The Evening Star

  Tommy looked at the space in the center of the prison often, at intervals between working on his code. He wanted to acquaint himself with the space—to let it become familiar and comfortable. He behaved very well in prison, mainly because he didn’t want to get moved. He wanted to stay on the fourth tier with the space two steps from his cell. The space was a resource he didn’t want to risk losing. He needed the space more than he needed anything or anyone else, and that was because he was working around to the conclusion that there was only one pure form of rebellion. Once, bored to tears in his father’s house in Riverside, California, he had picked up a book by Camus and ended up reading most of it. It was called Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, and it interested him enough that he bought and read two or three other books by Camus. It seemed to him that they were all suicide books. At the time he had just come out of the hospital after his second attempt at starvation; the Camus books disturbed him because they made him realize that he probably hadn’t wanted to die. If he had been ready to die, why had he chosen such a sloppy method, when so many definite methods were available? His conclusion was that he hadn’t wanted to die—he just wanted to make sure that the system had had to go to some trouble to keep him alive. To make matters worse, all this took place at an expensive white-bread hospital in Austin, a perfect embodiment of everything he wanted to attack.

  Now that some time had passed, Tommy saw his starvation attempts as things to be ashamed of. Of course he had known, from the very fact that he was in a hospital, that he wouldn’t be allowed to die. If he had really respected himself then, he would never have let them get him in a hospital in the first place.

  He worked on his code a while, fiddling with some Turkish words. Perhaps his code would never be finished, but the discipline of working on it was important, anyway. Now and then, in little respites, he stared at the space in front of his cell—the space that had become his freedom.

  He heard a rustling above him—Joey was awake and was fumbling for some of the cookies Aurora and Rosie had brought that morning. Tommy had immediately given the cookies to Joey—he always immediately gave away the things his grandmother brought him. He was honest about it, too. He told her he didn’t want anything from her and that he would immediately give away whatever she brought; still, month after month, she brought him cookies or books or cassettes of classical music or something. Maybe she went home and imagined him eating the cookies or reading the books or listening to the music. She was a stubborn old woman. No matter how many times he rejected her offerings, she kept trying.

  “Man, your granny makes good brownies,” Joey said, from above him. “Tell her to make chocolate chip next time.”

  “You tell her,” Tommy said.

  “Man, I can’t tell her, she’s not my granny,” Joe said, munching. “They ain’t gonna let her visit me.”

  Tommy said nothing.

  “Want a cookie?” Joey asked. “They’re real good brownies.”

  “You eat them,” Tommy said.

  10

  On his good nights the General dreamed of golf. On his bad nights he usually dreamed of abandonment—in those dreams Aurora was usually the person who abandoned him, and she usually did it in airports, in countries where he didn’t speak the language. Of course, there were a great many countries where he didn’t speak the language—almost all the countries fell into that category. Often Aurora seemed to abandon him in Lisbon; she had once abandoned him in Lisbon, after a terrible fight, and the memory of his depression in the hot little Lisbon airport infected his dreams like a virus.

  This time he had a good night, though—he had just hit a perfect tee shot down the fairway when he woke up. He had seemed to be golfing with Bing Crosby, whom he actually had golfed with once, during the war—he would have liked to ask Bing a few questions, but before he was able to get any questions out he woke up, only to discover that Aurora was sitting up in bed, staring at the Yellow Pages.

  “I was golfing with Bing Crosby,” the General remarked. “Did you ever meet him?”

  “Certainly not—why would you suppose I’d want to?” Aurora replied, in a tone that suggested that she might not have had an especially good night herself—she rarely did after visits to the prison.

  “Well, Bing was a celebrity once,” the General said. “I believe he liked to hunt quail. I was once invited to hunt quail with him in Georgia, but the hunt didn’t come off.”

  “Hector, I haven’t been forced to think about Bing Crosby in years,” Aurora said. “Why are you inflicting this on me when I’m trying to concentrate?”

  “You still look cute in the mornings,” the General said, noting that her bosom, at least, had not suffered as the result of the bad night.

  “I know you think that’s a compliment, but as it happens cute is not a word I care to have applied to me just at this moment—or ever,” Aurora replied. “Once we’re psychoanalyzed I hope all this will change.”

  The General had forgotten that Aurora wanted them to be psychoanalyzed. He was not quite clear as to what was involved, but he knew it was expensive and that you lay on a couch and talked about your parents’ sex lives, or your own sex life or something. It didn’t sound too bad—it might be a good idea to try it just to show Aurora that he was trying.

  “I guess it will be easier than shock treatment,” he said. “I don’t think I’m ready for shock treatment.”

  “I’ve found the name of a therapist named Bruckner,” Aurora said. “That sounds Viennese to me.”

  “Vienna is in Austria,” the General reminded her unnecessarily. He took off the one glove she had allowed him to retain.

  “I hope this Doctor Bruckner can do psychoanalysis,” Aurora said. “There aren’t many therapists in the phone book who sound Viennese to me.”

  “Personally, I don’t see what’s the hurry,” the General said. “I never knew much about my parents’ sex life anyway.”

