After the War: A Novel

PART I

Nineteen-Forty-Eight

1

YOU REMEMBER HOW IT was in those years after the war; everybody expecting a new life, everybody full of urgency, myself not least of all. Coming back from the Army a year before I had tried to go and live with my mother—my father had left us years before—until I knew what I wanted to do. That didn’t work for long, surprising no one.

So it was that I began a system of living, if I can call it by so precise a name, in the apartments of friends, or friends of friends, who were not in occupancy at the time. I had read somewhere that the poet Rilke lived in his wealthy friends’ summer houses in the winter and winter houses in the summer. Since my aim was to be a writer, though nothing so arcane as a poet, it seemed both appropriate and practical. It simply meant that I sometimes had to clear out on some very short notice. But I was no great possessor of things and dispossession was no great discomfort. I imagine Rilke suffered more from the European winter cold in those flimsy aristocratic dwellings than I did in my succession of borrowed cold-water flats.

I had come back from Europe suffering from a degenerative nerve disease. It was an unusual one. The army doctors could not even agree whether the mild chest wound I’d gotten at Salerno triggered it or not. In any case the prognosis was unanimous if indefinite: I would die from it some time in the future. The time-span allotted varied from six months to two years to ten years … or more.

There’s no way to figure it closer than that, the doctor at the Base hospital at Fort Meade had said. His name was Major Cotter and he spoke from within the sanctuary of a massive neck brace; his head protruded like the tip of a turtle from the safety of its shell. I only saw the major twice in my life; both times he wore the brace. Thus, to me, this rigidity was his natural condition. It seemed to give added strength to his statements.

I’m glad you told me, I’d said.

I’m not so sure, Major Cotter said.

Oh?

It’s just that I haven’t told you anything, really.

Yes, I said. Outside his window I could see soldiers drilling. They looked funny seen from a hospital window; toy soldiers.

No, the doctor said. Everybody’s going to die. The question of when gets to be crucial when it’s a year or so … or even definitely a couple of years. But this indefinite thing. It’s so …

Indefinite?

Well put. His grin was like a grimace of pain sent from within the mysterious reaches of the confining brace. We don’t know enough about how it operates. I mean—we can’t tell you just what to expect in the way of symptoms. Oh, hell—the reason I’m not sure it was right to tell you is just that there’s nothing for you to do except go home and live your life the way anybody else would.

Except …

He nodded and cleared his throat nervously. It was an animal growl from a prehistoric creature—from a time when all men had neck braces and communicated to each other by means of sympathetically clearing their throats from behind their constricting armor.

Except! he said. It was final; as final as the good-bye that followed. He was writing something on my papers when I left. I’ll never know what it was he wrote. But the upshot was: the Army could not decide that my illness was service-connected. Nor could they decide that it was not. So—any disability money was held up pending investigation. The investigation took seven years and is settled now. But the period with which I am presently concerned was the limbo before the decision.

I went back home, to live my life like anybody else would, as Major Cotter pleasantly put it. By the time I met Jemmy my program was in full swing and I was living in the apartment of a girl named Nina. Nina was a friend of a girl with whom I’d had an affair when I was first discharged from the Army. That’s how it was in those days: very complicated in a flat, simple sort of way. I told no one, not even my mother or my brother Larry, about my so-called fatal illness. If the Army could wait to decide about it—so could I.

Nina’s apartment was in an old, beat-up building on Second Avenue. It was here that I met the Greens (who brought Jemmy to me), Al Rourke, little Claude, Mr. Katz; all the companions of my own, personal postwar world.

It seems to me, now in retrospect, that the one thing we all had in common—a bourgeois couple turned bohemian, an Irish-Catholic in furious rebellion, a suicidal violinist-poet, myself—was imagination. It was the mark of the time. People who could never have imagined going to college were hopping out of the Army and into a university. It was the promise of the war: you could be whatever you wanted to be. From the red mouth of an exhausted Europe we seemed to be gathering some strange energy to believe in ourselves, once again.

You could practically smell it in the streets of New York that summer of nineteen-forty-eight. I, for example, had never thought I could be anything but a teacher. (My mother had never imagined anything more extraordinary.) Now, I was, or would be, a writer, studying at a creative writing workshop at The New School For Social Research on the G.I. Bill of Rights. One hundred and fifty million taxpayers were upholding my right to imagine myself into the state of being a writer!

