Evergreen (40 page)

“And had you?”

“No. It really was—is—like that.”

He laughed. “Good! Good!”

The sight of his triumphant pleasure brought a smile to Anna’s lips, and then a laugh. It was the first time she had laughed in months. Yet the sorrow was still there, she knew, and it would surge again when this hour was past and gone.

As if he were able to read her mind, Paul said, “I want to tell you a story I once heard. There was a woman whose child had died, in some especially tragic way. When they came home from the hospital, or maybe it was the funeral, the husband wanted to make love to her. And she was outraged, so he felt terribly guilty and they couldn’t understand each other at all. What do you think about that?”

“Oh,” Anna said, “he wanted comfort, he needed love! And she didn’t see that? Because when you’re all alone, when you’re dying inside, loving like this brings you back from the grave. It is the most alive thing you can do. Yes, yes, I do understand.”

“I think you understand everything,” Paul told her.

When they were dressed they came back to the fire. The log was burning down, and the afternoon outside was darkening. Paul turned the radio on.

“Tell me,” he began, “if you can be like this when you and I are together, how can you be happy with anyone but
me? I’m not speaking of these last tragic months. I’m excluding those.”

Anna considered and answered slowly. “What is being ‘happy’? I have peace, warmth and order. I am busy, I am loved.”

“I know I said in the car that I wanted no grave talk today and that I wouldn’t press you for anything but—marry me, Anna.”

She shook her head. “I’m tied, Paul. Don’t you see? I think of Maury and one day, perhaps, his little boy—”

He interrupted. “You can’t live for what is gone or for a hope that may never come true! And don’t you owe yourself anything
now?”

“I do owe myself something, that’s just it. I couldn’t cut myself away from my family and live.”

“But how can you weigh anything—anything at all—against this afternoon? You don’t think I’m
fond
of Marian? But I am! She’s a fine person and I would do anything to keep her from harm. Yet we could part as friends, with decent feelings. Knowing that she was well and would never lack care, I could put her out of my mind. And she would do the same with me.”

“But I—I should be thinking of Joseph every day of my life!”

Paul sighed. It was a grieving sound from deep inside. “I hope he knows what he has.”

“He does. He loves me. He believes in me.”

The fire crackled as it burned out; music sang tenderly from the radio. And Anna cried out in pain, “Paul, tell me, how is it possible to care so much for two different men in such different ways? Is there something wrong with me?”

“You’ve just said it yourself. ‘In such different ways,’ you said. Here, put your head back on my shoulder.”

So they sat until the light left the sky. The fire was a sprinkling of sparks in ash. The music, having risen to a passionate finale, came to a stop.

“I’m going back tomorrow,” Paul said quietly.

She sat up straight. “Not tomorrow? But why?”

“The
Mary
returns at midnight. I only came to see you, Anna. I have to get back.”

“All this way to see me? That was the only reason?”

“Reason? It wasn’t a thing I reasoned out. It was something I had to do.” And, standing up, he gave her his hands to pull her to her feet. “Come Anna, my Anna. It’s time to go.”

Today was mine, she thought, alone in the silent apartment, for neither Joseph nor Iris had yet come home. It was for me. I know I am rationalizing, finding a pardon for what I have been taught is wrong. And inasmuch as deceit is always wrong, it was wrong. But we are flesh, and it was inevitable. We are acted upon far more that we act.

The door will close with a hollow thud when Joseph comes in. He is coughing again. Very likely he will have the flu for the third time this year; he strains himself; he works far too hard; I tell him to stop it and I don’t want him to strive; it was good to have things but there’s nothing I want at the price that he is willing to pay. Yet I can’t stop him.

Iris is earnest, prolix and troubled. There’s nothing I can do to make her what young girls are supposed to be: genial and rosy with dreams. Yes, I was such a young girl, rosy with dreams, but perhaps I was foolish. Anyway, I can’t change Iris.

