Evergreen

  “Democracy! Anybody who thinks this country is a democracy needs a shrink!”

  Adam Harris smiled slightly. “Do you know of a better system anywhere?”

  “No, that’s just the point. We have to create one from the bottom up. And we start by stopping this war. That’s the first step.” Steve confronted Jimmy. “Why don’t you do something about it instead of just sitting on the sidelines? We’ve a meeting Sunday afternoon in Loomis Hall. Why don’t you come and hear what it’s all about?”

  “I know what it’s all about. I read the papers.”

  “Danny Congreve’s going to speak. Do you know he’s one of the best minds, the clearest thinkers we have? If we could have men like him running the country—”

  Jimmy had thought of Congreve as a rabble-rouser. Perhaps, though, that wasn’t fair? Congreve was a kind of disciple of Harold Clifford, an erstwhile Quaker and theologist who was sweeping the country from coast to coast with his antiwar fervor.

  But he shook his head and with effort met Steve’s blazing look. “Sunday afternoons I hit the books. You forget, I have to keep my grades up.”

  “An evasion,” Steve objected. “You could find some time if you wanted to.”

  “What I want most is to be a doctor. I might just be able to do some good for the world in my way.”

  “And incidentally pull in fifty thousand a year doing it. Or will you aim for a hundred.”

  “Listen, since you keep badgering me, I’ll tell you one reason I don’t want to get involved. I’ve been reading too much about overturned cars and broken bank windows. I know you personally don’t go in for that sort of stuff—at least I hope you don’t. But I want to stay away from it altogether and, if that’s your idea of cowardice, make the most of it, Steve.”

  “What you’re afraid of is your true self,” Steve said.

  Adam Harris interposed. “I happen to think the war is very wrong. But I don’t think that overturning people’s cars and breaking people’s windows is the answer. Violence never is.”

  Steve stood up and wriggled into his jacket. “Violence is what we’re against, don’t you understand? You talk about a car or a window as if they were significant, when they’re only incidents. The real violence is the shedding of blood in war, the strife in industry, the raping of nature. What we want is to bring the world back to decent values, to do away with competition and envy and anger.”

  He picked up his books, an abrupt, surprising shyness returning to his manner. When he wasn’t passionate about his beliefs, it flashed through Jimmy’s mind, all conviction went out of him. This was how he usually looked.

  “Well, so long,” Steve murmured. “So long.” And clutching the books, with shoulders bent, he scurried out into the dimming afternoon.

  The others stood up and moved toward the door. “A passionate young man, your brother,” Dr. Harris remarked.

  “I know,” Jimmy acknowledged. “I wish—” he hesitated. “I wish he would think a little more about himself, about where he’s going. We worry about him at home.”

  “I don’t think you need worry. A great deal of this talk is only talk. People like Congreve, for instance, they sound like young wolves who want to tear the world apart, but they don’t and the world goes muddling on as always.”

  They stood a moment on the sidewalk. “Yes,” Adam Harris said, “they’ll find out about violence. It’s the tragic mark of our time. But eventually they’ll learn that it can’t accomplish anything, not in the lives of nations or individuals. It always fails in the end. Well, it’s been nice talking to you two about something other than advanced vertebrate zoology.”

  When he had left them Janet spoke for the first time in the last half hour.

  “Amazing how such a brain can be so innocent, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean, innocent?”

  “Well, for Pete’s sake, Jimmy, all power, whether of nations or families, is founded on violence! From the oil dynasties to the British Empire, to the country’s private fortunes. His own family too, I’ll wager, although he may not even know it. Everything! You name it. Everything.”

  “But he did say,” Jimmy countered, “that they all fail in the end.”

  Janet stared at him. “Yes, of course they do! When they’re beaten by an adversary that’s more ambitious, clever and—more violent. Don’t you see?”

  “At this point I don’t see anything. My head’s spinning.”

  “I don’t say it’s right or good, but that’s the way it is.”