It wasn’t only the G.I. Bill of Rights; it was the whole cockeyed country that had the feeling: okay, we did it. We won the war. Now our lives will change—onward and upward. All we have to do is to imagine the life that we want. To imagine—that simplest and most difficult of acts.

2

WILL GREEN HAD SOMEHOW gotten the idea that Claude was my girl. We had all come back to my place (Nina’s place) for coffee, after the Workshop class at the New School. The apartment was more emblematic of my life than it was of Nina’s, the owner of the premises. Cracked crockery, dusty records and springless sofas. Yet, I instinctively reasoned, it was not my apartment; thus, I was blameless and the physical chaos of my environment was entirely accidental.

She doesn’t seem your type, Will said.

She isn’t my girl, I said. Not that I understand what you think my type would be.

Someone more substantial. Sensitive, but still more of the—of what someone called the ‘bourgeois compromise.’

I forget who your someone is, but I think he referred to Man as the ‘bourgeois compromise.’ This was Jesse Green. The jab at Will was part of her style of marriage. It was a style Will seemed to accept as part of his fate, or perhaps the fate of all married couples.

Never mind that, he said. Can you see Richard and this violinist?

I think she’s kind of interesting.

That doesn’t answer the question.

There’s no question, I said. She just lives in the building.

It was one of those Second Avenue nights of the summers after the war; the windows were wide open letting in automobile sounds, conversation sounds, children sounds; New York sounds. There was a clinking, glassy sound echoing in the chambers of the air. Somebody, somewhere, was being very drunk in Polish. The city had opened wide, as it always does in summer. There were no doors; only windows and wind. Everyone was young. Youngest of all, according to Jesse Green, was Jemmy.

I think her father keeps her that way. I mean she wears all those wide skirts and she has these wide eyes.

The father was Jeremiah Gordon! The sonorous sound of the war in far-off places: This is Jeremiah Gordon, in Burma … in India … in Paris (before the city fell and after liberation). I didn’t know if I was interested in meeting the daughter of a companion to Prime Ministers and Presidents.

You won’t be going out with the father, Will commented. He’s much too busy.

And the daughter, I asked, isn’t she busy? Isn’t she helping to build the postwar world we all fought for?

She works for her old man, Will said. She’s sort of promised to help out with my magazine.

Guilty about Daddy’s money, Jesse said.

No thanks, I said. Not if she’s one of these Radcliffe girls, burning with guilt over the family fortune …

Jesse stood flatly before me. Don’t do Jemmy any favors, she said. I don’t know that she’ll be interested in a professional veteran and indigent student.

I hesitated before replying. Jesse was a doughy-figured girl, the size of a tombstone, with a plump, eager and uncharming smile, who wanted only to be a writer. She sat in the writing class like a stone statue, taking notes with stiff fingers, paralyzed with fear that the omnipotent teacher would call upon her to read something she’d written. Because Jesse had written nothing, as far as I knew, beyond the now mythic fragment of a novel which had won her admission to the class. When she poked ridicule at me and what I was doing, she was calling up, too, the fact that I had been writing a chapter a week of my book, every week of the class … the class that meant salvation to her and precisely seventy-five dollars a month—and my first literary audience—to me.

I was saved from the necessity of being merciful by Claude and Al Rourke banging their way into the apartment. If Jesse was tombstone-size, so was Claude; only instead of thick stone she was all scroll and grillwork, slender arms and legs with a narrow torso topped by a mad smile and wide-eyed frightened gaze.

Al towered over her. He was (and often described himself as) a walking cliché. He looked utterly Irish with his jutting chin, lake-blue eyes and versatile smiling mechanism. Standing in front of the mirror in my place, he would look ironically at me, over his shoulder, and say in a rich, beery brogue: Tell me again, perfessor, how there’s no sich thing as national character.

Strangely enough, on his entrance this evening he picked up the writing theme that I was just sidestepping for the sake of Jesse’s sensibilities. Standing beside the chipped mantelpiece, he set a bottle of Chianti down on it and said:

Ah, yez are all just imitation writers, hackin’ around in a two-bit classroom. Now me, I’m a writer.

How so, O scribe of Ireland? I asked.

Ask Mr. Katz, on my floor.

I asked you.

