Envious Shadows

by R.P. Burnham

  Love and Hate

  On their first date Fiona was so nervous her hands shook. They had gone to a movie and afterwards to a bar, where they sat at a table in a dark corner. The place wasn’t busy, and the noise of other people and the piped-in music was minimal. They talked in generalities without any of the spontaneity they had experienced together at the softball game the week before. Her face was drawn, her eyes downcast; she did not smile. Just when Lowell was thinking that things weren’t going very well and that something must have happened to change the magic he had felt between them a week earlier, he noticed her hands trembling, and then he understood. His heart grew heavy in sympathy, but before he spoke he excused himself and went to the men’s room. Afterwards he stood alone drying his hands and thinking. When he got back to the table he told her the story of the electricity being turned off and how his mother had saved him and his brother from terror by saying, “Boys, tonight we get to camp out!” Somewhere in the middle of relating this anecdote he saw the tension drain from her face and her hands stop shaking. They had connected and since then had continued to connect.

  During the month of June he saw her frequently, and when he wasn’t with her, he thought about her. With construction of his cottage beginning, he spent most days at the lot. The foundation was poured, electrical service was hooked up, the septic tank and pipes installed, the artesian well dug, the rough plumbing was done and the water connected, and Fred McClellen’s crew was close to finishing the framing. He worked with the crew and alone all through this process, and it was particularly when he was alone that his mind would dwell on Fiona. Shyness, like the dove of love in a secular trinity, came to mind whenever he thought of her name and face. Shyness was the lack of trust, not only in others but in yourself. Shyness could be outgrown, he knew, because he, once a raw and awkward youth, had done it. You had to trust yourself, but first you had to have positive reinforcement, experiences that verified your validity in the world. The world internalized, you gained faith in yourself. Getting her to trust him would lead to her trusting herself more. She would gain in self-confidence and become more in command of herself. Her hands had trembled because she was unsure of herself, but he was already making her see that she was cherished. He remembered how his heart went heavy, an instinctive reaction, when he felt fear. Empathy made another’s pain his own. He remembered Laurie Heinsohn had appealed to him because she was quiet and gentle, and how her concern for the poor boy who was hit by a car instantly attracted him. So it was with Fiona. In a contest between peacocks and fawns he chose the fawns. In high school he remembered the revulsion that he would feel when he saw the star athletes and cheerleaders swaggering about campus swollen with the pomp and self-importance of a marching band. At the University of Chicago he had met many upper-class people who conducted themselves with a sense of entitlement, as if they were owed even more for having been privileged and pampered. We were creatures of flesh and blood; the slightest wrong turn could end in death; subject to disease and gnawing time, we lived in uncertainty; never could we be sure that anything we planned would come to fruition; bounded, limited, weighed down by more than gravity, what in this condition was there to strut about? Only the imagination and love were not limited. His people would always be the exact opposite of the strutting peacocks: people who felt as if they had to apologize for their existence, who were taught to expect nothing from life, who had to dig deep within to find the courage to assert themselves, who felt small, people whose hands trembled when something meant so much to them they felt they would die without it.

