by Vin Packer
“I was just hoping,” Gay said, “everything come out all right last night. Mmmm? Did everything?”
“As it turned out there was nothing at all to worry about,” Flo Benjamin said. “Dee wasn’t even with him, as it turned out, but home the whole time.”
“Law, no, really?” Gay exclaimed. “What you know about that?”
“It sure is lovely,” Flo Benjamin said walking along now, it sure is a lovely morning.”
“Morning,” Jack Chadwick said passing Cass on his way to the bathroom.
She said: “Morning. Cold with the sun out and it up in the nineties at noon.”
19.
JUST AFTER noon, he looked up and saw her in the doorway of the vestry, just as he was changing.
“Jud? Hi,” she said, walking across the thick gray carpet, offering her hand. “Thanks.” She smiled when he felt the touch of her again. “I know you didn’t have to do that. Everyone would have liked it better if you hadn’t.”
That was true. He said, “That’s not true, Dee.” He finished yanking off his clerical collar, reaching for the tie over the arm of his leather high-back chair. “Everyone’s glad you’re home again. I just made it official.”
“Put the tie on,” she said, “then tell me what in hell is wrong, Jud? Will you tell me that?”
He slipped the tie under his shirt collar and waved his hand at the couch near the window. “Is someone waiting, or can you sit down, Dee?”
“Someone” she said, “was just arrested.” Reaching in her bag for a cigarette, she walked across to the couch. “For a minute I thought they were going to arrest me, too. What is it with everyone Jud? When you stood up there and said you’d like to welcome back Deila Benjaman, I could swear I heard the hair bristling! And suddenly everyone had colds and St. Vitus dance and ants crawling over them! I felt like Fatty Arbuckle or Carry Nation at a bartenders’ convention.”
“No,” Jud said. “You felt like someone who was with Fatty Arbuckle or Carry Nation at a bartenders’ convention.”
She lit her cigarette and inhaled. “So that’s it.”
He watched her from where he sat, remembering that he had taught her how to inhale — and lots more. How to dance, how to drink so she could stand the taste of liquor, and how to make love.
She had thrust him into a long anguish through years of picking him up and setting him down like some rainy-day toy; smiling on him for favors and frowning on him out of boredom; letting him wind his long, love-trembling legs around her impassive body in any way he knew how, with her body marked off like a play court of some serious sport — the foul lines and the out of bounds — and always in the heat of his own passion and in the unbelievable lack of it in her reactions, she would interrupt to change the radio station and get better music; and ultimately after their clothes were twisted and gapping and wet with the perspiration of his dear work, she would say: Jud? Hadn’t we better start back?
Then Chad came, and he had thought it would end there.
Delia Benjamin said, from the couch: “What I don’t understand is all the heroics, Jud?”
What I’ll never understand, Jud thought, is why she decided on it after Chad went off to war. What made her come to him that day, and say that?
“Heroics?” he said. “Dee, this fellow — whoever he is — has stirred up a lot of trouble. I don’t think you realize.”
“He’s against the Negroes going to school — well, so are a lot of people,” she said, “and he’s made speeches down at the Wheel, and he’s damn uncouth. But after all, Jud — since when do we arrest someone for that? Oh, I’ve got my own bone to pick with him, a good meaty one. But after all — ”
She had said simply: Jud, do you still love me? You always claimed you’d never stop.
“Have you seen the pamphlets he’s distributing?” Jud pulled open his desk drawer. “I’ve got one here you can look at.” He got up and walked over to the couch, handing one to her. “He’s been behind all the threats people have been getting, too,” Jud said. “They’re too clever — most of them — in their wording and presentation, for folks around here, in sympathy with him, to think of. Look at that.”
Yes, you know I love you, he had said.
Then take me out tonight, Jud. Will you?
And it was crazy the way he knew exactly what she meant; just didn’t know why. Never did.