  “I’m confused. This sort of argument isn’t for me. I think I’ll go back to the room and tackle vertebrate zoology. It’s easier.”

  Somebody on the floor had been using his portable television and forgotten to turn it off. From the little box with the four-cornered eye there came a tumultuous, hysterical shrieking. One thought immediately of a street accident or some other sudden horror. But it was only a quiz show. The curtain had just been drawn back to display the prizes.

  Hot-eyed fools, licking their lips over a refrigerator, an electric broom, a—a gadget! Disgusting! he thought, switching the television off. And then: not disgusting. Pathetic. But why pathetic? Because they needed these things and it was so hard to afford them? Or because they oughtn’t to want them so badly in the first place? Which? I’m getting like Steve, Jimmy thought, addling my head with impossible questions that have no answers. He sat down in the armchair by the window, suddenly tired, with a kind of drained breathlessness.

  Yet so much of what Steve preached was true. The trashing of America. Litter of broken metal, rims, cans, frames of unrecognizable defunct machines. Seen from train windows: a blasted, withered landscape. Elevated highways over heaps of rusting cars among dying weeds as tall as a man; greasy puddles and smell of burning rubber, where once in the duck-filled marshes gulls had risen from the plume grass and flapped toward the sea.

  Gray. Mud gray, rain gray; gray of ashes, old tires and wet cardboard boxes. And over all a stinging, mucky smog.

  The trashing of America.

  And a similar trashing of that small country in Southeast Asia, except that there the ruin was overlaid with blood. He felt his brother’s anger, the righteous rage that sparked and shook the body of his brother.

  Yet there was something wrong with that anger, too. Jimmy strained. He was not used to thinking very hard about things unrelated to his own difficult, demanding goal. It had never been easy to find fluent words for his thoughts. He had heard and observed that science majors often were like that. Perhaps that was why patients complained that doctors didn’t “relate” to them?

  Yet now he knew well enough what he felt. A strong apprehension swept through him, so that he shuddered and was chilled. He understood that those who saw what Steve saw with such searing conviction, and what he himself half saw, could be as blind, as narrow and as ruthless as that which they fought against. He saw that their righteous anger could be dreadfully and easily perverted, that in its fanatic drive it might only end by tearing the world apart, like the wolves that Adam Harris had talked about.

  Although it was close to ten o’clock and the icebound campus was deserted, with all its windows shut tight against the cold, within minutes lights flared, telephones rang, voices called, doors banged and the quadrangles filled. Everyone raced toward the science building where more lights blazed from bottom to top, so that it looked like an ocean liner on a gala night.

  The stunned crowd was quiet. Voices murmured in the circle of flashing lamps, the ominous red warnings of police cars and ambulances.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” Jimmy said, inquiring of someone standing next to him, “did you hear anything?”

  “I thought I heard a thud or a thump, but I didn’t pay any attention to it until some guys came running down my floor yelling that there’d been an explosion in the science building. I never thought—”

  Other voices rose and faded.

  “… the building was empty!”

  “… al
l the ambulances?”

  “… army contracts, of course.”

  “… no right to use the campus for the war machine!”

  “… aren’t we part of America?”

  “… you’re full of shit!”

  “… geez, there was somebody in there!”

  Silence, except for small shufflings and rustlings. Among those standing near the door an aisle was cleared, so that men coming carefully down the slippery steps with the stretcher could pass through.

  “My God, who is it?”

  “Is he dead?”

  “No, not dead.” Moving, with an arm flung out from under the blanket that has been put over him. The blanket slips. It is picked up and laid back, but not before it can be seen that the lower half of the body is soaked with blood and wet, mangled cloth: a mush where two legs belong.

  “… it’s Dr. Harris! Oh, Christ, it’s Dr. Harris!”

  “… who’s he?”

  “… biology. He musta been doing papers late in his office.”

  “… geez!”

  “He’s not dead? I mean, the face all gray and—”

  “… that’s shock. Not dead. Not yet, anyway.”

  “… oh, my God!”

