An Independent Woman

by Howard Fast

  “I thought you didn’t have sin in your discipline?”

  “Do you mean we don’t admit to sin, acknowledge sin?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Of course there’s sin—just look around the world we live in. The difference is that we don’t deal with sin against God or the rules they make up concerning sin against God. We deal with sin against men and women, and that’s an entirely different matter.”

  She nodded, rose, and went into the kitchen for dessert and coffee. She returned with the coffeepot in one hand and a big platter in the other, which Philip took from her as its weight began to tell.

  “What on earth is this?” he asked her.

  “It’s a superb Australian dessert called a pavlova. She was dancing in Sydney, I believe, and they were so delighted with her that they named this dessert after her. It’s all egg white, sugar, and flavor—not a drop of cholesterol, and it rips the fat off you.”

  He had two helpings of the pavlova and praised it, and when she started to clear the table, he said, “No—please, Barbara. Sit down. I’ll help you clear later. There’s something I have to say now.”

  “Now? How about in the living room, and I’ll pour some brandy?”

  “No. Here, right now, before the telephone rings. Your friends always call when they think you’ve finished dinner.”

  “What an odd thought! All right, my dear Philip, here, now.” She leaned over the table and put her chin on her palms.

  “I want to marry you,” Philip said flatly.

  “Do you? That’s very flattering. But why?”

  “Because I love you.”

  “Thank you, dear Philip. But you don’t have to marry me to love me. Is that the result of seeing Harry and May Ling? May Ling is thirty-seven, and Harry is somewhere around fifty, and it’s quite intelligent for them to marry. You and I—”

  “I know how old we are. That makes no difference. I want very much to marry you, for us to be man and wife.”

  “But why marriage, Philip? This isn’t the largest house in the world, but I have three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, and a good many closets, and you could move in—and believe me, I have thought about it—and you could be perfectly comfortable here. You have stayed over here, let me see, four times at least. We could turn the extra bedroom into a study; one of the bedrooms, as you have seen, has a large window with a view of the Bay… I’ve been married twice, Philip. Don’t you think that’s enough?”

  “What has that to do with this?”

  “Oh, a great deal. I’m not much good at marriage.”

  “Barbara,” he said, “we can’t live together.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m a minister of a church.”

  “What!” Barbara exclaimed. “After all you’ve told me, after all your sermons about equality and the rights of women and the freedom of choice, you tell me that we can’t live together! They would fire you because you’re living with me? Then it’s all a lie, isn’t it? How can you say that you love me?”

  “I do love you.” He had never seen this part of her. “And they wouldn’t fire me. They wouldn’t care—but I would. Do you know, I never kissed a woman after my wife died; never been with a woman. Do you think I’d be in bed with you if I didn’t adore you? I was a priest. You can take a man out of the Church, but you can’t take the Church out of the man.”

  “So you keep telling me. Thank God I never had a church inside of me.”

  “Why are we doing this? For heaven’s sake, Barbara, marry me. We have no obligations to anyone.”

  She burst into laughter, rose, and went around the table; stood behind him and put her hands on his cheeks. “Poor Philip, poor Philip. And I’m to blame. I seduced you, deliberately and wantonly.”

  “No, you didn’t. I was praying to God that you would come into my room. I didn’t have enough courage to go into yours. Like President Carter, I lusted in my heart.”

  “Poor, dear Philip,” she said. “My darling Eloise will have a nervous breakdown before May Ling’s marriage is over, and you want to wish another one on her.”

  “No, we’ll be married in the church—with no fuss and no toll on Eloise.”

  “And who will marry us?”

  “I’m not the only Unitarian minister. Are you saying you’ll do it, you’ll marry me?”

  “I suppose so. That’s not very romantic, is it, Philip? But I hate sleeping alone, and when I wake up in the middle of the night and reach out and touch you, I feel safe and I can sleep again. We’ll wait until the big wedding is over—but don’t tell anyone, especially Eloise. Then we’ll do it quietly and slip away somewhere for our honeymoon.”

