Evergreen (81 page)

“… the watchman saw two guys here earlier tonight. He says he can identify them.”

“… bah, rumors! I don’t put stock in that stuff.”

“… I heard they found a body in there. I heard it was Dan Congreve.”

“… you’re out of your cotton-pickin’ head!”

“… no, he’s right, I heard two cops talking and they said so.”

“… they found two of them. You’d think they wouldn’t get caught by their own explosives. They don’t know the other guy’s name.”

“… one body, two bodies. Soon they’ll be talking about twenty.”

As soon as he could control his knees Jimmy got up. His chest hurt. He wondered whether you could have a heart attack at his age. He thought of what had been under the blanket and his stomach turned over. (You’ll never be much of a doctor like this!) But yesterday in the coffee shop Adam Harris had said that violence was something young people only talked about, not meaning it. The last man in the world to suffer from it! Wouldn’t hurt a fly, you had only to look at him to see that. Jesus! A liquid collected in his mouth, like vomit.

He had to see his brother. Could it possibly be? No, of course not. He quailed. Ought to be ashamed of myself for harboring—funny word, “harboring”—such a thought. Still, there was another body. Unidentified.
Steve said: One of the best minds we have, come hear him
.

Could Steve possibly—? No, of course not. Steve was no doubt still in his room, dreaming over a book, too absorbed to have heard the excitement. Besides, his room faced the other way, toward the lake. You might not even be able to see or hear anything there. Anyway, he had more likely been asleep. It was after midnight. Yes, Steve would be asleep. He always went to bed with the chickens. It was one of his traits. Of course.

Steve wasn’t in his room.

He knocked and kept knocking, disturbing the people across the hall.

“What do you want?” someone called out crossly.

“I’m looking for my brother, Steve Stern.”

“He’s not there. He went out a couple of hours ago.” The door slammed.

Now breathing was really painful. He panicked again: could a person his age really have a heart attack? There being no place else to sit, he sat down on the floor. A couple of fellows coming back to their rooms looked at him curiously, thinking, no doubt, that he was drunk.

The grandfather clock downstairs, gift of the class of 1910, went
bong!
One bong. One o’clock. He leaned his head against the door and stretched his legs. They reached almost across the width of the corridor.

Once, sitting with his father, he had watched a television play about the Nazis and the resistance in France. They had caught some woman and tortured her by pulling her toenails out. She hadn’t talked, had refused to talk, just kept repeating in such an awful voice, “I have nothing more to say! I have nothing more to say!” He remembered now that he had thought: “This is a helluva thing for Dad to be looking at, bringing everything back to him. I ought to turn it off but I don’t dare. Why doesn’t he just get up and walk out of the room?”

But his father had just sat there. When it was over he’d been silent for a few minutes and Jimmy had been silent too. Then his father had slammed his fist into the palm of his hand so loudly that Jimmy had imagined a fist cracking into a defenseless jaw must sound like that. He had kept sitting there, not knowing how to get up or what to say, feeling his father’s anguish.

Then his father had sighed and said, “It’s a great storm wind shaking the earth. It began in my youth and then a lull came, but I think the storm will rage again. I feel the grit and dust coming in the cracks.”

Jimmy shuddered. He looked at his watch. It was six
o’clock. He must have fallen asleep, and he ached all over. Steve hadn’t come back. What he must do became entirely clear to him. He must go to his room, wash and shave, then take the seven o’clock bus downtown and go to the police headquarters. Either that other, unidentified body was Steve’s, or else Steve would have to be sought somewhere. Yes, it was entirely clear.

He flexed numb legs, went downstairs and began walking toward his room. Outside the science building, where a black hole, broken glass and tumbled bricks were now visible in the daylight, was a police car with four police on guard. He walked deliberately in their direction and stopped in front of them.

“Is is true that Danny Congreve was killed in here?”

One of the policemen looked at him coldly. “You that interested?”

“Yes. Dr. Harris was a friend of mine.”

“Oh. Yeah, it was Congreve. And one other in the morgue. Up to now they haven’t identified him, or what’s left of him.”

Tears wet Jimmy’s eyes. He wiped them away with his glove, but not before the others had seen them.

