by Paula Fox
Around eight, the apartment house woke up, a toilet flushed, a distant alarm went off. There were loud steps on the floor above, someone ran down the stairs and shortly thereafter, Annie heard two women speaking, their voices growing louder as they neared the door. A key was inserted into a lock, and suddenly there were two young women looking down at her. Lucy Griggs woke—she looked up at them calmly, then at Annie, waiting.
One of the women set down a small overnight bag, the other went to turn off the pink glass lamp.
“What’s going on?” asked the woman with the suitcase.
“Harriet?” Lucy asked weakly. “Did you have a good time?”
Annie rose and went into the other room. Harriet, who had not answered Lucy’s question, followed her.
“Well?”
Annie looked at her. She was tall, dark-haired, muscular. Her expression held nothing but antagonism and suspicion. A young crone, Annie thought. She told her Lucy’s story quickly. There was no pity on Harriet’s face. Her narrow lips, her unblinking eyes proclaimed that she already knew what the world was.
“I think she should be taken to a doctor. She says she just wants to go home.”
The other girl was making clucking noises near the studio bed. “I knew she’d get into trouble,” Harriet said grimly.
“Poor soul,” said the other softly.
“Poor soul, my eye. There are certain things one simply doesn’t do if one wants to avoid certain consequences.”
“Oh, Harriet!”
“Oh, nuts! She’s alive, isn’t she?”
Annie turned away from that rocklike face. Lucy, wrapped in the blanket, was standing just behind her. She thought of Joe—it was only a flash, a shadow moving across her inner vision.
“We’ll take care of things,” Harriet said, dismissing Annie. She looked at Lucy, but Lucy was watching Harriet.
“I’ll go then,” she said.
Lucy glanced at her; for a moment she looked as if she was about to collapse. Then her face cleared and she turned back to Harriet.
“I’m going home today.”
“Yes,” said Harriet.
“I can’t stay here now.”
“I think you’d best go home.”
The other girl said, “I’ll help you pack up, Lucy.”
Annie walked to the door.
Lucy called out, “Thanks,” in a lifeless voice.
Annie ate scrambled eggs in a drugstore, and drank a cup of thin, sour coffee. Then she drove to Cletus’s.
Outside his loft, the morning life of the city cried its noises. Inside, it was quiet. Cletus was sitting on the old couch, a large bandage on his head, one finger splinted, his right arm in a sling. He barely glanced up at her.
“I stayed with her until her friends came back,” Annie said softly. He nodded.
“Have you eaten? Shall I make you breakfast?”
“No.”
“Cletus? Can I put on a record?”
“Get out of here,” he said.
“Cletus!”
“Get out!”
Chapter 17
August 8, 1945
Dear Annie,
Happy Birthday! Although by the time you receive this, several days will have passed. I was reminded this morning when I saw the red maple I planted the day you were born twenty-two years ago. My mind has been very distracted these last few years which I suppose everybody’s has been. I hardly read history now. I think history has died. The town has changed so much you wouldn’t know it. There are many colored now, and some of the grand old families I used to garden for have fallen apart, the children gone off, or killed, no servants to keep up the houses, rationing. Well, rationing didn’t affect some of us much as we’ve always lived lightly. Except for the gasoline. I had to keep my jobs pretty close to home; the old truck drinks up the stuff so I’ve had to let go of some of my people that I’ve worked for all these years, not that people have been tending much to flowers. I don’t know why, but the sight of vegetables growing in a plot where once chrysanthemums bloomed sets my teeth on edge. I’m just foolish, I guess, as I know those “victory gardens” were a good idea.
Gabriel Heatter says on the radio that the war is really over now they’ve dropped that bomb on Hiroshima. I sit up here on the hill in the old house at dusk, and I think I’ve lived much too long. For a while, I read all the stories about the camps in Germany, then I had to stop. My mind wandered away. I hardly know what I’m thinking about any more. The last time I felt all right was in May when I was digging a bed for the Belknaps who still keep up their borders despite the death of their youngest boy. Do you remember him? Brewster Belknap who died in far-off New Guinea?
