by Alice Adams
“Oh no, he’s about her age, just a little older.”
“Russ had a heart attack?”
“I think so, but he was out on the platform of a train with this Negro soldier—a sergeant, actually—so it’s all going to be investigated. In Texas. Some people of course think that the sergeant knocked him down and robbed him. There’ll be a trial, I’d even like to go—”
“Baby, darling Cynthia, I can’t hear a word you’re saying. Come back, I miss you!”
“You come back, I miss you.”
“Now I can’t hear you at all, are you gone back to sleep? Christ, I wish I were there—”
“Harry, where are you?”
“We’d better hang up, I can’t hear a fucking thing—”
Minutes later, as Cynthia curled up in her bed, alone, she thanked God that she was alone, no Derek at her side: Harry would somehow have felt that, felt some unfamiliar constraint, even guilt. But then she thought, It’s not even God that I have to thank, it’s myself; nevertheless, she retained a semi-superstitious gratitude—to fate. After all, she had tried to bargain with God, or whoever, about the safety of Harry, and so far it looked as though he, or He, would keep his side of the bargain.
The circumstances of Russ’s death indeed were, as Cynthia had said to Harry, an awful mess. The fact of its taking place in a small town in East Texas was, as many observed, very unfortunate. In that particular town, there had already been a certain amount of “trouble”—trouble including a couple of razor fights and more than a couple of rock-throwing riots, all having to do with the occasional presence of Negro soldiers, many of whom were from the North, Detroit or someplace like that, and not used to Southern ways.
The local paper announced that in the “sudden death” of the “promising” Southern poet, novelist, and playwright, James Russell Lowell Byrd, “foul play” was suspected, thus getting almost everything wrong, including the list of his children: nine, instead of the actual seven, and SallyJane Caldwell Byrd as the surviving wife, instead of Deirdre. The fact that the coroner had announced a heart attack was not mentioned.
As Dolly Bigelow put it, “However can they call a man of Russ Byrd’s age promising? Promising what? More children? You reckon he had some more that we don’t even know about, maybe out there in Hollywood? Like those novels that he was supposed to be the author of. You reckon they got him confused with Jimmy Hightower?” But Dolly too thought something was wrong. “Something suspicious, Russ just dying like that, out there with that colored soldier, and no money on him. And the colored soldier with a whole big wad on him, upwards of one hundred dollars, the way I heard it.”
The “colored soldier” was actually Edward Faulkner, from Roxbury, Massachusetts, at twenty-eight one of the youngest Negro sergeants in the Army. And the dispute in Texas seemed to be, at first, about whether a civil or a military team should investigate—which was soon settled. Since he had been discharged, the Army could not try him.
All this came through to Pinehill in snippets, small paragraphs wedged in among the more important pieces of real news, about the war. News from Leningrad, from the Marshall and Solomon Islands, from the Ukraine and Crimea.
Since Deirdre was away, no one knew what she thought about anything.
• • •
Having wondered and worried about Melanctha, Cynthia at last decided simply to call her. If Melanctha didn’t want to talk or to be seen, she could say so.
But what Melanctha said was, “Tea? I’d really like that. No, don’t come for me. I can drive Russ’s car.”
“Russ.” Had she ever called him Daddy, or Father? Cynthia couldn’t remember. In any case, it was strange, very strange, to see what had been Russ’s old dark green Chevy pull into her driveway, and to watch the brisk emergence of Melanctha, in a new blue coat.
“She sure do favor him,” murmured Odessa, also watching, at Cynthia’s side; they both stood near a window in the front of the house.
“The dead spit, as Dolly would say. Or almost,” Cynthia murmured in return. And both women smiled, acknowledging mutual affection as well as the tacitly agreed on foolishness of Dolly.
Once inside the house, though, divested of her coat and sitting with the tea that Odessa almost immediately brought in, Melanctha looked less like Russ and more like an extremely pretty, almost beautiful girl—herself, pale and somewhat strained (her mouth especially showed strain, in its compression, tight corners); her eyes looked larger, a darker blue, and intense—hers were passionate eyes. Too intense, too passionate, Cynthia judged. That girl will have a lot of trouble; well, she already has. Melanctha’s hair was pulled back smoothly (Cynthia approved of this), the thick curls (Russ’s curls) all under control.
