The Journal I Did Not Keep Read online

  “I’ll teach you the New York sandwich,” the man said.

  “You are a teacher? You don’t look like,” Ilka said and blushed; she thought she was flirting.

  The American regarded her with his bright brown stare and asked, “Like what do I look?”

  “That,” said Ilka, “is what I am not understanding. When I walk on Broadway and see an old Viennese pair I understand even from behind…” Ilka stopped, appalled at the number and the complication of the English sentences ahead.

  “Go on,” the man said.

  Ilka shook her head. She meant that she recognized the proportions, height by width, of the old man’s back, which fit and failed to fit, in the same places, into the same suit Ilka’s father used to wear to the shop Monday through Saturday. The fabric that upholstered the old man’s fat wife was the navy cotton, patterned with the same cabbage roses, bows, and violins on Great-Aunt Mali’s Sunday dress. Those German prewar cottons wore like iron and had outlasted Great-Aunt Mali, as well as Ilka’s father, three aunts, four uncles, and two of the cousins who used to gather for Aunt Mali’s afternoons of Kaffee und Gugelhupf. Aunt Mali’s oversize table had stood square in the middle of the room; the blue tile stove in the left corner gave off too much heat. The walls were dark and striped, the curtains lace, and the drapes flowered and fringed with black wooden beads, which little Ilka, lying on the Turkey carpet—cozy, too hot, bored, more than half asleep—used to pull off one after the other. Aunt Mali had sat at the table drinking coffee and watched Ilka.

  Ilka shook her head and said, “It is too complicate to tell it. But when I look at you…”

  “Ye-es?”

  Ilka shook her head. She meant that she did not recognize his hair, and that the size of his mouth and his laughter did not go with the urbane way he bent his wrist and crossed his ankles; that the luxurious tweed of his jacket contradicted his flattened nose with its small outgrowth of wild flesh at the bridge, which intimated to the girl disastrous chances, moving accidents his youth had suffered.

  Ilka said, “Take for an example these two Americans which are there coming in by the door.” She swiveled and watched the newcomers settle into the booth she had recently vacated. “Larry!” they shouted. “Couple beers, Larry!” One was a little shorter, with a barrel chest, the other a few years younger, perhaps. Both were in their thirties, of middling height, and wore, it seemed to Ilka, their undershirts. They had ruddy arms and round heads and looked underdone, as if they had been taken prematurely out and put down in the world.

  Ilka said, “I look: I am seeing two men, but I cannot imagine what are they working for a living, how dress themselves their wives, how is it looking inside their rooms…”

  The one who was perhaps younger stuck his head out of the booth and called for Larry. “What’s with Larry?” He looked slowly around the room, and the American on the stool said, “Keep talking,” in a high, different voice that made Ilka look at him to see what had happened: Nothing had happened. There was nothing different in the way his ankles crossed, his right hand surrounded the glass on the bar. He had not moved so much as his eyes to take in the newcomers. He sat like a cartoon of a smoker drawn by the lazy new breed of animators: head, neck, and trunk remained fixed; only the left arm, pivoting at the shoulder, brought the cigarette to his mouth and took it away again. In this new voice, pitched in the high, thin register of the castrato, he said, “I’ll buy you dinner over on Main Street.”

  Ilka said, “But Larry is making already our sandwich, isn’t it?” And here came Larry with two foaming mugs, which he carried around the bar and across the floor. He set them down on the table between the two men and slid into the booth, next to the one with the chest. (The aborted and unexplained sandwich Ilka laid away in the patient back part of the mind where a child keeps the things it doesn’t know what to make of, and other things it doesn’t know it doesn’t understand. There they lie unattended, but available to join with future information that will elucidate some but not all.)

  The man on the stool had smoked his cigarette down to a nubbin. He said, “We leave separately.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Get up. Go out the door, walk to Main Street, and wait for me.”

  “But,” said Ilka, “I can wait in here.”

  The man was patting his two trouser pockets, his right and left jacket pockets; he located his wallet. Was it that his neck had thickened, or shortened? Or withdrawn into his shoulders? Had the ears retracted? The head and shoulders had streamlined as if an outside pressure, failing to eliminate his person, had compacted it and reduced the size without affecting the bulk. He looked like a high-caliber torpedo.

