The Night of Trees Read online

  Now, as his father stared into the fire, Murray looked again at the spare, bony face. There was no other face he knew, in the family or among his friends, he would not fearlessly startle with a remark, then speak the truth. He might say: “Look, you ass! It’s not your fault!” knowing that his father would respond correctly, with a smile, and they could then talk. He might, but he could not.

  6

  RICHARD GRIMALD felt his son’s eyes upon him, and thought, The boy is being delicate with me. His son hadn’t mentioned his mother. The thoughts that, uttered, might have led to the mentioning of her name were wholly avoided, as if they both were as expert as chess players at seeing a hundred impending choices. It was as if, in his son’s delicate avoidance of her name, her name itself had become something of questionable taste. Mother. The word might so easily have sneaked into the air, but it had not.

  He saw her face in the face of his son, especially here in the windy dark, the firelight evoking memories of the deep and tribal strength of her Semitic face. Rachel in Murray, her back to the mountain, her face turned to the eternal, protecting fire. He had seen her turn from him as if he were the alien and threatening mountain: he knew when the moon would rise, where the bear denned up, that the night wind fell downhill. He did not really know why she had left him, except that the psychiatrist’s queer language did, sometimes, seem plausible. Plausible, but to his mind no cause for divorce. What it all amounted to was that he had too strong a character for her, they said; that he took care of everything too well; that she coped with too few problems; that, in fact, her personality was not in the process of disintegration, but of disappearance.

  “Nonsense!” he had said, and at the word they (the psychiatrist and Rachel’s sister, Ruth) seemed to be reassured of their prognosis. The old-fashioned word did not cut through their technicalities. He could not think in that language. Suddenly it occurred to him that they were both Jews, the doctor and the sister. Their faces hardened, became secretive, initiate; he had had to resist the temptation to think of the whole business as a plot.

  Rachel, at forty, hadn’t lost the highly vivid muscularity that had first struck him with such lust. Her long legs still revealed beneath the dark skin all the beautiful articulations of muscle and bone; her breasts were still high, still impossibly symmetrical, the great black dugs like cruel eyes; yet they were not cruel, just burned upon his own eyes so that even now he could see them, feel their touch upon his chest. Her face he knew, but did not see so clearly; round, black-browed, wide-mouthed, with large gray eyes—he saw more clearly the body with which she best expressed her presence.

  And his child, delivered of Rachel, had from the first been physically perfect, mentally unquenchable. The birth itself was nothing to her, and her care of the infant was as calmly efficient and instinctive as that of a mare for her colt. She possessed no nervous modesty, and when the child was hungry, no matter where, let fall the side of her nursing blouse, stunning observers with the sheen of the tumid flesh, the nipple seen suddenly for what it really was, and put the avid mouth to suck.

  The fire reddened; a yellow spout of flame whipped about in the wind and went out, then came on again like a lantern light. Suddenly, with blunt, deep pain, as if his flesh were tearing, he was filled with desire and love for his wife. He sat it out. He had experienced many such quick and agonizing upwellings before.

  His son leaned back against a bank of pine needles, his long legs stretched out before him with the clean and awkward grace of a colt’s. Murray was as big as his father, and at any time Richard might be startled by certain of the boy’s gestures. It was like seeing himself from outside himself, or seeing—perhaps more often this —Rachel if she had been a youth. In the boy, in his bones and violent grace, he and Rachel became one.

  And now, in Murray, he found some of Rachel’s talent for terrible and irretrievable negation. Why? Why? Nonsense! he wanted to shout. How could a part of his flesh be so reckless? All for a gesture? For revenge? For what? And was it all, as the psychiatrist so earnestly implied, his fault? No, it hadn’t actually been his fault; that would have been, in itself, too rational a verdict for them. It was his father’s fault, his mother’s, his grandfather’s—who knew? No one’s fault, in the end, and so—nothing could be done. The final triumph of science: no one was responsible.

