In the Absence of Angels (14 page)

B
EFORE COCKCROW
tomorrow morning, I must remember everything I can about Hilda Kantrowitz. It is not at all strange that I should use the word “cockcrow,” for, like most of the others here, I have only a literary knowledge of prisons. If someone among us were to take a poll — that lax, almost laughable device of a world now past — we would all come up with about the same stereotypes: Dickens’ Newgate, no doubt, full of those dropsical grotesques of his, under which the sharp shape of liberty was almost lost; or, from the limp-leather books of our teens, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” that period piece of a time when imprisonment could still be such a personal affair. I myself recall, from a grade-school reader of thirty years ago, a piece named “Piccola,” called so after a flower that pushed its way up through a crevice in a stone courtyard and solaced the man immured there — a general, of God knows what political coloration. Outside the window here, the only hedge is a long line of hydrangeas, their swollen cones still the burnt, turned pink of autumn, still at the stage when the housewives used to pick them and stand them to dry on mantels, on pianos, to crisp and gather dust until they were pushed, crackling, into the garbage, in the first, diluted sun of spring.

We here, women all of us, are in what until recently was a fashionable private school, located, I am fairly certain, somewhere in Westchester County. There was no business about blindfolds from the guards on the trucks that brought-us; rather, they let us sit and watch the flowing countryside, even comment upon it, looking at us with an indifference more chilling than if they had been on the alert, indicating as it did that a break from a particular truck into particular environs was of no import in a countryside that had become a cage. I recognized the Saw Mill River Parkway, its white marker lines a little the worse for lack of upkeep, but its banks still neat, since they came in November, after the grass had stopped growing. Occasionally — at a reservoir, for instance — signposts in their language had been added, and there were concentrations of other trucks like ours. They keep the trains for troops.

This room was the kindergarten; it has been cleared, and the painted walls show clean squares where pictures used to be, for they have not yet covered them with their special brand of posters, full of fists and flags. Opposite me is their terse, typed bulletin, at which I have been looking for a long time. Built into the floor just beneath it, there is a small aquarium of colored tile, with a spigot for the water in which goldfish must have been kept, and beyond is the door that leads to our “latrine” — a little corridor of miniature basins and pygmy toilets and hooks about three and a half feet from the floor. In this room, which has been lined with full-size cots and stripped of everything but a certain innocent odor of crayon and chalk, it is possible to avoid imagining the flick of short braids, the brief toddle of a skirt. It is not possible in the latrine.

They ring the school bell to mark off the hours for us; it has exactly the same naïve, releasing trill (probably operated electrically by some thumb in what was the principal’s office) as the bell that used to cue the end of Latin period and the beginning of math in the city high school where Hilda Kantrowitz and I were among the freshmen, twenty-five years ago. Within that school, Hilda and I, I see now, were from the first slated to fall into two covertly opposed groups of girls.

On the application we had all filled out for entrance, there was a line that said “Father’s Business.” On it I had put the word “manufacturer,” which was what my father always called himself — which, stretching it only a little, is what I suppose he was. He had a small, staid leather-goods business that occupied two floors of an untidy building far downtown. When my mother and I went there after a shopping tour, the workers upstairs on the factory floor, who had banded together to give me a silver cup at my birth, would lean their stained hands on barrels and tease me jocularly about my growth; the new young girls at the cutting tables would not stop the astonishingly rapid, reflex routine of their hands but would smile at me diffidently, with inquisitive, sidelong glances. Downstairs, on the office-and-sales floor, where there was a staff of about ten, one or the other of my uncles would try to take me on his lap, groaning loudly, or Harry Davidson, the thin, henpecked cousin-by-marriage who was the bookkeeper, would come out of the supply room, his paper cuffs scraping against a new, hard-covered ledger, which he would present to me with a mock show of furtiveness, for me to use for my poems, which were already a family joke.

