American Romantic

by Ward Just

  Harry had never been there. His damaged feet could not take him down and certainly could not take him back up. He watched the comings and goings through powerful binoculars, not that the comings and goings enlightened him. He admired the village’s situation, a child’s conception of a pirate’s cove. Its aspect was medieval, the houses constructed of stone, many of them with wooden porches. The steps leading to them were stone, and at dusk, the sun westering, the houses appeared to be hanging on the cliff without visible means of support. In the early morning, when the small fleet embarked for the fishing grounds, they ghosted through the mouth of the inlet like great whales. In the rain the village was as forlorn as any on earth, the air, the water, and the walls of the cliff an identical shade of gray. With the rain came mist, then fog. When the air cleared, Harry found the boats back in harbor. Harry saw the village as a means of escape. In that way it resembled a crease in a mountain chain, the crease that allowed a climber to descend safely. He knew people who would take him there for a look-around but never bothered to ask them. He liked the idea of its inaccessibility, its oddity and hostility to outsiders. He liked to think of the village as in some sense a version of himself. Harry finished his tea and picked up the binoculars and looked east and west. The sea was empty.

  He sighed heavily and stepped off the verandah and onto the path that led to the rear of his house. He moved slowly, using his cane, because the path was narrow and uneven. Under the enormous plane tree was his wife’s grave, simple granite with her name, May Huerwood Sanders, and the dates. Whatever the weather, Harry visited her each afternoon, speaking a few words, clearing the night’s debris from beneath the plane tree. Beyond the grave was rising terrain with farmhouses and a few vacation villas. The morning silence was disturbed only a little by the movement of the tree’s long branches and in the distance the faint hum of an automobile. Harry could hear the sigh of his own breathing. Auspicious, he thought, evidence of life, however slow. He sat on the bench under the tree, resting his chin on the crown of his whalebone cane, a birthday present from May. They were in Oslo then. He was at the end of his tour and awaiting a fresh assignment.

  They had taken an afternoon stroll in the neighborhood, and the moment she saw the cane in the window of a men’s shop she walked in and bought it, not without difficulty. The owner tried to explain that the cane was not for sale but for decoration, a bibelot. But when pressed he came up with a price, a ludicrous price, but May was not to be denied. For your birthday, she said, though Harry’s birthday was weeks off. She immediately threw his old cane into a trash barrel. She said, An ambassador should have a serious cane, an ambassadorial cane, don’t you agree? And it will remind us of Oslo wherever we go. White nights. Salmon. Herring. They strolled on, discussing Harry’s new assignment. May wanted someplace warm, perhaps a capital near the seashore. The Mediterranean was an agreeable sea. Wouldn’t Tunis be a good posting? Horseback riding was her favorite outdoor activity, and she knew for a fact that horses were present in Tunisia. Why don’t you suggest Tunis, Harry? He remembered saying that Tunis wasn’t a bad idea, knowing that the chances for a posting there were slim to none. He had no special knowledge of the Arab world. He did not speak Arabic. He had read the Koran but concluded that its dreaminess translated well enough into English, always allowing for obscure syntax: “Surely God wrongs not men, but themselves men wrong.” He said, What about Greece? All those islands requiring his personal attention, Hydra, Santorini. Santorini was said to be especially fine for bird watching. Bird watching on horseback, he added. May did not reply right away, preoccupied as she was by Tunisia. They walked on. Harry couldn’t remember the remainder of the day. Probably they went to dinner at Charlys, grilled salmon with a savory dill sauce. In those days the American ambassador could walk around unencumbered by drivers and bodyguards, especially in Scandinavia; then came Olof Palme’s assassination and the rules were rewritten, though not drastically. Then he remembered they did not go to Charlys but dined in with the mayors of Bismarck and Duluth and their wives, in Norway visiting relatives. They had written asking if they could meet for a meal and May suggested dinner at the residence; she had always had an interest in the Dakotas and Minnesota. That was news to Harry. But the mayors were interesting on economic conditions in the upper Midwest. At that time both cities were losing population. A way of life was disappearing. Norway, meanwhile, was prospering.

  That was the extent of his recollection of dinner with the mayors and their wives. He tapped May’s headstone with the tip of his whalebone cane and lamented his stuttering memory. There were tests available to assess the severity of memory loss and the causes and the prognosis. But what idiot would take such a test? So what? The news was either good or bad, and if bad, nothing to be done but continue to beaver away at crossword puzzles. A sentence of life, as it were, without parole. Now he watched a grasshopper light on the tip of his cane. Harry was not a connoisseur of insect species but, by God, this one was ungainly, all legs. He wondered if grasshoppers were identical the world over or if there were subtle variations like alligators and crocodiles or Germans and Austrians. This one was self-possessed, immobile on the tip of the whalebone cane. Wait him out, be patient, Harry thought. And then in an instant it was gone. Next time someone asked him about retirement he’d tell them about watching a grasshopper and waiting it out, offering his misshapen wrist as a landing zone and having the offer refused.

  He rose, tapping the cane on granite.

  It’s a beautiful day, he said aloud.

  A beautiful day for riding horses.

