The Unpossessed

by Tess Slesinger

  “My dear, what else could he have done?” Mrs. Fancher asked her friends. “Just barely settled in . . . the walls of the living-room imported . . . Tudor house in England . . . imagine the cost of that alone . . . and the bedroom absolutely lifted” “absolutely lifted” echoed Miss Titcomb and Miss Henley-Star “from a Louis Sixteenth boudoir” “a Louis Sixteenth boudoir” echoed Miss Cracken and Miss Milliken (“Don’t speak to me of bravery among your lower classes,” Mrs. Draper said; “I know nothing to compare with Emily Fancher’s courage in coming here tonight” “a question of standards,” said Mrs. Whitman proudly, “when one’s standards are at stake, culture, art—”) “an onyx bathtub,” Emily Fancher continued bravely, “gold faucets, oh gold fixtures everywhere, and the floor inlaid in marble, you know Jim, he had, he has, absolutely perfect taste” “absolutely perfect taste” breathed the efficiency expert’s wife as though she were in church “and he always, thank God, wanted the best of everything for me” “the best was none too good for her” “and then the marvellous Gobelins to cover up the Tudor walls” “Gobelins” “and then the crash came . . . well! what could he do?” “what could he do?”

  The buzz had risen in Elizabeth’s ears until it was terrific din, of drums and music expressing finality like the Day of Judgment, parade music, music louder than the world, and through it all some quiet bell, some quiet voice, trying to tell her something. She turned and struggled, tried to hear, tried properly to fix her aching eyes; but her camera trembled, the world and Bruno shaking on its retina. “S-scared, that’s what,” said the Middleton boy in a shaking voice. “Oh be quiet!” said Elizabeth.

  “Mr. Tevander, you are being deliberately obtuse,” Mrs. Stanhope rallied bitterly; “Jim Fancher had to do what he did . . .what he did took courage. . . .” “I know,” said Mr. Tevander restlessly, “all I say is, it oughtn’t to be necessary, I mean the system, I mean, men shouldn’t have to do such things as Fancher did. . . .” “Oho,” said Mrs. Stanhope cunningly, “so you are a Socialist, Mr. Tevander; but have you ever stopped to think what would become of art, of culture?”

  The Black Sheep were roaring out their anger.

  This is hell, this is purgatory, Miles said to Margaret; and he wiped his brow on which angry sweat was bursting out. Bruno stood before him as large, potentially as noble as once his Uncle Daniel striding down a side of hill; but Bruno’s hand was stayed, his strength was bottled—and Miles’ faith was trembling. It’s like a ghastly parable, he said. And she said nothing back to soothe him; she sat there beside him in the center of the maddening din and couldn’t find a word. It’s like a kind of sarcastic revelation from God, he said. I know, I know, she said, helpless.

  “and not one square inch of tapestry will you return, Emily, he said to me; not one gold gadget, not one splinter of the Tudor walls . . .” “not one gold splinter” said Miss Ermine-tails, her kerchief at her eyes (“She is brave, you were right,” whispered Miss Hobson, giving in to Mr. Terrill) “and his last words . . . before the reporters . . . goodbye, see you in jail, darling. . . .” This did affect Emily Fancher, brave as she was, in retrospect; she touched her eyes with a bit of lace and her audience solicitously looked the other way. “When you tell me,” concluded Mrs. Draper savagely, “about the sufferings of the poor—I’d rather starve than some things . . .” “I always say,” said Mrs. Whitman tearfully, “remember—” and she nodded a sage, coiffured, experienced head, “the rich have their troubles too.”

  Bruno stood crucified before the Hunger Marchers that Elizabeth had painted. He thought with pity of the envelope shaking in his hands, containing little words by all of them, his old triumvirate, or little designs that each had absently made while engaged in the endless conferences to prepare the speech within. He could hear the Black Sheep, could sense their impatience; he knew without listening to their words that they were shouting at him, pleading with him to go on, to drown the whole flimsy circus to which they turned their lean strong backs, to restore their faith in him, in themselves, and even—because they were so pitifully young, because they were children and he their teacher—in life. And he looked away, out over their heads, until one person emerged, as crucified as he was; he saw Elizabeth still standing like himself and his head grew rigid, his blood changed, he was paralyzed with a sense of shame. He looked from her to Emmett, wavering now in a strange excitement, entering Bruno’s vision of Elizabeth as though deliberately diluting it. He saw a look in Emmett’s eyes that he utterly failed to read, ironic, bitter, challenging—and because he despised Emmett now as much as he pitied him, his look was more unendurable than even the Black Sheep’s. He stared back, advanced to the extreme edge of the improvised platform and shouted into the swimming mass: “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN.”