  As he worked or perhaps paused with hammer in hand and tape measure at the ready to imagine where a door would go or a window placed, he would remember that his love for Laurie began in sympathy and ended in incompatibility. Was sympathy enough? Enough for love? The vulnerability that elicited a protective response in him was at least partially based upon identification. Perhaps he stopped to measure a length of floor and make a notation before Fiona’s face again settled in his mind. Love is such a need that in proportion to its depth fears and doubts grow into monsters. There were many bad moments in the time of awakening love. Just as she was not fully formed, neither was he. He was not sure if this was good or bad. More likely you were never fully formed. Maybe that was what being alive meant: to still be seeking, growing, learning and changing. Maybe, though, it meant something darker and more scary. Maybe it meant the tiger prowled and the fawn trembled. He had left Chicago feeling something was calling him home. Bill and Becky he thought, since he was inspired by the kind of life they had; but just as likely because he couldn’t find his father in the world, home was the only place to find himself. But wasn’t going backwards an admission of defeat? He knew that was irrational, for he had built two successful lives in Chicago as a software engineer and a builder. But for a long time the doubts would not go away. He had to talk himself into the truth. St. George had to slay the dragon. Laurie had begun in the same place he found Fiona. What separated him and Laurie was incompatibility. She knew stability, he only chaos. Fiona had been estranged from life even more than he had. With each successive meeting their compatibility grew more obvious, both intellectually and, more importantly, emotionally. A feeling, nothing but a feeling, had kept him from the final commitment with Laurie. Likewise a feeling told him even more strongly than reason that Fiona was right for him. She in turn was undergoing a similar process, for last week when they had met for dinner in Portland while she was on a four-hour break from a double shift at Phoenix Landing, they had actually told each other of their love. Dinner over, they had walked down to Deering Oaks to spend together the remaining hour before she had to return to work. Their hands had sought each other, the warmth of their palms like a transformer connecting two circuits. The sun was low in the west and the clouds glorious Japanese lanterns of purples, pinks and oranges as they strolled past the duck pond. The beauty of love is that it made you love not just an individual but the whole world, life itself. “I love the evening, the quiet of it, its peacefulness,” he had said, and she had answered in a hushed tone, “Isn’t the sky lovely?” They had stopped and looked into each other’s eyes. He had squeezed her hand. They both could feel love hovering between them like a beautiful butterfly, but first Fiona wanted to make sure no impediment, no misunderstanding, clouded that feeling. Haltingly she said, “Lowell, you know that I am a black woman. That’s how I see myself, I mean. It’s my identity.” He understood her. He told her that it was perfectly all right with him. Although he was of English descent he had never emphasized it much because white Anglo-Saxons were the norm. He explained that racism had never infected him and that he cared nothing for what others might think. He had had black friends at the commune when he was a little boy, and his mother didn’t have a prejudiced bone in her body. One of his roommates and good friends at the University of Chicago was a black man, and they had gone to demonstrations together when the Chicago police had brutally killed a young black man. He was glad she was a black woman since it was one of the things that made her who she was. He didn’t want to change a thing about her. “I feel happy and content when I’m with you. The sky is lovelier now because I’m with you. I do, you know, love you, I mean. I love you,” he had said, feeling some of Fiona’s own shy awkwardness as he spoke. And brave Fiona, not shy Fiona, had said, “I love you too.”

  That was last Wednesday. They had spoken to each other on the phone but had not seen each other until today, the Saturday of the Fourth of July weekend, when they met in Portland. During the vacation season the staff of Phoenix Landing was called upon to work sixty-hour weeks, and Fiona’s weekend duties spanned Friday night until two P.M. Saturday. He waited for her at Monument Square, frequently consulting his watch and pacing because he was too impatient to sit on one of the benches. He tried watching the crowds, the people feeding the pigeons and gulls, the traffic, but nothing made him forget the slowness of time, and his eyes mostly concentrated on the corner of the square where he expected
to see her. Finally, at almost 2:30, his heart leapt up like Wordsworth’s seeing a rainbow when he caught a glimpse of her. She was walking with quick, nervous steps through the crowd of tourists, and when she spotted him her face broke into a smile. She was dressed in blue jeans and a red, sleeveless jumper. He was similarly attired in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, appropriate clothes for a muggy day with temperatures in the low nineties. After shopping for a birthday present for Fiona’s mother, they planned to dine early and then meet Tara Wright and Meg Sirois at the gate to see a Portland Sea Dogs minor league baseball game. If the shopping was finished early, they would kill an hour or so having a beer at some bar.

  She came up to him, her face flushed. “Did you have to wait long?” she asked anxiously. “My replacement was late.”

