The thing happened for which, after all, they had come. Well, Corde said to himself, they were here to see Valeria—no? Blunter, to see her off? In spite of the Colonel, the purpose was achieved—no?
The hospital called while they were at breakfast next morning. Old Cousin Dincutza answered the telephone. Corde also came into the small parlor. The old woman stood stooping, holding her lowered head to the phone. She wagged her arm as if to forbid him to come nearer. She made signals with her aged face. Yes, here it was, it had happened. She put down the instrument and said in a low voice, “Elle est morte. Valeria est morte!” Then she hurried past him to the dining room, where he heard her reporting to the women.
When he came in, Minna was looking sternly absentminded. She did not seem to need comfort from her husband. She had made her preparations for this. She said, “You were right, Albert. If we hadn’t gone that night I would never have seen her again. Just this morning I talked to Dr. Moldovanu. Mother died a little later, just before nine.”
“I see. Well, what is there to do now? I suppose you’ve thought what to do.”
“Yes, of course I have. Tonight is Christmas Eve.”
“It is, isn’t it. I’ve lost track.”
“We’ll try to set the funeral for the day after Christmas. We’ll have to make the arrangements immediately. Traian will help. I discussed it with Ioanna last night. Petrescu came to the door just a while ago—before we sat down to breakfast. I talked to him for about five minutes. He already knew she was dead, I think.”
“Petrescu?”
“He keeps in touch. He’s always been like this. He watches from a distance. He made some suggestions about what to do.”
“What needs to be done? Death certificate? Undertaker? I’ll make the rounds with you today.”
“Petrescu gave me a number where I can reach him during the morning. And there’s Dincutza. Being over eighty, she knows a lot about such things. Whatever we have to do, cigarettes will make it easier.”
“I must get more Kents.”
“That’s what I meant. Traian will drive you over to the Intercontinental. But will you see what Gigi’s doing?”
Tanti Gigi was in the kitchen with Dincutza. Corde found them sobbing there. Then Gigi told Corde that she wanted to go below to see Ioanna, to tell her that it had happened. The elevator was stuck. On the cold staircase he put a shawl over Gigi’s shoulders and helped her down to the concierge’s lodge. It didn’t make much sense that Gigi should go to Ioanna, whose job it was to tell the police everything. But why should sense be made? In the concierge’s cavern, the two women sank to the small bed together, embracing and weeping in the alcove. Valeria’s photograph was on the night table, and on the wall were pictures of the dictator and his wife. Corde passed again through the lobby, where workmen with hoes raised a dust, mixing cement for the cracked walls. He climbed back to the apartment. Minna, very thin and stern, staring past everyone, black beneath the eyes, was discussing details of the funeral with Dincutza.
Traian had come upstairs. He sat slumped in a straight-backed chair by the door, buckled up in his fancy multi-zippered leather jacket and being seemly—that is, decently downcast in the house of mourning. He was completely at Minna’s disposal. He had plenty of time for her. It was no simple matter to obtain a death certificate. First you had to go to the hospital. You needed releases, authorizations, any number of official papers. “We’ll have to drive all over town,” said Minna. Corde was grateful to this Traian with the Mexican wisps at the corners of his conspicuous lips. He had taken the whole day off, Minna said. After Christmas he would be available, too.
More cigarettes were bought at the valuta shop. A pack or two of king-sized Kents saved dreary hours of waiting. From the Intercontinental they drove to the hospital, and after that to five or six government buildings—Corde, riding in the front seat of the Dacia, lost count. Traian knew what he was doing. Strange, what an expert he turned out to be. Traian in his leather cap and jacket, and his eyes like the green pulp of Concord grapes, was unbelievably effective. No waiting. He went to the head of the line. He presented himself at the desk boldly, making the essential signals, and putting down the cigarettes. He was a solid young man. His belly gave him more pull with gravitational forces than slighter people had, Corde thought. He took charge of all the papers. Minna paid the fees, signed the papers. She was firm, really very strong. Corde would never have guessed how strong she would turn out to be. She had no practical abilities, she had never needed them. Valeria had done all that. But now Valeria’s powers had passed to her (hitherto) absentminded daughter. This is how she’ll attend to me, too, Corde thought. It was an entirely commonsensical reflection; it hadn’t the slightest emotional weight.
By early afternoon all the necessary documents had been collected. In record time, Corde would have said. Traian drove to the crematorium through a freezing rain. Workers’ housing blocks and government buildings were covered with huge pictures of the President. His face, five stories tall, flapped and floated in gusts of rain. This must have been his way of resisting Christmas sentiment. He interposed himself.
