The Oasis: A Novel (Neversink)

by Mccarthy, Mary

  But the trespassers, as it turned out, had already left the meadow with only the crushed berries in the deep tracks of their tires to show that they had ever been there. It was almost a disappointment to the colonists to find, when they began to pick, no signs of a previous comer; the meadow, with its scattering of late white strawberry flowers, had a look of undisturbed serenity—had the intruders not been seen picking, no one could have believed in their reality; clearly, they had been scared off in time. The excitement of the past half-hour quickly assumed a dreamlike character; the members kept looking back at the car tracks to assure themselves that there had indeed been a danger, and gradually the absence of the strangers began to be felt as a positive embarrassment. Now that the crop was secure, no one felt satisfied with a victory that fell short of an ethical triumph. “Such a fuss over a few little berries,” Eva kept exclaiming, as she measured the contents of the baskets. “The big ones are so much nicer—what a pity we couldn’t have had them!” For once, she was not corrected. “Now, Mom,” said Joe, as she spat a hull disdainfully from her lips, but he was aware suddenly of a comradeship with her that put the others in the cold. Only the children picked with any real enthusiasm. “Those bad people tried to steal our strawberries,” a five-year-old was chanting. “Hush,” said his mother quickly, looking over her shoulder as though the ghost of the trespassers were lurking off in the pine shadows, ready to take offense. The prize was awarded to Katy in an atmosphere of forced congratulation; she was known to be the best picker, but her proficiency today seemed immoderate.

  It was not at first openly acknowledged that the picnic had been spoiled; the morale of the colony was too bruised and shaken by the encounter, but as the lunch hampers were opened and the sharp red wine began to circulate, the members drew apart from each other and, forming small circles, lowered their heads and voices, to allot blame and forgiveness and to moralize on the event. A phase of the colony had ended, everyone privately conceded; something had been lost that was perhaps an essential ingredient—a man can live without self-respect, but a group shatters, dispersed by the ugliness it sees reflected in itself. The distaste felt by some, Susan and Danny Furnas in particular, was so acute that they questioned the immediate validity of staying on in a colony where such a thing could take place. The fault, in their view, lay with no single person, but with the middle-class composition of the colony, which, feeling itself imperiled, had acted instinctively, as an organism, to extrude the riffraff from its midst. The fact that the incident had occurred spontaneously and almost against the will of the very members who had taken part in it was, to their minds, the most discouraging feature. “It happened too fast for them,” Danny’s wife put in excusingly. “They didn’t have time to think. We should make it a rule that nobody can take it on himself to execute colony business.” “Baby, you can never make rules to cover such situations, that’s the whole trouble,” said Danny. “Nice people like these,” he waved a chubby finger, “are always all right, unless you take them off guard. Let’s admit, to start with, that these folks have learned a lesson. If, in a couple of weeks, we get some raspberry pickers, you’ll see Katy or Cynthia running out with a silver dish—’Would you care to use this?’ ” he mimicked Cynthia’s accent.

  Susan and Helen laughed. But a little frown of anxious perplexity wrinkled the fair, thin skin of Susan’s forehead. “Still, Danny, that would be an improvement. Don’t you think so?” she asked with her usual after-flurry of alarm. Danny’s lower lip protruded thoughtfully. “Y-es,” he conceded. “I suppose you could say that. But something else will come along, something we can’t predict—if we could, you could make a rule for it,” he affectionately poked his wife, “and the organism, unprepared, will react to it according to its own rules, the ones it was born with. And then we will have another mass repentance.” He yawned and sank back in the grass. “Let’s hope that our next visitor will be an escaped convict.”

  “Let us ask ourselves why we feel bad,” said Leo equably to Macdermott. “True, we behaved unsociably; that can’t be denied. But aren’t we being a little Pharisaical in taking all the blame to ourselves? Supposing these pickers had been nice, co-operative people, and when Katy went up to talk to them, they had picked a few berries and left—how would we feel? We would feel fine, eh?” Macdermott uncertainly nodded. “Now suppose we had let them bully us into giving up the berries, how would we feel?” “Bad,” admitted Macdermott. “So therefore we feel bad because the pickers are bad people, is that right?” “Yes,” said Macdermott. “What follows?” “Why, nothing,” said Leo. “Let’s just get it clear what we are depressed about.” Macdermott fitted a cigarette into his holder and sat thoughtfully looking out toward the black range of the Taconics, following with his mind’s eye the Appalachian system down the rocky spinal column of Eastern North America, touching the anthracite ribs of Pennsylvania, the bituminous back of West Virginia, the dim extremities of the Great Smokies, and his heart, as he smoked, grew large with a pure and impersonal regret.

