Stolen Pleasures (14 page)

One morning, the moment the bell rang, we went quickly into the classroom, wanting to impress Miss Furguson with our eagerness to obey rules. Jolie Lotta's mother was in the headlines of the town newspaper, caught at doing something disastrously wrong, something against the strictest of all rules. Adrianna Lotta, a divorced woman, living with her mother and thirteen-year-old daughter, Jolie, in the Maple Apartments on Bee Street, was found near death at the side of her lover, City Councilman Mack McPorter, a married man, in the Seaside Motel. Asphyxiated by a leaking gas heater, they were both rescued from death in the nick of time. Our eyes alight, we sat down at our desks. Jolie Lotta was absent.

Miss Furguson, of course, knew more than we knew about this event. It was expected of teachers to know more about any event. She said nothing, but what she knew about this one filled out her person, elevating her short stature, swelling her bosom, enriching her voice, giving us a more complete picture of her than we'd ever had, and that usual stance of hers when she faced us, legs close together, feet close together, became curiously noticeable. Entranced, we watched her every move.

Some persons are made more perfect by what befalls them, as if whatever befalls them can never make them less, can never bring them low, as it might others. I figured this out in the five days Jolie Lotta was absent. I'd glance up at Miss Furguson engrossed at her desk and suspect her of perfecting Jolie Lotta ever more. One morning she was with us again, slipping in, paler, less spirited. The girls who had taken her into their circle enclosed her again, a prize.

Not many days after Jolie Lotta's return, Miss Furguson showed us the Japanese tea ceremony. Set before us were two round black cushions with a shimmer to them, so they must be silk, and a low, lacquered table. On the table was a pale green teapot, so precious you felt undeserving of the sight of it, and two little pale green bowls. While we were out at afternoon recess, Miss Furguson had set things up, to surprise us. On her desk was a bouquet of little yellow flowers in a vase. It had not been there before.

She stood before us, facing us, happier than we had ever seen her. The tea ceremony, she said, is perfectly beautiful, as you will see. If Miss Furguson had seemed happy a few other times, those times were not so believable as this. If whatever you call beautiful makes you happy, then that's what beautiful things are for, I thought, especially if they belong to you. I wish, said Miss Furguson, that I could have given each of you a nice clean handkerchief to wipe your hands with before you entered this tearoom. If we were really in Japan, she said, that's what we'd do. I've invited Jolie Lotta to do the honors. We've rehearsed it together and we're pretty confident.

Then Jolie Lotta came forward and knelt down on a cushion, her bare knees touching the floor. She bowed her head to Miss Furguson, who knelt down, less easily, on the other cushion, and there they were, facing each other, their profiles to the class. I thought I might draw their picture together, later, as a way of being an important part of the ceremony, even almost necessary. To begin, said Miss Furguson, we must all admire the teapot and the bowls and even the bamboo whisk. They spent a long minute doing that. Miss Furguson making chirpy sounds of belief, of belief in the beauty of the objects set before them. With a small square
of white silk, each one wiped the rim of her bowl so very much cleaner than any common cup was ever wiped. Then Jolie brought up from the floor a small iron kettle that had been waiting on a pad. Jolie, said Miss Furguson, is pouring the water slowly, very slowly, into the teapot which contains the green tea powder. Now, she said, Jolie is stirring it with the whisk. Too much stirring will make the tea foamy and too little will make the tea watery, so Jolie is stirring it just right, as you can see. Now the tea is steeping, said Miss Furguson. Then Jolie calmly, graciously, poured tea into Miss Furguson's bowl and into her own bowl, and wisps of steam rose up. How fragrant it is, said Miss Furguson, and they took their time inhaling. Then, at last, at last, they sipped their tea. Perfectly beautiful, said Miss Furguson. How perfect. And I knew that I would never draw them. My pen would make only false moves and the picture give away my lacking and my longing.

Nights at home, I thought about that tea ceremony. If Miss Furguson were ever to visit my family, something she'd never do but something I feared anyway, she'd know the worst if she came at supper time. Her suspicions about us, and I knew she had some, would be confirmed before her eyes. Other families sat down together, while each member of my family ate apart. A family askew, a family alone in a rain-stained bungalow in the weeds, faded curtains from the last house that didn't fit the windows of this one, and my parents' bed a sagging fold-out davenport. My brother, who strode the streets all day or besieged our mother with dreams of fabulous wealth, ate by himself like a lone and hungry wolf, the first to be served by my sister. Over in Japan, he'd scare all those tea worshippers out of their wits. Teacups crashing to the floor,
the teapot loudly cracking apart by itself. Our mother, who was served next, who ate more gracefully than anybody I'd ever seen but now sat with the dish in her lap and did not know exactly where in the dish to place her spoon, would never, of course, be invited. Next, my sweet sister and I sat down together, eating our supper just to get it over with, not talking, each knowing enough about what was in the other's unhappy heart. So afraid of making mistakes, my sister would not even be offered a chair where she could sit and watch the ceremony. My father came a long way on the clanking streetcar from the city, from his cluttered little office, and entered quietly, and did not sit down to eat until he had kissed our mother, gently, lovingly, on the top of her head. He placed only one thing at a time on his plate and ate slowly, and his shirt was white, washed and ironed by my sister, and our mother called him noble. My father, I thought, might possibly be acceptable at some celestial tea ceremony in some far distant time. One evening, coming in the door, he caught me doing something I had never done before, kneeling at my mothers slippered feet, begging her to tell me that someday I'd be a somebody.
Tell me, tell me,
I pleaded, and she waved her spoon over my head and said that I would. My father must have known, more than my mother did, what I meant by a somebody. A Somebody out in the world, who'd redeem us all.