Then the crematorium, standing on a hilltop, a huge domed building. Just as you would expect, the grounds were planted with small cypresses. Flanking the doors there were bas-relief figures of Graces in mourning, part Puvis de Chavannes, part socialist realism. Here as elsewhere, Traian seemed to know just what to do. Corde and Minna followed him to the desk (there was no office), where they began to make arrangements with the managing comrade. This man was dressed for the chill of the enormous circular place. He wore sweaters, shawls, an overcoat, an astrakhan hat. The astrakhan was a phony. He was not at all difficult, this official, not gloomy in the least, in fact he was more than normally cheerful, sociable—he was gabby. The paper work was done by his assistant, a young woman in the seventh or eighth month of pregnancy. Pregnancy was said to keep the body warm, the effect of double metabolism, or so Corde had heard. Anyway, she appeared unaffected by the cold—she alone. There was a green Nuremberg stove, but the comrade manager had it all to himself. Another mourner had already come up behind Corde. His coat was buttoned tightly across his belly; he was a stout man, very big, with a red, blustering face, but that was probably an effect of grief aggravated by the terrible cold. His blue bubble eyes were fixed on the tile stove. He reached over Corde’s shoulders, trying to warm his distorted large fingers. Meantime the seated comrade manager was receiving slips of paper from his assistant and using two kinds of mucilage to stick them to the documents—documents upon documents—and talking nonstop. He asked whether a priest would perform a service. Priest? Minna turned to Corde. No priest. Valeria was religious but there would be prayers at the cemetery when her ashes were placed in the family headstone. All that had been prepared by Valeria herself. Then did the family want music? There were two choices, the Chopin funeral march or, equally appropriate, Beethoven—the slow movement from the Third Symphony. Four minutes on tape. Minna chose the Beethoven. The astrakhan hat nodded and nodded, writing on diligently, holding the pen in his thumb and two middle fingers, the index pointing forward, riding above the papers. Next, very courteous, anticipating baksheesh from the American husband, he led the way to the center of the hall. This was where services were held. There were two single files of chairs for the principal mourners. Under the center of the dome, in icy gloom, was something that resembled a long metal barrel. It opened longitudinally. This was the bier. When the halves of the barrel closed, the body was mechanically lowered for cremation—same mechanism in double action. In this one spot, heat rose from below. Corde and Minna drew away from it.
There were flowers here, all cyclamens. There wasn’t light enough to distinguish their colors. The plants had been placed on the floor. Here they thrived like anything—low temperatures; just what they wanted. Above them, square containers of ashes were stacked like canisters of Twining’s tea. Each carried a photograph, and dates of birth and death, and an appropriate legend: “Militant,” “Engineer,” “Teacher.” So many contemporary faces, like pedestrians snapped by a sidewalk photographer. These must have been victims of the earthquake. Witnesses said that tall new buildings had turned to powder as they collapsed. But why were these tea boxes still here? Because there was no consecrated ground prepared for them? Traian explained this to Minna. The regime was short of cemeteries. Graves were at a premium. But why should there be such congestion—wasn’t there plenty of land beyond the suburbs? Trembling Dincutza had spoken of this at home. She criticized no one, of course. She only said that Valeria had bought graves in the year of Dr. Raresh’s death, when she was still in the government. She had raised the granite monument and built two benches. She owned several other plots as well. One had been promised to Engineer Rioschi, who used to drive her quite often to the cemetery to tend the Doctor’s grave. Dincutza stated shrilly (sometimes this kind old woman resembled Picasso’s horse in Guernica), “Nous savons combien elle aimait son mari.” Rioschi, you understand, didn’t want to be stacked with these other cans in the crematorium when his time came, so he had been glad to drive Valeria. That had been their deal. He was a single man, you see.
The gray astrakhan now moved more quickly before them. Corde assumed that he was leading them to a chapel of some sort, a place where friends could view the body before the service. But no such thing. He brought them into a curved corridor where there were curtained recesses, tall and dim. Then Corde was astonished to see a pair of shoes sticking through the green-tinted transparent curtains. He was brushed by the soles, by the feet of a corpse. Next were a woman’s feet, in high heels. In these cold recesses or cribs, corpses were laid out in their best clothes. Each one lay just visible in a shallow coffin shaped like a small punt and lined with dimity stuff, not much more than cheesecloth or insect netting. One tall corpse with a black Balkan mustache had his homburg set beside his head. He clasped his briefcase to his chest.
Lord, I am ignorant and a stranger to my fellow man. I had thought that I understood things pretty well. Not so.
The comrade manager said that he had wanted to show Minna where Valeria might be brought from the hospital next day. “No, thank you, no,” said Minna.
The hour for the service was fixed for ten o’clock on the morning of the twenty-sixth.
The funeral parlor was next. Coordination was the problem—the hearse to be sent to the hospital, the body to be ready for it.
In the dark shop, finished coffins were stacked against the walls. They were only half-coffins, really, lidless. An elderly workman had one on his trestle, tacking in the flimsy two-thread lining. Careful tucks made a simple ruffle along the top. Backed up against the tall tile stove, the place of privilege, an obese old woman in multiple sweaters and a circular fur hat repeated the order hoarsely as she wrote it out. The wisps of her hat matched the hairs of her whiskers. Her lips worked inwards continually. She was not chewing; she had no teeth. She seemed to be tasting her own mouth. She ordered the men about, growling and bullying, but she became happy when Minna paid her off and Traian gave her two packages of American cigarettes. As she shoved the money into the drawer she simultaneously heaved up her clumsy body to reach for the Kents.
Corde said, “Do we go home now?”
“Yes, there’s nothing else to do today, except to see if I can place an announcement in the papers. That’s the next thing. Then Gigi and I have to choose Valeria’s clothes for the funeral. Traian will take them to the hospital.”
They steered back through the freezing streets. The only heat he had felt all day came from under the bier. Yesterday he had suggested to Minna that they go out for fresh air. Now he wanted only to get back to his room.
Returning, they found the dining room table surrounded by old cousins. They came with small presents for the mourners. Gigi, wearing a black dress, was unwrapping cakes and bottles at the buffet. The cakes, like the old ladies who had baked them, were dimly spicy. Gigi told Corde, “You had two calls, one from overseas—I think your college in Chicago. They said they would call again.” And the other? Dewey Spangler, thought Corde, reporting on his efforts with the White House.
