After the War

by Alice Adams

  “Oh dear.” Even as she had listened, though, Cynthia had wondered: How would I ever tell Odessa that story, for example, assuming that I wanted to? How could I tell her anything?

  To Abby she said (and she knew that she was really talking to herself), “You know what’s really terrible, I’ve never really talked about anything with Odessa. There’s a lot of affection between us, I know that, and I know she feels it too, but we don’t talk. I mean, even if I wanted to, and in a way I think I do, there’s no way to explain to Odessa about Benny Davis coming.”

  Abby said, “I know.” And then she said, “I’ll do it. It’ll be easier for me.” She laughed. “And I’ll tell Dolly Bigelow too. That’ll be the fun part.”

  Feeling clever, not making a lot of the gesture, Abby picked up the big picture of Ben in his football uniform, and said to Odessa, “Did I show you this picture of my friend Ben? He’s the one coming this weekend.” She had been straightening her desk when Odessa came in to vacuum; in fact, she had been arranging her pictures: Harry, and Joseph, and Ben.

  After the smallest pause, Odessa said, “That is sure one handsome boy.”

  “Well, he’s sort of older than a boy. I mean he’s older than I am. But we used to go to school together, back in Connecticut. A long time ago.”

  “That so,” was all Odessa said, and then, “All right if I do the vacuuming in here now, or you rather I wait?”

  “Oh no, now’s fine. I wasn’t really doing anything.”

  “Really no reaction,” Abby told her mother. “But does ‘boy’ sort of mean Negro, to her? If he were white, would she have said young man, or something like that?”

  “I truly don’t know. I told you, we don’t exactly talk. We just exchange essential information like what I should buy at the A&P, and all the rest is nonverbal. For instance, I have no idea what she thinks is going on with me and your father.”

  “Especially since you don’t know yourself.”

  Startled, Cynthia stared at her daughter. “That’s true,” she rather weakly answered.

  Dolly’s hair was now dyed a very dark brown, and still tightly waved in a somewhat out-of-date way. (Abby supposed it to be thirties; it certainly did not look recent, not mid-forties.) In any case, the dark dye job made her carefully-never-exposed-to-sun skin look paler, more finely wrinkled. Older. Abby made this judgment as she also thought, How smart of her mother, Cynthia, not to dye her hair; God knows, she, Abby, never would. On the other hand, maybe blondes like Cynthia (and Abby) could dye their hair so that it didn’t show; Cynthia was perfectly capable of such subterfuge, Abby knew, even of a certain duplicity in small matters.

  Abby had time for all these and further thoughts as Dolly talked—and talked and talked—about her garden. Her essential message being that Cynthia’s flowers far outshone her own. But this took a long time to get out, what with various ramifications, explanations, and excuses. Much of the last, the excuses, had to do with “help,” both the hired help and the non-cooperation of the men in her house; namely, Willard, her husband, and the boys. “I declare, if I didn’t know better I’d say they were all just plum lazy, the three of them. Willard and Archer and Billy too.” She sighed deeply. “It’s not like I had the least little help from that Horace, can’t even spare me one hour once or twice a week, like I came near to begging him for. And Odessa knows. But I still don’t begrudge Cynthia all her lovely flowers, not one bit. She deserves them, she really does.”

  Abby then just managed to get in, “I’m glad they’ll look nice for my friend who’s coming this weekend.”

  “Oh, is this the weekend for your boyfriend? I guess I could say fiancé, since Cynthia’s told me your plans. Well, some of your plans.”

  “No, this weekend another friend is coming. This boy I knew back in Connecticut. He was at Harvard and played football—”

  “Well, a Harvard football star from Connecticut! Sounds mighty attractive to me. Maybe even some competition for that fiancé of yours.”

  How to explain? “It’s not like that,” Abby began, faced with the smiling, eager Dolly. “We’ve been friends since we were children, nothing romantic at all. Besides, I’m probably not brave enough. I mean, if we wanted to get married. I did tell you he’s a Negro?”

  Dolly took this much better than anyone would have expected—although, as Abby and Cynthia later speculated, God knows how she reported these facts.

