He smiled a little. “The answer to your question is no, I did not serve. I requested and received a deferment, and then I enrolled in college.” He shrugged and looked down at me. “Accounting.”
It was odd being the one looking up at him. “Sounds like a good decision. You’re lucky you had a choice.”
“It was an exciting time to be young and away from home for the first time. Everyone had an opinion on absolutely everything, as you might well imagine. It was an age of debate and discussion. I listened and read and tried to inform myself, and I began to develop my own opinions.” His voice had taken on a warmth and verve that made him sound like a much younger man. “I cannot express to you what a wondrous thing it was to have an opinion of my own. One of the things I was drawn to was the peace movement.”
“Really? You were a peacenik?”
“Not the violent antiwar radicals but those making reasoned arguments against U.S. involvement in a region of the world that neither wanted nor needed our help. The arguments of those who wanted peace seemed more compelling to me than the logic of those defending the war.” He put his elbow on his armrest and rested his chin in his hand, as if thinking it through all over again. “I also could not see a way to win, which meant men…boys were dying for nothing. And so I became an activist for peace.”
Had I given it any thought, I would have had him hanging out at the library, working as a proctor, afraid to talk to girls. I almost smiled as I pictured him with long hair, granny glasses, and a bong. “Did you march?”
“I did everything that was asked of me that was not violent in any way. I was not a leader but a follower, a fact that my father was gracious enough to point out on more than one occasion.”
“You father didn’t approve?”
“He was desperately disappointed in me, in the things I believed in, the things that I did. He accused me of intellectualizing my fear, of making up an argument to justify a decision that came from cowardice. He called it postdated conviction.” His voice had developed a sharp edge, and the warmth was gone.
“He wanted you to go to Vietnam and get mowed down in the jungle? Or addicted to heroin? Or so damaged by your experiences you could never be a fully functioning member of society again?”
“My great-grandfather came from Poland to settle here. Several members of the extended family, particularly on my mother’s side, came over before and after World War II. Other family members-aunts and uncles, older cousins-were lost in the camps. Another uncle died in the Warsaw uprising. He is a hero to them…to us, as he should be. My father believed we should give back because this country had given us so much.”
“And he was willing to offer up your life to pay the family debt? Screw that.”
He didn’t respond. He didn’t even seem to hear me. I was participating in a conversation he was having with himself, maybe had been having for years.
“Postdated conviction,” he said. “I have never forgotten that term. All my life, I have never truly known if he was right.”
“No, Harvey, you are not a coward, and fuck your father.”
He looked at me. “What did you say?”
“It takes a lot of courage to stand up to your father for the things you believe. There’s nothing you need to do to prove yourself to me or your father or…or Rachel or anyone else.”
Dust and dried mud rained down from my jeans as I unwound myself and got up from the floor. It took me a good thirty seconds to straighten up with my lower back so stiff, but I had to get up and pace around, because Harvey couldn’t, and his father had pissed me off.
“Fuck all fathers. Mine, too. Mine especially. Kids are sitting ducks to bad fathers. They believe everything Daddy tells them because they don’t know any better. It doesn’t make it true. It makes them cowards.”
He fiddled with the loose pad on the armrest, something else I should have fixed. “She has decided to leave. That is what would be safest for her, would it not? To leave Boston?”
He looked up at me with this futile hope in his eyes, and I realized he meant for me to disagree. I couldn’t.
“Yes, it would be safest for her to get out of Boston. At least for now. Maybe later, she can-”
“Yes, of course.”
I really needed to get cleaned up, but I didn’t want to leave him alone this way. For the first time-maybe the first time ever-I wished Rachel were there. I pulled my watch from my pocket, and he noticed. “Go and do whatever it is you must do. I will be fine.”
“I’ll just be upstairs in the shower. Call me if you need anything.”
He had made his way over to his desk and his computer. He pulled up a game of Minesweeper. Rachel wasn’t even gone, and the old Harvey was back.
32
WHEN I CAME OUT OF THE SHOWER, THE DIRTY JEANS I’D left on the floor had been replaced by a clean pair, laid out on the bed. If I hadn’t already known they were Rachel’s, I would have guessed when I lifted them up and saw they were the style that came only to mid-calf. I was a few inches taller than she, so when I put them on, I was relieved to see they made it that far. The long-sleeved cotton shirt she’d left buttoned down the front. The fit was a little tight for me. Baggy worked better for someone trying to conceal a waist holster and a weapon.
Rachel came in just as I was buttoning up and laid a blow-dryer on the bed. “I thought you might want to use mine. Harvey doesn’t have any around the house. I also put your clothes in the wash.”
“Thank you.” She was being nice, which meant there had to be something in it for her. “Did you talk to Harvey before you came up here?”
“Why?”
“He seems…”
“Sad?”
“Deeply sad,” I said. “Sadder than I’ve ever seen him.”
“That’s because he thinks he’s about to die.”
“What are you talking about?”
She shrugged casually. “I think that’s what he means. He keeps saying he feels a darkness.”
“He told you that?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. In the past few days.”
“Here I thought he was sad because you dumped him once and he’s about to lose you again.” When I sat up to face the mirror, she was there, too, standing with her arms crossed, her face pulled into a sulk, and one foot thrust forward in case she felt the urge to start tapping.
“I resent the implications.”
“This from a woman who ran around on a man with a critical illness. Pardon me for being skeptical.”
“Is that what you think? You would think that.”
“Tell me you weren’t running around on him before you dumped him.”
“I wasn’t.”
I stared at her in the mirror. She blinked first, coming out of her fighting stance to drop down onto the bed. The pills on the worn chenille bedspread suddenly held great fascination for her. I went back to my grooming task. Getting the knots out of my hair was easier than getting the truth out of her, and I had some serious knots.
“I wasn’t out looking, is what I’m saying, but by the time I met Gary, I already knew it wasn’t going to happen between Harvey and me, so what was I supposed to do? Pass on Gary and end up with neither one? Nuh-uh.”
“How do people like you get to be people like you?”
“You mean someone who takes care of herself?”
“That would be one way to look at it, I suppose.” I leaned forward to check out my face more closely. My skin was stressed and dry. The circles under my eyes had grown a darker shade of dark, and the hints of wrinkles around my mouth were turning to fact. A long weekend at a spa would have helped a lot.
“I worked my ass off to get where I am. How many people in my family do you think graduated from college? None. Not until me. No one in my family had ever even lived outside of Brooklyn. I went to college. I graduated. I earned every penny of my own tuition. I didn’t get any help from anyone.”