Soon after, she would happen to be in Times Square the day France capitulated to the Nazis. An immense crowd had halted on Broadway and stood reading the moving headline around the Times Building. Shame gripped her heart. Fink had explained that it was an imperialist war and that Germany, now a Soviet ally, was no worse than France, and she had tried to take that to heart, but a man standing beside her, a middle-aged round fellow in his sixties, had begun to weep into his handkerchief. It was weird how she had walked from him to the corner of Forty-second and Broadway, where a front-page photo looked up at her from a newsstand, of a round-faced middle-aged man standing on the Champs Élysées, watching the Nazi cavalry parading by as it entered Paris after the French defeat, and his eyes were flooding with tears, like a beaten child’s.
Trained to reason or think her way toward hope, she put things aside, neither denied nor affirmed. She lived in waiting as though for some verdict that had not yet been announced.
Suddenly she could wait no more. “Frankly, I am almost ashamed sometimes of saying I’m not anti-Soviet,” she dared to declare one night at dinner.
“My darling, you don’t know what the hell you are talking about.” He grinned paternally.
“But, Sam, they are helping Hitler.”
“The story hasn’t ended yet.”
Twenty-five years on, she would look back at this, one of her emblematic conversations, aware that she had known at the time that she was losing respect for Sam’s leadership; and how odd that it should have come about because of a pact made ten thousand miles away!
“But shouldn’t we object? Shouldn’t you?” she asked.
His mouth formed a smile that to her seemed smug, and he shook his head with unshakable pity. That was when it happened, the first cut of hatred for him, the first sense of personal insult. But of course she hung on, as one did in those times, and even pretended—not only to him but to herself—that she had absorbed another of his far-seeing lessons.
She felt paralyzed. They went coolly to bed, with the winds of the world crossing their faces. They knew they did not like one another that night. But how she could love him if he could only admit how wounded he was! Still, maybe a marriage could more easily sustain both parties lying rather than one. This must be a chapter for us, she thought. Maybe now it will all change. She reached to his shoulder, but he seemed happily asleep. Closing her eyes, she invited Cary Grant to lean over her and speak ironically as he undid his incredible bow tie and slipped out of his clothes.
But a year and a half later, when Hitler finally broke the pact and attacked Russia, the Village was relaxed again, with Fascism again the enemy. The Russians were heroic, and Janice felt part of America once more, no longer so dreadfully ashamed of a partnership with Hitler.
Sam Fink presented himself at the 90 Church Street navy recruitment office a week after Pearl Harbor, but with his name and his nose, he was not naval officer material—the grin on the amused face of the blond examiner, a lieutenant senior grade, was not lost on Sam, nor was its irony in this anti-Fascist war—and so he enlisted in the more democratic army. The rebuff was embarrassing but not unexpected under capitalism, when for years now so many Jewish students had been having to go to Scottish and British medical schools, turned away by the numerus clausus of American institutions. Sam trained first in Kentucky, then in the officers’ school in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, while Janice waited in broiling-hot wooden rooming houses off-base. The war might last eight or ten years, they were saying. But of course she must not complain, considering the bombing of London and the crucifixion of Yugoslavia. Desperately fighting loneliness, she taught herself shorthand and typing just in case she never landed the editorial job she had begun to apply for at magazine offices and publishing houses, which were losing men to the war.
By now she was twenty-eight, and on bad nights her bored face—the face of a trim, small horse, she had decided—could bring her close to tears. Then she would take a notebook and try to write out her feelings. “It isn’t that I feel positively unattractive—I know better. But that somehow I am being kept from anything miraculous happening to me, ever.”
