Phyllis

by Howard Fast

  “Yes, if it has to be that way.”

  Then we returned to the other room and, when I entered it,. Phyllis came over to me. “I thought you had left,” she said. I shook my head; and she said to me, “Stay next to me, Clancy, please don’t leave.”

  In the dim light I looked at her—perhaps more strangely than I imagined. Her eyes opened wider in a sort of fear and then I kissed her gently on the cheek. Her face was drawn and pale and tired, but I realized that she remained beautiful for me and would remain that way, and I told her that I would not leave her again, not ever again.

  part ten THE BEACH

  THE CEMETERY was far out on Long Island. There were only three cars in the funeral procession after the hearse—the hired limousine in which Phyllis rode with her aunt and Rabbi Freeman, then a Bentley which belonged to the Goldens, and then my car. The policewoman had wondered whether she should go along, but I told her that she didn’t have to and that I would remain with Phyllis for the time being and let them know downtown if I left her.

  It was a dismal and overcast day, the sky heavy hung with gray clouds, and by the time we reached the cemetery a soft misty rain was falling. The grave was ready and waiting and we stood around in the rain under umbrellas that the cemetery provided while Rabbi Freeman said the few words that he had to say. The coffin was lowered, the grave filled, and then it was over and we walked away back toward the cars. The Goldens wanted Phyllis and her aunt to return with them to their home, but Phyllis said no, she was going to remain with me. Rita Golden did not like this. She almost made a point of the fact that she had gone to some trouble to be there and if it was not thoughtless, it was at least ungracious for Phyllis to decline to return with her. Jack Golden kept looking at his watch. It was past lunch time now and he said that the best thing might be for all of us to go somewhere and have lunch. I felt a little sorry for him because the occasion was very awkward and the mere handful of people present robbed the burying of any meaning or ceremonial dignity that he perhaps considered it should have.

  Phyllis, however, was firm. She would not go with anyone. She kissed her aunt, who was sobbing violently, and sent her back in the limousine which was returning to New York with Rabbi Freeman. The Goldens stood around, awkward and ill at ease and uncertain about what to do now. Jack Golden repeated his lunch invitation. Rita Golden mentioned that she had an appointment with her hairdresser and her husband looked at her bitterly and told her, without words, to shut up and to hell with her hairdresser or anything else that might concern her. It was all in a look but she read it and understood it and retreated into the Bentley. “Gomez is having dinner with us again tomorow night,” Jack Golden said uncertainly, “it might take your mind off things.” Phyllis stared at him vacantly. He tried once again to persuade her to return with him and then his feelings began to be hurt. He had taken a day away from his business and he waa missing his lunch. The whole thing made no sense and he said so. I had kept silent but now I said to him that it would be better if he went and I would take care of Phyllis; and that, after all, it was what she wanted.

  “All right, Clancy,” he shrugged, “you’re the doctor. If that’s what she wants, she wants it.” His feelings were injured and, without another word, he got into the Bentley and drove away. We stood there in the rain-soaked cemetery watching his car as he drove down the road. In our whole world there was no sound except the wind and the rain and no life or movement except the four cemetery workers trudging away through the rain with their spades and rakes over their shoulders.

  I took Phyllis’s arm and led her to my car. She was dryeyed now, her face remote and dull with almost profound inwardness. “Don’t go back to New York, Clancy,” she said to me. “Drive somewhere.”

  “Where, Phyllis?”

  “Anywhere, but not back to New York.”

  I turned toward the South Shore and we drove on, both of us sitting in silence behind the even swish of my windshield wipers. There were few cars on the road; the Island was as gray and lonely as the day, and I had the strange feeling that, coming from nowhere, we were bound for nowhere—only driving through time without place or destination. Then Phyllis said to me,

  “The worst part of it, Clancy, is that no one really cares.”

  “That isn’t so,” I said. “You care, I care. I think, in their own way, the Goldens care.”

