Sometimes, after a few hours, they could sneak back home. By then their father was unconscious and no trouble. Sometimes, if Maureen was sound asleep, they would spend the night out—“camping out”—and Jules would sit drowsily on guard. He would drop off to sleep, then wake again, startled, his heart miserable, his mouth tasting of something foul. Very early, before dawn, he would wake Maureen and Betty. They would climb down to the alley and return to the house.
“Jesus, that bastard gets next to me,” Jules went around saying.
At confession he recited, “I was disobedient to my mother and father…”
* * *
—
He was to recall his childhood in flickers and flashes, as if it were a movie made before his time, one of those old halting, comic films in which foolishly dressed people could have felt no pain, no anguish. How could such out-of-date people be human? Had he, Jules Wendall, ever been a child? Really a child? In the sense in which other people have been children? And what did it mean, to have been a child? Did it mean that the child Jules was still with him, encased within his bones, an alert, nervous, hollow-eyed kid with a love of maps and music and pale, fierce women? Was he always to be half carrying the groggy Maureen back to her bed? Was he always to be dreaming of crushing his father’s skull, even after his father was dead?
One day, daydreaming of Sister Mary Jerome, Jules found himself taken home by his friend from the five-and-ten. She was a chesty girl who wore nylon sweaters so tight you could see the outline of her bra beneath. Her hair was pulled back in a bobbing ponytail. She was older, maybe eighteen. She talked excitedly about a murder in the neighborhood. “Oh gosh, I’m not gonna tell what they found. Not all of it. They don’t put stuff like that in the paper, know why?” Twin girls, nine years old, had been stabbed to death in the hours before dawn. One had been stabbed in the girls’ room and the other on the sidewalk where she’d run, chased by the murderer for nearly a block, so that bloodstains led from the room right out to the sidewalk. Everyone was talking about it, the girl could not stop talking about it. “They can’t put that stuff in the paper, ’cause other people would do it.” No one seemed to be home. She led Jules into the duplex. Turned on the radio. Her room was closet-sized, with a tiny window. She told Jules, who was nervous and excited, sexually aroused as he’d never been before in his life, “Told you I’m gonna cut my initials in you, kid.” Jules had been led to believe that girls got hurt doing this, or having it done to them, but he discovered that this girl was eager and impatient and what pain was felt was Jules’s, when she shut her fists in his hair and tugged. “Oh! Je-zus.” There was a skin of sweat between them, slick and rank-smelling. The girl’s guttural cries rang in Jules’s ears driving him into a swoon half of sensation, half of dread, sucking his strength out of him, through the pit of his belly, his convulsed groin. When it was over the girl lay back panting and triumphant. “See what I mean?” She pinched Jules’s cheek. Like a glamour girl in the movies she slid to her feet, stretching luxuriously, patting her disheveled hair. “Now you love me.”
Jules stared open-eyed at her, clammy with sweat.
“Yeah, you love me, gonna think about me all the time. I was the one who turned you out, kid. Remember that.”
“Okay,” Jules said.
“All your life—like in the song. Got it?”
“Okay.”
Sister Mary Jerome had vanished from his thoughts as if she’d never been.
9
It was a misty gray day, the kind of day Jules loved, with that faint metallic sheen to the sky that touched the edges of buildings and cars; he was cutting school for a good cause, taking his grandmother down to the clinic. So he whistled under his breath and sucked in the smudged air like a good boy, fifteen years old and dressed well in a silkish shirt and dark, slightly pegged pants, with his dark hair long and combed back in harsh wings to form a wavy mass at the back of his head. He kept seeing himself from a distance, flashes of himself—Jules Wendall—and could not help being pleased. He put his arm out cavalierly for Grandma Wendall to take. The old woman seized it with a muttered complaint that dampened him a little. “You’d think one of them, those two, could drive me there themselves.”
