Rubicon Beach (29 page)

He asked her out twice and twice she refused. The third time she said, “I want to drink whisky tonight. Come if you’d like.” He said, “It’s not legal,” and she laughed and walked away. He followed and she led him to a blue speakeasy down a back flight of steps where the patrons drank and danced to Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines playing “West End Blues,” and she barely paid attention to him. She got a little drunk and the two of them stumbled down the street under the eyes of the cops until they arrived at the brownstone of her father and mother. He had assumed she no longer lived with her father and mother. “I assumed you wouldn’t get along with them,” said Jack, “on account of the politics.” She laughed again. “They decided I’d only be wilder on my own,” she said. “Besides Daddy has a soft spot for his princess.” She leaned into the front door beneath the light of a gas lamp; up the street the iceman dropped a white glassy block from the back of his truck. She looked at the Indian virgin in hot silence. “What now?” he finally said, his mouth dry. “Utopia,” she answered, and opened the door and pulled him in. “But your parents,” he said, and she curled her lip and sneered, “College boy.” The seduction took place at the bottom of her father’s stairway, her claws predatory and her moans provocatively unrestrained. When it was over she laughed, “You do it like a bourgeois. Tenderly.”

Nothing but trains. I moved into the far wing of one of the outer dormitories and stared out my window at the convergence of tracks. I went with Leigh to her political meetings and met her political people. “This is a college boy,” she told them. For utopians who espoused a brotherhood of man, they had impressive reserves of contempt. Later she asked what I thought of them and I explained I wasn’t a political person. Everyone’s a political person, she said. I attended the speakeasies, new subversive that I now was. Sometimes Leigh made love with me and sometimes she didn’t. Let’s say she never did me any favors. She got it when she wanted it. She took it till she was full of my Indianness, till she had drunk the quarter of my juices that came from the underwater cave of my mother. I went mad for her. Sleeping alone I slumbered into Leigh-madness and woke one night to the black roar of trains and the knowledge that this madness, it was my new number, beyond desire. Beyond justice. The communication of the maternal blank of my past with my most passionate dream, the most untouchable part of my integrity. What I felt for her was the new place beyond nine; when I entered her I was on a far journey into what I was capable of being. I was the anarchist of passion in an age when passion was a country.

Pop and I got into it one night in the city. We were supposed to meet at Gene the Wop’s for supper, off Clark; I was late and didn’t arrive until he’d finished his meal. He glared at me as I walked in. I also smelled of bourbon. “You’ve been in a speakeasy,” he whispered. “I thought you’d changed your mind about prohibition,” I answered, and all he said was, “Law’s still the law.” Then he saw some of Leigh’s handouts I had with me. “Oh you’re a bolshevik now,” he said. “No,” I said, and forlorn pain shot through me because I thought of her and wished I was a bolshevik, I kept thinking I’d gladly be one if it got me Leigh, and yet the fact was that, for some reason inside me I couldn’t understand, I wouldn’t be one, glad or any other way. From there on Pop and I just began yelling at each other across the table, and the more I thought of Leigh the worse it got. Finally he just pushed away, stood up and put on his coat, and walked out without a word; it was the last conversation we had in a while, until my uncle died.

In the face of the Depression, as he struggled to save his paper, in the face of his estrangement from his son as he struggled to save his family, Jack Mick Senior received a letter one day from Bart’s wife, Melody. By now Bart was nearly sixty. The early sexual disappointments of the marriage had come to be, after ten years, profound failures as his wife, past thirty, lived in the late afternoon of her fertility. “These things never mattered to me,” Melody wrote, “but he doesn’t believe this.” She was frantic. He drank all the time. “There’s one soul prohibition never saved,” Jack said bitterly to Rae. “I can’t continue with this much longer,” Melody went on. “I don’t know what to do.” Two months later she left him.

 The last time Leigh and Jack made love it was at twilight on a cold May day down by the water, where she unzipped and straddled him, her coat pulled around her neck and a flurry of revolutionary announcements flung from her fingers. “Damn you,” she snarled in his ear when they had finished, and he knew by the way she looked at him as she left that he would never have her again. In the subsequent nights he continued to wake to the black roar of the trains and the despair of an irretrievable connection with her; and he would throw the sheets from him and go to his dark window naked, erect and aroused, standing in the window and pressing his whole body against the glass so as to freeze the black roar of his veins. He supposed he could put out the fire this way. To the tracks below, to the country beyond them, he called her name, and the hardness burst beneath him, the wet white of him rivering off into the beyond country; and he called her again. Later he could not remember how long he stood there or how many times he said it.

On the day of John Michael’s commencement Bart died, some six months after Melody had left him. The father and son accepted a mutual truce long enough to journey to Milwaukee, where they and Rae spent the afternoon with Bart’s daughter and her own children. Most of these hours were taken up with a general discussion among members of the family about the tragedy of Bart’s end and his awful second wife. Bart’s awful first wife—that is, his daughter’s mother—went unmentioned. Jack Mick Senior did not comment on any of this except once when he interrupted a rather euphemistic autopsy report to say, “Medical complications due to kidney disorder hell: the man drank himself to death.” After that the entourage traveled to the mortuary together amidst the continuing castigation of Melody Lake. The mortuary was small and filled with light; the open casket was at the front. The family filed in and there in the corner of the room, in an empty row, Melody sat sobbing with such a spastic grief that John Michael couldn’t imagine she would ever stop. Her face was invisible in her hands and she choked with desolation, gasping. The family stood watching in cold mortification.

And I was looking at her, and I was thinking that someone crying like this could never stop, and then I saw my father walk over to her and touch her gently on the shoulder and just rub his hand back and forth on her arm, over and over. I guess my cousins were stunned. My mother’s eyes had that way-back look in them. And my father stood there a long time, rubbing her shoulder over and over, not saying anything as she clutched the bottom of his coat and held on. It was the greatest thing I ever saw anyone do for any one. He didn’t care whether the family liked it or not. It didn’t matter that the last of his brothers was gone, well of course it mattered, it mattered in that he’d lost everything of his childhood, but it mattered a little less than the fact there was this stricken woman alone in an empty row who needed the mercy of the living to survive the judgment of the dead. And my father stood there alone with her, and all I wanted was to know that sometime in my life I would do something as good. “She gave him the worst moments of his life,” someone said to him later. “She gave him the best too,” he answered. That night we sat in our house by the fire where I had found the two brothers so stunned on that morning years earlier, returned from the west; and my father remembered all the nights they had sat there, back to when I was an infant sleeping in a bed by the heat, and they talked about the war and whether we’d be getting into it or not and how Jack Johnson lost the heavyweight championship of the world. Now on this night he said to me gently, “Go easy on the drinking, son,” thinking I guess of our argument in Gene the Wop’s and how I had smelled of bourbon. I flushed with shame. “I will, Pop,” I said. We had fights to come; we were still different. But not on this night.