When they came back to the house from the churchyard where the Guthries lay, the faces that gathered, faces of relatives and strangers, were familiar, too. How odd that you got used to other types and faces without real awareness of the difference and the change! Now suddenly he realized that he hadn’t seen faces like these in a long, long time.
Generalizations were totally unscientific. There were almost as many exceptions as the rule, and yet he could know, here in this room, that he was not among his father’s people. Less tension here perhaps, less animation, color, noise? No matter; it was different.
They were an unmistakable breed, these people, shaped narrowly and of a healthy toughness that went with hardy skills like rough-weather sailing or cross-country skiing. The women, even those who weren’t pretty, who had long, craggy faces, wore the marks of their kind: skirts and blouses, gold circle pins, a strong, no-nonsense manner. He would have recognized one of them if he had encountered her in Patagonia. He stood there watching the group around the coffee urn, listening to the crisp accents and gentle voices, feeling as if—as if he had just walked into his own home after a morning’s absence. And quite suddenly he understood what it was that moved him so, in a way that was probably not entirely reasonable, that was just simply because—
Because they looked like Gran.
Chris was there with his wife and older boys. Chris’s brothers were there also with young, pregnant wives.
Hugh came over to introduce Betsey. “I’ve heard you’re going on an exciting venture with Chris,” Betsey said. “We’re all so delighted that you’ll be together.”
Eric flushed. “I haven’t quite made up my mind,” he answered.
Chris had come up behind them. “I don’t know what you’re waiting for,” he said. For the first time he sounded impatient. “It’s already April and if you want to come along you’ll have to see the people in New York by the end of the month. I can’t stall any longer for you, you know.”
“I know.”
“For the life of me I can’t imagine why you don’t jump at the chance!”
“I guess because it’s for five years. One wants to be absolutely sure of a commitment like that.”
“Well, don’t think too long, that’s all.” Chris walked away.
Now Hugh introduced an old man who had been standing near the fireplace.
“Cousin Ted, this is Eric. You’ve never met, I think.”
Eric took hold of a hard leathery hand, looked into a pair of concentrating eyes.
“I knew your mother when she was a baby. Never saw you, though. Never see much of my wife’s family since she died. But I wanted to pay my respects today. I live over in Prides Crossing since I retired.” He rambled, moving toward senility.
“I met your father once. Came to me for a job at the bank, I recall. Couldn’t give him one, though. Depression, you know. No jobs. You look like your mother,” he said abruptly. “A fine, pretty girl, your mother was. Died too young. Look at me, I’m eighty-seven.”
Someone came and led him away to the coffee urn. Eric thought, All these people know more about who I am than I do. The thought caused a bleakness and at the same time a soft wish to reach out to them.
“Remember us,” Gran said.
If I turn my back now and cut myself off that’ll be the end, the final end. The old people are dying or dead. Chris will go away and when he comes back well be strangers. At least, there’s a little something between us now, a little flame that can be fanned.
Arabia. Riding with Chris of that old, first life, into a new life.… Someone had put pine cones in the fireplace; the sweet, sharp scent of them sifted through the warm air. Fragrance and flavor, like those of Proust’s madeleine, were potent instruments always; he could smell Maine’s salty coves again and Brewerstown’s gilt Septembers, its fires of fall. Oh, remembered places, remembered faces! Flesh of his flesh and quiet ways; Gramp’s birds and a white horse grazing, and so much more. So much.
He found Chris talking at the far end of the room. He tapped him on the shoulder.
“Chris, I’ll go with you,” he said.
* * *
During the week of spring recess he opened his mouth a dozen times to tell his grandparents and closed it again, feeling weak and cowardly.
“I want to buy you a good car,” Grandpa said. “The jalopy was good enough for a college boy, but you ought to have a better one now. So be thinking about what you’d like and well take care of it after commencement.”
He said, “Why don’t you take a month or two off before you start putting your nose to the grindstone? Drive out to California or something? Have a ball.”
