After the War

by Alice Adams

  “I reckon.”

  Ed noticed that when Dan Marcus talked like this, his voice, his accent tended to get sort of Southern, really more like somebody on a stage talking Southern. Or talking Negro, maybe.

  What Ed could never explain to Dan Marcus—not that he even wanted to try: Dan would have been much too interested—was his own trouble with all those down-South Negroes. Those supposed-to-be brothers of his, same color, although he was lots lighter than most. Same nappy hair and big mouths. But half the time he could not understand a word they were saying. And they thought he was some kind of a snob, a Tom, for talking like a Yankee. Talking white.

  “Were you sorry not to go overseas?” asked Mr. Marcus. “I reckon you were. Missing Paris. You know, unless it’s changed a lot there’s really no color line there. In fact I’ve heard that a lot of Negro GI’s—and in England—and I’m sure Italians—”

  On and on he went, smiling, enjoying his own speeches, agreeing with his own opinions and probably imagining that Ed did too.

  Susan Marcus wanted to flirt with Ed, but she didn’t know quite what kind of flirting to use, and she tried out different ways. She was all the time mostly after getting his attention.

  She was a pretty enough girl, Susan was, in her blond Jewish way, with her straight-down hair that was curled (too curled) at the ends, and her chunky frame—built like a fireplug, that girl was, or as they used to say, a brick shithouse. One of the attention-get things that she did was wear tight sweaters. Too tight for her small boobs; she was not any Ann Sheridan, or Lana Turner either.

  She wore a lot of bright colors too. Had somebody told her that that was what Negroes liked, loud pink? (“Nigger pink” he had heard about down South.) And a terrible pea-green sweater that she had. Ed really liked to see girls in black dresses, even black sweaters, and pearls. Black really set off a girl’s looks, he thought, no matter what was her color.

  Another thing that Susan tried, along with the bright colors, was serious conversation. She told him a lot about her work down at “Party Headquarters.”

  “People say all these bad things about the Party,” she told him. “All this terrible anti-Communism. It’s a lot like anti-Semitism or being anti-Negro. But we get in some amazing reports. There was this group down in North Carolina, at the university there—in Chapel Hill?—and they started up this credit union, for Negro people down there. The first one ever, so Negroes could borrow money, like anyone else. Honestly, those Southern people are hard to believe, don’t you think?”

  “I got some pretty nice family down there.”

  “Oh—well.” He’d caught her that time. No way she could say, “Well, all Negro people are nice.” Although she may have really thought that, that’s how ignorant she was.

  And so, partly to tease her, he said, “But you’re right. Some of those down-home niggers I met in the Army, bad stuff.”

  “Oh, I hate that word!” He could tell that she really did hate it, she shuddered all over.

  But he couldn’t resist more teasing. “Nigger? Down South they use it all the time, every color of folks.” He smiled at her, being nice. “But you don’t like it, you don’t use it, okay?” She took him seriously—she was really a serious girl. No chick. “Oh, I won’t,” she said. And then, “But I guess it’s sort of like certain words my father uses, words about Jews. And some jokes he tells. Awful jokes, about Jews. But he says it’s okay for him since he is one. I don’t quite get it, do you?”

  “I don’t know. I guess not.”

  And then in a flirty way she told him about guys she dated at Swarthmore College. “There was this football player,” she said. “A classic. Big and stupid and conservative! Gee! The worst kind of a bigot, a Fascist, really he was. I just went out with him a couple of times. A football player, honestly!”

  “Those guys aren’t all so bad,” Ed told her. “A couple of them in our high school, just plain regular guys. And smart.”

  This was not strictly true. The football guys at Roxbury High were boneheads, and besides they were white. Ed didn’t even know them, to speak to. But it was fun to tease Susan, she got so confused, so easily.

  But, “Oh well,” she said. “Talk about smart. We knew this guy who played on the team at Harvard. And very smart, he was going to go to med school but then he decided he didn’t want to be a doctor. And he was—a Negro.” She added recklessly, “He’s extremely good-looking.”

