The Unpossessed

by Tess Slesinger

  “But I don’t want to go,” he said incredulously. (Feeling took him by such quaint surprise!) “I want to stay home and take baths with my God damned wife.” He trailed his fingers in the water. “It’s much more fun at home.” He shyly winked.

  “Counter-revolutionary,” she mocked.

  “All those schemes and Manifestoes,” he said recklessly; “let Bruno and Jeff be the commissars—I want to make love to my wife.”

  She grew grave. “But Margaret—your scheming wife—has plans too, darling, a life-ahead plan, Miles. You aren’t forgetting, Miles . . .” She could not resist the pleading; the lightness of the heart was not to be belied. She drew herself back with difficulty from telling him what she and Mrs. Salvemini between them knew. Happiness was too precarious . . .

  “I’ll stick to my side of the bargain,” he said courageously. “But—it does worry me, darling. My salary—I’m sure to be cut again, or fired.”

  “A smoke-screen, darling,” she said carefully; “not what you really mean, Miles. Come clean, my dear.”

  “The Magazine,” he offered; “the movement, revolution—these things mean more to me than to you.” He played vaguely with a lock of his own hair.

  “Come cleaner, darling.” She was playful, but hard. “You’re mixing your mind with your emotions, Miles—a common New England fallacy.” She watched him gravely.

  “It does worry me, Margaret; it—I think it embarrasses me. As if I weren’t ready for so large a step.” His voice was husky. “I can’t seem to—seem to—imagine it somehow, believe it. I don’t cotton to it, as my aunt Martha used to say. I—maybe I’m jealous, Maggie; but I can’t seem to see myself, quite, in the rôle . . .”

  She laughed vigorously. “Quite natural, Mister Flinders. Missis Salvemini says—until he saw them with his own two eyes, Mister Salvemini never gave a damn. She says that men are like that. Very dear and very, very stupid.”

  “Are you taking up with the Salveminis,” he said, bewildered. “We might call him Daniel, Maggie,” he said suddenly. They were quiet with the vision. “And will you look like Mrs. Salvemini, Maggie, when . . .”

  “No, the Banners don’t run to so many bosoms, not even ‘when’ ”—she mocked his puritan reticence. “I may be a bit more billowy,” she said proudly. “I may look older,” she said firmly. “I may look a little on the full-bloom side—like my mother looked before she died. Do you remember my lovely mother, Miles?” She paused, moved; and shaken with wonder that they both instinctively went backward in their minds when they contemplated going forward; the thing made the thread, the meaning. “We mustn’t let ourselves forget her, darling.” She recalled her mother’s astonished acceptance of Miles; her loyal explanation, in the terms of the only thing she had ever understood, that the lad was young, the lad had never had a childhood. “Do you think I look the least bit like her, Miles?” she wistfully asked. But she was not like her mother, with her head filled with recipes for calming men and scalloping potatoes; or was she? “My forehead, I think, my eyes?”

  “In your balmy moods,” he said, with one of his quick, rare flashes; and he put his hand on her forehead so that she felt it round and high and beautiful beneath his touch; “in your balmy moods you look exactly like Mrs. Thomas Banner; telling her son-in-law to take life easy, to be happy with her daughter.” He smiled, the recollection filling him with tenderness. He could face Mrs. Thomas Banner and her ultra, rich-developed balminess, thought Margaret, more tenderly now she was dead; and could transfer his fear of it to the strain of the same thing in her daughter. She was deeply grateful for his tribute to her mother; felt it ironic but inevitable that only death had bridged the gap between the two she loved the most. Do you see, mother, do you see what’s happening to your daughter? she has a real live husband now, a man of flesh and blood, of tenderness; a man who dares to be a father.

  “Mrs. Thomas Banner,” she said softly, “wouldn’t need to tell you now.”

  His lips (so bitten in against emotion) trembled. He looked as he had on that dear morning when he marched across the kitchen to say, “Wait, I love you, Margaret.” He looked at her—then quickly down. “It needs a lot of strength,” he said, “to take so much. Even to look you in the eyes these days. It’s almost blinding.” He ran his fingers on the rim of the tub. His eyes he held carefully lowered; and suddenly, as though he were hiding the motion even from himself, his hands shot out toward her and reached with the despair of a child.

