A Flag for Sunrise

by Robert Stone

  After a while, he moved over to the double bed, propped a pillow up behind him and dialed his home number. When he heard his wife’s voice on the line, he lit a cigarette.

  “So you’re O.K.,” he said. “You got back all right.”

  “I told you not to worry. He had his medicine at the hospital. He was half zonked.”

  “So he didn’t rave and carry on?”

  “He slept. When we got to his house he didn’t know where he was.”

  “Does he ever?”

  “Sure. He’s very aware.”

  “What were his parents like?”

  “Very middle-class. Quite well off, fancy house. They asked me in but I didn’t go. They’ll drive him back.”

  “So that’s that.”

  “Yep,” she said.

  “I had my lunch with Marty. We drank a lot.”

  “You sound like you’ve been drinking. What are you going to do with yourself now?”

  Holliwell poured himself a little scotch and ice water. In the blue sky beyond his window, fleecy January clouds were speeding over Manhattan.

  “Maybe I’ll walk over to Eighth Avenue. For some twenty-dollar fellatio.”

  “You’re kidding, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

  “Well, I wish I was up there with you. And I wish I could go along.”

  “Marty told me that Paul Robeson just died.”

  “My God, was he gloating about it?”

  “He was sort of gloating.”

  “Listen,” she said. “Did he ask you to do any work for them?”

  “He had something up his sleeve. I turned him down cold.”

  “Did you let him know you were mad at him?”

  “I wasn’t mad at him.”

  “I think they have a hell of a lot of nerve,” she said.

  “I love you,” Holliwell told her. “Take care.”

  “I love you too. You take care too.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed, drinking still more whiskey and thinking about his conversation with Nolan. Shortly he began to wonder what Marty had been writing in that hootch outside of Hue, what he had meant by the modern world and by being at home in it. And by “the Jew.”

  A great deal of profoundly fractured cerebration had gone down in Vietnam. People had been by turns Fascist mystics, Communist revolutionaries and junkies; at certain times, certain people had managed to be all three at once. It was the nature of the time—the most specious lunacy had been conceived, written and enacted on both sides of the Pacific. Most of the survivors were themselves again, for what it was worth. No one could be held totally responsible for his utterances during that time.

  The Jew was presumably the one who squatted on the estaminet, blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in Antwerp. Holliwell knew him; his name was Sy, he had once run a newspaper stand on the corner of Dyckman Street and Broadway. Sy had lived almost across the hall from Holliwell and his mother in a cheap hotel in Washington Heights for ten years and Holliwell still half suspected that Sy had been his mother’s lover. He had never asked.

  For years, he had worked for Sy at the paper stand and they had conducted a running discourse on the state of the world at mid-century. Holliwell had learned the words of the “Internationale” from Sy but whenever Holliwell mentioned church or churchly things Sy would smile with lupine contempt.

  “They pound that shit into your head. At that school you go to.”

  Sy was a Communist, he had been an organizer in the merchant marine during the war. Holliwell had found Sy’s being a Communist appalling. He would bait Sy with the Hitler-Stalin pact, the Katyn massacre, forced-labor camps, the NKVD.

  When the trucks brought bound stacked papers to the curb, Sy would cut the twine from them with a sharpened knuckle-duster, baring his teeth at the red banner of Hearst’s Journal-American.

  “That school—they pound that shit into your head.”

  They would stand hunched over the stacks, in ink-stained aprons full of sweaty change, their backs to the ice-cold sour wind from the Bronx breweries.

  “What do you know about the Soviet Union?” Sy would ask. “You ever been there?”

  Stung, Holliwell would play his trump.

  “What do I know about Germany and Auschwitz and like that? I never been there either.”

  Sy would stick his hands in his pea-coat pockets with the same wolfish grimace.

  “Go ahead—be a Fascist. Be an anti-Semite. They pound that shit into your head.”

  But he was not at home in the modern world.