  They thought him cold. He could see it. Cold, that a man could organize his science, all his resources, even in desperation? Cold, that he argued straight for love, that he could not, with a melting, too sympathetic face like the psychiatrist’s, utter words so organized, so dialectical that they had lost all heat and meaning? Not cold: he had saved them the sight of a man berserk.

  When Rachel first left him, four years ago, his logic had sufficed to bring her back. At least her father had been on his side—Saul Weitzner, that real and honest man.

  And now his only son, held by a promise, waited for the contract to expire. Richard held himself together as coldly, as rationally as he could, and waited for a sign. The wind, sharp and clean, moved through the needles of the pines and fanned a spark up into the air, then tossed it until it winked out. From the corners of his eyes he saw that Murray had turned his face back to the fire.

  7

  “IT WAS a good day, wasn’t it?” his father asked.

  “Great!” Murray said, feeling that he had put too much enthusiasm into the word. His father could not be fooled. “That shot you made on your first bird,” he went on, trying to amend it, or perhaps to justify it. “Tremendous! Damned if you didn’t shoot right through a hemlock. You couldn’t see the bird when you shot, could you?” As if a question—any smokescreen—could fool his father! He wanted to say, God damn it! Let’s cut the shit! What did his father want to know, and how did his father want to find out? He might tell him of the dream he’d had at school, the beautiful dream about a girl, but that could not be told.

  “I shot where I thought he’d gone,” his father said. “Just luck.”

  “Calculated luck. That’s the best kind.” Something he’d once heard his father say. But his father was no professor eager to hear a young voice assert an old philosophy. Now he was making a bad impression; the embarrassment, the fakery. He thought: The man loves me. I am his son, and I act like a stranger.

  Did his father know how much he imitated, how much he admired him? Even the legends of that old and musty war, the war of Stukas and B-17S and the Bulge, were part of it. The medals, especially the drab brownish one with all the tarnished stars on it (that was a campaign ribbon, he’d found out), were part of his feeling about the man; that he was capable of the bravest and most heroic actions ever done. Even the long-dried blood and the nostalgic knowledge—somehow nostalgic, although Murray had been six or seven years old and mostly indifferent at the time—of all the drama and shabbiness of that war, its glory that sneered at glory, the massive pain of thousands and thousands of wounded men, killed men, men afraid, merged in his heart and became as deep and moving as the sea. In the old battles his father always walked, kind and brave; in them his father’s worth was struck permanent.

  Though wiser, more sophisticated in the youthful world, though quick to see a certain brittleness in his father’s mind, secretly he felt that his father was made of nobler material, that his guts were harder, his tendons stronger, his honor more durable than his own.

  And perhaps it was for these reasons he couldn’t tell his father about the dream of the girl. Anyway, he knew too well the usual diagnosis of such a dream, and maybe in a way the usual diagnosis was accurate; there had been that stiffness in his pajamas in the morning. But to him the dream was not at all funny, not even now.

  He was on his trip. In the beginning he saw a huge topographical map of the United States, only this map was not really a map, but the real thing. The Rockies were rock and they were actual Rockies; the Great Lakes were blue and fresh and cold; the cities were dark, smoky, and full of inviting rooms; the plains were soft with corn and wheat; the deserts
were hot to the touch. He found himself in the city, in that gray and somber place that was part of all the cities he had ever seen: City. Deep in buildings, on narrow streets where it was always night, some doors were dark and private; from some came music and laughter. He entered one of these. The girl was the beautiful blonde singer, and in the way of dreams, danger, without source or explanation, made everything tense and precious. After she sang he followed her up to her room, which was a moody high place, one side all clear glass—a huge solarium of a room, except that a full moon hung in the frosty crystal night sky.

  With infinite strength and gentleness he took her upon the wide bed; they made moans, her arms about his back. They loved each other, and would be married. Their love was perfect, and in that sudden love, as is the way of dreams, not the slightest reservation could exist. Even now, although he felt it still with the power of a shock, he could only describe it in abstractions. It could not be told, for a smile would murder it, and he didn’t want its power lessened. Even now, remembering it and what happened after, he began to melt.