He did not linger among the cousins. He felt used up; the round of offices, the crematorium, the coffin shop, had tired him deeply and the labor of French conversation was too much for him.
The cousins didn’t really want to talk to him, anyway; they were only being polite. This was no time to swap French phrases. He went to his refuge, his sanctuary, his cell. He had his private bottle there, and his bed; the flowers also. Towards the flowers he felt slightly negative now, as if they had betrayed him by blooming at the crematorium. An effort of reconciliation might be necessary. The irrationality of this did not disturb him. If this was how he was, this was how he was.
The telephone rang and Minna looked in and said, “For you, my dear.”
He picked up the instrument. “Albert? It’s Dewey. So far, no luck with those Georgia yokels. I can keep trying….”
“Thanks, Dewey. No point now….”
“Oh? Sorry. When did she pass away?”
“Early this morning. Funeral the day after Christmas.”
“You may not want to keep our date,” said Dewey. “I’d understand.”
“When are you leaving?”
“Evening of the twenty-sixth.”
“Why not the same afternoon—after the funeral? I probably won’t be needed then. There’ll be lots of callers.”
“Yes, that makes good sense. Not a bad idea to get away for a while and have a drink. It must all be completely foreign.”
“Not completely.”
“Not insofar as you liked that old woman.”
“I did, yes.”
“Foreign—I mean, to be an American in a foreign family. That I call an unusual experience. You didn’t tell me that Minna’s mother had been a friend of Ana Pauker, and knew Thorez and Tito. I found this out yesterday from an old-timer. He told me about her and that whole Stalinist generation.”
“These people were no Stalinists. They were just unpolitical people who got into politics.” Corde was beginning to wonder whether Dewey didn’t scent a story in Valeria. After all, he owed his syndicate two columns a week.
“How is your wife taking it?” said Dewey.
“At the moment she’s busy with arrangements. Doing fine.”
“Yes,” said Dewey. “It tends to hit one later.”
“I’ve often heard that said.”
“Poor girl. Say, before I forget, there’s no news out of Chicago about your case. Unless you’ve heard from other sources.”
“It’s the holiday lull. Jurors would raise hell if they didn’t get their Christmas.”
“Well, Albert, I’ll check back to see if it’s convenient, after the funeral. I’m pretty busy here, but there’s always a sort of gap before airport time.”
Hanging up, Corde glanced into the dining room but didn’t show himself. There were bowls of eggplant salad on the table. Dinner would be late, after the cousins went home. You didn’t get much to eat here. Leftovers. But in the West everybody ate altogether too much and sometimes he imagined that overfeeding made people toxic, slowed their thinking. He was trying to account for the recent increase in his own mental acuity. It now seemed to him that he was thinking more clearly here. Evidently fasting and disruption of routine were beneficial. But if his ideas were more clear they were also much more singular. For example: Valeria was certainly dead. She had died, and she was dead, and last arrangements were being made. But he couldn’t say that she was dead to him. It wouldn’t have been an accurate statement. One might call this a comforting illusion, a common form of weakness, but in fact there was nothing at all comforting about it, he could take no comfort in it. Nor was it anything resembling an illusion. It was more like an internal fact of which he became conscious. He hadn’t been looking for it. And he was not prompted to find a “rational” cause for this. Rationality of this sort left him cold. He owed it nothing. It was particularity that interested him….
Again the phone sounded off, and Corde picked it up. He had a hunch that it would be Chicago, and he didn’t want Minna to take it. He was right. The Provost was calling. “I wish you a Merry Christmas.” He inquired how they were. Ah, bad! Very sorry indeed to hear the news. He asked to have his sincerest condolences conveyed. Corde rumbled, “Thanks. Very thoughtful of you, Alec.”
One of the shrewdest operators that ever lived, the Provost was also very strong—the perfect, up-to-date American strongman. You felt his muscle the instant you engaged him. No one was more smooth, more plausible, long-headed, low-keyed than Witt. A man of masterly politeness, ultra-considerate, he had decided (elected in cold blood) to adopt the mild role. That was all right with Corde, by and large. Okay. He was willing to play any man’s game and accommodate his needs, if he could, but he was beginning to find the Provost’s highly perfected manner hard to take, especially hard since the onset of the troubles.
“I would so like to express my deepest sympathy to Minna. Is she there? I am so sorry to hear about her mother….”
“I’m letting her sleep,” said Corde.
“Ah, she must need the rest, poor thing.” Minna’s high standing, her academic importance, shielded Corde from the Provost. He had never really grasped that, but he understood it fully now.
“I don’t suppose there is any way to wire flowers to Eastern Europe,” said the Provost.
“There may be; you can find out more easily at your end than I can here.”
“Oh, for gosh sakes, I wouldn’t dream of troubling you with that, Albert. You must have your hands full.”
“Is there anything new on the legal side?”
The Provost said, “You may not have heard that you were subpoenaed by your cousin.”
“Is that so?”
“Mr. Detillion wanted to put you on the stand to establish the heavy involvement of the college in this case. I’ve checked into that with our legal department….”
