The Unpossessed

by Tess Slesinger

  The book looked up hopefully from its ribald red cover.

  “Stay, I dare you,” he whispered.

  “Darling, I’m practically on my knees,” he whispered.

  “Elizabeth, tell me you love me, don’t hide your face,” he dared not cry.

  “I, I think we could probably make a go of it, darling,” he said unhappily.

  She lifted her face at that and laughed with the tears rolling slowly down her cheeks. “Give me my toothbrush, Denny. And hurry, darling, hurry.”

  “I’ll throw it out the window,” he said like a defiant little boy; but did not. “Do you dare me to throw it out the window, Elizabeth?”

  “Yes, I dare you to throw it out the window,” she said grimly.

  His hand shook with guilt before them both as his fingers, in spite of him, convulsively clutched what they held. “Ask me to, ask me to, Elizabeth,” he pleaded.

  She took it gently from his hand and laid it in her bag.

  “At least we’ve two of those,” she said.

  “Maybe you will come back,” he said, frightened.

  The red book that belonged to both of them burst into passionate weeping on the floor as over it they gravely said goodbye.

  2. BRUNO AND THE BLACK SHEEP

  “TELL HIM from me,” Bruno shouted to Emmett through the door of his living-room which had turned overnight into Filing Cabinet headquarters, “that his stuff is sure-fire sale and sure-fire manure and we’re not having any in our stable. Tell him to shovel it under someone else’s door and get to hell out of our way—we’re busy; we’re a man of action, a man of Magazine. Besides we’ve got to meet a boat next Saturday.” (He drew a deep and happy breath of memory.) He turned complacently to the Six Black Sheep squatting on window sills and tables, like a young army too restless to take to chairs, their bright undergraduate sweaters like scattered parts of a flag at rest; and met the ultra-critical eye of their lean and un dernourished Chairman as he sat swinging his feet against Bruno’s grand piano. “Nothing,” Bruno added, chiefly to irritate young Firman, “stinks quite like a bad writer. Unless it’s the slightly foetid odor of a bad writer gone phony propagan dist. . . . Tell him we’re not running a dirty propaganda sheet, Emmett,” he roared, “we keep open house and open forum and if he can’t take it slam the receiver in his propaganda face. . . . But what’s the matter, Comrade Chairman? what have I said that isn’t kosher?”

  For Firman, perched like a young Jewish owl on the music stool, had kicked the piano disgustedly, while his eyes behind his glasses gleamed with intelligent dislike. “Oh nothing,” said young Firman coldly (did that lad exist, thought Bruno, return ing the look and the sentiment irresistibly, only to remind him that he must have been just such a conscientious bore himself fifteen years ago?). “Nothing, only that the open forum policy is untenable from the ground up. Every written word,” said Firman, hitching the glasses higher on his nose, “is propaganda.” Six Sheep bowed in a haughty phalanx of assent; their sudden sway putting the flag together for a moment.

  “I see you know your catechism,” Bruno said. “We will proceed to the next step. How about poetry? One at a time now, children.”

  “An opiate,” said Little Dixon briskly.

  “Propaganda for spending your life sitting on your ass reading it,” said Cornelia Carson promptly. Bruno failed to place her counterpart in any of the girls of his own day; she seemed an exclusive twentieth century product, half-boy, half-girl, born yesterday, of movies, radio and matter-of-fact class-consciousness.

  “For forgetting what’s wrong with the world and getting all tangled up being lyrical about the birds,” said one of the Maxwell brothers.

  “I’d have all the lyric poets jailed for counter-revolutionaries,” said Firman, gathering the comments of his committee and fitting them precisely into his dialectic nutshell. He spoke with jagged edges to his speech but when he came to revolution he slipped it out with the U sound round and slippery as a peeled banana.

  “And intentions?” Bruno began, thinking how the pleasant sophistries of his own day had changed to dogma in the mouths of this younger generation; when Emmett Middleton came sidling through the door like an uncertain deer; paused and looked about him for a place to sit as though he weren’t sure whether to cast his lot with his contemporaries or with Bruno. “Has our maiden contributor bit the dust, Emmett?” The boy smiled gratefully, as though Bruno’s notice decided him; he chose for his seat at last the corner of Bruno’s desk where he sat enthroned on Bruno’s right and above his fellow-classmen. “I thought propaganda was intentional, deliberate?”

