The Angry Ones

by Williams, John A. ;

  “Sad,” I said. “They’re treating me very sadly.”

  She nodded, but it was exaggeration; she didn’t believe me.

  “How are you making it?” I asked.

  She gave a little laugh and pointed to the kids who were just then galloping back into the room. Then I was lost in accepting their thanks—kissing them and getting kissed in return, holding their hand and listening to each of them in turn and together. I didn’t get another good look at Grace until after dinner. I put the kids to bed then. Frankie had forgot the Lord’s Prayer and I had to say it for him three times.

  “Why don’t you know the Lord’s Prayer, man?” I asked. I wasn’t upset that he didn’t know it. I mean, what the hell.

  “Teddy says them for both of us,” he said, smiling across at his brother.

  Teddy jumped up. “Do you know why?”

  “No, why?”

  “Because I’m Superman!”

  They cracked up. No lie, these guys belonged in my family. I stood near their door ready to snap out the light. Teddy said, in a tone unlike any I’d heard him use during the day, “Uncle Steve?”

  “What is it, Teddy?”

  “Uncle Steve,” he rushed on, “do you like our mother? Are you in love with our mother?”

  “Yeah, are ya?” Frankie said.

  “What makes you ask that?”

  Teddy crept close to me and his smile was filled with the mischief and tenderness kids can sometimes have. “You do, don’cha?”

  “I like your mother very much,” I said. I snapped out the light.

  “You going to marry her?” Frankie shouted in the darkness. He laughed and Teddy joined him. Then they said good night and I knew they were through having fun at my expense, at least for that moment.

  I closed the door and went to the kitchen to help Grace finish the dishes. I kissed her on the back of the neck, the way I used to when we rode in the valley and stood looking out over a green ridge. She stopped moving her hands in the water and turned to look at me, but I’d moved off to a rack for a cloth.

  She filled in the awkward silence. “Mom still in love with Hawaii?”

  “Yeah, she and the old man. Having a real bit out there.”

  “Got a letter from Dave last week,” she said. “When’s he going to get married?”

  “Soon, I guess. He’s got a real nice little doll.”

  “He’s a very wonderful guy,” she said.

  “Yes, he is.” I was thinking of the morning after the Seconol when he kept asking me, “What’s the matter, champ?” I didn’t tell him that I’d got halfway to hell and come back. After a long silence I asked Grace, “What’s with you, hon?”

  “Nothing. Just working and raising the boys.” There was a hint of bitterness in her voice.

  “I thought maybe you’d be thinking about getting married again,” I said, with the biggest goddam lump in my throat.

  “Sure, I’d like to.” She was washing the dishes very rapidly and I thought, Well, there’s no one else.

  “What are you waiting for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Teddy and Frankie just tried to get us married off …”

  She looked at me in the queerest way. She smoothed her dishcloth over a rack and lighted a cigarette. She exhaled the smoke coolly and looked at me. “Yes?” was all she said.

  I tried to smile and it fitted awkwardly upon my face. I tried to get a cigarette that refused to come out of the pack. All the time she just looked at me and it was as if I had no tongue at all.

  We left the kitchen and went inside to watch television. About midnight she made up the couch for me. I sat in the blue glare of the TV set alone while she got ready for bed.

  “Grace!” I called impulsively.

  She shot through the door of her room, her diaphanous robe billowing behind her. I met her halfway across the room and felt her body drive against mine. We kissed and afterwards she said, “Ooohh.” And it was like I always remembered it, that sound, the soft echoes of it.

  “Grace! Oh, Grace!” I said over and over again. It was all I could say. We sat on the couch and we whispered and clutched one another and Grace sniffled and cried softly and I might have, too, I don’t know. It was dark and I know my face was wet—her tears or mine, I don’t know. We sat there and remembered. Man, how we remembered.

  The smell of horses against the mint and pine of the valleys; the smell of fresh, running water; the sense of a complete and good world as we sat beside an empty lake in the fall with no one around for miles.

