Mrs. Van Vliet glanced at Caroline. Caroline pleated her damask napkin. Mrs. Van Vliet looked down the length of table at Gene. “You’re active against the loyalty oath, aren’t you, Gene?”
“Pretty much,” he said. “Yes.”
“Then you won’t sign?”
His twitchy stomach knotted. The sixty-four-dollar question.
In theory, of course, he’d told himself he would burn first. Gene, however, was totally self-honest. The implications of not signing, like the Titanic going down, had created a disastrous suction, threatening to pull him under. Who would he be if not Professor Matheny, author of critically well-received, nonprofitable novels?
Therefore his firmness of tone surprised him as he answered, “It wouldn’t be possible to, no.”
“I see,” Mrs. Van Vliet said.
“Not that I’d be perjuring—”
Fragile laughter shattered his reply. “Gene, Gene. I never believed you were slipping the Communist Manifesto to your freshmen along with their Sandburg. Why won’t you?”
“The State Constitution says no oath, declaration, or test shall be required of us, so it’s illegal. And the end of academic freedom—hiring and firing of faculty after this will be at the whim of the regents.” Abruptly he stopped.
“Go on,” Mrs. Van Vliet encouraged.
Gene’s long, pleasant face bore more than its customary resemblance to a hound dog. He chewed his thumbnail.
“It’s not that logical. I think the Oath is unjust to people who may have done something in the past, when it was legal and feasible. This is ex post facto.” He raised his heavy goblet, taking a sip of water. “It’s even more. The whole thing was started by a bunch of bigots in Sacramento and Washington—Tenney, J. Parnell Thomas, our honorable congressman, Richard Nixon. I’ll be damned if I’ll sign any paper that sets apart any group of people—whether I agree with their ideology or not—to bolster those hacks.”
Mrs. Van Vliet’s smile glowed with warmth. “Gene, I do like you.”
“I’ll be fired.”
She agreed.
“I’ll have to try my luck at some other campus,” he said with deep uncertainty.
Joseph bore in a magnificent crown of charlotte russe. Mrs. Van Vliet shook her head. Caroline, darting a defiant smile at Gene, carved herself a double portion. She was on a diet, she was always on a diet and telling Gene not to let her eat. He took a sliver.
“Teaching,” said Mrs. Van Vliet, “is not the only career.”
“It’s the only one I’m trained for, Mrs. Van Vliet.” His fork probed whipped cream.
Mrs. Van Vliet gazed at him.
And Gene understood the conversation was up to him. “I don’t know what I’m meant to say.”
“Try.”
“By other careers, you mean Van Vliet’s?”
His hostess nodded assent.
“I’ve had no business training. None.”
“Gene, to my knowledge there is not a single graduate of the Harvard School of Business running a supermarket in this area.” She paused. “The average Californian consumes fifteen hundred pounds of food a year. Van Vliet’s job is simply seeing he buys it at the lowest possible price.”
Caroline was watching intently.
Mrs. Van Vliet said, “It’s not a pretentious business, ours. The profits are in mills, not pennies. Once I remember my husband debating over some new office furniture. Finally he said, ‘We’ll have to move a million dollars worth of goods to pay for this.’ And he didn’t buy it. Food is the most basic human need.”
Mrs. Van Vliet’s faintly mocking tone angered Gene. She knew, and was using, his weaknesses. (Or his strengths.)
“You’re ringing Pavlov’s bell, Mrs. Van Vliet.”
Smiling, she bent her head. Through exquisite white hair the skull showed pink. And this was what calmed Gene. For all the imperiousness, wit, wealth, her pink skull proved her mortal.
They returned to the tapestry-hung living room for coffee.
“Well?” asked Mrs. Van Vliet.
Gene realized she’d been staring at him.
“You have no idea what an expressive face it is, Gene.” She paused delicately. “I take it you intend to make an honest woman out of my grandchild?”
Caroline turned crimson.
Gene, too, felt the blood rising. In those days such a remark, however lightly spoken, wasn’t for laughs: it was cause for a man to pick his ushers and buy the ring. From one fading tapestry a haloed angel beckoned.
“You’ll need a job to support her.”
Gene nodded.
“And selling food,” she said, “can never bring equal fulfillment with untangling allegory from the Great White Whale?”
Gene yearned to follow the beckoning angel into ancient threads. “I wasn’t thinking that.”
