No. Biko was dead.
Classes began and so did my sojourn before the cynical innocents—for they were both. In such times how could they be otherwise? They could not, would not, understand my anger, my insistence on their learning about the world they believed to be real enough because they were in college. They slept. They wrote reams of bullshit on their examinations. They begged for higher grades. My colleagues smirked. And why not? The Pushkin Papers had slipped quickly down the tube and therefore they did not have to pretend to offer congratulations and certainly had no reason to be envious. Three weeks into the new semester, I decided to take another leave when the year was over.
Autumn fled before the harsh smacks of a winter pounding in from the North. I crept in and out of my compartment.
Glenn stopped calling. Maija ceased to suggest that this or that wall could use another of her paintings, which were, in fact, improving. But the burn-smell in my head continued. It made me think of Karloff in the first film of Mary Shelley’s novel and her sense of the place of electricity not only in the body, but in creation itself.
God, don’t short-circuit me yet, I thought.
13
Then, the thirty-three-hundred-year-old boy-king came to town amid fabulous fanfare. We were ready, Allis and I, and that readiness, that opportunity to do, brought back a wider focus to my life.
Lines formed beneath the canopied entrance to the Metropolitan Museum. A small army of guards was posted throughout the exhibit. I shuffled along (Allis and Mack had already come and had provided me with the line of march) in a crowd that just as easily could have been headed for a fight in the Garden. Before each display I let slip half a handful of cards. I had pocketfuls. Most people walked on them, echoing each other in small ooos and ahhhs as if, on the ceiling above, a sign had flashed, reading: “Ooooooo” or “Ahhhhh.”
Yet before the tour ended, a tour that, like so many these days, was, in addition to a fight crowd, like the disorderly surge of cattle to the culture, I heard a voice behind me—somewhere near the Treasury / Annex (a few feet and around the corner from the souvenir sales area, as it happened)—“What’s all this stuff on the floor? These … cards?”
There was a falling-off of sound; people were listening to this loud, indignant voice that was reading: “Ecce signum—Cadit quaestio. Magna est veritas et praevalebit.”
“Greek?”
“No. Latin. Hey, stop shoving.”
“What’s it mean?”
The voice grew louder. It knew Latin.
“Uh—look at the sign … See the—uh—proof … the argument collapses. The truth is … great! and will … come out? Prevail? Some nut! Look. They’re all over the floor. It’s a disgrace. Why don’t the guards do something? They see them. Why’re they smiling at me?”
There near Tutankhamen the Harpooner, I heard another voice, young and clear, rising above the respectful babbling of the crowd: “Hey, you know, King Tut looks just like Michael Jackson—”
Still another voice bellowed, as if in sudden fright, “Shut up! Keep movin’!”
So, once again, it did not pass as much as I had, on still another level, learned or was learning to live with yet one more wound, the way an amputee for a time feels itching in the missing limb. I was running once again in my sleep. Not explosively, as in the hundred-meter run, but, Allis said, with a puzzled look on her face, “as though you were loping along, going a great distance at a leisurely pace.”
I lusted after her. I badgered, cajoled, seduced her into doing it at the most odd times, and with the most joyous lasciviousness. She pretended to be exhausted, often tried to beg off, but never meant it. It was a delicious time, during which I made my apologies to Glenn and Maija, read and made suggestions for his new book, a novel, and enticed Mack back to me.
“Hey,” I said one night when he came out of the shower, “Couple more years and you’ll have sprouts around your dong.”
“Aw, c’mon, Dad.” He was embarrassed, but he grinned.
“It’s okay, Mack. I still love ya.”
Banter and basketball games. Time with his homework. Talks.
In the classroom I smiled at the inanities of the students. I conducted myself with the utmost decorum at departmental and faculty meetings and even attended two or three meetings of committees I was on.
Then I asked Allis to give Unmarked Graves a read. She looked up from Alejo’s poems. “It’s done?”
That was it, the flood of light, the return (save for that sad itching) from the submerged caves of La Tortuga, the banter, jokes, apologies. I’d finished the fucking book. It was done.
