The Translator

by John Crowley

  She hadn’t written to Ben about Burke. She found she couldn’t write down his silly name on letter paper. For one thing.

  “Well it’s swell,” Ben said, and gave her back the sheet of onionskin.

  He had changed while he was away. She watched him, they all did when he wasn’t noticing; they could watch him because he didn’t notice. Watched how he looked out the windows at the brown lawns and bare trees, trying to remember them maybe, or maybe not seeing them at all, his attention on something else: as though during his absence he had grown a private self, and was no longer whole, all of a piece, the way he had been. Kit babbled at him and teased him, afraid and cold inside.

  Christmas Eve after George and Marion went to bed, Kit and Ben sat up; Kit insisted they watch an inane Christmas movie they’d seen together as kids. The only lights were the TV and the gray-green tree; already it looked a little tawdry and leftover, on the way out. On the sofa’s broad arm were the two books Kit had given Ben, printed by the Peter Pauper Press: The Flowers of Evil by Baudelaire and Pascal’s Pensées.

  “A matched pair,” she said. “Small, so you can carry them.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, nodding earnestly, maybe too earnestly. The Baudelaire had harsh, black woodcuts, dark women, demon lovers. It was for him, but even more it was from her: something of her, a part of her life for him to carry. The Pascal, though, was just for him, for his faith and his clear-eyed austerity: it scared Kit, but she thought Ben would respond. “So nicely wrapped too.”

  Kit had got a Christmas-season job at a department store downtown; they’d taught her to wrap, tie bows, skills she’d never lose.

  “So Merry Christmas,” she said; and because it was allowed, on this night of this year surely, she hugged him, laid her cheek against his rough one and held him a long time: feeling a hot dreamlike relief in his touch, a completeness, even as she felt him shrink and begin to extricate himself. Merry Christmas they said on the screen, the bishop’s wife, the suave angel who had come from heaven to help them, the happy people. Merry Christmas, while the big flakes of snow fell on the black-and-white town and the overcoats and fedoras and pheasant-feather hats.

  “So tell me,” he said. “What’s the plan? What are you going to do next year?”

  “I don’t know yet.” She spread her skirt flat with her hands, far from him again; shy to be questioned, her imaginary futures brought forth. “I’ve sent away for some college catalogs. I could get a scholarship maybe. Mom wants me to apply to Vassar.”

  “Good school.”

  “Oh my God,” Kit said. “All girls? I don’t think so. I don’t really like girls that much.”

  “No?”

  “No. You know that.”

  “Just boys?”

  “Well no, I mean…Oh you. You know. Ben: you know.”

  He wouldn’t talk about his own plans for when he got out, whether he’d use the GI Bill to go to school or if he’d get a job or what; he deflected his family’s inquiries with jokes, maybe he’d be a cop, the army was good training for police work, a lot of guys he knew. Or janitorial work too. Then Christmas night, as they sat in the kitchen eating cold turkey and pie, he told them what he had decided: he was going to reenlist when his hitch was done. Re-up he said: he’d learned a new language, and used it shyly but willfully, as though abandoning his old one in its favor.

  “What?” Kit whispered in horror, before her parents could speak. “What?”

  “I’ve been offered Special Forces,” he said. “It’s a program. Languages, and politics, and counterinsurgency.” He spoke to Kit, until her face made him look away. “How to help ordinary people: what they call nation-building. You serve in lots of places.”

  “But for how long?” Kit asked, hearing the rising edge in her voice. “For how long this time?”

  “Same again,” Ben said smiling. “Just the training takes a year.”

  “But you’ve done what you were supposed to do,” Kit said. She could feel her parents looking not at him but at her, at her weird intensity of feeling, her fear if that’s what it was, the thing come to life in her stomach. “Your part or whatever. Why do you have to do more?”

  “I don’t have to. I mean it’s not a law. I feel like I have to.”

  “You don’t.”

  “I do. And I did. I mean I’ve accepted. I’m telling you now. I’ve reupped.”

