The Hair of Harold Roux Read online

  “I’m changing it. I’ve made up my mind. It’s a business liability, for one thing. I’m changing it to Winston.”

  “Nathan Winston. Well, that does have a ring to it.”

  “It’s easy for you to be superior with a name like Allard Benson. But there’s an awful lot of anti-Semitism around that you might never notice. Believe me, when most people hear the name Weinstein the first thing they think of is a hooknose, a skullcap and they wouldn’t want their daughter to marry one.”

  Allard noticed that Nathan had filled a sheet of paper with his new signature. He said, “‘A rose by any other name, Nate. But you’re sure you want to go through all the paper work and everything?”

  “I’ve already looked into it. It’s complicated but it’s done every day. Nathan Winston,” he said. “Nathan H. Winston.” His eyes, big and sensitive in his small, bony face, were wondering and thoughtful. They reminded Allard of the eyes of a deer.

  After a while Nathan did look over at him and actually focus on him. “Jesus, who gave you the thick lip?”

  “Naomi.”

  “She’s still pissed off, huh?”

  “No, I think we made up, sort of. I got this when I told her I was thinking of marrying Mary.”

  “You deserved it, then. Jesus, you don’t tell a girl you’re jabbing you’re going to marry her roommate!”

  “Nate, you want to know the horrible truth? I want both of them. I want …”

  But Nathan was laughing, his reverberant noises distorting his Adam’s apple. “Oh, dear!” he said finally. “My Jesus, Allard! And you sure can pick ‘em, too! An Irish Catholic and a Jewish Communist! I mean with a harem like that what else could you want?”

  “I’m aware of the basic humor of the situation and fully forgive your boorish laughter, but the fact remains that I want both of them.”

  “I’m glad I’ve only got one,” Nathan said. “She may be nearly as big as two, but she’s only got one head!” And he broke into laughter again.

  “You sit there laughing, Mr. Winston, while my poor heart burns with impossible love.”

  The name sobered Nathan. Suddenly he was thinking about it again, how the magic of the name would change his life.

  Aaron Benham, left alone by his ungrateful family, wanders through his house looking at things, looking out windows, thinking about the party at Lilliputown. It was so long ago and so different, really, from what he must make of it. He is thinking about the tawdry side of the human psyche, of the puerile, the banal. No, that time of youth when the body ruled in all its perfection, demanding worship, not really suffering from mistakes or consequences. He thinks that youth does not really live in its own time because there is always more time, more youth ahead. Work that is not being done is not lost forever because there is forever. Especially back then, when the problems that now beset the world were not visible wherever one turned one’s eyes. The doom that breathes upon the world. The cruel and the nasty who have power. He stood at this very window in May of 1970 staring at that apple tree, grieving at its inevitable doom, fearing for the students he found so sweetly reasonable in their strike. Three times the town had been surrounded by the National Guard. Aaron knows guns; those who control guns want to use them. Perhaps his despair came in part because of the knowledge that those in power really wanted to kill the university. Of course he should have been aware all the time that he himself was an alien, only barely tolerated by any state, but he wasn’t ready and was deeply shocked. Write anything you want, but do not get in the way of patriotism as defined by the gun. All right, he thinks, let’s stop this thinking; these desperate issues cause an emotional death you cannot afford.

  The telephone rings, startling him. “Hello?” he says to its black distance.

  “It’s Linda. Linda Einsperger. Mr. Benham, we just heard they’re firing Mr. Buck!”

  He sees her pale, intelligent face, her long body that always suggests to him the dignity and grace of a giraffe. Two years ago there would have been anger in her voice, real anger, but now he hears the melting hesitations, hollow places where tears are possible.

  “Not really,” he says. “It’s the business about a deadline for his dissertation. If he can get it finished …”

  “He’s the best teacher I’ve ever had. Even Frank thinks he’s a great teacher! Don’t they think he knows enough? I mean he knows as much as any professor!”

  “It’s not that. They all want to keep him here, really.”

