by Alice Adams
“Sure you could.”
“I think I’d like to work with kids.” Then Abby asked him, “Do people still call you Benny now, or would you rather be Ben?”
“I guess Ben. But you call me whatever you want. After all, you’re my oldest friend.” And he grinned.
• • •
But it was as Ben that he was introduced to the Marcuses. To Dan and Sylvia, Joseph and Susan. And although she, Abby, was the point of contact, the mutual friend who made introductions all around, she had a sense of distance from her friends; she was able to observe, as though it all took place in slow motion—she found particularly interesting the response of the four Marcuses to Benny. To “Ben.”
His good looks astonished them all. Abby even felt a certain suspicion cast in her direction: why hadn’t she told them? (Though of course she couldn’t have, not knowing what he looked like.) She also sensed, especially in the grown-ups, in Sylvia and Dan, a certain disappointment: they had expected a nice young Negro student; the facts, that he had played football and went to Harvard, had been just slightly amiss, or askew, but still nothing had led them to expect this tall dark prince who looked (Dan Marcus, the Hollywood magnate, must especially have thought) like a movie star.
Susan Marcus (knowing her more closely than the others, Abby could probably read her best) reacted visibly and strongly to such a handsome boy; her smile and her whole posture became flirtatious, at the same time that she looked at Abby as though to ask: Is this okay? Or is he really yours?
Only Joseph seemed a little reserved, his reactions withheld; he was waiting to see what this man was really like. What he had to say for himself.
It was soon announced by Dan Marcus that they were going to a restaurant near Union Square—a real authentic old labor place, all the old Italian Reds used to go there, Dan said. Tresca, all of them.
The restaurant, reached after a walk of fifteen minutes or so, was slightly seedy: a worn green carpet, large yellowed group photographs on the walls. The tablecloths, red-and-white checked, were stained. Abby thought that her mother, tidy Cynthia, would have walked right out, probably. (“Look, we don’t have to eat here, besides there’s no one around.” Abby could hear her mother’s pretty, slightly arrogant voice.) The place was only about half full, and what most struck Abby was the total lack of uniforms, such a contrast to the streets they had just walked through, where there had seemed uniforms everywhere, festive clutches of soldiers or sailors out on the town, officers or privates with their families or their dressed-up girlfriends, or with both.
As they seated themselves, Abby between Ben and Joseph, facing the older Marcuses and Susan, Abby remarked on that fact. “It’s odd to see no uniforms in a restaurant these days.”
Surprisingly, Joseph laughed at this, but in a somewhat angry, defiant way, and he spoke not to Abby but to his parents. “The old Reds are still isolationist, isn’t that right? They think the pact is still on.”
Pleased that she knew, more or less, what he was talking about, Abigail (tactlessly) asked, “You mean like Colonel McCormick and the Chicago Tribune?”
Dan Marcus opened his mouth as though to say a great deal, but Sylvia, his wife, in a firm way patted his arm and spoke first. “Now, darling.” But she did not say it very nicely, Abby observed.
Removing his glasses, Joseph wiped at them in what Abby felt was a delaying tactic, postponing whatever he had to say. And when he spoke, this time addressing her, it was still without his glasses. “Not exactly like,” he began to explain, in a very kind and faintly amused voice. “The same conclusion, perhaps, but really from opposite points of view. The Midwest, and the Colonel, has to do with America Firsters, even Father Coughlin gets into the act, more or less. Why save Jews?—that’s their reasoning, or part of it. Whereas some of the old Reds are still hung up on the Hitler-Stalin pact. They’re a little confused, and behind.”
Abby listened, genuinely and intensely interested, as much in contemporary history as in the particular political passions of this family, which were new to her. Her parents cared, Cynthia did and especially Harry, who was so pleased to be in the Navy; they liked Roosevelt, they thought he did a great job, and they hated Hitler, as everyone did. But in Sylvia and Dan Marcus, Abigail felt a passion that was both political and personal; the two were combined (or possibly confused, confounded). And Joseph, as he talked, explaining things to Abby, was being nice to her but was also hoping to seal off his parents, so to speak. To prevent an explosion.
