Daughters of the Revolution (4 page)

Heck saw the shore. He saw a woman on the beach, who wore red clothing and held, in each of her hands, the hand
of a child. He paddled more shrewdly, to trick the ocean. He would not affront it directly; he would come in from one side. The gray shore lay just ahead and the woman standing on the shore appeared bright, like a red flag. She was the sight Heck set his eye on. His breath crackled in his chest like leaves on fire. Between strokes, he felt Rebozos’s wild stirring of the water. They might not be friends after this.

H
e begins with a bang at the center of his story. It’s spring of that revolutionary year, not too far in. Meringues of snow line the sidewalks, but a freshness cuts the air. Goddard Byrd—known to his friends and enemies as “God”—has just emerged from an afternoon at the Parker House Hotel, a virile, uncircumcised male of his class, upbringing and era. His prostate gland and his
praeputium
have not yet been removed, and he is unburdened, just now, of Puritanism’s load. He has drunk a glass of gin, then lain with Mrs. Viktor Rebozos—whom he must remember to call Aileen—and both of them are better for this exercise.

In bed, she tells him he is a bear, all paws and claws. She insults him, purrs, climbs on top. She wants to know if he could be any wild animal, which would he be?

An animal? He would be a tiger!

(She would be a gazelle.)

He likes himself better this way, his natural shyness tempered by adrenaline. She is more flexible than he, more at ease, depending on the occasion—more pliable. Women
are
pliable, he thinks; they revel in the shifting relations required by husbands, children, lovers, others. (How can this be a matter of opinion?) He can’t tell Mrs. Rebozos these things; she might eat him alive.

They lie together in the fading afternoon light, the March grisaille. “The most beautiful words in the English language are
sex in the afternoon
,” she tells him, and he can’t, in the moment,
find reason to correct her. Mrs. Rebozos’s tongue darts suddenly across his left nipple, and God rises with an animal roar, his body fire and ice.

She smiles. “I read that in
The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana.
”

“Do it again,” says God.

Her tongue and lips move excruciatingly over his body, describing ancient erotic techniques from the Orient. He rises obediently as a snake in a basket. God lifts his head to look at her, and feels an organ breach (liver? spleen?). She is so gamine, indeed! She looks like a boy. Almost. Short hair. Hoops in her ears. All of it signifying what? Maybe nothing.

Eventually, he pins her to her back, which she seems to enjoy, and humps her in the familiar way, running breathlessly toward a goal, which he reaches.

“You’re beginning to get it, my earnest missionary,” she tells him afterward. “Let’s hope it’s not too late.”

They share a plate of cold roast beef, a famous roll. Naked, quivering a little, she wraps a blue knit scarf around her shoulders. “My dark secret,” she says. “All my life I’ve been drawn to misogynist coots like you. Like a taste for black coffee—incredible when you think about it.” Even God is surprised that a free-spirited woman such as Mrs. Rebozos would so defiantly stand beside an old man, in his shadow, eat meat with him and be his prize!

“I have to go,” he says into her ear. “You could stay all afternoon; you could have a bath.”

“Just a quick shower,” she says. “I have a women’s thing. Last week, we inspected our cervixes. Mine looked like an eye. It
blinked.
”

God tries to conceal his horror. At three, he descends, leaving Mrs. Rebozos to enjoy the rented room, whose extravagant price stabs him when he thinks of it. (In spite of the evidence, he imagines her as feminine, passive, mysterious and inert. Women in their beds, Rorschach blots on luminous sheets.)

He advances through the lobby and rolls into the street like a well-oiled man on wheels. The atmosphere of hostility and depravity beyond the doors of the Parker House stings him like a slap. The street is filthy; even the city fathers are off their game, lax or stoned. Girls in paper dresses—temporary dresses for temporary girls—giggle at him. He’s harmless, they think, the last of a dying breed.

