In the Beauty of the Lilies (16 page)

The doctor—who had been a member of their old parish at Fourth Presbyterian—said Father had tuberculosis of the
esophagus and the only cure was to stay in bed utterly still and quiet and let the body fight the disease. So there was no more encyclopedia-selling, though his commission on the few sets he had sold kept coming in for a while, in envelopes from St. Louis whose toasted pale brown Teddy associated with the flakes of falling manna in the Bible. Teddy no longer went to Sunday school, it somehow would have been disgraceful for him to go, and he remembered some of the lessons and stories with a kind of horror, as if back there in ancient Hebrew times, those strange Elijahs and Elishas and Joshuas and Judases in their crayon-colored robes, lay the gnarled roots of his family’s present trouble. The money had dried up, but he helped with his three-fifty or so a week, and his mother did sewing piece-work, since before meeting Dad she had attended a school for young ladies back in Missouri that had left her clever with a needle and thread, and Esther was a secretary in the offices of the great Weidmann plant down along the river. She could type without looking at the keyboard and write Gregg shorthand, and still lived at home and gave her salary in, half of it, keeping the other half for her clothes and what she called “mad money”—movies and ice-cream sundaes and the little luxuries that women need, unlike men. Jared was at Rutgers, down in New Brunswick, and Mother said his duty was to stay there and get an education, but then in Teddy’s impression everything mysteriously darkened; there was some trouble with a girl who thought Jared should marry her, he had abused her trust somehow. Suddenly Jared wasn’t in New Brunswick, he was in New York City, and he didn’t come home for months. Dad lay in his room quiet all day. When Teddy looked in, after school, there was his father’s back, with no way of knowing if the man’s eyes were open or shut or if he was alive or dead. When his curiosity
got too much and Teddy went in and around the bed, the mahogany fourposter both his parents used to sleep in, his father would wink at him with his head still flat on the white pillow.

“Well, I hope your day has been more interesting than mine,” he would say, in that soft voice that seemed to be sifted through some kind of mesh. He would lift his head and hold it there until Teddy took the other pillow and put it under. His father’s breath had the faint brown sweetness of soothing syrup.

“It was O.K.”

“School is more than O.K. It’s a positive pleasure, isn’t it?”

Was it? Teddy was no athlete, and no tough guy, the kind that girls somehow like, even though they mean them no good. Girls didn’t notice Teddy; by the time he turned fourteen he had grown bigger but was still soft and square in shape, with the beginning of whiskers. He was quiet in class and his grades were good but not the best, not so good as to make him a star that way either, a future millionaire. He enjoyed being one of the bunch, swept through the halls and the day on the tides of young bodies, the others indifferent toward him but accepting, since he had met the basic requirements of the club, by being the same age as the others and being born in Paterson. He felt carefree, a harmless cog, doing his assignments, taking his place at the desk assigned. At home, sickness and worry ruled, and a sense of waiting, waiting for some second, even bigger blow to fall. This blow hung trembling in the faintly sweet bedroom air. “Yeah. I like school.”

“I was very fond of school, when I was your age. It seemed to me such a satisfactory place. I excelled, and never knew why I excelled. My mind could just take things in without any
effort, it seemed. I fooled myself. Things should never be too easy.”

“I guess not,” the boy responded, wondering why not. He would never be as clever as his father, or as popular and exciting as Jared—he had accepted that. He was even grateful, since both, through these qualities, had gotten into trouble.

His father strove to elevate his head on the pillows, alarmingly; the bed groaned and heaved with the effort and his head, lean and pale and waxen, seemed bigger than real, with its drooping, elongated, almost-white mustache. The unbuttoned neck of his nightshirt revealed some lank pale chest hairs. It seemed to Teddy at times that but for himself his father was being forgotten, in his quiet room, as Mother and Esther busied themselves with survival. His father was like an untended plant sending out yellow shoots in a dim half-light. “There’s some things you ought to know,” the invalid’s mouth pronounced.

Teddy was so afraid of hearing them that he merely nodded.

