by Jane Rule
“It must have been grim,” I said.
“Yes, it was. The only thing to be said for me is that I didn’t start it. The only thing. I lost my temper. It was more than that. I felt really quite out of my mind until this morning.”
“I would have, too,” I said.
“No, Kate, I don’t think so. But it’s nice of you to say so. Esther and I have now said things to each other that aren’t new but should be old, should be passed. How many times can people begin again, do you suppose?”
“May I change my mind about that drink?”
“I’d be grateful,” she said and poured me a scotch the way I like to drink it without asking.
“What are you going to do if John tries to get in touch with Esther?”
She didn’t answer at once. “I don’t see how he could,” she said finally.
“You don’t want him to.”
“Does it make any sense to you, with all this in his background? Oh, I know. John isn’t his mother. Esther shouldn’t have to bear my sins either, but, if Mrs. Kerry is the worst example of Louisville—and I’m afraid she’s not—what could it be like for Esther? And for John himself? After all, he’s going to practice there. He has to have patients. I just can’t conceive of it.”
“But what if he and Esther can?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t know. What do you think, Kate? Loyalty aside.”
“I don’t know either, but I think you should let them decide if they want to.”
“And how do I do that?”
“You write a letter of apology to John. You don’t have to invite him back. You don’t have to encourage him. But you can let him know that you spoke in anger.”
“Does Esther want me to do that?”
“We didn’t agree to terms before I came up,” I said, grinning.
“What if they did marry and it was awful?”
“I don’t see how you can protect her from that. She knows what the circumstance is. She may decide, or John may decide that it isn’t a good thing. But it ought to be their decision, not yours.”
“All right. I agree. I’ll write the letter. You were a great comfort to your own mother, I know. You are to me. I spoke of it to Doris—”
“Don’t give me a good conduct medal just now, Mrs. Woolf,” I said. “I don’t feel up to it. You could do me a favor instead.”
“Anything,” she said, frankly, without gesture.
“I want a job, and I think you know the head of the agency I’m interested in. I’ve met him, and I think he’d hire me, but I want the job right away.”
I left Mrs. Woolf making a phone call and went to my room to shower and change. While I was dressing, you came in.
“Word is that the Lady herself will be down for dinner,” you said. “Drinks at six-thirty.”
“She’s offered to write a letter to John, apologizing.”
“White of her,” you said. “Doubt must be on my father’s side.”
“She is sorry, E.”
“Oh, I know she is,” you said tiredly “So am I. We do try, you know, but there’s just so little to work with on either side. Can you face her and turkey?”
“I think so.”
“I made us all Pilgrim hats. Then I thought better of it.”
“You’re growing up into a very subtle woman, little dog. What happened to your watch?”
“John and I had a discussion about femininity, and we decided I ought to try it.”
“Very becoming.”
“Remember when I never thought I could make it? I’m not bad, really, am I?” You were quite ordinarily admiring yourself in the mirror.
“For hell too fair; for earth too wise,” I said, smiling.
“You remember that. That’s odd. But sex isn’t being wise, is it?”
“I don’t suppose so. Sometimes it seems to me downright stupid.”
“I’m so glad you’re here, Kate. Nothing’s ever too awful if I can talk to you about it.”
And I was back to being too good to be true, which was guiltily all right with me.
I spent that Friday at interviews your mother had arranged while you waited at home for some word from John. By the end of the day, I had the job I had been uncertainly moving toward for nearly a year, in which I could gather up all the scattered interests and talents that I had, from the languages I had almost inadvertently learned to the painfully acquired knowledge of governmental procedure.
“Little dog,” I said with almost as much candid excitement as you might have had, “I’m going to be in New York from the first of the year with a trip to Europe before the summer’s over. I’m going to help save the world after all.”
“Not if it’s nonsectarian,” you said.
“Why?”
“You should be doing missionary work.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!”
“Then where’s the moral responsibility? Money doesn’t bless anything if God isn’t involved. What good is a hospital without a church?”
“Plenty.”
“But it’s a man’s soul—”
“I don’t give a damn about a man’s soul. It’s his own business, and I want no part of tempting him to sell it for bread or medicine or education. I think it’s immoral.”
“Only if the faith isn’t true,” you said.
“And yours is the true faith?”
“Yes,” you said firmly “You’re the one who said there was no point in being a nominal Christian.”
“Right. That’s why I don’t go to church.”
“I pray for you, Kate.”
“Well, don’t,” I said angrily “I don’t want to be prayed for.”
“Don’t you believe in anything any more?”
“I never did, E., not in your sense. I’m no good at extremes.”
“You think I’m being extreme, don’t you?”
“No more than you’ve ever been. I don’t want to fight with you about God. Belief isn’t really a thing to fight about.”
“Why not? It seems to me the only thing worth fighting about.”
“Onward Christian soldiers,” I said.
“But I believe that activity not rooted in prayer is mere bombast and flurry”
“Don’t quote at me.”
“Why not?”
