This Is Not for You (3 page)

“E.,” I suggested finally, “why don’t you relax with Frank and Doris? Try to get to know them a little bit.”

“Why?” you asked, surprised.

“Because they’re human beings. You might even find you like them.”

“I do like them, Kate,” you protested. “It’s just that we don’t have anything in common.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “Find things in common. Take some interest in what they care about.”

“What do they care about?”

Put that way, the question had no real answer. For you there was one source of identity, the measure of commitment one had to people and ideas, out of which should come the work one did. Neither Doris nor Frank was put together so tidily. Frank was a successful but not dedicated banker, a theoretical liberal who took his conservative social responsibilities seriously. He had a wine cellar, a rose garden, season tickets to chamber music concerts, a wife and two children, perhaps occasionally a mistress, but certainly not in London. About most of these subjects he was pleased to speak briefly, and he was also interested in listening, but obsession with anything was for him a breach of good taste. In your terms, therefore, he cared about nothing. Doris was even more difficult to identify. The measure of her efficiency in any job was the measure of her boredom with it. What she enjoyed, she dawdled over and rarely finished, part of her pleasure being the freedom to be inaccurate and incomplete. There was never an error in her household books, but often flower arrangements waited for their final greenery until blooms were falling on the carpet. She made a similar division between people, careful and exacting of her own kindness with those to whom she was bound by nothing but duty, casual and sometimes wittily critical of the friends she chose and obviously loved. Even if you had been able to distinguish this pattern, you would have judged it shallowly perverse and missed the point, at least the human point. I could not answer your question; however, you heard my complaint and wanted to please me.

“Doris,” you began the next night at the dinner table, forcing yourself to call her by her first name, “how long does it take to have a baby?”

Frank looked up surprised.

“Why,” Doris said carefully, “nine months.”

“No, I know that. I don’t mean that. I mean really how long, how long out of a life, two years? Five years?”

“That depends, doesn’t it?”

“But on what?” you persisted.

“On how much money you have, on how much of a mother you want to be, on what kind of a life you mean to interrupt.”

“But it’s no good having a child physically, just that, is it? That isn’t what people mean when they talk about being fulfilled as a woman, You’d want to know your child. How long does it take to know your child?”

“It depends on the child,” Frank offered, sensing the opportunity you were offering, no matter how grossly. “How long did it take your mother to know you?”

“She doesn’t,” you answered. “And she’s never tried. She spends all her time trying to turn me into someone she’d like to know. So I have no measuring stick. How long did it take you?”

“With my son,” Frank answered, “I think I sin as your mother does. With my daughter… well, what man would dare to claim he understood a woman, even a very young one?”

“But that’s stupid,” you said. “Women are people. You could certainly understand me.”

“Surely, what Esther wants to know is how much time there’s left for being something other than a mother,” Doris said quickly.

“Yes,” you said. “You see, first of all I want to understand the nature of the world. Then I want to marry and have a child to fulfill myself as a woman. After that I want to be a sculptor, a great sculptor. When I’m old, I’ll join a contemplative order of some kind to serve God. I have to figure out the number of years each thing will take.”

“I see,” Doris said. “Well, I’d say five for the child, wouldn’t you, dear?”

“Five or six at the most,” Frank answered.

I was tempted to share their stifled hilarity because you were ridiculous, sitting there outlining your life, but I was also tempted to believe that you might, in your willful innocence, actually keep destiny in your own hands. There was about you such insensitive integrity.

After dinner, when you had gone to your room to write letters, I sat with Frank for a while.

“She thinks of herself as an emerging nation, as in need of five-year plans as India or Russia,” he said.

“She has a lot of natural resources to develop,” I said.

“True. But I don’t see any place in her plan for a course in investments. Does she know that one day she’s going to be one of the richest women in America?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t.”

“I can’t help knowing,” he said. “Be careful of her, Kate, won’t you?”

“How… careful?”

“I don’t mean anything personal. It’s just that she wants so much and doesn’t know what she already has to offer.”

