Thoughtfully he said, “It isn’t that this is a cause, it’s an effect.”
“I don’t understand a word,” said his father. “Please go on.”
“Why, it’s very simple,” said Melvin. “We’re not being married because she’s pregnant. I asked her before I knew, quite a while ago. And I have some more news.”
“Possibly you should keep it to yourself. I have had enough for one day.”
“I’ve got another job. That is, I think I have. It’s a wonderful opportunity with the gas company. I’ve been interviewed and they liked me and said to come back Monday. It’s a very progressive company, the interviewer told me. They believe in encouraging the employees to work their way to the top.” Melvin whipped a match across the sole of his shoe and lit a cigarette. “I wasn’t sure I’d like working for the gas company,” he said, between puffs, “but I’ve thought it over. I’d like being promoted. I don’t think I’ve had any sort of promotion since I don’t know when.”
“That is good news,” his father said. “Delivering ice was not dignified, but this sounds better. There is nothing wrong with delivering ice, except that we were disappointed. To make a comparison, it was the way we felt to learn you were no longer an aviation cadet but a sailor. We couldn’t imagine you as a sailor. It was like a dream, even when you came home wearing the uniform. Well—now, this sounds like an improvement, a step forward at last.”
“Yes,” Melvin said, “I think it is.”
“What are you to be doing? Tell me about the position.”
“First of all, I don’t have to get up so early. I won’t be expected at the office until eight o’clock.”
“If you enjoy sleeping late, all right, but that’s unimportant. I haven’t seen the gas company in Lawrence, but they have, I am told, a very nice building, modern, with satisfactory working conditions.” Jake Isaacs stood up and rubbed his hands together. “You don’t know how encouraging this sounds. Now, at last, you can amount to something. Buy a new suit. It’s important. I’ll give you the money. Customers don’t like to deal with shabby representatives. I can’t tell you how happy this makes me. If you work hard and obey your superiors there is no reason why you cannot advance rapidly. I happen to be acquainted with one of the head bookkeepers here. I will speak to him tomorrow, letting him know you will be working with the company in Lawrence. What will you be doing specifically?”
“I don’t think anybody would notice what sort of a suit I had on,” Melvin answered.
“Don’t be silly, of course they notice. I enter an office, the first thing—before anything else—I observe who greets me, how his shoes are polished, the haircut—you should get a haircut—and the quality of the gentleman’s suit. If I am greeted by a lady I observe her manners, the coiffure, hands, posture, and so forth. I then know the type of person with whom I am dealing. Nothing is more valuable. Get something appropriate, tailor-made. Pinstripe is always nice and creates a favorable impression, also a hat. Don’t forget to wear the hat to the office. The manager will notice and say to himself: I will keep my eye on that young man. Have the tailor send the bill to me. I’ll be delighted to pay.”
“I don’t need a suit.”
“Ridiculous. Let’s not argue about this. You’ve never been willing to dress, it’s good for you. What will you be doing?”
“Maybe so, but I don’t need a suit. In fact I’d look pretty foolish.”
“For the last time, what is your position with the company?”
Melvin hesitated. The fact was that if he obtained the job he would be reading meters, and he knew his father had gotten the impression that he was to be a junior executive. Finally, when the silence grew unbearable, he mentioned what he would be doing during a speech having to do with a number of other matters. He was intending to wear his comfortable and, by now, badly worn khakis and brogan shoes on the job. “And suppose it rains,” he suggested with persuasive confidence, “what then? I still have my canvas fatigue hat that we were issued in Iowa.”
“Gas meters? Is that the opportunity? Reading gas meters?”
“That’s right,” Melvin said.
“You told me you would be in a nice office.”
