After the War

by Alice Adams

  That was how, to Cynthia, every person at every party sounded, full of warmth and enthusiasm, prurience and sexual innuendo. And then she and Harry would go home from the parties, half-drunk, and pass out on the bed—to which, everyone thought, they had so much looked forward.

  In early July, Abigail arrived, with Joseph Marcus, whom Harry had not met before and whom, Cynthia’s instincts informed her, Harry would not especially take to. Harry would be nice, kind and polite and very “interested” in anything Joseph might say, but Joseph was not really Harry’s cup of tea. A young physicist, with Jewish-Communist parents, not to mention the lover of Harry’s very young and only daughter? All that asked a lot of Harry, a nice but basically very conventional man, with a lot on his mind these days. Cynthia herself did like Joseph, more and more; there was something wonderfully exotic about his eyes, an almost slant, and an interesting yellow-brown color. Also, perhaps more rationally, she thought that Joseph was both extremely intelligent and extremely sexy.

  Harry and Joseph argued about the bomb that had been tested in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

  “It’ll scare the Japs into total surrender,” said Harry, with military authority. “Christ, they’re not going to risk that kind of destruction. Truman said—and Churchill—”

  “I wish I were sure of that.” Joseph’s voice was both tentative and worried. “It doesn’t seem in character for them to fear anything, to act on fear. Not from what we’ve seen of them. And then a lot of our fellows, the scientists in New Mexico I mean, are so hung up on this thing, what they call ‘the Gadget’—Lord, as though it were harmless. I just can’t believe they’re not going to want to use it.”

  Both men, their two faces so very unlike, now wore very similar expressions, intense frowns of sincerity. Cynthia thought, Men! Harry is really saying, My generation is very reliable; I am a reliable, thoughtful serious person (which he was). And Joseph was saying, I don’t know, this is all brand-new; I don’t trust anybody around this “Gadget,” this horrifying bomb.

  Harry said, “I know Truman wouldn’t use it unless it was absolutely the only way we could win this war. Save our men’s lives.”

  “But costing how many Japanese lives?” asked Joseph. “You have to count them too.”

  Unable to bring herself simply to put Abby and Joseph in the same room (what would her mother have said, and for that matter what would Odessa think?), Cynthia had put Joseph in the guest room, which was just across the hall from Abby’s room. Convenient and discreet enough, except that in that old house the floorboards creaked, and thus Joseph’s nightly trek across the hall was loudly broadcast, though by morning no one paid much attention to his return.

  Cynthia only minded because of the situation, continuing, between herself and Harry. She was envious (God! envious of her daughter), and envy made her cross. Everything made her cross.

  “Mother, don’t you feel well?” Solicitous Abby, with the dewy flush of sensual happiness all over her face, and in her voice, and in the springy, confident way she walked.

  “Yes—no, I’m fine,” Cynthia told her daughter, and then she burst into tears.

  They were sitting on the edge of the pool, their bare feet dangling in the water, both wearing shorts and halters. As she covered her eyes with her hands, pushing back tears, Cynthia thought: This is a hell of a place to cry, and what a time. To Abby she said, “Darling, I’m sorry, I just don’t feel so great. I think it’s the heat.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” Quickly, Abby reached to pat her mother’s shoulder, and she said, “It is hot. Do you think it’s hard on you, having Daddy suddenly come home?”

  Very startled—they did not go in for habitual frankness, and how, and what, could Abby know? Cynthia hedged. “Maybe. You know, you read these articles about readjustment.” She tried to laugh, and did pretty well. “Maybe that’s what we’re doing. Readjusting.”

  Or maybe, she thought, I’m having an early menopause? Very early? And she recalled various horror stories of her mother’s about that (supposedly) inevitably terrible time for women.

  It was indeed extremely hot. The weather had changed from balmy and caressive to heavily oppressive, like a love affair gone bad. That was Cynthia’s thought as, later that night, she and Harry lay carefully apart. Well, it was too hot for touching, it really was.

