by Jane Rule
“He’s very fond of him. Perhaps with two daughters, he’s looking for a son.”
I went away for a weekend to visit Mother Packer and to call on Nancy Lockwood who had just had a miscarriage. She had been told she could have no more children. She lay in a darkened room, hardly able to speak, having invested too much hope in a second round of babies to replace the three daughters who were growing up. Being there in the house behind which Ann had lived for so long in happier times for them both, I wondered how long Ann had lain in a darkened room in similar near despair, her unborn child threatened, her hands paralyzed.
Mother Packer insisted on sending me back to college in a cab, a thirty-mile trip, and she specified that the driver was to be a woman. When a nice-looking young man turned up instead, she nearly forbade me to go.
“I’m going to Europe by myself this summer. I really am old enough to take care of myself.”
“Are you?” she asked sarcastically.
She was not enthusiastic about my plans. Mother had made the grand tour with a group of girls and a chaperone. Only the fact that I would be studying rather than be travelling around persuaded Mother Packer to consent to my going. I have sometimes wondered since if my own parents would have been more conservative in their attitudes toward their children if there hadn’t been disapproving parents for them to defy in our name.
My return to college was uneventful, but it was late when I got in, and I had reading to do for my lectures the next day. I read through breakfast as well, a habit I developed to avoid early-morning conversation, at which I’d never been good. So I hadn’t really exchanged more than greetings with everyone until I joined Dr. Pope at the college shop at ten in the morning. She was sitting alone with a glass of milk, always a clear signal that something had upset her.
“Don’t speak to me,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Just don’t ask me any questions because I can’t answer them,” she said, the sound of tears in her voice.
“I don’t have anything to ask,” I said. “I’ve been away all weekend.”
“You haven’t even heard about Barbara Carson?”
“No, what’s happened to her?”
“She was found wandering in a field in her nightgown at eight on Sunday morning, very drunk.”
“What else is new?” I said, sighing, for Barbara Carson’s antics had lost their sinister charms for me some time before.
“She said she’d been at a party at Donald’s with Harry.”
“And the dean is hopping mad at Donald and Harry? She can hardly accuse them of leading Barbara to drink!”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.
I changed the subject. Yet I couldn’t see why she was that upset.
“I’m so very glad you’re not mixed up in any of this,” she said as we got up to go to our next classes.
“I picked a good weekend to be away,” I agreed, knowing I would have been called in on it if I’d been around.
Then, as the day passed, the rumour began to spread. Some said Barbara was to be expelled. Others said both Dr. Weeks and Harry Bacchus had been fired. Then we heard that other members of the faculty were threatening to resign in protest.
One of the senior majors said to me at dinner, “It’s only the tip of the iceberg, you know. I can’t understand why the president or the dean didn’t blow the whistle on them months ago.”
“On what?”
“On those parties, for one thing. Once Mrs. Weeks and the children left, they really got out of hand. And, you know, Donald and Harry are crazy, one minute inseparable, the next minute threatening to kill each other.”
Barbara was nowhere to be found.
I phoned the dean.
“She’s all right. She’ll be back in the dorm in a few days’ time.”
“She’s not going to be expelled, is she?”
“Over my dead body!” the dean replied.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Stay out of it, Jinx. Stay as far out of it as you can. Thank heavens you’re not involved.”
Harry Bacchus was not allowed back on campus. Donald Weeks finished his year’s teaching and left. Only one man in the music department resigned in protest.
Barbara, back at the college, said, “It’s really the president I’d like to seduce. He’s the only really intelligent man around here.”
“You seduced Harry?”
“That pompous little prick,” she said.
Had Barbara stirred up this whole melodrama as a diversion for herself and then hidden behind her student status to see two men’s careers ruined?
“Don’t you feel guilty?” I asked.
“Why should I?” she said, opening her eyes wide. “It hasn’t anything to do with me.”
Several days later, when I passed Dr. Weeks on the creek bridge, he stopped and said, “You, after all, understand these things, don’t you? I just couldn’t do anything else.”