  And I’ll bet you really went after him, Ed did not say.

  She went on about this Harvard football player, this Negro. “He’s a friend of my brother’s girl, Abby Baird. And she’s a big friend of that Melanctha Byrd, the one you know.” She had said more than she meant to say, he could tell.

  And he was no help. “You mean the one whose father I did not kill on the train?”

  She looked so miserable that he felt a little sorry for her as she murmured, “Yes.”

  He said, “That Melanctha’s a real nice girl. I reckon your brother’s girlfriend, that Abby, is too?”

  “Oh yes, Abby’s terrific. Even my mother likes her. And my father forgives her for not being Jewish.”

  Ed thought, White people are as crazy as niggers.

  The one of the family that he liked by far the best was Joseph. When he was with Joseph, the two of them just talked, like regular people. Joseph was not the whole time thinking, I’m talking to a Negro. Like the rest of them did.

  Joseph talked mostly about his plans. After MIT, what kind of work he wanted to get into. “There’s some very exciting projects going on these days in physics,” he told Ed. “But I’m sort of worried about government connections with them. You know, the new HUAC. The House Un-American Activities Committee. Hell, they start poking around and interfering, and they could decide my parents are un-American.”

  Ed laughed. “You mean on account of being Jewish?”

  “Jewish Communists. Already that sounds un-American. I mean, if they start investigating physicists who want to work on the Manhattan Project, for example, they might conclude that I don’t come from a very reliable American family. I’m not saying that this is going to happen, but it could. I know a lot of people who’re worried.”

  Ed didn’t understand a lot of this; it was stuff he had never heard of, mostly, and he didn’t like this sense of being “ignorant” (like people said niggers were), and he had at that moment a new and startling idea. He said, “You know, I’ve been thinking, now that my Army discharge is all cleared, all okay, maybe with this GI Bill I could go to some school out west, like Wisconsin. I hear Madison’s really neat.”

  “I’ve heard that too. But why not try for the top? Try Harvard, or Swarthmore’s very good. You’d like it there. I did.”

  “Harvard! Jesus, I’ll be real lucky to get in at Madison.” This was not entirely true. Ed had a high B+ average in high school, considered not bad at all in that tough, competitive school.

  “Actually I think my mother wants to get out of the Party,” Joseph next said, in a worried way.

  “You don’t want her to?”

  “Oh no, actually I think she’s quite right. I mean, the Moscow trials and all that, not to mention the pact—and Finland. Well, I just think she’s right,” he said, seeming at that moment to understand that Ed probably did not realize what he was talking about. “I just don’t like my parents arguing,” he explained. “No matter who’s right.”

  “My mom’s the one always right,” Ed told him. “Especially when she’s not.”

  Ed had in fact heard the Marcuses arguing. His room was right next to theirs, and so he heard:

  “—but the Party—”

  “—Richard Wright—”

  “—the KGB, you can’t deny—”

  “—exploitation—”

  “—collectivism—”

  “—the trials—”

  “—at Harvard, Father Smythe—”

  A bunch of half-heard, mostly unfamiliar names and phrases, mixed up with the familiar ones tha
t he heard when his own parents argued—he guessed, when anyone did.

  “—you always—”

  “—you don’t understand—”

  “—I can’t—”

  “—you never—”

  “When you go out to Madison, I’ll come to see you, okay?” Susan had to shout above the noise of the band, a trio really, but loud, a bass and a sax and a trumpet, plus a guy that sang—looked like part Indian. They were perched on small chairs at a tiny table with another couple they had never seen before; the waiter just put them there with no questions, no apology. At a cellar joint on Fifty-second Street where Susan had handed out a couple of tens just to get them in—all her idea: his birthday, her party, she said.

  He teased her. “Not your folks’ famous Party, I hope.”

  For a minute she didn’t get it, and her blue eyes got wide, inviting pain—and then in another instant she had caught on, and with a small ironic smile she said, “Nothing like that, I hope.”

