ONE FAMILY AT A TIME
Customs.
When our turn came, Allis moved forward to the officer, and I, carrying Mack and a single bag, trailed. The customs officer looked up, this gray-uniformed man, and saw me closing fast behind Allis. His chin came up, his eyes blazed and he said in that sharp, official way all these people have when, finally, they have the opportunity to pounce on their betters, “Can’t you read the sign?”
I kept coming, perhaps even a bit faster, bumping Allis, and placing Mack squarely down upon his counter and easing the bag down to the floor in the same motion because I wanted to be very close to him. “We can read the sign,” I said. “I think we can read it better than you.” But he had already found himself caught out in that ageless web, and it wasn’t fashionable these days to be discovered. His neck was reddening; the color moved, like the ink in a thermometer, to his ears and then diffused like a stain over his face. My hands were trembling. He had dropped his eyes. Christ, I thought. They didn’t want to let you get out and once you managed that, they seemed not to want you back in. Was there something out there that was contaminating?
The officer nodded. “I’m sorry.” Allis’ hand closed over mine. Her grip was firm. Its strength surprised me.
“Stupid,” she said, aloud. He continued to flip through his book. I wondered what codes had been placed against which names and for what reasons. “Some welcome home,” she said when he had finished and passed back our passports. I glanced up the line of expressionless faces behind us and wondered what they were thinking. Allis pulled at me.
Another desk, and then out into the bullpen, where sweating men, trying to be polite, asked where you’d been, though the passport told them, and what you had to declare. I’d already unlocked our bags; they had been mockingly accessible. “Okay,” our inspector said, “you can go.” He hadn’t even asked me to open them.
He stuck the stamps on the bags. Allis and I looked at each other. “Wait,” I said. “You mean we’re free?”
He was a plump man with a round, dark face. His gray hair was matted down with sweat. His smile was quizzical “Free?” He waved us away. We were home again, angered and surprised by its rapid contradictions. But, then, it is always the returning, the meshing back in.
I was afraid that bad memories would start again for Allis, and I was not sure what I would do. When she spoke of Mr. Storto, I understood what had happened.
“Mr. Storto hasn’t been to visit us at all, Cate, since we moved, and I think it’s time he did. I’m going to call him.”
She did. The arrangement, as it turned out, however, was that we, en famille, would call on him. There had been, I gathered, as we cabbed down a couple of days later, profuse apologies on both sides for having been out of touch, and a great deal of talk about the baby. Mr. Storto was waiting outside in his old place, near the streetlight, all dressed up, his medal on his suit. He was happy to see us, his pleasure boundless. We had at last surmounted the bullshit of phrases like “will be in touch” and “let’s get together,” etc.; we’d made it. And Allis now had a surrogate father.
There was something comforting and old-fashioned and solid and correct about that afternoon. We had a marvelous antipasto and some country red and his beloved Italian ice. Mr. Storto held Mack and asked after Glenn. He showed me a photo of his cousin who had died in Spain fighting with the Garibaldi Brigade. We talked of big things in small ways—the assassinations, the Rebellions, the coming election, how the Village was changing, Vietnam. He still slept during the day and prowled the building and the block at night.
Allis, as if she were home, took it on herself to make the espresso. Mr. Storto liked the cards she’d sent to him. What were the people like, he asked; poor? Nice, though? Too many people had been poor too long, he said; couldn’t the big shots see that? Didn’t such a condition make them glance over their shoulders all the time? I teased him. He, after all, owned the building. Why was he on the side of the poor?
