This Is Not for You

by Jane Rule

  When I left you that day, I had offered no objection and made no gesture of protest. Perhaps I thought there was still time. But who on earth would have dared or even wanted to take the responsibility of saving you from seeking your own salvation?

  I had my own doubts, my own decisions to make. I spent the next day at the head office in committee meetings and conferences until late afternoon when I was to meet the head of the organization for drinks and dinner. He asked a great many questions about our work in Greece. Then he spoke of problems in South America, the political pressures from Washington. We had finished dinner before he was ready to discuss my job.

  “Kate, I think you know you’re being considered as a replacement for Grace. She’s recommended it, but she’s not sure you’re ready for it. I’m not, either. I’m not sure you wouldn’t be more useful to us here or in Washington. Since we don’t seem able to make up our minds, I think the answer is for you to make up yours. If we send you back to Greece, we’ll recall Grace almost immediately to set up a training program. If you stay here—”

  “Does she know she’d be recalled so soon if I accepted the job?” I asked.

  “It was her suggestion.”

  “I see.”

  Then he outlined the kind of job he had in mind for me if I stayed, and he did make it sound as attractive as he could. I listened to what a year before would have seemed to me nearly ideal. Now, when I tried to think of living a life of committee meetings and political cocktail parties, my imagination simply failed. Instead I could hear in my head the repeating sentences of the Greek language records I had once so dutifully listened to: “In Greece, the sky is almost always blue”; “Hospitality is a Greek virtue”; “Help! Police! Someone has stolen my purse!”; “Get a doctor. The pain is in my stomach.” I could feel the dry k’s of that language forming in my throat mixed with the sharp, unlikely taste of retsina.

  “Let me know on Friday,” he was saying.

  Monk was on her way to bed by the time I got home, but Andrew was in the mood for a nightcap. I told him about the two jobs, describing them in as unprejudiced a way as I could.

  “It sounds to me as if you’re going back to Athens,” Andrew said.

  “But you think I’d be more useful if I stayed here.”

  “No, Katie. That’s what you think. You’re bugged by people like John Kerry and their utilitarian arguments. Well, so am I. But if you make the wrong choice for absolute sense because it’s the right choice for you, why not? Something’s got to be said for loving what you do.”

  “Well, yes,” I said.

  “What about Esther?”

  I lifted my hands in a Greek gesture.

  “She’s doing some real sculpture, isn’t she? If she keeps it up, I want to give her a show.”

  “I don’t think it will work, Andy.”

  “She’s spoken to you then… about the order.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you try to talk to her?”

  “I didn’t have much to say.”

  “No,” he said. “No, I suppose not. Will you be going back to anyone there?”

  “No,” I said. “The only person… friend I’ve made is Grace Hardwick. She’ll be recalled.”

  “Will she mind?”

  “It’s her suggestion.”

  “Will you?”

  “For a while, yes, I’m sure I will.”

  “But you’ll manage,” he said, sighed and got up. “I couldn’t. I wouldn’t want to. I wonder how Grace Hardwick really feels.”

  “The way I do, I think.”

  “I’m glad it’s the job you want, Katie, but we’ll miss you… all of us.”

  I sat up for a while after Andrew had gone to bed, but I didn’t get anywhere with his doubts or my own. The choice, technically still before me, had been made. I did not think of Grace. I did not think of you. I was trying to decide what furniture I should ship to Athens.

  I didn’t really avoid seeing you for the rest of the week. There was a lot to do. We did go to the same parties. I called on your mother. We were simply never alone together. Perhaps everything that could be said had been said.

  “Come to see me in Athens,” I said to everyone as we waited for my plane to be called.

  Then, when the flight was announced, I went down the line kissing people, so many people a stranger could have joined the party and I wouldn’t have noticed. You were at the end of the line, wearing a hat because you had just come from church. I had to check an impulse to take it off your head.

  “Goodbye, little dog.”

  “I’ll pray for you.”

  “I know,” I said.

  It was over a year before I received the letter that told me you had made your decision. Shortly after that the box of your belongings arrived. I took a long time over the answer, finally reduced to a note. Nowhere are there directions for the proper form to thank someone for an inheritance. I was not sorry to miss the melodrama of your being taken away. Your mother wrote to say that you had been allowed to take your enameling set, rather as if you were going off to summer camp. I think at first it must have seemed like that to her.

