Sleepless Nights (9 page)

Alone? Hadn’t that been the point? Ah, Delacroix said of Rousseau that he had never faced fire except at the kitchen range.

Old English wallpaper, carpets, Venetian mirrors, decorated vases, marble mantelpieces, buzzers under the rug around the dining-room table, needlepoint seats: Alex was making an inventory of Sarah’s Philadelphia house before her mother died. Complaining that there wasn’t an Eakin ... Naturally not ... They weren’t smart enough for that.

On he went. I cannot tell you how badly Sarah and her man have behaved... The smugness, the cheapness... Terrible, terrible clichés. Everything supposed to be of value turned overnight into an item of indictment... My writing, my politics, my life, my friends... Now listen, listen carefully. She had the nerve to say that it was not him...him... not at all. Merely the occasion...yes, she’s capable of that phrase... No, the thing with us had been for a long time, she said. Dead... What a lie.

Everyone says that. I wouldn’t take it seriously.

He was getting drunk. Don’t tell me what to take seriously. I will take what I please.

Their trips, their lacerating frugal trips to Venice, all so painful because of his expansiveness, his natural chic. July visits to the North Shore around Boston, her sister, very boring indeed. There again, handsome yawls swaying down at the pier and brutal economies up at the house.

Listen, Elizabeth, you have no idea how much money these people can get their hands on... They don’t need to buy things... Their comfort is in having the money. And awful opinions—the works, let me tell you. These old Yankees put up a front, but the Bill of Rights doesn’t mean a thing in the crunch. They like to make war as well as anyone else...I am a romantic. I thought they’d all be like the elder Henry James—good, eccentric.
The Secret of Swedenborg
, how about that?... Divine, natural humanity... Remember,
Under the shadow of the Boston State House
... No, the world up there is a desert.

Maybe Sarah didn’t like your having other women...if you did.

If I did? Of course I did. But that isn’t the point... The point is that my fatal type is a plain woman, somewhat stingy, not very interesting...but high-minded in a frugal way... And with her own money to be frugal with... Not a lot, just enough... Enough to make her appear in my dreams like some old loved school principal with the keys, the reports, generations of grades in her head.

Listen, listen, listen, he would beg, and I was thinking that it would pass in a few months, so useful and kind is a quick, devastating disappearance, irrevocable, leaving in the blast of the storm the first seed of amnesia.

Listen. It is the prudish power of these women that attracts me... Beautiful, like thick hair or fine eyes. And the truth is that I have had nothing but the bare necessities from their torpid dollars... The cries of pain over my imprudence ... You wouldn’t believe the thrift of their Christmas presents...A miner’s children come out better... And yet in a funny way they don’t know the value of money... They get the zeros mixed up. Twelve thousand for a house? Isn’t that a lot of money?, they say... Maybe they think it is a hundred and twelve...

He is leaving. Suddenly, at the door, a smile drifted through the darkness of his face. All the bones lit up and the melancholy eyes glittered.

It is pleasant to lay out the evidence.

Up north, in Vermont, I knew two lonely men, furious with abandonment, shivering with ill-luck. One was left by his wife after twenty-five years and the other, after forty years of marriage, outlived his wife. Black, still nights, early snow, empty roads and half the summer houses boarded up, the furniture in icy sheets, the pictures leaving their blank squares on the dead wall, the shades drawn on a sunny afternoon in September, the houses waiting for June, when someone will come to lift the shades again, like pushing back a stone from the mouth of a tomb.

For the men—horror of mistakes in location, living like beasts locked in a stable. The friend betrayed by life was as pitiful as a leper.

We moved here for cheapness, for space to work, to get away from teaching, for the children, the air, the view.

Tell me, G., what is the worst. The quiet?

No, the worst was her feeling that she had done nothing wrong. Nothing wrong...

Had she?

She had done a great wrong. Over a dozen people suffered. I and our three children... They are grown, gone away, but they mind, yes they mind... His wife and his four children ... Did you hear? Four... My mother, her father... Her father was much too ill for this. He died from the devastation of our family...within a few months...

