The Bleeding Heart

by Marilyn French

  “Well, if it’s any consolation to you, I was jealous too. Poor Vickie: she must have felt that.”

  “Well, I don’t know.” He leaned back comfortably, his arm around Dolores’s shoulders. “Sometimes I get to feel there’s some kind of conspiracy among women.”

  “There is, of course,” she smiled. “Rather like the one among men.”

  “What did it?” He was smiling at her, but there was something hard in his smile. “What brought the two of you together so fast?”

  She shrugged. “You saw. Just our experience of being women in a male world. And talking about feelings, I suppose.”

  “No. There’s something you’re not telling me. There was something between you, something more….” He was still smiling, but the smile was fixed, there was an edge to it that frightened Dolores a little. She thought she would not like to be an employee of his, facing a smile like that.

  “There is something I’m not telling you, but I can’t.”

  His whole body seemed to rigidity, although he barely moved.

  “Why?”

  “It’s Vickie’s story. Her … secret, I guess. Shell tell you, I know she will. She wants to, but I think she’s a little intimidated by you.”

  His muscles loosened. “Oh,” Then tensed again. “She’s not pregnant?”

  She laughed. “Not that I know of.”

  He sat back again, looking grouchy. “Some man, I suppose.”

  “I suppose.”

  “You know! It’s not right. I’m her father! What did the bastard do?”

  “How can you be so sure he’s a bastard?”

  “All men are bastards.”

  “That’s what Anthony used to say, too.”

  “Well, it’s true.”

  “Why should any of us get involved with you then?”

  “I didn’t mean me, Dolores!” And took her in his arms. Later, he said, “Don’t go back.”

  “To Oxford? I have to.”

  “No you don’t. You could just as well work here. At the museum.”

  She considered. It had been a wonderful two weeks. She tried to remember her objections.

  “I couldn’t answer the telephone. If one of my kids needed me …”

  “Christ, we’ll get another phone!”

  “And where will you hide me when visiting eminences descend who aren’t your daughter? And what will you do with me when you have to go to Oxford? Take me to the Randolph with you?” A little nasty tone in that last. He heard it. An eyelash flickered, or a hair in his nose. Something.

  “If another eminence descends, I’ll introduce you. I’ll invite you to dinner with us. Boy, will you be sorry!”

  She smiled, took his hand. “Sweetheart, I think it’s better if I have my own place. Where I don’t ever have to hide from anybody. A place to go if I happen to get mad at you.”

  “Are you planning to get mad at me?”

  “No, but it is conceivable. I have felt anger at you.”

  “When?”

  But she could not remember. She searched her mind. “Well, that first time, when you left….”

  He dismissed that. “That was early. I didn’t know you then.”

  “And you do now.”

  He gave her a look that said: don’t be so uppity. I realize of course that you are immeasurably mysterious. But I know you well enough for all that.

  “I have to have my own place.”

  He sighed.

  “It’s better this way. Really.”

  “Better for whom?”

  “For both of us. For us.”

  “Somehow that sounds suspiciously like a parent telling a kid he’s spanking him for his own good.”

  “But it stands to reason, doesn’t it? that if I’m happier, we’ll be happier?”

  “Umm. And that sounds suspiciously like what I used to tell Edith when I wanted my own way.”

  4

  DOLORES WENT BACK TO Oxford. The sun rose late and set early; the sky looked grey and about-to-rain most of the time; and not a snowdrop appeared, poking its white fresh head above the tarnished grass, until the very end of January. But between Victor and Dolores, rainbows shimmered. They went cycling and for tramps through the woods; they ate out or in; they went to hear music in the Oxford chapels; they sat before the fire, holding hands; they talked; they made love. Their lips stayed wine for each other.

  She was inclined to glint I-told-you-so at him; he was inclined to suggest that more of a good thing could only be better. But, he said, it certainly wasn’t drab. Drabness and boredom were the two great curses, he said. Coming home night after night to the same old things—same old food, same old conversation, same old questions. Same kids having the same old squabbles, same old gossip about the same old neighbors, same TV blaring the same vapidities.

