The End of the Road (7 page)

“Well,” Joe said, “I’m not a guy who needs to be married under any circumstances—in fact, under a lot of circumstances I couldn’t tolerate being married—and one of my conditions for preserving any relationship at all, but particularly a marriage relationship, would be that the parties involved be able to take each other seriously. If I straighten Rennie out now and then, or tell her that some statement of hers is stupid as hell, or even slug her one, it’s because I respect her, and to me that means not making a lot of kinds of allowances for her. Making allowances might be Christian, but to me it would always mean not taking seriously the person you make allowances for. That’s the only objection I have to your making fun of Rennie: not that it might hurt her feelings, but that it means you’re making allowances for her being a
woman,
or some such nonsense as that.”

“Aren’t you regarding this take-us-seriously business as an absolute?” I asked. “You seem to want you and Rennie to take each other seriously under any circumstances.”

This observation pleased Joe, and to my chagrin I noticed that I was unaccountably happy that I’d said something he considered bright.

“That’s a good point,” he grinned, and began his harangue. “The usual criticism of people like me is that somewhere at the end of the line is the
ultimate
end that gives the whole chain its relative value, and this ultimate end is rationally unjustifiable if there aren’t any absolute values. These ends can be pretty impersonal, like ‘the good of the state,’ or else personal, like taking your wife seriously. In either case if you’re going to defend these ends at all I think you have to call them subjective. But they’d never be
logically
defensible; they’d be in the nature of psychological
givens,
different for most people. Four things that I’m not impressed by,” he added, “are unity, harmony, eternality, and universality. In my ethics the most a man can ever do is be right from his point of view; there’s no general reason why he should even bother to defend it, much less expect anybody else to accept it, but the only thing he can do is operate by it, because there’s nothing else. He’s got to expect conflict with people or institutions who are also right from
their
points of view, but whose points of view are different from his.

“Suppose it were the essence of my nature that I was completely jealous of Rennie, for instance,” he went on (I did not see how this could be possible, frankly; she didn’t have
that
much on the ball). “Now it happens that that’s not the case at all, but suppose it were true that because of my psychological make-up, marital fidelity was one of the
givens,
the subjective equivalent of an absolute, one of the conditions that would attach to any string of ethical propositions I might make for myself. Then suppose Rennie committed adultery behind my back. From my point of view the relationship would have lost its
raison d’être,
and I’d probably walk out flat, if I didn’t actually shoot her or shoot myself. But from the state’s point of view, for example, I’d still be obligated to support her, because you can’t have a society where people just walk out flat on family relationships like that. From their point of view I should be forced to pay support money, and I would have no reason to complain that their viewpoint isn’t the same as mine: it couldn’t be. In the same way, the state would be as justified in hanging me or jailing me for shooting her as I would be in shooting her—do you see? Or the Catholic Church, if I were officially a Catholic, would be as justified from their point of view in refusing me sacred burial ground as I’d be in committing suicide if the marriage relationship had been one of the
givens
for my whole life. I’d be a fool if I expected the world to excuse my actions simply because I can explain them clearly.

“That’s one reason why I don’t apologize for things,” Joe said finally. “It’s because I’ve no right to expect you or anybody to accept anything I do or say—but I can always
explain
what I do or say. There’s no sense in apologizing, because nothing is ultimately defensible. But a man can act coherently; he can act in ways that he can explain, if he wants to. This is important to me. Do you know, for the first month of our marriage Rennie used to apologize all over herself to friends who dropped in, because we didn’t have much furniture in the house. She knew very well that we didn’t want any more furniture even if we could have afforded it, but she always apologized to other people for not having their point of view. One day she did it more elaborately than usual, and as soon as the company left I popped her one on the jaw. Laid her out cold. When she came to, I explained to her very carefully why I’d hit her. She cried, and apologized to me for having apologized to other people. I popped her again.”

There was no boastfulness in Joe’s voice when he said this; neither was there any regret.

