She woke up.
“Where are we?” She yawned and stretched her long muscles, and he was startled, as usual, by the quick chemical change in him whenever he saw her move her body like that. It was sharp, and almost hurt.
“We’re in Iowa at last,” he said.
“Oh? Where?” She sat forward and looked around at the green banks of corn as though, being a native after all, she might be able to tell at a glance.
“Somewhere west of Davenport,” he said.
A sign came by: Clabber Girl Baking Powder.
“I’ve always wondered what ‘Clabber’ meant,” Phyllis said. “I’ve always meant to ask somebody or look it up but I never have. Isn’t it funny? You have these little questions and you never ask them?”
“I know what it means,” he said, and she turned toward him delightedly, took hold of his arm and smiled as though it were really a great treasure he had to give to her.
“Really? Richard!”
“Yes, I know what it means.”
“Tell me! Tell me!”
“It means curds, like in cottage cheese, or butter. Maybe the clabber girl churned the stuff. You know, the girl on the farm who made the clabber.”
“Wonderful! I know that’s right, Richard. But how did you know? You’ve never lived on a farm.” She was still delightedly squeezing his arm.
“You know my peculiar memory,” he said. “Once, God knows why, I signed up for a course in Irish. The word comes from the Irish.”
“You remember everything, Richard. I honestly believe you do. It’s so wonderful! You know it makes me feel more valuable? You never forget anything so nothing’s lost, and I’ve got everything right here beside me. No, I don’t mean valuable—me being, that is. No, wait a minute. Yes, I do. Do you remember everything about me?” She blushed and looked away, grinning happily at the highway and the endless green and blue outside.
“Every little thing,” he said.
“Oh, my goodness!” she said. “Oh, my goodness!”
“Is that why you want to marry me?” he asked. “Because I’m just a kind of permanent record? An encyclopedia?”
She looked at him, suddenly thoughtful, and her words seemed to come out automatically. “I want to marry you because I love you.”
But she still smiled at the countryside. She didn’t ask him why he wanted to marry her. This was a question he had to ask himself. And he asked that question again, getting no straight answer.
Perry had asked him, in Paris, why he had suddenly decided to go home. His answer then was, “Because I’m twenty-five and I discover that I have piles.” So he’d gone back home, finished law school, and now (it seemed more or less part of the same plan) he was headed toward marriage with this girl from Iowa. Headed toward it at sixty-five miles an hour on a concrete causeway that held them above the deep black earth. He would meet Phyllis’ mother and father, in Des Moines.
The memory again. Perry had been on dexedrine for a few days, and Richard and MacGregor were waiting for him to drop so they could carry him across rue Cujas and deposit him in his room. Perry was heavy as hell, too. “Piles?” Perry said. “Piles?” And Richard had explained that somehow his image of himself as a youth was in the process of disintegration. “Piles,” he said, imitating Perry’s British accent, “are not, somehow, compatible with my present life. Farewell.” “Rot!” Perry said. “Exactly,” Richard had explained. It had begun to seem to him that all his orifices were closing up; he couldn’t smile as wide, or laugh as loud, for instance. That was four years ago. Now he was twenty-nine, and a lawyer. His specialty was patents and copyrights, and already he had been relieved of the usual, mechanical tasks of the apprentice; it was his amazing memory again. He found his work at least as fascinating as bridge, or chess.
Phyllis was a senior at Sarah Lawrence, and she was twenty-two. They had known each other less than a year. “Carnally,” she said once, “we have known each other only six months.”
He grinned himself, now, as the highway made a ninety-degree right turn (a corrected section line, he supposed, and in a certain number of yards it would make a ninety-degree left turn and continue straight west), but in his grin he felt some self-consciousness; there was just a little fear mixed in with his amusement. Yes, there was, and he liked that fear, because it made him feel alive. In a few hours he would have occasion for another fear, too, and he looked forward to it. Phyllis would present him to her parents, and that would be interesting.