  With his arm around her, her arm around him, her hand, in that most loving and familiar way beyond modesty or fear delicate against his ribs, they walked to the great window. “God, I’m happy!” he said, and just then the moon exploded into fragments which came, hugely phosphorescent, slowly, massively turning, down. This knowledge was immediately in his possession: the earth was over. Man was over. He knew the exact meaning of it all because he then lived it. In a few seconds there would be no more history, no more hope, no more love. Then the great loudspeaker system came scratchily, booming on. The voice of the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, or perhaps that of a general, screamed hysterically into the last moments of earth and mankind: “Hymie did it! I didn’t do it! It’s all Hymie’s fault!“

  That was the dream, and it had left him with the deepest, most immediate feelings he had ever known. There had been crises in his life—when his mother and father first separated, for instance, when he was sixteen—but never had any experience reached him in so sudden and encompassing a fashion. When he found out, in Aunt Ruth’s apartment, about the first separation, there had been in operation that cold and protective ability of a child to disregard too great decisions. It worked in, though, after a while.

  But the dream—even now he felt an infinite sadness for mankind, for all the sufferers of his father’s war, for those who had been hurt in all wars, all fights, all little squabbles and arguments and sudden woundings everywhere back in the time that he had seen come to an end. For all artists and scholars whose work came to ashes—infinite sadness. Even for Hymie, even for the last petty voice screaming blame. Even more for love, poor love; perfect and wasted and gone.

  The trip he was about to take would not, he knew, find him the dream. There would be cities without danger, cans of beer drunk alone in hotel rooms, pictures of lovely women in magazines. The women he met would not be the women he wanted; none would be the girl of the high glass room. And perhaps, even if he did find her, the world would not end.

  Yet in spite of this dense, romantic urge to go, to search for fulfillment and destruction, he felt himself to be his father’s man. When this is over, he thought, when I get all this romance crap out of my system, why, then we’ll be at ease again.

  8

  IN THE southeast, over Brown Mountain, a certain cold light grew. Richard Grimald looked at his wrist watch and calculated the time before the moon would rise. His calculations made, he put another rotten birch log on the fire.

  “A while yet,” he said to his son.

  The boy looked up and smiled at him; smiled, he knew, half out of amusement at this odd knowledge of the sky. Half, he hoped he knew, out of affection.

  He had been a father, now, for twenty years, and he wondered when the condition would, if ever, seem his normal lot. His own father he could hardly remember. History belied, of course, his vision of Wall Street on Black Friday, the bodies of ruined men dropping down like bats to the pavement, but his father had not long survived that day. He remembered only a handsome, well-dressed man, who wore a black mustache. This man and his mother, who died a year later, always in his memory sat at a wide table: their mouths moved politely but no sound came out. He could not remember a sign of affection between the two.

  His idea of what a father should be—the father he tried to make of himself—he had found mostly in what he had read. He had found it easier to rule in a benevolent way, however, than to be “whimsical and gay.” He was no one’s pal, certainly not his son’s. Nor was Rachel’s father, Saul Weitzner, anyone’s pal. Strangely, this man had been to him much more than father, certainly more than father-in-law. Ugly, old, so washed and cured by life one couldn’t think of him as being anything but judicious and fair, the man had become mixed up not only with Richard’s idea of a father but also, by some mystical process, with his idea of a paternal, kindly God.

  He and Rachel had been riding in Saul Weitzner’s car on that September day in 1939 when they heard on the car’s radio that Hitler had invaded Poland. Even though Saul hated Hitler and could, perhaps, have seen in the coming war Hitler’s end, the idea of war had made him immediately and violently ill. He had to stop the car, and was sick in the gutter of Sixth Avenue. When Richard saw the ragged food come from the old man’s mouth, it seemed to him in one twist of horror that in that moment there was more sacrilege, more blasphemous violence done a good and gentle man, and in Saul all good and gentle men, than had ever before been done in the world.

