by Alison Lurie
“I don’t know,” Fred whispers back, wondering what the hell he can possibly tell his department if he doesn’t. Rosemary’s crinkled pale-green silk dress has been pushed down over her creamy shoulders; his hands are on her naked breasts. “Oh, darling—”
But she twists sideways, wrenches away. “You think I’m a little fool, don’t you,” she says, her voice shaking in a way Fred has never heard before. “You think I’m a—what is it you said of your cousin, an easy pushover.”
“No—”
“And when you walk out on me next month and go back to America, you think that will be easy too.”
“Jesus God. I don’t want to go back to America. But anyhow, it’s not forever. Next summer—” Fred reaches for Rosemary again, but as he does she stands up abruptly, causing him to lose his balance and flop across the white silky cushions of the sofa.
“Very well,” she says, in a tremulous version of what Edwin Francis calls “her Lady Emma voice.” Fred has heard this voice before, but not often, and only directed to recalcitrant taxi drivers or waiters. “In that case I’m afraid I must ask you to leave my house now.” She walks gracefully to the front door, and opens it.
“Rosemary, wait.” Fred hastens after her.
“Out.” Though she speaks through a tangled curtain of pale hair, and with one lovely breast still half exposed, her tone is chilly and formal. “Out, please.” She points the way at a downward angle, as if speaking to a dog or cat.
Years of training in good manners now work to Fred’s disadvantage. Without consciously willing it, he steps across the threshold.
“Listen to me a moment, damn it—” he begins, but she slams the door on him.
“Wait! This is crazy, Rosemary,” he shouts at the glossy lavender paint, the brass dolphin knocker. “I love you, you know that. I’ve never been so happy in my life . . . Hey, Rosemary. Rosemary!” There is no answer.
7
* * *
[Vinnie Miner] is no good,
Chop her up for firewood.
If she is no good for that,
Give her to the old tomcat.
Old rhyme
FOR the first time this spring Vinnie is ill, with a heavy wet cold that threatens to develop into bronchitis. She lies huddled in bed this mild showery morning under the down-filled comforter, with a flannel-covered hot-water bottle at her feet, and a roll of loo paper by her head because she has used up all the tissues in the flat. The hot-water bottle is lukewarm, and the carpet by the bed is littered with damp wads of paper, offensive to her natural tidiness; but she is too weary and depressed to do anything about either discomfort.
Vinnie’s cold is an embarrassment to her as well as an irritation. She has always declared and believed that she never gets ill in England—that the viruses and headaches that afflict her in Corinth cannot follow her across the Atlantic to what she feels is her ecologically correct habitat. What is she to say now?
Even worse, she suspects a psychological source for her affliction, though she doesn’t believe in such things. She was perfectly well until last week, when she heard that her grant wasn’t going to be extended for another six months. It wasn’t this news that made her ill—she hadn’t really counted on more support—but a letter in the same mail from an acquaintance in New York: a well-known scholar, one of the judges who had awarded Vinnie her original grant. This woman now wanted to dissociate herself from the recent decision. “I really tried,” she wrote, punctuating her words with a heavy black underline. “But I simply couldn’t convince them. I’m afraid it wasn’t any help that Lennie Zimmern is on the committee this year—and by the way, I should tell you that lots of people consider his remarks about you in the Atlantic most unfair.”
In other words, Vinnie thinks, unwinding another length of scratchy paper and blowing her small inflamed nose, if it hadn’t been for L. D. Zimmern, I might have had another six months in London. Paranoid ideas, like little invisible bats, unhook themselves from behind the tops of the drawn shutters and flitter about the darkened bedroom, occasionally landing on something with a squashy plop. Why is she being persecuted this way by Professor Zimmern, who doesn’t even know her? What has he got against her?
In the view of Chuck Mumpson, there is no use looking for a personal motive. Chuck’s views are known to Vinnie because, feeling that she had to talk to somebody, she had selected him as the least likely among her acquaintances to gossip, to judge, or to pity her. Two days ago, over the phone to Wiltshire, she gave him a slightly scaled-down version of Zimmern’s continuing persecution, speaking of herself as merely “very annoyed” and of Zimmern as “malicious.”
