by Paula Fox
Melvin listened to her story and shook his head and opened his trumpet case. Drawing his long black fingers along the shining surface of the instrument, he said, “Look, girl, there’s things here you don’t know about and you’d best not mess with them. If Cletus had lived more like me, he mightn’t be so surprised. He got this little corner for himself, you see, and thought the good world was where he was, and then he found out it was just a mouse hole, and the cats was the same as he’d heard rumors about all his life. He got scratched. He found out he was a nigger just like all the other niggers.”
“Oh, Christ! Melvin!”
He grinned. “I knew two things from the beginning,” he said. “I knew I was black. I knew I was going to die.”
“But I loved him!” she cried.
“Oh, yeah! I know that, baby! But he got the news, see? He’s always been a nervous man, Cletus. Now he got the news what he’s nervous about. He’s not even thinking about you, girl! He’s thinking about himself.”
Melvin was glad; she heard the triumph in his voice. The corrupt passion to be right was everywhere. Given the chance, she too would not pass up an opportunity to win. She tried Freud again; it whispered severely that her life was a lie.
She continued to see Cletus until he moved to San Francisco. He’d gotten some kind of job with the OWI and after a while, before he’d left, seemed to become his old self—almost. But she too had changed. She was uneasy with him.
“For God’s sake, will you stop waiting on me!” he cried out once as she was pouring him a cup of coffee, racing for the sugar bowl, placing an ashtray near his arm. “You got Saint Vitus’s dance?”
After Cletus left, she tried to get an overseas job. She’d heard file clerks and office personnel were in great demand at overseas army bases. She wrote to Uncle Greg for her birth certificate. When it arrived, she discovered she had no middle name after all. She was tempted to claim Elizabeth, dark, lissome, velvet Elizabeth, for her middle name anyhow. The passport division turned her application down. For the first time, the less romantic aspect of her involvement with the Communist party revealed itself in the person of a man named Dooley who interviewed her for one hour without raising his eyes from a folder that lay on his desk in front of him.
“Congratulations,” Theda said. “You’ve got a dossier.”
But she’d hardly been to a dozen meetings! Theda said, “You can get pregnant from one-night stands.”
The party had changed its name to the Communist Political Association. “Why, they’re practically Native Sons now,” Annie protested. “And I can’t leave this country.” She panicked. The entire country was no larger than Theda’s living room, and she couldn’t get out! She wanted to write to Max about it, but Theda warned her not to because of mail censorship. When she told Eva, she suspected she was gratified by the news in the way Melvin had been gratified hearing about Cletus. And Annie, listening this last April to Eva and some people who’d stopped by after supper to discuss the French Communist leader Jacques Duclos and his letter accusing Browder of “revisionism” and “right deviationism,” listening to the furious argument, the heated voices as they labored with the thick, unwieldy language of political talk in which the only vivid note was personal acrimony, had felt an exhaustion of all interest and, underneath that, the uneasy sense that she too was receiving “news,” although not about Browder and some distant Frenchman crushing the American Communist party with all of Stalin’s authority.
Myron Eagle had come to stand behind her and he now placed his hands over her eyes. “Staring like that…I can see your eyes, shining like a bear’s in a cave…”
She took his hands away, and he covered her breasts in the same way and she removed them again.
He grabbed her in the dark, danced a comic lindy with her, swinging her out so she banged into the furniture. “Dancing in the dark,” he sang in foolish tenor mimicry.
They talked about the ending of the war, the surrender that was being signed that very day on the battleship Missouri between the Americans and the Japanese. She recalled the day Roosevelt had died, how she’d gone to a coffee shop she was in the habit of frequenting and told the man behind the counter of the President’s death, and of how he had answered, “How’d he die? Lead poisoning?” and how it had taken her a while to get it, and the shock of it.