  He shook his head. “What did you have to do today?” he asked, slipping his arm around her back and giving her a little squeeze. Both of them felt uncomfortable with displays of affection in public, so they did not kiss, but both wore happy smiles radiating a contentment and joy to be in each other’s company so that anyone would recognize them as lovers.

  They started walking towards the Old Port section of Portland with its many gift shops. “I did the week’s grocery shopping with three of the residents.”

  “And that’s a part of their training to live in society, I assume?”

  They were about to cross a street but stopped for a car. “Yes. If they are to live by themselves, they have to know routine things. This morning one of them, her name is Ann Marie, wanted to buy candy, ice cream, pastries and such stuff. I had to lecture her on being prudent.”

  Lowell’s face broadened into a grin as they hurriedly walked across the street as another car bore down on them. “My mother could have used that lesson. I remember one time we had chocolate waffles and ice cream for supper.”

  “Oh, I bet she did that to please you kids.”

  “Yeah, maybe. But she was a kid herself.”

  They went into the first gift shop, a place that specialized in nature. In the back of the store Fiona pointed to a large gray sculpture of a frog, then smiled in such a way that he knew what she was thinking. Gardening was a recently discovered pastime for her mother. Until Fiona’s grandmother died a few years ago, she and her mother had lived in a succession of apartments. Now that they had inherited the house with its large backyard, her mother spent all her spare time there and had begun constructing a rock garden. Fiona’s clever idea for a birthday gift was to get her an outdoor sculpture for it, perhaps a Buddha or an animal.

  Lowell smiled in turn. “You’re thinking this looks silly but in a pleasant way. You’re thinking your mother will like it.”

  Fiona nodded. She reached down and picked up the frog, then handed it to him. “It’s surprisingly light. What do you think it’s made of?”

  He hefted it for a moment. “I think it’s some man-made material.”

  She looked disappointed. “You mean it’s not really carved? It’s manufactured?”

  “Is that bad?”

  She grimaced. “Maybe not, but I was hoping for something carved.” She walked over to a sleeping fawn and examined it.

  It was made of the same gray material, perhaps pumice that had been sanded smooth. “Maybe it is a sculpture,” he said as he watched her, but she was concentrating on examining the fawn and didn’t answer.

  Finally she stepped back and looked again at the frog. “Do you think she’d like either of these?”

  Having only met her twice, he didn’t know her mother well enough to be sure, but by generalizing to all the rock gardens he had seen and the ornaments they contained, he was able to say that she probably would. Then, while Fiona tried to decide, he thought about her mother. Alice Sparrow was much different than he expected. She was so self-assured and competent, in fact, that she ran the shipping and receiving office at her company, though he gathered she wasn’t all that well paid. But Fiona certainly didn’t get her shyness from her mother. In one way only did he see a similarity between his and Fiona’s mother. Both had left Waska for the larger world and returned home with a child. She had gone to Boston after high school with the vague idea of eventually going to college there. She lived in an apartment in Somerville with three other young women, one of them a friend from Waska and two they had met through the work they got in a place that sold sports memorabilia, particularly of Red Sox players. It was there she met Fiona’s father, a tall, athletic black man who had swept her off her feet. She was in love with him and pregnant before she discovered he was an alcoholic and, worse, a mean drunk. When she tried to leave him he stalked her so that finally she had come back to Waska to escape him. That was all Fiona had told him about her father, and as far as he knew all she could tell him about the man who had fathered her. Her mother had never married and had had few relationships with men through the years. Lowell wondered if her experiences had poisoned her opinion of men, but he didn’t feel ready yet to ask Fiona if that was the case.

  She was very pleasant to him, so he could easily say that he liked her. He did not, how-ever, like shopping. He himself bought Christmas and birthday gifts as much as possible from mail order cataloguers, and when he bought clothes for himself he often ended up with things that didn’t fit well or that he had second thoughts about after he got home because he was always in such a hurry to get out of the store. And yet, he thought, as he watched Fiona go from the fawn to the frog in an attempt to come to a decision, there was no place in the world he would rather be right now than here because he was sharing time with the woman he loved. Like the residents, he was willing to have many lessons on how to shop from this particular instructor.

