Even so, the year I met Paul the world cracked open for me, revealing endless possibilities to be achieved with words. Something began to click within me. I could write! I choked on words, drowned in them, constructed them into ideas; I wallowed in their shapes and sounds, their power to stroke or stun, sing or sorrow, accuse or acclaim. Living meant suddenly more than having a college education and being a husband and father. My life, then close to mounting twenty-two years, seemed presented to me once again. I exulted in the gift in quiet ways that I hoped would attract no one’s attention.
I had not had much of a life until the war, to which I’d fled with dreams of screaming down on the dirty Japs or dirty Huns in my silver, bullet-spewing fighter plane, or leading a charge against them on the ground, knee-deep in their bodies. Fled from rat’s-ass-end jobs that generations of my family, bitter resignation etched upon their faces, had settled in. The war got me away. It whetted my appetites; its horrors expanded my mind; and what men did to other men in it, underlining the whimsy of the species, brought me at last before Words as the keys to understanding.
We, Paul and I, shared a love of words and writing, and we understood, in that way people often have with each other, that he was the tutor and I the pupil. It was a role he enjoyed; he found it natural. We moved that year and the next, as seniors, from poetry to fiction and back to poetry, the Queen, once more, meeting her demands of precision and grace with the energy of the young, if not the skill of masters-to-be. We spent hours over beer gone stale talking of writing; missed dinners or were late for work talking of writing and writers; shouted writing above the din of small-time bop-playing student bands. But Paul hated bop anyway.
He preferred Dixieland and folk songs and the ballads that came out of the Spanish Civil War, and there were times when I visited Janice and Paul in New York and went to the Stuyvesant Casino to listen to Dixieland over pitchers of beer, and to be near the writers talking of J. D. Salinger and e. e. cummings. And how many nights back on campus did we end the evening with great, mournful choruses of Irene Good Night? A hundred, a thousand, and Catherine liked not one of them. She looked at those times the way a smooth, brown doe would look if does could show anger or disgust.
Looking at her then I would think, It’s going.
And I would be afraid.
We had had a thing of long standing, through the gray last days of the Depression, through mutual embarrassments endured in homes where the lights had been turned off because our parents hadn’t been able to pay the bill; we shared the youthful shame of being seen in clothes worn too often to school and to parties, of lunch periods in high school during which we ate no lunches because we didn’t have them—while we pretended that we simply weren’t hungry. After I fled to the marines when they finally allowed us in, she was my girl back home, her letters, tenderly scented, recalling spring proms, following me across the Pacific. She was waiting when I returned. We married and I took her away to school with me.
Won’t you come along with me …
Catherine was not enrolled. We had not the money for her to do so, even part time. But we had planned, yes, planned. We would do my assignments together; she would use my textbooks. What I learned, she would learn. She, too, would be studying Bacon and Johnson and Burton and Brown and Herrick, Cleveland, Lovelace, Marvell, Donne, Suckling and Crashaw; she would come to read Anglo-Saxon. Catherine would know an incline from a syncline, a fold, a fault, geological time from pre-Cambrian to Neolithic, the shapes of oceans millions of years ago. She would study the palatals, sibilants and glottals; she would get to know it all. She wouldn’t have the diploma, but that was all bullshit anyway.
We went on one or two field trips and hoarded our money to see road company productions of Broadway hits, often with Paul and Janice. The months passed. I would return from my copyman job in an advertising agency (sometimes, for small things, they let me write copy) to find the books untouched, the assignments undone, and when. I started to talk about the lessons, a look of fright raced across her face, to be replaced by a grin, a grin with curling bottom lip. “Honey, I don’t want to be bothered with that stuff.”
To not want to know. There was, of course, nothing special about wanting to know that stuff, but all knowing is like climbing steps: one bit of knowledge lifts you to the next step, or should.
So I would look at Catherine and think, It’s going.
She talked of the days when, finished with school, we would find ourselves respected citizens of a community where I taught literature. Teaching she understood. The writing was frightening her. First, she told me I was working too hard, staying up half the night writing those poems and stories which were, she said when she glanced at them too quickly to have read them, “nice.” Then she called me crazy, after which, months later, she tangled the ribbon of the typewriter, that tough little L. C. Smith-Corona portable, so much that it took me a day and a half to straighten it. She stopped giving it up; I had to take it; and after a while I stopped taking it.
We lay in bed listening to each other’s breathing, I waiting for her touch, she waiting for mine. Too much drinking at parties gave us our release; the mornings found us distant but polite as ever. It was still going. I didn’t want it to go. I felt I owed it more than I’d given it, our marriage, and what of the kids we’d wanted to have? Who else did I know well enough, had known long enough, to want to have kids with?
On one of those nights when we lay in bed I said, “Catherine, I know it’s not going okay with us. I don’t really know why. I want it to be okay.”
I felt her turning toward me. She sighed. “I guess it isn’t going so hot.”
“Then let’s have a baby,” I said. “We’ll be able to manage through graduate school.”
“Cate, do you really want to? Really?”
I thought I would hesitate, but I didn’t. I said, “Yes, yes, I want to.”