  She had stood now, napkin gripped in her hand. “Well why did you do that?” she said. She hated it that George and Marion could see her ask it, see her come out of herself to ask it in a voice full of tears. “Why did you go and do that? I thought you were coming home.”

  “Special Forces,” George said. “They have the different uniforms, is that right? The green berets.”

  “That’s right,” Ben said. “Green Berets is what they’re called. A special uniform.”

  “A special uniform!” Kit cried. “A special uniform, that is so great! Well gee no wonder!”

  “Kit,” Ben said.

  “You said you’d come home,” she said. Marion put her hand on Kit’s arm but Kit shook it off as though not recognizing what it was. “You told me.”

  He shook his head, looking down at his folded hands and smiling. It was a look she knew. And Kit turned away, threw down the napkin, and went out.

  Ben found her in the garage, wrapped in her winter dress coat, smoking a cigarette.

  “When’d you start that?” he asked her.

  “A while ago.”

  “What about…”

  “They don’t know.”

  “Well you ought to cut it out.”

  “All right,” she said. She tossed the butt to the oily concrete and ground it out. In the corner of the garage into which she stared was his bike, covered in a tarp. “I hate you,” she said.

  “Kit.” He sat beside her. “What did you think. What did you want from me.”

  As soon as he spoke she saw clearly what she had thought, that he would come home and that everything would be as it had been, which was impossible. Nothing is ever as it was, it is always as it is, and then as it will be.

  “It happens,” he said. “People grow up and move on. They have things they want to do. Have to do.”

  “What,” she said. “You mean your war.”

  “Not mine.”

  She waited, not looking at him still but poised to counter whatever he might say. For a while he didn’t speak further, as though what he thought was gathered within him but hadn’t ever been wholly said, and needed a moment to turn into words; and when he spoke it was as carefully as if the words might be the wrong ones, or words the wrong medium. “I do think there’s a war on,” he said. “I do think I have to fight it. I think everybody has to. I think Dad is fighting it in his way. Maybe you’ll find your way. This is my way.” He clasped his hands between his knees and studied them. “I haven’t shot anybody and I probably never will. The whole idea is to do what it takes so that you don’t have to shoot. But it’s still a war, and you can be on God’s side or not: there’s no other way to say it.”

  She still wouldn’t look at him, but she could see the light of the bare bulb overhead caught in the red stone of his high school ring.

  “You know,” he said. “When I was wondering what I should do, what I could personally do, and they pitched this program to me—I thought: Okay, I can do this; or I can join the priesthood.”

  Now she looked at him, and he smiled at her amazement. “The priesthood, yeah. Yup. I’ve thought about it. A lot. I decided I can’t do it, though. I’d have a problem with the vows.”

  “You would? You?”

  “Well. Not with poverty, or obedience.”

  She laughed, feeling a sudden awful vertigo, a doom opening beneath her that she had known about all along and hadn’t wanted to see: why she was losing him. It wasn’t war or Cold War or the army, he would go away from her no matter what, into whatever life he could flee to. He had asked her what did you want from me in that way, meaning that w
hat she wanted was impossible, and it was, and she knew why. She shook her head, hands pressed to her eyes as though to keep from looking down so far: laughing, laughing and then crying, crying at last.

  “Sis,” he said. “Sis.”

  What she had thought, what she had wanted. He had stepped back from the edge of an abyss, that’s what he had done; and she was the abyss. He put his arm over her shaking shoulders and in heedless defiance she turned into his embrace and wrapped her arms around him and pressed her wet cheek and mouth against his cheek.

  “No look,” he said. “Look, you’ve got to get over this,” not trying to tear himself from her now or slip from her but speaking to her tenderly and insistently. “You’ve got to grow up, Kit. You’ve got to. Everybody, everybody.”

  “You won’t come back,” she said.

  “I’ll come back,” he said. “I’ll always come back.” But she knew what this meant now, what it meant for him to say this: it meant that he wouldn’t come back, could not ever come back, that no one ever can; to say that he would was to admit that he couldn’t, to admit that there was no way back at all.

