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JANE RULE
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
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Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
A Biography of Jane Rule
For E. K.
THIS IS NOT A letter. I wrote you for the last time over a year ago to offer the little understanding I had, to say goodbye. I could have written again, but somehow your forsaking the world for the sake of the world left me nothing to say. Your vow of silence must also stop my tongue, or so it seemed. What a way to win an argument! Now I find I can’t keep your vow, not having taken it. Each of us has his own way to God, I used to say; there is no direct relationship, except through Him. But also, in the last hour of an examination we were both writing, I disproved the existence of evil. You must have written on the nature of salvation, starting down one of my untaken roads as I started down one of yours. For a long time, we could call back and forth, offering insults and encouragement. Not now. This is not a letter.
I sit surrounded by your trophies and treasures: old photographs, first editions, objects of stone and bone. Relics. I, who have complained halfway round a world with you because you would clutter and burden the way with such things, now live in the little museum of what you finally left behind. What is it you want me to fall heir to? Surely you don’t expect me to write with this quill pen or make real Jell-O in that seventeenth-century mold. And, as for the Milton, I will give it shelf room for your novice years, but the moment I hear you have taken your perpetual vows, into a library it goes where such things belong. I will keep the jewelry, the heavy paw of Mexican stone that lies at my throat, just as your beloved Rousseau’s lion weighs down his sleeping man. And I will keep the photographs, taken in England, in Spain, in California, in New York. Why? Because I like to remember. I have not been reborn. I have changed neither my last name for a husband, as you did, nor my whole name for God, as you now have.
Funny, Monk, who seems to make a drama and a romance of you, still minds this second change of name. “She’s giving up her given name. How can that be?” Given or not, biblical enough, “Esther” wasn’t Christian for some time, was it? “Surely,” I say, “it’s no stranger than marrying any other way.” So Monk tries to combine a notion of your marrying and being reborn. Soon she’ll begin to call you by your new name, Mary Whatever-It-Is. And she is also threatening to send scented soap and colored sugar to that biblical address of yours in swampy New Jersey. You don’t need to be called anything by me because I don’t intend to call you. In these old photographs you are Esther Woolf, “E.,” “little dog”; I was Katherine George, “Kate,” and still am. And here’s Monk, not yet twenty: Ramona Ridley. And Andrew Belshaw and Peter Jackson. I suppose I shared as few of your friends as you did of mine. And even those few we often shared uncomfortably.
“I never see why you like the men you like,” you said once.
“Why?”
“They’re all such… brutes.”
“It’s not so much that I like them. They like me. I’ve never gone out with anyone for long who didn’t bring me some sort of dead animal as an offering. You inspire poems and songs; Monk gets diamonds; I’m brought home the kill.”
“How awful! What do you do?”
“I pluck, skin, clean, and cook—with wine.”
There’s a picture here of the small octopus Andy brought me straight out of the Mediterranean Sea, not quite dead, still winding itself down his spear. Brute? No, Andy was not a brute, as far as I knew. He had, along with his intelligence, which you did admire, simple masculine vanities and appetites, attractive enough in so extremely attractive a man. I have always been drawn to good looks in men, something quite beneath your understanding. You were serious in all your relationships. I was not. If Andrew Belshaw was a brute, I had no intention of discovering it.
And you were patient, too, which often made me impatient with you. I was ready to make a soap opera out of Monk’s problems: “Will the history instructor, Richard Dick, finally leave his wife and three children for his beautiful Ramona?” “Will Ramona Ridley throw over Dick Dick for the handsome social worker who interviewed her after her brother was booked on a narcotics charge?” “Will Ramona Ridley sacrifice all her loves for a career?”
“But it’s serious, Kate. A number of people are involved. Monk doesn’t want to be unethical. That’s very important to her.”
“Then she should take her red curls to the back row and stop raising questions about historical inevitability.”
“But she may be in love with him, and if she is, isn’t that the highest ethic?”
You would still think so, I imagine, but I argued that, since Monk didn’t know how she felt, ethics had very little to do with it.
“But it isn’t all that easy to tell. He says she’ll simply have to go to bed with him to find out, which is out of the question if she can’t feel committed. It would just be adultery then.”
“It would be adultery anyway.”
“Well, and the other thing is that Monk really feels she’s got to live a little first.”
“And what does she mean by that?”
“Work, try for the stage. It’s pretty sheltered if you’re going to move right from college and your parents’ health insurance policy to someone else’s without ever taking care of yourself at all.”
“Ramona Ridley faces life with her own health insurance policy.”
“But you know what I mean, Kate.”
Yes, in those days at college I almost always did know, but your truthfulness, which I called oversimplification, sometimes embarrassed me. I was not prepared to reduce ethics to practical decisions. I had a personal investment in maintaining the gap. Perhaps I still do. And so I would gesture to the typewriter set up on the sleeping porch waiting for the last paragraphs of a paper on seventeenth-century prose or to the typewriter set up in the study with, as yet, nothing but the title, “The Metaphysical Necessity of Incarnation,” typed across the top of the page.