“I d’know, Chuck said. “It doesn’t hafta have been malicious, necessarily. Those things happen sometimes kinda by accident. You know how it is: a guy wants to make a point, so he hasta pick an example. He doesn’t always think how there’s a person and a career behind what he’s attacking. Anybody can do that kinda thing. I’ve done it myself, when I was younger. There was this superintendent once at a waste treatment plant in East Texas that wasn’t testing right; I’ll never forget his face. I didn’t have it in for him, no way. I didn’t even know he existed, so to speak, but I about ruined his life. It could be that way with your professor.”
“You may be right,” Vinnie said into the telephone—her usual response to statements she prefers not to challenge. And of course it’s possible that Zimmern has nothing against her personally. His prejudice, rooted no doubt in an unhappy and deprived childhood, may be against childhood itself; or against women in academia, or against folklore, or some combination of all these. But that doesn’t exonerate him. Like all offenders, he must be judged by his actions. And condemned. And punished.
If the world were just, Professor Zimmern and not Professor Miner would now have this cold, this headache, this stuffed-up nose, raw throat, honking cough, and general sense of ill-being. Vinnie imagines him afflicted with all her symptoms, only more so if possible, lying in bed at this very moment under a heavy matted mound of blankets (she denies him her down comforter; they are uncommon in the States anyhow). He is in his New York apartment, which she locates in one of those sooty cavernous stone buildings near to and owned by Columbia University. (Actually, L. D. Zimmern lives on the second floor of a brownstone in the West Village.) He has been ill off and on for weeks, Vinnie imagines—for months—ever since he wrote that revolting article. Since he spoke and voted against renewing Vinnie’s grant, his symptoms have been unremitting.
Zimmern doesn’t know it yet, but he is going to get worse. His cold will turn into bronchitis, his bronchitis into viral pneumonia. Soon he will find himself in one of those huge cold impersonal New York hospitals, at the mercy of impatient anonymous doctors, overworked nurses, and sullen, underpaid, non-English-speaking aides, many of them addicted to drugs. Zimmern will lie in a-semi-private room, not getting any better, and his friends, if he has any friends, will grow tired of visiting him. Vinnie can see this room clearly: its dirty window with a view of stained brick walls; its two high stiff white beds, the other one occupied by a coughing, snoring, incontinent, and smelly elderly man; its TV set, always turned to a game show. She can see Zimmern in his washed-out seersucker hospital gown, weakly pushing aside a frayed months-old copy of Time magazine, reaching for the plastic cup on the bedtray and sucking up stale lukewarm New York water through a plastic caterpillar straw.
No one has been to see Vinnie in her illness either, mainly because she hasn’t encouraged anyone to come. Whenever she’s depressed or under the weather her instinct is always to conceal herself until the skies clear. Even a very young and pretty woman is less charming with a bad cold, and Vinnie knows from the bathroom mirror that she looks plainer than ever now; her disposition, too, is at its worst. And though her acquaintance in London is extensive, it is largely composed of what she thinks of as fair-weather friends (with the exception perhaps of Edwin Francis, but Edwin is now in Japan). Fond as she is of them, she has the belief�
��or delusion—that their reciprocal fondness is the result of their natural sweetness of temper and general good will rather than of profound affection; she fears to test it under adverse conditions. If her friends weren’t put off by seeing her as she is this morning, they would probably pity her; and though she sometimes feels sorry for herself, Vinnie hates to be pitied by others, even in her own imagination.
When this danger begins to threaten, her usual resource is to dwell on the misfortunes of others and actively pity them. If she had caught this cold when the weather was consistent with it, early last month, she could have profitably contemplated the tribulations of Chuck Mumpson: his unemployment, his lack of inner resources, his third-rate education, his depression, his loneliness, his dislike of London, and the discovery that his wise and noble English ancestor was really an illiterate pauper. A few weeks later, and she could have added his deprived childhood and his delinquent adolescence.
Chuck’s “folks,” he told Vinnie during their first dinner together, were uneducated, “dirt-poor,” and none too law-abiding. “My dad—he was no good. He spent most of his adult life in jail, if you want to know the truth. And he never gave a hoot in hell for any of us.”
