by Joan Silber
“You think so?”
“Absolutely.”
“Right,” Joe said, as if he believed me, as if he’d been reassured. Maybe he had been. For a second. He clearly wanted all this very badly—why else would he keep asking? He sipped his cooling coffee.
And what was I? What wouldn’t I say? No one had held a knife to me and made me betray Forster, but I leaped to do it, to speak against him. No matter how dear he was in my heart. I placated my worthy husband with denunciations. I looked at the kitchen and thought that the scene of it would always be with me. The cupboard half open, with a canister of Swee-Touch-Nee tea inside, the oiled black gas stove with its red and white box of Diamond matches. Already I hated all of it, and I would see it again, tomorrow and the next day.
“Come walk outside,” Joe said. “We need to walk.” And he reached to hug me as I stood up. We leaned against each other like that, in a long, silent marital embrace, as if we understood one another very well. It was not a soothing moment for me.
I couldn’t stop thinking of Forster, with his handsome squint, leaning against a wall in his old gray worsted jacket. Well, goodbye to that. Dorothy was in my mind too, as I’d last seen her, walking through the park, her wool scarf blowing in the wind, rising to the occasion of what she had wrought, rising to her renunciation. I’d done my own renouncing too, if a person wanted to think in those terms, but it was my own business, it was now and always my own.
Later on, when I had children, I used to tell them: Well, you’ve done your best, that’s the main thing. I was repeating what I always said to myself. A person in favor of fairness has only certain routes. I didn’t give myself any special credit for sticking by my husband, but quite a few of the marriages of our youth didn’t last. The boldness of our thinking gave people too much faith in their impulses. Betsy made a very noisy exit from her life with Norman, and ran off with the man who owned our favorite speakeasy. He was older and not all that good-looking, one of the sillier passions someone like Betsy could have. We still saw her in the neighborhood, and she always referred to Norman as “the little genius of the masses,” as if mocking him made her case. I thought she was shortsighted, but she did remain with her new husband, to everyone’s surprise. Later they owned a hotel in Palm Beach that was supposed to be very famous.
Joe and I stayed anarchists, during years when not so many people were and others found communism more interesting. We tried to keep all our friendships, but there were hard times, during the Moscow trials, when we were very vocal against Stalin, and then during the Second World War, which we opposed. Richard, who was Jewish, would not talk to us for several years. In the war years, our two daughters had to face jeers and bullies who waited for them after school, and once a bag of dog excrement was thrown at one of them. It cut me very badly to know that. But we stood by what we’d always thought, when plenty of people didn’t.
Norman, of all people, wrote a book about his lost youth in the best years of the Village. Village Days and Nights, he called it—not much of a title. In it he referred to me as “a shy young thing who blossomed under attention from any males of the species,” and I told everyone I’d been called worse. Many pages were devoted to Dorothy, though I didn’t remember that Norman was an especially close friend of hers. But when you know someone who becomes famous, those memories grow more details.
No one could have predicted that the person most visited by fame would be Dorothy. In the early days, she seemed to want just the reverse—she stopped showing up for picket lines, she stopped going out to drink with us. We were no longer very fascinating. But at the height of the Depression, when certain streets in New York looked more and more like India, she and a friend started printing up a newspaper called the Catholic Worker, dedicated to the untapped theory that the Church had more to say about the poor than it was saying. Their tabloid sold for a penny and was full of Dorothy’s reflections and also little essays in free verse, about what Jesus really taught, by the oddball visionary who was her friend. (The two of them weren’t lovers either.) The paper was a runaway success, and within a few years they had launched their next project, Houses of Hospitality, where the poor were fed homemade soup and the homeless were given beds at night, and anyone who walked through the door was greeted as Christ. People showed up to volunteer, and followers set up more and more of these houses, in cities throughout the country. Dorothy Day was a famous spokesperson, traveling all over, a propagandist for Works of Mercy.
