by Terry Castle
Thus even when Tweedledee and Tweedledum, Molly and Tina, came along a few weeks later—the three of us becoming for a brief spell rival boinkees—it was supposedly no sweat. They didn’t know about me, the Professor insisted; nor were they aware of each other’s involvement with her. They were just two dumb kids she was helping out. Teaching them, as it were—Molly, the little baby dyke especially—that it was totally normal and okay to have sex with women. I was the one whom she had graced with a full accounting, the Professor explained, because I was tough enough, grown-up enough, and the one she really wanted. She owed it to me. Indeed, I should feel very special. It was precisely because she loved me so passionately—already, she declared—that she was screwing around. I’m testing you, I guess. The infidelities (aw, honey, if you can even call them that) were simply proof of her feeling for me. I should wait it all out: she’d slough off the other two soon enough. I would be hers and she would be mine because I was so goddamned smart and so goddamned substantial, such a fine and superior person—so funny too—but even more than that because I understood despair.
I’ll come back to the despair part in a moment. What is most difficult to convey here, of course, is why I remained so feverishly in thrall to the Professor, even as various unpleasant quirks and peculiarities in her began to reveal themselves. The Bluebeard business alone, I realize, suggests a certain monstrosity. Yet the Professor, I swear, was deeply lovable, too; lovable enough, in fact, to balance out whatever misgivings even a harsher judge than I might have entertained. True—the split in her nature was extreme: Ripley’s Believe It or Not could have done a feature on her. Good and Bad Amazingly Combined! Two People in One! The Famous Lady Jekyll-and-Hyde! She fooled even those, it seemed, far more subtle and streetwise than I. At the university and out in the world, after all, she was managing to function at an extremely high professional level without raising undue suspicion. Yes, I was a needy and overawed twenty-two-year-old. But jumbled up as everything was in my beloved’s psyche, I had legitimate as well as pathetic reasons for being smitten with her. She was a menace, it transpired, but a captivating one.
First, of course: the sheer seduction of her personality. She could love-bomb you. In social settings the Professor had a shining, attentive, fresh-faced quality to her—a sort of openness and kindness and unaffected curiosity about the world. She seemed more alive in the moment than most people ever became over their entire lives. When she was relaxed, not freaked out about something or someone, she could exhibit an enormous, infectious social charm, a charm almost impossible to delineate after the fact. It was fully embodied yet also somehow philosophical. The Professor was an accomplished winker, among other things, and when she winked at you from across the room you felt an immediate and delicious contact and acceptance. You couldn’t keep yourself from smiling back. No doubt, the wink suggested, there was something funny, as well as tragic, about being alive and you and she both knew it. What a farce, eh?
The sense of the comic was rich and well-developed in her; the lack of pretentiousness genuine. An early, deep-voiced kind of geniality had no doubt been a part of her professional success—had helped to make her a successful teacher and collector of data. She had a way with an audience: got people talking, made people open up in intimate ways. (It was also what made her such an effective manipulator of those who didn’t see through it.) She wasn’t afraid to play the jester in public. She enjoyed singing little bits of grossly ribald song, for example—especially some favorite lines from a smutty sailor ditty about frigging in the rigging. She approved of the silliness, the way lewdness got overtaken by slapstick. In fact, she seemed to relish silliness in any form. She admired dachshunds for the palpably absurd way they waddled through life. She had an iron doorstop in one of the rooms upstairs in the shape of a dachshund. (Was his name Alexei? Like the doomed Tsarevitch?) The ridiculous combination of preening amour propre with the Chaplinesque short legs never failed to delight her.
She was likewise drawn, in endearing fashion, to buoyant, fruity-voiced, full-figured comedienne types of the sort popular in classic Hollywood films in the 1930s and ’40s. Larger-than-life female clowns like Margaret Dumont, say, as Mrs. Gloria Teasdale in Duck Soup or Mrs. Claypool in A Night at the Opera. Margaret Rutherford in anything. (Or her panto-dame equivalent: Alastair Sim, in bosomy drag, as Millicent Fritton, the girls’ school headmistress in The Bells of St. Trinian’s.) The Professor greatly enjoyed hammy old burlesque queens like Tessie O’Shea and Sophie Tucker; likewise, the glorious Ruth Draper—famed for her arch comic monologues in Edith Wharton–ish grande dame persona. Anna Russell, the Canadian opera singer and comedian of the 1950s and ’60s was another special favorite: I first heard Russell’s (now classic) plummy-ludicrous retelling of the story of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungen one night at the Professor’s house. She’d dug the record out from her stack of favorite LPs and insisted that I listen.