  In a flash Margaret Flinders forgot all she knew, all she had carefully schooled herself to remember—and was in his arms, all wet and clean and naked, all of her pressed and gathered to his frightened heart that beat so painfully under the clothes he wore to hide it. He sobbed against her shoulder. Again she wished that they might die, that minute, so that their joy would last forever. But they would not die. And through her unbearable love for him, her grateful, overwhelming love for this moment that was like the end of all her aims, her newfound wisdom slowly filtered back. She held his head like something infinitely precious against her. But over his head her mind conferred with Mrs. Salvemini’s Mother of God.

  As when a thousand people gather in a square, an enigma called “mob” is born, so two people cannot live together without giving birth to a third entity, at once a part of themselves and greater than the whole. This entity, so Margaret thought, was a thing to be reckoned with, wooed, its presence constituting the aura in which lovers must live. They are never alone. This thing that is born of their being together is a censor, a chaperon, made of their separate consciousnesses meeting, not quite merging, wavering in a pattern they never can see, which nevertheless (dancing on the bathroom walls, the ceiling over their bed at night) dominates their life together. Ignored, it stretches forth an icy hand and claws their joy to death. Wooed, it hovers like a blessing on their heads.

  Margaret, born with the knowledge dumbly in her soul, having had it simply nourished by her mother who was born for nothing else, lived to court its blessing. Margaret could hold her breath forever in its service. But men, she thought, need something more; something at once more and less. So Miles, just dimly conscious as she felt he must be, would fight it even against his will, because it threatened death to him of those parts exclusively his own. She became whole (she knew it shamelessly) only when her self was merged. But Miles feared drowning.

  So over his head she studied minutely the stern and beautiful face of this thing that ruled their lives. She weighed and measured, her body and senses became the most microscopic thermometer of Miles’ emotional strength. She was superstitious, as though some god of love must be placated. The moment came (did she feel Miles infinitesimally withdraw? or did she merely anticipate and did the anticipation immediately become the fact?).

  She lifted his head and looked with cool tranquillity into his pleading eyes. “I shall catch cold,” she said lightly. His face looked hurt. Don’t you want me, he seemed to say. “You must go to meetings and things,” she said. (She couldn’t stop the bells from ringing in her voice.) Wouldn’t you rather I stayed home with you and let the meeting go to hell, he as much as said while he stared at her with his eyes filled and glowing. “Immediately, at once,” she murmured; and held him close against the lightness of her heart. “So that you will be back sooner,” she said, and firmly withdrew her arms, reaching bravely for the towel.

  He nodded as though he understood. The world came back as he looked at his watch. “My God, I’ve got to run! Jesus, how could I have hung around so long—” He caught her eye and smiled; handed her the towel as though he must do one last thing for her—and ran.

  “My love to Bruno,” she called as if to establish some contact between herself and the place he was going; “don’t let Jeffrey run away with the meeting darling, hold out for what you believe . . .” But he was gone; and she put his gift of the towel about her shoulder and it warmed her like a blessing. Middle of December, she thought; the old hat will surely do; work till June for Mr. Worthing
ton; be careful till the end of January; January, February, March, April, May, June, July, and August on the wedding-finger.

  9. THE INQUEST

  “MRS. MIDDLETON,” said the butler with gravity and fi nesse, “sends down word she is binding the canary’s leg—the little fellow broke it; Doctor Vambery is with her.”

  “Now what is your honest opinion, March,” said Al Mid dleton, button-holing him, “do you think Dickie’s leg is broken or that it’s just a compound complex, needing psycho analysis. . . . Well, tell her,” he said, sighing, “that the whole left wing is waiting for the outcome. Personally I’m betting on Vambery. Tell her her husband is fighting off a counter revolutionary stroke himself, and that if she isn’t down soon the radicals in the parlor will be so many grease-spots on the rug. Now: what are you going to tell her, March?”

  “That you hope she will be down shortly, sir,” said March and wheeled his abdomen about to carry it before him like the banner of his admirable profession.

