Waking the Dead

by Scott Spencer

  Mileski came up to me and looked into my face. It was a horrible thought, but I could not help but reflect that if moved he could certainly crush my head in his hands. But all he did was slap a resounding hand on my shoulder. “We’ll bring her back safe and sound, Fielding,” he said. “You have my word.”

  Despite myself, I felt a wave of relief and gratitude go through me. “I know you will, Steven,” I said, my voice suddenly thick.

  “Will you pray for us men?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, “I will.”

  He checked his watch, which was buried in the thick black hair of his arm. “All right,” he said. “We’re off.” He made no move to leave, however. His massive chest expanded as he took in a deep, sensuous breath. “You know,” he said, “the people we want to help all have souls surely destined to live with God. But we’re going to deprive him of their company for the time.”

  My emotions were lagging behind events; it was just then that it struck me that a great deal more was going on than half my bed’s being vacated. Whatever I thought of this mission, their courage was finally undeniable and I realized in a lurch of the heart that I was at last present at the moment I’d always craved, the moment when time is given its color and weight, the moment when history swishes its long armored tail and begins to crawl down another path.

  “What can I do to help?” I said.

  “Cover for me,” said Sarah. “If anyone asks where I am. Especially my family.”

  “I know, I know,” I said. “Is that all? I’d like to do something.”

  “Do you have any money?” Mileski asked.

  “Not really. Twenty dollars or something.”

  “Then give us twenty dollars. We’re way short.”

  I shrugged and went back to the bedroom, where my wallet lay on top of the navy blue dresser, encircled by an arc of hot yellow lamplight. I opened it up: two fives and eight ones. I took them all and went back to the living room. Sarah, Mileski, and Stanton had joined hands and were kneeling on the floor, their heads bowed, their eyes closed.

  “My goodness,” I said, “I can’t leave you kids alone for a minute.” I don’t know where that wise-ass crack came from. Perhaps from a dark little knot of resentment. But as soon as I’d said it an overwhelming sense of emotional hunger and helplessness went through me and I covered my face with my hand—too late. I was already crying.

  Did I want to kneel with them? Or was I fully realizing that the woman I loved beyond all reason was heading now behind enemy lines and what we had here was no argument, no mere moral assertion, but a full-out risk of life? Yet perhaps the cause of those red hot tears was simply a desire to be a better person, to have the foolish strength that would allow me to ignore all of the odds and all of the conventional wisdom and throw myself toward the light, no matter how dimly I might perceive it. I waited in silence for their prayer to end and when they stood up I said, “Take me with you.”

  Sarah looked to Mileski and it was he who answered. “You will be with us, Fielding. We feel your love right now.”

  “No, I mean really. I speak better Spanish than either of you.”

  “Sister Angela speaks it perfectly,” Mileski said. “And I’m not half bad.”

  “Just take me with you, all right?” I pointed to Sarah. “What do you say?”

  She was silent and then she walked across the room and put her arms around me and placed her head against my chest. “I’m so happy right now, Fielding,” she murmured. “I want you to believe in me.”

  “I do,” I said. My voice sounded weak, desperate; it had to work its way around a throbbing mass at the top of my throat.

  “Everything’s arranged for this time,” Sarah said.

  “We have to go and I mean immediately,” said Father Stanton. “Sister Angela will be awaiting you in Miami and it surely won’t do to miss your plane.”

  “Come to the airport with us,” Sarah said to me.

  And so we drove north in Stanton’s Plymouth Fury, with its smell of evergreen air freshener, its terry cloth seat coverings. The heat was on high, Mahler was on the radio; we were in a world of our own because outside it was all darkness and ice and the insane brightness of headlights, the cryptic kiss-off of red taillights. The priests were in front and Sarah and I were in the back. I held her close. She was trembling; I didn’t know if she was cold or frightened and for some reason I could not ask. I just held her tighter. She gripped my hand and squeezed it so hard it ached.

  Mileski was talking about the trip, hoping they’d have at least a day or two to hit the beach. I couldn’t tell if he was just acting bluff or if a quick bronzing was really on his agenda. Stanton, reduced to mother hen by his staying behind, only cautioned Steven to be careful and to come back as soon as possible.

