The Disappearance

by Philip Wylie

  But the Seminoles were never foolish enough to close in: they would hide until darkness came and paddle away—murderous ghosts, ghosts with an understandable reason for their hatred of the white man’s white women.

  Edwinna became one of the “scouts” of her section, going always ahead, stealthily, to locate concealed assassins and give warning in time. . . .

  All over the world where law had not yet been established, in cities, in towns, in the country, such small “wars” were raging. Battles for game, for granaries, for cropland and for the most habitable quarters left in burned-out cities. . . .

  In this same period, another fad developed which was to have its shattering effect on Paula.

  A year before, with hope of the return of the males still vividly alive, with partial mastery of the original catastrophe as a heartening stimulant, with stores and supplies of goods manufactured before the Disappearance on hand, the women had beguiled at least some of their hours by giving parties and bees, by playing games and dancing.

  Now, month by month, a grimmer reality asserted itself. The civilization in which they lived and upon which they depended was not one they could maintain alone. Here and there a woman understood the operation of a plant or a machine, laboratory technique, an industrial process, even an entire business or a profession. But those who had the knowledge could not train sufficient numbers in time to save key equipment and machinery from ruin.

  Thousands upon thousands of plants and factories lay idle because women could not learn fast enough how to run them. Idle, the machines rusted and corroded; idle and untended, belts moldered away, gears and bearings froze in red decay, intricate mazes of electrical equipment lost their glitter and their power of function, insulation rotted, foundations gave way, minor fires chewed at individual installations and were extinguished too late, windows broke and the weather entered, followed slowly by insects and vines.

  In addition, the competence of women in heavy industry was small. There was no one to mine coal. Few volunteers could be found even to try, for the dank galleries alarmed the unaccustomed women, uncertain power supply often stranded them at the bottoms of shafts, and unfamiliarity led to mine explosions. The women chopped wood for domestic fuel and concentrated on trying to maintain and expand a remnant of the petroleum industry. Oil wells still pumped in Texas; the Big Inch was made to flow and, in lieu of ocean tankers, trucks carried gasoline from those few refineries in operation.

  The making of steel was given up. There was steel in the burned areas to cannibalize. It was chore enough, and more than enough, to rework what metal lay above ground. Other types of mining, except where open pits gave access, were abandoned; and other basic industries perished through default.

  What had always been a fact—ignored, unnoticed—now became the most cogent fact: humanity had built its cities largely to lighten the burden of domesticity, which had been woman’s burden. The bulk of all civilized activity had directly or indirectly entered the service of woman and her home. Steel was forged for rails and bridges which in turn transferred food and fabrics, small machines and materials that, in the end, went to houses, the buildings serving the houses, and the goods and gadgets that steadily moved from the buildings to the houses. Woman, with her car, her supermarket, her department store, her home and its electrical accessories—and the children of the woman—were the chief consumers. Yet women, by and large, knew very little about the mechanism sustaining them.

  The dilemma was simple: their dependence upon civilization was equal to their ignorance. Having employed, consumed and come to count on thousands of “products,”

  the mechanical etiology of which few had even contemplated, women were also cut off from simpler, more primitive techniques.

  Even farm women were thus at a loss. Many had never milked cows or churned their own butter. When the milking machines stopped for want of power, when the trucks no longer called for the waiting cans, when the separators broke down, they did not know how to tend the cows or dispose of the milk. The “civilizing” of womankind had proceeded at a very superficial level, a level which had rarely aroused any extensive intellectual curiosity in them. So, with the civilized plant stopped dead, most women had no resources on which to fall back.

  After recovering from the initial shock, they had experienced a surge of hope founded on the surprising discovery that some few of their number were competent in most fields, for millions had worked in industries and tens of thousands in professions.

  But when time passed and it became apparent that “man’s world,” which had been largely devoted to woman, could not be restored in anyone’s lifetime, that hope withered.

  A remnant of faith was pinned on the possibility of parthenogenesis—the chance that a means of artificial fertilization might be discovered. But it finally appeared that, even under the best of fortunes, generations would have to be born and live and die—

  generations in which the putative men were trained by women—before a flow of minerals, metals, timber and industrial vegetable products would furnish the basis for any such luxurious bounty as had obtained in the old civilization.

  That fact had widespread psychological repercussions. Women at first had tried by every means to keep alive romantic images of the male sex. But in the second autumn following the Disappearance, an opposite reaction occurred. Feeling themselves victims of a circumstance both overwhelming and without justice, frustrated by lack of knowledge precisely where their dependence was greatest, many began to blame men for their predicament.

  That bitter note first appeared in the harangues of instructors and lecturers who fanned out from Washington to “orient” various groups. Paula encountered it in a talk given by a Miss Edna Wentler, who wound up an address on Sanitation Management, at the Coral Gables Town Club, with an extraordinary statement:

  “We from the nation’s capital are particularly concerned to warn against softness, sentimentality and lowering of morale, at this time. In my own personal opinion, the going of the males is a deserved fate. They spoiled us. And they left us without the means to sustain life as we had known it. Our present situation is thus, doubly, the fault of males! At Washington we have every expectation that a way will be found to restore childbirth and so to sustain our kind. It is my own personal feeling that we might do well, when we learn to propagate without males, to continue our species without males! We were able, but they kept us from learning. We were willing, but they voted us the lowly chores. We could have been their equals—their superiors!—but they maintained us in subservience. Now they are gone. This is our century! Out of these dark and trying times a new world may be born, a world of and for women, ruled by women alone!”

