In New Orleans
A classmate, Robert Sproul, watched him cross the street. He carried his books over his shoulder, tied together in a green web belt with brass buckle. U.S. Marines. His shirt was torn along a seam. There was smeared blood at the corner of his mouth, a grassy bruise on his cheek. He came through the traffic and walked right past Robert, who hurried alongside, looking steadily at Lee to draw a comment.
They walked along North Rampart, on the edge of the Quarter, where a few iron-balconied homes still stood among the sheet-metal works and parking lots.
“Aren’t you going to tell me what happened?”
“I don’t know. What happened?”
“You’re bleeding from the mouth is all.”
“They didn’t hurt me.”
“Oh defiance. You’re my hero, Lee.”
“Keep walking.”
“They made you bleed. It looks like they rubbed your face in it all right.”
“They think I talk funny.”
“They roughed you up because you talk funny? What’s funny about the way you talk?”
“They think I talk like a Yankee.”
He seemed to be grinning. It was just like Lee to grin when it made no sense, assuming it was a grin and not some squint-eyed tic or something. You couldn’t always tell with him.
“We’ll go to my house,” Robert said. “We have eleven kinds of antiseptics.”
Robert Sproul at fifteen resembled a miniature college sophomore. White bucks, chinos, a button-down shirt open at the collar. This was the second time he’d encountered Lee in the streets after he’d been knocked around by someone. Some boys had given him a pounding down by the ferry terminal after he’d ridden in the back of a bus with the Negroes. Whether out of ignorance or principle, Lee refused to say. This was also like him, to be a misplaced martyr and let you think he was just a fool, or exactly the reverse, as long as he knew the truth and you didn’t.
It occurred to Robert that there was, as a matter of fact, a trace of Northern squawk in Lee’s speech, although you could hardly blame him for it, knowing what you knew of his mixed history.
He spent serious time at the library. First he used the branch across the street from Warren Easton High School. It was a two-story building with a library for the blind downstairs, the regular room above. He sat cross-legged on the floor scanning titles for hours. He wanted books more advanced than the school texts, books that put him at a distance from his classmates, closed the world around him. They had their civics and home economics. He wanted subjects and ideas of historic scope, ideas that touched his life, his true life, the whirl of time inside him. He’d read pamphlets, he’d seen photographs in Life. Men in caps and worn jackets. Thick-bodied women with scarves on their heads. People of Russia, the other world, the secret that covers one-sixth of the land surface of the earth.
The branch was small and he began to use the main library at Lee Circle. Corinthian columns, tall arched windows, a rank of four librarians at the desk on the right as you enter. He sat in the semicircular reading room. All kinds of people here, different classes and manners and ways of reading. Old men with their faces in the page, half asleep, here to escape whatever is out there. Old men crossing the room, men with bread crumbs in their pockets, foreigners, hobbling.
He found names in the catalogue that made him pause with a strange contained excitement. Names that were like whispers he’d been hearing for years, men of history and revolution. He found the books they wrote and the books written about them. Books wearing away at the edges. Books whose titles had disappeared from the spines, faded into time. Here was
Das Kapital,
three volumes with buckled spines and discolored pages, with underlinings, weird notes in an obsessive hand. He found mathematical formulas, sweeping theories of capital and labor. He found
The Communist Manifesto.
It was here in German and in English. Marx and Engels. The workers, the class struggle, the exploitation of wage labor. Here were biographies and thick histories. He learned that Trotsky had once lived, in exile, in a working-class area of the Bronx not far from the places Lee had lived with his mother.
Trotsky in the Bronx. But Trotsky was not his real name. Lenin’s name was not really Lenin. Stalin’s name was Dzhugashvili. Historic names, pen names, names of war, party names, revolutionary names. These were men who lived in isolation for long periods, lived close to death through long winters in exile or prison, feeling history in the room, waiting for the moment when it would surge through the walls, taking them with it. History was a force to these men, a presence in the room. They felt it and waited.
