The Rebellion of Yale Marratt (26 page)

 

 

He had met McGroaty five years before at a church supper. He remembered
that he had attended it largely to obtain a square meal. He had discovered
in Peoples a kindred soul. Like Mat, the wiry, wrinkled-faced editor
had the kind of probing mind that was developing a constantly evolving
philosophy of life. Nothing was too small or insignificant to come under
the scalpel of his intellect.

 

 

After that evening, Mat became a frequent visitor to Peoples' famous
office. He would listen with wonder as Peoples roamed the world with
penetrating comments on people and politics while Mat sat next to him in
a broken-down leather chair surrounded by what he estimated must be five
thousand books that filled the room from ceiling to floor. The bookcases
that lined the walls had been filled years ago. Now books were piled
tipsily four and five feet high. Books were everywhere . . . on nearly
every available part of the floor. Peoples explained that he had a mania
-- he couldn't surrender one single book. If a book came into his hands
he had to read it; worse, he had to keep it. It had gotten so bad that
Peoples was looking for a man to screen the daily offerings of review
copies from the nation's publishers. Someone to decide what was really
worth reading. Not until he had met Mat had Peoples found a person
he trusted to do the job. Once a week, Mat went through the new book
arrivals. His only pay for the job had been an unending supply of books
on every subject from better cooking to zoology. Mat made twenty dollars
a week or more selling them at reduced rates to a local bookstore.
He wondered what Peoples' reaction to this graft might be. One day Peoples
bluntly asked him how much he was making peddling books. "I hope you are
clearing fifteen bucks or so a week, else I'd feel it necessary to put
you on the payroll," he had said, rubbing his leathery face without a
trace of a smile.

 

 

Peoples looked at Mat, now, with interest. "What in hell have you been
doing? You look as if you've been on a binge. Didn't you work today?"
One hand on the wheel, Peoples fiddled with his underwear, evidently trying
to pull it down. "This weather I get creeping underwear. You know it
was one hundred and two degrees at noon. Tonight is going to be rough --
no relief in sight." He stopped the car at a red light. They watched a
thin, raggedly dressed boy scooping tar bubbles off the road. The boy
wound the tar on a stick and then blissfully chewed some of it. Peoples
laughed. "You know I haven't chewed tar since I was a kid. Tastes
lousy." Peoples shifted the gears as the light changed. "Well, are you
going to confide in me or keep it to yourself?"

 

 

Mat shrugged. "I've been trying to decide what kind of heel I am."
He told Peoples about Honey Johnson. He explained his own reactions and
his childish desire to horrify Doctor Tangle. Almost a form of suicide,
so far as his ministerial career was concerned.

 

 

Peoples listened in silence. Finally, he said, "You're overlooking the
very obvious fact, Mat, that you felt a normal sexual attraction for
the girl. You're so bottled up inside yourself that you responded with
all the timidity and tenderness of a young man who feels the girl might
reject him."

 

 

Mat felt the angry blush on his face. "Why does it always have to be a
sexual motive?"

 

 

"When have you had a woman last? You are twenty-three. The sperm flows
strong at that age. Man of God or not."

 

 

Mat looked out the window of the car. Should he tell Peoples the truth;
that he had never had a woman. That his only release had been an occasional
"wet dream" that freed him temporarily from his nocturnal imaginings.
That he had spent so much of his life studying and earning the money to
pay for his studies that he simply didn't know how to approach a girl
to ask for a date . . . let alone go further than that.

 

 

"You know, Mat Chilling, your Honey Johnson has a sister Evelyn who has
been picked up a couple of times for whoring. Whether your motives were
sexual or whether they were hedonistic . . . or even whether you have a
deep sympathy for the plight of our Negro friends in Helltown . . .
no matter what your feelings may be, the plain truth is that this young
Miss Johnson will sooner or later lose her virginity . . . if she hasn't
already. I would suggest she couldn't lose it to a better prospect than
you. I had a colored girl once . . . they can be very affectionate."

