Rumors of Peace (19 page)

Eudene's grandmother was right to scream damnation at her. Eudene had let down the eighth grade, she had let down youth and freedom everywhere. And if she had to sit for nine long months in an unwed mothers' home, with an ugly uniform over her big filthy brassiere and ballooning belly, eating thin soup and fearing the devil's pitchfork, it was only just.

But I thought of something Aunt Dorothy had said to Helen Maria. Don't be so hard on people. I was hard on people too. Eudene. Peggy. Aunt Dorothy herself. I had pushed Aunt Dorothy so completely out of my mind that I hadn't even felt bad about her death. But think of her doing that, cramming those pills down her throat, and now she was lying cold under a mortician's sheet in Mexico City. Or maybe she was already buried, in the dry Mexican ground. Inside her coffin it was black, not one gleam left of a white dress or silver lake at twilight.

I saw her standing in Helen Maria's doorway in her navy blue suit and small white hat. I wanted to see her loud and horrible, sloshing her whiskey glass around. It hurt me to think of her laughing and hugging
Peggy in the doorway. I wondered if she was buried in those clothes; would she turn to dust in her navy blue suit? But she was already dust when she came; she swallowed all those pills because she'd been for a long time broken and burned-out inside, a heap of rubble. And a terrible thought suddenly came to me—it was like that day in the backyard, a frightening, hurtful rippling out, some kind of knowledge that would never end, now that it had begun. For what if war wasn't only bombs exploding, and blood and screams, but someone smiling in a doorway?

I
PRIMED MYSELF
to apologize to Peggy the next day, but she looked recovered. She must have found something to ease her pain, probably those little get-well notes, which had required neither time nor thought nor even the neat, clear hand she used for her lessons.

As for Helen Maria, when I said I was sorry about Aunt Dorothy, she gave a curt nod. I only stayed a minute.

Now it was early April, and Helen Maria was moving. Inside the sacred chamber stood a black battered trunk that must have belonged to the grandmother in the days when she had hiked across the Dolomites with an alpenstock. On brittle stickers, faded to the palest honey color, you could read the names of foreign cities. Paris, Rome, Berlin, London. How small and quiet they seemed on these stickers, cities that screamed at you now in black headlines.

Helen Maria was looking everywhere for her toothbrush. “I've packed it—all right, it stays there! I'm not unpacking a thing!”

She was all set to go, although she wasn't leaving till the next morning. Her coat and purse lay ready on a chair. Book-filled boxes covered the floor. The walls were bare; the desk was cleared. She walked among the boxes, taking out a book, putting it back, lighting a cigarette, restlessly smoothing her hair.

I sat down on a box.

She talked a great deal. She talked about her boardinghouse. It was three blocks from campus. Her room was right under the eaves, marvelous. The housemother was a retired art instructor with a braid, a woman of the world, marvelous. Finally, all her fellow roomers were marvelous. Independent spirits like herself, and some were even foreign, refugees from Central Europe who had gotten out before the war, women with burning eyes and hair drawn back in a bun like Rosa Luxemburg. . . .

They couldn't have been through much if they had gotten out before the war. In fact, how could you have refugees without a war? And who was Rosa Luxemburg? But I no longer asked questions, so I said nothing.

And there was a lovely large living room where one could entertain male callers, and she had seen some interesting callers the day she was there. “One in particular, with jet black hair and blue eyes.”

“Four-F, or he'd be in the Army.”

“It's no concern of mine if he has kidney stones or a deviated septum; that's not what I'm interested in.” She paced, smoking. On her face was a look of daring that I had never seen before. Again she swept her hair back. “I think in the evenings it must be quite nice entertaining there. It may be rather pleasant.”

It probably would be.

“Of course I'll miss Jack and Estelle.”

“You will?” I was surprised.

“Of course. Peggy I shall not miss.”

We listened for a moment to Frank Sinatra's croons seeping down the hall. Helen Maria resumed her pacing. I envied her her restlessness, her coat thrown over a chair. A new and perfect life, starting tomorrow morning.

She began rearranging her books in the boxes. It was clear that she didn't want a long visit. I got up, and suddenly I was overcome by an old, dog-eared, stupid hope that I hadn't had for a long time. Now that we were parting, she would at last hold out the golden word.

“I'll write when I'm settled in,” she said, coming with me to the door, “and we can arrange for your visit. A Saturday morning, maybe,
and you can stay the weekend. I'll put up a cot in my room. You'll love the place.”

No I wouldn't. I didn't like anything about it. But looking at the animated green eyes, I said, “I'm glad you're so happy.”

“I could be happier.” She blew smoke sharply through her nostrils. “Things happen. That you don't expect. Like someone dying. Oh, I don't know, it makes you think. Just that you can't go back and do things over. That's all.” She shrugged, then smiled and shook my hand. “Take good care of yourself, Suse.”

