A Tender Victory

by Taylor Caldwell

  The children were fascinated by their trees. Their faces glowed. They walked about them, touching them with gentle fingers. Emilie watched from her nest in Johnny’s arms; Mrs. Burnsdale uncomplainingly trundled Jean to his own trees. It was hard to take the children into the house again, where there was hot chocolate waiting in the warm kitchen, and large sugar cookies and a dish of red apples.

  “I wish,” said Johnny, “that you’d let me pay for the trees, Lon.”

  The boy’s expression became cold. “They were cheap,” he said. “Almost nothing. Besides, after you found me those car-washing jobs, and jobs washing windows and putting up storm windows, I got enough cash. I wanted to give something to the kids. I’ll be watching the trees too. First I ever planted, except the lilacs at home.”

  He gazed at Johnny with the unreadable eyes of the street-fashioned young. “Mom’s home now, all the time. And I got myself a job delivering groceries in a truck on Saturdays; almost enough, with Pop’s new Saturday job, to pay off the installments. The man who sold us the stove’s willing to wait until we can get around to him. Not a bad joe. And mom’s looking better every day, and we got new curtains. Kind of nice to see her when I come home from school.” He picked up another cooky, and chewed it casually. “Dr. McManus gave me a job, too, for the winter. Shoveling snow.”

  “But when will you do your homework?” asked Johnny anxiously.

  The boy let out a rude snort of laughter. “Man! I don’t do it! Don’t need to. What there is, when I do it, I do at our life-adjustment class. Under the desk, on my knees. Mrs. Guston got that one in—life adjustment.”

  Johnny was puzzled. He said, “Well, life adjustment doesn’t sound too bad. Tell me about it, Lon.”

  “Guess things have changed since you were a kid,” Lon said, staring at him cunningly. Johnny immediately felt a twinge of senility. The boy went on, “Pop doesn’t have much education, himself, but after you talked to him couple weeks ago he decided he ought to be interested in what I was doing. So first thing he asks me about was my school. You could see he was being conscientious, as you told him, but he wasn’t really interested. Not till he looked through my books.” Lon picked up another cooky, and chewed thoughtfully. “Funny, I never thought the old man was very bright. But he began to read my schoolbooks, and then he blew his top. He jumps up, and yells, and keeps stabbing pages with his fingers. Mom had her palpitation, as she calls it. And Pop says, ‘What the hell they teaching you kids nowadays? Where’s history? Where’s arithmetic? Where’s English? Where’s George Washington and geography? And what’s this crap’—excuse me, but that’s what Pop says—‘consumer economics, and how to have a successful date, emotional health, and how to keep your teeth white, and the dynamics of group dancing?’ And I says to Pop, ‘that’s what they call dynamic, functional learning.’ Then he blew his top again.”

  Johnny’s face darkened. “Is that what they’re teaching you in school, actually, Lon?”

  “That’s right, mister.” The boy grinned at him. “Well, Pop goes off up in the attic and he brings down his old schoolbooks. Don’t, know why he kept them. After all, he’s an old so-and-so, nearly forty. And he yells, and throws the books at me, and says, ‘Ninth-grade books—1918! Look at them!’” Lon’s tough face sharpened. “Well, mister, I look. And you know what? Why, we kids in senior high couldn’t do the algebra problems in those books, and we don’t know anything about the ancient history they taught way back there, and there was a French textbook, first year high, and American history in one whole book, not what we have now, social sciences, and an English grammar book that even the bright joes in our class wouldn’t know anything about. Diagrams and things. And civics. Who knows about civics in the schools? And commercial geography, with big maps. I look through the civics, and first time I ever heard about how cases get to the Supreme Court, and the functions of the Supreme Court.”

