II MODULO Women and short stories This module

II MODULO
Women and short stories
This module will focus on the reading and analysis of a number of short stories by women writers of the United
States. Attendance is highly recommended. THE COURSE IS TAUGHT IN ENGLISH.
Students attending classes (see also the writing study pack)
During the course students will be invited to build a portfolio of writing activities The portfolio will include a variety
of tasks, chiefly related to textual analysis and critical essays, and will be partially carried out during classes,
under the instructor’s supervision. Classes are two hours each.
Bibliography
- short stories
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892)
Kate Chopin, “The Story of an Hour” (1894)
Edith Wharton, “The House Of The Dead Hand” (1904)
Dorothy Parker, “The Sexes” (1927)
Dorothy Parker, “Big Blonde” (1929)
Two short stories chosen among the following
Susan Glaspell, “A Jury of Her Peers” (1917)
Katherine Anne Porter, “Theft” (1930)
Jean Stafford, “The Interior Castle” (1944)
Ann Petry, “Like a Winding Sheet” (1946)
Flannery O'Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1953)
Tillie Olsen, “I Stand Here Ironing” (1961)
Joyce Carol Oates, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” (1966)
Alice Walker, “Everyday Use” (1973)
Margaret Atwood, “Rape Fantasies” (1977)
Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl” (1983)
Susan Sontag, “The Way We Live Now” (1987)
Cynthia Ozick, “The Shawl” (1989)
Lorrie Moore, “You’re Ugly, Too” (1989)
Pam Houston, “The Best Girlfriend You Never Had” (1997)
- further reading:
Sandra Gilberg and Susan Gubar, “Toward a Feminist Poetics”, in The Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman
Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, New Haven, Duke UP, 1079.
Excerpts from Judith Butler, “Critically Queer”, GLQ: A Journal in Gay and Lesbian Studies, 1: 1, 1993, pp. 17-32
Students NOT attending classes
Students who cannot attend classes will have to take the final exam, which will assess their knowledge of the
texts and their capacity to critically engage the texts within a historical and literary framework.
Bibliography
- short stories
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892)
Kate Chopin, “The Story of an Hour” (1894)
Edith Wharton, “The House Of The Dead Hand” (1904)
Dorothy Parker, “The Sexes” (1927)
Dorothy Parker, “Big Blonde” (1929)
Susan Glaspell, “A Jury of Her Peers” (1917)
Katherine Anne Porter, “Theft” (1930)
Jean Stafford, “The Interior Castle” (1944)
Ann Petry, “Like a Winding Sheet” (1946)
Flannery O'Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1953)
Tillie Olsen, “I Stand Here Ironing” (1961)
Joyce Carol Oates, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” (1966)
Alice Walker, “Everyday Use” (1973)
Margaret Atwood, “Rape Fantasies” (1977)
Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl” (1983)
Susan Sontag, “The Way We Live Now” (1987)
Cynthia Ozick, “The Shawl” (1989)
Lorrie Moore, “You’re Ugly, Too” (1989)
Pam Houston, “The Best Girlfriend You Never Had” (1997)
- critical texts:
Sandra Gilberg and Susan Gubar, “Toward a Feminist Poetics”, in The Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman
Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, New Haven, Duke UP, 1079.
Gary Gutting, Foucault. A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, Oxford UP, 2005, chapter 9 (“Modern Sex”), pp. 91100.
Excerpts from Judith Butler, “Critically Queer”, GLQ: A Journal in Gay and Lesbian Studies, 1: 1, 1993, pp. 17-32
1
THE YELLOW WALLPAPER
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
IT is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the
summer.
A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of
romantic felicity, — but that would be asking too much of fate!
Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it.
Else, why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted?
John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.
John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and
he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.
John is a physician, and perhaps — (I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper
and a great relief to my mind) — perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.
You see, he does not believe I am sick!
And what can one do?
If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is
really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression, — a slight hysterical tendency, — what
is one to do?
My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says the same thing.
So I take phosphates or phosphites, — whichever it is, — and tonics, and journeys, and air, and
exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to "work" until I am well again.
Personally I disagree with their ideas.
Personally I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.
But what is one to do?
I did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a good deal — having to be so sly about
it, or else meet with heavy opposition.
I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus — but
John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel
bad.
So I will let it alone and talk about the house.
The most beautiful place! It is quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the
village. It makes me think of English places that you read about, for there are hedges and walls and gates
that lock, and lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and people.
There is a delicious garden! I never saw such a garden — large and shady, full of box-bordered paths,
and lined with long grape-covered arbors with seats under them.
There were greenhouses, too, but they are all broken now.
There was some legal trouble, I believe, something about the heirs and co-heirs; anyhow, the place
has been empty for years.
That spoils my ghostliness, I am afraid; but I don't care — there is something strange about the
house — I can feel it.
I even said so to John one moonlight evening, but he said what I felt was adraught, and shut the
window.
I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes. I'm sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is
due to this nervous condition.
But John says if I feel so I shall neglect proper self-control; so I take pains to control myself, — before
him, at least,—and that makes me very tired.
I don't like our room a bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza and had roses all over
the window, and such pretty, old-fashioned chintz hangings! but John would not hear of it.
He said there was only one window and not room for two beds, and no near room for him if he took
another.
He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction.
I have a schedule prescription for each hour in the day; he takes all care from me, and so I feel basely
ungrateful not to value it more.
He said we came here solely on my account, that I was to have perfect rest and all the air I could get.
"Your exercise depends on your strength, my dear," said he, "and your food somewhat on your appetite; but
air you can absorb all the time." So we took the nursery, at the top of the house.
It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine
galore. It was nursery first and then playground and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred
for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.
2
The paint and paper look as if a boys' school had used it. It is stripped off — the paper — in great
patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of
the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life.
One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.
It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate, and provoke
study, and when you follow the lame, uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide —
plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard-of contradictions.
The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering, unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slowturning sunlight.
It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.
No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long.
There comes John, and I must put this away, — he hates to have me write a word.
WE have been here two weeks, and I haven't felt like writing before, since that first day.
I am sitting by the window now, up in this atrocious nursery, and there is nothing to hinder my writing
as much as I please, save lack of strength.
John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious.
I am glad my case is not serious!
But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing.
John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies
him.
Of course it is only nervousness. It does weigh on me so not to do my duty in any way!
I meant to be such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and here I am a comparative burden
already!
Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able — to dress and entertain, and order
things.
It is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby. Such a dear baby!
And yet I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous.
I suppose John never was nervous in his life. He laughs at me so about this wall paper!
At first he meant to repaper the room, but afterwards he said that I was letting it get the better of me,
and that nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies.
He said that after the wall paper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead, and then the barred
windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on.
"You know the place is doing you good," he said, "and really, dear, I don't care to renovate the house
just for a three months' rental."
"Then do let us go downstairs," I said, "there are such pretty rooms there."
Then he took me in his arms and called me a blessed little goose, and said he would go down cellar if
I wished, and have it whitewashed into the bargain.
But he is right enough about the beds and windows and things.
It is as airy and comfortable a room as any one need wish, and, of course, I would not be so silly as to
make him uncomfortable just for a whim.
I'm really getting quite fond of the big room, all but that horrid paper.
Out of one window I can see the garden, those mysterious deep-shaded arbors, the riotous oldfashioned flowers, and bushes and gnarly trees.
Out of another I get a lovely view of the bay and a little private wharf belonging to the estate. There is
a beautiful shaded lane that runs down there from the house. I always fancy I see people walking in these
numerous paths and arbors, but John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least. He says that
with my imaginative power and habit of story-making a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all
manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. So I try.
I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and
rest me.
But I find I get pretty tired when I try.
It is so discouraging not to have any advice and companionship about my work. When I get really well
John says we will ask Cousin Henry and Julia down for a long visit; but he says he would as soon put fireworks in my pillow-case as to let me have those stimulating people about now.
I wish I could get well faster.
But I must not think about that. This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had!
There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you
upside-down.
I got positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness. Up and down and sideways
they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere. There is one place where two breadths didn't
match, and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the other.
3
I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression
they have! I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain
furniture than most children could find in a toy-store.
I remember what a kindly wink the knobs of our big old bureau used to have, and there was one chair
that always seemed like a strong friend.
I used to feel that if any of the other things looked too fierce I could always hop into that chair and be
safe.
The furniture in this room is no worse than inharmonious, however, for we had to bring it all from
downstairs. I suppose when this was used as a playroom they had to take the nursery things out, and no
wonder! I never saw such ravages as the children have made here.
The wall paper, as I said before, is torn off in spots, and it sticketh closer than a brother — they must
have had perseverance as well as hatred.
Then the floor is scratched and gouged and splintered, the plaster itself is dug out here and there, and
this great heavy bed, which is all we found in the room, looks as if it had been through the wars.
But I don't mind it a bit — only the paper.
There comes John's sister. Such a dear girl as she is, and so careful of me! I must not let her find me
writing.
She is a perfect, an enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession. I verily believe
she thinks it is the writing which made me sick!
But I can write when she is out, and see her a long way off from these windows.
There is one that commands the road, a lovely, shaded, winding road, and one that just looks off over
the country. A lovely country, too, full of great elms and velvet meadows.
This wall paper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can
only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then.
But in the places where it isn't faded, and where the sun is just so, I can see a strange, provoking,
formless sort of figure, that seems to sulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design.
There's sister on the stairs!
WELL, the Fourth of July is over! The people are all gone and I am tired out. John thought it might do
me good to see a little company, so we just had mother and Nellie and the children down for a week.
Of course I didn't do a thing. Jennie sees to everything now.
But it tired me all the same.
John says if I don't pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall.
But I don't want to go there at all. I had a friend who was in his hands once, and she says he is just
like John and my brother, only more so!
Besides, it is such an undertaking to go so far.
I don't feel as if it was worth while to turn my hand over for anything, and I'm getting dreadfully fretful
and querulous.
I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time.
Of course I don't when John is here, or anybody else, but when I am alone.
And I am alone a good deal just now. John is kept in town very often by serious cases, and Jennie is
good and lets me alone when I want her to.
So I walk a little in the garden or down that lovely lane, sit on the porch under the roses, and lie down
up here a good deal.
I'm getting really fond of the room in spite of the wall paper. Perhaps because of the wall paper.
It dwells in my mind so!
I lie here on this great immovable bed — it is nailed down, I believe — and follow that pattern about by
the hour. It is as good as gymnastics, I assure you. I start, we'll say, at the bottom, down in the corner over
there where it has not been touched, and I determine for the thousandth time that I will follow that pointless
pattern to some sort of a conclusion.
I know a little of the principles of design, and I know this thing was not arranged on any laws of
radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry, or anything else that I ever heard of.
It is repeated, of course, by the breadths, but not otherwise.
Looked at in one way, each breadth stands alone, the bloated curves and flourishes — a kind of
"debased Romanesque" with delirium tremens — go waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity.
But, on the other hand, they connect diagonally, and the sprawling outlines run off in great slanting
waves of optic horror, like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase.
The whole thing goes horizontally, too, at least it seems so, and I exhaust myself in trying to
distinguish the order of its going in that direction.
They have used a horizontal breadth for a frieze, and that adds wonderfully to the confusion.
4
There is one end of the room where it is almost intact, and there, when the cross-lights fade and the
low sun shines directly upon it, I can almost fancy radiation, after all, — the interminable grotesques seem to
form around a common centre and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction.
It makes me tired to follow it. I will take a nap, I guess.
I DON'T know why I should write this.
I don't want to.
I don't feel able.
And I know John would think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and think in some way — it is such a
relief!
But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.
Half the time now I am awfully lazy, and lie down ever so much.
John says I mustn't lose my strength, and has me take cod-liver oil and lots of tonics and things, to
say nothing of ale and wine and rare meat.
Dear John! He loves me very dearly, and hates to have me sick. I tried to have a real earnest
reasonable talk with him the other day, and tell him how I wished he would let me go and make a visit to
Cousin Henry and Julia.
But he said I wasn't able to go, nor able to stand it after I got there; and I did not make out a very good
case for myself, for I was crying before I had finished.
It is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight. Just this nervous weakness, I suppose.
And dear John gathered me up in his arms, and just carried me upstairs and laid me on the bed, and
sat by me and read to me till he tired my head.
He said I was his darling and his comfort and all he had, and that I must take care of myself for his
sake, and keep well.
He says no one but myself can help me out of it, that I must use my will and self-control and not let my
silly fancies run away with me.
There's one comfort, the baby is well and happy, and does not have to occupy this nursery with the
horrid wall paper.
If we had not used it that blessed child would have! What a fortunate escape! Why, I wouldn't have a
child of mine, an impressionable little thing, live in such a room for worlds.
I never thought of it before, but it is lucky that John kept me here, after all. I can stand it so much
easier than a baby, you see.
Of course I never mention it to them any more, — I am too wise, — but I keep watch of it all the same.
There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.
Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day.
It is always the same shape, only very numerous.
And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don't like it a bit. I
wonder — I begin to think — I wish John would take me away from here!
IT is so hard to talk with John about my case, because he is so wise, and because he loves me so.
But I tried it last night.
It was moonlight. The moon shines in all around, just as the sun does.
I hate to see it sometimes, it creeps so slowly, and always comes in by one window or another.
John was asleep and I hated to waken him, so I kept still and watched the moonlight on that
undulating wall paper till I felt creepy.
The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out.
I got up softly and went to feel and see if the paper did move, and when I came back John was awake.
"What is it, little girl?" he said. "Don't go walking about like that — you'll get cold."
I thought it was a good time to talk, so I told him that I really was not gaining here, and that I wished he
would take me away.
"Why, darling!" said he, "our lease will be up in three weeks, and I can't see how to leave before.
"The repairs are not done at home, and I cannot possibly leave town just now. Of course if you were in
any danger I could and would, but you really are better, dear, whether you can see it or not. I am a doctor,
dear, and I know. You are gaining flesh and color, your appetite is better. I feel really much easier about
you."
"I don't weigh a bit more," said I, "nor as much; and my appetite may be better in the evening, when
you are here, but it is worse in the morning, when you are away."
"Bless her little heart!" said he with a big hug; "she shall be as sick as she pleases. But now let's
improve the shining hours by going to sleep, and talk about it in the morning."
"And you won't go away?" I asked gloomily.
"Why, how can I, dear? It is only three weeks more and then we will take a nice little trip of a few days
while Jennie is getting the house ready. Really, dear, you are better!"
5
"Better in body, perhaps" — I began, and stopped short, for he sat up straight and looked at me with
such a stern, reproachful look that I could not say another word.
"My darling," said he, "I beg of you, for my sake and for our child's sake, as well as for your own, that
you will never for one instant let that idea enter your mind! There is nothing so dangerous, so fascinating, to
a temperament like yours. It is a false and foolish fancy. Can you not trust me as a physician when I tell you
so?"
So of course I said no more on that score, and we went to sleep before long. He thought I was asleep
first, but I wasn't, — I lay there for hours trying to decide whether that front pattern and the back pattern really
did move together or separately.
ON a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant
irritant to a normal mind.
The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is
torturing.
You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well under way in following, it turns a back
somersault, and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a
bad dream.
The outside pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus. If you can imagine a toadstool in
joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions, — why, that is
something like it.
That is, sometimes!
There is one marked peculiarity about this paper, a thing nobody seems to notice but myself, and that
is that it changes as the light changes.
When the sun shoots in through the east window — I always watch for that first long, straight ray — it
changes so quickly that I never can quite believe it.
That is why I watch it always.
By moonlight — the moon shines in all night when there is a moon — I wouldn't know it was the same
paper.
At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes
bars! The outside pattern, I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be.
I didn't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, — that dim sub-pattern, — but
now I am quite sure it is a woman.
By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still. It is so puzzling. It
keeps me quiet by the hour.
I lie down ever so much now. John says it is good for me, and to sleep all I can.
Indeed, he started the habit by making me lie down for an hour after each meal.
It is a very bad habit, I am convinced, for, you see, I don't sleep.
And that cultivates deceit, for I don't tell them I'm awake, — oh, no!
The fact is, I am getting a little afraid of John.
He seems very queer sometimes, and even Jennie has an inexplicable look.
It strikes me occasionally, just as a scientific hypothesis, that perhaps it is the paper!
I have watched John when he did not know I was looking, and come into the room suddenly on the
most innocent excuses, and I've caught him several timeslooking at the paper! And Jennie too. I caught
Jennie with her hand on it once.
She didn't know I was in the room, and when I asked her in a quiet, a very quiet voice, with the most
restrained manner possible, what she was doing with the paper she turned around as if she had been caught
stealing, and looked quite angry — asked me why I should frighten her so!
Then she said that the paper stained everything it touched, that she had found yellow smooches on all
my clothes and John's, and she wished we would be more careful!
Did not that sound innocent? But I know she was studying that pattern, and I am determined that
nobody shall find it out but myself!
LIFE is very much more exciting now than it used to be. You see I have something more to expect, to
look forward to, to watch. I really do eat better, and am more quiet than I was.
John is so pleased to see me improve! He laughed a little the other day, and said I seemed to be
flourishing in spite of my wall paper.
I turned it off with a laugh. I had no intention of telling him it was because of the wall paper — he would
make fun of me. He might even want to take me away.
I don't want to leave now until I have found it out. There is a week more, and I think that will be
enough.
I'm feeling ever so much better! I don't sleep much at night, for it is so interesting to watch
developments; but I sleep a good deal in the daytime.
6
In the daytime it is tiresome and perplexing.
There are always new shoots on the fungus, and new shades of yellow all over it. I cannot keep count
of them, though I have tried conscientiously.
It is the strangest yellow, that wall paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw — not
beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.
But there is something else about that paper — the smell! I noticed it the moment we came into the
room, but with so much air and sun it was not bad. Now we have had a week of fog and rain, and whether
the windows are open or not the smell is here.
It creeps all over the house.
I find it hovering in the dining-room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall, lying in wait for me on the
stairs.
It gets into my hair.
Even when I go to ride, if I turn my head suddenly and surprise it — there is that smell!
Such a peculiar odor, too! I have spent hours in trying to analyze it, to find what it smelled like.
It is not bad — at first, and very gentle, but quite the subtlest, most enduring odor I ever met.
In this damp weather it is awful. I wake up in the night and find it hanging over me.
It used to disturb me at first. I thought seriously of burning the house — to reach the smell.
But now I am used to it. The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper — a yellow
smell!
There is a very funny mark on this wall, low down, near the mopboard. A streak that runs around the
room. It goes behind every piece of furniture, except the bed, a long, straight, even smooch, as if it had been
rubbed over and over.
I wonder how it was done and who did it, and what they did it for. Round and round and round — round
and round and round — it makes me dizzy!
I REALLY have discovered something at last.
Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out.
The front pattern does move — and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!
Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls
around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over.
Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the
bars and shakes them hard.
And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern — it
strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads.
They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside-down, and makes
their eyes white!
If those heads were covered or taken off it would not be half so bad.
I THINK that woman gets out in the daytime!
And I'll tell you why — privately — I've seen her!
I can see her out of every one of my windows!
It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.
I see her in that long shaded lane, creeping up and down. I see her in those dark grape arbors,
creeping all around the garden.
I see her on that long road under the trees, creeping along, and when a carriage comes she hides
under the blackberry vines.
I don't blame her a bit. It must be very humiliating to be caught creeping by daylight!
I always lock the door when I creep by daylight. I can't do it at night, for I know John would suspect
something at once.
And John is so queer, now, that I don't want to irritate him. I wish he would take another room!
Besides, I don't want anybody to get that woman out at night but myself.
I often wonder if I could see her out of all the windows at once.
But, turn as fast as I can, I can only see out of one at one time.
And though I always see her she may be able to creep faster than I can turn!
I have watched her sometimes away off in the open country, creeping as fast as a cloud shadow in a
high wind.
IF only that top pattern could be gotten off from the under one! I mean to try it, little by little.
I have found out another funny thing, but I shan't tell it this time! It does not do to trust people too
much.
There are only two more days to get this paper off, and I believe John is beginning to notice. I don't
like the look in his eyes.
7
And I heard him ask Jennie a lot of professional questions about me. She had a very good report to
give.
She said I slept a good deal in the daytime.
John knows I don't sleep very well at night, for all I'm so quiet!
He asked me all sorts of questions, too, and pretended to be very loving and kind.
As if I couldn't see through him!
Still, I don't wonder he acts so, sleeping under this paper for three months.
It only interests me, but I feel sure John and Jennie are secretly affected by it.
HURRAH! This is the last day, but it is enough. John is to stay in town over night, and won't be out until
this evening.
Jennie wanted to sleep with me — the sly thing! but I told her I should undoubtedly rest better for a
night all alone.
That was clever, for really I wasn't alone a bit! As soon as it was moonlight, and that poor thing began
to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her.
I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that
paper.
A strip about as high as my head and half around the room.
And then when the sun came and that awful pattern began to laugh at me I declared I would finish it
today!
We go away to-morrow, and they are moving all my furniture down again to leave things as they were
before.
Jennie looked at the wall in amazement, but I told her merrily that I did it out of pure spite at the
vicious thing.
She laughed and said she wouldn't mind doing it herself, but I must not get tired.
How she betrayed herself that time!
But I am here, and no person touches this paper but me — not alive!
She tried to get me out of the room — it was too patent! But I said it was so quiet and empty and clean
now that I believed I would lie down again and sleep all I could; and not to wake me even for dinner — I would
call when I woke.
So now she is gone, and the servants are gone, and the things are gone, and there is nothing left but
that great bed-stead nailed down, with the canvas mattress we found on it.
We shall sleep downstairs to-night, and take the boat home to-morrow.
I quite enjoy the room, now it is bare again.
How those children did tear about here!
This bedstead is fairly gnawed!
But I must get to work.
I have locked the door and thrown the key down into the front path.
I don't want to go out, and I don't want to have anybody come in, till John comes.
I want to astonish him.
I've got a rope up here that even Jennie did not find. If that woman does get out, and tries to get away,
I can tie her!
But I forgot I could not reach far without anything to stand on!
This bed will not move!
I tried to lift and push it until I was lame, and then I got so angry I bit off a little piece at one corner —
but it hurt my teeth.
Then I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor. It sticks horribly and the pattern just
enjoys it! All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths just shriek with derision!
I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window would be admirable
exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try.
Besides, I wouldn't do it. Of course not. I know well enough that a step like that is improper and might
be misconstrued.
I don't like to look out of the windows even — there are so many of those creeping women, and they
creep so fast.
I wonder if they all come out of that wall paper, as I did?
But I am securely fastened now by my well-hidden rope — you don't get me out in the road there!
I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard!
It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please!
I don't want to go outside. I won't, even if Jennie asks me to.
For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow.
But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the
wall, so I cannot lose my way.
8
Why, there's John at the door!
It is no use, young man, you can't open it!
How he does call and pound!
Now he's crying for an axe.
It would be a shame to break down that beautiful door!
"John, dear!" said I in the gentlest voice, "the key is down by the front steps, under a plantain leaf!"
That silenced him for a few moments.
Then he said — very quietly indeed, "Open the door, my darling!"
"I can't," said I. "The key is down by the front door, under a plantain leaf!"
And then I said it again, several times, very gently and slowly, and said it so often that he had to go
and see, and he got it, of course, and came in. He stopped short by the door.
"What is the matter?" he cried. "For God's sake, what are you doing?"
I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder.
"I've got out at last," said I, "in spite of you and Jane! And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you
can't put me back!"
Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had
to creep over him every time!
THE STORY OF AN HOUR
Kate Chopin
Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently
as possible the news of her husband's death.
It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half
concealing. Her husband's friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in the
newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard's name leading
the list of "killed." He had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had
hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message.
She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept
its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister's arms. When the storm of
grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her.
There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed
down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul.
She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new
spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The
notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were
twittering in the eaves. There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had
met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window.
She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except when a sob
came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams.
She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength.
But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those patches
of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought.
There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not
know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her
through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air.
Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was
approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will — as powerless as her two
white slender hands would have been. When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her
slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under her breath: "free, free, free!" The vacant stare and the
look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and
the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body. She did not stop to ask if it were or were not
a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as
trivial.
She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face
that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter
moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and
spread her arms out to them in welcome. There would be no one to live for her during those coming years;
she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which
men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or
a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of
illumination.
And yet she had loved him — sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love, the
unsolved mystery, count for in face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as
the strongest impulse of her being!
"Free! Body and soul free!" she kept whispering.
Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhole, imploring for admission.
"Louise, open the door! I beg, open the door — you will make yourself ill. What are you doing, Louise? For
heaven's sake open the door."
"Go away. I am not making myself ill." No; she was drinking in a very elixir of life through that open
window. Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and all
sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only
yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.
She arose at length and opened the door to her sister's importunities. There was a feverish triumph in
her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She clasped her sister's waist, and
together they descended the stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at the bottom.
Someone was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered, a little
travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella. He had been far from the scene of the
accident, and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed at Josephine's piercing cry; at
Richards' quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife.
But Richards was too late.
When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease — of the joy that kills.
Reading and Discussion Questions on Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour"
1. What is the nature of Mrs. Mallard's "heart trouble," and why would the author mention it in the first
paragraph? Is there any way in which this might be considered symbolic or ironic?
2. The setting of the story is very limited; it is confined largely to a room, a staircase, and a front door. How
does this limitation help to express the themes of the story?
3. In what ways is this passage significant? "She could see in the open square before her house the tops of
trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street
below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her
faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves." What kinds of sensory images does this
passage contain, and what senses does it address? What does the vision through the open window mean to
her? Where else does she taste, smell, or touch something intangible in the story?
4. What kind of relationships do the Mallards have? Is Brently Mallard unkind to Louise Mallard, or is there
some other reason for her saying "free, free, free!" when she hears of his death? How does she feel about
him?
5. Mrs. Mallard closes the door to her room so that her sister Josephine cannot get in, yet she leaves the
window open. Why does Chopin make a point of telling the reader this? How might this relate to the idea of
being "free" and to the implicit idea that she is somehow imprisoned? Do other words in the story relate to
this idea?
6. What does Josephine represent in the story? What does Richards represent?
7. Mrs. Mallard is described as descending the stairs "like a goddess of Victory." In what ways does she feel
herself victorious?
8. The last line of the story is this: "When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease – of joy
that kills." In what ways is this an ironic statement? What is gained by having the doctors make such a
statement rather than putting it in the mouths of Josephine or Richards?
9. What view of marriage does the story present? The story was published in 1894; does it only represent
attitudes toward marriage in the nineteenth century, or could it equally apply to attitudes about marriage
today?
10. If this is, in some sense, a story about a symbolic journey, where does Mrs. Mallard "travel"?
Edith Wharton
The House Of The Dead Hand
I
"Above all," the letter ended, "don't leave Siena without seeing Doctor Lombard's Leonardo. Lombard is a
queer old Englishman, a mystic or a madman (if the two are not synonymous), and a devout student of the
Italian Renaissance. He has lived for years in Italy, exploring its remotest corners, and has lately picked up
an undoubted Leonardo, which came to light in a farmhouse near Bergamo. It is believed to be one of the
missing pictures mentioned by Vasari, and is at any rate, according to the most competent authorities, a
genuine and almost untouched example of the best period.
"Lombard is a queer stick, and jealous of showing his treasures; but we struck up a friendship when I was
working on the Sodomas in Siena three years ago, and if you will give him the enclosed line you may get a
peep at the Leonardo. Probably not more than a peep, though, for I hear he refuses to have it reproduced. I
want badly to use it in my monograph on the Windsor drawings, so please see what you can do for me, and
if you can't persuade him to let you take a photograph or make a sketch, at least jot down a detailed
description of the picture and get from him all the facts you can. I hear that the French and Italian
governments have offered him a large advance on his purchase, but that he refuses to sell at any price,
though he certainly can't afford such luxuries; in fact, I don't see where he got enough money to buy the
picture. He lives in the Via Papa Giulio."
Wyant sat at the table d'hote of his hotel, re-reading his friend's letter over a late luncheon. He had been
five days in Siena without having found time to call on Doctor Lombard; not from any indifference to the
opportunity presented, but because it was his first visit to the strange red city and he was still under the spell
of its more conspicuous wonders -- the brick palaces flinging out their wrought-iron torch-holders with a
gesture of arrogant suzerainty; the great council-chamber emblazoned with civic allegories; the pageant of
Pope Julius on the Library walls; the Sodomas smiling balefully through the dusk of mouldering chapels -and it was only when his first hunger was appeased that he remembered that one course in the banquet was
still untasted.
He put the letter in his pocket and turned to leave the room, with a nod to its only other occupant, an
olive-skinned young man with lustrous eyes and a low collar, who sat on the other side of the table, perusing
the Fanfulla di Domenica. This gentleman, his daily vis-a-vis, returned the nod with a Latin eloquence of
gesture, and Wyant passed on to the ante-chamber, where he paused to light a cigarette. He was just
restoring the case to his pocket when he heard a hurried step behind him, and the lustrouseyed young man
advanced through the glass doors of the diningroom.
"Pardon me, sir," he said in measured English, and with an intonation of exquisite politeness; "you have
let this letter fall."
Wyant, recognizing his friend's note of introduction to Doctor Lombard, took it with a word of thanks, and
was about to turn away when he perceived that the eyes of his fellow diner remained fixed on him with a
gaze of melancholy interrogation.
"Again pardon me," the young man at length ventured, "but are you by chance the friend of the illustrious
Doctor Lombard?"
"No," returned Wyant, with the instinctive Anglo-Saxon distrust of foreign advances. Then, fearing to
appear rude, he said with a guarded politeness: "Perhaps, by the way, you can tell me the number of his
house. I see it is not given here."
The young man brightened perceptibly. "The number of the house is thirteen; but any one can indicate it
to you -- it is well known in Siena. It is called," he continued after a moment, "the House of the Dead Hand."
Wyant stared. "What a queer name!" he said.
"The name comes from an antique hand of marble which for many hundred years has been above the
door."
Wyant was turning away with a gesture of thanks, when the other added: "If you would have the kindness
to ring twice."
"To ring twice?"
"At the doctor's." The young man smiled. "It is the custom."
It was a dazzling March afternoon, with a shower of sun from the mid-blue, and a marshalling of slaty
clouds behind the umbercolored hills. For nearly an hour Wyant loitered on the Lizza, watching the shadows
race across the naked landscape and the thunder blacken in the west; then he decided to set out for the
House of the Dead Hand. The map in his guidebook showed him that the Via Papa Giulio was one of the
streets which radiate from the Piazza, and thither he bent his course, pausing at every other step to fill his
eye with some fresh image of weather-beaten beauty. The clouds had rolled upward, obscuring the sunshine
and hanging like a funereal baldachin above the projecting cornices of Doctor Lombard's street, and Wyant
walked for some distance in the shade of the beetling palace fronts before his eye fell on a doorway
surmounted by a sallow marble hand. He stood for a moment staring up at the strange emblem. The hand
was a woman's -- a dead drooping hand, which hung there convulsed and helpless, as though it had been
thrust forth in denunciation of some evil mystery within the house, and had sunk struggling into death.
A girl who was drawing water from the well in the court said that the English doctor lived on the first floor,
and Wyant, passing through a glazed door, mounted the damp degrees of a vaulted stairway with a plaster
AEsculapius mouldering in a niche on the landing. Facing the AEsculapius was another door, and as Wyant
put his hand on the bell-rope he remembered his unknown friend's injunction, and rang twice.
His ring was answered by a peasant woman with a low forehead and small close-set eyes, who, after a
prolonged scrutiny of himself, his card, and his letter of introduction, left him standing in a high, cold antechamber floored with brick. He heard her wooden pattens click down an interminable corridor, and after
some delay she returned and told him to follow her.
They passed through a long saloon, bare as the ante-chamber, but loftily vaulted, and frescoed with a
seventeenth-century Triumph of Scipio or Alexander -- martial figures following Wyant with the filmed
melancholy gaze of shades in limbo. At the end of this apartment he was admitted to a smaller room, with
the same atmosphere of mortal cold, but showing more obvious signs of occupancy. The walls were covered
with tapestry which had faded to the gray-brown tints of decaying vegetation, so that the young man felt as
though he were entering a sunless autumn wood. Against these hangings stood a few tall cabinets on heavy
gilt feet, and at a table in the window three persons were seated: an elderly lady who was warming her
hands over a brazier, a girl bent above a strip of needle-work, and an old man.
As the latter advanced toward Wyant, the young man was conscious of staring with unseemly intentness
at his small round-backed figure, dressed with shabby disorder and surmounted by a wonderful head, lean,
vulpine, eagle-beaked as that of some artloving despot of the Renaissance: a head combining the venerable
hair and large prominent eyes of the humanist with the greedy profile of the adventurer. Wyant, in musing on
the Italian portrait-medals of the fifteenth century, had often fancied that only in that period of fierce
individualism could types so paradoxical have been produced; yet the subtle craftsmen who committed them
to the bronze had never drawn a face more strangely stamped with contradictory passions than that of
Doctor Lombard.
"I am glad to see you," he said to Wyant, extending a hand which seemed a mere framework held
together by knotted veins. "We lead a quiet life here and receive few visitors, but any friend of Professor
Clyde's is welcome." Then, with a gesture which included the two women, he added dryly: "My wife and
daughter often talk of Professor Clyde."
"Oh yes -- he used to make me such nice toast; they don't understand toast in Italy," said Mrs. Lombard in
a high plaintive voice.
It would have been difficult, from Doctor Lombard's manner and appearance to guess his nationality; but
his wife was so inconsciently and ineradicably English that even the silhouette of her cap seemed a protest
against Continental laxities. She was a stout fair woman, with pale cheeks netted with red lines. A brooch
with a miniature portrait sustained a bogwood watchchain upon her bosom, and at her elbow lay a heap of
knitting and an old copy of The Queen.
The young girl, who had remained standing, was a slim replica of her mother, with an apple-cheeked face
and opaque blue eyes. Her small head was prodigally laden with braids of dull fair hair, and she might have
had a kind of transient prettiness but for the sullen droop of her round mouth. It was hard to say whether her
expression implied ill-temper or apathy; but Wyant was struck by the contrast between the fierce vitality of
the doctor's age and the inanimateness of his daughter's youth.
Seating himself in the chair which his host advanced, the young man tried to open the conversation by
addressing to Mrs. Lombard some random remark on the beauties of Siena. The lady murmured a resigned
assent, and Doctor Lombard interposed with a smile: "My dear sir, my wife considers Siena a most
salubrious spot, and is favorably impressed by the cheapness of the marketing; but she deplores the total
absence of muffins and cannel coal, and cannot resign herself to the Italian method of dusting furniture."
"But they don't, you know -- they don't dust it!" Mrs. Lombard protested, without showing any resentment
of her husband's manner.
"Precisely -- they don't dust it. Since we have lived in Siena we have not once seen the cobwebs
removed from the battlements of the Mangia. Can you conceive of such housekeeping? My wife has never
yet dared to write it home to her aunts at Bonchurch."
Mrs. Lombard accepted in silence this remarkable statement of her views, and her husband, with a
malicious smile at Wyant's embarrassment, planted himself suddenly before the young man.
"And now," said he, "do you want to see my Leonardo?"
"Do I?" cried Wyant, on his feet in a flash.
The doctor chuckled. "Ah," he said, with a kind of crooning deliberation, "that's the way they all behave -that's what they all come for." He turned to his daughter with another variation of mockery in his smile. "Don't
fancy it's for your beaux yeux, my dear; or for the mature charms of Mrs. Lombard," he added, glaring
suddenly at his wife, who had taken up her knitting and was softly murmuring over the number of her
stitches.
Neither lady appeared to notice his pleasantries, and he continued, addressing himself to Wyant: "They
all come -- they all come; but many are called and few are chosen." His voice sank to solemnity. "While I
live," he said, "no unworthy eye shall desecrate that picture. But I will not do my friend Clyde the injustice to
suppose that he would send an unworthy representative. He tells me he wishes a description of the picture
for his book; and you shall describe it to him -- if you can."
Wyant hesitated, not knowing whether it was a propitious moment to put in his appeal for a photograph.
"Well, sir," he said, "you know Clyde wants me to take away all I can of it."
Doctor Lombard eyed him sardonically. "You're welcome to take away all you can carry," he replied;
adding, as he turned to his daughter: "That is, if he has your permission, Sybilla."
The girl rose without a word, and laying aside her work, took a key from a secret drawer in one of the
cabinets, while the doctor continued in the same note of grim jocularity: "For you must know that the picture
is not mine -- it is my daughter's."
He followed with evident amusement the surprised glance which Wyant turned on the young girl's
impassive figure.
"Sybilla," he pursued, "is a votary of the arts; she has inherited her fond father's passion for the
unattainable. Luckily, however, she also recently inherited a tidy legacy from her grandmother; and having
seen the Leonardo, on which its discoverer had placed a price far beyond my reach, she took a step which
deserves to go down to history: she invested her whole inheritance in the purchase of the picture, thus
enabling me to spend my closing years in communion with one of the world's masterpieces. My dear sir,
could Antigone do more?"
The object of this strange eulogy had meanwhile drawn aside one of the tapestry hangings, and fitted her
key into a concealed door.
"Come," said Doctor Lombard, "let us go before the light fails us."
Wyant glanced at Mrs. Lombard, who continued to knit impassively.
"No, no," said his host, "my wife will not come with us. You might not suspect it from her conversation, but
my wife has no feeling for art -- Italian art, that is; for no one is fonder of our early Victorian school."
"Frith's Railway Station, you know," said Mrs. Lombard, smiling. "I like an animated picture."
Miss Lombard, who had unlocked the door, held back the tapestry to let her father and Wyant pass out;
then she followed them down a narrow stone passage with another door at its end. This door was ironbarred, and Wyant noticed that it had a complicated patent lock. The girl fitted another key into the lock, and
Doctor Lombard led the way into a small room. The dark panelling of this apartment was irradiated by
streams of yellow light slanting through the disbanded thunder clouds, and in the central brightness hung a
picture concealed by a curtain of faded velvet.
"A little too bright, Sybilla," said Doctor Lombard. His face had grown solemn, and his mouth twitched
nervously as his daughter drew a linen drapery across the upper part of the window.
"That will do -- that will do." He turned impressively to Wyant. "Do you see the pomegranate bud in this
rug? Place yourself there -- keep your left foot on it, please. And now, Sybilla, draw the cord."
Miss Lombard advanced and placed her hand on a cord hidden behind the velvet curtain.
"Ah," said the doctor, "one moment: I should like you, while looking at the picture, to have in mind a few
lines of verse. Sybilla --"
Without the slightest change of countenance, and with a promptness which proved her to be prepared for
the request, Miss Lombard began to recite, in a full round voice like her mother's, St. Bernard's invocation to
the Virgin, in the thirty-third canto of the Paradise.
"Thank you, my dear," said her father, drawing a deep breath as she ended. "That unapproachable
combination of vowel sounds prepares one better than anything I know for the contemplation of the picture."
As he spoke the folds of velvet slowly parted, and the Leonardo appeared in its frame of tarnished gold:
From the nature of Miss Lombard's recitation Wyant had expected a sacred subject, and his surprise was
therefore great as the composition was gradually revealed by the widening division of the curtain.
In the background a steel-colored river wound through a pale calcareous landscape; while to the left, on a
lonely peak, a crucified Christ hung livid against indigo clouds. The central figure of the foreground, however,
was that of a woman seated in an antique chair of marble with bas-reliefs of dancing maenads. Her feet
rested on a meadow sprinkled with minute wild-flowers, and her attitude of smiling majesty recalled that of
Dosso Dossi's Circe. She wore a red robe, flowing in closely fluted lines from under a fancifully embroidered
cloak. Above her high forehead the crinkled golden hair flowed sideways beneath a veil; one hand drooped
on the arm of her chair; the other held up an inverted human skull, into which a young Dionysus, smooth,
brown and sidelong as the St. John of the Louvre, poured a stream of wine from a high-poised flagon. At the
lady's feet lay the symbols of art and luxury: a flute and a roll of music, a platter heaped with grapes and
roses, the torso of a Greek statuette, and a bowl overflowing with coins and jewels; behind her, on the chalky
hilltop, hung the crucified Christ. A scroll in a corner of the foreground bore the legend: Lux Mundi.
Wyant, emerging from the first plunge of wonder, turned inquiringly toward his companions. Neither had
moved. Miss Lombard stood with her hand on the cord, her lids lowered, her mouth drooping; the doctor, his
strange Thoth-like profile turned toward his guest, was still lost in rapt contemplation of his treasure.
Wyant addressed the young girl.
"You are fortunate," he said, "to be the possessor of anything so perfect."
"It is considered very beautiful," she said coldly.
"Beautiful -- beautiful!" the doctor burst out. "Ah, the poor, worn out, over-worked word! There are no
adjectives in the language fresh enough to describe such pristine brilliancy; all their brightness has been
worn off by misuse. Think of the things that have been called beautiful, and then look atthat!"
"It is worthy of a new vocabulary," Wyant agreed.
"Yes," Doctor Lombard continued, "my daughter is indeed fortunate. She has chosen what Catholics call
the higher life -- the counsel of perfection. What other private person enjoys the same opportunity of
understanding the master? Who else lives under the same roof with an untouched masterpiece of
Leonardo's? Think of the happiness of being always under the influence of such a creation; of living into it; of
partaking of it in daily and hourly communion! This room is a chapel; the sight of that picture is a sacrament.
What an atmosphere for a young life to unfold itself in! My daughter is singularly blessed. Sybilla, point out
some of the details to Mr. Wyant; I see that he will appreciate them."
The girl turned her dense blue eyes toward Wyant; then, glancing away from him, she pointed to the
canvas.
"Notice the modeling of the left hand," she began in a monotonous voice; "it recalls the hand of the Mona
Lisa. The head of the naked genius will remind you of that of the St. John of the Louvre, but it is more purely
pagan and is turned a little less to the right. The embroidery on the cloak is symbolic: you will see that the
roots of this plant have burst through the vase. This recalls the famous definition of Hamlet's character in
Wilhelm Meister. Here are the mystic rose, the flame, and the serpent, emblem of eternity. Some of the other
symbols we have not yet been able to decipher."
Wyant watched her curiously; she seemed to be reciting a lesson.
"And the picture itself?" he said. "How do you explain that? Lux Mundi -- what a curious device to connect
with such a subject! What can it mean?"
Miss Lombard dropped her eyes: the answer was evidently not included in her lesson.
"What, indeed?" the doctor interposed. "What does life mean? As one may define it in a hundred different
ways, so one may find a hundred different meanings in this picture. Its symbolism is as many-faceted as a
well-cut diamond. Who, for instance, is that divine lady? Is it she who is the true Lux Mundi -- the light
reflected from jewels and young eyes, from polished marble and clear waters and statues of bronze? Or is
that the Light of the World, extinguished on yonder stormy hill, and is this lady the Pride of Life, feasting
blindly on the wine of iniquity, with her back turned to the light which has shone for her in vain? Something of
both these meanings may be traced in the picture; but to me it symbolizes rather the central truth of
existence: that all that is raised in incorruption is sown in corruption; art, beauty, love, religion; that all our
wine is drunk out of skulls, and poured for us by the mysterious genius of a remote and cruel past."
The doctor's face blazed: his bent figure seemed to straighten itself and become taller.
"Ah," he cried, growing more dithyrambic, "how lightly you ask what it means! How confidently you expect
an answer! Yet here am I who have given my life to the study of the Renaissance; who have violated its
tomb, laid open its dead body, and traced the course of every muscle, bone, and artery; who have sucked its
very soul from the pages of poets and humanists; who have wept and believed with Joachim of Flora, smiled
and doubted with AEneas Sylvius Piccolomini; who have patiently followed to its source the least inspiration
of the masters, and groped in neolithic caverns and Babylonian ruins for the first unfolding tendrils of the
arabesques of Mantegna and Crivelli; and I tell you that I stand abashed and ignorant before the mystery of
this picture. It means nothing -- it means all things. It may represent the period which saw its creation; it may
represent all ages past and to come. There are volumes of meaning in the tiniest emblem on the lady's
cloak; the blossoms of its border are rooted in the deepest soil of myth and tradition. Don't ask what it
means, young man, but bow your head in thankfulness for having seen it!"
Miss Lombard laid her hand on his arm.
"Don't excite yourself, father," she said in the detached tone of a professional nurse.
He answered with a despairing gesture. "Ah, it's easy for you to talk. You have years and years to spend
with it; I am an old man, and every moment counts!"
"It's bad for you," she repeated with gentle obstinacy.
The doctor's sacred fury had in fact burnt itself out. He dropped into a seat with dull eyes and slackening
lips, and his daughter drew the curtain across the picture.
Wyant turned away reluctantly. He felt that his opportunity was slipping from him, yet he dared not refer to
Clyde's wish for a photograph. He now understood the meaning of the laugh with which Doctor Lombard had
given him leave to carry away all the details he could remember. The picture was so dazzling, so
unexpected, so crossed with elusive and contradictory suggestions, that the most alert observer, when
placed suddenly before it, must lose his coordinating faculty in a sense of confused wonder. Yet how
valuable to Clyde the record of such a work would be! In some ways it seemed to be the summing up of the
master's thought, the key to his enigmatic philosophy.
The doctor had risen and was walking slowly toward the door. His daughter unlocked it, and Wyant
followed them back in silence to the room in which they had left Mrs. Lombard. That lady was no longer
there, and he could think of no excuse for lingering.
He thanked the doctor, and turned to Miss Lombard, who stood in the middle of the room as though
awaiting farther orders.
"It is very good of you," he said, "to allow one even a glimpse of such a treasure."
She looked at him with her odd directness. "You will come again?" she said quickly; and turning to her
father she added: "You know what Professor Clyde asked. This gentleman cannot give him any account of
the picture without seeing it again."
Doctor Lombard glanced at her vaguely; he was still like a person in a trance.
"Eh?" he said, rousing himself with an effort.
"I said, father, that Mr. Wyant must see the picture again if he is to tell Professor Clyde about it," Miss
Lombard repeated with extraordinary precision of tone.
Wyant was silent. He had the puzzled sense that his wishes were being divined and gratified for reasons
with which he was in no way connected.
"Well, well," the doctor muttered, "I don't say no -- I don't say no. I know what Clyde wants -- I don't refuse
to help him." He turned to Wyant. "You may come again -- you may make notes," he added with a sudden
effort. "Jot down what occurs to you. I'm willing to concede that."
Wyant again caught the girl's eye, but its emphatic message perplexed him.
"You're very good," he said tentatively, "but the fact is the picture is so mysterious -- so full of complicated
detail -- that I'm afraid no notes I could make would serve Clyde's purpose as well as -- as a photograph,
say. If you would allow me --"
Miss Lombard's brow darkened, and her father raised his head furiously.
"A photograph? A photograph, did you say? Good God, man, not ten people have been allowed to set
foot in that room! A photograph?"
Wyant saw his mistake, but saw also that he had gone too far to retreat.
"I know, sir, from what Clyde has told me, that you object to having any reproduction of the picture
published; but he hoped you might let me take a photograph for his personal use -- not to be reproduced in
his book, but simply to give him something to work by. I should take the photograph myself, and the negative
would of course be yours. If you wished it, only one impression would be struck off, and that one Clyde could
return to you when he had done with it."
Doctor Lombard interrupted him with a snarl. "When he had done with it? Just so: I thank thee for that
word! When it had been re-photographed, drawn, traced, autotyped, passed about from hand to hand,
defiled by every ignorant eye in England, vulgarized by the blundering praise of every art-scribbler in Europe!
Bah! I'd as soon give you the picture itself: why don't you ask for that?"
"Well, sir," said Wyant calmly, "if you will trust me with it, I'll engage to take it safely to England and back,
and to let no eye but Clyde's see it while it is out of your keeping."
The doctor received this remarkable proposal in silence; then he burst into a laugh.
"Upon my soul!" he said with sardonic good humor.
It was Miss Lombard's turn to look perplexedly at Wyant. His last words and her father's unexpected reply
had evidently carried her beyond her depth.
"Well, sir, am I to take the picture?" Wyant smilingly pursued.
"No, young man; nor a photograph of it. Nor a sketch, either; mind that, -- nothing that can be reproduced.
Sybilla," he cried with sudden passion, "swear to me that the picture shall never be reproduced! No
photograph, no sketch -- now or afterward. Do you hear me?"
"Yes, father," said the girl quietly.
"The vandals," he muttered, "the desecrators of beauty; if I thought it would ever get into their hands I'd
burn it first, by God!" He turned to Wyant, speaking more quietly. "I said you might come back -- I never
retract what I say. But you must give me your word that no one but Clyde shall see the notes you make."
Wyant was growing warm.
"If you won't trust me with a photograph I wonder you trust me not to show my notes!" he exclaimed.
The doctor looked at him with a malicious smile.
"Humph!" he said; "would they be of much use to anybody?"
Wyant saw that he was losing ground and controlled his impatience.
"To Clyde, I hope, at any rate," he answered, holding out his hand. The doctor shook it without a trace of
resentment, and Wyant added: "When shall I come, sir?"
"To-morrow -- to-morrow morning," cried Miss Lombard, speaking suddenly.
She looked fixedly at her father, and he shrugged his shoulders.
"The picture is hers," he said to Wyant.
In the ante-chamber the young man was met by the woman who had admitted him. She handed him his
hat and stick, and turned to unbar the door. As the bolt slipped back he felt a touch on his arm.
"You have a letter?" she said in a low tone.
"A letter?" He stared. "What letter?"
She shrugged her shoulders, and drew back to let him pass.
II
As Wyant emerged from the house he paused once more to glance up at its scarred brick facade. The
marble hand drooped tragically above the entrance: in the waning light it seemed to have relaxed into the
passiveness of despair, and Wyant stood musing on its hidden meaning. But the Dead Hand was not the
only mysterious thing about Doctor Lombard's house. What were the relations between Miss Lombard and
her father? Above all, between Miss Lombard and her picture? She did not look like a person capable of a
disinterested passion for the arts; and there had been moments when it struck Wyant that she hated the
picture.
The sky at the end of the street was flooded with turbulent yellow light, and the young man turned his
steps toward the church of San Domenico, in the hope of catching the lingering brightness on Sodoma's St.
Catherine.
The great bare aisles were almost dark when he entered, and he had to grope his way to the chapel
steps. Under the momentary evocation of the sunset, the saint's figure emerged pale and swooning from the
dusk, and the warm light gave a sensual tinge to her ecstasy. The flesh seemed to glow and heave, the
eyelids to tremble; Wyant stood fascinated by the accidental collaboration of light and color.
Suddenly he noticed that something white had fluttered to the ground at his feet. He stooped and picked
up a small thin sheet of note-paper, folded and sealed like an old-fashioned letter, and bearing the
superscription: -To the Count Ottaviano Celsi.
Wyant stared at this mysterious document. Where had it come from? He was distinctly conscious of
having seen it fall through the air, close to his feet. He glanced up at the dark ceiling of the chapel; then he
turned and looked about the church. There was only one figure in it, that of a man who knelt near the high
altar.
Suddenly Wyant recalled the question of Doctor Lombard's maidservant. Was this the letter she had
asked for? Had he been unconsciously carrying it about with him all the afternoon? Who was Count
Ottaviano Celsi, and how came Wyant to have been chosen to act as that nobleman's ambulant letter-box?
Wyant laid his hat and stick on the chapel steps and began to explore his pockets, in the irrational hope of
finding there some clue to the mystery; but they held nothing which he had not himself put there, and he was
reduced to wondering how the letter, supposing some unknown hand to have bestowed it on him, had
happened to fall out while he stood motionless before the picture.
At this point he was disturbed by a step on the floor of the aisle, and turning, he saw his lustrous-eyed
neighbor of the table d'hote.
The young man bowed and waved an apologetic hand.
"I do not intrude?" he inquired suavely.
Without waiting for a reply, he mounted the steps of the chapel, glancing about him with the affable air of
an afternoon caller.
"I see," he remarked with a smile, "that you know the hour at which our saint should be visited."
Wyant agreed that the hour was indeed felicitous.
The stranger stood beamingly before the picture.
"What grace! What poetry!" he murmured, apostrophizing the St. Catherine, but letting his glance slip
rapidly about the chapel as he spoke.
Wyant, detecting the manoeuvre, murmured a brief assent.
"But it is cold here -- mortally cold; you do not find it so?" The intruder put on his hat. "It is permitted at
this hour -- when the church is empty. And you, my dear sir -- do you not feel the dampness? You are an
artist, are you not? And to artists it is permitted to cover the head when they are engaged in the study of the
paintings."
He darted suddenly toward the steps and bent over Wyant's hat.
"Permit me -- cover yourself!" he said a moment later, holding out the hat with an ingratiating gesture.
A light flashed on Wyant.
"Perhaps," he said, looking straight at the young man, "you will tell me your name. My own is Wyant."
The stranger, surprised, but not disconcerted, drew forth a coroneted card, which he offered with a low
bow. On the card was engraved: -Il Conte Ottaviano Celsi.
"I am much obliged to you," said Wyant; "and I may as well tell you that the letter which you apparently
expected to find in the lining of my hat is not there, but in my pocket."
He drew it out and handed it to its owner, who had grown very pale.
"And now," Wyant continued, "you will perhaps be good enough to tell me what all this means."
There was no mistaking the effect produced on Count Ottaviano by this request. His lips moved, but he
achieved only an ineffectual smile.
"I suppose you know," Wyant went on, his anger rising at the sight of the other's discomfiture, "that you
have taken an unwarrantable liberty. I don't yet understand what part I have been made to play, but it's
evident that you have made use of me to serve some purpose of your own, and I propose to know the
reason why."
Count Ottaviano advanced with an imploring gesture.
"Sir," he pleaded, "you permit me to speak?"
"I expect you to," cried Wyant. "But not here," he added, hearing the clank of the verger's keys. "It is
growing dark, and we shall be turned out in a few minutes."
He walked across the church, and Count Ottaviano followed him out into the deserted square.
"Now," said Wyant, pausing on the steps.
The Count, who had regained some measure of self-possession, began to speak in a high key, with an
accompaniment of conciliatory gesture.
"My dear sir -- my dear Mr. Wyant -- you find me in an abominable position -- that, as a man of honor, I
immediately confess. I have taken advantage of you -- yes! I have counted on your amiability, your chivalry -too far, perhaps? I confess it! But what could I do? It was to oblige a lady" -- he laid a hand on his heart --"a
lady whom I would die to serve!" He went on with increasing volubility, his deliberate English swept away by
a torrent of Italian, through which Wyant, with some difficulty, struggled to a comprehension of the case.
Count Ottaviano, according to his own statement, had come to Siena some months previously, on
business connected with his mother's property; the paternal estate being near Orvieto, of which ancient city
his father was syndic. Soon after his arrival in Siena the young Count had met the incomparable daughter of
Doctor Lombard, and falling deeply in love with her, had prevailed on his parents to ask her hand in
marriage. Doctor Lombard had not opposed his suit, but when the question of settlements arose it became
known that Miss Lombard, who was possessed of a small property in her own right, had a short time before
invested the whole amount in the purchase of the Bergamo Leonardo. Thereupon Count Ottaviano's parents
had politely suggested that she should sell the picture and thus recover her independence; and this proposal
being met by a curt refusal from Doctor Lombard, they had withdrawn their consent to their son's marriage.
The young lady's attitude had hitherto been one of passive submission; she was horribly afraid of her father,
and would never venture openly to oppose him; but she had made known to Ottaviano her intention of not
giving him up, of waiting patiently till events should take a more favorable turn. She seemed hardly aware,
the Count said with a sigh, that the means of escape lay in her own hands; that she was of age, and had a
right to sell the picture, and to marry without asking her father's consent. Meanwhile her suitor spared no
pains to keep himself before her, to remind her that he, too, was waiting and would never give her up.
Doctor Lombard, who suspected the young man of trying to persuade Sybilla to sell the picture, had
forbidden the lovers to meet or to correspond; they were thus driven to clandestine communication, and had
several times, the Count ingenuously avowed, made use of the doctor's visitors as a means of exchanging
letters.
"And you told the visitors to ring twice?" Wyant interposed.
The young man extended his hands in a deprecating gesture. Could Mr. Wyant blame him? He was
young, he was ardent, he was enamored! The young lady had done him the supreme honor of avowing her
attachment, of pledging her unalterable fidelity; should he suffer his devotion to be outdone? But his purpose
in writing to her, he admitted, was not merely to reiterate his fidelity; he was trying by every means in his
power to induce her to sell the picture. He had organized a plan of action; every detail was complete; if she
would but have the courage to carry out his instructions he would answer for the result. His idea was that she
should secretly retire to a convent of which his aunt was the Mother Superior, and from that stronghold
should transact the sale of the Leonardo. He had a purchaser ready, who was willing to pay a large sum; a
sum, Count Ottaviano whispered, considerably in excess of the young lady's original inheritance; once the
picture sold, it could, if necessary, be removed by force from Doctor Lombard's house, and his daughter,
being safely in the convent, would be spared the painful scenes incidental to the removal. Finally, if Doctor
Lombard were vindictive enough to refuse his consent to her marriage, she had only to make a sommation
respectueuse, and at the end of the prescribed delay no power on earth could prevent her becoming the wife
of Count Ottaviano.
