Fools Page 2

  I secretly loved the song. Joe and Forster were talking nearby—Forster kept saying Goya was the best draftsman who ever lived. “No! Rembrandt!” I said. Gin makes you very certain about things. I didn’t want to fight with Forster or cross him. “I really like Rembrandt,” I said, more quietly and dumbly.

  Dorothy said, “Nobody ever gets over those Goya war etchings. It’s Goya.”

  “What about the leper?” I said. “What about what Rembrandt does with Christ healing the leper?”

  “You people,” Betsy said, “have such grim ideas of beauty.”

  “Beautiful dreamers,” Joe said. “What queens of song you are.”

  “I bet you can sing,” Betsy said. “Can you sing?”

  “Like a half-dead frog.”

  “Frogs have outstanding voices,” Dorothy said. “As good as crickets.”

  I thought they all liked Joe better than me. I liked Joe better than me. He was a better talker, more showy and funny, and also more uniformly nice. Now he was twanging a frog’s version of “Beautiful Dreamer” and then “Swanee River.” Did Dorothy fancy him? Probably not. She could sometimes flirt but she loved Forster.

  “Some frogs can inflate their throats to the size of their heads,” Forster said.

  “Only you would know that,” I said.

  After Christmas, when the weather turned bitter cold, I was the one who ended up walking the dog when Richard didn’t want to bother going out, and I often ran into Forster in Washington Square. He had a favorite bench by the ginkgo trees on the south side. Like the dog, he liked to be outside.

  “You’re not cold sitting there?” I said. Bakunin the dog was investigating Forster’s shoes. It was a Sunday morning and not very many humans were out.

  “I don’t mind,” he said. “Dorothy says I just don’t notice.”

  “In Tibet there are lamas who sit out naked in winter,” I said. “They slow themselves down, I think.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not a lama,” he said.

  “Fine with me,” I said. “I’m not disappointed.”

  Forster smiled faintly at this. He was quieter than the others; you had to work to talk to him. “I’ve had enough clergy in my life,” I said.

  “Dorothy has quite a religious side,” he said. “I have to say, it’s superstition to me.”

  Bakunin barked at a squirrel, and I let him off the leash. He never caught any but it made him feel important to chase. We watched him leap at a sycamore, surprised each time that he couldn’t get up the tree by jumping. He consoled himself by sniffing at a man sleeping on a bench nearby. “Bakunin!” I said. “Don’t bother that person.”

  The dog was whining. “No,” I said. “He’s not waking up to play with you.” A howling wail came out of the dog, a sound I had not heard him make before—a siren with a long quaver. Or was it the man howling? It wasn’t the man. He wasn’t moving. He was probably too cold to move.

  “I’ll get Bakunin,” Forster said.

  I went with him. The man on the bench had rolled himself in a filthy overcoat and pulled the top of it over his head. He was lying sideways on the bench, with his feet jutting off the edge—bare feet, grayed with dirt. What kind of city lets a man go shoeless in ten-degree weather? Even the cracked skin on the ankles looked like stone, not skin. Forster touched the man’s shoulder (very kindly, I thought) and said, “Sorry, sorry.”

  I almost said, What an argument against alcohol! but it wasn’t a joke I wanted the man to hear. Anyone sleeping outside in winter was beyond desperate. Forster was bent over him, peering at whatever bit of the face showed from under the coat.

  “Will you stay here,” Forster said, “while I try to find a policeman?”

  “He’s not all right?” I said.

  “No,” Forster said. “He can’t hurt you, don’t worry.”

  I looked at the face myself. The helpless mouth, the empty eyes. When you grow up in the parish house of a church, you know what dead people look like. I gave a small, useless shriek, and then I said, “Go now.”

  Once Forster was gone, I became alarmed that he hadn’t checked the man over more closely. What if the man was only sick and frozen, and there was something I should be doing? I started to rub his bare feet, to chafe them into warming. They were stiff under my gloves, but feet are always stiff. It was horrible to think I was bothering a dead man with my touch, but I kept it up. I thought of Dorothy, who’d trained as a nurse during the war and might’ve known what to do.

