Lady Oracle (5 page)

I’d need a working title.
The Lord of Redmond Grange
, I thought, or, better still,
Terror at Redmond Grange
. Terror was one of my specialties; that and historical detail. Or perhaps something with the word
Love
in it: love was a big seller. For years I’d been trying to get love and terror into the same title, but it was difficult.
Love and Terror at Redmond Grange
would be far too long, and it sounded too much like
The Bobbsey Twins at Sunset Beach. My Love Was Terror …
too Mickey Spillane.
Stalked by Love
, that would do in a pinch.

I’d also need a typewriter. I touch-typed everything; it was faster, and in my business speed was important. I was a good typist; at my high school typing was regarded as a female secondary sex characteristic, like breasts. Perhaps I could buy a secondhand typewriter in Rome. Then I could fill in the opening pages, write another eight or nine chapters, and send them to Hermes Books with a covering letter explaining that I’d moved to Italy on account of my health. They’d never seen me, they knew me only by my other name. They thought I was a middle-aged ex-librarian, overweight and shy. Practically a recluse, in fact, and allergic to dust, wool, fish, cigarette smoke and alcohol, as I’d explained to them when declining
lunches. I’d always tried to keep my two names and identities as separate as possible.

Arthur never found out that I wrote Costume Gothics. At first I worked on them only when he was out. Later I would go into the bedroom, close the door, and tell him I was studying for some university extension course or other: Chinese Pottery, Comparative Religion, courses I never managed to complete for the simple reason that I never really took them.

Why did I never tell him? It was fear, mostly. When I first met him he talked a lot about wanting a woman whose mind he could respect, and I knew that if he found out I’d written
The Secret of Morgrave Manor
he wouldn’t respect mine. I wanted very much to have a respectable mind. Arthur’s friends and the books he read, which always had footnotes, and the causes he took up made me feel deficient and somehow absurd, a sort of intellectual village idiot, and revealing my profession would certainly have made it worse. These books, with their covers featuring gloomy, foreboding castles and apprehensive maidens in modified nightgowns, hair streaming in the wind, eyes bulging like those of a goiter victim, toes poised for flight, would be considered trash of the lowest order. Worse than trash, for didn’t they exploit the masses, corrupt by distracting, and perpetuate degrading stereotypes of women as helpless and persecuted? They did and I knew it, but I couldn’t stop.

“You’re an intelligent woman,” Arthur would have said. He always said this before an exposition of some failing of mine, but also he really believed it. His exasperation with me was like that of a father with smart kids who got bad report cards.

He wouldn’t have understood. He wouldn’t have been able to understand in the least the desire, the pure quintessential need of my readers for escape, a thing I myself understood only too well. Life had been hard on them and they had not fought back, they’d collapsed like soufflés in a high wind. Escape wasn’t a luxury for
them, it was a necessity. They had to get it somehow. And when they were too tired to invent escapes of their own, mine were available for them at the corner drugstore, neatly packaged like the other painkillers. They could be taken in capsule form, quickly and discreetly, during those moments when the hair-dryer was stiffening the curls around their plastic rollers or the bath oil in the bath was turning their skins to pink velvet, leaving a ring in the tub to be removed later with Ajax Cleanser, which would make their hands smell like a hospital and cause their husbands to remark that they were about as sexy as a dishcloth. Then they would mourn their lack of beauty, their departing youth.… I knew all about escape, I was brought up on it.

The heroines of my books were mere stand-ins: their features were never clearly defined, their faces were putty which each reader could reshape into her own, adding a little beauty. In hundreds of thousands of houses these hidden selves rose at night from the mundane beds of their owners to go forth on adventures so complicated and enticing that they couldn’t be confessed to anyone, least of all to the husbands who lay snoring their enchanted snores and dabbling with nothing more recondite than a Playboy Bunny. I knew my readers well, I went to school with them, I was the good sport, I volunteered for committees, I decorated the high-school gym with signs that read
HOWDY HOP
and
SNOWBALL STOMP
and then went home and ate peanut butter sandwiches and read paperback novels while everyone else was dancing. I was Miss Personality, confidante and true friend. They told me all.

