by Jane Rule
“Maybe I should try to be unhappy,” Monk said when we were alone together. “I can be unhappy for him, but I never expected to live in a great house with servants. I wouldn’t even know how. And that’s what irritates him—I’m a good wife for the bad world he lives in.”
“It’s not really that, Monk,” I said, trying to reassure. “He’s frightened of being a failure.”
“Andy? He couldn’t be,” she said with energetic certainty “He’s just impatient because he has so much confidence. He thinks he can run a firm before six months is up. It’s not a bad job he’s got, you know, Kate. Robin never dreamed of making the salary Andy’s begun with. And we’re not exactly slum dwellers. It’s just that Andy goes into a major depression because he can’t buy a Jackson Pollock or go to Bermuda for the weekend. In five years’ time he’ll probably be able to. Then it will be my turn to be miserable. I don’t even want to be rich. The whole idea scares me.”
In the next room Lissa woke in an immediate rage.
“She’s got her father’s temper,” Monk said, hurrying off with a look of defeat even before she’d tried to cope with the baby.
Andrew came in with the shopping, took the baby from Monk and soon had her changed and eating contentedly. Monk put away the groceries with comments like, “Oh, how nice! Lobster,” and “Were we really out of caviar?” I would like to have thought it funny, but I had outgrown the gallows humor of adolescence. Life was burdensomely serious, even dangerous. I could only be afraid. That fear perversely pleased Andrew. He had found someone to take him seriously. He burdened nearly all the weekend conversations with psychological and economic statistics to indicate the inevitable destruction of the individual and therefore of art. Pompous and panicked, he lectured on the failure of Western Man while Monk blinked and yawned over knitting and I filled ashtrays and emptied glasses.
“It’s your crisis, Andy,” I finally said. “You just confuse the issue with generalities.”
He walked out, slamming the door. Monk went on knitting for the moment before Lissa began to cry. We took turns walking her until she fell asleep again on her mother’s shoulder.
“Well, you just can’t let him go on being an angry bore,” I said defensively. “He could make a habit of it.”
“The prince in his frog phase,” Monk explained, resigned. “You know, he’s always been a little like this. It’s just that he was always on his good behavior with you. He shouted about his thesis sometimes, and he can talk for hours about the failure of Cambridge, in fact the whole educational system in England.”
“How long will he stay out?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes he’s away for a day or two, but with you here he’ll just have a couple of drinks around the corner.”
“How do you stand it, Monk?”
“That’s not the problem. It’s Andy who can’t stand it. I get more and more afraid that he’ll simply leave—but let’s not talk about it. Isn’t there something a little sordid in your life that we could talk about for comic relief?”
“Not at the moment,” I said, “but Esther’s doing pretty well.”
I tried to entertain Monk at your expense, so grateful for a topic that I forgot to feel guilty.
“But that’s immoral, Kate, and it’s illegal as well. I can’t believe it. Is he attractive?”
“To some people, he must be. And I think he’s probably very talented.”
“We should rescue her,” Monk decided. “We should get her to come east.”
“To her mother?”
“Ah… I’d forgotten about her. A block. But she could live in Washington with you.”
“I think you could put Lissa down now,” I said.
Andrew came in while Monk was in the bedroom with Lissa and I in the kitchen getting myself another drink.
“I probably need a good psychiatrist,” he said to my back.
“Or wise, kinder friends,” I said, turning to him. He looked terribly tired. “Andy, it’s a bad time, that’s all. You’ll figure it out.”
He nodded.
“I’m sorry,” he said to Monk as she came into the room to join us.
She kissed him tentatively, then stepped back to look at him. “Red and blue are my favorite colors, but I’m not as mad about pale green. Shouldn’t we go to bed?”
I listened to their brief love-making, which was no more reassuring than the faint sirens of New York. Petty, private disasters.
We talked once again before I went back to Washington about saving you, but none of us seriously considered it. The idea was simply an idiom for fond disapproval.
“We haven’t really heard anything about you at all,” Monk said as I was getting ready to leave.
“Nothing much to say. Aside from doing my work and being my boss’s social secretary, I build amplifiers.”
“But aren’t you meeting all sorts of important people?”
“Yes,” I said. “I helped Mrs. Roosevelt on with her coat. She wears the same powder Mother did.”
“And what’s she like?”
“Human.”
“Rare,” Andrew said.
“In a way. But I felt awfully hopeful, as if one really might finally grow up to be human.”
“Well, it’s a marvelous job for you,” Monk said. “You’re so good with old ladies and people like that.”
I made a face.
“But you are. You never say the wrong sort of thing. It’s no way to save the world, of course, but somebody’s got to be pleasant.”
“And being an Indian is such a political asset as well,” I said.
I said goodbye to Lissa with whom I had become intimate enough so that she was willing to pull my hair and chew at my watch band, but she was still indifferent to social customs. It was another year before she learned to call me Crow, the only appropriate nickname I’ve ever been given.
Andrew took me to my train, missing another half day’s work, but he was sober and gentle and apologetic.
