The Unpossessed

by Tess Slesinger

  When he dared look up King was a brown mass on the ground, and Uncle Daniel’s back, half up the hill again toward home, mounted with the muzzle of his gun pointed to the sky.

  “Twere the right thing to do,” said Old Man Brown in closing benediction. “Dan’l knew,” murmured all around.

  Nobody would touch the Picketts’ chickens. At last the “Italians,” wiping their moist and volatile eyes began to smile again, came forward and bargained with their friend John Pickett. In the end they got all twelve chickens for a dollar. They rode off slow and easy, carting John Pickett’s dead white chickens, their eyes looked back and shone with lazy pleasure.

  The valley sighed. The air lightened. Justice had been done. The people dispersed back to their fields, the Hired Men moved fast, knowing democracy was finished for the day.

  The Flinders women and the Flinders boy took the short cut home, up over the hill the way their man had gone. They placed their men’s felt hats over the pails of berries to keep the sun from wilting them. Miles could see across the field his Uncle Dan, already back at work, under the cloths stretched pole-to-pole to keep the backer in shade. When they went in the kitchen to wash the berries they saw his gun hung back in its place on the kitchen door. No one ever spoke of King again . . . but Miles knew well that day that there was something bigger in men than themselves, that could drive them to do what alone they would never have dared. . . .

  “Here we are,” said Margaret, and he gathered from the inflection of her voice she must have spoken twice. He looked up in haste—for he knew that it was as unendurable to her as it was incomprehensible, to be forgotten, to have their world together even for a moment so ignored—and saw, to his faint surprise, that his journey down Brown’s Lane had brought them ineluctably to the door of the house where Jeffrey and Norah lived.

  “Of course, if you don’t feel like seeing them,” said Margaret somewhat acidly.

  “Oh sure I do,” he said protestingly; and added, filled with compassion at the thought of how far he could wander from her, “Mrs. Salvemini was right dear, you ought to have dressed warmer, you look cold—maybe we walked too slowly?” He could feel her eyes penetrating gravely as, hiding his reluctance, he rang the bell.

  5. NORAH’S JEFFREY

  SHE STOOD listless at the kitchen door, watching Jeffrey range his bottles. From the living-room beyond came the sound of Miles’ and Norah’s voices, carrying on their desultory off-stage drama. “Yes,” Miles was saying, “oh yes, of course; living in the country is quite another thing; there you’re less aware of trends because you’re busy making them—grubbing away knee-deep in dirt, you can’t haul off and get a mental eyeful.” And Norah’s hearty murmur, scarcely audible, muffled by the din of Jeffrey opening bottles; words here and there like the thrusting undercurrent of the second violin, her father’s orchard, her mother’s brood of hens; and Miles again, patient, didactic, uninterested, politely intoning the theme-song from a corner of his shell. Margaret Flinders shivered. Cold? why yes, Mrs. Salvemini, chilled to the bone and heart; it was the coldest walk I ever took—winter is certainly in the air, Mrs. Salvemini. But another coat, Mrs. Salvemini’s shawl itself, would not have helped. For Miles had effectually shut her out, locked and double-barred the door which closed his shell; she had wandered many times around it, her fingers ached with battering vainly on its brittle walls. Let Norah try the empty shell-step now! She thought of Miles; and turned with relief to Jeffrey, preparing an altar on the kitchen table for the rite of mixing drinks.

  “no age for repressions, my dear,” Jeffrey spoke in a low and irritable voice, its deadline the kitchen door and the discretion of her ears. “Will you hand me the squeezer, please Maggie? Your repressions are unhealthy, a damned unhealthy lie.”

  “not a question of repressions, I’ve told you that before.” It was such a very old play; her lines came easily. She rummaged on the shelf for Norah’s lemon-squeezer.

  “so utterly bourgeois, not like you.” He took the squeezer angrily. “This gin,” he pointed to it proudly, it might be a bonus offered with himself, “is made with hardly any juniper; but lots of glycerine to make it smooth. And it’s not just that I’m arguing my own case,” he brought his large and beautiful eyes to stare like a baleful preacher’s into hers, “it’s for your sake just as much. I wish you’d read my book—where in hell is the ice-pick? the dynamics of healthy sex,” he finished absently. He forgot her; the dynamics of healthy sex slithered to the floor. His eyes and his quick nervous hands darted through the kitchen drawers.

