Voices From the Street

  “You’re looking at me funny,” Dave observed. “What’s the matter?”

  “I was just thinking. Some things haven’t changed. You’re still the way you were, only more so.”

  “I wish you were,” Dave answered. “I never thought you’d wind up this way, working in a TV store.”

  In high school he and Dave Gold had been in the chess club together. Dave had inveigled him into going to a meeting of the Young People’s Socialist League, whereat Hadley gave up twenty-five cents for the success of the revolution, a concept he had previously been ignorant of. In college, Dave had maneuvered himself onto the staff of the university literary magazine and the monthly humor magazine and the weekly newspaper.

  In 1948 Dave Gold persuaded Stuart Hadley into joining the Independent Progressive Party, and into going to listen to Henry Wallace and Glen Taylor, candidates of the party. Ellen Ainsworth typed mimeograph stencils for Students for Wallace. When Wallace ingloriously lost, Stuart Hadley left the IPP. Dave Gold, on the other hand, joined the Civil Rights Congress and began taking Russian at the California Labor School in San Francisco.

  In the kitchen, Laura Gold’s loud raucous laughter brayed out over the sounds of boiling water. The apartment was warm, cozy with food smells, bright with yellow light, close with the presence of people and untarnished possessions. There was less contrast between the two women. Ellen, tubby and awkward, waddled about the kitchen, her soft brown hair tied back with a rubber band, her blue maternity suit bulging in front of her. The obesity of her abdomen made her legs seem spindly and pale; she wore white bobby socks and laceless moccasins, no makeup or nail polish. Her skin was lightly freckled, soft, almost milky; her lips and eyes were colorless. Laura Gold was a permanently heavyset woman with coarse black hair, thick ankles, grubby hands, and protruding teeth. She wore a gray sweater, rumpled black shirt, and hiking shoes. Her nose was warty and bent.

  As Stuart Hadley gazed moodily at her he wondered to himself how he could have got mixed up with Jews. Of course, Dave was different from most of them: he wasn’t a pusher. But still, he had a lot of Jewish habits: he had their uncleanness… He chewed his food with his mouth open, left greasy bits of food around his plate, stains on books…

  Hadley tried to trace back the connections; how had he begun going around with Dave Gold? He remembered the high school physics teacher with his flowing white cape; he had managed the chess club and discussed Darwin and Einstein with them in the long afternoons when school was out. And, of course, in those days both he and Dave were Democrats; both of them wore Roosevelt-Truman buttons and fought bitterly with Republican youths from the wealthy houses up on the hill.

  Both of them had been united in the Democratic Party in those days. Dave Gold, whose father was a wood finisher at a furniture factory, a workman with a lunch pail and overalls; Stuart Hadley, whose father had been a wealthy upper-middle-class doctor in New York before his death in an auto accident. Stuart, in high school, wore a white shirt and jeans; so had Dave. They wore common dress against the rich boys from the hill, who dressed in expensive slacks and sweaters and drove polished cars, who belonged to fraternities and held dances. Later, the common dress and common party had broken down. What had seemed to be a deep sameness between them had dissolved into overt difference. Looking back, he could see that the Young People’s Socialist League had been for him only an academic lecture, a presentation of ideas, like physics and chess. Dave Gold’s father had been a Wobbly, had been beaten up and jailed. Had served on picket lines, distributed Marxist leaflets. Stuart Hadley’s father had been a respectable doctor with a practice and office and reputation, a dignified professional-class man who had driven his wife and children about in a LaSalle, and belonged to the AMA.

  “Have you listened to a word?” Dave asked. “A word, maybe, out of all I’m saying?”

  “No,” Hadley admitted. “Sorry… I’m all beat out from working. Friday’s the worst day of the week, this damn working late.”

  “It’s over. You can relax.”

  “I’m too tired to relax. And there’s tomorrow—Saturday!”

  “I can’t understand how they can work you six days a week,” Dave Gold said, puffing on his pipe. “Can’t you get yourself into the AF of L retail clerks’ union? Has anybody ever tried to unionize your store?”

  “Fergesson would close down first.”

