“What you said you wanted to do,” she said, her voice in awe of its meaning. “Do you still want to?”
“Yes.”
“Go to your room and I’ll be there in a minute.”
Oh, God, her prows—she wasn’t a Chris-Craft, she was a catamaran, swift in the blue Pacific. In the room his clothes were whisked away by dusky Nubian naiads, her slaves. He was young Apollo—no, Dionysus, son of Zeus, ready to be worshipped, the firm male beauty so waitfully imperious it trembled of its own commanding power.
She entered in her white nightgown and with a submissive shrug let it drop in slow, diaphanous folds from her fair shoulders and walked, almost awkward with modest lust, to him whose intentions were manifest within that imperative, that taut bright fleshy lance…
Oh, cut the shit, Hearne. He sat disconsolately on a stone bench, his pants painfully constricting his fleshy lance. Across the gravel path a lizard observed him with Barney Google eyes. Maybe it was a skink, a name not conferred in awe or wonder.
25
She heard the radio news—Gabriel Heatter and H. V. Kaltenbom, those cranky, portentous, unmistakable voices. The Sunday New York papers, the Herald Tribune and the Times, came to Leah on Mondays and she picked them up on her regular Tuesday shopping trip. She had become aware of opposing forces in the world, and along with that orienting perception, of stupidity in the larger affairs of man. But how had she come by her ideas of the right and the decent? Some maybe from John Hearne, but not all. What should she think of a country, once the admired ally of her own, that wouldn’t let people out of it? She felt the sad regression of hope, the smudged ideals, the madness engendered by power.
The year 1948 had begun with Mahatma Gandhi assassinated by a member of his own religion who thought he was too tolerant of another religion. In Prague, Jan Masaryk was found dead below his office window. Suicide? Why should the lip curl at that? Because murder was much more normal in such an affair. In South Africa, Malan took over and made race the obsession of the state. But in her own country, in the South, were laws, and in the North, customs, that reinforced this obsession too. The States’ Rights Democrats nominated Strom Thurmond for President because of Truman’s civil-rights policies. The Russians (or was it the Soviet Union?) decided to starve Berlin until it came under their rule. The U.S. government indicted the U.S. Communist Party leaders for conspiring to overthrow the government by force. Henry Wallace became the candidate of the Progressive Party and welcomed the support of the Communist Party. Truman was practically doomed to lose to Dewey. A jet plane went nine hundred miles an hour. A rocket went three thousand miles per hour at White Sands, New Mexico. Truman issued Executive Order 9981, integrating the armed forces. The draft was back for nineteen-to twenty-five-year-olds. John Hearne would have to register. The Jews and the Arabs were at war. There was the “Iron Curtain“; nations pouted and had tantrums like willful little boys.
She didn’t read all of the huge sheafs of newspapers, but she began to read Time, and she always went through Life. Jean Dorlean was always telling her, as if they were having a continual argument or discussion, what she supposedly wasn’t aware of in this cynical world. She learned about the Kuomintang, the Comintern, the Truman Doctrine, Dean Acheson, Chiang Kai-shek, Hiss, Chambers, the Hollywood Ten, Gerhard Eisler, the House Un-American Activities Committee, Elizabeth Bentley the Spy Queen. Madame Kosenkina jumped out of a secondstory window of the Soviet consulate in New York.
Thousands died in traffic accidents every week. Her country was turning mad, frivolous; its most popular song was “Buttons and Bows.” All was confusion, dread, sanctimony, disappointment, and all these things that had been peripheral to her because she was a child, and not responsible for them, grew over her like a huge storm of knowledge and concern she had to see as part of her own fate.
Ernst Zwanzig worked on his clay bust of Thomas E. Dewey, which was later to be cast in bronze, or he made his sketches of dancing Yvonne in her gauzy curtains, while Cynthia watched. Dibley would never go near, but nakedness was all right in the name of art, wasn’t it? Did Ernst Zwanzig sign those sketches with the name of his dead teacher? Why had Jean Dorlean told her this?
