Evergreen (27 page)

One band after the other came swinging down the road: the firemen, the high-school band, the American Legion and a grade-school group with their teacher, singing “Yankee Doodle.” And at the last, in an open car, driven slowly so that everyone might see, came three old men bowing and waving their blue caps, the last veterans of the Civil War.

“The one in the middle,” old Mr. Guthrie said, “that’s Frank Burroughs, some sort of relative by marriage of my late wife’s, I never did figure out the relationship.”

“He must be awfully old,” Maury whispered.

“Not much older than I am,” Mr. Guthrie replied.

The flag went past; hats that were not already off were swept off. A band played “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and, hesitantly, somebody began to sing. Then others joined and Maury’s heart was stirred here among these people in their home, on this old street under the leaves, with the thump of the brasses, the triumphant drums, the regimental flags and the voices. He heard his own voice, firm and joyous and proud: “Mine eyes have seen the glory—” and stopped, struck with embarrassment as Chris turned and smiled.

“Go on, sing!” the grandfather said. “Sing out! I like to
see a young man with enthusiasm. And you’ve a nice voice, too.”

So he sang out with the rest until the parade had passed and vanished to disband in back of the school, and people started home.

“Who wants to walk back with me?” Agatha asked.

There was a general groan. “It’s two miles, for Pete’s sake.”

“I know. But it’s a beautiful walk, by the short cut, not the road. Who’ll come?” she waited.

“I will,” Maury said.

They entered a lane, a dirt track that led off the road through pasture and brush. It was early afternoon and very still. Even the cattle had lain down, chewing with solemn faces in the shade.

Presently Agatha asked him, “Why did you have tears in your eyes at the parade?”

He was so humiliated that he was furious. How could she be so candid? And he answered stupidly, “Did I?”

“Why are you ashamed?”

“You make me feel foolish.”

“Why? I was touched myself. And I was curious to know why you were.”

“Well, I suppose because for a while there I felt so much a part of it. I felt what it must be to have roots in a place like this, to say, ‘this is my place.’ And when an old man marches with the Civil War veterans he’s someone of your own blood. I was just very much moved by all that, and wondering what it must be like.”

“What it must be like? You don’t know?”

He opened his mouth to explain and closed it. How could she possibly understand the whole complex, forlorn, confusing business?

Then he began, “You see, we—my people—We’re all fragmented. Not whole, not of a piece, like you. My mother, for instance, came from Poland. Her brothers live in Austria; they fought on the other side in the war. Now they don’t even speak the same language to each other. One
of them has a wife whose father’s people live in France, and my father has relatives in Johannesburg; I don’t even know what language they speak!” And he repeated, “Were all fragmented, don’t you see? All scattered.”

“But I should think that would be very interesting! Old American families like mine, who’ve been in one place for centuries, they’re like a little enclave into which nothing fresh or new ever enters. I sometimes think, especially since I’ve gone away to college, that were even rather boring, were so predictable.”

“No,” Maury said, patiently, “you’re basic, you’re strong.” And he was suddenly compelled to go on. “Sometimes I think: What are we, where do we belong? What country is ours, really ours, where we have always been and will always be? I feel so light, so without grounding, that it seems as if I—all of us—my family and our friends, all the people I know, could be blown away like leaves and it wouldn’t matter. Nobody would even notice.”

“That sounds so sad!”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be depressing.”

“It’s my fault, I asked you. Here, here’s our short cut, up the hill. Let’s run! There’s the most gorgeous view at the top, you’ve never seen anything like it.”

He never had. The hill fell away beneath them in loops and folds, and rose again all silvery-gold in the sun and green-black in the running shadows of the clouds. The land was cut by the bay and its crooked coves. Islands lay scattered in the water and beyond rose other hills, as far as they could see.

Agatha spoke deliberately in a warm and lovely tone,

Maury smiled and answered,

They stood still, looking at one another. Agatha said, “I thought when I first saw you that you were like Chris and most of his friends, with nothing on your mind, sort of.”

“I don’t know what I’m like, really.”

