Camelot

by Caryl Rivers

  Mary smiled. “He told me I was going to get married and wouldn’t have to work so I ought to take Home Ec.”

  Harry laughed. “Is he still there? Let’s go down and punch him out.”

  He ate another mouthful of the cake and said, “You know I never told you this, but what helped me straighten out was the way you managed things. I finally figured out, if you could do it, I could too. I mean, I’m a man. I’m supposed to be the strong one.”

  She picked up the carton of milk that was on the table and put it in the refrigerator. “You’ll do fine, Harry.”

  “Well, I think so. I think I’m going to really have it together before long. Then we’ll talk. You and Karen, you’re my life.”

  She turned to look at him. “No, you can’t live for us. You have to live for you. You have to find out what you want.”

  “Well,” he said, “that’s not so easy.”

  He left in the truck, and she sat at the kitchen table, staring at her hands and blinking back the tears. She had known he would be coming this morning, so she had put her wedding ring back on.

  “Oh, Harry!”

  If only she had a time machine, to take her back to that night she had stood on the lawn, a little crazy, to take back the words. I’m pregnant. But if she did that, there would be no Karen. Her daughter’s sturdy, perfect little body gave her such delight, and she saw in the soft curve of the cheek and the quickness in her blue eyes the shadow of the adult she would become. She could no more imagine her child nonexistent than she could wish for her own extinction.

  Her child? Not hers alone. Theirs. He was the father of her child. She had waited so long for Harry to be a man. Why did it have to happen now?

  She shook her head as if the motion could dislodge her thoughts. Then she went upstairs to get dressed for work, thinking of the story she was writing on James, of how he had buried his wife and child and vowed to carry on the fight. It was different from other stories she had done. He was not a string of disembodied quotes, he was coming alive on the page as no one had done before. Her own writing, she knew, was getting bolder, surer, and it excited her. A few months ago the city room had seemed like a vast universe she had to conquer. It was shrinking fast. There was a large world beyond it, and there might be a place for her out there. Jay would never stay in Belvedere. He sucked up the essences of things with his camera, and Belvedere would soon be picked clean. And if he went, she could go with him. With Jay, there were no boundaries. With Harry, her territory was paced off and staked out. Could she live anymore in so small a space? Could she survive, alone, outside it?

  She opened the drawer of her dresser, and Sigmund Freud was standing there, a smug smile on his face.

  Whither thou goest, I will go! Thy people shall be my people!

  Yeah, something like that.

  Or are you leeching onto a man, because you don’t have the guts to go yourself!

  That’s absurd.

  Is it? One part of you is thinking about him; another part is wilting the lead to your story. You are supposed to be lost in love, but you just did a forty-word lead. What kind of a woman are you?

  You can’t just live for love. You have to work, too.

  Ah, you sound just like a man.

  If you even say the words “penis envy” I’ll hit you.

  And what about your husband! The man who you married. Who loves you.

  I … I don’t know.

  He is who he is and where he is because of you. There is a debt.

  He’d know. After a while he’d start to hate me. He’d know I didn’t love him anymore.

  You are quite strong. You could make it work.

  I know.

  But you don’t want it to. You want to put yourself above everything.

  He vanished, and she stood looking into space. She loved Jay, but she was tied to Harry. Unworthiness clutched at her. Didn’t Jay deserve something better, a woman who could live and die and breathe only for him? Real women did that. And Harry, a good man whose life she had determined, how could she hurt him again? God, why couldn’t she just live, and hurt no one?

  There were no answers to those questions, so she put them aside and got in her car and drove to the Reverend Johnson’s house. Don was waiting for her, looking tired and drawn. She guessed he had slept very little in the last few days.

  “Did you see the editorial?” she asked him.

  “Yes, it was very good. If we win this, the Blade deserves a lot of credit. When we win it. Now, we have to.”

  “You’ve asked for an injunction?”