  “A man is never a prophet in his own pantry,” said Al; swallowed his drink and made inquisitively for the library which Merle had “opened” for the reception of the plotters. He stood for a moment listening outside the door; the buzz came out pleasantly like the growing roar of the Stock Exchange when something was brewing. But no sound like the one he wanted most to hear: his own son’s voice raised and bold like the voice of someone who belonged somewhere. The buzz went on; but Emmett played no part.

  He opened the door stealthily. “tactics” “I say tactics be damned, Jeffrey” “but boring from within”—“Pardon me!” said Al loudly—and noted with malicious amusement how the steady mumble of voices died down at his entrance; saw with a touch of irritated sympathy how his own son looked up in fear; “pardon me for just stepping right in as though I lived here. My wife is upstairs having a love affair with a sick canary and I got to feeling a little lonely. Ah there, Leonard, glad to see you. So this,” he said with a quick look round, “is the Revolution. Glad to meet you, boys.”

  “Please Al, we’re having a d-d-discussion,” said Emmett miserably.

  But Bruno Leonard was crossing the room with the swift tact of a woman and took his arm. “Since you’re buying a stake in revolution,” he said genially, “you ought at least to meet the dark horses, Mr. Middleton. Miles Flinders—between the fireplace and sofa, he’s marking it off for firing—Norah and Jeffrey Blake, Arnold Firman and Cornelia Carson, classmates of your son’s—and your own son I think you know.”

  “My own son I think I don’t know,” said Al advancing briskly. “Pleased to meet you all.” He swung the hand of each in turn. He was amused at the silence, both hostile and embarrassed, which greeted his appearance. “Well. Have you come to blow me up,” he said pleasantly. Still no one quite reacted. He felt the show was his. “And what a lovely female decoy,” he said, bending to the one called Norah Blake who sat on a hassock knitting peacefully; “Madame Defarge, eh?” he said, patting her—for she seemed deliberately planned to rest the eyes. The other girl, the Cornelia one sitting close to the angry young Jew, affected him like so much sand-paper, an insult to his generous welcome to the female sex. Male and female created He her, thought Al, vastly pleased with his wit.

  “Please, Al.” He heard Emmett’s agony; slapped his own hand on withdrawing it (though God knows there had been nothing but friendliness in his gesture, and the fair one’s smiling nod reciprocated nothing else), and put it firmly in his pocket. “We were talking, dad, I don’t know if you’d be interested . . .”

  Take that, Middleton, you plain tough guy—from your own son! that’ll show you—marrying an orchid and producing a pansy. (It hurt him nevertheless.) “Nonsense, my boy,” he said with cheerful cruelty, “I’m only doing what the medicine man told me—taking an interest in my son’s activities. Can I help it if my boy likes revolutions? Papa’ll get right down on the floor and play along.” Vambery called him a sadist, explaining it in terms of four-syllable words from the Latin; but Al slipped into bullying his son because it was the only way he could talk to him, because time after time he hoped he would kick the lad into being some kind of a man. “Go right ahead, boys,” he said genially, drawing a chair beside the knitting one, and crossed his legs to listen.

  There was silence, the young Jew and the female-impersonator whispering impatiently. “They’re taking your number as an upper-classman, Mr. Middleton,” said Leonard pleasantly (a nice guy for a professor, Al had thought from his few visits); “the younger faction, the Black Sheep, or Red Lambs as history will probably call them, I suspect are reverting to Alice-in-Wonderland: the off-with-his-head chorus. How about it, Cornelia? are you playing the Red Queen over there?” Trying to bridge the gap, thought Al, between the high-brows and the low-brow—good-natured devil.

  “We’ve merely been betting,” said the sand-paper acid voice, “on the chances of this meeting getting anywhere.” “We figure if we just came here to spend the evening” “why it’s a nice warm place to sit” “but we had rather thought”

  “They won’t talk,” Emmett again, in his wretched, sissy voice, “as long as you are p-p-present, Al.”

