The temperature had gone up high under the old man’s voice, and for the second time in as many hours he looked as if he were about to lurch up and tear the place apart. Walter sat frozen, so close he could smell the stink of the gin on his father’s breath. “If you want to get beyond all that, I mean. And you do, right? Or you wouldn’t have come all the way up here.”
Numb, Walter nodded.
“Okay,” the old man said, “okay,” and the calm had returned to his voice. He was wearing mukluks and a bulky wool sweater with reindeer dancing across the front of it, and when he leaned forward, his hair and beard touched with gray, he looked like some scored and haunted figure out of an old Bergman movie, the pale oracle of the north. “Let me start at the beginning,” he said, “with Depeyster.”
Truman had met him in England during the war — they were both G2, Army Intelligence, and they’d struck an immediate chord on discovering they both hailed from the Peterskill area. Depeyster was a smart guy, good-looking, tough — and a pretty good ball player too. Basketball, that is. They shot some hoop with a couple of other guys once in a while when they were off duty. But then Depeyster got another assignment and they drifted apart. The important thing was that Truman met Christina — and married her — before he ever laid eyes on Depeyster Van Wart again. And that was the truth.
“But you joined the party,” Walter said, “—I mean, that’s what Lola—”
“Oh, fuck,” Truman spat, a savage crease cut into his forehead. He pushed himself up from the chair and paced the little room. Outside, the wolf dogs set up a howl. “Yeah. Okay. I joined the party. But maybe it was because I was in love with your mother, ever think of that? Maybe it was because she had some influence over me and maybe because, in a way, I wanted to believe that happy horseshit about the oppressed worker and the greed of the capitalists and all the rest of it — hey, my father was a fisherman, you know. But who was right, huh? Khrushchev comes along and denounces Stalin and everybody in the Colony shits blood. You got to put things in perspective, Walter.” He paused at his desk, picked up a sheaf of paper covered in a close black typescript, then set it down again. Instead he shook a cigarette — a Camel — from the pack that lay beside it, and raised a lighter to it. Walter could see that his hands were shaking, for all his bravado.
“So then, what — we’re married a year, two years — and Depeyster comes back into the picture. After, Walter,” he said, something like a plea in his eyes for the first time, “after I met your mother and married her, I run into him in the store at Cats’ Corners out there, we’re going on a picnic, your mother and me and Hesh and Lola, and I stop in for a beer and pack of smokes on a Sunday afternoon, and there he is.” He paused, took another drink from the neck of the bottle. “There’s a lot of factors here, things you know nothing about. Don’t be so quick to judge.”
Walter found that he was gripping the arms of the chair as if he were afraid he would topple out of it, as if he were high up on a Ferris wheel in a wind like the wind outside the door. “I told you,” he said, “I work for him. He’s all right. Really, he is. He says Hesh and Lola are wrong. Says you’re a patriot.”
Truman let out a bitter laugh, the pale swampy green of his eyes obscured in smoke, the massive torso swaying ever so slightly with the effect of the alcohol and maybe the emotional charge too. “Patriot,” he repeated, his face contorted as if he’d bitten into something rotten. “Patriot,” he spat, and then he stretched himself out on the floor in front of the stove and fell asleep, the lit cigarette still jammed between his fingers.
In the morning — if you could call it morning — the old man was guarded, frazzled, hung over and furious, as communicative as a stone. At some point, deep in the folds of that interminable night, Walter had heard him stagger up from the floor, pour himself a drink and dial the phone. “I’m not coming in today,” he growled into the receiver. There was a pause. “Yeah, that’s right. I’m sick.” Another pause. “Let ’em read the Constitution — better yet, have them copy it out.” Click.
Now it was light — or rather there was a noticeable softening of the darkness that pressed up against the windows — and there was a smell of bacon, strong as life, mixed in with a subtler smell, a mnemonic smell, a cruel and heartless smelclass="underline" potato pancakes. Walter lurched up out of the sleeping bag as if it were on fire, living flesh in a house of ghosts. The dogs howled. It must have been about noon.
Truman served him bacon, eggs over easy, potato pancakes—“Like your mother used to make,” he said out of a pouchy, expressionless face, and then he said nothing more till the sun flickered out an hour later. “Gone dark,” he said suddenly out of the silence. “Cocktail hour,” he said with a sloppy grin. “Story time.”
There was more gin. Endless gin. Gin that flowed like blood from the gashes under a middleweight’s eyes. Not yet two in the afternoon and Walter was reeling. Slouched in the easy chair, his limbs gone plastic and light, so light they seemed detached from his body, Walter cradled a glass of industrial-strength gin and listened to his father tell out history like an Indian sachem telling out beads.
“Depeyster,” the old man rumbled by way of introduction, “I was talking about Depeyster Van Wart, wasn’t I?”
Walter nodded. This is what he’d come to hear.
Truman ducked his head, stuck a thick finger in his drink — gin and gin — and sucked it. “Maybe I misled you a little last night,” he said. “About that day when I ran into him at the store. It was an accident on my part, I swear it was, but not on his. No. Nothing he ever does is by accident.”
Walter fought down his fear, his anger, fought down the urge to challenge him, and sank deeper into the chair, sipping gin that tasted like cleaning fluid, while the old man went on.
It was funny, he said, the way Depeyster suddenly came back into his life. After that day at Cats’ Corners, he began to see more and more of him, even as he fell into the routine of Colony life, attending the lectures and concerts, even as he joined the association and then the party. Depeyster was everywhere. He was getting a new muffler at Skip’s garage when Truman took the car in for shocks and brake pads, he was hunkered over a drink at the Yorktown Tavern when Truman stopped in with one of the guys after work, he was in Genung’s buying drapes, at Offenbacher’s with a bag of kaiser rolls. He was everywhere. But especially, he was on the train.
Two days a week, when the 4:30 whistle blew at the plant, Truman picked up his lunchbox, pulled an old army rucksack out from under the iron work bench and walked the six blocks down to the train station. He was studying American history at City College, studying sociology, transcendentalism, American labor movements, the causes and effects of the War of Independence, and he chewed a sandwich, sipped coffee and read his texts on the seventy-five-minute ride into New York. One evening he looked up from his books and there was Depeyster, tanned and easy, in a business suit and with a briefcase under his arm. He had business in town, he said, though what sort of business he might have had at six o’clock at night Truman never thought to ask.
After that, Truman saw him frequently on the train, sometimes alone, sometines in the company of LeClerc Outhouse. They made a good group. Van Wart, of course, came from the old family, and he was a real repository of local history, not to mention a Yale B.A., class of ’40. LeClerc collected artifacts from the Revolutionary War, most of which he’d dug up himself, and he knew more about the fight for New York than Truman’s professor. They talked history, current events, they talked politics. LeClerc and Depeyster were hard-line Republicans, of course, Dewey men, and they saw Communists everywhere. In China, Korea, Turkey, in the incumbent’s administration. And, of course, in Kitchawank Colony. Truman found himself in the position of defending the Left, defending Roosevelt and the New Deal, defending the Colony, his wife and father-in-law and Hesh and Lola. He didn’t do very well at it.