by Nancy Thayer
“And when do we get to be happy again?” I longed to ask. Ever since that day in October when Adelaide’s first letter came, we had lived like two people on death row. There had been so many melodramatic letters and phone calls between lawyers and Charlie, and Adelaide and Charlie. Every night when we sat down to eat or went to bed to make love, half of us was waiting for the phone to ring, for a lawyer to say, “Sorry to bother you, Charlie, but there’s one more thing—” or for Adelaide to screech and cry. Christmastime was almost ruined. We sent only a few nice gifts to Caroline and Cathy, not wanting to incur any more of Adelaide’s wrath by sending too much. We spent two weeks of Christmas vacation on the farm, hiding from the phone, but it was not a merry time. We each kept thinking that this might be our last Christmas on the farm. I rode my horse every day, but not with the careless joy I had once known. And I didn’t shower Charlie with gifts, as I had wanted to; I saved the money I earned. I thought that someday we might really need it. And now, when the hearing was over and the farm was safe, it seemed we still were not to celebrate and be happy. I felt that Adelaide’s wrathful spirit was living with us like a malevolent ghost, keeping us from living joyfully. Everything seemed tainted. I could forgive Caroline and Cathy for reporting on us, for listing our every possession, but I wouldn’t be able to forget that they had done it. A pattern had been set: for years now the things that we would give them would not be simple gifts. If we gave them a lot, we were trying to buy them, we were wealthy and were spending money foolishly, money they (Adelaide) should have. If we gave them a little, we were being miserly and mean, we did not love the girls. If we wanted them to come visit us, we were trying to deprive Adelaide of her joy in life. If we didn’t want the girls to come, well, of course we did not love them. Nothing, for years, would be clear and good and free. And at least once a year there would be phone calls, letters from lawyers, threats. For a long time, for years, I would not make homemade bread, or talk to women who had children, or keep my kitchen floor shiny. I didn’t want to do anything that Adelaide had done. I didn’t want to be like her in any way at all. I thought she was a sad, nutty, lost woman.
“If you divorce me,” she had said to Charlie, “I will make you pay for it. I’ll do everything I can to make your life miserable.”
She spoke in clichés, but she tried her best to carry out her threats.
It didn’t seem like a very healthy way for a woman to live her life. But apparently it gave her a sort of bitter pleasure. Apparently, for a while, that was one of the greatest pleasures she had.
Charlie and I learned to live with it. We were happy in our work, happy in our love for each other. We even developed a wry sense of humor about it all. After a while it was almost an unwelcome, acknowledged guest in our home. We learned to live with Adelaide’s bitterness and with the sudden gloomy changes in our daily atmosphere that the bitterness could bring. We learned to go on living and loving and laughing in spite of it all. It was like having a ghost behind a door. If one buys a beautiful haunted house, if one loves it enough, one keeps it, and lets the ghost rage on.
* * *
In March of 1966, two months after the hearing, an international symposium on human relations was held. Approximately sixty scholars and professionals in the field gathered to spend five days at a first-class luxury hotel, lecturing and listening to each other, and participating in discussions and panels. The papers they presented were to be collected into a book, the National Social Science Association’s 1966 Symposium on Human Relations. The honoraria and transportation expenses provided were more than adequate; it was a first-class operation all around. Only the best people in their various specialities—anthropology, sociology, general semantics, linguistics, literature, psychology, nutrition, foreign relations, education, journalism, and so on—were invited, and the historian invited was Charlie. Perhaps to make up for the summer when I missed meeting the famous intellectual woman, perhaps simply because we were so much in love and didn’t want to be parted for long, Charlie took me with him to the symposium.
It was held the second week in March, which fitted exactly into our university’s spring break. We flew to Chicago and then to Boston, where a limousine from the hotel met us and three other participants. We rode for almost three hours, up into the hills of New Hampshire, and Charlie and the other men played intellectual tennis all the way, while I sat in a stunned respectful silence. I was twenty-three, I had just started work on my master’s. After those three hours in that limousine I was ready to weep with despair. I didn’t see how I’d ever in my life know as much as any one of the four men, or be able to present my knowledge with such careless, arrogant ease.
