Mabel was crimping and smoothing a piece of aluminum foil now, drawling in her soft Alabamian, “Well, what is she, a schizo-phren-iac?”
“I don’t know, Mabel. Or a manic-depressive without the manic. Those things don’t mean much to me. She’s just bitterly unhappy in a way she can’t get rid of.”
“They say Napoleon was a manic-depressive,” Jeremy put in, “only he was manic about ninety percent of the time. So was Hitler,” he added.
“I’ll tell you what she is,” Oliver chuckled, entirely to the Jeromes. I recognized the tone. I steeled myself to hear that she was a hysterical cow. “She’s just another one of those sloppy self-indulgent kids who thinks the world owes her a living. She’d be a draft dodger if she was eligible for the draft, which as a matter of fact would be the best thing for her.”
“She needs help,” I said to Mabel.
“What would help her, is to be thrown out on the rotten job market, instead of having it handed to her on a silver platter.”
“Well, but Ahlivah,” Mabel mouthed, “if she tried to kill herself …”
“Oh, she didn’t try to kill herself, that’s just a play for sympathy.”
When Jeremy, this time, started to protest, I jumped in, “I think it’s partly that. But I think when somebody goes that far for sympathy they must need a lot of it.”
Oliver joined us with the eggnog pitcher and an extra fifth of rum, saying in lethal imitation of husbandly indulgence as he spiked a round, “You see, the trouble is that Virginia’s mother raised her up to be Shirley Temple. Two dimples, a soft-shoe routine and a lollipop is the way to cure the world.”
“What?” said Mabel.
“Though as a matter of fact …” Rum and adrenaline lent him a little of his old loose style, which I found irrelevantly attractive. “… as a matter of fact, it is very peculiar for her to turn out to be a one-man welfare state, because she comes from a long line of conservative self-reliers.”
“Shirley Temple is a conservative,” Mabel said.
“Whereas Oliver’s family”—I imitated his waggish tone—“always voted Labour, though as a matter of fact his father never got over six months of being a sergeant, and thought that the way to build character was to kick anybody who fainted on parade drill.”
“I never saw anybody faint twice,” Oliver said.
The girls burst in complaining that there was holly but no berries, and we took dinner into the dining room, dry turkey, hot cranberries, mischosen plates and a severely truncated sense of holiday. I tried not to find myself alone with Oliver, but when I had to come back to the kitchen for a stuffing spoon he followed me in and took hold of my arm.
“You’ll do exactly as you please, won’t you?” he whispered, hot and cold.
“Can’t we leave it till later?”
“You’ll do exactly as you please.”
“Look, Oliver, somebody I know nearly died, and it made me late to dinner. Do you really mean to be such a bastard?”
“Innocent, innocent. Are you pretending you don’t know how I feel about this?”
“No,” I said, “I know how you feel, I just don’t know how you justify it. I don’t know what you can gain by it except just keeping me in line.”
“Nicholson told you to leave her alone and I told you to leave her alone.”
“That’s what I said.”
“And you’ll defy me, won’t you?”
The funny thing is that I had “obey” knocked out of the wedding ceremony with Oliver’s entire concurrence. It was already fashionable. I stared marveling at his mouth, pursed up so there was a whole sunburst of indignant wrinkles around it, and hard marbles of muscle at the corners holding it in that moue. I focused on this expression, which I associated with schoolmarms and dowagers, colonels and connoisseurs, and something about my own fascination scared me right down my thighs. I wanted to say: yes, I’ll defy you. I gave up Jill and got nothing for it. I won’t give up Frances. I meant this and I wanted to say it. But I couldn’t. All I said was, “It’s not that,” and fled with the stuffing spoon.
