by May Sarton
And a half-hour later she was sitting in one of the parlors that seem to have been designed for just such preposterous occasions—the fancy satin-covered armchairs more suitable for a boudoir in an operetta, the gold-framed mirrors, the old copies of magazines arranged on little tables as in a dentist’s office; an atmosphere of being in a waiting room where the shades of all the young men who had sat nervously waiting for a date to come down, the shades of uncomfortable parents falsely jovial, the shades of all the faculty who had been tortured here by feeling themselves under the circumstances neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring, gathered and presided.
“Yes, lemon please and no sugar,” she heard herself saying. “Thank you, Nell.”
Nell, who did very poor work but always giggled in conference as if she considered herself hopelessly funny, had now assumed the air of a very stiff hostess who did not know her guests very well.
“It is so kind of you to come, Miss Winter. We have been looking forward to this all week. Oh, I don’t think you have met Mary Macaulay.”
“How do you do,” Lucy said, shaking hands. “Are you enjoying this first year? I expect it must be quite frightening at times …”
Mary stammered something and sat down beside Lucy. Two or three girls from the freshman section came in and settled themselves on the floor. Lucy launched one balloon after another—the Christmas vacations and where they would be spent; the snow; the skiing weekend at Dartmouth in prospect, but all these balloons floated off after a second’s response and in sheer desperation she asked for another cup of tea, another dry biscuit, and looked at her watch. She couldn’t decently leave for another half-hour. What did one do? She was aware that she had been asked to tea because the freshmen enjoyed her class and wanted to know her better. But not one seemed capable of asking a question that might make for adult conversation; as good manners prevailed over life, they sank into a deafening silence. Lucy felt like some sacred gilded animal or relic that is wheeled out on occasion and expected to perform a miracle. What miracle and how? Whatever she was occasionally able to do in class—those moments when she and they were lifted up together on a wave of excitement—was quite impossible here. Here she was simply a rather plain older person saying “yes, thank you” “no, thank you” and deprived of her only valid function in relation to them.
She felt their expectant and already disillusioned eyes upon her; unlike her they had, in their inexperience, looked forward to the occasion, and now they were being disappointed. She was being as natural as she could, but this, she suspected, was just what they did not want. They wanted an intimate contact with the slightly-larger-than-life-size figure who confronted them on the raised platform and through whom (as if she were a Greek oracle) the voices of the gods could be heard. The image made Lucy smile; she caught Nell’s amused eyes, and decided to plunge in from there.
“I was smiling because I think this sort of thing is so hopeless,” she said. “Don’t you agree? It simply doesn’t work. Hasn’t it ever happened to you—if it hasn’t, it will—to invite some really great professor to a social occasion like this, and then have it go flat?”
Two girls exchanged a startled look, then burst into laughter.
“Ah, I see it has,” Lucy said, with relief. Now perhaps something could be salvaged, at least the way prepared to save herself and her colleagues from these fatal decrescendos.
“We asked Professor Cope to dinner, and we were so scared no one said a word. She talked the whole time about politics in the Middle East, and none of us knew a thing about it. Oh dear,” and they collapsed into delighted giggles.
“What did you expect?” Lucy asked. “I mean, how in hell could she behave under the circumstances? She was probably much more uncomfortable than you were, as a matter of fact. Here I’ve been making small talk for nearly an hour and all you do is sit and stare at me as if I were a ludicrous animal. Don’t you think you could manage to ask some question that might lead us into a real conversation?” The smiles vanished from the faces and a terrible look of concentrated effort took their place. “No,” Lucy said gently. “For one thing we are not brought up in these United States to have the faintest idea of what conversation is. You have led me here like a dancing bear and now expect me to dance without any music—look, we could talk about what has been wrong with the course this semester. That would be really interesting to me.”
“We love it!” two girls cried out at once, in alarm.
“You make it all seem so real,” Mary said earnestly. “Really, Miss Winter!”
“But you hated Thoreau,” Lucy needled them. “Why did you?” At once the atmosphere had become that of a classroom. Oh dear, Lucy thought, there really is no way out. “You know,” she said, lighting a cigarette and so giving herself a second’s time to think, “I think what you want and think you can get by inviting us to tea and supper with you, just can’t be accomplished that way. What you want, I would guess, is to make contact with the human being, with me myself, not Professor Winter. And this is possible sometimes between a student and a professor, but”—Lucy paused and realized that she had now their full attention, and all the masks, the social masks, had been quietly laid aside. “Maybe it can only be done after that particular relationship has ended. In the classroom, you see, there are three entities present, you the class, me, and a third far greater than we who fuses us at moments into a whole. When that third is absent, our real relationship falls apart. What we have felt for the last half-hour is that absence, don’t you agree?”
Two girls nodded solemnly. Then Mary leaned forward and said, “But, Miss Winter, we like you so much as a person too. Isn’t that fair?”
Lucy laughed. “Oh, it’s fair enough. It’s just not possible to live out the liking in this sort of social situation. I’m being horribly frank with you out of sheer desperation,” she ended. “I do think that some true friendships happen after a student ceases to be a student. For one thing time telescopes as one grows older—you’ll see,” she ended, getting up to go. “But for the time being let’s settle for what we have.”
