“Yes?”
I heard him say he wanted to tell me something.
“Hmm?” I said absently, looking for my keys.
I heard a low tremor in his voice: “There’s something I haven’t asked you.”
“What is it?”
“I’m not much of a talker,” he said plainly. “But I needed to ask you. I …”
He was staring at me. His book lay open beside him on the couch, one page stretching out into the air and slowly falling over as it lost his place. I turned my body to face Holland completely—my listening posture—and his face was as square and golden as an idol’s, his eyes bright, his striped shirt undone beneath his cardigan, one button dangling from its unraveling thread. He sat and planned his words. What a strange, sad thing to be a man. How awful to be beaten by life as much as anyone and yet never be allowed to mention how it feels. To sit in your home that you have paid for with your labor, beside a wife who knows your youthful secrets; to have traveled around the world to escape the prejudices of home and find them, now merely whispered, in the neighborhood around you; to have the past knock on your door in the form of Buzz Drumer. I cannot envy men their silences.
“Holland, what is it?” I asked almost in a whisper.
But I will have to imagine forever what it was, because an inhuman sound suddenly flooded the room. The air-raid drill.
“What do we do?” my husband asked, looking around him. The siren roared like a beast that had not been fed.
“We secure the windows,” I shouted. “We turn off the appliances and we wait in the shelter.” I was glad to be an expert. “Secure the windows, that means—”
“I know how to secure a window,” said the proud military man, and he went to the front room, latching things and pulling the blinds, as quick as a seaman, so I went around the kitchen and unplugged everything I could think of, grabbing the radio as I went. “Lyle, Lyle!” I yelled, but he was off somewhere and couldn’t hear me; there was no time to go and fetch him. Cars stopped all over the city; Market Street became a long parking lot as people huddled down during the drill; and everywhere people were running inside their houses, pulling out their newspapers, trying to remember what to do if the earth caught fire.
“The basement,” I said loudly. He nodded and followed me. I shouted for him to watch his step, there was a tricky drop at the end, and I was, after all, so used to caring for his health. He said nothing but simply put two fingers lightly on my shoulder. Down we went into the darkness; it was the opposite of Orpheus.
We waited on a cot beneath the naked bulbs of the basement, their filaments shivering like the husks of insects. The alarm sang like a buzz saw over everything: the train set with its town and trees and mirror lake, whose tiny abandoned boat always made me imagine a hungry local sea monster. The shelves of our belongings: an old oil-gleaming pistol (beside it, its lover: a bullet), pens, stationery, and stamps, and one particular envelope.
“What were you going to ask me?” I tried to say over the alarm.
“What?”
“You wanted to ask me something, before—”
“Oh nothing nothing just … I wanted to … ”
Down in the basement, the siren spun in our ears like a top. Holland took off his sweater; I unbuttoned my top button; we were just a few feet from the furnace.
And then, all of a sudden, the noise stopped. What a cool, crisp silence we sat in.
“We’ve got to wait for the all clear,” I said at last.
The moment for his speech had passed, but he stared at me as if I were the great mystery of the ages instead of the wife he had lived beside all these years. I looked away uncomfortably. I realized I did not want to hear whatever he’d been trying to ask me. The cowardly part of me wanted him to do the honorable thing; to come to his senses, silently and bravely.
I said, a little loudly, “I hope Lyle’s not frightened.”
He looked worried. “I forgot to warn Sonny about the air raid.”
“I’m sure the aunts told him,” I said.
“I just forgot all about it.”
“It’s okay. I’m sure they didn’t forget, they read the paper.”
He laughed at that. “I guess they do.”
“He’ll be good.”
He smiled and said, “I haven’t been down here in a while. It’s so quiet and dark.”
“It is.”
“It reminds me of my mother’s house,” he said. “The smell of a closed-up room. I can’t believe you visited me all the time. I can’t believe they never caught you.”
“Your mother was the clever one.”