  “This Fergesson must be quite a fellow. Is he the one I see, middle-aged man in an old-type blue suit, with a vest and pocket watch? My God, he’s out of another century. Virtually a living fossil.”

  “That’s him.”

  “He doesn’t believe in unions? Little businessmen identify themselves with big business; he probably has ambitions to get a chain of stores.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You think he ever will?”

  “He may. He’s been saving up. Some kind of deal.” Brooding, Hadley dismissed the subject. “You should have been along with me earlier.”

  “What did you do?”

  “We delivered an RCA combination to a minister up on the hill. Huge house. Immense garden. Like a monastery…probably brought over from Europe. His wife, one of those tall English ash-blondes. Both of them looked like kings.”

  “King and queen,” Dave corrected.

  Hadley gazed darkly down at the floor and went on: “We set up the combination, got the yagi set up on the roof. When we were through, Anderton—the minister—offered us a drink. Whiskey, beer, whatever we wanted.”

  “Fine,” Dave said approvingly.

  Hadley stirred with wrath. “A minister! Offering people liquor—you call that fine?” He got up suddenly and crossed the room to pull down the shades. Thinking about it brought back all his feelings with a rush, his amazement and resentment, the sudden disgust he had felt at the great house with its massive gardens and furnishings. “I don’t think ministers ought to have liquor around,” he said.

  “Did you take the drink?”

  “Just to be polite. I wanted to get out of there. If ministers serve whiskey who’s going to keep people from doing wrong? He didn’t even wear a special collar, just a regular business suit. And all that luxury—I thought a minister was supposed to live in a little barren room. And he shouldn’t marry.”

  “You’re thinking about medieval monks.”

  Hadley paced restlessly around the small illuminated living room. “I don’t see that there’s any spirituality when a minister has a big wealthy house and garden and a wife and liquor like every other successful businessman. That’s all it is…another business.”

  “True,” Gold admitted.

  “There’s nothing left of religion! You go to a church and the minister reads out of a best-selling novel. He’s nothing but a psychologist. They go out and tell soldiers it’s fine with Christ to kill the enemy—that’s what God wants.”

  Gold reflected. “Back when we were in school you hoped all the Japs and Germans would be wiped off the map. It’s interesting; now you’re not responsive to prowar slogans.”

  “They hurried the Korean War along too fast,” Hadley said.

  Gold grinned. “Yes, they should have waited a little longer. They should give time for the depression to come in between, so people are glad to go off and fight. This time they got their stage directions fouled up.”

  Ellen and Laura came lumbering into the room. “What’s this about stage directions?” Laura demanded. The two women lowered themselves into chairs; in the kitchen the dinner continued patiently drying by itself.

  “The war,” Dave Gold said.

  “I wish you wouldn’t talk about the war,” Ellen said, shivering. “Everybody’s always talking about it; every time I turn on the radio or the TV or pick up a magazine or go past the headlines, there it is.” To Laura she said: “If the baby wasn’t on his way, they’d have taken Stuart. Of course, his liver trouble helps…but you never know.”

  “See,” Laura said, in her brash, loud, stupid way, “they’re goin
g to need kids growing up for the next war. They’re planning ahead.” She bellowed with laughter, leaned back, and fumbled in her greasy sweater for cigarettes.

  Stuart glared at her with annoyance. His own wife sat placid and undisturbed, as if the source, not the contents of material, was the element to which she objected. It was all right for Laura to babble about war and death because that was woman’s talk, done between women, in the kitchen or nearby. When men said it, the sanctity of the home was invaded. The menace of outside war was brought close. Stuart Hadley was not permitted to touch on dire topics, but another woman could rave out her stock of superstitions, her old wives’ fears and querulous aches. Laura Gold, Progressive witch of the present, could stand beside Ellen flooding her ears with the raucous garbage of her trade, and meet not outrage but blandness, passivity. Another woman—any other woman—was in many ways closer to Ellen than he was. Even this crude imitation of femininity was on the inside, party to secret revelations and references. There were regions he couldn’t claim, areas he couldn’t enter, even in his own home. Another dimension existed to women; he had never penetrated it. No man could. Women were the metaphysics of the world.

