The Night of Trees

by Thomas Williams

  “Come in, cousin,” she said, and stepped back. He felt the warmth of her sleep as he passed, and the smell of her, even the sight of the odd little wrinkles in the gaudy silk of her pajamas, reminded him of his own bed and his own innocent sleep.

  When he turned to look at her again, in the living room among the solid, crowded furniture, she said wryly, “I’ve grown, haven’t I?”

  He smiled. He wanted to say something nice—that she was pretty, for instance—but she would not take that. She looked like a fifteen-year-old who was just a little too tall for her age, a plain girl who would never be very much else until she became ugly, whose spareness and cleanness were now attractive as all young are attractive—even young heifers—but whose bones predict surplus.

  “How are you, cousin?” she said.

  “Fine, Sophie. How are you?”

  “Don’t you know?” She was amazed.

  “Not really,” he said. “I just had to guess.”

  Her pajamas were such a primary, blatant shade of green they could only have been the property of a Chinese whore or a little girl, and he was now not sure. She seemed so innocent, she smelled so sweetly of sleep; even the tiny dark hairs upon her awkward, childish wrists were virginal.

  “Well, I’m pregnant, that’s what.”

  “Oh, hell,” he said, consciously imitating her bravado.

  “And don’t ask me how it happened. Honest to God, cousin, the next person asks me how it happened, I’m going to explain the whole process.”

  “Little Sophie,” he said admiringly, and she saw, with those evermoving big eyes, his admiration. “Where’s Aunt Mae?”

  “Mom and Dad? They took Nembutal. After last night’s screaming session, you know. Matinee in the afternoon, continuous performance in the evening. You hungry?”

  He nodded, and followed her into the kitchen. “How do you feel?” she asked him, then turned serious as she looked at him. “Grown up, or not?”

  “Right now?” he asked.

  “Now, and then, too, Murray.” She smiled, and he saw a woman’s wry twist upon her smooth child’s lips. “You know what? We’re both teen-agers, cousin. I figured that out.”

  “I don’t feel any older than you, Sophie,” he said, and knew, out of his own fear, that soon she would have to stop being so old. She began to make scrambled eggs, and he sat at the chrome-legged table and watched her. All the kitchen fixtures were of mauve enamel, and her green pajamas, moving against the mauve, hurt his eyes. A child, she was, with another child inside. Her hips were still too narrow—or at least seemed so on her gawky body—and her breasts, though possibly large for her age, were nothing to what they would be later. One didn’t see—or mean to see—such things as breasts and broadness upon her yet; her body’s attributes were all in length, and slimness, in her sharp shoulders and narrow thighs. She would look more natural running and jumping. And yet something grew in her womb. Here she was, in her ridiculous whore’s pajamas, an immature girl, and he found it hard to imagine the “process” she now knew all about. She did not yet seem to have the glands for it, and her flesh did not suggest at all ripeness, or oil, or the dark hollows of sex.

  They ate their scrambled eggs, and it was as if they were playing house, he the father and she the mother. She didn’t think to make coffee; they drank big glasses of milk.

  “I don’t have morning sickness,” she said. “I looked it all up. Thank God for small favors, at least. That’s what Mom says. I wouldn’t know it, really, if it wasn’t for the other thing. And the frog test. Boy, did I flunk that one.”

  “You don’t seem too shook up about it,” he said.

  “That’s what they all say. What do they want? So I should scream? You couldn’t hear me over Dad, anyway. He’s impossible.”

  He shivered.

  “Amen,” she said. “You’d think he was the one, really.” She went to the cupboard and got a cigarette. “They don’t seem to mind these any more. Again thank God for small favors.” She lit the cigarette and expertly inhaled. “The loose woman has her vices.”

  Her thick black hair was bound into a ponytail, and as she swung her head to clear away the smoke, the big brush, too large for her head, whisked through the air. “You want a Kent?” she asked.

  “I’m in training,” he said.

  “I’m so glad you came, Murray!” She did not startle him; he had seen himself in her too clearly.

  “Of course I came, kid,” he said.