As Claude began to open her violin case and tune her resin-speckled violin, Al carefully measured Chianti into paper cups and said, Mr. Katz has a daughter and a married son in Richmond, Virginia. The son is supposed to send money. Thus, we can see that writing letters without sounding like a whining, neglected father would be a tough writing assignment. Ah, you should have read the missive; flashing prose replete with what Camus (that decadent Frog) calls a ‘virile tenderness.’

Oh, Will Green said, reaching for his cup of wine, Now we’re comparing ourselves to Camus, are we?

We are not interested in vulgar comparisons, Al said with a stern smile. But Mr. Katz was most generous. Hence the current Chianti. We will drink first. We have earned it. He couldn’t keep the tight smile from loosening into a grin.

Claude drew her bow across the violin strings; Bachchords. Somehow, on that cool summer night it seemed a natural sound, at one with the whap and slap of the tires that drifted up from the Avenue, with the noises of windows being closed and opened, of air conditioners humming, with the Polish gutturals the distant drunk was growling to the world at large. Claude gritted her teeth in a grimace. She had said nothing since coming into the apartment. Her coffee-colored eyes which usually bulged in a kind of thyroid wonder were lidded. I thought, She’s depressed, tonight. Perhaps we all are.

No! I refused to be depressed. The chords of the Bach G Minor Suite sounded sad? Nonsense! It was only a question of will to transform them into a smooth harmonic happiness. Wasn’t that, after all, the stock-in-trade with which I had come back to the city … will … with which I was to live in society but not by it: the young man with a plan. Disconnectionism I had named it at Fort Meade, Maryland, when I was being discharged from the Army. (Separated from the Service, they called it, prophetically.)

The day on which I finally became a civilian, I stood at the bus stop waiting to ride to the train that would take me back to New York. Suddenly, one of the barracks that studded the low horizon burst into yellow and orange flames. I remember the sound of the siren cutting into the calm, sleepy afternoon of the army post. And I remember the peculiar exaltation I felt as I watched the scurrying figures dance around the fire in their ritual of rescue. It was an elation of distance. I was standing quite still, but already the figures seemed to be glowing dimmer in my gaze.

There was a girl, an army nurse, a yellow-haired Marxist with whom I’d had a love affair, lying on the grass whispering of Spain and the Loyalists, singing Joe Hill in the Officers’ Club (and once being asked to leave). She might have been in that barracks, or nearby, but I never thought of the possible danger to her.

Separated from the Service, they called it. Truly, then, I had become separated.

FIRST UNSENT LETTER TO MY FATHER

Writing to a man with no address; perfect homework exercise. I will acquaint you, my father, with my self; and with none of the dangers of such a project—only the pleasures. An undated Diary, undiscovered by a stranger. An anti-history. Nothing developing, nothing happening. Start with random memories: things I might have told you had we been separated by accident of time or space, instead of by your will.

Random memories: the cemetery on the hill outside of Oran with the fat old lady selling flowers, collecting them from the graves after everybody went home and selling them again the next day. She tried it at the military cemetery once and two M.P.’s felt fully justified in beating her up. The day I gave my beautiful watch, the chronometer that told the date and the year, to a cavalry sergeant to hock for me because I was confined to the post (Camp Lee, Virginia, before going over). And he gave me the thirty dollars and a fake ticket, because he’d sold it, kept the difference and shipped out the next day. I never knew his name. I didn’t even care. Did the erosion of feeling start then, or before, or later? The only time I missed the watch was when I was in the Post hospital in Oran. It’s important to know what time it is in the hospital; otherwise pains and fears start being the timekeepers and measure out the days in their own ways. I remember when I was a kid on West End Avenue, Mother away working, leaving lunch for me in the icebox, coming home and eating alone in the empty apartment, listening to WNYC, His Honor the Mayor’s own station for beautiful classical music (The Midday Symphony: Twelve O’clock in New York, A City Where Seven and a Half Million People Live in Peace and Enjoy the Benefits of Democracy—). Then one day the phrase Live in Peace is eliminated. And one day I have a terrible earache and the neighbor calls my mother at work and my older brother, Larry, at school. … And in the hospital the big fat doctor who had no patience with me because I was crying all the time. What passionate grief and loneliness the self-pity of childhood carries. And the fat doctor who finally tied a red ribbon in my hair and said I was a girl because I cried all the time and I told my mother and she didn’t know whether to laugh at it or cry over it. She was of the generation that never knew what to do about their children unless they were sure it was the right thing to do. And to distract me from my own injustice-suffering she told me stories about you. The wild days when you were still a musician and the tight, tormented days when you started to teach. She told me how you left her—the way you tell children—which, like a fairy tale, has more horror than the grownup version.

