Houses of Stone

by Kathy

  Thus encouraged, she told him of her discovery and confessed the inexplicable urge that drew her to the structure. It seemed to her that his brow grew troubled as he listened; yet when she had finished he answered with ready grace. "1 knew of it, yes; but I cannot tell you what its function may have been. It has been long abandoned. A grim, unsightly place; I confess I do not understand your attraction. But, " he went on, "that very attraction is sufficient cause to arouse my interest. We will inspect the place together, shall we? Tomorrow."

  This duly ensued; though summer's stifling breath had oppressed the earth for the past weeks, this day might have been stolen from May. Soft breezes caressed their cheeks, and the luxuriant greenery, the fascination of nature brought a smile to Edmund's face as they strolled.

  "This is a pleasure, indeed; I am grateful to you, Ismene, for forcing me out of my office. I have been bent over my ledgers too long."

  "I observed that." She hesitated, unwilling to display vulgar curiosity, but affection conquered delicacy. "I trust, Cousin, that there is nothing in those ledgers that causes you concern. If I can assist in any way—"

  He pressed the hand that rested on his arm and smiled at her. "You need not assure me of your goodwill or your affection, Ismene. Let me forget the deadly dullness of business for a time. What a heavenly spot! Those grim stone walls are like a blot on a master painting. "

  Yet to Ismene there was beauty and meaning in the contrast of rocky harshness and twining greenery. The delicacy of the honeysuckle softened the stone, smothering it in a soft veil of green. That slow, patient growth would triumph in the end over man's intrusion. Here was a living illustration of the Divine promise that the meek should inherit the earth.

  “Strange indeed,'' murmured Edmund, studying the structure with a puzzled frown. "Let us see what is within.

  With a strength his slender form did not suggest he put his shoulder to the sagging door and forced it open. ' 'You had best stay back,'' he warned. “A regiment of spiders guards the interior.

  Nevertheless she came to his side and looked inside.

  Only dust and cobwebs met her eyes. The interior, windowless and dark, had been swept clean of visible objects. At first it seemed to her that the floor was of earth, but then she realized that under the dust lay a carpet of cut stone, blocks as massive as those in an antique temple, closely fitted.

  "It is like a pagan temple," said Edmund, echoing her thoughts as he so often did. "The innermost sanctuaries of the shrines of Greece and Egypt were made thus: darkness shrouded the mysteries of those ancient cults. "

  "It could not have served such a purpose here.''

  "Surely not. There is a mystery, however, and it would amuse me to solve it. I will have the place cleared out; perhaps some clue as to its function lies buried under the dust. "

  Ismene had not intended to speak, unless to express approbation of his intent. She heard her voice as if it had been that of another. "May I, thereafter, claim it as my own? A private place in which to write and read and reflect?

  Astonishment shaped his features as he drew her away. "This grim, lonely place? There is much to admire in the uncultivated expanses of nature, but it is wild, uncontrolled—"

  “So must Eden have been,'' Ismene said. Her hands were clasped so tightly they pained her. "I would be alone.

  "I see." Thoughtfully he repeated, "Yes, I see. If this is your desire—" But then he broke off with a cry, and caught her up in his arms, swinging her aside; and she heard a rustle of foliage and beheld a sinuous footless form glide through the open doorway into shelter.

  “There is a serpent in your Paradise, Cousin,'' Edmund said with a strange little laugh. "If it offers forbidden fruit, will you resist the tempter?

  Karen rolled over onto her back. She had tried every other conceivable sleeping position, and she was still wide awake. She couldn't blame the weather; it was, as Peggy had said, a perfect night for sleeping, cool and crisp as autumn, with a soft breeze stirring the curtains and rustling the leaves.

  Nor was it the thought of her "talk" next day that prevented her from sleeping. Stage fright no longer bothered her and she had delivered countless lectures on the immortal Jane, to her own classes and elsewhere.