After some preliminary weather conversation—they agreed that the rain seemed ended, spring was almost there—Cynthia gently inquired, “Well, how’re you doing, generally? You’re feeling okay?”
“I’m really upset—” Melanctha flushed, and looked down. “I mean of course about Russ, but about that Negro, the sergeant. Those Texas people are saying all this terrible stuff, and there isn’t anything anyone can do. Especially me, everyone says. Russ’s lawyer—I guess he’s my lawyer now—said for me to go down there or even call would be ‘most unbecoming.’ Can you imagine? Most unbecoming, when we’re talking about a man who may be on trial for something he absolutely did not do.”
The flush on her face was attractive, as was the animation with which Melanctha spoke. Still, her concentrated excitement made Cynthia uneasy—it seemed so clearly a cover for darker, deeper feelings, related to Russ.
“Actually,” Melanctha confessed, “I did call one of the papers down there, and—you won’t believe this—he said they didn’t need any ‘outside agitators.’ God, what does he think I am, a Russian Communist?”
“Probably it’ll all just die down, don’t you think?”
“But, Cynthia, they could do something terrible to him, and it all seems like my fault, somehow.”
“Melanctha, please, come on. Your fault? It’s not even Russ’s fault, really.”
“Oh, I know.” Suddenly all Melanctha’s animation and the flush had gone, and she looked pale and sad and tired. “But in a larger sense, you know what I mean?”
Partly because she didn’t know where to go with this conversation, Cynthia asked, “How’s Deirdre?”
“She’s gone to California, I don’t know for how long.” Melanctha’s tone was that of someone talking about a rather distant acquaintance. But then in quite another voice she said, “I miss Abby, you know? There’s all this stuff I could say to her.”
“Why don’t you call her? I do, all the time.”
“God, I’m so dumb, I didn’t even think—”
“I’ll write down her number for you.”
Getting up, going into the breakfast room for a notepad and pencil, Cynthia was thinking: Deirdre in California—could she be meeting Derek there? She had not heard from him since the day after she had let him off at the hotel, which was not unusual; he was not given to friendly staying-in-touch phone calls. But now she wondered, Could he be in California? And at the same time she chided herself: Deirdre’s father’s in California; it was Russ who went to California a lot, not Derek—and you, Cynthia, are nuts; come on, pull yourself together.
Handing the pencilled slip to Melanctha, she told her, “Abby seems to be out a lot of the time, though. Probably studying in the library, don’t you think?” And she laughed, intending complicity.
Melanctha barely smiled before she said, very seriously, “I think this boy she knows sounds really nice. Joseph. His father’s a big director, or producer, or something, and he sort of knew Russ, but I don’t think they liked each other. Russ said he was a Communist.” She hesitated. “I don’t even know any Communists, do you? Unless, girls at Radcliffe I didn’t know about, or at Harvard. I guess there were some.”
“I’m not really sure I want to know Communists.” Cynthia had not meant to sound so prud
ish, and she amended, “What I mean is, I know so little about Communism, really. Or for that matter about this boy, this Joseph.”
“I’m going to call Abby tonight,” Melanctha said. She had seemingly lost interest in Communists, or in Cynthia.
But Cynthia had a pleasant sense of having cheered her, at least a little.
• • •
In fact, the very next day Melanctha called, and in very high spirits. “I got Abby! She was right there, honestly, it sounded like the next room. I told her all about Russ and the Negro sergeant, and she said she’d talk to Joseph’s parents, she’s going to see them this weekend, and they’re very interested in things like that, race relations and all. They have some committee.”
“Have you heard from Deirdre?”
“Yes, she called last night, she sounds fine. Said she had some old friends out there, or something.”
“Oh, well, that’s nice.”
“Old friends” did not necessarily mean Derek; in fact, why on earth should it mean him? Why does Cynthia even imagine that Derek is in California?
