The Night of Trees Read online

  Among Jews, Richard had always felt himself to be—an uninvited yet permanent feeling—more efficient: if it came to violence, he believed himself a more handsome and deadlier animal than they. His violence, of course, would be for their protection. And if he sometimes felt in them envy and resentment, he didn’t mind it, for on the fringe of his practicality, his pragmatism, he gave to Jews, nearly all Jews, intuitive powers. He thought of them as intellectuals, as critics. Even those middle-class Jews who seemed to have perfected their caricature of materialistic bad taste—something about them made him pause—perhaps it was the mark of torture on them all. To himself he reserved certain virtues of the wilderness; of the world as he saw it straight beneath the civilities, the brittle, thin civilities that masked the animal in man. Though he was not pugnacious, seldom raised his voice, and never fought, any really serious argument that did not end in blood was, to him, a kind of miracle.

  As much as, in a deliberately unformulated way, he admired them, he felt that they needed him more than he needed them. They usually came around to liking him. He knew, too, that if he ever tried to put his feelings about Jews in order he would end with self-disgust. Prejudice in other gentiles usually had the same effect upon him as the sight of gratuitous cruelty: he became cold, furious, and hard. Since he understood very well the stupidity of the Semitophile as well as that of the anti-Semite, he would then coldly convict himself. But these were vague thoughts, seldom acted upon, seldom anywhere near the surface of his mind.

  Murray confounded him. In the presence of his son, his flesh and blood, a bright and complicated and alien mind, he found no security in his own imagined superiorities, for he could see none, feel none. His love for Murray, unlike his love for Rachel or his love for Saul, was unprotected, and made him in many ways a coward.

  His son moved restlessly. With a stick Murray pierced the punky birch log, and steam hissed from the boiling wood. As he stared into the fire his young jaw tensed, teeth biting down on teeth—on nothing but the vague shape of an idea, perhaps; again Richard yearned helplessly to know.

  Over Brown Mountain a white haze grew. A long cold cloud pointed east and moved toward Maine and the sea. Soon they would not be blind in the night, and could start back. The trail, the straight path he knew, would be plain enough; back in the trees, where it was still black night, the shadows and hollows would seem deeper for the moon’s clear light.

  9

  HIS FATHER looked toward Brown Mountain, where the light of the moon, that cold and ominous planet, began to separate the earth from the night sky. His father seemed alone. He had always thought of his father and mother as two large and complete animals—gentle, strong animals—and if he no longer believed that beneficent Providence or God or Fate, or whatever it was made the world the generous and nearly perfect place it was in his childhood, if sometimes he could no longer believe that the act of creation was one of intelligence and love—still he felt that they should be together. The symmetry of the universe, of which his family was the microcosmic symbol, must not be tampered with; else, perhaps, the moon, its orbit bent, might fall, cold and gigantic like a great honeydew, and end the world.

  Ah, love, let us be true to one another! He moved his lips and caught his father’s wary glance. And we are here as on a darkling plain…. Yes, he accepted that; he’d known it all the time. (And who hadn’t? The instructor had been startled and a little upset when the whole freshman section agreed perfectly with the poem.) But where was his love with whom he could stand warm, fulfilled, and bravely, sadly watch the falling chunks of moon?

  If he had always thought of his mother and father as strong, handsome animals, he had also found it possible and not frightening that they slept together, and had that knowledge of each other that was dark and primitive, the flesh its own mover, thighs spread and urgent. He had felt the rhythms of their love in the night, and found himself alone.

  When he was sixteen his mother came to take him out of school, and he hadn’t thought to ask why. He’d been told that it was not permanent, but not by his mother. Mr. Skillings, the headmaster, had very lengthily and kindly, in the shining Georgian office, explained to him that his marks were so good he could take this necessary vacation. The Head, who had always seemed so remote, smiled at him for the first time, and it seemed to Murray that the smile was fake. He was never told why the vacation was necessary. Strange, he thought then—but only for a moment—that it was not his father who made the arrangements.

