by Jane Rule
“She’s right, you know. You are a harem thinker,” I said before I could check my anger.
“I should have let us make that pact about not being together when we’re desperate.”
“You’re not desperate,” I said, trying to recover amiability.
“No,” he said, “but I am embarrassed. Sometimes I feel a little too much like community property I hear, for instance, that I was once traded for a bag of liver.”
“You were, yes,” I admitted. “That was a bit of face-saving that shouldn’t have been necessary. I’m sorry.”
“We’re making each other earnest,” he said.
“Just don’t make me nervous, that’s all. Is there anything you want me to do?”
“Come out to dinner with me.”
“What about Monk?”
“She’s tangled up with a late rehearsal.”
Andrew had not been as candid in his explanations with Monk as he had been with you, and, though she was not openly jealous of the time he and I spent together, she was not easy about it. After that particular evening, she wondered if I didn’t owe her a bag of liver (“I can be an Indian giver, too”), but she took the reassurance in a return of rough teasing. When she was feeling particularly safe, she was even generous.
“You know, Kate, you shouldn’t always talk shop with men. They aren’t really terrified of intellectual women if they know how to be women, too. It isn’t that you aren’t attractive enough. You could do something more interesting with your hair.”
“Kate doesn’t need the entire male population in love with her,” you answered angrily.
“I wasn’t suggesting that she did. One would do.”
“One would be too many,” I said. “I haven’t time for that sort of thing.”
“Do you know what I think?” Monk asked. “I think you’ve got a secret lover. Andy thinks so, too. He doesn’t go along with my theory that he’s some sort of important spy or a married man with a tragically insane wife. Andy says it’s sure to be subtler than that, but he’s poor at specific guesses. Where were you last Friday night, for instance?”
“If she wanted you to know,” you said, “she’d tell you.”
“And why wouldn’t she want me to know? I tell both of you where I go.”
“You’d be so disappointed if you knew,” I said. “I have a duty to your imagination. After all, you’re a writer.”
“But I’m supposed to create the mystery, not be baffled by it myself. You don’t behave as if you were in love. But you might have a secret sorrow.”
“Tell us,” you said, “are you in love?”
“Oh, perhaps a little,” Monk said. “And don’t give me a lecture about keeping two men on the string. You have three.”
“That’s different,” you said.
“Yes, it is,” Monk agreed. “It’s absolutely regressive.”
“What’s regressive about friendship?”
I could have answered that one, but I didn’t. I wanted to get off the topic entirely.
“Doris wants to know if there are to be more than the four of us for Christmas,” I said.
“Marcus and Clide are both going home,” you said. “But Purple’s going to be on his own.”
“Shall we ask him?”
“Sure.”
“I think one of the beasts is going to be in town, too—Sidney,” Monk said. “That would make us even and give Andy a little competition in all directions.”
“Let’s not have anyone else,” you said suddenly “Just the four of us.”
“What about poor Purple?”
“He wouldn’t fit, not really. He’d rather spend Christmas in a pub.”
Sidney wasn’t even reconsidered, and the number was settled at four.
“Fine,” Doris said. “Then we won’t bother to open the top floor. I can give Andy young Frank’s room. I suppose you want Ann’s room, do you?”
“No, put Monk in Ann’s room and Esther and me into the guest room.”
“I’ve written to Andy to suggest he spend the whole of his holiday with us. It seems silly for him to go to a hotel at all. Wouldn’t you like a real holiday from housekeeping, too? The other two could come for five or six days—”
“No,” I said. “We’ll all three come at the same time. And you must promise me one thing right now—no negative conniving. Andy wants to marry Monk.”
“Does he,” Doris said, not really surprised, simply thinking about it. “All right. It is all right, isn’t it?”
“I think so,” I said. “I think it might be a very good thing for both of them.”
“Such altruism!”
“Masochism,” I said, smiling.
“You tell the truth often enough and someone may believe you.”
I did finally go over a few days before you and Monk arrived because Doris wanted help and companionship while Frank and Andrew played chess, listened to Bach, and talked about what had happened to some of the great European wine cellars during the war. Neither of them in either principle or habit excluded women from their conversation, but they were so content together we often chose to exclude ourselves. I didn’t miss young Frank, whose defense against his father was usually pompous aggressiveness, a tone he couldn’t drop while he was at home; but I did miss Ann, who was perhaps too dully typical of the nicest sort of English daughter, but she had an affectionate grace with her parents that I found charming. I couldn’t imitate it. I didn’t try. And I felt less inadequate because Andrew made himself so attractively at home. Perhaps Frank’s occasionally referring to us as “the children” gave Andrew the right sort of convention to move in with me, one that would be protective of both Monk and me. We went Christmas shopping together for Frank and Doris, Andrew with the addresses of several wine merchants, I with the name of a shop where we could find French gloves, and we gave them the presents we had found jointly, deciding to sign our cards “the children.” I went with him, too, to approve the amber necklace he had found for Monk on a day he and Frank had gone off together. Immediately, when we got home, he went to Doris for her approval, helping her over her uncertain loyalties. By the time you and Monk arrived, we were a solidly established family who could turn our attention entirely to our guests.