Wyant's anger had fallen at the recital of this simple romance. It was absurd to be angry with a young
man who confided his secrets to the first stranger he met in the streets, and placed his hand on his heart
whenever he mentioned the name of his betrothed. The easiest way out of the business was to take it as a
joke. Wyant had played the wall to this new Pyramus and Thisbe, and was philosophic enough to laugh at
the part he had unwittingly performed.
He held out his hand with a smile to Count Ottaviano.
"I won't deprive you any longer," he said, "of the pleasure of reading your letter."
"Oh, sir, a thousand thanks! And when you return to the casa Lombard, you will take a message from me
-- the letter she expected this afternoon?"
"The letter she expected?" Wyant paused. "No, thank you. I thought you understood that where I come
from we don't do that kind of thing -- knowingly."
"But, sir, to serve a young lady!"
"I'm sorry for the young lady, if what you tell me is true" -- the Count's expressive hands resented the
doubt --"but remember that if I am under obligations to any one in this matter, it is to her father, who has
admitted me to his house and has allowed me to see his picture."
"His picture? Hers!"
"Well, the house is his, at all events."
"Unhappily -- since to her it is a dungeon!"
"Why doesn't she leave it, then?" exclaimed Wyant impatiently.
The Count clasped his hands. "Ah, how you say that -- with what force, with what virility! If you would but
say it to her in that tone -- you, her countryman! She has no one to advise her; the mother is an idiot; the
father is terrible; she is in his power; it is my belief that he would kill her if she resisted him. Mr. Wyant, I
tremble for her life while she remains in that house!"
"Oh, come," said Wyant lightly, "they seem to understand each other well enough. But in any case, you
must see that I can't interfere -- at least you would if you were an Englishman," he added with an escape of
contempt.
III
Wyant's affiliations in Siena being restricted to an acquaintance with his land-lady, he was forced to apply to
her for the verification of Count Ottaviano's story.
The young nobleman had, it appeared, given a perfectly correct account of his situation. His father, Count
Celsi-Mongirone, was a man of distinguished family and some wealth. He was syndic of Orvieto, and lived
either in that town or on his neighboring estate of Mongirone. His wife owned a large property near Siena,
and Count Ottaviano, who was the second son, came there from time to time to look into its management.
The eldest son was in the army, the youngest in the Church; and an aunt of Count Ottaviano's was Mother
Superior of the Visitandine convent in Siena. At one time it had been said that Count Ottaviano, who was a
most amiable and accomplished young man, was to marry the daughter of the strange Englishman, Doctor
Lombard, but difficulties having arisen as to the adjustment of the young lady's dower, Count CelsiMongirone had very properly broken off the match. It was sad for the young man, however, who was said to
be deeply in love, and to find frequent excuses for coming to Siena to inspect his mother's estate.
Viewed in the light of Count Ottaviano's personality the story had a tinge of opera bouffe; but the next
morning, as Wyant mounted the stairs of the House of the Dead Hand, the situation insensibly assumed
another aspect. It was impossible to take Doctor Lombard lightly; and there was a suggestion of fatality in the
appearance of his gaunt dwelling. Who could tell amid what tragic records of domestic tyranny and fluttering
broken purposes the little drama of Miss Lombard's fate was being played out? Might not the accumulated
influences of such a house modify the lives within it in a manner unguessed by the inmates of a suburban
villa with sanitary plumbing and a telephone?
One person, at least, remained unperturbed by such fanciful problems; and that was Mrs. Lombard, who,
at Wyant's entrance, raised a placidly wrinkled brow from her knitting. The morning was mild, and her chair
had been wheeled into a bar of sunshine near the window, so that she made a cheerful spot of prose in the
poetic gloom of her surroundings.
"What a nice morning!" she said; "it must be delightful weather at Bonchurch."
Her dull blue glance wandered across the narrow street with its threatening house fronts, and fluttered
back baffled, like a bird with clipped wings. It was evident, poor lady, that she had never seen beyond the
opposite houses.
Wyant was not sorry to find her alone. Seeing that she was surprised at his reappearance he said at
once: "I have come back to study Miss Lombard's picture."
"Oh, the picture --" Mrs. Lombard's face expressed a gentle disappointment, which might have been
boredom in a person of acuter sensibilities. "It's an original Leonardo, you know," she said mechanically.
"And Miss Lombard is very proud of it, I suppose? She seems to have inherited her father's love for art."
Mrs. Lombard counted her stitches, and he went on: "It's unusual in so young a girl. Such tastes generally
develop later."
Mrs. Lombard looked up eagerly. "That's what I say! I was quite different at her age, you know. I liked
dancing, and doing a pretty bit of fancy-work. Not that I couldn't sketch, too; I had a master down from
London. My aunts have some of my crayons hung up in their drawing-room now -- I did a view of Kenilworth
which was thought pleasing. But I liked a picnic, too, or a pretty walk through the woods with young people of
my own age. I say it's more natural, Mr. Wyant; one may have a feeling for art, and do crayons that are worth
framing, and yet not give up everything else. I was taught that there were other things."
Wyant, half-ashamed of provoking these innocent confidences, could not resist another question. "And
Miss Lombard cares for nothing else?"
Her mother looked troubled.
"Sybilla is so clever -- she says I don't understand. You know how self-confident young people are! My
husband never said that of me, now -- he knows I had an excellent education. My aunts were very particular;
I was brought up to have opinions, and my husband has always respected them. He says himself that he
wouldn't for the world miss hearing my opinion on any subject; you may have noticed that he often refers to
my tastes. He has always respected my preference for living in England; he likes to hear me give my
reasons for it. He is so much interested in my ideas that he often says he knows just what I am going to say
before I speak. But Sybilla does not care for what I think --"
At this point Doctor Lombard entered. He glanced sharply at Wyant. "The servant is a fool; she didn't tell
me you were here." His eye turned to his wife. "Well, my dear, what have you been telling Mr. Wyant? About
the aunts at Bonchurch, I'll be bound!"
Mrs. Lombard looked triumphantly at Wyant, and her husband rubbed his hooked fingers, with a smile.
"Mrs. Lombard's aunts are very superior women. They subscribe to the circulating library, and borrow
Good Words and the Monthly Packet from the curate's wife across the way. They have the rector to tea twice
a year, and keep a page-boy, and are visited by two baronets' wives. They devoted themselves to the
education of their orphan niece, and I think I may say without boasting that Mrs. Lombard's conversation
shows marked traces of the advantages she enjoyed."
Mrs. Lombard colored with pleasure.
"I was telling Mr. Wyant that my aunts were very particular."
"Quite so, my dear; and did you mention that they never sleep in anything but linen, and that Miss Sophia
puts away the furs and blankets every spring with her own hands? Both those facts are interesting to the
student of human nature." Doctor Lombard glanced at his watch. "But we are missing an incomparable
moment; the light is perfect at this hour."
Wyant rose, and the doctor led him through the tapestried door and down the passageway.
The light was, in fact, perfect, and the picture shone with an inner radiancy, as though a lamp burned
behind the soft screen of the lady's flesh. Every detail of the foreground detached itself with jewel-like
precision. Wyant noticed a dozen accessories which had escaped him on the previous day.
He drew out his note-book, and the doctor, who had dropped his sardonic grin for a look of devout
contemplation, pushed a chair forward, and seated himself on a carved settle against the wall.
"Now, then," he said, "tell Clyde what you can; but the letter killeth."
He sank down, his hands hanging on the arm of the settle like the claws of a dead bird, his eyes fixed on
Wyant's notebook with the obvious intention of detecting any attempt at a surreptitious sketch.
Wyant, nettled at this surveillance, and disturbed by the speculations which Doctor Lombard's strange
household excited, sat motionless for a few minutes, staring first at the picture and then at the blank pages of
the note-book. The thought that Doctor Lombard was enjoying his discomfiture at length roused him, and he
began to write.
He was interrupted by a knock on the iron door. Doctor Lombard rose to unlock it, and his daughter
entered.
She bowed hurriedly to Wyant, without looking at him.
"Father, had you forgotten that the man from Monte Amiato was to come back this morning with an
answer about the bas-relief? He is here now; he says he can't wait."
"The devil!" cried her father impatiently. "Didn't you tell him --"
"Yes; but he says he can't come back. If you want to see him you must come now."
"Then you think there's a chance? --"
She nodded.
He turned and looked at Wyant, who was writing assiduously.
"You will stay here, Sybilla; I shall be back in a moment."
He hurried out, locking the door behind him.
Wyant had looked up, wondering if Miss Lombard would show any surprise at being locked in with him;
but it was his turn to be surprised, for hardly had they heard the key withdrawn when she moved close to
him, her small face pale and tumultuous.
"I arranged it -- I must speak to you," she gasped. "He'll be back in five minutes."
Her courage seemed to fail, and she looked at him helplessly.
Wyant had a sense of stepping among explosives. He glanced about him at the dusky vaulted room, at
the haunting smile of the strange picture overhead, and at the pink-and-white girl whispering of conspiracies
in a voice meant to exchange platitudes with a curate.
"How can I help you?" he said with a rush of compassion.
"Oh, if you would! I never have a chance to speak to any one; it's so difficult -- he watches me -- he'll be
back immediately."
"Try to tell me what I can do."
"I don't dare; I feel as if he were behind me." She turned away, fixing her eyes on the picture. A sound
startled her. "There he comes, and I haven't spoken! It was my only chance; but it bewilders me so to be
hurried."
"I don't hear any one," said Wyant, listening. "Try to tell me."
"How can I make you understand? It would take so long to explain." She drew a deep breath, and then
with a plunge --"Will you come here again this afternoon -- at about five?" she whispered.
"Come here again?"
"Yes -- you can ask to see the picture, -- make some excuse. He will come with you, of course; I will open
the door for you -- and -- and lock you both in" -- she gasped.
"Lock us in?"
"You see? You understand? It's the only way for me to leave the house -- if I am ever to do it" -- She drew
another difficult breath. "The key will be returned -- by a safe person -- in half an hour, -- perhaps sooner --"
She trembled so much that she was obliged to lean against the settle for support.
"Wyant looked at her steadily; he was very sorry for her.
"I can't, Miss Lombard," he said at length.
"You can't?"
"I'm sorry; I must seem cruel; but consider --"
He was stopped by the futility of the word: as well ask a hunted rabbit to pause in its dash for a hole!
Wyant took her hand; it was cold and nerveless.
"I will serve you in any way I can; but you must see that this way is impossible. Can't I talk to you again?
Perhaps --"
"Oh," she cried, starting up, "there he comes!"
Doctor Lombard's step sounded in the passage.
Wyant held her fast. "Tell me one thing: he won't let you sell the picture?"
"No -- hush!"
"Make no pledges for the future, then; promise me that."
"The future?"
"In case he should die: your father is an old man. You haven't promised?"
She shook her head.
"Don't, then; remember that."
She made no answer, and the key turned in the lock.
As he passed out of the house, its scowling cornice and facade of ravaged brick looked down on him with
the startlingness of a strange face, seen momentarily in a crowd, and impressing itself on the brain as part of
an inevitable future. Above the doorway, the marble hand reached out like the cry of an imprisoned anguish.
Wyant turned away impatiently.
"Rubbish!" he said to himself. "She isn't walled in; she can get out if she wants to."
IV
Wyant had any number of plans for coming to Miss Lombard's aid: he was elaborating the twentieth when,
on the same afternoon, he stepped into the express train for Florence. By the time the train reached Certaldo
he was convinced that, in thus hastening his departure, he had followed the only reasonable course; at
Empoli, he began to reflect that the priest and the Levite had probably justified themselves in much the same
manner.
A month later, after his return to England, he was unexpectedly relieved from these alternatives of
extenuation and approval. A paragraph in the morning paper announced the sudden death of Doctor
Lombard, the distinguished English dilettante who had long resided in Siena. Wyant's justification was
complete. Our blindest impulses become evidence of perspicacity when they fall in with the course of events.
Wyant could now comfortably speculate on the particular complications from which his foresight had
probably saved him. The climax was unexpectedly dramatic. Miss Lombard, on the brink of a step which,
whatever its issue, would have burdened her with retrospective compunction, had been set free before her
suitor's ardor could have had time to cool, and was now doubtless planning a life of domestic felicity on the
proceeds of the Leonardo. One thing, however, struck Wyant as odd -- he saw no mention of the sale of the
picture. He had scanned the papers for an immediate announcement of its transfer to one of the great
museums; but presently concluding that Miss Lombard, out of filial piety, had wished to avoid an appearance
of unseemly haste in the disposal of her treasure, he dismissed the matter from his mind. Other affairs
happened to engage him; the months slipped by, and gradually the lady and the picture dwelt less vividly in
his mind.
It was not till five or six years later, when chance took him again to Siena, that the recollection started
from some inner fold of memory. He found himself, as it happened, at the head of Doctor Lombard's street,
and glancing down that grim thoroughfare, caught an oblique glimpse of the doctor's house front, with the
Dead Hand projecting above its threshold. The sight revived his interest, and that evening, over an admirable
frittata, he questioned his landlady about Miss Lombard's marriage.
"The daughter of the English doctor? But she has never married, signore."
"Never married? What, then, became of Count Ottaviano?"
"For a long time he waited; but last year he married a noble lady of the Maremma."
"But what happened -- why was the marriage broken?"
The landlady enacted a pantomime of baffled interrogation.
"And Miss Lombard still lives in her father's house?"
"Yes, signore; she is still there."
"And the Leonardo --"
"The Leonardo, also, is still there."
The next day, as Wyant entered the House of the Dead Hand, he remembered Count Ottaviano's
injunction to ring twice, and smiled mournfully to think that so much subtlety had been vain. But what could
have prevented the marriage? If Doctor Lombard's death had been long delayed, time might have acted as a
dissolvent, or the young lady's resolve have failed; but it seemed impossible that the white heat of ardor in
which Wyant had left the lovers should have cooled in a few short weeks.
As he ascended the vaulted stairway the atmosphere of the place seemed a reply to his conjectures. The
same numbing air fell on him, like an emanation from some persistent will-power, a something fierce and
imminent which might reduce to impotence every impulse within its range. Wyant could almost fancy a hand
on his shoulder, guiding him upward with the ironical intent of confronting him with the evidence of its work.
A strange servant opened the door, and he was presently introduced to the tapestried room, where, from
their usual seats in the window, Mrs. Lombard and her daughter advanced to welcome him with faint
ejaculations of surprise.
Both had grown oddly old, but in a dry, smooth way, as fruits might shrivel on a shelf instead of ripening
on the tree. Mrs. Lombard was still knitting, and pausing now and then to warm her swollen hands above the
brazier; and Miss Lombard, in rising, had laid aside a strip of needle-work which might have been the same
on which Wyant had first seen her engaged.
Their visitor inquired discreetly how they had fared in the interval, and learned that they had thought of
returning to England, but had somehow never done so.
"I am sorry not to see my aunts again," Mrs. Lombard said resignedly; "but Sybilla thinks it best that we
should not go this year."
"Next year, perhaps," murmured Miss Lombard, in a voice which seemed to suggest that they had a great
waste of time to fill.
She had returned to her seat, and sat bending over her work. Her hair enveloped her head in the same
thick braids, but the rose color of her cheeks had turned to blotches of dull red, like some pigment which has
darkened in drying.
"And Professor Clyde -- is he well?" Mrs. Lombard asked affably; continuing, as her daughter raised a
startled eye: "Surely, Sybilla, Mr. Wyant was the gentleman who was sent by Professor Clyde to see the
Leonardo?"
Miss Lombard was silent, but Wyant hastened to assure the elder lady of his friend's well-being.
"Ah -- perhaps, then, he will come back some day to Siena," she said, sighing. Wyant declared that it was
more than likely; and there ensued a pause, which he presently broke by saying to Miss Lombard: "And you
still have the picture?"
She raised her eyes and looked at him. "Should you like to see it?" she asked.
On his assenting, she rose, and extracting the same key from the same secret drawer, unlocked the door
beneath the tapestry. They walked down the passage in silence, and she stood aside with a grave gesture,
making Wyant pass before her into the room. Then she crossed over and drew the curtain back from the
picture.
The light of the early afternoon poured full on it: its surface appeared to ripple and heave with a fluid
splendor. The colors had lost none of their warmth, the outlines none of their pure precision; it seemed to
Wyant like some magical flower which had burst suddenly from the mould of darkness and oblivion.
He turned to Miss Lombard with a movement of comprehension.
"Ah, I understand -- you couldn't part with it, after all!" he cried.
"No -- I couldn't part with it," she answered.
"It's too beautiful, -- too beautiful," -- he assented.
"Too beautiful?" She turned on him with a curious stare. "I have never thought it beautiful, you know."
He gave back the stare. "You have never --"
She shook her head. "It's not that. I hate it; I've always hated it. But he wouldn't let me -- he will never let
me now."
Wyant was startled by her use of the present tense. Her look surprised him, too: there was a strange fixity
of resentment in her innocuous eye. Was it possible that she was laboring under some delusion? Or did the
pronoun not refer to her father?
"You mean that Doctor Lombard did not wish you to part with the picture?"
"No -- he prevented me; he will always prevent me."
There was another pause. "You promised him, then, before his death --"
"No; I promised nothing. He died too suddenly to make me." Her voice sank to a whisper. "I was free -perfectly free -- or I thought I was till I tried."
"Till you tried?"
"To disobey him -- to sell the picture. Then I found it was impossible. I tried again and again; but he was
always in the room with me."
She glanced over her shoulder as though she had heard a step; and to Wyant, too, for a moment, the
room seemed full of a third presence.
"And you can't" -- he faltered, unconsciously dropping his voice to the pitch of hers.
She shook her head, gazing at him mystically. "I can't lock him out; I can never lock him out now. I told
you I should never have another chance."
Wyant felt the chill of her words like a cold breath in his hair.
"Oh" -- he groaned; but she cut him off with a grave gesture.
"It is too late," she said; "but you ought to have helped me that day."
“The Sexes”
Dorothy Parker
The young man with the scenic cravat glanced nervously down the sofa at the girl in the fringed dress. She
was examining her handkerchief; it might have been the first one of its kind she had seen, so deep was her
interest in its material, form, and possibilities. The young man cleared his throat, without necessity or
success, producing a small, syncopated noise.
“Want a cigarette?” he said.
“No, thank you,” she said. “Thank you ever so much just the same.”
“Sorry I’ve only got these kind,” he said. “You got any of your own?”
“I really don’t know,” she said. “I probably have, thank you.”
“Because if you haven’t,” he said, “it wouldn’t take me a minute to go up to the corner and get you
some.”
“Oh, thank you, but I wouldn’t have you go to all that trouble for anything,” she said. “It’s awfully sweet
of you to think of it. Thank you ever so much.”
“Will you for God’s sakes stop thanking me?” he said.
“Really,” she said, “I didn’t know I was saying anything out of the way. I’m awfully sorry if I hurt your
feelings. I know what it feels like to get your feelings hurt. I’m sure I didn’t realize it was an insult to say
‘thank you’ to a person. I’m not exactly in the habit of having people swear at me because I say ‘thank you’ to
them.”
“I did not swear at you!” he said.
“Oh, you didn’t?” she said. “I see.”
“My God,” he said, “all I said, I simply asked you if I couldn’t go out and get you some cigarettes. Is
there anything in that to get up in the air about?”
“Who’s up in the air?” she said. “I’m sure I didn’t know it was a criminal offense to say I wouldn’t dream
of giving you all that trouble. I’m afraid I must be awfully stupid, or something.”
“Do you want me to go out and get you some cigarettes; or don’t you?” he said.
“Goodness,” she said, “if you want to go so much, please don’t feel you have to stay here. I wouldn’t
have you feel you had to stay for anything.”
“Ah, don’t be that way, will you?” he said.”
“Be what way?” she said. “I’m not being any way.”
“What’s the matter?” he said.
“Why, nothing,” she said. “Why?”
“You’ve been funny all evening,” he said. “Hardly said a word to me, ever since I came in.”
“I’m terribly sorry you haven’t been having a good time,” she said. “For goodness’ sakes, don’t feel you
have to stay here and be bored. I’m sure there are millions of places you could be having a lot more fun. The
only thing, I’m a little bit sorry I didn’t know before, that’s all. When you said you were coming over tonight, I
broke a lot of dates to go to the theater and everything. But it doesn’t make a bit of difference. I’d much
rather have you go and have a good time. It isn’t very pleasant to sit here and feel you’re boring a person to
death.”
“I’m not bored!” he said. “I don’t want to go any place! Ah, honey, won’t you tell me what’s the matter?
Ah, please.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about,” she said. “There isn’t a thing on earth the matter.
I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do,” he said. “There’s something the trouble. Is it anything I’ve done, or anything?”
“Goodness,” she said, “I’m sure it isn’t any of my business, anything you do. I certainly wouldn’t feel I
had any right to criticize.”
“Will you stop talking like that?” he said. “Will you, please?”
“Talking like what?” she said.
“You know,” he said. “That’s the way you were talking over the telephone today, too. You were so
snotty when I called you up, I was afraid to talk to you.”
“I beg your pardon,” she said. “What did you say I was?”
“Well, I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to say that. You get me so balled up.”
“You see,” she said, “I’m really not in the habit of hearing language like that. I’ve never had a thing like
that said to me in my life.”
“I told you I was sorry, didn’t I?” he said. “Honest, honey, I didn’t mean it. I don’t know how I came to
say a thing like that. Will you excuse me? Please?”
“Oh, certainly,” she said. “Goodness, don’t feel you have to apologize to me. It doesn’t make any
difference at all. It just seems a little bit funny to have somebody you were in the habit of thinking was a
gentleman come to your home and use language like that to you, that’s all. But it doesn’t make the slightest
bit of difference.”
“I guess nothing I say makes any difference to you,” he said. “You seem to be sore at me.”
“I’m sore at you?” she said. “I can’t understand what put that idea in your head. Why should I be sore
at you?”
“That’s what I’m asking you,” he said. “Won’t you tell me what I’ve done? Have I done something to
hurt your feelings, honey? The way you were, over the phone, you had me worried all day. I couldn’t do a lick
of work.”
“I certainly wouldn’t like to feel,” she said, “that I was interfering with your work. I know there are lots of
girls that don’t think anything of doing things like that, but I think it’s terrible. It certainly isn’t very nice to sit
here and have someone tell you you interfere with his business.”
“I didn’t say that!” he said. “I didn’t say it!”
“Oh, didn’t you?” she said. “Well, that was the impression I got. It must be my stupidity.
“I guess maybe I better go,” he said. “I can’t get right. Everything I say seems to make you sorer and
sorer. Would you rather I’d go?”
“Please do just exactly whatever you like,” she said. “I’m sure the last thing I want to do is have you
stay here when you’d rather be some place else. Why don’t you go some place where you won’t be bored?
Why don’t you go up to Florence Leaming’s? I know she’d love to have you.”
“I don’t want to go up to Florence Leaming’s!” he said. “What would I want to go up to Florence
Leaming’s for? She gives me a pain.”
“Oh, really?” she said. “She didn’t seem to be giving you so much of a pain at Elsie’s party last night, I
notice. I notice you couldn’t even talk to anybody else, that’s how much of a pain she gave you.”
“Yeah, and you know why I was talking to her?” he said.
“Why, I suppose you think she’s attractive,” she said. “I suppose some people do. It’s perfectly natural.
Some people think she’s quite pretty.”
“I don’t know whether she’s pretty or not,” he said. “I wouldn’t know her if I saw her again. Why I was
talking to her was you wouldn’t even give me a tumble, last night. I came up and tried to talk to you, and you
just said, ‘Oh, how do you do’—just like that, ‘Oh, how do you do’—and you turned right away and wouldn’t
look at me.”
“I wouldn’t look at you?” she said. “Oh, that’s awfully funny. Oh, that’s marvelous. You don’t mind if I
laugh, do you?”
“Go ahead and laugh your head off,” he said. “But you wouldn’t.”
“Well, the minute you came in the room,” she said, “you started making such a fuss over Florence
Leaming, I thought you never wanted to see anybody else. You two seemed to be having such a wonderful
time together, goodness knows I wouldn’t have butted in for anything.”
“My God,” he said, “this what’s-her-name girl came up and began talking to me before I even saw
anybody else, and what could I do? I couldn’t sock her in the nose, could I?”
“I certainly didn’t see you try,” she said.
“You saw me try to talk to you, didn’t you?” he said. “And what did you do? ‘Oh, how do you do.’ Then
this what’s-her-name came up again, and there I was, stuck. Florence Leaming! I think she’s terrible. Know
what I think of her? I think she’s a damn little fool. That’s what I think of her.”
“Well, of course,” she said, “that’s the impression she always gave me, but I don’t know. I’ve heard
people say she’s pretty. Honestly I have.”
“Why, she can’t be pretty in the same room with you,” he said.
“She has got an awfully funny nose,” she said. “I really feel sorry for a girl with a nose like that.”
“She’s got a terrible nose,” he said. “You’ve got a beautiful nose. Gee, you’ve got a pretty nose.”
“Oh, I have not,” she said. “You’re crazy.”
“And beautiful eyes,” he said, “and beautiful hair and a beautiful mouth. And beautiful hands. Let me
have one of the little hands. Ah, look atta little hand! Who’s got the prettiest hands in the world? Who’s the
sweetest girl in the world?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Who?”
“You don’t know!” he said. “You do so, too, know.”
“I do not,” she said. “Who? Florence Leaming?”
“Oh, Florence Leaming, my eye!” he said. “Getting sore about Florence Leaming! And me not sleeping
all last night and not doing a stroke of work all day because you wouldn’t speak to me! A girl like you getting
sore about a girl like Florence Leaming!”
“I think you’re just perfectly crazy,” she said. “I was not sore! What on earth ever made you think I
was? You’re simply crazy. Ow, my new pearl beads! Wait a second till I take them off. There!”
By Dorotliy P a r k e r
When she had been working in the dress
' A Z E L M O R S E was a large, fair
woman of the type that incites some establishment some years she met Herbie
men when they use the word "blonde" to Morse. H e was thin, quick, attractive, with
click their tongues and wag their heads shifting lines about his shiny, brown eyes
roguishly.
She prided herself upon her and a habit of fiercely biting at the skin
small feet and suffered for her vanity, box- around his finger nails. H e drank largely;
ing them in snub-toed, high-heeled slippers she found that entertaining. H e r habitual
of the shortest bearable size. The curious greeting to him was an allusion to his state
things about her were her hands, strange of the previous night.
terminations to the flabby, white arms splat"Oh, what a peach you had," she used
tered with pale tan spots—long, quivering to say, through her easy laugh. " I thought
hands with deep and convex nails.
She I'd die, the way you kept asking the waiter
should not have disfigured them with little to dance with you."
jewels.
She liked him immediately upon their
She was not a woman given to recollec- meeting. She was enormously amused at
tions. At her middle thirties, her old days his fast, slurred sentences, his interpolations
were a blurred and flickering sequence, an of apt phrases from vaudeville acts and
comic strips; she thrilled at the feel of his
imperfect film, dealing with the actions of
lean arm tucked firm beneath the sleeve of
strangers.
I n her twenties, after the deferred death her coat; she wanted to touch the wet, flat
of a hazy widowed mother, she had been em- surface of his hair. H e was as promptly
ployed as a model in a wholesale dress es- drawn to her. They were married six weeks
tablishment—it was still the day of the big after they had met.
She was delighted at the idea of being a
woman, and she was then prettily colored
and erect and high-breasted. Her job was bride; coquetted with it, played upon it.
not onerous, and she met numbers of men Other offers of marriage she had had, and
and spent numbers of evenings with them, not a few of them, but it happened that they
laughing at their jokes and telling them she were all from stout, serious men who had
loved their neckties. Men liked her, and visited the dress establishment as buyers;
she took it for granted that the liking of , men from Des Moines and Houston and
many men was a desirable thing. Popularity Chicago and, in her phrase, even funnier
seemed to her to be worth all the work that places. There was always something imhad to be put into its achievement. Men mensely comic to her in the thought of living
liked you because you were fun, and when elsewhere than New York. She could not
they liked you they took you out, and there regard as serious proposals that she share
you were. So, and successfully, she was a western residence.
fun. She was a good sport. Men like a
She wanted to be married. She was Heargood sport.
ing thirty now, and she did riot take the years
No other form of diversion, simpler or well. She spread and softened, and her
more complicated, drew her attention. She darkening hair turned her to inexpert dabThere were times
never pondered if she might not be better blings with peroxide.
occupied doing something else. H e r ideas, when she had little flashes of fear about her
or, better, her acceptances, ran right along job. And she had had a couple of thousand
with those of the other substantially built evenings of being a good sport among her
male acquaintances. She had come to be
blondes in whom she found her friends.
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THE
BOOKMAN
"Yeah," Herbie would say.
more conscientious than spontaneous about
She inissed nobody. The old crowd, the
it.
Herbie earned enough, and they took a people who had brought her and Herbie
little apartment far uptown. There was a together, dropped from their lives, lingerMission-furnished dining room with a hang- ingly at first. When she thought of this at
ing central light globed in liver-colored all, it was only to consider it fitting. This
glass; in the living-room were an "over- was marriage. This was peace. ^
But the thing was that Herbie was not
stuffed suite", a Boston fern and a reproduction of the Henner Magdalene with the red amused.
hair and the blue draperies; the bedroom was
For a time, he had enjoyed being alone
in gray enamel and old rose, with Herbie's with her. H e found the voluntary isolation
photograph on Hazel's dressing table and novel and sweet. Then it palled with a feroHazel's likeness on Herbie's chest of drawers.. cious suddenness. I t was as if one night,
She cooked—and she was a good cook— sitting with her in the steam-heated living
and marketed and chatted with the delivery room, he would ask no more; and the next
boys and the colored laundress. She loved night he was through and done with the
the flat, she loved- her life, she loved Herbie. whole thing.
I n the first months of their marriage, she
H e became annoyed by her misty melangave him all the passion she was ever to cholies. A t first, when he came home to
know.
find her softly tired and moody, he kissed
She had not realized how tired she was. . her neck and patted her shoulder and begged
I t was a delight, a new game, a holiday, to , her' to tell her Herbie what was wrong, She
give u p being a good sport. If her head loved that. But time slid by, and he found
ached or her arches throbbed, she complained that there was never anything really, perpiteously, babyishly. If her mood was quiet, sonally, the matter.
she did not talk. If tears came to her eyes,
"Ah, for God's sake," he would say.
she let them fall.
"Crabbing again. All right, sit here and
She fell readHy into the habit of tears crab your head off. I'm going out."
during the first year of her marriage. Even
And he would slam out of the flat and
in her good sport days, she had been known come back late and drunk.
to weep lavishly and disinterestedly on ocShe was completely bewildered by what
casion. H e r behavior at the theatre was a happened to their marriage. First they were
standing joke. She could weep at anything lovers; and then, it seemed without transiin a play—tiny garments, love both unre- tion, they were enemies. She never underquited and mutual, seduction, purity, faith- stood it.
ful servitors, wedlock, the triangle.
There were longer and longer intervals
"There goes H a z e , " her friends would say, I between his leaving his office and his arrival
watching her. "She's off again."
at the apartment. She went through agonies
Wedded and relaxed, she poured her tears of picturing him run over and bleeding, dead
freely. To her who had laughed so much and covered with a sheet. Then she lost
crying was delicious. All sorrows became her fears for his safety and grew sullen and
her sorrows; she was Tenderness.
She wounded. When a person wanted to be with
would cry long and softly over newspaper a person, he came as soon as possible. She
accounts of kidnapped babies, deserted wives, desperately wanted him to want to be with
unemployed men, strayed cats, heroic dogs. her; her own hours only marked the time
Even when the paper was no longer before till he would come. I t was often nearly nine
her, her mind revolved upon these things and o'clock before he came home to dinner. Althe drops slipped rhythmically over her ways he had had many drinks, and their
plump cheeks.
effect would die in him, leaving him loud
"Honestly," she would say to Herbie, "all and querulous and bristling for affronts.
the sadness there is in the world when you
H e was too nervous, he said, to sit and
stop to think about it!"
do nothing for an evening. H e boasted.
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BLONDE
probably not in all truth, that he had never
read a book in his life.
" W h a t am I expected to do—sit around
this dump on my tail all n i g h t ? " he would
ask, rhetorically., And again he would slam
out.
She did not know what to do. She could
not manage him. She could not meet him.
She fought him furiously.
A terrific
domesticity had come upon her, and she
would bite and scratch to guard it. She
wanted what she called "a nice home". She
wanted a sober, tender husband, prompt at
dinner, punctual at work.
She wanted
sweet, comforting evenings. The idea of intimacy with other men was terrible to her;
the thought that Herbie might be seeking
entertainment in other women set her frantic.
I t seemed to her that almost everything
she read—novels from the drug-store lending library, magazine stories, women's pages .
in the papers—dealt with wives who lost
their husbands' love. She could bear those,
at that, better than accounts of neat, companionable marriage and living happily ever
after.
She was frightened. Several times when
Herbie came home in the evening, he found
her determinedly dressed—she had had to
alter those of her clothes that were not new,
to make them fasten—and rouged.
"Let's go wild to-night, what do you s a y ? "
she would hail him. "A person's got lots
of time to hang around and do nothing when
they're dead."
So they would go out, to chop houses and
the less expensive cabarets. But it turned
out badly. She could no longer find amusement in watching Herbie drink. She could
not laugh at his whimsicalities, she was so
tensely counting his indulgences. And she
was unable to keep back her remonstrances
— " A h , come on. H e r b , you've had enough,
haven't you? You'll feel something terrible
in the morning".
He" would be immediately enraged. All
right, c r a b ; crab, crab, crab, that was all
she ever did. W h a t a lousy sport she w a s !
There would be scenes, and one or the other
of them would rise and stalk out in fury.
She could not recall the definite day that
she started drinking, herself. There was
641
nothing separate about her days. Like drops
upon a window-pane, they ran together and
trickled away. She had been married six
months; then a y e a r ; then three years.
She had never needed to drink, formerly.
She could sit for most of a night at a table
where the others were imbibing earnestly
and never droop in looks or spirits, nor
be bored by the doings of those about her.
If she took a cocktail, it was so unusual as
to cause twenty minutes or so of jocular
comment. But now anguish was in her. F r e quently, after a quarrel, Herbie would stay
out for the night, and she could not learn
from him where the time had been spent.
H e r heart felt tight and sore in her breast,
and her mind turned like an electric fan.
She hated the taste of liquor. Gin, plain
or in mixtures, made her promptly sick. After
experiment, she found that Scotch whiskey
was best for her. She took it without water,
because that was the quickest way to its
effect.
Herbie pressed it on her. H e was glad
to see her drink. They both felt it might
restore her high spirits, and their good times
together might again be possible.'
" 'Atta girl," he would approve her. "Let's
see you get boiled, baby."
But it brought them no nearer. When
she drank with him, there would be a little
while of gaiety and then, strangely without
beginning, they would be in a wild quarrel.
They would wake in the morning not sure
what it had all been about, foggy as to what
had been said and done, but each deeply injured and bitterly resentful. There would
be days of vengeful silence.
There had been a time when they had
made up their quarrels, usually in bed. There
would be kisses and little names and assurances of fresh starts . . . "Oh, it's going
to be great now. H e r b . We'll have swell
times. I was a crab. I guess I must have
been tired. But everything's going to be
swell. You'll see".
Now there were no gentle reconciliations.
They resumed friendly relations only in the
brief magnanimity caused by liquor, before
more liquor drew them into new battles. The
scenes became more violent.
There were
shouted invectives and pushes, and some-
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THE
BOOKMAN
times sharp slaps. Once she had a black
eye. Herbie was horrified next day at sight
of it. H e did not go to work; he followed
her aboutj suggesting remedies and heaping
dark blame on himself. But after they had
had a few drinks—"to pull themselves together"—she made so many wistful references to her bruise that he shouted at her,
and rushed out, and was gone for two days.
Each time he left the place in a rage, he
threatened never to come back. She did not
believe him, nor did she consider separation.
Somewhere in her head or her heart was the
lazy, nebulous hope that things would change
and she and Herbie settle suddenly into
soothing married life. H e r e were her home,
- her furniture, her husband, her station. She
summoned no alternatives.
She could no longer bustle and potter.
She had no more vicarious tears; the hot
drops she shed were for herself. She walked
ceaselessly about the rooms, her thoughts
running mechanically round and round
Herbie. I n those days began the hatred
of being alone that she was never to overcome. You could be by yourself when things
were all right, but when you were blue you
got the howling horrors.
She commenced drinking alone, little,
short drinks all through the day. I t was
only with Herbie that alcohol made her
nervous and quick in offence.
Alone, it
blurred sharp things for her. She lived in
a haze of it. H e r life took on a dream-like
quality. Nothing was astonishing.
A Mrs. Martin moved into the flat across
the hall. She was a great blonde woman of
forty, a promise in looks of what Mrs. Morse
was to be. They made acquaintance, quickly
became inseparable. Mrs. Morse spent her
days in the opposite apartment. They drank
together, to brace themselves after the drinks
of the nights before.
She never confided her troubles about
Herbie to Mrs. Martin. The subject was
too bewildering to her to find comfort in
talk. She let it be assumed that her husband's business kept him much away. I t
was not regarded as important; husbands,
as such, p l a y e d ' b u t shadowy parts in Mrs.
Martin's circle.
Mrs. Martin had no visible spouse; -you
were left to decide for yourself whether he
was or was not dead. She had an admirer,
Joe, who came to see her almost nightly.
Often he brought several friends with him—
" T h e Boys", they were called. T h e Boys
were big, red, good-humored men, perhaps
forty-five, perhaps fifty. Mrs. Morse was
glad of invitations to join the parties—
Herbie was scarcely ever at home at night
now. If he did come home, she did not visit
Mrs. Martin. An evening alone with Herbie
meant inevitably a quarrel, yet she would
stay with him. There was always her thin
and wordless idea that, maybe, this night,
things would begin to be alL right.
The Boys brought plenty of liquor along
with them whenever they came to Mrs. Martin's. Drinking with them, Mrs. Morse became lively and good-natured and audacious.
She was quickly popular. When she had
drunk enough to cloud her most recent battle with Herbie, she was excited by their
approbation. Crab, was she.'' Rotten sport,
was she.'' Well, there were some that thought
different.
\ E d was one of The Boys. H e lived in
Utica—had "his own business" there, was
the awed report—^-but he came to New York
almost every week. H e was married. H e
showed Mrs. Morse the then current photographs of Junior and Sister, and she praised
them abundantly and sincerely. Soon it was
accepted by the others that E d was her
particular friend.
H e staked her when they all played poker;
sat next her and occasionally rubbed his
knee against hers during the game.
She
was rather lucky.
Frequently she went
home with a twenty-dollar bill or a ten-dollar
bill or a handful of crumpled dollars. She
was glad of them. Herbie. was getting, in her
words, something awful about money. To
ask him for it brought an instant row.
" W h a t the hell do you do with i t ? " he
would say. "Shoot it all on Scotch.''"
" I t r y to run this house half-way decent,"
she would retort. "Never thought of that,
did you? Oh, no, his lordship couldn't be
bothered with t h a t . "
Again, she could not find a definite day,
to fix the beginning of Ed's proprietorship.
I t became his custom to kiss her on the
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mouth when he came in, as well as for farewell, and he gave her little quick kisses of
approval all through the evening. She. liked
this rather more than she disliked it. She
never thought of his kisses when she was
not with him.
H e would r u n his hand lingeringly over
her back and shoulders.
"Some dizzy blonde, e h ? " he would say.
"Some doll."
One afternoon she came home from Mrs.
Martin's to find Herbie in the bedroom. H e
had been' away for several nights, evidently
on a prolonged drinking bout. His face was
gray, his hands j e r k e d as if they were on
wires. On the bed were two old suitcases,
packed high.
Only her photograph remained on his bureau, and the wide doors
of his closet disclosed nothing but coathangers.
" I ' m blowing," he said. " I ' m through
with the whole works. I got a job in D e troit."
She sat down on the edge of the bed. She
had drunk much the night before, and the
four Scotches she had had with Mrs. Martin
had only increased her fogginess.
"Good j o b ? " she said.
" O h , yeah," he said. "Looks all right."
H e closed a suitcase with difficulty, swearing at it in whispers.
"There's some dough in the bank," he
said. " T h e bank book's in your top drawer.
. You can have the furniture and stuff."
H e looked at her, and his forehead
twitched.
"God^ damn it, I'm through, I'm telling
you," he cried. " I ' m through."
"All right, all right," she said.' " I heard
you, didn't I ? "
She saw him as if he were at one end of
a caiion and she at the other. H e r head was
beginning to ache bumpingly, and her voice
had a dreary, tiresome tone. She could not
have raised it.
"Like a drink before you go ?" she asked.
Again he looked at her, and a corner of
his mouth jerked up. •
"Cockeyed again for a change, aren't
y o u ? " he said. " T h a t ' s nice. Sure, get a
couple of shots, will y o u ? "
She went to the pantry, mixed him a stiff
643
highball, poured herself a couple of inches
of whiskey and drank it. Then she gave
herself another portion and brought the
glasses into the bedroom. H e had strapped
both suitcases and had put on his hat and
overcoat.
He took his highball.
"Well," he said, and he gave a sudden,
uncertain laugh. " H e r e ' s mud in your eye."
"Mud in your eye," she said.
They drank. H e p u t down his glass and
took up the heavy suitcase.
"Got to get a train around six," he said.
She followed him down the hall. There
was a song, a song that M r s . Martin played
doggedly on the phonograph, running loudly
through her mind. She had never liked the
thing.
"Night and daytime.
Always playtime.
Ain't we got f u n ? "
At the door he put down the bags and
faced her.
"Well," he said. "Well, take cai-e of yourself. You'll be all right, will you?"
"Oh, sure," she said.
He opened the door, then came back to
her, holding out his hand.
" 'Bye,' H a z e , " he said. "Good luck to
you."
She took his hand and shook it.
"Pardon my wet glove," she said.
When the door had closed behind him, she
went back to the p a n t r y .
She. was flushed and lively when she went
in to Mrs. Martin's t h a t evening. The Boys
were there," E d among them. H e was glad
to be in town, frisky and loud and full of
jokes. B u t she spoke quietly to him for a
minute.
!
"Herbie blew today," she said. "Going
to live out west."
"That s o ? " he said. H e looked at her
and played with the fountain pen clipped
to his waistcoat pocket.
"Think he's gone for good, do you ?" he
asked.
• "Yeah," she said. " I know he is. I know.
Yeah."
"You going to live on across the hall j u s t
the same?" he said. "Know what you're
going to d o ? "
)
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644
BOOKMAN
"Gee, I don't know," she said. " I don't
give much of a damn."
"Oh, come on, that's no way to talk," he
told her. " W h a t you need—you need a little
snifter. How about i t ? "
'
"Yeah," she said. " J u s t straight."
She won forty-three dollars at poker.
When the game broke up, E d took her back
to her apartment.
"Got a little kiss for me?" he asked.
H e wrapped her in his big arms and kissed
her violently. She was entirely passive. H e
held her away and looked at her,
"Little tight, honey?" he asked, anxiously.
"Not going to be sick, are you?"
\
" M e ? " she said. " I ' m swell."
II
When E d left in the morning, he took her
photograph with him. H e said he wanted
her picture to look at, up in Utica. "You
can have that one on the bureau," she said.
She put Herbie's picture in a drawer, out
of her sight. When she could look at it, she
meant to tear it up. She was fairly successful in keeping her mind from racing around
him. Whiskey slowed it for her. She was
almost peaceful, in her mist. •
She accepted her relationship with E d
without question or enthusiasm. When he
was away, she seldom thought definitely of
him. H e was good to h e r ; he gave her frequent presents and a regular allowance. She
was even able to save. She did not plan
ahead of any day, but her wants were few,
and you might as well put money in the
bank as have it lying around.
When the lease of her apartment neared
its end, it was E d who suggested moving.
His friendship with Mrs. Martin "and Joe
had become strained over a dispute at poker;
a feud was impending.
"Let's get the hell out of here," E d said.
"What I want you to have is a place near
the Grand Central. Make it easier for me."
So she took a little flat in the forties. A
colored maid came in every day to clean
and to make coffee for her—she was "through
with that housekeeping stuff", she said, and
E d , twenty years married to a passionately
domestic woman, admired this romantic use-
lessness and felt doubly a man of the world
in abetting it.
The coffee was all she had until she went
out to dinner, but alcohol kept her fat. P r o hibition she regarded only as a basis for
jokes. You could always get all you wanted.
She was never noticeably drunk and seldom
nearly sober. It" required a larger daily allowance to keep her misty-minded. Too little, and she was achingly melancholy.
E d brought her to Jimmy's. H e was
proud, with the pride of the transient who
would be mistaken for a native, in his knowledge of small, recent restaurants occupying
the lower floors of shabby brownstone
houses; places where, upon mentioning the
name of an habitue friend, might be obtained
strange whiskey and fresh gin in many of
their ramifications. Jimmy's place was the
favorite of his acquaintances.
There, through E d , Mrs. Morse met many
men and women, formed quick friendships.
The men often took her out when E d was
in Utica. H e was proud of her popularity.
She fell into the habit of going to Jimmy's
alone when she had no engagement.
She
was certain to meet some people she knew,
and join them. I t was a club for her friends,
both men and women.
The women at Jimmy's looked remarkably
alike, and this was curious, for, through
feuds, removals and opportunities of more
profitable contacts, the personnel of the
group changed constantly. Yet always the
newcomers resembled those whom they replaced. They were all big women and stout,
broad of shoulder and abundantly breasted,
with faces thickly clothed in soft, highcolored flesh. They laughed loud and often,
showing opaque and lustreless teeth like
squares of crockery. There was about them
the health of the big, yet a slight, unwholesome suggestion of stubborn preservation.
They might have been thirty-six or fortyfive or anywhere between.
They composed their titles of their own
first names with their husbands' s u r n a m e s ^
Mrs. Florence Miller, Mrs. Vera Riley, Mrs.
Lilian Block. This gave at the same time
the solidity of marriage and the glamour of
freedom. Yet only one or two were actually
divorced. Most of them never referred to
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their dimmed spouses; some, a shorter time
separate, described them in terms of great
biological interest. Several were mothers,
each of an only child—a boy at school somewhere, or a girl being cared for by a grandmother. Often, well on towards morning,
there would be displays of kodak portraits
and of tears.
They were comfortable women, cordial
and friendly and irrepressibly matronly.
Theirs was the quality of ease. Become
fatalistic, especially about money matters,
they were unworried. Whenever their funds
dropped alarmingly, a new donor appeared;
this had always happened. The aim of each
was to have one man, permanently, to pay
all her bills, in return for which she would
have immediately given up other admirers
and probably would have become exceedingly
fond of him; for the affections of all of them
were, by now, unexacting, tranquil and easily
arranged. This end, however, grew increasingly difficult yearly. Mrs. Morse was regarded as fortunate.
E d had a good year, increased her allowance and gave her a sealskin coat. But she
had to be careful of her moods with him. H e
insisted upon gaiety. H e would not listen
to admissions of aches or weariness.
" H e y , listen," he would say, " I got worries of my own, and plenty. Nobody wants
to hear other people's troubles, sweetie. W h a t
you got to do, you got to be a sport and forget it. See? Well, slip us a little smile,
then. That's my girl."
She never had enough interest to quarrel
with him as she had with Herbie, but she
wanted the privilege of occasional admitted
sadness. I t was strange. The other women
she saw did not have to fight their moods.
There was M r s . Florence Miller who got
regular crying j a g s , and the men sought only
to cheer and comfort her. The others spent
whole evenings in grieved recitals of worries
and ills; their escorts paid them deep sympathy. But she was instantly undesirable
when she was low in spirits. Once, at
Jimmy's, when she could not make herself
lively, E d had walked out and left her.
"Why the hell don't you stay home and
not go spoiling everybody's evening?" he had
roared.
645
Even her slightest acquaintances seemed
irritated if she were not conspicuously lighthearted.
"What's the matter with you, anyway?"
they would say. "Be your age, why don't
you ? Have a little drink and snap out of it."
When her relationship with Ed had continued nearly three years, he moved to
Florida to live. H e hated leaving h e r ; he
gave her a large cheque and some shares of
a sound stock, and his pale eyes were wet
when he said good-bye. She did not miss
him. H e came to New York infrequently,
perhaps two or three times a year, and hurried directly from the train to see her. She
was always pleased to have him come and
never sorry to see him go.
Charley, an acquaintance of Ed's that she
had met at Jimmy's, had long admired her.
H e had always made opportunities of touching her and leaning close to talk to her. H e
asked repeatedly of all their friends if they
had ever heard such a fine laugh as she had.
After E d left, Charley became the main figure in her life. She classified him and spoke
of him as "not so bad". There was nearly
a year of Charley; then she divided her time
between him and Sydney, another frequenter
of J i m m y ' s ; then Charley slipped away altogether.
Sydney was a little, brightly dressed,
clever Jew. She was perhaps nearest contentment with him. H e amused her always;
her laughter was not forced.
He admired her completely. H e r softness
and size delighted him. And he thought she
was great, he often told her, because she kept
gay and lively when she was drunk.
"Once I had a gal," he said, "used to t r y
and throw herself out of the window every
time she got a can on. Jee-suss," he added,
feelingly.
Then Sydney married a rich and watchful bride, and then there was Billy. N o —
after Sydney came Ferd, then Billy.
In
her haze, she never recalled how men entered
her life and left it. There were no surprises.
She had no thrill at their advent, nor woe
at their departure. She seemed to be always
able to attract men. There was never another as rich as E d , but they were all generous to her, in their means.
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THE
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Once she had news of Herbie. She met
Mrs. Martin dining at Jimmy's, and the old
friendship was vigorously renewed.
The
still admiring Joe, while on a business t r i p ,
had seen Herbie. H e had settled in Chicago,
he looked fine, he was living with some
woman—seemed to be crazy about her. Mrs.
Morse had been drinking vastly that day.
She took the news with mild interest, as one
hearing of the sex peccadilloes of somebody
whose name is, after a moment's groping,
familiar, s
"Must be damn near seven years since I
saw him," she commented. "Gee. Seven
years."
More and more, her days lost their individuality. She never knew dates, nor was
sure of the day of the week.
" M y God, was that a year ago!" she would
exclaim, when an event was recalled in conversation.
She was tired so much of the time. Tired
and blue. Almost everything could give her
the blues. Those old horses she saw on
Sixth Avenue—struggling and slipping along
the car-tracks, or standing at the curb, their
heads dropped level with their worn knees.
The tightly stored tears would squeeze from
her eyes as she teetered past on her aching
feet in the stubby, champagne-colored slippers.
The thought of death came and stayed
with her and lent her a sort of drowsy cheer.
I t would be nice, nice and restful, to be dead.
There was no settled, shocked moment
when she first thought of killing herself; it
seemed to her as if the idea had always been
with her. She pounced upon all the accounts
of suicides in the newspapers. There was
an epidemic of self-killings—or maybe it was
just that she searched for the stories of them
so eagerly that she found many. To read of
them roused reassurance in her; she felt a
cozy solidarity with the big company of the
voluntary dead.
She slept, aided by whiskey, till deep into
the afternoons, then lay abed, a bottle and
glass at her hand, until it was time to dress
to go out for dinner. She was beginning to
feel towards alcohol a little puzzled distrust,
as toward an old friend who has refused a
simple favor. Whiskey could still soothe
her for most of the time, but there were sudden, inexplicable moments when the cloud
fell treacherously away from her, and she
was sawn by the sorrow and bewilderment
and nuisance of all living. She played voliiptuously with the thought of cool, sleepy
retreat. She had never been troubled by r e ligious belief and no vision of an after-life
intimidated her. She dreamed by day of
never ag'ain putting on tight shoes, of never
having to laugh and listen and admire, of
never more being a good sport. Never.
But how would you do it? vlt made her
sick to think of jumping from heights. . She
could not stand a gun. At the theatre, if
one of the actors drew a revolver, she
crammed her fingers into her ears and could
not even look at the stage until after the
shot had been fired. There was no gas in
her flat. She looked long at-the bright blue
veins in her slim wrists—a cut with a razor
blade, and there you'd be. But it would
hurt, hurt like hell, and there would be
blood to see. Poison—something tasteless
and. quick and painless—was the thing. But
they wouldn't sell it to you - in drug-stores,
because of the law.
She had few other thoughts.
There was a new man now—-Art. H e was
short and fat and exacting and hard on her
patience when he was drunk. But there
had been only occasionals for some time before him, and she was glad of a little stability. Too, A r t must be away for weeks at a
stretch, selling silks, and that was restful.
She was convincingly gay with him, though
the effort shook her viciously.
" T h e best sport in the world," he would
murmur, d e e p e n her neck. " T h e best sport
in the world."
One night, when he had taken her to Jimmy's, she went into the dressing-room with
Mrs. Florence Miller. There, while designing curly mouths on their faces with liprouge, they compared experiences of insomnia.
"Honestly," M r s . Morse said, " I wouldn't
close an eye if I didn't go to bed full of
Scotch. I lie, there and toss and turn and
toss and turn. B l u e ! Does a p e r s o n ' get
blue lying' awake that w a y ! "
•"Say, listen. H a z e l , " Mrs. Miller said, im-
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pressively, " I ' m telling you I'd be awake
for a year if I didn't take veronal. That
stuff makes you sleep like a fool."
" I s n ' t it poison, or something?" Mrs.
Morse asked.
"Oh, • you take too much and you're out
for the count," said Mrs. Miller. " I j u s t
take five g r a i n s ^ t h e y come in tablets. I'd
be scared to fool around with it. But five
grains, and you cork off pretty."
"Can you get it anywhere?" Mrs. Morse
felt superbly Machiavellian.
"Get all you want in J e r s e y , " said Mrs.
Miller. " T h e y won't give it to you here
without you have a doctor's prescription.
Finished ? We'd better go back and see what
the boys are doing."
That night. Art left Mrs. Morse at the
door of her apartment; his mother was in
town. Mrs. Morse was still sober, and it
happened that there was no whiskey left in
her cupboard. She lay in bed, looking up
at the black ceiling.
She rose early, for her, and went to New
Jersey. She had never taken the tube, and
did not understand it. So she went to the
Pennsylvania Station and bought a railroad
ticket to Newark. She thought of nothing
in particular on the trip out. She looked at
the uninspired hats of the women about her
and gazed through the smeared window at
the flat, gritty scene.
I n Newark, in the first drug-store she
came to, she asked for a tin of talcum powder, a naU-brush and a box of veronal tablets. The powder and the brush were to
make the hypnotic seem also a casual need.
The clerk was entirely unconcerned. "We
only keep them in bottles," he said and
wrapped up for her a little glass vial containing ten white tablets, stacked one on another.
She went to another drug-store and bought
a face-cloth, an orange-wood stick and a
bottle of veronal tablets. The clerk was also
uninterested.
"Well, I guess I got enough to kill an ox,"
she thought, and went back to the station.
At home, she put the little vials in the
drawer of her dressing-table and stood looking at them with a dreamy tenderness.
"There they are, God bless them," she
647
said, and she kissed her finger-tip and touched
each bottle.
The colored maid was busy in the living
room.
" H e y , Nettie," Mrs. Morse called. "Be
an angel, will you? Run around to Jimmy's
and get me a quart of Scotch."
She hummed while she awaited the girl's
return.
During the next few days, whiskey ministered to her as tenderly as it had done
when she first turned to its aid. Alone, she
was soothed and vague, at Jimmy's she was
the gayest of the groups. Art was delighted
with her.
Then, one night, she had an appointment
to meet A r t at Jimmy's for an early dinner.
H e was to leave afterward on a business excursion, to be away for a week. Mrs. Morse
had been drinking all the afternoon; while
she dressed to go out, she felt herself rising
pleasurably from drowsiness to high spirits.
But as she came out into the street the effects
of the whiskey deserted her completely, and
she was filled with a slow, grinding wretchedness so horrible that she stood swaying on the
pavement, unable for a moment to move forward. I t was a gray night with spurts of
mean, thin snow, and the streets shone with
dark . ice.
As she slowly crossed Sixth
Avenue, consciously dragging one foot past
the other, a big, scarred horse pulling a
rickety express-wagon crashed to his knees
before her. The driver swore and screamed
and lashed the beast insanely, bringing the
whip back over his shoulder for every blow,
while the horse struggled to get a footing on
the slippery asphalt. A group gathered and
watched with interest.
Art was waiting, when Mrs. Morse reached
Jimmy's.
"What's the matter with you, for God's
sake?" was his greeting to her.
" I saw a horse," she said. "Gee, I—a
person feels sorry for horses. I—it isn't
just horses. Everything's kind of terrible,
isn't it ? I can't help getting sunk."
"Ah, sunk, me eye," he said. "What's the
idea of all the bellyaching? What have you
got to be sunk about?"