  “Murray,” his mother said, her beautiful moonlike face a point of embarrassment to him, and yet of love in the cold, boy-noisy halls of Dexter-Benham. She did not go with him to his room.

  Though he was barely sixteen and hadn’t a license yet, she let him drive the car on the country roads until they came to the outskirts of Manchester, New Hampshire. “Maybe you won’t want to go back,” she said hopefully. She had never given him a direct order, not even when he was a little boy. The car was his mother’s old Fleetwood Cadillac, ten years old, polished until the white metal shone through at the edges of the door panels, yet slightly grimy from its last long rest in storage.

  “We’re going to stay with Aunt Ruth for a while,” she said, “and I want her to see your latest paintings.” He was still slightly annoyed that she had collected all his paintings, without his permission, from the school art room. Aunt Ruth taught at the High School of Music and Art, and for a moment he was worried. He didn’t want to leave Dexter-Benham, and he knew that he would not be made to leave it against his will; knowing how susceptible he was to flattery, he was a little afraid that he might make the choice himself. He was as vain about his drawing as he was about his athletic ability, and for a giddy, unreal moment he wondered if the High School of Music and Art had a football team.

  Once, on the Merritt Parkway, he asked, “Why are we going to stay at Aunt Ruth’s?”

  “We’re just going to stay there for a while,” his mother said.

  “ ’Way uptown like that? Why don’t we go home?”

  “I’ll explain everything,” she said.

  “What’s the matter with now? We’ve got plenty of time. It’s only Hamden.”

  But his mother drove carefully on, and wouldn’t look at him.

  Aunt Ruth lived in a tall old building on Riverside Drive, and her apartment had rooms as big as barns. On the high walls of every room hung expensively framed reproductions of the fauves. In her own bedroom were her two originals, a Mary Cassatt pastel, and a tiny Inness in which vague figures did agricultural things in the middle of a dark night. In the place of most dramatic honor, at the end of the long, narrow living room, a full-size copy of Picasso’s Guernica, done by one of Aunt Ruth’s students, agonized. To Murray the place had always been the center of the violent and perfervid world of Art. At sixteen, however, he had begun to guess that Aunt Ruth, in spite of her intense blue eyes, blue smock, and blue-black, straight hair, her dab of paint like a caste mark somewhere on her face, her exciting odor of cobalt and turpentine, had been passed by. He had an unsure feeling about his own talent, and had also begun to suspect that youth and time might not act always in his favor. She grabbed him too eagerly; her eyes dashed from his canvas to his face too often; she marched, with little cries, too often from the easel upon which she had put his painting, back to him. Tall for a sixteen-year-old, he looked down into her collar at the chamois flesh of her chest.

  “The boy has talent!” she said dramatically, “but he needs discipline!” as her round, plump face, the color of zinc, moved with excitement that seemed to him old, old and somewhat desperate. His mother, he could see, believed. He wanted to, and at that point of delicate balance when passion itself, not quite entered, seems to lie all clear and predictable ahead, he coldly foresaw that he, too, could believe.

  Then the buzzer: Aunt Ruth backed reluctantly toward it, her eyes still on the canvas, and spoke to the little box. “Who?” She turned conspiratorily toward her sister and whispered, “It’s him.”
r />   His mother said nothing, and Aunt Ruth turned back to the wall to shout, in sudden and extreme rage, “We don’t want any!”

  His father’s voice, tiny from the little holes in the box, said clearly, “Push that God-damned button.”

  Murray went forward and pushed it. He listened for the opening click of the outside downstairs door, then left off ringing.

  “Murray,” his mother said in a voice of sorrow and lost hope. She began to cry, and he, more confused than sad, cried a little himself.

  When the doorbell rang he let his father into the apartment, and the tall man, lean and vivid as a rooster, took charge. “This boy should be in school,” he said, and they all felt guilty. Aunt Ruth seemed really afraid of him. He looked at Murray, at his wife, and at the canvas, in which Murray saw all at once the fakery, the imitative facility of the amateur; it was a clever New Hampshire Cézanne.

