Soul/Mate

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Just as Howard Morland was known for his habits of obfuscation, so too was he known, by his professional colleagues at least, for sudden, sometimes dizzying transitions of subject. One moment he was chatting amiably, and at length, about the “marvelous wild monkeys—so shy” of the Windward Islands; the next he was telling Dorothea Deverell, in the same tone, his smile undiminished, that he had, at the previous Friday’s meeting of the board of trustees of the Institute, made the date of his retirement official: June 1. “And I requested of them, and they concurred—I should say, Dorothea, unanimously and enthusiastically concurred—that you be named the next director.” His smile deepened; his beautifully capped teeth shone whitely. Because of his tanned face his hair too shone white, a benign snowy innocent sort of white, still quite thick. “Dorothea? Did you hear? We want you to be the next director of the Institute.”

  Dorothea Deverell, listening intently, had not, somehow, heard.

  But she managed to smile and to nod, murmured a few confused words of assent, felt her eyes fill quickly with tears, as if swelling. She had to resist the impulse to say to Howard Morland, whom, suddenly, she saw as a beneficent father, her friend and protector all along, “But the directorship is too good for me—I don’t deserve it.”

  She said instead, “I’m very honored.”

  Mr. Morland went on expansively to tell Dorothea of the circumstances of the board meeting, in which, of course, he had played the major role: what was said, and by whom; how very highly Dorothea’s unique talents were regarded; their fear that (for there had been recent rumors) Dorothea might seek employment elsewhere. He told Dorothea the board hoped, if she accepted the terms of the directorship, that she might want to take over the responsibilities of “acting director” in a few weeks, to make the transition less difficult.

  “With an immediate adjustment in salary, of course,” Mr. Morland quickly added, misinterpreting Dorothea’s lowered gaze.

  So they spoke of practical matters, and problems that had accumulated in Mr. Morland’s absence; and the remainder of the historic conversation, for Dorothea, passed in a drunken sort of blur—for she feared she might burst into tears, and Mr. Morland would be obliged to comfort her. Yet she was not untouched by a sense of irony, knowing that, had not Roger Krauss been removed from the board of trustees by death, and had not the circumstances of his death been so inescapably lurid, it was quite doubtful—ah, quite!—that the director of the Brannon Institute would be having this particular happy conversation with his assistant; he might indeed be having a very different sort of conversation altogether. (Yet he is not aware of this at all, Dorothea thought. The fact of Roger Krauss has been removed from his memory entirely.)

  She thought it amusing too, more innocently so, that Mr. Morland should solemnly propose an interim assignment as acting director as if, for the past several years, that had not been, de facto, Dorothea Deverell’s very position at the Brannon Institute.

  Yet when she rose to leave and Mr. Morland again shook her hand, or, rather, clasped it almost tenderly, Dorothea felt tears of gratitude rush into her eyes, tears of relief, of sheer girlish joy. Now my future is clear, she thought. A part of my future at least.

  “I had always intended this, you know, Dorothea,” Mr. Morland said warmly. “You to succeed me, I mean. I hope, dear, you never had any cause to doubt—?”

  In a tone of equal warmth, her eyes shining with emotion, Dorothea Deverell exclaimed, “Never!”

  When she returned to her office on the second floor, there stood Jacqueline happily awaiting her, and several other staff members—for of course the secretarial staff had known, since the board’s meeting on Friday, of Dorothea Deverell’s promotion. “This,” Jacqueline said half accusingly, handing Dorothea a single long-stemmed rose, ruby-red, in a slender glass vase. “Why did you think this was on my desk? Did you think I just bought it, for myself, for no reason? To liven up Monday mornings?”

  Dorothea accepted it from her, blushing with pleasure. She hadn’t noticed the rose on Jacqueline’s desk at all.

  Later, she telephoned Charles Carpenter at his office, to tell him her remarkable news, which, to Charles Carpenter, did not seem so very remarkable. “It’s about time,” he said. Grimly, with a husbandly sort of loyalty, adding, “Those bastards.” But Dorothea refused to allow him to take that tone and spoke of how exceedingly gracious Howard Morland had been, and sincere; and not a word of course of her old enemy Roger Krauss. “I should hope not,” Charles Carpenter said. “I should think, rather, they all owe you an apology—starting with Howard. He has been slipping by on charm for the past sixty-odd years.”

