The Hair of Harold Roux (40 page)

“There is almost nothing I can’t do with the equipment in this room,” the Colonel said, waving at the big oily machines, the steel cabinets housing other tools, the racks across the room of wood and metal stock.

“It’s a beautiful workshop,” Allard said. Memories of childhood’s frustrations and lack of power haunted him in this room full of machines that could actually do things. To
be able to weld, for instance, had always been miraculous to him, far beyond his resources. To take two pieces of steel, the seemingly God-shaped hardness of the metal, and to join them together as one unit, as you wanted them to be—a miracle. Or to have any machine with those magical horses inside harnessed and working for you, so that all you had to do was conceive of the design and with calm, unstrained hands guide that power into your service.

He felt the Colonel’s sense of completeness, of place here. To have everything you wanted in one neat, known place was appealing. But of course he still had to travel. Places called to him, new and strange places where there would be adventures not related to property at all. Later, when he had been everywhere, perhaps. He thought of the apartment he and Mary would share, the calm work he would do. It all seemed now on a far shore, waiting for him warmly and patiently, but it would be some time before he arrived there.

After a few moments of admiring silence they hung up their white smocks in the wardrobe, took their sherry glasses from the bench where they had put them upon entering the workshop (alcohol and machines don’t mix, Allard seemed to hear) and went back upstairs to rejoin Harold and the ladies.

Mary was smiling as she listened to Morgana’s loud voice. Allard thought of a parrot, but Morgana’s voice hadn’t that metallic tonelessness; it was just that the voice was too large for the small person it came from.

“… of course not a thing Hamilcar would have anything to do with,” she was saying.

“Did I hear my name?” the Colonel said.

“Can’t I talk about you, Hamilcar?”

“As long as you don’t bore our visitors, my dear.”

Morgana laughed at the absurdity of this idea.

Harold, quite serious all of a sudden, said in an aside to Allard, “I’d like to talk to you.”

“Okay.”

“Not now. Can you come back?”

“You mean without Mary.”

“Yes, exactly.”

This was high seriousness indeed. A little guilty-feeling, but being lectured to by Harold was for some reason interesting all the same. And then there was the idea of the party, which he would have to broach to Harold with some care.

“All right. After supper? Say about seven-thirty or eight?”

Harold seemed surprised that he didn’t ask what their talk would be about.

When he left Mary off at her dormitory Allard said, “I won’t be seeing you tonight. Harold wants to talk to me.”

“What about?” She frowned, worried.

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask. But I imagine it will be Harold the Protector of Catholic Virgins night.”

“Very funny.”

“That’s the spirit, Mary. You know, I think you’re getting over the awfulnesses.”

“I don’t know why I love you.”

“Because I don’t treat you like the Virgin Mary?”

“You don’t know anything about the Virgin Mary.”

“I’m sorry, Mary, but you know I’ve got to convert you to my religion!” He laughed, the sounds coming up unbidden, a kind of mild hysteria.

He was in nearly the same mood when Harold met him back at Lilliputown that evening. He put the Indian Pony on its stand next to Harold’s Matilda and followed Harold to his room off the foyer of the Town Hall, a comfortable room much larger than Harold’s former room in Parker Hall. Here was his easy chair, a long wooden desk, his books in a bookcase, even a well-worn leather davenport and a glass-topped coffee table. Harold, or someone, had decorated the dark, brownish room with old sporting prints and a Currier and Ives. It might have been a room in Harold’s novel, say a reading alcove off the Ravendon library.

Harold poured them beers in tall, narrow pilsner glasses.

“Hey. Fancy,” Allard said. “Cheers!”

“I wanted to talk to you,” Harold began.

“Don’t you have a bed? Or is this just your sitting room?”

“It’s in the wall. It’s a Murphy bed.”

“Like in Charlie Chaplin?”

“Yes,” Harold said, annoyed.

“Harold, I’m sorry. I’m in a strange mood. End of semester and all that sort of rot, eh?”

“I wish you’d be serious for once. I’m worried about Mary and I want to talk seriously with you. Did you know she missed two finals?”

“Yes, but it’s all right. With a
4
.0 average you can do nothing wrong in college. You know that.”

“I’m not worried about her flunking out, I’m desperately worried about
her
”

“Well, what am I supposed to do?”

