To Betsy, these portraits were unreal—pictures from a novel, or from someone else’s family album. She found it hard to connect young Frank the seducer—the cad who had tormented two women—with old Frank, her sad-eyed grandfather. “He kept me dangling for twenty years,” Emily had said. “He was always going to leave that woman. For years, we used to meet, whenever we could. He never loved her. She was his duty—so he said. But his duty was to me, Betsy. I can’t get over thinking that.”
“So it’s because of him that you won’t come and see my mother,” Betsy had said, meaning only to clarify. But Emily had taken it as attack.
“That’s half of it, of course. And why not? He ruined my life, young lady! If it weren’t for Frank Robinson, would I be a sour old woman living alone? He’s put me where I am, and I’ll stay here. Why should I go back now? After thirty-five years? Why should I enter the house that should have been mine? I gave up my life for him, I gave up my baby on the promise that we’d all be together someday—”
The old woman had collapsed in sobs, and Betsy saw that her various griefs had stayed fresh all these years, as perfectly preserved as paintings in a closed cave. Her anger had kept her thin and upright and energetic—even, in a peculiar way, strong and happy. Her grandmother seemed the least theatrical of people—reserved and composed rather than, like Violet, self-dramatizing and volatile—but they kept the curtain down. These revelations, these tears, were terrible blows to Emily’s pride. Betsy almost regretted that she had tracked her to her snug fortress and forced them from her. She put her arms around her grandmother, but the sobbing had already begun to subside, and Emily felt bony and rigid and almost intangibly distanced.
“May I tell my mother I found you, Emily? Even that much would make her happy.”
“Tell her, Betsy.” Emily had wiped her eyes, but they looked older and reddened. “Make it all right, tell her I’ll write her. I will write her, that’s all I can do. But don’t hate me for it. I just haven’t got the strength.”
Tenderly, Betsy reassured her, wondering how she could make it all right. But she had forgotten Violet’s saintly passivity.
Not only did Violet not question Emily’s curious reserve, but she hadn’t said a word about Betsy’s pregnancy. Betsy wondered whether she honestly hadn’t noticed, or refused to take it in, or accepted it as a fact to be absorbed but not discussed. It worried Betsy more than any of Violet’s symptoms because it made her unlike herself. Violet had always been dreamy and placid and sweet-tempered, but she had never been incurious or unobservant. The draining away of her vigor Betsy could accept; her withdrawal from life was harder.
Betsy wanted to tell her that Frank was her true father, but she couldn’t find words. And she had an uneasy feeling that she ought to check with Frank; it was his secret. But she couldn’t imagine saying such a thing to him—not any longer. What she had learned about him made him remote from her. All Emily’s years of hope and disappointment and sorrow were stacked up behind him when she looked at him now, and she couldn’t help but think of Judd. She remembered, with chagrin, the times she had tried to see a resemblance between the two men, grandfather and lover—and there it had been all along, their essential sameness. They were men who deserted their women in a crisis. Even now, Betsy thought wryly, even now he’s deserting me—meaning Frank and his silent, ashamed outrage at her condition.
And then there was the fading of his Violet, his adored daughter. Her he didn’t desert. He had, in fact, become utterly absorbed in her condition, and he didn’t talk about or appear to think about much else. He spent most of his time sitting with Violet, watching her sleep, with a look of sad puzzlement on his face, reading a P. G. Wodehouse novel aloud. They spent weeks on the same book, a page or two at a time. Betsy became used to the sound of laughter as she went up the stairs to her mother’s room, but the laughter was always Violet’s. Frank wasn’t finding anything funny.
“My heart is breaking. Betsy,” he said once after a couple of drinks. “There’s nothing worse than watching your child die.” It was what Emily had said.
