The Naked and the Dead (73 page)

            Oh, it's not a bad job, I suppose, she says, but it's. . . the girls are not really high class, it's nothing special I could write a letter about. I'd like to do something else.

            Oh, I would too, so much, he says.

            You ought to, Joey, you're a finer-type person, I can see we're the only thinkers. (They laugh, suddenly and magically intimate.)

            Soon they are having long conversations on the stuffed rigid cushions of a maroon sofa in the parlor of her house. They discuss marriage versus a career for her, academically, abstractly; of course it concerns neither of them. They are the thinkers, regarding life. And in the complicated, relished, introspective web of young lovers, or more exactly, young petters, they progress along the oldest channel in the world and the most deceptive, for they are certain it is unique to them. Even as they are calling themselves engaged, they are losing the details of their subtle involved pledging of a troth. They are moved and warmed by intimacies between them, by long husky conversations in the parlor, in inexpensive restaurants, by the murmurs, the holding of hands in the dark velvet caverns of movie houses. They forget most of the things that have advanced them into love, feel now only the effect of them. And of course their conversation alters, new themes are bruited. Shy sensitive girls may end up as poetesses or they may turn bitter and drink alone in bars, but nice shy sensitive Jewish girls usually marry and have children, gain two pounds a year, and worry more about refurbishing hats and trying a new casserole than about the meaning of life. After their engagement,, Natalie talks over their prospects.

            Oh, honey, you know I don't want to nag you, but we can't get married on the money you're making; after all, you wouldn't want me to live in a cold-water flat. A woman wants to fix up things and have a nice home, it's awfully important, Joey.

            I understand what you mean, he answers, but, Natalie honey, it's not such an easy thing, there's been a lot of talk about a recession, and you can't tell, it might be a depression coming again.

            Joey, it's not like you to talk like that, what I like about you is you're so strong and optimistic.

            No, you make me that way. He sits there quite silent. You know, I'll tell you, I do have an idea, I've been thinking of going into welding, it's a new field but not so new that it isn't established. Of course I think that plastics or television is the thing to come, but it's undependable yet, and I don't have the education for that, I have to face it.

            That sounds all right, Joey. She considers. It's not such a snooty profession, but maybe in a couple of years you'll be able to own a store.

            A shop.

            A shop,
shop,
that isn't anything to be ashamed of. You'd be a. . . a businessman then.

            They discuss it, decide he must go to night school for a year until he is trained. The thought makes him moody. I won't be able to see you so much, maybe only a couple of nights a week, I'm wondering if that's such a healthy thing.

            Oh, Joey, you don't understand me, when my mind is made up it's made up, I can wait, you don't have to worry about me. She laughs softly, warmly.

            He begins a very hard year, working for forty-four hours in the warehouse, eating his quick supper, and striving to remain alert in the classrooms and workshops at night. He gets home at twelve, goes to bed, and drags himself up to meet the next morning. On Tuesday and Thursday nights he sees Natalie after class, staying up till two and three in the morning to the displeasure of her parents and the nagging of his mother.

            They have fights over this.

            Joey, I've got nothing against the girl, she's probably a very nice girl, but you're not ready to get married, for the girl's sake I don't want you to get married. She wouldn't want to live in a place not so nice.

            But that's what you don't understand, that's where you underestimate her, she knows what we'll have to face, it isn't as if we're going into it blindfolded.

            You're children.

            Look, Mama, I'm twenty-one, I've been a good son to you, haven't I, I've worked hard, I'm entitled to a little pleasure, a little happiness.

            Joey, you talk as if I begrudge it to you, of course you've been a good son. I want you to have all the joys in the world, but you're ruining your health, you're staying out late, and you're going to be taking on too much responsibility. Oh (tears form in her eyes), it's only your happiness I want, you should understand that. When the time comes I'll be happy for you to be married, and I only hope you should get a wife who deserves you.

            But I don't even deserve Natalie.

            Nonsense! Nothing is too good for you.

            Mama, you got to face it.
I'm going to get married.

           
She shrugs. Nu, you've got a half year yet, and then you got to find a job with this welding. I only want you should keep an open mind on the question, and when the time comes we'll see.

            But my mind's made up. It's no longer an issue. I swear, Mama, you make me so upset.

            She becomes silent, and they eat for a few minutes without speaking, both troubled, both absorbed with new arguments they are loath to use for fear of beginning it again. At last she sighs and looks at him.

            Joey, you shouldn't say anything of what I said about Natalie, I've got nothing against her, you know that. Cautious, half convinced, she is beginning to hedge the bet.

            He graduates from welding school, gets a job for twenty-five dollars, and they get married. The wedding presents come to almost four hundred dollars, enough for a bedroom set from a department store, and a couch and two chairs for the living room. They extend their furniture with a few pictures, an inaccurate calendar scene of cows in a pasture at sunset, a cheap reproduction of "The Blue Door" and a Maxfield Parrish from an advertisement. On an end table, Natalie puts their wedding pictures, joined like book covers in a double frame. His mother gives them a whatnot and a collection of tiny painted cups and saucers with plump nude angels chasing around the circumference. They settle down in their three-room flat, and are very happy, very warm and absorbed in each other. By the end of the first year he is making thirty-five a week, and they are moving through the regular ordained orbit of friends and relatives. Joey becomes adept at bridge. Their marital storms are infrequent and quickly lost, the memories of them buried in the avalanche of pleasant and monotonous trivia that makes up their life.

            Once or twice there is some tension between them. Joey, they decide, is very virile and the knowledge that she wants him less often than he needs her is bitter and sometimes ugly. This is not to say that their matings always fail or that they even talk or brood about it a good deal. But still he is a little balked at times. He cannot understand her unpredictable coldness; during their engagement she had been so passionate in her petting.