If I had not seen Doris working carefully with a calendar, I would have thought that the following five days simply developed with extraordinary natural pacing. Monk, less absorbed in playing her part, could have learned a great deal about play-writing. Doris, however, had generously given her a number of important scenes, hours in the day when she and Andrew would find themselves alone together on leisurely errands or in front of the fire with glasses of champagne while other people seemed to be still dressing or not yet back from calling on elderly relatives and business friends. If Monk did not agree to marry Andrew on the last day of the house party, it was not Doris’ fault.
She planned as carefully for all of us. She invited you to suggest inventive ornaments for the tree, then went off with you to Woolworth’s and Harrod’s and two or three art supply shops for the necessary materials. She might have been mildly surprised that you chose to work under rather than on the library table, but she did not show it. Occasionally we would find you both sitting on the floor, Doris as intent as you on starching and dyeing, cutting and painting. When people dropped in for drinks and Doris had to be hostess, she took them into the library to see you in the workshop. You’d nod out from under the table and behind a growing pile of invented flowers, star-winged angels, and apparently Easter eggs. On Christmas Eve, during cocktails, the decorating began. Frank followed your directions, threading dozens of tiny white lights through the branches. The rest of us followed with ornaments, but none was placed until you had decided where it would go. When we had finished, Doris was the first to speak.
“Esther, it’s marvelous. It’s a barbaric prophecy, as if we really were waiting for the Birth.”
You turned to her, seeing her for the first time. At that moment, dinner was annou
nced. We were reluctant to leave the tree, which was, as Doris described it, crudely splendid.
“Kate,” you said, calling me back for a moment, “do you think I could go back to my place for a few minutes tonight?”
“Of course, if you need to.”
“It’s just that I’d like to give Doris one of my bell ringers. I think maybe she’d like it.”
“I know she would,” I said. “Are you going to want to go to midnight mass?”
“Will you go?”
“For you.”
“No, then,” you said. “Let’s stay with the others.”
At dinner you asked Andrew if he’d mind going back to your room with you for a few minutes. You had treated each other as friends for weeks, but you had both been careful not ever to be alone together. Andrew would have liked a quick gesture of approval from Monk, but he could not risk it. He agreed at once.
When you had gone, we all went to our rooms to begin collecting presents to put under the tree. I was wrapping a last-minute present for Andrew, a book on dragons I had found, when Monk came into the room. She sat down on your bed and watched me for a moment without speaking.
“I’ve never known anything about Christmas before,” she said finally “In my family Christmas is just hell. Andy says it’s the same way in his family, too. Do you know how lucky you are?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Or do you get mixed up about it the way I do? Most of the time I’m just enjoying myself, but sometimes it’s so nice it makes me feel sad because this isn’t my family and because I could never learn how to live like this. Does it feel to you really your family?”
“In a way,” I said, “but part of it is having all of you here. When Frank and Ann are home, when Mother’s here, it’s not as easy.”
“No, but still it wouldn’t be like my family. And I didn’t mean that. Have you ever wished Doris and Frank really were your parents?”
“No,” I said. “You see, there is Mother still. If they were all my real family, it would be different, but I’m not sure it would be better.”
“Doris thinks it would. She told me she’d often wished you were her daughter.”
“Doris is very motherly,” I said. “She’d like to adopt you and Andy and Esther, too.”
“I wish she could.”
“Are you a bit homesick?”
“Just for something I never had, and, if you’ve never had it, how can you make it? Andy doesn’t know any more about this kind of living than I do.”
“I suppose not.”
“He’s been the only son just the way I’ve been the only daughter, spoiled and fought over and forced to be something he’s not until he doesn’t really know who he is or what he wants.”
It was not exactly the image I would have made of Andrew, but I recognized him in it. Monk could not afford to be as uncritical as I was. She was obviously contemplating what kind of a husband he would make.
As if she’d read my thoughts, she said, “I sometimes wish I could be a friend of Andrew’s the way you are, but it never works that way for me.”
“It’s regressive,” I said, without looking up from my wrapping.
“Well, yes, but it’s a regressive season. Isn’t Esther’s tree terrible?”
“No. It’s wonderful. I love it.”
“Should Andy have gone off with her?”
“Oh, Monk, you’re not worried about that, are you? I sometimes think you may really be in love with him.”
“I am,” she said bleakly, “but don’t tell him!”
“You’d be the obvious one to break the news.”
“I can’t. He’d lose interest in a minute, Kate. That’s the way men are. As long as they don’t know, as long as they’re uncertain, they’re marvelous, but the minute they’re sure, they’re all bastards.”
“And you call me a cynic!”
“But it’s true.”
“Then you aren’t in love with him,” I said primly.
“ ‘I love him not because he’s rich and handsome, Nelly,’ ” she said in a comically theatrical tone, “ ‘but because he’s more myself than I am.’ ”
“And would you lose interest?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I can’t imagine it. He is beautiful, isn’t he? I mean, even his teeth.”
“Even his teeth,” I agreed. “Now, that’s enough. Go get your presents.”
