“I’m sorry. Forgive me.”
The rain picked up a little. He took her hand, and felt as though something important had taken place. “Are you all right?” he said. It seemed to him that all their previous talk, everything he had ever said to her, had been at a level of frivolous chatter, and that now something more might be said.
“Such a kind, gentle boy,” she said. “A sveet man you vill be. Don’t change.”
“I won’t.” He had spoken too quickly, realizing that she had made a boy of him with this last. “I’m a man now,” he said.
She let go of his hand. “Yes. I know. Well, good night.” She turned from him, and walked up the sidewalk to the entrance. He looked at the building—a tall, flat-roofed row house not unlike the D’Allessandro School in appearance. Most of the windows were dark. Rain ran down the dingy surfaces. She went on inside, and she did not look back. The tall door at the front of the building squeaked as she opened it, and squeaked as she shut it, moving out of the small light in the foyer. For a few moments, he remained where he was, gazing at the many windows, with dark green sills and panes, some blocked with curtains, and some with figurines or flowers in them. One lighted window shone on the top floor, as if this were a beacon for wanderers in the inclement city streets. When a window on the second floor filled with light, he stood back a step, not wanting her to look out and see him still standing there.
But he couldn’t bring himself to leave right away, in the vain hope that she might decide to come back out and speak to him. For some obscure reason, it would be all right for her to find him here if she walked back out of the building. But she was nowhere, and the light in the window went out. Even so, it was a few moments before he started back down to K Street, and the late bus.
In 1964, the buses that rode to the Virginia side of the river were all old pre–World War II models, with small windows and no air-conditioning. From the front they looked angry, with their low-browed windshields and metal grillwork. Two of them waiting side by side at a light looked like scowling cousins, irritated by having to be seen in such nearness to each other. In cold weather, they were seldom warm enough, and the air inside them was often redolent of exhaust fumes. They rattled and clattered over the uneven streets like wagons full of loose metal. Walter Marshall liked the sound, and he liked the rickety feel of them, which fed somehow the sense of the world as being a place with its own old life, the life he was now entering: It would only have charmed him more had they been ramshackle stagecoaches rumbling over dirt roads.
His bus took him down the Whitehurst Freeway, built out over a soft bend of the Potomac, along tall brick facades and a thousand factory windows, past the sign that read, THE OBJECTIONABLE ODORS YOU MAY NOTICE IN THE AREA DO NOT EMANATE FROM THIS PLANT, and on to Key Bridge, with its view of the river glistening with rain, the reflected lights of the city crowding to its banks.
The rain had increased, and the clouds were trailing their ragged ends along the tops of the trees that lined Route 50. It looked like the low sky was breaking into feathery pieces. At a corner of the road, just past the Marriott in Rosslyn, was a field of grass and flowers that he had once described to his mother as being the place he would think of, the one place he would hold most clearly in his mind if it turned out that, like his father and grandfather and great-grandfather, he ended up fighting for his country. He never failed to look for the field, even in the dark. And when it was shrouded in night, as it was now, he took comfort from it anyway, knowing it was there beyond his pale, shimmery reflection in the window. The contemplation of it never failed to give him a warm sense of patriotic duty fulfilled, as though he had already been to war and done brave things to preserve the spot in its pristine beauty.