  “I don’t understand! It’s because of Mr. Buck I became an English major! I mean what’s writing a dissertation got to do with what he really is? He made it all come alive here! We all think so!”

  “I know he’s a good teacher.”

  “But is there anything we can do about it, Mr. Benham? Anything?”

  “You could write letters, you could see all the senior members of the department, the chairman, the dean, the vice-president for academic affairs, maybe even the president if he’s around. I just don’t think it would do any good in the end. George has to finish his dissertation. It’s part of the contract he made when he came here, Linda. According to the way things are he’s got to be a scholar too. Eventually he’d have to teach in the graduate program and just as a starter he’d have to have the degree.”

  “The way things are,” she says. “Frank’s so down he’s thinking of just dropping out again, and all he needs are three finals. It just makes it not worthwhile. After all that bullshit about rewarding good teaching we went through last year and the year before, here it is right back again.”

  “George is my friend,” Aaron says. Is he George’s friend? “But I have to see their point.” Why that guilty their rather than our? “Maybe George will finish his dissertation.”

  “You don’t think he will, though.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t know anything, either. This whole thing makes me want to cry.” There are tears in her voice, little echoes not quite voiced.

  “Me too,” Aaron says.

  “It just makes the whole four years seem ugly in the end. Mr. Buck helped some of us in other ways, too. When Frank was crazy in 1970, and when Bradford was back on his heroin. And other people. But he was all business in class. I mean you did the work and you knew he cared about whether you did the work.”

  “I know all that.”

  “I mean I’m not upset just because Mr. Buck helped me in my personal life. I mean his classes, what I learned.”

  “Yes.”

  Linda hears the impotence in Aaron’s voice. It is hopeless; she and Frank, Bradford and the rest, will get no real help from him.

  When the call is over, when their voices have expired, Aaron walks away from the telephone table, down the hall to the front door, opens it and stares out into the world. He remembers an incident in which he had the choice of action or inaction, but it was less complicated then, perhaps like an earlier version of Hamlet. Being central in his life, he can at least in private do without the wry muck of false modesty. The hole he is in is the most important hole on the front. No one but he can even attempt to define his view of the world. Man of violence, death-dealer, inclined to protect the weak, ashamed of all dogma, believer in man’s bestiality and in democracy, as afraid as anyone of death, not afraid of violence —a waking dream he has entered many times, often with joy —but afraid of the joy of violence.

  A warm evening in May, lively with the odors of Tokyo that were then human, coming from the processes of life as it survived in the rubble. Hibachi smoke, fish, onions, sboyu, beer, piss, the warm odors of the ages. He had left the Nihon Yusen Kaisha building, gone up the short broad avenue past the Maru-no-uchi, through the busy, bombed-out shell of Tokyo Eki and was crossing a long wooden footbridge over the yards of railroad tracks below. People moved quickly, small, gentle-seeming defeated wraiths going home from work in the dusk, geta and shoes clattering softly on the wooden planks, mixtures of Western and Japanese clothes, muted tired people walking with t
he delicate economy of the partly hungry.

  Ahead of him a big American soldier had something small trapped against the railing. Aaron approached this frantic center of energy, the Japanese who came toward him glancing fearfully at it, then setting their eyes ahead as they passed. The big shoulders of the soldier hunched forward in a rage Aaron saw was necessary to his task, created by desire but blown up by real sanctimony. Though his voice was strangled by his rage, the soldier seemed to be accusing a middle-aged Japanese man—an office worker, probably, in round spectacles, neat shabby Western coat and tie over the baggy cotton knickers of surplus Japanese army pants—of possessing American cigarettes. Possession was the soldier’s legal term. Possession. An observer, Aaron stopped behind the soldier and watched him steal the man’s wrist watch, discard his empty lunch box, rip his coat pocket in his search, all the time cursing out his one legalism, wanting to kill. The thin Japanese, in his terrible danger, of course said nothing. The people passed in their muted hurry, having to survive. Across the tracks, past a stone-lined canal, were the cracked buildings still standing, dim lights in windows, then the streets, stalls, the mounds of the city in the dusk.