  Fiona finally decided they should continue searching. If nothing better could be found, then one of the two sculptures of uncertain material would have to do. They went through several other stores without finding anything remotely suitable so that the chances for the fawn or frog were going up, but a shop closer to the waterfront was more promising. It specialized in imported items from Africa, Asia and South America, and here Fiona was able to find a Buddha about eighteen inches high that was perfect. She bought it using the credit card she just just gotten a few weeks ago and was nervous and awkward signing the receipt since it was the first time she had used the card. Lowell, watching her, remembered her trembling hands on their first date and felt his heart go heavy again.

  Outside she was embarrassed as she tried to put the receipt in her wallet while holding the bag. “I can’t believe I was nervous doing that. I’ve watched people do it a thousand times.”

  “First-time jitters,” he said. “Next time you’ll be an old pro.” He took the bag and carried it for her.

  They had plenty of time for a beer. After they dropped the Buddha off at Lowell’s car in the parking garage, she suggested they go to Gritty McDuff’s, explaining when he crinkled his nose doubtfully that it was like an English or Irish pub where they brewed their own beer in the European way.

  He looked at her suspiciously. “What are you smiling about?”

  “You. I notice you drink American beer.”

  “Well, don’t they serve that stuff warm?”

  “No. It’s not cold but it’s not warm either. It’s cool. I think you should try it. It’ll be a new experience, and I think you’ll find you like it. Almost everyone I know drinks microbrewery beer now. They call American beer Kool-Aid beer—you know, watered down. It’s like American white bread compared to a real bread like French. Haven’t you heard these things?”

  When he still seemed reluctant, she said with a mischievous smile, ‘What’s the trouble? Do you have first time jitters? Is that why you’re reluctant? If we have a drink with Tara and Meg after the game you can get a chance to have American beer then. That’s all they drink—and quite a lot of it.”

  “Okay,” he said, raising his arms in surrender, “I’ll try it.” He was actually already convinced but had been enjoying being cajoled by her. “By the way,” he sa
id as they walked towards the bar, “speaking of Tara and Meg. Are they more than roommates?”

  “What do you think?” she answered with a smile. “They’ve been lovers since high school. You don’t object, do you?”

  “No. How could I? I believe in love.”

  “So do I,” she said.

  His first impression of Gritty McDuff’s was favorable. It was moderately busy, and everyone seemed to be having a good time. The atmosphere was gemütlich, the decor, as Fiona had told him, continental. The first thing he noticed after the people who had turned to look at them was the hundreds of ceramic beer mugs hanging from a rack on the ceiling behind the bar. They all had names or emblems that identified them for the regular patrons. A long pole with a hook on the end to snag the mug from its mountain crevice was leaning against the mirror. The bar itself was long and made of dark, highly polished wood. The hardwood floors were worn smooth where people walked across the long and narrow room. Instead of looking grungy, it had a folksy, lived-in appeal. The walls were decorated with posters of rugby and soccer players. The one thing he didn’t like was the lack of small, private tables; instead the tables were, like the bar itself, long and narrow, and the seats provided were benches. They had to sit at a table near the entrance to the second, nonsmoking room where two couples had already established themselves. Their conversation was accordingly somewhat constrained; mostly they talked about the baseball game they would see and the rematch of the softball game, the plans for which were going to be finalized tonight when they saw Tara and Meg. The two couples, tourists who had just spent a week at Acadia National Park, were mostly discussing its beauties and contrasting it with Yosemite, Yellowstone and Great Smoky Mountains national parks, on the whole quite favorably. The tourists didn’t leave until they had almost finished their beers. Once alone and having the table to themselves, Lowell, feeling less inhibited, began joking about the beer. After his first few sips, which he didn’t like, the taste began growing on him. He joked that he had learned his lesson and bowed to her superior wisdom, but stopped when he suddenly noticed her face had become very serious. Concerned, he asked if something was wrong.