  Ilka saw what she saw and stored it away in the back of her mind. She said, “Yes, so, then, I wait corner Main Street,” and rose. He did not raise his head; he was busy with the wallet.

  “We are not all white” was what Ilka thought one of the men inside the booth had said and she stopped, and looked. The man with the big chest was looking at her. It was Ilka to whom he was talking.

  Ilka said, “Excuse, please?” and smiled apologetically and leaned to listen more closely. The other, younger man, and the barman, too, were looking at Ilka. She said, “I am new in America. I cannot yet so well understand.” The man looked her straight in the eye and, enunciating very clearly, said it again: “We are not all white.” Ilka smiled. She shook her head. She didn’t understand. As she went out the door, the barman was asking the two men, “Either of you fellows ever once in your lifetime got a lump sum? Did you have a opportunity?”

  * * *

  —

  This end of town was deserted and dark, the way the blacked-out wartime cities of Europe had been dark, except for that same curious pink glow Ilka had observed in the night sky over Manhattan. She imagined that it emanated from the noisy neon lights of every Times Square or Main Street, floated upward and spread like a comforter of rosy, possibly noxious haze over America.

  Ilka waited at the curb and presently the big American from the bar stood beside her. He kept a slice of the night air between them. The purple mountain had been assumed into the blackness that pepped up the colored lights. Over the restaurant across the street a blue cow blinked glamorous Disney lashes once, twice, and went out. THE BLUE cow spelled itself in capitals. Ilka felt excited and hilarious: on both thronging sidewalks everyone was male and young.

  “I believe you have conjured this all, isn’t it?”

  “I have conjured,” said the big American, looking at her. Then he looked deliberately across the street and back at Ilka, and said, “You and I stand here, side by side, but I don’t know what the hell you’re seeing.”

  “That is it, which I have been meaning,” said Ilka with a sensation of bliss. She came, afterward, to identify this as the moment in which she had fallen in love; it coincided with a break in the traffic and the man’s first, slightest touch, under her elbow. He withdrew his hand as soon as he had assisted her across the street and up the other sidewalk.

  “Where would you like to eat?”

  “I would like it that you are choosing.”

  “Right,” he said. He walked her past The Blue Cow, past the Bar and Beef, past the Steak and Swill, and Harry’s Hash, but at The Versailles—no better, it seemed to Ilka, and no worse—he opened and held the door for her, walked her past the empty window table, past a second empty table, and made a U-turn around a table from which three men raised simultaneous eyes. The three men watched a very large middle-aged, light-skinned Negro marching out the door with a thin blonde following behind him.

  Back in the street he asked her, “Are you hungry?”

  “Not very,” said Ilka.

  They passed Harry’s Hash and the Steak and Swill. Ilka said, “I don’t understand what for men are all these…”

  “Men,” said the man. They passed the Bar and Beef. “Good enough fellows, as fellows go—care for their kids, satisfy their wives some of the time, do their work as well as can
be expected, and pay their taxes, mostly, go to church, or not, and will string me up as soon as look at me.”

  “String you?” Ilka did not understand him. She said, “I think I must soon again instep back in my train, isn’t it?”

  “I will wait with you,” said the American. They walked past The Blue Cow. He supported her elbow across the dirt road and up onto the platform. They walked alongside the empty, darkened train. “You’re not afraid of me?” he asked her.

  It was this moment that brought to the forefront of Ilka’s attention the series of violent occurrences that had been unfolding parallel with, and on a level below, the actual events: those two men in the bar had been the law, drinking unwitting beers in the same room with the object of their manhunt—Ilka’s big American on the bar stool. In the dark, under the sinister pink sky, he had jumped her. Over The Versailles was a sleazy room in which Ilka lay naked and strangled across an open bed. Ilka looked at these imaginings, looked at the man who walked beside her and understood that she did not believe, and had at no point believed, any part of them. Ilka said, “No.”

  They sat down on a bench underneath one of the half-dozen lamps, weak and unsteady as gaslight, that made no inroads upon the darkness.