Something so moved him that he turned away. There were some tall plants in a clump, taller than he. “What are those things, with the little white flowers?”

“Oh, those? Just meadow rue. It’s a weed.”

“And this stuff, that’s so fragrant?”

“Another common plant. It’s yarrow.”

He looked up. She was still standing there, with such an expression on her face—He said, “I don’t really care what they’re called, you know.”

“I didn’t believe you did.”

And then they were standing together, their flesh joined from mouth to knee, with a hundred pulses beating, beating through layers of cotton cloth.

“When do you have to leave, Agatha?”

“Tomorrow morning. And you?”

“The day after. You know that well have to see each other again.”

“I know.”

“When? How?”

“In September. You’ll come to Boston, or I could go to New Haven. Either way.”

“Something’s happened that’s crazy. I’m in love.”

“It is crazy, isn’t it? Because I am, too.”

He was certain he must look different, that people must surely notice it. But nobody did and it was better so. Even Chris had no suspicion and Maury, with a certain premonitory caution, was glad to keep it that way.

He heard her voice in his head. Sometimes, driving the car, her face rose up in front of the windshield, to dazzle him. He thought about her naked body, tried to imagine it, and grew weak.

They met in Boston in September. Once she came to New Haven and he rode the train back with her. They
walked and walked and lingered over drawn-out meals in restaurants. Their feet ached in the museums. On the sidewalks, as the weeks moved toward winter, it was clammy cold and the wind seeped through their clothes. There was never any place to go.

One time she produced a key. “This is for my friend Daisy’s apartment. They’re away skiing in Vermont.”

“No,” he said, “no, we can’t”

“Why? I trust Daisy. And we’ve never been alone. I should just like to sit someplace together, quiet and alone.”

He was trembling. “I couldn’t just sit alone in a room with you, don’t you know that?”

“Well, then. I’d do anything you want to make you happy. I want so much to make you happy.”

“But it wouldn’t make us happy afterward. Aggie darling, I want to start right, to do everything right. We’ve so much against us, I don’t want to add more.”

She dropped the key into her purse and snapped it shut.

“You’re not—you don’t think I don’t
want
to, Aggie?” he cried.

“It’s just,” she said bitterly, “that I wonder whether we ever will be alone in a room together.”

“Of course we will. You mustn’t have thoughts like that.”

“You haven’t mentioned anything about me at home?” she asked.

“No. Have you?”

“My God, no! I’ve told you about my father. Oh,” she said, “we even got in a fight last time I was home. He was talking about how the Jews are in back of Roosevelt; of course he thinks Roosevelt is the arch villain of all time and our descendants are going to have to pay for what he’s doing to the country.

“And I said what you told me your father had said about Roosevelt, that people are starting to get a few dollars in their pockets and that probably he is really saving the American system … I thought my father would have a stroke! He asked me what kind of crazy, radical professors
we had at college, and then Mother signaled to me not to say any more, because he gets so excited. So that’s the way things are in my house.”

“Well think of something, some way,” Maury said confidently. A man was supposed to have confidence in his powers. But he didn’t feel very much.

The telephone was a life line and a misery at the same time. Agatha took his calls in a cubicle at the end of a corridor in her dormitory. For all the clattering, slamming and talking she was barely able to hear him. He had to repeat in a shouting whisper:
“I love you, I miss you so,”
feeling foolish, frustrated and sad. And then silence while time raced, with nothing to say, or rather, so much to say and no way to begin. Then the three minutes were up.

Thanksgiving vacation had to be endured. He went with his father to the apartments on Washington Heights to collect the rents and check repairs. He stood on the sidewalk and watched the lift vans being unloaded as the refugees began to arrive from Germany; stood while heavy ornate furniture from some villa in Berlin-Charlottenburg was lifted out, furniture too big and dark for the flat over the delicatessen or the laundry. His father stood there too, talking to the new arrivals in a mixture of German and Yiddish. His face was grave and he sighed. Always that sigh: What’s to happen? What’s to become of us? It was depressing.

