The Unpossessed (2 page)

In the moil, a Mrs. Fancher enters to be identified for the unknowing outsiders by the knowing Al: “Lady entering in pearls is our first prison-widow. Husband embezzled. Got five years. Damn shame. Best card player I ever knew.” In the staccato brilliance of the party scene more than two dozen voices and human shapes appear in a raucous mingling—not anonymous names on a list but creations distinct and placed in the social order. Miss Bee Powell, a Daughter of the Confederacy with “violet eyes framed in Junior League eyelashes”; Mrs. Stanhope, the horsewoman who never leaves the paddock; Mr. Crawford, “who fell short of being an English lord only by birth and a monocle,” will say “jolly, jolly” at every turn; the butler, of uncertain lineage, has by his station transmogrified into a Republican who would “feed beggars at the backdoor and throw away the rag with which he wiped their crumbs.” The pages have the reckless exuberance of the open bar, the dance floor, the plentiful harvest of the buffet table, the tribal company, each in its vanity, language, armor, and folly.

Bruno will be called upon to give a fund-raising speech for the Magazine and, dead-drunk, will fall into a long, self-destructive rant of misplaced irony that only an intellectual could excavate from his rattled brain:

The final chapter shifts to Margaret and Miles Flinders and to the Greenway Maternity Home where Margaret has gone for an abortion or for treatment after having had one. Miles, when the time came, could not face the diapers drying on the radiator, the convulsive change a baby would make in their lives, although he phrased the drastic moment as fear of going “soft” and “bourgeois.” It's a downward slide, this last chapter, a haunting return to private life. And again composed in a tornado of broken dialogue among the women having babies, one born dead and another having her fourth, a girl, when what was wanted was a boy after three girls.

The composition will center on a huge basket of fruit, now scarcely touched, which Margaret will forlornly offer to her ward companions and to the cabdriver taking her home. “Missis Butter, won't you?” No, Missis Butter has plenty of fruit of her own. “Missis Wiggam, wouldn't you?” No, can't hold acids after a baby. To the cabdriver: “You must have a peach”; but “Mr. Strite had never cared for peaches; the skin got in his teeth.” And no, he wouldn't have an apple, “must be getting on uptown.” Mr. Strite at last accepts a pear, “ ‘For luck,' he said, managing an excellent American smile.” In an unexpected, deftly managed change of tone, the rejected basket of fruit becomes the rejected baby—a symbol, if you like.

The Unpossessed
, noticeable indeed, was widely noticed when it appeared. The reviews were more benign in the traditional press than in
The New Masses
, or especially in
The Daily Worker
. Subversives are ever alert to traitors in their own ranks; traitors by way of style are a subtle threat to content, as even the uncultivated Stalin understood. It has been suggested that Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield may have been models for Tess Slesinger. Perhaps, but their art is more serene and controlled than the fractured eloquence of the polyphonic pages of
The Unpossessed
, interestingly dedicated:
to my contemporaries
.

—ELIZABETH HARDWICK

to my contemporaries—

MR. PAPENMEYER was ashamed of his celery!

Look at it. Frozen, for one thing; coarse; brown; ill-natured. He let the stalks snap toughly from his fingers.

Eric Papenmeyer could not find it in his heart to sell her celery, with celery in the shameful state it was!

There was plenty would sell it to her without a second's thought. But not Papenmeyer.

Yes; she knew that.

Unless she would cut it up for pot-roast? For a nice stew? His eyes brightened. His voice cajoled. His hands holding the frozen stalks begged.

Mrs. Flinders shook her head, widened her eyes coyly at the grocer like a woman confiding in her doctor. “
Mister
Flinders is from New England, you know.”

There was a moment during which it seemed that Mr. Papenmeyer's eyes would fill with tears. Then he nodded wisely; dropped the whole business of pot-roasts at once; grew brisk and detached, still nodding, oh of course, if Mr. Flinders is from New England then let us say no more about it, the least said about
that
sort of thing the better; and turned with admirable tact to potatoes.