  “Why not?” Al said coldly. “I’m the step-sugar-poppa. If your revolution’s borrowing money from Middleton’s Mid-Town Essentials, I don’t see why I can’t buy my way in; I want a ringside seat when the fight comes off.” “If it comes off,” said the tight-faced Yankee lad (Cinders? Flinders) who continued moodily to mark time on the carpet. Al looked them over coolly. From the young Jew perching defiantly with his shoes (and what shoes!) resting on Henry the Eighth in petit point at he had forgotten how many francs the square inch; to the handsome Jeffrey incredibly clad in a costume replete with wind-breaker; the nice plump knitting decoy duck; to Emmett, poor kid, stretched on the rack by his uncouth father. “How about it, boys? can I tune in on the inside dope? I want to deal in futures. When’s the opening? But please,” he said amiably, “don’t pull it off on a Saturday; it’s my only day for golf.” A pretty solemn bunch, he thought; all but Bruno Leonard.

  “We’ve been discussing a paper, Mr. Middleton,” said Norah kindly; “some kind of a paper Bruno wrote; to go in the front of the Magazine.” Thank you my dear, he said; and patted her warm hand; and is that a sweater you’re doing? Yes, for Jeffrey, she whispered back; I’m turning the sleeve.

  “My girl,” said the blond Jeffrey (and hadn’t he caught sight of him, clicking glasses with Merle last week; yes, he remembered the wind-breaker lying over March’s puzzled butler’s arm), “my girl has trouble with the English language. What we’re discussing is a Manifesto, a statement of policy, drawn up by Bruno, naming the issues.”

  “Evading the issues,” said the young Jew quickly “not a positive statement in it” said the dry male-and-female “cowardly” said the meager Jewish captain “hypocritical” said his sidekick immediately “wishy-washy liberalism” “pacifistic bellywash” “pink” “soft” “emasculated” “mugwumpery”

  “How many of them are there!” said Al, bewildered; “my God.”

  “Of course what you youngsters don’t understand,” said the wind-breaker conciliatingly (jumping his hands on his lap like a baby) “in your eagerness to go the whole hog, is that the intellectual has a definite function as an intellectual, a place of his own . . .”

  “On the sidelines, according to you,” said the minister’s son Flinders, pausing sternly in his walk; “a box seat, a loge, where he can reach for a drink if the revolution bores him. This thing is beyond a game, Jeffrey—even the Sheep know that.”

  “No game,” said the blond Jeffrey eagerly, “of course not; but it must be played like one at first. It’s a matter of tactics, I’ve just come from a conference with Comrade Fisher—”

  “So that’s where you were,” said Norah chuckling; and skillfully drew out an amber needle to start another row; “and there I was with all that lovely pot-roast.”

  “I bet you’re a swell little cook,” said Al turning t
o her with pleasure. She smiled complacently.

  “The revolution,” said Bruno Leonard lightly, “has taken a slight turn for the worse, ever since I learned that Comrade Fisher was a woman.”

  “And I,” said the caustic Firman, “have begun to suspect that it isn’t a revolution at all, since I learned she didn’t belong to the party.” “Her record,” said Cornelia, “would take some looking into.”

  “I told you smart kids,” said Jeffrey patiently, “that she’s even been in jail. . . .”

  “Now would you question her, you hard-boiled cynics?” said Bruno with delight.

  “Ruthie’s a nice girl,” said Norah simply.

  “I really think,” said Emmett, distressed, “that if mother doesn’t come soon, I mean we’re wasting so much time . . .”

  “My son,” said Al dryly, “counts on his mother’s arrival to drive me out. My dear boy, would you have her neglect a canary for a revolution?” My God! tears stood in the youngster’s eyes. Father to a sissy—I’d rather have a gangster in the family! “Do you really want me to go, Emmett,” he said gently.

  But Bruno laid his hand on Emmett’s shoulder. “Suppose you play umpire for a little, Emmett,” he was saying; “I’ll indulge in a little reactionary banter with our right wing.” Emmett calmed as he might beneath a mother’s hand—and never had, reflected Al. “Well! what do you think of my circus, Mr. Middleton?” He came jovially and sat between Al and Norah. “How would you like to place an ad in my Magazine? guaranteed to reach nobody with the cash to buy your product?”