The Wars of Love Read online

  But she cut him off. “We’re going to Europe.”

  We stared back at her. At last Freddie said, “You mean, in September?”

  “No, next week. It’s all settled. My father telephoned the steamship company this morning. We won’t be back here this summer.”

  “Why?” we asked. “Why so sudden?”

  Milly was standing on the pier above us, looking down. Now she looked away. “They think they can break this up.”

  “What?”

  “This. Us.”

  “Oh.”

  “I have to go to the village now—with—her. To get some stuff.” Then her thin, miserable face brightened a little. “But will you meet me here after dinner? Freddie—can you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good. Then be here.”

  And when we met again she led us mysteriously to a thicket of apple trees in a deserted orchard, and there she produced a razor blade with which she made each of us cut the palm of his right hand. Then each of us shook hands with the others and at the end all the right hands were clasped together in a knot. It was very solemn and rather messy. “Now you have to protect that hand,” Milly enjoined us at last. “Do not wash it. You have to let the blood wear off by itself.”

  4

  She vanished from that summer. They tried with good hearts but too late to draw her into their hot intimacy, the enveloping aura of engrossed attraction that was their marriage, yet that bond of passionate attentiveness was by its very nature exclusive. Wonderful for them, for Milly it could have been taken only in some other way: the closer she came to it, the more sharply it expelled her, and the summer shaped her independence.

  Uncommunicative postcards came to each of us now and then from Baden-Baden and Cernobbio, and they always said the same thing, “Say hello to—” and then named the other two, and no more. The summer burned away. That September I was sent to school in New Hampshire. Freddie sank back into the dead winter of Silverton. Milly was in Albany. Dan lived in the Eighties, and even when I had been in the city during the winter, we had never seen each other. The whole reason could not have been that our house was on Waverly Place, so far downtown. That friendship was a summer and a country thing. In the next summer it went on as if there had been no interruption, although for the first month Dan was not there, but with his mother and father in Paris. They came to Silverton just before the Fourth of July.

  I remember this because my mother gave a party for young and old, an enormous informal affair held on the shore between the garden house and the water. Japanese lanterns were strung from the trees, a fire blazed in the yellow evening light, long tables covered with white linen were set out on the grass, loaded with food and liquor, china and glassware and silver, and in the garden house a small orchestra played the tunes that punctuated that summer, and people danced. In the intervals, musicians dressed as gypsies wandered through the crowd with stringed instruments, and one of them sang melancholy waltzes in a trembling tenor. Still later, when the fire had died down and the darkness was complete, there were fireworks. These had been put in my charge, and Freddie and Milly helped me, and Dan was there, standing by. We tacked pinwheels to a tree trunk near the water and set them spinning. Fountains of colored flame danced up from Roman candles stuck in the wet sand. Rockets sprayed out over the lake like hissing stars, and some made triangles and squares, flowers bursting into a brief, geometric life, and at last, a flag—red, white, and blue—that stood in the air for a little while, a gaudy vision, before it wavered and melted and flowed away into darkness.

  After that, the music took up loudly again, the younger children were taken away, a crowd quickly gathered at the table with the liquor, and we four sat by ourselves among our burnt debris on the pebbly beach. Behind us, on the sloping grass, a bank of adults sat in scattered groups, and between the irregular alternations of music, jazz tunes and false gypsy songs, we heard their low laughter and talk and ice rattling in their glasses, and occasionally, my mother’s strident laugh above the other sounds. Presently there was more urgent talk behind us and her laughing response, and then she took the guitar from the warbling tenor and played it. In a white voile dress, with her head thrown back, she walked slowly back and forth along the shore, singing hoarsely:

