by Nancy Thayer
Daphne walked across the grass, a glass of white wine in her hand, and sank down on the blanket with Pauline and Douglas White. She would always be welcome with them; Pauline was her age and her good friend. Pauline had taught in the English department since before Daphne began as a secretary, and Douglas had been David’s best friend. And, long ago, they had both known Daphne and Joe in a social way.
“How do you like Jack Hamilton?” Daphne asked.
“Oh, he’s just fine,” Pauline said. Pauline had gone a bit square (she was shorter than Daphne) and let the gray thread through her dark hair. Tonight she was wearing a plaid shirtwaist that made her look even squatter and thicker than usual, but Daphne had given up trying to get Pauline to dress better. Pauline was through with vanity. “He’s so energetic, you know, as we all are when we’re new. I’ve seen him in his office, in the halls. He lets the students talk to him endlessly—they’re just eating up his time.”
“Oh, he wants to be popular with them!” Daphne said.
“We had dinner with Claire and Hudson last night. Daphne, it was awful. Claire is becoming wicked, I really believe it. All that elegant restraint we used to admire her for has become twisted, hardened, and I think she’s proud of it. She’s getting so … isolated. She relies on Hudson for everything, but treats him as if he were some kind of servant. She watches him like a hawk. I could be spilling government secrets to her and she’d turn away in the middle of our conversation if she saw that Hudson was involved in a conversation with someone else. You know, really involved, talking about something that interested him or made him smile. ‘Oh, Hudson,’ she says, ‘would you get my pills?’ Then she says, ‘I know it’s awful that Hudson has to help me so much, but if I were at home in England I’d have relatives around. Instead …’ Then she sighs and tries to look like a martyred saint. It makes me shudder. Why does he stay with her? And when do you suppose was the last time poor Hudson got laid?”
Daphne laughed, feeling terribly sad at the same time. “From what I’ve gathered, I think he’s just decided to forget about all that,” she began, but then her attention was diverted by a rustle that passed through the picnickers.
“Oh, God,” Pauline said.
Daphne turned her gaze in the direction it seemed that now almost everyone else at the picnic was looking. Jack Hamilton, his cute little daughter on his shoulders, was striding down the lawn from the parking lot. Carey Ann was walking along beside him. Jack had on khakis, a red-and-blue-striped cotton sweater, and leather loafers without socks; he looked casual yet decorous.
Carey Ann was wearing thin sandals that crisscrossed and tied around her slender ankles with pink ribbons, and her legs flashed bare and sleek all the way up to her very short pink shorts. Tied at her shoulders with pink bows was a tiny white top so short that as Carey Ann walked, it rose and dipped, rose and dipped, teasingly exposing a flash of her flat silky waist. She was not wearing a bra. Her shimmery blond hair flew out around her and she looked totally beautiful, intensely sexy, and completely inappropriate. She looked ready to attend the Indianapolis 500, not an Ivy League college affair.
The Hamiltons had come halfway down the hill before Carey Ann realized her mistake. By that time Daphne was muttering a silent rapid prayer: Oh, dear God, don’t let her notice. But Carey Ann noticed. As her big blue eyes swept over the lawn and porch and she saw the women in dresses, skirts and blouses, or at least long, loose silk or cotton slacks, her face took on a look of panic, a rosy glow spreading from her forehead down to the little top.
People were still laughing and talking, but most were frozen, watching, knowing they were witnessing a faux pas that would be remembered and discussed for years. And who was going to jump up and welcome the Hamiltons, talk to them? Not many wives there would forgive Carey Ann for being so stunningly, movie-star beautiful. They would have no mercy—and would not let their husbands show any. And the younger faculty did not want to appear guilty by association.
“God damn him, God damn him!” Daphne said. “Why didn’t he tell her? What is the matter with him?”
“He didn’t know, Daphne,” Pauline whispered. “He still doesn’t know. He doesn’t know about women’s clothes. Look at his face, he’s completely unaware.”
“He’s stupid,” Daphne said. “Pauline, go get them. Bring them here. I would, but you’d be better, you’re faculty.”
