Rock Wagram

by William Saroyan

  The racing automobile came to Endee. It was suddenly a street with buildings and people, alive in the desert. When Endee was gone the enemy spoke again.

  “What do you want, Rock?”

  “I want this,” Rock said. “To sit in my car and go. To be alone in my car and go and look. I want to look at the desert that will never be gone, that will grow its grass and cactus when I’m gone and everybody I ever loved or ever will love will be gone. There, over there. I see that, and that is what I want. To see it. I want to see.”

  “What do you see, Rock?” the enemy said.

  “Look over there,” Rock said.

  The enemy looked. He saw the bones of a steer rubbed white by sand and wind. “For God’s sake,” he said, “turn on the radio.”

  Rock turned on the radio, against blindness, absence, loss, farewell, and death: and for the girl in New York, for the daughter of her, for all women, for all the daughters of them, kissing the men goodbye.

  A man is forever involved in a dream of cities, money, love, danger, oceans, ships, railroads, and highways. But in all of his sleep, in all of his travel, a man knows his true destination. He knows everywhere else he goes is a detour. But a man cherishes his detours, for they take time.

  After Endee, long after it, came Tucumcari, but where was Tucumcari? Vega was in Texas, Endee was in New Mexico, but where was Tucumcari? It was in the dream, in his sleep, no less than New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Athens, and Moscow.

  “Go to Dublin,” the enemy said. “It’s a good city. Go there.”

  “I went there,” Rock said.

  That was in the summer of 1939. On O’Connell Street a boy in a ragged coat stepped up to him and said, “Aren’t you Rock Wagram?”

  “Yes, I am,” Rock said.

  “You may wonder how I recognized you,” the Dubliner said. “I have your books. They are two, are they not? Winery, and Eye.”

  “My books?” Rock said. “But they were published privately. How did they ever reach you?”

  “An American came through here three years ago and gave me the first,” the Dubliner said. “I sent for the second. I am also a poet, Brian O’Brian.”

  “Let’s have a drink,” Rock said, for he was astonished and delighted.

  Brian guided him to a bar, to the backroom there, and they sat and talked.

  “I know your poems well,” Brian said, “although I don’t understand the titles.”

  “Winery is for a house,” Rock said. “Eye is for a street. I was born in a house on Winery Street. I stood and talked on Eye Street. I worked in a saloon on Eye Street. I must get your books.”

  “There are none,” Brian O’Brian said. “I write and recite my poems. They are not published in books. I have had a half dozen or so in small magazines in England. I hope to do plays some day. What are you doing here?”

  “Visiting.”

  “Friends?”

  “Dublin itself,” Rock said. “I’m amazed and pleased that you know me from two privately printed books of bad poetry.”

  “Not altogether bad,” Brian said. “Hard, careless, arrogant, yet gentle, so personal as to be impersonal, and full of a kind of comforting hatred.”

  “Not love?” Rock said.

  “Perhaps,” Brian said. “I have spoken of the good things, but the bad things are very bad. Man, you cannot think of life as a contest between yourself and the world.”

  “What can I think?” Rock said.

  “The truth, man,” Brian said. “Your good luck in being who you are was an accident. You had nothing to do with it. How can you forget the man whose luck was bad?”

  “Who is that man?”

  “All of us,” Brian said. “Myself. Yourself, even. The best luck goes bad. To live is not a personal thing, man. One has one’s brothers. The contest must always be on behalf of one’s brothers. What are your plans?”

  “I shall think about it,” Rock said.

  “I don’t mean that,” Brian said. “What are your plans for Dublin? For the rest of this day and night?”

  “Anything you say,” Rock said.

  “Then come with me to the house of a friend in Killiney,” Brian said. “There will be some people there at a singing party.”