  She smiled nervously, then took a sip of beer. Replacing the glass on the table, she leaned forward and in a low voice said, “Lowell, I just found out something that is very disturbing. I’ve been thinking of a way to bring it up all afternoon.”

  His first thought was a selfish and insecure one. Her serious and deeply troubled tone made him panic and fear that something was going to separate them. Just as he felt his heart quicken, she said, “It’s about Marilyn…and your brother Bill,” and then after a moment of relief he began panicking in a different way. If Bill, his north star, his vision of normalcy in an insane world, and the main reason he had come home after Laurie had left him, was throwing his life away, what was there to hold on to? And yet he realized that he knew what she was going to say before she said it. He had begun noticing something wasn’t right between Bill and Becky ever since the cookout after the softball game a month ago. Last weekend he had not showed up for a promised visit to the lake to see the progress on the cottage and had not offered any explanation for his absence. He also seemed guarded every time they had talked lately.

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m not sure. I mean I’m not sure what the situation is. All I know is that Tara told me this morning when she phoned me at work that they saw each other in a bar a few weeks ago and at least once more last week. Someone on the team, she didn’t say who, saw them.”

  Lowell absorbed this information with difficulty. “You mean by design, don’t you? It wasn’t an accident.”

  She shook her head. “No, it wasn’t an accident.”

  “So you’re saying Bill is cheating on his wife Becky?”

  “I don’t know that. But what worries me is that I do know my cousin. She’s had relationships with married men before, so even if your brother thinks it’s something casual, she wouldn’t necessarily look at it that way.”

  Lowell nodded absently. “I’m trying to see what’s going on with Bill and Becky. They have two boys, one of them just a baby. I think Becky’s concentration is on the boys. She was born to be a mother. But isn’t that what Bill should want, a good mother for his sons?”

  “I don’t know,” she said with a sigh. “I have no experience here. None of my good friends are married with kids.”

  They were both silent for a while. The waitress came over and asked if they wanted another beer, but he said no.

  When she left and they were alone again he said, “Do you think I should talk to Bill?”

  Fiona finished her beer, then watched a large black man walk into the bar. As he passed by he frowned at her. “One of the reasons I hesitated to share an apartment with Marilyn was because she rarely goes more than a few months without a man in her life. I don’t know, Lowell. I think she’s a dangerous woman. I like her. She is my cousin, and we’ve been friends, good friends, for a long time. But I don’t trust her. I don’t know what you’d call her. If she was a man, she’d be called a Don Juan.”

  Lowell watched the black man go into the inner room of the bar. He’d seen a few white people look at them disapprovingly and was sure Fiona, with her background, had noticed far subtler looks. This was the first time the tables had been turned and a black person showed what he was thinking. In his mind the danger he felt from Bill’s behavior became associated with these strangers who disapproved. Both made him feel uneasy, as if he was walking near the edge of a cliff, and he was not thinking too clearly when he asked, “Has she always been like this?”

  She nodded, it seemed almost reluctantly. “In high school she stole the boyfriend of one of the other players one year, and it caused a lot of problems with the team. We even lost two games we should have won. At the dinner when she asked me to be a roommate, she even said that she believed all’s fair in love and war. Then she was talking about some teacher at her school. Now a month later it’s Bill, I guess…” Her voice trailed off.

  She looked down and stared at her empty beer glass. Lowell found himself thinking of his nephew Johnny. How could Bill do something that would hurt that little boy? Didn’t he remember his fatherless days? He started feeling angry, but looking up he saw that Fiona had thought of something. “What is it?” he asked. “Do you have an idea?”