“You’re getting at that early. I haven’t even finished reading Whitehead for mine on symbolism. But I have an angle for it. I want to talk about symbol as analogous experience.”
“Misleading. Hocking says God is first known through sensation in nature. Now, if you approach that as analogy…”
Sometimes you were reluctant because you hadn’t thought enough and didn’t want so tentative an idea taken from you. The trouble was that you had to argue not only for analogy but by means of it, something I always mistrusted, moving as I do directly from fact to abstraction.
“It’s all your poetic clutter,” I would protest.
“And you don’t care how any of it applies.”
“All right, you apply it to… let’s see… health insurance policies.”
“Everything’s relative…”
“Relevant.”
“That too,” you would agree. “You never get caught up in it, do you?”
“Caught up in what?”
“Believing before you think.”
You were so terribly loyal, translating my unkind satire into good judgment, my bad temper into righteous indignation, my defensive arrogance into natural superiority. I won all our arguments in those days, didn’t I? I won our chess games, too, played in the spring sun at the college shop where everyone could see us, a motive you would have admitted freely. Not I. For you there was a romance about scholarship which permitted gestures and poses. You called us, in all seriousness, “Artists,” “Intellectuals,” “Young Saints.” So I wrote you Portrait of the Artist as a Young Bitch and dedicated it to “little dog.” Instead of being irritated, you illustrated it, illuminated it, and claimed it would one day be a collector’s item. Now it is. I have put it on the shelf by the Milton.
In that green enclosure of young women, ungenerously supported by parents who wanted to preserve our virginity and their sanity a while longer, where only a few dozen concerned themselves at all with what you quite unselfconsciously called “the life of the mind,” you modeled our friendship in so lofty and extravagant a vocabulary that no responsible person could have been suspicious. There is, at a women’s college, always some emancipating encouragement for those with masculine tastes for such things as mathematics, philosophy, and friendship. You had to model it. I could not. I knew better, which forced me to be occasionally condescending, protective, inadequate. But I don’t want to confess to all these things. I want, rather, to describe them.
What, after all, did I know when I was seventeen and you were eighteen? Perhaps quite a lot. I knew what was right, and I knew I wanted to be right, and I knew I could not. Things irreconcilable have to be separated. I envied the flatworm, its ability to be cut in half and grow itself two new selves. I should have liked to do just that. Since I could not, I came upon a way to cut my life in half. Not quite, for winter, whatever the weather, is longer than summer. I wintered in California in the mild, academic climate with you. I went to Europe in the summer for a very different sort of life, which I never spoke of, from which I only gradually recovered each fall in your company and in work. But I had a recurring nightmare that a path through a narrow wood and across a shallow stream was all that separated those two worlds. And in that dream you were always about to discover it.
“Mother says I can go to Europe this summer if I can go with you…”
“Is that a condition?”
“Yes,” you said with such confidence that for the moment I could find no way to say that it would be inconvenient for me.
There never was a moment for saying so. All that spring while you planned our summer, I unplanned my own. It was not easy. But I didn’t know, until we had actually set out, that it would be impossible.
Parts of that trip have become such set pieces over the years that it’s hard to recall actually living through them. The humor was added after the fact, like salt at the table for those who must eat. I do remember clearly, because I haven’t told it over and over again, the real beginning—lunch with your mother in a palm-infested hotel dining room in New York.
“You must have some idea how long you’ll be away. You must have some itinerary.”
“We’re thinking of bicycling down the Nile in August,” you said.
Seeing you there, opposite your mother, sulking in the city elegance she chose naturally for herself and unnaturally for you, I understood why you could have believed yourself to be an ugly little girl with too small a head for the heaviness of feature and hair, hands and feet too large for the slight body.
“You must promise me you won’t go to Egypt.”
“It’s against my principles to promise. You have to learn to trust.”
“Katherine, will you promise me?” she asked, turning to me in charming distress.
“That’s not fair, Mother!”
“To a mother, there are things more important than being fair. You’d promise your mother if she asked, wouldn’t you, Katherine?”
“She wouldn’t ask,” I answered honestly.
My mother—my adopted mother, old enough to be my grandmother—knew too little about the world to discover the promises to exact. In fairness, you and I should have traded guardians to pair innocence and appetite. Your mother suspected a great deal you were incapable of. Mine imagined a simplicity only you were capable of. But I did not want to trade.
“You are not a Jew,” she said to me.
“Neither am I,” you said, “and neither are you, except for the paranoia.”
“Don’t you understand that I’m concerned for your safety?”
Jason was there, too, the first of the arrogant, delicate boys who always attracted you. I can’t remember that he did anything but blot the mayonnaise on his tender beard. It was Saul’s arrival that did not so much break the tension as shift it.
“Have you had lunch, darling?” Mrs. Woolf asked, in a doubled mother’s voice.
“Yep.” He stood, refusing to give space to a branch of palm that crossed his brow like an awkward salute, his hands hanging loose, folders climbing out of his jacket pockets to his arm pits.