" I can't help it," she said.
"Ah, help it, me eye," he said. "Pull
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THE
BOOKMAN
yourself together, will you? Come on and
sit down, and take that face off you."
She drank industriously and she tried
hard, but she could not overcome her melancholy.
Others joined them and^ commented on her gloom, and she could do no
more for them than smile weakly. She made
little dabs at her eyes with' her handkerchief,
trying to time her movements so they would
be unnoticed, but several times Art caught
her and scowled and shifted impatiently in
his chair.
,
When it was time for him to go to his
train, she said she would leave, too, and go
home.
"And not a bad idea, either," he said.
"See if you can't sleep yourself out of it.
I'll see you Thursday.
For God's sake,
try and cheer up by then, will you?"
"Yeah," she said. " I will."
I n her bedroom, she undressed with a
tense speed wholly unlike her usual slow uncertainty. She put on her nightgown, took
off her hair-net and passed the comb quickly
through her dry, vari-colored hair. Then
she took the two little vials from the drawer
and carried them into the bathroom. The
splintering misery had gone from' her, and
she felt the quick excitement ^of one who is
about to receive an anticipated gift.
She uncorked the vials, filled a glass with
water and stood before the mirror, a tablet
between her fingers. Suddenly she bowed
graciously to her reflection, and raised the
glass to it.
"Well, here's mud in your eye," she said.
The tablets were unpleasant to take, dry
and powdery and sticking obstinately halfway down her throat. I t took her a long
time to swallow all twenty of them. She
stood watching her reflection with deep, impersonal interest, studying the movements of
the gulping throat. Once more,she spoke
aloud to it.
" F o r God's sake, try and cheer up by
Thursday, will you?" she said. "Well, you
know what he can do. H e and the -whole lot
of them."
She had no idea how quickly to expect
effect from the veronal. When she had
taken the last tablet, she stood uncertainly,
wondering, still with a courteous, vicarious
interest, if death would strike her down then
and there. She felt in no way strange, save
for a slight stirring of sickness from the
effort of swallowing the tablets, nor did her
reflected face look at all different. I t would
not be immediate, t h e n ; it might even take
an hour or so.
She stretched her arms high and gave a
vast yawn.
"Guess I'll go to bed," she said. "Gee,
I'm nearly dead."
T h a t struck her as comic, and she turned
out the bathroom light and went in and laid
herself down in her bed, chuckling softly
all the time.
"Gee, I ' m nearly dead," she quoted.
"That's a hot one!"
Ill
Nettie, the colored maid, came in late the
next afternoon to clean the apartment, and
found Mrs. Morse in her bed. But then,
that was not unusual. Usually, though, the
sounds of cleaning waked her, and she did
not like to wake u p . Nettie, an agreeable
girl, had learned to move softly about her
work.
'
'
'
But when she had done the living room
and stolen in to tidy the little square bedroom, she could not avoid a tiny clatter as
she arranged the objects on the dressing
table. Instinctively, she glanced over her
shoulder at the sleeper, and without warning a sickly uneasiness crept over her. She
came to the bed and stared down at the
woman lying there.
Mrs. Morse lay on her back, one flabby,
white arm flung up, the wrist against her
forehead. H e r stiff hair hung untenderly
along her face. The bed covers were pushed
down, exposing a deep square of soft neck
and a pink nightgown, its fabric worn uneven by many launderings; her great breasts,
freed from their tight confiner, sagged beneath her arm-pits.
Now and then she
made knotted, snoring sounds, and from the
corner of her opened mouth to the blurred
turn of her j a w ran a lane of crusted spittle.
"Mis' Morse," Nettie called. "Oh, Mis'
Morse! It's terrible late."
Mrs. Morse made no move.
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649
"Snap it up there, big boy," the girl called
"Mis' M o r s e / ' said Nettie. "Look, Mis'
after
him. "Don't be all night."
Morse. How'm I goin' get this bed made?"
The doctor strode loudly into Mrs. Morse's
Panic s p r a n g upon the girl. She shook
flat and on to the bedroom, Nettie and the
the woman's hot shoulder.
"Ah, wake up, will y u h ? " she whined. boy right behind him. Mrs. Morse had not
moved; her sleep was as deep, but sound"Ah, please wake u p . "
Suddenly the girl turned and ran out less, now. The doctor looked sharply at her,
in the hall to the elevator door, keeping her then plunged his thumbs into the lidded pits
thumb firm on the black, shiny button until above her eyeballs and threw his weight upon
the elderly car and its Negro attendant stood them. A high, sickened cry broke from
before her. She poured a jumble of words Nettie.
over the boy, and led him back to the apart"Look like he try in' to push her right on
ment. H e tiptoed creakingly in to the bed- th'ough the bed," said the boy. H e chuckled.
side; first gingerly, then so lustily that he
Mrs. Morse gave no sign under the presleft marks in the soft flesh, he prodded the sure. Abruptly the doctor abandoned it,
unconscious woman.
and with one quick movement swept the
" H e y , t h e r e ! " he cried, and listened in- covers down to the foot of the bed. With
another he flung her nightgown back and
tently, as for an echo.
"Jeez. Out like a light," he commented. lifted the thick, white legs, cross-hatched
At his interest in the spectacle, Nettie's with blocks of tiny, • iris-colored veins. H e
panic left her. Importance was big in both pinched them repeatedly, with long, cruel
She did not
of them^. T h e y talked in quick, unfinished nips, back of the knees.
awaken.
whispers, and it was the boy's suggestion
that he fetch the young doctor who lived on
"What's she been drinking?" he asked
the ground floor. Nettie hurried along with Nettie, over his shoulder.
him. They looked forward to the limelit
With the certain celerity of one who knows
moment of breaking their news of something j u s t where to lay hands on a thing, Nettie
untoward, something pleasurably unpleas- went into the bathroom, bound for the cupant. Mrs. Morse had become the medium of board where Mrs. Morse kept her whiskey.
drama. W i t h no ill wish to her, they hoped But she stopped at the sight of the two
that her state was serious, that she would vials, with their red and white labels, lying
not let them down by being awake and nor- , before the mirror. She brought them to the
mal on their return. A little fear of this doctor.
determined them to make the most, to the
"Oh, for the Lord Almighty's sweet sake!"
doctor, of her present condition. "Matter of he said. H e dropped Mrs. Morse's limp legs,
life and death" returned to Nettie from her and pushed them impatiently across the
thin store of reading. She considered start- bed. " W h a t did she want to go taking that
ling the doctor with the phrase.
tripe for? Eotten yellow trick, that's what
The doctor was in and none too pleased at a thing like that is. Now we'll have to pump
interruption. H e wore a yellow and blue her out, and all that stuff. Nuisance, a thing
striped dressing-gown, and he was lying on like that is; that's what it amounts to. Here,
his sofa, laughing, with a dark girl, her face George, take me down in the elevator. You
scaly with inexpensive powder, who perched wait here, maid. She won't do anything."
on the arm. Half-emptied highball glasses
"She won' die on me, will she?" cried
stood beside them, and her coat and hat were Nettie.
neatly hung up with the comfortable implica" N o , " said the doctor. "God, no. You
tion of a long stay.
couldn't kill her with an axe."
Always something, the doctor grumbled.
Couldn't let anybody alone after a hard day.
IV
But he put some bottles and instruments
into a case, changed his dressing-gown for
After two days, Mrs. Morse came back to
his coat and started out with the Negroes. consciousness, dazed at first, then with a
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THE
BOOKMAN
comprehension that brought with it the slow,
saturating wretchedness.
"Oh, Lord, oh. Lord," she .moaned, and
tears for herself and for life striped her
cheeks.
,
Nettie came in at the sound. For two
days she had done the ugly, incessant tasks
in the nursing of the unconscious, for two
nights she had caught broken bits of sleep
on the living room couch. She looked coldly
at the big, blown woman in the bed.
"What you been tryin' to do, Mis' Morse ?"
she said. " W h a t kine o' work is that, takin'
all that stuff.?"
"Oh, Lord," moaned Mrs. Morse, again,
and she tried to cover her eyes with her
arms. But the joints felt stiff and brittle,
and she cried out at their ache.
" T h a ' s no way to ack, takin' them pills,"
said Nettie. "You can thank you' stars you
heah at all. How you feel now.''"
"Oh, I feel great," said Mrs. Morse.
"Swell, I feel."
H e r hot, painful tears fell as if they would
never stop.
" T h a ' s no way to take on, cryin' like that,"
Nettie said. "After what you done. "The
doctor, he says he could have you arrested,
doin' a thing like that. H e was fit to be
tied, here."
" W h y couldn't he let me alone?" wailed
Mrs. Morse. " W h y the hell couldn't he
have?"
I
i
" T h a ' s terr'ble, Mis' Morse, swearin' an'~
talkin' like that," said Nettie, "after what
people done for. you. H e r e I ain' had no
sleep at all, a n ' I had to give up goin' out
to my other ladies!"
"Oh, I'm sorry, Nettie," she said. "You're
a peach. I'm sorry I've given you so much
trouble. I couldn't help it. 1 j u s t got sunk.
D i d n ' t you ever feel like doing it? When
everything looks j u s t lousy to you?"
" I wouldn' think o' no such thing," declared Nettie. "You got to cheer up. Tha's
what you got to do. Everybody's got their
troubles."
"Yeah," said Mrs. Morse. " I know."
"Come a pretty picture card for you,"
Nettie said. "Maybe that will cheer you u p . "
, She handed M r s . Morse a post card.
Mrs. Morse had to cover one eye with her
hand, in order to read the message; her eyes
were not yet focussing correctly.
I t was from Art. On the back of a view
of the Detroit Athletic Club he had written:
"Greeting and salutations. Hope you have
lost that gloom. Cheer up and don't take
any rubber nickles. See you on Thursday".
She dropped the card to the floor. Misery
crushed her as if she were between great
smooth stones. There passed before her a
slow, slow pageant of days spent lying in her
flat, of evenings at Jimmy's being a good
sport, making herself laugh and coo at Art
and other A r t s ; she saw a long parade of
weary horses and shivering beggars and all
beaten, driven, stumbling things. H e r feet
throbbed as if she had crammed them into,
the stubby champagne-colored slippers. H e r
heart seemed to swell and fester.
"Nettie," she cried, "for heaven's sake
pour me a drink, will y o u ? "
The maid looked doubtful.
"Now you know. Mis' Morse," she said,
"you been near daid. I don' know if the
doctor he let you drink nothin' yet."
"Oh, never mind him," she said. "You.
get me one, and bring in, the bottle. Take
one yourself."
"Well," said Nettie.
She poured them each a drink, deferentially leaving hers in the bathroom to be
taken in solitude, and brought Mrs; Morse's
glass in to her.
Mrs. Morse looked into the liquor and
shuddered back from its odor. Maybe it
would help. Maybe, when- you had been
knocked cold for a few days, your very first
drink would give you a lift. Maybe whiskey
would be her friend again. She prayed without addressing a God, without knowing a God.
Oh, please," please, let her be able to get
drunk, please keep her always drunk.
She lifted the glass.
" T h a n k s , Nettie," she said. "Here's mud
in your eye."
The maid giggled. " T h a ' s the way. Mis'
Morse," she said. "You cheer up, now."
"Yeah,", said M r s . Morse. "Sure."
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1930
Katherine Anne Porter
Theft
FROM The Gyroscope
SHE HAD the purse in her hand when she came in. Standing in the
middle of the floor, holding her bathrobe around her and trailing a
damp towel in one hand, she surveyed the immediate past and remembered everything clearly. Yes, she had opened the flap and spread it out
on the bench after she had dried the purse with her handkerchief.
She had intended to take the Elevated, and naturally she looked in
her purse to make certain she had the fare, and was pleased to find forty
cents in the coin envelope. She was going to pay her own fare, too, even
if Camilo did have the habit of seeing her up the steps and dropping a
nickel in the machine before he gave the turnstile a little push and sent
her through it with a bow. Camilo by a series of compromises had managed to make effective a fairly complete set of the smaller courtesies,
ignoring the larger and more troublesome ones. She had walked with
him to the station in a pouring rain, because she knew he was almost
as poor as she was, and when he insisted on a taxi, she was firm and
said, "You know it simply will not do." He was wearing a new hat of a
pretty biscuit shade, for it never occurred to him to buy anything of a
practical colour; he had put it on for the first time and the rain was
spoiling it. She kept thinking, "But this is dreadful, where will he get
another?" and compared it with Eddie's hats that always seemed to be
precisely seven years old and as if they had been quite purposely left out
in the rain, and they sat with a careless and incidental rightness on
Eddie. But Camilo was far different, if he wore a shabby hat it would be
merely shabby on him, and he would lose his spirits over it. If she had
not feared Camilo would take it badly, for he insisted on the practise of
his little ceremonies up to the point he had fixed for them, she would
io6
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
have said to him as they left Thora's house, "Do go home. I can surely
reach the station by myself."
"It is written that we must be rained upon to-night," said Camilo, "so
let it be together."
At the foot of the platform stairway she staggered slightly — they
were both nicely set up on Thora's cocktails — and said: "At least,
Camilo, do me the favor not to climb these stairs in your present state,
since for you it is only a matter of coming down again at once, and
you'll certainly break your neck."
He made three quick bows, he was Spanish, and leaped off through
the rainy darkness. She stood watching him, for he was a very graceful
young man, thinking that to-morrow morning he would gaze soberly at
his spoiled hat and soggy shoes and possibly associate her with his
misery. And as she watched, he stopped at the far corner and took off
his hat and hid it under his overcoat. She felt she had betrayed him by
seeing, because he would have been humiliated if he thought she even
suspected him of trying to save his hat.
Roger's voice sounded over her shoulder above the clang of the rain
falling on the stairway shed, wanting to know what she was doing out in
the rain at this time of night, and did she take herself for a duck? His
long, imperturbable face was streaming with water, and he tapped a
bulging spot on the breast of his buttoned-up overcoat: "Hat," he said.
"Come on, let's take a taxi."
She settled back against Roger's arm which he laid around her shoulders, and with the gesture they exchanged a glance full of long amiable
associations, then she looked through the window at the rain changing
the shapes of everything, and the colours. The taxi dodged in and out
between the pillars of the Elevated, skidding slightly on every curve, and
she said: "The more it skids the calmer I feel, so I really must be drunk."
"You must be," said Roger. "This bird is a homicidal maniac, and I
could do with a cocktail myself this minute."
They waited on the traffic at Fortieth Street and Sixth Avenue, and
three boys walked before the nose of the taxi. Under the globes of light
they were cheerful scarecrows, all very thin and wearing very seedy
snappy-cut suits and gay neckties. They were not very sober either, and
they stood for a moment wobbling in front of the car, and there was
an argument going on among them. They leaned toward each other as
if they were getting ready to sing, and the first one said: "When I get
married it won't be jus' for getting married, I'm gonna marry for love,
see?" and the second one said, "Aw, gwan and tell that stuff to her,
107
why'nt yuh?" and the third one gave a kind of hoot, and said, "Hell, dis
guy? Wot the hell's he got?" and the first one said: "Aaah, shurrup yuh
mush, I got plenty." Then they all squealed and scrambled across the
street beating the third one on the back and pushing him around.
"Nuts," commented Roger, "pure nuts."
Two girls went skittering by in short transparent raincoats, one green,
one red, their heads tucked against the drive of the rain. One of them
was saying to the other, "Yes, I know all about that. But what about me?
You're always so sorry for him . . ." and they ran on with their little
pelican legs flashing back and forth.
The taxi backed up suddenly and leaped forward again, and after a
while Roger said: "I had a letter from Stella to-day, and she'll be home
on the 26th, so I suppose she's made up her mind and it's all settled."
"I had a sort of letter to-day too," she said. "I think it is time for you
and Stella to do something definite."
When the taxi stopped on the corner of West Fifty-third Street, Roger
said, "I've just enough if you'll add ten cents," so she opened her purse
and gave him a dime, and he said, "That's beautiful, that purse."
"It's a birthday present," she told him, "and I like it. How's your show
coming?"
"Oh, still hanging on, I guess. I don't go near the place. Nothing sold
yet. I mean to keep right on the way I'm going and they can take it or
leave it. I'm through with the argument."
"It's absolutely a matter of holding out, isn't it?"
"Holding out's the tough part."
"Good-night, Roger."
"Good-night, you should take aspirin and push yourself into a tub of
hot water, you look as though you're catching cold."
"I wUl."
With the purse under her arm she went upstairs, and on the first
landing Bill heard her step and poked his head out with his hair tumbled and his eyes red, and he said: "For Christ's sake come in and have a
drink with me. I've had some bad news.
"You're perfectly sopping," said Bill. They had two drinks, and Bill
told how the director had thrown his play out after the cast had been
picked over twice, and had gone through three rehearsals. "I said to
him, 'I didn't say it was a masterpiece, I said it was a good show.' And he
said, 'It just doesn't play, do you see? It needs a doctor.' So I'm stuck,
absolutely stuck," said Bill, on the edge of weeping again. "I've been
crying," he told her, "in my cups." And he went on to ask her if she
io6
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
realized that his wife was ruining him with her extravagance. "I send her
ten dollars every week of my unhappy life, and I don't really have to. She
threatens to jail me if I don't, but she can't do it. God, let her try it after
the way she treated me! She's no right to alimony, and she knows it. But
I send it because I can't bear to see anybody suffer. And I'm way behind
on the piano and the victrola, both — "
"Well, this is a pretty rug, anyhow," she said.
Bill stared at it and blew his nose. "I got it at Ricci's for ninety-five
dollars," he said. "Ricci said it once belonged to Marie Dressier and
cost fifteen hundred dollars, but there's a burnt place on it. Can you
beat that?"
"No," she said.
They had another drink and she went to her apartment on the floor
above, and there, she now remembered distinctly, she had taken the
letter out of the purse before she spread the purse out to dry.
She had sat down and read the letter over again: but there were
phrases that insisted on being read many times, they had a life of their
own separate from the others, and when she tried to read past and
around them, they moved with the movement of her eyes, and she
could not escape t h e m . . . "thinking about you more than I mean to . . .
yes, I even talk about you . . . why were you so anxious to destroy . . .
even if I could see you now I would n o t . . . not worth all this abominable . . . the end . . . "
Carefully she tore the letter into narrow strips and touched a lighted
match to them in the coal grate.
Early the next morning she was in the bath tub when the janitress
knocked and then came in, calling out that she wished to examine the
radiators before she started the furnace going for the winter. After
moving about the room for a few minutes, the janitress went out closing
the door very sharply.
She came out of the bathroom to get a cigarette from the package in
the purse. The purse was gone. She dressed and made coffee, and sat by
the window while she drank it. Certainly the janitress had taken the
purse, and certainly it would be impossible to get it back without a great
deal of ridiculous excitement. Then let it go. With this decision of her
mind, there rose coincidentally in her blood a deep almost murderous
anger. She set the cup carefully in the centre of the table, and walked
unsteadily downstairs, three long flights and a short hall and a steep
short flight into the basement, where the janitress, her face streaked
with coal dust, was shaking up the furnace. "Will you please give me
Theft
109
back my purse? There isn't any money in it. It was a present, and I don't
want to lose it."
The janitress turned without straightening up and peered at her with
hot flickering eyes, a red light reflected from the furnace in them. "What
do you mean, your purse?"
"The gold cloth purse you took from the wooden bench in my
room," she said. "I must have it back."
"Before God I never laid eyes on your purse, and that's the holy
truth," said the janitress.
"Oh, well then, keep it," she said, but in a very bitter voice, "keep it if
you want it so much." And she walked away.
She remembered how she had never locked a door in her life, on
some principle of rejection in her that made her uncomfortable in the
ownership of things, and her paradoxical boast before the warnings of
her friends, that she had never lost a penny by theft; and she had been
pleased with the bleak humility of this concrete example designed to
illustrate and justify a certain fixed, otherwise baseless and general faith
which ordered the movements of her life without regard to her will in
the matter.
In this moment she felt that she had been robbed of an enormous
number of valuable things, whether material or intangible: things lost
or broken by her own fault, things she had forgotten and left in houses
when she moved: books borrowed and not returned, journeys she had
planned and had not made, words she had waited to hear spoken to her
and had not heard, and the words she had meant to answer with bitter
alternatives and intolerable substitutes worse than nothing, and yet
inescapable: the long patient suffering of dying friendships and the dark
inexplicable death of love — all that she had had, and all that she had
missed, were lost together, and were twice lost in this landslide of remembered losses.
The janitress was following her upstairs with her purse in her hand
and the same deep red fire flickering in her eyes. The janitress thrust the
purse towards her while they were still a half dozen steps apart, and
said: "Don't never tell on me. I musta been crazy. I get crazy in the head
sometimes, I swear I do. My son can tell you."
She took the purse after a moment, and the janitress went on: "I got
a niece who is going on seventeen, and she's a nice girl and I thought I'd
give it to her. She needs a pretty purse. I musta been crazy, I thought
maybe you wouldn't mind, you leave things around and don't seem to
notice much."
io6
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
She said: "I missed this because it was a present to me from some
one . . ."
The janitress said: "He'd get you another if you lost this one. My niece
is young and needs pretty things, we oughta give the young ones a
chance. She's got young men after her maybe will want to marry her.
She oughta have nice things. She needs them bad right now. You're a
grown woman, you've had your chance, you ought to know how it is!"
She held the purse out to the janitress saying: "You don't know what
you're talking about. Here, take it, I've changed my mind. I really don't
want it."
The janitress looked up at her with hatred and said: "I don't want it
either now. My niece is young and pretty, she don't need fixin' up to be
pretty, she's young and pretty anyhow! I guess you need it worse than
she does!"
"It wasn't really yours in the first place," she said, turning away. "You
mustn't talk as if I had stolen it from you."
"It's not from me, it's from her you're stealing it," said the janitress,
and went back downstairs.
She laid the purse on the table and sat down with the cup of chilled
coffee, and thought. I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself,
who will end by leaving me nothing.
1944
Jean Stafford.
The Interior Castle
FROM Partisan Review
PANSY VANNEMAN, injured in an automobile accident, often woke up
before dawn when the night noises of the hospital still came, in hushed
hurry, through her half-open door. By day, when the nurses talked
audibly with the internes, laughed without inhibition, and took no
pains to soften their footsteps on the resounding composition floors,
the routine of the hospital seemed as bland and commonplace as that of
a bank or a factory. But in the dark hours, the whispering and the
quickly stilled clatter of glasses and basins, the moans of patients whose
morphine was wearing off, the soft squeak of a stretcher as it rolled past
in its way from the emergency ward — these suggested agony and
death. Thus, on the first morning, Pansy had faltered to consciousness
long before daylight and had found herself in a ward from every bed of
which, it seemed to her, came the bewildered protest of someone about
to die. A caged light burned on the floor beside the bed next to hers. Her
neighbor was dying and a priest was administering Extreme Unction.
He was stout and elderly and he suffered from asthma so that the
struggle of his breathing, so close to her, was the basic pattern and all
the other sounds were superimposed upon it. Two middle-aged men in
overcoats knelt on the floor beside the high bed. In a foreign tongue, the
half-gone woman babbled against the hissing and sighing of the Latin
prayers. She played with her rosary as if it were a toy: she tried, and
failed, to put it into her mouth.
Pansy felt horror, but she felt no pity. An hour or so later, when the
white ceiling lights were turned on and everything — faces, counterpanes, and the hands that groped upon them — was transformed into
a uniform gray sordor, the woman was wheeled away in her bed to die
somewhere else, in privacy. Pansy did not quite take this in, although
The Interior Castle
251
she stared for a long time at the new, empty bed that had replaced the
other.
The next morning, when she again woke up before the light, this time
in a private room, she recalled the woman with such sorrow that she
might have been a friend. Simultaneously, she mourned the driver of
the taxicab in which she had been injured, for he had died at about
noon the day before. She had been told this as she lay on a stretcher in
the corridor, waiting to be taken to the x-ray room; an interne, passing
by, had paused and smiled down at her and had said, "Your cab-driver
is dead. You were lucky."
Six weeks after the accident, she woke one morning just as daylight
was showing on the windows as a murky smear. It was a minute or two
before she realized why she was so reluctant to be awake, why her
uneasiness amounted almost to alarm. Then she remembered that her
nose was to be operated on today. She lay straight and motionless under
the seersucker counterpane. Her blood-red eyes in her darned face
stared through the window and saw a frozen river and leafless elm trees
and a grizzled esplanade where dogs danced on the ends of leashes,
their bundled-up owners stumbling after them, half blind with sleepiness and cold. Warm as the hospital room was, it did not prevent Pansy
from knowing, as keenly as though she were one of the walkers, how
very cold it was outside. Each twig of a nearby tree was stark. Cold red
brick buildings nudged the low-lying sky which was pale and inert like
a punctured sac.
In six weeks, the scene had varied little: there was promise in the skies
neither of sun nor of snow; no red sunsets marked these days. The trees
could neither die nor leaf out again. Pansy could not remember another
season in her life so constant, when the very minutes themselves were
suffused with the winter pallor as they dropped from the moon-faced
clock in the corridor. Likewise, her room accomplished no alterations
from day to day. On the glass-topped bureau stood two potted plants
telegraphed by faraway well-wishers. They did not fade, and if a leaf
turned brown and fell, it soon was replaced; so did the blossoms renew
themselves. The roots, like the skies and like the bare trees, seemed
zealously determined to maintain a status quo. The bedside table, covered every day with a clean white towel, though the one removed was
always immaculate, was furnished sparsely with a water glass, a bent
drinking tube, a sweating pitcher, and a stack of paper handkerchiefs.
There were a few letters in the drawer, a hairbrush, a pencil, and some
postal cards on which, from time to time, she wrote brief messages to
252
JEAN STAFFORD
relatives and friends: "Dr. Nash says that my reflexes are shipshape (sic)
and Dr. Rivers says the frontal fracture has all but healed and that the
occipital is coming along nicely. Dr. Nicholas, the nose doctor, promises
to operate as soon as Dr. Rivers gives him the go-ahead sign (sic)."
The bed itself was never rumpled. Once fretful and now convalescent,
Miss Vanneman might have been expected to toss or turn the pillows or
to unmoor the counterpane; but hour after hour and day after day she
lay at full length and would not even suffer the nurses to raise the
head-piece of the adjustable bed. So perfect and stubborn was her
body's immobility that it was as if the room and the landscape, mortified by the ice, were extensions of herself. Her resolute quiescence and
her disinclination to talk, the one seeming somehow to proceed from
the other, resembled, so the nurses said, a final coma. And they observed, in pitying indignation, that she might as well be dead for all the
interest she took in life. Amongst themselves they scolded her for what
they thought a moral weakness: an automobile accident, no matter how
serious, was not reason enough for anyone to give up the will to live or
to be happy. She had not — to come down bluntly to the facts — had
the decency to be grateful that it was the driver of the cab and not she
who had died. (And how dreadfully the man had died!) She was twentyfive years old and she came from a distant city. These were really the
only facts known about her. Evidently she had not been here long, for
she had no visitors, a lack which was at first sadly moving to the nurses
but which became to them a source of unreasonable annoyance: had
anyone the right to live so one-dimensionally? It was impossible to
laugh at her, for she said nothing absurd; her demands could not be
complained of because they did not exist; she could not be hated for a
sharp tongue nor for a supercilious one; she could not be admired for
bravery or for wit or for interest in her fellow creatures. She was
believed to be a frightful snob.
Pansy, for her part, took a secret and mischievous pleasure in the
bewilderment of her attendants and the more they courted her with
offers of magazines, cross-word puzzles, and a radio which she could
rent from the hospital, the farther she retired from them into herself
and into a world which she had created in her long hours here and
which no one could even penetrate nor imagine. Sometimes she did not
even answer the nurses' questions; as they rubbed her back with alcohol
and steadily discoursed, she was as remote from them as if she were
miles away. She did not think that she lived on a higher plane than that
of the nurses and the doctors but that she lived on a different one and
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that at this particular time — this time of exploration and habituation
— she had no extra strength to spend on making herself known to
them. All she had been before and all the memories she might have
brought out to disturb the monotony of, say, the morning bath, and all
that the past meant to the future when she would leave the hospital,
were of no present consequence to her. Not even in her thoughts did she
employ more than a minimum of memory. And when she did remember, it was in flat pictures, rigorously independent of one another: she
saw her thin, poetic mother who grew thinner and more poetic in her
canvas deck chair at Saranac reading Lalla Rookh. She saw herself in an
inappropriate pink hat drinking iced tea in a garden so oppressive with
the smell of phlox that the tea itself tasted of it. She recalled an afternoon in autumn in Vermont when she had heard three dogs' voices in
the north woods and she could tell, by the characteristic minor key
struck three times at intervals, like bells from several churches, that they
had treed something: the eastern sky was pink and the trees on the
horizon looked like some eccentric vascular system meticulously drawn
on colored paper.
What Pansy thought of all the time was her own brain. Not only the
brain as the seat of consciousness, but the physical organ itself which
she envisaged, romantically, now as a jewel, now as a flower, now as a
light in a glass, now as an envelope of rosy vellum containing other
envelopes, one within the other, diminishing infinitely. It was always
pink and always fragile, always deeply interior and invaluable. She
believed that she had reached the innermost chamber of knowledge and
that perhaps her knowledge was the same as the saint's achievement of
pure love. It was only convention, she thought, that made one say
"sacred heart" and not "sacred brain."
Often, but never articulately, the color pink troubled her and the
picture of herself in the wrong hat hung steadfastly before her mind's
eye. None of the other girls had worn hats and since autumn had come
early that year, they were dressed in green and rusty brown and dark
yellow. Poor Pansy wore a white eyelet frock with a lacing of black
ribbon around the square neck. When she came through the arch,
overhung with bittersweet, and saw that they had not yet heard her, she
almost turned back, but Mr. Oliver was there and she was in love with
him. She was in love with him though he was ten years older than she
and had never shown any interest in her beyond asking her once, quite
fatuously but in an intimate voice, if the yodeling of the little boy who
peddled clams did not make her wish to visit Switzerland. Actually,
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there was more to this question than met the eye, for some days later
Pansy learned that Mr. Oliver, who was immensely rich, kept an apartment in Geneva. In the garden that day, he spoke to her only once. He
said, "My dear, you look exactly like something out of Katherine Mansfield," and immediately turned and within her hearing asked Beatrice
Sherburne to dine with him that night at the Country Club. Afterward,
Pansy went down to the sea and threw the beautiful hat onto the full
tide and saw it vanish in the wake of a trawler. Thereafter, when she
heard the clam boy coming down the road, she locked the door and
when the knocking had stopped and her mother called down from her
chaise longue, "Who was it, dearie?" she replied, "A salesman."
It was only the fact that the hat had been pink that worried her. The
rest of the memory was trivial, for she knew that she could never again
love anything as ecstatically as she loved the spirit of Pansy Vanneman,
enclosed within her head.
But her study was not without distraction, and she fought two adversaries: pain and Dr. Nicholas. Against Dr. Nicholas, she defended herself
valorously and in fear; but pain, the pain, that is, that was independent
of his instruments, she sometimes forced upon herself adventurously
like a child scaring himself in a graveyard.
Dr. Nicholas greatly admired her crushed and splintered nose which
he daily probed and peered at, exclaiming that he had never seen
anything like it. His shapely hands ached for their knives; he was impatient with the skull-fracture man's cautious delay. He spoke of "our"
nose and said "we" would be a new person when we could breathe
again. His own nose, the trademark of his profession, was magnificent.
Not even his own brilliant surgery could have improved upon it nor
could a first-rate sculptor have duplicated its direct downward line
which permitted only the least curvature inward toward the end; nor
the delicately rounded lateral declivities; nor the thin-walled, perfectly
matched nostrils. Miss Vanneman did not doubt his humaneness nor
his talent — he was a celebrated man — but she questioned whether he
had imagination. Immediately beyond the prongs of his speculum lay
her treasure whose price he, no more than the nurses, could estimate.
She believed he could not destroy it, but she feared that he might maim
it: might leave a scratch on one of the brilliant facets of the jewel, bruise
a petal of the flower, smudge the glass where the light burned, blot the
envelopes, and that then she would die or would go mad. While she did
not question that in either eventuality her brain would after a time
redeem its original impeccability, she did not quite yet wish to enter
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upon either kind of eternity, for she was not certain that she could carry
with her her knowledge as well as its receptacle.
Blunderer that he was, Dr. Nicholas was an honorable enemy, not like
the demon, pain, which skulked in a thousand guises within her head,
and which often she recklessly willed to attack her and then drove back
in terror. After the rout, sweat streamed from her face and soaked the
neck of the coarse hospital shirt. To be sure, it came usually of its own
accord, running like a wild fire through all the convolutions to fill with
flame the small sockets and ravines and then, at last, to withdraw,
leaving behind a throbbing and an echo. On these occasions, she was as
helpless as a tree in a wind. But at the other times when, by closing her
eyes and rolling up the eyeballs in such a way that she fancied she
looked directly on the place where her brain was, the pain woke sluggishly and came toward her at a snail's pace. Then, bit by bit, it gained
speed. Sometimes it faltered back, subsided altogether, and then it
rushed like a tidal wave driven by a hurricane, lashing and roaring until
she lifted her hands from the counterpane, crushed her broken teeth
into her swollen lip, stared in panic at the soothing walls with her ruby
eyes, stretched out her legs until she felt their bones must snap. Each
cove, each narrow inlet, every living bay was flooded and the frail brain,
a little hat-shaped boat, was washed from its mooring and set adrift.
The skull was as vast as the world and the brain was as small as a
seashell.
Then came calm weather and the safe journey home. She kept vigil
for a while, though, and did not close her eyes, but gazing pacifically at
the trees, conceived of the pain as the guardian of her treasure who
would not let her see it; that was why she was handled so savagely
whenever she turned her eyes inward. Once this watch was interrupted:
by chance she looked into the corridor and saw a shaggy mop slink past
the door, followed by a senile porter. A pair of ancient eyes, as rheumy
as an old dog's, stared uncritically in at her and the toothless mouth
formed a brutish word. She was so surprised that she immediately
closed her eyes to shut out the shape of the word and the pain dug up
the unmapped regions of her head with mattocks, ludicrously huge. It
was the familiar pain, but this time, even as she endured it, she observed
with detachment that its effect upon her was less than that of its contents, the by-products, for example, of temporal confusion and the bizarre misapplication of the style of one sensation to another. At the
moment, for example, although her brain reiterated to her that it was
being assailed, she was stroking her right wrist with her left hand as
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though to assuage the ache, long since dispelled, of the sprain in the
joint. Some minutes after she had opened her eyes and left off soothing
her wrist, she lay rigid experiencing the sequel to the pain, an ideal
terror. For, as before on several occasions, she was overwhelmed with
the knowledge that the pain had been consummated in the vessel of her
mind and for the moment the vessel was unbeautifiil: she thought,
quailing, of those plastic folds as palpable as the fingers of locked hands
containing in their very cells, their fissures, their repulsive hemispheres,
the mind, the soul, the inscrutable intelligence.
The porter, then, like the pink hat and like her mother and the
hounds' voices, loitered with her.
Dr. Nicholas came at nine o'clock to prepare her for the operation. With
him came an entourage of white-frocked acolytes, and one of them
wheeled in a wagon on which lay knives and scissors and pincers, cans
of swabs and gauze. In the midst of these was a bowl of liquid whose
rich purple color made it seem strange like the brew of an alchemist.
"All set?" he asked her, smiling. "A little nervous, what? I don't blame
you. I've often said I'd rather lose an arm than have a submucuous
resection." Pansy thought for a moment he was going to touch his nose.
His approach to her was roundabout. He moved through the yellow
light shed by the globe in the ceiling which gave his forehead a liquid
gloss; he paused by the bureau and touched a blossom of the cyclamen;
he looked out the window and said, to no one and to all, "I couldn't
start my car this morning. Came in a cab." Then he came forward. As he
came, he removed a speculum from the pocket of his short-sleeved coat
and like a cat, inquiring of the nature of a surface with its paws, he put
out his hand toward her and drew it back, gently murmuring, "You
must not be afraid, my dear. There is no danger, you know. Do you
think for a minute I would operate if there were?"
Dr. Nicholas, young, brilliant, and handsome, was an aristocrat, a
husband, a father, a clubman, a Christian, a kind counselor, and a
trustee of his school alumni association. Like many of the medical
profession, even those whose speciality was centered on the organ of the
basest sense, he interested himself in the psychology of his patients: in
several instances, for example, he had found that severe attacks of
sinusitis were coincident with emotional crises. Miss Vanneman more
than ordinarily captured his fancy since her skull had been fractured
and her behavior throughout had been so extraordinary that he felt he
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was observing at first hand some of the results of shock, that incommensurable element, which frequently were too subtle to see. There
was, for example, the matter of her complete passivity during a lumbar
puncture, reports of which were written down in her history and were
enlarged upon for him by Dr. Rivers' interne who had been in charge.
Except for a tremor in her throat and a deepening of pallor, there were
no signs at all that she was aware of what was happening to her. She
made no sound, did not close her eyes nor clench her fists. She had had
several punctures; her only reaction had been to the very first one, the
morning after she had been brought in. When the interne explained to
her that he was going to drain off cerebrospinal fluid which was pressing against her brain, she exclaimed, "My God!" but it was not an
exclamation of fear. The young man had been unable to name what it
was he had heard in her voice; he could only say that it had not been
fear as he had observed it in other patients.
He wondered about her. There was no way of guessing whether she
had always had a nature of so tolerant and undemanding a complexion.
It gave him a melancholy pleasure to think that before her accident she
had been high-spirited and loquacious; he was moved to think that
perhaps she had been a beauty and that when she had first seen her face
in the looking glass she had lost all joy in herself. It was very difficult
to tell what the face had been, for it was so bruised and swollen, so
hacked-up and lopsided. The black stitches and length of the nose,
across the saddle, across the cheekbone, showed that there would be
unsightly scars. He had ventured once to give her the name of a plastic
surgeon but she had only replied with a vague, refusing smile. He had
hoisted a manly shoulder and said, "You're the doctor."
Much as he pondered, coming to no conclusions, about what went
on inside that pitiable skull, he was, of course, far more interested in the
nose, deranged so badly that it would require his topmost skill to restore
its functions to it. He would be obliged not only to make a submucuous
resection, a simple run-of-the-mill operation, but to remove the vomer,
always a delicate task but further complicated in this case by the proximity of the bone to the frontal fracture line which conceivably was not
entirely closed. If it were not and he operated too soon and if a cold
germ then found its way into the opening, his patient would be carried
off by meningitis in the twinkling of an eye. He wondered if she knew in
what potential danger she lay; he desired to assure her that he had
brought his craft to its nearest perfection and that she had nothing to
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fear of him, but feeling that she was perhaps both ignorant and unimaginative and that such consolation would create a fear rather than
dispel one, he held his tongue and came nearer to the bed.
Watching him, Pansy could already feel the prongs of his pliers
opening her nostrils for the insertion of his fine probers. The pain he
caused her with his instruments was of a different kind from that she
felt unaided: it was a naked, clean, and vivid pain which made her faint
and ill and made her wish to die. Once she had fainted as he ruthlessly
explored and after she was brought around, he continued until he had
finished his investigation. The memory of this outrage had afterwards
several times made her cry.
This morning she looked at him and listened to him with hatred.
Fixing her eyes upon the middle of his high, protuberant brow, she
imagined the clutter behind it and she despised its obtuse imperfection,
the reason's oblique comprehension of itself. In his bland unawareness,
this nobody, this nose-bigot, was about to play with fire and she wished
him ill.
He said, "I can't blame you. No, I expect you're not looking forward to our little party. But I expect you'll be glad to be able to breathe
again."
He stationed his lieutenants. The interne stood opposite him on the
left side of the bed. The surgical nurse wheeled the wagon within easy
reach of his hands and stood beside it. Another nurse stood at the foot
of the bed. A third drew the shades at the windows and attached the
blinding light which shone down on the patient hotly, and then she left
the room, softly closing the door. Pansy stared at the silver ribbon tied
in a great bow round the green crepe paper of one of the flower pots. It
made her realize for the first time that one of the days she had lain here
had been Christmas, but she had no time to consider this strange and
thrilling fact, for Dr. Nicholas was genially explaining his anaesthetic.
He would soak packs of gauze in the purple fluid, a cocaine solution,
and he would place them then in her nostrils, leaving them there for an
hour. He warned her that the packing would be disagreeable (he did not
say "painful") but that it would be well worth a few minutes of discomfort not to be in the least sick after the operation. He asked her if she
were ready and when she nodded her head, he adjusted the mirror on
his forehead and began.
At the first touch of his speculum, Pansy's fingers mechanically bent
to the palms of her hands and she stiffened. He said, "A pack, Miss
Kennedy," and Pansy closed her eyes. There was a rush of plunging pain
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as he drove the sodden gobbet of gauze high up into her nose and
something bitter burned in her throat so that she retched. The doctor
paused a moment and the surgical nurse wiped her mouth. He returned
to her with another pack, pushing it with his bodkin doggedly until it
lodged against the first. Stop! Stop! cried all her nerves, wailing along
the surface of her skin. The coats that covered them were torn off and
they shuddered like naked people screaming, Stop! Stop! But Dr. Nicholas did not hear. Time and again he came back with a fresh pack and did
not pause at all until one nostril was finished. She opened her eyes and
saw him wipe the sweat off his forehead and saw the dark interne
bending over her, fascinated. Miss Kennedy bathed her temples in ice
water and Dr. Nicholas said, "There. It won't be much longer. I'll tell
them to send you some coffee, though I'm afraid you won't be able to
taste it. Ever drink coffee with chicory in it? I have no use for it."
She snatched at his irrelevancy and, though she had never tasted
chicory, she said severely, "I love it."
Dr. Nicholas chuckled. "De gustibus. Ready? A pack, Miss Kennedy."
The second nostril was harder to pack since the other side was now
distended and the passage was anyhow much narrower, as narrow, he
had once remarked, as that in the nose of an infant. In such pain as
passed all language and even the farthest fetched analogies, she turned
her eyes inward thinking that under the obscuring cloak of the surgeon's pain, she could see her brain without the knowledge of its keeper.
But Dr. Nicholas and his aides would give her no peace. They surrounded her with their murmuring and their foot-shuffling and the
rustling of their starched uniforms, and her eyelids continually flew
back in embarrassment and mistrust. She was claimed entirely by this
present, meaningless pain and suddenly and sharply, she forgot what
she had meant to do. She was aware of nothing but her ascent to the
summit of something; what it was she did not know, whether it was a
tower or a peak or Jacob's ladder. Now she was an abstract word, now
she was a theorem of geometry, now she was a kite flying, a top spinning, a prism flashing, a kaleidoscope turning.
But none of the others in the room could see inside and when the
surgeon was finished, the nurse at the foot of the bed said, "Now you
must take a look in the mirror. It's simply too comical." And they all
laughed intimately like old, fast friends. She smiled politely and looked
at her reflection: over the gruesomely fattened snout, her scarlet eyes
stared in fixed reproach upon the upturned lips, gray with bruises. But
even in its smile of betrayal, the mouth itself was puzzled: it reminded
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her that something had been left behind, but she could not recall what
it was. She was hollowed out and was as dry as a white bone.
They strapped her ankles to the operating table and put leather nooses
round her wrists. Over her head was a mirror with a thousand facets in
which she saw a thousand travesties of her face. At her right side was the
table, shrouded in white, where lay the glittering blades of the many
knives, thrusting out fitful rays of light. All the cloth was frosty; everything was white or silver and as cold as snow. Dr. Nicholas, a tall
snowman with silver eyes and silver fingernails, came into the room
soundlessly for he walked on layers and layers of snow which deadened
his footsteps; behind him came the interne, a smaller snowman, less
impressively proportioned. At the foot of the table, a snow figure put
her frozen hands upon Pansy's helpless feet. The doctor plucked the
packs from the cold, numb nose. His laugh was like a cry on a bitter, still
night: "I will show you now," he called across the expanse of snow, "that
you can feel nothing." The pincers bit at nothing, snapped at the air and
cracked a nerveless icicle. Pansy called back and heard her own voice
echo: "I feel nothing."
Here the walls were gray, not tan. Suddenly the face of the nurse at
the foot of the table broke apart and Pansy first thought it was in grief.
But it was a smile and she said, "Did you enjoy your coffee?" Down the
gray corridors of the maze, the words rippled, ran like mice, birds, broken beads: Did you enjoy your coffee? your coffee? your coffee? Similarly once in another room that also had gray walls, the same voice had
said, "Shall I give her some whiskey?" She was overcome with gratitude that this young woman (how pretty she was with her white hair
and her white face against her china-blue eyes!) had been with her that
first night and was with her now.
In the great stillness of the winter, the operation began. The knives
carved snow. Pansy was happy. She had been given a hypodermic just
before they came to fetch her and she would have gone to sleep had she
not enjoyed so much this trickery of Dr. Nicholas' whom now she
tenderly loved.
There was a clock in the operating room and from time to time she
looked at it. An hour passed. The snowman's face was melting; drops of
water hung from his fine nose, but his silver eyes were as bright as
ever. Her love was returned, she knew: he loved her nose exactly as she
loved his knives. She looked at her face in the domed mirror and saw
how the blood had streaked her lily-white cheeks and had stained her
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shroud. She returned to the private song: Did you enjoy your coffee?
your coffee?
At the half-hour, a murmur, anguine and slumbrous, came to her and
only when she had repeated the words twice did they engrave their
meaning upon her. Dr. Nicholas said, "Stand back now, nurse. I'm at
this girl's brain and I don't want my elbow jogged." Instantly Pansy was
alive. Her strapped ankles arched angrily; her wrists strained against
their bracelets. She jerked her head and she felt the pain flare; she had
made the knife slip.
"Be still!" cried the surgeon. "Be quiet, please!"
He had made her remember what it was she had lost when he had
rammed his gauze into her nose; she bustled like a housewife to shut the
door. She thought, I must hurry before the robbers come. It would be
like the time Mother left the cellar door open and the robber came and
took, of all things, the terrarium.
Dr. Nicholas was whispering to her. He said, in the voice of a lover, "If
you can stand it five minutes more, I can perform the second operation
now and you won't have to go through this again. What do you say?"
She did not reply. It took her several seconds to remember why it
was her mother had set such store by the terrarium and then it came to
her that the bishop's widow had brought her an herb from Palestine to
put in it.
The interne said, "You don't want to have your nose packed again,
do you?"
The surgical nurse said, "She's a good patient, isn't she, sir?"
"Never had a better," replied Dr. Nicholas. "But don't call me 'sir.' You
must be a Canadian to call me 'sir.'"
The nurse at the foot of the bed said, "I'll order some more coffee
for you."
"How about it, Miss Vanneman?" said the doctor. "Shall I go ahead?"
She debated. Once she had finally fled the hospital and fled Dr.
Nicholas, nothing could compel her to come back. Still, she knew that
the time would come when she could no longer live in seclusion, she
must go into the world again and must be equipped to live in it; she
banally acknowledged that she must be able to breathe. And finally,
though the world to which she would return remained unreal, she gave
the surgeon her permission.
He had now to penetrate regions that were not anaesthetized and this
he told her frankly, but he said that there was no danger at all. He
apologized for the slip of the tongue he had made: in point of fact, he
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had not been near her brain, it was only a figure of speech. He began.
The knives ground and carved and curried and scoured the wounds
they made; the scissors clipped hard gristle and the scalpels chipped off
bone. It was as if a tangle of tiny nerves were being cut dexterously, one
by one; the pain writhed spirally and came to her who was a pink bird
and sat on the top of a cone. The pain was a pyramid made of a diamond; it was an intense light; it was the hottest fire, the coldest chill,
the highest peak, the fastest force, the furthest reach, the newest time.
It possessed nothing of her but its one infinitesimal scene: beyond the
screen as thin as gossamer, the brain trembled for its life, hearing
the knives hunting like wolves outside, sniffing and snapping. Mercy!
Mercy! cried the scalped nerves.
At last, miraculously, she turned her eyes inward tranquilly. Dr.
Nicholas had said, "The worst is over. I am going to work on the floor of
your nose," and at his signal she closed her eyes and this time and this
time alone, she saw her brain lying in a shell-pink satin case. It was a
pink pearl, no bigger than a needle's eye, but it was so beautiful and so
pure that its smallness made no difference. Anyhow, as she watched, it
grew. It grew larger and larger until it was an enormous bubble that
contained the surgeon and the whole room within its rosy luster. In a
long ago summer, she had often been absorbed by the spectacle of
flocks of yellow birds that visited a cedar tree and she remembered that
everything that summer had been some shade of yellow. One year of
childhood, her mother had frequently taken her to have tea with an
aged schoolmistress upon whose mantelpiece there was a herd of ivory
elephants; that had been the white year. There was a green spring when
early in April she had seen a grass snake on a boulder, but the very
summer that followed was violet, for vetch took her mother's garden.
She saw a swatch of blue tulle lying in a raffia basket on the front porch
of Uncle Marion's brown house. Never before had the world been pink,
whatever else it had been. Or had it been, one other time? She could not
be sure and she did not care. Of one thing she was certain: never had the
world enclosed her before and never had the quiet been so smooth.
For only a moment the busybodies left her to her ecstasy and then,
impatient and gossiping, they forced their way inside, slashed at her
resisting trance with questions and congratulations, with statements of
fact and jokes. "Later," she said to them dumbly. "Later on, perhaps. I
am busy now." But their voices would not go away. They touched her,
too, washing her face with cloths so cold they stung, stroking her wrists
with firm, antiseptic fingers. The surgeon, squeezing her arm with avun-
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cular pride, said, "Good girl," as if she were a bright dog that had retrieved a bone. Her silent mind abused him: "You are a thief," it said,
"you are a heartless vagabond and you should be put to death." But he
was leaving, adjusting his coat with an air of vainglory, and the interne,
abject with admiration, followed him from the operating room smiling
like a silly boy.
Shortly after they took her back to her room, the weather changed,
not for the better. Momentarily the sun emerged from its concealing
murk, but in a few minutes the snow came with a wind that promised a
blizzard. There was great pain, but since it could not serve her, she
rejected it and she lay as if in a hammock in a pause of bitterness. She
closed her eyes, shutting herself up within her treasureless head.
Flannery O’ Connor
A Good Man Is Hard To Find (1953)
The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her
only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the
Journal. "Now look here, Bailey," she said, "see here, read this," and she stood with one hand on her thin hip
and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. "Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose
from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just
you read it. I wouldn't take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn't answer
to my conscience if I did."
Bailey didn't look up from his reading so she wheeled around then and faced the children's mother, a young
woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around with a green
head-kerchief that had two points on the top like rabbit's ears. She was sitting on the sofa, feeding the baby
his apricots out of a jar. "The children have been to Florida before," the old lady said. "You all ought to take
them somewhere else for a change so they would see different parts of the world and be broad. They never
have been to east Tennessee."
The children's mother didn't seem to hear her but the eight-year-old boy, John Wesley, a stocky child with
glasses, said, "If you don't want to go to Florida, why dontcha stay at home?" He and the little girl, June Star,
were reading the funny papers on the floor.
"She wouldn't stay at home to be queen for a day," June Star said without raising her yellow head.
"Yes and what would you do if this fellow, The Misfit, caught you?" the grandmother asked.
"I'd smack his face," John Wesley said.
"She wouldn't stay at home for a million bucks," June Star said. "Afraid she'd miss something. She has to go
everywhere we go."
"All right, Miss," the grandmother said. "Just re- member that the next time you want me to curl your hair."
June Star said her hair was naturally curly.
The next morning the grandmother was the first one in the car, ready to go. She had her big black valise that
looked like the head of a hippopotamus in one corner, and underneath it she was hiding a basket with Pitty
Sing, the cat, in it. She didn't intend for the cat to be left alone in the house for three days because he would
miss her too much and she was afraid he might brush against one of her gas burners and accidentally
asphyxiate himself. Her son, Bailey, didn't like to arrive at a motel with a cat.
She sat in the middle of the back seat with John Wesley and June Star on either side of her. Bailey and the
children's mother and the baby sat in front and they left Atlanta at eight forty-five with the mileage on the car
at 55890. The grandmother wrote this down because she thought it would be interesting to say how many
miles they had been when they got back. It took them twenty minutes to reach the outskirts of the city.
The old lady settled herself comfortably, removing her white cotton gloves and putting them up with her
purse on the shelf in front of the back window. The children's mother still had on slacks and still had her
head tied up in a green kerchief, but the grandmother had on a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of
white violets on the brim and a navy blue dress with a small white dot in the print. Her collars and cuffs were
white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets
containing a sachet. In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once
that she was a lady.
She said she thought it was going to be a good day for driving, neither too hot nor too cold, and she
cautioned Bailey that the speed limit was fifty-five miles an hour and that the patrolmen hid themselves
behind billboards and small clumps of trees and sped out after you before you had a chance to slow down.
She pointed out interesting details of the scenery: Stone Mountain; the blue granite that in some places
came up to both sides of the highway; the brilliant red clay banks slightly streaked with purple; and the
various crops that made rows of green lace-work on the ground. The trees were full of silver-white sunlight
and the meanest of them sparkled. The children were reading comic magazines and their mother and gone
back to sleep.
"Let's go through Georgia fast so we won't have to look at it much," John Wesley said.
"If I were a little boy," said the grandmother, "I wouldn't talk about my native state that way. Tennessee has
the mountains and Georgia has the hills."
1
"Tennessee is just a hillbilly dumping ground," John Wesley said, "and Georgia is a lousy state too."
"You said it," June Star said.
"In my time," said the grandmother, folding her thin veined fingers, "children were more respectful of their
native states and their parents and everything else. People did right then. Oh look at the cute little
pickaninny!" she said and pointed to a Negro child standing in the door of a shack. "Wouldn't that make a
picture, now?" she asked and they all turned and looked at the little Negro out of the back window. He waved
"He didn't have any britches on," June Star said.
"He probably didn't have any," the grandmother explained. "Little riggers in the country don't have things like
we do. If I could paint, I'd paint that picture," she said.
The children exchanged comic books.
The grandmother offered to hold the baby and the children's mother passed him over the front seat to her.
She set him on her knee and bounced him and told him about the things they were passing. She rolled her
eyes and screwed up her mouth and stuck her leathery thin face into his smooth bland one. Occasionally he
gave her a faraway smile. They passed a large cotton field with five or fix graves fenced in the middle of it,
like a small island. "Look at the graveyard!" the grandmother said, pointing it out. "That was the old family
burying ground. That belonged to the plantation."
"Where's the plantation?" John Wesley asked.
"Gone With the Wind" said the grandmother. "Ha. Ha."
When the children finished all the comic books they had brought, they opened the lunch and ate it. The
grandmother ate a peanut butter sandwich and an olive and would not let the children throw the box and the
paper napkins out the window. When there was nothing else to do they played a game by choosing a cloud
and making the other two guess what shape it suggested. John Wesley took one the shape of a cow and
June Star guessed a cow and John Wesley said, no, an automobile, and June Star said he didn't play fair,
and they began to slap each other over the grandmother.
The grandmother said she would tell them a story if they would keep quiet. When she told a story, she rolled
her eyes and waved her head and was very dramatic. She said once when she was a maiden lady she had
been courted by a Mr. Edgar Atkins Teagarden from Jasper, Georgia. She said he was a very good-looking
man and a gentleman and that he brought her a watermelon every Saturday afternoon with his initials cut in
it, E. A. T. Well, one Saturday, she said, Mr. Teagarden brought the watermelon and there was nobody at
home and he left it on the front porch and returned in his buggy to Jasper, but she never got the watermelon,
she said, because a nigger boy ate it when he saw the initials, E. A. T. ! This story tickled John Wesley's
funny bone and he giggled and giggled but June Star didn't think it was any good. She said she wouldn't
marry a man that just brought her a watermelon on Saturday. The grandmother said she would have done
well to marry Mr. Teagarden because he was a gentle man and had bought Coca-Cola stock when it first
came out and that he had died only a few years ago, a very wealthy man.
They stopped at The Tower for barbecued sand- wiches. The Tower was a part stucco and part wood filling
station and dance hall set in a clearing outside of Timothy. A fat man named Red Sammy Butts ran it and
there were signs stuck here and there on the building and for miles up and down the highway saying, TRY
RED SAMMY'S FAMOUS BARBECUE. NONE LIKE FAMOUS RED SAMMY'S! RED SAM! THE FAT BOY
WITH THE HAPPY LAUGH. A VETERAN! RED SAMMY'S YOUR MAN!
Red Sammy was lying on the bare ground outside The Tower with his head under a truck while a gray
monkey about a foot high, chained to a small chinaberry tree, chattered nearby. The monkey sprang back
into the tree and got on the highest limb as soon as he saw the children jump out of the car and run toward
him.
Inside, The Tower was a long dark room with a counter at one end and tables at the other and dancing
space in the middle. They all sat down at a board table next to the nickelodeon and Red Sam's wife, a tall
burnt-brown woman with hair and eyes lighter than her skin, came and took their order. The children's
mother put a dime in the machine and played "The Tennessee Waltz," and the grandmother said that tune
always made her want to dance. She asked Bailey if he would like to dance but he only glared at her. He
didn't have a naturally sunny disposition like she did and trips made him nervous. The grandmother's brown
eyes were very bright. She swayed her head from side to side and pretended she was dancing in her chair.
