All the Little Live Things

  “With a minor it’s always rape,” Fran said, and then her voice got away from her and she was shouting a foot from my ear. “God, who knows what it was? The dirty, lying little beast!” In the harsh pause I heard her breathing. “I just wanted you to know what you started,” she said, and hung up, bang.

  If I started it, Fran finished it, and she didn’t wait. Before noon the next day a police car pulled up our hill and its driver, a uniformed cop from the next county, got out his notepad and took down my answers to a lot of questions about Jim Peck. How long had he lived down below? What were the arrangements, did he pay rent, or what? Had I known him before I let him camp down there? Ever notice anything queer about him or any of his friends? Act high ever? Wild parties maybe? Women coming in and out? Did I know what marijuana looked like, growing? That sort of thing.

  I gathered that Peck had been raided, but the policeman wasn’t telling me anything. Obviously he regarded me as a possible accessory, possibly a queen. He was alert for any dirt that blew, and his visit annoyed and bothered me so much that I did not go down for the mail, for fear I would have to talk with Marian about it. But I couldn’t wait indefinitely. At three, when the afternoon paper would be there, I walked down, and of course there she was in the grove, and John with her, and they had the paper in their hands. I joined them, though I would rather have had an errand somewhere else.

  It was front page, text and pictures: RAID UNCOVERS YOUTH DRUG-SEX RING. IRATE PARENT FLOORS HIPPIE. Here was Peck, beard and coveralls, holding his eye, his elbows held by stem deputies. Here was a ramshackle shingled cottage dwarfed by redwoods. Here was a disapproving district attorney with a tableful of evidence before him: a tobacco can said to contain grass, several bottles of barbiturates, a giant economy-size bottle of contraceptive pills. Here was the sex goddess Margo continued on page four, hair wild, hand raised in adjuration, while she talked sexual liberty and legalized abortion to a reporter. No other pictures of the people taken into custody, presumably because half of them were juveniles.

  But luscious details, piquant beside the enthusiastically aired theories of Margo and the accusations from Peck about police harassment and invasion of privacy. Such details as were provided by some of the juveniles, frightened by what they had got into. Several said that pot was commonly smoked among the group, and that they themselves had obtained it through Peck. One admitted that he had been taken up into the treehouse in the place formerly used by the gang and there taken on an LSD “trip” under Peck’s supervision. He thought that almost all of them had taken at least one trip, some many. He also said that sex was “pretty loose” in the camp, and that girls, including juveniles, were sometimes traded around among sleeping bags.

  The furious father of one of the juveniles had crowded in when the gang was being booked and knocked Peck down.

  I raised my eyes from the paper and found Marian sitting nervously straight, watching me. John was moodily smoking a cigarette. “I can’t imagine Lucio hitting anybody,” I said. “Was it Lucio?”

  “Tom Weld,” John said.

  “Oh, great,” I said. “The whole neighborhood gets in the act. Was that cop down here asking questions?”

  Marian nodded. “Fran too. We’ve had a session.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry they bothered you with it. What did she want?”

  “Wanted Marian to persuade Julie to have an abortion,” John said.

  “What? Why you?”

  She smiled a wincing smile. “Apparently I have influence over her. She’ll listen to me.”

  It was superb. Fran charging up to Marian, pregnant and dying and unalterably addicted to life, and proposing that she advise for another the abortion she would die rather than have performed on herself. In one flickering glance I assured myself that John and I were in complete accord on that one. My sympathy for Fran, which had been considerable, and considerably mixed with guilt, instantly diminished.

  “What’s the matter with an old-fashioned shotgun marriage?” I said.

  John laughed. “Find the man. Julie won’t say. Even if she would, can you imagine Fran welcoming any of Peck’s boys for a son-in-law?”

  “What about Dave?” I said, and as soon as I said it acknowledged the stupidity of the remark. Through her cocker bitch, tied however snugly to the clothesline, Fran had already had experience with the Weld genius for creatirig consequences. She would want Dave Weld no more than she would have wanted Peck himself.

