Evergreen

by Belva Plain

  “I didn’t know my father had anyone!”

  “Oh, yes,” Chris said carefully. “He had parents and a younger sister.”

  “Alive?” Eric’s voice rose, and squeaked, as it often did recently.

  “Yes. Living in New York City. Or, I should say, nearby.”

  “But why, but why? Why has everybody lied to me up till now?”

  “I wouldn’t say it was lying, exactly. They never told you that your father’s parents were dead, did they?”

  “No, but they were always saying: ‘You’re all we have, Eric, and were all you have.’ So I thought—”

  “Well, that was a way of putting it. Not a lie, Just not talking about it. There’s a difference, isn’t there?”

  He was so shocked, so absolutely stunned. He had no feeling as to whether this was a good thing or bad.

  Chris went on, “They planned to explain it all when you were older, probably would have done so before now if your grandfather had lived. Then you could have met these other grandparents.” He went on confidently, more rapidly, “Yes, that was definitely their intention.”

  “But why was it a secret for so long?”

  Chris paused. “You know how it is, Eric. People don’t always agree about things. To put it quite simply, they didn’t like each other. There was a lot of hard feeling when you were taken to live with your mother’s parents instead of your father’s.”

  “You mean, they wanted me, too?”

  “Oh, yes, they did, very much. After all, they loved their son and you’re their son’s child.”

  “But what was everybody angry at everybody about?”

  “I hate to say this, Eric, although I’m sure you’ve learned a few things about this imperfect world by now … it was a matter of religion.”

  “Were they—were they Catholic, then? Was that it?”

  “Not Catholic. Jewish.”

  Jewish! But that was—that was the craziest thing! How could that be?

  Jewish! Like David Lewin at school. He couldn’t think of anyone else he knew who was. He remembered when David had first come to the Academy in fifth grade. Everybody liked him except one boy, Bryce Henderson. No, two boys. Phil Sharp also. They’d said nasty things to David about being Jewish and David had punched Bryce and made his nose bleed. Then the headmaster had called David in and asked him why he’d done it and David wouldn’t tell, because everybody knew the headmaster was always talking about bigotry and prejudice. “That’s something we tried to wipe out in this war we’ve just finished,” he would say. So David didn’t tell on them and took his demerit, which was really swell of him and afterward most of the guys said it was.

  Yes, he was a nice enough guy, David. Once he and Jack Mackenzie had been invited to David’s house, near where his parents had the clothing store in Cyprus. It was some kind of holiday with a big dinner and wine. The father drank his out of a silver cup and everybody sang. It was neat, yet queer and foreign, too. Eric had invited David back to his house once, but that was all. There hadn’t been any reason why they should become special friends, although probably David would have liked to.

  And my father was like David! Hard to believe! His heart was really drumming now. He didn’t like it. It was too odd, too strange. Different. Like David.

  “I suppose they really should have told you before.” Chris was almost talking to himself, thinking out loud. “At least, I always thought they should. We all thought so.… But they did what they believed best, goodness knows, they did.”

  “Did you know my father?”

  “I certainly did. He was a very great person. He was one of my best friends at Yale.”

  “He was?” Eric felt a smile break out on his lips, a silly smile close to laughter; and close to crying, too. And he felt excitement, the way you do at a mystery movie when you’re so scared of what may be coming next, and you laugh because you’re scared.… “Have you—I never even knew what he looked like.”

  “Have I got a picture? I’m sure I’ve got snapshots of us playing tennis. I’ll look when I get home and send them to you. I’ll do it the minute I get home.”

  “Tell me in the meantime what he looked like.”

  “Well, something like you, as a matter of fact. I think you’re going to be tall like him. He had light hair, too, and thick eyebrows like yours.” Cousin Chris leaned forward with his chin in his hands and the boat rocked. “Funny, we were both going to be lawyers … we were both so certain of the future. And he’s not here, and I’m in the oil business. Life is changes and surprises, Eric, as you’re finding out right this minute. We never know what’s around the next corner.”

