Power (47 page)

“Don't tell me that, Al. Nobody tells me that, Al.”

I shrugged and ordered another drink for her.

“Now you're sore at me again.”

“I'm not,” I wasn't; I was too filled with grief. I think that it was grief for myself, and that Lena was right when she said that we weep for ourselves and not for others.

“Poor Al,” she whispered. “Poor Al, poor Mark, poor Ben. It's a lousy sleigh ride. I wish Dotty was here. She's good to me. She's good to everyone, a stinking saint, like Mark. Why don't you marry her, Al? Why don't you ask her to go away with you? Why don't you give her a chance? I never gave Mark a chance, but I didn't love Mark. You love Dotty, don't you?”

“No,” I replied. “I don't.”

“Ah, that's a lie. We're all liars—you, me, everyone. We keep telling ourselves that there's something noble and worthwhile, and when we get afraid, we turn to Mark and look at him. No more Mark. No more nothing.”

Later, I helped her up to her room. I took off her shoes and covered her, turned out the lights, and went to my own room. The undertaker had called and left word to call him back, no matter how late it was. When I phoned him, he told me that we had never settled what kind of embalming Mark was to have. The undertaker pointed out that usually he hesitated to recommend the most expensive type of embalming, because it was about twice the cost of the ordinary kind. But since then, he had probably checked the credit of the International Miners Union, and now he was certain that it would not be safe to put the body in transit without the expensive embalming. I told him to go ahead and spare no cost. After all, the union could afford it, just as the union could afford my five whiskies and Lena's seven whiskies.

I took off my jacket and vest and tie, and then kicked off my shoes and sat on the edge of my bed. I looked around the standardly equipped hotel room, with its ivory walls and its Renoir reproductions, its twin beds and its two overstuffed chairs—and I tried to recollect how many times I had inhabited such rooms and where they were and whether there was any essential difference in the bleakness of each. The small adventure into memory was fruitless, as most such adventures are. I was tired, yet I had no desire to sleep. As they say, I attempted to compose my thoughts, and reflected that somewhere I had read or heard that the first requisite for composure is a man's decent respect for himself. I lacked the first requisite. I had no respect for myself. I had no respect for what I was, what I did, or for what I ever might be. I could not even be properly sorry for Mark Golden, for in some way that was entirely beyond my understanding, Mark Golden had fulfilled himself. I blamed the five whiskies for the notion that he had come to earth, done his work, and departed. Aloud, I said, “That is pure, unadulterated horse-shit, and if it's the best you can do, then it's time that you departed.” But I had no inclination toward departure. Without any strong or principled desire to live, I was possessed of no pressing need to die. I was possessed of nothing. I was just a little bit drunk and possessed of nothing when the telephone rang. It was Ben Holt calling from Detroit.

“I tried to reach you before,” he said. “This is a hell of a note about Mark. It knocked me over. I never expected anything like this.”

“He was run-down,” I said. I didn't know what else to say.

“I guess so. Where did it happen?”

“In a restaurant.” I told him the details about where it had happened and how it had happened.

“Did he have much pain?”

“I don't know. Not much, I guess.”

“I'm glad there wasn't much pain. My God, Al, I never expected anything like this. It couldn't have happened at a worse time—a more crucial time.”

“That was thoughtless of Mark.”

“Don't be such a goddamned wise guy. Mark never did a thoughtless thing in his life. Do you know what I'm into up here? Ten thousand workers are holed up in the biggest automobile plant in these United States. Did you hear me, Al? Ten thousand workers.”

“I heard you.”

“Do you wonder that I need Mark?”

“Mark's dead.”

“I know that, God damn it, that's it. Try to understand my position, Al. Just listen to me and try to understand it. This is a sit-down strike. The workers in the largest factory in the world under one roof just laid down their tools and sat down. Closed the plant and locked themselves in, and they're going to stay there until the company gives them a proper union contract. There's never been a real union in this rotten industry—and suddenly these auto workers take the most militant action in the whole history of the labor movement. And so help me God, no one knows exactly what is happening. Should management break into the plant? There'll be a blood bath if they do. Should the governor take over? Should he use the militia? Every goddamn one of these questions, and they call me in here to lead the thing. Al, I'm blind. For twenty years, I never took a step without Mark putting the go-ahead signal on it, and now he leaves me here with this—”

“It's a damn shame,” I agreed.

