by Paula Fox
Whatever went on behind the Shores’ closed bedroom door, it went on quietly. Annie, on the couch, grinned uneasily, afraid always she would hear something. She tried to distract herself with the books Max gave her to read. They were not the sort that Eva pored over, making notes on a pad. Eva said to Max, “Why are you giving her all that stuff!”
Annie read several Thomas Hardy novels but balked at The Return of the Native. The dialect irritated her. She read Tender Is the Night twice. Eva picked it up off the floor next to the couch and turned it over in her hands. “I don’t know what Max is thinking of,” she said, shaking her head.
When the Shores went out in the evening, Annie took care of Thomas. Along with a small weekly amount she gave Eva for food, it was a way of repaying them. Once he woke, and she and he built towers and stockades in the living room until he lay down and went to sleep beside the blocks. She carried him to his crib, thrilled at the lightness of the small body in her arms, and at the thought of the paralyzing power he exerted during his rages. She covered him and turned on the little night lamp near the crib, then stood dreaming. She would become a nun—in an Italian cloister, vistas of Lombardy poplars, a stone cell, a wooden table, a hard cot, her hours ruled and redeemed by chapel bells.
The Shores did not ask her to go to party meetings, not even those open to nonmembers. She was glad of that. Fern Diedrich, the woman who’d driven her to San Diego, stopped in once for some purpose. “You again!” she said to Annie. Fern looked peculiar. Her glance moved restlessly from table to chair to couch to lamp, never resting on a face. She called Eva “Comrade,” and talked feverishly of the murder of Trotsky—an event about which Annie had no knowledge—which had taken place a couple of months earlier. Fern laughed dryly and coughed. “Your fate catches up with you, even in Mexico!” she said. Max looked sardonic. “Fate? Why, Fern! What kind of word is that for a Marxist!”
The night Annie had arrived, coffee grounds in her hair, she had told Max about Walter, talking for hours about Walter’s friend, Junior, the coffee cup hitting her on the head, the way Walter spoke to her. “He’ll never let me be whatever I am…he doesn’t like me, you see. He can’t stand me…”
“You mustn’t go back,” Max had said. Eva had long been asleep. Max made up the couch for Annie.
In the two weeks before she once more found a job—she had told the Greek she wasn’t coming back that next morning—she tried to locate Johnnie Bliss. She went to the boarding house where he’d lived.
“That unholy man has gone to his destiny,” the landlady said. “Shame on you for knowing him! He’ll be thrown from a car after being shot by gangsters. If I knew where he was, I wouldn’t tell you. I’m a Christian woman.”
She called St. Vincent. The phone had been disconnected. Perhaps they’d run out of credit, and Andrew was driving a laundry truck now, happy Andrew.
Sometimes Annie recalled sitting in a chair holding a woman’s hairpins in her fist, the torn stocking across her lap. She was unable to evoke the anguish she’d felt then. That she’d been married to Walter Vogel, that they had lived together at all was without reality. When she got a job working in a small ceramic plant, she used her maiden name. Eva said, “You’ll have to get a divorce someday.” The thought of divorce was more substantial than the marriage had ever been.
She stayed with the Shores for two months. With her first paycheck of twenty-five dollars she bought them a bottle of whiskey, a stuffed dog for Thomas and a collection of Hardy’s poems. She was very happy coming into the apartment with her packages. Thomas tossed the dog across the room, then crept after it on all fours. Eva said she shouldn’t have spent her money on such silly things, but thanks anyhow, and Max took the book and put it on a table next to their bed. Annie saw the book there from time to time as she set the table for supper. She felt sinful and triumphant. She’d gotten into their bedroom.
Eva distressed her more and more. Eva never really looked at her. Eva said, “Everything is all right,” all the time. Thomas’s tantrums were natural at his age; it was all right that Annie had married someone like Walter—at her age. Fern was all right—it was hard on unmarried women in a male chauvinist capitalist society—yes, Fern was all right because her growing untidiness and eccentric ways were appropriate to what was causing them. Marriage was all right, and death was all right.
