A Long Island Story Page 13

  Perle was amused by Becca’s invalid persona – a term Ben later played with, with much self-slaying – invalid! In-valid! – which infuriated Addie. When told about the sensitive patient episode, which only lasted a day or two, Ben could only come up with one background possibility. That December he had read the children A Christmas Carol and the pathetic figure of Tiny Tim had moved Becca to tears, which, though they were undoubtedly forced, nevertheless dribbled down her cheeks.

  ‘He’s so sad!’ she intoned.

  ‘He’s not, he’s stupid,’ said Jake, who was not a sentimental little boy, and whose current hero was the new heavyweight champion, Rocky Marciano. ‘He’s not as big as the other ones, but he’s the toughest! Nobody can beat him!’ One of the smaller boys in his class – indeed, several of the girls towered over him – he was wiry and pugnacious, with a quick temper, the kind of boy who would have enjoyed a bit of biffing and boffing, except that his first experience of fisticuffs had been unfortunate. He now limited his aggression to his mouth, though his vocabulary was limited. Burgundy Farm regarded cursing as vulgar and aggressive, and didn’t so much ban as discourage it, however much they promoted the ideal of the free child. When, in a rage over being denied something or other, he once called Ben a ‘basted’, his father, instead of taking umbrage or being amused, merely corrected his pronunciation. ‘Bastard,’ he said. ‘You pronounce it “bastard”.’ Jake didn’t believe him. Neddy said ‘basted’ when they played in the streets. Neddy said a lot of words. He could fight, too.

  On the first days of Becca’s illness, when Perle and Addie thought it best that the kids be separated, Jake was fretful and restless, wanting to go into the bedroom to see his sister. Becca would have liked that, so he lurked by the door, books in hand, until shooed away by Perle. When the fever lifted, and Becca was preening delicately on the porch, the desire to serve her, or even to be with her, had passed. She couldn’t understand it. She wasn’t yet a strong reader and confined herself to comics, of which she had a large number. She particularly liked Peanuts, had the book and read the strip in the newspaper every day. It was about kids her age. She loved Charlie Brown, he was so nice, but that Lucy was horrible.

  That afternoon, to her surprise and delight, Jake came in with a book that had cartoons in it, a real book in a real cover that looked like it was for grown-ups. He took the limp Peanuts paperback from her hand, put it on the table by her side. ‘Put that silly book away, it’s only for kids!’

  ‘I am a kid!’ she said, but weakly, as if without conviction. If Jake had something better she’d be interested. He sat beside her and opened his book, which was filled with cartoons in heavy black ink, not like Peanuts or Sluggo. Sometimes with a lot of writing as well.

  ‘These are in the newspaper too,’ Jake said, anxious to establish their importance. ‘They’re about politics!’ Becca looked a bit blank. ‘You know, like the government and what’s happening that gets on TV.’ He had dog-eared a couple of the pages, though he knew he wasn’t supposed to. He could always fold them back, no one would notice. If they did, he didn’t do it, nobody could prove he had.

  In the first few cartoons there was a man with a beard who looked ugly. The cartoon was making fun of him because he was a bad man.

  ‘That’s Senator McCarthy,’ said Jake. ‘He’s the reason we’re moving.’

  Becca had already forgotten the discussion in the dream-world of the fort, put it out of her mind. They were really moving! When? And why was that ugly man making them?

  She peered at the picture carefully. He looked like that man on TV sometimes, on the news, surrounded by other men all in suits and ties, having meetings. Nobody seemed to be having a good time.

  ‘How come he can make us move?’

  ‘Because he is hunting Communists, and he says there’s lots of them in the government, and they are against America. He’s a big fat schmo!’

  By the time he’d finished his explanation, including the astonishing information that Ben was a Communist – that must be wrong, Communists were bad, really really bad! – Becca was turning away, not in tears but in shock. That ugly man hated Ben, and Ben was going to run away. With Addie and her and Jake. To Huntington. What if they found him there and took him away?

  She put her hands over her ears and closed her eyes. Where was Granny when she really needed her? Or Addie, even?