  They drank until they were drunk, then took a bus, then another, then walked, and came at length to a house not surrounded by other houses, somewhat back of the road, almost in a meadow, and beyond the meadow he saw lakes and streams. They were late, so that when they entered the house everyone was there, and Rock Wagram called out to a girl he saw across the room, “I love you!”

  A man shouted, “Ho, now!” And a woman with a sharp musical voice said, “It’s Brian O’Brian himself at last with another drunk. This time an American one. Who is it he loves? Myself, did he say? The good-for-nothing!”

  “Not yourself at all,” somebody said, “but Rose here, Harry Madigan’s girl, fighting mad at him but already married to him, drunk as he is.”

  “Who is it, Brian?” the woman with the musical voice said.

  “Rock Wagram,” Brian said. “Who would it be? All alone in Dublin for no reason?”

  “No reason?” somebody said. “He’s here to find his girl, isn’t he?”

  “Here, you two,” a man said. “Just take a glass, and on with the singing.”

  Rock went to the girl.

  “Go on, now!” she said. “Go on over there and sing!”

  “Is it Rose Madigan?” Rock said.

  “It is, but go on over there and sing,” Rose Madigan said.

  The singing began, but Rock stayed beside her and sang.

  The party and afterwards fell away into something like a dream, himself and Rose in the back seat of a car racing about the countryside while the men up front, Brian O’Brian and the other two, sang.

  The next morning her own brother came to the hotel, who had been at the party, who had been the last to say goodnight.

  “Bad?” he said.

  “Yes,” Rock said.

  “Some coffee, then?”

  “Yes. Did I get very much out of line?”

  “Not at all,” the brother said. “Who didn’t, at any rate? Brian’s up at Rose’s, sleeping on the couch. He has his own place, but when he’s drunk he must stay where somebody can watch over him. Do you know his poetry?”

  “Not yet,” Rock said. “Where’s Rose? I mean, where does she live? I want to send her some flowers.”

  “Flowers, man?” the brother said. “Don’t waste your money. She lives across the Park there.”

  It was raining when he got to the Park. There was no telling which was the house in which she lived, for her brother had not given him the number, and he had not asked again. He began to walk around the Park. And then, far ahead, coming toward him, he saw a girl, knew it was Rose Madigan, and began to walk faster. When they reached one another, they did not speak, but stood a long time looking at one another, then kissed, but still did not speak, standing in the rain a long time. Then they went to her rooms. The others were there. They dried their clothes, drank coffee, laughed and sang, and only he and she knew.

  He was in Dublin three days longer, and saw her every day.

  “It was like this,” he said. “I was afraid of the Church. She wasn’t. She loved it. Her father loved it, too. Her brother didn’t, but she and her father did. The Church scared me. It always did. A man has to marry too much when he marries the Church. I may have been a fool, but I thought I could go back.”

  “You can still go back,” the enemy said.

  “No, it’s too late,” Rock said. “May my children forgive me.”

  A man’s needs are few, his desires many, but one need and one desire are the same, love. But love like money is a dangerous thing and the possession of it does peculiar things to a man, as the want of it does terrible. For want of love a man may invent a religion, take to drink, or to the belittling of poets.

  To be loved is to be accepted. To love is to accept. It is probably good
but probably impossible to accept. To reject is probably bad but probably natural, for the achievement of truth itself is the rejection of beauty, and the rejection of beauty is the rejection of all. Man is not beautiful, but his yearning for beauty is beautiful, and man’s true beauty, which is unrejectable, is failure, extreme and absolute. His effort to love is a comic and terrible thing. His failure to love is supposed to be a tragic thing and perhaps is, but a man’s longing to accept and to be accepted is basically only comic. The acts of a man who is seeking to love and be loved are strange, for he will become expert at all manner of things, solely in the hope of attracting love. Everything a man does is for love, therefore hopeless and futile, and therefore beautiful and comic.

