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Fools Page 3


  Forster shrugged.

  “He went to shell college,” Joe said. “They give you a wet mackerel for a diploma. Leaves a lasting impression.”

  When we were back home again in New York, Joe would sometimes imitate Forster picking up a crab or piece of kelp. “It’s very, very antique,” he would say. “Its smell is older than mankind.”

  Throughout that autumn I was aware of the months passing for Dorothy. I knew she believed that she was moving into a larger truth, growing herself into a fuller vessel. And the child would have the sweet, slightly neglected freedom the offspring of some of our friends had. If you did your best not to get in nature’s way, would nature reward you? Our most theoretical friends liked to say the institution of the state was unnatural, as if no insult could be more utter.

  Forster went out to Staten Island every weekend, even as the weather got colder. Betsy said Dorothy was looking wonderful. But Richard reported that Forster and Dorothy were having fights, because she’d started walking to town to go to Mass in the mornings. She mostly did this when he wasn’t there, but he was horrified anyway.

  “She isn’t even a Catholic!” Betsy said. “If I were her, I’d maybe just not bother to tell him about this little secret church habit. I’d keep my mouth shut, if I were her. At a time like this. Where is her brain?”

  “He’ll never agree with her,” Richard said. “Forster of all people. She knows that.”

  Dorothy had no cagey feminine practicality. She was more like a prophet, helpless to resist telling what she saw. My father, when he was a young man, had wanted to preach in India because (my mother told us) he couldn’t bear not explaining what he knew. We all thought Dorothy was moving backward, and yet it was a poetic motion. “She’s becoming medieval,” Norman said.

  Dorothy’s religious eccentricity had an interesting effect on me, it pushed me into a different stubbornness. I stuck closer to my husband, very close indeed (where would I be without such a husband? how would I live?), and this meant going to more meetings. They had their bits of beauty, those meetings, especially the ones for Sacco and Vanzetti, where the rhetoric was already a wail of grief, though the two men, in prison, waiting, were certainly still alive.

  In December Dorothy moved back to the city with Forster, and with her younger sister, Della. I liked Della, who was staunch like Dorothy but milder and girlier. It was Della who later went with Dorothy to Bellevue Hospital, when the labor pains came. Where was Forster? No one seemed to think he had planned to go anywhere near the yowl and blood of delivery. But everyone said he was entirely enchanted once the baby—a healthy girl—was actually born. Well, who didn’t like babies?

  When Joe and I visited Dorothy at her apartment, Della was holding the baby—a creature so tiny she could rest along Della’s forearm—and walking her around the living room. Dorothy was lying on a couch and Forster hovered in a doorway. It was a small room, with all of us in it. “Who thought I’d have such a pretty baby?” Dorothy said. “I thought I’d have some gnarled little thing only I could love. You don’t think she’s too pretty, do you?”

  “Definitely overdone,” Joe said. “See if you can feed her something to make her homelier.”

  Della put her in my arms, as a great favor, but I was less eager to hold her than they thought. She was chubby and damp, sweet as my own baby brother had been, but I didn’t want her curling too close to me. I knew perfectly well how babies were made, but I seemed to be afraid they were contagious. Joe said, “Look how she settles in.”

  “Hello, hello, hello, Tamar Teresa, hello, my fatso girlie girl,” Della said.

  I asked Forster how they’d decided on the names and he looked surprised. “Dorothy’s work,” he said.

  Joe said, “How calm the baby is.”

  The baby took that as her cue to begin fussing, and Dorothy got up to take her out of my arms. “You little fat thing, you want more to eat,” she said.

  Dorothy swiveled and turned her back to us when she bared herself to nurse the child. Dorothy a mother! Forster led us into the kitchen and poured us shots of brandy. Joe said, “To the future that’s just arrived,” and we drank the stuff down.

  Joe said, when we were out the door, “I think he really looks very happy.”

  “In his way,” I said.

  “He likes seeing Dorothy so glad.”

  “Richard thinks love is making a fool of him,” I said.

