The Merry Month of May by James Jones
I do not think it was because of any especial temperamental difference. I think we just made them uneasy. We were a pretty fiery bunch. We discussed everything. Nothing was sacred. There was a lot of drinking. There were a lot of four-letter words spoken, though Louisa never used them and neither did I. It was bound to make them uneasy. And I think the business community wives took a quiet but determined dislike to Louisa. It was as if, even though Louisa never spoke them herself, they felt she should not have tolerated the bad language or allowed it in her house—especially in front of her child daughter.
I gradually came to suspect that some of the men of the American business community, though not all, would have liked to come again, and again. But their wives were not about to let them. Louisa, of course, could not have cared less.
That Sunday there did not appear to be any of the American business community present.
Harry and I walked up toward the pulpit bar.
McKenna was at one of the refectory tables, absorbed in some tiny homework she had to do for her school, and she came running over to me with her arms out, to be picked up, tossed and kissed by her Godfather. She was getting harder to toss. She was growing, a lot.
At the bar a group was talking over the events of the weekend: the surprising return of Pompidou, his even more surprising speech and acceptance of the students’ demands.
The latest news was that a nationwide one-day general strike was being called for Tuesday the 14th, to protest “Police Repression”. Electricity, gas, water, transportation, telephone, telegraph, mail and taxi service would all be affected. Everybody was coming out on the side of the students. There would be no Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning newspapers. Banks, schools and many businesses would close. Students, teachers and workers would be on the march all across France to protest “repression”.
The feeling at the bar was that it was all over but the shouting. Someone said the phrase “The Students’ One-Week War”, and others picked it up. There was elation at the bar over the students’ win, but there was a nostalgia for the now-finished Revolution. They were all so certain that it was finished. But I could not forget my picture of Hill, and the things he had said on the phone.
Down at the end of the room Weintraub came in with Samantha-Marie. Louisa apparently had invited them. They made their way toward us slowly, shaking hands and saying hello.
Several others more had come in before them and there were now 18 or 20 people in the room and two of them were black people. One was a slender, beautifully muscled dancer from the Folies Bergère, a friend of Louisa’s, and of Harry’s too, but more of Louisa’s. The other was an old, aged painter, poor but famous in New York and Paris for ten or 15 years, who had the courtly manners of an old-time Virginia gentleman. He was a good painter. Weintraub introduced her to them. If Samantha felt any surprise or chagrin or anything else at seeing two other American blacks here, she gave no indication. And yet somehow I had a suspicion that she did.
From her table McKenna ran out to meet her and clasp her around the knees. Samantha patted her head and kissed her. McKenna rarely ran to kiss anybody, and I found myself feeling jealous.
Our discussion at the bar had centered itself on the question of whether the students would try to take over and occupy the Sorbonne tomorrow as they had threatened. Someone had asked if they would. Now that Pompidou had declared it would open.
“They’d be crazy to,” Harry said. I stared at him. He went right on blandly. “Pompidou’s given in to them on their demands. What’s the point? Now’s the time for them to sit down with the Government and negotiate. Get the reforms they want for the University. Not keep the Sorbonne closed down.”
“Don’t you believe it! They aint about to do it!” Weintraub boomed, coming up. He had his arm around Samantha.
At the bar Ferenc Hofmann-Beck, who up to now had been one of the most talkative, slipped off his stool and moved away. He gave Samantha a low bow as he passed her, and a sweet smile, his monocle in his fingers. He did not come back.
“But why?” Fred Singer the TV commentator said. “I have to agree with Harry. What’s the point? After Pompidou’s agreed to all their demands.”
“Because they don’t trust the Government,” Weintraub bellowed in his deepest basso. “That’s why. Every time the Government has given its word on something, and things have started to calm down, the Government reneges on its word again and forces the students a step further. And then they turn loose their jackals, the police, and claim it was all the students’ fault.” I thought it sounded almost like Hill.
“That’s true,” Fred Singer said, “The Government has been playing a both-ends-against-the-middle game.”