“With some real lawyers …”
“Oh, there’s no comparison,” said the Provost. “I don’t want to downgrade your cousin; you may have residual sentiments about him. But these are crack lawyers. Of course, you’d never have to get on the stand. The matter was gone into with the State’s Attorney. But the newspapers gave the subpoena some play, which was what your cousin wanted. How come all the French names in your family, Albert?”
“The family explanation is that we were leftovers of the Louisiana Purchase. Napoleon sold us all to Thomas Jefferson so that he could pay for his invasion of Russia…. Well, I’m sorry to be a cause of so much trouble to the administration.”
“Nonsense, Albert. There’s no real trouble, just silliness.”
Witt would concede him nothing. The likes of you can make us no trouble, was what he was saying. There was nevertheless real bitterness, and Corde could feel it. It came down from the communications satellite perfectly clear, pellucid. Corde was in an odd condition anyway, one that made it possible for him to see the Provost from all sides—the jut of his upper teeth, the gill-like creases under the ears, the continual play of deference and kindliness, command, pressure, threat—back and forth. No, he didn’t like Corde. The Dean’s appointment had been a mistake, and it was the Provost’s job to clear up the mess. Corde was an outsider, he hadn’t come up from the academic ranks, hadn’t been shaped by the Ph.D. process. It wasn’t even clear why he had wanted to become an academic, and even an administrator.
The Provost was still speaking. “Our people have met with Mr. Grady about this crazy subpoena. Since you’re out of the country and can’t be served, it’s all in fun.”
“And my nephew?”
“He came in, surrendered, and your sister posted a bond, so the young man is out. The grand jury’s indictment probably won’t stick, when it’s reviewed, because the boy didn’t have a preliminary hearing. But all the prosecution wanted was to establish that he had threatened the witnesses, which I’m afraid he really did.”
“I doubt that he fired a pistol at them.”
“Your guess is better than mine.”
“Because I’m his uncle?”
“Oh, no,” said Witt, suave again. “We can’t be responsible for our relatives; we don’t choose them.”
“Only I seem to have more bad relatives than the normal person.”
“We’ll work it out, believe me,” said the Provost,
Witt had from the first found it necessary to lead Corde step by step, rehearsing him, instructing him, making certain that he would interpret budgetary, educational, institutional policies appropriately. But (it was Corde himself saying all this for him) there was something unteachable about the Dean, an emotional block, a problem, a fatum. One of the permanent human problems, in every age of mankind (Corde saw it now), was the problem of not being a fool. This was truly terrible. Oh, that oppression, that fool-fear. It pierced your nose, blinded your eyes, split your heart with shame. And to Witt, a man of power, Corde was a fool. To conceal such an opinion was an operational necessity for a Witt. It was the sort of sacrifice (a sacrifice, not to let your opinion dart forth, and scream and mock) you had to make if you were to be a genuine administrator. That sort of thing you had to hold down. But then there was Witt’s brutal infrastructure, which could not be covered up. Witt, thought Corde, had a brutal drive to let him know, to transmit by his perfected devices, what a fucking fool he was. The Dean had made Witt very angry. He had bollixed everything up with his muddled high seriousness. It was not so much the Lester case that angered the Provost. The real vexation was that he had published those magazine articles without a clearance from the college. Not to submit them for approval was out of line, unheard of, dangerous to the last degree—wild! Corde had attacked—whom hadn’t he attacked: politicians, businessmen, the professions, and he had even loused up the Governor. Maybe suggestions had come to Witt from high places, by discreetest channels, that this was one highly expendable dean. For his part, Corde didn’t want to hide behind Minna. But Minna was involved. For Witt there was a delicate tactical problem. But the Provost, Corde believed, took professional satisfaction in his maneuvers, in operations calling for an unusual degree of skill.
He heard the Provost saying, “Lester was one of our graduate students, and we couldn’t have backed away from this case, it had to be followed up. I authorized the reward, you remember.”
Corde did remember that. But he recalled also how plainly the Provost was put off by the Dean’s emotionalism, his flushed face, his swollen eyes. “What verdict does the legal department predict?” Corde was asking, really, how the college hoped to come out of the case.
“Not pushing for a death sentence.”
“I never had that in mind.”
“Yes,” said Witt. “You expressed your views in Harper’s clearly enough. Capital punishment—according to you, nobody’s hands are clean enough to thro w the switch. What was your expression? Oh, yes, ‘the official brutes’…”
What Corde had had in mind … as if the Provost cared what position Corde had taken. Witt despised him. Nor, to tell the whole truth, did Corde altogether blame him for it. He was able to admit to himself that he had been out of kilter when he wrote those articles. Dewey Spangler was right, in part. There was a sort of anarchy in the feelings with which those sketches were infused, an uncontrolled flow of “poetry,” the truth-passion he had taken into his veins as an adolescent. Those sketches were raw, where was the control of deeper experience? There wasn’t any. He had publicly given himself the fool test and he had flunked it. And now came a man like Alec Witt, Witt who represented power, qualified by the higher deviousness, as power usually was. Corde had challenged this “real-world” power without reflective preparation, without taking account of the higher deviousness. He had left himself wide open. And today of all days—Valeria lying in the hospital morgue!—this depressed the Dean fiercely. But oddly enough, when the wave of depression returned from its far low-down horizon it brought back the idea of having another go at the thing. Do it right next time!
But the Provost had not telephoned from the free world in order to discuss capital punishment with a high-principled idiot dean. Both parties now made a pause. Witt was about to disclose the true reason for his call. The deep Atlantic stream brimmed between them. They were—what—seven thousand miles apart? You weren’t able to have conversations like this in the old days.
