Did her father want her to think of that woman as her mother? “I dare say he doesn’t quite know what he wants.
“Men won’t face things. How they hate to face things.
“It is impossible to talk to a man, in such a situation, when he is your father.”
Her own mother, when she was still alive, had been to Ethel... exactly what had she been? The mother had been rather like Ethel’s sister. She had got married when she was a young girl to this man, Ethel’s father. She had the four children.
“That fact must be an intense satisfaction to a woman,” Ethel thought that day. A queer little tremor ran through her body, thinking of her mother, as a young wife, first feeling in her body the movements of a child. In the mood she was in that day she could think of her mother, now dead, as just another woman. There was something between all women few enough men ever understood. How could a man understand?
“There might be a man. He would need to be a poet.”
Her mother must have known, after she had been married to her father for a time, that the man she had married, although he had an honorable position in the life of the town and the county, although he became a judge, he wasn’t terribly mature, never would be mature.
He couldn’t be mature in a real sense. Ethel did not know exactly what she meant by that. “If I could find a man to whom I could look up, a free-walking man, not afraid of his own thoughts. He might bring me something I need.
“He might penetrate me, color all my thinking, all my feeling. I am this half thing. I want to be made into a real woman.” There was the thing in Ethel that was also in the woman Blanche.
But Blanche was married — to Ethel’s father.
And she hadn’t got it.
What?
There was something to be achieved. Vaguely Ethel had begun to understand what it was. Being at home, in the house with Blanche, had helped.
The two women did not like each other.
They did.
They didn’t.
There was a kind of understanding. There will always be something, as between women, no man will ever perhaps quite understand.
And yet, every woman, who is really a woman will, all her life, want that more than anything else in life — real understanding with a man. Had her mother achieved it? Ethel looked sharply at her father that day. He wanted to talk about something and didn’t know how to begin. She did nothing to help. Had the conversation he had in mind got started, it would have got nowhere. He would have begun, “You are at home here now, Ethel... I hope you and Blanche will get along all right. I hope you will like each other.”
“Oh, shut up.” You can’t say that to your father.
As to herself and the woman Blanche... None of the things Ethel thought that day were said. “As to me and your Blanche... it is nothing to me that you have married her. That is a thing outside me. You have undertaken to do something to her. —
“Do you know that?”
“You do not know what you have undertaken. Already you have failed.”
American men were such fools. There was her father. He was a good, an honorable man. All of his life he had worked hard. A good many Southern men... Ethel had been born and had grown up in the South... she knew things... a good many Southern men, when they were young... there were brown girls everywhere in the South. It was easy for the Southern boy to find out certain physical things about life.
The mystery penetrated. An open door. “It can’t be so easy as all that.”
If a woman could find a man, even a brute man, who would stand up. Her father had made a bad guess in the woman he had picked as a second wife. That was obvious. If he hadn’t been so unsophisticated it should all have been plain to him before he married. The woman had worked him outrageously. She had decided to get him and so she had begun working along certain lines.
She was getting a little faded and worn-out and so she perked up. She tried to appear unsophisticated, a soft-speaking, child-like woman.
She wasn’t of course anything of the sort. She was a disappointed woman. The chances were that, somewhere, there was some man she had really wanted. She had made a mess of that.
Her father, if he hadn’t been such an honorable man. She was quite sure that her father, although he was Southern... he hadn’t fooled about, when he was young, with the brown girls. “It might have been better for him now if he had done that, if he hadn’t been such an honorable man.”
What his new woman needed was a good beating. “I’d give her one if she were mine,” Ethel thought.
There might be a chance, even with her. There was a kind of vitality to Blanche, something hidden away in her, down there under the paleness, under the dirt of her. Ethel’s thoughts returned, that day she rode with her father, to her own mother. The ride turned out to be a rather silent one. She managed to get her father to talking of his boyhood. He had been the son of a Southern planter who owned slaves. Some of his father’s acres still stood in his name. She managed to make him talk of the days when he was a young country boy, just after the Civil War, of the struggle of whites and blacks to adjust themselves to a new life. He wanted to talk of something else but she wouldn’t let him. It was so easy to manage. As he talked she thought of her own mother as a young woman, married to Willard Long. She had got a good man, an honorable man, a man, unlike most of the Southern men about, a man who was interested in books, who seemed intellectually alive. He wasn’t really. Her mother must soon have found that out.
For the woman, Ethel’s mother, the man she had got must have seemed rather above the average. He didn’t tell little lies. He didn’t chase off secretly after brown women.
There were brown women everywhere about. Langdon, Georgia, was in the very heart of the old slave-owning South. The brown women weren’t bad. They were unmoral. They hadn’t the white women’s problems.
