The Rebellion of Yale Marratt (38 page)

 

 

Maybe you do know. Maybe you do. You begin to share his thoughts.
Boy thoughts. And you love his excitement with life as he calls you,
"Fancy! Fancy. Look at this spider! Watch him. Isn't he wonderful?" And
you know somehow he is different from the other kids. He's only twelve
but he lives in a wonderland of birds and flowers and insects, and he
shares his secrets and his knowledge with you.

 

 

She remembered going to Ricky's house. How Mr. Wilson accepted her easily
and talked with Ricky and her, like grown-ups about the wonders of life.
"Right in your own back yard," he had said, "are entire worlds pursuing
their destiny; unaware of human beings. Underfoot in the insects you
crush, in the grass you walk over, is all the unsolved mystery of life
and living."

 

 

Sitting in Mr. Wilson's den, cluttered with books and specimens, she and
Ricky spent many afternoons while his gentle father explained to them the
wonderful world of flora and fauna. Afterwards, Ricky would talk with her
while she looked at him wide-eyed, not fully understanding, but feeling
a wonderful urge to hug him and tell him how much she cared for him.

 

 

It was you, Ricky, every step of the way. It had been really a marriage
from childhood through college. When he finished high school Ricky went
to Western Reserve. He was there when she arrived. He, a glamorous junior.
She a freshman.

 

 

He guided her in her courses. "Don't go too far in biology," he advised
her. "Take some, but branch out into something else. Maybe psychology or
sociology. I don't think a man and wife should have identical interests.
Do you?" He looked at her seriously. She must have had a question on
her face. "Fancy, Fancy, you are going to marry me some day? I suppose I
haven't been very romantic or anything, but I've always thought of life
with you in it. You're my religion, Fancy. A man can't go very far in
the world without that."

 

 

I cried, she thought. I loved you so much, I cried. There are some emotions
too big to hold onto. You have to release them. That's what I'm doing now,
Ricky. Trying to release all the pent-up love that is in me by helping.
It isn't much, she thought. I mother the kids. Talk to them about their
home, their girl friends, their wives. I hand them a cup of coffee,
light them a cigarette, and see the tears behind their eyes. You don't
know what loneliness is until you see them and have the same loneliness
in your heart. Sure, they whistle at me, but they're whistling in the
dark of their own unhappiness. It's a kind of curtain they pull between
themselves and the past. On one side is a tough what-the-hell attitude,
on the other -- the side they keep to themselves -- is home and whatever
it may mean.

 

 

 

 

You can't think when you're lonely. Not coherently. You just feel.
You feel the night, moon-pale and the sky black. You feel the smell of
Miami Bay. The lonesome, dead smell that the tide leaves behind.
It reminds you of other bays and other tides, and all you know is that
you are lonely. Tears are at the corners of your eyes. You wonder what
loneliness consists of, and you know that it is an aching of the mind
that throbs through your body as though part of you had been torn away.

 

 

For long minutes the moon would disappear, Miami Bay would be black.
Then, as the cloud disappeared, islands across the bay would reappear;
skylighted dragons creeping toward the ocean. Bent, wind-weary, palms
shivered in the light breeze, their fronds restless. The music of a
popular song and the thrashing discords of the orchestra seemed remote
and cleansed out here. Lonely, too, and ephemeral.

 

 

We were married once, Ricky. I guess we're married still, she thought,
in a funny sort of way. I could be in there dancing, she thought. I could
be. I could be home. It's Christmas Eve back home, and there's snow on the
ground. Heaps of it. She had seen pictures of it in the Miami papers. They
deprecated it as if to say, "Aren't you glad you're here? Aren't you glad
you're warm while those poor people have to suffer the cold?"

 

 

She had been walking down Lincoln Road wishing she was cold when she saw
those pictures. Her body ached with the feel, the long vanished feel of
her husband. She remembered how his cheeks would be cold and red. How she
would press her face against them. How she enjoyed standing on tip-toe
as she reached up to meet his embrace.

