Our Father

by Marilyn French

  Alex had learned about these people when she attended a talk at the convent by a Dominican nun who had worked with them, but she spoke innocently, without a real sense of the politics of the situation, her sweet light voice rising in outrage at the monsters who exploited these people and kept them in a state of misery so extreme that mothers rarely mourned when a baby died.

  “Once upon a time,” she concluded sadly, “these people lived on little plots of land, raised their own food, and lived decently. But they were shoved off the land by the growers, who were greedy for bigger cane plantations, by the rich! It’s so cruel!” she explained.

  “Don’t idealize the way they lived. They were probably little better off than animals,” Elizabeth said in a stiff authoritative voice. “Their babies still probably died, they were probably hungry then too.”

  “No, they grew beans, things that nourished them!” Alex cried. “Now they have to have money to buy food!”

  “It’s true,” Elizabeth conceded in that same authoritative voice, “some people are being destroyed by the shift in the world economic order. That’s sad, but it can’t be helped. These currents are larger than people, they create the changes we call civilization.”

  “I’d hardly call what they’re doing civilized, Lizzie,” Alex objected mildly.

  “Alex, you’re a political naïf, I can’t have this discussion with you. But things aren’t as black-and-white as you imagine.”

  Which silenced Alex, and that ended.

  But the real trigger was Ronnie herself, when they were back at the house and had finished cleaning the kitchen, and were relaxing in the playroom with drinks. The tape, a Gregorian chant, had run out, but everyone was feeling too lazy to get up and put another one on, and feeling utterly benevolent, Ronnie said, “This was one of the best days of my life.”

  “Ummm,” Mary mumbled. “Me too.”

  “Oh, me too,” Alex said fervently.

  “It’s so great when women do things together,” Ronnie went on. Then she told them about the dinner her friend Linda had had for her. “You know, it was the opposite of this, but it was great too. She’s a graduate student, she hasn’t got two cents, she lives in a dingy apartment, well, all my friends are poor, they all live like that, but they wanted to celebrate, it’s something they do a lot, me too when I lived there. And everybody brings something, you know, pasta or bean soup or rice and beans or a stew, bread, salad, wine, fruit, and we talk and laugh and eat and we all help clean up, and there are no zinging egos flying across the room, no pretenses about manliness to bolster, no lies to defend. We just have a great time.”

  Elizabeth’s chin changed. Was it jealousy at the fact of all those friends? An implicit challenge in Ronnie’s saying that dinner had been as fine as this one? The mention of defended lies? The accumulated pleasures of the day lying thick and lardy on an austere heart? Or was it a recognition of some essential difference in her from all the rest of them? Whatever hit her, she was palpably hit. She glared at Ronnie, included the others in the glare, burst into speech.

  “You all make me sick with your idealization of femaleness, as if women were morally better than men, as if they had a different nature! What sentimental slop! What a stupid ideal to entertain, some sweet little domestic world, everyone sharing, loving, cooperative, no egos, what a laugh! Who’s more competitive than women, I ask you! Weight, shape, clothes, hair, nails, cooking, they work like dogs to vie for men men men! And women have such nasty little ways of getting at each other, all the while smiling, such hypocrites, at least men pull out weapons and kill each other directly!

  “Do you really think if there were only women, if we could reproduce ourselves alone, we’d all be living in some communal paradise? We’d all be living in grass huts, that’s what!”

  When she paused to take a long drag on her cigarette, Ronnie said calmly, “Actually, if you look at the remains of matricentric societies, they lived in considerable luxury and well-being. Without war. And even if we did live in grass huts, if we got along and had enough to eat—and the evidence shows we did when we controlled our own lives and crops, most of the time at least—it might not be so bad. Compare a grass hut to some of the cribs in Roxbury and the South Bronx, and it doesn’t look half bad,” she laughed lightly.

