by Sarah Blake
She would grab her pocketbook and run down the wide marble, nearly falling at his feet because her legs were moving faster than her feet could keep up. But his arms went around her before she reached the bottom stair and he pulled her off the stairs and into him. Cigarettes and aftershave and his freshly laundered collar surrounded her and she closed her eyes as he held her, already hard, his hands on her shoulders as he drew her to him, making her shaky, weak, making her want to sit down suddenly, lie down and take him in. With him, for the first time in her life, she was not cracked, not wrong. She was right. This life was right, and surged through her, a rich beating vein that thrummed and bloomed in his hands.
Sometimes in those first few days, Joan would stop where she was walking and hold her hand out, just to hold it, as though stopping in the middle of a stream so she could feel the current racing round her, and feel herself standing strong against it, in it—this hot, explosive summer that would detonate the golden, gentle gates of fall. She would stand in the heat and know that gentleness was gone for good.
Twenty
WITHOUT LEN, REG FOUND himself wandering more and more out into the city on his own. The summer had settled into its unremitting heat, and so even if he’d wanted to go farther afield, at the end of a day in his high, hot office, his mind had gone so slack, his head so thick and dull, that his wandering was contained to the small streets of the Village as he traveled from work to home, from home to dinner or a drink, and then again, back home.
Coming up Hudson Street on the fourth evening in a row that the city had baked in ninety-degree heat, Reg was passing the White Horse Tavern and caught sight of Moss Milton sitting by himself at a table inside.
“Hello, Milton.” Reg set a pitcher and two glasses down on the table in front of Moss.
“Reg Pauling,” Moss said, the smile already spreading across his face.
“What gives?”
“Not a good goddamn.” Moss shook his head, rueful, pulling the pitcher toward him and pouring out the beer. “Cheers.”
“Cheers.” Reg touched his glass.
The night was drawing down on the bar. The secretaries and their bosses had given way to the deeper drinkers, the men and women who stopped in here for one, or two, and stayed for dinner, and for after. Over at the writers’ table, there were a few men Reg recognized but didn’t know by name.
“I met Jimmy Baldwin over there one night,” Reg said after a while. “I was banging around down here looking for pieces to write, and he sat down at that table and asked my name and then he asked what I wanted to write about and I told him America.” Reg snorted. “And then he turned those big black eyes of his on me—” He exhaled, remembering. “You get caught in Jimmy’s eyes, and you might as well just sink right on down.”
“How’s that?”
“He looks at you, and for those seconds it’s as if no one had ever seen you before in your life,” Reg said thoughtfully. “Not your mother, not your father, or a lover—”
Moss stared back at him.
“‘You want to write about America?’ Jimmy asked. ‘You’ve got to get out of here, then,’ he said to me. ‘Get out of the country.’”
“What?”
Reg nodded.
“And?”
“I did.” Reg looked up at Moss and shrugged, smiling. “It seemed as good an idea as anything else, and I worked for the next six months or so until I had enough to buy a ticket to France.”
“And?”
“I spent the next three years in cold-water flats and walk-ups, from Rome to Vienna to Berlin, sleeping on couches, and once in an apartment for a kept woman overlooking the Seine.”
“Nice.”
“For a time.”
Moss considered him. “And did you find America?”
“I found myself homesick.” Reg looked at him.
“For what?”
“Words, among other things.” Reg pushed back in his chair. “English words—any words: Cube steak. Morning glory. Five-and-dime. Heft.”
“Heft?”
“Heft, man. Heft. I like that word.” Reg lifted his beer. “Kenning. Word hoard. I would have made a good Saxon.”
Moss choked on his beer. The image of an enormous blond warrior striding bare-knuckled through a bog set against the slight black man in front of him was too much for Moss. He clapped his hand to his chest, delighted.
“Glad you like it.” Reg grinned, leaning his elbows on the table. “Glad I could be of service.”
“So then what?”
“Then I came back home.”
“And now?”
“Now—” Reg shrugged. “I’m here.”
“Here’s to that,” Moss said, and raised his glass. The two sat companionably.
Under the wide arch of the doorway, a few girls had kicked off their shoes and stood beside the men in blue shirts. One of them lifted and lowered on her toes as though practicing at the barre, and Moss again had the vision of a syncopated beat, but slow; a raptor’s wings up and down. At the closer table here, just beyond Reg’s head, a girl pulled her beret off a radiant mop of red hair. It was a bright spot in the dark tavern.
Moss’s right hand rested on the rim of the table as on a piano and he tapped out the girl, the bright spot he had heard, shifting in his seat.
“What’s that you’re playing?”
Moss pulled his hand off the table. “‘On the Rocks.’”
“Tune you know?”
“Tune I’m writing.” Moss leaned back and folded his arms across his chest. “Been trying to write all summer. Something that gets at a moment like this.”
“What moment is that?” Reg sipped his beer.
Moss thought. “This time we’re in, this time just before the key changes. I want to write that song.” He shook his head, rueful. “My America.”
Reg watched him.