She came upon Sean Patrick and Kaethe Muller in the lake, next to the raft, she floating in his supporting hands, her legs around him. What they were doing was so plain, so obvious, their disengagement when they saw her so fake and silly because there were their swimming suits on the raft. Why would she care what they did? Maybe, because Jean Dorlean was always talking to her, they thought she might tell him. But if he knew so much, as he claimed, he ought to know anyway. That he might know and not care was a concept new to her, another possible discovery about the indifferent and unloving world.
There was never a card or a letter from John Hearne.
Jean Dorlean kept finding her when she was alone. He had apologized for what he’d said and done before—apologized to Dibley, too, for upsetting him. He didn’t seem as small or as freakish when he was sincere, and she began not to mind the interest he took in her. He knew a great deal, and wanted to teach her. “Where do you go to school?” he asked, meaning what college, and was astounded when she said nowhere. She began to believe that he was not flattering her for some devious purpose, and that he no longer patronized her. There was a feeling of equality that was disarming, though she was still wary.
One day he asked her for a sailing lesson, putting himself in the position of the beginner, so that she could teach him. He wasn’t bad at picking up how to sail, but of course he had to give the standard confession of technical incompetence, which she knew meant overweening pride in other talents.
The wind was light and steady. After having him tack and jibe for a while she had him steer across the lake as closely into the wind as possible, watch his sails for luff and try to find the point of compromise.
“Ah,” he said, “the inevitable compromise.” But he did it well enough. He had a sturdy, muscular little body furred with reddish hair and she couldn’t help, for an unbalanced moment, thinking of what it would be like with him. She was startled, though she gave no sign of it, that he knew what she had just thought—a connective glance, like a touch of antennae, nothing said, the idea immediately rejected by her.
He said, “Kaethe Muller is not my girlfriend, I hope you know. She said you saw her going into my room one night, so you might have got that impression.”
Dory said nothing.
“I don’t know why I have this compulsion to tell you things,” he said. “Too damn many things. Oh, well. As for Fräulein Scharführerin Muller, we saved her, for our own reasons, from having her tits nailed to a barracks door—literally. And I’m her nursemaid at the moment. Does that make sense? I guess I tell you this because I don’t want you to think of me as a cuckold.”
Dory said nothing, so he shrugged and went on. “Since you won’t ask it, I’ll answer the question that ought to have occurred to you. I’m in what we call ‘intelligence,’ and I’m summer nursemaid here. You have your crew and I have mine, and may the two eventually disengage with as little publicity as possible. So how’s that for candid? Do you deign to answer? To bless my existence with a little curiosity?”
He had trimmed his beard. He was getting sunburned on top of his head.
“Are you being sincere, or not?” she said. “What have these people got to do with the government?”
“Oh, you think they’re sort of third-rate clowns, is that it? Dory, let me tell you that the war was fought by clowns, the camps were run by clowns. Only the victims didn’t look funny. As for me, I hate this job and wouldn’t mind if all my charges melted away like the Wicked Witch of the West, but now our clowns are in a war with their clowns and we use what we’ve got. Christ! Am I being sincere? How old are you—eighteen? Nineteen? I’m thirty-five and I can testify that most of the people on this planet are clownish swine. I hereby testify to that contemptible truth.”
He did seem in pain; he didn’t like what he’d
said.
“You mean the people here are all Nazis?”
“In their souls they’re Nazis. Haven’t you heard the key words and phrases? They just don’t like Hitler anymore—he was a carpet-eater, right? I’m not saying that they’re all equally guilty, it’s just that they don’t, any of them, feel any different than they ever did or ever will. Did Werner brag about his father? Did he mention the Ritterkreuz—the Knight’s Cross with oak leaves or whatever it was—and that he honorably fell in battle? Heil whoever! Actually we believe the Baron either deserted to the Russians or let himself be captured, and that he’s very much alive and of some importance in Eastern Germany. The Schutzstaffel were not always as they seemed. So we have his son. Does he care? Will he eventually cooperate with us?