We giggled and embraced and fondled each other until I whispered, “We might as well begin right now.”
She kissed me and got up and went to the bathroom. She slid back into the bed, murmuring, “All clear.”
Paul and I finished college high as soldiers made ready for combat. We did not attend our graduation, and in the quiet summer hiatus, when Catherine went home to visit her father with the news that she was pregnant, I labored in the agency full time or worked at home, taking only a couple of weekends to visit Paul and Janice and to make the pilgrimage to Birdland.
In the fall, Catherine’s belly swelling, I joined Paul in Bark’s advanced writing course. Last year his look had been like a sad, slow sigh: Quo vadis, Africanus? The nigger in his look was gone. It would take me a long time to understand his new one.
Paul and I regularly submitted our work, mostly poems, to the “little” magazines. Once, to what I suspect was Paul’s chagrin, Karl Shapiro of Poetry returned a poem with a note penciled in about the lines he liked.
Recklessly confident, I took to sending my poems to Elder Poets for their comments. William Carlos Williams had sent them back with an angry note—didn’t I know that when I wrote to Elder Poets I should enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope? He did not say marvelous things about my poems. I told Paul.
“Say,” he said, “what made you send your poems to WCW and not to someone like Langston Hughes?”
I said, “I went to see Hughes the last time I was in New York.”
He sat upright in the booth where we were drinking beer. A distance seemed to grow in his eyes. “What’d he say?”
I told him what Mr. Hughes had told me about my work—exaggerating ever so slightly. (I didn’t tell him what else Mr. Hughes said because I didn’t want to believe it and I wouldn’t forget it either: I would have to be ten times the writer a white man was and then it would be hell, which was not exactly an unusual experience. Agents would return manuscripts with rust marks from paper clips because they hadn’t bothered to read the material. Agents and editors would tell you to forget race—but they rarely publish
ed anything by a Negro that wasn’t about race. Still, they didn’t want you to be too serious about anything, even if you were able. But if I just had to be a writer, all this and more wouldn’t stop me, and that was good. And I certainly had to read Llewellyn Dodge Johnson’s works if I hadn’t already.)
Paul leaned back in a posture of muted arrogance, his eyes sparkling with a paternal kindness served up with a smile. “Hughes is good for what he does,” he said. “I never liked his collection Fine Clothes to the Jew.”
I didn’t know it. I said, “What do you mean he’s good for what he does?” I was rising to Hughes’s defense.
“Well! He’s not a William Carlos Williams, is he now?”
WCW was assigned; Hughes was not. And Mr. Hughes was not one of those writers who came every Thursday afternoon to read or to regale us with tales of writers and writing—Edel, Bowen, Auden, Ciardi.
And Paul’s credentials got in my way. That liberal background in a liberal New York City neighborhood. That union father who fought through the labor wars and was now with Harry Bridges on the Coast. Paul’s position in the Students for Democratic Action, which paralleled mine as president of the university chapter of the NAACP. But even with these things between me and my reality, I was beginning to sense machinations, like tiptoeing actors moving behind a set. I suppose that was why, in spite of our drinking days and nights, I had withheld confidences he on the other hand shared with me, perhaps, I sometimes thought, too openly, too eagerly. (I do not know why so many white men seem to do that, as if too heavily burdened.)
However, like entering boot camp or even changing schools, this writing, and its attendant fevers, was new to me and I must have carried my naïveté like a badge. That I had killed three men for sure (I think of them), and perhaps another two, during the war was not preparation for this or what lay ahead. Like most combat veterans, I felt that nothing in civilian life could ever match those encounters with that kind of death.
I did not know that there was another, more cancerous and far less glorious dying; it attacked in tandem, head and soul.
Six months into her pregnancy Catherine accused me of not trying to save the marriage. I was doing the same old things, spending most of my spare time writing or talking with Paul about writing. I laughed and tried to comfort her. If I was spending too much time writing, it was because I was trying to build a future for us; if I spent too much time talking with Paul, it was only so that I could learn from him. The rest of the time, I reminded her, I had to work at the agency to help stretch out the GI Bill and, naturally, I had to go to my classes.
The explanations did no good. She turned inward, and when the baby was born on a bitter March day, the old sense of impending loss and fear assailed me once again. I felt it twice over now.
At the end of the first year Cat and Glenn—for so we named him—went home to visit her father. I think she enjoyed being away from me. I had suggested that we all go, but she insisted that all of us couldn’t afford the trip. She was right; there would have been sacrificing later, which I was willing to do. That summer, however, I didn’t visit Paul and Janice. I worked and painted the house and thought from time to time of the war in Korea. I was glad I had dependents and relieved that Glenn was a baby. No more war for us, I thought.
Catherine’s return did not give our marriage the boost that it needed. Instead, as the year progressed, she and I became one of those habits, limping along, our lives leaking apart. When I was alone with Glenn, I would talk to him. He took his pacifier from his drooling mouth as if trying to respond. He made this sound: !Click !Click, and then, surprised, he would begin to cry until I went !Click !Click. Then he smiled, as if understanding.