I understood less and less.
Ellen said, “I’ve heard a really different story. Donald was in love with Harry, and that’s why he hired him. When Harry had mono last fall, he moved in and Donald’s wife nursed him. Then Harry fell in love with her, and she left with the children.”
“Where does Barbara fit into all this?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Harry was using her to protect himself from Donald.”
I heard again Dr. Weeks’s saying, “You, after all, understand these things, don’t you?”
The students’ loyalty to Donald Weeks didn’t waver. He had been a good teacher, and he now appeared like a Macbeth or Othello, a man brought down by his own tragic flaw who had lost wife, children, his lover and his career. But we thought no more of interfering with his fate than we would have thought of interrupting the progress of a tragedy on the stage.
I continued to feel that, though Barbara’s part in it was insignificant, she had been despicable.
For Dr. Pope and Ellen, the loss was more personal than it was for me. Each was also in a way disillusioned. There I was, closer to each of them than anyone else, carrying the flaw in my own nature which could also be exposed. I did not defend him to either of them. I couldn’t have. I thought he was wrong.
My own moral state can on the surface of it confuse me as I look back on it. I’m sure I was confused at the time. I seemed to hold two mutually exclusive views, that my love represented what was best in me and that it was a sin. Or more ambiguously and truly put, what was specifically good and generally bad. Ann called my love “misdirected,” and, as a general proposition I agreed that, if I could be as devoted to a man as to either of the women I loved, I should probably choose to. As long as I entertained the possibility that my emotional makeup would change, I did not really see that my devotion to either woman could effect the collapse of our worlds as Donald Weeks’s passions had toppled his. My fears were of staircases, sidewalks, doorways, the image always of a way I must walk that I could not.
The imaginary man, Sandy, still figured in my defences occasionally. Sally and Edy were so skeptical of his existence that I once asked Grandfather Rule to wire flowers in his name. The excuse I offered was wanting such a demonstration of affection to discourage another young man who didn’t interest me. I was embarrassed by such deceits. Still they were less painful in my conscience than the deceit of dating that I occasionally indulged in at Sally’s and Edy’s urging once or twice, even having my appetite roused by a technically competent young man about whom I didn’t know, about whom I therefore couldn’t care. Such experiences did teach me not to confuse desire with love. They may also have kept me open to the hope that I might, one day, love a man and welcome my ability to desire him.
Living with another woman, because it was a daydream fixed on either Ann or Dr. Pope, didn’t occur to me as a real possibility. Ann was married with two children, and I was too much involved in her happiness to wish away anyone else in her life. For Dr. Pope, given her religious views and her
position, it was unthinkable. If I had suggested by gesture or word that I was in love with her, I would immediately have been banished.
I was really not unhappy with the relationship as it was. Erotically constrained, I still had the abundance of her loving attention, the richness of her mind, the generosity of her imagination for my future. If she had not kept in mind that I would be spending six weeks among graduate students in England, I would have done nothing to prepare myself for it. Even as she did prepare me, I was hardly conscious of it. The summer meant crossing the continent to see Ann, then recrossing an ocean to get back to her.
She and Henry, with the two children, had moved to an apartment in a large house on the other side of the Hudson, whose grounds extended to the edge of the cliff above the river. It was a beautiful place with its view of the great river, the George Washington Bridge and the city skyline beyond, no fence or hedge of any sort to obstruct it. That drop, though not as dramatic as the fireball at Yosemite, was far enough to be mortal to the imagination. Carol was only two-and-a-half.
“I’ve taught her to be careful,” Ann said, practical fatalist that she was.
I took picture after picture of that little girl in a dress I’d bought for her. In them, she looks as lively and serene as her mother, who laughs up at the camera with her.
The first night I was there, Henry and Ann and I sat up late, talking. I could read on their faces some of the strain of the last months, but Ann seemed entirely recovered, and Susan at four months was a contented, quiet baby, already displaying her father’s curly grin.
