The Hair of Harold Roux Page 17

  “Fascisti! Fascisti! Fascisti! Fascisti!” Herbert madly screamed, and just then none other than Short Round ran up to the boulder shaking a quart bottle of beer and squirted foam all over Herbert and Naomi. Boom Maloumian roared in the crowd, the crowd roared, and the man in the sound truck turned Herbert off with a gigantic click. Herbert’s mouth continued to open and shut for an evidently hilarious few moments, and the sound came on again, this time carrying another voice which explained that the views of the previous speaker were not those of Acme Sound Services, Incorporated. Cheering and laughing, the crowd began to disperse.

  Allard and Mary continued down toward the Coffee Shop. “Fascisti, for Christ’s sake,” Allard said. He had seen Ninotcbka, and though he’d enjoyed it he knew that its basic assumptions were simple-minded and that it sucked up to its audience’s self-satisfaction. Some truth was perhaps revealed in it, and for Herbert and Naomi to get so exercised over this bit of froth merely reinforced its message. When Short Round squirted beer all over Naomi, however, Allard’s first instinct was to attack. He was very fond of her as a creature whose crannies, pleasures and quirks he knew in intimate detail. And Short Round, that utter creep, had the gall to squirt beer all over Allard’s nice animal.

  He and Mary were having their coffee in one of the cramped wooden booths of the Coffee Shop when Herbert and his troops came in, back from the barricades, their eyes illuminated by Righteousness Embattled. They sat at a corner table, eight or nine of them, including Naomi. One of the group, a small, deprived-looking boy wearing steel-rimmed GI spectacles, sang in a low, emotion-wavered voice:

  “Die Heitnat ist weit,

  Docb voir sind bereit.

  Wir kämpfen und siegen fur dich:

  Freibeitr!”

  Sitting glumly with Herbert’s friends was Use Haendler, a rather nice, sad, blonde German girl whose parents, it was said, had died as political prisoners in a concentration camp. Allard couldn’t understand why she hung around with Herbert. She did, however, have the firmly superior, kindly look of those who are dedicated to some transcendent ideal or other, and that benevolent, understanding firmness could at times be highly irritating. He caught her eye, raised his left fist and said, “Hoch die rote Fahne!”

  She frowned. Naomi had seen this, too, and she spoke quickly to Use, who then got up and came over.

  “Won’t you sit down?” Allard said, rising. Against part of his will he made a joke of his politeness.

  “Hello,” Use said to Mary, and sat down. With no change in her stern, forgiving face she said to Allard, “Why are you so aggressive toward us?” She had almost no accent at all.

  “I thought Herbert’s performance out there was ridiculous and stupid,” he said. “The fellow is an ass.”

  She frowned, perplexed. “But what has that to do with it?”

  “Those people aren’t ‘fascisti,’ they’re just boneheads, and for that matter hardly any of them are even Italian.”

  Ilse struggled not to be offended, and won. “It’s too bad. I hope one day you can try to understand.” She got up, saying abstractedly that she had a class she ought to attend. They said goodbye, rather distantly.

  As Ilse walked away on her healthy German legs, Allard felt just the slightest pang of loss. It was partly the impermeability of her opinions, like a soft, erotic irritation.

  Perhaps it was then, not later in College Woods, that Mary accused him of believing that every pretty girl in the world really belonged to him. She often surprised him by reading his mind—a startling little side effect of the intensity of her regard.

  “Are they really communists?” Mary asked. “Naomi thinks I’m so naive about politics we don’t talk about it any more.”

  “I don’t know,” Allard said. “I suppose you are if you think you are, but I don’t know how official it all is.” Naomi’s politics seemed to him an undisciplined mixture of the Freudian doxology of her middle-class parents and those parts of radical thought that justified what she wanted to do. As for Herbert Smythe, he seemed hardly real at all. When Allard asked Naomi if she’d ever made love (his euphemism) with Herbert, she made a disloyal grimace and said that even if he wasn’t exactly her sex image, she put her hand on him once and he just froze, so they both pretended it had never happened. Herbert, she said, was dedicated.