“When do you plan to be back?”
“For the new semester. Minna will have to settle up her mother’s affairs—the estate, such as it is. She also needs to get to Mount Palomar; she missed her telescope days.”
“You haven’t seen Vlada Voynich yet?” said the Provost.
“We’ve been expecting her. Her brother said she’d be here for Christmas.”
“She’s been telling what an interest you’ve developed in Beech’s work.”
“Purely amateur,” said Corde.
“Of course it would be. In the nature of the case. Are you planning, actually, to write about it?”
Corde in his bass voice answered, “That was Beech’s idea—he proposed it. He sent me the material.”
“That’s what Vlada told me. You haven’t decided yet, though, have you?”
“It hasn’t been on my mind much. I’ve put off thinking about it. I wouldn’t want to jump into anything. If there’s going to be more controversy … I need to be sure I’ve got a good grasp of the facts.”
This should have reassured the Provost somewhat. Instead it made him press a little harder. “These environmental, ecological questions are very complex.”
“I wouldn’t do it if it were only that. I don’t care to get mixed up in environmentalism. But I am interested in Beech himself. The personality of a scientist, his view of the modern world. But I’ll have to wait until Minna’s able to discuss it. I can’t take it up with her now. I’ll find out more from Vlada Voynich. She’s bringing more material.”
“So she told me, and I asked her also to give you copies of letters….”
“What sort of letters?”
“Things that have come in—in connection with those Harper’s pieces of yours.”
“What, complaints to the college, objections?”
“Nothing to disturb you. Lots of curious items. Amazing how worked up people can become and what a variety of responses one can get. You’ll find them really thought-provoking. I wouldn’t think of upsetting you at a time like this. And you don’t need to worry about things here; they’re under control. I keep a careful eye on Lydia Lester. She was splendid on the witness stand. But you saw that yourself. So fragile, and turned out to have real guts.”
Each of the Provost’s final words touched an anxiety in Corde.
“It won’t be a happy Christmas for poor Minna. Tell her at least that we think we can get another date for her at Mount Palomar. We’ll be looking for you after the first of the year.”
Corde explained to Minna under the dim chandelier of the dining room table—the taped black wires hung twisted from the broken plaster. “Alec Witt. Merry Christmas, and condolences. Don’t worry about the telescope. And Vlada Voynich is on her way.”
Gigi served an early dinner. It was eaten listlessly. For Christmas Eve the table had been laid with linens embroidered in red. Corde went to bed early. The twenty-fourth of December had lasted long enough.
On Christmas morning there were presents beside their coffee cups. The old girls saved gift-wrapping paper and ribbons from year to year. There were treasures of all kinds in the cupboards, boxes of pre-Communist ornaments. Gigi brought to the table the Christmas angels Minna remembered from childhood. They were designed to float slowly on wires radiating from a disk set in motion by the heat of a small candle. The toy would not work. “Valeria always could make it go,” Gigi said. She wore deep mourning and her neck was strained as she bent to strike more matches. She had combed out the bobbed hair but at the back it still looked like a hayrick. “It may be the candles,” she said. She went through the drawers of the buffet, looking for the right kind. She didn’t know where Valeria had put them. Corde tinkered with the wires. Americans were supposed to be mechanically gifted, but he could get nowhere with them. He only bent the toy badly. The four angels hung motionless. That was the end of them. Valeria had taken their secret with her.
“Then open your presents,” said Gigi. She had given Minna a peasant blouse. For Corde there was a large gold pocket watch which had belonged to Dr. Raresh. Surprised, he stared at it—graceful numerals, a shapely swell to the tip of the hour hand. To set it you depressed a tiny catch with your thumbnail. Gigi said, “This was the present Valeria decided you should have this year.” He slipped it into the pocket of his cardigan and as he bent to sip his coffee he felt the pull of the golden lump near his waist. He reckoned that after London, and especially after the Rowlandson exhibition and dinner at the Étoile, Valeria had accepted him as a full member of the family. When he had tried to take her by the elbow because she was listing, could no longer keep her balance, when she pulled her arm away, it had depressed him (something like the streak of a black grease pencil over his feelings); he felt that she was irritated with him. But that hadn’t been what it meant. On the contrary, it was then that his probation had ended.
The morning was sunny. He studied the watch at length in the bedroom. He read Vollard’s memoirs and reminiscences of painters—no boards, no back, nothing but a bundle of stitched paper. Minna had no time for him. She and Gigi spent most of the morning deciding how to dress Valeria. Which dress or suit would she have preferred, or shoes, or blouse or ornaments? They decided that she should wear a greeny-blue silk suit Minna had bought in London for her, and a green and black paisley scarf, dark blue shoes. Traian took the clothing to the hospital, together with a photograph to show how Valeria put up her hair.
Gigi, who had been so passive while Valeria was dying, turned assertive and militant, insisting that the government must be “forced” to give her sister a public funeral. She told this to Petrescu when he turned up on Christmas Day. Petrescu surprised Corde by the genuineness of his grief. He carried himself (his swooping belly, his wide undercurves) with soldierly decorum but his eyes were red, tragic pouches under them. He was indulgent with Gigi, he sat sighing and let her talk. She told him (defying the listening devices) that the least the government could do was to acknowledge the fidelity of Dr. Raresh to the Party and the Revolution and the contributions made by this family to surgery, public health, and also astronomy. He answered patiently, his voice rising in spirals until it broke in the higher registers. Minna said to Corde how decent of him it was to come, and how loyal he was to the family. “I think he had no personal secrets from my mother.”