  “I would have liked to make love to you,” said the American gloomily.

  Ilka, who had not been in the habit of receiving propositions, understood this one as a courtesy, intended as a compliment. The American said, “When a man hasn’t managed to buy a woman dinner, it is not conducive.”

  “I’m not so hungry,” said Ilka.

  “Well well well well well,” said the big American. “I owe you.”

  They exchanged addresses. He wrote Fishgoppel’s telephone number into a well-worn leather-bound address book. On the corner of an envelope he wrote down for Ilka the name of the hotel in New York where, he said, he used to live and might take a room, if they had one, until he figured out what the hell he was doing.

  “There is my conductor,” said Ilka.

  “When do you get back to town?”

  “Sunday,” said Ilka. “Monday I must go again to—I call it the agency of unemployment.”

  “Ah, yes, indeed,” the man said. He handed her up the steps.

  She found her seat and let down the window. When had the platform filled with all these people saying goodbye, getting on the train? It took Ilka a moment to identify the back of the American from the bar stool, already walking away.

  THE SUMMER

  Carter was waiting on the platform. The little stationhouse was made of brick, the color of raw sausage with bottlegreen trim. Carter wore shorts.

  “Whose car?” asked Ilka.

  “Ebony’s. Come, get in.”

  Ilka said, “I must go back Monday.”

  “When is your vacation?”

  “This is my vacation,” said Ilka. “I must go back and look for a proper job, Carter.” Ilka saw his shirt sleeve at close quarters and kissed it and said, “I must get on with my life, mustn’t I? Carter?”

  Carter said nothing. Ilka stared out of the car window. “It looks green! Carter, look at that big, lovely house, there, on top! This is it?” cried Ilka. Carter had turned up the hill. He drove around the big white house and stopped in back, at the door of a little house.

  “This is silly!” Ilka meant that this was the little house with fence, window with curtain, roof with chimney, sky with cloud that Ilka used to crayon on pieces of paper on the dining-room table, in Vienna. “I don’t believe this!” As Ilka stepped from the car, the curve and dip of fields turned to gold.

  “Come inside,” said Carter.

  Inside it was raw wood. The floor was a collage of odds and ends of faded antique rugs—oriental reds and blues and dim and dark cloths, patterned with cerulean lozenges like crescents of sky. “I don’t believe it.” Ilka meant the condition of happiness. “This is silly.”

  They got into the bed like a cave hewn out of some aboriginal wood, immovable as ships’ furniture, and when they heard Ebony hallooing across the grass there was no way to stop her short of shouting, “We’re in here, naked, making love!” Already her cheerful knock was pushing the door open. She said, “I beg your pardon,” stepped backward and closed the door.

  “Am I wanted at the house?” Carter called out.

  “No hurry,” Ebony called in. “Just walked over to tell Ilka hello.”

  “Hello,” said Ilka and kept her head flat on the mattress. She looked at the ceiling. It was wood.

  “What time is dinner?” Carter called out.

  “Seven, if that’s all right with Ilka and you. Stanley can start the fire,” Ebony called in.

  “Is seven all right with you?” Carter looked down to ask Ilka.

  “Yes,” said Ilka.

  “Seven’s fine for Ilka and me. I’ll be over to make the drinks in fifteen—make that twenty—twenty-five—minutes.”

  “Wonderful!” called Ebony and went away.

  Ilka wanted to laugh, but Carter had resumed his interrupted motion.

  * * *

  —

  Carter said, “I make the drinks; I don’t drink them. Come over when you’re ready.”

  Ilka made her solo way across the darkening grass. The big house had turned a magical blue. Ilka stopped to listen to the voices of many strangers speaking English and wished herself back in New York. That was Carter saying, “Whatnoswizzlestick?” Ilka listened harder. A male voice said, “Shake it,” and Carter’s voice said, “Andbruisethegin?” Ilka’s understanding sharpened with the sounding of her own name. “So, where is your Ilka?”

