“Right,” Joe said, as if he believed me, as if he’d been reassured. Maybe he had been. For a second. He clearly wanted all this very badly — why else would he keep asking? He sipped his cooling coffee.
And what was I? What wouldn’t I say? No one had held a knife to me and made me betray Forster, but I leaped to do it, to speak against him. No matter how dear he was in my heart. I placated my worthy husband with denunciations. I looked at the kitchen and thought that the scene of it would always be with me. The cupboard half open, with a canister of Swee-Touch-Nee tea inside, the oiled black gas stove with its red and white box of Diamond matches. Already I hated all of it, and I would see it again, tomorrow and the next day.
“Come walk outside,” Joe said. “We need to walk.” And he reached to hug me as I stood up. We leaned against each other like that, in a long, silent marital embrace, as if we understood one another very well. It was not a soothing moment for me.
I couldn’t stop thinking of Forster, with his handsome squint, leaning against a wall in his old gray worsted jacket. Well, goodbye to that. Dorothy was in my mind too, as I’d last seen her, walking through the park, her wool scarf blowing in the wind, rising to the occasion of what she had wrought, rising to her renunciation. I’d done my own renouncing too, if a person wanted to think in those terms, but it was my own business, it was now and always my own.
Later on, when I had children, I used to tell them: Well, you’ve done your best, that’s the main thing. I was repeating what I always said to myself. A person in favor of fairness has only certain routes. I didn’t give myself any special credit for sticking by my husband, but quite a few of the marriages of our youth didn’t last. The boldness of our thinking gave people too much faith in their impulses. Betsy made a very noisy exit from her life with Norman, and ran off with the man who owned our favorite speakeasy. He was older and not all that good-looking, one of the sillier passions someone like Betsy could have. We still saw her in the neighborhood, and she always referred to Norman as “the little genius of the masses,” as if mocking him made her case. I thought she was shortsighted, but she did remain with her new husband, to everyone’s surprise. Later they owned a hotel in Palm Beach that was supposed to be very famous.
Joe and I stayed anarchists, during years when not so many people were and others found communism more interesting. We tried to keep all our friendships, but there were hard times, during the Moscow trials, when we were very vocal against Stalin, and then during the Second World War, which we opposed. Richard, who was Jewish, would not talk to us for several years. In the war years, our two daughters had to face jeers and bullies who waited for them after school, and once a bag of dog excrement was thrown at one of them. It cut me very badly to know that. But we stood by what we’d always thought, when plenty of people didn’t.
Norman, of all people, wrote a book about his lost youth in the best years of the Village. Village Days and Nights, he called it — not much of a title. In it he referred to me as “a shy young thing who blossomed under attention from any males of the species,” and I told everyone I’d been called worse. Many pages were devoted to Dorothy, though I didn’t remember that Norman was an especially close friend of hers. But when you know someone who becomes famous, those memories grow more details.
No one could have predicted that the person most visited by fame would be Dorothy. In the early days, she seemed to want just the reverse — she stopped showing up for picket lines, she stopped going out to drink with us. We were no longer very fascinating. But at the height of the Depression, when certain streets in New York looked more and more like India, she and a friend started printing up a newspaper called the Catholic Worker, dedicated to the untapped theory that the Church had more to say about the poor than it was saying. Their tabloid sold for a penny and was full of Dorothy’s reflections and also little essays in free verse, about what Jesus really taught, by the oddball visionary who was her friend. (The two of them weren’t lovers either.) The paper was a runaway success, and within a few years they had launched their next project, Houses of Hospitality, where the poor were fed homemade soup and the homeless were given beds at night, and anyone who walked through the door was greeted as Christ. People showed up to volunteer, and followers set up more and more of these houses, in cities throughout the country. Dorothy Day was a famous spokesperson, traveling all over, a propagandist for Works of Mercy.
But I didn’t exactly believe in mercy. I thought it begged the question of why people had to be given what should have been theirs all along. I thought it tended the wounds of a violent system and helped keep it going, in years when such systems might’ve gone under and risen as far better things. I thought all the glory over giving away soup was myopic and misguided and ignored what really needed doing.
I did know, and even Joe said, there were worse things than people getting a few free meals — or being saved from freezing to death on park benches — while they waited for the revolution. Which (we knew by then) was going to be a very long wait. The great future was tarrying, like the next Messiah, and perhaps we were like Dorothy, in our patience. I had my old jealousy of Dorothy, but I revered (what a word) the way in which she had thrown herself into the fire of her ideas. She was burned down to Idea, all work and messy effort and silvery dedication. People thought she was saintlike, though being called that always made her say something scrappy and blunt.
And there was no man after Forster. She had probably expected another marriage — she liked men — but she became more and more a sister in her own order. We saw Forster on the street once, taking a pretty little girl of maybe eleven to a street fair, and I knew at once she was Tamar. I’d heard he took her for outings. She had fine, soft hair, clipped back from her forehead, and she looked skinny and quiet. I had my own girls with me, who were little then, dressed in nice summer rompers. Forster said, “Vera! There you are,” when he saw us. He didn’t look all that different — lean, rumpled, with his high forehead and squinting eyes. “Long time no see,” I said. We kept asking how each of us was — fine, fine — while the girls eyed each other.
“It’s very hot today,” he said to the girls. “You don’t like ices, do you? Probably not.”
They roared their protests to this notion, and he bought us all paper squeeze-cups of fruit ices, pale lemon and deep-red cherry, which Barbara, my youngest, got all over her. Louise, who was almost seven, dared Barbara to put her front teeth into the ices for the count of a hundred. “Don’t,” I said. “Do not.”
“Did you ever do it?” Louise said.
Ices had not been a feature of my youth, but I confessed to sticking my tongue to a frozen iron banister in winter, on a dare from Mary Elizabeth next door. I didn’t know why I had to tell them, except that I was always eager not to lie. We had once sent them to a kindergarten run by anarchists where they were told every day to be truthful.
Forster had taken a napkin and was busy trying to clean up Barbara’s cherry-stained face, without much success. The sight of this was so sweet it unnerved me entirely, and I had to drag the girls away before I acted peculiar in front of everyone.
Later my girls entirely forgot that they had met Forster, though they’d liked him fine, but they always remembered the story of my licking a frozen banister on a dare. Another version of their mother! They teased me about it for years. Joe joined them. And I couldn’t help liking being admired for any sort of courage, which it turned out we would all need, over and over.