Afterwards he told me something about her. They had met as students, lived together, and were married at twenty-three. It wasn’t a very happy marriage. She had turned into a sickly woman, unable to have children. “Something was wrong with her interior strugture.”
Though I asked no questions, Oskar said, “I offered her to come with me here, but she refused this.”
“For what reason?”
“She did not think I wished her to come.”
“Did you?” I asked.
“Not,” he said.
He explained he had lived with her for almost twenty-seven years under difficult circumstances. She had been ambivalent about their Jewish friends and his relatives, though outwardly she seemed not a prejudiced person. But her mother was always a dreadful anti-Semite.
“I have nothing to blame myzelf,” Oskar said.
He took to his bed. I took to the New York Public Library. I read some of the German poets he was trying to write about, in English translation. Then I read Leaves of Grass and wrote down what I thought one or two of them had got from Whitman. One day, toward the end of August, I brought Oskar what I had written. It was in good part guessing, but my idea wasn’t to do the lecture for him. He lay on his back, motionless, and listened sadly to what I had written. Then he said, no, it wasn’t the love of death they had got from Whitman—that ran through German poetry—but it was most of all his feeling for Brudermensch, his humanity.
“But this does not grow long on German earth,” he said, “and is soon deztroyed.”
I said I was sorry I had got it wrong, but he thanked me anyway.
I left, defeated, and as I was going down the stairs heard the sound of sobbing. I will quit this, I thought, it has got to be too much for me. I can’t drown with him.
I stayed home the next day, tasting a new kind of private misery too old for somebody my age, but that same night Oskar called me on the phone, blessing me wildly for having read those notes to him. He had got up to write me a letter to say what I had missed, and it ended in his having written half the lecture. He had slept all day and tonight intended to finish it up.
“I thank you,” he said, “for much, alzo including your faith in me.”
“Thank God,” I said, not telling him I had just about lost it.
Oskar completed his lecture—wrote and rewrote it—during the first week in September. The Nazis had invaded Poland, and though we were greatly troubled, there was some sense of release; maybe the brave Poles would beat them. It took another week to translate the lecture, but here we had the assistance of Friedrich Wilhelm Wolff, the historian, a gentle, erudite man who liked translating and promised his help with future lectures. We then had about two weeks to work on Oskar’s delivery. The weather had changed, and so, slowly, had he. He had awakened from defeat, battered, after a wearying battle. He had lost close to twenty pounds. His complexion was still gray; when I looked at his face I expected to see scars, but it had lost its flabby unfocused quality. His blue eyes had returned to life and he walked with quick steps, as though to pick up a few for all the steps he hadn’t taken during those long hot days he had lain in his room.
We went back to our former routine, meeting three late afternoons a week for diction, grammar, and the other exercises. I taught him the phonetic alphabet and transcribed lists of words he was mispronouncing. He worked many hours trying to fit each sound in place, holding a matchstick between his teeth to keep his jaws apart as he exercised his tongue. All this can be a dreadfully boring business unless you think you have a future. Looking at him, I realized what’s meant when somebody is called “another man.”
The lecture, which I now knew by heart, went off well. The director of the Institute had invited a number of prominent people. Oskar was the first refugee they had employed, and there was a move to make the public cognizant of what was then a new ingredient in American life. Two reporters had come with a lady photographer. The auditorium of the Institute was crowded. I sat in the last row, promising to put up my hand if he couldn’t be heard, but it wasn’t necessary. Oskar, in a blue suit, his hair cut, was of course nervous, but you couldn’t see it unless you studied him. When he stepped up to the lectern, spread out his manuscript, and spoke his first English sentence in public, my heart hesitated; only he and I, of everybody there, had any idea of the anguish he had been through. His enunciation wasn’t at all bad—a few s’s for th’s, and he once said bag for back, but otherwise he did all right. He read poetry well—in both languages—and though Walt Whitman, in his mouth, sounded a little as though he had come to the shores of Long Island as a German immigrant, still the poetry read as poetry:
And I know the Spirit of God is the brother of my own, And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers, And that the kelson of creation is love …
Oskar read it as though he believed it. Warsaw had fallen, but the verses were somehow protective. I sat back conscious of two things: how easy it is to hide the deepest wounds; and the pride I felt in the job I had done.
Two days later I came up the stairs into Oskar’s apartment to find a crowd there. The refugee, his face beet-red, lips bluish, a trace of froth in the corners of his mouth, lay on the floor in his limp pajamas, two firemen on their knees working over him with an inhalator. The windows were open and the air stank.
A policeman asked me who I was and I couldn’t answer.
“No, oh no.”
I said no but it was unchangeably yes. He had taken his life—gas—I hadn’t even thought of the stove in the kitchen.
“Why?” I asked myself. “Why did he do it?” Maybe it was the fate of Poland on top of everything else, but the only answer anyone could come up with was Oskar’s scribbled note that he wasn’t well, and had left Martin Goldberg all his possessions. I am Martin Goldberg.
