Evergreen

  It is said that time is merciful and that is true. The first mad anguish fades to heavy sorrow and, after a long while, into a soft weakness of tears that can be blinked away before anyone sees. But not always.

  In an old gesture he reached to twist the wedding band on his fourth finger, a habit of his when he was agitated. Then he remembered that in this marriage he wore no ring.

  This marriage, this new life. He had been thinking before he drowsed that Anna and Joseph reminded him in some ways of Vienna. Of course they were not at all like Vienna in many other ways, or at least not like the Vienna he had known. He remembered his parents’ somewhat formal, somewhat rigid bearing, the modulated voices at the table, with never any argumentation, no bickering, friendly or otherwise. That part was surely not like the Friedmans’, where everybody talked at once, with such eagerness to be heard! When they had more than a few guests the confusion was dizzying. He smiled to himself. His heart had slowed to its normal beat. Calm and reality returned. This was now and he was here. These were his people. Such good people, such home people!

  On Sunday mornings Joseph got up as early as on every other day and brought fresh lox and bagels to their door. On Friday nights when Iris and Theo arrived for dinner there was a package with two toys for them to take home to Steve and Jimmy. No use protesting that the old man was spoiling the boys. It was his pleasure, and he wouldn’t have listened to the protest anyway.

  Usually Theo went home after the dinner while Iris went with her parents to the synagogue. But now and then of late he had gone with them too, surprising himself by doing so, for he had hardly been half a dozen times in a synagogue during his entire life. He found it boring and meaningless, but it pleased Iris so much that he went, and pleased his in-laws too. Joseph especially was so proud, so bursting-proud, to be seen walking in with his son-in-law, the doctor.

  He felt a true fondness for Joseph. You would have to be callous to return nothing to a man who so evidently loved you, even though you knew you were in part a substitute for his dead son. No matter. A kind, kind man, Joseph was. He liked to call himself a simple man; it was a favorite expression of his. And actually he was. His pleasures were simple, not counting his work, which was probably his greatest pleasure. Other than that, he liked to eat the food his wife prepared, to be honored among the prominent for his charities and to play pinochle with old friends who were simple, too. One of them still drove a taxi; he always arrived at the house in his yellow taxi.

  Theo liked to think of his children growing up in this uncomplicated family. A warmth spread in his chest, thinking of it. The security, the safety! This broad peaceful country, this orderly town where his children slept in their clean beds. It was a miracle and there could be no other word for it. Out of the dregs and chaos of his own life, all this. This house, this family, these people. His.

  A ripple of rising wind fell chill upon his shoulders. The sun was low in the sky. In small reluctant groups of threes and fours people were gathering their towels and bags and walking toward the parking lot.

  He got up and helped his wife to her feet. She plodded heavily through the sand, holding Steve and Jimmy by the hand. The little boys were sleepy; they curled up on the front seat between Theo and Iris, their legs interlaced with one another’s, for once not squirming or fighting. The grandparents sat in the back.

  “A lovely day,” Anna sighed.

  Quiet settled over the beach. Even the gulls were gone (where had they gone?) except for one who stood at the end of the dock, a dark, still shape against the light. The sun blazed its last fire, balanced on the rim of the sea, bleeding pink into the clouds.

  “It’ll be a hot one tomorrow,” Joseph predicted, shaking his head.

  Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Separate from the other unnamed billions who walk the earth, each of these little groups of three or five or twelve, brought together by the shuffle of chance, then welded by blood, sees in itself the whole of earth, or all that matters of it. What happens to one of the three or five or twelve will happen to them all. Whatever grief or triumph may touch any one will touch every one, as they are carried forward into the unknowable under the brilliant, terrifying sun which nourishes all.

  33

  In the beginning it was primeval forest, ash and hemlock, maple, elm and oak. Then came the settlers to level the woods, plant corn and graze cattle. Trees were planted again for summer shade. During long years, two hundred or more, the farms were given by father to son and the land flourished.