  Jimmy’s knees buckled. He sat down on the steps. There was no one he knew in visible range, just a lingering crowd of strangers, watching for something else to happen. The ambulance whined down the street with its red lights revolving.

  “… the watchman saw two guys here earlier tonight. He says he can identify them.”

  “… bah, rumors! I don’t put stock in that stuff.”

  “… I heard they found a body in there. I heard it was Dan Congreve.”

  “… you’re out of your cotton-pickin’ head!”

  “… no, he’s right, I heard two cops talking and they said so.”

  “… they found two of them. You’d think they wouldn’t get caught by their own explosives. They don’t know the other guy’s name.”

  “… one body, two bodies. Soon they’ll be talking about twenty.”

  As soon as he could control his knees Jimmy got up. His chest hurt. He wondered whether you could have a heart attack at his age. He thought of what had been under the blanket and his stomach turned over. (You’ll never be much of a doctor like this!) But yesterday in the coffee shop Adam Harris had said that violence was something young people only talked about, not meaning it. The last man in the world to suffer from it! Wouldn’t hurt a fly, you had only to look at him to see that. Jesus! A liquid collected in his mouth, like vomit.

  He had to see his brother. Could it possibly be? No, of course not. He quailed. Ought to be ashamed of myself for harboring—funny word, “harboring”—such a thought. Still, there was another body. Unidentified. Steve said: One of the best minds we have, come hear him.

  Could Steve possibly—? No, of course not. Steve was no doubt still in his room, dreaming over a book, too absorbed to have heard the excitement. Besides, his room faced the other way, toward the lake. You might not even be able to see or hear anything there. Anyway, he had more likely been asleep. It was after midnight. Yes, Steve would be asleep. He always went to bed with the chickens. It was one of his traits. Of course.

  Steve wasn’t in his room.

  He knocked and kept knocking, disturbing the people across the hall.

  “What do you want?” someone called out crossly.

  “I’m looking for my brother, Steve Stern.”

  “He’s not there. He went out a couple of hours ago.” The door slammed.

  Now breathing was really painful. He panicked again: could a person his age really have a heart attack? There being no place else to sit, he sat down on the floor. A couple of fellows coming back to their rooms looked at him curiously, thinking, no doubt, that he was drunk.

  The grandfather clock downstairs, gift of the class of 1910, went bong! One bong. One o’clock. He leaned his head against the door and stretched his legs. They reached almost across the width of the corridor.

  Once, sitting with his father, he had watched a television play about the Nazis and the resistance in France. They had caught some woman and tortured her by pulling her toenails out. She hadn’t talked, had refused to talk, just kept repeating in such an awful voice, “I have nothing more to say! I have nothing more to say!” He remembered now that he had thought: “This is a helluva thing for Dad to be looking at, bringing everything back to him. I ought to turn it off but I don’t dare. Why doesn’t he just get up and walk out of the room?”

  But his father had just sat there. When it was over he’d been silent for a few minutes and Jimmy had been silent too. Then his father had slammed his fist into the palm of his hand so loudly that Jimmy had imagined a fist cracking into a defenseless jaw must sound like that. He had kept sitting there, not knowing how to get up or what to say, feeling his father’s anguish.

  Then his father had sighed and said, “It’s a great storm wind shaking the earth. It began in my youth and then a lull came, but I think the storm will rage again. I feel the grit and dust coming in the cracks.”

  Jimmy shuddered. He looked at his watch. It was six o’clock. He must have fallen asleep, and he ached all over. Steve hadn’t come back. What he must do became entirely clear to him. He must go to his room, wash and shave, then take the seven o’clock bus downtown and go to the police headquarters. Either that other, unidentified body was Steve’s, or else Steve would have to be sought somewhere. Yes, it was entirely clear.

  He flexed numb legs, went downstairs and began walking toward his room. Outside the science building, where a black hole, broken glass and tumbled bricks were now visible in the daylight, was a police car with four police on guard. He walked deliberately in their direction and stopped in front of them.

  “Is is true that Danny Congreve was killed in here?”