  ‘Go away!’ she said. ‘I hate you!’

  He was already turning to another page.

  ‘If you think that’s scary, look at this!’

  He had opened to one of Herblock’s cartoons featuring Mike the Atomic Bomb, a towering personage with the legs of a man, a huge sausage-shaped body and a leering expression, with whiskers like that bad Senator (he loved big bombs!) and a funny topknot on his head. He was enormous: people only came up to his knees, he leant over and threatened them, they cowered.

  ‘Just look at this, it’s funny!’ said Jake.

  She couldn’t resist, opened her eyes, turned back round, studied the picture. The big creature had a bunch of little bombs in his hand and a cuckoo clock with a horrible bird looking out. He was pointing to the time.

  ‘He’s so ugly. Who is he?’

  ‘He’s called Mike.’

  ‘Mike?’

  ‘He’s a bomb, the biggest one. He’s an atomic bomb.’

  Becca knew about bombs, sort of. On Looney Tunes sometimes one of the bad guys had a bomb, like on Tom and Jerry: it was round and had a string with fire on its top and in big white letters it said BOMB. Then it went BOOM! and there was smoke and then everything started again. Bombs couldn’t hurt you, they were funny.

  Becca looked at him again, fascinated by the picture without understanding it, quite.

  ‘We dropped one of him on the Japs,’ said Jake. ‘Twice! Killed millions of them, they were totally blown up, nothing left, not even any bones! Then they surrendered, pronto!’

  This was too much to take in, and Becca didn’t wish to hear any more. She got up from her chair with surprising speed and agility, and turned into the house, pausing only to ask, ‘Who’ll look after us when Ben’s in jail?’

  3

  ‘Will you read it to me?’

  She didn’t expect an answer, or get one.

  ‘You’re so private about your writing. I don’t understand. You’re not shy, and you certainly don’t lack self-confidence!’

  She’d been impressed, impressed and appalled, when Ben told her the story of how he’d got his first job, just out of law school. Asked by a prospective employer to provide a reference from one of his professors, he had approached the Dean of the law school, with whom he’d taken two classes.

  ‘I’m too busy,’ said the Dean, winking. ‘Why don’t you write it yourself, and I’ll sign it?’

  ‘Gosh,’ she’d said. ‘What’d you do?’

  ‘What would you have done?’

  ‘Me? I’d have refused.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Aside from the fact that it’s unethical, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. It’s impossible to be objective about yourself.’

  He’d laughed and shook her by the arm. ‘Objective? Is that what you think references are? Nonsense. They are advertisements for yourself, and you have to make sure that whoever provides one does just that. Sells you!’

  ‘So what did you write?’

  ‘I wrote the best goddamn reference anyone ever had. I said Ben Grossman is an exemplary student and person. That he was Phi Beta Kappa, chairman of the Philomathean Society, editor of the Law Review . . .’

  ‘Shameless!’ she’d said, shaking her head.

  ‘So far it’s true! I then went on to say that I was an outstanding student with a first-class, highly cultured mind, would make an exemplary lawyer, combined virtues of intellect and high moral purpose in a way unparalleled in the Dean’s experience . . .’

  ‘Jesus!’

  ‘And then I added some really complimentary stuff! I forget most of it.’


  ‘Did the Dean even read it?’

  ‘Of course, he had to sign at the bottom. He read it quite carefully, even added a comma in one place, then signed it with a flourish. “Good for you!” he said. “Just what I thought you’d do, quite right, that should do it!”’

  She considered the story, stretched her arms and rolled over in the bed.

  ‘What’s that word you use, you know, that means unmitigated gall?’

  ‘Chutzpah!’

  ‘Plenty of that, it’s amazing!’ She rolled over on top of him to demonstrate her admiration, her sexual intensity all the more appealing to him in that it was silent, save a final, not entirely ladylike grunt. A considerable contrast, and a welcome one. He didn’t make much of a fuss about coming either, just an orgasm after all, not exactly oceanic.

  He rubbed her naked arm, resting on his side, his head on the pillow, soothed to silence by their lovemaking.