God passes gently into a haze of mustard-purple-maroon and marijuana fumes. In spite of the expense of the hotel and the crudeness of the street, he feels deeply at home in this world. It is divided and antagonistic, filled with human hatreds bred by race, religion and economics; he loves it anyway.

He turns a corner and nearly collides with a regiment of fife and drummers near the Old City Hall. A young man leads it, his fuzzy black Afro powdered white. God stops to watch. What history is being revised or protested on the plaza? Could it be Crispus Attucks, the first man to die in the Boston Massacre of 1770, or one of the famous Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment authorized by President Lincoln in 1863 to fight for the side of the Union? But no, impossible: A bevy of females masses together in the rear of this regiment, backing up the black man like Motown floozies. They whistle shrilly into tin piccolos and drown out the drums. A fantasy history! Who made it up, and why?

The regiment plays “Dying Redcoat” and “Poor Old Tory.” A few rheumy veterans with tears in their eyes clasp Red Sox caps to their breasts; God also trembles to the revolutionary music. He has been something of a radical himself, the first Head to find promising colored boys in Roxbury, take them to the Goode School, wake them up and arm them against poverty, drugs and crime with Thomas Hardy and Shakespeare. Integration
was
his
cause, his triumph! Now the trustees (Mrs. Rebozos most vocally among them) want to bring girls in.

“Over my dead body,” he’d said.

Aileen Rebozos, gamine as she appears, is quite a formidable figure. The first night, he took her to a steak house on the highway, a bit of cowardice he’d assumed he could get away with, as there seemed no question of the thing going anywhere.

“Finish your peas,” he reminded her when she lit a cigarette in the middle of dinner; in reply, she poured her drink over his head. God chuckles, recalling aspects of her character that charm him—her direct speech and musculature, her randy infidelity. She and God are foot soldiers, she has informed him, in the sexual revolution. Together with her husband, Viktor, who is for some reason a source of embarrassment, Mrs. Rebozos contributed fifty thousand dollars to save the Goode School from financial exigency, which, Mr. Rebozos lugubriously explained to God, was a form of disease.

“Goode
will
coeducate, just as it has begun to integrate,” Mrs. Rebozos pronounced at the last annual meeting. “We will not take no for an answer!”

God had chuckled.
Over my dead body
. Perfectly serious, fair warning—and he’d allowed the moment to pass. It was still unclear to God whether by “we” Aileen Rebozos meant all the women massed behind men and oppressed through the ages, or whether she meant the foot soldiers in the new sexual revolution, of which, she’d assured him, he was also a part, or whether she meant herself and Mr. Rebozos, whose money turned the world.

Then suddenly God is slapped again, jarred from his complacency. He thinks first of his conscience, but no; it’s glass. Popping sounds are followed by a blast, then screams, and a few commanding male voices. There’s smoke, fire, even laughter—and a rich, almost human scent of burning rubber. He’s down
on the curb, his arse pecked by little stones. A cold puddle of snow has melted beneath him. A shard of glass sticks out from his forehead, and he flings it from him as if it might explode.

Bomb
. The word travels through the air—bomb, a bomb, a bomb blast. Something has blown up. A woman runs down the street directly in front of God, her face closed so tightly, it is not a face. Is it a woman? Her head is anonymous—it could be any head. Instead of hair, it wears a knit woolen cap, blue and green shot through with metallic thread. The figure runs past. Without thinking, an old schoolmaster’s instinct, he reaches out for the coattail. The figure—not precisely a “woman,” though God can’t say why—does not stop or slow. The coat slides down the length of its back, the figure’s arms fall to its sides and shed the sleeves. God grips it neatly, his prize.

He has seen revolutionary chaos before, on television: Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, Che Guevara, bra-burning women and Ho Chi Minh! A trash receptacle smokes arrogantly on the sidewalk, the metal torn, the trash spilled and burning in the street. It’s all part of the spectacle; everyone claims responsibility for destroying the order he loves; everyone has a recipe for an explosive device. A block away, the Irish police move in. Do-gooders rush in toward the trouble. He remembers the red writing on the walls of the bus where he first touched Mrs. Rebozos:
Are we not drawn onward we few drawn onward to new era?
She pointed out that the words spelled the same question backward and forward, a palindrome.