  “Yes. The NAACP has filed an amicus brief too. We’re asking the court to stay the action of the council.”

  “Do you have a chance?”

  “Iffy. Courts don’t like to step into local battles like this one. The federal regulations are vague enough so that it might get federal funds. The plan doesn’t specify that Negroes are barred from the new apartments, but of course economics will keep most people out. The council is trying to argue that there’s no intention to discriminate.”

  “Our story on the fire went out on AP. The Times had a piece. You’re getting national coverage.”

  “That should help.”

  “If it doesn’t?”

  “We go to the streets.”

  “James will be there. He told me so.”

  “He’s amazing. I sometimes wonder where our people get their courage. He’s determined we’re going to win this.”

  She walked to the window and looked out on the quiet street. “When you change the rules, is there always a price to pay? And who pays it?”

  He knew what she was asking him. He shook his head.

  “The question you have to ask is, Are the rules right? And if they’re not, you have to change them.”

  “No matter what?”

  “Yes. No matter what.”

  “You sound so sure.”

  He looked at her, and she saw that he was not as sure as he sounded; and he looked, all of a sudden, very young.

  “I have to be sure,” he said. If not —” He paused. “Do you think I haven’t said to myself that if I never came here, they’d still be alive? Don’t write this, please, but do you think I haven’t asked myself what right I had to come here?”

  She was surprised at how much he had come to trust her. Perhaps it was because they were both outsiders in a world where other people made the rules.

  “Your uncle asked you to come.”

  “But why did I do it? Was it because I felt guilty that I wasn’t in Birmingham, where a lot of my friends are? Because I had a nice, soft, cushy spot in a writing class? Did I do it for my own ego? T. S. Eliot once wrote that doing the right deed for the wrong reason is, in fact, the greatest treason.”

  “Does it matter? If what you did was right?”

  “It’s like the way I felt in the South, sometimes. I was going to come and go, but those people had to live there. Do I have the right to ask other people to face the consequences of what I’ve started?”

  “You couldn’t have known what was going to happen here.”

  “I knew something violent could happen. God knows, I’ve seen enough in the South to know what happens when you take the lid off. Only —I’ve never been responsible before. Not personally.”

  “Maybe the reason you do something doesn’t matter, in the end.”

  “To me it matters.”

  “If it’s any help, I think you were right to do this. A lot of people would have lost their homes. Why should they have to sit back and get kicked around?”

  He looked at her. “Aren’t you supposed to be objective?”

  “Yeah, I am. But there’s a time when some things are right, and that’s that. You have to say so.”

  “That attitude,” he said, “is going to get you in trouble in your business.”

  She looked at him and nodded. He was right about that. But once you started to trust your own per
ceptions and judgments, there was no going back.

  “Any detail, Mr. Broderick. Anything at all.” The trooper was pressing, politely but firmly. “Run it through your mind, like a film. Anything you pick up on would be helpful.”

  Jay was sitting in Charlie’s office, across from the state trooper.

  “It was so fast,” he said. “I just got a glimpse. Two men in the front seat, maybe one in back. I’m not sure about that.”

  “You couldn’t identify anyone?”

  “No. Like I said, I only got a glimpse.”

  “The car was a Ford?”

  “I think so. A ‘fifty-six, I’d say, or ‘fifty-seven. I’m pretty good on cars.”

  “No numbers on the plates?”

  “No, I couldn’t see the plates. I tried after they passed me, but it was too dark.”

  “Any other detail? Anything at all, no matter how unimportant it seems.”

  Jay ran the scene through his mind, for the hundredth time. “No, nothing.” He ran it again. “Wait a minute, there was something. Hanging down. In the rear window, I guess.”

  “What was it?”

  “Gloves. I just remembered. My headlights caught them. Small boxing gloves.”

  “Good. That may be a help.”

  When the trooper left, Jay walked over to Milt in the city room.

  “They’re going all out on it,” he said.