  He had a sudden awareness of the planet whirling in empty space around the sun, with nothing to hold it up but its own speed. What if it were to slacken and fall? Fall where? A terror came over him. There was nothing to hold to, nothing firm, not even the ground under your feet.

  “When am I supposed to go?” he cried in panic.

  “When the semester’s over at the end of this month.”

  “I don’t want to go to live with them! I don’t even know them! How can I go live in their house?”

  Chris swallowed. He had a huge Adam’s apple and it moved under the skin of his neck as if it would pop out. Eric had watched it at dinner last night. “Listen, Eric,” he said, “I know it’s a helluva hard thing, I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes, and I’m going to level with you about that. You know I wouldn’t fool you, would I?”

  “I guess you wouldn’t.”

  “You know I wouldn’t. So listen to me. These have got to be good people. They couldn’t have had a son as kind and good as your father if they weren’t. They’re going to love you; they love you already! It isn’t their fault that you don’t know them. And they’re as close to you really as Gran and Gramp, don’t forget.”

  I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go … .

  He thought of something. “What about George? I can’t go without George!”

  “I’m sure you can take him.”

  The dog, hearing his name, pricked his ears and looked from one face to the other as if asking a question. Then he laid his enormous paw on Eric’s knee.

  “Why can’t I live with you, Chris? I wouldn’t be any trouble, I really wouldn’t.”

  “I know you wouldn’t. But you see Eric, Fran and I are going to Venezuela for the company, it might be for four or five years. And we have three children already.”

  “I could help with the children.”

  Something rippled across Chris’s face. Eric thought he looked as if something hurt. “Eric, I wish I could. But Fran is expecting another baby, and she can’t—she doesn’t feel she can take on any more responsibility. You see what I mean? Do you, Eric?”

  He didn’t see, and he didn’t, wouldn’t, answer.

  “I know it’s hard for you to understand. My brothers are bachelors, my parents travel all the time now that Dad’s retired, Uncle Wendell’s past eighty. But you do have another place where you’ll have a home and an education and—Eric, you’ll see, you’ll be happy there! I’ll write to you, all the time, and you’ll answer and tell me what you’re doing and how happy you are, you’ll see you will. Eric? You do understand, don’t you, that it’s not because we don’t want you? Eric?”

  He knew that if he were to answer his voice would come out in that high silly squeak again. There was a pain in his throat, and he didn’t want to bawl like a little kid. He hadn’t cried in years.

  Suddenly he was bawling like a little kid, sobbing, his breath in gasps. He couldn’t believe the sounds he was making. He was so frightened and ashamed of himself, and alone, cold and alone. And, hiding, he put his hands over his face.

  For a while Chris didn’t say anything. Then he began to talk in that way he had which was so quiet, as if he were almost talking to himself again and didn’t care whether you were listening or not.

  “I cried when my friend was shot down over Germany. Yes, I remember how I cried
. I saw the plane go down, a long flame like a red pencil across the sky.… For a long time I had nightmares and woke up crying. I saw a lot of grown men cry in those years. Yes, yes.”

  The boat bobbed. George left his seat and went to lie down on the bottom, his nose resting on Eric’s shoe. After a few minutes Eric felt a handkerchief being thrust into his hand. He wiped his nose and eyes and looked up. Chris was turned away from him, still not looking at him. Then Chris bent to the oars and began to row, parting the lime-colored curtain. They came out into sun and water so bright that it made you blink. They moved slowly toward home.

  “Cousin Chris? Do I have to go right away? Couldn’t I just stay here till the end of the summer, and then leave in time for school in the fall?”

  Chris looked at him for a moment. Then he said gently, “That wouldn’t be a very good plan,” and Eric understood that he was saying, Gran may not live until the end of the summer.

  “So then,” Eric began, “are you going to tell them?” He didn’t know what he was supposed to call them. He couldn’t say “Mr.” and “Mrs.,” could he? But he certainly couldn’t say “Gran” or “Gramp,” either. “Are you going to call them up and tell them that—” He couldn’t finish.

  “That’s already been done. As a matter of fact, they’re on their way here now to see you.”

  “Today? This afternoon?”

