In the Beauty of the Lilies (17 page)

Jared’s eyes since he came back had changed; a muddy green, energetically protruding, they had grown a film, a fishy imperviousness beneath the pointy fox-red brows. “Do? Well, for what they call my partial disability I’ll be getting fifteen bucks a month for the next year plus the sixty that comes with every discharge. So I’ll sit around living on Uncle Sam till I get some use back in my arm and clear up this ringing in my ears. Then go back to Noo Yawk and make a ton of do-re-mi. If there’s one thing this war taught me, it’s that money is more important than pussy. Money makes the man, Ted, and pussy unmakes him. Money gives, and pussy takes.”

Teddy could see his brother’s nervous eyes narrow as he shifted into the more personal gear. Awkwardly, perched on the arm of the wicker chair on the little screened-in back porch here on East Twenty-seventh Street, where they had gone despite the November cold to be out of Mother’s and Father’s earshot—the bedridden man could hear everything, even the tiniest noise downstairs gave him some kind of pain—Jared leaned forward, his head cocked in a new way he had now, to let the good ear hear. “You got to watch it about becoming a mama’s boy. You’re going to be alone with Mom and Esther once Pop and I pull out.”

“Is Pop pulling out?” Teddy still thought of him as “Dad,” which had a childish ring.

“He’s been pulling out ever since we’ve known him,” Jared said. “Only it’s going faster now. Let me finish about women. They want two things, Ted: your money and your nuts. They spend your money; God knows what they do with your nuts. Nothing, I guess—they just don’t want
you
to have ’em.”

This all sounded a little off-key and flat to Teddy—missing a dimension, though he had no idea how to supply the dimension. His brother talked survival, and that was the name of the world’s game. His mother talked love, and that was the game you played at home, in its shelter and shadows.

Coming into his room in the dark just as he had cupped his left hand beneath his balls in anticipation of the loop-the-loop trip he had discovered he could give himself, she would tousle the hair on the top of his head and say, “Now, don’t you fret, little sweetheart, your daddy’s getting better every day, the doctor says, though I know he looks thinner—his body’s just squeezing the bad cells out, that’s what’s happening—and the way you’re growing, and bringing home those fine report cards, is a ray of sunshine in his life, he tells me twice a day.”

But she was scared, he could sense it in the quickened way she moved about the house, and in the way she touched him, for luck or reassurance, more than she used to, and in the tension of her hug, the hug a little shy now that he was fifteen going on sixteen. She had begun to clean houses, not the houses of her old parishioners—that would have been too great a comedown—but of those to whom she was recommended by her old parishioners. Her houses were not just on the East Side of Paterson but over in Clifton and up in Hawthorne, so there were long trolley-car rides. Teddy would often get back from school at four and find nobody in the house but Dad, dozing. He couldn’t talk now, just lay there
with his head held sideways on two pillows and his blue eyes getting livelier, looking out the window at Mrs. Levi’s wash, and the fences and backyards beyond like a ramshackle set of stairs mounting into the distance, south toward the inverted rows of rain clouds above Clifton. When Teddy would peek in, his father was lying there motionless. But then his eyes would open with their disconcerting lightness of milky-blue color and his eyebrows—thin and long like a woman’s, not bushy like Jared’s and their grandfather’s in the old photos—would arch in what Teddy knew to be a question.

“Good,” he answered. “School was good.” He did not say that he smoked a Fatima cigarette with Jake Wyzanski on the mile-long walk home along Grand and Essex Streets and then through Sandy Hill Park to Twentieth Avenue or that he had seen Charlotte Weed’s ankle when she reached down and scratched herself in American-history class or how the armpits of Edna Jacobson’s frilly blouse were stained wet from running when she came in late after lunch or how Peter McHegan said you could tell which girls were having their period from how red their pimples were or how Maria Caravello had come to the school as a substitute English teacher for the ninth grade. Or—and this he was tempted to tell—how Mr. Loesser, the geography teacher who also coached baseball, had seen him horsing around with four other guys with a broom handle and a rubber ball during recess this March and asked if he wanted to come out for the team; Teddy had pictured himself for a moment as Paterson High’s own Home Run Baker and how all those girls would be in the stands peeing in their pants because he was so great, but then he remembered that if he had too much exercise he might not be able to get up in the morning as early as he had to for the paper route even with his faithful Pierce and that he was
thinking now that he was bigger he should be helping out with a job after hours, if not with the Nagle Brothers ice wagon like Jared, working in some store as stockroom boy or as part-time apprentice at one of the dye works, which is what some of the other kids had been doing for years, waiting until age sixteen, when they could legally drop out of school altogether. Then they were lost to education, swallowed up in the clatter and the steam of the mills, their hands skinned down to the bone by the chemicals. A Wilmot couldn’t do that. But with Father the way he was, a Wilmot couldn’t play games after school, either. So Teddy had told Mr. Loesser thanks a lot, but he didn’t think he could. The man—not tall but taller than Teddy, with curly black hair receding at the forehead and one of those tan faces with deep loose sad creases in it—had nodded with curt understanding, and even smiled, but Teddy knew a door had been shut that would not open again. He was old enough now to see that life is a bent path among branching possibilities—after you move past a fork in the road you cannot get back.