Just before we arrived at the hotel, the old, bearded cyberneticist reached across and patted my knee in a gallantly lecherous stroke that he could get away with because of his age and his fame.
“Thank God your husband brought you along, honey,” he said. “You’re just what we all need: a beautiful young woman to make our blood race so we can keep up all this egotistical drivel.”
I smiled back at the man, genuinely pleased. I felt he had just given me a role to play, a reason for being there. I determined to look as pretty as I could at the symposium, and to listen in the most complimentary way possible.
The hotel was grand. It had once been a spa, and was pillared and columned and gilded and carpeted and furnished in the most luxuriously decadent way imaginable. In the winter it was used mostly as a ski resort, and it was so huge that the seventy-five scholars and wives and symposium administrators were simply given a separate wing of conference rooms and a separate dining room. The bedroom Charlie and I shared was carpeted in a deep rich red, and the curtains were thick and the sheets and towels were monogrammed with the hotel’s initials. It was great fun throwing off that thick, heavy, quilted satin spread and rolling on those expensive sheets with Charlie. Afterward Charlie took some scotch out of his briefcase and we had a little friendly toddy while I sat on the bed and let Charlie’s semen drip out of me into a soft initialed towel. Then we showered and dressed and tried to look appropriately serious as we went downstairs to dinner.
The symposium passed by me in a blur: mornings and afternoons spent listening to papers and discussions; lunch and dinner spent trying to be charming and complimentary to the others at my table; evenings—evenings were best—spent simply watching the famous people get drunk and show off or argue or tell long intimate, personal tales. I tried so hard to absorb all that knowledge that my head continually ached, and I faithfully scribbled notes in a small red binder, but what I carried away from that 1966 conference was a knowledge that I couldn’t yet assimilate, couldn’t yet understand, couldn’t yet use.
I learned that many famous intellectuals are silly little babies, full of pride and defences and wanting more than anything else some sort of woman to take care of their typing, plane schedules, laundry, and sexual needs, not necessarily in that order of importance.
I learned that a naïve young woman can deserve the company of a Nobel Prize winner if she’s pretty, and young, and willing to listen with a look of total awe on her face.
I learned that at symposia there were several sorts of men but only two kinds of women, excluding the hotel waitresses. There were the smart ones, who were the participants, and there were the pretty ones, who were the wives.
When I first entered the dining room, I felt relieved to see women sprinkled here and there among the men. Back home there had been only three women in a master’s program of twenty-two. The odds here seemed about the same, and it didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me, what did ever so slowly sink into my thick skull as the days passed and the participants were introduced to deliver their papers, was that there was not one woman participant that I would have wanted to be. There was a sweet, tired, serenely grieving nun, Sister Grace Anthony Morrow, a specialist in linguistics. There was a tall, wide woman from the U.S. Army, specializing in foreign affairs; she was forty-one and single and wore thic
k glasses and heavy dark suits and had her hair cropped like a man’s. There was a German woman, who wore her hair pulled back into a tight bun and who never smiled. She was a specialist in education, as was her husband, who was also at the symposium. They had written several books together, but they never smiled at each other, or touched, or even sat together. They were competitive with each other; sometimes they argued with each other in a language other than English, snapping at each other sharply, quickly, like a pair of rival dogs. There was a small Japanese woman whose lecture I didn’t attend. She was older, and she was exceptionally quiet. I don’t think she understood English very well. And there was an almost pretty sociologist, a woman who hid herself behind loose dark clothes and glasses that kept falling off. She trembled so much when she stood to present her paper that no one could understand what she said. She took her lunch in her room, and went to her room every night right after dinner, and left the symposium a day early. A famous woman anthropologist had been planning to come, but had fallen ill, and her huge, amusing, genial, womanizing anthropologist ex-husband came instead.