  ”Do you think what I’m doing is wrong?” Sarah whispered to me.

  “No. Not wrong.” I stopped. I didn’t really want to say anything more. We could have argued until the plane took off; we could have argued in our minds every moment she was gone.

  “Then stupid?”

  “No. Of course not. Not wrong. Not stupid. I just wish you weren’t going.” A part of me was virtually screaming This is not the way to get things done. This is not how the world works. This is nothing but a ridiculous adventure. And I think Sarah sensed it.

  “I just want to forget all of the things that separate us,” she said. “You’re my lover, the only man in the world I want to love.”

  “You’re mine,” I said, holding her still closer, talking into her hair, breathing in the soft comforting aroma of her scalp.

  “I’m getting scared,” she whispered.

  I closed my eyes. I had a ferocious urge simply to say, Then don’t go, but I let it pass. I put my hand against her face; she brought my fingers to her lips and kissed them one by one.

  The sound of a low-flying jet. You could feel two hundred wide-eyed souls passing directly overhead. The green signs pointing the way to the airport. The snow flying past the gooseneck street lamps. The Mahler was over and now a tonic water commercial was on. An English accented voice, very pompous, talking about Schweppervescence. Sarah leaned against the back door and crossed her legs. She looked very prim, ordinary; her animation had gone underground. The lights from a passing car wrapped and unwrapped around her face like a bandage.

  They had only a few minutes to make their plane to Miami. Stanton drove up to the Departures curb of United Airlines. There was a line of cars behind us that seemed to stretch two or three miles. Getting out and going in with them was out of the question. Stanton put his arms around Father Mileski and kissed him on the cheek, the forehead. The men embraced. “God be with you, Steven,” Stanton said and then he took hold of Mileski’s beard and squeezed it in his fist and made a deep, wild animal growl. I kissed Sarah and tried to press myself against her, but it was difficult while sitting down, with our thick winter coats on. Then Stanton turned around in his seat and reached back for her. She embraced him and kissed him on the cheek.

  “God be with you, Sarah,” he said.

  “Wait,” I said, “I’ll get out with you.” I wanted to touch her again; I wanted us to kiss standing up so every part of our bodies could connect. I grabbed for her valise and dragged it out after me, on the traffic side of the car. The wheels of taxis were rolling over the rock salt and it sounded as if they were driving over broken glass.

  The United sign looked particularly blue and red in that snowy night air. The lights in the pavilion illuminated the snow. Porters were pushing carts piled high with luggage. There was a gaseous, doomy feeling, a whiff of fate gone berserk in the air. The other travelers looked wide-eyed, apprehensive. I suppose no one likes to fly in storms, though by Chicago standards the night really wasn’t so bad. Mileski was carrying a small maroon canvas bag with a tan strap; in his other hand he had an old leather briefcase, bulging. He stood back as Sarah and I embraced; he seemed shy, a little embarrassed. I’d never known a kiss to feel so inadequat
e. We smiled. I put out my hand and she shook it.

  “I’ll be thinking of you,” I said.

  “I’ll be thinking of you, too,” she said.

  “Good luck,” I said.

  “Thanks. I’ll see you soon.”

  “OK.” I paused, shrugged, smiled. “Well … God be with you, then.”

  “Thanks.” She glanced over at Mileski. Mileski saluted me and then they were off. If that plane was going to leave on time, they were going to have to hurry. They were practically running. The doors opened automatically and I stood there, watching them penetrate and then disappear into the crowd inside. I turned back to the car; Father Stanton was sitting immobile and upright as the cars behind regaled him with their horns.

  I slid into the front seat next to Stanton and we pulled into the furious ooze of traffic. The radio was off and we were silent. I could feel his attention on me but each time I glanced at him, his eyes were forward. When we were finally out of the airport and moving south I said, “I appreciate your going out of your way like this, taking me home.”

  “I couldn’t very well deprive you of your final good-byes now, could I,” he said, so promptly that it seemed he’d already had this conversation in his mind.

  “I had no idea this was going to happen,” I said. It struck me just then how nice it would be to be part of his flock, or any flock really, to be able to empty the garbage of my heart into an incense-smelling box and be done with it. Yet I realized I didn’t really want to confess; I merely wished to complain.

