Museums and Women: And Other Stories Page 19

  But it was Joan who found some. “My God,” she said. “There’s my old analyst.” At the fringe of some Unitarians stood a plump, doughy man with the troubled squint of a baker who has looked into too many ovens. Joan turned to go the other way.

  “Don’t suppress,” Richard told her. “Let’s go and be friendly and normal.”

  “It’s too embarrassing.”

  “But it’s been years since you went. You’re cured.”

  “You don’t understand. You’re never cured. You just stop going.”

  “O.K., come this way. I think I see my Harvard section man in Plato to Dante.”

  But, even while arguing against it, she had been drifting them toward her psychiatrist, and now they were caught in the pull of his gaze. He scowled and came toward them, flat-footedly. Richard had never met him and, shaking hands, felt himself as a putrid heap of anecdotes, of detailed lusts and abuses. “I think I need a doctor,” he madly blurted.

  The other man produced, like a stiletto from his sleeve, a nimble smile. “How so?” Each word seemed precious.

  “I have a fever.”

  “Ah.” The psychiatrist turned sympathetically to Joan, and his face issued a clear commiseration: So he is still punishing you.

  Joan said loyally, “He really does. I saw the thermometer.”

  “Would you like a peanut?” Richard asked. The offer felt so symbolic, so transparent, that he was shocked when the other man took one, cracked it harshly, and substantially chewed.

  Joan asked, “Are you with anybody? I feel a need for group security.”

  “Come meet my sister.” The command sounded strange to Richard; “sister” seemed a piece of psychological slang, a euphemism.

  But again things were simpler than they seemed. His sister was plainly from the same batter. Rubicund and yeasty, she seemed to have been enlarged by the exercise of good will and wore a saucer-sized SCLC button in the lapel of a coarse green suit. Richard coveted the suit; it looked warm. The day was continuing overcast and chilly. Something odd, perhaps the successive explosions of the antihistamine pill, was happening inside him, making him feel queerly elongated; the illusion crossed his mind that he was destined to seduce this woman. She beamed and said, “My daughter Trudy and her best friend, Carol.”

  They were girls of sixteen or so, one size smaller in their bones than women. Trudy had the family pastry texture and a darting frown. Carol was homely, fragile, and touching; her upper teeth were a gray blur of braces and her arms were protectively folded across her skimpy bosom. Over a white blouse she wore only a thin blue sweater, unbuttoned. Richard told her, “You’re freezing.”

  “I’m freezing,” she said, and a small love was established between them on the basis of this demure repetition. She added, “I came along because I’m writing a term paper.”

  Trudy said, “She’s doing a history of the labor unions,” and laughed unpleasantly.

  The girl shivered. “I thought they might be the same. Didn’t the unions use to march?” Her voice, moistened by the obtrusion of her braces, had a sprayey faintness in the raw gray air.

  The psychiatrist’s sister said, “The way they make these poor children study nowadays! The books they have them read! Their English teacher assigned them Tropic of Cancer! I picked it up and read one page, and Trudy reassured me, ‘It’s all right, Mother, the teacher says he’s a transcendentalist!’ ”

  It felt to Richard less likely that he would seduce her. His sense of reality was expanding in the nest of warmth these people provided. He offered to buy them all Popsicles. His consciousness ventured outward and tasted the joy of so many Negro presences, the luxury of immersion in the polished shadows of their skins. He drifted happily through the crosshatch of their oblique, sardonic hooting and blurred voices, searching for the Popsicle vendor. The girls and Trudy’s mother had said they would take one; the psychiatrist and Joan had refused. The crowd was formed of jiggling fragments. Richard waved at the rector of a church whose nursery school his children had attended; winked at a folk singer he had seen on television and who looked lost and wan in three dimensions; assumed a stony face in passing a long-haired youth guarded by police and draped in a signboard proclaiming MARTIN LUTHER KING A TOOL OF THE COMMUNISTS; and tapped a tall bald man on the shoulder. “Remember me? Dick Maple, Plato to Dante, B-plus.”

  The section man turned, bespectacled and pale. It was shocking; he had aged.