“What the hell, Jake, the more sophisticated your ethics get, the stronger you have to be to stay afloat. And when you say good-by to objective values, you really have to flex your muscles and keep your eyes open, because you’re on our own. It takes
energy:
not just personal energy, but cultural energy, or you’re lost. Energy’s what makes the difference between American pragmatism and French existentialism—where the hell else but in America could you have a cheerful nihilism, for God’s sake? I suppose it was rough, slugging Rennie, but I saw the moment as a kind of crisis. Anyhow, she stopped apologizing after that.”

“Ah,” I said.

Now it may well be that Joe made no such long coherent speech as this all at once; it is certainly true that during the course of the evening this was the main thing that got said, and I put it down here in the form of one uninterrupted whiz-bang for convenience’s sake, both to illustrate the nature of his preoccupations and to add a stroke or two to my picture of the man himself. I heard it all quiescently; despite the fact that I was accustomed to expressing certain of these opinions myself at times (more hopefully than honestly), arguments against nearly everything he said occurred to me as he spoke. Yet I would by no means assert that he couldn’t have refuted my objections—I daresay even I could have. As was usually the case when I was confronted by a really intelligent and lucidly exposed position, I was as reluctant to give it more than notional assent as I was unable to offer a more reasonable position of my own. In such situations I most often adopted what in psychology is known as the “non-directive technique”: I merely said, “Oh?” or “Ah,” and gave the horse his head.

But I was interested in the story of Rennie’s first encounter with the Morgan philosophy, and the irresistible rhetoric Joe had employed to open her eyes to the truth about apologies. It demonstrated clearly that philosophizing was no game to Mr. Morgan; that he lived his conclusions down to the fine print; and Rennie became a somewhat more interesting figure to me. Indeed, I should say that that particular little anecdote was doubtless the main thing that made me amenable to a proposal that Joe made later on, after Rennie had joined us out on the lawn.

“Do you like horseback-riding, Jake?” Rennie had happened to ask.

“Never rode before, Rennie.”

“Gee, it’s fun; you’ll have to try it with me sometime.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Yes, I suppose it would be better to do that before I tried it with a horse.”

Rennie giggled, whipping her head from side to side, and Joe laughed loudly, but not, I think, enthusiastically. Then I saw his frowning forehead suddenly illuminate.

“Hey, that’s an idea!” he exclaimed to Rennie. “Teach Jake how to ride!” He turned to me. “Rennie’s folks have riding horses on then: farm, down the road, but I seldom get a chance to ride and Rennie hates to ride by herself. I’m busy nearly all day reading for my thesis before school starts. Why don’t you let Rennie teach you to ride? It’ll give her a chance to get outdoors more, and you all will be able to do some talking.”

I was embarrassed both by Joe’s deliberate enthusiasm for his project and by his poor taste in implying that talking to me would do Rennie good. It pleased me, perversely, to see Rennie squirm a little, too: she was apparently not yet so well educated by her husband that his ingenuousness did not sometimes embarrass her, even though she was careful to conceal her discomfort from Joe.

“What do you think?” he demanded of her.

“I think it’s a swell idea, if Jake wants to learn,” Rennie said quickly.

“Do
you?” Joe asked me.

I shrugged. “Doesn’t make a damn to me.”

“Well, if it doesn’t make a damn to you, and Rennie and I think it’s a good idea, then it’s settled,” Joe laughed. “In fact, whether you want to learn or not it’s settled, if you’re not willing to refuse, just like this dinner business!”

We all chuckled, and the subject was dropped, Joe explaining to me happily that as a matter of fact my statement on the telephone (that I would come to dinner whether I wanted to or not) was unintelligible.

“Rennie would’ve told you if you hadn’t flustered her by making fun of her,” he smiled; “the only demonstrable index to a man’s desires is his acts, when you’re speaking of past time: what a man did is what he wanted to do.”

“What?”

