by Carson, Tom
Not having lived long enough, I, Mary-Ann, had never actually taken part in an Unveiling, the last occurrence having been in 1876. But when I was a little girl, a few people who had been children during that one were still around, and they described it for me. In any case, the lore would be hard to avoid, for when you are a town in this type of situation, it is something your family and neighbors tend to discuss, however laconic they may be by nature. Up to the moment of my return, however, there had been only two Unveilings in all, and the first was witnessed only by some Indians, since relocated elsewhere, and a handful of horsemen on the move west from a small fort called Detroit.
If there can possibly be so much as a single three-year-old child who feels incompetent to figure out the date of Russell’s Unveilings with no help from I, Mary-Ann—and if so, then God protect you, and it will be a full-time job for Him—they happen, inevitably and gloriously, on the Fourth of July.
For the rest of each century, we natives of Russell can go in and out of our town at will, whether the summons in question is a college we’d like to attend, a war that we’ve heard on the radio we have to go fight in, or simply the lure of Topeka. We’d have to run out on errands in any case, such as fetching back newspapers, movies, TV sets and Sukey Santoit books. But if, on those visits to the outside world, we allow anything to change us—except for events in which we have no say whatsoever, such as our then future and now, I believe, former County Attorney’s near death on a rocky hill in Italy, one day in April 1945—then we become outsiders, and cannot return except at the Unveiling. Those who recalled the Second Unveiling in my childhood said that none of those exiled up to then had come back, presumably finding it too painful.
Crouched on the hood of my rental car, looking out at the wheat fields past the WELCOME sign, I mulled the possible reasons for my banishment. And considering that, in the interim, I had allowed myself to be penetrated multiple and glorious times by an unshaven, chain-smoking movie critic and aspiring post-modern filmmaker in Paris, France, while attending a summer program at the Sorbonne, you may wonder why I even thought an ambiguity existed. But this is to underestimate Russell, Kansas.
We may have sixteen churches. We may live under a sky so unmoved that it could put the fear of God into God. But even our ministers agree that heck, these things happen. Heck, I knew a couple of girls from Russell High who’d come back from weekends in Topeka pregnant, and everybody dealt with it. Maybe they didn’t get asked to help pass the collection plate during services or lead us all in “The Star-Spangled Banner” at pep rallies for a while, but beyond that they weren’t ostracized, much less banished. Their children were raised with the whole town’s help, just as barns were in the old days.
And by now, I had begun to suspect the true explanation for my own banishment, which was that I had come back not only un-pregnant but mysteriously undeflowered; this despite having allowed myself to be penetrated multiple and glorious times, See., See. Clearly, Russell found that too plain weird to fool with.
What had changed me beyond recourse, I now saw, was that I should have changed, and hadn’t. Under the circumstances, my continued—or rather ever-renewable—virginity was abnormal, a mutation paradoxically defined by lack of mutability. Ours may be a town that only magically materializes one day every hundred years, and so forth, but for all that its people are not short on plain horse sense. They knew darned well that something should have happened to me when I went forth out of Russell into this century’s bombs and music. Not unreasonably, they mistrusted the way my unaltered face, re-virginized body, pumping heart, and simple soul all kept insisting nothing had, for all that I myself might have wished otherwise. If I wasn’t a lie of some unprecedented sort, then I was just too strange for them to keep in close proximity. That was that.
Being no fool, although fairly glum at the moment, I, Mary-Ann, did understand I had been given a kind of freedom; albeit one that I had no idea how to use responsibly, or even if it could be used responsibly. I could go away, or I could stay in Kansas—anywhere else in Kansas, that is, unless I wanted to live in my rental car. (The fees on which would soon be astronomical, were I to opt for this plan; I reconsidered.) I could go where I wanted, do as I pleased, and I would never stay deflowered for more than five minutes. Heck, I could take on a whole class of graduating midshipmen at Annapolis if I felt like it, the night before they all shipped out to fly fighter planes off aircraft carriers and fire sixteen inch shells from battleships at some foreign coast somewhere—and I’d still be a virgin in the morning, by golly, and whether or not I cared to be one too.
