The Young in One Another's Arms Read online

  Ruth watched his face, the flesh finely and distinctively shaped over good bones, a strong, fair face, and tried to think of his family but was sorry for herself instead, knowing how much she would miss him when the move had to be made.

  “I’m sorry about it, but there’s no way to say that, even if my father is different. If I said I’d gone back to graduate school …”

  “Do you want to go back?”

  “No.”

  They sat together in silence then, trying to see white gulls and sailboats, children, the high white snow the roads had not yet reached. When Ruth got up to go, needing to be home to fix dinner, Tom did not follow her.

  She walked back along the street among crowds of schoolchildren, who had taken over the sidewalk in noisy bunches, shoals of them coming down the street on bicycles as well. Ruth was too old, and she was no lungfish to wallow out of the crowded shallows into a new kind of survival. Tom there on the beach might be, his breath hard and uncertain but his choice made. Ruth would be carried along instead to the next accident.

  Gladys and Stew were just getting out of Mavis’ Volkswagen as Ruth arrived at the house.

  “Mavis says the narcs were at the house last night.”

  “I didn’t say the narcs,” Mavis protested, getting out of her side of the car. “I said the police.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” Ruth said.

  “Jesus, when a house like this starts getting raided …” Stew began.

  “It wasn’t raided,” Ruth said. “It was just a routine check.”

  “They don’t usually bring the dogs the first time.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Gladdy, do we have to have political melodrama every time?” Mavis asked.

  “What did you do, Ruth?”

  “I answered their questions and offered them a cup of coffee.”

  “Can’t you see?” Gladys demanded. “This is just the beginning. Once they decide to start hassling, there’s no end to it.”

  “What was Ruth supposed to do, shoot them?”

  “You don’t let pigs into the house. You don’t tell them anything. You don’t make them a cup of coffee.”

  “So they come back with a warrant,” Mavis said, “clean Stew out and take Arthur into custody.”

  “I’m clean. I’m clean,” Stew protested. “I never keep anything at the house. Ruth knows that.”

  “Ruth did exactly what she should have done,” Mavis said.

  “How much do you have to see before you stop believing that? Do you really think they’re going to go on playing by the rules? How much television do you have to watch?”

  “You’ve told me yourself that cop baiting in front of the cameras is standard guerilla theater. Why should I believe that?” Mavis asked.

  “Because it’s bloody well true! Somebody risks his head to show you how the pigs behave, and you still don’t believe it.”

  “Leave all weapons and placards on the porch,” Ruth said, opening the front door. “Hello, Clara. The troops are home.”

  They all went in to greet Clara, gentling themselves for her presence, and, while Ruth went off to put the meat loaf and potatoes into the oven, they settled, Gladys at Clara’s feet, Mavis leaning against the bureau, Stew lounging on the bed in their custom of sharing the day with her. Ruth could hear Gladys giving reports on Shaky Sal, Two-Gun Charlie, Left-Wing Mike, some of the eight-year-olds she taught or, as her supervisor put it, terrorized with rough jokes, spontaneous games, and frank bullying. The children did get angry with her. Gladys brought home proof of their rage in grotesque pictures of herself, afflicted with all their ailments and frustrations. She put the best of them up on the bulletin board in her classroom. Of course, a child struggling to say a simple word could hate her easy tongue. A child strapped into a wheelchair could wish her running legs broken. Ruth suspected that the bruises Gladys actually suffered were almost always the result of burrowing or clutching love. When Joanie once asked, “How can you teach children like that?” Gladys had answered furiously, “I’ve been given permission by the authorities to love them.” Gladys did love them for the gang of little realists and revolutionaries she could teach them to be. They should be angry about the bodies they had been born or hurt into, angry enough to learn what they could, change what they could, and insist that the people teaching them come up with miracles.

  Ruth was stacking cutlery and glasses on the cart when Arthur came up out of the basement.

  “Let me do that.”

  “No, I only want done what I can’t do myself.”

  “It would only take a minute.”

