by Belva Plain
Look at him, Theo was thinking, defying me, standing there in his dirty wet jacket and sloppy half-grown beard, a handsome boy like him—what’s he trying to prove?
“Your sneakers are staining the carpet,” he said.
“It’s only water, and it’s only a carpet. There are more important things in the world.”
“Oh, really? Have you ever earned the price of a carpet? Why, you haven’t even earned enough to feed yourself, and you dare to talk—to—to face us with that twist on your lips and—what’s that on your pants?”
He looked down at a splatter of dark stains on his legs. “I guess it’s blood.”
“Blood, is it? That’ll be a nice thing for me to think about next time your tuition bill comes! Very, very nice!”
Theo walked to the end of the room and drew the curtains. The heavy silk swished and the brass rings clattered in the waiting silence. When he came back, his face was drained pale. He spoke slowly and heavily.
“For the last time I ask you, will you leave these people you’ve been hanging around with before you destroy yourself entirely?”
“No. I can’t do that.”
Theo’s fists clenched and unclenched themselves at his sides. “I ought,” he said, “as a law-abiding citizen, God damn it, I ought to turn you in. That’s what!”
“Oh, no!” Iris cried out. “No, Theo! You don’t really mean that. After all, it’s not as if he had hurt anyone. He said, in fact, that they were very careful not to hurt anyone. You have to take that into consideration, Theo.”
“No, Iris. Don’t tell me what I mean or don’t mean. Look at him with blood on his clothes, brought up in a home like ours—”
“Shit!” Steve cried. He was trembling. “I despise it. It’s narrow, stupid, selfish—” And he made a wide sweep with his arm to take in the whole room, his mother and grandmother, his father and brother, all the possessions so carefully collected for the benefit of our children, Iris thought, the books and pictures, the piano; he seemed with that violent gesture to condemn them all, even the innocent roses that Theo had sent for her birthday.
“You,” Theo said. “Do you know what’s going through my mind? That there’s some sickness in the air and you’ve caught it. Even your language is sick. We don’t talk that way in this house.”
“We don’t talk the same language at all in this house.” Steve swung about. “I can’t even stand a night in it. Nana, will you give me a bed for tonight? If you can’t, I’ll sleep under a tree.”
“Don’t be a fool,” Anna said. “Go wait in my car.”
When Steve had slammed the front door, the three stood looking from one to the other, as if an answer were to be found in each other’s faces.
Iris spoke first. “It’s all bravado. He’s frightened to death.” She appealed to Theo. “I’m sure, I could swear, he’ll never do anything like this again.”
“And I’m not sure at all,” Theo answered.
“I’ll drive him home. At least he’ll be out of the way so maybe you can get some sleep, you two,” Anna said. Putting her coat on, she added quietly, “If he’s to disappoint you, you’ll have to accept it. You can’t get into another person’s head.”
“You’re right, Mama,” Theo said, deeply bitter. “You can’t mold another human being to be his best. I see that now.”
At the front door Anna spoke again. “Every life is a secret. Every life. You can only understand your own.” In the dim light of the entry Iris saw her mother’s smile, wry and sad. “And sometimes you can’t even understand your own.”
Theo walked around the room while he undressed, thumping his shoes on the floor and flinging his shirt over a chair, all of which was unlike him, who was ordinarily so methodical. All the time he kept talking.
“Yes, you work and try to build something solid for your children, and they reject you. But we must have done something right, because the others seem to have turned out.” He grumbled, “Call themselves open minded! Meaning that everything they haven’t thought of, everything that’s older than yesterday or spoken by somebody over thirty, is garbage. And what’s more, they’re not even logical, because they want to make a revolution and still keep on living the free hippie life. You know how far they’d go, how long they’d last in Hanoi? Bah!” He sat down on the edge of the bed and put his head in his hands. “Iris, I don’t know what to do. Maybe if I turn him in, it’ll be better for him in the end. He’ll suffer his punishment and learn a lesson.”
