After the War

by Alice Adams

  “I declare, every colored person in this town has someway sent in word that she’s laid up with what they all call ‘misery in the laig.’ ” Dolly’s voice for imitating Negro speech was, to Cynthia’s Connecticut ear, more like a burlesque of her own Piedmont North Carolina dialect, or whatever it was.

  “But the roads,” Cynthia objected. “You really can’t drive out there.”

  “Got nothing to do with roads,” Dolly snapped. “You think every maid in town’s got a car? It’s even the ones that walk in here every day, it’s like in the rain they all go on some sit-down strike, like the miners. Though with these darkies it’s more like a lie-down strike.”

  Along the phone line, bad feeling between the two women surged high. Cynthia had reacted strongly (badly) to “darkies,” not to mention the very idea of those poor women, and men too, being expected to walk into town on those horrible wet clay roads. And Dolly was having familiar thoughts and feelings about how Yankees, as smart as they all thought they were, did not know or understand the first G.D. thing about the colored down here, and the way things are supposed to go. After the war, Dolly thought, things would get back more to normal, the colored back to their normal places, working for folks and showing up like they were meant to do. She was about to explain some of this to Cynthia—or try to, Cynthia could be as stubborn as a mule, for all her Vassar College smarts—when, fortunately for everyone (maybe), the long-distance operator broke in.

  “Mrs. Cynthia Baird? Is this Mrs. Baird, at 3871, in Pine-hill? I have an important call for you.”

  Cynthia’s heart jolted, hard and cold, as she braced herself for the news. Somewhere within her a scream broke out: Harry!

  As Dolly dithered, “Well, I’ll get right off the line. Cynthia, you call me right back now, I’ll want to know—”

  “Dolly, will you please shut up?”

  A loud sniff, and then a louder click, and then a male voice which was not the operator’s spoke. “Cynthia? Good Christ, the trouble I’ve had getting through to you, you and your insane Southern lady friend. Listen, I’m in Hilton, and I really need to talk to you. I’ve got a car, and I’d like to start the drive over right now. I assume that’s all right?”

  Oh. Derek. Feeling faint, pounded and shaken by too many, too strong emotions, Cynthia said yes, of course—and later wondered what it was that he had asked.

  An hour or so after that, an hour during which she drank some tea, and had some of Odessa’s good chicken-vegetable soup, Cynthia still was shaken, though now by a new set of fears and anxieties: what was it that Derek needed to talk about so badly that he had an operator cut in, an emergency interruption? Could Derek possibly have some news of Harry, some source?

  Rainwater dripped from his hat as Derek removed it, and from his trench coat, which he took back outside to shake off. He said, “Talk about cats and dogs. This is ferocious!” and he smiled and reached for Cynthia, to kiss.

  The kiss was more affectionate than passionate, a little hurried. Not lingering—most clearly not a lingering kiss.

  So that Cynthia wondered if he had not come, after all, to demand her hand. To forcefully claim her. Which she had seen as the only explanation that offered itself for his haste, his determination.

  But right away he told her, “I want to talk to you about Russ. About James Russell Lowell Byrd. It’s a very important interview. That you’re part of, I mean. Do you think his wife would see me too, and maybe some of his kids? The daughter with the funny name? Maybe tonight, I thought. I don’t have a hell of a lot of time.”

  He had put her through all that distress for questions about Russ? The panic over Harry—and the quite other panic to do with Derek himself? The skein of complicated emotions, both conflicting and intense, had left Cynthia weak and angry. Rather stiffly she asked Derek, “Shall I call Deirdre right now? Is that what you want me to do?”

  He gave her a quick look, not acknowledging stiffness on her part, anything wrong. “If you don’t mind,” he said formally.

  On the phone Deirdre said, “Derek McFall? Oh, I’d love to see him, really I would, you tell him that. It’s been, let’s see, over fifteen years? He was just in our school for that one year.” Her voice trailed off, remembering, and then came back. “But today is a bad one for me and Melanctha too. This lawyer’s coming over, ’long about five o’clock. So Derek would either have to get here real, real quick, or else make it some other day.”