  “Thank you,” he whispered. “God bless you, Barbara.”

  “And do you suppose that church you carry around inside of you will allow us to sleep together tonight?”

  “I think it could be arranged.”

  EARLY IN THE MORNING five days after Barbara’s discussion with Philip, Eloise telephoned, a note of panic in her voice. “Barbara,” she said, “what are you doing today?”

  “What I do every day, working on this damn book.”

  “I need you. I am going out of my mind.”

  “Ellie, calm down. What is happening?”

  “The wedding. Please come down today.”

  “We have two weeks before the wedding, and I must work.”

  “Why must you work?” Eloise asked plaintively. “You don’t have a boss. Your pay won’t be docked—and it’s not only the wedding, which would be enough, but Freddie.”

  “What’s happened to Freddie?”

  “I can’t talk about it over the phone. Please.”

  “All right, Ellie. I’ll drive down. I don’t know why, but I will.”

  Actually, Barbara was not displeased. It was a beautiful summer day, cool and sunny, and the wind from the Pacific was sweeping gently over the City. Barbara had been sitting at her typewriter for an hour, writing nothing and trying to decide whether a walk on the Embarcadero might refresh her mind or at least relieve the guilt she felt whenever she stayed indoors on a day like this. The memoir she was writing was the most difficult task she had ever attempted, heartbreaking when she wrote of the dead, puzzling and embarrassing when she turned to herself, and facing her with knife-edge decisions when she wrote of the living. She had started out to tell everything, and having no reservations in talking about sex, she did not hold back in the first hundred pages. Her publisher read the pages and decided that while sex usually did not hurt sales, she should remember that she was an icon. To this, she replied furiously that she was not an icon and that she had never sought to be one and that she had no intentions of being one; nevertheless, his warning gave her pause and made the work even more difficult. She’d been rereading the page she had written the night before:

  I don’t brood about death or fear it, but the deaths of the men I have loved were so senseless, so futile. I tell myself that if Marcel had died fighting for the Spanish Republic, I might have felt different. But he was a newspaperman; he took no sides, except the side of love and life and beauty. He was as gentle as Bernie was hard and intractable—

  She stopped there and fiercely crossed out the sentences that followed, and then she crossed out the words hard and intractable. That was not Bernie. Why was it so difficult to explain a man she had married and taken to her bed and to her heart? Bernie was not hard, he was gentle as a lamb; yet his profession was war. He had fought in Spain, in Africa during World War II, in Europe; and then when war broke out in Israel in 1948, he had taken a flight of C54s to Czechoslovakia and bought arms and died in Israel. It was death that she could not forgive—and that made no sense…

  Let it wait, she said to herself. I’ll think about it, and then—who knows—then I may begin to understand. It’s just too hard to write about people you loved, easier to write about strangers.

  The drive to Highgate would give her time to think. She had called Eloise and told her that she w
ould be there in an hour and would stay for lunch but not for dinner and not overnight.

  A distraught Eloise was waiting at the parking lot when Barbara pulled in. She embraced Barbara and led her to a table on the terrace, where coffee and sandwiches were set out.

  “You must be starved,” Eloise said. “You never eat breakfast. You should. It’s the most important meal of the day.”

  “Ellie, did you drag me out here to lecture me on nutrition?”

  “Oh no, no. I’m in trouble, Barbara, and Adam won’t listen to any of it. Sally is his sister, so you’d think he’d show some interest in it, but no. He has this damn winery”—her use of the word damn was an indication of her distress—”and nothing else matters. When I mention Freddie, he simply turns off.”

  “Let’s leave Freddie for later and talk about the wedding.”

  “Very well—and I don’t blame Adam. Do you know what Sally has done? She has invited over four hundred guests, and that doesn’t include Candido and his family, and Cathrena and her family, and three of the process supervisors and their kids—and, good heavens, where am I to put four hundred and fifty people?”

  “You ordered a tent?”

  “There are no tents big enough.”

