Butterfly's Shadow (15 page)

‘What’s funny about Walt Whitman?’

‘Nothing. I’ll read you some.’

Like pieces of a mosaic dropping into place, these glimpses and snatches gave Nancy an idea of those weeks in Washington, built up a picture of Ben that caught him at another angle, gave a different view of him.

She heard how the Bonus Army was beaten; the terrible final day. And Joel, who had shared Ben’s hut on the Anacostia Flats, recalled the government’s hostility and contempt.

‘They called us drifters, dope fiends, Bolsheviks. Any Jewish name they figured for a communist. We had coloured vets, guys who served in the 93rd. But black and white sharing, that really bugged those Washington guys, so the word “degenerate” came up. The rest of us, we probably looked pretty crazy by then, we were the dope fiends I guess.’ He shook his head, smiling without humour.

‘These are dark days for us all,’ Nancy said.

Later, alone, she thought about Ben, who had week by week grown closer to her as the distance between them widened. She reread his letters; those crumpled, grubby pages now seemed lit with hope and the possibility of a new beginning. She had closed herself off for so long – an aid to survival – but now, like a thaw after an ice age, she was melting; feeling and pain returned and she wept for the pity of it, the futility, the sad encampment viciously destroyed; the tired, defiant men.

Earlier, Nancy, like others, had blamed the President for losing control: he had given the orders. At the funeral, close beside her, Joey had listened carefully and held on to certain words: some instructions disregarded, others carried out. He knew who to blame: MacArthur had murdered his father.

It was difficult, this emptiness where Ben Pinkerton had been; Joey kept stumbling into it. He would be setting the table for dinner and notice that Nancy had come up behind him and was quietly removing a plate, knife, fork . . . she could not bring herself to remind him they needed one less of everything now.

There were still days when, returning from school, where some faraway unknown country had come up in class, he would automatically think of Ben: his father had travelled, he knew places. And then would come the kick in the head, remembering how things were now, and he would hurriedly
get a drink of milk from the fridge, or splash his face with cold water and scrub it dry before greeting his mother, home from work. All this came as a shock: he and his father had never been close; now to his surprise he felt bereft. He and Nancy could have cried together, they could have rocked and grieved. But two quiet people, they found feelings difficult to express.

‘How’s my boy?’ she would ask, and hug him tightly, noting a grubby smear on his cheeks.

‘I cut my finger at school.’

‘I’ll get you a Band-Aid.’

They got on with things.

Nancy had never been particularly moved by Whitman, but in her mind she saw Ben and Joel and the ex-actor in the Washington woman’s kitchen, and she had a sudden need to look again at some of the poems. She asked Joey to borrow the
Collected Works
from the library.

Elbows on her mother’s kitchen table, this one too covered with brightly coloured oilcloth, she opened the book:

‘
I sing the body electric . . .
’

She read on through the poem, thinking how that woman in her kitchen might have reacted to some of the more outspoken phrases. She turned the page and came to a line that stopped her, trapped the breath in her lungs till she gasped for air. Slowly she read on:

‘The swimmer naked in the swimming bath, seen as he swims through the transparent green-shine or lies with his face up and rolls silently to and fro and from the heave of the water . . .’

Did Ben roll silently to and fro in the green-shine, with his face up, in his last moments? Ben the beautiful swimmer, the incidental drowning.

*

In church the following Sunday the thought for the week seemed to offer a practical note of comfort, a message that reached out to an exhausted, apprehensive people. The preacher’s voice drifted across her consciousness as he spoke of the heroism of long-dead people, of eighteenth-century Quakers who had set a benchmark for courage:

‘Every age has heroes and heroines willing to face formidable challenges, make sacrifices for the common good and speak truth to power. They deserve our gratitude and support.’

At the end of the service the congregation came out into a grey, cold day but Nancy, burning with anger, was unaware of the chill.
Speak truth to power . . .
The President had betrayed them with his power. Across the country people starved, slept rough, were disallowed their dignity as human beings. Schools closed. The sick were dying untended. The land was full of vagrants, travelling to nowhere. Surely it was time for change?