June Star said play something she could tap to so the children's mother put in another dime and played a
fast number and June Star stepped out onto the dance floor and did her tap routine.
"Ain't she cute?" Red Sam's wife said, leaning over the counter. "Would you like to come be my little girl?"
2
"No I certainly wouldn't," June Star said. "I wouldn't live in a broken-down place like this for a million bucks!"
and she ran back to the table.
"Ain't she cute?" the woman repeated, stretching her mouth politely.
"Arn't you ashamed?" hissed the grandmother.
Red Sam came in and told his wife to quit lounging on the counter and hurry up with these people's order.
His khaki trousers reached just to his hip bones and his stomach hung over them like a sack of meal swaying
under his shirt. He came over and sat down at a table nearby and let out a combination sigh and yodel. "You
can't win," he said. "You can't win," and he wiped his sweating red face off with a gray handkerchief. "These
days you don't know who to trust," he said. "Ain't that the truth?"
"People are certainly not nice like they used to be," said the grandmother.
"Two fellers come in here last week," Red Sammy said, "driving a Chrysler. It was a old beat-up car but it
was a good one and these boys looked all right to me. Said they worked at the mill and you know I let them
fellers charge the gas they bought? Now why did I do that?"
"Because you're a good man!" the grandmother said at once.
"Yes'm, I suppose so," Red Sam said as if he were struck with this answer.
His wife brought the orders, carrying the five plates all at once without a tray, two in each hand and one
balanced on her arm. "It isn't a soul in this green world of God's that you can trust," she said. "And I don't
count nobody out of that, not nobody," she repeated, looking at Red Sammy.
"Did you read about that criminal, The Misfit, that's escaped?" asked the grandmother.
"I wouldn't be a bit surprised if he didn't attack this place right here," said the woman. "If he hears about it
being here, I wouldn't be none surprised to see him. If he hears it's two cent in the cash register, I wouldn't
be a tall surprised if he . . ."
"That'll do," Red Sam said. "Go bring these people their Co'-Colas," and the woman went off to get the rest
of the order.
"A good man is hard to find," Red Sammy said. "Everything is getting terrible. I remember the day you could
go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more."
He and the grandmother discussed better times. The old lady said that in her opinion Europe was entirely to
blame for the way things were now. She said the way Europe acted you would think we were made of money
and Red Sam said it was no use talking about it, she was exactly right. The children ran outside into the
white sunlight and looked at the monkey in the lacy chinaberry tree. He was busy catching fleas on himself
and biting each one carefully between his teeth as if it were a delicacy.
They drove off again into the hot afternoon. The grandmother took cat naps and woke up every few minutes
with her own snoring. Outside of Toombsboro she woke up and recalled an old plantation that she had
visited in this neighborhood once when she was a young lady. She said the house had six white columns
across the front and that there was an avenue of oaks leading up to it and two little wooden trellis arbors on
either side in front where you sat down with your suitor after a stroll in the garden. She recalled exactly which
road to turn off to get to it. She knew that Bailey would not be willing to lose any time looking at an old house,
but the more she talked about it, the more she wanted to see it once again and find out if the little twin arbors
were still standing. "There was a secret:-panel in this house," she said craftily, not telling the truth but
wishing that she were, "and the story went that all the family silver was hidden in it when Sherman came
through but it was never found . . ."
"Hey!" John Wesley said. "Let's go see it! We'll find it! We'll poke all the woodwork and find it! Who lives
there? Where do you turn off at? Hey Pop, can't we turn off there?"
"We never have seen a house with a secret panel!" June Star shrieked. "Let's go to the house with the secret
panel! Hey Pop, can't we go see the house with the secret panel!"
"It's not far from here, I know," the grandmother said. "It wouldn't take over twenty minutes."
Bailey was looking straight ahead. His jaw was as rigid as a horseshoe. "No," he said.
The children began to yell and scream that they wanted to see the house with the secret panel. John Wesley
kicked the back of the front seat and June Star hung over her mother's shoulder and whined desperately into
her ear that they never had any fun even on their vacation, that they could never do what THEY wanted to
do. The baby began to scream and John Wesley kicked the back of the seat so hard that his father could feel
the blows in his kidney.
3
"All right!" he shouted and drew the car to a stop at the side of the road. "Will you all shut up? Will you all just
shut up for one second? If you don't shut up, we won't go anywhere."
"It would be very educational for them," the grandmother murmured.
"All right," Bailey said, "but get this: this is the only time we're going to stop for anything like this. This is the
one and only time."
"The dirt road that you have to turn down is about a mile back," the grandmother directed. "I marked it when
we passed."
"A dirt road," Bailey groaned.
After they had turned around and were headed toward the dirt road, the grandmother recalled other points
about the house, the beautiful glass over the front doorway and the candle-lamp in the hall. John Wesley
said that the secret panel was probably in the fireplace.
"You can't go inside this house," Bailey said. "You don't know who lives there."
"While you all talk to the people in front, I'll run around behind and get in a window," John Wesley suggested.
"We'll all stay in the car," his mother said.
They turned onto the dirt road and the car raced roughly along in a swirl of pink dust. The grandmother
recalled the times when there were no paved roads and thirty miles was a day's journey. The dirt road was
hilly and there were sudden washes in it and sharp curves on dangerous embankments. All at once they
would be on a hill, looking down over the blue tops of trees for miles around, then the next minute, they
would be in a red depression with the dust-coated trees looking down on them.
"This place had better turn up in a minute," Bailey said, "or I'm going to turn around."
The road looked as if no one had traveled on it in months.
"It's not much farther," the grandmother said and just as she said it, a horrible thought came to her. The
thought was so embarrassing that she turned red in the face and her eyes dilated and her feet jumped up,
upsetting her valise in the corner. The instant the valise moved, the newspaper top she had over the basket
under it rose with a snarl and Pitty Sing, the cat, sprang onto Bailey's shoulder.
The children were thrown to the floor and their mother, clutching the baby, was thrown out the door onto the
ground; the old lady was thrown into the front seat. The car turned over once and landed right-side-up in a
gulch off the side of the road. Bailey remained in the driver's seat with the cat gray-striped with a broad white
face and an orange nose clinging to his neck like a caterpillar.
As soon as the children saw they could move their arms and legs, they scrambled out of the car, shouting,
"We've had an ACCIDENT!" The grandmother was curled up under the dashboard, hoping she was injured
so that Bailey's wrath would not come down on her all at once. The horrible thought she had had before the
accident was that the house she had remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee.
Bailey removed the cat from his neck with both hands and flung it out the window against the side of a pine
tree. Then he got out of the car and started looking for the children's mother. She was sitting against the side
of the red gutted ditch, holding the screaming baby, but she only had a cut down her face and a broken
shoulder. "We've had an ACCIDENT!" the children screamed in a frenzy of delight.
"But nobody's killed," June Star said with disappointment as the grandmother limped out of the car, her hat
still pinned to her head but the broken front brim standing up at a jaunty angle and the violet spray hanging
off the side. They all sat down in the ditch, except the children, to recover from the shock. They were all
shaking.
"Maybe a car will come along," said the children's mother hoarsely.
"I believe I have injured an organ," said the grandmother, pressing her side, but no one answered her.
Bailey's teeth were clattering. He had on a yellow sport shirt with bright blue parrots designed in it and his
face was as yellow as the shirt. The grandmother decided that she would not mention that the house was in
Tennessee.
The road was about ten feet above and they could see only the tops of the trees on the other side of it.
Behind the ditch they were sitting in there were more woods, tall and dark and deep. In a few minutes they
saw a car some distance away on top of a hill, coming slowly as if the occupants were watching them. The
grandmother stood up and waved both arms dramatically to attract their attention. The car continued to come
on slowly, disappeared around a bend and appeared again, moving even slower, on top of the hill they had
gone over. It was a big black battered hearselike automobile. There were three men in it.
4
It came to a stop just over them and for some minutes, the driver looked down with a steady expressionless
gaze to where they were sitting, and didn't speak. Then he turned his head and muttered something to the
other two and they got out. One was a fat boy in black trousers and a red sweat shirt with a silver stallion
embossed on the front of it. He moved around on the right side of them and stood staring, his mouth partly
open in a kind of loose grin. The other had on khaki pants and a blue striped coat and a gray hat pulled down
very low, hiding most of his face. He came around slowly on the left side. Neither spoke.
The driver got out of the car and stood by the side of it, looking down at them. He was an older man than the
other two. His hair was just beginning to gray and he wore silver-rimmed spectacles that gave him a
scholarly look. He had a long creased face and didn't have on any shirt or undershirt. He had on blue jeans
that were too tight for him and was holding a black hat and a gun. The two boys also had guns.
"We've had an ACCIDENT!" the children screamed.
The grandmother had the peculiar feeling that the bespectacled man was someone she knew. His face was
as familiar to her as if she had known him all her life but she could not recall who he was. He moved away
from the car and began to come down the embankment, placing his feet carefully so that he wouldn't slip. He
had on tan and white shoes and no socks, and his ankles were red and thin. "Good afternoon," he said. "I
see you all had you a little spill."
"We turned over twice!" said the grandmother.
"Once", he corrected. "We seen it happen. Try their car and see will it run, Hiram," he said quietly to the boy
with the gray hat.
"What you got that gun for?" John Wesley asked. "Whatcha gonna do with that gun?"
"Lady," the man said to the children's mother, "would you mind calling them children to sit down by you?
Children make me nervous. I want all you all to sit down right together there where you're at."
"What are you telling US what to do for?" June Star asked.
Behind them the line of woods gaped like a dark open mouth. "Come here," said their mother.
"Look here now," Bailey began suddenly, "we're in a predicament! We're in . . ."
The grandmother shrieked. She scrambled to her feet and stood staring. "You're The Misfit!" she said. "I
recognized you at once!"
"Yes'm," the man said, smiling slightly as if he were pleased in spite of himself to be known, "but it would
have been better for all of you, lady, if you hadn't of reckernized me."
Bailey turned his head sharply and said something to his mother that shocked even the children. The old
lady began to cry and The Misfit reddened.
"Lady," he said, "don't you get upset. Sometimes a man says things he don't mean. I don't reckon he meant
to talk to you thataway."
"You wouldn't shoot a lady, would you?" the grandmother said and removed a clean handkerchief from her
cuff and began to slap at her eyes with it.
The Misfit pointed the toe of his shoe into the ground and made a little hole and then covered it up again. "I
would hate to have to," he said.
"Listen," the grandmother almost screamed, "I know you're a good man. You don't look a bit like you have
common blood. I know you must come from nice people!"
"Yes mam," he said, "finest people in the world." When he smiled he showed a row of strong white teeth.
"God never made a finer woman than my mother and my daddy's heart was pure gold," he said. The boy
with the red sweat shirt had come around behind them and was standing with his gun at his hip. The Misfit
squatted down on the ground. "Watch them children, Bobby Lee," he said. "You know they make me
nervous." He looked at the six of them huddled together in front of him and he seemed to be embarrassed as
if he couldn't think of anything to say. "Ain't a cloud in the sky," he remarked, looking up at it. "Don't see no
sun but don't see no cloud neither."
"Yes, it's a beautiful day," said the grandmother. "Listen," she said, "you shouldn't call yourself The Misfit
because I know you're a good man at heart. I can just look at you and tell."
"Hush!" Bailey yelled. "Hush! Everybody shut up and let me handle this!" He was squatting in the position of
a runner about to sprint forward but he didn't move.
"I pre-chate that, lady," The Misfit said and drew a little circle in the ground with the butt of his gun.
5
"It'll take a half a hour to fix this here car," Hiram called, looking over the raised hood of it.
"Well, first you and Bobby Lee get him and that little boy to step over yonder with you," The Misfit said,
pointing to Bailey and John Wesley. "The boys want to ast you something," he said to Bailey. "Would you
mind stepping back in them woods there with them?"
"Listen," Bailey began, "we're in a terrible predicament! Nobody realizes what this is," and his voice cracked.
His eyes were as blue and intense as the parrots in his shirt and he remained perfectly still.
The grandmother reached up to adjust her hat brim as if she were going to the woods with him but it came
off in her hand. She stood staring at it and after a second she let it fall on the ground. Hiram pulled Bailey up
by the arm as if he were assisting an old man. John Wesley caught hold of his father's hand and Bobby I,ee
followed. They went off toward the woods and just as they reached the dark edge, Bailey turned and
supporting himself against a gray naked pine trunk, he shouted, "I'll be back in a minute, Mamma, wait on
me!"
"Come back this instant!" his mother shrilled but they all disappeared into the woods.
"Bailey Boy!" the grandmot
6
292
Tillie Olsm
I Stand Here Ironing
Tillie Olsen (/9/3- )
See page 159 for a biographical note on the author.
I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth
with the iron.
"1 wish you would manage the time to come in and talk with me about your
daughter. I'm sure you can help me understand her. She's a youngster who needs
help and whom I'm deeply interested in helping."
"Who needs help:' ... Even if I came, what good would it do? You think be­
cause 1 am her mother I have a key, or that in some way you could use me as a
key? She has lived for nineteen years. There is all that life that has happened out­
side of me, beyond me.
And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total? I
will start and there will be an interruption and I will have to gather it all together
again. Or I will become engulfed with all I did or did not do, with what should
have been and what cannot be helped.
She was a beautiful baby. The first and only one of our five that was beauti­
ful at birth. You do not guess how new and uneasy her tenancy in her
now-loveliness. You did not know her all those years she was thought homely, or
see her poring over her baby pictures, making me tell her over and over how
beautiful she had been-and would be, I would tell her-and was now, to the
seeing eye. But the seeing eyes were few or nonexistent. Including mine.
I nursed her. They feel that's important nowadays. I nursed all the children,
but with her, with all the fierce rigidity of first motherhood, I did like the books
then said. Though her cries battered me to trembling and my breasts ached with
swollenness, I waited till the clock decreed.
Why do I put that first? I do not even know if it matters, or if it explains any­
thing.
She was a beautiful baby. She blew shining bubbles of sound. She loved mo­
tion, loved light, loved color and music and textures. She would lie on the floor
in her blue overalls patting the surface so hard in ecstasy her hands and feet
would blur. She was a miracle to me, but when she was eight months old I had to
leave her daytimes with the woman downstairs to whom she was no miracle at
all, for I worked or looked for work and for Emily's father, who "could no longer
endure" (he wrote in his good-bye note) "sharing want with us."
I Stand Here Ironing
293
1 was nineteen. It was the pre-relief, pre-WPAl world of the depression. I
would start running as soon as 1 got off the streetcar, running up the stairs, the
place smelling sour, and awake or asleep to startle awake, when she saw me she
would break into a dogged weeping that could not be comforted, a weeping I
can hear yet.
After a while I found a job hashing at night so I could be with her days, and
it was better. But it came to where I had to bring her to his family and leave her.
It took a long time to raise the money for her fare back. Then she got
chicken pox and I had to wait longer. When she finally came, 1hardly knew her,
walking quick and nervous like her father, looking like her father, thin, and
dressed in a shoddy red that yellowed her skin and glared at the pockmarks. All
the baby loveliness gone.
She was two. Old enough for nursery school they said, and 1 did not know
then what I know now-the fatigue of the long day, and the lacerations of group
life in the kinds of nurseries that are only parking places for children.
Except that it would have made no difference if 1had known. It was the only
place there was. It was the only way we could be together, the only way 1 could
hold a job.
And even without knowing, 1knew. 1knew the teacher that was evil because
all these years it has curdled into my memory, the little boy hunched in the cor­
ner, her rasp, "why aren't you outside, because Alvin hits you? that's no reason,
go out, scaredy." 1 knew Emily hated it even if she did not dutch and implore
"don't go Mommy" like the other children, mornings.
She always had a reason why we should stay home. Momma, you look sick.
Momma, I feel sick. Momma, the teachers aren't here today, they're sick.
Momma, we can't go, there was a fire there last night. Momma, it's a holiday to­
day, no school, they told me.
But never a direct protest, never rebellion. 1 think of our others in their
three-, four-year-oldness--the explosions, tempers, the denunciations, the de­
mands--and I feel suddenly ill. 1put the iron down. What in me demanded that
goodness in her? And what was the cost, the cost to her of such goodness?
The old man living in the back once said in his gentle way: "You should
smile at Emily more when you look at her." What was in my face when 1looked
at her? I loved her. There were all the acts of love.
It was only with the others I remembered what he said, and it was the face of
joy, and not of care or tightness or worry I turned to them-too late for Emily.
She does not smile easily, let alone almost always as her brothers and sisters do.
Her face is closed and sombre, but when she wants, how fluid. You must have
'Works Prog~ss Administration. This government program provided work to many unemployed
people during the Depression.
294
Tillie Olsen
seen it in her pantomimes. you spoke of her rare gift for comedy on the stage
that rouses laughter out of the audience so dear they applaud and applaud and
do not want to let her go.
Where does it come from, that comedy? There was none of it in her when
she came back to me that second time, after I had to send her away again. She
had a new daddy now to learn to love, and I think perhaps it was a better time.
Except when we left her alone nights. telling ourselves she was old enough.
"Can't you go some other time, Mommy. like tomorrow?" she would ask.
"Will it be just a little while you'll be gone? Do you promise?"
The time we came back, the front door open, the clock on the floor in the
hall. She rigid awake. "It wasn't just a little while. I didn't cry. Three times I called
you, just three times, and then I ran downstairs to open the door so you could
come faster. The clock talked loud. I threw it away, it scared me what it talked."
She said the clock talked loud again that night I went to the hospital to have
Susan. She was delirious with the fever that comes before red measles, but she
was fully conscious all the week I was gone and the week after we were home
when she could not come near the new baby or me.
She did not get welL She stayed skeleton thin, not wanting to eat, and night
after night she had nightmares. She would call for me, and I would rouse from
exhaustion to sleepily call back: "You're all right, darling, go to sleep, it's just a
dream," and if she still called, in a sterner voice, "now to go sleep, Emily, there's
nothing to hurt you." Twice, only twice, when I had to get up for Susan anyhow,
I went in to sit with her.
Now when it is too late (as if she would let me hold and comfort her like I
do the others) I get up and go to her at once at her moan or restless stirring. "Me
you awake, Emily? Can I get you something?" And the answer is always the same:
"No, I'm all right, go back to sleep, Mother."
They persuaded me at the clinic to send her away to a convalescent home in
the country where "she can have the kind of food and care you can't manage for
her, and you'll be free to concentrate on the new baby." They still send children
to that place. I see pictures on the society page of sleek young women planning
affairs to raise money for it, or dancing at the affairs, or decorating Easter eggs or
filling Christmas stockings for the children.
They never have a picture of the children so I do not know if the girls still
wear those gigantic red bows and the ravaged looks on the every other Sunday
when parents can come to visit "unless otherwise notified"-as we were notified
the first six weeks.
Oh it is a handsome place, green lawns and tall trees and fluted flower beds.
High up on the balconies of each cottage the children stand, the girls in their red
bows and white dresses, the boys in white suits and giant red ties. The parents
stand below shrieking up to be heard and the children shriek down to be heard,
and between them the invisible wall "Not To Be Contaminated by Parental
Germs or Physical Affection."
I Stand Here Ironing
295
There was a tiny girl who always stood hand in hand with Emily. Her par­
ents never came. One visit she was gone. "They moved her to Rose Cottage"
Emily shouted in explanation. "They don't like you to love anybody here."
She wrote once a week, the labored writing of a seven-year-old. "I am fine.
How is the baby. If I write my letter nicely I will have a star. Love." There never
was a star. We wrote every other day, letters she could never hold or keep but
only hear read~nce. "We simply do not have room for children to keep any
personal possessions," they patiently explained when we pieced one Sunday's
shrieking together to plead how much it would mean to Emily, who loved so to
keep things, to be allowed to keep her letters and cards.
Each visit she looked frailer. "She isn't eating;' they told us.
(They had runny eggs for breakfast or mush with lumps, Emily said later, I'd
hold it in my mouth and not swallow. Nothing ever tasted good, just when they
had chicken.)
It took us eight months to get her released home, and only the fact that she
gained back so little of her seven lost pounds convinced the social worker.
I used to try to hold and love her after she came back, but her body would
stay stiff, and after a while she'd push away. She ate little. Food sickened her, and
I think much of life too. Oh she had physical lightness and brightness, twinkling
by on skates, bouncing like a ball up and down up and down over the jump rope,
skimming over the hill; but these were momentary.
She fretted about her appearance, thin and dark and foreign-looking at a
time when every little girl was supposed to look or thought she should look a
chubby blonde replica of Shirley Temple. The doorbell sometimes rang for her,
but no one seemed to come and play in the house or be a best friend. Maybe be­
cause we moved so much.
There was a boy she loved painfully through two school semesters. Months
later she told me how she had taken pennies from my purse to buy him candy.
"Licorice was his favorite and I brought him some every day, but he still liked
Jennifer better'n me. Why, Mommy?" The kind of question for which there is no
answer.
School was a worry to her. She was not glib or quick in a world where glib­
ness and quickness were easily confused with ability to learn. To her overworked
and exasperated teachers she was an overconscientious "slow learner" who kept
trying to catch up and was absent entirely too often.
I let her be absent, though sometimes the illness was imaginary. How differ­
ent from my now-strictness about attendance with the others. I wasn't working.
We had a new baby, I was home anyhow. Sometimes, after Susan grew old
enough, I would keep her home from school, too, to have them all together.
Mostly Emily had asthma, and her breathing, harsh and labored, would fill
the house with a curiously tranquil sound. I would bring the two old dresser
mirrors and her boxes of collections to her bed. She would select beads and sin­
gle earrings, bottle tops and shells, dried flowers and pebbles, old postcards and
,.,
296
Tillie Olsen
scraps, all sorts of oddments; then she and Susan would play Kingdom, setting
up landscapes and furniture, peopling them with action.
Those were the only times of peaceful companionship between her and Su­
san. I have edged away from it, that poisonous feeling between them, that terri­
ble balancing of hurts and needs I had to do between the two, and did so badly,
those earlier years.
Oh there are conflicts between the others too, each one human, needing, de­
manding, hurting, taking-but only between Emily and Susan, no, Emily to­
ward Susan that corroding resentment. It seems so obvious on the surface, yet it
is not obvious. Susan, the second child, Susan, golden- and curly-haired and
chubby, quick and articulate and assured, everything in appearance and manner
Emily was not; Susan, not able to resist Emily's precious things, losing or some­
times clumsily breaking them; Susan telling jokes and riddles to company for
applause while Emily sat silent (to say to me later: that was my riddle, Mother, I
told it to Susan); Susan, who for all the five years' difference in age was just a year
behind Emily in developing physically.
I am glad for that slow physical development that widened the difference
between her and her contemporaries, though she suffered over it. She was too
vulnerable for that terrible world of youthful competition, of preening and
parading, of constant measuring of yourself against every other, of envy, "If I
had that copper hair," "If I had that skin...." She tormented herself enough
about not looking like the others, there was enough of the unsureness, the hav­
ing to be conscious of words before you speak, the constant caring-what are
they thinking of me? without having it all magnified by the merciless physical
drives.
Ronnie is calling. He is wet and I change him. It is rare there is such a cry
now. That time of motherhood is almost behind me when the ear is not one's
own but must always be racked and listening for the child cry, the child call. We
sit for a while and I hold him, looking out over the city spread in charcoal with
its soft aisles of light. "Shoogily," he breathes and curls closer. I carry him back to
bed, asleep. Shoogily. A funny word, a family word, inherited from Emily, in­
vented by her to say: comfort.
In this and other ways she leaves her seal, I say aloud. And startle at my say­
ing it. What do I mean? What did I start to gather together, to try and make co­
herent? I was at the terrible, growing years. War years. I do not remember them
well. I was working. there were four smaller ones now, there was not time for her.
She had to help be a mother, and housekeeper, and shopper. She had to set her
seal. Mornings of crisis and near hysteria trying to get lunches packed, hair
combed, coats and shoes found, everyone to school or Child Care on time, the
baby ready for transportation. And always the paper scribbled on by a smaller
one, the book looked at by Susan then mislaid, the homework not done. Run­
ning out to that huge school where she was one, she was lost, she was a drop; suf­
fering over the unpreparedness, stammering and unsure in her classes.
1Stand Here Ironing
297
There was so little time left at night after the kids were bedded down. She
would struggle over books, ,always eating (it was in those years she developed her
enormous appetite that Is legendary in our family) and I would be ironing, or
preparing food for the next day, or writing V-mail to Bill, or tending the baby.
Sometimes, to make me laugh, or out of her despair, she would imitate happen.
ings or types at school.
I think I said once: "Why don't you do something like this in the school am­
ateur show?" One morning she phoned me at work, hardly understandable
through the weeping: "Mother, I did it. I won, I won; they gave me first prize;
they clapped and clapped and wouldn't let me go."
Now suddenly she was Somebody, and as imprisoned in her difference as
she had been in anonymity.
She began to be asked to perform at other high schools, even in colleges,
then at city and statewide affairs. The first one we went to, I only recognized her
that first moment when thin, shy, she almost drowned herself into the curtains.
Then: Was this Emily? The control, the command, the convulsing and deadly
clowning, the spell. then the roaring, stamping audience, unwilling to let this
rare and precious laughter out of their lives.
Afterwards: You ought to do something about her with a gift like that-but
without money or knowing how, what does one do? We have left it all to her,
and the gift has as often eddied inside, clogged and clotted, as been used and
growing.
She is coming. She runs up the stairs two at a time with her light graceful
step, and I know she is happy toriight. Whatever it was that occasioned your call
did not happen today.
"Aren't you ever going to fInish the ironing, Mother? Whistler painted his
mother in a rocker. I'd have to paint mine standing over an ironing board." This
is one of her communicative nights and she tells me everything and nothing as
she fixes herself a plate of food out of the icebox.
She is so lovely. Why did you want me to come in at all? Why were you con­
cerned? She will find her way.
She starts up the stairs to bed. "Don't get me up with the rest in the morn­
ing.""But I thought you were having midterms." "Oh, those," she comes back in,
kisses me, and says quite lightly, "in a couple of years when we'll all be atom­
dead they won't matter a bit."
She has said it before. She believes it. But because I have been dredging the
past, and all that compounds a human being is so heavy and meaningful in me, I
cannot endure it tonight.
I will never total it all. I will never come in to say: She was a child seldom
smiled at. Her father left me before she was a year old. I had to work her first six
years when there was work, or I sent her home and to his relatives. There were
years she had care she hated. She was dark and thin and foreign-looking in a
world where the prestige went to blondeness and curly hair and dimples, she was
296
Tillie Olsen
scraps, all sorts of oddments; then she and Susan would play Kingdom, setting
up landscapes and furniture, peopling them with action.
Those were the only times of peaceful companionship between her and Su­
san. I have edged away from it, that poisonous feeling between them, that terri­
ble balancing of hurts and needs I had to do between the two, and did so badly,
those earlier years.
Oh there are conflicts between the others too, each one human, needing, de­
manding, hurting, taking-but only between Emily and Susan, no, Emily to­
ward Susan that corroding resentment. It seems so obvious on the surface, yet it
is not obvious. Susan, the second child, Susan, golden- and curly-haired and
chubby, quick and articulate and assured, everything in appearance and manner
Emily was not; Susan, not able to resist Emily's precious things, losing or some­
times clumsily breaking them; Susan telling jokes and riddles to company for
applause while Emily sat silent (to say to me later: that was my riddle, Mother, I
told it to Susan); Susan. who for all the five years' difference in age was just a year
behind Emily in developing physically.
I am glad for that slow physical development that widened the difference
between her and her contemporaries, though she suffered over it. She was too
vulnerable for that terrible world of youthful competition, of preening and
parading, of constant measuring of yourself against every other, of envy. "If I
had that copper hair:' "If I had that skin...." She tormented herself enough
about not looking like the others, there was enough of the unsureness, the hav­
ing to be conscious of words before you speak, the constant caring-what are
they thinking of me? without having it all magnified by the merciless physical
drives.
Ronnie is calling. He is wet and I change him. It is rare there is such a cry
now. That time of motherhood is almost behind me when the ear is not one's
own but must always be racked and listening for the child cry, the child call. We
sit for a while and I hold him. looking out over the city spread in charcoal with
its soft aisles of light. "Shoogily:' he breathes and curls closer. I carry him back to
bed, asleep. Shoogily. A funny word, a family word, inherited from Emily, in­
vented by her to say: comfort.
In this and other ways she leaves her seal, I say aloud. And startle at my say­
ing it. What do I mean? What did I start to gather together, to try and make co­
herent? I was at the terrible, growing years. War years. I do not remember them
well. I was working, there were four smaller ones now, there was not time for her.
She had to help be a mother, and housekeeper, and shopper. She had to set her
seal. Mornings of crisis and near hysteria trying to get lunches packed, hair
combed, coats and shoes found, everyone to school or Child Care on time, the
baby ready for transportation. And always the paper scribbled on by a smaller
one, the book looked at by Susan then mislaid, the homework not done. Run­
ning out to that huge school where she was one, she was lost, she was a drop; suf­
fering over the unpreparedness, stammering and unsure in her classes.
I Stand Here Ironing
297
There was so little time left at night after the kids were bedded down. She
would struggle over books"always eating (it was in those years she developed her
enormous appetite that is legendary in our family) and I would be ironing, or
preparing food for the next day, or writing V-mail to Bill, or tending the baby.
Sometimes, to make me laugh, or out of her despair, she would imitate happen­
ings or types at school.
I think I said once: "Why don't you do something like this in the school am­
ateur show?" One morning she phoned me at work, hardly understandable
through the weeping: "Mother, I did it. I won, I won; they gave me first prize;
they clapped and clapped and wouldn't let me go."
Now suddenly she was Somebody, and as imprisoned in her difference as
she had been in anonymity.
She began to be asked to perform at other high schools, even in colleges,
then at city and statewide affairs. The first one we went to, I only recogniz.ed her
that first moment when thin, shy, she almost drowned herself into the curtains.
Then: Was this Emily? The control, the command, the convulsing and deadly
clowning, the spell, then the roaring, stamping audience, unwilling to let this
rare and precious laughter out of their lives.
Afterwards: You ought to do something about her with a gift like that-but
without money or knowing how, what does one do? We have left it all to her,
and the gift has as often eddied inside, clogged and clotted. as been used and
growing.
She is coming. She runs up the stairs two at a time with her light graceful
step. and I know she is happy toriight. Whatever it was that occasioned your call
did not happen today.
"Aren't you ever going to finish the ironing, Mother? Whistler painted his
mother in a rocker. I'd have to paint mine standing over an ironing board." This
is one of her communicative nights and she tells me everything and nothing as
she fixes herself a plate of food out of the icebox.
She is so lovely. Why did you want me to come in at all? Why were you con­
cerned? She will find her way.
She starts up the stairs to bed. "Don't get me up with the rest in the morn­
ing:' "But I thought you were having midterms." "Oh, those," she comes back in,
kisses me, and says quite lightly, "in a couple of years when we'll all be atom­
dead they won't matter a bit."
She has said it before. She believes it. But because I have been dredging the
past. and all that compounds a human being is so heavy and meaningful in me, I
cannot endure it tonight.
I will never total it all. I will never come in to say: She was a child seldom
smiled at. Her father left me before she was a year old. I had to work her first six
years when there was work, or I sent her home and to his relatives. There were
years she had care she hated. She was dark and thin and foreign-looking in a
world where the prestige went to blondeness and curly hair and dimples, she was
298
;/:1
;1
:'i
Tillie OIsm
slow where glibness was prized. She was a child of anxious, not proud, love. We
were poor and could not afford for her the soil of easy growth. I was a young
mother, I was a distracted mother. There were other children pushing up, de­
manding. Her younger sister seemed all that she was not. There were years she
did not want me to touch her. She kept too much in herself, her life was such she
had to keep too much in herself. My wisdom came too late. She has much to her
and probably little will come of it. She is a child of her age, of depression, of war,
of fear.
Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloom-but in how many does it?
There is still enough left to live by. Only help her to know-help make it so there
is cause for her to know-that she is more than this dress on the ironing board.
helpless before the iron.
..
POETRY
1961
~
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I
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,,'
.. ~
:1
(¥
Oates, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" by Joyce Carol Oates (1966)
for Bob Dylan
Her name was Connie. She was fifteen and she had a quick, nervous giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors or
checking other people's faces to make sure her own was all right. Her mother, who noticed everything and knew everything and
who hadn't much reason any longer to look at her own face, always scolded Connie about it. "Stop gawking at yourself. Who are
you? You think you're so pretty?" she would say. Connie would raise her eyebrows at these familiar old complaints and look right
through her mother, into a shadowy vision of herself as she was right at that moment: she knew she was pretty and that was
everything. Her mother had been pretty once too, if you could believe those old snapshots in the album, but now her looks were
gone and that was why she was always after Connie.
"Why don't you keep your room clean like your sister? How've you got your hair fixed—what the hell stinks? Hair spray? You don't
see your sister using that junk."
Her sister June was twenty-four and still lived at home. She was a secretary in the high school Connie attended, and if that wasn't
bad enough—with her in the same building—she was so plain and chunky and steady that Connie had to hear her praised all the time
by her mother and her mother's sisters. June did this, June did that, she saved money and helped clean the house and cooked and
Connie couldn't do a thing, her mind was all filled with trashy daydreams. Their father was away at work most of the time and when
he came home he wanted supper and he read the newspaper at supper and after supper he went to bed. He didn't bother talking
much to them, but around his bent head Connie's mother kept picking at her until Connie wished her mother was dead and she
herself was dead and it was all over. "She makes me want to throw up sometimes," she complained to her friends. She had a high,
breathless, amused voice that made everything she said sound a little forced, whether it was sincere or not.
There was one good thing: June went places with girl friends of hers, girls who were just as plain and steady as she, and so when
Connie wanted to do that her mother had no objections. The father of Connie's best girl friend drove the girls the three miles to town
and left them at a shopping plaza so they could walk through the stores or go to a movie, and when he came to pick them up again
at eleven he never bothered to ask what they had done.
They must have been familiar sights, walking around the shopping plaza in their shorts and flat ballerina slippers that always
scuffed the sidewalk, with charm bracelets jingling on their thin wrists; they would lean together to whisper and laugh secretly if
someone passed who amused or interested them. Connie had long dark blond hair that drew anyone's eye to it, and she wore part
of it pulled up on her head and puffed out and the rest of it she let fall down her back. She wore a pull-over jersey blouse that looked
one way when she was at home and another way when she was away from home. Everything about her had two sides to it, one for
home and one for anywhere that was not home: her walk, which could be childlike and bobbing, or languid enough to make anyone
think she was hearing music in her head; her mouth, which was pale and smirking most of the time, but bright and pink on these
evenings out; her laugh, which was cynical and drawling at home—"Ha, ha, very funny,"—but highpitched and nervous anywhere
else, like the jingling of the charms on her bracelet.
Sometimes they did go shopping or to a movie, but sometimes they went across the highway, ducking fast across the busy road, to
a drive-in restaurant where older kids hung out. The restaurant was shaped like a big bottle, though squatter than a real bottle, and
on its cap was a revolving figure of a grinning boy holding a hamburger aloft. One night in midsummer they ran across, breathless
with daring, and right away someone leaned out a car window and invited them over, but it was just a boy from high school they
didn't like. It made them feel good to be able to ignore him. They went up through the maze of parked and cruising cars to the brightlit, fly-infested restaurant, their faces pleased and expectant as if they were entering a sacred building that loomed up out of the
night to give them what haven and blessing they yearned for. They sat at the counter and crossed their legs at the ankles, their thin
shoulders rigid with excitement, and listened to the music that made everything so good: the music was always in the background,
like music at a church service; it was something to depend upon.
A boy named Eddie came in to talk with them. He sat backwards on his stool, turning himself jerkily around in semicircles and then
stopping and turning back again, and after a while he asked Connie if she would like something to eat. She said she would and so
she tapped her friend's arm on her way out—her friend pulled her face up into a brave, droll look—and Connie said she would meet
her at eleven, across the way. "I just hate to leave her like that," Connie said earnestly, but the boy said that she wouldn't be alone
for long. So they went out to his car, and on the way Connie couldn't help but let her eyes wander over the windshields and faces all
around her, her face gleaming with a joy that had nothing to do with Eddie or even this place; it might have been the music. She
drew her shoulders up and sucked in her breath with the pure pleasure of being alive, and just at that moment she happened to
glance at a face just a few feet from hers. It was a boy with shaggy black hair, in a convertible jalopy painted gold. He stared at her
and then his lips widened into a grin. Connie slit her eyes at him and turned away, but she couldn't help glancing back and there he
was, still watching her. He wagged a finger and laughed and said, "Gonna get you, baby," and Connie turned away again without
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Oates, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"
Eddie noticing anything.
She spent three hours with him, at the restaurant where they ate hamburgers and drank Cokes in wax cups that were always
sweating, and then down an alley a mile or so away, and when he left her off at five to eleven only the movie house was still open at
the plaza. Her girl friend was there, talking with a boy. When Connie came up, the two girls smiled at each other and Connie said,
"How was the movie?" and the girl said, 'You should know." They rode off with the girl's father, sleepy and pleased, and Connie
couldn't help but look back at the darkened shopping plaza with its big empty parking lot and its signs that were faded and ghostly
now, and over at the drive-in restaurant where cars were still circling tirelessly. She couldn't hear the music at this distance.
Next morning June asked her how the movie was and Connie said, "So-so."
She and that girl and occasionally another girl went out several times a week, and the rest of the time Connie spent around the
house—it was summer vacation—getting in her mother s way and thinking, dreaming about the boys she met. But all the boys fell
back and dissolved into a single face that was not even a face but an idea, a feeling, mixed up with the urgent insistent pounding of
the music and the humid night air of July. Connie's mother kept dragging her back to the daylight by finding things for her to do or
saying suddenly, 'What's this about the Pettinger girl?"
And Connie would say nervously, "Oh, her. That dope." She always drew thick clear lines between herself and such girls, and her
mother was simple and kind enough to believe it. Her mother was so simple, Connie thought, that it was maybe cruel to fool her so
much. Her mother went scuffling around the house in old bedroom slippers and complained over the telephone to one sister about
the other, then the other called up and the two of them complained about the third one. If June's name was mentioned her mother's
tone was approving, and if Connie's name was mentioned it was disapproving. This did not really mean she disliked Connie, and
actually Connie thought that her mother preferred her to June just because she was prettier, but the two of them kept up a pretense
of exasperation, a sense that they were tugging and struggling over something of little value to either of them. Sometimes, over
coffee, they were almost friends, but something would come up—some vexation that was like a fly buzzing suddenly around their
heads—and their faces went hard with contempt.
One Sunday Connie got up at eleven—none of them bothered with church—and washed her hair so that it could dry all day long in
the sun. Her parents and sister were going to a barbecue at an aunt's house and Connie said no, she wasn't interested, rolling her
eyes to let her mother know just what she thought of it. "Stay home alone then," her mother said sharply. Connie sat out back in a
lawn chair and watched them drive away, her father quiet and bald, hunched around so that he could back the car out, her mother
with a look that was still angry and not at all softened through the windshield, and in the back seat poor old June, all dressed up as
if she didn't know what a barbecue was, with all the running yelling kids and the flies. Connie sat with her eyes closed in the sun,
dreaming and dazed with the warmth about her as if this were a kind of love, the caresses of love, and her mind slipped over onto
thoughts of the boy she had been with the night before and how nice he had been, how sweet it always was, not the way someone
like June would suppose but sweet, gentle, the way it was in movies and promised in songs; and when she opened her eyes she
hardly knew where she was, the back yard ran off into weeds and a fence-like line of trees and behind it the sky was perfectly blue
and still. The asbestos ranch house that was now three years old startled her—it looked small. She shook her head as if to get
awake.
It was too hot. She went inside the house and turned on the radio to drown out the quiet. She sat on the edge of her bed, barefoot,
and listened for an hour and a half to a program called XYZ Sunday Jamboree, record after record of hard, fast, shrieking songs
she sang along with, interspersed by exclamations from "Bobby King": "An' look here, you girls at Napoleon's—Son and Charley
want you to pay real close attention to this song coming up!"
And Connie paid close attention herself, bathed in a glow of slow-pulsed joy that seemed to rise mysteriously out of the music itself
and lay languidly about the airless little room, breathed in and breathed out with each gentle rise and fall of her chest.
After a while she heard a car coming up the drive. She sat up at once, startled, because it couldn't be her father so soon. The gravel
kept crunching all the way in from the road—the driveway was long—and Connie ran to the window. It was a car she didn't know. It
was an open jalopy, painted a bright gold that caught the sunlight opaquely. Her heart began to pound and her fingers snatched at
her hair, checking it, and she whispered, "Christ. Christ," wondering how bad she looked. The car came to a stop at the side door
and the horn sounded four short taps, as if this were a signal Connie knew.
She went into the kitchen and approached the door slowly, then hung out the screen door, her bare toes curling down off the step.
There were two boys in the car and now she recognized the driver: he had shaggy, shabby black hair that looked crazy as a wig
and he was grinning at her.
"I ain't late, am I?" he said.
"Who the hell do you think you are?" Connie said.
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Oates, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"
"Toldja I'd be out, didn't I?"
"I don't even know who you are."
She spoke sullenly, careful to show no interest or pleasure, and he spoke in a fast, bright monotone. Connie looked past him to the
other boy, taking her time. He had fair brown hair, with a lock that fell onto his forehead. His sideburns gave him a fierce,
embarrassed look, but so far he hadn't even bothered to glance at her. Both boys wore sunglasses. The driver's glasses were
metallic and mirrored everything in miniature.
"You wanta come for a ride?" he said.
Connie smirked and let her hair fall loose over one shoulder.
"Don'tcha like my car? New paint job," he said. "Hey."
"What?"
"You're cute."
She pretended to fidget, chasing flies away from the door.
"Don'tcha believe me, or what?" he said.
"Look, I don't even know who you are," Connie said in disgust.
"Hey, Ellie's got a radio, see. Mine broke down." He lifted his friend's arm and showed her the little transistor radio the boy was
holding, and now Connie began to hear the music. It was the same program that was playing inside the house.
"Bobby King?" she said.
"I listen to him all the time. I think he's great."
"He's kind of great," Connie said reluctantly.
"Listen, that guy's great. He knows where the action is."
Connie blushed a little, because the glasses made it impossible for her to see just what this boy was looking at. She couldn't decide
if she liked him or if he was just a jerk, and so she dawdled in the doorway and wouldn't come down or go back inside. She said,
"What's all that stuff painted on your car?"
"Can'tcha read it?" He opened the door very carefully, as if he were afraid it might fall off. He slid out just as carefully, planting his
feet firmly on the ground, the tiny metallic world in his glasses slowing down like gelatine hardening, and in the midst of it Connie's
bright green blouse. "This here is my name, to begin with, he said. ARNOLD FRIEND was written in tarlike black letters on the side,
with a drawing of a round, grinning face that reminded Connie of a pumpkin, except it wore sunglasses. "I wanta introduce myself,
I'm Arnold Friend and that's my real name and I'm gonna be your friend, honey, and inside the car's Ellie Oscar, he's kinda shy."
Ellie brought his transistor radio up to his shoulder and balanced it there. "Now, these numbers are a secret code, honey," Arnold
Friend explained. He read off the numbers 33, 19, 17 and raised his eyebrows at her to see what she thought of that, but she didn't
think much of it. The left rear fender had been smashed and around it was written, on the gleaming gold background: DONE BY
CRAZY WOMAN DRIVER. Connie had to laugh at that. Arnold Friend was pleased at her laughter and looked up at her. "Around
the other side's a lot more —you wanta come and see them?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Why should I?"
"Don'tcha wanta see what's on the car? Don'tcha wanta go for a ride?"
"I don't know."
"Why not?"
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Oates, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"
"I got things to do."
"Like what?"
"Things."
He laughed as if she had said something funny. He slapped his thighs. He was standing in a strange way, leaning back against the
car as if he were balancing himself. He wasn't tall, only an inch or so taller than she would be if she came down to him. Connie liked
the way he was dressed, which was the way all of them dressed: tight faded jeans stuffed into black, scuffed boots, a belt that
pulled his waist in and showed how lean he was, and a white pull-over shirt that was a little soiled and showed the hard small
muscles of his arms and shoulders. He looked as if he probably did hard work, lifting and carrying things. Even his neck looked
muscular. And his face was a familiar face, somehow: the jaw and chin and cheeks slightly darkened because he hadn't shaved for
a day or two, and the nose long and hawklike, sniffing as if she were a treat he was going to gobble up and it was all a joke.
"Connie, you ain't telling the truth. This is your day set aside for a ride with me and you know it," he said, still laughing. The way he
straightened and recovered from his fit of laughing showed that it had been all fake.
"How do you know what my name is?" she said suspiciously.
"It's Connie."
"Maybe and maybe not."
"I know my Connie," he said, wagging his finger. Now she remembered him even better, back at the restaurant, and her cheeks
warmed at the thought of how she had sucked in her breath just at the moment she passed him—how she must have looked to him.
And he had remembered her. "Ellie and I come out here especially for you," he said. "Ellie can sit in back. How about it?"
"Where?"
"Where what?"
"Where're we going?"
He looked at her. He took off the sunglasses and she saw how pale the skin around his eyes was, like holes that were not in
shadow but instead in light. His eyes were like chips of broken glass that catch the light in an amiable way. He smiled. It was as if
the idea of going for a ride somewhere, to someplace, was a new idea to him.
"Just for a ride, Connie sweetheart."
"I never said my name was Connie," she said.
"But I know what it is. I know your name and all about you, lots of things," Arnold Friend said. He had not moved yet but stood still
leaning back against the side of his jalopy. "I took a special interest in you, such a pretty girl, and found out all about you—like I know
your parents and sister are gone somewheres and I know where and how long they're going to be gone, and I know who you were
with last night, and your best girl friend's name is Betty. Right?"
He spoke in a simple lilting voice, exactly as if he were reciting the words to a song. His smile assured her that everything was fine.
In the car Ellie turned up the volume on his radio and did not bother to look around at them.
"Ellie can sit in the back seat," Arnold Friend said. He indicated his friend with a casual jerk of his chin, as if Ellie did not count and
she should not bother with him.
"How'd you find out all that stuff?" Connie said.
"Listen: Betty Schultz and Tony Fitch and Jimmy Pettinger and Nancy Pettinger," he said in a chant. "Raymond Stanley and Bob
Hutter—"
"Do you know all those kids?"
"I know everybody."
"Look, you're kidding. You're not from around here."
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"Sure."
"But—how come we never saw you before?"
"Sure you saw me before," he said. He looked down at his boots, as if he were a little offended. "You just don't remember."
"I guess I'd remember you," Connie said.
"Yeah?" He looked up at this, beaming. He was pleased. He began to mark time with the music from Ellie's radio, tapping his fists
lightly together. Connie looked away from his smile to the car, which was painted so bright it almost hurt her eyes to look at it. She
looked at that name, ARNOLD FRIEND. And up at the front fender was an expression that was familiar—MAN THE FLYING
SAUCERS. It was an expression kids had used the year before but didn't use this year. She looked at it for a while as if the words
meant something to her that she did not yet know.
"What're you thinking about? Huh?" Arnold Friend demanded. "Not worried about your hair blowing around in the car, are you?"
"No."
"Think I maybe can't drive good?"
"How do I know?"
"You're a hard girl to handle. How come?" he said. "Don't you know I'm your friend? Didn't you see me put my sign in the air when
you walked by?"
"What sign?"
"My sign." And he drew an X in the air, leaning out toward her. They were maybe ten feet apart. After his hand fell back to his side
the X was still in the air, almost visible. Connie let the screen door close and stood perfectly still inside it, listening to the music from
her radio and the boy's blend together. She stared at Arnold Friend. He stood there so stiffly relaxed, pretending to be relaxed, with
one hand idly on the door handle as if he were keeping himself up that way and had no intention of ever moving again. She
recognized most things about him, the tight jeans that showed his thighs and buttocks and the greasy leather boots and the tight
shirt, and even that slippery friendly smile of his, that sleepy dreamy smile that all the boys used to get across ideas they didn't want
to put into words. She recognized all this and also the singsong way he talked, slightly mocking, kidding, but serious and a little
melancholy, and she recognized the way he tapped one fist against the other in homage to the perpetual music behind him. But all
these things did not come together.
She said suddenly, "Hey, how old are you?"
His smiled faded. She could see then that he wasn't a kid, he was much older—thirty, maybe more. At this knowledge her heart
began to pound faster.
"That's a crazy thing to ask. Can'tcha see I'm your own age?"
"Like hell you are."
"Or maybe a couple years older. I'm eighteen."
"Eighteen?" she said doubtfully.
He grinned to reassure her and lines appeared at the corners of his mouth. His teeth were big and white. He grinned so broadly his
eyes became slits and she saw how thick the lashes were, thick and black as if painted with a black tarlike material. Then, abruptly,
he seemed to become embarrassed and looked over his shoulder at Ellie. "Him, he's crazy," he said. "Ain't he a riot? He's a nut, a
real character." Ellie was still listening to the music. His sunglasses told nothing about what he was thinking. He wore a bright
orange shirt unbuttoned halfway to show his chest, which was a pale, bluish chest and not muscular like Arnold Friend's. His shirt
collar was turned up all around and the very tips of the collar pointed out past his chin as if they were protecting him. He was
pressing the transistor radio up against his ear and sat there in a kind of daze, right in the sun.
"He's kinda strange," Connie said.
"Hey, she says you're kinda strange! Kinda strange!" Arnold Friend cried. He pounded on the car to get Ellie's attention. Ellie turned
for the first time and Connie saw with shock that he wasn't a kid either—he had a fair, hairless face, cheeks reddened slightly as if
the veins grew too close to the surface of his skin, the face of a forty-year-old baby. Connie felt a wave of dizziness rise in her at
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this sight and she stared at him as if waiting for something to change the shock of the moment, make it all right again. Ellie's lips
kept shaping words, mumbling along with the words blasting in his ear.
"Maybe you two better go away," Connie said faintly.
"What? How come?" Arnold Friend cried. "We come out here to take you for a ride. It's Sunday." He had the voice of the man on the
radio now. It was the same voice, Connie thought. "Don'tcha know it's Sunday all day? And honey, no matter who you were with last
night, today you're with Arnold Friend and don't you forget it! Maybe you better step out here," he said, and this last was in a
different voice. It was a little flatter, as if the heat was finally getting to him.
"No. I got things to do."
"Hey."
"You two better leave."
"We ain't leaving until you come with us."
"Like hell I am—"
"Connie, don't fool around with me. I mean—I mean, don't fool around," he said, shaking his head. He laughed incredulously. He
placed his sunglasses on top of his head, carefully, as if he were indeed wearing a wig, and brought the stems down behind his
ears. Connie stared at him, another wave of dizziness and fear rising in her so that for a moment he wasn't even in focus but was
just a blur standing there against his gold car, and she had the idea that he had driven up the driveway all right but had come from
nowhere before that and belonged nowhere and that everything about him and even about the music that was so familiar to her was
only half real.
"If my father comes and sees you—"
"He ain't coming. He's at a barbecue."
"How do you know that?"
"Aunt Tillie's. Right now they're uh—they're drinking. Sitting around," he said vaguely, squinting as if he were staring all the way to
town and over to Aunt Tillie's back yard. Then the vision seemed to get clear and he nodded energetically. "Yeah. Sitting around.
There's your sister in a blue dress, huh? And high heels, the poor sad bitch—nothing like you, sweetheart! And your mother's helping
some fat woman with the corn, they're cleaning the corn—husking the corn—"
"What fat woman?" Connie cried.
"How do I know what fat woman, I don't know every goddamn fat woman in the world!" Arnold Friend laughed.
"Oh, that's Mrs. Hornsby . . . . Who invited her?" Connie said. She felt a little lightheaded. Her breath was coming quickly.
"She's too fat. I don't like them fat. I like them the way you are, honey," he said, smiling sleepily at her. They stared at each other for
a while through the screen door. He said softly, "Now, what you're going to do is this: you're going to come out that door. You re
going to sit up front with me and Ellie's going to sit in the back, the hell with Ellie, right? This isn't Ellie's date. You're my date. I'm
your lover, honey."
"What? You're crazy—"
"Yes, I'm your lover. You don't know what that is but you will," he said. "I know that too. I know all about you. But look: it's real nice
and you couldn't ask for nobody better than me, or more polite. I always keep my word. I'll tell you how it is, I'm always nice at first,
the first time. I'll hold you so tight you won't think you have to try to get away or pretend anything because you'll know you can't. And
I'll come inside you where it's all secret and you'll give in to me and you'll love me "
"Shut up! You're crazy!" Connie said. She backed away from the door. She put her hands up against her ears as if she'd heard
something terrible, something not meant for her. "People don't talk like that, you're crazy," she muttered. Her heart was almost too
big now for her chest and its pumping made sweat break out all over her. She looked out to see Arnold Friend pause and then take
a step toward the porch, lurching. He almost fell. But, like a clever drunken man, he managed to catch his balance. He wobbled in
his high boots and grabbed hold of one of the porch posts.
"Honey?" he said. "You still listening?"
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"Get the hell out of here!"
"Be nice, honey. Listen."
"I'm going to call the police—"
He wobbled again and out of the side of his mouth came a fast spat curse, an aside not meant for her to hear. But even this
"Christ!" sounded forced. Then he began to smile again. She watched this smile come, awkward as if he were smiling from inside a
mask. His whole face was a mask, she thought wildly, tanned down to his throat but then running out as if he had plastered makeup on his face but had forgotten about his throat.
"Honey—? Listen, here's how it is. I always tell the truth and I promise you this: I ain't coming in that house after you."
"You better not! I'm going to call the police if you—if you don't—"
"Honey," he said, talking right through her voice, "honey, I m not coming in there but you are coming out here. You know why?"
She was panting. The kitchen looked like a place she had never seen before, some room she had run inside but that wasn't good
enough, wasn't going to help her. The kitchen window had never had a curtain, after three years, and there were dishes in the sink
for her to do—probably—and if you ran your hand across the table you'd probably feel something sticky there.
"You listening, honey? Hey?" "—going to call the police—"
"Soon as you touch the phone I don't need to keep my promise and can come inside. You won't want that."
She rushed forward and tried to lock the door. Her fingers were shaking. "But why lock it," Arnold Friend said gently, talking right
into her face. "It's just a screen door. It's just nothing." One of his boots was at a strange angle, as if his foot wasn't in it. It pointed
out to the left, bent at the ankle. "I mean, anybody can break through a screen door and glass and wood and iron or anything else if
he needs to, anybody at all, and specially Arnold Friend. If the place got lit up with a fire, honey, you'd come runnin' out into my
arms, right into my arms an' safe at home—like you knew I was your lover and'd stopped fooling around. I don't mind a nice shy girl
but I don't like no fooling around." Part of those words were spoken with a slight rhythmic lilt, and Connie somehow recognized
them—the echo of a song from last year, about a girl rushing into her boy friend's arms and coming home again—
Connie stood barefoot on the linoleum floor, staring at him. "What do you want?" she whispered.
"I want you," he said.
"What?"
"Seen you that night and thought, that's the one, yes sir. I never needed to look anymore."
"But my father's coming back. He's coming to get me. I had to wash my hair first—'' She spoke in a dry, rapid voice, hardly raising it
for him to hear.
"No, your daddy is not coming and yes, you had to wash your hair and you washed it for me. It's nice and shining and all for me. I
thank you sweetheart," he said with a mock bow, but again he almost lost his balance. He had to bend and adjust his boots.
Evidently his feet did not go all the way down; the boots must have been stuffed with something so that he would seem taller.
Connie stared out at him and behind him at Ellie in the car, who seemed to be looking off toward Connie's right, into nothing. This
Ellie said, pulling the words out of the air one after another as if he were just discovering them, "You want me to pull out the
phone?"
"Shut your mouth and keep it shut," Arnold Friend said, his face red from bending over or maybe from embarrassment because
Connie had seen his boots. "This ain't none of your business."
"What—what are you doing? What do you want?" Connie said. "If I call the police they'll get you, they'll arrest you—"
"Promise was not to come in unless you touch that phone, and I'll keep that promise," he said. He resumed his erect position and
tried to force his shoulders back. He sounded like a hero in a movie, declaring something important. But he spoke too loudly and it
was as if he were speaking to someone behind Connie. "I ain't made plans for coming in that house where I don't belong but just for
you to come out to me, the way you should. Don't you know who I am?"
"You're crazy," she whispered. She backed away from the door but did not want to go into another part of the house, as if this would
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give him permission to come through the door. "What do you . . . you're crazy, you. . . ."
"Huh? What're you saying, honey?"
Her eyes darted everywhere in the kitchen. She could not remember what it was, this room.
"This is how it is, honey: you come out and we'll drive away, have a nice ride. But if you don't come out we're gonna wait till your
people come home and then they're all going to get it."