When Eva stood for moments at the kitchen counter, looking down into the sink, what was she thinking about? That it was all right to stare down into a sink? Eva moved clumsily; when she was tired, she looked old and heavy.
How broodingly she watched Max, smiling when she caught his eye. Nothing was all right, Annie thought, and took pleasure in the cruelty of her knowledge, wanting to bang Eva on the head, wanting to shout at her that her life was held together only by laundry lists and party slogans. To join the damned would be more bearable than the older woman’s insistent and meaningless certitudes. But Max’s patience with his wife shamed Annie. It was not necessary to behave as if you were damned, even if you were. And thinking that, she was alarmed; Joe must have felt damned before drowning himself. She tried, resolutely, to admire Eva. How well she ran her household even though she worked! What affection she lavished on Thomas!
Max had not explained to Annie what he did for a living until one day he arrived home late saying he had a job with a shipbuilding plant in San Pedro. He had been going to a machinists’ training school and had finished the program.
That night Eva had to go to a church group to try and raise money for some imprisoned Mexican boys who’d been accused of killing an old drifter in Los Angeles. Max and Annie and Thomas ate together. Max was silent through the dishwashing. He put Thomas to bed. Annie was reading Winesburg, Ohio.
“Don’t read now. I have to speak to you.”
She was instantly frightened. In the second before he began to talk, she saw imperiled the warm safety in which she had been living these months. Something was about to blow the walls down.
“Don’t be scared. Try not to be,” he urged her.
“Have I done something?”
“Eva and I are having a difficult time together.” At her look of surprise, he laughed aloud. “I know you,” he said. “You think you see everything, don’t you?” She turned away so that he would not see her chagrin.
“It’s not a noisy bad time,” Max said. “I won’t tell you much about it. Some of it’s to do with the way I’m heading, changing, politically. Eva, she’s…bewildered. And it’s not only that.” With unexpected bitterness, he said, “I’m not fit to live with.”
Her disbelief amused him. “Annie, you live in this house like a child,” he said gently. She thought guiltily of her surreptitious and constant preoccupation with their closed bedroom door.
“I don’t mean to insult you. But Eva’s afraid—afraid of you among other things. Your life, the way you walk into the room, everything about you, frightens her. She’s gone from one box to another, you see, from childhood to me—answers have flowed toward her. She’s not had time to ask questions…she’s not needed to. She knows I don’t love her. This first question of her life is ‘Why not?’ You understand, it’s not arrogance that makes her ask it. Perhaps I don’t love anyone. Although Thomas…but that’s something else. And she wondered if it was you I cared for. I do care for you, Annie.”
He was silent, looking down at his hands, then up at her. “Don’t imagine—” he began.
“Oh, please,” she interrupted clamorously.
“You are imagining! You’re afraid I’m going to say something shocking! Listen! This is what I want. I want you to move out from here now. I have a friend I’ve wanted you to meet for a long time. I’m going to take you there now. She’s expecting us.”
“You’ve already told her!”
He said nothing. “I’ll find a place of my own!” she cried, chilled to her marrow; he was looking at a shelf of books, and that aquiline profile she thought so fastidious looked only finicking. Did her fear give off a
n ugly aroma? What charade was he playing in this slovenly room? He didn’t belong in it either!
“You can find a room of your own later,” he remarked casually.
“Oh, what have I done?”
“Nothing, nothing…”
He had said he cared for her. He had told her to leave. She glanced inadvertently at the bedroom door. He caught it and appeared to shake his head ever so slightly. All along, she had thought there was a tie between them, a secret line, but it had gone slack. She floundered, casting about in her mind for some powerful, outrageous thing that would bring his attention back to her. But the room was not hers; the books, the toys, the indifferent furnishings were tokens of a life she had no claim upon.