I was sick for a week, had no desire either to inherit or investigate, but I thought I ought to look through his things before the court impounded them, so I spent a morning sitting in the depths of Oskar’s armchair, trying to read his correspondence. I had found in the top drawer a thin packet of letters from his wife and an airmail letter of recent date from his mother-in-law.
She writes in a tight script it takes me hours to decipher that her daughter, after Oskar abandons her, against her own mother’s fervent pleas and anguish, is converted to Judaism by a vengeful rabbi. One night the Brown Shirts appear, and though the mother wildly waves her bronze crucifix in their faces, they drag Frau Gassner, together with the other Jews, out of the apartment house and transport them in lorries to a small border town in conquered Poland. There, it is rumored, she is shot in the head and topples into an open ditch with the naked Jewish men, their wives and children, some Polish soldiers, and a handful of Gypsies.
1963
A Choice of Profession
1
Cronin, after discovering that his wife, Marge, had been two-timing him with a friend, suffered months of crisis. He had loved Marge and jealousy lingered unbearably. He lived through an anguish of degrading emotions and, a few months after his divorce, left a well-paying job in Chicago to take up teaching. He had always wanted to teach. Cronin taught composition and survey of literature in a small college town in Northern California, and, after an initially exhilarating period, began to find it a bore. This caused him worry because he hoped to be at peace in the profession. He wasn’t sure whether it was true boredom or simply not knowing whether he wanted to teach the rest of his life. He was bored mostly outside the classroom—the endless grading of papers and bookkeeping chores; and for a man of his type, Cronin felt, he had too much to read. He also felt he had been asking from teaching more than he was entitled to. He had always thought of teaching as something religious and perhaps still did. It had to do with giving oneself to others, a way of being he hadn’t achieved in his marriage. Cronin, a tall, bulky-shouldered man with sensitive eyes and a full brown mustache, smoked too much. His trousers were usually smeared with ci
garette ashes he brushed off his thighs; and lately, after a period of forbearance, he had begun to drink. Apart from students there were few women around who weren’t married, and he was alone too often. Though at the beginning he was invited to faculty parties, he wanted nothing to do with the wives of his colleagues.
The fall wore away. Cronin remained aimlessly in town during the winter vacation. In the spring term a new student, an older girl, appeared in his literature class. Unlike most of the other girls, she wore bright attractive dresses and high heels. She wore her light hair in a bun from which strands slipped but she was otherwise feminine and neat, a mature woman, he realized. Although she wasn’t really pretty, her face was open and attractive. Cronin wondered at her experienced eyes and deep-breasted figure. She had slender shoulders and fairly heavy but shapely legs. He thought at first she might be a faculty wife but she was without their combination of articulateness and timidity; he didn’t think she was married. He also liked the way she listened to him in class. Many of the students, when he lectured or read poetry, looked sleepy, stupefied, or exalted, but she listened down to bedrock, as if she were expecting a message or had got it. Cronin noticed that the others in the class might listen to the poetry but she also listened to Cronin. Her name, not very charming, was Mary Lou Miller. He could tell she regarded him as a man, and after so long a dry, almost perilous season, he responded to her as a woman. Though Cronin wasn’t planning to become involved with a student, he had at times considered taking up with one but resisted it on principle. He wanted to be protected in love by certain rules, but loving a student meant no rules to begin with.
He continued to be interested in her and she occasionally would wait at his desk after class and walk with him in the direction of his office. He often thought she had something personal to say to him, but when she spoke it was usually to say that one or another poem had moved her; her taste, he thought, was a little too inclusive. Mary Lou rarely recited in class. He found her a bit boring when they talked for more than five minutes, but that secretly pleased him because the attraction to her was quite strong and this was a form of insurance. One morning, during a free hour, he went to the registrar’s office on some pretext or other and looked up her records. Cronin was surprised to discover she was twenty-four and only a first-year student. He, though he sometimes felt forty, was twenty-nine. Because they were so close in age, as well as for other reasons, he decided to ask her out. That same afternoon Mary Lou knocked on his office door and came in to see him about a quiz he had just returned. She had got a low C and it worried her. Cronin lit her cigarette and noticed that she watched him intently, his eyes, mustache, hands, as he explained what she might have written on her paper. They were sitting within a foot of one another, and when she raised both arms to fix her bun, the imprint of her large nipples on her dress caught his attention. It was during this talk in the office that he suggested they go for a drive one evening at the end of the week. Mary Lou agreed, saying maybe they could stop off somewhere for a drink, and Cronin, momentarily hesitating, said he thought they might. All the while they had been talking she was looking at him from some inner place in herself, and he had the feeling he had been appraising her superficially.
On the ride that night Mary Lou sat close to Cronin. She had at first sat at the door but soon her warm side was pressed to his though he had not seen her move. They had started at sunset and for an hour the sky was light. The Northern California winter, though colder than he had anticipated, was mild compared to a winter in Chicago, but Cronin was glad to be in touch with spring. He liked the lengthening days, and tonight it was a relief to be with a woman once more. The car passed through a number of neon-lit mountain towns neither of them had been in before, and Cronin noticed that every motel flashed vacancy signs. Part of his good mood was an awareness of the approach of a new season, and part that he had thought it over and decided there was nothing to worry about. She was a woman, no eighteen-year-old kid he would be taking advantage of. Nor was he married and about to commit adultery. He felt a sincere interest in her.