  One of the policemen looked at him coldly. “You that interested?”

  “Yes. Dr. Harris was a friend of mine.”

  “Oh. Yeah, it was Congreve. And one other in the morgue. Up to now they haven’t identified him, or what’s left of him.”

  Tears wet Jimmy’s eyes. He wiped them away with his glove, but not before the others had seen them.

  One of the cops said, kindly now, “They say the prof will live. He’ll lose a leg, though. Maybe both.”

  Jimmy stood there.

  “Bastard!” another cop said. “And the damndest thing—they didn’t even know how to do the job properly. Killed themselves with their own dynamite.”

  The police radio crackled in the car and they stopped to listen. Jimmy walked away.

  Lose a leg. Maybe both. He was a tennis player, Adam Harris. A good one, too. The other’s in the morgue, what’s left of him.

  Again the pain came, a hot tightening in his chest. My brother. A brother of mine. My parents’ son. Christ almighty!

  He pushed his way up the stairs. Better get a cup of coffee before going; that way he wouldn’t feel so faint. Maybe. He came around the corner of the hall, toward his door.

  Steve was standing there.

  They stood there looking at each other.

  “You thought I was mixed up in it,” Steve said.

  “My God! I didn’t think you—But I didn’t know.”

  Steve’s face was white. No, not white, a dreadful color, like the underside of a frog.

  “Come in,” Jimmy said, unlocking the door. “Come in and sit. Where were you? I’ve been outside your room all night.”

  “I was undressed, studying, when I heard all the noise and running outside my room, so I got dressed and went over. And I saw, I saw your friend.” He put his hands over his face. “Jimmy, I’m sorry. So awfully sorry.”

  “Where were you last night?”

  “I couldn’t stop vomiting. So I went to the infirmary and they kept me there. One of the nurses told me this morning about Danny Congreve. Jimmy, I never thought, I could have sworn, I would have trusted him, I did trust him. I feel totally incompeten
t, unworthy—”

  A vast relief swept through Jimmy. “Don’t, don’t. You’re not the first person to have misjudged—”

  “This wasn’t what I wanted, what I talked about!”

  “I know that, Steve.”

  “I’ve gotta get away and think.”

  “About what? Think about what?”

  “About everything. Myself, mostly. I’ve got to.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “I don’t know. Some empty place. A guy I know, quiet guy, not political, just into conservation and the earth, you know, he’s got a place north of San Francisco, said I could come any time I want. So I guess that’s what I’ll do.”

  “When will you go?”

  “Now. Tomorrow. I want to get out of here. I’ve been wanting to, you know that, only now it’s for different reasons. You understand?”

  “I think I do.” He didn’t, really. He could feel pity and sadness, but he couldn’t understand. Perhaps he never would.

  “You’ll call the folks and tell them after I’ve gone? I don’t want to go through the hassle of talking to them right now.”

  “I’ll call them,” Jimmy said gently.

  They were an hour early. They stood in the lounge at the wall of windows, looking out upon arrivals and departures, baggage carts trundling back and forth, mechanics checking, pilots boarding with their little black bags en route to Paris; Portland, Oregon; and Kuala Lumpur.

  “I’ll miss Philip,” Steve said.

  “He’ll miss you, too. We all will.” Do all words that are torn out of you, yes, torn and ripped, do they always sound so banal? “Miss you”: what did it mean?

  “Don’t crap me up, Jimmy. It’ll be a lot more peaceful in the family with me gone.”

  Why did he feel like crying? You’d think he was seeing his brother off to certain death, when all he was seeing were things past: Steve hunching up the hill after school (why was just this such a persistent memory?); Steve and he as kids in the bathtub together, and long before that, Laura with them; three in the bathtub until they got too old, he and Steve staring at Laura, laughing about her after they had been put to bed, wondering what it feels like not to have a penis; Steve casually offering to go over his math with him, knowing he was stuck and ashamed to ask for help; Steve in the hospital with pneumonia and his mother crying in the bedroom, pretending she wasn’t.