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  Since then we have all left Detroit—Maureen is now a housewife in Dearborn, Michigan; I am teaching in another university; and Jules Wendall, that strange young man, is probably still in California. One day he will probably be writing his own version of this novel, to which he will not give the rather disdainful and timorous title them.

  I

  CHILDREN OF SILENCE

  1

  One warm evening in August 1937 a girl in love stood before a mirror.

  Her name was Loretta. It was her reflection in the mirror she loved, and out of this dreamy, pleasing love there arose a sense of excitement that was restless and blind—which way would it move, what would happen? Her name was Loretta; she was pleased with that name too, though Loretta Botsford pleased her less. Her last name dragged down on her, it had no melody. She stood squinting into the plastic-rimmed mirror on her bureau, trying to get the best of the light, seeing inside her high-colored, healthy, ordinary prettiness a hint of something daring and dangerous. Looking into the mirror was like looking into the future; everything was there, waiting. It was not just that face she loved. She loved other things. During the week she worked at Ajax Laundry and Dry Cleaners, and she was very lucky to have that job, and during the week the steamy, rushed languor of her work built up in her a sense of excitement. What was going to happen? Today was Saturday.

  Her face was full, and there was a slight mischievous puffiness about her cheeks that made her look younger than she was—she was sixteen—and her eyes were blue, a mindless, bland blue, not very sharp. Her lips were painted a deep scarlet, exactly the style of the day. Her eyebrows were plucked in exactly the style of the day. Did she not dream over the Sunday supplement features, and did she not linger on her way to work before the Trinity Theater in order to stare at the pictures? She wore a navy-blue dress pulled in tight at the waist. Her waist was surprisingly narrow, her shoulders a little broad, almost masculine; she was a strong girl. Upon her competent shoulders sat this fluttery, dreamy head, blond hair puffed out and falling down in coquettish curls past her ears, past her collar, down onto her back, so that when she ran along the sidewalk it blew out behind her and men stopped to stare at her; never did she bother to glance back at these men—they were like men in movies who do not appear in the foreground but only focus interest, show which way interest should be directed. She was in love with the thought of this. Behind her good clear skin was a universe of skin, all of it healthy. She loved this, she was in love with the fact of girls like her having come into existence, though she could not have expressed her feelings exactly. She said to her friend Rita, “Sometimes I feel so happy over nothing I must be crazy.” Dragging around in the morning, trying to get her father up and trying to get her brother Brock fed and out before somebody started a fight, still she felt a peculiar sense of joy, of prickly excitement, that nothing could beat down. What was going to happen? “Oh, you’re not crazy,” Rita said thoughtfully, “you just haven’t been through it yet.”

  She combed her hair with a heavy pink brush. It worried her to see her curls so listless—that was because of the heat. From the apartment across the way, through the open window, she could hear a radio playing music that meant Saturday night, and her heart began to pound with anticipation of the long hours ahead during which anything might happen. Her father, who had been out of work for almost ten years, liked to lie in bed and drink and smoke, not caring that so many hours rushed by he’d never be able to get back—but Loretta felt that time was passing too quickly. It made her nervous. She scratched at her bare arm with the brush in a gentle, unconscious, caressing gesture, and felt the dreaminess of the late summer afternoon rise in her. In the kitchen someone sat down heavily, as if answering her, in response to her wondering.

  “Hey, Loretta!” Brock called.

  “Yeah, I’m coming.” Her voice came out harsh and sounded of the dry cleaners and the street, but it was not her true voice; her true voice was husky and feminine.

  She prepared supper for Brock. The kitchen was narrow, and he had to sit right in her way, so that she made a face and said, “Excuse me,” ironically, squeezing past. Brock was dressed for Saturday night too. He wore a blue serge coat over gray trousers and a queer metallic bronze necktie. A necktie! It was part of Brock’s batty style. He had turned twenty a few weeks before, which seemed to Loretta almost old; and on his pinched face an expression of premature cunning seemed to have frozen, as in a movie still. Like Loretta, he had blond hair, but it seemed to be darkening; he rarely washed it, maybe once a month—it was stiff with grease. He had a strong, angular face with prominent cheekbones. This had been their mother’s face. Strange how, since their mother’s death some years before, Loretta had begun to notice her sometimes in Brock’s face. And in his sudden, impulsive bursts of rage—Brock was always incensed by the old man and certain noisy neighbors—she could see her mother’s restless agitation; it was disturbing.

  “Jesus Christ, is that perfume you’re wearing?” Brock screwed up his face like a clown.

  “Go to hell. You’re not funny.”

  Brock laughed, meanly.

  Loretta took a bowl of potatoes out of the icebox and put them into a frying pan; she had peeled them earlier. The grease sizzled and spat up at her. She resented cooking for her brother yet there was a strange pleasure in it. I do this. This is what I do. Brock liked her waiting on him, she knew. Sitting there at the end of the table so self-importantly, like the malicious spitting of grease: she had only to glance at his amused eyes to see how hateful he was.