She felt all that acutely—but as they faced each other, she and Joseph, sitting inches apart in the not large booth, she saw Joseph’s eyes as though for the first time: a curious dark gray-brown, gold-flecked. They were the most intelligent eyes she had ever seen.
“… a group in Cambridge,” Dan Marcus was saying. “Very interesting. Anglo-Catholic Marxists. A Father Smythe is the head of it all—the head priest, I guess you’d say. They have interesting Sunday brunches, Ben. You might want to take a look. I’d be happy to write to the good Father.”
“Oh, come on, Dan.” Sylvia sounded inexplicably annoyed.
Ben murmured something polite about how nice that sounded.
“Of course I don’t really know about your politics,” Dan said; it was a gentle but insistent question.
“Unformed, I guess,” Ben told him. “I like Roosevelt, and seems to me he’s doing a good job with the war, and he got us out of the Depression. Or maybe the war did that. But beyond that I really don’t know.”
“Sounds like you’re a lot more sophisticated politically than you think you are,” Dan Marcus told Ben, with a large and very warm smile.
Mr. Marcus’s sort of good looks did not appeal to her at all, Abby noticed. His features were all too regular, except for his oversized strong bright white teeth, and his eyes, which were brown and intelligent and small, a little close together—nothing like Joseph’s eyes. He looked dishonest, Abby thought, and then she censored the thought: Mr. Marcus was probably really nice and kind and smart, he was just—just not a kind of man she had met before, and she, Abigail Baird, was much too critical. Judgmental. “So young to make such harsh judgments,” her mother had said. “And such quick ones!” She was right, Abigail knew she was, and admitted as much; nevertheless, already she had observed in herself a tendency to return to whatever her first impression or judgment had been. She could still remember the first time she saw Benny, this tall skinny colored boy out on the playground at school. She thought he looked really nice, and smart, and she was right. Later she found out that his father was the janitor at the school, and a lot of kids wouldn’t ask him to parties or anything, though he was friends with some of the boys he played games with. Ben could run faster than anyone, they all said. Abby began saying “Hi” when they saw each other around the school, or downtown, and then they began talking sometimes. And then they were friends.
She would like it if Susan and Ben became friends, Abby thought. But would she? If they “fell in love” and Ben came down to see Susan at Swarthmore?
Returning her attention to Joseph Marcus, Abby noticed that his hands too were very different from his father’s. Mr. Marcus’s hands were stubby, reddish. Whereas Joseph’s hands were long and thin and smooth. Strong-looking. It occurred to her that Joseph’s hands looked sexy; odd, that was not a word she used a lot, and you don’t think of hands as being sexy, she thought (but of course they are, very sexy—was her next more secret thought).
“Just what are you trying to recruit that handsome Negro boy for, Dan Marcus?”
An indistinct sound from Mr. Marcus, a protest of some sort.
“Because he’s a Negro you think you’ll get points with your L.A. comrades.”
Another sound, louder but still indistinct.
“And Father Smythe, shit! This boy is not political, and he’s certainly not interested in you. Are you so optimistic you can’t even tell? Well, I can, and he’s not.”
“Oh, lay off, Syl. One episode.” That came lou
dly and clearly through the wall to the guest room, where Abby lay, trying to sleep.
She was used to parental sounds at night, even sometimes to quarrels, but those were always succeeded by more familiar sounds of love. Making up. Making love. Abby had heard those noises all her life, and they had become soothing to her, reassuring. She waited now for such sounds to come from the Marcuses, but she heard nothing.
Disturbed by what she could not make any sense of, Abby lay there, wishing for sleep that seemingly would not come.
Who was this Father Smythe that Dan Marcus wanted Benny to go and meet—whereas Sylvia apparently did not. And what did she mean, saying Benny was not interested in Dan Marcus? The word, as used between the Marcuses, meant something else, something specific and very likely sinister.
Dan Marcus began to snore, hoarse, belligerent sounds. It had to be Dan, no woman could make so much noise.