  Bruno quirked an eye on Firman, aware sheepishly that he had bought Emmett for an ally.

  “In Russia,” said Cornelia Carson in her dry two-tone, boy-and-woman voice, “intentions don’t count.” “Only results matter,” said Kate Corrigan, commonly known as “Irish,” laying the next step. “This is the age for objectivity, the subjective went out with individualism.” “Everything in the world,” Firman mounted the ladder and intoned from the top rung, “is propaganda. A tree is propaganda. Propaganda for cutting it down and making it into guns. For reforestation. For pulp magazines. . . .”

  “And just for lolling under counter-revolutionarily, I suppose, to the fat professors like myself,” said Bruno; perceiving that a superior form of Blake’s disease had taken the youngsters by storm. “Oh who will come and lie with me, under the propaganda-tree. . . . Pardon me, Firman, I have a touch of horse-blood.” He met Firman’s eye ironically; saw in them a reflection of his own look and drew back startled by the felt resemblance. “But you asked for an interview, Firman. Let’s get on with it, I’m a man of action this week, ask my secretary. . . .”

  “Yes, Doctor Leonard hasn’t got all night,” said Emmett in the tone of class monitor; “make it s-snappy, Firman.”

  “Nor yet all week,” said Bruno happily. Five days to Elizabeth’s boat; five days to seeing his earliest friend, to tearing down the walls of fog that they had let be built between them; to reaching out, touch hands at last, beg for forgiveness, beg for love. . . . “Now what’s on the Black Sheep’s mind?”

  The Sheep scrambled out of their silence and clattered eagerly for his attention. Only Emmett, diffident, kept still, dissociating himself from his colleagues (Bruno wondered what weakness in himself had made him choose the weakest of their number to befriend) till he saw which way the land lay.

  “The point is, Doctor Leonard” “and they won’t give us a column in the Campus Pilgrim” “open forum is all very nice” “but like all open forums” “it’s only open to one side” “try and slip in one intelligent thought, one protest” “I wish you’d all shut up,” said Arnold Firman vigorously; “how can he hear if we all yell at once like a damned cheering-squad.”

  Their enthusiasm for whatever it was that was eating them touched him but it made him feel a hundred years old or more. It had been so long, so many years, since his own contemporaries had gathered like an army behind him. “I gather that the Black Sheep are even hotter under the collar than usual,” he said dryly; “but my senile brains, you know . . . Firman, the ancient mariner looks to you.”

  The boy approached his desk with an air of timid impertinence, as though to show he dared be at home in the enemy’s territory, as though despite embarrassment to himself he claimed his rights. “Doctor Leonard. Before we go any further . . . excuse me for getting personal—” the lids fell half-way over his eyes—“but we’ve been hearing about your Magazine for so long now; rumor whispers—and yet . . . is there a Magazine, Doctor Leonard?” He raised profoundly sceptical brows.

  From behind their glasses the two Jews in the room glared at one another with what (Bruno was certain) must be the identical look. “Your scepticism, Firman,” he spoke coldly; but he could never avoid a faint intimacy when he spoke to Firman, “does you credit. But the Magazine,” and he felt stronger at once, as though he had needed his own words for re-conviction, “the Magazine, to my own s
urprise, is rapidly becoming a fact. Great trees from little shoe-strings grow; but our Magazine was founded on a Filing Cabinet. Behold, children! The first instalment’s paid—and Emmett’s mother’s going to meet the next. Although, I think, she doesn’t know it yet.” Emmett blushed with pride.

  “Well then,” young Firman said; and stood as though he planted his thin chest against invisible but omnipresent enemies impersonated momently in Bruno. “The Pilgrim is supposed to be the mouthpiece of the whole student body. ‘Open forum’ it says on the title-page; and some drivel about inviting all opinions. But it turns out that it’s only open to the opinions of the conservatives, the football heroes, the stinking-fascists.”

