Victory over Japan scarcely mattered to Caitlin. As far as she was concerned, the real war had been over for months. First Mussolini and his fatuous whore were shot in April, then Hitler and his blue-eyed whore were dead a few days later, and then on May Day that grotesque puppet Goebbels deprived the Allies of the catharsis of revenge by killing himself, and a week later Europe was at least nominally free.
As for the Japanese, they had been driven out of the Philippines in July and then in August Hiroshima and Nagasaki were yanked like teeth from the jaws of the earth, leaving behind two molten, steaming pits.
Even the first wave of celebration, in August, had gone right past Caitlin like hometown hoopla when the Yankees win the pennant.
She was still working at the Combined Emergency European Relief Committee. This was nearly eight years before the committee was suspected of left-wing ties and, as Caitlin herself would put it, all the financial angels turned into chickens. There were six people working with Caitlin then, and like her they would put in twelve to fourteen hours a day in that loft on Fourth Avenue, with the gouges on the floor where the old industrial sewing machines had once been bolted. Caitlin worked closely with Henry Lehman, whom she had met at Joe’s publication party, and for the past several months, though she had not allowed herself to say it, she had been working away at a cause she believed was already lost.
The Jews were dead. No one had come to their aid, no home was found, just a handful of heroes arose and that was not enough. Europe was a graveyard, a hideous horizon of black chimneys smoking against gray sky. Europe was a pile of skulls, truckloads of empty shoes. Lehman counseled her that the great task of gathering the survivors still remained. Yet remains were all that existed: remains of villages, shards of history, pieces of bone, shadows of former selves.
And so Caitlin refused to celebrate V-J Day because with millions dead and a million more still wandering, what was the use of clicking beer mugs with strangers and waving flags?
And Caitlin did not want to celebrate the war’s end because she had succumbed to bitterness. The dancing in the streets seemed an affront to the dead. And the hypocrisy made her tremble with shame: everyone exonerated, everyone a hero. In a sickening embrace, America was gathering itself close to its own breast. Coughlin forgiven, Vonsiatsky forgotten, the rallies, the torch-lit parades, the hate wagon making its way through Yorkville with the tinkle of hanging kerosene lamps like the laughter of glass children, the singing marchers in lederhosen in Camp Sunrise—fading now and fading fast. It was as if it had never happened, never mattered, and Caitlin was appointed by the forgetfulness of others to guard the true and shameful history of her time.
Today, the offices were closed and Caitlin slept late. When she awakened, she drank a glass of water, ate an apple, and listened to the sound of her neighbor’s radio. Sousa marches, on and on. Greenwich Village, she thought. Her internal self had taken on a caustic voice now, and since she had assumed it—at first as a pose, an alternative to her former, more pliant and hopeful inner voice—she could not speak to herself in any other tone.
Joe had given her his apartment, but the neighbors that went with it were less than desirable. She had expected opera singers, sculptors, a French Communist, perhaps, or at least a dizzy, promiscuous girl with wild hair and cherry-red lips. But those she lived with were just ordinary men who carried lunch pails and their cross-looking wives whispering among themselves on the way to the grocer.
She’d been living on Barrow Street for nearly three years and no neighbor had asked her in for tea or even said hello to her. A Mrs. Ernst once appeared at Caitlin’s door holding a scabrous ginger cat and asked if Caitlin would mind the animal while she, Mrs. Ernst, visited relatives in Harrisburg. Caitlin had declined and Mrs. Ernst had squinted at her and said, “Oh, a movie star, with a beautiful face. Excuse me for asking,” delivering the line as if she were starring in some comedy on the radio.
Caitlin had friends in New York, friends from work, and Gordon, of course. Gordon was in the Communist party now, and going out with a tall woman with a slight mustache who did not understand Gordon’s attachment to Caitlin—though if she were to have understood that he loved Caitlin partly as a way of abiding with his vanished friend Joe, it would not necessarily have made things any easier.
