The Players Come Again

by Amanda Cross

  I

  “In spite of the limitations imposed by the nature of the evidence, certain characteristic traits of Minoan religion do emerge in contrast to the Greek . . . And the observation must finally be added that all reference to sexual life, all phallic symbols, such as abound and are so aggressive in numerous religions—including the historic religion of Greece—are in Minoan art completely missing.

  II

  “The culture, as many have noted, was apparently of a matriarchal type. The grace and elegance of the ladies in their beautifully flounced skirts, generous decolleté, pretty coiffures, and gay bandeaux, mixing freely with the men, in the courts, in the bull ring—lovely, vivid, and vivacious, gesticulating, chattering, even donning masculine athletic belts to go somersaulting dangerously over the horns and backs of bulls—represent a civilized refinement that has not been often equalled since.

  III

  “There were no walled cities in Crete before the coming of the Greeks. There is little evidence of weapons. Battle scenes of kingly conquest play no role in the setting of the style. The tone is of general luxury and delight, a broad participation by all classes in a genial atmosphere of well-being, and the vast development of a profitable commerce by sea, to every port of the archaic world and even—boldly—to regions far beyond.”

  “I begin to get your drift,” Anne said. “And what does Sylvia Horwitz have to add? I don’t mean to sound impatient with your scholarship, but hadn’t we better get to sorting the pages?”

  “Certainly. This is just one sentence about Evans. I’ll read it to you: ‘However, [Evans] noted, it was more likely that the fabled labyrinth got its name from the word labrys, or double axe, the symbolic weapon of the Minoan Mother Goddess.’ ”

  “Fascinating. Are you planning to provide us with a double ax for the job ahead? I don’t mean to sound impatient, Kate, but even if the double ax were a two-edged sword, we’d still have to get the damned pages into some sort of order.”

  “True. Back to work, as you so wisely suggest. All I’m trying to point out in my tedious way is that the Greeks turned Crete from a matriarchal to a patriarchal culture, not only in fact but in memory. They rewrote its history, which is to say its myths. We may be able to figure out the order of Gabrielle’s pages if we have a clue, a thread if you’ll excuse the expression, through the labyrinth of her ideas.”

  “Which is no longer a labyrinth but a double ax.”

  “And which probably never was a labyrinth in Foxx’s sense, but rather a clue to a nature and culture unknown to patriarchal Greece. I don’t necessarily believe a word of this, you understand, but I think we must recognize what was being said after Evans’s great discovery at Cnossus.”

  “And what was the Minotaur, then, a Greek interpretation of something or other, like what for instance?”

  “The suggestion seems to be that the ‘bull’ gods were the consorts of the queens of Cnossus, and the whole story about Pasiphae was just another male version of making women either monsters of lust or pure queens of heaven.”

  “If you say so,” Anne said. “How about sorting pages; I’m beginning to think you academics would rather sit around talking than actually do anything.”

  “Of course,” Kate said. “What else is life for? All right, I’m coming. If you will just let me quote John Maynard Keynes, I promise to work silently and with great diligence until ordered to stop.”

  “Oh, God,” Anne sighed. “All right.” She leaned dramatically back in her chair—they were still around the breakfast table and the garden, like Kate’s ideas, seemed to summon them to less arduous work—and smiled to lift the sting from her words.

  “Keynes said,” Kate quoted, staring at the ceiling, “ ‘Both when they are right and when they are wrong, [ideas] are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.’ ”

  “I’ll think about it,” Anne said crisply, rising to her feet. “Pages first, ideas and double axes later. Not,” she added, patting Kate encouragingly on the shoulder, “that I don’t admit your ideas, or Evans’s or Campbell’s or even Keynes’s, may prove exactly the clue we need in the end.”

  They worked through the hours, reading to each other from pages, trying to sort out the chapters, recognizing Foxx’s order and, where it seemed in any way appropriate, following it. Kate could not be constrained altogether from making comments and tossing out observations—such as that it was too bad that Gabrielle had felt the need to follow Foxx’s order, but doubtless when one was reinventing one had to build on what was there, as the Greeks had built on and reinvented the myths and stories of Crete—but Anne, torn between ignoring Kate and bawling her out, finally agreed to allow her one comment per hour when they took time out to lie down flat on the floor, stretching and relaxing their aching backs. Kate agreed to this stringency, saying she found the discipline of being allowed only one remark an hour salutary.

  Their progress was slow, dogged, and discouraging. They were weary, besieged by shooting pains, and visited by the gremlins who attack those engaged in long and arduous tasks with doubts of their having any value or being in any way worth the effort. But by the end of a week’s persistent work, with lunch ignored and dinner each evening at the pub until they both announced themselves unable ever again to contemplate a Scotch egg, they declared their task, in its first stage, complete. Before them, on the sitting-room floor, once they could summon the energy to read it, was at least an approximation of Gabrielle’s cherished writings.

  Chapter Ten

  “You read it through to yourself,” Anne said. “You’re the one who’s going to have to edit it.”

  It was the morning after the last page had been tentatively assigned to a chapter, and the chapters put in what seemed a probable order. Nothing was certain, but Kate felt some confidence that they had come close to a reconstruction of Gabrielle’s novel. For yes, clearly, it was a novel.

