The Merry Month of May

by James Jones

  And with the window open now, I could hear faintly the isolated shout, the chant, a thin piping command, the thud of a gas grenade, the great rending crack, though muffled by distance, of a percussion grenade. The cops and the students, they’re putting on a show! Putting on a show! Let’s go! Let’s go! It was noon. The Festival was starting.

  How could anyone work? I put my foot up on the windowsill.

  There was a larger number of students than normal among the strollers. Most of them were dressed in the by now recognizable “running shoes and bandanna” uniform. All of them were laughing inordinately. Happily they strolled along in twos and threes, sometimes arm in arm.

  They were coming from the Left Bank, across the Pont de la Tournelle at the rue Cardinal Lemoine, passing indifferently by our two camions of CRS police, whose men studiously ignored them. They walked downriver toward Notre-Dame, presumably to recross the river there via the footbridge, and the Pont d l’Archevêché which butted on the rue des Bernardins, which led to the Place Maubert where they were apparently fighting for the moment. There was an awful lot of them, and they did not stop coming.

  So, their damned Revolution had finally come to the Seine islands, had it, damn them, I thought grimly; and found myself grinning. You couldn’t help it.

  But the air of electric gaiety and holiday did not come solely from them. It was in the faces of the older people, too—the rotund little Frenchmen with their gray moustaches and dark caps and baggy suits; the older women dressed in dresses designed not to hide but simply to cover their good French fat; the younger ones in their New York-cut suits and ties and miniskirts. They were all in it together, whatever it was; and whatever it was, it was fun.

  Behind me my Portuguese came in and interrupted me. This was something she almost never presumed to do. She told me she had just heard on her kitchen transistor radio that there was a big bagarre, a truly big fight, going on over at the Place Maubert.

  I gave up entirely on my Berkeley piece and stayed in my window to watch. I could almost see Maubert from where I stood, but not quite. The tall houses along the Left Bank cut it off from my view. But I could see the cloud of smoke and tear gas above it. Maubert was a marché, a street market, on the Boulevard St.-Germain almost on a level with Notre-Dame, where St.-Germain junctions with the rue Monge, which can be considered just about the eastern boundary of the Latin Quarter. It made a nice large junction for erecting barricades, when all the market stalls were taken down.

  The sun was pleasant and warm on my face and shoulders. I saw, picked out, the high bald dome of Harry Gallagher glistening in the sun as he crossed the Pont de la Tournelle. Harry was striding in his tweed jacket among the students like a senior professor. When he was below me, I leaned out and called down to him.

  “Wait up. I’m coming down.”

  We stood against the sidewalk’s belly-high stone parapet. Students who passed us on the sidewalk grinned merrily at us. I grinned back at them.

  “You’ve got to admit it’s exciting,” I said.

  “Oh, it’s exciting.” Harry had been up to the Brasserie Lipp in St.-Germain for lunch and had walked home through the students’ quarter.

  “I couldn’t work,” I said. “I had to give it up. There’s too much excitement all around.”

  Harry gave me a professional smile, but he looked as if he had not heard me. All through the Quartier the students were out in roving bands, he said, and the place was alive with platoons and companies of riot police, not only the CRS now but also the Gendarmes Mobiles, really a military force, armed with unloaded carbines and under the authority of the Army, but capable of being requisitioned by the Prefect. Barricades were up all over the place, and either being defended, or abandoned, or breached by the police, and then torn down by the truckloads of public-service workers who followed them.

  “But they have been doing that for days,” I said. “What is so different about today?”

  “Something is,” Harry said. “I don’t know. But it’s gotten bigger. Whatever it is.”

  “They’ve been fighting at Maubert before today,” I said. “But it never bothered me from working. What has changed?”

