Contract with the World

by Jane Rule

  “Sometimes I like you a lot. Sometimes you’re a little creep. You should get a life of your own.”

  He laughed.

  “I mean it. Learn a little self-pity. That bout of Tennyson the other night wasn’t funny.”

  “My mother liked the Brownings, too, and Shakespeare and the Bible. Sometimes my head is full of it.”

  Carlotta began washing brushes at the sink, and for the first time, Joseph realized he had outstayed his brief welcome.

  “I like it,” he said, nodding to the painting. “It’s full of light.”

  “I’m nearly through with my bones. Next I’ll probably have to paint with my own blood.”

  Joseph nodded and turned to go.

  “Joseph, what’s the matter?”

  “‘I want that glib and oily art, / To speak and purpose not,’” he said without any temptation to go further.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I have a lot on my mind. When I say anything, it begins to come out. So I have to try to shut up. I’m sorry about the other night.”

  “Well, the party was awful anyway,” Carlotta admitted. “At least it reminded me to celebrate being thirty alone.”

  “When will that be?”

  “Last week.”

  “Don’t get lost in this new year, will you? I feel as if we could all get lost,” Joseph said.

  Perhaps he really meant they might simply slip away from him, and they had been too long more real to him than his own life … or more important. He expected of them—or at least of Mike and Allen and Carlotta—that they would simply go on growing more and more into themselves, recognizable to him and gradually to the world. Instead, they had begun to flicker across his attentive consciousness, now a shirt (Mike), now a cough (Carlotta), now a gesture of glinting diamond (Pierre). He knew them as he knew different species of birds, could name them, but he could not recognize a whole, particular other self, would falter before any of them, knowing them to be essentially strangers. Did they have selves to kid? “Let no one till his death / Be called unhappy. Measure not the work / Until the day’s out and the labor done.”

  I am morally crazy, he thought, trying not to say it aloud, raised on tag lines my mother believed in, encouraged with, judged by: “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp …” “All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field.” He saw Carlotta’s exposed bones in clarifying light, lying on a lawn like an offering to the orange flame of an azalea. Mike’s ladders and poles began to sprout branches and then leaves. Joseph smiled, then laughed. “They shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”

  “We have to fly before we can run,” he shouted, his arms stretching out to reach the eagle turning above him. “We have to run before we can walk.” And he ran along the beach by the spot where he had first met Allen. “Finally we will walk and not faint.” And he walked. “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” He knelt at the edge of the water and wrote “JOHN” in the water with his finger. “I have no such immortal fears.” He wrote again, “JOSEPH.” And laughed and laughed like a buoy sounding its warning in the dangerously shallow sea.

  The blanching of spring into summer, the letting out of school gave Joseph again some small distance between himself and his allergy, radical joy, ecstatic mourning, craziness, whatever it was. There was time not only for his walking but for domestic kindnesses he knew he must develop not only for Ann and her children but for himself. The children were not exactly shy of him, tolerated his reading to them, fixing their toys, even occasionally making them a meal, without complaint, but they did not turn to him ever. A skinned knee on an outing was not cried over unless Ann was there. The six-year-old would not confess to Joseph about being unable to dial a number on the phone, chose disobedience over asking for help. The eight-year-old introduced him to a friend as “my mother’s husband.” The relief he felt increased his guilt now that the time of silent mourning must surely be over for children as young as they had been. For children as young as they still were, they needed a sense of him as more responsible for them, more loving of them than he had been.

  “Should I adopt them?” he asked Ann shyly one night.

  “If you want to, it would be very nice.”

  “Not for them to change their names or call me Dad or anything, just as a legal protection.”

  “They might like to have your name. They might like to think of you as their father.”

  “Well …” Joseph said.

  “You could ask them,” she suggested.

  “Why don’t you? That way they wouldn’t feel they had to …”

  “All right. And, Joseph, it’s no more a betrayal than my marrying you.”

  “No, of course not.”

  He spent most of the next day walking. When he finally got back just before dinner, Ann smiled at him, kissed him, and said, “Now you ask them.”

  “Do they understand what adoption means?”

  “I’ve explained it to them,” she assured him.

  So he went into the living room, where the children were watching television. Usually they took no more notice of him behind his newspaper than he did of them, but the moment they saw him they turned off their program.

  “Don’t let me interrupt,” he said quickly.

  “Mother said you wanted to talk to us,” the eight-year-old said in a voice firm enough to seem reproachful.

  “Yes, well, you see, I thought maybe it was time, now that we’re all more or less used to each other, for me to adopt you—that is, if it’s all right with you?”

  “I can already spell Rabinowitz,” the six-year-old announced.

  “Mother said, since you wanted to marry us, too, we could call you Dad. Can we?”

  “Sure you can, if you want to.”

  The sense of ownership the children immediately asserted was extraordinary to Joseph. He felt more like a new tandem bicycle than a legal protector, a lap full of children who had never before done more than hold his hand crossing the street. A dozen times a day, one or the other of them would instruct him, “Fathers do …” or “Fathers don’t do …” He was initiated into the intimate rituals of bathing, doing up hard buttons, braiding hair, forced for the first time to acknowledge these children as young females for whom legality already meant permissiveness.

