by Evergreen
"I thought you were going to quit!"
"Yeah, and a lot of my friends are, too. I don't mean the whole campus is free. Christ, no. I meant my crowd."
Steve's crowd. Earnest, gesticulating, wrathful. He supposed they were all ultra-bright like Steve, although he didn't really know any of them except by sight, orating on the campus, gathered under the trees or in club rooms. They were names he recognized from the Clarion Call, flying here and there, to congressional hearings, to vigils, parades and strikes, an uneasy flock in constant flow and motion. He wondered how they ever got any work done or passed exams. After all, you had to spend some time cracking the books . . . even if you were brilliant like Steve. It puzzled him.
"Where there's genuine love there's understanding, isn't there? Well, isn't there?" Steve demanded now.
"Steve, you see perfectly well what I mean but you pretend you don't. I can't win an argument with you. You've got a trick way of talking and twisting things against all common sense, against what any man in the street would simply feel was right."
"Yeah, feel. Think with your blood. Like a fascist," Steve said.
He had a slow, faintly mocking habit of shutting the lids down over his eyes, dismissing you. Sometimes when he did that Jimmy wanted to hit him. Then other times, when he looked at his brother, at the blue veins that stood out on the temples under the thin, fair skin, he felt a tenderness more moving than any he ever felt for their little brother, Philip.
"I didn't want to come home for Thanksgiving, anyway," Steve said. "You forced me to come."
"I'm sorry I did," Jimmy answered quietly. "Well, okay, then, I've had enough for tonight. I'm going to bed."
"The sleep of the just," Steve mocked.
His snapping sarcasm had always been infuriating. Yet it was only a cover-up. Jimmy remembered having thought that years ago. He remembered other things, too.
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There was the time when Jimmy had broken his leg and Steve had got all his assignments, brought books from the library for his project, typed his papers, fed his gerbils and tended his plants for the experiment on Mendel's Law. He remembered how, when they were very young, Steve used to get so mad about being weaker than he; never able to win a fight, he would fall into such a frenzy of outraged despair that the fight would end with Jimmy's being sorry for him.
My brother's debtor, and his keeper. It sounded so pompous. Yet there it was.
The next afternoon, to Jimmy's relief and his parents' concern, Steve left to attend a peace rally in California.
Nana invited Jimmy and Janet to lunch. He knew that she must have been very pleased with Janet or she wouldn't have invited them. They sat in the sunny, lofty dining room, the women chatting easily, as women always seemed able to do. With half his mind he heard them discussing Janet's family, college and skirt lengths. The other half of his mind was listening to different voices.
The dinners he had eaten at this long, polished table! It seemed as if all of them had been ceremonial, although there must have been many that were not. What he remembered, though, were song and prayer, flowers, candlelight and enormous quantities of sweet-and-sour food.
"We're boring you," his grandmother said suddenly.
"No, no. I was just letting my mind wander. I was thinking of how we used to be dressed up for holiday dinners in our best suits and how everyone was so punctilious."
"Did you hate it?" Janet asked curiously.
"Oh, when I was very young I was impressed. But from about fourteen on I used to be so bored. The meals took forever. I spent the time hiding my yawns."
"People are easily bored at fourteen," Nana observed. "But you know? It was beautiful, wasn't it?"
Yes, very beautiful. Now, having been away from home and childhood, far enough away in space and time to see it as it had been, he could think of it as a way that he would like to live over, to repeat when his turn should come.
"I wonder whether Mother feels the loss?" he asked. "She was
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so attached to Grandpa. And Dad doesn't or won't keep the holidays like that in our house."
"I imagine she misses it," Nana said quietly. "I know I do."
The silence held faint sadness.
Then Nana asked surprisingly, "Are you a religious person, Janet?"
"Yes, the tradition means a great deal to me. It always has."
His grandmother smiled. Then she said briskly, "If we're finished, why don't you show Janet through the house? She said she wants to see it."
They started in the music room. The Bach Goldberg Variations lay open on the rack of the piano.
Jimmy remarked, "I guess Philip's been here."
"Yes, he was here for supper last Sunday and he played for me."
"Do you remember how no one dared even cough when Philip was playing?"
"I do."
"With all respect, I don't think it was because Grandpa understood or even liked music."
Nana laughed. "He didn't."
"It was only because it was Philip playing."
The fierceness of that love! Jimmy wondered whether the kid had minded being displayed like that. But he guessed not. Philip was at Juilliard now and, after all, what use was it to play an instrument without an audience? Thank goodness, though, he wasn't a 'different' or outlandish boy. In fact, he was a great deal better adjusted than most people were, having a sociable, almost placid nature which didn't fit with the platitudes about musicians and temperament.
