After the War (3 page)

“This terrific thing, we just heard. Odessa’s husband, Horace, he’s out in the Pacific, in the Navy, and he saved a bunch of men’s lives. He’s getting this medal—Odessa’s so proud—” To her own vast surprise Cynthia’s voice broke off, choked by tears.

Looking up, though, she could see the faces of her friends, and though they all spoke at once she could hear them.

“Well! That Horace! How you reckon he ever learned to swim so good?”

“Mother, that’s wonderful, that’s just great!” (Abby, of course.)

“What a great story.”

“You could make a movie out of that one, Russ.”

“There’ll be no holding Miss Odessa now. She won’t do any work for any of us.”

“Him either.”

“Couldn’t we take up a collection and buy her a congratulation present?” That last, from Melanctha Byrd, was answered by a total silence, some shifting of feet.

Until Cynthia said, “Melanctha, what a good idea, you’re terrific.”

But Melanctha had already turned away, in tears.

2

I
N Cambridge, during the first weeks of college, in September and October, Melanctha experienced the heady, extreme, and slightly unreal joy of a person reborn. Or, a person restored to her rightful home, the place where all along she was meant to be. At home, back in Pinehill, everyone knew her; they knew who Russ was and what had happened to her mother, SallyJane, her depression and the shock treatment that had killed her. And they knew all about Russ and Deirdre, and all about Russ’s poems and his plays and now all this movie stuff. But here in Cambridge no one had ever heard of Russell Byrd, or any of that awful old family story; of course they hadn’t, they had more important families of their own.

And all over Harvard Yard, and spilling out onto Harvard Square, there were hundreds of the handsomest young men that Melanctha had ever seen. All around the hooded subway entrance and the Coop, everywhere, in that exuberant wartime fall, men in every variety of uniform, including the old classic Harvard garb of gray flannels and tweed, white shirts and striped ties. So many men, all so handsome and desirable, that at first for Melanctha the faces blurred.

At last a few faces began to separate out, certain men
whom she saw repeatedly and especially noticed. There was one of the Navy officers she saw everywhere, so handsome, with straight blond hair and blue eyes. And a boy about her age, in a V-
12
sailor suit, but tall and dark, with curly hair a little like hers (too curly, too much hair). All busily walking along, all preoccupied with the war? Although sometimes they seemed to be giving her certain looks.

Ben Davis, Abby Baird’s old school friend, the Negro boy, said to be very handsome now, was supposed to call her but he did not. Of course not, he was a football star, as well as handsome.

In one of her classes, Phil. A with Mr. Demos, she was seated next to a nice-seeming (but too young) boy from Connecticut, Tom (or Ted; she couldn’t quite read from his notebook) Byrington; seating was alphabetical. Later she observed or maybe imagined that he was trying to read her address from her notebook, which she usually carried so anyone could see, if they wanted to. And a few people, mostly very young guys, did call her, and they went out for beer at the Oxford Grill, or a movie at the University Theatre. Nothing exciting, not even any good-night kissing at the doorstep.

She was not attractive enough, Melanctha decided, not for those older officers. She needed new clothes, and she wrote to Russ saying that the weather up there was cold. A lie: it had been a balmy, golden fall. Russ sent her a check for two hundred dollars: he must have been drunk. And a letter. “Deirdre tells me I’m not a very good father, so let me try to make up for it a little. Besides, I’m being atrociously overpaid by Mr. Goldwyn.” Why did Deirdre even have to know? Melanctha considered tearing up the check and sending it back in fragments, but then did not.

She went in to Boston on the subway, to Chandler’s and
Stern’s and then out to Peck & Peck, on Newbury Street. She came back with so many bulky packages that she felt silly on the subway. She had bought a good tweed suit and some sweaters and a black silk dress, but not a new formal for the dance at Hilton, where she was supposed to go with Archer Bigelow at Thanksgiving.

A couple of times in the Yard or around the Square, she had seen a tall, handsome medium-dark Negro boy, and at those times her vulnerable heart had leapt up and she thought, Ben Davis, Abby’s friend. But he was supposed to call her, after all, and she couldn’t exactly run up to him and ask, “Are you Benny Davis?” Suppose he wasn’t, he was just some other Negro boy, but he knew Ben Davis, and of course he would know why she thought it might have been. Melanctha found this small fantasy infinitely troubling, embarrassing. As though she had actually done that: rushed up to this handsome Negro and said, “Are you—”

One night in Whitman Hall, the buzzer sounded; someone answered and then yelled out, “Byrd, line one. Melanctha!”