  “Oh, what nonsense!” Elizabeth interrupted. “War broke out eventually, didn’t it? When there were enough people, when there was crowding. It was inevitable. It’s part of the beast we are! All this feminist nonsense, it’s as bad as Marxism, it asserts, simply asserts, that we are kind loving cooperative creatures when every line in every book of history testifies to something else! The commies insisted we were something else, they tried to remake human nature by fiat, look where it’s gotten them, they’ve created the most oppressive society that ever existed—worse than any oriental tyrant, dictator, emperor. The only way you can build a halfway civilized society is by taking into consideration the fact that we are savage, cruel, competitive, aggressive, predatory animals. We’re killers, like other large mammals! Haven’t you ever heard of survival of the fittest? Well, who do you imagine are the fittest? The most savage, the most efficient killers—and here I’ll grant you, men take the prize. And the best you can do is protect yourself against them. But it’s inevitable that the weak will be destroyed, they will be exterminated. It’s happening clear across the globe right now. Every primitive society, every simple society is being wiped out, there’s nothing you can do about that, it’s nature, human nature, it’s inevitable because it’s necessary! And it has a function: it keeps the human race strong!”

  “That’s terrible!” Alex gasped. “You can’t be serious, Lizzie.”

  “I’m dead serious. You all are a bunch of sentimentalists! You don’t know what you’re talking about most of the time. Jesus Christ, what kind of world do you think you live in? You think our little idyll in Lincoln is anything but a dream made possible—bought and paid for—by the savagery of our forefathers, who robbed and seized and cheated and bribed and killed sufficiently to realize a little island in the middle of hell?

  “What do you think is going on out there! Constantly! The prime minister of India is assassinated, hijackers killed passengers in the airport in Teheran, a chemical factory explodes in Bhopal, hundreds of thousands of people are starving to death in Burkina Faso, and that’s just in the last few weeks! And that doesn’t count civil wars in hundreds of places across the globe—El Salvador that Alex is so passionate about is hardly the only place, look at what’s going on in Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Chile, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola, Jesus, even that only skims the surface. And beyond that, look at what people do to each other on the streets of so-called civilized countries, murder and mayhem, even people who love each other or say they do, how many men murder their wives or girlfriends every day, you can’t count them, how many if you added them up, beatings, rapes, torture, murders, in all the cities, in the towns, in villages, in the countryside across the world?

  “You don’t even need to be invaded by hooligans, your own father will do the job right inside that idyllic home! Just like our father! And if he doesn’t, your mother may hit you or worse.

  “There is no safe place, that’s an illusion, there is no security even though people struggle for it their whole lives long as if it existed, as if enough money or power or prestige can insulate you. But we know better, don’t we? We are constantly besieged, threatened, life is constant struggle, the best you can do is claw your way to some temporary security, some island like this house or my job or some academic post”—she glanced at Ronnie—“and try for dear life to hold on.

  “And beyond that, out there, it’s the same: empty space with exploding stars, black holes, planets of methane ice, comets, and now there’s a hole in the ozone layer, and acid rain, and god knows what else threatening us.

  “It’s a struggle to find enough food, to find drinkable water in most parts of the world, and then you have to avoid provoking
your fellow man, who may just pull out an Uzi or an AK-47 or whatever the current designer weapon may be. You have to be armed, armed with something, a weapon or money, position, some kind of power, because the name of the game is war, constant war, that’s what it is to be alive!”

  She fell back, exhausted, her eyes wild, her hands pulling at her hair, her cigarette out. She stared dully at the wall. The others gazed at her, aghast, and remained silent for a long time.

  “Oh, poor Lizzie,” Alex whispered, finally.

  “That’s quite a vision, Elizabeth,” Ronnie said quietly.

  “It’s not a vision!” she cried, “it’s reality!” She sat up and lighted a fresh cigarette. “Don’t you see? Don’t you realize?”

  “But it’s not the only reality,” Alex said softly. “It’s not all of reality.”