  Not so, though, for Abby and Joseph, whose sensual fervor seemed, if anything, increased by the heat, and perhaps a little by the illicit fact of doing it in Abigail’s parents’ house. They even discovered a couple of new positions for themselves, new ways of doing things.

  But in an interim of quiet, as they lay there in Abby’s drenched and hot white bed, their bodies slick and for the moment exhausted, Abby told Joseph that she was worried about her parents. “They don’t sort of sneak off for what they call naps anymore,” she whispered. “You’d think that now especially they would, I mean with my father just home.”

  “Maybe that makes it harder for them. What we’re reading about—‘readjustment.’ ”

  “That’s sort of what my mother said. Well, God! I hope they get over it.”

  “My parents have never ‘sneaked off for naps’ and they’re still married. People get over stuff. You’re supposed to know that. You’re the doctor.”

  “Not exactly. Yet.”

  “I’m not even sure I want to be a physicist anymore.”

  “You’re worried about stuff out in New Mexico?”

  “I sure am.”

  17

  AFTER the bombs that Joseph had predicted were actually dropped, on August 6 (Hiroshima) and August 9 (Nagasaki), and after a shared initial reaction of horror—although no one at the time had any idea of the range and intensity of destruction—arguments around the Baird household increased.

  Harry felt, and he said, that Truman had no choice; he had given the Japanese an ultimatum, joined in by Stalin, Russia. If he had not used the bomb, God knows how many more American soldiers would have died. Probably more than the 80,000 known as instantly dead in Hiroshima, the 40,000 in Nagasaki. At least that many American soldiers: 120,000?

  “Nevertheless,” Joseph said with passion, “we cannot think of human life in terms of those numbers—any numbers. The bomb should never never have been used. Morally, entirely wrong.”

  “Besides,” added Abby, who agreed with Joseph, “there may be long-term effects we don’t even know about. We’re just beginning to think about radiation. Doctors are. We just don’t know what happened.”

  Cynthia too agreed in a general way with Joseph, although she did not quite say so. She felt that things between her and Harry were already touchy, possibly incendiary. She observed, though, with a certain objective (or nearly objective) interest, that it was the two supposedly scientific minds in the group, Joseph and Abigail, who on mostly moral grounds objected to this ultimate use of “science,” whereas Harry, the reluctant military man, argued for it. Quite often she inwardly sighed over everything; it was all too much for her, she felt.

  And then, days after the bombs, the war was over: the Japanese surrendered and everyone celebrated, and they all forgot about how much it had cost.

  To Cynthia, Harry seemed frenziedly happy. Of course she too was glad that the war was over, but Harry was manic, hyperexcited. He brought out champagne for the four of them, Cynthia, himself, Abigail, and Joseph, in the stifling August heat. It was still hot at night; they sat around the pool, as though the water might make them cool, and toasted the end of the war.

  Heat increased the smell of chlorine, and of privet—and of all their bodies; all four of those people had bathed or showered at least once that day, but still some scent of warm flesh and talcum powder lingered, plus light perfume from Cynthia, and Harry’s new English aftershave (Cynthia imagined a present from some sad deserted English lady friend).

  Exuberant Harry declared, “You see? It worked! Mr. Truman, the other Harry, that is”—he laughed—“old Harry did the right thing. If he hadn’t dropped those bombs,
we’d still be at it until God knows when.”

  No one had the heart or the energy to disagree, assuming they wanted to.

  • • •

  Cynthia had read a little about a mental illness, Manic Depression, which was characterized, she thought, by wildly erratic mood swings such as Harry had seemed to exhibit since he got home, and she wondered, Could that be what was wrong? Had Harry come down with, succumbed to (however you put it, the notion was ominous) this disease of the mind? Did it run in his family, possibly? This seemed hardly the moment to ask as she looked over at his still basically boyish, Irish-charm face, and heard his old warm, seductive laugh—and smelled (again) the new English aftershave, a light lavender.

  This Manic Depression was usually treated with electric shock, Cynthia had read—what an entirely horrible idea! Also, that was what had killed poor SallyJane Byrd, the first wife of Russ, mother of Melanctha and those boys. When she went down to that terrible doctor with the awful sexy wife, whom everyone still talked about.

