Rumors of Peace (18 page)

T
HE NEXT DAY
when Mr. Kerr sat down by me at practice, I averted my eyes. When I had to answer something he said, I addressed the drum. This was how I would manage it. He would not exist.

But by the end of the week I was curious to know if his spell was still in force, and when he left me, I moved over to the cushion on his chair. As fearsomely as the first time, the strange feeling thrilled up my spine, spread piercingly into my chest, melted my heart.

He stood regarding the finger work of a bassoonist.

He was like a bomber that blew everything up and flew off high and safe. I stood up in the gloom and for the second time gave his chair a hard kick. A chair was no longer a chair; a teacher wasn't a teacher; your own insides were no longer your own insides. I had an odd thought then, not odd in itself, but out of place. If I had gone along to that Jap house in the outskirts, there wouldn't have been any slashed furniture or running faucets, no such puniness. I would have drenched the rooms with gasoline, locked the couple inside, and burned the place to the ground. The black, sticky skull sticking out of the tank. It made me feel better, thinking of this.

“What's that geranium doing sticking out of the mailbox?” Dad asked one night at bedtime as he was putting the hook on the screen door.

“A geranium?” Mama asked.

“How funny,” I said, blushing. “I wonder who could have put it there.”

“Probably some neighborhood kid,” Dad said, and went out and removed it. But it was I myself who had stuck it there, on a sudden impulse, for the mailman. It was he who brought us news of Karla and Peter, and it seemed so decent of him; he was so dependable, like the Pony Express. He deserved at least a geranium.

The news he brought from Karla was that an agent from the Disney studios in Hollywood had been up to the institute, and she was thinking that she might go down there. Not if she had to sit at a factory belt drawing the same rabbit's tail over and over, but if she could do some original work. She would have to look into it.

Peter had been promoted from buck private to PFC, and he had been to London twice now. He had been to a music hall review, a Shakespearian play, and Westminster Abbey. He wrote about the red double-decker buses and how people called you “chappie” and “luv.” He said the city was leveled in places, big sections of rubble, and how there were props all over the place holding up sides of buildings. He wrote how Big Ben sounded and how it was to hear it as you walked along the Thames at night, in the fog.

I told Helen Maria about the Thames; it was so poetic, she would like it. But she seemed sad. And I realized, looking at her face, that missing out on Oxford was not just an ordinary big disappointment, it was the greatest disappointment of her life.

I hesitated, embarrassed to offer comfort. “You'll get there afterwards, Helen Maria. After the war.”

“Oh yes, I suppose so.”

I didn't add: if ever it ends.

Mr. Kerr's power began spreading from his chair. The current flashed through me when he took my wrist or if his shoulder happened to graze mine. It left me red-faced, staring at the floor. Often he did not take my wrist or graze my shoulder, and then I had to brush against him, to know if things continued as fearfully as before, which they did.

One night in bed, as I was drifting off, I had a kind of dream. I was walking along a road. It was a warm summer night. I came to a large Parisian mansion and knocked on the door. Mr. Kerr opened it. His jacket was off, and his shirt sleeves were rolled up. A full moon hung overhead. Faint music drifted through the door.

“What beautiful music,” I said. “Who is playing?”

“Not my wife, it is a phonograph. I am alone now; she has gone away.”

“That is too bad.”

“Not at all.”

And now the blue eyes looked deep into mine as he slowly extended his hand and said in soft, low tones, “Come in, Suse.”

It was sublime; it was terrifying. I burned the whole thing up in a flaming vision of the Jap house.

From then on, every night, I had this fantasy. It never progressed beyond the soft, low invitation to come in, but it was enough, it was far too much, and I always ended it with the roaring destruction of the Jap house.

Outside the French windows the rain poured down. A cozy blaze crackled in the fireplace. Helen Maria had made hot wine, and as she poured it, I thought she looked unusually happy, almost to the point of bursting. But I had something important to ask, and I got it in before she could speak.

“How's Mr. Tatanian?”

“Who? Don't even remind me. It must have been the heat.”

She was free! Released! It was what I had hoped she would say, yet now that she had said it I was disappointed.

“Love should be eternal,” I said.

“That is boring.”