  Ilka stepped around the corner. On a great slope, beneath a high lemon sky, milled an undeterminable number of persons like black paper cutouts. They would not stay put and would not stay attached to the names Carter kept telling Ilka. She walked behind Carter. Carter carried a tray. He said, “Ilka Stanley Stanley Ilka Stanley your bourbon Percy bourbon Percival where the hell are you Percival Ilka Sarah Sarah your martini Victor martini wasn’t it Ilka Victor Doris Mae Ilka Doris Mae where the hell is Percival?”

  “Hello,” the people said to Ilka.

  “Hello,” said Ilka, keeping her eye on a naked child with short, fiercely flying hair, who ran in narrowing circles around and around a central vessel of live coals that flared as darkness fell from the air.

  * * *

  —

  Indoors and in place around the long dining table they turned into a finite number of partially clothed and undistinguished-looking individuals. Ilka was disappointed. She let the talk flow around her while she organized them into those first categories by which we fix strangers: four males and four females created he them, five whites—not counting the baby—and three Negroes, nine souls in all including herself. Carter had said Stanley, Ebony’s husband, was a Jew, so which one was he? The pink, smiling, wizened little man, like a stick figure, who sat at the foot of the table, could not be the husband of the ample Ebony…

  Ebony stood up at the head of the table to address the rare steak of beef. She speared the first cut and walked it to the other end, put it on the plate in front of the little stick man and said, “Everybody will excuse us if we serve Stanley’s plate first. Stanley gets upset when he is hungry and what we want to avoid at all costs is Stanley getting upset, baby, don’t we!”

  The creased little pink man grinned at the beauty on his plate and gave the woman’s bottom a pat, so he was her husband.

  Ilka tried to understand how the rest of the people around the table were connected with one another, and what promise they might hold for herself: there was one other white man. He sat across from Ilka, was young and bare-chested and had blue eyes. He kept smiling at Ilka in a particular way; Ilka could tell that he was wanting to say something to her, but the baby, whose naked stomach and back were welted with red mosquito bites and mottled blue in the chilly evening air, stood up on her chair trying to stuff a macaroni up the young man’s left nostril, so he must be the father. “Annie,
sit down. Annie! Annie, don’t!” the young man kept saying and arched himself away from the invading pasta. “Sarah! Do something!” he said to the plain young woman who sat on the baby’s other side and must be his wife. She had the nice sort of face that eschews vanity—the face of one who means well and tries hard. Ilka liked her face.

  “Annie, don’t,” the young woman said without conviction.

  “I have here,” said Ebony, “a piece of meat that looks exactly the right size for Annie, if Annie will come and sit on this chair, next to me. We’ll put the Britannica A to AUS on top of the Connecticut telephone directory so you can reach the table, and we’ll tie the dish towel around your neck, like this, like a napkin which is traditionally worn under the chin to keep crumbs off the shirt front, but you don’t have a shirt front so you can wear it like a cloak to keep the draft off your back, like this. Now, if you will pass this plate to Aunt Ilka.

  No, that is Aunt Doris Mae. That’s Aunt Ilka…”

  “Why do we have to have her at dinner?” the baby’s father complained to his young wife. “Why can’t she be put away?”

  “The peas, please,” said the prettyish blond young woman with wire-rim spectacles who sat on Ilka’s left side. Ilka passed her the peas. The young woman heaped peas onto the plate of a bespectacled and perfectly black—a blue-black man with a silly mustache, who sat on her left. He was the blackest man Ilka had ever seen. “Bread, please. The butter, please,” said the bespectacled blond woman. She buttered a piece of bread for the black man and put it on his plate.

  Carter said, “No starch for me, thank you. Ebony, a small piece of meat, please. This is my summer for shaping up. Neat soda!” He lofted the seltzer bottle he kept close by his plate. “Annie, will you pass this small piece of meat to Uncle Carter, please?”

  Ilka sat and smiled her self-conscious, gap-toothed smile, hoping for a pause in the conversation to coincide with something interesting it might occur to her to say. Ilka’s English tended to regress when she was excited or nervous or tired, and she was all of these. The prospect of sending her voice out among so many strangers made her heart beat and strangled her breath. Later, under cover of conversation grown general, Ilka turned to the blond young woman, who seemed least formidable, and said, “Tell me one more time what your name is.”