  Resignation is always a temporary and easily disturbed condition. Mine was disturbed each time I had any communication from you. During the months you were a postulant, you wrote more letters than I had ever known you to before, perhaps because you had to ask permission. They were dutiful little notes for Christmas and my birthday. You spoke briefly of your life which was simple and hard and happy. You sent prayers for me and my work. I did try to answer them, but it wasn’t any use. My concern about earthquake damage in three villages, my most recent trip to England to see Frank and Doris, the concert Sandy had given in Athens all seemed beside the point. I wrote a couple of paragraphs after I’d seen the new cathedral at Coventry with its faint flights of saints and strong, unattractive Christ, but they were irrelevant comments. You could no longer be concerned with the things of this world. It felt to me as if I were trying to conduct a private séance, and I’ve never been any good at communicating with spirits. I have a hard enough time with what I know to be the real world of people around me.

  I suppose I can explain why all this began, though I don’t know why it has gone on and on through these months of my living and the years of our life. It was after Monk and Andrew had been here in Athens with me for a week last spring. They had just seen you as a bride of Christ and watched the doors close behind you, shutting you off from them for the last time.

  “I always thought it was odd that you didn’t see her again at least once before she went in,” Monk said. “I think she expected you to come. But maybe, in a way, she was just as glad you didn’t. She said a funny thing—she said she thought you had taken paganism just about as far as it could go. I was expecting to find you involved in some kind of cult of Athena. I guess she didn’t have vestal virgins though, did she? Wasn’t that Diana? But here you are, as rational as ever. What do you suppose she meant?”

  “That I’m as rational as ever,” I said, “worshipping what is political and humane and worldly.”

  “But you’re really not that cynical, are you, Crow?” Monk asked. “Don’t you sometimes feel the prayers of the nuns?”

  “Do you?”

  “Oh yes. If I hadn’t married Andy…” she began, “but we’re all committed by now, aren’t we? Here you are with your Greeks. I have motherhood and television. And Esther’s with God.”

  “Oh Monk,” I said, laughing, “you do make us sound a tidy, mad lot.”

  “I think we are. Did you hear that Andy sold Esther’s Crucifixion for a fabulous amount of money to some religious fanatic in Connecticut? We gave the money to Esther’s order. It will keep them from starving and begging for a while. I did find out that, though you can’t send individual presents, you can send things for everybody. Esther always liked olives. You could send them all olives.”

  Andrew and I walked up the Acropolis one afternoon while Monk was resting. She said it was e
ither the seafood or she was pregnant again. We listened to the same guide I had listened to when I first came to Athens, then stood where I had stood, looking down on the city.

  “It’s a good life you have here, Kate, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “We see Grace quite often, you know. She said you’d be happy. I think she gets homesick for Athens occasionally, but she likes what she’s doing.”

  “She would,” I said. “She’s a good teacher.”

  “It was as if she had a part in a play,” Andrew said after a moment, and I knew he was speaking of you. “It was as if, after it was all over, she’d come out again dressed in her own clothes ready to go off with us for coffee or a drink somewhere. When we drove off, I somehow felt we were deserting her there. That isn’t the way she feels, I know. The trouble all along for Esther was that nobody she met was ever God.”

  “How did her mother take it?”

  “Quietly. Ramona says she was proud. I hope so. It’s the only good choice she has.”

  “Do you believe in it?” I asked. “In what Esther’s doing?”

  “No,” he said. “I believe in this,” and he nodded down at the city “I believe in art and in failure. But Esther couldn’t ever have settled for that, could she?”

  “I’m not sure I do, either,” I said.

  “Oh, I think we kill a few of our dragons before one of them gets us. I believe that. Were you in love with Esther, Kate?”

  “Yes.”

  “She didn’t know.”

  “Probably not,” I said.

  “Surely that’s a failure masquerading as success.”

  “That’s your decent answer,” I said.

  I am not guilty, and Joyce is right: it is a limited way to live. Yet I don’t see how I could have afforded any other. It’s a happy enough ending surely, even for me, vindicated of a crime I didn’t commit, an evil I don’t believe in. Andrew is right too: there may be something wrong with the argument, with the whole concept of self-sufficiency, but it has been expedient. If I have been incapable of loving you well enough, I’ve made a virtue of loving you badly. Pray for me if you will, Sister, beloved of God. This is not for you.

  About the Author

  Jane Rule (1931–2007) was the author of several novels and essay collections, including the groundbreaking lesbian love story Desert of the Heart (1964), which was made into the feature film Desert Hearts. She was inducted into the Order of Canada in 2007. Born in New Jersey, Rule moved to Canada in 1956, and lived on Galiano Island, British Columbia, until her death at the age of seventy-six.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2005 by Jane Rule

  Cover design by Tracey Dunham

  978-1-4804-2942-0

  This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

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