  “But how do you know so much about all this political stuff?” Mary said. “Like that German—hoch die, whatever it was.”

  “Well, I’ve heard those songs before,” he said.

  He’d come by his mishmash of left-of-center beliefs through inheritance, which in some not quite logical way seemed to make them more legitimate. Perhaps they had been legitimized in Japan. He’d been doing the work of an officer, and his commanding officer suggested that he apply for a commission. He was nineteen, and there was an arrangement where he could go to a quick officer training school and come back to his job. He passed the exams, the physical, the OCS board and all the rest, only to be told a month later that his eyes weren’t good enough. Because this made him worry about his eyes he got them tested by another army optometrist, at St. Luke’s Hospital in Tokyo, and aside from a permissably mild myopia they were all right. Then it occurred to him that the army of his country, the whole huge apparatus whose uniform he had been actually proud to wear, had conspired to make that little lie. Because of certain left-wing connections in his family he would never be trusted enough to assume any real authority. It was a quick and very interesting education for that American. Amazing how many myths were lost all at once in that Tokyo summer; the void they left in his assumptions proved that he had believed a good deal. He’d been thinking of staying in Japan another year, but when his hitch was over he came home. Home? Back to the States, his only country, from which he’d innocently, apolitically sprung.

  He never mentioned his new knowledge to any of his family. They had all settled into their businesses and professions, those few who had been radicals having been tumbled and buffeted by the Moscow trials, Trotsky’s assassination, the invasion of Finland, the Moscow-Berlin alliance, until they had retreated back toward positions of respectable Democratic leftishness. They tended their own business, raised their children and sent them to college. He was the oldest of all his cousins, the only one old enough to get in on the tail end of the war against fascism. Later a cousin would die in the First Marines near the Changjin Reservoir in a war generally approved of by most of the family.

  It is noon in Aaron’s lonesome house. The house belongs to Agnes—its heart does. Just look anywhere and you’ll see antiques, which make him nervous because he doesn’t want to break or stain them or burn long brown cigarette grooves in them. He likes to look at that lean, delicate Shaker chair, but he won’t sit in it. In his study he has a ragged Morris chair he found at the town dump, and his desk is a solid-core birch door on sawhorses; if he ruins this side he can just sand it down or turn it over. Everything he owns is cracked, burned, dented, faded, flawed in some way, small or large, but everything works. The ejector-holding spring, for instance, on his 30-06 came from something as unmilitary as a ball-point pen, but it works as well as the original flat spring, which tended to break. The rubber footrests on his Honda are cracked, now held on with elastic bands made from an old inner tube. The left bow of his glasses is mended with masking tape.

  He is having a beer for lunch. As far as the writing is concerned, this is like cutting his throat. After lunch he will have another beer for desert. Finito. No words will appear, only chaotic thoughts, memories, nostalgic scenes. How Mary cried. The taste of her tears, like the warm unsaline seas of the Eocene. She would have liked that phrase. He would like to drink her tears again.