  “You really don’t mix cocktails, you perform them,” Margaret said; and gave herself over to the joy of watching a man in love with what he did. She thought of Miles; from the outer room the sounds came vaguer, Miles withdrawing deeper in his hard impenetrable shell—poor Norah! She thought of Miles. But Miles for all his scorn of Jeffrey’s catholic amours, had brought her here himself; Miles had not lifted his eyes when on the flimsiest pretext (for she had shivered in his presence, found it impossible to raise her voice from spirits sunk so deep) she had followed Jeffrey wildly to the kitchen. Then let Miles go! forget him! forget Norah too, her friend. Forget them both (she urged herself on; she needed courage); let them go on sitting there, discussing Marx, if she knew Miles! in whatever state they might: Norah in her hearty silence, Miles laboriously making faces from the safety of his cloistered shell. She thought of Miles; and turned with warmth to Jeffrey. “Two parts gin without juniper, and about ten parts Jeffrey’s soul,” she said; she paused; “if you put as much ardor into your courtship, Jeffrey . . .” She let her eyes smile mockingly.

  “And that’s just where you’re wrong,” he said, taking her look and swallowing it with his own egocentric brand of salt, “that’s just where you’re wrong, my dear. I don’t believe in courting, any more than marriage. Dynamics, I tell you—I only believe in nature. I tell you honestly how I feel—and I know damn well you feel the same. So there isn’t any courting needed. It’s entirely up to you. Either you go against your nature; or you follow where it leads.” Yet in the very face of nature she observed he lowered his voice; as though nature were something belonging exclusively in the kitchen and by no means to sidle down the hall to the room where Miles and Norah sat. “You resent that I seem to put more ardor into making drinks? Why Margaret! you romantic lady! back to the middle-ages, darling, I’m no Galahad.” His voice changed—she loved his trick of turning with a grin, feeling quick joy from some little thing: disarming, almost admitting his own absurdity. “But really—I confess it: I do get a kick out of mixing drinks. Why not? it’s part of living. And out of so many things besides, Maggie—and that’s all the courting I can give you darling, invite you to share things with me, get a kick out of something together, you and I and nobody else. . . .”

  That was it, that was the whole thing, she reflected, handing him the can-opener for which he had not asked, on an impulse to contribute something to his joy—he got a kick out of practically anything: men, women, gin without juniper, jokes and espousing justice and his own shallow sparkling books; there was nothing Jeffrey could not eye with pleasure. (She heard Miles in the other room explaining to Norah how economic determinism was responsible for even private motives; “even most marriages” he said in what sounded to her a grim and disillusioned tone.) Avidity immediately followed; insatiable hunger to capture, to make a part of Jeffrey whatever caught his eye—what Miles called spreading himself thin like synthetic cheese to reach indiscriminately everywhere. (Oh Miles, it wasn’t economic determinism darling, that was responsible for us—why Miles, have you forgotten everything?) And Miles was right about the cheese, he always was right in some meaningless mental zone that took nothing human in account; but that Jeffrey was democratic to the point of spreading indiscriminately she found she suddenly could forgive. It was a pleasant quality, and pliable, proof of his being alive and young. (“Well, I don’t really know, Miles,” she heard Norah’s calm and laughing answer; “now take my fat
her’s rooster; you can’t tell me he only thought of ways to earn his keep! And I never heard a banker crow so loud!” Then Norah too had found the shell-door bolted! but Norah could stand on the shell-step laughing; she knew she had no rights inside.) That capacity of Jeffrey’s for uncritical enjoyment—Miles would condemn it forever, Miles would never understand it—but let Miles go! who sat and explained the nature of economics and forgot to consider his pulse-beats; who turned deliberately from her warmest gifts and chose to wander off alone, carrying his hard-shell integrity on his back like a hard-shell baptist beetle—let Miles go!

  “I do like to enjoy things,” she said; “and I like to enjoy things with you. But Norah—she’s my friend, Jeffrey, after all, as well as you.” This was taking Jeffrey seriously! she was almost frightened.