  “S-speech, speech!” cried Emmett in a high falsetto. Glances shot his way. He was the son of the house. “Speech, speech!” he cried again in his high wavering shrill voice. The Black Sheep took it up, stamped furiously and roared for silence. Al Middleton put down his punch; never had he seen such violence in his puny son—he seized his turkey-leg and beat upon the punch-bowl: “Shut up, shut up, everybody! Doctor Leonard’s going to speak!” “S-speech!” Emmett’s voice broke into hysteria. The buzz died slowly.

  The silence sounded. It was as though the congestion in Elizabeth’s ears were pierced at last so that the voice which had been saying something to her for twenty-six years quietly, spoke quietly now and could be heard. It was final but not surprising. As a child she had waited two hours for a parade to pass a certain window; it was coming! it was not coming! (but all the time she knew it was); till there it came, rounding a corner and burning itself forever into her eyes. So now in her eyes this figure of Bruno (after twenty-six years of waiting), Bruno standing mountainous and mountainously weak; so now in her ears this cessation of sound, this cessation of doubt, this quiet voice, you love him, you love Bruno, you never loved anybody else, you never can love anybody else. Lucidly she saw that there could never be any exchange on this level with Bruno; not unless one of them lay on his death-bed. And now looking at him she could see again that look of guilt, as he would look at some woman he had wronged, to whom he could make no retribution. As though he had had a light case of some malady himself, and instead of hiding himself from her had drawn closer and infected her, recklessly, half-knowing, half-unwitting, with a severe case which would—which had—marked her for life. Never then could he see her without seeing those marks upon her face, which marked her sicker with his own disease, which must mark her ugly and yet a part of him, which marked her forever his victim and his possession, a possession which he wanted and which he loathed. I love you, she said quietly into the silence; and leaned against a pillar for support. But Bruno was raising the envelope which held his speech and her fingers moved with his. She could feel with the tips of her fingers the touch of the cord as rapidly he unwound it. Oh my God! said Emmett—and started forward weakly, oh stop him, s-s-stop him, Elizabeth! don’t let him . . .With a strength that was scarcely her own she put the Middleton boy back in his place as Bruno with his peculiar delicacy of gesture ran his finger under the envelope’s flap. Oh my God, said Emmett, trembling under Elizabeth’s restraining hand, I wish I were d-dead.

  “THE TIME HAS COME,” said Bruno; and at least a thousand scraps of paper, torn and torn again, fluttered like confetti in his hands, inside his coat, hung on the edge of his pockets, clung like powder to his cuffs; and scattered at his feet and over them and lay, some with the white sides up and frightened, some with little dots of print. He stood in horror and continued to shake the envelope till it gave up its thousandth scrap. Then he stared gravely in for more, turned it in bewilderment, this way and that, and fell to shaking it again, without much hope. Oh my God, moaned Emmett, I c-couldn’t help it, I couldn’t s-stop myself . . .

  The ballroom trembled with embarrassment, the people sat, shocked corpses, on their chairs. Bruno’s hand continued to move monotonously; he shook the envel
ope up; he shook it down; he seemed to eye it with some morbid hope; and then the thousand-and-first scrap fluttered in bewilderment. Then someone laughed out nervously: Miss Ermine-tails—her mouth would open in spite of her, just as it did at accidents, just as it had when her father was brought home dead from a fall off his horse, and emitted its short yelp. She clapped her hands over her mouth immediately as though she had sneezed. But the germ got out; Miss Hobson caught it. Mr. Terrill, bored, was an easy victim. Then someone else; and then a fifth; Miss Ermine-tails, in terror at what she had done, squeezed the little tails, looked down, tried to look demure, and failed: was re-infected—the mouth opened again and repeated the theme-yelp. Oh very good, ve-ry good, said old Miss Ballister who could see as well as she could not hear. Oh jolly jolly jolly, Mr. Crawford yawned, a vodaville. The laugh ran round the room. It grew. Arturo and his orchestra awoke and craned their necks over their sleeping instruments to see the joke, were in time to spot the envelope shaking like a palsy in the speaker’s hand, and added their cooperative employees’ laugh. Mrs. Stanhope’s crowd were softly whinnying. Miss Titcomb murmured through streaming eyes that she had thought all along he did it on purpose but was afraid to laugh alone; and passed her laugh to her friends: Miss Henley-Star, Miss Cracken and Miss Milliken. The thing went so far that at last Mrs. Emily Fancher gracefully cast her vote, handed over the laurels and started a round of applause. Mr. Terrill took another look at Bruno covered with confetti, gasped and slapped Miss Hobson on the shoulder. Miss Hob-son grew hysterical and abandoning more respectable desire became short-sighted and rolled in Mr. Terrill’s arms: so fun-nay, so fun-nay, she cat-called. The laughter was enormous. Laugh collided with laugh; echoed; doubled; crashed; shrilled; shrieked; held its breath and burst again; and held its breath once more and waited, tittering, to be renewed. Al Middleton, shrewdly observing his son, was alternately shocked and pleased: such malice he had not suspected in the boy; but when he speculated on the motive . . . he grew ruminative and drank mechanically, reluctant to go nearer for an explanation.