  On one of his last visits to New York—it had been a few years before—Holliwell had gotten drunk to the point of riotous indulgence and he had undertaken a sentimenal journey uptown. He had found himself walking around Fort Tryon Park in the fading light, feeling perfectly safe, and everywhere he turned he had seen vistas that were part of his interior landscape, all the scenes of his early adventures imaginary and real. Immediately, he had realized that the neighborhood had nothing for him anymore.

  Then he had seen Sy on a bench along Broadway in a black overcoat too warm for the weather and a cloth cap out of The Grapes of Wrath.

  Sy had asked after his mother. “Alive?”

  She was dead, Holliwell had told him. She had gone back to Glasgow on her Social Security and died there.

  He had said to Sy: “I thought you’d be in Florida.”

  And Sy had said forget Florida. The fucking animals, they hunt me on the street. They want to break down my door and put a rope around my neck. The scumbags, they ruined the neighborhood, they ruined the city. Fucking Lindsay.

  His broken nose was sprouting gray whiskers. He was old unto death.

  Then Sy had told him the story of Press who ran the drugstore on Manhattan Avenue.

  Press the druggist. Retired, closed the store—he was robbed so often. Visiting his brother on the Concourse. In a car—he wouldn’t dare walk. And the animals got him in his car. Just bang—fuck you, he’s dead. The cops stop the car, they catch the animals, one animal confesses. But Press, they put him in the city dump at Mott Haven—they don’t remember where. The cops can’t find him. The city says we can’t find him, the dump’s too big. A needle in a haystack. He’s there now, under the garbage. A religious Jew. Nice for his family. A fucking dog you bury in the ground.

  While he told the story of Press, Sy looked across Broadway where a Hispanic woman in red boots was leaning against a squad car, talking to the cops inside. Holliwell’s last view of him was walking along behind the woman in the direction of the river, hurrying until he caught up in mid-block and they turned the corner together.

  The hotel where Sy and Holliwell and his mother had lived was still standing. It was a welfare hotel now and the junkies were lined up on a metal rail outside, resting their scarred hams on the pigeon spikes, blowing their noses into Orange Julius napkins.

  This time he would refrain from sentimental journeys and gestures. Sy would be dead now, like his mother.

  He took his drink to the window to look down at the patch of Central Park that was visible from his room. The lights were going on; the lawns darkening. It was remotely possible, he thought, the depression and the war years being what they were, his mother being who she was—that Sy was his father. But it was unlikely. There had once existed, at least legally, a person called Michael J. Holliwell who was his father of record.

  The thought of Sy made him feel like mourning, really like weeping. Drunk again, boozy ripe, ready to sniffle with promiscuous fervor over lost fathers and hillbilly songs. He put the glass down. The juice was turning on him altogether, softening him up; it was all catching up with him. His past was dead and his present doing poorly. In his briefcase was an unfinished address to the Autonomous University of Compostela but lie was too far gone, he decided, to even look at it.

  Hunger made him feel ashamed; he experienced it as further evidence of his frail sensuality. He ate from room service and nearly fini
shed the bottle.

  When he had put the empty tray outside his door, he dutifully took up the briefcase and opened it on his night table. After a moment, he took out the address and set it aside face down. Beneath it in the case were his air tickets and a yellow file folder in which he kept a changing collection of notes and clippings, drawn from the long hours he spent in idle reading. At any one time, Holliwell’s file might contain bits from the Times and the news magazines, religious pamphlets, anything which seemed to him when he read it to have some relevance to the proper study of mankind. Often, when he reread the pieces in his file, he experienced difficulty in recalling why he had clipped them in the first place. If, after a while, he could not use the pieces in an article or introduce them into one of his classes, he would throw the entire stack away.

  The file which Holliwell was bringing with him to Compostela contained only two items—a National Geographic article on Port Moresby and a letter that had appeared in his local alternative newspaper.

  Holliwell took the printed letter from the file and set it before him. “Dear Editor,” it began.