At his stop in Arlington, a small booth for passengers stood at the curb, and his mother waited for him there. It distressed him to see this, since she never came to meet him unless she felt blue, and had begun to worry—as only she could worry. Sometimes he had inklings of what it must be to have her mind, with its steady stream of frightful images. Whenever he took the car out and she heard sirens, no matter how far away, she believed immediately, with grisly pictures in her mind, that the sirens were responding to the fatal accident involving her son. If he had gone for a walk and was late coming home, and forgot to call her, she imagined the circumstances in which he had been abducted, beaten, shot, or stabbed. In her own terrible and helpless imaginings, Mrs. Marshall had lost her one son many times: through illnesses of every stripe and kind, through madness, through accident or negligence, hers or his own; he had fallen down stairs, walked in front of speeding trucks, been hit by a train, crushed by a downed aircraft, and trampled by panicked crowds in the street. He had tripped and plummeted into deep holes, wandered into the exposed end of a live power line; he had been burned, or exploded, or maimed, or crushed. Storms had taken him, lightning had struck him, tornados had touched down on the spot where he walked. These images came to her unbidden, in a flash of panic, and once the thought occurred to her, she could not unthink it, nor bring herself to behave other than as though it were true. There had been night phone calls to hospitals, to the police, to the offices of newspapers, to friends and relatives. Several times the young man had come home to find her sitting up with someone—a sleepy cousin or a stranger in the employ of the city—frantically unscrolling her dream of the latest catastrophe that had befallen him.
Her tendency to worry in this morbid way increased whenever she had been putting cordials in her tea, and since his father’s sorrowing, valedictory visit two years ago, the occasions on which she felt the need to have the cordial tea, as she called it, had arisen more often than he liked to contemplate, hoping as he did that it would change with time. The cordials came in fancy bottles, and had odd, foreign-sounding names—Galliano; Kahlua; Grand Marnier; crème de menthe; crème de cacao; Amaretto; Drambuie. They were the polite, sweet drinks one took in tiny glasses. Except that Loretta Marshall liked pouring them into tea, and some evenings she drank tea till bedtime.
Tonight, she had looked out and seen the rain, and decided the roads must be getting slick. She had not quite gotten to the point of mentally assigning him to some disaster, but she had come out to wait for him. He got off the bus and she greeted him with a motherly kiss on the cheek. “Button your coat,” she said, already doing it for him, fussing with him as Alice had done. “It’s so chilly.”
“Let me,” he said.
She slapped his hand away, smiling. “I’ve got it.”
He allowed himself to be buttoned up, standing in full view of the other passengers, as the bus pulled away from the curb.
“So,” she said. “How was night school?”
At the same time, he had said, “How was work?”
And she answered, “Some dumb new kid scraped himself with a culture needle in the biology lab. It broke the skin, and Mr. Judd had the ambulance and everything. Poor boy was scared out of his mind. They were growing staph germs in the culture, though. So they took precautions. Gave him a couple of shots and soaked the cut in iodine. Mr. Atwater was gone all afternoon. And that was my life today.”
“He didn’t come over tonight?” Marshall asked.
“He had a meeting with the PTA.”
Clark Atwater was the principal of the high school, and sometimes taught a course in social studies. Marshall’s mother was his secretary, and lunched with him occasionally at the school, since Marshall had graduated. Now and again she went out with him. Recently, they had gone to see Hello, Dolly!—Mr. Atwater had a friend who worked in the box office at the National Theater, and could get tickets for almost nothing. They had come home singing the title song, a little tipsy from the experience, if not from the wine they had drunk at dinner.
“Hel-lo, L’retta,” Mr. Atwater sang, waving at the passing cars in the street. “Well, Hel-lo, L’retta.”
The young man took her arm as they walked across the street, and along it to the apartment-house entrance. There was the
slightest unsteadiness in her step. The building was an old, box-shaped structure three stories high and a city block wide, with a sagging canopy over the main entrance, and a wobbly looking fire escape winding down from a complicated tangle of iron and neon at the level of the roof. It was made of multicolored brick, but in large patches on this side the brick had faded to one ashen shade. Some of the windows were blocked with air conditioners. Others were open. You had the sense, gazing at it, that if another building were close enough, there would surely be laundry strewn across the spaces, from window to window and fire escape to fire escape. The apartment itself was on the third floor, up two flights of steps just to the left of the main entrance. A bank of mailboxes stood to the right as you entered. Marshall’s mother always paused to look in hers each time she passed through, no matter what time of day or night. The same affliction that caused her to imagine catastrophic events each day for her son also caused her to check for mail each time she passed through the foyer. Marshall had recently understood this, and was astute enough to recognize some slight taint of it in himself: It was simply that an aspect of her imagination, whenever it was engaged, provided her, always, with an attendant belief. The remotest fancied possibility produced behavior—perhaps someone passing along the street in the fifteen minutes she had been gone to wait for him at the bus stop, at almost ten o’clock at night, had put some message to her in the mailbox. The thought, no matter how fleeting, no matter how absurdly unlikely, brought forth the conviction, and she could not walk past the box without looking in. “Nothing,” she said.
