A Flag for Sunrise (5 page)

“Well,” Holliwell said, “there’s nothing like total vindication.”

“Exactly. See, it’s all a movie in this country and if you wait long enough you get your happy ending. Until somebody else’s movie starts. In many ways it’s a very stupid country.”

“Is this the patriotic approach?”

“Hell, no,” Nolan said, “the patriotic approach is out of date.”

They sat drinking in silence for a while. When the check came, Holliwell moved it to his own side of the table and kept it there.

“We’re at a very primitive stage of mankind,” Nolan declared, “that’s what people don’t understand. Just pick up the
Times
on any given day and you’ve got a catalogue of ape behavior. Strip away the slogans and excuses and verbiage, the so-called ideology, and you’re reading about what one pack of chimpanzees did to another.”

Holliwell paid the check with his BankAmericard and Nolan did not move to prevent him.

“Sorry,” Holliwell said. “Not this time.”

They walked to the front door together and stood beside the parking-lot fence. The brisk wind raised whirls of dust from the sidewalk and Nolan shielded his eyes with his right hand.

“When you’re down there you may feel differently. So if I may, I’ll ask you again through a third party.”

Holliwell only smiled and they shook hands. It was not until he was halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge that the suggestion of a threat in Nolan’s final words struck him, making him think of the man entombed beside the Perfume River, the involved observer of the modern world. A chill touched his inward loneliness. He was, he knew at that moment, really without beliefs, without hope—either for himself or for the world. Almost without friends, certainly without allies. Alone.

He drove toward Manhattan facing the squat brutality of the new buildings that had gone up around the bridge; he was depressed and too drunk for safety. The drive uptown left him tired and anxious. Gratefully, he turned the Volvo keys over to the hotel doorman and once upstairs ordered a bottle of scotch from room service. When the drink arrived, he sat with his feet on the windowsill looking out over the midtown rooftops. On a day in May, he and Marty Nolan had once walked from the library on East Seventy-ninth Street all the way down Second Avenue to the bridge and then across it, ending up in a bar on Clark Street. It would have been about 1955. Hour after hour, block after block of talk.

After a while, he moved over to the double bed, propped a pillow up behind him and dialed his home number. When he heard his wife’s voice on the line, he lit a cigarette.

“So you’re O.K.,” he said. “You got back all right.”

“I told you not to worry. He had his medicine at the hospital. He was half zonked.”

“So he didn’t rave and carry on?”

“He slept. When we got to his house he didn’t know where he was.”

“Does he ever?”

“Sure. He’s very aware.”

“What were his parents like?”

“Very middle-class. Quite well off, fancy house. They asked me in but I didn’t go. They’ll drive him back.”

“So that’s that.”

“Yep,” she said.

“I had my lunch with Marty. We drank a lot.”

“You sound like you’ve been drinking. What are you going to do with yourself now?”

Holliwell poured himself a little scotch and ice water. In the blue sky beyond his window, fleecy January clouds were speeding over Manhattan.

“Maybe I’ll walk over to Eighth Avenue. For some twenty-dollar fellatio.”

“You’re kidding, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

“Well, I wish I was up there with you. And I wish I could go along.”

“Marty told me that Paul Robeson just died.”

“My God, was he gloating about it?”

“He was sort of gloating.”

“Listen,” she said. “Did he ask you to do any work for them?”

“He had something up his sleeve. I turned him down cold.”

“Did you let him know you were mad at him?”

“I wasn’t mad at him.”

“I think they have a hell of a lot of nerve,” she said.

“I love you,” Holliwell told her. “Take care.”

“I love you too. You take care too.”

He sat on the edge of the bed, drinking still more whiskey and thinking about his conversation with Nolan. Shortly he began to wonder what Marty had been writing in that hootch outside of Hue,
what he had meant by the modern world and by being at home in it. And by “the Jew.”

