After the War (21 page)

“Well?” said Joseph to Abby as he stood up.

She stood too. “Okay!” and she kissed her parents good
night, and started back to the house with Joseph—a little too eagerly, Cynthia thought; couldn’t they even pretend to observe proprieties? And then she thought, But what am I talking about? Who am I to talk?

Almost before they were out of earshot, though, just as the screen door to the house slammed shut, Harry began to talk, in a fast, compulsive way; it sounded rehearsed. Except that it also sounded as though he was starting in the middle.

“… so trite,” he said. “When I stand back from it, I can hardly believe this is me. But maybe the other stuff was trite too. Being faithful to you, the way I planned. But then in Devon there was this girl, she’s Scottish, funnily enough she’s a Lady, actually. Lady Veracity McCullough.”

He paused just long enough for Cynthia to say, in a furious low voice, “I can’t think why you’re telling me this.”

“Cynthia, darling, I don’t blame you for being angry—”

“Oh,
good
. I mean it, why do I have to hear this?”

“Because I’m serious,” he said. “Veracity and I—oh, darling—”

“Veracity. Oh Jesus.”

“Cynthia, darling, come on—”

“Will you please stop calling me ‘darling’?”

There were more tree frogs, throatily protesting, and another hound, with a deeper, more dismal voice. And always everywhere, the fireflies, and the jarring smells of chlorine, and privet, and wine.

Sounding for the first time quite angry, Harry told her, “Besides, I don’t necessarily want to live down here. You’ve made all these plans, and gardens and swimming pool. And now your career law school in Hilton. Where do I come in?”

“Oh, Harry—”

“I like it in Washington, I’ve never really liked this dumpy town.”

“… well, I wish you’d said—”

“You weren’t looking! You’ve been so fucking busy down here, you never looked at me—”

“Harry—”

“Well, I’m sorry, but—”

“I suppose Veracity looks at you all the time—”

“You’re being cheap—”

“I know, I should have said
Lady
Veracity—Harry, we’ve got to stop this.”

In disbelief, in the heavy hot dark, they stared at each other. Each remembering everything at once. Their life.

On a single impulse, they reached toward each other, and Harry pulled her to her feet. In a frantic embrace, they kissed, and kissed—until in the midst of kissing Cynthia fatally thought:
Lady
Veracity?

Standing back from him, she said, “Harry, please just go and sleep in the study. You’ve made me very tired.” She patted him on the shoulder.

“Cynthia—darling, I understand how you must feel.”

“You do not. I’m going up to bed.”

Joseph asked, “Do you think we should get married?”

Abby gave it some thought. “I guess. Eventually.”

“Or we could just live in sin forever.”

She thought again. “That makes a big deal of it too, though, don’t you think? Living in sin forever is as assertive as getting married.”

Joseph laughed. “You’re right, of course you’re right.”
After a small pause he said, “I think you’re so smart, and so beautiful, you’re so sexy and you always make me laugh. And I never say that stuff, does that bother you?”

“No, really not.”

“And you don’t mind that I don’t talk about love?”

“No.” She added, “It’s not the kind of conversation we have.”

“Well, for the record,” he said, “I do love you. Assuming that we know what one means by the word.”

She laughed. “For the record, me too.”

To her own great surprise, as soon as she got into bed, alone, Cynthia began to cry. Almost worse, popular songs throbbed through her mind, their silly words thronged. The one I love belongs to somebody else—songs of love, but not for me—memories of you—dreams—blue—
you
.

And then she slept for a while.

Waking an hour or so later and acutely aware of all that champagne, she got up and went into her bathroom, for a very quick cool shower. Somewhat relieved, having also taken aspirin, she came back to bed in a rather different mood. Lady Veracity indeed, she thought. Why did I even have to listen to that stuff? And I didn’t tell him a thing. I could have gone on about Derek—Derek McFall, or for that matter Russ Byrd. Even if they don’t have English titles. How dare Harry? How cheap of him, how trite: American Naval Officer and His Lady. It’s the dumbest story I ever heard—and I wish it were someone else’s.

Her next sleep was sound and deep, and lasted until she heard Abby and Joseph, doors opening and closing, a suitcase
banging down the stairs. She got up and put on a robe—not, by design, her prettiest, just a clean practical summer robe.