“Boy, you sure have hit the nail on the head!” A girl Lucy did not know was rubbing her forehead.
“I’ve simply behaved like a bull in a china shop,” Lucy laughed, “if we can change the metaphor. I hope I haven’t broken all the tea cups in the process!”
She left to a chorus of “Thank yous,” escorted by Mary, who shook her hand and said, for once, very seriously, “You made it not just a social situation, so maybe all you said has been disproved after all! We are grateful, Miss Winter.”
But the effect on Lucy of the whole episode was to make her wish wildly for some contemporary to ask her out to dinner and to precede it with a great many drinks. Instead, she saw coming toward her out of the dusk, Maria’s determined figure.
“Come for a walk,” she said in a tone which precluded refusal. “They told me you were over here.”
“One of those nightmarish teas—I hope I managed, by being brutally frank, to scotch any further such invitations.”
“You are brave.”
“In the absence of any real private life I find I resent this kind of waste of time more than ever before. It’s damned lonely at times, Maria.”
“Get out and marry your young man.”
“I have no young man. I never did have one in the sense that you have Jack.” Maria strode along, her hands thrust down into the pockets of her full black coat, like a fury. Only when they had emerged from the campus and turned toward the hill back of the President’s house did Maria finally slow down. She stopped then. In the distance the cries of children sledding came to them sharp and clear.
“We are getting a divorce,” Maria said in a flat voice.
“Maria!”
“Come on, let’s walk.”
They walked side by side, with a little distance between them, while Lucy tried to control the panic that was flooding in on Maria’s statement. Was everything breaking down, breaking up like an
ice-floe under the impact of Jane’s own breakdown?
“It can’t be true. Wait, Maria … wait for this storm to subside.”
“It’s Jack,” Maria said in a hard voice. “He does not change his mind when it is made up. That New Englander.”
“But the children … Giorgio, Pietro, and Stephen!”
“Don’t! I tell you his mind is made up.”
“He behaved like a madman at the faculty meeting, like someone possessed, literally possessed by rage. It’s not what he really means. Wait, Maria.”
“No.”
They were climbing the hill, past lighted houses. A woman came to a door and shouted “Mary!” In the stillness, the cry reverberated on and on. It sounded desolate. In its wake there seemed nothing to say.
“We are too different. For a long time we have rubbed each other like a saw on glass. It is enough.”
“But you love him!”
“Love is not enough. It does not keep us from murdering each other. It is a love too much like hatred. Even for the boys no father is better than this ugly war. I want to take them to Italy!” She said it with passionate nostalgia. “To Italy!”
“Things are better there?” Lucy asked, out of her own desperation. Was there anywhere in the world where people did not murder each other and call it love?
“Normal warmth, life flowing, natural like the trees and the air. In Italy my sons might grow up into men who love women instead of hating them, men who are not threatened by the power of women. Not in this sour self-devouring world locked in ice,” and she kicked a ball of snow forward with one foot as if she hated the very earth they trod.
“It’s not true,” Lucy stammered. She felt acute distress. Maria, of all people, should not allow herself to be so shaken.
“What’s not true?”
“I don’t know. How should I? I am just one massive protest!”
“I can’t live without love,” Maria uttered now, standing with her head flung back as if to challenge the night itself. “I am dying,” she announced bitterly, “and I want life and life for my sons. The atmosphere in our house has been dank for weeks now, no air, no sun, Jack’s mood like a prison locking us all in to misery and humiliation. I tell you, I will not stand it!” she said to the winter heavens.
“I wonder how many people do … live without love. Love comes and goes, but people do manage to go on living somehow.”
“I won’t live ‘somehow!’”
They walked on in silence while Lucy tried to think, but only felt confused, battered, and in some way forlorn, as if she were more closely woven into Jack’s and Maria’s marriage than seemed sensible. She remembered the first evening she had been in their house, when she had observed a child’s painting pinned up on the wall and a bicycle, how warmed she had felt, and how she had said to herself, “Someday I shall have three little boys.” But in the world around her lately the only people able to shed warm light were the isolated ones, those ‘without love’ in Maria’s terms, Hallie and Jennifer Finch. Whereever there was passionate love, between the Beveridges, between Carryl and Olive, there was strain, if not hatred, something dark and struggling in the dark … herself and John. Only the innocent Atwoods appeared to be immune, and that might be, she surmised, because they had never quite grown up.
“If you go to Italy,” she thought aloud, “you will be planting everlasting conflict in the children, surely. They will never be either wholly Italian or wholly American.”
“But they will love Italian girls, Italian women, and they will not grow up as Jack did, punished and afraid.”
“He was brave enough to marry you!”
“Oh well, people marry in a state of madness. We were like two wolves, starved for each other.”
“But when you married him, you must have known whom you were marrying. You knew he was not warm in the same way as you. You must have known!” Lucy felt she was pleading with a goddess of stone. The words bounced back. What offering could one make? What moves such gods as these, the wholly committed who are beaten down? The wholly committed when they have had enough? Not tears, that was sure. Lucy walked fast, paying attention to her feet and to each step she took, to keep the tears back.
