by Belva Plain
Well, there was no reason why a man couldn’t love two women, even in some sort of muddled overlap, was there? Yes, and he could be a little bit resentful of both of them, too, at the same time. A pity it was that neither one was here with him on this perfect morning.
Then he straightened himself and looked into the mirror that hung over the console. Tall and thin, with not even a trace of baldness, he was still able to find a pretty woman to escort to dinner, still able to enjoy life and, God willing, would continue so to the end. God willing.
Out on the terrace he sat down with the Herald Tribune and Il Messaggero. He was doing well with the language. It was good to keep your brain young with the effort of learning something new; Italian grammar was not the easiest to master. Also he had begun to take cello lessons again. Years ago he had played, had never been really good at it, but had loved its plangent tones. Even a single chord sent a wave of sweetness into the air, and he was determined to do better with the instrument, just as he was determined to fit himself into Italian life as long as he was here. Otherwise, there would have been no point in coming to Italy in the first place; there were plenty of lovely, warm places at home where one might sit on a terrace and look out at water.
Today he was going to a wedding. The niece of his Roman friends was to be married in the village church with a reception afterward in a grand old Edwardian hotel, between banks of flowers, under crystal chandeliers and carved ceilings. Outdoors, the gravel would be raked fine in the gardens, and pastel parasols would shade all the little iron tables and skinny iron chairs. Tiny boys and girls in their bright little suits and dresses would go tearing down the paths. It would be a family affair, for all these Italian parties included everyone of every age. Paul liked that. There’d be music, he would dance and be grateful that he had been invited.
Beneath the stone balustrade now, the gardener’s young daughter had been picking roses on the slope. She came up the steps with an armful held against her young white breasts, between which hung a gold cross on a thin gold chain. In another year she would be honey-ripe and the young men would flock like bees. Unless the city should lure her away, she would quickly marry one of them, breed one perfect baby after the other, and soon would become as fat as her mother.
Accident! All—well, not entirely all—but a great deal of it anyway, was accident, where you were born and to whom. If your ancestors were stronger or smarter or simply luckier than most, you would likely be in a position different from those whose ancestors had not been. Thrown dice, he thought. I have been fortunate, fortunate to be enjoying the pleasure of this breeze, and the girl walking away with the heap of roses, and the lake below as deeply blue as stained glass.
His brown-and-white spaniel came bounding around the house, jumped up on him, and licked his hand. For years, ever since childhood, he had missed having a dog because he—and most emphatically, Marian—had thought it wrong to keep one in an apartment. But that had been foolish. The apartment was across from the park, where a dog might have plenty of exercise, and so he would take this one home with him when he went. But when? Whenever he should get tired of being here. That was the answer. He had set himself no time limit. He had earned this rest, he thought defensively, at the same time asking himself what puritan conscience made him feel that he needed defending.
It was good just to be in the sun, here in this peace where, if he did not want to trouble himself about it, he could pretend that there was neither Cuban nor Libyan terror, that there was no Israel, still wary and insecure even after its victory in the sixty-seven war, that there was no Vietnam, and that his own country wasn’t being torn to pieces because of it.…
The dog had gone racing down toward the shore and now came back to stand at Paul’s knees, barking and wagging in some private, ecstatic joy.
“Oh, all right,” Paul said, “I understand. You want a walk, and you want me to come too.”
So he stood up and strode off down the hill to where the lake lay rippling in the wind.
15
You come to the land by crossing the Golden Gate Bridge in the morning, with the wrinkled silver ocean on your left. You pass through Sausalito and on to where the green shoulder of Mt. Tamalpais bulks in the west, then go up by the Muir Woods, where the great trees are older than the United States, were already old when William the Conqueror crossed the Channel, and already old when the Saracens fought the Crusaders. In Marin County smart new houses arranged themselves on the cliffs like glass boxes on shelves. Farther still, in the wine country, in Sonoma, lie the vineyards where the tended grapes lie evenly on the earth like ruled lines on a light brown pad; the sun is blinding.