  In recent weeks, since Dorothea’s retreat to Vermont, she and Charles Carpenter seemed to have drifted closer together; they were in one of their cycles of intense, almost sibling intimacy, speaking with each other daily, sometimes twice daily, on the telephone, though they usually did not see each other more than once a week. Charles confided in her that he spoke to her more frequently than he spoke to his wife, and always about more significant things. For which, I suppose, Dorothea thought, I should be grateful: there is that at least.

  Charles did congratulate her on the promotion, however; he was happy, he said, that she was happy. “Now my future is clear, in Lathrup Farms,” Dorothea said jubilantly. Then added, lest her lover be hurt or alarmed, “A part of my future at least.”

  (Though Roger Krauss had been dead hardly more than a month, the subject of his death, and its shocking circumstances, was no longer much discussed in Lathrup Farms; other matters, less scandalous but gratifyingly local, had come to the fore. Out of a dread of seeming to delight in another’s ill fortune, Dorothea Deverell did not follow news of the police investigation in the papers, if, indeed, there was news; nor did she participate in conversations that drifted onto that topic. In time she might even convince herself that Mr. Krauss had merely been baiting her, taking a devil’s advocate sort of stand vis-à-vis “feminism,” as often, in social situations, meaning no real harm, otherwise good-hearted men will do. To think of him as her enemy was surely to exaggerate? “I must guard against that sort of thing.”

  It was Dorothea’s vague understanding that the mystery of the murder was more or less solved; that the police had their man; that there would eventually be a trial. And this too, this public posthumous death ritual, she would make every effort to ignore in the interest of maintaining that purity of conscience, or soul, that seemed to her as much a part of Dorothea Deverell’s identity as her dark brown eyes, her dark brown hair, her creamy-pale skin, her delicate frame.)

  On the day that Dorothea Deverell’s promotion to Director of the Brannon Institute was made public—by “public” meaning simply its release to the Lathrup Farms weekly, where it was featured in a prominent article—she arrived home from the Institute at about 6:30 P.M. and had scarcely taken off her coat and begun sorting through the morning’s mail when the doorbell rang. As if, she thought, someone had been waiting for her. Or had followed her home.

  It was Colin Asch, whom she had not seen for weeks, with a bouquet of flowers. “I hope you don’t mind, Miss Deverell! I just wanted to drop by, you know, to congratulate you!”

  Dorothea was startled to see him, so tall, so blond, so palpably there—yet rather happy too, for she’d been thinking of him, and in a way missing him. She invited him inside, and offered him tea or some sherry—“Thank you, you’re very kind, why don’t I have whatever you’re having: tea?”—and put the flowers in a vase. A half dozen gorgeous flame-colored gladioli. Each stem was about three feet tall, each blossom the size of a man’s fist. Dorothea laughed aloud at the prodigality of her young friend’s gift. She felt suddenly quite giddy, festive. “Sherry,” she said. “And what the English choose to call ‘digestive biscuits.’”

  They sat in the living room, Colin Asch rather shyly, at first, on the sofa, whose excess of little pillows seemed initially to confound him; Dorothea in a facing Queen Anne chair. How larger than life her
visitor appeared, and how enlivened, keyed up, physically busy—leaning forward to examine books and magazines on Dorothea’s coffee table, craning his neck to see the framed Oriental woodcut on the wall behind the sofa, smiling, smiling, like a child on a rare excursion, or a lover newly admitted to the very bower of bliss. He wore a sports coat in bright Harris tweed, and striped tweed trousers, not quite matching—the latest in men’s fashions presumably; his white-gold hair was cropped short at the sides and back but rose in thick tufts at the crown of his head. A scrim of pale beard glimmered on his jaws and cheeks, and this too Dorothea seemed to know was fashionable—though why it should be, she hadn’t the slightest idea. And was that an earring in the young man’s right earlobe? Not an earring precisely but a sort of clamp, gold or brass and rather cruel-looking?