It was a pleasant evening drive in early March, and on their way back they stopped off at a bar in Red Bluff, about forty miles from the college, where it was unlikely anyone they knew would see them. The waiter brought drinks and when Mary Lou had finished hers she excused herself, went to the ladies room, and, upon returning, asked for another on the rocks. She had on a bright blue dress, rather short, and wore no stockings. During the week she used no lip rouge or nail polish; tonight she had both on and Cronin thought he liked her better without them. She smiled at him, her face, after she had had two, flushed. In repose her smile settled into the tail end of bitterness, an expression touched with cynicism, and he wondered about her. They had talked about themselves on the ride, she less than he, Cronin reticently. She had been brought up on a farm in Idaho. He had spent most of his life in Evanston, Illinois, where his grandfather, an evangelical minister, had lived and preached. Cronin’s father had died when Cronin was fourteen. Mary Lou told him she had once been married and was now divorced. He had guessed something of the sort and at that point admitted he had been divorced himself. He could feel his leg touching hers under the table and realized it was her doing. Cronin, pretty much contented, had had one drink to her two, and he was nursing his first when she asked for a third. She had become quiet but when their eyes met she smiled again.
“Do you mind if I call you Mary Louise?” Cronin asked her.
“You can if you want to,” she said, “but my real name is Mary Lou. That’s on my birth certificate.”
He asked her how long she had been married before her divorce.
“Oh, just about three years. One that I didn’t live with him. How about yourself?”
“Two,” said Cronin.
She drank from her glass. He liked the fact that she was satisfied with a few biographical details. A fuller exchange of information could come later.
He lit a cigarette, only his second since they had come in, whereas she squashed one butt to light another. He wondered why she was nervous.
“Happy?” Cronin asked.
“I’m okay, thanks.” She crushed a newly lit cigarette, thought about it, and lit another.
She seemed about to say something, paused, and said, “How long have you been teaching, if you don’t mind me asking you?”
Cronin wondered what was on her mind. “Not so long,” he answered. “This is only my first year.”
“You sure put a lot in it.”
He could feel the calf of her leg pressed warmly against his; yet she was momentarily inattentive, vaguely looking around at the people in the bar.
“How about you?” he asked.
“In what ways?”
“How is it you started college so comparatively late?”
She finished her drink. “I never wanted to go when I graduated high school. Instead I worked a couple of years, then I joined the Wacs.” She fell silent.
He asked if she wanted him to order another drink.
“Not right away.” Mary Lou’s eyes focused on his face. “First I want to tell you something about myself. Do you want to hear it?”
“Yes, if you want to tell me.”
“It’s about my life,” Mary Lou said. “When I was in the Wacs I met this guy, Ray A. Miller, a T-5 from Providence, Rhode Island, and we got hitched in secret in Las Vegas. He was a first-class prick.”
Cronin gazed at her, wondering if she had had one too many. He considered suggesting they leave now but Mary Lou, sitting there solidly, smoking the last cigarette in her pack, told Cronin what she had started out to.
“I call him that word because that’s what he was. He married me just to live easy off me. He talked me into doing what he wanted, and I was too goddamn stupid to say no, because at that time I loved him. After we left the service he set me up in this flea-bitten three-room apartment in San Francisco, where I was a call girl. He took the dough and I got the shit.”
�
��Call girl?” Cronin almost groaned.
“A whore, if you want me to say it.”
Cronin was overwhelmed. He felt a momentary constricting fright and a strange uneasy jealousy, followed by a sense of disappointment and unexpected loss.
“I’m sorry,” he said. Her leg was tense against his but he let his stay though it seemed to him it trembled. His cigarette ash broke, and while brushing it off his thigh, Cronin managed to withdraw his leg from hers. Her face was impassive.
Mary Lou slowly fixed her bun, removing a large number of hairpins and placing them thickly back again.
“I suppose you have a bad opinion of me now?” she said to Cronin, after she had fixed her hair.
He said he had no opinion at all, though he knew he had. “I’m just sorry it happened.”
She looked at him intently. “One thing I want you to know is I don’t have that kind of a life anymore. I’m not interested in it. I’m interested in taking it as it comes or goes but not for money anymore. That won’t happen to me again.”
Cronin said he was surprised it ever had.
“It was just a job I had to do,” Mary Lou explained. “That’s how I thought about it. I kept on it because I was afraid Ray would walk out on me. He always knew what he wanted but I didn’t. He was a strong type and I wasn’t.”
“Did he walk out?”
She nodded. “We were having fights about what to do with the dough. He said he was going to start some kind of a business but he never did.”
“That’s when you quit?”
The Complete Stories Page 45