtain; not totally, apparently, for of late the locals had inaugurated some democratic reforms and liberalizations, and now the Soviets were coming down on them. It seemed to William a little analogous to what was happening in the United States and even in his own life, for whenever anybody—societies or adolescents—tried to claim more freedom than authority—governments and grown-ups—thought was good for them, they got quashed. Now this was happening in the blatantly oppressive and totalitarian environment of Eastern Europe (which, however, Jane had told him, ought to be given some credit for at least trying socialism), and even in his darkest moments he did not imagine tanks and soldiers in American cities enforcing the status quo. As for his own present freedom—his and Emily’s Prague spring—it was more a toy they had quietly borrowed for a week and would quietly put back, with no one being the wiser.
When Emily came that afternoon, they did pretty much as they had done the previous afternoon, albeit without the overtures and preambles (as a matter of fact, they undressed one another in the hallway and made love alongside the chest of drawers, the umbrellas and boots, and Jane’s archival wicker basket of New Yorker magazines). Afterwards, they lay down on William’s bed, but they did not sleep. William rested his hand on Emily’s bottom and told her about his morning, and in particular about his triumphal return to Brower’s. He left the bed to get the boots and show them to her, and this led in turn to his guiding her through some of his other possessions, including the cache in the closet floor (excluding, for modesty’s sake, the magazines therein). He showed her his favorite books; his maps of the north woods; his knife and hatchet; his pack (the one item he had managed to obtain while still eligible for the Brower’s employee discount); his canteen, mess kit, and set of nesting kettles and pans; his savings passbook (now exceeding five hundred dollars); and his father’s boyhood copy of Ernest Thompson Seton’s Book of Woodcraft and Indian Lore.
It seemed to William that he had told Emily a great deal about himself in presenting this display, and he added, as an afterthought, “If we went away, this stuff would come in handy.” Emily nodded, but made no response, instead finding herself wishing that she too might do the same thing for him, in her own room, showing him without apology or hesitation her St. Teresa doll in its frayed and sandbox-scruffy habit, the stuffed rabbit toy whose ear she had habitually sucked as a toddler, her copy of Sartre’s La Nausée (bought in Paris by Sister Mary Catherine), and even her autographed picture of Jon Provost (obtained in person when he and Lassie had come through town some years before). There was nothing Emily did not want to know about William, and nothing she did not want William to know about her, because knowing and loving, apprehension and adoration, had become, at least for now, one thing.
They passed the afternoon in this way, and at its end they agreed that for appearance’s sake tomorrow they should imply they were going to the Scholar for a show that would begin early and run a little late (Emily’s parents had become quite pliable about curfew times where William was concerned), but would in fact spend the evening here. He would make Emily dinner, maybe spaghetti.
William’s mother called a little after dinnertime, and her mood was less sanguine than the day before. The “dream ticket” had evaporated, the Vietnam plank being pushed through was one that Richard Nixon could comfortably run on, and there had been some confrontations between police and protesters in the big park downtown. There were police and soldiers everywhere.
“It’s like Czechoslovakia, kind of,” William offered.
His mother’s sigh came down the telephone line, all the way from Chicago, like a groan of wind, like smoke. “It’s worse. Because it’s here. Where it’s not supposed to happen.”
“But it is.”
“It is. Watch the TV. And watch the TV tomorrow night. That’s the nomination. You might see me when they do the roll call.”
“Wow.”
He telephoned Emily, not to tell her about the distressing things unfolding at the convention, but about the possibility that his mother might be on television, or at least glimpsed among her delegation. He did not mention this on the phone, but he imagined they might watch the TV naked and perhaps smoke the rest of the grass he still had from Jim Donnelly.
The next evening, a little before six o’clock, William picked up Emily and drove her to the apartment. He had prepared most of the dinner in advance—spaghetti, tomato sauce, French bread with butter and garlic salt, and salad with the dressing you made in a special bottle with a packet of seasonings—so first they made love, quickly, on his bed, just by way of saying hello.
Afterwards, William stood naked before the stove finishing the cooking, and then, at Emily’s suggestion, he put on the tawny burlap apron that his mother sometimes wore. He put the spaghetti into the pot and stirred it and Emily watched his bottom and his cock and balls, dipping in and out of sight. They ate at the kitchen table pretty much as anyone might eat, save for the fact they were both naked and that in mid-course William, overcome by the sight of Emily’s breasts where he might normally have seen a stack of unread copies of Ramparts or The Nation, came over to her, knelt before her, and lapped her nipples with his tongue.
When they were done with dinner and the rest, they went into Jane’s bedroom, sat on the floor at the foot of her bed, and watched the television. It was a black-and-white television; while William coveted a color television almost as much as he did a canoe, his mother could not be prodded into purchasing one. Perhaps if she had, everything—the sad and foolish things that followed this night—would have been different; perhaps William would have wanted to stay home, simply to watch everything there was to see or that he had already seen in this new and glorious form, in color.
