Refiner's Fire (43 page)

Marshall was grateful, and not just because of the wedding. Some of Lydia's friends had flown in from Berkeley and arranged to meet her in a Charleston restaurant. Even at a distance Marshall heard over the phone as they specified in conspiratorial yet booming voices that he not be present. He asked Lydia why, and she replied that they had come to dissuade her from marriage. “They're feminists, and think that marriage is being a prisoner of war. They would rather spend their lives seeking out reflections of themselves in everything that exists. You see, if you are married to a man, he does not present you with a mirror-image. You have to look apart from yourself. They're afraid to do this, imagining that they would be subsumed, and perhaps
they
would be. But I do like them, or at least I used to.”

“Are they against the family?”

"Sure."

“They would really rather see men and women apart?”

“Yes.”

“And what about the children?”

“God help the children.”

This was one area in which Marshall had not a defense in the world, and could not even begin to think clearly enough to argue. He could only feel, and it upset him very much. All his life, he had loved and been thankful for the Livingstons, and, lacking a real father and mother, did not understand how anyone could wish to rid himself of the true attachments for want of which he had been outcast and tormented. He was afraid that they would take Lydia away from him.

“Why?” she asked. “It doesn't make sense. How could they?” Then she realized that such things did not have to make sense—they just swooped down as hard and as surprising as falcons. Marshall was afraid because it had happened to him in a time that he could not even remember. She took him in her arms. “You don't know about these things,” she said. “Of course you don't. Now what can I do? I know. Come to the Palm Restaurant and hide on the roof. It will be dark, and you can get up there. We'll sit in the courtyard, toward the water. It's a late supper, at ten.”

He made his way to the restaurant and struggled two stories up a drainpipe until he reached the roof. Just as he was clear, a Chinese chef brandishing a long knife rushed into the alleyway and, cursing in Mandarin with great ferocity, killed a slew of invisible swordsmen. Marshall groped along terra-cotta tiles until he caught sight of Lydia in the courtyard. As she had said, she was sitting at a table on the bayside. He perched on the roof unseen, squatting with chin in hand like a forgotten gargoyle. From above, he could see the full sweep of her hair. She was wearing a black shawl. He threw a pebble onto her plate. The china rang and everyone looked, but she calmly crossed her legs and scratched her nose.

Then the two young women arrived and embraced and kissed Lydia in a way that made Marshall bristle. He could hear every word of their conversation. First they talked about women; women here and women there, women in literature, women in art. Then they talked about women; women in politics, women in society, women in sports. And then they talked about women; women in the cinema, women in history, women in agriculture.

At dessert they got to the heart of the palm. They wanted Lydia to come with them at that very moment and fly out of Charleston, without even going home to pack, without making a telephone call. They held up a ticket. “Its for you,” they said. “It has your name on it. You can live in the co-operative. Come with us. Be our sister.” With uncharacteristic softness, they looked into her eyes, waiting for her answer. Marshall was clenching his fists, swaying back and forth as if he were watching a boxing match. Lydia had listened silently. They thought they had her, and, for a moment, so did Marshall. What they said was powerful for the times, direct, and daring. There were two of them and only one Lydia, and they were skillful proselytizers, because they depended completely on making others believe what they believed.

“No,” said Lydia. But they didn't take her seriously, and they started up again. She interrupted, saying, “Didn't you hear me? I said no, thank you.” Again they began, as if what she thought meant nothing as long as it did not fit their expectations. This made her rather angry, for she was someone who, most of the time, was taken very seriously.

“Lydia...” they oozed.

“Lydia, shmidia. Do you know what ‘no' means, a nice, tough, assertive, no-nonsense ‘no'?”

“She went soft,” one of them said to the other, and they started to get up.

“Just one minute,” shouted Lydia in rage. “If there's anything soft here, it's your mushy little brain.”

“Where do you think you're going to get, with babies, and a house to run?” they screamed. “In a few years you'll come to us, you'll see, when you want to escape a dead, fascist institution which will rape the life out of you. Marriage is paid rape. There's no such thing as love, except between sisters.”