While I wasn’t sure if this was a curse or just some kind of superpower, one thing you couldn’t call it was restricting. Except for one small limitation that a lot of people—maybe most—would likely find negligible, if they even noticed it existed in the fust place.
That was the fact that I, Mary-Ann, the personification of America,
wasn’t ever going to see my hometown again.
At the time that I got back in my rental car and, blinking away my special astigmatism, started he engine up again, that limitation wasn’t yet, strictly speaking, absolute. I was still only twenty, and the Third Unveiling wasn’t that many years off. Indeed, in my childhood I had often been told that my generation was favored by fortune, as many people’s life spans fell between two Unveilings and they never got to take part in one at all.
Of course, as a sign now reading EMOCLEW shrank into a greeting fit only for ants and then atoms before it disappeared entirely from my rear view mirror, I had no way of knowing that I, Mary-Ann, would be in no position to turn up in Russell on that happy day. Since the years and for that matter the decades all tend to be pretty much alike on the island, I was only guessing that it was even 1976 on the bright, hot, enormous morning that, staring out to sea, I decided to pretend it was the Fourth—and then, an astigmatic moment or two later, to pretend instead it wasn’t.
But before I’d turned the key in the ignition, I knew already, and I mean in my bones, why none of those banished had come back for the last Unveiling. Soon afterward, I reached Route 40; and not until then did it sink in that I could turn in either direction, east or west, and not have any more or any less of a destination. Pulling over and killing the engine while I thought, I now mulled two questions, viz.:
1. Where was I going to go?
2. What was I going to do?
No one was around to help me. Nor, with Jean-Luc several thousand sky- and Gauloise-blue miles away, was there even anyone to say he didn’t give a damn—which might have been a goad, if not precisely a consolation. In any case, after new adventures too much like mimeographs of the old ones to be worth passing around, for all that the purple odor of that quaint reproductive process is memory’s umbilicus to any graduate of Russell High, I ended up in New York.
There I found work as a translator at the United Nations, putting my French language skills and command of idiom, both still sharp as tacks then, to good use. While all the other girl translators were equally proficient if not more so, I had the distinction of being the only American citizen in the bunch, all of my co-workers having been recruited from abroad. Our own government was still reeling from the recent discovery that not one Anglo-Saxon in the United States—all except I, Mary-Ann—spoke a single foreign language anymore, as they found even capable handling of their first one a chore by then. Be that as it may, a second major difference between me and all the other girl translators, obviously, was that none of them had renewable virginities.
As a result, I soon had something of a reputation around the old UN. Still, I’m not sure it was all deserved; is any reputation, ever? The first time I strolled into the lobby of the Plaza, cloaked in a capote from Hats by Audrey and swinging my handbag as if I had a hammer, to see an evidently Latin gentleman in a befrogged and ornate uniform buying up weapons and torture implements at a trade show, I leaped to the same benign conclusion sure to have been lit upon by anybody similarly afflicted wi
th a desire to think the best of people. This was that the hotel’s doorman had just won the lottery, and was naturally of a mind to protect himself from possible desperadoes. Admittedly, as time went on, I did find it odd that the Latin and Asian doormen at both the Plaza and the Sherry-Netherland seemed to win lotteries with such frequency, and always bought weapons, torture implements, and cocktails for me with the proceeds. But then again, America—the land I, Mary-Ann, personify—is a land of opportunity if it’s anything, as my best gal-pal would impishly remind me whenever Holly and I found ourselves bumping gloved elbows in the Four Seasons’ powder room. Or seated together, behind an unforgettably sweet pair of goggling adolescents, at one of the pianist Henry Orient’s madcap Carnegie Hall recitals, as a fractured fuss of whispers around us excitedly spread the gossip of the latest suicide in the Glass family.
At a loss to see a pleasant, polite, and cheerful way of doing so, I never once considered taking that way out myself. That much of Russell I still had in me, impulses to auto-destruction being ruled out not only by our sixteen churches but by our distrust of the hoity-toity and general desire to remain laconic. In Kansas, slashing your wrists is considered one more of the luxuries we’d only be tempted to if we had sophisticated folks’ money and problems, and I was wary of being thought pretentious. Yet I was often bluer than Manhattan’s stony sky.
