by Amanda Cross
“Do you think I can come again!” Kate said. “Have I worn her out?”
“She’s loved it; you come again anytime. But do call first; some days are better than others. I think you’ve done her a world of good.”
“And she me,” Kate said, walking from the room, her footsteps silent on the thick carpet.
Chapter Five
“ARIADNE, in mythology, daughter of Minos (q.v.) and Pasiphaë. When Theseus (q.v.) came to Crete, she fell in love with him and gave him a clue of thread by which he found his way out of the Labyrinth after killing the Minotaur. He then fled, taking her with him, but (magically?) forgot and left her on Naxos (Dia). It is generally said that Dionysus found her there and married her . . .”
—The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 2nd Edition
“Matrilinear custom deprived an heiress of all claims to her lands if she accompanied a husband overseas; and this explains why Theseus did not bring Ariadne back to Athens, or any further than Dia, a Cretan island within sight of Cnossus . . .”
—The Greek Myths, Robert Graves
From her earliest memories, Sundays had been trying days for Kate. She still claimed that, should she wake from a coma, she would know if it were Sunday. Perhaps it was that families were together on Sunday, stayed at home and pretended, if they were adults, to enjoy this “family” day. Kate could still sense her father’s noisy silence, her mother’s irritation, the haste with which, after the awful midday family dinner, her brothers found reasons to leave the house if, indeed, they were not old enough to have already escaped being there at all. Those times were long passed, but little even now could remove the sticky stigma of Sunday and its endless, unmoving hours. The only strategy that Kate had developed over the years was to make it a working day, on a far stricter and more demanding scale than other days when time seemed capable of organizing itself in reasonable and reliable ways. She arose earlier than usual, spent a half hour with the fat Sunday newspaper which she would pick up in casual moments during the week, and got down to serious work, meticulously planned the night before. This scheme, faithfully adhered to, not only passed the day but brought the evening in with less of a sense of dread, a dread which, even in her earliest years, the promise of evening radio programs had not been sufficient to assuage.
Her work for this Sunday was a serious contemplation of Ariadne by Foxx, a novel whose rereading she had just completed. In keeping with the habits of modernist writers, Foxx had not presented his readers with the story of Ariadne in any of its mythic forms; he either assumed knowledge on the part of his readers, or ignored its necessity. (T. S. Eliot’s notes for The Waste Land, the only apparent exception to this generality, had, as any English graduate student knew, been added by him to fill up extra pages in the poem’s original binding and were wonderfully insufficient to an understanding of that poem’s sources.) The title, however, for Foxx as for Joyce, whispered the necessary clue. All modernist writers were fascinated by the figure of the labyrinth and the Minotaur Daedalus had hidden there, but none before Foxx had made Ariadne the center of his tale. Women writers of that period apparently preferred, as Kate reflected, to create their own female heroes, leaving those of mythology to the men. And the men had, for the most part, ignored the women or exiled them to their separate chapters or sections. Only Foxx had decided to put his woman in the middle, to make her consciousness the center of his masterpiece.
The book began as Ariadne and her court awaited the arrival of the bull leapers from across the sea. She had forewarning that Theseus would be among them, and that she would love him. What that love would mean was the question she posed for herself in the early part of Foxx’s novel. Her mother, Pasiphae, had loved a bull, and Daedalus had contrived for her the form of cow inside of which she might allow the bull to satisfy her passion. The Minotaur, born of this union, was hidden at the heart of the labyrinth, and Ariadne was destined to love the man who killed him and was able to find his way out of the labyrinth—for that was the hard part. Because she was a priestess, and because the educated reader already knew it or could find out by reading one of the many books explaining his novel, Foxx allowed Ariadne awareness of the other (future) fatal love in her family, that of Ariadne’s sister Phaedre for her stepson, Hippolytus, the child of Theseus and Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, whom Theseus had defeated in battle. Fatal loves were clearly the curse on that family, and it was Foxx’s fascination with these fatal loves, with the fatal loves of all women, that formed the heart of his novel. And, Kate reflected, Ariadne’s violent and instantaneous passion for Theseus was one for which Foxx had the perfect model in Gabrielle’s similar desire, indeed lust, for himself.