Harry emerged from his study, looking red-eyed, reproachful, in a travel-worn robe. And so it was together that they went out to say goodbye to Joseph, whom Abby was to drive to Durham, to his train.

Abby said, “I think I’ll stop off and see Melanctha on the way home. She’s back to Radcliffe soon. You know, their funny wartime schedule.”

Joseph thanked them, and said he hoped he would see them in New York, or somewhere—maybe they would come up to Swarthmore? He’d had a wonderful time, he said (with possibly the smallest blush?).

Smiling to herself at their visible happiness with each other, their sheer young healthy well-being, as she thought, Oh good, I’m not envious of my daughter, Cynthia went into the kitchen, intending to make coffee, but Harry right behind her said that he wanted to make breakfast. “Just sit down,” he told her. “I’ll do it.”

Not saying, Oh how nice, an English breakfast, but tactfully sitting down and not helping, Cynthia watched some very busy small birds on the grass outside. So wholly intent on their tiny projects, they were, as they hopped here and there on the yellowing grass, bright-eyed and observant.

Seated at last, with breakfast toast and coffee on the table between them, across from each other, Harry began—as Cynthia had almost, somehow, known that he would. “I think I was crazy last night, I must have been. I can’t drink anymore—the champagne. Veracity—today the whole thing feels totally unreal. I mean I did have a sort of a fling, well, you must have too? I hope you did, I guess.”

This last was clearly invitational, but Cynthia declined, and only looked at him as though unsure what he meant.

“Well,” he managed to continue, “I’m really sorry for what I put you through. You must have thought I was crazy, not to mention—”

“As a matter of fact, I do think you may be having a sort of breakdown. Probably. I don’t know much about this stuff.” She had not at all known what she was going to say, but Cynthia continued firmly, “I think what you said about Pinehill and us is true, though. I love it here, and you don’t. You love living in Washington.”

“Oh, I’m not so sure about that.”

“I’m pretty sure. Seeing you there, I saw you’d found your element. And what I think is, you should go back up there. If you think you need an excuse, there’s always the Navy, some unfinished business.” She caught herself: Why am I planning his life for him, even inventing his excuses? But she went right on. “And I think you should find some sort of psychiatrist up there. You could ask Dr. MacMillan.”

“Jesus, Cynthia, I could find my own doctor. Assuming I need one.”

Standing up, and managing a smile, Cynthia told him, “I really think I have a headache. I guess I’m not a very good drinker anymore either. I’m going up to lie down.”

Back in bed, before she mercifully fell asleep again, Cynthia’s first thought was, Will things get any better for us, after the war? And then she thought, Shit, it’s already after the war.

PART TWO

18

Y
OU could tell Deirdre almost anything and she would believe you—or so Melanctha thought. Later it occurred to her that maybe Deirdre believed what she chose, and that it had been convenient for her to believe Melanctha when she had said, “I guess I’ll be heading up to Cambridge next week. Early registration.” Deirdre, not having been to college herself, would not know that after you’ve been a freshman you do not have to register again. Or maybe she was as anxious to have Melanctha out of the house as Melanctha was to be gone? To be back in Cambridge, in the familiar dormitory, Whitman Hall, but alone. No one else would be back yet. Just a few of the maids around, maids who liked to open all the windows wide, to air out the rooms before the girls came back with their dirty habits, their cigarettes and their coming in at night with beer or worse on their breath.

Melanctha, who did not smoke and certainly did not go out drinking beer or anything else, to a great extent shared their attitude. Alone in the now smokeless smoking room, she savored the air, which even then in early September was brilliantly blue, electric. Which spoke of fall, in intensely New England accents.

She was supposed to be studying, in fact reading two
novels for a course in American literature, Faulkner’s
The Sound and the Fury
and
Absalom, Absalom
! These were assigned not by the professor—an elegant Henry James scholar, who was worried by Faulkner, made nervous by his “Negroes”—but by the section man, a young poet.

