Timebends (16 page)

“I am not trying to change it.”

“You will have to make up your mind to wait through the weekend.”

“We are marrying tomorrow, sir. If you want it done with a dispensation, it will have to be here before then.”

There was silence. “I'll inquire again, but I am sure there is nothing to be done.”

“Well then, thank you very much.”

In his excitement, Slattery unloosed a veritable flood of spit into his cuspidor, and a new energy seemed to charge Mrs. Slattery, who forgot her weakness and marched into the kitchen to make some cheerful iced tea. They wanted to know exactly what the monsignor had said, and I had to reenact the conversation several times. Suddenly the phone rang. Hardly an hour had passed. Slattery picked it up, and his small blue eyes widened. As he covered the mouthpiece he loudly whispered the caller's identity: the
young local priest. Back into the phone, all he could say was “Thank you, Father. Yes. Thank you. Yes. Thank you. Yes. Thank you.” The dispensation would be arriving in time for the wedding tomorrow. Oddly, my having to win Mary like this had blasted away whatever doubts I had that we belonged together.

But Mrs. Slattery's fears were not so easily downed. As the pale priest next morning read off his special service, her tensioned fingers managed to break her rosary and the beads bounced all over the polished floor, causing everyone to look around for them while the reluctantly uttered words rolled on. She looked guiltily at me, paralyzed by this prophetic symbol of destruction that her hands, all by themselves, had unloosed upon the ceremony.

But all was changed again by lunchtime. After the morning reception ended, with its scant few whiskey bottles and canapés spread as far as they could go on a table, we were off inland to Berea and the old family farm where Mrs. Slattery was born and raised. The square Victorian house stood under elms and old maples whose limbs stretched over a broad yard surrounded by flat fields of hay and sugar beets and corn. Braces of small children raced in and out among some fifty people, including a dozen of Mary's adult young cousins, some of them broad thigh-slapping laughers and others with introverted and sad faces, and immensely fat farmers and small-town folk, all of them feeding on slices of roasts and turkeys and chocolate cakes six inches thick.

Overlooking the crowd, seated on the deep porch rocking rapidly back and forth, Mrs. Slattery's eighty-year-old mother, Nan, looked with darting eyes from face to face, her expressions changing as she recognized some rarely encountered member of the clan. She wore a flowered blue cotton print dress that was obviously brand-new and still stiff, and an old-fashioned, high-crowned tucked bonnet of the same material with a visor ten inches deep. Thin as a whip, she gripped the chair arms with her gnarled hands as she excitedly rode it back and forth. When we arrived Mary had kissed her feelingly and she had looked into Mary's eyes and said, “You were always smart.” Now, when I happened to be alone on the lawn for a moment some yards from the porch, I heard her shriek, “Arthur!” I turned and saw her beckoning me surreptitiously, and I came up onto the porch and sat beside her as she began to tell me her life. At a table not far off in the crowd, Mary's mother kept glancing over at us with a nervous smile, but Mr. Slattery seemed an altogether different man, waving to me from time to time with the secret smile of a co-conspirator. In his eyes,
I was now a go-getter, a type he looked up to from the shafts he had been strapped to all his life.

When I said the farm looked beautiful to me, Nan told me it had been rented out for years now; all the girls had married and gone off—there had been six daughters and no sons, a calamity for a farm couple—and her husband had not lived a long life.

“We come out here on a wagon from New York State, don't y'know, and we arrived over there by the lake and I liked it fine right there, but he wanted a heavier soil so we come back in here, and the clay was what killed him. The spot I wanted to settle turned into the middle of Cleveland.” She chuckled, stared out at the mob, and suddenly yelled toward a passing man at the top of her lungs, “Bertie!”

Mary's mother was instantly on her feet coming over in embarrassment to tell her not to scream like that. The old lady listened studiously to this instruction, and Mary's mother returned to her table and sat again, but her eyes were open in the back of her head.

