The Theban Mysteries

by Amanda Cross

  Irene Rexton’s report amounted to a defense of Ismene’s position. She chooses, in the beginning of the play, to preserve rather than risk her life and her safety. She joins the great majority of those who are willing to be unnoticed and insignificant. When, after Antigone’s capture, she offers to share Antigone’s fate, she is rightly denied martyrdom now, having refused it earlier. It is easy enough, Irene suggested, to sneer at Ismene, but without the Ismenes of the world, what would the Antigones do for a background against which to flaunt their glory?

  “You feel she’s mainly a foil for Antigone, the way Laertes is for Hamlet?” Freemond asked.

  “I guess so,” Irene said. “Even if that isn’t her intention, it’s her destiny. What I’m arguing, though, is that we couldn’t possibly have a world of Antigones, but we do have a world of Ismenes, who have all the family problems too, and I think we ought to give them credit.”

  “The silent majority,” Alice said.

  “The majority, anyway. Yet with guts, guts to take it, I mean, as well as dish it out, which is what they are never credited with.”

  “I don’t see,” Betsy said, “why the silent majority has suddenly got to be endowed with Ismene’s virtues, just because like her they lack guts to take action, to change things.”

  “Obviously,” Freemond said, “Ismene is there to show up Creon, among other reasons. His malevolence toward her, his being so tyrannical toward her, proves that he’s not interested in justice, or even law, but in power.”

  “She shows where his hostility is.”

  “Yet,” Elizabeth said, “when we acted out with, that is, if you think about it, well, his anger there isn’t …” Her voice trailed off.

  “Even Angelica as Creon couldn’t work up much anger against Ismene pounding the mattress,” Alice said, “so it seems to me …” She was silenced by glares.

  “Mattress?” Kate asked. “Have I missed something?”

  “Alice has a habit of running off at the mouth,” Freemond said, “and she’s occasionally even known to hallucinate. Who else could imagine Creon and a mattress together?” It had happened, of course, the connection between the Egyptian dynasty and today, but these were seniors, and Kate was too much in the confidence of the Establishment to be shown connections.

  “Why do you think Ismene wants to die with Antigone?” Kate asked into the silence.

  Freemond undertook to answer. “For much the same reason, eventually, that Antigone chooses to die with her brother: because the reason for continued living has vanished.”

  “There’s nothing remarkable that I can see about Ismene,” Betsy said, “she’s exactly what one would expect. It is Antigone who amazes one—imagine Sophocles being able to conceive her.”

  “Ismene’s a bore, naturally, being the ordinary woman despite fascinating parents,” Alice said. “Haemon’s the one with guts; how many men would choose to die with a female martyr? I ask you. The only man who showed any interest in Joan of Arc was some soldier who plucked her heart from the fire, which did her one hell of a lot of good. But Haemon stabbed himself over Antigone’s body, and no one, I pray to God, is going to make some big Freudian thing out of that.”

  The class laughed, and turned to Haemon, whom Elizabeth McCarthy found sinful, arrogant, and failing in respect for his parents, to everyone’s delight.

  “My God,” Alice said. “What he, like, absolutely proves is that courtesy is wasted on parents. Haemon was sirring his father all over the place, but his father sneered at him just the same. What Haemon was lacking in was respect for himself, until it was too late.”

  Other words were said, but those echoed in Kate’s mind after the seminar was over. She asked Betsy Stark to remain behind to discuss the possible entry of her poem into the school poetry contest.

  “If you haven’t any immediate commitment,” Kate said.

  “That’s O.K.,” Betsy said, dropping her book bag to the floor, and eying Kate warily.

  Kate went to the door and closed it. “Sit down, Betsy,” she said. “Don’t worry, I shan’t whip out a gun and hold it to your head. My intentions are frankly dishonorable, but I won’t hide them.”

  “It’s not about the poem?”

  “That’s an excuse, though Mrs. Johnson does want me to urge you to enter it, and Mrs. Copland is anxious for at least one entry from each teacher, so you’re like my only opportunity.”

  Betsy laughed. “I don’t care if you enter it, or if I do. But it’s a poem that lends itself to misunderstanding, which the discussion here sure demonstrated.”

  “I know,” Kate said. The class had accused Betsy of trying to turn Tiresias’s boy into Peter Pan, than which there was, as Kate readily agreed, no more hideous fate. But why, she had asked, must we deprive ourselves of an interesting idea because Barrie appealed to the Victorian fear of sex?

  “The truth is,” she said now, “I need help about Angelica. I think I might, just possibly might, be able to offer her a hand in crawling out of the abyss, but I don’t want to make any ghastly mistakes. Sooo—I’m pumping you, as Angelica says. I’m not asking you to betray any confidences, dearly as I’d love to know what you’ve been doing with mattresses—involving Creon, that is.”

  “Why me?” Betsy asked.

  “I don’t know exactly, but when I came to consider, it seemed obvious.”

  “That I was likelier to spill?”

  “I won’t dignify that with an answer; you appear to me more mature, at least in some ways; bright enough, anyway, to figure out that mysteries, particularly those involving the death of one’s mother, are always more threatening than the truth.”

