The Oasis (8 page)

Katy started to walk slowly across the lawn. Having
secured from Preston what she interpreted correctly as a guaranty of return, she began to consider the quarrel in quite a different light, to ask herself, first what account she should give of it to the other colonists, and, secondly, what apologies and admissions she could wring from him later in the day. The phrase, “You disgust me,” kept surging up to her esophagus like something she had been forced to swallow but could not assimilate; if it were not retracted, she felt it would literally kill her. At the same time, she was aware of the folly of reopening the discussion; her husband, rearoused, was only too likely to repeat it. That this phrase might embody an actual truth of feeling elicited from her consciousness only a vague and irrelevant wonder: is it possible, she asked herself in a tone of disinterested curiosity, that he does not love me? And though she was in the habit of cross-examining him tenderly on this point (“Do you love me?”—“Yes,” “Perhaps,” “What do
you
think?”), she found, to her surprise, that the possibility of a negative answer did not really exist for her. “Nonsense,” she said to herself, “he
must
love me,” and the notion that he perhaps did not simply annoyed her with him, like some idle, neurotic fancy or an over-conscientious scruple. A nicety of feeling which could withdraw him from her in spirit, while he remained physically on the premises, exasperated, even as a hypothesis, everything practical and quotidian in her tenacious and self-centered character. “I would not forgive him for that,” she declared to herself precisely, forgetting that
the offense she postulated placed him by definition beyond the reach of her disapproval. But the instant this difficulty became clear to her, and the psychic absence of her beloved appeared suddenly as real, as real as the death she feared for him whenever he left her side, the armies of her love rushed after him, to surrender and bring him back captive. To surrender and treat afterwards was Katy’s habitual strategy in love, but now, shaken by her husband’s words, by the presence of onlookers, by the fright she had just given herself, she made a great resolution: to resign herself to his condemnation as to an immutable fact of nature, to take it, that is, seriously. For a single moment, in the severe northern light, darkened by the long shadows on the mountains, she had a perception of life as a black chain of consequence, in which nothing was lost, forgot, forgiven, redeemed, in which the past was permanent and the present slipping away from her (contrary to her instinctive opinion, which was that the past could be altered and actions, like words, “taken back”). She nearly cried out with pain as this unconscionable truth bit into her, and she recognized that the events of the past half-hour were, literally, irrecoverable. Such powerlessness, guilt, and desolation she had known only in nightmares, and from those she had, naturally, awakened, a fact which had misled her into considering evil a dream. Here for the first time, this impulsive and ingenuous nature found itself alone in a cold and unresponsive climate in which to announce, “I have ruined your morning,” did not
constitute a refutation of the truth that indeed she had.

Accustomed to please, to smile, and court, and be petted, she felt the sensation of having given displeasure to forty-odd people as something so alien that she could hardly connect herself with it. That this had “had” to happen on the very first morning, when she, more than any of them, had wanted things to go well, she could only attribute to the malignant perversity of circumstance, and the pathos of the distance between her hopes and the reality received its final nuance when she presented herself in the kitchen, ready to take over, and found herself superseded, her menu set aside, and Eleanor Macdermott and Irene, the girl student, hurriedly making eggs and toast with silent, starched faces, as if in the presence of illness. With that instinctive tactlessness so common among educated people, they made no remark on her absence but simply became more busy. Lacking any fresh impetus she wandered vaguely over to where her big bowl of waffle batter stood untouched, like a pariah, precisely as she left it, except that the table around it had been very carefully wiped. “Would you like me to put it in the icebox?” Irene inquired, kindly, but with a manner decidedly mortuary, which suggested that this object revived associations too painful to be borne at the moment. Katy picked up the enamel spoon, which had been washed and aligned beside it, with that same hint of obsequies and ritual observance. “It’s too late?” she hazarded timidly, and the girl looked at her and sadly
shrugged. She had studied Greek with Katy, and the humiliation of her teacher was painful for her to witness. “Much too late,” put in Mrs. Macdermott firmly. “They’re sitting down inside.” “Come,” said the girl gently, taking the spoon from her hand. “Come and eat.” Katy shook her head; her large brown eyes filled with tears. “I can’t face them,” she muttered.

