Superior Women (30 page)

Peg has left her own house in a hurry, having errands to do on her way to see Cornelia: she stopped by Cornelia’s house with some hastily bought presents for the children, and she has with her a present for Cornelia. (She did not even stop to call Lavinia, to say goodbye, she now guiltily thinks.) Nor did she get dressed up; she is wearing the old college Levi’s that she had put on at breakfast. And now, confronting one hospital official after another, including a succession of hostile nurses, she wishes that she had got dressed. No one cares in the slightest whether or not she finds Cornelia Smith, who is there for an unknown and probably suspicious ailment.

The smells of disinfectant and of medicine have begun to give Peg a headache. As she hurries through those corridors and wards she gets glimpses of bloody bandages, of faces drawn in pain, and of tearful visitors, sitting miserably on the hard waiting room benches. She sees tiny fearful (Negro) children in oversized wheelchairs, or on crutches.

But finally, in a narrow white bed, in a roomful of beds, she comes to Cornelia: Cornelia, ashen-faced, dopey, weakly crying.
She barely smiles as Peg comes up to her, she only murmurs, “Miz Sinclair.”

Peg takes her hand; she is thinking how beautiful Cornelia is, more beautiful than Lavinia ever was, even.

“Miz Sinclair, they done took it out. They done took everything out of me,” Cornelia cries.

“Oh, Cornelia, how do you mean? What was wrong?”

“I ain’t no more woman, they done took it out.”

“A hysterectomy? Is that what they said—did you hear that word?”

“Yes’m, they say that.” And Cornelia cries harder, sniffling, holding her fist to her nose and wiping at tears.

Wishing she had a handkerchief or even some Kleenex to offer, Peg feebly says, “Oh, Cornelia, oh, that’s too bad.”

“They just took it all out!” Cornelia begins to cry harder, her words making what she feels worse.

Peg wonders if her visit is doing any good; she does not feel helpful, or cheering.

“Cornelia,” she tries to ask, “is there anything I could bring you, anything you need? I took some things over to your house for the children, just some food and a few clothes, some toys, so don’t worry. They all looked fine—”

“I just need to be back where I was before,” Cornelia moans.

“But Cornelia, now you won’t have all that trouble every month. And you really didn’t want any more children, did you?”

“No’m, I didn’t, but I might, some year. Somethin’ could happen to these ones that I have.” And she cries and cries.

Peg has brought Cornelia a pink silk nightgown; having had no idea what to bring, she was caught by a display of gowns, in the department store where she went to look for children’s toys. Deciding that it might at least be a diversion, she holds out the box, as she says, “Here, I thought you might like this.”

Quieted, for the moment, Cornelia takes and begins to unwrap the present; she even smiles. But then as she parts the tissue and comes to the actual gown, her tears begin again, coming harder and faster than before. “But I got no more use—,” she gets out, with the most terrible plaintiveness.

After a dull, uncomprehending moment, Peg suddenly understands that Cornelia believes her sexual life to be over: the nightgown will not do her any good, with men. And of course she, Peg, must tell her that this is not true. Which seems impossible. They don’t talk about sex, they have no words for it.

“Cornelia, what you think isn’t really true,” she clumsily attempts. “I mean, you can still find some nice man, who loves you.” For a minute she is too embarrassed by the transparent silliness of what she is saying to continue: Cornelia has never yet and most likely never will find a nice man to love her. Peg forces herself to say what is more nearly true. “Cornelia, you can still have intercourse. Have sex, if you want to.”

But do you want to, Peg would like to ask; did you ever enjoy it, really? Or do you feel, possibly, as I do, that it’s something you have to do for men?

Cornelia gives her a look of sheer disbelief, in which there is some anger, as though Peg were willfully misleading her, one more treacherous white person, meddling where she has no business to be.

Peg touches her arm. “Cornelia, look, I’ll come back tomorrow, okay? And you be thinking about what you need. Cornelia, tell me, what’s the name of your doctor?”

“But if the tumors weren’t malignant, I don’t quite see—” Lack of medical information makes Peg stop, and she wonders, how
can
women know so little about their bodies? Or, do men really know much more about theirs—or ours?

Ignorance, coupled with habitual shyness, awkwardness, make this phone conversation with Cornelia’s doctor almost impossible. But Peg is forcing herself, very hard. She feels herself to be Cornelia’s champion, her only possible savior.