The Professor’s favorite star of all time, though, was Marie Dressler—she of Dinner at Eight, Tugboat Annie, and Min and Bill. She seemed in fact to have a huge crush on her. Dressler was then just a name to me—a symptom of the seemingly vast age difference between myself and the Professor, so I didn’t pay much attention. I know more now. (Was Dressler too a big ole dyke? She definitely looks like one in photos.) You can see lots of Dressler today on YouTube—going all the way back to her 1914 silent film with Chaplin, Tillie’s Punctured Romance. She’s utterly marvelous. One could hardly say that she and the Professor looked alike—the P. being lean and athletic, almost sinewy, when I knew her, and Dressler like a giant washerwoman—but there’s something in the theatricality and warmth, the comic mobility of expression, that carries over. A certain bizarre sexiness. After thirty years it’s hard for me to retrieve more than a weak-signal, evanescent sense of the Professor’s presence in the flesh—her distinctive carnal magic—but I’ve felt closest to her, and her closest to me, while watching Dressler mug and dance and carry on in these flickery, droll, now-ancient video clips. I can imagine the Professor and I laughing at them together, in some life we never had.
Yet even more attractive to me than the Professor’s comic side was her melancholia. The two things were related, of course: the comedy, like her sexual promiscuity, bore the traces of, seemed to grow out of, some deep and unfathomable undercurrent of pain. This pain, I suspect, was both what bound us, at first, then sent us careening off in opposite directions with such violence. We saw reflected in one another the same need—ancient, tactile, immense—for succor. I’m tempted to call it a need for mothering, except I’m English and hate the reductive and humiliating cliché sound of that. Mother’s milk and such. Yuck. So let’s look round for another way of saying it, shall we? Hmmm…
Too bad, fatso. Mothering, goddamn it, is the only word for it.
Mothering. The Professor had been right, in one of her seduction speeches, to speak of a universe of human suffering: everyone needed this mothering, it seemed, but not everyone got it. Or not enough. The Professor knew the bitter reality—inside and out, apparently—and was able to express it better than anyone I had ever met. In moments of intimacy, this dark knowledge—somehow enthroned in her—gave the Professor what can only be called an overwhelming emotional depth and moral pathos. Overwhelming to me especially because I felt I responded to it in every cell of my being. I recognized it. She seemed to describe me to myself. And to listen to her—especially the pillow talk—was to experience a devastating wish to console. Devastating because the pain was as much one’s own as it was hers and one knew that consolation was impossible. One had not the power. One tried to clutch at her anyway, to pat her chest, or lay one’s hand or head against her breastbone. But everything was so terribly unstable, like a nightmare.
To return to the world of fairy tales: if the Professor was in one sense Bluebeard-like, she was also, at other times, like the Beast in Beauty and the Beast. Her beastliness, like the latter’s, was of that achy, endearing, human-all-too-human sort th
at makes one want to weep. One could imagine her crouching down, like the Beast in Cocteau’s film, to lap water from some clear crystal pool. Because the Beast is yet an animal—though also a noble and stately one and soon to metamorphose, ever so feelingly, into Jean Marais—he has, one realizes, no other way of doing it. The vulnerability in the movement, the enactment of frailty and mortality, of embodied need and suffering, is heartrending. Yet the Professor too conveyed such vulnerability. She seemed to grasp the nature of things in a way I had yet to understand. I remember once asking her if she would like to live forever. Wouldn’t it be great if we never had to die? No, she responded, because then nothing would ever mean anything. Not the answer I wanted, of course, but I’ve never forgotten it.