“If I knew back when I got the place what I know now,” he said, “I’d have got myself a farm. Nothing but headaches. Taxes. Inspectors—crooked, too. The meter-reader, he wants grease; the garbage people, they want grease; the postman. Man comes with a bucket of cement and bottles of water to mix it, an’ the first thing he wants to know is if I own or am I the super. I tell ’im I’m the super.” He cracked his knuckles. “What the hell, the worker gotta cheat to stay up. I own somethin’, well, I’m supposed to have the dough. I never once work a job where workers didn’t try to slow it down, not give hundred percent, because they know no job ever pays what they’re worth. It’s all rigged, like the mob rigs things, y’see. The working man’s smart. He don’t put this screw in outa spite, he do this outa spite; what else can a man do? So, I know, ’cause I’ma poor man, too. Looka this place. Does this dump look like where a rich man lives? An’ the rich don’t know the poor. I know ’em, ’cause I’m poor.” He shrugged himself self-righteously. Allis, standing behind him, patted his shoulders, then poured his coffee.
“You still like it up there?” he asked when we were ready to leave.
“It’s close to the Park,” Allis offered.
“Ah, sure. Get the baby out. Sure, sure.”
“You’ll come to see us?”
“Sure. I promise.”
“When?”
“Well—”
“Next Sunday. We can all go sit in the Park.” She had said it with finality. Mr. Storto looked at me.
“You better come,” I said.
Allis emanated peace on the way home, and I was glad for her and proud of her in that way it is so difficult to speak of, for it is like suddenly coming on a secret, very private, part of someone.
I kissed her.
“What’s that for?”
Her smile told me that she knew very well what it was for.
10
I delivered Circles Round Saturn to Maureen Gullian. We were to have lunch with the president of the company at Latoque Blanche. “He wants us to pick him up at his office,” Gullian said. She patted the manuscript. “I’m dying to read it.”
The literary game of musical chairs had brought Jock Champion to Twentieth Century Forum only six months earlier. He had been nearly everywhere else in publishing, each move being a step up. Now he was president. He was on the phone. He winked at us and gestured toward chairs.
“Well, yuh. He’d be all right. Okay. You got my vote on him. Goddamn it, we do need an improvement over there, and I hope he can pull it off. Otherwise, let’s go to the well again.”
He hung up and swung around toward us. “You brought in the new one.”
“Big one, Jock.”
“That’s great. We think the trend is back to bigger books.” He stood and pulled on his jacket. His pants had cuffs. His suit, I guessed, was British-made, a shade rakish, with nipped-in waist, hacking pockets and double vents. I wondered on which side he wore the codpiece. Otherwise, Champion was cool and correct in his suit.
“That was Marsh over at the paper,” he volunteered. “They got major publishers’ approval on the new books editor.”
“Including yours, too, I take it,” Maureen said.
“You betcha. I wasn’t about to approve any more of those assholes they keep flying up the pole.”
We drifted out of his office and through carpeted halls.
“What’s that over there, in that section with the drapes drawn?” I asked.
Jock and Gullian smiled at each other. Jock laughed aloud then, and said, as we strode by, “That’s what we call the War Room; Gleason runs it. Probably in there with his girl, Nan Tyce. That’s why the drapes are drawn. Shall we run over and peek?”
“No,” Gullian said.
To me Jock said, “She never wants to peek. Nan spends so much time in there that she probably knows how to—”
He broke off and picked up his pace.
“So,” I said when we were out of the building, walking toward the restaurant, “just who is
the new books editor?”
“Shelly Popper. Know him?”
“Not really. Met him once when he was reviewing for the Voice.” My mind was on this arrangement whereby people on the paper called publishers for their approval of candidates for books editor. Perhaps I was foolish. I figured the books editor worked for the paper and therefore no outside approval was required. How many others had been rejected and why? What made Shelly Popper okay, the publishers’ choice? Did he even know what had gone down? They say the wife is the last to know about the affair. Maybe we all get to the place where we’d rather just not know.
Champion’s table was ready, the perspiring maître d’ rushed up to tell him. Champion chatted briefly with the waiters about the lousy summer weather, the mood of the chef, and ordered pâté (“Really great stuff, Cate”) and our first round of drinks.
“I got a call this morning from Life,” Gullian said, tossing her head so that her hair came whisking around in a soft, dark rush, which Champion’s eyes followed.
