T. Boyle - World's End

Walter shook his head. But that’s not the point, he said.

No, of course it wasn’t, but it was true, and Depeyster opened up on him anyway. He cited the Pilgrims, Brook Farm and hippie communes, deplored the fate of the kulaks, railed against the Viet Cong and pointed a finger at the face of the Worldwide Communist Conspiracy, but Walter refused to budge. Worse, he kept bringing the dialogue around to that single sore point that lay between them like a bloody stick. Whether or not communism worked wasn’t the question, Walter kept insisting — the question was what had gone down on Peletiah Crane’s property on that hot August evening in 1949. Depeyster dodged around the issue — not yet, not yet — vehemently asserting that he was within his rights, that everything he’d done he would do again. He looked into Walter’s face and saw Truman, and at that moment he understood that he was no longer defending the vanished father — Truman was mad, he was indefensible — no: he was defending himself.

He wanted to give it to him straight, wanted to tell him just how far Morton Blum and Sasha Freeman had gone to provoke the confrontation — how he himself had been duped into responding when it would have been far better to leave it alone — wanted to ask him if he really thought a peaceful rally was worth as much to the cause as a loud and dirty riot with its front-page photographs of bloodied women, screaming children and colored men beaten till they looked like prizefighters on the losing end of a unanimous decision. But he held back. All that was for the next lesson.

Look, Depeyster had said finally, I know how you feel. I admit your father was wrong to go off and desert his family like that — and I admit he had his crazy streak too — but what he did was in the name of freedom and justice. He sacrificed himself, Walter — he was a martyr. Be proud.

But what, Walter gasped, what was it? What did he do?

Depeyster dropped his eyes to slip open the drawer and fortify himself with a pinch of dust, but thought better of it. He looked up before he answered. He was with us, Walter, he said, slamming the drawer home. He was with us all along.

But then the image of Walter was gone and Depeyster found himself staring into the null faces of the subversives and draft dodgers his daughter had brought home with her. Human garbage, and they were here in his house, under his roof; for all Marguerite knew, he approved of them, liked them, shared their dope and bean sprout sandwiches. “Get out,” he repeated.

Through the wild frizzed fluff of her hair, Mardi was giving him a half-hateful, half-frightened look. Perhaps he’d gone too far. Yes: he could see it in her eyes. He wanted to stop himself, soften the blow, but he couldn’t.

“All right,” she shouted for the third time, “all right,” for the fourth, “I’m leaving.” There was a scurry in the hallway, the spic kid ducking out of her way, Tom Crane’s hands fluttering like flushed quail, the frame-wrenching boom of the door, and then they were gone.

Depeyster glanced at Marguerite. She’d gone pale beneath the ruddy film of her makeup, her pupils were dilated and the tip of her tongue was caught between her lips. She looked as if she’d awakened from a trance. “I, um,” she murmured, gathering up her things, rustling papers, reaching for her coat, “I have to be going. Appointments, appointments.”

At the door, he tried to apologize for his daughter, but she waved him off. “Three thousand,” she said, brightening just a bit. “You think about it.”

It was late in the afternoon, and he was out back, spading up the earth around his roses, when he thought of Joanna. He’d been in the house just a moment earlier, looking for a fishing hat to keep the sun out of his eyes, and noted absently that Lula had set but a single place at the dining room table. Now, as the rich black loam of the rose bed turned beneath his spade, that solitary place setting loomed up in his mind till he saw not roots and soil but the pattern of the china, the cut of the crystal, the crease of napkin and glint of silver. It was puzzling. Mardi wouldn’t be eating — probably wouldn’t be home at all after the scene in the parlor — but where was Joanna? She’d left the previous morning for the Shawangunk reservation, the station wagon packed to the roof with the cast-off pedal pushers, clam-diggers and toreador pants she’d collected door to door in her biannual trouser drive. Which meant that she would spend the night at the Hiawatha Motel, as usual, and be home for dinner in the evening. As usual. And yet he was sure he’d seen just the one place.

It was something to think about as he bent to the rose bushes, mounding the earth in little pyramids at the base of the canes and tamping it down deep over the roots. He was in the act of exhuming the previous year’s mulch from the trough around the Helen Traubels, when a startling thought crept into his head: she’d had an accident, that’s what it was. The accident. The one he’d always pictured. Yawing over its oppressed springs, the station wagon had veered off one of the tricky bends of Route 17 and wound up on its roof in the icy pellucid waters of the Beaverkill; a semi had jackknifed, crushing the car like an aluminum can: Joanna was gone. Sarabande, Iceberg, Olé: he could already smell the blossoms. But no. If it were anything serious — anything fatal — Lula would have let him know.

Roses. Here it was mid-October already and he was just now getting around to preparing the beds for the hard frost to come. Not that he’d been neglecting them — he exulted in his roses, prided himself in them, wouldn’t let the gardener near them — it was just that September had been glorious — Indian summer to the hilt — and he’d found himself out on the Catherine Depeyster nearly every afternoon. Or on the links. No, she’d had a flat, that’s what it was. The engine had seized, the fan belt disintegrated, she was stuck in Olean, Elmira, Endicott. He stood, knocked the dirt from his work gloves. Little Darling, Blaze, Mister Lincoln, Saratoga: the very names gave him satisfaction. He’d finish up tomorrow, wrap the canes in burlap, manure them. But where was she? Maybe she’d left him. Vanished. Run off. As he strode up the hill to the house, a guilty little fantasy overtook him for just a moment — she was naked, that big freckle-faced dormmate of Mardi’s, hovering over him and bucking like a wild animal, and he could feel his seed taking hold, could see them — his sons — marching from her hot and fertile young womb as from the mouth of some ancient cave.

Lula’s face dropped when he mentioned the place setting. “Oh my blessed Jesus, it just slipped my mind.” The kitchen, with its concessions to modernity — dishwasher, electric range, frost-free refrigerator — gleamed behind her like something out of a commercial for the newest wonder cleaner. She’d been pounding veal at the kitchen table when he stepped into the room. “Oh Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” she wailed, and you might have thought she’d lost her entire family in a train wreck, “I just can’t figure what’s come over me.”

Depeyster leaned back against the radiant counter and folded his arms.

“It was one o’clock this afternoon she called. Something’s come up up there, something about a protest march — here, I’ve got it written down.” She heaved herself up from the table, a heavy woman, solid as the oaks along the drive, and snatched a scrap of paper from beneath the phone. “Here it is,” she gasped, breathing hard from the effort, “ ‘Six Tribes Against the War.’ She says not to expect her till tomorrow this time.”

Six Tribes Against the War: what a joke. He let the words sit on his tongue a moment before repeating them in a tone of bitter contempt. Six Tribes Against the War. He could picture them — a bunch of unemployed half-looped overfed Indians dressed in toreador pants and carrying placards, his wife out front in curlers and beaded moccasins, marching up and down in front of the feed store in Jamestown. It would almost be funny if they weren’t doing the work of the Viet Cong. And Joanna. The relief business was bad enough, but this — this was demeaning. His own wife involved in a demonstration. What next?