them

  She walked alongside him as if forcing him along. With the gun she kept him at a distance, assessing him. But there was no recognition in her face. Her beauty had gone all into hardness, in vacuity.

  “Nadine, you’re not going to shoot me, not me,” Jules said, astonished. “You love me, I love you—don’t you love me?”

  She pulled the trigger. The bullet struck him somewhere in the chest, a terrible blow. Jules reeled, seeing the sunshine shattered in the windshields of an acre of large, gleaming, expensive cars.

  The spirit of the Lord departed from Jules.

  III

  COME, MY SOUL, THAT HATH LONG LANGUISHED…

  1

  April 1966. A girl in love is standing before a mirror, very still. Her gaze is fixed upon herself. The name Maureen Wendall is attached to this reflection, a clouded reflection in a cheap bureau mirror, and she stares at this reflection because it is all she has. Love, she is in love, sunk in love…

  Outside a group of boys are playing baseball in the street. This is a street in Highland Park, which is in Detroit, a section surrounded by Detroit and shot through by Woodward Avenue, Second Avenue, Third Avenue. She lives in a large brick building on Third Avenue, in a single room. A single girl in a single room. Her face is heart-shaped and very pure, knowing nothing. A cautious face. It is pale as if with dust, with cheap powder, even the flesh beneath the eyes curiously pale as if she has seen nothing, nothing. Nothing has happened to her.

  She presses her flat stomach against the edge of the bureau; she brings her face up close to the mirror. Doomed to be Maureen all her life? It seems to her a mystery that she should always be herself, this particular person; there is no way out. But she will escape into love, sink into love, fall backward into an abyss of love that will obliterate most of what was Maureen.

  In the hospital, after Furlong had beaten her, she had worn a narrow plastic bracelet with her name on it: MAUREEN WENDALL. It is not possible to escape your name.

  She is wearing a white slip. Her hair is cut short about her face, curly hair, giving her a girlish look. In her mid-twenties, now, she looks much younger. She watches herself closely, cautiously. Outside the sky has turned from blue to gray, a midwestern sky, changeable but monotonous. Maureen has spent too many years beneath that sky. She flinches from it, is nervous of windows, has thought much too often at work, What if I fall out that window? (She works on the seventh floor of an office building downtown.) Something draws her to the window and then teases her, What if you fall out this window?

  The man’s name is Jim. The name is too short. It does not seem to her enough to catch hold of, to keep her from toppling out an open window. His name is Jim Randolph. Randolph is also her half-brother’s name; he is a brat of twelve; she tries not to think of him, her mind is closed against him and his dirty mouth. She thinks of him only when Loretta brings up the subject, complaining. When Maureen goes to visit her mother, Randolph is usually gone, running around somewhere. Too many kids on the streets. At twelve years of age they are grown up except for the terrible energy in their legs. Maureen has only to glance at Randolph (the kids call him Ran) to know that this loose-limbed smart-aleck kid knows everything, everything. Loretta complains, “He’s just like Betty was, I can’t do a thing with him or talk to him, but he’s worse than Betty—he’s got more energy.” Loretta, now forty-six, must spend hours dreaming of a life without children dragging her down. Maureen’s sickness was bad enough, thirteen months of it, but Randolph in perfect health is worse; he is making her a wreck, she complains, pouting, very serious with her pouting. What the hell has all this been for, all these kids? And Betty is always in trouble. And Jules, look what happened to Jules…

  Jules almost died. But he did not die. A woman tried to kill him, firing two shots into his chest and then turning the gun on herself, but failing to kill herself also—the important thing should have been that Jules hadn’t died, but somehow he did not seem to have survived. He does not seem to be alive; he has disappeared somewhere into Detroit. They hear about him, but rarely. Why did a woman try to kill him? Why would anyone want to kill Jules? Maureen remembers him as gentle, too gentle. She loves him but does not want to see him. She is afraid of what she might see—Jules changed, Jules worn out. He is almost thirty. A lifetime of being a kid and now—almost thirty! So Maureen tries not to think of him but thinks instead of the man she hopes to marry.