  “No,” Mary murmured. “What about all the beauty, the beauty of days, of light, of nature, of cities, of people? What about all the lovely things we gave each other today, all the wonderful things we ate, the fun we had?”

  “And it’s not the only truth about us, either, about human beings,” Ronnie said stubbornly. “We’re not all at war with each other, we help each other. Where I come from, it’s a world you don’t know, no one would survive if the women didn’t watch each other’s kids, take each other’s kids, sometimes for months, for god’s sake. They share food, there’s always room for one more at the table even if things are rough, and they lend each other stuff—a blanket, a heavy coat, whatever.

  “Listen, I work with nature at the lowest level. Mosses and lichen are called lower plants, they don’t have the complexity of larger ones—although some mosses are unisexual and some bisexual,” she grinned. “But our entire ecology depends on them, among other such species. And lichen, which is probably one of the first forms of life to appear on earth, which is thus fundamental to other life, is symbiotic, it’s made up of two different species that need each other to exist. It survives by cooperating, not conflict. It can live where nothing else can live—in the highest mountains where nothing else grows, at the edges of the oceans, at the very top of the highest tropical trees where the sun blazes too strongly for any other plant. It even lives at the bottom of those trees, where the climate is too dark or wet for other plants. And it’s a frontier plant, it makes soil, one of a few species that do. It creates.

  “And much of nature works this way. If you want to talk about the nature that is in us, and from which we arise, you should think about how the nature outside us works. You know some botanists—guys—the guys are always looking for signs of domination in nature—tried to make out that the fungi are dominant in lichen, because they’re more conspicuous and have greater volume. But they concluded that the fungi are utterly dependent on the algae, maybe even more dependent on the algae than the algae are on them. Things are not the way they seem. Consider your father, my mother. There’s no comparison between them in terms of power, fame, wealth, you can’t even discuss them in the same breath. But I doubt, if your father had died, my mother would have had a stroke—assuming she wasn’t already dead. My mother seemed to be completely dependent on your father. But the truth was otherwise. …”

  She paused, lighted a cigarette, continued in a calmer voice. “Your vision is a male vision, a capitalist vision, well I suppose today’s communists have it too, it’s the vision that justified the changes in economic structure from feudalism to industrialization. It’s taught to us to keep us in line, but it isn’t necessarily the truth about human nature. They want us to believe it so we’ll go on fighting their wars and dying for them, dying to bolster their power, so they can increase their wealth and only give the dead medals.

  “You have to believe this stuff so you can go on working for that administration, go on believing in the economic principles you learned in school. You have to believe it to justify your life. But we don’t.”

  Elizabeth sat erect. “That’s nonsense! You are all simply willfully blind. Naive. Well, I don’t know why I should expect more from you than other people. Few people are willing to face unpleasant realities. They’d rather console themselves with a hot dog, a beer, and the tube. Like animals!” she snorted.

  “Well, we are animals,” Alex murmured. “Rather sweet ones, I think, at root.”

  “Oh, like the torturers of El Salvador?” Elizabeth asked sarcastically. “Or Chile, or Peru, or Argentina, or Algeria, or Vietnam? Do you really think your clinic is going to make a significant difference, is going to affect the problem?”

  Alex frowned, considering the question seriously. “I think opening a clinic can ease the pain of some people—maybe hundreds of people. That’s all,” she concluded.

  “And suppose the government decides your clinic is subversive, then what? Suppose they send death squads to shoot you and the nuns, rape you first maybe. Have you considered that that very well may happen, that it happens often where you’re going?”

  “I do know that,” she answered softly.

  Elizabeth looked at her, and her eyes filled with tears. “Don’t do it, Alex. Don’t go! It’s asking for trouble! Don’t go!”

  “Oh, Lizzie.” Alex got up and went to her sister and embraced her. Elizabeth sobbed aloud into her cupped hands.