As near as Vinnie can make out, Chuck and his too many brothers and sisters grew up in a kind of rural slum, with an overworked and frequently drunken mother. “She wasn’t a bad woman,” Chuck explained, forking up an overload of Wheeler’s sole véronique and parslied potatoes (his table manners leave something to be desired). “Only she wasn’t home much to keep an eye on us. And when things weren’t going too good for her she got pissed, and then she slammed us around.”
Unsupervised, half neglected, Chuck and his siblings began to get into trouble as soon as they hit puberty. “I ran with a rough crowd for a while. By ninth grade we were cutting school pretty regular to hang out in pool rooms and go joy-riding.”
“What’s that?” Vinnie asked, marveling at the inappropriateness of Chuck and his history to the old-fashioned British elegance of Wheeler’s.
“Aw, you know. You find some car with the keys left in, or you jump start it, and a bunch of you go for a ride. Take the heap out onto the highway and see what it’ll do; maybe pick up some girls and drag to the next town. Then when you think the cops might be onto you, or the gas runs out, you shuck it. Or sometimes we’d borrow a couple of horses instead.
“When we got tired of that, we started breaking into empty houses. For the thrill mostly; but if you saw something you wanted, you took it. I used to go for the cameras Then one time the house wasn’t empty; we had to run for it. Afterward nobody wanted to admit he was chicken, so we started talking big, how next time we would bring a gun, and if anybody gave us trouble we would fucking blow him away. One of the guys, he knew where his dad kept a pistol. Wal, we were lucky. Before we could get shot up, or hurt somebody, the law caught up with us. Most of the guys got probation, but they took a look at my family and sent me to a home for bad boys.”
“Hell, no, that didn’t reform me.” Chuck continued with his story later, as he and Vinnie sat in the stalls at Covent Garden waiting for Fidelio to begin. “Are you kidding? You ever seen one of those places? . . . Naw, what stopped me was the war. I got drafted, and went to the Pacific with an engineer’s unit. If it wasn’t for that, I probably would have gone on the way I was going; maybe ended up like my dad. Only after the war, killing a guy didn’t look so cute anymore. It was bad enough when it was some Jap that would’ve got you first if he could. You get home, you hear some old buddy talking, how he went into this all-night gas station maybe, with a gun, and there was this guy. He didn’t intend him any harm, but he thought he heard a noise in the back room, he panicked. Pretty soon the guy’s laying there dead, and your buddy took the rest of his life away, for what? For maybe a couple hundred dollars. That wasn’t for me, y’know?”
“I see what you mean.” Vinnie looked around the great opera house, with its multiplication of shaded lamps and crimson velvet, its festooned golden tiers of balcony—and then, with a sense of the collision of worlds, back at Chuck in his plastic raincoat and leather string tie. “So you went straight,” she remarked.
“I guess you could say that.” Chuck laughed awkwardly. “Anyways, after I was discharged I didn’t hang around home for too long. I had the G.I. Bill, and the tests said I was smart enough for engineering college, so I thought, hell, why not.”
“Why not,” Vinnie echoed, marveling at the long fuse of chance that had blasted this unhappy jobless ex-delinquent from rural Oklahoma into the seat next to hers at Covent Garden. She felt a rush of condescending pity, and congratulated herself on her good luck in being born to educated, affectionate, sober, and solvent parents.
In the days that followed that evening at the opera, however, Chuck gradually became less pitiable. Because he was bored and miserable, he was willing to go anywhere, eat anything, and look at anything Vinnie suggested. Sometimes he seemed to enjoy it, or at least find it interesting. After Fidelio, for instance, he remarked that it sure wasn’t much like real life, but maybe we’d all be better off if when things went wrong we stood around and screamed for a while. His grandad used to do that, he said. “When he got really riled up he’d stop whatever he was doing and just cuss everybody and everything for maybe ten, fifteen minutes, till he was out of breath.”
Somewhat to Vinnie’s embarrassment, Chuck insisted on paying for everything they did together, and thanking her for it as well. From the start he has had a wrong idea of her as helpful and kindly—a misconception born on the flight to London, when all she was really trying to do was protect herself from having to talk to him, and confirmed when she made a few simple suggestions about genealogical research. “You think I’m a nice person, but I’m not,” she occasionally wants to say, but refrains.
