by Sue Miller
But that need passed, and I turned back, finally, to my work, to our peaceful life together. And it was comfortable, truly comfortable, just as I told Dr. Dusek. And certainly mùch easier for me than it had been earlier, when I was alone and struggling financially, or sleeping with someone who was also doing the deed with several others. So much easier that I did at least know what Will meant when he called the pregnancy inconvenient. It was only very occasionally that I felt that nagging sense of Will’s desire for ownership of my eccentricity, or the impulse to make him pay for it.
Aside from parents, the only members of my family left in Chicago were Mary and Mack. I didn’t see much of her. Partly it was the fact that she was very pregnant. To my surprise, this disturbed me. But also, she continued to work until nearly the end—she was a pediatrician in an HMO—and between that and her marriage, she didn’t have a lot of free time. We did a few things together the last week before she delivered, but I relied much more on Mack for company.
He was a bartender—actually the co-owner of the bar—on the Near North Side. He’d created a tiny, self-sufficient world for himself, and he seemed to live safely and happily in it. I worked for him a dozen or more times when he needed an extra waitress. I liked the work. I’d done it often enough in New York before I got married. It was absorbing and comforting, and as close as I wanted to come at that time to being sexual—the constant bumping into other bodies, turning, reaching around the other “girl.” I liked, too, the music, the dim, smoky intimacy, the slightly risqué banter from the customers.
And I especially liked the hour or so after closing, when Mack and I, sometimes with another bartender or Melanie, the regular waitress, would sit around with most of the lights off and talk. No one was anywhere near ready for bed, even though it was two or three in the morning. We were all keyed up from the hectic pace of the work. And stirred too, I think, by the intimacy of the rhythms we’d set up with each other all night.
When the others were there, the talk was often political, locally political. Mack had been active in his alderman’s losing campaign for office the year before, and he was already thinking about the next election. They talked of Mayor Washington, of the Council Wars, of the abiding power of racial feeling in the city. Though I understood very little of the specifics, it had the fascination for me that Chicago politics always had.
And Mack, so absorbed in it, seemed at peace to me finally, healed almost. I could forget, looking at his face, the occasional uncomfortable moments when I saw the other side of him, the crazy side, the side that seemed to want to throw everything good in his life away. Only every now and then there might be a sudden visible flash of those impulses that had brought two marriages to an end, that had made his second wife say to me after she’d moved out, “I love Mack a lot, but you just can’t live with him.”
One time it was a drunk who wouldn’t leave. It was late. The place had completely emptied except for him. He was loud and seem ready for a fight. He knocked over a couple of the tables. I was frightened and went to stand behind the bar. Mack talked to him gently for a long time, trying to persuade him to go home. He actually got him standing up, got him near the door. But every time he’d mention the need for departure, the drunk’s voice would move higher, shift into a dangerous gear. He’d accuse Mack of trying to get rid of him.
“If you don’t like me,” he said finally, “at least do me the fucking courtesy—the fucking courtesy—to say so.” His feet were widely planted. He held his arms rigid at his sides, his hands balled into fists.
“Oh, no,” I heard Mack say, mildly. “I like you. A lot. You’re one of my favorite people.” And then I could see his face lift with a kind of pleasure: he’d thought of a new approach. “Let’s shake,” he said. “We like each other. Let’s shake on that.”
The drunk was wary, but he extended his hand. As soon as Mack gripped it, his own left hand lifted and punched hard twice, once quickly to the man’s chest, once again under his chin. The man made several strange noises, and his knees buckled. Mack grabbed his crumpling form and half walked, half carried him to the door. Neither Melanie, across the room, nor I seemed to be able to move, and the cold air blew in the open doorway for the entire minute or so Mack was outside. I could see him lower the man carefully into a sitting position on the curb and then bend over him, arranging him as if to make him perfectly comfortable.