 

 

She would drop her fur coat in a heap on the sofa, and kiss him and
muss his hair; talking all the while in the excited eager chatter of a
schoolgirl. "Rick, we're going to have steak tonight. I splurged. And I
made ice-cream too, with fresh strawberries. Well, frozen. I love you!
You look so cute with your hair mussed. May Thomas is going to have a
baby! What do you think of that? Don't you think we should get started?
I made rolls, too. Aren't I a good wife?"

 

 

Back. Back somewhere in the confusion called time. Back when I wasn't
sitting here in Miami waiting for my name to be called over a public
address system . . . we were married, Ricky.

 

 

Remember our first dance at Western Reserve? I had on a lacy white evening
gown that showed the tops of my breasts. I heard one of the fellows --
probably Willy Anderson -- remark, "Wow what a pair of boobs." You were
angry. Willy didn't mean anything. I probably should have worn a less
revealing dress. You seemed to really belong to me that night. Your eyes
kissed me when I looked at you. It was all kind of silly and adolescent,
I suppose. You touched my breasts. You put your face against them,
in the car. It seemed as if I were protecting you against something.
I held onto your hand, as if the only reality were you.

 

 

I've always been afraid, Anne thought. Once I was afraid I would die
before I accomplished all the things I had planned. I remember myself at
Western Reserve. Those were the days when all the boys argued hotly that
they'd be god-damned if they would ever fight in a foreign war. They
would go to jail first. I went to America-First rallies with Ricky
and I applauded Gerald P. Nye and Charles Lindbergh. I knew that Ricky
wouldn't fight. Yet the fear was there. The everlasting fear that he
would have to go to war . . . wanting to or not . . . understanding or
not. I knew in my heart that America's college days were ending. America
was graduating. Life was real. Free will as you planned it was not the
graduation gift.

 

 

It's strange, she thought, what a change in values had occurred in just
three or four years. There had been books on their shelf at home that
were meaningless. She could remember when she and Ricky had discussed
Steinbeck or Richard Wright, or Erskine Caldwell. It all seemed so
important, then. So terrible that such outrages against human decency
could exist in the United States of America. Richard Wilson would set
some of these things right, and Anne would help. These things shouldn't
happen here. Then the war came, and what could be encompassed by the mind
. . . poor whites here, or unfortunate Negroes there, or persecuted Jews,
or vile capitalists . . . could no longer be grasped. It was beyond
the power of one man to correlate the evil in the world and crusade
against it. Tragedy on so vast a scale was incomprehensible. You lived
with it and you ignored it. You substituted a flippant fatalism for the
philosopher's dream called free will.

 

 

Some day the smaller struggles would emerge but to what extent would
her generation care? What would these soldiers do afterwards?

 

 

How did you really know that you were Anne Wilson? People said you were.
They addressed you as if you were the same "I" who had graduated from
the Red Cross school, the same "I" who majored in sociology at Western
Reserve and graduated cum laude while Mom and Dad sat somewhere in the
audience, beaming and proud. To them you were the same "I" who was born
Anne Meredith, May 11, 1919. The baby girl who made them so happy. But
were you the same "I"? -- the same "I" who had married Richard Wilson
who now was dead?

 

 

The "I's" were not the same. They were hundreds of separate "I's." If you
wished you could call them Anne Wilson but they weren't the same people,
simply friends who met once in a while in your mind. Friends to whom
you nodded in passing.

 

 

The "I" was wind-tossed by ceaseless experience coming too rapidly for
assimilation and comprehension. Some things stood out here and there.
It was like Marcel Proust's cup of tea. A smell, a touch, a feeling could
bring memory crowding painfully to the foreground of consciousness as if
the "I" sought to re-establish itself, to reassert that it really existed.
But Proust was wrong, she thought. Memory doesn't come back in a flood
bringing a whole life with it. It comes back in isolated snatches without
meaning, and without desiring it.

 

 

The moldy smell of the bay at low tide was an old smell. She had breathed
it before when she and Ricky had taken their one vacation on Cape Cod.
It was an odor of time gone by. She fought it, feeling that the mystery
of this dank, cold smell was something she shouldn't probe too deeply.

