by Jane Rule
And that show, which marked the end of failure for Andrew, also marked his acceptance of the idiom of violently treated metal. As I looked at one bold assemblage of bright but fractured and betrayed steel colliding up into fountains of light, I heard Monk say, “After all, it’s the way a lot of us are going to die.”
I turned to find Doris, wanting to explain it to her, but she and Frank were busy receiving guests with so much parental pride that I didn’t want to disturb them. It was Andrew’s eye I caught instead. I went over to join him.
“If we can just live long enough, Katie,” he said quietly, “maybe we can learn how.”
Monk came over and said, “That’s the tenth red sticker. Don’t you feel a little ashamed to be selling all this junk for thousands of dollars?”
“You’re the one who liked it,” he said in amused protest.
“Liking it’s one thing. Paying for it is another.”
Dan behind her muttered, “Will you send your wife home before she ruins us?”
“In fact, I’ve got to go home,” she said. “This time I think I’m getting morning sickness at night.”
“Oh, Monk, I’m so glad,” I said.
“You women who get your satisfaction out of vicarious motherhood!” she said fiercely “Next time I’m going to buy one at a store.”
“Only if it’s another redheaded girl,” Andrew warned.
“A boy,” Monk said. “If this one isn’t a boy, I’m giving it back.”
The following evening when Doris and Frank were having dinner with young Frank, I accepted an invitation to dinner with Sandy. The apartment was so like the one in Los Angeles that for a moment it was hard for me to believe that I was still in New York. Sandy greeted me and took me into the living room where Lauris waited, but it did not take me long to keep from confusing places and people. Lauris was not another Esther Wilson. She was interested neither in making an impression nor in listening to personal histories. Later I learned that her reserve that night was partly reluctance to be at all involved with anyone Sandy had known before, but Lauris never, even with close friends, gossiped much. It bored her. I learned, too, that she shared my indifferent suspicion about the cause-dedicated magazines that Sandy so faithfully supported. Her attention was engaged when the conversation was about travel or paintings. And she asked a lot of intelligent questions about my work until I felt embarrassed by the amount of talking I was doing and asked her what she did.
“I’m Sandy’s manager,” she said. “Traveling as much as we do, I couldn’t really be anything else, and I like it.”
There were no possessive gestures, no private looks or comments. The duties of entertaining were not so rigid an imitation of male and female roles. Lauris fixed the first drink, Sandy the second, and then it was Sandy who stayed in the kitchen to finish a sauce.
Because Sandy wasn’t so obviously in command, not at all indulgent, in a way she was less easy than she had been, but the nervousness disappeared as Lauris and I began to make friends. By the end of the evening they were telling stories together of places they had been, things they had learned.
“I have now rationed the number of hairy rugs Sandy can buy on any one trip,” Lauris said, laughing. “It began to feel as if we’d been on a hunting expedition instead of a concert tour.”
“And Lauris is rationed on paintings.”
“You must get on Andy’s mailing list for when you’re in town,” I said.
“Good,” Sandy said. “Has Esther done anything lately?”
“A little,” I said. “She hasn’t had much time.”
“Any good?”
“No. It’s uncertain and sentimental. We had a wild argument recently about the theater mostly but about sculpture, too. Esther’s theory is that she ought to be able to use all the materials and devices for the dissolving or destroyed form in order to redeem it. We went to see Krapp’s Last Tape. That’s what started it. I told her nobody in his right mind would want to write Krapp’s Salvation, but she does, sculpt it, anyway. And I didn’t have much support from Monk, either, who thought writing Krapp’s Salvation would be just her sort of thing.”
“We saw one of her plays on TV the other night,” Lauris said. “I didn’t think it was bad.”
“Monk’s an amazing person,” I said. “I think you’d like her, Lauris.”
“You know, I never did,” Sandy said. “She was such a fool at college.”
“You wouldn’t find her the same kind of fool now,” I said.
“Of course, I was a fool, too,” Sandy said. “I guess, one way and another, we all were.”
“Well, come to dinner with me one night after I’m back. I’ll have Monk and Andy.”
After I left them, I found myself thinking of Joyce, but, even if she hadn’t had a husband, it could never have been like that for Joyce and me, any more than it could have been like that for you and me. Sandy and Lauris were emotional equals and glad to be. I wondered if that, in fact, was what Andrew and Monk had begun to discover about each other so that Monk could now risk an idea of her own and work of her own, so that Andrew didn’t have to keep asserting his freedom.
“So love isn’t an audience participation sort of thing, agreed,” I explained to Dan, “but it isn’t a spectator sport either, is it?”
“It’s true I’ve never seen enough of it to learn how, if that’s what you mean. Do you suppose, for instance, that I could finally stop being a dependent, little faggot and grow up into the person I walk around pretending to be?”
“Maybe. Meanwhile, will you promise to look after my parrot and feed my cat and see that the guppies don’t eat each other while I’m away?”
“And someday we may be old enough to have real pets, too,” Dan said. “See if you can find one while you’re away—one that costs too much and hurts too much—a real one.”
