Answer as a Man

by Taylor Caldwell

  “If he did, he would have to hold it against his blessed Mother, too,” said Bernard.

  “There is a difference,” said John. Bernard gave him one of his formidable looks. “There is, eh?” he replied. “And how would you know of any difference, you who never loved anyone?”

  John involuntarily glanced at his sister, who gave him a slight sympathetic smile. Then his hunger assailed him. He went to the cupboard for plates. “Will you join us, Father?” he said, turning from the cupboard with a certain stiff grace.

  “Ah, yes,” said Bernard. “It seems you always did have a fork in your hand, bucko. Well, get at the victuals. Your damned mouth is watering.”

  Jason sat, his big arms folded over his chest, and he looked at his brother with open hostility. Joan said, “We haven’t had anything since breakfast, after the funeral. I’m hungry, too.” Her usually delicately tinted cheeks were flushed with remembrance of Lionel.

  The priest sat down after furtively inspecting his watch and then replacing it. “I have about half an hour,” he said. John was eagerly uncovering the hampers of food.

  “I’m going back to the seminary tomorrow, Father,” he said.

  “Thank God,” said Bernard, putting a slice of ham and another slice of roast beef on the priest’s plate. “A small blessing, but an appreciated one.”

  “Da …” said Joan.

  “Ah, shut up, Joanie,” said Bernard.

  Jason looked at the food and felt repelled. His sorrow was like an iron ball heated to fire in his chest. He would never, now, be able to do anything for his mother, to make her life more pleasant, less painful. He felt her presence in the kitchen, that gentle, tender presence, and his eyes darkened with tears. There was no mercy for the blameless, the kind, the trusting. Yes, God was the adversary. Man had to contend with him all the days of his life.

  But even in his pain Jason thought: Better a terrible world with God in it than a painless world without him. He was stunned by his own thought.

  John, forgetting everything completely, devoured the food piled on his plate. His expression was orgiastic, his eyes fixed and glazed and intent on what he was eating. He bent over the table as a priest bends to kiss the altar.

  Observing this, Father Sweeney wondered with sudden and shocking suspicion: What is it he wants, what is he really devouring, what is the source of his hunger?

  He was not revolted by John. For the first time he felt an awful compassion for him. Of all the Garrity family, he was the most needful of pity.

  As if in counterpoint, the wind howled dolorously in the chimney.

  10

  Patricia Mulligan sat with her father in the huge ugly dining room of Patrick’s house. It was a warm Monday afternoon in late May 1907. Patrick felt it was his paternal duty to dine with his daughter once a week, instead of eating at the Inn-Tavern. Besides, he liked his own dining room better than the one at the hotel, with its lighter furniture and its numerous windows and scintillating chandeliers. His taste, and the public’s, collided; he conceded gracefully to the public. But he was happiest here, among the enormous furniture of dark red mahogany, brown velvet draperies and wavering gaslight.

  Patricia thought her father’s table manners repellent. He never lifted his little finger daintily. He gulped at his wineglass; he shoveled in his food, in a very ill-bred haste. He was also getting very fat, she thought with distaste. He ate in his shirtsleeves, despite her protests, wearing his vest open, his watch chain strained across his ample belly. He often took off his collar, too, and his tie, in what his daughter thought was a deliberate affront, and often she was right. But she was the center of his heart, for all, he would reflect, the poor colleen did have her airs and pretensions and lack of real intelligence. He gave her no credit for her secret shrewdness, for he did not know she had any. While she was not corrupt in spirit, as was Joan Garrity, she knew the world much better than did the other girl. She was also sly. And she had a Problem, which must be handled with dexterity.