One morning Miss Furguson stood up before us and told us something we already knew. We are at war, said Miss Furguson. The Japanese have bombed our territory, they have destroyed our ships, they have killed many of our sailors, and they have done this deceitfully.

The world went awry. It may always have been awry but I hadn't known, being so concentrated on my family awry. The world shattered itself, like that teapot my brother's presence would have caused to crack apart. Everywhere in the world millions of people were dying and great cities were blasted into rubble and dust and families huddled together in basements, hiding down there from inescapable night. Jolie Lotta disappeared from that class and her mother disappeared from the drugstore. I glanced in twice through the display window and could not find her.

Years into the war I began to look for something to call perfectly beautiful. Whatever it was, I couldn't find it again. I heard of a place in another city called a Museum of Art, and I wandered in. Carpets, like sanctification of my otherwise noisy shoes, and fragrance—sandalwood?—throughout the wide spaces, a fragrance I was to return for, again and again, as much as for the objects on their pedestals and in their frames. I stood before each one, or walked around it, at a loss. What I had to do, I saw, was imagine their beauty. What I had to do was dream it up, just what all those artists must have had to do. Wandering around in all that dreamedup beauty, I thought about Jolie Lotta. How she presided at the tea ceremony, how she stirred the tea and poured it, and inhaled its fragrance, and drank it, and nodded in agreement with Miss Furguson that it was all perfectly beautiful, her own self, too, Jolie Lotta, amidst it all. If you could save yourself from a world awry by calling up something beautiful, I called up Jolie Lotta from my memory. Or I must have called her up from my wounded heart, since, even after so long, I wasn't spared the pain of my lacking and my longing.

J
OSEPH CARMODY WAS conspicuously absent from the funeral of his dear friend and mistress of five years, Alice Lawson. The ladies in black, climbing into their cars in the misty cemetery, liked him less and with a definite sense of relief, for they had admired him only for her sake. But when, on the long drive back to the city, Alice's daughter, Ruth, asked querulously, “Where was Joe? I wanted to hold his hand,” those in the car with her glimpsed reluctantly all that he had meant to the girl and her mother.

He came that evening to visit Ruth, said his good evening to the other visitors—Alice's sister and cousin, two small, wealthy women—somberly settled his hefty body at the other end of the sofa from Ruth, who was lying under a comforter, and with weary grace accepted his coffee. While he was stirring his sugar in, more visitors came—the two tall, gray-haired women from the next apartment, who smoked cigarettes and wept, recalling their maternal love for Alice and hers for them, and then, to change the subject for Ruth's sake, told of the ups and downs of their dress shop to the cannily
curious relatives. But the neighbors left soon enough, realizing that it was a family gathering, and after a moment the cousin went into the kitchen to rinse out the cups, and the tap water ran on and on in a forlorn pitch.

Vera, the sister, piled her big tweedy coat over her black jersey dress and sat on a chair arm, swinging her foot and chatting with Joe. “She talks about living in a guest house. I agree it's good experience living with strangers, but it's only good if you've got a family to come home to. If you've got nobody then it's lonely, it's a substitute and you know it. You think so?” She strongly resembled Alice—the light curly hair, the angular face, the tiny, almost skinny body—but her mannerisms were of a different nature; she talked fast, she fussed. “I told her to come and live with Gordon and me. The girls adore her, they think she's so grown-up, being seventeen and all. Then in another year if she wants to move, that's fine. It'll be a healthier thing to do then because she'll have a family, she'll have us.”

Joe looked down at his coffee cup, gazed over at Ruth, saying appealingly with his large brown eyes that he was in no condition to give an opinion now.

“She doesn't know enough about life, don't leave it up to her,” Vera protested. “God knows she's been through enough this year, but at her age you don't learn from your experiences, you repudiate them. She'll think it's tragic and interesting living among strangers, but all the time she'll belong to nobody and pretty soon she'll take up with some kid who'll be mama and papa to her. She'll think he knows all the answers because he recites Eliot, when he won't even know how to blow his nose.”

The cousin returned from the kitchen, picked up her furs, and threw the strap of her alligator purse over her shoulder. The two women bent to Ruth, kissing her on the mouth, sadly, emphatically.

The carpet in the hallway silenced them the instant they left the apartment. That sudden silence always aroused in Ruth the suspicion that visitors stood for a few minutes listening to what was being said about them. Was Aunt Vera laying an anxious ear against the door, afraid that her niece actually would accept the invitation? In that carpeted after-quiet, Ruth recalled her mother's complaints about Vera's lack of sisterly love, recalled the whisperings of the two little girls on their one and only visit to their Aunt Alice, a few weeks ago.

“Shall I heat that cocoa?” Joe asked. “Don't you want it? What did you have for supper?”

“Some toast and an orange.”

“What do you want to do, starve?” He stood up, took the cup from her. “It must be an old superstition still in our blood. We've got to atone for all our sins against the departed one, so we fast. Well, you're going to eat something. You think she wants you to starve yourself?”

While whatever he had found in the kitchen was heating on the stove, he returned to her and penitently squatted down on his heels beside the sofa. “You want to know why I didn't show up today?” he asked. “Because I didn't want to remember it. I didn't want to superimpose it on the things I wanted to remember.” He covered his eyes with his hand. “Sometimes I wonder at myself,” he said. “In order to make her sufferings bearable—to myself, I mean—I likened her to Camille. Not that the illnesses were the same. You mother's was much harder to bear and less adaptable to any romantic story.
But that was the only way I could bear the human, the ugly part of things, by likening her to a romantic figure.”