She realized then she’d told Mike about that incident because she’d been offended by Mike’s reference to Stalingrad. How could he refer to their personal destinies in the same breath in which he was speaking of three hundred thousand dead? How could they jitterbug in the dark after that appalling unimaginable bomb had been dropped on two Japanese cities?
“I’m going to make another try at the State Department,” she said. “I want a passport.”
“Where the hell are you going to go?”
“Out. Away.”
“To what?”
“I’ll get a job.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. England.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know that either.”
“You’re brutal sometimes, Annie,” he said.
“No!” she cried. He turned on a light. It was the worst charge.
———
Annie had been asked to model some clothes for the wife of a Hungarian screenwriter. They were poor, they were “progressives.” One of the writers at the studio had stopped her one day and told her about Heida and her husband, the couple’s struggles after they’d managed to get to Portugal from unoccupied France in 1939. Would she do it for free? Heida hoped to become a couturière, but they had no capital. She’d agreed, not so much from sympathy for Hungarians as for the pleasure of wearing clothes.
She felt somewhat nervous about it, even though she’d rehearsed the runway walk several times, how to turn and bend and hold her hands, so she was ready an hour early. She drifted restlessly around the room, stopping finally in front of the bureau where she kept her papers in a tin candy box. Inside it was her divorce decree, her Social Security number, the letter from the State Department refusing her a passport “at this time,” a large bundle of letters from Max, and two notes from her father, one announcing his arrival in Los Angeles two years ago, the more recent which she’d received earlier this week.
In pity, she’d written him of the death of James St. Vincent, for once not the carefully careless letters she sometimes wrote with an observation she’d worked over, a story she thought might amuse him and bring her the painful pleasure of his appreciation.
She had seen St. Vincent only a few weeks earlier. He’d had a heart attack. Hope, her face blank, her mouth a dead line, was sitting by the bed. St. Vincent’s face was as white as the sheet that covered him, which he held to his neck as though the heart itself, faulty and wounded, would be revealed should he relinquish a corner of the cloth. His voice was so weak. Yet he made an effort to talk in the old cadences she remembered. But he faltered, and closed his eyes after smiling a little and asking her how she was, and then Andrew came in, eyes only for his father, looking at Hope for one split second, dread in his face as though he knew only too well what his fate was to be once his father was no longer there, his father, his shelter. Andrew’s features had thickened in some indefinable way and Annie recognized that Andrew, indeed, was “different.”
It was Andrew who called her to tell her his father had died, and although after having seen St. Vincent she couldn’t imagine how he could have continued to live, and although she was shocked and frightened, she was distracted by Andrew’s voice, which was so strange. Then she realized he was trying to speak as his father had. It was a grotesque parody. The boy telling her the news with James St. Vincent’s beat and jargon, Andrew’s voice breaking suddenly into gulping sobs, wailing out, “What will happen to me? To me?”
So she’d written to her father at once, and for once, he’d replied by return mail. “Sad, sad,” he’d written, the passing of one’s youth, one’s era. Oh, the times they’d
had, he and Jim, gone, gone. Who the hell was keeping her these days? That plump nice doctor fellow? Her little brother, Ned, was a dummy, but sweet. He had broken Margo’s new potter’s wheel.
She hated the letter. It was the part about Ned. The rest was Tony’s old song. It was the casual executioner’s judgment against the child she’d never seen that made her queasy, made her restless and angry.