“But you can't forget him, just like that.”

“Why not? He's in the dreary past.” She handed me my wine and sat down on the Persian spread with hers. “Waste no regrets on Mr. Tatanian. He's quite content collecting his little tickets.”

Little tickets—he who had inspired a poem to the nation of Armenia. It was not as it should be.

“Now, listen, do you want to hear something smashing?” She set her cup aside and crossed her legs tailor fashion, putting her hands on her hips.

“All right,” I said.

“I'm moving to Berkeley.”

I looked, shocked, at the radiant face.

“In April, when I turn seventeen. Jack and Estelle have agreed. Just a boardinghouse, it won't be the same as having my own apartment, but I'll be independent.” She screwed a cigarette into her amber holder, lit it—but without the flourish; she no longer made those grandiose sweeps—and blew the smoke out through a smile. “I'll do exactly as I please. I absolutely can't wait to leave.”

I looked over at the fireplace.

She was silent for a moment. “Listen, Suse . . . I want to tell you something. You've been my only friend . . . we're true friends. I'll miss you.”

I looked away from the fireplace, at her face, which was embarrassed and severe. I couldn't speak; I had nothing at my command except an overflowing heart and a tight throat.

She took a brisk sip of her wine. “When I'm settled in, you must come down and visit. You can take the train, and I'll meet you at the depot. I'll show you the campus, and we'll eat out at a restaurant. Maybe you can even stay overnight.”

“That will be nice,” I said, clearing my throat.

“Yes, we must look forward to that.”

When would the invasion begin? Dad didn't know. The newspapers didn't know. No one knew. That was the whole point, it had to be kept a secret. Waiting, waiting, always the waiting. And Peter a machine gunner. If only he would get the flu again, so he would be flat on his back when the others left. Except they were brothers of someone too, thousands and thousands of them. Impossible to hope for thousands of cases of flu. And if it did miraculously happen, there would be no invasion, no end of the war. However you looked at it, there was no way out.

“No way out,” I said, looking into the rain.

“What are you, talking to yourself?”

“I guess.” I took the butt Eudene held out. We were standing under a pepper tree at noon, having a puff.

“When you talk to yourself,” she said, “it means you've lost your marbles.”

“I lost them a long time ago, Eudene.”

She began singing, “I lost my marbles at the stage door canteen. . . .”

At least I had Eudene. In a way she was like old fat Peggy. She made life seem less serious.

But overnight Eudene changed. She sat at her desk in silence. At lunchtime she didn't eat. She didn't roll her eyes and smash you in the ribs. She didn't want to talk. After a few days I wrote a note and put it before her on her desk. “What is the matter?” She glanced at it, chin in hand, and continued brooding.

One day she didn't come to class. The next morning she wasn't there either. By noontime I had decided to go to her house after school. Getting my lunch from my locker, I turned to find Peggy beside me. I felt a shock of joy, for this was old drowned Peggy raised from the depths, standing gracelessly on heavily planted feet, hair carelessly combed, mouth untouched by lipstick. She had come back.

“This awful thing happened, Suse . . . I think you'd like to know. Aunt Dorothy died.”

So that was the reason for her appearance. It wasn't that old Peggy had come back.

“We just heard this morning. . . .” The eyes suddenly squeezed into slits, shone with water. “She committed suicide.”

I looked at the tight mouth, the chin trembling. Why did she come to me? She never bothered with me otherwise. “What'd she do, hang herself?”

Peggy looked down at the floor, trying to speak. “Pills,” she said in a little gasp, and kept looking at the floor. “I don't really remember, but when she was here, I don't think I was really mean or anything?” The wet eyes looked up.

“No, I suppose not. You just ignored her. You wouldn't talk to her. I suppose it wasn't really mean, except she must have thought it was.”

The eyes looked down again.

“You treated her like a bore. I'm only telling you what you told me.”

She didn't look up again. Turning, she walked slowly away. I felt a blow of remorse but stood firm as she made her way to the girls' lavatory, no doubt to lock herself in a stall and cry. I had only spoken the truth. The truth was moral; the truth was just. And Peggy, the door swinging shut behind her, would have to live with it.