With the dimming of her love for Sam, time moved in detached patches, and she could no longer find reasons to do or not do anything. A saving miracle was becoming a less than silly idea. “Somehow, when I look at myself, the miraculous seems to be more and more possible. Or is this hot room driving me crazy?” Here in Oklahoma, deep in America, she understood that secretly she was part of nothing larger than herself, a ridiculous person. At night, awakened by a line of tanks roaring past, she would go out on the front stoop of their cottage and wave to the officers, whose upper bodies, like centaurs, stuck up out of the top portholes. The thought of the familiar faces of the ones she knew being blown apart astonished her all over again. She had never understood life, and now it was death that bewildered her. All she was sure of was that America was beautiful for fighting the wrong! When the tanks were gone, leaving behind a rain of dust sparkling in the moon rays, she stood there wondering: “Did we huddle together with one another because we each felt unwanted?” This hateful self-affront would send her more and more gratefully and often to the bottle, and with a couple of drinks she would force the worst to her lips: “He makes love like mailing a letter.” And then she would flush one more of what she called her “whorish notes” down the ever-obliging toilet.
Her rage, like everything else in this wartime, was on hold for the duration. Drunk, she saw more broadly; saw herself in a sort of a secret American consensus to conceal the vileness of their true needs. The whole apple-cheeked country, was it a gigantic fraud? Or was it only the homely ones who, when all was said and done, were—had to be—unhappy and full of hate? Back inside the cottage, she sat on the lumpy mattress and thought guiltily of poor Sam on bivouac, sleeping on the wet ground out there in the dripping pinewoods, his alien self in a swamp of Deep South accents. “What an ungrateful bitch I am,” she said aloud. And falling back onto the damp pillow: “That bastard Hitler!” and swung out into sleep on her anger. Would she ever be allotted time for anything but goodness?
II
Recalling it all later, her collision with Lionel Mayer, in all its painful ordinariness, had sent her flying off the track of her old life. He and his wife, Sylvia, a left-wing organizer for the Newspaper Guild, had been their friends for years by this time, and by some miracle he had been assigned as press officer in Sam’s division. That fall, ordered out on a five-day bivouac, Sam, giving up pretending that his wife was happy hanging around army camps, asked Lionel to invite her to dinner in Loveock. Janice was vaguely unnerved at the date; Lionel, with his thick black curly hair, powerful hands, and juicy sense of the outrageous—he had acting ambitions—had always seemed to be inviting her curiosity about him; she had noticed how he lost himself staring at women, and it was easy to set him to performing for her with his impudent stories and jokes. Gradually, she had realized, with some amusement, that she had some kind of control over him. With Sam gone, he invited her to dinner, and she knew at once that he wanted to make love to her. The idea sent an exciting charge of power into her, along with a deep curiosity about how he reconciled his principled nature and his shyness with his wife with this hot interest in her—until she thought of her own behavior.
She had never been alone with him in a strange place, and he was a different man over dinner, holding her hand on the table, all but offering himself in his gaze. Calculating the risk, she thought it seemed low; he would clearly not want the undoing of his marriage any more than she did hers.
“You have gray eyes,” he said, with a certain hunger she found absurd and necessary.
“Two of them, yes.”
He burst out laughing, relieved that ploys were no longer necessary. Walking back to the bus stop from the restaurant, they saw the Loveock Rice Hotel sign overhead, and he simply grasped her hand and steered her into the lobby. The room clerk, a s
tout woman listening to a radio play and eating hard-boiled eggs out of a waxed-paper wrapper, seemed to recognize Lionel, or at least to be less than surprised to see him, and absently handed him a key after hardly any talk between them. Janice’s insides caved in like sand before the notion of his experience. She was delighted. If she was recognized going up the broad mahogany stairway with him, then so be it; she numbly resolved not to stop the force that was carrying her forward and out of a dead life. Lionel descended on her like an ocean wave, tumbling her, invading her, pounding her past to bits. She had forgotten what stings of pleasure lay asleep in her groin, what lifts of feeling could swamp her brain. As they rested, a sentence spread before her mind: “The key to the present is always pleasure.” In the bungalow afterward, sliding back down to the bottom of her pit, she studied her sated face in the bathroom mirror and saw how slyly feminine she really was, how somber and untruthful, and she happily and sadly winked. It flickered across her mind that she felt free once more, as she had when her father died.