  Her agate-colored eyes studied him tonight. Though he had little taste for formality in himself, he demanded it of his daughter, so Patricia was always dressed elegantly at the table. Today she wore a white silk shirtwaist, buttoned to the throat, with a pearl-and-diamond pin and pearl-and-diamond earrings, and two pearl-edged combs upholding her brown pompadour—filled out with “rats”—and a black silk skirt and soft kid buttoned shoes. There was a pearl ring on her finger which had belonged to her dead mother. She looked almost pretty; there was a pink tint in her thin cheeks, and her eyes had an unusual sparkle and her tilted nose gave her an expression at once haughty yet flippant. She had a slightly dreaming expression, alien to her, for Patricia was a very practical girl. Though she had little of a figure, she had discreetly filled it out on the chest with pads of cotton under her camisole. There was also padding over her narrow hips. Patrick thought she had begun to “bloom.” He did not know of the artifices, of which he would have disapproved. Glancing fondly at her today, as she daintily toyed with her food, he thought again of something he had been earnestly considering for over two years. After all, she was twenty years old now; and an heiress. Her own mother had been a wife and mother for two years at this age. Patricia was getting on. She had nothing but disdain for the eligible young men in Belleville, and never encouraged them. But she did speak too often of the fine young gentlemen who courted her when she was visiting her aunt in Philadelphia. Patrick distrusted them. He would not have his daughter leave him for another city, and for what were rakes in his estimation. Opportunists. Adventurers.

  Patricia said, in her light voice which was always a little petulant, as if she were chronically displeased, as she was, “Dada, I do think that, as your daughter, I should visit the Inn-Tavern occasionally for dinner. In your company, of course.”

  “No,” said Patrick. Then he looked at her with surprise. “You never wanted to go there before, Patricia.”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “I never thought it concerned me, Dada. Now I know it does. After all, I will inherit it, won’t I? I should know about it. You agree with that, don’t you?”

  Patrick was about to disagree; then all at once, and for the first time, to his surprise, he saw that Patricia’s eyes were quite sharp and knowing, and not soft and girlish at all. He was not entirely pleased, however, for girls should be vague and soft and womanly, not concerned with business or the world. But then, she had a point there. She was his heiress. He decided, with sudden pleasure, that Patricia resembled him in spirit.

  But he wavered. He refilled his wineglass, before the housemaid could do so, and Patricia frowned. Really, Dada’s manners were execrable. Her thought did not distract her. She leaned toward her father, waiting.

  Patrick studied his daughter, and was more pleased with her every moment. “It’s time you got married, my girl.”

  As he had hinted this—more than hinted—several times, to Patricia’s cool indifference, he was surprised to see the sudden hot flush appear on her cheekbones. She also averted her eyes. “Who?” she murmured. Her heart was making her silk shirtwaist tremble with its quick pounding.

  Patrick reflected. Too soon, perhaps, to tell her whom he had in mind? “Well,” he said, watching her, “there’s Dave Muirhead, Frank Flaherty, and others.” He paused. “And my young assistant, Jason Garrity.”

  Patricia was about to say, throwing up her hands, at the last-named, “Oh, my God, Dada!” But she was a very careful girl. She knew of Patrick’s affection for Jason Garrity, whom she despised as ill-bred like her father. He was not in the least elegant; he was not, coming down to it, a gentleman. He had no graces, no delicacies, no subtlety, no fascination. He was a lout. His hands and feet were too big, his body too forceful in appearance, his step too hard and firm, his face too overtly male. So unlike …

  So Patricia merely folded her hands on the table and looked at her father with meekness. “I don’t really like any of them, Dada. But … give me time, won’t you? I do so want to be your
little girl for a while longer. Please?”

  Patricia could be very artful and she knew how to manage her father. Patrick’s rosy face blushed more deeply as she continued. “And I don’t want to marry someone who does not live in Belleville or who would take me away from my home.”

  Astonished delight shone on Patrick’s face. “And I thought you always wanted to get out of this town, love! I was always afraid you would marry someone from, say, Philadelphia.”

  Patricia gave him her sweetest smile, which was an effort for her. “I’ve come to my senses, Dada. I don’t want to leave you, ever.”

  “Love, love,” said Patrick, sentimentally close to tears. “And I’ll have grandchildren to dandle on my knee every day!”

  Patricia blushed violently, and her whole meager body tingled and her heart bounded. She dropped her eyes in a virginal fashion, and seeing this, Patrick was remorseful. A man should not speak to his daughter in any way which suggested Bed. He was touched by her deep blushes. He was a crude bastard, that he was, to offend her maidenly sensibilities in this fashion. It was bad enough for a poor colleen to face the realities of matrimony on her wedding night, without implying them beforehand. That “good” women ever had lusts of their own, Patrick did not believe. Passion was reserved for mistresses and whores. “Good” women merely endured conjugal assaults. Only “bad” women courted them.

