The Story of a Marriage (14 page)

“And they sent you away? To the camps?”

“Oh yes.”

“Did they hurt you?”

“No,” he said, very far away now. “They didn’t need to. We did that on our own.”

I wanted to ask what he meant, but I saw the sharp, clever look leave his eyes. Instead, in an automatic action he would have prevented if he could, his right hand went out to rub the stump of his little finger, to soothe it like an injured child; it was his “tell,” as they say in poker parlors. It was the sign of some private pain that had nothing to do with Holland, or me, and yet might explain what had brought Buzz Drumer here.

He chose not to go to jail, he told me. Selective Service offered other tasks an objector could still do for his country, including pulling stumps in a northern state, and that is what he did.

How would you picture a camp for conscientious objectors back in 1943? Perhaps as a traveling tent show: a caravan of white dormitories, a great gold big-top. The word “camp” brings to mind swimming, painting, races; most Americans pictured it that way, full of cowards and traitors and spies having a wonderful time. But what Buzz saw, as he arrived by car down a muddy road, was an internment camp.

It was run by the Quaker church “in the spirit of individual pacifism,” but they in turn took their orders from Selective Service, which reluctantly accepted the camps only as a way to keep these abnormal men imprisoned, working without pay for the duration of the war. Buzz had no idea. “You can bunk with the Quakers, the Catholics, or the Coughlinites,” he was told.

He’d had a fantasy they would all be like him: misfits, pacifists, outsiders. He picked the Quakers out of instinct; he was raised Baptist, and the only other Baptist was a colored man who played the cello, and lived with the Quakers. There was only one colored man in the whole place, and only one Jew.

The Jew was a problem for the Coughlinites. They were the followers of Father Charles E. Coughlin, a Detroit radio priest who felt America should not be fighting against that hero of the twentieth century: Adolf Hitler. These men weren’t pacifists at all. How had they convinced the draft board? Perhaps some psychologist had nodded his head at their ideas and stamped their forms out of unimaginable sympathy. And so there they were, living under a president they saw as a Jewish conspirator. The Coughlinites were loathed by their fellow Catholics, who hated them nearly as much as the do-gooder Quakers.

So the Jew had to be kept away from the Coughlinites, who had to be kept away from the other Catholics, who had to be kept away from the Quakers. The colored man had to be kept away from everybody. In a pacifist camp. Those were the times we lived in.

“It was a dull, strange kind of life,” Buzz said.

The day began with the yelling of the night watchman to head to the work trucks. Work was pulling stumps from a field, and Buzz’s job was to coil the chain around the stump before another man turned on the winch to haul it away. The only satisfying moment of the day came when that stump would pop out, like a rotten tooth, and a secret hell of worms and Paleolithic beetles would gape before them. The stumps were chopped up into firewood, and stacked in a long wall in the woods, where they rotted all through the war; nobody used them. The field was never plowed. It was the kind of work you imagine angels devising for uncertain souls, endlessly raking the clouds.

Men went insane from the monotony, the wormy sky, and the wormy oatmeal, but mostly they went insane from the sense that they did not matter. The earth was burning itself to the ground, east and west of America, and they took no part in it. It drove some men to go AWOL, and some to join the army and go to war, or to sail away and die out on an ocean. Many others, including Buzz, sought another way out. It is surprising, he said, to learn that a man needs to matter.

A chorus of screams silenced Buzz’s story; the ride had come to an end. Buzz crossed his arms and looked away. I wanted to say something to him, but the noise overwhelmed any talk, so we merely stood and watched them together: William laughing with just his top teeth showing, eyes hidden under the shadows of his thick eyebrows, arm now around his girl (it must have happened at a turn in the track), and Annabel slumped in hysterical false terror beside him.

“Take your girl to the Limbo ride!” the barker beside us comically cried.

“Yes,” said Buzz quietly. “She’s the marrying kind.”

As the operator let them out of the gate, Annabel stumbled and grasped at William for support, holding his right arm, laughing, for once forgetting the cares of her father, her future. No one could ever wish her harm.

“Come see Limbo!”

It happened the day the dog ran away. Sonny was staying with the aunts at their house on Fillmore, Lyle was out in the backyard, and I came home to find Holland in the living room, reading. It was very still and quiet, as it often was in the Sunset; all one heard was a soft burring noise that sounded like a warplane nosing its way through the clouds but was just someone mowing his lawn.

“Pearlie,” Holland said to me as I walked in and set my purse on the console.

“Yes?”

I heard him say he wanted to tell me something.

“Hmm?” I said absently, looking for my keys.

I heard a low tremor in his voice: “There’s something I haven’t asked you.”

“What is it?”

“I’m not much of a talker,” he said plainly. “But I needed to ask you. I …”

He was staring at me. His book lay open beside him on the couch, one page stretching out into the air and slowly falling over as it lost his place. I turned my body to face Holland completely—my listening posture—and his face was as square and golden as an idol’s, his eyes bright, his striped shirt undone beneath his cardigan, one button dangling from its unraveling thread. He sat and planned his words. What a strange, sad thing to be a man. How awful to be beaten by life as much as anyone and yet never be allowed to mention how it feels. To sit in your home that you have paid for with your labor, beside a wife who knows your youthful secrets; to have traveled around the world to escape the prejudices of home and find them, now merely whispered, in the neighborhood around you; to have the past knock on your door in the form of Buzz Drumer. I cannot envy men their silences.

“Holland, what is it?” I asked almost in a whisper.

But I will have to imagine forever what it was, because an inhuman sound suddenly flooded the room. The air-raid drill.

“What do we do?” my husband asked, looking around him. The siren roared like a beast that had not been fed.