  Aaron looked up at the breadth of the soldier’s thick neck from behind, feeling more than naked. Amputated. He felt made of air, a ghost. He had no weapons. It was not his business; it was always his business. He yearned for a gun, a knife, a two-by-four, anything to give him leverage beyond his thin bones. A bar of soap in a sock, which one soldier he knew carried in his back pocket, would have made a sap. But he had nothing, and after a while he walked on by. For a long time he daydreamed of his ideal duty, in a sick rage within himself. He might have reached down from behind and grabbed the soldier by the cuffs of his pants and heaved him up and over the railing, where he would have fallen twenty feet or more to the tracks below. Because of Aaron’s weakness, death or terrible injury were the only choices he had. It was what the soldier would have done to him if he’d said a word. By then he knew murder’s symptoms.

  He could later tell his friends about it and gain some of the fraudulent relief of confession. Little Willy, a corporal, showed him the folding stiletto he carried—a mean-looking knife made in the Philippines. But even with such a weapon, acting on such a level, where would he have cut or stabbed the soldier? The blade, though five inches long and thick enough, didn’t seem adequate for a mere threat. He might have hamstrung the soldier, or cut his Achilles tendons, but he didn’t think he would be able to carry away the responsibility for the blood, the blue-white tendons drawing up along their ruptured sheaths into the leg muscles. In the absence of real power blood seemed the only alternative.

  Though he could walk away, and had to walk away, he could not walk away with impunity. He could never be a mordantly amused or merely interested observer of the beast.

  He acquired the Nambu later, but never carried it.

  Dusk is falling in his yard, the apple trees fading into their night shapes in which one doesn’t think of them as having mass, they are so quiet in the dark.

  His wife and children will be returning soon, the headlights of the Chevrolet beaming down the gravel there, bringing the apple tree brightly out of its shadows for a moment before the lights are swallowed by the garage. And then from the garage, after the slamming slabs of the car doors, will come those closest to him, the ones bound to him so deeply he cannot function without them. This he knows because he tried it once and it was like trying to live without his heart or lungs. They are the forces that keep him alive, shocking him into his duty with the irritant voltage of pacemakers.

  Embedded in him. Sometimes he doesn’t like any of them. He feels misunderstood, taken for granted, attacked. He would rather be an Eskimo leaning over a seal’s breathing hole waiting, waiting in the sub-zero wind for the meat and fat with which to feed a hungry and grateful family. All he wants is for them to smile and be happy when he feeds them. He can’t remember everything! Don’t they understand how much he tries to remember, has to remember?

  He finds himself shaking with indignation and guilt. His eyeballs grate in their sockets, his brain dims, there is a short in the electronics of his spine caused by his bruised knee and wrist and the dying day’s hangover. This wreck who peers bleakly across the falling darkness can’t be him.

  It was such a short time ago when he and Agnes moved into this house with the two young children, when the house’s warmth was a wonder to them all as the snow swirled at the windows and the wind was beaten back up the chimney by the fire. He and Agnes saw through much younger eyes then, as though childhood were more translatable among them all than this later time.

  But now it seems too late. He can speak to his children, who are growing up into their ironies, their humor that speaks to his, but he can seldom speak in that relaxed way with his wife. Of course they always had little to say outside of the tensions of their relationships—once good tensions, exciting ones. Still exciting, but now often wearisome, turned into accusation. When they are making love it is still the way it used to be. He would like to have a woman again with whom he can relax, admit things, be valued for the nonvalue that consists of merely being a man.

  He thinks that he will never leave Agnes, but he can’t predict what he will do. He isn’t much different from any man, his years have slowly but surely taught him, and he sees so many of his friends and acquaintances breaking up, desperately looking for a remembered calm.