  “Rachel, I want you to come home. Just for a while, anyway.” Richard Grimald motioned toward Guernica. “We can discuss this better without that God-damned ruptured horse dying in our faces. Murray, come with me now. I want to talk to you.”

  Murray followed him. They never did talk. They walked downstairs, across the street, and under the West Side Drive to the river, then stopped near a husky man in nothing but a jockstrap who tried with mighty heaves, a wrecking bar and science to pry a huge stone block into the water. It was September, and cool, but the man, his strong face dedicated and stern, glistened all over the orange fuzz that covered his muscular body down to the crack of his behind.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Richard Grimald said. “For Christ’s sake!”

  The next day Murray went back to Dexter-Benham.

  10

  THE MOON had appeared, gigantic among the pines, cold and near above Brown Mountain. They buried the remains of the fire and pissed on it: steam flowed along the ground in the October wind, through the bare stalks of the October brush. Richard handed Murray his gun, and as the boy took it and carefully snapped the action to, he looked straight at Richard’s face, and smiled. In the darkness of the dead fire, even in the cold and sober light of the moon, the smile seemed to Richard a warm fire itself, like a flame against a vast bank of cool snow.

  As he led the way down through the black shadows, the smile was like a mote in his eyes, and superimposed itself, sentient and warm, against the false passages, the deceptive corridors of the night of trees.

  11

  MURRAY HAD taken the new sports car for a drive, leaving his old Volkswagen in the parking place, and Shim was again out in the night somewhere. Zach sat at television in the kitchen.

  Richard again tried to read the novel, but in spite of its pretty dust jacket, its crisp binding, and a look about it as fresh and appetizing as a canapé, his eyes kept going to the hardwood fire, to the fireplace’s weathered fieldstones set in dark mortar, to the gaunt, ancient bucks who gazed from the high walls.

  Opal came in and stood in front of the fire, then said with difficulty, “I’ll take that drink you offered.” Almost, he could see in her face. She must, he realized, see in him the world of sophistication she could only read about or see in the movies or on television. She’d almost said it right, and saw that she hadn’t. He went quickly to the kitchen to make the drinks, feigning, out of his embarrassment for her, much pleasure at the idea. She was very smart, and probably saw that, too. Knowing that he shouldn’t, that he should not play with danger, he made her a stiff one, decided to take that one himself, then at the last moment, as he saw her again so strange and womanly, handed it to her. He sat a certain distance away from her on the davenport—a distance he saw her measure and file away—and watched her drink. She shuddered and took another, smaller sip, then pulled her little legs up under her so that she could sit comfortably on the wide cushion. She had prepared for this—changed to a narrow yellow Chinese dress with a modest slit that showed the incredibly smooth skin of her knee. He thought of poor Shim, but with a kind of triumph, and wondered, and wondered.

  “You live in Manhattan all the time now?” she said.

  “Yes. That winter we lived in Leah was sort of a vacation. My business is all in New York.”

  “I know. It must be quite lively there,” she said, and he noticed her choice of the word, and again saw that she was smart, and a learner.

  “It’s dirty, and that’s good for my business,” he said, and smiled at her. She smiled back, her little heart-red lips just open, and took a sip of her drink. The glass looked enormous, as if she were drinking from a pitcher.

  “You should have brought your wife along,” she said. “Or maybe that isn’t done on hunting trips.”

  “We’re separated.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It happens,” he said.

  “But I thought you were such a happy family. Such a wonderful boy. I remember your wife, and I thought she was…” Opal thought for a minute, then tipped her head to the right, then to the left, as if she had a choice to make between this word and that word. “Beautiful.”

  “Yes, she is.”

  “Do you love her?” Her voice grew small at the enormity of the question.

  “Yes, yes,” he said, again painfully seeing Rachel.