  Now it is evening again and the metal bars that separate we poor shadows from the outside world have slammed shut with a soul chilling echo. Before me lies another night in which moon and stars are only a phantom memory on the ceiling of my cell. During the night I shall experience many things. Some will be the faces of those I have loved and lost, others will be the memories of hatred and violence. And during the long night ahead I will cling to my dreams, hoping to find in the peace of slumber a surcease from the rage that gnaws inwardly at my heart.

  My convict’s world is a lonely one and I would be bold enough to ask of there is a reader (woman, race not important) who would share my lonely hours with me by writing and speaking to me of the outside world from which the so-called justice of our society has banished me.

  Yours truly,

  Arch Rudiger

  #197–46

  Box 56 G.F.

  Farmingdale, Wash.

  Holliwell had found the clipping in his daughter’s room. It had lain for something like a year between her book of the films of Rita Hayworth and her copy of The Last Unicorn until he had finally snatched it up and incorporated it into his collage.

  Once he had read the letter aloud to his wife; she had looked at him, closely suspecting mockery.

  “I hope she answered it,” his wife had said. She had helped to fashion Margaret’s sense of social and moral responsibility.

  Holliwell was quite certain that she had not.

  He lay back on the bed, holding the clipping between his fingers, indulging Arch Rudiger with the pity he felt for himself. It reminded him of a few nights of his own.

  Holliwell had ended by feeling guilty about Arch and he had assuaged his guilt by fantasizing the ideal response.

  Dear Arch 197–46,

  I know that you are a young community male while I am a student at a privileged and elitist woman’s college in the East. My family’s immense wealth and status fill me with shame when I consider the cruel injustice which you have suffered.…

  Holliwell threw the clipping into the wastepaper basket and then tossed the Port Moresby article in after it. He turned on the television set to watch the first part of a World War II movie and fell asleep in the flickering light of burning Germans.

  “Well,” Sister Mary Joseph said, “I don’t believe for a minute that it all ends in the old grave.”

  She and Sister Justin Feeney were sitting in the shade on the mission veranda drinking iced tea. Sister Justin frowned at the sunlit ocean. Mary Joe’s Bronxy certainties drove her to fury.

  “Let’s not talk theology,” she said.

  “Who’s talking theology?”

  “You,” Sister Justin said. “Pie in the sky.”

  Sister Mary Joseph had come down from the mountains around Lake Tapa to talk sense to Justin. Her own situation was very different; her order was strong and adaptable, her dispensary could measure its effectiveness in lives preserved. Arriving at French Harbor she had quickly surmised that the local people were staying away, that something was seriously wrong with Father Charlie Egan and the stories she had heard about the state of the Devotionists on the coast were at least partly true.

  “You gotta have an element of pie in the sky, kiddo,” she told Sister Justin. “That’s part of the basics.”

  Justin shaded her pale blue eyes from the glare of sky and ocean and leaned her chin on her fist.

  Sister Mary Joe stood up and took their tea glasses.

  “You want to talk pragmatism—O.K. we’ll do that.” Holding the glasses between her thumb and fingers, she waved them before Justin’s averted face. “You’re accomplishing nothing. You’re not needed. Am I reaching you now?”

  These were words as hard as Mary Joe commanded and the satisfaction with which she flung them at poor Justin caused her immediate remorse.

  She was rinsing the glasses in the kitchen when Father Egan came in, shuffling toward the icebox, holding a flyswatter absently in his right hand.

  “How’s things, Father?” Sister Mary asked, looking him up and down.

  “My dear Joe,” Egan said. “Things are rich.” He fixed himself a glass of water and gave her a vague smile. “How nice of you to come and visit us.”

  “Beats working,” she told him. “Still going over your book?”

  “Scribble scribble scribble,” the priest said, and retreated back to his room.

  Mary Joe wiped the glasses and went to the refectory to get a stethoscope from her black bag. Then she rapped once on Father Egan’s door and let herself in.

  She found him sitting by his window, the shutters thrown open to the green hillside below, a working bottle of Flor de Cana at his feet. Outside chickens picked among the morning glory vines, an old woman chopped at a stand of plantain with her machete.