  Mr. Terrill, drunk, threw a wad of paper napkin which landed at Bruno’s feet. As though it were a signal Bruno stepped up closer to the crowd and waved his arms till he was a large and frantic cloud above the Black Sheep’s heads. “Pardon my dandruff,” he bellowed at the crowd; and fastidiously flicked the thousand scraps of paper. They screamed again; he reared reproachfully and rapped with his empty envelope for silence. “FRIENDS,” he shouted—but at the very sound of his voice they roared again; comfortable, assured; a happy audience.

  “FRIENDS, INTELLECTUALS, FELLOW-SCEPTICS:” (Emmett’s eyes opened wide in terror for this was not the opening they had planned). “I am with message.” (O I could die, wheezed Ermine-tails.) “The world is up a tree. Three movements are abroad to lure it down, led separately by Einstein, Vambery, and Mary Baker Eddy; we will omit the communists because no one present ever saw one.” (O my God, moaned Emmett.)

  “To the future this era will be known as the great age of panaceas, of patent medicines, of Little Magazines. Friends, as intellectuals it’s time we took our stand.

  “Are we as intellectuals going to remain sitting on the fence, watching Christian Science fight with Freud? are we going to twiddle our thumbs and stew in our juices while the world is on the breadlines, the redlines, the deadlines? are we going to dope ourselves and stuff ourselves, intoxicate ourselves, anaesthetize ourselves, against all decent feeling—and meanwhile miss the bus?” He tottered, swayed; the laughter held itself as when the clown, hanging from a ladder too high above the audience, swings out and threatens the safety of the crowd. He recovered and straightened, bowed with a homosexual Tammany smile and waved his empty envelope to show them they, as well as he, were safe. “The answer is: WE ARE.” The laugh broke out, relieved, the merry cocktail laugh, the self-indulgent, self-effulgent upper-class champagne laugh. O my God, moaned Emmett.

  “But comrades! need I tell you” (he brandished the envelope with an arm emotionally aquiver) “we must have competent defeatist leadership; without it we are lost.

  “Friends, it’s time our party organized; I offer you a leader. My candidate stands on the slippery platform and the sliding scale, the only frankly anti-progress program in the country: the old barbed wire fence.

  “Our party is of the intellectuals, by the intellectuals, and naturally against them. Down with revolutions, resolutions, Magazines, and all attempts to put this country on its feet. We believe in nothing but aspirin and sex. The full bladder is our only goal. We sponsor: sublimation, constipation, procrastination, masturbation, prevarication, adumbration, equivocation, prestidigitation, moral turpitude, split personalities and rape; pornography, salacity, apostasy, hypocrisy, erotica, neurotica—in plain words, fellow-victims, anything that’s phony or a fake.”

  “Leonard for president,” Al Middleton cried—for he had caught a look of terror from his son (standing now, side by side with Bruno’s green-clad cousin)—and the horror dawned upon him; a horror to be drowned, or drunk, enough to annihilate a father. “Second the nomination,” cried Mr. Terrill recklessly. O my God, moaned Emmett. “Middleton for commissar of sex,” Lucius Whitman (his hand on Mrs. Draper’s knee) cried gayly. “I decline,” shouted Al, mounting the buffet table and standing with one foot in a Virginia ham, “I’m no intellectual, I practice, I can’t preach.” He dragged Miss Powell up beside him; the merry olives flew.