  Could the Screaming Lady be a distorted, romanticized memory of a woman silenced not by nature but by her society? Karen would have liked to believe it—what a subject for an article that would make!—but she couldn't. The symbolism was too subtle, too farfetched. Did the weird story contain the seeds of some actual past event, or was it only another version of a common folk legend? Peggy's admission that she had reached a dead end in tracing the ownership of the house implied a corollary Karen hated to admit. This might be the first of many dead ends. She might never know who Ismene really was.

  She forced her tense muscles to relax; she had been lying stiff as a board, fists clenched. Historical research seldom presented neat, unanswerable solutions to problems. Scholars were still arguing about whether Richard III had slaughtered his nephews in the Tower, and how much Mary Stuart knew about the plot that had taken her despised husband's life. She had been unreasonable to expect that a few days or weeks of investigation would provide an answer to the question that had become an obsession. Sharon would probably say she needed counseling. It wasn't "healthy" to care so much about a dead woman.

  I don't need a psychologist to explain why I feel that way, she thought, turning onto her side. That same sense of helpless rage, of voicelessness, was familiar to her too, though—thank God and Betty Friedan—not to the same extent. She understood Ismene's need for a place of her own, even a place as forbidding as the abandoned house in the woods. It was desirable because of its very desolation; no one else would claim it.

  Did everyone feel that same need for solitude, she wondered, or was it an aberration, experienced by only a small percent of the human race and incomprehensible to the rest? And why was it so difficult to attain? Modern life had added various forms of mechanical intrusion into one's privacy; the very ringing of a telephone was a demand for attention, even if one had enough willpower to ignore it, and automobiles made it easier for friends to drop in and purveyors of goods and services—including purveyors of salvation—to reach one's door. Resentment of intrusion provoked not apology but indignation and hurt feelings. That had been true even in Jane's day, when she sat writing in the parlor, covering her papers when she was interrupted as she so often was. Some people found that picture charming—cute little Jane, curls tied back and slippered feet dangling, looking up with a smile whenever someone popped in to chat. It had always made Karen's blood run cold.

  She yawned and stretched and wondered drowsily whether that had ever been used by a mystery writer as a motive for murder: the frantic, frustrated need to be alone. Snatching up the first weapon that came to hand—shotgun or knife, frying pan or baseball bat—striking out in a frenzy, seeing faces turn from smiles to blood-streaked, ruined horror.

  Perhaps it had been a motive for murder more frequently than anyone suspected—uncomprehended even by the killer.

  Chapter Ten

  The sniffs I get from the ink of the women are always fey, old-hat, Quaintsy, Gaysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquille in mannequin's whimsey, or else bright and stillborn.

  Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself, 1959

  KAREN had spoken at a number of luncheon meetings. This wasn't the first time she had toyed with the idea of starting a protest movement. Serving the food before the speech might suit the audience, but it was sheer hell for the speaker. If she didn't dribble salad dressing down her front or spill coffee onto her skirt while making genteel conversation with her neighbors, she might get a scrap of lettuce or spinach caught between her teeth, with no hope of extracting it genteelly before she was introduced. If she ate too much she ran the risk of emitting what some Victorian writer had called "an unseemly sound of repletion" in the middle of a sentence.

&nb
sp; In this case Karen wasn't tempted to overeat. The entree was creamed chicken and peas, just as Peggy had predicted. The gluey mass rested in and on a patty shell so flaky it exploded like a grenade whenever she cut into it. At least she wasn't pilloried on a podium, in full view of the audience. There had not been time for the "little chat" with Mrs. Fowler. The old lady hadn't been ready at eleven; she had dithered and fussed and misplaced hat, gloves, and purse for over forty-five minutes. They had barely made it to the restaurant on time.

  Mrs. F. sat at Karen's right; the Colonel, in his capacity of vice president of the organization, was on her left. Peggy was across the table.

  She had not mentioned her intention of attending, no doubt because she knew Karen would object; she had simply turned up, in full uniform— gloves, heels, fluttering skirts—except for the hat, which, she admitted, was more trouble than it was worth.