  “Forgive me, love,” he said to Patricia now.

  Patrick was well-softened, to Patricia’s satisfaction; she said, “Well, may I dine with you once a week at the Inn-Tavern, Dada?”

  Patrick thought. He would have to ask Mrs. Lindon not to come to the tavern too early with her young relatives, of a Sunday. That Patricia had any idea of Mrs. Lindon’s profession, he would not have believed, even if she had told him herself. “There are characters, Patricia, who come to the place that I don’t want you to know.”

  “But you will be there, Dada. I’ll dine with you.” She smiled at him.

  “I’ll think on it, my dear,” said Patrick. His daughter sighed gently. She had won. Now she could relax and remember the day that had so changed her life.

  It had happened on a sweet Sunday afternoon of flowery trees and warm grass.

  It had been a perfect day, marred only by Dada’s insistence on High Mass, which was too long and boring, as usual. Early dinner at home had been tasteless and heavy, and Dada had gone promptly upstairs at two o’clock for his Sunday nap before he left for the Inn-Tavern. Patricia, who was supposed to occupy Sunday afternoons with a Sunday nap, also, and to read an improving book, or to visit one of her few female acquaintances, was restless. There were strange urges in her twenty-year-old body, and her mind was filled with amorphous fantasies of knights in white armor. Patricia was not, by nature, romantic, but her body had its secret and imperious impulses. She knew, by intuition, far more than her innocent father would ever have suspected, though the intuitions were not explicit. She understood that men were different from women, and her female instinct was alerted. But exactly in what lay the “difference” was still not understood by her. She had viewed fig-leafed statues of men in the galleries and museums to which her aunt in Philadelphia had taken her, and had wondered what the fig leaves concealed. That they concealed something “naughty” but delightful, she was positive. She had heard the girlish giggles of her young cousins, and had listened to their whispered comments. All this had stirred and excited her without informing her.

  She had seen a celebrated painting of Adam and Eve in one of the galleries. Adam, of course, had a decorous fig leaf. But Eve had had one, too. One of the cousins giggled and whispered, “Why does she have one, for heaven’s sake!” Patricia had smiled knowingly, and had inspected Adam’s fig leaf intensely, if covertly. What did it hide? It bulged. But what did it hide? There were no overt contours. However, she instinctively guessed that it had importance for women. At this thought she had felt a dismaying hotness in her virginal loins, and had been ashamed, if deeply excited.

  Because her cousins knew almost as little as she did, there was no fully informed instruction from them. Her aunt, sorry for the motherless girl, had attempted some instruction, but it was mostly of warnings about men. A girl did not allow any intimacies, such as kisses in lonely places, or embraces. A girl kept herself “pure” before marriage. Men did not marry bad girls. There were dark hints of unwanted babies, and fates worse than death. In some fashion, babies were implicit with intimacies, but exactly what those intimacies were, Patricia did not know. Did one have babies if one sat in a chair a gentleman had just vacated? Did a kiss, however innocent, bring about a child? Finally Patricia guessed all this did not. It needed Something Else. But no one told her exactly what. Her aunt had, with an embarrassment which intrigued Patricia, gone through the routine of the birds and the bees, without details except those concerning stamens and pistils, and Patricia knew she possessed neither.

  Patricia had finally resorted to the dictionary in her father’s library. “Sexual intercourse.” What did that mean? There was another word pertaining to something which only men possessed. Patricia looked it up in the same dictionary. There was no illustration, just babble about “glands.” That was the extent of Patricia’s knowledge, while her young body demanded insistently, again without exact information. So, though Patricia was baffled, she was still confronted by the imperatives of her young flesh, and grew increasingly restless.