“Are you drunk?”

“A little, yes.”

“I can understand that,” Ben said sympathetically. “How do you feel right now?”

“Lousy.”

“Did you make all the arrangements? I mean the body and what to do with it?”

“I made them.”

“All right. Al, I got to have you here—now. Get a good night's sleep, and take the first plane in the morning for Detroit.”

“I can't, Ben.”

“What do you mean, you can't. Al, I tell you it's absolutely necessary.”

“We're taking Mark's body back to Pomax, and I'm going to Pomax for the funeral.”

“Of all the crazy notions! Mark has no family in Pomax.”

“He has no family anywhere else.”

“Whose idea was this?”

“Lena's.”

“Yes—Lena,” Ben said, and then he hesitated for a moment before he asked, “How is she?”

“Rotten.”

“She took it hard?”

“How do you suppose she took it?”

“All right. If she wants the body shipped back to Pomax, there's nothing wrong with that. But I want you here in Detroit tomorrow.”

“No,” I said. “I'm going with Lena, Ben. I can't leave her alone.”

“Look, Al—this is Ben. Don't make sentimental speeches to me. The whole world is exploding here in Detroit. Doesn't that mean anything to you? A week from now, we can be out of business or have the beginning of the biggest labor movement in the world. This is everything we ever dreamed of.”

“I know that, Ben,” I agreed wearily. “I know that. But I have to go back to Pomax with Lena.”

Finally, he agreed. I would meet him in Detroit a day or two later. But he couldn't forgive Mark for dying at a time like this. And apparently, he had forgotten all about the house he had sent me to Washington to buy, or at least a picture of the same.

 

5

The day they buried Mark Golden in Pomax was clear as crystal and cold as ice, the sky a burnished blue and the wind pouring down out of the north and sighing through the crisp, bare branches of the birches. Jack Mullen had gone to Detroit with Ben, leaving Oscar Suzic and Gus Empek at Pomax. Of their own accord, they had called a day's stoppage, and two thousand diggers turned out for Mark's funeral. They followed the casket down the street to the edge of town, to the Orthodox cemetery where Mark was buried. There was no difficulty about that. A priest in Pomax could hardly hew to the hard edge of rule or prejudice, and when the union contributed two hundred dollars to the Church fund, a small corner was found where, by stretching a point, the ground could be considered a little less than hallowed. We sent a car to Cairo for a rabbi, and he read the Hebrew prayers while the bearded Orthodox priest stood by and watched. Altogether, it was more thoughtful care and consideration than we had ever shown for Mark while he was alive, and a scrupulous attention to detail that was alien to all he believed in. But the dead do not argue these things.

The rabbi was impressed. As he and the Orthodox priest shared a drink, he wondered whether there was any precedent for this kind of thing and said that it had a symbolic meaning beyond the fact of the burial. I couldn't see any symbolism in it, and as it was very cold, we soon left to go our separate ways.

Dorothy took Lena home with her, and since there was no other place in which to pay our respects, Gus and Oscar and old Dan Jessup and one or two of the older miners came to Dorothy's house for a little while. They had a few drinks and tried to express something of the very real feeling they had had for Mark, and then they left. I remained there with Lena and Dorothy. Norah was away at college this year, and Sam and Ben, Jr., oversized, pimply-faced boys of sixteen and fifteen respectively, uncomfortable and somber in the presence of death, excused themselves and hid in their rooms. We three sat in the living room, drinking tea and trying to remember Mark with conversation, simply in terms of our own need for self-respect.