“Nonsense,” said the girl maternally. “It was not your fault, you know,” and indeed such was the impression that prevailed among the majority of the colonists, who believed that Preston had stamped off blaming her, unfairly, for the accident and the late breakfast, while a dissenting minority, on the other hand, could not be swayed from its verdict, which was that she had flooded the stove herself and had been caught by her husband trying to pass the buck to Joe. The code of honor articulate in the colony was by no means so theatrical as Preston’s: Macdougal Macdermott, for example, would have given a great hoot of laughter if anyone had proposed that his Eleanor “confess” to an oversight not her own—“For God’s sake, Preston, come out of it, man; you’re living in the Middle Ages!” The marital quarrels of the Norells, moreover, were too regular a feature of this society to excite any great curiosity, since everyone but the participants knew what the outcome would be. Only the young minister, with whom self-questioning was a vocational aptitude, could have wound his sinuous way through this labyrinth of error and triviality, and he had a priest’s tolerance—Katy’s capacity for regrets,
together with her classical studies, had convinced him that she possessed a genuinely religious nature (ethics, in his view, had little in common with religion; every third Sabbath he produced a sensation in his rural flock by calling on the ladies of the altar guild and the Girls’ Friendly Society to abandon the specious assurance of salvation by works).

Katy, at any rate, allowed herself to be persuaded and made her appearance in the dining room, with a mournful step that suggested the whole chorus of
The Suppliants
. A picture of grief, silent, composed, unassuageable, had suddenly proposed itself to her imagination, and the sincerity of her inner feelings passed off at once into performance, as she bargained on the power of this
pietà
to move her husband to pity. But when her ranging eye at length discovered him sitting at the far end of a long table, wedged in between two other colonists, his high-colored face averted and obdurate, her heart collapsed within her. These moods of his (she recalled) could last as long as a day, and she felt really quite unequal to the tedious process of reconciliation which, in view of the fact that she was sorry, seemed to her highly unnecessary, like some legal routine or the difficulty of getting passports. Her interest in expiation quickly vanished in the face of its actuality. She could not be bothered with it—“It is simply too stupid,” she thought, experiencing on her own behalf that rational impatience with suffering that made her detest cruelty, injustice, poverty, and wars. Men, to Katy’s mind, were born to love one another, and
their refusal to do so she attributed to that same mulish obstinacy which her husband was demonstrating here in the fraternal hall. A strong will and a weak character had led her greatly to overestimate the plasticity of the human material, and indeed that of matter itself: she recognized no obstacle to the general attainment of plenty and happiness, just as she saw no reason why she should not have a new Plato or a hat.

Preston now, no doubt about it, was taking advantage of the Utopian brotherhood to shut her out from himself. In this, she felt something unsportsmanlike and even illegitimate: he knew very well that here, before all these people, she was helpless to secure his attention, and he must know also how she would suffer if he were to go out to the fields and leave her, without so much as a look. That the privacy to make a scene was something she would miss in Utopia was a contingency she had never anticipated, but now, surrounded by these watchers, she felt deprived of a basic right, the right to go over and expostulate with him, behave badly if necessary, until he responded to her grief. Preston, on his side, was discovering in the Utopian situation a privacy he had sought in vain during two years of marriage. Though unaware of his wife’s exact location, he presumed that she had come into the room, but he had no intention of speaking to her until much later in the day. He felt protected by the others, in precisely the manner she assumed, and a cruel streak in his character was rejoiced by this turning of the tables, this illustration of poetic justice: little
had she thought, when urging on him the manifold blessings of Utopia, that
this
would prove to be the chief. At the same time, however, he was conscious of a purer happiness, an extraordinary sense of solitude, as though he walked on a carpet of pine needles; the conversation around him acted as a kind of blanket which muffled the din of relationships; he sat alone among others, peacefully absorbed in his thoughts. As if on an ocean liner, a train, or a crowded foreign square, he recaptured his identity in a nothingness, an absence of the acting self. He was recalled to this world by the scraping of chairs in the dining room. The men were setting out for the fields.