When Henry finally decided to go to bed, he asked, “Shall I go to her tonight?”
“No, I will,” Ann said definitively.
Then she said to me, “Carol has trouble sleeping. I think it was being with Mother all that time and then having to adjust to a baby sister.”
She reached out to me, held me and held me away, beginning again all the sexual questioning I found so difficult to cope with. If I told her I’d made love with half a dozen men and thoroughly enjoyed myself, chances were she would come to my bed. Though I wanted her very much, I didn’t want to lie to her, an ironic deficiency given all the lying about myself I was willing to do among my friends. I was constrained, too, by Henry’s presence in the apartment, by children who might any moment wake and need her.
Carol did not call. We went in and found her playing in the dark in her crib. Ann picked her up, held her and sang to her, then put her back to bed.
We went back to the living room where I was to sleep, chain-smoked and talked quietly for another hour. When we checked again, Carol was still awake.
“I’ll leave you with her now,” I said and went to bed.
After that night, there was no suggestion that Ann and I might make love. As Carol became accustomed to me, I took my turn with her in the night. During the day, the two children kept us occupied, and Henry brought us news of the outside world in the evening.
“Oh, it’s a tonic for Ann to have you here,” he’d say. “And for me, too.”
The erotic tension I created sweetened their nights together, and I didn’t resent it. Though I wanted Ann, I felt no claim to her.
Ann sometimes said, “Henry would enjoy making love with you.”
“I love Henry,” I said. “I want you.”
“We can’t always have what we want,” she said, the platitude of motherhood in her voice.
“No, but there’s more than one alternative,” I said.
“Meaning?” she asked, studying me.
“There’s going without.”
Ann mistrusted my chastity nearly as much as my desire for her. She talked always as if we were dealing with my feelings. Her own were outside the range of discussion. She could transmit them only if they weren’t named.
“She doesn’t look sick, does she?” Ann asked, looking at Carol.
“No, but I think she is. It isn’t that she has trouble sleeping, she simply doesn’t sleep.”
Ann took her to the doctor who diagnosed infant insomnia and gave Ann sleeping medicine for her to be used just long enough to break the pattern. We put it in her milk that evening. She sat in her high chair drinking it, and then she put the bottle down and her small head dropped to her chest. Neither of us moved nor spoke for a moment. Then Ann picked her unconscious child up and took her to bed. When she came back to the kitchen, she was crying. I held her, stroking her hair, saying into its fragrance, “It’s all right. It’s all right,” as I did to Carol in the night.
I spent some of my last few days with my grandparents, trying not to grudge the time to them. Grandfather was delighted with the trip ahead of me. He wanted me to model the clothes I was taking and had no more sense than Mother Packer did of how inappropriately lavish my wardrobe was. It took up four suitcases, and I also had with me a small portable typewriter, the only item of my own choosing. Mother Packer had asked the advice of her friends still travelling, as she had done in the years before she was an invalid, on the cost of the trip as well as what I needed to take with me.
Though I had pointed out that students travelling third class would not really be expected to dress every night for dinner on board ship, I had to take one evening gown against the three listed. I had a wide-brimmed, navy, straw picture hat, an argument I’d lost against the likelihood of my being invited to a garden party at the palace. I had two other hats for church services, to which I did not expect to go. No one suggested the mix and match travelling became for everyone only after plane travel overtook ocean liners as a way to cross the ocean. I had to have navy, brown, black and white shoes, heels and flats. I had to have theatre clothes and school clothes, city clothes and country clothes. There were handbags and gloves to match, three different coats.
There was no one my own age to ask advice. European travel, stopped during the war, was still in 1950 a doubtful enterprise, rationing still on in England, reservations uncertain, much of what people had gone to see in ruins. I was the only one I knew going to Europe that summer.
“If you meet the old queen,” Granny said, “be sure to say you’re Hugh Rodman’s great-niece. He was a favourite of hers.”