“No, no, that’s what you said, I only said I had to report at the office by eight o’clock, which is right. They give you a book, see, each meter reader gets his route book—it’s about so big,” he explained, boxing it with his hands, “like a notebook except that it has a metal binding, and there’s one page for each house on the route. It shows the location of the meters—you read the electric meter, too. Well, the minute I saw one of those books I thought—I don’t quite know what I’m trying to say, but it’s sort of a passport, if you know what I mean. For instance, on the ice truck, the passport was my icepick and rubber vest and tongs. What I mean is, nobody asked questions or wondered about me. I was no different from anybody else with a job. I was a member, don’t you see? I belonged. Well, so a flashlight and a meterman’s book accomplish exactly the same thing.”
“I don’t understand a word. Not one.”
“It’s clear enough. All that matters is the—well, there are these stereotypes, let’s say. It’s assumed if somebody looks like a professor, he is a professor. Or, take another example, if you come to attention and salute the flag, you’re patriotic. Or vice versa, of course. Now, in this case, I could be Karl Marx, or Machiavelli, but so long as I carry the flashlight and meterman’s book nobody will notice me. The point I’m making is that—ah,” he stopped, squeezing his lip and frowning, trying to recall the point.
“Marx? Karl Marx, did I hear you say? The Communist?”
Melvin felt suddenly depressed, and thought of how often he had attempted to explain one thing or another without success. “I should be starting back to the university,” he said. “There’s a talk and discussion in the auditorium tonight I want to hear. Some librarian lost his job on account of having a Communist mother-in-law, or something like that.” He noticed his father looking at him quite strangely.
“You are going to what? A Communist meeting on the campus? A librarian discharged as a security risk is speaking to students? I didn’t know that was allowed. You’re joking!”
“Security risk?” Melvin asked uneasily. “I never said—”
“A Senate Committee investigating public education and misuse of funds has discovered the new American history texts contain the word ‘liberty’ no more than twelve times as against a total of nineteen times in the previous edition. No one can explain the reason. The reason, however, is that Communists have infiltrated. Further, if I remember correctly, the word ‘Russia’ is now to be found a total of seventeen times, as opposed to five times in the previous edition. These are facts I am giving you, not mere opinions. In addition, it has been revealed the name of one of the editors is Lubitov, a native of Russia, born in Moscow.”
Melvin was dumbfounded by the expression which had come over his father’s face.
“It’s time to tell America the facts,” Jake Isaacs continued, and got to his feet and began walking back and forth, gesturing as he spoke. “The United States may be forced to defend itself again!” His voice was rising as it did whenever he was irritated or excited. He seemed to be aware of this, and made an effort to speak calmly. “I am reminded of a magazine cartoon showing an American peaceably asleep beneath a tree. Along comes a British soldier with a sword. The American wakes up fighting for his life. The struggle is over and he returns to sleep. Next comes a Spaniard with a sword, the same happens as before. Next a French soldier. Next a German. Each time the same thing occurs. America is now in the process of settling down for another nap, following the defeat of the Axis, unaware of the Russian soldier approaching. It is dreadful we don’t learn from experience. Am I correct in hearing you say you are going to listen to a Communist lecture? Possibly I was mistaken. You didn’t say any such thing.”
“Yes! I did say that!” Melvin exclaimed. He jumped up and thrust his hands into his pockets.
“I am! I’m going to that lecture.” He ran upstairs to his room for some books and then hurried away to catch the bus. He had not particularly cared about the lecture and had merely given it as a reason for starting back to the university, but now he was determined to attend.
27
In the days and weeks that followed he found himself thinking less often of his approaching marriage than of the change which had come over his father at the mention of Communism. It was as though his father had been stimulated by the possibility of another world war. This was so incredible that Melvin could not consider the idea for long without wondering if he himself had become unbalanced. He recalled as much as he could of their conversation. But it was not what had been said that was so frightening; it was the eagerness with which his father had begun to speak, the strength of his gestures, the animation that suffused his voice. And it seemed to Melvin that since the end of the last war his father had been a little discontented, as though some obscure purpose had gone out of his life. The implications of this, too, were frightening, for if it was true that he looked forward to another war, it must follow that he was insane. And yet, because he was not alone in his violent hatred, how could anyone say—and be called sane himself—that thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions, perhaps, were mad?