The doctor snaps, “Fibroid tumors. Besides, do you want her to have fifteen children before she’s forty? Some of them do, you know.”

Hanging up, some minutes later, without much further enlightenment, Peg thinks, I only want her to get well and stay with me forever. I love Cornelia.

“Darling, you must tell me, how do you like our house now?” asks Lavinia of Henry Stuyvesant, on a Thursday afternoon, near the end of a remarkably hot and wet month of May. This particular day has been clear, but billowing heavy gray clouds hang just above the fields across the river, the Rappahannock, and the light is unnatural, too bright, so that the meadow grass even from this distance looks unreal, its green bright and poisonous (or is it simply that my mood is poisonous? Henry wonders, focusing on the meadow).

On the terrace, where they now sit sipping lemonade from fluted champagne glasses (why champagne glasses? Henry has never asked Lavinia this, but now he wonders), the scent of roses and wisteria is almost overwhelming, like spilled perfume. The very air is burned out, decadent (to Henry).

Trying to remember what Lavinia has just said, Henry replays her last sentence in his mind, a trick he has taught himself at political meetings; it works, thank God, “… do you like our house now?” He rehears her sentence, with its light but marked, ironic emphasis on
our,
and
now.
It is her special tone, and in his own, expected voice he answers her, “Oh, it’s absolutely splendid, never better.”

Looking around, Henry tries (and knows that he will fail) to notice what she has done to the place since they last were here; she is always doing something. He cannot even recall, precisely, just when they were here last, and the effort of trying to remember everything exhausts him. Which adds to the weight of another worry growing in his mind, just now, having to do with the night ahead, and Lavinia’s clear anticipations, her preconceptions, as it were, of their “love,” of how lovers behave, what they do. Henry smiles at what he perceives, now, as the absolute inappropriateness of all the words that he and Lavinia ever use, talking together.

Involuntarily he then thinks of Adam Marr, his sometime friend, who would inevitably say to him, “What’s bugging you, man, is if you can get it up or not,” and he can hear Adam’s “Negro” laugh. And his own hyperstilted, impossibly refined response: “Well, old man, it isn’t quite all that simple. This particular situation requires, well, considerably more than my simply ‘getting it up.’ You’d have to know Lavinia.” He smiles again, aware of irony, and pain.

“Darling, whatever are you thinking?” asks Lavinia, smiling to his smile, speaking in her reasonable voice. She is almost always reasonable—the most reasonable, rational living romantic, he has always said.

And so he answers reasonably, and truly. “I was wondering if it would rain.”

This simple statement has an unlooked-for success, however; Lavinia, ardently gray-eyed, picks up his nearest hand with hers, hers so tended and ringed, and so talented, in some ways. She says, “Darling Henry, I was thinking of that too, that night. And I now forgive you for not noticing the new awning.”

Henry smiles warmly, as though also remembering a certain romantic night, presumably of rain, and then mercifully he does remember: a night in this house, “their” house, a windy night of wild crashing flailing rain, an overstimulated night (were they drunk?) of making love wildly, repeatedly. He remembers how they stared at each other, amazed, in the intervals of lightning, at each other’s white naked bodies, flashed into exposure, and at that time so passionately new.

And he understands that for Lavinia it could have been the night before, or last week; her memory is less sullied than his, by far, and her high notion of love does not admit of change. She retains her view of their love, of him and of herself; it is necessary for her to do so. She even believes that Amy is “their child,” and that Amy was conceived, now that Henry fully recalls it, on that particular rainy April night.

Because he chooses to, perhaps, Henry believes that the child is Potter’s. Certainly that tiny girl has no look of him. In any case, in a legal sense she is Potter’s child, and for the child herself that
is the emotional reality. It is also, from Henry’s (Marxist) point of view, the correct position.

Lavinia sighs. “If only we had the whole weekend. If I didn’t have all those
people
coming tomorrow.”

“You mean, all your new best friends?”

Teased, Lavinia turns girlish, daddy’s girl; she almost pouts as she pleads, “But I have to have friends. You’re never around, you’re always down at your precious Chapel Hill, with all
your
new best friends.” She adds, half seriously, “All Communists, I suppose.”

Lavinia, I am a Communist. Henry does not say this, although he would like to, since it is the truth.

