by Philip Wylie
She had told Paula the scandalous news just to shake Paula from her depression. It was, so to speak, Berthene’s humble and humbling contribution to morale.
New tears came into Paula’s eyes but they were not tears of defeat. If that old horse of God can change so much, Paula thought, then women are really wonderful. All women!
The atmosphere at home seemed different after that. Edwinna, on a stepladder, was singing carols to a bunch of the kids while she tacked more branches from the Caribbean pines on the beams overhead. The children joined the choruses in their woodwind voices.
Upstairs, Paula found Kate West mending doll clothes and humming with the singers below, while her new-washed black hair dried on her bare back.
Paula hugged her affectionately, fingered the long locks, and said, “I’ll comb it for you, child.”
“It is kind of hard to do yourself. Paula, you look all bright!”
“It’s Christmas,” Paula answered as she hung up her coat. “The old Yule spirit has just got to me!”
Kate’s pretty face lighted up. “Then I guess everybody will feel Christmasy! I’m so glad!”
Paula stayed in the closet for a moment to overcome an inexplicable sense of joyousness, of strength restored and command regained, which seemed, somehow, out of proportion to reality. Then, almost as if to punish both of them for unwarranted happiness, she took a heavy comb and attacked the young girl’s black hair with hurtful energy. But Kate didn’t appear to mind; she kept on smiling and singing the carols, softly.
When Christmas was over, the household settled down to what Edwinna called
“grimy-scrimy grin-and-bear-it.” The winter was an unusually cold one, with an excessive amount of rain. Three of the quota children were in bed at once with measles.
In downtown Miami, smallpox broke out. The entire population was vaccinated. Edwinna got the flu and a bronchial complication which kept her in bed with a fever for many days. These same infections, and others, appeared in the colored colony, where Hester’s daughters and her female grandchildren camped out, with other families.
And, of course, there were no doctors to attend them.
As Edwinna said, one night when her temperature was high arid her head was light, “According to the regulations, I’ve figured out that you couldn’t call a doctor even if you broke both legs. ‘Splints—and take her to the hospital,’ for that. If you were giving birth to a child at the same time—which anybody would break both legs to do—you probably would still get no doctor, unless it turned out to be a breech presentation. If you also had double pneumonia—or thought you did—you would be ‘entitled to a prescription for penicillin.’ But no doctor. If, in addition to pneumonia childbirth and double fracture, you had an infected blister from hoeing with the Farm Crews in the potato fields—as I have been doing—you could get medical attention for the blister! ‘It is vital that our land girls be kept in good physical condition’—so infected blisters probably are on the list of ailments entitling you at least to a nurse’s squint!”
Paula agreed it was almost that difficult.
“Mother,” said Edwinna, later that night, “did you ever know I detested you when I was a little girl? And thought you were ridiculous and hateful when I went to boarding school? And decided, in college, to ignore you as much as possible the rest of my life?”
Paula began mending stockings. “I knew you always felt—hostile—to me.”
“Did you ever know you felt hostile to me?”
Paula flushed. “I don’t believe I did, dear. Why don’t you rest? You’re pretty feverish.”
Edwinna laughed, but not nastily. “It’s like three Martinis. Makes you babble.
You always were hostile—”
Paula found herself at once annoyed and trying hard to seem anything but annoyed. “You were an extremely difficult kid to raise, Edwinna. Perverse and stubborn and—destructive. Wanton.”
“Did you ever think you might have been jealous of me?”
“Jealous?” Paula murmured. “Of course not! What a crazy idea!”
“You were, though. I can remember, even when I was little and Daddy used to play with me—take me horseback on his shoulders—you’d get a look. And I’d know you didn’t approve. I’d—”
The older woman frowned. “You shouldn’t carry into maturity a lot of feelings you had in your childhood, Edwinna. Bill spoiled you, right from the start!”
“Daddy was crazy about me,” Edwinna answered. “And you knew it. He didn’t
‘give me up’—the way you did—until I was grown and married and he didn’t like my second husband, or anything about me, any more.”