  “Well,” I said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Which does a lot of good. Are you going to advise Julie to get it aborted? You could get Margo to help persuade her.”

  Marian stared at me so long, with such a blank, concentrated expression, that I thought she must be watching something behind me. I thought I saw her shake her head very slightly. John stepped on his cigarette and said, “No, she’s not going to advise her one way or the other. She’s not going to get involved. She’s not going to waste her strength feeling sorry or worrying about that kid, because the kid will do exactly what she pleases in any case. She won’t tell who the father is, assuming she knows. She won’t agree to an abortion. Why would she? She says they gave her pills and she threw them away. She wanted to get pregnant to spite Fran, and now she has, and that’s it.”

  “She says?” I said. “Have you talked to her?”

  “Oh, sure. Fran brought her over.”

  “Good God!” I said. “Hasn’t she got any better sense than to ...”

  “I don’t know,” Marian said. “If there was something I could conscientiously do, I’d be so glad to do it! Poor sullen Julie. Poor Fran, too, she’s being torn apart. And the Welds, my goodness, they had no idea what was happening, they just got called down to the station. It was like having something fall on you out of a window. You knew it was Dave who got scared and talked to the police?”

  “Gunslinger? He always seemed the strong silent one.”

  “Julie’s vicious about him. She calls him the squealer.”

  “Forget it,” John said. “Put it all out of your mind.”

  She mused, relaxing back against the lounge and examining her pink palm. “I’m a naïve,” she said. “I thought, because they all seemed so sort of natural and good-natured and liked the outdoors and only seemed to dislike artificial things like shaving, that we could set them some sort of example—you know, show them that all their kicks were artificial too, and unnecessary. Your own five senses ought to be more than enough. Hmmm?”

  “Nothing.”

  “But I guess they probably thought I was pretty square. I’m sure they liked me, and I liked them, they were so full of vitality and a sort of spirit of adventure. But beliefs, that’s something else. They must have thought what I believe was something suitable for Girl Scouts.”

  “Forget them,” I said. “Forget the whole business. They aren’t worth ten minutes of your time, isn’t that right, John?”

  “That’s right,” John said. “They couldn’t get an abortion in California anyway. It never was your problem, Marian. You couldn’t help even if they’d let you.”

  He did not say it, but we all understood as precisely as if he had: You’ve got your own problem to handle. Fran LoPresti is not the only one who has a crisis in her life.

  6

  Crisis turned out to be like the smell of tarweed. By the time you realized you were smelling it, you had been smelling it a long time.

  That realization came to us only a few days after the Peck blowup, when we stopped in and found Marian not outside, not reading, not tidying up the details of her life, but flat in her bed, and nauseated.

  It was shocking to see her down: I had the instant conviction that I would never see her up again. The thinness that had always roused protective feelings in us had taken a sudden change and become emaciation. The face that tried to smile and reassure us through spasms of nausea was for the first time weary and pathetic. None of it was new. We had simply not noted the stages of her deterioration, de
spite our watchfulness. It dawned on us that for days, a week, maybe two weeks, Ruth had had trouble making anything that would tempt her appetite. She found her invalid delicacies untouched on the tray or in the refrigerator. Appetite, attentiveness, the performance of little duties, had all been growing more forced. Now suddenly she was a woman sick to death.

  John was not at home-he had taken Debby to school and gone on to a meeting at the university. The place was ours, dismay and all. Ruth sent me out while she got Marian comfortable and tidied the bedroom. Outside, I stacked a lot of the wood that John and Debby had been so assiduously making, and I raked up the front yard and burned a pile of leaves.

  Later I went inside, out of the nostalgic sad autumnal smell of leaf smoke, and talked a few minutes to the girl propped in bed with her hair in pigtails. Despite the nausea, her eyes were extraordinarily bright. I thought she looked at me with the soft intensity, the tenderness, that I had seen in the eyes of too many people dying of cancer-the look that says how lovely are the shapes and colors of life and how dear the faces of friends, how desirable it all is, how soon to be lost.

