But the world conspired against me that November. It started with my father, who wanted me off and away, because he had his own foul mood to contend with, and I was doing nothing to ease it. What Judas had done to Christ, what I had done to Ben Gennaro, Harry Truman did to my father that election day.
“My God,” he would say over his paper at the breakfast table, “the lunatics are in charge of the asylum for good now. My God, what’s to become of us? I ask you,” not really asking, but declaring his anguish this way, all the anguish of the principled man facing the aberrations of the scoundrel voters, and of the contributor to the campaign fund discovering that he was to get no return on his investment.
It was my uncle Charles who had persuaded him to make that contribution, so the Asquiths received the larger share of his vitriol, but there was enough left over to splash on me, sunk as I was in the misery of my own plight. A week before the holiday my father came into my room holding a letter. “The Schupfields want to know if you’ll be up there for Thanksgiving,” he said.
“No, I won’t.”
“Oh?” said my father. “And why not?”
“Because I’d rather stay home.”
“I see. You’d rather stay home with your sour face and your nasty temper and that sick look about you instead of getting out to the country where the fresh air might do you some good. Well, I’d rather you didn’t. I’d damn well rather you went off somewhere and got some color in your face and came back acting like a live one instead of a dying pup. And I’m sending them a card to that effect right now.”
I said, “You asked me what I wanted to do, and I told you. If you already had your mind made up, you didn’t have to bother about asking me.”
My father poked out his jaw at me. “Don’t you use that tone of voice to me, damn it. I asked you, because I expected a sensible answer from you.” He looked around the room with a puzzled expression. “What’s that stink? Perfume?”
“Yes.”
The box of Mia’s letters was open on my desk, and his nose like that of a pointer unerringly led him to it. He picked up an envelope. “Ah,” he said, “love’s old sweet song.”
“Put it down. It doesn’t belong to you.”
He turned over the envelope and studied it. “Marian Gennaro, St. Cecilia’s. Well, you seem to have good enough taste in that direction. She’s a pretty little thing, isn’t she?”
“That’s my letter,” I said, ready to strike him dead where he stood. “Put it down.”
He flipped the envelope back into the box, in no way embarrassed. “Yes, in a couple of years she’s going to be a real beauty. But she ought to know better than to soak her letters in this kind of smelly stuff. You can tell her that when you see her Thanksgiving. Schupfield wrote that her family’s expecting you to dinner then.”
That was my father’s part in the conspiracy. After that, others joined it, never knowing how they were undoing me that strange Thanksgiving Day. Ben did not come home on furlough; some uniformed bigwig decided that it was more important for him to play in a service football game. The Gennaros insisted that I spend the whole day with them, so I could be close to Mia and breathe her in without daring to touch her. And Phyllis—Aldo’s heifer, Phyllis—gave a party in her home that evening, so that I could touch Mia, hold her when we danced, sit with her close against me, and lose my head completely.
I took Mia home at midnight while the party was still in progress. We walked the dark cold road, two somnambulists heated by a mounting fever, holding hands and saying nothing. At the door of the house she said to me, “It’s cold. I’ll make some cocoa,” and I followed her through the silent house into the kitchen. Still in her coat she took the cocoa tin from a shelf and put it on the table, and then moved against me, her mouth open, her eyes closed, and we kissed, clinging to each other, hands and lips never at rest.
There was a small room off the kitchen—half closet, half bedroom—windowless, furnished with only a battered chest of drawers and a cot for the slavey or poor relative who helped with the spring cleaning each year, and there on that creaking, iron-hard cot we completed our journey of discovery. First discovery, then exploration, everything going much better this time, until it was all over and the reaction set in. The first time it had been a reaction like the warning hiss of a cold wind blowing through scorched grass. Now it was a thunderclap of reaction, a storm beating down everything beneath it.