  Toward the end of the last century came men of wealth from the cities, gentlemen farmers assembling their estates among the working farms, building their country mansions behind walls and wrought-iron gates. Still the trees flourished, for these men liked to play at rural living. On their terraces they sat and watched their fine blue-ribbon herds; their burnished horses hung their heads over the post-and-rail fences that kept them away from the gardens and the specimen shrubs.

  After the Second World War the developers arrived, answering the pressure of population from the cities. Now, for a second time, the trees came down, not selectively, a few here where needed, a few there, but drastically and ruthlessly, in a total leveling. An oak stood tall against the sky, its leaves at the crest still tossing in the summer wind, while the saw screeched at its base. It stood, leaned very slightly for an instant, then plunged in a wide arc to the ground and lay there shuddering, prone on the earth out of which its first soft, timid finger had emerged a century and a half before.

  So the trees came down; the meadows were divided and sub-divided and the bulldozers ripped the earth. Acre after acre, row after row of identical houses like checkers on a board lay flat in the glare of the sun. The streets were given the aristocratic English names of poets and admirals. The houses were sold as “manors” or “estates,” in spite of the fact that very often one could reach out of a window and shake the hand of a neighbor leaning out of his.

  Like a stain on a tablecloth the tracts spread over the countryside, covering the land. Then came the shopping malls, the crisscross highways; great transit systems in which roads looped and turned back upon themselves to handle the enormous flow of cars, so that the traveler who wanted to go west had first to turn east, find an overpass and swing back in the opposite direction.

  Growing, growing, spreading, with no end in sight.

  34

  Eric sat on the steps of the sales bungalow, waiting for his grandfather. To the left stretched long rows of completed houses, all alike under the gray March sky. To the right, frames were going up; hammers racketed; dust rose in spurts of reddish cloud when a truck dumped a load of bricks; cement mixers rumbled. Enormous pipes, wide enough for two men to crawl through, lay among coils of glittery copper wire. A truck ground up a small incline. Another dropped a load of sheetrock. Confusion out of which, to be fair about it, would come order.

  Soon he would be starting the fourth year in his “new family,” so he had been on these visits to the building sites many times by now. He didn’t really mind, as long as he wasn’t asked to go too often. Today they had combined the trip with shopping for shoes and a raincoat. Grandpa said that was a man’s business, not a grandmother’s.

  He didn’t really need a new raincoat. Gran would have looked at his old one and said, “It’ll do for another year,” just as Gran used to say, “You already have enough sweaters, you don’t need another one.” Or, “You’ve really had enough to eat, Eric,” a statement that would be unthinkable in the Friedman house.

  Here, food was urged upon you, more than you could swallow sometimes. Here, something was always being bought for you. “You like the sweater? It’s nice, I’ll get it for you.” Giving was a way of loving, not as a substitute for time or caring but only because, Eric realized, they never seemed to find enough ways. If Chris and the family had had any worries about how he would be loved—and he had no reason to think so—they needn’t have had them. He was bathed, surrounded and enveloped with it.

&n
bsp; Chris wrote to him regularly. The other Guthries wrote from wherever they happened to be. Cards were mailed on ‘round-the-world cruises. Greetings and small presents came from the house that the elder Guthries had rented in the south of Portugal. Chris wrote really long letters with descriptions of Venezuela and snapshots of the children sent, Eric knew, to stave off any loneliness Chris thought he might be feeling. Eric tried to respond in kind. I’ve made the basketball team, playing forward. I got a new bike for my birthday. Everybody is good to me. I’ve got lots of friends. I’m in a new scout troop.