  Agnes is the sort of woman who remembers everybody’s children’s names, and the full names and occupations of coupies met once at parties. She has the talent to make him feel guilty that he does not. She has the talent to make him feel guilty most of the time, and it has always seemed to him a strange talent for a wife to cultivate. His colleagues think of him as a prodigy of industry. He is never sick and never misses classes or conferences or meetings. He is always available to his students and his colleagues. Though he thinks of himself as a fairly lazy writer, the statistics seem to disprove this. And so it is mainly through his work that he retains a sense of his worth, except for the negative indication of Agnes’ possessiveness. He is wanted; he is demanded. It is demanded of him that he be prompt, courteous, efficient, etc. And if he is a writer, of course he writes; doesn’t a doctor doctor, a plumber plumb? God, he hears the echoes of his self-belittling screams of rage.

  Aw, shut up and get to work, says his other voice. You need a woman to tell you you’re great all the time?

  Yes! Yes!

  Well, then why don’t you and, say, Helga run away together? Take the old Vollendam to Havre and the train to Paris; there’s still a fine little hotel with tall windows near the Luxembourg Gardens.

  The two children, tender in their cotton flannel pajamas, snuggled on either side of him; across the room in the black interior of the fireplace dark orange flames silently flowed upward from the hardwood logs. He was the father, the large one who kept the cold away. In the deep chair Agnes was not reading her book but listening. It was a winter story Janie and Billy knew as deeply as experience, a story as frightening as they knew things really were. But they were allowed the hope, the slightest hope, that virtue and love would in the end surmount the most deadly tribulations.

  And so he told them the story, how, that night, when everyone was asleep, Janie put on her warmest clothes and went to search for Oka under the frozen moon. She went to the barn first, the crampons her father had made squeaking on the blue ice. Maybe Brin, out of his warm, phlegmatic vastness, might have something to tell her. Or the clever goats, who seemed to know so much though they never seemed to care, their indifference as distant as the moon—what they must have seen through the black slots in their yellow eyes.

  She stood in the breathing barn, slits of moonlight and the briny smell of hay and manure around her, saying, “Brin? Brin?”

  He moved a gigantic part of him—brisket or flank, she couldn’t see that well at first—and rumbled deep inside one of his stomach chambers: I am only a beast and do not und
erstand much. Oka was warm and could help to hear the noises. She could smell wolf and bear when they were hungry, but now she is gone and I am only an ox, strong but with few opinions.

  “But where did she go, Brin? Where did she go?”

  She will follow the moon because how else could she see?

  “But the moon goes over Mount Gloam!”

  Why do you ask anything of an ox?

  Behind her the goats, amused, tilted their heads at each other and stamped their feet.

  Janie didn’t know if she’d heard anything at all other than the movements of penned animals and the creaking of frozen timbers, but she had to go toward where the moon would set, toward where it was forbidden to go. Mount Gloam was dark, sacred to the Old People, Tim Hemlock had told them many times, and only the Old People, if there were any of them left, could go there. It was said that the gods of the Old People could never die, and without their people they had grown mean and vicious.

  But Oka knew nothing of this. If only she could catch up with Oka before she got to the forbidden place, she could lead Oka home to the warm barn. With her crampons she could cross the ice better than Oka on her slippery hooves.

  She took Oka’s rope bridle from its peg and tied it over her shoulder. As she left the barn, carefully closing and latching the door upon its warmth, the frozen windless air came into her nose, into her chest. She knew she shouldn’t go alone into the forest, across the crackless ice that was smooth as the ice on a pond yet frozen into hills and waves, but she must find Oka. Her crampons squeaked, complaining of the hardness, as she entered the frozen, silent trees.

  “She didn’t take the Timothy seeds,” Janie Benham said. “She didn’t take the Dandy Timothy seeds so she could drop them one by one and be able to find her way back.”

  “I didn’t think she’d need them,” Aaron said, “because Billy could see which way she went by the crampon marks in the ice. So could she.”

  “Oh.”

  “Suppose it gets warm and melts,” Billy said.