The Small Room

by May Sarton

  “Heavens, I trust not! That would make me quite impossible, wouldn’t it?”

  “If all this is so,” Debby said, “what’s going to happen next? I had no idea of all that could be involved in what seemed a simple case of plagiarism!”

  “At some point,” Lucy said, “some clarification will have to take place. It can’t be avoided, can it, Professor Finch?”

  “Jennifer, please! I hate being ‘professored’; the mantle falls and the role must be played. This is a holiday from all our roles!” Her face had grown quite pink. “I cannot tell you what is going to happen. I wish I knew!”

  “It could all simmer down, I suppose,” Lucy said without conviction.

  “Not likely!” Maria said. “Not without some catharsis.”

  Jennifer smiled. “The terms of Greek tragedy may seem slightly exaggerated, but on the other hand, they may not. I would be inclined to fear that there will be an explosion.”

  “Jane might break down, for one thing,” Lucy said. “She is, from what I gather, being ostracized by the students. Like Henry I can only say that I feel desperately sorry for her.”

  “Yes …” Jennifer put her hands to her forehead, pressing them against it as if she too were feeling the strain. “Yes …”

  For the moment, they had reached the end of what there was to say. And everyone, no doubt, felt as Lucy did, exhausted by the complexity, longing only to be relieved of having to consider it for another moment. Would it be possible to change the subject? It was rather like a toothache; they had to keep feeling round the tooth, trying to diagnose the pain.

  “How do you know Jane has been ostracized?” Maria asked Lucy. “From what I hear she goes around as if nothing had happened, her nose in the air!”

  “We hear so many things …” Jennifer murmured.

  “One of my students came to me to tell me she and her friends felt that the student council was being emasculated.”

  “Naturally!” Maria snorted. “Of course!”

  “Whew, that was a tough nut to crack. How did you crack it?” Jack asked with the greatest interest. “If I am not being indiscreet, or merely intoxicated?”

  “I told her that the council should call on the President and present their case to him … and I tried to make her see the other side, Carryl’s side, a little. Was that wrong, I wonder?”

  “You see!” Maria said triumphantly. “The most natural human relationships are being poisoned at the roots, just as I said. A professor hesitates to be honest with a troubled student who asks for help. Is this education?” She rose clumsily to her feet, to stand like an alarming slightly-larger-than-life-size goddess, and glared at them all.

  “Poor Blake,” Jack murmured to himself. “When the whole business stinks like a piece of rotten meat in a garbage can, when the maggots are at it, it will finally reach him, and he will have to deal with it.”

  “My guess is,” Jennifer said quietly, “that Blake knows pretty well what is going on. Blake is no fool. I don’t suppose any of you were in chapel yesterday, but I was—Blake chose to speak on the text ‘O sancta simplicitas!’ Jane is hardly a saint, but still some of those who were so eagerly bringing faggots to the fire may have stopped to think twice.”

  “Good old Blake!” Jack gave a shout of happy laughter. “Occasionally the Unitarian Minister comes out in a rush, I almost said ‘rash.’ So he, at least, is on the side of the angels,” he said, chuckling again, and giving Maria a teasing glance.

  “Your angel, maybe, not mine,” she said bitterly. “No doubt Carryl Cope had a little talk with him.”

  Henry came back from the kitchen with a new supply of martinis just as Lucy caught Jack’s look of icy dislike of his wife.

  “Maria,” he said. “It is time we went home. Thank you, Henry, but we really must leave this pleasant gathering before the explosion we have foretold happens right here.”

  “Ah!” Maria said, her eyes blazing. “He is angry. At last, he is angry!”

  “Shut up, Maria!” Jack pushed her roughly toward the door. The gesture, so violent for him, was shocking.

  “I won’t be pushed out!” Maria cried, struggling. For a second it looked as if they might fall.

  “Don’t you think,” Jennifer dominated them without raising her voice and without moving, “we might all sit down and try to achieve a calmer climate before we part? ‘Teach me to heare, Mermaides singing, Or to keep off envies stinging.…’ Do sit down, Jack dear. We cannot let you go in anger.”