  Nothing was worse than drabness and boredom, Victor said.

  Dolores thought about worse things: death camps; gulags; torture cells in Iran Chile Brazil the Philippines Argentina Cambodia. Identification passes and black encampments in South Africa Rhodesia.

  Boredom and drabness, Victor said, were the things he dreaded most.

  Dolores tried to think what she dreaded most. Not death, not pain, bad as those were, because there was no point in dreading them, they were inevitable. Not natural catastrophe, bad as it was, because there was no point in dreading it since it was unpredictable. She knew what she dreaded most: the complete take-over of the world by a mentality she privately called Nazi. No relation to any political party in any country; found everywhere, indigenous on planet earth. And gaining every day.

  The Nazis, after all, were only the epitome, the egregious example in her own lifetime of a common enough tendency, found on your own block, found maybe in your own house. Started from the belief that some people were inherently better than others, were by birth entitled to what they called rights, but were really privileges not extended to others. Color them legitimate. The “in” group then made nice neat (or not so neat) demarcations among the others: some people were more entitled to respect by the legitimates than others. Color most of them white, and all of them male. There were even a few white Jews and some almost white niggers, if you looked hard. Not for some Nazis, of course. Some Nazis were more fastidious.

  But everybody, and in time, everything, was ranked, And even the legitimates in one place became less so in another. The department head strode around like a martinet until he went up in the elevator to the top floor and met the president, and quavered. And the man on the assembly line had to take all kinds of shit from his foreman, but when he was with his buddies in the bowling alley, he was king of the hill. But all men had one unfailing area where they were legitimate, and that was with their women. Maybe with all women. Used to be, social class kept some men from daring to approach some women, but not anymore. Democracy had made all women open to anything from all men.

  And the way you run this shop is through the brain: everybody is convinced that the people who say they are legitimate are legitimate. So everybody runs in fear, abject to authority. And everybody who has any hope at all aims for the top floor where the chairman lives. The chairman has no face and no body either. He has a uniform with a blank on top of it and he lives always at the tops of high buildings, or in fortresses on islands in warm waters. He goes up and down in private elevators and never encounters anything unfriendly, anything untamed—not people or weather or a hostile editorial. His underlings make sure of this.

  And it is very scary to be in such a position, so you have to keep securing it. You severely rank the country. You put half the people in death camps or gulags or poverty or maybe you actually kill them—but for such a direct method, you may be called mad by other nations, as is Idi Amin. Then you put safe women in great houses where they can be inseminated only by those with the proper credentials, so you can raise a race of legitimates. The rest deserve what they get. Eventually, you tell your confidants, the world will be a great stall for a few black-jacketed or bro
wn-shirted men to romp in, and everyone else will be dead or at-your-service.

  But it is still scary, yes, because to secure your legitimacy, everyone else must be disinherited. And in time, the legitimate must hear the cries of the starving hordes just beyond the iron gates, and so must build higher and higher iron gates, pile more concrete around the bunker, must drink only bottled and tested water, breathe only canned and tested air.

  Power held and loved and cherished in the hands for no other end than itself, yes. Oh, eventually, it dies, of course. It goes round and round, eating everything in sight, and never excreting, jealous of conferring, by accident, one magical bit of itself that might be seized upon and used by the unlawful to work a spell. So, bloated and glutted, it topples over, unable to control its own swollen body.

  Except that now they were working on better and better ways to control—buttons and wires and wirelesses and computers that could reach not only the four corners of the earth, but even to space. And anyway, it is no consolation that the legitimates die, because there are always new ones to spring up and take their places, claiming transcendence, claiming invulnerability. And besides that, they always take us with them. Certainly. Look, there, that pink-cheeked boy with the tam and the rifle, standing scared on the street corner, he never finished school, and the army at least paid a decent wage, so there he is, but just behind him (he can’t see them, but look and you will) are some children, not much older than eleven, sneaking up behind him, three of them, boys, with a bomb, just a little one. There! now you see the explosion, and the pink cheeks and the tam are in slivers, the boys didn’t do much better, one ran faster and got away with one leg intact, the others lie there, their blood mingling with the soldier’s now, in death, when it is too late.

