Evergreen (80 page)

Steve was like their mother, he mused, although whenever Jimmy had remarked it he had been contradicted. And he could see why. On the surface no two people could have been less alike, his mother being so courteous, so anxious (one read anxiety in her eyes, in the two vertical lines between the eyebrows), so concerned to please. She had always been afraid to lose her temper. (Because she feared that her children wouldn’t love her?) She had let them get away, very often, with far too much. Yet her same anxiety was in Steve.

Perhaps, Jimmy thought, I am more perceptive than I think, and shall not lack for understanding when I become a doctor.

Dad had treated him and Janet with serious respect as he took them on a tour of the hospital on the day before Thanksgiving. Back at his office he had had lunch sent in and they had sat with him for an hour or more talking earnestly about doctors and medicine. After a while the
conversation had drifted unexpectedly into family, perhaps because of having seen Grandpa’s name on a bronze plaque in the lobby of the hospital.

“I miss him,” Dad had said. “We were two very different people and we disagreed about many things. Yet there has never been a man whom I respected more or loved more.” He had gone on talking and recollecting. “His family was everything to him. And, you know, he was right. There was a time in my life when I didn’t want to be vulnerable because of family, when I wanted to put all that away. Yet without it there’s nothing. Only the black hole of the spirit.”

Jimmy had seldom heard his father so solemn. He had sounded like Grandpa. He hadn’t even been sure he understood what his father was talking about, but he sensed that Dad had honored them by revealing a part of himself.

Yes, Jimmy thought now, I come from decent people.

He would have liked to ask his parents specifically about Janet, but he didn’t dare. They wouldn’t approve of such an early marriage. They would say that at twenty he couldn’t know his own mind or make a decision that would be permanent. But if he was mature enough to know that he wanted to be a doctor and so to dispose of the rest of his life, then why was he not mature enough to make a decision about Janet? They would think otherwise, however. Most parents would.

Anyway, there was the question of money. He couldn’t ask them to support a wife for him. Dad made a fine living, but there were four to educate and he had to work very hard to keep up. No, it was quite impossible.

He trudged up the stairs to his room. Steve. Janet. An enormous work load. And admission to medical school. But mostly Janet.

The room was cold without her, as he had known it would be. Five years! Who knew what five years might do with their commitment to each other? A couple of hours together here and there, now and then? It could take the very life out of their relationship.

Five years. It was like saying: a century. It was like saying: never. He felt deeply tired.

“All wars,” Steve repeated. “Not only the Vietnam war. All wars are fought to benefit a few who get rich or richer. The rest just die in them for nothing.” The veins were prominent again in his temples. They looked bruised. One of them twitched, Jimmy observed.

It was an incongruous group at the table in the coffee shop, haphazardly come together. Jimmy and Janet had come in out of the perilous cold for a hot drink, and had been joined by Adam Harris, alone. Shortly afterward, they had seen Steve shove in, just back from the peace rally in California. He must spend all his allowance on travel, Jimmy thought. His coat was torn. It lay now, flung on the floor with a pile of paperbacks: Kafka, Fanon, Sartre.

“All wars?” Adam Harris queried. “You remind me of the student groups who vowed they wouldn’t fight in any war, even though Hitler was arming under their noses. What can you say to that?”

“It was basically the same thing. If the world’s financial interests hadn’t fostered Hitler there would have been no need for a war. Don’t you see that war and the system are reverse sides of the same coin? That the one can’t exist without the other?”

Exhausted, he put his head down on his folded arms for a moment. The others stared at him and shifted restlessly. He had been with them for half an hour and the tensions he had brought had now begun to affect them, too.

Suddenly he flung his head up. “I was thinking on the plane flying back: everybody on it was dead, do you know that? Ask them about Vietnam, the schools, Latin America—you think they give a shit? No, who’s going to win the next Series, can we keep the blacks out of the union, should I get out of the market, that stewardess would be a great lay. That’s all they were thinking.”

Adam Harris said patiently, “You’re not discovering anything new or startling. People are naturally and always
concerned first with themselves. Social change is slow. But it comes. Eventually, when enough people want to get out of this war in Southeast Asia, well get out of it. That’s the way democracy works.”