  “Look, what the hell is eating you?” Loretta cried.

  Brock smiled innocently. “Is the old man back yet?”

  “You know he isn’t.”

  “How do I know? I’ve got X-ray eyes?”

  “He went out this morning with that Cole to look at some vacant lot. Oh, I know it’s crazy—don’t look at me.”

  “What vacant lot? He’s going to buy a vacant lot?”

  “Ask him.”

  “With what? Where’s the money? What’s he going to buy it with?”

  Brock was getting excited. Saliva shone on his lips.

  “Brock, forget it! Pa isn’t hurting anyone.”

  “He’s sick. He should be carted away.”

  “Carted away where?”

  “Should be locked up.”

  Brock leaned forward on his elbows and spoke in his rapid, insinuating voice, as if he meant something other than his words, and you were a fool not to catch on. Oh, he was hateful! He was Loretta’s brother and in the years of their childhood he had done well by her—he’d fought with older kids who teased her, following the rule of the street, but that was maybe for his own honor, not her. At one time no one could have guessed that Brock Botsford, the long-limbed stooping kid with the blue-eyed stare and quick fists, would grow so much apart from the other boys, precocious, yet in a way stunted, into this strange, mock-serious old-young man. Beneath his sly words and his facial mannerisms, a perverse and malicious will. Loretta dreaded her girl friends talking with Brock, attracted by his cheap flashy clothes and movie-style, then edging away, nervously giggling, “Isn’t that guy queer?” In that way that girls do, with absolute accuracy.

  “Oh, you talk too much sometimes! Get a job yourself, a good job, if you think you’re superior to him,” Loretta said, incensed.

  She sat at the other end of the table, as far from Brock as possible. But the table was small, she couldn’t escape his presence. He was leaning across the table; with his restless drumming fingers he could take hold of her wrist if he wished. He’d done this, a trick of his, twisting the wrist until she cried out in pain, many times. Just kidding! She looked uneasily at his free hand as he ate with the other…His hands were always dirty, he worked in a machine shop, the nails ridged with grease, and beneath the grime his skin was waxy pale as their mother’s had been. For such death-colore
d skin Loretta had no love, only pity; it worried her, Brock was her brother, maybe his health was not right. She loved him, didn’t she? There was a grudging bond between them. Brock drifted from job to job, but even when he was out of work he seemed to have money. Mystery-money, he called it. On the street he hung out with his punk-friends from school, smoking and laughing at Brock’s wild jokes, glancing at Loretta if she caught on. Oh, she caught on! Every other word spilling from a guy’s mouth was dirty. She considered Brock’s friends hopeless bastards. Brock was maybe a bastard, but not yet hopeless. Was he? The newspaper, the radio, things you hear from adults, you understand that the world divides in two: those who were hopeless, losers, a big pack of them, and those headed for somewhere. These were men and boys, of course: females, Loretta didn’t even consider. But boys like her cousin Frank Benyas for instance. Yes, Frank had been in Children’s Court a half-dozen times, he’d made his mother’s life miserable, yet there was a certain severity about them, a determination to get somewhere. Frank was now a printer’s apprentice and he would do all right. Other boys like Joe Krajenke and Floyd Sloan and Bernie Malin, especially Bernie, who’d been in trouble as kids, spending time in Juvie Hall, still their eyes didn’t glint with the nerved-up malice of Brock’s—they were decent, in their souls. You could trust them, maybe. Especially Bernie Malin. Loretta felt a jab of excitement when she thought of Bernie, his eyes on her, his easy smile…She could lose herself in thoughts of Bernie for long dreamy minutes. Oh, Bernie lost his temper sometimes, he had a dirty mouth like any guy, but he’d apologize, and he had a job, at least Loretta thought he had a job. Whatever it was that prevented people from falling through the bottom of the world the way her father had fallen, and Brock seemed to be falling, Bernie had it, it was a mystery wasn’t it?

  “You are such an—aggravating bastard,” Loretta said. This was brave and bold and maybe a little reckless. Provoking Brock, did she want to risk it? But sometimes he liked her speaking hard and fast to him, the way a sister should speak to a brother, hiding nothing. Telling the truth. For who else would tell Brock the truth? He watched her closely, his eyes narrowed. She was sitting upright, her shoulders slightly raised, tense. “Last night, that was so stupid! It was cruel. You egg him on, and he says things, and you get mad at him, it’s like lighting a match and dropping it, and why? And that gun of yours! That isn’t a real gun, is it? I bet it isn’t.” She thought of something, frowning. She saw him watching her. “Are you trying to give him a stroke or something?”

  Brock laughed. “What an imagination, kid.”

  “A—heart attack? He gets so red in the face, and panting.”

  “Why not, after what he did to Ma?”

  “That wasn’t his fault.”

  “Whose, then?”

  “He couldn’t help getting laid off, Jesus! Everybody was, they shut half the plant down. Ma was wrong to blame him for that, she was always crazy that way needing to blame, blame, blame.”

