by Jane Rule
“There’s enough unavoidable stupidity,” I said, refusing to be amused. “You don’t have to invent any more.”
“I do have to dig for your temper,” she said. “I sometimes despair of finding it.”
“Well, congratulations.”
Two nights later, still in an unforgiving mood, I began to pack for my trip.
“Don’t leave too much behind,” Grace said. “You may not be coming back.”
“What are you trying to prove?” I demanded.
“Nothing, Katie. I’m trying to leave you free to decide.”
“Okay but I got that point about six weeks back. I’m very quick-witted about seeing that I’m free to decide. Nobody’s ever wanted to take the blame for what I do. You haven’t even been invited.” I was shouting and beginning to enjoy it. “You don’t have to bail out. You’re not even on the trip. Relax, relax, relax!”
She was holding me and laughing at me and telling me to please shut up before I blackened her already mythical reputation.
“You’re a witch,” I said more quietly.
“There we are,” she said. “I’ve ruined you for the Junior League. I’ll take the blame for that.”
“You don’t have to,” I said, sitting down on my bed, feeling so tired that I couldn’t imagine ever moving again.
“What’s this?” Grace asked, picking up a long, cardboard cylinder.
“I meant to show you. I found a painter while I was up north last week, making things out of string and wax and wool. The people in the village think he’s crazy. He probably is, but I bought a couple to show to Andy, to give to him if he likes them.”
Grace had opened up the package and was holding up the ragged apron shapes.
“Sick ethnic,” she said.
“Yes, and there ought to be more of it and less depressed imitation. ‘We have history, but we have no bread’—he gets the two things together.”
“Would he know that he does?” Grace asked.
“Yes, I think so.”
“You’re falling asleep, child.”
“Defense mechanism.”
“A good thing you’ve got them. Sleep well.”
I did, and I slept well on the plane, too, so that when I arrived in New York on a Saturday morning, I had accomplished the time shift without effort and was met by yawning friends, complaining at the early hour: Dan, Andy, and you. Monk was at home, supervising the children and an elaborate breakfast which began with strawberries and champagne.
“We canceled your hotel reservation,” Andrew explained. “You’re staying with us.”
They had bought a small town house in the Village. Andrew called it small, anyway. It was five stories high, one room wide and two or three rooms deep. It reminded me of Frank and Doris’ house in London.
“It did us, too,” Monk said. “That’s really why we bought it, but I’ll never be any good at running a house, Kate.” She looked over her shoulder quickly and then whispered, “I just hate the servants. The first two weeks we had them I just locked myself in my room and cried, but Andy’s fired the nanny now so that at least I can play with the children.”
Lissa was temporarily a very solemn and uncertain little girl, learning to deal with the obscene curiosity of a baby brother, but there were already healthy signs that she would survive him. That he would survive her was still considered risky.
“Hello, Crow,” she said, the first time any of us had heard the name, but we knew it would stick.
That first day was full of drifting conversation and patches of excitement. I had presents for everyone and tales to tell. Andrew and Dan were fascinated by the paintings I had brought home and began to plan a show. Monk decided I ought to be the subject of a television documentary which she described in a thrilling voice, details supplied by an impudently enthusiastic audience if she faltered for a second. You were very quiet, not withdrawn really, but patient. The story you had to tell did not belong to this mood of homecoming which went on through Sunday to a party on Sunday night, which included Sandy and Lauris, who had finally found their way to the gallery, and a number of other old and new friends.
Monday was the day set aside for visiting with you. I discovered that you were not living at home but had an apartment of your own only a few blocks away. I could walk to it for a late breakfast Monday morning, just any time I woke up. Accustomed to your habit of late rising, I spent the early part of the morning reading volumes of new plays that had been left in my room. I didn’t dress until about ten-thirty, then realized, as I was putting on my lipstick, that I was nervous. Well, why not? This was the meeting I had come all the thousands of miles for without any clear idea why. And you had seemed to me in the last two days farther away than you had often been in Greece.
The streets of New York are extraordinarily quiet after Athens. That June morning the air was clear and warm as I crossed a wide, clean street free of organic odors and shouting friends. The Village, which had at one time seemed to me an intimate neighborhood, felt huge and impersonal and strange. I had a hard time distinguishing the words of an occasional American voice, being unused to its rhythms. The experience wasn’t new to me. I noticed it more for the choice I would have to make before the week was out. I was thinking of that as I knocked on your door.
It was obvious that you had also been up for some time, working perhaps, and then waiting with some apprehension of your own. You were dressed in lemon yellow, a color I always forgot about for you because it seemed unlikely until you were in it. We kissed in what becomes a shy custom for American women by the time they are nearing their thirties, and then you stood back with a gesture as much of showing as of welcoming me in.
“It’s very small,” you said, “but I have a good workroom out in back.”