The old lady continued. “My husband liked that heavy soil they had in Alsace, that's in the old country where he come from, but the clay is what killed him …” She seemed to see something to one side of the porch and got to her feet, and I followed her over to the railing where a chicken house stood fenced around with wire. Now I could hear some restive clucking from within. She went to a glider couch standing against the house wall and, bending far over, drew a hatchet out from underneath and went back to observe the chicken house. I asked her what was happening, and she said, “They's rats been gettin' in there.”

“What do you do with the hatchet?”

“Why, I throw it,” she said, as though I must be stupid.

Mary's mother was suddenly behind us, blushing and taking the hatchet from the old lady. “Now, Mother, you don't have to today …”—and led her back to her rocker, where I sat beside her again. Quite mortified, Mrs. Slattery climbed back down the stoop and returned to her table, wearily wiping her hair away from her face, stretched in a slow agony between her husband's spitting and her mother's throwing hatchets at rats.

“Who're you voting for?” Nan suddenly asked me. I told her it would be Roosevelt.

“Yes. Well, he's the best around, I guess. But I always voted Farmer-Labor, and always for Bob La Follette when I could, although he never got close for president. But I was a member of the party, and he was always my man.”

“Are you a socialist?”

“Oh, sure. But them”—she waved toward the party of people—“they're all conservative and Republicans now.” Suddenly she half stood up and started to scream someone's name but stopped herself and sat, impatiently waiting for the person to turn her way. Then she waved properly and said, “Hi!” in a softened voice and returned to rocking rapidly as though she were on horseback with her eyes roving across an interesting horizon.

Without warning she turned to me and said, “I like you bein' so tall, my husband was a tall man.”

“I like you too, Grandma.”

She patted my knee and went back to looking over the crowd. Mary came up and sat down on her other side, and they held hands. After a moment the old lady turned to me and said, “She was always the smart one, don't y'know.” An immense feeling of safety crept over me as we sat there in the middle of America.

But the serenity of that scene begins to tremble as I look at it more closely after nearly half a century. I was far less secure than I have accustomed myself to believe, and the reasons were in great part political. Ohio was deep in isolationism in 1940, and I knew that most of the people on the lawn were persuaded that after a mere twenty years of peace America had no business entering another European war. I felt the same, but my reasoning, unlike theirs, was radical; I saw the conflict between Germany and the Anglo-French as a new version of the old imperialist conflict of the previous world war, another last gasp of an expiring, self-destroying capitalist system. The people on the lawn, even if temporarily denied its bounty, believed in capitalism. Some of them had also bought the idea that by standing against America's involvement in the war they were foiling the international Jewish banker conspiracy to get us into it.

This message had gradually evolved into the main theme of a radio preacher with the largest audience in the world, Father Charles E. Coughlin, who by 1940 was confiding to his ten million Depression-battered listeners that the president was a liar controlled by both the Jewish bankers and, astonishingly enough, the Jewish Communists, the same tribe that twenty years earlier had engineered the Russian Revolution and was sworn to repeat it in “Washingtonsky,” as he called it. I could just see Mr. Slattery with his ear to his Philco, shaking his head with a deeply pleasured grin
at the padre's wicked wit. He was being educated, as were an unknown number of others on that lawn, to understand that Hitler-ism was the German nation's innocently defensive response to the threat of Communism, that Hitler was only against “bad Jews,” especially those born outside Germany, just as he was against “bad gentiles,” the ones who had radical ideas. That Coughlin was broadcasting word-for-word translations of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels's editorials in
World Service,
the German government's official propaganda sheet, was not known to the people on the lawn, and for some of them would not have been shocking news. That I shared with them an opposition to entering the war while disagreeing with everything else they believed in was a gnawing unhappiness for me and a rather new experience with ambiguity. Every generation looks back longingly to an earlier age when things were simpler and clearer, a time before degeneration began, but the year 1940—the end of my bachelor-youth and of the Depression—does still seem to me to have marked the end of a simple democratic idealism handed us by the overwhelmingly obvious evil of Hitlerism. At least it was obvious to us in New York. The further into the country one moved, however, the more human Hitler seemed to look, simply another warlike German leader who was out to avenge his country's defeat of 1918, a not entirely dishonorable ideal, come to think of it, and in any case not our business to interfere with.