Melanie had started to cry. When Mack came in and heard her, saw her, his face changed instantly into a composed kindness that made me think of my father. He went to her and held her, stroked her back. Melanie buried her face in his striped shirt and let him comfort her. She’d been behind Mack when he punched the guy. She’d heard the quick dull whumps, the grunting push of breath out of the drunk’s lungs with the first blow—but she hadn’t seen, as I had, the transforming cruel excitement in Mack’s face the instant before his fist moved.
When Mack and I were alone, we talked about the family. Sometimes he would be doing some final chore—washing glasses, wiping down the stainless-steel sinks behind the bar, checking and restocking the bottles in the vast display along the mirrored wall. There was a pleasant music to this—the steady burble of running water, the clinking of glasses or bottles—and it moved us easily back in time.
I was surprised, always, by his insistence on early, happy memories. Memories of the years before I’d been born, before they knew what was wrong with Randall. Surprised by the power of those memories to change his face, to smooth it into youth again. Once he told me a long story about how he and Liddie had found a bunch of coins under the ice in the square. As he spoke I could imagine the two of them, shapeless in their woolen snowsuits, hunched over the discovery. Then stomping the clear ice to get at the bright coins: quarters, dimes, half-dollars. He said that every time they freed one, they’d carry it carefully across the ice to Lainey, who was sitting on the front steps in the winter sun in her old blue coat. “I remember how huge the square seemed then, how far away Mother looked, watching us coming across all that snow, carrying our treasure.” His expression was as awestruck, as deeply pleased, as it must have been when he lived the moment.
He, in tum, was startled by the pain, the fighting, the discord, in my memories. He had forgotten the time he cut his foot. He hadn’t been there when Randall pushed Lainey into the newell post. “The amount of blood alone is appalling,” he said.
I’d been to see Dr. Dusek only a few days before this. I’d been thinking ever since of what she’d said about the importance of struggle, of pain, in our family’s life. I said, “Well, maybe that’s what you get when you go into therapy. You remember all the gory things you’d really rather forget.”
“One good reason I’ll never try it.”
I watched him for a moment. He was moving steadily behind the counter, washing the glasses in a quick, practiced sequence. His longish dark hair fell forward across his forehead, masking his eyes.
“Well, you know the argument,” I said at last. “All that pushed-under stuff gonna get your mama one day.”
He laughed. “I’m sure that’s true. I’m sure you’re right. But I sort of feel, at this point—you know—it’s what I’m made of.” He lifted his face, and his motion stopped for a few seconds. “Pushed-under stuff.” He was still smiling, looking over at me. “I’m like some stretch of the city built on polluted fill, fill packed with PCBs and toxic waste. But I am all built up, see? And you’ve got your choice. You want to get rid of the bad stuff, you’ve got nothing left. Nothing.”
He was sober, suddenly. “But you’re right. It is true. It does come back. It all comes back anyway. In dreams sometimes. Same with certain memories of Vietnam. It’s all distorted, of course. Sometimes, you know, I rescue myself from things that really happened, things I couldn’t escape from then. I’m doing things the way I wished I’d done them at the time.” His voice became abruptly deep and ministerial. “Or I’m leaving undone those things I should not have done.”
I brought o
ver a tray of dirty glasses and stood for a moment leaning on the bar to be close to him, hoping that brought him comfort. I was afraid to ask him anything about Vietnam. Once I’d said to him that it must have been awful in battle, and he’d looked at me as though I were a stranger. “Battle,” he’d said contemptuously. “I was never in battle. I just tried to kill people who were trying to kill me.”
When he went on now, his voice was his own. “Sometimes, though, it’s worse than it was,” he said. “Sometimes it’s as though I’m seeing some concentrated version of whatever was evil in me at a given moment. Sometimes it’s stuff I don’t even want to think about in the morning. Very interesting ways, for example, of causing people pain. Or sexual things.” His face had gone dead. Then he looked at me. “Do you have that?”
“Sure,” I said. “Horrible stuff. But I always try to remember it. To figure it out. But that’s from therapy again.”