  “I don’t put much value on a friendship embalmed in vinegar—which is all that denial is.” She thought it odd that Jeffrey, with all his talk of nature and denial, continued to resemble a poetic, fair-haired priest. “Now let me see. Oh yes—I have the bitters: it’s the sugar I want next.” He worked his way happily with the can-opener around the seal-tite grapefruit. “If you can find it, Maggie. And when you come to your senses, darling, about life, I mean, let me be the first to know.”

  The ice-cubes clinked; the liquid thrashed—and Margaret’s spirits rose. Why of course! (she opened the door of Norah’s cupboard); she had reckoned, on that lonely walk with Miles, altogether without Jeffrey, without the world outside of Miles that Jeffrey stood for. She had fallen (loosening her hold experimentally on Miles’ unwitting arm, vainly seeking company from Mr. Papenmeyer’s passing store) into a state of injured apathy she now could hardly credit; creeping beside him in the tempo of some demoded world (but not the middle-ages; her mother’s world perhaps) where drinks and men beside one’s husband had no place. Now Jeffrey and his cocktail rite, Jeffrey and his warming words, lifted the curtains again on the world of faster rhythms; in Jeffrey’s eyes and Jeffrey’s admiration she could feel Margaret recreated, Margaret standing for herself again, no longer Mrs. Salvemini’s shivering Missis Flinders. She faltered, facing Jeffrey’s gayer world, for what she left behind was far more dear. But one must compromise! one must evade; fatuity got one nowhere. She searched through Norah’s cupboard for Norah’s store of sugar; and found it in the crock marked GINGER.

  She held it out with the faintest suspicion that she gave him more than sugar. He turned and meeting her eye, swiftly kissed her hand and held it quietly in his. She strained for a sound from the other room, some perceptive signal (but God knew what she wanted!) from Miles perhaps; but there was silence. She was frightened; and drawing back her hand she spoke in the high artificial voice of an actress stressing the cue.

  “The reviews, Jeffrey, tell me what they did to you.”

  “The reviews,” he said obediently; and taking the sugar returned with characteristic absorption to his task. “Idiotic as usual,” his hands moved competently opening bottles; “all that economic drivel, you know—well, Miles subscribes to it, and Bruno too—about my not dealing with ‘social distinctions’ —when I’m concerned with life transcending class-lines . . . will you hand me the lemons now Maggie? and anyway (thanks darling) I’m something of a mystic.” He poured with an expert narrowing of the eye from a brown bottle into the cocktail shaker. “They did speak of me, though—two of them,” he numbered modestly, and fastidiously pushed the lemon peels back off the cocktail altar, “as America’s D. H. Lawrence.” More ice-cubes tumbled in. “I’m terribly fed up with grenadine, aren’t you? to hell with it. And of course, they missed my most symbolic meanings. . . .”

  “I thought you were a communist,” she murmured—and thought how Miles would add ‘this week.’ (She wished that Miles’ ghost would stay outside with Miles, arguing Marx to Norah.)

  “Of course, I am; a Marxist intellectual, I should say.” He stirred and tasted; added another spoon of sugar. She wondered if his Revolution existed just as cocktails did, something for Jeffrey to enjoy. “And as a matter of fact, I have it on good authority that certain members of the Left Wing, you know I’m pretty close to them . . .” He paused and thought; his fine brow wrinkled. “Oh yes! I’m ready for the bitters, Maggie.”

  It struck her how from her earliest days it had been dinned into her that a woman’s life was completed by her husband; and now (taking the sugar, handing him the bitters, in short building with Jeffrey toward something, the ingredients the lightest symbols if she wished them so) how utterly false that might be. The bond, for instance, that she plainly felt with Jeffrey—it was surely more than friendship? strengthened and put to the test by Margaret’s long denial of it, it certainly existed in itself and was extraneous to Miles. Convention, her mother’s sweet and trustful code, dictated that denial. But it might be one thing for her mother and another for her mother’s child, she found herself reflecting now—and Mrs. Thomas Banner had had something, the sanctity of the family she had called it, to preserve. But Miles and Margaret Flinders had no such tender thing, their rooms housed nothing but each other—and what had they, Miles and Margaret, what thread, that Jeffrey could destroy? For fidelity—there, it was out! she slipped it recklessly free of her conscience and looked it in the face; the word and its antithesis must have been playing in her mind since early evening, surely since she chose a dress to wear for Jeffrey. For fidelity—it must have some object larger than itself; it must achieve some end; and what had come of hers, tonight and many times before?