Derek and Deirdre spend an hour or so together, probably just talking, expecting her lawyer to arrive at any minute. Cynthia does not hear from Derek, and Melanctha says that Deirdre is in California. None of these known facts add up to anything positive, or even suggestive—except to Cynthia, who began to think that she was truly nuts.
Not being with Harry is not good for me, she thought—her most sensible conclusion for some time.
“They’re really interested, the Marcuses,” Melanctha told Cynthia. “I think they’ll get involved, in some way.” She was describing her most recent conversation with Abby, after Abby’s weekend in New York with Joseph’s family. Cynthia had talked to Abby too, and they had discussed the Marcuses, but had talked mostly about New York, how much Abby liked it there.
For some reason the notion of the Marcuses’ involvement in the case—if there was to be a case—of Russ and the sergeant made Cynthia uneasy, and her attention wandered as Melanctha continued, intensely, about the Marcuses and the sergeant, Sergeant Edward Faulkner.
Outside the big living-room window, in a broad circle on the lawn, the daffodils were just coming into bloom, brave yellow flags on their tall green waving stalks. Cynthia, aided by Odessa, had planted them in the fall. “Don’t matter ’bout too close together, Horace always say that,” Odessa had advised, and she—she and Horace—had been right. In a few weeks there would be a foam of yellow there, the effect was of bounty, generosity. And then again next year, at this same time, more daffodils. And eventually Harry would be home to see them.
And Abigail, who said she was coming home soon and bringing Joseph—probably.
“Deirdre’ll be back tomorrow, I think,” said Melanctha, a few days later.
“Where in California has she been?”
“San Francisco, mostly. She says it’s beautiful there.”
As Derek used to say, “San Francisco is really beautiful.” Inwardly quailing as she thought and remembered this, at the same time Cynthia managed to tell herself, to remember that Derek had also said that Venice was beautiful, and Paris, and Istanbul—and a town in Mexico with an impossible name: Oaxaca. Why should he be in San Francisco, with Deirdre, any more than in any of those places—or for that matter, in London, with Harry?
Some terrific lawyer, she said to herself again, as she tried to concentrate on Melanctha.
Melanctha, who was saying, “… that operation you told me about?”
Operation? Cynthia must have looked very blank, for Melanctha then explained, “You know, you had this friend, and she thought her breasts were too big?” (Those last words came out in an embarrassed rush.)
“Oh yes. Buffy Guggenheim, I think.”
“Well, I thought about it a lot, and right now I could do it if I wanted to. You know, I got this money from Russ.” She looked away, as much embarrassed by money as she was by her breasts, it seemed. “And I just don’t think I will. Or anyway not now. I basically don’t like the idea of it, you know what I mean? I’d rather give the money to someone. Maybe that Ed Faulkner. You understand?”
“Of course I do. I wouldn’t like it either, I don’t think. Even just getting your face done—and people look so terrible.”
“I heard that Brenda Frazier had it done on her legs,” surprisingly said Melanctha. “As a matter of fact it was Abby, she told me that.”
“Well—really—”
“And I’m going back to Radcliffe next week,” announced Melanctha, somewhat defiantly. “Abby and I plan to get together in New York sometime soon. I could even fly! I never have, it could be wonderful.”
“I’m sure—” Cynthia had found all this darting about by Melanctha more than a little hard to follow, from Deirdre (and, in Cynthia’s own mind, Derek) to the Marcuses, the Negro sergeant, Russ, breast reduction surgery, Brenda Frazier’s legs, and to flying to Radcliffe.
“Russ flew sometimes. He liked it, I think,” said Melanctha. And she continued, as though to herself, “I think all those long cross-country trips in the big car depressed him. With my mother and all of us. I’m sure we acted up. I think the time he ran over the pig and it smelled so horrible—that’s all I remember, the smell, and I do remember that Russ said, ‘Pig shit’—what a shock! Anyway, I think that trip was the end of something for him. Maybe flying could help him think it all never happened.”
