The War Between the Tates: A Novel

by Alison Lurie

  Brian does not like the idea of thus admitting guilt. On the other hand, he is weary of hearing from Jack that Erica’s lawyer has not yet answered his last letter or returned his phone call, or has done so only to propose ridiculously unfair terms. Leonard also has an opinion about these proposals: “Six hundred a month? You know what they’re trying to do, those harpies, don’t you? They’re trying to emasculate you, to cut off your balls. They want to get at you through your superego and destroy you economically. Clarabelle tried the same thing on me, but I finally beat her down.”

  At times Brian thinks his friend may be right about Jack’s incompetence and Clara’s malice. More often, though, he suspects that Jack and Clara are in collusion—that they have agreed to delay the Tates’ divorce as they have in the past delayed the Zimmerns’, and others’, in the hope that time may effect a reconciliation. They may not have discussed it openly, but they are old friends, and understand each other almost without words. (“Real shame about the Tates.” “Mm, yes.”—A procrastination of six months or more—“Not exactly surprised re the Farrells.” “No; about time, some might say.”—Formalities concluded in two weeks.)

  Though he suspects this, Brian has not yet challenged Jack on it, for in a way the delay is useful to him; it sets up a blockade between him and Wendy’s wish to get married. Actually she has not spoken of marriage in some weeks, but he can feel her desire for it all the time, just as he now feels the warm, heavy, slightly numbing pressure of her body against his leg.

  There are other disadvantages in being legally separated. It is expensive, for one thing, and will be inconvenient and embarrassing if/when he decides to return to his family. He hasn’t given up the idea of such a return, though he tends to imagine it as taking place further and further in the future. He certainly doesn’t want it now, and Erica doesn’t want it, though it would be in her best interests. Living alone hasn’t been good for her; she has been ill often this winter, and looks thin and strained. Last Sunday when he went to pick up the children this appearance was so pronounced that Brian could not help commenting: “You’re very pale. Have you got another cold?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact,” Erica replied bleakly.

  “You’re overworking yourself, that’s what it is. If you gave up that ridiculous job—”

  “If I gave up that ridiculous job,” she interrupted in a thin, strained voice, “I couldn’t buy groceries.”

  Brian has managed not to brood about this conversation by telling himself that he is giving Erica so much of his salary now that it is he who can hardly buy groceries; that she is still living in a large comfortable house and not in a cramped apartment. He has repeated to himself the words of Leonard Zimmern: “You’ve got to be tough, or they’ll get you down with their female pathos and whining. Erica was never ill when I knew her.”

  These techniques have been partly successful. Brian does not feel consciously guilty; he doesn’t even think about Erica very often. But he has bad dreams. Often they hark back to his war experiences, and repeat the nightmares he had just after his tour in the Pacific on a DE; nightmares involving confused orders and water and sticky darkness and loud noises. Only now Erica is in them. Last week he had one in which she appeared with large wings, perched on the porch roof of the house on Jones Creek Road, like a figure in Renaissance painting. It was a cloudy evening in this dream and the air was full of a dangerous waning noise like antimissile missiles which made him gasp and cry out, waking Wendy. “Hey Brian? What’s the matter? Is it one of your war nightmares? Wake up! What happened, tell me about it.”

  And Brian told her, ill-advisedly. For after she hugged and soothed him she asked, “How come you always dream about Erica? Maybe you’re still in love with her.”

  “I’m not in love with her,” Brian insisted. “I wish she’d get the hell out of my dreams.” Wendy remained silent, unconvinced. “She had wings like a harpy,” he added, and went on to relate this to Clara Dickson’s impossible demands.

  But Wendy was not persuaded. “I d’know. Maybe she’s asking for so much bread on purpose, to zap the proceedings. On account of she wants you back, account of she’s still in love with you.”

  “Erica is not in love with me,” Brian insisted with still greater conviction. “As a matter of fact, I don’t think she’s ever been in love with me.” In the dark, Wendy murmured doubtfully. “Look, let’s go back to sleep. I have two classes tomorrow.”

