by Paula Fox
“You got to play the cards the way they falls,” Andrew said. “That’s what my father says.”
He cut them two more slices of cake. “There’s one good thing. When they all go away, I can eat what I want.”
“Where do you go to school?”
“I have tutors,” he said. “You know, my mind isn’t quite right. Oh, it’s not that I’m crazy. Nothing like that! Just that my equipment is a little different. That’s what my father says. Like arithmetic. I can’t do it at all. But my father says arithmetic is all made up anyhow. It all depends on what you’re good at making up. I’d like you to see my armies. They’re the best in the world. My father sends to England for the soldiers.”
“Nobody’s mind is quite right,” she said. “I think…”
“You didn’t have to say that to me,” Andrew said kindly. “I don’t require it. I know what I know. I’m useful when we run out of cash. I’m a good driver, superb, my father says. When we move out of here, I get a job driving laundry trucks, just like that!” He snapped his fingers.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“Nearly seventeen,” he said. It was shocking—he was so small and bent.
“When you move out of here? Why?”
“When he’s on a movie, we stay. Everybody out here lives on credit, you know. After he gets the money for the movie, he pays up everything, and then we go on credit. But sometimes, when it’s a long stretch between movies, we run out of credit too. Then we move out to a shack on Old Veteran’s Road, and I get a job. No more tutors, no dancing master for my sister.”
Dancing master! Annie visualized a slender Frenchman in evening dress tangoing through a salon. “Does he come here?”
“He used to, before my sister went away to boarding school. Let’s go see my soldiers.”
He took her to a study off the living room. A billiard table took up most of the space. On one wall hung a dartboard. Near the windows was a broad table on which hundreds of toy soldiers were deployed in some kind of order.
“My extras!” said Andrew proudly. Annie was listening to the babble of the artificial brook. “Look!” cried Andrew.
He picked up several of the toy warriors, examined them raptly, then set each one back in exactly the same place. Evidently there was a vast plan located in the depths of Andrew’s not quite right mind.
“I’m going to change the situation here,” he said. “Now watch carefully!” Rapidly, he moved a number of the little soldiers. In a minute or so, the overall design of the armies had changed drastically. “I have confronted them with new problems,” he said. “Did you notice the civilians? You see the woman and her children? I have a crate full of farmers and animals. Von Clausewitz said total war means everything—citizens and property—should be attacked. Have you read On War? My father reads me parts of it when he feels up to it. You’d be astonished at how much I understand.” He picked up a foot soldier between two fingers, held it toward Annie, then shouted, “Bang!”
“You have to kill so many,” she murmured.
“It’s not real death.”
“Last winter in New York, I saw a man walking almost naked out in the cold. Someone said he’d been gassed during the World War. There must be terrible suffering when you’re like that.”
Andrew stooped over the board, making some new arrangement. When he looked at her again, there was a stubborn expression on his face.
“But I said—it’s not real. Anyhow, man is a killer by nature. It’s only that he won’t admit it.”
“Show me your house,” she asked quickly. The little gnome looked very fierce.
“It’s boring,” he said stiffly. “Just a boring house with furniture. The other place, where we go when we’re broke, is better. It’s a shack.”
He was being contrary. What could he know about shacks? She looked at his beautifully polished shoes. She brooded on what lay ahead for her. For the moment, she doubted Walter’s existence; he had simply disappeared, leaving her the inexplicable burden of his name. He’d disappeared, stealing her name.
“I’m not a killer,” Andrew said pleadingly.
She started as though she’d been asleep. “Oh, I know that!” she assured him. He smiled and replaced on the board a riderless horse that was rearing up from his fingers, its eyes starting from its head, its stirrups flying.
She stayed awhile longer. They sat at the piano together and Andrew showed her how to play “Chopsticks.” The intolerable sense of emptiness was returning. She wanted to move on.
“I’d better go,” she said.
“Not yet, please…”
“Yes. I have to get to work very early.”
He looked solemn at once. “Yes. Then you should go. I know all about work.”