It was, I think, what is called a Pullman apartment, a name that means little to my generation, most of whom have never been inside anything but a commuter train. It was one long, narrow room, at one end of which was a bathroom and a tiny, open kitchen, one unit containing stove, sink, and refrigerator. All along one wall, which was brick painted white, book shelves had been built under which was a door-sized table that served as a desk and an eating area. It had been set for breakfast with two straight chairs, side by side. On the other side of the room, to the right of the entrance door, there was a daybed, at the far end of the room a comfortable chair, a small table and lamp that obviously served as a bedside table as well. What was remarkable about the room was neither its odd shape nor its smallness but its immaculate order, which had not been achieved by one, grand cleaning gesture but was obviously habitual.
“I wouldn’t know it belonged to you, except for the first editions,” I said. “What’s happened to the antlers?”
“I left most of my stuff at home in the attic. There wasn’t room. Anyway I got tired of the clutter. It was time to simplify.”
The meal you presently began to prepare was as much of a surprise. Gone were the greasy fried eggs and burnt toast you used to present without embarrassment, if clumsily. Your gestures were sure, accustomed. A pot of jam and glasses of orange juice were set out before it was time to sprinkle capers into the scrambled eggs.
“Scotch woodcock,” you said, “in memory of London.”
You had made real coffee, which sat over a candle keeping warm. I was ridiculously impressed by the matching cups and saucers. I felt I should say something, but the change that seemed to me so extraordinary obviously had taken place too long ago for you to be aware of it any more. It was not, in your terms, important.
Sitting side by side to eat made conversation awkward. There should have been a mirror of the sort I so often spoke to you in, as we sat at the counter in a London milk bar. Instead we had to stare at book titles or turn to find our faces much too close together so that we chewed and swallowed with self-conscious daintiness. I felt ridiculous and somehow relieved. I found myself imagining how I would describe this scene to Grace, and I saw her eyes, slightly hooded with age, amus
ed, but there was reserve there, too, requirement: go and find out. When we finished breakfast, I moved at once to the daybed. You cleared away the dishes and brought back an ashtray and fresh cups of coffee. I expected you to sit in the chair, but instead you sat down next to me, and there we were in this awkward side-by-side again.
“Don’t you want to look at me?” I asked.
“Not for a while,” you said, “not until I’ve told you the hard things.”
And so we looked down at our own hands and feet while you told me the story of your marriage from the wedding night until the day you packed your bags and left for Mexico nine months later, I waiting for the paper flowers and animals which never materialized. Apparently they did not breed in the new, tidy soil of your life.
“I almost didn’t go to Mexico. I almost took a plane to Athens instead. I had some melodramatic notion of throwing myself at your feet, telling you I’d given up everything—God, John, the lot. If you wouldn’t have me, I’d kill myself.”
“Why didn’t you come?”
You turned to me, startled. “What would you have done with me?”
I didn’t answer. For once I was silent against my welling desire, not from any reluctance in me but from a mood in your face I couldn’t read but didn’t feel either known or welcomed by. You took that silence for what it had always been before, nothing, and turned back to your telling.
There was no malice in it. There was real sorrow. I tried to forgive you the graphic detail which forced me to imagine what it had been like. I didn’t really have to imagine anything but the final scenes. I had known myself what it was like to stand before the open delight of your desire and be incapable of answering it. At least I had had a moral excuse. John had none.
“When I realized that he was afraid he simply couldn’t,” you said, “I thought I could do something about it. For a long time, I just didn’t have the nerve. He’s so remote in some ways. There wasn’t any way of talking about it. But I thought I could help. I wanted him so much. The longer he avoided it, the worse it was for me. It was about five months after we were married. I simply couldn’t stand it any longer. One night after dinner, I just began. At first I thought it was all right. He laughed and told me not to be silly, but he seemed interested, curious anyway. I didn’t care what I did as long as it worked. It was quite a performance. And I didn’t even know, when he started toward me, that it wasn’t all right.”
He had nearly killed you. Then he didn’t dare take you to the hospital. He tended you himself with absolute gentleness, but in horror of you and of himself that he could not speak.
“I told him we had to talk. I told him nothing mattered. Sex didn’t matter, but we had to be able to talk about it. Finally he said I was morally depraved. He’d realized before we were married that I’d had some experience. He knew women did these days, but nobody but a whore knew the things I knew, did the things I did. I tried to tell him. I tried to explain to him that nothing about the body is evil, that nothing he might want or I might want could be anything but lovely if we really loved each other. And I did love him. I wanted to tell him that I knew he was afraid. I didn’t dare. We went on for a couple of months the way we had before, twin beds and reading lamps. I was beginning to resign myself to it. There are lots of things besides sex once you decide about it. Then one night he came over to my bed as if he’d made up his mind to try. When, after a while, nothing happened, I began to be afraid for him. I touched him and began to talk to him, nothing crude really, just loving, and it began to work, but he felt to me so uncertain. I took him with my mouth, and he came. Then he hit me. Just once. He told me he never wanted to see me again, and he meant it. Oh, I stayed around for a week. I didn’t really know what to do. Finally I went to my minister. He talked with John. After that, he said I really had no choice. I should go to Mexico for a legal divorce. Then I should file for annulment with the Church because the marriage had never been consummated. I’m waiting for that now.”