  “It’s only that I was thinking about Marilyn and her selfishness in love. If we can’t expect any restraint from her, it all depends on your brother.”

  “Well, if you’d asked me a month ago I would say Bill and Becky were solid as a rock. But he did seem to have a lot of resentment of her at that cookout. I didn’t quite believe what I was seeing, though, because every other time I’ve seen them they seemed like a perfect couple. I don’t know anymore. I don’t know.”

  After this conversation dinner at the Tandoor Restaurant was a somber affair, though it did teach him something else about his relationship with Fiona. Minutes would go by without their talking, but instead of making him uncomfortable, he saw that they were two people who could get along well in silence, and the realization pleased him. During those silent intervals he thought about what Bill’s actions would do to his worldview and his sense of self without any clear resolution until the waiter came over to clear the dishes away. A tall, light-skinned Indian with shiny black hair styled in something of an Elvis hairdo, he asked Fiona if she would like some Masala tea. “I remember the last time you were here you liked it.” As Fiona smiled, both pleased and embarrassed to be remembered, the uncertainty and uneasiness he had been feeling suddenly lifted. He vowed he would do all he could to make things right between Bill and Becky again, but he realized that the center of his world now was Fiona. Only she could make his world disintegrate, and because he loved her and she loved him, that was not going to happen.

  So it was with a lighter spirit that they walked from the Old Port section down the hill to the stadium near Deering Oaks. They arrived early
and stood near the main gate, which was their place of rendezvous with Tara and Meg. The Sea Dogs were popular in southern Maine so that the crowd, augmented by tourists, was a large one. People streamed by in couples, groups of single guys, and a surprising number of families with children wearing their excitement like a red balloon for everyone to see. A scalper, if one could call him that for a minor league game where the tickets were not very expensive, came up to them and asked if they needed tickets. Another man, with bored wife and two smiling, excited boys in tow, asked them if they knew where section C was. They told him it was their first visit to the park and did not know. Soon after the family disappeared through the gate and into the stadium, where from the sounds of the crowd someone was putting on a show during batting practice, a man walked by and scowled at Fiona. He had a scar across his unshaven chin that showed up like a white clamshell on a bed of seaweed, and standing over six and a half feet, he clearly intimidated her. She moved closer to Lowell for security. They exchanged a wordless glance that reconfirmed their love. She had told him that her mother used to say, “It’s us against the world.” The world was mostly benign or indifferent, but when it did show its teeth it could be scary. He wanted to tell her, it’s us against the world, but the glance they exchanged had already said that. He put his arm around her back and held it there. He began thinking of Bill, almost amazed that he wasn’t central to his life anymore. Bill was betraying love. It disappointed him. It hurt him. It had even momentarily thrown him off stride, but it did not touch his core. He drew her closer to him, now comforting and being comforted. Then he noticed a man handing out leaflets some thirty or forty feet away that were of the same yellowish-orange color that the man who had scowled at them with a look of the blackest hate had had in his hand.

  “What’s that man doing?” he asked.

  She looked across the crowd and shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said in a quiet, small voice. She was still frightened.

  Just then the man turned and Lowell recognized him. The scrawny body, the pronounced Adam’s apple, the ratlike eyes, the thinning brown hair: it was Rett Murray. Remembering what Bill had told him, he grew uneasy for the second time today. He watched him intently. Murray said something to everyone he tried to give a leaflet to. Most people refused it without looking. Some others accepted it, glanced through it as they walked along, and then threw it with what looked like disgust into one of the trash bins in front of the gate. A few became angry and said something to Murray. The noise of the crowd didn’t allow Lowell to hear the words, but the tone and body language told him that the leaflet contained offensive material, probably Nazi or KKK stuff.

  He nudged Fiona and pointed with his eyes. “That’s the man I bought my mother’s car from. The guy’s a Nazi or a Klansman.”

