Gone to Soldiers (10 page)

Now he wanted to be with her, gathered into that intelligent warmth that was never entirely without judgment but never off-putting. He wanted coddling. He wanted to share with her the adventures that since he was a kid had been almost more satisfactory in the telling than in the living. Nothing was quite real until Bird received it. Instead here he was in Denver.

If he hitched down to Boulder, he could get a ride when school let out for Christmas, but the thought of waiting that long made him shrivel with self-pity. He wanted to look at that last canvas he had completed, shipped to Bernice. He wanted to paint from the cliffs of Jumpers Mountain in the morning with a dusting of snow on the scene.

He'd either hitchhike with truckers or ride the rails, but he never asked for money from home. The Professor was paid barely sufficient to maintain the household. War had put an end to his summer excursions, which had brought in as much as his nine months of teaching. Bernice made do, but Jeff knew how carefully she managed. He himself had vastly enjoyed that bourgeois summer life, hotels, restaurants, museums, playing the artist he really was. In Taos in the local uniform of Levi's, bandanna and boots, social classes mixed, but still he was living as a ranch hand, not as a painter. That hurt.

Bernice had been allowed to attend classes, but was not granted a degree by St. Thomas. The Professor would not allow her to work, even if she had been qualified for anything. He, Jeff, would always land on his feet. He was no remittance man, adventuring on a sure monthly check. He was also free. When he went home, it was because he longed for his sister, not because he expected anything of them. Now getting there was the little problem to be solved.

Dolores had offered that haven at first, that warm place he sought with women. Women always seemed to pick him out in a crowd, at a party. One of the tedious aspects of being down and out was that the jobs he could fall into often kept him in an all-male enclave, and the truth was that most men had no idea how to live. They built no nests, they created no comfort, they made the worst out of their shortfalls. He liked to move in with a woman.

He had not actually lived with Dolores, for he had his lodging as part of the job on Quinlan's dude ranch, and Dolores was mindful of the neighbors' opinions. Still she had cooked for him frequently, and he had had the cosiness of her whitewashed adobe house to curl into. He had liked to look at her, even done a few sketches, although he knew that when he did one of his rare figure paintings, the people turned into landscapes. Her face was fascinatingly asymmetrical. Dolores herself was not aware of the way one side of her face was more angular and the other softer. Shadow playing over it had never stopped attracting him. Her body was neatly voluptuous, the flare out to the buttocks accentuated, her hips going out in a baroque curve that had two distinct waves to it. Her skin had hints of amber and of a faint green in its duskiness.

Dolores had told him he was an old tomcat, un gaton, who had got used to wandering and cadging meals. Then she had put pressure on him to settle down. Why did women do that? They picked him out for his air of being well traveled, the romantic allure of the wanderer who tomorrow would be gone, and then they attempted to enlist him in domesticity.

In ordinary times he would have been graduated from college and gone to a studio school here or abroad, come back to teach and paint, married and had children. But there had been no money and no jobs. He had begun wandering with the army of homeless men from freight train to skid row to hiring hall. By the time he had won the competition for a WPA job painting murals on post offices, he had got used to picking up and leaving a set of complications.

He would settle eventually but only when he found the right place, the proper place, his own landscape, a woman who combined Dolores's beauty with Bernice's independence and brains. He was like someone who had been put on morphine out of necessity, to kill pain, and grown addicted. Moving on had become a habit, but he dreamed constantly of a companion. Someone who would know what things had been like in the town before or the previous country, who remembered Barcelona before Franco and London before the blitz and Paris before the Nazis had occupied it. A common frame of reference. Not even fear of war was that. Most people seemed to assume it would never come. The only common culture seemed to be movies and comic strips. Everybody would talk about Gasoline Alley, Li'l Abner, Dick Tracy. Maybe that was why he needed to go home, now, immediately. Bernice was his repository. All stories ended in her mind.