  Finally she said, “It’s always been you, Steve. You know that.”

  Man, I tell you WHOO Eeeeee! At that second there was nothing impossible—I could do anything. And I said, “I know, I know, I know.” We were off and running. We’d get married, have a home for the kids and have more kids and it would be just as we’d always wanted it.

  “But first,” I said, eagerly, “I want to get a good job, baby, a really good job.”

  “I thought you had one.”

  Then I had to tell her about Rocket and my pay. She said I could leave and take something in civil service—that we would have security because of Grant’s untouched insurance money.

  Something went out of it then, and we were back in a living room with the television set going.

  “Grace,” I said. “I’ve been through too much to give it up. This marriage has to be on my terms.”

  “Your terms haven’t changed and they’re just as frail as ever,” she said.

  “And yours,” I said, “haven’t changed.”

  All that remained the same was my love for her and, damn it, I knew she still loved me and maybe it was the thing so stubborn in me that she loved the most. Anyway, she left me. Much later I turned off the set and lay listening to it ticking into coolness. I smoked and listened to the noises of the night and I didn’t get to sleep until day began to come. I woke late and was headed for the john when the phone rang. It was Grace calling from downtown where she was shopping with the kids. She asked, “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah,” I answered. I wanted to communicate my gruffness to her. I did.

  She asked, “What’s the matter?”

  “Grace, I think I’ll take a run to the old homestead. I’ll stop for a while on the way back.”

  She was silent a moment, then said, “Sunday night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, Steve, we counted on your staying the whole week end.”

  “We?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Steve.” Reproach was in her voice.

  “I said I was sorry.”

  “All right, then. I’ll look for you Sunday night.”

  “Good-bye.”

  “Steve?”

  “What, Grace?”

  “Please stop on your way back.”

  “I said I would.”

  “Steve?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh,” she said in exasperation. “I wanted to say something very important, but I can’t talk when you’re like this.”

  “S’long, baby.”

  The train hurtles along the Mohawk. To the north the Adirondacks begin to swell, at first gentle mounds of green and brown, then hills covered with trees and on into great garnet-speckled mountains. Along the river the wide and green fields flash by, still luxuriating in the richness brought thousands of years ago by the glaciers. The river narrows into a marsh which spreads southward and is abruptly gone. The land, now solid, is cluttered with kettles and gouges, boulders and baby drumlins. Old Revolutionary War memorial shafts point toward the skies like outmoded rockets on their launching pads, and you can almost see the Continentals, drummer boy in front, blue-clad, ragged marching idiotically over those open fields toward the British redcoats. Industries, the dead and the living, announce themselves on brick and wooden buildings as the train flattens out, streams past them.

  Overhead the sky goes from blue to yellow and to a darker blue again, and the shapes of
things beautiful during the day hulk forlornly in the dark. Across the way cars, their light beams needles in the night, rush without end on the Thruway, and the stars calmly pin up the night so that the moon may behold what is below.

  I have been home many times and I always sought that special thing I didn’t know, but felt I lost there. I became both glad and afraid when the train jerks, pulls, presses downward against the tracks, begins to slow. And when it finally stops, and the steps go down, steel clanking in the air, I want to run where, I don’t know. Just to fly with the wind rushing in my ears and with my eyes running water from the whistling air.

  Things began to settle, though, once I got outside the station. I hurried to the little club where no whites are allowed except cops. Before, I went to the club every Friday and Saturday night when the other bars had closed. The place hadn’t changed. It even smelled the same. I had a couple of quick ones for bracing, then I surveyed the place for a girl—Somebody’s Daughter.

  I didn’t see her but I did see that the records in this place hadn’t changed either. Someone played “Nancy” and I began to think of my old buddy, Rowe. We’d been in the army together. When we came out we must have set something of a record for Saturnalias—every night. When we were kids, he won an amateur contest. He wouldn’t perform before the audience, so the judges allowed him to go offstage and sing, unseen. “Nancy” made me think of him.