  They began discussing why Tara and Meg were late, the implicit subtext of their conver-sa-tion being the uneasiness they felt in Murray’s presence. The uneasiness was well founded because at some point Murray spotted them. Lowell could tell that he was recognized, but at first nothing happened. Murray went on thrusting leaflets at people’s hands and saying something to them. Sometimes he answered angry retorts he would get; sometimes he would simply shrug indifferently. It was clear that he had no expectations of convincing many people of his political opinions. He was looking for the one percent or so who would be receptive. Too late Lowell realized Murray had formulated a plan and was slowly making his way towards them.

  He looked up and down the street hoping to catch sight of Tara and Meg, who were now very late, but they were nowhere to be seen and there was no escape.

  Finally Murray was close enough to accost them. “I have a leaflet you should read, Edgecomb. It’s about the mongrelization of America. By the looks of things you should definitely read it.”

  “I’m not interested. I’m waiting for some people, and then we’re going to a baseball game.”

  “Don’t you have an open mind? You haven’t read it and yet you reject it.”

  “I don’t have to read it to know what it says.” He could feel Fiona’s muscles tensing up and could feel her psychic tension even more powerfully. “Would you please leave. We have no interest in talking to you.”

  Murray glanced at the people who were starting to gather round to listen to them. He had an audience now, which was probably the reason he confronted them. “Maybe you don’t, but I’m part of society. You live in the same society. What you do has an effect on me. You’ve forgotten that you’re an American. Doesn’t it mean anything to you that your ancestors came from England to start a new country? Do you think their plan was to make a place where miscegenation became commonplace? I don’t, that’s for sure. I think you’re betraying your ancestors.”

  “This is ridiculous. What possible business is it of yours what I and Fiona do? Good grief! Why don’t you mind your own business and get a life.”

  For a moment only the muscles in his cheeks twitching indicated he had heard and taken in Lowell’s heated remarks. When he spoke, however, he maintained a calm, businesslike tone. “You think your life belongs to you? It doesn’t. It belongs to society and to your race. You have a duty to avoid the mongrelization of America.”

  “Bullshit! Again I tell you, mind your own business. If there’s any duty here, it’s your duty to respect the rights of others and keep your racist garbage to yourself.”

  Murray grunted. “Read this leaflet before you shoot your mouth off.” Again he tried to hand it to Lowell, who roughly brushed it away.

  “I’m not reading racist garbage. Do you understand?”

  A wild look of anger flashed across Murray face, but he was a coward and kept his temper. He stepped back and shrugged while pursing his lips. “You know, Edgecomb, I thought at first you were a Jew boy, but now I see it’s even worse. You’re betraying your race. You’re a traitor. Don’t think you can get away with it.”

  Lowell clenched his fists. “Are you threatening me?”

  “Just some friendly advice, that’s all. I wouldn’t care if you and that…” He paused before he said something like “black bitch” and said with a curl of his lips as offensive as any words he could choose, “that woman were lovers if you were a Jew. But your lineage is Aryan. You have responsibilities.”

  A tall, rather distinguished man with a neatly trimmed gray beard and gold-rimmed glasses resting on a prominent nose had stopped and listened to the argument. He was growing angry and having a hard time keeping himself under control until Murray’s use of the term “Jew boy” became too much for him to take. He stepped forward right in front of Murray. “I know you. You’re the man who was arrested in front of the temple. Why don’t you take your Nazi garbage to the nearest dumpster and while you’re at it throw yourself in too, because you’re garbage as well, you scum.”

  Murray held his ground and coolly regarded the man. Although Lowell was sure he was a coward, he was clearly used to confrontation and was not afraid of it. If that was a kind of courage, he had it even though it was the courage of a hissing snake. “You ever heard of free speech?” he asked calmly. “It’s guaranteed by the Constitution.”

  “Yeah, slime, that’s typical of you people. You use part of the Constitution to spread your venom and ignore the rest of it, like freedom of religion and equal protection under the law.”