He was watching her now, smiling. She couldn’t help it; selfbetrayed, she smiled back. It was exactly the same smile, that of two people in trouble.
She packed her suitcase. She would like to not have anything. But the suitcase was there, its shabby contents reminding her of how many times it had been packed before. The suitcase was always looking for a place to be set down, emptied, and put away. When you carried a suitcase out of a door it was because you’d been asked to leave. If you walked away with nothing, the house fell to dust behind you.
She snapped the locks. He embraced her as she stood up, the old pocketbook in her hand. She sighed as though life itself were draining out of her, the terrible life of nerves and embarrassment and repudiation. They stood, swaying slightly, for a time. Then he picked up the suitcase and took it to the door.
“Wait here. I’ll go get Mrs. Oliver.”
Driving to the place of the woman he called Theda, he grew almost gay. Eva was not mentioned. He told her about the plant where he worked, the Southerners who were flocking west to get those lucrative jobs, wages they’d never dreamed were possible; they came from as far as Mississippi. He thought he could get her a job there too. They had a training program—how would she like to learn to operate a drill press? Besides, the company had not really swung into serious action yet, even though they were hiring people by the hundreds. The main thing was, the United States was bound to get into the war at some point. It was the first time in American history there’d been compulsory military service during a time of peace. Money, money. There was going to be a lot of money made; there always was in a war.
Was Theda a Communist? she asked. “You mustn’t ask that about anyone,” he said. He suggested again that he try to get her into the plant. She didn’t want to go on painting sleeping Mexicans on pitchers. Besides, she ought to make some money herself.
“It doesn’t seem possible that I could, ever. I go in the other direction, never a dollar ahead of anything.”
“You know what? You sound proud of that. I know how it is. One turns one’s subjugation into an act of will, in the head anyhow…But what it really means, it means you’re on the handout line and unless you wish to become a rich man’s dolly”—he turned to smile at her—“unless you want that, you’re going to have to make it another way.”
“I’m not proud of it. It makes me sick.”
“What makes you sick is pretending you mean to be that way —indifferent to money. Tell the truth.”
She didn’t deny it.
“If you come to the plant, I can see you. We can eat our lunch together. There’s a bench I know of. We’ll bring our lunches and sit and talk.” This rather domestic detail both attracted and wounded her.
“Can’t I come to see you at your place? Oh, I think there’s something Eva’s said, something you’re not telling me!”
“No. I’m clearing the field. I don’t want a divorce; I don’t want to scatter my life around. And Thomas…there has been something wrong all along…my expectations…and you see, the political thing is fundamental because, in a way, Eva is part of the decision I made years ago, about the party. Eva is really good, you know. She is, really, a religious—oh, not the tormented skeptical sort, the simpler kind of nun. The party is the way she understands life. She’s running scared now. She loves me, in the way she knows how to love, all patience and fear. She used to order me around a good deal. I didn’t mind. I think I thought it was funny because I knew, or thought I knew, that my will was stronger in the end. But she’s stopped that. I remember the day, almost the hour when she stopped telling me to take out the garbage or see to Thomas’s supper or straighten out the lapels of my jacket. I can hardly stand that—the way she bites her tongue. I’m sick with pity, for myself, for Eva, for you.”
“Me?”
“You.”
Theda stood in the middle of her room, a cigarette drooping from her mouth, a gun in one hand.
“Were you expecting someone?” Max asked.
“I just found it in an old suitcase,” Theda said. “One of the Brigade people brought it to me several years ago. Simon got it in France. I can’t get over it.”
“Stop pointing it at us. This is Annie.”
Theda nodded as she aimed the gun into the fireplace. “It’s not loaded,” she said, and pulled the trigger. There was a loud report.
“I will never make that claim again,” Theda said. “Simon was always telling me I thought I knew everything. I’ve made coffee. You can take your suitcase in there, Annie. Then come back. Be sure to come back right away.”