William and Hannah Krause would not be shocked by his appearance, because he looked as conventionally Anglo-Saxon as anybody. He was even blond. But there was something about him, he knew, that would give the Krauses pause. It always happened. Some turn of phrase or turn of mouth would, he was afraid, turn the father’s thoughts to darkness. He’d seen it happen before; it was as though he suddenly became a Negro in the sight of fathers. Their little daughters—they had a hard time facing up to it.
And the daughters, how they seemed to rub it in. Strange, because girls had always wanted to bring him home to show their parents, and he thought one reason was his conventional appearance, as though they brought him home to show their worried parents what a clean, nice young man they had, so that their parents wouldn’t worry about them. But it never seemed to work out that way. What usually happened was that the father seemed to grow more bouncy on his feet, and a little caustic in his remarks. Well, he would see.
His own parents had died in an automobile accident in 1936, when he was nine, and he had grown up in New York City in the house of his grandmother and grandfather, a brownstone house that was narrow and high, with the sidewalk of Tenth Street in front and in back a dusty little garden with a broken fountain and a fig tree that was in a state of suspended animation. The grounds of his childhood, compared to this rich Iowa earth, were almost totally artificial; the plants he had known were always dirty to the touch. In that house nothing much was kept from him or given to him; because of his youth and his grandparents’ age he did what he wanted and made his own rules. When he was old enough he was sent to boarding school, and after that there was the army and college. His grandfather was still alive, but Richard went to that house only as a visitor; the old man’s memory wasn’t too good, and most of the time he considered Richard to be his son rather than his grandson. It was disconcerting to act as the impersonator of a father he hadn’t known too well anyway. Richard’s grandmother was dead, and with her had gone all the remembered evidence of family and relatives—cousins and second cousins, ancestors and aunts. When his grandfather died he would in effect have no family, and so it was as a kind of singleton he traveled through Iowa with this warm girl.
“I wonder what you’ll think of them,” Phyllis said.
“I wonder what they’ll think of me.”
She was honest; she wouldn’t ever lie. “Yes, I wonder,” she said, looking at him speculatively.
“Can you look out of your mother’s eyes and see me?” he said.
“That’s a funny idea.”
“Sort of incestuous.”
“Well,” she said, “I wouldn’t stay inside her too long.” She thought for a moment, then added, “My God! Poor old Daddy. He’s such a dear ass.”
“I’ll tell him you said so.”
“He’ll be very impressed by you—lawyer and all that. Don’t be too hard on him. Tell him how much money you make—I’m sure he makes three times as much.”
“You think he’s a good man, don’t you?”
She cocked her head and thought. It was as if she had never before considered this. “Well, he’s a good man,” she said.
“You mean he’s stupid.”
“Not exactly,” she said.
“Sort of vaguely,” he said, and she punched him playfully on the arm. It hurt, though. Somehow she’d found the exact place, and it hurt like hell.
In a couple of hours they came to Iowa City, where they had decided to stop and eat, and as they came down a surprisingly steep hill in
to the town he was impressed by the large trees and the look of permanence and grace in some of the houses.
“Well, it’s a college town,” Phyllis said.
“What college?”
“The State University of Iowa,” Phyllis said.
“I thought that was at Ames.”
“No, that’s Iowa State.”
“Oh. That figures.”
“Listen,” Phyllis said. “If you think you can patronize Iowa, wait till you meet Mother. She can do it better, and she’s lived here all her life.”
They stopped at a diner, and as they sat down in a booth the waitress came so quickly and cheerfully, with such an excited and really friendly smile, Richard was certain she must be an old friend of Phyllis’.
“Hello!” the waitress said, and Phyllis smiled back, as friendly as the waitress. How they seemed to love each other! The waitress, whose blonde hair and perfect teeth were quite similar to Phyllis’, handed them menus and asked if they’d had a good trip. “All the way from New York?” She had seen their license plate.
“We stopped over twice,” Phyllis said. “Once in Ohio and once in Moline.”
