This Is Not for You

by Jane Rule

  “I’m glad you could keep Joyce company,” he said to me, coming into the room. “Have you had a nice weekend?”

  “Very,” I said.

  “But don’t be polite now,” Joyce said. “You go on to bed, and I’ll do the explaining.”

  I stood, uncertain what to do.

  “Do you want to take Andy a nightcap to bed?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” I said. “Well, good night.”

  “Good night.”

  I stood outside the guest bedroom door for a moment, but I could hear Joyce and her husband getting ready to come upstairs. I knocked quietly.

  “Come in,” Andy called. He was sitting up in bed reading. “What’s up?”

  “Joyce’s husband’s home.”

  “Oh.” He thought a moment. “Well, come on to bed then.”

  “Andy, I’m terribly sorry I—”

  “Just be grateful I’m here. At least nobody’s going to break your nose.”

  There was another quick knock on the door, and Joyce was handing my suitcase to me.

  “God! Aren’t we lucky?” she said and was gone.

  Andrew had pulled the second pillow out from behind him and moved to one side of the bed. He went on reading while I undressed, but he’d put his book away when I got back from the bathroom.

  “I always meant to ask you if you slept with your teeth in,” he said, grinning.

  “Just for special occasions,” I said.

  I got into bed, trying to be neither stiff nor intrusive. Andrew turned out the light, and we lay listening to the sounds of the house.

  “Well,” Andrew said in a quiet, but very wakeful voice, “we’ve done everything else together.” He took my hand, waited, then turned toward me. “Why not this, Kate?”

  I understood the offer. It was no more than that. One gesture of reluctance from me and he would have turned kindly away. I did not make it. And perhaps curiosity, as much as the sad ridiculousness of the circumstance, required me. It was not physically unpleasant. It was curiously simple. And afterwards our bodies were related enough for sleep. Andrew slept almost at once. I lay awake, refusing the moral and emotional complexities that threatened to make important what I was sure was not.

  I was awake when Joyce got up at six-thirty. I tried not to disturb Andrew as I got out of bed, but he woke.

  “Go back to sleep,” I said. “I’ll go in with Joyce. You can drive my car in later.”

  “What about her husband?”

  “No problem.”

  “All right,” he said and turned over.

  Joyce and I didn’t attempt conversation until we were in the car and on our way to work.

  “Silly damned thing, leaving the men asleep while we go off to earn the bread,” she said. “I wonder if they’ll have breakfast together.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Andy must have been surprised.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Sorry to throw you at him that way, darling, but it was lucky, wasn’t it? Another half hour—”

  “You didn’t know he was coming?”

  “Of course not. He told me he probably wouldn’t be back until Tuesday.”

  “Oh.”

  “You’re not mad at me, are you, Kate?”

  “No.”

  “It was a good weekend, wasn’t it? Except for last night. I had such lovely plans for last night.”

  Andrew was in no more cheerful and sociable a mood than I by the time I got home for dinner. For the first hour we simply tried not to get in each other’s way.

  “Joyce’s husband is quite a nice guy,” Andrew said finally as we sat at the dinner table.

  “I thought you’d like him,” I said.

  “I did.”

  The assertion lay between us for a moment before we both tried to pick it up at once. Andrew hesitated in automatic mannerliness. But I did, too.

  “I think it’s sort of a mess, Kate. Not just that he’s a nice guy Not just that. Your job’s involved. Why Joyce, anyway?”

  “I don’t explain and defend well at the same time. They’re two different activities.”

  “But why do you always get yourself into a sexual mess?”

  “You’re a great one to talk!”

  “Well, you’re a friend of Ramona’s—or are supposed to be. Why did you let me do it?”

  “Really, Andy, that’s one cliché too many.”