  So long, sweetheart, see you tomorrow.

  May Huerwood grew up in a hamlet in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. The aptly named Slother contained a drugstore, a hardware store, a tavern, an IGA, and a Congregational church. The lawyer and the surveyor shared an office above the IGA. Slother was a quiet village except on Saturday nights when the tavern was full. The high school was one of those called consolidated, a low-slung, fawn-colored building that accommodated grades eight through twelve. Students came from miles around. Few of its graduates went on to college, and those who did enrolled at Johnson State College and at once fell behind, most of them, owing to inadequate preparation at the consolidated school. The home life of many of the children was less than ideal. The economy of the region was depressed—marginal farming, some logging, a little tourism, and of course the school and the regional hospital. Slother still felt the effects of the Great Depression. Many of the inhabitants remembered it well and told stories to prove it. People loaded up their flivvers and lit out for California. And many came back. There was a CCC camp and a soup kitchen. Truth was, the town was sore. It was indisposed. Slother had never sent a child to an out-of-state college until May was offered a scholarship, a prize not valued by her family. The school May chose was a small college near Denver. The college had never had a student from Vermont and the admissions director thought that May would add New England sobriety to the classroom, Mrs. Wharton taming Jack London. He was charmed by the idea of a Northeast Kingdom. And May was a fine student, high marks all the way around. Also, she was eager to be quits with Slother. She wanted to see something of the world and Denver was as good a place as any to begin. The admissions director at the Denver school laughed and laughed when May recycled the old adage:

  The Northeast Kingdom. So far from God, so close to Canada.

  May did have a shadow on her spirit, an inheritance, Harry thought, from her Vermont family, hotheaded and mutinous, vengeful. The far north of the Northeast Kingdom was closed in, a wild terrain of worn-out hills and trackless forests, unforgiving and monotonous. They called it God’s country and dared you to disagree. May’s parents were suspicious, hard-muscled, expert with firearms, prideful, wary of outsiders. And no wonder. Entrepreneurs from Boston and Providence and beyond showed up from time to time with promises of a resort village or a ski lift, needing only a tax break and some seed money, and always went away with the proceeds. The resort village or s
ki lift never materialized, God’s country vandalized once again. When May arrived with Harry one October afternoon, the Huerwoods’ worst expectations were met. The family had the idea he was a socialist sympathizer because he lived abroad and worked for the government, a toxic combination, no different from any sly commissar from the Ukraine or worse. May had abandoned God’s country for the devil’s, and whatever the consequences for her and her parasite boyfriend, it served them right. Harry had never met anyone like them, not in the most remote regions of Paraguay or the war zone or anyplace else. They were utterly incurious, though fascinated by his cane, which they identified as a fashion accessory like an ascot or pearl-gray gloves, the sort of doodad an Englishman might wear. Bum leg was all Harry said when they asked him about his injury, the word “injury” accompanied by a doubtful smile. Their first day together was exhausting, then infuriating, and yet when they talked about surviving the dreadful winters and the mud-strangled streams, the proper way to fell a tree or quarter a calf, they were informative. They were tolerant of the various communes established in the region, perhaps because everyone had to endure the same weather. No one was exempt. Sam and Esther Huerwood knew what they were talking about and Harry listened attentively. He guessed that their cockeyed political talk was a way of marking a boundary, the way wolves pissed in a circle to mark theirs.

  Sam was a large man, well over six feet tall and rugged. His size seemed to mean a great deal to him. When he sat in his big leather armchair by the wood stove, his hands clasped tightly behind his head, he appeared as immovable as granite. Harry sensed that this was an advantage in daily life, a strenuous outdoor life, the forest always encroaching, the weather all too predictable. Three cords of wood were stacked neatly between two ancient oak trees. At night coyotes howled.

  May had suffered at their hands but she tried to be understanding, at least when she was talking to Harry. Her voice was soft and filled with regret and forbearance. He knew that her inner thoughts were laden with anger. Regret and forbearance were her public voices. They’re hard to know, she said of her parents.

  They don’t get out much.

  They are not worldly people.

  They think I abandoned them. Betrayed them. Don’t value them. They have a point, I think.

  But my life could never be their life. I chose you.

  Harry said, I think they’re not wild about your choice.

  I didn’t expect them to be, May said. They never have been before. May smiled and looked away into the forest. The time was near nine, after a second fractious dinner in Vermont. May’s sister, Belle, had joined them for dessert, Belle shaking Harry’s hand with an iron grip, hugging her father, kissing her mother, finally settling into a chair and lighting a cigarillo, tapping it impatiently on the edge of an ashtray. Belle posed a number of questions about Harry’s “prospects,” to which he had no satisfactory answer except he was done with the war. In his line of work you went where they sent you. Belle pointed out that in the government you had a job forever; wasn’t that the great thing about it? Absolutely, Harry said, cradle to grave. That’s what I mean, Belle said. The pay’s good, too, Harry replied. I’ll bet it is, Belle said. Esther looked disappointed. She had not liked his answer concerning the war. Evidently he planned to retreat in the face of the communist enemy.

