Son of a Smaller Hero

  Afterwards Miriam joined Noah in the Yacht Club. She had a lot to drink. “Sweet Marg says that I’m thirty. She says that you, Mr. Adler, are a dirty little boy who needs a haircut. She says that she used to like having a bit of fun herself but that – let’s face it – we’re getting on and the time has come to settle down. Theo, sweet Marg says, wouldn’t mind if I had an affair or two, but why humiliate him? She also says that John’s lousy in bed. That John is not as bright as she is, and that that makes it tough.”

  They drove up to Ste. Adele on Friday night.

  Those first two weeks were the happiest of their lives. Not that there had been any especial afternoon or evening that was so very memorable, but everything, even the most commonplace incident, seemed quite beautiful in retrospect. They got up early every morning and walked hand-in-hand in the woods. They ate lunch on the screened porch and afterwards took a blanket out and slept or read in the sun. Noah felt freer than he ever had previously: there was no past and no future. He did not worry about his family. She watched him jealously. For the first few days she had missed Theo. Earlier, when she had been shopping in Montreal, she had been able to stifle her thoughts with work, but those first few days in the mountains he had intruded on her joy like a recurring bad dream. For several years she had lived narrowly but within certain conventions, everything being habitual. Secure, also. Alone, they had had very little to say to each other, but that, in retrospect, had been more reassuring than boring. She worried about Theo. Had he remembered to thank Aunt Clara for the lamp she had sent for Christmas? Would he pay the butcher bill? Remember not to be so belligerent about his politics when the dean was around?

  Theo and Miriam had met at McGill. That had been a time of baffled men and evening and paper souls and loving like fast handshakes. Writers, famous and forgotten since, who had been crackerjacks with French-kiss symbols. Indolent, imitation Rimbauds. With John Kennedy, Marg Bradshaw, Herb Shields, Chuck Adams, Mary Walsh, Pip McLeod, and others, they had formed a group of vigorous and politically conscious rebels. Nobody had thought of Theo and Miriam as being anything more than a part of a group. As a matter of fact, Miriam seemed to be seeing a lot of Chuck Adams. Chuck, however, was one of the first to go. He joined the RCAF. The others followed quickly. Theo, through no fault of his own, was the last to go. That’s how the two of them had been thrown together.

  Second-Lieutenant Hall searched for his friends on his last night in Montreal but all of them, except Miriam, had dispersed. So Theo and Miriam set out into the night intent on drinking their way through every bar in town. But without the rest of the crowd – without Chuck in particular – they had surprisingly little to say to each other. They tried, however. Miriam evoked a few forced laughs by reminding him of that night when Mary had disrupted all of Windsor Station – outraging the flag-carriers and scandalizing the teary-eyed – by coming down to see off Pip McLeod dressed in widow’s black and sweeping down the platform on roller-skates. Some girl, Theo said, and then told the story of how Chuck had damn near got himself thrown out of McGill. Chuck was mad, Miriam said. And so they drifted from bar to bar, determined to have a night that could be committed to memory, embellished upon and written of to the others, who were in Alexandria or London or Hong Kong or Toronto. But they soon ran out of anecdotes and they did not know how to talk to each other. Miriam felt that she had failed the others. Theo remembered that when Chuck had gone off there had been a hell of a party. Everybody had had fun.

  But they couldn’t call it quits. They watched the clock in one anonymous bar after another, until Miriam frantically suggested that they go up to her apartment. That had been his thought, too, but only as a last resort. Miriam, he thought, was Chuck’s girl. Chuck was away fighting. So they failed at making love, too, lonely for the others even in bed. Afterwards they were still left with time. Theo started off on another Chuck Adams anecdote and Miriam, suddenly conscious of the pathos of their situation, took him into her arms and wept bitterly. Theo did not understand. Miriam sobbed. Theo fled. He waited around for more than an hour in that chill station which was as vast as his melancholy, until his train left at 7:15 a.m. Miriam didn’t see him.