“See that you pick them without too many eyes,” she said coldly. (Mr. Papenmeyer's hands brooded among the potatoes.) For the man deserved a little taking down. Standing there with all that heavy German
Verstandt
in his eyes; as if he were indeed a gynecologist (his white apron spattered with vegetable stains!); as if it were too much for him that Miles was a New Englander. “And your lettuce is frozen! But the cider! the cider looks lovely, the first I've seen this fall. I'll take a jug of cider,” she said, relenting.

“Everything's withering,” Mr. Papenmeyer said, as though corroborating. “I might never step out of this store. But still I'll know. I'll see the vegetables freezing and the prices going up, and I'll know winter's coming. I'll say here's another winter with everything to do again. Will I send it, Mrs. Flinders?”

“Send it? Dear Lord no! Why it might get there in time for breakfast, Mr. Papenmeyer—and how is your little girl?” Dear Lord no! there would be Miles come home ahead and waiting, and she must not come to him empty-handed. Oh no; give me the world all wrapped in bundles; let me carry it home resting on my breast; let me bring the world home to Miles and lay it at his feet. A dash of salt, a skillful stir; and I will serve him the world for his supper.

“Good after
noon,
Mr. Papenmeyer.”

“Good day to
you,
Mrs. Flinders.” He had his dignity too.

Certainly the street lay quieter now, the air upon it darker, the wind big with solemn tidings. For summer with its suspension of life, its long and endless days of sun like the days without end of one's childhood, was gone again. And another fall, another year, another round of life (Mr. Papenmeyer was right!) to do again.

Soon the chestnut vendors would warm their hands in the whistling steam on their little wagons; the Scottsboro boys would be called for re-trial; butter would go up, eggs would go up. Would there be apple-sellers again, crying their fruit on cold corners? The wind would whinny down the chimney; and in the mornings after the alarm-clock one of them must brave the cold to shut the windows while the other cowered in bed, clinging to last night's nest like a slow-witted chick.

The Sunday papers would issue their supplementary book sections for the Flinders to strew over the bathroom floor on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Mr. Worthington would reduce the summer's amount of ice for the office water-cooler. Elections again; and whether one voted for the Republicans or the Democrats, or tossed one's vote to the left in futile protest (but Miles said it was
not
futile) would the scabrous unemployed be swept from one's sight off the public parks? Then the smell of camphor in the house! its glint where it fell shining and secret in the cracks of the old floor! Soon the last leaf would be off the last tree in Sheridan Square; there would be that feeling in one's chest of ending and beginning again, expelling the last of one breath and expanding the lungs for the intake of another; sorrow for the departing year curling smaller and smaller until it was dead, excitement and wonder opening their eyes and catching their breath as the winds grow colder, the nights fall quicker, the curtains are early drawn and the fires lit. Was there progress? was there change?

At the office he let her sign his name with her own hand now, and she marvelled to see how day by day her writing as she flourished Adolph Worthington over
Business Manager
so gravely typed grew less and less her own. He wondered too at her smiling so much; with your husband gathering pay-cuts right and left, Miss Banner? Miss Banner-that-was, that is, he adds with his daily tic of humor. Ah, signing his name with her own hand! Carrying the only key to The File in her purse! Answering the telephone in the cabalistic tones of the hired, “He is in Conference, We have changed our Policy, We have closed our Autumn List.” Ah, what glory is yours, Maggie—Miss Banner-that-was, Missis Flinders-that-is! As long as you can play school all day at the office with Adolph Worthington,
Business Manager
; dance home through the shades of the evening to play house all night with Mister Flinders, husband; live the year round, make a leisurely circle through the seasons and come safely back to the starting-point again, the fall. This was progress? this
was
change? Well, last year she left the letters on his desk for Mr. Worthington to sign; last year it seemed that the Scottsboro boys must hang without much ado; last year Miles' soul was worn about the edges but displayed no gentle fraying in the seams.