  She was irresistible enough to stop the lightning as it flashed out. And Lucy longed to ask, What is your power, you so detached, you so gentle, you so subtly intelligent, you spinster held in thrall by your mother, yet, to us, safety and a continuous act of grace, the refuge of every one of our tormented minds—what is your power? But though the martinis might bring out hostility in the most reserved of men, they did not loosen the social bonds to the point where such deep feeling could be spoken.

  Jack sat down again, so did Maria. But Lucy was dismayed to see that tears poured down from those defiant eyes; the most natural person among them was weeping uncontrollably.

  “It is h-h-hell,” she said. “Henry, give me another drink!”

  “Your wish is my command,” Henry said, arriving with his jug like a messenger a little too late with his message.

  “Only, I have lost my glass.”

  “Maria, darling, please …” Jack handed his wife a new glass with a gesture as gentle and loving as his earlier one had been brutal.

  “I feel mildly intoxicated,” Jennifer announced, “a state my mother will not condone, and quite rightly. But it is a state that moves me to speak of Carryl. Our dear and noble Maria is suffering before our eyes, and may not this suffering spring in part from a—perhaps—I do feel tentative here—partial understanding of what Carryl Cope is, as a human being. And how she has become what she is? Am I speaking out of turn?” She turned to Jack with a luminous smile.

  “Please go on,” he said.

  “I simply hate her.” Maria spoke thickly through her tears.

  “Yet you do not inhabit opposite poles of the universe of the soul. You have a great deal in common, you know.”

  “I—and Carryl Cope!” The tone was pure disdain.

  “You and Carryl Cope. I read you, Maria, though perhaps I am—as they say—crazy, as an undisciplined passionate nature. In this occasionally fossilized atmosphere, you burn like a great exploding star. We are grateful. Carryl Cope is also a passionate nature, only one that has been severely disciplined.”

  “She has always had things her own way,” said Maria, not softened.

  “This is a small puddle and she is a big frog in it,” Jennifer granted with one of her swallowed smiles. “But how is this kind of power achieved, would you guess?”

  “By being Olive Hunt’s pet, for one thing.”

  “No, Maria!” Jack flushed a furious red.

  “Maria is only saying aloud what a great many people think, Jack. Please let me go on to the end of these probably irrelevant remarks.”

  “By all means.”

  “Are you aware that Carryl is one of perhaps five living historians of the pre-Renaissance who amounts to anything? Do you know, Maria, for instance, that she has been translated into Persian, Arabic, Japanese? If she had been a man instead of a woman …”

  “As she obviously should have been,” Debby broke in.

  “That is possible. If she had been, there is no doubt that she would have been given the Haskins Chair at Harvard. Ten years ago Carryl faced the fact that she would stay here.”

  “At Harvard she would have been one of many big frogs—it might have taught her not to be so arrogant,” Maria challenged.

  Lucy had listened with increasing nervousness; the air was becoming too charged for Jennifer’s subtle means to subdue, and she felt forced now to commit herself, to take a stand. “I must say I don’t see the arrogance. She is a dedicated teacher, one senses, and it must be rather rare t
o find someone who can command two fields as she does. I suppose it must have caused her considerable conflict, one way and another. But why do people feel so bitterly about Olive Hunt? Why do you?” She turned to Maria now. “I should have thought this was a private matter.”

  For once Jennifer launched into speech without a second’s hesitation. “Whatever Olive has done for Carryl has been repaid in full. Olive is an old woman now and it is she who has become dependent and demanding.”

  “Besides,” Jack said with icy emphasis, “it happens to be a real relationship. The fact is that they love each other and have done so for twenty years. Beyond our recognition of that fact, I quite agree with Lucy, it is none of our damned business.”

  “Well,” the adamant Maria pursued her course, “the question was, where does she get her power? You can’t tell me that Olive Hunt’s money has nothing to do with it—or that in the case of Jane Seaman the fact that Olive can choose to leave her money elsewhere may have influenced ‘poor Blake,’ as you call him.”