Among other things, the time lags before my virginity renewed itself after a date had grown longer and more unpredictable. My single most protracted lapse began on a date in late November, 1963, after which I didn’t become a virgin again for almost three whole months. As Thanksgiving’s pilgrim migraine gave way to a coffin-shaped Christmas, a New Year’s Eve without a hat or toot in sight, and then the prison of New York’s bleak February, I wondered, with ambivalence, if this might be It. But one night not long before Valentine’s Day, I was watching television in my apartment with the roommate I had just acquired, who was working on her Barnard master’s thesis—or antithesis, as she oddly called it—and was intellectual but good company. To my surprise, I felt myself turn virginal again while watching The Ed Sullivan Show; but for no reason that I know.
Yesterday never knows.
Even after that reprieve—which was, all things said, a doozy—my mixed feelings persisted. In fact, they grew worse. If running around as a girl translator at the UN and waiting for my virginity to kick back in after every halfway memorable date was what personifying America called for, then I, Mary-Ann, was no longer sure that personifying America was my can of Coca-Cola, my jolt of Jim Beam, my mug of Maxwell House or my whiff of airplane glue. In moments of reflection, usually after seeing mine in some chance shiny duplication of a mobbed but briefly paralytic room, I often fell prey to a disturbing notion. In a mental state midway between rage and mirage, most likely induced by the way my New York life’s peculiar flimsiness and generally makeshift air seemed to put out the welcome mat for delirium, I would catch myself more than half believing that everything I’d done since EMOCLEW receded in my rental car’s rear-view mirror had been the actions of a painted puppet who bore my face and name, yet whose behavior and general situation were caprices over which I had no more control than did whatever stranger might be next to me. Increasingly convinced that none of this was my idea, I wanted to rebel against my own unasked-for nature, and probably would have if I’d known how to go about it.
As she had plainly never given an inch to anyone since whenever she’d lost her virginity, I sometimes thought of asking my new roommate for advice. But she seemed too engrossed in her burgeoning antithesis for me to feel comfortable barging in on her, and by the fall of the same year I was on the island with the others. Anyone can see that even if we had something to rebel against here, that is besides each other, there wouldn’t be much point in trying. It would be like arguing with the sky.
Nor, for that matter, do I feel any desire to—and the distinct lack of get-up-and-go that my current life encourages isn’t the only explanation. That summer of ‘64, not long before I left on the vacation that never quits, a chance encounter made me see my unexpectedly strange life in a new light.
In a furious and therefore most un-if not downright anti-Mary-Annish mood, aching to kick off the traces and rid myself of this whole renewable-virgin, personifying-America load of you-know by hook or by crook, I suddenly found myself seated in a Greenwich Village saloon. To this day, I’m not sure what dragged me there, as I had grown leery of the artistic set after my fling with Jean-Luc ended in such acrimonious mutual perplexity; an aversion putting Carmine Street and environs well outside the ambit of a Mary-Ann-ized Manhattan that consisted in toto of the United Nations General Assembly, a nondescript apartment where I watched Ed Sullivan with my roommate, and a motley slew of midtown nightclubs, midnight powder rooms, and slaloming hotel beds. But I do recall the bar’s name. Freshly painted and indeed being hoisted with some difficulty by a couple of burly workmen as I passed under it, next to a banner reading “Grand Re-Opening Under New Management,” the sign above the door told me that this shadowy place, whatever its previous incarnations, was henceforward to be called The Bar of History.
One stool over, having slammed himself down on it mere moments after I came in, was a bright-eyed, slightly cracked-looking fellow in a mackintosh who looked to be in his early forties, drinking coffee and doodling on a napkin. Once he had drawn me into a conversation, it soon came out that he was even less a New Yorker than I, Mary-Ann, having just dashed up for the day from his home in Virginia.
His name, I think, was Gaingill.