 

 

Mat shook his head. "I know that you seem to think I have inherited some
chivalrous ideas from the Middle Ages, Peoples, but I can't view people
or women or any particular woman -- even Honey Johnson -- simply as a
sexual object. To me she is very much a feeling, breathing person. You may
be right that I want to go to bed with her; but if I could, it would be
with a girl named Honey Johnson and I would be forever in her debt." Mat
smiled. He continued, slowly, feeling for the words to evoke his thoughts
. . . "I would be my sister's keeper, because I share the intimacy of her
fears, her hopes, her despair. I wouldn't want her otherwise. Too many
men view sex as an open vagina; a clutching of legs and a grovelling
of bodies. I look on it as a commitment of one individual to another,
a total involvement of which the congress is an ultimate manifestation."

 

 

Peoples laughed. "You believe so much in human dignity, don't you,
Mat? I won't argue with you, but I'm afraid most people are a long way
from accepting your views." He lighted a cigarette and inhaled, blowing
the smoke in a cloud around his head. "No . . . men do not change. We
lose sight of this historically, because we lose, in an impossible
accumulation of words, the details that make history intimate on a
day-to-day basis. Are the Nazis in their persecutions of the Jews
different, basically, than a previous generation? Last night I was
reading some sidelights on the French Revolution, the period seventeen
ninety-two to seventeen ninety-four, the Reign of Terror. Have you ever
read some of the eye-witness accounts? Thousands upon thousands of people
were brutally slaughtered by the tribunals of the Republic. Given the
emotional impetus, the individual for most men becomes nothing. There's
a horrible account of what happened to the Princesse de Lamballa, one
of thousands who were murdered. She was in the household of the Queen,
accused of plotting against the Republic. She was tossed into a courtyard
filled with massacred bodies of the aristocracy, bashed on the head with
a sabre, stripped, her breasts hacked off, her body opened up and her
heart torn out, her head cut off and placed on the end of a pike which
they later paraded before Louis XVI and his family. . . ."

 

 

Mat shuddered, listening to the recital. "That's not all," Peoples
continued grimly. "One of the ruffians was seen later chewing on
her heart, another cut off the lips of her vagina and made mustaches
. . . while others loaded cannons with her legs. Let's see . . . that
was about one hundred and sixty years ago . . . some of the stories that
have come out of Germany recently seem to have a remarkable similarity."

 

 

"What are you trying to prove?" Mat asked.

 

 

Peoples shrugged. "Nothing, I guess. I hope you retain your idealism.
The fact at the moment is that you do need a woman, and fate, destiny,
Karma, call it what you will, says that inevitably Honey Johnson will
engage in some dispassionate use of her vagina with a man, white or dark,
who just wants to release his sperm, and in all probability this man
will care not one whit about Honey as an individual."

 

 

"I don't care," Mat said. "Someday I may have the courage to fight for
the Honey Johnsons and their lousy destinies. At the moment, I'll have
to live by what I believe."

 

 

Peoples turned his car into College Avenue, driving toward the campus.
"Have you heard about the shindig tomorrow?" he asked. "Biggest social
event in the whole year. Everybody who is anybody in the city will be there."

 

 

Mat knew that he was referring to Barbara Marratt's wedding. Doctor Tangle
was officiating. "I'm sorry," Mat laughed, "you are discussing something
outside my social ken. I would be better understood by the Honey Johnsons
of this world. I've met Yale Marratt and talked with him several times
after classes. I've heard Doctor Tangle complain about young Marratt's
interest in one of the female students. That's the extent of my knowledge
of the Marratts."

 

 

Peoples pulled the car up in front of Doctor Tangle's house and stopped.
"Guess you don't read the
Midhaven Herald
. . . this is a marriage of
millions. The bridegroom's father owns Texas ranches and oil wells. Local
estimates are that Pat Marratt, father of the bride, is personally worth
at least three or four million dollars."

 

 

Mat wondered what Peoples was trying to tell him. It wasn't like Peoples
to recite the gossip from his own paper. "What do the Marratts have to
do with my problem, and the whole subject of human dignity and destiny?"

 

 

Peoples' eyes were twinkling. "Ah, you sensed that I was about to make
an important generalization."