“Maybe,” Cynthia murmured in soft agreement, while to herself she added: Probably, Russ was so many different people, really, and flying up high he could forget the husband-father selves, and just be that. A high flyer.
11
HAVING always thought of sex as something that he would probably not be good at, Joseph Marcus was astounded at the bountiful, splendid success of doing it with lovely Abby Baird, who was in many ways the sort of girl with whom he had imagined himself a failure: a beautiful blond gentile from both Connecticut and the South. However, she was also smart, extremely smart, which did not concur with his failure-fantasy picture. But even the very first time, which she later confessed was her first time too, it was she who reached for his cock and thrust it so easily, slippingly inside herself. He came instantly, incredibly (Christ! No one had said it would be like that), but so did she, signalling her pleasure with a small high cry that he came to know, and to cherish.
They did it again several times that afternoon, sweatily, in the bright December sunlight that lay across his narrow dormitory bed—and afterwards almost every chance they got, sometimes in her room, sometimes on weekends at his parents’ place in New York, where they were thoughtfully, tactfully put in adjoining rooms, what had been the maids’ quarters up on the top floor. (His parents’ knowing looks, just short of insinuation, were mildly annoying to Joseph, but what the hell, it was better than some sort of Republican puritanism, hypocrisy, he supposed, although sometimes he wondered.)
Logically—and Joseph was on the whole a very logical person—he might have been expected to conclude from his experiences with Abby that in a general way he was great at sex, “really a stud in the sack,” as some guys he knew used to put it, and that he should try it out with lots more girls, more Episcopal blondes, and dark prim Jewish girls, and maybe a few wild Italian Catholics. But Joseph did not think this; in fact he reached an opposite conclusion, which was that sex with Abby was superior, why bother with anyone else? Besides, once that part of his life was settled, for good, all the rest of his attention and energy would be freed for work.
Joseph had spent a lot of his early years, especially summers, in various left-wing family resorts, and in those days no one worried much about what children were exposed to, in terms of conversations, theories, ideas. Thus Joseph and Susan, the young Marcus children, were always listening to long soul-searchings, analyses, and questionings as to marriages and love affairs, along with political speculation and theorizing (could rumors of the Moscow trials be true?). Joseph’s picture of himself as a young child was of a skinny
, tall, dark, bare-kneed boy, sitting at the back edge of a camp-fire circle, next to Susan, who slept, while the grown-ups, with their guitars, sang Spanish Civil War songs, songs from the Lincoln Brigade, and Spanish folk songs, often followed by heavy, mournful “Negro spirituals,” an occasional Negro blues, late at night, in the cooling New England lakeside air.
Joseph’s sexiest pre-Abby experiences had been at those camps, beside those lakes. He and a small succession of girls, not more than one a summer, would be out there on a blanket, or sometimes just sand, kissing and striving against each other. But Joseph’s lust-driven fingers were always stopped by those quick-handed girls with their iron wrists. And the one time that he reasonably asked, “What’s so much worse about touching than what we’re already doing?” he was flatly rebuked for his logic by a buxom blond girl who after that refused even to kiss him anymore.
He was supposed to talk about love to these girls, Joseph knew that, but all that kind of talk bored him silly, as did the things the grown-ups talked about; both then and later in life emotional conversations struck him as the most total waste of energy. He thought that might explain his own choice of physics as a field of concentration—which was about as far as he got with introspection. His sister, Susan, reacted more or less oppositely: she enjoyed a lifelong preoccupation with the vagaries of her own and almost anyone else’s mind; she was always happy to examine and question the motives and forces underlying and propelling anyone’s love and/or work.
The second half of the twentieth century, Joseph believed—and they were almost at it—would contain remarkable, in fact stupendous developments in his chosen field. The release of atomic energy, just for starters. Its peacetime use. He imagined for himself a rather spare, dedicated life: a good lab to work in with similarly dedicated colleagues, and probably students; a book-lined, large-windowed apartment, full of music, especially Schubert and Brahms; outdoor weekends, mountain hiking and swimming—and all this he now envisioned himself doing with Abigail, plus all those nights of screwing. Infinite sex.