Anywhere this side of a shipwreck, Gaingill and I would have had little in common, he being one of those irksome types whose private grins are more undercut by their public blinks than they know, as well as vice versa; not to mention a man whose jacket evidently hadn’t had to match his pants a single workday of his life. Yet he must have struck me as a sympathetic auditor, for within a few minutes—and to my own astonishment, as I had never breathed a word of it to anyone—I found myself spilling the whole story: being Kilroy’s daughter, sailing to Paris on the S.S. United States, my summer program at the Sorbonne, Jean-Luc, Sukey Santoit, sailing home on the S.S. America, my renewable virginity that I’d paid for with the loss of Russell, Kansas, and my current life as the UN’s most notorious party girl. In short, the works, bedewed with more than one outbreak of my special astigmatism.
All in all and with no aim of self-flattery, I was reasonably sure that the story of my life up to then was a cut or two above the average anecdotes told in bars. Considering that, Gaingill took my narrative remarkably in stride. Then, with a grin whose clear preference for the far side of his face got me suspicious that he might be teasing me, much as JeanLuc used to—the ashtray’s little Père Lachaise of mashed stubs was familiar, though not the perky and brunette Notre Dame that my interlocutor’s eyes were making of I, Mary-Ann, whose reflection in The Bar of History’s mirror he almost seemed to prefer to looking at me directly, as if he feared that doing so too often would turn my features into Medusa’s instead—he gave me his best guess as to the meaning of my uniqueness.
As far as he was concerned, Gaingill explained, my endlessly renewable virginity could only mean one thing. And that one thing was that,
when and if I ever did get pregnant, it was going to be with Jesus.
Except on the jukebox, where the Everly Brothers were trying to wake someone up, things got awfully quiet then in The Bar of History, at least to my own hearing. Now that he’d said it, I was floored that I, MaryAnn, despite having been raised amid sixteen church steeples, had never considered that possibility on my own. And so, Gaingill confessed, was he, since he had thought I’d be smart enough to guess without his help—a belief I promptly validated by figuring out the meaning of the meaning of my uniqueness.
“Wait a minute,” I said, and we did.
“Do you mean God’s my pimp?” I said, when it was up.
He nodded. It was the only explanation that made sense
to him, he said, given my story. So far as he could tell, the Deity Himself had no idea what was really going on anymore, or any sure sense of how to accomplish whatever it was that He was trying to accomplish, and possibly why too; and so He just kept on sending me out into the world, hoping that I and so He would get lucky someday. He was, Gaingill imagined, sorry about Russell, Kansas. But even I, Mary-Ann, couldn’t have everything, Gaingill supposed.
At this point, I gathered that I had some reason to be wary of my new friend; being, as he himself had pointed out, no fool. “Hold your horses, mister,” I said. “I don’t mean to be rude. But is all this just your way of hinting around that you wouldn’t mind giving the job of fathering Our Savior the old college try yourself? Because-”
No, no, Gaingill interrupted me, with a scuttling sort of chortle and an upheld, smoke-wreathed hand. Unless my God’s dark wit knew no bounds, he said, he was an unlikely choice to make a success out of the gig of Holy Ghost, as he was not only an agnostic but an atheist. Personally, he suspected that one reason I had yet to lose my virginity was that more people in this country believed in believing in God than actually believed in Him. But then again, being not only an a but an a., he probably wasn’t the best judge of that, he allowed. After all, he’d once considered buying a dog and naming it Robertson just so he could tell people to pat Robertson.
I didn’t understand this, and Gaingill told me never mind. The fellow in question hosted a sort of cooking show minus utensils on TV, he said. Anyhow, he went on, even an atheist could have a sense of sacrilege, and the mere prospect of attempting sexual congress with the personification of America that I, Mary-Ann was left him feeling so pre-emptively over-whelmed and inadequate that he doubted he’d be able to rise to the occasion even if I were to suddenly up and say ‘O.K. let’s go Gaingill,” which he didn’t consider likely. He’d had a previous experience in this vein in his youth, he said, and offered to tell me about it if I was interested.