The Early Stories (70 page)

The section man turned, bespectacled and pale. It was shocking; he had aged.

The march was slow to start. Trucks and police cars appeared and disappeared at the playground gate. Officious young seminarians tried to organize the crowd into lines. Unintelligible announcements crackled within the loudspeakers. Martin Luther King was a dim religious rumor on the playground plain—now here, now there, now absent, now present. The sun showed as a kind of sore spot burning through the clouds. Carol nibbled her Popsicle and shivered. Richard and Joan argued whether to march under the Danvers banner with the psychiatrist or with the Unitarians. In the end it did not matter; King invisibly established himself at their head, a distant truck loaded with singing women lurched forward, a far corner of the crowd began to croon, “Which side are you on, boy?,” and the marching began.

On Columbus Avenue they were shuffled into lines ten abreast. The Maples were separated. Joan turned up between her psychiatrist and a massive, doleful African wearing tribal scars, sneakers, and a Harvard Athletic Association sweatshirt. Richard found himself in the line ahead, with Carol beside him. Someone behind him, a forward-looking liberal, stepped on his heel, giving the knit of his loafer such a wrench that he had to walk the three miles through Boston with a floppy shoe and a slight limp. He had been born in West Virginia and did not understand Boston. In ten years he had grown familiar with some of its districts, but was still surprised by the quick curving manner in which these districts interlocked. For a few blocks they marched between cheering tenements from whose topmost windows hung banners that proclaimed
END DE FACTO SEGREGATION
and
RETIRE MRS. HICKS
. Then the march turned left, and Richard was passing Symphony Hall, within whose rectangular vault he had often dreamed his way along the deep-grassed meadows of Brahms and up the agate cliffs of Strauss. At this corner, from the Stygian subway kiosk, he had emerged with Joan—Orpheus and Eurydice—when both were students; in this restaurant, a decade later, he and she, on three drinks apiece, had decided not to get a divorce that week. The new Prudential Tower, taller and somehow fainter than any other building, haunted each twist of their march, before their faces like a mirage, at their backs like a memory. A leggy nervous colored girl wearing the
orange fireman's jacket of the Security Unit shepherded their section of the line, clapping her hands, shouting freedom-song lyrics for a few bars. These songs struggled through the miles of the march, overlapping and eclipsing one another. “Which side are you on, boy, which side are you on … like a tree-ee planted by the wah-ha-ter, we shall not be moved … this little light of mine, gonna shine on Boston, Mass., this little light of mine …” The day continued cool and without shadows. Newspapers that he had folded inside his coat for warmth slipped and slid. Carol beside him plucked at her little sweater, gathering it at her bosom but unable, as if under a spell, to button it. In the line behind him, Joan, secure between her id and superego, stepped along, swinging her arms, throwing her ballet slippers alternately outward in a confident splaying stride. “… let 'er shine, let 'er shine …”

Incredibly, they were traversing a cloverleaf, an elevated concrete arabesque devoid of cars. Their massed footsteps whispered; the city yawned beneath them. The march had no beginning and no end that Richard could see. Within him, the fever had become a small glassy scratching on the walls of the pit hollowed by the detonating pills. A piece of newspaper spilled down his legs and blew into the air. Impalpably medicated, ideally motivated, he felt, strolling along the curve of the cloverleaf, gathered within an irresistible ascent. He asked Carol, “Where are we going?”

“The newspapers said the Common.”

“Do you feel faint?”

Her gray braces shyly modified her smile. “Hungry.”

“Have a peanut.” A few still remained in his pocket.

“Thank you.” She took one. “You don't have to be paternal.”

“I want to be.” He felt strangely exalted and excited, as if destined to give birth. He wanted to share this sensation with Carol, but instead he asked her, “In your study of the labor movement, have you learned much about the Molly Maguires?”

“No. Were they goons or finks?”

“I think they were either coal miners or gangsters.”

“Oh. I haven't studied about anything earlier than Gompers.”

“Sounds good.” Suppressing the urge to tell Carol he loved her, he turned to look at Joan. She was beautiful, like a poster, with far-seeing blue eyes and red lips parted in song.

Now they walked beneath office buildings where like mounted butterflies secretaries and dental technicians were pressed against the glass. In Copley Square, stony shoppers waited forever to cross the street. Along
Boylston, there was Irish muttering; he shielded Carol with his body. The desultory singing grew defiant. The Public Garden was beginning to bloom. Statues of worthies—Channing, Kosciuszko, Cass, Phillips—were trundled by beneath the blurring trees; Richard's dry heart cracked like a book being opened. The march turned left down Charles and began to press against itself, to link arms, to fumble for love. He lost sight of Joan in the crush. Then they were treading on grass, on the Common, and the first drops of rain, sharp as needles, pricked their faces and hands.

“Did we have to stay to hear every damn speech?” Richard asked. They were at last heading home; he felt too sick to drive and huddled, in his soaked, slippery suit, toward the heater. The windshield wiper seemed to be squeaking
free-dom, free-dom
.

“I wanted to hear King.”

“You heard him in Alabama.”

“I was too tired to listen then.”

“Did you listen this time? Didn't it seem corny and forced?”

“Somewhat. But does it matter?” Her white profile was serene; she passed a trailer truck on the right, and her window was spattered as if with applause.