“Where have you been?”
“To the Cloisters.”
“I love the Cloisters,” you said, regretfully.
“Doing what?”
“Feeding peanuts to the unicorns,” Saul answered, slumping into the chair a waiter had brought.
“I thought unicorns ate nothing but virgins,” I said.
“That’s why unicorns are starving in New York,” Saul answered with pure, fourteen-year-old cynicism.
“Did you buy any prints?” you asked.
“Two, a little one for you and a big one for me. I don’t know about taking unicorns to Britain, like coals to Newcastle maybe.” Saul shrugged and began to sprinkle salt on the table in front of him.
“You’re so nervous, darling.”
“It’s my Oedipus complex.”
It was time then to feel sorry for your mother. She had two such unsuitable children, no matter how interesting. And, say what you like about the persecution of children by parents, the parents are finally the victims. They are not expected to rebel, even though they are the dominated ones for the real length of most parent-child relationships. Your mother was at the beginning of that domination, and no one had taught her any handsome or generous way to suffer. She has since learned a lot.
During that meeting, for all her failure with you, she did succeed in adding weight to the burden of responsibility I already felt. Why, with you, did I always feel responsible? You were a year older than I (that year we were nineteen and twenty), and you were neither stupid nor reckless. Impractical, yes, and trusting.
I keep speaking of your qualities as if I were writing a letter of recommendation. But people did—and probably still do—misunderstand you. Or at least they misunderstood what you have done and are doing. I should not pretend to be any different from the others. It is not that I have superior insight. It is not even that I have cared more. Simply, I was more important than the others to you, failed you in ways you could rationalize, an ability which may be one basis for a lasting friendship.
I have wondered what might have happened if you had not, from the first day we met, placed me on so high a pedestal that I couldn’t get down. You were not entirely to blame. I often liked it up there, and, when I didn’t, all I had to do was to move to the edge to see what a long way I had to fall. For you, I was not alone. Over the years, you had quite a number of us, self-conscious heroes and heroines, disdainful of each other’s stances in your garden of honor. Jason was the first I met that day at lunch, and, if I was not impressed with his mayonnaise-threatened beard, he was as unresponsive to my raw-boned, bird-eyed suspiciousness. Your friends usually didn’t like each other because embarrassment is not an interest to be shared.
If I had been a little older, a little less frightened, I might at least have been able to sit down, let my feet dangle over the edge, send you a rueful whistle through my teeth, and then say, little dog, listen. What I had to confess was no more than ordinarily grotesque. That was the trouble for me. I suffered so uncommonly from such common fears.
When you spoke of being called a Jew for nothing more than a last name and a dark complexion, guilty with wanting to reject a label which did not identify you, why did I listen in such superior, if also sympathetic, silence? I had my own stories to tell, being the illegitimate child of an Indian woman and a white man, a half-breed, adopted by an Episcopal minister and his wife who had already raised their own daughter. As a child, I was never called an Indian, a half-breed, or any of the variety of crude, colloquial terms every region has for its natives. My background was never mentioned to me by my adopted parents on the theory that I was to be made to feel no separation from them. And I half forgot it myself, growing up in the world given me. If I could have said to you, we suffer from opposite uncertainties, opposite guilts, I would have said it; but that was not really true. Yours was essentially a religious problem, no matter how else it was presented to you from the outside as a question of racial identity, integrity, courage. I believed you could establish your innocence, your freedom to choose. You wanted to. You did not secretly cherish the suffering you felt false heir to. I did.
And you talked with candor about your ugliness. Mildly, you envied Monk her sexual trials in parked cars, though, in those days, you believed in the old-fashioned romance of giving yourself once, wholly, to someone wholly chosen. Perhaps accepting ugliness is the beginning of beauty. Monk never was given the opportunity, limited from the age of fifteen by prizes from beauty contests, fulfilling the myth that the American female now skips the awkward age. You were old-fashioned, suffering the sexual change which at first coarsens the features, corrupts the skin, violates the appetite, and finally establishes a humility which the spirit struggles with long after the body has survived. And you were further protected—or discriminated against—because you were born into a culture that does not recognize your kind of beauty, can be suspicious of it, even occasionally repelled. Only once before you were twenty was your ugliness clearly denied.
You had been working in the sculpture studio on one of those unconsciously comic female thinkers which in those days obsessed you when the instructor, an impatient middle European, suddenly shouted, “Always swollen heads and fallen tits! Why? Have you no mirror, Cleopatra? Look at yourself. See what a woman is!”
You told me about it with his accent and his gestures.
“It is the high breasts,” shaking your own fists at your collar bones, “the small head for beauty,” turning your chin as if with his hand. “Egypt.”
You paused then, looking at yourself doubtfully in the long mirror on my closet door.
“Kate, I couldn’t possibly be beautiful.”
Standing there in blue jeans and one of Saul’s old shirts, your dead father’s watch hanging on your wrist, clay drying in the circles of your finger nails, you didn’t believe him. What should I have said? I could not say anything, nor could I turn away, caught by what you couldn’t see.