  There was a second’s pause when they all realized that even Jennifer was powerless to prevent the explosion.

  “What you need,” Jack said, getting up violently, “is a good spanking!”

  “If so, you are hardly the man to administer it.”

  The moment was so naked and painful that Lucy did not know where to look. Jennifer rose to her feet. “Perhaps it is time we retired to our separate lairs,” she said. “I do not think, dear Jack, that Maria needs a spanking. She is too unhappy.”

  A great sob burst from the recumbent figure at her back. “Don’t leave us, Jennifer. Don’t go …”

  “My dear, my mother is now in the middle of writing down in her still-elegant hand a prepared speech of recrimination which she will deliver when I get back over half an hour later than I had promised.”

  “Not really?” Lucy found this statement nearly impossible to believe. “Are you serious, Jennifer?”

  “Perfectly serious. Come, Jack, take me home, will you? You can come back and pick Maria up later …”

  When they had left, the room looked disorganized as if the focussing center had fallen away. Debby got up and began to empty ashtrays and take the dirty glasses out. Henry, who had been very quiet, sat down and looked nervously at Maria, who was blowing her nose in silent withdrawal and grief.

  “However did Jennifer Finch become what she is?” Lucy mused aloud, more to herself than to anyone else.

  “Some people are born wise, I guess,” Henry said.

  “No one is born wise,” Maria sat up. “What she must have endured from that dreadful old woman, I cannot imagine!”

  “But there must be something,” Lucy said, glad they had stumbled on a change of subject, “some redeeming quality …”

  Maria’s eyes were flashing again. “Let me give you an instance of what Mrs. Finch is like: she is arthritic, you know, and eats like a pig so she is very heavy. Last year she fell, and Jennifer had to call the police to help lift her into bed—it was late at night. Naturally Jennifer was anxious and got up several times to see that her mother was all right. So when, the next morning, Mrs. Finch announced that she had not slept a wink, Jennifer made the mistake of telling her that she had looked in once or twice and found her fast asleep. At this, the old woman rose up in a fury and shouted, ‘I will not be looked at by people I own, while I am asleep!’”

  “Whew!” Henry rubbed his hand across his forehead.

  “So that golden detachment has been bought dearly,” Lucy said, thinking aloud. “Actual slavery—for that is what it amounts to—yet inner freedom.”

  “No,” Maria answered, “not perfect inner freedom. Jennifer is detached about everything except this one thing. There she is frozen into the ethos of her generation.”

  The post-martini exhaustion was setting in. “Human relations …” Lucy gave a sigh.

  It fell into the silence and stayed there.

  “It is not Jack’s fault. It is mine,” Maria said suddenly. “I am a pig.”

  “Dear Maria,” Lucy felt it strongly, “you are such a darling!”

  “I am not a darling. I am a disgusting pig. I am devoured by jealousy of that impossible woman. I hate it that Jack admires her. I always have and I always will.”

  “So the old record is still playing, is it?” Jack stood in the doorway, hostile, fatally assuming that what he had heard was the whole truth.

  “No, Jack.” Lucy got up and went to him. “No, no!” She wondered if she were shouting, and she felt that she could not make him hear. “Maria is sorry. That’s what she was saying.”

  “I’m not sorry!” Maria hurled the words out. And the dangerous spiral, which might have been broken if only Jack had come in a second sooner, twirled itself up again toward misunderstanding and rage.

  “Sorry or not, you are coming home now!” They did not offer to drop Lucy off on the way.

  “Stay and have some scrambled eggs,” Debby said, when she and Henry came back from the farewells, hand in hand.

  “I ought to go. I must pack and do a thousand things.…” But inertia had taken over and Lucy allowed herself to be persuaded. She felt they had all been in the power of a storm, blown hither and thither on currents they could not control. It had been exhausting and, while Debby could be heard breaking eggs in the kitchen and talking to herself, Lucy lay down full-length on the day-bed.

  “I feel completely bewildered,” Henry said. “What on earth is going on?”

  “The quiet groves of academe,” Lucy murmured, “the safe groves of academe.”