Caitlin went out on Saturdays with a man named Tom Lawson, who taught anatomy at the Art Students League—a sexually avid man of forty-four. Lawson was rather skeletal himself, as if he did not want any extra flesh to interfere with the intricacy of his bone structure. Like so many men, his idea of intimacy was sharing his plans for the future with the pliant woman of his choice, and what made this particularly trying was that Lawson had irritating plans for the future. They had a far-flung Jamey Fleming quality and seemed mostly to concern finding a spot in the world where civilization had not encroached and where Lawson and his beloved—he was never very specific about who might be cast in the role of the beloved—might live on breadfruit and fresh fish and he himself could become the Gauguin of bones.
Caitlin kept the curtains drawn against the heat of the day. She was wearing blue-and-white man’s-style pajamas, bought years ago in Washington on a shopping trip with Betty. She walked into the bathroom with its tiny black-and-white tiles and the boiler pipe pushing up through the floor and disappearing into the ceiling like a cast-iron beanstalk. She looked at herself in the mirror. She had been up until two reading Brideshead Revisited, which she had found snobbish, though the pastoral nostalgia moved her in ways she could scarcely admit even to herself. Her face no longer absorbed those long nights like a deep river; now the restlessness left its bruises and hollows. She was glad to look slightly a wreck. She had always felt that something hurt and dissipated was her true face. She was bored and even antagonized by what was pretty and wholesome in her face; it was annoying to be thought beautiful, or so she thought in 1945, when her beauty was in perfect balance with her intelligence and her melancholy and she was more beautiful than ever before, or ever after.
She dressed in the bathroom, as if there were people in the house and she needed to be modest. She put on a pale green skirt and a matching, wide-shouldered jacket. She had no green shoes to match but she had gray ones and she had chosen a grayish blouse to go under her jacket. There was somewhere in all this an anticipation of a moment, a personal drama, in which she would take off her jacket and some unknown person would notice that her blouse matched her shoes.
The Combined Emergency European Relief Committee was on the second floor of a cast-iron building filled with commercial tenants who were willing to sacrifice charm and even tidiness for a reasonable rent. When Caitlin arrived that morning at eleven it was quiet; sunlight drifted through the small gray and beige lobby, caught in a net of silence. Her footsteps resonated as she walked up to the second floor; a single fly buzzed around the enormous glass globe that lit the way. Upstairs, the tiled corridor was in shadows—the only light came from beneath the door to the Wo Trading Company, where a tall Chinese businessman seemed always to be talking loudly over the telephone to people who, judging from his tone of voice, either didn’t understand him or had willfully betrayed him.
Caitlin walked slowly to Room 208, where the CEERC had its offices. The corridor, the doors, the cool, drab light, the sound of Mr. Wo’s plaintive warble, all seemed part of a world separate from the merriment outside, a place that had been tucked away and then forgotten, like one of those towns on a country road that slowly die when a new highway carries all the traffic ten miles to the west of them.
The frosted glass of the door to Room 208 was dark and the door itself was locked. She had just assumed that at least Lehman would come in. She stood there, feeling a little foolish, and a little self-righteous as well, and then she tried the door again.
Footsteps. A clatter of mop and bucket. Caitlin turned to see Mrs. Oberman, the building’s cleaning woman, limping past the darkened offices of Dr. Marcus, the dentist, and then Rosenberg Ceramics, coming t
oward her with a broken gait that seemed more the expression of a deep melancholy than a lameness in any limb.
“Everybody’s closed, Mrs. Oberman. It’s a holiday.” “Closed except for Wo,” Mrs. Oberman said. She was a small woman with protruding eyes, a small chin, a cringe that was slowly curving her spine. She wore a black dress and black high-top shoes without laces. She gripped her mop handle as if it were her staff. “For the end of the war?”
“I think for Labor Day, Mrs. Oberman.”
“The dirt doesn’t know the war is kaput.”
“You should be home. Enjoying yourself, relaxing.”