“And that Abernathy. God, if he's John the Baptist, I'm Herod the Great. ‘Onteel de Frenchman go back t'France, onteel de Ahrishman go back t'Ahrland, onteel de Mexican, he go back tuh—' ”

“Stop it.”

“Don't get me wrong. I didn't mind them sounding like demagogues; what I minded was that god-awful boring phony imitation of a revival meeting. ‘Thass right, yossuh. Yos-
suh!
' ”

“Your throat sounds sore. Shouldn't you stop using it?”

“
How
could you crucify me that way?
How
could you make this miserable sick husband stand in the icy rain for hours listening to boring stupid speeches that you'd heard before anyway?”

“I didn't think the speeches were that great. But I think it was important that they were given and that people listened. You were there as a witness, Richard.”

“Ah witnessed. Ah believes. Yos-suh.”

“You're a very sick man.”

“I know, I
know
I am. That's why I wanted to leave. Even your pasty psychiatrist left. He looked like a dunked doughnut.”

“He left because of the girls.”

“I loved Carol. She respected me, despite the color of my skin.”

“You didn't have to go.”

“Yes I did. You somehow turned it into a point of honor. It was a sexual vindication.”

“How you go on.”

“ ‘Onteel de East German goes on back t'East Germany, onteel de Luxembourgian hies hisself back to Luxembourg—' ”

“Please stop it.”

But he found he could not stop, and even after they reached home and she put him to bed, the children watching in alarm, his voice continued its slurred plaint. “Ah'ze all raht, missy, jes' a tetch o' double pneumonia, don't you fret none, we'll get the cotton in.”

“You're embarrassing the children.”

“Shecks, doan min' me, chilluns. Ef Ah could jes' res' hyah foh a spell in de shade o' de watuhmelon patch, res' dese ol' bones … Lawzy, dat do feel good!”

“Daddy has a tiny cold,” Joan explained.

“Will he die?” Bean asked, and burst into tears.

“Now, effen,” he said, “bah some un
foh
-choonut chayunce, mah spirrut should pass owen, bureh me bah de levee, so mebbe Ah kin heeah de singin' an' de banjos an' de cotton bolls a-bustin' … an' mebbe even de whaat folks up in de Big House kin shed a homely tear er two.…” He was almost crying; a weird tenderness had crept over him in bed, as if he had indeed given birth, birth to this voice, a voice crying for attention from the depths of oppression. High in the window, the late-afternoon sky blanched as the storm lifted. In the warmth of the bed, Richard crooned to himself, and once cried out, “Missy! Missy! Doan you worreh none, ol' Tom'll see anotheh sun-up!”

But Joan was downstairs, talking firmly on the telephone.

Nakedness
 

“Oh, look,” Joan Maple said, in her voice of delight. “We're being invaded!”

Richard Maple lifted his head from the sand.

Another couple, younger, was walking down the beach like a pair of creatures, tawny, maned, their movements made stately by their invisible effort to control self-consciousness. One had to look hard to see that they were naked. A summer's frequentation of the nudist section up the beach, around the point from the bourgeois, bathing-suited section where the Maples lay with their children and their books and their towels and tubes of lotion, had bestowed upon the bodies of this other couple the smooth pelt of an even tan. The sexual signs so large in our interior mythology, the breasts and pubic patches, melted to almost nothing in the middle distance, in the sun. Even the young man's penis seemed incidental. And the young woman appeared a lesser version of the male—the same taut, magnetic stride, the same disturbingly generic arrangement of limbs, abdomen, torso, and skull.

Richard suppressed a grunt. Silence attended the two nudes, pushing out from their advance like wavelets up the packed sand into the costumed people, away from the unnoticing commotion and self-absorbed sparkle of the sea.

“Well!”:
a woman's exclamation, from underneath an umbrella, blew down the beach like a sandwich wrapper. One old man, his dwindled legs linked to a barrel chest by boyish trunks of plaid nylon, stood up militantly, helplessly, drowning in this assault, making an uplifted gesture between that of hailing a taxi and shaking a fist. Richard's own feelings, he noticed, were hysterically turbulent: a certain political admiration grappled with an immediate sense of social threat; pleasure in the sight of the female was swept under by hatred for the male, whose ally she was
publicly declaring herself to be; pleasure in the sight of the male fought specific focus on that superadded, boneless bit of him, that monkeyish footnote to the godlike thorax; and envy of their youth and boldness and beauty lost itself in an awareness of his own body that washed over him so vividly he involuntarily glanced about for concealment.

His wife, buxom and pleased and liberal, said, “They must be stoned.”

Abruptly, having paraded several hundred yards, the naked couple turned and ran. The girl, especially, became ridiculous, her buttocks out-thrust in the ungainly effort of retreat, her flesh jouncing heavily as she raced to keep up with her mate. He was putting space between them; his hair lifted in a slow spume against the sea's electric blue.

Heads turned as at a tennis match; the spectators saw what had made them run—a policeman walking crabwise off the end of the boardwalk. His uniform made him, too, representative of a species. But as he passed, his black shoes treading the sand in measured pursuit, he was seen as also young, his mustache golden beneath the sad-shaped mirrors of his sunglasses, his arms swinging athletic and brown from his short blue sleeves. Beneath his uniform, for all they knew, his skin wore another uninterrupted tan.

“My God,” Richard said softly. “He's one of
them
.”