Secret Anniversaries

by Scott Spencer

  She had directions from the subway stop to Joe’s apartment. Joe had drawn her a map showing the labyrinth of streets she had to navigate, and he had even sketched in an occasional stick figure of a man, holding on to his hat while his eyes bugged out, the men who would be going mad over Caitlin’s beauty as she walked the streets of Greenwich Village.

  There were no such men, or she did not notice them. The very idea was really a nightmare to her, though there was something touching in Joe’s presuming it to be so.

  Joe’s apartment on Barrow Street was part of a fifty-unit building begun during the flush years and then hastily completed after the stock market crash in ’29. To enter it, Caitlin had to walk from the sidewalk through a brick archway that led to an interior courtyard, which in turn radiated to five separate entrances. It was called Barrow Court and it had all the discomforting qualities of failed elegance.

  Joe had just gotten into his trousers, his shirt was unbuttoned, when he opened the door to Caitlin. His chest was smooth, boyish, his nipples like peach-colored dimes.

  “Caitlin,” he said. His eyes showed relief and uncertainty, as if he were a prisoner whom someone had finally come to visit.

  “Joe,” she said. She hadn’t fully known how much she had missed him.

  He put a finger to his lips and pulled her inside. “Fred,” he whispered. “Don’t use that other name.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

  Joe made a calm-down gesture with his open hand.

  “I just brewed up some coffee,” he said.

  “I’d love some,” said Caitlin. She cleared her throat. She was suddenly very nervous and she wondered why. At first she thought it was the awkwardness of having failed to use Joe’s new name, but then she realized it was something more personal and vast: this was the first time she had seen him since moving in with Betty. She wondered if Joe could see the difference in her, sense it, however unconsciously. Did she walk differently, smile in a new and alien way? Was there something in the way she combed her hair, stood, the way she held her hands, cocked her head, breathed, spoke, smiled, smelled, was there something in her eyes, a darkness, a glow, an involuntary evasiveness?

  Joe had still been in and out of his sister’s huge, sunstruck house when Caitlin had realized she loved Betty, he had still been working in Washington when Caitlin and Betty became lovers, he had heard her voice as it made its way up through the sudden tangle of all that new knowledge, those new layers of self. But in those first weeks of loving Betty it had not yet become entirely real. It was still something her old self was doing, a short detour off the original path, a moment, an interlude, something discontinuous from the overreaching arc of her life, and she could hold it at bay. It was really when she moved into Betty’s apartment and began living the most serious secret of her life that she began to wonder how much was left of the girl who had stumbled off the train the year before.

  The coffee he served her was black, thick as oil. She sipped it and her nerves jumped.

  “So you’re on your way home,” said Joe. He sat in a camel-colored wing chair. He started to cross his legs but then stretched them out instead.

  “It’s about time, I guess.” She looked around Joe’s apartment. On the floor there was an old Persian rug the Flemings would have liked. The furniture was old, covered in heavy, uncomfortable fabrics. Everything looked old and uncomfortable. Unstable shelves, heavy with books, leaned away from the smooth plaster walls. A black Underwood typewriter was set up on a folding table near the casement windows.

  “All those books come from used-book stalls on Fourth Avenue,” Joe said. “I buy them three cents a pound. My real books are at Gordon’s. No one from the … ” He gestured to indicate the words he didn’t want to say, lest someone be listening in. “None of my new friends come to visit me,” he said, very softly. “But if they did … ”

  “I don’t really understand what you’re doing,” said Caitlin. She sipped her coffee again. It tasted burned in an agreeable way.

  But Joe did not answer her directly. Instead he asked her about her travel plans. She was on her way to Leyden, to visit her parents for the first time since leaving to work in Washington. Her father had written her an imploring letter, strongly suggesting that Annie, who had been having a bad year, would improve and be able to work normally again if Caitlin would spend a little time with them. The train for Leyden left that evening; she had checked her luggage in a locker in Grand Central Station.