Now I could play fairy godmother to them, despite their obvious defects, their calves which were too skinny, those disfiguring hairs on their upper lips, much deplored in cramped ads at the backs of movie magazines, their elbows knobby as chickens’ knees. I had the power to turn them from pumpkins to pure gold. War, politics and explorations up the Amazon, those other great escapes, were by and large denied them, and they weren’t much interested in hockey or
football, games they couldn’t play Why refuse them their castles, their persecutors and their princes, and come to think of it, who the hell was Arthur to talk about social relevance? Sometimes his goddamned theories and ideologies made me puke. The truth was that I dealt in hope, I offered a vision of a better world, however preposterous. Was that so terrible? I couldn’t see that it was much different from the visions Arthur and his friends offered, and it was just as realistic. So you’re interested in the people, the workers, I would say to him during my solitary midnight justifications. Well, that’s what the people and the workers read, the female ones anyway, when they have time to read at all and they can’t face the social realism of
True Confessions
. They read my books. Figure that out.

But that would have been going too far, that would have been treading on Arthur’s most sensitive and sacred toe. It would be better to approach it from a materialist-determinist angle: “Arthur, this happens to be something I’m good at and suited for. I discovered it by accident but then I became hooked, I turned professional and now it’s the only way I know of earning a living. As the whores say, why the hell should I be a waitress? You’re always telling me women should become whole people through meaningful work and you’ve been nagging at me to get some. Well, this is my work and I find it meaningful. And I’m hardly an idle drone, I’ve written fifteen of these things.”

Arthur wouldn’t have bought this, however. Marlene the paragon had worked as a typesetter for three months (“You can’t really understand the workers until you’ve been on the inside with them”), and for Arthur, the snob, nothing less would do.

Poor Arthur. I thought about him, all alone in our apartment, surrounded by the rubble of our marriage. What was he doing at that instant? Was he stuffing my red and orange gowns into a Crippled Civilians bag, emptying my makeup drawer into the garbage? Was he leafing through the scrapbook I’d started to keep in those first weeks
of childish excitement after
Lady Oracle
had appeared? How naive to have thought they would all finally respect me.… The scrapbook would go into the trash, along with all the other scraps of me that were left on the other side. What would he keep, a glove, a shoe?

Perhaps he was regretting. This was a new thought: he was feeling melancholy, bereaved even, as I was. It struck me that I might have misjudged him. Suppose he no longer hated me, suppose he had given up revenge. Perhaps I’d done something terrible to him, something final. Should I send him an anonymous postcard from Rome
– Joan is not dead, signed, A Friend –
to cheer him up?

I should have trusted him more. I should have been honest from the beginning, expressed my feelings, told him everything. (But if he’d known what I was really like, would he still have loved me?) The trouble was that I wanted to maintain his illusions for him intact, and it was easy to do, all it needed was a little restraint: I simply never told him anything important.

But it wasn’t more honesty that would have saved me, I thought; it was more dishonesty. In my experience, honesty and expressing your feelings could lead to only one thing. Disaster.

I
f you let one worm out of a can of worms, all the other worms will follow. Aunt Lou used to say that; she had many useful maxims, some traditional, some invented by her. For instance, I’ve heard “The tongue is the enemy of the neck” elsewhere, but never “There’s more than one cat in any bag” or “Don’t count on your rabbits before they’re out of the hat.” Aunt Lou believed in discretion, though only in important matters.

That was one reason I never told Arthur much about my mother. If I’d started on her, he would’ve found out about me soon enough. I invented a mother for his benefit, a kind, placid woman who died of a rare disease – lupus, I think it was – shortly after I met him.

Luckily he was never very curious about my past: he was too busy telling me about his. I heard all about his own mother: how she’d claimed to have known the very instant Arthur was conceived and had dedicated him to the ministry (Anglican) right then and there in her womb, how she’d threatened to cut his thumbs off when she caught him playing with himself at the age of four. I knew about his contempt for her and for her belief in hard work and achievement,
so curiously like his own, and about his fear of her orderliness, symbolized by her flower borders which he was forced to weed. I heard about her dislike of drinking and also about his father’s bar in the recreation room in that Fredericton judge’s mansion he claimed to have left so far behind, with the miniature gold Scotsmen’s heads on the bottletops, perversely like nipples, or so I imagined them. I knew about the various hysterical letters his mother had written, disowning him for this or that, politics, religion, sex. One came when she learned we were living together, and she never did forgive me.