“You are deranged. Don't tell
me
about getting along in the world. Who was
Summa
? Who won the History Prize? And what did you do? I happen to know what you did. You spent your time staring at your genitals in a mirror—four whole years!” They gasped.

“You could be a
pioneer
they said, unable to escape a world of slogans.

“
You
be a pioneer,” said Lydia. “Go out West. Beat off the Indians.” They gasped again. “I'm going to have a family, and I will love them and be devoted to them. The rest will work itself out. And if that's a dangerous pronouncement in these times, then I choose to live dangerously. I can do it, even if I'm the last woman in the world who does. And you, you self-centered gherkins, keep on riding your endless corkscrew. But stay out of my life.”

Marshall, who had been completely engrossed in the argument, lost his footing on the roof and began to slide. “Oh, no,” he said, desperately clawing the smooth tile, but he continued to slide. “Oh, no,” he said, hurtling off the edge of the roof, ripping his pants on a projection of drainpipe, and flying, as if aimed, right for Lydias table. He landed on his back. The table broke in two and collapsed with a great clatter. A dozen old ladies began to scream uncontrollably, as if in a play when a woman sees a mouse. The two sisters assumed vicious self-defense positions. Marshall stood up quickly and began to hop around on one foot. In the sound of Lydias laughter, his fear of feminism disappeared forever.

Among the hundred guests at the wedding were dozens of admirals and the Secretary of the Navy. The rabbi had forgotten to bring the canopy, so they improvised. They used a damask tablecloth as lustrous as snow, two rifles from the honor guard, and a rake and pitchfork from the garden shed. Levy and Livingston held the rifles, and Rob and a young sailor held the pitchfork and rake, to make a tight canopy which glowed in the sharp morning sun.

Marshall and Lydia stood before the admirals in the garden as the tents were buffeted by the wind. The rabbi said, “They, who in the face of their mortality and in the decadence of their times, who with hearts gentle and true profess their love for one another, today have our blessing. Lord keep them safe.” They smashed the glass. A jet climbed straight as an arrow against a blue and wistful horizon. They embraced, and champagne began once more to flow abundantly in the Levys' garden. Battered gently by the music, couples danced. A young man wrote something on the brim of a girls hat. An officer held the collar of a womans dress and talked at her determinedly as she looked down. A woman in salmon-pink satin had one hand on the table, and the other stretched out holding a champagne glass. The clouds sailed by as sure as the regatta, and Marshall and Lydia were taken up and beyond their control, lost in the music. They turned 'round and 'round on the dance platform oblivious once again of the admirals and the noise. Then they stopped and put their heads together like horses in the field, only to feel a flood of tenderness and love, and their courage tolling about them like a brass bell.

A
COLLECTION
of canopied launches had accumulated by the Battery wall. Sailors in garrison belts rested on piles of Civil War shot, and were brought one barrage after another of wedding food and champagne. At nightfall, the last of the launches pulled away into the smooth water and warm air.

The caterers folded their tents and retreated with the speed and finesse of the French Army. It took them no more than an hour to get everything in the trucks and restore house and garden to their original June splendor. Lydia and Marshall sat in the garden in familiar fashion—back to back. They seldom needed chairs, and were so expert at descent and ascent to and from this position that they operated in the smooth offhand way of acrobats. They looked in separate directions and thought independently, but returned to the same center, their backs warm and touching, and, sometimes, their hands entwined. It became almost an emblem for them, and they thought that if they were to have a coat of arms it would show Marshall and Lydia nonrampant, and a great symmetrical pine.

She gazed at the full darkness of a blossomed tree, listening to its lush spaces. She was thinking about her new name, and it tumbled on her lips as her old name had often done. Lydia Levy had by law and decree become Lydia Pearl. She said them over and over again: “Lydia Levy, Lydia Levy, Lydia Pearl, Lydia Levy Pearl, Marshall Pearl, Marshall Levy, Lydia Levy Marshall Pearl, Marshall Levy Lydia Pearl.” She took yet another sip of champagne (they had decided to drink champagne all night), and the moon in the glass as flat as a quarter and as white as paint reminded her of her new name. It made the glass sparkle, she thought, like Lydia, and the moon was Pearl. There before her clear and reflecting was Lydia Pearl, and the confusion of names and refractions penetrated with her gaze into the softness of the tree, landing as if on a pillow.