  I said, “It’s all right, it’s all right,” to the body. The head had lank hair and a broken tooth showing from under the lip. I had to stay where Forster had left me, but I was afraid of the man as a corpse and afraid of him as a live human who might wake up dangerous. And then I was ashamed to be so interested in my own feelings when I was standing over a man at the border of life.

  And the feet. I wouldn’t let the dog sniff them, I pushed his muzzle away. I knew perfectly well that they were Christ’s feet, even though I no longer took any of that literally. How could I not know? I was still chanting, “It’s all right,” and rubbing the shoeless feet, when Forster got there with a policeman.

  “Please hold the dog, miss,” the cop said. Then he did all the things Forster and I should have done. He cupped his palm under the nostrils to feel for warm breath, he clasped the wrist where the pulse would be, he reached under the man’s shirt to find his heart.

  “It’s bad?” Forster said.

  “Bad as it gets,” he said. “You can go. Thank you. Thank you very much.”

  I was going to say, Rest his soul, but I didn’t, because I didn’t want Forster to think I was a ninny. I followed him on the path.

  “Doesn’t it seem very noisy outside, all of a sudden?” I said. “We’ve been elsewhere.”

  “Yes,” Forster said. “I’m not quite back yet.”

  We were at the edge of the park, in the cold. Everything was too vivid, after our time spent guessing how far the man was from anything we knew. The bare quiet was still in our heads. We walked without speaking—I was glad of that. How tinny and insubstantial everything in the shop windows was, how childish. What did anyone need a feather-topped hat for?

  In front of my building, Forster said, “Go sit by yourself somewhere, if you can.”

  “I wish we’d been there sooner for him,” I said.

  “That part makes me furious,” he said. “No one cares about a man like that.”

  He put his hand on my shoulder. I was afraid to touch him, with my gloves that had touched the dead man’s feet, but I leaned my head slightly.

  A few days later, Dorothy told me she’d been saying prayers for the man’s soul.

  “What kind of prayers?” I said.

  We were in the corner of a loud and pleasantly crowded living room where a party was going on. Dorothy had a cigarette in her hand. “To beg that he’s taken into heaven. What else can be asked for? And I gave something to the priest at St. Guadeloupe to have him included in their prayers.”

  Dorothy, poor as a church mouse, was giving coins for this?

  “We all had lots of training young, didn’t we?” I said.

  “Actually, I didn’t,” she said. “I just like to go into churches, I have for years. Mostly Catholic ones. Especially late at night, after I’ve been out, I like to go in and see the lit candles. But not only then. And I notice that I tend to pray in my head. Don’t ask me Who’s listening. I don’t have a final opinion.”

  All this was a surprise. I wasn’t one of those who thought that praying was demented—my family prayed pretty constantly—but I thought of myself as done with such things. In Philadelphia I’d gone to meetings (and marched too) with workers whose pamphlets said, “Jesus Saves the Slave,” not to mention “Trust in the Lord and Sleep in the Street.” Dorothy must’ve known those lines. She made a living of sorts as a writer and she’d done reporting for radical magazines for years.

  “People are at their best when they’re in devotion,” Dorothy sa
id. “Sometimes I just walk from the beach into town with my rosary beads in my pocket. I don’t think it matters if I don’t say the words completely right.”

  Is she unbalanced? I thought. And I saw that I wanted her to be. I had an oddly happy feeling at the thought that she might be not right at all for Forster. I knew what this thought meant. (And didn’t I have a husband I loved? I did.) It was my own business what I thought. Not every involuntary wish had to be acted on. Thoughts are free, I thought. This was the refrain of a German song they sang at meetings: No man can deny, Die Gedanken sind frei.

  Dorothy was fishing a piece of fruit out of her empty glass of rum punch. It was the made-up, improvised nature of Dorothy’s praying that gave it a semi-crazy taint. And then I was embarrassed to think that. Dorothy was a sensible and highly original person. If she wanted to walk around mentally intoning addresses to pure space, that was her own business, her own liberty.