They were going to grow more and more like white women, facing the same problems, the same difficulties in life but...
In her father’s day, as a young man.
How had he kept so straight? “I would never have done it,” Ethel thought.
Such a man as her father would go ahead and perform certain functions for a woman. He could be depended upon for that.
He couldn’t give a woman what she really wanted. It might be no American man could. Ethel had just returned from Chicago where she had gone to school and where she had studied to be a librarian. She was thinking of her experiences there... a young woman’s attempts to thrust out into life, what had happened to her in the few adventures she herself had made to get hold of life.
It was a spring day. In the North, in Chicago, where she had been living for four or five years it would still be winter but in Georgia it was already spring. Her ride with her father to the Negro school building, some miles from the town, past Georgia peach orchards, past cotton lands, past little unpainted cabins, scattered so thickly over the land... the usual cropper’s portion was ten acres... past long stretches of worn-out lands... the ride during which she did so much thinking about her father in relation to his new wife... making it a kind of key to her own thoughts of men and a possible permanent relation to some man of her own — her ride took place before the two men of the town, one very young, one almost old, became interested in her. Men with their mules were plowing the fields. There were brown men and white men, the brutalized ignorant poor whites of the South. Not all of the woods in that country were pine woods. There were stretches of lowland along a river road they traveled that day. At places red newly plowed land seemed to go right up the side of a slope into the dark wood. A brown man, driving a team of mules, went right up a slope into a wood. His mules disappeared in the wood. They turned in there and came out. Single pine trees seemed to run out from the mass of trees as though to dance on the fresh newly plowed land. At the river’s edge, below the road along which they drove, Ethel’s father now quite lost in a tale of his young boyhood on the land, a tale she kept going by asking occasional que
stions — at the river’s edge swamp maples grew. A little earlier the leaves of the swamp maples had been blood-red but they were now turning green. The dogwood was coming into bloom. It gleamed white against the green of the new growth. The peach orchards were almost ready to bloom, soon they would burst forth in a mad riot of bloom. Just at the river’s edge, cypress grew. You could see the knees sticking up out of the brown slack water and out of the red mud at the edge of the river.
It was spring. You felt spring in the air. Ethel kept glancing at her father. She was half angry with him. She had to keep him going, keep his mind occupied with thoughts of his boyhood. “What’s the use?... he will never know, can never know why his Blanche and I hate each other, why at the same time we want to help each other.” Her eyes had a way of getting bright, like a serpent’s eyes. They were blue and as thoughts came and went they sometimes seemed to grow green. They were really gray when she felt cold, gray when warmth came into her.
The intensity broke. She wanted to chuck it. “I should fake him into my arms, as though he were still the boy he is talking about,” she thought. No doubt his first wife, Ethel’s mother, often did that. There might be a man, who was still a boy, as her father was, who nevertheless knew he was a boy. “I could perhaps make a go of it with such a one,” she thought.
Hatred grew in her. It was as a bright-green new spring plant in her that day. The woman Blanche knew she had hatred in her. That was why the two women could both hate and respect each other.
If her father had only known a bit more than he did know, than he could ever know.
“Why couldn’t he have got for himself, if he were determined to have another wife, if he felt he needed one?...” She felt vaguely her father’s hunger for a son... the World War had taken his last one... and yet he could go on, like the eternal child he was, believing the World War justified... he had been one of the leaders in his section, whooping it up for the war, helping to sell Liberty Bonds... she remembered a silly speech she had once, before her mother’s death, after the son had enlisted, heard her father make. He spoke of the war as a healing thing. “It will bind up old wounds here in our own country, between the North and the South,” he said that time... Ethel sitting beside her own mother listening... the mother went a little pale... women surely have to stand for a lot of nonsense from their men... Ethel felt it was rather absurd, the determination of the male about sons... a vanity that went on and on in men... wanting to reproduce themselves... thinking that so terribly important....
“Why, in God’s sweet name, if he wanted another son, did he pick out Blanche?”
“What man would want to be Blanche’s son?”
It was all a part of the immaturity of men a woman got so tired of. Now Blanche was tired of it. “Such damn children,” Ethel thought. Her father was sixty-five. Her mind leaped to something else. “What do women give a damn whether or not the man who can do to them what they want done is good or not?” She was getting into the habit of swearing, even in her thought. Perhaps she had caught that from Blanche. She thought she had one thing on Blanche. She was less tired. She wasn’t tired at all. She thought, sometimes, when she was in the mood she was in that day... “I’m strong,” she thought.
“I could hurt a lot of men before I die.”
She might have gone in for something — with Blanche. “I could fix her,” she thought. “This business of her letting herself go, dirty and shabby-looking as she is... It may be a way of keeping him off... It wouldn’t be my way.”