Bound to have secrets, in his racket: Corde silently dissented. However, Petrescu’s face certainly was ruined. If intensive care doctors could light candles for the dying, secret agents could mourn their adoptive mothers. There was sentiment all over the place. Petrescu had his family side, his soft side. He was delicately, even endearingly attentive to the ladies. He was thoughtful towards Corde, too, and brought him two green bottles of Chenin Blanc, unobtainable except in the commissaries for high-ranking bureaucrats.
Gigi explained to Corde what she was doing. “I am insisting that my sister should not have a commonplace funeral. She ought to be exposed publicly in the great lobby of the Medical School, as her husband was before her. It is only right and proper to give her official recognition.”
“Will they give it?”
“We shall insist. I am requesting Mihai Petrescu to approach old members of the Politburo. They remember her. They are aware, as younger ones are not. There was typhus. There was starvation. Valeria asked Truman for supplies. He sent them. The Russians put their own labels on. Requesting drugs and food from America was one of her crimes.”
Minna agreed with her aunt, while Corde was thinking that you saw eyes like his wife’s in famine photographs. She was starving herself. It would take months to restore her.
“If not the lobby of the Medical School, then the Memorial Hall next door to the crematorium,” said Gigi.
Petrescu, downcast, much troubled, nodding, stroked the fuzz of his fedora, stroked the dense hairs growing from his ears. In spite of its wide bottom, his broad body sat uncomfortably. He often pressed his palm over the thin hairs streaking backwards on his skull. His fingers were actually trembling. His pouchy eyes occasionally were lifted to carry silent messages to Corde, to another man. These poor women were innocent… they didn’t know, couldn’t understand. Corde believed that Petrescu had tried to make a stand against the Colonel, had been beaten quickly, clobbered, forced to back off. Now, after Valeria’s death, he may have gotten official permission to be helpful to the family. Petrescu’s rank in the security forces must have been fairly high. Whatever he had to do in the line of duty (don’t ask!) he atoned for in this household by services, by emotional deeds, tender attachments. He was an old-consciousness type in a new-consciousness line of business. Gigi declared, “I assure you, Albert, and I will even swear, that my sister shall have her due. Until now my sister, who was a figure in the history of our country, has been denied notice in the national encyclopedia. But she shall have it. I shall go to the greatest lengths….”
But Minna privately told Corde, “Today I can’t even get the newspapers to print a notice of the funeral.”
“Why do you suppose …?”
“The obvious reasons. I ran away from them. And my mother was expelled, then refused to rejoin the Party. I think the funeral will be well attended, though. Just word of mouth. The telephone doesn’t stop ringing. My mother is a symbol….”
“Of what?”
Minna whispered. “It isn’t political, it’s just the way life has to be lived, it’s just people humanly disaffected.” She covered his ear with cupped hands and said, “The government may be afraid of a demonstration at the Medical School.”
Corde, who didn’t believe this for a moment, nodded. He said, “Sure. I understand. But what would the demonstration be?”
“I told you. It would be sentiment. To approve what Valeria personally stood for. Just on human grounds…. Why don’t you go and rest for a while, my dear. You’re tired. This is hard on you. I can see. Vlada is coming later. She arrived this morning.”
A clear Christmas Day. The room was surprisingly warm, the sun heating the windows. It made him feel how badly he needed a breather, “a few minutes of Paris,” as he called it—some civilized calme, or luxe. He picked up the crumbling paperbound Vollard, his Souvenirs d’un Marchand de Tableaux, and read a few paragraphs about the testiness of Degas. “You’ll see, Vollard, they’ll raid the museums for Raphaels and Rembrandts and show them in the barracks and the prisons on the pretext that everybody has a right to beauty!” A crabby old bigot, and he looked so ferociously at a child who annoyed him in a restaurant that he scared the little girl into fits and she vomited on the table. But for this nastiness he gave full compensation in lovely painting and bronze. Whereas a fellow like the Provost … But the Provost was no genius-monster, he was only … And Corde now tried to protect his sunlit breather, the moment of peace, but he could not beat off Alec Witt and he presently surrendered to Chicago thoughts. The Provost’s signal was easy to read: for the sake of the college, he was protecting Beech. Scientists were far too naive to protect themselves, and Corde was especially dangerous because he, too, was in a way an ingenu. Once a man like Witt decided that you were not a man to observe the discreet convention, that you talked out of turn, and that you were a fool, nothing but trouble, you were out. He would do everything possible to stop Corde from writing a piece on Beech—”one of those pieces of his.” And you couldn’t altogether blame the guy, thought Corde. It’s true, I was carried away. Hearts hanging in the dark too long, and going bad, spoiling in suspension, and then having a seizure, an outburst. In most things I don’t hold with Dewey, he’s too psychoanalytical, but he’s clever enough in his own way or he wouldn’t have become such an eminence. Give him his due. And he says I was settling scores with Chicago. I must admit that I was retaliating on my brother-in-law, on Max Detillion and on many another.