“Bill never ‘gave you up,’” Paula said quietly. “Nor I. We both—simply never figured you out—”
“Or else—yourself. I don’t think”—her tone was detached, musing—“you were jealous of the attention I got. What I think you didn’t like was the fact that, when I was very small, I’d do anything for Dad. And dispute you. I’m not trying to rankle you, Mum.
Or pick a fight. Just to think out loud. You know, darling, you have got a grade A managerial complex. It always irritated you when I wasn’t being managed to suit your ideas of child rearing. What I suspect you were jealous about was Bill’s authority.
Anything in that, do you think?”
“I hope not,” Paula answered. “It would mean I was a pretty poor sort of parent.”
“We all are,” Edwinna replied. “Why don’t we admit it? I got thinking about these things when I was watching Alicia try to make time with the older girls yesterday. There she was, four years old, and a greedy, stuckup little bitch, if I ever saw one. And my fault
—and why is that? No father? Fatherless girls aren’t all so touchy. Do you know what I realized?”
“What you ought to realize is that you should rest.” Paula walked from the divan, which was made up as a bed, to the fireplace. She put on a log. The living room was the warmest room in the house, so Edwinna had been moved there.
Now she ignored the admonition to rest. “What I realized was that all parents are frustrated all their lives in umpteen ways. They never really know what they are, or think, or feel, or should become. They just know the system is cockeyed in relation to their inner urges. And so they try to raise kids in such a way that the kids will adapt better than they did to a system they really have no faith in or respect for.”
“Isn’t that a shade cynical, Edwinna?”
“In view of what’s happened to us, how can anybody say that a dim attitude toward our past is cynical? We’ve got a tigerish yen for power. All of us. Maybe women especially, because they’ve been so limited for so long. Anything that clips our little prerogatives is un” bearable. Dad could command me, and you couldn’t, when I was a nipper. You hated that. I hated you for hating that. So I married a gentle guy, thinking it would be fun to pull his wires. But it was too easy; and besides, whenever I pulled too hard, he got drunk. So then I married a so-called he-man and he didn’t have any wires to pull. I tried pushing and when I pushed he just socked me. That was very no-good.
Meantime, Alicia had got into the act. So I concentrated all my beat-up desire to run the show on her. In addition, I felt stuck with her. It’s damned hard to be the bride of a jerk who thinks a woman is something to go whistling down cold hills in ski pants with, when you’re due in twenty minutes to sterilize the next bottle and mix the formula. Never take a baby on a honeymoon. People should be drilled in that.” Edwinna chuckled. “Well, Alicia’s an emotional orphan—the way I was finally. My fault. I was jealous of her. I loathed her sometimes. I hated the cinch her two popsies had, making her coo and giggle.
They got all the laughs and I got the diaper end. The whole psychology is loused up-was.
And I’ve only begun to see the answers. We should have had a lot more love.”
Paula didn’t reply. Soon a reply was unnecessary: Edwinna was sleeping and the firelight revealed that sweat had broken out on her
forehead. In the morning she was better.
During that winter and in the ensuing spring, the “crazes” commenced.
The world’s women, inadequately housed, hungry, in many regions starving, working long hours at jobs to which only war veterans were accustomed, nevertheless found the energy and the leisure to begin to seek entertainment.
Where electric power was sufficiently restored, movies had huge audiences.
Romantic films were revived. Rudolph Valentino became more of a household name in that era than he had been during his lifetime. Discussions of the “romantic approach,” the
“technique,” the “appeal” and the putative erotic habits of male movie stars were soon conducted at a level of candor that would have horrified nine-tenths of the ladies who now most ardently took part in them. With the need for “modesty” absent they showed a frankness about their sex sensations and fantasies that Western men, under similar circumstances, probably would have been incapable of displaying.