  Now he and May were alone in the chill of the evening. May said, I think you frighten them.

  Frighten them? A rattlesnake wouldn’t frighten them.

  I don’t mean physically, May said.

  Harry let his mind drift while May told a rattlesnake story, something about sitting up all night with a snakebitten calf. His thoughts wandered here and there, to evenings in Connecticut and in Asunción, while he looked at the sky for familiar constellations. A soft breeze moved around them, stealthy as a ghost. May put her head on his shoulder; the scent of jasmine. He said, Your parents. What did they think when you took up Chopin?

  May said, I beg your pardon?

  Harry returned at once to the present moment. Oh, sorry, he said. I was thinking of something else.

  Someone else, May said. Who was she?

  Someone I knew in the war, he said.

  Where is she now?

  Damned if I know. I haven’t seen her since.

  Was it serious?

  For a weekend, he said.

  What was her name?

  Sieglinde, Harry said.

  What sort of name is that?

  She was German.

  What did Chopin have to do with it?

  She played the piano. Chopin.

  Do I have to worry about this Sieglinde?

  No. You don’t.

  I hope not, May said. That was certainly a surprise. Not a welcome surprise.

  Everybody has a past, Harry said.

  Not everybody, May said.

  They met on a wet afternoon in April 1969, in a seminar room of the small college near Denver, the alma mater of a deputy assistant secretary of state. Harry was on home leave from Asunción. The chairman of the history department at the college had asked the deputy, the alumnus, to send someone to talk about the war—someone young, good on his feet, attractive, someone who could relate—and helpfully added that the class was composed mostly of the children of middle-class parents who lived nearby, a few ranch kids from the high country, a distinctly nonpolitical group, and that was the trouble. The chairman wanted someone who could stir them up a little. Harry protested that he had not been to the war zone in two years. What he knew about the war he read in newspapers. In any case, he was not an advocate and the war was on its way to being lost. Sorry, the deputy said, everyone else in this shop is busy. You’re not busy, so you’re nominated. Give them a good spiel, Harry. Put a good face on it.

  The students seemed to him from another world. The boys had the fresh faces of American infantrymen. But they were not infantrymen, though some of them soon would be. Harry stood at a lectern, and on the wall opposite was a drypoint print of bearded, weary Herodotus, who had traveled the known world in search of unheard-of civilizations. Wherever he went, Herodotus insinuated himself into the fabric of life in foreign lands. Harry had always thought of him as the first foreign correspondent, moving hither and thither on someone else’s dime. What would these students think if Harry were to tell them he was out-of-date. The war had been going badly when he was there and it was worse now and would be worse still next year and the year after. Harry tried to gather himself for the task at hand, the American mission, its causes, its ways and means, its prospects, its objective. War aims. The war was misbegotten, that was the truth of it; and his memory wound back to his trek through the jungle and the pockmarked face of the enemy soldier soon to be dead. He paused somewhere in the middle of his discussion of war aims, quoting the secretary of state as saying they were nothing more or less than “to stop the North from doing what it is doing.” A formulation perhaps not fully thought through. A reductio ad absurdum. He wondered if he should tell them that when he was in the war he lived there as easily as they lived in their dormitories, except that nine-tenths of his world was below the surface, life an enigma; and it was likely the same was true for them in suburban Denver. They were very young after all. Harry watched them nod off. In the rear of the room two girls passed notes as they looked out the window. This war defeated language. He caught his breath when he realized that he was looking at the dead and wounded of next year and the year after. He owed it to them to suggest Canada, an altogether pleasant country, easy to get lost in. But there were consequences to Canada, too, a reckoning down the line. All in all, Harry’s appearance in the seminar room was a wasted two hours, and late in the afternoon, when he could decently excuse himself, he went at once to a bar near the campus for a drink before the ride to the airport, thinking all the while that he was not an outside man. He was not a Spokesman. Harry preferred the privacy and infinite subtleties of inside work.

  May and two friends were at a corner table. Harry recognized them from
the seminar, the two note-passers and a pretty girl who sat behind them, attentive. When May approached and asked if he would join them, Harry said he had only a few minutes, and when she pressed him he said all right, because she was the attentive one, most attractive, with pale gray eyes and an open smile, a mellow voice, freckles, a face with a rosy glow. She said, My friends and I want to know what it’s like for you in the war. How do you get on? Do you like the people? Do the people like you? Do you have a social life? Harry sat drinking with them for two hours and finally the friends wandered off. He rebooked his flight. The bar filled up. When Harry asked May why she was interested in the war, she said she wasn’t that interested but thought she ought to know something about it, and besides, she had seen his photograph in the school newspaper and liked his looks. She was an art history major, Angelico to Zurbarán. All day long she looked at faces. Dürer faces. Rembrandt faces. Hopper faces. Why do you suppose there are so few female painters? Harry said he didn’t know but it was worth thinking about. He and May sat talking until near midnight, when they went together to her apartment. Harry stayed on another day and night, and then he was back in Washington, receiving a final desultory briefing before returning to Paraguay. Paraguay was not on their minds. The nation was at war and the State Department had become a war department.