Belva Plain - Evergreen.txt

by Evergreen

  There is a rustle. People rise and murmur the Kaddish: "Yit-ga-dal ve-yit-ka-dash she-mei ra-ba—"

  Iris is sobbing when Theo leads them back to the car. Why am I not crying, too? Joseph would be proud that I'm not. Still, I ought to cry.

  Someone whispers, "I thought he spoke beautifully." Someone: "She's holding up well ... she always had dignity."

  The sky goes wintry. Before we reach home the rain comes, a somber, gusty, spattering rain. Lights are on all over the house. Friends and neighbors have come with pink chrysanthemums, baskets of fruit and chocolate cakes.

  "Come," Celeste says, "have a cup of tea, you've had nothing all day." She leads me to the dining room, and I allow myself to be

  led. In spite of everything the body cherishes its comforts: the tea, the fire, the windows tight against the rain. I let them put half a chicken sandwich on my plate. Why don't I cry?

  It was the hat that brought tears. After that long day it was the sight of Joseph's crumpled rain hat, forgotten on a chair in the upstairs hall. She went into their room, holding it to her cheek—his old hat that he would never wear again—and stood there weeping, swaying in the ancient way of mourning women.

  Empty, empty.

  She got undressed. The bed was turned down, such a wide bed to lie in alone. She had a quick flashing picture—from what storage space in her head?—of Joseph playing at the beach and Solly with him . . . they were throwing a ball . . . "Poor Solly ... all of his young brightness quenched," Joseph had said once, not seeing himself.

  Somebody pushed open the door. It was only the old dog, George the Second, who had slept with them ever since—since Eric went away. He raised his head, turning his mild eyes toward Anna, asking where Joseph was . . . and receiving no answer he settled on the mat at Joseph's side of the bed to wait.

  I wasn't good enough for him. I said that yesterday, and Iris stroked my hands. She said, "Mama, that's not true. You made him happy. You know he was happy!"

  Yes, he always told me he was. It must have been hundreds of times during all our years that he told me so. And still it's true; I wasn't good enough for him.

  Oh, I tried, I tried. I wanted to, and I owed it to him.

  That priest who, besides Paul, is the only other being on earth who knows what I know—I wonder whether he's still alive? We never even told each other our names.

  Theo knocked. "I've brought you something. May I come in?" He had a glass of water and a pill in the palm of his hand.

  "I never take tranquilizers, Theo." She hadn't meant it to sound stiff-necked or proud, but it came out that way.

  "Just once, tonight. You've been a good girl and you deserve a little help."

  "I want to face it with my own strength."

  "I know you're strong, but you're also stubborn. Now, the doctor says, take it . . ."

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  "All right, all right. I thought you had gone home."

  "We're sitting downstairs."

  "Take Iris home . . . it's been so hard for her."

  "I know. Now she'll really have to finish growing up, the whole way."

  "You've known that, too?"

  "Of course. She was her father's little girl."

  "Yes. His little girl."

  After a moment Theo said, "Laura's here, sleeping in the room across the hall."

  "Oh, no, why?"

  "Oh, yes. She'll come back tomorrow after school and sleep here for the next few nights."

  "You shouldn't burden the child with me."

  "Laura's not a child. And she's not to be her father's baby girl, Anna. Besides, she wants to stay."

  I'm overwhelmed with your love and I can't speak.

  "That's what families are for," Theo said firmly. "Now, sleep."

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  With pride and pleasure Jimmy observed Janet across his parents' Thanksgiving table. It had been a wonderful vacation so far, except that he'd missed sleeping with her as they did back on the campus. She was in a bedroom just down the hall from his, but he wouldn't enter her room while they were in his family's house. Was that hypocritical? But he just couldn't have. Anyway, he didn't want his parents to have the slightest reason to find fault with Janet.

  She was laughing now, flinging back her dark, curly hair. She hated that hair. No matter how strenuously it was brushed, it always fell back into a shape of its own, a round crest above a round face. Her arms, breasts and hips were round. (She would have to watch her weight in only a few more years.) Even her blue eyes were round. In all that curving softness one would expect the eyes to be naive or vague, but they were not. They slid up from under heavy lids with sharp awareness, keen as the brain inside the curly head.

  It amused him to think that she had come with the highest references, being the granddaughter of some vaguely distant relative of Nana's, that old lady, Ruth, who used to visit his grandparents before she died.

  "How did you two ever meet in that huge place?" Dad inquired now. "Well," Jimmy explained, "since we're both pre-med, naturally we have a lot of the same profs. And one day after zoology

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  lab this guy Adam Harris gave me a message. You tell the rest, Janet. I never get the relationships straight."

