Axel was not called up: something, some weakness or problem, kept him out. He did war work alongside people with exemptions or disabilities that were often a lot more obvious than his. He had a lapel button to wear, and moved it carefully each night from blue suit to gray. Before Winnie too could find something to do, she learned she was pregnant.
On hot nights in that summer, when she could no longer bear to sit in their apartment by the fan, legs splayed like a fat person and mouth open, Axel took her on the Staten Island Ferry to get a breeze. Some days when he was at work, she went to the air-conditioned movies. Or she went over to Manhattan and uptown to the Metropolitan Museum, cool and huge, or the Museum of Natural History, not walking far within but finding a gallery or room she liked and sitting, placid as a houseplant in the dimness.
Natural history: the words soothed and calmed her all by themselves, not merely different from corrosive human history but its antidote. A nightmare from which I am trying to awaken: that's what Axel said history was. That was only another quotation, though; Axel didn't mind history, he loved it actually, and seemed not to see that it led to this, to people's brothers and husbands being sundered from them and sent far away for remote causes, for vengeance or conquest or to stop wrongdoing, whatever history's reasons were.
She walked in the room of Asian fauna, where animals and birds from the Pacific were mounted and put behind glass in spaces that reproduced the lands they came from, far islands whose names she read with a shock, for they were the very ones that were now in the papers and in Sam's letters, where the terrible fighting was going on; they appeared in the newsreels blasted and smoky and gray, but here they were green and altogether still. New Guinea. Samoa. The Solomons. Fabulous birds in a thousand colors who had lived there unobserved for centuries, for all time. The diorama of Samoa was set high on a cliff above the sea, looking down through the leaves and vines to an empty beach; it took you a while to see, perched at the end of a twisted limb, a small brilliant bird.
Empty. Before humans. Winnie after the months of fear—months of thinking about those soldiers and their fear when they had to go ashore on such beaches against the Jap machine guns and then pour fire into their holes to burn them out—was tempted to wish men or Man had never gone to those places, never found them and put them at risk so thoughtlessly. For there were no birds there now, she bet, no blossoms. Which led to the thought that it would be better if men hadn't come to be at all, the peace and endlessness without them: and she drew away from that thought in a little awe.
* * * *
Sam returned unhurt. Coming down whole and hale (a little fatter, even) from the great brown plane almost before its props stopped turning, one of so many in their billed or cloth caps, brown leather jackets, brown ties tucked into their shirts. A major: they had told him that if he stayed in he'd be made a colonel in two years. Winnie and Axel and their son Pierce on the tarmac behind the fence, with Opal and Sam's son and daughter, and all the other wives and children.
Winnie thought later that it must be Pierce's first memory, and he came to believe that it might be, that the little brown pictures Opal took—of Sam holding his son Joe aloft, Sam grinning cheek to cheek with his sister—were things he had seen and stored away. The small flag he was given to wave. How he cried when Sam bent to dandle him, cried and cried till Sam took off the scary phallic cap.
It was in any case the first time he ever saw the man under whose roof and rule he would live for ten years.
You remember the reason for that: how Winnie learned what kind of man Axel was, not the marrying kind (it was Axel himself who told her, in tears, late in the night or early in the morning of a day in Pierce's tenth year, Pierce asleep in the far room); what things he had done before his marriage, maybe even after it, the felony arrest long ago that had made him undraftable, she stopped her ears at that point. The way I'm made, he said.
When she packed her bags and took her son to live in Kentucky with her newly widowed brother (for it was Opal, beautiful, wise Opal, who didn't live long, and Sam who was left to mourn), it was as though her own life bent backward just at that awful juncture, returned to take instead a way that she had projected for herself when she was a child; as though Axel's sin or sickness had been the necessary condition by which she took her rightful place beside her brother, in his kitchen and on the distaff side of his fireplace, in her chair just smaller than his. It seemed—not in the first flush of horror and amazement, but not very long after—so clear a case of benevolent or at least right-thinking Destiny in action that she really held nothing against Axel, and even let Pierce spend days with him now and then in Brooklyn when the family came north.
She never could bring herself to touch him again, though.
The way Pierce pleased his father when they were together (and he did want to please him, mostly) was to listen to him talk, as Winnie had done, and which Pierce did then and ever after. Axel was one of those people who seem to have been born without a filter between brain-thought and tongue-thought: to be with him was to be set afloat or submerged in his tumbling stream of consciousness, where floated odd learning, famous names, the movie version of his own life and adventures, fragments of verse and song, injunctions, dreads, self-pity, antique piety, the catchphrases of a thousand years. With how sad steps O Moon thou climb'st the skies, he would say; rum, sodomy, and the lash; inter fæces et urinam nascimur, plangently in altar-boy pronunciation; Count Alucard? Why I don't believe that's a Transylvanian name.... He could often seem like other people when in public, but alone with you he overflowed those banks, and you fled or you followed: whether borne along as Winnie had been, trailing one hand, or poling as fast as you could down the same thousand-branching streams and through its bogs and backwaters, as Pierce felt he must. He could weary of Axel, but he never despised him, because he was never taught that what Axel possessed wasn't worth possessing, and also because he was afraid to: afraid that if he hurt his father he would hurt him mortally, and so lose the last of something that he had already lost nearly all of, without which he would cease to exist.
Anyway he liked knowing things. From his earliest years he gathered things to know like grain, and never forget them afterward. He learned what Axel knew, and then later he learned where Axel had learned those things; he came to know many things Axel would never learn. When Axel was on TV—an unbelievable overturning of the natural course of things, that he should be there, looking like himself but smaller and smoother: a doll of himself, answering questions on a famous quiz show for big money—Pierce knew the answer to the question that finally stopped him. You could only miss one, and then you left, shaking the hand of the host and the other guy, who looked like Arnold Stang and sounded like somebody else entirely. The question that stopped Axel was What is the Samian letter, and after whom is it named?
Pierce Moffett was a junior at St. Guinefort's Academy then, watching TV in the crowded student lounge—you may not remember that, but maybe you remember the tick-tock music that played while Axel stared like a damned soul, everybody who heard it played week after week remembers it. And Pierce knew: he knew what the Samian letter was, and after whom it was named, and his father didn't.
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