Moss tried again. “Moments that hold inside the sense of what’s coming.”
“The future of the now?”
“That’s good.” Moss looked at him appreciatively. “Something like that.”
Reg nodded. “What is coming?”
Moss grinned and shook his head. “New notes.”
Reg raised his eyebrows.
“I can almost hear them,” Moss sighed.
Reg followed Moss’s gaze around the room.
“Like that.” Moss pointed to a woman with the lamplight on her hair. “You see how sweet that glow is, how it warms her, makes you want to hold her, like she was a flame—a roar of D’s.”
The girl was talking seriously to a man at the end of the table against the wall. It wasn’t flirtatious. She sank into the chair next to him, telling him something.
“And those dockworkers, sitting right beside her. They’ve been here drinking all afternoon,” Moss went on. “They’re a B, a dead B. And over there, the table of self-proclaimed cool cats, the writers, and right here, back again, us.”
Reg nodded. “A white man and a black man.”
Moss frowned. “Well, yes. But not only that.”
Reg folded his arms.
“The room, man. Us in the room.” Moss leaned toward him. “Here we are, talking. All of us in the same room, unimaginable to my parents, my grandparents. But we are here now. New notes.”
Reg turned back to him, away from them.
Moss looked at him. “But where’s the bass line? What holds it. I can’t find the tone, the string that pulls it all together into a line. The inner logic. The notes don’t add up.”
“Maybe you’re not seeing straight.”
Moss frowned.
“It’s still the country that elected Eisenhower,” Reg observed. “Twice.”
Moss was quiet.
“It’s still the country that rebuilds Europe and lets the Negro nation—”
“The Negro nation?”
Reg nodded and stubbed out his cigarette. “I spent years over there seeing the fruits of American investment grow through the goddamn Marshall Plan. Mone
y, money, money—and not a dime to sow the same seeds right here.”
Moss considered him. “You should write about that.”
Reg looked at Moss directly. “I should.”
Moss sat back in his chair. “But what do you make of us sitting at a table, talking? We are sitting at a table talking.”
“So?”
“So, that’s new, isn’t it—that’s news.”
Reg shook his head. “That’s Harvard, man. And random chance. Most people in the rest of the country would walk in here and see one black man sitting where he shouldn’t.”
Moss shook his head stubbornly. “We are sitting together, and that’s the fact. Anything can happen from here on out. Anything is possible. Big ears, man. You gotta have big ears.”
Reg looked at him. “You’re an idealist.”
“Guilty.” Moss exhaled, smiling.
Reg nodded and stubbed out his cigarette. “Then you’re the dangerous one.”
His tone was unreadable. He pulled himself onto his feet and was reaching for his hat.
“But I like the sound of your new notes,” he said. “I’d like to hear them, when you find them.”
And the smile he turned on Moss was rich and warm and wide. “So long.”
“So long,” Moss answered. And as he watched Reg find his way through the clutch of people and out the door, he felt his chest catch and fill.
Twenty-one
PAUL HAD BOUGHT HAMBURGER, three potatoes, and frozen peas—as though they still had a small child at home, Evie remarked.
“Or as if it’s the seventies or something.” Seth dropped his backpack in the hall.
But it was comfort food for all of them, the smell of potatoes in the oven, Paul at the dining room table reading, and the June twilight slipping through the window. In the week since he’d come home, they’d fallen into a kind of truce, picking up the regular threads between them and stepping around the tear in the surface.
She set the bottle of wine in front of Paul, who reached for it without lifting his eyes from the page. The dark mahogany table, once her grandmother’s and once worth thousands but now scratched irredeemably, was set for the three of them. Around the table ranged four of the six Windsor chairs Evie’s mother had shipped to California when Evie was in graduate school, a rampart against whatever wilderness Joan imagined Evie to be living in with Paul. On a strip of masking tape under the seat of each of them, Joan had written, Aunt Minerva, 1893–1968. Now they circled the table in varying degrees of disrepair.
“Hey, Mom. I need lacrosse socks for camp.”
“You have socks.”
“No. Mom. Lacrosse socks.” Seth pulled out the catalog he had just brought in from the hall. “I can order them right now.”
“You don’t need special socks. That’s absurd.”
“Mom.”
She looked at him. “All right, but don’t close the magazine until I get the web address. I’ll take a look.”
“You don’t need the address. Just look up ‘lacrosse socks’ and hit enter.” He grinned. “See, that’s why our generation is so much better. We just google things. We don’t need to look up addresses, we can just go there.”
“Yes, and when the whole system crashes, you’ll be lost, and maybe”—she tapped him—“just maybe, we’ll come and fetch you out of the darkness.”
“Dubious,” he pronounced gleefully. He took the plate she handed him and sat down.
“Question: are we middle middle class, upper middle class, or lower upper class?”
She glanced at Paul, setting down the wine bottle, and raised her eyebrow. “Why?”
“Just wondering.” Seth spooned his peas into the opened slit of the baked potato. “We just got our short answer exam questions and—”
“We’re comfortable,” she hedged. “You don’t have to worry.”
