by Rule, Jane;
At that moment Ruth missed her husband, not really because he would have been any help. He could bluster as noisily and ineffectively as Gladys in his own unionized jargon or berate Ruth for the stupidity of buying a house in a neighborhood bound to be torn down, anyone could see it, could have seen it years ago. No, what she missed, wanted, was to be reduced momentarily to his simple need, urgent enough to arouse her own, to be part of his rutting pleasure. She was too old now often to be able to give herself such comfort, and alone an orgasm was more like the relief of tears, which brought with it the rain of children out of the sky. Even Mavis, not yet twenty-five, usually chose to drink herself to sleep instead.
Ruth turned on the dining-room light and began to set the breakfast table. Gladys came sleepily up the basement stairs, a sight to envy if you hadn’t learned the deep lesson of vicarious pleasure. Ruth smiled at her.
“Arthur’s going to be all right,” Gladys said, stretching and yawning. “We had a long talk.”
Ruth tilted her head.
“Oh, and a lovely screw,” Gladys admitted and laughed. “Good night, Ruth.”
Not willing to sleep but even less willing to intercept any more traffic of this restless night, Ruth finished her chores, spoke softly to Clara, and went out among the mousing cats to walk away her need of anything at all, even to draw a picture of Gladys without one arm and with a face of weathered stone.
CHAPTER THREE
“Gladys said, ‘Stew doesn’t own me,’ and then Mavis said, ‘You don’t own the house either, and you’re making everyone uncomfortable.’ Do you think you should speak to Gladys?”
Ruth sighed. Sometimes she and Clara were like a pair of ancient parrots, passing the time by repeating everything they had heard and overheard in the house. It had been an increasingly uneasy place in the days since Gladys had shifted her attention from Stew to Arthur. Jealousy hung in the house like the smell of cabbage, and, if it was strongest in Stew’s presence, it had begun to permeate other people as well. Arthur was too nice a boy to be lordly about his good fortune, but he was also too needy to let Gladys alone long enough for her to negotiate any comfort for Stew, which however much against her principles might not be against her good nature. Tom, who maintained the same friendly distance from Gladys that he did from Joanie and Mavis, had begun to make ironic comments about Gladys which were not entirely kind and discovered him in unacknowledged needs of his own, harder to keep in check when they were being acted out nightly under his own roof. While Gladys was Stew’s girl, there was a settled erotic climate about the house. Now appetites were riled. Mavis, practically moral, was right: the quarters were too close. But her judgment was too charged with anger for Ruth to be comfortable about agreeing with it.
“Mavis wants Gladdy punished with good Dickensian clarity. I can’t quite see what that punishment would be, never mind the justice of it.”
“Do you think she has any idea what trouble she may be stirring up?” Clara asked. “Stew’s making himself quite sick.”
“Perhaps I should talk to him.”
“Have you tried to lately … about anything?”
“If we could find Arthur a job far enough away from Vancouver …”
“He’s a dear boy,” Clara said.
“Not to be banished?”
“I just don’t know.”
Ruth would have liked to put the circumstance into the category without solution, therefore not a problem but something to be lived with, like the occasional stench of the pulp mills when there was an easterly wind, but her own level of tolerance had not been reached by anyone else in the house. If she didn’t try to do something, someone else would. Stew was so stoned most of the time that the only real danger from him was to himself. It was not in him to be violent. And he would agree that he did not own Gladys, but you did not have to own to suffer loss. Gladys could be made aware of that, but what real good would her sympathy do? It was no substitute for her presence in Stew’s bed. Seeing to it that Gladys felt guilty would satisfy no one but Mavis, and it would have no happy effect on Arthur, whose well-being had so recently been the generous concern of them all.
It was stupid of Ruth not to have known at the start. If she had been detached enough herself, not so busy stemming her own envy, she might have frowned instead of smiled. At that time her disapproval might have accomplished something. Ruth was not averse to asserting herself, but she had more faith in keeping the bathrooms clean and the ownership of towels straight than she did in insisting on the tidiness of relationships to keep everyone comfortable.