"You want that telephone pulled out?" Ellie said. He held the radio away from his ear and grimaced, as if without the radio the air
was too much for him.
"I toldja shut up, Ellie," Arnold Friend said, "you're deaf, get a hearing aid, right? Fix yourself up. This little girl's no trouble and's
gonna be nice to me, so Ellie keep to yourself, this ain't your date right? Don't hem in on me, don't hog, don't crush, don't bird dog,
don't trail me," he said in a rapid, meaningless voice, as if he were running through all the expressions he'd learned but was no
longer sure which of them was in style, then rushing on to new ones, making them up with his eyes closed. "Don't crawl under my
fence, don't squeeze in my chipmonk hole, don't sniff my glue, suck my popsicle, keep your own greasy fingers on yourself!" He
shaded his eyes and peered in at Connie, who was backed against the kitchen table. "Don't mind him, honey, he's just a creep.
He's a dope. Right? I'm the boy for you, and like I said, you come out here nice like a lady and give me your hand, and nobody else
gets hurt, I mean, your nice old bald-headed daddy and your mummy and your sister in her high heels. Because listen: why bring
them in this?"
"Leave me alone," Connie whispered.
"Hey, you know that old woman down the road, the one with the chickens and stuff—you know her?"
"She's dead!"
"Dead? What? You know her?" Arnold Friend said.
"She's dead—"
"Don't you like her?"
"She's dead—she's—she isn't here any more—"
But don't you like her, I mean, you got something against her? Some grudge or something?" Then his voice dipped as if he were
conscious of a rudeness. He touched the sunglasses perched up on top of his head as if to make sure they were still there. "Now,
you be a good girl."
'What are you going to do?"
"Just two things, or maybe three," Arnold Friend said. "But I promise it won't last long and you'll like me the way you get to like
people you're close to. You will. It's all over for you here, so come on out. You don't want your people in any trouble, do you?"
She turned and bumped against a chair or something, hurting her leg, but she ran into the back room and picked up the telephone.
Something roared in her ear, a tiny roaring, and she was so sick with fear that she could do nothing but listen to it—the telephone
was clammy and very heavy and her fingers groped down to the dial but were too weak to touch it. She began to scream into the
phone, into the roaring. She cried out, she cried for her mother, she felt her breath start jerking back and forth in her lungs as if it
were something Arnold Friend was stabbing her with again and again with no tenderness. A noisy sorrowful wailing rose all about
her and she was locked inside it the way she was locked inside this house.
After a while she could hear again. She was sitting on the floor with her wet back against the wall.
Arnold Friend was saying from the door, "That's a good girl. Put the phone back."
She kicked the phone away from her.
"No, honey. Pick it up. Put it back right."
She picked it up and put it back. The dial tone stopped.
"That's a good girl. Now, you come outside."
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She was hollow with what had been fear but what was now just an emptiness. All that screaming had blasted it out of her. She sat,
one leg cramped under her, and deep inside her brain was something like a pinpoint of light that kept going and would not let her
relax. She thought, I'm not going to see my mother again. She thought, I'm not going to sleep in my bed again. Her bright green
blouse was all wet.
Arnold Friend said, in a gentle-loud voice that was like a stage voice, "The place where you came from ain't there any more, and
where you had in mind to go is cancelled out. This place you are now—inside your daddy's house—is nothing but a cardboard box I
can knock down any time. You know that and always did know it. You hear me?"
She thought, I have got to think. I have got to know what to do.
"We'll go out to a nice field, out in the country here where it smells so nice and it's sunny," Arnold Friend said. "I'll have my arms
tight around you so you won't need to try to get away and I'll show you what love is like, what it does. The hell with this house! It
looks solid all right," he said. He ran a fingernail down the screen and the noise did not make Connie shiver, as it would have the
day before. "Now, put your hand on your heart, honey. Feel that? That feels solid too but we know better. Be nice to me, be sweet
like you can because what else is there for a girl like you but to be sweet and pretty and give in?—and get away before her people
come back?"
She felt her pounding heart. Her hand seemed to enclose it. She thought for the first time in her life that it was nothing that was
hers, that belonged to her, but just a pounding, living thing inside this body that wasn't really hers either.
"You don't want them to get hurt," Arnold Friend went on. "Now, get up, honey. Get up all by yourself."
She stood.
"Now, turn this way. That's right. Come over here to me.— Ellie, put that away, didn't I tell you? You dope. You miserable creepy
dope," Arnold Friend said. His words were not angry but only part of an incantation. The incantation was kindly. "Now come out
through the kitchen to me, honey, and let's see a smile, try it, you re a brave, sweet little girl and now they're eating corn and hot
dogs cooked to bursting over an outdoor fire, and they don't know one thing about you and never did and honey, you're better than
them because not a one of them would have done this for you."
Connie felt the linoleum under her feet; it was cool. She brushed her hair back out of her eyes. Arnold Friend let go of the post
tentatively and opened his arms for her, his elbows pointing in toward each other and his wrists limp, to show that this was an
embarrassed embrace and a little mocking, he didn't want to make her self-conscious.
She put out her hand against the screen. She watched herself push the door slowly open as if she were back safe somewhere in
the other doorway, watching this body and this head of long hair moving out into the sunlight where Arnold Friend waited.
"My sweet little blue-eyed girl," he said in a half-sung sigh that had nothing to do with her brown eyes but was taken up just the
same by the vast sunlit reaches of the land behind him and on all sides of him—so much land that Connie had never seen before
and did not recognize except to know that she was going to it.
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Jamaica Kincaid
Girl
Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and
put them on the clothesline to dry; don't walk barehead in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet
oil; soak your little cloths right after you take them off; when buying cotton to make yourself a nice blouse, be
sure that it doesn't have gum on it, because that way it won't hold up well after a wash; soak salt fish
overnight before you cook it; is it true that you sing benna in Sunday school?; always eat your food in such a
way that it won't turn someone else's stomach; on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you
are so bent on becoming; don't sing benna in Sunday school; you mustn't speak to wharf–rat boys, not even
to give directions; don't eat fruits on the street—flies will follow you; but I don't sing benna on Sundays at all
and never in Sunday school; this is how to sew on a button; this is how to make a button–hole for the button
you have just sewed on; this is how to hem a dress when you see the hem coming down and so to prevent
yourself from looking like the slut I know you are so bent on becoming; this is how you iron your father's
khaki shirt so that it doesn't have a crease; this is how you iron your father's khaki pants so that they don't
have a crease; this is how you grow okra—far from the house, because okra tree harbors red ants; when you
are growing dasheen, make sure it gets plenty of water or else it makes your throat itch when you are eating
it; this is how you sweep a corner; this is how you sweep a whole house; this is how you sweep a yard; this
is how you smile to someone you don't like too much; this is how you smile to someone you don't like at all;
this is how you smile to someone you like completely; this is how you set a table for tea; this is how you set a
table for dinner; this is how you set a table for dinner with an important guest; this is how you set a table for
lunch; this is how you set a table for breakfast; this is how to behave in the presence of men who don't know
you very well, and this way they won't recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming;
be sure to wash every day, even if it is with your own spit; don't squat down to play marbles—you are not a
boy, you know; don't pick people's flowers—you might catch something; don't throw stones at blackbirds,
because it might not be a blackbird at all; this is how to make a bread pudding; this is how to make doukona;
this is how to make pepper pot; this is how to make a good medicine for a cold; this is how to make a good
medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child; this is how to catch a fish; this is how to
throw back a fish you don't like, and that way something bad won't fall on you; this is how to bully a man; this
is how a man bullies you; this is how to love a man; and if this doesn't work there are other ways, and if they
don't work don't feel too bad about giving up; this is how to spit up in the air if you feel like it, and this is how
to move quick so that it doesn't fall on you; this is how to make ends meet; always squeeze bread to make
sure it's fresh; but what if the baker won't let me feel the bread?; you mean to say that after all you are really
going to be the kind of woman who the baker won't let near the bread?
1987
Susan Sontag
The Way We Live Now
FROM The New Yorker
AT FIRST he was just losing weight, he felt only a little ill, Max said to
Ellen, and he didn't call for an appointment with his doctor, according
to Greg, because he was managing to keep on working at more or less
the same rhythm, but he did stop smoking, Tanya pointed out, which
suggests he was frightened, but also that he wanted, even more than he
knew, to be healthy, or healthier, or maybe just to gain back a few
pounds, said Orson, for he told her, Tanya went on, that he expected to
be climbing the walls (isn't that what people say?) and found, to his
surprise, that he didn't miss cigarettes at all and reveled in the sensation
of his lungs' being ache-free for the first time in years. But did he have a
good doctor, Stephen wanted to know, since it would have been crazy
not to go for a checkup after the pressure was off and he was back from
the conference in Helsinki, even if by then he was feeling better. And he
said, to Frank, that he would go, even though he was indeed frightened,
as he admitted to Jan, but who wouldn't be frightened now, though, odd
as that might seem, he hadn't been worrying until recently, he avowed
to Quentin, it was only in the last six months that he had the metallic
taste of panic in his mouth, because becoming seriously ill was something that happened to other people, a normal delusion, he observed to
Paolo, if one was thirty-eight and had never had a serious illness; he
wasn't, as Jan confirmed, a hypochondriac. Of course, it was hard not to
worry, everyone was worried, but it wouldn't do to panic, because, as
Max pointed out to Quentin, there wasn't anything one could do except
wait and hope, wait and start being careful, be careful, and hope. And
even if one did prove to be ill, one shouldn't give up, they had new
treatments that promised an arrest of the disease's inexorable course,
research was progressing. It seemed that everyone was in touch with
The Way We Live Now
601
everyone else several times a week, checking in, I've never spent so many
hours at a time on the phone, Stephen said to Kate, and when I'm
exhausted after the two or three calls made to me, giving me the latest,
instead of switching off the phone to give myself a respite I tap out the
number of another friend or acquaintance, to pass on the news. I'm not
sure I can afford to think so much about it, Ellen said, and I suspect my
own motives, there's something morbid I'm getting used to, getting
excited by, this must be like what people felt in London during the Blitz.
As far as I know, I'm not at risk, but you never know, said Aileen. This
thing is totally unprecedented, said Frank. But don't you think he ought
to see a doctor, Stephen insisted. Listen, said Orson, you can't force
people to take care of themselves, and what makes you think the worst,
he could be just run down, people still do get ordinary illnesses, awful
ones, why are you assuming it has to be that. But all I want to be sure,
said Stephen, is that he understands the options, because most people
don't, that's why they won't see a doctor or have the test, they think
there's nothing one can do. But is there anything one can do, he said to
Tanya (according to Greg), I mean what do I gain if I go to the doctor; if
I'm really ill, he's reported to have said, I'll find out soon enough.
And when he was in the hospital, his spirits seemed to lighten, according to Donny. He seemed more cheerful than he had been in the last
months, Ursula said, and the bad news seemed to come almost as
a relief, according to Ira, as a truly unexpected blow, according to
Quentin, but you'd hardly expect him to have said the same thing to all
his friends, because his relation to Ira was so different from his relation to Quentin (this according to Quentin, who was proud of their
friendship), and perhaps he thought Quentin wouldn't be undone by
seeing him weep, but Ira insisted that couldn't be the reason he behaved
so differently with each, and that maybe he was feeling less shocked,
mobilizing his strength to fight for his life, at the moment he saw Ira
but overcome by feelings of hopelessness when Quentin arrived with
flowers, because anyway the flowers threw him into a bad mood, as
Quentin told Kate, since the hospital room was choked with flowers,
you couldn't have crammed another flower into that room, but surely
you're exaggerating, Kate said, smiling, everybody likes flowers. Well,
who wouldn't exaggerate at a time like this, Quentin said sharply. Don't
you think this is an exaggeration. Of course I do, said Kate gently, I was
only teasing, I mean I didn't mean to tease. I know that, Quentin said,
with tears in his eyes, and Kate hugged him and said well, when I go this
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evening I guess I won't bring flowers, what does he want, and Quentin
said, according to Max, what he likes best is chocolate. Is there anything
else, asked Kate, I mean like chocolate but not chocolate. Licorice, said
Quentin, blowing his nose. And besides that. Aren't you exaggerating
now, Quentin said, smiling. Right, said Kate, so if I want to bring him a
whole raft of stuff, besides chocolate and licorice, what else. Jelly beans,
Quentin said.
He didn't want to be alone, according to Paolo, and lots of people came
in the first week, and the Jamaican nurse said there were other patients
on the floor who would be glad to have the surplus flowers, and people
weren't afraid to visit, it wasn't like the old days, as Kate pointed out to
Aileen, they're not even segregated in the hospital anymore, as Hilda
observed, there's nothing on the door of his room warning visitors of
the possibility of contagion, as there was a few years ago; in fact, he's in
a double room and, as he told Orson, the old guy on the far side of the
curtain (who's clearly on the way out, said Stephen) doesn't even have
the disease, so, as Kate went on, you really should go and see him, he'd
be happy to see you, he likes having people visit, you aren't not going
because you're afraid, are you. Of course not, Aileen said, but I don't
know what to say, I think I'll feel awkward, which he's bound to notice,
and that will make him feel worse, so I won't be doing him any good,
will I. But he won't notice anything, Kate said, patting Aileen's hand, it's
not like that, it's not the way you imagine, he's not judging people or
wondering about their motives, he's just happy to see his friends. But I
never was really a friend of his, Aileen said, you're a friend, he's always
liked you, you told me he talks about Nora with you, I know he likes
me, he's even attracted to me, but he respects you. But, according to
Wesley, the reason Aileen was so stingy with her visits was that she
could never have him to herself, there were always others there already
and by the time they left still others had arrived, she'd been in love with
him for years, and I can understand, said Donny, that Aileen should feel
bitter that if there could have been a woman friend he did more than
occasionally bed, a woman he really loved, and my God, Victor said,
who had known him in those years, he was crazy about Nora, what a
heart-rending couple they were, two surly angels, then it couldn't have
been she.
And when some of the friends, the ones who came every day, waylaid
the doctor in the corridor, Stephen was the one who asked the most
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603
informed questions, who'd been keeping up not just with the stories
that appeared several times a week in the Times (which Greg confessed
to have stopped reading, unable to stand it anymore) but with articles in
the medical journals published here and in England and France, and
who knew socially one of the principal doctors in Paris who was doing
some much-publicized research on the disease, but his doctor said little
more than that the pneumonia was not life-threatening, the fever was
subsiding, of course he was still weak but he was responding well to the
antibiotics, that he'd have to complete his stay in the hospital, which
entailed a minimum of twenty-one days on the IV, before she could
start him on the new drug, for she was optimistic about the possibility
of getting him into the protocol; and when Victor said that if he had so
much trouble eating (he'd say to everyone when they coaxed him to eat
some of the hospital meals, that food didn't taste right, that he had a
funny metallic taste in his mouth) it couldn't be good that friends were
bringing him all that chocolate, the doctor just smiled and said that in
these cases the patient's morale was also an important factor, and if
chocolate made him feel better she saw no harm in it, which worried
Stephen, as Stephen said later to Donny, because they wanted to believe
in the promises and taboos of today's high-tech medicine but here this
reassuringly curt and silver-haired specialist in the disease, someone
quoted frequently in the papers, was talking like some oldfangled country GP who tells the family that tea with honey or chicken soup may do
as much for the patient as penicillin, which might mean, as Max said,
that they were just going through the motions of treating him, that they
were not sure about what to do, or rather, as Xavier interjected, that
they didn't know what the hell they were doing, that the truth, the real
truth, as Hilda said, upping the ante, was that they didn't, the doctors,
really have any hope.
Oh, no, said Lewis, I can't stand it, wait a minute, I can't believe it, are
you sure, I mean are they sure, have they done all the tests, it's getting so
when the phone rings I'm scared to answer because I think it will be
someone telling me someone else is ill; but did Lewis really not know
until yesterday, Robert said testily, I find that hard to believe, everybody
is talking about it, it seems impossible that someone wouldn't have
called Lewis; and perhaps Lewis did know, was for some reason pretending not to know already, because, Jan recalled, didn't Lewis say
something months ago to Greg, and not only to Greg, about his not
looking well, losing weight, and being worried about him and wishing
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he'd see a doctor, so it couldn't come as a total surprise. Well, everybody
is worried about everybody now, said Betsy, that seems to be the way we
live, the way we live now. And, after all, they were once very close,
doesn't Lewis still have the keys to his apartment, you know the way you
let someone keep the keys after you've broken up, only a little because
you hope the person might just saunter in, drunk or high, late some
evening, but mainly because it's wise to have a few sets of keys strewn
around town, if you live alone, at the top of a former commercial
building that, pretentious as it is, will never acquire a doorman or even
a resident superintendent, someone whom you can call on for the keys
late one night if you find you've lost yours or have locked yourself out.
Who else has keys, Tanya inquired, I was thinking somebody might
drop by tomorrow before coming to the hospital and bring some treasures, because the other day, Ira said, he was complaining about how
dreary the hospital room was, and how it was like being locked up in a
motel room, which got everybody started telling funny stories about
motel rooms they'd known, and at Ursula's story, about the Luxury
Budget Inn in Schenectady, there was an uproar of laughter around his
bed, while he watched them in silence, eyes bright with fever, all the
while, as Victor recalled, gobbling that damned chocolate. But, according to Jan, whom Lewis's keys enabled to tour the swank of his bachelor
lair with an eye to bringing over some art consolation to brighten up
the hospital room, the Byzantine icon wasn't on the wall over his bed,
and that was a puzzle until Orson remembered that he'd recounted
without seeming upset (this disputed by Greg) that the boy he'd recently gotten rid of had stolen it, along with four of the maki-e lacquer
boxes, as if these were objects as easy to sell on the street as a TV or a
stereo. But he's always been very generous, Kate said quietly, and though
he loves beautiful things isn't really attached to them, to things, as
Orson said, which is unusual in a collector, as Frank commented, and
when Kate shuddered and tears sprang to her eyes and Orson inquired
anxiously if he, Orson, had said something wrong, she pointed out that
they'd begun talking about him in a retrospective mode, summing up
what he was like, what made them fond of him, as if he were finished,
completed, already a part of the past.
Perhaps he was getting tired of having so many visitors, said Robert,
who was, as Ellen couldn't help mentioning, someone who had come
only twice and was probably looking for a reason not to be in regular
attendance, but there could be no doubt, according to Ursula, that his
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605
spirits had dipped, not that there was any discouraging news from the
doctors, and he seemed now to prefer being alone a few hours of the
day; and he told Donny that he'd begun keeping a diary for the first
time in his life, because he wanted to record the course of his mental
reactions to this astonishing turn of events, to do something parallel to
what the doctors were doing, who came every morning and conferred at
his bedside about his body, and that perhaps it wasn't so important
what he wrote in it, which amounted, as he said wryly to Quentin, to
little more than the usual banalities about terror and amazement that
this was happening to him, to him also, plus the usual remorseful
assessments of his past life, his pardonable superficialities, capped by
resolves to live better, more deeply, more in touch with his work and his
friends, and not to care so passionately about what people thought of
him, interspersed with admonitions to himself that in this situation his
will to live counted more than anything else and that if he really wanted
to live, and trusted life, and liked himself well enough (down, ol' debbil
Thanatos!), he would live, he would be an exception; but perhaps all
this, as Quentin ruminated, talking on the phone to Kate, wasn't the
point, the point was that by the very keeping of the diary he was accumulating something to reread one day, slyly staking out his claim to
a future time, in which the diary would be an object, a relic, in which he
might not actually reread it, because he would want to have put this
ordeal behind him, but the diary would be there in the drawer of his
stupendous Majorelle desk, and he could already, he did actually say to
Quentin one late sunny afternoon, propped up in the hospital bed, with
the stain of chocolate framing one corner of a heartbreaking smile, see
himself in the penthouse, the October sun streaming through those
clear windows instead of this streaked one, and the diary, the pathetic
diary, safe inside the drawer.
It doesn't matter about the treatment's side effects, Stephen said (when
talking to Max), I don't know why you're so worried about that, every
strong treatment has some dangerous side effects, it's inevitable, you
mean otherwise the treatment wouldn't be effective, Hilda interjected,
and anyway, Stephen went on doggedly, just because there are side
effects it doesn't mean he has to get them, or all of them, each one, or
even some of them. That's just a list of all the possible things that could
go wrong, because the doctors have to cover themselves, so they make
up a worst-case scenario, but isn't what's happening to him, and to so
many other people, Tanya interrupted, a worst-case scenario, a catastro-
6
SUSAN SONTAG
phe no one could have imagined, it's too cruel, and isn't everything a
side effect, quipped Ira, even we are all side effects, but we're not bad
side effects, Frank said, he likes having his friends around, and we're
helping each other, too; because his illness sticks us all in the same glue,
mused Xavier, and, whatever the jealousies and grievances from the past
that have made us wary and cranky with each other, when something
like this happens (the sky is falling, the sky is falling!) you understand
what's really important. I agree, Chicken Little, he is reported to have
said. But don't you think, Quentin observed to Max, that being as close
to him as we are, making time to drop by the hospital every day, is a way
of our trying to define ourselves more firmly and irrevocably as the well,
those who aren't ill, who aren't going to fall ill, as if what's happened to
him couldn't happen to us, when in fact the chances are that before long
one of us will end up where he is, which is probably what he felt when
he was one of the cohort visiting Zack in the spring (you never knew
Zack, did you?), and, according to Clarice, Zack's widow, he didn't come
very often, he said he hated hospitals, and didn't feel he was doing Zack
any good, that Zack would see on his face how uncomfortable he was.
Oh, he was one of those, Aileen said. A coward. Like me.
And after he was sent home from the hospital, and Quentin had volunteered to move in and was cooking meals and taking telephone messages and keeping the mother in Mississippi informed, well, mainly
keeping her from flying to New York and heaping her grief on her son
and confusing the household routine with her oppressive ministrations,
he was able to work an hour or two in his study, on days he didn't insist
on going out, for a meal or a movie, which tired him. He seemed
optimistic, Kate thought, his appetite was good, and what he said,
Orson reported, was that he agreed when Stephen advised him that the
main thing was to keep in shape, he was a fighter, right, he wouldn't be
who he was if he weren't, and was he ready for the big fight, Stephen
asked rhetorically (as Max told it to Donny), and he said you bet, and
Stephen added it could be a lot worse, you could have gotten the disease
two years ago, but now so many scientists are working on it, the American team and the French team, everyone bucking for that Nobel Prize a
few years down the road, that all you have to do is stay healthy for
another year or two and then there will be good treatment, real treatment. Yes, he said, Stephen said, my timing is good. And Betsy, who had
been climbing on and rolling off macrobiotic diets for a decade, came
up with a Japanese specialist she wanted him to see but thank God,
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607
Donny reported, he'd had the sense to refuse, but he did agree to see
Victor's visualization therapist, although what could one possibly visualize, said Hilda, when the point of visualizing disease was to see it as
an entity with contours, borders, here rather than there, something
limited, something you were the host of, in the sense that you could
disinvite the disease, while this was so total; or would be, Max said.
But the main thing, said Greg, was to see that he didn't go the macrobiotic route, which might be harmless for plump Betsy but could only
be devastating for him, lean as he'd always been, with all the cigarettes
and other appetite-suppressing chemicals he'd been welcoming into his
body for years; and now was hardly the time, as Stephen pointed out, to
be worried about cleaning up his act, and eliminating the chemical
additives and other pollutants that we're all blithely or not so blithely
feasting on, blithely since we're healthy, healthy as we can be; so far, Ira
said. Meat and potatoes is what I'd be happy to see him eating, Ursula
said wistfully. And spaghetti and clam sauce, Greg added. And thick
cholesterol-rich omelets with smoked mozzarella, suggested Yvonne,
who had flown from London for the weekend to see him. Chocolate
cake, said Frank. Maybe not chocolate cake, Ursula said, he's already
eating so much chocolate.
And when, not right away but still only three weeks later, he was
accepted into the protocol for the new drug, which took considerable
behind-the-scenes lobbying with the doctors, he talked less about being
ill, according to Donny, which seemed like a good sign, Kate felt, a sign
that he was not feeling like a victim, feeling not that he had a disease
but, rather, was living with a disease (that was the right cliche, wasn't
it?), a more hospitable arrangement, said Jan, a kind of cohabitation
which implied that it was something temporary, that it could be terminated, but terminated how, said Hilda, and when you say hospitable,
Jan, I hear hospital. And it was encouraging, Stephen insisted, that from
the start, at least from the time he was finally persuaded to make the
telephone call to his doctor, he was willing to say the name of the
disease, pronounce it often and easily, as if it were just another word,
like boy or gallery or cigarette or money or deal, as in no big deal, Paolo
interjected, because, as Stephen continued, to utter the name is a sign of
health, a sign that one has accepted being who one is, mortal, vulnerable, not exempt, not an exception after all, it's a sign that one is willing,
truly willing, to fight for one's life. And we must say the name, too, and
often, Tanya added, we mustn't lag behind him in honesty, or let him
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feel that, the effort of honesty having been made, it's something done
with and he can go on to other things. One is so much better prepared
to help him, Wesley replied. In a way he's fortunate, said Yvonne, who
had taken care of a problem at the New York store and was flying back
to London this evening, sure, fortunate, said Wesley, no one is shunning
him, Yvonne went on, no one's afraid to hug him or kiss him lightly on
the mouth, in London we are, as usual, a few years behind you, people I
know, people who would seem to be not even remotely at risk, are just
terrified, but I'm impressed by how cool and rational you all are; you
find us cool, asked Quentin. But I have to say, he's reported to have said,
I'm terrified, I find it very hard to read (and you know how he loves to
read, said Greg; yes, reading is his television, said Paolo) or to think, but
I don't feel hysterical. I feel quite hysterical, Lewis said to Yvonne. But
you're able to do something for him, that's wonderful, how I wish I
could stay longer, Yvonne answered, it's rather beautiful, I can't help
thinking, this Utopia of friendship you've assembled around him (this
pathetic Utopia, said Kate), so that the disease, Yvonne concluded, is not,
anymore, out there. Yes, don't you think we're more at home here, with
him, with the disease, said Tanya, because the imagined disease is so
much worse than the reality of him, whom we all love, each in our
fashion, having it. I know for me his getting it has quite demystified the
disease, said Jan, I don't feel afraid, spooked, as I did before he became
ill, when it was only news about remote acquaintances, whom I never
saw again after they became ill. But you know you're not going to come
down with the disease, Quentin said, to which Ellen replied, on her
behalf, that's not the point, and possibly untrue, my gynecologist says
that everyone is at risk, everyone who has a sexual life, because sexuality
is a chain that links each of us to many others, unknown others, and
now the greatest chain of being has become a chain of death as well. It's
not the same for you, Quentin insisted, it's not the same for you as it is
for me or Lewis or Frank or Paolo or Max, I'm more and more frightened, and I have every reason to be. I don't think about whether I'm at
risk or not, said Hilda, I know that I was afraid to know someone with
the disease, afraid of what I'd see, what I'd feel, and after the first day I
came to the hospital I felt so relieved. I'll never feel that way, that fear,
again; he doesn't seem different from me. He's not, Quentin said.
According to Lewis, he talked more often about those who visited more
often, which is natural, said Betsy, I think he's even keeping a tally.
And among those who came or checked in by phone every day, the
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609
inner circle as it were, those who were getting more points, there was
still a further competition, which was what was getting on Betsy's
nerves, she confessed to Jan; there's always that vulgar jockeying for
position around the bedside of the gravely ill, and though we all feel
suffused with virtue at our loyalty to him (speak for yourself, said Jan),
to the extent that we're carving time out of every day, or almost every
day, though some of us are dropping out, as Xavier pointed out, aren't
we getting at least as much out of this as he is. Are we, said Jan. We're
rivals for a sign from him of special pleasure over a visit, each stretching
for the brass ring of his favor, wanting to feel the most wanted, the true
nearest and dearest, which is inevitable with someone who doesn't
have a spouse and children or an official in-house lover, hierarchies that
no one would dare contest, Betsy went on, so we are the family he's
founded, without meaning to, without official titles and ranks (we, we,
snarled Quentin); and is it so clear, though some of us, Lewis and
Quentin and Tanya and Paolo, among others, are ex-lovers and all of us
more or less than friends, which one of us he prefers, Victor said (now
it's us, raged Quentin), because sometimes I think he looks forward
more to seeing Aileen, who has visited only three times, twice at the
hospital and once since he's been home, than he does you or me; but,
according to Tanya, after being very disappointed that Aileen hadn't
come, now he was angry, while, according to Xavier, he was not really
hurt but touchingly passive, accepting Aileen's absence as something he
somehow deserved. But he's happy to have people around, said Lewis;
he says when he doesn't have company he gets very sleepy, he sleeps
(according to Quentin), and then perks up when someone arrives, it's
important that he not feel ever alone. But, said Victor, there's one
person he hasn't heard from, whom he'd probably like to hear from
more than most of us; but she didn't just vanish, even right after she
broke away from him, and he knows exactly where she lives now, said
Kate, he told me he put in a call to her last Christmas Eve, and she said
it's nice to hear from you and Merry Christmas, and he was shattered,
according to Orson, and furious and disdainful, according to Ellen
(what do you expect of her, said Wesley, she was burned out), but Kate
wondered if maybe he hadn't phoned Nora in the middle of a sleepless
night, what's the time difference, and Quentin said no, I don't think so,
I think he wouldn't want her to know.
And when he was feeling even better and had regained the pounds he'd
shed right away in the hospital, though the refrigerator started to fill up
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with organic wheat germ and grapefruit and skimmed milk (he's worried about his cholesterol count, Stephen lamented), and told Quentin
he could manage by himself now, and did, he started asking everyone
who visited how he looked, and everyone said he looked great, so much
better than a few weeks ago, which didn't jibe with what anyone had
told him at that time; but then it was getting harder and harder to know
how he looked, to answer such a question honestly when among themselves they wanted to be honest, both for honesty's sake and (as Donny
thought) to prepare for the worst, because he'd been looking like this for
so long, at least it seemed so long, that it was as if he'd always been like
this, how did he look before, but it was only a few months, and those
words, pale and wan looking and fragile, hadn't they always applied?
And one Thursday Ellen, meeting Lewis at the door of the building,
said, as they rode up together in the elevator, how is he really? But you
see how he is, Lewis said tartly, he's fine, he's perfectly healthy, and Ellen
understood that of course Lewis didn't think he was perfectly healthy
but that he wasn't worse, and that was true, but wasn't it, well, almost
heartless to talk like that. Seems inoffensive to me, Quentin said, but I
know what you mean, I remember once talking to Frank, somebody,
after all, who has volunteered to do five hours a week of office work at
the Crisis Center (I know, said Ellen), and Frank was going on about
this guy, diagnosed almost a year ago, and so much further along, who'd
been complaining to Frank on the phone about the indifference of
some doctor, and had gotten quite abusive about the doctor, and Frank
was saying there was no reason to be so upset, the implication being
that he, Frank, wouldn't behave so irrationally, and I said, barely able to
control my scorn, but Frank, Frank, he has every reason to be upset, he's
dying, and Frank said, said according to Quentin, oh, I don't like to
think about it that way.
And it was while he was still home, recuperating, getting his weekly
treatment, still not able to do much work, he complained, but, according to Quentin, up and about most of the time and turning up at the
office several days a week, that bad news came about two remote
acquaintances, one in Houston and one in Paris, news that was intercepted by Quentin on the ground that it could only depress him, but
Stephen contended that it was wrong to lie to him, it was so important
for him to live in the truth; that had been one of his first victories, that
he was candid, that he was even willing to crack jokes about the disease,
but Ellen said it wasn't good to give him this end-of-the-world feeling,
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611
too many people were getting ill, it was becoming such a common
destiny that maybe some of the will to fight for his life would be drained
out of him if it seemed to be as natural as, well, death. Oh, Hilda said,
who didn't know personally either the one in Houston or the one in
Paris, but knew of the one in Paris, a pianist who specialized in twentieth-century Czech and Polish music, I have his records, he's such a
valuable person, and, when Kate glared at her, continued defensively, I
know every life is equally sacred, but that is a thought, another thought,
I mean, all these valuable people who aren't going to have their normal
four score as it is now, these people aren't going to be replaced, and it's
such a loss to the culture. But this isn't going to go on forever, Wesley
said, it can't, they're bound to come up with something (they, they,
muttered Stephen), but did you ever think, Greg said, that if some
people don't die, I mean even if they can keep them alive (they, they,
muttered Kate), they continue to be carriers, and that means, if you
have a conscience, that you can never make love, make love fully, as
you'd been wont — wantonly, Ira said — to do. But it's better than
dying, said Frank. And in all his talk about the future, when he allowed
himself to be hopeful, according to Quentin, he never mentioned the
prospect that even if he didn't die, if he were so fortunate as to be
among the first generation of the disease's survivors, never mentioned,
Kate confirmed, that whatever happened it was over, the way he had
lived until now, but, according to Ira, he did think about it, the end of
bravado, the end of folly, the end of trusting life, the end of taking life
for granted, and of treating life as something that, samurai-like, he
thought himself ready to throw away lightly, impudently; and Kate
recalled, sighing, a brief exchange she'd insisted on having as long as
two years ago, huddling on a banquette covered with steel-gray industrial carpet on an upper level of The Prophet and toking up for their
next foray onto the dance floor: she'd said hesitantly, for it felt foolish
asking a prince of debauchery to, well, take it easy, and she wasn't keen
on playing big sister, a role, as Hilda confirmed, he inspired in many
women, are you being careful, honey, you know what I mean. And he
replied, Kate went on, no, I'm not, listen, I can't, I just can't, sex is too
important to me, always has been (he started talking like that, according to Victor, after Nora left him), and if I get it, well, I get it. But he
wouldn't talk like that now, would he, said Greg; he must feel awfully
foolish now, said Betsy, like someone who went on smoking, saying I
can't give up cigarettes, but when the bad X-ray is taken even the most
besotted nicotine addict can stop on a dime. But sex isn't like cigarettes,
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is it, said Frank, and, besides, what good does it do to remember that he
was reckless, said Lewis angrily, the appalling thing is that you just have
to be unlucky once, and wouldn't he feel even worse if he'd stopped
three years ago and had come down with it anyway, since one of the
most terrifying features of the disease is that you don't know when you
contracted it, it could have been ten years ago, because surely this
disease has existed for years and years, long before it was recognized;
that is, named. Who knows how long (I think a lot about that, said Max)
and who knows (I know what you're going to say, Stephen interrupted)
how many are going to get it.
I'm feeling fine, he's reported to have said whenever someone asked him
how he was, which was almost always the first question anyone asked.
Or: I'm feeling better, how are you? But he said other things, too. I'm
playing leapfrog with myself, he is reported to have said, according to
Victor. And: There must be a way to get something positive out of this
situation, he's reported to have said to Kate. How American of him, said
Paolo. Well, said Betsy, you know the old American adage: When you've
got a lemon, make lemonade. The one thing I'm sure I couldn't take, Jan
said he said to her, is becoming disfigured, but Stephen hastened to
point out the disease doesn't take that form very often anymore, its
profile is mutating, and, in conversation with Ellen, wheeled up words
like blood-brain barrier; I never thought there was a barrier there, said
Jan. But he mustn't know about Max, Ellen said, that would really
depress him, please don't tell him, he'll have to know, Quentin said
grimly, and he'll be furious not to have been told. But there's time for
that, when they take Max off the respirator, said Ellen; but isn't it
incredible, Frank said, Max was fine, not feeling ill at all, and then to
wake up with a fever of a hundred and five, unable to breathe, but that's
the way it often starts, with absolutely no warning, Stephen said, the
disease has so many forms. And when, after another week had gone by,
he asked Quentin where Max was, he didn't question Quentin's account
of a spree in the Bahamas, but then the number of people who visited
regularly was thinning out, partly because the old feuds that had been
put aside through the first hospitalization and the return home had
resurfaced, and the flickering enmity between Lewis and Frank exploded, even though Kate did her best to mediate between them, and
also because he himself had done something to loosen the bonds of love
that united the friends around him, by seeming to take them all for
granted, as if it were perfectly normal for so many people to carve out so
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613
much time and attention for him, visit him every few days, talk about
him incessantly on the phone with each other; but, according to Paolo,
it wasn't that he was less grateful, it was just something he was getting
used to, the visits. It had become, with time, a more ordinary kind of
situation, a kind of ongoing party, first at the hospital and now since he
was home, barely on his feet again, it being clear, said Robert, that I'm
on the B list; but Kate said, that's absurd, there's no list; and Victor said,
but there is, only it's not he, it's Quentin who's drawing it up. He wants
to see us, we're helping him, we have to do it the way he wants, he fell
down yesterday on the way to the bathroom, he mustn't be told about
Max (but he already knew, according to Donny), it's getting worse.
When I was home, he is reported to have said, I was afraid to sleep, as I
was dropping off each night it felt like just that, as if I were falling down
a black hole, to sleep felt like giving in to death, I slept every night with
the light on; but here, in the hospital, I'm less afraid. And to Quentin he
said, one morning, the fear rips through me, it tears me open; and, to
Ira, it presses me together, squeezes me toward myself. Fear gives everything its hue, its high. I feel so, I don't know how to say it, exalted, he
said to Quentin. Calamity is an amazing high, too. Sometimes I feel so
well, so powerful, it's as if I could jump out of my skin. Am I going
crazy, or what? Is it all this attention and coddling I'm getting from
everybody, like a child's dream of being loved? Is it the drugs? I know it
sounds crazy but sometimes I think this is a fantastic experience, he said
shyly; but there was also the bad taste in the mouth, the pressure in the
head and at the back of the neck, the red, bleeding gums, the painful, if
pink-lobed, breathing, and his ivory pallor, color of white chocolate.
Among those who wept when told over the phone that he was back in
the hospital were Kate and Stephen (who'd been called by Quentin),
and Ellen, Victor, Aileen, and Lewis (who were called by Kate), and
Xavier and Ursula (who were called by Stephen). Among those who
didn't weep were Hilda, who said that she'd just learned that her seventy-five-year-old aunt was dying of the disease, which she'd contracted
from a transfusion given during her successful double bypass of five
years ago, and Frank and Donny and Betsy, but this didn't mean,
according to Tanya, that they weren't moved and appalled, and Quentin
thought they might not be coming soon to the hospital but would send
presents; the room, he was in a private room this time, was filling up
with flowers, and plants, and books, and tapes. The high tide of barely
suppressed acrimony of the last weeks at home subsided into the rou-
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SUSAN SONTAG
tines of hospital visiting, though more than a few resented Quentin's
having charge of the visiting book (but it was Quentin who had the
idea, Lewis pointed out); now, to insure a steady stream of visitors,
preferably no more than two at a time (this, the rule in all hospitals,
wasn't enforced here, at least on this floor; whether out of kindness or
inefficiency, no one could decide), Quentin had to be called first, to get
one's time slot, there was no more casual dropping by. And his mother
could no longer be prevented from taking a plane and installing herself
in a hotel near the hospital; but he seemed to mind her daily presence
less than expected, Quentin said; said Ellen it's we who mind, do you
suppose she'll stay long. It was easier to be generous with each other
visiting him here in the hospital, as Donny pointed out, than at home,
where one minded never being alone with him; coming here, in our
twos and twos, there's no doubt about what our role is, how we should
be, collective, funny, distracting, undemanding, light, it's important to
be light, for in all this dread there is gaiety, too, as the poet said, said
Kate. (His eyes, his glittering eyes, said Lewis.) His eyes looked dull,
extinguished, Wesley said to Xavier, but Betsy said his face, not just his
eyes, looked soulful, warm; whatever is there, said Kate, I've never been
so aware of his eyes; and Stephen said, I'm afraid of what my eyes show,
the way I watch him, with too much intensity, or a phony kind of
casualness, said Victor. And, unlike at home, he was cleanshaven each
morning, at whatever hour they visited him; his curly hair was always
combed; but he complained that the nurses had changed since he was
here the last time, and that he didn't like the change, he wanted everyone to be the same. The room was furnished now with some of his
personal effects (odd word for one's things, said Ellen), and Tanya
brought drawings and a letter from her nine-year-old dyslexic son,
who was writing now, since she'd purchased a computer; and Donny
brought champagne and some helium balloons, which were anchored
to the foot of his bed; tell me about something that's going on, he said,
waking up from a nap to find Donny and Kate at the side of his bed,
beaming at him; tell me a story, he said wistfully, said Donny, who
couldn't think of anything to say; you're the story, Kate said. And Xavier
brought an eighteenth-century Guatemalan wooden statue of Saint
Sebastian with upcast eyes and open mouth, and when Tanya said
what's that, a tribute to Eros past, Xavier said where I come from
Sebastian is venerated as a protector against pestilence. Pestilence symbolized by arrows? Symbolized by arrows. All people remember is the
body of a beautiful youth bound to a tree, pierced by arrows (of which
The Way We Live Now
615
he always seems oblivious, Tanya interjected), people forget that the
story continues, Xavier continued, that when the Christian women
came to bury the martyr they found him still alive and nursed him back
to health. And he said, according to Stephen, I didn't know Saint Sebastian didn't die. It's undeniable, isn't it, said Kate on the phone to
Stephen, the fascination of the dying. It makes me ashamed. We're
learning how to die, said Hilda, I'm not ready to learn, said Aileen; and
Lewis, who was coming straight from the other hospital, the hospital
where Max was still being kept in ICU, met Tanya getting out of the
elevator on the tenth floor, and as they walked together down the shiny
corridor past the open doors, averting their eyes from the other patients
sunk in their beds, with tubes in their noses, irradiated by the bluish
light from the television sets, the thing I can't bear to think about, Tanya
said to Lewis, is someone dying with the TV on.
He has that strange, unnerving detachment now, said Ellen, that's what
upsets me, even though it makes it easier to be with him. Sometimes he
was querulous. I can't stand them coming in here taking my blood every
morning, what are they doing with all that blood, he is reported to have
said; but where was his anger, Jan wondered. Mostly he was lovely to be
with, always saying how are you, how are you feeling. He's so sweet now,
said Aileen. He's so nice, said Tanya. (Nice, nice, groaned Paolo.) At first
he was very ill, but he was rallying, according to Stephen's best information, there was no fear of his not recovering this time, and the doctor
spoke of his being discharged from the hospital in another ten days if all
went well, and the mother was persuaded to fly back to Mississippi, and
Quentin was readying the penthouse for his return. And he was still
writing his diary, not showing it to anyone, though Tanya, first to arrive
one late-winter morning, and finding him dozing, peeked, and was
horrified, according to Greg, not by anything she read but by a progressive change in his handwriting: in the recent pages, it was becoming
spidery, less legible, and some lines of script wandered and tilted about
the page. I was thinking, Ursula said to Quentin, that the difference
between a story and a painting or photograph is that in a story you can
write, He's still alive. But in a painting or a photo you can't show "still."
You can just show him being alive. He's still alive, Stephen said.
1997
Pam Houston
The Best Girlfriend
You Never Had
FROM Other Voices
A PERFECT DAY in the city always starts like this: my friend Leo picks
me up and we go to a breakfast place called Rick and Ann's where they
make red flannel hash out of beets and bacon, and then we cross the Bay
Bridge to the gardens of the Palace of the Fine Arts to sit in the wet grass
and read poems out loud and talk about love.
The fountains are thick with black swans imported from Siberia, and
if it is a fine day and a weekend there will be wedding parties, almost
entirely Asian. The grooms wear smart gray pinstripe suits and the
women are in beaded gowns so beautiful they make your teeth hurt just
to look at them.
The roman towers of the palace facade rise above us, more yellow
than orange in the strengthening midday light. Leo has told me how the
towers were built for the 1915 Panama Pacific Exhibition out of plaster
and papier-mache, and even though times were hard the city raised the
money to keep them, to cast them in concrete so they would never go
away.
Leo is an architect, and his relationship to all the most beautiful
buildings in this city is astonishing given his age, only five years older
than 1 . 1 make my living as a photographer; since art school I've been
doing magazine work and living from grant to grant.
The house Leo built for himself is like a fairy tale, all towers and
angles, and the last wild peacock in Berkeley lives on his street. I live in
the Oakland hills in a tiny house on a street so windy you can't drive
more than ten miles per hour. I rented it because the ad said this: "Small
house in the trees with a garden and a fireplace. Dogs welcome, of
course." I am dogless for the moment, but it's not my natural condition.
770
PAM HOUSTON
You never know when I might get overwhelmed by a desire to go to the
pound.
It's a warm blue Saturday in November, and there are five Asian
weddings under way at the Palace of the Fine Arts. The wedding parties'
outfits do not match but are complementary, as if they have been
ordered especially, one for each arch of the golden facade.
Leo reads me a poem about a salt marsh at dawn while I set up my
old Leica. I always get the best stuff when nobody's paying me to shoot.
Like the time I caught a bride waltzing with one of the caterers behind
the hedgerow, his chef's cap bent to touch the top of her veil.
Then I read Leo a poem about longing in Syracuse. This is how we
have always spoken to each other, Leo and I, and it would be the most
romantic thing this century except that Leo is in love with Guinevere.
Guinevere is a Buddhist weaver who lives in a clapboard house on
Belvedere Island. She makes cloth on a loom she brought back from
Tibet. Although her tapestries and wall hangings have made her a small
fortune, she refuses to use the air conditioner in her Audi, even when
she's driving across the Sacramento Valley. Air conditioning, she says, is
just one of the things she does not allow herself.
That Guinevere seems not to know Leo is alive causes him no particular disappointment, and that she forgets — each time she meets
him — that she has met him several times before only adds to what he
calls her charming basket of imperfections. The only Buddha I could
love, he says, is one who is capable of forgetfulness and sin.
Guinevere is in love with a man in New York City who told her in a
letter that the only thing better than three thousand miles between him
and the object of his desire would be if she had a terminal illness. "I
could really get behind a relationship with a woman who had only six
months to live" was what he wrote. She showed me the words as if to
make sure they existed, though something in her tone made me think
she was proud.
The only person I know of who's in love with Leo (besides me, a
little) is a gay man named Raphael who falls in love with one straight
man after another and then buys each one a whole new collection of
CDs. They come, Leo says, as if from the Columbia House Record Club,
once a month like clockwork, in a plain cardboard wrapper, no return
address and no name. They are by artists most people have never heard
of, like the Nields and Boris Grebeshnikov; there are Andean folksongs
and hip-hop and beat.
Across the swan-bearing lake a wedding has just reached its comple-
The Best Girlfriend You Never Had
77i
tion. The groom is managing to look utterly solemn and completely
delirious with joy at the same time. Leo and I watch the kiss, and I snap
the shutter just as the kiss ends and the wedding party bursts into
applause.
"Sucker," Leo says.
"Oh, right," I say. "Like you wouldn't trade your life for his right this
minute."
"I don't know anything about his life," Leo says.
"You know he remembered to do all the things you forgot."
"I think I prefer it," Leo says, "when you reserve that particular
lecture for yourself." He points back across the lake, where the bride has
just leaped into her maid of honor's arms, and I snap the shutter again.
"Or for one of your commitment-phobic boyfriends," Leo adds.
"I guess the truth is, I can't blame them," I say. "I mean, if I saw me
coming down the street with all my stuff hanging out, I'm not so sure
I'd pick myself up and go trailing after."
"Of course you would," Leo says. "And it's because you would, and
because the chance of that happening is so slim, and because you hold
out hope anyway that it might... that's what makes you a great photographer."
"Greatness is nice," I tell him. "I want contact. I want someone's
warm breath on my face." I say it as if it's a dare, which we both know it
isn't. The flower girl across the lake is throwing handfuls of rose petals
straight up in the air.
I came to this city near the ocean over a year ago because I recently
spent a long time under the dark naked water of the Colorado River and
I took it as a sign that the river wanted me away. I had taken so many
pictures by then of the chaos of heaved-up rock and petrified sand and
endless sky that I'd lost my balance and fallen into them. I couldn't keep
separate anymore what was the land and what was me.
There was a man there named Josh who didn't want nearly enough
from me, and a woman called Thea who wanted way too much, and I
was sandwiched between them, one of those weaker rock layers like
limestone that disappears under pressure or turns into something
shapeless like oil.
I thought there might be an order to the city: straight lines, shiny
surfaces, and right angles that would give myself back to me, take
my work somewhere different, maybe to a safer place. Solitude was a
straight line too, and I believed it was what I wanted, so I packed
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PAM HOUSTON
whatever I could get into my pickup, left behind everything I couldn't
carry, including two pairs of skis, a whole darkroom full of photo
equipment, and the mountains I'd sworn again and again I couldn't live
without.
I pointed myself west down the endless two lanes of Highway 50 —
The Loneliest Road in America say the signs that rise out of the desert on
either side of it — all the way across Utah and Nevada to this white
shining city on the bay.
I got drunk on the city at first, the way some people do on vodka, the
way it lays itself out as if in a nest of madronas and eucalyptus, the way
it sparkles brighter even than the sparkling water that surrounds it, the
way the Golden Gate reaches out of it, like fingers, toward the wild wide
ocean that lies beyond.
I loved the smell of fresh blueberry muffins at the Oakland Grill
down on Third and Franklin, the train whistle sounding right outside
the front door, and tattooed men of all colors unloading crates of
cauliflower, broccoli, and peas.
Those first weeks I'd walk the streets for hours, shooting more film in
a day than I could afford in a week, all those lives in such dangerous and
unnatural proximity, all those stories my camera could tell.
I'd walk even the nastiest part, the blood pumping through my veins
as hard as when I first saw the Rocky Mountains so many years ago. One
night in the Tenderloin I rounded a corner and met a guy in a wheelchair head on, who aimed himself at me and covered me with urine.
Baptized, I said to my horrified friends the next day, anointed with the
nectar of the city gods.
Right off the bat I met a man named Gordon, and we'd drive down to
the Oakland docks in the evening and look out at the twenty-story
hydraulic boat lifts, which I said looked like a battalion of Doberman
pinschers protecting the harbor from anyone who might invade. Gordon's real name was Salvador, and he came from poor people, strawberry pickers in the Central Valley, two of his brothers stillborn from
Malathion poisoning. He left the valley and moved to the city when he
was too young by law to drive the truck he stole from his father's field
boss.
He left it double-parked in front of the Castro Theater, talked a
family in the Mission into trading work for floor space, changed his
name to Gordon, changed his age from fifteen to twenty, and applied
for a grant to study South American literature at San Francisco State.
He had his Ph.D. before he turned twenty, a tenure-track teaching job
The Best Girlfriend You Never Had
77i
at Berkeley by twenty-one. When he won his first teaching award, his
mother was in the audience; when their eyes met, she nodded her
approval, but when he looked for her afterward, she was nowhere to be
found.
"Can you believe it?" he said when he told the story, his voice such a
mixture of pride and disappointment that I didn't know which was
more unbelievable, that she had come or that she had gone.
"If one more woman I used to date turns into a lesbian," Leo says, "I'm
moving to Minneapolis."
The wedding receptions are well under way, and laughter bubbles
toward us across the lagoon.
"It's possible to take that as a compliment," I say, "if you want to bend
your mind that way."
"I don't," he says.
"Maybe it's just a choice a woman makes," I say, "when she feels she
has exhausted all her other options."
"Oh yeah, like you start out being a person," Leo says, "and then you
decide to become a car."
"Sometimes I think it's either that or Alaska," I say. "The odds there,
better than ten to one."
I remember a bumper sticker I saw once in Haines, Alaska, near the
place where the ferries depart for the lower forty-eight: Baby, it said,
when you leave here you 11 be ugly again.
"In Alaska," I say, "I've actually had men fall at my feet."
"I bet a few men have fallen at your feet down here," he says, and I try
to look him in the eye to see how he means it, but he keeps them fixed
on the poetry book.
He says, "Aren't I the best girlfriend you never had?"
The last woman Leo called the love of his life only let him see her
twice a week for three years. She was a cardiologist who lived in the
Marina who said she spent all day with broken hearts and she had no
intention of filling her time off with her own. At the start of the fourth
year, Leo asked her to raise the number of dates to three times a week,
and she immediately broke things off.
Leo went up on the bridge after that. This was before they put the
phones in, the ones that go straight to the counselors. It was a sunny day
and the tide was going out, making whitecaps as far as he could see into
the Pacific. After a while he came down, not because he felt better but
because of the way the numbers fell out. There had been 250 so far that
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PAM HOUSTON
year. Had the number been 4 or 199 or even 274, he says he might have
done it, but he wasn't willing to go down officially with a number as
meaningless as 251.
A woman sitting on the grass near us starts telling Leo how much he
looks like her business partner, but there's an edge to her voice I can't
identify, an insistence that means she's in love with the guy, or she's
crazy, or she's just murdered him this morning and she has come to the
Palace of the Fine Arts to await her impending arrest.
"The great thing about Californians," Leo says when the woman has
finally gotten up to leave, "is that they think it's perfectly okay to exhibit
all their neuroses in public as long as they apologize for them first."
Leo grew up like I did on the East Coast, eating Birdseye frozen
vegetables and Swanson's deep-dish meat pies on TV trays next to our
parents and their third martinis, watching What's My Line? and To Tell
the Truth on television, and talking about anything on earth except what
was wrong.
"Is there anyone you could fall in love with besides Guinevere?" I ask
Leo, after he's read a poem about tarantulas and digger wasps.
"There's a pretty woman at work," he says. "She calls herself the
Diva."
"Leo," I say, "write this down. I think it's a good policy to avoid any
woman who uses an article in her name."
There are policemen at the palace grounds today handing out information about how we can protect ourselves from an epidemic of carjackings that has been taking place in the city for the last five months.
The crime begins, the flyer tells us, with the criminal bumping the
victim's car from behind. When the victim gets out of the car to exchange information, the criminal hits her — and it's generally a woman
— over the head with a heavy object, leaves her on the sidewalk, steals
her car, and drives away.
The flyer says we are supposed to keep our windows rolled up when
the other driver approaches, keep the doors locked, and say through the
glass, "I'm afraid. I'm not getting out. Please follow me to the nearest
convenience store." It says under no circumstances should we ever let the
criminal drive us to crime scene number two.
"You couldn't do it, could you?" Leo asks, and slaps my arm like a
wise guy.
"What do you think they mean," I say, "by crime scene number two?"
"You're evading the question because you know the answer too well,"
The Best Girlfriend You Never Had
77i
he says. "You're the only person I know who'd get your throat slit sooner
than admit you're afraid."
"You know," I say to Leo, to change the subject, "you don't act much
like a person who wants kids more than anything."
"Yeah, and you don't act like a person who wants to be married with
swans."
"I'd do it," I say. "Right now. Step into that wedding dress, no questions asked."
"Lucy," Leo says, "seriously, do you have any idea how many steps
there are between you and that wedding dress?"
"No," I say. "Tell me."
"Fifty-five," he says. "At least fifty-five."
Before Gordon I had always dated the strong silent types, I think, so I
could invent anything I wanted to go on in their heads. Gordon and I
talked about words and the kind of pictures you could make so that you
didn't need them, and I thought what I always thought in the first ten
minutes: that after years and years of wild pitches, I'd for once in my life
thrown a strike.
It took me less than half a baseball season to discover my oversight:
Gordon had a jealous streak as vicious as a heat-seeking missile, and he
could make a problem out of a paper bag. We were asked to leave two
restaurants in one week alone, and it got to the point, fast, where if the
waitperson wasn't female, I'd ask if we could go somewhere else or have
another table.
Car mechanics, piano tuners, dry cleaners, toll takers — in Gordon's
mind they were all out to bed me, and I was out to make them want to.
A honey pot, he'd called me once, and he said he and all other men in
the Bay Area were a love-crazed swarm of bees.
When I told Guinevere how I'd fallen for Gordon, she said, "You only
get a few chances to feel your life all the way through. Before — you
know — you become unwilling."
I told her the things I was afraid to tell Leo: how the look on Gordon's
face turned from passion to anger, how he yelled at me in a store so loud
one time that the manager slipped me a note that said he would pray for
me, how each night I would stand in the street while he revved up his
engine and scream Please, Gordon, please, Gordon, don't drive away.
"At one time in my life I had breast implants just to please a man,"
she said. "Now I won't even take off my bracelets before bed."
776
PAM HOUSTON
Guinevere keeps a bowl of cards on her breakfast table between the
sugar and the coffee. They are called angel cards and she bought them at
the New Age store. Each card has a word printed on it, sisterhood or
creativity or romance, and there's a tiny angel with her body in a position that is supposed to illustrate the word.
That morning I picked balance, with a little angel perched in the
center of a teeter-totter, and when Guinevere reached in for her own
word she sighed in disgust. Without looking at the word again, without
showing it to me, she put the card in the trash can and reached to pick
another.
I went to the trash can and found it. The word was surrender, and the
angel was looking upward, with her arms outstretched.
"I hate that," she said, her mouth slightly twisted. "Last week I had to
throw away submit."
Guinevere brought me a cookie and a big box of Kleenex. She said
that choices can't be good or bad. There is only the event and the lessons
learned from it. She corrected my pronunciation gently and constantly:
the Bu in Buddha, she said, is like the pu in pudding and not like the boo
in ghost.