  Oh, poor Harry! she thought.

  On the other hand, it could be just an ordinary Nervous Breakdown, not Manic Depression. Friends of her father’s had those breakdowns a long time ago. But Cynthia did not remember what anyone did to cure them, anything recommended; she seemed to recall that people went to Florida, Palm Beach or someplace like that, and took long walks.

  Now Harry was pouring more champagne—from the bottle in the silver ice bucket that he had brought out (silly, in this weather; the ice all melted right away, no matter what you did).

  Fireflies, tiny and bright, came darting out of the black around the edges of flowers, in and out of dark bushes. Fascinated, Joseph explained, “We don’t have them in New York.”

  “Children down here catch them and put them in jars and keep them in their rooms at night,” Abby told him, and she reminded her mother, “Graham and I used to do that, remember? I showed him how.”

  But it was Harry who answered, “I sure do! And they were all dead in the morning, usually, and you were upset. It’s hard now to remember you and Graham being such friends, isn’t it? What a sissy he’s turned out to be, I guess no wonder.”

  Abby frowned. “I don’t think—”

  But Harry went right on, “Joseph, drink up! We’ve barely touched this bottle—can’t let it go to waste.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not much of a drinker, and I do have to get up early tomorrow. The train—”

  All around them, invisible in the heavy night, tree frogs croaked their full-throated sounds, and somewhere off in the distance a lone hound bayed.

  Cynthia was thinking that she had also read about men who came home from the war with afflicting ailments they did not want to talk about, but which were not necessarily “social diseases.” (If the disease was “social,” you would have to talk about it right away, wouldn’t you?) Maybe ulcers, or hemorrhoids, something embarrassing. Maybe some little infection in the penis itself, noncommunicable but incapacitating? How little we know about these things, thought Cynthia as in her mind she heard, inappropriately, the song “Oh, I hope in my heart that it’s so, in spite of how little we know.”

  “Well?” said Joseph to Abby as he stood up.

  She stood too. “Okay!” and she kissed her parents good night, and started back to the house with Joseph—a little too eagerly, Cynthia thought; couldn’t they even pretend to observe proprieties? And then she thought, But what am I talking about? Who am I to talk?

  Almost before they were out of earshot, though, just as the screen door to the house slammed shut, Harry began to talk, in a fast, compulsive way; it sounded rehearsed. Except that it also sounded as though he was starting in the middle.

  “… so trite,” he said. “When I stand back from it, I can hardly believe this is me. But maybe the other stuff was trite too. Being faithful to you, the way I planned. But then in Devon there was this girl, she’s Scottish, funnily enough she’s a Lady, actually. Lady Veracity McCullough.”

  He paused just long enough for Cynthia to say, in a furious low voice, “I can’t think why you’re telling me this.”

  “Cynthia, darling, I don’t blame you for being angry—”

  “Oh, good. I mean it, why do I have to hear this?”

  “Because I’m serious,” he said. “Veracity and I—oh, darling—”

  “Veracity. Oh Jesus.”

  “Cynthia, darling, come on—”

  “Will you please stop calling me ‘darling’?”

  There were more tree frogs, throatily protesting, and another hound, with a deeper, more dismal voice. And always everywhere, the fireflies, and the jarring smells of chlorine, and privet, and wine.

  Sounding for the first time quite angry, Harry told her, “Besides, I don’t necessarily want to live down here. You’ve made all these plans, and gardens and swimming pool. And now your career law school in Hilton. Where do I come in?”

  “Oh, Harry—”

  “I like it in Washington, I’ve never really liked this dumpy town.”

  “… well, I wish you’d said—”

  “You weren’t looking! You’ve been so fucking busy down here, you never looked at me—”

  “Harry—”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but—”

  “I suppose Veracity looks at you all the time—”

  “You’re being cheap—”

  “I know, I should have said Lady Veracity—Harry, we’ve got to stop this.”

  In disbelief, in the heavy hot dark, they stared at each other. Each remembering everything at once. Their life.

