In the restroom mirror she tosses her head at herself. The ungainly jacket, too warm yet for now, has to be worn. In her household she is the only clothes tree. Tan shirt, rumpled but not soiled yet, and a hip choice for the coffee-with-cream face above it. The fingernails filed now to curved points, like women in the barrio. But the haircut was what kept her from sliding over the line. When she exited, she smiled at the cop.
Alphonse was not at their table. Maybe his will to pull over to the right side of the fence has nailed him. Or maybe he was ashamed of loving without sex. Then she saw him—coming from the men’s room—on his face a waiting look that made it clear she had a continuity for him, and she was shamed. Her thoughts were changing, rubbing against one another like knives in a drawer, when not set all one way.
As she came up to him a second cop approached the man in the woolen cap. The man had sagged down, one foot feeling for a haven on the chair next to him. He was dead for sleep but fighting that. Wanting to be where it was safe, and where he could pee respectably. He pulled himself upright. She knew how that was. Bravo.
The cop passed on, not threatening, but measuredly.
‘That’s what you call “patrol,”’ she whispered—‘isn’t it?’
The two policemen had joined up, staring vacantly over the scattered crowd. And shifting their feet, side to side. Though of course there was no comparison. ‘He’s not such a bad guy, that second cop,’ she said. ‘He looks—puzzled.’
‘You’re too easy,’ Alphonse said. ‘Sometimes I think this city should be running in blood.’
‘Oh, no. You haven’t been—in the slammer.’
‘Haven’t been where?’ He always heard how you said things. But there were some she had never said.
The two cops had seen they were being observed. Four persons, when you came down to it, staring across the checker board.
‘Come on—’ Alphonse said. ‘And give me that pack.’ Slinging it on his back he took her by the elbow and walked her up to the cops.
‘Would you be knowing the best way to the City Center now, Officer?’ he said, jaunty, with a slight Irish burr.
‘Well now—’ the first one said. He sounded relieved. ‘Would you be wanting the City Center? Or the center of the city?’ Both men smiled at Alphonse. His accent was almost the same as theirs.
‘Hoo—the hall. We’re ahf to see a plee.’ Alphonse was in his element. She prayed he wouldn’t ham it too far.
‘And to meet up again with the tour,’ he said.
‘Aha—’ they said. He had explained her.
Directions were given benevolently, metropolitan to foreigner. ‘Longer to the subway from here, lad. Shorter by bus.’ She kept her lips tight. Who knows where his tour pal might be from?
As they were off, the first officer touched the Pak. ‘Neat. Get it here?’
‘All over Belfast,’ Alphonse said.
When they were yards away she turned around to take in the luxurious plaza, the view, the soaring palms, the arching roof. And the restroom. ‘Great—’ she said. ‘But it’s having trouble being a public space, isn’t it.’
HOW COULD I have forgotten the way a theater smells?
Sweat—from gestures long gone. Tragedy’s gunpowder, blown away. Matinee candy. In this former union hall, postered with faded campaigns, even the dust electioneers.
As Alphonse proudly leads me through the unattended stage door, toward wings cluttered with ladders and paste-buckets, and down into the auditorium, I am treading the avant-garde of a Boston light-years back. We munched that daytime candy in the student evenings, rattling the stale slot machines like pledges to the new politics. Any performance, free or on the cheap, was our guildhall.
A stage is a place born to show insurrection. Only send across it a crowd like the one up there: in motley, its garments calculatedly ragged, its gestures on the cusp of anguish and the edge of violence, yet falling plumb.
‘Carol, you’re shivering,’ Alphonse says. He pats the hand clawed in my lap. ‘Take it easy, huh? It’s only a rehearsal. And the crowd is all friends.’
I can smell them also. Up there on stage and in the rows behind us. Memory is a smell. Memory is a crowd. Memory is a rehearsal. A whine of the slot machines, as they pay off. A tread of sneakered feet, stealing toward the armored heart, kicking at the drug-sealed brain. Memory is an underground minefield. On tiptoe, I’m treading it.…
… I’m seeing revolution as a nest of college girls had once seen it. They are nothing like the calico-skirted, flower-scattering princesses of ideology who had floated the caravans of the mid-century, later lulling their breast-fed babies with plainsong, while on a diet of bulgar wheat, Molotov cocktails and LSD. When Peace was the bomb.