The books were struggles. He had to fight to make some elementary sense of what he read. But the books had come out of struggle. They had been struggles to write, struggles to live. It seemed fitting to Lee that the texts were often masses of dense theory, unyielding. The tougher the books, the more firmly he fixed a distance between himself and others.
He found enough that he could understand. He could see the capitalists, he could see the masses. They were right here, all around him, every day.
Marguerite browned flour in a heavy-bottomed pan. They watched each other eat. She was always right there, hands busy, eyes bright behind the dark-rimmed glasses. He could see the strain and aging in her face, the flesh going taut at the hairline, and he felt something between pity and contempt. They watched TV in the next room. Miniature willow baskets hung on the wall. Her skull was showing through.
“Lillian says I spoil you to a T. You think you own me, she says.”
“I’m your son. You have to do what I want.”
“I admit this, which I shouldn’t say a word, but your brothers were a burden on my back. They demanded attention which it was not humanly possible to give. This is where the human element comes in. When I think of all the tragedies. Your daddy felt a pain in his arm, out mowing. The next thing I know.”
“They’re in the service to get away from you.”
“When I think of being a grandparent who is denied affection. We ate red beans and rice on Mondays. I took you to Godchaux’s in a stroller.”
Ever since he could remember, they’d shared cramped spaces. It was the basic Oswald memory. He could smell the air she moved through, could smell her clothes hanging behind a door, a tropical mist of corsets and toilet water. He entered bathrooms in the full aura of her stink. He heard her mutter in her sleep, grinding the death’s-head teeth. He knew what she would say, saw the gestures before she made them.
“I am entitled to better.”
“So am I. I’m the one. I have rights,” he said.
He helped her hang half-moon wall shelves. He would find a communist cell and become a member. This was a city with a hundred kinds of foreigners and ideas and influences. There were people who ran ads in the paper to seek favors of a patron saint. There were people who wore berets, who did not speak ten words of English. Down at the docks he saw oppressed workers unloading ninety-pound banana stems from Honduras. He would find a cell, be given tasks to prove himself.
“Lillian expects endless thanks. She lives off thank-yous and you’re-welcomes.”
“She thinks we’re one jump up from handouts in the street.”
“She thinks we’re beholden,” Marguerite said. “I was a popular child. I am willing to stand on the facts.”
They’d lived with her sister Lillian on French Street. They took an apartment on St. Mary Street, eventually moving to a cheaper apartment in the same building. Then they moved to the Quarter.
He is a quiet and studious boy who demands his meals, like any boy.
“The Claveries were poor but not unhappy. We ate red beans and rice on Mondays. Just because she let us stay a few weeks, I know what she says behind my back. They talk and make up stories, which I am not surprised. They have hidden reasons they aren’t telling for how they feel. They say I fly off too quick on the handle. I just can’t get along, so-called. They never say it could be they’re the ones at fault. They’re the ones you can’t reason with. She says I take one little word and make a difference, out of it, which stands between us until we see each other on the street when it’s ‘Oh hello, how are you, come see us real soon.’ ”
“She thinks because she gives me money to rent a bike.”
They lived in a three-story building in an alley that opened onto Canal Street, the dodging bodies and shopwindows glaring hot. The building had arched entranceways with decorative crests. That’s what Marguerite liked most. It was otherwise a sad show. Lee had the bedroom, she took the studio couch.
In St. Louis Cemetery Number One he sees an old Negro snoring in his stocking feet, body propped against one of the oven vaults, the sun beating down on smashed amber glass.
They watched each other eat. He practiced chess moves at the kitchen table. She described houses and yards and furniture way back to the early decades of the century, in New Orleans, where she was raised, a happy child. He knew these things were important. He did not deny the value of what she said or the power of the images she carried with her. These were important things, family, money, the past, but they did not touch his real life, the inward-spinning self, and he let her voice fall through a hole in the air.