He watched her face in its growing concern and faint alarm rising in the features now: “You’ve been away a long time, Dee,” he said. “You’ve forgotten how things like this can pull the trigger on all the guns people have always had loaded around here. You’ve forgotten about the rednecks who hate the townspeople because credit’s hard for them to get in the stores, or the poor whites who are even worse off than the Negro and blame the Negro for it — hate him! Or the backswoodsman who just plain likes any old lawless uprising that can help him blow off steam; or the farmer, Dee, who believes in keeping the Negro in his place as fervently as I believe in keeping Sunday sacred, and who’ll go against any law that goes contrary to that belief! You’ve forgotten about these loaded guns back in the closets, a lot of us had — but they were always there. And now this fellow’s managed to pull the triggers!”
Jud sat down beside her on the couch. And maybe, he thought, you’ve forgotten the old Negro woman’s shack outside Morrow and the rain-racked night afterwards on the weeping-ride home through the vine-hung back roads; you should have seen it, Jud, she showed it to me, held it up with her black hands, like a little wet rat. And it was a boy! Did you know you could tell at three months? Our son, Jud, and she put him down the hole in the outhouse behind the place …
“And I managed to meet him — first thing,” she said looking up from the pamphlet. “Lord, how do I always manage to go head-first toward trouble, Jud?”
“You have a knack for it, I guess.”
She put her head down: “God, I wish I’d never come back here!”
“Dee — ” he touched her hair — ”don’t feel that way,” he said, feeling that way himself, wishing she’d never come back; like an albatross, he thought, for the first time thought that in how long?
“I wish I’d never come back,” Troy Porter said after dinner that afternoon, as he sat out on Belden’s back porch, watching the twins play on the lawn. “I was thinking of staying in Montgomery through Monday, but I hated to leave Poppy alone. Now, this mess!”
“Pam and I understand your position,” Arnold Belden told him. “I want you to know that, Troy. Poppy ought to know a man can’t be a politician and a hero at the same time.”
“Oh, now, I wouldn’t put it that way, Arnold.” Troy leaned forward in the wicker chair, frowning. “I mean, I never was for integration, you know that. So why should I lead the Nigra kids to school? I mean, look at it that way. I’ve always had a very clear picture of how I felt about the Nigra. You know, Arnold, during the war when I was laid up outside Cannes, I met up with the Towers boy, right in the same hospital. Uniform and all. I had my leg busted and I was sitting out on the porch and they brought him out to me — this French boy did. Had the idea we’d be thrilled to see each other because we were from the same home town. You know, Arnold, that colored boy was just plain miserable out there talking to me. I tried to put him at his ease best I could, but you know the Nigras feel stronger about what’s proper even than we do. He just didn’t feel right, Arnold. Felt things were way out of proportion. I could tell. Way after the war I met him in the drugstore — I was with Poppy, and he was back to himself again, back to normal. All smiles and wanting to know if he could take care of any odd jobs around the house.” Troy bit off the end of a cigar and struck a match. “I tell you, for the Nigra’s sake, as well as for what I believe is right, I oppose integration.”
Arnold said, “Well, that’s not exactly the point being made, Troy. It’s the law now. It’s whether we go by it, or go against it.”
“Oh, I’ll go by it,” his son-in-law answered, sucking smoke through the ciga
r, “but I can’t see helping it be enforced. That’s not my job.”
Arnold thought a moment, studying his nails. He said finally, “That’s not the point, either, Troy. It’s just that we seem to be in trouble in Bastrop. Jack Chadwick thought — ”
Troy Porter pulled his cigar out of his mouth and said sharply: “And I’m sick of what Jack Chadwick said!”
“We all thought,” Arnold Belden said quietly, “that it’d be a way to counteract the trouble!”
Troy didn’t say anything.
“Pam and I understand your position,” Arnold Belden said.
“I wish I did,” Troy answered. “I wish I knew what I’m supposed to do tomorrow. Here’s my father-in-law threatened, and my neighbors threatened, and Poppy promising my career away to a Nigra escort service, and a reporter from the Birmingham Post-Herald down at the hotel. I wish I knew what I’m supposed to do. I did the one thing I thought would help) — got that Yankee locked up. But what’m I supposed to do tomorrow?”
