IT WAS THE FRIDAY NIGHT before Christmas. Weak electric candles burned in some windows, and the hopeful young couple with the matching briefcases had installed a tree in their living room, but they were in Stowe, at the mountain resort, and the tree’s lights were out. The rest of the street was unfestive. Peter’s apartment, the exception, was glowing—he loved Friday nights; even though he no longer had a job he still felt an end-of-the-week release—but the shivering presence of Jack Wren was robbing his place of warmth. The man had stayed late at school to make sure everything was in order before vacation, like a proper principal, and then he had driven straight into Boston with all the Friday-night traffic, straight to Peter. He had arrived at seven o’clock. It was now after eight. Peter kept idiotically offering him food. Jack kept refusing. He would go home soon, he kept saying. He and Meg had not separated yet. They had not told the children. They were still man and wife. Meg was expecting him. “It’s unbelievable,” he said.
Not to mention unseemly, Peter thought. Also untrustworthy. And what was Geronimus Barron planning to do about his own wife? But he knew the answer to that question. Mrs. Barron—properly, Dr. Barron—was a distinguished immunologist; plenty of scientists were no doubt eager to keep her company. Geronimus, too, seemed to like her. Theirs had been a good marriage, Peter realized. They would part as friends.
But what about the Wren children? he asked himself, rattled. How would they fare on the inevitable vacation when they were forced to share a villa or a yacht—or, more likely, a tent and a latrine—with the overachieving Barron kids? Well, maybe the Barron children, too, tended toward the mean. Jews were subject to the same Mendelian laws as everybody else, Peter reasoned. Jews were …
Jack said, “They take our jobs, our money, our positions at schools. They take over our towns. Now they are taking our women.”
“Not our houses,” Peter murmured. “Not all our houses.”
“Meg never liked our house.”
“No, Jack. Maybe she says that now, but—”
“She always said it.” Jack pressed his nose against the window like one of his sons. “She would have preferred to live in some split-level in the boonies and send the kids to public school. Now I wish we’d done that. She wouldn’t have met any Geronimus Barron at the Nothingsville PTA.”
Peter had to agree. Which proved, he supposed, that Meg and Geronimus had been destined for each other. She had once told him that she wasn’t meant to be gentry; that she wasn’t aristocratic, just simple; and that, despite her ease with computers, she wasn’t particularly bright. Nor was she ambitious. They had been alone under the apple tree with her sleeping daughter. When he opened his mouth to argue with this unexpected and certainly inaccurate disclosure, she put her finger over his lips. “Just an ordinary prairie girl,” she whispered. He remembered now the blinding beauty of her pale, freckled face and her blue eyes, and he understood that what she felt for Geronimus was a prairie love, irresistible as the wind.
He moved to Jack’s side and put an arm around the younger man. In the supportive embrace, Jack held himself straighter.
“You’ll never get over her,” Peter said, “but the rage will ease, and the sorrow.”
“Yes,” Jack said. Peter wondered without much interest who would marry Jack. Some nice woman. She would appreciate the house but would not realize that its furnishings included a retired teacher with a bee in his bonnet about Dickens and Maimonides. Peter would be invited to visit perhaps once a year. As for Geronimus and Meg, they would live in a penthouse overlooking the redeveloped harbor. A caterer would take charge of their hors d’oeuvres. He hoped they would keep him on their party list.
Along the sidewalk below hurried a large man and a tarty-looking woman. On the other side of the street two young men walked, arguing. Though they had left their bookbags at home, their beards and their parkas identified them as law students. They would be gone after commencement, Peter predicted; they would decamp for Charlestown or the South End. The hopeful young couple, discovering themselves pregnant, would sell their folly and flee to a western suburb. The students’ places, the couple’s house, would be taken by other people. Homes allowed themselves to be commandeered by whoever came along. Not like cats; cats remain aloof. Not like dogs; dogs remain loyal. Like women, he made himself think, willing misogyny to invade him, to settle in, so that in another few years everybody would assume he had been in its possession forever.