  “I don’t mean to ask like that,” Opal said quickly, “but I’ve been married for just a little while…Shim. I just…wonder about marriage. I’m thirty…” Her expression asked, please don’t let me finish, and he said:

  “Don’t you know by now?” Kindly—he was full of sorrow still. “Aren’t you happy?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, and her face went darker. “I’m not a fool. I know nothing’s the way a girl wants it. But how can it really be?” She took a long drink, for strength. “I didn’t mean to talk like this.”

  They sat for a long time as the fire consumed the logs with a yellow, rather avid, smooth wrapping of flame, silently except for a little hiss, an occasional tick as the charred squares upon the wood contracted. From the flue came a windy rumble. The ice in their glasses was very loud. Without asking he took her glass and made two more drinks, hers this time not so strong, the reason being that he had begun to like her a little. He had, he decided: yes, and to see her—that common weakness—as a person (that old joke).

  “I mean,” she said when he returned, “it scares me. I’m small.” She looked at him, daring him to smile. “I’m small, and I’ve always puffed myself up, like one of those funny little fish. Against the big world. You know, strutting. But I used to think when he came along…”

  “Shim?”

  “Yes, Shim. Whoever he was. What a romantic!”

  “Mr. Right,” he said, smiling.

  “Oh, I know all that. By the time I got to be thirty and an old-maid schoolteacher, I wasn’t so particular.” She thought for a second, and then said, “Me? An old maid?” She couldn’t believe it.

  “I wouldn’t believe it either,” he said. “You’re pretty.”

  She blushed darkly. “I love this,” she said suddenly, and blushed harder, then moved her glass in a circle as if to take in the davenport, the braided rug, the fireplace.

  He had a sudden, reckless desire to tell her that he had watched her and Shim in the barn, but fear and caution stopped him.

  “Does she love you?” Opal asked, her voice small again.

  “Yes, I think so. I know she did once.”

  “How? How did you know?”

  “I don’t know how. I don’t know.” He had never talked about it to anyone, never put any of it into words before. He turned to her. “Do you really want to know?” All right, he thought, what do I know about it?

  “Yes,” she said, and with the fear that he might not know, or that he might find that he knew what he didn’t want to know, he tried to tell her. She leaned toward him eagerly.

  “I know because of the way she waited for me, and needed me. No, wait: more like this! The way she looked, all soft and devastated by me. This was a long time ago. She opened up to me, ev
erything, every way. I don’t know. Don’t you know how a woman loves a man?” He was very depressed, and wished he’d kept his mouth shut, his secrets to himself.

  “Only in dreams,” Opal said.

  “Shim?”

  “Sometimes I think we’re a different species,” she half whispered, shuddered, and took a drink. “You don’t have cigarettes, do you?” She got up and went for a cigarette, came back with it lighted and tossed an empty book of matches toward the fire. It hit the andiron and bounced back to the hearth. She knelt unsteadily, tossed it into the flame, and stood up, laughing. “I almost asked you why I was telling you all this.”

  “Maybe because I look old and wise.”

  “Sometimes I wish I were a man,” she said as she leaned back against the big stones. He smiled.

  “I do, though,” she said.

  “You make a good woman, Opal,” he said.

  “No, I don’t. I want to, but I don’t. Oh, my God! I’m going to be sick!” She staggered toward him, and he jumped up and held her.

  “Don’t fall into the fire,” he said. She laughed bitterly, gagged, and said, “Front door. Front door. Not the kitchen. Won’t be seen.”

  He picked her up and carried her through the hall and out the seldom-used front door, into the trees. “Oh, God! I’m sorry,” she said. “What a mess!” He put her on her feet and held her over as she was sick, took her glasses and put them in his pocket, then held her over so she wouldn’t dirty her shoes. His hands, only because it seemed the best way to hold her, cupped her soft little breasts. As he held her light, racked body he looked up through the branches, saw a star, and felt terribly strong and for a moment unbearably tender.