Nana said, “I was thinking, would you like me to fix up your room at the office or do you want to pick out your own things? Jerry Malone just refurnished, so maybe you’d like to take a look at what he bought for some ideas—”
Grandpa said, “You haven’t seen the new shopping center since we finished up, have you? How about taking a ride over with me? I have a couple of people to see there this afternoon.”
Eric went along and strolled through the long expanse of malls, turns and alleys, up a level and down a level, marveling at the enormity of it all and trying to observe enough to make, later, the intelligent comments that would be expected.
But all he could feel was a pervasive sadness. So many aimless couples drifting through the afternoon with their children tugging at them, looking for amusement! Anxious men in lumber jackets, tired women with hair in curlers, wandering with their desires through mazes of stores piled with shoddy trash that they couldn’t afford and didn’t need! And Eric knew that if he were to express all that to his grandfather he would only stare in astonished dismay.
They got back in the car. “Well, what did you think of it?” his grandfather asked. There was a sparkle in his voice.
“It’s a busy place, all right.”
“Wait till you see what were building in south Jersey. It’s still only on paper but we expect to break ground in September. Maybe I’ll let you work on it. I’ll send you down with Matt Malone to get the feel of things. Matt’s a smart boy. You can learn a lot from him.”
Eric’s left hand lay on the seat and suddenly his grandfather placed his own over it. He spoke very low, so that Eric could barely hear him and knew that the old man was embarrassed by his own emotion.
“For years I’ve envied Malone. It was wrong of me, I know. Thou shalt not covet … . But I did, all the same. All those fine sons to go into business with him! To carry on what he had built out of years of sweat, while for me it was all going down the drain. Into nothing, as if I had never existed. Until you came. I don’t mind telling you, you’ve taken years off my shoulders. Or put years onto my life, however you want to say it. Do I make you feel uncomfortable, Eric? Forgive me this once, if I do.”
“That’s okay, Grandpa.” My God, my God, how am I going to say it? With what words? Where? When?
On Friday evening his grandmother called him aside. “Eric, I want to ask a favor. Would you come to temple with us tonight? It’s the anniversary of your great-grandfather’s death and Grandpa has to say Kaddish for him.”
“Yes, surely, I’ll go.”
“Thank you, I’m glad. I know it’s not your prayer, but still it will make him feel good to have you there.”
He sat through the sermon not hearing it, heavy with the weight of his dilemma. He was aware from time to time of plaintive music, but only half aware. The name of Max Friedman was called in a long list of names; the sounding of its syllables made a small shock in his head and it came to him for an instant that the blood of that totally strange man—for if he were to be brought back to life what could they have to say to one another?—that strange man’s blood was in him, nevertheless. The congregation rose. He felt the rustling and stood with them through the murmuring of several hundred voices all in unison. His grandmother’s head was bowed, her hands were clasped, her face was serious. His grandfather’s old hooded
eyes were partly closed. He swayed as he held the prayer book but he was not reading it; he knew it by heart. They know I won’t be saying this prayer for them, Eric thought. One of Aunt Iris’ little boys will have to do that when they are dead. And yet I mean so much to them.
And now the blessing: “The Lord bless thee and keep thee; the Lord cause the light of His face to shine upon thee—”
Then “Good Sabbath,” the people turning to each other in the neighboring pews, families, friends and strangers kissing or shaking hands.
“Good Sabbath.” Joseph kissed Eric and kissed Anna; Anna kissed Eric and kissed Joseph.
They moved slowly in the press going down the aisle. Grandpa rested a hand on Eric’s shoulder. He saw that his grandmother watched the gesture. He thought irrelevantly that her red hair was too youthful for the expression that she wore. He looked at her while she looked at her husband’s hand. Something was being weighed and balanced behind her thoughtful, clever face, something of delicate complexity, spun of unspoken things. He felt, he could almost touch, an emotion so tense that a move might shatter it, whatever it was: a question held back, a plea, perhaps, for which there were no words?