Marshall stared at the whitened bay. Leaning against Lydia, he entertained visions of himself as a lustrous fighting fish piercing the waves of the Atlantic. He saw from afar the shimmer of a curved and muscular salmon rising in combat over the waves, and at the same time he felt the leap and the foaming white water, as if his eye had been in the fish, and his skin were smooth and glowing. He pushed against a fast river and went upstream jumping falls and resting in backwaters only to start again, against the water, which had once carried him downward. All around, the sound of breaking waves came rolling at him, and in his mind's eye he leaped another falls, flying in a great arc weightless and abstract.

Then Levy came silently down the path and invited them to his study. “It's a quiet night,” he said. “Do you think you can make it up the stairs?”

In the airy room high above the bay, they sat in a triangular pattern—Levy at his desk, with a bunch of papers spread before him. Marshall felt momentarily perfect and fulfilled, and said, “You read it. So you do ... too much champagne I say.”

“I'll summarize, since they're partly in German.”

“That's fine,” said Marshall, “I couldn't read them in English.”

Levy began, haltingly piecing them together, and then using them as the base for his own narrative. At first, Marshall's and Lydia's thoughts were elsewhere, but then they began to listen intently—if not soberly.

“From ‘Report by Stabseinsatzfuhrer Anton, Lodz, 11 February, 1943': ‘This last Wednesday Bureau 17 received a group of prisoners from the detention camp temporarily set up at the station. All were members of the Polish underground. Several Jews were among them ... two women and three men ... Zelewski, Carnovski, etc.... and Katrina Perlé, a Jewess speaking Russian as native tongue ... prisoners transferred ... Jews given over to custody of SS Obersturmbannführer Rauf.'

“Strangely, here is an excerpt from the ‘Report of the Commander, Group C, Kamentz-Podolsk, 23 September, 1943': ‘Executions have taken place in the following categories: political officials, active communists, thieves and saboteurs, Jews with false papers, NKVD agents, denouncers of ethnic Germans, revengeful and sadistic Jews, undesirable elements, partisans, members of Russian bands, insurgents caught with arms in hand, rebels, agitators, young vagrants, and Jews in general. Appended is a list of those considered most vile and dangerous. They are no more.'

“Katrina Perlé is on this list, and on other lists, and it's always the same. She is captured. She is reported executed. She turns up again. When I was in Europe in the summer of 1950, 1 thought to see if others on the list were alive. It took several months, but the Red Cross found a man who had been on the roster of dead.

“He was in a hospital in Geneva, where I went to see him. His name was Metzner, and he was very sick. I was stupid, and I went in uniform. He didn't trust me. I
came
the
next
day in civilian clothes; he just looked at me and shook his head. He told me a little, but not much. Perhaps he knew nothing more.

“He said that he and Katrina Perlé had escaped, and that for the third or fourth time they had gone back with the partisans. They once came in contact with a dislocated band of the Red Army in Poland, far behind German lines.

“He said that when they first collided face to face deep in the mountains, Katrina fell to her knees on the snow, in amazement, and a tall Russian carrying arms and bandoliers of ammunition rushed to her through the mist and darkness. Evidently they had been in love before the war, and it seemed a miracle that both should be alive in the midst of winter, in a forest of high trees, behind the retreating Wehrmacht.

“I have his words here, as I took them down: ‘On the first beautiful day, they were married. We had very little food and most of us were sick, but we paused for half an hour and the leader at that time, who later was killed, married them. They cut down some vines with berries and that is what they gave one another when they embraced. And they knelt in the snow as she had done when she had first seen him...'”

“And what of my father?” asked Marshall, unexpectedly drawn into a past with which he felt nearly as much intimacy as with his present.