That Ariadne, by providing Theseus with the thread for the labyrinth, had made inevitable her own sad destiny was an irony not lost on Foxx. So, he thought, all women contrived their own passions, and all men used them for their own ends. If a woman considers herself destined to love—and what woman does not, Foxx would have asked—she will provide the required condition of her passion, if, of course, she is in a position to control any part of her life. The wonder for Foxx of Ariadne’s action was that, living in a matriarchy and having within her grasp enormous powers as a priestess and queen, she had offered her power to a man whose choice or fate it would be to desert her. That the established accounts of her affair with Theseus should mention prominently her father and her lover (for readers were not urged to “q.v.,” that is go “see” any account of Pasiphae, Ariadne’s mother, or any other woman) indicated the male side of this story that all recorded history had emphasized. Women longed to help men, to be loved by them, to be carried off to ancillary destinies; this much Foxx knew. But he dared to tell that story from the woman’s point of view. That Ariadne had gone no farther than the island of Dia might, according to Graves, be because she did not wish to lose her claims to her lands, but Foxx believed, as his novel made evident, that Theseus had deserted her because her powers frightened him, or because he recognized Dionysus as having a greater right to Ariadne.
Kate was greatly impressed with Foxx’s self-admiration when she realized that he had combined Theseus and Dionysus into one character, Ariadne’s chief lover. The character Ariadne in Foxx’s novel was called Artemisia, the name given to Foxx’s granddaughter, but, in the case of the granddaughter (as Kate had learned from Anne’s memoir) immediately abandoned for “Nellie.” Picking up the most obvious strands from biographies of Foxx, Hansford’s and others’, Kate guessed that Gabrielle had led Foxx at the time of their first meeting through labyrinthlike paths to the beech tree grove where she had become his lover, his willing slave. According to the legends Kate had recently reread, Dionysus had transformed Ariadne into a goddess, or a star, and clearly Foxx saw himself as having performed the same task for Gabrielle. The question remained: where was the real woman Gabrielle in all this, at the center as Foxx claimed, or only at the center of her creator’s imagination and therefore secondary to him?
By the time Kate had sorted all this out, her Sunday was largely conquered, and she was ready in the evening to join Reed in outraged contemplation of the current events described in the Sunday newspaper. But why, she continued to ponder, had Foxx made Artemisia’s lovers either inadequate men or women?
For Artemisia had not ceased her lovemaking with the Theseus figure; she had gone on to other loves and other passions, some with feeble men, lacking either physical or mental prowess, or, in one extraordinary scene, to a passionate encounter with another woman. Unlike D. H. Lawrence, whose enactment of a lesbian love had rendered it sinister and life-demeaning, Foxx had shown the passion of the two women in a fulfilling, almost magical light. In the end, his heroine’s woman lover, like Lawrence’s, had abandoned the love of women for the love of an evil man, but while her passion for Artemisia lasted it provided the heart of the book, as well as the primary reason for its censorship. Artemisia had doubted the wonder of men, but, unlike Joyce’s Molly Bloom, she
did not despise other women. It was this fact that had prevented Foxx’s masculine-centered book from being wholly dismissed by women through the years of feminist criticism in the seventies and eighties. No wonder there had been questions about Gabrielle; no wonder, Kate thought, that the discovery of Anne’s memoir had at last opened the possibility of a biography of her.
What could Gabrielle possibly have made of Ariadne? Damn it, why did you die? Kate found herself irrationally addressing Gabrielle; why didn’t you tell us what you thought? Why didn’t you at least tell Nellie, or Anne? Did you indeed write it all down and leave it to Anne to hide away?