“Mirror, mirror on the wall,” you chanted, “who’s the fairest of them all? Not you, little dog.”
It was a bad nickname, one only I used, having given it to you because you would walk just half a step behind me with a shorter stride, with a trot if I hurried. Like so much else that you could have found offensive, it amused you.
That night, after we had argued about art as imitation or incarnation, you giving in to the temptation of a Christian esthetic, I looked at myself in the same mirror, but did not ask the same question, not looking for your kind of answer. I liked my face well enough, its high cheekbones and strong nose, the dark, carefully remote eyes. I hardly noticed my body, instrument not object. “How am I to use myself? What am I to do?”
At college, where we had roommates and lectures to go to and papers to write, we could discuss your problems and ignore mine. Traveling, we had to encounter each other’s difficulties, your vagueness and my obsession with details, your fear of most adults and my reluctance with strangers, your exhaustion and my restlessness. We had to encounter each other. And I had not wanted to.
I tried to explain my adopted sister and brother-in-law to you before we arrived in London; but, because they were old enough to be my parents, they were automatically your enemies, not in the real way they might have been, but simply dismissed into the dull world of authority and responsibility. Any man who went to the office, any woman who went shopping and dealt with servants and had her hair done could not possibly have anything to say to you. Frank, who is not easily offended, was the first man I saw suffer from your childishness. Doris was curious at first, then bewildered, but she never quite gave up. Last time I saw her, she asked about you. She said, when I told her what you’d done, “Well, He’s the one grown-up Who will let her go on being a child.” Doris, like so many children of ministers, had found having two fathers a bit much. I had more in common with you, having lost the only human father I knew when I was twelve, but I did not allow us to make common cause over that, either. Frank had been an unintrusive but willing substitute for official purposes. I think he was genuinely fond of me. It was gaining a second mother in Doris that was difficult. She was capable of being as suspicious as your mother, but she had never learned to be fearful. She invaded my privacy with more shrewd concern and indulgent affection than I could understand or handle. It might have been better for me if she had either never appeared or had been home more often.
Except for the war years, Doris visited Mother and me in the Bay Area once a year when Frank came to the States on business. She always brought me new novels and plays, and I did like discussing them with her, but I was as uneasy as I was flattered by the value she placed on my opinions, which were often based on experience she credited me with rather than experience I had had. With everyone else I had a more certain role.
In my last year in high school, I was captain of the debating team, captain of the swimming team, my top drawer rattling with medals for good attendance, good sportsmanship, good scholarship, good Godliness—a joy to my teachers and my elderly mother, a pain in the ass to my classmates, who were, just the same, never rude. I was at that time threatening to be a national swimming champion, which awed them a little and worried me a lot. I liked the prestige, but I hated racing. I was of two minds about entering a qualifying meet, but the coach, who had offered to take me to Carmel for it, persuaded my mother and Doris that I should go.
We drove down the afternoon before, checked in to a guest-house my mother was fond of, walked on the beach for an hour, then went out for an early dinner. The town was full of Rotarians. At the third restaurant we tried, we finally agreed to wait an hour in the bar. When my age wasn’t questioned and the coach suggested I have a cocktail, I agreed. Unlike you, I had always wanted to be an adult and was willing to make any of the appropriate gestures. Somehow we got into a friendly argument with four men at the next table. The coach was a Democrat; they were Republicans. That’s how it seemed to me then, but, of course, the coach was also a young woman, healthily attractive as gym teachers are supposed to be. More drinks came, and more. We did finally eat, and our Rotarians delivered us to our guest-house rather too noisily, shouting Republican slogans at our window long after they should have gone home.
I had not been drunk before, never having had the opportunity. I did not intend to be drunk then, and I was concerned about the noise we were making, troubled by the heavy uncertainty of my feet and tongue. My companion decided to take a bath. I was left with the complicated task of undressing myself. It must have taken me a long time. Finally I stood at the basin, thinking of brushing my teeth, washing my face, then trying to find my pajamas. As I stood there, a glass on the shelf fell into the basin and smashed. There were four glasses, and one by one they all fell while I stood watching. It seemed to me incredibly sad that every one should break. I began to cry. Perhaps her embrace began as a gesture of comfort. I was not surprised by it, nor by being put to bed. I was surprised by what she was saying, words I had read on fences and in literature but had never heard pronounced before.
“That’s what they say: give a little clootch whiskey, and what you’ve got is nothing but a piece of fucking tail, a little redskin cunt.”
I listened, so close to unconsciousness that it was easier to seem so than to sort out the appropriate response. I wanted to solve the problem about the broken glasses and I wanted to be sure the Rotarians had really gone home and I wanted to listen for stress, for accurate pronunciation just as I did in German class, and I wanted to go on trying to feel what I had begun to feel. The glasses began to fall again, but slowly this time, and they broke slowly in showers of light.
“Don’t cry Don’t cry. It’s nothing to cry about.”