Still waiting, I stood looking at her.

“Lebe wohl,”
she said softly, closing the door.

The German dictionary at the library yielded up
lebe wohl
after some searching. But it wasn't the golden word. It meant farewell.

“Come in.”

“Come in, Suse.”

“Come in, Suse, my great love.”

“You are here at last, my beloved Suse!”

“Suse, you are here! Come in, come in, my heart is bursting. Your hair, your eyes, your passionate soul. I must have you! The storm of a kiss!”

Here, in this moment, the rest of the world is gone. All that exist are Mr. Kerr's blue eyes and low, throbbing voice. There is no end of variation on his welcoming speech. I add a word, take it out, put in others. The speech grows longer each night, richer, more passionate. Where have these glorious words hidden in me, to suddenly pour forth like this now? I stand breathless, I dissolve in his moonlit eyes, and then I destroy everything in flames because it is too much.

The days are warm now, with high fluffy clouds. On Sunday afternoons Dad and I putter around the victory garden, where we've planted new seeds. The creek is clear and gurgling, its banks green and glossy, alive with white butterflies. Behind the garrison storm fence the soldiers are always stopping and stretching, lifting their faces to the sun, as if they had come out of a cave. Downtown, Sheriff O'Toole's sandbags have
dried out from the rain, servicemen disgorge from winter bars and pool halls, shopgirls again walk arm in arm in thin flowered dresses. The streets are crowded and lively. Cassino has fallen; the Russians have broken through to Rumania. Spring will bring victory, maybe even without an invasion.

One day, in the course of my lesson, Mr. Kerr touches my wrist and I feel nothing. Afterward I plump down on his cushion. Nothing. I look across the room at him, stunned by this loss. He stands listening to someone scraping on a violin, having done all this to me and now pulling it all away. I feel a fury mounting, yet I am somehow thinking of his nostrils, which are not only too big but hairy. The fury sinks; I feel oddly quiet and a little embarrassed. And gradually, as I continue my practicing, I feel relief and joy. I am free.

A few days later, going through the gym entrance, I collide with the boys' coach. I've never given him a second glance, a boring-looking man with slicked-back brown hair, but in one second I am again lost, the old thrill zinging through my body. Doomed, I stare at his back as he passes on.

I
T WAS
C
OACH
T
HAXTER
who now opened the moonlit door. His brown eyes burned into mine.

Then one day Mr. Villendo, the science teacher, happened to touch my hand in returning a paper and electrified me. Mr. Villendo had black double-sized eyes behind thick glasses, and now it was his black double-sized eyes that burned from the door.

Soon after, Mr. Lewis brushed past me with his heavy Gestapo tread, and I felt a world-weary acceptance along with the piercing thrill and the evaporation of Mr. Villendo.

How unclear Mr. Lewis had been until this moment, just a gray suit and a nasty expression. But now I beheld his thick smooth brown hair and dark gray eyes and wide firm mouth. When he opened the moonlit door that night, he spoke in a tragic way:

“Ever since I first saw you, you have sank deeper and deeper into me. You may think I am a harsh person, but I am not; I am misinterpreted. I am a lonely, desperate man, and I long to smother you in the storm of a kiss!”

How strange that it was Mr. Lewis of all people who was the real one, who struck me deepest. For he did. In class, behind my book, I pressed my mouth to the back of my hand, ignoring the taste of green lavatory soap, and imagined that it was the wide, firm lips of Mr. Lewis
that I was kissing so hard. Whenever I saw Peggy walking down the hall with some pimpled, thin-necked boy, I pitied her that she thought there was anything there worth having. Could she really want to hear his puny thoughts, feel his weak flutter of a kiss? If that was all she aspired to, I pitied her very much. I felt out of place with these dull and simple students. I felt dark, wild, as if I belonged in a forest. What tepid interludes Coach Thaxter and Mr. Villendo had been; how unbelievable my long encounter with Mr. Kerr.

I could look Mr. Kerr full in the face now, speak normally, smile. I even came to like him, and I felt a great sympathy for him that he was sitting here in the Mendoza Junior High School instead of standing to an ovation at Carnegie Hall. They said he had been working on his
Europana
symphony for seven years now. Probably he would never finish it, he was too old. It was just a habit he couldn't stop, like wearing his velvet jacket and foreign shoes. In the evenings he sat bent over an old piano, slowly writing and crossing out notes with his fountain pen, while his wife with her purple eyelids brought him strong cups of tea to stimulate his tired mind. When it was late, they turned off the light and went to bed. No moonlight shone on their door. It was a small ordinary house, with small ordinary night sounds outside. A dog barking, a freight train wailing. It would never be any different for him.