“Bees” and “socials” for the purpose of companionship while useful work was accomplished became a fad. Women foregathered, as in the time of their great-grandmothers, to quilt, sew, mend, knit, make clothes, weave, cook, and perform other tasks which could be enjoined communally.
Just after New Year’s, a song writer named Margaret McKee produced the first post-Disappearance hit. Called “Remember Them,” it had a rhythm and a sentimentality that set America singing and sighing at the same time. With that song, dancing was revived. Some women had always danced together and enjoyed it. Now bands were organized, parties were given, and women of all sorts and ages began to learn dance steps.
Edwinna, Kate and Paula took avidly to the vogue. At night, although they were always tired, they set the phonograph going and, while the old records tortured them with nostalgia, they practiced tangos, rumbas and fox trots. They felt less tired for the fun; and eventually Paula, a natural “leader,” grew so skillful that she and Kate gave exhibitions for other dance enthusiasts.
“Bar parties” became a rage at about the same time. Women who could prove they had contributed their stint to the common weal pooled their drink tickets and entertained in reopened cocktail lounges. Since the women were lawfully restricted to a maximum of three drinks each, these festivities provided a good deal of relaxation without occasioning much drunkenness. But a special fad developed in the bars and lounges, one supposedly originated by Midwesterners. In each cocktail room appeared a life-size wax or plaster figure of a man, the image of a real person, such as a movie star, or a mere idealization. These “men” sat as “hosts” in the drinking places, in cowboy costumes, dinner jackets or even swimming trunks. They were toasted by their loyal women “guests,” each of whom felt a mirthful (or sorrowful, or sardonic) “attachment”
for the “man” at “whose” bar she whiled away an occasional evening. The bars, not surprisingly, took their names from the images: Gerry Cooper’s, Clark Gable’s, Cowboy Dave’s.
Another craze was the wearing of a large medallion containing the photograph of a husband, a sweetheart, a lover. That fad embraced at first pictures only of real persons associated with the women who wore the medallions. But it changed to the wearing of pictures of handsomer, if unknown, gentlemen. Amongst girls of high-school age it became a fashion to adorn the pictures with the large, crimson stains of lipstick kisses.
“Pants parties” were still another fad. For such occasions, women drew lots and half appeared, on the night of the party, dressed as elegantly and accurately as possible in men’s clothes. The temporary transvestites provoked mirth and relish by aping and caricaturing the behavior of the vanished males. They flirted clownishly, courted grotesquely and chased genuine girls, screaming, through the diverted onlookers. It was fun. And sometimes these impersonations were good enough to make hearts sick—or to make them skip beats.
“Crushes” became, expectably, a pattern of behavior that gained social acceptance. Women found it socially permissible to pair off, exchange infatuated looks, share secret laughter, accompany each other everywhere, hold hands and act generally like doting schoolgirls. A song called “She’s My Crush” in turn became the most popular tune of that benighted spring.
In the first issue of the Journal-Companion, a joint publishing effort of the staffs of five women’s magazines and a new triumph of “Recovery,” three noted women psychiatrists collaborated on an article dealing with the subject of “crushes.” One favored the practice as an “obviously necessary and currently harmless emotional outlet”; one seemed to believe it was a matter for individual discretion; and the third opposed it as
“inherently homosexual and regressive.”
The magazine, printed without advertising in an edition of a million copies, was read until everyone had been shredded. It contained fifty pages of counsel on what to do, how to do it, where aid was needed for the national program, how to apply and what was required of drafted workers. Women, accustomed to guidance in such a form, found the appearance of the first issue of that magazine among the most reassuring events of the period.
The second issue was even more heartening. It featured a discussion of parthenogenesis—the development of a viable fetus from an artificially fertilized egg.
“There is reason to hope,” the article began, “that the problem of artificial reproduction, like that of artificial insemination, may eventually be solved in the case of human beings, so that the species will not die out and women may again bear children.
There is even some reason to believe that ways may be found to assure offspring of both sexes. Female frogs and even rabbits have for years been produced by artificial stimulation of ova. Though the human problem is more complex, the existing facts and experiments make its solution expectable.