She had taken a job as office cleaner, and sweeping up at the local Democrat headquarters she came upon leaflets asking for volunteers. She looked at the posters, studied the literature. Next day, after work, she was knocking on doors, handing out leaflets.

Not long afterwards, one of the churchgoing ladies approached Nancy, her face contorted into a grimace of commiseration. Voice modulated into appropriate concern she enquired, ‘Nancy my dear. What are your
plans
?’

‘I’m campaigning for FDR,’ she said.

‘Let’s hope your hero can deliver the goods,’ her father remarked, sounding less than hopeful. ‘Remember the old fairy tale warning: be careful what you wish for.’

When the voters got the president they wished for, Nancy danced round the kitchen table.

‘We should be drinking champagne! A toast to Franklin Delano Roosevelt!’

‘Well now, we were never a wine-in-the-icebox family,’ Louis said. ‘Would you settle for cola?’

She read the Inaugural Address aloud to Joey from the newspaper:

‘So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.’

There was more: there was comfort, inspiration, when the President told his penniless people that happiness did not lie in the mere possession of money but in the joy of achievement and moral stimulation of work. ‘These dark days will be worth all they cost if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and our fellow men.’

On the radio, later, crackling through the ether, he repeated the words that had given her hope: ‘I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.’

Filled with post-election euphoria, as she kissed Joey goodnight, Nancy said, like someone ending a bedtime story with the promise of happy ever after: ‘Things will get better, you’ll see. Roosevelt will help the homeless.’

As she turned to the door of the attic where his bed was squeezed between storage boxes and empty suitcases, she added, to herself, ‘and help us, too, please God.’

‘Amen,’ came Joey’s voice, from beneath the bed cover. Nancy looked startled. Had she spoken aloud? The boy must have sharp ears.

Joey, in the not-quite-darkness of the attic heard her go down the stairs, move around the room below, each sound conjuring up an action: the soft thud of a closing door, the click of a switch, the muffled sound of the radio, a reassuring, unemphatic voice: Nancy was listening to the President.

Once, there would have been a blur of conversation, husband and wife exchanging comments. Once there would have been a father with peppermint breath looking in to say goodnight and ruffle his head. Crying was not something Joey did, but he felt a familiar, lurching emptiness as though a part of him had been wrenched away, leaving a hollow place too raw to touch.

The resonance of the calm, measured tones from the radio filtered through the floorboards, up the metal legs of the bed and through the pillow into his head. Not the words, but a deep, soft buzzing sound that lulled him towards sleep.

He thought of Nancy as his mother, what else could she be? Waiting for her to collect him from school one day years before, he had caught sight of her at the gates across the playground as she spread her arms to attract his attention. Without thinking he had run towards her and leapt into those open arms, leapt up, flinging his own arms around her neck, squeezing tight. He recalled that one of the other parents, passing, had given him an amused look and he had yelled, over Nancy’s shoulder, ‘This is my
mom
!’

‘Well, sure she is,’ the woman had replied with a shrug, passing on.

No ‘sure she is’ about it. Other kids had mothers they didn’t need to think about. Joey had felt Nancy’s body, warm against his, and her arms tighten, holding him close, and he knew this was different.

‘And you’re my boy, Joey,’ she had said, laughing, though her voice had sounded wobbly. That moment a pact was formed; a corner turned. That was when he stopped calling her Nancy; she became Mom.

His father had been pleased, but Joey thought that to Ben too it had probably seemed something of a ‘sure she is’ situation: Mom was what kids called their mother, no big deal. And a new order established itself, a family unit. But still Joey had nightmares, he was in a room with a floor made of matting, running towards a woman in white, collapsed on the floor like a crumpled flower, and then running on the spot, like a character in a cartoon movie, getting nowhere. He would wake to find his hands pressed against his ears to try and cut out the sound of someone screaming.

Through his pillow he heard the soft, comforting drone of the President’s voice.