Iris, who had been brushing her hair at the dressing table, now whirled around on the bench. She was horrified.
“Theo! You can’t mean that. He’d never forgive you, never, for the rest of his life.”
“It might be the best thing for him, all the same.”
“And I—I would never forgive you either. He’s only a child, and this will pass. Be patient with him.”
“What? A child? I’m not going to coddle him, I can tell you that. I want to make something of him, not humor him.”
“Didn’t you agree with my mother a few minutes ago that you can’t mold a person to your liking?”
“ ‘To his best,’ is what I said. But that’s only partly true. What I meant was—oh, for God’s sake, let’s have an end to this for tonight! I have to operate early. Set the alarm for five-thirty. I’ll have to shower. I’m too worn out to do it now.”
They lay together in the bed. It was her habit to rest her head in the hollow of his shoulder, he always said he liked to feel her weight and her warm hair on his chest. But now she slid upward so that their cheeks touched. And she felt the tiny flutter of his lashes. They turned toward each other so that their hearts met, fusing the double thud.
“Live hearts beating,” she whispered, thinking aloud, and softly stroked his cheek.
“Iris.… Is the door locked?”
“Yes.”
And she thought, when he moved upon her, when she received him, No matter what else comes, we have this always, this unmeasurable, pure sweetness and lovely trust, this healing.
Then came the moment’s dazzle, the “little death,” as someone, she couldn’t remember who, had called it, and from it she woke again into life, into the silence, with the beloved hand on her breast.
It was a night on which, after making love, one should lie easily waiting for sleep in the warm bed, the warm room, safe from the rain that rushed at the windows and safe from the wildness out of doors. But one could tell that the wildness could break in whenever it chose. Somewhere at the back of the yard Theo heard a tree limb fall, cracking like a broken bone. It was probably the old maple in the corner; the bottom limb had long been rotten. Miserable night. At least Steve wasn’t out in it, or in jail. Fool, young fool, ruining his young life! It was one thing to have ideals and to speak out, but not this way. Too bad somebody couldn’t punish him enough to knock sense into him. Anna, maybe, Anna might talk to him as she had on the night of his Bar Mitzvah, which seemed a hundred years ago. But no.… He was almost a man now, and, anyway, this was different.
He twisted, turning lightly in the bed so as not to disturb the blankets and wake Iris. He listened. Her breathing was irregular, so she wasn’t sleeping either. She was a wreck over this. Poor Iris. This was going to come to no good end. Their son was going to come to no good end. He saw that clearly.…
Iris could always feel when Theo fell asleep and when he awoke. She moved to comfort him, but drew back; there were times when he needed comfort and other times when he needed to be let alone. How well she knew him!
What’s Steve going to do next? The worry over him is even worse for Theo than it is for me. He would deny it, but the truth is he wants everything to be perfect.
Poor darling Theo. He wants to please me. He doesn’t even flirt much anymore. And ever since that day a few years ago when he gave that nurse a lift in town, and I made such a jealous fool of myself, I’ve made up my mind not to notice it if he should.
A few cold tears slid down Iris’s temples i
nto the roots of her hair.
8
By the fall of 1967 Americans, despite their previous enthusiasm, were growing sick of the war in Vietnam, sick of the nightly television news, a landscape of burning villages, small people running, dank, infested jungles, ambushed trucks, and helicopters whirling to pluck the wounded out of the tropical hell.
It is a world in agony, thought Iris, not only on the far side of the Pacific, but in the east, too, where Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, helped by the Soviet Union, were almost daily marauding the fields and cities of Israel. No peace, said the Arab leaders who met in Khartoum, until Israel is driven into the sea.
It was an unending cycle of terror.
Chiefly, of course, it was Steve who weighed on her heart. He had seldom been home since the affair of the draft cards. On the telephone their dialogue was calm, but awkward. No one dared ask what he was doing, not only because he would probably not answer but perhaps also because it was easier not to know. At least he was still in college and keeping his grades up.