Early in the afternoon as you climb gradually into the easy roll of hills and slanted fields, the land greens into pastures and meadows ringed by woods. You turn off the asphalt pavement onto a dirt road, bumping and swerving around boulders in your way, follow the road along a dry gulch for three miles, take a fork onto a lane just wide enough for the car, and come to a stop at a dead end in front of a large Victorian house at the edge of a spreading farm.
This is what Steve had seen when, for the first time, he had walked up the lane, carrying all he owned in his duffel bag. But now, from where he was standing on the hill above the house, he had an almost aerial view of Peace Farm, with its apple orchards, its sturdy, black Dutch Belted dairy cows with their wide white cummerbunds, and its human traffic, small, dark spots moving among the houses and the barns. Beyond all these lay a distant blur that might possibly be clouds or possibly the sea.
It was high noon and the heat lay heavily on his head. He had been working all morning on the rail fence that was going, eventually, to keep a flock of sheep from falling into the ravine. He was tired, but it was a good tiredness, the kind that comes when healthy muscles have been well used. The upper half of his body was brown; his hair was sun bleached and his spirit calm.
“You need a change and some quiet,” Tim Powers had urged.
They had talked in Tim’s office a few days after the campus bombing, in which a man had lost his legs.
“I saw him, I was passing on my way to the library when I saw the crowd. They were carrying him to the ambulance.… Tim, I haven’t slept for two nights, I keep seeing those bloody stumps and hearing his screams.… God, Tim, those screams ringing in my ears.…”
Tim had come from behind his desk and laid two firm hands on Steve’s shoulders.
“They will stop ringing. Believe me. Nothing lasts forever. Time is merciful,” he’d said kindly. “Besides, you had nothing to do with it, anyway.”
In all the disorder and fury of the demonstrations in which Steve had taken part, even on that day of fear and trembling when they had invaded the Selective Service office, he had never been so shaken. But the mutilation of that one man, a man he had known, had shaken him most awfully.
And he had demanded of Tim, “But what if I had had anything to do with it?”
“You know perfectly well that it’s our policy to do no harm to persons, but only to property, if we can help it. You do know that.”
“Yes. I know.”
Tim had dropped his hands and sat down again, while Steve stood, staring at some dust motes in a stream of sunlight over the desk.
“That’s not to say,” Tim said suddenly, “that a time may not come when we have to—to escalate. You know that too.”
Steve nodded, feeling desolate.
“The man was a victim, but the struggle that made him a victim is a pure one all the same. It’s the cause of peace and justice. Sometimes, in the most noble causes, mistakes are made. That’s all there is to it. Don’t you agree?”
“Of course I do. But still, Tim, my nerves … I surely never thought—I thought I was the last person ever to be talking about nerves.”
Tim smiled. “Nobody’s made of iron. What you need is a rest in the fresh air. One of those communes in California is the place. Nice warm climate, nothing on your mind. Stay until you feel ready and whole
again, and then come back.”
As always, Tim had understood him better than he understood himself, Steve thought now as he collected his tools and started the long walk downhill. For in the months he had been here this place had truly healed him, so much so that he had no thought of when he might ever want to leave it. This was his place and there were his new people, friendly and undemanding.
The forty-five or fifty men and women who were usually at the farm at any given time described themselves as “apolitical.” Some of them had once been involved in public causes, but had given up. The political was irrelevant, they said. They neither listened to the radio nor read the newspaper, and there was not one television set on the place. The simple life of sharing was all. And this new way of life was the true revolution, they believed.
Everything was held in common: books, food, clothing, drugs, and lovers. Happy, independent, half-naked babies toddled about in the sunshine. Whoever happened to be nearest watched out for them and answered their calls. Any mother took care of any other mother’s child, and the men did the same. Often enough, a man wasn’t sure which child was his or whether any child was his; it didn’t matter.
