Evergreen

  “But I should think that would be very interesting! Old American families like mine, who’ve been in one place for centuries, they’re like a little enclave into which nothing fresh or new ever enters. I sometimes think, especially since I’ve gone away to college, that were even rather boring, were so predictable.”

  “No,” Maury said, patiently, “you’re basic, you’re strong.” And he was suddenly compelled to go on. “Sometimes I think: What are we, where do we belong? What country is ours, really ours, where we have always been and will always be? I feel so light, so without grounding, that it seems as if I—all of us—my family and our friends, all the people I know, could be blown away like leaves and it wouldn’t matter. Nobody would even notice.”

  “That sounds so sad!”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be depressing.”

  “It’s my fault, I asked you. Here, here’s our short cut, up the hill. Let’s run! There’s the most gorgeous view at the top, you’ve never seen anything like it.”

  He never had. The hill fell away beneath them in loops and folds, and rose again all silvery-gold in the sun and green-black in the running shadows of the clouds. The land was cut by the bay and its crooked coves. Islands lay scattered in the water and beyond rose other hills, as far as they could see.

  Agatha spoke deliberately in a warm and lovely tone,

  “All I could see from where I stood

  Was three long mountains and a wood.”

  Maury smiled and answered,

  “I turned and looked another way,

  And saw three islands in a bay.”

  They stood still, looking at one another. Agatha said, “I thought when I first saw you that you were like Chris and most of his friends, with nothing on your mind, sort of.”

  “I don’t know what I’m like, really.”

  Something so moved him that he turned away. There were some tall plants in a clump, taller than he. “What are those things, with the little white flowers?”

  “Oh, those? Just meadow rue. It’s a weed.”

  “And this stuff, that’s so fragrant?”

  “Another common plant. It’s yarrow.”

  He looked up. She was still standing there, with such an expression on her face—He said, “I don’t really care what they’re called, you know.”

  “I didn’t believe you did.”

  And then they were standing together, their flesh joined from mouth to knee, with a hundred pulses beating, beating through layers of cotton cloth.

  “When do you have to leave, Agatha?”

  “Tomorrow morning. And you?”

  “The day after. You know that well have to see each other again.”

  “I know.”

  “When? How?”

  “In September. You’ll come to Boston, or I could go to New Haven. Either way.”

  “Something’s happened that’s crazy. I’m in love.”

  “It is crazy, isn’t it? Because I am, too.”

  He was certain he must look different, that people must surely notice it. But nobody did and it was better so. Even Chris had no suspicion and Maury, with a certain premonitory caution, was glad to keep it that way.

  He heard her voice in his head. Sometimes, driving the car, her face rose up in front of the windshield, to dazzle him. He thought about her naked body, tried to imagine it, and grew weak.

  They met in Boston in September. Once she came to New Haven and he rode the train back with her. They walked and walked and lingered over drawn-out meals in restaurants. Their feet ached in the museums. On the sidewalks, as the weeks moved toward winter, it was clammy cold and the wind seeped through their clothes. There was never any place to go.

  One time she produced a key. “This is for my friend Daisy’s apartment. They’re away skiing in Vermont.”

  “No,” he said, “no, we can’t”

  “Why? I trust Daisy. And we’ve never been alone. I should just like to sit someplace together, quiet and alone.”

  He was trembling. “I couldn’t just sit alone in a room with you, don’t you know that?”

  “Well, then. I’d do anything you want to make you happy. I want so much to make you happy.”

  “But it wouldn’t make us happy afterward. Aggie darling, I want to start right, to do everything right. We’ve so much against us, I don’t want to add more.”

  She dropped the key into her purse and snapped it shut.

  “You’re not—you don’t think I don’t want to, Aggie?” he cried.

  “It’s just,” she said bitterly, “that I wonder whether we ever will be alone in a room together.”

  “Of course we will. You mustn’t have thoughts like that.”

  “You haven’t mentioned anything about me at home?” she asked.

  “No. Have you?”

  “My God, no! I’ve told you about my father. Oh,” she said, “we even got in a fight last time I was home. He was talking about how the Jews are in back of Roosevelt; of course he thinks Roosevelt is the arch villain of all time and our descendants are going to have to pay for what he’s doing to the country.

  “And I said what you told me your father had said about Roosevelt, that people are starting to get a few dollars in their pockets and that probably he is really saving the American system … I thought my father would have a stroke! He asked me what kind of crazy, radical professors we had at college, and then Mother signaled to me not to say any more, because he gets so excited. So that’s the way things are in my house.”

  “Well think of something, some way,” Maury said confidently. A man was supposed to have confidence in his powers. But he didn’t feel very much.

  The telephone was a life line and a misery at the same time. Agatha took his calls in a cubicle at the end of a corridor in her dormitory. For all the clattering, slamming and talking she was barely able to hear him. He had to repeat in a shouting whisper: “I love you, I miss you so,” feeling foolish, frustrated and sad. And then silence while time raced, with nothing to say, or rather, so much to say and no way to begin. Then the three minutes were up.