“Democracy! Anybody who thinks this country is a democracy needs a shrink!”

Adam Harris smiled slightly. “Do you know of a better system anywhere?”

“No, that’s just the point. We have to create one from the bottom up. And we start by stopping this war. That’s the first step.” Steve confronted Jimmy. “Why don’t you do something about it instead of just sitting on the sidelines? We’ve a meeting Sunday afternoon in Loomis Hall. Why don’t you come and hear what it’s all about?”

“I know what it’s all about. I read the papers.”

“Danny Congreve’s going to speak. Do you know he’s one of the best minds, the clearest thinkers we have? If we could have men like him running the country—”

Jimmy had thought of Congreve as a rabble-rouser. Perhaps, though, that wasn’t fair? Congreve was a kind of disciple of Harold Clifford, an erstwhile Quaker and theologist who was sweeping the country from coast to coast with his antiwar fervor.

But he shook his head and with effort met Steve’s blazing look. “Sunday afternoons I hit the books. You forget, I have to keep my grades up.”

“An evasion,” Steve objected. “You could find some time if you wanted to.”

“What I want most is to be a doctor. I might just be able to do some good for the world in
my
way.”

“And incidentally pull in fifty thousand a year doing it. Or will you aim for a hundred.”

“Listen, since you keep badgering me, I’ll tell you one reason I don’t want to get involved. I’ve been reading too much about overturned cars and broken bank windows. I know you personally don’t go in for that sort of stuff—at least I hope you don’t. But I want to stay away from it
altogether and, if that’s your idea of cowardice, make the most of it, Steve.”

“What you’re afraid of is your true self,” Steve said.

Adam Harris interposed. “I happen to think the war is very wrong. But I don’t think that overturning people’s cars and breaking people’s windows is the answer. Violence never is.”

Steve stood up and wriggled into his jacket. “Violence is what we’re against, don’t you understand? You talk about a car or a window as if they were significant, when they’re only incidents. The real violence is the shedding of blood in war, the strife in industry, the raping of nature. What we want is to bring the world back to decent values, to do away with competition and envy and anger.”

He picked up his books, an abrupt, surprising shyness returning to his manner. When he wasn’t passionate about his beliefs, it flashed through Jimmy’s mind, all conviction went out of him. This was how he usually looked.

“Well, so long,” Steve murmured. “So long.” And clutching the books, with shoulders bent, he scurried out into the dimming afternoon.

The others stood up and moved toward the door. “A passionate young man, your brother,” Dr. Harris remarked.

“I know,” Jimmy acknowledged. “I wish—” he hesitated. “I wish he would think a little more about himself, about where he’s going. We worry about him at home.”

“I don’t think you need worry. A great deal of this talk is only talk. People like Congreve, for instance, they sound like young wolves who want to tear the world apart, but they don’t and the world goes muddling on as always.”

They stood a moment on the sidewalk. “Yes,” Adam Harris said, “they’ll find out about violence. It’s the tragic mark of our time. But eventually they’ll learn that it can’t accomplish anything, not in the lives of nations or individuals. It always fails in the end. Well, it’s been nice talking to you two about something other than advanced vertebrate zoology.”

When he had left them Janet spoke for the first time in the last half hour.

“Amazing how such a brain can be so innocent, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean, innocent?”

“Well, for Pete’s sake, Jimmy, all power, whether of nations or families, is founded on violence! From the oil dynasties to the British Empire, to the country’s private fortunes. His own family too, I’ll wager, although he may not even know it. Everything! You name it. Everything.”

“But he did say,” Jimmy countered, “that they all fail in the end.”

Janet stared at him. “Yes, of course they do! When they’re beaten by an adversary that’s more ambitious, clever and—more violent. Don’t you see?”

“At this point I don’t see anything. My head’s spinning.”

“I don’t say it’s right or good, but that’s the way it is.”

“I’m confused. This sort of argument isn’t for me. I think I’ll go back to the room and tackle vertebrate zoology. It’s easier.”