Note: write sketch of the day you came back, saw your child (my brother Larry), stayed long enough to implant another child (me), and vanished forever. Oh, the fat doctor and his terrible red ribbon, where is he now?

3

CLAUDE WAS THE ONLY person I ever knew who brought me back to my book-choked childhood. She was involved with books in the simple, direct way some girls are involved with lovers (though God knows she had those, too). Her apartment, which actually was only a room with a screened-off kitchen, had books everywhere; scattered along the floor, alongside her bed, crawling out of the overstuffed bookcases. If you sat down on a chair, you sat down on a book. She spoke of them with the intimacy people reserve for lovers.

When I was in deep with Romain Rolland, about two years ago, she would say, "I couldn’t listen to any music except Beethoven. God, it was stifling."

Or—"Spinoza broke my back. After the way the Sanhedrin treated him … I mean, God they excommunicated him … after him I could never take being Jewish. Until the war and the Nazis, anyway."

Or—"What the hell can I do about Auden? I’ve read him and lived with him … but it’s not going anywhere. Not like the way it is with, say, Wallace Stevens. You know? God!"

Claude was about five feet two. She looked the way she spoke; a kind of walking exclamation point in the peculiar grammar of that old apartment house. Her violin playing was good; a little wild but full of flair. Her poetry was better. Whichever one you praised, she automatically became savagely defensive about the other. She was always having love affairs which left her absolutely drained of self-confidence. It seemed she had only to kiss someone to start toying with ideas of suicide. There was either something erotic, to her, about death; or something deathly about the erotic and even the mildly romantic.

She improvised everything: unaccompanied sonatas in the style of Bach, love affairs, financial matters. We all did this last, in those days, but her style was the wildest; life-and-death loans negotiated in the middle of the night from recent lovers or soon-to-be lovers. She was innocent of all guile and of all ability to see ahead for more than twenty-four hours. She might very well have loaned someone else her last dollar before desperately starting to scrounge some money from me or from Al Rourke, who lived on the landing opposite her apartment.

As a matter of strange fact, it was from Claude that I learned one particular trick of financial survival that in the long run helped to get me through that difficult spring of nineteen-forty-eight. She was a mad messenger bringing me instructions scrawled in some indecipherable tongue.

4

THROUGH A SIMPLE COINCIDENCE I was living on Second Avenue and Twelfth Street. But it seemed more like fate. All around me, shimmering in a neon net, were the remnants of my prewar life. The whole neighborhood was like a teeming museum. Exhibit I: Second Avenue itself. It was, in those days, the spiritual western border of that mystic entity, the Lower East Side. The purple snake of the East River, flecked with the beautiful white condoms of my childhood dreams, was one boundary; Delancey Street, where the babble of foreign tongues became Babel, was the southern edge; and Second Avenue marked the western perimeter, because beyond lay the mendicant desert of Third Avenue, roaring drunk under the roaring Elevated. It made Second Avenue the last outpost of goodness, with its rudely hospitable dairy restaurants, its eternally dying Yiddish theaters, its sprinkling of Poles and Italians, of children who talked tough but who really were frightened of their parents.

But this is not to be a fond memoir of that territory that haunts the educated imagination today. Because I came back to it as a ghost, myself. I did not even tell my mother where I was living. I called her when I chose, and visited her only unexpectedly. I prowled, unhailed, through the streets where I had grown up; past Exhibit II: the Music School where I battled with Sevczik and Kreutzer, the Stalin and Hitler of my pallid violin; past Exhibit III: the Public Library whose shelves were always peopled with my imaginary books; past Exhibit IV: the Synagogue from which I fled, trailing my forgotten phylacteries, running from its sardonic question—if not to me, then to what?

To nothing, to myself, to a blind date the Greens have arranged to solve my life for me, to a contest with the interior of the world in which I will prove that one can live on the rim of the Earth.

Once, when the writing was going slowly, and I was walking along Second Avenue as if in a dream, a voice called out to me. I stopped. It was a beautiful girl wearing a bright pink spring coat; a locket watch dangled from