Evergreen

  “Shit,” Eddy said. “You’re burdened and you’re constricted as much as I am. And you’ve no way out. My advice is: get used to it.”

  As soon as they were able to change rooms they did so. They had been best friends, he and Eddy Holtz, and they never exactly became enemies. They still waved a greeting in passing, but neither would go so far as to cross the street for anything more than that.

  Maury settled the suitcase and stowed the five-pound box of candy for Chris’s mother in a safe place. Ma had bought the candy and laid out his clothes, whitened his shoes, sent his white flannel trousers to the tailor for pressing and even bought him a couple of new ties.

  He smiled now, remembering his mother. “You’re not taking those old slacks? They’re faded, Maury!”

  “I know. We’re going fishing. And anyway, these people don’t dress up.”

  “Better listen to your mother,” his father had warned. “Rich people with a summer house like that are bound to dress. You don’t want to look like a beggar.”

  Maury had tried to explain, feeling as he spoke a surge of enthusiasm. “They’re not rich, Pa, not in the way you think of it. Chris doesn’t care what he wears. His sweaters have holes in them. He and all his friends are simple. They don’t struggle. You’d be surprised.”

  “Maybe I wouldn’t be surprised,” his father said. His eyebrows rippled. “They don’t struggle, you tell me. They can afford to be simple. If I go downtown with a hole in my overcoat, they’ll say Friedman’s broke and they’ll have nothing to do with me. People like us have to dress right.”

  From the moment he was met the next morning at the station he was glad he had used his own judgment. Chris, his brothers and their friend Donald were in an old station wagon loaded with sacks of dog food. Their clothes were as old as the car and their sneakers were tattered.

  At dinner, though, they dressed, and then he was glad his mother had taken care of his white flannels, he thought with amusement.

  The house was low, with brown-weathered ells and wings. From the row of wicker chairs on the front veranda one looked out over lawns and water to the pine hills on the other side of the cove. After dinner they all went out to watch the stars come up.

  “As you can see, we’re not famous for our night life here,” Chris remarked.

  “No apologies in paradise,” Maury answered.

  “This is my fifty-seventh summer in this house,” old Mr. Guthrie remarked abruptly.

  “Sir?” Chris asked.

  That was something Maury had never heard. At home you asked: What did you say? when you hadn’t understood.

  “I said, ‘This is my fifty-seventh summer in this house,’” the grandfather repeated. “I thought that’s what you said.”

  The old man, erect in the fan-backed wicker chair, tapped Maury’s knee with his cane. “Young man, would you like me to tell you about how this house came to be built?”

  “Yes, sir, I would.”

  “It was in 1875 and I was twenty-five years old, just out of law school. I had been married a year and my wife was expecting our first child. Her people had been seafaring folk here on the coast and, although she was contented enough in Boston during the winter months, she hankered after her home place in the summer. So when I came into a little unexpected legacy from my grandmother I decided to build a house near my wife’s family village. We had to travel by boat then, you know, from Boston to Bar Harbor; then overland by buckboard for the luggage and buggy for ourselves. It took five hours on a single-track dirt road all the way. I’m eighty-two years old next Thursday.”

  “Do you like being eighty-two, Gramp?” asked Tommy. He was eleven, the youngest of Chris’s brothers.

  Everybody laughed and the old man answered, “Can’t say that I’m delighted with it. But since the alternative is to have died young I’ll say, yes, I like it well enough.”

  In the gauzy light Maury’s eyes moved around the semicircle. What an agreeable, variegated family! First the grandfather’s baby brother Ray, a lively tennis player at the age of seventy-one. Then Uncle Ray’s daughter with her husband and two vigorous children, who had come in their camper from a nature tour of the national parks. And Chris’s Uncle Wendell with his wife; both close to sixty, he estimated, but, like all the rest of the family, thin and flat of stomach and taut of skin.

  “Uncle Wendell’s a departure from the family pattern,” Chris had explained. “Didn’t give a damn for banking or law or business. Teaches classics at St. Bart’s, when he’s not on a dig in Greece or someplace.”