As it happened, the coverage of the convention was in color, although William and Emily had no way of knowing this, and most of the rest of what they saw—the news film from outside the hall, from Grant Park and Michigan Avenue—was in black-and-white anyway. They were in any case chiefly watching out for William’s mother, but the roll call seemed never to come, being interrupted not by commercials but by images of the police, the soldiers, and the protesters. There were speeches and more film from outside and William and Emily did indeed smoke the last of Jim Donnelly’s grass. They watched, and at one point William said, “Wow. They’re just . . . beating the shit out of them.”
The roll call still didn’t come, and then they realized it was time to go if Emily was going to be home by eleven o’clock. They had some trouble finding all their clothes, and their parting felt very odd, perhaps because of the grass, or what they had seen on TV, or the fact that the whole evening was in some sense imaginary, since they were supposed to have been at the Scholar, not cooking dinner and lolling naked together, watching the nation come apart at the seams.
They drove towards Emily’s house through the dark and noiseless streets, the sound of the marchers and the truncheons and the bullhorns left behind them, stoppered inside the cooling television tube. It was inky and silent in the car and in the night, and with the dumb spinning of the tires, the mood deflated, turned somber, regretful, and discontented.
“So what happens,” William said, �
�after this?”
“After what?”
“After this week. Next week. The week after that.”
“When your mom’s back?”
“And when school starts. What happens to us?”
Emily was not sure she was following what William was saying, but she felt scared. “How do you mean? Why should anything . . . ?”
“Because,” William said, “all this ends next week. Being together.”
“Well, we’ll see each other. Just the way we did before, I guess.”
“We’ll be apart mostly.”
“We’ll see each other. All the time.”
“I don’t want to ‘see each other, ’ ” William said. “I don’t want to just go on ‘dates, ’ like stupid high school kids.”
“It doesn’t have to be like that. We’ll find ways. And then next summer, you’ll be free, and I’ll just have another year.”
“Yeah, free to get drafted or go to college. Neither of which I want to do.” William had turned onto Emily’s street and was coming up to her house. “What I want is us.”
Emily was looking at her hands. She said, “So you just have to wait for me.”
William brought the car to a stop in front of the house and turned to her. “For two years?”
Emily looked up at him. There were tears in the corners of her eyes, tiny glintings in the flat opacity of the dark. “It’s not so long,” she said.
William turned his face back towards the windshield. “It’s still two years,” he said quietly. “Two years ago there wasn’t anything.” He put his hand in Emily’s lap and searched for her hand. When he found it and had taken it, he said, “Two years from now maybe there won’t be anything either. I won’t even be me. Like I am now. Not without you.”
“And who do you think I’ll be?”
“I don’t know. I’m afraid to think about it,” William said. “I mean, not about what you’ll do, but about us. That we could change without even wanting to. Does that make sense? That things we don’t even know about could change us. Unless we do something to stop it.”
Emily had put her hand over William’s hand so now their hands enveloped one another, shells within shells, cradled. “I know. Don’t worry.” Emily felt as if she were saying these things in a play or a movie or a song, and that made them more real; made her feel stronger. “We’ll find a way,” she said.
When William got home, he went back to the television and found the roll call had begun, and was in fact well into the letter M, with Michigan about to begin. So he only had to endure that one state, and then he began to look for his mother, and he thought he saw her, in what he guessed must be her yellow shift, as the numbers were bellowed out and repeated from the rostrum. Then he switched it off. He really didn’t want any more.
He went to bed, and the bed was still full of the smells of him and Emily together. He fell asleep very quickly. Then, sometime later, the telephone rang. The experience of this—of the phone ringing in the dead of night, down the hall, like what he had always imagined the Gestapo coming to your door would be like—was so alien to him that he sat upright and did nothing for two or three rings. Then he got up and went to the kitchen and picked up the receiver. Maybe, somehow, it was Emily.
It was his mother. “Billy, I know it’s very late. But I thought I ought to call—to make sure you’re all right.”
“I’m . . . fine. Why shouldn’t I be?”
“Well, with everything going on, I was worried, I was scared. You watched, right?”
“Yeah. I think I saw you.”
“That’s nice. But you saw everything else too?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s awful. It’s worse than I ever imagined.”
“But it’s over now?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Because they’re everywhere, the police and the army. And there are two more days and people are very, very angry. They should be, of course. But it could spread. Into the ghetto here, and to other cities. And then who knows what the military and Johnson would do? Would feel that they had to do?”
“I guess I didn’t know it was that bad. I was with Emily. I made her some supper.”