When I said to her, How do you propose to make a life on these corpses? She said, I can only try.

The man whose wife died, died just as they were making a new life, setting themselves in order. They had planned to go from the good to the better; they had retired to the loved summer house. With an improvident madness quite unlike their usual way, this couple, not knowing death was in the garden, raced after perfection. I would rather cook looking toward the south, she said, and so the kitchen was moved from the north. He fell in love with porches in the summer and determined that his heart’s wish was to sit on the porch all winter, and so foundations were laid, great glass windows lay glistening on the lawn and were finally set in place, long evenings over catalogues produced a beautiful Swedish stove, and the splendid new porch changed the shape of the old house, making it and the couple new and daring and full of light.

They were not alone. All the retired people labored and labored for perfection. Additions, new wings, roofs sliced off, stairways turned around, bedrooms on the first floor, trees cut down, trees planted. Profoundly difficult renovations undertaken to make life easier. The children’s inheritance was used up, but one day there would be the house, reshaped often out of childhood dreams and wounds of six decades ago.

And then the wife died, just when all was ready and in harmony.

The large, lonely house in the lovely, lonely northern town. The cold nights and the copper bottoms of the pans slowly losing their sheen. Nothing to smile about in the afternoons on the improvident sun porch. Bachelors again, in their depopulated settings, like large animals in their cages in the zoo, with the name of their species on the door.

Dearest M.: Let me bring you up to date on Alex. He actually got a job in a small college in Ohio. He is working! Is it possible? He has married a plain woman, a nurse, with a job in a hospital. Alex is radical again and has the beard of a terrorist. The students like him and the faculty does not. He lives in a dreadful house and mows the lawn—starting over, poor,
on time
as it were.

T
HE BEARD
of a terrorist, the first refrigerator, the down payment, tools in the garage, the neighbors hosing down the car.

Dear old Alex: I will remember this for you.

I am eighteen years old and here they come, two people from the Communist Party in Cincinnati. The heat is full of dust, the grass is harsh and dry as straw, the dry roots of old flowers are gasping. That is the way it is. It is Sunday. Inside my house, around the dining-room table, there are more people than there are in the Communist Party in the state of Kentucky.

They, the two, have driven up in a gray-snouted car, a pitiful, abused drayhorse, loaded with newspapers and with pamphlets as frayed as last season’s cabbage leaves.

The young woman and the older man are not attractive. They sit down on the porch swing, which moves back and forth on its old chains. Well, this is organizing the South, their tired, peculiar glance seems to say.

They handed me a Browder pamphlet. Popular front period.
Communism Is Twentieth-Century Americanism
. An interesting idea, she says.

I said: I have that in my room upstairs.

Good for you.

They sighed, lost in the downtrodden Sunday air. Are there any
good
people in Lexington? they want to know. Sighing again, listening to the questioning coughs and growls from the Sunday table, they soon leave on their dusty journeys.

Good people? There are some on High Street perhaps. A deteriorating old avenue, running east and west, its history sinking and rising. Nearby are the fraternity houses: whiskey, predatory, vacant-faced young men with their pins and rings and a terrible memory of their drunken singing, their drunken hands on my own drunken breasts.

A transcendental family lived on High Street. They were poor as their ancestors before them, never once brushed by the wing of comfort and savings, never once even on the middle of the ladder, teetering there hopefully. Instead they lived in a dreaming world of ideas which had come to them almost like a missent letter or one of those messages in a bottle that float on currents continents away. The family had learned about Soviet communism and experienced the multifarious tremblings of conversion.

The house—who knows who once owned it or owned it then? It had few of the stems and patches of proprietorship, none of those expanding arms grown over the years. It was painted in the unhappy two tones of tan and brown much in favor at the time. Winter showed the rotting porch of splintered wood against which the canvas summer chairs were propped. This was not, then, their own house, but at one time they were all in it: three generations, old parents, sons and daughters and grandchildren. They were mountain people, perhaps Scotch-Irish descendants of an emigrating crofter.