  Bill Meyer was not at their table. He was present, however. "I wouldn't miss it for the world," he had assured Karen, when they met by chance outside the door of the restaurant. She had managed not to call him a rude name.

  Dessert consisted of cheesecake with cherry topping. Glancing at Karen's serving, from which she had taken two small courtesy bites, Mrs. Fowler smiled and patted her hand. "Don't be nervous, dear. This is quite an intellectual audience, but I'm sure you'll do just fine."

  The kindly reassurance might have been partially responsible for what happened, but at the time Karen wasn't aware of feeling anything except mild irritation and amusement. Bored and impatient, but not at all nervous, she sat through Mrs. Fowler's introduction—which described her as a distinguished lady scholar—and took her place at the reading stand amid a spatter of applause. Then, as was her habit, she looked over the audience before beginning to speak.

  A few familiar faces: Peggy's, set in a sardonic but sympathetic smile, Bill Meyer, grinning in a way that made Karen want to slap him, Lisa Fairweather . . . What was she doing here? She hadn't returned Karen's calls. Catch her before she leaves, Karen thought, and introduce her to Peggy . . . Tanya, the librarian. There were only four dark faces in the room, all at the same table.

  The faces of Mrs. Fowler and the Colonel blended into the mass. With a few exceptions most of them might have been blood relatives, not because of a particular physical resemblance but because they bore the same stamp of complacency. Well-fed, well-dressed, warm and comfortable, they now awaited the confirmation of their own self-satisfied sense of intellectual superiority. Half of them would doze off before it was over. The other half wouldn't understand what she was talking about.

  It felt like a sudden rush of water pouring into a container, filling something that had been empty before, rising from feet to body to throat till it overflowed her parted lips—anger, cold as melted snow, consuming as flame. It was unlike anything she had ever felt before, but it was not alien. It felt . . . right. Clearing her throat, she said, slowly and deliberately, "The Pen as Penis."

  She paused, expecting a gasp of collective outrage from the audience. There was no sound at all. The faces that stared back at her were like masks, unblinking, frozen. She saw Peggy clap her hand over her mouth.

  "In 1886 Gerard Manley Hopkins—he was a poet, by the way—wrote, in a letter to a friend, 'The Male quality is the creative gift.' Ruskin— I'm sure you've all heard of Ruskin—was more direct. He described the 'Penetrative Imagination' as a 'piercing mind's tongue.'

  "This image of the male quality, symbolized by the male member, as the only true source of literary and artistic creativity permeated nineteenth-century criticism and nineteenth-century attitudes.

  "It is such an obvious pun, such a childishly irresistible symbol, that modern critics have been unable to abandon it. A book review that appeared in The New York Times in 1976 remarked that women writers 'lack that blood-congested genital drive which energizes every great style.' Well, of course they do, don't they? Castrated by nature, lacking that essential instrument, they are by definition incapable of originality or a great style. Another critic, writing a decade later, employs an even more emphatic metaphor. Creativity, he says, arises from 'the use of the phallic pen on the pure space of the virgin page.' That metaphor certainly excludes women writers; it makes literature a variety of rape."

  Two women at a table near the door pushed their chairs back and stood up. Their faces were crimson with rage or embarrassment, or a blend of the two. Karen half expected they would rush at her, swinging their big black purses like clubs. Instead they turned as one and stamped out of the room.

  Karen's eyes moved coolly over the faces of the audience. Most were the same angry shade as those of the defectors, and their expressions were equally outraged. No one else left the room, though. They're waiting to hear more dirty words, Karen thought. I mustn't disappoint them.

  "But what, you may ask," she went on, "does all this have to do with Jane Austen? According to certain giants of criticism, her novels are not worthy of inclusion in the lofty canon of true literature. They lack— and I quote—'a strong male thrust.' "

  The paralysis that had held the Colonel immobile snapped; his face swelled like a big red balloon and he leaned toward Mrs. Fowler, muttering in her ear. Across the table Peggy sat quietly, hands folded, eyes fixed on Karen's face. Meyer's face was equally impassive, but the corners of his mouth were quivering.