“We secure the windows,” I shouted. “We turn off the appliances and we wait in the shelter.” I was glad to be an expert. “Secure the windows, that means—”

“I know how to secure a window,” said the proud military man, and he went to the front room, latching things and pulling the blinds, as quick as a seaman, so I went around the kitchen and unplugged everything I could think of, grabbing the radio as I went. “Lyle, Lyle!” I yelled, but he was off somewhere and couldn’t hear me; there was no time to go and fetch him. Cars stopped all over the city; Market Street became a long parking lot as people huddled down during the drill; and everywhere people were running inside their houses, pulling out their newspapers, trying to remember what to do if the earth caught fire.

“The basement,” I said loudly. He nodded and followed me. I shouted for him to watch his step, there was a tricky drop at the end, and I was, after all, so used to caring for his health. He said nothing but simply put two fingers lightly on my shoulder. Down we went into the darkness; it was the opposite of Orpheus.

We waited on a cot beneath the naked bulbs of the basement, their filaments shivering like the husks of insects. The alarm sang like a buzz saw over everything: the train set with its town and trees and mirror lake, whose tiny abandoned boat always made me imagine a hungry local sea monster. The shelves of our belongings: an old oil-gleaming pistol (beside it, its lover: a bullet), pens, stationery, and stamps, and one particular envelope.

“What were you going to ask me?” I tried to say over the alarm.

“What?”

“You wanted to ask me something, before—”

“Oh nothing nothing just … I wanted to … ”

Down in the basement, the siren spun in our ears like a top. Holland took off his sweater; I unbuttoned my top button; we were just a few feet from the furnace.

And then, all of a sudden, the noise stopped. What a cool, crisp silence we sat in.

“We’ve got to wait for the all clear,” I said at last.

The moment for his speech had passed, but he stared at me as if I were the great mystery of the ages instead of the wife he had lived beside all these years. I looked away uncomfortably. I realized I did not want to hear whatever he’d been trying to ask me. The cowardly part of me wanted him to do the honorable thing; to come to his senses, silently and bravely.

I said, a little loudly, “I hope Lyle’s not frightened.”

He looked worried. “I forgot to warn Sonny about the air raid.”

“I’m sure the aunts told him,” I said.

“I just forgot all about it.”

“It’s okay. I’m sure they didn’t forget, they read the paper.”

He laughed at that. “I guess they do.”

“He’ll be good.”

He smiled and said, “I haven’t been down here in a while. It’s so quiet and dark.”

“It is.”

“It reminds me of my mother’s house,” he said. “The smell of a closed-up room. I can’t believe you visited me all the time. I can’t believe they never caught you.”

“Your mother was the clever one.”

Holland leaned toward me and the old lightbulbs shivered. He said, “Why didn’t we ever do more than kiss?”

The strange quiet of the basement took me back to his dark room in Kentucky, Holland’s younger face staring at me with an expression of either gratitude or desire. Maybe, for him, there was no difference between the two.

“You were the only girl I saw for six months,” he said, shaking his head. “You know that’s all I dreamed of after a while? The shades, the bunk bed, the poetry you read to me. And Miss Pearlie.”

He had never called me that before. A phantom girl haunting him at night, just as he haunted me for all the months of his imprisonment, the years without him and of course the years with him, sleeping in his bed behind that door. In dreams, he came to me with wide arms, promising things a waking Holland could never deliver. He told me everything then, meant all of it, opened his spectral chest to display for me—his beating transposed heart. He swore he loved me. But I had never thought that he had dreamed of me, back in those dim-lit days of war. How beautiful to find you once were someone’s ghost.

His face searching mine for the answer to an unasked question—it belonged to the imprisoned boy in that room when I came one winter’s day to find him standing in the bright light of an open window. “Holland, you’ll be seen!” I had whispered. I ran to pull the shade, and when I turned around, I saw him. Tall and skinny, underfed, clothes hanging from him. He had the look of those fire-stricken buildings that are beautifully painted on the outside and only show, at the smoke-scarred windows, where the fire has burned everything inside. I was too young to know about internment, how it bends the mind.

As we waited in that basement for the all clear, another window opened in my mind, another Holland in another room. The look in Buzz’s eyes as he awakened; it could not have been too different from Holland’s that snowy day in Kentucky. A burned-out face trying not to break open at the horror he has seen. The way they look at you, those poor broken men; it’s not empty or terrified at all. It’s as if you were the first sign of life, of beauty, after a long, long winter. Does love always form, like a pearl, around these hardened bits of life?

“I’m sorry I never wrote,” he said.

“I can’t possibly understand what you went through.”

He nodded, looking at his father’s gun on the shelf. “But I’m sorry all the same. And we never got to say goodbye.”

I shrugged. “I didn’t know if I’d ever see you again.”

“I can’t possibly understand what you went through.”

I shivered, despite the heat of that basement. “Well we survived it, didn’t we?”

“We sure did,” he said, grinning. “You and me and Countee Cullen.”

I could see in his eyes that he wanted to say something more, perhaps try at last to make things right. The sad smile, the sorry shake of his head. The attempt, this time, to say goodbye.

I felt my husband’s hand on my shoulder.

He whispered close: “I have a rendezvous with life ”

I looked up, and there he was smiling at me, his shirt unbuttoned, revealing a dark triangle of skin.

The small dark room when we were young. A boy in his hot summer bed, dreaming of me; a boy gone a little mad. And when he whispered, “Pearlie, is this what you—” I guessed his question, and I let him. I took it as a token, as if in a time of war; a wordless way to say goodbye. There on the cot with the train village below us. There with the long wait for the all clear, an answer to both our questions that day. As he caressed and kissed me, we could hear the low movements of the wind as it stepped up to the house, and over it, around it, making the beams creak ever so slightly like a hospital patient shifting in his bed. For a moment, we were our younger selves.