“It makes Babs sick,” he smiled at us.
We were silent for a moment, I not knowing just how to take it; I suppose I thought he meant sick for the home she had left or something like that.
I didn’t pay much attention to it, looking at the lake below, which was dark now with the sun only in the tops of the trees on the hill, as if night were floating up out of the black water and pushing the light away. “Yes, it makes Babs sick. Actually makes her nauseated.” I looked at her in the silence that followed his laugh; she was peering off into the woods across the gorge as if she hadn’t heard him. “Doesn’t it, Babs?”
She turned back to us at her name and smiled obliquely at the ground. “It’s the foreign trees. They have a smell.”
He cried, “Nonsense!” and we all laughed, I don’t know why.
“It isn’t far, we could visit it now,” he said. But my wife said quickly it was getting late, we’d have to come another day. And he turned away from the subject and began calling the dog again. The light was fading out fast now.
“Jerry’s going to get a good beating,” she murmured in a sad singsong.
“He certainly is,” he pronounced like a judge, voice different from any I had heard him use before.
Then suddenly, imploring, almost tearful, “Don’t beat him, Tom!” raising in me again the old inarticulate feeling of being very close to something, yet very positively separated from it.
The fires were burning bright when we went in and we sat down and drank some of the good pale corn whisky he had promised us. He and I were alone for a few minutes before we left and he said something about Glad to be away from cities and crowds. I said lightly, just for something to say because I found talking to him difficult, “You’re certainly not troubled with neighbors here, I’d say,” thinking of the lonesome-looking red fox, the other dog asleep on the rug with his chin beside the heavy-soled shoe.
I had put my stick back in the stand in the hall but he had kept his and he rubbed the knob of it in his left palm, saying nothing for a moment, dreamily watching the dog. Then he laid it on the floor and picked up his glass from the rug, giving the pale whisky a grim smile and saying, “I’m not so sure.” I didn’t know what he meant. Nothing significant, I guessed. And yet as I waited a second for him to go on I could feel the skin at the back of my neck tightening. A man ought to know whether or not he has neighbors.
“Some nights,” he said, twirling the ice in the glass as he had done on the afternoon at our house, speaking with the flat matter-of-factness of someone stating the price of cotton or how much hay he expects to put up; “Some nights I’m rather certain we have neighbors in the Lower Vale,” twirling the ice two or three times, round and round. “Jerry catches on before I do usually.”
Once he had said it I thought I had felt it coming all along, or something very much like it. I didn’t laugh or even smile but sat there quite blank and still.
“But they are harmless,” brushing it off. “Except that their scent fascinates my dog Jerry. I’m afraid he’ll take up with them one day. Or one night,” starting back like someone being waked from a light sleep as we heard our wives descending the chilly uncarpeted stairs. “Don’t mention them to Babs. She doesn’t know anything about it yet.—Feels something,” he smiled, “but doesn’t understand.”
They stood in the door looking after us as we drove away; you could hardly see her face for the dark of the porch roof closing over it. We thought we wouldn’t go back “to shoot.”
WAR MEMORIAL
The notice in our paper the other morning of the death at 89 of my good friend Dr. Wallace Meigs mentioned his having been head of our City Hospital back in the years of World War II—before Pearl Harbor, the US not in the war, only watching appalled at what was happening in France, to France. It didn’t mention the two visits he had from the FBI; hardly pertinent anyway, even if the editor had known about them, which not many people did.
He told me later that when Miss Gilbert brought him the little white card with Federal Bureau of Investigation down in a corner he read that before he read the man’s name. It was the second time he had seen such a card and it made him uncomfortable; they were giving him too much business. He was a doctor. You found a man’s liver in the same place whether he was an American or a Nazi. Or a Red. He didn’t care what a man believed in, except for the effect it might have on his intestinal tract—which, of course, however, might be considerable.
He said, “Tell him to sit down. I’ll be with him in a minute or two,” turning away to the sweetgum tree beyond his window with its pyramid of star-shaped leaves that to him always suggested symmetry and order and the way things tended to grow if left to themselves. Certainly not “Dr. Josef Schurz” this time. In all probability, the clever young man with the good American name of Williams. Black hair this time instead of yellow, brown eyes instead of blue, down in Georgia from New York State not Munich. And a good intern too. Not like the other one, but good. The other one had really been something special; on all counts.
“I am not a Nazi, Doctor,” in flawless English, even using the English “z”.
And that settled it. You had to assume a man was telling you the truth or you wouldn’t have any civilization at all.
“There will be no fist fights on these premises while I am superintendent here, do you understand?” the two there beyond his desk, the Southerner more or less on one leg, rubbing his knuckles with his thumb, looking down at his hands, the German with heels together, hands beside him, straight spine, chin up, gazing at a point just over the doctor’s head.