He sees a tough-looking Mexican or whatever he is suddenly strike a female pose outside a bar, getting a laugh from his friends.
He had his one-volume encyclopedia of the world, which his aunt Lillian said he read like a boy’s novel of the sea. Kinetic energy. Grand Coulee Dam. He would join a communist cell. They would talk theory into the night. They would give him tasks to perform, night missions that required intelligence and stealth. He would wear dark clothes, cross rooftops in the rain.
How many people know a killdeer is a bird?
He got a letter from his brother Robert, his full brother, who was still in the Marines. He took a page out of his spiral notebook and replied at once, mainly answering questions. He liked his brother but was certain Robert didn’t know who he was. It was the age-old family mystery. You don’t know who I am. Robert was named for their father, Robert E. Lee Oswald. That’s where his own name came from, Lee. His father was at the end of the Lakeview line, turning to chalk.
“I took you to Godchaux’s to see the flag, the two of us. The war was on and we lived on Pauline Street and they hung a seven-story flag right down the front of Godchaux’s, where I bought my light-gray suit which I am wearing in the photo with Mr. Ekdahl, which is shortly after our marriage. A seven-story American flag. This is when you caused a flurry with Mrs. Roach, throwing an iron toy.”
He wanted to write a story about one of the people at the library for the blind. That was the only way to imagine their world.
Marguerite had blue eyes and dark lashes. She was a sales clerk and cashier, working near the hosiery shop she’d managed, about a dozen years earlier, on Canal Street, before they fired her. She could not add or subtract was the stated reason. Marguerite knew better, felt the vibrations, heard the whispers of nasty attitude, of grudge against the world, which wasn’t as bad as the time she was fired from Lerner’s in New York because they said she did not use deodorant. This was not true because she used a roll-on every day and if it didn’t work the way it said on TV, why should she be singled out as a social misfit? New York was not behind the times in strange smells.
He did his homework at the kitchen table, questions only morons would want to answer. She woke him up for school by clapping her hands in the doorway, insistently, the fingers of one hand tapping the palm of the other. Something in him turned to murder at the sight of her, sometimes, in the street, coming toward him unexpectedly. He heard her footsteps, heard her key in the lock. The voice called out from the kitchen, the toilet flushed. He knew the inflections and the pauses, knew what she would say, word for word, before she spoke. She tapped her hands in the doorway. Rise and shine.
“It is evident,” he read, “that the definition of capital-value invested in labor-power as circulating capital is a secondary one, obliterating its specific difference in the process of production.”
He tried to talk politics with Robert Sproul’s sister, mainly to say something. They played chess on a closed porch at the Sproul house. Robert sat nearby doing a term paper on the history of air power.
She was a year older than Lee, soft-skinned, blond, with a serious mouth. He had a feeling she tried not to look too pretty. There were girls like that, hiding behind a surface of neatness and reserve.
“Eisenhower gets off too easy,” Lee was saying, “and I can give you a good example.”
“I don’t think you can but go ahead.”
“It was Eisenhower and Nixon who killed the Rosenbergs. Guaranteed. They’re the ones responsible.”
“Well that’s just you’re daydreaming.”
“Well no I’m not.”
“There was a trial unless I’m sadly mistaken,” she said.
“Ike is a well-known boob. He could have stopped the execution.”
“Like a movie, I suppose?”
“Do you know who the Rosenbergs are, even?”
“I just said there was a trial.”
“But the hidden factors, the things that don’t get out.”
She gave him a tight look. She was just the right height. Not too tall. He liked her air of restraint, the way she moved the pieces on the board, almost bashfully, giving no hint of the winning or losing involved. It made him feel animated and rash, a chess genius with dirty fingernails. There was a mother or father moving around inside the house.
“I read all about the Rosenbergs when I was in New York,” he said. “They were railroaded to the chair. The idea was to make all communists look like traitors. Ike could have done something.”
“He did do something. He played golf,” Robert said.