  “Something has,” Harry said. The students were apparently trying out a new tactic, he went on, which consisted of raising a barricade at some undisputed point, which of course would bring the police in their camions, then after a small fight retreating and fading away, while by radio or motorbike informing another group to begin doing the same thing somewhere else. They were keeping at least a dozen big task forces of police busy in this way. They seemed very well organized. In addition, large contingents of police were blocking off all the bridges on the Left Bank side, from the Pont Alexandre III at the Invalides to the Pont au Double at the front of Notre-Dame.

  “They’re not going to have any police left,” Harry said, “if they don’t watch out.”

  Place Maubert had been one of the big fights today, he said. Barricade after barricade had been put up, lost, sometimes retaken there.

  Both of us looked across the river. We could still hear the occasional chant or shout or muffled thud of a grenade, coming across. And the tear gas made a high, rising cloud of white above the tops of the houses over there. Right then, I made up my mind to go over there, and have a look at it.

  “Well, I certainly can’t work around here,” I said.

  “It’s amazing to see them put one of those things up,” Harry said. “All they need is one crowbar to start it, and then a couple of shovels to keep it going. They form human chains to pass the paving stones along. There’s something truly ritualistic about it.”

  “Well, they’ve certainly had enough centuries of practice at it for it to become a ritual,” I said. I coughed. “I can’t get over the feeling that I’m at Pamplona for San Fermin.”

  Harry grinned. “It is like that. Everybody’s having a ball, all at once. The whole town.”

  “I’m going over there and have a close look at it. Do you want to come along?”

  “No. I’ve already been. I’m going home. You’re not going to work any more? Come on walk down with me toward my place.”

  Just then, suddenly, across the river, a mass of running bodies, students’ bodies, squirted around the corner of the narrow rue Cardinal Lemoine. It debouched onto the Left Bank quai, moving toward the Pont de l’Archevêché at Notre-Dame. No police came after them.

  “We’ll have a beer at the Brasserie,” Harry said after the flurry had passed away.

  We moved out into the stream of walkers, and I walked along with him. I could not get over a feeling that Harry was wanting to talk to me about something.

  “What was it you were going to say, Harry?”

  He didn’t answer for a moment. “I wasn’t going to say much of anything,” he said.

  We walked some more.

  “I just can’t help but think that they’re not doing any good,” he said in a different voice. This clearly was not what he had been meaning to talk about. “The kids, I mean. They’re getting themselves all beat up for nothing. And I don’t think they’re going to do any good. It’s all just too—too frivolous.”

  “It does appear like everybody’s having a good time,” I said.

  “Hell, when we were kids demonstrating back in the Thirties, we didn’t have any of these kinds of attitudes, or act like this. We didn’t do this.”

  “What did you do, Harry?”

  “Well, we . . .” It trailed off, as if he were taking a moment to formulate something. But then his silence continued. We were just strolling again.

  “I suppose it’s that I don’t like being relegated to the sidelines,” Harry said, and made a rueful smile. “I don’t like being classified as an old fogy and tucked away on a shelf. I don’t like being told I’m an old-man member of a conservative Establishment who doesn’t understand, and never knew what it was to revolt.” He paused. “But it’s more than that. I don’t like being told it’s my generation that’s solel
y responsible for everything that’s wrong with the fucking world. Christ, didn’t any of them ever read their history? Didn’t they hear about the war we fought with Hitler and Tojo? Didn’t they ever hear about the Depression and the New Deal? The House Un-American Activities Committee in 1950? Who the hell do they think they are?”

  I did not try to answer this. It was rhetorical, anyway.

  “They don’t want us,” Harry said. “They don’t even want to utilize our knowledge and experience to help them.”

  —Another trio of laughing students passed us and grinned happily at us.—

  “They don’t want anything to do with us or our past, and I don’t like that. I also don’t think it’s very sane.”

  I had been thinking and feeling a lot the same way, since seeing Hill—and his Anne-Marie.

  “Maybe you just don’t like not being young, Harry.”

  “Maybe. And I’ve thought of that. But I’ve never thought of myself as young, or not young. It’s never been a criterion I’ve ever applied to myself.”