When I was twenty-five years old, I took home to my parents a boy
named Jeffrey I thought I wanted to marry. He was everything I believed
my father wanted. He had an MBA from Harvard. He had patches on
the elbows of his sportcoats. He played golf on a course that only
allowed men.
We spent the weekend drinking the wine and eating the pate Jeffrey's
mother had sent him from her fermette in the southwest of France.
Jeffrey let my father show him decades' worth of tennis trophies. He
played the piano while my mother sang her old torch songs.
I waited until I had a minute alone with my father. "Papa," I said — it
was what I always called him — "how do you like Jeffrey?"
"Lucille," he said, "I haven't ever liked any of your boyfriends, and I
don't expect I ever will. So why don't you save us both the embarrassment and not ask again?"
After that I went back to dating mechanics and river guides. My
mother kept Jeffrey's picture on the mantel till she died.
The first time I was mugged in the city, I'd been to the late show
all alone at the Castro Theatre. It's one of those magnificent old moviehouses with a huge marquee that lights up the sky like a carnival, a
The Best Girlfriend You Never Had
77i
ceiling that looks like it belongs in a Spanish cathedral, heavy red velvet
curtains laced with threads that sparkle gold, and a real live organist
who disappears into the floor when the previews begin.
I liked to linger there after the movie finished, watch the credits and
the artificial stars in the ceiling. That Tuesday I was the last person to
step out of the theater into a chilly and deserted night.
I had one foot off the curb when the man approached me, a little too
close for comfort even then.
"Do you have any change you can spare?" he said.
The truth was, I didn't. I had scraped the bottom of my purse to put
together enough quarters, nickels, and dimes to get into the movie, and
the guy behind the glass had let me in thirty-three cents short.
I said I was sorry and headed for the parking lot. I knew he was
behind me, but I didn't turn around. I should have gotten my keys out
before I left the theater, I thought. Shouldn't have stayed to see every
credit roll.
About ten steps from my car I felt a firm jab in the middle of my rib
cage.
"I bet you'd feel differently," the man said, "if I had a gun in my
hand."
"I might feel differently," I said, whirling around with more force
than I intended, "but I still wouldn't have any money."
He flinched, changed the angle of his body, just slightly back and
away. And when he did, when his eyes dropped from mine to his hand
holding whatever it was in his jacket pocket, I was reminded of a time I
almost walked into a female grizzly with a nearly grown cub. How we
had stood there posturing, how she had glanced down at her cub just
that way, giving me the opportunity to let her know she didn't need to
kill me. We could both go on our way.
"Look," I said. "I've had a really emotional day, okay?" As I talked, I
dug into my purse and grabbed my set of keys, a kind of weapon in their
own right. "And I think you ought to just let me get in the car and go
home."
While he considered this, I took the last steps to my car and got in. I
didn't look in the rearview mirror until I was on the freeway.
By mid-afternoon Leo and I have seen one too many happy couples get
married, and we drive over the Golden Gate to Tiburon to a restaurant
called Guymos where we drink margaritas made with Patron tequila
and eat ceviche appetizers and look out on Angel Island and the city —
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PAM HOUSTON
whitest of all from this perspective, rising like a mirage out of the
blue-green bay.
We watch the ferry dock, unload the suburbanites, then load them up
again for the twice-hourly trip to the city. We are jealous of their
starched shirts and brown loafers, how their clothes seem a testament to
the balance in their lives.
The fog rolls over and down the lanyard side of Mount Tamalpais,
and the city moves in and out of it, glistening like Galilee one moment,
then gray and dreamy like a ghost of itself the next, and then gone, like
a thought bubble, like somebody's good idea.
"Last night," I say, "I was walking alone down Telegraph Avenue. I
was in a mood, you know. Gordon and I had a fight about John
Lennon."
"Was he for or against?" Leo says.
"Against," I say, "but it doesn't matter. Anyway, I was scowling, maybe
crying a little, moving along pretty fast, and I step over this homeless
guy with his crutches and his little can and he says, 'I don't even want
any money from you, I'd just like you to smile.'"
"So did you?" Leo says.
"I did," I say. "I not only smiled, but I laughed too, and then I went
back and gave him all the money in my wallet, which was only eighteen
dollars, but still. I told him to be sure and use that line again."
"I love you," Leo says, and takes both of my hands in his. "I mean, in
the good way."
When I was four years old and with my parents in Palm Beach, Florida,
I pulled a seven-hundred-pound cement urn off its pedestal and onto
my legs, crushing both femurs. All the other urns on Worth Avenue had
shrubs in them trimmed into the shapes of animals, and this one, from
my three-foot point of view, appeared to be empty.
When they asked me why I had tried to pull myself up and into the
urn, I said I thought it had fish inside it and I wanted to see them,
though whether I had imagined actual fish or just tiny shrubs carved
into the shape of fish, I can't any longer say.
The urn was empty, of course, and waiting to be repaired, which is
why it toppled over onto me. My father rolled it off with some of that
superhuman strength you always hear about and picked me up — I was
screaming bloody murder — and held me until the ambulance came.
The next six weeks were the best of my childhood. I was hospitalized
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the entire time, surrounded by doctors who brought me presents,
nurses who read me stories, candy stripers who came to my room and
played games.
My parents, when they came to visit, were always happy to see me
and usually sober.
I spent the remaining years of my childhood fantasizing about illnesses and accidents that I hoped would send me to the hospital again.
One day last month Gordon asked me to go backpacking at Point Reyes
National Seashore, to prove to me, he said, that he could take an interest
in my life. I hadn't slept outside one single night since I came to the city,
he said, and I must miss the feel of hard ground underneath me, must
miss the smell of my tent in the rain.
Gordon borrowed a backpack, got the permit, freed the weekend,
studied the maps. I was teaching a darkroom workshop in Corte Madera on Saturday. Gordon would pick me up at four when the workshop ended; we'd have just enough time to drive up the coast to Point
Reyes Station and walk for an hour into the first camp. A long second
day would take us to the beach, the point with the lighthouse, and back
to the car with no time again to spare before dark.
I had learned by then how to spot trouble coming, and that morning
I waited in the car with Gordon while first one man, way too young for
me, and then another, way too old, entered the warehouse where my
workshop was going to be held.
I got out of the car without seeing the surfer, tall and blond and a
little breathtaking, portfolio under the arm that usually held the board.
I kept my eyes away from his, but his handshake found me anyway.
When he held the big door open, I went on through. I could hear the
screech of tires behind me through what felt like a ton of metal.
That Gordon was there when the workshop ended at 4:02 surprised
me a little. Then I got in the Pathfinder and saw only one backpack. He
drove up the coast to Point Reyes without speaking. Stinson, Bolinas,
Dogtown, and Olema. The white herons in Tomales Bay had their heads
tucked under their arms.
He stopped at the trailhead, got out, threw my pack into the dune
grass, opened my door, and tried with his eyes to pry me from my seat.
"I guess this means you're not coming with me," I said, imagining
how we could do it with one pack, tenacious in my hope that the day
could be saved.
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What you're thinking right now is why didn't I do it, get out of that
car without making eye contact, swing my pack on my back, and head
off down the trail? And when I tell you what I did do, which was to
crawl all the way to the back of the Pathfinder, holding on to the cargo
net as if a tornado were coming, and let go with one ear-splitting,
head-pounding scream after another till Gordon got back in the car, till
we got back down the coast, back on the 580, back over the bridge, and
back to Gordon's apartment, till he told me if I was quiet, he'd let me
stay, you would wonder how a person, even if she had done it, could
ever in a million years admit to such a thing.
Then I could tell you about the sixteen totaled cars in my first fifteen
winters. The Christmas Eve my father and I rolled a Plymouth Fury
from median to guardrail and back four full times with nine complete
revolutions, how they had to cut us out with chainsaws, how my father,
limber from the Seagram's, got away unhurt. I could tell you about the
neighbor girl who stole me away one time at the sound of my parents
shouting, how she refused to give me back to them even when the police
came with a warrant, how her ten-year-old hand must have looked
holding my three-year-old one, how in the end it became a funny story
that both sets of parents loved to tell. I could duplicate for you the
hollow sound an empty bottle makes when it hits Formica and the stove
is left on and the pan's started smoking and there's a button that says off
but no way to reach.
I could tell you the lie I told myself with Gordon. That anybody is
better than nobody. And you will know exactly why I stayed in the back
of that Pathfinder, unless you are lucky, and then you will not.
"Did I ever tell you about the time I got mugged?" Leo asks me, and we
both know he has but it's his favorite story.
"I'd like it," I say, "if you'd tell it again."
Before Leo built his house on the street with the peacocks, he lived in
the city between North Beach and the piers. He got mugged one night,
stepping out of his car fumbling for his house keys; the man had a gun
and sneaked up from behind.
What Leo had in his wallet was thirteen dollars, and when he offered
the money he thought the man would kill him on the spot.
"You got a cash card," the man said. "Let's find a machine."
"Hey," I say when he gets to this part, "that means you went to crime
scene number two."
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77i
The part I hate most is how he took Leo's glasses. He said he would
drive, but as it turned out he didn't know stick shifts, and the clutch
burned and smoked all the way up Nob Hill.
"My name's Bill," the man said, and Leo thought since they were
getting so friendly, he'd offer to work the clutch and the gearshift to save
what was left of his car. It wasn't until Leo got close to him, straddling
the gearbox and balanced against Bill's shoulder, that he smelled the
blood under Bill's jacket and knew that he'd been shot.
They drove like that to the Marina Safeway, Bill's eyes on the road and
his hands on the steering wheel, Leo working the clutch and the shifter
according to feel.
At the cash machine Leo looked for help but couldn't get anyone's
eyes to meet his, with Bill and his gun pressed so close to his side.
They all think we're a couple, he thought, and laughter bubbled up
inside him. He told Bill a lie about a hundred-dollar ATM limit, pushed
the buttons, handed over the money.
They drove back to Leo's that same Siamese way, and when they got
there Bill thanked Leo, shook his hand, asked one more favor before he
took off.
"I'm going to give you a phone number," Bill said. "My girlfriend in
Sacramento. I want you to call her and tell her I made it all right."
"Sure," Leo said, folding the paper.
"I want you to swear to God."
"Sure," Leo said, "I'll call her."
Bill put the end of the gun around Leo's belly button. "Say it, motherfucker, say, 'I swear to God.'"
"I swear to God," Leo said, and Bill walked away.
Back in his apartment, Leo turned on Letterman. When the shaking
stopped, he called the police.
"Not much we can do about it," the woman at the end of the line told
him. "We could come dust your car for fingerprints, but it would make
a hell of a mess."
Two hours later Leo looked in a phone book and called a Catholic
priest.
"No," the priest said, "you don't have to call her. You swore to God
under extreme circumstances, brought down upon you by a godless
man."
"I don't think that's the right answer," I had said when I first heard
the story, and I say it again, on cue, today. The first time we had talked
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about the nature of godlessness, and how if a situation requires swearing to God, it is by definition extreme.
But today I am thinking not of Bill or even of Leo's dilemma, but of
the girlfriend in Sacramento, her lover shot, bleeding, and hijacking
architects and still remembering to think of her.
And I wonder what it was about her that made her stay with a man
who ran from the law for a living, and if he made it home to her that
night, if she stood near him in the kitchen dressing his wounds. I
wonder how she saw herself, as what part of the story, and how much
she had invested in how it would end.
"I'm so deeply afraid," Gordon had said on the docks our first night
together, "that I am nothing but weak and worthless. So I take the
people close to me and try to break them, so they become as weak and
worthless as me."
I want to know the reason I could hear and didn't hear what he was
saying, the reason that I thought the story could end differently for me.
Things ended between Gordon and me in a bar in Jack London
Square one night when we were watching the 49ers play the Broncos. It
was Joe Montana's last year in San Francisco; rumors of the Kansas City
acquisition had already begun.
It was a close game late in the season; the Broncos had done what
they were famous for in those days, jumped out to a twenty-point lead
and then lost it incrementally as the quarters went by.
The game came right down to the two-minute warning, Elway and
Montana trading scoring drives so elegant it was as if they had shaken
hands on it before the game. A minute twenty-seven left, ball on the
Niners' twenty-two: Joe Montana had plenty of time and one last
chance to shine.
"Don't tell me you're a Bronco fan," a guy on the other side of me, a
late arrival, said.
"It's a tough job," I said, not taking my eyes off the TV set. For about
the hundredth time that evening the camera was off the action and on a
tearful, worried, or ecstatic Jennifer Montana, one lovely and protective
hand around each of her two beautiful blond little girls.
"Geez," I said, when the camera came back to the action several
seconds too late, "you'd think Joe Montana was the only football player
in America who had a wife."
The guy next to me laughed a short choppy laugh. Joe took his team
seventy-eight yards in seven plays for the win.
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On the way to his Pathfinder, Gordon said, "That's what I hate about
you sports fans. You create a hero like Joe Montana just so you have
somebody to knock down."
"I don't have anything against Joe Montana," I said. "I think he
throws the ball like an angel. I simply prefer watching him to watching
his wife."
"I saw who you preferred watching," Gordon said as we arrived at the
car and he slammed inside.
"Gordon," I said, "I don't even know what that man looked like."
The moon was fat and full over the parts of Oakland no one dares to
go to late at night, and I knew as I looked for a face in it that it didn't
matter a bit what I said.
Gordon liked to drive the meanest streets when he was feeling meanest, and he was ranting about my shaking my tail feathers and keeping
my pants zipped, and all I could think to do was remind him I was
wearing a skirt.
He squealed the brakes at the end of my driveway, and I got out and
moved toward the dark entryway.
"Aren't you going to invite me in?" he asked. And I thought about the
months full of nights just like this one when I asked his forgiveness,
when I begged him to stay.
"I want you to make your own decision," I said over my shoulder, and
he threw the car in second, gunned the engine, and screeched away.
First came the messages taped to my door, the words cut out from ten
different typefaces, held down with so many layers of tape they had the
texture of decoupage. Then came the slit tires, the Karo Syrup in my gas
tank, my box set of Dylan's Biography in a puddle at the foot of my
drive. One day I opened an envelope from a magazine I'd shot for to
find my paycheck ripped into a hundred pieces and then put back in the
envelope, back in the box.
Leo and I trade margaritas for late-afternoon lattes, and still the fog
won't lift all the way.
"What I imagine," I say, "is coming home one night and Gordon
emerging from between the sidewalk and the shadows, a Magnum .357
in his hand, and my last thought being, 'Well, you should have figured
that this was the next logical thing.'"
"I don't know why you need to be so tough about it," Leo says. "Can't
you let the police or somebody know?"
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PAM HOUSTON
I say, "This is not a good city to be dogless in."
Leo puts his arm around me; I can tell by the way he does it he thinks
he has to.
"Do you wish sometimes," I say, "that you could just disappear like
that city?"
"I can," Leo says. "I do. What I wish more is that when I wanted to, I
could stay."
The ferry docks again in front of us, and we sit quietly until the
whistles are finished and the boat has once again taken off.
"Are you ever afraid," I say to Leo, "that there are so many things
you need swirling around inside you that they will just overtake you,
smother you, suffocate you till you die?"
"I don't think so," Leo says.
"I don't mean sex," I say, "or even love exactly — just all that want
that won't let go of you, that even if you changed everything right now
it's too late already to ever be full."
Leo keeps his eyes fixed on the city, which is back out again, the Coit
Tower reaching and leaning slightly like a stack of pepperoni pizza pies.
"Until only a few years ago, I used to break into a stranger's house
every six months like clockwork," he says. "Is that something like what
you mean?"
"Exactly," I say. A band of fog sweeps down, faster than the others,
and takes away the city, even the site of Leo's mugging, even the apartment where Gordon now stays.
When I was eighteen years old, I met my parents in Phoenix, Arizona, to
watch Penn State play USC in the Fiesta Bowl. I'd driven from Ohio,
they'd flown from Pennsylvania, and the three of us — for the first time
ever — shared my car.
My father wanted me to drive them through the wealthy suburbs,
places with names like Carefree and Cave Creek. He'd been drinking earlier in the day than usual, they both had, and he got it into his
head that he wanted to see the world's highest fountain shoot three
hundred gallons of water per minute into the parched and evaporative
desert air.
We were halfway through Cave Creek, almost to the fountain, when
the cop pulled me over.
"I'm sorry to bother you," he said, "but I've been tailing you for four
or five minutes, and I have to tell you, I really don't know where to
start."
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The cop's nameplate said Martin "Mad Dog" Jenkins. My father let
out a sigh that hung in the car like a fog.
"Well, first," Officer Jenkins said, "I clocked you going 43 in a 25.
Then you rolled through not one but two stop signs without coming to
a safe and complete stop, and you made a right-hand turn into the
center lane."
"Jesus Christ," my father said.
"You've got one taillight out," Officer Jenkins said, "and either your
turn signals are burned out too, or you are electing not to use them."
"Are you hearing this?" my father said to the air.
"May I see your license and registration?"
"I left my license in Ohio," I said.
The car was silent.
"Give me a minute, then," Officer Jenkins said, "and I'll call it in."
"What I don't know," my father said, "is how a person with so little
sense of responsibility gets a driver's license in this country to begin
with." He flicked the air vent open and closed, open and closed. "I
mean, you gotta wonder if she should even be let out of the house in the
morning."
"Why don't you just say it, Robert," my mother said. "Say what you
mean. Say Daughter, I hate you." Her voice started shaking. "Everybody
sees it. Everybody knows it. Why don't you say it out loud?"
"Ms. O'Rourke?" Officer Jenkins was back at the window.
"Let's hear it," my mother went on. "Officer, I hate my daughter."
The cop's eyes flicked for a moment into the back seat.
"According to the information I received, Ms. O'Rourke," Officer
Jenkins said, "you are required to wear corrective lenses."
"That's right," I said.
"And you are wearing contacts now?" There was something like hope
in his voice.
"No, sir."
"She can't even lie?" my father asked. "About one little thing?"
"Okay now, on three," my mother said. "Daughter, I wish you had
never been born."
"Ms. O'Rourke," Officer Jenkins said, "I'm just going to give you a
warning today." My father bit off the end of a laugh.
"Thank you very much," I said.
"I hate to say this, Ms. O'Rourke," the cop said, "but there's nothing I
could do to you that's going to feel like punishment." He held out his
hand for me to shake. "You drive safely now," he said, and he was gone.
786
PAM HOUSTON
When the Fiesta Bowl was over, my parents and I drove back up to
Carefree to attend a New Year's Eve party given by a gay man my mother
knew who belonged to the wine club called the Royal Order of the
Grape. My father wasn't happy about it, but he was silent. I just wanted
to watch the ball come down on TV like I had every year of my
childhood with the babysitter, but the men at the party were showing
home movie after home movie of the club's indoctrination ceremony,
while every so often two or three partygoers would get taken to the
cellar to look at the bottles and taste.
When my father tried to light a cigarette, he got whisked outside
faster than I had ever seen him move. I was too young to be taken to the
cellar, too old to be doted on, so after another half-hour of being
ignored I went outside to join my father.
The lights of Phoenix sparkled every color below us in the dark.
"Lucille," he said, "when you get to be my age, don't ever spend New
Year's Eve in a house where they won't let you smoke."
"Okay," I said.
"Your mother," he said, as he always did.
"I know," I said, even though I didn't.
"We just don't get love right, this family, b u t . . . " He paused, and the
sky above Phoenix exploded into color, umbrellas of red and green and
yellow. I'd never seen fireworks before, from the top.
"Come in, come in, for the New Year's toast!" Our host was calling us
from the door. I wanted more than anything for my father to finish his
sentence, but he stabbed out his cigarette, got up, and walked inside. I've
finished it for him a hundred times, but never to my satisfaction.
We pay the bill and Leo informs me that he has the temporary use of a
twenty-seven-foot sailboat in Sausalito that belongs to a man he hardly
knows. The fog has lifted enough for us to see the place where the sun
should be, and it's brighter yet out by the Golden Gate, and we take the
little boat out and aim for the brightness, the way a real couple might on
a Saturday afternoon.
It's a squirrelly boat, designed to make fast moves in a light wind, and
Leo gives me the tiller two hundred yards before we pass under the dark
shadow of the bridge. I am just getting the feel of it when Leo looks over
his shoulder and says, "It appears we are in a race," and I look too, and
there is a boat bearing down on us, twice our size, ten times, Leo tells
me, our boat's value.
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"Maybe you should take it then," I say.
"You're doing fine," he says. "Just set your mind on what's out there
and run for it."
At first all I can think about is Leo sitting up on top of the bridge
running numbers in his head, and a story Gordon told me where two
guys meet up there on the walkway and find out they are both survivors
of a previous jump.
Then I let my mind roll out past the cliffs and the breakers, past the
Marin headlands and all the navigation buoys, out to some place where
the swells swallow up the coastline and Hawaii is the only thing between
me and forever, and what are the odds of hitting it if I just head for the
horizon and never change my course?
I can hear the big boat's bow breaking right behind us, and I set my
mind even harder on a universe with nothing in it except deep blue
water.
"You scared him," Leo says. "He's coming about."
The big boat turns away from us, back toward the harbor, just as the
giant shadow of the bridge crosses our bow. Leo jumps up and gives me
an America's Cup hug. Above us the great orange span of the thing is
trembling, just slightly, in the wind.
We sail on out to the edge of the headlands, where the swells get
big enough to make us both a little sick and it's finally Leo who takes
the tiller from my hand and turns the boat around. It's sunny as Bermuda out here, and I'm still so high from the boat race that I can tell
myself there's really nothing to be afraid of. Like sometimes when you
go to a movie and you get so lost in the story that when you're walking out of the theater you can't remember anything at all about your
own life.
You might forget, for example, that you live in a city where people
have so many choices they throw words away, or so few they will bleed
in your car for a hundred dollars. You might forget eleven or maybe
twelve of the sixteen-in-a-row totaled cars. You might forget that you
never expected to be alone at thirty-two or that a crazy man might be
waiting for you with a gun when you get home tonight or that all the
people you know — without exception — have their hearts all wrapped
around someone who won't ever love them back.
"I'm scared," I say to Leo, and this time his eyes come to meet mine.
The fog is sitting in the center of the bay as if it's over a big pot of soup
and we're about to enter it.
788
PAM HOUSTON
"I can't help you," Leo says, and squints his eyes against the mist in
the air.
When I was two years old my father took me down to the beach in New
Jersey, carried me into the surf until the waves were crashing onto his
chest, and then threw me in like a dog, to see, I suppose, whether I
would sink or float.
My mother, who was from high in the Rocky Mountains, where all
the water was too cold for swimming, and who had been told since birth
never to get her face wet (she took only baths, never showers), got so
hysterical by the water's edge that lifeguards from two different stands
leapt to my rescue.
There was no need, however. By the time they arrived at my father's
side I had passed the flotation test, had swum as hard and fast as my
untried limbs would carry me, and my father had me up on his shoulders, smiling and smug and a little surprised.
I make Leo drive back by the Palace of the Fine Arts on the way home,
though the Richmond Bridge is faster. The fog has moved in there too,
and the last of the brides are worrying their hairdos while the grooms
help them into big dark cars that will whisk them away to the honeymoon suite at the Four Seasons, or to the airport to board planes bound
for Tokyo or Rio.
Leo stays in the car while I walk back to the pond. The sidewalk is
littered with rose petals and that artificial rice that dissolves in the rain.
Even the swans have paired off and are swimming that way, the feathers
of their inside wings barely touching, their long necks bent slightly
toward each other, the tips of their beaks almost closing the M.
I take the swans' picture, and a picture of the rose petals bleeding
onto the sidewalk. I step up under the tallest of the arches and bow to
my imaginary husband. He takes my hand and we turn to the minister,
who bows to us, and we bow again.
"I'm scared," I say again, but this time it comes out stronger, almost
like singing, as though it might be the first step — in fifty-five or a
thousand — toward something like a real life, the very first step toward
something that will last.
Biographical Notes
The author of more than one hundred short stories and ten novels, Alice
A d a m s (1926- ) lives and writes in San Francisco. Her most recent novels
are Medicine Men, A Southern Exposure, and Caroline's Daughters. She has
received numerous awards, including the O. Henry Special Award for Continuing Achievement.
S h e r w o o d A n d e r s o n (1876-1941) began his writing career in 1913 after serving in the Spanish-American War, working as a copywriter, and managing a
paint plant. He initially received critical notice for Winesburg, Ohio, the first of
several collections of stories. His other works include poetry, criticism, essays,
and novels, including Dark Laughter; Tar, A Midwest Childhood; and A Story-
Teller's Story.
Known for his irreverent, innovative fiction, D o n a l d B a r t h e l m e (1931-1989)
wrote a dozen books, including the novels Sadness, Snow White, and The Dead
Father. His story collections include Come Back, Dr. Caligari; Unspeakable
Practices, Unnatural Acts; City Life; Amateurs; and Great Days. He won the
National Book Award in 1972 for The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine, a book for
children, and was nominated for the National Book Award in 1974 for Guilty
Pleasures.
One of the most distinctive voices of her generation, A n n Beattie ( 1 9 4 7 - ) is
the author of several novels, including Chilly Scenes of Winter, Falling in Place,
Love Always, Picturing Will, and Another You. Her story collections include The
Burning House, Distortions, Where You'll Find Me and Other Stories, What Was
Mine, Secrets and Surprises, and, most recently, Convergences: New and Selected
Stories.
Saul B e l l o w ( 1 9 1 5 - ) was born in Canada and grew up in Chicago. His works
include The Dangling Man, Henderson the Rain King, Seize the Day, and Mosby's
Memoirs and Other Stories. The recipient of many literary awards, he won the
National Book Award in 1954 for The Adventures of Augie March, in 1965 for
1989
Lorrie Moore
You're Ugly, Too
FROM The New Yorker
YOU HAD TO GET OUT of them occasionally, those Illinois towns with
the funny names: Paris, Oblong, Normal. Once, when the Dow Jones
dipped two hundred points, a local paper boasted the banner headline
"NORMAL MAN MARRIES OBLONG WOMAN." They knew what was
important. They did! But you had to get out once in a while, even if it
was just across the border to Terre Haute for a movie.
Outside of Paris, in the middle of a large field, was a scatter of brick
buildings, a small liberal-arts college by the improbable name of
Hilldale-Versailles. Zoe Hendricks had been teaching American history
there for three years. She taught "The Revolution and Beyond" to freshmen and sophomores, and every third semester she had the senior
seminar for majors, and although her student evaluations had been
slipping in the last year and a half — Professor Hendricks is often late for
class and usually arrives with a cup of hot chocolate, which she offers the
class sips of— generally the department of nine men was pleased to
have her. They felt she added some needed feminine touch to the corridors — that faint trace of Obsession and sweat, the light, fast clicking
of heels. Plus they had had a sex-discrimination suit, and the dean had
said, well, it was time.
The situation was not easy for her, they knew. Once, at the start of last
semester, she had skipped into her lecture hall singing "Getting to Know
You" — all of it. At the request of the dean, the chairman had called her
into his office, but did not ask her for an explanation, not really. He
asked her how she was and then smiled in an avuncular way. She said,
"Fine," and he studied the way she said it, her front teeth catching on
the inside of her lower Up. She was almost pretty, but her face showed
the strain and ambition of always having been close but not quite. There
You're Ugly, Too
653
was too much effort with the eyeliner, and her earrings, worn, no doubt,
for the drama her features lacked, were a little frightening, jutting out
the sides of her head like antennae.
"I'm going out of my mind," said Zoe to her younger sister, Evan, in
Manhattan. Professor Hendricks seems to know the entire soundtrack to
"The King and I." Is this history? Zoe phoned her every Tuesday.
"You always say that," said Evan, "but then you go on your trips and
vacations and then you settle back into things and then you're quiet for
a while and then you say you're fine, you're busy, and then after a while
you say you're going crazy again, and you start all over." Evan was a
part-time food designer for photo shoots. She cooked vegetables in
green dye. She propped up beef stew with a bed of marbles and shopped
for new kinds of silicone sprays and plastic ice cubes. She thought her
life was O.K. She was living with her boyfriend of many years, who was
independently wealthy and had an amusing little job in book publishing. They were five years out of college, and they lived in a luxury
midtown high rise with a balcony and access to a pool. "It's not the
same as having your own pool," Evan was always sighing, as if to let Zoe
know that, as with Zoe, there were still things she, Evan, had to do without.
"Illinois. It makes me sarcastic to be here," said Zoe on the phone.
She used to insist it was irony, something gently layered and sophisticated, something alien to the Midwest, but her students kept calling
it sarcasm, something they felt qualified to recognize, and now she had
to agree. It wasn't irony. "What is your perfume?" a student once asked
her. "Room freshener," she said. She smiled, but he looked at her, unnerved.
Her students were by and large good midwesterners, spacey with
estrogen from large quantities of meat and eggs. They shared their
parents' suburban values; their parents had given them things, things,
things. They were complacent. They had been purchased. They were
armed with a healthy vagueness about anything historical or geographic. They seemed actually to know very little about anything, but
they were good-natured about it. "All those states in the East are so tiny
and jagged and bunched up," complained one of her undergraduates
the week she was lecturing on "The Turning Point of Independence:
The Battle at Saratoga." "Professor Hendricks, you're from Delaware
originally, right?" the student asked her.
"Maryland," corrected Zoe.
"Aw," he said, waving his hand dismissively. "New England."
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Her articles — chapters toward a book called Hearing the One About:
Uses of Humor in the American Presidency — were generally well received, though they came slowly for her. She liked her pieces to have
something from every time of day in them — she didn't trust things
written in the morning only — so she reread and rewrote painstakingly.
No part of a day — its moods, its light — was allowed to dominate. She
hung on to a piece for a year sometimes, revising at all hours, until the
entirety of a day had registered there.
The job she'd had before the one at Hilldale-Versailles had been at a
small college in New Geneva, Minnesota, Land of the Dying Shopping
Mall. Everyone was so blond there that brunettes were often presumed
to be from foreign countries. Just because Professor Hendricks is from
Spain doesn't give her the right to be so negative about our country There
was a general emphasis on cheerfulness. In New Geneva you weren't
supposed to be critical or complain. You weren't supposed to notice that
the town had overextended and that its shopping malls were raggedy
and going under. You were never to say you weren't "fine, thank you —
and yourself?" You were supposed to be Heidi. You were supposed to lug
goat milk up the hills and not think twice. Heidi did not complain.
Heidi did not do things like stand in front of the new IBM photocopier
saying, "If this fucking Xerox machine breaks on me one more time, I'm
going to slit my wrists."
But now in her second job, in her fourth year of teaching in the
Midwest, Zoe was discovering something she never suspected she had: a
crusty edge, brittle and pointed. Once she had pampered her students,
singing them songs, letting them call her at home even, and ask personal questions, but now she was losing sympathy. They were beginning to seem different. They were beginning to seem demanding and
spoiled.
"You act," said one of her senior-seminar students at a scheduled conference, "like your opinion is worth more than everyone else's in the
class."
Zoe's eyes widened. "I am the teacher," she said. "I do get paid to act
like that." She narrowed her gaze at the student, who was wearing a big
leather bow in her hair like a cowgirl in a TV ranch show. "I mean,
otherwise everybody in the class would have little offices and office
hours." Sometimes Professor Hendricks will take up the class's time just
talking about movies she's seen. She stared at the student some more,
then added, "I bet you'd like that."
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"Maybe I sound whiny to you," said the girl, "but I simply want my
history major to mean something."
"Well, there's your problem," said Zoe, and, with a smile, she showed
the student to the door. "I like your bow," she said.
Zoe lived for the mail, for the postman — that handsome blue jay —
and when she got a real letter with a real full-price stamp from someplace else, she took it to bed with her and read it over and over. She also
watched television until all hours and had her set in the bedroom — a
bad sign. Professor Hendricks has said critical things about Fawn Hall,
the Catholic religion, and the whole state of Illinois. It is unbelievable. At
Christmastime she gave twenty-dollar tips to the mailman and to Jerry,
the only cabbie in town, whom she had gotten to know from all her
rides to and from the Terre Haute airport, and who, since he realized
such rides were an extravagance, often gave her cut rates.
"I'm flying in to visit you this weekend," announced Zoe.
"I was hoping you would," said Evan. "Charlie and I are having a
party for Halloween. It'll be fun."
"I have a costume already. It's a bonehead. It's this thing that looks
like a giant bone going through your head."
"Great," said Evan.
"It is, it's great."
"All I have is my moon mask from last year and the year before. I'll
probably end up getting married in it."
"Are you and Charlie getting married?" Zoe felt slightly alarmed.
"Hmmmmmmnnno, not immediately."
"Don't get married."
"Why?"
"Just not yet. You're too young."
"You're only saying that because you're five years older than I am and
you're not married."
"I'm not married? Oh, my God," said Zoe, "I forgot to get married."
Zoe had been out with three men since she'd come to HilldaleVersailles. One of them was a man in the municipal bureaucracy who
had fixed a parking ticket she'd brought in to protest and then asked her
out for coffee. At first, she thought he was amazing — at last, someone
who did not want Heidi! But soon she came to realize that all men, deep
down, wanted Heidi. Heidi with cleavage. Heidi with outfits. The parking-ticket bureaucrat soon became tired and intermittent. One cool fall
day, in his snazzy, impractical convertible, when she asked him what was
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LORRIE MOORE
wrong he said, "You would not be ill served by new clothes, you know."
She wore a lot of gray-green corduroy. She had been under the impression that it brought out her eyes, those shy stars. She flicked an ant from
her sleeve.
"Did you have to brush that off in the car?" he said, driving. He
glanced down at his own pectorals, giving first the left, then the right, a
quick survey. He was wearing a tight shirt.
"Excuse me?"
He slowed down at an amber light and frowned. "Couldn't you have
picked it up and thrown it outside?"
"The ant? It might have bitten me. I mean, what difference does it
make?"
"It might have bitten you! Ha! How ridiculous! Now it's going to lay
eggs in my car!"
The second guy was sweeter, lunkier, though not insensitive to certain
paintings and songs, but too often, too, things he'd do or say would
startle her. Once, in a restaurant, he stole the garnishes off her dinner
plate and waited for her to notice. When she didn't, he finally thrust his
fist across the table and said, "Look," and when he opened it, there was
her parsley sprig and her orange slice crumpled to a wad. Another time,
he described to her his recent trip to the Louvre. "And there I was in
front of Delacroix's The Barque of Dante, and everyone else had wandered off, so I had my own private audience with it, all those agonized
shades splayed in every direction, and there's this motion in that painting that starts at the bottom, swirling and building up into the red
fabric of Dante's hood, swirling out into the distance, where you see
these orange flames — " He was breathless in the telling. She found this
touching, and smiled in encouragement. "A painting like that," he said,
shaking his head. "It just makes you shit."
"I have to ask you something," said Evan. "I know every woman
complains about not meeting men, but really, on my shoots I meet a lot
of men. And they're not all gay, either." She paused. "Not anymore."
"What are you asking?"
The third guy was a political-science professor named Murray Peterson, who liked to go out on double dates with colleagues whose wives he
was attracted to. Usually, the wives would consent to flirt with him.
Under the table sometimes there was footsie, and once there was even
kneesie. Zoe and the husband would be left to their food, staring into
their water glasses, chewing like goats. "Oh, Murray," said one wife, who
had never finished her master's in physical therapy and wore great
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clothes. "You know, I know everything about you: your birthday, your
license-plate number. I have everything memorized. But then that's the
kind of mind I have. Once, at a dinner party, I amazed the host by
getting up and saying goodbye to every single person there, first and last
names."
"I knew a dog who could do that," said Zoe with her mouth full.
Murray and the wife looked at her with vexed and rebuking expressions,
but the husband seemed suddenly twinkling and amused. Zoe swallowed. "It was a talking Lab, and after about ten minutes of listening to
the dinner conversation this dog knew everyone's name. You could say,
'Take this knife to Murray Peterson,' and it would."
"Really," said the wife, frowning, and Murray Peterson never called
again.
"Are you seeing anyone?" said Evan. "I'm asking for a particular
reason. I'm not just being like Mom."
"I'm seeing my house. I'm tending to it when it wets, when it cries,
when it throws up." Zoe had bought a mint-green ranch house near
campus, though now she was thinking that maybe she shouldn't have. It
was hard to live in a house. She kept wandering in and out of the rooms,
wondering where she had put things. She went downstairs into the
basement for no reason at all except that it amused her to own a basement. It also amused her to own a tree.
Her parents, in Maryland, had been very pleased that one of their
children had at last been able to afford real estate, and when she closed
on the house they sent her flowers with a congratulations card. Her
mother had even UPS'd a box of old decorating magazines saved over
the years — photographs of beautiful rooms her mother used to moon
over, since there never had been any money to redecorate. It was like
getting her mother's pornography, that box, inheriting her drooledupon fantasies, the endless wish and tease that had been her life. But to
her mother it was a rite of passage that pleased her. "Maybe you will get
some ideas from these," she had written. And when Zoe looked at the
photographs, at the bold and beautiful living rooms, she was filled with
longing. Ideas and ideas of longing.
Right now Zoe's house was rather empty. The previous owner had
wallpapered around the furniture, leaving strange gaps and silhouettes
on the walls, and Zoe hadn't done much about that yet. She had bought
furniture, then taken it back, furnishing and unfurnishing, preparing
and shedding, like a womb. She had bought several plain pine chests to
use as love seats or boot boxes, but they came to look to her more and
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more like children's coffins, so she returned them. And she had recently
bought an Oriental rug for the living room, with Chinese symbols on it
she didn't understand. The salesgirl had kept saying she was sure they
meant "Peace" and "Eternal Life," but when Zoe got the rug home she
worried. What if they didn't mean "Peace" and "Eternal Life"? What if
they meant, say, "Bruce Springsteen"? And the more she thought about
it, the more she became convinced she had a rug that said "Bruce
Springsteen," and so she returned that, too.
She had also bought a little baroque mirror for the front entryway,
which, she had been told by Murray Peterson, would keep away evil
spirits. The mirror, however, tended to frighten her, startling her with
an image of a woman she never recognized. Sometimes she looked
puffier and plainer than she remembered. Sometimes shifty and dark.
Most times she just looked vague. "You look like someone I know,"
she had been told twice in the last year by strangers in restaurants in
Terre Haute. In fact, sometimes she seemed not to have a look of her
own, or any look whatsoever, and it began to amuse her that her
students and colleagues were able to recognize her at all. How did they
know? When she walked into a room, how did she look so that they
knew it was she? Like this? Did she look like this? And so she returned
the mirror.
"The reason I'm asking is that I know a man I think you should
meet," said Evan. "He's fun. He's straight. He's single. That's all I'm going to say."
"I think I'm too old for fun," said Zoe. She had a dark bristly hair in
her chin, and she could feel it now with her finger. Perhaps when you
had been without the opposite sex for too long, you began to resemble
them. In an act of desperate invention, you began to grow your own. "I
just want to come, wear my bonehead, visit with Charlie's tropical fish,
ask you about your food shoots."
She thought about all the papers on "Our Constitution: How It
Affects Us" she was going to have to correct. She thought about how she
was going in for ultrasound tests on Friday, because, according to her
doctor and her doctor's assistant, she had a large, mysterious growth
in her abdomen. Gallbladder, they kept saying. Or ovaries or colon.
"You guys practice medicine?" asked Zoe, aloud, after they had left
the room. Once, as a girl, she brought her dog to a vet, who had told
her, "Well, either your dog has worms or cancer or else it was hit by
a car."
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She was looking forward to New York.
"Well, whatever. We'll just play it cool. I can't wait to see you, hon.
Don't forget your bonehead," said Evan.
"A bonehead you don't forget," said Zoe.
"I suppose," said Evan.
The ultrasound Zoe was keeping a secret, even from Evan. "I feel like
I'm dying," Zoe had hinted just once on the phone.
"You're not dying," said Evan, "you're just annoyed."
"Ultrasound," Zoe now said jokingly to the technician who put the cold
jelly on her bare stomach. "Does that sound like a really great stereo
system or what?"
She had not had anyone make this much fuss over her bare stomach
since her boyfriend in graduate school, who had hovered over her
whenever she felt ill, waved his arms, pressed his hands upon her navel,
and drawled evangelically, "Heal! Heal for thy Baby Jesus' sake!" Zoe
would laugh and they would make love, both secretly hoping she would
get pregnant. Later they would worry together, and he would sink a
cheek to her belly and ask whether she was late, was she late, was she
sure, she might be late, and when after two years she had not gotten
pregnant they took to quarreling and drifted apart.
"O.K.," said the technician absently.
The monitor was in place, and Zoe's insides came on the screen in all
their gray and ribbony hollowness. They were marbled in the finest
gradations of black and white, like stone in an old church or a picture
of the moon. "Do you suppose," she babbled at the technician, "that
the rise in infertility among so many couples in this country is due
to completely different species trying to reproduce?" The technician
moved the scanner around and took more pictures. On one view in
particular, on Zoe's right side, the technician became suddenly alert, the
machine he was operating clicking away.
Zoe stared at the screen. "That must be the growth you found there,"
suggested Zoe.
"I can't tell you anything," said the technician rigidly. "Your doctor
will get the radiologist's report this afternoon and will phone you then."
"I'll be out of town," said Zoe.
"I'm sorry," said the technician.
Driving home, Zoe looked in the rearview mirror and decided she
looked — well, how would one describe it? A little wan. She thought of
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the joke about the guy who visits his doctor and the doctor says, "Well,
I'm sorry to say, you've got six weeks to live."
"I want a second opinion," says the guy. You act like your opinion is
worth more than everyone else's in the class.
"You want a second opinion? O.K.," says the doctor. "You're ugly,
too." She liked that joke. She thought it was terribly, terribly funny.
She took a cab to the airport. Jerry the cabbie was happy to see her.
"Have fun in New York," he said, getting her bag out of the trunk. He
liked her, or at least he always acted as if he did. She called him Jare.
"Thanks, Jare."
"You know, I'll tell you a secret: I've never been to New York. I'll tell
you two secrets: I've never been on a plane." And he waved at her sadly
as she pushed her way in through the terminal door. "Or an escalator!"
he shouted.
The trick to flying safely, Zoe always said, was to never buy a discount
ticket and to tell yourself you had nothing to live for anyway, so that
when the plane crashed it was no big deal. Then, when it didn't crash,
when you succeeded in keeping it aloft with your own worthlessness, all
you had to do was stagger off, locate your luggage, and, by the time a cab
arrived, come up with a persuasive reason to go on living.
"You're here!" shrieked Evan over the doorbell, before she even opened
the door. Then she opened it wide. Zoe set her bags on the hall floor and
hugged Evan hard. When she was little, Evan had always been affectionate and devoted. Zoe had always taken care of her — advising, reassuring— until recently, when it seemed Evan had started advising and
reassuring her. It startled Zoe. She suspected it had something to do
with her being alone. It made people uncomfortable.
"How are you?"
"I threw up on the plane. Besides that, I'm O.K."
"Can I get you something? Here, let me take your suitcase. Sick on the
plane. Eeeyew."
"It was into one of those sickness bags," said Zoe, just in case Evan
thought she'd lost it in the aisle. "I was very quiet."
The apartment was spacious and bright, with a view all the way
downtown along the East Side. There was a balcony, and sliding glass
doors. "I keep forgetting how nice this apartment is. Twenty-first floor,
doorman . . ." Zoe could work her whole life and never have an apartment like this. So could Evan. It was Charlie's apartment. He and Evan
lived in it like two kids in a dorm, beer cans and clothes strewn around.
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661
Evan put Zoe's bag away from the mess, over by the fish tanks. "I'm so
glad you're here," she said. "Now what can I get you?"
Evan made them lunch — soup from a can and saltines.
"I don't know about Charlie," she said after they had finished. "I feel
like we've gone all sexless and middle-aged already."
"Hmmm," said Zoe. She leaned back into Evan's sofa and stared out
the window at the dark tops of the buildings. It seemed a little unnatural to live up in the sky like this, like birds that out of some wrongheaded derring-do had nested too high. She nodded toward the lighted
fish tanks and giggled. "I feel like a bird," she said, "with my own personal supply of fish."
Evan sighed. "He comes home and just sacks out on the sofa, watching fuzzy football. He's wearing the psychic cold cream and curlers, if
you know what I mean."
Zoe sat up, readjusted the sofa cushions. "What's fuzzy football?"
"We haven't gotten cable yet. Everything comes in fuzzy. Charlie just
watches it that way."
"Hmm, yeah, that's a little depressing," Zoe said. She looked at her
hands. "Especially the part about not having cable."
"This is how he gets into bed at night." Evan stood up to demonstrate. "He whips all his clothes off, and when he gets to his underwear
he lets it drop to one ankle. Then he kicks up his leg and flips the
underwear in the air and catches it. I, of course, watch from the bed.
There's nothing else. There's just that."
"Maybe you should just get it over with and get married."
"Really?"
"Yeah. I mean, you guys probably think living together like this is
the best of both worlds, but —" Zoe tried to sound like an older sister;
an older sister was supposed to be the parent you could never have, the
hip, cool mom. "But I've always found that as soon as you think you've
got the best of both worlds" — she thought now of herself, alone in
her house, of the toad-faced cicadas that flew around like little men at
night and landed on her screens, staring; of the size-fourteen shoes she
placed at the doorstep, to scare off intruders; of the ridiculous, inflatable blowup doll someone had told her to keep propped up at the
breakfast table — "it can suddenly twist and become the worst of both
worlds."
"Really?" Evan was beaming. "Oh, Zoe. I have something to tell you.
Charlie and I are getting married."
"Really." Zoe felt confused.
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"I didn't know how to tell you."
"Yeah, I guess the part about fuzzy football misled me a little."
"I was hoping you'd be my maid of honor," said Evan, waiting.
"Aren't you happy for me?"
"Yes," said Zoe, and she began to tell Evan a story about an awardwinning violinist at Hilldale-Versailles — how the violinist had come
home from a competition in Europe and taken up with a local man who
made her go to all his summer Softball games, made her cheer for him
from the stands, with the wives, until she later killed herself. But when
Zoe got halfway through, to the part about cheering at the Softball
games, she stopped.
"What?" said Evan. "So what happened?"
"Actually, nothing," said Zoe lightly. "She just really got into Softball.
You should have seen her."
Zoe decided to go to a late afternoon movie, leaving Evan to chores
she needed to do before the party — "I have to do them alone, really,"
she'd said, a little tense after the violinist story. Zoe thought about going to an art museum, but women alone in art museums had to look
good. They always did. Chic and serious, moving languidly, with a
great handbag. Instead, she walked down through Kips Bay, past an
earring boutique called Stick It in Your Ear, past a hair salon called
Dorian Gray. That was the funny thing about "beauty," thought Zoe.
Look it up in the yellow pages and you found a hundred entries, hostile
with wit, cutesy with warning. But look up "truth" — Ha! There was
nothing at all.
Zoe thought about Evan getting married. Would Evan turn into Peter
Pumpkin Eater's wife? Mrs. Eater? At the wedding, would she make Zoe
wear some flouncy lavender dress, identical with the other maids'? Zoe
hated uniforms, had even in the first grade refused to join Elf Girls
because she didn't want to wear the same dress as everyone else. Now
she might have to. But maybe she could distinguish it. Hitch it up on
one side with a clothespin. Wear surgical gauze at the waist. Clip to her
bodice one of those pins that say in loud letters "Shit Happens."
At the movie — Death by Number— she bought strands of red licorice to tug and chew. She took a seat off to one side in the theater. She
felt strangely self-conscious sitting alone, and hoped for the place to
darken fast. When it did, and the coming attractions came on, she
reached inside her purse for her glasses. They were in a Baggie. Her
Kleenex was also in a Baggie. So were her pen and her aspirin and her
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663
mints. Everything was in Baggies. This was what she'd become: a woman
alone at the movies with everything in a Baggie.
At the Halloween party, there were about two dozen people. There were
people with ape heads and large hairy hands. There was someone
dressed as a leprechaun. There was someone dressed as a frozen dinner.
Some man had brought his two small daughters: a ballerina and a
ballerina's sister, also dressed as a ballerina. There was a gaggle of sexy
witches — women dressed entirely in black, beautifully made up and
jeweled. "I hate those sexy witches. It's not in the spirit of Halloween,"
said Evan. Evan had abandoned the moon mask and dolled herself up as
hausfrau, in curlers and an apron, a decision she now regretted. Charlie,
because he liked fish, because he owned fish and collected fish, had
decided to go as a fish. He had fins, and eyes on the sides of his head.
"Zoe! How are you! I'm sorry I wasn't here when you first arrived!" He
spent the rest of his time chatting up the sexy witches.
"Isn't there something I can help you with here?" Zoe asked her sister.
"You've been running yourself ragged." She rubbed her sister's arm,
gently, as if she wished they were alone.
"Oh, God, not at all," said Evan, arranging stuffed mushrooms on a
plate. The timer went off, and she pulled another sheetful out of the
oven. "Actually, you know what you can do?"
"What?" Zoe put on her bonehead.
"Meet Earl. He's the guy I had in mind for you. When he gets here,
just talk to him a little. He's nice. He's fun. He's going through a divorce."
"I'll try," Zoe groaned. "O.K.? I'll try." She looked at her watch.
When Earl arrived, he was dressed as a naked woman, steel wool
glued strategically to a body stocking, and large rubber breasts protruding like hams.
"Zoe, this is Earl," said Evan.
"Good to meet you," said Earl, circling Evan to shake Zoe's hand. He
stared at the top of Zoe's head. "Great bone."
Zoe nodded. "Great tits," she said. She looked past him, out the
window at the city thrown glittering up against the sky; people were
saying the usual things: how it looked like jewels, like bracelets and
necklaces unstrung. You could see the clock of the Con Ed building, the
orange-and-gold-capped Empire State, the Chrysler like a rocket ship
dreamed up in a depression. Far west you could glimpse Astor Plaza,
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LORRIE MOORE
with its flying white roof like a nun's habit. "There's beer out on the
balcony, Earl. Can I get you one?" Zoe asked.
"Sure, uh, I'll come along. Hey, Charlie, how's it going?"
Charlie grinned and whistled. People turned to look. "Hey, Earl,"
someone called from across the room. "Va-va-va-voom."
They squeezed their way past the other guests, past the apes and the
sexy witches. The suction of the sliding door gave way in a whoosh, and
Zoe and Earl stepped out onto the balcony, a bonehead and a naked
woman, the night air roaring and smoky cool. Another couple were out
there, too, murmuring privately. They were not wearing costumes. They
smiled at Zoe and Earl. "Hi," said Zoe. She found the plastic-foam
cooler, dug in and retrieved two beers.
"Thanks," said Earl. His rubber breasts folded inward, dimpled and
dented, as he twisted open the bottle.
"Well," sighed Zoe anxiously. She had to learn not to be afraid of a
man, the way, in your childhood, you learned not to be afraid of an
earthworm or a bug. Often, when she spoke to men at parties, she
rushed things in her mind. As the man politely blathered on, she would
fall in love, marry, then find herself in a bitter custody battle with him
for the kids and hoping for a reconciliation, so that despite all his
betrayals she might no longer despise him, and, in the few minutes
remaining, learn, perhaps, what his last name was and what he did for a
living, though probably there was already too much history between
them. She would nod, blush, turn away.
"Evan tells me you're a history professor. Where do you teach?"
"Just over the Indiana border into Illinois."
He looked a little shocked. "I guess Evan didn't tell me that part."
"She didn't?"
"No."
"Well, that's Evan for you. When we were kids we both had speech
impediments."
"That can be tough," said Earl. One of his breasts was hidden behind
his drinking arm, but the other shone low and pink, full as a strawberry
moon.
"Yes, well, it wasn't a total loss. We used to go to what we called peach
pearapy. For about ten years of my life, I had to map out every sentence
in my mind, way ahead, before I said it. That was the only way I could
get a coherent sentence out."
Earl drank from his beer. "How did you do that? I mean, how did you
get through?"
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"I told a lot of jokes. Jokes you know the lines to already. You can just
say them. I love jokes. Jokes and songs."
Earl smiled. He had on lipstick, a deep shade of red, but it was
wearing off from the beer. "What's your favorite joke?"
"Uh, my favorite joke is probably — O.K., all right. This guy goes into
a doctor's office, and — "
"I think I know this one," interrupted Earl, eagerly. He wanted to tell
it himself. "A guy goes into a doctor's office, and the doctor tells him he's
got some good news and some bad news — that one, right?"
"I'm not sure," said Zoe. "This might be a different version."
"So the guy says, 'Give me the bad news first,' and the doctor says,
'O.K. You've got three weeks to live.' And the guy cries, 'Three weeks to
live! Doctor, what is the good news?' And the doctor says, 'Did you see
that secretary out front? I finally fucked her.'"
Zoe frowned.
"That's not the one you were thinking of?"
"No." There was accusation in her voice. "Mine was different."
"Oh," said Earl. He looked away and then back again. "What kind of
history do you teach?"
"I teach American, mostly — eighteenth- and nineteenth-century."
In graduate school, at bars the pickup line was always, "So what's your
century?"
"Occasionally, I teach a special theme course," she added. "Say, 'Humor and Personality in the White House.' That's what my book's on."
She thought of something someone once told her about bowerbirds,
how they build elaborate structures before mating.
"Your book's on humor?"
"Yeah, and, well, when I teach a theme course like that I do all the
centuries." So what's your century?
"All three of them."
"Pardon?" The breeze glistened her eyes. Traffic revved beneath them.
She felt high and puny, like someone lifted into heaven by mistake and
then spurned.
"Three. There's only three."
"Well, four, really." She was thinking of Jamestown, and of the Pilgrims coming here with buckles and witch hats to say their prayers.
"I'm a photographer," said Earl. His face was starting to gleam, his
rouge smearing in a sunset beneath his eyes.
"Do you like that?"
"Well, actually, I'm starting to feel it's a little dangerous."
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"Really?"
"Spending all your time in a dark room with that red light and all
those chemicals. There's links with Parkinson's, you know."
"No, I didn't."
"I suppose I should wear rubber gloves, but I don't like to. Unless I'm
touching it directly, I don't think of it as real."
"Hmm," said Zoe. Alarm buzzed mildly through her.
"Sometimes, when I have a cut or something, I feel the sting and
think, Shit. I wash constantly and just hope. I don't like rubber over the
skin like that."
"Really."
"I mean, the physical contact. That's what you want, or why bother?"
"I guess," said Zoe. She wished she could think of a joke, something
slow and deliberate with the end in sight. She thought of gorillas, how
when they had been kept too long alone in cages they would smack each
other in the head instead of mating.
"Are you — in a relationship?" Earl suddenly blurted.
"Now? As we speak?"
"Well, I mean, I'm sure you have a relationship to your work." A
smile, a little one, nestled in his mouth like an egg. She thought of zoos
in parks, how when cities were under siege, during world wars, people
ate the animals. "But I mean, with a man."
"No, I'm not in a relationship with a man." She rubbed her chin with
her hand and could feel the one bristly hair there. "But my last relationship was with a very sweet man," she said. She made something up.
"From Switzerland. He was a botanist — a weed expert. His name was
Jerry. I called him Jare. He was so funny. You'd go to the movies with
him and all he would notice was the plants. He would never pay
attention to the plot. Once, in a jungle movie, he started rattling off all
these Latin names, out loud. It was very exciting for him." She paused,
caught her breath. "Eventually, he went back to Europe to, uh, study the
edelweiss." She looked at Earl. "Are you involved in a relationship? With
a woman?"
Earl shifted his weight and the creases in his body stocking changed,
splintering outward like something broken. His pubic hair slid over to
one hip, like a corsage on a saloon girl. "No," he said, clearing his throat.
The steel wool in his underarms was inching down toward his biceps.
"I've just gotten out of a marriage that was full of bad dialogue like 'You
want more space? I'll give you more space!' Clonk. Your basic Three
Stooges."
You're Ugly, Too
667
Zoe looked at him sympathetically. "I suppose it's hard for love to
recover after that."
His eyes lit up. He wanted to talk about love. "But I keep thinking
love should be like a tree. You look at trees and they've got bumps and
scars from tumors, infestations, what have you, but they're still growing.
Despite the bumps and bruises, they're — straight."
"Yeah, well," said Zoe, "where I'm from they're all married or gay. Did
you see that movie Death by Number?'
Earl looked at her, a little lost. She was getting away from him. "No,"
he said.
One of his breasts had slipped under his arm, tucked there like a
baguette. She kept thinking of trees, of parks, of people in wartime eating the zebras. She felt a stabbing pain in her abdomen.
"Want some hors d'oeuvres?" Evan came pushing through the sliding
door. She was smiling, though her curlers were coming out, hanging
bedraggled at the ends of her hair like Christmas decorations, like food
put out for the birds. She thrust forward a plate of stuffed mushrooms.
"Are you asking for donations or giving them away?" said Earl wittily.
He liked Evan, and he put his arm around her.
"You know, I'll be right back," said Zoe.
"Oh," said Evan, looking concerned.
"Right back. I promise."