And it occurred to Melvin that if in the act of war, or in the preparation for it, there was indeed the sign of madness—if war was not, as he had once supposed, an instrument of divine providence, but merely a consequence of human intent—some proof of insanity should exist. And he reflected that if this proof did exist he most likely had encountered it already. He might well have met it face to face, day after day, without seeing it for what it was.
He thought of the various bases at which he had been stationed. Somewhere, he was sure, buried in that experience, a clue existed, a glyph or symbol. He remembered the snowy mesa where the Deacon crashed, the tiny red-and-black plane upside down like a celluloid T on a sparkling white tablecloth, and recalled how he had spiraled and circled in the silence that reigned over the wreck, studying and wondering. Then with the wind and inseparable from the wind he went floating over the great river and saw the shining water that descended from the lofty Colorado plains and flowed through Albuquerque on the way to Mexico, through Socorro and Rincon, Las Cruces, El Paso, and Juarez, until, turning to the east, embodied in the verity of that river, he and it together poured onward toward the azure Gulf.
He had been aware of almost nothing except this river flowing through the valley, and had thought of how the rivers joined and mingled in the sea; that one day these waters should again rain down on the mountains—that this should be true, that it had never failed to be true, now seemed to him not only impressive and strangely authoritative, but hinting deeply of some response to the questions which perplexed him.
He thought of the sky above Pensacola, of clouds and darkened earth, and the rain, seeing deep blue lakes in the distance, and densely wooded hills which gradually approached and were not hills but only shadows, of the day he alone flew between two fantastic pillars into a gray and ghostly city where fog swirled and he was lost and burst forth miraculously into the blinding sun while the city drifted on, clouds eternally drifting toward the sea. He remembered that he had seen the shadow of his airplane on a cloud in the very center of a rainbow-colored halo, and it seemed to him this might be an omen. At Pensacola the meaning lay close to the surface.
So it was that the morning after their marriage Melvin and his new wife, carrying a cake box packed with sandwiches and fruit and with a large Thermos bottle of coffee, boarded a train to New Orleans. From there they planned to take a bus to Pensacola. He had obtained a vacation of one week from his job as a meter reader, and, because there were no examinations scheduled for either of them at the university, they had decided they could afford to miss a few classes.
After a day in New Orleans, during which they walked around the city a great deal and paid a brief visit to the air station on Lake Pontchartrain, they got on a bus to Mobile.
In a little while the bus was out of the city and racing along the sandy coast, through Gulfport and Biloxi—one after another the sun-struck southern beach towns flew past the bus windows. Once he had peered down through rifts in the blooming cumulus clouds and distinguished this same highway on which he was now traveling, and had been able to make out automobiles and trucks and buses, and had sometimes seen a train, and here and there an isolated tree casting a shadow in a watery field or across a road. The pine forests had resembled fungus, lichens clinging to an iron-red and umber earth, variegated like damp granite, and he had watched the shadow of his airplane flicker across the highways and fields and forests and ponds with the fantastic rapidity and frenzied energy of a spider suddenly floating, stiffly poised, on the water of some lake, with the shore receding steadily.
He had assumed there would be a number of interesting things to point out to her in Mobile, so they wandered around in Bienville Square, stopped at Walgreen’s for a soda, browsed about in the Haunted Bookshop—Pat Cole, who seldom returned from liberty in Mobile without a new book, had one day introduced him to the people who owned the shop—and eventually, fatigued by the relentless heat, they returned to the depot, yawning and fanning themselves. He had not been able to explain successfully that once upon a time Walgreen’s drugstore had been of considerable importance in the scheme of things—on two particular fountain stools, still there, which he had pointed out to her, he and his best friend Sam Horne used to wait, and wait for hours, and stare into the mirror at the passersby, at the activities going on behind their backs. They had never quite known what they were waiting for, but they had been prepared for it, whatever it was. They had waited there and scanned the scene in that mirror.