  “You’re just saying that, Clancy, because you can’t admit that death can come and produce indifference, but it isn’t true. Nobody really cares. I tried so hard to care and I find that I can’t. I’m full of the horror of it, but horror isn’t grief. All my life I’ll live with the horror of it, but the little bit of grief is gone already. That’s a terrible thing, isn’t it, Clancy?”

  “It’s not terrible,” I said. “Grief isn’t anything you can measure. It’s no virtue. It’s nothing to be proud of. It doesn’t define you or your mother either, or whatever was between you. I know. I have become a sort of minor specialist in the field of grief. It’s nothing to be proud of. When you come down to it, it’s a sort of divorcement—it’s a reason to remove yourself from the whole world of life and people and hope and beauty.”

  “Did you do that, Clancy, remove yourself?”

  “I did it,” I said.

  She was silent for awhile after that and then she said to me, “The way I was before, Clancy, I tried to tie strings to you—that’s no good. I can’t tie any strings to you. I want you to be with me now, but in the end, when you take me home, Clancy, you go your own way.”

  “What is my own way, Phyllis?”

  “That’s up to you, Clancy.”

  “Then leave it up to me.”

  She nodded without replying. We drove through a town and then through meadows of high dead grass. The rain had stopped but the sky remained gray and leaden. Now the road paralleled a long, empty beach separated from us by an endless row of tiny, shabby summer houses—empty and deserted at this time.

  “Can we stop here?” Phyllis asked me. “I want to walk. If you don’t mind?”

  I turned the car into one of the driveways and parked there. We got out of the car and walked down to the beach and then walked through the sand along the beach. I took Phyllis’s hand. It was cold and wet out, but the strong east wind was sweet and refreshing. The surf thundered on the beach and broke in great combs of white spume. A few gulls circled above the water. Otherwise the beach was deserted as far as we could see in either direction. In silence we walked about half a mile and then turned back. I looked at Phyllis. Her hair blew in the wind and her face was flushed and alive. I stopped suddenly and took her in my arms and she said to me, “Only if you want to, Clancy, not if you don’t want to.”

  I kissed her and felt the salt taste; the smell of salt and the damp of spray was all over us. A gull sailed crazily on the wind and came swooping down almost at our feet With my arm around Phyllis, we walked back to the car, chilled now and glad for its shelter and its warmth. Seated in the car, we lit cigarettes and smoked.

  “Do you know what I was thinking?” Phyllis finally said. “I was thinking about a story I once heard.”

  “I was thinking about you,” I said. “I was thinking about you and me. If we can begin with some truth between us today, Phyllis, then it’s the first time I ever really thought about you and me—in this way, I mean.”

  “I know, and I was thinking about this story I once heard. It’s an old, old story—I don’t know how old it is, Clancy, and I don’t suppose anyone really knows who wrote it in the beginning. It’s a story about a man and a woman who loved each other. Their love was supposed to have been a very remarkable and true love. It was the kind of love that poems are written about and songs are made from. I guess there was never a bad word between them—only this love which was like no other love that the world had ever seen.”

  “It’s a story,” I said. “That kind of love is worthless—that kind of love is a fairy tale.”

  “I know it’s just a story, Clancy, but, accord
ing to the story, that’s how they loved each other. And then the man died. When the man died, the woman had no more desire to live. I mean that, according to the story, she had loved him so much that life without him was impossible and all she wanted was to die. In those days they didn’t bury people the way they do today. They took his body and they put it in a big crypt and bis wife went along with the body and remained beside it. She told everyone that she was going to remain there until she was also dead. She would not eat or drink, only stay there in the crypt by her husband’s body and die beside him. That’s what she did. She sat beside him, moaning and weeping, and because everyone knew how great their love was they understood and they sympathized with her and they left her there and went away, closing the door of the crypt behind them.”

  She paused and looked at me. I watched her curiously. Did I want to hear the rest of it, she asked me? I told her to go ahead.