“And another thing. Werner wasn’t just a little kid in the Volkssturm, he was an SS cadet, Klagenfurt, class of ’44. And here’s the sick part; when it was revealed to Himmler that the Baron had made his separate peace with the Russians, his son—this is typical Nazi logic—was used for revenge. He was posted to the Totenkopfverbände at Dachau. It was typical of the Nazis to feel sorry for themselves for having to murder so many people. Their sensitive souls suffered, don’t you see. They were afraid a ten-foot pile of corpses might dehumanize them. What a pity. So Werner was posted there to punish his father, and given rather nasty work to do. We plucked him out of there when the place was liberated in April ’45.”
“But is he all right?”
“Meaning sane? I don’t know. I imagine he’s harmless enough. Even if I can’t stand him, I must say the poor bastard’s had a rough adolescence. And there’s Sean Patrick, who was in the Ausland SD from 1942 on, a British-maddened Celt, and there are none as thoroughly insane as the Irish insane. Yvonne’s husband is also alive in Eastern Germany and they’re in contact with each other, through friends of ours. Anything else you’re incurious about? Zwanzig is simply the pretentious con man he’s always been, and the Princess is Werner’s aunt and guardian. And she’s a real princess, Dory—as real as any princess has ever been real. Kasimir is her servant, no more and no less. But, Dory, don’t ever forget that these people are real, in the sense that the world and all its murdering swinishness is real. Do you understand? Christ, I still don’t know why I’m compelled to tell you everything. Maybe it’s like washing my dirty hands. Maybe it’s that I want to corrupt you. Are you just innocent? Are you wise? You’re not innocent. What the hell are you, anyway? Where do you get off being what you seem to be?”
On his own authority he came sloppily about and they headed back. She loosened the starboard shrouds and told him to let the sail out going downwind, and the wide, no-class boat eased toward Cascom Manor. A half mile away, next to the boathouse, Dibley watched, straight as a post.
“I don’t know why I seem to be anything,” she said. “I’m just myself. I’ve lived in Leah all my life and I just graduated in June from Leah High School.”
“You appear to be honest. You’re invulnerable to the shoddy beast I’m vulnerable to. And I can’t believe you’re that young. You don’t act like a young girl.”
“In Leah I’m not a young girl.” At this moment she didn’t feel like a young girl, she felt the mental and cultural equal of the mature, experienced man who wanted to tell her things almost in the way of confession. He said she was honest, and she honestly enjoyed his appreciation, but there was something wrong, something untrustworthy in this direction. Already she seemed to have traded something valuable for mere pleasure. But she enjoyed being admired and flattered, who didn’t? And this man had been out in the wide world, the real world, where he had been hurt and made bitter by evil.
When they beached the sailboat Dibley wasn’t there.
“That was fun,” Jean Dorlean said. “Take me out again when the wind’s stronger, will you? Do you think I’m getting the hang of it?”
In the warmth of his strange admiration she said yes, and she agreed. Though he looked at her tan legs, though when he’d been a little drunk he’d held her for a moment against her will, the power she’d felt in him was, as a memory, growing benign. And he represented the government of her country; she believed that. She might not be going to college but she was a student, and listened and observed. Flattery was praise you didn’t deserve, and he hadn’t said anything about her she didn’t deserve.
But she would not let this person haze into the warm softening that meant friendship, understanding, generosity without suspicion. She was vulnerable, but she knew she was vulnerable, and the knowing was a warning and a strength.
That afternoon she picked up the Princess, who had gone to Boston to see a doctor, at the Leah depot. In the car she told Dory with her usual candor that she was not going to be pregnant, though Robert had hurt her horribly.
“He hurt you?”
“Alas, it is psychological,” the Princess said. “I desire to arouse men but I cannot bear to have them handle me. Because Robert was so shy, and a virgin, I could not believe he would turn on me as he did.”