But while Pauline was still struggling to rise from the blanket, another senior faculty member came down from the porch, hands held out, to greet the Hamiltons. He could not have been more welcoming or jovial. It was Hudson, and he brought the Hamiltons up onto the porch to greet the old guard seated there.
“Oh!” Pauline said, breathing a sigh of relief. “Oh, bless his heart. Oh, God bless him. Daphne, you ought to sleep with him for that.”
“You know, you’re obsessed with Hudson’s sex life!” Daphne said, laughing. “I think you want to sleep with him!”
“Oh, I don’t, not really, but I do care for Hudson, and I’d like to see him happy. He’s such a good man. And I know how his face gets when he looks at you, Daphne. He’s loved you for years.”
“And you and I have discussed this for years. He’s married, Pauline. He’s an honorable man. For that matter, I’m an honorable woman. Oh, let’s eat,” Daphne said, jumping up from the blanket in her sudden impatience.
After the meal everyone relaxed as the sky paled and then darkened with the deepening night, and the babies fell asleep on their blankets. The oldest of the old guard tottered home, and the adults that were left moved among each other, talking, having another drink, one last drink. The end of summer was in the air. Tomorrow there were duties, tomorrow they must face classrooms full of rampant youth who had the world before them, while they, the professors, had already used up a good part of their lives and were entrenched in marriages or relationships that they cherished, or didn’t cherish, but had chosen and must get on with. But tonight they were outdoors, and the stars came out, more and more of them; tonight was expansive—and kind, and warm. They lingered.
Daphne, another glass of white wine in her hand, approached the Hamiltons, who were sitting on a blanket with Robert Butler. Butler was in the chemistry department, a nice man, but almost astonishingly boring, and once he found someone who would listen to him for a minute, he clung for hours. Jack was nodding and responding politely, but Carey Ann’s eyes were glazing over, and Alexandra had fallen asleep in her lap.
“Hello, everyone,” Daphne said. “No, don’t get up, please. Carey Ann, I thought you might want to come with me and let me introduce you to some of the women who have children Alexandra’s age. They could tell you about play groups and preschools and pediatricians and all that sort of thing.”
In response, Carey Ann looked miserable. “Well,” she said hesitantly, “Alexandra’s sleeping …”
“I’ll hold her,” Jack said, and before his wife could reply, he reached over and took his daughter from her. Alexandra sighed, a singing little sound, nestled against her father’s shirtfront, and stuck her thumb in her mouth.
Warily Carey Ann rose to her feet. She and Daphne had not seen each other since the day Alexandra crawled across the piano.
“Do you want another glass of wine?” Daphne asked, thinking: Why don’t you have three or four, maybe you’d relax.
“Well …” Carey Ann said, uncertain.
Daphne took her gently by the arm then—it was the only way, she decided, like leading a timid beast, perhaps one of those quivering, gorgeous, skinny Afghan hounds with lots of messy blond hair (one had to take gentle but firm control)—and half-pulled her to the bar. Daphne chatted the entire way about the mothers Carey Ann would meet, and their children, and finally got Carey Ann to the blanket where the young mothers were gathered, some with babes in arms. Daphne knew some of these women, not all, and she remembered how it had been to be one of these women, with life passionately, messily, almost insanely centered on one tiny human being. She introduced C
arey Ann and then excused herself to get more wine—she felt that Carey Ann would be more relaxed without her around, and indeed, that probably all those women would. She could remember how she had felt when she was in her twenties and early thirties—women over forty seemed antediluvian.
When she reached the wine table, she realized she really didn’t want any more wine. She was tired. Now she felt her singleness and it weighed her down. When she and Joe had divorced, her friends had at first rallied round her and made her join them on their forays to the faculty-club affairs. At first she had been a “cause” for her friends, and after all that died down, she felt comfortable enough to brave the affairs on her own. She had known so many people. Then she started working for the history department and had her own membership. For a long time she had come with David. And now, again, she came alone. When she had been younger, divorced, it took courage, real determination, to walk by herself into a room crowded with couples, but now that was the easy part, for there were so many people who were glad to see her. It was the leaving that was difficult—not awkward, for no one noticed, but simply painful, because she was alone and had no one to gossip with about the evening, no one to ride with through the dark night: no one to cuddle up with in bed.
