Short Century

by David Burr Gerrard

  Though I don’t think I was ever a racist—certainly not in the way my grandfather was—my understanding of and ability to relate to black people did take some time to percolate. Enough discomfort with racism had gotten through to me now that I always dreaded meeting Fred, our black doorman. Sometimes I tried striking up a conversation with him, but I never knew what to say. The previous summer, I had told him I sympathized with the race riots in Detroit and that I thought that black people might be justified if they rose up in New York or New Haven. Of course I neglected to mention that at the same time I was imagining saving Emily from these same riots. Throughout this conversation he kept opening the doors for people who were just passing by, and I could tell that he thought I was trying to trap him or something. I wound up saying something embarrassing about how much I respected him and then I just went upstairs. The few times I had come home since, I tried to do so during hours when I knew he wouldn’t be working. He would be working today, so I spent most of the walk up Park Avenue trying to think of what I would say.

  As it turned out I needn’t have bothered because when Fred saw me he looked confused, and I knew something was wrong.

  “Your friend James went upstairs half an hour ago. He said he was here to see you.”

  I instructed myself not to panic; maybe Hickham had dropped by to see me, on the off-chance that I might be home. But that was extremely unlikely, since I was at Yale and came home only rarely. No, by the time I was in the elevator, I was convinced that Hickham was raping my sister.

  When I arrived at the apartment upstairs I heard Emily saying, “No, no,” fairly insistently. I opened the door to find them both on the white sofa. They both sat up having seen me, but Hickham was slow to disentangle his hand from Emily’s blue blouse. By the time his hand was free I was at the sofa and in the middle of a punch. Nearly half a century later I can still hear the pop-crack of the breaking of his nose, and the thud he made when he fell onto the Persian rug, which still bore its stains of candy bar and apple. Despite my bad knee, and despite Emily’s pleas that I stop, I jumped over the couch, knelt by Hickham, and grabbed him by the throat. I’m doing my best to remember whether I squeezed; I’m fairly certain that I did not.

  “You think women want to be raped? You think violence is sexy?” He shook his head no, and I punched him in the stomach.

  “Arthur!” Emily said, now grabbing my arms and trying to restrain me. “Arthur, leave him alone.”

  It did not take me all that long to let him go.

  Emily crouched down next to James and held both of his shoulders. She looked at him and then she looked at me. The two looks were very different, and both were very familiar to me. When he had taken a moment to recover, he lunged for me with his right fist, but Emily restrained and then soothed him.

  “It’s all right, James,” she said. “It’s all right.”

  “I’ll call the police,” I said. “He needs to be locked up.”

  “I think you should leave, Arthur. I need to get some ice for James, but I’m not going to do that until you leave because I’m not going to leave you alone with him.” The looks were looks she had been giving since she was a child, but they had always been directed at Paul or my mother. The calm, articulate strength was new, if unsurprising.

  “He was trying to rape you.”

  “No, I wasn’t, you idiot,” James said, holding his bleeding nose.

  “He wasn’t.” Emily sat up straight. Her shirt was still unbuttoned and her bra cup, though it covered her nipple and areola, was twisted. She looked, unquestionably, like a sexually competent woman. But looks can be deceiving, and Hickham had once said that he had no desire to have sex with a woman whom he wasn’t raping.

  I looked at her, trying to be sympathetic and caring.

  “Emily,” I said. “We told each other that we would never deny the truth. Right? And the truth is that he was trying to rape you.”

  “The truth is that he’s my boyfriend.”

  “He’s your boyfriend? But he doesn’t respect women.”

  “Arthur. We’ve been going together for three months and this is the first time he’s tried to touch my breasts. He’s a gentleman. You, on the other hand, are just like Paul.”

  I was shocked that she would actually say this out loud. I stood up, finding that my knee hurt very badly.

  “You’d probably like it if I killed myself like Paul.”

  This was an immensely petulant, manipulative, and self-pitying thing to say. It—and I—deserved her contempt. What it and I got was something else.

  Her face crumpled into a helpless sobbing that made her look five years old again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Arthur, I’m so sorry. I never should have said that. You’re nothing like Paul.”

  “I wouldn’t mind it if you killed yourself,” Hickham said.

  “James!” she said, and slapped him across his cheek.

  “Ow!”

  Shame started to set in, and I said that I should probably go.

  “You should stay. James should go.”

  But I was already on my way out.

  f

  The incident left me so unhappy that I took a cab back to Grand Central and got on the next train to New Haven. I realized fully that I had overreacted, and that Hickham had unquestionably been the victim of the afternoon. If anything, I was more clearly guilty of assault than Paul had ever been, at least until that day on the beach. When I got back to my dorm I knew I should call Emily and apologize, but I was embarrassed about my behavior. I hardly got any sleep that night, because I kept thinking about what I had seen and what I had done. I was going to call Emily the next morning, but then I didn’t, and a couple more days went by and I still didn’t call her. I found it difficult to concentrate on schoolwork, so mostly I did a lot of wandering around campus, thinking of everything and nothing. She called several times and left messages with the guys who lived on my hall, prompting them to tease me a bit. Sounds like she’s got it bad for you, that sort of thing. Finally I called her back, and the first thing she told me was that she had broken up with James Hickham.