This time it could be Ben Davis, she thought irrationally.

A man’s voice, or a boy’s, but deep, and deeply Southern. (Or was it someone pretending to be Southern? Boys she went out with had done that, to tease her.) “Miss Melanctha Byrd? This here is Miss Melanctha?”

Not Ben Davis; he wouldn’t talk like that. She said, “Yes.”

“Well, I’m what you might call a friend.” A laugh, at which Melanctha began to feel an unaccountable fear.

“We’ve sure looked each other over, you and me,” the voice went on. Was he drunk? He sounded a little like Russ imitating someone more drunk and more Southern even than he was. But of course it wasn’t Russ.

“And I just wanted to tell you”—the man paused, did he
almost laugh?—“tell you that you’ve got the greatest pair of boobs that I ever saw. Tits like that, well—Melanctha, are you there?”

In the faintest, smallest voice Melanctha breathed out, “No,” as she hung up the phone. Clutching her robe around her as closely as possible, she somehow got back to her room; she closed the door and pushed a chair up against it. She got into bed and she lay there, wholly terrified. Disgraced. Mortified and embarrassed beyond all reason, or recall.

He could have been anyone at all. Any of those faces, those eyes that have met her eyes.
Anyone
. It was that that Melanctha found so terrifying. She did not see how she could walk across the Yard again.

She decided that she would, after all, go home for Thanksgiving. Maybe she could get so sick that she would never have to come back. Never hear that voice again, that horrifying voice that she might not even recognize.

At the Deke House, in Hilton, on football weekends, in those bright electric days, the major event was the post-game, pre-dance party. The house then was packed with Dekes and their dates, and a few old grads, who generally did not bring their wives. The air, what air there was in that overcrowded room, smelled of bourbon and cigarettes, a few cigars; the powder and perfume of girls, and boys’ anxious sexy sweat. And noise: laughing and shouting, and people trying still to talk above all that. And somewhere a record playing “Tuxedo Junction.” And from down in the basement, what was called the Rebel Room, came more shouts, and a wilder noise of yelling—rebel yells.

Melanctha, watching and feeling herself apart from all
that, although she was actually laughing and talking and drinking bourbon, at the same time distantly observed that all the girls in the room, in their too hot fall tweeds and pale cashmere sweaters—they all have perfect pancaked skin and small pearl teeth, small breasts and smooth blond hair, almost all of them. Except Melanctha, with her father’s hopeless dark curly hair and her mother’s breasts (did her mother get horrible phone calls, ever? No wonder she drank and went crazy).

Melanctha has beautiful legs; all the boys say her legs are great and even some girls have said it. Melanctha doesn’t understand: what could be so great about legs, anyway? People don’t touch each other’s legs, as far as she knows. It’s not like breasts or skin.

This particular party, along with celebrating the big Homecoming Game, was to welcome a special old grad, a Deke: the famous news correspondent Derek McFall. There in town for a speech he was going to give tomorrow, in the new Graham Memorial building. On postwar problems or something like that. Melanctha has seen pictures of Mr. McFall, seen him in newsreels—usually in his trench coat, with his collar turned up, and smoking cigarettes or a pipe. Good-looking, for someone his age: very tall, with straight blond hair. Deirdre claimed that she knew him in high school, but Deirdre could have got his name mixed up with someone else’s, especially since she was drunk when she said it—making such a big deal of it, of knowing Derek, at that awful party by the Bairds’ swimming pool in August.

But at some point, looking across that crowded, smoky room, Melanctha thought that she actually saw Derek McFall, with a pretty blond lady who looked a lot like Mrs. Baird, Mrs. Cynthia Baird, from Pinehill. Abigail’s mother. (Once, Melanctha saw that Cynthia Baird out in the woods with Russ; they
were kissing, so absorbed in it they never saw her.) But that was probably someone else across the room.

Although Melanctha did not exactly use the word “hate” in thinking of her father, did not explicitly think, I hate my father, she did hate him. His presence to her was unendurable, almost, and she watched him continuously, meticulously: his deep dark and blue eyes, his huge hands gesturing clumsily in the air, his slow warm dishonest smile, pretending to like all the people who loved him too much.