  “Then use two large pavilions open at the ends. Put them together.”

  “The worst is yet to come. Sally forgot about the growers in the Valley. All right, they’re not overnighters, but we have at least sixty people whom we must lodge. Where can I put them? I can’t scatter them around in the villages.”

  “Why not?” Barbara asked. “Take Saint Helena and Rutherford and Oakville and Yountville and Napa—all within short driving distance. Reserve the rooms. We’ll make maps for each group. I’ll help you.”

  “Oh, Barbara, would you? I’d be so grateful. But we’re up to seventeen thousand dollars already—everything’s so expensive.”

  “Do you mean to tell me that you and Adam are paying for this?”

  “Well, Sally says she can’t afford—”

  “Oh, come off that, Ellie. Joe has a good practice, and they do have money. What about Harry?”

  “He offered to pay for everything, but I’d die first.”

  “Yes, I suppose you would.” Then she added, “I can take half of it.”

  “Never!” Eloise declared.

  “Then I’ll speak to Sally. It’s her daughter. As a matter of fact, I’ll talk to Joe.”

  “Joe doesn’t live in this world.”

  “Then I’ll drag him back into it. He is my brother,” Barbara said.

  “And there’s no way we can cook for such a mob, so I made a deal with a caterer. Twenty-five dollars a plate—without wine. Sally says she wants our best Cabernet, and she wants to buy ten cases of white wine. Adam hit the ceiling. He was already grumbling about giving away his best red. You know how he is.”

  “I do. I also remember the sweet boy you married.”

  “He grew up,” Eloise said ruefully. “Oh, sometimes I hate this place and the whole ideology of wine. We’re already over seventeen thousand without the wine.”

  “Darling, we’ll work it out. I have more money than I know what to do with, and Joe is my brother and May Ling is my niece, and let me whisper something else to you: There’ll be another wedding—oh, a month or two from now, and it won’t cost twenty cents.”

  “Barbara, tell me! Philip?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he proposed it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t just keep saying ‘yes.’ How old is he?”

  “Seventy-three.”

  “I mean, how did it happen? Why don’t you just live together?”

  “He regards sexual intercourse as a sacrament. Oh, don’t ask me to explain, Ellie. I’m old and lonely. He’s old and lonely. And we both live in a world that’s damn strange.”

  “And where will you be married?”

  “In his church. Just a simple ceremony with a few members of the family.”

  “And we’ll have a big party here,” Eloise said cheerfully.

  “Have you lost your mind? It will be at least a year before you recover from this one. No, we’ll go away. He’s lived like a monk and hasn’t gone anywhere. I think we’ll go to England and perhaps to France.”

  “And to Australia?”

  “Australia? Why Australia?”

  “Barbara, you’re wonderful. And thank you. If it weren’t for Freddie, I could relax a bit.”

  “Yes. What’s the problem with Freddie?”

  “He’s in love.”

  “But Freddie’s always in love with someone.”

  “Yes—but this time he wants to get married. He sounded me out yesterday. ‘Mother,’ he said, ‘how would you feel if I married a black woman?’”

  This time Barbara had to catch her breath. “Not the lady from the Fairmont?”

  “How do you know about that?”

  “I hear things.”

  “She’s a model; according to Freddie, the highest-priced model in the San Francisco area. He showed me a picture of her in a magazine—in Vogue. Very good-looking and six feet tall—can you imagine? I’m five-foot-three.”

  “And how did you react when he told you that?” Barbara asked.

  “I didn’t react. I just stared at him. He said, ‘Mother, are you all right?’ I wasn’t all right. I told him to let me think about it.”

  “And what have you thought?”

  “I telephoned you and asked you to come out here.”

  “Were you shocked?”

  “Suppose Sam came home and told you he was going to marry a black woman?”

  Barbara shrugged. “I don’t know. I suppose I’d be a little concerned at first. But it would depend on the woman. Can you deal with it, Ellie?”

  “I don’t know. I never believed I was prejudiced. Do you think I’m a racist, Barbara?”