  “I wonder how James is doing,” Chris’s mother remarked now.

  Someone answered, “As usual. He insisted that Polly and Agatha come for the Fourth, which is like his usual considerate self.”

  Chris expained to Maury, “My Uncle James is crippled from polio and he doesn’t always feel like traveling, though he comes sometimes. But it’s a long trip. They live over in New York State. Brewerstown.”

  “How horrible!”

  “Yes, it is. He was a prominent lawyer, representing American banks in France, when this happened to him about twelve years ago. So he came back home and runs a small practice to keep busy. But the whole thing just turned their lives upside down, as you can imagine.”

  “Aggie’s great, you’ll like her,” Tommy said now. “She goes to Wellesley. Last year when she came for Gramp’s birthday we went to the fair and we rode on the Ferris wheel. She plays a great game of tennis, too.”

  Mr. Guthrie laughed. “Tommy’s enthusiastic about girls because he’s never had a sister. A girl is a real novelty around our house, I can tell you.” He stood up. “Well, I don’t know about all of you, but I’m turning in. Who’s for tennis early in the morning, and I mean early?”

  “Maury?” Chris asked. “I thought we could pack a lunch and sail down the coast tomorrow. But we could get a set of doubles in first, if you’re willing.”

  “Any time you say.”

  “Six o’clock. Game?”

  “Game!”

  He was so pleasantly tired, yet he didn’t fall asleep for quite a while. He lay in bed listening to the night, to low thunder from a little storm passing in the hills and to rising wind. He was enchanted. This graceful, peaceful family, this simple ease. Oh, this is where I want to be, where I fit, where I belong.…

  He supposed you wouldn’t call her beautiful, and yet he didn’t want to look away from her. She was small and moved lightly. He thought of birds and fawns, of quick, alert, soft things. She was tan; her skin, her hair, even her eyes were golden brown. Cat’s eyes. If there had been such a name for a girl, he would have thought she ought to be called September.

  They lay on the float together on her second day. Everyone had gone sailing, but Agatha had not wanted to go. “Don’t go sailing,” she had said to Maury, “keep me company for a swim. No, of course I don’t mean that. Do whatever you want,” she’d said.

  And he had answered, “I want to keep you company.”

  So they lay, while the sun burned and the wind cooled. And Agatha spoke into a drowsy silence.

  “Maury, do you mind if I ask you something?”

  “Ask away.”

  “Are you poor?”

  He sat up on one elbow. “What a question! What makes you ask that, of all things?”

  “I’m sorry if it sounded horrible. But most of Chris’s friends are so awfully rich, and I wondered whether, well, whether the reason you seemed kind of quiet was that maybe you were poor. Because we’re the poor ones in our family, so I sort of know how it feels.”

  Poor, Maury thought, remembering the tenements from which his parents had come, where people still lived and eked out their days … poor, he thought grimly.

  “No,” he said quietly, “not really. My father manages all right, considering the times.”

  “Well, then, I suppose it must be because you’re Jewish.”

  He was astounded. He didn’t know what to say to this girl.

  “Chris told
me you were.”

  “Is that such an interesting subject?”

  “I think it is. I don’t know many Jews, just one or two girls in my dorm. But Dad talks about them so much that it’s made me curious.”

  “There’s nothing to be curious about. They’re only people like everyone else. Some saints and some sinners.”

  “My father hates them. He blames them for all the troubles since the world began. It’s a kind of hobby with him, like Uncle Wendell’s digs in Greece.”

  A kind of hobby! He swallowed and changed the subject. “That must be an interesting life, your uncle’s.”

  “Oh, yes, you ought to get him talking sometime. He’s got more stories to tell! He’s from the bookish branch of the family. Not like this house.”

  Maury had observed that the house was filled with plants and needlework, all the cozy comforts, but no books. Nothing to read except an old set of the Britannica and the National Geographic magazine.