 

 

That summer they had been driving along the road between Provincetown and
Hyannis. Why they had gone to Provincetown she couldn't remember. Not
everything comes back; gestures and feelings, yes . . . not reasons.
Perhaps, they had found a movie somewhere up that way. She and Ricky
were always going to movies.

 

 

It was odd, she thought, even then we couldn't stop going. It was a madness.
A warning, presaging the events to come, this endless going; this urge to
escape from something. The clouds that were gathering around us were too
large to drive away from or even fly away from, but we all kept hopefully
moving. The strong ones will have to stop some day, she thought, and
face it. Face the paucity of our own souls in the light of day, and
answer the probing questions.

 

 

She tried to recall the evening. The memory was thin, wafted in on a smell
of tide from Miami Bay; eager to vanish. It had been a cold summer night,
with a heavy fog. She remembered the windshield of their car was clouded
over with precipitation. The windshield wipers fluttered back and forth.
An easterly wind blew in between the door and frame of the car. The cold
breeze swept along the floorboard. Her left leg had seemed frozen.

 

 

"Aren't you ever going to fix that door?" Anne had asked. She had shivered
and tried to pull her coat down farther over her knees. She remembered
he didn't answer.

 

 

"Did you hear me, Richard Wilson?" she demanded.

 

 

"Sure."

 

 

"Well?"

 

 

"Do you do everything I ask you? Did you clean the kitchen closet so that
I can find a wrench if I wanted it without having clothespins and bottles
fall down on my head?"

 

 

"Ricky, do you always have to answer me by asking another question? If you
don't hurry up and fix this door, I won't ride in the car any longer."

 

 

They drove home in silence, Anne pretending to be angry. It was a simple
recollection, yet meaningless, extracted from the past that was. Those few
weeks on the Cape had been their only sample of normal civilian living.

 

 

The wind blew lightly across Miami Bay. Again the tide smell filled her
mind. She and Ricky had stood on the front porch of the cottage they
had rented on the Cape. Anne puttered through her handbag looking for
the key to the front door. In the dim light from the street lamp across
the street he had watched her. She knew that he was exasperated.

 

 

She kept turning things over in her pocketbook, afraid to admit she
couldn't find the key. "Anne, you are so unsystematic," Ricky had said.
"Right now I'll bet your pocketbook is jammed with letters I wrote you
two weeks ago plus hair pins, lipstick, cosmetic, pencil, pens, that
rabbit's foot, five or six mirrors, a small flashlight, handkerchief,
change purse and the whole bottom scattered with loose change and paid
and unpaid bills." He looked at her crossly. "Why don't you admit it? You
haven't got the key!"

 

 

"No, I haven't," she had snapped, "and don't look so peeved. It's
somewhere. The people who rented us this cottage will have another.
Besides we can go in the bedroom window." She walked down the front
steps and around to the side of the cottage.

 

 

He followed her, shivering. He looked at the window and wondered aloud
if it was unlocked. "If this is summer on the Cape you can have it."

 

 

"Are you going to stop talking and boost me up?" Anne's voice got shrill
when she was angry.

 

 

He grabbed her around the waist. "Sometimes you sound more like a fishwife
than Mrs. Richard Wilson." He shoved her toward the window.

 

 

She fussed with the window while he supported her. Finally she slid it up.
She started to wiggle through. He slid his hand up her calf and grabbed
her crotch.

 

 

"You goosed me!" she screamed. She catapulted through the window.
He heard the crash of a skidding chair, and then silence.

 

 

"Anne? Anne! Are you all right?"

 

 

She hadn't answered.

 

 

"Anne!"

 

 

She heard him hoisting himself into the window. Heard him as he fumbled
in the blackness of the room. He saw her on the floor motionless. Saw she
might have hit her head on the footboard of the bed. He stumbled around
in the darkness, frightened, saying he hadn't meant to hurt her. She kept
very quiet. He picked her up and put her on the bed . . . worried . . .
saying softly, "Anne, Anne, I'm sorry. I love you." Finding her lips,
he had kissed her, and then she bit him.