by Philip Wylie
To reconstruct the male attitude toward women. Destroy the films! Tear down the signboards with their flagrant bathing beauties! You’ve heard, of course, that many of them have already been smashed—burned—?”
“I’ve seen some, despoiled by bitter men.”
“Bitter? Why not pure, Bill?”
“It’s hard to explain,” Gaunt answered. “Where experience is absent. The sensations. The values. I mean to say, you’ve been brought up strictly. Except for the squeamish little self-sins of adolescence, you’ve lived the good life. Onanism and its needless guilt and then you married. Berthene is the only woman you ever knew. So how can I go about telling you other men feel differently, have the right to their different feelings?”
That question silenced the clergyman. A slow flush came in his cheeks; it deepened and spread until his face and neck were rosy. He made several abortive manual gestures and once or twice opened his wide, mobile lips to speak—only to purse them again. But at last, in a strained, feeble voice, far from his usual register, he began, “Bill, I never expected I would say to a living, breathing soul what I am about to trust you with at this moment.” He stopped there.
Gaunt took care to hide his surprise. “You don’t need to go any further, John. I understand.”
“You don’t!” It was a hoarse retort. “You take life at a different tempo, without hard, high standards like mine! You could never understand! Berthene—!” He broke off, glanced at the shining sky of midmorning and repeated the name. “Berthene was the choice of my parents. She possessed everything they regarded as suitable and desirable. A pious disposition and an excellent knowledge of the Lord’s Way and His Words.
Forcefulness. A good, sturdy body and abundant health for bearing and rearing children.
A determination to marry into the ministry or the missions; a life prepared for that. Even money; a really decent sum! She was the constant delight of my mother and father, the constant companion arranged for me by them. We plighted our troth when I was twenty and the happiness of my family seemed brighter to me than my own feelings, which partook of dubiety. We were married soon after and I went on through divinity school. I obtained a small parish. Just outside of Yonkers.”
Just outside of Yonkers, Gaunt thought. Anywhere else, the phrase might seem ridiculous. Here it was charged with wistfulness. Connauth went on, reaching out a supplicatory hand, putting it on Gaunt’s big, bony knee. “You have no idea how difficult this is to discuss, old man! There was a contralto in my choir, beautiful woman with long, golden hair, married to an utter no-account. Genial, fervent person, left alone in her small house most of the time, while her husband went on his traveling-salesman way, drinking and carousing. She called on me, for comfort. Berthene, I needn’t say, was above suspicion; such things never entered her head—then, or since. She was busy with church organizational work, busy with what, in all honesty, amounts to the politics of the church.
Busy, that is to say, with my advancement, or the hope and intent of advancing me.
Naturally, I gave the woman what comfort I could, of a spiritual nature. But there was an earthy streak in her that, I must confess, had a sinister appeal to me. Fed on my mind.
Invaded my meditations. Interfered with my abstractions. She was casual, for example, about dress. She would make a pastoral appointment and neglect to finish her household duties so I would find her, like as not, in a silken kimono—”
“Negligée,” Gaunt murmured.
“What? Yes. I needn’t carry the thing into an excess of detail. Though, once started, momentum does sweep you along. There came an evening when she phoned and left word with Berthene that she was ill. Indeed, she seemed to be. I found her in bed with a hot toddy for her disturbance. Nothing would do but I had one—it was an icy night.
How and when it happened to me—how I found myself with her, casting every modesty aside, all shame, all caution—saying things I did not know I knew to say—I cannot explain. My life since then has been a lasting expiation.” Connauth was flushed scarlet now, perspiring, breathing sibilantly.
His auditor could imagine the unhappy conclusion of this episode: some parishioner’s discovery, perhaps; possibly, the husband. And a lifetime (Connauth was sixty-two) was a formidable “expiation.” He murmured, “A long penance, John.”
The man of God nodded, or rather bowed his head an inch at a time with pauses between, a motion of assent and contrition.
“For one night, one moment of mere error—” Gaunt added musingly. “A lifetime of repayment! Surely, a harsh—!”