I seem to be talking all the time about myself. I meant to thank you for your Christmas letter. I was glad to hear of your job. Annie, don’t think I’m reproaching you, but I wish you had told me about your marriage, and then the divorce. Tony called me and told me about it and I was grieved to hear that you’d gone through all that at so young an age. I guess you know that Tony has a son now (and you a half-brother!). I was surprised to hear from him at all but perhaps he has memories of your dear mother and remembers me now and then. He sounded like the same old Tony on the telephone. I haven’t written you before because I’ve not been well. I seem better now which shows that it isn’t necessary to flee to a doctor the moment you get a pain. Sometimes I think you’ll come walking up the hill and open the door. Write to me again, Annie, when you can.
Love, Uncle Greg
“Letter from the heartland,” said Dr. Myron Eagle, handing the sheets of paper back to Annie. “So that’s what you came out of.”
Annie didn’t reply. She dropped the letter on the counter and ran a knife along the sides of the duck she was roasting. The fat poured out and splattered threateningly in the bottom of the pan.
“If it isn’t the Communists, it’s the Congregationalists,” said Myron. “Pay some attention to me.”
“I am, through the medium of this duck,” she said.
How tall she was! The knife was in her right hand, with her left she pushed back the hair from her cheek where the perspiration from her exertions at the oven had glued it. She was wearing a navy-blue skirt and a white blouse. Myron, as he often did, gazed at her flat belly where, beneath the flannel of the skirt and the cotton of her slip, she wore his scar. It moved him oddly to think of that arrow-shaped indentation she would bear all her life, which, three years ago, he had sewn up himself. Now and then, peering at it as they lay in bed together, he would see a shadow of a stitch working its way through the flesh. There were new techniques now, learned from the war, and scars could be made no more than hairlines. The thickness of hers satisfied him though, gave him the kind of medical pleasure that he referred to as his little touch of sadism.
He attributed to himself a small “touch” of any sort of psychological quirk—and proud of it, Annie thought, telling him once that he had a large touch of belief in the supernatural.
“You don’t want to be surprised by yourself, do you?” she’d observed dryly.
“We’re all potentially aberrant,” he’d replied. “My patients trust me because I don’t put distance between myself and them. I can be as sick in body as they are, and as sick in mind.”
She held back an ironic retort. She didn’t believe that Myron believed he was a peer among his peers as he did his rounds in the hospital wards. Anyone could be sick; anyone could go mad. “Truths” like that weren’t about anything. As far as Annie was concerned, the mere avowal of such commonplaces was boasting, an effort to raise oneself above the common lot by dint of superior comprehension. Myron irritated her faintly, mildly, always. Their arguments were low-keyed. He always had the answers, yet she knew she disconcerted him, and although he laughed at her assertions, he couldn’t dismiss them. They’d spent the afternoon wrangling about cause and effect. There was nothing without an original cause, he’d said. “But some things spring into being out of nothing!” she’d said.
“That’s irrational.”
“Myron, you’re trying to chain water!”
“I can!” he said triumphantly. “Look at the TVA! Now, give me an example of something springing out of nothing.”
“A poem.”
“Oh, Jesus!” he cried.
She watched him walk over to her bureau and lift the cover of the leather cosmetic case that always rested on the bureau top.
“The bastard,” he muttered as he took out a pink jar and sniffed at it. Tony Gianfala had brought her that luxurious case two years ago when he’d come to Hollywood for a brief visit with news of the birth of his son, Ned. She’d taken Tony to a restaurant, letting Myron know in advance where they were going to be so he could get a look at her father. But she hadn’t introduced them. “Don’t you know why you didn’t want him to see you with a man?” he’d asked portentously. She affected not to notice his emphasis. But it embarrassed her.
“Every time I look in here, it’s the same stuff. Don’t you ever use it?”