I settled in for the rewrite as winter deepened and as Glenn grew restless to be off, somewhere, seeing things, people and places. If he was to be a target, he’d be a moving one, as he’d said. But all his plans were stored for the spring, the same time for which I’d been contracted for a couple of readings out of town, one in Denver, where I’d never been.
The day the invitation came from Denver (Allis was not home and so I wallowed leisurely in the mail) there came, too, a small, square package from Italy.
It has to do with Mr. Storto, I told myself. Mr. Storto. I opened it. His medal seemed larger, lying there in velvet, and for a second, the subtle sugars of good Italian ices caressed my taste buds. I pushed back the lid of the box so that it stood open. I took out the letter, feeling precisely the way I feel when I hear of disasters far from me, hear the bells tolling, absorb my own diminishment.
Era la voglia ultima di Signore Storto che lei ha questa medaglia, la Legione di Onore. E morto il venti settembre passato. Ha ricevuto la medaglia per eroismo e valore durante la battaglia per Vittorio Veneto, il ventiquattro ottobre, 1918.
Voglia gradire i miei cordiali saluti e migliori auguri.
Mario Mondadari,
Sindaco
“Morto” leaped out. He’d died then. On September 20. “Medaglia” okay. Medaglia d’Oro coffee. Medal of gold. Medal. “Battaglia.” Battle—of? for?—Vittorio Veneto. Wasn’t that a street? No. Via Veneto, that was a street in La Dolce Vita.
I looked up Veneto: “The region witnessed severe fighting in World War I but was largely spared in World War II. Bounded by Trentino–Alto Adige and Austria, the Adriatic Sea, Emilia-Romagna and Lombardy.
“In June 1918, the Austrians attempted an offensive on the Piave, crossed the river successfully and then were thrown back. [So, I thought, that’s where it came from, Il Piave Mormorava.] This caused the Austrian war effort to collapse and made the general offensive by the Italians (Oct. 24, et seq.) a success that took Vittorio Veneto (Oct. 30), Trieste (Nov. 3) and Fiume (Nov. 5), by which time Austria was out of the war.”
(“Oh,” Mr. Storto had said. “The rats; they were as big as dogs, eating what they ate.”)
I looked at the medal again. I hoped Mr. Storto had not received it in one of those hurried ceremonies where the brass rushes in accompanied by aides-de-camp whose arms are filled with boxes containing medals that the generals pass out like samples of soap. I wanted the ceremony to have been special. You think of Caporetto and you think of Hemingway and Rinaldi and drinking grappa; you do not think of men like Mr. Storto, who lived his life at night because he remembered the rats.
I called Frances, down on the eighth floor. She was Italian. Her kid, Aldo, played with Mack. There was no answer. I wrote a note and went down to stick it under her door. I wanted her to come up and translate as soon as she came in. Please. I wanted it all to be there when Allis came home. No loose ends. She’d sometimes wondered if Mr. Storto was in pain, if the Italian doctors were as good as the Americans when it came to cancer.
Frances arrived a half-hour later.
“It was,” she wrote out quickly, “Mr. Storto’s last wish that you have this medal, the Legion of Honor. He died on the 20th past. He received the medal for heroism and valor during the battle for Vittorio Veneto, October 24, 1918. Please accept my cordial greetings and best wishes. Mario Mondadari, Mayor.”<
br />
“Thanks,” I said.
“He was a good friend?”
“Yeah, an old friend.”
Frances looked at the medal. “I’m sorry.” As she left, she said, “Tell Aldo no candy if he comes in.”
I called Glenn to tell him about Mr. Storto, then returned to the desk for a while.
“What’s up?” Allis was suspicious. I’d helped her off with her coat and fixed her a drink and some cheese and crackers. She looked around for the mail. “Huh?” she said with her mouth full. “What’s up?”
“Mr. Storto died. He sent us his medal.”
She reached for the box. She was chewing carefully and taking long swallows of her drink.
