Ultraviolet

by Suzanne Matson

  Samantha’s last words thrill her, but also make her drop the topic like a hot potato. Kay doesn’t know how much Vera is indebted to her, for sharing her children all these years. But she also knows how easy it is to be Favorite Auntie, and Kay knows it too.

  Vera tires of the cartoons’ glaze about the same time it seems the children in Ramblin’ Rod’s studio audience do; they wave goodbye to the viewers at home with somewhat defeated expressions. Vera spends a moment wondering if the studio children were even able to see the cartoons, decides that they probably did on a television screen like everybody else, and that this, perhaps, is the reason for their inscrutable disappointment, the fact that they never actually pierced the shell of the cartoon world and reached the bright interior where gravity and mortality and other laws do not apply. No one probably told them beforehand that sitting on the bleachers in the studio would be farther from the cartoons, not inside them.

  Her niece, too, seems a bit deflated, maybe from the sugary dose of child entertainment she is really too old for, though she’d hugged her stuffed dog and seemed to watch with fixed attention. Now Vera feels the girl’s impatience from the way she casts herself back onto the cushions. She can’t say she remembers what it’s like. Her own childhood left her as soon as the next few babies were born in the family. She simply wasn’t allowed to decide when it was time to stop being a child and start being something else.

  ***

  The next morning—another mild, sunny one—stretches out in front of them. There are few entertainments Vera can provide besides her daily rounds, and how much of that can bear repeating now that the girl is older? The very repetition is what moves Vera forward into her day, but what does it feel like to the girl who is used to more action, more novelty, and friends her own age? Yesterday at the store they picked out some cotton yarn; they’ll crochet the bag in the afternoon, after their walk. This morning they’ll take in the Historical Society, a downtown attraction they’ve never explored together. Samantha told her she gave an oral report on the Klamath Indians last spring, and Vera thinks they’ll find some interesting pioneer and tribal artifacts on display.

  As they near the corner of Jefferson and Park, the intersection with the green strip of the Park Blocks, Samantha points to a gathering of people that seem to be headed toward them from the direction of Portland State. The two of them pause on the sidewalk, watching. Is it a parade? Vera doesn’t see the flash of instruments, doesn’t feel the reverberations of a bass drum. As the group approaches, it becomes a bunch of students with signs, shouting slogans. Vera rests her hand on Samantha’s shoulder as a precaution. At first the shouts sound only like Hunh hunh! Hunh hunh! but as the faces and beards and dungarees come into focus, so do the words: Hell no! We won’t go!

  Two police cars glide into the loading zone near them, and two others are nosing into position across the street. The officers climb out of their cars and amble to meet at the center of the park strip, conversing as if they only happened to convene there for a morning chat, though each of them crosses his arms in front of his chest and their glances keep sliding sharply toward the direction of the marchers.

  When the chanting is thirty yards away, the officers give up their pretense at small talk and turn to face the protesters. There are eight of them, forming an unbroken row. They seem to be suggesting to the marchers that Jefferson Street is the farthest they should consider advancing, beyond which shoppers and secretaries and businessmen have important things to do that must be carried out in an atmosphere of order and quiet.

  Vera tenses in reaction to the set of the officers’ jaws, their out-thrust chests. She thinks Pinkertons. She thinks of Red Lodge’s Liberty Committee during the Great War, and their basement interrogations of Socialists and Wobblies. The marchers are close enough now so that she can see their particularity, the fact that they are little more than boys and girls, that growing hair in long and unkempt fashion seems to be one of their main statements, that and the fact of having dirty bare or sandaled feet beneath their dungarees. Their chants have grown more raucous. Like birds obeying an invisible signal to change direction, they have moved from Hell no! We won’t go! to One, two, three, four! We don’t want your fucking war!

  At this, Vera sucks in her breath and almost cups her hands over her niece’s ears, though it is too late; the word is loose in the air. The two of them should just turn from where they stand and find a roundabout way to the Historical Society. This is not their argument. Vera touches her niece’s shoulder to give it a little steer but the girl twitches her hand away. Does not shake it off, exactly, but makes clear that she has no intention of being guided. Her face seems transfixed by the marchers, her mouth a little slack with fascination. There is something excited and happy and terrified in her niece’s eyes as she takes their measure.