  He wrote her from England, France, Germany, and from England again. At first she answered his letters as a kindness. His early letters were cautionary. Hers were factual. Then one day she wrote him a long and gloomy letter. Chuck was missing over Germany. “When will this madness end? What if Stalingrad falls?” And he wrote back: “Remember that night in Montreal, the night of my departure …”

  Memory swindled them. That wretched night took on glamour in retrospect. They recalled that there had been drinks and love-making, and not the desperation that had been inherent in both. Wave after wave of yearning letters broke on her, each one more full than the last. Soon she found herself thinking, why shouldn’t I be loved too? I’m tired of running, tired of searching. He’s so solid.…

  Their parting had been clumsy. She had expected that there would be a sadness shared, or a kind exchange for the sake of memory. Instead she had said that the alarm clock was hers and he had said that the radio was his – when it wasn’t. What was to be done with the dishes? Wedding gifts? Which records were hers and which books were his? Finally and between sobs she had said that she would take nothing. But he had said no, he wasn’t in need of her charity. So they had quarrelled again. She had fled the apartment, leaving everything behind. But she had returned the next day when he was away at lectures and had taken her things away. She had left the alarm clock and the radio behind.

  She watched Noah anxiously. Everything he did was new. Unexpected. What if he left her? What if …

  But after a few days she felt that even her anxiety had passed. She surrendered herself gladly and without motives to her lover and the sun and living without habit or security.

  After dinner they would sprawl out on the rug before the open fire.

  “I feel so utterly dependent on you now. Does that frighten you, Noah?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sometimes afraid that you’ll meet a younger woman. Somebody prettier. Or more intelligent.”

  “If I do, we’ll send her away. We’ll … Funny, I would like everybody to be in love now.” He laughed. “You’re so neat. Did you know that? You’re always cleaning or mopping up or sweeping. I noticed that this afternoon.”

  “Marg wouldn’t mind us. Neither would the others. If they thought that we weren’t serious.”

  “I’ll bet. I guess she’d make you a member of the club. I guess she’d issue you with a badge and a book of secret signals and a douche bag. Christ.”

  “I love you, Noah. I’ve never been so happy. Something’s always spoiling things. Don’t let that happen. Please don’t.”

  One rainy afternoon he wandered off by himself down the dirt road. The sky swept down darkening the day and hiding the hills. People on all sides ran for cover. Horses disturbed in their stables whinnied and kicked. His hair adhering to his head, water running down his neck, Noah felt more sympathy for the horses. He was suddenly filled with a sense of his own small condition. If I were a horse, he thought, I would gallop up to the top of the highest hill and bray louder than any thunder. Then he sat down under a tree and watched the rain peck small holes in the dirt. He stared pleadingly at the people who were huddled in doorways under awnings. Come, come out and dance. Shout. Sing. Even as a boy he had been disturbed by the fact that people stopped talking during a storm or, if they did talk, talked too loud.

  The hills greyed and black clouds swirled, lightning cracked and then the rumbling distant, closer, and the rushing in the trees. Down, down, swoosh after swoosh of rain. Eventually he kicked off his shoes and, up again, wandered into the woods singing the prayers of his boyhood boldly. At last the rain stopped. Clouds broke up and softened until the sun – magnanimous beyond compare – condescended to shine down in the woods and on the reappearing hills, as if nothing, nothing at all, had ever happened.

  Wait
ing for him, huddled up on the screen porch, teeth chattering and chain-smoking, she saw him appear sodden and shivering out of the woods, barefoot, his eyes wild. She had been through an awful time. He’s bored, she thought. He’s leaving me. Miriam leaped up and led him into the bedroom. She undressed him and rubbed him down with a towel and gave him brandy. He seized her. Something in his eyes made her struggle against him. They grappled briefly. She bit him and he yelled. Then responding to a current that raced madly through her loins she submitted to him eagerly. His love-making that afternoon often verged on violence, even if it never quite broke out that way. That last climatic groan that usually broke from her lips seemed, that afternoon, to infuriate him. He muttered imprecations. His caresses could have been blows. Each time she thought that he was exhausted he managed to summon up energy again from the darkest places. Finally, however, he grimaced as though in great pain and rolled away into a corner of the bed and fell into a deep sleep.