  Lon was speaking again. “We got a good handball team at our school. Oh, they teach us lots of sports! Pop loves sports himself, but he says all that sports in school do is to take up our time so we can’t learn anything or want to learn anything. Well, we play the other public high schools. And then there’s a private school in town, just one. The Beaverbrook School for Boys. And that private school challenges us to a game. The principal didn’t want that. He refuses. So the Beaverbrook joes needle us. So the principal agrees, when we threatened to stage a strike. We wanted to show those high-class joes with their convertibles and their girls with pink cashmere sweaters and their golf clubs. Then the principal gets us together and talks about us beating the pants off those joes. Well, we won the game, and we didn’t even work up a sweat. But it’s funny; a couple of us got to know a couple of their guys, and one of them’s a friend of mine now. His old man is what our teachers calls an absentee landlord or something; he owns stock in the New York Central and other railroads, and just lives here because he was born here. And, yeah, something else I didn’t think about until now. Bob’s old man was a miner, right here in Barryfield, and he invented an automatic coal-mining machine, and an automatic warning device when the coal gas begins to get thick. Bob’s proud of his old man. Wish my dad would invent a machine or something, so I could have a convertible myself, and one of those dolls too.” His young voice was wistful. He sighed. “Guess I’ll never have a chance to get anywhere. Just for the fun of it I applied for admission to a university where they got a wonderful engineering school, and they sent me an old entrance exam, and, damn it, I couldn’t answer half the questions! Maybe Pop’s right.”

  He forgot Johnny and brooded, and his face was no longer young but filled with a mature anger and frustration, and his eyes glittered with furious resentment. Johnny saw this, and said to himself, There must be tens of thousands, perhaps millions, of boys like this one.

  Lon’s hands began to play with that huge belt buckle which Johnny had thought was touchingly absurd. And then he saw that it was a weapon, a lethal weapon attached to a thick, wide belt of leather.

  Lon’s sharp voice, so devoid of proper diction and so slurring of consonants, broke in again, “Well, Bob and I got to talking about school. He’s a senior too. He showed me his books. You know what? I’ve been getting books from the library and studying all kinds of things, by myself, but Jesus! Bob’s books were Greek to me! They had all the things Pop says he learned in school, and I didn’t. Nothing about ‘group and social adjustments,’ ‘life adjustments,’ and machines, and other crap. Mister, I say crap, and this time I don’t apologize. Nothing about what to do on a date, or insulting things about brushing your teeth to make them white. Jesus, we know about toothbrushes, don’t we, and girls are just girls, aren’t they?”

  “Yes,” said Johnny.

  Lon stood up, tall and lithe, and he hooked his hands in his belt, and his lean, intelligent head was held high. “Well, Bob got me a midyear sophomore exam. Here I am, a senior in the Lenox Street High School, and I answered seven out of every ten sophomore questions right! The other three? Never heard anything about them. And Bob says it wasn’t an accident; it was planned that way. So he gets me sophomore textbooks, and here I am in high school, a senior, and I study up on them, and finally, I pass them—the sophomore exams. Bob sneaked me out a copy. And this year he got me junior textbooks, and I’m studying them.”

  He stared before him, lost in grim and furious thought. “You know what they say in our school? There shouldn’t be competitve exams! No ‘child,’ they say, should be made to feel inferior; it might hurt his life adjustment. Just knowledge isn’t enough. But then we’re just due to drive trucks and work machines, anyway.”

  He caught Kathy gazing at him intently, her blue eyes very serious. “Hello, yellow hair,” he said.

  She said precisely, “You are a fine boy. I think I shall marry you when I grow up.”

  He waved a grubby, calloused hand largely. “Oh sure. Just give me a ring when you’re eghteen. I’ll take you out on my truck route, and we’ll eat hamburgers.”
He turned back to Johnny, whose pallor and strain stood out on his face. “Bob takes me to his school one day. A small, dark-brick school on a nice street. Old school. Old steps. Kind of high, pointed windows. Nothing like our school, yellow brick and big hunks of glass making walls all around. Old beat-up desks, fastened down; ours can be shoved around to make things cozy, when the dumb kids want to sound off. The rooms in Bob’s school are dinky; floors polished, but dark and uneven. We have bright, fresh linoleum, with designs, and our rooms are big as hell. But, you know something, mister? There was kind of a smell in Bob’s school—”

  “I know,” said Johnny, trying to smile through his dread. “It’s called the odor of learning.”