The next morning we did not discuss anything that had happened the night before. We agreed that breakfast was not a good idea. I had to swim at ten o’clock; we’d eat afterwards. It did not occur to me to refuse to swim. It was important to behave as if nothing unusual had happened.
I could not make myself go into the pool to warm up. I stood in my dry suit, my feet and hands blue in the warm morning sun, waiting to be forced by the gun. Only after I hit the water did I discover that it was salt. I swam eight lengths of the pool, my teeth clenched against my rebelling guts, touched in, lifted myself half out of the pool, and vomited with fountain force to the cheering crowd. It is the only record I have ever set. I never swam in a race again. If that had been the humiliating end of it, I would have felt punished enough for my sins, but we had a three-hour drive home after that, and the lead item on the sports page the next day would be NEW NATIONAL RECORD SET under a picture of me retching up the whole of the night before.
“Flu,” the coach said to my mother and Doris, delivering me into their hands, but just half an hour before we arrived, she had persuaded me to try the only cure she knew, a little hair of the dog; and, as Doris held my protesting head fifteen minutes after I got home, she said, “Flu, my foot. You’re drunk.” I was too busy proving it to deny it.
Then she sat on the bed, wiping my face with a cool wash cloth, smiling and shaking her head, talking to me. “So, okay, how long has this been going on?” She didn’t expect any answer, and she didn’t get one, but she had a captive audience and enjoyed it, imagining both my fears and my sins in exaggerated generalities which were, nevertheless, alarmingly accurate. I have never told Doris anything. She always tells me what I’m up to. And, if she’s troubled by her imagination, she never admits it.
But you weren’t aware of Doris at all, except as she was one of the authorities to be placated with childish good manners. You stood when she came into the room with the memory of a curtsy stammering in your knees, made any request with an apologetic preface, answered any direct question as if you had been called on to recite. Frank suffered from your behavior even more than Doris. In your hands his good manners turned into willful attacks on your independence. He found himself at the brink of a real argument over carrying your suitcase. You would not go through a door before him, a problem he finally solved by forceably taking your arm and escorting you through. His tactful compliments were received with such surprise and suspicion that he gradually gave up any attempt to talk with you. Then he felt rude in his own house, uneasy. If you had been twelve, he would have known what to do. He would perhaps have taken on your instruction as he had his own daughter’s, and to some extent mine. But you were twenty and now so close to being a woman that it was impossible to treat you like the child you also were.
“E.,” I suggested finally, “why don’t you relax with Frank and Doris? Try to get to know them a little bit.”
“Why?” you asked, surprised.
“Because they’re human beings. You might even find you like them.”
“I do like them, Kate,” you protested. “It’s just that we don’t have anything in common.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “Find things in common. Take some interest in what they care about.”
“What do they care about?”
Put that way, the question had no real answer. For you there was one source of identity, the measure of commitment one had to people and ideas, out of which should come the work one did. Neither Doris nor Frank was put together so tidily. Frank was a successful but not dedicated banker, a theoretical liberal who took his conservative social responsibilities seriously. He had a wine cellar, a rose garden, season tickets to chamber music concerts, a wife and two children, perhaps occasionally a mistress, but certainly not in London. About most of these subjects he was pleased to speak briefly, and he was also interested in listening, but obsession with anything was for him a breach of good taste. In your terms, therefore, he cared about nothing. Doris was even more difficult to identify. The measure of her efficiency in any job was the measure of her boredom with it. What she enjoyed, she dawdled over and rarely finished, part of her pleasure being the freedom to be inaccurate and incomplete. There was never an error in her household books, but often flower arrangements waited for their final greenery until blooms were falling on the carpet. She made a similar division between people, careful and exacting of her own kindness with those to whom she was bound by nothing but duty, casual and sometimes wittily critical of the friends she chose and obviously loved. Even if you had been able to distinguish this pattern, you would have judged it shallowly perverse and missed the point, at least the human point. I could not answer your question; however, you heard my complaint and wanted to please me.
“Doris,” you began the next night at the dinner table, forcing yourself to call her by her first name, “how long does it take to have a baby?”
Frank looked up surprised.
“Why,” Doris said carefully, “nine months.”
“No, I know that. I don’t mean that. I mean really how long, how long out of a life, two years? Five years?”
“That depends, doesn’t it?”
“But on what?” you persisted.
“On how much money you have, on how much of a mother you want to be, on what kind of a life you mean to interrupt.”
“But it’s no good having a child physically, just that, is it? That isn’t what people mean when they talk about being fulfilled as a woman, You’d want to know your child. How long does it take to know your child?”
“It depends on the child,” Frank offered, sensing the opportunity you were offering, no matter how grossly. “How long did it take your mother to know you?”
“She doesn’t,” you answered. “And she’s never tried. She spends all her time trying to turn me into someone she’d like to know. So I have no measuring stick. How long did it take you?”
“With my son,” Frank answered, “I think I sin as your mother does. With my daughter… well, what man would dare to claim he understood a woman, even a very young one?”