The bomb has carried pieces of him away. There’s been a concussion; he is concussed. The angry new women have done it—he has their blue coat as evidence. His ears ring; he can’t remember where he put his wagon. Usually, he parks along one of the side streets, or occasionally, and though it pains him, in
the paid parking underground. But this afternoon, he can’t visualize his car any more than he can see his own face. He finds himself walking along the river, under the bridge. The yellow twilight drains into the dark. He walks until he can’t retrace his steps and the only course is forward. Then he walks in darkness, on the side of the highway, breaking laws.

He has never taken a journey like this, alone on foot. Not during the first war, which he spent in Italy. Not during the second war, in China. At the edge of the city, he steps into the fringe: sidewalks, crabgrass, narrow houses with covered porches, the metal detritus of family life—tricycles, charcoal grills. His white face must glow in the dark like a moon. He passes an empty public school, half an acre of macadam surrounded by chain-link fence. A young man brushes by him, whispering, “Smoke, smoke, smoke,” and vanishes. God thinks for a moment that he taught this boy in English 6. He continues past empty lots and convenience stores, along a band of gravel. No cars stop; he would not know what to do if they did. His breath steams companionably around his face. Cold rain begins to fall. A pool of yellow light appears, and a sign within the pool reads
CHINESE FOOD—COCKTAILS
. Behind the sign, a glassed-in room where people eat. In the distance, beyond the restaurant, the skeleton of an old warehouse beckons feebly, bricks and broken windows that God recalls from his youth, the dying days of his grandfather’s factory—Byrd Brothers India Rubber. An out-of-date sign on the brick offers the building
FOR SALE OR LEASE
.

A Chinese woman shows God to a table, where the menu appears under glass. At the adjacent table, four public high school students eat fried egg rolls and play a game of questions. “Ever lose more than fifty dollars on a bet?” “Ever have sex while unconscious?” “Why did thirteen women willingly open their doors to the Boston Strangler?” “Ever been pushed down a flight of stairs by a family member?”

He asks for a bowl of rice. The warm, glutinous grain
together with the chopsticks on the table and the polite offer of the necessary spoon all remind him that he is part of history. He helped to liberate Shanghai!

The revolutionists want to revise history, judge the past by the gleaming standards of the present and kill off old men, men like God. Then the new era will roll out, democratic and diverse. His body buzzes with the same excitement he feels when close to Mrs. Rebozos (the danger, her money and heat). Once again he’s the enemy, the target.

God pays for his rice, drapes the fugitive wool coat over the shoulders of his raincoat and marches out into the night, along the postindustrial corridor of Route 8, past the old Byrd Brothers rubber works, which once employed hundreds of men and women in making boots, raincoats, life preservers and, eventually, more delicate female items fabricated and manufactured under his aunt Olympia’s supervision. Now only the ghost building survives, followed by an eight-screen cinema and a scrubby, disreputable-looking woods behind the auto mile.

The moon flickers in and out of view. God stumbles on clods of burst tires and cracking ice. Since the navy he hasn’t felt so vulnerable or bold. To keep himself company on this strange journey, he works on the memoir he is writing for the Goode School Press, so that future generations might understand what sources nourished the souls of dead white men. Last month, the trustees invited him to retire, to make way for fresh blood. He won’t give way until his hour is up, but has been writing in his head for weeks, casting even intimate reflections in polite prose:

As he walks home, now along the old Post Road toward Cape Wilde, he moves on to larger themes. Cape Wilde is a hard place. Judges used to send girls into exile here rather than bother burning them at the stake, and let Indians take them, or wolves eat them. Sailors have drowned here for centuries; their ships crack up. These days, it’s a motif for Sunday painters, who describe the docks and barns and churches whose spires impale the air. There is nowhere God would rather live.