  The march was slow to start. Trucks and police cars appeared and disappeared at the playground gate. Officious young seminarians tried to organize the crowd into lines. Unintelligible announcements crackled within the loudspeakers. Martin Luther King was a dim religious rumor on the playground plain—now here, now there, now absent, now present. The sun showed as a kind of sore spot burning through the clouds. Carol nibbled her Popsicle and shivered. Richard and Joan argued whether to march under the Danvers banner with the psychiatrist or with the Unitarians. In the end it did not matter; King invisibly established himself at their head, a distant truck loaded with singing women lurched forward, a far corner of the crowd began to croon, “Which side are you on, boy?,” and the marching began.

  On Columbus Avenue they were shuffled into lines ten abreast. The Maples were separated. Joan turned up between her psychiatrist and a massive, doleful African wearing tribal scars, sneakers, and a Harvard Athletic Association sweatshirt. Richard found himself in the line ahead, with Carol beside him. Someone behind him, a forward-looking liberal, stepped on his heel, giving the knit of his loafer such a wrench that he had to walk the three miles through Boston with a floppy shoe and a slight limp. He had been born in West Virginia and did not understand Boston. In ten years he had grown familiar with some of its districts, but was still surprised by the quick curving manner in which these districts interlocked. For a few blocks they marched between cheering tenements from whose topmost windows hung banners that proclaimed END DE FACTO SEGREGATION and RETIRE MRS HICKS. Then the march turned left, and Richard was passing Symphony Hall, within whose rectangular vault he had often dreamed his way along the deep-grassed meadows of Brahms and up the agate cliffs of Strauss. At this corner, from the Stygian subway kiosk, he had emerged with Joan—Orpheus and Eurydice—when both were students; in this restaurant, a decade later, he and she, on three drinks apiece, had decided not to get a divorce that week. The new Prudential Tower, taller and somehow fainter than any other building, haunted each twist of their march, before their faces like a mirage, at their backs like a memory. A leggy nervous colored girl wearing the orange fireman’s jacket of the Security Unit shepherded their section of the line, clapping her hands, shouting freedom-song lyrics for a few bars. These songs struggled through the miles of the march, overlapping and eclipsing one another. “Which side are you on, boy, which side are you on … like a tree-ee planted by the wah-ha-ter, we shall not be moved … this little light of mine, gonna shine on Boston, Mass., this little light of mine …” The day continued cool and without shadows. Newspapers that he had folded inside his coat for warmth slipped and slid. Carol beside him plucked at her little sweater, gathering it at her bosom but unable, as if under a spell, to button it. In the line behind him, Joan, secure between her id and superego, stepped along, swinging her arms, throwing her ballet slippers alternately outward in a confident splaying stride. “… let ’er shine, let ’er shine …”

  Incredibly, they were traversing a cloverleaf, an elevated concrete arabesque devoid of cars. Their massed footsteps whispered; the city yawned beneath them. The march had no beginning and no end that Richard could see. Within him, the fever had become a small glassy scratching on the walls of the pit hollowed by the detonating pills. A piece of newspaper spilled down his legs and blew into the air. Impalpably medicated, ideally motivated, he felt, strolling along the curve of the cloverleaf, gathered within an irresistible ascent. He asked Carol, “Where are we going?”

  “The newspapers said the Common.”

  “Do you feel faint?”r />
  Her gray braces shyly modified her smile. “Hungry.”

  “Have a peanut.” A few still remained in his pocket.

  “Thank you.” She took one. “You don’t have to be paternal.”

  “I want to be.” He felt strangely exalted and excited, as if destined to give birth. He wanted to share this sensation with Carol, but instead he asked her, “In your study of the labor movement, have you learned much about the Molly Maguires?”

  “No. Were they goons or finks?”

  “I think they were either coal miners or gangsters.”

  “Oh. I haven’t studied about anything earlier than Gompers.”

  “Sounds good.” Suppressing the urge to tell Carol he loved her, he turned to look at Joan. She was beautiful, like a poster, with far-seeing blue eyes and red lips parted in song.