He told her about it as lucidly as he could. “We wasted a lot of time there. Everybody congregated in that drugstore, I don’t know why. It was sociable, somehow. Cadoodlers, they used to call us, or did I mention that already? ‘Evenin’, cadoodlah boy,’ some girl might say. ‘Wheah y’all from?’ Well, then, we’d say we were from Barin Field, though sometimes, if they looked like they came from the bottom of the barrel, Horne would poke me in the ribs and say we were from Corry or Bronson, and he’d introduce us with fictitious names. They were suspicious of us, though, even when we told the truth. I think they figured we had only one thing on our minds.”
“They were so right.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” he nodded, and felt obscurely flattered that nothing else had been on his mind. “We tried to get them drunk and into bed, naturally, and they tried to drink the liquor without getting drunk. We only got one night a week away from the base, that’s why.”
“I see,” said his wife, who did not sound too cordial.
Then they were on another bus speeding through the humid day. In the pine woods were cattle, cream-colored and brindled; he had never noticed them when he was a cadet. Aroused by the bus, they ambled away from the road and trotted with cumbersome udders swaying, deeper into the woods. Vegetation grew in high tropical profusion; telephone poles sunk in marshy ditches alongside the road were half concealed, old vines and fresh tendrils encircled the posts and crept along the crossbars to touch the wires and glass plugs. The tilled fields whose every detail he clearly discerned—tin cans strung up to frighten the crows, each ditch, each furrow methodically turning like the spoke of a wheel as the bus went speeding by—the last time he had seen these fields he had thought of them only in terms of personal security, as places to land in case of emergency. He had looked down on them, estimating their substance, comparing the color of one to another as he flew by, in order to judge how it would support him, meanwhile listening absently to the pulsing roar of the engine, which was like the surf, or the wind on a mountain, and as the cruciform shadow flickered along he glanced ahead more frequently and earnestly to catch sight of the water tower at Barin Field—a stiff-legged, stilt-legged, red-and-white giant standing spraddled with pine t
rees at his waist and wearing a friendly, preposterous, impossible coolie hat, a red-and-white checkerboard monster all the way around, like some metallic companion of Dorothy, unutterably nonplused but affable just the same, who had gotten lost in the woods on his way to Oz.
Bloody Barin was closed, the gates chained and secured by a rusty padlock. Melvin stood with his hands grasping the fence and stared through the mesh at the distant barracks where he had lived. On the second floor at the central window he used to stand with a billiard cue like a rifle in the crook of his arm while he drank a bottle of Coca-Cola and waited for Sam Horne. From another window on the left side of the barracks—he was not positive which window, although once he had known—he used to stare, idly, feet on the desk and a gunnery manual in his lap, half asleep from boredom, toward the flight line where during interminable winter months the hangars loomed like mausoleums just beneath the sluggish clouds, illuminated and discolored by reflection in the gray-green daylight, while rain dripped from the eaves, and over the field monotonously swept the red beacon, thrusting and darting at the clouds like a fish at the stormy surface. Through the fence to his right was a bunker that separated the landing mat from the road; hundreds of cadets had been standing on it the night the planes collided and crashed and exploding gasoline spouted from the wreckage in flaming diagonal arches. The back steps to the barracks had been crowded, too. The billiard game had stopped. Everyone was silent because Death was visiting once again.
Although he had not seen Death the Horseman that night he thought it must be as they say, riding across a yellow moon with a wooden-handled scythe uplifted. Death that night had come to visit Pensacola, as it often had before, and as he had understood it would again, perhaps for him. So, too, had they all known it might have been for them; they watched the great spurting flames, the incandescent eruption, in such silence—leaving the ivory balls to gleam unattended on the green baize table.
The Patriot Page 42