  “How long can this go on, Noah? Don’t you want to do anything?”

  “Are you afraid, Miriam?”

  “Of you, mostly. I’m living with you yet I don’t know you. You seem to go only so far and then … There is a part of you that I can’t reach or understand.”

  “Miriam, how far do you think two people can really go?”

  III

  Back in Montreal, Theo was worried and angry but he was going to face the whole problem intelligently, without emotion. She’ll be back, he thought. That kind of thing never lasts. At Oxford she had had an affair with Chris Taylor, who had emended the most recent edition of the poems of George Herbert. But that had been a thing of the spring. This thing with Noah, Theo thought, is different. And it was. Noah wasn’t a member in the sense that those in the group in Montreal, and afterwards in the other group at Oxford, had been members, with a sort of option on the extra-curricular lapses of other members. Not only that. But Noah was a Jew as well. Now Theo, if anything, was not an anti-Semite. As a student he had refused to join anti-Semitic fraternities and still later he had boycotted restricted hotels and restaurants. That’s why he felt cheated. Why should a Jew take away his wife? There were other complications, too. Miriam aside, Theo had not slept with any other women save whores. Whores in France and Germany, when the need had been great or when the fear of being branded a queer had demanded such behaviour. He hadn’t enjoyed that kind of thing much. He was against such transactions in principle and he had had to get drunk first. But all the same his experience with women had been paltry. Most of his sexual experiences had been characterized by anxiety rather than pleasure. He hadn’t guessed that the others in the officers’ mess – those who spoke crudely and with lust – had been even more panicky than he was.

  Among the superstitions of his boyhood, and later of the officers’ mess, had been one that said Jews and negroes were without equal in bed. If that were so, and if that accounted for her attraction to Noah, then Theo was both glad and sorry. Glad, because then the affair was only a thing of the body. Sorry, because then the affair was an affront to his own virility. Theo would have liked, just once, to have made a woman grateful to him in the way that hot bitch from the CWACS had been grateful to Major Fournier.

  At first he had been delighted and spiteful to a certain extent about his new-found freedom. Now I can write that book on Landor, he thought. Then he had been depressed by the empty apartment for several weeks. He wrote a sentence or a paragraph and then found some excuse to abandon his work. What if the book turns out bad? Who says that I have to write it?

  Three weeks after Miriam had left him Theo wrote to his mother asking her to come and stay with him. That was just about when he began to play a new role in the lecture rooms.

  English 102, one of his summer classes, was a survey course in English literature. Beginning with Chaucer, G., and ending with Eliot, T. S., it included a poem or a thought or a few pages of satire by almost everybody and was, like good table manners, designed to make for full Jr. Executives. Theo was accustomed to the groan that rose like a puff of smoke from the class when he first handed out the reading list. But that summer when a Miss Collins stood up and asked the perennial question – Sir, which of these writers are really important? – he was not his usual kind, reassuring self. Instead he stared back into that haze of similar faces and said: “None of them is important, Miss Collins. Not one of them ever won the V.C. or had as many readers as Mickey Spillane. Several were homosexuals and most of them drank too much.” Not very witty, he knew. But it impressed them. They laughed.

  Mrs. Hall arrived on a Wednesday. She was tall and grey-haired with a mouth like a small drying cut, and obviously voted intelligently. Seated in the armchair she leaned forward fanatically absorbed, much as if she sat on a public platform weighing the speaker’s every word. Theo, like a Liberal candidate who had just sat down after a rather glib but empty speech, submitted uneasily to her tattoo of penetrating questions. Waiting with some suspense for the unseen audience of socialists to burst into applause after her attack had completely shattered him.

  “Theo dear, naturally you would tell me that you satisfied her. But let’s be completely objective. How many times a week did you have sexual intercourse?”

  “Mother …”

  “Did she have an orgasm each time?”