  “You look more beautiful than ever,” Joe said.

  “But you look so serious when you say it.”

  “I am serious.”

  “Like it was a disease, I mean.”

  “Well, I suppose it could be,” said Joe. “If that’s all people saw in you. I think you could start to hate being beautiful.”

  “I’m ten pounds overweight, my ears stick out, my feet are too big, and this is a ridiculous conversation. Anyhow, it’s you we should be talking about. You look so different with your hair like that.”

  “If they even suspected I was a Jew they’d tear me limb from limb.”

  “Who would? The people you’re trying to find out about?”

  “People like Stowe, if you must know. You work for a very bad man, Caitlin.”

  “I don’t know what to believe. Betty says Stowe knows Hitler is just a transitional figure. If we would take some of the war pressure off him, the German people would remove him. But he thrives on war and the threat of war. Really, Joe, he’s not such a bad guy.”

  “Hitler?”

  “Stowe. I mean once you know him.”

  “I do know him. Maybe not the way you do. I don’t know how he likes his coffee or what’s his favorite joke, but I know who his friends are, where his sympathies lie.”

  “He’s not a Nazi. I’d know it if he was.”

  “What if I could prove he was using public money to mail German propaganda? It would ruin him, you know.”

  “Caitlin fell silent. She tilted her coffee cup and looked into it. A sludge of dark grounds shifted at the bottom of the cup. “He wants peace,” she said.

  “Does he know you’re coming to see me?”

  “No one does.” She was going to say, Not even Betty, but it wouldn’t have made any sense to Joe—at least she hoped it wouldn’t.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Joe, I really don’t like that sort of question.”

  He pursed his lips, shook his head. “Fred,” he said.

  She sighed. “OK. Fred.” Why did he have to pick an absurd name, she wondered.

  He got up, went to the window, and looked down at the courtyard. He bent the Venetian blind down and white summer light covered his mouth and nose like a bandit’s bandana. Was he looking to see if she had been followed?

  “I’d like for you to come with me,” he said. “I’d like my new friends to see me with a beautiful girl.”

  “I’ve got to be back at the station at six-fifteen.”

  “Then you’ll come with me?” he said, turning toward her, and she surmised from his ardent tone that no one had made a friendly gesture toward him in a long while. He was lonely, he was frightened, and he was clawing at the reserve and formality that encased their friendship, as if he could tear it open like the foil on a bar of chocolate.

  He took her to East Eighty-sixth Street. It was the middle of a Saturday afternoon. Shoppers were thick in the street, shopping for veal, paprika, undershorts, ice, used typewriters, brooms, fabrics, religious statues and books, fish, stationery, shoes. The cars, mostly black, looked particularly dark beneath the bright blue sky, and the bus windows were open: here a man in short sleeves leaned out, looking balefully at the street, there a woman in a large hat held her infant near the window to give it a little fresh air.

  And through this weekend crush came Joseph Mc-Williams, leader of the Christian Mobilizers. For the past month, he had become a fixture on East Eighty-sixth Street, addressing the crowds from the back of a covered wagon. T
he wagon was pulled by two white horses with crosses and swastikas on their bridles, and the horses were driven by a small, oyster-colored man with large ears. The driver routinely tossed lazy handfuls of leaflets into the street urging shoppers to “BUY CHRISTIAN” as McWilliams exhorted the crowd through a megaphone, on one side of which was painted an American flag and on the other a cross.

  “Stop the persecution of Christian Americans!” he shouted.

  Because it was summer, the canvas of the covered wagon had been taken off, and hanging from the bowed wooden frame were dozens of kerosene lanterns, with blue and gold glass chimneys. When McWilliams worked into the night, the lanterns were lit and made his message all the more stirring.

  But it was daylight now and the shoppers were not paying much attention to him. From time to time, he lowered his megaphone and chewed thoughtfully on his lower lip, as if this irritating, inexplicable apathy was something he could turn around with a well-chosen phrase. He turned toward Joe. “It’s as if these folks are too scared to listen, Fred.”