  “Fellow dope-fiends!” Bruno cried. “Observe your host in position one of a most important object lesson, proving that the greatest opiate the intellectual has ever known is SEX. There are those who will tell you that all activity is sublimation, a substitute for sex. Don’t believe the lousy academics, gentlemen: TO THE INTELLECTUAL SEX IS THE SUBSTITUTE FOR ACTIVITY, THE HIGHEST SUBLIMATION, THE FINAL OPIATE.”

  “Hurray for opiates!” cried Mr. Terrill drunkenly. “What’s position two, there, Middleton!” cried Mr. Draper. “What am I bid for this lovely pony?” shouted Al, revolving Miss Powell on the buffet table; “what am I bid for the Magazine in cellophane, unseen by human hand? what am I bid for one half-baked revolution, guaranteed not to bite, scratch, or come off?” Miss Powell laughed her dress half off her shoulder; Al reached behind the one remaining turtle-neck, pulled down the banner of the Hunger Marchers, and used it for a screen. “Position three,” he cried, and disappeared behind it; laughing olives skipped from Miss Bee Powell’s feet. Oh very good, ve-ry good, said old Miss Ballister feebly. O my God, Elizabeth, can’t you stop him? why don’t you move? are you drunk?

  “. . . for too long,” Bruno was calling hoarsely, unheard, into the growing din, “for too long we have wandered unorganized, unwitting members of the lost tribe, the missing generation, the forgotten regiment; outcasts, miscasts, professional expatriates . . . accidents of birth—for many of our fathers were farmers or tailors or jewellers—we have no parents and we can have no offspring; we have no sex: we are mules—in short we are bastards, foundlings, phonys, the unpossessed and unpossessing of the world, the real minority.” (Was she looking at him, thought Jeffrey, was Elizabeth’s strange and beautiful stare for him? or was she staring still at Bruno? Never in all his life had his blood surged with such violence.) “We have no faith,” cried Bruno: “we are scared till the blood in our veins runs thin and we hop from one faith to the next because to believe is too unbearably exactly what we want.” (Oh Margaret, Margaret, let’s go home . . . darling, darling, I am frightened too—perhaps he’s drunk.) “We have no class: our tastes incline us to the left, our habits to the right; the left distrusts, the right despises us. Our race, one time the aristocrats, the philistines, the high-paid prostitutes, is dying out; our function’s dead, our blood is blue. Have you read today’s assignment in Pushkin, young men? ‘Strike me dead, the track has vanished, Well, what now? We’ve lost the way . . .’ ”

  “Oh he’s starting on the Bible, Mrs. Middleton, can’t we have some music,” cried Miss Titcomb and Miss Milliken. The ban
d was tuning up. Miss Hobson kissed Mr. Terrill passionately (and knew that he would never marry her), Miss Ermine-tails squeezed her fur pellets till they bled between her thumb and forefinger, Mr. Tevander felt sick at the stomach and didn’t know why, Miss Powell screamed in sensual amazement and scattered more olives from behind the Hunger Marchers, Miss Titcomb permitted herself to smile with chaste pleasure at the ‘Spaniard,’ Graham Hatcher, the efficiency expert got rid of his wife to someone else and reminded Emily Fancher that she was a merry widow now, and Mrs. Whitman sucked her pearls on Mr. Draper’s lap. The music blared out, as much under control as it would ever be—and Al and Miss Bee Powell kicked aside the Hunger Marchers and leaped down to dance, Miss Hobson sprang up with Mr. Terrill in her arms, in no time the floor was covered with dancers spilling out like beads from a box, melting rhythmically in one another’s arms. “Dance!” cried Elizabeth, waking like a mechanical doll (she was looking at him, thought Jeffrey, with a sudden fear), “dance, Jeffrey, dance, partner!” O my God, moaned Emmett.

  “Listen, comrades!” shouted Bruno in a fury. “Don’t wait for the bandwagon to steamroller you, the ghost brigade is forming now, the corpse parade, the fellow-traveller charade; limp up and join us now, there’s room on our fence for every individual straddler in your number. Are you a tired radical? are you a parlor pink? are you a political pansy? are you a morbid individualist? are you a victim of the twentieth century social disease? do you have singed or clipped left wings? then climb right up and straddle with us. . . .”