  In a high rapid self-conscious voice Colin Asch was explaining to Dorothea, as if some sort of explanation were expected, that he had actually heard of her good news from his Aunt Ginny days ago—“But she cautioned me not to be premature. To wait, you know, for the official release.” His expression shifted as if in mimesis of his days of anticipation and impatience. “It’s such wonderful news, Miss Deverell—I mean, Dorothea! And so deserved!”

  Dorothea thanked him and tried, after a discreet pause, to deflect the subject from herself, asking after Colin Asch’s job at the television station and where he was now living—she’d heard, she said, that he had found an apartment somewhere in Lathrup Farms? It struck her at the time, though less forcibly than it would afterward, as odd, just slightly odd, that a young man whom she scarcely knew should be so impressed by—indeed, so emotionally caught up in—her modest professional success. And the way he looked at her, his beautiful eyes widened in respectful admiration: it was all rather odd. But flattering.

  When Colin Asch told Dorothea that he no longer worked at WWBC-TV but had a “much more challenging” job in public relations with a firm here in Lathrup Farms, she recalled vaguely that Ginny Weidmann had told her something of this and of Colin’s rather abruptly leaving the Weidmanns’ house. She recalled too that there had been some unpleasantness—hurt feelings on Ginny’s part—and something more, but for some reason it had all faded from her memory; perhaps she hadn’t wanted to believe anything less than good of Ginny’s extraordinary young relative. He was saying, with an embarrassed shrug of his shoulders, “They didn’t want me to leave the television station, and it was all rather awkward at the end. In fact, a competitor of theirs found out I was leaving and made me an offer over the telephone—which left me a little breathless. But I had had it up to here, Dorothea,” he said, drawing a forefinger swiftly across his throat, “with the media and their pitiless emphasis on popularity. The only question such people ask themselves is, ‘Will it sell?’ Or, ‘Will advertisers like it?’ The content of a typical television program is always subordinate to so many other factors, so many other trivial factors—I mean, it’s an insult to the human species! At least,” he said, lowering his voice, “it was an insult to me. They practically begged me to do a pilot show, a sort of high-level interview program like on public radio, you know, where the interviewer really knows his material, reads a lot of books and things, to prepare, and I was tempted, sort of, but not, you know, really seriously—what the media takes from you ultimately is your soul, Dorothea: nothing less. So I quit. Walked away. And had the good luck to walk into another—well, a much better job.”

  Dorothea Deverell, rather dazzled by the rapidity of her young friend’s recitation and the intensity with which he regarded her, could only murmur, banally, “Good for you!”—though the thought occurred to her that public relations, as she understood the field, could not really be much of an improvement over television.

  Colin Asch finished his glass of sherry, and licked boyishly at his lips, and laughed, and said, “I know what you’re thinking, Dorothea—”

  “Yes?”

  “—that a job in public relations is the same kind of thing as a job in television, that the goals are sort of basically the same—an emphasis upon surfaces, images, and all that. But no, actually,” he said, frowning, “it isn’t like that, actually. I mean, it can be, and probably is, in most circumstances, but this position that I have, assistant to the art director at L.L. Loomis and Company—d’you know them? ever heard of them? they’re a state-of-the-art kind of company, first-class, upbeat, sort of wired, but wired in a good way—the director’s a guy about my age, only a few years older, really great to work with. In fact I was thinking, Dorothea, on the way over here—I mean, I have another reason, a primary reason, for being here—but I was thinking, sort of, I could help you out, I mean at the Institute, with publicity for your programs and exhibits, that kind of thing—I mean,” he said, breathless, “if you wanted me to.”

  Dorothea smiled, as if ruefully, and said, “Yes, publicity hasn’t been one of our strong points. I never seem to—”

  “It isn’t just informing people of what you’re doing, it’s forcing them to take notice,” Colin Asch said passionately. “Some of the programs you sponsor, they’re so good, they’re so deserving of a much wider audience—they’re as significant as anything going on in Boston, in my opinion, or in Cambridge—but the masses have to be alerted. Not that you’d want too many people of course; the auditorium wouldn’t hold them. But the art exhibits, that’s different, they’d space themselves out sort of naturally I’m sure.” Seeing Dorothea’s smile he asked, “Is something wrong?”