“That’s very sweet. But I think you need to be very careful. That’s why I really called. Because you need to be careful. Stay away from the police or crowds or anything like that. Maybe you should just stay inside.”
“I will. If anything happens.”
“I’m afraid it will, maybe even there. I’d come home, but . . .” Jane paused. “Do you want me to come home? It’d be difficult, but I could.”
“No, it’s really okay. Really. But you be careful. You’re the one that’s down there, Mom.”
“Oh, I’ll be fine. They’ll probably just lock us all up inside the amphitheater. Where we can’t do anything. We didn’t do anything anyway, did we?”
“So it’s Humphrey.”
“Oh yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s the least of it. It’s really very bad, Billy. And no one knows where it’s going to end. So I think you should just stay inside, until I get back Saturday.”
William was not going to argue. He was very tired and it was very late. “Okay. I will. I promise,” he said.
When William went down to the vestibule in the morning, he looked out the door of the apartment building and everything looked the same. The paper was full of the events in Chicago, but outside the street was quiet and the sun was angling down, hot and acute, through the trees. So of course he went out, leaving the phone off the hook so if his mother called she’d think the line was busy with him talking on it. He delivered a few things for the drugstore, and every house and street was normal and ordinary. There was no gunfire, no smoke or flames.
It was in all these ways a day like any other, except that when William went by Emily’s house that afternoon no one was at home except Emily. He went inside and they had the whole place to themselves.
She took him upstairs, where he had never been before. They ascended the stairs in a hush, on tiptoe, and when they arrived on the upstairs landing it was as if they had reached the top of a tree they had climbed together, and there ought to have been long, vertiginous views and no sound save the wind.
It was indeed quiet and sunlit, and, from the walls to the curtains to the bedspreads in the bedrooms, very white. William held his arms against his sides and kept his hands in his pockets as he looked around, swaying a little. “It’s really . . . clean,” he said. “I mean, in a nice way.”
“There’s not really anyone here to make a mess. Just the three of us these days,” Emily said. She pointed to a doorway at the side of the landing. “This one’s mine. My room.”
“I see,” William said. “Is it okay? If I look?”
“Sure,” Emily said, and led him in.
“It’s nice. It’s like I imagined it.” William scanned the room nervously. “All your stuff.”
“I suppose it’s not much different from when I was little.” Emily shrugged. “Dolls and things. Corny stuff.” She pointed to a bookshelf, to a figure robed in a nun’s habit. “That’s Teresa. She was my favorite.”
“She’s . . . a nun or something?”
“A saint.”
“Umm.” William nodded. “And then there’s all your books, right?”
“There’s not much to it.”
“But it’s good. It really is.”
Emily looked up at him. “But it doesn’t seem to have much to do with anything anymore, you know?”
“I guess,” William said. “I guess it’s the same with my room. In my house.” Then he backed out the door, as though he thought the room was very small and if he had turned around he might have knocked something over.
Out on the landing, Emily indicated another door to a room at the front of the house. “That’s my mom and dad’s.”
They moved to the doorway together. William looked in and saw there was a bay window looking out onto the street, and op
posite it, a big double bed with a white coverlet. His hand was on Emily’s waist, almost as though to steady himself, and he put his index finger into one of her belt loops and drew her a little closer. He was looking at the bed and then at her. Each knew what the other was thinking, and they nearly shook their heads at the same time. No, they had both decided, that would be too weird.
Outside the door again, Emily said, “That’s about it. My sister’s room is back there.” William looked down to the far end of the hall beyond the landing, to where the sun was pouring in.
He said, “There’s an attic, isn’t there? With a sort of terrace or something?”
“You mean like a balcony?”
“Yeah. I noticed it once.”
“My dad calls it a widow’s walk. It’s like a crow’s nest, where the sailors’ wives could see when their husbands were coming home. There’s no ocean, but it’s still kind of cool. You want to see it?”
“Sure,” William said.
Emily opened a door and they climbed a narrow, roughly finished staircase that emerged into a surprisingly large space, lit by a bank of windows at one end and a set of small French doors at the other. Between them were stacks of cartons, rolled-up carpets, suitcases and steamer trunks, high chairs and floor lamps, and, hung from the rafters, tennis rackets and old suits and dresses.
“That’s Susan’s dollhouse,” said Emily, pointing towards the doors. “And this is my dad’s trunk from the war. See the stencil? He was a captain. In Germany.”
William was looking around, smiling and nodding. “It’s like your family museum,” he said.
Emily patted a big rectangular box from Schuneman’s Department Store. “And here’s my mom’s wedding dress. And”—she gestured beyond them—“my crib.”
“This is great. You could hide up here,” William said. “Like Anne Frank.” He laughed. “Like me, when the FBI draft guys come looking for me.”