  Now they walked beneath office buildings where like mounted butterflies secretaries and dental technicians were pressed against the glass. In Copley Square, stony shoppers waited forever to cross the street. Along Boylston, there was Irish muttering; he shielded Carol with his body. The desultory singing grew defiant. The Public Garden was beginning to bloom. Statues of worthies—Channing, Kosciuszko, Cass, Phillips—were trundled by beneath the blurring trees; Richard’s dry heart cracked like a book being opened. The march turned left down Charles and began to press against itself, to link arms, to fumble for love. He lost sight of Joan in the crush. Then they were treading on grass, on the Common, and the first drops of rain, sharp as needles, pricked their faces and hands.

  “Did we have to stay to hear every damn speech?” Richard asked. They were at last heading home; he felt too sick to drive and huddled, in his soaked, slippery suit, toward the heater. The windshield wiper seemed to be squeaking free-dom, free-dom.

  “I wanted to hear King.”

  “You heard him in Alabama.”

  “I was too tired to listen then.”

  “Did you listen this time? Didn’t it seem corny and forced?”

  “Somewhat. But does it matter?” Her white profile was serene; she passed a trailer truck on the right, and her window was spattered as if with applause.

  “And that Abernathy. God, if he’s John the Baptist, I’m Herod the Great. ‘Onteel de Frenchman go back t’France, onteel de Ahrishman go back t’Ahrland, onteel de Mexican, he go back tuh—’ ”

  “Stop it.”

  “Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t mind them sounding like demagogues; what I minded was that godawful boring phony imitation of a revival meeting. ‘Thass right, yossuh. Yos-suh!’ ”

  “Your throat sounds sore. Shouldn’t you stop using it?”

  “How could you crucify me that way? How could you make this miserable sick husband stand in the icy rain for hours listening to boring stupid speeches that you’d heard before anyway?”

  “I didn’t think the speeches were that great. But I think it was important that they were given and that people listened. You were there as a witness, Richard.”

  “Ah witnessed. Ah believes. Yos-suh.”

  “You’re a very sick man.”

  “I know, I know I am. That’s why I wanted to leave. Even your pasty psychiatrist left. He looked like a dunked doughnut.”

  “He left because of the girls.”

  “I loved Carol. She respected me, despite the color of my skin.”

  “You didn’t have to go.”

  “Yes I did. You somehow turned it into a point of honor. It was a sexual vindication.”

  “How you go on.”

  “ ‘Onteel de East German goes on back t’East Germany, onteel de Luxembourgian hies hisself back to Luxembourg—’ ”

  “Please stop it.”

  But he found he could not stop, and even after they reached home and she put him to bed, the children watching in alarm, his voice continued its slurred plaint. “Ah’ze all raht, missy, jes’ a tetch o’ double pneumonia, don’t you fret none, we’ll get the cotton in.”

  “You’re embarrassing the children.”

  “Shecks, doan min’ me, chilluns. Ef Ah could jes’ res’ hyah foh a spell in de shade o’ de watuhmelon patch, res’ dese ol’ bones … Lawzy, dat do feel good!”

  “Daddy has a tiny cold,” Joan explained.

  “Will he die?” Bean asked, and burst into tears.

  “Now, effen,” he said, “bah some unfoh-choonut chayunce, mah spirrut should pass owen, bureh me bah de levee, so mebbe Ah kin heeah de singin’ an’ de banjos an’ de cotton bolls abustin.’ .. an’ mebbe even de whaat folks up in de Big House kin shed a homely tear er two.…” He was almost crying; a weird tenderness had crept over him in bed, as if he had indeed given birth, birth to this voice, a voice crying for attention from the depths of oppression. High in the window, the late-afternoon sky blanched as the storm lifted. In the warmth of the bed, Richard crooned to himself, and once cried out, “Missy! Missy! Doan you worreh none, ol’ Tom’ll see anotheh sun-up!”

  But Joan was downstairs, talking firmly on the telephone.