Four dormitory radicals, only as pinko as their shorts and tee-shirts, they are sorority sisters linked by a daisy-chain of steel. Rich girls, spoiled for their lot by a humane education, they will act solely in response to what they are. Daughters respectively of an Illinois industrialist; a banker once a conscientious objector, who had fled a wartime USA to Montreal, made money there, and now lived both places; a titled member of the inner council of the government of the island of Bermuda; and of a New York attorney for ‘lost’ causes and his activist wife—they themselves have no dogma beyond what they will do. They’re of course the same girlfriends who house-guest each other at poolsides in Evanston, Westmount, Paget, and Bridgehampton. Along with their follower, the ‘Boston environmentalist’, veteran of two rallies and one long march—me. They admire me for having done it all on foot.
I see them—us—at a long wooden table in the basement of a brownstone in Greenwich Village, the house of a boyfriend whose parents were in Europe. The basement was once the servants’ kitchen, from which meals were carried upstairs to the dining room; now it is the ‘family room.’ The long table has been swept clean of picture puzzles—the expensive kind, each with two hundred fifty pieces as sharp as cameos, and is piled with bomb parts. Our trouble is—or my four friends’ trouble is—that though no one of them knows everything about bomb-making, each of them knows something. No matter, they are in practice session. I can feel again that electric atmosphere. They are feeling revolution. I can see all four, as sharply as if memory had never lapsed.
On the left is Doris Brody from Evanston, a brownie dumpling of a girl who believes her life there is a bore. ‘They’re sweet, my folks, but like marshmallow, though our food is much fancier. No—like the upholstery in Cadillacs. They gave us kids everything but real ethics; we did nothing for the world. Not bad people so you could see, nothing satanic. Just co-omfortable.’ She moos the word. ‘We live in the suburbs of life. Lots of pillows.’
Then comes Emmy Sklar the banker’s daughter, skinny bird from commuting between three houses and back-and-forth over a border. When she invited me to the Westmount house where she was born, her favorite, she and I were the only ones who turned up, and the bonne served us our holiday meal. ‘My father collects pre-Nazi German art about the masses. Though we never met any of those. My mother kept the Käthe Kollwitz drawings on Park Avenue, to show where we stand.’ And the Hampton house was great for benefits. Her mother died, though, of leukemia. Now her father collects Klimts—‘Sexy Austrian dames, with bodies like waterfalls,’ and at first had a mistress who looked like one, then married again, not her. ‘My stepmother, I have nothing against her, except I can’t be in the same house with her.’ When Emmy chokes, is it sentiment or revulsion? ‘She’s a ringer for my mom.’ And her own analyst is advising that if she has no boyfriends it’s because she can’t choose what kind to have. Monied guys, like the only ones she meets, or bruisers from the bottomline South Fork bars, who scare her blue. ‘Better be red—’ she says, her tiny fingers manipulating the wiring into what must be its proper destination. A bomb’s surer than most things. And you don’t need a collection.’
Carey Plumford. At the table she never said much. I see her stretch, strawberry blonde in daisy-print bathing suit, never
bikinis, neat sports-girl from the elite of Bermuda. Never wore make-up, toenails like a baby’s. In the hay with boys since she was twelve. Papa, a Sir somebody, suspected nothing. ‘“Dear girl,” he calls me. But my mother, she drinks so you don’t see it, slow but sure. And alcohol makes one wise. She always sneaked me in to see American movies; Dadda forbade me them.’ And raised the roof when she wanted college in the U.S.
I see that roof again. Long, low, sub-British in the not quite tropics, it had needed raising. Solid conservative new, the house could have subbed for Triminghams’s, the traditional shop for tourist goods: blue-and-white Wedgwood ashtrays, silver boarding-school style bracelets. Carey laughed when I told her that. ‘We’re related to them.’ She would be the one who flaunted me at all the pools down there. And took me to visit the family of her former nurse. They had no pool but were the most polite. Their manners to me rustled like tissue paper. Though Carey had worn a skirt, she was out of favor with them. Her last boyfriend before she left the island had been black, like them. ‘That’s how I got away.’
