by Jane Rule
My chess game isn’t really good with an audience. Neither is my cooking. Still I am ambivalent about showing off because what I lose in concentration I gain in energy I finished a difficult transitional paragraph with odd confidence.
“I wish I could write that quickly,” she said, as I finished.
“So do I,” I said. “We aren’t going anywhere that needs a skirt, are we?”
“No, I just want to pick up a hamburger and eat it on top of a hill somewhere. I had a lesson this morning,” she added, explaining her own clothes.
Sandra Mentchen always dressed well, whether for the concert stage or for tennis. She chose what you called “no-colors”—beige, stone, or very pale, muddy greens or black. She had the fair skin of a redhead, which she was not, brows and lashes pale, a thin, triangular face that would strengthen as it aged. She was all texture rather than color: leather, raw silk, roughly woven wool, linen. That day she had on an Irish sweater with leather buttons which I coveted.
She drove a sports car which most people coveted, pale in color, elegant in line, powerful. Everything matched. And she drove with the same hard, accurate skill that she used on the concert stage, like a man. It is what the reviews still say of her: a masculine strength. They usually add a phrase about feminine sensibility or, more negatively, lack of masculine intelligence. “Not bright but sometimes brilliant,” was her teacher’s evaluation of her. She had and has the force of discipline. These things are enough.
“On top of a hill somewhere” was obviously a vague reference to a specific place. There was nothing happenstance about the rock-shadowed parking place, then the small meadow we walked down to, protected from the road by the steep incline, lined with trees to the north and south, open only to the view in the west so that, as we ate, we could watch the city, clear in a sea wind, white.
“I don’t think Esther’s a sculptor, do you?” Sandy asked abruptly.
“I don’t know,” I said, quick to be irritated by the arrogance of tone. “It’s not something like music that you do know early.”
“Oh, I don’t mean talent. She’s probably got lots of that. But she doesn’t think of it as a life. She’s full of a lot of nonsense about fulfilling herself as a woman and serving God, as if they were something else again.”
“Maybe for her they are.”
“Then she’s not a sculptor, and she never will be.”
“What will she be?”
“Somebody’s wife,” Sandy said.
“Perhaps.”
“You aren’t sure?”
“How could I be?”
“Very easily. All you’d have to do is ask her.”
“Ask her what?”
“Don’t put me off, Kate. Do you want her or don’t you? Because if you don’t, I do. I wouldn’t even bother to ask if I couldn’t see how she feels about you. I want you to take her or let her go. At the moment, she’s just going to waste.”
“And you’re looking for ‘a wife’?”
“That’s right,” she said, and then she turned to me, “aren’t you?”
“No… I don’t even like the vocabulary.”
“Who said anything about liking it? What are you going to do—join her in a nunnery in your old age?”
“Leave her alone, Sandy.”
“Why? Give me one good reason.”
“Esther.”
“Do you want me to feel sorry for you, Kate?”
“No,” I said. “There’s no reason to. It’s just not her world, not her sort of thing.”
Sandy was silent for a while then. Finally she said, “How do you stand it?”
“I don’t even find it very difficult,” I said, but the tightening of her face made me regret it. “I don’t know. I go away. In the winter—this winter—I don’t know.”
“This is where I always come,” she said, “with a new one every week. But not Esther, you say.”
“No.”
“Then you,” she said simply.
“Are you bargaining?”
“In a way,” she said.
“Now?”
“You are girlish.”
“And you’re bloody childish,” I said, sounding to myself like Doris. “Come on. I have to get back to work.”
I sat at my desk all afternoon, trying to contemplate gifts acceptable and unacceptable to God. “Where is your brother?” Well, where was God? Whose keeper is He? Are all the rest of us meant simply to serve the chosen few, those beloved? And if that is true, should I have bargained? No. It would not have been for you. I wanted her. It was no bargain.
The transitional paragraph was glib. What followed was turning into an obscure private joke. Before dinner I tore it all up. After dinner I began again. At midnight Sandy, in a velvet shirt and linen trousers, did not bother to knock.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but it’s awfully late.”
“Please.”
“Aren’t any of your friends around?”
“Esther’s just gone to bed.”
“This is an odd sort of blackmail.”
“It’s not blackmail.”
I was surprised by her body, surprised by its ignorance of itself and therefore of mine. She must always before have done all the teaching of the very little she knew, physically too shy to be curious, simply needy I would like to have been relieved, but I was disappointed. We lay in the dark, silent. Then Sandy got up.
“I can’t stand much more of this,” she said.
“Oh? I’d heard you were determined to make everyone in the graduating class.”
“Don’t, Kate. Help me.”
How? In the dark, particularly, words are important, as graphic and repetitive as the body’s rhythm, but anticipating it so that nothing is uncertain or clumsy. While touch is gentle, exploring, let words invade, startle so that crude touch does not. Then speak gently so that breasts do not forget what thighs open for now. Talk to desire, call to it, make it come to you all together. Now.