We went to bed well after midnight, Doris cautioning us all to sleep late in the morning because these years were a brief respite between being children and having children which we should enjoy. She stood with Frank, her hand cupped round his elbow, an odd, masculine gesture, more personal for that, because it is the kind only years can teach and permit. They saw us upstairs as if they were going to fill stockings for us all before they went to bed; we countered with dignified behavior, prompted by an uncertain amount of brandy, which is always sobering to the young.
“How are you?” I asked, when we got to our room. “I don’t seem to see much of you, seeing you all the time.”
“Fine,” you said. “You were right about Doris. I should get to know her. I’m still pretty hopeless with Frank.”
“You’re fine with everyone. You’ve made a beautiful tree.”
“Monk thinks it’s awful,” you said, amused. “Then she’s never really looked at Christmas trees to see how awful they traditionally are. Doris likes it, though, doesn’t she?”
“And Frank and Andy and I.”
“Do you think she’s going to marry Andy?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“But what would happen if they ever stepped out of the silverware ad and started trying to live together?”
“What happens to a lot of people, I suppose.”
“That’s a terrible thought.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” I said.
“Probably I’m jealous,” you said.
“Of whom?”
“Both of them. If I were a man, what a Christmas I’d make this for you!”
“What a ghastly idea!”
“I don’t know. I wouldn’t make such a bad man, do you think?”
You were standing in your bra and pants by this time, but your hair was still done up in a large soft shape at the back of your finely shaped head.
“You make a beautiful woman. I’d settle for that.”
“You would?”
“I mean,” I said quickly, “you should.”
You got into your pajamas and went off to wash, leaving your father’s watch carefully on the bedside table, your clothes scattered about the room. I picked them up and put them away Then I turned off the overhead light and opened the window, loving the smell of earth and trees even at this time of year in the crescent.
“What are you looking at?” you asked.
“Nothing really. I was smelling.” You came and stood beside me. “You smell lovely, too.”
“Doris has marvelous soaps. It’s cold.”
“Hmm. Get into bed.”
I followed you to your bed, covered you as if you were a child, then sat with you for a moment. You took my hand tentatively and put it to your mouth.
“Merry Christmas, Kate.”
“Merry Christmas,” I said. “You do make it fine for me. Sleep well.”
I lay awake for a while, wondering if Mother, left to herself, would go to midnight service. She was vague in her letters about what her plans were for Christmas, but then she was always vague. She did refer to people and places by their names, but there was never an identifying phrase, a reminder. Doris and I had to guess or not bother to guess. She fades, I thought. Or dreamed. I woke, expecting and missing the uncertain sweetness of her voice, the wry, shy morning moment which began any of our days together.
“I miss Mother today,” I said to Doris.
“So do I,” Doris admitted. “It always seems odd if I’m not introducing myself to her on Christmas morning of all mornings.”
“Introducin
g yourself?” Andrew asked.
“Mother never seems to know anyone very certainly in the morning,” Doris explained. “It’s not that she’s senile. She’s always been that way. Once you’ve established yourself with her again, it’s fine, but it always has to be done.”
“How unnerving!” Andrew said.
I would have said no if Doris hadn’t said yes so promptly. The ritual of being reestablished had always been reassuring to me, as if Mother considered again and accepted again the responsibility I was to her. For Doris, her natural child, to be considered again and again must have seemed an unnecessary strain. I didn’t say these things, either. If Doris ever presented a view of Mother, that view took precedence over mine, for I had neither the length of experience nor the blood claim to speak with her authority.
After Mother had been brought, with reservations, into the breakfast conversation, Frank reminded us of their absent children, then of the absent families of all our guests. It was a graceful substitute for a real blessing and probably more accurately expressed the feelings of everyone at the table who, not able to depend on God to love those well whom they loved badly carried the burden with some sense of responsibility.
Christmas morning without the very young and the very old, without God Himself, is simpler. From under our nearly pagan tree, we took the gifts, not quite one at a time, and measured again the degree of perception there is in giving. It was one of Andrew’s extraordinary talents. I have never had a present from him that didn’t serve the image I hope I hold up to the world: a book I would like to be thought of as reading, a blouse neither so tailored as it fit my private taste and public shoulders nor so feminine as to embarrass me, a sketch either a little subtler or a little bolder than I would risk buying for myself. Your gifts were your own. You always gave yourself away to anyone you trusted or wanted to trust, not always in the work you were seriously doing however. I have gross enamel cuff links with my initials on them from your brief enthusiasm for learning to make them. I have a mosaic ashtray—the very first thing you tried—which is a ridged and fractured attempt at a candle and book, I think, and perhaps my name is on that, too, though it would be hard to prove in the inaccurate cuttings and smeared plaster. I would not have been surprised by a pen wiper or pot holder, though I don’t remember those particular kindergarten items on any of the many Christmases we exchanged presents. Monk had a flare for the outrageous and useful, but did she know that giving you a cook book was outrageous? The card on my lounging pajamas said, “to encourage you to entertain more at home.” When Frank opened his shaving mirror, he asked if he wasn’t too old to look that closely at himself.