I couldn’t be with you every moment. I didn’t want to be. There were other people to see. If I left you alone for a few hours, I never knew what you would find and bring back. Sometimes it was only a first edition or a seventeenth-century amber ring (which I wouldn’t accept then, and, of course, have now), but more often it was a young composer or painter or actor, awed and irritated by the ample comfort of Doris’ and Frank’s living, fortunately unaware of how modest it was compared to your own. But for all the irritations of those first weeks, I was more independent of you in London than I could be once we left for the Continent, and there were the selling galleries to discover together, the late Turners at the Tate, the good arguments about T. S. Eliot and Christopher Fry. If the summer had gone on like that, I might have been able to cope.

Why was it that we decided to bicycle? I had never been enthusiastic, though I’d taken a couple of bicycling trips in southern England two summers before. It was probably your idea. I didn’t find out until we were trying to get our new bicycles from one side of London to the other that you hadn’t been on one since you were twelve. I was ready to leave them with Frank and Doris, but you insisted that you would practice in the three days we had left. Off down the crescent you’d wobble, dressed in blue jean pedal pushers, pale blue wind-breaker, and white baseball cap, your dark hair more horse’s mane than pony tail, vanishing between double decker buses.

“Don’t watch,” Doris said kindly, as I stood on the drawing room balcony.

“It’s a sick fascination.”

“You worry too much. I’ve never seen you so motherly.”

“She’s such an idiot,” I said. “Who do you suppose she’ll find to bring home today?”

“You don’t have to be jealous of her young men. They’re all homosexuals.”

“Do you think so?”

“Yes, blatant or latent. It’s hard on Frank. He finds her very attractive. ‘What a waste!’ he keeps saying. Are you serious about her, Kate?”

“It’s nothing like that. In any case, I’m never serious about people.”

“She’s rather remarkably beautiful.”

“Or ugly,” I said.

By the morning we were to leave, you claimed to be able to ride with no hands through the traffic at Hyde Park Corner, which, even in those days, was terrible. We planned to leave a lot of our belongings with Frank and Doris, either to be shipped to us later or to be collected on our way home. Clothes never mattered to you anyway, unless they had about them the character of costume. I remember the first time you wore your academic gown at the Freshman assembly.

“Gosh, this is the life of the mind, all right. I really feel it, and I want to feel it all the time. In England, students do, don’t they?”

“Feel the life of the mind all the time?” I asked.

“Wear gowns.”

“They were monks once, too,” I said.

“And thinking ought to be holy,” you decided. “Or reverent. I wish I had a religious vocabulary What’s the difference between holy and reverent?”

“ ‘Holy’ comes from the same root as ‘whole’; taken over by the church, it means coming from God, therefore pure or sinless. To be reverent is to be loving and respectful at once. I don’t know how I could think about history or philosophy, for instance, if I had to think like that.”

“But you do think like that, Kate. Maybe I should be a Christian. Do you think I could be?”

“The vocabulary’s free in any dictionary.”

“But to have it mean something…”

“Well, save religious box tops and see.”

As I inspected your double pack that morning in London, I thought perhaps you had taken my advice. There were pamphlets and postcards, deer antlers and junk jewelry, books and notebooks, all packed round with Kotex and toilet paper, emblems of one of your shynesses.

“But, little dog, you have to take some clothes.”

“I was going to,” you said, “but there isn’t room. I can tie my coat onto the back.”

The performance that followed reminded me of Fish, a card game I played as a child. “I have two pairs of shoes,” I would say, and you’d answer, “I have none.” You would have liked to add, “Go fish!” But I changed the rules. Out of your pack would have to come the antlers, into it the required shoes. In the end, this long-disputed first edition of Milton was the only thing I allowed you to take because you insisted that you needed it. One of your summer projects was to memorize the whole of
Paradise Lost.
I never heard anything beyond the first book, but I can hear that still:

Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit

Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste

Brought Death into the World, and all our woe…

Through summer France you chanted:

Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime,

Said then the lost Arch-Angel, this the seat

That we must change for Heav’n, this mournful gloom

For that celestial light?