He had nothing to say about Betsy’s pregnancy. Betsy sometimes wondered if what was repugnant to her grandfather was the idea of birth in the presence of Violet’s calm drift toward death. She longed for him to be reconciled to her baby. To Betsy, that coming birth bound the three of them more securely than ever—daughter, mother, grandfather—so that she saw them as three persons in one, like the Trinity—that close. But Frank held her off, and for the first time in her life she found she couldn’t speak to him of what was on her mind. She wavered between thinking it her duty to inform him that she knew so she could tell Violet, and feeling that it didn’t matter. Violet couldn’t love her father more for knowing she was his daughter by blood. Betsy saw how it comforted her to have him in the room, how delight spread over her face when he made one of his infrequent jokes, how her eyes rested happily on him when he was reading. What could Betsy’s revelation add?
In some ways, despite the rift with her grandfather, Betsy thought she had never been happier, and that she would look back all her life with joy on these few months, when her baby was still a promise, when her mother was alive and not yet suffering, when the excitement of finding her grandmother was still fresh, when she herself seemed to be blossoming mentally and physically. She looked in the mirror and saw herself bright and pleased and healthy, with the “nice fresh bloom” Emily had insisted on, and thought how becoming her life was to her at the moment.
Much of it was a solitary life. Her friends left her alone. They had begun leaving her alone when Judd took possession of her. During his residency they saw his friends; Judd jokingly but unmistakably discouraged her from inflicting hers on him: “Spare me the intellectuals,” he said, with a groan. Before Judd, she regularly had given elegant, old-fashioned dinner parties for her colleagues, two couples at a time, seating them, in the alcove off the living room, at a table that was just right for five people because one end of it had to fit tight to the wall if they were all to get in. She had liked presiding there, alone, while her married friends talked books and devoured her fussy dinners—pâtés and chickens in aspic and puff-pastry tarts—a fifth wheel so often, for so long, that she didn’t notice anymore that others rolled along while she stayed put. She was becoming a fixture in the English department. She would be there forever, competent and just this side of drab, a spinster professor whose work was her life. This was her situation when Judd took her down from the shelf and set her whirling. Now she stood still and looked straight ahead, and tried to see her way.
She had told a select few people of her situation and left them free to spread the news. She found that people avoided her, at a loss. They were furtive with her, and resolutely didn’t look at her expanding middle, talking nervously about department business and avoiding the personal, glad to get away. This didn’t worry her; she assumed it would pass. Meanwhile, as she had told Emily, she didn’t mind being alone, though she hoped her old age wouldn’t be as solitary as Emily’s. Betsy couldn’t see herself living for her peace of mind.
When she was home, she took to sitting naked on her bed, with her spine pressed hard against the headboard for the sake of her backaches, and her hands folded on her stomach. She loved the hard, strong feel of her belly, and the way it bulged when the baby struck out. The kicking, swimming, battering presence was her insurance against an old age like her grandmother’s.
She was often with her mother. She had been thinking lately of her childhood, and getting Violet to talk about it. She wanted to know at what age she had crawled, walked, cut teeth. She recalled herself as a solitary child who clung to home. Violet had tried to push her out, Frank had encouraged her to hold back—her grandmother had had no opinion, demanding only that Betsy be quiet and obedient, and eat what was put on her plate.
“You were such a good child it scared me sometimes,” Violet reminisced one evening over her bourbon. “Sometimes a child can be too good.” But she smile
d up at Betsy.
Her grandfather sat across the room. He had said she would suffocate her baby with love. Betsy frowned silently at him. You were the suffocater, she thought. She made frantic resolutions to herself: play groups, nursery schools, extended family …
“Except for the one thing,” her grandfather said, suddenly, from his corner.
Violet looked over at him, her face clouded over. “What do you mean, Dad? What one thing?”
“Betsy knows,” he said, and left the room.
“What, Betsy?” Her mother clutched her hand. “What one thing?”
Betsy smoothed her dress over her large middle: Violet didn’t see, or didn’t understand. “I suppose he means Judd, Mom. That whole thing.”
“Ah,” Violet said, squeezing her hand and releasing it. “Yes, that whole thing. I suppose you’re lonely, honey.”
“A little.”