  “No more than I am, and I don’t think I am. Anyway, you know Freddie.”

  “I thought I did,” Eloise said hopelessly. “This time I think he’s serious.”

  “And if he is, would it be so terrible?”

  “I don’t know. Joshua is dead. I’ve been thinking about him and that terrible Vietnam War. I shed some tears last night. Freddie’s the only one left, he’s all we have. For God’s sake, Barbara, tell me what I should feel, because I don’t know.”

  “Ellie—Ellie, darling, how can I tell you what you should feel? If we go by Freddie’s record, he won’t marry this woman, but suppose he does? Julian Huxley said that the world’s future lies in miscegenation, or maybe the world’s hope. It can be either frightening or exciting. I have lived by Eleanor Roosevelt’s maxim that it’s better to light just one little candle than to sit and curse the dark. I don’t think that what we do in this little corner of the earth matters very much—but just think of the wedding: May Ling, who is part Chinese and part Wasp and part Italian, marrying Harry, who is Jewish. A hundred years ago this would have been unthinkable, or it would have spurred the vigilantes into action. Now it’s a blessing. In those hundred years a gang of roughneck Irish and Jews and Italians have built us the most wonderful and beautiful city on the face of the earth. The point is that anything is possible if we have the courage to make it possible.”

  Eloise wiped away her tears. “I’m doing it again. If only I were like you, Barbara.”

  “You are. We’re as close as two people can be. What has Adam said to this?”

  “I haven’t told him yet. Freddie wants to bring her to the wedding.”

  “Good. We’ll have at least a dozen other black people. Let me talk to Adam.”

  Suddenly Eloise’s face brightened. “Barbara, I have a wonderful idea.” She paused and regarded Barbara thoughtfully. “You are going to marry Philip?”

  “Yes—it would seem so. He asked, ‘Will you,’ and I answered, ‘I will.’ I always thought that age would take care of desire, but it doesn’t, and I have no talent for celibacy.”

  “Now listen,
Barbara—listen to me and don’t say a word until I have finished. Here we are talking about May Ling’s wedding, and the money we’re going to spend and all the difficulties we’re facing, and all the good people we never see except when there’s a wedding or a funeral—”

  “No!” Barbara exclaimed. “I know what you’re getting at. No. Absolutely not.”

  “Barbara! Will you please let me finish, and think about it? The people are the same. You told me Philip has practically no family, and all your ideas about the two pavilions give us the space we need, and it would make me the happiest woman in the world, and why should you be married in some somber church when we could do both weddings here, since all the preparations have to be made—and, oh, it would make me so happy—so why not?”

  “No, no, my dear. I don’t even know—I mean, I’m not entirely sure that I want to marry Philip.”

  “But you said—”

  Barbara sighed. “Yes, I said—but, Ellie, it’s not even two months since I met Philip. I want to know him better. You don’t rush into things at my age, and I’ve been married twice before, and this will be May Ling’s day, as it should be.”

  “Then you don’t know May Ling. It would make her so happy—believe me. She loves you, and everyone you would want to invite to a wedding will be there, and I can’t imagine anything more delightful, and if your mother were alive—Barbara, your mother was the closest thing I ever had to a real mother—Barbara, please, please consider it. Think about it. You don’t have to decide this minute.”

  “I would have to talk to Philip. It would mean more guests, at least a few from Philip’s church.”

  “Does that mean you’ll agree?”

  “No, Ellie. It means I’ll talk to Philip.”

  “I do hope he agrees.”

  Eloise rose and embraced Barbara, who said she had to get back to the City but would like a word with Freddie before she left. Eloise said he was in his office, and she walked there with Barbara.

  “I. would prefer you didn’t mention our talk about Judith Hope,” Eloise said. “He spoke to me in confidence, but I keep nothing from you, Barbara.”

  “Of course not,” Barbara agreed.

  FREDDIE WELCOMED HER WITH A BEAR HUG. “Now, what on earth are you doing here at Highgate? What a good surprise!”