“Pam and I understand your position.” Arnold Belden had said that too many times already.
But the third time it didn’t irk Troy because he was thinking of something else now; something he could do about that position by just making one phone call.
• • •
“Afternoon is nice, Daddy,” the boy said, standing by the oak. “Is this brown?”
“That’s brown,” Jack Chadwick answered. “Smell the air, son? Smell the brush burning? Well, those leaves are all colors — red, like the sun is hot; and green, like grass feels, and yellow, like lemons smell, and brown — ”
“Like the tree,” the boy said.
“Yes, like the tree. And when folks rake them up and burn them, all those colors smell like the air, Johnny, like it smells now. Isn’t that a good smell!”
“I want to make Mommie a necklace,” the boy said. “Can I?”
Jack bent over and picked up some leaves. “C’mon,” he said. “help me gather up these leaves and lay them in a pile, and then you can start to work.”
“Tomorrow’s Mommie’s birthday,” Johnny said.
“It is? You sure of that?”
“Ginnie Lee says so. Says she’s baking a orange-frosting cake. So I’m going to make a bracelet and a necklace for Mommie.”
“Well, that’s a good idea,” his father answered.
“Where you going, Daddy?”
“Just off a minute,” he said. “Just down here a ways.”
“You going away, Daddy?”
“Just down here to help someone,” his father said. “Someone’s lost the way.”
“Will you come right back?”
“I’ll be right back, son. You make Mommie a birthday present.”
“A lady’s lost the way,” Johnny talked to himself, “I can smell a lady.”
He wove the leaves into a long necklace, tying the ends together, and then more into a bracelet, and he could feel afternoon going. It was a long time before Daddy came back and when he did, he was whistling.
“You happy?” he called out. “Daddy, you happy?”
“I guess I am, big fellow,” his father said. “I guess I am, all right.”
“It isn’t afternoon any more.”
“It still is,” Jack said, “It’s just very late in the afternoon.”
Afternoon near five-thirty and the stranger ripped the Scotch tape from the letter, sitting in the cell in the courthouse near the Wheel.
20.
DEAR Maur,
This, over a nightcap …
I’ve been thinking, all the way down here — oh, and long before that, when we first spoke of divorce, and all through the divorce, and during the dismal aftermath, that it all started when we got mixed up with the couch clique. Remember? I can remember so damn clearly the night we had drinks with Julie at The Drake, and he said: “No kidding, analysis made a new man of me,” and I saw that little light bulb go on in your head, and you said: “How do you go about it?”
Julie said, “What do you mean?”
You said, “I mean, how do you start it? Do you just walk in and say, ‘Look, I’m all screwed up?’ and I knew that’s exactly what’d you be just walking in and saying the next afternoon to some psychiatrist.
Because we were having terrible fights then, weren’t we, Maur? I remember it because every place we went that song from High Noon was playing (Do not desert me, O my darling) and we were always in the midst of an argument when it would come singing over the radio in our bedroom, or come pumped into some cocktail lounge when we were raging at each other. And if we were on a street corner, someone would come by humming it, and it seemed to haunt the days and nights. We’d been to see The Shrike the night we met Julie, and I remember what you said during inermission:
“I brought the original with me,” and a week later there was an intruder in our house, an uninvited guest who stayed with us until we split up, ate meals with us, fought with us, made up with us, went out with us, made up our party lists with us, even tried making love with us — we fooled him there, though — and sent us a bill for $420 a month. How well I remember the figure, every month on the check stub, and the name: Dr. Feldman.
It was Dr. Feldman would say this and Dr. Feldman would say that, and Dr. Feldman thinks this, and Dr. Feldman thinks that, and before very long we had another guest to keep Dr. Feldman busy, and her name was Dr. Mannerheim. She was my check stub.