  A man is supposed to be blessed if he is meek, but this may not be so. A man may be only partly blessed if he is meek, for a man is not completely anything. The only thing he is completely is alive, a business of which he is mainly ignorant. And it may not be important or possible for a man to be blessed, or no more important than it is for him to be irritated or discontented, angry or tired, indifferent or bored. The only other thing a man can be completely is dead. A man cannot be meekly dead or righteously dead or nobly dead. He can only be totally dead. This may or may not be the tiresome thing it seems to be to so many men, for it is past a man’s own experience, even though it is his most private one, after birth.

  A man knows something of both of these secret experiences when the life in him is in the act of seeking to give life to another, when he is with a woman, in the act of love. It is here that he knows all he is ever apt to know, and be able to remember, about birth, about death, for here it is that the vitalest part of him returns to the place from whence all of him came, and it is here, in this tender and violent home-going that he, in the act of giving life, tastes a little of the death that is altogether his only end. Dead is the man who was meek, who was proud, who was good, who was wicked. Proud and dead is the man who was meek. Good and dead is the man who was wicked. Dead is the man who was not dead.

  “Look over there,” Rock said. “That’s her at that corner table.”

  He was in the Cub Room at the Stork Club with Myra Clewes who wanted to have Rock in a play she was excited about called The Indestructibles.

  “Who, for God’s sake?” she said.

  “That girl,” Rock said.

  “What girl?”

  “That I’ve been thinking about all night.”

  “What a nice compliment to me, you dog!” Myra said. “I had no idea you’ve been thinking about a girl all night. I thought you were thinking about me. I thought you were thinking about The Indestructibles and the part in it for you. Is that her there? All that dazzling white I see over there?”

  “Yes,” Rock said.

  “Well, let me look a moment,” Myra said. “Yes. I see. But do you see who she’s with?”

  “Who?” Rock said.

  “Well, let me put it this way,” Myra said. “By the time you go to the Stork Club with him, it is understood by everybody—certainly everybody in New York—that you have gone the distance and no longer care who knows it.”

  “Why?” Rock said.

  “Because he pays,” Myra said. “Sometimes in diamonds, sometimes in furs, sometimes in promises, sometimes in what he thinks is most precious of all, his charm. That girl’s a child, isn’t she?”

  “Yes of course,” Rock said. “She probably doesn’t know very much about him except that he’s rich, whoever he is. Who is he?”

  “Andrew Joseph Blanca,” Myra said, “but everybody calls him Junk. He’s fifty-five.”

  “She’s seventeen,” Rock said.

  “How nice.”

  “What do you think of her?”

  “Another blonde.”

  “Is that all?”

  “That’s all, my boy,” Myra said. “Now let’s talk about this play by Patrick Kerry.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Rock said. “You don’t even know the girl.”

  “If it’s Ann Ford,” Myra said, “I know her. It is Ann Ford, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Rock said. “Do you know her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  “Why?”

  “I took her out a couple of times in Hollywood,” Rock said. “I’ve done a lot of thinking about her ever since.”

  “What sort of thinking?”

  “The sort that has to do with children.”

  “Not really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you tell me something first,” Myra said. “What do you know about her?”

  “I know she says things to make me laugh that do make me laugh,” Rock said.

  “Anything else?” Myra said.

  “I’m half in love with her,” Rock said.

  “In that case, good luck to you.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  “Let me put it this way,” Myra said. “Get rid of that half-portion of love. She’s not for you. Now, let’s talk about the play.”

  They drank and talked. The girl passed before their table on her way to the Powder Room but didn’t stop to say hello. She walked swiftly, with a kind of shyness she was eager to conceal, as if she felt it was out of order for her to be dressed up the way she was, to be where she was, and so glad and excited about it. As if she weren’t at all what she seemed to be, but didn’t want anybody to suspect for a moment that she wasn’t. He saw her on her way back, too, and it was still the same, but when the waiter brought him his fourth drink he handed Rock a small piece of folded paper, on which Rock read:

  Don’t you dare believe a word of the truth. Don’t you ever dare believe your own eyes. It’s bad for you. Everything is different and better than what it really is.