In short, my conscience was muddled, as tends to happen when one knows one's agreement with a friend or ally is not at all as unconflicted as it purports to be. I still believed in the goodness of a Soviet Union that in the official Catholic view of my new in-laws and their friends was the chief creation of the Antichrist. But I refused to despair, because I thought that it was simply their longing for peace that had allowed them to be misled by demagogues into what seemed a sympathy for fascism.

The end of all this inner turmoil was that it reinforced the weld between my personal ambition as a playwright and my hopes for the salvation of the Republic. More, it deepened the presumption that should I ever win an audience it would have to be made up of all the people, not merely the educated or sophisticated, since it was this mass that contained the oceanic power to smash everything, including myself, or to create much good. By whatever means, I had somehow arrived at the psychological role of mediator between the Jews and America, and among Americans themselves as well. No doubt as a defense against the immensity of the domestic and European fascistic threat, which in my depths I interpreted
as the threat of my own extinction, I had the wish, if not yet the conviction, that art could express the universality of human beings, their common emotions and ideas. And I already had certain clues here in Ohio that at bottom we were all pretty much the same.

Slattery was actually going around spreading the news of my refusal to accept the delay in the granting of the dispensation. It seemed now that as a New Yorker and a “writer,” and possibly even as a Jew, there was something almost glamorous about me, dead broke as I was and altogether uncertain of my future. Sitting beside the old lady on the porch, I now began to enjoy acceptance of myself not only as a person but as a symbol of suspect strangeness beneficently transformed. Now people began recommending Mary to me, recalling what a great reader she had always been, practically the only kid who had loved school, as though her marrying an intellectual had been fated. The relaxed bursts of laughter of honest folk along the banquet tables on the grass, the high nasal women's voices, the overeating of the roasts and turkeys and cakes and all the creamy goodness of that countryside, spoke to me of the oneness of mankind. My father had been right in his refusal to deny gentiles a capacity for justice and warmth toward the stranger.

And at the same time, of course, running parallel with this euphoric hopefulness was my certainty that if I should suddenly stand up and announce that it was all a mistake and that I was leaving alone for New York, Mary's mother would thank me rapturously, followed by the whole clan.

As usual, it was dialogue that combed out my muddle. People now had momentarily ceased to come up to us on the porch, and turning to me with the vaguely apprehensive look in her eyes that old people sometimes show when addressing the opaque young, Nan asked, “What're you making of this pact?”

The Nazi-Soviet Pact had stunned the world; Hitler's archenemy had been Bolshevism, whose threat to Germany had justified all his barbarities and had won him support from many conservatives in the West. Partisans of the Soviet Union who had not quit the ranks in disgust were defending the pact by recalling that for years the Russians had been pleading with France and England for a treaty against the Nazis and had gotten nowhere; now they had simply turned the tables and from their point of view neutralized Germany in order to give themselves time to prepare for the inevitable German attack later on. In other words, the myth still held that these were not only different but absolutely opposite systems.

Before I could answer, the old woman said, “Looks like the
Russians just got fed up with those French.”
French
sounded slightly distasteful, she being of German Alsatian background. “I wouldn't blame them at all.”

Coming from so authentic a native of the heartland rather than from a New York radical, this was a relief to me. The truth was that with the pact there had come, as some such moment does to every generation, an end to innocence, the sunny air of youth clouding over with an ambiguous weather. Throughout the Depression years, whatever the frustrations and political twists and turns, one's pure words had had no need to be colored by unacknowledged reservations: one had simply and directly reached out to the rational and landed on the left. The alternative was to justify insanities like the destruction of crops to keep prices up when people in the cities were starving for food. But nothing was that clear anymore.