  “I could read it to you,” Kate suggested, “and we could both decide on whether or not we find the story coherent. Or you could read it to me; or we could read it to each other.”

  “I’ll leave it to you now, if you don’t mind,” Anne said, staring into the garden. “That is, if you have accepted the editing job together with the writing of the biographical portrait. I know it must seem odd to you, my not being more curious after all this work, but I have a strong sense of wanting to hand it over to you and let you cope. I want to quit thinking about it now. I look forward with great eagerness to reading the book when it emerges, but I really don’t want to deal with it anymore. No doubt a psychologist could tell me why if I really cared to know, but I don’t. I hope I haven’t offended you.”

  “No offense in the world,” Kate said. Strangely enough, she understood Anne’s feelings without understanding why, a case of muddled conviction. “But before I fly home with the manuscript, leaving you to have a decent vacation in this nice house, there is one more task I need your help with.” The cat was sitting before the French windows, blinking in the sun, and there seemed promise of good times to be had here without the endless shuffling of papers.

  “What task?”

  “We need to make copies,” Kate said, patting the stack of papers beside her. “The thought of losing this or, worse, having to start sorting again, is not to be contemplated.”

  “Probably the English have copying shops the way we do.”

  “Probably, but we can’t use them. We’ve got to do this ourselves, by hand.”

  “Are you planning to buy your own copying machine and leave it as a house present for Lavinia?”

  “If we have to. I rather thought of calling Reed and asking him to locate a law office in London with a copying machine which we might use on Saturday or Sunday. I did think of asking Simon Pearl
stine to ask a publisher or agent here for the favor, but I realized I don’t want to explain to Simon on a transatlantic basis what it is I’m copying and what has happened to his cherished idea of a biography. That sort of thing goes down better face-to-face and with the material to hand. Will you help with the copying?”

  “I can’t think of a reason to refuse, though I would if I could. How many copies do you want to make and what do you plan to do with them?”

  “I’ve gathered you’d rather not have Gabrielle’s papers, even photocopied, on your hands at this point. I don’t know why but I have the sense that you’ve made the right decision. That means that I shall keep one copy, mail one copy to myself in New York, send one copy by some other means to another address (yet to be determined) in New York, and leave the original here with a law firm or again in a bank, whatever Reed advises. I’m rather into taking advice at this moment, and, as you can see, I’m doubling my protection, outwitting even the most malevolent intentions of ill chance. Also, I’m sure Reed will feel as I do that the original belongs here, at least until you and Nellie decide what to do with it. It may, if the publication of Gabrielle’s novel is a success, bring quite a bit of money when auctioned off.”

  “I know,” Anne said. “You’re scattering so many copies because you don’t wish to give the gods any chance to do easy mischief. That doesn’t sound any more bonkers to me than to you.”

  Anne smiled, and Kate knew it was going to be all right, that she and Anne were still on the same side, that Anne was still a friend and likely to remain so. So Kate went off to consult Reed by long distance, and to ask him, as she liked to put it, to pull strings to get her what she wanted. Reed had often pointed out that he didn’t pull strings, he called in favors, but Kate found that view of things uncongenial. She knew, nonetheless, that Reed was good to people, generous with his help, and many considered it a pleasure to help him in his turn, even for the sake of his nosey-Parker wife.

  Reed’s strings were as effective as ever. He found a law firm willing to lend out its photocopying machine and happy to keep in safety the original manuscript once a copy had been made. He suggested a New York law firm to whom a copy might be sent, and urged Kate to carry the remaining copy home with her on the airplane, contemplating it the while. He would meet her at JFK Airport when instructed about her flight. He looked forward to seeing her very soon. “Mutual,” Kate assured him, wanting very much to get all this over, to go home to Reed and a life that had come to seem charmingly calm and sane, with most of its activities not taking place on the floor.

  Meanwhile, she and Anne trundled off late the next afternoon, each of them carrying half the manuscript with the wonderfully mad conviction that if one was run over, at least half of Gabrielle’s endeavors would survive, unbloodied, unscattered. Kate had been told by older colleagues of the days when there was no photocopying at all, and the single typescript of a precious dissertation, representing perhaps a decade’s work, would be carted about by its frenzied creator. One might have made a carbon copy, but, too often, one hadn’t. Those were indeed parlous times, here repeated at least for a few hours more. After tedious hours of feeding Gabrielle’s pages into the copying machine, Kate would be ready to leave London and Anne to their mutual enjoyment.

  But at the last minute, a reprieve marvelously presented itself, first in the form of an English lawyer who knew and admired Reed, was delighted to meet Kate, honored to meet Anne, eager to be helpful. He had work and would remain in his office until they finished: he would then see to the proper stowing away of the original manuscript. Meanwhile, the copy machine operator, Mr. Martin, known to all as Phil, was here to help them feed the pages into the modern copier which not only could make four copies at a time but could collate and staple them into the bargain.

