An Independent Woman (36 page)

I
NSIDE THE HOUSE ON GREEN STREET
, their luggage still piled in the living room, the two of them drinking coffee in the kitchen, Barbara said, “I'm still, uncertain whether it's tomorrow or yesterday. As for the mail, we could hardly get the door open, there was such a pile of it. When am I going to answer all those letters? I don't dare roll back the answering machine. Also, we have to learn to be unimportant. We no longer have a small country at our disposal, willing to pay all our bills. You got the short end of it, my dear. You paid the fare, I went along for the ride.”

“We're not unimportant, Barbara. Every human beings—”

“Philip.”

He paused.

“Philip,” Barbara said sternly, “I love you because you're kind and brave and loving, and because you're my husband. I will always love you. You had begun to say that every human being is important. I will not be married to a saintly man. You are a human being. You're not obligated to be personally responsible for every other human being. That's God's job. Leave a little bit for God. Every human being is not important in
our
scheme of things. Every human being may be born equal, but some are more equal than others. Millions and millions die of hunger and war—”

“Barbara, you're angry with me.”

“Oh no, no. How could I be angry with you?”

“Yes, I was going to say that every human being is important. I believe that.”

She went to him and kissed him. “Why do you put up with me?”

“Very simple. You put up with me.”

“I'm going to call Eloise now. Can you get the bags upstairs by yourself?”

“Absolutely. No problem at all.”

He took the bags up to the second floor, and Barbara called Eloise, who exploded with delight and excitement. “Barbara, you're back! I'm so delighted. You don't know how I've missed you—and we missed your birthday, but all your presents are piled up here, and it's only a few days to Thanksgiving, and so we will celebrate then—and so much has happened in the few weeks you were gone. I won't try to go into it over the phone, but you must drive down tomorrow.”

“Eloise, darling, that's impossible. We've just walked through the door. There's a mountain of mail, parcels and letters and newspapers and all the junk mail, and somehow I must go through it and try to answer some of it. Philip has the church, and he must get to his office and try to catch up. But I promise you, we will be there at least a day before Thanksgiving, so we'll have time to talk and tell you everything.”

“And how is the wonderful Philip? Was he badly burned? We couldn't find out through the newspaper accounts, and your postcards were brief to a point of utter frustration.”

“Oh, Philip is fine. He has practically no hair, but there is a nice fuzz coming in, and the blisters are healed. Bald men are interesting, don't you think?”

“Barbara, how can you joke about something like that?”

“My dear Eloise, without a sense of humor, no one could survive being married to Philip. No, he's upstairs and can't hear me. We'll speak again soon. I trust the family is well?”

“We're all good. Bless you for coming home alive.”

Philip came down the stairs, and Barbara told him that Eloise had blessed her for coming home alive. “A sort of paradox—how else did she expect us to come home?”

“She's a dear soul. I started to unpack, but I don't know where things go—I mean your things—and what should be washed. If you'll direct me, I'll finish.”

“Philip, for heaven's sake, go to your office. I'll unpack. I have the whole day ahead of me, and tomorrow and the next day. Don't worry. Just go off to the church, and I'll know where to find you.”

He embraced her, kissed her, and left; and Barbara slumped into a chair and wept.

What is wrong with me? she asked herself. Why on God's earth am I so unhappy? My first husband was the ultimate macho who spent most of his life as a soldier and who died in some bleak desert spot in Israel, and I am a pacifist who has fought against war all her life, and I could love him so much—but would I have loved him if he had lived? Why couldn't I live with Carson? Why did I have to divorce him? Why do I love men so, and find it so difficult to live with them? Why in hell am I so confused? I married the best man I have ever known—why can't I be happy with him?

It lasted only a few minutes, and then she shook her head, wiped away the tears, and told herself that she would love Philip, that she would learn to love him and be kind and thoughtful to him and never allow him to know what she felt at this moment.
Only this moment. It comes and it goes. We had good days in England and Israel, and now I have work to do. I'm seventy years old, and I can still wear the dresses I bought twenty-five years ago, and Teddy Kollek told Philip that he thought I was beautiful, and even if he says that to half the women he meets, it's not bad at seventy. I have been on the side of decent people all my life, and I think I can say as Blake said, “I will not cease from mental fight, /Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, /Till we have built Jerusalem”—no, not the Jerusalem I saw— but a place where Philip's belief in the importance of every human being is real—oh, for heaven's sake, Barbara, you are an absolute manic-depressive case history, and a moment ago you were in tears, and your only, hope is the fact that they say that if you know you are crazy, you're not crazy at all—the catch-22 that Heller wrote about so beautifully
.

And then, in her study, she saw her unfinished manuscript lying neatly in a wooden box on her desk. It was irresistible, and, filled with remorse, like a mother who has abandoned and put her child out of her mind, she greedily read the last two pages. There she was in North Africa, talking to Italian prisoners of war; and now something one of them had said flashed into her mind. She put paper into the typewriter and began to write, and ran onto a second page; and she was lost to Green Street and the telephone messages and the unpacking—when the telephone rang.

It was Birdie MacGelsie, calling to welcome her home and tell her she was scheduled to speak before the Women's Democratic Committee the week before Christmas, and wasn't Philip wonderful?

“Absolutely wonderful, yes.” The spell of North Africa and the Italian prisoners was broken. Almost sadly, Barbara covered her typewriter.

Then Barbara ran the tape on her answering machine, made notes on the twenty-three calls the tape held before it gave out, and went upstairs to unpack.