Then home to Iris at the dinner table, giving her earnest daily rehash of the
New York Times
, pushing the untidy hair behind her ears. “You can’t oversimplify, Pa. This thing that is happening in Germany has its roots in the Versailles Treaty and the economic collapse—”

Poor Iris! Would any man ever rejoice in her as I rejoice in Agatha?

He recalled the dinner table at Chris’s house. Everything was so
emotional
here. But perhaps that was unfair? Perhaps the emotion was in him, too?

At Thanksgiving dinner there were some new faces.

“Mr. and Mrs. Nathanson,” Pa said. “He’s our new accountant
and a very bright guy. His daughter’s coming too,” he added casually.

Just as casually, the daughter was seated next to Maury. But he had to give them credit. They had too much respect to foist just anyone upon him. She was a nice, a really nice girl. She went to Radcliffe and she was very smart, but she didn’t try to impress him with it. He liked her pale gray wool dress and her shiny thick black hair. He even liked her nails, dark red ovals, perfectly manicured. Aggie had short nails like a little boy’s; he suspected that she bit them. But he could have been locked in a room with this girl, or any other girl, and it wouldn’t have meant a thing.

“What are you planning to do after Yale?” the girl asked.

Everyone at the table had caught her question. He hadn’t planned to answer as he did, hadn’t even been sure of what he wanted. It was just an idea that had been growing, perhaps because of Chris’s own plans or Chris’s fine old grandfather.

“I want to go to law school,” Maury said.

His father’s mouth fell open. He almost chuckled. “Maury! You never said a word!”

“Well, I wasn’t certain.”

“By golly, this is great news! You know,” he confided to the table, “when he was a baby his mother and I used to talk, we’d talk about him being a doctor or a lawyer. Well, you know how it is.”

The Nathansons smiled. They knew how it was.

“So what’s it to be? Harvard or Yale?”

Maury answered modestly, “I’ll have to see who’ll take me.”

“Well, well, I’ll have to do some hustling, but I’ll do it. For Maury I’ll move the earth if I have to,” his father said.

“When the building business comes back,” Mr. Nathanson observed, “it’ll be a good thing to have your own son handle the legal end. You’ll have it made. And you too, Maury. It’ll be a good thing for you, too.”

That was not at all what he had in mind, but he didn’t
say so. What he had in mind, as the idea took form and grew, was a good American life in some old town, or some small city. He saw himself sitting behind a roll-top desk with maple trees outside the window. He felt an atmosphere clean and quiet and austere. Like Lincoln in Springfield. Yes, that’s how it would be. Like Lincoln in Springfield.

A few days later his mother remarked, “A nice girl, that Natalie, don’t you think so?”

“Oh, very,” he agreed. His mother was waiting for more but he did not give it.

Then a few weeks later while they were talking on the telephone, his mother said, “I spoke to Mrs. Nathanson today. She happened to remark, I don’t know how it came about, you never called Natalie.”

“No.”

A pause. “You didn’t like her?”

“I liked her.”

“I don’t want to interfere. A young man wants his privacy, I’ve never interfered, have I, Maury?”

“No, you haven’t.” And that was true.

“So forgive me this once.… Have you got another girl, is that it?”

“Well, it’s too early to say. I’ll tell you, Ma, I promise, whenever there’s anything to tell.”

“I’m sure you will. Whatever you do will be fine with us, Maury, you know that. As long as she’s a Jewish girl. Not that it’s necessary to say that to you. We trust you, Maury.”

Christmas vacation was no better. Agatha came to New York for a Christmas party. He met her in the lobby of the Hotel Commodore. Feeling fiercely jealous, ineffectual and stricken of manhood, he listened to her assurances that Peter So-and-So and Douglas So-and-So meant nothing to her at all, that they were only party escorts, that nobody meant anything to her at all (Oh, God, Maury, do I have to tell you?). And he knew that was the sacred truth and
died of his jealousy anyway: hands that would touch her while they danced; ears that would listen to her voice; eyes that would look at her freely, publicly, with no apology.…

By March and spring recess he was close to desperation. “Pa, I’d like to have a car for a day or two,” he said. “I’d like to run up and visit a fellow near Albany.”