“I’m not worried.” He set the spoon down and reached for the salt. “I just want to know whether I can write something.”
“Upper middle,” she said.
“But we’ve got the Island,” he countered. “I mean, nobody else we know has an island, a whole island.”
Paul was paying attention now, though he didn’t lift his head.
“Yes,” she said, her eyes on Paul, “we have the Island—”
“Because I’d put Larkin Reed in lower upper, wouldn’t you?” Seth looked at her.
“Why’s that?” she asked.
“They’ve got so much stuff.”
“There’s old money. There’s new money. There is comfortable. There’s rich. There is filthy stinking rich,” she said blithely, and paused. “And then there are the people who know better.”
“Know better about what?” Seth asked.
“About not spending money.”
“So we are comfortable and know better?”
“Well,” Evie admitted, “yes.”
“Know better than whom?” Paul spoke for the first time. “Who are you better than?”
“No one.” She frowned at him. “We’re not better than anyone; it’s just an expression.”
“Ask your mother what her grandmother always used to say.”
“What?” Evie tried to read Paul’s expression.
Seth looked from Paul to Evie, waiting.
Paul prompted. “Always remember you are a Milton—”
“Go on,” Seth prodded.
She turned and looked at Seth. “You are a Milton. Not a Lowell. Not a Rensselaer, a Havemeyer, or a Strong. The uprights, not the crackpots. The all-around men, the good sports.”
“Whoa. That’s intense,” Seth said. “What’s a crackpot?”
“The Lowells,” Paul answered smoothly, “are crackpots. Also geniuses, but never mind.”
Evie flushed.
“So what were the Miltons?” Seth asked.
“Were? Are. You are.”
“I’m a Schlesinger,” Seth said.
“Half,” said Evie.
Paul looked up.
“Is that what your grandfather was?” Seth asked. “A good sport?”
“He was,” Evie answered quickly, “and also the head of a major investment bank that oversaw the end of the Great Depression, and instrumental in the Marshall Plan.”
“So he was famous.”
“He was, yes,” Paul said, and looked at Evie without any irony. “He was, on the one hand, a great man.”
“He did what he was raised to do,” Evie amended.
“Which was what?” Seth looked from his father to his mother.
“Step up,” Evie searched. “Work for the common good,” she went on. “All of us were raised for that.” She stopped. “But you know this.”
Her son sat up straight. “I don’t, Mom, not really.”
“The boys were meant to take up the reins their fathers held—go into banking or go down to Washington and be of service. Be useful.”
“Lead the country,” Paul added.
“As they had for hundreds of years. They were expected to, they expected to, and they did.”
“All of them? All the boys?”
Evie nodded. “Pretty much.”
“There weren’t any fails?”
“Fails?”
“Guys who didn’t do—what they were supposed to.”
Evie shook her head.
“How about your uncle Moss?” Paul said.
“Moss?” She stopped. “No one ever really talked about Moss. He was a little tragic, I think. He played the piano.”
“What about the girls?” Seth asked, tipping back in his chair.
“The girls? We were to adorn. To adorn and to add.”
“Add what?”
Evie mimicked her grandmother’s tone, her eyes on Paul. “That irreducible something—color in a room, good conversation—grace.”
“It used to drive your mother crazy.”
Evie nodded. “And if you were going to have children, have three, but not four—that verged on Catholic, for god’s sake—an
d two was a little pathetic.”
“And one?” Seth asked.
“Mmm. Unimaginable.” She smiled at her son. He tipped farther back, leaning against the wall.
(I understand perfectly, her grandmother had sniffed when Evie had handed her a copy of her first book, why you would want to teach, but why on earth you need to write something that no one has any intention of reading—what is a trope, for goodness sake?—I can’t fathom.
There would be the light, appraising gaze followed by a quiet. You knew only that you had disappointed, though never exactly on what score. It was as though there were a twin beside you, the ideal twin, on whom she bestowed her satisfaction, and even more—her pride. There in the air beside you was who she really sought.)
“Mom?”
She looked at Seth, returning.
“Anyway,” Evie finished, “Granny K pronounced us all interesting, by which I think she meant not a one of us stayed the course, not a one of us carries the torch.”
“Yeah,” Seth continued, “and I didn’t even know what the rules were. So it’s really over. That torch is—out.”
“Lord, Seth,” she said, pricked. “And can you stop tipping in Aunt Min’s chair?”
He brought the legs of the chair down. “Torches don’t just go out. I’ll bet there’s some dark secret hidden away.”
“Oh, you do, do you?”
“There’s always something.” Seth paused, thinking. “Festering.” He grinned, wobbling his finger.
“Oh really?”
“I’m serious. Something always happens and then the whole world changes, boom. Look at World War One, for instance.”
She shook her head, smiling in spite of herself. He sounded like all her students. “If there is anything history teaches, it’s that nothing happens. No single moment. No story. Just people going around doing the best they can, without knowing what on earth they are doing.”