At forty, Dorothy Holt was still an attractive and desirable woman, somewhat subdued, her hair beginning to streak with gray, but slim and tight-skinned. She had been deeply disturbed at Mark's passing, perhaps more deeply, in a manner, than either Lena or myself; for here in Pomax, Mark had been a pillar of support and sustenance to her. The rare moments when they had played together, Mark on his violin and Dorothy at the piano, had been very rich and much anticipated events, breaking an otherwise unexciting existence. Mark had also played the role of confidant and father confessor, and had seemed to impart in her at least an illusion of security. The illusion was gone now, and suddenly Dorothy seemed utterly bereft.

I spoke about the funeral, and said that Mark would have liked it—only miners, and no one else, to mourn him. Lena said that when you are dead, it makes little difference what you like or dislike. She was very tired, and Dorothy persuaded her to go upstairs and lie down for a little while. I remained in the living room, while Dorothy took Lena to the bedroom. When Dorothy returned, she said that she had never seen Lena this way before.

“She's never been this way before. She's never been without Mark before.”

“I suppose not,” Dorothy agreed. “Did she take it very badly when Mark—when he died?”

“She took it badly.”

“I never thought she really loved Mark. I thought—”

“Mark loved her,” I said.

“Yes. I suppose that meant a great deal.”

“I don't know. Maybe it did, maybe it didn't. Sometimes I feel that Lena's like myself—”

“How?” Dorothy asked me after a long moment. “How do you mean that, Al?”

“Waste. You look back, and it seems that it's all wasted. You try to understand why it should have been that way, and it's blurred and unclear, and none of it makes very much sense.”

“For God's sake, Al,” Dorothy cried, “how much sense does anyone's life make? The waste is everywhere you look. Do you think you and Lena are so exceptional? We live in a time when the whole world's a wasteland—last spring a million cabbages dumped into the river, a thousand tons of corn burned while people starve, apples rotting on trees because it's not worthwhile to pick them and ten million men rotting in hopelessness and idleness. Or the waste in Spain now, with this filthy war started and Franco riding in there on his white horse, or the waste in Germany with that terrible man, Hitler! At least you made something and Lena made something and Mark made something.”

“What?”

“The union. Hope and life for half a million men who lived for so long without it.”

“Not me or Lena or Mark. Ben did that.”

“Really? Do you think so?”

“He did it. I know—I watched. That's all I did, I watched. Like he's doing it now in Detroit.”

“You're a fool, Al!” she cried.

“Thank you.”

“Stop that! Look at yourself for once, Al!”

“I've looked.”

“Don't you want anything? Haven't you ever wanted anything?”

“I've wanted,” I nodded. “But I never really knew what I wanted, and if I had, I wouldn't have known how to take it.”

“You gave it all to Ben,” she said, smiling ruefully. “You, Gus Empek, Oscar, Jack—oh, it's such a long list—and Mark too. Mark did it in his own, peculiar Jewish way. Let me suffer for the sins that others have visited upon my fellow man. His whole existence was a passage of guilt. I never knew what he atoned for, but his life was an endless act of atonement—”

“For being present in the company of human beings,” I said sourly.

“Al!”

“I'm sorry, Dotty.”

“Al, why don't you take Lena and get away from here? Go away for a month, both of you, and give something to each other. God knows, you have it coming to you.”

“Two reasons, Dotty. One, Ben needs me in Detroit.”

“Ben needs you in Detroit,” she repeated scathingly. “What a fool you are, Al!”

“You said that before.”

“Then it wants saying again. Ben doesn't need—he takes. There's a difference, or don't you know that there is?”

“Needing and taking—”

“There are people who need and can't take. And there are people who take without any need.”

“There's another reason,” I said dully. “I'm not in love with Lena. She's not in love with me.”

“Who are you in love with, Al? Do you think you're in love with me?”

“I don't know. If I did, I'd ask you to go away with me.”

“I wouldn't go,” Dorothy smiled. “You know that.”

“Naturally. Ben wouldn't want you to.”

“Go to hell,” she said.

“I've been there—there and back. Why don't you leave me alone? Go up and see how Lena is.”

“Lena's all right. I want to talk to you.”