  “It takes me exactly four minutes,” Ruth said, smiling at him. “Pour Clara her sherry and take it in to her, but leave her door open. I like to listen to Gladdy.”

  They both heard her voice, rising in energy to her story. “I said, ‘Don’t sit there and cry because your pencil’s broken. I’d sooner you threw it at me. That would get you another one fast enough.’ In a rain of misaimed pencils, in walks Supe, and everyone has to listen to a lecture about how eyes could be put out. ‘The step from self-pity is to self-control, not to bursts of indulgent temper.’ Fuck! The only thing wrong with my teaching methods is that I can’t get them to work better around here. My eight-year-olds would no more let the pigs intimidate them, the city bulldoze them …”

  “I think the school board would take a dim view of your leading a wheelchair march of eight-year-olds into the city hall,” Stew said.

  “Fascist politics are being practiced in every classroom in this city. The school board never raises an eyebrow about that!”

  Arthur and Ruth exchanged smiles as he left the kitchen with Clara’s sherry.

  “How was Roger today?” Clara asked. “Oh, thank you, Arthur. Sit down. Join us.”

  “Oh, Roger, he’s such a little faker. I said, ‘Roger, how come, when you know how to spell a word, I can understand you perfectly, and when you don’t, you talk like you had a mouth full of marbles?’ Supe says, ‘Never cast doubt on a child’s honesty. Never threaten a child’s self-esteem.’ Roger’s self-esteem is the best bubble gum in town. He can blow it twice the size of his head.”

  Ruth hoped Clara could keep Gladys on the subject of school and off the subject of the police while Arthur was there. He could do without her fantasies, given the number of his own he must have. But Ruth had learned long since that there was no way to protect people from each other if they lived under the same roof.

  Joanie came in and went straight to her room for her curlers. Then Willard nodded in at the kitchen before he went to his habitual chair in the living room, set apart under a good light, to finish reading his paper. The final shutting of the front door was Tom, who didn’t join the others in Clara’s room. He would instead take quieter time with her after dinner, reading to her about the lungfish. Instead of going to his room, he came to Ruth in the kitchen and began slicing the meat loaf. She didn’t order him out as she had Arthur or would have any of the others. He was comfortable for her, nearly as easy as her daughter had been.

  “I’m going over to the Gulf Islands this weekend. A friend of mine says there’s a café for sale on Galiano right near the ferry dock, good business in the summer, possible business in the winter if you could encourage the locals.”

  “How many people live on Galiano?” Ruth asked.

  “I don’t know, maybe five or six hundred in the winter.”

  “Mostly pensioners without money to eat out,” Ruth suggested.

  “Well, I thought I’d look around.”

  “Do you have money to buy a café?”

  “No,” Tom said, and he grinned. “I still think I can persuade you to buy it.”

  “Clara on an island? Where would Willard sell shoes?”

  “Couldn’t Willard garden and chop wood and fish?”

  “He’d get pretty discouraged with his shoehorn, and it’s the only tool he’s ever mastered.”

  Tom picked up the platter of m
eat, carried it into the dining room, and called the others. Clara came, Mavis on one side, Gladys on the other, Stew and Arthur behind them. Then Willard came in, his eyes to the floor, and finally Joanie, breathless.

  “What make and year tonight, Joanie?”

  “Oh, Stew!”

  “For your sins you’re going to marry an antique car-freak and have to ride around in a Model T.”

  “What’s the top of the news tonight, Willard?” Tom asked.

  “More bad weather on the way,” Willard said, which was one of his two stock responses. The other was, “It’s a troubled world.”

  Ruth’s hand trembled a little as she tried to help herself to meat. She had for years been able to live with those simple, gloomy truths, and there was no point in feeling fainthearted about them now. Tom didn’t need her. Clara and Willard did. Their presence in other crises had kept her sane and responsible. Losing a house was not, after all, like losing an arm or a child, if only she did not have to give up as well this large unlikely family who even now could distract her from her distress.

  “Are we all pubbing tonight?” Gladys asked.

  Stew had a club date. Mavis had work to do.

