Authors: True Believers
Chuck seemed to be replaying Hendrix songs in his head as we walked out. His eyes were huge, and his breath sounded like a horse snorting.
Because of our mescaline plan, and my fear that I would be unable to distinguish between hallucinogenic and hypoglycemic effects, I’d brought along six Hershey bars to keep myself sugared up. I was eating the fourth as we walked past the West Side Tennis Club’s mock-Tudor clubhouse.
I mainly pretended but almost believed we were in England. Specifically in the south, in Kent, near Sandwich.
“The Royal St. Marks!” I said, my mouth full of chocolate glop.
As Chuck grinned, his lips and teeth seemed to stretch halfway around his head. The Royal St. Marks is the country club where Bond beats Goldfinger in a round of golf. Then I couldn’t remember for sure if the scene was in the movie or in the novel or both, which prompted me to gobble the rest of my Hershey bar.
On the subway back to Manhattan, we said nothing for a long time. The sounds of wheels on tracks and the metal-on-metal shrieks of the train’s turns were music, a Hendrix encore. The ride seemed to take hours. A middle-aged couple sat down across from us, talking loudly in some Eastern European language. Chuck leaned over and whispered, “Soon we’ll be in Belgrade, Tanya. Sorry I dosed you earlier.”
I grinned, and nodded, and clasped his hand tighter inside both of mine. In
From Russian with Love,
the assassin Red Grant puts a drug in Tatiana Romanova’s drink aboard the
Orient Express.
I felt comforted at that moment. It was as if we had played our children’s games in order to learn a private language we could speak when we were no longer children but still together.
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.
The Eastern Europeans had been replaced by three young black men. I reminded myself that despite appearances, this was not a supernatural transformation, that I’d simply missed seeing the old folks get off and the young guys get on. One of them kept staring at us. Chuck, looking back and smiling, raised the first two fingers of his left hand in a V, which made the black kid look away.
As we understood it, a hundred hours earlier and ten miles west, crowds of black people had spontaneously formed into platoons of street-fighting guerrillas. There had been riots earlier that summer—in Houston after a white cop shot a black child, in Tampa after a white cop shot a black teenager, in Buffalo, Hartford, Atlanta, even in some small town in Iowa—but these riots right across the Hudson River, provoked by the arrest and fatal beating of a black cabdriver by white cops, were huge and escalating.
And that mob of chittering, screeching girls in Forest Hills who wanted Jimi Hendrix yanked off and replaced by four white boys, they were the brainwashed baby flying monkeys of the same rotten system.
No wonder Negroes feel like killing white people,
I thought, and then I revised my thought, replacing “Negroes” with “black people.”
“Brainwashed flying monkeys” was a phrase of Chuck’s in one of the sixteen letters he sent me that summer, what he called in another of the letters “our last months apart forever.”
After I introduced Chuck to Sarah that week in New York, she told me she understood why I was “gaga for the guy,” but that he “gives off a vibe like he’s keeping some big secret. Although maybe that’s just being Jewish. Which is like being a better-behaved Italian.”
When I returned home from New York in August, I was delighted to see Alex. He had fully come to terms with the three of us accommodating the Karen-and-Chuck romantic subunit. He’d also become more entertainingly fake-British—his favorite adverb was “frightfully,” New York City sounded “brilliant” although my work in the Dump Johnson office was “bollocks,”
Sgt. Pepper’s
was “a complete load of shite.” He couldn’t stop talking about the charms of Eastern Europe, especially of his new thirty-four-year-old friend Darko, an up-and-coming leader of the Yugoslavian Communist party. “He’s progressive and completely charismatic, sort of like their John Lindsay,” and he had played for a professional soccer team called Partizan—all of which Chuck and I had to admit sounded pretty cool. And Bondlike.
I didn’t ask Violet what she thought of all the ghetto uprisings, because I knew from the last two summers that she was ashamed of them. (She’d also told me once that she hated the word “ghetto,” that she’d “never even
heard
of it until around the World War II time.”) On the Friday morning before Labor Day weekend, as I helped her fold sheets, she used her inhaler twice. I asked if she was okay.