But I didn’t exactly believe in mercy. I thought it begged the question of why people had to be given what should have been theirs all along. I thought it tended the wounds of a violent system and helped keep it going, in years when such systems might’ve gone under and risen as far better things. I thought all the glory over giving away soup was myopic and misguided and ignored what really needed doing.
I did know, and even Joe said, there were worse things than people getting a few free meals—or being saved from freezing to death on park benches—while they waited for the revolution. Which (we knew by then) was going to be a very long wait. The great future was tarrying, like the next Messiah, and perhaps we were like Dorothy, in our patience. I had my old jealousy of Dorothy, but I revered (what a word) the way in which she had thrown herself into the fire of her ideas. She was burned down to Idea, all work and messy effort and silvery dedication. People thought she was saintlike, though being called that always made her say something scrappy and blunt.
And there was no man after Forster. She had probably expected another marriage—she liked men—but she became more and more a sister in her own order. We saw Forster on the street once, taking a pretty little girl of maybe eleven to a street fair, and I knew at once she was Tamar. I’d heard he took her for outings. She had fine, soft hair, clipped back from her forehead, and she looked skinny and quiet. I had my own girls with me, who were little then, dressed in nice summer rompers. Forster said, “Vera! There you are,” when he saw us. He didn’t look all that different—lean, rumpled, with his high forehead and squinting eyes. “Long time no see,” I said. We kept asking how each of us was—fine, fine—while the girls eyed each other.
“It’s very hot today,” he said to the girls. “You don’t like ices, do you? Probably not.”
They roared their protests to this notion, and he bought us all paper squeeze-cups of fruit ices, pale lemon and deep-red cherry, which Barbara, my youngest, got all over her. Louise, who was almost seven, dared Barbara to put her front teeth into the ices for the count of a hundred. “Don’t,” I said. “Do not.”
“Did you ever do it?” Louise said.
Ices had not been a feature of my youth, but I confessed to sticking my tongue to a frozen iron banister in winter, on a dare from Mary Elizabeth next door. I didn’t know why I had to tell them, except that I was always eager not to lie. We had once sent them to a kindergarten run by anarchists where they were told every day to be truthful.
Forster had taken a napkin and was busy trying to clean up Barbara’s cherry-stained face, without much success. The sight of this was so sweet it unnerved me entirely, and I had to drag the girls away before I acted peculiar in front of everyone.
Later my girls entirely forgot that they had met Forster, though they’d liked him fine, but they always remembered the story of my licking a frozen banister on a dare. Another version of their mother! They teased me about it for years. Joe joined them. And I couldn’t help liking being admired for any sort of courage, which it turned out we would all need, over and over.
The Hanging Fruit
So now we have the whole world going broke or already gone. Right in the twenty-first century, when people thought profit was so scientific. In a magazine I saw a page of cartoons on the financial meltdown, and one showed a bum on the sidewalk—same scruffy guy with a bottle in a bag who’s always in cartoons—and next to him he has a sign: HAH HAH HAH. I tore out the cartoon and put it up on the door to my apartment. Neighbors kept stopping me in the hall to say,
“Anthony, that’s so great, I love that.” Little did they know I used to be that bum. That is, I used to panhandle, when I was young. I did it in Paris, which made it seem less sordid, even to me. But the French can be stingy as a people, and their cops are every bit as mean as ours, so it had its bad days.
I was born in Palm Beach, by way of irony. My parents ran a hotel. They started it at the end of the Depression, when I was a baby, and it was a big deal in the late forties and early fifties when I was a teenager. It was a hulk of stucco built to look neo-classic—like a White House with palm trees—famous for its water views and its Nesselrode pie. The colonnaded lobby was packed with tanned, overdressed guests, all of them eager to call my mother Betsy, to rush at her on sight, to be tickled when she granted favors. Which she didn’t always. She was a little queen of her domain, my mother.
