Marry or Burn

by Valerie Trueblood

  “Of course her life was in a shambles,” my mother went on crisply. “She couldn’t look back, once he wrote for her to come. She had to go.”

  My mother and Aunt Maggie sipped coffee, sighed. My aunt gracefully lit her one Pall Mall of the day, and their mood affected all of us, including the men who came down smelling of Aqua Velva and resigned to a weekend of talk. “Her life was in a shambles, you say?” my father said, winking at his brother-in-law. Maggie half closed her eyes and turned her cigarette against the rim of the ashtray, filing the ash delicately, sadly.

  Uncle Ted was her second husband, a tall, quick-thinking, athletic man of forty with many schemes, I see now, for consolidating the property of others under his own hand. Now he would be called a developer, but I don’t recall hearing the word then, when what he did for a living was spoken of with a little smile as though it were a helpless mischief. Uncle Ted was handsome, however, and if it had been suggested to him that he was a poor substitute for his wife’s first husband, at most his hand would have hovered an extra second over a contract before his exuberant “Ted Brown” raced onto the line.

  Oddly enough the dead one in the case, Uncle Randall, had been even more successful than Ted. Aunt Maggie took care not to let material want spoil her loves. But Randall was redeemed and recovered for legend by illness and politeness. From his name flew a pennant: THE POLITEST MAN IN VIRGINIA. It was said that when someone had uttered a crass inebriated suggestion to Maggie on the lawn, Randall had strolled forward in one of his cream-colored summer suits and said, “Now, your people, sir, must be wondering where you’ve gotten to,” instead of “What was that you said?” Or worse, nothing at all, ignoring the offense. As men were increasingly doing, Maggie said with a faraway smile, even then, even in the South. I could picture the kind of man who had come up grinning to Aunt Maggie, even put a hand on her pretty shoulder, somebody too much of a cutup for his own good, like Ted Brown.

  “Randall’s lovely manners,” my mother would prompt.

  “Ah, Randall,” Maggie would sigh, lifting her eyes to the ceiling where the boards creaked as Ted Brown roved about the bedroom getting dressed, and the soft languor that settled over us at the breakfast table seemed to say that men who were gracious had an ascendancy over men who were not. Even years after they were gone, the gracious ones, their heads rose above the ones bobbing and maneuvering below, and looked around collectedly like statues, blind and just.

  But he suffered, this polite man. This was what gave his manners their shine. Randall. He had a disease that wasted him in a year and pinched away his nervous system. I don’t remember ever seeing him. He died before he was thirty, in the days of Aunt Maggie’s flowered sundresses that tied at the back of the neck.

  “Of course she never got over it.”

  JACK AND I were buying olives in a Greek grocery store. I had known him a year. His internship was almost over, a year he had put in on call every other night in the hospital and the rest of the time trying to exorcise the ghost of the love of my life.

  Jack! After the foreign syllables of my unforgotten lover’s name. Where did he get the name Jack? Jack, a doctor! A doctor from the Midwest. No one else I knew in Chicago was from the Midwest. A Jewish doctor, from a prosperous and assimilated family who without any conversion or renunciation had nevertheless shed all the bother of being Jewish, and had further camouflaged their sons by sending them to a military academy where they attended chapel and learned to play polo. Jack played football there, and again in college, where he lived happily in a fraternity and graduated summa cum laude. On to medical school and into his internship, his hair—hair was nothing, feet were stirring the dust of the moon—long enough to touch the wide shoulders from his football days. He was going to be a surgeon and he was going to work for the day when the country would be ready to accept socialized medicine.

  That was when I met him, the spring of his internship, when he was tired to the core, tired even of fun. In the middle of the night in the emergency room he was feeling the seriousness of life, and he wanted a serious life with me.

  I could not consider such a man, so unscathed, so unsuspicious and liberal, so optimistic. My heart had been sealed with a black wax, censed with a bitter myrrh. The man I had known from the first to be the love of my life had shriveled my benign past with the cold wind still blowing out of his lost country.