  “She’s a brave girl,” Stanton said. “Terribly courageous.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t talk about her like that,” I said. Stanton turned toward me; I could just barely see his eyes in the darkness of the car. “Sorry,” I said. “But you make her sound in such grave danger when you call her brave. It scares the hell out of me.”

  “Yes, well, it’s always peculiarly more difficult to stay behind, now isn’t it. For instance, I was posted in a little mission in the bush, far away from the world I’d come to know in Salisbury. And one evening it became, shall we say, urgent to transport two young blacks out over the border and out of harm’s way. There were three of us there, three whites, that is, and I was chosen to stay behind and look after things while the others made the trek to the border. Well, I don’t think I’ve ever suffered so much in my entire life. I lay there in my bed and listened to the insects eating the leaves in the banana trees and I quite literally thought I was going to lose my mind. Well, along about eleven the next morning, my friends returned. The mission had been absolutely without incident; they’d stopped off at a neighboring village for a large breakfast and had brought back a little spider monkey as a pet for the children who frequented our nursery program. I vowed to myself I would never stay behind again. Simply too trying.”

  “Yet you’re staying behind now,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Are they really going to be safe, Father Stanton?”

  “Would you like a truthful answer?”

  I didn’t think much of that question. How do you answer it in the negative. There’s something sadistic in people who ask that.

  “Yes, I would,” I said.

  “They are walking into the lion’s den and there is danger. But the lion is very fat and entirely stupid and frightened as well. I expect they’ll have less trouble than you or I will, waiting for them.”

  The snow was almost stopped. I saw the red wing lights of a climbing jumbo jet. I wondered if that was Sarah’s plane. She was somewhere out there, cutting through the clouds, riding some high icy current, speeding away from me.

  “Our Sarah reminds me of a woman who I think is a genuine American saint, a woman named Dorothy Day. Are you familiar with her?”

  “A little.The Catholic Worker.”

  “Yes. A woman whose fiery temperament prevented her from truly embracing the life of the Church, but who chose instead to goad the Church on to a sense of daring and responsibility that the meeker Catholics might never otherwise have imagined. Sarah is such a principled, passionate young woman. And so fearless. You must feel fortunate to have been chosen by such a soul.”

  “I guess it’s all how you look at it,” I said.

  “I’ve wondered why you don’t marry,” said Father Stanton. “Please don’t misinterpret me, though. I certainly recognize the sanctity of love outside the bonds of marriage. And I realize many young people, what with the war, and Watergate, and all of the hypocrisy of institutions, feel that they’d rather not be involved with marriage.”

  “I suppose we will marry one day,” I said. I felt a tremor of hopefulness go through me as I said these words. Perhaps it was what Stanton had intended. “You know, when we met, I was in the service. And now law school. We’ve always been dead broke.”

  “You’d like to have more money before you marry?” asked Stanton. When he smiled, his eyes sunk behind folds of flesh.

  We drove in silence for a while. I watched the neighborhoods go by, the two- and three-story brick houses, with initials on the storm doors, low wattage bulbs burning over the porch stoops, and I thought that one day I would go into each of those houses and ask the people inside if they would give me the power to make decisions about their lives and the idea seemed more than absurd—it seemed wrong, ghastly. It seemed venal.

  “The extraordinary thing about our Sarah,” Stanton suddenly said, “is she has no perception of herself as a good person, or even a particularly moral one. She lives on the surface of her anger, her outrage, and I think she remains wholly unconscious of her enormous spiritual power and discipline that exists directly beneath that shell of outrage. She is one of those incredibly fortunate individuals who can follow their heart and do just what their impulses dictate—and they will always be on the side of God.”

  “And you know what side that is?” I asked.

  “Yes, I do. And so does Sarah.”

  And, I thought to myself, she gives great head, too. I turned away from Stanton and watched the city go by: a railroad trestle with walrus tusks of icicles hanging from it; a grocery store with a Polish sign and a picture of a Coca-Cola bottle over it; a vacant lot filled with junked autos and on one shell of an old car stood a wild dog, its eyes flashing red in the lamplight, its muzzle thrust up toward the moonless sky.