To all these monstrosities and injustices I listened faithfully, partly out of a hope that I would gradually come to understand him, but mostly from habit. At one stage of my life I was a good listener, I cultivated listening, I figured I’d better be good at it because I wasn’t very good at anything else. I would listen to anyone about anything, murmuring at appropriate moments, reassuring, noncommittal, sympathetic as a pillow. I even took up eavesdropping behind doors and in buses and restaurants, but this was hardly the same, since it was unilateral. So it was easy to listen to Arthur, and I ended up knowing a lot more about his mother than he did about mine, not that it did me much good. Knowledge isn’t necessarily power.

I did tell him one thing though, which should’ve made more of an impression on him than it did: my mother named me after Joan Crawford. This is one of the things that always puzzled me about her. Did she name me after Joan Crawford because she wanted me to be like the screen characters she played – beautiful, ambitious, ruthless, destructive to men – or because she wanted me to be successful? Joan Crawford worked hard, she had willpower, she built herself up from nothing, according to my mother. Did she give me someone else’s name because she wanted me never to have a name of my own? Come to think of it, Joan Crawford didn’t have a name of her own either. Her real name was Lucille LeSueur, which would have suited me much better. Lucy the Sweat. When I was eight or
nine and my mother would look at me and say musingly, “To think that I named you after Joan Crawford,” my stomach would contract and plummet and I would be overcome with shame; I knew I was being reproached, but I’m still not sure what for. There’s more than one side to Joan Crawford, though. In fact there was something tragic about Joan Crawford, she had big serious eyes, an unhappy mouth and high cheekbones, unfortunate things happened to her. Perhaps that was it. Or, and this is important: Joan Crawford was thin.

I was not, and this is one of the many things for which my mother never quite forgave me. At first I was merely plump; in the earliest snapshots in my mother’s album I was a healthy baby, not much heftier than most, and the only peculiar thing is that I was never looking at the camera; instead I was trying to get something into my mouth: a toy, a hand, a bottle. The photos went on in an orderly series; though I didn’t exactly become rounder, I failed to lose what is usually referred to as baby fat. When I reached the age of six the pictures stopped abruptly. This must have been when my mother gave up on me, for it was she who used to take them; perhaps she no longer wanted my growth recorded. She had decided I would not do.

I became aware of this fairly soon. My mother had enrolled me in a dancing school, where a woman called Miss Flegg, who was almost as slender and disapproving as my mother, taught tap dancing and ballet. The classes were held in a long room over a butcher shop, and I could always remember the way the smell of sawdust and raw meat gave way to the muggy scent of exhausted feet, mingled with Miss Flegg’s Yardley cologne, as I trudged up the dusty stairs. My mother took this step partly because it was fashionable to enroll seven-year-old girls in dancing schools – Hollywood musicals were still popular – and partly because she hoped it would make me less chubby. She didn’t say this to me, she said it to Miss Flegg; she was not yet calling me fat.

I loved dancing school. I was even quite good at the actual dancing, although Miss Flegg sometimes rapped her classroom pointer sharply on the floor and said, “Joan dear, I wish you would stop thumping.” Like most little girls of that time I idealized ballet dancers, it was something girls could do, and I used to press my short piggy nose up against jewelry store windows and goggle at the china music-box figurines of shiny ladies in brittle pink skirts, with roses on their hard ceramic heads, and imagine myself leaping through the air, lifted by a thin man in black tights, light as a kite and wearing a modified doily, my hair full of rhinestones and glittering like hope. I worked hard at the classes, I concentrated, and I even used to practice at home, wrapping myself in a discarded lace bathroom curtain I had begged from my mother as she was about to stuff it into the garbage can. She washed it first though; she didn’t like dirt. I longed for a pair of satin toe shoes, but we were too young, Miss Flegg explained, the bones in our feet had not hardened. So I had to settle for black slippers with an unromantic elastic over the instep.