But Connauth’s head had come up and his face was startled. “One night! I said no such thing, man! I tell you, I was young. Vigorous. Berthene was with child most of the time. We had six, you know; five in eight years. For seven of those years—!” His Bush became purplish—the shocking hue heightened by his white hair.
Gaunt was astonished and then hilarity welled in him. He turned his face, struggled with the corners of his mouth, breathed hard and checked its torrent. When he spoke, it was gravely. “You mean—you had an affair with this blonde contralto for seven years?”
“I’m afraid I did.” Guilt as if for all human devilment quavered from the constricted throat.”
“And no one found out?”
“No one.”
“That’s not sin,” Gaunt said. “It’s genius!”
The other man’s eyes were harried. “I never took it, then or since, with levity, Bill.”
“No. Still—”
“Carnal sin. Mortal sin. A commandment broken. One of the Seven Deadlies and, by the clearest inferences, other sins compounded! My life—a lie. A masquerade. A poisoned hypocrisy.” He sighed hoarsely. “Berthene’s manip—her tact and effort—won me, in three years, a new and larger pastorate. Another town, some hundred miles away. I thought—cheaply, snidely—that circumstance had come to the rescue of my enslaved soul. But the woman moved—her husband did not care much where she lived. And not only that, she took a dwelling a block from my new church, with a wooded yard, so that any idle errand, any anonymous call, served to conceal my actual whereabouts. Seven years. Then, quite abruptly, she divorced her husband and married a man I’d never heard her mention. The most horrible part of it all is that for months—no, years—I felt myself the one divorced! Yet all the while I knew, and at long last admitted, that this other man, whom ultimately she married, must also have walked the selfsame short cut through her willows when neither her rightful spouse nor I was there! Did you ever hear a tale shabbier or more sordid?”
Gaunt leaned back in the reed settee and lighted his pipe again. “Frankly, yes.
Many. John, let me ask you something. You came over here to get my opinion as to the advisability of passing—or advocating—a new set of blue laws to meet these insane times. Didn’t it enter your head there was a touch of hypocrisy in that mission?”
The clergyman thought awhile, composing himself. “I think not. I feel I have in a measure atoned—that I have, in a way, a greater reason to eliminate temptation, since I have been its most merciless victim and know the strength of it.”
“Did you ever look at the matter from the angle of the woman?”
“Virginia’s angle?” Having given away the name, the Bishop flushed with fresh humiliation. His eyes darted at those of his friend in a kind of fevered hope that Gaunt had not heard. Seeing he had, Connauth said, “I trust you! Heaven knows why, sometimes! The name’s a trifle in the face of the rest of it. Certainly, I thought of what you call her ‘angle.’ At bottom, she must have been a lustful creature, vain and fickle, who took a secret pleasure in trying to destroy me.”
Gaunt gazed again at his pipe. It is, he thought, the one good thing about pipes: they serve better for punctuation than cigarettes; they require looking after. “Really? How did she behave toward you in those seven years? As a friend? Maternally? Was she Sisterly?”
“None of those,” said the Bishop. “We knew together the carnal abysses.”
>
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
“Sorry,” said the other. “Sorry I ever told you. It came bursting out of me, as things do these days.”
“Usually,” Gaunt continued as if to himself, “it’s sopranos. Parsons and sopranos.
Contraltos seem to be the exception. I’ve known of half a dozen cases, personally. Read of hundreds. Scores, anyhow,” he corrected. “Why, I wonder? Are those high notes an indication of taut nerves? Instability? Lust? Livelier tissue? Or do newspaper reporters merely know the word ‘soprano’ and forget about contralto? Alto?”
“It’s easy for you,” the Bishop cut in, “to make sport of the tragedy of my life!”
“Not sport, John. I’m trying to make sense of it. Maybe the woman loved you—”
“That—is not love!”
“Well, it’s quite a step in the direction of love, I’d say. Seven years is a good while. Obviously, her first marriage was as empty as your own.”
“My life with Berthene has been rich and full and rewarding!”
“But you’ve just said it’s been poor and empty and disappointing.”