It was 1953 now, and Grandma Wendall was in Detroit living with them, a widow, her thick lardlike legs a mess of splotched and broken veins, her gray hair frizzled and thin at the very top of her head, her face lined with fierce, contemplative lines that gave her the appearance of being an ancient man, soured on life but not ready to leave it. She poured into Jules’s patient, pitying ear the ugly news of her widowhood and her decline into a mother-in-law, pushed into a back room in a dump of a house on Twentieth Street, a dump of a street, bossed around by a frowzy dump of a woman who drank too much. “But God bless her, she’s your mother and that’s that,” Grandma Wendall said, twisting her mouth, leaning on Jules heavily, “but anyway it’s to your credit you take after our family—not after your father but after me. You and I have the same brains.”
“I’m not anywhere near as sharp as you,” Jules said, playing to her the same banter he’d played for years, but a little distracted; he wondered where the hell the bus was. Why was there always such a wait? His grandmother was tough in her bones and brains, that was true, but she was wearing down as the months went by, and just this walk from home to Fort Street left her out of breath. She panted like a cow, baffled at the failure of her body to maintain her assessment of herself. They waited in the fog on Fort Street, Jules conscious of his handsome (though slightly blemished) young face, his duck-tail haircut, his neatly flashy clothes that put him in a certain high-school crowd—at the very top of that crowd, he liked to think, being clever and mobile enough. He was spending his adolescence in the faint shadows of actual gangsters, or the friends of gangsters; something in him yearned for the doomed, derelict, glamorous style of their living. He took some of his language from them or from their imitators or from movies, and his style was lounging, lethargic, contemptuous, self-conscious, a pimp’s style; he was very pleased with it.
He said to his grandmother, “Pa couldn’t take off from work. He had two sick days last month.”
“What about her?”
“I can take you as well as her, can’t I? You said you liked to ride the bus. You want a cigarette or something?”
Her husband had died of cancer of the throat, and during this lingering death of all times she had begun to smoke. She astonished everyone. She carried on with Jules a man-to-man, boy-to-boy, brotherly, childish camaraderie, conspiratorial and pointless to Jules but, he supposed, a means for her to take revenge on that middle generation she believed had wronged her, her son and his wife. So, with a smirk, as if they were both putting something over on Loretta, she accepted a cigarette. Jules was saddened to see his grandmother such a lumpy woman in her dark, long, shapeless coat and her pushed-down hat of some indecipherable style, with a torn veil and dark brown wings of feathers. What an old woman she’d become! Better for her to have been transformed into an old man! She complained about that bastard, the Mayor, and that other bastard, the Governor, and most of all that bastard who was President of the United States. Taxes, too many taxes. Social Security was a racket, a joke. They were playing a joke on her. If she wasn’t an old woman she would fight. The United States was crazy, she could tell from the newspaper, and Europe was crazy, a loss. “All of the world is a garbage dump,” she said.
On Fort Street a steady stream of cars and trucks passed. The river was not far away. Jules looked about and his eyes took in the heavy, unbeautiful span of the Ambassador Bridge, the bridge to Canada, a sight he’d lived under for many years. He wondered what was the way out, which direction he should take. Though his grandmother mouthed sourly these complaints, it was too late for her: she could never escape.
“All my life I lived around men,” the old woman was saying angrily. “I know men. Women I don’t know. Women I don’t talk to. You
’re better letting them alone. You are a man yourself, at your age, you got common sense, I can talk to you. Right? But your mother…”
So it was about his mother again. Jules said evasively, “Oh, let Ma alone.”
“Does she let me alone? Does she ever let me forget whose house I’m living in? I just ask you that, I put it to your common sense. Tell the truth. Does she let me alone?”
“I don’t know.”
“A crazy house, wide open like that. People coming and going, those friends of hers, them, those women got nothing better to do than drag their asses around in a bathrobe and drink beer all afternoon, playing rummy all the time. It’s no wonder Howard stays out late, I don’t blame him. And your sister Betty is going to go bad—”
“That’s her business.”
“Your sister Maureen is too skinny.”
“She’s okay.”