“I smell it,” she said. “I love the smell.”
“It must have cost over a hundred dollars. Do you want another drink?”
She nodded and began to shell peas. He mixed a martini for himself, and handed her bourbon and water. “When are you going to stop drinking this peasant swill?” he asked. She smiled and said, “I have a touch of the peasant.” Then she burst into laughter, and Myron smiled at the sound of it. “Listen! Did I tell you Bea uses a hammer to mash garlic?”
“Swell.”
“No. Really. I just remembered that, thinking about the salad I’m going to fix for us. That time I went to see her last spring, she was sloshed to the gills, tripping over her old black lace peignoir and smashing the life out of a little clove of garlic.”
“There’s nothing funny about it. You were depressed for a month after you saw her.”
“Oh Mike, it doesn’t matter.”
After dinner, they turned out the lamps and sat by the window looking out through the leaves of the eucalyptus tree over the lights of Hollywood. Theda had left her scarred old table for Annie when she’d moved into the San Fernando valley into her own little house. Sometimes, when Annie was alone on a Saturday or a Sunday, when Mike had to be with his wife and children, she sat there just as Theda had, her arm where Theda’s had been, a book open in front of her, looking out as though from a lighthouse.
“It was strange of Tony to come out,” Annie said softly, “just to tell me about the baby, after not bothering all the other years.” They had speculated about her father’s visit often enough. Some of their conversations were old conversations. They had a history now, after two and a half years.
“Stalingrad,” said Mike, touching her hand. She withdrew it. “Was I vulgar?” he asked, offended yet apologetic. She had been listening that November in 1943 to the radio, and a labor reporter from a San Francisco newspaper had wept over the air waves as he described the battle then taking place in Stalingrad. A few months later, they had both heard the same reporter read letters from the Russian soldiers who’d been imprisoned by the siege in November.
Mike Eagle, out on his night calls, had knocked at her door. “Wanted to know how you’re feeling,” he’d said, standing there with his black medical case in one hand. She’d been struck by the absence of a pronoun. He hadn’t said I. He had stood there like two decisions colliding—his presence affirming his wish to see her, the unidentifiable person, I, he, they, who? not present.
Myron Eagle was thirty-five. He had a daughter named Brett and a son, Tracy. They were fancy names, Annie had remarked. “For a Jew?” he’d asked. “For anybody.”
She rarely inquired about his wife. He found her lack of curiosity unnatural. “She’s limited,” he’d offered once. “Who isn’t?” Annie had replied. “It’s beastly,” he’d protested, “to answer anyone that way.”
She’d laughed at the word, beastly. After that, he used it often. Annie might have confessed to him that she did not feel she was vying for his attention; she was on the side. She had, in fact, once touched upon her sense of her transitoriness ever so indirectly. She’d seen how uneasy her words had made him; he’d accused her of false humility, of not even taking his marriage seriously! And she hadn’t defended herself. Underlying whatever she might have said would have been her consciousness that she didn’t love Myron. She suspected he nurtured an inner vision of himself, torn between two women, and that for all his vaunted rationality, he yearned to be struck down by passion. A lunatic romantic was on the loose somewhere in Myron, waiting for the curtain to rise at last. Crediting him with this secret dream, she felt tenderly toward him, as though he were innocent.
Besides, she was grateful for his presence, for the freshly laundered smell of his shirts, for the domestic aura which clung to him and from which she drew illicit sustenance, for the authority of his medical knowledge, for his humor, quick and sardonic, for his sexual diffidence, which while it sometimes made her laugh to herself—he always covered his nakedness when the lights were on, grabbing up a towel, a blanket, once a sweater she’d left lying in a chair—made her feel less responsible. But she was most indebted to him for those very things that—if she’d imagined such an affair, such a long one as this, several years ago—she could not have conceived then would become central to it. He sent her to a good dentist. Outraged yet amused, he tore into her eating habits with grisly explanations of what she was doing to herself with her impulsive and irregular snacks. Because of him, she had begun to cook. He kept her drinking down. He brought her a good reading lamp. He stuffed her with fresh fruits from the Farmers’ Market and demanded, with uncharacteristic aggressiveness, that she drink milk and eat vegetables.