He listened as Harold spoke about his and Mary’s basic incompatibility because of upbringing, religion, and especially because of (said with a certain hesitant delicacy) Allard’s being essentially not right for her because, er, well, he didn’t, couldn’t, appreciate a lady of Mary’s delicacy and refinement—spiritual refinement—and in fact when one came right down to it Allard was too much of a different kind of person entirely for Mary. He listened, but in flashes his mind was off”, thinking of Mary, of Naomi, of women and what in God’s name they found so powerfully fascinating in men. Compared to their loveliness a man seemed to have very little to offer. Perhaps a strange fusion happened in a woman’s mind (tenderness as he thought of a woman’s mind thinking of a man) concerning the wideness of shoulders, the narrow buttocks of a man that were more tensely vigorous than the misty, acquiescent tenderness of a woman. That, and possibly the increment of a child only a man could set swimming toward her womb. Maybe. But no, we use powers we don’t understand, can’t understand. He did know that Mary now wanted to exist in his shadow, to have him dominant and near, and he had known this would happen. She trembled, she hummed within her nerves, she had become too intensely a mirror for each of his thoughts and attitudes. She waited for
him, always waiting, he knew. She considered him a real man, the man, and most of the time he didn’t quite recognize that quality in himself. He was twenty-one, a veteran of many things in the past, and the future seemed full of reality, but the present was less definable. Actually he was only a student, that gelding state in the eyes of the real world. What he would do later would be real and substantial. Now was limbo, a sort of limbo, but he felt that it wasn’t any sort of limbo to Mary. Yes, and a darker side was that he thought himself an uncrowned prince who would come into his inheritance someday; would Mary Tolliver be the consort of the future prince?

“Oh, you’re probably right, Harold,” he said. “But love conquers all, doesn’t it?”

“Do you love Mary?” Harold asked slowly, as though Allard were about to take an oath.

“I swear on the shop manual of my Indian Pony I love Mary.”

“Will you be
serious
?” Harold was really angry now, willing to endanger their friendship. Allard was fond of Harold; he did recognize the differences between people like Harold and Mary and people like himself.

“I’m sorry, Harold.”

Harold took a deep breath and a little color came into his face, emerging in his skin as a delicate shade of olive. “Because,” he said. “Because I’m really afraid that without really knowing it, without being responsible, you two might fall into something that neither of you will foresee …”

Allard waited, wanting to laugh but at the same time embarrassed for Harold, who was trembling with nervousness now.

“Because you’re both very young and won’t know what you’re doing until it’s too late …”

“Yes?”

“I mean that in a moment of passion you might go all the way.
That’s
what I mean. I happen to know how much Mary is infatuated with you, Allard!”

“I’ll try not to hurt her, Harold.”

“Don’t joke, Allard. You won’t know how powerful the sins of the flesh can be until it’s too late.”

Ah, Harold, Harold, he thought. What a sweet gentle naive prince you are. Once Harold had told him about a girl friend he’d had in the army, a WAAC private first-class named Mary Ann Waltzel, and had even shown him a letter he’d received from her after she had been transferred to Fort Benning, Georgia.

Dear Harold,

Well, here I am at Fort Benning and I don’t know whether I am going to like this set up or not. My commanding officer I am told is a big bull dyke. She is from Alabama and looks like General Patton without the six shooters. I will sure be glad when I get out of this woman’s Army.

How are you? I will never forget how nice you were to me, Harold. I think you are the nicest person that ever came into my whole stupid life.

Love ever,
Mary Ann

In spite of the chummy, companionable, even somewhat hard-bitten tone of Mary Ann’s letter, Harold had been embarrassed and offended when Allard asked if he had slept with her.
Of course not
! They went to movies and played honeymoon bridge and talked. But didn’t you even try? Allard asked.
No, and don’t pretend you’re so experienced either, Allard Benson. I know better
!

Well, Allard wasn’t going to argue about it now because it was useless and it would endanger Harold’s receptivity toward the party, which would have to be presented as a chaste, dignified affair all around.

Harold said, “Don’t hurt her, Allard.”

“Look, I do love Mary. What if I said I was going to marry her?”

“I’d be appalled. You aren’t about to become a Catholic
and it would be a very unhappy situation for her. A tragic situation.”