  “But now they are applying it to you. Through their eyes we must look pretty ‘old’, Harry.”

  “Well, I don’t mind being old. I even like it. Let somebody else pick up the old torch. But I refuse to be ‘old’ just because these kids think I think ‘old’. Hell, I can still get it up three or four times a day. Anyway, at least you would think Hill would know differently.”

  “Why? I think Hill least of all would. Hill is the young bull pawing and snorting to take on and pull down the old bull.”

  “And take over the herd. Sure. Chart-class Freud. The young buck wants to screw the doe I’m screwing, even if it is his mother. Especially if it is his mother. Chart-class Freud. Christ, Jack!”

  “Okay. I know it’s so general it hasn’t got any applicable meaning. Still, I think you probably did exactly the same thing when you were young.”

  “Yee-ah.” He said it, half-breathed it, in the old tough Hollywood way that Julie Garfield used to say it in his films. “You and your analysis. A great lotta help. And I wish you’d stop saying ‘when you were young’ like that to me, for God sake.

  “I hope he’s all right,” he added.

  “He’s all right. Nobody’s been killed yet.”

  “As far as we know,” Harry added. “Yee-ah!” he said again.

  We had reached the Brasserie. That was all we ever called it. Its full name was the Brasserie of the Red Bridge of the Island of St. Louis: Brasserie du Pont Rouge de l’Île St.-Louis. There wasn’t any red bridge, but apparently there had once been one, way back. It was our local pub on the Island. It squatted in the ground floor of a building at the foot of the rusting green Bailey bridge footbridge called Pont St.-Louis which had been put up temporarily in 1940 when a péniche barge had crashed into and weakened its old stone predecessor, in a tiny Place where a few late beer-drinkers stationed their deux chevauxs late at night, and it served the best beer in Paris in stone mugs. It was generally closed Thursdays but it was open now, and it was crowded with people, and the bridge was crowded with people. A group of its patrons and habitués stood outside its painted windows on the sidewalk with the gray stone mugs in their hands, and stared over at the Left Bank. Harry stopped.

  “I think I’ll beg off on that beer, Jack, and go straight on home.” He put his hands in the pockets of his khaki drill pants. He jiggled some keys. “No, about what I was going to say before, back up the way.”

  For a moment I couldn’t read his reference. Then I remembered.

  He peered at me quizzically. “I was just going to say that I hoped you weren’t upset or angry about the way Louisa and I jumped on you last night. We lit on you pretty hard.”

  “?” I didn’t want to complain about it; but neither did I think I ought to pretend it had not happened.

  “There certainly wasn’t anything personal in it,” Harry said. “We weren’t attacking you. Hell, you’re the best friend we’ve got. Louisa, I think, feels that even stronger than I do. And you know how I feel.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that,” I said.

  “It didn’t really have anything to do with you at all. We’re in a strange position, with Hill out there. I guess a lot of parents are.” He lowered his head, and looked down at his shoes. “Politics and college kids are two things that really turn Louisa on. Put them both together in something and . . .”

  “It made me feel guilty,” I said. “In an oddly strange way. And I don’t think I deserve to.”

  “Fuck, you certainly don’t,” Harry said. “But you know how Louisa is about politics. She wants so badly to help. We’re really behind these kids, Jack. Really behind them, all the way.”

  “I thought somehow that maybe there was something more behind it than that,” I said. “I mean, I felt that.”

  “Well, there wasn’t,” Harry said, looking me squarely in the eye. It seemed to me he was looking me too straight in the eye, or doing it too carefully.

  “Well, I’m glad,” I said, simply. It wasn’t my business, anyway.

  “Louisa wasn’t—We weren’t after you. Louisa’s always gotten these moody spells. Especially about politics. Louisa hasn’t ever been able to do all she’d like to do. It’s pretty hard being a parent, in this. Quite a lot of them feel that, I expect. It’s worrisome. I know Hill’s younger than I am.”