Did you know that the true cranberry is native only to the acid bogs of the northern United States and Canada? Did you know that the establishment of Thanksgiving as a national holiday is credited to Sarah J. Hale of Ladies Magazine, who pestered President Lincoln with letters and editorials until he proclaimed it in 1863? Did you know that in Canada Thanksgiving is celebrated on the second Monday in October? Jeremy was an encyclopedia of enlightening information. Did you know that Thanatos was the Greek god of death, that the city of Thanjavur is famous for its repoussé work, and that the U in U Thant stands for “uncle,” a title of Burmese respect? Enough of these tidbits slipped out during second helpings that Jeremy, accused, admitted he’d been reading up on Thanksgiving in the Americana. Mabel was fascinated by all of it, including Thanom Kittikachorn and the Thar Desert. What mainly interested Maxine was that whereas she was one hundred percent American, Jill was only half. In her opinion Jill should only get half a piece of pie. Scornful, Jill pointed out that she had two nationalities whereas Maxine had only one. “You’re a half-breed,” said Maxine. “You’re a foreigner,” said Jill. Let us give thanks for our survival through the bitter winter and for this bountiful harvest.
I drank a lot of wine. I couldn’t eat much and I couldn’t stop watching Oliver eat. He didn’t get rid of that expression all the way through dinner; it interfered with the working of his mouth. He cut very small bites and chewed them like he was being filmed for a hygiene and nutrition class, half a dozen rolling thrusts of his jaw to the left and around, half a dozen to the right, a tuck of his chin and a hop of his Adam’s apple: there. When he bit into an iced celery stick I could hear it all the way from my end. I could also hear the squeak of his knife down the back of his fork and across his plate as he made each precise slice of breast. He cut his stuffing into a checkerboard the same way before he picked up the cubes of it one by one. He didn’t look so much like he was eating his food as like he was sentencing it to death.
“Wouldn’t you say, Virginia?”
“What? Sorry, Jeremy.”
“I say it doesn’t so much matter what country you belong to, the important thing is to love your country.”
“I love two countries,” Jill scowled.
“Yes, but she hasn’t been across the ocean, has she, Daddy? She hasn’t been across the Atlantic Ocean!”
“You don’t have a queen!” yelled Jill. “I’m going to tell Miss Hyde-Smith you don’t have any right to sing ‘God Save the Queen!’”
“They’re exhausted,” I said. “Why don’t you let Maxine bed down here and pick her up in the morning?”
“I’m not exhausted,” the girls said in near-unison.
“If you can stop fighting you can watch a half hour of telly. Jill, honey, go get your nightgown on and give one to Maxine.”
“You’re not to!” Jill screamed, blue blitzkrieg out of her eyes. “You’re not to!”
I don’t know what Shirley Temple does in such circumstances. I bounded up and picked her from her chair, pinning her arms in front of her. A thrash of her head flipped one braid into the cranberry dish and drew a jellied path across the tablecloth on the backswing. I knee-bended her out of the room, hoisted her under one arm and up the stairs, where I drew her not very gently by the pigtail to the bathroom basin. All of which convinced her of something or other.
“Hold still.” She held still. I washed out the cranberries, undid both braids and pushed her into her nightgown and into bed.
“Now what’s all this? You’re always begging for Maxine to stay over.”
“I want her to stay over.”
“Then what is it that I’m not to do?”
“You’re not to talk about nightgowns in front of people.” She focused miserably on her counterpane.
“I never heard such nonsense.”
“It’s not nonsense, you’re nonsense. You’re very rude.” It was clear from her mum
ble and a scared catch of breath that this was one of the worst accusations in her vocabulary.
“Do you think the Jeromes never heard of a nightgown before?”
“I don’t care.”
“Fine. I don’t care either. But if I hear another word out of you, you’ll see just how rude I can be.” I went to the door and snapped out the light.
“Daddy’s mad at you!” she blurted. It was not a threat, it was an explanation. I pressed my forehead into the doorframe for a second and then went back to sit on her bed.
“Did Daddy tell you he’s mad at me?”
“Yes.”
“Did he tell you why?”
“Because you were late to your own dinner party. It’s very rude.”
“Okay. But a friend of mine is sick in the hospital, and I wanted to let her know that I was worried about her. Don’t you think it would have been rude to leave her before she waked up?”
