Power (46 page)

Lena made no bones about her own feelings on the matter. “My opinion of Ben Holt does not bear expression,” she said. “But at least it was an opinion I always held. As far as Al Cutter is concerned—”

“Let Al be,” Mark said wearily. “He's doing something that Ben asked him to do, and to Ben it's important. Maybe it's the most important thing in the world to Ben.”

“Then why doesn't he do it himself?”

“Because he's in Detroit and he must be in Detroit. Try for one minute to understand that Ben is in a special category. Right now, the whole world is sitting on his shoulders.”

“The whole world is not sitting on his shoulders,” Lena protested. “You're like a kid, Mark.”

“Sure, I'm like a kid.”

“Yes, like a kid. Ben Holt is a hero. Ben Holt is a man on a white horse. That's never changed for you, has it? Never. You can see through anyone else, but not Ben. Ben is it. Ben is God.”

“God damn it, Lena, you know that's not true. I take Ben as he is, and I know him for exactly what he is. But I don't confuse the man with his achievements.”

“I do.”

I pushed the photographs away. “Enough of that back-biting,” I told them. “There's nothing here that makes me want to live in it. I'll look at more tomorrow. Now suppose we eat.”

Mark rose slowly and wearily. “Age and a man's back,” he commented. He tried to smile. “Lena says I'm a kid. That's a laugh, Al. I'm going to be sixty years old, and I feel like a hundred.”

“Are you all right?” I asked him.

“I'm all right. I'm fine.”

 

2

At the restaurant, Mark sat stiffly and looked at his food without touching it.

“Why don't you eat something?” Lena asked him.

“I don't know. I don't seem to be very hungry.”

“You had no lunch either,” Lena said. “Are you all right, Mark?”

“I don't know,” he replied strangely. “I think I'll be all right. Don't worry about my eating, Lena. I'll have coffee and a piece of pie later. That's enough to carry me through. The truth is, I don't require much food.” He began to tell me about the building he had made arrangements to rent. It was four blocks from the White House. “I thought you and Ben would like that, Al.” He tried to smile, and instead he grimaced with pain.

“Mark, what is it?” Lena whispered.

“I don't know. I don't feel so good.”

I called the waiter and asked whether I could see the manager. When the manager came, Mark was leaning over the table, supporting his head with his hands. “My friend here is ill,” I said. “Do you have a place where he can lie down?” He said that there was a couch in his office that we could use, and I asked him to try to get a doctor. Lena and I supported Mark as we led him into the manager's office and then helped him to lie down on the couch. His face was gray, his breathing heavy and labored. I loosened his tie and shirt collar and opened his vest.

“Should I take off his shoes?” Lena asked me.

I nodded. Then I asked Mark how he felt. His eyes were closed and he didn't respond. His hoarse, heavy breathing continued.

Meanwhile, the manager had telephoned for an ambulance. We sat helplessly next to Mark until the ambulance arrived. The intern who examined him wasn't certain what was wrong with Mark, but he felt that it could be a heart attack. They carried Mark out into the ambulance, and then Lena and I took a cab to the hospital. When we arrived there, Mark was dead. He had suffered a coronary thrombosis, and he had died in the ambulance.

 

3

Lena sat in the waiting room, dry-eyed, her hands clasped in her lap, her eyes focused across the room on nothing and witnessing nothing, her sight perhaps turned inward and witnessing more than I knew. Did she want anything? No. Was there anything that I could do? No, there was nothing that I could do, and would I please leave her alone for a little while and then she would be all right. Anyway, the world was a place where you were all right or you were not all right, and there was not a great deal more to it than that. “Rotten, stinking way to die,” she had whispered, but I wasn't sure that there was any other way to die. “Do you want a drink? A glass of water?”

“Al, I don't want a goddam thing.”

An intern with a clip board asked me about the body. They wanted to do an autopsy. It was procedure when there was any question at all about the cause of death, and I said that there was no reason why they should not perform an autopsy. “It's usual to have the signature of some close kin, a wife or relative.”