In all the biographies of Foxx there had been reports from people who had spoken to Gabrielle, who, friends of both the author and his wife, had reported comments of Gabrielle’s made in passing, or confided in an off moment. She had told one man that her husband had encouraged her love affairs with other men because he wished to study her responses to them. Could that possibly be true, and if true, did Gabrielle follow through on the request? Kate had begged from Dorinda a copy of the picture of Gabrielle at the window and had hung it above her desk. It seemed to claim her attention in a supernatural way.
“Turn around,” Kate wanted to say, did say; “tell me what you are thinking, what you make of all this brouhaha about a book that you must understand better than anyone.”
Would Gabrielle have been likely to tell anyone of the cruelties, if there were cruelties, in her marriage? She was a proud woman; on that all who knew her agreed. She had been scorned by her family, and scorned them and all the English aristocracy in her turn. But the pride of caste is hard to shake off; certainly the habit of it clings long after belief in its justification has been shaken. Could such a woman have said: “He wants me to go with other men”?
Had she returned to England in an attempt to reclaim England, as Ariadne may have stayed on Dia to reclaim her inheritance? But Cnossus was a matriarchy, which no one in her right mind could accuse England of being. Why, after all, had Gabrielle returned to England? Well, why not? It was her first home.
Kate gave the dreary news of the world as she and Reed discussed it only part of her mind, as he was quick to notice.
“Gabrielle seems to have claimed you,” he said. “But what I can’t decide is whether you are engaged as a detective or as a scholar and writer.”
“I haven’t a clue,” Kate said. “If you want a definition of our time, there it is: there are no longer any clues to the labyrinth, not for love, and not for power.”
“For what, then?” Reed asked.
“One must find the thread for oneself, now that Ariadne has given us the hint. Simple, really.”
And they laughed at that.
By the following week Kate had made up her mind that Nellie was the next one to be interviewed. It turned out that she was in Switzerland, working for an international organization that required languages and a dedication to causes beyond nationalism. Kate wrote to her, forming the letter with care, suggesting that she wished to meet her, to write of her grandmother, but that she would respect any of Nellie’s wishes not to be quoted or not to be asked about certain things. Kate provided her own academic qualifications and assurances from the publisher as well as herself that this biography of Gabrielle would be as sound, as unspectacular, and as un-journalistic as could possibly be hoped.
The response to this carefully contrived letter was short and disturbing, if not, Kate had to admit, rude. Nellie Foxx—she signed herself by that name which she had apparently made legally hers—appreciated Kate’s honorable intentions and her outstanding qualifications for writing the biography. She had, however, long ago become convinced that the dead had a right to their privacy, that consequently Gabrielle’s relationship to Emmanuel Foxx did not permit the betrayal of her personal papers. She had therefore burned all her letters from Gabrielle and all the other letters from Gabrielle she had been able to acquire. So she could not produce any letters for Kate’s or anyone else’s use, as she hoped would become widely known. If, however, Kate found herself in Geneva, Nellie would be happy to meet with her to indicate that there was nothing personal about her position in this matter, and that her decision to burn the letters was not to be perceived as in any way discourteous to Kate, but rather as a matter of principle. The letters had, in any case, been burned years ago. Furthermore, she would be glad to assist Kate in any way if she could. And she was very truly Kate’s.
Horrified, Kate called Simon Pearlstine to ask—demand would more properly describe her tone—if he had known about Nellie’s burning of Gabrielle’s papers.
“It had been rumored, certainly,” Simon answered. “But we had all hoped that it was not true. Nellie has very emphatic views on this, that everyone knew, but no one knew she’d actually done it. I think you should take it as a good sign that she has written to you so frankly and offered to talk with you; that looks like quite a compliment to me.”
“I’d rather she’d kept the letters and refused to talk to me, if you want to know,” Kate shot back.
“But that wouldn’t necessarily have helped you. She could still have refused to let you see the papers, let alone publish them. It isn’t as though she’d put them in a library somewhere, or sold them. I think talking with her may be more productive.”
“I feel you have tried to put something over on me, frankly,” Kate said. “I don’t know that I’d have taken this on if I’d been aware that most if not all of Gabrielle’s letters had been destroyed.”