Not everyone was happy with the election.

A long time afterwards, when she had learned to hate her hero, Nancy could barely recall her shocked reaction, her outrage
when she read the newspaper revelations of Fascist conspiracies, secret enclaves of financiers, the machinations of Wall Street elders to bring down the bleeding-heart President. Assassination plots scribbled on boardroom notepads.

With no more election leaflets to deliver, no front porch campaigning, her hours at the local Democrat offices moved on from envelope-filling to taking messages; listening to frantic people, hearing how poverty brought despair. There was nothing to be learned from hard times apart from the acceptance of helplessness. Mostly Nancy talked to women desperate for understanding.

‘What about the doctor’s bill, shoes for the kids?’

But guilt insinuated, and often it was the men who cracked.

‘What does a man do?’ Nancy asked her father, ‘when he’s got no work, and can’t buy food or pay the rent?’

One man took a belt to his wife, because she was there; another scraped a few cents together to get a rosier view of the world through the bottom of a bottle; one jumped off a bridge, another off a kitchen chair with a rope around his neck. Others just disappeared.

Hard times.

Nancy was an employee now, working at the office fulltime; typing up interviews, writing copy for support leaflets, answering telephones, providing information –

‘Nancy, Eleanor’s discovered infant malnutrition –’

And it emerged that Nancy had studied dietary health care at college.

‘Nancy, the local CCC wants a literacy programme for the men. Who do we know—’

Disingenuous: they knew she was a trained teacher. She began setting up local classes, but the city’s political leadership was not happy about FDR’s initiatives – ‘unadulterated communism! Socialist ruination!’

Nancy brought the news home: ‘The mayor’s rejected what
he calls “federal handouts”. The city council says public housing will depress property values.’

‘There goes the neighbourhood,’ Louis commented drily.

‘What about the work-relief programme?’ Mary asked.

‘They don’t like it. Of course. But we’re battling on.’

She got home late, exhausted, and filled the kitchen with an account of her day as Mary reheated her supper and Louis made coffee. Excitement streamed from her; hope was an infection that she caught and passed to others.

‘The President’s finding work for men all over the country; they’re living free in camps, they get their food and a few dollars. It’s a miracle!’

‘Finish your supper,’ Mary said.

By day the men planted trees, cleaned up a slum, painted walls. At night, they took over schoolrooms, big men at little desks, painstakingly mastering the art of the written word, forcing their fists into a new discipline. These were the men – or men like them – Nancy had seen walking, without aim, without hope, as she watched from the porch while Ben was on his way to Washington.

‘They’re beginning to remember what it’s like to feel human –’

‘Your coffee’s getting cold,’ her father said, patting her shoulder.

Later, as he climbed into bed, Louis said, ‘She’s like a kid, she’s like she was at college – remember how she met that missionary and wanted to go out to a leper colony someplace?’

He wanted to say, remember how she was before she married Pinkerton.

Next morning, before breakfast, she was gone: so much to do, people to see, not enough hours in the day, she called out as she left. No time to sit brooding; they were all treading on shifting ground: chaotic but filled with hope; men learning to
read and write producing a newspaper for camp inmates, asking for articles, stories, even poems –

‘They ran a headline last week: “Buddy Can you Spare a Rhyme?” Cute.’

‘Did you get any?’ Mary asked.

‘They poured in. Pretty bad, mostly, but that’s beside the point.’

Not all the desperate people were illiterate labourers; some had fallen from high places. Nancy heard stories of big-time bankruptcies, yachts repossessed; an entrepreneur husband abandoned: ‘She took her diamonds and the kid, and went to Canada.’ The servants and the pool man were long gone. He shrugged, managed a smile. ‘I had a chauffeur and two European cars.’

‘I had an electric kitchen,’ Nancy said.

The letter from Nagasaki was in excellent English, exquisitely handwritten, bringing Mary information, news. But it was not from her brother.

At the bottom of the page, after a formal farewell message, was a small, square printed seal. Then a signature.