I fled shuddering before it. Mia and the untouched tin of cocoa were left behind, but Ben Gennaro was with me. When I stood panting in the kitchen of my own house, the Schupfields sleeping overhead, Ben Gennaro, naked, carved of mahogany, confronted me. Not me alone. The infinite series of Daniel Egans was there with me, chittering like bats in my ear. And what we all knew was that this is when a man gets drunk. He cannot just stand shaking in the middle of limbo. This was the time and place to get drunk.
I wanted wine, remembering the feeling it could give me, but there was none to be had. All I could find on the pantry shelf was a pint bottle of applejack almost full. I uncapped it and drank, swallow after swallow, the raw taste of it like rotten apples diluted in kerosene stinging my throat and making me gag. I allowed myself a long breath, watching myself as I stood there, marveling at myself. I was the vortex of a storm. I was a man suffering a man’s fate and taking a man’s measures against it. The Daniel Egans observing me mocked me. They snickered and held their noses and rolled their eyes at the drama I was playing, but I rejected them. I finished the rest of the bottle and waited to see what would happen.
Nothing happened. I waited and waited, and still nothing happened. My pulse thudded in my ears, my throat burned from alcohol, and Ben Gennaro was still there with me. I went into the kitchen and sat down on a chair, and he remained with me. I closed my eyes tight and shook my head, and I discovered that he was in my head, there was no turning away from him. He was there, his naked loins exposed to me, and my eyes fixed with fascination on them added to my shame. He was there, incredulous at what I had done and done again, terrible in his wrath.
That was when I knew that one of us must die. It came as a fleeting idea at first, the wisp of an idea elusive as smoke, and then it froze into cold hard clarity so that I could see it clearly and contemplate it. One of us must die. I could not live with Ben Gennaro in me, and he could not live unavenged. One of us must die, and I accepted with pain and pleasure, with sorrow and triumph the knowledge of which of us it must be.
I went out into the night and discovered that I was still holding the empty bottle. I put the bottle into the pocket of my coat, feeling it would be disgraceful to mar the silence of the night with the sound of shattering glass. The road to the river lay before me, deep-rutted, patches of wetness on it glazed by frost, and I walked downhill on it, then trotted, then ran, bounding wildly yards at a time, keeping my footing by a miracle on the rocks that thrust up here and there, on the twists and turns that I had to sense in the darkness. I ran frantically and gloriously, feeling that I was part of the wind that hammered at the trees around me, feeling stronger than I had ever felt in my life, a young buck outrunning the hunter.
At the water’s edge I took off my jacket and shoes and flung them aside. The river welcomed me, the small ripples breaking against the bank whispering an invitation. I stepped into it, and the shock of cold on my feet burned like live coals. I hesitated only a moment, and then with raging resolution I plunged forward. I felt my feet skid on the mossy rock under the surface, felt with blank amazement the loss of balance as I went over sideways, throwing out an arm against the coming impact, felt the impact and the blast of pain as my arm shattered under it, and I screamed at the feeling.
I lay stunned, icy water lapping at me, warm blood trickling down my cheek, my arm flaming with pain, and one leg, as I learned when I tried to move it, dragging uselessly. This was not what I had wanted. This was not a glorious death but a flogging by the gods, and I fought against it, cursing them and their works, weeping helpless tears a
s I dragged myself out of the water.
Earl Schupfleld found me there the next day at noon, he and half a dozen neighbors who had been scouring the roads and fields for me once Dora Schupfleld had found my bedroom empty and my bed unslept in. They thought I was dead at first, unconscious and half-frozen and battered as I was, and some of their initial panic must have been communicated to my father when they phoned him about it. When he and Margaret arrived at the hospital in Maartenskill that evening they were both badly shaken, but it was a strange thing to see in my father. He kept his voice down with an effort, he paced the floor heavily, working his hands together and now and then shooting glances full of concern at me, and at one point he actually patted my head with a sort of rough affection, the first time I could ever remember his doing that.
