Dissident Gardens (44 page)

Now that she’d found her way to Kelcy’s, Rose was able to journey back at will.

Archie showed few signs of budging from his barstool, unless it was in agitated proclamation of the injustices done to “Richard E. Nixon.” The disgraced president had been the country’s last hope, according to Archie, who’d lower his voice sorrowfully to add, “But then we all turned on him, poor bastard.” Meeting censure from the regulars there at Kelcy’s—men whose faint liberal sentiments were legible only by contrast to Archie’s intolerance—he’d blow a raspberry or narrow his eyes and command: “Drink your drink there, and synchronize your tongues to silence.” Or, “Skip it. I ain’t got no time to, what do you call it, bandage words with you.” Then he’d resettle into the sulky pudding he’d been an instant earlier, behind his tumbler of blended whiskey. What implacability!

And of what, or whom, was Rose reminded? Despite every sensible or humane opinion, also the English tongue, having been turned on its head? Her former self!

For Rose had one of these, after so long: a former self. All she’d done was to ride the magic carpet of her darkened apartment’s couch, while the illuminated spotlight of the television’s tube transported her to Kelcy’s Bar, to afterward be whisked direct from Kelcy’s into dreamless, amnesiac sleep. In this she discovered freedom, like a painted figure who’d slipped out of a gilded frame, then tiptoed from the museum and into a nearby park.

She’d become a—well, not a regular, not by the standard here. A returner, day after day, her presence barely noted by the others. Their taking her for granted was what Rose came for: to be fly-on-the-wall uncrucial, occupy no role whatsoever. Forty-odd years she’d dwelled,
sometimes ruled, sometimes raged like a prisoner, in the Gardens, that urban farm she’d leapt at, in escaping the mud-baked trap of New Jersey. Then one day wandered into Kelcy’s Bar and discovered she’d been frozen into oppositional postures, stances at once as defensive as those of a crouching wrestler and as inflated and bogus as an opera singer’s.

A former self, shed. Was she, then, at last, an
anti-Communist
? No. That Koestler stuff,
The God That Failed
, was as pompous in its way as its opposite. Another religion. She’d renounced nothing; ideals that had sustained her a lifetime still sustained her, because they weren’t ideological nor even really ideals. They existed in the space between one person and another, secret sympathies of the body. Alliances among those enduring the world. You found this where you found it, suddenly and without warning, at a certain meeting or protest. You’d then seek for a similar sensation, at the next hundred such meetings or protests, and be disappointed. It might be found at a pickle factory, in the pleasures of actual solidarity in labor. You found it at the counter of a White Castle, lunching on boiled eggs in a fraternity of those who’d sacrificed their hamburgers to soldiers’ rations. And now, at a boor’s tavern on Northern Boulevard. The century’s great comedy: that Communism had never existed, not once. So what was there to oppose?

Rose
existed. Communism, not so much. And for
what
did Rose exist? To talk and read and compel. When young, to fuck. Now, on her downslope, to talk and laugh at inanities and drink. She’d begun accepting the hospitality on offer at Kelcy’s, a whiskey and soda water now and again no longer refused, never mind the hideous flavor to which she’d never grow accustomed, never mind the occlusion to razor senses, to the trip-wire alertness on which she’d prided herself for years. No wonder no one trusted the Jews! The Jews refused to be stupid in this pleasant way, where certain lines blurred and dissolved, to form an automatic human amalgamation outside of capitalist exchange, of a kind socialists can only dream. How late in life to discover intoxication—but not too late. She’d tumbled from the party into civic purposes, civic institutions; she should have made for the first available alehouse. She should have let Miriam hand her a reefer,
the one and only time Miriam had tried. Dope was like feminism: a gift refused, an opportunity that died with her daughter.

One afternoon Archie, resplendent surrealist poet, gave Rose’s secret mood a name. “Comraderism.” He’d been trying to name the feeling between himself and the others there, the men whom he lashed with insults when he wasn’t driving them into muttering perplexity at his baroque views on the Polish (“People of the Polack persuasion lean toward what you might call a certain lack of drive”), the Italians (“Packed into the subway like sardines we was, with no lights and no fans and me standing next to a three-hundred-pound Eyetalian, half of which was pure garlic”), and eschatology (“You liberals got more ways for the world to end than a dog has fleas”). Rose had grown to be an intimate of the tavern’s whole cast: the sepulchral Hank Pivnik, blinking into some unseen distance, perhaps toward his shell-shock’s Omaha Beach; Barney Hefner (“No relation to Hugh,” he said when he and Rose were introduced, “but we do share certain interests”); Van Ranseleer, the blind man with the dry wit; and Harry Snowden, the beleaguered bartender, who was readying himself against his best instincts to go into partnership with Bunker. For Archie’s dream was of scraping Kelcy’s off the window and renaming the tavern Archie Bunker’s Place.