They shook hands formally at the door but Andrew looked desolate as he turned away into the empty house.
Annie ran to the car. She sat for a long time in the quiet, expensive twilight of the tree-lined street. Then, afraid but eager, she set out for Venice Park. She was tracking herself down, going to all the places she’d been. Perhaps at the end of the trail, she would find something substantial, a token to carry through the days ahead.
The long drive was not oppressive; she was used to being alone, she’d forgotten that. But her thoughts were uneasy, not quite distinct enough for her to say, “Here. This is what I’m thinking about.” She concentrated on Bea. She remembered how Bea had roamed at night, a cup of cold coffee in one hand, her black hair disarrayed. Sometimes there were violent fights in the middle of the night, but Bea had a strange bumbling quality and was no match for Annie’s father when his expression chilled with distaste, when he called Bea “the primitive” to her enraged face.
During the brief time Annie had lived with them, they’d moved so often that she had made few friends, a French boy jeered at by his schoolmates for his thick accent and small stature, an ugly little girl whose glasses revealed the borrowed eyes of an old woman, a girl named Brooks who fell on the classroom floor and turned blue in the face when she dropped a spot of paste or ink on a piece of paper but who, except for these strange seizures, was more reasonable than any other child Annie had ever known. These “friends” were all transients like herself. Through some convention of childhood they never spoke of their troubles to each other. They played their own games, travesties of the games the acceptable children played, the ones to whose houses Annie was never invited, the ones upon whose heads teachers rested hands that gave blessings. These games almost always ended in wild laughter, outsiders’ games, parodies, full of savage disappointment.
She’d forgotten to ask Walter about the scar on his thigh. It bothered her that she’d not asked him. He might never come back. She could see it plainly now in her mind’s eye, the scar tissue glowing in his brown skin. And then, just ahead, she saw the lurid lights of Venice Park. But this time, the sky was not so black, and moonlight laid a white tongue along the surface of the water.
Annie walked down the pier. She remembered the shooting gallery where Karin had won the bear. As she neared the end of the pier where the roller coaster rose in menacing humps, she saw a building called the House of Freaks. She did not recall having seen it that first time with St. Vincent. She drew nearer. The lurid posters, painted in colors that looked as if they’d been scraped from living things, promised shocks that would make strong men faint. Two men looked up at the drawing of a tattooed lady. An elderly woman wrapped from head to ankles in a thick black shawl stared longingly toward the entrance, where a man in a booth played with a roll of tickets.
St. Vincent had warned her—what you’re afraid of becomes your only real life. She bought a ticket and passed through canvas flaps into a dark passage. From somewhere ahead she heard a low murmur, as of people conversing softly. The passage led into a round room with a high tent ceiling. Just to her right was a small stage on which sat a huge obese man, a black ribbon tied into a bow around his neck. As she quickly averted her eyes, one of his hands slipped
indolently from a thigh like a torso. Ringed around the circular wall were other such stages, set off from each other by black curtains. In each one, on a straight-backed chair, sat a motionless creature deformed or hideously marked; all were as silent as stones.
She was suddenly aware of a powerful smell, a combination of rotted fruit, urine, straw, sweat, and the unsettling odor of animals. The murmuring she’d heard had apparently come from a small group of people who were leaning on a corral fence looking at the prize exhibit. A sign clamped to chicken wire announced: HUMAN MOTHER OF MONKEYS.
In the middle of this ring, behind the chicken wire which rose to the ceiling, sat a monumental Negro woman on a small stool. Straw was scattered over the floor, a few wisps of it clung to her hair, a patch here and there on the brown tuniclike garment which left one of her brown shoulders bare. Around her, darting, grimacing, defecating, poking, pinching, and screeching, was a horde of small monkeys. They climbed to her lap, her shoulders; they plucked at her hair that was like a thicket of black heather. Sometimes they sat and held their tails like ladies holding fans. Their little flecked yellow eyes moved like the eyes of thieves and they bared their teeth in batlike grins.