When, a few days later, he confided his feelings to me I knew that Margaret must have given him a good talking to. He was, for Neil Egan, surprisingly restrained. He hoped that I had learned once and for all the stupidity of getting drunk. There was no use of my denying that I had acted on drunken impulse that night, because the empty bottle was there in evidence. But he was willing to forgive and forget. He was a reasonable man; he knew that youth would have its fling, and I must have been taught a good lesson by mine.
But all that was only a side issue. The fact remained that I was obviously a badly disturbed boy, and that was what we had to face. Why the hell any son of his should be badly disturbed was beyond him, but there the fact was, and something had to be done about it. And while he didn’t take any stock in a lot of the nonsense that a bunch of overpaid psychiatrists were foisting on the innocent public, he felt that maybe they could do something to help me. After all, if they couldn’t, who could? So when I got back to the city—
I had a horrified picture of myself facing some bearded and bespectacled psychiatrist the way Mia faced her priest at confession. “Oh Jesus, not that,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not crazy. All right, maybe I got drunk and did something stupid, but that’s not like being crazy, is it?”
“Who said anything about being crazy? But you are disturbed, aren’t you? Damn it, you can’t deny that, the way you’ve been going around.”
“That’s what Margaret says, isn’t it? She’s full of that kind of talk now that she’s taking those psychology courses. She’s probably got a crush on one of her professors, that’s all it amounts to. And when it comes to spending a lot of money just to have—”
I knew his Achilles’ heel and I hit it dead center. “Well,” he said, weakening as I watched, “Margaret’s a bright girl. She knows about these things, and I don’t. All I want to do is what’s right.”
“I know. But I’m not disturbed. You don’t have to pay anybody a lot of money to tell me I am.”
“You’re sure of that?” my father said. He studied my face as if he could find my complexes imprinted on it. “After all, there’s nothing to be ashamed of if you’ve got—ah—some kind of emotional thing. It happens. It happens.”
“No,” I said, “I’m fine. Just tell Margaret to leave me alone. That’s all.”
He accepted this with considerable relief. “Well, if you say so,” he said, and then stood frowning at me and slowly shaking his head from side to side. “Applejack,” he said at last. “A goddam pint of applejack. It’s a wonder you didn’t drop dead in your tracks.”
The Gennaros came regularly, bringing Mia with them, and she and I spoke to each other politely and distantly across the room before the others. I was ashamed to have her see me looking like this, swathed in bandages, yet I was glad in a way, because the pity in her eyes made her that much lovelier when I looked at her. It was a week before she managed to visit me alone. There was a nurse in the room taking an unconscionably long time over some trays and glasses, but as soon as she was gone Mia came swiftly to me and pressed her cheek tight against mine.
“You did it on account of me,” she whispered. “It wasn’t because you were drunk. It was on account of me, wasn’t it?”
“No.”
“Yes, it was. And it was a sin. Didn’t you know you’d go right to hell if you were killed that way? Didn’t you even think of it?”
“I don’t believe in hell.”
Mia looked around in quick alarm as if she expected to find the Recording Angel there marking this down in his book. “You do! Don’t say things like that. Oh, you’re so crazy, and I love you so much. Why do you have to be so crazy?”
“I don’t know. My sister wants me to go to a psychiatrist and find out. But sometimes I like being crazy. I mean, times like this.”
“But you scared me. If anything happened, we couldn’t get married.”
“I guess we couldn’t. But nothing happened, so it’s all right, isn’t it?”
“No, because now I’m not sure what you’ll do. Don’t you want to marry me?”
“Yes.”
“All right then, you’ve got to stop being so crazy. And I’ll help, Danny darling, cross my heart I will. We mustn’t spoil it any more. It’s no good that way. It’s not like with Aldo and Ben and the pigs they go with. I don’t want it to be that way. It’s dirty. Don’t you think it’s dirty?”
“I guess so.”
“Don’t say it that way. Say it so I know you mean it.”