  The expressions of both Kate and Anne, who had been beaming with gratitude, changed to alarmed apprehension. Telling Reed about it afterward, Kate saw how funny their two horrified expressions must have been, but at the time she and Anne feared, sharply and simultaneously, Phil Martin’s chance to read Gabrielle’s words. The English lawyer, whose name they had in their anxiety missed the first time and felt unable, from awkwardness, to have repeated, sensed the reason for their alarm. He ushered them into this office, each of them still hugging to her chest her half of the manuscript, and shut the door.

  “Don’t worry about Phil’s having any interest in your manuscript,” he said. “Phil wouldn’t be interested unless it were about a soccer game or a rock group and probably not even then. He’s happy to make overtime staying to help you, but you probably couldn’t pay him to read a word of what you have there, and between us, I’m not even sure that he could read much of it. Phil’s got a knack with machines, but for him the written language is something that had its place only in antediluvian times. If it isn’t electronic, mechanical, or athletic, Phil doesn’t trouble with it. Anyway, you can stay there with him while he makes his copies, and grab each sheet of the original as he removes it, if that will make you happy.”

  “You must wonder what this is all about,” Kate said. After all, he was an associate, perhaps a friend, of Reed’s, and one might be well advised to stop being the nervous editor and become a civilized woman and professor.

  “Reed told me enough to let me know what we are copying and keeping,” the lawyer said. “Go and have it copied, and I’ll be waiting here for the original when you’re done. Perhaps you would both like to have dinner with me?”

  “How kind,” Kate said, glancing over at Anne who shook her head. “I have to make a plane early tomorrow and Anne is rather tired, as we both are. But thank you for asking.”

  And they returned to Phil, impatiently awaiting their task which was keeping him after hours, however well paid. Kate and Anne placed the manuscript in proper order near to him—they had by now tentatively numbered the pages from beginning to end—and watched him work with a speed and efficiency that was quite breathtaking. Before their eyes, Gabrielle’s precious papers were transformed to something now readily available to anyone, now somehow part of the permanent record of the twentieth century’s last decade.

  Phil was careful, but once he grabbed a sheet a bit roughly, and they heard it slightly tear; they both gasped as though he had struck them. “Easy does it, love,” he said in an extraordinary accent but with a certain kindness. Clearly, he thought them two mad biddies, one old, the other getting there, carrying on about a heap of paper as though it were real money. Phil shrugged. Women much over the age of twenty held neither interest nor possibility for him: you paid him, he did his job, and on to the rear world.

  He finished with amazing speed. Anne had brought mailing envelopes for the copies destined for New York, one via the post office, the other via Kate. The original was carefully wrapped and handed over to the nice English lawyer, in whose office they made their farewells. Kate once again clutched her copy to her chest, but with less anxiety. They thanked the lawyer profusely, relief rendering their gratitude near to fulsome, and departed into the London evening.

  The first phase in the resurrection of Gabrielle’s papers was finished. Kate wondered if she had pictured it this way, not the copying machine, of course, but the first stages of the journey to publication. Anne, upon being asked, said she had imagined Gabrielle there the whole time Phil was carrying on, in spirit of course.

  “Of course,” Kate said, hailing a taxi which, by a miracle, was depositing a customer near them. After stowing their copies in the house and letting the cat out, they walked around for a final drink together at “their” Hampstead pub. Kate had offered a proper restaurant dinner, but Anne wanted to stick with the by-now-familiar routine, and Kate agreed with her. It would, in any case, be a considerable time before Kate ate another steak and kidney pie, to say nothing of a glass of bitter.

  As Kate and Anne drank and were having their final pub meal together, the London lawyer called Reed, catching him about to
retire, to report that all had gone well, they would guard the manuscript with their lives, but Kate had not quite been as anticipated. She seemed quiet, nervous, not at all the sort of person he had been led to expect, didn’t look as though she would say boo to a goose.

  “She’s never been in charge of an original manuscript before,” Reed said, laughing. “You must have dinner with us when next you’re in New York and meet her in her true form. It’s worth a transatlantic flight, I assure you.”

  “It’s a date,” the English lawyer said, practicing his Americanese.

  Kate treated herself to a first-class seat on her return. Sitting like a baby in a high chair, usually in alarming proximity to some overweight neighbor, had lost its appeal; she had also lost her faith in sufficiently light traffic to permit her to sleep in three adjoining seats, as on the outward journey. Alone, she relaxed and enjoyed the pleasant service, accepting a glass of champagne as they awaited the flight.

  “To Gabrielle,” she said, startling the stewardess, to whom she explained that this was a toast rather than a request or comment. The stewardess smiled, but Kate noticed her saying something to the steward, who served her from then on out. I must be turning into a typical batty traveler, she thought with some pleasure. So long as they left her to herself, she didn’t mind.

  Well before the airplane had filled up, taxied into the runway line and been assigned its order for takeoff, Kate had settled down with Gabrielle’s novel. She had adamantly restrained herself from any judgment, any careful contemplation of the novel, while she was in London, preferring to keep her attention on the physical task to hand. She would have to decide about the edition—whether or not she wanted to do it—and she would have to decide what to say to Simon Pearlstine. It was possible to imagine both delight and dismay as his logical reaction, and Kate wanted to be certain of her ground before she even broached the subject with him.