  La noche ’sta serena,

  Tranquilo el aquilon,

  Tu dulce centinela,

  Te guarda el corazon.…

  She returned the guitar, and she listened to the applause and the murmuring approval, and then cried, “Oh God, how boring! And it’s hot!” and kicked off her shoes and strode purposefully to the pier and out to its end and dived off into the black water. There was a gasp and uneasy laughter. I didn’t know where my father was—was he there at all?—but a few other men ran out to the end of the pier where they could see her bare white arms breaking the black water, and then they were kneeling on the planks and, in the light of the paper lanterns that were strung down the length of the pier, were helping her up the ladder. Freddie was standing, staring, his mouth open, beside me. Milly and Dan were silent. A woman’s voice behind me said, “What’s boring is Ellen, with her grandstanding.” I had never before felt such total indifference, both to this and to my mother herself, as she came back then, leaning on the men around her, laughing, her hair streaming, her white dress plastered to her body. It was not I but Dan who said, in a tight, embarrassed voice, “Let’s go up to the orchard.”

  Our orchard was an old, neglected patch of apple trees that grew in a meadow between the back part of the house and the highway. In an earlier summer, we had contrived a primitive system of parallel bars in the gnarled branches of three or four trees, and it was a place we liked, because it was at once near our houses and yet always deserted, the scene of our pact. Only we went there. We sprawled out now in the long grass at the edge farthest from the house. Away from the lights and the party, we could see the bright stars scattered over the immense sky.

  “Polaris. The Pole Star,” Dan said, pointing up. “The star you sail by.”

  We lay on our backs, hands under our heads. Dan moved, and pointing to the southwest, he said, “Venus. Venus is blue. No one has ever seen Venus because of the clouds around it, but it’s most like the earth.”

  “How do they know, if they haven’t seen it?”

  “They know.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. But they do. It’s so much like earth that there may be people like ourselves there.”

  “Ahh—”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Why should there be?”

  “Well, the clouds mean that there’s water, and where there’s water, there could be people like us.”

  “Ahh—”

  “Yes,” he said again. He stood up and pulled himself up on one of the bars in the tree nearest us. He sat on it, and then swung round and hung by his knees and craned his neck to look at the sky upside down.

  “If you look this way, you see shapes.”

  “What shapes?” one of us asked without interest. We three, lying close together in the grass, each aware of the others’ breathing bodies, were feeling our older emotions. Dan was the youngest.

  “Shapes,” he said, “like those the rockets made. Hang up here—you see these things!”

  Milly, beside me, said, “Squint your eyes down here, it looks the same way.”

  “Squares and triangles.…”

  “Yes!” she said. “If you squint, the stars all put themselves into shapes, squares and triangles and wheels.…”

  The bar that Dan was hanging on creaked in the branches as he dropped to the ground. He flung himself down and after a moment cried, “Yes, that’s it! See? You see it all in shapes!”

  Then we all lay on our backs and squinted at the sky, and it was true, the stars fell into patterns, and they did look, indeed, like the simple forms left in the sky by the spurting rockets when their first lavish flare thinned out, but fixed forever in their rigid designs, bright, complacent specks strung
on invisible lines of vastly distant fixity!

  “You can almost see the lines,” I said.

  “Lines?”

  “The lines that make the shapes—squares, triangles.…”

  “Are lives,” Milly asked, as if she had misunderstood my word, “are lives tied on wheels?”

  No one answered, no one understood for the moment, perhaps. We lay still and stared up at the black dome fitted with its brilliant, necessitarian array.

  “Lines,” I said at last. “I said ‘lines’ Like in science books, where they draw in the lines of the constellations so you can see the shape.”

  “But I meant lives.” Her voice was small. “Are lives tied to wheels?” She sounded distant, not next to me, queer, and her question or the voice in which she asked it made me feel alone and queer. I moved my arm and let my hand lie on Freddie’s shoulder.

  “What wheels?” he asked.

  “I mean—” We waited for her to go on, and in the silence we heard the distant, ghostly rhythms, hardly more than the beat-beat-beat of a song called “I Won’t Say I Will, but I Won’t Say I Won’t.” They were still dancing at my mother’s party, and I wondered idly whether she had changed her dress, and if she had, what dress she was wearing now, and the soft heat of the summer night seemed slowly to gather together and press down on me where I lay. Then I felt my own fingers moving restlessly and independently of any volition on the curve of Freddie’s shoulder, and I took my hand away.