  She didn’t behave well the next days, the last of Ben’s leave, she knew it but couldn’t stop, would every day hit upon the wrong thing to do and then with grim elation do it. Mostly she stayed in her room, waiting for his knock on her door, once slamming it in his face when he did come and then said the wrong insouciant impertinent thing. Sat folded up in her little velveteen armchair or under her quilt feeling herself seethe and boil uncontrollably, trying to think who she could be if she could no longer be herself, which she could not. Then she emerged suddenly, hectic smile pasted on, willing to let him take her for walks around the courts and drives and circles; she’d talk and talk, romping and frisking by his side like a bad puppy. Okay okay he’d say at last and she’d shut up and turn to go back, walking far ahead of him, hands in her pockets and shoulders hunched.

  The morning he left he put his leather jacket around her shoulders. Keep it till I get back. Don’t lose it. Don’t give it away. She put it on over her nightgown and said nothing and did nothing until he had gone out the door with George and she heard the car start and turn out onto the street; then she tore open the door and broke away from Marion and ran in her slippers over the snow crying his name, knowing they wouldn’t hear or turn back.

  Her job downtown changed after Christmas: now she stood at the window where people brought back the ravished packages she had made up the month before, dissatisfied, annoyed, exasperated, apologetic. Kit took the unwanted things and looked at them while their owners gave their reasons for rejection. Harmless hopeless unwanted things. After a dinner break she didn’t go back to the window where she had stood; went out of the store to the bus stop blocks away. A bus stopped but she didn’t get on; let it roll away.

  Sometimes looking back Kit can see herself—by that trick of memory or imagination whereby we see our past selves from the outside, like people in a movie—on that street corner in the evening as she must have looked when Burke Eggert saw her, skinny in her flat shoes and straight skirt, hugging herself in Ben’s jacket, trying to warm herself with a cigarette. Why he chose to pull over and talk she couldn’t know, but surely it was something like his pulling over that she was trying to cause by her standing there.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey, Burke.” She hadn’t seen Burke since he had graduated in June. She felt a profound and exhilarating indifference. If nothing mattered then it didn’t matter what she said, or what she had once felt or not felt or written or done. “Hey, how’s it going. How’s tricks.”

  He grinned at her, maybe a little baffled, leaning out the open window. The car was a Studebaker, a Hawk. Burke’s father had a dealership.

  “Whatcha doing?” she asked. “Big graduate.”

  “Oh. Not much.”

  “Not much? What, not much?”

  “Well.” He laughed at her vehemence. “I don’t know. Working for my dad.”

  “Hey! Your dad!”

  “Thinking of going to pharmacy school.”

  “Pharmacy school!”

  “Well. It’s only two years. Not like college.”

  “Well sure.”

  “I always got pretty good grades in chemistry. Hey, are you cold?”

  “I’m freezing.”

  “You want a ride somewhere?”

  “Um sure.” She went around the Hawk’s sloping snarling nose and into the warm insides. “Nice car.” She knew that the girl she was imitating here would say this, so she did. She even stroked the dash appreciatively.

  “Well, it’s not mine. I mean it’s the dealership’s.”

  “I’ve none of my own, said the Hatter, I only keep them to sell,” said Kit. “Right?”

  “Um right.”

  “So how’s it going?” she asked again. “You married or engaged or anything?”

  “Jeez no.” He grinned. “Give me a while.”

  “What about what’s-her-name. Mary Anne.”

  “Mary Jo.” He shrugged one shoulder, eyes on the street. “She’s at school. State.”

  “Oh.” Mary Jo had worn Burke’s great ring around her neck on a chain, too wide for her finger. How about through her nose, Kit had asked of no one, like a bull’s, or a cannibal’s bone. “You want to know something? I used to have an awful crush on you.”

  He grinned sideways at her, pleased and surprised but not exactly astonished; his walleye gave him an expression of devilish interest Kit was pretty sure he didn’t intend.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Of course you never gave a look my way.” As far as I could tell she thought of adding, and laughed.