Grandfather gave me Uncle Hugh’s silver flask filled with whiskey as an antidote to seasickness.
Ann and the children were on the dock to see me off on the Queen Mary. There was a band playing. I boarded the ship, found my way out on deck and could just make out Ann’s face in the crowd. It was only at that moment that the folly of the summer overtook me. I had no desire to go to Europe at all. But the ship’s whistle sounded. The tugs bullied that cumbrously large ship out on the river, and I was on my way.
Down in the cabin, I discovered three unhappy cabin mates, climbing around my mountain of luggage, on top of which was an enormous basket of fruit. The card was signed, “Sandy.” So my darling, romantic grandfather had made his contribution to my embarrassment.
Jane Rule aboard the Queen Mary (en route to London, England)
Jane Rule Fonds, University Archives, University of British Columbia
I had to ask my cabin mates’ patience while I sorted out my clothes as quickly as I could in order to get the steward to check three of my four bags. Sharing the fruit with them did improve their tempers, but I was tagged the first-class traveller in steerage.
Whenever I hear stories about brash American travellers, I can match them with errors of my own that summer, those suitcases more often than not playing some part in the drama. I would have been better advised to dump them overboard that first day.
After I recovered from the drowsiness of my first unnecessary pill against seasickness, I began like any normally adventuresome nineteen-year-old to enjoy myself. I was younger than most of my travelling companions. My cabin mates were teachers in their late twenties and early thirties, either desperately or resignedly single. The cabin across the hall was crammed with students from Notre Dame, lecherous but Catholic. One of them, tall enough to be as crippled as I was by the restrict
ing short bunks, limped to breakfast with us every morning, challenged me to martini-drinking contests every evening and fortunately passed out before I was seriously threatened.
Barbara Carson was the only woman I knew who drank to get drunk habitually, but nearly every male I met drank himself unconscious at every opportunity. I was a show-off drinker who also welcomed the silly indifference which could come over me, muting fear or active boredom.
The novelty of ocean travel soon became regimentation. I was very grateful to disembark at Southampton, escaping the small quarters of the cabin, the repeating faces of my shipboard companions.
England from the train window was a miniature country, small houses, small gardens, small cars and lawns. Then suddenly, as we crossed the Thames, the London skyline was more impressive to me than New York’s had ever been, the flat image the Houses of Parliament had been, there in three-dimensional stone. The station itself was huge, and I did not feel a Gulliver among the crowds of people.
Before I reached the English-Speaking Union, central and sedate, where I was to spend ten days, I passed a theatre advertising a play by Christopher Fry, starring Laurence Olivier. I went to it that evening for the price of an American movie, the ground still swelling under me from my six days at sea.
The following morning, I had a letter from my mother, telling me that Grandfather Rule had died suddenly of a heart attack the day I sailed. I was shocked to be so far away from everyone in my family, but I particularly wished I could be with my father. I knew for him my relationship with Grandfather Rule eased the half guilt he felt at his own impatient judgments of his father. I wanted to be with him on the trip down to Kentucky where Grandfather would be buried. But there was no question of my going back now. It was too late. I spent the morning writing to my father and to Granny.
In the afternoon, I went to Madame Tussaud’s. It was an unfortunate choice. Wandering among those wax effigies, I had an overwhelming sense of the futility of all that vanity, kings and queens in their paste crowns and tacky robes, statesmen and actresses in melodramatic poses. I passed Sleeping Beauty, a sign stuck to her glass box reading “Out of Order.” Her breathing apparatus was broken. Down in the Chamber of Horrors, one famous murderer wore a sign which read, “Dressed in his own clothes.” Often that phrase has come back to me when I’ve been unhappily involved in some public event. “Dressed in her own clothes,” I think. The murderers were arranged together in groups like juries, and dangling nearby were men hanging by their heads from ropes, by their eye sockets from hooks. All the people on the bus I took back to the English-Speaking Union looked like wax figures. I kept finding reasons to move, to keep from letting myself turn to wax.