I learned that I liked being considered pretty, and I liked being smiled at by men. I liked being cheerful and helpful and warm. I liked having Charlie look at me in a special way, touch me in a special way; I liked having Charlie love me. If a woman had to lose all that in order to reach the top of her profession, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to start the climb.
The most attractive woman there was a wife. Other wives were there, of course, mostly following their husbands around saying, “Of course, dear, I’ll run back to the room and get it for you,” or, “Do you need a pill, dear? I’ve got one right here in my purse.” But the most attractive woman there didn’t do that. She smiled at her husband and leaned against him fondly when they were together, but she didn’t fetch and carry for him. She was a tall, slim woman in her late thirties who had long blond hair and eyes as blue and warming as a summer sky. Men congregated around her; she was witty and intelligent and kind. And she seemed wonderfully together, wonderfully self-sufficient. She attended only a few of the lectures, and spent most of the days reading by herself in the hotel’s wicker and green solarium. I admired her for three days, almost wanting not to get to know her, not to ruin the spell. I wanted to be like her, obviously beautiful, warm, confident, serene, and obviously, kindly, intelligent. When I finally got up the courage to interrupt her reading in the solarium, I was amazed at what she revealed.
“How nice of you to come chat with me,” she said. She put her book down and pulled some bright yarns out of a batik bag. “I’ve been ignoring my knitting. I love to read, but I’ve got to get this sweater done.”
Her name was Alice. And she had six children. She was enjoying a week away from them; it was a bliss to have someone else cook, not to wake up in the night, but she had to confess that she missed them all dreadfully.
“But—but—” I stammered, and then blurted honestly, “You’re always throwing out the most marvelous quotes from Plato or Montaigne! How can you—”
Alice laughed, delighted. “I’m a Leader of a Great Books Discussion Club for teenagers,” she said. “This is my fourth year of doing the classics. After four years things start to stick. It certainly does fool everyone, doesn’t it?”
Alice thought that children were endlessly fascinating, and actually pitied the intellectual men for their dried-up, fusty-dusty, nitpicky lives. She liked to cook and bake and make jelly, to sew, to touch and mold textures and colors into something unique and new. She loved being pregnant, giving birth, nursing, playing with the children.
“Oh, I love to read and think,” she said, “but I infinitely prefer life.”
I fell in love with her, a little bit. We traded addresses and secrets and agreed to correspond. It wasn’t until years and years had gone by that she accidentally let the secret of her maternal joyfulness slip. Actually, she hadn’t intended for it to be a secret, she hadn’t really thought about it at all as entering into the picture. What it—her secret, was, was money. She was married to a professor, and professors seldom make much money. But she was the daughter of a New England insurance executive and she had lots and lots and lots and lots of her own money. Which she spent for babysitters and household help. Whenever she wanted. So that there was actually a world of difference between her and any other mother who on any given day cannot afford to say, “Connie? Come over and watch the children today, will you? I think I’m coming down with a little cold; I’m going to make some rose hip tea and go read a book in bed and see if I can’t get rid of it before it gets worse.”
But I didn’t know that then. I was desperately searching for models, I suppose. I suppose that’s why I fell in love with her. Of course I wasn’t the only woman, or man, who did. Several of the famous men practically fell over their feet trying to offer her a chair when she entered the room. Two of the most famous men, men so big in the intellectual world that they would have to be called planets rather than simple stars, brought her drinks and beamed down on her with open admiration. Years later I discovered why, yet another secret: Alice had been sleeping with them at the symposium. She had gone to their rooms—on two different nights, of course—and shared a bottle of gin with one and two bottles of champagne with another and screwed them both silly. Alice loved to screw strangers, especially important ones. She always had fun at conferences; she had a powerhouse of memories that she savored like Polish vodka on a cold rainy day.
But at the symposium in 1966, I wasn’t aware of all of Alice’s secrets; those wouldn’t be revealed for years. I was aware of only the obvious: there were smart women; there were pretty women; and the only woman who combined both qualities was a woman who had six children.