  Escape, exile. The stories of this man had been glimpses, rather than any consecutive account, of the dirt compounds and hungry boredom and incomprehensible negotiations his family had lived through during and after the war. He had fed these scraps to me—in place of my own historyless American diet—as a sacred food, bursts of outraged reminiscence washed down with so much alcohol that most of what met my eyes in those years had a brooding, tilted, provisional look to it, and Chicago, where we lived, exists in memory like huge stage props thrown into storage. In time I allowed myself to think that the ordeal of living within his mood, within the dark worry and ecstatic remorse of his exile, had made me his equal.

  But of course it had not. The country of his birth had been seized and swallowed in a war. His family had fled. He had been a Displaced Person for years, finally arriving with his exhausted parents in the coal-mining hills of Pennsylvania, bitterly wary at ten as he climbed the school steps with vitamin-toughened Americans who knew the language the teacher was speaking. At twenty he got married to a nurse who saw and liked a skinny, serious kid in an air force uniform. Their quick failure settled his conviction that there was to be no happiness in this country. He got out of the service and into college, where, suddenly, he was not out of place but foreign. He was “older.” There he began to come into his own, gathering in the women, girls most of us, barefoot on our campuses in the first faint cat-smile of the Sixties. The wedding ring, which he would not take off until the divorce was final, entered my consciousness one day in a seminar. I was eighteen. His hand on the table was not American: a hand, as I saw it, from Europe. A square hand, foreign. The hand of someone only half a dozen years older than we were, but a man, not a boy.

  Suddenly, when he was getting ready to leave for graduate school in Chicago, he asked if I would go with him.

  Friends warned me. By then anyone could see that although he was surely my fated love, it was unlikely that I was his. But of all those he had gathered in—and his open arms had been the subject of talk—I was the one he wanted in Chicago. There is no way to know why this should have been so. Wanted is the wrong word. I’m not sure what the word would be. He was willing to have a thing but he was careful not to want or expect or safeguard it.

  For a shocking length of time I didn’t know there were women, wherever he was, who knew this willingness of his, who knew that if they called and asked him to come, he would come. That he would call another woman waiting somewhere—in this period, myself—and say, “I won’t be home.”

  I see how long ago the years of these phone calls were when I remember that a popular magazine of the time did a feature on couples who lived together. In those days that made for a human interest story. They were chic, fearless couples who stood pampas grass in clay jars against walls with unframed paintings hanging on them. They didn’t want frames on their pictures; they sat on pillows; they didn’t want couches or houses or families. But I was not living in a half-furnished apartment with him out of fearlessness. It was living streets away from him that I was afraid of, while his touchy remoteness, his casual secrecy, gradually freed him from the life I did not even know I was planning for us.

  We lived above a tavern on the South Side, but we drove all over the city to go drinking and arguing in bars. Usually I ended up in tears in the bar and in the car driving home. Crying on the stairs at night. Crying in the daytime on a South Side beach, where nobody stared, even though we were white. The crying made us disappear. Crying on the El on the way to my job, once I got a job. Because he didn’t know, and he was unable to know, whether I should stay or not. Maybe so. But maybe not. But
meanwhile the women beckoned, a new kind of audacious women, like the ones in the magazine article, all of them photographers or dancers it seemed to me, women with satchels I glimpsed and sullen curses I heard, because before they let him go they were going to come with him right to the curb below our window, holding on to him, no one could stop them, women having about them some promise irresistible to a man so melancholy—I knew it was irresistible, just as I knew I didn’t have it—of recklessness and bitchiness and oblivious demand.

  But it would never work with those women either. Something had gone wrong. The war.