  Brock said coldly, “Don’t call her crazy, you.”

  “She was! You know it.”

  “Nobody in our family is craz-y. Don’t spread the word.”

  Loretta understood. Crazy was a place, like the back of a vacant lot where things have been dumped, trash and garbage and rotting things, where you don’t want to go.

  “Well, look,” Loretta said, trying to smile, to soften the tension between them, “I’m not defending either one of them! I’m fed up with it. With home. So Pa won’t work, says he’s afraid—well, Rita’s father is the same. They got the shakes, their hands. Sometimes it’s so bad, Pa can’t light a cigarette, I got to do it for him. Jeez! He sees cockroaches that aren’t there, and I look, where he’s pointing, and a cockroach peeps out. Why d’you always blame people for things they can’t help? Ma believed in God, some kind of nasty-minded God, but you, you don’t, do you?—so why blame people?” It was a long speech that left her breathless, and pleased with herself.

  “What’s that got to do with it? Believing in God?”

  “I just don’t give a damn about it. I don’t look back on it, that’s all.”

  “Well, I do.”

  “What are you going to do with that gun?”

  Brock tapped at his forehead with his fingers and pretended to think. “I’m going to kill somebody with it,” he said seriously.

  Loretta said “Tsk,” to show her disgust, and stood up to stir the potatoes. She showered them with pepper. Let him burn his mouth out, the miserable bastard…She glanced over at him and saw how bent his shoulders were, even inside the new coat. Twenty years old! It had taken him two weeks’ pay to buy that coat, and as soon as he’d bought it he’d turned sneering about it, ashamed of it; she had no idea why. That was Brock! Wanting something for a year, wanting something all his life, as soon as he got it it would turn to garbage in his hands and he’d be left sneering down at it, puzzled. She felt sorry for him. She said, “Are you keeping it for somebody, is that it?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “You’re keeping it for Harry Honigan.” Harry Honigan was a neighborhood character who had gone on to better things, so he said, and had an apartment farther uptown and a good car; unfortunately he had been sentenced to ten years in prison just the other day. Brock had always hung around him like a puppy. When Honigan was in trouble he drifted back to the neighborhood, where his mother took him in and fed him well and wept over him, and his grandmother and aunts crowded around him, protecting him, and at such times Brock might get to see him. When things were good no one heard of Harry for months. “It’s got something to do with Harry,” Loretta said.

  “Aren’t you smart.”

  “Are you keeping the gun for him? When does he think he’s getting out?”

  “No, it has nothing to do with Honigan. He’s finished.”

  “Oh, he’ll get out again, won’t he?”

  “He’s finished.”

  Loretta stirred some hash in with the potatoes. She stirred it slowly round and round, thinking of Harry Honigan, who was finished. “Well, that’s too bad,” she said.

  “Might be that I feel like killing somebody,” Brock said slyly, as if she’d forgotten what they were talking about.

  “Sure.”

  Brock had gone through spurts in his childhood, through “phases,” as their mother kept saying. For a while he had been thought simple-minded because he was slow to hit other kids back and slow to respond at school. And he’d been very small for his age. Then, in fifth grade at the nuns’ school, he had begun to grow and get smarter, and then he had the reputation of being a little crazy. It was Brock who crawled on the school roof one day, just for fun, and across the railroad tracks that went over the canal, and it was Brock who ran yodeling and flailing his arms when a policeman was after all the boys. Brock had done it to make fun of his own terror, to make fun of running itself—that was the kind of strange thing about him that people didn’t understand. When a drunken cop had beaten him up one night, mistaking him for somebody else, Brock had lain in an alley, bleeding, and when somebody found him his first remark had been, “I landed without my parachute!” So he was peculiar. He wasn’t crazy exactly. You couldn’t decide what was what and forget him, though of course he was a hopeless bastard in general and would never accomplish anything, he was too wild; but there was no joy in his wildness, she saw that. From the time he was thirteen until his eighteenth birthday he’d been secretive and edgy, miserable to have around the house; like his mother, he could go for weeks without smiling. Now that he was twenty, now that he was out on his own and had a little money, he was more gentlemanly to Loretta in an ironic, overdone way. She couldn’t figure him out. She couldn’t take him seriously.

  While he ate, she scraped the frying pan noisily and ran water in the sink. Their father hadn’t come home all day; no supper for him. She’d have to put supper in the oven. She stood on her toes and tried to look out the window, but all she could see w
as a fire escape on the building across the way. A German family lived there, four mean kids and a mean old man and a woman who spoke only German. They had to be taken seriously. Downstairs in this building was an old, soiled woman whose name Loretta did not know. She saw her all the time. And down the way, out on the street, people were already beginning to drift into the city heat, not really minding the heat but oddly pleased with it, its fluidity, as if they were creatures in a sea who were all kin, bound by the same element, which touches them on every pore and draws them helplessly together.

  “Where are you going tonight?” Brock said suddenly.