by Jane Rule
“I’m afraid I’d like your father,” I said.
“How can that reassure me?” Andrew asked, “but it does. Come on. I’m thirsty for one of those filthy English gins.”
While we drank, Andrew got out his appointment book and a fan of tickets he had bought while he was waiting for me. Around those he began to block out our “doing” of London, as careful of our feet and our stomachs and the variable English weather as he was of the interests we were willing to share. I did remember to reserve an evening for seeing you, but you had already promised John you’d go to an important party with him. Between us, we managed not to see each other for the week Andrew was in London. We were not exactly awkward about him. You had no patience with negative loyalty of any kind. If anything, I think you were comforted by my being able to go on liking him during the time that you couldn’t. But our experiences of Andrew were so different that it was hard to talk about him.
I was not really bewildered by the violence in Andrew which in those days I never saw. He spoke of it himself occasionally, sometimes bitterly self-critical, sometimes justifying himself. His temper wasn’t always simply an expression of his own frustration. He could lose it to other people’s stupidity and brutality as well. And I understood why I never saw him do it. With me, Andrew took a deliberate holiday from aspects of himself. I was neither a woman to win nor a friend to compete with. For me, our relationship had the same kind of ease. I hid from myself in his handsome protection, refusing to see any harm in it or in him for either of us. I didn’t tire of Andrew as I did of other company, particularly yours.
Doris could not have been more enthusiastic about Andrew than Frank, who surprised me with his almost immediate and candid approval. Frank’s own son was a fiercely ambitious young man, impatient with his father’s unstraining success, with his father’s love for England. They had disagreed as much as Frank would allow it. Finally he had given his permission for young Frank to finish his education in the States. But he would never understand why his son could not be glad of the freedom from ambition Frank could have given him. It was what Frank would have liked himself. He might have been, if he had not had to sacrifice his comfort for it, a minor botanist or music critic. But he was first a gentleman, and that was expensive. To recognize in Andrew the same tastes and temperament was a sharpened pleasure because of his recent failures with his son.
Doris did not usually leave men to port and cigars except at large, formal dinners because Frank was a man who often found other men’s company gross and tedious. Even when the custom was observed, the ladies hardly had time to powder their noses and compliment each other on their hairstyles before Frank raised the men from the gusts of digestion and manly good humor in the dining room to the clearer, upper air of the drawing room. But on the evening Andrew and I had dinner with them, Doris signaled to me at the end of the meal as if it were ritual.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “It’s all I can do to be generous with Andy myself, but I haven’t seen Frank so happy in months. And it makes me feel guilty for suspecting him of other things. I don’t think they’ll be long.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Frank really does like him, doesn’t he?”
“It’s not hard,” Doris said. “I’ve seen Arrow shirt ads before, but usually they’re stuffed. This boy’s an absolute delight. He’s intelligent.”
“I knew you’d like him.”
“Oh, Kate, you’re not going to waste him, are you?” Doris asked with some real distress.
“Of course not. I’ll give him away long before he’s spoiled.”
“But he’s so good with you.”
“Better than he really is, he claims. So am I. But wouldn’t it be awful to live with someone who always brought out the best in you? Exhausting!”
“Don’t you… aren’t you interested in him at all?”
“Well… no,” I said.
“But how about him?”
“He doesn’t really strike you as the sort of person who’d pine, does he? We’re a lovely rest for each other. And, God knows, we both occasionally need it.”
“Frank is going to insist that you marry him,” Doris decided.
“But he isn’t even pregnant!”
“You’re impossible, Kate.”
“Yes,” I said. “Why don’t we have some port and cigars? I’m sure Frank and Andy won’t, and we need to amuse ourselves with something.”
Doris was so near true distress that I had to work hard on distracting and entertaining her. I was afraid for a moment that she might ask me if I wanted to go to a psychiatrist or a minister of my choice, but by the time Frank and Andrew joined us again, she had settled to a civilized and entertaining distance.
“That was almost more than I’d bargained for,” I said to Andrew after we’d left. “You’re sometimes so lovely as to be a trial to me.”
“Why?”
“Well, Frank obviously wants to adopt you, and Doris thinks I ought to make a dishonest man of you at once.”
“I do like Doris!”
“I’m glad. I do, too. It’s odd. I think I am a little vain about you. I like showing you off. It doesn’t embarrass you, but it does embarrass me.”
“Why should it?”
“I don’t want to even look tempted.”
“Are you ever?”
“No… not really”
“Because I am,” he said, quite matter-of-factly.
“But it doesn’t really matter to you,” I said.
“No, it doesn’t.”
“If it ever did,” I said, “I’d go to bed with you.”
“Generously.”
“I’m afraid so.” And then I grinned. “But I can’t ever imagine you desperate.”
“What’s really unfair is that, if you were desperate, I couldn’t do anything about it. And that embarrasses me.”
“Let’s make a pact about never being desperate in each other’s company.”
“No,” Andrew said, “because someday we might outgrow being embarrassed.”
“How is it that Esther didn’t fall in love with you? I don’t really understand that.”
