This Is Not for You

by Jane Rule

  “It’s not mine. There’s an objective difference between hallucination and fact.”

  “But is there a moral one? What’s art?”

  “I’m not talking about morality. I’m talking about sanity”

  “Sanity’s a convention,” you said.

  So it may be and one that hasn’t found easy acceptance since the Victorian period. I could not argue that I lived with insanity and knew what you did not. You still came often to the house, bringing Mother sawed, soldered, and wired objects, and you went on learning the names of her dead relatives and imaginary companions and torturers just as you went on learning the names of the friends of your downstairs neighbor. You didn’t have to deal with stocks and bonds, nurses, servants, and old friends of Mother’s who were still alive. Those were the realities or conventions you chose to ignore.

  I cannot say that the “sanity” of the old ladies who did occasionally come to call was any comfort to me. Their propriety and sympathy sometimes seemed more grotesque than Mother’s violence of imagination. When she was obviously out of her mind, I didn’t let them upstairs to see her. I would invite them into the living room for tea, all of us carefully avoiding the chair Mother habitually sat in, and I would ask them questions about their grandchildren and their clubs and their travels, letting them punctuate the conversation occasionally with, “She’s much the same, is she?” and “It’s such a pity.” But on the days when she was calm and rational enough to receive guests, I always waited with a terrible tension for one of her disconnected comments. The old ladies did not humor or argue or engage with Mother at those moments. They ignored her. The sins against good behavior she committed did not exist. She did not even have to be forgiven. And so she became, like their own passing of wind, unreal to them. It took an age I didn’t have to so discipline nose and heart. Perhaps all of us have trouble admitting what we have no control over.

  My own sanity had to lie outside both households. I attended summer session, and in September I committed myself seriously to completing the masters degree requirements in economics and government. At about the same time you made another kind of important decision.

  “I want to tell you, Kate, that I’ve decided to take a lover.”

  “Oh? Anyone I know?”

  “You may have seen him around. His name is Christopher Marlowe Smith. He’s married, but he didn’t have enough money on his grant to bring his wife and child west with him. He’ll go back to them in a year. We’ve made a perfectly rational agreement. He has needs and so do I.”

  “Is he going to live here?”

  “More or less. He’ll keep his other address for a while, but he’ll move in on Tuesday after I’m fitted for my diaphragm.”

  “You’re not at all in love with him or anything like that?” I asked carefully.

  “He’s an intelligent person. He’s attracted to me. That’s all, but we’ve agreed that that’s enough, all either of us wants right now.”

  “What if you find you’re getting more involved than that?”

  “I won’t,” you said simply. “I’m going to treat it as something like a training period, a learning experiment.”

  “Sex and cooperative living,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  You were nervous. You were trying not to be defensive. You were trying not to ask either my permission or my blessing. You did not even risk the suggestion that I would like this Christopher Marlowe Smith. I made some attempt not to treat him like an invention or a joke, though either of those was preferable to considering him as a fact. I postponed that trial for over a week.

  By the time I did call, dressed in dark linen and looking rather like the local social worker come to make a report on the moral and sanitary conditions of the building, Christopher Marlowe Smith was as well settled as anyone could be in that tangle of used auto parts, pianos, and refrigerators. He was not much older than you, had a broad-faced, ordinary handsomeness, an uncertainly loud voice, a way of rubbing his hands together as if he were going to make a meal of whatever was put before him. At that time he had not yet got over his surprising good fortune, and his laughter had a startled, self-satisfied tone that was not unpleasant. He obviously thought the whole thing was quite a lark, though his own cliché for it was “fucking great,” in military manliness. He’d served his year otherwise innocently. You looked a little tired, a little bewildered by the amount of human noise after living with nothing but drills and saws, and you were mildly embarrassed by his frank and expressive enthusiasm for your tits, cunt, tail, in fact every four-letter part of you but your mind which there had not, admittedly, been time to discover. I generously considered the possibility that you had lost it anyway. Yet who but a hardy, insensitive, cheerfully argumentative, simple-hearted sponger could have lived with you like that? If I wasn’t kind in my private summary of your Christopher Marlowe Smith, I was kind enough to him. And he was to me, too. As long as no one asked for money and offered it freely, he worked on the buddy system with everyone.

  “Here’s our Katie,” he’d say, giving me a one-armed hug, “with a case of beer and the second best-looking legs in town. And I’ve got that paper for you, though old Charlie claims it isn’t worth its weight in shit. Why don’t you just once stay for dinner? Ah, I know. Mom. Well…”

  Blurred. You were. I was.

  “So Charlie knocks on the door, and I say, ‘Look, Charlie baby, we’re at it just now, having a lesson, so why don’t you come back in an hour, eh?’ So he goes back downstairs and turns up the volume on the most God-awful, I mean erotic machine noises. That man’s got an inhuman sense of humor.”

  The lessons weren’t going all that well, you admitted with no more than hopeful concern.

  “I’m slow, he says, but I’m getting a bit better.”

  Progress. The same thing could be said for Mother. The housekeeper and maid suggested that we didn’t need the day nurse. I was home enough during the day to keep an eye on things, and I would still be free to go out in the evening. I decided to ask Mother herself about it.

