by Paula Fox
In all of Max’s letters, he had never written of his domestic unhappiness which Annie had seen so clearly, if not understood. As for love between Annie and Max, she did not understand that either. She put it down to a kind of passionate interest which satisfied her sense of its uniqueness without binding her to the frightening uncertainties of loving.
She would have to put aside some money; she had four hundred dollars in an envelope. It had seemed a mighty sum, but with moving on in her mind, it was nothing. She lived for the next few months without movies or purchases or restaurants. She saved another one hundred and fifty. She took the amber beads Ben Greenhouse had given her and showed them to Theda. Theda draped them around her long neck and they slid down over her green sweater. Theda smiled, pleased, peered into a mirror. “I want to sell them,” Annie said.
“They suit me,” Theda murmured, turning her head this way and that.
“What do you think?”
“They’re worth more than I can pay—three hundred dollars probably.”
Annie gasped. Greenhouse must have been crazy. Theda observed, “People like that, it excites them to pay a good deal of money for things. It reminds them of how much they have. I’ll give you two hundred. What do you need it for?”
She looked out to Theda’s lawn where a small white goat was tethered.
“Does the goat know you?”
“I should hope to Jesus it does!”
“I mean—does it recognize you, like a dog?”
“Not so I’m oppressed by it, just enough. Enough for me.”
“Theda, I’m going away. I’m going to Europe.”
Theda disappeared into the kitchen and returned with sandwiches and coffee.
“Graveyard,” she said. “Why do you want to go to a graveyard?” She looked despondent; her shoulders drooped forward. “Didn’t you try once before? Didn’t they turn you down?” And then, as though the words were flying through her mind and she must snatch at them, “How can you think of it! The air is still full of the smoke of the crematoriums! I can hear the cries—I can hear the crying of children—I can hear the last breath of the children. Have you seen the pictures? Have you seen them stacked up in layers, and the villagers, have you seen the faces of the villagers who knew nothing! Don’t you know the moral back of the world is broken forever! How can you step on ground where these things have happened! For your own entertainment? Because you’re bored? Because your mind is empty—” She sat down and rubbed her face with violent hands, then sprang up and went to a table and opened a drawer and took out a checkbook. She wrote a check and came back to Annie, who had pushed herself back against the wing chair. She thought Theda was going to strike her, but Theda merely handed her a check for two hundred dollars and said, “Come and eat your sandwiches.”
They ate in silence, Annie thinking how often Theda had fed her, had sheltered her, had listened so intently to her. The amber beads swung forward as she ate; her expression was abstracted. How deep the lines had become around her mouth! Annie put her hand on Theda’s arm. Farewells hung in the air; partings, changes. Theda put down her cup of coffee and enclosed Annie’s hand in her own.
“I’ll be sorry,” she said.
When Annie got up to leave, Theda said with a certain ferocity, “I want my old table back.” “I’ll get it back to you,” Annie promised. “Will you keep my books for me?” “As if I didn’t have enough goddamned books,” Theda grumbled.
She walked out with Annie to the car. The goat ran toward them until it came to the end of its restraining chain, one glossy eye fixed on Theda’s hand. She scratched its head a moment. “You’ve always reminded me of Simon,” she said to Annie. “Like Simon’s little sister. I thought that the first time Max brought you, how much you reminded me of Simon.”
The last real time she spent in California was in a log cabin in the Big Bear mountains outside of Los Angeles. Mike Eagle had, he said, been told by his wife that he looked like hell and ought to go away for a few days’ rest. It was January in the mountains, almost a true January. There were patches of snow on the ground, the air was blue with cold, the small lake frozen, and Annie glimpsed the white flanks of mule-tailed deer among the pines.
They slept beneath layers of cotton blankets and woke to a cold clear light, their breath making vapour in the small cabin. Mike made a fire in the potbellied stove and they ate bacon and drank coffee looking out across the lake at the black tamaracks on the other side. It was hard to leave the warmth of the bed; there was such timeless, mindless pleasure in that warmth, and in the contrasting pine-scented chill air which would soon be obliterated by the wood smoke of the stove.
Annie kept one of the blankets around herself as they ate. Remembering Joe, she wondered if she’d ever be able to look at such a blanket again without its reminding her. She told Mike about him. He listened with his face prepared to smile, as always when she unfolded her “stories,” and she grew resentful at the smugness of his anticipatory amusement. She told him more than she’d intended.
“He had no insight,” Mike said. “It’s clear he was a homosexual. That fact may explain his sister’s promiscuity too, or vice versa.”
“Fact, vice versa?”
“Lots of people commit suicide.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It looms large for you because you knew him. It’s a perfectly commonplace happening, especially among younger people.”
“Commonplace!”
“Don’t get sore. Here, have a cigar.”
She dressed, averting her face from him.
Later, walking through the forest, they came to a narrow valley where the remains of an old movie set looked, from their vantage point on the hill above it, like a small frontier village. They walked down and among the façades where snow had caught along the ridges of the wood. In the silence and the cold, they stood huddled together looking up at the saloon, the houses that were only rough-painted wood drawings against the hillside. She wondered if mountain lions walked down the main street. They had heard something cry out the night before, and Mike had said it must be a mountain lion hunting.