The childhood polio—grotesque curse of the American mid-century—was one eminent source of pain; a historic sadness that kept on giving. Even for me at the time it was easy to see that the psychic consequences of the Professor’s illness had been deep and disordering. She had had the disease when she was around twelve or thirteen. Though never confined to an iron lung (or at least I don’t recollect her ever saying she was) the Professor was clearly still haunted by the mechanical 1940s–’50s sci-fi nightmare of it all. Big metal mummy-tubes. People locked inside what looked like cyclotrons. Her restlessness, her athleticism, her twitchy, quick-to-surface aggression and agitation—all suggested a massive compensatory effort of self-mobilization. The point was not to get paralyzed. To keep moving. Such willfulness and strength at times made her seem ineffably brave and wise.
One night as we lay in bed she showed me an old black and white photograph of herself. She was on the cusp of adolescence in the picture and posing outdoors, tennis team–style, with a group of ten or fifteen other girls. The girls were all smiling: they seemed in fact to be a sports team or summer camp group of some sort. Everyone had on shorts and white middy blouses and kerchiefs. The Professor was in the middle of the back row, her then-dark hair in pigtails, looking out at the camera with dread and dismay. That was the day I got sick. I was already feeling sick when they took that picture. That was when it started, right then. I remember feeling sick.
I didn’t know what to say, nor indeed what to do—that night or any other—when the Professor’s withered leg began acting up. At times she got a tormenting sensation in her calf and hamstring akin to “restless legs” phenomenon. Some sort of neuropathy? She jerked around and groaned briefly and told me that the only thing that helped was quinine and she didn’t have any. I was fascinated and appalled. I’d been born in 1953, soon after Jonas Salk had tested the first polio vaccine. I was so much younger—a Baby Boomer: safe forever. Quinine sounded like something from the nineteenth century. Such suffering was exotic to me, like the word “poliomyelitis” itself. My goggle-eyed concern during these episodes in turn seemed to exasperate the Professor. She became irritable and nasty. Things were definitely starting to go south the last time it happened—I was fretting incessantly about how to be around her—and this strange pain threw her bad luck, and my good luck, into relief. There was nothing I could do but look stricken and dumb and far too young to cope with any of it.
That the Professor’s disability meant something, inalterable and profound, in the gestalt of our relationship seems clear, though I still can’t say exactly what it was. Even now a sort of aphasia comes over me. To be sure, she had developed a certain assertion and bravura in response to it. Yet it had also instilled in her a generalized anxiety and hypochondria. She was obsessed with dread diseases, and cancer in particular. These fears were in turn ineluctably bound up with sex and death. Not long after we’d begun sleeping together, we were again in her bed—the place where almost all of the important conversations I remember having with her seem to have occurred—and she told me she was worried about her breast lumps. They were all over the place. She took my hand and guided me to some of them and wanted me to palpate them. (I did so gently, though not without a sickening wave of disquiet.) Would I stay with her if she had to have a mastectomy? Oh, yes, yes. Of course. Yes. Would love her even more, in fact. It was clear one had to demonstrate more equanimity under the circumstances than the reviled Colleague-Lover of a few years back had shown—the lady, that was, whose apparent dastardliness had obliged the Professor to fire a bullet into the bedroom floor. One night when she and the Professor had been making love—or so the Professor scathingly related it—this feeble excuse for a girlfriend had brushed against a particularly hard nodule by accident and instantly become nauseous. Freaked out. Unable to continue with the business at hand. All the more proof, said the P., she was a complete psycho. Didn’t matter then that she was a former child figure-skating star and a blond cutie-pie and they’d been going to buy a house together. Fucking cow.
I remember—again—listening in on such anguish, scared but mesmerized. So far, so bad. One lay on one’s side, head raised and resting on one hand, and gazed down into the Professor’s unseeing eyes as she talked. (Oddly, despite her Jewishness, her eyes were a stark gray-blue.) As she emerged from her pain-reverie, she would gradually return the gaze, focusing increasingly intently, as if searching one’s features for something resembling strength. One tried to look pensive, tough—courageous. But what did one really feel about any of it? This terrifying fragility in things? I couldn’t tell you.