  I remembered the times we double-dated. We would usually wind up in some thin-walled hotel, and I could always hear him telling his girl, “Thank you, dollin’.” He was so damned polite. I asked him why and he said, “I’m just grateful, and when I’m grateful, I say, ‘Thank you, dollin’.”

  He could really sing “Nancy.” In the early mornings on the way home he would do it. It always seemed springtime then. We would amble along the deserted streets, each of us with an armful of woman to hold for a few hours, and Rowe would sing. God, how he would sing!

  I thought of Rowe as I leaned on the bar. I didn’t know where he was; they all leave, if they can, because in that place the force which is evil prepares one early for life of a sort. And if they leave it means that they have gone to seek other than evil. Good for us in childhood and even in adulthood was simply to resist evil since that was the active force, good being passive. Few people taught us that good was a positive thing. They said, “This is bad and that is bad and that also is bad. Resist them.”

  The good things somehow just happened. Like Sundays. Sunday really began with Saturday night when the bathroom was busy hours on end, what with the bathing and hairdressing. My father sipped beer he’d made and plucked the chickens he’d bought Saturday afternoon in the Italian section. My mother straightened her hair, but this would not be completed until Sunday morning, after which she’d brush Dave’s hair by the hour, it seemed, while my father would tend to his favorite, Grant. Saturday then would melt into Sunday, and while my father went over Grant’s hair again, my mother turned on the RCA radio which said inside, Equipped for television attachment, and got the program “Wings Over Jordan,” only she said, “Jerdan.”

  How that choir poured out of that little radio! Really poured out, singing, “Go Down, Moses,” filling the whole house. And when my father joined, singing the bass, the place quivered. Then he got into his gray suit and went off to church. He sang in the choir and had to be there early. My mother swished around, pulling and tucking at Dave, combing her hair and singing in a determined off-key voice until she was radiant and ready for church, managing things somehow so that dinner would be ready when we got home. When we left the house, piles and piles of browned chicken, hordes of stringbeans and biscuits, yams and salads lay ready for our return.

  In church we always marched down the middle aisle to the front pew. I had to go along, although I would have preferred the rear pew. I could see my father in the choir, dressed like the others in a black robe. I could single out his voice, rumbling along beneath the others, providing a deep, soft bass for the other voices to tread on. I suffered through the services and only became gay again when the choir started to file down the center aisle. I looked up eagerly, waiting for the long lines of black-robed people to pass so I could catch my father’s eye when he winked at us. I had to smile back—I couldn’t wink without twisting my face. Then we went home for dinner.

  “Steve Hill! Haven’t seen you since the night you and Grace broke up, right in this club!”

  I turned. It was, of course, Somebody’s Daughter, but what she had just said finished me for the night. I couldn’t be interested in anything now. I said hello and offered her a drink, which she accepted. Time seemed to have had whims with her. In some respects she looked very old and worn, but in others quite young and fresh.

  She chattered on. “I suppose you’re all over her by now, though,” she said.

  “Sure,” I said. “Sure.”

  “You look well,” she said.

  “So do you,” I said.

  We had another drink and I said good-bye. I went out to wander around the empty streets, looking for what, I just didn’t know. But I looked anyway. It was cool outside, and walking along I could almost hear Rowe singing “Nancy,” hear the click of high-heeled shoes and the voices of women.

  I looked and I looked. There was the spot where our pup had been mashed to death by a car; there was the stretch of road I’d helped with by laying cement in the summer. My initials were still there. But these were none of the things I was looking for, and I caught the train at daybreak. As soon as I got it I thought of Rowe again. It was sort of funny, the way we drifted apart. He decided not to go to school. That was what had done it. There had been a time when we’d meet in the streets and he’d want to talk about pussy. I was more interested in Pope and Proust. Then we didn’t even bother to stop. We just waved at each other and passed on.