  “Okay. I’m sorry. It’s just—I mean, shit, you never dream about me.”

  “I don’t have to dream about you,” Brian said in his fondest tone, and with an appropriate gesture. He could feel her relax then; she returned the gesture, laughed warmly, and flopped back onto her stomach. She always slept that way, often with one fist in her mouth, like a child; and now, like a child, she was asleep again in a few moments. But Brian lay awake for over, an hour, while the wailing noise of his dream came and went in his mind.

  The joint comes around to Brian again: a thin, wrinkled cigarette, pinched and wet at one end. Again he passes it on. He has no moral objection to marijuana, but he dislikes its effects. When he smokes grass he enters into a dull, stupid, sensual state in which the world is brightly colored and flattened out like the sort of abstract painting he finds most boring. He has the sense of being slowed down and speeded up alternately: a minute passes infinitely slowly, and quarter-hours disappear between two sentences. Wendy and her friends, with their childish sense of an infinite future, may think this amusing; but Brian finds it disagreeable: he does not wish to have big bites of time taken out of his life. Still worse than these sensual distortions is the intellectual effect of the drug. Meaning and order are blurred, and rational argument and comparison become impossible.

  Besides, it makes social life boring. When drinks are served, people become more lively and communicative; they talk and move around more. Grass has the opposite effect: look at Linda and her guests, lying about for the last half-hour almost silent, like cows on actual grass.

  Brian is seriously concerned about Wendy’s constant use of marijuana. She and her friends cannot seem to get together socially without lighting up a joint, and hardly a day goes by that she doesn’t smoke at least part of one, often (as now) mixed with hash to make it stronger. Possibly the stuff is harmless in small amounts, but what is a small amount? Without federal controls, how can anyone know how much they are getting? Also, he has read that the effect may be cumulative over months or years. Besides, it is a drug, and leads to stronger drugs: to LSD, speed and heroin; to addiction, weird delusions, mental and moral collapse, overdose and death. Nobody has proved that marijuana itself is not addictive, at least psychologically. And apart from everything else, it is illegal. It is distributed by criminal organizations part of whose profits go to bribery, corruption and possibly murder, and the use of it makes one a criminal. Right now Wendy and her friends are breaking a federal law. They could be arrested and tried and sent to jail; and so could he, as an accessory. Probably the judge would be especially hard on him because of his age and position.

  Brian sighs and reaches past Wendy for another can of beer, and as he does so her peaceful bovine smile is replaced by a look of anxiety. He knows what this means: she is worried about his constant drinking. She has discovered that he and his friends cannot seem to get together socially without opening a bottle; that hardly a day goes by when he doesn’t have at least a glass of vermouth before supper, often mixed with gin to make it stronger.

  In fact Wendy thinks of alcohol much as he thinks of drugs. In her view, grass makes you relaxed, happy and at peace with the world; it refines and heightens perceptions. Alcohol blurs the senses and causes you to become noisy and violent. Besides, everyone knows the stuff is addictive. A small amount—a can of beer or a glass or two of wine—might be harmless, but it is apt to lead to the use of stronger and more dangerous drinks: to loss of physical control, shouting, fighting, vomiting and fatal auto accidents; eventually to impotence and visions
of snakes and cirrhosis of the liver. And apart from everything else, it is a gross commercial rip-off. A bottle of whiskey costs six to eight dollars, and a lot of that is taxes, which means it goes to supporting corrupt government and killing people in Vietnam.

  The doors bangs open, admitting two more of Linda’s friends: a pretty, sturdy girl with a Jewish Afro hairdo, and a bearded young man. Both are already known to Brian: the young man is the graduate student in physics named Mark who used to live downstairs. He now lives in a commune with the girl, Jenny, a Corinth undergraduate with whom he is having a relationship, but not a really meaningful one. As Wendy has explained to Brian, “In a relationship you’re just screwing the guy. In a meaningful relationship you’re screwing him and also he’s your best friend.”