“Simply insensitive,” Andrew said, but it was a hard joke for him.
The day Andrew left London I was restless with the reading I had planned to do. When I phoned, you were out; so I went to call on Doris, planning to stop at Sloane Square on my way home.
“I’ve been thinking about Christmas,” Doris said. “With young Frank away and Ann threatening to accept an invitation to France, Frank and I must either go away or find another family. Would you like to have your friends here for a sort of house party? Don’t say yes as a favor to us, only if you’d really like it.”
“I’d love it,” I said. “Who and how many have you got in mind?”
“Well, Esther, of course, and Andrew? And—”
“You don’t think Mother will come over?”
“No, not until spring. And what about this other college friend of yours?”
“Monk? Yes,” I said.
“And if she and Esther have young men about—”
“Monk would think a real English house party almost too much to hope for. It’s a marvelous idea.”
“Shall I ask them?”
“Yes,” I said. “Let’s be very proper. You do so many things that please me, Doris. I wish I were a better sort of sister-daughter for you.”
“You please me,” Doris said, a quick, affectionate hand on my cheek, “and always have. The only person you find hard to please is yourself.”
What a comfort she would have been if what she had said were true. Just the same, I set off to find you in an uncommonly happy mood, the sort that catches up the human details of a street as if they were all as bright and free as the autumn leaves that also fall, noticed and rejoiced in. I took the stairs, two at a time, forgetting that I had no use for my body, banged loudly on your door, shouting, “You must be in, E. I won’t be disappointed!”
I
heard you moving about inside, but it took you a long time to come to the door.
“I was asleep,” you said.
“Well, wake up. It’s a glorious day We’re in London. We should do something—at least go for a walk in the park.”
You contemplated my mood out of a face white and still from sleep. “I’ll have to get dressed. Come in.”
It was the first time I noticed with any shock the physical chaos you lived in, perhaps because here it was complicated by your sleeping, eating, and working all in one room. Days of changes of clothes were piled on one chair. Dirty dishes and plates of butter and jars of jam were visible under opened mail, books, sketches. At the far end of the table there was an unfinished head of John, which apparently had fallen over. It hadn’t been wrapped and was drying, while its rags curled stiffly over the arms and back of the other chair. The room smelled oddly of peanut butter, Imperial Leather, and clay. I wandered around, picking up books and sketches, not watching you hunt for something to put on. You went off to the bathroom to dress, leaving me to tend my ailing pleasure.
“Let’s go out for lunch,” I said, when you came back, dressed in black trousers and a black sweater, your face unmade-up, “and then walk. What’s the matter, E.?”
“John’s married,” you said quietly “He has two children.”
“When did you find that out?”
“Two days ago. He didn’t tell me. One of his friends did. When I asked him about it, he was embarrassed. Then he got mad. What did I think his spending all this time and money on me meant, anyway?”
“What did you say?”
“Nothing. Why am I so stupid, Kate? Why do people have to keep telling me things that I ought to see for myself?”
“It’s not your fault,” I said. “I’m so sorry, E.”
“No, don’t sit down in this mess. Let’s go out. Let’s go to the park. And we won’t talk about it. I swore I wouldn’t, and that’s the first thing I say. But that’s all. Come on.”
There was no conversation to be made as we sat side by side in a dull, cramped little snack bar eating gray tomato sandwiches. I didn’t want to talk about Andrew, and it didn’t seem the right time either to mention Doris’ Christmas plan. We finally did chat about Monk, about a play I’d seen, about registration at Slade and LSE. And I watched your face in the mirror before us, the bold strokes of dark hair and brows against the paleness of skin, even your lips pale, your whole head part of a collage of ads pasted on the mirror, meat pies congealing on open shelves, steam from a kettle dampening the reflection of your temple. I wanted to get you out of there into the bright, clean autumn day of the park. Once we were walking it was right for me again, but you didn’t notice where we went. You didn’t see the bright red double decker bus, caught in a shower of leaves, like a paperweight snow scene, just as we crossed the road, or the five young boys in a ballet war under a statue, or the long-legged girl lying beside her bicycle in the tall grass, reading a leather-bound book, or the chrysanthemums. You did not see all the people seeing you, sleep-walking through the park. You did not even see me, walking carefully beside you until we were almost at the band stand and the band suddenly began to play. You looked up, smiled, and put your hand on my wrist.
“There,” you said. “There you are.”
How many times in that long English winter, during which we were learning to live single and singular lives, did I look up to think—more accurately feel—“There, there you are”? If I didn’t invest you with the same powers of safety and strength you always so generously gave me, if I never had the candor to speak the simple relief and pleasure of recognizing you again among so many strangers, I did, just the same, more often seek you out than you did me. I could, of course, because I was the one who also imposed the restrictions. And I moved in the world you were discovering because I did not want you to discover mine. I made no friends at the London School of Economics. Instead I made casual use of yours at Slade and Monk’s at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. I should probably have been more generous with my flat because it was in the neighborhood, because I could afford heat and had access to Frank’s supply of drink, but too many of the art and drama students both bored and frightened me, willing, as they were, to be themselves in whatever mood or need they happened to be. I liked better going to the cafes and pubs where gossip and arguments always had a public flavor, where friendliness, not friendship, was all that was required.