‘I’m not sure I approve of why you’re here, Carey,’ Laura, daughter of the dissident lawyer and the activist says sourly. ‘Your politics consists of giving your father apoplexy. Not that it doesn’t make me jealous; I can never do that. My dad represents every leftist in the book. Though my mother, the peacenik, is the real radical. I was fed ethics before I could speak. And met the masses, even if we had to go to rallies to make contact.’ Laura was the one who knew where to steal all but one of the needed materials—like at her former school’s chem-lab in the Village, where science was taught pragmatically. And it was she who claimed to know best how to make a bomb. But if she had nothing from which to rebel, why was she here? ‘I’m my parents’ best protégé. But they don’t do enough acting out.’ And she is kind of spaced-out by Carey. Nothing lezzie—Laura’s boyfriend from sixth-grade, whose parents own the house we meet at, is the one male allowed in—but like goody-goodies are sometimes entranced by sexpots. ‘So we better keep you for show, Carey doll. You’re so healthy. No analyst even.’ The other three have had some psychiatry as routinely as going to dancing school. And you’re our prize Wasp.’
Carey could afford to laugh; she got top marks like we all did, though she said it was only due to her Brit school habits. And I felt the most comfortable with her; she was the one who didn’t make me feel like their prize. Do I need to say for what? Though in a way we were all on show.
I am beginning to remember it all now. How, down the table somebody’s hands are always pushing in, each pair of hands eager to have a part in this object intended to collide with what its owner has been bred to. They are so bad at it, I can’t take it seriously. Calipers and tongs, cotton waddings and a kitchen clock with its innards all over the table, each time we come. Surely the air down here makes them clumsier, reassuringly slow. Under the table is still the unopened bundle from over the border, delivered early, the one component to be kept to the last.
‘Here it is, chums—the canister sinister!’ our Canadian liaison had said, taking a wrapped oval from her backpack, which she had worn forward, and depositing it carefully. ‘Of course, it may contain only bicarb of soda.’ Since then she had disappeared into her own Quebec operation. ‘Dear God—’ she’d said, surveying the litter of manuals at every chair, ‘you’ll be at this “til the Pope turns Protestant,”’ and at the basement door—for they’d tolerated me only as doorkeeper and gofer—she’d whispered: ‘Might as well have poured that stuff down a drain—they’ll never never. Bonne chance! Ta!’
Half wanting to leave with her, I’d gone back inside.
All three heads are haloed in golden Saturday afternoon light. They are interweaving wires that will make sense and idealism interact chemically. Across the street, in the brownstone opposite, antique lace curtains hang ready for the petard, ignorant of the commune—and bless them. This here is only the parcheesi game that rich girls play.
But was I sent for sandwiches? …
‘Production’s on the cheap, but getting a cast together was no problem,’ Alphonse is saying. ‘Not for this play. Now that half of Europe’s in flames again.’ He hands me a flyer. ‘Director fresh from Russia.… Look at that crowd, must be forty of them. On this peanut stage. And how he handles them. New arrivals too, some his friends. They work now as hairdressers, vendors, anything. This is their spare time.’ He is meanwhile saluting people across the aisle. ‘Of course, there’s an Equity cast as well.’
On the flyer the play is called The Heart Of Europe.
On the outside, one may scrounge a newspaper now and then, from a bin. Back at the pad there was only the Spanish daily taken by the bar. Angel, clearing my trash, had noted my lack. A sports fan, he picked up his copies from park benches. ‘I could bring you.’ I had declined. Politics was a clock I could do without. It pretends to take you inside of what will be happening to you anyway, willy-nilly. Or nevertheless.
‘What flames?’ I ask. ‘Which particular ones?’
By his sad shrug he knows my lack. ‘No dialogue. Dance drama, sort of. Mime. Now and then some fife-and-drum.’