“But that’s stupid,” you said. “Women are people. You could certainly understand me.”
“Surely, what Esther wants to know is how much time there’s left for being something other than a mother,” Doris said quickly.
“Yes,” you said. “You see, first of all I want to understand the nature of the world. Then I want to marry and have a child to fulfill myself as a woman. After that I want to be a sculptor, a great sculptor. When I’m old, I’ll join a contemplative order of some kind to serve God. I have to figure out the number of years each thing will take.”
“I see,” Doris said. “Well, I’d say five for the child, wouldn’t you, dear?”
“Five or six at the most,” Frank answered.
I was tempted to share their stifled hilarity because you were ridiculous, sitting there outlining your life, but I was also tempted to believe that you might, in your willful innocence, actually keep destiny in your own hands. There was about you such insensitive integrity.
After dinner, when you had gone to your room to write letters, I sat with Frank for a while.
“She thinks of herself as an emerging nation, as in need of five-year plans as India or Russia,” he said.
“She has a lot of natural resources to develop,” I said.
“True. But I don’t see any place in her plan for a course in investments. Does she know that one day she’s going to be one of the richest women in America?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t.”
“I can’t help knowing,” he said. “Be careful of her, Kate, won’t you?”
“How… careful?”
“I don’t mean anything personal. It’s just that she wants so much and doesn’t know what she already has to offer.”
I couldn’t be with you every moment. I didn’t want to be. There were other people to see. If I left you alone for a few hours, I never knew what you would find and bring back. Sometimes it was only a first edition or a seventeenth-century amber ring (which I wouldn’t accept then, and, of course, have now), but more often it was a young composer or painter or actor, awed and irritated by the ample comfort of Doris’ and Frank’s living, fortunately unaware of how modest it was compared to your own. But for all the irritations of those first weeks, I was more independent of you in London than I could be once we left for the Continent, and there were the selling galleries to discover together, the late Turners at the Tate, the good arguments about T. S. Eliot and Christopher Fry. If the summer had gone on like that, I might have been able to cope.
Why was it that we decided to bicycle? I had never been enthusiastic, though I’d taken a couple of bicycling trips in southern England two summers before. It was probably your idea. I didn’t find out until we were trying to get our new bicycles from one side of London to the other that you hadn’t been on one since you were twelve. I was ready to leave them with Frank and Doris, but you insisted that you would practice in the three days we had left. Off down the crescent you’d wobble, dressed in blue jean pedal pushers, pale blue wind-breaker, and white baseball cap, your dark hair more horse’s mane than pony tail, vanishing between double decker buses.
“Don’t watch,” Doris said kindly, as I stood on the drawing room balcony.
“It’s a sick fascination.”
“You worry too much. I’ve never seen you so motherly.”
“She’s such an idiot,” I said. “Who do you suppose she’ll find to bring home today?”
“You don’t have to be jealous of her young men. They’re all homosexuals.”
“Do you think so?”
“Yes, blatant or latent. It’s hard on Frank. He finds her very attractive. ‘What a waste!’ he keeps saying. Are you serious about her, Kate?”
“It’s nothing like that. In any case, I’m never serious about people.”
“She’s rather remarkably beautiful.”
“Or ugly,” I said.
By the morning we were to leave, you claimed to be able to ride with no hands through the traffic at Hyde Park Corner, which, even in those days, was terrible. We planned to leave a lot of our belongings with Frank and Doris, either to be shipped to us later or to be collected on our way home. Clothes never mattered to you anyway, unless they had about them the character of costume. I remember the first time you wore your academic gown at the Freshman assembly.
“Gosh, this is the life of the mind, all right. I really feel it, and I want to feel it all the time. In England, students do, don’t they?”
“Feel the life of the mind all the time?” I asked.
“Wear gowns.”
“They were monks once, too,” I said.
“And thinking ought to be holy,” you decided. “Or reverent. I wish I had a religious vocabulary What’s the difference between holy and reverent?”
“ ‘Holy’ comes from the same root as ‘whole’; taken over by the church, it means coming from God, therefore pure or sinless. To be reverent is to be loving and respectful at once. I don’t know how I could think about history or philosophy, for instance, if I had to think like that.”
“But you do think like that, Kate. Maybe I should be a Christian. Do you think I could be?”
“The vocabulary’s free in any dictionary.”
“But to have it mean something…”
“Well, save religious box tops and see.”
As I inspected your double pack that morning in London, I thought perhaps you had taken my advice. There were pamphlets and postcards, deer antlers and junk jewelry, books and notebooks, all packed round with Kotex and toilet paper, emblems of one of your shynesses.
“But, little dog, you have to take some clothes.”
“I was going to,” you said, “but there isn’t room. I can tie my coat onto the back.”