Then we didn’t even bother arguing with each other any more. We just mixed our nightcaps and let Dr. Feldman and Dr. Mannerheim argue, like proper mediums, never interfering with the messages, but rolling them out rote-style, until pretty soon it had nothing to do with Maur and Deel, but with what was left of Maur and Deel. The neuroses.
I was a neurosis who married a father-image because I feared sex, translated from the Freud as incest, and you were a neurosis who satisfied me because you were impotent and I had nothing to fear from you because you too feared sex, translated from the Freud as incest.
We wiggled and squirmed under the microscopes as pretty as any two neuroses could for the doctors, and in our new-found microcosm we collected dreams and slips of speech and prescriptions for tranquilizers, and we told time by the fifty-minute hour.
None of it seems real now, Maur, nor fair, nor honest — just glib and pat and too much like tennis. Anyone can play.
I always hated taking the scalpel to emotions, and I still don’t like it — but you accused me, right before our split, of still holding back. And you were right. So if we can save anything, if all the sawdust hasn’t spilled out by now, let’s patch it with facts.
I told you at Missouri about the abortion, told you then about this thing I had for types like Duboe and how I made Jud feel responsible. I told you too that I couldn’t marry Chad because I was afraid of that side of me. I knew how strong it was. But you said I couldn’t go through with my marriage with Chad because I didn’t love him — that much was true — I never loved anyone but you — and you said I didn’t love him because I didn’t want any kind of relationship but the kind we had. You wanted to believe that. I did too — even that, instead of the truth that Dr. Mannerheim dug out with her pad and pencil.
But there were things in the way: a cab driver one night — the night you were sick after we came back from our honeymoon, and I’d gone down to London Terrace for dinner at Dru’s. A TV repairman, one afternoon, six months later. In Juan les Pins, the beach bum who paraded as the squash player, and in Florence, Emilio — the guide from the Pitti Palace. There was a deck steward on the Liberté, and a fellow I met down in the Village when I was buying you a pair of space shoes. Others, too.
And Maur, every time I hated myself afterward, but it didn’t stop me.
For a while Mannerheim had me thinking I was a Lesbian and you were a fairy — and then I began to think Mannerheim was a Lesbian and Feldman was a fairy — and all the while this was going on, you were saying we were getting better.
Our nightcaps went fr
om four to six a night that spring, and in June for an anniversary present, you gave me a gold pillbox from Cartier — for my Milt own.
You said we were getting better.
I don’t remember when it was we got well enough, in your opinion, to start talking about divorce. Maybe you do. Because I never felt well enough for that, if that’s what it took.
When you called me in Las Vegas and asked me to come back, when you said — remember, Maur? — ”I guess we’re both pretty peculiar people, Deel, but I know something. I love you!” I was too battle-scarred, or too proud, or maybe just too goddam tranquilized to do anything but hang up on you — and after it was over, I was dazed.
Now I’m back home, or back in Bastrop — because home isn’t here, there’s nothing here but unpleasantness to remember, except for the day you came here and took me away — and Maur, that seemed as much a miracle then as our getting together again seems now — but you came. I would have married Chad, I suppose, and gone on living the image other people saw, and he saw — and probably one day I would have gotten into trouble, real small-town trouble, like the last time when he was at war, but you got the vibrations, didn’t you? Remember how we used to believe we had E.S.P. or folie à deux; or that we were enchanted — our own magic?
Now it’s gone. But Maur, I haven’t been taking those don’t-give-a-damn pills any more, and I find I do give a damn. If we needed pills at all, maybe we needed do-give-a-damn ones. Because we lost something, Maur. Maybe it wasn’t much, but it was all I ever had, or wanted — you. And you!
Deel.
21.
TWILIGHT AND HE pulled himself to his feet, holding his jaw where he’d been punched, leaning against the fence, breathless, with his stomach still aching, sometime after six; still light out.
He heard the pickup go down the street at a wild pace and remembered the angry words: “You dare show up looking that way, do you?”