“What’s happened to John?”
“Nothing. He wrote to my mother and told her that he’d like to stay on in Boston if she’d allow him to pay back the money over the next five years. Otherwise he’d sell out and go back to Louisville. She said he could stay. She has that little bit of vindictive pleasure at keeping him away from his mother.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say. I realized that at some point in the story I had taken your hand which I still held very firmly in mine. Now that I knew I had it, I didn’t know what to do with it, but you didn’t seem to have noticed.
“Well, it’s over,” you said, “and the odd thing about it is, I’m not really unhappy. In fact, I’m sometimes even… glad. There’s something very peaceful about giving up all that. Human relationships don’t really even interest me very much any more. I don’t mean I don’t care about people. I do. In a way, I even care more because I’m not involved. I’m getting an answer to that old question of Pete’s—we have to be ugly with each other’s sins until we’re detached enough to accept them of our own free will. Do you understand that? Probably you do. You’ve always been self-sufficient. I never have. It’s something I had to learn about now.”
“And you’re working,” I said, having let go of your hand.
“Yes,” you said. “I want to show you.”
Your workshop was as uncharacteristically ordered as your apartment had been. There were a dozen sketches pinned up on the wall. In the center of the room, on a stand, was your Crucifixion, almost finished. The cross was wooden, the Christ shaped of pieces of metal which had, though not obviously, first been used for other purposes. It must have been fairly heavy, but it was supported by the right number of nails. The figure was life-sized, the head up, the effect not skeletal so much as sketched in three dimensions, a hanging, straining weight of mortal suffering, undefeated. It was almost as if the head listened, as your bell ringers had done, to the note sounded above. I stood before it a long time before I turned away, knowing that for me man so tormented into whatever vision of salvation could lead me nowhere but to despair.
“No?” you asked.
“It’s powerful, E. It’s beautiful in a way—beautiful with the sins of the world. You’ve done what I said couldn’t be done, redeemed the material. It’s just that I don’t believe it.”
You nodded. “I know. It’s funny how far apart we’ve grown, isn’t it? That’s maybe the only grief I’ve got left with knowing how much farther I have to go.”
“How far have you got to go?”
“On anyway, as far as I can, as far as I’m called.”
Then you talked of the faithful life lived in the imitation of Christ. You read me bits from the lives of saints, but your texts were not often those we had studied together and argued about in philosophy of religion courses. What you were reading now was confessional literature mostly and persuasions of the persuaded. You had one little book called The Right to be Merry by a nun in an enclosed order. She wrote of talents given up to be given back, of poverty. “We are just too poor to own our bodies, to exercise over them the proprietorship by which we could lawfully claim the pleasures of the flesh.” “We accept the commands of others as alms to our poverty.”
“Are you thinking of going into an order, E.?”
“Thinking isn’t exactly what it is,” you said. “I study and pray and wait.”
“A teaching order?”
“I’d take the vow of silence and enclosure,” you said.
“Do you want to?”
“How can I explain it to you? In the worldly sense, nobody wants to be a saint, but some of us are called. I may have to be a saint, but I’m not sure I can bear it.”
I could hear the disbelieving laughter, the derisive comments, the cynicism of an invisible company of people. You, a saint? First, there was the impossible arrogance of it. Second, there were the doctrinal problems to be solved with particular reference to you: because your only sanctioned relationship was technically unconsummated, your pur
ity could be established for you to take your vows. Finally, your personal history made you such an unlikely candidate. But none of that mattered really. Nor did it matter that I myself couldn’t possibly believe in the usefulness of a life spent in prayer for the world. The only honest protest I had to make was for myself. That you might one day shut the door on the world we lived in, leave me in it alone without ever the hope of looking up in a company of strangers to say, “There. There you are,” was all I could think of.
“I would miss you,” I said.
Later all the others would argue against belief or your motives in belief or your capacity to serve. You had friends more capable than I of denying the truth of Christianity. You had in your life lined up so many psychological clichés that it wouldn’t take more than an introductory course for anyone to accuse you of searching for a father figure, of trying to sublimate your homosexual tendencies, of Jewish paranoid appetites and delusions. Nobody needed even the terms to know that you had been, in the simplest, old-fashioned sense, “disappointed in love.” It was Saul, apparently, who fought morality with morality. He was to tell you that you were making a completely selfish decision, committing suicide to escape the responsibilities of love for your family and your friends. There must have been lots of people to remind you of the fortune you were giving up. Your mother, for one, for it was the only gift she was certain of giving you. Christopher Marlowe Smith, I’m sure, suffered a sense of shocking waste. For you, giving up the trinkets and toys that had delighted you would be much more difficult than giving away an inheritance you never really believed in and found an occasional nuisance. Did I know that none of these arguments would finally matter to you at all? They didn’t matter to me.
“It would be hard to give up children,” you said that afternoon. “It would be hard to give up fame, but, if the teaching of Christ is true, the only thing to do is live in terms of it.”
“It’s a hard faith,” I said, remembering how long ago you had said it to me. “Maybe any faith, taken seriously, is.”