“I don't know that there is any.”

“Isn't she his wife?” nodding at Lena.

“No, just a friend.”

“He must have some relative,” the intern insisted. “Someone has to assume custody of the body and arrange for the burial.”

“I'll take care of that,” I assured him.

“But the autopsy?”

I went over to Lena, and he followed me, and I told her what the question was. She said that Mark had been through enough, and why did they have to cut him up now.

“They have to find out the exact cause of his death.”

“He died. What difference does it make now?”

“It's a district ordinance,” the intern explained. “Aren't there any relatives?”

“He had a wife once,” Lena said dully. “They were divorced years ago. I don't know her name or where she is. He had a sister who died last year. His mother and father are dead.”

“No children?”

There were no children. There were only the two of us, sitting in a bleak waiting room, while outside big, wet flakes of snow levitated and turned over and over and plastered themselves against the windowpanes. As an official of the organization he had worked for, I signed the papers. The intern was a decent young man who had probably seen too much death of this kind to allow himself to become emotionally involved in it, but who desired to be helpful, and he said that downstairs in the hospital office they would assist me in making arrangements with a local undertaker, either to have Mark buried in a local cemetery or to undertake a cremation. Myself, I favored a cremation, and when the intern had left, I told Lena what we would have to do.

“I don't want to do that,” she said to me. “I want to take the body back to Pomax and bury it there.”

“What?”

“That's what I want to do, Al. I want to take the body back to Pomax.”

“But why?”

“Why? You have to ask, Al? It was the only place he had—the only place that meant anything to him—yes, that lousy, stinking miserable town was the only place that meant anything to him. You want to burn him up and get a pot of ashes? I don't. I want to put him back where he spent his life, whatever there was of his life that made any sense.”

“Lena, that doesn't make any sense,” I argued. “In the first place, Mark was Jewish.”

“What the hell difference does that make?”

“It makes this difference. As far as I know, you can't bury a Jew in a Catholic or Protestant cemetery.”

“Who says you can't? Is Mark going to object?”

“The people who operate the cemeteries won't permit it, believe me, honey. Here in Washington, we can find a Jewish cemetery—”

“You make me sick,” she said. “I'm Greek Orthodox, and there's an Orthodox cemetery in Pomax, and if anyone tries to stop me from burying Mark there, I'll burn down their lousy church. So stop this kind of thing, Al, just stop it!”

I nodded, and we went down to the hospital office and made the arrangements that were necessary. The undertaker agreed that he would pick up the body at the hospital, embalm it, and ship it to Pomax the same day. They had a Western Union service there, and I sent a wire to Ben, telling him what had happened, and another one to Oscar Suzic, at the Union Building. Then I took Lena back to the hotel. It was about nine o'clock in the evening now.

We went to Mark's room. I would have felt better if Lena had been able to weep or go through some kind of an outburst, and I think she would have felt better too. It would have lessened the effect of whatever was building up inside of her, but evidently tears or hysterics were impossible. “I can't cry,” she said to me. “I didn't love Mark, that's the terrible shame of it. You only cry for yourself. It's a lie that we weep for others.” I tried to tell her that we weep for others, each in our own way, but she informed me that I could keep the platitudes. In Mark's room, we gathered together his clothes, an extra suit, a few shirts, underwear, handkerchiefs, some shaving stuff, and packed it into his grip.

I said to Lena that unless she had some other idea, we could take it back with us and give it, along with the rest of Mark's clothing, to the Miners' Relief. She smiled for the first time since dinner, a wan, drawn smile that reminded me of how beautiful she had once been, and, indeed, considering what had happened, still was, the strong, sculptured bones of her face defying the pressure of time and misery, her skin pale and clear, her eyes bright and bitter.

“The rest of Mark's clothes,” she shrugged. “These are his wardrobe, Al. Practically all of it. Did you ever see the place where he lived?”

I shook my head.

