Rumors of Peace (9 page)

W
E STOOD CLOSE TOGETHER
, like visitors in a cathedral. There was a cheerful fire in the fireplace. A sweet-smelling plume of incense issued from a copper ashtray. From the phonograph came a light, gay piece of music.

“Do sit down,” said Helen Maria.

We seated ourselves tailor fashion on the floor, where she had placed two throw pillows. On an electric ring a pan was heating. Next to it stood a plate covered with a napkin. “Please let me know if there's anything special you wish to hear after the Mozart,” said Helen Maria, standing over us like a grand hostess in her sea-green robe, hands graciously folded. “And I hope you like spiced wine,” she said, going over to the pan and breathing deeply of its aroma. After pouring the contents into three cups, she handed us ours; then she whipped the napkin from the plate, revealing a half dozen French pastries, which she set before us. “Please help yourselves. There are two for each.”

Arranging herself on the Persian spread, she sipped from her cup. We followed suit. It was a strong, fuming concoction, rather pleasant. We sat drinking and chewing, waiting for our hostess to speak. Behind her the rain streamed down the French windows, making a gray blur of the garden.

She dusted her fingers off. Gracefully she inserted a cigarette into her amber holder. She seemed quiet, serene.

“Helen Maria, what do you think of the war?”

“Are you back on that again?”

“No, but—”

“War is stupid. Man is stupid.” She lit the cigarette with her fine, sweeping flourish. “That is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.”

I thought for a moment. “Everybody?”

“Of course not. There's always been a tiny minority of thinkers. But they've never made any difference. Take your other pastry.”

I had a vast, sinking feeling. On the turntable the Mozart record came to an end and spun hissing.

“I hope you'll appreciate Mahler, whom I'll now play,” said Helen Maria, getting up and crossing the room. A few moments later a soft, desperately forlorn melody filled the air. My eyelids felt heavy from the wine; my eyes grew filmed with sadness.

“What about the people who get killed?” I said as she sat down again. “All the refugees, and the soldiers and army horses. . . .”

“Can she include horses with people?” Peggy asked through a mouthful.

“Why not?” I said. “They hurt like us.”

“Not quite,” corrected Helen Maria. “They can't reason. They lack a concept of extinction. Their pain is a simple physical one.”

“Well, they hurt!”

“Of course. I'm simply pointing out the difference between man, who is highly developed, and the lower order of animals, which is not.”

“You said man was stupid!”

“I should say. The lower orders aren't stupid at all. They don't go in for bombast and bamboozlement.”

“I don't understand that!”

“What are you so angry about?”

“Because it's not what I mean—not what I'm talking about!”

“Yes, what exactly are you talking about?”

“I don't know. Just that the war's happening . . . while we're sitting
here, it's happening somewhere else, and it doesn't matter if you can't see it, because you know it . . .”

“Ah,” she said, nodding thoughtfully. “Imagination is all very well and good, but you mustn't overdo it. You can't dwell on misery and death. That way lies madness.”

Worriedly I lifted my eyes.

“At best you'll wind up in the Salvation Army. You'll wear a black bonnet and sing ‘Rock of Ages' on street corners.”

Peggy gave an amused snort.

“Please don't snort, Peggy. And you've had three pastries. One of those was Suse's.”

I didn't care about pastries. I wanted to go home. But my body was heavy; my eyes seemed to drift.

“Are you enjoying the Mahler?” asked our hostess.

I shook my head. “He makes me too sad.”

“Oh, buck up, for God's sake. Don't take everything so personally. Are you enjoying the wine?”

“I'm drunk,” Peggy smiled.

“Don't be. I hate a drunk.”

We both sat straighter and tried to look alert.

“Now. Let's talk about something worthwhile. What have you been reading lately, Suse?”

“Madame Bovary.
”

“Again?”

“I've read it four times. I like it.”

“Certainly one likes it. I myself like it. I understand what Emma was up against. Those shopkeepers and notaries and priests. What a dreary lot.”

“I think they're interesting,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “How they lived and everything. I like how they're different from how it is now. I mean they didn't have airplanes or refineries. . . .”

“My dear friend, just because they used tallow candles and blotted their letters with sand doesn't mean they weren't dreary. Flaubert despised them. For that matter he wasn't too keen on Emma because she was a sloppy thinker. All romantics are sloppy thinkers. And that's what you are, a romantic.”

“Me? I'm not romantic. You mean like kissing?”

Peggy gave an interested grunt and sat forward.

“I mean you've taken literature's crowning glory of realism and varnished it over with romanticism. Do you realize you've read this book four times and never understood it?”

I looked down again, invaded by a cold doubt.

“You'd have been very unhappy a hundred years ago,” she said, getting up and turning the phonograph off. “You'd have worn a tight corset and never been able to go hiking. You'd have been married off at sixteen to an old man. And then you'd have died of a mere flu. But these things you blithely ignore. You're no better than those housewives who read silly historical novels and recline there in the past. But the past is no better than the present, and was usually worse. It's no place to recline in.”

