The Man Who Cried I Am (24 page)

“How was the year for you, Regina?” he asked.

“I was tempted to call you Christmas. It was too much for me again.”

You did call, Max thought, sadly, and it would have been too much. Christmas, Chanukah, Bob in the bosom of his family (yours dead), Bob in someone else's pants besides hers and his wife's. Well, it was all a part of Regina's thing, apologizing to hell and back for being alive with the rest of her family dead. The holidays were bad. Then (she had told him) she usually checked into a mental clinic, or friends did it for her, afraid of what she might do to herself after her ten-times-a-night calls.

“Hi, there! This is Regina Goldberg Galbraith. Oh, you know who this is. Well! Merry Christmas! Happy Chanukah! God, I feel so lonely. What are you doing tonight? I thought you might take a few moments out to talk to me. It's good I have a friend like you to talk to when I feel this way. Where will you go Christmas? What will you do? Max [it was the call last Christmas] we are friends, right? You'd let me talk to you anytime if I needed someone to talk to, wouldn't you? I'd let you talk to me anytime if you were a little ill. I mean, if we were very good friends, true friends. Last night, Max, I called a man, just to talk to. I was
very
ill.” (Max had not asked if it was Bob.) “He said he would come over and stay with me for a while. I said not to sleep with, I didn't want to sleep with him, and he said yes, he understood and he came over and after a while we were on the rug, the red rug on my floor, and he made me go put in my diaphragm and we both got naked and he made love to me on the rug, oh, he fucked me and he fucked me in dirty places and I felt very dirty, dirty, Max, ohhhh, so dirty, and I thought he would stay with me after that, but he got up and left and I cried and cried, then I got up to look for my pills, but I must have hidden them from myself or—maybe he took them! Yes! He took them from the medicine chest! [Max listened and felt a chill creeping upward from the middle of his spine until it fuzzed somewhere in the front of his head.] Now I have no more pills!” She said the last, Max remembered, with a scream.

She had continued to scream and moan and Max had tried to calm her down. “Max! I need someone
now!
Come over, Max. I've no pills, what'll I do, what'll I do?”

“Whiskey,” Max had suggested. She dropped the phone. He could hear her drinking from a bottle. “Come talk to me, Max. I know you won't do what he did.”

He couldn't call Bob. Stay out of that mess. Besides, he would start wondering. She couldn't either. Max had sat and listened, inserting a word here and there when he could. He knew he should have gone to be with her through the night. How well he knew that. But, suppose she continued screaming and moaning even if he were there, and finally the neighbors called the police. Sure, try and get out of that one. A half-naked girl (he assumed), out of her mind, her gray eyes bulging with fear and incomprehension, and a spade cat sitting there. Shit, he'd be in more trouble than she. No, he didn't need that. He listened to her a long time, then he hung up without a goodbye.

It was after the New Year before he could think of her without a great deal of remorse. He had told himself over and over again that he hadn't made the world; he just lived in it. He could have shown the cops his press card, but, so what? He was still a spade who was driving a nice young white girl to madness, they would think. And there was no certainty that Regina would not have led them on with her rantings.

But she had forgotten, or rather, she had not remembered the Christmas call. Max said, “I was away anyhow, Christmas. I was hoping it would be better for you. What about the Christmas coming?”

“Oh, don't. I don't want to think about it.”

“Okay, then, let's arrange to meet for dinner,” he said, but he was thinking, A black man sorry for a white woman. A sucker for the people who hurt. Who's a sucker for me? But then the world was gleefully crashing its way toward a kind of Jewishness. The war, the horrors of that war, had done it. Jewish comics were stomping out of the Catskills and clustering around the coaxial cables; they shot their biting, mother-geared humor across the land. Yiddish phrases were becoming national catchwords. The nation (and the world) was guilty about what had happened to the Jews in Germany. Therefore, we will take this Jewish thing and, finally, make it American. Forgive us for the delay, Sholem Asch and Henry Roth. Better late than never. And there was Regina. Who did what about her, bubi? The day after dinner with Regina (she told him that Bob was doing so well with his painting—he'd had two successful shows in two months—that he was thinking of buying a house in Manhattan, to her delight), Berg summoned Max to his office.