  Thanksgiving vacation had to be endured. He went with his father to the apartments on Washington Heights to collect the rents and check repairs. He stood on the sidewalk and watched the lift vans being unloaded as the refugees began to arrive from Germany; stood while heavy ornate furniture from some villa in Berlin-Charlottenburg was lifted out, furniture too big and dark for the flat over the delicatessen or the laundry. His father stood there too, talking to the new arrivals in a mixture of German and Yiddish. His face was grave and he sighed. Always that sigh: What’s to happen? What’s to become of us? It was depressing.

  Then home to Iris at the dinner table, giving her earnest daily rehash of the New York Times, pushing the untidy hair behind her ears. “You can’t oversimplify, Pa. This thing that is happening in Germany has its roots in the Versailles Treaty and the economic collapse—”

  Poor Iris! Would any man ever rejoice in her as I rejoice in Agatha?

  He recalled the dinner table at Chris’s house. Everything was so emotional here. But perhaps that was unfair? Perhaps the emotion was in him, too?

  At Thanksgiving dinner there were some new faces.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Nathanson,” Pa said. “He’s our new accountant and a very bright guy. His daughter’s coming too,” he added casually.

  Just as casually, the daughter was seated next to Maury. But he had to give them credit. They had too much respect to foist just anyone upon him. She was a nice, a really nice girl. She went to Radcliffe and she was very smart, but she didn’t try to impress him with it. He liked her pale gray wool dress and her shiny thick black hair. He even liked her nails, dark red ovals, perfectly manicured. Aggie had short nails like a little boy’s; he suspected that she bit them. But he could have been locked in a room with this girl, or any other girl, and it wouldn’t have meant a thing.

  “What are you planning to do after Yale?” the girl asked.

  Eve
ryone at the table had caught her question. He hadn’t planned to answer as he did, hadn’t even been sure of what he wanted. It was just an idea that had been growing, perhaps because of Chris’s own plans or Chris’s fine old grandfather.

  “I want to go to law school,” Maury said.

  His father’s mouth fell open. He almost chuckled. “Maury! You never said a word!”

  “Well, I wasn’t certain.”

  “By golly, this is great news! You know,” he confided to the table, “when he was a baby his mother and I used to talk, we’d talk about him being a doctor or a lawyer. Well, you know how it is.”

  The Nathansons smiled. They knew how it was.

  “So what’s it to be? Harvard or Yale?”

  Maury answered modestly, “I’ll have to see who’ll take me.”

  “Well, well, I’ll have to do some hustling, but I’ll do it. For Maury I’ll move the earth if I have to,” his father said.

  “When the building business comes back,” Mr. Nathanson observed, “it’ll be a good thing to have your own son handle the legal end. You’ll have it made. And you too, Maury. It’ll be a good thing for you, too.”

  That was not at all what he had in mind, but he didn’t say so. What he had in mind, as the idea took form and grew, was a good American life in some old town, or some small city. He saw himself sitting behind a roll-top desk with maple trees outside the window. He felt an atmosphere clean and quiet and austere. Like Lincoln in Springfield. Yes, that’s how it would be. Like Lincoln in Springfield.

  A few days later his mother remarked, “A nice girl, that Natalie, don’t you think so?”

  “Oh, very,” he agreed. His mother was waiting for more but he did not give it.

  Then a few weeks later while they were talking on the telephone, his mother said, “I spoke to Mrs. Nathanson today. She happened to remark, I don’t know how it came about, you never called Natalie.”

  “No.”

  A pause. “You didn’t like her?”

  “I liked her.”

  “I don’t want to interfere. A young man wants his privacy, I’ve never interfered, have I, Maury?”

  “No, you haven’t.” And that was true.

  “So forgive me this once.… Have you got another girl, is that it?”

  “Well, it’s too early to say. I’ll tell you, Ma, I promise, whenever there’s anything to tell.”

  “I’m sure you will. Whatever you do will be fine with us, Maury, you know that. As long as she’s a Jewish girl. Not that it’s necessary to say that to you. We trust you, Maury.”

  Christmas vacation was no better. Agatha came to New York for a Christmas party. He met her in the lobby of the Hotel Commodore. Feeling fiercely jealous, ineffectual and stricken of manhood, he listened to her assurances that Peter So-and-So and Douglas So-and-So meant nothing to her at all, that they were only party escorts, that nobody meant anything to her at all (Oh, God, Maury, do I have to tell you?). And he knew that was the sacred truth and died of his jealousy anyway: hands that would touch her while they danced; ears that would listen to her voice; eyes that would look at her freely, publicly, with no apology.…

  By March and spring recess he was close to desperation. “Pa, I’d like to have a car for a day or two,” he said. “I’d like to run up and visit a fellow near Albany.”

  He drove north on the Albany Post Road, then crossed the river at West Point. It grew colder. The little villages were still shut into the silence of winter and there was snow on the slopes. He stopped for lunch in a place that smelled of hot grease. When the door opened cold air came in with the noisy men who pushed to the counter, bantering mock-sexy innuendoes with the middle-aged waitress. He had a desolate, hopeless feeling. He thought of turning around and going back, but he did not. Instead he filled the tank at the next gas station and drove. The farms grew larger and farther apart. There were miles of woods; of old, unpainted houses and shaggy cattle penned in barnyards. Toward evening he drove into Brewerstown.