Back at Cascom Manor she seemed her usual self. Dory thought, judgmentally, that if you were going to have hysteria, why didn’t it matter in the end? It had certainly bothered Robert. Or maybe it didn’t really bother him so much anymore, and he went around telling his friends about it, exaggerating, bragging how he grabbed the prick-teaser and put the wood to her whether she liked it or not. This way no one came out of it with any credit at all, but one could always think the worst.
And now there was the business of Debbie and Werner again. Werner had long ago given up on Cynthia, but in him was a constant need to impress, so now instead of insulting Debbie he treated her with politeness and a sort of gallantry that had no deprecating humor in it that Dory could see. Debbie was charmed and made happy. Her expressions didn’t even look like hers. Dory had never seen her smile like that, never in all her life seen that proud, demure lift in Debbie’s neck, that glow of importance. All of her new gestures and poses were felt, yet they looked like the exaggerations of acting. Her coquettish glances, which may have been caused by shyness and tremulous sincerity, were so obvious they caused pity, a kind of horror; Debbie was not witless, so she must be insane.
But that was Dory’s own judgment. How much of it came from aesthetic prejudice—that Debbie was too fat, that Werner’s strange misfitting body and personality precluded real feelings? The judger was no beauty herself. No, it was that Werner had treated Debbie badly once, and once was enough. No one changed. She had never seen anyone change. Your opinion of someone might possibly change, but the person never changed.
To Debbie it must be such a romance. The poor young American girl and the handsome European count with a tragic past, and then, in spite of their vastly different backgrounds, the things they suddenly find they have in common…
He had pulled Debbie’s buttocks out of her bathing suit, the harsh red finger marks too near the places where touch meant violation, called her a cow in German, and a slut in English, to her sister. But what could her sister do? And did her older, loving, protecting sister want to make trouble, or would she let things ride and hope for the best, just hope for the best?
26
Bonnie wore a slippery light dress of pale green with strange liquid highlights that appeared and disappeared, a cloth-covered pocketbook to match, a red coral necklace and red pumps, both of which matched her lipstick exactly. He thought of the over-lush fragility of cut flowers.
They drove up into parched mountains that were composed of reddish dirt covered by scrub brush turning gray, where the only permanent feature was the curving shelf of the highway. Below in yellow haze were the cities of the plain, all one city; then, beyond the haze, the blue ocean. They drove northwest until the highway began to descend toward sparsely inhabited hills starved for water. They passed a scarred hillside where rows and parabolas of houses were being built all at once. Looking at this dusty, marginal world made him uneasy, as if he were responsible, or in danger along with
the deprived trees that had been metered their water. The feeling was not so much of thirst as it was of suffocation. In spite of the glinting energy of passing cars, the unfocused sunlight and all the building—fragile, minimal sticks above thin slabs—it seemed a land of children who would eventually be called home from play.
They descended further, into a cityless suburb of small homes and pampered shrubs, until the land greened somewhat and they could see the ocean. “Here we are,” Bonnie said, and stopped at a restaurant, or roadhouse, with the look of walled secrecy on the street side. They went through its darkness, however, and came out on a bright patio from which they could see the blue Pacific. Here were widely separated chairs and tables, all with an expensive, cared-for look, of redwood, heavy linen and silver. “This place is special,” she said. “People come here all the way from Santa Barbara.”
He decided to have a beer and had to undergo the self-exaggerated humility of having to show the waitress his driver’s license in order to prove himself twenty-one, which made him feel, as usual, that he was cursed by youth, that he was going through life but not quite of it. If he were, say, twenty-six, the ideal age, he and Bonnie…
“I was just thinking,” Bonnie said. “Since you’re so much better—it’s a miracle, isn’t it? And don’t think our Healing Echelons had nothing to do with it! You could get a job with Oval at the Produce Co-op.”
“Yeah, maybe,” he said doubtfully, trying not to sound ungrateful. The waitress brought him a blue blazer and tie, so that he’d conform to the decor. He put on these public garments and felt regionally nautical in his brass buttons and also camouflaged, a little more secure.
She instructed him upon their meal, the specialty of the place, a mollusk called abalone, whose flesh had to be pounded with a mallet.
“Have you ever had it?” she asked.
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