  “Do you remember when you were Joseph, you didn’t kiss us good-night?”

  “Daddy, what is my name? Say my name.”

  “Susan.”

  “My whole name.”

  “Susan Rabinowitz.”

  “And mine, too,” the younger one demanded.

  “Rachel … Rachel Rabinowitz.”

  He had not really thought about Ann calling herself Ann Rabinowitz, but now that he had, as Ann put it, “married them all,” he could think of her as his wife with less surprise and disbelief. If the children felt no more his, he felt much more theirs, and that was, after all, the point. After the first month, hearing either of them shout “Daddy” at him on the public street no longer seemed their calling attention to a criminal act.

  Joseph would have liked to say to Carlotta or Allen and Pierre or Mike that he had adopted two children. Particularly he would have liked to speak to Mike, wondering how Mike really felt about his own. Joseph had seen him only as a bluff bully but now he remembered that Mike also absent-mindedly touched his children, as if they could offer the comfort of worry beads. Joseph couldn’t imagine himself ever unselfconsciously touching Susan or Rachel, perhaps not because they weren’t his, but because they were girls.

  Mike was in no mood for anyone else’s intimate disclosures, working obsessively to avoid discovering any of his own. He would talk about nothing but money or art.

  “I should buy into that damned club and make some real money for a change.”

  Aside from the fact that he could get money for such a project only from his father-in-law, being part owne
r of a nightclub would tie him to it and encroach even more on the little time he had.

  “This is a hick town, Joseph. The only action in this country is in Toronto, and that’s nothing but a suburb of New York. Nothing’s going to come into Vancouver except from the outside with a label like Henry Moore or Barbara Hepworth.”

  Mike never spoke, therefore, of leaving Vancouver. He was a man not only in domestic chains but imprisoned in a vanished neighborhood, where street signs could still remind him of the fights he had won and greetings from boyhood friends could reassure him of the aesthetic distance he had put between himself and them. Afraid of rejection at the local galleries, which he accused alternately of being run by a bunch of goddamned Americans or local art school types doing their own thing only because they’d never been taught any goddamned thing else, Mike apparently didn’t even dream of the large world beyond this city as having any real place for him.

  Though Joseph had sometimes wished for a talent with words that might absorb the energy of his hysteria and transform it into poetry, he did not envy anyone who was actually trying to be an artist. Mike’s angry frustration had a basis in fact. There wasn’t room for anyone but the masters who did live in places like New York and London. Everyone had to work for years in the humiliation of being not good enough until a very few came to be great. As Allen had said from the beginning, Mike did not seem a candidate for greatness.

  Carlotta didn’t seem to care. For her, anyway, there was some measure of success.

  “You can say all you like about being a big frog in a little pond. It takes talent,” she said.

  Allen, who by now was accepting more and more American and European assignments, refused to call himself an artist at all. “It’s business, Joseph, not even big business. I can live like a millionaire on the job, but I’ll never be one. The only way Pierre will ever be an heiress is on my flight insurance.”

  “Have you ever thought of adopting Pierre?” Joseph asked.

  Allen snorted in derisive laughter. “You must have been reading Somerset Maugham’s biography. There are two great differences between Maugham and me: I’ve never made the mistake of fathering a child or accumulating enough money to be fought over.”

  It was a stupid question and as close as Joseph could get to telling any of them that he was a legal father of two girl children because he would then have to explain that he was married and further explain why he hadn’t mentioned the fact for the nearly two years since his wedding. He didn’t know why he had kept Ann in the same privacy that he did his illness, nor did he understand why only the fact of the children tempted him to confession. After his tactlessness with Allen, he did have the sense to avoid asking Carlotta if she wanted a child.

  Alma might have talked about being a parent, but Joseph was avoiding that house as much as he could, and motherhood, anyway, seemed to him so huge, sacred, and mysterious as to have nothing in common with his own tentative feelings. His not wanting to father a child had something to do with Alma, a sense that impregnating a woman so transformed and alienated her that what tenderness she had once given was obliterated. Adopting Ann’s two, on the contrary had brought her nearer to him, a reserve in herself so deep he had not even known it was there removed from him now. She was more affectionate with him in front of the children, readier to ask his advice, and she paused now before any of his small offerings about the people he knew, inviting him to go on rather than closing him off with “How nice” or “How interesting.” With her, as with his friends, he would have liked to begin to close the gap, but his long silence now made it somehow impossible.

  On Mike’s birthday, at a dawn that promised a day hot as zinnias, Joseph walked down to the warehouse, hoping to find Mike there, but the door was locked. Instead of going back to the house, where he might be involved in a tense family meal, he went home for breakfast, again aware of the great difference between his own life and Mike’s. Would Mike be as surprised by Ann as Joseph had been by Alma, not just the fact of her but the kind of woman she was? She didn’t look the two years older than Joseph but only because Joseph looked older than he was. She was … old-fashioned, like someone out of his mother’s or even grandmother’s generation, a round, good woman, whose beauty had to be unclothed and surprised. This morning she looked worn, the heat steaming her glasses, dark hair damp at her temples. Joseph remembered only faintly that the children looked like their father, who had died out of his own face months before his actual death, which had lodged in the set of Ann’s jaw as a fact. She looked what she was, a woman who had borne two children and buried a husband before she was thirty.

