back home the man pauses for a last breath of the outdoor air; the dog’s nose nuzzles his hand. She bows, wriggles, cavorts, goes belly up, eyes rolling in frantic appreciation:
walker on hindlegs, hurler of sticks, foodgiver, builder of shelter, toolmaker,
creation’s lord, initiator, master of Yes and No;
wagging dog-Shakespeare her tail declaims:
Oh paragon of animals.
IT BECOMES NECESSARY
by Ward Moore
It was just about twenty-five years ago, as a high school student, during the period of hope between the Great Depression and the pre-war “recession,” that I first read Dos Passos’ U.S.A.
That was the day of the WPA, PWA, CCC, and NYA. In my school in the Bronx, a dollar was enough for an evening’s date; none of my friends owned a car; the burning question among Young Intellectuals was whether to take the Ludlow Oath (never to fight in a war) or to support Collective Security (economic sanctions against fascist and militarist nations). Compulsory military service in peacetime was a practice of undemocratic foreign governments. We worried about civil rights; we were proud that this country held no political prisoners.
The prevailing intellectual tone was agnostic: religious instruction in the public schools was as unthinkable as sex education was unobtainable. The only really strong opposition to Communism here was from the extreme right wing— and the Trotskyites. The failure of the League of Nations had undermined any hope for world government.
In the quarter century since then, we have been acutely conscious of the changes in our physical existence. Synthetic fabrics, antibiotics, the home freezer, television, transistors, fm radio, cloud seeding, DDT, jet planes, radar, atomic reactors — all these were unknown, and almost undreamed, twenty-five years ago.
But the social and political changes — good and bad both — and both greater than all the changes In the first hundred and fifty years of American history — have crept in on us, almost unawares…
She sat there thinking. These chairs were never designed for living women, only mannikins. You had to be wax or plastic or whatever they made them out of, with Brancusi heads for pillared hats (the cult of Nefertiti, like that of the Druids, domesticated for Macy’s and Gimbels) and lower extremities in the best tradition of Albert the Good. Ten years younger, and she could do a nice paper for Sociology 2—or would it be European History 4?—on the Victorianism of the French, or, Why Was Louis Napoleon Little? Whatever happened to feminism? Her feet ached.
Hot water. Surely there was nothing unreasonable about hot water. Fifty thousand bathtubs in lower Manhattan, five million in New York (Oh God, why did I ever start on this, with my head for statistics?). . Even in England, with the stoic revulsion against comfort, it wasn’t too hard to get. Only here in France, in mobilized, dedicated, redeemed, righteous France, with everyone sacrificing to the point of ecstasy, was there suspicion attached to such use of patriotic resources.
She sipped the beer which she found completely revolting. I have no business here, she told herself for the fiftieth time, no business whatever. I could be asleep in that kennel they call a hotel, or could have gotten decently drunk, or thrown myself in the Seine (Paris is worth a Mass — but not to me) instead of torturing myself with this filthy chair and this filthy drink in this filthy café in this filthy city. Oh heavens…
He slid into the seat opposite so quickly that he was there, established, before she was aware of him. He was big, with a crooked nose and light eyes and freckled, hairy hands which he placed on the table like an offering. “Mrs. Fieldman?”
I don’t have to answer, she assured herself, I really don’t have to answer. I didn’t agree to any meeting. I’ve promised nothing; I’m not committed even to acknowledge my name. I can jump up and say, Sir! or just look haughty, or walk away. But of course I’ve been so conditioned against making a scene (Concord and Lexington were in bad taste, the fall of the Bastille would have shocked Emily Post and we don’t even think of the storming of the Winter Palace), I’m not going to do anything except sit here and listen to this fat man — he isn’t really fat; I’ve just been out of the country so long that anyone who eats steak regularly looks fat — and hear him patiently through. Hate him? Naturally I hate him. He’s one of them, isn’t he?
“Mrs. Fieldman— Do you want to see my credentials, by the way?”
“No.”
“That’s good. Because I could hardly carry them in enemy territory, could I?”
“France isn’t enemy territory,” she said more pedantically than she meant because she hadn’t intended to talk to him in anything but monosyllables. “It’s only one of the policing nations which—”
“ ‘Policing nations.’” He didn’t raise his voice; he expressed his disgust softly, with a soft sneer, a soft contempt. ‘The U.S. isn’t a two-bit country to be policed. If there’s policing to be done, we do it. Policing nations, Third Force! Who do they think they are?”
She shrugged her shoulders. Answering rhetorical questions only got you started on a treadmill.
He made an observable effort to be soothing, earnest, confident, winning. “Mrs. Fieldman, you have an opportunity—”
“Oh God,” she said, “the opportunities I’ve had. When I consider my moderation, I’m amazed at my opportunities. This time no doubt it’s to serve my country.”
She thought his pale eyes wavered just a little. “Well, it is your country.”
“Is it? I understood, or read in the paper, or something, that my citizenship was voided.”
He regarded her through partly closed lids. How silly, she thought; like a parlor hypnotist or something: the hard look. Really, they picked the stupidest men for agents. It’s a pattern, I guess. William S. Hart, the frontier marshal, steel-eyed character. “That disability can be removed.”
“What’s done can be undone?”
“Sure. Sometimes. Especially in the case of native-born.”
“The March on Washington can be reversed, the Defenders of the Constitution can bow out, Regulations can be replaced by laws again, the disfranchised minorities can be reinfranchised, the dead restored to life?”
He leaned back in the chair, obviously never meant to accommodate a man of his weight. “Little lady,” he said easily, “why do you bother your pretty head about crap like that? Sure, they lynched a few coloreds and booted out a few Jews, but what’s that between you and me?”
You just can’t ever tell, she thought; I’d have sworn (an archaic expression) he was the type to say between you and I. You never know, do you? ‘This”: she began, hoping she was speaking judicially, implacably, with a haughty calm which should make him quail, yet feeling pretty sure she was only sounding feminine and hysterical, “is the destruction of a democratic system which may not have worked too well but which was infinitely better (in kind, not just in degree) than the totalitarianism you replaced it with. Monstrousness, brutality, beastliness, the killing or exiling of those who couldn’t be numbed or corrupted, moral and political bankruptcy— Oh, hell, I can’t talk about it without bleating like an orator…”
“We all make mistakes,” he said soothingly. “You have to admit the Defenders have done a lot of good.”
“Do I? The compulsion doesn’t seem inescapable. Or have you a car around the corner that will draw up in a minute to convince me?”
“Now, we don’t do things like that. You’ve been reading those sensational limey papers.”
“They are annoying, aren’t they?” she taunted him, suddenly unafraid. ‘Too bad you can’t suppress them or take them over the way you did the Times and the Post-Dispatch and all the rest.”