Thursday morning he cleaned himself up at the train station and headed for a truck depot. He was almost immediately successful. An independent driver who was picking up a load of tires and taking them north to Cheyenne would carry him along for the work at either end. He was glad to move a step nearer. This trip was a game of chess where he was the knight who moved two steps forward and one step to the side each time. The tires turned out to be huge, for earthmoving equipment. Although the man watched him skeptically at first, Jeff did not doubt his ability to move the massive things. He was stronger than he looked, with no fat on him; and he understood balance.

As they rode north across the wastelands where he watched antelopes the color of the ground running lightly, he was considering investigating Central America or perhaps heading down to Brazil. He imagined the sharp jagged reds of the Mediterranean rocks but set against the lurid pulsing greens of a jungle. He would research points south in the library while he was feeding up on Bernice's good home cooking. They would climb Jumpers Mountain to steal a tree. They would take out the old boxes of ornaments, the Czech prisms and German globes with the gilt bites in their roundness, the wooden horses and painted drummers, the tinsel birds. He would visit his earlier paintings, ranged around Bernice's room and his own. His failure in Taos had eroded his confidence. He needed to see his best work.

What had he been sniffing after in Taos after all, the ghost of D. H. Lawrence? Everyone pointed out to him the relics, the place Lawrence had done or said this or that outrageous or meaningful, absurd or prophetic thing.
The Plumed Serpent
had been his least favorite of Lawrence's novels, yet he found himself fascinated by the imagery. A snake with feathers caught his imagination. Perhaps he had been seeking some image like that in Taos, a way to combine flight and earthiness. He had never been repelled by snakes, but had used to catch black snakes and king snakes and pretty little garters.

He had seen a Morris Graves show that had moved him immensely, but the landscapes he responded to were the opposite of those foggy seamisted visions he admired in Graves. He needed intense light, hard definitions, rock and strong shapes. Why then had he failed so in Taos?

They stopped for lunch. He bought himself a bowl of chili. The trucker stood him to coffee. The guy seemed pleased Jeff had not tried to get lunch out of him. He had an interesting face, all flat planes set against each other at different depths, a face made with a chisel, or one of Braque's cubist collages. When they were back in the rig, he asked Jeff if he knew how to drive it. When Jeff proved he did, the trucker climbed into the back of the cab and went to sleep.

It was snowing lightly. The mountains to the north were white a third of the way down. Dust mixed with the snow for a while, pocking the windshield. He remembered a dream of a woman whose thighs had been feathered. Blue and green and gold iridescent feathers blowing softly as he parted her thighs. Her hair had been jetty as Dolores's. Even thinking of her now he became partly erect. He turned the radio softly to news, half listening.

Since 1939 he had lived expecting war any moment. The Nazis were far more real to him than to most Americans he met, and far more frightening. He did not share the mirth of his acquaintances at Hitler the ex-paperhanger who made funny faces and ridiculous speeches as his legions goose-stepped and fell on their faces. He had seen them in the streets of Heidelberg and Berlin and Frankfurt. They were drunk with violence and power. They felt themselves superior because they were together and together they administered pain. They had discovered domination under a visible god. He had attended a Nazi rally and watched crowds choreographed, manipulated, mesmerized into ecstasy and roaring blood lust and loving the transport.

He awaited the next move of the gods or his sister or his friends. He expected to be rescued from his boredom, but he did not know who would do it this time. Zach could, always. He had not been surprised to hear from Zachary Barrington Taylor, although they had not seen each other in … two years? Someone would make an offer, as a ride would turn up in Cheyenne.

He was not fated to be stuck in Cheyenne, Wyoming, with the snow blowing down from the Big Horns. Jeff had the sublime faith of those to whom things happen. He need only to post himself in the open, he was sure, for it had always happened, and someone would speak to him, someone would make him an offer or ask him a favor or throw themselves upon him or proposition him, for Jeff was always prepared far more seriously than the Boy Scouts. He believed the gods loved him and would surely send some interesting adventure his way, so long as he waited with empty hands and the readiness of mind and body that was his notion of grace.