  “Get back together with him,” I said. “I had no right to…interrupt you.”

  “No. You were right all along about James. Only an unredeemable prick would tell someone to kill himself. Of course I should have known he was a prick, since he talks all the time about how women want to be raped. Just like you said. I’m so stupid.”

  “You’re not stupid. You’re the furthest thing from stupid.”

  “What I said was stupid. Nobody has ever said anything stupider than that thing I said. Promise you forgive me?”

  “Of course. And I’m sor…”

  “Listen, I’m going to tell Father that we’re not going to the Chappine this year. He’ll just have to cancel the reservation.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Emily.”

  “We’ll get out of the Chappine. I promise. So what are your plans for the week?”

  “Lady Bird Johnson is giving a talk today, so I was thinking about going to a protest rally against her.”

  “That reminds me. I just read this amazing book called The Dominion of Pleasure, by Jersey Rothstein. He says that politics is a waste of time. Politics are? Politics is? Anyway, a waste of time. He says you should focus only on your own sexual gratification.”

  “Why are you reading something like that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean something about…”

  “You mean something about sex? I’m going to be sixteen tomorrow.”

  “Sixteen is young.”

  “Too young to think about sex? That’s a boring rule, and boring rules aren’t for us,” she said. Already she was back to her provocative self.

  This reminded me that James Hickham, an eighteen-year-old college freshman, had touched the breasts of a fifteen-year-ol
d girl. Maybe it was unnecessary to feel sorry for assaulting him.

  “James read the book and said it was a masterpiece. I read it so I could argue with him, but he turns out to have been right about that, at least. Anyway: sex, not politics. Don’t go to the protest. Go out and get laid. Unless you’re going to the protest to get laid. In which case I don’t know what I think.”

  “Happy early birthday, Emily. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Not at the Chappine.”

  “It’s not a big deal.”

  “Read Jersey Rothstein’s book so we can talk about it. I’m really sorry about what I said.”

  She apologized for a few more minutes before I could get her off the phone.

  f

  I intended to walk to the library, but instead I just took a long, aimless stroll around campus. I knew that there were things motivating me that I couldn’t name, or at least things that I didn’t want to name, things that left my actions soggy with psychology.

  The protest itself was well attended, by Yale men and by girls from various women’s colleges. Fifteen hundred people, according to later estimates. We were all jammed together outside the Commons, the building inside of which Mrs. Johnson, rather ill-advisedly, was giving a talk entitled “Beautification in America.” The attire at the protest would have been unimaginable only a year or two later, with most of the boys in coats and ties. People jostled me and, twirling an unlit cigarette in my fingers, I surveyed them. Many looked engaged and hopeful, like they might taunt Lady Bird into divorcing her husband and blowing some guy with long hair and a beard on the White House lawn, or perhaps on the steps of the Capitol, on the theory that steps would be harder on her knees. Many others stood slack and chatted with their friends; this was just something to do for an afternoon. Signs jutted and bobbed over heads: “Lady Bird Beautifies While Lyndon Burns” and “How Do We Beautify Vietnam?” Many of the signs depicted burned children war victims.

  A bone-thin, sandy-haired girl paced a small stretch of concrete; she was wearing a blue sweater and she had her arms folded over her breasts as though she were awaiting the results of a medical exam. Beyond the quad was the law school tower, decorated with thin spires. From the sky, the tower and the quad would look like a watchtower and prison courtyard.

  Almost all of the guys at the rally came from families that were just as wealthy as mine or wealthier. Among them were guys who would later talk about blowing things up. Other guys were standing apart in clusters and mocking the protesters, laughing with that laugh they all had, the one where they threw their shoulders back and raised their chins. I could never master this laugh, though I had to admit I had spent much of my teenage years trying.

  I was convinced, as many other people were at the time, that America was headed for some revolutionary conflagration of race, of class, of anything else people could think of. I knew that if I became a revolutionary there would be something craven in it, a simple desire to be on the winning side. And a large part of me still thought that the side that I had been born into deserved to win, had to win if there was going to be anything other than chaos and fire—if not for the country, then certainly for me. Everyone I had grown up with had been raised to know that the world worked a certain way, and now, just as we were reaching adulthood, the world might cease to work that way. There was a word for a game in which the rules changed in the middle: a scam.

  Did I want to be a guard in the watchtower, my rifle trained? I looked at a guy with brown hair and pictured how he would look from the tower. I would stand on a ledge on the tower and I would balance my rifle on one of the spires. I would get the guy in my sights and shoot. The guy would fall, the crowd would scatter. Then I saw the guy’s mother over the body, wailing, and I felt an immense rush of guilt. I wanted to apologize for fantasizing about killing him, I wanted to apologize to his mother for fantasizing about killing her son.

  It must be awful to kill someone if a daydream could make me feel this bad, I thought.