  "It's the craziest thing!" Janet began. "It seems that Dr. Harris' grandfather—he's dead now—was some sort of fourth cousin to my grandmother Levinson. And that year, at some other cousin's funeral, a whole group of relatives got talking and found out that Jimmy and I were at the same university. So they decided that Adam Harris ought to introduce us. All of this in a cemetery, imagine!"

  "Adam Harris thought it was very funny," Jimmy added. "Incidentally, he's the best thing that's happened in college. A gifted research man who also likes to teach. A rare bird. And human, too. A regular guy."

  "I'm told that our grandfathers, yours and mine, grew up together on the lower East Side. I never knew that; did you? Well, anyway," Adam Harris had said that day, "I've delivered the message and done my duty."

  "What's she like?" Jimmy had wanted to know.

  "Judge for yourself, my friend. I will tell you this, though, she's damn smart. One of the best in her section. And that's all I will tell you."

  It hadn't occurred to Jimmy to ignore the request, for he had a strong sense of courtesy and social obligation. So he had intended simply to call, take the girl out once for coffee and then not call again.

  Janet had laughed when he'd told her. "You know, I was supposed to look you up, too. My mother'd been bugging me about it. She still exchanges New Year's cards with your grandmother since mine died, and I think that's how she learned we were both out here. My mother's impressed with your family. She thinks they're important."

  Only Janet said things like that, coming right straight out with them. At first her manner had startled Jimmy, but then he grew to like it. She didn't fumble or hint; you always knew what was on her mind.

  "We're fairly poor," she had told him directly. "My dad owns a shoe store. Oh, I guess I shouldn't say 'poor,' exactly. What I mean is, I can't go to med school unless I put a lot of the money away for myself. I work every summer and I've got a scholarship for college now."

  "You make me feel pampered," Jimmy had admitted. "A little ashamed."

  "Why? I wish I didn't have to struggle so hard. I'd be glad to have my parents give me money or get married and have a man buy things for me."

  "You know I live on Washington Heights around the corner from the apartment house you used to live in," Janet was saying now Xo Nana. "Your husband was so good to my grandmother," she went on. "She was always talking about him. When my Uncle Harry's grandson was sick he paid for everything. She used to say they don't make people like Joseph Friedman anymore."

  Nana's eyes looked wet. Ever since Grandpa died her eyes had been quick to tear at the slightest few words.

  She seemed to be very interested in Adam Harris. "You admire him so much?"

  "Oh, yes," Janet said. "He'll talk to you and he'll listen.
He's really great."

  Nana shook her head. "Strange. When I think how different the grandfather was—"

  "In what way, different?"

  "Well, I never knew too much about him, only that he was once a boy in your Grandpa's neighborhood and ended as one of the biggest liquor distributors in the country."

  "Funny background for Dr. Harris," Jimmy remarked. "He's such a simple person. Drives a Volkswagen and wears the same suit every day."

  "Interesting," Nana said, and Jimmy wondered what she was holding back. With his grandmother, you never knew. Then she inquired of Steve, "Do you know him too, this Adam Harris?"

  "I don't take sciences. But I know him a little, see him around with guys at lunch. He's a sentimentalist, a phony defender of the status quo, like most of the faculty. Full of crap."

  "It seems to me," Dad said, "you don't have a good opinion of anyone at college, do you, Steve?"

  "Actually, no. They're all tools of the system, hirelings paid to train the young for the corporate rat race. What's there to approve of?"

  "I'm sorry you find it all so miserable."

  "Oh, I don't really give a damn."

  Their mother, Jimmy saw, glanced at their father as she passed

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  the cranberry sauce, and had just opened her mouth to change the subject when Steve dropped his bomb.

  "And the reason I don't give a damn is that I intend to quit at the end of the term."

  "What's that you said?" Dad asked.

  "I said I intend to quit. Drop out. Leave."

  "Oh, really," Dad said politely. When he talked that way, there was fire under his ice. "Oh, really? And what do you plan to do with two years of college to your credit?"

  Steve shrugged. "Before I do anything else I want to stop this war."

  "They'll draft you, don't you know that?"

  "Not me, they won't! I won't go."

  "You'll go to jail?"

  "Could be," Steve said carelessly. "Or Sweden or Canada, more likely."

  Their grandmother gasped and started to say something, but Mother warned her with a look. Everybody in the family knew that Dad's rare anger was not to be interfered with. Steve liked to call it the Prussian in him, although it seemed to Jimmy that he had always heard that Austrians and Prussians despised each other.

  "Let's leave the war out for a moment," Dad said carefully. He laid his fork down, although the dinner wasn't half over. "Or let us assume that the war has ended, which, please God, I hope it soon will be." Dad always said 'please God,' while denying that he believed in God. "Would you still feel that an education was unnecessary?"

  "This kind is. They don't teach anything you can't pick up by yourself if you want to. And I don't want to. I don't intend to train myself to spend a lifetime making money."