They went on up to the apartment. Marshall, who had been buzzing with worry about what he had been through with the D’Allessandros—and thinking about the walk with Natalie to her apartment building—experienced a disheartening moment of remembering that this was a night in which he had momentous news. He did not know quite how he would put it, and soon he was wondering if it might be better to wait until the clear light of day, when the cordials would have worn off. His mother walked on through to the lighted kitchen, where she liked to sit. A bottle of crème de menthe stood on the small table, with a smoking cigarette in an ashtray full of butt ends, and a box of tea bags. The cigarette had burned down almost to the filter. “I could’ve started a fire,” she said, crushing it out, lighting another. “Want some mint tea?”
“No, thanks,” Marshall said. “Think I’ll go on to bed.”
She put the cigarette down in the ashtray where the other had been, then took her jacket off and hung it over the back of the chair. She was wearing jeans, and a dark blue sweater, and she looked boyish—the jeans accentuated her thin bones. Her short, cropped hair had strands of white in it. Sitting down, she took up the cigarette and puffed on it, then talked the smoke out, leaning her elbow on the back of the chair so that the cigarette was at the level of her ear. The smoke made a grayish, moving wreath around her head. “Well, now,” she said, “why don’t you tell me about this party I’m supposed to go to.”
He sat down across from her, unable, for the moment, to say much of anything.
“This is the skinny little girl you’ve been going around with at work?” she said. “Alice?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“A nice girl. She called around seven o’clock, all excited.”
He could only manage a small, breathed “Yes.” He was convinced that Alice had told her everything, even as he almost choked with incredulousness that she could have done so.
“Said she’s having this birthday party,” his mother went on. “Or her father’s having it, is that it?”
Marshall couldn’t speak.
“Well?”
He nodded again, watching her smoke the cigarette. “What else did she say?” he ventured.
“She said you told her you’d try to get me to come, and she wanted to put her own vote in. She really used the word ‘vote,’ Walter.”
This seemed an odd thing to fix on. It threw him off. “What’s wrong with that?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Just sounded strange. Are we voting on something?”
Once more, he was unable to find a word to utter in response.
“What is it, son?” His mother reached over and touched his cheek. “You feel okay?”
“Fine,” he said. “Fine.” Then, “Did Alice—did she say anything else?”
“I had the feeling that she wanted to—why?”
“Oh, no reason.”
“What’s the matter, Walter? Tell me.”
The only thing he could find the strength to say was, “I had my pocket picked tonight. Guy took forty dollars. A pickpocket.”
“My God.” She stood and took his face in her hands. “Are you all right? Did he hurt you?”
“It was a pickpocket,” he said. “I didn’t even feel it. And I would’ve given it to him, too, that’s the thing. All he had to do was ask, and maybe he didn’t even have to do that. I’d have given him whatever he needed. And he stole it. Can you believe that?”
“You’ve got to stay away from people in the city,” she said, sitting back down. “Don’t talk to anyone, and don’t look at anyone, either. Eye contact can be a bad thing in the city. He might’ve really hurt you.”
“I told you I didn’t even feel it happen,” he said. “We were talking—”
“You actually talked to him?”
“How do you think he got close enough to pick my pocket?”
“What were you talking about?”
“Nothing,” he said. “It was silly. We were arguing about—names—”
“I tell you not to talk to anyone and here you are having an argument with a criminal? God,” she said, communing with her own anxiety. “How could you be talking to a criminal?”
He explained as best he could, then took his eyes from her and looked at his hands. There was so much more to tell her.
“You’re sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said, deciding that everything else could wait. “I’m tired.” He feigned a yawn. “I think I’ll go to bed.”