  On a single impulse, they reached toward each other, and Harry pulled her to her feet. In a frantic embrace, they kissed, and kissed—until in the midst of kissing Cynthia fatally thought: Lady Veracity?

  Standing back from him, she said, “Harry, please just go and sleep in the study. You’ve made me very tired.” She patted him on the shoulder.

  “Cynthia—darling, I understand how you must feel.”

  “You do not. I’m going up to bed.”

  Joseph asked, “Do you think we should get married?”

  Abby gave it some thought. “I guess. Eventually.”

  “Or we could just live in sin forever.”

  She thought again. “That makes a big deal of it too, though, don’t you think? Living in sin forever is as assertive as getting married.”

  Joseph laughed. “You’re right, of course you’re right.” After a small pause he said, “I think you’re so smart, and so beautiful, you’re so sexy and you always make me laugh. And I never say that stuff, does that bother you?”

  “No, really not.”

  “And you don’t mind that I don’t talk about love?”

  “No.” She added, “It’s not the kind of conversation we have.”

  “Well, for the record,” he said, “I do love you. Assuming that we know what one means by the word.”

  She laughed. “For the record, me too.”

  To her own great surprise, as soon as she got into bed, alone, Cynthia began to cry. Almost worse, popular songs throbbed through her mind, their silly words thronged. The one I love belongs to somebody else—songs of love, but not for me—memories of you—dreams—blue—you.

  And then she slept for a while.

  Waking an hour or so later and acutely aware of all that champagne, she got up and went into her bathroom, for a very quick cool shower. Somewhat relieved, having also taken aspirin, she came back to bed in a rather different mood. Lady Veracity indeed, she thought. Why did I even have to listen to that stuff? And I didn’t tell him a thing. I could have gone on about Derek—Derek McFall, or for that matter Russ Byrd. Even if they don’t have English titles. How dare Harry? How cheap of him, how trite: American Naval Officer and His Lady. It’s the dumbest story I ever heard—and I wish it were someone else’s.

  Her next sleep was sound and deep, and lasted until she heard Abby and Joseph, doors opening and closing, a suitcase banging down the stairs. She got up and p
ut on a robe—not, by design, her prettiest, just a clean practical summer robe.

  Harry emerged from his study, looking red-eyed, reproachful, in a travel-worn robe. And so it was together that they went out to say goodbye to Joseph, whom Abby was to drive to Durham, to his train.

  Abby said, “I think I’ll stop off and see Melanctha on the way home. She’s back to Radcliffe soon. You know, their funny wartime schedule.”

  Joseph thanked them, and said he hoped he would see them in New York, or somewhere—maybe they would come up to Swarthmore? He’d had a wonderful time, he said (with possibly the smallest blush?).

  Smiling to herself at their visible happiness with each other, their sheer young healthy well-being, as she thought, Oh good, I’m not envious of my daughter, Cynthia went into the kitchen, intending to make coffee, but Harry right behind her said that he wanted to make breakfast. “Just sit down,” he told her. “I’ll do it.”

  Not saying, Oh how nice, an English breakfast, but tactfully sitting down and not helping, Cynthia watched some very busy small birds on the grass outside. So wholly intent on their tiny projects, they were, as they hopped here and there on the yellowing grass, bright-eyed and observant.

  Seated at last, with breakfast toast and coffee on the table between them, across from each other, Harry began—as Cynthia had almost, somehow, known that he would. “I think I was crazy last night, I must have been. I can’t drink anymore—the champagne. Veracity—today the whole thing feels totally unreal. I mean I did have a sort of a fling, well, you must have too? I hope you did, I guess.”

  This last was clearly invitational, but Cynthia declined, and only looked at him as though unsure what he meant.

  “Well,” he managed to continue, “I’m really sorry for what I put you through. You must have thought I was crazy, not to mention—”

  “As a matter of fact, I do think you may be having a sort of breakdown. Probably. I don’t know much about this stuff.” She had not at all known what she was going to say, but Cynthia continued firmly, “I think what you said about Pinehill and us is true, though. I love it here, and you don’t. You love living in Washington.”