The Scarlet Letters (8 page)

"Of course, you're going to apply to Vollard Kaye for a job," she told him one night at their Automat.

"You think they'd take me?" he inquired earnestly. "I'm not exactly a white shoe type. And I'm told that most of the partners are listed in the Social Register."

"That's because most of them have worked their way up. Pa doesn't give a hoot about those distinctions. I thought you knew that."

"Oh, I wasn't thinking of
him
. To work for him would be my dream of dreams!"

"Please! You'll be making me think I'm only a rung in your ladder to fame."

He became instantly solemn. "You couldn't think anything as awful as that, could you, Vinnie?"

"Why not? A talented man without a fortune has to look about him to get started. In Europe it's taken quite for granted that one of the functions of a woman is to have something to give a push-up to a man, whether it be blood or connections or just hard cash."

"Vinnie, I don't want you to talk that way. Those things have nothing to do with how I feel about you. Tell me that you believe that, Vinnie. Tell me, please."

She was a bit taken aback by his gravity, but decided to pass it off. "Of course. I was only joking."

She discovered that his stern morality was absolutely consistent. He had no use for ambiguities or double standards. A discussion they had after attending a Saturday matinee of
Hedda Gabler
brought this out rather too forcibly for her. It was a play that had excited Vinnie, an Ibsen enthusiast, but which had failed to arouse Rodman on this, his first experience with the great Norse playwright.

"What does it all add up to?" he wanted to know. "A bored, idle woman in a fit of petty jealousy burns the manuscript of a presumably great book by a drunken genius and then goads him into suicide. After which she follows in the same godforsaken path. Is that a tragedy? Or even a comedy?"

Vinnie tried to recall the lecture of a favorite Vassar professor. "It's neither. You might call it an ancient morality play. Of man and morals, and a world outside of man and morals."

"What kind of a world is that?"

"We don't know! That's what's so spooky. Ibsen seems to believe in something like the survival of the old pagan gods. They lurk in the dark air around us. Old wild demiurges. Wasn't there a medieval legend that Dionysus reappeared in a monastery in the form of an impish youth and presided over orgies? Hedda is subject to some terrible influence like that. She has great force and will, but she is completely unrestrained by any modern sense of right or wrong."

"But she knows she's doing a wrong thing when she burns that manuscript," he objected. "She gives her husband a false excuse to explain what she's done."

"That's just to shut him up. She recognizes that other people know right from wrong. She even despises them for it. You must see her as a wild creature caged in a zoo of Victorian morality."

"Victorian? Is it Victorian to disapprove of destroying works of genius and handing loaded pistols to depressed alcoholics?"

"Well, call it man-made morality."

"Man-made! As opposed to what, Vinnie?"

"Oh, I don't know." She waved a hand vaguely in the air. "Maybe Ibsen is saying that other systems and values exist beside the frail ones that man has put together to separate himself from the beasts. They aren't necessarily what we would call nice ones."

"Well, if he means that, why doesn't he say it?"

"Because he's dealing with imponderables. With mysteries."

"Well, all I can see is that he's dealing with a wicked woman who gets what's coming to her in the end. There's your moral, I suppose. But wouldn't it be better to redeem her? To make her see the error of her ways? Isn't it rather crass the way he handles her? Sets her up and then knocks her down?"

"Certainly, the way
you
put it."

"I don't see any other way to put it. I can't see that it's any halfway excuse for her to say she was worshiping Dionysus or Bacchus or whoever, if that's what Ibsen
is
saying. There was a minister at school who used to preach a sermon about what he called overtolerance. 'Boys,' he used to say, 'you'll hear a lot of excuses these days for the bad things people do. You will hear that they are manic, or neurotic, or obsessed, or whatever. Don't forget, boys, one useful little word in your vocabulary. Wicked. Those people are wicked.' That may sound harsh to you, Vinnie, but it's really not. It's really kinder. Because the wicked can be redeemed. Isn't redeeming them better than explaining them?"