“Yeah?” he said. “The pâté stinks today. From Brance?”
“Yes. He wanted to know if Cate’s a nice guy.”
She set aside her pâté and began to nibble at a breadstick. The pâté was lousy.
“Sure he’s nice,” Champion said. “Aren’t you, Cate?”
Gullian broke in. “I told him you were nice. Had a family. Devoted husband and father. Very serious about your work.”
“What the fuck does being nice have to do with my work?” I looked from Champion to Gullian. “He didn’t mean nice nice, did he? Not a wave-maker, not militant, a weshallovercomer—”
Champion was waving his hand. “Aw, these jerks. You know how they are. Call him tomorrow, Maureen, and bug him. Bug him good.” He smiled. “That certainly wouldn’t hurt, to bug him into doing a big spread in Life, huh?”
I ignored him and turned to Gullian. “He asked about Allis, I suppose?”
She stopped chewing suddenly. It was as though I’d reached across the table and smacked her right in the chops. She went pale. Her eyes emptied of all guile, all embarrassment. “Yes,” she said. “He did.”
“So much for your big spread, Jock.” I didn’t wait for him to signal the waiter; I did it myself. Champion waved his finger in a circle. The waiter nodded and left. When the drinks came, I lifted my glass. “A toast.” Champion and Gullian held their glasses toward me. They were bewildered. “A toast to being nice; to being the right kind; to pleasing everyone.”
As I drank I looked across the table at Champion. Surely, if he could okay Shelly Popper, he could pull Life’s coattail. Yet he wasn’t about to, and I certainly wasn’t going to ask.
“To the first of several,” Gullian said.
“My glass is empty,” I said.
“God, no,” Champion said, waving to the waiter. “We want your cup to runneth over.”
Just then I remembered that I didn’t have the gun; that I had not carried it since we returned. Stupid! I thought. Forgetting like that.
For it was, after all, the season of the Long Hot Summers, of Poverty Programs (phrases that slipped on and off the ink of the presses to be pulped and washed clean and formed into clean slates or pages again), of do-gooding on a national scale.
Colleges and universities were starting, reluctantly, to beat the bushes for the Asian–Hispanic–Amer-Indian–Afro-American faculty members they thought were hiding. Ethnic Studies departments sprang up like pissweed—so quickly that the various heavy weathers of the near future would pound them into oblivion.
Newspaper, magazine and book editors took to the phones, scouring candidates who could man the desks in their outer offices so that visitors would notice them. (Amos Bookbinder was not nearly enough, and no one knew about Jeremy Poode.)
Foundations plunged cleverly into the bash, offering funding for this or that—actually, peanuts for them, but worth a good mill or two in public relations, given the time. Thus, an array of institutes, academies, centers and colloquia were established, and the artists and intellectuals belonged to these.
But there was also money for the “communities,” the “neighborhoods,” the “areas.” In short, there was money to wallow in. So much, that it called to mind the cartoon of a fleeing man popping big bucks out of his pockets to persuade his pursuers, close behind, not to chase, capture and perhaps kill him.
Thomas Nast, had he been with us, would have drawn such a cartoon.
It didn’t matter that the money was “white.” Who else had money, anyway? We had it coming for slave labor; this was reparations money and it was about time. How could there be any strings attached?
Out of these events and organizations came what was called a “dialogue.” If indeed such an exchange of ideas did take place, it was of short duration.
Not immune to these events, I had accepted a membership in the Center for Black Arts and Letters. It was fashioned after the Center for Democratic Studies. Our sponsoring foundation was the Coalition for the Development of Western Institutions—an outfit so rich and with business origins so crooked that both Gustavus Meyers and Ferdinand Lundberg had been on its case. Big Oil was behind the coalition.
We took offices on the upper floors of a new high-rise on Third Avenue. Our directors jetted into New York from all points of the compass to hold their meetings. They took suites in the Waldorf-Astoria. We held lavish parties and made awards to black artists and scholars most white people never knew existed.