The eyes of the other man were abruptly angry and without trace of their usual mild aspect. “There’s the difference between your religious man and your vacuous, truth-torturing ‘philosopher’!”
“Is it? Come, come, John! We’ve argued too often and too long to get peevish now! And it would be Freud, not myself, who’d say sex could throw a man like you—
logic, faith, and all. Not any other kind of misbehavior.”
“Freud!” The Bishop uttered the name with a derisiveness that was his custom; he rattled the “r” and gave the vowels an umlaut sound.
“‘Rich and full and rewarding,’” Gaunt quoted. “That’s what marriage is supposed to be; that’s what, in consequence, you say yours was. How childish! How devout! How many people, like you, first read your Good Book and ever afterward lay claim to all the virtues and noble experiences mentioned in it! Since Berthene’s gone—to God knows what limbo—you might have had the simple dignity to confess, for once, the truth! Your marriage was not ‘rich’ or you could not have spent seven years in the bed of a handsomer woman. It was ‘full,’ full of children; but not of love, which you have only just finished complaining of. As to its ‘rewards’—didn’t you find the most and best of them beyond the connubial couch?”
Connauth’s anger ebbed. He sat limp and his eyes accumulated tears. “Must you be so harsh? Have you never—yourself—?”
Gaunt nodded. And now he gave up the forensic tone. “Paula,” he said meditatively, “must have loved me a great deal. So much, I felt ashamed sometimes.
Perhaps it was a cultural shame—the guilty sense men have, because, it may be, they are quite different in their sexual feelings from women. Who knows? Who knows how much a man is woman and therefore able to accept a woman’s selfish patterns for his own?
Who knows how much, in two thousand years and more, women have managed to infiltrate society with the notion that their egotistical desires are right—and man’s wrong? Who knows the truth?”
“I don’t understand you, Bill.”
“I don’t understand myself! It was you who made the confession. I’d have a few, on my part, if I felt urged to talk—the way you’ve felt urged. Twenty-seven years is a long time to be married. Often we’ve been apart for months. Would you expect a philosopher to neglect experience, avoid profound urges, turn aside from what only the moralistical call sin but nevertheless commit, and live like an anchorite always?”
“And what stabs of conscience did you have? What amends did you feel compelled to make?”
Gaunt shrugged. “Conscience? None, unless it was a sensation of inequality.
Injustice. I’m sure Paula never had the feelings that were sometimes mine. She was devoted. She was faithful. A two-faced standard seemed contemptible to me. I told her so, as a young man. When I grew older, I desisted. She had the private right to choose; she chose fidelity. If I had compunctions, they lay there. As for amends—what amends are necessary? You owed your Virginia nothing, I dare say. Quid pro quo. And Berthene nothing, for what she was too prudish to learn and to be. Your debt to God is therefore in your imagination.”
“You mean to say,” the Bishop inquired after a moment, “that you actually suggested to Paula, your wife, that she be unfaithful?”
“That’s a bit twisted, isn’t it? I never pandered for her, the way I’ve seen other husbands do, often enough. Husbands, perhaps, who feel subservient to their wives or who have guilty consciences, like you.”
“Under the guidance of men such as you, Bill, the world would become a wallow!
A sexual quagmire—!”
“It would, if people reared in your beliefs were given the power of determination.
Sure! People reared otherwise—say, the Samoans—”
“Who never learned the Word of God! Who were never Christianized!
Civilized—!”
“Do you still feel,” Gaunt asked quietly, “that humanity is in any way civilized’?
Do you still believe, when two continents can respond to common disaster by hurling atomic bombs at each other, that education, or culture, or the Holy Writ has really had a prodigious good influence’?”
It was noon, now, and the shadows of the pines lay beneath the trees, slanting but slightly toward the north. The summertime smell of Florida came to the porch on hot, damp occasional stirrings of the air, a smell of mold, musty earth, baking pine needles, far-off flowers, and the salty sea—a combination of odors and fragrances which permeated bedding and even clothes, so that a trunkful, packed in Miami and opened months later in some northern region, exuded the nostalgic blend, and the man or woman who had lifted the lid would be transported to that sunlit place where great birds sailed in the sky and the sea was like fire and jungles had their only foothold on American land.
