The match was even more curious than this. Bart was now in his late forties, the edge of his masculinity dulled in a previous decade, a man of some ascendant means, and a large man of height and girth that bespoke recent fortune. Melody was a pretty blonde. She had much humor and was not wild like her predecessor; she didn’t want or need wild things. Given her own childhood, it was enough that she had a man who would care for her, it was enough to have an affectionate love rather than a passionate one. They lived in Wisconsin, a Wisconsin couple. It never occurred to Bart when he met her that he had a chance with her; when he got the chance it never occurred to him he could actually keep her. They married in 1921, quietly. Jack Junior knew nothing of it until it was over; later in his life he couldn’t even remember a ceremony, at which his father was best man. Every month or two Jack Mick and Rae and Jack Mick Junior drove to Milwaukee to visit; sometimes Bart came down alone, as on the night they got the wire about Dirk. After the marriage the drinking did not abate but became worse as Bart waited dreadfully for the new wife, blond and pretty, to get wild and leave like the old wife. That she did not, at least not until life became intolerable for her and her love for Bart was rendered so clearly inadequate, only tortured him more.
This business with my uncle and his second wife went on over some time of course. I was growing up through most of it. I never understood anything was wrong anyway, the insurrections and dashed treaties of the bedroom were beyond me, and mostly I remember Melody laughing all the time. Also I was at the university. Also I was in my own world, as my father always complained: I barely saw the soup lines, the liquored amber flash of gangland nights. I don’t think it occurred to me something was wrong in the country until one evening in the door of a flophouse I recognized a man from my bank, a man who’d been sitting behind a desk nine or ten months before, deciding whom to give money to. Then I noticed every road off the college grounds seemed to be an alley of sleeping men, and the yellow lights of the flophouses were dim not because the houses were closed but because they were so full that men inside were sleeping against the windows one atop another, the light from the bulbs barely seeping out between the fingers of their hands. I think one day I said to myself, Life’s different now. Meanwhile my family was coming apart too and I didn’t know it. In my third year, when I was nineteen or so, a couple of things happened. I met Leigh. I found The Number.
I was computing an equation one night in my room at my desk when everyone else was sleeping, and there it was. I shouldn’t have been startled: it was the twentieth century. Mathematics was new. It shouldn’t have startled me that there was this other number no one had ever found. It was there between nine and ten. Not nine and a half or nine and nine-tenths, not the asteroids of ten or nine’s missing moon, but a world of a number unto itself. For the next year I tried to compute the moral properties of this number; it was not the number for justice or desire, or avarice or betrayal. It was the number of an altogether different promise made from an altogether different place. No field or plain had ever sung it. No dream or memory had ever known it. I told no one of it, not yet.
Young “John Michael” fell in love with Leigh the second time he saw her only because he was incapable of so unequivocal a response to anything the first time; it was also one of those rare instances when he remembered a real life event with such statistical certainty. Jack Mick/John Michael had never gone with a girl, discouraged by his wiry slightness and the dark Indian quarter of him which he supposed would frighten the creamy girls of Chicago. Leigh was in fact attracted by this lndianness. She was the creamy daughter of a district judge and had scandalized her family by becoming a Red. Her cadre worked out of the shack of a newly failed boat-building operation on Lake Michigan. Jack/John saw her distributing leaflets one morning to eight hundred laborers in line for three jobs who watched her with open mouths. It wasn’t what she said to them, they had heard that before, it was the gold of her, as though in the windblown flame of her hair was the transience of their luck, the flight of their futures. They would have ridden her hair to other births, somewhere out west, where there was no history. “Ah, utopia,” the boy said when she handed him the paper, and he nodded knowingly. “Go back to your books, college boy,” she answered, and took back the leaflet. But it meant, of course, she knew who he was.
He asked her out twice and twice she refused. The third time she said, “I want to drink whisky tonight. Come if you’d like.” He said, “It’s not legal,” and she laughed and walked away. He followed and she led him to a blue speakeasy down a back flight of steps where the patrons drank and danced to Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines playing “West End Blues,” and she barely paid attention to him. She got a little drunk and the two of them stumbled down the street under the eyes of the cops until they arrived at the brownstone of her father and mother. He had assumed she no longer lived with her father and mother. “I assumed you wouldn’t get along with them,” said Jack, “on account of the politics.” She laughed again. “They decided I’d only be wilder on my own,” she said. “Besides Daddy has a soft spot for his princess.” She leaned into the front door beneath the light of a gas lamp; up the street the iceman dropped a white glassy block from the back of his truck. She looked at the Indian virgin in hot silence. “What now?” he finally said, his mouth dry. “Utopia,” she answered, and opened the door and pulled him in. “But your parents,” he said, and she curled her lip and sneered, “College boy.” The seduction took place at the bottom of her father’s stairway, her claws predatory and her moans provocatively unrestrained. When it was over she laughed, “You do it like a bourgeois. Tenderly.”
Nothing but trains. I moved into the far wing of one of the outer dormitories and stared out my window at the convergence of tracks. I went with Leigh to her political meetings and met her political people. “This is a college boy,” she told them. For utopians who espoused a brotherhood of man, they had impressive reserves of contempt. Later she asked what I thought of them and I explained I wasn’t a political person. Everyone’s a political person, she said. I attended the speakeasies, new subversive that I now was. Sometimes Leigh made love with me and sometimes she didn’t. Let’s say she never did me any favors. She got it when she wanted it. She took it till she was full of my Indianness, till she had drunk the quarter of my juices that came from the underwater cave of my mother. I went mad for her. Sleeping alone I slumbered into Leigh-madness and woke one night to the black roar of trains and the knowledge that this madness, it was my new number, beyond desire. Beyond justice. The communication of the maternal blank of my past with my most passionate dream, the most untouchable part of my integrity. What I felt for her was the new place beyond nine; when I entered her I was on a far journey into what I was capable of being. I was the anarchist of passion in an age when passion was a country.