  ‘I need to talk about your writing,’ she said. ‘I feel as if it’s a sort of barrier between us, that if you could share . . .’

  ‘It’s private, that’s all. Leave it, Rhoda, please leave it.’

  ‘One of your compartments, is it? Everything in its place, nothing slopping over the boundaries, each area sacrosanct. For someone who wants to love you, who does love you, you never come together, never form a whole.’

  He saw that this was right, for it was what he intended, what protected and nourished him. ‘I know.’ He should have said he was sorry to have excluded her, but he wasn’t.

  She’d had the same answer before, the same tepid response, and knew that was all she’d get.

  ‘But do you share it, you know . . .’

  ‘Not any more.’

  In fact, though he would not admit it to her, even his writing was compartmentalised. She knew a little about the unpublished novel, and the short story that had been published in Story magazine, been impressed that he was keeping company, if only on that one occasion, with real writers, famous ones. What he didn’t tell her was that he also wrote popular articles simply to make some money, full of faux wisdom and shoulder-shrugging cuteness. He’d had one published in Your Life, a sub-Reader’s Digest rag, entitled ‘Let’s Not Pretend’. It ended with a folksiness that had made him wince until the cheque arrived: ‘Most of us have a long, long way to go. But no one has ever crossed the ocean without first leaving the shore. As one dope to another – Bon voyage!’

  Such articles were surprisingly hard to write, he’d had too many rejected, and could hardly tell why some were deemed better than others. You just had to keep trying, like fishing with six hooks, one would catch a fish.

  ‘Let’s Not Pretend’ – why would he tell her about that? It made him ashamed. And proud too, ashamed and proud. She thought of him as the high-brow author of that piece he’d published in Story magazine, claimed even to remember it. Probably even went back to it after they’d met and she became interested in him. Though it had been published six years earlier, the gloomy tale of marital discord might have suggested to her that there was, as it were, an opening available. (Or, she giggled at the thought, an opening unavailable?) On rereading ‘Track Shoes’, Rhoda was struck by how obviously autobiographical it was: the story was virtually a cry for help.

  The marriage at its centre, between Bob and Helen Goodrich, is sterile, undermined by her unhappiness, hostility and promiscuous flirtatiousness (perhaps something more). Sexless, virtually.

  ‘That night, Helen was sleepy. When Helen was sleepy, the little Louis Quinze table between the two beds stood guard over no-man’s land . . . How long since they had even—? Quite a while . . . Good thing one of them could sleep.’

  Two beds? No man’s land? Poor Ben, married to such a frigid bitch, what a sorry situation! The story turns on the Goodrichs’ argument about Helen’s unjust treatment of their older son, who had caused the younger one to hurt himself falling off a bike. Helen punishes him by withdrawing permission to run in the hundred-yard dash at the weekend picnic, a race he is sure to win. His father had bought him a pair of track shoes to help him to victory.

  Helen asserts her right to make household decisions, clearly favouring the younger child. What’s done is done, unjust and irrevocable. The story ends, as if inevitably, with that ghastly wife enticing him into her bed, and he following abjectly, abandoning his moral high ground for the low terrain of the bedroom.

  But the story, Rhoda recognised, was more than an expression of desperation, it was finely wrought, knew when to hold back and when to let go, entranced and involved the reader. Ben was a real writer, and Story was a great magazine!

  ‘Didn’t they publish Shirley Jackson and H.E. Bates and Tennessee Williams and . . .’

  ‘And,’ he said, ‘Langston Hughes, and Peter De Vries.’

  ‘Enough! Why didn’t you do more?’

  ‘I tried. But kids came, Addie is pretty demanding, and DC came, and I didn’t have the time.’

  ‘Real writers always have time!’ she said, as if she knew what she was talking about.

  ‘Perhaps I didn’t have the heart then,’ he said. ‘Enough already.’

  She paused, having crossed a line. Contrite.

  ‘Time, you need time . . .’

  He laughed, as if what she was suggesting was pure fantasy, the hanging gardens of Babylon. To have time to write!