Max’s letters, the correspondence of over two years, were mostly written on the self-sealing stationery that she’d frequently torn in trying to open. At first, the letters had been avuncular, concerned for her well-being, with a few comic asides on his army experiences. But as the months went on—he’d been transferred from Montana to England with a brief furlough during which he’d phoned her—the letters grew into a continuing reverie of his own life. In one, he told her a story of killing a cat. He’d been nine, he and the other boys—the horror remained with him—he’d never told anyone about it; he’d never seen the boys again. Only Eva, his life with Eva was unmentioned. But of an eccentric uncle, of school and college, of poker playing and radicalization, although about the latter he was quite circumspect, a result she imagined of his caution concerning censorship, of girls and boys he’d known, of the house he’d lived in, the pictures on the wall, the books he’d read, the view of the world from the house a few miles outside of Portland, Oregon, he wrote fully. She had responded in kind. When she wrote him of Joe’s suicide, he’d written back that she’d taken on the responsibility of the death, and that she couldn’t arrogate such power to herself. Perhaps Max’s letters, read at the same time as the war news, increased the sense of unreality of what was happening in Europe. In Los Angeles, there had been so many soldiers coming and going. She’d met a few at Eva’s, “comrades,” some of them, or “progressives.” And Miranda Katz had gone on two voyages, returning from the last one pregnant by a Swedish junior officer who’d subsequently jumped ship to be with her.
Annie had been awakened one morning at three by the doorbell. Mike had fallen out of bed, dressing in panicked haste in the dark while she delayed answering the persistent ring as long as she could. It had been an immigration officer. Did she know of Miranda Katz’s whereabouts? No? Well, then, did she know of a certain Jensen, an officer from a Swedish ship? Had she seen this man?
Standing there with a raincoat thrown over herself, she had finally lost the faculty of speech, aware that Mike was buttoning his shirt, in silent terror, in her bedroom. When she’d returned, she’d said, her voice trembling, “The immigration man was after a Swedish seaman…a girl I know…” But they’d looked at each other straight through rational explanations, and both had felt at once the underlying vulnerability of their arrangement. But her fear, not of informed wives and outraged neighbors, was an old one. His was plainer, more immediate. She’d known then how irrevocably he was a husband.
After that, he never stayed later than midnight.
She picked up the divorce decree. Max had written it was a good thing to have finished with it, and after all that anguish, the time in court had been negligible, the procedures fraudulent, community property none, alimony none. She’d stepped down from the oak witness chair, glanced briefly at the judge and left the courtroom.
She put away her papers, threw a sweater over her shoulders and drove out to Sunset Strip, where in a small empty store, Heida was shouting at a group of young women who were wandering about the back room in various stages of undress. They would have to wear Band-Aids over their nipples, Heida was screeching. Her dresses were not made to be worn over those medieval siege weapons, American brassières! They rehearsed for a bit, then Annie and one of the girls who had an apartment nearby went there to have a sandwich before the show began at eight. The girl, Laura, was someone with whom Annie had a slight acquaintance. She was the girl of a screenwriter who’d been in and out of the party a number of times, and who referred to himself ponderously as a universal gadfly, épataying the comrades as well as the bourgeoisie. He was rich.
Laura was beautiful. Dark-haired, romantic eyes, perfect teeth. When she wrapped a silk scarf around her head, binding in her dark hair, she looked like the heiress of California. Her apartment was full of flowers, a piano stood in one corner, and there were pictures of herself on all the walls, Laura in riding breeches, her eyes sad, her smile gay, Laura on a sailboat, in a jersey, her eyes sad, her smile gay! Clumsily, she prepared them some sandwiches. When she sank into a chair, she was perfect. Doing anything at all, except being looked at, brought out a peculiar awkwardness. Annie watched her, fascinated. The girl’s total intelligence was directed toward her own person. In her own milieu, couches, soft chairs, on the makeshift runway in the shop for tonight’s show, she attained perfection.
Eating a lettuce and tomato sandwich, she spoke of proletarian revolution; she referred to the “little people.”
“Little people!”
She pushed back her glorious hair. “The little people,” she murmured, “the oppressed masses.”
Little people…
“Richard’s making a film in Mexico. Everyone’s against it. He doesn’t care…about the peons. I’m going with him…his own money.”
“Mexican dwarfs?”
Laura looked at her blankly. “Well, I don’t know about dwarfs.”
A woman got into the elevator with them. She seemed galvanized the moment Annie entered. It was a slow elevator.
“Why are you staring at me?”