“But it’s for the best. He wasn’t the man for you. Don’t you think it’s for the best?”
Violet so obviously thought it was that Betsy made herself smile. “Yes, I suppose it is, Mom.” Her mother smiled sweetly back.
The day came, late in November, when the scandal boiled over, when it became obvious that it had been simmering all autumn. Betsy was in her office on a Monday morning when Roger Blake, whose office was next door, burst in.
“Have you seen this, Betsy? You’re being used as a pawn in some sordid campus power struggle.” He was holding a copy of the college newspaper, and he put it down on her desk on top of Boswell in Holland. “Read this.”
The paper was open to the letters to the editor, and Roger had marked one letter in red with an angry circle. The headline was “The Reign of Hypocrisy.” Betsy began reading. It was a diatribe against one of the deans, who had publicly advocated the establishment of an abortion referral service on campus and then in his official capacity worked against it
“What’s it got to do with me?”
“Read on,” Roger said grimly. He sat down and took a series of impatient puffs on his pipe. He and Betsy were old friends who had agreed to agree on nothing. He was lending her a baby carriage and a changing table, and was one of the few who spoke frankly about her pregnancy.
“Then there’s all this stuff about the Board of Directors.”
“The last paragraph, Betsy dear. Keep reading.”
She read aloud: “Mention might also be made of a touch of related hypocrisy among the ranks of the faculty. One wonders at the mentality of a professor who can reconcile her conscience between, on the one hand, signing a petition favoring the establishment of an abortion referral service and, on the other, publicly flaunting her own visible argument against such a service and the principle behind it, as a mockery (every bit as blatant as. the actions of Dean Koch) to those who support it, and as a moral outrage to those students accustomed (at their peril) to look up to their professors as mentors and role models. There may, of course, be circumstances that extenuate, and surely the private lives of the faculty cannot concern us except as they impinge on the life of the university. But in the case at hand it seems especially apt to quote Alexander Pope: ‘What can we reason but from what we know?’” It was signed Jonathan Simonson.
Betsy finished reading and looked blankly at Roger.
“Well?” he demanded. “Recognize yourself?”
“I suppose so.… I did sign some sort of petition, I think.”
“It’s libelous! It’s actionable!”
“Oh, Roger, it isn’t. It’s just—” She read the florid prose of the paragraph again. It seemed impossible that anyone could say those things about her. She knew Jonathan Simonson vaguely; he’d been in a class of hers. How dare he drag her into this? She felt a surge of anger to match Roger’s. “The pompous young twit!” she said.
“It’s an outrage!” Roger insisted.
“Apparently, it’s I who am the outrage,” Betsy said. Her flaring anger subsided as she read the veiled insults. Crawford had spoken in almost exactly those terms, of her flaunting the visibility of her condition. She wondered sickly if he was behind the letter.
“Do you know this Simonson?”
“He was in one of my classes, the eighteenth-century survey, I think, last fall.”
“Look him up. What grade did you give him?”
She consulted an old grade book. “He’s got a B. He wanted an A.” She smiled briefly. “He did a paper on The Castle of Otranto that included an adaptation for a movie he wanted to make. Real Vincent Price stuff. He takes himself very seriously, I think.”
“He’s a fathead with a grudge,” Roger said. “It makes me wonder about the wisdom of things like this abortion referral service when you have idiot thugs like this one supporting it. I think you should press charges. He makes you look like a fool.”
“Pressing charges would make me look like a fool!”
“There are certain things that have to be fought for,” said Roger sententiously, posing with his pipe, “whatever the cost.”
“No, there are certain things that have to be ignored, Roger, whatever the cost.”
They glared at each other, then laughed, though not without some lingering antagonism. During the late sixties, Roger had been an activist at Columbia. He had been arrested there and his phone had been tapped (he believed, proudly) for two years. Betsy, at Syracuse, had retreated uninvolved from the militant campus life into her dissertation, a humorous study, called Pigs in the Garden, of Jane Austen’s villains. Now—in what he called “the snug, smug seventies”—she and Roger found it amusing to stereotype each other as, respectively, ivory-tower isolationist and knee-jerk activist, but they were serious, too, and got on each other’s nerves from time to time.