Frank and Doris and I had arranged to travel together. We were all very tired by the time we boarded the plane, but we hadn’t had a real opportunity to talk together since they’d arrived in New York. Yawning, Frank put away the book he would love to have slept over, and Doris asked for black coffee.
“I hope when young Frank decides to get married, he finds a poor Quaker. I don’t think I’m strong enough to do this again,” Frank said.
“What really amazed me is that Esther so obviously enjoyed it all,” Doris said. “And John, too.”
“After all my effort to marry her off to a responsible young man. I just shouldn’t have worried. Were you surprised by him, Kate?”
“In a way,” I said. “Did you like him?”
“Yes,” Frank said slowly “He’s a bit earnest, but then Americans are. Certainly Esther is. For her a husband with a developed sense of humor would be like a husband with a second head.”
“I didn’t like him much,” Doris said. “And I can’t really say why. Unfair to judge someone under those circumstances, anyway I felt sorry for him, I think.”
“Hard not to,” I said.
“You two always do this to me. Just as I think I can give up worrying, you tell me I have to start all over again,” Frank said. You aren’t going to tell me that really Andrew and Ramona are still miserable just as I’m feeling really happy for them.”
“No,” I said. “Anyway, I’m not.”
“Nor I,” Doris said. “Just think of those television plays!”
The conversation no more than touched on you and John again. It drifted instead from pleasure to pleasure until our sense of well-being made us overwhelmingly sleepy and we gave in to that pleasure as well. When I woke to landing instructions, Doris’ head was resting heavily on my shoulder, Frank’s on his own developing double chins. A good moment, that kind: the world behind settled and growing, the world ahead full of possibility.
I hadn’t time to stay in London. I took a flight out to Rome that day and was in Rome for three weeks, learning everything from office methods to the structure of welfare agencies in Italy. I spent more time in committee meetings
than seemed to me useful, less time observing the work that was actually being done until I went to Sicily. There our funds were being handled by local welfare agencies, supervised only to the extent that they must follow basic policies of distribution, which I discovered were so broadly interpreted in some cases that it was hard to find any rational explanation for how the money was being spent; but, if I was sometimes bewildered or disapproving, I was also fascinated to see the way in which one intention is translated into another from one culture to another. Because my Italian was good, I was treated with particular respect, but the social workers were more interested in showing me monuments to their culture than the slum areas I had come to see. When I asked about a particular fishing village, close enough to the city so that several large tourist hotels had taken over much of the sea frontage, I was given a lecture on the economic delights of tourism.
“But what about these fishermen and their families? What are they doing now?”
“We can’t deal with everyone. We interview only those families who have steady income. The others’ aid would be wasted on.”
I was invited to be present on the day in which a number of the families came to pick up welfare checks and boxes of food and clothing sent from the warehouse in Rome. When I arrived at the office, coffee and cakes were being served by a young secretary to three social workers. It was obviously a special occasion for my benefit. We talked with formal politeness. One of the women was the daughter of a rich family, another the granddaughter of a famous composer. I had noticed elsewhere in Sicily that social work was not so much a profession as a dedication for wellborn women who had a taste for piety and power. The secretary left us and returned to announce that everything was ready.
We walked across a bleak, little courtyard and into a low, dark building. The door opened to the sound of a great number of subdued voices, but, as we walked in, there was silence and then the scraping of chairs and benches. There must have been at least a hundred women and as many children in the room, all standing now in silence. The women were almost all dressed in black as were not quite so many of the children, all of whom had been dressed in their best clothes. The chief social worker greeted the group, and they chorused a formal greeting in return, the children in the front rows bowing and curtsying. Each of the social workers was greeted in the same way, and finally, when I was introduced with a formal eulogy which made me feel a cross between the Statue of Liberty and the Virgin Mary, the chorus was even louder, the curtsying and bowing deeper. I had not expected to make a speech. The few words I said mildly surprised the social workers and puzzled the audience, for whom Italian was a public language which had little to do with real communication. Fortunately I didn’t speak long enough to make any serious social or political mistakes. After that, I watched the lines form before tables of parcels and books of checks.
Soon after the distribution began, a young woman with a very young baby and a little boy of no more than three tried to enter the room. She was told by the secretary that she was too late. I heard the young woman try to explain that she had walked a long way from her village into the city. The little boy had been sick and couldn’t walk very fast. But the secretary was firm. The woman must come back next month and see to it that she was on time. She turned away without further protest. I didn’t say anything, but I must have looked both puzzled and disapproving.
“They have no discipline,” the secretary explained. “If we are not strict with them, they think they can come in any time at all for what they want.”
“But she’s walked a very long way, hasn’t she?” I asked.
“Yes. And next time she will know not to be late and waste so much of her time.”
A little girl stumbled into me on her way out with her mother. I righted her and smiled. The child backed away into her mother’s skirt while her mother bowed and thanked me a number of times, but behind the almost frantic humility of gesture I felt a deadening hostility. It was very hard to stay in that room until the last mother and child had left.