Daphne found her straw summer purse where she’d left it on a blanket. Everyone else, in couples or groups, was engaged in intense conversation, it seemed. Pauline and Douglas had already left. There was no one for her to call or wave good-bye to. She left the party in silence, trailing up the lawn past all the people like someone unseen, like a ghost.
Ghosts. They were everywhere. They materialized all over: from a piece of jewelry or a piece of furniture or a wisp of song curling from a radio or a nightmare. They sprang up like geysers, right out of the top of Daphne’s head, and spilled down all around her, enclosing her in their falling fluid silvery sheen so that she became a ghost herself, trapped in the past, in her past.
Daphne, in her teens and early twenties, had lived in a dream world. She had been held back. Hindered, indeed, by her times, by her parents, by her religion, and by the nature of her own personality. Slowed down, and, later, demented.
If she were to tell Cynthia, her sixteen-year-old daughter, who had friends taking the pill (who might even now herself be taking the pill out there in fast-paced, action-packed California, for all Daphne knew), that she had been a virgin at twenty-three, Cynthia would fall off the sofa with laughter. Or, more likely, these days, when Cynthia was so bound and determined that she and Daphne would not get along, Cynthia would seriously, with the deadly earnest patience of a true martyr, point out that this was just one more sign of the difference between mother and daughter, the proof that there was no way Daphne could ever understand Cynthia, ever come close to understanding Cynthia.
But the twenty-three-year-old Daphne, still a virgin, had been a happy one—actually, an oblivious one—drifting along in a world all her very own. Since then she had seldom been as happy, certainly not as peaceful.
She had been an English major. She had finished her bachelor’s degree and was working on her master’s, with every intention of going on for her doctorate in medieval literature. Her body made the necessary motions of going through ordinary life in the town of Amherst, where she was a student at the University of Massachusetts, but her soul and mind and imagination belonged to the literature of the Middle Ages. It was 1962, and her world was peopled with knights and faeries and dragons and sorcerers and love stories of mythic dimensions. The legends of King Arthur and the Round Table. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Aucassin and Nicolette. Tristan and Isolt! What in modern life could compare with the romances of ancient times, especially those romances with pure and noble and faithful and chaste and yearning lovers?
While her friends were lying in their apartments listening to Johnny Mathis, Daphne lay on her bed truly lost in another world, swooning as she read for the fiftieth time the poem The Nut-Brown Maid. While her friends were twisting to Chubby Checker, Daphne’s mind was full of medieval ballads sung in a high clear voice, accompanied by lute.
She was, really, just a little bit nuts. Something in her then longed for the romantic, the epic, the impossible, wanted love in the twentieth century to be like love in the Middle Ages. She wanted a knight, she wanted true, pure, superior love.
Her wish had come true, as wishes sometimes have a way of doing. Oddly enough—humorously enough—it had been a cock that had brought her love, true love. It had been her naive and romantic handling, so to speak, of a cock, that had brought her romance and love and marriage.
While working on her master’s degree, Daphne held a teaching assistantship. She was paid an insignificant sum of money to teach beginning literature to freshman students. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning at eight o’clock and again at nine o’clock (while the professors with tenure slept late) she taught poetry, essays, and short stories to freshman students who were not especially interested, but who were required to take basic English in order to get a degree in anything at all. She went into her teaching determined to make her students love the language, determined to open to her students the ethereal, majestic, magical world of fiction.
The poetry in the fat text chosen by powers above her was arranged chronologically. The first poem she chose from the text was one written in the fifteenth century. It was brief, and very easy to read. And, as Daphne told her class, it was wonderfully subtle and clever! She read it aloud:
I have a noble cock,
Who croweth in the day.
He maketh me rise early,
My matins for to say.
I have a noble cock,
Whose breed is nothing low.
His comb is of red coral,
His tail of indigo.