  At the party, someone put on a record of “My Baby Just Cares for Me” and Joe came to claim me for a light, not too bouncy fox trot. Forster wasn’t around (he didn’t like parties) and Dorothy found Richard to dance with. She talked while she danced, in that smoky room, with her shining cropped hair showing wispy in the light, and she looked like any of us, nicely in rhythm, set on what she was doing, pretty enough.

  Could someone who loved freedom above all believe in a fat, overconstructed, historically corrupt institution like the Catholic Church? Joe and I had several talks about this. Dorothy wasn’t even born a Catholic, but if it was truly and freely in her own individual nature to love the Church, what then? “It’s the illusion in it that gives me the creeps,” Joe said. He meant divinity. Christ’s or anybody’s. Couldn’t you be opposed to submission—I didn’t expect to ever again kneel to pray—but be receptive to what Dorothy liked to call the Unseen? “Not possible, I don’t think,” Joe said. “Name me a religion where people don’t bow their heads.”

  I wasn’t keen to think about it, now that I was away from my father’s house. I didn’t need to have an opinion, in the life I had. But I saw how lit up Dorothy was, how charged with bits of liturgy, how stirred and driven, how thirsty. She would start to find us all shallow, if she kept on this way. But we had our own beliefs, our hopes for knocking down the stupidities of the past. “She thinks we’re nothing,” Joe said.

  “Don’t be vain about it,” I said. “That is not the problem.” But I was hurt too, that Dorothy could think of leaving us.

  Joe and I kept meaning to visit Dorothy’s little house in Staten Island, but we didn’t get there till the height of summer, when Manhattan was an oven and the beach was fresh and astounding. We all ran around in the surf in our bathing costumes, shrieking when the waves hit us. Forster was out fishing when we got there, but Dorothy’s twelve-year-old brother John, who was staying with them, dove fearlessly under the waves and kept teasing his sister by popping up right under where she was. Joe pretended to rescue her by dragging her off. “All the Day family are good swimmers,” she said, kicking and escaping. I didn’t know then that Dorothy was pregnant.

  She was perfectly slender in her sleeveless tunic and narrow swimsuit. I was shorter and rounder and felt more exposed and fleshy, though I forgot myself because of the ease everyone else had. We dried ourselves sitting on the porch, eating blackberries from the garden. The house itself was a mess of specimens that Forster had dragged in—skate egg cases, the skulls of small animals, bird’s nests, the shell of a huge turtle—and the kitchen table was piled with pages of a serial romance Dorothy was writing for a newspaper. I envied their lives in that little house.

  Forster showed up in time for supper, tanned and wild-haired from the boat and quiet as ever. He had caught a dogfish, which looked like a small shark—Dorothy said no one around there ate them but an Italian neighbor had said Italians thought they were delicious. So Dorothy fried up pieces in butter and we had potatoes and cabbage salad with them. The fish was strong-tasting but not bad. “Oh,” Forster said, “I just had to cut away the venomous part when I filleted it.” I thought he was kidding but he wasn’t.

  “Vera, honey bun, don’t be nervous,” Joe said, so I decided not to be. Everyone thought Forster knew what he was doing, and I probably thought so too. They lived on nothing, he and Dorothy, and looked better and healthier than the rest of us.

  Dorothy told me the news when we were cleaning up in the kitchen. “Don’t you notice how magnificent I am?” she said. “It’s the end of the second month already. Every morning I give thanks.”

  I knew she’d had an abortion when she was younger and had suffered for it. And the man had left her afterward. It wasn’t much of a secret. A novel she’d written about it had actually been published—The Eleventh Virgin, by Dorothy Day—and movie rights had paid for the beach shack, though no one made any such movie. Dorothy was so earnest she didn’t bother to have what would be secrets for anyone else.

  “I thought Forster was looking very tickled,” I said. “Now I get it.”

  “Forster will get used to the idea,” she said. “He thinks it’s a terrible world and we shouldn’t add to its numbers.”

  “It is a terrible world,” I said, “but he’ll be fine.”

  I meant that he would stick by her. Dorothy didn’t appear to doubt this either. She was twenty-eight already.