  That evening, when Allard and Mary went to see Ninotcbka, they had to pass a picket line of Herbert Smythe’s friends, including Naomi, who pretended not to see them. In the semi-dark before the screen, they held hands. Mary squeezed his hand, signals in a little code it was not necessary to decipher. He had crude thoughts. He
had tender thoughts. The tender thoughts combined with the crude thoughts to give him what Boom Maloumian would call a blue-steeler. Throughout the film he was urgently aware of the delicate organism beside him who held his hand, nerves touching at fingertips. He could feel her happiness. She had a talent for shimmering happiness he had never known before in anyone. Yet it was not demanding or cloying; it seemed always that he owned her, not the other way around. Near the end of the movie he was desperately trying to think his erection down. He had various ways to do this, gathered over the years. His motorcycle needed a new front tire; but that didn’t work because the new tire was suddenly installed and he was taking Mary out to his hidden place in College Woods. Arithmetic didn’t work; it had no power over the current flowing through her touch. She moans as her first man gently but enormously enters her. Garbo laughed. Melvyn Douglas smiled. Allard Benson grimaced at the extruded frozen fire the whole middle part of his body seemed to feed. Fetch the baggy tweeds and we’ll smuggle it into London, said the Duke to his valet—courtesy Boom Maloumian. All life, even the shadow people on the screen, inflamed him, bade him erotic welcome. He could think of nothing that was not sweet help and welcome. Since puberty this desperate situation had lain in wait for his dignity. High school had been hell. How in God’s name to make this willful monstrosity desist? The bell will ring, he’ll have to stand up, and he’ll look like a triangle. But so what? God knew what; for some unarguable reason he could not let himself be observed in public in the rut. Ah, but alone with Mary! He decided, at the last moment, that he would visit her family this weekend. Either that resolve, or the usual end-game desperation, enabled the mindless, mind-proof member to partly disengorge, and they left the theater looking more or less like the other people.

  They stopped at the College Pharm and had a sundae, chocolate fudge with crushed nuts. Crushed nuts? asked the soda jerk of the trembling man. No, shell shock, was the reply—courtesy B. Maloumian.

  They sat in a narrow booth, facing each other, Mary’s neat lips at her sweet spoon. She was so pretty, so perfectly immaculate, that she had the power all at once to turn him into the perfect date for her. America, innocent honest sweet America, the girl next-door, the wonder of growing up. And with most of his real, or dark, desires wafted away before this American idol, or ideal, or idyll, he fell in love with her, or it, as though he were the kind of person (boy) whose fondest dream was to possess this sweet clean intelligent American girl, meet her family, take instruction in her religion, marry her in church—she in taffeta, lace and veil, an untouched virgin until her sacred wedding night. How God and all the authorities, heavenly and civil, would smile upon the pretty young couple! How all would approve!

  He told her he’d changed his mind and would like to go home with her for the weekend.

  Her happiness deepened, sobered into deeper places. “If you come to mass on Sunday, I’ll have to show you how to genuflect.”

  Holding hands, they walked back to her dorm. In a shadowed place beside an arborvitae he unbuttoned her jacket and put his arms around her, his hands on the silken warmth of her blouse. She trembled as they kissed. Her mouth was sweet, not sugary but the deeper sweet of her health, giving him a feeling of his own rough unworthiness.

  “I think I love you, Allard,” she said, breathless mystery and bravery in these words. “I know I love you. I couldn’t feel anything stronger than this.”

  “I think I love you, too,” he said.

  “You,” she said. “You won’t …”

  “Won’t what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I can hardly breathe. I’m all confused.” She turned her face away. “It’s nearly eleven, I’ve got to sign in.” Her ear was hot to his lips and she trembled so much a buzzer seemed to be going off inside her somewhere. She turned back and kissed him awkwardly, as though in reckless desperation, then stepped away from him. He held her hand and pulled her back.

  “We’ve got a full thirty seconds,” he said.

  When he kissed her again she seemed to be committing a sweet but mortal sin. “I love you,” he said.

  “I love you. I’ve never felt anything like this. I love you.”

  How beautiful to say that, to say something with no reservations, with nothing at all left unsaid.

  Gravely blushing, with her face averted as though she were ashamed of what must be too apparent upon it, she ran up the steps to the dorm entrance and inside.

  He walked, dazedly, back to Parker Hall, dreaming upon the sweet simplicities of love. The trees leaned, sweet green, benevolently above him. Orange windows were gentle depths, each with its meaningful life inside. A lamp seen glowing on a student’s desk must surely illuminate a calm, important volume explaining the beauty of existence. Mary seemed now all perfect and whole, gleaming silver and gold. He could worship her heel, idolize the pit of her knee. No part of her could displease him, nothing. He was unworthy of her body yet protectively superior to her mind, to her strength. She was his to tenderly break, yet honorably, honorably.