  “I’ll bet Chris seldom gets over a C, does he?” Agatha remarked.

  “Well, now, I really can’t—”

  She laughed. “Don’t worry about being disloyal! It’s no secret and his parents don’t care.”

  “Don’t care? I can’t imagine that.”

  “Why? Do your parents care so much?”

  “I should think they do.” He thought of the last semester in high school, when he had got his first grade below an A minus. It had been a B minus in chemistry; he hated science. And his father had said mildly enough, “Maury, I saw your report card. What’s the B minus doing on it?”

  “They never pushed me,” he said now, “not the way some parents do. It’s a kind of silent pressure. You know they want you to do well. They expect you to take advantage of all the good opportunities and somehow, if you don’t do well, you feel as though you had hurt them.”

  “I’ve always heard that Jews set so much store by education.”

  There it was again. You could hardly touch on any subject without having that creep in. The Difference.

  “Have I said something to upset you?”

  He turned to her quickly. “I want to know, are you like your father?”

  “I? How do you mean?”

  “About Jews, I mean?”

  She laughed. “Of course I’m not! How can you ask? I don’t believe in that stuff! Nobody else in the family does. Why, Uncle Wendell is the most liberal, broad-minded man—”

  “And your mother?”

  Aggie waited a moment. She said slowly, “Mother is—well, it’s hard to know what Mother would be if it weren’t for my father. But she’s been especially influenced by him since he’s been home all the time. I really think a lot of his thinking is because of his sickness. When you don’t move around in the world, you narrow down, you don’t see any new people, and you get—well, fanatic. Goodness,” she said ruefully, “he doesn’t even like Catholics, especially the Irish! And maybe Mother has got a touch of that. Yes, I would say she had.”

  “She doesn’t know about me?”

  “I’m sure it hasn’t been mentioned.” Agatha frowned. “Maury?”

  “Yes?”

  “Perhaps it would be better not to mention it to Mother.”

  Ah, the hell with them all! The hell with her frosty, pinch-faced mother and the whole damned lot!

  “Maury?”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t want you to think, I mean, it’s a dirty bird that soils its own nest and all that sort of thing.… My father is really a very wonderful, kind man in spite of that. He’s suffered horribly and I really love him very much. I wouldn’t want you to think I came from some sort of abnormal, awful family where the people all hate each other.”

  Why should she care what he thought about her and her family?

  She looked into his face. She had the most appealing, sweet, sweet smile. He smiled back. Her smile broke into a laugh, not the silly artificial laugh of a girl who wants to show how gay she can be, but a bright laugh, honest and true.

  “Hey, you know you people have been stewing in the sun for two hours?” Chris called over the water.

  They scrambled up and dove in, racing to the shore.

  She put an idea into his head. Maybe Chris hadn’t told his parents, had only mentioned it to Agatha? He didn’t want to ask, to seem to be making a big thing out of it. In a way he hoped that Chris had told his family, because if he had not and it were later to come out that Maury was, why, then it would appear that he had come under false pretenses.

  At dinner that evening something had been said that made Maury think they did know. In talking about a banker whom he had met in London, Chris’s father mentioned that the man possessed a famous collection of paintings and that he was a man of great culture, as so many Jews were. So Maury thought probably they knew, or else why would he have said that? Or maybe it was the other way around?

  Very distressing, a nuisance really. Of course, the name ought to tell them something. Still, it sounded German. Or did it? What a nuisance! Not that there was anything to be ashamed of. Surely he was not ashamed of his people who had given the world so much, and been so unjustly treated by the world. Certainly he was not ashamed. But what, then? Well, he was ill at ease, wondering what they might be thinking, since undoubtedly so many of them did think. Or perhaps didn’t think, merely just felt something? Funny, he hadn’t been this way, really hadn’t been this way on the campus with Chris and the other fellows. He’d felt equal, genuinely comfortable and good.