“Something very close, then,” said Mrs. Van Vliet. She set her demitasse on a bowlegged table. “Los Angeles is growing. We recently opened two markets in Watts.” A colored area, and perhaps the most telling argument with Gene.
His gray eyes looked into space. This, too, he thought, is coercion. Caroline, who for once had remained totally silent, moved to the couch where he was sitting.
“No wonder you were nervous,” he said. “You’d like me to, wouldn’t you?”
“Luv, she wanted me to put it to you. I said absolutely no.”
They were parked on Cordell Road, in front of her house. On the radio, Frankie Laine wished to go where the wild goose went.
“I’d be good at it,” he said thoughtfully.
“Don’t be ridic!”
“I would.” He reached an arm around the lightly padded shoulders of her red Ann Fogarty suit. “Caroline, can you understand this? I want writing—and teaching—too much. When you want something too much, you’re a little terrified of it. In business I’d have the necessary contempt. I’d do well, but I’d feel wasted.”
“You would be! It’s grubbing. The way my uncles talk for hours about buying truckloads of toilet paper for three cents less a case!” She kissed his ear. “I love you the way you are.”
“I’d have a job. A living.”
“You’d be a sellout.”
“You don’t want me to?”
“Never.”
“Then I’ll stick,” he said.
“Good,” she whispered, and held him with her full strength. He turned his back to the wheel, and they were kissing hungrily. After a few minutes he whispered, “Are they sleeping, your parents?”
“Like dormice.”
Caroline and Gene, arms around one another, walked through the darkness, pausing to embrace at the back door, she unlocking it, he following quietly into the unused maid’s room. An hour later, smiling and flushed, they emerged. Caroline, rather noisily, unlocked the front door, bidding Gene goodnight.
6
The next morning a note was folded in Gene’s pigeonhole:
After your section come to my office
LFD
Gene stared at cheap, yellow-lined paper. He’s read “Troopship,” he thought.
“Come in,” said LeRoy Duquesne, continuing to scan a blue book. Through an open window came the between-class roar. Gene sat opposite the desk. The hubbub quieted. The electric clock rang. Harsh, abrasive. LeRoy Duquesne’s red pencil scratched a grade. “Troopship” has gone down with all hands, Gene thought, otherwise wouldn’t he have dropped a life preserver?
“LeRoy, I’ll come back.”
“Wait,” LeRoy Duquesne ordered, picking up the next blue book to correct.
Gene waited. What’s the worst thing that can happen, he asked himself, seeking nourishment from his thumbnail. The very worst. He’ll say it’s garbage. Oh God, God. Gene hunched in the comfortless oak chair. For the first time he understood that the quiet man who cannot sing great paeans, the man who cannot dance to the glory of the gods, offers up his gift on paper. And if the gods find his gifts wanting? Gene’s mouth went dry. Another blue book shuffled.
<
br /> The clock was ticking ten thirty-four as LeRoy Duquesne leveled the corrected stack. Without raising his leonine head, he inquired, “Are you still working on that petition?”
We’re friends, he knows I am, Gene thought, confused. “Getting noplace fast,” he replied, “but sure.”
“Drop it.”
“Come again?”
“Drop it.”
“LeRoy, I don’t understand.”
“Tear the petition in two, in four, in eight. Incinerate the scraps.”
Gene was remembering the fall afternoon that LeRoy Duquesne had encouraged him. “You’re kidding,” he said.
The professor was paying exquisite care to the packing of blue books in his attaché case.
And all at once Gene understood.
He examined his fingernails. I must stop biting them, he thought tangentially. He lifted his honest gray eyes to LeRoy Duquesne.
“You signed, didn’t you?”
LeRoy Duquesne refused to meet his gaze. “You’re one of the few holdouts in the department.”
“But you’ve been talking as if—”
“Categorically and unequivocally, I am against any form of loyalty oath.”
“Why sign one, then?”
LeRoy Duquesne glanced around his windowed office, desk, bookshelves, framed degrees. It was no answer, yet it said everything.
“You’re one of our best teaching assistants,” he said. “You’ll be a real addition to the faculty.”
“So this is how it’s done,” Gene said, unable to hide his bitterness.