“All governments always do,” I put in sourly. “Look at our own.” Almost all of us were against the Vietnam war, if not for moral and political reasons, then for strategic and tactical ones. The Paris talks about it would be opening here tomorrow, in the midst of all this. This whole discussion was boring me suddenly.
“That’s true enough,” Harry said to me. Then to Weintraub, “If those kids want to play with grown-ups, they better learn how dirty it’s going to be, when they finally get out there.”
“They’re learning,” Weintraub said. “They’re learning damn fast. The students want a firm, solid bargaining position,” Weintraub said in his deepest voice. “And they believe the only way they can have that is to keep the Sorbonne closed and occupied.” He sounded as if he was quoting some student leader.
“Then maybe they should occupy it,” Harry said. Suddenly he scratched irritably at the close-clipped hair alongside his bald, sharp-ridged skull. “But hell, you know the police could throw them out of there any minute they choose.”
“The police wouldn’t dare right now,” Weintraub said. “And the Government wouldn’t dare let them. What do you think this big strike is all about? Everybody’s on the side of the students. Even the shopkeepers on rue Gay-Lussac who had their shops burned, are on their side.
“And those kids are mad,” he said. “Do you know nobody knows how many people were hurt Friday night? Literally hundreds haven’t turned themselves in to the hospitals.”
“Where do you get all your information, Dave?” I said thinly, and looked at Harry.
Weintraub’s arm around Samantha had slipped down until his hand was on her hip, and now he threw out his burly little chest. He made one of his dramatic pauses. “From the kids,” he intoned deeply. “From the kids themselves. That’s where.” He turned to Harry. “And your kid Hill is one of them. Incidentally, he’s all right.”
“Yes. Yes, we know he’s all right,” Harry said. “He’s been calling us.”
“Well, he told me to tell you that,” Weintraub said, a little more defensively.
“Probably showing off to his buddies,” Harry said, easily. “I guess it’s not popular to be in with your parents right now.”
I wanted to take some of the weight off. “Where did you see them, Dave?”
Weintraub was delighted to tell. He took his arm from around Samantha to give himself oratory room. He had met a group of them, at a little café-tabac in the Carrefour Odéon, a place called the Monaco, where a lot of American beatniks used to hang out years ago, and where he himself still went sometimes because it was cheap. I knew the Monaco, and it was a pretty low dive. Anyway, Dave had seen this group of kids, students obviously, all huddled up over a table in the back every day, and finally one day he noticed Hill was with them and started talking to them. They were all students of Cinema at the Sorbonne and most of them were studying Sociology too, like Hill, and they were planning what they were going to do when the Sorbonne was occupied, as all of the student groups had voted for. They were the leaders of a special Comité du Cinéma des Étudiants which was assigned the job of photographing the Revolution, the occupation of the Sorbonne, and everything that happened after that until the end of the Revolution, whenever that might be. They all expected a lot more fighting. From their foot
“This afternoon?” Harry said, and gave me a look. “At the Monaco? You saw them?” Hill had told me he was calling from the Place Contrescarpe. But there was no discrepancy in that.
“Yes,” Weintraub said. “Why? You know, the great thing is that they’ve brought the workers into it, now. They tell me delegations of the students have been working like hell all week to do that, going out to the factories, and the auto assembly plants. That’s the important thing.”
“That’s absolutely true,” Fred Singer put in, “that’s going to make all the difference come Tuesday.”
We were suddenly off into another discussion, about the workers now, and their plans, their demands, and their hopes for wage increases. Above this, Harry gave me a knowing, sort of conspiratorial look. But I did not know what he meant to do, or convey. It was perfectly possible that Hill could have been at both Contrescarpe and Odéon during the afternoon, and it didn’t make any difference if he had, or even if he had not. I couldn’t read what Harry was trying to signal.
Then suddenly Samantha Everton, Weintraub’s little “mistress”, who had said practically nothing at all up to now, burst into the discussion with both her pretty feet.
“I think it’s all a lot of bullcrap,” she said to us all with a covering grin, but there was an edge to her voice.