The performance that followed reminded me of Fish, a card game I played as a child. “I have two pairs of shoes,” I would say, and you’d answer, “I have none.” You would have liked to add, “Go fish!” But I changed the rules. Out of your pack would have to come the antlers, into it the required shoes. In the end, this long-disputed first edition of Milton was the only thing I allowed you to take because you insisted that you needed it. One of your summer projects was to memorize the whole of Paradise Lost. I never heard anything beyond the first book, but I can hear that still:
Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe…
Through summer France you chanted:
Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime,
Said then the lost Arch-Angel, this the seat
That we must change for Heav’n, this mournful gloom
For that celestial light?
I woke to:
… from Morn
to Noon he fell, from Noon to dewy Eve,
A Summer’s day; and with the setting Sun
Dropt from the Zenith like a falling Star…
and slept to:
For Spirits when they please
Can either Sex assume, or both; so soft
And uncompounded is their Essence pure…
And works of love or enmity fulfill.
At times I regretted not letting you take the antlers instead; you couldn’t have done much but wear them to anticipate your Oberon period when you gave all creatures horns. But there are worse things to live with than Book I of Paradise Lost. And worse things we did discover.
The hazards of bicycling were not really among them. We rode only to Victoria Station. Finding ourselves in Dieppe at dusk, we hitchhiked to Rouen on a truck delivering toilets to farmhouses. We took a train from Rouen to Paris where you sold your bicycle to a redheaded American boy. I stored mine. Years later I gave it away to a young woman who didn’t really look very much like you.
And I have told that story too often, the last time to your mother in a taxi after Monk’s wedding to keep her from other kinds of discussion about you. She laughed a great deal, if uncertainly. That’s enough. This is not intended to be a 1950s version of Innocents Abroad.
We were intent on silly pilgrimages. Fortunately, in search of Rodin you also found Henry Moore. On the trail of Alice B. Toklas, we learned to eat snails and read Henry Miller. It was a summer of Henrys until we set out for Valla de Mosa to find George Sands and Chopin, encountering instead Andrew Belshaw and Peter Jackson on a train stalled between the French border and Barcelona. We had been on our way all night, you very cheerful at first, trading sandwiches and jokes with five railroad workers who shared our third-class carriage, accepting lessons in drinking from their goat skin flasks; but, when morning came and you found yourself stained with red wine, a little sick with indigestible good fellowship and no sleep, you were simply miserable. The train stopped, and there was nothing to see but the flat heat of a flat landscape through the dirty train window You were near tears, I near speaking my now almost constant irritation, but I suggested the dining car as a distraction for us both. Officials stood along the tracks on the shady side of the train, smoking cigarettes, obviously in no hurry to solve whatever the problem was. We climbed over armed guards, slumped down over their knives, bayoneted rifles, and pistols, enjoying a short and uncomfortable sleep along the corridors. We climbed with other foreigners, all crowding to the dining car to complain. Only the Spaniards stayed in their places, slicing melon and cleaning their fingernails with pocket knives. There we found or were found by Andrew and Peter. It was the first time I was more enthusiastic about strangers than you. You sat by the window, sulking, just as Peter did on the other side of the aisle. Andrew offered me an American cigarette. We exchanged unpleasantries about the train, Spanish customs officials, Spanish beer.
“We’re on our way to Mallorca,” Andrew explained. “I hope to hell we get to Barcelona in time to make the nine o’clock boat.”
“We are, too,” I said, “but we’d been thinking about staying a day or two in Barcelona.”
“Why, in this heat?”
“Just to look around.”
“Have you got an address for Mallorca?”
I did not want to admit that we were on our way to Valla de Mosa. I didn’t even know that it was a place to stay. “No, not really.”
“Because I’ve got a good one, out of town, cheap, right by the sea. Would you like it?”
“It sounds like just what we’re looking for.”
You were taking no interest in the conversation; Peter’s silence was more hostile than indifferent. In these moods, you were both as responsible as Andrew for convincing me that it was a good idea. I wanted to be relieved of our isolation, of your devotion and dependence, your soaring and tumbling moods; but I also felt guilty. Because Andrew was not the person I would have ordered, because Peter seemed as difficult for him as you were for me, the solution had enough discomfort in it to be acceptable. While we were in the dining car, the train began to move again. Before we returned to our own compartments, we agreed to meet on the platform at Barcelona to decide what we would do.
“I thought you said we were going to Valla de Mosa,” you said, lurching along the corridor behind me.
“We still can. We haven’t decided anything.”
“But you want to go with them, don’t you?”
“It sounded like a good place, that’s all.”
“I don’t think that one guy was so keen on having us along. And he’s the one who seemed nice.”
“What is it about you that makes good looks and decent manners so repellent to you?”
“They scare me,” you said bleakly.
But arriving in Barcelona and walking down to the square where Columbus looks so intently out over the wrong sea revived you. We sat with the boys at a sidewalk cafe, drinking brandy and eating popcorn, unable to talk sensibly against the songs, threats, dances and fights of two dozen beggar children for whom we were the most likely carrion in the neighborhood. You had not seen beggars before and in your distress encouraged them with small change against Andrew’s advice. Their number doubled; their anger increased. Two waiters beat them off a dozen yards. Cowed but still insolent, they jeered at us across the forbidden space.
