American Romantic

by Ward Just

  Harry and May wrote each other often, long colorful letters, May of her afternoons on horseback, Harry of his journeys to the Paraguayan interior. That was where some Nazis supposedly were, but he never saw one. May had taken a job at a country club stable teaching the fine points of horsemanship to teenage girls, and when the lessons were done she took one of the horses into the countryside, riding until dusk and beyond, moonlit fields and hills, riding breakneck all the way. And at night she had a new enthusiasm, Francisco Goya, painter of kings and queens, the vicious and the prey of the vicious. Harry could not resist quoting a letter he received from a friend in the war zone, Franz, whose most immediate problem was a sixteen-foot python, the python ineffectively imprisoned behind chicken wire. Its name was Wormwood, an indolent creature but ever poised and spiteful. The python put Harry’s friend in mind of the war itself, slow-moving but dangerous and sinister. Treacherous, Franz said, long periods of immobility and then a slow Wormwood uncoiling, a kind of shudder. Wormwood was heedless, a heartless mass of willful muscle with an appetite that came and went according to whim or some mysterious snake-rhythm. When a neighborhood cat went missing, no need to ask where it was. The python seemed to be most active in the evening hours. No cage could contain it and night was its friend and it always returned in the morning, sluggish and distracted. Franz wrote that he, too, lived in a shadow world where much transpired in the dark. The American occupiers were the veneer of the earth, its visible lakes and oceans, its rivers and mountain ranges and deserts and forests. Everything subterranean belonged to the communist enemy. Reading Franz’s letters gave Harry the awful premonition that this was to be the way of things for years to come. And Franz had an inquiry of his own. What in God’s name do you do in Paraguay? What are the women like? Harry replied that he thought he had found a Nazi in the hills of Curuguaty, close by the Brazilian border, but alas he was but an old infantryman from the Great War whose memories of the Somme would not go away. He’d lost an arm there, at either Ypres or Thiepval, he could not remember which. Really, there was no difference between them. He was not right in the head in that year, 1916. A pig of a year. He left Germany for good after the war, immigrated to Paraguay, and now managed an estate. Harry met the old man in a bodega and listened to his tales of the Somme, scarcely imaginable. He countered with tales of his own war but they did not measure up. He did omit the boy with the carbine. He was talking arithmetic to a man skilled in quantum mechanics.

  Harry completed his tour in Paraguay. His apprehension of the future did not abate. He and May married in Paris, a civil ceremony in the mairie of the Fourteenth Arrondissement. Friends from the embassy were the witnesses, Harry and May having decided that a mairie wedding with both families present would be a catastrophe. A month’s honeymoon in sunny Provence and then to a central African nation where Harry took up his duties as ambassador, supervising a staff of eight.

  Along with Harry came the foreign service, its traditions and customs, its rules, its hierarchies, its formal pace with continual changes of venue. Time was measured by “tours” and “postings.” Harry liked the idea of a fresh billet every few years, fresh faces, a fresh terrain, and another language. He liked getting out of the office, and naturally each country had its own history and set of circumstances and constellation of personalities who often enough controlled events or thought they did. May liked to say she came from a long line of people who had stayed put and she had broken the mold. Mold-breaking was not her family’s way, either. She grew distant from them. Letters between May and her family became less frequent as time went on and finally ceased altogether. In due course her parents died. Her sister died. She and May had had a vicious quarrel when May married Harry—by no means the first in their long and contentious life together but the most consequential and unforgettable, and that quarrel had never been resolved. Five years separated them, May and May Belle, called Belle. Belle did not like the idea of Little Sister. Subordination was not in her makeup. The sisters had never been close, although May looked on Belle as a second self, the doppelgänger who was forever out of reach, willful on the outside and chilly within. The five years might have been a century. They did not resemble each other but anyone seeing them together knew they were sisters, something subtle, a way of walking perhaps, a certain tilt of the head and particular gestures. Belle was a tomboy and indisputably her father’s favorite. He called her Bill, taught her the ropes, taught her to drive a tractor when she was ten years old, took her to the rifle range. They were a closed circle with no entry for May. When May got her period, Belle was furious and refused to speak to her for a week, and when she did, her voice was an insinuating sneer, as if some cherished rule had been broken. May had cheated.

  Each sister had the ability to read the other’s thoughts, not always but at specific times and places. The thoughts May read she did not like, Belle continually weighing and measuring with May coming up short. May often heard her sister and her father snickering over the breakfast table, then falling silent when she joined them. Belle was high-spirited, her father’s darling and her mother’s worry. Belle had the looks and bearing of an actress and a temperament that stole the oxygen from any room. May was the shy one, good at school, often with her nose in a book, happiest when alone on horseback. However, she did not ride like a farm girl but like a Denver debutante at a horse show. No fun to be around, her father said. May was cut from strange cloth. Who did she think she was? May herself did not know, but she was determined to find out in someplace other than Slother, Vermont, with its monotony and subservience to weather. She called farm life weather-beaten, as if it had an ancient face, lined, raw-boned, and morose. She had no interest in farm animals or wildlife generally, although the howling of coyotes late at night had a certain primal attraction. May’s health was delicate. Always around the ides of March May took to her bed with bronchitis and a high fever that would last for a fortnight and sometimes longer. She did not appear to require attention, so her mother brought her meals and the prescribed medications and left her alone. When the fever was at its height May would hallucinate, crying out in an anguished incoherent tongue. In some inevitable thoughtless way May slipped to the margins of family life, an unwelcome guest in her own house. Her family thought it was her own choice, a willed distance, but that was not how May saw it. She saw her family as a nation with a fault line, America and slavery, the French and their bloody revolution, the Spanish Inquisition. She was the Other. And when May went off to her Denver college on a generous grant-in-aid everyone breathed easier. No member of the family had ever been to college. There had been no need of it.