“Yeah. Therapy.”
“It brings you good things too,” I said. And then backed up, raising my hands. “I’m not trying to convert you. Honest.”
“Don’t,” he said. “Besides, I get the good stuff too.” He slid my tray closer to him and his arms shifted their movement, started to pick up the glasses. “I dreamed about Randall not so long ago.”
“Did you?”
“Yeah. Somehow …” He looked up, and the faintest line of concentration moved in his forehead. “This was it: He was Mary’s baby—she’d been pregnant with him, that’s why he was here. But he was adult too. You know, magical stuff. And he was walking past the house, our old house. He walked right past me. I was on the porch or something. And I called to him, but he didn’t stop. So I ran and caught up with him and grabbed him, turned him around. I was tremendously excited, touching him. Not surprised at all, you know, just happy. And he was looking at me with his same face, but it was, like, intelligent. Normal. And I said, ‘Don’t you know me, Randall? I’m your brother. It’s me. I’m your brother, Mack.’
“And his eyes got … just very tender and concerned. And he reached over and touched my face and he said, ‘But what happened to you? What’s wrong? You look so worn out.’
“And I realized that he didn’t know me because I was older, older than I’d been. I’d aged. And he thought it was … a disease or something. Anyway, that seemed funny to me; I actually laughed, in the dream. And then I said to him, ‘I’ve been alive. I’ve just been alive, that’s all.’ And he looked so sorry for me, like he was the one who pitied me.
“When I woke up I didn’t remember it. But I was just so fucking glad; I knew something good had happened, that I’d been dreaming something I wanted to get back to. And then I did, I remembered why, that I’d seen him again. That he’d talked to me. That he was all right. Cured.”
“God, what a wonderful dream,” I said.
“Yeah. Done entirely on my own. No therapy.” He smiled for a moment. “You know, the only other person I’ve told that to was Mother. That I’d dreamed of Randall, talking.”
“Was she excited?” I asked.
He laughed and stopped moving again. “You might say so. She said—and this is a quote—‘Oh, what did he say?’”
He had imitated perfectly her eager inflection.
Afterward, driving home in my mother’s car, I thought about her response to Mack’s dream. The night sky was black over the lake, away from the glare of streetlights on the Outer Drive, and the moon rode along with me, speeding south too, leaving a trail like a blur of sequins on the water. I was thinking of how different my father’s reaction to the dream would have been if he had been the one Mack told it to. Of how he would have seen it as a clue to Mack’s way of thinking about himself, about himself and Randall. But to my mother, it could still have a nearly biblical quality. She was like some pre-Freudian who believes that dreams, even the dreams of others, carry messages for her. That word can come this way—if not from God, then from a beloved son. I imagined her listening to Mack as though he were bringing this kind of report from another world, a world where Randall was safe and forever young and could speak, in a shy, unused voice. “Oh, what did he say?” she had asked. I could see her face as she waited for Mack’s answer—open, ready to believe, grateful for the word Mack brought her, her first meaningful words from Randall’s lips.
Chapter 14
November-December 1968
At the moment when Mack’s plane lifted from the runway at O’Hare and all the buildings and streets began to fall backward—to become toylike miniatures—Mack was elsewhere. He was pushing one steel blade after another across the gleaming gunmetal of the ice, sending up the slightest splash with each stroke.
He had the rink nearly to himself: there was a group of squealing teenage girls, four or five of them, at the far end; and a small child, lumpy in a green snowsuit, staggering on her ankles, making her way slowly around the loop, her mother holding on to one hand. After each tortured circuit the two of them disappeared for a break into the heated changing room.
But Mack never stopped. On the long straight runs he leaned forward, arms swinging, to build up speed. On the curves, he watched the same skate cut in front of the other over and over in a precise hissing repetition of angle and force. Already his legs ached from the unaccustomed exercise—he’d done no more physically, this fall, than occasionally throwing a Frisbee with his roommate at Harvard. But he pushed himself harder, enjoying the strain, enjoying his own speed, elaborately enjoying this moment, so that he wouldn’t have to think of all the other things that were happening somewhere else—the plane rising above the cloud cover to blue sky and blinding sun; his mother at home, trying to invent reasons for his not showing up; his room at school, darkened, stale-smelling, empty, waiting.