He stayed an hour, then left them at the table near the window, Theda chain smoking, one long brown arm resting on the table, Annie sitting up straight on the other side, watching Theda with grave admiring eyes. Max saw the pure intelligence, the observational force in the girl’s face; and something unawakened, entirely untouched that faintly repelled him—she was, in an essential way, without self. What does the sentry do? On guard all night, alone in the dark—the relief never comes—he cannot sleep—relief was promised, but he has forgotten the password, only the urgency of the duty, not to sleep.
———
Now, another world. Theda knew movie people, ballet people, bums, painters, Negroes.
She gave parties. People drank Dago red. She made pots of chile. People danced, sang, got drunk, slept on Theda’s floor. Often she worked on her reading assignments while her guests moved around her, talking and shouting and occasionally fighting. Theda paid no mind. She seemed to like the noise. Sometimes, when there was no one around, she went to a bar a few blocks away and sat at a table, her notebook open, her pencils sharpened, a gin drink at hand.
Annie continued to work at the ceramic shop until Max called her and told her to come out to the plant and be interviewed for a training job. It was a long way, the streetcar, then a bus. The training shop was in a shed reeking of metal and oil, with machines standing in two threatening rows. People worked at them, several wearing isinglass masks. There were only a few women. She would make more at the school than she was making now. The course lasted six weeks.
“It’s a long way,” she told Max on the phone later. “It took me hours.”
He would manage something, he said, when she was through the training school. If they got on the same shift, he’d drive her to the plant.
She began, on Saturdays, to look for a place of her own. Theda’s life was an enchantment, a thrall, but it filled every inch of the apartment. Theda’s strange hours, her work habits, her morning lust for the newspaper obituary page, her fits of black melancholy, her wisecracks, her broodings, her demands for conversations in the middle of the night—“Let’s have a little conversation,” she would say, waking Annie up and dragging her to her feet, feeding her pieces of the cake she’d suddenly decided to make at one in the morning—it was like one drunken spree. For the first time in her life, Annie wanted a room of her own.
Wandering around Hollywood on these Saturdays, she began to know its sun-dried puniness, the depthless quality of the little shoddy houses that lined streets which could have been anywhere, the plaster flamingos, ducks, geese, dwarfs, squirrels, cats, stuck into the grass of the small lawns which each house had, a domestic apron of yellowing green that proclaimed its owner
’s good fortune. She found a boulevard lined with old frame houses, like swollen invalids with half-shut eyes. It was the place of the fortunetellers, the astrologers, the spook cults whose members she glimpsed limping down the stairs to the sidewalk, old women most of them, maggot-faced old ones in print dresses and ugly small hats nailed to thin skulls. Miles away were the canyons where the movie people lived, the hills where their houses hung above the valley, the dream castles of money, half-baked Moroccan and Spanish delights, houses of eighteen and twenty and fifty rooms.
Even in the shabbiest areas, there were nightclubs with Hawaiian motifs, giant pineapples on their roofs, urine-yellow in the daylight, autographed photographs of huge-breasted girls in the windows, girls who sang and danced, or boys with slickeddown hair, comedians and piano players.
Once she came upon a group of people around a red-cheeked, middle-aged man who held a small American flag in one hand, pamphlets in the other.
“America!” he was crying, “thy purity is besmirched by the Jews! By the mixed breeds, by the coyotes, by the yellow races, by the intolerable mutts and mongrels, the godless and the Reds, the grinning Nigras swarming and filthy. Oh, thy wretchedness! God Bless Us! Friends, take my sermons, read! Learn how you may turn back the deadly tide!” He waved the little flag. There was scattered applause. A man standing on the outside of the group shouted, “Fascist!” then took to his heels. The red-cheeked man, his followers, at what seemed a leisurely pace, went after him. He disappeared around a corner. The street was silent again except for a few cars, the sound of a lawn mower somewhere, a window banged shut.