“I could take her, make her live a little. I wonder if she wants me to. I guess she does. I guess that is what she is up to.”
Ethel sat in the car beside her father smiling, a hard queer smile. Once her father caught a glimpse of it. It frightened him. She could still smile softly. She knew that.
There he was, the man, her father, perplexed by the two women he had got into his house, his wife and his daughter, wanting to ask his daughter, “What’s wrong?” Not daring to ask.
“There are things going on about me I can’t understand.”
“Yes, boy. You are right about that. Yes, there are things going on.”
Two or three times during the drive that day, a flush came to the judge’s cheeks. He wanted to lay down certain rules. He wanted to be a law-maker. “Be kind to me and others. Be honorable. Be fair.”
“Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”
Ethel’s father used to put his foot down hard sometimes when she was a little girl at home. At that time she was half a torn-boy, she was eager, easily excited. At one time she had a mad desire to play with all the bad little boys of town.
She knew which the bad ones were. You could tell them, the bold ones.
They would do things to you, perhaps, that kind.
There was all the terrible talk about pure spotless white womanhood in the South. Better to be a nigger girl.
“For God’s sake, come here. Put some spots on me. Don’t listen to anything I say. If I become frightened and cry out pay no attention to me. Do it. Do it.”
There must have been some sense in the strange, halfmad men of Russia, before the revolution, who went about urging people to commit sin.
“Make God happy. Give Him a lot to forgive.”
Some of the bad little white boys of Langdon, Georgia, might have done it. One or two had almost got the chance with Ethel. There was one bad little boy who had come close to her in a barn, another at night in a field, in the field near her father’s house, where he kept his cow. She herself had crept out at night to that one. He had told her that afternoon coming home from school to creep out there, in the early evening, just after dark, to the field, and although she had trembled with fright, she had gone. There had been such a strange, half-frightened eager daring look in his young boy’s eyes.
She had got out of the house safely, but her father had missed her.
“Damn him. I might have learned something.”
There were memories like that in Blanche too. Of course. She being puzzled and puzzled a long, long time, through girlhood, through early womanhood, as Ethel had been, Blanche taking Ethel’s father at last, going after him and getting him.
That good, good old boy. O Lord!
Ethel Long was hard, she was glistening, riding with her father as he went one day to pay a visit to a Negro school teacher who had been indiscreet, riding with him and thinking.
Not seeing, on that day, the dogwood shining against the green by a river’s edge, not seeing white men and brown men driving mules, plowing the Southern land for another cotton crop. White cotton. Sweet purity.
Her father had come into the field that night and had found her there. She stood in the field trembling. There was a moon. There was too much moon. He didn’t see the boy.
The boy had come toward her across the field as she crept out of the house. She had seen him coming.
It would be odd if he were also shy and frightened as she was. What chances people take! Men and women, boys and girls, approaching each other thus... seeking some obscure Heaven, for the moment. “Now! Now! We may at least have this moment’s taste of it... if it be Heaven.
“So blunderingly we go. It is better to go blunderingly than not to go.”
Perhaps the boy felt that. He had determination. He ran toward her and grabbed at her. He tore her dress at the neck. She trembled. He was of the right sort. She had picked one of the right sort.
Her father hadn’t seen the boy. When the father came out at the door of the Long house that night, his heavy feet making a loud sound on wooden steps, the boy dropped to the ground and crawled toward a fence. There were some bushes by the fence and he achieved the bushes.
Queer that her father, seeing nothing, was yet suspicious. He was convinced there had been something wrong, something to him terrible. Were all men, even good men, like Ethel’s father, closer to animals than they ever let themselves know? It would be nicer if they did let themselves know. If men dared let themselves
know women might live more freely, they might lead sweeter lives. “In the present world of men there is too much thought and not enough thought. Men want courage and, not having it, they make women too much afraid,” Ethel thought.
“But why was I given a mind? I am too much woman and not enough woman.”
That night in the field her father hadn’t seen the boy. If there hadn’t been a moon she might have got away from her father and followed the boy into the bushes. There was too much moon. Her father sensed something. “Come here,” he said to her harshly that night, advancing toward her across the pasture. She didn’t move. She wasn’t afraid of him that night. She hated him. “Come here,” he kept saying, striding across the field toward her. At that time her father wasn’t the meek thing he became after he got Blanche. He had a woman then, Ethel’s mother, who was perhaps even afraid of him. She never crossed him. Was she afraid or was she merely patient? It would be nice to know. It would be nice to know whether it had always to be so, the woman either dominating the man or the man the woman. The name of the vulgar little boy she had arranged to meet that night was Ernest and although the father had not seen him on that night, several days later he suddenly said to her, “Do you know a boy named Ernest White?”
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 154