* * *
By September the leaves began to change and the nights became cool. Ruth would be leaving Zuñi soon. It was during this time that she received a letter from Edward that contained a verse he’d written for her:
Through the dry glitter of the desert sea
And sharpness of the mesa keep the flowing
Of your spirit, in many branching ways,
Be running mirrors to the colored maze,
Not pool enchanted nor a water slowing.
She copied it out and tacked the copy onto the wall next to her bed. She was starting to feel less apprehensive about returning to New York.
One afternoon she walked out, past the gardens where melons were ripening on the vine, past the peach orchards where the full fruit was hanging in clusters. Coming toward her were groups of men, carrying their scythes up against their shoulders, their work done for the day. In the distance she could see the yellowish acres of wheat fields outlined by a darkening sky.
As Ruth neared the fields, she caught the smell of freshly cut wheat and damp earth. A roll of thunder echoed from above. Ruth held her face up and let the rain splash over her, cool and cleansing. She reached up her arms, spread them, opening herself to life.
13
HER HEAD WAS SPINNING
At present my soul won’t stop. It’s discovered perpetual motion in a circle.
—MARGARET MEAD
August 1924
A pot of water was boiling wildly on the stovetop. Margaret stood over it, feeling the steam rising around her face. Taking a spoon, she put a tomato on it, and lowered it into the water. When she lifted the tomato out, its loose and crinkled skin fell off. It had been Grandma who’d taught her this trick for peeling tomatoes.
She was thinking about what she wanted to say to Ruth.
Ruth was still on the mesa, not due to return to New York for a few weeks. It seemed like she’d been gone forever.
The letter was difficult to write. She’d been putting it off for days. Later that night she started.
I don’t like to think of you there all alone—tho in many ways I suppose it will be less of a conversational strain at least. I wish we could go on a field trip together—only in my present state I’d talk you insane. I don’t seem to be able to stop talking any more than I can stop thinking.
Margaret continued, “At present my soul won’t stop. It’s discovered perpetual motion in a circle.”
The spinning in her head wasn’t unpleasant. In fact she was thoroughly enjoying the sensation. She was brimful of energy with no idea what to do with it. She told Ruth that she had “a list in her pocketbook of stories to tell her,” but they were “either too detailed or depended too much on intonation to be trusted to paper.”
There was one story, however, that she had no plans to divulge. That story was hers alone to savor.
Margaret was just beginning to understand that for her, some people could be as intoxicating as that first taste of a fine wine.
* * *
It was one of those events that one plays out in one’s head, over and over.
It had happened early in August, when Margaret had gone to the University of Toronto to attend the ninety-fourth annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
She’d arrived for the opening ceremonies on a hot and humid morning, stepping into the dank foyer of a nineteenth-century behemoth known on campus as the Anatomy Building. At the far end of the hallway she saw a line of people passing through the open doors of an auditorium. Her heels clicked as she crossed the marble floor.
It was her first experience on her own as a professional, presenting her work to a formidable group of academics, a coming-out before the scholars who would one day be her colleagues. They were, for the most part, at least two decades older than she, and soon she would be standing before them—these three dozen men and two women—delivering her paper, full of her ideas. She wasn’t intimidated, in fact she wasn’t even nervous. Dadda had made sure she had mastered the art of public speaking.
She was eager to see, with her own eyes, the men who were considered the most renowned anthropologists in the world: A. C. Haddon, an expert on the cultures of Melanesia and the author of Head-hunters: Black, White and Brown; and Charles Seligman, the Africa scholar, who used his knowledge of physiology to identify the Bushmen, Pygmies, Negroids, and Hamites, the four distinct races that inhabited the African continent.
She sat near the back of the auditorium so she could watch people enter. Many seemed to be old friends, calling out greetings to one another, clasping hands, embracing. She opened the program, scanning to see who was scheduled to speak over the next three days. Her eye caught “Rank in Polynesia,” the paper she was going to deliver, and alongside it her name: Margaret Mead.
She was thrilled.
Suddenly the sound of a finger tapping on a live microphone drew her attention to the stage. Then a voice filled the room, calling notice to itself with an effortless command. The sound of the voice was deep, melodious and warm.
Margaret strained to see the speaker.
On the stage stood a dark-haired man dressed in a rumpled tweed jacket. He was pacing the floor as he talked, welcoming his “esteemed colleagues from across the Atlantic and south of the border to his adoptive country, the Dominion of Canada.” He was gesticulating as he spoke, and his face, from what she could see, was animated.
This must be Edward Sapir—Ruth’s Edward Sapir.
Flashes of the hours spent sitting in the seminar room with Ruth, telling each other “stories about people the other had never met, wondering and speculating why they had done or felt or thought what they seemed to have,” all came back in a rush. And the individual upon whom Ruth had conferred a near mystical aura was this man, Edward Sapir, once the wunderkind of the New York City school system, the linguist who could speak over thirty-five languages and the chief of anthropology for all of Canada.
Ruth had even gone further, describing Sapir as a truly masculine man who wrote verse. A rogue poet.
Rising up in her seat, straightening her spectacles to get a better view, Margaret decided that he was even more attractive than Ruth had let on. And the timber of his voice was spellbinding.