‘I see.’ Like at a rally. Nobody really has to say what everybody’s already for. On the flyer’s cast-listing I see there are no heroes or heroines either. Just a long column of names, a rag-bag of all the world—or maybe just the city’s boroughs. And all identified only by their props, as in Coffin, Carousel, Three Men and A Steeple, Drum Corps, Hospital Ward, Green Table, File Room—Secret Police, Kitchen Crew, Business Office, and even a simple: Wall. Sometimes there is a doubling up. The six Coffins are also the Carousel. Orphans and Widows are also Anniversary Ball.
‘Crowd’s the real hero, see?’ Alphonse says. ‘This play comes straight out of the velvet revolution.’
I know better than to show myself the fool again by asking which one that was. Still—I think to myself—I know dirty-sweaty-more about crowds than this fairy tale.
‘So it did.’ A tall, stocky man looms over us. ‘And already out-of-date. Hi, Phonsie. Hear you’re working in this too. Aren’t we the lucky stiffs. Or are we?’
‘Keep on saying. This is my friend Carol.’
‘Hi, Carol. I’m Wall.’
When I sneak a look at the flyer, which lists Wall as played by Martyn Brice—who is also listed as one of the two under Adapted by—both laugh. ‘Good part,’ Wall says. ‘I gave myself it. I’m in the whole last scene—I don’t speak, but make the best prime noises trying. To get people to pull me down. Klas—that’s our mad director—wanted me to shave my noggin as well, but I said, “Not if I’m to sprout flowers at the end.” Where I do fall apart, all on my own. Breaks people up.’
‘Like.… Bottom—’ I say, without thinking.
Alphonse turns to look at me. Surely he knows who Bottom is? Though he’d said he never played Shakespeare. ‘In—you know.…’ I can hear my brain creak, almost. The words come slowly. ‘Midsummer Night’s.…’
‘Dream.’ Wall has a good low baritone. I can imagine the noises it might make. Hollow, as such a wall would be. Yet there.
‘I suffer from memory loss,’ I say.
‘Do you now. Mine’s a silly harpist. Always at the cadenzas.’ He has a nice smile, the kind that can accept the flat statements which some persons can’t avoid making. And offering one of his own.
I am grateful. ‘You’re right not to shave your head. Noggin.’
‘Except maybe for God,’ Alphonse says. ‘Like at the monks’ school I went to. And got kicked out of. Thank God.’
‘The Jesuits? You never let on.’ But it figures. And where he and I had been, who shared?
Now he’s cocking an ear, away from us. An intercom is on, low and constant. Until now I hadn’t noticed. What does register with me is still up for grabs. I see Alphonse knows. He pats my shoulder. ‘It calls us by number, the cast is so huge.’
‘And changes daily,’ the tall guy says. He’s older than us, but not by much. Forty maybe? The
sandy thatch he won’t shave has gray in it. ‘They run it off a computer. Even in a big scene everybody knows his place.’
‘Forty-eight—’ Alphonse says. ‘Is that me?’ He slips a stub from his breast-pocket. The shirt is the one I brought him. ‘No.’ He doesn’t say what number he is. I think now that he’s seen me this far he wants to leave me. For good. He’s done what he can for me. From now on I’ll only remind him of the other life. He’s now on a job that isn’t only himself.
‘I don’t need a number—’ the tall guy says. ‘I only come in at the end. So I know when.’ He turns to me. I don’t want to think of him by name yet, I don’t know why. Such a vigorous presence he has, yet such a pallor. So easy, like he’s been in the sun all his life. Yet can’t tan. ‘I’m no rebel, alas. But I like what you said about heads.’
‘She knows a lot about them.’ Alphonse is like poised, ready to split.
A rebel? Is that what’s coming out of my pores? So that anybody who meets me can feel it? Something is.
‘So why don’t we meet after the show? … We three.’ That last is added on.
Alphonse is taking a folded piece of paper from that shirt pocket. Maybe his whole future is there. ‘Here, Carol. The Jersey address. They’re moving next month to Parsippany. They’ll always know.’
Where he is, he means. That’s the sum of knowledge maybe, for him and me. Not who we are, but where. And he doesn’t want to whistle me off. They can’t believe that you might want to be, because when you begin to feel—there’s no knowing. I better make it clear. ‘You have a room there? That’s great.’ I lean forward to put my cheek against his. Never have. Now I can. ‘So long.’
In the Slammer With Carol Smith Page 8