  The truth was more complex than these flat facts. It was so very different, this household. For one thing, it was so busy. The sense of a busyness almost hectic came from his grandfather. Take today: it was supposed to be his free day. But as always there was some emergency which he absolutely had to attend to, even today, with Passover starting at sundown. He was always rushing somewhere. Eric had been surprised to learn that his grandparents had only lived seven years in town; they were as involved as if they had been there all their lives. His grandmother was on the hospital board and so many other charitable boards that he couldn’t remember them all. Grandpa had built a chapel for the new temple and turned over his half of the profits as a gift. (Grandpa wouldn’t have told him, but Aunt Iris had; she was so proud of him.) Last week a policeman had been run over chasing a suspect and the town had taken up a collection for his widow and children; Grandpa was the head of the committee. There was talk of his being appointed to a state commission to study public housing. No, he was not the kind of man with whom a boy could spend long afternoons in the woods with book and binoculars, hunting for birds. He wouldn’t have been interested, even if he had had the time.

  Perhaps, though, that wasn’t fair? When you thought of his life and where he had come from? Once in New York they had driven past the house on Ludlow Street where he had grown up and past the house on Hester Street where Nana had come as an immigrant. He’d been shocked at the narrow, crowded streets and the mean houses. He’d never seen such places except vaguely in pictures.… What could you learn of forests and birds living in places like those?

  Last fall before school opened Grandpa had had to go to Boston on business, and Nana had suggested they travel north through New England for a few days. It was surprising, but Grandpa had agreed. They had gone all the way up to Mt. Monadnock in New Hampshire, staying in old wooden hotels with sunflowers in the yard and stacks of pancakes to start the chilly mornings. They’d walked around the white little towns and Nana had gone into antique shops and, bought knickknacks of old glass.

  “Keeps a woman happy, buying toys,” Grandpa had said, and winked at Eric.

  They had walked down a road, Grandpa and Eric, and stopped on a bridge over a stream where a couple of boys were fishing.

  “Know anything about fishing?” Grandpa had asked and when Eric said yes, he’d often used to fish for trout outside of Brewerstown, he’d looked out over the sloping fields where the corn stubble was dry, and then to the hills, to the far blue ranges overlapping one another; he had looked and looked and finally said, “There’s so much I’ve never seen, Eric.”

  So perhaps it wasn’t right to say he wouldn’t be interested.

  On the way south it was Nana who had made a suggestion, as if she had been reading Eric’s mind. “Maybe we could go back through New York State and Eric could see Brewerstown again.”

  It wasn’t that he’d been afraid to ask. By this time he knew he could ask them for anything and they would give it or do it. The reason was that he hadn’t wanted them to think he was homesick or not happy with them. They were so dreadfully sensitive about him! Once he had overheard his grandmother talking to that old lady Ruth who came to visit.

  “Eric has grown even closer to our hearts than Maury was at that age,” she had said. “Joseph used to be strict with Maury, remember? But Eric can do anything he wants.” And she had sighed. “I don’t suppose he can have any idea of what he means to us.”

  They would have been surprised to learn that he did have, that he observed far more than they knew. He saw, for instance, that when Grandpa was working especially hard and long he could be quite cross with Nana. Small things irritated him, a purse or a pair of gloves left lying on a chair, or being kept waiting for five minutes. And Nana didn’t answer him back. But he was never cross with Eric, never once, although Nana sometimes was, but not very often, either.

  They were soft with him because they were afraid he wouldn’t love them, he knew that clearly. There had been times when he’d been so sorry for himself, especially during the first year; no kid he’d ever known had been in his position. In a way he still sometimes felt a little sorry for himself. But most times he was more sorry for the two old people, he didn’t know just why.

  So they had stopped in Brewerstown. Driving down the main street toward the house he’d had a sick feeling and slumped in the car, hoping nobody he knew would see him. He’d remembered the day he left the house almost three years before. Gran had gone back to the hospital where she was to die. They had carried her out, all shrunken and dark yellow, with a strange unpleasant odor not like Gran, who had always smelled of lemon soap. When he had gone down the front walk for the last time he had been thinking that the house would be lonesome for them. On the way out he had stopped to stake an enormous peony head that otherwise would have drooped in the dust along the front walk; Gran was so particular about her peonies. He’d tried in those last minutes to memorize everything: the hawthorne tree, a real hawthorne from England, with wicked needles; the mulberry bush where he used to make a shady cave for himself and George when they were both very young. It had seemed to him that all of these were aware that he was going away. He’d gone down the path between Grandpa and Nana, strangers then, had got into their car and all the way down the road, until the house was out of sight, had not allowed himself to look back, had just stared straight ahead.