The
Century
(quite naturally, Max reflected now) was for Wallace. The defection of Southerners from the Democratic Party to form the Dixiecrats made the question of Truman's election more than unlikely. Dewey looked like a shoo-in for the Presidency.

“We're giving you Wallace headquarters in town,” Berg said. He seemed to be looking for a paper on his desk; he didn't look at Max. He kept looking for the paper, but really, he was waiting. Max knew he was waiting. It was an important assignment. There were more experienced political writers on the paper. And Max also knew the assignment would entail the digging out of Jews and Negroes high up in the Wallace hierarchy. Portraits, color. He said aloud, “Jews and Negroes, portraits, color.”

Berg stopped looking for his paper. He turned a dour eye on Max. “Oh, Max. Oh, Max. Say it with
sincerity.
” Berg broke into a sheepish grin. “Guess you know the paper pretty well by now.” He broke off the smile. “That's exactly what we want, Jews, Negroes, portraits, color. If you can catch Wallace, we want to know about the abolition of the poll tax, enforcement of the statutes calling for the end of Jim Crow in interstate travel, the continuing apprehension and conviction of Nazi war criminals. We want to know if he's going to expand the Marshall Plan or drop it as soon as he gets a chance. Okay?”

“Okay. And thanks.”

The Wallace people relied heavily on dramatics. Theirs was an uphill campaign. From the first it was not directed against Truman; Dewey was the target. Wallace, the thin man with the long face, the stiff, sweeping mop of hair, the toothy, embarrassed, adolescent grin, attracted young people—and, Max noted at the time, the younger veterans of the war. There was a certain vibrancy to the campaign, the kind only underdogs wage. Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson, blacks and whites. There were spotlights in a thousand high school auditoriums that cut through the darkness with the speed and force of a knife wounding the eye to disclose Henry Agard Wallace.

The volunteers and staff people worked around the clock. Many nights Max left headquarters, leaving Regina behind with other volunteers who had come in from full-time jobs to ink the mimeograph machines and cut the stencils and run them off for the next day. But dramatics, spotlights, guitars and folk songs were not enough; nor were crowds of young people dancing in blue jeans. That was when blue jeans came to have their first bad connotation, because the people wearing them, the folk singers, brethren of the people and prebeatniks, were for Wallace. Long, long before Election Day the outcome was foreseen through that mysterious American device, the poll, the polls and talk; talk and the lack of money in the Progressive camp; the lack of money and the snowballing whisper campaign about the Communists flying high on the Wallace coattails. Tom Dewey's star rose higher and higher. The Dixiecrats were going to hurt Truman, wound him mortally. Dewey all the way. The Gangbuster, the Governor. Truman? President by accident. Wallace? Even Roosevelt had kicked him out. Dewey all the way.

It seemed to Max that Wallace started to quit in October; the fire was cooling. Papers like the
Century
were few and damned far between. The rumors started whipping the man. Who would Wallace be able to trust if he got in? There was all of that and more. It was the black and the white. The sudden equality in 1948 (much too early for America). It was the deep fear of that as well as anything else. Henry A. Wallace went quietly that November Tuesday, quietly and early. Harry Truman retired in the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City and everybody felt sorry for him, thinking that when he woke the next morning, he would have two and a half months left in the White House. Max Reddick felt sorry for him, crusty little bastard, haberdasher, symbol of the American dream, little guy gone big. Max preferred Truman to Wallace. Wallace had too much to think about; Truman took a step at a time and took it decisively and later for the rest of you cats. Who really could like Tom Dewey? The polls told the story on Wednesday morning, the same day Truman woke and fired his Secret Service chief who had stayed in New York to guard Tom Dewey, who lost the Election.

Max had laughed his ass off; it was just like Truman. Then it was all over.