So then, the cobbled streets and moonlit duels were not what they seemed. Hunchbacks did not swing forever on cathedral bells, or Emma gallop eternally through green forests, but all was thin and false, and I could not recline there. But I had a thought.

“You study ancient Greece. You must recline there.”

“I do not recline. I stride about, exercising my mind. Besides, that was a glorious age.”

“The age of Plato,” Peggy told me sleepily.

“Pericles,” corrected Helen Maria, shooting her cigarette butt into the ashtray. “Of course, to the world, ancient Greece is
parti avec le vent
—gone with the wind. I have no delusions. When I become an archaeologist and unearth an ancient city, it will make no difference to the swarming masses.”

“Who?” I saw gnats, hornets.

“The masses. Man. Man is not impressed by knowledge. He just goes on making a mess of things.”

Again I had the vast, sinking feeling.

“But what the masses do is their business, and what I do is mine. As a student of history, specifically of Greece, my business is the clarification of man's experience.”

“But you said man is stupid—why would you want to know about them? I mean if they're stupid and they don't pay any attention to
you and you don't pay any attention to them, I mean if you and them aren't even connected—”

“If you say ‘I mean' once more, I shall vomit! And, Peggy, it's rude to fall asleep!”

Our hostess's speech was growing more and more clipped, while mine was becoming more slurred and difficult, but I said again, “But why do you want to study man then?”

“Because! If one is interested in history, one studies man! One would hardly study reptiles or rock formations, would one?”

“No,” I said, but I was lost. My eyes were drifting in circles. I tried to stifle a yawn, but it broke through loudly, just as Peggy's head sank down on her chest.

“What a choice crew,” the genius whispered slowly, as though to herself. Then suddenly she clenched her fists. Her face turned bright red. “Get out!” she cried, leaping to her feet.

We staggered up as she hurried over to us, grabbing us by the arms and dragging us to the door. “Get out! Get out!” she cried again, flinging us from the room.

Maybe it was just as well if the genius was through with us, I thought later. Because I had had enough of her answers, which just made everything darker and worse.

T
HE NEXT DAY IN GYM
, as I was stepping into my cubicle to undress and shower, Peggy the Towel Supervisor strode to my side with an official order: “Come with me.”

I followed her down the row of cubicles until she stopped before one and opened the curtain. From behind the second curtain inside I could hear Eudene singing “Besame Mucho” in the shower.

Peggy pointed to a brassiere lying on the floor. It looked huge and hugely interesting. Peggy lifted it up between thumb and forefinger. It was a terrible-looking thing, gray and sweat-stained, its straps held together by rusty safety pins. It hung enormous and shapeless, and shameful too—even if it had been clean—like one of those medical trusses you saw in store windows.

“Poor Eudene,” I whispered.

Poor Eudene's big wet face emerged from behind the curtain. “What're you guys doing!” she yelled over the noise of the shower.

“I can't hear you,” Peggy said pleasantly. She was always good in an emergency—clear-eyed, innocent. Calmly she deposited the garment on the wooden bench as Eudene turned the shower off. When the face reappeared, Peggy said, “I may need one of these, so I thought I'd have a look at yours.”

Eudene gave her a careless squint. “You're fat, kid, but not where it counts.”

“Who's fat?”

Eudene threw her head back and let out one of her big donkey brays. She was not cast down by the brassiere, whose every stain and rusty pin she knew we had inspected.

But Peggy cut into the laughter. She had her authority. “This is temporary fat. By the time I'm your age I'll have a terrific figure.”

I had not known she planned along these lines and frowned at her. But maybe she only meant to point out Eudene's great age and embarrass her for being fifteen years old in the seventh grade.

“How old do you take me for?” asked Eudene, her gray eyes growing smoky, almost exotic. “I bet you think I'm right up there. A guy the other night he took me for twenty-one.”

“You like that?” I asked.

“Sure. I like to be right up there.” Then with a robust shiver, she yelled, “Clear out, you guys, I'm freezing my ass off!” and came barging out rump first, reaching for her towel on the peg, a glimpsed enormousness of pale quivering flesh, a sudden matted brown armpit. She was like a piercing sense of upturned earth, something secret and unexpected that spread waves of nameless alarm as we whirled around and flapped through the curtain.

“You wanna meet me after,” she yelled, “I'll tell you about that guy!”

“If she takes showers, how come she's always dirty!” Peggy demanded angrily, hurrying along.

“I know!” I agreed, but I was not thinking of Eudene's grooming habits, and I sensed Peggy was not either. What I was thinking about, stamping into my cubicle, was what lived beneath that ordinary skirt and sweater Eudene was pulling on this minute, that white, quivering nakedness, that swampy armpit breathing in secret under her sleeve. It was all wrong, and it made me angry. It was wrong that such strangeness should suddenly be there—that nude, billowy whiteness, somehow grave, as though heavy with fate, perhaps known already to a man's hand, a hairy, sinewed, sliding hand. . . .