On their last morning, she said she had another commonplace story to tell him. He listened impassively to the tale of Lucy Griggs and Cletus, and the two Gorgon women.
“There’s a victim theory,” he said. “I believe it, too. That little girl was a natural for a rape attack. Listen, some of my patients live in places dangerous to walk in at ten in the morning. No one’s ever bothered me. It’s partly because I don’t expect to be bothered.”
“You’ve got an answer for everything.”
“I try to understand these things.”
“How can you? After you’ve already decided what they are?”
“I try to understand you.”
She shuddered exaggeratedly. “Crated and mailed,” she said. “I don’t want to hear about it.”
He embraced her suddenly. “I try, but I don’t,” he said humbly. “Don’t be so mad at me—you can’t wander around through a lifetime leaving everything an open question. Look at you! Don’t you think you tried to find a system when you were hanging around the Reds?”
“It wasn’t that,” she muttered, her head resting against his shoulder. “Something else…”
“You can’t ask people not to have a viewpoint—to simply look, the way you do. One of these days, you’ll have to come to some conclusions—you’ll have to be thickheaded and convinced, just like the rest of us.”
She hardly heard him, but she was no longer angry. She thought of Uncle Greg who had no answers for earthly matters, who believed in God’s heaven.
“You must make judgments,” Mike said. “How can a person live without them?”
They packed and made sure the fire was out. Mike went to pay the couple who ran the little cabin community. On their long descent to the warmer regions, Mike spoke accusingly and restlessly about her leaving California. She was simply being ruled by impulse. Her life wasn’t
bad out here. Now that the war was over, things would be getting better, more opportunities, she might think of going to school. Had she ever thought of becoming a nurse? Or a laboratory technician? She was very observant—she’d be good at that, lab work. He could help—
“No. I’m going.”
“It’s because you’re so young.”
“That must be it.”
Melvin helped her with Theda’s table and the boxes of books. He had a friend with a pickup truck. Melvin had a year to go on his six-year hitch. What would he do after that?
“Maybe Basie remembers me,” he said. “I’ll get myself a good spot somewhere. I’ve saved a little money. My, how the old days have gone! You remember what nice times we had? Playing cards up at Cletus’s with old Miranda! Those were the good times, weren’t they? I’ve had a lot of good times and a lot of bad times and I don’t know which is coming up now. You’re taking off too, and that’s what I’d like to be doing but I got to finish out my time. I saw Cletus last week, but he don’t have much time for me now. He’s got a column he’s going to write for some newspaper. He asked me if I’d seen you around, but I’ll tell you, Annie, it’s not the same old Cletus we knew. Nothing’s the same now.”
She was getting ready to go. She had the car checked and the garage mechanic said she might get to Texas without trouble, after that, he didn’t know. She had thought there would be so much to do, but after all, there wasn’t so much. Some of the people she’d known had disappeared; some had died, some had changed.
When she saw Mike Eagle for the last time, he had hardened against her in some odd way. She felt he didn’t like her at all. But just before he left, he handed her a roll of bills. “Just some undeclared Jewish profits,” he said. “God! What’s going to happen to you!” Then he kissed her cheeks, and ran his hand down her arm. “I’m sad,” he said heavily, looking plumper than ever, and awkward, as though he couldn’t feel the edge of his own body. She kissed his olive cheek, tasting the particular smooth, faintly oily quality of his skin. Never again, she told herself. And then, startling them both, she pressed the money he had given her back into his hand.
“No, no. Take it!”
“Help me,” she said. “I don’t want to this time.”
He looked closely at her face, as though examining it for symptoms of physical distress. Then he put the money back in his pocket. “Annie makes a resolution,” he said.
“Don’t make fun.”
“I won’t, not even in memory.”
She spent a few hours with Eva. Theda was there and had bought her a pretty blue cardigan sweater—“In case you get to Lapland.” Eva had made her a lumpy chocolate cake.
But Thomas wasn’t there. “At the sitter’s,” Eva explained. “He’s a little nervous these days when people come. It’s the eye trouble.”
“What eye trouble?” Annie asked.
“I would have thought Max had written you about it,” Eva said with a touch of irony. Annie was startled. Max had told Eva about their correspondence!
“No, he hasn’t. I haven’t heard from him for a while,” she said, abashed.
“Oh? Well, you might get to see him in New York. He’ll be stopping there before he comes home.”
“What about Thomas’s eyes?”
“We don’t know yet. He’s been examined by several doctors. It’s all made him very nervous.” Eva looked vaguely around the room as though searching for the little boy. “I’m sure it’ll be all right,” she said. Theda asked, “What’s it called? What he has.”
“I can’t even pronounce it,” Eva replied, and offered them more coffee with a rush of words about the cake, why it was lumpy, the recipe she’d used.
Eva shook her hand formally and wished her good luck. Only when she turned back to the apartment did Annie see the anguish on her face. Driving Theda home, she said, “What was that all about?”