“Why are you upset? What is it to you?” Maria turned on her suddenly. “I came to find you because I thought you would be detached.”
“I’m not. I can’t be,” Lucy said miserably. “It just all seems so hopeless … you, me, the whole human compact. The waste of feeling.”
“Yes,” said Maria. They walked on in silence until they had reached the top of the hill. Then Lucy, out of breath, turned to look back, down to the lights of the college and the town, looking so bright and safe, and each lighting up some intimate, tragic struggle. What a farce!
“What possessed Jack to be so involved with these women? I could forgive him, maybe, if this were a sensual passion, if there were some real life in it. What I cannot accept is that he can reject me for Carryl Cope.”
“Wait, Maria, please wait!” It was the only word Lucy could find that still rang true. It was preposterous that Jack Beveridge would break up his marriage because of what had happened over Jane. “It just doesn’t make sense.”
“I have waited three weeks,” she said bitterly. “Now, today, I have got our passage to Italy for Christmas.”
“Dear town,” Lucy said, as if she had not heard.
“Full of good people who murder each other every day.”
“Maybe.”
“Jack says he can no longer live with an irrational force, an animal, that is what he means. He has placed me in some outer darkness where I can no longer function even as myself apart from him. Can’t you see?”
Lucy turned back, as if she were pulled in spite of herself toward the lights, however deceiving they might be, toward the warmth, however false. “He is angry, Maria. His anger will go someday like a fever.”
“And meanwhile I shall be dead.”
We die between the too-much and the not-enough, Lucy was thinking ironically. She could understand how Maria’s excesses, her violence, her absoluteness might be tiring, how living with her one might long for stable, plain, unexciting fare. And yet … and yet … might one not also hunger for and come to need this torrent of life? “But people don’t die of not being loved, only of not loving,” she heard herself say. “Look at Jennifer.”
“Sacrifice, sacrifice! I want fulfillment, for me, for my children.”
“Some people might say that cutting out your heart to find fulfillment was a rather strange thing to do.”
Who am I to say such things, Lucy asked herself bitterly? All she wanted at the moment was to be warmed (the wind was icy), to be held close in someone’s arms, almost anyone’s, she thought ironically, just to be hugged without any words. And she suspected that this is what Maria wanted too, and might just possibly find.
“You are formidable,” Maria said after a silence.
“I am desperate,” Lucy answered quickly. “I must believe in something, don’t you see? Or failing that, have a roll in the hay,” she added with a laugh. “Or failing that, a long time in the serene tough world of the intellect, undisturbed contemplation of an idea. Don’t you miss teaching sometimes?”
“I haven’t exactly stopped doing it,” and suddenly Maria smiled. “I think if I ever taught professionally again, I would want small children, eight or nine. They are so fresh.” She stopped in her tracks. “Every now and then I forget. Then I remember.”
They had reached the town again, and were passing the President’s house. Was he at this very moment composing a letter to Olive Hunt to try to persuade her to. change her mind? “It will be awfully hard on Carryl Cope if Olive stands by her word and leaves that three million somewhere else!”
“To hell with Carryl Cope!”
“I never did understand what you have against her. It’s as if she were a symbol, a gigantic antagonist who I suspect does not exist in reality.”
If Maria resented this
, she did not show it. She stopped again, and rubbed her forehead with one hand, against the cold, or against the turbulence within. “I know. I am crazy,” she said in a low voice. “I am jealous. Black with jealousy of that old bluestocking. It is ridiculous.”
“Do you remember Jennifer saying at the Atwoods’ that evening how alike you are?”
Maria laughed, a laugh with desperation in it. “Only because we are each a little larger than life-size!”
“I don’t understand.”
“I am a giant of naturalness and she is a giant of control; we are monsters, each in our own way.” Maria looked at her watch. “Good heavens, I must get back. I promised Stephen to go over his arithmetic lesson before supper.”
“I’ll walk you home.”
But the spell was broken, the moment of intimacy gone. Maria was back in her own world, thinking, Lucy sensed, about supper or the immediate task ahead. Her face had taken on its closed somber look. But Lucy was wide-awake still to the issue they had dropped.
“Maria, why do you feel threatened by Carryl?”
“Don’t ask me,” she said crossly. “I don’t know myself.” Then she added, “Maybe because she is Jack’s ideal. He would love to be like her himself, free of a family, the great Professor Beveridge, aloof on his Olympus. She threatens me as a saint threatens the wife of a man who would really like to enter a monastery.” Maria suddenly laughed, as if uttering these words had released some tension in her. “We are all mad—mad—mad—” she said. “Even you!”
“Me?”
“Yes, you, with your impossible love affair, with that John you cannot forget.”
“That’s not my fault,” Lucy said, feeling desolate.
“Oh fault, fault! Nothing is anybody’s fault. We are as we are.”
“If only we didn’t have to hurt each other so much in being it,” Lucy murmured to herself. They were at the gate of the Beveridges’ house, and she would not go in.