  Receiving this message, which Cynthia delivered to him entire, Derek stood up. “Well, that doesn’t give me a hell of a lot of choice, does it?” He grinned unconvincingly. “I’m sorry, angel. But I’ll be back before you know it.”

  “You know where the house is?”

  “You showed me once, remember? Out in the woods past the Hightower house?”

  Did she show Derek that house? Cynthia did not remember such a drive with him, or any conversation about it. Though both must have occurred, to make him set off with such confidence, and so quickly.

  What she really—intensely, wrenchingly wondered was: How much had she told Derek about her own connection with Russ? She and Derek tended to drink a fair amount; they did not get drunk, no lurchings about or falls or blackouts. (Cynthia had observed all that behavior in her previous life, in Connecticut, and to some extent in Georgetown, more recently.) But she and Derek drank enough so that the course of an evening, its threads and themes of conversation, sometimes became blurred the next day in Cynthia’s mind, not to mention the details and nuances of repeated acts of love, which she would have liked to recall as vividly as possible.

  Derek liked a good martini before dinner, and so did Cynthia, something she had discovered with him. And then along with dinner they drank what they called “Dago red,” meaning cheap Italian Chianti, which was sold more or less in bulk, in large green bottles. Those dinners, usually cooked by Cynthia, less often taken in restaurants, were marvellous fun, the fun wine-fueled and fueled too by the anticipation of later pleasure, great pleasure in bed.

  But what had she said in the course of those hours of heightened, delighted conversation? Drink made Cynthia voluble, she knew that, profligate with confidences, even confessions. Like a drunken Santa Claus, she bestowed bits of gossip plus some intimate glimpses of herself—all gifts. And what had she told Derek?

  If Deirdre’s lawyer was coming at five, Derek should be back at Cynthia’s by five-fifteen or so, she thought, but then she further thought: Deirdre said “long about five,” which can mean almost any time at all, in the long rainy, chilling evening.

  The rain made a walk impractical for Cynthia—and Derek might always come while she was out. She turned on the radio but something was wrong, only static came across—or bombs; it had the sound of a bombardment. Outside everything dripped, the dark thick heavy leaves of the rhododendron, long pine needles, and the bare black branches of winter trees—as though spring had been frightened backward by the rain, retreating into invisibility.

  Derek got back to Cynthia’s house at five after seven. He said, “Christ, the lawyer just got there. And it seemed sort of rude to leave before he did.”

  Wanting to say, How about rude to me? Cynthia instead asked how it went. Did he get what he wanted to know from Deirdre and Melanctha?

  Melanctha was not there, Derek told her, he did not know where Melanctha was. And yes, Deirdre had talked a lot, a surprising amount. “Generous” was how Derek described it. She talked about her son, about Graham. Did Cynthia know that, that he was really her son, not her brother?

  “Oh, we all figured that one out sometime back,” despite herself Cynthia snapped. “He’s the dead spit of Russ, as they say around here. Have you seen him?”

  “No, but I never really met Russ either. Deirdre thinks I did, but I’m sure I’d remember.” He smiled, not drunkenly but in a way that told Cynthia that he had had a few drinks with Deirdre—Deirdre the new widow—as they raked over her life with Russ.

  One of Cynthia’s reactions to this percep
tion—shared drinks, a long happy time—was to think, Then why should I tell him a goddam thing? Who gives a damn about his lousy article? I for sure don’t.

  Derek said, “How about dinner? You feel like fixing a sandwich here, or would you rather go out?”

  “Out would be better, I think.”

  The Pinehill Hotel, which catered to visiting parents and alumni, as well as unwary travellers, served stiffly formal dinners, overpriced and not very well cooked, in a too bright dining room. The only good thing there was the plenitude of fresh raw oysters, which were reliably great—if you liked raw oysters, which both Cynthia and Derek very much did.

  The only other out-for-dinner possibility near Pinehill was a run-down barbecue roadhouse, about seven miles off, called The Pines. Much favored by students, it was known for serving beer to anyone at almost any hour—and for the hottest, possibly messiest barbecue for miles around. They chose The Pines, or rather, Derek did.