  “Charlie’s done an editorial calling for the FBI to come on.”

  “Any chance?”

  “Doubtful. No interstate angle on it. Hey, look at this.”

  Milt handed Jay a photo torn from the AP wire machine.

  “Jesus, I wish I’d taken that one.”

  In the photograph, George Wallace was standing in the doorway of a University of Alabama building, and the assistant attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach, backed up by federal marshals, was asking him to stand aside. The governor was opposed to desegregating the stage’s colleges.

  “That’s historic,” Milt said. “A hundred years from now, that picture will be in the history books.”

  “They’ll think we were nuts. Federal troops to let people go to school?”

  “Speaking of school, why aren’t you on your way to the science fair at St. John’s?”

  “Shit, I thought you forgot.”

  “Shoot for a spread, in case we need it. And don’t talk to anybody.”

  “What?”

  “You open your mouth, you get in trouble. I had a call from Father Carmody at St. Theresa’s today. I sent you up there to shoot the new organ. How could you get in trouble shooting an organ?”

  “Look, I’m minding my business, and Carmody says to me, ‘How come I don’t see you at Mass?’”

  “How did he know you were Catholic?”

  “Probably the stigmata.”

  “The what?”

  “Never mind.”

  “He said you were — and I quote — blasphemous.”

  “Oh, hell no. I just told him I was a Druid. I said God is a Tree. A sycamore, on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway.”

  “I’m not going to tell Charlie. He’ll be bullshit.”

  “Charlie’s always bullshit at me. Hey, any messages for God? I’m driving by him tonight.”

  “Get the fuck out of here, Jay.”

  The science fair was one of those corny assignments that Charlie loved; he said it built loyalty to the Blade to have parents see the pictures of their kids’ models of the solar system and volcanoes that spouted baking soda. It was a special challenge for him to take these assignments and make them sing. He did pretty well, he thought afterwards. Just the kind of light feature that played so well in Life. Hedley Donovan would look at it and say, “Jesus, look what this guy can do with a science fair. Get him. I want him!” He saw himself thirty-seven stories up in the Time-Life Building, chatting with Mydans and Bourke-White about exposures and f-stops. They never had to take pictures of Father Carmody and his goddamned pipe organ.

  He thought about Father Carmody, and his mood soured. Carmody could have been a double for Father Hannigan, the bête noire of his martyrdom fantasies, and that fact alone pissed him off. All that innocent pleasure, down the toilet, thanks to one old Irish priest.

  He was the most celebrated gladiator in all of Rome (after seeing Kirk Douglas in Spartacus) but he had converted to Christianity and would kill no more. He had already dispatched scores of opponents, stuck them in the gut with his pitchfork-shaped sword, and they bled copiously, as Caligula gave the thumbs-down signal from his skybox. Now Caligula was really POed. He decreed that his favorite gladiator was going to be thrown into the arena with the newest warrior from the wilds of Britannia, and if he turned the other cheek, tough darts.

  He was in the locker room, dressing, his magnificent body glistening with oil, when the warrior burst in on him. It was Drusilda, the warrior queen of the Britons, captured and brought to Rome in chains for the sport of the arena. She was dressed in furs, her wild, dark hair falling across her metal breastplate. She wore a tiny piece of fur across her crotch, and the muscles of her long and shapely legs gleamed with fine beads of sweat. She smelled of rose water and musk.

  “What’s this shit about you not fighting!” she growled. “I never thought Romans were wimps.”

  “I have accepted Jesus, our Savior, and I will kill no more.”

  “Who’s Jesus!”

  “The Son of God, the Supreme Being, infinitely perfect, who created all things and keeps them in existence.”

  “I thought Thor did that.”

  “Thor is a pagan invention, Jesus is the true Lord, and he commands us to love one another.”

  “Thor says we should kill and loot and pillage.”