  “Well, outside the crypt, Clancy, was a place of execution. There was a gallows outside the crypt and a thief was hanging from the gallows. He had been executed that same day. A young soldier stood at the foot of the gallows, leaning on a spear. The soldier was guarding the thief. In those days the bodies of thieves were cast into lime pits and I suppose the authorities felt that the thief’s relatives would try to steal the body from the gallows and give it a decent burial. That’s why the soldier had to stand there all night, guarding the body. Well, while he stood there, he heard a sound. The sound was the weeping and the mourning of the woman who had decided to remain in the crypt and die with her husband. The soldier followed the sound and it led him to the crypt and he went inside the crypt and discovered this beautiful woman, who had condemned herself to death.

  “When he saw how young and beautiful she was, he was horrified at the thought that she had decided to die there beside her husband. The young soldier spoke to her. He comforted her, Clancy. He dried her tears and he whispered to her about life and living. He must have been very persuasive, that young soldier, because presently from comforting her he turned to embracing her and then to making love to her and so they lay there together in the crypt on the bier, making love to each other, the poor woman in all her grief and the soldier in all his youth and health, and then suddenly the first light of morning lightened the crypt. The soldier stood up and went to the door of the crypt and looked out and, when he saw what he saw, he let out such a moan of sorrow and despair that the woman came running to his side to see what the trouble was. He pointed to the gallows. The body was gone. It had been stolen by the relatives of the thief. ‘Do you see what that means?’ he said to her. ‘I was assigned to guard the body of the thief. Now it has been stolen. Therefore, my own life is forfeit and they will hang me on the gallows for my failure to do my duty.’

  “The young wife was horror-stricken at this—to be parted by death again from someone she had come to love as she did this young soldier was beyond her power to bear; so she assured him that he would not die, that everything would be all right; that she would make it all right.”

  Phyllis’s voice trailed away. I waited for a moment or two and when she didn’t continue I said to her, “And did she make it all right?”

  “She made it all right,” Phyllis said. “You see, she and the soldier took the body of her husband and hung it from the gallows instead of the thief.”

  I thought about it for awhile and then I backed the car out of the driveway and started toward New York. “The trouble with a story like that,” I said, “is that it tells too much and too little. Our own story is much simpler and yet much more complex. Yet we do what we have to do and they did what they had to do. The worst part of it, in any case, is to be called upon to sit in judgment. I can’t sit in judgment, Phyllis. I’m not a judge. I’m a cop—a policeman—and that’s the beginning of it and the end of it.” I didn’t look at her but kept my eyes on the road, and I think I would have known if she bad been surprised or terribly disturbed, but it was none of these—only a long silence until she answered me and said that she had known.

  “Since when?”

  “I think from the beginning, Clancy, or almost from the beginning. Anyway, I knew the other day. I knew when you took me in your arms. I felt the gun. A teacher doesn’t carry a gun.”

  “You have to be afraid to carry a gun or ambitious—very ambitious.”

  “And do you know who killed my mother, Clancy?”

  “I think so.”

  “And why she was killed?”

  Then I told her the whole story. I told it to her while we were driving back to New York—all of it—leaving nothing out; and when I finished, I asked her whether she believed me.

  She gave it some thought and then she said that she believed me. “I think you always tell the truth, Clancy, or you try to, unless you gave your word to someone that you were going to lie. But now I think your’e telling me the truth. I’m glad you told me. It’s easier to stop loving someone when you know that you’re not loved.”

  “I didn’t tell you that.”

  “I think you did, Clancy.”

  “You said that this time I was telling you the truth. You said that you believed me. Can’t you believe me if I say that I love you, Phyllis?”

  “No,” she said simply. Her voice was very tired.

  “You begin something one way,” I said desperately, “and then it finishes another way. Don’t you understand, Phyllis?”

