My mother was taller than average — five foot seven — and she played intramural basketball when she was in high school, loved swimming and hiking and gossip. She was of Dutch descent — her maiden name was van der Post — and she had a natural wave to her hair, which was an amalgam of red and brown that in summer went to gold on the ends. She had a dramatic figure (I’m aware of this, in retrospect, not so much from observation — you just don’t think of your mother in that way — but because she was proud of it, forever dispensing the information that so-and-so had complimented her legs or made some reference to the way her sweaters fit her like a model’s and how she ought to have a screen test in Hollywood), but if she had any sexual outlets after my father’s death, she was careful to conceal them from me, and I wouldn’t mention the subject here at all but for what transpired between her and Prok. And for the sake of inclusivity, of course.
In any case, I was watching at the window that Friday afternoon when Tommy’s Dodge pulled up to the curb in a flash of reflected sunlight and my mother and Aunt Marjorie got out, looked round them as if they’d been delivered to the Amazon instead of Bloomington, Indiana, and adjusted their hats a moment before mounting the front steps of the rooming house. I could have met them at the door, but I held back a moment, and I don’t really know why. This was a time of celebration, of joy — for once I had the prospect of being spoiled a bit; there would be a nice dinner certainly, oysters, celery sticks with blue-cheese filling, steak served up medium rare on unchipped plates against a field of linen so white it could have been manufactured that very morning — but I just stood there at the window and never made a move to go downstairs till I heard her voice in the hallway. I don’t know what she was saying — greeting Mrs. Lorber no doubt, making some sort of animadversion on the state of the roads or Tommy’s driving, or the weather: Wasn’t it hot? — but the tone of it took hold of me and I went downstairs to her cold embrace, the dutiful son, John, her boy John.
The three women stood there in the vestibule, turned slightly toward the staircase, as if posing for a group portrait, which I suppose you might call Awaiting His Footsteps in a Time of Quiet Jubilation or Who Will Save the Day? “Mother,” I said, taking the steps one at a time, slowly, with dignity, no bounding or undergraduate hijinks here, “welcome. And Aunt Marjorie — thanks so much. And Mrs. Lorber — have you met Mrs. Lorber?”
My mother embraced me in her stiff, formal way, but her eyes told me she was proud of me and pleased too. She was about to say something to that effect — or at least I assumed she was — when Tommy came rocketing up the steps from the street and burst through the door to wrap me up in a bear hug. “Hello, professor!” he shouted, spinning me around like some oversized package he was about to raffle off. “You know it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing!” Everyone smiled as if he’d lost his mind. Which he had. A moment later, when we were alone up in the room, he showed me the agency of his temporary derangement: a flask of whiskey convenient to the inside pocket of a sports coat. He handed it to me and I automatically took a long burning swallow, and when I tried to pass it back to him, he wouldn’t take it. “Look at the initials on it,” he said, sinking into Paul’s bed as if his legs would no longer hold him.
Reproduced there, in filigree, were the initials JAM, for John Anthony Milk. “These are my initials,” I said stupidly.
Tommy regarded me out of eyes that ran down the depths of two long tunnels. He’d listened to my mother and aunt for hours on end and who could blame him for being on the far side of sober? “You bet,” he said.
There were five of us at dinner that night — my mother, my aunt, Tommy, Iris and myself. The restaurant was on the ground floor of a downtown hotel (not the one where my aunt and mother were staying, which was much more modest), and it had the reputation of being Bloomington’s best, at least in that sleepy, provincial era before the war. There were potted palms to shield the tables from one another, the maitre d’ was decked out in his best approximation of a tuxedo and had managed to paste his hair so tightly to his scalp it was like a black bathing cap with a part drawn down the side of it, and the menu ran from onion soup au gratin to grilled veal chops, whitefish and, of course, beef in all its incarnations. We all started out with shrimp cocktails, the shrimp perched prettily up off individual goblets of ice, and Tommy and I ordered beers while the ladies had a round of gin fizzes. I was feeling elated. Not only was I the center of attention — this was a fete for me, and because I was an adult now, a college graduate who’d achieved something in his own right, it had none of the constraint of the regimented birthday parties my mother used to arrange right up until the time I left high school for the university — but there was the flask to consider too. Its contents had gone a long way toward fueling my enthusiasm. Was I tipsy? I don’t know. But I saw things with a kind of blinding clarity, as if the world had suddenly been illuminated, as if I’d been living in two dimensions all my life, in a black-and-white picture, and now there were three and everything came in Technicolor. Iris, for instance.
She sat across the table from me, her shoulders bared in a strapless organdy gown — blue, a soft cool pastel blue, with a tiny matching hat pinned atop the sweeping shadow of her hair — and I saw that she’d plucked her eyebrows and redrawn them in two perfect black arches that led the way to her eyes. To this point we hadn’t said much to each other, she absorbed with my mother and aunt, Tommy and I reliving old times with a series of sniggers and arm cuffs and all the rest of the adolescent apparatus that still imprisoned us in boyhood though we would have been mortified if anyone had taken us for anything less than men. My mother said, “We have to intervene. There’s no choice to it now. God forbid my son should have to go — I don’t have to tell you he’s the only thing I have left in this world — but we can’t afford to divorce ourselves from the rest of humanity, we just can’t, not anymore.”
“That’s what they want you to believe,” Iris said, setting down her fork. She’d ordered the fish, and the white flakes of it gleamed on the tines against an amber puddle of sauce on her plate. “Why should we get drawn in? Forgive me — I know Holland’s been occupied — but it’s happened before, hasn’t it? War after war?”
Tommy was in the middle of a reminiscence about a prank he’d pulled off after a football game against our biggest rival, and he was mistaken in thinking that I’d been part of it, but he was so wrapped up in the memory that I didn’t want to disabuse him. But now he looked at his sister as if he couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. “Oh, come on, sis, are you kidding me? France’ll be gone in a week, two at the most, and then Hitler can pound England till there’s nothing left but rubble, and you really think he’ll be satisfied with that? You think he’ll send a box of chocolates to Roosevelt and kiss and make up?”
“Exactly,” my mother said, and her chin was set. “It might take him years to get here — a decade even, who knows? But the world is smaller than you might think, Iris, and nobody is safe as long as that madman is in it. Did you see him in the newsreel last week? The goose-step. Aren’t you sick to death of the goose-step?”
“You don’t understand. It’s not our war,” Iris said. “It has nothing to do with us. Why should our boys die for some crumbling empire, for, for — John,” she said, turning to me, “what do you think?”