Apart from his misunderstanding of her character and motives, Vinnie decided presently, Chuck wasn’t really stupid so much as badly educated—hardly educated at all in her sense of the word. But at least he was willing to learn. Since he’d read practically nothing, she decided to start him at the beginning, with the classics of children’s literature: Stevenson, Grahame, Barrie, Tolkien, White. She bought him the books to ensure that he had decent editions, and to make some sort of return for the dinner and theater tickets he kept buying her.
Going with Chuck to the best current plays, films, concerts, and exhibitions, Vinnie of course risked meeting some of her London acquaintances. And indeed, on only their third excursion—to the National Theatre—they ran into Rosemary Radley. Vinnie quailed inwardly as she introduced Chuck, and took him off as soon as was reasonably polite. His subsequent comment was predictable: “A Lady, is she? Wal, anyhow, I got to meet one real aristocrat over here. Handsome gal, too.”
But Vinnie was astonished when at a lunch party a few days later Rosemary, without any appearance of irony, regretted that she had rushed her “amusing cowboy friend” away so fast, and declared that she positively must bring him to her house the following week. Vinnie said she would try, at first resolving not to. She might not think all that much of Chuck, but she wasn’t going to take him to a Chelsea party to be laughed at. But then, Chuck probably wouldn’t notice if someone like Rosemary was laughing at him; and if she was showing him London, shouldn’t he see more than just its tourist attractions?
So again Vinnie broke her rule about not mixing English and American acquaintances: she took Chuck to Rosemary’s party, hoping that it would be large and various enough to muffle his impact somewhat. To her surprise, his Western costume and Western drawl were an instantaneous hit. Though he explained that he hadn’t worked on a ranch since he was a kid, the British clustered round him, inquiring in sentences bristling with invisible quotation marks how exactly one went about roping and branding cattle, and whether there were still many Red Indians on the range. “I adore your Mr. Mumpson,” Daphne Vane, the actress, said to Vinnie. “He’s definitely the real thing, isn’t he?” And Posy Billings, pronouncing C
huck “awfully amusing,” declared that he and Vinnie must come to stay with her soon in Oxfordshire. Vinnie realized that over here Chuck wasn’t a banal regional type, but original, even exotic—just as, for instance, a Scots sanitation engineer in a kilt would be in New York.
Chuck’s London season was brief, however. Ten days after Rosemary’s party he decided to return to Wiltshire, largely because of something Edwin Francis had said. Instead of sympathizing with Chuck’s disappointment over Old Mumpson, Edwin had congratulated him. “Fascinating! A real Hardy character, he sounds. You’re so lucky; most of my forebears are dreary beyond words, all lawyers and parsons. You must find out more.”
“I’ve been thinking,” Chuck told Vinnie later. “I figure Mr. Francis has a point. I oughta learn all I can about the old guy. After all, he was family, whatever else he was.”
So, leaving most of his possessions with Vinnie, Chuck departed. She gave him a book for the train journey and packed him a lunch—well, why not? He’d certainly bought her enough meals in the last few weeks, and British Rail food is famously dreadful. Besides, by now—at least in Chuck’s view—they are friends. Many of Vinnie’s acquaintances, she is irritatingly aware, suspect that they are also lovers, in spite or even because of her perfectly truthful statements to the contrary.
In all the years she has been coming to England, Vinnie has never made love with an Englishman. Of course her previous visits have been brief, a few weeks at the most. This time, however, she had rather hoped for an adventure; and she had, as always on these trips, recast her fantasies to feature British intellectuals rather than American ones. Not of course that she really expected a romantic interlude with any of these well-known dons, critics, folklorists, or writers. But she certainly hadn’t come all the way to London to make it with a sunbelt polyester American left behind by a two-week guided tour, an unemployed sanitary engineer who wears a transparent plastic raincoat and cowboy boots and had never heard of Harold Pinter, Henry Purcell, or William Blake until he was fifty-seven years old and she told him about them. To be suspected unjustly of such a connection causes Vinnie much social discomfort—and also, it must be admitted, a certain amount of irrational pique. Of course she’d turn Chuck down if he made a move, but why hasn’t he done so? Either because he foresees her response—unlikely, since he isn’t the intuitive type—or because, though he likes her, he finds her unattractive.