“You’re right about the Catholic part. To tell you the truth I went to Mass with her family half expecting to be impressed, but I wasn’t. It all seemed sort of mechanical. And the priest gave a talk about motherhood that was really creepy. I mean that priest was really strange.”

“What that particular priest was like has nothing to do with it. It’s deeper and has to do with the truth.”

“The truth!”

“Yes, the truth. You may be young and proud and self-confident and think you don’t need God, but you’re wrong. I fear for your immortal soul.”

“Oh, come on.”

“You are not a complete man. Without God you are not complete. You cannot make your own sacraments.”

“Well, I still don’t think I’m a total shit, Harold.”

“No, and that’s the tragedy. You’re really a very sweet person underneath.”

Allard thought he wouldn’t go quite so far as that, himself, but on that milder note he brought up the subject of the party, emphasizing its sedateness, its farewell-for-the-summer cheeriness and so on. “And we won’t mess up the area, either. We’ll police up the trash and leave the place as clean as ever. Just a small gathering of old friends havin’ a brew or two and a hot dog, singin’ some good old songs ‘neath the spoony Juny moon …” Now stop that, damn it. Why couldn’t he keep that tone down?

Harold considered the idea. “Well, I don’t know. The Imminghams won’t be here all next week. They’ll be in Boston. But I don’t know, it might be all right. It might be a nice idea, really. If we just have a few nice people. Yes, I can’t see why anybody would object. All right, I’ll ask the Imminghams if it’s okay.” Having come to this decision Harold drew a deep breath and let it out.

“Great, Harold. It’s been sort of an odd year. And you
did manage to escape the clutches of Boom Maloumian, The Mean Armenian. I suppose that alone is worth celebrating.”

“Getting out of that dormitory was the best thing that ever happened to me, Allard. Fm serious. I feel I have some dignity now.” He looked around at his high-class digs. “And the Imminghams. I can’t tell you how much they’ve meant to me.” Harold was getting emotional, his eyes growing misty over the Imminghams. “They’re so kind, so thoughtful, so
honorable
, Allard!”

He knew Harold had a final in the morning so he left early. As he rode back through the campus to the town square he noticed that the lights were on in Herbert Smythe’s apartment over the pharmacy. Though Herbert might indeed be an ass, he was probably owed an apology. Also, Naomi might be there and he wanted to try to talk to her, to get all the bad feelings over and done with. She was Mary’s roommate after all, and ought to be invited to the party. Yes, she should come to the party, bringing Herbert if she wanted to, or maybe she could be Harold’s date. Poor frozen Harold; maybe she’d be good for him. But let’s be honest, Allard, let’s be honest now. All other considerations aside, Naomi is your burnished, beautiful animal, the dark one, the one with the unshaven armpits smelling of myrrh, and you haven’t been with her a long time now. No, it was more complicated than that. It truly was more complicated than that.

Still wondering what he was doing, he parked the Indian Pony at the curb and climbed the dentist-smelling stairs toward Herbert’s apartment, thinking that he ought to be ashamed to show his face there after the scandalous way he had behaved last time. But he wasn’t. None of the people he might find there seemed totally real to him—the men, that is. Naomi and Use Haendler seemed real people infected by their crazy, unreasonable Stalinism, but the men all seemed to have been dissolved by their beliefs into shadows and cutouts. Several
of Herbert’s male troops were physically bigger than Allard, but it was impossible to think of them as threats to him no matter how bloody the situation.

When he knocked on the door the room behind it immediately grew silent. Suspicion was so palpable he could almost smell it over the medicinal fumes of the hallway. The door was opened, finally, by the deprived boy in the steel-rimmed GI glasses, whose shin Allard had damaged on his last visit. The deprived boy stepped back, his small face defensive, suspicious, and Allard confronted all of them, the same deep disapproval on all their faces. Most of Herbert’s group was there—Herbert himself, Naomi, Use, a small girl in a dirndl dress whose name Allard had forgotten but who was the new mimeograph girl, and several men or boys. Their faces were like cold walls, all denning him, walls people were stood against to be shot. He was the enemy, he supposed, the real enemy: not a mere misled fascist dupe who might be converted, but a nasty ironist, a creature of no faith.