“Well, then quote decent English, something like, ‘How many other things could be tolerated in peace and left to conscience had we but charity…”
“No point in quoting that. It supports your argument.”
“You used to like Milton.”
“You’re playing, Kate. I’m serious. You never really talk any more. You never really settle down with an argument.”
“I never did,” I said defensively “I’ve always been frivolous and irresponsible. You’re just seeing me in the new light of faith.”
“You make fun of me.”
“Not really I just don’t want to be bullied. I want you to be pleased with me about the job. I want to be able to talk about it without getting into a religious argument.”
“I’m sorry,” you said.
“And don’t sulk, please.”
But you were crying.
“Didn’t he call?” I asked.
“No.”
“He will, E. I’m sure he will.”
“I don’t know what I’ll do if he doesn’t. I’m marooned in this house. When you go, there won’t be anyone.”
“Monk’s here, and I’ll be back after Christmas.”
“No, she’s not. She took Lissa to Calgary on Wednesday.”
“Oh, good,” I said.
“Is it? Is that marriage any good at all by now?”
“Oh, I think so,” I said, trying not to sound uneasy. “If Andy gets his money problems straightened out now—”
“They’re straightened. The will was very generous.”
“So—”
“What does money cure?” you demanded. “I mean, really?”
“I hope a lot, but let’s not get back
to that. Why don’t we have a game of chess or listen to records or something?”
I was sorry not to be able to talk about God, but I simply couldn’t. You weren’t really interested in doctrine or history. You were reading the lives of the mystics and martyrs, and you had collected a vocabulary and imagery which were embarrassingly sentimental. I hadn’t been raised in a hard faith. I don’t suppose any Episcopalian is, but my father treated ritual with more intelligence than emotion. Being in love with God, the only relationship you considered, made me uncomfortable. I was suspicious. I’d been free to be suspicious of all your other enthusiasms. This unnatural respect, inhibition, made real talking impossible. I couldn’t settle to critical gossip about Monk and Andrew, either. I was still too rawly involved and ashamed. As for John, I felt required to support him, but I hadn’t met him. And, though nothing you told me about him gave me any real opportunity to be critical of him, I still kept coming up to responses I knew I should not make. Embarrassed, I hid in chess, in music, until by the time I left for Washington on Sunday, we were nearly shy with each other and sorry about it. There was still no word from John.
I spent that Christmas alone in Washington. I could have hurried my packing and been with you, but I hadn’t the courage to go through your first Christian Christmas, which would be literal with love. I preferred to remember the tree full of pagan promise, on which birth was still represented with Easter eggs and from which no shadow of the cross was cast. In any case, John was with you.
He had accepted first your mother’s apology and then her invitation. Meanwhile he wrote to you, as careful as a lawyer in his phrasing, releasing you but not himself from the commitment of the engagement. He did not mention his mother.
By the time I arrived on January, John had gone back to Louisville to pack up his belongings. He had decided to accept an offer of partnership in a practice in Boston, the money for which was an early wedding present from your mother. The wedding itself had been postponed until June.
“He said he needed to get settled,” you explained, “but I suppose he hopes that maybe, given a little time, his mother may be resigned enough to come. Anyway, there’s no reason to rush. As John says, we aren’t exactly eager teenagers.”
“And your mother is resigned.”
“Oh yes. Once he said he had decided to practice in Boston, she was fine. She could pay for it. That was hard on him. He wanted to borrow the money from her, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She told him accepting it would prove that he’d forgiven her. So he did. He can’t practice anywhere but Louisville without money. It doesn’t really make any difference. Once we’re married, Mother’s going to turn over all my money from my father to me anyway, so this really meant just having some of it sooner. John’s pretty solemn about money. It’s a good thing one of us is. And it’s nice that, for once, it’s going to be useful.”
Why did I listen, suspicious? John Kerry was a man with a profession. He was obviously not like Christopher Marlowe Smith or Charlie or any of the others who had never had any intention of supporting themselves, much less anyone else. If he asked for money, it was to make a world that would be possible for you to live in, free of the social capital he had depended on. He was willing to borrow it. He was willing to desert his mother and his world. He was in no great hurry. Maybe, in John Kerry’s position, I would have been in a hurry. But he was being protective of you, careful. And surely I should be able to understand that.
“A happier time for us all,” your mother said, greeting me warmly.
“It is all right, is it?”
“I think so, Katherine. And what mother can really resist a June wedding? I started dreaming about Esther’s before I stopped dreaming about my own. I’ve had a very rude, very dear note from Andrew Belshaw saying that he intends to pay for the bridesmaids’ dresses.”
“Are they back then?”
“Yes, they’ve been back in town since two days after Christmas. Didn’t Esther tell you? They’re coming for dinner tomorrow night.”
Andrew’s partner, Dan Karno, had also been invited. You were sorry that John couldn’t be there, suggested seriously, until both your mother and I laughed at you, that we set a place for him anyway, but were finally comforted by the promise of another dinner party particularly for him when he got back to New York.