“Russian biologists have apparently already made some remarkable advances in the field. The day may not be far off when, by surgical means, any normal, healthy woman may have a pregnancy ‘planted’ within her. The day may not be much farther off when such pregnancies will produce boy babies! So, however tragic and terrifying the situation of today’s woman may be, it is not necessarily shadowed with that blackest prospect of all-the slow, certain extermination of humanity. A female world may be the human world for some while; but a world there will doubtless be!”
A national glow followed that summation of what had thitherto been no more than speculation, scattered fact and rumors in the newspapers and on the radio. Reflective women had long since observed that the greatest hazard of the period was spiritual: the absolute despair accompanying the idea that, without males, life had lost its purpose.
Indeed, thousands of women, arguing What’s the use of anything? had turned even from good homes, from lofty precepts and restrained habits, to every sort of violence, viciousness and evil. But now the prospect held out hope. Self-sacrifice was necessary; perhaps one human generation would be “lost.” Yet the generation beyond might witness the restoration of the two sexes, wherefore the recreation of humanity and the return of life’s purpose. The deepest instinct of mankind, of the host of other animals, the instinct to preserve its own species at whatever cost, was given fresh outlet and expression.
Millions of women were exalted by the thought that they might yet bear offspring, even sons, though denied husbands.
Some took a special view of the possibility, pointing out that not only would women perhaps be self-sufficient without men but that they might create mankind without men, thus reversing the story of Eve’s fabrication from Adam’s rib, along with all the inferior, even insane connotations of the legend. . . .
It was in such an atmosphere of sordid struggle for survival on the sordid continents, of moments of perfervid play and of endless hardship matched by elements of hope, that Paula’s personal dilemma had its beginning. The stage had been set long before; but the fact that she was in dilemma could not be made evident to Paula.
Edwinna once tried to warn her. . . .
It was the eveni
ng of a typical day. Martha and the four quota children had come home from school, hungry and restless. They had played hide-and-seek in the yard, trampling the untended flower beds.
One of them, a nervous girl named Doris whose mother had been crushed under a collapsing hotel in Miami, stepped on a rake and badly lacerated her foot. Kate, in charge of the house that day, as usual, called on Bella Elliot for assistance. The two women held the screaming, wildly fighting child and managed to clean out the wound, disinfect it, and put on a bandage. Then Kate, using precious gasoline, drove Doris to Miami and spent an hour and a half in a line of mothers and children. After filling out three forms she had managed to have a tetanus shot given Doris.
When Kate returned she was both weary and shaken. Bella had gone home. Kate was obliged to hurry to get dinner ready for the six children and three adults who constituted that household, or “food group” as the ration blanks now called it.
Nothing unusual had happened to Edwinna. It was one of her days in the field.
She had spent its ten work hours under a broad-brimmed hat, setting out tomato plants in flat shimmering acres near Homestead. She had thereafter come back to within a half mile of her house in a truck crammed with women, both black and white, who rode as inertly as zombies: they were not yet accustomed to such labor.
Edwinna walked the stretch to her home and did not even bother to ask Kate why she hadn’t heated the water tub on the outdoor fireplace; she bathed tiredly in cold water and lay down afterward for a nap.
Paula was therefore the freshest of the three. Her day had been active but it was a kind of activity to which she was better adjusted. She had met with three committees. The first was the State Liaison Board which, through channels in Tallahassee, kept up with Washington’s orders, plans, projects and procedures. The second was the County Health and Medical Committee, a layman-nurse-doctor organization designed to deal with the endless shortages, with catastrophic, chronic and trivial sicknesses, with epidemics, and with the appalling difficulties of sanitation, of proper food handling, of milk pasteurization and the like. This was an Augean task in a region with only half the necessary housing, few sewers, novice inspectors who were often unable to enforce the simplest edicts and, of course, one doctor where a hundred were desperately needed.