“That one is our pride,” the secretary explained to me about a young boy of perhaps ten. “He stood highest in the city in his class in religion and was sent to Rome to see the Pope. He came back with a signed photograph. A devout family.”
I gave you a mindful nod, thinking of our argument about nonsectarian aid. I was not sorry to leave Sicily at the end of ten days.
I had seen so many photographs of the Parthenon that I had not expected to be impressed by it, and at first I was not, but I was not disappointed, either. Seeing it there from the plane window, I had an odd, comforting sense of a familiar skyline, like the skyline of San Francisco from the Berkeley salt flats or the skyline of New York from the deck of a ship. The drive in from the airport increased that sense of familiarity because so many of the trees and flowers were familiar to me in the partial desert of California. Even the air, trembling with the possibility of heat mirage, was part of my earliest memory of California roads and fields. The city itself was, of course, not familiar at all. I disliked it first for its strangeness after so much promise of home. Once I got to know it, I disliked it for other things, but that was later; that is how it is now.
Athens had been planned as the most important part of my trip, not because activity there and throughout Greece was more extensive than it was in Italy but because the woman who ran the Athens office was considered the best informed and most successful of all the regional supervisors. Several times it had been suggested that she return to the States to train younger people, but she had lived in foreign countries too long to feel at home in her own. She had asked to stay in Athens until she retired. Trainees of all sorts were, therefore, sent to her. A man who was about to take over one of the small offices in South America had just been with her for two weeks. I was to stay a month.
Like many women who have dedicated all their intellectual and emotional energy to a job of work, whether it be a school or a hospital or a charitable agency, Grace Hardwick had collected a personal folklore. She had obviously been too attractive a young woman to be dismissed into sublimated spinsterhood. The stories ranged from tragic, young love to lovers in high places. There were rumors of an illegitimate child; there were other rumors of self-sacrificing sterility. Some even believed that she had been in a religious order for some time. What all these stories had in common was their lack of malice. Each one paid its own kind of tribute to Grace Hardwick’s personal magnetism.
By the time I met her, she was nearing sixty, and, though she was extraordinarily hard-working, some of the natural energy, which had won her so much admiration and probably at one time strong criticism, too, was gone. The attractiveness was not. She had the kind of dark hair that moves to white without stages of gray. And, though her face was strong-boned, it was gently fleshed, both her mouth and eyes sensitive to and expressive of a narrow, positive range of moods. I never saw her depressed, but she smiled and laughed easily. Though she was absent-minded about combing her hair, often noticed a button or a drooping hemline after she got to the office, she dressed well and was, with good reason, proud of her figure, faddish about diet. Her staff, all of them Greek, liked to indulge her in the few quirks she had, and she let them, with an amused gratitude that did not get in the way of her being very demanding about thorough and accurate work. No one stayed in her office long who did not like to work.
I arrived prepared to like her, and I did, but at our first meeting I felt I had not made a very good impression. When I got back to my room at the YWCA, I nervously went over the questions and answers of that hour, wondering what kinds of mistakes I had made. Oh, she had been kind enough, but something in her manner was reserved, even perhaps disapproving. Had I been too critical of what I had seen in Sicily? I didn’t think so. Had I asked too many questions or the wrong ones or too few? Had I been too casual? No, I had probably been too formal. When I could locate no specific mistakes, I was impatient with my own nervousness. I decided that my only mistake was being disappointe
d that she hadn’t recognized something remarkable in me. And, when I came upon that truth, I realized that I had been in love with the myth of Grace Hardwick for several months, was, after one hour with her, in love with the person of Grace Hardwick as well. She knew it. She was used to it. She would not let it get in her way. I decided that it wouldn’t get in my way, either.
It was that first evening that I took a bus tour up the Acropolis to see the Parthenon. For a while I stayed with the crowd of tourists and listened to the guide. On the steps of the Parthenon, he delivered a tribute to Athena who was not, he insisted, a primitive image of the Virgin Mother, but the manifestation of both masculine and feminine virtues. This building in its perfect proportions, combining strength and subtlety, was more an embodiment of Athena than any of the representations of her we would see either here or in the British Museum. All the attributes at the center of Greece’s unique greatness were here in an aesthetic both rational and humane…. I walked away and stood at the wall, looking down at modern Athens, a mean, gimcrack sprawl of crumbling plaster and dirt and noise in the shadow of this great and ancient hill, this perfect intelligence. I was moved as I have never been in church, both awed and required by the truth behind me and the bitterness at my feet.
I didn’t carry this revelation with shining eyes into the office the next morning. I’d have to do my own admiring of my winning sensitivity and medal intelligence. This woman honored nothing but successful hard work, and I should not expect stars for that, either. I could hear my father say with some wryness, “The truth is that virtue is not only its own reward, it is often its only reward.” At the end of the week, I was so much absorbed in learning the idiosyncrasy of the office routine and reading reports in the spare minutes I had that I didn’t notice at first the absence of that arm’s length at which I had been kept. I must have reacted to it just the same because my comments about my discoveries were less and less guarded.