  Although he had been an American citizen for twenty years, Saul had been caught on family business in Berlin in 1938. It happened on a night called Reichskristall, and before he managed to get out he had been, among other things, dragged by his heels for a block and taken into a lorry full of S.S. bravoes where, with several other people, he was robbed, stripped, nearly beaten to death, and left naked and bleeding in the middle of Krausenstrasse. He was then put into jail for indecent exposure. After six months, a period he would not ever talk about, he was released through the efforts of the United States Embassy. Richard hadn’t known Saul before this time, but according to the family he did not look the same when he returned; he was hard to recognize, partly because of a crushed sinus in his forehead, partly because of certain spinal changes which had caused him to lose about two inches in height.

  And it was to this man, so much a part of all men, so responsible for all men, that he gave the compliment of imitation; yet he felt few of Saul Weitzner’s social obligations. He just didn’t feel that way. They were all mad, the organizers, the petitioners as well as the governors. What could a sane man do? When his business let him, he came to New Hampshire. Here he knew, at least, the comforting, reasonable patterns of the seasons.

  Saul had always been involved in his causes, and his causes were not always fashionable. Once he even found himself allied with the League of Navy Wives, an organization hardly liberal in Saul Weitzner’s mind, because he believed, with them, that the right of the citizen to bear arms should not be infringed upon. In the presence of these ladies, before the City Council, Saul found himself, who had never fired a shot, arguing against an unenforceable gun law. In his thorough way he became a competent authority on ballistics and bullet identification.

  “You should go. You know these things,” he said to Richard, who could only hedge. “Yes!” Saul had shouted, “next they take your guns away from you! They would disarm only the honest man, not the criminal!”

  Senator McCarthy gave Saul deep sorrow; he felt that he could do little or nothing, and yet he signed his inevitable petitions. “Why don’t you do something?” he asked Richard again and again. Finally, with much shame, feeling like a bragging, ineffectual little boy, Richard said, “I won’t do anything now, but if that man takes over my country I’ll get my rifle and kill him.”

  Saul shook his head, his large, bristly, and worried head that in emotion always seemed to have a slight wettish patina over the dull skin an
d iron hair, then looked again, and sharply, at Richard’s face. “You really mean it,” he said, and added thoughtfully: “It’s nice people like you we argue to protect. You would be killed.”

  Richard suspected, in his son, a greater depth of feeling than in himself. Perhaps Murray had inherited a strain of social responsibility from his grandfather, and the wandering he wanted to do was not the result of detachment but of connection. If it were, he did not know the language with which to ask. Idealists were so sensitive, so quick to condemn forever a slip of syntax—a violation, really, of their own dialectic, whatever it happened to be. What was the boy? He was quite sure Murray wasn’t a Communist, although he suspected that any political language would be held in abeyance in front of a parent. Not a Communist, God forbid. Sex? He shivered. The boy might be a homosexual. He didn’t think so, but God only knew how to tell that sort of thing. A beatnik? No, he had heard Murray say of them that they ought to have stamped upon their foreheads, as advertised in Life magazine. He might be anything—anything that he wouldn’t tell a father about. And a father could not ask.

  He hadn’t really known the boy for such a long time, not since Murray first went off to prep school, seven years ago. When he and Rachel first separated, Murray was sixteen, and Rachel wanted to take him back to New York and send him to the High School of Music and Art. Thank God that had never come off. If anything, Murray had too many talents; everything came easily to him. He never had to work at anything. He was too damned bright, too damned handsome, too damned well coordinated. He’d never been gawky like most teen-agers, never had many pimples. The Dartmouth freshman football coach once told him that Murray was the best natural football player they’d seen in years. He was also a fine wingshot. Who taught him that? He looked across the dark at his son, who now stared thoughtfully into the embers, his square hands supporting his jaw. Strangers for so few reasons, Richard thought: age, and because I am his father and he is my son, and what else?