“Being in the prime of life is a hell of a letdown after being young, but I’ll sort it out somehow. Meanwhile, keep on being brave and useful for us, won’t you?”
“Take care of your redheads.”
“Yes.”
He settled my suitcase on the rack, handed me a newspaper and a candy bar, kissed me and was gone. It wasn’t the candy bar that made me cry. I was terribly tired.
“Long weekends don’t seem to be your sort of hobby,” Joyce Lowe said to me the next morning when I went into her office to answer some questions about a report.
“Friends with a teething baby,” I said.
“Not the sort of friends to have.”
I shrugged agreeably. I liked Joyce Lowe. She worked hard and had a practical, but not cynical view of what could be accomplished. She had a quick temper about unimportant details, but she could be patient for months to make a real point. She had been patient with me while I learned. The occasional, sharp correction now and the slightly acid personal comments were signs of approval. I failed her only in never misinterpreting them and therefore never giving her the opportunity to be kind or confiding.
“We’re having lunch with private agencies on Thursday. Wear a hat.”
I nodded.
“And not the gray one if you don’t look any better than you do today.”
“I’d better take the agency folders home tonight,” I said.
“No. Get some rest or sex or something. I’ll do the talking.”
I took the folders home on Wednesday night, and Thursday morning I was in Joyce’s office when a telephone call came through for me from New York.
“Take it in here if you like,” Joyce said.
It was Mrs. Woolf, asking if I could have lunch with her.
“Today?”
Yes. She would be at the Washington airport at noon. She wanted me to meet her there.
“I can’t today,” I explained. “I have a business luncheon.”
She wanted to know how soon that would be over
.
“I really don’t know, but I won’t be free until around six this evening.”
But she had to see me. It was urgent. She was leaving for California in the afternoon. Couldn’t I cancel the luncheon? Or anyway meet her by two o’clock? Her plane left Washington at three.
“I don’t see how I can,” I said. “Is there anything wrong, Mrs. Woolf?”
Yes, there certainly was. She couldn’t talk about it over the phone. That was the point, but she assured me that something was terribly wrong, and she had to see me before she left for the West. It was a matter of…
“Life and death?” I prompted when her voice faltered.
Yes.
“Could you hold on a minute?” I said, cupping my hand over the phone. “Joyce, this seems to be an emergency. I need to be at the airport at noon for a couple of hours.”
“Then go,” Joyce said.
“What’s the flight number?” I asked Mrs. Woolf. “I’ll meet the plane.”
Joyce was handing me a lighted cigarette when I hung up.
“I’m awfully sorry,” I said to her. “I couldn’t think what else to do.”
“Then there probably isn’t anything else to do. Can you be back at the office by three, or do you need the afternoon off?”
“Oh no, I’m sure I can be back by three.”
“That would help. But if not, just give me a ring. I’m not a matter of ‘life and death.’ ”
“Good,” I said.
“Is it bad, Kate?”
“I really don’t know,” I said. “I think a good friend of mine must be in trouble.”
“Are you involved?”
“No,” I said. “There will be no reflection on the office.”
“I didn’t mean that,” she said. “Surely I don’t have to tell you…”
“No, you don’t. I was making a bad joke.”
“Be careful you don’t pick up any of my other bad habits,” she said. “You owe me a cigarette.”
“I’ll write it down.”
I stood, watching Mrs. Woolf walk toward me as if she were the arresting officer, for I was sure that whatever had happened to you was somehow my fault. It was a natural guilt your mother had carefully nourished in me. She looked more like a lady lawyer than a policewoman in her elegant suit and short fur cape, but she was neither calm nor aggressive. She had been crying and she was relieved to see me there, even grateful, so candidly so that she didn’t offer to pay for cab fare, time off, or our drink in the bar before we had lunch.
“She’s in jail, charged with possession of drugs. Or was this morning, anyway. Bail’s being arranged. And there’s a young man involved, a person named—”
“Charlie,” I said.
“That’s the one. You know him, then.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Katherine, I don’t want you to betray any confidence that you feel you can’t, but it would be a great help to me to know as much about this as I can before I arrive. Esther and I haven’t had a very easy relationship over these last few years. I don’t blame her. I blame myself. I have tried, but obviously…”
She couldn’t go on talking for a moment. I waited, oddly expecting small paper animals and flowers to appear on the table. Your mother had never reminded me of you before, and she didn’t really now, but, however badly and ordinarily she put it, she was your mother; this was hard for her.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“How much do you know about the circumstances?” I asked.
“Nearly nothing. She and this young man were picked up by the police.”
“Where?”
“At her apartment.”
“What kind of drugs?”
“Marijuana.”
There was a lot I didn’t know, and I told her so. What I did know or could guess was hard to say. If you had been experimenting with drugs, you would not easily be persuaded to deny it. And, since stealing from a church had seemed to you sensible, a little marijuana certainly could fall within the range of your morality. But even if you hadn’t been tempted to extensions of perception, you would probably want to share the blame with Charlie or even take it to yourself. And Charlie was not the sort to turn down that kind of sacrifice. He lived on it. I didn’t tell your mother that.