I woke to:

… from Morn

to Noon he fell, from Noon to dewy Eve,

A Summer’s day; and with the setting Sun

Dropt from the Zenith like a falling Star…

and slept to:

For Spirits when they please

Can either Sex assume, or both; so soft

And uncompounded is their Essence pure…

And works of love or enmity fulfill.

At times I regretted not letting you take the antlers instead; you couldn’t have done much but wear them to anticipate your Oberon period when you gave all creatures horns. But there are worse things to live with than Book I of
Paradise Lost.
And worse things we did discover.

The hazards of bicycling were not really among them. We rode only to Victoria Station. Finding ourselves in Dieppe at dusk, we hitchhiked to Rouen on a truck delivering toilets to farmhouses. We took a train from Rouen to Paris where you sold your bicycle to a redheaded American boy. I stored mine. Years later I gave it away to a young woman who didn’t really look very much like you.

And I have told that story too often, the last time to your mother in a taxi after Monk’s wedding to keep her from other kinds of discussion about you. She laughed a great deal, if uncertainly. That’s enough. This is not intended to be a 1950s version of
Innocents Abroad.

We were intent on silly pilgrimages. Fortunately, in search of Rodin you also found Henry Moore. On the trail of Alice B. Toklas, we learned to eat snails and read Henry Miller. It was a summer of Henrys until we set out for Valla de Mosa to find George Sands and Chopin, encountering instead Andrew Belshaw and Peter Jackson on a train stalled between the French border and Barcelona. We had been on our way all night, you very cheerful at first, trading sandwiches and jokes with five railroad workers who shared our third-class carriage, accepting lessons in drinking from their goat skin flasks; but, when morning came and you found yourself stained with red wine, a little sick with indigestible good fellowship and no sleep, you were simply miserable. The train stopped, and there was nothing to see but the flat heat of a flat landscape through the dirty train window You were near tears, I near speaking my now almost constant irritation, but I suggested the dining car as a distraction for us both. Officials stood along the tracks on the shady side of the train, smoking cigarettes, obviously in no hurry to solve whatever the problem was. We climbed over armed guards, slumped down over their knives, bayoneted rifles, and pistols, enjoying a short and uncomfortable sleep along the corridors. We climbed with other foreigners, all crowding to the dining car to complain. Only the Spaniards stayed in their places, slicing melon and cleaning their fingernails with pocket knives. There we found or were found by Andrew and Peter. It was the first time I was more enthusiastic about strangers than you. You sat by the window, sulking, just as Peter did on the other side of the aisle. Andrew offered me an American cigarette. We exchanged unpleasantries about the train, Spanish customs officials, Spanish beer.

“We’re on our way to Mallorca,” Andrew explained. “I hope to hell we get to Barcelona in time to make the nine o’clock boat.”

“We are, too,” I said, “but we’d been thinking about staying a day or two in Barcelona.”

“Why, in this heat?”

“Just to look around.”

“Have you got an address for Mallorca?”

I did not want to admit that we were on our way to Valla de Mosa. I didn’t even know that it was a place to stay. “No, not really.”

“Because I’ve got a good one, out of town, cheap, right by the sea. Would you like it?”

“It sounds like just what we’re looking for.”

You were taking no interest in the conversation; Peter’s silence was more hostile than indifferent. In these moods, you were both as responsible as Andrew for convincing me that it was a good idea. I wanted to be relieved of our isolation, of your devotion and dependence, your soaring and tumbling moods; but I also felt guilty. Because Andrew was not the person I would have ordered, because Peter seemed as difficult for him as you were for me, the solution had enough discomfort in it to be acceptable. While we were in the dining car, the train began to move again. Before we returned to our own compartments, we agreed to meet on the platform at Barcelona to decide what we would do.

“I thought you said we were going to Valla de Mosa,” you said, lurching along the corridor behind me.