Holland leaned toward me and the old lightbulbs shivered. He said, “Why didn’t we ever do more than kiss?”
The strange quiet of the basement took me back to his dark room in Kentucky, Holland’s younger face staring at me with an expression of either gratitude or desire. Maybe, for him, there was no difference between the two.
“You were the only girl I saw for six months,” he said, shaking his head. “You know that’s all I dreamed of after a while? The shades, the bunk bed, the poetry you read to me. And Miss Pearlie.”
He had never called me that before. A phantom girl haunting him at night, just as he haunted me for all the months of his imprisonment, the years without him and of course the years with him, sleeping in his bed behind that door. In dreams, he came to me with wide arms, promising things a waking Holland could never deliver. He told me everything then, meant all of it, opened his spectral chest to display for me—his beating transposed heart. He swore he loved me. But I had never thought that he had dreamed of me, back in those dim-lit days of war. How beautiful to find you once were someone’s ghost.
His face searching mine for the answer to an unasked question—it belonged to the imprisoned boy in that room when I came one winter’s day to find him standing in the bright light of an open window. “Holland, you’ll be seen!” I had whispered. I ran to pull the shade, and when I turned around, I saw him. Tall and skinny, underfed, clothes hanging from him. He had the look of those fire-stricken buildings that are beautifully painted on the outside and only show, at the smoke-scarred windows, where the fire has burned everything inside. I was too young to know about internment, how it bends the mind.
As we waited in that basement for the all clear, another window opened in my mind, another Holland in another room. The look in Buzz’s eyes as he awakened; it could not have been too different from Holland’s that snowy day in Kentucky. A burned-out face trying not to break open at the horror he has seen. The way they look at you, those poor broken men; it’s not empty or terrified at all. It’s as if you were the first sign of life, of beauty, after a long, long winter. Does love always form, like a pearl, around these hardened bits of life?
“I’m sorry I never wrote,” he said.
“I can’t possibly understand what you went through.”
He nodded, looking at his father’s gun on the shelf. “But I’m sorry all the same. And we never got to say goodbye.”
I shrugged. “I didn’t know if I’d ever see you again.”
“I can’t possibly understand what you went through.”
I shivered, despite the heat of that basement. “Well we survived it, didn’t we?”
“We sure did,” he said, grinning. “You and me and Countee Cullen.”
I could see in his eyes that he wanted to say something more, perhaps try at last to make things right. The sad smile, the sorry shake of his head. The attempt, this time, to say goodbye.
I felt my husband’s hand on my shoulder.
He whispered close: “I have a rendezvous with life ”
I looked up, and there he was smiling at me, his shirt unbuttoned, revealing a dark triangle of skin.
The small dark room when we were young. A boy in his hot summer bed, dreaming of me; a boy gone a little mad. And when he whispered, “Pearlie, is this what you—” I guessed his question, and I let him. I took it as a token, as if in a time
of war; a wordless way to say goodbye. There on the cot with the train village below us. There with the long wait for the all clear, an answer to both our questions that day. As he caressed and kissed me, we could hear the low movements of the wind as it stepped up to the house, and over it, around it, making the beams creak ever so slightly like a hospital patient shifting in his bed. For a moment, we were our younger selves.
We think we know them, the ones we love—for can’t we see right through them? Can’t we see their lungs and organs hanging like grapes under glass; their hearts pulsing right on cue; their brains flashing with thoughts we can so easily predict? But I could not predict my husband. Every time I thought at last I’d seen to the bottom of him—he clouded over.
For, just as he was undoing my buttons to reveal Buzz’s present, that corselette as spring-loaded as my heart, he said something that stopped me.
I pulled my blouse together and moved away. “What did you say?”
He sat up slightly. “I said, ‘Don’t ever change.’” There was that smile.