  So now they had come up before the house again and, astonishingly, it looked the same. There was a doll carriage on the front walk. A baby carriage with a mosquito netting stood on the porch. They had sat in the car observing a croquet set on the side lawn and wash blowing on the line near the garage. The house was alive, as if Eric had never lived in it and left it.…

  “Would you like to go in?” Nana had asked. “I’m sure the people wouldn’t mind—”

  “No,” he’d said firmly. “No.” They had understood and started the car and driven away.

  Wanting to say something, Eric had pointed out the horses in the Whitelys’ field. “That’s Lafayette, the brown and white one. I used to ride him almost every day.”

  “You never said you could ride! Why didn’t you tell us? I’ll buy you a horse,” Grandpa had exclaimed. “There’s a good stable not fifteen minutes away from our house!”

  “No,” he’d refused. “No, thanks. I don’t have the time now, with school and basketball practice and everything.”

  But that wasn’t the truth. The joy of riding, the free wind, the horse-companion—all that belonged to the other life. He mustn’t mix them up. It had been confusing enough. He must keep the lives separate. That other was finished and closed. Forget it.

  The door swung open now and Mr. Malone came out. He sat down with Eric on the step.

  “Your grandfather will be through in a couple of minutes.” He wiped his forehead. “This is some big job, let me tell you. Think you’d like to run this business?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” Eric answered politely.

  “Silly question, wasn’t it? How could you know? But you will! My boys have taken over magnificently. And your grandfather will be in seventh heaven the day you hang your hat in our office.” He lowered his voice. “You know, Eric, he’s a different man since you came. Not that there was anything wrong before, but now it’s as if he’d shed years. I can tell. I’ve known him long enough. You know how long I’ve known him?”

  “No, sir.”

  “It was in 19
12. Let’s see, that’s thirty-nine years. We’ve seen a lot of life together. Did he ever tell you how I was wiped out in the stock market in ‘29 and how he took care of me?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, of course, he wouldn’t. But I’ll never forget! He fed me and my whole family until I was able to pull myself together again. Yes,” Mr. Malone said, “old times. Old times. Seeing you here reminds me of when your father used to come to visit the job in the city. He was younger than you are. You don’t mind my mentioning your father?”

  “No, sir.”

  “‘Sir.’ I like the way you say ‘sir,’ although I wouldn’t object if you didn’t. But it shows you’ve been well brought up. Kids these days don’t say it. Except the parochial school kids. They have manners. They have to, or Sister would rap their knuckles for them.”

  Strange how many different kinds of people there were around here, Eric reflected. Mr. Malone was so Catholic! And one of the engineers was Chinese; after you got used to his odd face you could see it was really handsome.

  “Your grandfather had better put a move on.” Mr. Malone looked at his watch. “If he wants to be home in time for the Seder.”

  Imagine Mr. Malone reminding his grandfather of the Seder!

  Grandpa came out and they got into the car. “Some project, hah?” he said, as they bumped their way around bulldozers and cranes. “Three million dollars’ worth! Don’t get me wrong, we don’t make that out of it.” He laughed. “Not by a couple of long shots, we don’t. What I meant was, we have to get that much together from the banks and syndicates to get the thing started. A thousand hours of headache, I can tell you that. But it’s a great challenge, Eric, a thrill to drive past when it’s all finished, and see the cars in the driveways, curtains in the windows, kids playing on the sidewalks. To think that you—we—conceived it in our heads and saw it through. Think you’d like it?” he asked, as Mr. Malone had done.