  “Mother, I …”

  “Theo, this is important. I’m not pursuing this for the sake of vulgar curiosity.”

  Friends, women in particular, were sympathetic. Joan, Paula, and Betty competed with each other to have him as their guest. Theo refused to allow any of them to say a cruel word against Miriam. All of them agreed – considering that she had left him for a mere boy – that that was pretty noble of him. But wasn’t that just like Theo? Sort of Christian. How come we hadn’t noticed him – not really – in all this time?

  So Theo, who had never really been considered interesting by his friends, enjoyed a new popularity. He did not question it. But he also did not know what to do about Marg, who was particularly friendly. Forward, rather. He guessed that he might be able to have an affair with her, but he was going to stay faithful to Miriam. That would be his triumph.

  IV

  Noah and Miriam had a month together that was full of loving and sun and idleness. Together, they were complete and had felicity, separated or with others there was a kind of tension.

  The second month, however, was different.

  Noah drove into Montreal every Wednesday to visit his mother. Miriam usually went with him and spent the day shopping and visiting friends.

  Leah was not well. Vindictiveness had sipped the colour from her long, melancholy face. “I guess I should be grateful that you visit once a week. She probably doesn’t like it.” Leah referred to Miriam only as “she” or “her” or “Mrs. Hall.” “I understand things for the first time, Noah. My father – let me tell you – had a good daughter in me. But great man that he was, he was also shrewd. That’s why he … As long as I was married to him my father was still the only man in the house. A terrible thing to say? Maybe? But what have I got from you with all my struggles? I can assure you, Noah, that you wouldn’t take care of me the way I took care of my sick father. You’ve got your Mrs. Hall. A lot of good she’ll do you! Do you study? You might as well have been a truck driver, like they wanted. Look at you.…”

  Noah saw Wolf only once that month. He found him sitting at his desk in the den. Wolf nodded and wiggled his ears and made his glasses go up and down on his nose. I’m your son, Noah thought. Do you count me among your tormentors too?

  “Maybe you can tell me what she wants, Noah? Everything I do she finds fault with. But one thing, eh? At least I can look into mirror nights. Max may be richer – a b.t.o. from the b.t.o.’s – but I’ve got no regrets. Maybe I didn’t get to the top but I haven’t broken anybody to get where I am. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, Daddy. That’s right.”

  “She’s trying to make a split between Paw and me. Paw may be this and Paw m
ay be that but he’s still my father. And you listen here, my boy, but you’ll never have a friend like your dad. You think I don’t know you think I’m a dumb-bell? All right, go ahead. Think what you want. But I watch everything like a regular hawk, I tell you. Max is the King of Siam for her. So what? A guy named Louis was once the King of France. Did you know that Max has started up a new company? Ajax Trading. All right. But in that business he doesn’t call himself Adler. Allen, if you please. Mr. Allen. Max is getting a bit too big for his ootbays.”

  They went to Panofsky’s for Cokes. In those surroundings Wolf became friendly and more expansive. “Noah, listen, she’s very sick. The finest doctors don’t know exactly what it is. One of them, a real expert, said it’s in the think-box. She’d be all right, he said, if she wanted to. Go talk to the Goyim. What’s the difference if it’s in the mind or the legs or the plumbing or the heart or the you-know-what? Sick is sick and that’s the fact we gotta face …” Wolf spoke of her disease with pride. He seemed to feel stronger, the man of the house, for the first time. “Thank God there’s nothing wrong with my ticker,” he said, pounding his chest with his fist. “Paw ain’t exactly ship-shape, you know. Listen, we’re all gonna catch that last bus one day. Rich and poor alike. Knack!” He made a sweeping cut with his hand and many imaginary heads rolled. “But it’s a good thing that I’m okay because somebody’s gotta bring in a few pennies into the house.… Listen, Noah, Max likes you. No itshay. If you caught him in the right mood – if you told Max that he should tell Paw that I should be a partner, I think your mother would brighten up a bit. I’m not asking for myself.…”