  He’d tried, half-heartedly. Sat in his office at the typewriter, hunting for the right words, stalled, the blank page mocking him, made as few pecks as a replete chicken, pushed the typewriter away and closed its case. Hunt and not peck. Even when it was going badly, though, nothing was more important than this, he reassured himself: making the words matter.

  Lawyers should be like that, they should be wordsmiths too, like proper authors, writing succinct briefs, arguing cases compellingly. It was one of the reasons he’d gone to law school at Penn, edited the Law Review, joined the Department of Justice lawyers arguing the cases for rural electrification and the development of hydroelectric power in Tennessee. To make a difference, and to make it crisply and compellingly. He wanted his briefs to bear a personal stamp. That must be Grossman, he wanted to hear his colleagues say as they examined his arguments, and his exposition, enviously.

  Most lawyers were prolix, their prose impenetrable and jargon-laden, the absence of proper punctuation enough to bring a tear to the eye. For every Clarence Darrow, there were ten thousand illiterate shysters and incompetent dogsbodies droning on. It made his ears hurt and his heart ache.

  At an Appellate Court in Tennessee, arguing what should have been a straightforward government case, he treated the judge as if he were an attentive reader, as Hemingway would have regarded his, keeping his language simple but exact, compelling attention. He had traipsed through small courts like this for years, arguing a case that should have been obvious! Rural electrification was essential, it had improved lives that were still mired in the primitive deprivations of the nineteenth century. Thanks to the federal government projects, there would be electrical outlets in every room, and hence lighting even in the night-times, indoor toilets, electrical pumps for water. Telephones to keep in touch with each other! But even in communities that had begun to profit from the bringing of the light – that was what the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 accomplished! – there was still resistance. Country people did not like federal intervention, they could look after themselves! That they had failed to do so was hardly the point, it was not up to the government to tell them what to do!

  Ben was used to explaining this patiently, and in detail. It was so obvious to him – it was obvious to anyone with half a brain. But he had trained himself – perhaps not altogether successfully – not to talk down to the people he encountered in small-town courts. All he had to do, after all, was to explain. The government wanted to improve people’s lives! He listed the many benefits, one by one. Small local businesses could not provide such changes, it took vast amounts of money. The government was anxious to provide loans and crea
te jobs, create huge projects that would bring the light into the darkness. The New Deal was a great deal!

  ‘That was an elegant presentation,’ drawled the judge in his summing up, looking at this Grossman directly and unsympathetically, eyes hooded like a water moccasin from a Southern swamp. During the trial, he had continually referred to Ben by his full title, ‘Chief of the Consulting Section of the Electrifications Operation Division’, which he drew out languorously, syllable by syllable, until it seemed meaningless nonsense.

  ‘Like some lines from Jabberwocky,’ thought Ben, at first amused by the ploy, because he thought it was a fatuous title too. The more unwieldy an organisation is, the dumber its job descriptions and demarcations. But by now Ben had heard his title numerous times and it caused him nothing but the irritation it was designed to elicit.

  ‘Veh elegant . . . Ah’m gonna rule against you.’

  It was the absence of the ‘but’ that gave the game away: Grossman – not the name of a proper American! – was a Yankee Jewboy big shot who thought he could hornswoggle a bunch of rednecks. He lost because his argument was elegant, not in spite of it.

  The hell with it, with them. Let them sink back into the darkness. Better to be a writer, a proper writer, to write short stories, be brief, not write briefs. But there was no sense forcing it: trust your unconscious and it will come. Right?

  ‘You know,’ Rhoda said tentatively, taking his hand, ‘I don’t tell this to everyone, no one really, I’m sort of ashamed of it, but . . .’

  He had no idea what was coming, felt apprehensive. Was she married? She was evasive about her past, had alluded briefly to a privileged childhood in Santa Barbara, California, but gave few details about her family, though she claimed to be close to them, mentioned occasional boyfriends and lovers but didn’t give details. When he solicited more information – a sign, to him, of interest and desire for increased intimacy – she would draw away and say, ‘I don’t want to talk about all of that. It’s boring. I only care about what I am now, what we have now.’