  “I understand,” she said. “It always finishes another way.”

  part eleven THE HOTEL

  WE WERE BACK in Manhattan when I told Phyllis about Grischov. It was not a simple thing to tell. In my own small way I had discovered that nothing that existed between the United States and the Soviet Union was either simple or reasonable; it was only by considering two smoking gaps in the tissue of what passed for civilization—one where Moscow had been and the other where New York had been—that I could make a matter of fact thing out of my association with Dmitri Grischov, and now he wanted to see Phyllis and to talk with her. I explained that to her; then I tried to explain that, while in some ways Grischov might appear to be very like myself, in other ways he was very different from myself. No one lives apart from politics, but I had almost succeeded in keeping politics hidden deep in whatever passed for my personality. I suppose I was afraid of politics, which is a not too uncommon attitude in the United States.

  “But why should he want to see me?” Phyllis wondered.

  “I tried to explain, Phyllis. All of us—we know things and we don’t know that we know them.”

  “I don’t know where Alex Horton is,” she said slowly.

  “If you don’t, you don’t. You haven’t any obligations to me and certainly you haven’t any to Dmitri Grischov. I told him that I would ask you and that, if you wanted to come, I’d bring you. I didn’t promise anything.”

  “What will he do to me?” Phyllis asked almost abstractly. Her interest had withered away. Her voice was flat and listless.

  “Only talk to you. I’11 talk to you, he’ll talk to you.”

  “And pick my brain and find something that isn’t there, Clancy? I’ve been picking my own brain. I’ve been trying to find my mother and to discover why she isn’t there, and there aren’t any answers, Clancy. I don’t have a brain that can be picked at. It’s all locked in and today it’s all gray and shapeless—formless. I try to think through the gray and to remember things about my mother that will allow me to bring back a time when she was happy. But the trouble is I don’t know whether she was ever happy, Clancy. I took her to the theater once I remember, but she didn’t seem to know what was happening on the stage or to understand any of it. She was like a locked box that I could never open and now, after what happened, I think that the thing that saddens me the most is knowing that I’ll never open that box now—never at all. Or are we all like that, Clancy, locked up and separated from each other—eternally?”

  “It’s only natural for you to be depressed now,” I said.

  “What do
es a man mean when he says that something is only natural, Clancy? Have you ever tried to put yourself in the place of a woman and think the way she thinks?”

  “I have tried,” I agreed.

  “Did it work for you, Clancy? I keep asking myself how you felt when they told you to go up to Knickerbocker and teach a class in physics and make love to a dowdy little teacher called Phyllis Goldmark. That would be a way to save the world. So I wonder whether you felt like a savior, Clancy, or at least it would save a lot of effort and panic, wouldn’t it? I mean that if these bombs ever existed. You see I’m not sure they exist; all the thinking is the way a man thinks and, when you come right down to it, Clancy, it’s the way a little boy thinks, isn’t it? All of you playing at some kind of foolish game of cops and robbers and bombs and threats, you and this Commissioner Comaday and that FBI man you brought up to the house, and poor Alex Horton. You never met him, did you, Clancy?”

  “No, I never met him.”

  “That’s a pity—I mean it’s a pity that you and your Mr. Comaday and the Mayor and all the other important people you told me about—it’s a pity that none of them ever met Alex Horton because, you see, Alex Horton couldn’t make a bomb. He’s too frightened. That was our bond, Clancy, that was what existed between Alex Horton and myself—a community of fear; when we discovered that it existed in each other, we became very close for awhile. Not close the way I thought that you and I were close, Clancy; it was something else. It had nothing to do with his being a man and my being a woman. He wasn’t a man in that sense, but we both knew how to be afraid. We had both of us lived lives that were threaded through with fear—not with danger, Clancy, but with fear. Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?”

  “I think I do.”

  “But he couldn’t make an atom bomb and so I’m not sure that I believe in these bombs of yours at all. I don’t know about this Professor Simonovsky in Moscow, but if he was anything like Horton, he couldn’t make an atom bomb either. But then if you were to believe that, Clancy, what would become of your mission and the heroics and the fact that Phyllis Goldmark is expendable?”