He had fallen in love with landscape painting because of that element of chance and grace. He would go out to a field, to a beach, to a hill, and set himself up. As he focused on the scene before him, around him, the scene he was part of and became rooted in, it came more and more intensely alive until every leaf and every fly glinting in the sun and every dust mote demanded his attention. He felt totally open then, connected, vulnerable, better than love and more honest. In order to paint well he had to abandon control. Everything constantly changed before him and everything moved and he stood in a swirl of chaos and humbly addressed it. Whatever he put on canvas was insufficient, as love is insufficient.

If he was clear, if he was open, if he was vulnerable and strong enough in his seeing, then he would grasp some spirit present and it would animate what he painted, although his first reaction was always to hate what he had done, because it failed the vast changing thingness he had astonishingly and passionately witnessed. Studio painters could dream of control, but landscape painters knew how they stood before the gods of the place, tiny, hopeful, diddling away. All he could ever paint was a tiny flash of what truly showed itself to him, a seizure on one moment.

Thus Jeff headed East toward home and toward the next adventure that must surely save him from remaining there long.

RUTHIE 1

Ruthie's Saturday

Ruthie Siegal had dated more in high school than she did now. For one thing, she had enjoyed many more free evenings. Four nights a week she went to classes at Wayne; Friday was traditionally a family night. Although her family went to the synagogue only on holidays and although since Bubeh had died, Mama no longer kept kosher, she did bake challah and roast a chicken. Friday remained a special night with the candles in the holders Bubeh had brought from Poland and a clean tablecloth laid over the oilcloth. That left Saturday and Sunday nights only, and sometimes Mama needed her help.

Nor did she meet a great many young men eager to ask her out. The salesforce at Sam's was female and only women came in to buy dresses, unless a husband tagged unwillingly along. In her classes, many of the young men were not Jewish, and the Jews often were married or engaged.

She had gone out with Leib all through her last year of high school, but he had pushed her again and again to sleep with him. She would not. Not only did she fear the consequences, she did not want to bring more trouble into the house and betray the confidence of her mother, who trusted her far more willingly than mothers of her friends trusted them. What finally did not tip that balance was that the wish was his, not hers. She simply did not want him enough, and if she had given way, it would only have been to keep him. So finally she had not kept him.

Tonight she had her third date with Murray, who was in her Monday-Wednesday class because he too wanted to become a social worker. Ruthie had gone out with perhaps five young men since that final foot-stomping scene with Leib, when he had broken down, wept and called her names and then calmed abruptly and walked out of her life, but she had gone with none of them more than twice, and usually once was enough.

“You have to give them the benefit of the doubt,” her best girlfriend Trudi said. “You ought to wait to see what's going on with a guy.” Ruthie did not have a lot of time to waste with idiots and fresh schlemiels. She would be better off home studying than killing four hours fighting off a pasty-faced gorilla or making conversation as if it were secreted out of the depth of the bone marrow one precious drop at a time. If she did not force herself through night school classes, she would never be a social worker; forever she would be stuck in a dead-end department store job. The older women who worked there liked Ruthie because she was quick to see their fatigue and offer to help; but they represented failure to her. If she was kind to them, it was part habit, for so she had been trained, part unwilling empathy and part a superstitious attempt to buy off that future she did not want by bribing it with small favors. It was not a true mitzvah.

She was nervous about tonight, because a third time seemed almost a commitment, and because she was not sure she should be going out. Mama had made her usual rounds of rummage sales for clothes, much of it needing repairs. Even though Ruthie got a discount at Sam's, they could not afford many new clothes. That afternoon she had meant to teach Naomi to build a snowman, but drizzle had melted the snow. Instead they had looked at magazines. Ruthie had not been putting enough time into improving Naomi's English.

She wished Duvey would take that on, but he was seldom home once he pried himself out of bed. He was running around with his old gang. She was not quite sure what they were up to—she knew Duvey had Trojans in his wallet and went to Negro prostitutes in the Paradise Valley section. Condoms were scattered all over the grass in the park after the weekend like punctured balloons, where Leib had shown them to her as an argument.