  “Who said anything about your parents’ sex life?” Aurora asked, looking up from the phone book. In the morning light the General looked a good deal like a mummy, but he spoke in his customary grating tones.

  “Well, I think that’s what you do when you’re being psychoanalyzed,” the General said. “So I’ve been given to understand. How much do you remember about your parents’ sex life?”

  “Nothing, blessedly,” Aurora said. “I don’t even remember my own, why should I be expected to remember my parents’? Do you think Bruckner is a Viennese name?”

  “I guess, why?” the General asked.

  “Because our analyst should be Viennese, of course,” Aurora said. “That’s where the whole business was invented, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Right, in Austria, as I said,” the General replied.

  “Perhaps this man will do, I think we ought to try him,” Aurora said.

  “If he’s a strict Austrian—and most of them are strict—he’s not going to like it if we don’t know beans about our parents’ sex lives,” the General said. “I believe your mother had a lot of affairs, didn’t she? You probably got quite a few of her genes.”

  Aurora carefully wrote Dr. Bruckner’s name and phone number on her little pad before turning to deal with the General’s last remark.

  “I didn’t mean that quite the way it came out,” the General hastened to say—he thought he had probably let his tongue get the best of him again. “I just meant that you’re both lively women who liked your jollies.”

  “I liked them when I could get them,” Aurora said, meaning to give him a few sharp verbal raps. After all, he had just implied that both she and her mother had been loose—to use the word her mother would have used. But, before she could deliver the raps, she was seized with such a sharp longing to be with her mother again that she couldn’t speak. She wanted to be in her mother’s arms again—she hadn’t been in almost fifty years. What peace it would be to be a girl again, if only for a few minutes, if only in a dream—to be small, to be protected by her unshakable mother, to be
just awakening to life again rather than awakening to Hector Scott.

  The urge, she knew, was crazy—a lifetime, or much of one, had passed since she had last touched her mother’s living hand. Yet the urge to go back, to escape the years, to be her mother’s young child rather than the crabby grandmother of her dead daughter’s children, was so sharp that tears came to her eyes. She flung the phone book off the bed and buried her face in her pillow. Hector Scott must not see what she was feeling—it was too crazy, and he’d think it was his fault.

  The General did think it was his fault, and he was horrified. What had he done now? Things were getting impossible. He and Aurora were both so sensitized on the subject of sex that the most casual reference to it was likely to send them over the edge. He didn’t really know a thing about Aurora’s mother’s affairs, and even if she had had a lot, so what? That was in New Haven, and a long time ago. Besides, Yale was in New Haven, and people who lived around colleges were always apt to be having affairs. Being at Yale was not like being at the Point. Now he had hurt Aurora’s feelings, and they hadn’t even had breakfast. If the slightest reference to sex was going to cause her to burst into tears, he might as well move out—but where would he go? He had no children—he and Evelyn had kept putting it off, and then Evelyn got too old. Teddy was the only one of Aurora’s grandchildren who really liked him, but Teddy was at least half crazy and could barely manage his own life. It was a grim picture he faced, filled with nothing but old soldiers’ homes, endless bridge games, and widows who probably wouldn’t turn out to be half as interesting as Aurora. And even if they were half as interesting, he loved Aurora, not them. She’d get another boyfriend, she’d never come to visit, and he’d be alone. Perhaps he’d do better just to join the homeless, once he got off his crutches. The papers maintained that most of the homeless were Vietnam veterans, and he had to admit that a good many of the homeless he’d spotted in his drives around Houston looked as if they might be veterans. Well, he was a veteran himself—he could go back to his own and live in a tent in a park when Aurora threw him out.

  The grimness of it all reduced the General to a state not far from tears. He had never supposed he would end up in a tent in a park—he had never been very good at erecting tents, for one thing. Most enlisted men could erect tents far more efficiently than he could. It might be that he’d have to pay one of the homeless enlisted men to set up his tent for him. That would be rather a sorry pass for a general to come to, but if that was the best he could do, then so be it.

  Aurora felt the General fumbling for her hand and let him hold it, but she didn’t immediately remove her face from the pillow. She enjoyed, for a few moments, the ridiculous fantasy that her mother was once more holding her in her arms, as her mother had often done during her childhood. It was a ridiculous fantasy, but at the same time it was deeply comforting, and Aurora clung to it as long as she could before reluctantly raising her face and resuming the taxing life of someone who had miserable grandchildren and a played-out lover.

  Looking over at the played-out lover, she noticed that his Adam’s apple was quivering, a sign that he was in distress. Hector’s Adam’s apple quivered only on those occasions when she had vexed him almost to tears. Now it seemed to have happened again, although, as she recalled, he was the one who had accused her and her mother of being loose, an accusation to which she had made only the mildest reply. What could have happened to hurt the man’s feelings now?

  “Hector, are you getting ready to cry, and if not, why is your Adam’s apple behaving that way?” Aurora asked.

  “Sorry,” the General said. “I guess I just never thought I’d end up in a tent. Old age is full of surprises.”