A year or two after getting dumped I had a bizarre reminder of the Professor—the polio, the withered leg, and everything else I didn’t understand about her. My feminist reading group was having its biweekly get-together. (What were we reading? Eudora Welty? Carson McCullers? Flannery O’Connor? Something corny and 1940s but wonderful like that.) Jo was there, and by some odd coincidence reminiscing vividly about the polio epidemic. She too had lived through it—obviously without succumbing—but as a child had been terrorized by the thought of the disease. She’d been too young to understand about viruses and their transmission and had somehow concluded that “Polio” was a monster who would pursue you and kill you if he saw you having fun at a swimming pool. Polio was his name—a name like Popeye or Bluto. (“Ah wuz tahr-ri-faahd that PO-LEE-OH wuz gawna git me.”) It was a gripping account—Jo’s eyes had gotten huge and everyone else in the room seemed to have stopped breathing. Just so: at the thought of little Jo and Polio, that nightmarish monster, I was instantly overcome with hysteria, an urge to giggle and guffaw as mad and gay and preemptive—as sexual in fact—as any I’ve ever felt. It was hideous: I had to contort my face gargoyle-fashion—grit my teeth and somehow try to keep my lips from moving, so as not to explode. But the image in turn just wouldn’t stop being hilarious. The whole dreadful fit went on for what seemed like ten minutes—a sort of multiple orgasm of wanting-to-laugh. I just had to shut my eyes tight—contain the feeling even if it killed me—and somehow I guess I did.
But lodged in the Professor too were other even more archaic fears. She often spoke with some anguish about being Jewish, which she seemed to regard as a sort of primeval curse. Jewishness was not so much a bequest as a kind of doom, the dire and definitive mark of Cain. Perhaps not so unusual for an American woman of her generation, I guess: the Professor had lived through the discovery and first documentation of the Holocaust, after all. News of that inassimilable disaster had coincided exactly with her coming of age. True: I didn’t know her long enough to acquire many intimate details about her parents or early life—I can’t recall what her father did for a living, for instance, or anything about siblings, except that she had a brother. But one gathered that the family unit (huddled up together somewhere in a middle-class Long Island suburb) was dreary and unhappy—rather like the one Art Spiegelman depicts in Maus. The Professor’s parents, unlike Spiegelman’s, were not survivors, as far as I know, except in the most displaced and psychological sense. Yet the atmosphere of unease—a pervasive feeling of oppressiveness and precariousness—seems to have been similar. There’d been a sort of crazy-suicidal vibe in the air: that Maus-vibe.
And thus it was, grimly enough,
that our postcoital conversations so often turned on extermination camps, the hideous arbitrariness of fate, the children who never should have been born. On the latter topic the Professor’s usual steely manner would give way to tremulousness and she would fall into a sort of maudlin schoolgirl reverie. I’ve said she was a hypochondriac; she could also be morbid and histrionic—a sort of sorrowing death-junkie. Her inner world was dark and sad and full of dangers, constantly flooding out with anxiety. At such moments she exuded a strange mixture of panic, fierceness, and despondency. So labile, in fact, was her emotional state over the period I knew her, she was having to pop “tranquilizers” fairly often. (I don’t know what they were. Maybe Valium? This was all long before Prozac.) No doubt these angst-spells would have become exhausting over the long run, but in the moment I found them stirring and seductive.
The children who never should have been born, I soon learned, had their melancholy counterparts elsewhere in my lover’s troubled soul: namely, the children who should have been born, but weren’t. Which is to say the children that the Professor herself might have had—had she ever married; had she not turned to homosexuality; had she not had the hysterectomy of several years before, had she not delivered (as she put it) a healthy eight-pound uterus to the world. This infertility, this regret, this anger at Nature’s cruelty, was another part of her I never understood very well at the time—to my sorrow. But I was miles from ever getting it. (And in some way I’m not sure I even get it now, having seldom had more than the most fleeting desire either to bear or raise a child.) It was unlucky too, perhaps, that I was young enough, indeed, for her to have given birth to me. In the early fifties she would have been eighteen or nineteen.