Occasionally I went to your room for one of your parties, which were never really planned, happened instead gradually and gradually ended, defined in time by the possibilities of public transportation rather than by night or day I didn’t much like them, noisy with ill-informed theories around your large, never-cleared table, awkward with stayed orgasms on child’s bed and bear rug. You were never a hostess, feeling responsible for nothing that went on around you except whatever intent conversation you were the other half of. A crowd, whether on the street or in your room, was as much background noise as a radio. Under the protection of it you talked or listened to one another always. If Lady Alice complained, you let someone else deal with her. If she decided to lock herself into the bathroom for a long, leisurely soak while ten beer-strained boys waited in line, you let them threaten her with the consequences. I stayed long enough to attach faces to the names and backgrounds you talked of and then left, sometimes alone, sometimes with Monk, who, for reasons of her own, often found these gatherings as tedious and depressing as I did.
At first I didn’t imagine that I would see much of Monk, certainly not unless you were around and wanted her with us. But it was to my flat rather than your room that she came. And I went alone to the boat train to meet her because you had a class or an appointment or simply a need not to meet her. I can’t quite remember. I only remember being surprised that I was left to be concerned about her. After failing so badly in hospitality with you, I was determined both to be more patient and to define the limits more clearly with Monk. She would understand the problems of food rationing from the beginning, and she would know the hours I was committed to my own work, which had begun. But I would be more helpful, too. Monk, after all, had never traveled out of her own country before.
From the moment we greeted each other, we might have been reading a carefully reversed script.
“Kate, you look simply awful!” she exclaimed, shining at me out from the frame of her glorious red hair which offered its own lights even in the vaulted grayness of Waterloo Station, lights by which not one but two young men had also found their way along the platform. “My beasts of burden,” she said by way of explanation as she took cartons of cigarettes, which she did not smoke, out of their mackintosh pockets to offer to me.
Monk had no questions about what to do with her luggage. The beasts had arranged all that. They also arranged us very carefully in a taxi with Monk’s one necessary suitcase and a couple of parcels which turned out to be household supplies, cans of butter and meat, sugar, cake mixes, coffee. There was even a bottle of whiskey, but that evening we weren’t to open anything, because the beasts, on their way to Edinburgh, were staying over to take us both out to dinner. It was ladies’ night at their club, which happened also to be Frank’s club where he and Doris were having cocktails, as if expecting us. Frank knew one of our escorts, knew the family of the other, and was reassured for a second time in a few weeks about his ability to be pleased by the younger generation. Doris, who always tried so hard with you, was effortless with Monk, at her hopeless best that night in making hilariously tactless remarks, encouraged by all of us. It was the first time I entertained the possibility that Monk was a fool on purpose.
We were all asked back to Frank and Doris’ for a nightcap and accepted. Frank told the driver to take us through the park so that Monk could see Buckingham Palace.
“There’s the Queen!” Monk exclaimed at an elderly, ordinary woman walking her dog. “Doesn’t she look English? I was told Philip wears lipstick, but that can’t be true, can it?”
“I told you, only for state occasions,” one of the beasts reminded her.
“Isn’t it lucky that you found these two to prepare you so well for England?” Doris asked, amused.
“I didn’t find them!” Monk protested. “They found me. I decided I wouldn’t talk to anybody. I cried all the first day out, and then I was sick all the second day. I had a book to read after that, but these two came down and got the stewardess to introduce us. I told them I was engaged—it’s only officially broken, not really—but they said they were both thinking of becoming priests; so we spent the rest of the trip together.”
“All very proper,” Doris agreed.
“But I had no idea, Sidney,” Frank said in a heavy tone, “that you were thinking of renouncing the world.”
“The sea air and the red hair,” Sidney explained.
I wondered why the manner that had so often irritated me at college amused me now. Perhaps it was my faithless comparing of your two arrivals, you so isolated in your apologetic uncertainty, Monk so confident that she could not offend. Occasionally on that first evening, confronted with the silverware at dinner, with the butler at Frank and Doris’ front door, Monk faltered, but she clowned past her fear with, “Do the English have unusually big mouths?” about a dessert spoon and “Butlers do make a place feel more homey, don’t they?”
“She’s simply marvelous,” Doris said to me quietly “She’s a riot.”
“I’m not always sure she knows she’s funny until after someone else has laughed,” I said.
“Nonsense! It’s simply perfect timing.”
Once or twice over the Christmas holidays, Doris shared my doubts, but she and Frank were by then so much Monk addicts that it didn’t matter.
Monk stayed with me only four days. During that time she somehow persuaded the officials at RADA that she should be allowed to register late, found herself a bed-sitting-room and cooking privileges in the flat of an elderly woman who traveled a lot, and got herself established with a ration book and shops. She was also around the house enough to learn the few English housekeeping tricks I had at my command.