T
HE DAY BEFORE THANKSGIVING
Eloise walked with Barbara to the rear of the bottling plant at Highgate. There in an enclosure with a shed at one end were two large white turkeys and six small ones. “The large hen,” she explained, “is Murtle. The enormous cock—and well named—is Turtle. The kids know the names of the small ones. I can't tell one from another.”

“Do you mean,” Barbara asked, unable to keep a note of horror out of her voice, “that we're going to eat that beautiful bird tomorrow? Eloise, I don't believe it.”

“Of course not. Do you think I'm a barbarian? I brought you here because this has become a moral question at Highgate. Adam bought the breeding pair about a year ago. He decided that we might just as well raise our own turkeys. The six small ones are their children. Do you remember Adam, when I first met him at your mother's gallery? He was the sweetest, gentlest young man I had ever met. But when Sally and I said that we couldn't dream of killing and cooking that beautiful, stupid bird, he really lost his temper. He almost never loses his temper. After forty years of marriage, he's turned into an irascible, bearded creature out of the Old Testament. He considers himself a farmer. Can you imagine, with this enormous institution that Highgate has become, he considers himself a farmer!”

Barbara, watching the birds with fascination, smiled and said, “Did you know, Ellie, that Benjamin Franklin suggested making the turkey the national bird of America? He argued that the woods abounded with them, that they made good eating, and that they were altogether noble. The bald eagle, on the other hand, was a killer of small creatures and very bad eating.”

“I think he had a point,” Eloise agreed.

“And how did you resolve it?”

“Well, when May Ling and Freddie joined in and said they wouldn't touch a bite of Turtle, and May Ling is pregnant, and Adam is so pleased about having another kid on the place—well, Adam relented and became human again.”

“So it's no turkey for Thanksgiving?”

“Of course not. I went down to Napa and bought one of those frozen twenty-pound monsters that are all breast. It's been defrosting for a week, and it will be perfect for tomorrow night.”

Barbara stared at Eloise. “Hold on, Ellie. Don't you think there's something wrong in your reasoning?”

“Not at all. What would Thanksgiving be without a turkey? It's the best of all holidays, and Clair, who never knew where the next meal was coming from when she was a kid, used to say that it was a perfectly Christian thing to do to worship food for one day a year, and can you imagine how disappointed everyone would be if we didn't have a turkey?” And then, after a moment, Eloise added, “You're always so reasonable, Barbara, but nothing in this world makes real sense. Adam lost his brother in World War Two, and then when that madness in Vietnam destroyed our son Joshua, Adam and I could have gone out of our minds. But we didn't. We worked it through, and we still had Freddie—and I must tell you about Freddie. Are you cold?”

“No, not at all.” Both women were wearing heavy sweaters, Eloise a tightly knit red sweater with a hood, and Barbara a hand-knit Irish sweater. “But it does get cold here in the afternoon.”

. “Let's walk up the hill to our old place. We'll have a good talk, and we can have a fire. I have matches with me, and there's always plenty of wood there.”

“You really want to build a fire, Ellie? We haven't had one up there in years.”

“Just a small one. Philip is somewhere with Adam, giving him a history of Israel, I'm sure. Adam is becoming very Jewish, patriarch-style. I argue with him that his mother was Presbyterian, so by Jewish law, he's not Jewish at all.”

“Why not let him be Jewish if he wants to?”

“I'm almost hesitant to tell you, but I'm going to church this Christmas. Chalk it up to age. I want Adam to come with me.”

“That's the least he could do,” Barbara said.

“Do you ever go to church, Barbara?”

“Well, I do go to hear Philip preach. That's where I met him, you know. But real church, Grace Cathedral—no, only for funerals. I'm not a church person. You know, Sam's daughter was never baptized. He's also decided to be Jewish, same process as Adam. And Mary Lou is pregnant again. She's younger than May Ling, but not much. They do wait to the last minute.”

“That's wonderful. I love family, and the more the better. And Sally's Daniel is going with someone. I haven't met her yet, but—well, just perk up your ears. She's Chinese.”

“Oh no! That's great.”

“She's coming to dinner tomorrow. And Freddie—no, I'm saving that.”

They didn't build a fire after all; Barbara was tired by the climb more than it had ever tired her before, and they would have to come down before sunset. Even with Eloise's guidance, Barbara did not trust herself to come down the hillside in the darkness. They sat together on the bench, leaning against each other for warmth. “Now, about Freddie?” Barbara said.

“There are two parts to it,” Eloise began, “and it's incredible that so much has happened since you left. Well, maybe there are three parts to it. Harry has given up lawyering, and he and May Ling, together with Freddie and Adam, have purchased the Hawthorn Winery down the road. May Ling was unhappy in San Francisco, and they've given up their apartment there. Harry is converted to wine—totally.”

“Oh no—no, I don't believe it.”

“Then you won't believe the rest of it. Adam has agreed to have them specialize in Chardonnay. Well, the market for white wine is growing and Adam has to be realistic—although there's some word out of France that red wine is life prolonging—nothing much yet, but Freddie has been corresponding with a French vintner who's trying to get some scientists to investigate it statistically.”

“Harry and May Ling here in the Valley—”

“And the little boy is happy—now that he has his own Highgate.”

“Do they have a house on the place?”

“A lovely house,” Eloise said. “We'll drop over there tomorrow, if we can find time. But let me get on to the second part of the Freddie story. He's become part of the faculty at Berkeley. They invited him to give a weekly seminar on winemaking during the next semester. He's as excited as a kid about it. Tuesday nights. He's going to drive in every Tuesday next year, and the first person to sign up for the course was Harry. I think his relationship with Harry is remarkable, considering that Freddie was once married to May Ling.”