It struck Vinnie that his features had none of the dark, comminatory look that his words might have conjured up in another. He took no visible pleasure in the idea of stern judgment or punishment. If he was a knight, he was a knight like Galahad, more intent on rescue than revenge.

"I suppose if we go to
A Doll's House
next week—it's alternating with
Hedda
—you'll say that Nora should have stayed home and raised the children. And you might be right, too. Poor little things, look at the father she leaves them with."

And she came to the happy conclusion that he was not a man to slam doors but to open them.

But then, all at once, everything changed for her. Rod's roommate's family had a house in Glenville not far from the Vollards, and when Rod came down for a weekend visit there Vinnie drove over to join him at their pool. He was clad in tight white swimming trunks, and for one blinding moment as she caught sight of him she thought he was naked. His skin was an ivory white, unlike the tanned bodies of the others at the poolside, for unlike them he had been cloistered in the city, but his torso, his shoulders, his thighs, finely sculpted, were splendid. She was confronted no longer with an overworked law student, a pale library product, but a magnificent man. She noted the sizable bulge in his pants where they covered his genitalia.

What now crawled over her like a massive skin itch was such a lust as she had never conceived herself having. She felt giddy, shocked. She was not only confronted with a new Rodman Jessup but a new Lavinia Vollard. She was going to have to reckon with a totally new force within herself.

Sitting beside him at the far end of the pool to which they both repaired, she found her mind so stuffed with sexual images that she had to find an outlet in a subject somehow related. She found herself telling him of a Vassar classmate who, finding herself pregnant at the termination of a wholly clandestine love affair, had availed herself of an abortion, without telling her family. He was visibly shocked. She should have had the child, he argued.

"But it would have been her social ruin," Vinnie protested. "She wanted to go on with her life as before, the way her ex-lover was doing. Of course, no one would have blamed him, even if it had become known."

"
I
would have blamed him. Just as much as I blame her. Even more, perhaps, because as a man he should have been stronger against temptation."

Vinnie debated for a moment in her mind. Was this naïveté or something finer? Had this near naked sleek animal been reserved for her alone? Her giddiness returned. "You hold that a man should keep himself as pure as a woman?"

"If he expects it of her, yes. Why should he have any lesser obligation?"

"And that he should be a virgin until he marries?"

"As much as his wife, anyway."

"But what about the old theory that he should have enough experience to initiate his bride in the rites of love?"

"Does it take so much experience? The birds and the bees don't seem to think so."

"They haven't been petrified by civilization. They haven't had to wear clothes."

"You think Adam and Eve had an easier time? Of course, they had no alternative to each other. Anyway, I don't think you'll find me lacking in that respect if you marry me."

"Heavens!" she gasped. "Is this a proposal?"

"It would be, if there were any chance of its being accepted."

"Too soon, too soon," she murmured, almost breathless at his precipitation. When he wasn't looking serious, he was almost too light. But there was
no
mistaking the yank at her heart. She had brought this man into her life, and she was going to have to cope with him. "I need more time, my friend. Only don't think I'm letting you off the hook. I shall remember that you have made a formal proposal."

"It's not binding, of course, until accepted. And it must be accepted or rejected within a reasonable time. How long shall we give it?"

"Say a year?"

But it only took months. They were married after his graduation from law school, during the first year that he worked at Vollard Kaye. Her father, delighted at the match, supplemented Rodman's slender salary, and they were soon settled very comfortably in a charming small flat in town. Rod, as a lover, proved indeed that he had no need of earlier amatory lessons, and there seemed no cloud on their wedding bliss.

Except a seemingly tiny one. Vinnie came to reflect that too much good luck and family approval might prove to have a faintly cloying side. One of her Vassar classmates had married a handsome Jewish boy who had helped her to her feet after a bad tumble on the Central Park skating rink. Her family shared the routine anti-Semitism of the then New York society, and his was stoutly Orthodox. Spurned by all four parents, the young couple had eloped in a frenzy of romantic delight and were promptly forgiven by both families on the birth of the first baby. Vinnie rather ruefully contrasted their Romeo and Juliet story with the heavy blanket of family congratulation that had almost stifled the pleasure of her engagement.