  Kate spoke truthfully about Betsy, but not the entire truth. She could guess something of Betsy, poised on the razor’s edge between commitment to her individual destiny and longing for the accepted destiny of a feminine place in a male world. “There is no woman,” a misogynist colleague of Kate’s at the university had once said to her, “who will not exchange any gift she may have for success with men. Occasionally, very occasionally, you find a woman who has had success with men, and whose gift, when she comes to value it, is still intact.” Kate knew well enough the humiliation that society, even so enlightened a society as the Theban, prepares for its unpretty members. “Dogs” they are called by the boys they would like to attract—odd how the idea of dogs kept intruding itself—and they are forced either to attend social occasions on which, like rejected slaves, they are not chosen, or to refuse to attend them, which is an admission of failure of nerve—both demeaning choices. Girls like Betsy, if they could wait without bitterness for the opportunity to meet men, as opposed to boys, or if they could willingly abandon a role as a man’s woman, might find a life—but the dangers of resentment and cynicism were perilous, more perilous, Kate thought, than the dangers of stoning which Antigone faced.

  “Sorry,” Kate said, “I was following my wandering, will-o’-the-wisp mind, and giving you time to think. You can tell me to go to blazes, you know, and sweep from the room.”

  “What did you want to know?”

  “Well, for a start, what was Angelica’s mother like? And how did Angelica feel about her?”

  “I was afraid you’d ask that. Oh, not because I’m loath to answer; it’s always fun in a way to paint a portrait in vitriol, soothing to the nerves to be nasty and deadly accurate all in one fell swoop. It’s just that it’s difficult to sound as though one isn’t being carried away with the passion of one’s words. She was a stinker, in short, and if the dogs got rid of her I think they should be given all the sirloin steak they can eat for a month. Can I sweep out now?”

  “Of course not. Go on.”

  “She was afraid of everything, not just airplanes and fast cars and self-service elevators and streets and shut-in places and heights and poisons and contagious diseases, all of which are more or less rational, at least if they occur one at a time, but that robbers would open both locks if she had two and three locks if she had three, that the man
who collects tolls on a bridge would try to hold her hand or give her a skin disease, that the sun would give her freckles, that a transfusion from a Negro would turn her black, that—there, I am beginning to sound as though I were exaggerating, which I’m not, but I soon would be, probably.”

  “She was afraid of dogs?”

  “Oh, God yes. Apart from biting you, they gave you diseases, and if a dog licked you you would probably get hepatitis, shingles, and African sleeping sickness before nightfall.”

  “It sounds rather horrible, certainly. Was she fond of Angelica?”

  “She was actually one of those women who is jealous of her own daughter, which I know used to happen in Bette Davis movies, but she’s the only person I ever knew who actually was.”

  “I take it she thought of herself as a femme fatale.”

  “The original sex object. If her hair wasn’t properly set, colored, teased, and sprayed the very planets would cease in their orbits, or ought to have, out of sympathy. She had a mind so wooly that a prize sheep would have looked bald beside it, and if either of her children ever tried to talk to her about anything, she either pretended to have a heart attack or threw a hysterical fit, depending on how much energy she had to spare at the time.”

  “But she did have a heart condition, you know.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Her doctor says so, emphatically. It was reported quite officially to the police, who could tell anyway, from the autopsy.”

  “Yes. Well, even the boy who cried wolf ended up facing a wolf one day; in fact, that’s the whole point of the story, isn’t it?”

  “It is, I take it, the point of this one.”

  “I know that she was actually hospitalized once with what Angelica and Patrick used to call her quote unquote heart attack. I think they simply didn’t believe it, though I guess it was true.”

  “Truer, apparently, than the doctors thought it wise to tell her. I mean, if she was capable of being frightened to death, there was no point in frightening her to death by telling her so. She was, one gathers, not one of those people who want to be told the truth.”

  “Hardly, though I don’t think she would have recognized the truth even in its simplest arithmetical form. By which I mean,” Betsy added, apparently feeling that this needed amplification, “two plus two always equaled whatever she wanted it to equal. Hell, she was a fright and no mistake. We all have problems with our mothers, of course,” Betsy said, as though she were confirming that they all had two arms and two legs, “but Angelica’s mother didn’t even achieve a modicum of consistency. She’d say Angelica could have friends overnight and then throw a tantrum in front of them. Oh, I don’t know; but the worst was, she tried her best to divide Angelica from her brother and her grandfather; it’s to their credit, I think, that she—the mother, that is—never succeeded.”

  “They all lived with their grandfather, didn’t they?”

  “Yes. He insisted on it, and reactionary and old fogeyish as he is, and he is, I think he was right. He couldn’t possibly have gotten custody of the kids when their father died, and he knew it would be fatal to leave them to her tender mercies, so he persuaded her to live with him, bribing her with plenty of money for shoes made out of alligator and coats made out of seal, which would have broken Angelica’s heart if everything else had not already broken it—she’s a conservationist, of course. He did at least see that they went to good schools, and lived a decent sort of life—actually, it worked out rather well until this damn war. I think, without wholly understanding it when she was young, Angelica knew that her grandfather was doing the right thing, and he had the sense never to speak against her mother, so Angelica didn’t have any conflict of loyalties as people always do when they’re young about their mothers. Of course, once the old man turned his back on the two of them, the sh—um, there was trouble.”