Unable to sleep, Abigail, for whom that affliction was extremely rare, sent her inner vision back to Pinehill, to the woods around the town where she used to wander for hours, alone and perfectly happy. She saw with absolute vividness the gray November trees with their thin, faintly fluttering leaves, and the rich dark green heavy-boughed pines, and she smelled the pines and the fecund fall earth, the loamy dirt below the thick brown-needled carpet. She saw the clearing in the woods as she came to the desiccated cornfield, the rows of crumbling ruts and the tottering, tattered gray stalks. She began to cross the cornfield, heading not fast but very happily toward the creek, its ghostly border of peeling white poplars and leafless honeysuckle vines.
And then she fell asleep.
5
RUSS, James Russell Lowell Byrd, has often dreamed of his daughter’s breasts. Long, soft, and white, floating upward in a foamy bathtub, or flopping down against her ribs as she stood up to dry herself. He knew, although (of course) it was not Melanctha’s actual breasts that he had seen but SallyJane’s, her mother’s. Heavy-weapon breasts, concealed in pointed bras, aimed at him. Accusing breasts. And now his young wife Deirdre’s breasts, stretched after pregnancy and all that nursing (nursing SallyJane, his daughter who would grow and soon have breasts of her own), now Deirdre has those breasts, like all the women in his life. Large and terrifying.
Would it help if he called them tits, as most men did? Would it make them smaller? He doubted it, but he could try.
Trying to shrug himself out from the dream, from the weight of the Melanctha-SallyJane-Deirdre breasts, he thought then with some tenderness and gratitude of Cynthia Baird, her sweet tender girlish pink breasts, delicate and vulnerable. Unthreatening. He should have married Cynthia, he thought, as though there were no Harry Baird and marriage were possible.
In the meantime, there he was, wide awake too early in this New York hotel room, with a big erection between his legs and dreams of his daughter, Melanctha, her breasts, weighing down his spirit, his whole mind.
He turned over onto his stomach, hiding his face in his pillow, his cock mashed down in the sheets. But finding no escape from his mind.
That night he was to take Esther Hightower out to dinner. Esther, also up here from Pinehill, doing her Jewish refugee work. Beautiful Esther, with her big high pointing breasts. Oh Jesus!
But when evening actually came, and he was seated with Esther—Esther across from him at a small sidewalk table at the Brevoort, on lower Fifth Avenue—he barely thought of her breasts; he only thought, and he said, that the dark red suit she wore was extremely becoming. “You’re looking like a real stylish New York lady, Miss Esther. I don’t see the Oklahoma in you one bit, nor the Pinehill either.”
She answered in a serious way. “I feel very at home in New York. Really more than I ever did in Pinehill. Maybe it’s because of all the Jews. In Pinehill, I’m the only Jew in town.” She laughed to indicate the essential non-seriousness of that remark. “Although I guess a few of the students are Jewish. Very few,” she added.
“That’s changing now,” Russ told her, in his own more “Northern” accent. “Over at the college they’ve hired three of these ‘refugees,’ one from Austria and two from Germany. The German ones are both Jewish, I believe.”
“And the Austrian’s a Nazi, probably.”
“Now, Esther—”
“Well, the Austrians mostly were. They welcomed Hitler, the Anschluss. Except for the Jews, of course.”
“The Austrian’s a tennis coach, so he shouldn’t do too much harm. One of the Germans is an economist, the other teaches German.”
“I’ll have to meet them when I come down to see Jimmy and the girls,” Esther mused. “I’ve been studying German, hard. It’s a real intensive course.”
So many beautiful women passed by on the sidewalk, just separated from their table by a hedge. All ages and sizes and colors of lovely women, in their wartime short skirts and high heels, with the pointed toes. Hard for a man to imagine how they could walk; Russ could not, his imagination tripped at the very thought. But they did, some slowly and languorously, seeming to savor the unseasonably warm fall night, enjoying the men at their sides, the uniformed heroes back from or off to wherever, the glamorous ones. Other women, a few of them alone, or sometimes in groups of two or three, hurried past, but probably they too had some war-heightened rendezvous. They all looked so fresh, so beautiful, so remotely alluring. Admiring, and dimly lusting after them all, Russ felt infinitely old—a finished old poet, a finished man. A very old husband and father.