It was different for Mr. Lewis. He blazed with glory. He made me desperately happy and sometimes so desperately sad that I thought of killing myself. I didn't think of a bottle of pills and a coffin. I thought of unholy music and long-flamed candles and of turning an antique dagger in my fingers, and these thoughts poured into my love for Mr. Lewis, bringing it a dimension so fateful and sublime that I could hardly breathe for the pounding of my heart as I stalked him through the halls.

After school he climbed into a green coupe and drove away. I could not follow him and knew nothing about him. His name wasn't even in the phone book. He was too remote; he filled me with frustration. I longed to be in his class, to hear his voice, to watch him move, to turn homework in so that our naked hands would meet in electrifying contact. Then, although it was almost May, I saw that there was time
yet in which to hoist my math grades up so that I could enter his class in the fall.

The idea took hold with a powerful grip. But where did you start when your grade average in math was a D minus? Desperation breeds humility. I went to my math teacher and told her I wanted to understand what she was talking about. This desire was so unheard of in our class that Miss Moose—it was her real name—appeared as shocked and thrilled as if I had handed her a hundred-dollar bill. If I were truly earnest, she told me with shining eyes, and if my parents were willing to pay a tutor, she would recommend a very able student to help me.

So it came that a few days later, at four o'clock in the afternoon while the sun shone temptingly outside, I sat at the living-room table under the cool gray gaze of little Valerie Stappnagel. Little Valerie had been around as long as I could remember, a remote and colorless figure skipping grades and mingling with no one. She was now only eleven years old and in the ninth grade. She had a small, piping voice and was shorter than I and had to sit on a pillow. I supposed she was some kind of genius, but she was not like Helen Maria; she was more like a gray filing cabinet.

“We'll go back to first-grade arithmetic,” she piped. “You're probably weak in your fundamentals.”

I set my lips, humiliated, and watched as she took two pencils from her satchel.

“It's very important,” she informed me, “to always have a sharp pencil,” and she began carefully sharpening them with a pocket sharpener. Her eyes were small and slate gray behind round glasses. Her face was square and doughy, with pale brown hair growing high on the forehead and hanging thin and straight past her ears. She looked like Benjamin Franklin, but she seemed to have no idea of this resemblance. She seemed a person completely untroubled.

“Now. Addition first. Then we'll go on to subtraction, multiplication and division.” She settled, businesslike, into her pillow.

At the end of the two hours she told me my big weakness was the multiplication table. “You don't know it at all. You'll have to drill yourself. Do it all the time, like when you're brushing your teeth or walking to
school. At the end of the week I'll test you.” She put her things back in her satchel, zipped it up, and kept sitting. “My mother has to pick me up. We live out in the valley.”

“On a ranch?”

“It's called Rancho Manzanita, but it's not a real ranch. We just have a few animals.”

“Like what.”

“Rabbits and ducks.”

“Are the ducks in a pond?”

“Yes.”

“Is it deep? Can you swim in it?”

“I suppose you could, but it's scummy. There's the bell. It's probably my mother.”

While our mothers talked at the door, Valerie reminded me once more to practice the multiplication table. “That's the whole thing about numbers, you have to know the combinations by rote or else you waste too much time. All the answers are right there, they never change. So study hard.”

All the answers are right there; they never change. I kept thinking about this as I said good-bye. They never change.

“How was it, Suse?” my mother asked when they were gone.

“I think I'm really learning something,” I said with enthusiasm.

Mama looked almost as surprised and delighted as Miss Moose.

By our third lesson Valerie had brought me up to the sixth grade. There she was met by a vacuum. Her small gray eyes took on an iron glint.

“All right. Now let's get to work.”

“Not bad,” she said at the next session.

I had flawlessly rattled off the multiplication table. It might be five years late, but it had been achieved in a few short days of concentrated discipline. I was proud of myself, and though Valerie was not given to wild praise, I knew she was satisfied with me on all counts so far. I felt warm toward my little tutor.

“I want to get into College Prep algebra next year,” I confided.

“You have a D minus average now?”

“That's right.”

“Even if you got an A this semester, it wouldn't bring you up far enough.”

I sat looking at her. There was something so irritating in the tiny, piping voice that you wanted to kill her.

“It's no use getting mad. You can't change the rules. But you might be able to repeat the course in a summer school arrangement.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Well, you have to decide what's important.”

I knew what was important. Sun, freedom, swimming lessons. Anyway, if I got an A this term, it would be such an extraordinary leap that the whole math faculty would be flabbergasted. They would make an exception of someone so amazing, and in September I would take my place in the rich and dazzling presence of Mr. Lewis.

I didn't voice this projected chain of events to Valerie. But it was as sound and predictable as the equation she was writing down with her well-sharpened pencil.