“Me?” Mrs. Oberman was sixty; her hair was colorless, unkempt, and Caitlin had assumed that madness roared inside of the old woman like a furnace, burning away sense, humor, hope, leaving only instinct, fear. But then she shrugged and moved her fingers as if to grasp something delicate, something tangible only under the most extraordinary of circumstances, and there was an unexpected grace in the gesture that made Caitlin wonder if once perhaps Mrs. Oberman had been a student, or danced, or painted, or sat alone on some distant hill and watched the sun slowly set, sending up flares of color like the final chords in an organ sonata.
“For me this war has taken everything,” Mrs. Oberman said, moving close to Caitlin, touching her wrist with one hand while holding tightly to her mop with the other. “Everything and everyone. A mother and a father and my little sister, all from Sofia. Also nine cousins, and my aunt Rosie, God rest her soul. She was always my favorite, she treated me so good. My whole family rubbed out like you take an eraser on a mistake. Except for me, who comes here to America, and my husband, and my uncle Isaac. That’s all. For the whole war we say, One day the Nazis will get it in the neck and we’ll dance in the streets. But now … ” She stopped, shook her head. “Maybe I got too old for dancing.”
Caitlin reached out to hold Mrs. Oberman, who merely allowed herself to be held. She was no more responsive than a doll upon which a distraught child unleashes a fit of sorrow.
“Really, really,” Caitlin said, “if there’s anything I can do, anything. If you need anything. You know, already in Europe there are committees looking for survivors. I could put you in touch with some. I’ll go with you.”
Finally, Mrs. Oberman lifted one arm and patted Caitlin softly on her back. “Shh, that’s all, that’s all.”
Caitlin bowed and rested her forehead on Mrs. Oberman’s oddly childlike shoulder; it seemed hard as a darning egg beneath her coarse black dress. The old woman’s touch filled the chambers of Caitlin’s heart as a summer tide seethes within an empty conch shell—but in an instant the tide shifted and she felt empty again.
Mrs. Oberman stuck her mop into her bucket and stood for a moment in front of Caitlin, assuming an aspect that was a mixture of cool appraisal and waiting to be dismissed. Then she turned her back and walked down the hall, with her back to Caitlin, at first moving slowly, and then briskly, and by the time she was fifty feet away Mrs. Oberman was practically running. The mop smacked against the sides of the bucket like a crude clapper inside an even cruder bell.
Caitlin turned away from the door to Room 208 and headed for the stairwell. She was halfway to the lobby when she heard the doors to the street open. A roar of traffic and human excitement came in and then was muffled as the door closed again. Whoever had just come in made his way to the directory on the north wall. Caitlin spied over the banister; a man with black hair, wearing a tan summer suit.
She proceeded to the lobby and the man who had been scanning the building directory turned toward the sound of her feet on the stairs and it was Joe. She could barely believe it was happening, but it was true, it was he, Joe, looking a little surprised to see her, reacting with a certain drawing back, a certain defensive glaze over the eyes, but, on the whole, looking just as he had the first time she’d met him at his sister’s house five years before, dark, with a hidden male sultriness, a stubborn delicacy.
“Caitlin,” he said, his voice falling a little bit short of the task of animating all the silent air between them. He reached out toward her and then closed his hand. “I was just now coming to see you.”
“We’re closed. Everything’s closed.”
“Caitlin?” he said. He made a gesture that said, Are you going to stay on the stairs?
She descended toward him. His suit was wrinkled; his shoes were scuffed. He looked as if he had slept sitting up the night before—on a train, or a bus, one of those men trying to maintain a certain appearance but overwhelmed by exhaustion.
He waited for her at the foot of the stairs. Then he stepped back and they stood in the lobby with a few inches between them. Neither of them said a word; there was no language for what they felt. Everything would have been wrong. Then, finally, Caitlin extended her hand and Joe shook it briskly, making matters a little worse. Now they had something to overcome.
“Where have you been?” Caitlin asked.
“Uncle Sam discharged me three weeks ago and then … ” He gestured vaguely. “I was worried I wouldn’t be able to find you. I had this terrible feeling that everything would be someplace else when I got back.”