  CHAPTER 12

  As always when Lucy had had several drinks, she found herself thinking of John, longing for his physical presence, longing to come swinging along a path with his hand in hers as she had seen Henry and Debby do (though John and she had known little enough of such innocent communion), to end the fierce conflict and misery as, no doubt, Jack and Maria would do eventually, in bed. Exhaustion, liquor, the unclosed wound of separation—it was all very well to understand why she was weeping now she was alone in her room, but it did not help. She lay in the dark and felt the cold, comfortless tears slide down her cheeks and into her ears.

  It was terribly startling then to hear a sharp rap at the door. In the second that Lucy thought, I can pretend I am not here, she was on her feet, had snapped on the light and opened the door, to be confronted by Jane Seaman, in a trench coat, hatless, and—Lucy suspected—drunk. She looked as if she might fall.

  “Take off your coat, Jane, sit down,” Lucy said automatically. “I was lying on my bed, trying to get up the energy to undress.”

  “You said if I needed help …” She was still standing on the threshold just inside the door, leaning against it. “I’ve got to get out of here,” she said, shaking her head back and forth like an animal trying to shake off a halter.

  Lucy went right over to her and held her, as she staggered forward, then led her to the daybed and helped her out of the coat.

  “Why don’t I make us some coffee? It won’t be very good, hot water out of the tap, but it might sober us up. I’ve been to a cocktail party, and could do with a little coffee myself.”

  Jane said nothing at all, just sat there, leaning forward, hugging herself, while Lucy busied herself with Nescafe and paper cups. She sensed that, for the moment, it was best to ask nothing.

  “Here you are, Jane. Drink this.”

  “I feel sick.” The voice was thick and muffled, not like Jane’s at all.

  “Yes … well, just take it easy.” Lucy poured cold water on a handkerchief and brought it to press against Jane’s forehead.

  “Thank you. That feels good.”

  After a moment Jane shakily sipped at the coffee, then drank the whole cup down in a swallow and crushed the empty cup in her hand. “Miss Winter,” she said, “I’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Yes, I know.” Lucy was afraid of saying the wrong thing; her instinct was to treat Jane as a small sick child, wrap her up in a
blanket, console her, but this was not possible. The slight figure sitting there, one lank piece of hair drooping over her face, had not relaxed for a moment. “But there is the holiday. Are you going home?”

  “Home? I don’t have a home. My mother’s in Europe and my father wouldn’t want me around. He’s just married again.”

  An idea flashed through Lucy’s mind … ask her home with me. But it was risky, and she decided to wait and see. “Will you stay here then?”

  “I suppose so.” The tone was flat, as if Jane had come to the end of feeling. She glanced up through her hair defensively. “I only got drunk because I was with such a jerk.”

  Lucy glanced at her watch. “You got rid of him rather early, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.” The sly smile came and went. “I won’t be pawed by a disgusting rich boy who thinks because he has a Thunderbird that he is irresistible.”

  “Quite. I do see,” and Lucy laughed. “My poor girl, you have had rather a lot to take lately.”

  “I feel like a rat in a cage,” Jane said, hugging herself with both arms and rocking back and forth.

  “What would you like to do?”

  Again Jane shook her head in that obsessive gesture, back and forth, back and forth. “I don’t know. Get away.”

  “You wouldn’t get away from yourself.” Lucy winced at the smugness of this as soon as she had uttered it.

  “I’d get away from here.”

  Lucy wondered what Carryl Cope was doing about this state of affairs, but didn’t dare ask. It must be assumed that she had taken on some responsibility for Jane.

  “You can’t imagine what it is like,” Jane said, between her teeth. She looked as if she were full of poison. “Whenever I go into a room, everyone shuts up like a clam; I’m treated like a criminal.”

  “You would rather have taken the punishment—Oh, I can understand that! But, you see, it would have meant being unable to finish college. That is what Professor Cope wanted to prevent at all costs.”

  “Maybe she didn’t know the cost. Maybe she was only protecting her own skin, not mine.”