  We were all upset when we heard that Dorothy had made friends with a nun on Staten Island and had the baby baptized at a church there. Neighbors came to the beach house afterward for a celebratory lunch of boiled lobsters and salad, but Forster, who had caught the lobsters, left before people got there.

  “He didn’t have to rain on her parade,” Betsy said. “What does it matter to him if she likes Jesus?”

  “She’s the one who won’t stop talking about it,” I said. “And it’s his baby.”

  “He left on principle,” Richard said. “I don’t blame him.”

  Joe and I stood with a group in Union Square, trying to get people to sign petitions to the governor of Massachusetts, begging him to stop the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti. In a light summer rain Joe and I took turns holding an umbrella over us. Some people signed and were friendly. Some boys threw clods of mud at us, which we tried (to everyone’s amusement) to block with the umbrella. Joe believed in acting jolly about it.

  I looked at our flyer with its portraits of Sacco and Vanzetti, the two of them cuffed together, staring ahead, deep-eyed, men fond of gardening and known to nurse sick kittens, men neighbors said were too gentle to have shot two other workers for payroll money. Probably. Plenty of people I knew were sure the most dearly held principles had to yield to larger principles, that sacrifice was necessary for any radical change, even the sacrifice of mercy to violence.

  I was against ever giving up mercy, and I thought the old kind of anarchism was done for. The point about Sacco and Vanzetti—anyway—was the government’s unrelenting malice. I got wet and dreary and discouraged, standing out with our petitions. No wonder people like Forster never volunteered for this.

  Really, as I saw it, Forster might just as well have stuck around to eat a lobster or two for the baptism lunch. Melted butter, hot rolls, crisp lettuce from the cottage garden. I thought he meant to stay for the meal but then he couldn’t do it: he had no polite lying in him, not even for love.

  Dorothy would have to be married in the Church, if she was really going to join the Church. No more cozy common-law in the beach shack. Betsy said Dorothy was painting herself into a corner, tying herself into an obedience she didn’t even believe in. I barely knew any Catholics, not as close friends, and I didn’t think Dorothy did either.

  Sometimes I prayed when I was alone, a fact Joe didn’t know. Not to any deity—I was done with kowtowing to whatever ran the universe—but sometimes I pled for help or for mercy. And in moments of great sweetness I would think, Thank You for this. After Joe and I were married, when we were alone, after the reception, in a hotel room with a ceiling of looping plaster garlands, I thought that.

  We hadn’t even meant to be married, had we? But then we’d made our concession, we’d given way on a point we decided didn’t matter. It turned out we were that kind of people. Sometimes.

  Forster kept leaving Dorothy and coming back. This went on for months and months. What did I want him to do? Terrible for a woman with an infant to have to put up with that. Didn’t I want Dorothy to have him? But hard too for him to put up with Jesus all the time. Did I want him to find solace with me? Even in my dreams I couldn’t bring myself to think of leaving Joe. In my fantasies I had a torrid affair with Forster, our dazzled bodies falling into one audacious discovery after another. But my mind got stuck on where we would go to act out these exquisite inventions: Didn’t he still share the apartment with Della, when Dorothy wasn’t there? Or had they all given that up? Could he be living alone, on his crummy earnings? I could foresee so easily every step in our fal
ling into bed together, the hesitations and overtures and bursts of truth. But I puzzled over what bed we would use. The practicality of my nature worried the problem.

  I had no special reason to think Forster was drawn to me. I had sometimes had glimmers, but I didn’t think I was worldly enough to gauge them. The deepest question—which was not even a question but a blot over thought—was what it would mean to deceive a person like Joe. Even if he never knew.

  But still I might do it. It might not be beyond me to do such a thing. Who knows until the tests are given? My mother used to say that India had tested her faith. The place was hot and terrifying but Jesus still lived. Once I told Joe that India had given me my own faith. I meant the leper. I was in a horse cart on the street with our maid when one came up to us, with his parched skin mottled light and dark, hobbling against a cane because one foot was missing. I knew about lepers from the Bible. His begging bowl was on a cord around his neck, but the maid had the cart go faster, to get away. At home I wanted my mother to find him and give him all our coins. My poor mother, I had a crying fit when she wouldn’t. Joe said Emma Goldman told people she became an anarchist after she saw a peasant beaten with the knout, when she was a girl in Russia. Horror eats you, if you don’t have an idea: that was what I thought.