  “He’ll teach the baby how to fish,” I said. “You’ll have the only infant who knows how to surf-cast.”

  I didn’t say it, but I was ever so slightly sorry for Forster, who’d been outmaneuvered, caught off guard. Nature’s dupe. He really did only want a few simple things—a life with lots of empty space in it—and now he was getting more than he’d bargained for.

  But you always did, in a couple. That was what I thought when I lay next to Joe in the tiny bedroom at the end of the hall. Joe was talking on about how fishermen never had to punch a time clock, no wonder Forster liked it. That was how come Vanzetti had no proof he was at work the night of the Braintree robbery, he was out selling fish. Could he get a lobster to testify he never fired a shot? An eel to swear for him?

  It was okay. I might’ve had a husband who talked about things I cared far less about. “It’s so quiet here at night,” Joe said. “At home our streets are teeming, aren’t they?”

  “Most streets,” I said.

  “And heartless. We’re as bad as India,” Joe said. “Only they have more people.”

  “We could have just as many, before very long,” I said. “In about a minute, we could. Margaret Sanger’s mother lived through eighteen pregnancies and eleven births, did you know that? Nobody cares whether poor people have birth control.”

  We were practitioners of birth control ourselves. I hated nothing more than having to buy feminine hygiene products like jellies and foaming tablets—I’d wait till a woman clerk was on duty in the drugstore and whisper the words. They were too graphic, those products, like artificial versions of private natural processes. I was sure it was wrong that such items should be made for profit and sold in stores for cash.

  I was thinking about the capitalist system having this intimate contact with my own tissues, as I took the tube out of our suitcase and padded down the hall to the bathroom to slip the manufactured gel inside me. I tried to be fast, so Joe didn’t wait too long, but a kind of modesty always kept me from doing this in his sight.

  “It’s ridiculous we have to do things with chemicals just to make love freely,” I said to Joe, when I was getting back into bed. “It makes me hate nature.”

  “Don’t tell nature you said that,” Joe said.

  “I hate it that procreation has anything to do with sex,” I said. “Who thought that up? What sense does that make?”

  “Our opinions were not consulted,” Joe said.

  “There are too many babies,” I said, “born every day and they don’t get cared for and nobody does anything about it.”

  “I wouldn’t say nobody,” he said.

  “You haven’t been to In
dia,” I said. “You haven’t seen all the babies in India.”

  I hadn’t seen all the babies in India either, as Joe well knew. I did have a memory of a row of mothers and little children (littler than I was) sleeping along a narrow street, curled on blankets in a settled way, as if they were camping at a relative’s. My father shuttled us past them very swiftly.

  And why was I going on about this now? Dorothy had been so radiantly emphatic about how happy she was, and here I was having a fit about excess infants. I was in a house with a garden full of nasturtiums and green squash, the clean smell of salt all around, the frogs and crickets thrumming out the window, and I was mad at nature.

  “Manhattan in August is every bit as hot as India,” I said, a fact I made up, but I reached for Joe just then, so he didn’t need to answer.

  The next day we all took a walk along the beach with Forster. He pointed to a horseshoe crab, which looked like an iron helmet with a bayonet attached. “They’re living fossils,” he said. “Haven’t changed for three hundred million years.”

  I thought the thing was dead, but Dorothy’s brother John poked it with a piece of driftwood and it moved very slightly in the sand.

  “Will it bite?” I said.

  “Oh, no, never,” Dorothy said.

  “Its mouth is in the middle of its underside,” Forster said, “so it can’t bite you unless you pick it up.”

  “It doesn’t seem like an animal,” Joe said. “More like a moving ashtray.”

  “Forster said they can live to be thirty,” John said. “But they don’t have babies till they’re eleven.”

  “He knows a lot, that Forster,” I said.

  “I see hundreds of things on the shore much more clearly,” Dorothy said, “because of Forster.”

  “He’s the man to have by the sea, I can tell,” I said.

  Forster looked away. “He is,” Dorothy said.

  “Dorothy has extremely good eyes,” Forster said. It was the fondest thing I’d heard him say.

  “How did you learn it all?” I said. “It’s kind of amazing.”