  “That crap is for pagans, Jesus tells us to love those who hate us, and we will have eternal glory in Heaven.”

  “That sounds neat,” Drusilda said. “How do you get to be a Christian!”

  “Believe in your heart, and you will be saved.”

  A sudden glow of light bathed the room, heavenly music drifted in the air, and Drusilda fell to her knees before him. Suddenly, she lifted the hem of his gladiator skirt, her round lips moist, her breasts heaving under the metal plate —

  “Stop right there.” Father Hannigan’s voice boomed in his mind.

  Oh, jeez, I’m doing it again. OK, no more gladiator.

  His hands were tied to two marble pillars, a Christian hiding in the catacombs, hunted down by the evil emperor. Again and again the cruel lash bit into his back. He groaned but refused to burn incense to the pagan gods. Disgusted, his torturers untied him, and he fell, bleeding, to the floor.

  “Leave the Christian scum to die with the dogs,” they said.

  The beautiful wife of the emperor, dressed in her silks and robes, came to the dungeon with her handmaiden. She saw him lying, naked and bleeding, on the floor.

  “Such courage he has,” she said to her handmaiden.

  “Cute buns, too,” the handmaiden said.

  “Let us ease his pain. Such a brave man should not be left to die with dogs. Get me the oils and the healing herbs.”

  She rubbed the ointments into his bleeding back, then cradled his head in her arms, not caring that his blood stained her silks.

  “I will not refuse my God, though I die,” he murmured.

  “Rest easy, Christian. I will help you, if I can.”

  She rubbed the oil across his chest and belly, gently. Of course, the torturers would be back, and they would flay him alive with their metal-tipped whips, but in the meantime…

  “There!”

  “Ah yes, that’s good.”

  “And there!”

  “You are very kind, milady.”

  Gently, her hands went lower, lower…

  “This Christian is hung like a horse,” the handmaiden said.

  Milady’s fingers touched him gently, gently, and he moaned, and she rubbed him a little
bit, and he moaned some more, Ohhhhhh, Ohhhhhh. Ohhhhhh. Oh shit!

  “That is enough. You have a very warped idea of martyrdom.”

  “This isn’t a blow job. It’s only a little … massage. Can’t a martyr get a massage before he’s flayed to death!”

  “Not where you were getting it. And what’s this ‘hung like a horse’ business! Do you think martyrs obsess over penis size!”

  “Maybe they think about it once in a while.”

  There was a sudden grinding noise from the front of the car. Father Hannigan and his lecture vanished. The car started to pull to the right, and the noise got louder.

  “Fuck!” He pulled the car to the side of the road, got out the flashlight and went to look at the tire. It lay hopelessly flattened against the ground.

  He kicked the tire, viciously. “In the fucking boonies.”

  He went back to the trunk to get the spare; it was there, but the jack wasn’t. He remembered he had loaned it to Roger, who hadn’t bothered to return it. He started in on Roger, questioning his sexual habits and his ancestors fifteen generations back. When he tired of that, he looked up the road. The nearest house was at least a half mile away. He could probably drive on the tire, but it would be slashed to ribbons, and it was a brand-new tire.

  While he was debating, he heard the hum of an engine and saw two headlights coming towards him down the road. He waved his flashlight, and a truck slowed down as it passed and pulled to the side of the road in front of him. A man got out and walked towards him.

  “Hi,” Jay said. “Thanks for stopping. I got a flat and no jack. Can I hitch a ride to Belvedere?”

  “No jack?” Jay could see the man now in the glare of the headlights. He was young, stocky, with close-cropped hair. His manner was amiable.

  “I did a real half-assed thing. I lent my jack to a guy and forgot to get it back.”

  “I got a jack in the trunk. You got a good spare?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll give you a hand. I wouldn’t leave a car out here. The damn kids go joyriding, and they like to strip cars.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “I drive this road a few times a week. I had a flat here myself, so I know how it is. There’s nothing out here.”