Zoe hurried inside, across the living room into the bedroom, to the
adjoining bath. It was empty; most of the guests were using the halfbath near the kitchen. She flicked on the light and closed the door. The
pain had stopped, and she didn't really have to go to the bathroom, but
she stayed there anyway, resting. In the mirror above the sink, she
looked haggard beneath her bonehead, violet-grays showing under the
skin like a plucked and pocky bird's. She leaned closer, raising her chin
a little to find the bristly hair. It was there, at the end of the jaw, sharp
and dark as a wire. She opened the medicine cabinet, pawed through it
until she found some tweezers. She lifted her head again and poked at
her face with the metal tips, grasping and pinching and missing. Outside the door, she could hear two people talking low. They had come
into the bedroom and were discussing something. They were sitting on
the bed. One of them giggled in a false way. Zoe stabbed again at her
chin, and it started to bleed a little. She pulled the skin tight along the
jawbone, gripped the tweezers hard around what she hoped was the
hair, and tugged. A tiny square of skin came away, but the hair remained, blood bright at the root of it. Zoe clenched her teeth. "Come
692 LORRIE MOORE
on," she whispered. The couple outside in the bedroom were now
telling stories, softly, and laughing. There was a bounce and squeak of
mattress, and the sound of a chair being moved out of the way. Zoe
aimed the tweezers carefully, pinched, then pulled gently, and this time
the hair came, too, with a slight twinge of pain, and then a great flood of
relief. "Yeah!" breathed Zoe. She grabbed some toilet paper and dabbed
at her chin. It came away spotted with blood, and so she tore off some
more and pressed hard until it stopped. Then she turned off the light,
opened the door, and rejoined the party. "Excuse me," she said to the
couple in the bedroom. They were the couple from the balcony, and
they looked at her, a bit surprised. They had their arms around each
other, and they were eating candy bars.
Earl was still out on the balcony, alone, and Zoe rejoined him there.
"Hi," she said.
He turned around and smiled. He had straightened his costume
out a bit, though all the secondary sex characteristics seemed slightly
doomed, destined to shift and flip and zip around again any moment. "Are you O.K.?" he asked. He had opened another beer and was
chugging.
"Oh, yeah. I just had to go to the bathroom." She paused. "Actually, I
have been going to a lot of doctors recently."
"What's wrong?" asked Earl.
"Oh, probably nothing. But they're putting me through tests." She
sighed. "I've had sonograms. I've had mammograms. Next week I'm
going in for a candygram." He looked at her, concerned. "I've had too
many gram words," she said.
"Here, I saved you these." He held out a napkin with two stuffed
mushroom caps. They were cold and leaving oil marks on the napkin.
"Thanks," said Zoe, and pushed them both in her mouth. "Watch,"
she said with her mouth full. "With my luck it'll be a gallbladder operation."
Earl made a face. "So your sister's getting married," he said, changing
the subject. "Tell me, really, what you think about love."
"Lover Hadn't they done this already? "I don't know." She chewed
thoughtfully and swallowed. "All right. I'll tell you what I think about
love. Here is a love story. This friend of mine — "
"You've got something on your chin," said Earl, and he reached over
to touch it.
"What?" said Zoe, stepping back. She turned her face away and
You're Ugly, Too
669
grabbed at her chin. A piece of toilet paper peeled off it, like tape. "It's
nothing," she said. "It's just — it's nothing."
Earl stared at her.
"At any rate," she continued, "this friend of mine was this award-winning violinist. She traveled all over Europe and won competitions; she
made records, she gave concerts, she got famous. But she had no social
life. So one day she threw herself at the feet of this conductor she had a
terrible crush on. He picked her up, scolded her gently, and sent her
back to her hotel room. After that, she came home from Europe. She
went back to her old hometown, stopped playing the violin, and took
up with a local boy. This was in Illinois. He took her to some Big Ten bar
every night to drink with his buddies from the team. He used to say
things like 'Katrina here likes to play the violin,' and then he'd pinch her
cheek. When she once suggested that they go home, he said, 'What, you
think you're too famous for a place like this? Well, let me tell you
something. You may think you're famous, but you're not famous famous.' Two famouses. 'No one here's ever heard of you.' Then he went
up and bought a round of drinks for everyone but her. She got her coat,
went home, and shot a bullet through her head."
Earl was silent.
"That's the end of my love story," said Zoe.
"You're not at all like your sister," said Earl.
"Oh, really," said Zoe. The air had gotten colder, the wind singing
minor and thick as a dirge.
"No." He didn't want to talk about love anymore. "You know, you
should wear a lot of blue — blue and white — around your face. It
would bring out your coloring." He reached an arm out to show her
how the blue bracelet he was wearing might look against her skin, but
she swatted it away.
"Tell me, Earl. Does the word 'fag' mean anything to you?"
He stepped back, away from her. He shook his head in disbelief. "You
know, I just shouldn't try to go out with career women. You're all
stricken. A guy can really tell what life has done to you. I do better with
women who have part-time jobs."
"Oh, yes?" said Zoe. She had once read an article entitled "Professional Women and the Demographics of Grief." Or, no, it was a poem. If
there were a lake, the moonlight would dance across it in conniptions. She
remembered that line. But perhaps the title was "The Empty House:
Aesthetics of Barrenness." Or maybe "Space Gypsies: Girls in Academe."
She had forgotten.
670
LORRIE MOORE
Earl turned and leaned on the railing of the balcony. It was getting
late. Inside, the party guests were beginning to leave. The sexy witches
were already gone. "Live and learn," Earl murmured.
"Live and get dumb," replied Zoe. Beneath them on Lexington there
were no cars, just the gold rush of an occasional cab. He leaned hard on
his elbows, brooding.
"Look at those few people down there," he said. "They look like bugs.
You know how bugs are kept under control? They're sprayed with bug
hormones — female bug hormones. The male bugs get so crazy in the
presence of this hormone they're screwing everything in sight — trees,
rocks, everything but female bugs. Population control. That's what's
happening in this country," he said drunkenly. "Hormones sprayed
around, and now men are screwing rocks. Rocks!"
In the back, the Magic Marker line on his buttocks spread wide, a
sketchy black on pink, like a funnies page. Zoe came up, slow, from
behind, and gave him a shove. His arms slipped forward, off the railing,
out over the street. Beer spilled out of his bottle, raining twenty stories
down to the street.
"Hey, what are you doing!" he said, whipping around. He stood
straight and readied, and moved away from the railing, sidestepping
Zoe. "What the hell are you doing?"
"Just kidding," she said. "I was just kidding." But he gazed at her,
appalled and frightened, his Magic Marker buttocks turned away now
toward all of downtown, a naked pseudo-woman with a blue bracelet at
the wrist, trapped out on a balcony with — with what? "Really, I was
just kidding!" Zoe shouted. The wind lifted the hair up off her head,
skyward in spines behind the bone. If there were a lake, the moonlight
would dance across it in conniptions. She smiled at him and wondered
how she looked.
I
Toward a Feminist Poetics
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman
Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary
Imagination
New Haven, Yale UP, 1979
The Queen's Looking Glass: Female
Creativity, Male Images ofWomen,
and the Metaphor of Literary
Paternity
And the lady of the house was seen only as she appeared in each
room, according to the nature of the lord of the room. None saw
the whole of her, none but herself. For the light which she was was
both her mirror and her body. None could tell the whole of her,
none but herself.
-Laura Riding
Alas! A woman that attempts the pen
Such an intruder on the rights of men,
Such a presumptuous Creature is esteem'd
The fault can by no venue be redeem'd.
-Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea
As to all that nonsense Henry and Larry talked about, the necessity
of"l am God" in order to create (I suppose they mean "I am God,
I am not a woman") .... this "I am God," which makes creation an
act of solitude and pride, this image of God alone making sky, earth,
sea, it is this image which has confused woman.
-Anats Nin
Is a pen a metaphorical penis? Gerard Manley Hopkins seems to
have thought so. I n a letter to his friend R. W. Dixon in 1886 he
confided a crucial feature of his theory of poetry. The artist's "most
essential quality," he declared, is "masterly execution, which is a
kind of male gift, and especially marks off men from women, the
begetting of one's thought on paper, on verse, or whatever the matter
is." In addition, he noted that "on better consideration it strikes me
that the mastery I speak of is not so much in the mind as a puberty
m the life of that quality. The male quality is the creative gift." 1
3
4
Toward a Feminist Poetics
Male sexuality~ in other words, is not just analogically but actually
the essence of lnerary power. The poet's pen is in some sense (even
more than figuratively) a penis.
Eccentric and obscure though he was, Hopkins was articulating
a concept central to that Victorian culture of which he was in this
cas~ a representative male citizen. But of course the patriarchal
nouon. that the writer "fathers" his text just as God fathered the
world IS and has been all-pervasive in Western literary civilization
~o much so that, as Edward Said has shown, the metaphor is buil~
mto .the v~ry word~ ~utho~, ~ith which writer, deity, and pater jamilias
~re ldenufie~. ~a1d s m1matu~e meditation on the word authority
1s worth q uoung m full because It summarizes so much that is relevant
here:
Authority suggests to me a constellation of linked meanings: not
only, as the OED tells us, "a power to enforce obedience "
or :'a derived or delegated power," or "a power to influen~e
ac~1~n,". or "a power to inspire belief," or "a person whose
o~m10n IS accepted"; not only those, but a connection as well
With autho_r- that is, a person who originates or gives existence
to somethmg, a begetter, beginner, father, or ancestor, a person
also who sets forth written statements. There is still another
cluster of meanings: author is tied to the past participle auctus of
t.he verb au~ere ; therefore auctor, according to Eric Partridge, is
~lterall.y an mcre~er and.t?us a founder. Auctoritas is production,
I~venuo~, cause, m addltlon to meaning a right of possession.
Fmally, It means continuance, or a causing to continue. Taken
tog~ther these meanings are all grounded in the following
~ot~ons: ( I) t~at o~ the power of an individual to initiate,
~nsutute, establish-m short, to begin; (2) that this power and
Its product a.re ~n. increas.e over what had been there previously;
(3) th~t the ~ndiVtdual wtelding this power controls its issue and
wha~ IS. den~ed therefrom; (4) that authority maintains the
contmuny of 1ts course. 2
In conclusion, Said, who is discussing "The Novel as B · ·
I t · ,
k
egmnmg
n ent10n, rem~r s that "All four of these [last] abstractions can
be used t~ descnbe the way in which narrative fiction asserts itself
psychologtcally and aesthetically ~hrough the technical efforts of the
The Queen's Looking Glass
5
novelist." But they can also, of course, be used to describe both the
author and the authority of any literary text, a point Hopkins's
sexual/aesthetic theory seems to have been designed to elaborate.
Indeed, Said himself later observes that a convention of most literary
texts is "that the unity or integrity of the text is maintained by a series
of genealogical connections: author- text, beginning-middle-end,
text- meaning, reader- interpretation, and so on. Underneath all
thtse is the imagery of succession, of paternity, or hierarchy" (italics ours).3
There is a sense in which the very notion of paternity is itself, as
Stephen Dedalus puts it in Ulysses, a "legal fiction," 4 a story requiring
imagination if not faith. A man cannot verify his fatherhood by
either sense or reason, after all; that his child is his is in a sense a
tale he tells himself to explain the infant's existence. Obviously, the
anxiety implicit in such storytelling urgently needs not only the reassurances of male superiority that patriarchal misogyny implies, but
also such compensatory fictions of the Word as those embodied in
the genealogical imagery Said describes. Thus it is possible to trace
the history of this compensatory, sometimes frankly stated and sometimes submerged imagery that elaborates upon what Stephen Dedalus
calls the "mystical estate" of paternitys through the works of many
literary theoreticians besides Hopkins and Said. Defining poetry as
a mirror held up to nature, the mimetic aesthetic that begins with
Aristotle and descends through Sidney, Shakespeare, and Johnson
implies that the poet, like a lesser God, has made or engendered an
alternative, mirror-universe in which he actually seems to enclose or
trap shadows of reality. Similarly, Coleridge's Romantic concept of
the human "imagination or esemplastic power" is of a virile, generative force which echoes "the eternal act of creation in the infinite I
AM," while Ruskin's phallic-sounding "Penetrative Imagination" is
a "possession-taking faculty" and a "piercing ... mind's tongue" that
seizes, cuts down, and gets at the root of experience in order "to
throw up what new shoots it will." 6 In all these aesthetics the poet,
like God the Father, is a paternalistic ruler of the fictive world he has
created. Shelley called him a "legislator." K eats noted, speaking of
writers, that "the antients [sic] were Emperors of vast Provinces"
though "each of the moderns" is merely an "Elector of Hanover." 7
In medieval philosophy, the network of connections among sexual,
literary, and theological metaphors is equally complex: God the
6
Toward a Feminist Poetics
Father both engenders the cosmos and, as Ernst Robert Curtius
notes, writes the Book of Nature: both tropes describe a single act
of creation. 8 I n addition, the Heavenly Author's ultimate eschatological power is made manifest when, as the Liber Scriptus of the
traditional requiem mass indicates, He writes the Book ofJudgment.
More recently, male artists like the Earl of Rochester in the seventeenth century and Auguste Renoir in the nineteenth, have frankly
defined aesthetics based on male sexual delight. "I ... never Rhym'd,
but for my Pintle's (penis's) sake," declares Rochester's witty Timon,a
and (according to the painter Bridget Riley) Renoir "is supposed to
have said that he painted his paintings with his prick." 1o Clearly,
both these artists believe, with Norman 0. Brown, that "the penis
is the head of the body," and they might both agree, too, with John
I rwin's suggestion that the relationship "of the masculine self with
the feminine-masculine work is also an autoerotic act ... a kind of
creative onanism in which through the use of the phallic pen on the
'pure space' of the virgin page ... the self is continually spent and
wasted .... " 11 No doubt it is for all these reasons, moreover, that
poets have traditionally used a vocabulary derived from the patriarchal "family romance" to describe their relations with each other.
As Harold Bloom has pointed out, "from the sons of Homer to the
sons of Ben Jonson, poetic influence (has] been described as a filial
relationship," a relationship of "sonship." The fierce struggle at the
heart of literary history, says Bloom, is a "battle between strong
equals, father and son as mighty opposites, Laius and Oedipus at
the crossroads." a
Though many of these writers use the metaphor ofliterary paternity
in different ways and for different purposes, all seem overwhelmingly
to agree that a literary text is not only speech quite literally embodied,
but also power mysteriously made manifest, made flesh. In patriarchal Western culture, therefore, the text's author is a father, a
progenitor, a procreator, an aesthetic patriarch whose pen is an
instrument of generative power like his penis. More, his pen's power,
like his penis's power, is not just the ability to generate life but the
power to create a posterity to which he lays claim, as, in Said's
paraphrase of Partridge, "an increaser and thus a founder." In this
respect, the pen is truly mightier than its phallic counterpart the
sword, and in patriarchy more resonantly sexual. Not only does the
The Q.ueen's Looking Glass
7
writer respond to his muse's quasi-sexual excitation with an outpouring of the aesthetic energy Hopkins called "the fine delight that
fathers thought" - a delight poured seminally from pen to page-but
as the author of an enduring text the writer engages the attention
of the future in exactly the same way that a king (or father) "owns"
the homage of the present. No sword-wielding general could rule so
long or possess so vast a kingdom.
Finally, that such a notion of "ownership" or possession is embedded in the metaphor of paternity leads to yet another implication
of this complex metaphor. For if the author/father is owner of his
text and of his reader's attention, he is also, of course, owner/possessor
of the subjects of his text, that is to say of those figures, scenes, and
events-those brain children-he has both incarnated in black and
white and "bound" in cloth or leather. Thus, because he is an author,
a "man of letters" is simultaneously, like his divine counterpart,
a father, a master or ruler, and an owner: the spiritual type of a
patriarch, as we understand that term in Western society.
Where does such an implicitly or explicitly patriarchal theory of
literature leave literary women? If the pen is a metaphorical penis,
with what organ can females generate texts? The question may seem
frivolous, but as our epigraph from Ana:is Nin indicates, both the
patriarchal etiology that defines a solitary Father God as the only
creator of all things, and the male metaphors ofliterary creation that
depend upon such an etiology, have long "confused" literary women,
readers and writers alike. For what if such a proudly masculine
cosmic Author is the sole legitimate model for all earthly authors?
Or worse, what if the male generative power is not just the only
legitimate power but the only power there is? That literary theoreticians from Aristotle to Hopkins seemed to believe this was so no
doubt prevented many women from ever "attempting the pen"-to
use Anne Finch's phrase- and caused enormous anxiety in generations of those women who were "presumptuous" enough to dare
such an attempt. Jane Austen's Anne Elliot understates the case
when she decorously observes, toward the end of Persuasion, that
"men have had every advantage of us in telling their story. Education
has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their
8
Toward a Feminist Poetics
hands" (II, chap. 11}. 13 For, as Anne Finch's complaint suggests,
the pen has been defined as not just accidentally but essentially a
male "tool," and therefore not only inappropriate but actually alien
to women. Lacking Austen's demure irony, Finch's passionate
protest goes almost as far toward the center of the metaphor of literary paternity as Hopkins's letter to Canon Dixon. Not only is "a
woman t~at at.tempts the pen" an intrusive and "presumptuous
Creature, she IS absolutely unredeemable: no virtue can outweigh
the "fault" of her presumption because she has grotesquely crossed
boundaries dictated by Nature:
They tell us, we mistake our sex and way;
Good breeding, fassion, dancing, dressing, play
Are the accomplishments we shou'd desire;
To write, or read, or think, or to enquire
Wou'd cloud our beauty, and exaust our time
.
'
An~ mterrupt the conquests of our prime;
Wh1lst the dull mannage, of a servile house
Is held by some, our outmost art and use. a
~~cause th~y are by definition male activities, this passage implies,
wntmg, readmg, and thinking are not only alien but also inimical
to "female" characteristics. One hundred years later, in a famous
letter to Charlotte Bronte, Robert Southey rephrased the same notion:
"Literature is not the business of a woman's life, and it cannot be." u
~t can~ot b.e, the metaphor of literary paternity implies, because it
~s ~hysiOIOgically ~well~ sociologically impossible. If male sexuality
IS mtegrally ~so~1ated '"':1th the assertive presence of literary power,
fem~e sexuahty 1s assoCiated with the absence of such power, with
the 1dea- expressed by the nineteenth-century thinker Otto Weininger-that "woman has no share in ontological reality." As we
~hall see, ~ fur~her ~~plication of the paternity/creativity metaphor
IS the notton (~mphcn both in Weininger and in Southey's letter)
that women e.xtst only ~o be acted on by men, both as literary and
as sensu~! objects. Agam one of Anne Finch's poems explores the
assumptions submerged in so many literary theories. Addressing three
male poets, she exclaims:
Happy you three! happy the Race of Men!
Born to inform or to correct the Pen
To proffitts pleasures freedom and command
The QJteen's I.AJoking Glass
9
Whilst we beside you but as Cyphers stand
T' increase your Numbers and to swell th' account
Of your delights which from our charms amount
And sadly are by this distinction taught
That since the Fall (by our seducement wrought)
Our is the greater losse as ours the greater faultY1
Since Eve's daughters have fallen so much lower than Adam's sons,
this passage says, all females are "Cyphers"- nullities, vacanciesexisting merely and punningly to increase male "Numbers" (either
poems or persons} by pleasuring either men's bodies or their minds,
their penises or their pens.
In that case, however, devoid of what Richard Chase once called
"the masculine tlan," and implicitly rejecting even the slavish consolations ofher "femininity," a literary woman is doubly a "Cypher,"
for she is really a "eunuch," to use the striking figure Germaine
Greer applied to all women in patriarchal society. Thus Anthony
Burgess recently declared that Jane Austen's novels fail because her
writing "lacks a strong male thrust," and William Gass lamented
that literary women "lack that blood congested genital drive which
energizes every great style." 17 The assumptions that underlie their
statements were articulated more than a century ago by the nineteenth-century editor-critic Rufus Griswold. Introducing an anthology entitled The Female Poets of America, Griswold outlined a theory
of literary sex roles which builds upon, and clarifies, these grim implications of the metaphor ofliterary paternity.
It is less easy to be assured of the genuineness of literary ability
in women than in men. The moral nature of women, in its
finest and richest development, partakes of some of the qualities
of genius; it assumes, at least, the similitude of that which in
men is the characteristic or accompaniment of the highest grade
of mental inspiration. We are in danger, therefore, of mistaking
for the efflorescent energy of creative intelligence, that which
is only the exuberance of personal "feelings unemployed." ...
The most exquisite susceptibility of the spirit, and the capacity
to mirror in dazzling variety the effects which circumstances
or surrounding minds work upon it, may be accompanied by
no power to originate, nor even, in any proper sense, to reproduce. [Italics
ours]I8
10
Toward a Feminist Poetics
Since Griswold has actually compiled a collection of poems by women,
he plainly does not believe that all women lack reproductive or
generative literary power all the time. His gender-definitions imply,
however, that when such creative energy appears in a woman it
may be anomalous, freakish, because as a "male" characteristic it
is essentially "unfeminine."
The converse of these explicit and implicit definitions of "femininity" may also be true for those who develop literary theories
based upon the "mystical estate" of fatherhood: if a woman lacks
generative literary power, then a man who loses or abuses such power
becomes like a eunuch- or like a woman. When the imprisoned
Marquis de Sade was denied "any use of pencil, ink, pen, and paper,"
declares Roland Barthes, he was figuratively emasculated, for "the
scriptural sperm" could flow no longer, and "without exercise, without a pen, Sade [become] bloated, [became] a eunuch." Similarly,
when Hopkins wanted to explain to R. W. Dixon the aesthetic
consequences of a lack. of male mastery, he seized upon an explanation
which developed the implicit parallel between women and eunuchs,
declaring that "if the life" is not "conveyed into the work and ...
displayed there ... the product is one of those hens' eggs that are good
to eat and look just like live ones but never hatch" (italics ours). u
And when, late in his life, he tried to define his own sense of sterility,
his thickening writer's block, he described himself (in the sonnet
"The Fine Delight That Fathers Thought") both as a eunuch and
as a woman, specifically a woman deserted by male power: "the widow
of an insight lost," surviving in a diminished "winter world" that
entirely lacks "the roll, the rise, the carol, the creation" of male
generative power, whose "strong JSpur" is phallically "live and
lancing like the blow pipe flame." And once again some lines from
one of Anne Finch's plaintive protests against male literary hegemony
seem to support Hopkins's image of the powerless and sterile woman
artist. Remarking in the conclusion of her "Introduction" to her
Poems that women are "to be dull J Expected and dessigned" she
does not repudiate such expectations, but on the contrary admonishes
·
herself, with bitter irony, to be dull:
Be caution'd then my Muse, and still retir'd;
Nor be dispis'd, aiming to be admir'd;
The Qjuen 's Looking Glass
11
Conscious of wants, still with contracted wing,
To some few friends, and to thy sorrows sing;
For groves ofLawrell, thou wert never meant;
Be dark enough thy shades, and be thou there content. 20
Cut off from generative energy, in a dark and wintry world, Finch
seems to be defining herself here not only as a "Cypher" but as "the
widow of an insight lost."
Finch's despairing (if ironic) acceptance of male expectations and
designs summarizes in a single e~isode the coer~ive .power not only
of cultural constraints but of the hterary texts wh1ch mcarnate them.
For it is as much from literature as from "life" that literate women
learn they are "to be dull/Expected and dessigned." As Leo Bersani
puts it written "language doesn't merely describe identity but
actuall; produces moral and perhaps even physical ide?t.ity.. · · ~e
have to allow for a kind of dissolution or at least elasuclty of bemg
induced by an immersion in literature." 21 A century .and a ?alf
earlier,Jane Austen had Anne Elliot's interlocutor, Ca~t~1n Harv1lle,
make a related point in Persuasion. Arguing women s mconsta~cy
over Anne's heated objections, he notes that "all histories are aga~nst
you- all stories, prose, and verse .... I could bring you fifty q~ota­
tions in a moment on my side the argument, and I do not thmk I
ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon
woman's inconstancy" (II, chap. 11 ). To this Anne responds, as
we have seen, that the pen has been in male hands. In the context
of Harville's speech, her remark implies that women have not only
been excluded from authorship but in addition they have been subjust to (and subjects of) male authority. With Chaucer's astute Wife
of Bath, therefore, Anne might demand, "Who peynted the leoun,
tel me who?" And, like the Wife's, her own answer to her own
rhetorical question would emphasize our culture's historical confusion
ofliterary authorship with patriarchal authority:
By God, ifwommen hadde writen stories,
As clerkes han withinne hir oratories,
They wolde han writen of men more wikednesse
Than all the mark of Adam may redresse.
...
_
12
Toward a Feminist Potties
In other words, what Bersani, Austen, and Chaucer all imply is
that, precisely because a writer "fathers" his text, his literary creations (as we pointed out earlier) are his possession, his property.
Having defined them in language and thus generated them, he owns
them, controls them, and encloses them on the printed page. Describing his earliest sense of vocation as a writer, jean-Paul Sartre recalled
in Les Mots his childhood belief that "to write was to engrave new
beings upon (the infinite Tables of the Word) or ... to catch living
things in the trap ofphrases." 22 Naive as such a notion may seem on
the face of it, it is not "wholly an illusion, for it is his [Sartre's) truth,"
as one commentator observes23-and irideed it is every writer's
"truth," a truth which has traditionally led male authors to assume
patriarchal rights of ownership over the female "characters" they
engrave upon "the infinite Tables of the Word."
Male authors have also, of course, generated male characters over
whom they would seem to have had similar rights of ownership.
But further implicit in the metaphor of literary paternity is the idea
that each man, arriving at what Hopkins caJJed the "puberty" of
his creative gift, has the ability, even perhaps the obligation, to talk
back to other men by generating alternative fictions of his own.
Lacking the pen/penis which would enable them similarly to refute
one fiction by another, women in patriarchal societies have historically been reduced to mere properties, to characters and images imprisoned in male texts because generated solely, as Anne Elliot and
Anne Finch observe, by male expectations and designs.
Like the metaphor ofliterary paternity itself, this corollary notion
that the chief creature man has generated is woman has a long and
complex history. From Eve, Minerva, Sophia, and Galatea onward,
after all, patriarchal mythology defines women as created by, from,
and for men, the children of male brains, ribs, and ingenuity. For
Blake the eternal female was at her best an Emanation of the male
creative principle. For Shelley she was an epi-psyche, a soul out of
the poet's soul, whose inception paraJJeled on a spiritual plane the
solider births of Eve and Minerva. Throughout the history of Western
c~lture, moreover, male-engendered female figures as superficially
disparate as Milton's Sin, Swift's Chloe, and Yeats's Crazy Jane
have incarnated men's ambivalence not only toward female sexuality
but toward their own (male) physicality. At the same time, male
The Q.uem's Looking Glass
13
texts, continually elaborating the metaphor ofliterary paternity, have
continually proclaimed that, in Honore de Balzac's ambiguous word~
"woman's virtue is man's greatest invention." 24 A characteristically
condensed and oracular comment by Norman 0. Brown perfectly
summarizes the assumptions on which all such texts are based:
Poetry, the creative act, the act oflife, the archetypal sexual act.
Sexuality is poetry. The lady is our creation, or Pygmalion's
statue. The lady is the poem; [Petrarch's] Laura is, really,
poetry.25
No doubt this complex of metaphors and etiologies simply reflects
not just the fiercely patriarchal structure of Western society but also
the underpinning of misogyny upon which that severe patriarchy
has stood. The roots of "authority" tell us, after all, that if woman is
man's property then he must have authored her, just as surely as
they tell us that if he authored her she must be his property. As a
creation "penned" by man, moreover, woman has been "penned up"
or "penned in." As a sort of "sentence" man has spoken, she has
herself been "sentenced": fated, jailed, for he has both "indited"
her and "indicted" her. As a thought he has "framed," she has been
both "framed" (enclosed) in his texts, glyphs, graphics, and "framed
up" (found guilty, found wanting) in his cosmologies. For as Humpty
Dumpty tells Alice in Through the Looking Glass, the "master" of
words, utterances, phrases, literary properties, "can manage the
whole lot of them!" 26 The etymology and etiology of masculine
authority are, it seems, almost necessarily identical. However, for
women who felt themselves to be more than, in every sense, the
properties ofliterary texts, the problem posed by such authority was
neither metaphysical nor philological, but (as the pain expressed by
Anne Finch and Anne Elliot indicates) psychological. Since both
patriarchy and its texts subordinate and imprison women, before
women can even attempt that pen which is so rigorously kept from
them they must escape just those male texts which, defining them
as "Cyphers," deny them the autonomy to formulate alternatives
to the authority that has imprisoned them and kept them from
attempting the pen.
The vicious circularity of this problem helps explain the curious
passivity with which Finch responded (or pretended to respond) to
14
.
'
Toward a Feminist Poetics
male expectations and designs, and it helps explain, too, the centurieslong silence ofso many women who must have had talents comparable
to Finch's. A final paradox of the metaphor of literary paternity is
the fact that in the same way an author both generates and imprisons
his fictive creatures, he silences them by depriving them of autonomy
(that is, of the power of independent speech) even as he gives them
life. He silences them and, as Keats's " Ode on a Grecian Urn"
suggests, he stills them, or- embedding them in the marble of his
art- kills them. As Albert Gelpi neatly puts it, "the artist kills
experience into art, for temporal experience can only escape death
by dying into the 'immortality' of artistic form. The fixity of 'life'
in art and the fluidity of 'life' in nature are incompatible." 27 The pen,
therefore, is not only mightier than the sword, it is also like the sword
in its power-its need, even- to kill. And this last attribute of the
pen once again seems to be associatively linked with its metaphorical
maleness. Simone de Beauvoir has commented that the human male's
"transcendence" of nature is symbolized by his ability to hunt and
kill, just as the human female's identification with nature, her role
as a symbol of immanence, is expressed by her central involvement
in that life-giving but involuntary birth process which perpetuates the
species. Thus, superiority- or authority-"has been accorded in
humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills."28
In D. H. Lawrence's words, "the Lords of Life are the Masters of
Death"- and therefore, patriarchal poetics implies, they are the
masters of art. 29
Commentators on female subordination from Freud and Horney
to de Beauvoir, Wolfgang Lederer, and most recently, Dorothy
Dinnerstein, have of course explored other aspects of the relationship
between the sexes that also lead men to want figuratively tO "kill"
women. What Horney called male "dread" of the female is a phenomenon to which Lederer has devoted a long and scholarly book. so
Elaborating on de Beauvoir's assertion that as mother oflife "woman's
first lie, her first treason [seems to be] that of life itself- life which,
though clothed in the most attractive forms, is always infested by the
ferments of age and death," Lederer remarks upon woman's own
tendency to "kill" herself into art in order "to appeal to man":
From the Paleolithic on, we have evidence that woman, through
careful coiffure, through adornment and makeup, tried to stress
The Ofleen's Looking Glass
15
the eternal type rather than the mortal self. Such makeup, in
Mrica or Japan, may reach the, to us, somewhat estranging
degree of a lifeless mask-and yet that is precisely the purpose
of it: where nothing is lifelike, nothing speaks of death. 31
For yet another reason, then, it is no wonder that women have
historically hesitated to attempt the pen. Authored by a male God
and by a godlike male, killed into a "perfect" image of herself, the
woman writer's self-contemplation may be said to have begun with
a searching glance into the mirror of the male-inscribed literary
text. There she would see at first only those eternal lineaments fixed
on her like a mask' to conceal her dreadful and bloody link to nature.
But looking long enough, looking hard enough, she would see- like
the speaker of Mary Elizabeth Coleridge's "The Other Side of the
Mirror" -an enraged prisoner: herself. The poem describing this
vision is central to the feminist poetics we are trying to construct:
I sat before my glass one day,
And conjured up a vision bare,
Unlike the aspects glad and gay,
That erst were found reflected thereThe vision of a woman, wild
With more than womanly despair.
Her hair stood back on either side
A face bereft of loveliness.
It had no envy now to hide
What once no man on earth could guess.
It formed the thorny aureole
Of hard unsanctified distress.
Her lips were open-not a sound
Came through the parted lines of red.
Whate'er it was, the hideous wound
In silence and in secret bled.
No sigh relieved her speechless woe,
She had no voice to speak her dread.
And in her lurid eyes there shone
The dying flame of life's desire,
Made mad because its hope was gone,
•
16
Toward a Feminist Poetics
And kindled at the leaping fire
Of jealousy, and fierce revenge,
And strength that could not change nor tire.
Shade of a shadow in the glass,
0 set the crystal surface free!
Pass-as the fairer visions passNor ever more return, to be
The ghost of a distracted hour,
That heard me whisper, 'I am she!'3 2
What this poem suggests is that, although the woman who is the
prisoner of the mirror/text's images has "no voice to speak her dread,"
although "no sigh" interrupts "her speechless woe," she has an
invincible sense of her own autonomy, her own interiority; she has a
sense, to paraphrase Chaucer's Wife of Bath, of the authority of her
own experience.38 The power of metaphor, says Mary Elizabeth
Coleridge's poem, can only extend so far. Finally, no human creature
can be completely silenced by a text or by an image. Just as stories
notoriously have a habit of"getting away" from their authors, human
beings since Eden have had a habit of defying authority, both divine
and literary.34
Once more the debate in which Austen's Anne Elliot and her
Captain Harville engage is relevant here, for it is surely no accident
that the question these two characters are discussing is woman's
"inconstancy" -her refusal, that is, to be fixed or "killed" by an
author/owner, her stubborn insistence on her own way. That male
authors berate her for this refusal even while they themselves generate
female charact~rs who (as we shall see) perversely display "monstrous" autonomy is one of the ironies of literary art. From a female
perspective, however, such "inconstancy" can only be encouraging,
for-implying duplicity-it suggests that women themselves have
the power to create themselves as characters, even perhaps the power
to reach toward the woman trapped on the other side of the mirror/
text and help her to climb out.
Before the woman writer can journey through the looking glass
toward literary autonomy, however, she must come to terms with
Thl (bum's Looking Glass
17
the images on the surface of the glass, with, that is, those mythic
masks male artists have fastened over her human face both to lessen
their dread of her "inconstancy" and-by identifying her with the
"eternal types" they have themselves invented-to possess her more
thoroughly. Specifically, as we will try to show here, a woman writer
must examine, assimilate, and transcend the extreme images of
"angel" and "monster" which male authors have generated for her.
Before we women can write, declared Virginia Woolf, we must "kilt"
the "angel in the house." 36 In other words, women must kill the
aesthetic ideal through which they themselves have been "kjJled"
into art. And similarly, all women writers must kill the angel's
necessary opposite and double, the "monster" in the house, whose
Medusa-face also kills female creativity. For us as feminist critics,
however, the Woolfian act of"killing" both angels and monsters must
here begin with an understanding of the nature and origin of these
images. At this point in our construction of a feminist poetics, then,
we really must dissect in order to murder. And we must particularly
do this in order to understand literature by women because, as we
shall show, the images of"angel" and "monster" have been so ubiquitous throughout literature by men that they have also pervaded
women's writing to such 'an extent that few women have definitively
"killed" either figure. Rather, the female imagination has perceived
itself, as it were, through a glass darkly: until quite recently the woman
writer has had (if only unconsciously) to define herself as a mysterious
creature who resides behind the angel or monster or angel/monster
image that lives on what Mary Elizabeth Coleridge called "the
crystal surface."
For all literary artists, of course, self-definition necessarily precedes
self-assertion: the creative "I AM" cannot be uttered if the "I" knows
not what it is. But for the female artist the essential process of selfdefinition is complicated by all those patriarchal definitions that
intervene between herself and herself. From Anne Finch's Ardelia,
who struggles to escape the male designs in which she feels herself
enmeshed, to Sylvia Plath's "Lady Lazarus," who tells "Herr
Doktor ... Herr Enemy" that "I am your opus,/ I am your valuable,"36 the woman writer acknowledges with pain, confusion, and
anger that what she sees in the mirror is usually a male construct,
the "pure gold baby" of male brains, a glittering and wholly artificial
18
Toward a Feminisl Poelics
child. With Christina Rossetti, moreover, she realizes that the male
artist often "feeds" upon his female subject's face "not as she is but
as she fills his dreams." 37 Finally, as "A Woman's Poem" of 1859
simply puts it, the woman writer insists that "You [men] make the
worlds wherein you move .... Our world (alas you make that too! )"
-and in its narrow confines, "shut in four blank walls ... we act
our parts." 38
Though the highly stylized women's roles to which this last poem
alludes are all ultimately variations upon the roles of angel and
monster, they seem on the surface quite varied, because so many
masks, reflecting such an elaborate typology, have been invented
for wome.n. A crucial passage from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
Au~ora Letg~ suggests both the mystifying deathliness and the mystenous vanety female artists perceive in male imagery of women.
Contemplating a portrait of her mother which, significantly, was
made after its subject was dead (so that it is a kind of death mask
an image of a woman metaphorically killed into art) the youn~
Aurora broods on the work's iconography. Noting that her mother's
chambermaid had insisted upon having her dead mistress painted
in "~he red stiff silk" of her court dress rather than in an "EnglishfashiOned shroud," she remarks that the effect of this unlikely costume
was "very strange." As the child stared at the painting, her mother's
"swan-like supernatural white life" seemed to mingle with "whatever
I last read, or heard, or dreamed," and thus in its charismatic beauty,
her mother's image became
by turns
Ghost, fiend, and angel, fairy, witch, and sprite;
A dauntless Muse who eyes a dreadful Fate;
A loving Psyche who loses sight of Love;
A still Medusa with mild milky brows,
All curdled and all clothed upon with snakes
Whose slime falls fast as sweat will; or anon
Our Lady of the Passion, stabbed with swords
Where the Babe sucked; or Lamia in her first
Moonlighted pallor, ere she shrunk and blinked,
And shuddering wriggled down to the unclean;
Or my own mother, leaving her last smile
The Queen's Looking Glass
19
In her last kiss upon the baby-mouth
My father pushed down on the bed for that;
Or my dead mother, without smile or kiss,
Buried at Florence. at
The female forms Aurora sees in her dead mother's picture are
extreme, melodramatic, gothic- "Ghost, fiend, and angel, fairy,
witch, and sprite" -specifically, as she tells us, because her reading
merges with her seeing. What this implies, however, is not only that
she herself is fated to inhabit male-defined masks and costumes, as
her mother did, but that male-defined masks and costumes inevitably
inhabit her, altering her vision. Aurora's self-development as a poet is
the central concern of Barrett Browning's Bildungsroman in verse, but
if she is to be a poet she must deconstruct the dead self that is a male
"opus" and discover a living, "inconstant" self. She must, in other
words, replace the "copy" with the "individuality," as Barrett
Browning once said she thought she herself had done in her mature
art.' 0 Significantly, however, the "copy" selves depicted in Aurora's
mother's portrait ultimately represent, once again, the moral extremes
of angel ("angel," "fairy," and perhaps "sprite") and monster
("ghost," "witch," "fiend").
In her brilliant and influential analysis of the question "Is Female
to Male as Nature Is to Culture?" the anthropologist Sherry Ortner
notes that in every society "the psychic mode associated with women
seems to stand at both the bottom and the top of the scale of human
modes of relating." Attempting to account for this "symbolic ambiguity," Ortner explains "both the subversive feminine symbols
(witches, evil eye, menstrual pollution, castrating mothers) and the
feminine symbols of transcendence (mother goddesses, merciful dispensers of salvation, female symbols ofjustice)" by pointing out that
women "can appear from certain points of view to stand both
under and over (but really simply outside of) the sphere of culture's
hegemony." 41 That is, precisely because a woman is denied the autonomy- the subjectivity-that the pen represents, she is not only
excluded from culture (whose emblem might well be the pen) but
she also becomes herself an embodiment of just those extremes of
mysterious and intransigent Otherness which culture confro0 ts with
worship or fear, love or loathing. As "Ghost, fiend, and angel, fairy,
20
Toward a Feminist Poetics
witch, and sprite," she mediates between the male artist and the
Unknown, simultaneously teaching him purity and instructing him
in degradation. But what of her own artistic growth? Because that
growth has for so long been radically qualified by the angel- and
monster-imagery the literary woman sees in the looking glass of the
male-authored text, some understanding of such imagery is an
essential preliminary to any study of literature by women. As Joan
Didion recently noted, "writing is an aggression" precisely because
it is "an imposition ... an invasion of someone else's most private
space.'' 42 Like Leo Bersani's observation that an "elasticity of being
[is) induced by an immersion in literature," her remark has special
significance in this connection. A thorough study of those male constructs which have invaded the "most private space" of countless
literate women would require hundreds of pages-indeed, a number
of excellent books have been devoted to the subject 43-but we will
attempt here a brief review of the fundamental extremes of angel
and monster, in order to demonstrate the severity of the male text's
"imposition" upon women.
The ideal woman that male authors dream of generating is always
an angel, as Norman 0. Brown's comment about Laura/poetry
suggested. At the same time, from Virginia Woolf's point of view,
the "angel in the house" is the most pernicious image male authors
have ever imposed upon literary women. Where and how did this
ambiguous image originate, particularly the trivialized Victorian
angel in the house that so disturbed Woolf? In the Middle Ages, of
course, mankind's great teacher of purity was the Virgin Mary, a
mother goddess who perfectly fitted the female role Ortner defines
as "merciful dispenser of salvation." For the more secular nineteenth
century, however, the eternal type of female purity was represented
not by a madonna in heaven but by an angel in the house. Nevertheless, there is a clear line of literary descent from divine Virgin to
domestic angel, passing through (among many others) Dante, Milton,
and Goethe.
Like most Renaissance neo-Platonists, Dante claimed to know God
and His Virgin handmaid by knowing the Virgin's virgin attendant,
Tlu Quem's Looking Glass
21
Beatrice. Similarly, Milton, despite his undeniable misogyny (which
we shall examine later), speaks of having been granted a vision of
"my late espoused saint," who
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind.
Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight,
Love sweetness goodness, in her person shined
So clear, as in no face with more delight.
In death, in other words, Milton's human wife has taken on both the
celestial brightness of Mary and (since she has been ."washed fro~
spot of childbed taint") the virginal purity of Beatnce. In f~ct, If
she could be resurrected in the flesh she might now be an angel m the
house, interpreting heaven's luminous mysteries to her wondering
husband.
The famous vision of the "Eternal Feminine" (Das Ewig-Weibliche)
with which Goethe's Faust concludes presents women from penitent
prostitutes to a~gelic virgins in just this role of interpreters or intermediaries between the divine Father and his human sons. The
German of Faust's "Chorus Mysticus" is extraordinarily difficult to
translate in verse, but Hans Eichner's English paraphrase easily
suggests the ways in which Goethe's image of female intercessors
seems almost to be a revision of Milton's "late espoused saint": "All
that is transitory is merely symbolical; here (that is to say, in the
scene before you) the inaccessible is (symbolically) portrayed an~
the inexpressible is (symbolically) made manifest. The eternal feminine (i.e. the eternal principle symbolized by woman) dr~ws us to
higher spheres." Meditating on the exact nature of this e.~~mal
feminine, moreover, Eichner comments that for Goethe the 1deal
of contemplative purity" is always feminine while "the ideal of
significant action is masculine." 44 Once again, therefore, it is just
because women are defined as wholly passive, completely void of
generative power (like "Cyphers") that .they be~o.~e ~ur:!i~ou~ to
male artists. For in the metaphysical emptmess their punty sigmfies
they are, of course, self-less, with all the moral and psychological
. .
.
.
implications that word suggests.
Elaborating further on Goethe's eternal femmme, E1chner gives
an example of the culmination of Goethe's "chain of representatives
22
Toward a Feminist Poetics
of the 'noblest femininity'": Makarie, in the late novel Wil/u/m
Mtistn-'s Travels. His description of her usefully summarizes the
philosophical background of the angel in the house:
She ... leads a life of almost pure contemplation .... in considerable isolation on a country estate ... a life without external
events-a life whose story cannot be told as there is no story.
Her existence is not useless. On the contrary ... she shines like a
beacon in a dark world, like a motionless lighthouse by which
others, the travellers whose lives do have a story, can set their
course. When those involved in feeling and action turn to her
in their need, they are never dismissed without advice and
consolation. She is an ideal, a model of selflessness and of purity
ofheart.u
Sht has no story Q[ her own but gives "advice and consolation" to others,
listens, smiles, sympathizes: such characteristics show that Makarie
is not only the descendent of Western culture's cloistered virgins but
also the direct ancestress of Coventry Patmore's angel in the house,
the eponymous heroine of what may have been the middle nineteenth
century's most popular book of poems.
Dedicated to "the memory of her by whom and for whom I became
a poet," Patmore's The Angel in the House is a verse-sequence which
hymns the praises and narrates the courtship and marriage of
Honoria, one of the three daughters of a country Dean, a girl whose
unselfish grace, gentleness, simplicity, and nobility reveal that she is
not only a pattern Victorian lady but almost literally an angel on
earth. Certainly her spirituality interprets the divine for her poethusband, so that
No happier post than this I ask,
To live her laureate all my life.
On wings of love uplifted free,
And by her gentleness made great,
I'll teach how noble man should be
To match with such a lovely mate.•&
Honoria's essential virtue, in other words, is that her virtue makes her
man "great." In and of herself, she is neither great nor extraordinary.
Indeed, Patmore adduces many details to stress the almost pathetic
The Q.ueen's Lcoking Glass
23
ordinariness of her life: she picks violets, loses her gloves, feeds her
birds, waters her rose plot, and journeys to London on a train with her
father the Dean, carrying in her lap a volume of Petrarch borrowed
from her lover but entirely ignorant that the book is, as he tells us,
"worth its weight in gold." In short, like Goethe's Makarie, Honoria
has no story except a sort of anti-story of selfless innocence based on
the notion that "Man must be pleased; but him to please/ Is woman's
pleasure." 47
Significantly, when the young poet-lover first visits the Dean~ry
where his Honoria awaits him like Sleeping Beauty or Snow Wh1te,
one of her sisters asks him if, since leaving Cambridge, he has "outgrown" Kant and Goethe. But if his paean of praise to the EwigWeibliche in rural England suggests that he has not, at any rate,
outgrown the latter of these, that is because for Victorian men of
letters Goethe represented not collegiate immaturity but moral
maturity. Mter all, the climactic words of Sartor Resartus, that most
influential masterpiece of Victorian sagacity, were "Close thy Byron;
open thy Goethe," 48 and though Carlyle was not specifically thinking
of what came to be called "the woman question," his canonization
of Goethe meant, among other things, a new emphasis on the eternal
feminine, the angel woman Patmore describes in his verses, Aurora
Leigh perceives in her mother's picture, and Virginia Woolf shudders
to remember.
Of course, from the eighteenth century on, conduct books for ladies
had proliferated, enjoining young girls to submissiveness, modesty,
self-lessness; reminding aU women that they should be angelic. There
is a long and crowded road from The Booke Q[ Curtesye (I 4 77) to the
columns of "Dear Abby," but social historians have fully explored
its part in the creation of those "eternal feminine" virtues of modesty,
gracefulness, purity, delicacy, civility, compliancy, reticence,
chastity, affability, politeness-all of which are modes of mannerliness that contributed to Honoria's angelic innocence. Ladies
were assured by the writers of such conduct books that "There are
Rules for all our Actions, even down to Sleeping with a good Grace,"
and they were told that this good Grace was a woman's duty to her
husband because "if Woman owes her Being to the Comfort and
Profit of man, 'tis highly reasonable that she should be careful and
diligent to content and please him." 49
24
Toward a Feminist Poetics
The arts of pleasing men, in other words, are not only angelic
characteristics; in more worldly terms, they are the proper acts of a
lady. "What shall I do to gratify myself or to be admired?" is not
the question a lady asks on arising, declared Mrs. Sarah Ellis, Victorian England's foremost preceptress offemale morals and manners,
in 1844. No, because she is "the least engaged of any member of the
household," a woman of right feeling should devote herself to the
good ~f others.60 And she should do this silently, without calling
attentiOn to her exertions because "all that would tend to draw away
her thoughts from others and fix them on herself, ought to be avoided
as an evil to her." 61 Similarly, John Ruskin affirmed in 1865 that
the woman's "power is not for rule, not for battle, and her intellect
is not for invention or creation, but for sweet orderings" of domesticity. 52 Plainly, both writers meant that, enshrined within her home
a Victorian angel-woman should become her husband's holy refug;
from the blood and sweat that inevitably accompanies a "life of
significant action," as well as, in her "contemplative purity," a living
memento of the otherness of the divine.
At times, however, in the severity of her selflessness, as well as in
the extremity of her alienation from ordinary fleshly life, this nineteenth-century angel-woman becomes not just a memento ofotherness
but actually a memento mori or, as Alexander Welsh has noted an
"Angel of Death." Discussing Dickens's heroines in particular 'and
what he calls Victorian "angelology" in general, Welsh analyzes
~~e .wa~ in which a .spiritualized heroine like Florence Dombey
ass1sts m the translanon of the dying to a future state," not only
by officiating at the sickbed but also by maternally welcoming the
sufferer "from the other side of death." 53 But if the angel-woman in
some curious way simultaneously inhabits both this world and the
next? then there is a sense in which, besides ministering to the dying,
she 1s herself already dead. Welsh muses on "the apparent reversibility of the heroine's role, whereby the acts of dying and of saving
someone from death seem confused," and he points out that Dickens
actually describes Florence Dombey as having the unearthly serenity
ofone who is dead. 64 A spiritual messenger, an interpreter of mysteries
to wondering and devoted men, the Ewig- Wtibliche angel becomes,
finally, a messenger of the mystical otherness of death.
As Ann Douglas has recently shown, the nineteenth-century cult
Tlu Quem's Looking Glass
25
of such death-angels as Harriet Beecher Stowe's little Eva or Dickens's
little Nell resulted in a veritable "domestication of death," producing
both a conventionalized iconography and a stylized hagiography of
dying women and children.55 Like Dickens's dead-alive Florence
Dombey, for instance, Louisa May Alcott's dying Beth March is a
household saint, and the deathbed at which she surrenders herself
to heaven is the ultimate shrine of the angel-woman's mysteries. At
the same time, moreover, the aesthetic cult of ladylike fragility and
delicate beauty-no doubt associated with the moral cult of the
angel-woman-obliged "genteel" women to "kill" themselves (as
Lederer observed) into art objects: slim, pale, passive beings whose
"charms" eerily recalled the snowy, porcelain immobility of the
dead. Tight-lacing, fasting, vinegar-drinking, and similar cosmetic
or dietary excesses were all parts of a physical regimen that helped
women either to feign morbid weakness or actually to "decline"
into real illness. Beth March's beautiful ladylike sister Amy is thus,
in her artful way, as pale and frail as her consumptive sibling, and
together these two heroines constitute complementary halves of the
emblematic "beautiful woman" whose death, thought Edgar Allan
Poe, "is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world." 56
Whether she becomes an objet d'art or a saint, however, it is the
surrender of her self-of her personal comfort, her personal desires,
or both-that is the beautiful angel-woman's key act, while it is
precisely this sacrifice which dooms her both to death and to heaven.
For to be selfless is not only to be noble, it is to be dead. A life that
has no story, like the life of Goethe's Makarie, is really a life of death,
a death-in-life. The ideal of "contemplative purity" evokes, finally,
both heaven and the grave. To return to Aurora Leigh's catalogue,
then-her vision of"Ghost, fiend, and angel, fairy, witch, and sprite"
in her mother's portrait- there is a sense in which as a celestial
"angel" Aurora's mother is also a somewhat sinister ''ghost," because
she wears the face of the spiritualized Victorian woman who, having
died to her own desires, her own self, her own life, leads a posthumous
existence in her own lifetime.
As Douglas r.eminds us too, though, the Victorian domestication
of death represents not just an acquiescence in death by the selfless,
but also a secret striving for power by the powerless. "The tombstone,"
she notes, "is the sacred emblem in the cult of the overlooked." 57
26
Toward a Fnninist Poetics
Ex_orcised from pub~ic life, denied the pleasures (though not the
pams) of sensual extstence, the Victorian angel in the house was
allowed to hold sway over at leas~ one realm beyond her own household: the kingdom of the dead. But if, as nurse and comforter
spirit-guide ~nd mystical messenger, a woman ruled the dying and
the dead, rmght not even her admirers sometimes fear that besides
dying or easing death, she could bring death? As Welsh pu~ it, "the
power of an angel to save implies, even while it denies, the power of
death." Spe~k_ing of ang~ic Agnes Wickfield (in David Copperfield),
he adds a stmster but Witty question: "Who, in the language o:
detective fiction, was the last person to see Dora Copperfield alive?" sa
Neit~er W~ls~ nor Dic~ens does more than hint at the angelwoman s permc10us potential. But in this context a word to the wise
is enough, for such a hint helps explain the fluid metamorphoses that
the figure of Auro~a's mother undergoes. Her images of "Ghost,
fi:nd, and_ angel, fatry, witch and sprite," we begin to see, are inex~nca?ly hn~ed, one to another, each to its opposite. Certainly,
tmpnsoned _m the coffinlike shape of a death angel, a woman might
long demorucally for escape. In addition, if as death angel the woman
suggests a providentially selfless mother, delivering the male soul
from one realm to another, the same woman's maternal power implies,
too, the fearful bondage of mortality into which every mother delivers
her childre?. Fina_lly, the fact that the angel woman manipulates
her domesttcfmysttcal sphere in order to ensure the well-being of
those entrusted to her care reveals that she can manipulate; she can
scheme; she can plot-stories as well as strategies.
The Victorian angel's scheming, her mortal fleshliness, and her
r~pressed (but therefore all the more frightening) capacity for exploSlve rage are often subtly acknowledged, even in the most glowing
texts of male "angelographers." Patmore's Honoria for instance
r.roves to be considerably more duplicitous than at fi;st she seemed:
To the ~weet folly of the dove," her poet-lover admits, "She joins
t~e. cun~mg of _the ~nak;;" To be sure, the speaker shows that her
wihness ts exerctsed m a good" cause: "to rivet and exalt his love."
Nevertheless,
Her mode of candour is deceit·,
And what she thinks from what she'll say
The Quem's Looking Glass
27
(Although I'll never call her cheat)
Lies far as Scotland from Cathay. 6&
Clearly, the poet is here acknowledging his beloved's potential for
what Austen's Captain Harville called "inconstancy" -that is, her
stubborn autonomy and unknowable subjectivity, meaning the
ineradicable selfishness that underlies even her angelic renunciation
of self.
Similarly, exploring analogous tensions between flesh and spirit
in yet another version of the angel-woman, Dante Gabriel Rossetti
places his "Blessed Damozel" behind "golden barriers" in heaven,
but then observes that she is still humanly embodied. The bars she
leans on are oddly warm; her voice, her hair, her tears are weirdly
real and sensual, perhaps to emphasize the impossibility of complete
spirituality for any woman. This "damozel's" life-in-death, at any
rate, is still in some sense physical and therefore (paradoxically)
emblematic of mortality. But though Rossetti wrote "The Blessed
Damozel" in 1846, sixteen years before the suicide of his wife and
model Elizabeth Siddal, the secret anxieties such imagery expressed
came to the surface long after Lizzie's death. In 1869, to retrieve a
poetry manuscript he had sentimentally buried with this beloved
woman whose face "fill(ed] his dreams"-buried as if woman and
artwork were necessarily inseparable-Rossetti had Lizzie's coffin
exhumed, and literary London buzzed with rumors that her hair
had "continued to grow after her death, to grow so long, so beautiful,
so luxuriantly as to fill the coffin with its gold!" 60 As if symbolizing
the indomitable earthliness that no woman, however angelic, could
entirely renounce, Lizzie Siddal Rossetti's hair leaps like a metaphor
for monstrous female sexual energies from the literal and figurative
coffins in which her artist-husband enclosed her. To Rossetti, its
assertive radiance made the dead Lizzie seem both terrifyingly
physical and (iercely supernatural. "'Mid change the changeless
night environeth, I Lies all that golden hair undimmed in death,"
he wrote. 61
If we define a woman like Rossetti's dead wife as indomitably
earthly yet somehow supernatural, we are defining her as a witch or
28
Toward a Feminist Poetics
monster, a magical creature of the lower world who is a kind of
antithetical mirror image of an angel. As such, she still stands, in
Sherry Ortner's words, "both under and over (but really simply
outside of) the sphere of culture's hegemony." But now, as a representative of otherness, she incarnates the damning otherness of the
flesh rather than the inspiring otherness of the spirit, expressing
what- to use Anne Finch's words-men consider her own "presumptuous" desires rather than the angelic humility and "dullness"
for which she was designed. Indeed, if we return to the literary
definitions of "authority" with which we began this discussion, W•.!
will see that the monster-woman, threatening to replace her angelic
sister, embodies intransigent female autonomy and thus represents
both the author's power to allay "his" anxieties by calling their
source bad names (witch, bitch, fiend, monster) and, simultaneously,
the mysterious power of the character who refuses to stay in her
textually ordained "place" and thus generates a story that "gets
away" from its author.