A horrible-looking man, maybe older than her father, even, with his cigar all wet in one hand and his glass of bourbon in the other—this man came up to her, standing much too close and breathing everything into her face, and he spoke right at her: “I just wanted to tell you, honey, that you’re the prettiest, sweetest, freshest young thing in this room, and don’t let anybody tell you different, ever. Those other gals, they’re faded, and jaded—faded and jaded, now there’s a good one, ain’t it? We live over to Winston-Salem, we’re all in big tobacco over there, and don’t get back to cheer the Tarheels but about once a year. But you’re so young, little honey, I’m not sure you’re even old enough to be here!”

Melanctha smiled, hiding her teeth as she has learned to do (as she hid her breasts with big sweaters), and wishing him dead,
this minute
.

“You from around here, sweetheart?” His breath was violent as his big red face leaned toward her.

“No. Pinehill.”

“Oh, Pinehill. Well, now—” His face was redder yet as he leaned still closer, until quite suddenly in slow motion, seemingly, he had toppled to the floor—shoving against Melanctha on his long way down. She clutched her breasts (had he meant to touch them?) and gasped aloud at the color of his
face, the paralyzed remains of his grin—as people all over the room turned to look, the record stopped, and several girls screamed.

“Someone call an ambulance! He’s passed out, he looks terrible! No need for an ambulance, the infirmary’s right there. Does anybody know who he is? Is he anybody’s daddy? Sick! Drunk! Is anybody here a doctor? Is there a doctor—?”

Archer Bigelow, Melanctha’s date, who had come with her from Pinehill, appeared beside her, his face spotted with acne (being in college had wrecked his skin), tall and thin and chivalrously concerned. A Deke pledge. “Oh, Melly, whatever—? Oh, you poor darlin’—”

Melanctha thought several things at once, a bad tendency she had; she was almost always confused. The oddest thought was that Archer sounded a lot like his mother, Dolly Bigelow, whom Russ, Melanctha’s father, did not like. Another was that she hated being called Melly, and Archer knows that; it sounds like that dopey woman in
GWTW
. Another thought, which is less a thought than a vision, a quick hot dream—she thought of kissing Archer (probably) later, pushing and twisting together, parked somewhere in the dark, in Archer’s car.

She thought and felt all that, as yet another stern voice within her demanded: You wished he was dead, that old man—did you kill him? Mean bitch. Mean Melanctha. Wicked girl.

To drown out that last voice, she said to Archer very loudly, “I’m all right, really I am. I just need another drink.” And she smiled up to him.

As it turned out, some old grad in the room who was a doctor pushed through the crowd and squatted down beside the fallen man. The doctor said, “He’s just passed out. Hey, help me get him out of here.”

Archer, because of a weak leg, did not go over, but five or six big husky Navy boys did, and the still unconscious man was carried out and across the street to the infirmary, which was handily right there, on the corner opposite the Deke House.

Where, still unidentified, he was pronounced dead of unknown causes—but among them booze. When his billfold was found at last, dropped and trampled on the Deke House floor, it turned out that he was someone very important in Winston-Salem, in the R. J. Reynolds Company. Big tobacco.

The dance was held in the gym, which was called the Tin Can, now lavishly filled with flowers, giant pink and white roses everywhere, and rich loops of satin ribbon. No one could call it a tin can now.

At one end, the big band was up on its stand, all the men in cream-colored suits and dark green ties, not quite right with the decorations but never mind, the music was marvelous, everyone thought, throbbing with trombones and trumpets, and aching violins. And everyone was out there dancing now, the most beautiful small powdered blondes in white chiffon or pink satin, and tall handsome smooth-skinned boys, though some were drunk, just barely on their feet. In tuxedos or dress uniforms, mostly Navy, which everyone knew was the best.

Melanctha, although she was wearing her aqua taffeta, with wine-colored velvet bows (a leftover high-school dress), still felt herself merged with the crowd. She was part of the beautiful dancers; she was what she saw.

And she was merged with Archer, a part of him, as they danced very slowly, beyond the lights. It was possible not to
think about the terrible phone call, in Cambridge, or the old dead drunk in the Deke House.