A great deal of profoundly fractured cerebration had gone down in Vietnam. People had been by turns Fascist mystics, Communist revolutionaries and junkies; at certain times, certain people had managed to be all three at once. It was the nature of the time—the most specious lunacy had been conceived, written and enacted on both sides of the Pacific. Most of the survivors were themselves again, for what it was worth. No one could be held totally responsible for his utterances during that time.

The Jew was presumably the one who squatted on the estaminet, blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in Antwerp. Holliwell knew him; his name was Sy, he had once run a newspaper stand on the corner of Dyckman Street and Broadway. Sy had lived almost across the hall from Holliwell and his mother in a cheap hotel in Washington Heights for ten years and Holliwell still half suspected that Sy had been his mother’s lover. He had never asked.

For years, he had worked for Sy at the paper stand and they had conducted a running discourse on the state of the world at mid-century. Holliwell had learned the words of the “Internationale” from Sy but whenever Holliwell mentioned church or churchly things Sy would smile with lupine contempt.

“They pound that shit into your head. At that school you go to.”

Sy was a Communist, he had been an organizer in the merchant marine during the war. Holliwell had found Sy’s being a Communist appalling. He would bait Sy with the Hitler-Stalin pact, the Katyn massacre, forced-labor camps, the NKVD.

When the trucks brought bound stacked papers to the curb, Sy would cut the twine from them with a sharpened knuckle-duster, baring his teeth at the red banner of Hearst’s
Journal-American.

“That school—they pound that shit into your head.”

They would stand hunched over the stacks, in ink-stained aprons full of sweaty change, their backs to the ice-cold sour wind from the Bronx breweries.

“What do you know about the Soviet Union?” Sy would ask. “You ever been there?”

Stung, Holliwell would play his trump.

“What do I know about Germany and Auschwitz and like that? I never been there either.”

Sy would stick his hands in his pea-coat pockets with the same wolfish grimace.

“Go ahead—be a Fascist. Be an anti-Semite. They pound that shit into your head.”

But he was not at home in the modern world.

On one of his last visits to New York—it had been a few years before—Holliwell had gotten drunk to the point of riotous indulgence and he had undertaken a sentimenal journey uptown. He had found himself walking around Fort Tryon Park in the fading light, feeling perfectly safe, and everywhere he turned he had seen vistas that were part of his interior landscape, all the scenes of his early adventures imaginary and real. Immediately, he had realized that the neighborhood had nothing for him anymore.

Then he had seen Sy on a bench along Broadway in a black overcoat too warm for the weather and a cloth cap out of
The Grapes of Wrath.

Sy had asked after his mother. “Alive?”

She was dead, Holliwell had told him. She had gone back to Glasgow on her Social Security and died there.

He had said to Sy: “I thought you’d be in Florida.”

And Sy had said forget Florida. The fucking animals, they hunt me on the street. They want to break down my door and put a rope around my neck. The scumbags, they ruined the neighborhood, they ruined the city. Fucking Lindsay.

His broken nose was sprouting gray whiskers. He was old unto death.

Then Sy had told him the story of Press who ran the drugstore on Manhattan Avenue.

Press the druggist. Retired, closed the store—he was robbed so often. Visiting his brother on the Concourse. In a car—he wouldn’t dare walk. And the animals got him in his car. Just bang—fuck you, he’s dead. The cops stop the car, they catch the animals, one animal confesses. But Press, they put him in the city dump at Mott Haven—they don’t remember where. The cops can’t find him. The city says we can’t find him, the dump’s too big. A needle in a haystack. He’s there now, under the garbage. A religious Jew. Nice for his family. A fucking dog you bury in the ground.

While he told the story of Press, Sy looked across Broadway where a Hispanic woman in red boots was leaning against a squad
car, talking to the cops inside. Holliwell’s last view of him was walking along behind the woman in the direction of the river, hurrying until he caught up in mid-block and they turned the corner together.

The hotel where Sy and Holliwell and his mother had lived was still standing. It was a welfare hotel now and the junkies were lined up on a metal rail outside, resting their scarred hams on the pigeon spikes, blowing their noses into Orange Julius napkins.