“Don’t you see?” asked Rennie, and Joe sat back and relaxed. “The idea is that you could have conflicting desires—say, the desire not to have dinner with us and the desire not to offend us. If you end by coming to dinner it’s because the second desire was stronger than the first: other things being equal, you wouldn’t want to eat with us, but other things never are equal, and actually you’d rather eat with us than insult us. So you eat with us—that’s what you
finally
wanted to do. You shouldn’t say you’ll eat with us whether you want to or not; you should say you’ll eat with us if it satisfies desires in you stronger than your desire
not
to eat with us.”

“It’s like combining plus one hundred and minus ninety-nine,” Joe said. “The answer is just barely plus, but it’s completely plus. That’s another reason why it’s silly for anybody to apologize for something he’s done by claiming he didn’t really want to do it: what he
wanted
to do, in the end, was what he did. That’s important to remember when you’re reading history.”

I observed that Rennie colored slightly at the reference to apologizing.

“Mmm,” I replied to Joe, non-directively.

THE CLUMSY FORCE OF RENNIE WAS A THING THAT ATTRACTED ME
during the weeks following this dinner of shrimp, rice, beer, and values that the Morgans had fed me. It was a clumsiness both of action and of articulation—Rennie lurched and blurted—and I was curious to know whether what lay behind it was ineptitude or graceless strength.

At least this was my attitude when we began my riding lessons. My mood was superior, in that I regarded myself as the examiner and her as the subject, but it was not supercilious, and there was a certain sympathy in my curiosity. That I felt this special superiority is fortunate, because it got me through the first lessons on horseback, which otherwise would have been difficult to face indeed. I hated not the work but the embarrassment of learning new things, the ludicrousness of the tyro, and I can’t imagine ever having learned to ride horses (for I had only the most vagrant interest in riding) without this special curiosity and special superiority feeling to salve my pride.

Rennie was an excellent rider and a most competent teacher. We rode mostly in the mornings, fairly early, and occasionally after supper, and we rode every day unless it was raining very hard. I would drive to the Morgans’ place at seven-thirty or eight in the morning, sometimes earlier, and have breakfast with them; then Joe would begin his day’s reading and note taking, and Rennie, the boys, and I would drive the four miles out to her parents’ farm. Mrs. MacMahon, her mother, took charge of the children, and Rennie and I went riding. Her horse was a spirited five-year-old dun stallion of fifteen hands (her description) named Tom Brown, and mine a seven-year-old chestnut mare with a white race down her face, sixteen hands high, named Susie, whom both Rennie and her father described as gentle, although she was plenty lively enough for me. Rennie’s father kept the two horses for his own pleasure but rarely had a chance to exercise them properly, and so he was quite pleased with Joe’s project. The first thing he said to Rennie when he saw us approach in our riding outfits (Rennie had insisted that I purchase cotton jodhpurs and riding boots) was “Well, Ren, I see Joe recruited you a companion!”

“This is Jake Horner, Dad,” Rennie said briskly. “I’m going to teach him how to ride.” She was quite aware that her father’s remark had told me something I wasn’t especially intended to know—that Joe’s project hadn’t occurred to him on the spur of the moment, but had been premeditated—and being conscious of this made her awkward. She moved off immediately to the paddock where the two horses were grazing, leaving her father and me to shake hands and make pleasantries as best we could.

There is no need for me to go into any detail about my instruction: it is uninteresting and has little to do with my observation of Rennie. About the only prior knowledge I had of horses was that one mounted them from the “near,” or left, side, and even that little piece of equine lore I found to be not so invariably true as I’d believed. I was introduced to the mysteries of Pelhams and hackamores, snaffles and curbs, of collected and extended gaits, of the aids and the leads. I made all the mistakes that beginners make—hanging on by the reins, clinging with my legs, lounging in the saddle—and slowly corrected them. That I was at first very much afraid of my animal is irrelevant, since I’d not under any circumstances have shown my fear to Rennie.

She herself was a “strong” rider—she applied the aids heavily and kept frisky Tom Brown as gentle as a lap dog—but most of her abrupt instructions to me were aimed at making me use them lightly.

“Stop digging her in the barrel,” she’d blurt out as we trotted along. “You’re telling her to go with your heels and holding her back with your hands.”