  The drive out there seemed long, down the winding wet gray-white concrete highway, between high red clay embankments—now shining, wet, and slick—and past dark dim wet woods. And his choice of The Pines struck Cynthia as both perverse and slightly hostile; neither she nor Derek was a big fan of barbecue, and the students there tended to be rowdy, noisy. As they walked in, they were instantly assailed by smoke and strong smells of pork and tomato and spice.

  “Not the greatest place for an interview,” was Derek’s comment.

  Is that why they were there? Cynthia murmured, “Oh dear, I’m afraid not,” in a helpless, innocent way which she knew to be unconvincing, and she looked up and smiled at him. They sat across from each other in a high-backed, hard-seated booth, where the streaky table smelled of beer and of catsup. Officially, The Pines served only beer, but if you knew what to say and paid enough you could get thick coffee mugs of rotgut bourbon, which is what they did.

  What she was feeling as they sat there—in the cave of jukebox noise and student noise and the smells of everything, everyone there—Cynthia knew to be crazy, this blood-racing frenzy of jealousy and suspicion. For in a practical way (Cynthia prided herself on practicality), she wondered how much or indeed what at all could have gone on between Deirdre and Derek? (She was even alarmed by the alliteration of their names.) In Russ’s house, as they waited for a lawyer who might have shown up at any minute—as well as, possibly, Melanctha? But crazy or not, Cynthia did feel that frenzy, that race of blood, and tightness in her chest.

  At a table not far from theirs a group of students began to sing. “Violate me, in violet time, In the vilest way that you know! Rape me, ravage me, brutally savagely—”

  Cynthia shuddered. “What a dreadful song, really.”

  Derek leaned forward. “You knew Russ pretty well?”

  As though she had planned a speech, Cynthia told him, “Actually hardly at all. Although”—and she laughed a little, a girlish, confessional laugh—“I had a sort of distant crush on him, and that’s one of the reasons we moved to Pinehill in the first place. I’d read a lot of his poetry. Honestly, I even knew a lot of it by heart.” She repeated the laugh. “But the times we met—well, I felt shy. I guess he was sort of shy too. Also, I guess people have told you, he drank quite a lot.”

  But: had someone told Derek otherwise, about her and Russ? Could someone have hinted anything of the sort? Could Russ—this was a horrid, unlikely, but possible speculation—could Russ have said anything to Deirdre, a marital confession? “Darling, it didn’t mean anything, I just fell into it, and she’s rather aggressive.” Surely not, Russ didn’t talk like that; still, Cynthia inwardly quailed and told herself that it would not have happened, given Russ’s strict Southern notions of honor—unless two of those notions came into conflict, I-must-not-tell-anyone pitted against I-should-tell-my-wife-everything. The latter was most hard to imagine, though—Russ telling anyone everything.

  Derek, sounding irritated, broke into her somewhat complicated stream of thoughts. “Of course he drank a lot. Russ was drunk when he died, remember? He couldn’t hold his liquor, as they say down here.”

  Now the singing group was doing “The Ship Titanic”: “… husbands and wives, little children lost their lives. It was sa-ad when that great ship went down.”

  Another horrible song. “What will happen to that Negro sergeant, do you think?” asked Cynthia.

  Derek frowned. “The evidence against him is that he had a lot of money in his billfold. Close to a thousand. He said he’d cashed his discharge check in L.A., but still, it doesn’t look good.”

  “Why not? ‘Colored’ sergeants aren’t supposed to go around with a lot of money?”

  Derek ignored her. “The bad part is, Russ’s billfold was just about empty. Just a couple of single dollar bills.”

  “But that’s just like Russ. He always went around with no money on him. It was sort of an affectation. Part of his pose, I’m just a poor country boy.”

  “I don’t think they’d take that into account. Not in the current climate.”

  “But—but that’s totally unfair. Russ wasn’t in good shape. He could just have had a heart attack, like that man in the Deke House. No one said anything about Melanctha killing him.”