  “I mean—” Her voice rose a little with the effort of her thought. “Like the stars. See—they’re all tied to those shapes. They have to stay that way. They all move only as the shape moves. Or really, they don’t move at all, it’s the earth that moves. But the earth, too, it can’t move except in the track, on its wheel, like. Are lives like that? That’s what I mean.”

  Dan sat up. “If a tree falls in the forest,” he said eagerly, “and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? Does it?”

  “That’s different,” she said patiently. “I mean: do we live the way we do because we have to, or because we want to?”

  “What’s fate?” Dan asked. “What is it, anyway?”

  Freddie spoke. “Fate is what happens to you. The opposite is will. Will is what you make happen.”

  “That’s it,” she said. “Do we really make things happen, make our lives, our selves, or are they made for us?”

  “We make them,” Freddie said, and he sat up.

  “But how do you ever know?” she persisted.

  “Well, like—” He started and stopped. “Well, I do,” he insisted. “Like—what I wanted most of all a couple of years ago was to know you. If I’d gone on just wishing, it would never have happened. You have to do something about it. So I hung around where I knew you sometimes went. And you came. See? Also, I knew you were city kids and wouldn’t just take up with me if I didn’t have something to make you want to. See? It works both ways. So I brought that slingshot. Remember? And it was easy as anything.” He laughed with deep warmth in his recollection.

  Milly sat up. Reflectively, she said, “I never did learn to hit a bird!” and Freddie laughed again. She looked at him closely, leaning toward him in the darkness. “And can you always do that? Make what you want to happen, happen?”

  “Sure.”

  “But you have parents. They have something to say.”

  “They don’t care. They care less and less. See, you get older, you get freer—”

  “I don’t. Mine interfere more and more, instead of less and less.”

  “But you care less, because what they want doesn’t have anything to do at all with what you want, and because it doesn’t really change anything that you want, and when you get free, you’ll be what you want.”

  “When do you get free?” she asked, and once more her voice had gone small and queer, tight with some pain.

  Only I lay on my back now. The others sat up around me, alert with their talk. I lay there feeling numb and apart from them, unattached, and as I stared up at the limitless vault of black sky and the glimmering stars, my throat constricted, and I wanted to cry out to them: But is that what we want, to be free? do we want to be free? I turned over so that I would not suddenly sob, and then slowly, as I lay there, with the distant, rapid thrum-thrum-thrum-thrum-thrum of “Stumbling” beating on the night air, all that loose, enervating melancholy that ached in and, as it were, around me in the immediate darkness, drew itself together and tightened in me, almost as if it were a matter of nerves and muscles, and I felt my body grow quiet and come to some hard rest.

  Something had happened to Milly, too. She leapt to her feet and did a few quick turns on the bar and then dropped briskly to the ground and said, “I have to go. She said to be in by eleven.” She said it almost without resentment, with none of her usual cutting emphasis on the “she,” with the kind of acceptance in her voice that must have meant that she had, in a measure, won a freedom through Freddie’s assurances, that she, like others, saw and held a future.

  “I’ll go with you,” he said. Was it a new, proprietory tone he used? Had we all changed there, in that brief and childish colloquy on the stars? Apparently not, or not Dan, at any rate, who said now with his usual blandness, “Well, we’ll all go, won’t we?” And we all went, very much as usual, through the dark orchard, across the lighter meadow, past the Fords’, on to the shore, and toward the great, dim windows of the Moores’ house, where Milly disappeared through draperies, gray in the night, that billowed out momentarily like mist, then hung still.

  We walked back to the Fords’. Freddie got on his bicycle and wheeled whistling down the drive to the highway, and Dan and I stared up at the house, which was silent and only dimly lit with night lights.

  “They’re not home yet,” he said. The sounds of laughter and music at our house persisted. “Let’s go down to the pier.”