“I got Frances to translate the note,” I said. She opened the box and looked at the medal. She sighed and reached for another cracker, more cheese. “You okay, honey?”
“Sure. Fine.”
She got up and went to the record rack and put on the Brahms Concerto No. 1 in D minor. I fixed her another drink and had one for myself. We sat and did not talk until the record was over.
We heard Mack and Aldo whooping in the hall, and I folded away the letter and translation, closed the box with the medal and carried them into the bedroom.
14
Maxine accepted the manuscript of Unmarked Graves somberly. The shelves in her office were mostly bare. She had already started cleaning out.
“You do remember what I said?”
“Yes, I remember,” I said.
She drummed her fingers on the script. “What’d I say?”
“That you were out after Graves.”
“Right. I’ll handle what there’ll be of subsidiaries—”
“Okay, sure.”
“Sorry, babes.”
“Listen. Will they still do it?”
She half-turned in her chair toward the window and Madison Avenue. “Why wouldn’t Jock do it?”
“You said times had changed.”
“They have. How’s Allis?”
“All right.”
“These manuscripts from Roye and Ike—you can take them.” She pushed them toward me.
“No good? I thought they were very good.”
“C’mon, Cate. Ten years ago. Not today. Too serious. They make demands on people. Readers don’t want that.”
“Oh. Yeah. That’s right. Shitbook time.”
“Whatever. You want lunch?”
“No. Thanks.”
“What’s the next project, Cate?”
“Getting to shore.”
“What?”
“Swimming through this shit to something solid.”
“Uh-huh. I guess Maureen Gullian will be calling you after I send this over. Lunch with her.”
“Do I have to?”
“You get the word from her, buddy-boy, remember?”
I stood. “Well—”
“Let’s stay in touch, okay, Cate?”
“I didn’t think we wouldn’t, did you? It’s not as if I’ll be drinking with another crowd.”
“I mean, don’t let it get to you. Promise?”
“Okay.” I paused. “I wonder what Queensbury would say about all the changes—”
“What?” Maxine looked puzzled that I had interrupted myself, but I knew what Sandra Queensbury would have told me.
“Nothing,” I said to Maxine. I left.
Sandra would have told me: “Dear Cate. Be honest with yourself. Try to be. Try hard to be. You know as well as I do that for you and all like you nothing will ever really change. Do you understand, darling? Change comes from without, hardly ever from within.” And she would have smiled and kissed me.
You are always saying goodbye to children; hello and goodbye; how ya been and where ya goin’; and you are always wondering why you don’t hear from them. Summer was coming on fast, now. There had been nothing about Alejo and Dolores. An entire year had not passed, then, could not have passed. Yet it had, an aching, terrible year.
Mack was going off to camp this summer, his first time away, on his own, and he looked forward to it with an eagerness that surprised me. He could not understand my surprise and I could not understand why he didn’t. And this one, too.
Glenn was chewing his piece of my chitlin with great distaste. They would not be serving them again in the Rooster until next fall. He grinned at me and shook his head: “And you like these things.” He swallowed and gratefully returned to his crab cakes. Well, I thought, some of us have soul and some of us don’t. I wondered if Alejo would have liked (would like!) the Red Rooster; it had something of the air of a Barcelona restaurant that had seen better days.
“I hope you’re subletting your place to some dependable people,” I said. “I don’t want to be runnin’ down there every other day.”
“They’re okay,” he said. “And we’re storing what good stuff we have. Don’t worry.”
“Good. I don’t have any experience dealing with tenants. These days you can get killed behind that.”
“Relax. It’ll be cool.”
I knocked back the martini that had gone mostly to water. I couldn’t remember now when we’d had our first drink together. But I remembered waiting for that time to come. “When do you think you’ll be finished with the book?”
“I dunno,” he said. “It’s going okay. Maybe by next spring.”
“Good.”
“Then there’s another I want to start.”
“Give yourself space, kid.”
“Yeah. I will. There’s plenty of that in this business, right?”
“Yeah, sure right about that.”