  The lecture was one Karen had given on several occasions, tailoring it, as experienced speakers do, to the particular audience. The only concession she made to this audience was that of simplification. They wouldn't have recognized the names of the modem critics she had quoted, so she didn't mention them. She gave them Jane from a feminist perspective—the subtle digs at male vanity, the cynical resignation of women who were passed from one male guardian to the next, without independence or legal identity—and ended by quoting one of Jane's few overt protests against masculine domination. "Men have had every advantage of us in telling their story . . . The pen has been in their hands."

  She didn't have to belabor the point. Dirty old man, she thought, smiling sweetly at the Colonel, whose complexion had darkened from crimson to purple. With a polite "Thank you, ladies and gentlemen," she gathered up her unused notes.

  An isolated outburst of applause drew her eyes to Bill Meyer. He was on his feet, clapping enthusiastically.

  "I can't imagine what came over me," Karen repeated for the tenth time.

  They were in Peggy's room at the hotel—"hiding out," as Peggy put it. Karen had collapsed onto the bed, her head in her hands.

  Peggy got her amusement under control and wiped her eyes. "Well, you sure took care of Mrs. Fowler. She won't be sticking any more cute little notes under your door. And you gave me the thrill of a lifetime. I haven't enjoyed myself so much since . . . Never mind. Stop berating yourself; it was worth it, even if you did antagonize the old lady."

  "Oh, I don't regret giving them a taste of feminist criticism." Karen raised her head and gave Peggy a defiant look. "Those quotations speak for themselves; all you have to do is hear them to realize how absurd and unfair and silly they are. It isn't what I said that bothers me—it's the way I said it. Not only was it counterproductive, it was rude! Those poor stupid pompous people can't help being the way they are. They were trying to be nice to me. And what gives me the right to assume they are all stupid and pompous? Am I turning into a damned intellectual snob? I could have got the point across without going out of my way to offend them."

  "You could have, but it wouldn't have been as much fun."

  Karen groaned and hid her face in her hands. "I sounded like Bill Meyer," she mumbled.

  "He loved every word," Peggy said. "I was watching him."

  "Thanks, that's just what I needed to hear."

  Peggy said nothing. Karen sat up with a sigh. "Ah, well. I made a mistake. I regret it, I'll try not to repeat it, but I'm not going to brood about it or go into hiding."

  "Are you going to apologize to Mrs. F. ?"

  "No. That would i
mply that I'd done it on purpose. Seems to me my best defense is innocent unawareness of wrongdoing. They claim to be a literary society, don't they? I paid them the compliment of speaking to them as if they really were."

  "You're probably right," Peggy said. "It's a minor tempest in a very small teapot, after all. There was no lasting harm done." Smiling, she added, "Look at it as a symbol of how far women have come. A hundred years ago they'd have ostracized you. Two hundred years ago—"

  " 'Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart, By the women of Marblehead.' "

  "Is that a quote? Sounds familiar."

  "It's a poem, by Whittier," Karen said abstractedly. "It was old Floyd Ireson they tarred and feathered—for his hard heart."

  "They didn't tar and feather uppity women, even then."

  "No, they just exiled them into the wilderness, like Anne Hutchinson, or hanged them as witches, or ducked them till they drowned, or—"

  "Enough of this," Peggy said firmly. "I'm going to change out of this ridiculous outfit and then we are going to pay a business call. Lisa Fairweather has agreed to let me inspect the rest of the family papers."

  "Lisa?" Karen repeated in surprise. "When did you talk to her?"

  "Before your speech. Bill introduced us, and then tactfully withdrew. I'm beginning to think he really has reformed."

  "The hell with him, I don't want to talk about him. That's good news, Peggy."

  Peggy pulled a blouse and skirt off their hangers and headed for the bathroom. "I'm not counting on any great discoveries, but it's a loose end we have to tie up. Be with you in a minute. Have a drink while you're waiting."