“When school started up again and Eunice returned from vacation, I saw that she meant it. Her eyes were all over Frank. The three of us weren’t together very often, because why would we be? The person that linked us was gone.”
“Please tell me again how he died?” said Dr. Grossman.
“Infected tooth,” said Andy. “Utterly needless.” She cleared her throat. The sun poured in the window, and Andy could easily sense the Hudson River below in the quality of the light. “However, in the Union or walking across campus, if I was with either of them and the other one appeared, no one had to tell me a thing. It was like magnets. It hurt my feelings at first, but then it didn’t. Whatever was going on between them just squeezed some other things out of him that I actually preferred—‘I love you,’ stuff about his family, his brother Joe. Joe is a wonderful person. The sense of sin did it. You know, that is the one time in my life with Frank that I ever saw him be sorry for anything, anything at all. His usual attitude is very fatalistic. If Michael hits Richie and blackens his eye, or Janny gets bullied at school, then it was just what was meant to be. I mean, when I showed him that article in the Times that said that the Russians have a hundred missile bases, and said what would we do if…, well, he said, ‘Just sit right here.’ ”
“So — go on with your story.”
“Frank thought it was a dead secret, but Eunice gave me the blow-by-blow. How he kissed her, where he touched her, which item of clothing he took off first, how one time he ripped her stocking. Believe me, I was not envious. Sometimes I thought she was crazy, and she was doing it not with Frank but with someone she thought was Frank or she was telling me was Frank, but wasn’t really. I mean, Frank was nicer to me every single day, and rougher with Eunice, apparently. It was like I had to choose — there were two of him, or there were two of her, or it just wasn’t my business. Like I say, I was so young.”
“Have you seen this kind of split personality since in him?”
Of course the answer was yes. Or no. Andy thought about Frank, the Frank she had sat with at dinner the night before, silent for a while, then irritable with Janny, then laughing at the boys, then seeming to enjoy his au-gratin potatoes (Nedra’s were indeed delicious), then telling her a joke, then asking her what a dress she bought for one of Jim Upjohn’s cocktail parties had cost ($230), scowling only for a moment, then laughing. She said, “I would say that my sense of what is in a personality has gotten larger since then. His or anyone else’s.”
Dr. Grossman said, “Hmm.” That was a sign of approval.
Andy said, “Anyway, he ran off to the war. That’s how he put it back together again. It was Eunice who suffered.”
“And how did your friend suffer?”
“Well, the fellow she married beat her senseless more than once.”
“Do you mean that literally?”
Andy said, “Yes.”
“How do you feel about that?”
Andy said, “I feel nothing about that.”
Now there was a long silence, and Andy knew that Dr. Grossman believed her.
1960
HENRY DIDN’T THINK about Rosa much. Sometimes he identified her to himself as his “first love,” rather like Flora in Little Dorrit—the wrong girl, fortunately escaped, though she wasn’t silly, like Flora — she was argumentative, resentful, beautiful, and severe. And yet, when he got to the part in Eloise’s letter where Eloise said that Rosa had gotten married and seemed to be having a baby, he felt his mood darken. He read it over: “I don’t know if you met Elton Jackman when you were here. He is friends of friends. Anyway, Rosa has told me that she and Elton had decided to get married in a simple ceremony down in Big Sur (to which I was not invited, also not surprised) and they will now live down there with some friends until their baby is born (I guess it’s due in June).” Then she went on to write about some organizing she was doing in Oakland.
Henry had met Elton Jackman once — a small, wiry fellow whose real name, it was said, was O’Connell, and whose real game, it was said, was fencing stolen goods, though when the horses were running at Golden Gate, Bay Meadows, or Tanforan, he spent most of his time there. Jackman would take Rosa’s literary friends to the races and induce them to bet (and to fund his betting); he would give them a decent tip often enough so that they felt flush. Jackman, talkative and funny, was a bona-fide member of the Lumpenproletariat. Henry thought he was maybe forty-five or so by this time. He himself was twenty-seven, Rosa nearly twenty-six; when he broke up with Sandra, this seemed old, but now it seemed almost virginal. He had thought that failed romances were Rosa’s vocation, along with mourning the father she lost in the war. Obviously to everyone, including Rosa, these two activities were deeply and meaningfully intertwined, and getting knocked up by Eddie O’Connell could easily be the culmination of them.
There was a letter from Sandra, too, not in today’s mail, but in Friday’s, now four days old, which he hadn’t read, much less responded to. He sincerely hoped that Sandra was full of the same news — she was marrying an older man, she was pregnant, she was happy, she was defiant, she was thrilled beyond words to have escaped their hasty engagement, which Henry had attributed to the excitement of finding not one but two Roman coins in the same day on their dig in Colchester (“Camulodunon,” then “Camulodunum,” then, perhaps, “Camelot”?).
Henry went into his perfectly neat bedroom and opened his perfectly neat closet. Stacked on the shelf, perfectly folded, were three sweater vests in shades of brown — he called them “tobacco” (an Arawakian/Caribbean word apparently related to Arabic tabaq for “herbs,” describing in its very being the colonization of the Western Hemisphere by the Spanish), “rust” (from the Old English root, rudu, for “redness,” and obviously related to “red,” but also to erythros, Greek, and rudhira, Sanskrit, and the only color with such broad provenance, and what did that mean?), and “shit,” the darkest one, from Old English scitan, to “shed,” “separate,” or “purge,” also the root for “science”). Henry chose the rust, and then a nice Harris-tweed jacket with a bluish green cast, and a navy blue scarf.
The idea that his class would be starting on Beowulf in two hours reminded him that he should drop a note to Professor McGalliard, that man of infinite patience who had taught him everything he knew — or, rather, everything that Henry had been capable of learning at the time, which right now didn’t seem like much — and who had recommended him for this position. Henry had a couple of chapters to go on his dissertation, but when the department had gone to McGalliard for advice right after Professor Atlee dropped dead of a heart attack in August, he had recommended Henry most highly, so here he was. Professor McGalliard had never married. Now that Henry was rid of Sandra, never marrying seemed like the purest option.