  But in the presence of these polished elders it was, for some reason, different. For the first time since his arrival he felt that it was. The dinners here were so different from home. He looked at the cool table, sparsely set, the thin-sliced roast beef on the platter. No wonder they were all so lean! He could have eaten more, but Mrs. Guthrie paid no attention to anyone’s plate. At home Ma would have been urging, insisting that everyone take more, and sometimes when they refused she would put it on their plates herself. Here there were formal manners. At home there were discussions, often emotional ones, about business, about politics, about Iris’ math teacher who seemed to torment the poor child.

  Yes, it was different. He felt angry that it should be. Angry at whom? At himself? Or at life that had made him what he was?

  By the Fourth of July, for some reason, his mood had lifted and floated away. When he woke in the morning to the sound of firecrackers booming in the hills, he felt good again and normal. They had played two sets of tennis, had a big breakfast, then gone swimming; and now at noon they stood on the main street, really the only street, of the village watching the parade go by under the elms.

  People had come in farm trucks and on foot; there were even a couple of wagons drawn up in front of the post office. There were groups of summer people like the Guthrie group, scouts in uniform and volunteer firemen with equipment. Some of the farm families had brought lunch and sat now on the grass near the bandstand, with their dogs and children running loose. Maury was delighted. It was an old engraving, a print by Currier and Ives. It was real America.

  One band after the other came swinging down the road: the firemen, the high-school band, the American Legion and a grade-school group with their teacher, singing “Yankee Doodle.” And at the last, in an open car, driven slowly so that everyone might see, came three old men bowing and waving their blue caps, the last veterans of the Civil War.

  “The one in the middle,” old Mr. Guthrie said, “that’s Frank Burroughs, some sort of relative by marriage of my late wife’s, I never did figure out the relationship.”

  “He must be awfully old,” Maury whispered.

  “Not much older than I am,” Mr. Guthrie replied.

  The flag went past; hats that were not already off were swept off. A band played “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and, hesitantly, somebody began to sing. Then others joined and Maury’s heart was stirred here among these people in their home, on this old street under the leaves, with the thump of the brasses, the
triumphant drums, the regimental flags and the voices. He heard his own voice, firm and joyous and proud: “Mine eyes have seen the glory—” and stopped, struck with embarrassment as Chris turned and smiled.

  “Go on, sing!” the grandfather said. “Sing out! I like to see a young man with enthusiasm. And you’ve a nice voice, too.”

  So he sang out with the rest until the parade had passed and vanished to disband in back of the school, and people started home.

  “Who wants to walk back with me?” Agatha asked.

  There was a general groan. “It’s two miles, for Pete’s sake.”

  “I know. But it’s a beautiful walk, by the short cut, not the road. Who’ll come?” she waited.

  “I will,” Maury said.

  They entered a lane, a dirt track that led off the road through pasture and brush. It was early afternoon and very still. Even the cattle had lain down, chewing with solemn faces in the shade.

  Presently Agatha asked him, “Why did you have tears in your eyes at the parade?”

  He was so humiliated that he was furious. How could she be so candid? And he answered stupidly, “Did I?”

  “Why are you ashamed?”

  “You make me feel foolish.”

  “Why? I was touched myself. And I was curious to know why you were.”

  “Well, I suppose because for a while there I felt so much a part of it. I felt what it must be to have roots in a place like this, to say, ‘this is my place.’ And when an old man marches with the Civil War veterans he’s someone of your own blood. I was just very much moved by all that, and wondering what it must be like.”

  “What it must be like? You don’t know?”

  He opened his mouth to explain and closed it. How could she possibly understand the whole complex, forlorn, confusing business?

  Then he began, “You see, we—my people—We’re all fragmented. Not whole, not of a piece, like you. My mother, for instance, came from Poland. Her brothers live in Austria; they fought on the other side in the war. Now they don’t even speak the same language to each other. One of them has a wife whose father’s people live in France, and my father has relatives in Johannesburg; I don’t even know what language they speak!” And he repeated, “Were all fragmented, don’t you see? All scattered.”