“This guy’s a Nazi, Doctor.”
“I am not a Nazi,” moving nothing but his lips. “I simply said the German Army was invincible, sir. Does that make me a Nazi?”
No. Positively not. With the green uniforms spreading across almost every country you could name, flooding through the broken dikes, it might be just a cool-eyed appraisal of the evidence; on many a dark day it looked like that to himself too.
“How does this man get out of Germany, Doc?” “I am a Jew, Doctor.” It made good sense. A Jew couldn’t be a Nazi. And what of it, anyhow? This was a free country, wasn’t it? We weren’t fighting anybody.
“I am not interested in politics. What matters in this hospital is the way you do your work, and Schurz’s work is—quite satisfactory,” gulping a little before he could get out “satisfactory” in describing a standard of performance that would have done credit to any of the great hospitals anywhere.
He got rid of them. He was no good at discipline. “If anything like this comes up again I promise you I’ll have both of you dismissed from the Hospital,” the Southerner nodding in some relief, and the German’s eyes shifting off the wall in a blue surprise probably at not being dismissed this time.
The boys didn’t like him but that meant nothing. They wouldn’t have liked anybody who clicked his heels. It was that simple. It had nothing to do with patriotism. A little to do, perhaps, with the German’s having a better education than they had, an education that seemed an inherent part of him, not a pasted-on sheet of forced schooling with deep-dyed ignorance showing through it unashamed (proudly, almost); a little to do, perhaps, with the clean, cool job he did, and with his self-sufficient manner, going his way, friendly enough if cornered but not seeking friendship. But most of it was in the click of the heels.
From one of the staff: “He’s a good intern all right, Dr. Meigs, but—”
“What else does he have to be, Howard? Does he have to be a member of the Democratic Party?”
“Why not give the place to some American boy?”
“Find me one who’s a better doctor and if he wants the place it’s his. I’m a doctor first, Howard, and then I’m an American.”
Howard sauntering to the door, jingling his car keys in his pocket, and coming back. “But suppose this man’s not like you and me. Suppose he’s a German first and a doctor second; suppose he’s a Nazi.” “He’s not a Nazi, Howard.” “How do you know he’s not?” “Because he says he’s not. You’ve got to assume a man’s telling you the truth or everything breaks down.”—And so on. Interminable talk about it. Nobody seemed to put any stock in the fact you couldn’t tell the difference between American and German kidneys.
Then one warm summer morning, a Friday—the little calling card. They “just wanted to check up”: where he came from, how long he had been there, and all that, “Does he get much mail, Doctor?” Coldly, “I don’t keep track of the mail.” “Well, Doctor, would you mind calling in the clerk who handles that sort of thing?”
And he sent for her, garrulous widowed “Miss Julia”: not much mail, she had wondered about that herself, he didn’t seem to expect any, never came by the window to ask, if something came in she would send word to him and he would appear, accept it, make a little bow, say “Q” in a kind of chirp and go away. “Handsome young—”
“I want you, if you please, Doctor, to hold up any mail that comes in for him in the next few days. I’ve got to go to Savannah but I’ll be back through here on Monday or Tuesday.” “I can’t hold up a man’s mail!” “Oh, that’s all right, Doctor,” with a barely perceptible tightening of his eyelids; “just hold it here.”
But it wasn’t all right at all. There was something about it he resented. It wasn’t just that there was something shady about watching a man’s mail; that was bad enough, but this went further. You couldn’t have nationalism getting mixed up in medicine without hurting medicine, hurting the whole structure of free inquiry. You hurt yourself more than the man whose mail you watched. He felt like getting his back up, but he didn’t. He nodded; maybe luck would be with him and there wouldn’t be any mail.—And there wasn’t, through Saturday noon when he closed up and drove home (at 24 miles an hour).
Rattling around the empty house in the heavy stillness of Saturday afternoon, the family in the mountains to get out of the heat, feeling rather friendless himself, he started wondering about Schurz and his friendlessness. Friendlessness could do strange things to you, make you take all kinds of false positions to bolster yourself up, show everybody you didn’t care; Schurz might be a different man with a little friendliness. And he got Schurz on the phone, told him he was going to play some of Beethoven’s piano sonatas on the phonograph. “My family is away but I think I can find a few bottles of beer in the icebox and some cheese and crackers.”
He came. Walked up to the door dressed in dark woolens, almost invisible in the falling night, the perspiration on his chin shining in the porch light. Dr. Meigs said, “You’ll have to get you some cotton clothes if you’re going to be down here in the summertime. Don’t get linen. Cotton’s cooler.” “It’s nothing,” with a smile as he passed a handkerchief over his mouth and stuffed it back up his sleeve.