“I guess.”
“Then you can see I had a dilemma.”
“What’s a dilemma?”
“A dilemma is when there’s no right thing to do. When whatever you choose, it’ll be wrong some way or other.”
She pondered that. “Tell Daddy you had a dilemma.”
“I will.” I kissed her and hung onto the hug for a minute, thinking what a reasonable person she was after all. “Do you want Maxine to stay?”
“Yes, please.”
I went down, sent Maxine up, made coffee and carried it back into the dining room, where Oliver was pouring finicky dollops of brandy into the oversize snifters. I noticed I was a little drunk. I noticed we were all a little drunk.
“I’m sorry about that,” I said, pointedly adding a more generous splash to my own brandy. “I embarrassed her mentioning her nightgown, if you please. I don’t know how she got on this modesty kick. She didn’t pick it up from me.”
Jeremy leaned forward, rolling his snifter. “Lemme ask you two something. D’you ever worry about her being in an all-girl school?”
“No,” said Oliver.
“I do when she can’t hear the word ‘nightgown’ without throwing a tantrum.”
“No, I don’t mean that.” Jeremy made an artistry stroke at his beard, unbuttoned his jacket and leaned back to give us a full panorama of his tartan waistcoat. “I mean, these crushes they get. We’ve heard some pretty wild stories about what goes on in boarding schools …”
“A schoolgirl crush never did anybody any harm,” I declared recklessly. “I had a dozen of them without setting foot in a girls’ school.”
“No, but I mean …”
“We all know what you mean,” Oliver broke in. Tipsy, he was clipping his words more sharply than before. Snip, snip. “But let me understand you, Virginia. You’re saying that if St. Margaret’s teaches her modesty, that’ll be worse than if it teaches her homosexuality? Is that what you’re saying?”
A dilemma. Which Jeremy saved me from with his own preoccupied “Look. This David Philpott up at the university. You know what he said to me? He said to me: everybody’s part queer. So. What am I supposed to answer to that?”
Mabel said, “David Philpott is a psychologist.”
Her husband turned on her. “So?”
“Well.” Mabel clenched her napkin and spread it open as if to offer visible proof of her purity. She is so breathlessly pretty at forty-five that it has never been necessary for her to alter her schoolgirl stance. “He can’t mean everybody,” she said, for instance, with the urgency of explaining all.
“G’dammit, he said everybody.”
“But he didn’t mean Eskimos.” I think she intended to discredit David Philpott altogether, in support of her husband’s scorn, by suggesting that his notion of “everybody” was as limited as Freud’s had proved to be. She isn’t stupid. She never understands why nobody understands her.
“He bloody well meant me.”
“Well, but, Jesus,” I said, “if the shoe doesn’t fit don’t buy it. Maybe he likes to put people on.”
“But such shit,” said Jeremy, appeased.
“And of course he’s right,” I said.
Oliver ate another piece of pie. He lifted it onto his plate with the spatula and did interesting things to the shape of it, slicing parallel lines from the two long sides of the triangle so that he ended up with a harlequin pattern. Oliver didn’t want this piece of pie. It was a new tactic in a repertoire of tactics for dissociating himself from me.
“Balderdash. Humbug,” Jeremy said.
I was feeling extremely lucid. I know this is a common claim of drunks, but it is not commonly my claim when drunk. On the contrary, when I’ve had a lot to drink I behave more like you’d expect me to behave than you might expect. I say, “I’m so drunk,” even if I’m not, and “I didn’t intend to have so much,” even if I did, and “I didn’t know the punch was so strong,” even if I knew. But tonight I felt very lucid about several things including my drunkenness. I felt very lucid about Oliver’s pie, which was a bit more dimensional than normal. I felt very lucid about what I had to do, which was to make Oliver understand a dilemma as simply as Jill understood it. Since Oliver would refuse to do this, I had to make Jeremy Jerome understand that he found homosexuality threatening in a way that it was not threatening to him. This also seemed terribly urgent. It was not my fault if the subject was one that would anger Oliver above all others, or if his own social code would prevent him from showing anger.