Kissing Sam Fink goodbye the night he sailed for England, she thought he had never looked so handsome in his uniform and his shoulder bars and his fine double-breasted trench coat. But with the holy cause so nobly glowing in his face, his eyes, his manly grin, she mournfully knew she could not go on with him for life; even at his best it would not be enough. She was a real stinker, a total fraud. He insisted she stay behind in the apartment and not accompany him to the ship. A novel gravity was in his look now: “I know I’m not right for you, but . . .”
Guilt smashed her in the face. “Oh, but you are, you are!” What a thing to say, when he might be going to his death!
“Well, maybe we’ll figure it out when I come back.”
“Oh, my darling . . .” She clutched him closer than she had ever wanted to before, and he kissed her hard on the mouth in a way he’d never done.
It was still difficult for him to speak, even though it might be their last moment together. “I don’t want you to think I don’t know what’s been happening.” He glanced at a wall to escape her eyes. “I just haven’t taken us seriously enough—I mean in a certain sense—and I regret it . . .”
“I understand.”
“Maybe not altogether.” He looked straight at her now with his valorous warm smile. “I guess I’ve thought of you as a partner in the Revolution, or something like that. And I’ve left out everything else, or almost everything. Because my one obsession has been Fascism, it’s taken up all my thinking.” No, dear, it’s sexual fear that’s done that. “But America is on the line now, not just people like me, and Hitler is finished. So if I do come back I want to start over as a couple. I mean I want to start listening to you.” He grinned, blushing. “The idea of that excites the hell out of me.” Appalled at herself, she knew it was hopeless with them—he was sweet and dear, but nothing would stop him from going to meetings the rest of his life, and she could not bear to be good any more; she wanted glory. She drew his head to her lips, kissing his brow like a benediction. In death’s shadow, she thought, we part in love. He let her hand slide out of his fingers and moved to the door, where he turned to look back at her one last time; romantic! She stood in their doorway watching him as he waited in the corridor for the elevator. When its door clanked open, she raised a hand and wiggled her fingers, giving him her smile and her irony. “Proud of you, soldier!” He threw her a kiss and backed into the elevator. Would he die? She threw herself onto their bed, dry-eyed, wondering who in the world she was as she filled up with love for this noble man.
He might be gone a year. Maybe two. No one knew. She registered at Hunter as a graduate student in art history. It was perfect; her good husband off to the war in the best imaginable cause, and she in New York and not some godforsaken army camp, taking courses with Professor Oscar Kalkofsky.
The war continued its unrelenting grip on time. The “duration” calcified most decisions; nothing long-term could be started until peace came, in probably five or six years, it was thought now. Frustration was mitigated by the solace of having a ready excuse for everything undone or put off—like confronting Sam Fink with a divorce when he was off fighting in Germany and might well be sent to the Pacific for the assault on Japan.
But suddenly the Bomb settled that and everyone was coming home. But where would she find the strength to tell Sam Fink that she could not be with him any more? She must find a job, an independence from which to address him. She walked endlessly in Manhattan, tensed, half angry, half afraid, trying to conjure up a possible career for herself, and finally one day went to see Professor Kalkofsky, to talk not about art but about her life.
Months earlier, tired of walking, she stopped by the Argosy store on lower Fifth Avenue, to get off her feet and look for something new to read, and was talking to Peter Berger, the owner’s son and Sam’s immediate boss, when the professor came in. Almost immediately his quiet, self-mocking smile and wry fatalism drew her in, an affectation of weariness so patently flirtatious that it amused her. And his gaze kept flicking to her calves, her best feature.