  They were still face-to-face, only a foot apart. “I’m just standing up for America, mister. The founding fathers didn’t plan on making it a menagerie. It didn’t plan on the Jews buying up all the media so that all you hear is Jewviews.”

  A cop had finally come over to see what the trouble was and heard the last part of this exchange. Seeing him, the man with the gray beard said, “This man is trying to incite a riot. he’s done it before. He should be arrested before he succeeds.”

  “I can’t be arrested for speaking my mind. At least not until the Jews buy up all the courts too.”

  The cop was stereotypically big with a red face and pronounced paunch. His dark eyes l
ooked tiny in his massive head. It didn’t appear he had much disagreement with the view Murray was espousing, for all he said was, “I can’t arrest a man for talking. Why don’t we all just go our separate ways and avoid trouble.”

  As the policeman spoke Lowell saw Tara and Meg making their way to the front of the crowd. He could see that Tara must have heard part of the conversation and had a pretty good idea of what had happened. She also appeared to recognize Murray.

  The cop stood between the man with the gray beard and Murray, causing the former to rejoin his wife and begin walking through the gate, but not until he had delivered a parting shot. “I hope you find yourself in jail before many days go by. Either that or an insane asylum. A freak like you belongs in a cage.”

  Murray ignored him, possibly didn’t even hear him. He kept his eyes trained on Lowell and Fiona. The cop gave him a little nudge, saying, “Okay, buddy, move on,” but he too had a parting shot. “Remember what I said, Edgecomb. You’re being watched now.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Tara said. “That Nazi was at you guys, wasn’t he?”

  Collectively they turned their back on Murray and joined the crowd surging through the gate. It was almost time for the game to start. Before they got to the ticket collector, Lowell stopped and let people pass. His hand, which had never left Fiona’s back, could feel her agitation, and he wanted to give her a moment to collect herself.

  “What would you like to do?” he asked.

  She looked as if she was about to cry. “I think I’d like to go home,” she said quietly.

  Tara turned and glared at the retreating figure of Murray. “That dirtball. I’d like to have him come up to the plate when I was pitching. I’d take him out, that’s for sure. He said racist crap, didn’t he?”

  Meg, who was as quiet as Fiona, showed that she had a sense of humor. “Did you ever notice that these guys who talk about racial purity and so forth aren’t exactly in danger of being confused with Mr. America? From the looks of that Adam’s apple on his chickenlike neck, I’d guess he had a vulture for an ancestor.”

  Fiona managed a wan smile while Tara grinned broadly. “Yeah, consider the source, Fifi. The guy’s a loser.”

  Lowell, trying to comfort Fiona, put his arm over her shoulder and drew her to him. “Yeah, he is. Do you know him? He’s a Nazi.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard all about him. He was at C.A. with us. Fifi,” Tara said in a softer tone, “don’t let that scumbag get to you. If he ruins your evening he’s won.”

  Unfortunately it looked as if he had already won, for she was crying now. “I’m sorry,” she murmured to Lowell. “I’m sorry I caused—”

  “Hey, it wasn’t your fault,” he said quickly. He knew she was going to say that she brought this incident on him, and he couldn’t bear to hear her say it. He could feel the loneliness of her humiliation. Murray had addressed only him, but it was her fragile spirit he had poisoned. Something in her eyes told him that she was considering sacrificing her love as the only way to make them safe. He could feel her going very far away from him and he couldn’t stand it. He would rather die. “It’s not your fault,” he repeated. “It’s not our fault. That man is unspeakable. He’s sick. He’s distorted. He won’t have any effect on us.”

  He spoke with ferocious assurance in an attempt to drive his own doubts away. He understood exactly how she felt, robbed of innocence and with choice, and therefore freedom, narrowed. Like her he was confused and afraid, possessed by the feeling that weeds were proliferating in the same soil where the flower of their love grew and were draining its life away.