“Don’t blame me, Gene, for the monstrous times. The country’s out of control, and this is only one small part of it. The witch-hunt is upon us, and God help the holdouts. We’ll have martyrs. Historically, there always have been martyrs. The difference is today they’ll be denied the dignity of flame or lion. They’ll simply be made to appear corrupt and incompetent, both, then thrown out of work.”
“You make it sound inevitable.”
“It is. We liberals are all victims.” At last he met Gene’s gaze. “Either public or private victims.”
The look he gave Gene was of unwilling assassin to victim, of lover who has betrayed love. And in that long, silent exchange, Gene’s burden of humanity was compelled to admit the uncrossable rift between conviction and action: i.e., between talking and eating. Gene never had felt closer to anyone in his life, not to his parents or Caroline.
“Gene, listen to me. You won’t be hired by any university or junior college. Or even high school. Blacklists do exist. These people aren’t fools. They mean business.”
Gene’s stomach was in peculiar rebellion.
“What’s a signature? This is what you’re made for, and you know it. Don’t be a fool.”
Gene wanted to reply, I’m stuck with being one. But his stomach was churning, and if he opened his mouth he knew a terrible ululation would spurt like vomit from him. He hurried from the office (“Gene,” LeRoy Duquesne was calling, “Gene!”), moving down the dusty stairs to his desk, hunching in a beam of sunshine, his arms wrapped around his chest as if he were naked in snow.
LeRoy signed months ago, he thought. And the thought was a heavy stone idol falling, crashing on the supportive blocks of his political belief, which was constructed of the fragile human element. LeRoy Duquesne signed before Thanksgiving, he thought. That ties it. He opened his top drawer, mechanically removing three yellow pencil stubs, rubber bands, paper clips, a very clear snapshot of Caroline making a cross-eyed face. LeRoy signed, Gene thought, and his throat clogged with tears, routine tribute to a fallen god.
“Cleaning?” asked Caroline.
He looked up at her.
“Hey,” she said, and despite three other TAs bent over their desks in the big office, she rested a cheek to his forehead, cuddling him to her breasts. “Wha’ hoppen?”
“The boom was just lowered. Sign or else.”
“Who says?”
“LeRoy. He signed last Thanksgiving.”
“And all this time he’s been talking big liberal!” she cried. “And to you.”
“I think I understand. He needed someone to carry the flag for him.”
“Come the revolution, we shoot rats like him.”
“He’s got a wife and career to support.”
Caroline held Gene’s cheeks in her palms, staring at him. “Maybe he’s right,” she said. “Why not? It’s no lie. You’re not in the party. And this is what your life’s all about. Genebo, the price isn’t all that high.”
“Caroline, not you.”
Blue eyes shrewd, Van Vliet eyes. Caroline let her little finger play an eraser across the cluttered desk. “Listen, what’s the rush for us to get married? That’s old-fashioned jazz. Your parents’ll let you stay in the house. Why don’t you just write?”
“Write?” Gene’s lips formed the word slowly, like a child sounding out the difficult syllable. “Write? I went in there thinking we were about to rip apart ‘Troopship.’ I was plenty anxious. But once LeRoy started in on the Oath business, I never gave it another thought. Until you mentioned it, I’d completely forgotten I ever wrote anything.”
“Mitigating circumstances.”
“Never. Writing is something you have to care about. Really care. Give total dedication. You can sell out your mother, your father, your wife, your ideals, but you must be serious about one thing. Writing.”
“Gene, you’re good.”
“And you’re loyal.”
“Weren’t you published all over?”
“Everywhere. School papers.”
“You never tried the others.”
“Forget it, please,” he said wearily.
On his desk lay books, papers, his Thesaurus, his Modern Library Portrait of a Lady, clippings of his UN columns for The Bruin (these had turned praline brown), slick copies of Claw, The New Yorker with Hersey’s Hiroshima, his lecture notes, his looseleaf of ideas for novels, the detritus of years with that intricate blending of smells, must, metal, ripe banana, smells that were familiar and suddenly dear to a teaching assistant who has come to the end of the line.
“Which’ll we toss out?” Caroline asked.
“Everything.”
Together they filled two large, institutional wastebaskets. “Not that,” Gene said, pocketing the snapshot of her.
She straightened, saying, “I swear it. I’ll leave the minute you bark like Uncle Hend or give the glad hand like Uncle Richard.”
“Caroline, it’s what you really want.”