  The Taste of Metal

  METAL, STRICTLY, HAS no taste; its presence in the mouth is felt as disciplinary, as a No spoken to other tastes. When Richard Maple, after many years of twinges, jagged edges, and occasional extractions, had all his remaining molars capped and bridges shaped across the gaps, the gold felt chilly to his cheeks and its regularity masked holes and roughnesses that had been a kind of mirror wherein his tongue had known itself. The Friday of the final cementing, he went to a small party. As he drank a variety of liquids that tasted much the same, he moved from feeling slightly less than himself (his native teeth had been ground to stumps of dentine) to feeling slightly more. The shift in tonality that permeated his skull whenever his jaws closed corresponded, perhaps, to the heightened clarity that fills the mind after a religious conversion. He saw his companions at the party with a new brilliance—a sharpness of vision that, like a camera’s, was specific and restricted in focus. He could see only one person at a time, and found himself focusing less on his wife, Joan, than on Eleanor Dennis, the long-legged wife of a municipal-bond broker.

  Eleanor’s distinctness in part had to do with the legal fact that she and her husband were “separated.” It had happened recently; his absence from the party was noticeable. Eleanor, in the course of a life that she described as a series of harrowing survivals, had developed the brassy social manner that converts private catastrophe into public humorousness; but tonight her agitation was imperfectly converted. She listened for an echo that wasn’t there, and twitchily crossed and recrossed her legs. Her legs were handsome and vivid and so long that, after midnight, when parlor games began, she hitched up her brief shirt and kicked the lintel of a doorframe. The host balanced a glass of water on his forehead. Richard, demonstrating a headstand, mistakenly tumbled forward, delighted at his inebriated softness, which felt to be an ironical comment upon flesh that his new metal teeth were making. He was all mortality; all porous erosion save for these stars in his head, an impervious polar cluster at the zenith of his slow whirling.

  His wife came to him with a face as unscarred and chastening as the face of a clock. It was time to go home. And Eleanor needed a ride. The three of them, plus the hostess in her bangle earrings and coffee-stained culottes, went to the door, and discovered a snowstorm. As far as the eye could probe, flakes were falling in a jostling crowd through the whispering lavender night. “God bless us, every one,” Richard said.

  The hostess suggested that Joan should drive.

  Richard kissed her on the cheek and tasted the metal of her bangle earring and got in behind the wheel. His car was a brand-new Corvair; he wouldn’t dream of trusting anyone else to drive it. Joan crawled into the back seat, grunting to emphasize the physical awkwardness, and Eleanor serenely arranged her coat and pocketbook and legs in the space beside him. The motor sprang alive. Richard felt resiliently cushioned: Eleanor was beside him, Joan behind him, God above him, the road beneath him. The fast-falling snow dipped brilliant—
explosive, chrysanthemumesque—into the car headlights. On a small hill the tires spun—a loose, reassuring noise, like the slither of a raincoat.

  In the knobbed darkness lit by the green speed gauge, Eleanor, showing a wealth of knee, talked at length of her separated husband. “You have no idea,” she said, “you two are so sheltered you have no idea what men are capable of. I didn’t know myself. I don’t mean to sound ungracious, he gave me nine reasonable years and I wouldn’t dream of punishing him with the children’s visiting hours the way some women would, but that man! You know what he had the crust to tell me? He actually told me that when he was with another woman he’d sometimes close his eyes and pretend it was me.”

  “Sometimes,” Richard said.

  His wife behind him said, “Darley, are you aware that the road is slippery?”

  “That’s the shine of the headlights,” he told her.

  Eleanor crossed and recrossed her legs. Half the length of a thigh flared in the intimate green glow. She went on, “And his trips. I wondered why the same city was always putting out bond issues. I began to feel sorry for the mayor, I thought they were going bankrupt. Looking back at myself, I was so good, so wrapped up in the children and the house, always on the phone to the contractor or the plumber or the gas company trying to get the new kitchen done in time for Thanksgiving, when his silly, silly mother was coming to visit. About once a day I’d sharpen the carving knife. Thank God that phase of my life is over. I went to his mother—for sympathy, I suppose—and very indignantly she asked me, what had I done to her boy? The children and I had tunafish sandwiches by ourselves and it was the first Thanksgiving I’ve ever enjoyed, frankly.”

  “I always have trouble,” Richard told her, “finding the second joint.”