  “I’ve talked to the grandfather, so I understand a little about that. I mention it because I don’t want to appear to be pumping you without telling you what I know.”

  “For someone of your generation you try to be honest, though all of us agree you can’t possibly be as straight as you obviously are.”

  Kate laughed. “What I didn’t have the nerve to ask Mr. Jablon,” she went on, “is why he was so eager for his grandson to be in a war when his father, Mr. Jablon’s son, had died in one.”

  “Angelica doesn’t believe her father died in the war. She thinks he killed himself.”

  “My dear girl, surely it’s a matter of record.”

  “You sound like Miss Tyringham. It’s on the record O.K. He inveigled his way out to Korea and shot himself or something cleverly enough to win the purple heart or the chartreuse kidney or whatever they give you for being wounded in the service of the military, particularly since the fighting had already stopped when he got there, and it wasn’t the service of the military that interested him, it was getting away from his horrible wife and dominating father.”

  “In my opinion, they would never have had wars throughout history if men had not needed an excuse to get away from their wives.”

  “Do you really? I thought you liked women.”

  “Certainly I do. But I don’t think making them dependent on one man for everything increases their attractions for him; it only increases his guilt if he leaves her, but war takes care of that.”

  “Do you believe in group marriage?”

  “Believe in it? I don’t even know what it is.”

  “Well, lots of people live together and change partners, as Fred Astaire used to sing in the dear, dead days.”

  “You really must meet my husband,” Kate said, if he survives, she added privately. “That sounds rather problematic, as though one were a pride of lions without the necessity of working together to catch gazelles. I believe in voluntary associations, but I certainly believe that every woman should contribute to the family kitty by having a job and bringing home part of the bacon. Does that throw any light on my straightness?”

  “Do you think you can have comedies of manners about sex if you don’t have any ritual about it—courtship, and all that crap?”

  “Well, you couldn’t have fewer than you have now, so it’s worth trying. I’ll tell you about sex if you’ll tell me about mattresses, and if that sounds like an indecent proposition, it is, since only you can tell me about mattresses, and anyone, including yourself in a few years, can tell you about sex.”

  “People who are honest are more dishonest than liars because they disarm you. Somerset Maugham said you could make a character sound breathtakingly brilliant by just letting her tell the truth. You ever heard of Esalen?”

  “That place in California that cures drug addiction?”

  “That’s Synanon. Esalen has lots of techniques and we, that is—well, some of us tried this. You hit a mattress, which is soft and doesn’t mind taking a beating, and pretend it’s whomever you feel hostile toward. That way, you work out the hostility and even recognize some you hadn’t wanted to think about, which is always useful. Do you think there shouldn’t be any sexual mores at all?”

  “Wait a minute. Where did you find out about Esalen—has one of you been there?”

  “You can read about it.”

  “I think women should be virgins when they marry, because their jewel is the most precious thing they have, and how else could they wear white at their wedding when they are handed from one man who owns them to another? You learned it from Mrs. Banister, didn’t you?”

  “If you know, why are you asking me?” Betsy said, sounding more like a petulant child than she had all afternoon.

  “I didn’t know until a few minutes ago. It sounds a damn good idea—the mattress bit, I mean. Why be so secretive about it?”

  “Well, it wasn’t exactly what the Theban had in mind under the heading of dramatics. We talk to pillows, too, as though they are our other self with whom we are arguing, or someone else who—people used to kid about our encounter groups, but they never really th
ought …”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, sometimes we had sessions after school, and Mrs. Banister, though she never said so, wasn’t certain, anyway we weren’t certain …”

  “If the school would officially approve.”

  “That’s it. Actually, she helped us an awful lot. You can’t imagine.”

  “I think I can, you know. I told Mr. Jablon just today that what one wanted to do was more to the point than what one should do, and you don’t know what you want till you face what you hate, face it, and recognize it into proportion.”

  “In case you’re wondering, Mrs. Banister hasn’t got any sort of thing over girls, you know what I mean?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “One has to be careful; it’s a nasty and suspicious world, though we try not to be more paranoiac than absolutely necessary. I wish I could think of a perfectly sizzling question to ask you about sex …”

  “When you do, I shall answer it between my blushes.”

  “I’ll remember that. Don’t tell …”

  “Only if necessary, and then only in perfect confidence. Trust me.”

  “I’ve decided to,” Betsy said, sweeping from the room at last.

  Reed didn’t sweep into the room; he tiptoed in and cast glances about him with all the furtiveness of an eavesdropper in a Restoration comedy. He carried with him a heavily padded jacket which Mr. O’Hara had insisted upon his wearing against the possibility that the dogs’ teeth might close around an arm or neck. While the dogs were guaranteed not to bite or play unnecessarily roughly, precautions were nonetheless taken against their doing any such thing.