I think it was then that I first began to think of her as “Sam”. She had said before she liked to be called that. Instead of Samantha, or Samantha-Marie. I think it was the grin that did it.
9
HARRY GRINNED AT HER. “Say shit,” he said. “Bullshit. You can say bullshit here.”
“Then, bullshit. I say, it’s all a lot of bullshit.”
“What is?” Harry said.
“The Students’ Revolution, They’re not going to change anything.” She grinned up at Harry from the stool she had slipped onto. “Incidentally, I met your son, too. This afternoon. He’s a nice boy.”
“Yes. Well,” Harry said. Then after a minute, “I’m glad he’s all right. He is a nice boy.”
“He’s a lovely boy,” Sam said. “But he’s much too young, and much too idealistic, for me.”
“He has your age.”
“I know. Yes. But he hasn’t my experience. I like them older, when they’ve been around a little.”
“And you don’t think the students are going to change anything?” Harry said.
“Men like you,” Sam grinned at him. “What? Change anything?” She raised her voice, and the rest at the bar stopped talking to hear. “Certainly not. No, they won’t change anything. Oh, they’ll make the old folks give them a few little concessions and reforms. But they won’t change anything. Revolutions can’t happen in the kind of highly organized societies we live in today. And I’m not so sure they should happen. Look at what their Revolution cost the Russians. Anyway, today everybody’s got to have his electricity and his water and his gas and his automobile. But Revolution? That’s all horseshit. The TV wouldn’t work.”
Weintraub had put his arm around her, after finishing his oratory, and his hand now rested on the curve of her hip, just at the bone. Beside me, Sam twitched her hip irritably, and Weintraub’s hand disappeared from it as if shot away. “These kids are out there in the streets having the time of their lives. They’re having their ‘war’. They’re playing games. They’re getting their kicks. All getting their rocks off. That’s the truth about it all!” She grinned her street Arab grin at us all.
“I take it you don’t think the Students’ Revolt of Paris is very important,” Harry grinned at her.
“No, not very.”
“She just got in from America, you know,” Weintraub said.
“Sure, I just got in from America. But I’ve lived in France. Quite a lot. I went to school here two years.” Her voice got sing-song, “And I’ve been in CORE. And I’ve been a SNICK worker. And I’ve been SDS. Students are all assholes and jerks. If I could ever find one person who didn’t have personal ambition mixed in with his altruism. If I could find one. Students give me a royal pain in the ass.”
“What about Mickey Schwerner, and those other two boys?” Harry said. “Chaney and Goodman.”
“James Chaney and Andy Goodman. What about them? They’re dead,” Samantha said. “That was a long time ago. So what about them? They knew what they were getting into. Or should have. They knew the chance they were taking. They went down there. Those two white Jewish boys were white Northern assholes. They were fools. They didn’t believe those crazy rednecks would ever kill them. And the nigger, James Chaney, knew the chance he was taking in his home country. They all wanted to be there.”
She shifted her little, high Negro behind on the old seventeenth-century prayer stool. “Oh, it’s all sexual, all of that, down there, don’t you know? At least for the white men. And probly for the niggers. Did you ever read that book? That Huie book? Did that man Huie ever speculate on how much the crazy redneck sexuality might have played in the murder of those three boys? No.”
“He alluded to it,” Harry said.
“But did he ever speculate on the real meanings of his allusions? All those white women making those crazy obscene phone calls about orgies at the Center? Down there, every crazy redneck believes black girls wiggle their ass better, and know how to clamp down inside better. And every white woman believes every black man’s got a big enormous schlong, and can go on screwing all night long. They hate their white men for screwing nigger gals. And the rednecks are terrified of being cuckolded by big black bucks. And rightly so. Because if their white women don’t do it, they sure as hell think about it. No, down there it’s all sexual, sick redneck sex. They’re not very swinging cats, those New York sociology cats. Not if they think they can answer that with some sociology textbook about the Rights of Man. The textbook hasn’t been written yet about down there.”
