by M. E. Kerr
“She helps the guys’ morale with her visits,” he said. “Even priests and ministers stay away from us. But Dorothy gives us a pep talk. She says things like How can people be against abortion and birth control, then send boys off to war when they reach eighteen?”
“Not everybody is against birth control, though,” Tommy said.
“Catholics are. What if war was forbidden to all Catholics?”
“It’d be hard to have a war then,” I said.
“It’d be hard to have a war if the government told the truth, too. What if they said, Look, this has to be done. We’re going to do it. Some of you will come back blind, some without your legs, or with an arm missing, some deaf, some will come back crazy…that is if you come back at all.”
“I didn’t know we were going to have lunch here,” Tommy said.
“Did you think I could afford to take you out?” Bud laughed.
“I could buy us lunch,” I said. “Aunt Lizzie gave me twenty-five dollars for my birthday last month.”
“Good!” Tommy started to put his tray back in the stack. “Lunch on Jubal!”
Bud retrieved the tray and handed it to Tommy. “Let’s eat here,” he said. “I’m on duty.”
“I’d love to treat us!” I said. I didn’t know how I’d eat in that place without getting sick from the smell. I wished I had some Vicks Vapo Rub with me. Before I’d become used to mucking out the stables, I’d put a dab in my nostrils to get past the odor.
“Be sure to take a napkin and silver,” Bud said. “Jubal, there’s cocoa. You don’t have to drink coffee.”
“I drink coffee now,” I said proudly.
Before I knew it, we were carrying trays of bread, chili, cookies, and coffee back to a table in the huge dining room. It was a shabby place with stained walls, the paint peeling, and radiators hissing and clanking. On one wall was a large, gold-framed painting of Jesus with his arms around a white man and a Negro, who were shaking hands.
“Why does everybody keep their coats on?” Tommy asked. “It’s not cold in here.”
“They don’t want them stolen, so watch yours,” said Bud. “How’s Quinn doing?”
I told him Quinn was his old self. If he was out in the paddock and he saw Daria coming, he’d sometimes stamp his front foot, then run around, dancing sideways.
“From what Tommy’s written about Daria, she sounds swell!”
“Mr. Hart’s crazy about her,” Tommy said. “So’s little brother, I think.”
“Is that right, Jube?” Bud asked.
I shrugged. “I like her. That’s not the question.”
“What’s the question?” Bud said.
I hadn’t told Tommy about Radio Dan’s rule against “fraternizing” with a Shoemaker. Tommy believed in telling Bud the truth about everything. I didn’t see the point in making him feel worse than he already did about what was happening to us because of him.
“The question is does she like me?” I said.
“Oh, she likes you, Jubie,” Tommy said. “She’s at the Harts’ the minute she’s out of Mrs. Ochevsky’s. Every single Saturday, Bud.” He gave Bud a wink. “Forget Fast Tom. How about Fast Jubal?”
“She comes because of Quinn,” I said, “not me.”
Then Bud asked what was going on between Mom and Dad. Tommy filled him in on how cranky and sullen Dad was, and how he spent his time at home down in the basement by himself.
I pushed the chili around on my plate and stole glances at the other tables. I was thinking of how Daria’d told me once that I wasn’t very sensitive or worldly. She couldn’t believe I didn’t like poetry. I wondered what she’d think of this place. She’d probably feel more sorry for everybody there than sickened by the sight of them, the way I was.
Where had Bud’s great caring for other people come from? Why didn’t I seem to have it? I kept thinking about things like that while Bud and Tommy talked. I kept thinking I’d never be as good as Bud, and maybe never be able to tell a draft board I was a CO.
“I wish Dad had come along,” Bud said. “It sounds like he could use a vacation.”
“And leave the store?” Tommy chuckled.
“Do you guys give him any help, or do you spend all your time at the Harts’?”
“He’s still got the Warner sisters,” Tommy said. “He doesn’t need much more help.”
“What about weekends?”
“What about them?” Tommy said.
“Are some people still refusing to shop there?” Bud asked.
“The war isn’t over, Bud,” Tommy said.