Breakfast, even relieved of Tom’s increasing haughtiness, was nearly unendurable. Mavis was now forcing Stew to get up in the morning. He sat at the table, his long hair uncombed, his usually expressive eyes with the deceptive shine of wet pebbles in an acid wash, his mouth a bad imitation of the Mona Lisa. Mavis shoved food at him like an aggressive bird, but he ate nothing.
“Stew, you’ve got egg in your hair,” Joanie reported with disgust.
He did not register her complaint. Arthur had to do it for him.
“You’ve got curlers in yours.”
“I have to go to work, unlike some people around here.”
“Gladdy, if you don’t go up and get your clothes on in a hurry, we’re all going to be late,” Mavis said.
“Just this last piece of toast,” Gladys said cheerfully, a robe wrapped around nakedness only she was unmindful of. “I’m starving this morning.”
Arthur smiled, still too recently satisfied to take her nearing departure and his empty day seriously. Now that he had Gladys to wait for, even his idleness could be a pleasure, lying on his back remembering how he had been wakened with her teasing fingers, her tongue at his ear, his lust lazy, his hands playful at her breasts until he slid a hand down into the soft, swelling wetness of her …
Ruth willed herself out of Arthur’s idle day, but, if even she could dally there, her own hand guiding Arthur’s, what violence was being committed in Stew’s imagination? The rational censor in Mavis must be strained to breaking.
“There’s no point in asking Gladys to dress before breakfast,” Ruth said to Clara. “It wouldn’t make any difference.”
“I enjoy her,” Clara said. “I’m afraid we all do.”
“She enjoys herself,” Ruth said, remembering again that yawning stretch, daddy’s young breasts, free and uptilting under her blouse, which came untucked at her hips, revealing the soft skin of her back, her trousers so low they did not completely cover the shadowed cleavage of her buttocks, a sight to make one almost cannibal-joyful about human flesh. Joanie had always been jealous of her. No imitation of style or contrivance of cosmetics could ever produce for Joanie an erotic moment to touch Gladys, who didn’t even try.
“Perhaps, if Arthur got a job night shift somewhere …”
There was a hard knock at the door. Ruth and Clara looked at each other.
“Oh, I hope not …” Clara said.
They were in uniform this time, and they knew Arthur’s name.
“I’m not sure he’s in,” Ruth began.
She had never thought to plan out what she would do in this circumstance; she had not even, after their first visit, taken Gladys’ warnings seriously.
“Arthur?” she called at the basement door.
They all heard his door open.
“Yes?”
Run, she wanted to shout, but she saw their guns.
“Has he done anything? Do you have to take him?”
“We want to talk with him, that’s all.”
What were Arthur’s rights? Did he have any? Ruth felt stupidly ignorant and helpless as she watched Arthur walk meekly down the path with the two men in uniform. They all got into the car. Before a minute had passed, the engine started, and the police car moved away from the curb and was gone.
“Can they do that?” Clara demanded. “Can they just take him off like that? Did they have a warrant, or whatever it is?”
“I don’t k
now,” Ruth said, and she wished she had paid some attention to Gladys’ lectures on civil rights, however inaccurate they might have been. “Maybe I didn’t even have to let them in.”
Ruth knew no lawyers. They were attendants for criminals and the rich. If she had a problem with the city hall or the telephone company or a department store, she dealt with whoever answered the phone. She did not even know the groups organized to help deserters and draft dodgers. Hers had always come to her because a lot of people happened to know that Ruth Wheeler would take in such young men without asking questions. They simply arrived at her door, and she let them in, just as she had let the police in.
“He mustn’t be taken off,” Clara protested. “That’s not right.”