I rang the bell and waited. I waited a long time. Shell Hill towered behind my back, dark and cindery in the rain, its black storage tanks glistening. Poor Eudene, one direct hit and there wouldn't be a piece left of her on the face of the earth.

But solid and real, she opened the door, standing in a threadbare bathrobe, looking sick and tired out and not happy to see me. But she let me in and walked heavily down the hall to where she lived.

It was just one room, huge, cold, and gray as an aerodrome. But there were the Parisian windows, and I went over to them. The bay was silt yellow, broken everywhere by whitecaps. Overhead the dark clouds merged and shifted, all at once exposing a cauldron so glaring that all the raindrops were lit and broke against the glass like diamonds.

Eudene took no notice of the splendor. Crawling under the blankets of a ratty chesterfield, she looked at me uneasily, her face chalk white, darkly discolored under the eyes. She said she had the flu.

It was an odd visit. She kept saying she didn't feel like talking and I couldn't stay, yet she talked more than I had ever heard her, mostly about her grandmother, how religious she was, how she kept screaming about hell and damnation. I didn't even know she lived with her grandmother. I thought she lived with parents like everyone else.

Abruptly she said she wasn't coming back to school. She was moving away.

“Why!?”

She only glared at me. She was terribly nervous and irritable, and the whole time I was there she kept asking if I believed in hell and damnation. I kept saying no, and she kept saying, “What do you know about it?” It was useless to open my mouth. I looked around the room,
so big and bare, with its gray floor like an ice rink. Poor people were supposed to live in tiny cramped rooms. It was a fact of life, and a logical one, because they kept warmer that way. I looked at a framed picture of Jesus on the wall.

“Where is she anyway, your grandmother?”

“The arsenal. She works there.”

I couldn't imagine a grandmother working anywhere; they were too old. But this one was apparently different. She thought she looked like Sonja Henie, Eudene said—and here came the old bellow of laughter, but black with scorn—and she was getting remarried next month. “She said I could keep living with her when she got married, and I never even
wanted
to! But now I want to, but she says no because she's so godalmighty religious and pissed off.”

“About what?”

“Nothing!”

I was getting tired of the visit, but I stayed because Eudene looked so sick and unhappy. I sat listening to the rain battering the windows, and to a dreary ping-ping-ping from the icebox.

“What'd you come here for?” she asked. “Just to spy?”

“Spy? What d'you mean? I just came to see how you were—”

“Well, this is how I am!” she cried, sitting upright and grabbing herself all over, as if plucking a chicken. “Go on, tell them all you seen me and what I look like, I don't give a shit!”

“What d'you mean?”

“You're so stupid!”

“You're
the stupid one! I can't even figure out what you're talking about, that's how much sense you don't make!”

“Maybe I don't want to make sense!”

She was absolutely a lost cause. I sighed and shook my head.

Eudene had a trembling look around her mouth, as if she were going to vomit. A chair stood next to her with a chipped enamel basin on it, and she pulled it closer. She leaned over the basin, holding her greasy sauerkraut hair back with both hands.

I stood up quickly. “Get better soon!” I called, hurrying to the door. Closing it behind me, I had a sense of having done something wrong, or at least of not having done something right.

In the hall I saw a woman coming through the front door, closing a dripping umbrella. She wore overalls and a lumber jacket and had a lunch pail under her arm. As we passed, she threw me a brief glance. Her face was like a walnut, topped by dark-streaked yellow bangs. She didn't look religious, she didn't look like Sonja Henie, and she didn't look like anybody's grandmother, but she turned in at Eudene's door.

That night in bed it all came to me. But how could a member of the eighth grade be pregnant, even sweaty, big-bosomed Eudene? It was one thing to suspect her of doing fleshly things with men. That at least was alive in a dark mysterious way. But being pregnant was like being dead. You saw them all over town, war wives, very young, with protruding bellies and a toddler already whining and dragging at their skirts. Their faces were deaf-looking, like cows' faces; all they did was shop, cook, change diapers, and drink coffee in a pablum-smeared kitchen with some other young mommy just as deadly washed-up as themselves. They were so dreary that when you saw them on the street, you made a detour around them, thankful that you were a free, high-stepping schoolgirl.