“I know it,” she said. Fishing a Kleenex from her purse, she blew a sob through her nose. “I’m a rotten winner.”
A chill wind raked the portico. It was 1:00 P.M., Tuesday, the twenty-third of February, 1950. The sun was shining. The wind blew leaves and tugged at coeds’ long skirts. On Royce steps a cluster of SAE pledges burst into ribald laughter. The chimes started “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.” A moment to remember. For Gene knew that although he had stood up for his principles, on a subtler level, at 1:00 P.M., the twenty-third of February, he had sold out. He was walking away from everything (or almost everything) that he wanted from life. His face was grave. Yet his down-slanted eyes were bright with anticipation. Crossing the quad, he smiled at Caroline.
She did not smile back.
Chapter Five
1
Beverly Schorer curled around herself.
Trapped between sleeping and waking, she imagined she could hear Philip breathing. Sometimes in these dreamlike moments, the three phases of her life merged: she was at the same time a girl, a young wife, and a woman waiting out a divorce to marry her lover. She heard water running in Alix’s, her daughter’s, bathroom. Beverly pushed herself from bed, glimpsing herself in the mirror. She looked wan and crumpled. Last night was a Business Evening, and (inevitably, inescapably) they had argued, she and Dan. She squeezed toothpaste and told herself not to think about the argument. Instead, she found herself thinking (inevitably, inescapably)
about Philip—well, not exactly about Philip, but her guilt toward him.
She had met Philip Schorer about a year after the rainy night she’d broken up with Dan Grossblatt. A bad year, but she had dated various boys in the spasmodic way of the forties. Philip was a blind date. As Beverly entered the living room he rose. Tall, tanned, dark-haired, with perfect features. She had remained in the doorway a few seconds. How could a man be so beautiful? She felt as if she had moved into another dimension. Her skin flushed. Philip was half-Jewish, enough, certainly, to satisfy the Lindes. His father, the Jewish half, owned a small but growing furniture plant. Philip worked with him.
Philip edged his words in a faintly ironic tone that made him sound superior. After they were married, she realized his irony was an act of separation from himself. He wasn’t quite sure whether he were scorned for being a mix. This made her feel closer to him. Philip, unfortunately, did not care to be close. They had a daughter, Alix, and two years later, Jamie, their boy. They bought a charming Cape Cod house, a boat—Philip loved sailing, and Beverly learned to love it, too. Yet she was no nearer her husband.
They never argued. Philip, annoyed, would intensify his mocking tone until it was frozen.
To others—and maybe to Philip—they were an exemplary couple. They had been married twelve years that night of the Mortons’ big, loud party. The Dan Grossblatts were guests, too. Dan had asked her to dance, and during “Mack the Knife” had moved in, saying, “Who can catch up with all this racket? Let’s have lunch.” She was about to refuse when he, smiling, traced under her lip as he had years before, and she knew she absolutely must refuse. Must.
Dan took her to the thin-walled bachelor apartment he kept—he made no effort to hide the fact—for “lunches.” It was rotten. She never before had been unfaithful. Philip was handsome, considerate. What was she doing, her naked thighs clutched around a man who habitually fooled around? It wasn’t for many weeks that she was able to accept the simple answer. She wouldn’t have been in that position if she hadn’t still loved Dan. Love—impossible. Love was veneered with more betrayals than adultery. Love was the enemy. Yet instead of keeping at her easel, she returned to the apartment. Guilty, always guilty. That hot summer and chill winter, Dan would draw acid-green drapes, for a couple of hours closing off her guilts. Beverly had experienced few of the possibilities of physical love. By nature she was a voluptuary, but the times she had elaborated on Philip’s joinings, he had lost desire. She bought flowered sheets for the convertible bed, and with Dan on lavender peonies intuited a call girl’s skill. Not that it was all sex. They could be as open with one another as they’d ever been. Talking, talking. Dan told her that when, after their breakup, he had left his father’s business, his father had ranted in his harsh accent, hitting at Dan with a chair, an old man’s terrible weakness. You’ll fail without me, the old man had screamed. “I managed to patch things up,” Dan said. “But after that, you think I could take one penny? When he died—God, I was a mess—I told Justin, my brother-in-law, he should run S&G Shoes. Justin’s a schlemiel, but what the hell. How could I touch it?” In underwater-green shadows they talked of everything. Except that most guilt-provoking word. Love.
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