Outside, on the porch, a vast elation seized him as he considered the empty morning and the loneliness of the work ahead. It had rained during the night, and the sky, still tossed with clouds, and the rumpled mountain landscape had an air of exhausted wildness, like a face on which the tears have just dried. This comparison, which came to him wittily, evoked the figure of his wife, who had strangely slipped from his mind, and, suddenly well-disposed and merry, he rushed into the kitchen to find her, whirled her twice around the room, and let go of her, to the discomfiture of Eleanor Macdermott, whose sense of permanent ill-feeling toward this
femme savante
had been somewhat mollified by the suspicion that she was about to become an object for charity. Katy, surprised and delighted, smiled her pleasure at once; she had never learned how to stay angry, which was perhaps a defect
in her character. Yet the terms of the amnesty were too vague to set her mind altogether at rest, and forgetful of that resolve, which had seemed only an hour before essential to her moral survival, she detained him at the screen door. “Preston,” she ventured. He turned and waited politely, certain of what was coming but unwilling, even now, to please her, except on his own terms. “Preston!” she repeated. He raised his eyebrows in a look of inquiry. She did not know what to say. “Do I really disgust you?” she whispered, looking nervously behind her in the direction of Eleanor Macdermott. “Yes!” he cried emphatically, but with a shout of laughter; the conspiratorial manner of the question struck him as splendidly farcical—in his very tenderest moments, he looked upon Katy as a comedian. He now relented and patted her sharply on the buttocks. Katy returned to her work, in some peculiar fashion well pleased; though she had broken her resolution and come off with nothing to show for it, it seemed to her undeniable that she had acted for the best.

Meanwhile,
sotto voce
, in another part of the dining room, the realists were earnestly conferring. A tap on the shoulder and a significant nod of the eyes had directed each member of the faction to the small table at the rear, where Taub, spooning the dregs of his coffee, measured with a brief glance the loyalty of each newcomer and invited him to pull up a chair. Susan Hapgood was present, Harold Sidney (Will’s oldest
and most cautious ally), John Aloysius Brown, Danny Furnas, Fearon Powers, and several others; the wives had not been included. Taub had already narrated his experience of the night before, and for the benefit of the late arrivals, Harold Sidney kept furnishing a rapid whispered summary of the outrage, like a respectful usher at the door of a meeting. Exclamations of indignation were general—“I think it’s just
terrible
,” Susan Hapgood cried, each time the story was told, her small-town capacity for being scandalized asserting itself somewhat ingenuously in this new sphere. “Don’t you, John, don’t you, Fearon?” she asked, turning her pretty birdlike brown head in sudden alarm and indecision to every member of the party. “Yes, yes indeed, quite,” they reassured her. The problem was, what was to be done. Taub, who had been waiting imperturbably for this question, like a headliner idling in the wings, proceeded to unfold his plan. Any board member, he pointed out, had the right to call an emergency council meeting, without stating his reason, if eight hours’ notice was given. Council members, therefore, would be notified immediately of a session to be held that night,
in camera
, at his cottage, to act against an unnamed person who had been guilty of asocial behavior. This procedure would give Joe’s friends neither time nor occasion to organize a counter-movement on his behalf; the atmosphere of mystery would demoralize any potential opposition, which would waste and scatter its energies trying to guess who was meant. “Bad conscience,” he explained stonily, regarding his
confederates with a look almost of warning. “That’s how we get these moralists. Make each one think it’s
him
.” He gave a brief snort of pure laughter. “And don’t give them a chance to discuss it.” “Why not at five o’clock, then?” asked someone, counting on his fingers. The realist leader frowningly shook his head: conditions of secrecy were indispensable; happily, they could infer from Lockman’s hour of rising that he went to bed early. “What if he has insomnia?” put in Brown, with the air of a veritable Aquinas and laughing heartily at the same time to indicate the savor of the jest. He was a philosophy teacher who had been converted from Marxism to the absurd, an ungainly and aggrieved man full of insistences, who imagined that his jokes were not understood. “I say, Will, what if he has insomnia?” he repeated, flapping a loose forefinger to command Taub’s attention. Taub shrugged impatiently; he did not greatly care for Brown, whom he considered too unstable to be of much use in practical affairs. “Insomnia gosomnia,” he remarked, dismissing the objection.