Don’t ever change: I felt a part of my mind burst into flame. For change was all that was called for; change was the only item on the menu. There was no other possibility, and yet here he stood and, smiling like a boy, commanded me never to change. Here at last I had thought he’d submitted to his life and was telling me so, in his quiet way. That he longed for change: for who could endure our lives as they were? I was prepared to give him what he wanted, if he would choose it. If, like the rest of us stepping toward the edge of thirty, he would figure out at last his heart’s desire.
“I’m too tired,” I said, sliding out from under him.
“Oh,” he said, surprised. I’m not sure anyone had ever stopped that handsome man from kissing them.
He looked at me expectantly, but I couldn’t say anything. If I tried to open my mouth there wouldn’t be an atom of oxygen in the room. The gun’s eye winked in the darkness. No. He was never going to change.
Of course he wasn’t. Why had I ever thought he might? It was not even possible; he was a fog that cannot change because it has not fixed a form. He was so used to being all things, pleasing all people. Yes, yes, of course, I imagined him whispering to Buzz, enjoying the odd flush on that man’s cheeks, never meaning a word of it. No, to change anything could only mean mortal danger—could only mean losing the ones who adored him, losing his wife or son, losing his own sanity if anyone strayed an inch from where they stood. No, nothing was going to change; he would bask in the admiration of an old lover, a young girl, his bewildered wife, who knows who else—this would go on forever until he was arrested or blackmailed or worse.
Then it came. The all clear—the hopeful, singing note of it—and in the instant afterward, we could hear neighbors yelling after our dog.
“Are they calling Lyle?” I asked, standing up.
“I guess so—”
“Do you think he got out under the fence? We should have fixed that hole.”
Holland looked very worried. “He can’t survive out there alone, he can’t even bark. Poor old thing.”
“Sorry?”
“I said he’ll never survive out there alone. He ain’t the kind.”
Those words shot like darts across the room. “Am I the kind?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Wait there.”
“What are you doing, Pearlie?”
I took what I needed from the shelf and held it in my hand. And then, as he looked at me with the tender bemusement of a husband, I decided to do what was necessary.
A moment later, I walked upstairs, out through the back door and into the garden, draped with vines. A crowd of untended roses lay bruised and blue in the dusk, alongside daylilies caught in the act of closing for the night. In one, a tardy bee engrossed herself among the shutting petals. Perhaps she would linger too late, become trapped in the mindless flower, struggling in there all night long, exhausting herself to death in that pollened room.
Holland was already in the street calling the dog’s name. He was crouched down, clapping his hands and yelling: “Come boy! Lyle! Come boy!” He suggested walking to the ocean; it seemed like a place a mute dog might go, and so we went down Taravel to where the twilight sky opened up above us, packed with clouds and pink as a tongue. There I dropped an envelope into the little iron mailbox on the corner. And then, his face toward an ocean my ancestors had never crossed, a blameless ocean, his back to a country that did not love us, Holland sighed and looked at me, his eyes as trusting as ever.
I didn’t touch that gun on the shelf. Of course not; I am no murderess. It lay in the basement, as quiet as ever, deep in its long-deserved sleep from another war. And yet, though no one heard it, from that mailbox down on Taravel a silent bullet was already headed for its target.
III
amonth after the air-raid drill, the fog released its hold over the city and the sun began to reach as far as the Panhandle, and then to Kezar Stadium, and then at last into the Outside Lands. San Francisco isn’t a city for the twentieth century; its persistent cool is meant for women in horsehair crinolines and men in wool frock coats, not for a modern show of neck and leg. So all of us were out, taking advantage of the sun and warmth like children taking advantage of a parent’s jolly mood, and some of those days, walking with Sonny out by the ocean, I found myself imagining Lyle.
Who knows what voice whispers nightly to an animal until, driven mad by the air raid, he digs at the sandy dirt of our backyard and wriggles until he is free. Where would he go? To the ocean, I imagined. Every scent, every track must lead down to the ocean.
