Marry or Burn (24 page)

That was my litany. But while I was repeating to myself these things so familiar and provable, the proprietor was wrapping up our olives and staring at Jack. He was a giant bald man with black eyebrows that must have once matched his hair. He had on a bib apron that almost reached the floor. For some reason he couldn't take his eyes off Jack. Jack was a handsome man, but the Greek was not noticing his good looks. Suddenly he came out from behind the counter. He grabbed Jack by the shoulders. “See there!” he said excitedly, seizing Jack's chin and turning it up to the ceiling. “See there!” There was a row of framed photographs on the topmost shelf, above the gallon cans of olive oil.
“My father!” cried the man, pointing to a mustached man in uniform, in a brownish picture.

“That's your dad?” said Jack good-naturedly.

“My father. Killed in '41. Crete. April of '41. Eh? Eh?”

“What was his outfit?” said Jack.

The man rolled out an answer in Greek and grinned at Jack cagily. “Not Greek?” he said after a pause while the three or four other people shopping in the store all smiled at us.

“No, sir, I'm not,” Jack said regretfully. He still used the
sirs
they had taught him at the military academy.

“Yugoslav?”

“No. No . . .” said Jack with a sigh and a look at me. “Jewish.” He sounded surprised himself, but firm, that first moment of turning his back on his family's precautions and becoming Jewish.

“Ah,” said the man, jostling me and moving in to look closely at the pores of Jack's face. “My father,” he said again and gestured at the picture. “You are the same man! You see?” he said to the other customers and to me. Some of them craned their necks at the picture and saw a resemblance. The Greek hauled out his stepladder and climbed up and took the picture off the shelf. He came down and handed it to Jack, who studied it while the man stood rubbing his hands together. He had tears in his eyes. To his wife, who had come to the doorway of the little room behind the refrigerator and stood drying her hands, he said something in Greek. He pointed upward. With a quick look and a shake of her head the woman folded the towel. But the Greek had made his judgment; he stepped up to Jack and gave him a bear hug. Over Jack's shoulder hung his big face, eyes shut and tears running into the mustache. “Just like my father!” he said to the spectators with a tearful laugh.

Jack wrapped his arms around the man's back and returned
the hug. He did not pass it off, he neither moved nor smiled as the Greek let go of him and stepped back, keeping his fingers with their longish nails on the sleeves of Jack's coat. There was a stillness in the store while the respect and honor due the soldier in the picture was offered to Jack.

Then the two of them shook hands, and the man wiped his eyes and went back behind the counter to ring up our retsina on the huge cash register. “Brass!” he said, tapping the etched flank of the machine with his nail. “Antique. Found it on Jackson a block over. Old Greek had it, didn't speak any English, sold it for nothing. The antique stores, they all want it! Old but as you see . . .” His big fingers caressed the register. His voice died away as he surveyed his long counter with its drawers of pasta and trays of herbs in bundles tied with string. Then, speaking straight into Jack's eyes, he said, “I had this one ever since I had the store, twenty-four years. You see this store? I got this store with my uncle Giorgos in '45.” He ran his fingers through the silky lentils. At last he took his eyes off Jack and turned to the other customers, as the past, with his father in it, receded.

We left the store. I took Jack's hand. I was thinking about the war, how belatedly I had understood anything about it. If I understood at all.

I was wondering how it was I spent so little time thinking about or writing to my family, whom I had left such a short time ago to follow the man who had done the harm to me.
But what if he was harmed by me too
? I suddenly thought.
By my selfish American tears and my stupidity
?
My not knowing what a war was?
How crude were the uses to which I had put my own courage: lying to get a prescription for sleeping pills, for example, to leave on the table where it might jerk back to life his boyhood fear that he could not perfectly understand anyone in this country, or know how far we might go.

I thought of my father. He had given me so many humble warnings, whenever I flew home from Chicago with circles under my eyes and made grim, tearful, late-night phone calls and then turned around and flew back. Without pretending to firsthand knowledge, having missed being sent overseas in the war himself, and without ever censuring the man I was suffering over, in fact protecting him, trying to turn me out of his path, a girl deliberately raised in ignorance of life! Maybe my father regretted my ignorance, thought it was not too late for me to be made to see how the little rivers of private life might join up with or dwindle off from the huge river of war. But I couldn't see.

I thought of my father as he must have been at my age, when the war was coming and young men all over the world didn't know whether they would live or die, and as he had been on those Saturdays with my aunt and uncle, when we were children. Hidden from my sight, although he stood in the same kitchen where I sat with my sister, my mother, and my aunt at the table, wrapped in the scent of shaving lotion, which would drift like his ghost across hotel lobbies in later years, to find me. Hidden from me, because my concentration was on what awaited the female. The fateful events, the loves and cruel sorrows that would attend her.

I thought of my father aging without any attention from me or my sister, who was just like me, far away on quests of her own, while something in both of us had coarsened, had hardened towards our families and our pasts, in order for us to spend our full energy, our remembering and planning, on men we loved. I thought of the face of the Greek in the store as he stared so hopelessly at Jack. No getting through. No getting back to the time before that war. No restoring his father, or reversing the exile of my lover and his parents, or showing mercy to those
people as handsome and fated for accomplishment as Jack, who saw, from inside, the doors of boxcars slide shut.

This was approximately when I decided the theme of
War and Peace
was not the coarsening of Natasha, was not even love. First I decided that the books I had thought were about love were about time, and death, and then, that I did not have any idea what they were about, because my lover had been right, I knew nothing.