“But I thought they weren’t going to keep punishing Dad,” said Bud. “They stopped writing on the windows.”
“Yeah, the writing stopped. Now it’s yellow Ys.”
“You didn’t write me about that, Tom.”
Tommy shrugged. “And half our customers are gone too.”
“Half?”
“You say you want to know these things,” Tommy said.
“I do. Why didn’t you write me about this?”
Tommy said, “I wasn’t sure we’d lost them, but I am now. Our regulars just aren’t regular anymore. You could say they’re ‘infrequent’ if they show up at all.”
“No wonder Dad’s changed.”
“That’s why I’ve decided not to make it worse,” Tommy said. “Because of Dad.”
“What do you mean?” Bud asked.
“I mean when I register for the draft, I’m going to go 1AO, not 4E, Bud.”
That was news to me.
Bud raised an eyebrow, frowned, was quiet for a second.
“You do what you want to, Tommy,” he finally said.
“Maybe it’s not what I want, but I’ll do it for Dad.”
Bud said, “Don’t hide behind Dad.”
“You’re right,” said Tommy. “Your letters helped me make up my mind too.”
“I wanted you to know the score,” Bud said. “That’s all.”
“Thanks.”
Silence.
I broke it. “I’ll probably be 4E, like you.” I just blurted it out without thinking.
Bud must have seen something in my face that said the thought of being a 4E scared me. “You’ve got time,” he said.
Now the din in the dining room was so loud, Bud was practically shouting. “I can’t wait until Hope gets here tomorrow. She’s worried sick about Abel. They keep him in solitary most of the time. The guards take turns beating him up.”
Tommy asked him how Hope knew that.
“There’s a Jehovah’s Witness in the same prison. He wrote Hope about it.”
“Mr. Hart knows about the solitary, but not about the beatings!”
“Abel wouldn’t want him to know!”
At the next table a man in a wool jacket and a stocking cap was sitting quietly crying. The men on either side of him went on eating.
“What’s the matter with him?” Tommy said.
“A lot of people here have a sadness,” said Bud.
“Can we get out of here?” I said.
“You didn’t eat,” Bud answered.
“Yeah, let’s get out of here,” Tommy said. “Let’s take a walk. It stinks in here.”
Bud got a coat and walked a few blocks with us. It was raining lightly. The street was jammed with traffic, horns blowing, smoke from truck tailpipes, pushcarts with hot dogs and pretzels.
“That’s some coat!” Tommy said to Bud.
It was moth-eaten, with sleeves that ended above Bud’s wrists.
“I grabbed it from the clothes bin. If you’d like to look there, you can have anything you find. Everything’s free.”
“I hope you’re not going to wear that coat tonight,” Tommy said.
“I’m not like you, Tom. I wait till the last minute to decide what to wear.”
Tommy gave him the elbow and Bud laughed. “I have to get back now,” he said. He handed Tommy an envelope. “Look this over later and see if you can draw something to go with it.”
“What is it?”
“It’s going to be a letter to newspaper editors, and we’ll make up some posters for reception rooms in hospitals. Make it look good, if you can.”
“Okay. We’ll see you tonight, Bud. Mike’s treat, right?”
“Mike and Lizzie are taking us, yeah.”
“I’m surprised you got an invitation,” said Tommy.
“Lizzie’s doing it for Mom, but there won’t be a fight.”
“If either you or Lizzie, or Mike, open your mouths, there will be,” Tommy said.
“No, Mike’s taken care of it,” said Bud. “We’re eating at Asti.”
“And you can’t fight there?” said Tommy.
“You’ll see,” Bud said.
FOURTEEN
That afternoon Natalia took Tommy and me for a walk around Greenwich Village. When we got to Bedford Street, she said she was going to show us the narrowest house in New York City, built in 1873.
We stopped at 751/2, and she said, “A famous poet named Edna St. Vincent Millay lived here.”
“‘World, I cannot hold thee near enough,’” I said.
Natalia said, “Close, Jubal. It’s ‘O world, I cannot hold thee close enough.’ How come you know that poem?”