His eyes are shining crystal,
Rimmed all around with amber;
And every night he perches
Within my lady’s chamber.
“You see how devious the poet is,” Daphne (enraptured by her own sensitivity and by anything written in the fifteenth century) said to her students. “Now, what does he say in the first stanza that the cock does? Why, he wakes his master up. Of course that is what a rooster does, but we can imagine this as a pet rooster, a beautiful bird with a comb of coral and an indigo tail, who crows in the morning and wakes up his master. Why does he love his rooster so much? Why is this rooster so special, so noble? What is the poet trying to tell us by innuendo? What does the poet tell us in the last stanza? Where does the rooster go to sleep at night? ‘In my lady’s chamber’! So you see, the poet is subtly, inventively, telling us that he is sleeping in the bedroom of his ladylove—the rooster who wakes him in the morning goes to sleep at night in ‘his lady’s chamber.’ It is the indirectness of poetry, the clever sidestepping of it, the sneakiness of it, if you will, that often gives poetry its power. The poet is writing a love poem to his lady, but instead of praising her, he is praising an object that is related to her and to the fact that he is sleeping in her room.”
On and on she went, while her students stared down at their books, strangely quiet that day. She began to wonder if she had embarrassed them, because they said nothing. She went on from that poem to other love poems by Donne and Shakespeare, and was just beginning Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress when the hour was up. She taught the next period—the same subject, the same poetry (with the same strangely numbed reaction on her students’ part)—and then, when her class was over, she walked down the long hallway to the private lounge where the faculty and staff, including the lowly T.A.s, gathered for coffee and quiet conversation.
She was just outside the door to the lounge when she heard such an explosion of laughter that she paused. If the room was full of men, and only men, she wouldn’t go in. There were only three other female T.A.s, and she often felt timid around the male T.A.s when they were in their group, laughing with their low voices, gesturing extravagantly, bellowing out their opinions, fighting over their explication of The Waste Land
like bulls butting for territory. She listened for the sound of any moderating female voice. What she heard was:
“… Gawd, I stood outside the door for fifteen minutes without taking a breath. I couldn’t believe my ears! ‘I have a noble cock’! I have a noble cock, and she thinks he’s talking about a rooster! Those kids must have peed down their legs with laughter when they got out of there.” The speaker (Daphne thought it was George Dobbs, a freckled red-haired arrogant Mark Twain specialist) paused to cackle. “She tells these freshmen, who are, you know, the horniest people on God’s green earth, that ‘in my lady’s chamber’ means the bedroom. She thinks that a cock in a lady’s chamber is a rooster in a bedroom! Haw haw haw haw …” The laughter rose, billowed, burst. “Dear Christ, how can one woman be so dumb! How can they let her teach freshman literature? She should be teaching first grade, maybe kindergarten!”
Daphne felt her entire being shrinking, collapsing into herself, like a star falling inward and becoming a cold void. Not until this very moment had it occurred to her that there might be more earthy interpretations to that poem. And now she saw how wrong she had been—how unbelievably ignorant and naive. Her students must be laughing at her. And now that Dobbs was telling everyone else, how would she ever face her colleagues? They would all think she was a fool. And she was, she really was. Oh, dear God, her life was ruined. She wasn’t a teacher, she was a little idiot.
Suddenly another voice imposed itself upon her panicked mind, and to her amazement, she heard a man saying, “Oh, George, you are such a mental slob. Just because you read vulgarity into everything you see doesn’t mean that everyone else does. Now, how do you know that the poet was talking about his cock and not a pet bird? Huh? How do you know? And even so, do you expect a beautiful classy female like Daphne Lowell to stand in front of a class of horny freshmen and talk about penises? I’m sure she can be sexy when she wants, but a woman teaching freshmen can hardly choose to be lewd. And we’re supposed to be teaching poetry, don’t forget, you know, we’re supposed to be trying to introduce the sublime, the majestic, the angelic—‘the music of the soul, and above all of great and feeling souls’—to these poor earthbound clods. What a crud you are to make fun of that elegant woman just because your own vision is so crass.”