  Because she had watched her downward progress more knowingly than we had, she knew what the nausea meant. She had discussed it all with her doctor in advance, and as usual had made preparations. Though she insisted she would not take drugs if pain came upon her, she had no objection to intravenous feeding, for that would keep her stronger for the baby. John, she said, would take her to the clinic that afternoon, and they would see if they couldn’t find a practical nurse, someone who could give her the feeding at home. She would not go to the hospital, not so long before the baby was due. It would, she implied but did not say, be a fatal omen. When you went to the hospital in cases like hers, you were already dead, you lost your identity as a person, you became a case, a sickness, an obligation or an anxiety only. She knew very well she would not survive three or four weeks of the hospital. To go there this early would be to go defeated.

  Nevertheless, they took her there that evening. John joined with the doctor to overrule her. But at the end of three days they brought her back again, shakily triumphant, and looking better for the three days of care. A nurse was with her, a large white-nylon person with upper arms as big around as Marian’s waist. I heard her name a hundred times while she was there; I can’t remember it now to save my life.

  But coming home did not restore Marian to what she had been before. There was now no pretense that she was simply resting and would soon be up and around. The needle taped into her thin captive arm, the bulky figure in white nylon, were temporary, yes, but not in that way. What is more, the nurse’s coming shut us out of most of the comforting chores we had formerly done, and gave us in exchange only sickroom visits, stiff and awkward and tainted with false cheerfulness.

  Ours, not Marian’s. She had no need of false cheerfulness. She simply opposed her will to the sickness and deflected it. Now that she had made it home, she had not a doubt that she would live to bear the child. Strengthened by the drip of maltose into her blood stream, she might even manage a normal birth. With laughter in her throat and tears in her eyes she told about meeting, on a visit to the clinic a couple of weeks before, the wife of one of John’s colleagues who, seeing her obviously pregnant, had wanted to give her a baby shower. “She was kind,” Marian said. “She meant only the friendliest. But it made me laugh, it was so sort of ... orthodox.”

  Never with the lamp turned down, never with her mind or her resolution clouded. Whatever darkness she looked into when she was alone, or alone with John, never left the slightest shadow on her face. Yet we became gradually aware of some change of expression, a change that we might have thought the flicker of response to some thought until one afternoon, sitting with her while the nurse took a walk, I realized that Marian had stopped what she was saying. Her legs stirred under the spread. The grimace, the sickroom tic, the shadow of a thought, whatever it was, passed plainly across her face.

  Across the bed, stiff and sudden, Ruth leaned forward in her chair. “Pain?”

  Marian’s half-closed eyes cleared, the grimace became a smile. She nodded.

  “Which?”

  “Which?”

  “Labor, or ... the other?”

  “Ah,” said Marian disgustedly, “I wish it was labor!”

  “How long?”

  “The last few days. It’s not too bad, just twinges.” .

  “Marian, you’ve got to let them give you something for it!”

  But she shook her head, stubborn and intractable. She set her will against the pain as she had set it against time and malignancy. She did her best to ignore it. She held on. She held out.

  But it must have made her desperate, as it made us grim, for it told her how little time she had. Death and life grew in her at an equal pace, the race would be down to the wire. And of all the things she might have ,feared, she feared pain worst, because it might obliterate in animal agony the last great experience.

  John and her doctor both told her-and John told us -that they would not let her endure too much pain, they would give her drugs whether she agreed or not. She hadn’t much choice: either pain or drugs would blur the climax she had set her whole strength toward. So she willed her pain small, she denied its capacity to hurt her. And who of us could tell whether she managed to make it small, or whether she only forced herself to bear more than she could?