“There,” I said. “That’s something worth feeling guilty about, anyway.”
“You’re incredible.”
Not bad for a girl, I wanted to say, or it’s nothing really, or all I’m after is a credible performance; but I didn’t say anything. After a moment, I turned on the light to find a cigarette. “Don’t hide. You’ve got a lovely body.”
“Aren’t you ever afraid?”
“Of this? No.”
Now get out, I wanted to say, but I didn’t. We talked awkwardly for a little while before she finally dressed and left. It was three in the morning.
That was a different kind of bad day for you, too, wasn’t it? And, though Andy was the villain, I don’t suppose he enjoyed it, either. Years later he said to me, “Why did I feel I had to have her? Why did she make me so angry?” Because he wouldn’t actually force you, he had to commit some other violence.
“You and your purity! The only thing that keeps you a virgin is your stupidity. You think I was brutal to Pete, and you don’t even know what you do to Kate. You didn’t even know why she left you.”
“I haven’t come to ask you if it’s true, Kate. I just have to tell you what he told me. Otherwise I would feel I’d betrayed you.”
“It’s true and it’s not true,” I said. “I’ve never minded your not knowing, and I don’t mind your knowing now.”
“Did you… want me?”
“No,” I said, “not ever.”
“It sounds so crude to ask… why not?”
“Because I don’t want to want you. It’s as simple as that.”
“Oh,” you said. “Well, one thing is true. I am stupid.”
Before I could say anything more, you had left.
Andrew did telephone before he left town. Neither of us said anything about you, but he didn’t burden me with reasons for his change of plans.
“Maybe I’ll see you in the fall, in London.”
I gave him Frank’s and Doris’ address. I didn’t want to be angry, but the control I thought of
as a virtue might have been fear. I could not afford to feel frightened.
I went back to my desk to write the final paragraph of the sermon. “We are the betrayer and the betrayed. We are Cain and Abel.”
Monk announced her engagement to Robin Clark at the party after the opening performance of her play. Her parents were not there, and, because you were as surprised as everyone else, I decided that it was an impromptu gesture, its motives despair over the obvious failure of the play and perhaps revenge against Richard Dick, who was there with his wife. The party was very like the play, sad and silly and confused, everyone with ponderously intelligent lines dealing with true confession circumstances. Yet the only difference between that very bad play and Monk’s recently very good ones is that she is now conscious of her view of the world.
“Do you think we could leave?” you asked before I did think so, but I agreed at once.
“When did she decide to do that?” I asked as we walked back to the dormitory.
“She didn’t. And she won’t be able to make it stick. Her father will never let her go through with it.”
“If one kind of performance fails, try another.”
“I think so,” you said. “What’s going to happen to Monk?”
“She’s going to be a rich man’s wife,” I said, and then I remembered what Sandy had said about you. “Or not.”
“But she does have talent, Kate. She just doesn’t know yet who she is.”
I began to laugh, not being able to help it.
“What?” you asked, still urgently serious.
“Oh, I don’t know, little dog. Do you know who you are yet?”
“Well, I know this much—that right at the bottom of me there’s one strong word, ‘yes.’ ”
And at the bottom of me an even stronger one, “no,” but the sweetness of your confidence did touch me. I did not want to mock you, ever.
“Is your show just about ready?” I asked.
“No. I’m never ready until the day after things are due, but I still have three weeks. So much of the old stuff is junk, Kate—swollen heads and fallen tits. I wish I had enough to show only what I’ve done since I got back. I had a good title for it all, ‘Holey, Wholly, Holy’ but I can’t use it.”
“Thank God for that.”
“Nobody likes my jokes but me.”
“They aren’t jokes,” I said.
“When are you going to walk me through the service? That’s more pressing. What a weekend it’s going to be, Sandy’s proficiency concert Saturday night and your sermon Sunday.”
“I haven’t seen Sandy lately.”
“Nobody has. I just caught sight of her between classes a couple of days ago and she said, ‘You and Kate are coming to my concert, aren’t you?’ It’s funny, but I think it matters to her a lot, our going. I do like her. Do you?”
“Yes,” I said.
It is hard to believe that anyone was important to Sandy on the night of her concert. When she came onto the stage, the black Grecian folds of her dress making her stiffness appropriate, her pale, triangular face was grave, preoccupied. She turned not away from the audience but toward the piano, which was what she had come to find. She sat down, making no nervous adjustments of bench or dress. She was perfectly still, waiting with perhaps no awareness at all that an audience waited with her. Then she began. The music she played was chosen to display the range of her skill, technical and interpretive. The professional critics were there because Sandy had already begun her career as a concert pianist. They could be picked out among the music students and faculty members, who also made occasional notes on their programs. This was as much an examination as a concert, and at first I found it hard not to listen with some anticipation of the criticism. She was precise, almost automatic, a perfect machine, the emotion there, but programmed in advance, memorized. Then first in Bach and again in Bartok, she played as if she were discovering rather than recalling, and the sound opened into the present, into the audience, new and requiring. There. There it is, whatever it is, the power.