Right to do it, too, for the place
was
Archie’s. The various men who populated the bar were, despite any protestations to the contrary, in Archie’s pocket, under his sway, and Rose no less than any of them. More, she had the audacity to believe she was other than invisible to him, to think he might feel something for her. So that day when his stream of talk had led him blundering into the evocative word, she decided she might confess to him, make her stigma known in a humorous way.

“Comraderism,” she repeated, moving one stool nearer. “I’m with you, Archie, I don’t care what anyone else says. You and me are a couple of unrepentant
comraderists
.”

He made the face of a querulous bulldog, raised a chubby finger. “Watch it dere, Rose, don’t you go takin’ my words out of contrext.”

But she couldn’t stop. To see Archie on the brink of explosion was Rose’s only vice now, the whiskey nothing by comparison. That he
might explode in her direction was tantalizing. “My dear Archie, I only meant there’s something in the way you or Harry can be relied upon always to be buying rounds for the house, something which somehow seems to testify for a from-each-according-to-his-ability-to-each-according-to-his-need view of things …”

She raised her glass and Archie reflexively raised his own, then squinted, wondering if he’d been tricked.

“Dunno if I follows ya …”

“The whole atmosphere of the tavern,” Rose said, freeing herself to play to the unseen audience hiding in the footlights, letting herself be more than an extra here. “It suggests a sanctuary, from the depredations of the market. What’s the phrase? ‘After the subordination of the individual to the division of labor has vanished—’ ”

“What littles I understand in yous gobbledlygook, which is minimal, I wish I
didn’t
.” Archie delivered the line with restored brio, triumphant in his sacred ignorance. The place exploded with congratulatory laughter, much more than the scattered population of drinkers should be able to supply.

She carried on, into the teeth of the hilarity, but narrowed her target to Archie himself. Forget the room. She’d lost the room long ago. “You’d better face it, Archie, I ought to know a commune when I see one.”

“Don’t talk that way here,” he hissed. The dime on which his rage turned could never be spent.

“Yes, I’m a Communist, take a good look. I’m a woman and a Communist and I got under your skin. I know that look in your eyes, a lifetime’s worth I know it.”

“Stop dat!” He leaned in conspiratorially close, eyes scanning for the informant, the mole among his drinking companions. In fact, no attention was paid. Snowden, Pivnik, Hefner, Van Ranseleer, they were like switched-off machines, like string-clipped marionettes, apart from those moments when Archie addressed them directly.

“I love you—” she began.

He tugged her by the arm from her stool, his head turned on its exasperated spring, white hair drifting loose maniacally. His lips were drawn back in panic. “Come you! Come into the back, we can’t be talkin’ like dis out heah.” Rose found herself shunted into the bar’s
storeroom, a place of cardboard crates loaded with bottles, full and empty, and lit by a bare hanging bulb.

“Listen, now, youse.”

“Hold me.” His mitt had still clasped the back of her arm. Now it leapt as though she were hot.

“Don’t get me wrong, youse is an attractive lady, Rose, but jeeeeez I got me a wife at home.”

Rose knew all she wanted, more than she wanted, about mawkish, screeching Edith, and the home-truths this man daily fled—the drab recursion of cold bacon and eggs, the sing-alongs at the ill-tuned upright piano, things even his dim sensibility had grown incapable of enduring. How to let him know she’d been around this particular block, had lost all aspiration to remove a man from his wife? She’d be satisfied with a cuddle from Archie. Or a roll in the sack. Yet how to let Archie know it, without razing the little castle he’d erected around his despair? “Now it’s your turn to listen, Archie. You think a quarter century of infiltrated cells didn’t make me a sorcerer at keeping my yap shut? You think I won’t go to my grave with secrets of global import? Sure, I’ve been an enemy of bourgeois propriety my whole life, it doesn’t mean I care to wreck your home. Be orderly in your married life so that you may be violent and original in your adulterous affairs, that’s Flaubert who said that. I’ll tutor you in doublethink, Archie, just for God’s sake and I don’t even believe in God take me in your arms.”