He made her vegetable soup. “Do you like it?” “It’s good,” she admitted. “But it’s boring to eat soup.” “Boring?” he’d asked. “Like peeing.” He laughed. “You eat like a ragamuffin.”
He really was concerned about her, one of his more interesting patients, she guessed. For if he wasn’t encouraged by her to speak of his home, she implored him to tell her about the people he treated on his night calls. She never tired of their histories—the elderly men living alone in rooms, morphine addicts, pregnant runaways, the demented, the poor, the declassed—those were his patients, his real patients. Despite their arguments, he’d brought a new idea into her mind, psychology. She was struck by the thought that people were ruled by laws of which they had no knowledge. He gave her a book called Totem and Taboo. She read a few pages, until she came to this sentence: “The prohibition owes its strength—its compulsive character—to its association with its unknown counterpart, the hidden and unabated pleasure, that is to say, an inner need into which conscious insight is lacking.” Her alarm outdistanced her comprehension. She dared not bring it up to Myron for fear he would explain the meaning of the sentence by applying it in some measure to her. Or to himself. She could not grasp the sense of it—yet it frightened her, like a voice speaking about her in an unknown language. Everything she was ignorant of spoke of her—and, she told herself, she was nearly ignorant of everything. Was that a reason to learn? To stop the world’s whispering? She noted the sizable library she had been gradually accumulating over the years. But those books, except for the few political tomes, were only stories; they did not turn in unfavorable reports on your own existence.
She told stories about people she’d known and knew, and Myron delighted in them, saying there was more than a passing resemblance between her friends and his patients. She wrote to Max, copying out Freud’s sentence, saying that all such information, if that’s what it was, filled her with dread as though she’d been suddenly struck blind. Max replied from North Africa. He said she ought to read history, it would give her perspective, she would not feel so persecuted by learning. Had she ever heard of mechanism, of Descartes? And was she still seeing that doctor? Seeing had been her word to Max. She had mentioned Myron only in passing. Max hadn’t forgotten.
We
ll, a lot was missing between herself and Myron, she knew that. Passion? What was it? She had once entertained dark nebulous thoughts about Bea and her father, thoughts she fled from no sooner than they occurred to her. And the romantic light in which she had once seen Theda had long since begun to fade. She didn’t know that she really believed in Theda and Simon any more. Once, so deeply stirred by the idea that this lanky self-ruled woman had been ruled by her silent lover, she wondered now how much Theda had invented, or how much, she, Annie, had invented. Theda was becoming what she had always really been, a cranky, sharp-tongued impatient woman, given to morose asides on the fatuity, the futility, of nearly everything, sclerotic in the affections, guarding her health as though she were in perpetual danger—she managed to suggest there were lepers on the loose everywhere—and she had abandoned any talk of marriage and children. As for Cletus and the functionary’s wife, what was that all about except a convenient dodge so that Cletus could pursue his lone path?
She had not seen Cletus now in a year. After the rape of the redheaded girl—poor Lucy Griggs, what had happened to her?—things had changed. He had called to apologize for his behavior that morning, a brittle, unfriendly apology, sounding of recrimination. She had fled back to him at once, her friend. She was so grateful that he had not meant her to “get out!” But she found a guarded, sardonic-faced enigma who had once been darling Cletus, and what was crueler, who made it clear that the old habit of familiarity was broken, and walked to the farthest end of his loft, wearing his old robe, laughing unpleasantly at her struggles to speak plainly. “Cletus, what is it? What is it?” He finally put an end to her fumbling efforts, saying, “I apologized. I thanked you for your help. What do you want me to do now? Be your pet darkie a little bit longer till you give up being the poor little match girl and take up with your proper life? My, my, my!”