He knew then, in the throb of that instant, that he couldn’t go.
“You’re not angry, Chris?” he asked, when he had finished his story. They had met in New York for the purpose, so Chris had expected, of taking Eric to the interview.
“I won’t allow myself to be.” Chris smiled but his eyes were angry. “I’ll just say you’re rather young for your years, completely inexperienced and far too sentimental. You’re like your—” he broke off.
“Like my parents, you were going to say.”
“Well, yes, I was. However, it’s hardly unusual for a person to be like his parents.”
“Like which of them?” Eric persisted.
“Like both. Too idealistic for their own good, each one of them.”
Chris took Eric’s hand. “I’m always in a hurry these days, it seems. So let’s just say, ‘Good luck to us both.’ And if you ever need me, Eric, you’ll know where I am. Keep in touch, will you? All the best,” he said. His face changed; a look of gravity and softness came over it, and for an instant Eric was back in the boat, bobbing behind a curtain of willows, and Chris was saying, “Your Gran is going to die.” He shook off the illusion.
“Thanks, Chris, for everything,” he said, and, releasing each other’s hands, they parted among the hastening crowds on Forty-third Street.
Later that week Iris told him, “I’m not sure it was the right decision for your own self-interest. But it surely was generous, Eric.”
He didn’t answer. Now that he had made the decision he felt that it hadn’t really been generous of him at all, that actually he had been and was—would always be?—too divided to be entirely content either with staying or with going.
“I think I’d like to wander around Europe for a couple of months this summer,” he said suddenly, the idea having just come. “I’ve never been much of anywhere.”
A small inheritance from Gramp was to be given to him at commencement time. It was a legacy, literally and figuratively, from an era when a young gentleman was expected to make a tour of Europe before he “settled down.”
“I wish I could go with you,” Iris said. “But Theo says Europe smells of decay. I’m hoping someday he’ll change his mind.”
“This wouldn’t be your summer to go anyway, would it?” For Iris was pregnant again, at thirty-seven; he wondered how pleased she could be about it, and rather thought it must have been an “accident.”
“The baby’ll be here by the time you get back, I guess. It’s due around the middle of October.”
“I’ll be back,” Eric assured her.
In mid-June, after commencement, they helped him pack. His grandmother brought home a set of fine luggage, a traveling umbrella and a travel bathrobe, all highly impractical, and all a way of saying, “have a wonderful time; we love you.” He had learned that much about them during his time in their house.
On the last night they went to Theo’s and Iris’ for dinner. The two boys had pooled their allowances and bought film for his camera.
“I would like some pictures of Stonehenge,” Steve told Eric solemnly. “I have a book about it. Nobody seems to know who built it, do they?”
Jimmy asked Eric to find out how you play rugby and how it was different from football. Laura had helped her mother make a package of fudge, “to eat on the plane for dessert.” And Eric felt the poignancy of departure.
Anna cried a little. “I don’t know why I’m crying! I’m so happy that you’re going to have a marvelous summer. I don’t know why I’m crying.”
She cried so easily. Gran would never have done that. He thought that he had been cursed with ambivalence. In some ways he was closer in feeling and expression to this woman than he had ever been able to get to Gran, and yet Gran was a part of his fibre and his life as this other grandmother could never be. She had come too late. A part of him would always be withheld from her and awkward with her.
Suddenly it occurred to him that that was what she was feeling too, and that was why she cried.
In a little town near Bath one afternoon he bought a cheap notebook at a stationer’s and began to write.
I think sometimes that what is brothering me is that I no longer believe in anything. Perhaps, coming from an urban, halfway educated American in this secular age, that sounds absurd. But there it is, all the same.
Perhaps if I believed in something I would know where I belong, or where I want to belong, and among what people. You may ask, what has belief, which is so absolutely personal, got to do with belonging to this, that or the other social group? Nothing, really.