“Someone I know knows it.”
“Darie Daniel, his girlfriend,” Tommy said.
“She doesn’t know she’s my girlfriend,” I said.
“Maybe you ought to tell her.”
“You’re a fine one to talk, Natalia,” I said.
Tommy said, “I remember a Millay poem we studied when I went to Friends school. It was called ‘Conscientious Objector.’ ‘I shall die, but that is all I shall do for Death.’”
“Another line goes, ‘I am not on his payroll,’” Natalia said. “She wasn’t talking about this war, though.”
“How do you know?” Tommy asked.
“Because I know. She hates the Nazis! Have you ever heard of a village in Czechoslovakia called Lidice?”
Tommy shook his head.
“Of course not! Our schools don’t teach one damn thing about what’s happening to the Jews!” She sounded like Aunt Lizzie.
“What happened in Lidice?” Tommy asked her.
“The Nazis killed every single man and fifty-two women—the rest were shipped off to concentration camps!”
“I didn’t know that,” Tommy said.
“How could you? That’s why the Writers’ War Board asked Edna St. Vincent Millay to write a poem about it. It’s called ‘The Murder of Lidice.’ I know because one of our tenants is on that board. We were invited to a reading of the poem.” Natalia never looked at Tommy when she talked to him. Every time Tommy looked at her, she got red. She hadn’t lost any weight since Christmas, but she seemed more grown up. She’d stopped saying “Damnation!” and she hadn’t yet told me one dirty joke.
When we reached Sheridan Square, she said, “I know something your girlfriend would like, Jubal.”
She led us into a drugstore that sold handmade greeting cards. There was one with a picture of the house on Bedford Street.
“Send her this,” Natalia said.
I turned it over. It had a quote from one of Millay’s poems.
I know I am but summer to your heart,
And not the full four seasons of the year.
You can say that again, I thought. I would have sent it to Daria if it hadn’t had that verse on it. But I shelled out two cents for it anyway. It would be a good souvenir of the trip.
When we arrived back at 57 Charles Street, we could hear from the hall a discussion between Lizzie and Mike, not meant for our ears.
“Why did she ever marry him, anyway?” Mike was saying. “She could have done a lot better than that.”
“I might have married him myself. You should have seen Efram back in those days!”
“Thanks a lot, sweetheart! What was I? Chopped liver?”
“You were my mental giant, darling. If you marry a mental giant, your marriage has a better chance of lasting than if you marry Handsome Harry.”
“Their marriage isn’t in trouble because of Efram. It’s Bud.”
Natalia shouted, “Hello! We’re home and we can hear you!”
“I’m not saying anything I wouldn’t say to Bud’s face,” Mike said as we walked into the living room. Shakespeare’s blue eyes narrowed, and his black tail flagged. He leaped from Mike’s lap and ran off with his ruff up.
“But tonight is not the night to say anything to Bud’s face! It’s my sister’s birthday,” Lizzie said.
I changed the subject. “We saw the Millay house.”
“I bet that gave you a thrill,” Mike said. His paintings were all around the room. Lizzie called him a “social realist.” He painted coal miners with blackened faces and red eyes, tenement life, factory workers, all grim scenes.
Dad said Mike was a card-carrying Communist, that he could afford to be because he’d come from a rich family. The town house Dad had led me to believe would be filled with loose living was a disappointment that way. It was red brick, well kept, its brass railing and door-knobs gleaming. Whoever else was in residence there didn’t show themselves or make noise.
Before we went out that night, Tommy showed me what Bud wanted him to illustrate.
THE POWER OF WORDS
Mental illness seems to be a disgrace when we describe it with the old ignorant words. Why not use “patient” instead of “inmate”? How about “mental hospital” instead of “insane asylum”? Over 600,000 Americans are now hospitalized because of mental illness. Most of them are receiving pitifully inadequate treatment and care. We can start to change things by changing our vocabulary when we speak of them.
“What can you draw to go with that?” I asked Tommy.
“Maybe a bird flying.”
“Or a flock of them.”