  Sister Mary settled her thick body on the window rail.

  “We’re old friends, aren’t we, Father? We can speak plainly to each other.”

  “Yes,” Egan said, “we’re old pals, Joe.” His smile faded and he turned his head to look over his shoulder. “And I won’t have her tyrannizing you. You don’t have to listen to her.”

  “C’mon,” Mary Joseph said, “Justin’s O.K. She’s a good kid.” She opened one of the buttons of his white cotton shirt and pressed the scope over his breastbone. “Let’s talk about you.”

  The beat was feathery and irregular. Egan was in his early sixties; to Mary Joe his heart sounded as though it should belong to a very old man.

  “So how about laying off the sauce?”

  “Ah,” Father Egan said. “You have me there.”

  “Yeah, I got you there, Charlie. And from where I’m standing you look a little portly to me and what do you bet your liver’s enlarged? The right bug would knock you flat on your back.”

  She bent down, picked up the rum and set it down on Egan’s desk beside the crucifix.

  “You need to go home, Father. This kind of life—keep it up and it’ll be curtains.”

  Father Egan scratched his ear and looked out of the window.

  “I mean, what are you guys doing here anyway?” Sister Mary demanded. “Your instructions are to close this joint. This is the religion where people do what they’re told, right?”

  “Yes, well,” Father Egan said, “you see, I thought I’d finish the book before we struck the flag.”

  “Boo for that idea,” the nun said. “Because if you want to finish that book you better strike your flag or whatever—quick.

  “Look,” she told him. “I’ll leave some pills with Justin for you. Take one every four hours instead of the joy juice. But don’t take them both or you’re dead.”

  “Bless you, Joe,” Father Egan said. He said it in a far-off manner that Mary Joe found alarming.

  “God bless you, Charlie,” she said. “Pray for me.”

  She went back to the refectory, put the stethoscope away and carried her b
ag out to the veranda. Sister Justin was still in her chair, staring sadly out to sea, and Mary Joseph suspected she had been crying. Mary Joseph was not very sympathetic.

  From time to time, up at Lake Tapa, Sister Mary had found herself with the obligation to comfort some of the younger and tenderer agents of the Peace Corps. She forgave them for their tears—Tecan was a hard place and they were young and American. First time away from their skateboards, she liked to say.

  But the sight of a nursing nun in tears made her feel ashamed and angry. Tears were for the Tecanecan women, who always had plenty to cry about.

  “Great day in the morning,” she declared, forgetting that she had repented her earlier hardness, “if I lived around here and I needed help I sure wouldn’t try to get it from this balled-up operation. I’d go right straight to the Seventh-Day Adventists or the LSA’s or to somebody who knows what the heck they’re doing.”

  “The LSA’s!” Justin said savagely. “The LSA’s are a bunch of right-wing psalm-singing sons of bitches. They’ve got a picture of the President on their wall, they suck ass with the Guardia and they fink for the CIA.”

  In spite of herself, Mary Joseph blushed.

  “You got a lot of nerve,” she said, “to talk that.”

  Justin looked down at the veranda deck and shielded her eyes. Mary Joe waited for her to calm down and then sat beside her.

  “Look, Justin, the very fact that you have the leisure to sit around and brood should tell you that you’re not doing your job. I mean, great guns, kid—it’s no time or place for ego trips.”

  “Am I ego-tripping?” Justin asked. “Isn’t it supposed to bother me that people starve so America can have Playboy Clubs and bottomless dancing.”

  Sister Mary snickered. “Aw, c’mon,” she said.

  “Maybe I’m putting it stupidly. Doesn’t it bother you?”

  “If it’s true it bothers me. But what do I know? I’m just a pill pusher. So are you. Nobody elected us. You know,” she told Justin, “in many ways you’re a typical Devotionist. You all tend to be very bright and high-strung and short on horse sense.”

  Sister Justin brushed the windblown hair under her checkered bandana.