Things happen. Things are. I am I, torn in two directions. Shall I ever see Paul again? I believe that I shall, but I can’t really know. Tomorrow night he will set out across the ocean, into a thousand dangers. He will wait, he says, for the message that I have changed my mind. It will not come, Paul. It will not come.

But I shall not forget today. The other time I scrubbed myself in the bathtub; now I cherish the feel of your flesh on mine. I was young that other time and the world was either black to me or it was white: a simple view, with nothing in between. Now I know it is not like that, although Joseph
always says it is. Perhaps Joseph is right? But if he is, I can’t help that either. Today was mine.

I have hurt no one. I shall hurt no one.

“Oh Maury! Iris, Joseph—” she said aloud.

The front door opened with a key and Iris let herself in. “You’re still reading? Is Papa home yet?”

As always, she asked for Papa.

“No, he’ll be late tonight.” Anna got up and crossed the room. “Iris,” she said, pushing the girl’s hair back and kissing her forehead.

“Mama, what is it? Is anything wrong?”

“No, no. It’s only that you mean so very much to me, my darling.”

Iris was startled, perhaps embarrassed. “Well, but I’m all right, Mama.”

“Nothing must ever happen to you. Nothing, do you hear?”

“But nothing will! Go to bed, Mama! Take a book and you’ll fall asleep reading. Go on, do.”

Sleep. Yes, sleep, if it comes, if it wants to come. One cannot command that, either. Sleep comes and peace comes with it, if it wants to. The thoughts roll in, pour in: Iris, Joseph, Maury. And Eric. And Paul. They surge, they beat, they crowd like waves of the vast ocean and peace doesn’t want to come.

One day the mood stirred again—her “cleaning fits,” Joseph called them—and ever since the mood had come over her Anna began to work on closets and shelves, rooting in drawers that had been untouched for the last few years.

The lower drawer of the desk in the hall was stuffed with papers: postcards from friends in Florida, receipted bills, letters, wedding invitations. One was from a name she didn’t even recognize, out of the years when people gave lavish entertainment to other people whom they hardly knew. Throw those out. Here was a pile of letters from Dan in Mexico: most of the people were Indians, he wrote; their monuments were marvelous, they still spoke their ancient langauges. It would be a wonderful thing to see all that, to see Dan again, but they couldn’t possibly afford it. Here were letters from Iris, the summer they had gone to Europe: “Dear Daddy and Mommy, When are you coming home?” Here was the wedding announcement from Eli in Vienna: “Elisabeth Theresa to Dr. Theodor Stern”; the pointed Gothic letters were like the peaked and medieval roofs of middle Europe. And these letters, this paper on which their hands had rested, was all that remained, the only trace of people swallowed up? She ran her fingers over the engraving—and put the card back into the drawer. Here next was a letter from Maury at Yale; shall she open it, shall she read it? No, some other day perhaps, and she put it too back into the drawer, knowing that there would never be
another day when it would be easier to sift through any of these things.

After Maury had died, in that long wet spring of dirty snow when it seemed the sun would never come to comfort, that spring when the letters from Vienna had arrived—she remembered them lying white on the dining-room table where they were first opened, a summons to doom, a cry of horror, an accusation so terrible that it seemed the pages must burn the hand—all that spring she had walked and walked, back and forth, and ended always in what had been Maury’s room. There she had gone into every corner looking for something that would tell her why. She had found one sneaker, a high school text of
Julius Caesar
with Maury’s name in a flourish of bright green ink and a doodle of a fat man smoking a pipe, his teacher perhaps. The crumpled banner,
For God, for Country and for Yale
, had been there too, along with a Red Cross swimming card award for one hundred yards’ back crawl or trudgen crawl; what was a trudgen crawl? She had found all these, but no answer, and had longed for work, hard work, carrying bricks or stones, something to break her nails, to tear her skin and to exhaust her.