I sat half the afternoon in a Saxon church in a Thomas Hardy village. Saxon! Imagine how old! It was cold behind those thick walls, with a hot summer hush outdoors. I walked out to the churchyard. There was no one in sight except some cows chewing and drooling in the field next to the graves. Sound of bees. I read the names on the headstones where they weren’t rubbed out by centuries of rain. The same names on plaques in the nave; the same on doors in the village. Thomas Brearley and Sons, Cobblers since 1743. Live here all your life; work; sing hymns on Sunday. Same work, same words, over and over. Baptized in this church, cold water on the infant’s forehead, squalling at the font. Die and be buried a few steps away. Must be some truth here? If all these generations, in grieving or rejoicing, felt there was Something here, must there not certainly be Something?
In the silence, in the old, old place so small and plain and human, I could see myself on the edge of believing.
At nine or ten, going to church with Gran and Gramp, it was different then. So much awe. Used to come home to big Sunday dinner, roast and pie, wearing my best suit, feeling everything in order. Wish I could feel it again. Wish I could feel like my grandfather and Aunt Iris in the synagogue. Not so sure about Nana; I think she’s trying to be like them. Naturally, she wouldn’t say, or maybe doesn’t even know herself. Asked Uncle Theo once about himself: had he lost faith? I never had it, he said.
* * *
Ireland. Fearful damp and chattering teeth. Fog and rain in cold stone slums. I watch old women in black shawls doing the Stations of the Cross in roadside villages. My great-great—many greats ago—came from Ireland, Gran said. Like one of these women in the shawls? But first a girl, walking the roads. So poor. Decaying teeth. Eyes like turquoise. Superstitious. Clustering, dark legends: elves, gnomes of the woods.
I go into a church. Tawdry frescoes, calendar art in candy-box colors. Effeminate figure on the cross, insipid woman holding the infant. Think of high art: the Pietà, the Mother and dead Son. The accumulated agony of the centuries: above all, human.
That’s all it is: human. Need to lean on something while we stumble through life. That’s all it is, isn’t it? Any thinking man knows that’s all it is.
Father, I believe. Help Thou mine unbelief.
br /> Gramp always wanted to come back here and couldn’t. Now I see why he wanted to. Plane trees, hill towns, old olive orchards of Provence. Snapshot of my mother, sitting in front of a vineyard. Her eyes turned to this same light. Roman faces. They’ve been here since then. No, before then; the Greeks came first. Marseilles was Marsallia. Ruins of a Greek city at Glanum. All these flowing rivers of life. The Rue des Israelites in a medieval town; another flowing river, but of blood. The Judengasse in Salzburg: all over Europe, locked up, chains at the two ends of the street. A unique history among peoples, myself at the tail end. Fierce beliefs. They died for them. I don’t think they were worth dying for. I don’t think any belief is worth dying for. Do I? Maybe I’ll find one that is. Then it will be worth living for, too.
I pose myself a question, a cliché by now. Would I give my treasure, my small worldly treasure (large to me) for the lives of a thousand unknown yellow (or any other color) men on the far side of the globe? Another question: what is the value of my immortal soul (assuming that I have one) compared to the immortal soul of a squalid pimp in a New York alley? I don’t know the answer to either question.
These things trouble me.
Weeks later
Juliana stands before red flowers in a window box. The house has a gable roof and a canal runs in front of it. She eats from a box of Dutch chocolates. I think I am falling in love with her.
I know I am falling in love with her. She has been working on a kibbutz in northern Galilee and is home for vacation. Why? I ask her. Why Israel? She says she wants to see the world. She says the Dutch have been good to the Jews (that I know); she says it is exciting there. Ideals in action, she tells me. A place for the young. A new country. She wants me to go back with her. Just to see what it’s like, she says. I’m going. I would go anyway, even if it was to Timbuktu.