The girls I went with, with whom I sat at lunch, or whom I rushed to meet after hours in the Greek soda parlor we favored, might too have been called, quite appositely, manufacturers’ daughters, although not all of their fathers were in precisely that category. Helen’s father was an insurance broker in an office as narrow as a knife blade, on a high floor of the most recent sky-scraper; Flora’s father (of whom she was ashamed, in spite of his faultless clothes and handsome head, because he spoke bad English in his velvety Armenian voice) was a rug dealer; and Lotte’s father, a German “banker,” who did not seem to be connected with any bank, went off in his heavy Homburg to indefinite places downtown, where he “promoted,” and made deals, coming home earlier than any of the others, in time for thick afternoon teas. What drew us together was a quality in our homes, all of which subscribed to exactly the same ideals of comfort.

We went home on the trolley or bus, Helen, Flora, Lotte, and I, to apartments or houses where the quality and taste of the bric-a-brac might vary but the linen closets were uniformly full, where the furniture covers sometimes went almost to the point of shabbiness but never beyond. Our mothers, often as not, were to be found in the kitchen, but though their hands kneaded dough, their knees rarely knew floors. Mostly, they were pleasantly favored women who had never worked before marriage, or tended to conceal it if they had, whose minds were not so much stupid as un-aroused — women at whom the menopause or the defection of growing children struck suddenly in the soft depths of their inarticulateness, leaving them distraught, melancholy, even deranged, to make the rounds of the doctors until age came blessedly, turning them leathery but safe. And on us, their intransigent daughters, who wished to be poets, actresses, dancers, doctors — anything but merely teachers or wives — they looked with antagonism, secret pride, or dubious assent, as the case might be, but all of them nursing the sly prescience that marriage would almost certainly do for us, before we had quite done for ourselves.

This, then, was the group with which I began; in a curious way, which I must make clear to myself, as one makes a will, it is the group with which, perhaps tomorrow, somewhere outside this fading, posthumous room, I choose to end. Not because, as we clustered, by turns giggling, indecisive, and impassioned, in our soda parlors, we bore already that sad consanguinity of those women who were to refuse to stay in their traditional places either as wives, whom we identified with our mothers, or as teachers, whom we identified with lemon-faced aunts, lonely gas rings, and sexual despair. Hindsight gives us a more terrifying resemblance. Not as women but as people. Neither rich nor poor, we were among the last people to be — either by birth or, later, by conviction — in the middle.

For the rich, even while they spun in their baroque hysterias of possession, lived most intimately with the spectre of debacle. Like the poor, they were bred to the assumption that a man’s thought does not go beyond his hunger, and, like them, their images of ruin were absolute. When the spectre of violent change arose in our century, as it had in every century, this time with two mouths, one of which said “Need is common!,” the other of which answered “Therefore let thought be common!,” it was the very rich and the very poor who subscribed first — the rich transfixed in their fear, the poor transfixed in their hope. Curious (and yet not so curious, I see now) that from us in the middle, swinging insecurely in our little median troughs of satisfaction, never too sure of what we were or what we believed, was to rise that saving, gradient doubt that has shepherded us together, in entrenchments, in ambush, and in rooms like these.

Two cots away from mine sits a small, black-haired woman of the type the French call mignonne; one would never associate her with the strangely scored, unmelodic music, yawping but compelling, for which she was known. She is here for an odd reason, but we are all here for odd reasons. She is here because she will not write melody, as they conceive melody. Or, to be honest — and there is no time left here for anything but honesty — as most of us here would conceive melody. But we here, who do not understand her music, understand her reasons.

Down at the far end of the room, there is a gray, shadowy spinster who knows little of heresies concerning the diatonic scale. She is here because she believes in the probity of mice. All day long now, she sits on her bed in a trance of fear, but the story is that when they came to the college laboratory where for forty years she had bred mice and conclusions, she stood at first with her arm behind her, her hand, in its white sleeve, shaking a little on the knob of the closed door. Then she backed up against the door to push it inward, to invite them in, their committee, with the statement she was to sign. Past all the cages she led them, stopping at each to explain the lineage of the generation inside, until, tired of the interminable recital, they waved the paper under her nose. Then she led them to the filing cabinets, unlocked the drawers, and persuaded them to pore over page after page of her crisscrossed references, meanwhile intoning the monotonous record of her historic rodent dead. Not until then, until the paper had appeared a third time, did she say to them, with the queer cogency of those whose virtue is not usually in talk, “No. Perhaps I will end by lying for you. But the mice will not.”