  “Well, Arthur, your hair’s long enough by now to risk the pub,” Gladys said.

  “Don’t you get Arthur involved in any of your demonstrations, Gladdy,” Ruth said.

  “Not right away, all right, but deserting is only a negative political act. There’s got to be positive political pressure as well. This isn’t lotus land.”

  “Making it into lotus land might not be a bad idea,” Tom said.

  “You think you can save the world just by giving it indigestion day after day?”

  “The world’s been saved by odder means. Once a fish had to learn to breathe.”

  “Loren Eiseley,” Mavis said impatiently, “wants the world to go to the dogs. He even dedicated a book to his. He doesn’t really like people.”

  “Do you?” Tom asked.

  “I think on the whole I prefer birds,” Clara said.

  “Far out,” Stew said. “My best friend when I was a kid was a lizard.”

  “I bet,” Joanie said.

  “And I bet you always wanted a pony,” Stew said, not unkindly, “and still do.”

  “Do you, Mavis?” Tom repeated.

  “Oh, well enough,” Mavis said. “I don’t think there’s really much choice. We’re social animals after all.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t be resigned to that,” Tom said.

  “It’s not a matter of being resigned,” Gladys said. “We have to do something positive about it.”

  “Well, you could help me clean up the kitchen,” Arthur suggested in the first glimmer of ease he’d shown.

  “A practical man in our midst,” Mavis said with approval.

  “With sinister male chauvinist tendencies,” Tom said.

  “Sure, I’ll help you,” Gladys said, surprising them all as she often did, good humor overtaking her in the middle of the fiercest arguments.

  “Would you like to go to the movies?” Willard asked Ruth.

  “Why, it’s Monday night, isn’t it? Yes, I would. What a good idea.”

  Ancient-faced, Ruth had always been taken for Willard’s mother when they were out in public together. She did not mind. One did not choose one’s children, either those born to one or those come upon by accident. Ruth had been given this odd man to love, who could bring her just such simple distraction and comfort as a movie she didn’t have will enough to go to on her own. She took his arm on the way to the bus stop.

  “How many movies do you suppose we’ve gone to, Willard?”

  “Never thought to count.”

  He was instead secretly counting the change in his pocket. Ruth could feel the muscles in his arm working. Would he have enough to offer her a beer after the show? Ruth could have told him that he did. But he needed to get to his decisions by his own route.

  “Have you ever done any fishing, Willard?”

  “Fishing?”

  “Catching fish.”

  “No.”

  No, he’d never caught anything but feet in his life, and he never would. Ruth had no business to confuse him with such questions. She had to prepare him for the simple move he could make.

  “I want you to move with Clara and me into an apartment when the time comes. You know that, don’t you?”

  “The future takes care of itself,” he said, evasive rather than comfortable in his tone.

  “But you’re coming with Clara and me.”

  He signaled a bus and, once they were settled in their seats, there was no point in talking with Willard. He would not make minimal conversation again until they sat down for their beer, and Ruth knew she wouldn’t have the heart to bring the subject up again. The narrow limits of his life did give him the virtue of being able to live from day to day, if he were let alone to do so. There was probably no virtue in being prepared for pain.

  It was after eleven when they got home. Willard had to go right to bed to keep the variation in his schedule to reasonable limits. Ruth went in to chat with Clara, who had spent her evening with Tom and then been settled in bed by Mavis.

  “Nature is a metaphor,” Clara said decisively. “It’s just that there seems to be less and less of it.”

  “You’re not convinced by the lungfish?” Ruth asked, smiling.

  “The lungfish came ashore millions of years ago when life was crowded only in the shallows. It chose light and air. I said to Tom, ‘What about those who chose to go deep, to take the pressure and the dark instead? If the whole sea is dying, how do we know what will come lumbering up out of it this time?’ Mavis says I sound like one of those Doomsday cranks. The end of the world isn’t any longer such a crankish notion, though, is it?”

  “I don’t suppose so,” Ruth said. “But it doesn’t seem near enough to solve any personal problems.”