  Johnny moved a spoon on the plastic table top. What can I do for this boy? He thought of the money he had placed in the bank for the children, the money given him by Dr. Stevens and the soldiers. “For the kids,” they had said. And here was another of the lost and the betrayed. Johnny came to a quick decision. “Lon, you told me you wanted to be an engineer. How’d you like to go to Bob’s school for your last year? It isn’t too late to enroll.”

  Lon eyed him, astounded. He said slowly, “Look, mister, are you nuts?”

  “No, Lon. Never mind about your clothes. I’m sure you have something else besides those jeans, and the belt—and things. And I’ll help some way. Listen, Lon. I’ll call the principal of Bob’s school. You’ll get in! And—I have a friend, Dr. McManus. And then, Lon, when you graduate, with the honors you’ll get, there’ll be a good university. You can work your way through. I did.”

  Lon could not speak. He looked into Johnny’s dark-blue eyes, which were full of fervor and resolution. “If I can just save one of you,” said Johnny, “it will be something. Just one of you. And you’ll remember, and later you’ll help.”

  “Papa knows best,” said Kathy, from out of some forgotten memory of discipline.

  The others echoed her, soberly. Pietro screamed impatiently, “Lon must do as Papa says!” The volatile little boy could not understand the older boy’s absolute stillness, his fixed expresion, his fallen, limp hands.

  “You mean it, sir?” Lon said huskily.

  Johnny stood up. “Yes, Lon.” He put his hand on the lean shoulder and shook it affectionately. “Think about it. Call me tomorrow. Talk to your parents. It’s getting dark, and you ought to be on your way home.”

  18

  The children could talk of nothing else but their trees. They sat about the table with Johnny, eating heartily, except for little Emilie. There was color in Jean’s sunken cheeks, and even in Max’s. Max was really the wonder, thought Johnny, with a satisfaction that almost overcame his despondency. The shut and empty look had gone from his brown eyes; he did not speak often, but he looked about him with interest and attention, and when he caught Johnny’s eye he would smile shyly. Kathy said, as she urged Emilie to eat, “Isn’t it wonderful about Emilie’s flowers? We didn’t get any flowers. Lon must like Emilie the best of all.”

  Immediately there was a little silence, and every youthful pair of eyes was turned sorrowfully upon the child, who was smiling with proud radiance. How much they know! thought Johnny. “Emilie give flowers,” said Emilie. Yes, thought Johnny, with the sorrow wizening his heart again, you will give flowers, my darling, for many years. Now his fierce rebellion tore him once more, and with this rose his old hatred for those who had almost shattered these children’s lives, not only in Europe, but in America. There is no end to man’s evil, he said to himself, and he remembered how only a short time before he had had compassion upon mankind for the evil it embraced every hour of every day.

  “Lord,” he prayed silently, “why didst Thou come? Why didst Thou climb Calvary, and hang upon the Cross? Two thousand years—and man is no kinder or more merciful. Out of love, Thou tookest on his flesh, yet he gives Thee no love in return. How lonely it must be for Thee, out in those spaces, remembering!”

  He thought of that loneliness, and he was pierced by a fresh and more powerful sorrow, and this time for God.

  “Well, well, eating again, stuffing yourselves at the expense of those who work!” a familiar voice squeaked. The children raised a cry of pleasure, but there was no pleasure on Johnny’s face when he turned to see Dr. McManus, more uncouth and untidy than every, more formidable of expression. “Any apple pie left?” asked the doctor, after a swift glance at Johnny.

  Johnny stood up. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Besides, I want to talk to you, doctor.”

  The old man raised one of his craggy brows. “Talk to, not with, eh?” he said. “Remember, I’m your senior, parson. Don’t be disrespectful. All right, come on.” He waved his hand at the children and went with Johnny into the parlor and sat down.

  Johnny told him everything about Lon. When Johnny had finished, the doctor was silent for some time, twisting his cigarette reflectively in his mouth. Then he exclaimed, “Thought what little cash you had was for your kids! Your idea is the damnedest one I ever heard! Of course you aren’t serious.”

  “I am,” said Johnny firmly. “And that’s where you come in. You know Mr. Beaverbrook. I wish you would speak to him and try to get Lon into his school. I’m not worrying about the money.”

  “God will provide,” said the doctor sardonically.