Well, he could tell his father one of the things from school. “Dad, remember the Caravellos that used to be members of our church?” The long horizontal head, the ends of its mustache both drooping in the same direction, made a sideways motion the boy took to be a nod. It was not the Caravellos but themselves whose connection with the church “used to be,” but his father had understood. “I saw her in the hall and she didn’t recognize me, then she came into English class because Miss Harriman is sick and she recognized our name on the list and after class talked a little to me. She was much better than Miss Harriman, much livelier, and her English is perfect now—better than ours. Her sister and mother are both married, she said, but she had it in her mind always to be
a schoolteacher in this country, where women were allowed to be teachers without being nuns.”

His father soundlessly formed a word with his lips and then repeated it with a distant creak of breath so that Teddy heard the word “Wonderful.” Then his father said something else, which after a second of trying to understand Teddy made out to be Italian words, “
La bella professoressa
.”

There were languages in that long sallow head—mazes of books, of dead men’s words and the mazy tracks they had left in the dust. Teddy had often stood in his father’s book-lined study, feeling dwarfed and oppressed. When they had tried to sell the books to raise money, nobody wanted them, not even the Princeton Seminary. His father’s long pale head, its fine hair fanning from the semi-transparent top of his pink skull onto the bleached pillowcase, lay there like a giant egg—the egg, it occurred to Teddy, from which he had somehow hatched. He tried to put the weird thought behind him—people coming out of one another like segments of a telescope. His father and he were two entirely different people bound together only by a name and an unspeakable mutual pity. Since the man couldn’t talk beyond a whisper or two, and the boy couldn’t think of enough to say, Teddy began to read him the Paterson
Evening News
, which would be sitting on the porch when he came home from school in his knickers and billed cap and high-top button shoes he had walked so much in that the damp and cold came through their thin soles. He would get himself a glass of milk and an oatmeal cookie if there were any in the bread tin and read his father the headlines and more of the article if he indicated it roused his interest. The local news, the obituaries and murders and threatened strikes and marriages, interested him less than the international developments in the wake of the Great War—
monarchies overthrown, millions starving, red revolutions in Russia and Berlin and Hungary, New Jersey’s own President Wilson like a grim worn ghost of high ideals trundling his message of peace and forgiveness back and forth to Europe and being hailed as a hero to his face and behind his back outsmarted by foreigners like Clemenceau and Lloyd George. Roosevelt, Teddy’s namesake, died, and then Wilson broke down on a tour across the United States begging the Senate to approve of the League of Nations. Lenin formed the Third Communist International; Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks formed United Artists, their own film company. Father was especially interested in this item and made Teddy read every word, and also an item about a horse called Sir Barton that for the first time ever won something called the Triple Crown, and another on the sports page about Jack Dempsey beating Jess Willard, who had taken the title from a black man called Jack Johnson four years earlier. Father whispered close to Teddy’s ear, “Never should have had it. Big bum. They hounded Johnson till he took a dive in disgust.” Steelworkers in Indiana and coal miners in Pennsylvania went out on strike and rich men called Frick and Carnegie died, but Father was most interested in an item saying that astronomers had observed light bend around the sun during a solar eclipse, confirming some German’s theory of relativity. “Relativity,” Father pronounced for Teddy, when he tangled his tongue over the word. “The universe is getting stranger. I was told it would.” And then it was a new decade, and drinking was illegal all across the nation, and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer accused the IWW of causing the railroad strike as part of an international conspiracy and vowed war upon “the moral perverts and hysterical neurasthenic women who abound in
communism.” His father faintly rasped, “Had the Wobblies prevailed in Paterson, we’d have a different country.” Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks were married in a Hollywood dream come true, and Europe twisted and turned with coups and riots and little wars, and the Democrats at their convention put up James Cox and another Roosevelt, and Bill Tilden became the first American man to win at Wimbledon, and the amendment entitling American women to vote was ratified, but with no women present at the ceremony. And Father, Clarence Arthur Wilmot, slipped away one night, one of the first cool nights at the beginning of September, just died without a sound so they found his body like a beautiful perishable statue in the morning, all of a stiff pale piece—his spirit had slipped through their fingers, his and Mother’s and Esther’s, as if to spare them any further trouble. Yet there also was in his silence a rebuke, blaming them for having been unable to reverse the trend that had carried him off like an unmoored boat on an outgoing tide.