The old woman sucked at her cigarette. Jules observed from the corners of his eyes that she did not know how to smoke with any grace. “My boy Samson has sure turned against me,” she said, latching onto another favorite topic. When Jules did not reply she said confidentially, “He’s the one with the brains. He’s got them. Poor Howard was standing behind a door or something when the brains were handed out. When Samson was just a little kid, I forget how old, he’d been fooling around with fixing things. Like the car, the toaster, stuff like that, the oven, wires and stuff. Now he’s got in good at Ford’s, and it’s a big celebration for me to come over, his wife thinks I should kiss her big feet or something, but I sit there in the chair and look around and I don’t say much. I’m thinking plenty though. She can tell what I’m thinking about her. But I never ask them for anything—they can wait till hell freezes over before I ask them for a dime, them with all their money. Any day they wanted to they could take me in. They have a room in the upstairs. I’m no trouble, I can cook for myself, but no, nothing. Let me stay with Howard, let me stay with your parents who got troubles of their own and a dump on Twentieth Street thrown in. No, I’m just talking, Jules, don’t get me wrong. Don’t get me wrong…” And on and on in her jocular, angry, whining monologue, while Jules held himself protected against her bitter insults, his eyes fixed upon the smoggy distance. She said, “That kid of theirs born with the bad ear—that serves them right, her with her snotty face and those cut-glass plates and crap she thinks so much of!”
Loretta had had a baby with a bad heart a few years before; it had been a boy, had died at eighteen months.
“All right, Grandma,” Jules said.
“People get what they deserve. You’ll see.”
“All right, please.”
“Well, I’m not doing it! I’m not the one! God will take vengeance in His own time. I’m not passing judgment or waiting for anything,” she said hatefully.
Jules saw the bus on its way. Relief. Gratitude. He guided the old woman up the steps and down the aisle, fearful of her falling—she had fallen more than once already, hard, and it had been Jules’s task to get her home again. No light-boned old woman was his grandmother, but a leaden, lumpy old man whose very muscles seemed to work spasmodically against her. The bus smelled of exhaust and sweat. Jules sat beside his grandmother, but half out in the aisle to give her room, and gave himself up to the ride. Someday I will change all this, he thought with a flash of joy.
He thought of a wilderness, land out West; a golden sky, or perhaps a golden field of wheat…mountains…rivers…something unmapped.
The bus went slowly. Stops and starts. Jules’s eyes took in the other passengers and saw no one interesting; he’d seen them all before. He fixed his attention finally upon one woman, a fairly pretty woman. He liked women. He felt his pulse quicken at the sight of a woman of some charm, and he could find charm in almost anyone, in a nervous flicker of the eyes, a tugging of a skirt. Having lived so close to his mother for so many years, yet at a certain intelligent distance from her, he understood the bewilderment of women in Detroit. They were bewildered, confused, fearful. He dreamed of offering his brains to them, putting himself in their service, helping them through a bus ride or across a street or when their husbands came home drunk. A woman in a laundromat in Detroit only appears to be in control of the machines! A woman in a car only appears to be in control! Inside, her machinery is as wobbly and nervous as the machinery of her car, which may have been slammed together by someone as mutely angry as Jules’s father, now on the assembly line at Chrysler. Jules began to smile, thinking of women. Through his mother’s pale puffiness he could see a pretty face—he didn’t need to be reminded by the snapshots she loved to pass around—and though her legs were clumsy he could imagine some grace to them in the years before her mother-in-law and the baby with the bad heart and Howard’s nightly snoring, which kept Jules awake many hours and raised his hatred to a passionate height. His sister Maureen had a delicate, intelligent beauty that pleased him; she was his sister, and on the street he took pride in defending her. In Betty he had less interest. She was tough and quick and could take care of herself.
“Why do you think Betty will go bad?” he asked his grandmother.
When he was least prepared for it he gave in to her: there was something in him, as there was in his mother, that leaned toward the old woman with pained and fearful expectation.