They didn’t talk about Maury anymore. On his birthday Joseph didn’t say a word. Perhaps he didn’t remember; he wasn’t very good at remembering dates, but perhaps he did; with Joseph you could never tell. For a long time after Maury died it had seemed that Joseph was strengthened by his faith and Anna had wished she might feel whatever it was that made him able to say, and actually appear to mean, that we must praise God even in our suffering. “That’s what the Kaddish is,” he said, “a prayer of praise to God, and that’s why we use it in time of death.” And he tried to explain, seriously and at length, how we must pray that someday it will be given us to know why we suffer. “Surely there is a reason for it, as there is for everything,” he said, and if she had not known him to be a man without hypocrisy and a totally honest person she would have scoffed.

Joseph believed in sin and retribution. But what was Maury’s sin to deserve such punishment? Or the sin of the child who had lost his parents? Yes, she thought, if I believed in retribution I would have lost my mind by now. Because then all of it would be my punishment, for what I did.

She had read too much about primitive religion, too much Freud and his search for the father figure—or, to be exact, too many articles about them—not to have diluted her earliest faith. So now she could not truthfully say of herself:
I am a believing person
, nor yet,
I don’t believe at all
. She was, rather, a person who wanted to believe and often did, but that was a very different thing from what Joseph was.

Yet how much had he hidden, did he perhaps still hide, from her? She remembered a night, weeks or months after it happened, when, lying in bed, she had stared at the white oblong of sky through the window; they were so high up there was not even the comfort of trees, and she remembered the trees of her childhood in the attic room where you looked out upon warm, dusty leaves, and in the windy seasons twigs scratched on the windowpanes. Here in this city you were in limbo, hung between earth and the cold enormous sky. Strange how she noticed such things after Maury’s death; she had not thought of them before, but when you had sleepless hours the tags and remnants that slipped in and out of your head were astonishing. Lying there like that, she had felt something in the wide bed, then knew that what she had felt was a shaking cry and, putting out her hand, touched Joseph’s face wet with tears. She had said nothing and only held him, and made no sound. Nor had he.

They never spoke of it afterward. Nor did Anna tell of her recurrent dream, always the same dream. She was walking into a room, known or unknown; there was a window, with a large wing chair at an angle so that she could see the crossed legs of a man sitting in it, but not his face. She came nearer, and when the man turned she could see he
was very young. He began to rise in greeting and she saw that he was Maury. “Hello, Mother,” he said. The same dream over and over.

The gilded clock chimed in the bedroom; it still stood on Joseph’s dresser. How perverse that, of all the gifts and gadgets which had come to them in their prosperous years, it should be just that clock which appealed to him the most! Not that its presence brothered Anna anymore; with or without it, she knew what she knew and felt the weight which had been placed upon her. She felt a stinging behind her eyes, and watched in the mirror as a swollen tear, slick as glycerine, filled one eye and slid over. How ugly we are when we weep! The grimace of sorrow, the spotted red skin stretched over the animal skull! And when we see how ugly we are the tears come faster.

The house was so still. Iris would be home soon; she must have been delayed after school. She had gone to work two years ago at her first job, teaching fourth grade. Jobs were easy to find because all the young men were in the army. Iris was a fine teacher; she would do anything well, for she had Joseph’s commitment to hard work. It was good for her to be earning her own money and to clothe herself, not that she cared very much about clothes. Too bad that in just these years of her youth the men were all gone! If only she were a little older or even a few years younger, for surely the war would be over soon. But she was just in the middle years, twenty-three, and there were so few men left at home. There was one odd small fellow who taught in her school, a reject of the army and, not to be unkind, of much else besides. He was the only man who had ever called Iris more than two or three times. Friends gave names of men stationed in the area; Ruth’s daughters invited her to meet men, but they rarely called back. Ruth’s daughters! With all they had gone through, none of them as bright as Iris, and not all that much better looking, either, all of them were married. Often Anna met them at their mother’s, wearing the harried look of overworked motherhood, which is a mask for their satisfaction and
their pride. But whatever it was that they had and Iris lacked, she wasn’t suddenly going to acquire it now.