THE NONCOMBATANT
“IF THEY FINISH UP THE WAR I’LL never be a nurse,” complained his oldest daughter.
“Why not?” Richard asked.
“There won’t be any more battles,” she said, and frowned at him from the foot of his bed. He remembered that she was reading a child’s biography of Florence Nightingale: she must see herself gliding from tent to tent in the dusty Crimea, bringing comfort to brave British Tommies.
“You could be a peacetime nurse,” he said. “Like the ones who helped me when I was operated on.” In fact he had not found them helpful, those pitying, red-armed women. He had metastatic cancer. He was forty-nine.
“Nurses in the hospital, Uglies,” this uncompromising eight-year-old was saying. “Will the war get over?”
“Yes.” The war in Europe was already over. Now, in the beginning of July 1945, the war in Asia was winding down. Richard heard exultation in radio commentators’ voices. He saw relief on service-men’s faces. His family had arrived in this little Cape Cod town three days ago, and when, that afternoon, Catherine had run from the parked car into the grocery store for some milk and bread, two young soldiers, safe now from battle, had felt as free as schoolboys to whistle, while Richard watched from behind the windshield.
Though he no longer shared their hunger, he understood it. In her little cotton dresses Catherine was indeed very pretty. The two lines of worry that stood guard between her brows enhanced the softness of her large brown eyes. She had been raised a Quaker, and she retained the stillness she had learned as a child. She was fifteen years younger than he.
Their two younger daughters were Catherine’s replicas. The oldest, this fierce girl who wanted the war to continue, resembled him. She had his narrow pewter eyes and fair skin. “If I can’t be an army nurse, I’m going to be a doctor, like you,” she said.
“A good second choice,” he commended. He saw that her face had already been made rosy by summer, whereas his, he knew, was still pale as sand.
BUT BY THE SECOND WEEK OF JULY he was beginning to look better. Within his body there seemed to be a temporary lull in combat. Since coming here he had been able to reduce his painkillers. That made him more alert. Waking up was no fun, but by ten in the morning he could sit more or less comfortably on the screened porch of their rented house. He watched his children playing under a low, gnarled tree. He answered mail he’d received during the recent hospitalization. He listened to Catherine’s fluting commentary as, near him on the porch, she sorted laundry, or peeled potatoes, or bent over the jigsaw puzzle.
Every afternoon Catherine walked with the girls to the beach. He watched them until they were out of sight, then picked his way back to the dining room turned sickroom. His bed was here because the bathroom was on this floor—near, though not always near enough. By the time the family returned he’d be waiting for them on the porch. Catherine sometimes carried the three-year-old. She’d remind the older girls to run around to the back of the house and wash their feet under the tap. “And don’t make too much noise. Think of Mrs. Hazelton!”
Most days Mrs. Hazelton wasn’t there to be thought of. The girls knew she was absent when her bicycle wasn’t leaning against the shed, which doubled as her home when she was renting out the house. Whenever the bike was gone (they told their parents) they felt free to peer into Mrs. Hazelton’s window and announce to each other—and later to anyone who’d listen—the marvels inside. Richard remembered the first day of this inventory: how eagerly they had interrupted each other, the eight-year-old and the six-year-old.
“A teeny, tiny sink, and—”
“One bed. A puffy blanket?”
“Comforter,” said the attentive Catherine.
“A kettle. Gold?”
“Copper, I’m afraid,” Catherine said, smiling.
“A rocking chair. A bureau. A rug like a snake?”
“… Ah. Braided.”
“A black stove-thing, fat.”
“That’s for cooking children,” Richard teased.
“Oh, Daddy,” said the oldest, and “She’s not a witch,” said the middle. But the youngest cried. She had been ready to cry anyway, regarding some other matter. “Mrs. Hazelton is a good witch,” Richard explained.
But she might have been the wickedest witch, for all Richard and Catherine knew. They knew only that their landlady was a recent widow and that she worked at the library. They knew that she was tall and spindly; they guessed she was about Richard’s age. Her hair was striped with gray and somewhat wild, as if she were perpetually standing on a bridge in a windstorm. She wore government issue pants and men’s shirts open at the throat.