“Moline’s a nice town,” the waitress said. “Have you got much farther to go?”
“My folks live in Des Moines,” Phyllis said.
“Oh, that’s nice. I like Des Moines. Well, you’ve got over a hundred miles to go. You’ll make it for supper, I bet.”
“They’re expecting us, anyway,” Phyllis said.
“That’s nice. They’ll be so happy to see you again.”
They did order, finally, and after they’d eaten the waitress came to the door with them and asked them to drive carefully.
“Good-by!”
“Good-by! Good-by!”
In the car again, he asked Phyllis if she had known the girl. She just looked at him. “Known her? No, of course not. Oh. I see what you mean. No, that’s something you’ll get used to out here.”
“Well, I gave her a good tip.”
Now Phyllis was startled. “But you didn’t have to at all! She wasn’t being friendly for tips. In fact there’s a law against tipping in Iowa. Did you know that? You only tip in sin places, like night clubs and bars.”
“These strange foreign customs!” he said.
“And of course the bars only serve beer,” Phyllis said.
They drove on through the town and over a rich brown river, then up again into the inevitable tall corn, where the highway again was a white corridor through all that fuming green life. The sky was wider than he had ever seen it—wider than on a ship—and bluer. And in the sky was the sun, a deliberate part of this system of growth. Symbiosis, he thought; everything is making and reproducing, waxing big. The sun was a huge ball of heat that gave and at the same time drew; sucked out moisture, and yet the air was full of moisture. Everything was growing. He felt like the one cool piece of matter, the one constant, steady thing in this moiling place. As cool, almost, as a piece of ice.
After he had driven for a while Phyllis became fidgety; she went through the dash compartment looking for something, anything, to read, and he suggested that she drive. She liked this. She loved to drive, and she was very good at it. She’d even taken driving in high school. So he stopped the car and they changed places. The thick corn seemed to tremble, not so much from the mild wind as from growth itself, and as he looked closely at the black earth it seemed unnatural that there were so few weeds around the bases of the stalks, that they stood too cleanly in the rich black.
With Phyllis driving he lay back in the seat, not wanting to make her self-conscious by looking at her or at the road. But he found it hard not to look at this woman he was going to marry. Those hips were to be his, in a way; the smooth insides of those adequate thighs his forever. And with the lively body all the other things about her. Her fantastic energy, her commitment to everything in the world. Once she had said to him, “I warn you, Richard. If there are any rallies, or sit-ins, or anything like that, you know me, I’ll be there too. I’ll be right in it up to my neck.” She would be, too.
He wondered why causes had never appealed to him, why his sympathies, though clear enough, never roused him to action. It was as if he lacked some essential quality of optimism, or excitement; as if he had in a rather un-American way never developed hope of controlling the future.
So why should he marry this American? Again the little shiver of fear, undeniably painful, undeniably pleasant. Risky, bittersweet. Once before he had thought he was in love, in Paris, and the girl’s name was Eva. She was from Lyon, and was going to Beaux Arts. She made a little extra money sketching portraits in bars, and she’d been so pretty in her dark, complicated little way—she looked so pale and interesting—he let her sketch him once, in the Capoulade, and soon they were together most of the time.
His memory, even in this humid Iowa August, brought back that early spring in Paris. He and Eva walked together in the Luxembourg Gardens. It was in that first tentative, almost cruel part of spring, bitterly cold except in the sun, when the people came out from their damp rooms into the Gardens, carefully turning themselves in the sun. It was a time of delicate balance between warmth and cold. When a cloud came over everyone turned old and shivery, and for a long moment it would be winter again. The sun was always a little warmer when the cloud had passed, and the wind a little colder.
They had been holding hands and running. They walked, out of breath, across the early grass to the pond and statue, and he remembered feeling as if he were coming out of hibernation—tremendously tense and hungry, yet not irritable.
“You’re all of a piece,” he said in English, then laughed—as if the laugh itself could do for a translation.