  Or maybe, they further wondered, a lot of Dolly’s quoted remarks were actually invented by themselves by their own imaginations? Dolly was an easy mark for caricature: the dumb Southern bigot. Whereas she was not dumb, as they knew, and maybe not so rigidly bigoted as they thought.

  In any case, at this time, the time of her conversation with Abby, all Dolly said was, “Really? A Negro boy? You know I don’t think I’ve ever met one, I mean at a party. In a social way. But you’re probably right. It would take a lot of courage to marry one, and maybe not right for the children. But I’m sure you’re brave enough for anything, Abigail Baird. You remember that paper on integration you wrote, back in high school? Seemed like you were still just a child, but you said all that.”

  “How could I forget? I thought we’d all be run out of Pinehill.”

  “Now, now, folks down here are not as bad as all that. You just shook us up some, that’s all. But now, about this fiancé, the friend you are going to marry. Joseph, his name is?”

  “Yes, Joseph Marcus. He’s Jewish.” Abby was not sure why she had needed to add this last. And if it had been a bait for Dolly, as such it failed.

  “That so?” was Dolly’s comment (for a moment sounding just like Odessa). “Well now, soon as you-all set the date I want you to let me know, and I want to have, oh, just the biggest old party since the war. To celebrate. You promise, now, honey?”

  24

  THEN, quite suddenly, one day in April the weather changed, and a dark fierce storm blew in. It came from somewhere far out in the ocean, the wild cold Atlantic, the papers and the radio all said. Winds and lashing rain, dark and gray, attacked the small town of Pinehill and other towns all over the state—and the whole of the East Coast, actually. All around Pinehill, the country red clay roads were slick, and red clay washed down from eroded banks on either side of the new white concrete highways, so that they too were slick and dangerous.

  Even inside her house, which was warm and dry, Cynthia felt an unease, in that weather, a threat, a sense of danger.

  “Looks like somebody up there’s angry for sure,” was what Odessa said, arriving at a run from across the yard, her raincoat clutched over her head. “No use even trying to use an umbrella in this wind.”

  Cynthia, meeting her in the kitchen, could only agree. “You’re right, this is one angry storm.”

  “Horace, he real worried over his azaleas, and the rhododendrons he just put in near the pool. But he do what he can to save them.”

  “Oh I know he will. Odessa, don’t you want some coffee? Please take some.”

  Coming into the kitchen just then, Abby grumbled, “Great weather for Benny to drive down in. God, I never saw such a rain.”

  “Terrible,” Cynthia agreed, and she thought of driving, all those roads, cars skidding across, only she was thinking not of Ben but of Harry. Quite irrationally but powerfully, she imagined Harry—Harry suddenly, whimsically, deciding to surprise them with a visit. Harry heading South in his little pre-war Ford coupe. (“Gas is easier to come by than train tickets, a lot of the time, these days.” He had said that more than once.) She imagined the phone call, for Mrs. Baird: “… an accident … your husband—” She shuddered, realizing with the smallest jolt of surprise that an accident involving Harry, hurting Harry, would be quite literally unbearable to her, she could not stand it. She must not think about damage to Harry, no matter what the weather.

  “I have to go over to see Melanctha,” Abby announced, over coffee, as Odessa started upstairs with the new vacuum cleaner that in theory did everything. “Honestly, sh
e’s getting more than a little nutty about that dog,” Abby added, of Melanctha. “She says he’s been throwing up, and would I come and look at him. Honestly, it’s not as though I were anywhere near being a doctor yet. I’m not a vet, I probably don’t know any more than she does.”

  But Cynthia could see that Abby was somehow pleased. “Maybe she’s worried and just wants to see you,” she suggested to her daughter, at the same time thinking, If that dog, if River gets sick and dies, Melanctha won’t be able to stand it, she just won’t, I know that. And at that dark moment, in that dark and rainy, windy day, she believed that Melanctha’s dog would indeed turn out to be very sick. She asked Abby, “You’re driving over? Be careful, it looks awful.”

  “Oh, Mother, come on. Cheer up.”