Of the confused, brief period that followed, Teddy remembered mostly Esther, as if Mother, being the widow, encased in a black that included glittering square black stones that had appeared on her wrists like manacles, was too hot with life’s dangerous essence, its hidden lava of disaster, to look at. Now twenty-five, Esther had been working for five years in the offices of Weidmann Silk Dyeing Company, ever since the upsurge in wartime orders had revitalized the company. A little strike by the dyers’ helpers in 1919, for a raise and an eight-hour day, had been easily defeated. Esther wore her skirts ten inches off the ground, according to the latest Paris fashions. She was like Father in her tall thin physique and she smoked cigarettes, but not in the house, where Mother could smell them. Esther knew that Teddy smoked, too, on the way back
from school, and didn’t tell. He and she seemed guilty spies crossing the enemy lines into the real, bustling, indifferent world and sneaking back into the terrible defeated hush of the house after Father’s death: his room and bed, day after day, unchanging, unslept-in, though sometimes in the middle of the night Teddy awoke as if Father’s cough had punctured his sleep—a dry, dragging cough that used to start timidly and become louder and more frantic, as if he were trying to dig out something jagged and tenacious stuck between his vocal cords. But the house was silent. Paterson at night was silent, but for a lone car purring past and the tiniest trickle of music from a gramophone in the neighborhood and, if Teddy listened hard enough, the faraway roar of the Falls merged with the muffled clatter of the mills weaving breadths of silk all through the night shift. These sounds had formed the undercurrent of his life, in this city crowded in a loop of the river at the foot of Garrett Mountain, and now there was talk of leaving. Modest as it was, the house was too much for them to carry, on the slim pickings of her cleaning and sewing, Mother said, and Jared’s charity, and Esther’s slender salary—for who was to say how much longer Esther would be with them? The thought of Esther marrying put a gleam of sad merriment into her berry-black widow’s eyes, even though Esther waved the thought away with a brusque disgust that was more and more her mannerism. “As long as dear Clarence was here,” Mother went on, in that sugary voice that had something pathetic about it now, an outmoded appeal to gallantries being swept away by the world’s quickening, nervous pace, “we had to hang on, so as not to disturb him, but now it’s not fair to Jared, to ask so much to make our ends meet. He’s a young man on the rise in New York City, and he needs nice things to wear. He mustn’t keep living in that boarding
house, with its dubious characters. He needs his own apartment, with a doorman, and to belong to a club, to associate with the calibre of people he must deal with.” As to exactly what that calibre was, or what Jared’s enterprises were beyond collecting other people’s rent, she was purposefully vague. She didn’t want to know. Unlike Teddy, Jared had reached that age when young men could have their secrets. “I’ve been getting the
nicest
letters from your Aunt Esther, down there in Basingstoke.” Basingstoke was the small town in Delaware, a few miles north of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, where Father’s sister and her chirpy, rosy-faced husband, Horace Truitt, lived in a big house right in the middle of town, with a long backyard that when the Wilmots visited in the summer had seemed to Teddy sleepy and sinister, full of droopy-limbed hemlocks and tall flowers like chains of soft bells strung together. Horace, who had been a chemist for the Du Pont Company and who had retired early on the strength of the shares he had been privileged to buy before they soared during the war, took care of the gardens; his especial pride was what he called a gazebo, wooden and eight-sided and freshly painted white and reached by a path winding through flower beds, even though just over the fence there was a busy street of less ample and picturesque homes called Locust Street, and in another block the downtown, which had shaped itself to the river. On its trips there in summer, the family would drive in Uncle Horace’s Hupmobile through miles of marshes to get to the beach, a strip of sand bent around a rocky point where the Delaware became wider than a normal river but still narrow enough so that you could see individual trees in the forested shore of New Jersey on the other side. Teddy was always excited when he got there, by the smallness of everything in Delaware and the hovering salt
tang of sea air, promising something to happen that couldn’t happen at home; by the third day he became bored and cranky, seeing that it wasn’t going to happen, and missing his own room, with his stamps and baseball cards and model airplanes and view of the neighborhood’s windows; sometimes he saw Deborah Levi in her slip, but she always moved out of sight before coming back dressed in her nightie. “Well, she solemnly maintains that, ever since Horace”—Mother hesitated; Uncle Horace had run away, a few years ago, with another Basingstoke woman—“did his unforgivable deed, she’s rattling around in that place and would like nothing better than if we would come stay with her for a time, until we can find a place of our own. Everything costs less down there, and it would be so healthy for little Teddy to get away from the mills and the rough element they attract.”