I had two older sisters, Gigi and Ellen, and they both liked working the front desk, smiling away (sometimes they recognized an actress), but they were too earnest and silly to be as good at it as my mother. I was the one boy in the family, lazy and pensive and unathletic, and I hated the desk, I hated wearing a suit. When my mother was around, she would chat up the guests and then treat me to bits of cattiness about them. (“Is that a new haircut or a squirrel on her head?”) But she loved their money, she loved the ring of their names, she loved their parades of suitcases. Her conversation was full of retold incidents and small quotes inflated. Her politics had once been leftist and she still had streaks of those views—she gave everybody a day off for May Day, she let people with Jewish names stay at the hotel, and she refused to let us buy gum because it was an empty commercial product. My father used to sneak us Juicy Fruit.
My father ran the bar and the restaurant. He loved hanging out all day and night, and he liked to think of passing the hotel on to me. Once he had me play my clarinet for Rita Hayworth, a favorite star of his, who was visiting the hotel. I wasn’t a bad player. Happy birthday, dear Rita. On other nights he sat with me on the terrace, smoking his Havana cigar, praising the moon. I liked the moon well enough, but I was immune to the magic of the hotel. From the time I was little, I knew we were the servants of rich people.
I went away to college in Miami, not that far away but far enough. I lived in the dorm, with the rowdiness of other boys (I knew how to drink but I was quieter about it), and I loved the way Miami was a real city, each neighborhood its own planet. I was supposed to be studying business administration, but I was out walking the streets, eating Cuban sandwiches and conch fritters and pastrami (which I’d always thought was a joke, not a real food). The mess and noise of the outer world were a great discovery to me. I wanted to leave school right away, except that the first girl I dated told everyone that I used to party with the son of the Secretary of the Interior and I knew a lot of dirt about Cary Grant. These were exaggerations on her part, but other girls wanted to hear more. I’d say, “No, it’s stupid,” and they’d say, “Oh, come on,” and next thing I knew I was telling some very attentive blonde about Rita Hayworth’s drinking problem and what her daughter looked like.
Word went out that you had to know Anthony (me) very well before he would “confide” in you. I began to feel princely and wellborn. When I went home for Thanksgiving I was the least sullen I had been for years. I was dating three girls at once! Sophomore year I fell hard for Melanie, a lively person with a fabulous way of kissing, and in the course of sleeping together we became engaged.
It wasn’t my worst idea either. Those were heady times for us—all the fun of sex was mixed in with our sense of being golden: we had luck and we deserved it. We felt a little sorry for the other kids, who hadn’t found what they wanted and didn’t even know what it was. We had already come into our own, our true and continuing inheritance. And she wasn’t a stupid girl, my Melanie. She loved music and knew much more than I did—she introduced me to Miles Davis and Ahmad Jamal and Big Joe Turner. Like millions after us, we made love with those records playing, and then, when she sat near me in sociology class, she’d hum a bar into my ear, our private language. Unlike me, she had a very exact sense of pitch and could imitate any sound.
I still thought my classes were taught by nincompoops, and I never would have shown up for them if not for Melanie, who said, “Just get through it, get it over with.”
“They’re wasting my precious time,” I said.
“Think of it as a savings plan that will pay off later,” she said. We were both used to waiting. Being young then was waiting, it was the end of the fifties.
My mother liked Melanie’s style—direct and sensible—but she had to tell me that the girl might be a gold digger. “I think you might have delusions,” I said. She did, about Melanie, who was not a grasping type, and about the hotel, which, for all its booming success, was a mom-and-pop operation, not a corporate giant.
“Melanie could do a lot better if she wanted,” I said.
Of course, I believed she could do no better than me. Who made her moan in bed, who could get her laughing at anything, who bought her a very excellent hi-fi for her birthday? And when I graduated (okay, I had a few credits missing, I wasn’t in the ceremony), we could marry right away, because I had a job and a place for us to live, a sunny, peach-colored suite on the second floor of the hotel, in the back. I’d paid just enough attention in my classes to decide we had to modernize our billing and receiving—my mother balked but then relented—and I went through the days quite pleased with myself. All the guests, even the staid and desiccated ones, liked to brag they’d known me since I was knee-high. And now look at me, man of the world, cool as a cucumber, married.