  “As long as it doesn’t interfere with your work, dear, but it’s true, I don’t have many needs. I could have my bath after four.”

  I had learned not to count on the permanence of the smallest agreement. I knew explanations might have to be made over and over again, but so great a step forward was encouraging to me and would be to Doris, too. The night before the new routine began, I spoke to Mac about it.

  “You can just check out with me in the morning.”

  “And you’re not interested in my opinion.”

  “The doctor’s agreed. He thinks it may be a morale booster for Mother.”

  “Mmmm.”

  “Well, anyway, we’re going to try it.”

  I tried to sleep at once in order to be fresh in the morning, and, of course, I couldn’t sleep at all. I heard the clock in the downstairs hall strike five before I finally napped. I woke startled at what I thought was the striking of nine. My own clock confirmed it. Damn Mac! I fumbled into my robe and rushed into the hall. There at the other end of it stood Mac in the door of Mother’s room, talking to the housekeeper.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  “Why didn’t you wake me?”

  “I was near the end of a good murder,” she said.

  “Is everything all right?”

  “Fine.”

  I looked into Mother’s room, and there she sat tidily enjoying her breakfast tray.

  “Good morning, Mother.”

  She looked up, paused, and then said, “Katherine, you haven’t combed your hair.”

  “I overslept,” I said, grinning.

  “It’s not like you.”

  “No.”

  “Well, go make yourself look like yourself, dear. I don’t like shocks with my breakfast.”

  By the time I had washed and dressed, Mac was gone and Mother was watching television. The maid was in her room dusting. I went down for my own breakfast in the dining room.

/>   “That wasn’t a very good beginning,” I said to the housekeeper.

  “Miss Hanser didn’t mind. She said she could always stay over a bit if you were having a sleep.”

  “Well, she won’t have to again. It was nice of her, but she should have called me.”

  “Doesn’t hurt to learn to take a little along with the giving, Miss Kate.”

  I knew that Mac and the housekeeper had had a nice, long chat about just what would be good for me. I couldn’t resent it. In fact, I felt more in charge of the household that morning than I usually did and could even indulge myself a little in their concern. When the housekeeper told me she had a number of “sit-down” jobs that morning and wouldn’t need me to be with Mother at all, I went to my own work without protest. I didn’t see Mother until lunchtime. She was serene and attentive.

  Perhaps it was the long strain of the year that had passed which had become too much of a habit for me. I couldn’t accept the reassurance of Mother’s continuing quietness and clarity. I was more reluctant than ever to be away from the house for long, and I was, in dozens of small ways, nervously overprotective until Mother herself grew mildly impatient with me.

  “You do hang about, Kate. Haven’t you got work to do? Don’t you want to go out to see some of your friends? Or have Esther in for dinner.”

  I did go out then, walked as far as your apartment, but I remembered the story about Charlie, and I didn’t want to be greeted by the interrupted Christopher Marlowe Smith. Even if you were involved in no more than one of your long, incoherent arguments which never had a focus narrower than the nature of Man, I didn’t want to join it. I would like to have found you alone, but really alone as you had been before his vocabulary, even his voice stress and gestures became your own. I certainly didn’t want to know how the lessons were going now. I didn’t want to go to the library, either. I knew where I would have gone if I had been any place but in the town where I had grown up. Nearly two years away from that. My hand felt the still unaccustomed thickness at the ridge of my nose. What I really needed was an evening with Monk or Andrew. Monk and Andrew. I walked the quiet blocks home and went to my room to write them a letter.

  It crossed one from Andrew, in which he tried to speak of work and the haphazardly happy domestic life he shared with Monk in Cambridge, but the central fact of the letter was Peter Jackson’s suicide at the hotel where we had all stayed on Mallorca. “Nobody who knows anybody else well ever needs to ask why,” his letter said.

  “Why?” you asked.

  Nobody who ever loves anybody else well can help asking. Christopher Marlowe Smith sat very still. For all his boisterousness, for all his sharing of other people’s wealth, he had an instinctive delicacy about emotions not his own.

  “And why there?”

  For some reason I suddenly thought of Sandy Mentchen and her meadow. It was not the first time Peter had gone to Mallorca. In the years between he might have stayed several times in that hotel, but I wasn’t much comforted by the fact that we only numbered among his griefs… that Andrew and I only numbered among them. Surely you were…

  “Stupid,” you said. “Why was I so stupid?”

  “You weren’t, E. You were the only one who wasn’t.”

  “Do you remember what he said about those children? ‘Why do they have to be ugly with our greed?’ I’d never thought about it. I still haven’t. I haven’t even thought about Pete for months. He needed other people to keep him alive. He needed that.”

  “What was he like?” Christopher Marlowe Smith asked.

  How eager we were to make him up again in words, to bring him back to life, flinging himself up mountains, playing his harmonica, being priest in a row boat—but not crying in the night, not nearly drowning himself, not declaring his hard love. We spared ourselves those things, as we had tried to at the time, you in ignorance and I in anger. We were giving him a proper burial, until you did say, “He was queer.”