Because, as Dorothy Dinnerstein has proposed, male anxieties
about female autonomy pn:.bably go as deep as everyone's motherdominated infancy, patriarchal texts have traditionally suggested
that every angelically selfless Snow White must be hunted, if not
haunted, by a wickedly assertive Stepmother: for every glowing
portrait of submissive women enshrined in domesticity, there exists
an equally important negative image that embodies the sacrilegious
fiendishness of what William Blake called the "Female Will." Thus,
while male writers traditionally praise the simplicity of the dove,
they invariably castigate the cunning of the serpent- at least when
that cunning is exercised in her own behalf. Similarly, assertiveness,
aggressiveness- all characteristics of a male life of "significant
action" - are "monstrous" in women precisely because "unfeminine"
and therefore unsuited to a gentle life of "contemplative purity."
Musing on "The Daughter of Eve," Patmore's poet-speaker remarks,
significantly, that
The woman's gentle mood o'erstept
Withers my love, that lightly scans
The rest, and does in her accept
All her own faults, but none of man's.ez
Tlu Q.ueen's Looking Glass
29
Luckily, his Honoria has no such v1c1ous defects; her serpentine
cunning, as we noted earlier, is concentrated entirely on pleasing
her lover. But repeatedly, throughout most male literature, a sweet
heroine inside the house (like Honoria) is opposed to a vicious bitch
outside.
Behind Thackeray's angelically submissive Amelia Sedley, for
instance- an Honoria whose career is traced in gloomier detail than
that of Patmore's angel- lurks Vaniry Fair's stubbornly autonomous
Becky Sharp, an independent "charmer" whom the novelist at one
point actually describes as a monstrous and snaky sorceress:
In describing this siren, singing and smiling, coaxing and cajoling, the author, with modest pride, asks his readers all around,
has he once forgotten the laws of politeness, and showed the
monster's hideous tail above water? No! Those who like may
peep down under waves that are pretty transparent, and see it
writhing and twirling, diabolically hideous and slimy, flapping
amongst bones, or curling around corpses; but above the water
line, I ask, has not everything been proper, agreeable, and
decorous .... 63
As this extraordinary passage suggests, the monster may not only
be concealed behind the angel, she may actually turn out to reside
within (or in the lower half of) the angel. Thus, Thackeray implies,
every angel in the house- "proper, agreeable, and decorous,"
"coaxing and cajoling" hapless men- is really, perhaps, a monster,
"diabolically hideous and slimy."
"A woman in the shape of a monster," Adrienne Rich observes
in "Planetarium," "a monster in the shape of a woman / the skies
are full ofthem."64 Because the skies are full of them, even if we focus
only on those female monsters who are directly related to Thackeray's
serpentine siren, we will find that such monsters have long inhabite~
male texts. Emblems of filthy materiality, committed only to the1r
own private ends, these women are accidents of nature, deformities
meant to repel, but in their very freakishness they possess unhealthy
energies, powerful and dangerous arts. Moreover, to the extent that
they incarnate male dread of women and, specifically, male scorn
of female creativity, such characters have drastically affected the
30
Toward a Feminist Poetics
self-images of women writers, negatively reinforcing those messages
of submissiveness conveyed by their angelic sisters.
The first book of Spenser's The Faerie Queene introduces a female
monster who serves as a prototype of the entire Hne. Errour is half
woman, half serpent, "Most lotbsom, filthie, foule, and full of vile
disdaine" (1.1:126). She breeds in a dark den where her young
suck on h~r p01sono~s dugs or creep back into her mouth at the sight
of bated hght, and m battle against the noble Red-crosse Knight
~~e spews out a flood of books and papers, frogs and toads. Symbol~
lZlng th~ dangerous effect of misdirected and undigested learning,
her filthmess adumbrates that of two other powerful females in book 1
Duessa and Lucifera. But because these other women can creat~
false appearances to hide their vile natures, they are even more
dangerous.
Like Errour, Duessa is deformed below the waist, as if to foreshadow
Lear's "But to the girdle do the Gods inherit, Beneath is all the fiend's."
When, like all witches, she must do penance at the time of the new
moon by bathing with herbs traditionally used by such other witches
as Scylla, Circe, and Medea, her "neather parts" are revealed as
"misshapen, monstruous. "Sb But significantly, Duessa deceives and
ensn~res men by assuming the shape of Una, the beautiful and angelic
her~me ~ho ~epresents Christianity, charity, dociHty. Similarly,
Luc1fera hves m what seems to be a lovely mansion, a cunningly
constructed House of Pride whose weak foundation and ruinous rear
~uarters are carefully concealed. Both women use their arts of deception t? entrap and destroy men, and the secret, shameful ugliness of
both IS closely associated with their hidden genitals-that is with
their femaleness. .
'
Descending from Patristic misogynists like Tertullian and St.
Augustine through Renaissance and Restoration literature-through
Sidney's Cecropia, Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth and his Goneril and
Regan, Milton's Sin (and even, as we shall see, his Eve)-the female
monster populates the works of the satirists of the eighteenth century,
a company of male artists whose virulent visions must have been
part~cularly alarming to feminine readers in an age when women
had JUSt begun to "attempt the pen.'' These authors attacked literary
wom~n on two fronts. First, and most obviously, through the construction of cartoon figures like Sheridan's Mrs. Malaprop and
The Q.ueen's Looking Glass
31
Fielding's Mrs. Slipslop, and Smollett's Tabitha Bramble, they
implied that language itself was almost literally alien to the female
tongue. In the mouths of women, vocabulary loses meaning, sentences
dissolve, literary messages are distorted or destroyed. At the same
time, more subtly but perhaps for that reason even more significantly,
such authors devised elaborate anti-romances to show that the female
"angel" was realiy a female "fiend," the ladylike paragon really an
unladylike monster. Thus while the "Bluestocking" Anne Finch
would find herself directly caricatured (as she was by Pope and Gay)
as a character afflicted with the "poetical Itch" like Phoebe Clinket
in Three Hours After Marriage, 66 she might well feel herself to be
indirectly but even more profoundly attacked by Johnson's famous
observation that a woman preacher was like a dog standing on its
hind legs, or by the suggestion-embedded in works by Swift, Pope,
Gay, and others-that all women were inexorably and inescapably
monstrous, in the flesh as well as in the spirit. Finally, in a comment
like Horace Walpole's remark that Mary Wollstonecraft was "a
hyena in petticoats," the two kinds of misogynistic attacks definitively
merged. 67
It is significant, then, that jonathan Swift's disgust with the monstrous females who populate so many of his verses seems to have been
caused specifically by the inexorable failure of female art. Like
disgusted Gulliver, who returns to England only to prefer the stable
to the parlor, his horses to his wife, Swift projects his horror of time,
his dread of physicality, on to another stinking creature-the degenerate woman. Probably the most famous instance of this projection
occurs in his so-called dirty poems. In these works, we peer behind
the facade of the angel woman to discover that, say, the idealized
"Caelia, Caelia, Caelia, shits !" We discover that the seemingly
unblemished Chloe must "either void or burst," and that the female
"inner space" of the "Queen of Love" is like a foul chamber pot. 68
Though some critics have suggested that the misogyny implied by
Swift's characterizations of these women is merely ironic, what
emerges from his most furious poems in this vein is a horror of female
flesh and a revulsion at the inability-the powerlessness-of female
arts to redeem or to transform the flesh. Thus for Swift female sexuality
is consistently equated with degeneration, disease, and death, while
female arts are trivial attempts to forestall an inevitable end.
I
32
Toward a Feminut Poetics
Significantly, as if defining the tradition of duplicity in which
even Patmore's uxorious speaker placed his heroine, Swift devotes
many poems to an examination of the role deception plays in the
creation of a saving but inadequate fiction of femininity. In "A
Beautiful Young Nymph," a battered prostitute removes her wig,
her crystal eye, her teeth, and her padding at bedtime, so that the
next morning she must employ , all her "Arts" to reconstruct her
"scatt
.
er'd Par ts. " 88 S uc h as they are, however, her arts only contribute to her own suffering or that of others, and the same thing
is true of Diana in "The Progress of Beauty," who awakes as a
mingled mass of dirt and sweat, with cracked lips, foul teeth, and
gummy eyes, to spend four hours artfully reconstructing herself.
Because she is inexorably rotting away, however, Swift declares that
eventually .all forms will fail, for "Art no longer can prevaylf When
the . Matenalls all are gone." 70 The strategies of ChJoe, Caelia,
Connna, and .Diana-artists manque all-have no success, Swift
shows, except m temporarily staving off dissolution, for like Pope's
"S_.... of Queens," Swift's females are composed of what Pope called
"Matter too soft," and their arts are thus always inadequate. 71
No wonder, then, that the Augustan satirist attacks the female
scribbler so virulently, reinforcing Anne Finch's doleful sense that
for a wo.m~~ to attempt the pen is monstrous and "presumptuous,"
for sh~ IS to be dull / Expected and dessigned." At least in part
reflecung male artists' anxieties about the adequacy of their own
ar~, femal~ writers are maligned as failures in eighteenth-century
s~u~e ~rec1sely because they cannot transcend their female bodily
hmnauons: they cannot conceive of themselves in any but reproductive
terms. Poor Phoebe Clinket, for instance, is both a caricature of
~inch hersel~ a.nd .a protot~e of the female dunce who proves that
hterary creauvlty m women IS merely the result of sexual frustration.
Lovingly nurturing the unworthy "issue" of her muse because it
~tlests to the "Fertility and Readiness" of her imagination, Phoebe
IS as sens~~ and ~ndis~riminate in her poetic strainings as Lady
Townley lS m her msat1able erotic longings.n Like mothers of illegitimate or misshapen offspring, female writers are not producing
~hat they ~ught, the satirists declare, so that a loose lady novelist
ts, appropnately enough, the first prize in The Dunciad 's urinary
contest, while a chamberpot is awarded to the runner-up.
The Q.ueen's Loolcing Glass
33
For the most part, eighteenth-century satirists limited their
depiction of the female monster to low mimetic equivalents like
Phoebe Clinket or Swift's corroding coquettes. But there were several
important avatars of the monster woman who retained the allegorical
anatomy of their more fantastic precursors. In The Battle of the Books,
for instance, Swift's "Goddess Criticism" clearly symbolizes the
demise of wit and learning. Devouring numberless volumes in a den
as dark as Errour's, she is surrounded by relatives like Ignorance,
Pride, Opinion, Noise, Impudence, and Pedantry, and she herself
is as allegorically deformed as any of Spenser's females.
The Goddess herself had claws like a Cat; her Head, and Ears,
and Voice, resembled those of an Ass; Her Teeth fallen out
before; H er Eyes turned inward, as if she lookt only upon
Herself; Her diet was the overflowing of her own Gall: Her
Spleen was so large, as to stand prominent like a Dug of the
first Rate, nor wanted Excrescencies in forms of Teats, at which
a Crew of ugly Monsters were greedily sucking; and what is
wonderful to conceive, the bulk of Spleen increased faster than
the Sucking could diminish it. 73
Like Spenser's Errour and Milton's Sin, Criticism is linked by her
processes of eternal breeding, eating, spewing, feeding, and redevouring to biological cycles all three poets view as destructive to
transcendent, intellectual life. More, since all the creations of each
monstrous mother are her excretions, and since all her excretions
are both her food and her weaponry, each mother forms with her
brood a self-enclosed system, cannibalistic and solipsistic: the creativity of the world made flesh is annihilating. At lhe same time, Swift's
spleen-producing and splenetic Goddess cannot be far removed from
the Goddess of Spleen in Pope's The Rape of the Leek, and-because
she is a mother Goddess-she also has much in common with the
Goddess of Dullness who appears in Pope's Dunciad. The parent of
"Vapours and Female Wit," the "Hystertc or Poetic fit," the Queen
of Spleen rules over all women between the ages of fifteen and fifty,
and thus, as a sort of patroness of the female sexual cycle, she is
associated with the same anti-creation that characterizes Errour,
Sin, and Criticism. 74 Similarly, the Goddess of Dullness, a nursing
mother worshipped by a society of dunces, symbolizes the failure of
34
Toward a Feminist Poetics
culture, the failure of art, and the death of the satirist. The huge
daughter of Chaos and Night, she rocks the laureate in her ample lap
while handing out rewards and intoxicating drinks to her dull sons.
A Queen of Ooze, whose inertia comments on idealized Queens of
Love, she nods and all of Nature falls asleep, its light destroyed by
the stupor that spreads throughout the land in the milk of her
"kindness." 75
In all these incarnations-from Errour to Dullness, from Goneril
and Regan to Chloe and Caelia-the female monster is a striking
illustration of Simone de Beauvoir's thesis that woman has been
made to represent all of man's ambivalent feelings about his own
inability to control his own physical existence, his own birth and
death. As the Other, woman comes to represent the contingency of
life, life that is made to be destroyed. "It is the horror of his own
carnal contingence," de Beauvoir notes, "which [man] projects
upon (woman]." 76 In addition, as K aren H omey and Dorothy
Dinnerstein have shown, male dread of women, and specifically the
infantile dread of maternal autonomy, has historically objectified
itself in vilification of women, while male ambivalence about female
"charms" underlies the traditional images of such terrible sorceressgoddesses as the Sphinx, Medusa, Circe, Kali, Delilah, and Salome,
all of whom possess duplicitous arts that allow them both to seduce
and to steal male generative energy.11
The sexual nausea associated with all these monster women helps
explain why so many real women have for so long expressed loathing
of (or at least anxiety about) their own, inexorably female bodies.
The "killing" ofoneselfinto an art object- the pruning and preening,
the mirror madness, and concern with odors and aging, with hair
which is invariably too curly or too lank, with bodies too thin or
too thick- all this testifies to the efforts women have expended not
just trying to be angels but trying not to become female monsters.
More significantly for our purposes, however, the female freak is
and has been a powerfully coercive and monitory image for women
secretly desiring to attempt the pen, an image that helped enforce
the injunctions to silence implicit also in the concept of the EwigW eibliche. Ifbecoming an author meant mistaking one's "sex and way,"
if it meant becoming an "unsexed" or perversely sexed female, then
it meant becoming a monster or freak, a vile Errour, a grotesque
The Queen's Looking Glass
35
Lady Macbeth, a disgusting goddess of Dullness, ~r {to name a few
later witches) a murderous Lamia, a sinister Gerald me. Perhaps, then,
the "presumptuous" effort should not be made at all. Certainly the
story of Lilith, one more monster woman- indeed, according to
Hebrew mythology, both the first woman and the first mo?sterspecifically connects poetic presumption with madness, freak1shness,
monstrosity.
.
..
Created not from Adam's rib but, like him, from the dust, L1hth
was Adam's first wife, according to apocryphal Jewish lore. Beca~se
she considered herself his equal, she objected to lying beneath him,
so that when he tried to force her submission, she became enraged
and, speaking the Ineffable Name, flew away to the ed~e oft_he ~ed
Sea to reside with demons. Threatened by God's angehc em1s:anes,
told that she must return or daily lose a hundred of her demon children
to death, Lilith preferred punishment to patriarch~!. m~rriage,_ and
she took her revenge against both God and Adam by mJurmg bab1esespecially male babies, who were tra~itionally thou~ht to ~e mor_e
vulnerable to her attacks. What her h1story suggests 1s that m pat~l­
archal culture, female speech and female "presu~ption".-that 1s,
angry revolt against male domination- are inextricably li~ked and
inevitably daemonic. Excluded from the human co~mumty, even
from the semidivine communal chronicles of the B1ble, the figure
of Lilith represents the price women hav_e ~een to~d the~ must pay
for attempting to define themselves. And 1t 1s a ternble pnce: cursed
both because she is a character who "got away" and because she
dared to usurp the essentially literary authority i~pli~d. by the ~ct
of naming, Lilith is locked into a vengeance (ch1ld-k!lling). which
can only bring her more suffering {the killing of her own ch1ldren).
And even the nature of her one-woman revolution emphasizes her
helplessness and her isolation, for her protest takes the form o: a
refusal and a departure, a flight of escape rather than an acuve
rebellion like, say, Satan's. As a paradigm of both the "w~tch" ~nd
the "fiend" of Aurora Leigh's "Ghost, fiend, and angel, fa1ry, w1tch
and sprite," Lilith reveals, then, just how difficult it is for _wo~en
even to attempt the pen. And from George MacDo~~ld, the V1cto~1an
fantasist who portrayed her in his astonishing Lzltth as ~ ~arad1gm
of the self-tormenting assertive woman, to Laura Ridmg, who
depicted her in "Eve's Side oflt" as an archetypal woman Creator,
36
Toward a Feminist Poetics
the problem Lilith represents has been associated with the problems
of female authorship and female authority. 78 Even if they had not
studied her legend, literary women like Anne Finch, bemoaning the
double bind in which the mutually dependent images of angel and
monster had left them, must have gotten the message Lilith incarnates: a life of feminine submission, of "contemplative purity," is a
life of silence, a life that has no pen and no story, while a life of
female rebellion, of"significant action," is a life that must be silenced,
a life whose monstrous pen tells a terrible story. Either way, the
images on the surface of the looking glass, into which the female
artist peers in search of her self, warn her that she is or must be a
"Cypher," framed and framed up, indited and indicted.
As the legend of Lilith shows, and as psychoanalysts from Freud
and Jung onward have observed, myths and fairy tales often both
state and enforce culture's sentences with greater accuracy than more
sophisticated literary texts. If Lilith's story summarizes the genesis
of the female monster in a single useful parable, the Grimm tale of
"Little Snow White" dramatizes the essential but equivocal relationship between the angel-woman and the monster-woman, a
relationship that is also implicit in Aurora Leigh's bewildered speculations about her dead mother. "Little. Snow White," which Walt
Disney entitled "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves," should really
be called Snow White and Her Wicked Stepmother, for the central
action of the tale-indeed, its only real action-arises from the
relationship between these two women: the one fair, young, pale,
the other just as fair, but older, fiercer; the one a daughter, the
other a mother; the one sweet, ignorant, passive, the other both
artful and active; the one a sort of angel, the other an undeniable
witch.
Significantly, the conflict between these two women is fought out
largely in the transparent enclosures into which, like all the other
images of women we have been discussing here, both have been
locked: a magic looking glass, an enchanted and enchanting glass
coffin. Here, wielding as weapons the tools patriarchy suggests that
women use to kill themselves into art, the two women literally try
to kill each other with art. Shadow fights shadow, image destroys
The Queen's Looking Glass
37
image in the crystal prison, as if the "fiend" of Aurora's mother's
portrait should plot to destroy the "angel" who is another one of
her selves.
The story begins in midwinter, with a Queen sitting and sewing,
framed by a window. As in so many fairy tales, she pricks her finger,
bleeds, and is thereby assumed into the cycle of sexuality William
Blake called the realm of "generation," giving birth "soon after"
to a daughter "as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the
wood of the window frame." 79 All the motifs introduced in this
prefatory first paragraph- sewing, snow, blood, enclosure-are associated with key themes in female lives (hence in fe!lJale writing), and
they are thus themes we shall be studying throughout this book.
But for our purposes here the tale's opening is merely prefatory.
The real story begins when the Queen, having become a mother,
metamorphoses also into a witch- that is, into a wicked "step"
mother:" ... when the child was born, the Queen died," and "After
a year had passed the King took to himself another wife."
When we first encounter this "new" wife, she is framed in a magic
looking glass, just as her predecessor- that is, her earlier self-had
been framed in a window. To be caught and trapped in a mirror
rather than a window, however, is to be driven inward, obsessively
studying self-images as if seeking a viable self. The first Queen seems
still to have had prospects; not yet fallen into sexuality, she looked
outward, if only upon the snow. The second Queen is doomed to the
inward search that psychoanalysts like Bruno Bettelheim censoriously
define as "narcissism," 8° but which (as Mary Elizabeth Coleridge's
"The Other Side of the Mirror" suggested } is necessitated by a state
from which all outward prospects have been removed.
That outward prospects have been removed-or lost or dissolved
away-is suggested not only by the Queen's mirror obsession but
by the absence of the King from the story as it is related in the Grimm
version. The Queen's husband and Snow White's father (for whose
attentions, according to Bettelheim, the two women are battling in
a feminized Oedipal struggle) never actually appears in this story
at all, a fact that emphasizes the almost stifling intensity with which
the tale concentrates on the conflict in the mirror between mother
and daughter, woman and woman, self and self. At the same time,
though, there is clearly at least one way in which the King is present.
38
Toward a Fnninisl Poetics
His, surely, is the voice of the looking glass, the patriarchal voice of
judgment that rules the Queen's-and every woman's-self~evalua­
tion. He it is who decides, first, that his consort is "the fairest of all,"
and then, as she becomes maddened, rebellious, witchlike, that she
must be replaced by his angelically innocent and dutiful daughter,
a girl who is therefore defined as "more beautiful still" than the
Queen. To the extent, then, that the King, and only the King,
constituted the first Queen's prospects, he need no longer appear
in the story because, having assimilated the meaning of her own
sexuality (and having, thus, become the second Queen) the woman
has internalized the King's rules: his voice resides now in her own
mirror, her own mind.
But if Snow White is "really" the daughter of the second as well
as of the first Queen (i.e., if the two Queens are identical), why does
the Queen hate her so much? The traditional explanation-that
the mother is as threatened by her daughter's "budding sexuality"
as the daughter is by the mother's "possession" of the father-is
helpful but does not seem entirely adequate, considering the depth
and ferocity of the Queen's rage. It is true, of course, that in the
patriarchal Kingdom of the text these women inhabit the Queen's
life can be literally imperiled by her daughter's beauty, and true
(as we shall see throughout this study) that, given the female vulner~
ability such perils imply, female bonding is extraordinarily difficult
in patriarchy: women almost inevitably turn against women because
the voice of the looking glass sets them against each other. But,
beyond all this, it seems as if there is a sense in which the intense
desperation with which the Queen enacts her rituals ofself-absorption
causes (or is caused by) her hatred of Snow White. Innocent, passive,
and self-lessly free of the mirror madness that consumes the Queen,
Snow White represents the ideal of renunciation that the Queen
has already renounced at the beginning of the story. Thus Snow
White is destined to replace the Queen because the Queen hates her,
rather than vice versa. The Queen's hatred of Snow White, in other
words, exists before the looking glass has provided an obvious reason
for hatred.
For the Queen, as we come to see more clearly in the course of the
story, is a plotter, a plot-maker, a schemer, a witch, an artist, an
impersonator, a woman of almost infinite creative energy. witty,
The Q.uem's Looking Glass
39
wily, and self-absorbed as all artists traditionally are. On the ot?er
hand, in her absolute chastity, her frozen innocence, her sweet nullity,
Snow White represents precisely the ideal of "contemplative purity"
we have already discussed, an ideal that could quite literally kill
the Queen. An angel in the house of myth, Snow White is not only a
child but (as female angels always are) childlike, docile, submissive,
the heroine of a life that has no story. But the Queen, adult and demonic,
plainly wants a life of "significant action," by definition an " unfeminine" life of stories and story-telling. And therefore, to the extent
that Snow White, as her daughter, is a part of herself, she wants
to kill the Snow·White zn herself, the angel who would keep deeds and
dramas out of her own house.
The first death plot the Queen invents is a naively straightforward murder story: she commands one of her huntsmen to kill
Snow White. But, as Bruno Bettelheim has shown, the huntsman is
really a surrogate for the King, a parental- or, more specifically,
patriarchal-figure " who dominates, controls, and subdues wild
ferocious beasts" and who thus " represents the subjugation of the
animal, asocial, violent tendencies in man." 81 In a sense, then, the
Queen has foolishly asked her patriarchal master to act for her in
doing the subversive deed she wants to do in part to retain power
over him and in part to steal his power from him. Obviously, he will
not do this. As patriarchy's angelic daughter, Snow White is, after
all his child and he must save her, not kill her. Hence he kills a
' boar in' her stead, and brings its lung and liver to the Queen
wild
as proof that he has murdered the child. Thinking that she is devouring her ice-pure enemy, therefore, the Queen consumes, instead, the
wild boar' s organs ; that is, symbolically speaking, she devours her
own beastly rage, and becomes (of course) even more enraged.
When she learns that her first plot has failed , then, the Queen's
story-telling becomes angrier as well as more inventive, more sophisti:
cated, more subversive. Significantly, each of the three "tales" she
tells- that is, each of the three plots she invents- depends on a
poisonous or parodic use of a distinctively female device as a murder
weapon, and in each case she reinforces the sardonic commentary
on "femininity" that such weaponry makes by impersonating a
"wise" woman, a "good" mother, or, as Ellen Moers would put
it, an "educating heroine." 82 As a "kind" old pedlar woman, she
40
Toward a Ftmmist Poetics
offers to lace Snow White " properly" for once-then suffocates her
with a very Victorian set of tight laces. As another wise old expert
in female beauty, she promises to comb Snow White's hair "properly,"
then assaults her with a poisonous comb. Finally, as a wholesome
farmer's wife, she gives Snow White a "very poisonous apple," which
she has made in " a quite secret, lonely room, where no one ever
came." The girl finally falls, killed, so it seems, by the female ar ts of
cosmetology and cookery. Paradoxically, however, even though the
Queen has been using such feminine wiles as the sirens' comb and
Eve's apple subversively, to destroy angelic Snow White so that she
(the Queen) can assert and aggrandize herself, these arts have had
0 .1 her daughter an opposite effect from those she intended. Strengthening the chaste maiden in her passivity, they have made her into
precisely the eternally beautiful, inanimate objet d'art patriarchal
at:sthetics want a girl to be. From the point of view of the mad,
self-assertive Queen, conventional female arts kill. But from the point
of view of the docile and selfless princess, such arts, even while they
kill, confer the only measure of power available to a woman in a
patriarchal culture.
Certainly when the kindly huntsman-father saved her life by
abandoning her in the forest at the edge of his kingdom, Snow White
discovered her own powerlessness. Though she had been allowed to
live because she was a " good" girl, she had to find her own devious
way of resisting the onslaughts of the maddened Queen, both inside
and outside her self. In this connection, the seven dwarves probably
r<-present her own dwarfed powers, her stunted selfhood, for, as
Bettelheim points out, they can do little to help save the girl from the
Q.ueen. At the same time, however, her life with them is an important
part of her education in submissive femininity, for in serving them
she learns essential lessons of service, of selflessness, of domesticity.
Finally, that at this point Snow White is a housekeeping angel in a
1iny house conveys the story's attitude toward "woman's world and
woman's work": the realm of domesticity is a miniaturized kingdom
in which the best of women is not only like a dwarf but like a dwarf's
servant.
Does the irony and bitterness consequent upon such a perception
lead to Snow White's few small acts of disobedience? Or would
Snow White ultimately have rebelled anyway, precisely because she
Tlu Quem's Looking Glass
41
is the Queen's true daughter? The story does not, of course, answer
such questions, but it does seem to imply them, since its turning
point comes from Snow White's significant willingness to be tempted
by the Queen's "gifts," despite the dwarves' admonitions. Indeed,
the only hint of self-interest that Snow White displays throughout
the whole story comes in her " narcissistic" desire for the stav-laces,
the comb, and the apple that the disguised murderess offers. As
Bettelheim remarks, this "suggests how close the stepmother's temptations are to Snow White's inner desires." 83 Indeed, it suggests
that, as we have already noted, the Queen and Snow White are in
some sense one: while the Queen struggles to free herself from the
passive Snow White in herself, Snow White must struggle to repress
the assertive Queen in herself. That both women eat from the same
deadly apple in the third temptation episode merely clarifies and
dramatizes this point. The Queen's lonely art has enabled her to
contrive a two-faced fruit- one white and one red "cheek"- that
represents her ambiguous relationship to this angelic girl who is
both her daughter and her enemy, her self and her opposite. Her
intention is that the girl will die of the apple's poisoned red half-red
with her sexual energy, her assertive desire for deeds of blood and
triumph-while she herself will be unharmed by the passivity of
the white half.
But though at first this seems to have happened. the apple's effect
is, finally, of course, quite different. After the Queen's artfulness
has killed Snow White into art, the girl becomes if anything even
more dangerous to her " step" mother's autonomy than she was
before, because even more opposed to it in both mind and body.
For, dead and self-less in her glass coffin, she is an object, to be displayed and desired, patriarchy's marble "opus," the decorative and
decorous Galatea with whom every ruler would like to grace his
parlor. T hus, when the Prince first sees Snow White in her coffin,
be begs the dwarves to give "it" to him as a gift, "for I cannot live
without seeing Snow White. I will honor and prize her as my dearest
possession". An "it," a possession, Snow White has become an
idealized image of herself, a woman in a portrait like Aurora Leigh's
mother, and as such she has definitively proven herself to be patriarchy's ideal woman, the perfect candidate for Queen. At this point,
therefore, she regurgitates the poison apple (whose madness had
'
42
Toward a Feminist Poetics
stuck in her throat} and rises from her coffin. The fairest in the land,
she will marry the most powerful in the land ; bidden to their wedding,
the egotistically assertive, plotting Queen will become a former
Queen, dancing herself to death in red-hot iron shoes.
What does the future hold for Snow White, however? When her
Prince becomes a King and she becomes a Queen, what will her
life be like? Trained to domesticity by her dwarf instructors, will
she sit in the window, gazing out on the wild forest of her past, and
sigh, and sew, and prick her finger, and conceive a child white as
snow, red as blood, black as ebony wood? Surely, fairest of them all,
Snow White has exchanged one glass coffin for another, delivered
from the prison where the Queen put her only to be imprisoned in the
looking glass from which the King's voice speaks daily. There is,
after all, no female model for her in this tale except the "good"
(dead) mother and her living avatar the "bad" mother. And if Snow
White escaped her first glass coffin by her goodness, her passivity and
docility, her only escape from her second glass coffin, the imprisoning
mirror, must evidently be through "badness," through plots and
stories, duplicitous schemes, wild dreams, fierce fictions, mad impersonations. The cycle of her fate seems inexorable. Renouncing
"contemplative purity," she must now embark on that life of " significant action" which, for a woman, is defined as a witch's life because
it is so monstrous, so unnatural. Grotesque as Errour, Duessa,
Lucifera, she will practice false arts in her secret, lonely room. Suicidal
as Lilith and Medea, she will become a murderess bent on the selfslaughter implicit in her murderous attempts against the life of her
own child. Finally, in fiery shoes that parody the costumes of femininity as surely as the comb and stays she herself contrived, she will
do a silent terrible death-dance out of the story, the looking glass,
the transparent coffin of her own image. Her only deed, this death
will imply, can be a deed of death, her only action the pernicious
action of self-destruction.
In this connection, it seems especially significant that the Queen's
dance of death is a silent one. In "The Juniper Tree, " a version of
"Little Snow White" in which a boy's mother tries to kill him (for
different reasons, of course) the dead boy is transformed not into
a silent art object but into a furious golden bird who sings a song of
vengeance against his murderess and finally crushes her to death
The Queens's Looking Glass
43
with a millstone.s• The male child's progress toward adulthood is
a growth toward both self-assertion and self-articulation, "The
Juniper Tree" implies, a development of the powers of speech. But
the girl child must learn the arts of silence either as herself a silent
image invented and defined by the magic looking glass of the maleauthored text, or as a silent dancer of her own woes, a dancer who
enacts rather than articulates. From the abused Procne to the reclusive
Lady of Shallott, therefore, women have been told that their art,
like the witch's dance in " Little Snow White," is an art of silence.
Procne must rec~rd her sufferings with what Geoffrey Hartman calls
"the voice of the shuttle" because when she was raped her tongue
was cut out.86 The Lady of Shallott must weave her story because
she is imprisoned in a tower as adamantine as any glass coffin, doomed
to escape only through the self-annihilating madness of romantic
love (just as the Queen is doom<:d to escape only through the selfannihilating madness of her death dance), and her last work of art
is her own dead body floating downstream in a boat. And even
when such maddened or grotesque female artists make sounds, they
are for the most part, say patriarchal theorists, absurd or grotesque
or pitiful. Procne's sister Philomel, for instance, speaks with an
unintelligible bird's voice (unlike the voice of the hero of "The
Juniper Tree"). And when Gerard Manley Hopkins, with whom
we began this meditation on pens and penises and kings and queens,
wrote of her in an epigram "On a Poetess," he wrote as follows:
Miss M. 's a nightingale. 'Tis well
Your simile I keep.
It is the way with Philomel
To sing while others sleep.a•
Even Matthew Arnold's more sympathetically conceived Philomel
speaks "a wild, unquenched, deep-sunken, old-world pain" that
arises from the stirrings of a "bewildered brain. " 87
Yet, as Mary Elizabeth Coleridge's yearning toward that sane
and serious self concealed on the other side of the mirror suggested
- and as Anne Finch's complaint and Anne Elliot's protest told us
too-women writers, longing to attempt the pen, have longed to
escape from the many-faceted glass coffins of the patriarchal texts
whose properties male authors insisted that they are. Reaching a
44
Toward a Feminist Poetics
hand to the stern, self-determining self behind the loolcing-glass
portrait of her mother, reaching past those grotesque and obstructive
images of "Ghost, fiend, and angel, fairy, witch, and sprite," Aurora
Leigh, like all the women artists whose careers we will trace in this
book, tries to excavate the real self buried beneath the "copy" selves.
Similarly, Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, staring into a mirror where
her own mouth appears as a "hideous wound" bleeding "in silence
and in secret," strives for a "voice to speak her dread."
In their attempts at the escape that the female pen offers from the
prison of the male text, women like Aurora Leigh and Mary Elizabeth
Coleridge begin, as we shall see, by alternately defining themselves
as angel-women or as monster-women. Like Snow White and the
wicked Queen, their earliest impulses, as we shall also see, are ambivalent. Either they are inclined to immobilize themselves with
suffocating tight-laces in the glass coffins of patriarchy, or they are
tempted to destroy themselves by doing fiery and suicidal tarantellas
out of the looking glass. Yet, despite the obstacles presented by those
twin images of angel and monster, despite the fears of sterility and
the anxieties of authorship from which women have suffered, generations of texts have been possible for female writers. By the end of
the eighteenth century- and here is the most important phenomenon
we will see throughout this volume-women were not only writing,
they were conceiving fictional worlds in which patriarchal images
and conventions were severely, radically revised. And as self-conceiving women from Anne Finch and Anne Elliot to Emily Bronte and
Emily Dickinson rose from the glass coffin of the male-authored text,
as they exploded out of the Queen's loolcing glass, the old silent
dance of death became a dance of triumph, a dance into speech,
a dance of authority.
Infection in the Sentence:
The Woman Writer and the Anxiety
of Authorship
The man who does not know sick women does not know women.
-S. Weir Mitchell
I try to describe this long limitation, hoping that with such power
as is now mine, and such use of language as is within that power,
this will convince any one who cares about it that this "living" of
mine had been done untler a heavy handicap....
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman
A Word dropped careless on a Page
May stimulate an eye
When folded in perpetual seam
The Wrinkled Maker lie
Infection in the sentence breeds
We may inhale Despair
At distances of Centuries
From the Malaria- Emily Dickinson
I stand in the ring
in the dead city
and tie on the red shoes
They are not mine,
they are my mother's,
her mother's before,
handed down like an heirloom
but hidden like shameful letters.
- Anne Sexton
What does it mean to be a woman writer in a culture whose fundamental definitions of literary authority are, as we have seen, both
45
Gary Gutting
FOUCAULT
A Very Short Introduction
1
3
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Foucault : a very short introduction / Gary Gutting.
p. cm.—(A very short introduction)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Foucault, Michel. I. Title. II. Very short introductions.
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Chapter 9
Modern sex
The irony . . . is in having us believe that our ‘liberation’ is in the
balance.
Because he was homosexual, writing a history of modern sexuality
must have been a particularly personal enterprise for Foucault. His
biographers suggest that as an adolescent he suffered from having
sexual interests that French society of the 1940s and 1950s regarded
mostly with shame or outrage. Even the generally tolerant milieu of
the École normale was not entirely hospitable to homosexuality.
Foucault makes it clear that one of his reasons for accepting a job in
Sweden was the hope, not entirely fulfilled, of finding a more open
sexual climate. Even though the details of Foucault’s sex life remain
sketchy – and why shouldn’t they? – there is every reason to think
that the experience of gay marginality was an important part of
his life. On the other hand, he was as unwilling to accept the
identity of ‘homosexual’ as he was any other. He seldom wrote or
spoke on record as a ‘gay man’, and, when he did – for example,
in a few interviews with gay publications – his attitude toward
the activist gay community is more that of a sympathetic observer
than a committed participant. He is most attracted by what he
sees as recent gay explorations of new forms of human community
and identity.
In any case, homosexuality was just one of many topics to be
91
Foucault
covered by Foucault’s history of sexuality, which in addition to a
volume called ‘Perverts’ would also have volumes on children,
women, and married couples. Moreover, his general introduction
to the project, the only volume of the series actually published,
shows that, as in Discipline and Punish, his treatment would
expand beyond marginalized groups to everyone in modern
society. In fact, it seems clear that, from the beginning, Foucault’s
work on sexuality was developing a dimension beyond that of
power relations. It was becoming a history of the formation
of subjects in not only a political but also a psychological and
ethical sense.
The starting-point is, however, still Foucault’s conception of
modern power, which is most explicitly set out in volume one of the
History of Sexuality. As a result, Foucault’s initial treatment of
sexuality is a fairly straightforward extension of the genealogical
method of Discipline and Punish. The method is applied to the
various modern bodies of knowledge about sexuality (‘sciences of
sexuality’) in order to show their intimate association with the
power structures of modern society. The focus of this aspect of
Foucault’s discussion is what he calls the ‘repressive hypothesis’.
This is the common assumption that the primary attitude of
modern society toward sex (beginning in the 18th century, reaching
a peak in the Victorian Age, and still exerting strong influence
today) was negative; that, except for the closely delimited sphere
of monogamous marriage, sexuality was opposed, silenced, and, as
far as possible, eliminated.
Foucault does not deny the fact of repression. The Victorian
age covered bosoms, censored literature, and waged vigorous
campaigns against masturbation. But he denies that modern
power is primarily exercised through repression and that opposition
to repression is an effective way of resisting modern power.
Rather, he thinks that modern power created new forms of
sexuality by inventing discourses about it. For example, although
same-sex relations have occurred throughout human history, the
92
homosexual as a distinct category, with defining psychological,
physiological, and perhaps even genetic characteristics, was
created by the power/knowledge system of the modern sciences
of sexuality.
A large part of the history of modern sexuality is the secular
adaptation and expansion of these religious techniques of selfknowledge. Confession may no longer be made to a priest but it is
surely made to one’s doctor, psychiatrist, best friend, or, at least, to
oneself. And the categories that define the possibilities of one’s
93
Modern sex
According to Foucault, sexual repression is a superficial
phenomenon; far more significant is the ‘veritable discursive
explosion’ (HS, 17) of talk about sex that began in the 17th century,
with the Counter-Reformation’s legislation on the practice of
confession. Penitents were required to ‘examine their consciences’
with a thoroughness and nuance previously unheard of. It was not
enough to say ‘I slept with a woman other than my wife’; you had to
say how many times, just what sorts of acts were involved, whether
the woman was herself married. Nor was it enough to report overt
actions. Equally important were thoughts and desires, even if
not carried out. But even here it was not enough to say, ‘I thought
about sleeping with a woman other than my wife’. You also had to
determine if you had dwelt on the thought, found enjoyment in it
rather than rejecting it immediately; and, if you had entertained it,
whether this was done with a certain inadvertence or with ‘full
consent of the will’. All these factors were needed for the confessor
to determine the degree of guilt (for example, mortal versus venial
sin), impose an appropriate penance, and give advice for moral
improvement. The result for penitents was an ever deeper and
more precise self-knowledge, the outcome of a ‘hermeneutics of
the self ’ that revealed as fully as possible their inner sexual natures.
Foucault’s suggestion, however, is that this nature is not so much
discovered as constituted by the required self-examination. What I
am sexually depends on the categories I am required to use in
making my confession.
Foucault
sexual nature are not self-chosen but accepted on the authority of
‘experts’ in the new modern sciences of sexuality: the Freuds, the
Kraft-Ebbings, the Havelock Ellises, the Margaret Meads. Such
experts present as discoveries about human nature what are
actually just new social norms for behaviour.
Of course, there is a distinction between sexuality as a social
construct and sex as a biological reality. Foucault does not deny that
there are, for example, undeniable physiological facts about human
reproduction. But he maintains that once we move from sheer
biology to the inevitably hermeneutic and normative concepts of
psychology, anthropology, etc., the distinction breaks down. The
Oedipal complex, for example, is tied to assumptions about the
meaning and value of the bourgeois family; it is not just another
fact, like the physiology of conception. Even what seem to be simple
biological facts, for example, the distinction of male and female, can
turn out to have normative social significance, as is demonstrated
by the case of Herculine Barbin, a 19th-century hermaphrodite,
who was raised as a female but, in her twenties, came under the
scrutiny of doctors who decided that she was in fact a man and
forced her to live as one. Foucault published the poignant memoirs
Barbin wrote before committing suicide at the age of thirty.
Given his critique of the repressive hypothesis, Foucault is able to
develop a history of sexuality that often parallels his history of the
prison. Just as the modern sciences of criminology define categories
of social dysfunction ( juvenile delinquent, kleptomaniac, drug
addict, serial killer, etc.) that are simultaneously sources of
knowledge and of control regarding their ‘subjects’, so the modern
sciences of sexuality define categories of sexual dysfunction
(homosexual, nymphomaniac, fetishist, etc.) that have a parallel
role as power/knowledge. Foucault cites the case of Jouy, a slightly
retarded 19th-century French peasant, who would occasionally
entice young girls of his village into what Foucault describes as
‘harmless embraces’. No doubt such things had gone on in French
villages for centuries, but someone reported Jouy to the authorities
94
who brought down upon him the full brunt of the new science
of sexuality. After detailed legal and medical examinations, he
was found guilty of no crimes but was nonetheless confined to a
hospital for the rest of his life as a ‘pure object of medicine and
knowledge’ (HS, 32). Many of us today will be shocked at Foucault’s
insouciance over what we might well judge sexual molestation, but
Foucault would no doubt see our reaction as itself a sign of the
effects of the modern power/knowledge system.
In the concluding chapter of the introduction to The History of
Sexuality, Foucault seems to be moving beyond sexuality as such
and develops a notion of biopower, which embraces all the forms
of modern power directed toward us as living beings, that is, as
subject to standards of not just sexual but biological normality.
Biopower is concerned with the ‘task of administering life’, a
process that operates on two levels. On the level of individuals, there
is an ‘anatomo-politics of the human body’; on the level of social
groups, there is a ‘bio-politics of populations’ (HS, 139. The first
level implicitly complements the primarily epistemological
95
Modern sex
Three of Foucault’s six planned volumes were to treat specific
marginalized groups: children, as the object of the campaign to
suppress masturbation (The Children’s Crusade); women as
subjects of the sexually based disorder of hysteria (The Hysterical
Woman); and homosexuals and other groups judged sexually
‘abnormal’ (Perverts). All of these, like the criminals of Discipline
and Punish, were constituted and controlled by hierarchical
observation and normalizing judgements. Further, as in the case
of criminality, there was no real possibility of eliminating or even
substantially reducing the targeted behaviours, so the de facto
function of the power apparatus was simply to control segments of
the population. A fourth projected volume was The Malthusian
Couple, where Foucault’s topic would have been various power
structures designed to limit the population and improve its quality.
This, again as in Discipline and Punish, is readily seen as an
extension of disciplinary power to non-marginal groups.
Foucault
treatment of medicine in The Birth of the Clinic, making explicit the
political significance (in a broad sense that includes the social and
the economic) of the medical norms defining a healthy individual.
So, for example, the modern medical notion of obesity corresponds
to the marginalized social class of ‘fat people’, and modern
techniques of drug treatments of illness are inextricably tied to
the economics of the pharmaceutical industry. The second level
concerns the modern focus on a nation’s entire population as a
resource that must be protected, supervised, and improved. Thus,
capitalism requires universal medical care and education to ensure
an adequate workforce; racist ideologies call for eugenic measures
to protect the purity of the population ‘stock’; and military planners
develop the concept of ‘total war’, as a battle between not just
armies but entire populations.
We see, then, that Foucault’s project of a history of modern
sexuality was, even as he began it, expanding to a history of modern
biopower. And from the late 1970s on, he took up the themes of
such a history. So, for example, he returned to issues in the history
of medicine and psychiatry, now from the broader perspective of
his new view of power. Also, he began studying what he called
‘governmentality’: the art, developed from medieval pastoral
models, of rulers’ care for the populations under their control.
But even more significant was another direction of expansion,
toward what Foucault came to call a ‘history of the subject’. This
had already begun to emerge in Discipline and Punish, where
Foucault occasionally noted how the objects of disciplinary control
could themselves internalize the norms whereby they were
controlled and so become monitors of their own behaviour. In
the context of sexuality, this phenomenon becomes central, since
individuals are supposed to discern their own fundamental nature
as sexual beings and, on the basis of this self-knowledge, transform
their lives. As a result, we are controlled not only as objects of
disciplines that have expert knowledge of us; we are also controlled
as self-scrutinizing and self-forming subjects of our own knowledge.
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13. Foucault in his apartment in Paris, 1978
Foucault
This new perspective leads Foucault to question the modern ideal
of sexual liberation. I discover my deep sexual nature through
self-scrutiny and come to express this nature by overcoming
various hang-ups and neuroses. But am I really freeing myself, or
am I just reshaping my life in accord with a new set of norms?
Isn’t promiscuity as demanding an ideal as monogamy, the
imperative to be sexually adventurous as burdensome as a prudish
limitation to the missionary position? The magazines, self-help
books, and sex manuals that guide us to a life of liberated sexuality
seem to induce in us as much insecurity and fear about our sexual
attractiveness and ability to perform as sermons and tracts did in
our grandparents about the dangers of sexual indulgence. More
importantly, is my acceptance of the demands of liberation any
more an expression of my ‘true nature’ than were our grandparents’
acceptance of the demands of traditional morality? Foucault
suggests that, in both cases, the acceptance may merely be an
internalization of external norms. The irony of our endless
preoccupation with our sexuality, Foucault says, is that we think
that it has something to do with liberation (HS, 159).
Even more importantly, Foucault’s new perspective led him to
the view that his study of sexuality was really part of an effort to
understand the process whereby individuals become subjects. He
was, he concluded, writing not so much a history of sexuality as a
history of the subject. This transition arose from the fact that he
had found sexuality to be an integral part of our identity as selves
or subjects. To say that I am homosexual or that I am obsessed
with Albertine is to say something central about what I am in the
concreteness of my subjectivity. Here Foucault seems to return
to the standpoint of individual consciousness, which he earlier
rejected in his choice of the philosophy of the concept over the
philosophy of experience. I, however, would suggest that he never
really left this standpoint, but instead rejected transcendental
readings of subjectivity that ignored its fundamentally historical
nature. In any case, he now felt the ability and the need to give an
account of the historical process whereby we become subjects. The
98
question is not how consciousness emerges from unconscious
matter but how a conscious being assumes a particular identity, that
is, comes to think of itself as directed by a given set of ethical norms,
which give its existence a specific meaning and purpose.
In any case, as Foucault reflected further on his project, he
decided that he needed to begin not with the Middle Ages but with
ancient Greek and Roman views on sexuality and the self. He had
concluded that to properly understand the Christian hermeneutic
view of the self, he had to trace its origins and differences from
ancient ideas. He began brushing up his school-boy Greek and
Latin and had many discussions with two of his friends and
colleagues in the Collège de France: Paul Veyne, a Roman historian,
and Pierre Hadot, an historian of ancient philosophy. This major
redirection, combined with ill health (which turned out to be the
AIDS from which Foucault eventually died) seriously delayed the
project. It was only in 1984, just before his death, that Foucault
was able to publish two volumes on the ancient world: The Use of
Pleasure, which discussed Greek texts of the 4th century bc, and
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Modern sex
In The History of Sexuality, Foucault began looking at the way
the modern consciousness of an ethical self emerged through the
secularization of Christianity’s hermeneutics of the self (as in the
confessional practices we discussed above). His original plan was to
develop this theme at length in a separate volume on medieval
Christian views of sexuality, which he called Les Avoux de la chair.
(This was to be the second volume of the history of sexuality,
followed by the four volumes, on children, women, perverts, and
couples.) Foucault says he finished a draft of this volume but was
not satisfied with what he had written and set it aside. Although
the draft apparently does still exist, it has never been published
(Foucault’s family have insisted on following his terse injunction:
‘No posthumous publications.’). Nor is the draft available in the
Foucault Archives in Paris; very few people have even seen it and
there are no detailed accounts of its content. (Some who have seen it
say it isn’t really a complete draft, as Foucault suggested.)
Foucault
The Care of the Self, which covered Greek and Roman texts from
the 1st century bc to the 1st century ad.
Although these books were titled Volume II and Volume III of
Foucault’s History of Sexuality, there is no sense in which Volume I,
which we have been discussing here, can be regarded as an
introduction to them. Put roughly, the project Volume I is
introducing is one in which modern sexuality would be studied as
an example of bio-power: biological (in a broad sense) knowledge
as a basis for socio-political control of individuals and groups. This
is a project Foucault never carried out, although there are some
elements of it dispersed in his writings before and after Volume I.
Volumes II and III are part of a study of ancient sexuality as an
example of the ethical formation of the self. It has no overlap with
the earlier interest in bio-power, although there is a connection
through the shared topic of the Christian hermeneutics of the self.
It would have been less misleading if Foucault had not presented
theses two books as continuations of his original history of sexuality.
He may have envisaged some broader project that would have
approached sexuality through both bio-power and the formation
of the self. But at the end of his life he seems to have rather been
moving away from the history of sexuality. His new direction, as we
shall see, connects the formation of the subject not to sexuality but
to what he came to call ‘games of truth’.
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Judith Butler, from “Critically Queer”, GLQ: A Journal in Gay and Lesbian Studies, 1: 1, 1993, pp. 17-32.
[…]
Performative acts are forms of authoritative speech: most performatives, for instance, are statements which, in
the uttering, also perform a certain action and exercise a binding power. Implicated in a network of authorization
and punishment, performatives tend to include legal sentences, baptisms, inaugurations, declarations of
ownership, statements that not only perform an action, but confer a binding power on the action performed. The
power of discourse to produce that which it names is thus essentially linked with the question of performativity.
The performative is thus one domain in which power acts as discourse.
Importantly, however, there is no power, construed as a subject, that acts, but only a reiterated acting that is
power in its persistence and instability. This is less an “act,” singular and deliberate, than a nexus of power and
discourse that repeats or mimes the discursive gestures of power. Hence, the judge who authorizes and installs
the situation he names (we shall call him “he,” figuring this model of authority as masculinist) invariably cites the
law that he applies, and it is the power of this citation that gives the performative its binding or conferring power.
And though it may appear that the binding power of his words is derived from the force of his will or from a prior
authority, the opposite is more true: it is through the citation of the law that the figure of the judge’s “will” is
produced and that the “priority” of textual authority is established. Indeed, it is through the invocation of
convention that the speech act of the judge derives its binding power; that binding power is to be found neither in
the subject of the judge nor in his will, but in the citational legacy by which a contemporary “act” emerges in the
context of a chain of binding conventions.
Where there is an “I” who utters or speaks and thereby produces an effect in discourse, there is first a discourse
which precedes and enables that “I” and forms in language the constraining trajectory of its will. Thus there is no
“I” who stands behind discourse and executes its volition or will through discourse. On the contrary, the “I” only
comes into being through being called, named, interpellated (to use the Althusserian term), and this discursive
constitution takes place prior to the “I”; it is the transitive invocation of the “I.” Indeed, I can only say “I” to the
extent that I have first been addressed, and that address has mobilized my place in speech; paradoxically, the
discursive condition of social recognition precedes and conditions the formation of the subject: recognition is not
conferred on a subject, but forms that subject. Further, the impossibility of a full recognition, that is, of ever fully
inhabiting the name by which one’s social identity is inaugurated and mobilized, implies the instability and
incompleteness of subject-formation. The “I” is thus a citation of the place of the “I” in speech, where that place
has a certain priority and anonymity with respect to the life it animates: it is the historically revisable possibility of
a name that precedes and exceeds me, but without which I cannot speak.
[…]
How, if at all, is the notion of discursive resignification linked to the notion of gender parody or impersonation? If
gender is a mimetic effect, is it therefore a choice or a dispensable artifice? If not, how did this reading of Gender
Trouble emerge? There are at least two reasons for the misapprehension, one which I myself produced by citing
drag as an example of performativity (taken then, by some, to be exemplary, that is, the example of
performativity), and another which has to do with the political needs of a growing queer movement in which the
publicization of theatrical agency has become quite central.
The misapprehension about gender performativity is this: that gender is a choice, or that gender is a role, or that
gender is a construction that one puts on, as ·one puts on clothes in the morning, that there is a “one” who is
prior to this gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender and decides with deliberation which gender it will
be today. This is a voluntarist account of gender which presumes a subject, intact, prior to its gendering. The
sense of gender performativity that I meant to convey is something quite different.
Gender is performative insofar as it is the effect of a regulatory regime of gender differences in which genders
are divided and hierarchized under constraint. Social constraints, taboos, prohibitions, threats of punishment
operate in the ritualized repetition of norms, and this repetition constitutes the temporalized scene of gender
construction and destabilization. There is no subject who precedes or enacts this repetition of norms. To the
extent that this repetition creates an effect of gender uniformity, a stable effect of masculinity or femininity, it
produces and destabilizes the notion of the subject as well, for the subject only comes into intelligibility through
the matrix of gender. Indeed, one might construe repetition as precisely that which undermines the conceit of
voluntarist mastery designated by the subject in language.
There is no subject who is “free” to stand outside these norms or to negotiate them at a distance; on the
contrary, the subject is retroactively produced by these norms in their repetition, precisely as their effect. What
we might call “agency” or “freedom” or “possibility” is always a specific political prerogative that is produced by
the gaps opened up in regulatory norms, in the interpellating work of such norms, in the process of their selfrepetition. Freedom, possibility, agency do not have an abstract or pre-social status, but are always negotiated
within a matrix of power.
Gender performativity is not a matter of choosing which gender one will be today. Performativity is a matter of
reiterating or repeating the norms by which one is constituted: it is not a radical fabrication of a gendered self. It
is a compulsory repetition of prior and subjectivating norms, ones which cannot be thrown off at will, but which
work, animate, and constrain the gendered subject, and which are also the resources from which resistance,
subversion, displacement are to be forged. The practice by which gendering occurs, the embodying of norms, is
a compulsory practice, a forcible production, but not for that reason fully determining. To the extent that gender
is an assignment, it is an assignment which is never quite carried out according to expectation, whose
addressee never quite inhabits the ideal s/he is compelled to approximate.
[…]
It may seem, however, that there is a difference between the embodying or performing of gender norms and the
performative use of language. Are these two different senses of “performativity,” or do they converge as modes
of citationality in which the compulsory character of certain social imperatives becomes subject to a more
promising deregulation? Gender norms operate by requiring the embodiment of certain ideals of femininity and
masculinity, ones which are almost always related to the idealization of the heterosexual bond. In this sense, the
initiatory performative, “It’s a girl!”, anticipates the eventual arrival of the sanction, “I pronounce you man and
wife.” Hence, also, the peculiar pleasure of the cartoon strip in which the infant is first interpellated into discourse
with “It’s a lesbian!” Far from an essentialist joke, the queer appropriation of the performative mimes and
exposes both the binding power of the heterosexualizing law and its expropriability.
To the extent that the naming of the “girl” is transitive, that is, initiates the process by which a certain “girling” is
compelled, the term or, rather, its symbolic power, governs the formation of a corporeally enacted femininity that
never fully approximates the norm. This is a “girl,” however, who is compelled to “cite” the norm in order to
qualify and remain a viable subject. Femininity is thus not the product of a choice, but the forcible citation of a
norm, one whose complex historicity is indissociable from relations of discipline, regulation, punishment. Indeed,
there is no “one” who takes on a gender norm. On the contrary, this citation of the gender norm is necessary in
order to qualify as a “one,” to become viable as a “one,” where subject-formation is dependent on the prior
operation of legitimating gender norms.
It is in terms of a norm that compels a certain “citation” in order for a viable subject to be produced that the
notion of gender performativity calls to he rethought. And precisely in relation to such a compulsory citationality
that the theatricality of gender is also to be explained. Theatricality need not be conflated with self-display or
self-creation. Within queer politics, indeed, within the very signification that is “queer,” we read a resignifying
practice in which the desanctioning power of the name “queer” is reversed to sanction a contestation of the
terms of sexual legitimacy. Paradoxically, but also with great promise, the subject who is “queered” into public
discourse through homophobic interpellations of various kinds takes up or cites that very term as the discursive
basis for an opposition. This kind of citation will emerge as theatrical to the extent that it mimes and renders
hyperbolic the discursive convention that it also reverses. The hyperbolic gesture is crucial to the exposure of
the homophobic “law” which can no longer control the terms of its own abjecting strategies.
[…]