  But of course he would then bring her into his own world—as soon as he achieved it. For instance, he was not about to become a Roman Catholic. He had nothing against its pomp and ceremony, but he would always view it as interesting theater. Their children could have their choice. With the thought of their children a fearful shiver of pleasure quaked his loins; they were good protoplasm, he and Mary. To enter and become part of her body in another! It awed him, that sweet mortal union. Its particulars, its biological miraculousness awed him. My God, there was a deep complex inside her body made to welcome part of his body. Little live parts of him would then swim up into her, there to meet and combine with her in that blood darkness. Life, continuation. No miracle conceived by man could compare to the one made actual by protoplasm itself.

  Dreaming upon these sweet and dangerous possibilities, he returned to Parker Hall. He wanted to talk to Nathan, who would, in his fashion, take him seriously. It seemed necessary to Nathan to consider him naive in those worldly affairs having to do with money, or the Great American Game of Con, and perhaps also, on a less important level, fashions in clothes. Allard’s genius, as Nathan seemed to need to have it, was in art and in love. All Nathan’s friends had to have their spheres and be great in them. Allard believed that as audience for this confession of love and future, Nathan would be properly and seriously correct. Harold Roux would have suspected his motivations and quizzed him sharply—too sharply—on the practicality of it all, but Nathan would never doubt the romantic importance of this crisis.

  Allard knew all this but without any diminution of enthrallment. Our self-importance raises the importance of our friends, our loves, our world. To be truly involved while observing our skill at the scene itself is not really dishonest. Does he cry at the beauty of his sorrow or joy (both of which are real)? Does he love the beauty of his vision of love?

  Back at the room he found Nathan studying. Knuck was snoring, his gray-white head as insensible to its own signals as a buoy rocking upon the sea.

  “Ho!” Nathan said. “The lover returns.” He looked at Allard, the large dark eyes in his bony little head holding, after the first glance, seeing what Allard wanted them to see.

  “What’s the serious bit?” Nathan asked.

  “I think, my friend, I am under the influence of love.”

  “Mary?”

  “Mary. I’m having a crisis about marrying her, Nate.”

  “Whew! Ooee! That is serious.” Nathan’s face turned properly grave at the wonder of this life-important decision. “That’s a big step, Allard. A big step.”

  “In fact, I’m going home with her this weekend and meet her father and little brother.”

  “And go to Mass on Sunday?” Nathan asked shrewdly.

  “I suppose so.”

  “That’s sort of like getting engaged, you know.” Nathan, who was a Unitarian himself, made it a point to know about the protocols of various Christian sects. “I mean, are you going to turn R.C.?”
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br />   “Impossible.”

  “Mary is going to turn whatever you are? What are you, anyway, come to think of it.”

  Allard couldn’t think what he was, and realized nervously that this question would certainly be asked. A non-Protestant? A paradoxologist? “I don’t know what the hell I am, Nate.”

  “You better think of something before ol’ Dad lays his cold eye on you, boy. You’re the crummy crud who’s going to violate his sweet virgin daughter.”

  “How true.”

  “You haven’t touched her yet, though, have you.”

  “No.”

  “Maybe you are in love, Allard.” Then Nathan’s avuncular side began to function. “You’re only twenty-one, right?”

  “Yeah, but I’ve been around. Maybe I’d like to settle down.” He felt that he had important work to do, and maybe all this dating and screwing around was what kept him from it.

  “Are you sure you’re ready, Allard? I mean it costs money, and then come the babies. You want to tie yourself down to a nine-to-five?”

  “I’ve got the GI Bill for about four more years.”

  “Slim pickin’s. What does Mary think about birth control?”

  “We haven’t discussed it. But I know what I think about it. Mary doesn’t know much about the whole subject of sex, as a matter of fact.”