She, the shadowy, weak-voiced woman, and I are alike in one thing, although I am not here after any action such as hers. They came quite conventionally to my suburban cottage, flung open the door, and loaded me on the truck without a word, as they had previously come to another poet, Volk, on his island off the coast of Maine, to Peterson, the novelist, in his neat brick box at the far end of Queens, to all the other writers who were alive because of being away from the city on the day it went down. Quite simply, they, too, have read Plato, and they know that the writer is dangerous to them because he cannot help celebrating the uncommonness of people. For, no matter what epithalamiums they may extort from us, sooner or later the individuality will reappear. In the very poems we might carpenter for them to march to, in the midst of the sanitized theses, the decontaminate novels, sooner or later we will infect their pages with the subversive singularity of men.

She — the biologist — and I are alike because we are the only ones here who do not cry at night. Not because we are heroic but because we have no more hostages for which to weep. Her mice are scattered, or already docilely breeding new dogma under the careful guidance of one of the trainees brought over here from their closed, incredible, pragmatic world — someone born after 1917, perhaps, who, reared among the bent probities of hungry men, will not trouble himself about the subornation of mice.

And I, who would give anything if my son were with me here, even to be suborned, as they do already with children, can afford to sit and dream of old integrities only because I, too, no longer have a hostage — not since the day when, using a missile whose rhythm they had learned from us, they cracked the city to the reactive dirt from which it had sprung — the day when the third-grade class from the grammar school of a suburban town went on a field trip to the natural-history museum.

Anyone born in a city like that one, as I was, is a street urchin to the end of his days, whether he grew behind its plate glass and granite or in its ancient, urinous slums. And that last year, when it was said they were coming, I visited my city often, walking in the violet light that seeped between the buildings of its unearthly dusk, watching the multiform refractions of the crowd, telling myself “I do not care to survive this.” But on the way up here, when, as if by intention, they routed our trucks through streets of fused slag and quagmire (which their men, tapping with divining rods, had declared safe), I sat there in one of the line of trucks, looking dry-eyed at the dust of stone. Was it when the class was looking at the dinosaur, the
Archaeopteryx,
that the moment came? Was it while a voice, in soft, short syllables suited to his shortness, was telling him how a snake grew wings and became a bird, how a primate straightened its spine and became a man?

The room is quiet now, and dark, except for the moonlight that shows faintly outside on the hedge, faintly inside on the blurred harlequin tiles of the aquarium. Almost everyone is asleep here; even the person who rings the bell must be asleep, somewhere in one of the rooms in the wing they reserve for themselves. The little composer was one of the last who fell asleep; she cried for hours over the letter they brought her from her husband, also a musician, who wrote that he was working for them, that there could be glory in it, that if she would only recant and work with him, they would release his mother, and the daughter, and the son. The letter was couched in their orotund, professional phrases, phrases that in their mouths have given the great words like “freedom” and “unity” a sick, blood-sour sound. But tomorrow she will agree, and there is no one here who will blame her. Only the gray woman at the other end of the room and I sit hunched, awake, on our cots — taking the long view, who have no other. I sit here trying to remember everything I can about Hilda Kantrowitz, who was my age, my generation, but who, according to their paper on the wall, will not be here with us. Perhaps the last justification for people like me is to remember people like Hilda, even now, with justice.

What I see clearest about Hilda now is her wrists. I am looking back, with some trouble, at a girl who was never, except once, very important to me, and with some effort I can see thick braids of a dullish, unwashed blond, stray wisps from the top of them falling over her forehead, as if she had slept so and had not taken time for a combing. I cannot see her face from the side at all, but from the front her nostrils are long and drawn upward, making the tip of her nose seem too close to the flat mouth, which looks larger than it is because its lines are not definite but fade into the face. The eyes I cannot see at all as yet. She is standing for recitation, holding the Latin book, and her wrists are painfully sharp and clear, as if they were in the center of a lens. They are red — chapped, I suppose — and their flat bones protrude a long way from the middy cuffs. She does not know the recitation — she almost never does — but she does not titter or flush or look smart-alecky, the way the rest of us do when this happens. She just stands there, her eyelids blinking rapidly, her long nostrils moving, and says nothing, swaying a little, like a dog who is about to fall asleep. Then she sits down. Later on, I learn that it may be true — she may never get enough sleep.