They waited, watching the street for the car to return. In that hour, neither of them put the obvious question to the other: how had the police got Arthur’s name? Neither of them wanted to suffer the obvious answer. Stew might have had nothing to do with it. The police were checking before Stew had any reason to be rid of Arthur. Arthur had begun to go out with Gladys in the evening. He had probably met dozens of people, one of whom might sell bits of information to the police. Ruth’s reputation for housing Americans could have come to police attention in any number of ways. Their source didn’t really matter.
“I could just phone the police,” Ruth finally decided, “and tell them what happened. I could say I’m worried about him and would like to help him if he’s in trouble.”
“Yes, do that,” Clara said. “We could hire a lawyer.”
The police had no information. Arthur had not been booked.
“But they can’t just drive off with him and then pretend they don’t know what’s happened to him. If he hasn’t been booked, why haven’t they brought him home?” Clara demanded.
“I suppose they could simply have driven him to the border,” Ruth said, “and turned him over to the military police.”
“But that’s wrong!”
“I’ve got to order the groceries,” Ruth said.
The phone hunched to her ear by her right shoulder, Ruth modified weights and numbers as she read her list, canceling Arthur’s rations from bread to liver, her voice as aged as her face, a nearly deaf resonance in it, cut off periodically by the stinging sweetness of the bile in her throat.
She did not want to be angry with Stew. She never wanted to be angry with any of them. Arthur, so newly made sane with the joys of his body, was being humiliated again now, his clothes taken from him, his head shaved, a cell door locked against him. She was angry for Arthur. It shouldn’t have been a problem, his loving Gladys. Why couldn’t they all understand that and learn to live with it? She was angry for Mavis, who had to live in her own prison of morality, and, yes, she was even angry for Tom, the ungenerous price he had to pay to stay aloof from so many of his own needs. Poor Stew, if he had this on his conscience, how much more he’d have to abuse himself to deny knowledge of himself, to become, as he put it on a happier evening, “Just a melody.”
It had begun to rain. By the time Tom arrived home without his rain gear, he was soaked and cursing this damned rain forest which was healthy enough for trees except that they were all being cut down.
“Tom, the police came and got Arthur this morning. They haven’t booked him and he hasn’t come back.”
“Then they’ve taken him home,” Tom said, unconscious of that irony.
“I don’t know how to find out. Is there any way we can find out?”
“Maybe,” Tom said.
His wet shoes in his hand, he went up to his room.
“Could it happen to Tom?” Clara asked.
“I don’t know,” Ruth said. “He’s a landed immigrant. I suppose it could happen to anyone. If that is what’s happened to Arthur.”
In a dry shirt and trousers, carrying a pair of socks, Tom came back downstairs with a mimeographed list of telephone numbers.
“The Unitarian Church is the best bet,” he said. “Arthur wasn’t registered with them, but I don’t think that matters. They’ve got good lawyers working for them.”
Three phone calls later, there was again nothing to do but wait.
“He should have been careful,” Tom said angrily. “He didn’t have any sense.”
“There’s no point in being angry with Arthur,” Ruth said.
“There’s no point in a lot of the things I feel,” Tom replied and went off to his room.
For a moment Ruth was relieved to see Gladys and Mavis coming up the walk without Stew. Mavis would have given her no sign; she always trudged, shoving herself forward a shoulder at a time as if the air were as heavy as water, but Gladys, who enjoyed the sun, who enjoyed the rain, was usually as skittish and playful as a pup. Her steps up the porch stairs were nearly as heavy as Mavis’. They must somehow already know.
“We’ve put Stew in the university hospital,” Mavis said.
“I’ve been telling him for months,” Gladys said, pleading with Ruth, “one of these days he was bound to have a bad trip. You can’t drop that much acid; you just can’t.”
“Take off your raincoat before you flood the hall,” Mavis said, but her gruffness was affectionate and concerned.
“Is he all right?” Ruth asked.