  Vera’s hand finds Samantha’s arm and stays there. She, too, is a little mesmerized, more by the officers than the students. Their uniforms are different from long ago, these ones navy blue and crisp—the pleats so sharp, in fact, it almost hurts to look at them. But the faces, pink and shaved, are familiar. The shoulders thrown back, the posture of prideful, righteous duty—that is familiar. The guns and batons in holsters hang heavy and glossy at their hips.

  “Let’s go, Samantha.” The air is beginning to change, thickening with a dangerous charge.

  “No! I want to see!”

  The marchers and the police are face-to-face. The police, if they wanted to inform the marchers of something, explain the regulations, or ask for a parade permit, could not be heard against the chanting—back again to Hell no! The students are stalled, milling about in place, feet restless, no order to their movements although their ranks are closer now, shoulder to shoulder. More police have filtered in, there are about a dozen now, to about forty or fifty marchers with their homemade signs.

  Her father wrote the messages on paper; the men would ball them up and pass them to other miners during shift changes. Shake hands, pass on a circular: Strike against draft. Strike against militarism. Do not register. Pull another out of your pocket, shake hands, pass on a circular. Right under the noses of the shift bosses, those men standing with arms crossed, enforcing an orderly transfer of workers. Down with war profiteers. Down with invisible government.

  Her brother Werner was put on the slacker list for not registering, his name published. The newspaper printed the warnings: Such as do not appear for examination . . . if they fail then to heed the call . . . deserters and if apprehended . . . in time of war . . . punishable by death.

  He didn’t register—I’ve got no beef with those Huns—and then he did. What else could he do?

  Protesters are bunched up against one another, up against the line of police, unbudging. Now their feet are out of step, voices out of chant, shouting, practically spitting, in the officers’ faces.

  Hell no—don’t want your fucking—

  Glossy black holsters, arms no longer crossed but hanging down, fingers loose and empty.

  Then, like birds obeying an invisible signal, hands go to batons.

  She draws Samantha back against the building wall. A dentist’s office, she remembers, behind them. Novocaine, laughing gas.

  Hell no, hell no.

  Like birds, batons raised, batons slicing the air, black arcs, black wings.

  The protesters roar out, as if already struck. No chant, no rhymes, no feet in step, nothing linking them together anymore. A collection of kids, uncollected. Just people’s children, parents maybe thinking, He’s at class. Or, She’s at her job, Or, That kid needs a goddamn haircut. Or not thinking at all, just everyone having an ordinary day.

  The students haven’t been touched, not yet, but their cries sound wounded. They are hurt, they are angry. Wronged.

  Both sides are out of order now, movements jagged, shoving. The batons, the signs, swinging, sawing. Police and students not just on the grass of the Park Blocks anymore, like a playing field, like a game, but o
n the street in front of them. Raging and surging and pushing. She hears Samantha’s sharp intake of breath.

  They need to leave, now. Kent State. Tear gas. She turns, sees that their immediate way is blocked by a new phalanx of officers approaching, two more squad cars parked at crazy angles in the middle of the street. In the distance, sirens.

  While she hesitates, tries to plot their route, the crowd surges closer to their position on the sidewalk. Directly in front of them is a girl, smaller than the rest, maybe someone’s younger sister. Vera can’t judge age these days, all the children barefoot, all the hair long. The girl trips on someone’s dropped sign, goes down to her hands and knees, looks toward Vera and Samantha, her mouth open with surprise. A young man behind her is pushed forward, falls over the fallen girl. Another scuffle in front and someone is pushed backwards, falls.

  Samantha tries to jerk her hand free of Vera’s clutch.

  “Help her, she’s on the bottom.”

  “No, Samantha.”

  “We need to!”

  “No, Samantha.”