One got older. One grew soberer. One would like perhaps to see a thread drawn through the years as though they were beads. (Twenty-nine! what was the deadline for babies? for clearing out and starting somewhere else?) This year on Charles Street, last year on Tenth; surely these were stations along some route? One's world too, which had been a tight nut, expanded; burst; until there you were, stepping out over the broken shells, soberly trotting down a street—toward what, and why, one vaguely wondered. And was there something else?

There had been small Maggie, child of a family, fastest girl-skater on a city block, most important child in the world (had the world known it? now she had been sure, again it seemed it waited for enlightenment). Growing and growing; then squeezed back into something resembling all other children (she remembered sashes; the day they cut her bangs because her forehead so high and naked made the other children stare) and sent off to school; where to her surprise and terror—and something like relief—she was given not the best desk nor the worst desk nor the farthest nor the nearest nor the most nor the least of anything. The feeling of deprivation! But rising out of it a sense of importance, of social responsibility: the blackboard erasers must be in line, chalk must not strew the school-room floor; one was song-book monitor once a week. So the world of school opened until it took in Saturday morning concerts and Irma Haliburton's father explaining Damrosch over lunch. And whenever (then) you took stock in the fall, up another grade, maybe a floor higher, granted more freedom this term—you found a newer and bigger world, you belonged to a larger and deeper fraternity. Now you and Miles, you live in a room on Charles Street (the richness of their daring, of their living together and calling the same place home, caught her suddenly unawares), you have never been out of your country or even to the south of it; yet you make out checks from your meager income to send to the Scottsboro boys quaking in Alabama jails; you subscribe to a German paper which names writers you will never read; you visit Russian movies whose characters you comprehend no more than you do their machines.

Is this because the room on the fourth floor is too small, because Charles Street is too narrow? Because one's horizon must stretch till it takes in the world?

Here she turned a corner and came upon the last street, and because it was home her heart must do something, it must go up, or it must go down; she must hurry or her feet must lag. She shifted her bundles (the world in her arms had grown heavy; the cider weighed it down) as if in indecision. For the street ran too smug, too sure, between the same rows of houses, too properly studded with corners, with lampposts. There is satisfaction implicit in recognizing, in coming back to the known—the pink house again, the house with one shutter hanging loose, the Italian speakeasy, the only tree. But a finer excitement would lie in change, in things concealed from view. The pink house moved down the block! why the shutter has been taken down at last, the speakeasy closed! The street ought to wind at the middle; the lamp already glowing die: catch your breath as you round the turn! anything might happen! But there was the house again squatting smug on its rump like an injured woman. The fourth floor still there, its windows like a train of cars above the third. O drop the bundles on the nearest stoop; turn round and run, run back, run the wrong way for once up that right street, run and chase the world that hides around the corner!

For she would come in. She would drop her bags on the kitchen table. There would be Miles in the leather chair, his feet lifted to the wicker one; his New England conscience ticking neatly on his desk, beside the clock. He would look up. He would check her home-coming with a smile, as in the morning he acknowledged the ringing of the clock by pressing down the jigger. Jeffrey called up, he might say—called
you
up, he would put it if his mood demanded hurt. What happened to you all day, Miles? (The moment of her standing there and waiting, jealous a little of his day which had not held her, fearful at the same time that another day had passed without leaving its mark on him, another day like a sheet of Mr. Worthington's calendar to be torn off and dropped heedlessly away.) No, what did
you
do, Margaret? you are the one things are always happening to, you make them up if they don't, you liar: what did
you
do all day? . . . And then the cider in the jug. If he didn't see it, not as cider, but as cider she had bought for him, as cider which had come out of the country from the apple trees specifically and courageously for them, for Miles and Margaret, to sit in a jug on their checkered tablecloth, why then the fine apple-y taste was nothing, the tang was bitter, the color dull.