They climbed the stairs to Grandpa's round room. The humidor still held the scent of rich Havanas, although it had long been empty. Blueprints lay rolled in sheaves on the shelves. A handful of fresh marigolds stood in a little cup on the desk, Nana's flowers, the same as the ones that bordered the terrace and framed the lawn on this pearl-gray day of fading fall.
Janet stood at the window. "What a lovely house!" she cried softly.
"Yes," Jimmy said. "In some ways it seems more like my childhood's house than the one I actually lived in."
Below on the one-story wing of the library, Virginia creeper
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climbed thickly on the walls. It took a generation for creeper to grow like that. It was so strong now you would barely be able to pull it off if you should want to. The whole house was strong.
"I remember sleeping over once when I was very little," Jimmy said. "I was terribly afraid of thunder and on that night there was an awful storm. You knew I was afraid, Nana, and you came into my room where I was lying awake. But for the first time I wasn't afraid at all, and you were so surprised. I told you that I wasn't afraid in this house, that nothing bad could ever hurt or scare me in this house. Do you remember that?"
"I don't remember it and I'm glad you told me." Nana was pleased.
Presently they kissed her good-by and rode away.
"You have a wonderful family, Jimmy," Janet said. "I love your grandmother especially. She does seem strong, like her house. She gave me—oh, I don't know exactly—a feeling of permanence. I'm the sort of person who likes things to last, Jimmy."
"I am too," he said.
In his dormitory room, Jimmy lay sprawled on the bed in a jumble of blankets, clothes and textbooks, watching Janet get dressed. He imagined that his flesh still glowed, as though the air that touched her flesh was warmed by it and brought the warmth back across the room to him. He foresaw the bleakness of the room when she would have left it, and him alone in it, until next time. In the year he had known her she had become as near to him as his pulses or his breath.
"Don't go," he said.
"Jimmy, I have to. If I stay here I won't study and I've a chemistry quiz on Thursday."
"We'll both study. I won't bother you."
"You know we won't study."
He laughed. "All right. You win."
She drew on her jacket. "Okay. I'm going. You can come to my place Friday. My roommate's going home for the weekend."
"Okay. Wait, let me get something on and I'll walk you over."<
br />
He ran around the room picking up clothes, a shirt flung over the typewriter, pants on the floor.
"Janet?"
"What, dear?"
"I'm sorry there was a scene at my house. A helluva thing, on
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your first visit! And honestly, we never have big fights like that one, only small ones now and then when Steve starts them."
"I didn't mind. I only felt bad for all of you, especially for your grandmother. I liked her so much."
"Yeah. It's been hard for her since Grandpa died. She's really great, Janet. Sometimes she can sound like somebody in a fairy tale, as if she hadn't been paying attention to the world at all. Then other times you think, She's no fool, that lady. Did I tell you she's an opera buff?"
"Do you really think Steve will drop out of college?"
"Yeah, I really do. I really do. You know," he said slowly, "Steve's kind of a genius. I mean, he could be if he wanted to. He can do languages, math, everything. Did I tell you he got in the seven-nineties on his Boards? And he never has to study the way I do. I mean, I kill myself studying. With him I think it's a question of memory; he reads a page once and the whole thing sort of prints itself on his mind. He's fantastic."
"What is he interested in?"
"Nothing. He used to be a history buff, but then he started saying it was all crap, all slanted, the books don't tell the truth. After that he got involved with philosophy, that's his major, but I don't know whether he cares about it that much or what he plans to do with it."
"Teach is about all, isn't it?"
"He doesn't want to teach. Anyhow, the new wrinkle is that the universities are all fake, irrelevant, feeding the war machine, you know that." He thought of something and laughed. "I remember one time he told my grandfather about the philosophy major and Grandpa asked him what he was going to do with it. With Grandpa everything had to be practical. So when Steve didn't answer my grandfather said, kind of making a joke, 'Well, you could open a store: Steve Stern, Philosophy.' Everybody laughed and Steve was so mad."
"Not much humor in him."
"Not much. Especially now. It's this damned Vietnam. Seems as if that's all some people talk about."
"It's important enough, Jimmy," Janet said very seriously.
"I know. But it doesn't have to poison a person's whole life, does it? I plan on going ahead and being a doctor, regardless. And so do you, don't you?"
"Of course I do."
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They opened the door onto an altered world. Snow, which had been sifting finely all the day, had turned into floods of sleet. It rattled like gravel as it fell. The wind slammed the door shut behind them and bent the trees, sending a shower of icicles cracking to the ground.
"The world looks angry," Janet said.
Probably you had to be born here on these midwestern plains to live easily with such savage winds, such- dark gray, frozen winters. The sleet stung their cheeks. With eyes pressed half-shut against it they stumbled and slid. Janet fell. Jimmy pulled her up and they struggled on to her door. Light from the building showed her curls salted with white.