The father was tall and thin, with thick, straight hair the color of sand. The mother had an abashed and kindly manner, a sparsely fleshed Anglo-Saxon toothless jaw. Her solemn gaze and ruined smile sent forth its message: Appalachia.

The hero of the house was an ill son who lived, skinny and feverish, in an agitated convalescence brightened by passionate ideology. Inside the house in the chill of February, a warm, numbing air of gas stoves seemed to heat the brain more than the bones.

The son lay under a mound of worn blankets, his lively, alert skull, his large ears pressing forward to life against the downward surge of his ill body. He lay under the quilts and under a blanket of papers, as if the old
Daily Workers
could give the body warmth, like rags. Pamphlets and boxes and sacred texts surrounded him, the accumulation of what he referred to, in a singsong rural speech, as “International Communism.”

No doubt the son looked older than he was. He may have been twenty-one or thirty-one. He had thrown himself into a grand engagement, a bizarre far-flung battle that reached out from an arsenal of strange sounds, the peculiarly pronounced but well-understood mottoes of Marxist-Leninism, the slogans of party belief. The names of European Communists, of Togliatti and Thorez, enshrined home figures like Mother Bloor, the reviewers, writers and propagandists of
The New Masses
—an extraordinary oratorio, high notes and low, poured forth from the head jutting out of the covers. Dictatorship of the proletariat, the masses, the ruling class, the
lumpen
, the vanguard.

Sometimes, when his health was better, he might be seen hobbling down High Street to Main, rushing on to the great cathedral, the Post Office, the giver and receiver of life. Mail, papers, reports, rebuttals, accusations and counteraccusations, denunciations and affirmations: in this whirlpool he swam.

Confessions, executions and trials, bad news, came to the son, whose name was Lyle, as news in small print, not the main story. They might have been a long table of figures at the end of a thesis, or footnotes for a specialist. Here he was, a provincial acolyte, and what went on in the vague and thrilling transformed land came to him as murmurings of misrepresentation, bias reported by enemies. Turning pale, his throat a quivering rope, in a dejection of mind but never without hope, the son struggled for sanity. Poor young man. No one knew him and he knew no one, no one in the news, not one of the names so richly near to his thoughts. No policeman sought him out and only the mailman wondered about him.

The frenzy of politics in the battered house, the obscure discussions in the high mountain accents, the knowledge in the yellowing newsprint, surplus value, superstructure. Into the place of love and ambition, of envy and pride there had grown instead the most consuming of the passions, politics, to fill every cell of being.

So far as I know, the family has gone. How can you tell about people who have never been in the phone book? Sometimes they disappear, as into a collapsing mine shaft. Off some place or back to some place. Black people moved into the tan-and-brown house. New themes to mingle with the dust of the old ones.

Lyle was friendly with another native “red” who had the look of a clever turkey. This friend, an isolated, gawky gnostic, always rolling cigarettes, weak-chested and yet energetic, was mysterious. There was something quarrelsome about him although he did not quarrel; it was perhaps that one felt he was engaged in a silent disputation in his head. With his long gobbler’s neck, his little mustache, his lidded turkey eyes, he looked like a small-town detective and yet he was the opposite of that. He himself was the one most likely to feel a hand on his wrist and an official voice saying: Come with me. He talked very little, but with a funny nicotine grin he would say that he had been born in October 1917. Under the very star and sign of the Revolution. Born in Ohio, just over the border.

For a time he had a small office, a shack near the old railroad station. There he ran off sheets on a mimeograph machine, sheets which announced meetings few attended except for an occasional troublemaker, the contentious radical university students who were Socialists or Trotskyites. Ruthlessly they attacked Mason—that was his name, first or last—and the blur of his cigarette eyes thickened almost to blindness.

Mason at least knew one pure, perfect joy. That was to go to the polling station near the courthouse and to write in the names of Communist Party candidates on election day.

Marie, Marie, in your cloudy eyes there is the same misty defense against apostasy that recalls to me Mason in his stubborn cigarette clouds. Marie was much later, a rich young woman who spoke in a drifting voice of Building Socialism. Socialism appealed to her as a more pleasant word than communism, or perhaps there was a flutter of prudence in the preference.