  Samantha tries to get loose. And then she does, in one slippery twist, moving off the sidewalk and into the street to offer the girl a hand, a way out. A sign comes see-sawing down on her niece’s back. Samantha looks up, annoyed, ow, as if her brother has not followed the rules, has tagged her too roughly. She looks mad, she’s going to tell.

  “Samantha!”

  Samantha ignores her, the way these barefoot children have ignored all their parents. The girl has reached for Samantha’s hand, taken it, and Samantha is trying to push the men off her with one hand, pull the girl with the other. Vera must help, must end this, must get them out of here. She moves into the scrum, trying to pry Samantha free.

  Someone in front of them is shouting pig fucking pig fucking pig, his own face red and distorted. A baton swings down, cracks the top of the boy’s head. Everyone around cries out except the boy who took the blow, he alone is silent, staggering, falling back. The girl who was on the bottom has managed to rise upright on her knees, until the dazed, now bleeding boy lurches back, topples her like a bowling pin and in the process Samantha, too.

  Samantha on the ground, blood on the sky-blue seersucker of her shorts.

  Vera can hear the officer’s words because they are delivered over a bullhorn—Disperse NOW! You must disperse NOW! But she cannot hear her own words, her own voice—tearing, torn—hoarse from shouting something. She makes a guttural noise, her arms push, lift, pull—she tugs at whatever is in between her and her girl—she pushes and pulls.

  A hand grips her by the elbow. She tries to resist it, her girl still on the ground, but the hand is insistent, then a voice, equally insistent. “I’ll get her. Stay back.”

  Vera turns her head, sees that it is the drummer boy, the one she’s noticed in the neighborhood.

  He somehow separates Samantha from the flail of limbs and deposits her, mussed and terrified, at Vera’s side. Vera is opening her mouth to thank him when she sees his gaze slide behind her, over her shoulder. He raises a quick hand—to forestall her thanks, or say goodbye—then is gone around the corner of the dentist’s office, just as suddenly as he’d appeared. Vera turns to see what made him go: a stone-faced officer approaching, notebook open.

  He levels his pen at her: “You wait right here, ma’am. Don’t you go anywhere.”

  Then he turns back to help with the sorting—dazed children, angry and cursing children, crying children, as many as the police can corral being herded into the paddy wagon. Many more are leaving than are being rounded up—the rear guard is either running up the Park Blocks toward the refuge of the college, or slipping sideways into the city streets.

  When the officer returns, he demands her name and identification, which she produces for him to scowl at. Can she explain herself, her involvement in all this? Is she aware that he could write her a court summons if he chooses to, for disorderly conduct? That she was endangering this child?

  Samantha tries to protest that it was all her fault, her eyes filling with tears. Vera shushes her. She feels her father’s tongue wanting to flare; she feels on the verge of offering her opinion of this war and of the officers’ batons.

  Instead she answers yes to every admonishment, tells him they just got caught in the middle. Sees, in a funny way, that the man just needs to let off steam, calm down. His eyes, close up, are bloodshot and red-rimmed. He has a middle-aged paunch. Too old for this kind of shenanigans. Who knows but that he doesn’t have a teenager at home, someone shaggy and disobedient who keeps slipping away before his father can get him into the barber’s chair.

  By the time he’s done lecturing her, telling her to be more careful next time, to avoid these agitators like the plague, he regards Vera kindly, as if she might be his own aunt gone strangely awry for a brief period.

  No court summons for her; it is a fact that almost shames her, thinking about how she calculated that politeness was her strongest weapon against the officer’s irritation—that and respectability. Also in her arsenal: her two-piece summer suit, a pale green tweed today; her low walking heels. She recalls now that she used her white patent leather pocketbook as a kind of battering tool when she was trying to part the tangle of people between her and Samantha. But no summons, because the officer, when he wound down, came to see her as she wished to be seen: a respectable American.

  ***

  Puhutteko te suomea? Her mother, asking left, asking right, in the immigration line. Please, does anyone speak Finnish? Vera by the hand, Celia in her arms, Kate and Werner and Walter trying to manage the hand baggage. Puhutteko te suomea?