And in time there was something else. Rod from the beginning of their marriage had become more like a son than a son-in-law to her father. Wasn't this exactly what she had wanted? Oh, those gift-bearing Greeks! Had she immolated herself, a latter-day Iphigenia, on the altar of her father's frustrated paternity? In bringing him the son he craved, had she lost her own position in his heart?

Yet her marriage in every other way proved to be just what she had wanted. Rod worked joyfully and serenely in the firm and achieved not only an early partnership but the undisputed position of right hand to the man whom everyone referred to as the "chief." The year and a half that he spent in the Pacific on a destroyer only added to his glamour, and she loved reading his vivid letters aloud to her avidly listening (yes, even her mother!) family. Two little girls, in perfect health, were born to them, the product of her husband's regular and spirited, if somewhat predictable, lovemaking. And she had taken an active part in local charities, including her father's settlement house, and had become the admired chairman of the board of the Manhattan day school that her daughters attended.

And yet. When her father and husband, after a hearty Sunday lunch on a Glenville weekend, reverted to an animated discussion of their last corporate reorganization, she would sometimes find herself wondering if their Garden of Eden, which she had so tenderly planted and watered, was really open to either Eves or snakes. And if her function as a wife was not simply to supply the oil of a supporting love, both physical and spiritual, to the smooth working of an otherwise totally independent male machine. What imp was it in her that caused her fingers nervously to keep unraveling the far corners of the tapestry of her life? A tapestry that she had woven herself?

W
HAT WAS PERPLEXING
to Vinnie was in how many ways Rod was the perfect spouse. That many of her girlfriends envied her she did not doubt. Not only was he a fine-looking and well-mannered man; she sensed that they presumed him to be a vigorous lover. And he was, though he went at it almost as if it were a regular and healthful calisthenic. He was definitely not open to imaginative variations of the act of coition, and the one time she had suggested a ritual described graphically to her by a girlfriend over a beach club sandwich, he had been distinctly shocked. After that she refrained from any further such suggestions and sought to content herself with the supple if habitual movements of his elegant body. How many women, after all, she would ask herself, had anything half as good as that?

And what was more, he was an easy man to live with. He was consistently good tempered, even when in the throes of a grinding securities case, and on the rare occasions when his mood darkened, he was considerately silent. He never reproached her for anything she did or failed to do. If something went wrong his rebuke was confined to a calm and reasonable suggestion of how it could be remedied. The children adored him, and no matter how many nights in the week he toiled at the office, a good part of every weekend was kept rigorously free to teach the girls tennis or take them sailing or, if it was raining, to a movie. He was a good host at their occasional Saturday night dinner parties, mixing drinks for all and never overindulging himself, looking after the shyer or less popular guests, showing a friendly interest in the pleasures or problems of all.

About herself and her own interests he was scrupulously careful to make inquiries as soon as he came home from the office. He interested himself in the fund-raising drives that she instituted for her settlement house and school, and offered her the names of clients to whom she might make an appeal. If it seemed to her that he was not deeply concerned with such matters, but lent a hand and ear solely because they were hers, was she not honest enough to admit that her own concern with them was not much greater? Even if she should raise enough money to allow the settlement house to divert and edify its whole neighborhood, or the school to endow chairs for the finest teachers and provide scholarships for all its needy students, would she enjoy a fraction of the high elation with which Rod approached each new law problem presented by a client? No! When she complained of this to her mother, for whose wisdom she sometimes hankered even as she feared its acidity, she found cold comfort indeed.

"If you want the thrill that men like your father and Rod get out of their profession, you have to go whole hog, my dear. That's what you and so many of your friends have yet to learn. The job must come first."