  “Life is full of surprises,” Aurora said. “They are apt to come at all ages, in my observation. I must say I was quite surprised to look over just now and see your Adam’s apple bobbing like an apple in a barrel. What’s the matter? All I was doing was looking up psychoanalysts in the phone book. Are you going to begrudge me even that mild pleasure?”

  “No, no, you can have all the analysts you want,” the General said. It was perfectly obvious that she had had her little fit and was now in a good humor, and yet the fact that she had surprised him in a low mood was as likely as not going to cast her back into a low mood, and this time she would blame him. Sometimes it was so hard to get through a morning, not to mention a day, with Aurora that on the whole he thought it might be easier to be homeless and live in a tent.

  “I was just worrying about my tent,” the General said, not quite able to detach himself from the grim vision he had just conjured up.

  “What tent?” Aurora asked, surveying her nice sunny bedroom. “Have you been dreaming of the Battle of the Somme again? Does this look like a tent we’re quarreling in?”

  “No, it’s a bed, but I’ve decided to go live in a tent in Herman Park when you finally throw me out,” the General said. “For one thing, I won’t last long in a tent, and a short end is about the best prospect I have to look forward to now.”

  Aurora saw to her amazement that the man was genuinely upset, and for no reason—when had she ever said anything about throwing him out?

  “A tent in Herman Park would be a damn sight better than one of those stupid old soldiers’ homes with no old soldiers in them,” the General said, his Adam’s apple still aquiver.

  “Hector, I’m baffled,” Aurora admitted. “You brought up my mother, and the thought of her undid me for a moment. I loved my mother very much and she died much too young. I think I have every right to be undone by her memory, but that’s all that happened. I don’t have the least desire to dispatch you to a tent in the park and I don’t know how you can have conceived such a notion. This convinces me that we had better make an appointment with Dr. Bruckner quickly. You might be beginning to drift off your moorings or something.”

  The General was both relieved and annoyed: relieved that Aurora was no longer angry, annoyed that she kept slipping into nautical metaphors.

  “Aurora, I’m a general, not an admiral,” he reminded her, for at least the hundredth time. “Generals do not drift off their moorings. Generals aren’t moored. Even admirals aren’t moored. Boats are moored.”

  “Well, touchy, touchy,” Aurora said. “Perhaps the word I was seeking was ‘mired,’ You can hardly deny that we’re mired in a rather quarrelsome embrace.”

  “The hell we are,” the General said. “This isn’t an embrace. I remember our embraces. I wish I was dead. Then you could embrace anyone you could catch.”

  “I can anyway,” Aurora informed him. “It’s obviously not doing me much good, but I’ve always claimed the right to embrace people at will. That’s where this conversation started, remember? You said I was loose, and my mother before me.”

  The General recalled that he had said something like that. He said it not long before he decided to go live in a tent. Now he couldn’t remember why the subject had come up in the first place. They had been talking about Vienna or something and then the quarrel started.

  “Well, I suppose I popped off,” he admitted. “Did she have affairs or didn’t she? Let’s get this settled.”

  “She loved the gardener,” Aurora said. “Before he arrived I certainly hope she had a few affairs. What’s a girl to do?”

  “What do you mean, what’s a girl to do?” the General asked. “She was married. Why can’t a girl who’s married sleep with her husband?”

  Aurora was remembering a conversation she had had with her mother once—it was after a concert in Boston. They were walking across the Commons and it was snowing. She could not remember the program, but it seemed to her Brahms had been on it. Her mother confessed to a considerable weakness for Brahms. The evening snow was beautiful, falling on the Commons; the air was wintry and clean. Her mother, Amelia, had evidently been somewhat more stirred by the music than Aurora—just about to marry her beau Rudyard—had realized. Out of the blue her mother made a startling statement.

  “I o
ught to tell you that your father has abandoned my bed,” her mother said. “The truth is he abandoned it eleven years ago.”

  Aurora did not immediately comprehend.

  “Why?” she asked. “Isn’t it a comfortable bed?”

  Her mother, who rarely looked happy but even more rarely looked sad—who made it a point of principle never to look sad, in fact—pursed her lips for a moment and gave her daughter a look that was unmistakably sad.

  “It’s not the bed he finds uncomfortable,” she said. “It’s the woman in it. It’s me he doesn’t like.”

  Aurora did not remember how the conversation ended, though now she wished she could. As soon as she got her memory project really cranked up she meant to go through her vast collection of old engagement books and concert programs and pin down the concert. If she could recover the program, she might be able to recall the end of the conversation. The two things she was sure of were that her mother had used the word “abandoned,” and that she had mentioned eleven years.

  “My father didn’t sleep with her for eleven years, or possibly longer,” Aurora said. “My mother lived for six years after she told me that—so it was probably more like seventeen years that he didn’t sleep with her. What do you think of that, General?”

  “If you’re thinking it’s some kind of record, forget it,” the General said. “I went more than twenty years without sleeping with Evelyn.”

  “But did you dislike her?” Aurora asked.

  “No, not particularly,” the General said. “She was a little chirpy, but I didn’t exactly dislike her.”

  “Then what happened?” Aurora asked.