He looked up, no smile now. “I’m hoping to track him down. See him. Talk to him. He is my father, after all, you know?” And then he was telling her about the letters he’d written — sometimes two or three a day — trying to catch up eleven years in a couple of months. “I told him it was okay, let bygones be bygones, I just wanted to see him. ‘Dear Dad.’ I actually wrote ‘Dear Dad’ at the top of the page.”
He drank off the wine and set the glass down on a carton of old magazines. She was turned away from him, in profile, stringing her beads as if there were nothing else in the world. He watched her a moment, her lips pouted in concentration, and knew she was faking it. She was listening. She was trembling. On fire. He knew it. “Listen,” he said, shifting gears all of a sudden. “I never told you how hurt I was that day in the Grand Union. But I was. I wanted to cry.” His voice was locked deep in his throat.
She looked up at him then, her eyes soft, a little wet maybe, but she let it drop. It was almost as if she hadn’t heard him — one moment he was pouring out his heart to her and the next she was off on a jag of disconnected chatter. She talked about the war, protest marches, the environment — there was untreated sewage being pumped into the river, could he believe that? And then ten miles downstream people were drinking that very same water — incredible, wasn’t it?
Incredible. Yes. He gave her a soulful, seductive look — or what he thought was a soulful, seductive look — and settled in to hear all about it. They were on their third glass of wine when she brought up the Arcadia.
To this point, her litany of industrial wrongs, her enumeration of threatened marshes and polluted coves, her wide-eyed assertion that so-and-so had said such-and-such and that the something-or-other levels were a thousand times the maximum allowable by law, had only managed to lull him into a state of quiet contentment. He was half-listening, watching her hands, her hair, her eyes. But now, all of a sudden, he perked up his ears.
The Arcadia. It was a boat, a sloop, built on an old model. He hadn’t seen it yet, but he’d heard about it. Heard plenty. Dipe and his VFW cronies were up in arms about it—It’s the riots all over again, Walter, Depeyster had told him one night, we taught them a lesson twenty years ago in that cow pasture down the road and now it’s as if it never happened. As far as Walter was concerned, it was no big deal — who cared if there was one hulk more or less on the tired old river? — but at least he had some perspective on it. It was Will Connell’s connection to the thing that burned Dipe and LeClerc and the others, that much was clear. The very name was a bugbear, a red flag, a gauntlet flung down at their feet — Robeson was dead, but Connell was still going strong, vindicated by the backlash against the McCarthy witch hunts, a survivor and a hero. And here he was parading up and down the river in a boat the size of a concert hall (Can you believe it, Walter, Depeyster had asked, his voice lit with outrage, to put together this, this floating circus as a front for his Communistic horseshit … clean water, my ass. All he cares about is waving the Viet Cong flag on the steps of the Capitol Building …), here he was laughing in the faces of the very people who’d turned out to shut him and Robeson down twenty years back.
Rednecks. That’s how Walter had always thought of them — how he’d been taught to think of them — but now that he actually knew Dipe, now that he’d worked with him, sat in his living room, drunk his Scotch, confided in him, he saw that there was a lot more to it than he’d imagined. Hesh and Lola and his mother’s parents had forced their version on him, and wasn’t that propaganda? Hadn’t they given him one side of the story only? Hadn’t they told him all his life that his father was no good, a traitor, a fink, a broken man? They were wrong about the Soviets, after all — they knew in their hearts they were. Here they’d bought the party line as if it were carved in stone, and then Stalin rotted away from within, and where were they? Freedom? Dignity? The Workers’ Paradise? Russia had been a morgue, a slave camp, and the party the ultimate oppressor.
They were gullible — Hesh, Lola, his own sad and wistful mother and her parents before her. They were dreamers, reformers, idealists, they were followers, they were victims. And all along they thought they were the champions of the weak and downtrodden, thought they could blunt the viciousness of the world by holding hands and singing and waving placards, when in truth they themselves were the weak and downtrodden. They were deluded. Unhard, unsoulless, unfree. They were dreamers. Like Tom Crane. Like Jessica. He was leaving for Alaska in the morning and he was going to find his father there and his father was going to tell him how it was. Traitor? Walter didn’t think so. Not anymore.
“You didn’t know we were founding members?” Jessica said, and he was looking right through her. “Tom and me? Tom even crewed down from Maine on her maiden voyage.”
He hadn’t known. But he could have guessed. Of course, he thought, hardening all of a sudden, Jessica and Tom Crane, Tom Crane and Jessica. The two of them, out on the river, clasped together in their sanctimonious bunk, waving their I’m-Cleaner-Than-You banners on the deck and chanting for peace and love and hope, crowing for the spider monkeys and the harp seals, for Angel Falls and the ozone layer and all the rest of the soft-brained shit of the world. Suddenly he pushed back the chair and stood. “Did you hear me before?” he asked, and there was no trace of humor in his voice now, no humility, no passion even. “When I said how much you mean to me?”
She bowed her head. The stove snapped, a bird shot past the window. “I heard you,” she whispered.
He took a step forward and reached for her — for her shoulders, her hair. He could feel the heat of the stove on his left side, saw the dreary woods through the smeared window, felt himself go hard with the first touch of her. She was still sitting, slumped in the chair, a welter of beads, elastic thread, fishing line and sewing needles spread out across the table before her, and though he pressed her to him, she didn’t respond. He petted her hair, but she turned her head away and let her arms fall limp at her sides. It was then that he felt it, a tremor that began deep inside her, a wave that rose against the tug of gravity to fill her chest to bursting and settle finally, trembling, in her shoulders: she was crying.
“What’s the matter?” he said, and his voice should have been soft, tender, solicitous, but it wasn’t. It sounded false in his ears, sounded harsh and impatient, sounded like a demand.
She was sniffling, catching her breath at the crux of a sob. “No, Walter,” she breathed, looking away from him still, as limp as one of the dead, “I can’t.”
He had his hands on the sweater now, and he was pressing his lips to the part of her hair. “You’re my wife,” he said. “You love me.” Or no, he’d got that wrong. “I love you,” he said.
“No!” she protested with sudden vehemence, turning on him with a face that was like a mask, like someone else’s, like something she’d put on for a costume party, for Halloween, and then she seized both his arms just above the elbow and tried to push him away. “No!” she repeated, and all at once he could see her as if through a zoom lens, the tiny capillaries of her eyes gorged with blood, droplets of moisture trapped in her lashes that were thick as fingers, the nostrils of her turned-up nose dilated and huge, red as an animal’s. “It’s over, Walter,” she said. “Tom. I’m with Tom now.”
Tom. The name came at him out of nowhere, out of another universe, and he barely heard it. Victims. Dreamers. He fought down her arms and jerked at the sweater like a clumsy magician trying to pull the tablecloth out from under a service for eight. She cried out. Flailed her arms. Fell back against the table. Beads scattered, falling to the floor like heavy rain, like the drumbeat of the polluters marching off to war. He tugged the sweater up, bunched it in an angry knot beneath her chin and lifted her from the chair, pinning her groin to the edge of the table with the weight of his own. He went for her mouth, but she turned away from him; he went for her breasts, but she hung on to the sweater with both hands. Finally, he went for her jeans.