  “Yes, it’s much too sudden for you, I know. I was supposed to get here last week to talk to you, but I had to go to Galveston instead and that’s why it’s all being done at the last minute. I’m sorry.”

  “I just wish I’d had more time to think about it before they came.”

  “Maybe in a way this is easier. Not to have so much time to think about it, I mean.”

  George climbed back up on the seat, his great head almost on a level with Eric’s. The dog leaned heavily, closer, as if he knew. Eric was sure George knew when to give comfort. He thought of the time he had been scolded, his worst and only real, furious scolding, the time when he was ten and he had started the car up and taken it out the driveway. And then there was the time, not long after that, when Gramp had had his heart attack and died out on the porch after dinner. He remembered going up to his room, and sitting there all that evening with his arm around George just like this. There was something between himself and George that he’d never felt with anybody else.

  The boat drew up at the dock with a soft bump and Chris tied the rope.

  “Gran will be wanting to talk to you, Eric.” They walked up through the hemlock grove toward the house. “You know, she’s been far more worried about you than about her sickness. You’ll make it easier for her to go back to the hospital and—you’ll make everything easier for her if she knows you’re all right. Remember it’s hard for her, too. Not only for you.”

  He knew he would find her at her desk in the upstairs sitting room. She was mostly there lately, paying bills and going over papers, those stiff long crackly sheets that come from lawyers’ offices. Trusts and wills and deeds, he heard her say, when she talked on the telephone.

  He waited in the doorway. “Gran?” he called. Sometimes she didn’t hear people coming up the stairs. “Gran?”

  She swung round in the chair and he saw at once that she had been crying. It was the first time in his life that he had seen her tears. Even when Gramp died, she had said very quietly with a still, sad face, “He went without suffering, in his own home, at the end of a happy day. We must remember that and not cry.”

  But now she was crying. She stood up and put her head on his shoulder. He was as tall as she. And he was consoling her the way Chris had been trying to console him in the boat only a few minutes ago.

  “I’ll be all right, Gran, I promise I will.” Remember, it’s hard for her too, Chris had said. “Just take care of yourself, Gran. Don’t be afraid for me.”

  She straightened up. “Oh, my dear, how wrong of me! As if there were anything for you to be afraid of! You’ll have a good home, you’ll be cared for! I’m not crying about that, it’s just that—”

  And he understood that they were being uprooted, torn away and apart. It was all without warning, like the night that the storm had destroyed the great elm in front of the house, the tree that had soared above their roof for almost seventy-five years, Gramp had said. In a few minutes of rage the storm had torn it out of the earth and it had fallen, with its great roots ripped, the clotted wet earth dripping from them. He remembered wondering whether trees could possibly feel pain.

  “Sit down,” Gran said. She wiped her eyes and wiped her glasses, straightening her face into the one he knew. Her face never changed very much. Even when she was happy it was kind of firm and plain. When she was cross—and she could get quite cross sometimes—he’d even hated her face. But not now. All he could think of now was that this face was soon going to disappear.

  “Surely there must be a lot of questions you want to ask me? Things Cousin Chris didn’t explain?”

  “He explained, but I still don’t understand it.”

  “No, of course not. How could you absorb all these changes in just a few minutes? I wish so much that there were more time.”

  “Tell me, why didn’t they come to see me before? Why was everything such a secret?”

  “We agreed, we all agreed, it would have been too confusing for a young child. You were only a baby.… This way, you had no doubts about where you belonged. It was really healthier for you. Yes, it must have been right, because you’ve always been so happy.… Still,” she said thoughtfully, “still, I always did feel sorry in many ways. Mr. and Mrs. Friedman—by the way, Eric, we’ve been spelling your name differently, because we wanted to make it easier, more English. But they say ‘Friedman. I, E, D.’ That’s the German way.” When Eric didn’t comment, she added, “I know it must be awful for you to find out that even your name isn’t spelled the way you thought it was.” He was silent.

  “You’ll make a new life, Eric. You’ll see so many things in the city! You remember what a fine time we had that weekend last year when we went to the theatre and the planetarium and—”

  He didn’t want to talk about things like that. “Why did everybody hate everybody else so much? Why did it matter so terribly that they had another religion?”