  Mary took a deep hit on her joint. What a shock, Lizzie sobbing like that, I can’t remember her sobbing ever, ever, even when she dislocated her elbow when she fell out of a tree that time we were climbing in it. Father was so angry, said young ladies don’t climb trees, we never did it again, it was so much fun I really loved it, it was too bad.

  Was that what it was all about, fear for Alex? I’m afraid for her too, Lizzie’s right, she has no idea what she’s getting into, I wouldn’t go to such a place for anything, not for anything. Not anything. But she … who can fathom her?

  Such an outburst, is that how she really sees life, how can she bear to go on living? You hear men talk that way, but I always have trouble believing they mean what they say, I always think they’re just saying that to justify some particularly vicious business deal, something that harms other people … dog-eat-dog world, they say, but only when they’ve just done the eating. Tough world, they say, you have to be tough, hardheaded, which means not feeling anything. And they do it, I know they do it, but then don’t they go home and unbend somehow, ease into a different mode, enjoy their kids, their wife, their dinner? Even Paul, and he was the hardest of my husbands, he could be really tender with me at times. Those were the times when I liked him, when he relaxed and sat in the sun and swam and had a gin and tonic and smiled and let himself enjoy just being alive. …

  Ronnie’s right, she has to believe that stuff to justify her work, which is after all her life. She hasn’t had much of a love life I don’t think, she has no kids, I don’t think she has any friends. …

  Poor Lizzie. So lonely. I never saw it before. Begging me to move down there, really that’s what it amounted to, I never thought I’d hear her beg, when I think how I used to beg her, please please Lizzie, play house with me, swim with me, you want to roller-skate on the terrace?

  Truth is, I don’t have any friends either, not real friends, not friends like Ronnie has, and Alex with those nuns, the way she talks about Sister Evangeline, nun in a business suit flying all across the country raising money, things have certainly changed, and Sister Bernadette with the freckles and the humor drinking Irish whiskey, she really loves them. …

  Lizzie and I, we got the worst of it. Alex was removed early, Father never treated Ronnie as part of the family, we got the full blast of his contempt and the manners too, the rules, so many rules. …

  Mary stubbed out her joint and placed the roach in her little cloisonné case. She rubbed her hands up and down her arms, feeling chilled, alone. The night sky was starless and gray as if a dark dull blanket covered the heavens. She rose heavily and moved toward the bed, not tonight relishing the pleasure of getting into it, sliding her immaculate body between the cool clean white sheets. She didn�
��t, tonight, feel immaculate.

  All games I play with myself—white foods, white night clothes, white sheets, white rooms. An illusion I create for myself daily, over and over in rituals, to create the illusion of cleanness, purity, to feel immaculate. But I’m not. Not. I am as corrupted, corrupting, as any other human on earth. Look at what I did to my children. What is wrong with my daughter, my baby? What am I going to do? What can help her? Is it possible that Father …

  Lizzie is right: we are a cruel selfish predatory race.

  Tears squirmed sidewise down her cheeks as she lay there. She didn’t wipe them away.

  Her poor heart torn up like that, believing such things, well of course she’s right to a degree, but the degree makes all the difference. What do I mean by that? Still, I know I’m right.

  Alex carefully hung up her dress, smoothing down the silk folds lovingly, such a lovely soft silk, so wonderful to feel. So many wonderful things in life, she leaves all that out of her accounting. Economics she calls it, a science she says, it’s a peculiar science if it leaves out half of existence, more than half, but maybe all sciences do that, certainly medicine does, I watch the doctors at St. Mary’s, they forget the spirit, they forget how important it is to be held and touched and consoled. Also they forget nutrition, at St. Mary’s at least. The terrible food they serve patients, don’t they think they would get better faster with healthier food? All they can see is medication and surgery, well my clinic will do a better job, we’ll have fresh food there for patients who need that more than they need a pill. Fruit, vegetables, rice and beans, and there will always be a pot of soup cooking in my clinic.