  A bleating nuisance, unable to bear her bearing of her pain, I called her doctor and asked if she could not have a Caesarean immediately. Why shouldn’t she have the satisfaction of bringing forth that hard-won baby, seeing it, handling it, assuring herself that it was normal and warm? Then she could let go.

  He told me she couldn’t possibly stand an operation. She wouldn’t live to know whether she had borne the child or not. No doctor, certainly not himself, would perform any such operation except as a last-ditch measure to save the child. The baby, he told me, was safe as long as Marian was.

  “Which is not long,” I said.

  “No,” said his dry controlled voice (Why does one so hate those who must keep their heads in human and feeling situations?), “no, it’s a great pity.”

  A pity.

  That was the afternoon when Tom Weld drove his caterpillar across the tottering bridge and began tearing great wounds in the hill. We saw him as we walked slowly home from our afternoon visit, and full of the bitterness of being able to do not one thing for Marian, we took refuge in fury at that barebacked Neanderthal and his brutish machine. I associated his mutilation of the hill with the mutilations that Marian had suffered and was still to suffer, and I hated Weld so passionately that I shook. He was a born ugliness-maker, and he was irresistible and inescapable. We couldn’t move our hill or turn our house the other way; and we could no more resist the laws of property, the permit of the planning commission, and the Weldian notion that mutilation was progress, than we could stop the malignant cells from metastasizing through Marian’s blood stream.

  For a long time that evening we sat on the terrace, while the swallows and later the bats sewed the darkening air together over the oaks, and the crude gouge that would become a road faded into dusk, then dark. The white surveyors’ stakes swam and were lost in granular obscurity. The night air was strong with the scent of tarweed, mixed now with the half-sour smell of broken adobe.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I don’t mind getting old. I wish it would hurry up. The other day I read something in Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer that said it all: ‘Sometimes my heart grows tired with beating, it wants rest like my eyelids.”

  “Marian would read you a lecture if you said that to her,” Ruth said. “Though you couldn’t blame her if she felt that way herself, poor child. I suppose we ought to wish it would come soon.”

  “What I wish is that she’d give up that baby and start taking some sort of treatment and give herself a chance.”

  “It’s much too late. You mustn’t kid yourself.”


  “I guess not,” I said. “She never has.”

  We sat on in silence, and as we sat a soft darkness moved against the sky’s darkness, and soundlessly an owl had settled in the oak almost level with our eyes. I could just see his outline, a Halloween cutout, on the branch. For several minutes he sat there, utterly noiseless, and then he was gone.

  “What was that, a bloody omen?” I said.

  “Oh, Joe, stop it! You’re only making it worse.”

  “It couldn’t be worse.”

  She stood up with a rustle of impatience. Then after a few seconds her hand came under my arm, and I put my own arm around her. “We’ll have to do our outside living in the patio now,” she said. “I don’t think I could bear to watch what he’ll be doing over there.”

  “We’ll take up new positions, in other words.”

  “What?”

  “That’s the way the military reports defeats. ‘Our troops have taken up new positions.’ Life is one new position after another.”

  “There’s more to it than that.”

  “Like what? Intelligence doesn’t help, foresight doesn’t help, determination doesn’t help, courage doesn’t help, grace doesn’t help. If any of them did, Marian wouldn’t be where she is.”

  It was too dark for me to see Ruth’s face, but I could tell from the outline of her head that she was looking at me directly and hard. “But she hasn’t given up,” she said.

  Ruth has her own variety of toughness. She is rawhide where Marian was some kind of light, strong metal. “All right,” I said at last. “Tomorrow we’ll take up our new positions.”

  We went around to the patio side and stood. It was so still that I heard the hollow rush and murmur of traffic from the choked highways of the valley. Over that way the sky was reddened, but in the other direction the hills were dark and whole. A star looked up at us from the bottomless black pool.

  “It isn’t as if he could ruin everything,” Ruth said. “This side is getting lovely as the planting grows up. Lots of people don’t have a tenth as much.”