“What did you say?” she asked seriously. She wanted to learn how to laugh with him, and quite seriously she asked questions.
He picked her up, his face sifting through her dark hair, and pretended to throw her into the pond. Her arm around his neck was confident, and she smiled.
“You seem so young—much younger than the French boys. Are all American so young?”
“I’m five years older than you!” he said.
“You must keep on saying that. ‘How old I am!’ And then you run through the Luxembourg Gardens!”
“You little twirp,” he said in English, and kissed her. He remembered that first time with such clarity that he could actually see Eva and himself—their faces firm, clear ivory in the sun. He remembered even that their teeth had touched once, lightly, and he could still feel, even hear, that solid little click. She seemed perfectly happy to be held. She would wait, confident of him, yet ready to be released, anticipating his movements by a period of time so precisely minute that it seemed to have nothing to do with the mechanisms of consciousness. Unless she meant it to happen, she never moved against him—they never matched strength. Often they would be at Jewell’s night club listening to the jazz or trying to hear MacGregor’s sentimental piano over the talk, and Perry or Jewell would be sitting with them admiring such nice love. Fat black Jewell, who liked to see them together so much, who kept watch over them as though they were her little white pets she was mating, who fed them Southern Fried Chicken, the specialty of the house. But that was all gone by.
Nearly a year later, when his G.I. Bill ran out and he decided to go home, he said good-by to Eva. It seemed so inevitable that he must leave—simply fate, implacable and remorseless—that he’d said good-by to Eva as he might have said good-by to any friend. She had never suffered in his presence, and he thought she realized that there were many Richards in the world, as well as many Evas; he was terribly unhappy and helpless when she cried and cried. But how could he comfort her when he’d already received a check from home to buy his passage? She refused to believe that he considered himself merely one of thousands; she refused to believe that he was interchangeable. While he was in law school and she back home in Lyon they wrote to each other perhaps twice a year until she was married.
“Des
Moines!” Phyllis said.
“What does it mean?” Richard asked her.
“My God! I was born here, and I don’t know! It’s the name of the river, but I don’t know what it means!” She was really troubled. “I don’t think I ever knew. I don’t think anybody ever told me.”
“Maybe nobody knows,” Richard said.
“I must find out. I’ve got to. You remind me to look it up the minute we get home.”
Home, he thought. This medium-sized city, with no particular distinguishing marks except for the greenness of its green wherever there was grass, was home. There was a river, a long bridge, those business buildings and blocks that might have been imported from New Jersey or anywhere in America, the same gleaming automobiles.
It was late afternoon, and Phyllis had driven very fast for a hundred miles, but she didn’t seem at all tired.
“Should we bring a present?” he asked. “A bottle of wine or something?”
“Oh, no. No, I don’t think so. I don’t think that would be right. Dad will want to give us everything. He won’t want to get a present. Besides, you need a little book to get liquor. You have to go to a state liquor store, you know, and buy a little book, and they write down in it everything you buy.”
“For Christ’s sake.”
“Well, don’t worry. There’ll be plenty of liquor around,” Phyllis said.
They left the neighborhood of gas stations and stores, drove past the neat little cottage-houses of wood or stucco, each with its luxuriant little lawn and hedge, and then came to a neighborhood where the trees, maples and oaks and elms, were taller and thicker in their trunks, where the houses were set back away from the street, and farther apart, each in its own park of rich green. And then suddenly they were turning into a long driveway, and it was a pleasant little shock to him that they were here, and would now have to stop and get out in front of the house. He saw it, long, brown and low. He shivered. It had a certain grace to it, this big house, and it belonged where it was among its carefully tended trees. A sprinkler made a huge diaphanous bell of mist beside the driveway, and a gray Cadillac sat on the smooth damp asphalt as if it belonged there. The house itself was made of some kind of brown stone, and in its long spaces unbroken by windows, its tall, recessed windows and its dark overhangs he recognized the spatial generosity that money can buy.
A High New House Page 14