“Women are concerned with the interior of things; men with the exterior,” a famous psychologist told me gently, benignly, like God talking to a child. “This is only right, only natural, my dear. Think of your body.”
I was too dazzled by his mere presence to question or argue. One of the other things I learned at the symposium was that although famous intellectuals might be silly little babies, demanding and egotistical, arrogant and defensive, they could also be wonderfully handsome and rivetingly powerful. Age only made them more distinguished; fat tummies made them seem only more solid, more significantly secure. The Europeans especially had beautiful, expensive, elegant clothes and charming courtly manners. If my mind said, What a prick that guy is, my body still said, Oh, you bet, pant, pant, let’s just go stand near him some more and let the radiation jingle over us.
I learned that my body quite often disagreed with my mind. I was just twenty-three. I thought I’d develop more control over my body as I got older. What a fool I was.
So I learned nothing at the symposium that really helped me at that time of my life with my own personal problems. Charlie, of course, always tried to help in his own vague, preoccupied way, but I knew he didn’t understand my problem. I could barely come clear about it myself; it had something to do with wanting to see the famous woman intellectual the summer before. It had something to do with being a smart little female Methodist from Kansas.
I had turned twenty-three that winter, and had begun work on my master’s degree, and after the first excitement died down and I realized I could easily handle the work, I looked around the department and noticed that all the professors, every single one, were male. And there were only two other women entering the master’s program. One was named Sylvia. Sylvia was skinny and homely and intense. She had a wart, an honest-to-God wart, on the end of her nose. Poor girl. She looked like a comic book witch. She wore nothing but gray, brown, or black. She was fiercely unfriendly and competitive. To be fair, I think she was very poor, and this was her only way up and out. Also, to be fair, she knew a great deal more than I, was a much more serious student. I always thought that love was the most important thing; I still do. Love, first. And also laughter. But Sylvia put literary criticism first, with her teeth clenched. She had no laughter, n
ot even for Chaucer. She did not talk to me, not even if I started the conversation. She never sat next to me in class, as if I had something hideously contagious about me. I thought she was more amusing, in her own wart-nosed way, than anything else.
In fact Linda, the other woman MA candidate, used to laugh with me about Sylvia behind Sylvia’s back. Linda was a real whiz kid, a woman much quicker than either Sylvia or I. Her brain was always racing, zip, zing, zap; she could make analogies and describe similarities between any two poets or dramatists or novelists one could name. She operated on instinct, mostly. And she was gorgeous, in a strident, plump way. She was wealthy. She was like a great big red-haired sexpot running on a Mercedes 450SL engine. She didn’t belong in a master’s program. She didn’t give a shit about her studies. Nothing was serious to her: she had all that money, and a big diamond ring from a law student, and she was just filling time until her fiancé got out of school and they could have a large expensive wedding. She wrote her papers on topics such as “Metaphors in Ben Jonson’s Plays: Scatology, Bugs, Muck, and Gore.” She openly flirted with the professors and the other graduate students. She attended all kinds of rallies and sit-ins, not out of concern but out of boredom. She was a high-powered lady, but a high-powered lady all the same: there were vestiges of the old South in her wealthy family, and she had been brought up to be a tease, a flirt, a wife, a mother, and a generally good-looking sweet-talking amusing little thing who always kept her white gloves clean. It was almost too bad that she was so brilliant; it only made her flighty and discontented with everything. She would have gone nuts teaching the freshman courses I loved; nothing that routine could have held her interest. In a way I felt more sympathy for her than I did for Sylvia: Sylvia would eventually find a job, and would turn out one well-researched and yawningly dull but thorough paper a year. She would be stolidly content. But Linda was like a flamingo on a farmyard pond. She would never be content. Not with anything. It was only a matter of months, I knew, before she’d get herself knocked up simply to get some action, have a new experience, create a little drama, and force a big showy wedding out of everyone before her fiancé finished law school and she finished her master’s. Then she’d be home with a baby for entertainment. I wouldn’t have wanted to be that baby.