  She looks at herself in the mirror, seeing herself as he must see her. She loves him. Her life is set for him, for loving him. She supposes that her body is set for loving him. She feels herself to be a cheap plaster figure set out on a lawn, the Virgin Mary or a deer, something that looks strong but is really brittle and can be broken easily. Out the window she can see children playing. They slam the ball at one another, they never seem able to catch the ball—it flies out of their hands, stinging them, and crashes against someone’s front porch…so many thumps, so many jarring noises, vibrations…it is mixed up with her dreams about Jim, this sense of permanent alarm, caution. How is she going to give herself to him? How is she going to embrace him when that time comes? She closes her eyes and imagines. But her body tenses with fear, with panic.

  Maybe she has chosen a married man because there is the hope she will fail?

  He is her teacher in a night-school class at Highland Park Junior College. This college is in the same building as a high school. Maureen takes the Third Avenue bus and her route is simple enough; there are plenty of street lights and plenty of people getting on and off buses; plenty of traffic. But one day she saw a crowd of Negro kids, circling two boys who were fighting. Everyone shrieked and clapped hands. Come on! Come on! The kids who were fighting circled each other with a terrible adult caution. One had a knife and the other had his jacket, to slap into his opponent’s face. A knife! A green canvas jacket! Maureen stared out at them, and that day she did not get off the bus, she was paralyzed and could not get off…her hatred for Negroes paralyzed her. She hates them violently, obsessively. She hates the teen-aged boys, those loud-mouthed hoodlums, she hates the teen-aged girls, the smaller children with their running and shrieking, the men, the women, all of them. But the next day she forced herself to go back. She went back. Nothing was going to stop her from getting to that classroom, not the men cruising the neighborhood in low-slung flashy cars, white or Negro men leaning out car windows to ask her if she’d like a ride, not the policemen in squad cars eying her, not the dirty drab old men riding the city buses perpetually, staring at her, vaguely staring at her, not all the newspapers blown in a mild whirlwind into her face, not the heavy air, the changing sky, the melancholy exhaustion of the other students in her class—nothing was going to stop her.

  She is dressing now for class. Preparing for it excites her. Her mind is obsessed now with the thought of attracting this man, pleasing his eye, drawing him to her. She, Maureen, is a window that will draw him to it, stupefy him. He will fall in love with her and leave his present life. He will leave his family. She wants him so badly that the man himself fades from her mind and she can only think of wanting him, wanting it, marriage. She wants to love him, with her heart and with her body, but there is no time for love to rise in her; she does not know how to work it up, cultivate it, she’s heard too much about it from her mother and other girls and from the movies, and it has been breathed into her ears too often, from men who did not love her but supposed they did. So Maureen supposes she will love this man, once they are married. She stares longingly into the mirror, as if staring into the future. Her face is the way into the future. Nothing can bring her into life, into the world, except that face.

  Jules in the hospital, his face pale and thin, his eyes dark and melancholy in their sockets. What is a face, some bone and skin and gristle? What is the mysterious substance of the eye, what magic comes out of it? Maureen does not understand. This magic is a terrible cruelty, because it wears out. In America it wears out quickly. She feels a sense
of alarm, of panic, staring at her face and knowing that it will not last, and that the loss of that face is more terrible than the loss of flesh and bone, rotted into the earth.

  A guarded, cautious game with this man. He is her teacher and must keep himself at a distance. She is ready to love him and perhaps he understands? He shuffles papers, he is nervous, he is kindly and gentle; she understands again and again that he is a man to marry, a perfect husband. She wants to marry him and take him from his wife and three children—his wife and three childrenare a sign that attracted Maureen at once, for he is settled down, a good man, he has prepared his future and seems content with it, he is a perfect husband. If he leaves his family for her he will have proved his love, making this change, and never, never would he dare to make another change. He is thirty-four years old and she is twenty-six. Good. The difference is just enough, and the family he must leave for her is just enough—proof of what she can do, of her power, proof of his love if he comes to love her, a way of closing him off from the past and insuring the future.