  Johnny looked at him straightly. “He always has,” he replied. “He provided what little money I have; He sent me here; and He gave all of us you, and Sol Klein, and Dr. Kennedy, and Father John Kanty, and Rabbi Chortow, and Lorry. I’m not sure why I’m here yet, but perhaps I’ll find out eventually.”

  The doctor looked at his newspaper. “Perhaps sooner than you think, Rover boy. All right. I’ll see Roger Beaverbrook; you commit me to the most hellish and ridiculous things. I don’t know why I stand for you. You’ve upset my whole life.” He looked slowly about the parlor. “What a foul room. By the way, has the roof been leaking?”

  “Of course,” said Johnny, smiling. “But I took your advice, and we use pans.”

  But the doctor was serious again. “This was my father’s home. I always thought it was miserable. No one would do anything about it, though. Anyway, I don’t want to pull it down. Perhaps”—The doorbell rang, and Johnny got up and went to the door. He said over his shoulder, “But we’ll still have to do something about the deliberate mediocrity of the school curriculum, and about the bright kids.” He opened the door, turning on the raw bulb over the stoop as he did so. Three men stood on the threshold, the ruddy-faced little Dan McGee with his pile of white waves over his round head, a tall, robust blond man with very pale blue eyes, and a slender medium-sized man of about fifty-five with an anxious face which was singularly ghostlike.

  Dan said, “Hello, Mr. Fletcher.” He indicated the last man. “This here is Mr. Glen Dowdy, one of the mine owners around here. And this,” indicating the smiling blond stranger with his remarkably well-tailored clothes and air of sophisticated assurance, “is Mr. Lars Swensen, who’s got credentials. Can we come in and talk to you?”

  Johnny looked at Mr. Swensen, puzzled. If this was a union man, he was an entirely new kind. He glanced at Mr. Swensen’s smooth, big white hands, and thought, This man’s never been a miner. A “city” man. And in what they call “Brooks Brothers” clothing.

  The minister admitted the three into the house, still frowning in some bewilderment. Dr. McManus raised his formidable eyebrows, focused for a hard moment on Mr. Swensen, and thought, So this is the Swensen Lorry’s told me about. Mac Summerfield’s friend. How come he’s interested in our piddling little mines around here?

  Johnny introduced Mr. Swensen to the doctor, and Mr. Swensen murmured courteously. Dr. McManus grunted, shifted on his huge buttocks. “Heard about you, Mr. Swensen,” he said. “Friend of Mac Summerfield’s, ain’t you?”

  Mr. Swensen smiled his happy smile. “As a matter of fact, I do know Mr. Summerfield slightly. I think we’ve met once or twice, but I can’t remember where.”

  The doctor was sile
nt as he lit his cigarette. Swensen was lying. Why? A man usually had an urgent reason for lying. What was Swensen’s reason now? Suddenly McManus became aware that Swensen was giving Johnny a long, appraising look, a thoughtful look, a weighing look, and the doctor sat upright in his chair. A sharp sense of uneasiness caused a tingling in his hands and feet.

  “What’re you doing here, Mr. Swensen?” asked the doctor, suddenly and bluntly.

  Mr. Swensen smiled again. “You might say, doctor, that I’m interested in justice.”

  “Um,” said Dr. McManus. He looked at Johnny, who was utterly baffled, and then at Mr. McGee and Mr. Dowdy, who slumped dejectedly in their chairs. “Justice,” said the doctor. “Seems I heard somewhere that justice has got a thousand names. Depends, too, on your politics, your religion, your employer or your employees, and even your wife. Loosest word in the English language, which sure is a very loose language. Means anything at all, to anybody.” He grunted as if amused. “Studied semantics, myself. We ought to have a more precise language, like the French. So we’d each know what we mean. Now what would you mean by justice, Mr. Swensen?”

  Mr. Swensen appeared to be enjoying himself. He gave all his attention to the doctor. “In this case,” he said gently, “justice means the right thing for the miners of Barryfield.”

  Mr. Dowdy coughed miserably. Dr. McManus looked amazed and said, “So you’re interested in getting justice for our miners, are you? That sure is damn nice of you, Mr. Swensen! But how come? What’s it to you? What’s this all about?”