Walter went off with his grandparents to spend the day amidst the fascinating fishes of the Hudson, while Truman and Hesh loaded the sound equipment into the back of Hesh’s Plymouth and Christina made sandwiches, cookies, a thermos of iced tea. Was she humming to herself? Smiling over her private thoughts? She’d seen it in his eyes, seen that he was dead to her inside, and she didn’t want to believe it. She wanted to believe that this morning of the concert was a new beginning, radiant and propitious. He was recovering, coming back to her — it had been the pressure after all, and now it was over. He’d got his degree, worn his robe to tatters. So what if he’d been out letting off steam? It was only natural.
Wrapping sandwiches, she thought of the concert of the year before, at the pavilion in the Colony, when they’d sat on a blanket in the grass, holding hands, Walter asleep beside them. Robeson sang “Go Down, Moses,” he sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and something from Handel’s “Messiah,” and she slid into the cradle of Truman’s arms and closed her eyes to let the great deep thrumming voice quaver on the sounding board of her body. There was no Piet then, no manila folder, no Crane/Mohonk conspiracy. There was only Truman, her husband, the man with a smile for the world, the athlete, the scholar, the party acolyte and hero — only Truman, and her.
And then the morning was gone and she was collating the pages of her pamphlets and thinking how maybe next weekend they could go up to Rhinebeck or someplace — just to get away for a couple of days. They could stay at that old inn on the river, and maybe go sailing or horseback riding. Her fingers were ink-stained. It was three o’clock, four. She was sitting by the window and listening to the radio, waiting for her husband and Hesh to get back from their last-minute conference with Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum, when she glanced up to see Hesh’s Gillette-blue Plymouth swing into the driveway. She was out the door, picnic basket in one hand, A&P bag of literature in the other, before the car rolled to a stop. “Hey,” she was about to call out, “I was beginning to think you forgot all about me,” but she caught herself. For at that moment, with fear and loathing and a sinking sense of defeat, she saw that they were not alone. There, perched between them like a ventriloquist’s dummy, his naked little hands braced against the dashboard and his face locked in a mad evil sneer of triumph, was Piet.
When she looked back on that night, the night that broke her life in two, she saw faces. Piet’s face, as it was in the car, insinuated in some unspeakable way between her husband and herself. Truman’s face, turned away from her, hard and unsmiling. Hesh’s face: bluff, honest, opened wide to her as she slipped into the seat beside him, numb and composed for death as he lay unconscious on the scuffed pine boards of the stage while the criminals and brownshirts howled like demons in the dark. And then there were the faces of the mob itself: the rabid women thumbing their noses, eyes popping with hate; the boy who’d leaned forward to spit on the windshield; a man she recognized from the butcher shop in Peterskill who’d bared his teeth like a dog, cupped his genitals in both hands and then clasped the crook of his arm in the universal gesture of defiance and contempt. A day passed, two, three, four, a week, a month, and still she saw them. Though she struggled to escape them, though she shut her eyes fast, paced the floor, fought for sleep, those faces haunted her. They were there, ugly and undeniable, when she started up in the morning from the fitful sleep that overtook her at first light, they were there in the afternoon as she sat sobbing on the davenport, and in the maw of the night when the dark conjured its images. These were her ghosts, this her attack of history.
It began in the deeps of that first night, when the nervous phone calls had ceased and Hesh’s blood had dried to a crust on the sleeve of her blouse, when she’d got to the end of the list of hospitals in the Westchester-Putnam phone book and found that none had admitted a bleeding athlete with hair the color of tarnished copper and a torn polo shirt, when she pictured him lying unconscious in a ditch or crawling home like a dog struck down on the highway. She sat by the phone, listless, the eyes sunk back in her head, willing him to call. He didn’t call. The night held on, tenacious, implacable. From the back room came the arhythmic click and scrape of Walter’s teeth, grinding, bone on bone. And then, caught in the window, hovering over the coleus, peering out from behind the radio console, the faces began to show themselves. Piet’s face, Truman’s, Hesh’s, the twisted feral mug of the man from the butcher shop.
The next day Lola sat beside her through the never-ending morning, the unendurable afternoon and the starless night that fell on her like a curse. Don’t worry, Lola said, her voice dabbing at the wounds, he’ll turn up. He’s safe, I know it. For all they knew he could have gotten away to the City with a carload of concertgoers or doubled back to Piet’s place in Peterskill. He’ll call, she said, any minute now. Any minute.
She was wrong. Soothing, but wrong. He didn’t call. Hesh beat the bushes and Hesh found nothing. Lola wanted to know if she could get her a sleeping pill. It was 11:00 P.M. No one had seen or heard from Truman in twenty-seven hours. Scotch? Vodka? Gin?
Then it was Monday, early — seven, eight, she didn’t know. Lola was standing behind the counter at the van der Meulen bakery and Hesh, his arms rough with scab and his face ripened like a fruit, was on his way to Sollovay’s Auto Glass and Mirror on Houston Street. That was when he walked in. She hadn’t slept in fifty hours and she was seeing faces, Walter was wound up like a dervish in his private three-year-old’s dance of denial and trauma, the trash was overflowing, the larder empty, her mother rushing back from a vacation in Vermont to be with her in that bankrupt hour, and he walked in the door.
He was limping. He was drunk. There was a dark punished bruise beneath his left eye, his ear was bandaged and he was wearing the same clothes he’d worn to the concert, dirty now, torn, steeped in blood. What was there to say? We were worried sick, where were you, did they hurt you, I’m so glad, we’re so glad, Walter, look, look who’s come home. She was up off the davenport and rushing to him, Walter at her side, leaping to the familial embrace, tears of gratitude, Odysseus home from the wars, unfurl the banners, sound the horns, lights, camera…but he was numb to their touch. In the next moment he shoved past them, shielding his face like a gangster outside the courthouse, and then he was in the bedroom, the suitcase gaping open on the bed like a set of jaws.
“What are you doing?” She was on him now, tugging at his arm. “Truman, what is it? Talk to me! Truman!” Beneath her, clinging to his father’s legs, Walter kept up a steady dirge, “Daddy, daddy, daddy.”
Nothing could touch him. He shrugged her off as he’d shrugged off tacklers in the years of his glory, single-minded and heedless, plunging for the goal line. Books, clothes, his notes, the manuscript: the house was on fire, the woods were burning. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, his lip quivering with that sick betrayer’s grin — she didn’t exist, Walter was invisible — and then he was on his way out the door.