I imagined him running across the Great Highway with its rumbling trucks, onto the sand of the Pacific. Straight into the water itself—his breed had a love of water—wrestling aimlessly with the foam, tongue flapping, instinct telling him there was something to be done here. And, once done, he could come home. But for some magnificent reason he had forgotten home—he had forgotten me and Holland and his best friend Sonny, his allies (the bowl and the leash and a series of blue rubber balls), his enemies (the postman, the train set, the demonic black telephone)—and now was out in the world without a compass.
Golden Gate Park—surely that’s where he headed next. Into the tulip garden, where tourists dropped half-eaten egg-salad sandwiches, to the golf course with trails of spilled whiskey, in a loping run he crossed it with the wind in his ears and only a far-off trio of men to watch him, as the golden streak of him passed across the green, grinning as dogs grin, all memory of us utterly erased. All memory of shoes and socks and shameful errors on the carpet. Past squirrels in the park, fussing like accountants, and blue herons imitating statues in a muddy pond, and once in a while a hawk flying overhead, eye trained on a hapless mouse. Maybe trained on Lyle. Perhaps house cats, having slipped their keepers, lay hidden in the rhododendrons, and lizards and snakes and rabbits; perhaps whole colonies of them existed, burrowed deep under the lawn-bowling courts, or hiding all day in the Tea Garden and emerging at night to eat the remains of crumbled tea crackers. Pets, beloved, cosseted, having broken their chains, wandering the Outside Lands. Living together, wild, in the park, hunting in packs beneath a waxing moon. Some accidental frequency in the siren had lit a gene like a flare in their rib cages, freeing them—for what greater freedom could there be than to forget your home?
Buzz was out of town for a week, and the news was almost entirely taken up by the last throes of the war and by the approaching execution of the Rosenbergs. Their final Supreme Court appeal was sure to be denied and it seemed a foregone conclusion that they were going to die. I remember very clearly an image of Eisenhower (who refused them clemency) smiling broadly and how some newspaper artist had replaced each of his teeth with a tiny electric chair. But there wasn’t a single person in my neighborhood who doubted the Rosenbergs’ guilt, doubted that they had a console table made for photographing documents instead of one bought at Macy’s to hold the telephone, or doubted the system
of justice that had tried and convicted them, or the highest court that would never hear their appeal. So the conversations in the Sunset weren’t arguments for or against execution—that talk was going on east of us, in North Beach, or even among the colored Communists out on Fillmore, none of whom we knew—no, our part of town experienced the dawn excitement of a mob, each of whom had brought a picnic for the hanging.
When we met again at Playland, I told Buzz I’d done what he’d asked. He seemed startled—a spasm of conscience—then put his hat on the seawall and said, “I’m sure it’s too late.” I said it was all I could think of to do. “Don’t worry, we’ll see what happens.” Surely nothing would come of it. Birds by the dozens were sitting on the sand and staring at us, chirping. We stood for a long time by the seawall, camouflaged by passing crowds, with nothing to say to each other. It was when we left the boardwalk that we were almost caught.
Buzz was discussing our next rendezvous—he had a movie theater in mind—as we stood beside that Limbo ride, about to be consumed by a crowd of popcorn-eating Boy Scouts. He was leaning very close to me so he could be heard above the boys tomahawking the air, when I saw two familiar straw hats with fluted ribbons emerge from the park.
“Pearlie!” they cried.
I immediately stepped sideways and let Buzz be swallowed by the Scouts (popcorn eruption, “Hey there, mister!”), and I kept moving until I faced the aunts alone.
“You’ve gone out for a walk!” one announced.
I said, “Edith is looking after Sonny.”
Another looked at me carefully. “Is Holland here?”
“No, he’s at work of course.”
“Then what are you doing with his hat?”
I looked down and there it was, Buzz’s two-ounce Dobbs that he was so proud of rolling up into his pocket and pulling out again unscathed; I must have picked it up off the seawall. A man’s felt hat in my hand. I could not think of a single plausible explanation. But people are not as interested in us as we think they are. And so they did not blink an eye when I answered, “I have no good explanation.”
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