  “I mean I always liked you, cousin, even when I was a kid—loved you—you know, like the family insists until you get to believe you even love Aunt Ruth. But I mean I’ve wanted to talk about it. They made me swear all over the place not to tell any of my friends about it, Murray, and I was about to flip. I mean it. You’ve just got to have some other human being to talk to!”

  “Yes, I know,” he said, and filled, suddenly, with love—or as suddenly emptied of fear—he reached for her hand, and took it, and they were both silent as they looked for a long time at the two hands joined firmly upon the mauve formica.

  Everything was made for silence in that house—everything except Orson Gelb, whose private image of a man of the house he screamed and bitched about and tried out all his life. He meant to be bluff, hearty; it came out querulous, precarious. He meant to be good-natured, to imply, through his bluntness, that it was all a huge joke; it came out not merely loud, but dangerous. He now appeared in the kitchen, after having rammed the swinging door with his hip, in striped shorts and shaving lather. “Huh! The college boy!” he shouted, then went back through the house and up the stairs yelling, “Mae! Wake the hell up! The college boy is here!” His deep voice seemed a falsetto, and had a falsetto’s lack of expression. To Murray his Uncle Orson had always seemed mad. As a child the man had frightened him; now, because his uncle had always seemed on the edge of purely physical violence, and Murray was bigger and stronger, it simply made him nervous.

  Sophie looked at him commiseratingly and said, “I thought of saying that Daddy is really a dear, underneath, but Daddy is really a drip.”

  “I’ve just never quite got used to him,” Murray said.

  “So who has? God! I’m glad you came.”

  Now Aunt Mae appeared in the swinging door. She was as tall as Murray’s mother, but had a plainer, more disorganized face. She’d worked on it some already that morning, but it was softer in spots where her sister Rachel’s face was firm and burnished. She had the same large gray eyes, but they seemed unanchored, and her nose was her father’s; something about the hinge of her jaw was Saul Weitzner’s, too, and her face must always have been a foil to her beautiful sister’s, as if some principle of symmetry, the subtle organization of beauty, were just plain missing. Else, Murray could not help thinking, she wouldn’t have settled for Orson, that shlemiel in the skin of a shlemozzle.

  She’d been standing there looking grateful, tearful, pumping up the glorious, deedful moment: Murray had come! “Murray, you came!” she said dramatically.

  “Said I would,” he could only mumble. He felt like making that hand signal which is used in construction work: Slow it down, now, slower, easy.

  “Sophie, you didn’t make coffee for Murray! Murray, did you have enough to eat? Here!” She tightened the belt of her housecoat and rushed to the electric coffeepot, then came over to him. “I’ll bet you didn’t get any sleep at all, poor boy. Now, did you?” A warm, fluttery hand against his cheek.

  “I’m not sleepy,” he said.

  “You’re nervous, darling. You don’t know why we dragged you away from school.”

  “Not really. Sophie and I talked some.”

  Mae shut her eyes and pretended to faint—pretended to catch hold of the table. “Oh, isn’t it a mess?”

  Sophie looked on, seeming to be quite alert and calm. Mae then insisted that he talk about college, looking sharply at Sophie now and then, as if to say, “See? See what Murray does?” and he knew that part, at least, of his duties was to make Sophie
want to go to college. She was only a sophomore in high school. He knew he’d better wait until they were alone before he brought that up.

  Orson slammed something in the living room, by way of announcing himself, and then charged through the swinging door, his eyes averted from Murray, his pot now disguised by the pleats of his suit pants. Eventually, Murray decided, Orson Gelb would turn into a smooth white egg, like Humpty Dumpty. He shaved so closely and carefully his skin looked burned out, like bone ash, and even his forehead was white and fat. And yet he was not roly-poly; he looked somewhat manufactured, like a vegetable grown under optimum soil conditions, but in artificial light.