“Everything passes,” his father said, huskily. “ ‘This, too, shall pass away’ are words more comforting than any I ever found in the Bible. Abraham Lincoln said them, in a speech before the War between the States. He was referring to a story about an Eastern potentate who asked his wise men for a sentence that would be good for all occasions, and that’s what they came up with. ‘This, too, shall pass away.’ It’s good when you’re high, and good when you’re low. I’m not low now, Theodore, though I know I must seem so. I’m having a selfish rest, while my family keeps up the struggle. I feel guilty, sometimes, to be having so good a time, lying here on my side watching Mrs. Levi hanging out her wash so it snaps and shines in the breeze, or listening to the O’Brien girls
practice their duets, while the rest of my poor little crew carries the weight of the world. But your mother loves the battle; a healthy husband wouldn’t give her enough to do.” Silence passed, and then the man continued as if Teddy had asked a question. “You’ll be fine, son—don’t you worry. You have a caring heart and a good level head. If there’s any danger, it’s that you’ll settle too cheap, from not valuing yourself enough. If I’d valued myself more, I wouldn’t have let
my
dad scare me into the ministry. He was the one wanted to preach, and instead he ran a gravel pit.” He smiled at his son’s serious face. “Now, what does that have to do with anything? When you use your voice so little, when you drag it out of its box it tends to run on.” He reached out a bony dry hand, which was surprisingly warm. Embarrassed, Teddy took it in one of his plump, square, sweating ones. His father softly squeezed out of his chest, “This will pass, for better or worse. I feel I’m getting better, the curious truth is. How do I sound?”

“Better,” the boy lied, feeling breathless himself.

“Well, then. Now run tell your ma I have some business to do.” This meant he had to go to the bathroom, and he needed her to help him get there. Such help Clarence asked of the two women in the house, but not of his younger son.

Thus Teddy moved through adolescence, its storms of desire muffled, waiting for his father to die. Like many organic processes it took longer than it humanly seemed it should; the loss that sooner befell them was Jared’s, an arm crippled by shrapnel in the battle for the Marne, outside the village of Trughy-Epied, on the 24th of July, 1918. He lay in a Paris hospital for a month and then was shipped back to the state hospital in Newark. Only Mother visited him, since now with the end of this cruel war in sight an influenza epidemic was raging around the globe, killing more than the war had. Right
there in the hospital wards men who had survived Château-Thierry and the second Marne were dying of it, quickly and quietly, after a few days of aching and fever: their spirits just flew up out of their mouths, Mother said. She told Teddy to stay off of trolley cars and out of crowds. The old red-brick high school on Lee Place, which the city authorities declined to close, was one big crowd, buzzing with news of a grandparent or parent or brother or sister suddenly carried off. The desks on both sides of Teddy were empty for several days but the children—Charlotte Weed, Jacob Wyzanski—both came back, gloating at having out-toughed death. When Teddy came down with a fever and dryness in the throat and a feeling of the walls around him being paper-shin and covered with moving designs, he thought of praying that he not die, but this seemed disloyal to his father, somehow. His father had fallen out with God and Teddy would not go behind his back. It was easy, after a while, not to pray. Statistics showed that children resisted the flu better than the old and frail and what a terrible sort of divine punishment it would be if he brought home the illness that killed his father—if he was his father’s murderer. But the fever passed, and then the cough, and he was ready to take on the paper route again. Jared, too, survived, lying in the Newark hospital surrounded by dying young men.

Jared had quit Rutgers with one year left to go, in 1916—they never explained to Teddy quite why; it had not everything to do with the girl who wanted to marry him, there was some problem with his grades as well. He had neglected his studies for extra-curricular activities, was how Mother put it. But he had worked as a slip runner and then found a job as a rent collector with a New York real-estate corporation. Supposedly he was doing well. He wore checked suits and a
bowler when he visited, and seemed to his brother harder and more remote than ever; when he knuckled Teddy’s head it felt like the grip of a knobby, implacable machine. “I’m going to be a soldier man,” he had bragged.

“Why? Do you have to?”

“Yeah, they’ll be having a draft anyways. All my buddies in Noo Yawk are signing up. If you don’t, you won’t get any more pussy, that’s what our girlfriends tell us. Over in France, the mademoiselles do it to Americans for free. They
aimez beaucoup
.”

“They do?” He tried to picture what “it” was, and came up with twisted positions like the rubber man at the circus freak show could get into, in the tent with the smelly sawdust.

“Sure. We go over there to save their ass, you bet they do. They slobber all over you. Anyways, like the President says, who wants to live in a world run by Germans? They’d make you eat sauerkraut every day and wipe your heinie with a wire brush.”