  But while he asked the questions he knew the reason, really. It was because—because Jews were odd people, not like the ordinary, everyday people you knew. They were different. He didn’t know why, but they were. And he was one of them! Was he, or wasn’t he? Yet, if he was, he didn’t feel any change in himself.

  Gran sighed. “The hatred, if you want to call it that, well, whatever it was, it wasn’t all on our side. Believe me. Of course, Gramp did have very definite ideas, I can’t say I agreed with them all. Sometimes they were extreme, but he was a very proud American and in a sense I can see what he meant by keeping your own ways, among your own people.… ‘Let them go their way and I’ll go mine,’ he always said.”

  “But if he—disliked them so—how is it he never talked about them to me?”

  “I suppose he felt he’d be talking about you, or a part of you, wouldn’t he? And he loved you so!” She stopped. Her eyes had a remembering look, as though she were seeing things that had happened long ago, and hearing voices. “Yet I always felt,” she went on, “that I would have done it differently, if it had been left to me. Not that I’m finding fault with your grandfather. He did what he thought was best for you. Perhaps he was right; dividing a child between two worlds is wicked and harmful.… ”

  Eric thought of something. “Did you ever see them? My father’s parents?”

  “Only once, when your own parents died. Oh,” Gran said, “they’re nice people, Eric! Gentle people, I thought. They’ll talk to you about all this, I’m sure, when you get to know them. I’ve been speaking to them on the telephone these past few weeks and—”

  Chris knocked at the door. “May I join you, or is this private?”

  “Not private. Eri
c and I were only finishing what you began. I think—I hope he understands things a little.”

  “Aunt Polly? Perhaps you ought to go and lie down for a bit,” Chris urged.

  “Yes, I think I might. For fifteen minutes or so.” She stood up and Eric saw that she tottered and had to take hold of the back of the chair. Her face was an awful yellowed gray; there were sweat stains under her arms. She was so fastidious. He’d never seen her sweat before.

  He looked past her to the window. When the wind moved the leaves you could see the flat silver shimmer of the lake. He would be leaving that, too. It was like shedding one skin and growing another. This house, these trees, these faces would all be here, except for Gran’s face! They would be here, and he not here. He would be someplace else, where he had never been before.

  “Gran! Have you asked them—I mean, I have to take George. I can’t go without George, you know.”

  “I’m sure that will be all right,” Gran said. She looked at Chris and smiled. At the door she remembered something. “Eric, don’t forget who you are. We’ve tried to teach you and I know you’ve learned good ways. You won’t forget them?”

  “I won’t forget,” he said. “And now I think I want to go out.” And, seeing the question on their faces, added, “Not far. I won’t be long.”

  He had a vaguely formed idea of talking to Dr. Shane, but when he passed the yellow house and saw that there were no cars in the garage he was in a way relieved. As Chris had told him, the doctor would only repeat what he now knew. He retraced his steps to his friend Teddy’s, but Teddy had gone to the dentist and again he was relieved. He felt that he had to talk to somebody, had to tell somebody, like Chicken Little in the ridiculous childhood tale, running out to report that the sky had fallen. And yet he didn’t really want to talk to anybody at all.

  The Whitelys’ horses were grazing near the road. He went over and stood by the rail fence, waiting until they saw him. He wondered whether they really knew him, or were only smelling the sugar in his pockets. Their soft noses snuffled into his palm. The brown and white pony, Lafayette, had a habit of shoving into the hollow of Eric’s shoulder. He thought, I’d like to get on him and ride through empty woods; I’d just like to shed everything, feel empty of everything but motion, not think about Gran or school or whether I’ll make senior basketball (I never will now, not in that school, anyway: somewhere else, perhaps; but where?). Not to think of anything at all. Animals understand. Dogs and horses. I’d rather be with them than with people sometimes. Gramp had promised him a horse of his own when he got to be twelve, but Gramp was dead by that time and Gran said that, what with tuition at the Academy and all, she just couldn’t afford to maintain a horse. But the Whitelys were really nice; they let him ride Lafayette anytime.