  “It’s pretty strong stuff,” said Joe. He glanced at Caitlin, who was at his side.

  McWilliams smiled. He looked like a child who has been left to fend for himself and has been made a little dangerous. “Do you think so?”

  It took Caitlin a moment to realize McWilliams was asking this question of her. She was holding on to the side of the wagon while the horses’ heavy, shaggy hooves rang against the pavement and the buckboard swayed from side to side.

  “It is,” said Caitlin.

  Renewed by the faint praise, McWilliams brought the megaphone to his mouth again and bellowed, “Sure as shootin’ we need a new deal, Mr. President, but we need a CHRISTIAN new deal! And not for the bankers and the professors, but the man on the street.”

  “That’s right!” shouted a voice from the sidewalk. “Heil Hitler, God bless Germany.”

  It was a man wearing a heavy gray suit and riding boots, despite the August heat. He carried a small paper bag in one hand, inside of which Caitlin guessed was a bottle of whiskey. He was unshaven and beneath his sweat-stained homburg soiled bandages were wrapped around his skull.

  “Don’t even look at him,” McWilliams warned Caitlin. “He’s mental.”

  “God bless you, Mr. McWilliams!” the man on the pavement called out. He was leaning against the window of a Buster Brown shoe store and a woman leaving the shop with a sun-suited child in tow gave him a look of disdain.

  “Go home, Mr. Spilke,” the woman said. “Your family needs you.”

  McWilliams’s driver made a clucking noise, shook the reins, and the horses headed east on Eighty-sixth, lifting their tails to void their bowels as they neared First Avenue.

  McWilliams drummed his long spatulate fingers against the megaphone. “Did Fred tell you what kind of crowd we had last week at Innisfail Stadium?” he asked Caitlin.

  “Fifteen thousand people,” said Joe, quickly, seeming to Caitlin a little worried that she might ask, Who’s Fred?

  “It was a beautiful sight to behold,” said McWilliams. He noticed how tightly Caitlin was holding on to the side of the wagon. “Fred told me you were a country girl. Surely this isn’t your first time in a good old American horse and wagon.”

  “I think I’m just wearing the wrong kind of shoes,” said Caitlin.

  “Whereabout in the country were you raised up?”

  “Leyden.”

  “Oh, up in Windsor County. A lot of fine people up there. Quite a few subscribers. What about you? Do anything special with yourself up there in Leyden?”

  Caitlin was silent for a moment. She felt McWilliams’s curiosity moving toward her with a kind of brutal nonchalance, an eel under ice. She heard the telegraphy of the horses’ hooves against the street; she saw from the corner of her eye a boy in a red shirt running along the sidewalk, weaving in and out of the slow-moving crowd.

  “Mostly wait for Fred to come up and marry me,” she said, smiling.

  McWilliams laughed. It seemed somehow a genuine laugh but he was so used to artificial gestures that even his spontaneity was compromised by guile. He pushed Joe playfully. “Glad to hear it,” he said. “To tell you the truth, I was a little worried about Fred here. Fellow his age, living alone. You can’t help but wonder.” He looked Joe up and down and then nodded, with what certainly looked like approval.

  “OK, Freddie my lad, give me a line or two and let’s get something going here.”

  “Let’s try asking them if they want their sons and lovers to be killed in another useless war,” said Joe.

  McWilliams chewed on his lip for a moment. “Well, how about we say loved ones and keep it clean. OK?”

  The man at the reins had just thrown another batch of BUY CHRISTIAN leaflets into the air. There was no breeze to carry them and they fell in a clump onto the street. Though his back was to McWilliams, he stopped the cart as soon as McWilliams brought the megaphone up to his mouth.

