Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

“He’ll be fine,” her mother told her. “People from here don’t get sent to the frontlines. He’ll sit in an office someplace. He’s big and he’s smart.” Even in Evelyn, least mothering of all mothers, there were twin knots of concern and kindness. She thought that a man who acted like a man could do anything he wanted, that his whole life would be easeful, and she wished this for her son. She wished for him a world of unlocked doors. With the armor of money and stature there to protect him from being sent overseas, maybe the war would be a favor to Ben. A means for him to grow up.

Fern said, “Have you ever watched him in a room full of people he doesn’t know? He disappears. He’ll be trampled.”

“How can he disappear? He’s enormous,” Evelyn said. “Anyway, it’s not a choice, he’s been drafted. What am I supposed to do, send him away to San Francisco to be babysat by those hippies?”

Over the last few weeks of summer, Ben’s fuses all shorted out. He came downstairs on the day he was to be driven away wearing dress pants with his undershirt and a pair of slippers and a straw hat from the attic. He stood at the door and tapped his fingers on his heart in counts of sixty, over and over. “Ben. What are you wearing?” Fern asked. She brought him a real shirt and buttoned it, tied his shoes. She brought the suitcase she had packed for him. She had tried to calculate the books that would be least likely to get him beaten up (nothing about birds). She had written down a story he could tell about a girlfriend and sealed this in an envelope. In a second envelope she included evidence of this invented love: two letters written by the unreal girl, a locket engraved with her name on the back. And inside? A week before, Fern had disguised herself with a wig and makeup, slipped out of her clothes, taken a grainy photograph in half light. Sex might offer some protection, even if it was fictional. A sister would have been no armor at all.

Ben had no clear thoughts in his head. Without his sister and his home he felt that he might simply cease to exist. And that did not even take into account the air raids, the helicopters, the guns. He tapped his heart. His eyes darted.

“Stop being theatrical,” Evelyn said. “You are going to be no less safe than you would right here at home.” She knew she was cold. She tried to say she loved her son because she did — she had practiced saying it in her head but now her mouth was unmoved. Paul stood by, still circling a headache, trying to comprehend what was real.

Fern hugged Ben. She felt the body that had once been her counterpart, such a different body from the one she had lately been snuggling into. Ben smelled like he had not showered in too long. “You just have to go unnoticed,” she whispered. It seemed like his best hope — so far, he had done this without trying. “Call me and I’ll come rescue you anytime. We’ll all run away to Italy.” His eyes looked foggy.

Ben started to laugh and could not stop. At first they all laughed with him, his parents in their summer linens, his sister in a sundress, none of them knowing what the joke had been, all of them trying to survive an unsurvivable moment, but then they stopped laughing and Ben kept going and going. He laughed while they hugged him and put him in the car. He was still laughing when the door closed and sealed him into the chamber, still laughing when Evelyn tapped on the trunk to tell the chauffeur, Okay, all set. Take him away .

Fern called Edgar from the phone in the hallway. He did not ask her to explain anything, just listened while she wept.

—

Edgar went back to college in the fall and they wrote letters while Fern took Home Economics with the blue-haired Mrs. Sparrow and Edgar studied Greek History and Sociology, subjects his parents would never have approved of. It was 1965. Most of the students looked the way they had for ten years: smooth hair, neat dresses and pants. A cigarette if they were feeling rebellious. Maybe they drank beer. There were a few boys who grew their hair long. Jack Kerouac was on certain bookshelves. There was a new thing to smoke. On the weekends, a new kind of girl showed up from other campuses, from the city, wearing jeans and cropped shirts, pale bellies exposed to the sun. Edgar stood at the outskirts of the tame anti-war protests on campus and once went to New York for a bigger one, but like most of the students he also went to class on time and studied in the library, some because they were good kids on their way to good lives and others because college was their pass out of the draft. Edgar read Marx and he also read William Butler Yeats. He listened to folk music while he studied sine, cosine, tangent. He tacked up a picture of Malcolm X on his dorm wall and then he put his head down and wrote his papers and passed his tests.

Edgar and Fern confessed the things that young lovers do: my parents are horrid; it feels as if there’s a hole in me that needs filling; I worry about the way I look; I worry about dying and other times I wonder if dying is the answer; I want a different kind of life, a bigger life; the world is terrifying and unjust and we have to change it. They wrote the names of big cities as shorthand for A place where no one is watching : New York, San Francisco, Paris. I’ve never met anyone like you, Edgar wrote. How was it that out of the perfectly tended soil these two weeds had been allowed to grow?

They wanted to travel but not in the luxury their parents did: they imagined riding the mail boat through Polynesian islands, a rickety train filled with the smoke of a coal-powered samovar across the USSR. Fern said she wanted to be an archaeologist. Edgar did not know what he wanted to be but not because he was stagnant. He was a typhoon inside, a fast-moving storm, the whole brunt of which blew against . He did not want to own or be president of a steel company. He did not want to send lesser men into the mines to breathe the black air. He did not want to know the names of cigars or scotches or sit in endless conversation about which of the obviously crooked politicians would best protect his business interests. Edgar said all of this to Fern and Fern wrote back that she understood, that there were much more important things than money, that art mattered and education, justice. Knowledge, philosophy, poetry. Fern talked to Edgar about Ben who sent letters of quiet desperation. I have a black eye but it’s healing up. The guy in the bunk above me spits on me in my sleep. I keep my shoes shined. I miss you, I miss you, I miss you.

To Edgar she said, “If only my brother was a girl. They don’t send girls to war and my parents wouldn’t have cared what he turned out to be.”

“We could try to hide him. People are going to Canada.”

“Thank you for not telling me it’s going to be okay,” she said. They stayed on the phone all night talking about the ways they could save Ben and save the world and save each other. Fern’s window turned dawn-blue. She woke up still holding the phone to her ear. “Edgar?” she said into it but he did not answer. Then she listened again and heard his steady breathing, sure as sure.

—

Before Halloween, Edgar told his mother that he wanted to have Fern’s family over for Christmas dinner. Mary saw in her mind the effort and peril of a white-linen tablecloth and a roast goose, a hundred side dishes, each of which could be ruined a hundred different ways. “You had better really like this girl,” she said. Nothing would secure their stead better than a marriage into such an old family, Mary knew. She also knew that she would have to be the one to prove their worth again and again to these Old Moneys. For the next six weeks she thought of nothing but Christmas Eve. She had the cook practice each dish six times. She tried twelve different floral arrangements. She opened every drawer in the house every day, sure that on the night of the party someone would go snooping and find a mouse nest in the one place she had forgotten to check. Mary was a woman at war.