  She grows nervous and greedy, thinking of this.

  Last fall she went for a walk up around Gesu Church, which is a block above Six Mile Road, a block from the University of Detroit, in a neighborhood of large brick homes. These large homes! these lawns! And in each house people lived, families lived, mothers and fathers and children, going about their lives as if such living, in such homes, were nothing extraordinary. It astonished Maureen to realize that these people did not comprehend their own lives. They did not comprehend the distance between themselves and Maureen, who was walking through their neighborhood, pretending to have a destination. She was eager to see people, to hear them. Occasionally a woman was working outside on her lawn, occasionally children were playing on the sidewalks, and Maureen’s heart leapt up eagerly to see what these people were like. She wanted to go up to them and say hello. Two women, young mothers, were talking excitedly about something, and Maureen wanted to be a third young woman, talking with them, a young mother talking out on the sidewalk casually, aware of nothing extraordinary in her behavior. She stared at the women. Her envy was not hatred but something like love: she loved them. This was as close to love as she could come.

  Toward men she could really feel no love, not really. She would have a baby with her husband, to make up for the absence of love, to locate love, to fix herself in a certain place, but she would not really love him. And yet there was the possibility that, once he was her husband, she would learn how to love him.

  She couldn’t be like her mother, always ready for the next day, always curious, cheerful, even in her complaints anxious to see what was going to happen next—she couldn’t be like Loretta, ready to begin all over again. Loretta was always ready to begin all over again. She was not her mother’s daughter. She felt an almost physical revulsion for that kind of woman, Loretta’s kind, their hair in curlers and their monkeyish faces set for a good laugh.

  I will fall in love, Maureen thinks, I will make him love me.

  2

  That morning something disturbed him, before he woke, not quite a thought but the apprehension of a thought, the fading conclusion of a dream. Asleep, most himself, he was alarmed at the great range of his desires, and waking was always a relief to him. Waking, he understood who he was and what he was. He moved to embrace the woman sleeping beside him, his wife, taking comfort in her warmth.

  At this time they had been married for nine years.

  The depth of her sleep seemed to him a great trust, a treasure. She slept silently, in his arms. It stunned him to think that for nine years they had slept together, himself and this woman, that their lives had become inextricably bound, that he could not clearly remember a time when he had not known her. That time belonged to another, younger, more helpless self. He got no pleasure from thinking of it.

  She was thirty-two. She had had three children, and the children slept along the corridor of this small apartment, two in one room, peaceful and miraculous to him in their sleep, a perpetual surprise, because he could recall a time in his life when they hadn’t existed, when he himself had been no more than a child and unnaturally wary of the traps of permanence adults accepted so quietly. He had always been a wary person, beneath his kindliness and his gentle, patient smile. Before waking, drifting in a gray tangle of sleep that was like the tangle of a woman’s hair, he felt his wariness rise in him to become a kind of evil. What is he waiting for? What is going to happen? Is he going to do something to his life, something irreparable?

  He found himself waking again, out of a muddle of a dream, something about a train crossing an icy continent. It was time to get up. The day stretched before him suddenly like a continent, full of dangers and petty jokes and humiliations, something to be crossed. His wife was awake. She pressed her face against his wordlessly. He thought of the rickety train setting out across a wasteland of ice and a sensation of fear rose unaccountably in him; he began to sweat. “I don’t want to be late,” he said, drawing away from her. He got up. She got up from her side of the bed. The shades in the small room were drawn but he could tell that the day was going to be another overcast day, a monotonous day. He was thirty-four years old and the sky of Detroit had burned its way into his brain, searing it with gloom and grit and something relentless, monotonous, and powerful.