The clinic was a new, cheap building, only one story high, with a parking lot surrounded by a fence that seemed to be made of bright brown cardboard but was probably made of wood. Jules guided his grandmother inside. Already exhausted, she sank into a chair spitefully; Jules had to stand. The bus passengers were here already. More of the same. Detroit people—Polish mothers, Polish children, old men out of work, middle-aged men out of work, welfare slobs, the sick, the dying, the prematurely gray and the prematurely wasted, all of them sitting staring at one another with gaunt, suspicious eyes. The whites stared at the whites and at the Negroes; the Negroes stared at other Negroes and at the whites.
Whenever someone came in the front door everyone looked at him with a kind of hope and then registered disappointment; it was mysterious, this ritual. A few patients came out of the inner part of the building and seemed to be finished for the day. They put on their coats in that humble, resigned way of people on charity, halfway out the door as the left sleeve is conquered, head bowed, eyes spiteful and apprehensive.
Jules nearly fell asleep standing, the fluorescent lighting was so hypnotic, the odor of unwashed bodies so oppressive and yet so narcotic; he thought dreamily of the girl in his class whom he now adored, and he thought of the life he would break into when he got out of school and was on his own, finally, a man, leading a life that involved raising his family and then getting out from under them. First he would raise them to be like other people. Then he would get out from under them. I will change my life in the end, he thought. He would go to California.
They waited. The first hour passed slowly. Some skinny children played in the waiting-room. They knocked over an ashtray. Their mother, a very thin, angry woman, slapped their faces and forgot them. The receptionist leaned over her counter and said in a courteous but sharp voice, “Please keep those children quiet.” They were quiet for a while, sullen and weary, then their legs began to twitch and they were up again, fooling around. A man with a trembling head said suddenly, loudly, “I been waiting here since nine o’clock! They told me come at nine o’clock. I was here before the doors was unlocked!” The receptionist stared at him. She was a youngish woman with a severe, lined face. “What is your name, please? Come up to the desk, please,” she said. The man did not seem to hear. He had a beery red face and an enlarged nose, all pores and blackheads. He said to Jules’s grandmother, seeing some kinship in her impatient scowl, “They give you pills with flour in them here. This place, they give you air bubbles in the blood so you die. It’s free.”
Jules’s grandmother, always unpredictable, snubbed the man.
The second hour passed into the third hour. J
ules was still standing, too weary to try for a seat. The children were still playing, wandering from one side of the room to the other; other children had joined them. A Negro boy of about five cringed behind his mother’s thigh, watching the white children. He sucked noisily at his thumb.
At last Jules’s grandmother was called. She stood; he helped her into the consulting room, embarrassed at her clumsiness. He never knew whether she was exaggerating pain or suppressing it. When he got back, her seat had been taken by a fat woman, so he remained standing. A strange, cool patience entered him. He picked up a copy of the Saturday Evening Post and read an article on football. He read it carefully, as if he were reading about something from another planet: but to know anything was valuable. He had no interest in sports. All that energy expended among boys, for a trivial goal with no profit, seemed to him foolish, but still some people took it seriously—why did they take it seriously? He picked up an issue of the National Geographic with thumbprints of blood on its cover. Its photographs fascinated him, tugging at his eyes as if to exclaim, Look, look at this, look at this skyline, look at this formation of rock, look at this African chieftain, look, why are you here, who are you? He put the magazine back and leafed through a copy of Time. He read about the Negroes of America—“A Decade of Prosperity”—the achievement of equality, of justice, affluence in Harlem; he read the cover story, about a man from India named Vinoba Bhave. “I have come to loot you with love,” said this man. Jules read, fascinated: “We are all members of a single human family.” Vinoba Bhave read only three books, Euclid’s Elements, Aesop’s Fables, the Bhagavad Gita. Jules grew excited; he too would read these books. He would get hold of them the next day. Vinoba Bhave said, “My object is to transform the whole of society. Fire merely burns…Fire burns and does its duty. It is for others to do theirs.”