  “A home truth,” Andrew said, “but you wouldn’t know much about that. You know how to use people and be used by them. Right out of the manual for social workers and humanitarians. It’s too bad there’s no course in being a human being. You’ve never cared enough about anybody to be really ugly or really beautiful. You’re too damned tidy to think you’ve betrayed Ramona because it never occurred to you that you ought to be loyal. And, of course, making love with me matters so little to you that being upset by it seems to you a cliché.”

  “And what does it mean to you? Nothing humanitarian about it on your side? No small hope that you might have begun a conversion?”

  “Thank God, girl, I don’t suffer from any fear of kindness. I didn’t want to do anything for you. I simply wanted you… for myself. That’s probably ugly, but it’s got some clean beauty to it, too. It’s at least part of what love’s all about. Have you ever wanted and taken somebody you also loved? No. You don’t love Joyce. So why should you feel guilty about her husband? You don’t love me, so why should you feel guilty about Ramona?”

  “And you love me, and so you do feel guilty?”

  “I love Ramona.”

  “I see.”

  “Why don’t you hit back, Kate? Or cry? Or be unreasonably angry? Don’t you really care at all?”

  “For what?”

  “For me. Am I really beneath your contempt?”

  “Perhaps,” I said. “Perhaps you are.”

  “Why? Am I really so inferior to you?”

  “No, Andy, you’re superior to me—born male, white, handsome, intelligent, and rich. Perhaps with so much, I would be as reckless… as loving… as ugly. My own sins are simply the ones I can afford. Maybe they don’t include either love or contempt. Except in very rare, extravagant moments with you.”

  “You’re not poor, Kate. You’re stingy”

  “I agree. Monk should have got something more for that bag of liver.”

  We were too shocked to stop, too miserable to be very accurate, accusing each other at random. You got involved in it. So did Peter. And poor Monk was set above us like a martyred referee.

  “This is just too stupid,” I finally protested in the tears he had accused me of being incapable of. “Tearing each other apart doesn’t help any.”

  He stopped then and stared at nothing. “I don’t know,” he said finally “Maybe it does. We’re such shits, you and I, such real shits.”

  The word from Andrew had power because he never used it. For that moment I shared his despair, never mind that it was too easy, a gagging comfort that the sickness was communal. The story, as I would have told it about all of us at that time, would have been even more unbecoming than it is now. Shits, the lot of us. So much for your “artists,” “scholars,” “young saints.”

  We were listening to old Deller records when the phone rang. It was Monk.

  “Dan had an idea that you might know where Andy is,” she said. “I’ve got to reach him. His father died this morning.”

  “I do know where he is,” I said. “I’ll get in touch with him and have him call you back.”

  Andrew would have had no defense against the news at any time, but at that moment he was so raw he reacted immediately. He wept. It was a hard weeping that went on a long time. I wondered if it was the kind of weeping Doris had done. When it was over, he telephoned Monk. I put him on a plane for Calgary at one in the morning.

  I spent the rest of the night writing two letters to Joyce, one an official, the other a personal, resignation. She accepted the first with an official acknowledgment; she acce
pted the second with no comment at all. She was, perhaps, as relieved as I was.

  V

  THAT WAS AN HISTORIC Thanksgiving, wasn’t it? I can’t recall that we had anything to be thankful for ourselves, which should have made it a truly religious festival for counting basic blessings, but we were not much in the mood. I never find it easy to identify with the Pilgrim fathers, and you were, just then, absolutely paranoid about them, one of their descendants having descended so recently and harshly on your household and heart. Perhaps I could have been thankful that the landing of the Pilgrim mother had taken place the day before I arrived, but I was so angry when I heard about it that I could only wish I’d been there with poison darts or whatever tokens of welcome my foremothers had on that occasion. (I am willfully ignorant about my half-heritage.)

  Typically you hadn’t warned (should I say promised?) me what the occasion was meant to be. In the first confusion of explanation, I gathered that you and John Kerry had planned to announce your engagement at a party scheduled for Saturday evening. John Kerry’s mother had been invited. She arrived from Louisville on Wednesday afternoon. She departed on Wednesday evening, accompanied by a disbelieving but dazed son. By the time I arrived on Thursday, your mother had retired to her rooms, leaving her secretary to telephone canceled invitations.