  One alphabet letter chalked on their back by the health inspectors—just one L or K, for cough or eye disease or something else—would be enough to send them all back home across the Atlantic.

  The inspectors had buttonhooks; they turned up the eyelids to check.

  Vera imagined them sent home, not even seeing Dad after all this time, Celia born after he left and now walking and him never even meeting her yet. Him waiting and waiting at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, with no way of knowing why they didn’t come.

  Or what would happen if just one of them got the alphabet letter? Would Mother send that child home alone?

  It was June when they boarded their ship at Hanko, the long sun never setting: strangers, well-wishers, milling about on the pier with the departing passengers. They pinned wild roses to the emigrants’ cloaks, embracing them with quick, tight hugs. The girl who pinned a blossom to Vera’s shawl whispered, “God bless. I’ll see you one of these days in the fri contri.”

  Mrs. Vera Killorn. She enunciated it clearly. The officer had been on the point of writing it down, but something in her firm delivery left his pen hovering. No need to make a fuss about this, she could almost see him thinking. All a misunderstanding that Mrs. Killorn, in her tweed summer suit, was mixed up in this. It was a good Irish name, Killorn, better to have had at a certain point than a Finnish name. There were radical Red Finns and churchgoing, conservative White Finns. In Finland, it became a civil war. In America, the White Finns sometimes translated issues of the worker newspapers such as Industrialisti or Työmies for those in charge who wanted to know the contents. The Red Finns went to jail and court and deportation parties where they danced and danced and sometimes dropped. Polite or not so polite men in overcoats and short-brimmed hats flashed badges and produced lists. Do you know this man? How about this man? This woman? No? We think you might.

  ***

  They go to rest and gather their wits on a park bench. Samantha sits beside her, still sniffing her last tears away and shivering on this warm day. Someone else’s smear of blood, now a drying rust, stains her shorts. At the bench Vera brushes her off, checks her for scrapes, makes the child test her joints. She is all right. Now they sit, stunned, and don’t talk.

  They remain in silence for some minutes, just breathing, feeling the flicker of sun between leaves. Sparrows have resu
med chatter. Finally, Vera straightens her spine and pats her niece’s arm, reassuring in its substance. On the ground, a few abandoned signs, a sandal. Like the trampled grass after a carnival has left town. Like the fifth of July.

  “Should we go straight to Manning’s, dear? Or eat at home? I don’t think I’m up to the museum right now.”

  “Me neither. Whatever you want, Auntie.”

  The day is too lovely to waste: Picnic warm. Beer-by-the-lake warm. There are days when all you should think about is pleasure. When you should play hooky with your husband and go to Belle Island, feel sand.

  As they make their way through the restaurant toward a table, she feels the pressure coming, the silverware glinting up at her at odd angles. The secret is to breathe through the squeezing, try to breathe it away. She lags behind a moment to feel for her pillbox, slip a nitro under her tongue. Simple angina, she tells herself, hasn’t she lived with it for years? You don’t go through a morning like they just had and not have it rear its head.

  The meal is a strange copy of yesterday; they are still quelled, subdued. It’s early for lunch and Vera takes only a cup of coffee and a bowl of barley soup, Samantha a square of custard and a glass of milk, foaming from the dispenser. They just need a quiet place to be.

  “Will those kids go to jail?” Samantha asks.

  “Jail? No, I doubt it. They’ll pay some kind of fine, I expect, or their parents will.”

  “Why are we in the war, anyway?”

  Vera stirs her coffee. “I don’t think we even know anymore. It started with wanting to stop communism. Do you know what that is?”

  “Not really. I hear it on the news.”

  When the family gets together at the holidays, there are things they never, by unspoken compact, speak of. There are gaps in the stories that the younger generation doesn’t notice. It’s not Vera’s business to fill in these gaps and, anyway, she’s used to burying the past. The men in the short-brimmed hats wanted Reds, of which, when Vera began counting the Party membership cards in her brothers’ pockets back then, she guessed she knew several.