If the establishment had disgraced an individual in one way or another, for some thing or other, we embraced. The Coalition for the Development of Western Institutions could have stopped us, simply by withdrawing its funding. But we had deluded ourselves into thinking that we had grown so quickly and powerfully that CDWI dared not challenge us!
(Ah, but that was the major discovery of those times: we came ultimately to the understanding of everyone else, but not of ourselves.)
We watched while PEN and the Authors Guild hurled themselves into the postures of radical thought and action, only to come up with Prison Programs, which, after all, nurtured those who presented little in the way of either challenge or change because they were locked up, anyway.
And there was, also, that whirlwind, off in a corner, that had been created by the larger storm, the Black-Jewish Thing, which broke open during a meeting in Westchester, with blacks shouting that Hitler had been right at about the same time Jews were shouting nigger.
Paul and Betsy were returning, and I looked forward to seeing him; he was a part of my past that, in contrast to the present, seemed blessedly stable and unadorned with cunning and clever twists. Paul was what he was.
11
Did I wake you, Cate?
It’s Betsy and it’s two in the afternoon and I do not take naps in the afternoon. I say, No. How’s it going?
I’m okay, thanks. It’s not as if I had to start pulling things back together. It’s more like having done a favor for an old friend.
I’ll bet it’s different for the kids, though.
Yes.
There is a pause, the one that always comes when people who don’t usually telephone you call and know that you’re wondering why they did. When Betsy broke up with Paul, she did not come to cry on our shoulders. Instead, she cut loose everyone who’d ever had anything to do with him, as if we all had the plague.
Uh, Cate—I wonder if I could come over and talk with you.
About Paul?
She sighs. The sound comes over the phone like a small bird falling. Yes, it’s Paul. Would you mind?
I say, No, and let the silence come again.
Don’t you wonder, Cate?
While I’m searching for an answer, she says, I don’t know what to tell the kids.
I don’t know, either, but, hey, you want to talk, come on over. We’d love to see you.
She says, with haste and a shading of haughtiness, I don’t want to be a burden, really.
You wouldn’t be.
What’
s there to talk about, Allis says later.
Maybe it’ll help her. I don’t know. What could I say, No?
She pats the side of my face. Poor Cate, she says.
I find myself shaking my head.
What? she asks.
In college he was so sure his heroes would never do that, and, by extension, that he wouldn’t either.
If he’d left a note, would that have satisfied you and Betsy?
I wasn’t married to him.
She snorts.
But maybe, I say. A statement. A curse. Something. Like George Sanders.
Sanders did himself in in the Hotel Don Jaime Rey not far from Sitges. From the main road the hotel looked like a medieval castle. The walls were thick and the rooms were tiled and the windows were small. Sanders had done it in one of those rooms. But he’d left a note.
He left a note, I say, something like: I AM BORED.
That was something! I marvel every time I think of it. Not a whimper, not a defiant shout, just the cutting edge of the truth, which for him was that life had not sent its best into the arena where he was squared off to meet it.
Amos’ wife left a note with only three words, too, Allis reminds me. You said it was mean, spiteful, vengeful.
It was, I say. It really tagged Amos. For the rest of his life. You look at him and you see the words of her note burned into his eyes.
Allis says, But what brevity, clarity.
We are at my desk in the corner of the bedroom. She leans over me. Her breath beats like tiny wings against my face. Let’s not talk about it anymore, she says. Save it for Betsy.
I push the pages in place in the Unmarked Graves typescript. Allis smoothes the title page. It does not need smoothing. Together we stare at the pile of pages, some three inches thick. I drum on them with my fingers. I have not had a manuscript rejected in twenty years. I think I am still shocked. I have no excuse for feeling this shock. I know the countryside hereabouts, and the main roads, high and low; I know the byways, the grass-turned, dew-spilled tracks.
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