  “I just can’t believe it,” you said over and over again.

  “But what happened?”

  “It was all perfectly pleasant through cocktails and dinner. Oh, a bit stiff with Mother being impressive and Mrs. Kerry not being impressed, but John and I had expected that. Then over coffee and brandy in the living room, Mrs. Kerry started talking about the old families of America. At first I didn’t think anything about it. I mean, the Kerry family don’t have money. John’s father ran off with somebody else years ago. So his mother needs ancestors, and she’s got lots. So she was betting ancestors against affluence—okay. But she kept using the word ‘blood,’ and she was obviously getting excited. John tried to interrupt her a couple of times, not rudely, just making a light remark, but she wasn’t having any of that. Finally she said to him, ‘You let me handle this, John.’ Before anyone could say anything, she turned to me and said, ‘And don’t think you’ll fool anyone with Christian baptism or changing your name. You’re the sort of Jew even plastic surgery wouldn’t fix.’ I told her I wasn’t trying to fool anyone. I’d been baptized because I’d accepted Christ as my salvation. She said that Christ couldn’t save me, and, if there was anything more disgusting than a murderer of Christ, it was one who then tried to hide in the Church from the consequences. John tried to protest. So did Mother, but neither of them got more than two words into a sentence before she said to Mother, ‘And, looking at her, I wonder how many niggers there’ve been in the wood pile.’ That did it. Mother went right off her nut. She started calling John a gold digger, his mother poor white trash. She ordered them both out of the house, but not before Mrs. Kerry called me a mongrel and Mother a bitch.”

  “And John left with his mother?”

  “What else could he do? Mother said if he tried to contact me, she’d call the police and do what she could to ruin his ‘little career.’ The minute they were gone, Mother and I had a great row of our own. She hasn’t appeared since.”

  The chauffeur opened the car door for us, the butler the front door, and a maid was waiting to take me to my room. You were more or less ordered into the library where tea would be served when I was ready for it, after I had given and taken instructions about my personal habits and wardrobe. There was a note from Mrs. Woolf, apologizing that she was not able to greet me, advising me to comfort and reassure and advise you. She would hope to join us for dinner. In other words, I was to make it possible for her to join us for dinner. I didn’t feel like it. I should have gone and had a good shout at your mother myself, but I didn’t feel like that, either. There had been no satisfaction in my last experience of being rude to her. And, though it seemed to me that she had behaved inexcusably, she’d been badly provoked. I turned to the maid who was unpacking my suitcase.

  “Will people be dressing for dinner?”

  “No, Miss George, not tonight. But everything will be pressed. Is there anything you’d like me to lay out?”

  “The black wool, I guess. Thanks.”

  “Would you like your bath drawn at six?”

  I smiled at her. “I really prefer a shower.”

  She returned the smile, offering just the degree of conspiracy I had invited. I wondered how people like Mrs. Woolf trained servants in the tact she was incapable of. Of course, she didn’t. The housekeeper would take care of that. Yet no matter how much professional kindness she bought, Mrs. Woolf couldn’t protect herself from the Mrs. Kerrys of this world or even from her own daughter. Or from me. I’d better choose to be kind to her.

  “Your father used to say,” I heard my mother’s gentle, uncertain voice, “guest and host share the burden of hospitality, but each carries the whole weight.”

  You sat, sulking at the tea tray in the library, too tired and despairing to cope with ritual weight.

  “I can’t stand tea,” you said.

  “What would you like?”

  “A Coke—in a bottle.”

  “So would I.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “E., ask for it,” I said firmly “You don’t have to be a victim.”

  “But that’s just what I am, Kate. I should have left here last night, just gone, but you were coming. Anyway, I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “No money, not a penny of my own. I signed everything over to Mother after California—for my own protection, she said. I’ve got nothing but charge accounts and pocket money.”