 

IN THE YEARS after Uncle Randall died, Aunt Maggie did not so much coarsen as become the woman we all knew, who looked with wide, daydreaming eyes on everything as if to say, “What is this to me?” She always glanced at my sister and me wonderingly if we spoke, as if we had come up from under the table. She woke to our voices reluctantly, blinking, to let us know she herself had come up out of memory, out of the embrace of that great life-sullying misfortune, Randall's death. When we came running into a room she looked past us with a faint smile, for some witness to this scene of normality—happy children, activity—in which she couldn't hope to participate. But talk was something else: she would talk all day, as long as the subject was the perfection of certain lives, the lives in which women and occasionally men—if they were men honed and modeled and made unforgettable like Randall—stepped up to and met their fate, swallowed the communion of pain.

When Maggie died in her old age, my mother said matter-offactly, “Nobody will remember the same things I do, now.” My father was alive then, but his memory was gone. I saw in my sister's attentiveness, her careful stirring of his coffee, that she too had waited too long to make up for her unconcern, her single-minded pursuits. We were there with all the family, both of us with our children, around the kitchen table after Maggie's funeral.

“Would you say you remember things the way Maggie did, the way she said they were?” Jack asked my mother, with the interest he always showed in our family's history, despite its being so narrow and individual.

“Oh, well, yes, some things, dear. Some people.”

Jack said, “The way she talked they were all so . . . complete.” It was safety, they lived in safety, I could have told him. For he was probing for something to explain people so free of any wish to change themselves, people so unscarred by what was going on in the world at the same time they were watching for a fate of which they had no fear.

“Oh yes. But some of that was Maggie.” We all looked, as one, at the table where the ashtray for Maggie's cigarette would have been.

“But that first husband? Uncle Randall? He was really such a prince?” said my husband Jack.

“He was indeed,” my mother said. “But you know Maggie was untrue to him. Did you know that? With Ted Brown.” She paused and sighed, turning her own wedding band. “Of course, Ted was the love of her life.”

M
Y HUSBAND DRAGS my arm under the pillow he has over his head. “Poor Joe, poor Joe.” He is mumbling into the mattress, keeping my hand against his cheek.

All I say is, “Oh, I don't know. Maybe there's a young thing out there for Joe.” We have drunk so much bad wine at Joe and Kate's house that we can't get to sleep. We toss around and finally turn on the TV and watch a program on the naked mole rat. “They look cozy,” Cy says, as the teeming pile of babies clambers and suckles in their burrow. It appears each mother can smell her own. We can't be sure, we have the sound off, but it appears the fathers grow long teeth and enlarge the burrow.

Earlier it had been a clear night with a moon, but it got chilly after dark. Kate kept going inside to get sweaters for us, a fringed red shawl for herself that I had never seen before, and finally an old sleeping bag. “Move in close,” she said as she draped it over our shoulders on the picnic bench. We were out in back on the deck. Cy stuck his arm through a hole in the moldy lining and Kate said, “Looks like Joe got the good sleeping bag.”

She displayed each wine bottle in a dishtowel before she screwed the top off. “I can bring the tape deck out. That's all
that's left. With this wine we need something funky to listen to, but all I have is what we had before CDs. Joe—”

“Joe took all the good blues,” Cy growled at her.

Kate and Joe have both suffered financially in the divorce, each taking only half of everything. That doesn't bother Kate. She always made fun, anyway, of people like their next-door neighbors the Rileys, a handsome younger couple who take courses in wine and Italian cooking and planning a remodel. The Rileys have been redoing their house ever since they moved in; every time they paint a room Kate gleefully reports the colors. “Papyrus and . . . urn!”

“Urn?”

“Urn is dun.”

“And how are the Rileys and the fair Riley-ette?” Cy will say. That is the little daughter as pretty as the mother. For some reason this couple, the Rileys, whom he knows only to wave to, stirs up a little flame in Cy. Kate knows it. She agrees it's the wife. “Oh, the Rileys are exceptionally well!” she will sing out. “They've found the granite for the counters!”

Kate's counters, where you can see them through the frying pans and stuck spoons and propped-open books, are the cracked linoleum put in in the '20s; she and Joe never painted or rearranged or altered anything in their house. They were lazy; once their kids were in college they liked sleeping all weekend. Our best friends. Two big, unhurried people, alike in their habits. As lecturers they were fond of the slide projector, both of them popular, all their fifteen years in the History Department with Cy, as givers of easy tests.

Joe always smiled and shrugged if Kate got started on the Rileys, or sometimes he allowed himself to grunt, “Now, Katie.” Joe has a mild stutter, for which he is known on campus. Students can be heard “doing” Joe: “Some will blame the entirety of
the World—
War
on the—on the kaiser's—uh, uh—
withered arm
!” It's a kind of tribute. Joe is always at the top of the student polls, with Kate, despite her sharp tongue, only a little farther down, while my husband Cy is more demanding, sought out by a smaller, fiercer group of students.

The street winds up a hill that puts the Rileys' deck a level above Kate and Joe's. Occasionally through the sparse laurel hedge we see handsome legs: Riley's muscular in tennis shorts; Mrs. Riley's very long, dreamily crossing and uncrossing, ending in big smooth sandaled feet with polished toenails. Seen full-length she is tall, thin, and swayingly top-heavy, with blond hair pulled back from her moody delicate face in a French braid—exactly the kind of woman who can bring my husband low.