One of the cops said, kindly now, “They say the prof will live. He’ll lose a leg, though. Maybe both.”

Jimmy stood there.

“Bastard!” another cop said. “And the damndest thing—they didn’t even know how to do the job properly. Killed themselves with their own dynamite.”

The police radio crackled in the car and they stopped to listen. Jimmy walked away.

Lose a leg. Maybe both. He was a tennis player, Adam Harris. A good one, too. The other’s in the morgue, what’s left of him.

Again the pain came, a hot tightening in his chest.
My brother. A brother of mine
. My parents’ son. Christ almighty!

He pushed his way up the stairs. Better get a cup of coffee before going; that way he wouldn’t feel so faint.
Maybe. He came around the corner of the hall, toward his door.

Steve was standing there.

They stood there looking at each other.

“You thought I was mixed up in it,” Steve said.

“My God! I didn’t think you—But I didn’t know.”

Steve’s face was white. No, not white, a dreadful color, like the underside of a frog.

“Come in,” Jimmy said, unlocking the door. “Come in and sit. Where were you? I’ve been outside your room all night.”

“I was undressed, studying, when I heard all the noise and running outside my room, so I got dressed and went over. And I saw, I saw your friend.” He put his hands over his face. “Jimmy, I’m sorry. So awfully sorry.”

“Where were you last night?”

“I couldn’t stop vomiting. So I went to the infirmary and they kept me there. One of the nurses told me this morning about Danny Congreve. Jimmy, I never thought, I could have sworn, I would have trusted him, I did trust him. I feel totally incompetent, unworthy—”

A vast relief swept through Jimmy. “Don’t, don’t. You’re not the first person to have misjudged—”

“This
wasn’t what I wanted, what I talked about!”

“I know that, Steve.”

“I’ve gotta get away and think.”

“About what? Think about what?”

“About everything. Myself, mostly. I’ve got to.”

“Where will you go?”

“I don’t know. Some empty place. A guy I know, quiet guy, not political, just into conservation and the earth, you know, he’s got a place north of San Francisco, said I could come any time I want. So I guess that’s what I’ll do.”

“When will you go?”

“Now. Tomorrow. I want to get out of here. I’ve been wanting to, you know that, only now it’s for different reasons. You understand?”

“I think I do.” He didn’t, really. He could feel pity and
sadness, but he couldn’t understand. Perhaps he never would.

“You’ll call the folks and tell them after I’ve gone? I don’t want to go through the hassle of talking to them right now.”

“I’ll call them,” Jimmy said gently.

They were an hour early. They stood in the lounge at the wall of windows, looking out upon arrivals and departures, baggage carts trundling back and forth, mechanics checking, pilots boarding with their little black bags en route to Paris; Portland, Oregon; and Kuala Lumpur.

“I’ll miss Philip,” Steve said.

“He’ll miss you, too. We all will.” Do all words that are torn out of you, yes, torn and ripped, do they always sound so banal? “Miss you”: what did it mean?

“Don’t crap me up, Jimmy. It’ll be a lot more peaceful in the family with me gone.”

Why did he feel like crying? You’d think he was seeing his brother off to certain death, when all he was seeing were things past: Steve hunching up the hill after school (why was just this such a persistent memory?); Steve and he as kids in the bathtub together, and long before that, Laura with them; three in the bathtub until they got too old, he and Steve staring at Laura, laughing about her after they had been put to bed, wondering what it feels like not to have a penis; Steve casually offering to go over his math with him, knowing he was stuck and ashamed to ask for help; Steve in the hospital with pneumonia and his mother crying in the bedroom, pretending she wasn’t.

“They tried to be impartial but they always loved you more, Jimmy.”

“Not more. Just differently. Because we’re different, aren’t we?”

Steve didn’t answer. A crowd of tourists came through when their flight was called. Bound for Hawaii, with tour signs pinned on their shoulders, they were middle-aged and raucous, wearing Hawaiian print shirts under their overcoats;
the men were bald or balding; the women were freshly curled and blue-rinsed. They clamored out of sight with their cameras, bags and merriment.