In Leiden, high on the morphine, Max laughed softly and clutched his paining rectum. How naive he had been then. It had not been over with Wallace, it had just begun, that pulsating, murderous desire to be near or in politics, for that was where power was. Politics was some American game; it had its pauses, but never an end. It was the Ultimate Game, while you lived. It had sent people back to where they came from; it killed others and drove still others to the psychiatric wards or alcoholic clinics. It was where one learned the sorry truth about his countrymen.

For example, Stevenson's great losses to Ike brought forth the terrifying realization that unless the people could have a rich President who had had the leisure to study their problems and learn the right phrases and how to utter them (the European heritage—a good King Wenceslaus) like Roosevelt or Kennedy, they'd make do generally with someone pretty much like themselves. A five-star hero, perhaps, who, from the age of eighteen or nineteen had only to answer the call of a bugle to be fed, clothed and provided water for washing for most of his life, with time out for other jobs which were equally unfamiliar, until they made him their President. A man in their image.

There was no faking that image, as Humphrey could tell anybody; it was no good rambling about the old days as a druggist. Kennedy had put the spurs to that concept of the good old guy next door.

Max had been an incurious Democrat, but had never thought of himself as a politician, in fact, not even a good, Northeast variety Democrat. But the co-speechwriting, the tremor of Washington, the cold, steely scent of power had touched him. The social crisis that loomed black over the land had attracted him, but now Max wished that it hadn't turned out the way it had.

Max's third novel came out during the end of the Wallace campaign. “… now bests his master, Harry Ames …”

“The
Tribune
here [Harry wrote] says you're better than me. Do you believe it …?”

Letters from Harry were few after that. When they came they were unexpected, and therefore they threatened. They contained no warmth. It was just as well, for Max, in a manner he never would have admitted, was weary of being compared to Ames, to Bolton Warren, and now, to Marion Dawes, who was in Paris. The critics and reviewers were unrelenting because, Max concluded, they did not know what they were doing; and because they were supposed to be knowledgeable people, they'd never admit to an ignorance of discrimination. The effect was the same. White writers were compared only to other white writers; black writers were compared only to other black writers.

Max was deep in bitterness when he received a call from Kermit Shea, who was now a senior editor at
Pace
. Shea had changed, Max noticed. He was no longer a hot roast beef sandwich and two double-bourbon man. Now he ate two-hour lunches at the best French and Italian restaurants in midtown. His suits were pressed, his shoes polished, his hair neatly combed. Now he wore glasses with complexion-tone frames. He was a different kind of newsman.

“I'm glad you got the break with
Century,
” he said. “And of course, I've read your book. We gave it a good review.”

Max remembered the lead. It had been about Harry Ames. “Who were you writing about, me or Harry Ames?”

“Yeah, yeah, I noticed that too,” Shea said. “Well, a review in
Pace
, good or bad, doesn't hurt sales, you know.”

And Max knew it.

Shea chewed his food slowly; he had expected some bitterness. “You know, we've already had some discussion at the magazine about opening up, the way the
Century
has. Nothing's come of it yet, but I'd like to be able to throw your name in the hopper when the time comes.”

Max made him work. He listened and nodded or said nothing. He spoke only enough to keep the conversation from dying. He kept thinking: Kermit Shea, white, senior editor,
Pace
. Western Reserve, class of '37. Italian campaign,
Stars and Stripes
. Age, thirty-four. Future, a snap. Why? White. Max Reddick, black, city reporter, the
Century
. Western Reserve, class of '37. Italian campaign, infantryman. Age, thirty-four. Future, doubtful. Why? Black.

“You mentioned Ames. What do you hear from him?”

“He's all right.”

“Is he coming back?”

“I don't know. Why?”

“Well, I mean, things are … you know what I mean.”

“Yes, I know.” Max lit a cigarette. Seeing Shea again combined with the hurting business of the book brought on all the old pains. “Do you think he should come back? Would you, if you were him?”

“I don't know what I'd do if I were him,” Shea said. “But he was born here. It's his country. You care for it—”

“
I
care for it? Kermit, this is my day for not giving one good fuck where or how this country goes. I couldn't care less.”

“You can't mean that.”

“Am I really permitted to be as conscientious about these things as you? C'mon, Kermit. Since when?”