  Katy and Preston Norell sat with Bill and Irene, conversing sparsely and coldly, and getting disagreeably drunk as the jug passed between them. They felt that the colony was on the verge of dissolution unless some tremendous effort were made at once to save it, but their imaginations were unequal to formulating what this should be. Irene looked to her teacher for a sign that she might follow, and, failing to receive one, slumped into a childish melancholy. She set her thin lips and ceased to speak altogether, blaming Katy, the colony, and everyone older than herself for their inadequacy to her personal standards; all the sympathy for the disaster she was envisioning, she lavished youthfully on herself. The faint wrinkles by Katy’s eyes, the few threads of grey in her brown hair, presented themselves in this northern noonday with an ugly distinctness. Irene studied them without pity, as if they were a moral blemish her teacher had been concealing from her and which she now took a mordant satisfaction in unmasking. “We’re going for a walk,” she suddenly announced, pulling herself to her feet, and brushing her skirt fastidiously. She took Bill’s arm and they strode off on their long legs into the forest, leaving their dessert uneaten.

  Taub, perceiving that the Norells were alone, made his way slowly over to them. Restored to kindliness by the lunch he had eaten and by the assurances of the majority that there was nothing more to fear from the poachers, he felt a desire to make amends for his hastiness on the verandah and also to point the moral so aptly illustrated by the incident. No sense of reproach remained in him. “Human nature, Katy,” he remonstrated playfully, wagging a finger at her. “That’s the thing you leave out.” “Mine, you mean, or those pickers?” asked Katy, sitting up. “Both!” enunciated Taub, with the air of a master theorist. “Force,” he declared softly. “That’s what we all understand. You have it in you, Katy,” he continued, almost in a whisper, and with a hypnotic stare of his black eyes. “You gave yourself away on the porch.” Taub, too, was a little drunk and was swaying slightly on his feet, as he leaned caressingly down toward her, his eyes damp and glittering, like a magnetic confessor of women. Katy felt slightly repelled. “You had to use force to get rid of them—admit it for once, Katy.” He leaned still closer to her, urgent, masterful, persuasive.

  “You conceive the problem incorrectly,” she declared, straightening herself up and articulating with that unnatural distinctness that betrays that the speaker has been drinking. Her mind, however, was lucid. “If the problem is to get rid of the berry pickers, it follows that force is the answer—to that extent, you are right. Ultimately, it will have to be resorted to, if they will not respond to moral coercion, which is simply force still withheld. But,” she went on, growing more excited, “supposing there is no problem, but simply an event: the berry pickers are in the meadow; the sun is in the sky. If you do not wish to eject them, there is no problem, there is only an occurrence.”

  Taub shrugged; he did not understand what she was getting at. “Do you know why the saints and the moral philosoph
ers call for a rule of abstinence and chastity?” she asked eagerly, as if this question had been a perpetual source of difficulty to her listener. Taub shrugged again. “I’ve never been sympathetic to it either,” admitted Katy, “but just now I’ve seen what they mean. The body is not evil, and the body’s objects are not evil—the strawberries are ethically neutral. But if these corporeal things become the object of a mental desire, the result is an impurity, which is evil. A mental desire of material things is always bad—sex becomes pornography; hunger becomes greed or gourmandism—you follow me?” Taub nodded succinctly. “The mind, properly speaking, must desire only its own objects, love, formal beauty, virtue. But if the mind is not trained to distinguish its objects from the body’s, it confuses the two. It constructs the whim for the strawberries into an ethical demand; it appears, then, to the mind that it needs the strawberries and is therefore morally justified in any action it may take to secure them. But since the strawberries are a material thing, they can, in the last analysis, only be secured by force, which is physical necessity. If we had been hungry,” she added, “there would have been nothing inconsonant in putting up a fight for the strawberries. However, since our desire for them was mental, one strawberry would have served as well as a hundred, and there should have been no need of disputing possession, for two minds can hold an object simultaneously.”

  Taub ruminated for a moment. The strawberries of Carpathia-Ruthenia stirred restlessly in his imagination, as though to say, Yes, we are here. “There is something in what you say,” he remarked cautiously. “Asceticism,” continued Katy, “is simply an extreme method of accomplishing this necessary separation—you browbeat and degrade one half. To train the mind is more difficult,” she interjected with a flash of sadness. “The problem for the colony is not to confuse its material triumphs with the triumph of its idea. There is nothing here,” she gestured vaguely into the blue distance, “which the colony cannot do without. That is what we should be concerned to demonstrate. We’ve shown that we can do without cars and electricity, but we ought also to show that we can do without our butter churns and oil lamps and go back to washing-machines and Mixmasters, if it seems necessary. The colony must not be identified with its implements.” Taub frowned at the last word, which recalled him to the sphere of his ascendancy. “Historically,” he stated, “man is shaped by his economy and his environment.” “Then let us get out of history,” retorted Katy rather sharply. Will’s face abruptly hardened. “Try it,” he suggested with a fleeting laugh. “Know yourself, Katy,” he advised her, bringing a large hand down on her shoulder. “You forget that one little thing, the first rule of your philosophers.” He teetered heavily toward her, and Preston, who had been half-listening, looked up in sudden surprise. He was not especially interested in her conversation with Taub, for he knew that Katy was sad and that whenever she was sad she had many new ideas and tried to reform herself and him also. He considered her, on the whole, to be well enough as she was, being himself a little weary of this quest for perfection, which only meant upsetting their habits for a short time and buying, usually, several new objects which would gradually fall into disrepair. This time, he had begun to suppose, she would be asking to send for a prayer-rug. Glancing up at her, however, he felt a quick rush of uxorious pride and reassurance, for her face was lively and sensible, and as he watched her, she commenced to smile broadly. “I?” she said to Taub. “I’m the worst of all. Who did you suppose I was talking about?” Taub gave a short grunt, but, not wishing to appear disconcerted, he decided to treat this as an admission wrung from her by his thumbscrew of analysis. He hastily became genial. “Don’t flatter yourself, Katy,” he said kindly. “You’re just like everybody else.” And imparting to these final words the sonority of a black benediction, he left her, before she should use the occasion to interpose any more of her thoughts.