  “I suppose he knows all the dirt!” Orson said in his gruff, toneless shout. Mae got him his breakfast—orange juice, toast, tea and Alpha-Bits, and as he spooned up the little letters he seemed to be carefully reading them. He never once looked Murray in the eye, or spoke to him directly. “I don’t know,” he said. “All I do is earn the money! Why the hell should I know what’s going on? Jesus Christ! All I do is pay the rent around here!” He drank his glass of warm tea and then struck the glass, deliberately, upon the table as he put it down. He hurried into the living room, and they heard him shout, “Where the hell are my cigars? Somebody stole my cigars!” Mae went in to find them. “Had a five-pack!”

  Sophie shrugged her shoulders and pretended to faint, as her mother had, then grimaced in the ugly, contorted way young girls do. More shouts from the other parts of the house: “Has she started smoking cigars, yet?”

  Later Murray would remember that Orson really meant to be funny; later, though, was always too late.

  Orson had to be off to work—“to buy the goddam chow around here.” He made a good living, surprisingly enough, selling life insurance to gentiles. His Chrysler fed past the kitchen door, yard by yard of it, slowly. He was a careful driver.

  Aunt Mae said to Sophie, “Go take a bath, with plenty of hot water.”

  “It won’t work,” Sophie said. “You want me to fall downstairs?”

  “I want to talk to Murray, dear. That’s all.”

  “Friday they took me riding, out to King’s Point. What a kick! Daddy fell off his horse three times, walking! You should have seen him, cousin. He’d start to list, like a boat, and then pretty soon he’d have both hands around the horse’s neck, and then he’d be hanging right down between the horse’s front legs, holding on like mad!” Sophie laughed, with some hysteria; they both watched her anxiously, but she got over it. “OK, OK, I’m going. Me and my loathsome disease.”

  Mae waited until they heard the bath water start. Then the door to the bathroom closed, and in that sound-proof house they couldn’t hear the splashing. A pipe in the kitchen wall hummed, but that was all.

  “Your grandfather knows, Murray.” Mae slowly stirred her coffee, testing with her spoon for the saccharine tablets. “Nobody else knows. I know it sounds bad to ask you not to tell Rachel or your father, but I ask you, Murray.”

  “I won’t tell. Don’t worry.”

  “I know you won’t! You’re one of the best people I know!” Tears grew in the corners of her eyes, and another highlight appeared in each iris. “If only all boys were like you, Murray!”

  “Take it easy, Aunt Mae. Take it easy. I’m no angel.” To put it mildly, he thought, remembering his careless cruelty to girls—the common, careless egotism of boys, and the girls who had to wait and wait and couldn’t ever do anything about it.

  “Well,” Mae said, drawing in her breath with the word, “I just want to tell you that your grandfather agrees. We’ve got to have an abortion.” She could hardly say the word, and it worked its way out of her mouth shudderingly, as if the syllables themselves were little abortions. “The reasons are…” Here she began to list upon her long, nervous fingers. “Sophie simply can’t marry at fifteen, and she couldn’t marry this boy anyway. His name, God strike me dead, is Patrick Flaherty, and he’s a Roman Catholic.” She spoke the two words carefully, he knew, in order to distinguish between that and Protestant, which Murray vaguely was. “But aside from that he’ll never amount to anything. Sophie even says that. She doesn’t love him. Says she doesn’t know why she let him—she just melted, she says. Oh, God!” Here Mae ran out of fingers and breath.

  “Anyway. Anyway,” Mae said, “if she has to stay out of school she’ll end up a year behind, and that’s bad, and then there’ll be a baby. A baby…” She pronounced it, with horror and tenderness, “bay-bee,” and ran right out of breath again.

  “So, Oh, God! I hate to ask you, and you don’t have to do it, and nobody will blame you, but we’ve tried to find a doctor who’ll do it. It’s simple, very simple, really. Anyway, things are tight right now. They’re ’cracking down’ on that sort of thing, and unless both parties appear nobody will touch it. It’s got to look just right, or they get suspicious. The boy doesn’t know, and we don’t want him to know, or his family to know, you see? So we want you, Murray, to—oh!—pretend it was you. Now, we’ve got these names—Saul got them—your grandfather got them, somehow. And we just want you to take Sophie to these doctors….” She shuddered so that she spilled her coffee.

