I quickly came to understand why my brother liked Nick’s place (I never heard the proprietor called anything but Nick). It was peaceful—a retreat from life so retired that the world seemed to have fallen completely away. It was friendly and the wine was cheap and not nearly so harmful as the villainous whiskey sold at the bars.
My brother and his friends almost always sat at the big center table, laughing and joking. I used to be amazed at the endless inane conversation that kept them amused. I sat, a silent presence, enjoying the peace and my own thoughts. Nobody seemed to mind my just sitting there. My brother was delighted to have me.
One night, when the wine was having its effect, my brother and his friends began to sing songs in turn—chiefly the song of the year: “If You Knew Susie, Like I Knew Susie.” When my turn came, I sang the first verse of the “Internationale:” Arise, ye prisoners of starvation,
Arise, ye wretched of the earth,
For justice thunders condemnation,
A better worlds in birth.
When I reached the refrain, from a darker comer of the room, a clear, deep voice suddenly joined mine, singing the original French words:C‘est la lutte finale,
Groupons-nous et demain,
L’Internationale
Sera le genre humain.
Tis the final conflict,
Let each stand in his place,
The International
Shall be the human race.
The dream of human brotherhood, lifted in two languages, rose through the eddying smoke and wine fumes. A fair-haired, middle-aged workingman detached himself from his darker friends, wove over to our table, and asked in French if he might sit down. “Vous êtes bolchévique?” he asked me—“You are a Bolshevik?” I said: “Yes.” “Moi aussi,” he said and grasped my hand. He told me that he was a Rumanian from Bessarabia, that he had been through the Russian Revolution and the civil war in Odessa. He had been a sailor around the Mediterranean and later on the ocean. Now he was a tinsmith. He was not a member of the Communist Party and never had been. He was one of the drifting thousands in whose dark lives the vision is a nameless hope. He was only semi-literate, but he spoke Greek, Russian and Rumanian as well as French. He would sit slumped over his wine, singing the slow, mournful Communist “Funeral Hymn”—one of the most moving songs in the world—which became slower and more mournful as he got more drunk.
Thereafter, while my brother and his friends laughed and canvassed their sexual exploits at their table, I would sit discussing world politics with the Rumanian and the Greeks, who also spoke French and most of whom were sympathetic to Communism.
XLI
Often Nick’s place was only the evening’s starting point. From there, the crowd would pile into the car and visit other speakeasies near the village. Sometimes they drove to East Rockaway where there was a very comfortable blind tiger beside the harbor. Sometimes we drove eastward on Long Island, to the North Shore or to New York where there was a speakeasy at the Manhattan end of the Queensboro Bridge. There was exhilaration in the wild rides in the open car through the brisk nights. I began to sense a pleasure of fellowship and mindless, animal activity that I had missed in my own youth, for these lapses take unexpected revenges.
Not all of those occasions were pleasant. When my brother drank the poisonous Prohibition whiskey, he inclined to be fighty. Once standing at the bar in East Rockaway, he began to tell me, for everyone to hear, what he thought about our family. He shouted that our mother and father had ruined their own lives and both of ours, and then dismissed them with a foul expression. I picked up a tumbler of whiskey and threw it in his face. It was an involuntary action. He sprang at me and we fought. Others pulled us apart and hustled him, cursing and struggling, to the back of the room. The woman who ran the place screamed: “Your brother did right to throw the whiskey in your face.”
The bad blood seethed between us for the rest of the night. It boiled up again in a service station where one of my brother’s cronies was on night duty. My brother baited me and again shouted his filthy remark. Again, we grappled and this time crashed to the concrete floor, he underneath. As I tried to extricate myself, he reached up, and, taking careful aim, struck me in the face with the stone set in his ring. The little scar on the bridge of my nose is one of the things he left me to carry permanently through the rest of my life.
My pleasure in those aimless and besotted rovings faded. I could not prevent my brother’s drinking. He laughed at me savagely whenever I tried. I could not prevent his drunken night drives. In time, I thought, he must tire of them as I was tired of them. Until then, I could not see what good my supervision did. I began to go my own ways again.
XLII
Late one night I came home and, as I opened the door, the smell of gas struck me. I rushed into the kitchen. All the jets and the oven were turned on in the gas stove. The room was filled with gas. My brother was slumped across a chair. I picked him up and dragged and carried him into another room. 1 worked his arms across his chest and slapped his cheeks. Very quickly he revived. He sat up. Presently, I made black coffee and gave him some.
“Why did you stop me?” he asked in a voice so pitiful that I wondered if I had not, in fact, committed a sin. Then, as he sipped his coffee, he said: “You’re a bastard, Bro. You stopped me this time, but I’ll do it yet.”
XLIII
My father had watched all this helplessly. But one night I heard a shout in the kitchen. I hurried down to find my father and my brother fighting furiously. My brother was drunk and could not see what he was doing. My father was blind with rage and no longer knew what he was doing. He was pummeling my brother’s face which was streaming with blood. My mother was screaming: “Hell kill him!”