“Oh, it’s this rotten
humidity.
”
“It was really humid in New York.” And jam-packed with black people! “Did you know I lived in Harlem?” This was only a slight exaggeration.
“You did
not,
Kay-Ray!”
“The dorm was on 119th, and Harlem’s main street is 125th.”
“Did your parents know that?”
“Uh-huh.”
She shook her head. “I’m glad
I
didn’t know.”
“How’s the handicapping been going?”
She shook her head again. “I’m glad you weren’t here to waste your money on me. I done no better than
show
in three weeks. Kay-Ray is my lucky charm.” She grinned at me. “I got a real good one today, though.”
I was now old enough to make bets myself. “I can go out to the track if you want. One last bet before I go to college!”
“No, you’re busy, honey.”
“I’ve got nothing to do but pack. And Chuck and I are going to a concert tonight at the Cellar”—Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, more music I didn’t really get—”which is right near the track, so we can make your bet on the way.”
Violet wasn’t resisting my offer. “She’s a long shot, but you’ll like her, Kay-Ray.” When she told me the name of the horse, I blushed.
My mom and her purse were at the beauty parlor, so I swiped four dollars from Sabrina’s stupid little safe—the combination was 6, 23, 12, 11, the numbers of Paul, John, and the two Piuses, the last four popes. Chuck and I drove out to the track and smoked a joint in the parking lot. The plan was to pop into the racetrack, place the bet on Violet’s horse in the eighth, and go spend the rest of the afternoon hanging out in one of the big, wild parks just beyond Arlington Heights. But Chuck made us stay for an hour, betting our own money and losing two dollars every race, because he loved watching the horses running on Arlington Park’s enormous new closed-circuit color TV screen, the largest on earth. “It’s like the gigantic telescreen in the Ministry of Truth,” he said.
1984
was his favorite novel. “I wonder if they ever show real TV on it. Imagine watching the
news
on this, footage from Vietnam. Imagine watching
Johnson
giving a
speech
from the
Oval Office.
” I did imagine, and it gave me the creeps, as did the anxiety and hysteria radiating from the crowd during each race, so we left and drove out to the woods and listened to the birdsong.
The next morning my family left for Oconomowoc Lake for the Labor Day weekend, but I stayed home. Sometime that Saturday afternoon, just before Chuck was supposed to pick me up to go see
Bonnie and Clyde,
I remembered the bet for Violet and dug the newspaper out of the trash to check the results—and discovered that, holy moly,
yes,
Violet’s horse had gone off at fourteen-to-one and
won.
I got Violet’s number off the yellowed note card thumbtacked to the kitchen bulletin board and, for the first time in my life, phoned her. I was thrilled for Violet—her winnings were as much as she earned in a week—but also pleased by the good omen for myself, by the improbable victory of a long-shot filly called Chuck’s Sweetie.
“Hi, this is Karen Hollaender. May I speak to Violet, please?”
“Hello, Miss Hollaender, this is Reggie Woods, Violet’s son.”
“Hello!” I’d never met him. I’d never met any member of Violet’s family. “I have some great news for your mother!”
There was a long pause, and I heard voices in the background before he spoke again.
I don’t know if he realized I was crying as he explained to me what had happened, that she’d had a bad asthma attack around midnight and called three times for an ambulance that never came, that she phoned him and he finally found a taxi at two
A.M.
and took her to the hospital, that she’d had a heart attack in the emergency room. And died.
My cheeks, my chin, my neck, even the top of my blouse was wet. “I am so sorry about your mother.”
“Her horse you bet at Arlington? She
knew
she won that, she was real excited yesterday afternoon, so happy about that, she called me and my brother, Randall, about that—and said she called you, too, but nobody was at home.”
“I loved her. I really loved her.”
“She loved you, too. She sure did.”
There was no phone at the lake house, so I couldn’t call my parents to tell them. When Chuck showed up, I sobbed again, this time noisily.
I had a horrible thought: maybe Violet’s excitement over Chuck’s Sweetie had triggered the asthma attack. Which would make me responsible for her death. I went to the bathroom to see if my distress might be partly hypoglycemic, and when some of my tears dripped into the Dixie cup of urine, I started crying again and had to start over and pee into a fresh cup. The strip turned a deep blue, which meant my blood sugar was low.