  It was easy enough to imagine Paul, had he lived, taking a rifle to every anti-war protester he encountered. These protesters were all Yale men who, no matter what they would later say, were no likelier to participate in a present-day American revolution than they were to build a time machine and fight next to Robespierre, but Paul wouldn’t have taken a chance, or maybe he just wouldn’t have cared, and would have just shot them all. When that guy shot some people from a tower at the University of Texas, I thought: Paul must have survived, this must be him. And yet here I was, having the same fantasy.

  By the time I looked back for the bone-thin girl in the sweater, I could not see her anymore.

  It didn’t matter if I was on the losing side right now. I had been born on one team, but the glory of democracy was that I could switch sides. Equality was good, a goal to strive for. If the war was what my class had done for the world, then it deserved to lose. I could switch sides. The glory of democracy was that it sanctified betrayal.

  There was a reason, it occurred to me, why people who shared my blood had ruled this country for hundreds of years. It was because we were stronger, more powerful. And the truth was that I was stronger than Paul; he had killed himself and I never would. There was only one other person as strong as I was: Emily. That bone-thin girl wasn’t worthy of me—only Emily was.

  If I married my sister, even the hippies in San Francisco would have to be impressed. Talk about freedom from taboo!

  In a way it made a certain amount of sense. Emily and I got along very well, probably better than most boyfriends and girlfriends or husbands and wives, and there was no reason for us to pay attention to anyone else’s standards of morality.

  But it was also insane.

  This was bad. I could feel myself turning into some kind of evil fascist. That wasn’t who I wanted to be. I wanted to be someone who stood up for justice against unfair privilege. In the smithy of my soul I wanted to forge not the oft-created consciousness of my race, but simply my soul. I wanted to turn inward, but not incest-inward. I wanted to be wholly myself in a world that was new, and my sister was not new.

  It occurred to me that I should date a black girl. There were, of course, a lot of black girls who lived in New Haven. But I didn’t want to date a black girl just for the sake of dating a black girl; that seemed racist, too.

  I put a cigarette in my mouth and struck a match against the matchbook, but to no avail. Two more matches failed to light. I could feel Paul laughing at me, both for failing to light a match and for worrying so much about becoming a traitor to my class or to my family. The fact that I was even worried about betraying my class or my family showed that I was much more beholden to Paul than I wanted to think.

  I stood there for another ten minutes. Burned children jerked and spun as people shifted their feet and let their placards fall to their sides.

  Fingering my cigarette pack, still needing a smoke, I looked around this stretch of Connecticut and wondered whether any of my ancestors had ever killed an Indian where the school’s buildings now stood. Doubtful, but it was almost certain that my ancestors were responsible for many deaths.

  There was a boisterous couple a few feet from me, the guy with his hands on the girl’s waist and both of them laughing. Without noticing it until now, I had been dipping in and out of eavesdropping on their conversation. They had been talking about movies and music and occasionally they shouted slogans. The girl reached behind and scratched the back of her boyfriend’s head. Her sunglasses and her dark, curving bangs made her impossibly attractive to me. There would be something wonderful about a world where everyone was equal and everyone shared and no one owned anything or anyone, where I could walk up to this girl and kiss her. Where she could scratch the back of my head.

  Paul would have known what to say to this girl. He had probably picked up a lot of girls right where I was standing. I could feel him taunting me for not being bolder.

/>   It was important that I start dating someone immediately—someone as far from a WASP, and certainly as far from Emily, as I could find.

  I reached into my pocket for another cigarette, and as I fumbled with the pack I noticed a girl with long black hair. There was something about her mouth that intrigued me—was it that it was wide or that it was narrow? I put the pack back in my pocket and walked over to her.

  “Can I bum a cigarette?”

  She examined me from head to toe, making no effort to hide that she was doing so.

  “You look like you went to Eton.”

  “Wrong side of the pond.”

  “I think bluebloods are parasites.”

  “We are. That’s why I’m bumming a cigarette.”

  She tilted her head and smiled faintly. I was impressed with myself; this was the sort of line I usually came up with only after the moment was over. I tried to smile slyly, in a way that acknowledged our mutual attraction as an oblique, private joke. She gave me a cigarette and a light. I took a drag and felt wonderful.

  f

  After the protest dispersed with a long silence, I took her to an agreeably scummy New Haven diner, where she insisted on ordering only toast.

  She told me that she was a sophomore at Smith on scholarship—“my mother wouldn’t pay even if she could”—and that she wanted to be a painter. It turned out that we had both seen a production of Julius Caesar several weekends earlier, so we talked about that.

  “The play was pretty conservative,” Miranda said. “They didn’t make any effort to connect the play to our time. They could have dressed Caesar up as General Westmoreland. Or maybe they could have dressed Cassius up as General Westmoreland, depending on how they interpret the play.”

  I took an unpleasant bite from my burger. The burgers were good at this diner but they were ruined by the damp buns. I usually ate the burgers with a fork and knife but I didn’t want to do that now.