  “I’ll take you swimming this afternoon,” Joseph promised the children before he went downstairs to the press.

  Joseph picked up the stick, lifted the four-letter blasphemy out of it, and began to set, using his most ornate capitals for the beginning of each line:

  TRASCO’S DECREES

  Soft Sculpture Is a Pile of Crap

  There Is No Real Power on Earth but Art

  Sculpture Is the Greatest

  Found Art Is Bullshit

  As Joseph was studying the drawer of ornaments to find a border that was suitable, Susan and Rachel appeared at the top of the stairs.

  “Can we play down here where it’s cool?”

  “Sure.”

  He pulled out the bottom drawer of one of the type chests and let the children play with the large wooden antique letters he and John had found and bought.

  “They’re all backwards,” Susan complained.

  “Write your name backwards, and I’ll print you a sign.”

  It was lunchtime before Joseph finished. He sent the children up with fine new signs for their doors and left the ink on the plate and rollers to be cleaned after he had eaten.

  Ann, her back to him at the kitchen counter, said, “Would you just see the girls’ hands are clean, John?”

  Joseph stiffened, then realized that she had not noticed her mistake.

  “That daddy’s dead,” Rachel corrected, standing in the hall.

  Ann turned to him then.

  “I was thinking of him, too,” Joseph said.

  “He always loved the sound of the press,” she said. “So do I.”

  Joseph had a premonition that if he lived into old age with Ann, she would grow gradually free to confuse them, the two husbands for whom she wore the same ring.

  It was almost eight o’clock, time for Mike to go to work, when Joseph got to his house with the sign he had made, carrying it carefully because the ink wasn’t really dry. He felt cheerful at this afterthought of a birthday present, made while Mike slept. The light was on in the alley shed, but the door of that was locked, too. Reluctantly Joseph knocked on the back door. Alma opened it, her face frankly angry.

  “Oh, it’s you.”

  “I just wanted to drop off a sort of birthday card for Mike. Has he already gone?”

  “No, he’s out there,” she said, “sulking.”

  “Well, shall I just leave this … ?”

  “No. Pound on the door. Get him to stop behaving like a child.”

  She turned back without taking the sign.

  Joseph went back down to the shed, knocked, and called, “Mike?” and then tried the latch, which gave this time.

  The door swung open, and there for a second Joseph saw Mike hanging before him like a huge, obscene joke. “Alma!” Joseph shouted before he stepped forward, touched, and realized that it was an obscene joke, a life-sized soft sculpture, self-portrait of suicide. The hand was clay, an exact replica, wearing Mike’s wedding ring, glued into the cuff of one of Mike’s favorite wool shirts. The arm underneath was as soft as any other rag doll. Joseph climbed up onto the box Mike himself must have used to hang his own image. Joseph’s urgent need to touch the head was repugnant to him, but he had to see the face. The hair, when he took hold of it to lift the face up off the dummy’s chest, felt real. Then Joseph confronted the death’s head, Mike’s face serene as Joseph h
ad never seen it. He heard hurrying footsteps.

  “Wait!” he shouted, and as he jumped down from the box, he saw what he had not noticed before, the straining point of an erection against the trouser fly.

  Alma was at the door before he could warn or stop her. Her scream seemed to go on for minutes, an absolute sound that could not be interrupted, like a river that finally reached a fall of sound which might have been giggles, freeing Joseph to take hold of her and shake her.

  “It’s a joke. It’s a dummy.”

  He led her back into the house, more worried by her sudden docility than he had been by her scream. Both the children were at the top of the stairs, crying. Since Alma made no move toward them, Joseph went up to calm them and get them back to bed.

  “Your dad played a joke and scared your mother for a minute, that’s all. She’s all right.”

  Joseph had not been in this part of the house before. The boys’ rooms looked like something out of a magazine. From rocking horse to train set, they had everything that could be bought. To reassure and distract them, Joseph admired a toy fire truck with a real water tank and hoses. The older child showed him how the hoses could be cranked after the ladders had been unhooked. His hands, so like his father’s, reminded Joseph of the clay hands of the dummy, the wedding ring. He wished Alma would come up and help him. He did not like to leave her alone. Ann would never have allowed her own fright or grief or anger to get between her and her children. These two, Joseph realized, were dissembling for him, pretending to be all right. They seemed to him so appallingly small already to know they must cover up fear. But he accepted it and sent them to their beds.

  Alma was sitting at the dining-room table, her head in her hands.

  “He’s insane,” she said quietly.

  “He’s unhappy,” Joseph said.

  Alma looked up at him, her face more tired and vulnerable than he had ever seen it.

  “Yes,” she said, “I suppose he is. I’ve got past caring.”

  “I’m going to go take it down before it frightens anyone else.”

  “I’ll go up to the children. Joseph? I’m sorry, and thank you.”