They never used Jimmy, who was now on the same campus, as a conduit. It was not fair, not a clean thing, to ask him to report on his brother. Once in a while, though, quite casually, Jimmy would tell them something, such as: “Steve left for a march in Baltimore today. I only told you so you wouldn’t worry if you should read anything in the newspapers.”
Iris asked once, “Wherever does he get the money? Surely his allowance isn’t enough for all those trips.”
“His crowd has money,” Jimmy assured her. “I don’t know where they get it, but they have it.”
In February 1968 the Vietnamese had a national holiday. Tet was the anniversary of their defeat of the Chinese a century and a half before. It was astonishing that this battered people were not only still alive, but were able actually to launch an offensive against the Americans; yet launch it they did, right into the embassy compound in Saigon, and it took a night-long fight to rout them. There were those in the military who made light of the episode, but it nevertheless marked the beginning of the President’s defeat. In March he decided not to run for another term, and America’s youth, or a large segment of it, rejoiced.
In August the Democratic convention opened in Chicago. Preparations for it were ominous. The Illinois National Guard and the entire police force were in readiness to meet horrendous threats such as, for example, that “Yippies” were going to put LSD into the Chicago water supply. And so America’s eyes were fastened even more avidly than usual to the television screen.
Theo and Iris were alone for the summer. Laura, by now a senior in high school, had gone to New Hampshire with a group to campaign door to door for McCarthy. Philip was at camp in the Maine woods. Jimmy was working as an orderly in a Chicago hospital. From Steve they had only a scrawled note giving minimal information: He was going west with a political science group for some sort of seminar and they would hear from him. By August they had heard no more, and it seemed as clear to Iris as if she had been told that he was no farther west than Chicago. But still, as she sat with Theo watching events, she did not speak of her anxiety.
They watched as, one by one, the “peace now” candidates lost and Humphrey won the nomination. They watched as chaos erupted through the city, as the police cleared Lincoln Park, where camping out had been forbidden. “Pigs!” yelled the young, the bearded, the long-haired girls in their uniform of jeans and shirts. “Commies!” screamed the police, striking with billy clubs. In Grant Park ten thousand rallied. Across from the Hilton Hotel there was a melee on the street. Bricks, eggs, stink bombs, and stones were met with tear gas by reinforcements of police. From upper windows fell bags of excrement and urine. And, facing the cameras, swaying as in a chorus or ritual dance, the young protesters chanted: “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!”
Iris, in tense absorption, was not even aware that her fists were clenched. The room was dark except for the great bright eye of the screen, and by its light she saw Theo leaning forward, straining to see it all. She wondered whether, like herself, he was searching for Steve in that frenzied crowd.
“The police are going too terribly far,” she said. “It’s brutal. They’re only kids.”
“That’s true. Some of them have gone too far. And yet they’re human and they’re mad. These kids are out of hand. Throwing filth out of windows and dancing naked in fountains! They’re supposed to be intelligent, they’re college students. What sense are they making? What the hell do they want? We’re having peace talks in Paris right now.”
“I wonder,” she murmured, “whether Steve is there.”
“Well, he’d better not be dancing naked in a fountain, if he is.” Theo sounded grim.
Not more than fifteen minutes later the telephone rang. Afterward Iris remembered that, with the first ring, she had been certain of an unwelcome message.
It was Jimmy. “Mom? Don’t get excited. Everything’ll be all right. But Steve was arrested this afternoon.”
“Oh, God! Arrested? Where?”
“In Chicago. I’m there now. He called me and I flew in. I’m at the police station.”
Theo grabbed the telephone and Iris ran to the kitchen to pick up the extension.
“It’s a disorderly-conduct charge, nothing too bad, but they want bail. I haven’t got enough money.”
She heard the rage in Theo’s voice. Whenever he spoke barely above a whisper, one knew he was enraged.