I tried to pry my father off and failed. At that, the ulcer of years of anger burst within me—as if my father had not done his part to make my brother what he was. I struck at my father. My brother slid to the floor and lay there prone. Above him, my father and I wrestled and fought. Finally, I flung him against a cabinet. The ferocious strength drained out of him. His face was ashen and twitching. He was an old man, fighting for breath and panting: “He—has been taking girls—into that little house—at night. Your mother—I won’t stand for it.”
I walked over to my father and put my arms around him. We wept.
XLIV
Now my brother was seldom sober even in the daytime. He used to wear a vivid plaid pullover, violent checked knickerbockers and green or red golf stockings. Above this atrocious outfit, which seemed to me to symbolize the whole failure of our judgment, peered my brother’s pale, drawn face from which all joy had gone.
One cold night, with the snow lying hard on the ground, I reached home about midnight. Before I went to bed, some instinct, some prescience, something, made me decide to look in the little house in the yard. I had never done so before.
When I opened the door, gas rushed out at me. My brother was lying on the couch. His hands were cold. I dragged him frantically into the yard. I could scarcely manage his dead weight, his heels hit the snow lifelessly as I lugged him into the big house. His face was rigid, and from the fixed, open mouth came the smell of gas and alcohol. He was almost gone but his heart was still beating.
I laid him on the floor, and endlessly raised and lowered his arms as we do to resuscitate a drowning person. I must have worked over him half an hour. Slowly, life came back. It came in a hideous form. He did not regain normal consciousness. Instead, he pulled himself up on all fours and began to drag himself across the floor. He would hook his leg around a chair or table leg, and his muscles were set in such an iron clamp that it took all my strength simply to pry hin loose. Then he would drag himself around again and bark like a coyote—a thin, inhuman yelp repeated four or five times. That kept up all night.
When my mother came down in the morning, I went to bed.
XLV
After that, it was decided that I should again sit up and watch through the nights. Sometimes my
mother watched part of the night with me. More often, I sat in the kitchen alone. Sometimes, in the dead of night, the door from the living room would open noiselessly. My grandmother’s face would appear in the opening, and stare fixedly at me. “Do you want something, Grandmother?” I would ask. The face would silently withdraw and the door close noiselessly again. I used to wish that the house would burn down with all its horrors.
My brother knew that I was watching and laughed at me for it. He simply took to staying away all night, though sometimes I would hear him crunching the snow in the yard outside as if he were stalking us. Then I would go out and inspect the little house in back, from which my mother had had the gas disconnected.
XLVI
My brother had introduced me to a girl. He told me that he intended to marry her. I urged him not to, supposing that marriage could only lead to unhappiness for both of them. He said, with a touch of his old grace, that he had promised and he thought he should. I saw that both what was best and worst in him was driving him on.
He was married. My brother’s friends attended the wedding. My brother and his wife went to live in a little apartment in a neighboring village. For a time, I did not see my brother at all. After some months, he began to appear at our house again. He said very little, but I gathered from my mother, to whom he still told a great deal, that his wife had gone back to her parents. It was summer. They were living at one of the ocean beaches.
One night, my brother drove to the station in Lynbrook with a friend from whom I learned the details that follow. They waited for the train I usually came home on. I was not on it. I had stayed in New York, chatting with a Communist college friend. They waited for another train and another. I was not on them. I had failed my brother for the last time.
My brother and his friend drove to a pier from which they could see across a tidal inlet to the lights of the beach where his wife was staying. He sat there for an hour or more, saying nothing, smoking cigarettes and staring across the black water. Then he drove his friend home and went to his own apartment where he now lived alone.
XLVII
In the morning, I was awakened by the telephone ringing. I heard my mother hurry to answer it. The instrument fell from her hand. I heard it strike the floor. One single, terrible scream swelled through the house. I knew, even before I reached my mother’s side, that my brother had at last killed himself.
XLVIII
We drove to the next village and climbed the stairs to the little apartment. The kitchen was crowded with police and people I had never seen before. My brother was lying with his head in the gas oven, his body partly supported by the open door. He had made himself as comfortable as he could. There was a pillow in the oven under his head. His feet were resting on a pile of books set on a kitchen chair. One of his arms hung down rigid. Just below the fingers, on the floor, stood an empty quart whiskey bottle.
I picked it up and put it out of sight. “Put that back. Don’t touch anything, an officer snapped at me. I pointed to my mother who was sobbing, with her face buried in my brother’s chest. Nobody put back the empty bottle.
XLIX
They took my brother’s body to be embalmed.
My parents had collapsed. They lay, as I had never seen them before, side by side across my father’s bed, eyes open, not even weeping. At last, my father tottered out and said: “You will have to take charge. Do what you think best.”