  Or that is what he thought she said. You couldn’t hear in this place, especially with that guy up there singing, along with the band, the trio. Now singing “Margie.”

  “You are my in-spir-a-tion, Margie,

  I’ll tell the world I love you—”

  He had a good beat, this singer. As they say, a great sense of rhythm. But he did, he broke up the words into beats. And he had a good big friendly smile, all white teeth. The folks loved him, white and black too, and they clapped along. Especially Susan, her whole body was caught up in that beat; she listened, and nodded and swayed.

  In the Army, Ed had heard a story about some white chick who could actually come, listening to Louis Armstrong. Well, he liked Louis too, who didn’t? But really—

  Ed thought about later, how they’d be kissing in the taxi going home, getting all worked up, and then more kissing in the downstairs living room, on the big wide velvet sofa where he always worried: were they making stains? But, tonight: would he get it inside her? (She has told him she isn’t a virgin, so there isn’t blood to worry about—he hoped.) And would she really be doing it with him, coming for him? Or would it really be the singer guy she was fucking, fucking a darker Negro?

  As for him, he’d be doing it with Lena Horne, a really beautiful woman. Not any fat little old white girl.

  21

  “WHEN we first moved down here, I used to go on long bike rides, or else I’d just walk as far as I could,” said Abby. “And one day I came right down here, to the creek, and I was standing on the sand, I guess actually sitting down on a log, I’d decided to take my shoes off and wade, and this extremely pretty little boy came along and told me not to, he said the creek was too dirty for wading, and then his mother came up—I mean his sister, she said she was his sister. And it was Deirdre and Graham. We talked, and I asked them to come home with me for a Coke or something—that was when we first got here and we lived in that sort of penthouse at the Pinehill Hotel. But that’s how we all met, how my parents met Deirdre, and they really liked her. I remember I was sort of jealous, I wanted her to stay my friend, not theirs. I thought she was closer to my age than to Cynthia’s and Harry’s. Graham was just this very small boy, but so pretty.”

  Melanctha, to whom Abby has just said all this, sighed deeply as she said, “He still is pretty. I worry a lot about Graham.” With a small wry laugh, she added, “When I’m not worrying about me.”

  Abby agreed with her. “Yes, he is worrying.”

  “I mean, at Harvard, some older boy who, you know, liked boys could assume that Graham was like that too … ‘queer.’ And Graham’s such an innocent, I think. I mean, he seems a lot smarter and more knowing than he is. He’s always been like that.”

  Abby nodded, agreeing again.

  This conversation took place on an oddly bright day in December; it almost looked like spring, it was almost warm. The two young women, both home for Christmas vacation, had said this to each other earlier on the phone, and had decided simultaneously on a walk in the woods.

  All the paths in their repertoire of woods walks would take them, in one way or another, down to the creek. They had chosen the way that led through some small deciduous trees, now leafless and gray, then down a fairly steep pine-wooded hill, to a narrow and mostly overgrown white road (no one was sure where ultimately it went). Across an abandoned cornfield in which there were still some falling and fallen gray desiccated stalks.

  After the cornfield came the border of the creek, from early spring through summer and into fall a rich thick green, poplar leaves and honeysuckle vines, announcing the creek. Now in December, after a long dry fall, despite the deceptive weather the poplars were bare and peeling, white sentinel ghosts. And the vines were withered, brittle underfoot. The creek, so rich and rushing, so full in rainy spring, was now a thin brown stream, a muddy bed of rocks and rotting branches, winter leaves.

  In other seasons, a small gray sandy beach edged the water. Much wider now, its sand was darker, coarser—where Melanctha and Abigail stood, considering and talking.

  Melanctha continued the topic of Graham at Harvard. “He’s entering in March,” she said. “Some special early entrance program that they started during the war. I think it’s a bad idea, he’s so young. Just sixteen. Dumb Deirdre just wants him out of the house, I think.”

  “She’s still seeing that reporter, that Derek whatever?”

  “Derek McFall. I don’t think so, I’m not sure.”