  “No—”

  “And Russ would never pick a fight, especially not with a Negro man he didn’t even know. That just wasn’t in him.” Cynthia spoke more passionately than she had meant to.

  Which Derek caught. “Come on, you said you hardly knew him.”

  She forced a giddy laugh. “My instincts are very quick and accurate.” But then very seriously she asked him, “Can’t you do anything?”

  “To help this Negro sergeant I’ve never met?—when I never met Russ Byrd either, and can hardly attest to his good character? Christ, Cynthia, sometimes—”

  In an unfriendly way, they stared at each other across the booth. Derek reached for his mug as Cynthia thought, feared, that he could get really drunk.

  The barbecue sandwiches that they had both forgotten arrived. “Here y’are, folks,” announced the grinning, small bald red-faced waiter—at whom Derek glared.

  Derek said, “I never saw anything so repulsive in my life.”

  The waiter blinked, then recovered his grin. “Well, I always say it takes all kinds,” he said before he scuttled away.

  The waiter didn’t make those sandwiches, was Cynthia’s first thought; why take it out on him?

  Her second was from ten to fifteen minutes back; she thought, Why not help a Negro sergeant you’ve never met, if he’s being unjustly accused? You’re a reporter, and you could help. Harry would, if he could, and I would, especially if I were a lawyer.

  She took a dutiful bite of her sandwich, which was as bad as it looked. Chewing, trying to swallow, Cynthia imagined her own clean warm quiet kitchen, herself alone there, eating a couple of nice fresh scrambled eggs.

  Looking across at Derek, she observed that he was doing everything in slow motion, trying for control, or at least to look controlled.

  Too drunk to drive, she thought, and she experienced one long moment of panic before she got to her feet and said, “Come on, I’ll drive us home.” Tactfully adding, “You look tired.”

  “This is the worst sandwich,” he muttered, but at the same time, surprisingly, he got up, reaching into his pocket, and handed her the keys—her keys, they had come in her car. “You’re right,” he told her. “Let’s get out of here.”

  And they started back, not talking, as Cynthia concentrated on the drive in the dark and increasing rain. Among other things, she was thinking that Derek was probably unaware of her plan, which was to drop him off at the Pinehill Hotel.

  Which is what she did—before going home to her scrambled eggs and relative peace, a peace somewhat troubled by persistent, anxious thoughts of Derek’s hours with Deirdre—and of the so far unknown Negro sergeant, unhappily with Russ when he died. And who was now being held in jail for questioning, in Texas. Her own raging sense of injustice kept Cynthia awake f
or hours, as she listened to rain on her roof—ordinarily a soothing, soporific sound, but tonight it sounded threatening, even accusatory: why didn’t she go and help? And what on earth was she doing with Derek in the first place?

  She was able to salvage some of her pride, at least, by replaying in her mind the small scene of her leaving Derek at the hotel. For she had done just that, left him there. She just reached for the door for him to get out. No thanks for the barbecue (certainly not). No gesture or good-night kiss (most certainly not). She left him there and she drove off into the rain, which seemed appropriate (in some B-movie way).

  10

  “HARRY!” Cynthia shouted into the telephone. Awakened at 3 a.m. by an operator who asked her name, then announced an overseas call, she had at first thought it must be some terrible, cruel joke—or, much worse, some terrible news of Harry. But then, though wavering and distorted, came Harry’s voice.

  “Baby, did I wake you? I got this chance to call you, so I didn’t even calculate the time. What time is it there?”

  “About three. But, Harry, this is marvelous, how are—?”

  “Baby, I can’t hear you either. You’re okay?”

  His voice came back and forth, in and out of focus, as though tossed on all those monstrous black Atlantic waves, then strung along wires and swaying tall poles all across the gigantic continent.

  She shouted, “I’m fine! So is Abby, she loves it at Swarthmore, and I think she’s in love with a nice boy, a physicist.” And then, irrelevantly, “Russ died. Russ Byrd?”

  “A physicist—isn’t he too old for Abby? Not Oppenheimer?” She thought she heard him laugh.