“I can’t stand this any longer,” Peter said suddenly. “Let’s get aboard ship.”
“Before dinner?” Andrew asked.
“We can eat on board.”
Without ever actually having decided to go with them, we went. Standing on deck, looking back at the square and the children, I heard Peter say to you, “Why do they have to be ugly with our greed? Why can’t we suffer for our own sins?”
“I don’t know,” you said. “I’ve never even thought about it.”
“Don’t then,” Peter said, stepping away from the railing. “Let’s look at the sea, instead.”
As you crossed to the other side of the deck, I felt Andrew beside me relax.
“I’m glad you decided to come along,” he said.
He was still watching the children when I turned to answer him. There was hardness in his face, but it seemed to me in conflict with a stronger, less certain gentleness. Aware that I was looking at him, he smiled.
“It’s hard to have no decent answer,” I said.
“It certainly is, and that could be the slogan of my life.”
A rough sea and the smell of rancid oil discouraged our appetites. Rain made the deck uncomfortable. We were very tired from sitting up all the night before and so decided to go to bed. I wonder now why we all so unquestioningly always traveled third class. You and I had plenty of money to travel comfortably. Andrew, as it turned out, was the son of an oil-rich Albertan who provided all his children with handsome allowances. Only Peter, living on the G. I. Bill in Paris and scrounging for painting materials, had any reason for such economy. Andrew would have explained it in one of his terrible lapses into sociological jargon as “dedication to peer group values,” I suppose. We were students and therefore traveled like students. That night you and I found ourselves in adjacent upper berths in a cabin for a dozen women. I was too tired to object to the sour smelling straw mattress, the heat or the noise. I lay down in my clothes and was asleep at once, but several times in the night I woke to the retching of an unhappy traveler. And once I saw that several men had invaded the cabin and were dressing themselves in the underwear of women who had bothered to get undressed. I slept again without reaction. I had even forgotten that you slept just across the gulf of aisle. It was not until morning that I realized you had been sick in the night.
We found our way up into the air and stood gray-faced in the gray morning, staring out at the line of shore which was Mallorca.
“Doesn’t look very promising,” Andrew said, appearing beside us. “I’ve just heard that we’ve been through the worst storm in ten years. It’s supposed to start clearing at noon.”
Peter had obviously had no better a night than you. The pallor he always had was luminous that morning, and he shook a little under his thin jacket though it was not really cold. But he seemed easier with Andrew as well as with us. He was the only one who had been to Mallorca before, and his confident anticipation reassured us.
The streets of Palma were shallow streams of mud, and Peter’s friend who was to get him black-market money and cigarettes had left the island, and the bus we got on to take us to the north coast of the island bogged down twice in water holes. We all had to get out, help unload the heavier luggage, trunks, crates of live chickens, a bass fiddle, wade out of the mud to higher ground, back again to push, reload, and climb back to sit, wet and filthy on hard benches. It took over five hours to cover the few miles up over the mountain and north to the inland town of San Telmo which was as far as we could go by public transportation. We had been told we could get a taxi to take us from there back over the coastal hills to the village which was our destination. But there was no taxi. We walked the last four miles, grateful to have nothing but our bicycle packs to carry. The sky had cleared, and already, under the intense sun, the road surface had dried to dust. We passed tiny, slow-moving burros loaded with wood, then rested on large rocks and watched them pass us. Peter found a harmonica in his pocket, which he was soon teaching you to play.
We arrived at the hotel about seven o’clock in the evening to find that it was, truly, on the sea. Waves broke against its rock foundations, and the terrace hung out over the sea like a deck. We were greeted with enthusiasm by the owner and his wife. We were the only guests in the hotel and therefore chose our rooms among the twelve available. Somehow our simple luggage was scrambled, mine with Andrew’s, yours with Peter’s. No one joked about it. Peter returned mine and claimed his own.
When we discovered that there was no water for bathing, we changed into our suits immediately and went to the beach. It was a clear, warm evening, but the sea was still rough with the storm we had traveled through. We played hard in the surf, returned to the beach more scratched and bruised than we intended. You or Peter began to build a sand castle which we were to rebuild almost every day with greater elaborateness. At last you could be a child. We were all as intent and as isolated from each other as children. And we did not return to the hotel until we were called from play like children. It was eleven o’clock at night when we sat down to an eight-course dinner, the first real meal we’d had in two days. Immediately afterwards we went to our rooms.
You and I tried to write letters, but our lamp sputtered against a sea wind that blew even through closed shutters; so we turned it out, opened the window to the sound of the sea and lay down. Almost at once I also heard the sound of someone crying.
“E.?” I said quietly.
“I think it’s Peter,” you answered.
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” you said.
We listened again, but the crying had stopped or had been taken in to the sound of the sea.
“I feel guilty to feel so happy,” you said. “Are you glad we came?”
“I think so,” I said. “Yes.”
“Thank you for being patient with me…”
“E.,” I said, “don’t…”
“I know I just mean… thanks.”