This time he would refrain from sentimental journeys and gestures. Sy would be dead now, like his mother.

He took his drink to the window to look down at the patch of Central Park that was visible from his room. The lights were going on; the lawns darkening. It was remotely possible, he thought, the depression and the war years being what they were, his mother being who she was—that Sy was his father. But it was unlikely. There had once existed, at least legally, a person called Michael J. Holliwell who was his father of record.

The thought of Sy made him feel like mourning, really like weeping. Drunk again, boozy ripe, ready to sniffle with promiscuous fervor over lost fathers and hillbilly songs. He put the glass down. The juice was turning on him altogether, softening him up; it was all catching up with him. His past was dead and his present doing poorly. In his briefcase was an unfinished address to the Autonomous University of Compostela but lie was too far gone, he decided, to even look at it.

Hunger made him feel ashamed; he experienced it as further evidence of his frail sensuality. He ate from room service and nearly finished the bottle.

When he had put the empty tray outside his door, he dutifully took up the briefcase and opened it on his night table. After a moment, he took out the address and set it aside face down. Beneath it in the case were his air tickets and a yellow file folder in which he kept a changing collection of notes and clippings, drawn from the long hours he spent in idle reading. At any one time, Holliwell’s file might contain bits from the
Times
and the news magazines, religious pamphlets, anything which seemed to him when he read it to have some relevance to the proper study of mankind. Often, when he reread the pieces in his file, he experienced difficulty in recalling why he had clipped them in the first place. If, after a while, he could not use the
pieces in an article or introduce them into one of his classes, he would throw the entire stack away.

The file which Holliwell was bringing with him to Compostela contained only two items—a
National Geographic
article on Port Moresby and a letter that had appeared in his local alternative newspaper.

Holliwell took the printed letter from the file and set it before him. “Dear Editor,” it began.

Now it is evening again and the metal bars that separate we poor shadows from the outside world have slammed shut with a soul chilling echo. Before me lies another night in which moon and stars are only a phantom memory on the ceiling of my cell. During the night I shall experience many things. Some will be the faces of those I have loved and lost, others will be the memories of hatred and violence. And during the long night ahead I will cling to my dreams, hoping to find in the peace of slumber a surcease from the rage that gnaws inwardly at my heart.

My convict’s world is a lonely one and I would be bold enough to ask of there is a reader (woman, race not important) who would share my lonely hours with me by writing and speaking to me of the outside world from which the so-called justice of our society has banished me.

Yours truly,
Arch Rudiger
#197–46
Box 56 G.F.
Farmingdale, Wash.

Holliwell had found the clipping in his daughter’s room. It had lain for something like a year between her book of the films of Rita Hayworth and her copy of
The Last Unicorn
until he had finally snatched it up and incorporated it into his collage.

Once he had read the letter aloud to his wife; she had looked at him, closely suspecting mockery.

“I hope she answered it,” his wife had said. She had helped to fashion Margaret’s sense of social and moral responsibility.

Holliwell was quite certain that she had not.

He lay back on the bed, holding the clipping between his fingers, indulging Arch Rudiger with the pity he felt for himself. It reminded him of a few nights of his own.

Holliwell had ended by feeling guilty about Arch and he had assuaged his guilt by fantasizing the ideal response.

Dear Arch 197–46,

I know that you are a young community male while I am a student at a privileged and elitist woman’s college in the East. My family’s immense wealth and status fill me with shame when I consider the cruel injustice which you have suffered.…

Holliwell threw the clipping into the wastepaper basket and then tossed the Port Moresby article in after it. He turned on the television set to watch the first part of a World War II movie and fell asleep in the flickering light of burning Germans.

“Well,” Sister Mary Joseph said, “I don’t believe for a minute that it all ends in the old grave.”

She and Sister Justin Feeney were sitting in the shade on the mission veranda drinking iced tea. Sister Justin frowned at the sunlit ocean. Mary Joe’s Bronxy certainties drove her to fury.