  Katy lay back on the meadow grass and enlaced her fingers with Preston’s. For some curious reason, she felt suddenly happy and contented. Her conscience no longer troubled her, for in this luminous interlude between drunkenness and sobriety she had divined that her hunger for goodness was an appetency not of this world and not to be satisfied by actions, which would forever cheat its insistencies. She recognized, with a new equanimity, that her behavior would never suit her requirements, not to mention the requirements of others; and while she did not propose to sink, therefore, into iniquity or to institutionalize her frailties in the manner of the realist faction, still, seen in this unaccustomed light, the desire to embody virtue appeared a shallow and vulgar craving, the refracted error of a naïve and acquisitive culture which imagined that there was nothing—beauty, honor, titles of nobility, charm, youth, happiness—which persistency could not secure. And the colony itself, as she considered it, with its energy, its uncertainty, its euphoria, its cycles of recession and recovery, seemed also to have been prismatically imaging the galvanic world down below—in the social field, it had been treating itself as a kind of factory or business for the manufacture and export of morality. The spirits of the colonists rose and fell with the market-quotation of the enterprise; at the moment, its stock was very low. These crises, she foresaw, would shake the colony to pieces, unless a new pattern were discovered.

  Ultimately, Utopia would fail; that was to be expected. But it might survive for many months or for years, if the production of a commodity more tangible than morality could be undertaken. Morality did not keep well; it required stable conditions; it was costly; it was subject to variations; and the market for it was uncertain. Cheese, wine, books, glass, furniture—idly Katy’s mind considered the possibilities a factory might offer, certain that somewhere in this practical realm lay the colony’s true security. But she said nothing aloud, for it seemed to her presumptuous to come forward with a panacea. This was not her part. Moreover, it was still too early. Much remained yet to be suffered, many failures, many humiliations. The colony must settle like a house onto its foundations, creaking and groaning and sighing. Certain visitors must leave it. In the warm sun her eyelids began to droop. Leo’s plan, she remembered; the pamphlet—half-starting up in fright and then sinking back, as she recalled that they had not yet betrayed it; not a day had elapsed since its proposal. The sun beat down on her eyelids, making a red darkness, and suddenly, on the screen of her vision, a scene from the future was projected. She saw Jim Haines, whom she had been missing, as she suddenly realized during the last hour of the picnic, dressed in his city tweed suit, walking in a pair of orange-brown shoes with a peculiar sidelong gait toward the shed; the light was grey—it was early in the morning. “Hello, there, Katy,” his voice mumbled as if directly into her ear. “Glad I came across you. Meant to mention it earlier. Martha and I are leaving.” And then immediately the rear of the Haines’ nondescript black car was disappearing bumpily up the driveway, the trunk partly open and a kiddie-coop tied with rope and a lumpy bag of laundry protruding. As Katy stood watching, endeavoring to call, “Stop,” the struggle for articulation brought her back to consciousness. She knew at once that she had been warned of a clear and present danger. Jim Haines was about to abandon them, like a sorely beset husband; the doubt, the hesitation, the scruple had worn out his stock of magnanimity. And yet if he went, all went; the man willing to be shown departed, having seen enough. She made a movement to rise to go to find him; appeasement, explanations, cajolery could hold him a little longer. Her husband’s fingers, squeezing her own gently, deterred her, as if sentient of her thoughts. Haines could not be held; equivocal, slippery, indeterminate, the citizen of open opinions evaded the theoretician’s grasp and returned stealthily to his habits, as if to a gentleman’s club. On the wide canvas of the meadow, crowded with bright, grotesque types, the apostles of a Brueghelesque vision, eating, drinking, disputing, elongated or vastly swollen, she saw the average man stealing out of one corner of the picture, a guilty finger to his lips. And rising apologetically from nearer the center, Joe, an itinerant harvester, was sharpening his scythe,
tarrying briefly before the journey to new fields of conquest. Who would remain at the banquet? Drowsily, she began to count on her fingers: Macdermott, Susan, Francis; Preston, Danny, Leo. Taub? she asked herself; then confusing her fingers with her husband’s she lost track of the number and assentingly fell asleep.

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