Not really wanting to work, Melanctha leaned back with the books on her lap, in the lumpily padded maple sofa, beside the opened window, and remembered her father, Russ, the poet, saying (incorrectly, as almost always), “Ten years from now no one will give a thought to Henry James, who as Mr. Faulkner once said was a very nice old lady, and everyone will have recognized Mr. Faulkner as the giant-above-us-all genius that he is. Or was, if he’s drunk himself into the grave by then.”

Melanctha opened one of the books—it was
The Sound and the Fury
, Russ’s favorite, and she began to flip through pages (she had read the book several times before), and there were all the old familiar words: bright, brave, honor, truth, death—and Caddy, and caddie. All those old words to which Melanctha responded as to the sound of a bugle, a call to tears, even as she thought: This is a bunch of shit, of brilliant junk, I hate it, I hated Russ—and she remembered without even looking at it the end of the other book, the end of
Absalom, Absalom
! where Shreve, the Canadian, asks the Southern Quentin, “Why do you hate the South?” and Quentin answers, “I don’t, I don’t. I don’t hate it!” She thought, I hate William Faulkner. Probably his ancestors owned slaves who were the ancestors of Ed Faulkner, whom I must find. And for the first time she acknowledged to herself that that was her true reason for coming back to Cambridge so early, alone.

• • •

The house in Roxbury that Melanctha picked, almost at random, as belonging to Ed Faulkner’s family, was large and gray-shingled and shabby, and far enough from the street and the sidewalk to seem vague in its outlines, indistinct. Certain parts of it—a tiny unattached house (cabin, cottage) in the rear and a rotting, half-fallen shed—would seem to have been added more recently than the building of the house itself, and maybe on the cheap. However, despite all the disrepair, the decay, the sheer size of the main house, its sprawl across its high, commanding hill, made it clear that this had once been a grand house.

“The colored have taken all of it over, all of what used to be the grandest neighborhoods, and they’ve just let it go to rot, the way they do.” In that manner, Hattie, one of the Irish maids at Whitman Hall, had described Roxbury to Melanctha, who had asked for directions. And Hattie went on, “But you being from down South, you must know how they do?”

“No, it’s very different. They live mostly out in the country, they don’t move much, and certainly not into fancy neighborhoods.” She had tried to explain, even as she had thought, I don’t know what I’m talking about. The Negroes may all move North after the war, which is now. “Up here it may be all they can afford,” she said vaguely, at that moment hating both Hattie and Mayor James Michael Curley, who presided over Boston—charmingly, dishonestly. Mayor Curley, Melanctha was sure, would agree with what Hattie had said: “You let the colored into decent places and they wreck them as quick as they can.” And Melanctha would argue back, and she would be right, but they would win the argument.

A familiar sense of total frustration and outrage almost choked her.

• • •

In the Boston telephone directory under Faulkner, in Roxbury, there were fifty-seven names. The impossibility of getting in touch with such a number of people was relieving, and actually Melanctha could not imagine the necessary conversations: “Ed Faulkner?
Who
? Why? Which one? How come you looking for him?” (That last being the crucial and impossible question, since she didn’t know herself.)

On the map Roxbury was just across the river from Cambridge. Very easy on the subway, although she was a little uncertain about the names of the stops along the way—and she did not want to ask one of the maids, especially not Hattie.

Which is how she ended up in Brookline, on her first try, instead of in Roxbury. On Longwood Avenue, in front of Harvard Medical School.

The crisp and bracing air of earlier that morning had evaporated into midday heat. Fall leaves hung limply from their trees, and a steamy odor of tar rose from recent patches of street repair. A hot breeze from the coast, the Atlantic, smelled of salt and dead fish. A foreign, alien land; only the tar was familiar. What on earth was she doing there? What was this quest for Ed Faulkner? Should she ever find him, what on earth could she say or do with him? His coming to see her in Pinehill had really been enough, and more.

Students from the med school hurried past her, men in Army khakis or Navy blues mostly, a few civilians. No visible women. And Melanctha felt herself to be invisible; she who had no reason to be there, actually. Dazed, she stumbled over to a bench and sat down.

A very large Negro woman in decorous black sat near her, with a younger, much smaller woman, also in black: her daughter? Were both of them maids somewhere? Could they
know Ed Faulkner? At that preposterous thought, Melanctha covered her mouth and forced a cough, as though she had spoken those words aloud and the women could have heard.