“There are pictures on her bureau,” the girls told him.
“Pictures of what?” he idly inquired.
“You know, Daddy. People’s faces.”
“Photographs?”
“Yup,” said the middle daughter. “Men. They all wear caps with sivors.”
A few minutes later: “Sivors?” he asked.
“Visors,” explained the oldest.
The one-room, one-windowed shed that Mrs. Hazelton retired to while renting her house stood in the northeast corner of the backyard, separated from the family by the victory garden of tomatoes, beans, and lettuce. “There’ll be squash after we go home, and pumpkins last of all,” Catherine said, grinning at this future abundance. Mrs. Hazelton left vegetables for them in a basket on the back steps. Once in a while they saw her on hands and knees, yanking weeds out of the soil. She wore an overlarge officer’s cap. Occasionally they caught sight of her leaving in the morning or returning in the early evening. But often the bike was still gone at nine o’clock, when the littlest girl was fast asleep and the older ones were in bed with their books. And sometimes it wasn’t until midnight that Richard, reading in his downstairs bed until the hour of the final medication, heard wheels crunch on unyielding soil. He’d look up from the page and wait for the second sound. There: the slam of the little house’s door.
BY THE THIRD WEEK in July he felt well enough to walk to Main Street and back every evening before dinner. In the beginning he walked between his two older children. Then one day he took the youngest along, too, in the old-fashioned stroller that allowed child to face parent, that allowed this parent to gaze at the sweetness of dark brown eyes and the arabesque of lips. He never again left the little look-alike behind.
By the end of July he was taking two walks a day—the one before dinner with all his daughters, and a later one alone, under a sky still patrolled by searchlights. On the first of these nights on the town he had stopped at a pink ice-cream parlor. Working girls sat at tiny round tables. Groups of women and children ate enormous sundaes. The pain within him, never altogether absent, flared. He blamed the harem atmosphere of the place.
The next night he went to a bar. Though he was not much of a drinker, he felt immediately comfortable. Here the walls were of no particular shade, and the dark booths sheltered both military and civilian customers. The radio gave them news from the Pacific. He sat at the counter, making one beer last a long time, testing his pain. The pain did not worsen, as if demonstrating that it could be merciful. Main Street was still busy when he emerged, but his own street was dark. Halfway home he urinated in the shelter of some stunted pines.
Catherine laughed when she smelled beer on his breath. “You old lush.”
“I’m celebrating.”
“Are you!” she said in her sweet melodious way, while a different tune twanged between them: What on earth have we got to celebrate?
THERE WERE VISITS. Banice Bass came, recently discharged from the navy. (Richard had preferred the army. He might have been a major by now. But the military hadn’t wanted a sick, overage doctor, even one in remission, and certainly not one with a pregnant wife.)
The MacKechnies and their four children recklessly used up gas coupons to drive from Providence. Rationing would end soon, they all agreed. Catherine was saving drippings in a can on the back of the range, but that too would no longer be necessary. “The war will stop, and my battle will begin,” he said to Mac on the porch.
“Cobalt,” Mac said right away.
“Yes, we’ll try cobalt,” Richard said, sighing. And he would volunteer for an experimental protocol and hope he wasn’t put in the placebo group.
It was raining. The wives had taken all the girls to a Betty Hutton movie. The MacKechnie boys grumbled quietly over the jigsaw puzzle. Boughs shifted and leaves rustled under the onslaught of rain. There was thunder in the distance and the hoot of ships. Without making a sound a figure pedaled down the strip of earth that was her own path, and onto the street. She wore no rain jacket, no hat. She lifted her wet head; she biked urgently toward the storm, as if it, at least, loved her.
THE BARTENDER WAS A FRIENDLY CHAP. The three or four regulars were also decent fellows. Their talk was always of the end of the war—how long do we have to wait, for Christ’s sake? How many more of us need to be lost? A faded, stringy couple usually occupied one of the middle booths. A group of high-spirited middle-aged women often commandeered a table in the back of the room. One had artificially black curls. Another wore a lot of red. A third had a swishy sort of glamour; she could have played Rita Hayworth’s aunt in the movies. One night they brought along a new woman. She had untidy hair and a mannish way of dressing … He nodded down the length of the bar. Mrs. Hazelton nodded back.