  “That’s not the real problem, anyway, is it?”

  “I don’t suppose so,” you said.

  “What about John? What’s going to happen?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Will he get in touch with you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  You began to pour out the tea.

  “Do you want to marry him?”

  “Of course I do,” you said, energy in your voice for the first time.

  Then gradually you began to tell me about him, how you’d met aboard ship, he on his way home from two years at an eye clinic in Barcelona, staying over in New York for a convention where he gave a paper, staying on after that, postponing his return to Louisville first a week, then a month, until he’d asked you to marry him.

  “He was going to go back with his mother, anyway. There’s a practice in Louisville pretty well ready for him to walk into. We were going to be married here around the first of the year. and then I’d go to Louisville.”

  “Did you have any idea about his mother?”

  “You know me, Kate. After the fact, sure. I mean, I think now about things he said, and I should have known or had an inkling. He’s an only child without a father. She’s a southern lady. She’d hate all Jews, ‘niggers,’ and Catholics on principle, and if one, both, or all three wanted to marry her son, well, she wouldn’t like it. Isn’t it a good thing I finally chose to be an Episcopalian?”

  “Shouldn’t John have known?”

  “Well, I didn’t know my mother was going to call him a gold digger and poor white trash, did I? I think he hoped my being a Christian—he was glad I was baptized before we were engaged—would do it. The ‘nigger in the wood pile’ bit caught him off guard. I wonder if there is one. But it hasn’t seemed exactly the right time to ask Mother a disinterested question.”

  “The mongoloids,” I said. “This is no time to feel tired of it, right at the beginning of the battle, but I do. I must have been born tired of it.”

  “I’m not,” you said.

  “How would you live in Louisville, anyway? How would you be a southern lady?”

  “I could begin somewhere. John isn’t like that. He says it’s only a question of time because it’s a question of economics. He’s very practical and un
emotional about everything, like you. It’s funny. He’s the first sort of ordinary man I could ever feel attracted to, ever really like. Love. Maybe it’s because I feel surer of myself. He’s polite and responsible and all the things I used to be afraid of, except in you, of course. When I told him I just wasn’t interested in sex any more, that I wanted to be a Christian, he accepted that. He said he respected it. He said everybody our age had some experience, and that didn’t have to be discussed. Now we should take things seriously. You know, from the minute I decided that I could become a Christian, it really was like being born again, a new life, and there was John to share it with…”

  As you talked, you obviously forgot for a moment what had happened the evening before. Your voice was full of a child’s happiness. I had time to notice the new design of your hair, the quietly expensive dress that allowed for your taste for large, sculptured jewelry, the absence of your father’s wrist-watch, your engagement ring, but, when the picture was complete, the catastrophe reoccurred to you.

  “What am I going to do, Kate?”

  “I suppose you’ve got to wait for him to do something.”

  “But Mother’s threatened him with the police.”

  “She likes him, doesn’t she?”

  “She did.”

  “Well, you need to deal with her.”

  “How?”

  “Shall I?”

  “I wish you would. Would you mind? Even when I try to be decent, I’m not.”

  When we had finished the tea neither of us wanted, I sent up a request to see Mrs. Woolf. I was invited to her apartment at five. I had expected to find her in operatic decline. Instead, she greeted me at the door of her sitting room with a firm voice and hand that drew me into a formally affectionate embrace. She had aged since I’d last seen her. Her makeup was less strained and really more becoming. It was a tired, sad face, but I liked it better.

  “I’m sorry to include you in another crisis, Kate,” she said, as she led me to the chair she had chosen for me. “It was planned to be a very pleasant weekend. Will you have a drink?”

  “No thanks. We’ve just had tea.”

  “Do you mind if I do?” She poured herself a whiskey and soda. “Last time we met, you gave me some rather blunt advice. It may surprise you to know that I took it. Tried to, anyway. Before last night, I think Esther might have given a better account of me than you would have expected. However, that can’t be undone.”