  “Well,” he said. “Hey. You were so, I don’t know. Standoffish. Like you thought we were all beneath you.”

  “Beneath me?” she said. “Really?”

  “Like you were better than us.”

  “‘Us’?”

  “Well, everybody.”

  “No,” she said. “I never thought that.” She had, though; and realized in amazement that what she had felt she had shown. “I even,” she said, “gave you a poem I wrote. A couple.”

  “That was you? You? And you wrote those?”

  “Yup.” She shrugged, she’d done it, couldn’t help it.

  “I thought somebody copied those out of a book. Like for homework. God.”

  “Nope. Me.”

  He shook his head and let a little sound escape his throat, a little cough of disbelief. “Damn,” he said.

  “I had it bad,” she said.

  “You were just kidding,” he said. “Come on.”

  She didn’t answer. For some minutes she had been filling with some clear astringent fluid, a fuel that raced effervescent in her veins and skin, and she didn’t know what she would do or say next.

  “So how come you’re not in school?” he asked. “You didn’t quit, did you?”

  “Christmas vacation!” she said, and slapped his wrist lightly, you silly.

  “Oh right,” he said. “Yeah. Two weeks.”

  “Not for you, huh.”

  “No. Day or two at Christmas.” He hooked an arm over the seat between them and looked ahead as though seeing more than the street. “School was easy,” he said, and Kit seemed to see a devolution in Burke Eggert’s life, a decline in status that might go on a long way; and felt a delicious pity. “So how are you spending all the free time?” he asked.

  “I got a job at Robertson’s. Actually I just quit.”

  “Huh.”

  “And I baby-sit. You know.” Her heart suddenly filled with that hot clear blood and she said, “Actually I’m baby-sitting tonight. Right near here.”

  “Really.”

  “A Dr. Thorne. Pippi. Pippi Thorne.”

  “No.”

  “Yep. Hey, maybe you could come over later. They’ve got a big house. Big TV.”

  He smiled at her in a way that she would come to recognize, after she’d seen it in enough men: a look of glee and unce
rtainty mixed, as though they’ve pulled off a trick but wonder if maybe they’re the butt of one too: even in this first instance of it she sensed what it meant, and that she had caused it. “We can catch up,” she said. “The old alma mater.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll show you where his place is. It’s on the way to my house.”

  They both fell silent then, and watched the road till she pointed out the Tudor pile of Dr. Thorne’s house. “Pippi’s good,” she said. “She’ll be asleep by eight.”

  “Hey. Good.”

  “Okay,” she said. “So. My place is down that way. Take Elderberry Drive.”

  He let her off—didn’t get out to open her door as she momentarily waited for him to do—and she went in and up the half-flight of stairs to her room.

  “Kit?” her mother called. “You home?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s early.”

  She didn’t answer. On the back of her closet door was a mirror, a full-length one; by swinging open the door fast and wide she was able to take from the closet what she wanted without seeing herself in it, and close the door again before it caught her. She thought for a mad moment of calling down to her mother, asking her how it actually happened, this that was going to happen to her, for she knew it was going to happen, all of it or some part of it.

  You’ve got to grow up, he’d said, everybody does.

  “Do you want an egg?” Her mother called. “It’s what I’m having. I didn’t expect you.”

  “No, Mom, it’s okay.”

  She took from her drawer a panty girdle; she had two, worn so far only once each, a Little Godiva by Warners and a Magic Lady by Exquisite Form. When she had got into the one she chose and felt its grip around her, she picked a cashmere skirt to go over it, soft over strong. She thought: This isn’t so hard.

  She drew on pale stockings. Once in a poem she had compared her mother’s peeled-off nylons to rags of sunburned skin. The skin of her own legs was weirdly cold, her knee a cold stone, her toes nearly numb. The stockings went clipped to the stretchy clips that dangled from the girdle. The poem was called “Skin.” Ben’s leather jacket was in it too. It would be one of the poems that eventually Kit lost, that was lost for good, burned up and lost.