  Yes, and there is a slender golden-skinned boy with fair hair, who used to play with his sister on the veldt, and who always had to be reminded to brush his teeth, but who learned to obey because his father had a broad belt, and right this minute he is lifting his rifle, aiming it at a brown-skinned boy in a tree whom he takes for a guerilla, and who knows? maybe he is. CRACK! goes the rifle. DOWN falls the brown-skinned boy, the branches break as he hits them, his head clobbers the ground like a coconut and the brains spill out and the golden-skinned boy turns away a little ill, and pulls his illness together and molds it into righteousness and marches home and announces his feat. Never again will he cry: he will only shout. That’s how the transcendents do away with pain.

  Yes, and there, that one, he isn’t very old, younger than Tony, he looks a little like Tony, same dark hair and sensual mouth and eyes. He too learned early to obey Father, and Father stands behind him now, Father-Commandant, Father-Superior, Father-in-Heaven, ordering him to do it, to do it, to place the electrodes on the woman’s vulva, and he does, and the switch is pulled, and the woman shrieks and writhes and passes out, there is a terrible smell of burning flesh and the Father says good and the boy creeps back to his quarters and lies on his bunk with his legs drawn up into his stomach and tries not to think, tries to remember his village, but all he can remember there is hunger.

  And if he grows up, he too will have to be a Father, for his guilt will permit him no other alternative.

  Yes, yes, but maybe it’s no worse now than it ever was. Maybe she shouldn’t dread it as if it were the end of a livable world, maybe things had always been this bad only you didn’t know about it.

  Picture: a hovel in bare country, scrub trees and sandy soil, people bent and wrinkled and nearly toothless by thirty (even though they didn’t eat white bread), bodies permanently stiffened into odd postures by work and cold, calloused feet wrapped in rags, minds nearly crazy with hunger and ignorance. Cold indoors and out; never enough fuel to do much more than bake the bread that is usually their only meal, and to keep a spark of the fire going. They milk the cow with stiff fingers, and bring it and their chickens indoors with them at night. The woman nurses her children as long as she can, or until they die. If they die quickly, she nurses herself into a cup and feeds the two who have somehow, miraculously, lived.

  Their farm is in Cornwall, on the rough ragged coast, or in Crabbe country, perhaps. It is the middle of the fifteenth century. The country is falling apart, between civil wars and the plague. And one day up rides this band of marauders, wild, crazy-eyed kids out of the army because of missing eyes or limbs and no dole, but still able to ride. Come tearing up on hungry horses and rip the bread from their hands, kill the children, rape the woman, murder the man and then the woman, and burn the hovel. So mean it didn’t require burning, it would have retreated back into the earth in no time at all.

  Four skinny bodies wrapped in rags, two of them tiny, lie on the dirt floor as the straw flares and catches. The crazy kids yell crazily. They kill the cow and eat it over a couple of days until it begins to stink. Then they kill the chickens and eat them with the feathers still clinging in places. Then they ride off to find another hovel. It will be days before they do, and two of them will be dead by then.

  “As our life is very short, so is it very miserable; and therefore it is well it is short.” Jeremy Taylor should be resurrected and taken on a junket to Marin County.

  Things are better, aren’t they?

  Still: who before the twentieth century could have imagined a long line of railroad tracks with connections to all of Europe, dotted all along the way with little white railroad stationhouses, decorated with pots of bright flowers and quaint signs bearing phony names? All designed to calm down people who couldn’t get away anyhow, who were going to places that had signs over them saying Arbeit Macht Frei, where they would be forced to work. Slavery is an old institution, but what kind of insane slavery was that? It was the first wave, how many millions? the first line of the ridding the earth of the untouchables, the forever and irredeemably illegitimate. There were to be many more, but the giant toppled. It doesn’t matter. He lives elsewhere.