“Face it, Roger, you know I’ll never sue.”
He gave her an exasperated look. “Jesus, Betsy, what does it take to get you worked up? First you let what’s-his-name walk off and leave you with this—” He jabbed his pipe in the direction of her belly; he had advocated making Judd pay. “And now you’re going to let this little shit of a student get away with calling you a hypocrite and a moral outrage!”
Betsy lost her composure, “Damn it, Roger, I value my privacy, I value my peace of mind. As for this—” She put her hands over her stomach protectively, finding the gesture ludicrous but uncontrollable. “I’ve explained to you, even though it’s none of your damned business, that I have no claim on him, that it was my choice and I made it freely and deliberately.”
“Under the illusion that—”
“Roger, my humiliating illusions are of my own construction. I’ve made my bed and I’m lying in it very comfortably. I don’t need a lawsuit to make me happy. I am happy, I’m a very contented woman. And as for this”—flicking the newspaper with her finger as if it were a dead bug—“of course it gets me worked up! Of course it gets me angry! But dragging this stupid kid into court isn’t going to make me feel better. It would blow the attack up out of proportion. As it is, half the campus won’t notice it and the other half will forget it in a week.”
He puffed away angrily. “It’s the principle, Betsy. You let people get away with this sort of thing and you contribute to the breakdown of justice.”
“I’m not good at abstractions, Roger, and I don’t agree with you that the principle is more important than I am.” She calmed down and looked at him earnestly. “I don’t want my child born under a cloud. If illegitimacy is considered a cloud, there’s nothing I can do about it. But I refuse to sink to the level of some misguided college student and turn myself and my child into objects of ridicule.”
Roger sighed, deflated but unconvinced. “Ah, Betsy, I’d marry you myself if I didn’t have a wife.”
It was a peace offering, and she accepted it. “I’ll bet there are times Karen would be glad to have you run off with someone else and stop haranguing her.”
They smiled at each other, and he stood up. “You will dine with us on Friday?”
“I believe that’s the arrangemen
t. Here—” She held out the newspaper to him. “Take this filthy rag with you.”
“No, thanks. Take it home and wrap your garbage in it.”
Betsy tossed the paper into the wastebasket and returned to Boswell and his woman in Holland, the ironic Zélide. Resolutely, she forgot about it, but when her classes were over she drove to her grandfather’s to spend the evening grading midterms and listening to snatches of Right Ho, Jeeves, fully aware that she was using her family, perhaps not healthily, as an escape.
The scandal’s next installment came two days later, in the form of an answering letter in the newspaper. Betsy saw it as she was drinking coffee in the faculty lounge. It was signed by Rachel Grace, her thesis advisee. “I wish to protest the scurrilous charge made by Jonathan Simonson against one of our most respected and accomplished faculty members.” Betsy flushed and looked around the room. If anyone caught her reading this! The praise was more unsettling than the attack that had prompted it. The room was nearly empty, and she read on, helpless and shamed. “There are varieties of courage which are always unfairly labeled immoral by foolish and narrow people. History provides us with a wealth of examples—” O God, not Joan of Arc and George Sand. Betsy felt faint with embarrassment. “Students in need of mentors and role models might well look to those who act on the courage of their convictions and yet do not deny freedom of conscience to those whose beliefs run contrary to theirs.” There was a good deal more. Betsy was glad to see it was more gracefully written than the Simonson attack and that it didn’t veer off toward fanaticism as she had feared it would. The letter ended, “I can only conclude that Mr. Simonson must be among those whom Pope derided in the Dunciad as having ‘a brain of feathers and a heart of lead’—those to whom a moral inspiration is a moral outrage, who mistake honesty for hypocrisy, and who, lacking consciences of their own, are unfit to pronounce on the consciences of others.”
Family Matters Page 17