  There was no name, and even though he had never before seen her handwriting, he recognized it instantly. He burst into laughter. The writing was swift, joyous, sophisticated, and yet child-like. He handed the slip of paper to Myra Clewes, who read it quickly and handed it back.

  “Treasure it,” she said.

  “She’s delightful,” Rock said. “She didn’t nod or smile or say hello, yet she knew all along.”

  “Knew what?” Myra said.

  “Knew I had been thinking of her.”

  “She’s a lovely girl.”

  “No,” Rock said. “What is it? Tell me.”

  “Good God, Rock,” Myra said. “Are all Armenians as naïve as you are?”

  “I don’t know all of them,” Rock said.

  “She’s a lovely girl,” Myra said. “She’s yours to marry any time you’re ready. And yours alone to marry, I might say. The others are not so naïve.”

  “O.K., I won’t marry her,” Rock said. “I get it, whatever it is you’re trying to tell me. I won’t do any more thinking that involves children.”

  “Don’t do any more that involves her,” Myra said.

  “O.K., if you say so,” Rock said. “It’s nothing. I just happen to remember her in a way that I have never before remembered anybody else. She’s got feet that make me laugh every time I see them. Her hands seem to be the washed hands of a dirty little girl who sneaks through Woolworth’s stealing jewelry and valentines. She goes after life with a kind of wicked skill that is terribly innocent.”

  “You have got it bad, haven’t you?” Myra said.

  “Not at all,” Rock said. “But I’ve got to find a wife and start a family. I’m thirty-three and my father had two kids when he was thirty.”

  “How many did he have when he was forty?” Myra said.

  “He was dead when he was forty,” Rock said. “He’d had three when he was thirty-seven, but that’s when he died, and five years before that his last-born died, my brother Haig. My father and my brother are dead in Fresno.”

  “Is your mother still there?” Myra said.

  “No,” Rock said. “She asked me to move her to San Francisco three years ago, so she could be near her daughter, my sister Vava. Her grandkids visit
her all the time. She subscribes to all the Armenian newspapers and magazines, and I send her all the Armenian books I can find.”

  “Family means a lot to you, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, family means nothing to Ann Ford, and never will,” Myra said.

  “I suppose not,” Rock said.

  They went back to talking about the play by Patrick Kerry. Rock promised to read it that night and telephone her around three the following day, a Sunday. It was almost two in the morning, so they got up and left. Rock took Myra to the Sherry-Netherlands, walked up Fifth Avenue a mile or so, then back to his room at the Pierre. He was reading the play when Ann Ford telephoned.

  “Don’t ask me how I found out where you’re stopping,” she said. “Just get up and come and see me because my parents and the servants are gone for the weekend.”

  Her hands and her feet were beautiful to behold, and beholding them Rock Wagram believed in his health. He believed in his humor too. He believed in the exemption of his unborn children from pain.

  “Where’d you get them?” Rock said.

  “These?” Ann said.

  “Yes, and the feet, too,” Rock said.

  “Do you like them?”

  “More than I could ever say.”

  “What do they do?” Ann said.

  “They twinkle, wink, and laugh,” Rock said. “Where’d you get them?”

  “God gave them to me,” Ann said.

  He drove on, staring at the twinkling, winking desert, kissing her goodbye.

  A man and his friends are liars to one another. They are friends only of one another’s best. Let one among them show his worst, and the friends are gone. Let one among them speak the truth, and the others are gone. Let one among them ask of another the truth, and the others will be gone. For a man lives for himself, and is righteous in this. The man who goes abroad to do good unto others also lives for himself, and is righteous in this, and a liar. So it is with the man who goes abroad to do mischief. He, too, is righteous, and a liar. A man is not a guilty thing, he is an innocent thing, as he himself knows.