“Charlie lives downstairs,” I said. “In fact, they’ve been living together, so it’s possible that he can be charged alone. It’s not his first arrest. If Esther is involved, the worst is probably a suspended sentence.”
“It will ruin her life,” Mrs. Woolf said.
Now that a jail sentence has become a status symbol in the civil rights movement, some of the general, social horror has been dissipated. In 1956, a record hadn’t the same reality. We were too far away from the suffragette movement for it to be anything but an academic reference; nevertheless, I used it. I used everything I could think of to show that your life might not be entirely razed by such an experience.
“She won’t ever be able to hold any position of responsibility She won’t be able to vote.”
“It’s not good,” I admitted, “and maybe it won’t happen, but Esther hasn’t ever wanted to be anything but a sculptor, and she wouldn’t know how to vote anyway, I’m sure never has…” but I faltered because such penalties seemed dreadful to me. “Look, the point is to try to understand her view so that you can persuade her to take the advice of the best lawyer available.”
“I brought her up… I brought both my children up to respect the law.”
“The trouble with that is, if she has broken the law, she ought to accept the punishment.”
“Not while I can fight it. I’ll take it to the Supreme Court!”
“That won’t be Esther’s notion of respecting the law,” I said, and I could just hear the kindergarten logic which would allow you to break the law but not to use the legal loopholes to set you free of it; your sort of creative morality would stop at avoiding consequences.
“I don’t understand her. I simply don’t understand her.”
“Try, Mrs. Woolf.”
We looked at each other.
“You blame me, don’t you, Katherine?”
“What would be the logic of that? You could as easily blame me.”
“And in a way I suppose I do. You could have protected her.”
“How?” I demanded.
“I’m not blind, Katherine,” your mother said. “Haven’t I made that clear from the beginning? She needed someone like you, someone responsible.”
“That’s hardly fair,” I said and heard, from all those years ago. “To a mother, there are things more important than being fair,” without the Yiddish accent but with its emotional rhythms still.
“Well, it’s past in any case. I have to decide what I’m going to do with Esther once I’ve gotten her out of this mess. I think perhaps we’ll take a trip, and then she’d better come to live with me. As soon as I have her with me, I’m going to telephone. I want you to talk with her and tell her that you agree with me about what she’s to do. Will you do that much?”
“No,” I said. “I’ll listen to what she has to say and try to understand her point of view. And you’d better do the same thing, Mrs. Woolf, if you want to be able to help her at all. Excuse me, but you’ve been an aggressive fool with her long enough to know that doesn’t work. Now it’s time you were practical.”
“Why Katherine!”
I had gotten up from the table as the waitress came with the check. I took it from her.
“I can’t allow—” Mrs. Woolf began.
“It’s good practice,” I said. “Give Esther my love.”
On the way back to the office I was having a conversation in my head with Monk. There now: I don’t have to be pleasant to people, and, if it doesn’t save the world, what’s the point? But I knew that being rude didn’t save the world, either, and I couldn’t shut off first embarrassment and then shame. Under both of those, of course, was the pain of her accusation. She had made her arrest after al
l.
“I’m not guilty,” I said aloud, but what a comfortless thought that was when the heart also required, “Forgive me, E.”
Joyce was just back from her luncheon and taking a long-distance call from her husband when I got to the office. I went to my own desk and pushed papers from one side of it to the other until Joyce called me in. I took her a lighted cigarette.
“How did it go?” I asked.
“The other end of the table went a bit thin and competitive without you there, but I got more or less what I wanted. Can you have dinner with me tonight? I’m going to stay in town to get some work done.”
“Sure. I can come back with you if you like.”
“I like,” she said. “Now get hold of these five people for me for an afternoon meeting some time next week.”
“Robertson’s out of town until the first of the month,” I said.
“We’ll do without him then. Get his assistant.”
“Anything else?”
“Not just at the moment.”
I find it very difficult to concentrate on things that don’t require it. I spent the rest of the afternoon with at least three stations of my mind turned up full volume, and I not only listened to them all but did a good deal of talking back while I also made telephone calls, proofread reports, and added a few memos of my own to external communications. At five-thirty Joyce was standing by my desk ready to go.
Over a drink a few minutes later, she asked, “How did your lunch go?”
“A bit thin and competitive, too,” I said, “and I didn’t seem to be much help.”
“Does it matter?”
“I don’t know. Is a new commission going to be set up, do you think?”
“You’re usually smoother at changing the subject than that.”
“It’s just a boring story with an unhappy middle.”
“Tell it to me, anyway,” Joyce said. “I don’t want to talk shop.”
“Once upon a time,” I said, “there was an ugly, little rich girl with a mean, real mother and a make-believe father who looked like a wristwatch. She was kept in a tower at the top of the house along with the second-best dining-room furniture and her ugly little brother until they both grew tall enough to be mistaken for beautiful grown-ups. They even fooled their mean, real mother, so she sent them out into the world to be fallen in love with, and they were.”