  “Oh,” Christopher Marlowe Smith said.

  That doesn’t explain it, I wanted to protest, but I was probably the only one among us who really was afraid that it did. And I felt a returning, almost soothing anger for Peter Jackson. It honored him better than my attempt at guilt. With it came an impatience with your wanting to have a share of the responsibility. It was his own life; he took it, helped himself to the lot. We ended our conversation in unspoken disagreement.

  That night I tried half a dozen ways of writing to Andrew. There was nothing decent to say. We had never talked about Peter Jackson except as a way of talking about ourselves. A moment’s silence then, a moment’s shutting up. I stood, deciding to get a drink. When I opened the door, Mac took a step back.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “No. She’s asleep.”

  “Then…?”

  “I’ve been wondering about how much longer you… she’ll really need me. I thought we probably ought to discuss it some time soon. Your light was on…”

  “Yes, I suppose we should. Come in.” She did and stood awkwardly, looking at the crumpled paper on my desk. “I was trying to write a letter. Sit down.”

  “You’d hear her if she called,” Mac said without moving.

  “If the doors were both open… Mac, don’t go. I couldn’t manage it.”

  “Manage what?”

  “I’m nearly out of my mind now,” I said, beginning to shake. “At least I know you’re there.”

  “As a possibility?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Kate.” She took my head in her hands.

  “Be careful of my face. Be careful of me.”

  “You’ll fire me in the morning.”

  “Yes, I will.”

  But I was asleep when she left in the morning. There was a note at my place at the breakfast table giving a formal week’s notice. During that week, we exchanged only a few words. After she had really gone, I found her card with address and phone number on my desk. Across the back of it was written, “As a possibility.” I never saw her again. But I kept the card.

  “What are the dates of your spring vacation?” Mother asked one morning.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Why?”

  “It’s time for me to see Doris, and I want her to be here so that you can get away for a week or two.”

  “I don’t really need a holiday.”

  “You do. Anyway, it would make me feel better.”

  “I wonder where I’d go,” I said, trying to be agreeable.

  “Why not Carmel? You haven’t been there in years.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, begin to think about it.”

  “All right.”

  “I’m going to talk to Doris about finding myself a companion. There’s no hurry about it. You want to be here until you finish your work in June, but after that we must make some other arrangement.”

  “Mother, don’t send me away.” I was appalled to hear tears in my voice.

  “My dear child!” Mother said. “I had no intention of sending you away, but you must want to go. You have things to do with your life. I know I won’t live forever, but I don’t want you to think it’s forever. Now, go get your calendar, and let’s think about Easter.”

  You and Christopher Marlowe Smith had also been thinking about Easter. He wasn’t sure he shouldn’t go east to visit his wife and child since he’d not managed it at Christmas. He hadn’t the money to go, of course, but perhaps he could borrow it.

  “You’re not going to pay for his trip, are you?” I asked, as we sat over coffee in a shop just down the street from your apartment where we now often met.

  “I think I should,” you said. “I think he ought to go, and he can’t afford it himself. The only thing is that I don’t want him to feel indebted to me. Do you think he would?”

  “No more than he already must,” I said.

  “A clean break in the summer is important. It’s what we agreed on at the beginning. But, if I just give it to him… yes, that’s the way
to do it.”

  Christopher Marlowe Smith didn’t agree. In fact, he was uncharacteristically adamant about it. Borrow, yes. Take, no.

  “I can’t have that,” he said to me. “I’d rather steal it from her—or anyone.”

  I made myself leave my purse sitting within his reach, but I advised you later that you’d better let him have the money on the terms that made him comfortable.

  “Otherwise I think he might steal it from you,” I said, trying for lightness of tone.

  “Maybe he should. Then I wouldn’t be involved at all.”

  “Just leave two hundred dollars or so lying around for him to pick up?”

  “Oh, no. He’d have to figure out how. That wouldn’t be my affair.”

  “E., you don’t really take this stealing thing seriously, do you?”

  When you hesitated, I terribly regretted having asked the question.

  “I stole these saddle shoes,” you said, moving one foot out from under the table to display a shoe that looked at least five years old.

  “When?” I asked with bored irritation.

  “A couple of weeks ago at a church bazaar.”

  “Have you gone right out of your mind, Esther?”

  “I don’t know. At first I thought I might just shift the price tags. That’s what I’ve done before, but this time I thought, no, I must take them outright. They were marked at twenty-five cents. They fit perfectly.”

  “But why?”

  “I’m not a Christian,” you said. “It would be hypocritical to support a church bazaar.”

  “But there’s a difference between supporting something and… and that!”

  “Yes. There’s being passive. I’ve always been passive. Now I’m learning to make real choices, to admit my condition…” Your voice had begun to sound very like Christopher Marlowe Smith’s. “To act.” You were nearly rubbing your hands together.

  “I don’t even know where to begin to disagree,” I said.

  I saw your eyes rim with tears. “Then you know how I’ve felt with you for all these years.”

  “But, E.—”

  “Morality is creative,” you said. “Each of us makes his own.”