  “How’d you like seeing your sons and husbands, your brothers and friends bleeding to death?” he fairly crooned into the megaphone. A woman wearing a wrinkled white linen dress, with slack yellow hair and dark circles under her eyes, stopped and looked up at McWilliams. She was carrying a string bag filled with canned food; her hand was red from the weight of her groceries. She nodded her head thoughtfully, and as these things so often seemed to go, in Joe’s experience, all it took was one person to break the rhythm, to jam the slowly moving gears of life. In a moment the wan woman with the string bag was joined by a furious-looking man in overalls, who seemed to have been trudging home from a dirty job he despised, and they were joined by a slight fellow carrying a doctor’s bag, with a mustache and pale, abrupt eyes, and then by a couple of what used to be called husky young men, wearing V-necked undershirts, summer trousers, and sandals, and before long McWilliams had what he had been counting on— an audience. McWilliams was thinking of running for president and, in the summer of 1941, it seemed to some that anything was possible.

  Joe brought Caitlin back to his apartment on Barrow Street. She was trembling and it was his version of solicitousness to pretend not to notice.

  “What time does your train leave?” he asked her.

  “Soon.” She had barely spoken for the long ride downtown and during the walk from the subway, and she showed no signs of being capable of real conversation now.

  “Would you like some coffee?” Joe asked.

  “I can make some,” she said.

  “It’s OK,” said Joe. “It’ll just take a minute.” Yet he made no move toward the kitchen. He stood next to the chair in which she had thrown herself and glanced down at her. Then he touched her hair.

  “Oh, Joe,” she said. “Those men. How can you stand it?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure that I can.”

  “What if they found out about you?”

  “They won’t.” He looked at her, smiled. His uncertainty flickered across his eyes; it was like the sudden change of light on the river when the sun is devoured by a cloud. His bravery was, in fact, a kind of retreat—not from his mission, but from the moment. His bravery was a way of not speaking to Caitlin.

  “But if they did,” she said, insisting. She wanted him close, she wanted after a day of repulsive fantasy to hear only the truth.

  “Then it would all be up to you,” he said.

  “What would?”

  “I’m just kidding.”

  “Joe, I don’t think you should be doing this.”

  “I’m going to write a book, Caitlin. I’m going to drag these night crawlers into the sun. I’m going to—” He stopped himself. It made him feel corny to be beating his breast in front of her. The less said the better. “I’m going to make coffee for us, is what I’m really going to do. Wait here.”

  He went into the kitchen and left her alone, where she listened to the ruminative noises of his apartment—the creak of the floors, the elevator rattling its chains like Marley’s ghost, the exhausted, loveless ar
gument of a man and a woman in another apartment—as well as the sounds from the street below, the trucks on Hudson Street, the boys playing in the courtyard below.

  Stacked on an easy chair was a pile of the Christian Mobilizer. Caitlin picked one up and began paging through it. One headline said “MOBILIZE AGAINST WAR,” with the subhead reading “Lindbergh Appeals to America.” Another headline said “AMERICA AND GERMANY—HOPE OF THE CHRISTIAN WORLD.” Below this headline was an article written by Frederick Hollander and below that, over an article initialed F. H., was a headline that asked “IS ROOSEVELT A JEW?”

  “Oh, Joe,” Caitlin said softly to herself.

  She got up and joined him in the kitchen. He was sitting in a folding chair, watching the coffee as it percolated on the little two-burner gas stove. She rested her hands on his shoulders and he leaned his head back until it touched her breasts.

  “I wish I was in an army,” said Joe. “I wish I was marching across a battlefield with a thousand other men and we all knew each other by our first names.”

  Caitlin breathed shallowly. She didn’t want her chest to heave for fear Joe would then move his head off her.

  “Or nicknames,” she said. “Everyone would have a nickname.”

  “I never had a nickname,” said Joe. “I don’t think anyone’s ever known me well enough to give me one.”

  “Joe’s a nickname,” said Caitlin.

  “Not really. It’s just short for Joseph. It doesn’t mean anything more.”

  Looking over the crest of his brown hair, his high, rounded brow, she saw his eyes close. The barber had neglected to dye Joe’s eyelashes: they were obsidian.