“It’s a little early for you, isn’t it?”
“I’ll read,” he said.
“Don’t you want to be with me?” She pretended to pout.
He leaned over and kissed her cool forehead. “If you want me to stay up, I will.”
“Clark says we’re too close. He says it’ll ruin you.”
“Mr. Atwater doesn’t know enough about us to make a comment like that.”
“Well, I think sometimes—I know I’ve kept too close a watch on you.”
He kissed her forehead again. In the morning, she would remember that he had not told her about Alice.
“I’m going to bed myself.” She yawned, stretching her arms toward the ceiling.
Into this casual sleepiness, he said, “I think I’m getting married.”
Briefly, her yawn froze, so that she simply looked at him agape, her arms still stretched high. She brought them to the table and started to rise, but then she sat back down. Her hands were holding the edge of the table, as if to support herself.
“Alice,” he said. “I—I asked her tonight.”
“You had a busy night. You got mugged and you got engaged.”
“It wasn’t a mugging.”
She seemed to be going over everything to herself. Her lips moved, but she said nothing.
“Alice gave me the money to get home,” he said.
“Is this going to be soon? Getting married?”
“Not too soon.”
Now her fingers were moving in a pattern on the tabletop. “And in your mind, son, how soon is too soon?”
“Oh,” he said, unable to keep himself from mumbling. “Next—June, maybe.”
“June?”
He nodded.
“That’s not too soon?”
He couldn’t say anything.
“June.”
“I think so.”
His mother stared at him. “Well,” she said. “You should get some sleep. I
can tell it’s been a rough day. Anyway, it’s been a busy day.”
“Sometime around June,” he said. “We didn’t really settle on a—a time.” He felt foolish, again, as though he were a child playing at being adult. He stood there.
“Are you all right, son?”
“I’m fine. I saw Father Soberg.”
“How is he?”
“He asked that I remember him to you.”
“I hope you told him hello for me.”
“How come you didn’t tell me he was going overseas?”
“Oh, that,” she said. “I guess I forgot. I don’t like to think about this war—or whatever it is. They never got around to declaring Korea a war, either. And a lot of boys died.”
“He seemed okay about it.”
“Well, then I’m glad for him.”
There was something artificial about this last exchange. It caused him to take a step toward the other room.
“Good night,” she said.
He walked over and kissed her cheek, then went back to his room. Closing the door, he leaned against it and waited a few seconds, listening for her movements. He couldn’t really hear anything. She coughed. There was the small sound of dishes being moved about in the kitchen. Finally, she walked past his door, toward her own room, and soon she was in the bathroom cleaning her teeth. He turned around in the narrow, carpeted space between his bed and the door and breathed a long sigh—not a sigh of relief. He felt no relaxing of the muscles of his chest and lower jaw. His mother’s acceptance of the idea of his getting married had made the whole thing seem somehow accomplished. It was really going to happen. All his nerves were jumping.
When he looked at his room, it seemed the room of a boy: On the wall, along with the crucifix and the picture of Jesus revealing his sacred heart, hung photographs of Ted Williams and Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays and Hank Aaron, and a bright red-and-gold pennant from his high school. The dresser top was crowded with things: a thick deck of baseball cards, several model airplanes, a paint-by-numbers set, a stack of comic books. Dirty clothes were strewn across the foot of the unmade bed. Only the night table provided any sense of maturity: books by Fulton Sheen and Thomas Merton stood in a row along with The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola, The Summa Theologica, Edwin O’Connor’s The Edge of Sadness, the unexpurgated edition of War and Peace alongside the abridged version, two anthologies of poetry, a collection of the speeches of JFK—and, of course, Dr. Barbet’s book on Calvary. Above this was a map of Washington with radial circles in bright red, distances from ground zero in a nuclear attack. He and his mother were in the shock and heat part of the second circle. He had bought the map in a Drug Fair shortly after the missile crisis.
Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. America, and All the Ships at Sea Page 10