  —To me that seemed a strange thing to say.—

  “And I wouldn’t have it any other way. I mean, it stands to reason any father’s got to be older than his son. But I sometimes don’t think Hill sees it that way. And sometimes I don’t think Louisa does.”

  “I think Hill sees it,” I said noncommittally. “I don’t know about Louisa.”

  “Well, I just wanted to explain. Louisa wasn’t—We weren’t after you, last night.”

  “Oh, forget it, Harry. I don’t really care. Tell Louisa that.”

  “Be careful over there,” he said as he left. “I mean, you don’t run so good any more. Just don’t get caught between the lines. Especially when a charge is working up. I’ve found that if you want to change sides, to observe, it’s best to circle back around on another street that isn’t in dispute.” He waved, in a kind of awkward way that made me feel sad for him and warm.

  I still had the feeling that he was trying to tell me something about Louisa that he had not been able to say. Or that I had not been able to get.

  In the fact, I had seen her in those strange moods before, a lot of times. But her attacks had never been directed at me before. You had the feeling when she was in those moods that if you disagreed with her even in the slightest way, you would destroy her whole psyche, crumble her all up like a handful of soda crackers. She seemed to expect that you would, and how dare you? You felt she might brood for weeks, for months over it. Yet I had never thought of her as being goofy, or even very neurotic. I was sure she wasn’t goofy.

  I still had my feeling that there was something more there, something still, that had nothing to do with what we all had said.

  I went in the Brasserie.

  It was cool and dim in there. They kept a thin film of sawdust on the tile floor around the bar in the front. I ordered my beer. It was served in my own special stein, with a pewter top. All of us habitués had our special steins, which were all kept apart, on a separate shelf.

  The long dining room in the back had hardwood floor and no sawdust, and it was crowded with luncheon eaters. I had been coming there for years, and knew all the waiters by their first names. But I suddenly felt constrained about asking them about the riots.

  Anyway they were all very busy. The bar was crowded too. The waiters all wore white shirts, black four-in-hand ties, and in winter little red sleeveless sweaters, above long blue-denim aprons that wrapped around the back and tied in the front. The place was owned by Monsieur and Madame Dupont who ran it themselves aided by a series of brothers-in-law, Madame Dupont’s brothers, and one thin little old grandmother with an old white dog. Today Madame Dupont w
as on duty and sat up on a stool behind the cash desk which was placed against the wall, between the bar and the dining room. The waiters from the dining room had to pass this cash desk and run behind the bar, shouting their orders, to the kitchen which was on the other side. Sometimes the grandmother sat up there, sometimes Monsieur Dupont, and other times one of the brothers-in-law. Beside the cash desk was a table usually considered the family table. The waiters had a table on the other side near the kitchen.

  The Duponts had bought the place the first year I lived on the Island, and had been doing a huge business ever since, huge enough that Madame Dupont now sported a leopard coat and purse and wore Chanel suits which, whether they were high-class copies or not, looked like real Chanel. They had a 14-year-old daughter, whom I had watched grow up from a tiny girl.

  She was sitting at the family table, and came over to me to say hello, her young breasts covered only by a slip under her sweater. She had nice legs. It was astonishing to think I had watched her grow from almost a baby.

  “Well, what do you think of it?” I asked in French.

  “It is certainly something, isn’t it?” she smiled.

  She always smiled shyly at me, and always blushed. I was sort of the place’s “very own American”, more than Harry, and maybe that accounted for it. She had the short pert Bretonese nose of her father, who was a tough hombre, and she was sweet when she blushed.

  “You are on the side of the students?” I said.

  She blushed again, and smiled more. She was really very tiny, dark and olive, with black hair. “M’sieu, the police have entered the University. That has not happened in a very long time. There is an old and valuable tradition against that, and the police have flaunted it. Also, the reforms of the students are good reforms, and are necessary in the modern world.”