Driven, as he sees it, from elective political office by the McCarthy committee, Henry continued his graduate work in history at Columbia, and he then became an instructor in the department at Chapel Hill. Offered several choices, his record having been outstanding, he chose North Carolina with an informed and calculated look at the civil rights movement, his new passion. Once down there, Henry found, or came to believe, that the most active, the liveliest, and brightest Movement people were party members, and he was urged to join. And so, after some months of indecision, hesitations, he did join the Communist Party—it was all done very discreetly, since the Smith Act had forced the whole party underground, at that time. Especially, one did not tell nonmembers of one’s membership, not even sympathizers. (Thus, Adam Marr, a flirtacious nonmember, kept urging Henry to join.)

To Lavinia, Henry only says, quite mildly, “I do like Chapel Hill. It’s old and very pretty, and I like the people. Most of them.” He adds, “Adam Marr’s speech down there last week was quite sensational.”

“Oh, I’m sure. If you say, uh, ‘fuck’ every other word, it’s bound to be a sensation.”

“Actually he was talking about writing plays. We have quite a famous group, the Playmakers, and a wonderful old theater—Greek revival. Where Adam spoke.”

Lavinia laughs. “Darling, you sound so patriotic. Like a convert. What is it you call yourselves down there, the tar babies?”

“Tarheels.”

“Well,” says Lavinia, after a moment, with a small frown at the now dissipating clouds, the clearing air. “I guess it’s not going to rain, after all.”

“I guess not. But it’s wonderful to have such a handsome new awning.”

In June of that year, 1956, during which the four friends all turn thirty, Cathy and Megan arrange to spend a few days together, in Carmel, California.

Megan has ostensibly come out to see her parents; actually she has wanted to see Cathy, but so far that has not worked out very well. Both Megan and Cathy have been constrained, during their lunches; Megan has felt that they were not quite themselves. Her own problem has been quite simply her worry about her parents, who seem suddenly old, or nearly: Florence, still working as a carhop, looking more brazenly dyed, more foolish (to Megan) in that perky uniform; Megan is torn between irritation and pity for her. And Harry, her father, still so hopeful that his store will be discovered, or that he will discover among the “junque” a genuine antique.

Megan does not know what, if anything, is bothering Cathy, but Cathy surely does not look well; in fact she looks so unwell that it has been hard for Megan not to ask her what is the matter. To begin with, she has put on a lot of weight. And she is pale; her
always vulnerable skin is blotchy, her dark hair too long, and lank. She looks unhappy and cross, and her manner, even with Megan, has been snappish, stiff.

At last Megan does bring herself to say, “Honestly, Cath, you look a little pale. Let’s do go to Carmel. We’ll walk on the beach a lot, it’ll do you good, and me too. I need to get away from
them.
”

A wan smile. “You’re probably right,” says Cathy.

And so, having agreed that it would be wiser to avoid a weekend, on a Tuesday morning they head westward, toward the coast. They have also agreed on the shoreline route.

These days Cathy has an old red Ford convertible—it wildly occurs to Megan that Cathy’s car could once have been Phil-Flash’s; this is an aged, beat-up version of his grand car. And Megan wonders if Cathy thought of Flash, as she chose and bought this car. But she cannot ask; even mentioning Flash would seem a mistake, so great is the contrast between this pale, blotchy overweight Cathy, indifferently dressed, and the Cathy of ten years back, all curled and pretty and proud of going off with Flash. (The fact that Phil-Flash was on the whole a jerk now seems less important than that with him Cathy was confident, and happy. As she so visibly now is not.)

Taking back roads, they are heading for Pescadero, and all that terrain is deeply familiar to Megan: the rounded hills shaded with live oaks, eroded red clay embankments, the occasional fruit orchards where now, in early June, the blossoms are just wilted, fallen onto the barely yellowing grass. Pine trees, clumps of cypress and manzanita, eucalyptus.

One clearing, then, in a pine grove just off the road, suddenly looks so familiar that Megan is startled; she might have dreamed of it the night before. But just as they pass she recognizes the place: it is where she and George Wharton used to park and neck, with such passion, such ignorance and frustration. That was almost half a lifetime ago, Megan now thinks, and she considers that sixteen-year-old girl, her former self, with some affectionate pity and some embarrassment, for her intensity, her innocence, her simplicity.