  The war. The war had ended twenty years before. “Don’t speak if you know nothing!” he told me, his face turning ugly. Because I did not understand his country, or anything about a country such as his, an Eden of larch trees and peaceful rivers and ancient cities, one risen from the ashes thirteen times, and conservatories of music—a country that could be consumed in war. Nor did I understand anything about him, a man in the mold of his birthplace. And not just him but the whole forlorn, wrongly dressed, belligerent company, in cities like Chicago, of the permanently displaced. I had grown up in Virginia; I had studied literature, not history. I knew about the wars in novels. I did remember Khrushchev banging with his shoe. This was years after Khrushchev had vanished, and to this abhorrer of every emanation from the Soviet Union I said, “I liked him.”

  In no time there was another war, of course. He was loyal. The United States of America did not err in its choices. If such a country were to hate, it would not do so in error. If such a country went to war, it would be to liberate the captive.

  First the Germans and then the Americans had liberated his family. He had memories of candy bars: something to unwrap, unspeakably glorious, after potatoes. So he always bought candy bars. He had memories of his parents in tears, pleading with someone. Others might forget but he remembered: rescue. Rescue somehow not completed.

  And I, I could not complete it? He laughed. This went on for years. Finally he decided, of course, to leave me.

  I COULD NOT get over it. I did not want to get over it. And so in the Greek grocery I was looking at Jack, the intern, and telling myself, Nothing’s gone wrong for him. His father is a doctor, his son will be a doctor. Of course he loves life. Why not? How has it ever hurt him? Look how he buys retsina, and tastes the glowing, wrinkled black olives set out on the little plate on the counter. Of course he has eaten olives in Greece, he has eaten the delicacies of the world, hiking and engaging people in conversation and staying in their houses as often as in hotels, welcomed and served, nowhere offered any impediment, any defeat.

  That was my litany. But while I was repeating to myself these things so familiar and provable, the proprietor was wrapping up our olives and staring at Jack. He was a giant bald man with black eyebrows that must have once matched his hair. He had on a bib apron that almost reached the floor. For some reason he couldn’t take his eyes off Jack. Jack was a handsome man, but the Greek was not noticing his good looks. Suddenly he came out from behind the counter. He grabbed Jack by the shoulders. “See there!” he said excitedly, seizing Jack’s chin and turning it up to the ceiling. “See there!” There was a row of framed photographs on the topmost shelf, above the gallon cans of olive oil. “My father!” cried the man, pointing to a mustached man in uniform, in a brownish picture.

  “That’s your dad?” said Jack good-naturedly.

  “My father. Killed in ’41. Crete. April of ’41. Eh? Eh?”

  “What was his outfit?” said Jack.

  The man rolled out an answer in Greek and grinned at Jack cagily. “Not Greek?” he said after a pause while the three or four other people shopping in the store all smiled at us.

  “No, sir, I’m not,” Jack said regretfully. He still used the sirs they had taught him at the military academy.

  “Yugoslav?”

  “No. No . . .” said Jack with a sigh and a look at me. “Jewish.” He sounded surprised himself, but firm, that first moment of turning his back on his family’s precautions and becoming Jewish.

  “Ah,” said the man, jostling me and moving in to look closely at the pores of Jack’s face. “My father,” he said again and gestured at the picture. “You are the same man! You see?” he said to the other customers and to me. Some of them craned their necks at the picture and saw a resemblance. The Greek hauled out his stepladder and climbed up and took the picture off the shelf. He came down and handed it to Jack, who studied it while the man stood rubbing his hands together. He had tears in his eyes. To his wife, who had come to the doorway of the little room behind the refrigerator and stood drying her hands, he said something in Greek. He pointed upward. With a quick look and a shake of her head the woman folded the towel. But the Greek had made his judgment; he stepped up to Jack and gave him a bear hug. Over Jack’s shoulder hung his big face, eyes shut and tears running into the mustache. “Just like my father!” he said to the spectators with a tearful laugh.

  Jack wrapped his arms around the man’s back and returned the hug. He did not pass it off, he neither moved nor smiled as the Greek let go of him and stepped back, keeping his fingers with their longish nails on the sleeves of Jack’s coat. There was a stillness in the store while the respect and honor due the soldier in the picture was offered to Jack.