Tired of false opinions, and of his own distortions most of all, Corde admitted that, yes, he had wanted to give it to them (to a generalized Chicago), to stick it to them. To stick it, and to make it stick so that they couldn’t shake it off. Now, a man in a position of real responsibility, a Witt, for instance, he protects his institution from everything immoderate. That’s how the silky style is justified. That’s his method for dealing with disruption: never lose your cool with the disrupter, gag him with silk, tie him in knots with procedures. Corde would class that as one of the hard, essential jobs of democracy. I gave no sign that I was going to turn disruptive. Dumb thoughtful sweet, was my type, mulling things over. Then I turned out to be one of those excessive, no-inner-gyroscope fellows he can’t stand. So he despises me; what of it? I detest him, too. That’s neither here nor there.
The publication of his articles had also given Corde a profile of the country, a measure of its political opinions, a sample of its feelings. “I administered my own Rorschach test to the U.S.,” Corde said. Before leaving Chicago he had already received a batch of letters forwarded by the editors of Harper’s. “A flood of mail,” one of the assistants wrote. Liberals found him reactionary. Conservatives called him crazy. Professional urbanologists said he was hasty. “Things have always been like this in American cities, ugly and terrifying. Mr. Corde should have prepared himself by reading some history.” “The author is a Brahmin. The Brahmins taught us to despise the cities, which accordingly became despicable.” “Mr. Corde believes in gemütlichkeit more than in public welfare. And what makes him think that what it takes to save little black kids is to get them to read Shakespeare? Next he will suggest that we teach them Demosthenes and make speeches in Greek. The answer to juvenile crime is not in King Lear or Macbeth.” “The Dean’s opinion is that a moral revolution is required. His only heroes are two self-appointed possibly dubious benefactors.” “You should be congratulated for opening up these lower depths of psychology to your readers, giving us an opportunity to look into the abysses of chaotic thinking, of anarchy and psycho-pathology.”
Curious what people will pick on. About Macbeth Corde had only noted that in a class of black schoolchildren taught by a teacher “brave enough to ignore instructions from downtown,” Shakespeare caused great excitement. The lines “And pity, like a naked newborn babe, Striding the blast” had pierced those pupils. You could see the power of the babe, how restlessness stopped. And Corde had written that perhaps only poetry had the strength “to rival the attractions of narcotics, the magnetism of TV, the excitements of sex, or the ecstasies of destruction.”
It was certainly true that Corde had found himself in Chicago looking for examples of “moral initiative,” and he had come up with two: Rufus Ridpath at County Jail; and Toby Winthrop, also black, an ex-hit man and heroin addict. He hadn’t found his examples in any of the great universities, and there was a large academic population in Chicago. What Alec Witt probably would like to know was why Corde hadn’t made his search for moral initiative in his own college. Why, thought Corde, I did look there, up and down, from end to end. Corde was not a subversive, no fifth columnist, nor had he become a professor with the secret motive of writing an exposé. He hadn’t been joking when he quoted Milton to his sister Elfrida: “How charming is divine philosophy”—the mosaic motto on the ceiling of the library downtown. And the universities were where philosophy lived, or was supposed to be living. He had never forgotten the long, charmed years in a silent Dartmouth attic, where he had read Plato and Thucydides, Shakespeare. Wasn’t it because of this Dartmouth reading that he gave up the Trib and came back from Europe? To continue his education, he said, after a twenty-year interruption by “news,” by current human business.
It was Ridpath who had sent Corde to Toby Winthrop at Operation Contact. He drove to the South Side on a winter day streaky with snow. You could see the soot mingling with the drizzle. Corde hadn’t come to this neighborhood in thirty years. It was then already decaying, now it was fully rotted. Only a few old brick bungalows remained, and a factory here and there. The expressway had cut across the east-west streets. The one remaining landmark was the abandoned Englewood Station—huge blocks of sandstone set deep, deep in the street, a kind of mortuary isolation, no travelers now, no passenger trains. A dirty snow brocade over the empty lots, and black men keeping warm at oil-drum bonfires. All this—low sky, wind, weed skeletons, ruin—went to Corde’s nerves, his “Chicago wiring system,” with peculiar effect. He found Operation Contact in a hidden half-block (ideal for muggings) between a warehouse and the expressway. Except on business, to make a sale, who would come to this place? He parked and got out of the car feeling the lack of almost everything you needed, humanly. Christ, the human curve had sunk down to base level, had gone beneath it. If there was another world, this was the time for it to show itself. The visible one didn’t bear looking at.
Well, Corde entered the “detoxification center” and climbed the stairs. Two landings, a wired-glass door where you showed your face and were buzzed in. You found yourself in a corridor, and then, unexpectedly, you came into a room furnished with umber and orange sofas. Philodendrons hung in all the corners. Here he met someone who encouraged him, a wiry, whiskery Negro who said, “Go on, man—go, go; you on the right track.” The tentative, pale, blundering Dean amused him.
Winthrop’s office window was heavily covered in flowered drapes of pink and green. The ex-hit man sat waiting for him. His trunk was enormous, his thighs were huge, his fingers thick. No business suit for him. He was dressed in matching shades of brown—a knitted shirt in beige, a caramel-colored suede jacket, chocolate trousers, tan cowboy boots. He wore a small brown cap with a visor, a boy’s cap. His face curved inward like a saddle. He was bearded and, like Dr. Fulcher at County Hospital, he had pendants on his neck and big rings on his hands. He picked up the note Corde had sent him. In the lamplight the folded paper seemed no bigger than a white cabbage moth. “You a friend of Rufus Ridpath, Professor? He asked me to talk to you. Thinks we can do each other some good. Maybe he thinks you might be able to do something for him. Set the record straight.”