Somebody on the floor had been using his portable television and forgotten to turn it off. From the little box with the four-cornered eye there came a tumultuous, hysterical shrieking. One thought immediately of a street accident or some other sudden horror. But it was only a quiz show. The curtain had just been drawn back to display the prizes.

Hot-eyed fools, licking their lips over a refrigerator, an electric broom, a—a
gadget!
Disgusting! he thought, switching the television off. And then: not disgusting. Pathetic. But why pathetic? Because they needed these things and it was so hard to afford them? Or because they oughtn’t to want them so badly in the first place? Which? I’m getting like Steve, Jimmy thought, addling my head with impossible questions that have no answers. He sat down in the armchair by the window, suddenly tired, with a kind of drained breathlessness.

Yet so much of what Steve preached was true. The trashing of America. Litter of broken metal, rims, cans,
frames of unrecognizable defunct machines. Seen from train windows: a blasted, withered landscape. Elevated highways over heaps of rusting cars among dying weeds as tall as a man; greasy puddles and smell of burning rubber, where once in the duck-filled marshes gulls had risen from the plume grass and flapped toward the sea.

Gray. Mud gray, rain gray; gray of ashes, old tires and wet cardboard boxes. And over all a stinging, mucky smog.

The trashing of America.

And a similar trashing of that small country in Southeast Asia, except that there the ruin was overlaid with blood. He felt his brother’s anger, the righteous rage that sparked and shook the body of his brother.

Yet there was something wrong with that anger, too. Jimmy strained. He was not used to thinking very hard about things unrelated to his own difficult, demanding goal. It had never been easy to find fluent words for his thoughts. He had heard and observed that science majors often were like that. Perhaps that was why patients complained that doctors didn’t “relate” to them?

Yet now he knew well enough what he felt. A strong apprehension swept through him, so that he shuddered and was chilled. He understood that those who saw what Steve saw with such searing conviction, and what he himself half saw, could be as blind, as narrow and as ruthless as that which they fought against. He saw that their righteous anger could be dreadfully and easily perverted, that in its fanatic drive it might only end by tearing the world apart, like the wolves that Adam Harris had talked about.

Although it was close to ten o’clock and the icebound campus was deserted, with all its windows shut tight against the cold, within minutes lights flared, telephones rang, voices called, doors banged and the quadrangles filled. Everyone raced toward the science building where more lights blazed from bottom to top, so that it looked like an ocean liner on a gala night.

The stunned crowd was quiet. Voices murmured in the
circle of flashing lamps, the ominous red warnings of police cars and ambulances.

“I didn’t hear anything,” Jimmy said, inquiring of someone standing next to him, “did you hear anything?”

“I thought I heard a thud or a thump, but I didn’t pay any attention to it until some guys came running down my floor yelling that there’d been an explosion in the science building. I never thought—”

Other voices rose and faded.

“… the building was empty!”

“… all the ambulances?”

“… army contracts, of course.”

“… no right to use the campus for the war machine!”

“… aren’t we part of America?”

“… you’re full of shit!”

“… geez, there was somebody in there!”

Silence, except for small shufflings and rustlings. Among those standing near the door an aisle was cleared, so that men coming carefully down the slippery steps with the stretcher could pass through.

“My God, who is it?”

“Is he dead?”

“No, not dead.” Moving, with an arm flung out from under the blanket that has been put over him. The blanket slips. It is picked up and laid back, but not before it can be seen that the lower half of the body is soaked with blood and wet, mangled cloth: a mush where two legs belong.

“… it’s Dr. Harris! Oh, Christ, it’s Dr. Harris!”

“… who’s he?”

“… biology. He musta been doing papers late in his office.”

“… geez!”

“He’s not dead? I mean, the face all gray and—”

“… that’s shock. Not dead. Not yet, anyway.”

“… oh, my God!”

Jimmy’s knees buckled. He sat down on the steps. There was no one he knew in visible range, just a lingering crowd of strangers, watching for something else to happen. The
ambulance whined down the street with its red lights revolving.