  Joe believed in using city libraries, and we were on our way to the Ottendorfer branch one Saturday when we ran into Forster on the street. It was October by this time and he looked all right—thin, but he was always thin—and he said, “This is the best season in New York, isn’t it?” I thought it was a cheerful thing to say, and the sky was indeed a rare deep blue.

  “It must be still beautiful out at the beach,” Joe said.

  “It would be, if we could be simple again, but we can’t be,” Forster said. “When I go out to fish, Dorothy has the nun come to visit her. The woman runs off if she happens to come when I’m there.”

  “The sister comes to teach Dorothy?” I said.

  “Oh, yes, she does,” he said. “Often.”

  “How’s the baby?” Joe said. “She’s all right?”

  “Tamar is excellent,” he said. “She’s taught herself to crow at the gulls.”

  “The gulls probably know what she’s saying,” Joe said.

  “I bet you can talk to the gulls,” I said to Forster. “You of all people.”

  “Who’d want to?” Joe said. “Bunch of complainers, those gulls.”

  “At least they’re not bowing and cooing to idols and statues,” I said. “Gulls don’t strike me as Roman Catholic types.”

  “What a thing to say,” Joe said.

  “You think I insulted the gulls by comparing them?” I said.

  “Oh, Vera,” Joe said. “Stop pandering.”

  It was very true I didn’t sound like myself, I was helplessly overshooting to let Forster know I was on his side. And it wasn’t the kind of tone Forster liked either.

  “It’s the pigeons that are more papish,” I said. “Bobbing up and down like that.”

  “She still prays when she visits her family,” Joe said, about me.

  “Only at certain times,” I said. What dolts Forster must have thought women were.

  How exposed and absurd I felt afterward. Was I going to launch into flattering stupidities every time I saw Forster? Was I a helpless besotted creature? I had no respect for that sort of helplessness. It fit with none of what I believed or leaned on. Like not being deluded. Like the great question anarchists asked the world: Can’t you do better than that?

  I tried a new secret discipline with myself. For each time I thought of Forster, I set aside two cents to give to Joe, who was trying to save enough for us to get our own apartment. I thought Joe would be glad if I took more of an interest, and I could do without hoarding change for silk stockings. But there were too many illicit thoughts to keep track of, and it was too depressing to tally them when I did. So I underestimated and lumped the sums together in a dollar I gave to Joe at the end of the week. “What’s this?” he said, surprised. “You don’t have to.” But he took it.

  In August 1927 Sacco and Vanzetti were put to death in the electric chair, and the person who took this the hardest, of all of us, was Forster. He was out in Staten Island with Dorothy, and he went for days without speaking or taking food. He sat out on the bay in his fishing boat, in a stupor of despair. Some nights he slept on the beach. We heard this from Norman, who heard it from their neighbor. The neighbor said he did still like to play with the baby.

  But how could it have been news to Forster, what human beings were? Where had he been all his life?

  “If he’d grown up in India,” I said, “nothing would surprise him.”

  Joe said, “He has a good heart but he needs to toughen up.”

  “He’s not weak,” I said. “Why do you think he’s weak?”

  “He should be infuriated instead,” Joe said. “That’s the whole point of what we go around telling people.”

  “Well, don’t call him weak,” I said. “That’s all I’m saying.”

  “Is it?” Joe said. “You can stop saying it, then.”

  In November Dorothy and Forster had another serious fight about where her beliefs were taking her, and he walked out on her again. I could hardly believe he spent the night on the beach in the middle of November. When he came back, Dorothy wouldn’t let him in the house. She locked the door against him. It was hard to imagine the two of them in such a drama. People who never shouted in ordinary life, reduced to harshness in a religious war. The next day she took the train into Manhattan and left the baby to be watched by her sister, and then she went out to the church in Staten Island and was baptized. She went through all of it alone, with only her friend the nun to be her godmother. We heard all this from Norman, who had a friend who was close with Della.