  “I think my mother sort of likes him too, or at least she used to,” said Abby.

  “They’re splitting up, your parents?”

  “I don’t know, I honestly don’t. My father—Harry’s coming down for Christmas, but I think that’s mostly so he can get to know Joseph a bit better. Before we do anything official.” Abby laughed, although in fact she found her parents’ situation quite depressing. All those jokes from Cynthia about “Lady Veracity”—she’d now found a couple of dozen rhymes for that name, and the joke was getting a little stale. Also, Joseph was worried about his own parents not getting on, big political fights all the time. He was looking forward to getting away, spending time with Abby in Pinehill, but Abby was not sure that things would be better down here.

  Melanctha asked, “You’re getting married soon?”

  “Oh God, I doubt it.” Abby laughed again, less convincingly. “Marriage might spoil everything, the way I see it. I mean, why bother?”

  “Well, if you wanted to have children—”

  “We don’t, we don’t believe in it. There’re too many people already.”

  Despite the unusual bright day, the warmth, both women felt a certain lowering of their spirits as they talked. Good friends for years, each had imagined that a few hours with the other would be cheering, instead of which the smiles that they exchanged contained sadness, and a certain wry acceptance of the fact that friends are only so much help to each other.

  She dreaded Christmas; that is what Melanctha was mostly thinking. All her brothers would be home from their schools, and Graham, getting ready for Harvard, talking about Harvard, and her baby half sister, SallyJane (God, how could they name her that?). Silly Deirdre trying to act like she was everyone’s mother. And big Ursula back out from Kansas again, being a sort of ambiguous housekeeper-servant-houseguest. (Russ many years ago in Kansas had run over a pig—Melanctha could still remember the smell, and Russ and then all the boys yelling “Pig shit”—a pig that belonged to Ursula; then when SallyJane was sick, Ursula had come to stay, and stay, although Deirdre couldn’t stand her, Melanctha knew, and probably Ursula hated Deirdre too.) In any case, for every reason, Melanctha hated the coming of Christmas.

  As did Abby—what with her parents, and Joseph’s worries over his own family.

  They were staring up the creek to where it bent, and a clump of pussy willows leaned out over the slow brown diminishing water—both silently staring, as though some help might come up from out of the water.

  Which, astonishingly, it did.

 
; Something dark brown, small and bobbing along, but not a piece of wood, an energetic little head emerged—not a bird or a rabbit.

  Melanctha softly cried out, “It’s a puppy!” and she splashed out to where on a small shoal it had just managed unsteadily to stand—the puppy, trembling with cold and trying to shake off water, something it did not quite yet know how to do. Reaching the little dog, Melanctha grabbed it up, cradling him inside her coat, peering down. The puppy raised his head and gave one light lick to her chin. An investigation, possibly—what was this new strong dry source of warmth?—but Melanctha took it for love.

  She breathed, “Oh, he’s so lovely!” She added, “How could anyone—?”

  “He could have just wandered off and fallen into the creek,” Abby told her. “Will Deirdre let you keep him, do you think? My mother—”

  “She’ll have to, it’s not just her house. Shall we go on back?”

  And they began the slow trudging walk back home, across the cornfield and up the pine-wooded hill to the smaller, lighter woods, to the road.

  “Your sweater’s really wet,” Abby observed. “But he’s so cute.”

  “Oh, I don’t care!” Melanctha grinned, and patted her dog, nestling him more securely beneath her muddied camel-hair coat.

  They agreed to call each other soon, and to get together during what they both termed “these goddam holidays.” “I’ll come and see your puppy,” Abby promised, wistfully adding, “My mother loves dogs, in case Deirdre doesn’t.”

  “Oh, to hell with Deirdre.”

  The little dog turned out to be very pretty indeed. Melanctha, brooking no objections from anyone, bathed him in the kitchen sink, and dried him off with several towels—so that everyone could admire the wavy, silky dark brown hair, and enormous brown-black eyes. “His name is River,” she said.