            After the boy is born there are other concerns. He is making forty dollars a week, and working as a soda jerk in the corner drug store on weekends. He is tired, often worried; her delivery is a Caesarean, and they go into debt to pay the doctor. Her scar troubles him; despite himself he looks at it with distaste and she notices that. She is completely involved with the child, content to stay at home for week after week. In the long evenings, he wants her very often and contains himself, sleeping irritably. One night their coupling ends in a quarrel.

            He has a bad habit in the middle. Always, despite his injunctions, he must ask, are you warm? Her smile is so noncommittal; he is vaguely angered.

            A little, she will say.

            He slows himself, rests his head on her shoulder, relaxing, breathing deeply. Then he moves again.

            How are you now? Are you close, Natalie?

            Her smile again. I'm all right, Joey. Don't worry about me.

            He glides through the passage of several neutral minutes, his mind far away, imagining another child. They had the last one after discussing it and agreeing that they wanted a baby, but now he cannot afford another one, and he is wondering if her diaphragm has been set properly. He thinks he can feel it, which worries him. Abruptly, he is conscious of the pressure in his loins, the perspiration on his back, and he halts roughly, relaxing again.

            How close are you?

            Don't worry about me, Joey.

            He is angry suddenly.
Tell me, how close are you?

            Oh, darling, I won't be able to tonight, it's not important, go ahead, don't mind me, it's not important.

            The bickering offends both of them, makes them cold. He dreads his tasteless isolated throe, knows suddenly that he cannot do it, cannot lie afterwards on his bed depressed with failure.

            For once he swears. To hell with it. And he leaves her on the bed, and walks over to the window, staring at the drab parchment of the shade. He is trembling, partially from cold.

            She comes up beside him, nuzzling her body against his to warm him. The caress is tentative, uncertain, and it offends him. He feels her maternalness. Go away, I don't want a. . . a mother, he blurts, feeling doubt and then dread at the awfulness of what he has said.

            Her mouth forms in the blank smile, wrinkles suddenly into weeping. She cries on the bed like a little girl. He realizes abruptly after two and a half years of marriage that when she forms that smile she is close to hysteria and terror and perhaps even loathing. The knowledge freezes in his chest.

            After a moment he flops down beside her, cushions her head, and tries to comfort her weeping, his numb hand moving over her forehead and face.

            In the morning none of it seems so awful, and by the end of a week he has nearly forgotten it. But on his side it marks the end or almost the end of one expectation from marriage, and for Natalie it means she must pretend excitement in order to avoid hurting him. Their marriage settles again like a foundation seeking bedrock. For them, that species of failure is not acute, not really dangerous. They ensconce themselves in their child, in adding and replacing furniture, in discussing insurance and finally buying some. There are the problems of his work, his slow advances, the personalities of the men in the shop. He takes to bowling with a few of them, and Natalie joins the sisterhood at the local temple, induces them finally to give courses in the dance. The rabbi is a young man, quite liked because he is modern. On Wednesday nights they have a baby sitter, and listen to his lectures on bestsellers in the social room.

            They expand, put on weight, and give money to charitable organizations to help refugees. They are sincere and friendly and happy, and nearly everyone likes them. As their son grows older, begins to talk, there are any number of pleasures they draw from him. They are content and the habits of marriage lap about them like a warm bath. They never feel great joy but they are rarely depressed, and nothing immediate is ever excessive or cruel.

            The war comes and Joey doubles his salary with overtime and promotion. He is up before the draft board twice and is deferred each time, but in 1943 when they start drafting the fathers he does not try for an exemption because he is a war worker. There is a sense of guilt in all the familiar landscape of his home, there is the discomfort of walking the street in civilian clothes. More, he has convictions, reads
PM
from time to time, although he will say that it upsets him too much. He reasons it all out with Natalie, is drafted against the protests of his boss.

            In the draft-board office on the early morning when he reports for induction he talks to a father like himself, a portly fellow with a mustache.

            Oh, no, I told my wife to stay at home, Joey says, I figured it would be too upsetting for her.

            I had an awful time, the other fellow says, settling everything, it was a crime what I had to take for my store.

            In a few minutes they discover they know a few people in common. Oh, yes, the new friend says, Manny Silver, nice fellow, we got along fine up at Grossinger's two years ago, but he travels in a crowd a little too fast for me. Nice wife, but she'd better watch her weight, I remember when they were married they were inseparable for a while, but of course you got to get out, meet people, it's bad for married people to stay alone together all the time.

            Farewell to all this.

            It has been lonely at times, empty, but still it has been a harbor. There are all the friends, all the people you understand immediately, and in the Army, in the bare alien worlds of the barracks and the bivouacs, Goldstein fumbles for a new answer, a new security. And in his misery the old habits wither away like bark in winter, and he is left without a garment. His mind searches, plumbs all the cells of his brain, and comes out with the concretion, the heritage, smudged for so long in the neutral lapping cradle of Brooklyn streets.

            (We are a harried people, beset by oppressors. . . we must always journey from disaster to disaster. . . not wanted and in a strange land.)

           
We are born to suffer.
And although he strains with the sinews of his heart and mind back toward his home, his cove, his legs are beginning to steady, his thighs to set.

            Goldstein is turning his face to the wind.

3

            The platoon forded the stream and assembled on the other side. Behind them, the jungle gave virtually no hint of the trail they had cut. In the last twenty yards, glimpsing the hills, the men had hacked away very little shrubbery, had crawled through the periphery of the brush on their stomachs. Now if a Japanese patrol should come by it was unlikely the new trail would be discovered.