  “I was just thinking, Colin, that it has never yet been a problem for us, at the Institute: an excess of people—of ‘masses.’”

  “Well, I know,” Colin Asch concurred, with a sheepish smile, “it’s been a small operation, mainly local, serving the community and all that. But now that you’re in charge it’s a new era, sort of—has got to be. Maybe you could give me your schedule for this spring—before I leave—so I could get started, just sort of unobtrusively? I mean just on my own.” As if to discipline himself for speaking so excitedly he came to a full stop; Dorothea saw his jaws clamp. Then he said, “I mean just on my own, Dorothea. Don’t worry about a fee. Pro bono.”

  Dorothea said, uncertainly, “That would be very kind of you.”

  “Oh, no! I’m not kind! I’m just—a cultural emissary!”

  Colin Asch had settled almost comfortably into the sofa, with the pillows neatly positioned beside him. He now crossed one long lanky tweed-clad leg over the other and chose a biscuit from the plate Dorothea offered him. She saw that he was wearing enormous running shoes, in shades of lavender. And—was it possible, in 20 degree weather?—no socks.

  He said, as if to prod her into speaking a bit, “But it is a new era, Dorothea. With a woman in charge, and all.”

  Dorothea Deverell did indeed have plans for change, and newness; but she supposed she had better go slowly and not worry, or annoy, or offend the rather conservative board of trustees and the faithful little corps of volunteers, mainly female, who supported the Institute. But she confided in Colin Asch that, yes, she was intending to broaden the scope of the lecture series in particular: the former director had not wanted her to bring in a “controversial” speaker, a woman defense attorney who worked with battered women and children in Boston, and this excellent woman she would certainly engage for next year; and she would invite poets now and then; and in two or three years, when a former professor of hers at Yale retired, a distinguished art historian in the Renaissance, she might arrange a sort of Festschrift in his honor, inviting a number of art historians in his field, including former students, to give public lectures … and it would be tied in, of course, with an art exhibit.

  “Those are wonderful ideas,” Colin Asch said, staring at her. “Those are—I mean, those are brilliant ideas.”

  So encouraged, Dorothea Deverell was led to confide in her young friend even more, some of it sheerly speculative, and all of it unformed, inchoate: she foresaw an education series, she foresaw extensive renovations in the building, she
foresaw new additions—a wing better suited for art exhibits, a new auditorium. She said, breathless, “I was telling a close friend about some of these things the other day, Colin, and he said, as if he were startled, ‘I hadn’t realized you had such ideas, Dorothea,’ and I said to him, ‘I’ve never had power before, and power brings ideas.’ He looked at me strangely, then, and said, ‘I suppose it is a matter of power ultimately, the realization of ideas.’ I couldn’t help replying—though I didn’t at all want to offend him!—‘Not ultimately, but immediately.’ And then,” she said, laughing almost girlishly, “and then he really did look at me strangely.”

  But Colin Asch was not to be drawn in with Dorothea Deverell’s laughter. He said soberly, brushing a crumb or two fastidiously from his lips, “Yes, the average man is very jealous of a woman’s ‘power.’ Who did you say was your friend?”

  “Charles Carpenter,” Dorothea said. (But why had she told Colin? She hadn’t meant to.) Her cheeks pulsed with warmth; she added, apologetically, “You wouldn’t remember him, but he—”

  “Of course I remember him,” Colin Asch said. He cast his eerily dazzling smile up at Dorothea as if she were teasing him. “A lawyer. A friend of the Weidmanns’. His wife attacked me on the issue of my vegetarianism. She was drunk—she was a drunk. Yet, do you know, Dorothea, Mrs. Carpenter tried to make it up to me afterward? Sent a check for two hundred dollars to me for the Animal Rights League, by way of my aunt.”