“What will she do now?” you asked, as we waited for space in the crowd.
“You mean, tonight?”
“Well, there’s the reception.”
“But afterwards.”
“Do you want to be with her?”
“I’d be inadequate,” you said.
“For what?” Monk asked, suddenly at my elbow. She had been sitting with Robin a few rows behind us. “Are you going to the reception?”
“No,” I said.
“Of course, you have to be Jesus Christ tomorrow morning,” Monk said, and then she turned to you, “and you have to be Jesus’ little helper.”
“Sun beam,” you said. “I guess I won’t go, either. If you have a chance, tell Sandy it was just great, will you?”
I had none of Sandra Mentchen’s preoccupation with the performance itself. I felt very much the way I had on the morning I had stood at the edge of a pool waiting to disgrace myself. “Talent without discipline, courage without moral intent are deformities, not gifts,” I could hear my father say, and I agreed with him; yet I very much hoped that just those deformities would carry me through the hour that was about to begin. You waited beside me with a different kind of nervousness, which had to do with particular uncertainties: standing at the wrong time, mispronouncing a word, reading a prayer designated for me. But you weren’t worried about failing anyone but me. And there was something else for you, more important. Over your cherished black academic gown was the white surplice, “the life of the spirit.”
“Try it on for size, little dog,” I had said and helped you on with it, just as more recently you must have been helped into your second bridal gown by one of your sisters, who call you by God’s nicknames now.
Then, unconverted Jew and reverting half breed, we stood in the unorthodox costumes invented for essentially Episcopalian variations, about to conduct a service which would have a Hindu prayer or two along with the general confession and thanksgiving, in honor of the Brotherhood of Man: Cain and Abel. The choir was in place; the candles were being lighted; there were only a few people in the congregation still offering private prayers. When the organ began the introduction to the processional hymn, the congregation stood, and, as they began to sing “Once to Every Man and Nation,” we walked slowly down the aisle, seeing nothing but the familiar backs of heads until the procession parted before us and we stopped to bow to the cross, given to the chapel by my family in memory of my father. Then I had to face the congregation with the call to worship.
“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me…”
But immediately I could kneel for the general confession, for the Lord’s Prayer, and, when I stood again, I could turn my back on them for “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost.”
The responsive reading, according to the printed program, was adapted from The Just Vengeance—mine, but you had to carry it out. You read out clearly:
“Brother, what is your name?”
“My name is Cain and Abel,” the congregation was forced to reply.
“Brother, what is your name?”
“My name is Cain and Abel.”
“Brother, what is your name?”
“My name is Cain and Abel.”
“God send justice! The blood of Abel cries out from the ground.”
I had put into your mouth all that I didn’t dare to say or could no longer say. You read the St. Paul passage: “Who wilt not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able, but wilt with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it…” and “for thou madest us for thyself, and our heart is restless, until it find rest in thee….”
I read the sermon quietly enough, except inside the voice of Judas:
“Can anything clear me in my own eyes? or release me from the horror of myself? I tell you, there is no escape from God’s innocence.”
And on into the last paragraph:
Yours was the prayer before the benediction.
“O life-giving sun, offspring of the lord of creation, solitary seer of heaven!… By the path of good lead us to final bliss… Deliver us from wandering evil…”
After all these years, your voice is what I remember more than my own. They were the last prayers I ever offered. And you offered them, your own and your first. If I had not so certainly turned away from the Church then, would your own detour have taken so many years? Probably I had nothing to do with it.
“What a performance,” Sandy said, as she shook hands with both of us after the service. “I wish I wanted to be saved. What I ought to do is write a couple of hymns. I could get along without ‘Once to Every Man and Nation.’ When you’re ordained, Kate, that’s what I’ll do.”
“A safe promise,” I said, being pleasant, waiting for some reference to my other talents.
“That was a great concert last night,” you said.
“Well, I passed,” Sandy said quietly, “on the strength of Bach and Bartok. I wish you’d both been around for a drink afterwards, but I knew you had this to do this morning.”
“Why don’t you come drinking with us after my show?” you suggested.
Sandy looked at me, and then she said, “I’d like that, but I’ve got to go to Los Angeles. Maybe some time before it’s all over…”
That night I went to find Sandy. She was in the living room of her dormitory, talking with a couple of friends.
“Hi,” she called. “We were just arguing about your sermon. These people don’t want Cain and Abel one nature. They want the sheep and the goats separated.”
“You’re really a Zoroastrian, aren’t you?” one of them asked.
“No,” I said. “Just a bad Christian. Have you got an hour or so, Sandy?”
“Sure.”
We excused ourselves.
“Where do you want to go?” she asked.
“Anywhere that’s private.”
“Let’s drive then.”
After we had left the campus and the town and were driving in the hills above the city, I was not sure I could or would say anything. Perhaps I had never intended to.