  Of course she was right. It was just a dark day, on which very likely nothing bad would happen, not to Harry or to Abby, or even to Melanctha’s dog, River.

  To fight off what she realized as irrational low spirits, what Harry used to call “a patch of blues,” Cynthia kept herself busy with small personal and household tasks: her nails, a few letters and bills, the several downstairs houseplants, and the start of a salade niçoise for dinner, for herself and Abby.

  By the time the phone rang, around mid-afternoon, she had almost forgotten her earlier forebodings, and even the rain had lifted a little. Only a light gray misting hung over the garden, the shrubbery and the flowers. Still, Cynthia started at the ugly mechanical phone sound, the insistent brrring.

  Long distance. Collect. For Miss Abigail Baird. But it took Cynthia several long, confused, and frightening minutes to piece out even that much information from the maze of deeply Southern voices.

  She tried and tried to get across the fact that Abigail was out, she would be back soon, and she, Abby’s mother, Cynthia Baird, would take the call.

  She was sure that this was Harry, Harry in some trouble that he wanted to break to Cynthia by way of Abby, and she experienced a colder and colder fear in her veins, reaching to her heart.

  Does slow speech indicate slow wits? Certainly these operators seemed most incredibly slow of speech, and of dubious intelligence.

  At last, after what had seemed forever, a strong male voice (but not Harry’s voice) broke in, saying that Yes, yes, he would like to speak to Mrs. Baird.

  He said, “This is Dr. Jefferson,” and Cynthia, still thinking of Harry, froze—but even frozen she still reacted to the voice, which was deep and rich, authoritative, and Negro: a Negro doctor, down here? “We have this patient, just came in,” he said. “Your daughter’s name and address. He’s not in good shape—car accident—head injuries—back—”

  “But what’s his name?” Cynthia cried out.

  “Oh, Davis. Name of Benjamin Davis.”

  Although the rain had stopped, wide patches of red clay still smeared the highway, slowing, almost halting cars along the way. The roughly twenty-five miles from Pinehill to the County (Negro) Hospital, in Orange, would take forever.

  “I don’t dare go any faster,” Cynthia told Abby for the fifth or sixth time; she could feel Abby’s impatience, her tension, and also her wish to be nice to her mother.

  More or less to herself, Abby said, “I just hope we’re there when he comes to.” She breathed very deeply, breaths that Cynthia could clearly hear. “I mean, assuming that he does.”

  Cynthia took this in, along with Abby’s visible determination to be brave. To be good. And she helplessly looked across at her daughter.

  “Melanctha’s dog’s okay, though,” Abby said a little later, with a tiny ironic smile. “She really is sort of nuts—she hadn’t even felt his nose. Which was beautifully cold and wet.”

  “But that’s the first thing you do with an animal,” Cynthia said. “You feel their noses.”

  “You’d think. But she hadn’t. Anyway, he just ate something that must have disagreed. He’ll be fine. Lucky thing. Melanctha’s so crazy about him, really crazy.”

  For several very long and slow cautious miles, they talked about Melanctha in a worried, distracted way: her intense, tangled, and troubled relationship with her father; trouble with Deirdre; trouble at Radcliffe. Seemingly trouble all over, except with River, the dog. Abby and her mother were the two people to whom Melanctha talked most, it seemed, and unspokenly they had agreed that it was all right, not really breaching confidence, to discuss her between themselves.

  “She even told me she’d been planning some plastic surgery,” said Abby. “Breast reduction. But now she won’t. ‘River doesn’t care,’ she told me. I know she was kidding, but still.”

  “I’m afraid I’m the one who told her about that operation. Buffy had it, and she looked a lot better, easier with clothes.”

  “I don’t know—” Abby said as Cynthia slowed down and braked with great care. “I’m glad she’s not going to do it. She could always meet some guy who thinks big breasts are wonderful.”

  “Easily. Don’t most men?”

  “I think. County Hospital. I guess we’re here.”

  The hospital was an old brick building, clearly built with some other intention; it had housed a very large and prosperous family, probably, many years back. Now it was shabby, paint long peeled from the high-pillared porch, and it had a swollen look of overcrowding, of lack of money and time for even rudimentary upkeep.