The woman’s head was bowed. Then, as Annie started to turn away, the mother of monkeys looked up. One of the animals leaped to her lap and tugged at the cloth of the tunic, then fell to the straw where it instantly mounted another monkey that had paused at the woman’s feet. There was a shout of laughter from the watchers at the fence. The woman turned her head slowly, her glance coming to rest on Annie. Her expression was grave, remote. Annie flushed with shame and pity. The woman smiled, holding Annie’s unwilling gaze. The smile widened. It was as though the two of them were alone. Annie smiled back uncertainly. The woman nodded her head very slightly. Perhaps Annie imagined it. Then the woman’s head drooped; she hid her hands in the folds of her costume.
Driving home, Annie relived that flash of light between herself and the Negro woman. What had it meant? Why had the woman’s smile lifted her heart so? What moment’s comprehension had brought them together?
When she got back to the apartment house, she found two letters that had been slipped under her door. One was from Paul Lavan, the other from Max Shore.
PART TWO
Meetings
Chapter 11
On an evening during the long rainy spell that summer, Jake Cranford went to see Max Shore. Jake’s shoes sloshed, his basketball player’s jacket clung wetly to his shirt, and water dripped down his face from his plastered hair. From the doorway, he looked uneasily at Eva, who was painting her nails by the light of a small table lamp, her lips tightened with concentration.
“Jake, it’s been a while. Come in.”
Max dropped the typescript pages he’d been editing and stretched. The pamphlet was impossible! Before it could be translated into Spanish, it had to be translated into English. The dense airless language, clogged with party jargon, was supposed to reveal to the Mexican community of Los Angeles that its treatment by the police was a matter of brotherly concern to the Communist party. Why had there been that long tangent about the chauvinistic implications of the phrase “fine Italian hand”? The pamphlet was stuffed with such irrelevant asides. But knowing the ex-missionary who’d been assigned the job, Max was not surprised. Calvin Schmitter would suffocate his flock, any flock, with every piece of information he could marshal whether it made sense or not.
Calvin Schmitter was implacable, his washed-out pale little Swede face forever contemplating some judgment day when all the truths he had gathered would be confirmed by the appearance of the Lord. The pamphlets he wrote were usually given to Max to put into some semblance of order, and no matter how aware the committee in charge was of Calvin’s deadly turgid prose, they continued to assign such work to him. There was always a fight afterward as Calvin, rigid with insult, tried to put back each irrelevancy Max had excised. He’d accused Shore of being a “literary deviate,” of succumbing to fancy standards meant for bourgeois consumption. Why didn’t Max respect the plain language needed by oppressed minds? It was clear to Calvin that Max must purge himself of incorrect attitudes.
“Could I speak with you?”
Eva said, “Sit down, Jake, but not in the blue chair. My God, don’t you have an umbrella? Do you want wine or coffee?” Eva flexed her fingers under the light.
“Nothing,” said Jake, looking warily at her. He could hardly dissemble his desire for her to leave the room. Eva smiled faintly.
Max, feeling dusty, watched the two of them with some appreciation, part of it gratitude to be free of the onerous job he’d only half completed. Eva had a certain shrewdness about the weight of her own presence; she always seemed to know when people would like her to leave. She teased, staying on until it was her pleasure to leave. She knew Jake was shy.
“I don’t have nothing,” she said. “How about a cup of tea? Or Ovaltine? Or cocoa?”
Jake writhed, water scattering in drops to the floor.
“Oh, for God’s sake, take off your jacket,” Eva said. “I’ll make some coffee.”
She moved slowly out of the room, looking at Max to make sure he was up on her game.
Falling over his own feet, Jake ripped off his lank jacket and handed it helplessly to Max. Then he sank into the couch. His bones were prominent, and his hair stuck to his skull. Max saw what he’d look like when he was an old man. He’d known boys like Jake when he was growing up. They’d been his friends. His family’s wealth, its position in the community, had not troubled him in those days, not until just before he’d gone off to college.