  “I hope she’s happy,” Richard said, not nicely.

  “I feel sorry for him,” Norman said. “Outrivaled by Jesus.”

  “Bet she finds someone else,” Richard said.

  “How could she find someone better than Forster?” I said.

  “She just did,” Norman said.

  “She has his baby,” Betsy said. “It’s very cruel.”

  “Oh, the man will land on his feet,” Joe said.

  And I saw Dorothy not long after, pushing a carriage in Washington Square. It was winter again, with the park bleak and windy, and the baby, already a toddler, was almost invisible under the wool blankets and knit cap. A soft pink face with closed eyes and a double chin. “She looks warm,” I said.

  “That’s why we’re here, it’s too cold out by the beach,” Dorothy said. “Forster used to chop all the wood for the stove but I can’t manage all that.”

  “No. How could you?”

  “Forster was a great wood-chopper. He’d hack up a big pile of driftwood for me to use all week.”

  “He must miss you and the baby,” I said.

  “How do you know?” she said. “Have you spoken to him?”

  “No, but Richard has. I think he’s fine.”

  “He’s always fine, he’s very healthy. Did he ask about me? Forget I asked that.”

  “Richard didn’t say. Forster always keeps his cards close to his chest anyway. You know. Never one for loose talk.”

  “He thinks everyone else talks too much.”

  “Maybe we do.”

  The wind was blowing her hair from under her hat. “I think you love him yourself.”

  “What?” I said. “No, I don’t. Not that way. I don’t.”

  Everyone knows, I thought. There are fewer secrets in the world than people think.

  “I probably don’t really want to know,” Dorothy said. “I’m just forcing you to lie. It’s pointless of me.”

  “You have this wrong. Believe me.”

  “And then it will hurt our friendship,” she said, “that you’ve lied to me. I’m making a mess, I’m sorry.”

  “No, no,” I said.

  “Never mind,” Dorothy
said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  We stood there, in our awkwardness. How much she must want Jesus, I thought, to have let Forster go like that. Our Forster. I couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t more lies.

  Beneath us Tamar made a little snorting noise—she had her face screwed up in distaste at finding herself awake. “Are you thinking of crying?” Dorothy said, bending down to her. “Think again.”

  “How big the baby’s getting,” I said. “She’s so pretty.”

  “Bigger every day,” Dorothy said. “I can hardly keep up.”

  That winter, I was much admired for my willingness to take the dog out to the park in any weather. Bakunin didn’t care how many times we walked past the bench under the gingko trees to see if Forster was there. Dogs like repetition, it doesn’t feel futile to them.

  All through the holidays, when Joe and I went out to parties, I looked for Forster, but I only saw him once that season. On New Year’s Eve, one of Betsy’s friends held a masked ball in her apartment. Joe and I appeared as a dog and cat, with socks pinned on for ears. I saw Forster when we came in, leaning against the wall in a corner, but when I went to talk to him, he was already gone. When did he ever like parties? He’d only come before because of Dorothy.

  The next day, Joe and I sat around the big apartment kitchen, trying to cure our hangovers with cups of black coffee, while the others slept.

  “Everyone liked that party but Forster,” Joe said. “Who comes to a costume party in street clothes?”

  “Well, that’s him.”

  “You just think he looks so dignified in his regular old jacket. That beat-up thing he wears,” Joe said.

  I did think that. Exactly that.

  “The thing with Forster,” I said, “is that he’s sure he’s too good for everything.” Was Joe even listening? “I think he has to get over that.”

  “Do you?”

  “He’s too full of himself by half,” I said. “You know what I mean. That expression of disdain he gets.”

  Joe was nodding. It was excruciating to see.

  “But people like him change. He can get better,” I said. “Eventually.” I seemed to feel a note of condescension would help.