“You sound like you know the South pretty well,” Harry said.
“Well, I’ve been down there,” Sam said. “Students. Students make me laugh. You all make me laugh.” She slid down off her bar stool. She had no drink. “Your students’ll get their reforms. Or watered down half-assed versions of them. And so what? Meanwhile they’re all out there running and yelling and having themselves a vacation, playing cops and robbers. They’re enjoying it, you’re enjoying it, the police’re enjoying it, and the French’re enjoying it. It’s a bore. I’d rather talk about dancing.”
I came in, here. “Do you feel that same way about the race riots in the States?” I simply could not not ask it.
She gave me a smile. “Sure, pretty much. But when I was there we had some guns, and we killed a few people, and we burned down some warehouses. There, at least old nigger ladies are smart enough to steal themselves a free new TV set out of it. But as for changing society, changing the world—” She shook her head. “The world,” she said, and paused as if searching for an unaccustomed word, “the world absorbs everything. Finally. I wonder if anybody’s talking about anything interesting down at the other end.” And she walked away.
“Hey, that’s pretty profound!” Weintraub bawled from the bar. He made as if to go with her, but she gave him such a look of contemptuous dislike that he stopped. He turned back to the bar. She went off alone. Down the room, I saw Louisa come over to her.
Her talk effectively put a damper over the discussion at the bar. But in a minute it got going again. This time it was still about the workers,
She had come on from New York, Weintraub told us, to Paris on her way to Israel, and had run out of money. In fact, that was incorrect, he said. She had come on from New York knowing she did not have enough money to get to Israel, but figuring something or other would turn up here to get her to Israel.
“What about her mother? What about Rosalie?” Harry said. “Well, her mother doesn’t give her any money apparently,” Weintraub said. “She claims her mother doesn’t have much money.” She was going to Israel to live for a while with a friend. “A boyfriend?” Harry said.
“Well, no,” Weintraub said. “A girlfriend. A Sabra girl.” There was something about the way he said it.
“My God!” Harry said. “A Sabra lesbian?”
“Why not?”
“She’s a lesbian?”
“I suppose. I mean, that is what she seems to like.” Weintraub tried a bluff grin. “But from personal experience I can say it would be hard to contend that she wasn’t double-gaited.”
“Well, come on. Tell us all, Weintraub,” I said.
He puffed out his really quite deep chest like a pigeon. He did not need much urging. She had been sitting in Castel’s in one of her little yé-yé outfits with a French girl whom Dave knew vaguely but only vaguely, nursing a Scotch and soda she didn’t want. Castel, whom she knew from two years before, had bought her a bottle as a welcoming-back gesture. Dave had picked her up. She had been hoping someone would pick her up she told him, because she did not have anyplace to stay. She had gotten off the plane from New York that morning with ten dollars in her pocket. Her bags were locked up in a tin locker at the Invalides Aérogare. Weintraub had taken her home to his one-room, one-bed pad in his pension. He had been feeling vague and strange and not very much with it that night because it was last Tuesday and he had been out in the streets with the students for a while. His clothes and his hair stank of tear gas. So did his room in the rue Condé, when they got there. There had been a fight in the Carrefour Odéon. He had taken a shower and put some stuff in his eyes. When he came back down the hall in his robe, Sam was sitting nude on the bed edge. She had looked at him quizzically and asked if he wouldn’t like for her to call the other girl, the French girl. He’d said what the hell, sure, why not; and she had. While they waited (she insisted that they wait) he had asked her why she hadn’t let the other girl pick her up if that was her action, and she said she had tried but the other girl hadn’t made a play. And she herself hadn’t felt she had the right to pick the French girl up, since she did not have a room to take her to or enough money to rent one. Also, she thought the other girl maybe liked having a fellow around, too. What about you? he had asked her. She had smiled and shrugged. I’m here, aint I, baby? was all she had said. Then the knock came on the door and they let in the other girl. Dave had seen her around with boyfriends a hundred times at least. And there they were. He had never suspected the other girl of making it with chicks.