  Then the two of them shook hands, and the man wiped his eyes and went back behind the counter to ring up our retsina on the huge cash register. “Brass!” he said, tapping the etched flank of the machine with his nail. “Antique. Found it on Jackson a block over. Old Greek had it, didn’t speak any English, sold it for nothing. The antique stores, they all want it! Old but as you see . . .” His big fingers caressed the register. His voice died away as he surveyed his long counter with its drawers of pasta and trays of herbs in bundles tied with string. Then, speaking straight into Jack’s eyes, he said, “I had this one ever since I had the store, twenty-four years. You see this store? I got this store with my uncle Giorgos in ’45.” He ran his fingers through the silky lentils. At last he took his eyes off Jack and turned to the other customers, as the past, with his father in it, receded.

  We left the store. I took Jack’s hand. I was thinking about the war, how belatedly I had understood anything about it. If I understood at all.

  I was wondering how it was I spent so little time thinking about or writing to my family, whom I had left such a short time ago to follow the man who had done the harm to me. But what if he was harmed by me too? I suddenly thought. By my selfish American tears and my stupidity? My not knowing what a war was? How crude were the uses to which I had put my own courage: lying to get a prescription for sleeping pills, for example, to leave on the table where it might jerk back to life his boyhood fear that he could not perfectly understand anyone in this country, or know how far we might go.

  I thought of my father. He had given me so many humble warnings, whenever I flew home from Chicago with circles under my eyes and made grim, tearful, late-night phone calls and then turned around and flew back. Without pretending to firsthand knowledge, having missed being sent overseas in the war himself, and without ever censuring the man I was suffering over, in fact protecting him, trying to turn me out of his path, a girl deliberately raised in ignorance of life! Maybe my father regretted my ignorance, thought it was not too late for me to be made to see how the little rivers of private life might join up with or dwindle off from the huge river of war. But I couldn’t see.

  I thought of my father as he must have been at my age, when the war was coming and young men all over the world didn’t know whether they would live or die, and as he had been on those Saturdays with my aunt and uncle, when we were children. Hidden from my sight, although he stood in the same kitchen where I sat with my sister, my mother, and my aunt at the table, wrapped in the scent of shaving lotion, which would drift like his ghost across hotel lobbies in later years, to find me. Hidden from me, because my concentration was on what awaited the female. The fateful events, the loves and cruel
sorrows that would attend her.

  I thought of my father aging without any attention from me or my sister, who was just like me, far away on quests of her own, while something in both of us had coarsened, had hardened towards our families and our pasts, in order for us to spend our full energy, our remembering and planning, on men we loved. I thought of the face of the Greek in the store as he stared so hopelessly at Jack. No getting through. No getting back to the time before that war. No restoring his father, or reversing the exile of my lover and his parents, or showing mercy to those people as handsome and fated for accomplishment as Jack, who saw, from inside, the doors of boxcars slide shut.

  This was approximately when I decided the theme of War and Peace was not the coarsening of Natasha, was not even love. First I decided that the books I had thought were about love were about time, and death, and then, that I did not have any idea what they were about, because my lover had been right, I knew nothing.

  IN THE YEARS after Uncle Randall died, Aunt Maggie did not so much coarsen as become the woman we all knew, who looked with wide, daydreaming eyes on everything as if to say, “What is this to me?” She always glanced at my sister and me wonderingly if we spoke, as if we had come up from under the table. She woke to our voices reluctantly, blinking, to let us know she herself had come up out of memory, out of the embrace of that great life-sullying misfortune, Randall’s death. When we came running into a room she looked past us with a faint smile, for some witness to this scene of normality—happy children, activity—in which she couldn’t hope to participate. But talk was something else: she would talk all day, as long as the subject was the perfection of certain lives, the lives in which women and occasionally men—if they were men honed and modeled and made unforgettable like Randall—stepped up to and met their fate, swallowed the communion of pain.