  His wife was talking to him. She had a solid, muscular stance, buttoning her bathrobe. There was something efficient about all her movements, even her gestures; she knew how to get through the day. They had been married for nine years. He tried to listen to her but something failed and his face took over, smiling an early morning smile, showing strain, affection. She was talking about going shopping that afternoon. About money. Frowning, apologetic, she spoke to him about money.

  Out in the kitchen he sat with his head in his hands, at the table, until his wife whispered, “What’s wrong? Do you have a headache?” He told her no, nothing was wrong. While she made breakfast—he would take only coffee—he sat thinking guiltily of that dream of his, himself wary and shrewd, in a gray wild tangle of sleep. That was not his true self, yet he preferred it to himself. The self he lived in was familiar and familiarly treated, by his wife and his children and his friends and the people who were his superiors and by the entire world, seeing in him a kindly man with lines in his face caused by kindliness.

  His wife said, whispering, not wanting to wake the children yet, “I can get Brenda to come down and sit for me. When will you be home tonight?”

  “I thought I’d go right from school out to the college and skip dinner.”

  “Do you think you should skip dinner?”

  “I never feel much like eating before that class.”

  “But don’t you want to come home first?”

  “It would be easier the other way. The long drive…”

  He was in love with this woman, set in the condition of love, entwined in the history they had lived through together, and responsible for it; he could see himself from a short distance, perhaps through the window of this cramped kitchen, a man sitting at an ordinary breakfast table, watching his wife closely. Of such a man what can be said? He would squint desperately at himself, hoping for some recognition, some certainty. So he was Jim Randolph. He had an older brother, Tony, of whom he’d been jealous all his life. His mother had several sisters and they all had families and so he had many cousins, some of whom he’d liked and some he’d hated, and two of his grandparents were still living, all people to testify to his identity, should any question arise. And of course his mother and father. They all knew him.

  He pressed his hands against his eyes, wondering.

  A woman’s magazine lay on the kitchen counter. On its cover was a bright color photograph of a cake, a birthday cake. What colors, what breadth, what a peculiar, squat, outrageous authority in that cake! Headlines: Spring Comes to Your Home, A Shower for Someone Close, A Doctor Looks at Intimate Problems of Marriage. His wife bought
these magazines occasionally, and it had been years since she’d stopped apologizing for them. He was curious about the magazine and wondered what it could possibly have to say about the problems of marriage, but he would never bother to open it—he was too intelligent and fixed, too scornful of such things. His wife was whispering again, about clothes for Terry. Terry was the five-year-old, a girl. He smiled at his wife and agreed with her. Sometimes his amiability was like a hand thrust into her face and she grew silent, offended, and he was forced to ask her what was wrong, why was she angry? And she would say coldly, “Because you don’t really listen to me!” The bond of their love was a puzzle to him, a sweet puzzle. It decided his life; he was fixed within it. He was not the kind of Catholic who believed that divorce was impossible, and he was not the kind of Catholic who took religion very seriously, but he felt the bond between himself and his wife was irreparable, a permanent condition, as permanent as his own name. But something had happened once that had alarmed him. He had been on his way home, when they had lived in married students’ housing at another university, years ago, and he had noticed several young wives talking out near the mailboxes by a muddy road. His imagination had touched upon them lightly enough, wanting to admire them, noting their slim legs and their nervous laughter, that trilling catch in their voices that showed how close to the surface of their young bodies hysteria lay. Some distance from them, he thought them desirable enough, but as he approached and one of them made a tired, cynical gesture, a pushing of the air outward with her hand, he had thought suddenly that it was all a loss, a mistake, this combining of lives and bodies, this wretched joking camaraderie of being poor and being in perpetual uncertainty; people were better off apart. Then the woman turned and it was his wife herself, catching sight of him. It was a commonplace happening and yet it alarmed him, being so commonplace, so ordinary.