And he didn’t; he didn’t think of any of it. There was gay music, something by Strauss, perhaps, pumping in over the loudspeakers, echoing in the cavernous empty space under the stands. And he was sweating, adrenalized, thrilled by his own speed, by the emptiness of his mind.
He wasn’t dressed for this—his hands were bare, his long, uncovered hair flew back in the wind he made with his steady forward motion. He’d chosen this abruptly, gratefully, when he’d spotted the little flag trembling on its pole above the unused football field, the flag which had signaled throughout his youth that the long, sheltered rink under the stands was open. If he hadn’t come to the rink, he might have gone home and let his mother drive him to the airport—it could have happened that easily. Chance. Luck. He believed this as he went around and around. The thought made him laugh out loud, and the teenage girls, who had been watching him intermittently, laughed too, at him, with him.
Mack was the last to leave—the music had been turned off for some time, and twice the student manager’s voice had come over the loudspeaker, asking that the ice be cleared. Finally he cut half the lights, and Mack did one last loop, standing straight, gliding with his feet together, listening to the slowing sibilance of their doubled slice. When he sat down to unlace the skates in the changing room, his legs jumped and trembled against the bench, and his first steps in his own heavy shoes were awkward and uncertain, brought him staggering against a rectangular silver radiator on his way out.
But once in the dark, cold air again, he took long strides, heading down the empty streets away from home. He realized abruptly that he was hungry, hungrier than he’d been straight through this Thanksgiving holiday, in which he’d felt like an outsider at each family meal amid his noisy, dramatic sisters. They were full of exclamations, excitement, pronouncements—someone was weird beyond words, a complete dink. Or unbelievably groovy, super. He’d shoveled in what he had to and fled each evening to be with Al or Rob or Soletski. To get drunk or stoned.
He found himself now thinking of hamburgers, of thick, stinking slices of onion, of half-sours, potato chips. He turned east down Fifty-fifth Street toward Blackstone and then walked up to a little bar and restaurant called The Eagle. It was brightly lighted and quiet—a Sunday-night
crowd. There were two men at the ornate bar, and only four of the tables were full. Mack could see that if he sat at the bar he’d have to talk to the men—they were speaking loudly down its length to each other—so he chose a small table near the window.
The waitress was young, not attractive, but she called Mack sir in a small, sweet voice. He ordered a beer, then the hamburger special. When it came he ordered another beer, and then another; and then he ordered a second hamburger, plain this time, with another beer. The waitress served him silently, politely, and he smiled a tender smile of real gratitude at her.
He was sitting, full finally, sipping this last beer and watching the sparse walking traffic on the street outside, when a middle-aged couple, making their way to the door from the back of the deep room, stopped at his table. The man touched his shoulder and had his hand extended as Mack struggled to his feet, trying to place the face and then succeeding: Mr. Stahl, the father of Annie, his high school girlfriend. Mrs. Stahl stood smiling just behind her husband’s right shoulder. They all chatted. Mack felt proud of the smile lifting his face: how pleasant he was being! He inquired about Annie. She was at Northwestern, in her senior year, like him. She was happy there. They got to see a lot of her. They asked how he was, what his plans were after graduation.
He hoped his face was falling into thoughtful lines when he said, “Still formulating.” He wanted to laugh.
Mr. Stahl nodded. “I know how it is. You need a strategy now. This Vietnam thing. You can’t just do what you might have done. There’s too high a price, with this goddamned war.” He patted Mack on the shoulder. His hair was longer now than it had been when Mack was dating Annie. His sideburns curled wildly down his cheeks and made him look younger—much younger than his wife—in spite of the gray in them.