Melanie, who didn’t have to keep house or cook because we lived in a hotel, became my dad’s ally in managing the restaurant and club. They had long conferences about whether to change the house band and what music the square audiences would tolerate. Melanie liked being useful, she wanted a little importance, why not? My dad liked it.
We didn’t take our honeymoon until the next spring, and it was Melanie’s idea to go to Paris for two weeks. “You think I’m made of money?” I said. She pleaded (this was not like her) as if she were my child: “Oh, pretty, pretty please, with a cherry on top.” And in our daze after our long, long plane ride, how beautiful the city of Paris looked, old and stately, dirt-streaked with history, full of nonchalant strangers parading for us. We took a nap in our hotel, woke up, and looked out our balcony at the spangle of streetlamps and lit windows in the dark. Melanie said, “Here we are, sweetie.”
But no place is perfect, is it? A heavy, gusty rain poured from the sky the next day, and by afternoon it struck us forcibly that we really did not know much French. The rain kept on, day after day. Prices were low, but people cheated us, which bothered me more than I wanted it to. In my head I kept tallying bills I’d overpaid, I couldn’t stop. A saleswoman seemed to swear at Melanie when she was trying on gloves. Over and over we were stymied and confused, our confidence left us. We lost each other outside the Louvre. Melanie said, “I was waiting—can’t you keep track of anything here?” when we found each other back at the hotel. These were ordinary mishaps, but we were not ready to be anything but victorious and clever, cherished by all. We left France with a vague feeling of shame.
Once we were home, it was very wonderful to me to have my old boldness back. I wisecracked with our busboys, I was charming to tittering dowagers, I drank till very late and made Melanie get up and look at the moon. “There’s no better view in the world,” I said. “Name one.” I had us go out for drinks in other hotels, to feel myself recognized, to draw the greetings of management. When Melanie didn’t come with me, women sought me out; they came up to my table to ask when we were getting a bigger pool or whether I liked the whiskey sours here.
That was how I took up with Debbie. She was only nineteen and first sat at my table with her mother, who wanted to know the best place to buy a panama hat for her husband. Debbie was a perky little blonde with a big bust, and I didn’t know why she dec
ided to fix on me, but she found me in the parking lot an hour later and made up pointless things to ask me. I was drunk but not dumb and knew not to risk making a pass, though she kept me there awhile. Of course, the whole encounter stayed in my brain and when she came to visit me at the hotel the next day, I snuck her into an unused room. What did I think I was doing? Taking more than I needed, piling on extra. People did. She was not even as pretty as Melanie, and nowhere near as smart. I lived in a sea of extra helpings, on an island of the overfed.
Debbie would lie on my chest and call me pet names. “Baby boy.” “Mon amour.” “Mi corazón.” A year of junior college was enough for her, but she liked languages. Her family was booked for the season, so our affair had a whole winter to bloom. And she decided to be afraid she was breaking my heart. “Don’t look so sad,” she said. “I mean it. Give me a smile.”
I liked my wife as much as ever. I never didn’t like Melanie. The sight of her stepping out of her shoes at night excited me; I was even more attentive, more stirred up. “Wild man,” Melanie said.
Did I feel guilty? I was too fascinated by what I was doing. I think I felt heroic, a man equal to a double task. I had passed beyond what was usual. Would I ever go back? I wasn’t sure.
Debbie and I had a room in the hotel that was sort of our room, and I had the maids put flowers in it, hot pink gladioli, anthurium with curved red spikes, orchids with spread sepals and speckled labella. How sexy those flowers were, in an abstract way. Our affair had that kind of abstraction, it was intense and simple. We didn’t need to know much.
The front desk had been told not to rent that room because the plumbing had an unfixable leak (much tee-heeing from Debbie about this excuse). “The number 716 is going to make you so lonesome after I leave,” she said. She was going back to Wilmington, where she lived.
“We could meet in your town,” I said. “I’ll go.”