Well, there’d been plenty of free sex, although not babies, on the campus. So all this was nothing new to Steve. As to the sharing of drugs, that was all right too, although he himself had never been big on drugs. Clothing he had to share, and that was good. There was a free store in town that kept a bin for such as he; one reached in and took whatever was needed.
Very soon he learned to do things he had never done before, some carpentry to keep the houses in repair and some work in leather. One made one’s own sandals here. He had learned how to milk a cow and deliver a calf. He now knew the difference between a Delicious and a Gravenstein apple. He tended goats and made “garbage runs” to town to pick up the vegetables and fruits that were discarded by the supermarkets.
A long way from Westchester, from the tennis courts and the pools, he thought now, and, for that matter, from the university too. And smiling a little, both with amusement at himself and with satisfaction, he entered the tool shed to put away the various hammers, saws, and planes that he had been using.
For some unknown reason, after these things were neatly stowed, he stretched out his hands, splaying the fingers, and regarded them. They were large, strong hands, the nails somewhat worn and the palms calloused. They were competent hands that knew how to make things. And he smiled again, only to be stopped so abruptly that the smile broke. This happened now and then, this sudden brutal stab of memory, of home.…
Sad, hurtful memories. His father’s hand. He shuddered, and in his own fingers felt the bloody shock of the smashing door. My God, it was the man’s whole life gone down the drain! Selfish and narrow as was that small, arrogant medical world, yet it had been the man’s whole life! There was no denying the horror of it, or the pity, too, of his mother who had caused the wreckage.
He tried now to block out a vague, uncertain recollection of some words he thought he had overheard during that brief time when he had come home after the accident. The maid and the gardener had been whispering outside the kitchen door, and did he imagine they’d said something about his mother’s trying to kill herself? He had never mentioned it to anyone, half disbelieving that he had heard it, wanting to disbelieve it.…
For a minute or two he stayed in the shed, leaning against the doorpost and looking out into the noonday quiet as if the sight of it would return to him the sense of well-being that had filled him up until now.
To the right of the cow barn, farther down the hill, stood a crudely fashioned wooden dome on pillars. It looked something like a bandstand on the central green of an old town, except that it was larger and contained benches in a circle. There in the evenings everybody met to meditate, joining hands and facing west toward the setting sun. In the warmth of this contact, warm palm against warm palm on either side, you could forget everything that troubled you, forget about the ugliness and evil of the world, forget even that any world existed beyond these meadows and these hills.
Resolutely, Steve straightened his shoulders, as the tragic mood ebbed. He became aware of hunger. Of course that was why the place was deserted—everybody was in the big house, eating.
“You’re late,” someone said. “So am I. Are you going to lunch?”
He looked down—he had to look down, for she was quite small—at a young girl. Then he corrected his thought: You were supposed to say, even to think, “woman,” not “girl.” She was carrying a kitten not much larger than a full-sized mouse. It could not have been more than a week old, and it was desperately mewing.
“It’s starving,” the girl said. “The mother had too many, you see, and this is the weak one. It gets shoved aside. Do you suppose it can be saved?”
“Let’s see. Give it here.” Steve weighed the limp creature in his hand. “I think it’s dying,” he told her.
“Poor little thing! It wants to live.”
The genuine sorrow in her voice appealed to Steve and piqued his interest. She was new at the farm, having arrived only a week or two earlier. He had scarcely spoken to her, knew only that her name was Susan and that, because there were several other Susans on the place, she was called Susan B.
“Well,” he said, “let’s get something to eat ourselves and then think about how to get some food into him—or is it her?”
“It’s so little and frail, I haven’t bothered to look.”
You look sort of frail yourself, Steve was thinking while she trotted along beside him. He wondered why he hadn’t noticed her that much before. She was—well, different; it was the best word he could think of. Different. Rosy beige all over, from her two fat braids to the cotton shift and the bare, narrow feet. Only her eyes were very dark, and soft as flowers.