“You knew him fourteen years and you never saw the place where he lived,” Lena said. “What a rich, warm world we live in! Well, he had a little room with the Kovacs—just a plain miner's family in Pomax. Like a monk's room in a monastery. He had a bed and a chair and a little chest of drawers in that room. He didn't even need a will. If he had any money left over at the end of the week, he gave it to the Miners' Relief. Since he was the supervisor of the fund, no one ever knew—not even Ben. I knew, but no one else. Sometimes, he used the money for food or for toys for kids. Never saved anything, never wanted anything. You think I admired that? Like hell I did! I hate saints. He gave away his own life—and that's even more selfish than hanging onto it tooth and nail. He had to be Jesus Christ!” She choked up suddenly, her breast heaving. “Lousy, damn Jews—what do they want from us? Wasn't one Christ enough? Al, why did he have to do it that way? Why?”

“I don't know, honey,” I said. “I don't know one damn thing about people, so help me God, I don't.”

“Buy me a drink, Al,” she whispered. “Please buy me a drink.”

“All you want.”

“Stay with me. Oh, Jesus, I'm so frightened, Al. He was my father and my mother and he made the whole world right for me even when he tore my heart out, because he could give me nothing—but nothing, Al. Don't leave me alone, Al.”

 

4

In the cocktail room in the hotel, we took a little table in the corner and we each of us put down a double whisky, and then we felt a little better, not much better but a little. We ordered double whiskies again.

“Cold son of a bitch,” Lena said to me. “You could put down ten of these and you wouldn't even be high. Al Cutter. A cold son of a bitch.”

“I don't get drunk easily. I wish I could, but I don't.”

“With me, it's easy, but not tonight. I won't get drunk tonight. I'll just sit here in this fancy cocktail lounge—that's a good word, lounge—we're lounging here, Al, right on top of the world, you and me, two trade-union functionaries in Washington to pick up a couple of buildings for Ben Holt. Sweet Benny. Mark, run down to Washington and buy me an office building. Al, run down to Washington and buy Dotty a house. Buy Dotty a pretty house. You always adored Dotty, so you'll know just the kind of a house that would make her happy.”

“That doesn't help, Lena.”

“Sure it helps, Al. It makes me feel good to know that everyone's doing what Ben wants him to do. Except you and me right now. We're sitting in a cocktail lounge. Ben always hated cocktail lounges. A worker should get drunk in a saloon. None of the frivolous stuff for Ben. No hundred-dollar-a-night whores—not for Ben. No twenty-dollar dinners, no night clubs. Just substantial stuff, like office buildings and Georgian houses. Isn't that what he wanted, Al, a fine Georgian house with a red brick front and maybe a porch of white pillars? It surprises you, doesn't it—that a trade-union slut, a cheap convention lay like me should know all about Georgian houses? Thank Mark Golden, who taught me to read good books. Good books and good conversation. We used to talk for hours—hours. Once we talked all night long. I could mention a different kind—look, baby, shut up and screw. I'm here for the pleasure not for the conversation. Buy me another drink, please, Al. Please put up with me. Don't get angry with me.”

“I won't be angry with you.”

“I know. I know. Al Cutter takes any kind of crud. I would ask Mark why, and do you know what he said?”

“What did he say, Lena?”

“Because he believes in something, but he isn't sure what he believes in but he believes in it very strongly. Does that make sense, Al.”

“No, not much sense, Lena.”

“Mark didn't say it. I said it. I don't know why I said it. Sometimes I love you and sometimes I hate you.”

“That's normal.”

“Like hell it is. What's normal about me, Al? Mark ran out on me, and I feel like I'm sitting here naked. Where is my life, Al? You know what a woman's career in the trade-union movement is, Al? It's an Indian wrestle, a Japanese wrestle—what do they call them, kabookie, kaboochie? We're brother and sister, baby, so let's screw. This is a struggle for the deepest and most basic rights of man, so let's screw. You been brought up in it, baby, you know the working class from A to Z and nobody has to tell you what it suffers and what we're trying to do in this movement, so let's screw—how about it, what are you waiting for, what's a convention for? What's a convention for, Al?”

“I think you've had enough to drink, Lena.”