The nods were exchanged on subsequent but not consecutive nights. Sometimes she was there, sometimes she wasn’t.
RICHARD’S BROTHER CAME to visit. Their families were close. His brother’s children were old enough to appreciate the gravity of their uncle’s situation. A mishap occurred: after lunch his middle daughter fell out of the tree. She blacked out for a moment. Richard’s brother, also a doctor, examined her thoroughly—Richard and Catherine anxiously held hands—and pronounced her unhurt. But everybody was shaken. And then, just before dinner, they discovered a puddle under the refrigerator. The food was still edible, but the interior was warming. Catherine knocked on Mrs. Hazelton’s door. No answer. So the sisters-in-law prepared the meal, and the nine of them were already on the porch, eating their salad and hot dogs and corn (“The butter is supposed to be melted,” the middle girl pointed out), when Mrs. Hazelton cycled past. “We’ll get her,” said his children, scrambling from the porch.
She was indeed a witch, if cleverness with stubborn household servants was any test. He watched from the kitchen doorway. Catherine sat at the table. Mrs. Hazelton opened a low door that revealed the refrigerator’s innards. Then she squatted before it, reaching in to twist something and pull something else. Presently a buzzing indicated that the machinery was working again. She beckoned to Catherine. Squatting, they examined the refrigerator together. Why had she chosen Catherine to instruct? he wondered. Wasn’t he the officer here? Both women rose—the graceful younger one in a dotted dress and the angular older one in her dead husband’s garments—and they turned toward each other, then toward him. For a moment they loomed larger than life: Grave Acceptance and her grim sister Defiance. Then they became two people again: sweet Cathy and the backyard widow, whose eyes, blue as a gas flame, flickered at him.
AUGUST BEGAN. His pain decreased. He wasn’t deceived, but he took advantage of the situation. One night they hired a babysitter and saw a movie. Another night they went out to dinner. Catherine’s charm almost distracted him. How lucky he had been in her, and in their children, and in his work—and yet how willingly he would trade the pleasures of this particular life for life itse
lf. He would hide in a cave, he would skulk in an alley, he would harness himself to a plow—anything to remain alive.
On August 6 the bar radio shouted out the news of Hiroshima. Many of the patrons applauded. People stood rounds of drinks for one another. Mrs. Hazelton turned from her companions and stared at Richard. Her palms lay flat against her thighs, as if they were lashed there.
On August 9 the destruction of Nagasaki was announced. Mrs. Hazelton was not present. Richard left early. At home he found Catherine knitting by the radio. She turned her large eyes toward him. “This is terrible,” she said.
“All wars are terrible.” He lowered himself to the floor near her feet. “The bombs may end the war and save lives. Killing to cure, darling.” They listened together to the radio’s ceaseless gloat.
In the coming days the town began to swell with civilians and servicemen asking one another for news from Japan. The day after the bombing of Nagasaki, Richard and the girls could hardly make their way through the sidewalk crowds on Main Street. A woman they didn’t know, wearing a ruffled turquoise sundress, bent over the stroller and emotionally kissed his youngest daughter, all so fast that the child merely stared instead of crying.
Catherine reported that the beach was packed. A noisy blimp hovered over the water on August 11, enchanting some children and terrifying others. Eventually it moved slowly westward and out of sight. Meanwhile a new concessionaire had appeared, a vendor of cotton candy, which he swirled out of a vat. The girls had never seen such stuff before. When they came home their cheeks were laced with fine pink lines, like the faces of alcoholics.
On August 13 the bar was so full that Richard could find no stool. It was better anyway to drink standing. His pain had sharpened again. The underweight elderly couple shared their booth with strangers. The bartender was very busy. His son was working, too … a wiry young teenager whose presence behind the counter was buoyantly illegal.
Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories Page 5