“Don’t worry. Hey, how do you like Maija’s work these days?”
“She’s improving. Really.”
“You noticed. It was that first trip, Dad; some of the world got inside her head.”
I guessed he meant Alejo and Dolores, too, for he suddenly stopped and flicked a look at me. He said, “We’ll look for him, don’t worry about that, either.”
“I wasn’t worried. I knew that. Say, that was nice, what you said to Allis, really, really nice, about the money she gave you.”
“Well—”
“Okay.” I laughed. “Anyway, it’s nice not to have to worry quite so much about money, surviving. It was her father’s.”
“I gather you didn’t get along for the usual reasons?”
“Yeah. Bad news.”
“Sorry.”
I could laugh now. “Why? Wasn’t your fault. Naw. It’s all right now, but it gave us some problems.”
“Some soul, too, I guess. Especially Allis. She’s a very good poet. Those translations are something else. Alejo’d be—he’ll be crazy about them.”
He’d been looking at me and must’ve seen my reaction; that must’ve caused him to change his own tenses.
“They’re all strong, none weak.”
“She worked on them, man.”
Glenn pushed back. “Any wise words on publishing? When will we be published again? When is any good stuff going to be published again?”
“Just worry about the words,” I said. “Like you did with Jumper. I love that book. First-born and all that. I’ll worry about the publishing. The seasons are, well, seasons. A Phillis Wheatley this time, a Richard Wright the next. Hey, we’re the last of the dreaming people here, like the blackfellows of Australia with their dreamtime. That’s the affliction: believing that if we write well and truthfully, it will be read and, being read, it’ll cause the imperfections to be corrected, the gaps filled in.”
He sighed and gave me a sidelong glance. At that moment, he looked just like Mack giving me the same look. When Mack did it, he made me think of Glenn.
“You’re right,” I said. “I stopped dreaming, stopped believing. But that goes against the grain, against the impulse to harmony, rhythm, man, balance. Everywhere you look in nature there’s some kind of harmony, maybe even truth, everywhere except in the affairs of men, us assholes—”
“Sounds like you’re telling me t
o dream and to believe, while you’ve quit.”
“Right, goddamn, don’t do as I do; do as I say do.”
“Is it supposed to be healthier or something?”
“Yeah. Anyway, you’re doing it.”
“Not quite,” he said. “Let’s have a cognac. On me.” He waved to a waitress and gave the order. “I have a good teacher,” he said, “so I’m not quite ready—”
“Yes, you are.”
“No! I’m not!” he said.
“Then why did you decide to continue writing? To make money? To win fame? To win women? No, no, no. Hell, you haven’t looked at anyone since you got together with Maija—”
“All right, then, why do you keep on writing?”
“Because I’m crazy, as you well know. I saw you cuttin’ your eyes at me.”
He bounced in the chair with his laughter. His eyes glistened for a moment. “I like having a crazy father. They aren’t dull. No, man, never.” He raised his cognac glass and we tapped them.
“I envy you all that great Spanish cognac you’ll be drinking again. I think they’re more serious than the French.”
“I’ll save lots for you,” he said. “Lots.”
“We’ll be there, sooner or later. But for now, think about the words. Fly on your words. Fuck the wax on the wings. That’s a Greek story. They were what we claim the Japanese are—good copiers. There wasn’t shit in Greece; that’s why they all went to Africa to study. They brought back Daedalus and Icarus, Phaëthon, Oedipus, all those cats and most of the gods, most of the knowledge. They copped everything that was coppable, and only Herodotus and a couple others dared to say so. Then the Greeks iced the stolen cake with their language. The wax on the wings is a hoax. Fly, son, fly, through a multiplicity of worlds.”
I stopped, wondering what had got into me, why I so desperately wanted to tell him something. His smile seemed sad. I had a moment’s panic. Had I been rapping out some senile, stupid line? I couldn’t tell whether the sad smile was for him or for me.
The musicians came in. It was time to go before they broke our eardrums. We slowly climbed the stairs to the street, checked the newsstand.
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