I supervised the barbaric rites of a modem funeral. I told the men where to place the casket and the flowers. I arranged for a preacher. I had known the young funeral director all my life. As we stood looking at my brother together, he said: “When I look at the stars at night, I sometimes wonder.”
My mother wanted to spend the last night in the room with my brother’s body. I set up a cot for her. She asked me to stay with her. I lay down on the floor with my clothes on beside my brother’s casket. I did not sleep. Sometimes my mother made a little gurgling sound. She had been weeping in her sleep and awakened when the tears choked her. I prayed: “Evil that drifts through the world, pass by this house tonight.”
We buried my brother in the Sand Hill graveyard. It was a sunny autumn day, shortly before his birthday. As I stood by the open grave, I could see one of the lakes where I had wandered as a boy. We tossed in the handfuls of earth. I took my mother and father home.
L
Only when my brother was dead did I know how much I had loved him. Death had never really touched me before. I had to fight an all-pervading listlessness of the will. I would lie for hours and watch the leaves, heaving gently in the wind. To do anything else seemed, in the face of death, gross and revolting, seemed a betrayal of my brother because any activity implied that life had meaning. Life that could destroy so gentle a nature as my brother’s was meaningless. I wanted to talk to nobody, see nobody.
I forced myself to go to work every evening. I sometimes forced myself to go on long rambles during the day. On one of them I composed that dirge that later appeared in Poetry magazine, and which was read in court by the Hiss defense to prove something about me that I never quite understood. Its first verse went:The moving masses of clouds, and the standing
Freights on the siding in the sun, alike induce in us
That despair, which, we, brother, know there is no
withstanding.
Every day, before going to work, I walked to the graveyard, sometimes with my mother. Every night, when I came back from work, I went to the graveyard alone. I went in rain and in snow. I never missed a night.
The thought that tortured me was whether my brother had not been right in that repeated insight: “We are hopeless. We are gentle people. We are too gentle to face the world.” My instinct told me that he was right. I thought that he had acted quickly and bravely to destroy his life before the world could destroy it. But I questioned whether I was not wrong to have let him make the lonely journey alone. That was the question I was seeking an answer to.
One night, after returning from the graveyard, I went to look inside the little house, where I had once narrowly saved my brother. There I made my decision: “No. I will live. There is something in me, there is some purpose in my life which I feel but do not understand. I must go on living until it is fulfilled.” I added to myself: “I shall be sorry that I did not go with my brother.”
LI
Not long after my brother’s death, I was living in a cottage on one of the Long Island tidal inlets. I was living with a Communist girl in what was called a “party marriage”—the kind of union that the Communist Party sanctioned and, in fact, favored. My mother knew where I was living, but, of course, never visited us.
One morning, she drove up to my house, breathless and distraught. “Your father is dead,” she said. “You will have to come and move his body.” He had dropped dead in the bathroom as he prepared to shave.
My father lay huddled in his bathrobe on the sea-blue tiles my brother had laid. His body was still warm. Of the bodies I had lifted in the last years, his was the most inert. I could move him only inch by inch. My mother had to help me raise him to his bed.
Later, the undertakers carried my father downstairs. Without my knowledge, they began the preliminary stages of embalming, in our living room. Unsuspectingly, I walked into the room. My father lay naked on a stretcher. One of his arms was dangling. From this arm, near the shoulder, his blood, the blood that had given my brother and me life, was pouring, in a thin, dark arc, into a battered mop bucket.
We buried. my father beside my brother.
Our line seemed to be at an end. Our family was like a burnt-over woods, which nothing can revive and only new growth can replace. The promise of new growth lay wholly within me—in my having children. No need was so strong in me as the need to have children. But by then I agreed with my brother that to repeat the misery of such lives as ours would be a crime against life.
LII
My relations with my father softened after my brother’s death. His loneliness, his
sense of the failure of his whole life, was inescapable, and he began to show me as much affection as it lay in his nature to show anyone. His hand fumbled for mine and my hand fumbled for his. I thought: “Under so great a damnation, how can any one of us feel anything but pity for any other?”
We took to meeting in New York for lunch or supper. Then we would ramble aimlessly around the insensible city. We were still almost as silent with each other as in the past, but now my need for silence had become almost as great as my father’s. Sometimes his old sardonic coldness would betray him and rebuff me. But I felt a will to ignore it. He, too, struggled against it, and this struggle was visible and absolving. From things he let drop, or ventured almost furtively, I began to grasp that, in the long drama of our house, he, too, had a human case.
One night, not long after my brother’s death, we met by chance on the Long Island train and walked home from the station together. It was a very starry night. As usual, we walked in silence. Both of us were watching the sky. Both of us saw a shooting star streak across it and flash out as it hit the earth’s atmosphere. “Strange,” said my father (who knew even less about science than I did), “to think that a world has ended.”
Witness Page 25