  He thought he had driven into the eighteenth century. He felt an absolute surge of delight and recognition. My time, my place! But of course that was absurd; it was only in pictures that Maury could have known this place. Yet he knew it perfectly. He knew the wide, wide streets and the elms that would form a dark green aisle in leaf. He knew the white church with the graveyard on one side, the parish house on the other. And all the white fences, the brick walks, the fanlights, the driveways lined with rhododendrons. It took half a century to grow rhododendrons that size.

  The town was shut down for the night, except for a drugstore on the main street. Maury went to the telephone book and marked down the address and the telephone number. The store was empty except for the man behind the counter.

  “Is Lake Road far from here?” Maury asked.

  “Depends where you want to go on Lake Road. It goes five, six miles around the lake, then joins up with the highway. Who you lookin’ for?”

  Maury shook his head. “Oh, I don’t plan to visit tonight I’ll call first.”

  He dropped a nickel into the slot and gave the number to the operator.

  “The line is busy,” she said.

  He wondered whether he would have the courage to try again. The man behind the counter looked at him curiously while he waited.

  “You’re not from these parts?”

  “New York City.”

  “Ayeh. Been in New York once. Didn’t like it.”

  “Well. Can’t blame you. This is a beautiful town.”

  “Ayeh. My folks came here when they was just Indians around.”

  Maury put the nickel in again. This time someone answered. “Is Agatha at home, please?”

  “Miss Agatha?” He was relieved to know it was a maid. “Who shall I say is calling?”

  “Just a friend. A friend from New York.”

  When she came to the phone he whispered, “Aggie, I’m here in town.”

  “Oh, my God, why?”

  “Because I was going out of my mind without seeing you.”

  “But what am I going to say? What am I going to do?”

  Suddenly he was decisive. “Say you need something at the drugstore. Anything. I’ll be waiting down the block in a tan Maxwell. How long will you be?”

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  “That’s just about as long as I can hold out,” he said.

  They drove about two miles out of town and stopped the car. When they put their arms around each other it was like the healing of a wound.

  “I have to know,” Maury said, “what’s going to become of us.”

  She began to cry. “Don’t, don’t,” he murmured. “Ever since that Christmas dance in the city I’ve been thinking the world is full of enemies, people who want to take you away from me …”

  “Nobody can do that,” she said fiercely.

  “Then will you marry me? In June, after I graduate? Will you, Agatha?”

  “Yes, yes, I will.”

  “No matter what?”

  “No matter what.”

  At least he knew now where they were going. He hadn’t the faintest idea how they were going to get there, how he would manage law school and this marriage, but he had her promise. It sustained him, through the spring session, through the finals, through commencement.

  His mother had a habit of drinking a late cup of coffee in the kitchen before going to bed. He sat there with her on the night after commencement. He had known all day that there was something she wanted to say, he knew her so well.

  “Maury,” she began now, “you have a girl, haven’t you? And she isn’t Jewish.”

  He felt a giggle, an absurd shocked giggle and quelled it. “How did you guess?”

  “What other reason could there be for you to be so secretive?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “That’s where you went when you borrowed Pa’s car last spring, isn’t it?”

  He nodded.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Ma
rry her, Ma.”

  “You know, of course, what trouble this is going to make?”

  “I know. And I’m sorry.”

  His mother stirred her coffee. The spoon made a pleasant, comforting sound against the cup. She began to speak softly. “My mind is so often divided. I can see two sides of everything, as though I were holding a ball between my hands. I think: Maury, you’re right. If you really love another human being—if it’s real, and God knows there is so little real love and it’s made up of so many things that even at my age I don’t understand it, so I suppose I should use the word ‘want’ rather than ‘love’ … if you really want to be with a person, why shouldn’t you be? Life is short enough; why suffer and sacrifice? One is born with a label, one could just as easily have been born something else. You see what I mean, Maury?”

  “I see. But what is the other side?”

  “The other side,” she said quietly, “is that you were born what you are, nothing can change it and your father is right. So that side says to me: Tell Maury to listen to his father.”

  “You know what he’s going to say? You’ve discussed it with him?”

  “Of course I haven’t! And of course I know what he’s going to say, just as you know it.” She swallowed her coffee.

  What a beautiful face! he thought. She has a lovely, serious, gentle face, my mother …

  “He’ll say,” she went on, “and he’ll be right—he’ll say that you come from a proud, ancient people. You may not always think so when you look around at the children of the eastern ghettos. We’re not educated; were often noisy; we don’t have the finest manners; where could we learn them? But were only one very small part of the history of our people.”

  “I know. I understand.”

  “Sometimes I’ve wondered,” she said, “I’ve wondered whether perhaps, since you’ve been in a different world at college, whether you might have been ashamed of me, only a little? A foreign-born mother with an accent. Has that brothered you?”