  May had been an unhappy inhabitant of God’s country but that did not mean an absence of grief when her family disappeared, all within two years. When her parents died she and Harry were in Washington for the obligatory home posting. The news came in a letter from Belle some days after the funeral. They died in a fire at night, the farmhouse consumed, burned to the ground. All that remained was the land itself, deeded to Belle the year before. The funeral, Belle wrote, was a simple affair but everyone in the village attended. The letter ended there and was signed simply “Your Sister Belle.” Two years later Belle died of cancer, but by the time the news reached May, the funeral had already been held. The funeral director had thought to contact the State Department, but by then a week had passed. May and Harry were in Oslo.

  May was shaken by this news. In fact, she was surprised at her distress. Her family came back to her in dreams, especially her father and Belle. No more agreeable in dreamland than they were in life, but poignant still. She knew in her heart that reconciliation was impossible. She had chosen one sort of life and they had chosen another, and when May looked back on it she wondered about the word “chosen.” She was not conscious of having chosen anything. She was born into one sort of life and that had led to a college near Denver, and one afternoon she had gone to a lecture, dreading it actually, and there was Harry Sanders, foreign service officer. And her life chan
ged utterly. She wished she had known her mother better. They might have been close, been able to confide in each other, but her mother had not wanted that. May had not seen them in many years and always remembered the family stonefaced when she and Harry drove away in their rental car after the disastrous weekend at the farm. Her family had been rude to him and rude to her. May did not care if she ever saw Vermont again, though she knew it would always be with her. You could never avoid your birthplace. It was where your memories began and if many of those memories were unhappy—well then, all subsequent memories were contaminated. The subsequent memories were shadowed by the early pentimento. Americans were supposed to be born free, but the truth was that they were no more free than anyone else. Canadians. Mexicans. The idea was that Americans were in a constant state of reinvention, but invention and reinvention did not liberate but only brought you closer to your essential self and that was governed by the childhood pentimento. May brought those scattered thoughts, much edited in her telling, to the family table one night. They elicited only silence until her father said, Well, I don’t know, May. Look at the Eskimos. One igloo is pretty much like another, wouldn’t you say? And Belle howled with laughter. May shrugged them off; her father’s comment made no sense to her. She herself hoped to God her inference was not correct, because the north country was a blight on her spirit. The woods were a barrier as formidable as any ocean or mountain range, a prison for its inhabitants, a narrow slice of life in a narrow part of the world, where even a desire to ride a horse was looked upon as condescension. The region was an ice palace with no possibility of thaw. She wanted to make something of herself. What that something was, she had no fixed idea. So she would fly away with Harry Sanders and that would be that, put paid. Her family would be rid of her and she would be rid of her family. Their hearts were closed to her and, she knew now, vice versa. Of course dead or alive they were still her family—and what they saw was that May didn’t care. Didn’t care for the farm. Didn’t care about livestock. Didn’t care about the northern lights or winter blizzards or the hunt. Didn’t care that the farm had been in the Huerwood family for a hundred years. Was sick each March. May believed that her nonconformity was essential to her self, her way of getting on in the world. Her own destiny. No one ever said that the north country was easy.

  May wished she had put a simple question to her family.

  What is there about me that you dislike so?

  She was ill at ease in Africa. She reminded herself of the tourists she saw in Slother, arriving in their German cars, always well turned out, bound at once for the three Victorian houses on the town green, beautiful houses with wide porches and narrow windows. The Congregational church, built in 1790, was badly in need of paint but its lines were as chaste as a Puritan’s sermon. The tourists would stop at curbside to look at the church and the houses before leaving in a hurry, bound for Canada or the resort hotel to the southeast. In Africa May felt like an ill-mannered tourist or an amateur sociologist come to inspect the culture of the natives. In these endeavors chaste was not the word that came to mind. By contrast Harry seemed quite at home. He explained to her that his task was to understand the problems, but in Africa understanding did not lead to solutions. It led to discouragement because the facts were brutal. Poverty, disease, ignorance, corruption, violence, and an absence of law. The war had given Harry a cautious approach to intervention. He said to her that one of his specialties was the problem that had no obvious solution. This was not an excuse for inaction, only a reason to avoid the wrong kind of action. He said, We are not a colonial power despite appearances. I am doing what I can to avoid a colonial attitude. Also, revolution was in the air but revolution never came. Breakdown came. Nevertheless, May said, I will do what I can for children and their mothers. That will be my task.