Lanky, indolent boys who fumbled their way through adolescence, given to secret hero-worshipping sometimes of one another, bouts of heavy drinking, small impulses of criminality that often climaxed those early years and resulted in short jail sentences or probation, from which they emerged abashed and confused; nothing in their own understanding could account for what they’d done. He’d asked Jake often enough why he’d stolen that car and Jake simply looked puzzled and repeated the sequence of events as though they might account for the theft. As for hero-worshipping, he’d been the hero to that small group in the town up north with whom he’d run for a few years. He’d come to think they admired him simply because he was rich in options they’d never have; they sensed the larger life his family’s good fortune made possible for him. He supposed they’d envied him too. Now, if they knew what had happened to him, they’d get their own back.
“Jake, what’s up?”
“I am, I guess,” said Jake. “Everything’s happened. My old buddy, Carson, and I have split up, and I got done in by a girl, that one you had call me up. And I can’t get work. It’s the damnedest thing. But I can’t get it. You know I’ve always been able to pick up a thing or two to keep me going. I’d saved some money for going east, and now I’ve blown that too.”
He looked miserable. But Max’s sympathy died the moment Jake mentioned the girl. “A girl—Annie,” he said, and saw her vividly as he’d first glimpsed her on the road, her back against the tree trunk.
“Yeah, Annie,” Jake replied, and began a rambling tale of his betrayal, interspersed with philosophical admonitions to himself that combined Brody’s nastiness with a kind of homespun sad wisdom of defeat. “You’re well rid of Brody,” Max interrupted at one point. “He really is no good.” But Jake rushed to defend him: Max had only seen him once, didn’t Max know what an awful life Brody had had? What a loyal friend he’d been? How right he’d been when he’d said the best buddies were always getting into trouble over a girl? Well, Brody had been right about this one, and he, Jake, would just have to lump it, chalk it up to experience, cut his losses.
“Stop!” Max said.
Jake paused. Eva came in with a tray of coffee cups and a pot.
“What happened to her?”
Jake looked at him dully, then at Eva.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Max felt a storm of impatience wi
th both of them, Jake speaking his adolescent drivel, Eva looking so self-satisfied with her fresh nails gleaming over the coffee cups.
“Why don’t you spare some of your self-pity for her?” Max asked Jake. “She seems to have been in more trouble than your pal, Brody.”
“She lied.”
“She omitted to tell you certain things.”
“Hunh!”
“Only a kid,” muttered Max.
“She lied.”
“So what!” retorted Max angrily. “You’ve never lied?”
“Not about something like that,” Jake said.
“You’ve never been in a position where you felt you had to. You’re so foolish with your truth-telling categories! You think the world is as easy for everyone?”
“It’s not been easy for me either!” cried Jake.
Eva said, “I don’t know what this is all about, Max, but lying is lying.”
“No. That’s just it. And you don’t know what it’s about.”
“You’re on her side,” Jake said indignantly.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Max cried. “I just want you to think about it. You haven’t said a thing that would convince me you cared about her at all! Your vanity is wounded!”
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” said Jake plaintively.
“I can see that.”
Jake got to his feet. Max, as a sudden and inexplicable panic possessed him, grabbed Jake’s arm. “Take it easy,” he said. “I know you feel bad, I was just trying to understand. But what happened to her?”
“Who?” demanded Eva.
“A girl,” Max said shortly. “Fern and I picked her up on the road to the convention.”
“You never told me.”
“It wasn’t important,” he said, by which he meant she wouldn’t have been interested. She heard the unspoken truth. She said she would have been interested, as though he had in fact spoken aloud. Yes, she was shrewd; Max would give her that.
Before Jake left that evening, Max had, upon learning that he wanted to enlist in the army, given him the name of a lawyer who might be able to straighten out his record. Eva had been wild at Max’s abetting Jake’s joining an imperialist army. For one second, he thought he’d heard her say she’d report him to the party, but then told himself she couldn’t have said it. It must have been his own inner voice. No, Eva had grown silent, as though at last he’d really shocked her. She was given to political shock.