  “How can we not talk about it?” Hadley demanded. “It’s all around us!”

  “That’s why I don’t want to hear about it,” Ellen said simply. She smiled dreamily around the room, contented with this shoddy collection of guests; her hostess instincts were satisfied by dinner prepared for one unpleasant young couple. “Stuart, get some music on the radio, not that news commentator talking away.”

  Marriage, pregnancy, had softened and mellowed her. The sharp cautiousness of the old days, when the possibility of having to learn typing and shorthand and earn her own living existed, had rapidly blunted. Deprived of the impetus of economic competition, Ellen had sunk to a fecund vegetable level: she was a generative principle, not a person. She was rooted, planted. A ripe moist melon within panes of glass. As sweetened and fattened as any kept prostitute, made complacent by her blanket of respectability.

  And Hadley knew that Dave Gold saw with understanding this transformation from sharp-eyed practical little bride to massive vegetable; Dave’s calm alert gaze blinked out critically from behind the thick lenses of his glasses. Puffing on his pipe, Dave nodded, not in agreement, but in comprehension. “There’s hysteria in the air,” he said. “Cold wind of witches…the fear of death. Cunning men prey on this, feed on this. McCarthy, a clever man.”

  “Don’t mention that rat!” Laura protested, making a disgusted, furious spitting motion. “That fascist!”

  The women were united in bonds of not wanting to hear things distasteful. A common bond that connected them, the mystical psychology of the separate female race. Hadley, speaking to Dave Gold, harshly continued the conversation where it had been interrupted. “Sure, I approved of fighting the Nazis and Japs. I was glad as hell when we got in the war. Roosevelt said the Axis was the enemy of mankind and I wanted to wipe them off the map. I was so excited December seventh I couldn’t eat dinner.”

  “That was a Sunday,” Ellen said nostalgically, deflecting the conversation again. “I remember, my aunt and uncle were over for the afternoon. Relatives, all so stiff and formal. I was just dying to go off to the show… There was some Maria Montez picture showing.”

  Looking across the room at Dave, Hadley went on: “Roosevelt told us they had to be totally defeated—not a stick or a stone left standing. Now I look back and I can’t understand how I could have felt that way. There was a movie, a newsreel. A Jap running out of a bunker on Okinawa. Some GI got him with a flamethrower. There he was running along and burning up.” Hadley’s voice trembled. “Incinerating, a blazing torch. Everybody in the theater clapped and laughed. I laughed, too.” A cold, hard expression settled over his face. “I must have been crazy.”

  Ellen shrugged irritably. “In wartime—”

  “Yes,” Hadley said. “In wartime. The time you believe anything. I believed anything and everything they told me. Why not? I was only a kid. How was I supposed to know we were being snowed? I trusted them… It never occurred to me to doubt. When they said the Japs were submen, beasts, I believed that; yes, you could see it just by looking at them. Look at their little bandy legs. Look at their buck teeth. Look at their nearsighted eyes…half-blind little savages. Treacherous?”

  “Yes,” Dave corroborated. “They were treacherous.”

  “What else?”

  “They grinned,” Dave said. “As they raped women and bayoneted babies they grinned.”

  “That was it.” Hadley nodded. “When I heard how Tokyo was bombed until it was nothing but flames I was so glad I almost leaped out of my skin. It was like the home team winning the big game…cheering crowds, bands, pennants waving. Then I saw that newsreel, that man on fire. That thin silent little fellow hurrying along, trying not to burn up. Springing out of the hole, that cave he had got himself into. Popping out, goaded out like an insect or something. Like a beetle some kid sits and pokes at, hour after hour. And those people cheered.” His voice sank into bitterness. “Up to then I cheered, too. But not after that.”

  “Now it’s the Russians,” Dave said. “Only they don’t grin. And they’re great hulking fellows, not small and bandy-legged.”