  For coming faithfully home from the market had she not paused at sight of her house, before her again! smitten with the longing to turn back and lose herself somewhere in the city out of sight forever of that house, to chase madly in pursuit of some world around corners (and might Jeffrey possibly be its door?). But had she not also, drawn there surely by her loyalty, raced up the stairs in terror? had she not joyfully greeted Miles when she half-hoped to find him gone? And better so, better so, she had thought, and thought repeatedly. Let us have no change; let us have no hurry; let us have no infidelities. Let us lull the men till they leave off their restlessness and come and sit in the cynical shade of our bosoms—grown large (how ripe and fine her mother was, just before her death) to comfort them; let them be at last like our fathers, our children, with bald heads pressing them down and in, safe and sweetly defeated. So she had turned, as she had a hundred times before, from infidelity even in her mind; and what had come of it?

  She was Miles’ faithful wife. Yet Miles could wander (even now, she heard his voice, droning on to Norah, and it sounded strange to her) walking even by her side, so many dark turns from her. And she could not leap jealously in pursuit because the grounds were so intangible, because he took his road alone and went unaccompanied by what it would have been comparatively light to bear—some other woman. She turned from a twinge of loneliness determinedly to Jeffrey. His infidelities were something a woman could grasp and meet; Norah could offer him the same gifts that lured him off to win him home again. Or was Margaret Flinders telling herself this, to pave the way for disloyalty to Norah, just as she coached her soul for infidelity. . . .

  “This will knock us for a goal,” said Jeffrey happily.

  She watched him keenly. Jeffrey Blake (she said his name with pleasure to herself, as if it became a part of her) was too often absurd—she would admit it freely again to Miles; occasionally seemed mad; certainly was obsessed with the importance of himself and his enthusiasms. But all the while there was this healthy appetite in him, a capacity for absorption and enjoyment, that she knew could match her own. Even his beauty—strange anachronism in a male, as Bruno said—seemed a symbol of his inner glow, his inner generosity: he wore it, showed it, loaned it, with such frank delight. His laugh, his joy, his childlike glow. . . . Was it infidelity if she turned to another man for what Miles could never give her?

  His voice came floating muffled down the hall; his words stopped short just at the kitchen door. But she thought that even if h
is words came in and stood about her, they could not touch her now, so completely had she moved to Jeffrey’s world. The world of gayety, of warmth! it might be as closed to Miles as his New England shell to her.

  And if it were infidelity? if it were disloyalty? Mustn’t she be Margaret first, before a friend and wife? And if her life, unlike her mother’s, were not completed by her husband?

  He had said it himself, in a hundred different little ways, during their loyal drinking of the cider (which had tasted like tears in her throat): “Something is wrong with our life.” And she might have agreed, they might have faced it down—but that it seemed two people never bravely spoke the truth at once; she had manufactured peace. She sighed. Such peace was fraudulent, she knew it. Clearly something was wrong, and wrong for her part too. On her side it consisted perhaps in a failure to keep her identity apart from his; she sought a thread and a meaning, and expected them both from him. But that was impossible; it was sentimental; moreover, it had failed.

  “And last but not least,” said Jeffrey with joy, “the gin. Did I tell you my man said—less juniper and lots more glycerine—is what does the trick?”

  He rattled the shaker high over his head. Then he poured a little in a glass; sipped, his brows raised quizzically. He handed the glass to her. “What do you think Margaret, taste it carefully?” He watched her anxiously, his forehead beaded with sweat like a baby’s.

  She tasted it and holding the glass in her hand as though she weighed it against the delicacy of the moment, swallowed slowly. She came to decisions and reversed them; sipped again, her eyes gravely meeting his. It was a fine moment; fidelity hung in the balance; she wanted to prolong it. “A little sweet,” she said at last, “a very little too sweet, I think,” she said faintly (for she liked it sweet, it was Miles who would want it dry) and handed him back the glass. Now they almost held their breaths as he with infinite precision added infinitesimal drops of bitters, the final touches to their masterpiece. They tasted again—first Jeffrey, then Margaret; then Margaret again, then Jeffrey to make sure. Their eyes met; they nodded; and she trembled so her hands went cold.