  Football! Was that the worm that gnawed that hollow intellectual chest? Bruno felt a wave of nostalgia, the strange and nauseating kinship, binding and repugnant, which a cripple feels when meeting a fellow-cripple on the street. Jew on a window-sill! When did not a smart young Jew turn his back with hate upon the football heroes of his world—and pinch his heart at night with longing to be one of them? One batters on closed gates begging for admission; and when the gate stays fast, the battering turns imperceptibly from pleading to attack.

  “Why?” said Arnold Firman rhetorically. He spoke with the relentless persistence of one climbing endless ladders toward an unwavering and unforgettable goal. “Because of football politics. Because of fraternity politics. Because the same stinking-fascism that rules the board of directors runs the student-body too. Because, as I said before, the open forum principle is untenable, because propaganda is inherent in every written word. Now—when the Black Sheep resigned from the Campus Club last year in protest against the fraternities. . . .”

  “Can the Roberts rules of order, Firman, and get to the point,” said Cornelia Carson briefly. She was a small girl, taut and tightly drawn on strong dry wires; it occurred to Bruno that she might not have enough to eat.

  Firman pulled himself up short. “Objection sustained, sister. I thought for a minute I was on the soap-box. The point is, Doctor Leonard, that the Pilgrim’s pages are so filled with football drivel that the Black Sheep can’t get a word in edgewise. Last month we sent in an article on the Scottsboro case—from the youth angle, you know. They sent it back. ‘We haven’t room,’ they said, ‘for anything but collegiate topics.’ And it’s the same with everything we write.”

  The Black Sheep nodded like one man. They all reached boiling point, catching heat from their leader, at once.

  “We think the student body has a right to know the facts” “whether they want to or not, the dumb yeggs” “if we have to ram it down their throats” “what’s education for” “we’re sick and tired of being told to shut up like a bunch of God damn kids,” cried Cornelia, summing up, “when the Scottsboro boys are younger than we—and they’re going to hang them like sure-enough adults.”

  The telephone cut like a barbed wire through their unity. They dwindled angrily into silence; drew together whispering and gesturing in their bright wool sweaters, the parts of the flag almost fitting together. Emmett jumped up—“I’ll take it here,” said Bruno grimly; he wanted respite from the mounting fire. Jeffrey’s voice came like a thin thread sounding the note of his own contemporaries. Behind his back the army of the future milled. He heard Jeffrey through. “I don’t give a damn,” he shouted back, “Fisher or no Fisher, Comrade or no Comrade, I won’t print lies. And badly written ones at that. Stop acting like a God damn procurer. Alienate, hooey. If literary conscience alienates them we’ll start a lefter wing. Tell your Comrade Fisher that a truth in the hand is worth twenty propagandist lies in the bushes, from the early Esquimaux. . . . And don’t buy any more pen-holders. All we need now is an umbrella stand and a spittoon. Goodbye, you God damned fool. See you on the barricades. Yes, I’ll speak to Emmett. Yes, sometime this week if his mother can make it. Goodbye, goodbye.” He slapped down the receiver with vigor. He would have to wait for Elizabeth; his friends were mad. “See, Firman? Man of action. Brusque. Determined. Editorial sense combined with courage. . . . But I think you were saying something. All of you at once, if I’m not mistaken.”

  The flag broke up as Firman rose again; behind him the woolly parts waved as though the same wind blew them all. The pose of angry unconcern fell from Firman’s face; the very lines that made it ugly made it, for a moment, fine. The eagerness in those lidded eyes, unaccustomed as they were to holding light, was singular and moving; Bruno warmed despite himself. An ugly Shelley, the boy stood, raised by some inward urge, forgetful at last of a world forever hostile; and behind him his small army stood solid.

  “Doctor Leonard. The Black Sheep need a mouthpiece of their own. We want a chance to speak. Not on such little issues as football—that’s just a symbol, so far as we’re concerned.” (Take that, Leonard, Bruno told himself; these kids are smart; maybe they apply their lingo.) “And not just to the students of this campus. We feel that college students don’t live in glass houses, the campus is a miniature fascist state, run by the same lousy factors that the outside world is run by. We want to open students’ eyes. We want to talk to all the students in the country. . . .”

  Excitement mounted among the Sheep. They leaned forward, their eyes alight on Bruno. Firman at their head looked like a tough little Jewish Napoleon—Bruno felt himself drawing back from their concerted onslaught. Young Emmett squirmed, his eyes swinging like a nervous pendulum from Firman’s face to Bruno’s.