“It was Eva, being evasive,” said Theda. “Maybe you’d better not tell Max about it, if you do see him. He’s used to getting information indirectly.”
“Not from me,” Annie said.
“He’s not yours,” said Theda sternly.
“I never thought I owned anybody.”
“Hunh.”
She telephoned Cletus early in the morning. She could hear Brahms playing in the background. Her heart sank with dread. She was leaving the only place she’d ever been for any length of time, the only friends she’d ever really had.
“Why didn’t you come and see me?” Cletus asked. She was silent, looking at the receiver.
“Yeah,” said Cletus, as though she’d answered. “That’s how it goes. I’ll think of you, Annie.”
“I’ll think of you.”
The following morning at six, two suitcases in the back of the old car, and a full tank of gas, off the ration now, she drove out of Los Angeles. A few miles beyond the city limits, on the side of the road, a Negro soldier stood holding a sign that read HOUSTON. She stopped the car. The man ran to the door and opened it.
“Thanks,” he said, getting in. “How far are you going?”
“All the way east,” Annie said.
“My name’s Mason White,” he said.
“You live in Houston?”
“I do now. War’s all over. I’m going home.”
Chapter 18
They drove night and day, spelling each other. He slept, his head against the window, his overseas cap draped over one knee while Annie took them through the Mohave mountains, dropping ever southward, pushing the car to its highest rattling speed through night-shut villages until Mason White touched her arm and said, “Not too fast along in here. We don’t want to be stopped.” She had forgotten there were towns—she had been driving across a map, unpeopled, a matter of road signs, of dirt roads leading off from the main highway to no place at all.
“When I came to California,” she told Mason White, “I gave a ride to an old cook from a CCC camp. His wife was having a baby up in a mountain village in the Rockies. He took the wheel and drove like a fury.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Five years,” she said, and hearing her words, could not believe them, remembering the cook bent over the wheel like a large red bird with lidless eyes, forgetting for a moment all the faces in between that time and this.
“Nearly as long as I been in the army.”
“Do you have a wife and children in Houston?”
“Just my mother and sisters. But I think I will have a wife soon. They say things are going to be better now. The magazines, the newspapers say things going to be better for us. Better jobs. Better life.”
She felt the slight emphasis he had put on the word, us, as though he’d touched her arm; he hadn’t meant her.
“They can’t go back on it now,” Mason White went on. “People had good jobs in the war plants, they aren’t going back to mopping up grease.”
“You’ve always lived in Houston?”
“From the time we moved there from Alabama. My father had a little truck farm up there. One day, he was going to market. A white fellow came out of a side road and smacked into my father’s truck. My father came home and said, ‘Pack up.’ See, when they do you something bad, then they’re going to do worse. He hammered out the door of the truck where it’d been bashed in and we put what we could carry in the truck and we left that night and came to Houston because he had a brother there. Then, after we’d been there a year or so, my father moved on. I don’t know, none of us know, where he got to. My sisters, they’re both learning nursing. Things got a little better while the war was on. They can’t push us all the way back now.”
While Annie slept, Mason White brought them into Texas.
At Mason’s insistence, Annie had gone in alone to roadside stops, bringing them out sandwiches and coffee. “But you’re a soldier,” she’d protested.
“Don’t make no matter what I am.”
He stopped for gas only at the smallest junction where there would be a combined stor
e and gas station, a few old men rocking on the porch storefront, picking their teeth. These settlements were so negligible that the planks out of which the tumble-down buildings were constructed looked like the debris left after a hurricane. There were no facilities for travelers, only the same old store with its brooms and hoes, bags of feed and sacks of nails and a few canned goods, a gas tank rooted in the ground as though it had dropped straight down from a hole in the sky. Sometimes, in a diner, Annie found a squalid toilet. But Mason White waited until they were out on the main road, then while she rested against the seat, White searched out a hidden place behind rocks and bushes.
He drove with absolute control, the car his servant. His plain brown face was creased with fatigue. He was a reticent man but the little space of the car in which they worked so steadily, eroding the distance before them, held the special intimacy that springs from mutual purpose. He was considerate toward her. He observed her for signs of exhaustion. “You’re too tired now. You stop, and I’ll take over,” he’d say.
They advanced hourly into increasingly dangerous territory. As the gas meter dropped down toward empty, she felt his fear and knew it was worse than her own.
“You had nerve, to pick me up and drive me like this,” he remarked once.
“I didn’t think of it like that.”
“I know it,” he said. “I’m just telling you. Five years ago, they would’ve broken my legs for this. I’m not sure what they’d do now if I wasn’t wearing these sergeant stripes, this uniform, and if all their young men were back, not just those old bones clacking around.”
Because her fear began to intensify, because she wanted to get to the other side of that fear to prove it was unwarranted, she insisted, finally, that they both go into a bar that advertised meat-loaf sandwiches and cold beer. A few gray shacks like inflated chicken coops lay in the rough field behind the bar. In one, something like a doorway gave onto a dark interior. A shining black inner tube rested against the gray slats, and near it a yellow chicken stood in an attitude of expectancy. There was no other sign of life.