  Her aunt had told her that men were predatory and they put upon unwary girls. Patricia yearned to be put upon, though her aunt had warned of dire consequences such as “unwanted children.” Too embarrassed at last, the aunt had burst out, “There are good girls and bad girls! Men don’t marry bad girls! Bad girls show their legs and entice gentlemen!” Patricia began to long to show her legs. Her aunt had warned of “the pit.” Patricia wanted to peer into it. She began to massage her tiny bosom with butter and honey, hoping to increase it. She had noticed that men discreetly stared at the fronts of shirtwaists and dresses. She envied the women in portraits who had large white bosoms. Apparently men liked them, though in Patricia’s opinion they were neither beautiful nor useful except to nurse infants. But how, exactly, did women get infants?

  She found herself dreaming at night, but when she awoke, sweating and trembly, she could recall nothing of what she had experienced in her sleep except that it had been body-shaking.

  She was ripe for seduction. She had guessed long ago that Mrs. Lindon’s young relatives were not relatives at all. She had come upon servants who whispered and snickered behind their hands. Mrs. Lindon’s girls were evidently “bad,” and were to be avoided by “good” girls. What did they do in the bedrooms of that house? wondered poor Patricia. That they did something very deplorable, but interesting, was evident, and there was money involved. But how, and why? Patricia held her skirts when encountering the young “relatives,” but for what explicit reason, she did not know. They did things only married women did—but what the hell was that? Patricia was shocked at the sudden vehemence of her own question.

  Once, half-asleep, she had involuntarily masturbated. The wild explosion had unnerved and profoundly shaken her, and she had gasped and sweated and had thought of evil. Somehow, in some mysterious way, men were involved in this savage experience. She took to reading the Bible. “Adam knew his wife, Eve.” How?

  On this lovely May Sunday, Patricia had not gone upstairs for the customary afternoon nap after noon dinner. Her restlessness overcame her. She had got out her bicycle from the stable and had furiously ridden off, pedaling with all her strength. That she was desperately seeking an encounter she did not know. The exertion exhilarated her and she pressed for the outskirts of the town. The gentle heat made her sweat; her breasts tingled wetly against the camisole and the shirtwaist, and the sensation excited her. Her loins, on the seat of the bicycle, began to burn. She took off her straw hat and tied it on the handlebars. The wind lifted her light brown hair and she laughed. She felt alive and vibrant as never before. Sh
e felt her femaleness and was proud. It was naughty, of course, but in what way?

  She passed carriages and automobiles and did not see or hear them. She was intent on something, though it remained hidden from her. She searched with her eyes, and did not know for what she was looking. Her heart was beating very fast. An unimaginative girl, she had never noticed beauty before. Now she was entranced by the countryside which bordered the narrow road. Everything elated her, the new green of the trees, the scent of the warm grass, the sight of wild-flowers shyly clustered in the shade of great trees—purple, yellow, red, and blue—the mauve glisten of the mountains in the distance, the fragrance of hot stone and hot dust, the comfort of the sun on her face and her hands. She smiled, and she wanted to cry in her delight. Patricia Mulligan had discovered life. She felt she was part of it and that she was beautiful, too. Her heart expanded. She began to sing.

  There was a break in the thick trees lining the road. Patricia got off her bicycle and entered the break. There were shrubs here, but beyond them she could see a small oval glade surrounded by trees that threw cool shadows on the high grass. It was shiningly silent here and secluded and very still. Patricia pushed her bicycle to the end of the shrubbery and looked about her with pleasure. Buttercups and tall wild daisies mingled with the grass, sweetening the air with aromatic if rank fragrance. To Patricia it had a compelling fierce power which excited her. The leaves of the trees were polished by the spring so that they seemed to be coated with a green lacquer. She touched a trunk; it was alive and warm to her hand. She leaned her bicycle against it. Beyond the glade she could see the green-and-purple mountains and the small distant walls of the rising Ipswich House. It was not being built very fast; that, she had heard. It had something to do with the Panic, lack of credit, and money, and other tiresome things with which men engrossed themselves. Dada had a mortgage now, on his Inn-Tavern, for the Ipswich House, and was depressed by it, which seemed silly to Patricia, who had no idea what a mortgage was. When she had last gone to Philadelphia, the money her father had given her was less than the year before, and when she had wailed he had said, “There’s a Panic, love, and money is short.” She had pouted for two days, but Patrick, though sad over this, did not increase the gift. He had not tried to explain. Ladies should not be concerned by Finance, even if they were hurt by it.