Collected Stories

The seat-belt sign went on and the pilot announced, “Owing to the weather, O’Hare Airport is closed, briefly. We will be landing in Detroit in five minutes.”

“I can’t be stuck in Detroit!” said Katrina.

“Easy, Katrina. In Chicago it isn’t even one o’clock. We’ll probably sit on the ground awhile and take right off again.”

Suddenly fields were visible beneath—warehouses, hangars, highways, water. The landing gear came into position as Katrina, watching from the ground, had often seen it do, when the belly of the Boeing opened and the black bristling innards descended. Victor was able to stop one of the busy stewardesses, and she told them that it was a bad scene in Chicago. “Blitzed by snow.”

When they disembarked they found themselves immediately in a crowd of grounded passengers. Once you got into such a crowd your fear was that you’d never get out. How lucky that Victor was not fazed. He was going forward in that rising-falling gait of his, his brows resembling the shelf mushrooms that grow on old tree trunks. For her part, Katrina was paralyzed by tension. Signs signified little. BAGGAGE CLAIM: there was no baggage. She was carrying Vanessa’s precious fiddle. TERMINAL: Why should Victor limp all the way to the terminal only to be sent back to some gate? “There should be agents here to give information.”

“No way. They’re not organized for this,” said Victor. “And we can’t get near the phones. They’re lined up ten deep. Let’s see if we can find two seats and try to figure out what to do.”

It was slow going. Alternate blasts of chill from the gates and heat from the blowers caught them about the legs and in the face. They found a single seat, and Victor sat himself down. He had that superlative imperturbability in the face of accident and local disturbances that Katrina was welcome to share if she could. Beila seemed to have learned how to do it. Trina had not acquired the knack. Victor laid his heel on the duffel bag. The violin case he took between his legs. With his stick he improvised a barrier to keep people from tripping over him.

Going off to gather information, Katrina found a man in a blue-gray uniform who looked as if he might be a flight engineer. He was leaning, arms crossed, against the wall. She noticed how well shined his black shoes were, and that he had a fresh complexion. She thought that he should be able to direct her. But when she said, “Excuse me,” he refused to take notice of her, he turned his face away. She said, “I wonder if you could tell me. My flight is grounded. Where can I find out what’s happening?”

“How would I know!”

“Because you’re in uniform, I thought…”

He put his hand to her chest and pushed her away. “What are you doing?” she said. She felt her eyes flooding, growing turbid, smarting. “What’s the matter with you?” What followed was even worse. While he looked into her face, not downward, his heel ground her instep. He was stomping her foot. And this was not being done in anger. It didn’t seem anger at all; it was a different kind of intensity She tried to read the name on the bar clipped to his chest, but he was gone before she could make it out. She thought: I’ve put myself in a position where people can hurt me and get away with it. As if I came out of Evanston to do wrong and it’s written all over me. It might have been a misogynist, or other psychopath in uniform. A bitter hot current came from low underneath, going through her bowels like fainting heat, then moved up her chest and into her throat and cheeks. Hurt as she was, she conjectured that it might have been disrespect for his profession that put him in a fury, an engineer being approached like a cabin steward. Or he might have been putting out waves of hate magnetism and praying for somebody to approach, to give the works to. Victor, if he had been there, would have hit the guy on the head with his stick. Sick or well, he had presence of mind.

While she waited in a flight information line, Katrina concentrated on shrinking down the incident and restoring scale. He was just a person from a nice family in the suburbs probably, average comfortable people, judging from the way he wore his uniform—what Victor, when he got going, called the “animal human average” and, quoting one of his writers, “the dark equivocal crowd saturated with falsity.” He liked such strong expressions. Good thing she had on the ostrich boots. Otherwise the man might have broken something.

When her turn came, the woman behind the counter had little information to give. New flights would be announced as soon as O’Hare opened its runways. “There’ll be a rush for seats. Maybe I’d better buy first-class tickets,” said Katrina.

“I can’t reserve for you. The computer has no information, no matter how I punch it.”

“Still, I’ll buy two open first-class flights. On my credit card. They can be turned in if I don’t use them.”

As she approached Victor from the side, he looked pleasant enough in his cap—silent, bemused, amused. It was in the lower face that the signs of aging were most advanced, in the shortening of his jaw and the sharpening of its corners. In profile the signs were more noticeable, touched off more worry, inspired more sorrow. Katrina did not think that her full face, the just-repainted mouth, and the carriage of her bosom gave it away, but she was in low spirits: his condition, the jam of passengers, the spite of the man who had stomped her, the agony of being stuck here. From the front Victor was as “rich” in looks as ever. Yet she could not borrow much strength from him. There were Wulpy fans even here in Detroit who would have rushed out to the airport in a fleet of cars if they had known that he was here. They were better qualified to appreciate him than a woman who had twisted his arm to see M*A*S*H. These fans from the city would talk, drink, or take him home. All she could do was to stand on Square One—a woman from Evanston, not vivid with desperation but dull with it, without a particle of invention to her.

You seldom saw Victor in a flap. He wasn’t greatly disturbed—not yet anyway. “Aren’t you getting hungry? I am,” he said.

“We should eat, I suppose.”

“I guess we could find a fast-food spot.”

“Something more substantial than a hamburger.”

“…Not to spoil tonight’s banquet,” he said.

Their march through the concourse began. Normally Victor was a fair walker, patient with his infirmity. But a solid mass like this was daunting. Movement was further complicated by baggage carts, sweepers, and wheelchairs, and Katrina soon said, “We aren’t getting anywhere. It’s after one o’clock in Chicago.”

Victor said, “I wouldn’t panic just yet. The housekeeper is there. Your sister. Your friend the cop.”

“My sister isn’t exactly in sympathy.”

“You often say how critical she is. Still, she may not let you down.”

“Even through bad times, I stood by her. Last summer she drove up with a shovel in the trunk of her car and said she was on her way to the cemetery to dig up her husband. She said she just had to see him again. I took her into the garden and made her drunk. Then she told me I had let her down, that I had gone to Boston to be with you when she was having surgery. They removed that tumor from the cervix.”

Victor, far from shocked, nodded as she spoke—grieving wives, hysterical sisters. To read about such matters in a well-written book might have been of interest; to hear about them, no. Katrina could not convey how awful it had been to get her sister plastered—the damp heat, Dotey’s thin face sweating. Because of the smell of clay underfoot you were reminded of graves. Just try to picture Dotey with neurasthenic stick arms, digging. She would have passed out in a matter of minutes.

Victor was filled with scenes from world history, fully documented knowledge of evil, battles, deportations to the murder camps from the Umschlagplatz in Warsaw, the terrible scenes during the evacuation from Saigon, and certainly he could imagine Dorothea trying to dig up her husband’s corpse. But when to turn your imagination to phenomena of this class remained unclear. He had written about the “inhuman” as an element of the Modern, about the feebleness, meanness, drunkenness of modern man and of the consequences of this for art and for politics. His reputation was based upon the analyses he had made of Modernist extremism. He was the teacher of famous painters and writers. She had pored over his admirable books, yet she, you see, had to deal with him on the personal level. And on the personal level, well, he had more to say about art as a remedy for the bareness, as a cover for modern nakedness, than about the filling of personal gaps, or deficiencies. Yet even there he was not entirely predictable. He never ran out of surprises.

“I see you favoring your left foot. Does the boot pinch?”

“It was stepped on.”

“You bumped into somebody?”

“A nice fair-haired young man rushed away from me when I stopped to get information, but before he rushed away he stomped me.”

Victor stopped, looking at her from his height. “Why didn’t you report him?”