“What do you think?”
“I think he was the best warden County ever had, and I was a prisoner before and during his time….”
The body of this powerful man was significantly composed in the executive leather chair. If you had met him in the days when he was a paid executioner, if he had been waiting for you on a staircase, in an alley, you would never have escaped him. He would have killed you, easy.
“You can’t do much for Ridpath. The guys who did the job on him don’t have to worry about you or me, my friend. It’s their town. Their names are in the paper every day. No trouble at all to get names. But that’s all you could get. Rufus doesn’t really expect anything from you. He just likes you. Now, what did he tell you about me?”
“He said that you and your friend Smithers founded this center to cure addiction without methadone, as you cured yourself.”
This man with the black nostrils, impressively staring under the visor of the childish cap, interrupted him. He said, “You bein’ polite. He said I was a hit man, right? I was, too, a hired killer working for very important people in this city. I was tried three times for murder. Those important people got me off. Ask me how, and I identify you as a man who don’t know this town.”
How many people he had murdered, he didn’t care to say. But then he nearly killed himself with an overdose of heroin. Someone should have warned him how strong it was. After he took it he recognized it for what it was. As it began to take effect, he saw that he was dying. This happened in a hotel room near Sixty-third and Stony Island, the end of the el tracks, the tip of rat-shit Wood-lawn. “I’m goin’ to tell you just a little about this.”
A friend came and put him into a tub of cold water, but he saw that Toby was dying and he beat it. “No use hangin’ around. But after eighteen hours of death, I came back.”
He lifted himself from the tub, and just as he was, in wet clothes, he went down into Sixty-third Street and caught a cab to Billings Hospital, to the detoxification unit. Because of his terrifying looks, the receptionist signaled the police, who grabbed him in the lobby. But they had nothing to hold him on at the station, only vagrancy and loitering. “I bailed myself out. Always a big bankroll in my pocket. I got another cab back to Billings, but this time I stopped in an empty lot and tore the leg off a table. I went in with it under my coat, and I showed it to the receptionist. I said I’d beat her brains out. That’s how I got upstairs. They gave me the first methadone shot. I was in a hospital gown, and I went to the toilet and sat on the floor to wait for the reaction. I put my arms around the commode and held tight to it.”
“But you didn’t go through with the methadone treatment.”
“No, sir. I did not. Something happened. When I came in I had the table leg, I was ready to kill. I would have killed the lady if she called the cops again. But in less than an hour I was called to stop a riot. I had to stop a man breaking up the joint. He was a black man, as big as me, and he had delirium tremens. He smashed the chairs in the patients’ sitting room. He broke a coffee table, broke windows. The orderlies and nurses were like kindergarteners around him. He was like a buffalo. I had to take a hand, Professor. There was nothing else to do. I separated from the commode and went out and took control. I put my arms around the man. I got him to the floor and lay on the top of him. I don’t say he was listening, but he wasn’t so wild with me. They gave him a needle and we laid him on a cart and put him in bed.”
“That was Smithers?”
“Smithers,” said Winthrop. “I wish I could explain what it was all about. I’ve told this before. It’s as if I kept after it till I could find out what happened that moment I took control of him. Maybe it was because I died twenty-four hours before. Maybe because my buddy left me in the bathtub in the hotel—that was all he knew how to do for me. But when they put Smithers in bed, I sat by him and minded him.”
“This was when your own treatment stopped.”
“I wouldn’t leave him. They had to measure his body fluid. I held the man’s Johnson for him. You understand what I’m saying? I held his dick for him to pee in the flask. He had a bad ulcer in his leg. I treated that, too. That was his cure, and it was my cure, at the same time. I was his mother, I was his daddy. And we stayed together since.”
“And made this center.”
“Built it ourselves in this old warehouse—the dormitories, kitchen, shops downstairs to teach trades. We bring in old people from the neighborhood—the old, they’re starving on food stamps, scavenging behind the supermarkets. The markets post guards, they say they don’t want the old people to poison themselves on spoiled fish. We need those old people here. They teach upholstery, electrical work, cabinetmaking, dressmaking. They teach respect to young hoodlums, too. But it isn’t only hoods. We get all kinds here. We take all the kinds—white, black, Indians, whatever color they come in. From the richest suburbs, from Lake Forest …”
“You’d call this center a success?”
Winthrop stared at him a moment. Then he said, “No, sir, I don’t call it that. They come and go. It takes with some. I could name you a many and a many it never could save.”
Until now Winthrop had sat immobile in his chair, but now he turned and, to Corde’s great surprise, began to lower himself towards the floor. What was he doing? He was on his knees, his big arm stretched towards the floor, his fingers hooked upward. “You see what we have to do? Those people are down in the cesspool. We reach for them and try to get a hold. Hang on—hang on! They’ll drown in the shit if we can’t pull ‘em out. Some of ‘em we’ll get out. Some of them will go down. They’ll drown and sink in the shit—never make it.” With an effort that caused one side of his face to twitch, he labored to his feet and backed himself into the chair again.
“You’re telling me that the people who come here …”
“I’m telling you, Professor, that the few who find us and many hundred of thousand more who never do and never will—they’re marked out to be destroyed. Those are people meant to die, sir. That’s what we are looking at.”