“I never heard such a hill of beans,” Jeremy was spluttering on. “I can tell you for certain I’ve never had a luscious thought about a male member of the species in my life. You might not think it, but I was very athletic in my younger days. Football, hockey …”
“C’mon, Jeremy,” I said, “you haven’t read your Leslie Fiedler. Don’t you know all that old-boy stuff in America is a form of gender-love? In England boys go to boarding school, in America they join the Little League. Don’t tell me you never participated in a good ol’ locker room hug.”
Now Oliver began to stir his coffee, in which there was no sugar or cream, making a perfect whirlpool into which I also stared because it seemed to me that even a very small vortex might offer stillness at its center.
“That farfetched stuff,” Jeremy said and swirled his brandy hard. “If that’s the case, why, what, is it bestiality if I pet my cat?”
“No, that’s exactly what I’m saying.” But I lost the thread of my argument for a minute while the image of Mrs. Fromkirk and her tom flashed into my head and out again. “Anything you like you want to touch, and it isn’t sexual unless it’s … sexual. But the impulse is the same, it’s toward. You back off from anything you dislike. By definition: recoil, repulse, reject. So you pet your cat and you kiss your wife and you nuzzle your daughter. I hugged horses. Look—you want people to lie all over your nudes. What’s that, a marble fetish?”
“That’s sensual, not sexual,” Jeremy said stiffly. “They’re two different things.”
Oliver stopped stirring his coffee long enough to take a vicious slit out of a cigar with a cigar clipper. “I think this is rather naïve. One also moves toward a creature one intends to strangle.”
“Yes, but we aren’t talking about that. We’re talking about whether little girls that stroke each other in a boarding school dorm are damaged by it, or whether they’re just prelapsarian by our social rules. I’d say we’re all part queer, part bestial, part cannibal if you like. We don’t have to live by it. Eventually we choose the lines we draw. The awful thing; yes, well, the awful thing is to draw the lines too soon and cut yourself off from what you really feel. I’d say it’s worse to be modest at seven and a half. Yes; I’d say that.”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Mabel murmured, rolling the tablecloth from its hem. “I led a very sheltered life.”
“So did I. But—listen, why is all this so threatening to you? Listen, I played my share of doctor; it hasn’t deformed me. Let me tell you. When I was eleven or so there was a Mexican gi
rl that came to the trailer court. Felicita Alvarez. Her father had started out as a migrant laborer and worked himself up to the scrap paper business. I wasn’t supposed to play with her, she was bound to have lice or Catholicism or something. But I was dazzled by her. She had masses of thick black hair to her waist, and skin like polished wood. She was fourteen, and she walked like a woman, a hand on her hip, tossing her hair. I’d have done anything in the world to impress her. I drew dozens of sketches of her. But the best thing I found, I taught her about the theater. Very high tone, yes? I called it improvisation, out of my school drama class. I’d be the boy, then she’d be the boy, we saved each other from forest fires or else we were the prince and the peasant girl that met in Liechtenstein. And we fell in love. We always fell in love; it was drama. That way we could explore each others bodies in the name of Stanislavski. Maybe it was De Mille.”
Suddenly the cone of Oliver’s swirling coffee inverted itself into the perfect dark nubile breast of Felicita Alvarez in the crabgrass under the concrete pile of the railroad bridge. Dollar crabs only a few feet below us on the channel rocks, and the SP due to thunder overhead—not to mention my parents only just out of sight over the bank, and God above the SP ready with his thunder … such a lucid sense of sin. And of course I was talking contradictory crap (the style of our times) because at eleven I had drawn my lines. I had a clear and delicious, bounded category: sin. If only I could find, now, such unequivocal commandments as I lived by at eleven. If only I knew one forbidden and delicious thing I could willfully do, instead of sitting here dully propagating these several mortal and venial revenges against my husband, against my will, while he hates me by stirring his coffee and I punish him by talking, talking importunately at random of memories of adolescent sin.
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