At the same time, a certain wan quality came upon Paul, and, strangely, a sheen of gaiety to Janice. Winter came, blustering down from the Laurentians, piling foot upon foot of snow upon the campus. Milk froze. Icicles formed. Cold seemed to have penetrated not only the world but souls as well.
On such a morning, leaving for a class in Anglo-Saxon, I stuck my hand in the mailbox and came up with a letter of acceptance of a story by Neurotica. I reopened the door and told Catherine. “Is that good?” she said. I closed the door and hiked down to the bus stop, itching to tell Paul. I felt sharply triumphant when I told him that afternoon over beer. I had read the letter 151 times, knew it by heart. It was my first acceptance.
Shock burst in his eyes like puffs of ack-ack. He tried to smile, then laugh. He hadn’t sold anything, and there was again distance in his eyes. Finally, he laughed. “Neurotica? What’s that, a disease?”
“It’s published in New Orleans. Editor’s G. Legman.”
“A Jew,” he said, curling his bottom lip.
Sometimes Paul puzzled me: Was he for or against Jews? There was much news about the death camps in Europe.
“Does it make a difference, and anyway, how do you know?”
“The name.”
“C’mon,” I said. I was remembering something Richard Wright said: something like a Jew-hater being but three letters removed from being a Negro-hater. And that was something else about white men: they tended to think that they could share the garbage of their psyches with black people, who would lap it up and rise on tiptoes, singing brotherhood. “I don’t give a fuck what he is, man,” I said. “He’s got good taste, better than yours. You didn’t like the story—”
“Which one was it?”
“‘The Age of Bop.’ I read it last year. Did some more work on it.”
“Bach?”
“Bop, man, bop. B-O-P. Bird. Monk. Diz. Max. Fats. Miles—”
“Oh! Be-bop!”
“Yeah,” I said. “Some Jewish guys play it, too.”
He ignored that. He wanted to talk about the story.
“I’d like to look at it,” he said.
“Why? It’s being published. I don’t need any criticism—”
“No, no—”
I lied. “I don’t have a copy.” I was learning. Paul never passed his work around, but freely criticized whatever work of others that came into his hand. “You wouldn’t be jealous?”
His smile was genuine, disarming. “No. I mean, who ever heard of Neurotica?”
“You’re holding out for A.M. or Harper’s or Esquire, right?”
Still smiling, in a parody of the filmic tough guy, he turned up a corner of his mouth. At that moment he reminded me of a marine hero who, after Guadalcanal and Henderson Field, was sent back home to go on tour. His second hitch took him to Iwo. At home he must have begun to believe the stories of his invincibility; through the corps, island to island, the story went that he leaped atop a rock on Iwo, shouting that the Japs couldn’t kill him, he was Johnny Barone. The Japanese did not understand English; they buried Barone on Iwo.
But I understood English, or was beginning to. Nevertheless, it was later that I would come to understand. Paul had been so sure of himself, of what he was because it had been there all the time, under a veneer of acceptable, right things; there all the time the way it must have been for boxers before Jack Johnson and baseball players before Jackie Robinson.
Sitting there, both of us raking feelings we’d not dared to touch before, I thought of the past summer and my visit to the city while Catherine and Glenn were away again. Paul and Janice loved Leadbelly and Blind Willie Lemon and Pops Foster. I could say that they patronized their pained music. They were warm to the old, black, white-haired fugitives from the Deep South. Yet when I managed to get them to the Royal Roost or Birdland, Paul and Janice were stiff and strange, even antagonistic, toward the music of Fats Navarro and Bird. They didn’t understand it.
Paul ordered another round, lit a cigarette and said, “Yeah, I guess I am jealous, and yeah, I suppose I still have some of the white chauvinist in me.” (That term was big on campus. The lefty students were all using it, and it crept into general usage. White chauvinist.)
I said, “Yeah.”
Our studies eased to their appointed ends, both of
us publishing a lot of poetry in third- or fourth-rank publications.
In the spring, walking slowly back home through the panty-raids and clots of weary athletes trudging to their dorms after hours of practice, Catherine said, “When we go home this summer, we’re not coming back.” She didn’t stop, didn’t break stride. Neither did I. But I summoned words to give me time to think: “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean, Cato.”
I sighed. We kept moving, our feet making soft sounds in the roadway.
“Leave Glenn,” I said.
She turned to me, still not breaking stride, and arched her brows. Women do not think men capable of caring for children; neither do the courts. I thought I could. I also knew that Catherine would refuse, because Glenn was the trophy of our marriage. He made her a woman, a wife and a mother, titles the Western woman and perhaps even the world woman cherish.
Catherine said, “Shit,” and kept on walking.
“What happened to it?” I asked.
She kept walking and shrugged her shoulders.
“Was it all me?”
“I want to say yes, but it wasn’t all you, Cato.”
“Look, we can—”
Laughter echoed down the block from a fraternity party. I wondered if she felt as much an alien in that place at that moment as I did.
Her hand, long and slim, fell gently upon my wrist. “Let’s let it go,” she said almost pleadingly. I could not meet her gaze. I saw, I thought, an endless string of commitments broken, underlining my life. She read me.
“Don’t feel guilty, Cato. It’s just something we were never trained up to handle.”
“What something?”
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