  “No,” Hadley said, “I won’t do it. Once is enough. I’m not going through with it again. I’m not going to hate any more godless atheistic Oriental materialists. They can come and take over America. If there’s another war I’m going to sit here and wait for the bomb. We invented it… We used it on those Japanese women and tired old men and sick soldiers. We used it on them, and someday they’ll use it on us.” He grinned a little. “I guess I’m a godless atheist, too.”

  “But look at the lives we saved,” Ellen said, frowning at him. “So many of our boys would have been slaughtered… The bomb ended the war.”

  Hadley’s smile increased. “Death ends everything, not just wars. Where are we going to stop? After the godless atheists come the just plain starving.”

  “It’s not our fault,” Ellen said vaguely. “And look what happens when we try to help them—they hate us. They’re envious.”

  “They’re envious,” Hadley said, “because they know our wealth doesn’t belong to us. They know it’s stolen. They know where it came from; they know part of it should be theirs. We’re rotten with wealth and opulence. We deserve to get slaughtered. Can’t you feel it? Don’t you know it? Our sin, our guilt. We deserve the punishment that’s coming.”

  “Don’t talk that way,” Ellen said peevishly; her husband was interfering with the easy social air on which she had planned. But it was more than that. She recognized the look on his face, the hard emotionless glaze that rose to the surface when the man’s deepest wellsprings of discouragement had been touched. The look made her nervous, taut with apprehension. “Sit down and behave yourself,” she snapped.

  Hadley ignored her; he continued pacing around the room. “This country is evil. We’re big and rich and full of pride. We waste and we spend and we don’t care about the rest of the world.” To Laura he said, “A minister I met today poured me a highball. He had a big luxurious home and a lovely wife and an eight-hundred-dollar television combination and a refrigerator full of liquor.”

  “What’s the matter with that?” Ellen flared up furiously. “We keep liquor around the apartment; you’re always sitting down in some cheap bar drinking beer, like the night before last when you were out until two a.m. and I could hardly get you up to go to work.” Face flushed, she hurried on: “You have a lot of nerve talking. Wouldn’t you just love a big beautiful house… If we could afford that eight-hundred-dollar TV set we’d sure as heck get it—and whose fault is it we can’t afford it? Don’t begrudge others their success. You’re jealous, that’s what’s wrong with you. You’re envious of this man.” Panting, “What’d she look like?”

  Hadley blinked. “Who?”

  “His wife.”

  Hadley’s memory tu
rned back to the scene. As he and Olsen crouched grunting and sweating, adjusting the television set, Mrs. Anderton had appeared at the foot of the stairs. One hand resting on the banister, she gazed coolly at them, a tall slim figure in a floor-length robe, dark blond hair spilled around her shoulders, face calm, noble. “She was beautiful,” Hadley said sincerely. “A princess.”

  Ellen’s face worked. Before she could answer, Laura Gold began giggling stupidly. “Stuart, you’re so bourgeois you stink! You’re bourgeois through and through.”

  Hadley glared at her. “I have taste; is there something wrong with having taste and wanting to live nicely?”

  “I thought you objected to this man’s possessions,” Dave Gold said, puzzled and disturbed. “I don’t get you, Stuart. You talked as if you wanted these things wiped out…but now you say—”

  “I don’t think he should live that way,” Hadley said stubbornly. “It’s not right.”

  Ellen rose, frigid with hostility. “I think I smell the roast. Stuart, go wash for dinner.” She disappeared into the kitchen, vast and swaying. Laura followed after her; low voices and then shrill laughter floated out to the living room.

  Hadley and Dave Gold faced each other across the room.

  “What do you know about the Society of the Watchmen of Jesus?” Hadley asked.

  Gold puffed on his pipe. “Not much.”

  “They’re having a meeting tonight.”

  Gold nodded. “That’s so. Stuart, it’s none of my business, but you ought to quit your job. You’re eating your heart out, working at that run-down little TV shop. You shouldn’t be working for that man. What do you care about television? Get the hell out of there.”

  Hadley spread his hands helplessly. “How? Christ, this is no time to quit, with the baby coming.”

  “Don’t you have anything saved?”

  “A couple hundred for hospital expenses.” It wasn’t really that much; he didn’t know exactly what it was down to by now.