“Yes,” I said, wondering about it, “it’s dirty.”
“And this way we can just be sort of engaged and see each other and write letters, and it’ll be all right. You can even give me a ring, and I’ll wear it around my neck. It’s all right that way.”
“What kind of ring?”
“I don’t care. A nice one.”
“Suppose somebody sees it?”
“Then I’ll say we’re going steady. We are, aren’t we? And nobody in the family’ll mind, either. They all like you a lot. You should have seen how scared they were when you got hurt.”
I said, “Did you write Ben about it?”
“I had to. It would have looked funny if I didn’t. Anyhow, Papa told him on the telephone first, so what difference does it make?”
The weight of Ben Gennaro was back on my chest again. “No difference, I guess.” Then I said, holding hard to my one consolation, “Anyhow, we’re going steady.”
That was how it was for the five years that followed. We made a nice triangle, Mia and Ben and I. Not Ben really, but the image of Ben in me, because when he returned from Korea, a full-fledged hero, it was that image I was still a slave to, and not the Ben Gennaro that the rest of the world around me knew and worshiped. I was a slave to an image, a pressure on the chest, eyes that looked mockingly into mine, seeing but not seeing. Until the last night we ever looked at each other eye to eye.
The party was over, the girls had been taken to the hotel where they would be berthed for the night, the Iobacchoi house, a temple to Bacchus draped with now listless streamers of crepe paper, was silent in the small hours as I followed Ben up to our room. We undressed in the smothering June heat and lay down on our beds in the darkness for a final cigarette.
Ben said, “You going straight up to Maartenskill tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so. Well, you do the driving while you’re on the highway. I wish to hell the old man had never bought Mia that car. She drives like a real nut.”
“I know. But I always do the driving when I’m with her.”
“Old faithful,” said Ben. “Hell, I don’t blame you. There wasn’t anything here tonight that came within a mile of her. You pick any Hollywood dame you want, there isn’t one of them has what she has.”
“I know.”
“I’ll bet you do. And not only you. There’s somebody else around here got a light in his eye. This Claiborne fag was making a real play for her. I hate that kind of creepy bastard keeps one girl cooling off on the couch while he works on another. And always the little gentleman. Always there with the profile and the pretty words. You’re smart you’ll keep her away from hi
m.”
“He doesn’t mean anything to her.”
“So you say. But she’s a woman, Danny boy, a real good-looking woman who can be just as dumb as the next one about a man. He comes along and gives her a good pitch, and then what?”
“All right,” I said. “Then what?”
Ben laughed. “You wouldn’t know, would you? Hell, maybe I did too good a job on you.”
I let that penetrate, and then I sat up swinging my feet off the bed, and I faced him in the dim light of the room. He lay on his back, naked as I was, the cigarette a small glow near his lips.
“What does that mean?” I said.
“Ah, come on, Danny boy. I’m making a joke. I’m kidding. Where’s your sense of humor?”
I said, “I asked you a question. I want an answer to it.”
“You mean about my doing a job on you?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“Hell,” he said a little angrily, “you ought to know what I meant. You’re old enough by now, aren’t you?”
“Am I?”
“Well, you’re not sweet sixteen any more, the way you were when I joined up with the Air Force and told you to play watchdog with Mia. That’s all I meant. I knew damn well you and she had a thing for each other, and the best way I could figure to keep you out of trouble was to make you Boy Scout in charge. I was never worried about her getting the works from anybody else. The only one I was worried about was you, so I fixed it up like a real genius, and you ought to be goddam grateful I did. It didn’t hurt you any, did it? You could always work it off on some other babe, if you had to.”
I sat there looking at him, and when my cigarette suddenly burned my fingertips I relished the sting of it. I pressed it out carefully in the ashtray on the night table and stood up, feeling the fury and the wild comedy and the grotesque irony of it churning in me.
The Winter After This Summer Page 11