He watched as a shy-looking, very young, very thin girl walked by, her dark face wistful, he thought, as she scanned the terrace where he and Esther and other (rich, successful) older people sat and drank and talked, and perhaps made plans for love that might or might not work out. Don’t envy us, he wanted to say to the girl. It is not what it looks like. But before he could further explain, in this imagined, partly paternal speech to the pretty girl, a young sailor rushed out of the restaurant to seize her arms, to bend and to kiss her, avidly, familiarly; they knew all about kissing, those two. And Russ now saw the girl’s unshy, not wistful face as they broke off to laugh, still looking at each other, and then to leave the terrace, heading back into the restaurant.
“I could use another drink,” Russ said; he felt that he had not said anything for a while—he was not being a good host, or “date,” and so he added, “Sure you won’t join me?”
“Actually I will have another lemonade.” She laughed a little. “Jews don’t drink, you know. Almost never.” And then she told him a long, somewhat involved story about a waiter once who assumed that Jimmy, her husband, was trying to get her drunk—“I’d ordered something called a Horse’s Neck, which I just thought meant no liquor, but apparently it’s some kind of signal. Whatever it was I got was mostly gin. Jimmy drank it, he thought it was really swell.”
“I’ll have to remember that the next time I want to get a lady drunk,” Russ told her, with his special small polite laugh, as he thought: That’ll be the day, hell will burn first. I can’t stand it when women drink, Jesus Lord. SallyJane, and now Deirdre, so often—
Reading his mind, it seemed, or maybe his expression, Esther frowned and reached forward to touch his hand, very lightly but kindly. As she said, “I’m sorry, Russ,” she looked at him with her great depthless dark eyes that were full of pain.
Very suddenly then, Russ thought, or he knew, that he was truly, was absolutely in love with Esther Hightower, wife of Jimmy, the wildcat oilman, the writer, the ass. He loved her! and she would never, never in a month of Sundays, she would never love him! There would always be this beautiful distance between them, always. Beautiful! Enraptured by this perception, this marvelous insight, Russ beamed beatifically across the table at Esther.
Her telepathy seemingly turned off, Esther smiled back very pleasantly, and she told him, “I’m really glad you like it here. I do. Jimmy and I often come here when he’s in town. They have the best vichyssoise—I can’t get used to that name, can you?”
Not hearing much that she
said, but able still to make the requisite sounds of polite response, Russ’s poet-playwright’s inventive, romantic mind raced ahead: he foresaw a lifetime of immense and extraordinary love for Esther (“My vegetable love will grow, / Vaster than empires, and more slow—”). Marvell? he thought so; in any case, old lines that he had always loved. And it was wonderful that she would never know—unless, miraculously, she could somehow read between the lines of some poem of his, some great new poem, for Esther, that he would start tomorrow, or maybe tonight.
But she would not love him. Not ever. She wasn’t like that (he often thought in these phrases from his Baptist boyhood). He could not bear any more women who loved him, who “responded.” Or who, in some cases, even with Cynthia, but even more so with that cat witch, that psychiatrist’s wife, whose name he could never remember—in those cases, the women had started off the whole thing themselves. Initiated aggression—which Esther would never, never do; she wasn’t that kind. Contemplating this long life, or perhaps a short one, of unrequited love, Russ felt a vast peacefulness. A wonderful release from so much anxiety and pain. From the terrible doom of sex. Forgetting for the moment that he was married, and to a young and frequently amorous wife, he thought: I’ll never have to do all that again. Esther wouldn’t even want me to.
“Well,” he said, “maybe we should order?”
“We just did!” she cried out. “Russ, I don’t think you were even listening.” And she laughed. “Well, you’re getting the vichyssoise, and lobster salad. Whether you like it or not.”
And Russ, the inland Southern boy, who secretly hated lobster and almost all seafood, told her, “Of course I heard. Sounds wonderful!”
As he thought, No more bad dreams. No more terrible hot breasts. Only dreams of Esther, who is lovely and regal. And unattainable.