“You’re so beautiful,” said the woman. Annie flushed, looking apologetically at Laura and then down at the Heida-designed black suit she was wearing. It was a beautiful suit, expensive, the kind of cut and fit and cloth that made all the difference.
The show was over at eleven, and Annie emerged into the street, intending to get into her car which was parked on the opposite side, when someone hailed her. She turned and looked down to another more elaborately lit storefront. A short man, whose face she couldn’t make out, was waving to her. She walked over to him. She was quite sure he had called her, Ann.
It was Ben Greenhouse.
“My dear Ann,” he said. He was drunk, and he had become stout.
“Hello, Ben.”
“Come in here. We’re having an art show. The studio’s going all out for culture, a spasm that will pass. Come in and look at the freaks.”
She hesitated, but he took her arm and as soon as he’d touched her, she remembered the lifeless fastidiousness of his ways.
Inside the room, swarms of people in evening dress moved from group to group in front of the paintings. In the middle of the room, on a velvet-covered couch, sat an elderly actor whom Annie recognized from a dozen movies. Sitting along the back of the couch, drooping over him like week-old gladiolas, were a number of girls. Ben was sarcastic in his introduction of Annie to people who affected to take no notice of his words and who moved out of range of her vision no sooner than they had touched her hand. She wanted to leave. “I must go,” she said. “I have to work in the morning.”
“Oh, but I want to hear about you.”
“You’ve changed,” she said, angered by his grip on her arm.
“So have you. You’re all grown up, aren’t you?”
“No,” she said furiously. “I’m not.”
“I never thought you’d remain a child,” he said interestedly.
“You haven’t thought of me at all!”
“Oh—that poor young man. You remember the day on the beach? His body?”
“Listen, I do have to go.”
He released her then. He looked offended. “Well, if you want to …I’m simply curious. It’s my field you know, curiosity…”
She was thinking how often she’d known people she really hadn’t liked, had spent hours and days and months with them. Greenhouse was ridiculous. Thin, he’d been nervous and jumpy and interesting. Now, he was merely fat.
“I detest your curiosity,” she said suddenly in a loud voice, attracting the languid interest of several people near
by. “It’s only greediness.”
“You’d better go.”
She did.
She drove past the Trocadero, past the roads to the canyons where once she’d gazed up at the houses of the movie people, where James St. Vincent had sat, his head covered with a linen table napkin, where an opium-addicted cook played golf on his time off, news of another world, a flat world, all tricks of the eye, there for an instant, then dead, fallen into the reality of death.
The party had not so much taken her in as given her temporary shelter, and when she’d wandered in and out of it, not a “serious” person, after all, they’d paid little enough attention to her.
The “serious” person had died. Ethel Schaeffer with her singleminded vision, her kindness a lambent wash of feeling that blindly blessed the self-deceivers around her, the small tyrants, the secret bullies, or people like Theda and Max, turning and twisting inside definitions they were endlessly questioning, or someone like Lavan, scuttling from one dogma to another, carrying his own betrayer in himself, always secret, always transparent in his secrecy, a kind of underground man of fashion.
What had she understood from all of it? That she belonged to something even as abstract as a class? How primitive she had been, she thought, if only now she had begun to classify that which was not herself. A flash of memory illuminated a picture from years gone by: she was sitting on the stony driveway of the old Nyack house with a large flat stone near her knee, her hand gripping a round stone as a hammer, and cleaving open other stones, discovering how different each was from the other, and she had named them names of her own imagining.
As she parked in front of her apartment, she felt a powerful rush of gratitude, even toward Calvin Schmitter, and realized at that same moment as tears came to her eyes that her emotion was facile. What lay behind it was the knowledge that she was going to leave California as soon as she could.
The war was over; Max, she’d heard from Eva, would be coming home soon, coming home to Eva. She did not think she could slip back into their lives again like the nervous castaway of that earlier time—nor, she knew, could they allow her to.