"You look sweet with the snow on your hair," he said.
She put her hand up to his cheek. "I love you, Jimmy. You're so soft, I must remember never to take advantage of you."
"I'm not worried about that."
"Don't study too late."
Walking back against the wind and sleet, he lowered his face into the woolen scarf. He felt deeply tired. It wasn't a physical fatigue. He hadn't realized how tense he'd been about the weekend at home, either because Janet might not like his family, or, more probably, that they might not like her and that she would then turn against him. But everything had worked out well enough. Now he was feeling the aftermath of tension.
He'd been especially glad that Laura and Janet had gotten on together. He thought of his sister, now that she had passed through the audacious moods of adolescence, as a kind of 'norm.' She had such a friendly attitude toward life. If he had been asked to characterize her he would have used words like 'reasonable' or 'accepting.' He supposed he might be oversimplifying but anyway, that was how he saw her. She was rather like their father.
Steve was like their mother, he mused, although whenever Jimmy had remarked it he had been contradicted. And he could see why. On the surface no two people could have been less alike, his mother being so courteous, so anxious (one read anxiety in her eyes, in the two vertical lines between the eyebrows), so concerned to please. She had always been afraid to lose her temper. (Because she feared that her children wouldn't love her?) She had let them get away, very often, with far too much. Yet her same anxiety was in Steve.
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Perhaps, Jimmy thought, I am more perceptive than I think, and shall not lack for understanding when I become a doctor.
Dad had treated him and Janet with serious respect as he took them on a tour of the hospital on the day before Thanksgiving. Back at his office he had had lunch sent in and they had sat with him for an hour or more talking earnestly about doctors and medicine. After a while the conversation had drifted unexpectedly into family, perhaps because of having seen Grandpa's name on a bronze plaque in the lobby of the hospital.
"I miss him," Dad had said. "We were two very different people and we disagreed about many things. Yet there has never been a man whom I respected more or loved more." He had gone on talking and recollecting. "His family was everything to him. And, you know, he was right. There was a time in my life when I didn't want to be vulnerable because of family, when I wanted to put all that away. Yet without it there's nothing. Only the black hole of the spirit."
Jimmy had seldom heard his father so solemn. He had sounded like Grandpa. He hadn't even been sure he understood what his father was talking about, but he sensed that Dad had honored them by revealing a part of himself.
Yes, Jimmy thought now, I come from decent people.
He would have liked to ask his parents specifically about Janet, but he didn't dare. They wouldn't approve of such an early marriage. They would say that at twenty he couldn't know his own mind or make a decision that would be permanent. But if he was mature enough to know that he wanted to be a doctor and so to dispose of the rest of his life, then why was he not mature enough to make a decision about Janet? They would think otherwise, however. Most parents would.
Anyway, there was the question of money. He couldn't ask them to support a wife for him. Dad made a fine living, but there were four to educate and he had to work very hard to keep up. No, it was quite impossible.
He trudged up the stairs to his room. Steve. Janet. An enormous work load. And admission to medical school. But mostly Janet.
The room was cold without her, as he had known it would be. Five years! Who knew what five years might do with their commitment to each other? A couple of hours together here and there, now and then? It could take the very life out of their relationship.
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Five years. It was like saying: a century. It was like saying: never. He felt deeply tired.
"All wars," Steve repeated. "Not only the Vietnam war. All
t wars are fought to benefit a few who get rich or richer. The rest
just die in them for nothing." The veins were prominent again in
his temples. They looked bruised. One of them twitched, Jimmy
observed.
It was an incongruous group at the table in the coffee shop, haphazardly come together. Jimmy and Janet had come in out of the perilous cold for a hot drink, and had been joined by Adam Harris, alone. Shortly afterward, they had seen Steve shove in, just back from the peace rally in California. He must spend all his allowance on travel, Jimmy thought. His coat was torn. It lay now, flung on the floor with a pile of paperbacks: Kafka, Fanon, Sartre.
"All wars?" Adam Harris queried. "You remind me of the student groups who vowed they wouldn't fight in any war, even though Hitler was arming under their noses. What can you say to that?"
"It was basi
cally the same thing. If the world's financial interests hadn't fostered Hitler there would have been no need for a war. Don't you see that war and the system are reverse sides of the same coin? That the one can't exist without the other?"
Exhausted, he put his head down on his folded arms for a moment. The others stared at him and shifted restlessly. He had been with them for half an hour and the tensions he had brought had now begun to affect them, too.
Suddenly he flung his head up. "I was thinking on the plane flying back: everybody on it was dead, do you know that? Ask them about Vietnam, the schools, Latin America—you think they give a shit? No, who's going to win the next Series, can we keep the blacks out of the union, should I get out of the market, that stewardess would be a great lay. That's all they were thinking."