“I feel so sorry for people,” Steve said suddenly. “For their struggles and their sicknesses, and all knowing they’re going to die. I feel their pains so badly sometimes. Yet I don’t like them,” he mused, almost as if Jimmy weren’t there. “I don’t really like them, do you understand what I mean? With their transistor radios and their guffawing. They’re such small-minded buffoons, most of them. I don’t have anything to say to them.”

It seemed to Jimmy that if you tried, you could surely relate to anybody, even to a bald old guy in a Hawaiian shirt. He was human after all, like yourself, wasn’t he? But probably that was too simplistic. If it were that easy Steve wouldn’t be what he was.

“How’s Dr. Harris? Have you heard anything?” Steve asked.

“He’ll live. One leg’s off at the hip, the other at the knee.”

“Christ,” Steve whispered. He bit his lip. “He was a gentle, decent man, Jimmy.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know how I can ever get over it.”

“But you weren’t involved! It had nothing to do with you.”

“On the periphery I was, and it did.”

“You didn’t know what those people were going to do!”

“But I should have known, that’s the point. You see what I mean about myself? I don’t understand people. They never say what they mean or mean what they say.”

“Do you feel that way about me?”

“No, it’s funny, you’re probably the only one I can read clearly.”

“I must be pretty empty, then!”

“Don’t joke. I know you’re trying to make the moment easier. I think if I get away, just get out where it’s warm enough to be outdoors all year and plant things, work in
the earth, use my hands, I think maybe that will help. Maybe I’ll straighten out in my mind what I want to do.”

“Yes, yes, it ought to be a good thing,” Jimmy said awkwardly.

“The land needs healing, too,” Steve said. “Maybe I can help heal it?”

The question, rhetorical, hung in the air.

Mother said once of Steve that there are people to whom living comes hard. They see the world as it ought—or so they think—it ought to be. But they are never at home in it as it is, for what reason neither they nor anyone else can say. Well, that was a neat enough summing up. But what was to be done about it?

The flight to San Francisco was called and Steve picked up his bag.

“Well, Jimmy?”

Jimmy put his arms out. They hugged each other. Steve felt so light, so light and frail in his arms. Then Steve turned and walked abruptly away. It seemed to Jimmy that, of all the crowd pushing toward the plane, Steve was the only one traveling alone, although that was probably not so. He only looked that way, hurrying with his rapid walk, his shoulders forward and, although Jimmy could not see his face, the expression of anxiety that he so often wore.

The loaded plane slid down the field to the takeoff point, where it went out of sight behind a wing of the terminal building. Jimmy watched until it came in sight again, taxiing to the far end of the field where it waited for takeoff. Even from this distance he imagined he could see it trembling, an insect with two rows of seats in its thorax, and a roaring heart too big for its skin. He thought he could even hear its mighty whir as, gathering all its strength, it tensed itself and leaped, rose into the lurid air and headed west.

Back in his room he waited for Janet. The hour moved so slowly. He ought to be using the time. The pile of books, the assignment notebook on the desk, were urging him to
use it. But a lethargy had come over him, lying on him like heavy, pressing hands.

He ought to call his parents. They would take the news with an assumption of calm, not wanting him, Jimmy, to know the force of the blow. (Would they always, all their lives, shield and protect him, or would a time come when it would be their children who would shield them?) They would go into the dining room at the next dinner hour and tell Laura and Philip, keeping their manner light, that Steve had gone but would surely be back, that while they thought it was a grave mistake, people had to make their own mistakes and were sometimes the better for having learned from them. (That would be Mother talking.)

Afterward, upstairs in their bedroom, she would cry, and come to breakfast the next morning with slightly swollen eyes and claim a head cold. (Was this a harbinger of years to come that, already while they were still only in late middle age, not really old at all, already he could feel this way for them? And feel the end that was inevitable? A tooth parting from its socket, a wrenching of bone out of bone, that’s how it would be.)

The telephone rang. He got up to answer it, hoping it wasn’t his parents, because he hadn’t yet framed what he was going to say.

It was his grandmother. She had never telephoned him at college and a fear of some disaster shot through him.

“It’s all right, everything’s all right,” she said, as though she could read his fear. “Except that we’ve heard what happened on your campus.”