“Oh, we got a bloody great comforting lecture from the doctor about the number of permanent psychoses he’d seen lately. Only two more and he ought to be able to write a definitive article.”
“He’ll probably be all right,” Mavis said to Ruth. “He’s in a pretty bad state now. He thinks he can fly. He thinks he has to fly.”
“Silly bugger!” Gladys muttered, her voice threatened with tears.
The phone rang. Ruth answered it and called to Tom.
“Where’s Arthur?” Gladys asked suddenly.
“We don’t know,” Ruth said. “Tom may be finding out now.”
“What happened?”
“The police came this morning and took him away to question him. He hasn’t come back. He hasn’t been booked. We just don’t know where he is.”
The great burst of political violence Ruth had expected from Gladys didn’t occur. She walked over to Tom and stood by him, watching his face until he said, “Yes, thanks,” and put the receiver down.
“They did take him back. They turned him over to the American military police at Blaine. It’s cheaper than a deportation order, of course.”
“What can we do?” Gladys asked quietly.
“Make a great, fine, principled stink, get lots of media time for the next two or three days, maybe even finally an investigation of police action to scare them enough so that they won’t do it again for several months.”
“What about Arthur?”
“There’s not a damned thing we can do for Arthur,” Tom said, and then his tense anger broke, and he put an arm around Gladys’ shoulders. “I’m sorry, Gladdy, but that’s the way it is.”
Ruth, Tom, Mavis, and Clara in her room all waited for Gladys to rage into action, but she only turned quietly out of the shelter of Tom’s arm and went to her room.
“How did the police find out?” Mavis asked.
Neither Tom nor Ruth offered to answer, and the silence from Clara’s room was complete.
The news of Stew’s bad trip and Arthur’s deportation, “two bad trips” as Mavis put it, seemed to have more effect on Joanie than on anyone else. She cried, an embarrassment to the others who could not get beyond stupid silences and bursts of nervous irritation. They all needed something useful to do, but even the publicity and pressure for police investigation was out of their hands. There was an experienced and efficient committee for that.
“Should someone go to the hospital to see Stew tonight?” Ruth suggested.
Tom and Mavis, for the moment, wanted no part of him, and Gladys had stayed in her room.
“I could go myself,” Ruth said.
“Leave it until tomorrow night,” Mavis said.
“I could go tomorrow night,” Joanie offered.
Gladys did not appear for dinner, which was a sorry affair of their diminished numbers, nothing to talk about that could be talked about except the weather, which interested no one but Willard, oblivious to the tension.
“Do use the ashtray, Willard!” Ruth snapped.
“Shall I take something up for Gladys?” Mavis asked.
“Do,” Clara said.
“I’ll take care of the dishes, Ruth,” Tom offered.
They were clearing the table when Mavis came back with the plate of food she’d taken up.
“She’s not hungry.”
“That’s decent of her.”
“Oh, Tom, let’s not blame Gladdy,” Mavis pleaded in real distress.
“Or anyone,” Ruth added, “except the police.”
“Which won’t do much good,” Tom said.
Ruth wanted to speak to the bitterness in him, but she had nothing to say, and Mavis, who could usually moralize anyone into a frenzy, was obviously too unhappy herself to try. Tom bristled with his own vulnerability. They worked together without more attempt at conversation until the kitchen was set to rights.
“Will you read to Clara tonight, Mavis?”
“Of course.”
Ruth left the kitchen and went upstairs. Gladys was sitting at her desk, a confusion of papers, books, old coffee cups, and underwear, like every other surface in her room. Normally she spent very little time here even to sleep, and her resolute pose now was unconvincing.
“This isn’t a good idea, Gladdy,” Ruth said.
“What isn’t?”
“Shutting yourself up.”
“Ranting around about things is pretty much a waste of time, though, isn’t it? I thought you always thought so.”
“It’s not my way, that’s all.”
“It’s not mine either. I’d rather bust heads,” Gladys said, but sullenly, softly.