“You don't want to meet her, do you?” Peggy asked through the curtain.

“No, do you?” I said, coming out.

“No, do you?”

We hung around, unable to make up our minds, until we noticed that Eudene had gone in any case.

“I'm extending another invitation,” said Helen Maria as we came down the hall to Peggy's room. She was unsmiling, cool. But she had forgiven us. Relieved, nudging each other, we followed her to her room. This time there was no hot wine or French pastries, but the fire crackled as it had the day before, and the sweet smell of incense once more filled our nostrils. With the Eudene experience fresh in my mind, I hoped the genius would discourse on flesh. But she was aimed in the opposite direction. “Do you believe in God?” she asked us, stretching out on the Persian spread.

“No,” answered Peggy. “I'm an iconoclast.”

“What is an iconoclast, please?”

“It's when you don't believe in God. Isn't it?”

“No. It is not. I disapprove of the way you pick up my words and use them inaccurately. You shouldn't be content with the approximate. Why don't you look in the dictionary? Why don't you seek?”

“I do seek.”

“You do not. You're a born disciple. That's your problem.”

“I'm not a disciple. I break rules!”

“You break rules because you're lazy or you wish to draw attention to yourself.”

“I do not!”

“You do,” said her sister, not unkindly. “And you must change. You must become an independent thinker. But go on.”

“I don't want to,” said Peggy sullenly.

Helen Maria turned to me. “And what about you?”

“I don't believe in God,” I said. I had not formed this thought before, but as I sat there, I knew it was true. After God came to me on the union hall roof, I had never thought about Him again. I just knew He
was around. Now I knew He wasn't. He hadn't been for a long time. “I used to,” I said. “But I don't anymore.”

“Were you required to attend church? Our family, I rejoice to say, has never been sucked into the tentacles of organized religion.”

“Well, I had to go to Sunday School, but He didn't have anything to do with that. He just came along on His own.”

“An independent experience. Good for you.”

Peggy threw me a sour look.

“There is no authority for God,” Helen Maria went on. “The Greeks understood this. You were right to turn your back on the rotting superstitions of the cloister. Go on. What was your experience?”

“I don't know, I never even thought about Him. He was just around, in the hills and the sky.”

“Ah, yes, you're the pantheist. But tell me, how does a pantheist lose faith?”

“I don't know, He just disappeared. . . . I think it was when the war started.”

“The war again.”

“And she'll join the Salvation Army,” Peggy said sharply. “That's what you said. And that's not turning her back on anything, that's not being an independent thinker. Is it!”

“Brava,
Peggy” said her sister. “Now you show the spirit of inquiry.”

Peggy shrugged, but her cheeks pinkened.

“And I did say that. I don't say she
will,
but she
could,
if she doesn't rid herself of this preoccupation, which is both lopsided and useless.”

She got up and stood before us, very tall from our vantage point on the floor, the firelight flickering on her sea-green robe. “There is nothing worse than a disunited soul.”

A hush spread through me. She had put her finger on it. “How do I get rid of it?” I asked carefully.

The green eyes flashed down. “Do you know what the Greek concept of God was?”

“No.”

“Excellence. Striving for the highest. For clarity, vision, and balance.”

“How did they get it? What did they do?”

“They examined their lives.”

I sank back on my pillow. It was a disappointment. It sounded like tests and homework and drudgery.

“That doesn't sound like God to me,” said Peggy, made bold by her triumph. “God should make you good and kind.”

“You're quite right, Peggy,” said her sister, sitting down again. “But it is thinking that makes you good and kind.”

“Can it make you bad?” I asked quickly.

“Of course. Wrong thinking. But right thinking brings virtue and freedom.”

“How do you know if you're doing it right or wrong?”

“That,” said the genius, reaching for her cigarettes and holder, “that,” she said, lighting up and blowing out a stream of smoke, “is the question.”

Again I sank back with dashed hopes, but Peggy was in strong spirits, once more the Towel Supervisor. Briskly, officially, she spoke. “We know a girl at school who can't think at all. She's been kept back three grades. She's a mess.”

“What type of mess, precisely?” inquired Helen Maria.

“Well, she's sloppy, and she's really big, she's got this big rear end and everything. She doesn't know what's going on half the time, and she's always laughing and punching you with her elbow.”

“But she's nice,” I said. “But she wears this big dirty brassiere, it's like a harness.”

“Does she speak in complete sentences?” Helen Maria asked.

“I never noticed. I think so.”

Peggy crossed her hands, interlacing the fingers. “We think,” she said quietly, “that she goes all the way with men.”

“Ah,” mused the genius, taking a puff. “
La Grande Horizontale
.”

“I mean, we think she goes all the way with men,” Peggy said again.

“Why not?” asked her sister. “Why not?”

Peggy and I exchanged a look. We had not expected such simplicity; we did not want it. We gathered our mystery back into our laps and said no more about Eudene.