  We sat on a bench at the end of the Ford pier. Here the stars seemed to have faded, and the lake was black everywhere except over at our pier, where the lanterns made colored splashes on the lighter surface. Staring at those lights, I thought that again I could feel the night grow closer, hotter, and I said, “I’m going swimming.”

  “Yes. Let’s,” Dan said. We took off our clothes and dived into the water, and we swam quietly out from the end of the pier, then back, floated idly on our backs for a while, spouted water, and climbed out. Then we sat naked on the end of the pier, our feet dangling over the edge, touching the water, and we shivered with a kind of luxury as the soft air dried us. My hands lay in my loins. The music sounded across the water—the throbbing piano and drums, the mooning tenor saxophone, and the cutting, climbing, obbligato horn. Something happened again: the notes of the music reached me, reached into me, and prodded that melancholy ache of the orchard into a vicious clutching that was like hatred, if hatred can be of the flesh. At the same time, under my hands, there was a stirring that was now part of the hatred. I waited while this perverse excitement grew like a violent stranger outside me who would suddenly speak, and then, when Dan began to speak, saying dreamily, “Sometimes—” I swung toward him abruptly and said, “Do you do this?” and with quick thrusts showed him what I meant. In the darkness, his face was only a blur, and I could not see his eyes at all, but I could visualize their wounded widening and surprise from his voice, which said distantly, weakly, “You and Freddie—” and stopped, and started again, “I haven’t hardly got any hair there yet,” and turned his head.

  His mildness was suddenly outrageous to me: it gave me, at last, a target, I suppose, and all of whatever it was that troubled me, crowded into a vicious, panted whisper, in a double release, “You stinking little Christer!”

  He sat quietly beside me for a minute or two, his face turned away. The music had stopped, and in the silence I could feel him trying to understand this violation of his innocence in my sudden tortured attack. At the same time, wondering why I had done it, I felt feeling diffuse itself in me again, drain rapidly away,
until once more, as previously in the orchard, I was numb and utterly unattached, but in addition, ashamed. Then, quietly, Dan swung up to his feet and picked up his clothes.

  “Where are you going?” I managed.

  He kept on walking. His steps made the pier vibrate gently. Then he was off it, gone. And then I let my rage, mixed now with remorse, burst out. Or rather, it was as if rage and remorse took hold of me and controlled me, shook me and wracked me, threw me down on the wet boards and rained blows on me, howled for me in the salty, empty darkness, until I escaped from under the torrent at last and slid into the water and swam again, alone now, and sick of feeling.

  Next morning I went straight to Dan’s house and told him that I was sorry. He looked at me with perfect friendliness and said, “Forget it.” Thus, no harm had been done. Perhaps good came of it: that was the last time I cried. Tears, I mean.

  5

  But this eye should be more neutral. I let myself speak too much of myself, who am of least importance. Already I was breaking away from them, writing, in those moments of isolated pain and struggle, my declaration of independence, such as it was to be—wanting more than they had. Summer was no longer, for me, a separate season, and I began to bring into it, in a way that the other three somehow did not, the demands and the lessons of the winter. In the next summer, this difference became clear. In that New Hampshire town where I went to school, there was, for example, a girl who for fifty cents would meet any older boy behind a boarded-up refreshment stand at the outer edge of a park that was itself on the edge of the village. I was sixteen that winter, and when I came to Silverton in the next summer, I was different.

  Winter had changed me, and I knew it when I looked at Milly. Something physical happened to me then, in that sixteenth summer, an ache in my throat, an almost sickening emptiness in my stomach, and some kind of glaze over my eyes. Until that summer I had felt about her exactly as I felt about the two boys who now lay stretched on their backs in the long grass behind the log on which she sat. Dan and Freddie and Milly and Grant: until this summer there had been no distinction: all equal, all friends. Now there was a difference. I wondered whether Dan and Freddie felt it too, whether, when they looked at Milly now, they felt as I did, as though someone had punched them hard in the belly. Milly, I thought from a certain strain between us, knew that something had changed.