  "You don't approve of money?"

  "Not the way it's exalted in this country. Not when it's put ahead of love."

  "You're very glib, but your glibness doesn't stand up under analysis. Do you think, for instance, that because a man makes money for his family he doesn't love them?"

  "That's not what he said, Theo!" Mother objected, defending Steve.

  Her defense of his brother was as old as Jimmy's memory. Even years before, when Laura teased him and Steve hit her, although

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  they both were scolded, the scolding voice was different for Steve. Did their mother hear her own anxious plaint when she spoke to him, or about him?

  Steve murmured now, "If you want to get personal, I'd say it would have been better if you had cut your practice in half and given us more time."

  "Cut my practice in half! I couldn't possibly have kept you in this house if I'd done that! Would that have been love?" Now his father's voice rose and although it still wasn't loud, it vibrated and seemed to shake the table. "Here you sit with good white teeth, fifteen hundred dollars at the orthodontist's—oh, I know it's vulgar to mention money, but I'm not the one who brought it up, you are. Money is part of love and don't say it isn't. Every time I wrote out a check for something you needed or something that would give you pleasure, I felt your pleasure. A piece of my love went into every dollar. Yes, and a piece of my gratitude for the country that makes it possible for me to be generous with you. Can you understand that?"

  "I don't share your jingoism," Steve said.

  "Jingoism! Because I speak of gratitude to this country?" Dad pushed his chair back. "Listen to me! I owe everything I am to this country that took me in. Fools like you who were lucky enough to have been born here don't know how lucky you are. I kiss this ground. I say this before all of you. I'll go out on the sidewalk in front of this house, and I'll kiss the ground! You hear me? Yes, and your grandfather felt the same way, too."

  "My grandfather was a money machine," Steve said. "I'll give you this much credit: at least you do have other interests, music and tennis and reading. But he did nothing at all with his life except make money. And you know that's true."

  "Oh!" their grandmother cried. "Oh, I don't understand what's happening here, never at the dinner table—"

  Jimmy glanced at Janet, but she was carefully looking at her plate.

  And Mother said, "Steve, I'm saddened and ashamed that, no matter what you may think, you should have so little feeling, that you should—"

  "Feeling!" Dad interrupted. "Feeling! Yes, these left-wingers weep their tears for every underdog and malcontent in the four corners of the earth, but for the family that breaks its back and heart for them, no tears at all. Nothing. So you'll drop out of col-

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  lege; never mind asking your parents what they think or how they feel about your throwing your life down the drain—"

  A mess.

  Upstairs, later, Jimmy went into Steve's room. "What the hell ever got into you? Christ, I don't care whether you want to act like a damn fool! Drop out, do what you want, but will you tell me why you had to wreck the dinner?"

  "You're sore because your girl was. there."

  "You're damn right I am! It could have waited for a private time. There was no real reason for doing it then."

  "No real reason not to, either. I didn't make the uproar, remember! I just quietly said what I was going to do and it was Dad who hit the ceiling."

  "Yes, and you had a pretty good idea he would. You used to do that when Grandpa was alive too, say things that you knew were like waving a red flag in front of a bull."

  "Grandpa!" Steve said scornfully.

  "You didn't like Grandpa?"

  Steve shrugged, loosing from his shoulders, in a gesture of total rejection, all unwanted burdens. "It's like saying I don't like Tut Ank Amen. We hadn't communicated in years. Actually he was dead years before he died, only he didn't know it."

  "Sometimes you're awfully hard, Steve."

  "I'm not hard. I only want the same right that everybody else in the family has to express my opinions, which seem to shock them to their foundations. They never think how I'm shocked by theirs."

  "That's not so. I've heard you and Dad talk about things, politics and social justice, lots of times."

  "Okay. I'll admit Dad means well. He tries to be open-minded, now and then when he's in the mood to be. He'll listen and try—or he says he tries—to understand. But basically, you know as well as I do, he's as uptight as any Wall Streeter about getting ahead and having things, cars and new carpeting and crap like that. He doesn't really care about people in places like Harlem who have to worry about food instead of carpets. And Vietnam. Sure, he thinks it's wrong, but does he do anything about it, put himself on the line? God, it stinks, the whole business, you know what I mean? Sometimes when I hear them talking about insurance and tax-free bonds and all that garbage I could puke. I could honest-to-God puke!"

  "So, okay, I get what you're driving at, but all the same, it is

  their house and I guess they can talk about what they want in it, can't they? Hell, I don't agree with them half the time but I don't g
o around making waves. Let them think what they want and I can think what I want, for Pete's sake."

  "What kind of relationship is it where you can't speak your mind? That's why I hate to come home, if you must know. At least on the campus I can talk freely. It's like breathing fresh air again when I get back there."