  “Hiya, everybody.” Jenny pulls a poncho over her bushy head. Beneath it she is dressed in a style Brian recognizes but still finds odd. Unlike Wendy, with her mixed East-West Indian costume, Jenny and most of her undergraduate friends get themselves up as poor cowboys and dirt farmers. They wear heavy boots and faded, patched jeans, with a man’s shirt or sweater. For parties the sweater is replaced by a fancy low-necked blouse trimmed with lace or bright embroidery; necklaces and long earrings are added. But the jeans and the boots remain, making these girls look mismatched at the waist, like the cardboard figures in a game Brian had as a small child.

  “How’s everything?” Linda raises a limp bony arm and hand from the floor, where she is lying prone.

  “Lousy.” Jenny waves away the joint one of the other-guests has offered her and sits down next to Brian, reaching for a can of beer. “I’m really disgusted at this university.”

  “Oh, yeh?” Brian shifts position, relieving the weight on his leg, and turns toward Jenny with pleasure—not only because she is very pretty, but because he may now hear something of interest. Also, he may be able to help. In the last few months he has counseled Wendy’s friends on a variety of problems: academic foul-ups, hassles with landlords, job applications, draft resistance. His advice is valuable to them, partly because of his greater knowledge of university procedures, partly because of his greater experience of the world. “What’s happening?”

  Jenny frowns as she pulls open her beer can, but is silent.

  “It’s that man in your department, that Professor Dibble,” Mark explains. “He sort of keeps insulting women in his lectures.”

  “Not sort of,” Jenny says. “He does it blatantly.”

  “Ah.” Brian is familiar with this problem; more, he is in a sense responsible for it. It was he after all, who last Thanksgiving suggested to a hitchhiker that she enroll in Dibble’s course. Sara had not only acted on the recommendation, she had passed it on to friends and members of her commune. As a result, at least three militantly feminist students are taking Poly Sci 202. They have not found Dibble sympathetic, nor he them; Brian has already heard complaints from both sides.

  “I figured he was going to be bad when we got to the Nineteenth Amendment, but I didn’t think he’d be this bad. I mean, he’s really a fascist chauvinist pig. Some of the things he’s said, I didn’t think I’d ever hear them in an American university; they sound like Mein Kampf. And you can’t reason with him.”

  “You’ve tried?”

  “Oh yeh. Pat and Sara tried to talk to him after class, and I went to his office twice this week. The first time he wouldn’t even speak to me because he had some meeting, and yesterday he made me wait about half an hour and then gave me five minutes. And he was like really insulting. He said he was surprised an attractive young woman like me should be associated with such a foolish cause.” Jenny imitates Dibble’s supercilious look and prissy manner, then scowls darkly. Neither expression is able to disguise beauty so remarkable that even a woman-hater like Dibble was aware of it—the full young mouth, the very full young breasts unconfined in the flimsy embroidered blouse.

  “Disgusting,” caws Linda, of whom such an insulting remark will never be made. “You know what you ought to do, you ought to stop going to his class.”

  “That’s what Pat said. She thinks we should just drop the course and write Dean Kane telling why. But I don’t know. It seems like sort of futile to me. I thought maybe we should try to organize a boycott.” She turns to Brian. “We could call a meeting of the women in the course and try to get them all to cut class, and send a letter to the Star about it. What do you think? But why wouldn’t that work?” (for Brian is shaking his head).

  “It’s wrong politically,” he explains. “Negative tactics. Let me ask you one question: What do you want from Dibble?”

  Jenny takes a breath, raising her breasts. “We want him to listen to us, and stop saying denigrating things about women, and apologize publicly—at least correct the lies, like when he told the class that women’s IQ stops at age twelve, and—”

  “Exactly,” Brian interrupts. “But Dibble doesn’t listen to you, and he won’t pay any more attention to a letter to the Star. And I doubt it will help if you cut class. How many girls, excuse me, women”—he smiles at Jenny—“are there in 202?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Maybe twenty.”