He reached out for her, took her in his arms. It felt as if he were holding on to her while he died. He breathed slowly and nuzzled the side of her face and pressed his forehead against hers.
“I’ve never been so glad to see anyone in my whole life,” he said.
He gathered her closer and the silence between them was soft wind.
“I knew it was just a matter of time,” said Caitlin. “I think about you all the time. I know you’re not supposed to tell someone that.”
“Let’s go next door,” said Joe. “I noticed they’re open and I could use a drink.”
They left the building, walking close to each other but not touching. The sunlight was bright, assaultive. And it was hot, the heat came from the air, the pavement, from the buildings and the cars, it radiated everywhere. A plane droned overhead and the passersby stopped to look up.
Caitlin and Joe walked into the Amsterdam Bar and Grill. It was dark inside, full of noise and smoke and the slightly skunky smell of beer. The men’s faces were golden and moist; their eyes receded in the darkness, leaving only dark holes in their faces. Reflexively, Caitlin stood closer to Joe. She had been working next door to this bar for over two years and had never walked in. She had pictured it just as it was, a place for men who were alone, alone in their drinking, alone in their beds, unclean men, unshaved, sour-looking, the sort of men who even in this time of lonely women felt bitter and rejected.
The bartender was sallow, with wiry hair, and something truncated and incomplete about him. The victory celebration seemed to be faring slightly better in this saloon than in other parts of the city, but he himself remained dour. When he asked Caitlin and Joe what they would have he immediately got a worried look, as if expecting them to order something he no longer had.
“Four Roses and a glass of water,” said Joe, describing a small glass with his thumb and forefinger. Caitlin wondered if this meant he wanted a small amount of whiskey or a small amount of water.
“I’ll have the same,” said Caitlin. “Except for the water.”
Joe smiled at her. “Sure?”
“Oh, I may as well.”
They waited for the bartender to bring their drinks. The silence between them was encased in the noise of the bar. A small, dapperly turned out but utterly plastered old gent in a plaid suit and bowler hat stood on a table and hoisted his beer mug up toward the lilac galaxy of cigar smoke that hovered between him and the tin ceiling. “My nephews are coming home!” he bellowed. His voice was surprisingly deep, resonant, as if he had come by it on the sly, a black-market voice.
The beery men over whom he now unstably loomed cheered the old man and his bowler.
“Did he say nephews?” Joe asked. He moved his fingers on his whiskey glass, rotating it in his palm. All the time that he had been gone was somehow captured in that gestur
e, that display of some new nocturnal elegance. His fingers had lost some of their taper and his bottom teeth were discolored.
“I thought only Donald Duck talked about nephews,” said Caitlin. She lifted her glass, clicked it against Joe’s, watched to see how much of his he drank in one swallow, but could not match him.
He took a small sip of water; he seemed to have made a bit of a science out of the procedure. Then he smiled at Caitlin. “Donald Duck,” he said. He touched her elbow and then looked away. “Well,” he said, “I missed you. I certainly missed you. At least we’ve ascertained that. I don’t see you, I miss you. Fact.”
“We’ve also ascertained that you don’t see me, you don’t write me,” said Caitlin. “Fact.” She took the water glass out of his hand and sipped from it. Water served with whiskey seemed colder than ordinary ice water; the glass itself seemed narrower, denser, ceremonial.
“I wrote to you,” said Joe. He gestured to the bartender. “I wrote to you right after I enlisted, I wrote you from basic, and then I got assigned to Stars and Stripes and I wrote you from there. The only time I stopped writing you was when I got that goddamned fucking intestinal disease and my whole life was just shit in a pot.”
“Then what happened to all those letters, Joe?”
“I don’t know. I just threw them away as I wrote them. I seem to be living that kind of life, just a long letter never sent.” He laughed—and it was a rather awful laugh, full of scorn, and mystery, and aloneness.
The bartender brought their refills. Caitlin had only half finished her first and she placed the second one to her left, as if it had been ordered for somebody else.
Secret Anniversaries Page 21