No wonder people said Edward Sapir would be the man to succeed Dr. Boas.
It seemed all too soon when Sapir completed his introductions and turned the podium over to A. C. Haddon.
Haddon’s paper was followed by three solid hours of mostly pedantic lectures on such subjects as “Diffusion as a Criteria of Age” and “An Analysis of the Ceremony of the First Salmon on the Pacific Coast.” When an intermission was finally called, Margaret gratefully followed the crowd out of the auditorium and into the foyer.
People were milling about, chatting. Margaret met the unconventional Erna Gunther, who had made an avant-garde “contract marriage” with Leslie Spier and T. F. McIlwraith, who talked about his work reconstructing the old ceremonies of the Bella Bella. And Diamond Jenness, a New Zealander, who was every bit the maverick as his name implied, back from another expedition to the Arctic in which half the crew he had traveled with had perished in an ice-locked ship.
More and more, it was sinking in that each one of these anthropologists had a “people.” Margaret, too, wanted to have a people on whom she could base her own intellectual life.
Then she spotted Goldie—the infamous Alexander Goldenweiser—a brilliant but risqué Jewish intellectual, another one of Dr. Boas’s disciples, who had made a study of psychological factors common among tribal cultures. In spite of his “great big head and slight body,” he was known to be quite the lady’s man. There was even talk that he’d had an affair with one of his Iroquois informants.
Goldie was standing with a group of men; one of them was Edward Sapir.
Margaret moved closer.
“Your tales,” a man with a French accent was saying, “contain words that are unreadable by the old schoolmarms. Daring, smutty word
s.”
Sapir stuck his hands in his trousers. “You mean the words that they themselves used?”
“You know what I mean. Those items should have been removed.”
“He’s too candid to think of that,” said Goldie.
“Nor do I agree with the principle of censorship,” said Sapir.
“The two publications were denounced in Parliament by the members,” said the man, who Margaret realized was Marius Barbeau, a French Canadian from Ottawa. “Later we heard that the king had given instructions to burn the editions.”
“Actually,” Sapir said laughing, “I’ve heard somehow they’re still on the shelves.”
At the luncheon Margaret made sure to sit at the same table with Goldie and Sapir. These two, like everyone else it seemed, were arguing over the merits of Freud’s theories as compared to Jung’s.
“Freud,” Margaret heard Edward Sapir say, “is more interested in typical mechanisms of personality formation than in types.”
“I tend to concur with Freud,” said Goldie. “The individual is malleable.”
“Malleable or not,” said Sapir, “Jung proposes there are fundamental types over and above the mechanisms.”
Goldie snorted.
Before he could elaborate, Margaret interrupted. “Not all people under the same circumstances will develop in the same way.”
Sapir looked at her, his eyes happily dancing at the unexpected challenge. He turned back to Goldie. “If you doubt the usefulness of the classifications, consider what Seligman has to say.” He then began to explain that Charles Seligman, that great dean of African ethnology, had suggested that Jung’s typologies of extrovert and introvert could even be applied to tribal societies.
“The extrovert is greedy for experience,” Sapir continued. “He tends to become greatly influenced by slight or fleeting stimuli. The extrovert is always asking, ‘Where did he get it?’ The introvert wonders, ‘What will he do with it?’”
Margaret thought she saw Sapir glance in her direction, but then she really wasn’t sure if that was just something she’d imagined.
* * *
The next afternoon, as the session was ending for the day, Margaret looked about for Sapir and saw him in the center of a group that included Goldie, Diamond Jenness, and several others.
She noticed he had a particular way of standing with his head cocked, his hands shoved in the pockets of his trousers, his legs spread, and his body tilted slightly backward. His jacket, once a presumably stylish cut, was now so frayed that the inside lining, torn and sagging, stuck out below the hemline.
Once again they were all talking about their fieldwork. McIlwraith had a story to tell about the Bella Bella, Buxton about the Navaho. Then Diamond Jenness, referring to his Eskimos as the “Twilight People,” told a story about living among the Copper Inuit for a year.
The story involved an old woman who believed that Diamond, who had brought the remains of a human skull back to his tent, was responsible for causing a curse to descend on the village.
“She’d been sewing in her tent, she told me, when she saw my tent, a few paces away, begin to shake violently.” “She ran in fear from what was happening.”
He paused. They all waited.
“I’m a slow thinker. It never occurred to me she thought a ghost was in there. But her husband came to my rescue. ‘Nail a lid on the box,’ he said, giving me a sly wink behind her back. ‘That will prevent it from doing us any harm.’”
“Like I’ve always said,” Goldie said, “we all get the tribe we deserve.”
Everyone laughed but Margaret, once again aware that she was the only one who had not experienced what Goldie was talking about. “Everyone has a field of his own,” she thought, “each has a people to whom he can refer. Everyone but me.”
As she turned away, she suddenly felt a hand touch her upper arm. Looking up she found herself face-to-face with Edward Sapir. “Oh,” she said, feeling herself being gently guided away.