From Archie came only the slowest of slow burns. His eyes popped, oatmeal with bubbles of steam escaping. She wanted to seize his calflike cheeks in her hands and scream
Bubbelah!
She wanted to gnaw on his jowls.

“I’ve chosen you for my final lover. Your lifelong dream, Archie, only you don’t know it. Hump a hot Red.”

He gaped at her in wonder. “We ain’t right for one and the other, see?”

“Why?”

“It’s like this, Rose. A Jew and a gentile ain’t got a Chinaman’s chance.”

Archie was alone and never without a choir. Rose needed to accustom herself to this. His invisible studio audience roared with laughter,
acclaiming the brutish joke.
Jew, gentile, and Chinaman
. If Archie’s sensibility was where melting-pot dreams went to die, this aphorism made a fair epitaph. Yet let it not be the epitaph to their affair, let it not be Rose and Archie’s hill-of-beans farewell address on the tarmac. She wouldn’t give him up so easy.

“Can you not see that I’m a subversive foremost and a Jew only negligibly? Very well, if it makes you hot, fuck a sorrow-maddened Commie Jew lady.”

“Yeeeeeeeze, yers got some mouth on you, Rose, do you think you could stifle it down a percent or two?”

Too easy, he’d only needed to reach for
stifle
to oblige his invisible mob to another sidesplitting crescendo.

“You won’t have me?”

“I am
havin’
all of youse I can take RIGHT! HERE! AND! NOW!!!!”

The pileup of agonistic punch lines suggested, to Rose’s terror, that the credits verged, the episode nearing its end. Just when she’d gained Archie’s attention at last. The consolation being that, should they end here in this back-room cliff-hanger, she’d undoubtedly be central in subsequent episodes. Perhaps a spin-off was in the cards. Call it, simply,
Rose
. Or
Unrepentant!

Without Rose noticing, the door from the barroom had been nudged open by a small hand. A black-haired girl now slipped inside and called to Archie. The girl wore corduroy overalls and a turtleneck, had hair in braids, might be nine or ten. Archie and Edith’s foster daughter; how could Rose have forgotten? No, Rose would never have this man to herself, not long enough to matter. Archie was a planetary giant around which lesser bodies orbited. Whether at home or tavern, someone new always strode through the door. Characters were buried, like Stretch Cunningham, and new stooges appeared, fresh butts for Archie’s rage. Rose should learn to live with it.

Archie granted the girl no outward display of affection, only caustic rebuff. “What are
you
doin’ in here? How many times I gotta tell you, this ain’t no place for a kid!”

The girl ignored his bluster. “Archie, can you buy me some roller skates? McCrory’s announced a sale yesterday.”

“Yesterday? Well, then, you missed it! And tuck that thing into your collar, for the love of Pete. Just ’cause I bought it for you don’t mean I wanna be starin’ at it—”

“Sorry, Archie.”

“Bought her what?” asked Rose.

“None of your business,” said Archie.

“Wait.” Rose intervened, stopping the girl’s hand where she gathered the necklace dangling at her blouse front. Impassive, the girl unfolded her fingers to display what lay in her palm: a chintzy aluminum Star of David.

A Jewish girl orphaned by fate, sheltered in a cold universe by the neighborhood bully. Of what was Rose meant to be reminded? Anne Frank? Or—? How putrid the heart-tugging shamelessness of it all.

“You bought this for the girl?”

“And what if I did?” he nearly spat.

“You and Edith are foster parents to a
Jewish
child?”

Archie winced, bared his teeth, hoisted a reproachful finger. “Don’t youse get smart with me now. This here is a family matter, see? She can’t help what she is!”

“No more than—” But Rose failed. The body had requirements of its own, commands among which the language of the mouth was only a minor outlet. Something in the contact broke Rose open. She clutched the delicate hand that held the Star of David to her own bosom, as if the trinket could serve for them both at once. Then, kneeling, swept the girl into her embrace. The girl lay cool and inert against Rose’s heaving chest, as Rose’s tears now began to pelter her hair. Archie shrugged, screwed up his mouth, rolled his eyes, helpless as ever against the emotional mayhem of Jews. Rose, through the scrim of her sorrow, understood this was no longer her script. There’d be no spin-off.