  “And how many of them would join you, do you think?”

  “All of them, I hope,” she says warmly. “Or almost all. There’s always a few Aunt Toms in every bunch.”

  “Hm. But all right. Suppose you did get real cooperation. I know Don Dibble. He wouldn’t care if every female student quit his courses. And he’d be quite happy to fail ten or fifteen of you for unexcused absence. Or at least lower your grades. No.” Brian shakes his head once more decisively. “There’s no point in removing women from the course. What you want to do is bring in more women.” He glances around; everyone looks puzzled except Jenny.

  “You mean, we should ask our friends to come to class—a whole lot of them—fill up the room.” She rises to her knees, the light of battle beginning to shine in her big brown eyes. “I get it! Then when Dibble starts his stuff we can all look angry-groan and hiss—interrupt even—stamp our feet—” She laughs eagerly.

  “That’s right.” Brian smiles at Jenny, thinking that she has a lively mind and, for one so young, a good grasp of the principles of political action. Then he looks down at Wendy, whose face is still clouded with incomprehension. It occurs to him, not for the first time, that if he had consciously set out to leave his wife for a student, he could have done better in terms of both brains and looks.

  “You can get everyone you know,” Linda says, sitting up. “I’ll come, and I could ask Marilyn—”

  “More than that,” Jenny interrupts. “I’ll go to the next WHEN meeting and ask for volunteers. Then we can organize them into shifts, and have signals—It’s a great idea. Wow, thanks!” She turns toward Brian and suddenly embraces him, kissing his cheek; her large warm breasts are briefly pressed against his shirt.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Fantastic,” Wendy seconds adoringly, embracing and kissing him from the other side. Brian hugs her back; but he cannot help noting the physical contrast, and wondering why, for the second time in his life, he has become involved with a relatively flat-chested woman. It is not as if he preferred small breasts. But his life is not over yet. Perhaps eventually he and Jenny ...

  “It’s easy for Brian. He only has to see them once a week.” Erica stops, hearing the shrill complaining tone of her own voice.

  “Ah.” Zed hands her a mug of mint tea.

  “He never disciplines them,” Erica continues, for after all she has to complain to someone. “He just takes them out to dinner and lets them order whatever they want: pies, Coke, steak sandwiches and greasy French fries; he never makes them have milk, or vegetables. So of course they think he’s keen.” Holding her mug, she sits down on the thin, lumpy day bed in the back room of the Krishna Bookshop. “I know all about it, from my own childhood.”

  “Mm.” Zed has perched opposite her on the rubber top of a kitchen stepladder, with his worn tweed jacket hung
around his shoulders like the wings of a skinny bald bird.

  “Only in my case it was worse. I hardly ever saw my father after he went into the Canadian Army; so I not only preferred him, I thought of him as an ideal hero. All through high school, whenever I was unhappy or felt my life was unjust, I had fantasies of how he would come to rescue me. Or sometimes I imagined how I would go to England or France or Canada to find him, and we would have a romantic reunion.”

  “And then, when he came back?” Zed prompts after a pause.

  “He didn’t really. He came less and less; after I was fourteen, not at all. I pretended to the girls at school that he did, though, sometimes,” she adds, looking down. Then she looks up, but his expression has not changed—it is still gentle, impartial.

  “I went to see him once,” she continues. “It was in spring vacation, my second year at college. I told my mother and everybody that I was invited to visit a friend in Detroit. Then I bought a bus ticket to Ontario, and wrote and told him I was coming, too late for him to stop me. Or really, too late for his wife Myra to stop me; I’d decided that it was all her fault, that she’d been keeping us apart for years, saying spiteful things against me, even tearing up the letters I wrote him every Christmas and birthday, which would explain why he never answered.”

  “And how was it when you saw him?” Zed asks after another pause.