  At the conclusion, it was Paula’s first impulse to boo, or to call out, “Phooie!”

  Yet she did not. Instead, she found in herself a vague agreement and even some slight pleasure. There was a wisp of truth beneath the silly phrases of this spinster who, Paula thought, had known nothing more about men than she had read and heard. So Paula smiled, but she also nodded. For she had taken on responsibilities far beyond her known capacity. She had done what many men would have funked. She was too compassionate actually to enjoy, as some women did, authority amidst the misfortunes of others; but she felt self-satisfaction in the effective performance of roles which had always been masculine.

  Paula did not boo. Yet she was startled when many women applauded—and with violence.

  “She’s got something!” Ella said after the talk. “I would have loved—just for one day—to have the men but under the thumbs of women!”

  Bella Elliot demurred. “She’s just an old pickle! Nobody ever loved her. She’s probably a Lesbian.”

  “And what,” Ella answered, “is wrong with that—in a manless world, darling?”

  Bella laughed gently, shook her soft, brown head and answered, “It’s ersatz.”

  “Tell me something nowadays that isn’t!” The blonde poetess walked away.

  Mrs.
Treddon-Stokes took her place. “An excellent lecture! Inspiring! A world of women-forever! A quite new thought!”

  It was not so much the argument as the manner of Mrs. Treddon-Stokes that caused Paula to say, “Don’t judge everybody by your own lack of loneliness. We weren’t all married to your Walter.”

  The towering woman pursed her lips. “Good breeding has disappeared along with other things!”

  “Breeding that interfered with truth was never any good. We’ve got a woman’s world. Do we like it?”

  “Give us time!” said the tall matron. “Time! Personally, as I grow more accustomed to it, I find it increasingly interesting. I have formed new, fascinating friendships! I have found out what an utter wretch my husband was! My secret impressions of him—and of marriage—were far from incorrect!”

  “I wonder what Walter’s were?” Paula said rudely. . . .

  The attitude of hostility toward the memory of men persisted and increased. Most of it was childishly emotional; but some took on the forms of intellectualism.

  Thus, “Better-Off-Without-’Em” clubs spread amongst lower-class women while at the same time pretentious discussion groups considered whether or not (providing human breeding again became possible) women should take advantage of the potential

  “opportunity” and either limit the number of males to a select “breeding stock” trained for that purpose alone or do away with males the moment it was scientifically certain their “service” no longer would be required.

  Hostility became a source of resurgent social life. Once again, women dressed up as men; but now their caricaturing was unleavened by sentiment. They acted out vicious roles: the drunk, the bully, the wifebeater, the cheat, the gambler, the criminal, the mar-tinet, the fop, the sadist. Any argument that women had produced comparable types was refuted by attributing the cause of that to males. Women without men commenced proving, everywhere, the depth and the fury of the cruel slight they had endured for so long a time. . . .

  One night, several Miami Better-Off-Without-’Em clubs paraded by torchlight.

  Paula saw them on the way home from a meeting.

  The “men” were as repulsive as was customary—the women, as appealing. Pretty girls adorned floats, girls uninhibited by a two-sexed “modesty.”

  The floats represented community enterprises and service units; but the girls took delight in revealing beauties and charms for which there was no natural demand and which, these days, were generally sullied by labor and concealed by rough clothes.

  Alone in her car, parked at a corner, looking over the heads of the crowd, Paula suddenly appreciated what it was men felt about women—as women.

  A band played. The lighted, paper-decorated trucks moved slowly. Paula’s conscious sense that the new tendency to demean men was wrong diminished as she watched. What else could they do? A feeling that this odd attitude was justified pervaded her mind and with it came an awareness, at first inadmissible but soon accepted, that ever since the Disappearance she herself had been a “man” amongst these beleaguered women. She had led, organized, fought to maintain her own household, accepted directorships, planned, ordered, and helped to govern. She, she alone—through her knowledge of languages—had even been her country’s brief but effective ambassador in dealing with the preposterous “mission” from the Soviet.

  If men were gone forever, she was like a man.

  She stood up, at that point. A warm breeze blew upon her, a breeze that carried the fragrance of nearby frangipani. The band played with a rare ecstasy, it seemed to Paula. And as the girls went by, dark hair, gold hair, red hair stirring, bare flesh shining, Paula had a diffuse, physical sensation of their desirability. For the instant, she could project upon the flash of every eye, the curve of every shoulder, the shimmer and shade of every lock of hair such desires and such aggressive passions as men have.