  “You and Mavis, always so practical.”

  “Did Tom talk about a café on Galiano?”

  “Yes,” Clara said.

  “We couldn’t live on an island.”

  “I suppose not, not with Willard.”

  Clara sighed and turned a little in her bed. Her age and her pain set her against the future, and why not? Ruth straightened the sheet a little as a way to apologize and then left Clara.

  Mavis was in the kitchen, looking for ice.

  “Too geared up to sleep?” Ruth asked.

  “Not for long. A good stiff drink will do it. Join me?”

  “Thanks.”

  “Imagine Tom trying to turn himself into a new species,” Mavis said impatiently, venting her irritation on the ice tray. “This house is full of cranks, do you know that? Stew with his acid alteration of consciousness, Gladys cleaning up the world with blood instead of soap and water, Tom with some kind of Aquaman complex. Why is it so hard for them all to live in the real world?”

  “Tom isn’t really impractical.”

  “Oh yes he is. He should go back to school, and he knows it, but it’s easier to be a fry cook and a lungfish than a responsible sociologist trying to help sort out the mess. He’s worse than the others. He’s got more to waste.”

  “You’re a good puritan, Mavis.”

  “All it takes is will and tranquilizers and a bit of this,” Mavis said, holding up her glass. “Why should I apologize?”

  “No reason I can think of.”

  “But it’s Tom you love …”

  Ruth looked sharply at Mavis, but her remark was guarded with an ironic smile. Mavis debated; she did not plead.

  “I’ve sometimes thought you loved him.”

  “Creatures of different species don’t breed,” Mavis said, and she stood up. “That should do it. Good night, Ruth.”

  Mavis had a heavy walk, a middle-aged way with her shoulders, though she had not yet turned twenty-five. Maybe she needed to be that defensive. For her it was obviously not a good idea to love Tom, or any of them. But she did.


  The front door opened. It was Stew, carrying his clarinet.

  “Is that Gladdy just going up?”

  “Mavis.”

  “Oh. Is she home?”

  “Don’t know. I haven’t been in long myself.”

  He went up the stairs two at a time, grasshopper-legged, happy. You had to be a night owl or a heavy sleeper like Willard to survive in this house of blatant living. Nobody was really noisy. People closed doors, but, since Ruth didn’t lay down rules and regulations except about drugs, there was nothing to sneak about, neither a drink nor a lovemaking. That set moods loose in the halls and stairway, Mavis refusing her own loneliness, Stew leaping up toward simple appetite.

  He was clattering down again within two minutes.

  “Not there?”

  “Damn,” he said, then grinned at Ruth. “Well, there’s a party I can go to.”

  After the door had closed behind him, Clara said, in her light yet carrying voice, “She’s downstairs with Arthur.”

  Ruth stood in the living room, thinking about that, but to be young was not to measure the strains as she did. You didn’t use one arm well until you had only one. Stew did have a party to go to, and Ruth didn’t have the prejudice against sex that she did against drugs. If Gladys could stop the flickering of Arthur’s smile, steady it into a grin, perhaps not much harm would be done.

  When Ruth heard the front door open again, she moved quietly into the darkened dining room. Joanie at that time of night was too used to lay eyes on. She needed to take herself off to her room for repairs to her clothes and her person among her threads and needles, creams and lotions, finally to crown herself with curlers and sleep. Was she so different from what Ruth had been herself at that age? Softer, sillier, more childish, she would have chosen the traveling salesmen rather than the truckers. Ruth had liked the aloofness of the truckers from what they hauled. Their friendliness was simpler, but Joanie would have been tempted instead by the briefcases of samples, the company cars, the cheap, travel-polished suits, the salesmen’s banter. It made very little difference really whether you lay on packing blankets in the back of a truck or on sample cases in the back seat of a car, as long as you thought you were being taken somewhere away from your own stagnant life. Ruth was afraid it took a war for women like herself and Joanie to marry, and only being married made you see what little difference it made, for most anyway who hadn’t the wit or even the will to hold a man for long. Life was easier without one.