There is comfort and protection in formality, whatever else it stifles. I was glad of an evening dress, of the maid who helped me into it, of my mother’s sapphires. I was glad to be a guest of the household so that I could move forward to greet Monk and Andrew and Dan when they arrived with ritual kissing and handshaking, determined by the length rather than the intimacy of relationship. I knew it would take more than an evening like this for Andrew and me to reestablish ourselves in customary friendship, but it was a beginning.
Monk, who might have been shy of a party less declaredly costume, could burlesque this occasion with real, if slightly hectic, success.
“One should never dine with friends in street clothes,” she announced to us all, then confided to me in a whisper that raised the butler’s lapels but carefully not his eyebrows, “I even bought a Maidenform bra. Isn’t it grand to be rich?”
Andrew smiled at her, not with the young indulgence he once had, but more easily. He looked very tired, but he did not seem so. He and Dan together divided their attention among the four women with such ease that we must certainly have been a pleasure to them. Dan was particularly protective of you, as if he sensed your new, engaged vulnerability. Andrew, who had found the right balance of impudence and flattery with your mother, talked with her about the gallery, letting Monk describe their discovery of new Canadian painters when they went through Vancouver. And I found myself on Dan’s other hand, postponed a little perhaps, but not ignored. We were all enjoying being well behaved because, with the exception of Monk, it was a thing we knew how to do and weren’t often enough so encouraged.
At dinner Mrs. Woolf directed our attention to topics obviously already chosen. Monk and Andrew were asked to tell us about their trip to California to visit the Ridleys, a subject which allowed them to entertain us with a plan they had made to marry off Andrew’s sisters to Monk’s brothers in an orgy of mismatching that was sometimes diabolically inventive. Once we had sketches of each of the characters, it was a game we could all play There was one sister left over, which led us to choose a brother deserving of two wives until Dan offered himself, subject to discussions of dowry as a solution. Before we had strained or exhausted that kind of good humor, Mrs. Woolf shifted our attention to several shows in New York.
“I wish someone could explain to me all these twisted pipes and engines and wrecked cars,” she said.
Dan had some trouble with them himself. Andrew talked about the problem of innovation, the influence of professional speculators. You spoke with too much defensive energy about the right of the artist to choose his own raw materials. I tried to suggest, less personally, that economics might have something to do with it. Traditional materials were so expensive that perhaps the dump was the only source for some sculptors.
“But you all seem to be agreeing that you don’t really like it,” Monk said suddenly “Lissa loves the dump. I don’t mean I take her there on purpose for an outing, but in California where you feed the ducks is next to the town dump. Lissa was much more interested in the bits of glass and bottle tops and old bumpers than she was in the ducks. She kept saying, ‘Pretty, pretty’ And I looked at it again and thought, ‘Well, maybe it is.’ It’s just that all of us feel guilty about the waste and the mess—”
“But the artists aren’t telling us it’s pretty,” I said. “This kind of thing is social satire, surely, a comment on planned obsolescence. We’re not supposed to like it, are we?”
“Some of it doesn’t seem to be satirical,” Andrew said. “That’s what troubles me. It’s all right for Lissa to think a Coke bottle top is pretty, but once you know what a Coca-Cola culture means, you ought to be satirical.”
“Why?” Monk demanded without belligerence but with a kind of bravery to challenge Andrew that I hadn’t seen before. “Being critical isn’t the only way to live in the world.”
“Like the crucifixion,” you said. “It’s one of the ugliest acts in history, but in painting and sculpture it’s often not just tragic but beautiful.”
“Do you think we’re getting religious insight into smashed cars?” Andrew asked.
“I like that,” Monk said. “I’m sure it’s time we did. After all, it’s the way a lot of us are going to die.”
“There’s a lot of talk,” Dan said, “about the significance of destruction, the aesthetics of destruction.”
“I don’t like the nihilism of it,” I said. “It frightens me.”
“Understanding destruction doesn’t have to be nihilistic,” you said. “That’s what you’ve never understood. It can be part of the cycle. How can you be reborn until you know what it is to die?”
“Some kinds of knowledge I don’t risk,” I said.
“But it’s not all dark, it’s not all destruction,” Monk insisted. “We’ve been taught to be suspicious of every bright object. I like the lights of the city. I like the colors in the supermarket. What’s so dreadful about Coca-Cola?”
“Well,” Andrew said, smiling, “you’ll keep us all from being comfortably reactionary, but that’s sociologically all wrong. Young mothers are supposed to be the conservative force, not the avant-garde.”
“Come on, Andy,” you said, “motherhood has nothing to do with it.”
“It certainly does,” Monk said, refusing your support. “I’m talking about what Lissa knows about the dump.”
It was a conversation that went on nearly all evening. Mrs. Woolf commented only occasionally, but she listened with real interest, with a kind of proprietary pleasure. She was offering the evening to you as proof of her ability to produce it. Perhaps she knew, too, that art was the one subject that could keep you from talking too much about religion, a subject about which the rest of us shared her nervousness.