  Inside, the impression was the same, with various strong human emotions added: fear, desperation, and a harried need for haste, goodwill.

  It would take forever even to find Ben; Cynthia knew this as they entered and a sweet and pretty but overwhelmed young nurse scanned a list, which turned out to be the wrong one, found another list, and at last found Ben’s name and the location of his room. “He’s just out of Intensive Care,” the nurse said. “Been there a while.” Cynthia watched her daughter’s face tighten at that news, and she thought: Abby really loves her friend Ben, she always has.

  He was in the far corner of a large men’s ward, Negro men (“Colored”), their dark heads and faces, many bandaged in one way or another, their arms attached to tubes, hanging bottles, in their high white narrow beds. Ben’s head was bandaged, his arms attached to both tubes and bottles. He seemed to be asleep, peacefully, but Cynthia wondered, Asleep or unconscious? Surely there is a difference?

  “I’m going to find his doctor. You stay here,” Abby whispered firmly to her mother—who obeyed.

  Ben’s hands were spread, palms down, on the limp white coverlet. Long, fine, beautiful brown hands, against that coarse cloth. Such perfect hands, Cynthia thought: perfect male hands, strong and so—so sensual. She delicately touched the one close to where she stood; feeling its smoothness and mostly its reassuring warmth, she realized that she had not been sure he was alive. But the hand was living, warm. Cynthia felt, or thought she felt, the smallest return of her slight pressure.

  “You can tell from the size of a man’s hands how big his thing is,” a sophisticated Vassar senior had said to a bunch of (probably) virginal freshman, in one of the smoking rooms. Candida, the senior, was rumored to have slept with five different boys over the past summers, before she was twenty-one. “It’s not true about feet. Just hands. And believe me, girls, size counts.”

  God, what an appalling recollection for her to have just at this moment: Cynthia is horrified by herself. Here she is, standing beside a possibly dying man, her daughter’s friend, and thinking about penises, about his.

  She let go of his hand and covered her face.

  “Mother, are you okay? He’s going to be all right, we think.” Abby, returning, patted her mother’s shoulder—and Cynthia did not explain. (It was an hour or so later that she thought of Harry’s hands, which were large, and Derek’s, very large. Russ Byrd had rather small hands, for such a tall man. And she thought, Size may be important, but it’s not what you remember.)

  “The thing is,” Abby told her mother as they began the drive home, “they’re not sure what’s wrong. He is conscious some of the time, and of c
ourse that’s good. I wished he’d woken up a little while we were there. They need to do more tests.” She added, “They’ve called his mother and she’s coming down.”

  “Where will she stay?” Practical Cynthia had instantly thought, No hotel around here will take her.

  Abby gave her mother an appreciative look. “Actually, there’s a hotel near the hospital where they often put their visitors, one of the nurses told me. So it must be okay. Not Jim Crow.”

  Cynthia had been about to say, They could stay with us, but for whatever reasons (maybe guilt about her sexual thoughts) she did not.

  The sky had partially cleared; there were bright acres of blue between the gray rain clouds, and sunlight glittered on the wet pine needles, on the trees along the highway, above the high red clay banks.

  Abby said, “I’m worried that I have to go back to school on Monday. Could you sort of call and check on him, do you think? I remember his mother, and she’s nice, sort of shy.”

  And then Cynthia did say, “You know, they could both come and stay with me. There’re all those rooms, and Harry’s hardly ever—”

  “That’s really good of you.” Abby reached to touch her mother’s hand, a quick pat. “First we’ll see how he does.”

  25

  IN May, on a rare visit to New York—she had left her work there the year before but liked an occasional visit—Esther Hightower became suddenly, extremely, and at first undiagnosably ill. She was rushed by friends to Mt. Sinai, and Jimmy arrived the next day. She was prepped for surgery the day after that, a surgery that Jimmy was told was exploratory. “We honestly don’t know what we’re going to find in there, but I have to tell you, man to man, I don’t think it looks good, from the tests so far.”