  And he had a matching frisson—a beaut. For a moment he felt like running; remembered exactly where he’d left his overnight bag, and had it all planned how he’d run into the living room, grab it by its familiar, comforting plastic handle and run, run right out and down the street, the identical blind picture windows ticking off his speed like telephone poles along a road.

  And then he thought of poetic justice, and how lucky he’d always been, especially with Gretchen, who was so irregular. Well, it had finally got him, by proxy. He smiled. Mae, who couldn’t interpret the smile, looked as though she’d been stabbed.

  “Murray?” she quavered.

  “Of course I’ll do it,” he said.

  “Don’t if you hate it!“

  “I hate it, Mae,” he said, and he cursed the tears that threatened his eyes—tears of appreciation of his nobility. “But I love you and Sophie, so that cancels it out.”

  “Oh, Murray!” And this time she let go altogether, and sobbed so hard it sounded as if she retched.

  Sophie came downstairs clean and young-looking. Every time Murray looked at her he got a chill for himself and, for her, a sympathy pain in his crotch. She was now very meek, subdued, and when his grandfather came she sat mildly by the old man’s side.

  Saul Weitzner was, even more than his father, to Murray a kind of prow that steadily and capably thrust into the outside world—that brutal, noisy place outside school and family. He was old, but never infirm. He was solidly the head of his family. He either knew everything or knew where to find it out, and Murray had never seen a man treat him with disrespect.

  He was the color of beaten iron, and lumpy, as if he had at some time in the past been clubbed and mashed and bludgeoned for months at a time. What was left was ugly, but purified; there seemed to be no room left in Saul for impatience, for meanness, for cruelty, for any of the small weaknesses of ordinary people. Anger, maybe; Murray had never seen him pushed by anyone, but there did seem to be a place in his grandfather’s soul for gigantic wrath. He was a strong man, with a short, wide back, and whether he said so or not—for he was mild, usually—he judged sternly. Murray knew, too, how important Saul’s opinions were to his father, even though his father had never really let himself become too much a part of the Weitzners. And this, he felt, was not because they were Jews, and thus strange, but because his father had no family (except a cousin in the import-export business in Buenos Aires whom they never saw) and did not know how, or did not want, maybe, to know how to become part of a family. Murray had been told, too, that the only reservation Saul had made when his daughter Rachel wanted to marry a gentile was that after the civil ceremony they be married by a progressive rabbi.

  One time, when he was in grammar school, Murray saw on television some old movies of the liberation by the British of a concentration camp—an extermi
nation camp—and he went through streets full of monsters, butchers, torturers waiting to catch the poor skinny big-eyed Jews—went to Saul and told him, bawling, that he wanted to be a Jew. Saul told him to be a man, like his father, and to be whatever his father wanted him to be. Murray said he wanted revenge; he was thirteen years old and he understood that if he were a Jew he would already be a man, and could fight. Saul told him, with pride, and also with a kind of perplexity that seemed akin to sadness, that in the Second World War his father had killed men enough for those crimes. “Your father is a warrior,” he said, and coming from Saul Weitzner it sounded like a great, echoing judgment out of the Old Testament. On the way home Murray looked the people coolly in the eyes, but it was some time before he could again look calmly upon strangers and think of them as possible friends.

  Saul now took Sophie’s narrow hand in his wide, grayish, salt- and-pepper one as he spoke: “Our little girl has been foolish. Stupid!” he added sympathetically, with a deliberately startled expression. Sophie giggled, and without knowing why Murray laughed too. He remembered that in spite of his grandfather’s wise leadership, he himself had to do something very unpleasant. And then, just as quickly, he was ashamed, because Sophie faced something a hundred times worse, and she was just a girl.

  Saul had just looked in, he said, and would come back later, for dinner, and they would get all the details straightened out. They all seemed to have decided that night was the time for shady doings, and that after dinner Murray and Sophie would go see the doctors. They would all go in the car to Saul’s apartment, and Murray and Sophie would take a taxi from there; the doctors were in Manhattan, and neither was very far from Central Park West. To give them strength, they would have steak for dinner, Mae decided.