“I always enjoy spending time with Goldie,” he said. “I like him tremendously, in spite of my periodic disgruntlements with him.” Then, in an offhand manner, “What do you hear from our mutual friend, Mrs. Benedict?”
“Ruth?” She was surprised that Sapir knew about their friendship. “She’s living in a house with Bunny Bunzel. Working eleven hours a day,” said Margaret.
“A Puritan on the mesa,” he said. “And what about you? Are you going to the Southwest, too?”
“No,” she said, “certainly not. I intend to go someplace that hasn’t been overrun by Americans. And anthropologists.”
They were walking now, heading back to the auditorium for the day’s final session.
“Be sure to give my regards to Mrs. Benedict,” he said. “No doubt your letters will reach her before mine do.” Then he stopped, for the first time looking directly into her eyes. “Have you ever thought how truly unfair it all is?”
“How unfair what is?”
“Here we are, dutifully waiting for another paper to be read to us, and there is Mrs. Benedict, in the thick of it, in Zuñi.” His eyes, quite expressive, seemed to smile. “I’m sure she’s enjoying herself hugely.”
“Ruth tells me that you write serious verse,” said Margaret.
“Is that what she said?”
He turned to go, then stopped and turned back. “I suppose she thinks I’m one of those dainty men who write poetry?” When Margaret didn’t answer he added, “Lately my muse seems to have taken a holiday.”
“Not a long one, one hopes,” said Margaret.
“Who ever knows,” he said, making a slight bow and walking away.
Watching him go, Margaret had much to ponder. Ruth had filled her mind with so many stories. She knew that he not only wrote verse, but also composed his own piano concertos. She knew that his wife had died, just a few months earlier. No wonder his muse had taken a holiday.
Margaret was a subscriber—as were others in her circle—to the Jungian theory that a muse or “anima” existed within the unconscious of every man. There were times, during periods of great difficulty, or even for no apparent reason, that this anima was not accessible. After a long dry spell a man was only able to reawaken his inner anima when he recognized her in the external world, personified by a flesh-and-blood woman. Perhaps Sapir needed such a woman.
* * *
The hotel room was stifling and it wasn’t just the lack of cross-ventilation. Margaret felt almost breathless. The feeling of being with him still lingered. He had constellated something within her.
She believed that just as a man possessed an anima within his unconscious, so did a woman possess an animus, or male figure within hers. And when the male side of a woman’s nature was activated, it pushed her to achieve something in the outer world, something of meaning, something of worth.
This, above all, was what Margaret wanted for herself. She had, for a long time, been waiting for the maleness inside her to be given life. Somehow she felt that when it was, her animus would propel her to greatness.
She took off her dress and hung it in the closet. Wearing only a slip, she stood in front of the oval mirror that hung over the bureau. She looked at her reflection. Her arms were thin, her chest nearly flat. Her hair was cut in a short bob with unruly waves sticking out every-which-way.
Tomorrow she was going to read her paper to the professors.
Edward Sapir would be in the audience.
She pulled her slip over her head and, naked, climbed into bed.
She could almost hear his voice. It was almost as if he was there in the room with her. She lay on her back, imagining that he was next to her.
Sex with a man was not something Margaret had ever enjoyed. Although he’d tried, Luther had not aroused any real excitement in her. Often when they were lying awake at night in their bedroom, she in one of the single beds, he ten feet away in the other, she wondered if it was possible for her to ever be truly intimate with a man.
In fact, s
he’d had crushes on girls that had engendered more excitement than Luther ever had. For the most part these crushes had been fleeting and, in an era in which same-sex colleges were the rule, were not considered abnormal.
There had been one flirtation, while in college and before she married, that was different. At the end of her first year, Margaret had met a physics major named Lee Newton, the same Lee who had gone “hysterically blind” in the days before Marie Bloomfield killed herself. Margaret and Lee had created a fantasy life together based on their shared love of Shakespearean comedies like As You Like it, in which two of the female heroines hide their gender by dressing in male clothing. In their correspondence, Lee had assumed a character named Peter, while Margaret called herself Euphemia. Some of these letters were passionate.
For nearly a year, Margaret and Lee played out their flirtation in secret. While other coeds lingered with their beaus under an arbor at the center of the Barnard quad, Margaret and Lee had gone there as well, pinning notes for one another on a tree trunk. One of Lee’s notes said:
The warmest glow just raced through me when I found your letter on the “tree” this morning. I seized it so hungrily that the 11-year old William inquired if I was a “feller.” He couldn’t understand about “a little wifelet.”
Margaret had been fiercely private about her attraction to Lee, aware that any hint that she might be romantically involved with another girl would be ruinous for her future.
In comparison to the fantasies that Lee had aroused, her experience with Luther seemed tepid. She loved him and she couldn’t imagine life without him, so what was wrong?
Perhaps it was the pull of these other urges, tamped down and suppressed, that stopped her from being attracted to Luther. She wished she knew.
She rolled over on her side and wrapped her legs around a pillow. Then she thought about the things Ruth had said about Sapir. It was obvious that Ruth was in love with him. Her “vividly relayed conversations” had become a part of Margaret’s thinking “long before she’d set eyes on him.” All that talk, perversely, made Margaret want him, too.
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