“At least you know for sure,” Simon maddeningly replied. “So far, it’s only been rumored. Why not go off to Geneva and save your recriminations until you return. At least spend some of the advance before you decide to return it and abandon so fascinating a project.”
“I was wrong about you,” Kate said. “You’re no different from other publishers: money, money, money.”
“Let’s have a good lunch complete with wine when you get back,” Simon said. Kate did not exactly hang up on him, but she didn’t exactly say good-bye either. She just replaced the receiver slowly, contemplating Geneva.
Chapter Six
That evening Kate asked Reed if he happened to have a map of Geneva. She could, of course, have walked to the nearest bookstore and bought the newest guidebook, but generosity and the secret love we have for those who refuse to adopt our efficiencies required that she ask Reed if he had such a map. Kate believed that in enduring marriages there was always one who, on trips, did all the collecting—of maps, guides, theater programs, memorable newspapers, endless photographs, and the detritus of travel. In their marriage. Reed did the keeping. Since they had enough room, Kate confined her grumbling to outworn kitchen utensils and broken appliances. In a perfect society, appliances would be fixed and not tossed away to add to the ever-growing mountain of garbage and rejected non biodegradable materials. Since no one in the United States could afford to fix appliances or to pay anyone else to, Kate saw little point in keeping them. She and Reed had, however, agreed without ever actually discussing it that he would hoard all his mementos without comments from her, and she would be permitted to discard any gadget that no longer worked. It made for an agreeable companionship.
Which was why Reed was able, after some burrowing, to produce a guide to Geneva written in French and acquired when, as a child after World War II, he had visited Geneva with his parents. Entitled Les Guides Bleus Illustrés: Genève et ses environs, it had been published in 1937; the Swiss, having presumably remained unchanged by the war, had not required a new guide because it had ended. In Switzerland, Reed remarked as he turned it over, nothing changes. Of course, he pointed out, where the guide refers to the “palais de la Société de Nations” one must assume that the League of Nations has departed, leaving some other international organization hopefully in its wake to occupy its building. All else could be counted on to have altered little if at all. That, he concluded, is the whole point abo
ut Switzerland.
“Have they given women the vote yet?” Kate asked.
“Probably, although there may be a canton here or there that has held out. I do hope you are not going to Switzerland to start a revolution; there are better places for that.”
“I’m going to talk to a woman who believes in burning the private letters of those connected to famous writers. I only hope that she will talk to me, not least because, in the deepest, least scholarly part of my being, I agree with her. Except for the fact that Gabrielle is dead and beyond having her privacy invaded, while we struggle on in a dreary world that she, in her privacy, may have been able to illuminate and may illuminate yet.”
“Remember that bit for the woman in Geneva,” Reed said; “it’s very good.”
Kate buried her nose in the guide, snubbing him.
She too had been to Geneva in her youth, but remembered little except the lake, the bridge across it, and the island named after Rousseau and boasting a statue of him. There was also, she seemed to remember, a monument to the Reformation with a statue of Calvin, to whom she had taken an instant and intense dislike. Rousseau she had in extreme youth rather admired; it was only when she encountered the destiny he had planned for Sophie while outlining the education of Emile that she had withdrawn that admiration.
Kate was, in truth, a poor traveler, going to places willingly enough if there was reason, but growing rapidly bored with sightseeing, an undertaking her mother had carried out with all the vigor of one desperate to acquire what she had been told was significant but without the usual concomitance of significance: risk. Sometime, Kate thought, there will be something my mother admired that I shall also learn to admire, but I cannot imagine what it will be.
Geneva was not the dearer for reminding Kate of her mother; little was. She therefore got down to business: after settling herself into her admirable Swiss hotel room and flushing the very Swiss and because wholly silent, strangely disconcerting toilet, she telephoned Nellie at her office. Nellie was pleasant, if formal, and invited Kate to a restaurant, name, address, and directions given, for dinner. Kate accepted and sat down to pull together her thoughts. When one had so many questions, it was well to order them.