A gentle, platinum-haired giant, he sat with European academic propriety in his office one afternoon, both enormous shoes set on the floor, his pipe smoldering in his right hand, whose two crooked fingers, broken by a Nazi torturer, spoke to her of a reality the Atlantic Ocean had sterilized before it reached America. She was sure he not only was taken with her but had no thought of a future relationship; his witty eyes and unsmiling mouth, some adamance in his unspoken demand on her, and his quiet speech that day—it all seemed to be solemnly taking charge of her body. Despite his muscled bulk, there was something womanly about him; maybe, she thought, because unlike most men, he was obviously unafraid of sex.
“Is not very complicated, Mrs. Fink.” She liked his not using her first name yet and hoped, if they made love, he would continue calling her Mrs. Fink in bed. “After war like this, will be necessary to combine two contradictory drives. First, how to glamorize, as you say, cooperative modes in new society; at same time, incorporate pleasure ethic which certainly must sweep world after so much deprivation. That means following: to take what is offered, ask for it if it is not offered, regret nothing. The regret element is main thing; once you accept that you have chosen to be as you are, incredible as that seems, then regret is impossible. We have been slaves to this war and to Fascism. If Communism is brought to Poland and Europe, it will never last long in countries of the Renaissance. So now we are free, the slavery is finished, or will soon be. We are going to have to learn how to select self, and so to be free.”
She had read existentialist philosophy but had never been seduced by it before, armed as she was by the decade of puritanical Marxism that followed the disgraced Jazz Age of her father. But there was another fascination: Europeans liked talking about submerged connecting themes rather than mere disjointed events, and she loved this, thinking she might figure herself out if she could only generalize with precision. But it never quite happened. As though she had known him a long time—which in a way she had—she began telling about her life. “I realize I don’t have any kind of standard look, but . . .” He did not interrupt with a reassuring false compliment, and this meant he accepted her exactly as she was. This thrilled her with sudden possibilities. “But I . . . I forgot what I was starting to say.” She laughed, her head full of lights, admitting a hunger for something to happen between them beyond speech.
“I think what you are saying is that you don’t feel you have ever really made a choice in life.”
Of course! How could he possibly have known that? She was drifting with no real goal . . . She felt her hair, suddenly believing it must be tangled.
And he said, “I know it because I see how much expectation there is in you.” Yes, that was it! “Almost any suffering is tolerable provided you have chosen it. I was in London when they attacked Poland, but I knew I must go back, and I also knew the danger if I did. When he broke my fi
ngers, I understood why the Church was so strong—it was built by men who had chosen to suffer for it. My pain was also chosen, and that dimension of choice, you see, made it significant; it was not wasted, not nothing.”
Then he simply reached out over the arm of his chair and gripped her hand and drew her to him and meditatively kissed her lips, closing his eyes as though she symbolized something for him and his wise European suffering. She immediately knew what the years-long aching in her really was—simply that she had never truly chosen Sam, he had kind of happened to her because—yes, because she had never thought of herself like this, as a woman of value choosing to grant herself. He slipped his hand into her clothing, and even the cynicism of his cool expertise pleased her with its brazen consciousness.
She looked down at him kneeling on the floor, with his face buried between her thighs. “I love knowing what I’m doing, don’t you?” she said, and laughed.
His face was broad and very white, its bones thick and strong. He looked up at her and, making a wry mouth, said, “The postwar era begins.” But he kept it wry, just this side of laughter. What delight that, as she knew now, she meant nothing to him!
III
After Sam’s return in September, whole guilty months passed before she could dare to tell him that she could no longer bear her life with him. It came about by accident.
Bringing it up had been difficult because he behaved once again as though they had never had a problem; and it didn’t help that somewhere in him he was taking a substantial amount of credit for destroying Fascism. His prophetic Marxism had proved itself in Russia’s new postwar power and Fascism’s extinction and set him consciously as a participant in history, and nobly at that. A new note, something close to arrogance, a quality she had formerly wished for him, irritated her now that their spirits had parted. But what set her off was his implying one evening that he had forced himself on a German farm woman who had given him shelter in a rainstorm one night.