The clergyman snapped a watch case and read the time. “I must go! I gather you’ll have nothing to do with my program, Bill’?”
“On the grounds, John, that only the innocent should throw the first stone. A precedent from your own sources. And one I recommend you to consider gravely, unless your conscience can stand an even bigger load.”
Connauth was able now to answer with a smile—wan, deprecatory, but significant. “Just one more question. Can you countenance the rising tide, the flagrant spread of homosexuality’?”
“Have you any alternative in mind’?”
“Is that the best answer you can supply from all your wisdom’?”
“You were an Army chaplain, John. You’ve seen men penned with men and without women, before now. The whole world’s in that camp. Even the most austere clerics have had to admit the fact of libido, although they try to take full charge of it through the churches and their codes. But sex is permitted a certain feeble sanctification, isn’t it? A dirty thing that men do which is made somewhat acceptable by words at the altar and purged with later rites. Well. What brides can the church offer now?”
Connauth rose. “That’s my answer, then! You condone every sort of vicious perversion—”
“I condone nothing of the sort! Infantile business, homosexuality. Immature, and unfortunate. I simply say, it’s bound to be, in a society of men alone. If you want to stop it, learn what it is and where its causes lie in your so-called moral codes and in the way we raise children and in that sex secrecy which is a lot like the late ‘secrecy’ of our admirals and generals—mythological measures attempting an impossible ‘security.’
Nature, not man’s ideas, controls man. Every boy discovers the secrets kept from him.
Every man interprets them according to his compulsions and his fears.”
“What a hypocrite you are to pose as a good man!”
“John, John, John! How can you judge me when you do not even try to learn what I know? I could give you a half dozen books and if you read them with detachment—as honest works—instead of in a pass
ion to discern where every sentence deviated from your pre-convictions, your whole attitude would change. But you don’t know how to read any more! When you open a book, you do it in the faith and assurance that you are already master of what it contains and that the author has written only so you may prove him wrong!”
“That’s pretty cruel.”
“Faith’s the agreement to abandon detachment, John! To supplant a packaged security for open integrity. To agree not to learn anything more. It is the acceptance of a channel, by a man who was previously able to move on the whole terrain. I’ve done an essay on the subject—‘Conviction.’ Well—you have your conversion, and I will not try to reconvert you, or to deconvert you. Maybe the semantic’s wrong. You were never converted from anything to begin with but only more deeply ‘versioned’ every day, in the images of your father and mother.”
“Why not give me the books?”
“Because you wouldn’t read them.”
“Suppose I promised to?”
“Then, as I said—because you’d read them only to show yourself how mistaken they were.”
“Suppose you give it a try. After all, I am troubled in my mind.”
Gaunt smiled and went into his study. He came back carrying the volumes, popular discussions of modern psychology.
With these, the Bishop drove away.
Gaunt returned to his labors.
The earth spun away the afternoon.
Toward dusk, he tried a light and found the power on again. He was hungry. In the kitchen, which Byron had cleaned, he fried six eggs and heated a can of tomatoes, sugaring it and putting in it chunks from his stale loaf. This, with two oranges, constituted his second meal of the day. He ate from the skillet and the saucepan.
Afterward he thought of going over to see Jim Elliot. Gaunt was lonesome and enervated. But Jim, he knew, would want to while the evening away in metaphysical discussion. Jim had rekindled a former interest in mandalas. He was deep in a contemplation of the thesis that all life is the manifestation of pattern, that the unconscious mind, when wholly integrated, presents to the conscious self (and presents in dreams) mandala formations—many-colored designs, pentagons (like stars), hexagons (like snowflakes), which are (Jim would interminably assert) instinct’s clues to the nature of consciousness and the purpose of mankind. They represent (Jim would say) thought-value pictograms. They are the psychic parallel (or reflection) of the crystalline structure that underlies all matter. “Find your own mandala—in a dream—by automatic drawing,”