I took the orange juice from the icebox and guzzled it straight from the plastic pitcher.
“You know,” Chuck said, “it sounds to me like she died because she was poor and black. If some white lady on Lake Shore Drive was having an attack, you can bet the ambulance would be there in five minutes.”
My family and I were the only white people at Violet’s funeral. I was shocked to learn that she was fifty-one, just a few years older than my parents. She had always seemed ancient. I handed Reggie the fifty-seven dollars she’d won. And I was appalled by the fact, which I realized as I shook hands with him and his brothers, that they were the first black men I’d ever touched.
The riots had continued the rest of the summer all over the country, a new one every few days, each one put down by National Guard troops, thousands of black people thrown in jail. I took no pleasure in reading about policemen killed and stores looted and buildings torched, I told myself, any more than officials in Washington took pleasure in the destruction of Vietnamese towns and the deaths of Vietnamese women and children. What he’d learned from World War II, my dad always said, from Dresden and Hiroshima and even his own experiences in Denmark, is that history doesn’t happen cleanly or easily. Pain and ugliness and horror and regret are always part of the price of freedom and justice, he told me, and once a war starts, “good guys do terrible things.”
My last night before I left for college, I was watching the evening news with my family. During the commercial after a report about “ ‘black power’ and the militant young Negroes who espouse it,” I said that I’d told Reggie Woods at the funeral that he ought to sue the city of Chicago for violating the Civil Rights Act by failing to send an ambulance for Violet.
My parents both nodded. My mother said that when I grew up, I could be the first woman on the Supreme Court.
“It’s terrible what happened to Violet,” Dad said. “But you know, these days, this summer, a Friday night, after midnight, Negro snipers shooting at white men in uniforms—I bet those ambulance attendants were
terrified
to go into Violet’s neighborhood. I would be.”
My mother tensed up, anticipating my outrage.
“My God,” I said, “that is
grotesque,
Dad! You’re
excusing
it? By blaming the victims? Now it’s black people’s fault that the system is screwing them over?”
“Honey,” my mom said, “your
language.
”
“Fuck my language.”
Had the word “fuck” ever been uttered in our house before that evening in 1967? Sabrina shook her head and went upstairs, but Peter, on the sofa, put his arms around his knees, eyes wide open and hunkered down the way he did when a TV show engaged him, dying to see what would happen next.
My father, damn him, sagely smiled. “Our Radcliffe freshman has become a woman of the world.”
“By the way?
We
probably contributed to Violet’s death, too. Chuck says his aunt has asthma and can’t be around Windex or Pledge or anything, and what did Violet do here all day long? Breathe in cleaning sprays.”
The news came back on, and we sat in silence during a report about the intensified U.S. bombing campaign against Vietnam, and the Johnson administration’s claim that it was all about “bringing the Communists to the peace table.”
“War is peace, just like in
1984,
” I said. They showed a clip of an air force fighter-bomber being struck by a North Vietnamese SAM missile and disintegrating in midair, and I muttered, “Bull’s-eye.”
My mother gasped. “That’s a terrible thing to say.”
“It’s a terrible war we’re waging on a country that can’t do us any harm.”
“I agree, you know I completely agree, but there was a man in that plane who died. An American
person.
”
“Who had probably killed a hundred Vietnamese
people
five minutes earlier. I hate to tell you, Mom, but the war’s going to be stopped by them winning, not by you and me disapproving of it and wearing peace buttons. Not as long as these … fucking fascists are in charge.”
I had at last made my father angry. “Young lady,” he said, “do not use that word.”
“Okay, is this better? This genocidal war will continue and expand as long as these fascists are in charge.”
“
Goddammit,
Karen, no, I mean
that
word, ‘fascist’—they’re bloody-minded, Johnson and the rest, stupid, tragic fools, but this country is
not
fascist. And the war’s a horror show, but it is not genocide. I lived through fascism. I saw genocide.”
“Maybe that’s why you can’t see
this
evil, now, for what it is—”