After the War by Alice Adams

back on track,” explained Oscar, using his own Hollywood version of common sense. “You called me, remember? Said you were tired of being a college playwright, little amateur college productions. You’d been sidetracked by Ursula’s pig, you said—your very words. You’d like to get back in the money. And I can see why—all those kids, a lovely young wife. They don’t come cheap, those assets.”
    “No, they don’t,” Russ agreed as he was thinking, Back ontrack. I could take a train home. No New York. No Esther. No airplane. Russ had no memory of making any such phone call to Oscar, although the phrase “Ursula’s pig” was vaguely familiar, and at the same time incomprehensible. And so he said, as though he knew what he was talking about, “Ursula’s pig.” Reminiscently.
    “A great play,” Oscar informed him. “But not right for out here. You knew that, remember? But this Oppenheimer thing, it’s about the war and then again it’s not. It’s perfect. It’s going to make someone really rich and famous, and I’d like that person to be you. I mean, you were doing great until that fucking pig.”
    The pig. Crossing Kansas, in his old Caddy, Russ had run over a pig. All his children—all of them, five? No matter. They were in the backseat, and his wife was up in front with him. Brett, SallyJane, Deirdre— what wife ? Well, Brett, at that time, he’d named her himself, from SallyJane to Brett, but then she went back to SallyJane, and then he married Deirdre; it was beginning to come more clear.
    When he thought of the pig, though, he recalled a horrible disgusting smell, dead-pig shit, and a great big woman, Ursula, who was very nice. Who was now, at times, his housekeeper. His wife’s housekeeper. One of the people for whom he needed more money. And Deirdre, once his beautiful secret girlfriend and now one more fat wife, as SallyJane/Brett had been. Of course he remembered the pig, and Ursula, and later he wrote a play, raising pigs in Kansas, the Depression—a sort of Grapes of Wrath , with pigs for grapes, except that it was not a best-seller or a movie; nobody out there would touch it. Too fucking folksy, they all said, in one way or another. And so it went to little theatres, university playhouses, and wonvarious prizes for Russ, and not much money. To Oscar he said, with his slowest, most Southern smile, “I reckon pigs are more in my line than physicists are. Come to think of it, I never even met a one of those guys.”
    Having left Death Valley, and Oscar, to whom he had said no, all that pig history returned to Russ’s splotchy mind as his train east rattled and shook across mountains of sand, the desert with its obscene and terrifying shapes of cactus. Cross shapes, crucifixes. Or cocks, big giant spiky cocks. The phallic cross; he’s never thought of that before, but very likely a great many people already had, and knew what they worshipped.
    For all he knew, they were passing Los Alamos right now, the train with its load of soldiers and sailors, mothers and wives and girlfriends and children and luggage, all over the aisles, swaying across the fucking desert—where at least he had known not to go. Los Alamos. He shuddered against the worn green velour of the harshly upright seat, in which he had sat and not slept the night before. All around him babies had been crying, small children with their loud sleepless whines, and oblivious lovers, immodestly necking, repulsive in their need, their ugly greed for each other’s grimy faces, their lumpy bodies.
    Crossing Texas at night, endless black plains with here and there some sparse and scary vegetation, Russ took two long swallows of bourbon from his pocket flask and was visited by some half-remembered fragments of his last letter fromMelanctha. Partly to divert himself from the lunatic scene surrounding him, he tried to bring it into sense.
    “My back hurts a lot, and my shoulders, the bra straps cut into them … the boys make