His thoughts flitted: She doesn’t look like a person who’s cast off her bourgeois hang-ups. I don’t see her doing free and easy sex. There’s something about her that says she wouldn’t. To begin with, she can’t be more than fifteen, can she? Still, you never can tell for sure, not about age, or about sex either.
“I’ve asked around for a medicine dropper, but nobody has one,” Susan said.
“When I go in to town this afternoon I’ll get one,” Steve offered.
“Oh, would you? When will that be?”
“Soon’s I have lunch.”
The dining room, the pantries, and the spacious kitchen, in which servants must once have prepared splendid dinners, were crowded now with people cooking, eating, and washing up. The food was cooked in huge battered pots and eaten on chipped plates. Things were spilled and nobody minded, babies cried and were nursed, children climbed on the tables and were never reprimanded.
Steve and Susan, with the kitten in her pocket, found places on a bench and helped themselves to stew from the communal bowl. Suddenly she began to laugh.
“What’s funny?” he asked.
“I was just remembering things. Linen table mats, polished mahogany, and flowers, and it struck me funny. Maybe you don’t know what I mean, though.”
“I know exactly what you mean.” And he, too, felt the humorous contrast of his home to this friendly, merry hubbub.
“This must have been a millionaire’s place once. That grand staircase with the carved banisters, and the organ in the music room—the solarium—and look what’s become of it!” Susan exclaimed.
“All to the good, don’t you think so?”
“Oh, yes, I only meant that there must be a story in it.”
“There is. It was once a summer home for a family with a mining fortune. But after the first couple of generations died off, the heirs weren’t interested in coming here and the place went to seed, fell apart. Then a rich man’s young son finally bought it, but he was supposed to be not responsible, not quite right in the head, I guess, but maybe he was very right, because he wanted to give all his money away to the needy. Anyway, they appointed a conservator to take charge of his affai
rs, although not before he had already given this property to the group that has it now. So that’s the story.”
“I think that’s wonderful,” Susan B. said earnestly. “Are you going to stay here always, Steve?”
“Maybe. Anyone’s welcome to stay as long as he wants and as long as he’s willing to share the work and whatever he owns or can earn.”
“That’s wonderful,” she repeated.
The kitten mewed, its cry surprisingly loud for such a weak creature. Steve got up.
“I’ll be going to town. Where shall I look for you when I get back?”
“Somewhere around the cow barn. I’m supposed to clean up there this afternoon.”
While going about his errands in town, Steve’s preoccupation with seeds, baling wire, light bulbs, and cattle feed was interrupted from time to time with a thought of Susan B., the kitten, and the medicine dropper. What a child she was! No, definitely, she did not fit at Peace Farm. Imagine walking up to her and saying: “How about it tonight?” Or even more impossibly, imagine her walking up to a man saying: “How about it tonight?” She was cut of the same cloth as his own sister, Laura, typically middle class, uptight, and he certainly couldn’t imagine Laura here in this place. So whatever had made Susan B. come here?
He found her in the barn, sweeping up spilled grain, and gave her the medicine dropper.
“Where’s the animal? Still alive?”
“Yes, but only just. I put it in a shoe box by itself so the others wouldn’t trample it.”
It turned out that the kitten accepted the medicine dropper. The feeding process was slow, taking almost an hour before it was satisfied and fell asleep in the shoe box. The dinner bell had sounded over the fields long before, but Steve and Susan B. had sat on under a eucalyptus tree unheeding, which was an odd thing for him to be doing, because he was usually hungry.
“I’ve got a couple of apples in my pocket,” he offered.
“Maybe later.”
The girl’s delicate hands were locked around her knee, and her forehead rested on the same knee, so that he could look down at the nape of her neck where the center part ended and the hair on either side was tightened into the braids. Why is there always something touching about the back of a neck? he wondered.