  DAD RETIRED AND there was a party for him. “Even my goddamned boss is coming to this party,” he said to me on the phone. He sounded amazed, delighted, even a little scared. He couldn’t even put up a screen of disdain, as he did when Mom wanted to celebrate his birthday. He tried to keep it at arm’s length. What was being celebrated was not himself, not Edward Pierce, not Eddie, not Dad, but a piece of history.

  He had gotten his first job as a printer in 1936. He had set type for the Daily News, the Daily Worker, Collier’s, the Book-Find Club, he had printed up invitations to the weddings of Rockefellers and Astors, he had set copy for the first public offering of Polaroid, he had printed up civil defense instruction booklets, and the owner’s manual for the Edsel. He had minded his p’s and q’s and now it was all coming to an end at this party they were throwing for him at the Hotel St. George, which Danny was springing for with who knows what ill-gotten gains. Invited were co-workers, family, friends, union buddies, and even a few of the fellows from management, guys who were not so unlike himself and with whom he could now bury the hatchet of class struggle for an evening of hot casseroles and whiskey right out of the bottle.

  We’d gotten the invitation weeks in advance. This enormous lead time was my father’s idea. He imagined people’s social schedules as somehow very dense and complex and felt you could not invite someone without at least two months’ notice. Sarah and I had been planning to go but now she was in Chile and I was reluctant to leave Chicago, lest she return and find me gone. But the party was on a Friday, eleven days after her departure, and since she said she would be gone for two weeks, I took the chance and flew east for it.

  The Hotel St. George w
as in Brooklyn Heights, not really our kind of neighborhood. It seemed a mixture of well-off widows and young gays. But it was awfully pretty, even in the old snow. The hotel was cavernous and, though later it would be turned into apartments for successful people, the people living in it then were old, many of them on public assistance, most of them with failing health.

  Dad’s party was in a reception room on the ground floor, a salmon and blue ballroom with an art deco chandelier and an old mauve carpet that had been delicately patterned by the ten million footsteps that had gone over it through the years. Dozens of tables had been set up and each had a bottle of Canadian Club on it. The New York Times had chipped in for a trio and they were set up at the front of the room, a piano, bass, and drums: dapper men in tuxedos, with white hair and sly bachelor airs about them. (Later in the party, Eric McDonald played with them: he looked like an African prince standing before the trio, playing with a sweet, full vibrato out of respect to my father and the guests, though Eric’s usual saxophone style was slashing, atonal. He paced back and forth, his stiff tusk of beard looking windblown and a touch Satanic as he played “Strangers in the Night” and then “Solidarity Forever.” Dad was delighted: it made him feel a part of the twenty-first century to be serenaded by a black relative. Malik was just barely walking. Rudy danced with Mom.)

  The party had begun at six and by nine people were going up to the microphone to deliver speeches in Dad’s honor. Mr. Glass, the owner of Pinetop Printers, where Dad worked before the Times, spoke of Dad’s professionalism, called him the Lou Gehrig of Lower Manhattan because Dad was never sick, but he couldn’t say anything about the work Dad did because Glass had inherited the company and knew nothing about it. Danny spoke and said Dad taught him about effort and he also taught him that if you don’t look after yourself no one else would. “He gave me the guts to take chances and the guts to say what I’m going to say right now—Dad, I love you.” We all cheered, though it seemed a little crazy to make such noise after something so private. Caroline wouldn’t speak. “Oh, he knows what I think,” she said. “Anyhow, I always embarrass him.” But a guy named Dave Southworth, who was an international vice-president of the Typographical Union, spoke and he detailed Dad’s long years of service to the union. “It’s rank-and-filers like Ed Pierce that make the labor movement strong,” Southworth said. He was a big, sleek man, with his black hair combed straight back, and I couldn’t help noting how careful he was to designate my father’s status as rank-and-file, knowing, I suppose, that quite a few of us there felt Dad could have run that union a lot better than its officers. I got up and said something, too. Mom’s old boss, Corvino, had appointed himself master of ceremonies and when he called me up he put his hand on the back of my neck and announced, “Now he’s a lawyer, huh? Remember this one with his shorts hanging down and the mouth full of beans?” I could feel Corvino’s Cornell class ring at the base of my skull; I looked down and his little hooflike feet were in black patent leather pumps, such as Gene Kelly might have worn.