  I didn’t stop in Albany. I was undecided until the very last moment, but I didn’t. I went to sleep and didn’t awake until the train was slithering its way underground to Grand Central. I called Grace as soon as I got home. I tried to explain, but it’s difficult when you don’t know what it is you’re trying to say.

  The next day, Monday, would be a work day. I could bury myself in that.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The first thing I did the next afternoon was to go in and ask Rollie for the raise Rocket had promised me after the first couple of months. Rollie was very affable. He pulled out a bottle of martinis and we had a little drink. He told me he was pleased with my work, that I was a definite asset to the company, but—Of course there had to be a “but.”

  They couldn’t give me the raise just yet, it seemed. Rocket was a relatively new company, it was just getting on its feet. It would not grow too much, Rollie said, and he himself planned to move on after he got the business going well. His spot would be mine, since I’d already proved myself capable. In fact, Rollie said, I had more on the ball than he—I could not only talk with the authors, I could handle promotion and distribution and publicity as well.

  Rollie sold me on the challenge. I left the office almost happy with the peanuts Rocket was paying. On the way back to my own desk I was already noting the changes I’d make when I took over for Rollie. Old Rollie Culver. He was a fascinating person to know. He had a great deal of charm. He was the sort of guy who could do five things at once and do all of them charmingly. He seemed to charm the hell out of Sarah. I heard once that they went together, but it seemed odd to me, what with Rollie’s being a flit and all, though I wasn’t sure. But then perhaps Sarah was one of those women who prefer that type to another for her own special reason. They got along very well in the office. If you saw one, within seconds you’d see the other. They were inseparable.

  It was Rollie’s job to talk with authors. He was more interested in the prospective ones than in the ones already published. When an author, prospective or not, walked in and met Rollie’s dazzling smile—which carried in it just a hint of wistfulness (Gee, I wish I could write)—the contract
, if there was one involved, was generally as good as signed. Authors already published and dissatisfied with the sales of their books were, as a rule, mollified in a face-to-face session with Rollie. Securing contracts was Rollie’s forte. The rest of us were what the Times ads called “self-starters”—we worked largely without supervision. This left Rollie with plenty of time to think up new ways to secure book contracts.

  There was a lot about Rocket that I didn’t know until later. One of the things was that a company like Rocket was primarily geared for printing. The contracts secured by Rollie through direct mail, personal contact and magazine advertising represented total profit to the printers, who set type for the books when the presses were empty. The books were supposed to be ready on a set schedule, but they seldom were, because printing was always coming in. Editorial work, publicity and promotion were basically decorations. There was no sales department.

  Working with that secret portion of human nature which balks at frustration and obscurity, companies like Rocket do very well; they need the frustrated ones, though. First there is an outfit like Rocket. Then there is the writer or a person who writes. A friend says it is good. Other friends say it is good. Very often the writer is far past middle age. And, too, perhaps the community has displayed irritating disregard for the genius in its midst. For these people it is not enough to have lived and died and enriched the ground. This simple scheme escapes them. They must do something then, and, too often unequipped, they write. And wanting to do this, they are compelled to show it to friends and others who are kind. Having been compelled to show it, they are then compelled to publish it, and when the announcement is made that the manuscript has gone to New York, it must not return unpublished. And in New York, Rocket and similar companies sit and wait and sometimes are alerted by cheap literary agents who are paid for their referrals.

  But I didn’t know this until later.

  I had to take on several part-time people to get my work out. Sarah screamed, but Rollie calmed her down. Going home nights, shoving and cursing in the crowds, I reflected again how good it was to be working. In the evenings I spent a lot of time looking for a new place. I finally found one which was only twice as big as the first, but it had a private bathroom. For the time being, I was happy to have found it. The rent, however, would have put me into an East Side midtown building, if I could have got in. I spent one night carrying my belongings from the old place. A funny thing happened that night.