 

 

"Stop being so damned pompous, Peoples," Mat said. He opened the car door.
"Come on, out with it, I've got to get out of these stinking clothes."

 

 

"Well, I thought you might have known Yale better. Unless you do,
my point is lost. You see, in a larger sense he is caught in the same
web as Honey Johnson. You tell me that she is trying to escape from
her environment . . . a world she never made. Young Marratt is trying
to do likewise. Both of them are up against forces stronger than they
are." Peoples smiled wistfully. "Human dignity can't persevere in the
face of dismemberment. Honey Johnson won't have her legs stuffed in a
cannon and Yale Marratt may never lose his head, but as they make their
'truce with necessity' the dignity they once possessed will shrivel
and attenuate."

 

 

Mat shook his head. "Sometimes, I think you read too much, Peoples!
You won't make a good newspaper editor when you grow up." He walked up
Doctor Tangle's front steps followed by an explosion of laughter from
Peoples' car.

 

 

 

 

 

 

14

 

 

Yes, it had been a strange day, revealing undercurrents in his feelings
that he had suppressed too long. As Mat lay on his cot, trying to get
up energy to take a bath, he had made at least one decision. No matter
what openings there might be, no matter what Doctor Tangle might suggest,
he was going to spend the summer working at Latham's. For three months
he was going to forget God, religion and theology. After having pursued
God in an effort to find himself, perhaps by searching his own personal
thinking he would find the kind of God that was necessary for his own
wellbeing as well as a God he could bring to others. Mat had a feeling
growing in him that it would not be the God of orthodox Protestantism
that he had studied so carefully these past years.

 

 

He heard a cautious knock on his door. If it were Mrs. Tangle he was not
in a very presentable condition. He opened the door warily and peered
into the hall. He recognized Yale Marratt. The coincidence of his recent
conversation with Peoples and the fact that Yale Marratt was standing
on his landing flashed through his mind.

 

 

"Yale. What brings you around on such a warm night?"

 

 

"I don't know just how to tell you, Mat. But I need your help." As Yale
walked into the room, Mat was shocked at his appearance. He had been
crying. His face was smudged with dirt. His shirt was torn.

 

 

"For heaven's sake, Yale! What is it?"

 

 

"Cynthia . . . you know her . . . my girl friend . . . is badly hurt.
She's down near the chapel. I wonder if I could bring her up here."

 

 

Mat tried to conceal his amazement. "Chum, you must he affected by the
heat. Don't you know this is Doctor Tangle's house?"

 

 

"He's not home. I just saw him go out with Mrs. Tangle. Please, Mat."
Yale's voice bordered on hysteria. "I'll go get her."

 

 

"Use some sense," Mat said. "You better take her to the infirmary.
How did she get hurt, anyway?"

 

 

"Look, Mat. I can't explain. I don't know why the hell she did it,
but it was practically suicide. Will you please help me?"

 

 

Reluctantly Mat followed Yale down the stairs. They found Cynthia huddled
in the shadows of one of the buttresses of the college chapel. In the light
of a street lamp, Mat caught a glimpse of her face and whistled.
"Good Lord, young lady, what happened to you?"

 

 

Cynthia looked away from him. He could tell that she was in pain. As
she walked she swayed, and nearly fell. Mat and Yale steadied her and
listened in dismay to her hushed sobbing as she let herself be slowly
guided up the four flights of stairs to Mat's room.

 

 

Mat latched the door. Seeing Cynthia in the light he was shocked. She
looked as if she had been beaten by a sex maniac. Her face was a mess;
bruised, with long torn gashes in several places. One gash came perilously
close to her eyes. Her blouse was stained with blood.

 

 

"Were you attacked?" Mat asked. "Who did this to you?"

 

 

Cynthia slumped in a worn mohair chair. "I did it to myself," she said.
"It's no one's faalt. Would you help me get my skirt off? I can't reach
the zipper. My arms feel as if they were dead."

 

 

Yale looked at Mat and around the room. There was no place for privacy,
except a tiny four-by-five bathroom. Yale nodded at the bathroom. "Will
you excuse us, Mat?" he asked.