  And yet we forget. We forget it all, as we forget the Albigensians, the Amalekites, what they did to Joan. Even though the signs are still there, we forget.

  What lies beyond the signs is beyond imagining. You have to see it. You have to go to Theresienstadt, climb out the single lookout tower that is left, and gaze out at miles of silence. Not a single red patch stains the dry brown earth, for all the blood that was spilled there. The wind blows through and doesn’t weep as it passes, for all the cries that were heard there. And for all the agony that was felt there, there is no monument, no bleeding heart set into the image of a god, nothing but the barren earth. Not a wall remains. No voice comes on the soft wind late at night and sings lamentations.

  At Auschwitz the ovens stand empty, birds sing in the trees surrounding the compound, they peck in the earth. In a display case huge as a truck are shoes and boots taken from the prisoners. The boots crinkle and curl down, sad as bassets’ eyes, but no sigh wrinkles the air. Even the visitors keep their mouths shut.

  No depiction of human pain can ever suggest its reality. Even the earth doesn’t remember, it doesn’t want to remember. The world would drown in its own tears if it ever let itself feel its grief.

  So maybe their way is better. Forget it! Onward and upward! Hey, young feller, pick yourself up (and wipe them tears offa your cheek), dust yourself off and GET OUT THERE AND WIN THAT GAME!

  LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, HE’S COMING BACK! LISTEN TO THAT APPLAUSE! NOTHING CAN STOP HIM! Not osteomyelitis or his bad heart or his broken knee or his fractured collarbone or his ingrown toenail or his wife in the loony bin or his mother on the dry-out farm or his little baby kidnapped: NOTHING! HE’S DOING IT FOR THE OLD MAN, LOOK AT HIM, WILL YOU, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE HERO’S FATHER STANDING UP! STANDING UP!

  The hero is running off and off, into the future with a bomb in his arms.

  Yes, but you had to admit it was a way of surviving. They deny pain. Is your way any better?

  To deny pain you must deny all feeling. Denying feeling leads to insanity.

  And who’
s the most insane person around here, huh?

  It’s true. Watching TV one night back in the States, the evening news. Report on a new weight-losing technique: Diet with Jesus. The women (they were, of course, all women) gathered weekly, were weighed, compared statistics, and read the Bible and prayed together. Sufficient faith, they insisted, would sustain them in their ordeal. The interviewer homed in on a woman who was not at all fat, even on TV.

  Microphone in hand, hushed voice, reverent attitude, crock of shit: “You have just listened to a passage from the Bible. Tell me, what did it mean to you?”

  The woman had a soft Southern voice, a sweet manner, a child’s eyes: “That passage tells me that I don’t need to eat to feel filled. It tells me that Jesus will fill me with His love.”

  Dolores had (naturally) burst into tears.

  Everyone is a woman to somebody, but everyone doesn’t admit it.

  That nice Southern lady, there, she should have an affair. It was guaranteed to work, for a month or six. Of course she won’t. Too pious: a good girl. Slowly, over the years, she will dry up, begin to say Tssk at movies with too much flesh in them, begin to feel what so many people felt, that sex was the deepest evil. (Forgetting the dry earth, not knowing about Theresienstadt.) She was a nice woman, she’d try not to turn vicious. She’d screw her face up into a smile and although somebody could see the trembling at the corners of her mouth, nobody would mention it, and she would say that she certainly did try to understand the young people of today even though she, of course, came from a different generation.

  She might try tranks or booze or tennis or golf or bridge. She’d sit in a chair in front of the TV and her mouth would crinkle up and she’d read romances in which every titillation and no consummation occurred. Sundays she’d go to church and Thursday nights to the Ladies’ Auxiliary.