Teddy laughed, pleased to be talked to this dirty way—the code of a monstrous world that a man evidently grows into. “Aren’t you scared?”

“What’s to be scared of? They see that old red, white, and blue flappin’ away, they’ll run, the dumb Huns. They can push the frogs and Belgies around, but they won’t push real he-men. Anyway, Ted, you take your chances, ain’t that the way of life? You can’t live forever, so why try?”

“You said it,” Teddy said, at heart disagreeing. You could see in the newspapers every day, there were the reckless and foolish, who sinned and suffered for it, and there were others, who played it safe and stayed out of the papers. Now, according to Mother, they had removed eight jagged pieces of metal from Jared’s right shoulder and certain nerves were severed
forever. He had been spared amputation of the arm but would never be able to shake hands the normal way or hold a pen to write—he who had always done everything so easily, tossing a baseball or juggling three apples or scrubbing Teddy’s head with his knuckles while his left arm was crooked like a vise around his little brother’s throat. And all for a war that had nothing to do with us, Mr. Dearholt said, one day when he visited: “The Europeans in Paterson came to this fair city to get away from all the hatreds, centuries of hatreds going back to the days they lived in caves, and here we go over and join in, all to save the international bankers, who are mostly Jewish, as the case seems to be.”

Father, sitting up downstairs in his bathrobe and Turkish slippers, did not agree: it had been necessary, it had been successful, and a lasting peace would result. With Europe rid of its royalty, democracy could take hold even in Germany, where the old autocratic ideas had the most stubborn grip—the darkest part of Martin Luther’s heritage. “Wilson is right—America can no longer hide from the role it must play in the world. We are, as Abraham Lincoln said, the last, best hope of earth.”

Mr. Dearholt just sat there, his glasses and teeth gleaming, not wanting to argue with a sick man, or else still giving him the respect owed a clergyman. Teddy wondered why Mr. Dearholt stuck by Father, when no one else from the church had. There was something in his father worth admiring: the boy held on to that thought.

Jared when he came home, hard of hearing in one ear and his limp arm in a sling, didn’t want to talk about the war, or his experiences in it. Teddy asked him once about the French girls who
aimezed beaucoup
.

“They were there, I guess all right, but it was different than
you pictured it ahead of time. The froggies had set it up as a kind of industry—they’re way ahead of us, with doctors checking out
les poules
every month, for VD—and the officers got the benefit, not your ordinary doughboy. Everything is some kind of business over there, even the church. Nothing’s sacred, believe me. Even the priests drink and eat till they’re red in the face and fat as pigs. Imagine: the war just a few miles away, their country a battlefield for four years, and these waiters in the bistros hurrying and scurrying making a quick franc on the Americans dragged over there to save their lousy froggy hides. If the Germans had broken through to Paris, they would have hurried and scurried for them too. They don’t have our pride, Ted. For all their talk of
gloire
this and
gloire
that from all I saw this glorious war was just a mess of bodies, some dead and some still alive and kicking, and nobody had a notion in hell of what it was all about—why the war had come, or why it was going away. It just happened. Millions died, and it just happened.
C’est la guerre, c’est la vie
. It was weird, the war, how normal it got to be. Guys you know, guys you’ve been beside day and night, suddenly they’re dead—a piece of garbage, like some big white log you step over without thinking much about it, until it begins to stink. I’m not complaining. It could have been a lot worse, personally. At least I kept my sight, I wasn’t gassed like those poor bastards in the Toul, fresh off the boat and sent into battle without masks by officers green as paint. Europe, they can keep it—the frogs, the Krauts. I don’t ever want to cross the fucking-ass Atlantic again.”

Teddy tried to hide his shock at the swear-word, stronger and stranger than any he had heard Jared use before. “So what are you going to do?” Teddy surprised himself with the question; he realized only he could ask it, directly like that—Mother
and Father and Esther were too afraid. They were afraid of Jared since he had come back hardened in a fire they would never experience. Teddy had no desire to experience that fire, or any fire really, but he found that now he loved his brother, which he hadn’t before. And his brother in his thin-lipped way found something in Teddy that he hadn’t needed before—a listening audience before which he could hear himself speak. Wounded people need an audience.