  A moment later she sat down—collapsed, very nearly, from the intensity of the sensation. She was shaking. Her mind teetered between two emotions—one of yearning for the men to return and the other, an abnormal desire which, she believed, rose from the long assumption of men’s duties.

  When she drove on toward home, it was with reluctance and regret. She had felt the same way in her childhood when the curtain had been rung down on the first play she had seen and the glamour of theatrical spectacle had abruptly become the getting of hats and coats in a people-smelling, bleak auditorium. The parade, the beautiful girls, the glitter, the frangipani fragrance clung to her—or she to them; it was hard to bear the commonplace night, the dirty streets, the bumps and turns and the occasional glaring trucks.

  Kate was at home, quietly sewing by candlelight. The children were asleep.

  Paula looked at the dark-haired girl, at the strain and sadness in her eyes as she smiled a welcome. Paula dropped her notebooks and put her long-strapped bag on a table.

  She thought Kate was like the girls on the floats.

  She sat down and talked about the parade. Kate parted her lips but said nothing while she listened to every uneasy intonation.

  “Of course,” Paula said at last, with a shrug, “anybody with a psychological background can understand this whole down-with-men business! What women are doing is expressing the frustrations—the hostilities and aggressions frustrations make—that had piled up even before the Disappearance. We were forever being told we were equal—and forever being kept from behaving equally. We were brought up to think of ourselves as independent—and then forced into dependence. Look at us now! We don’t even know enough to do more than barely exist!”

  “Besides,” Kate interrupted, surprising Paula a little, “we haven’t anything better to do with our emotions anyhow. Anything whatsoever!”

  “There’s that.” Paula gazed curiously at the girl and returned to her theme. “We couldn’t, actually, most of us, love men completely, because the whole picture of life was too unloving! Follow some of your feelings for one little evening and you were disgraced! Even divorced! Yet they insisted you should have freedom and initiative! Get even a political opinion contrary to your husband’s and, for most wives, hell moved in!

  They sent you to school and made you work and told you good marks meant everything.

  If you were like me, you topped all the boys in your class. You went to college. You studied. You earned degrees. You married. And then— what? You had to learn a lot of new things about running a house and raising babies and taking care of measles and ordering groceries and then about architecture and interior decoration and plumbing and how to run a waxer. Meanwhile, the years of hard, hard work to get an education went down the sewer! You married a brighter man with an even better education and your light went right out, no matter how bright it was! Is it any wonder women feel hostile about men? Aggressive?” Her eyes flashed.

  Kate nodded gently and sighed more gently still. She sewed while Paula reflected, not contritely, on her outburst.

  Presently Kate said, “You know, I think I’m going to get a job somewhere and go away.” She didn’t look up.

  “Go away! Kate! You couldn’t quit us! You’ve got a tremendous job right here, running things! And Hester to help you! If you went away, you’d wind up with a flock of odious characters, sleeping in bunks and eating stew twice a day, working in a mill or in the fields!”

  Kate nodded in miserable agreement and stopped sewing. A tear, shiny in the candlelight, fell from her eyes onto her wrist.

  “Is it still—Alicia?” Paula asked softly.

  “Oh, partly.” Kate put her handiwork on the divan.

  “And partly—what?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.” Kate looked up now, smiled as if forgivingly through more unfallen tears, and said, “I guess I’ll go to bed. I’m tired.” She began to loosen her long, black braids.

  The fact that Kate would be irreplaceable, that she had come as the one boon in a period of endless difficulty, seemed of less consequence to Paula than a sudden-glimpsed loneliness. With a murmur
, she crossed to the divan, moved the sewing and put her arm around the girl. “You mustn’t go, Kate! You just mustn’t! Honestly, I’d feel utterly lost!

  I’d have to stop all the work I’m doing and take over the household. I’d feel”—she laughed—“like an abandoned husband.”

  “Would you?” Kate’s eyes fixed hopefully on Paula’s. “I didn’t believe any of you—Edwinna or you or Bella—or any of you had such feelings! You’re all so darned cold! You always seem to approach everything with a lot of thoughts, merely, and talk.

  Talk, talk, talk!”

  “I know. We do. It’s foolish.”

  “I’m fond of you,” the younger girl said urgently. “Very. Maybe too much.

  You’ve been good to me. I’ve felt, since I came here, there wasn’t anything you wouldn’t do for me.”

  “But there isn’t, dear!” Paula said it quickly.

  Kate lowered her head. “I know. I guess, inside I’m just a beast. And not appreciative.”

  “What do you mean, Kate?” Paula’s voice had become flat and tense as a different interpretation of Kate’s mood occurred to her.

  The girl untwisted her braids and shook out her hair. “I wish,” she said in a low tone, “I was your wife, in a way. Sort of. I wish—you were—a man. I wish”—her voice rose—“you, or Bella, or Edwinna—but mostly you—weren’t so damned prissy! That’s what I can’t stand! I wasn’t brought up the way you were. My people may have” been no-account, but they wouldn’t kill themselves, practically, to keep from admitting they had feelings! And they wouldn’t just give you the cold edge of a dirty look for showing the feelings you had, no matter how you showed them!”