  “We’d like to strike a bargain with you, Doctor Leonard. We’d like to volunteer to work for you, free, do all the dirty work, the grubby odds and ends, on your Magazine. If you’d let us, in turn,” here Firman’s passion made him shy; “if you’d let us—I suppose you think we have a hell of a lot of nerve—if you’d let us have one department in it. A student forum, run by students, you see, run for them. If you’d let us run it,” he concluded bravely. He fell back and became a private in his own army again.

  The Sheep leaned forward, their eyes big with their daring and their hope, and shouted.

  “relate collegiate topics” “apply Marxism” “correlate” “emphasize” “denounce” “teach” “explain”

  Twelve years had passed since Bruno and his friends had grown so heated. Twelve years since Bruno the valedictorian had remained behind to be instructor, then professor, in their hated Alma Mater; since Elizabeth had said (she was fifteen then; precocious but sentimental; impelled trustfully to always speak her mind): I hope you won’t get glued behind that desk, I hope you won’t grow fat and jowly and sad like our fathers. No, he had not got glued; this he told himself sternly now; and all this week he had been feeling in himself (since his cable to Elizabeth, since her quick response) the strength stored up in all these dozen years.

  He suddenly resented Firman and his devoted army as though they threatened the twelve-year dead triumvirate of Bruno, Jeffrey, Miles; as though they eagerly dug graves for the generation fifteen years their senior. Into their smug united strength he felt impelled to hurl a knife.

  “Spare my aged ear-drums,” he dropped his words heavily on the bold and budding flower of their zeal. “Sheep in wolves’ clothing I call it—you want to get in on the ground floor, do you? and buy the old man out?” But his irony was heavy, without meaning even to himself. In young Firman’s fierce pale eyes was coldly marked acceptance of the fifteen years which separated them. The army of the younger generation, led against him by his counterpart, the bitter Jew. He longed for autonomy of contemporaries; for Elizabeth, so close a reflection of himself. He resented Emmett, the boy’s imagination fired, hanging between two armies, between two generations.

  “But I don’t know, you see—” He found himself hesitating; but he discovered that he knew he would accept them; to include them was peculiarly fitting, ironically just; but also he felt vaguely apprehensive. “You might all get kicked out of school,” he threatened them lightly.

  “We don’t give a damn,” the younger generation cried. He could see Emmett bar
ely suppressing a smile of pride for his colleagues.

  “I’ll have to think it over,” he said; he knew he sounded like an irritating and unreasonable parent; but his mind was made up. “I’ll have to put it to the others too. There’s plenty of time anyway,” he said uneasily.

  “There isn’t plenty of time,” they shouted back. “We want to do something—NOW.” They stood, a half-dozen lean and half-grown children; but Bruno saw their banner waving; their numbers multiply.

  “All I can do,” he said firmly, “is put your suggestion before Flinders and Blake”; but he knew the Black Sheep must be voted in; they would lend a life and a fury and off-set the tired-radical element.

  “Thanks, Doctor Leonard.” “Three cheers!” “Hurray!” they cried, accepting it as a matter settled in their favor; and rose like a triumphant army moving on to conquer further fields. The parts of the flag sprang together; moved in a swirling mani-colored block toward the door. “We’ll work like hell, Doctor Leonard,” said Cornelia Carson in her boy-and-woman voice.

  Emmett had leaped off his perch to the floor; stood hesitantly beside the desk; for a moment Bruno thought he made an odd gesture forwards, incomprehensibly, perhaps from habit, as a child automatically rises and follows its class out of assembly, to join his generation. Bruno touched his arm; he fell back quickly. “If you can put up with my company, Emmett—we might go over the manifesto again; we might even play chess.” Emmett brightened; smiled ostentatiously at the backs of the departing Sheep.

  The little bastard Firman, Bruno thought; the smart wisecracking little Jew; is there a Magazine? the nerve of the little devil. But was there? It was up to Elizabeth. The door closed on Firman’s army; the room was ten shades darker. “Get out the masterpiece, Emmett,” he said; “it’s filed under something or other. We’ll go over it with Jeffrey’s red pencil.”