Читать книгу Three Short Novels - Gina Berriault - Страница 14

7

The day that Roosevelt died she took her son for a walk to share the shock of the death with the people in the streets. She and her son went hand in hand along by the shops, and in every shop people were talking about the death, and the ones inside and the ones waiting to cross at corners all had a look of shock that—because it was not for anyone close, for father or brother or husband, for anyone they had spent a lifetime with, but for a great man—was touched or tainted with a sense of privilege: that they were granted a time beyond the life of the great man was like a sign of favor. The sorrow that she felt over the President’s death became an encompassing sorrow for the millions of others dying, the anonymous others dying, and her husband dying, and for everything that went on that was tragic and that was not known to her. But as little as she knew, she thought, her son’s knowledge was only a fraction of her own. He was not even aware of nations and their governments, of the year and the era, and much less of the irretrievability of the dead; but if he did not have the comprehension now, he would have it in a few years. In a few years he would have more than she had at this moment, a great man himself, perhaps, about whose death—when he was seventy or eighty, and she was already dead a long time—everybody would be informed by newspaper and by radio. They walked slowly because that pace was suited to the day of mourning and to her son’s small legs; yet, after a time, the slowness began to annoy her. There seemed to be too much imposed upon her in that slowness, the dependent age of the child and the tremendous death of one great man.

In the evening, among the patrons of the lounge—among the men who, although they were subdued by the death, were nevertheless bathed and shaved and manicured and brilliantined and brushed and polished, and anticipative of pleasures that night with the women beside them or women waiting somewhere else—she gave herself up to the exciting paradox of the living opulently mourning the dead, and something more came into her consciousness of the magnitude of the world. At night in the bar with the changing patrons, the changing faces in the dimness moving in and out of her vision with more fluidity, more grace, because of the solemnity of the night, she realized, more than earlier with her son, the extent of a great man’s effect upon the world, the extent of the power he seemed to have even after his death, the extent of power over death that all these men seemed to have. She sang the president’s favorite song, and the pianist played it over and over again, pounding it out like a dirge while the solemn drinking went on at the tables.

Her father came in with Adele and with the actress who was to have helped Paul into the movies, a woman small and delicate, with a broad, flat-boned, powdered face, her shoulders emerging tense and arrogant from her ample fur coat. With her was the actor Max Laurie, a tragic comedian, always in each of his movies in love with the hero’s woman. A civilian at the table next to them, whose shoulder was near to Max’s, leaned over between him and the actress, gazing with a pretense of idolatry from one to the other, amusing his two companions, two men, with his intrusion into the glamorous company.

“It’s a sad day,” he said to Max. “You agree with me it’s a sad day?”

“We agree,” said the actress.

The man turned his head to look at the actress appealingly, a flicker of ridicule crossing his face. “Anybody who disagrees is a dog,” he said.

“Nobody disagrees,” said the actress.

“You ever met him?” the man asked. “They say he liked the company of actors and actresses. Banquets and entertainments, he liked that. Like a king, you can say, with his jesters. I thought you might have met him.”

“Never did,” she said, turning her back on him, drawing up her fur coat that lay over her chair so that the high collar barred his face. Then she turned abruptly back, as she would have on the screen, while the man’s face was still surprised by the fur collar. “Are you envious because you won’t die great?” she asked him.

“I’m living great, that’s all I want,” he said, and his companions laughed. “If you want to know another fact of life, because you don’t know all of them, it’s this: If you’re living great, the odds are you’ll die great. Like in the arms of some beautiful woman, right smack in her boodwah.” And while his companions laughed, he looked around at Max and at Vivian and at her father, and since they were not regarding him with annoyance, he looked again, boldly, into the face of the actress.

“He was a wonderful man,” said Max, his rich voice conciliatory, simple. “I met him myself. A bunch of us were out making speeches for him, can’t remember if it was his first term or his twelfth.” He had a way of lowering his eyes when everybody laughed and glancing up with a smile that suspected, shyly, that he was lovable.

“What was your name?” the man asked.

“Max Laurie,” he said.

“Is that Jewish or is it Scotch?” the man asked and everybody at both tables laughed. “He loved everybody, didn’t he?” he went on, striking their table with his palm. “Regardless of race, color, or creed. He had no discrimination—is that the word?” and overcome by his joke he bowed back over his own table, in silent tussle with his laughter.

Vivian left the table to sing again, and when she returned, the actress had moved to the chair Vivian had vacated, and she sat down in the actress’s chair, nearer now to the intrusive man, and saw that he was observing her, his face that of an outsider, desirous, recriminative. “I guess he thought he was going to live forever,” he said to her. “You could tell he thought so by the way he smoked that cigarette in the longest holder I ever saw outside of the movie queens back in the flapper days.”

“You saw his picture when he was at Yalta?” she asked him, repeating an observation she had heard earlier. “He looked sick then, his face looked as if it got the message he was going to die. He had a blanket or an overcoat around his shoulders.”

He patted her wrist. “You’re sweet,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“Because you got nursey eyes. ‘He looked sick at Yalta.’ Did you hear that?” he asked his companions, who were no longer listening to him. “You got nursey eyes.” He took her hand between both of his, caressing it between his palms, attributing to her, with that pressure of his hands, a sympathetic knowledge of all men. “Go on.”

“Go on what?” she asked.

“Tell me some more.”

“More of what?”

“Oh, they got so much on their minds they don’t take care of themselves. More of that. You know when a man gets a lot on his mind what happens to his body? Look at Gandhi—that’s what’s the matter with me. I’m as skinny as Gandhi only more because I’m twice as tall as he is. I think big thoughts. My head is big, see, but all my hair has turned white and my body is skinny.”

“What big thoughts?” she asked him.

“We all got a stake in it,” he said. “Those who stayed at home as much as those who laid down their lives. Got two factories going day and night, one down in El Segundo, out near the beach where the aircraft factories are. We make a small part that you girls would call an itsy-bitsy part, but without it the plane couldn’t fly. It couldn’t fly. Got another factory up here, feeds the shipyards with another itsy-bitsy part. When the general goes marching through the surf up to his neck, we’re right along with him, you and me. You and me, we’re right there when he delivers the coop de grace. The coop de grace belongs to you and me.”

He brought their clasped hands into her lap and, opening her hand, he began to smooth it flat, palm up, insistently smoothing out her fingers that curled again after his hand passed over them.