“Something changing,” Tommy said. “What’s changing?”
“Draw Dad.”
“Jubal, the Comedian,” Tommy said.
Là ci darem la mano,
Là mi dirai di sì.
“We’re going to hear a lot of longhair music,” Bud leaned down to say to me, “so prepare yourself.”
“I like this opera,” I said. “It’s Mozart’s Don Giovanni.”
“Good for you, little brother.”
I could almost hear Daria’s voice singing out: Calma, calma il tuo tormento.
Asti was in the Village, on East 12th Street. We’d walked to it from Mike and Lizzie’s, on Charles Street. Daria would have thought she’d died and gone to heaven there. It was filled with the sounds of opera. While you ate dinner, everyone sang around you: waiters serving you, bartenders, other customers; even Mike let go during Aïda.
The first thing I noticed was that there weren’t a lot of servicemen there. I could see only two sailors at one big table, and an Army lieutenant at another. I was glad of that. I wondered if Bud ever paid attention to things like that when he was away from the hospital, if he was ever uncomfortable in places where there were a lot of men in uniform.
He hadn’t worn the old coat he’d had on that afternoon. He wore a tweed jacket with a flannel shirt and knit tie. He had a fresh haircut and shave he said he got free at a barbers’ school on the Bowery. I heard Mike mutter, “Trust you to take a free ride,” but Bud didn’t hear him.
Lizzie looked more glamorous than ever with her blond hair wrapped behind her head, a black dress cut low, a string of pearls around her neck. And Lizzie had talked my mother into accepting one of her suits, a black silk that looked great with this white silk blouse that Lizzie said was a present from Einstein, Marx, and Shakespeare. I was glad Dad wasn’t there to throw his hands up at that idea.
Bud had been right: Mike had the right restaurant. Although Natalia had glommed onto Tommy on the walk there, and then sat beside him at the big round table we occupied, Tommy didn’t have to talk much. Everyone was singing. Bud was forking down spaghetti like someone straight off a desert island,
grabbing the Chianti bottle by the neck now and again to offer some to everyone, drinking faster than any of the others. I’d never seen Bud drink anything but an occasional beer. And neither Bud nor Tommy smoked in front of Mom.
Both Mike and Lizzie were trying not to react to Bud. The few digs at Bud that Mike made weren’t loud enough for Bud to hear. And Mike liked to sing, too.
After a few hours waiters carried in a huge cake singing “Happy Birthday, Dear Winnie,” and champagne corks popped.
Mike tried to get Mom to have a glass of champagne, but she wanted “just ginger ale, thank you.” Lizzie reminded her how Dad always said when in Rome do as the Romans do. Mom might just as well have been in Rome for all the familiarity she had with a New York City restaurant. She looked smaller, somehow, and a little lost. Lizzie’s toast to Mom was too long and too mushy.
I was allowed one glass of champagne, which I gulped down. I wanted Natalia to stand back-to-back with me, to see if I wasn’t finally as tall as she was, or taller.
“Not now.” Bud stopped me from getting up with his hand on my wrist.
“Bud, how’s Hope?” Lizzie asked.
“She’s okay. You’ll see. She works too hard, and there aren’t enough recipes that use beans. That’s what she’s got the most of down there. They have beans for every meal.”
I was expecting some sarcasm from Mike about hungry G.I.’s somewhere who’d give their eyeteeth for beans, but he was busy singing something from Carmen along with the others.
When Tommy went to the men’s, I followed him in and said, “I know I’m taller than Natalia now. I’m as tall as Daria, too!”
“I know you’ve got a buzz on,” Tommy said.
“Me? On one glass of champagne.”
“Yeah, you, little brother.”
“I’d like it if you and Bud wouldn’t call me that anymore.”
“Okay.”
“Are you making the announcement tonight about going 1AO?”
“No, and don’t you.”
“Why? Uncle Mike and Aunt Lizzie will be glad to hear it.”
“That’s why. I don’t care what they’d be glad to hear. I’m not going to put Bud in a bad light, as though I made a great decision and he didn’t.”