  Easy to call Harry cynical and May naïve, and easier still to say that May had the larger heart, but that was closer to the truth. Harry believed that his wife needed a period of adjustment. She had never been outside the United States and was unprepared for the tumult of central Africa, its noise during the day and its deep silence at night—deep silence unless you listened carefully and heard the feral rustle in the bush. Harry realized eventually that the daytime noise and nighttime silence were what May was prepared for, and they were not consoling. The capital was disheveled, a knot of streets with crowded concrete buildings and an open-air market, soldiers lounging nearby. The food stalls were filthy. Soon enough May chose to shop at the commissary like the other embassy wives. The French, Italians, and Spanish had small missions with ambassadors. There were half a dozen others supervised by a chargé d’affaires. The Soviet Union had a suspiciously large mission, including a technical office with a team of geologists said to be in search of uranium deposits. The embassy residences were located in a cul-de-sac, entry gained through an iron gate overseen by two soldiers in dusty white uniforms. No expatriates, because this was not the sort of country a man expatriated himself to, unless he was on the run. What would be the point?

  On weekends Harry and May often drove into the countryside, miles and miles of stunted trees and shrubs. They looked for game but there was no game. Once they saw an elephant by the side of the road. May had never seen terrain as monotonous as this African terrain, few dwellings, few people. Late in the afternoon the security car that followed them wherever they went honked twice and pulled over. The command sergeant alighted and suggested, most politely, that they return now to the capital.

  It is not good to travel at night. Bandits come out at night.

  Dangerous bandits? May asked.

  Not dangerous, the sergeant said. Unruly.

  He means drunk, Harry said.

  That is correct, the sergeant said. Drunk and unpredictable.

  Their social life, such as it was, centered around the other foreign diplomats—though the Russians kept to themselves. Each weekend there was something festive, a cocktail party or dinner. Now and again one of the senior government officials, the vice president or the foreign minister, would have a reception. The country was at the far margins of significance and Harry questioned more than once why America bothered except to keep an eye on the Russian geologists. In time May involved herself in relief work, distributing food and medicines, opening a U.S.-sponsored clinic, donating books to the few schools, trying to be helpful. Meanwhile, Harry kept his eye on the Russians and cultivated sources inside the government. They did make side trips every few months, to Cape Town and Salisbury, Nairobi once, thriving cities with decent hotels and restaurants. And then, deep into their second year in Africa, May discovered she was pregnant. Her mood brightened and in some deep-felt sense her period of adjustment came to an end. She threw herself into her relief work, stopping only when she reached the seventh month of her pregnancy. She sent away for a bassinet and other newborn paraphernalia. She painted the spare second-floor bedroom that would now be the baby’s. The doctor said that all was proceeding quite normally. He gave May a brilliantly colored lambswool sweater with a front pouch for the baby. It was knitted by the doctor’s wife, who wished for a boy child. The doctor said, I hope you have the baby with us.

  May shook her head, embarrassed.

  You will go to the English hospital, then.

  Yes. I’m sorry.

  We deliver babies here every day, the doctor said in a low voice.

  My husband insisted, May said.

  The ambassador insisted?

  Yes, May said. It is my first child. He worries about me.

  I see, the doctor said. I wish you good fortune.

  Thank you, May said.

  It is a fine hospital, the English hospital. It is immaculate. They have equipment . . . He did not finish the sentence but said instead, Of course you will fly there.

  Yes. It’s not so far. Two hours, they told me.

  Drink plenty of water on the airplane.

  Thank you for all you have done, May said. You have been very kind. We hope you will look after the bab
y when we return.

  I will be happy to do so, the doctor said. I feel I already know her.

  How do you know it’s a girl?

  Things like that I know. I always have.

  Instinct, May said with a smile.

  Experience, the doctor said.

  They thought they had left in good time, two weeks prior to the delivery date. But May went into labor on the airplane, with pain such as she had never experienced in her life, wave after wave. They took a cab from the airport because the ambulance was engaged. May was in and out of consciousness and half crazy with pain. She lay with her head in Harry’s lap, remembering him handing money to the cabman and saying, Drive! Drive! The traffic was terrible at five in the afternoon. When they arrived at the English hospital she was taken at once to the emergency room, two doctors and a nurse assisting. They gave her something and she fell unconscious at once, knowing her baby was gone, had been gone for some little while. She came awake in a room with white walls and an overhead fan. She required a moment or two to locate herself, surprised at her shrunken belly. The air was warm, the windows thrown open to the African night. Harry was snoring in the bed next to hers. She wondered if he was dreaming of the Chopin girl and then thought not. His face was tight and his expression sober. A bat flew into the room and out again. She heard noises in the corridor and when she turned to look out the door the pain almost made her faint. Her forehead was clammy, slick with sweat. May reached for the call button but decided against it, and the pain subsided, drawing back like waves on a beach. She did not want to talk to anyone.