“I see. And if there’s no bail?”
“Well, he’ll be held. I don’t know exactly.” Jimmy’s voice was audibly shaking. “You want to talk to him? He’s here. We’re at the sergeant’s desk.”
Then came Steve’s voice. “Hello, here I am.”
And Theo’s: “What’s this? What have you done now?”
“You know. You just heard.”
“I heard, all right. What are you doing to yourself? And do you know what you’re doing to your mother?”
For Iris had begun suddenly to cry, and through the open kitchen door Theo could see her.
“I’m sorry,” Steve said. “But that’s not the point right this minute. The point is, I need bail.”
How could he be so cool? She imagined the police station; probably the only time she had been in one was the day somebody rammed her parked car, and all she remembered was a high desk of golden oak, so high that she hadn’t been able to see its surface, and the glare of the ceiling lights. She saw Steve standing there now.
She heard him ask, “Do I get bail?”
“That depends on you,” Theo answered. “On whether you’ll promise to stop this stuff once and for all.”
“No promises,” Steve said.
“I see. No appreciation to this country that’s giving you an education—”
“This country’s not giving me anything.”
“It’s given you everything you have, damn it! Your freedom—”
“What freedom? To make money manufacturing napalm?”
Now Theo exploded. “Jesus Christ!”
Iris had to intervene. “Steve, don’t argue with Dad. This isn’t the time.”
“You’re right. They want me to cut this short, anyway, these fascists. Bail or not?”
“ ‘Fascists’! You’re out of your mind to talk like that,” Theo shouted.
In the background Iris could hear voices, ringing phones, and a sound like a chair scraping over a floor. Now she could see Jimmy standing at that desk; it wasn’t fair that he should be in this mess, that he should have been called to this responsibility when he was only a boy himself.
“Steve,” she pleaded, “don’t say things you’ll be sorry for. Talk sense and straighten this out right now.”
“They want me to get off the phone, I told you.”
“Very well,” Theo answered. “I’ll ask you one more time to give your word. Then I’ll talk to the sergeant and find out what to do. Just give me your solemn word.”
“I can’t,” Steve said.
Iris
felt sudden panic. Was it possible that he was going to desert the boy?
“Call back if you change your mind,” Theo was saying. “Now put your brother on the phone.”
Jimmy’s voice came through. “Dad, they want us off the phone. The place is jammed here, and—”
The receiver clicked.
Iris rushed back into the den. The sound on the television was shut off, but frantic motion was still bobbing and jerking on the screen, and Theo was standing with the dead telephone in his hand, staring at it.
“So here we are,” he said.
“You’re not going to help him? You’re not?”
“You want to know something? I’ve gone as far as I can go. I’ve tried to be the best human being, the best father, I know how to be, but I’m no saint and this is my limit. I’ve reached it. Here. Now. This minute.”
“You can’t! What’s to become of him? You can’t!”
Theo was staring through the glass wall into the hot white summer night. “I remember his Bar Mitzvah, I remember it well. Right here in this room. I couldn’t figure him out then, and I still can’t.”
“Don’t bring that up, Theo. It’s long past and forgotten.”
“I haven’t forgotten it.”
“Locked up,” she said. “Locked up.”
“With a bunch of his own kind, Iris. Kids gone wild.”
He looked ill. She watched him go into the kitchen and heard water running and the clink of a glass. Calm, she thought, keep yourself calm and let him calm down. Then surely he will call back and find out what to do.
When Theo returned with a glass in hand and sat down again, she was able to speak quietly, smoothing her voice as one smooths wrinkles in a skirt.
“It’s an old scenario. Their ideals run away with them.” And when he did not answer, she went on, “Such a confusing world right now, fearing the draft, growing up to face competition and overcrowding—”
Theo gave a stop signal with his hand. “Please. Spare me the pop psychology.”
“It’s not pop psychology. It’s true. You grew up in a much more orderly world. I know there were wars—”
