The Unpossessed (35 page)

Of course, Al thought, after twenty years of being married you didn't really love your wife; nor, after five years of not sleeping with her could you even remember her very well; all the same it was a little hard to see her entering her ballroom now, her hair suspiciously smooth, her expression frozen—and her Greek dress sloping off one shoulder. He watched her move across the room, with each step attaining more grace, more deliberation; past the group of Black Sheep she sailed without a sidewise glance and on, growing cooler, more collected, toward the double throne of the Ballisters. Changing classes, he thought ironically; and could have sworn that her dress lifted itself back on to be respectable.

“Well, we have a minyan,” Bruno said as Jeffrey came at last. “Hurray!” cried the Black Sheep. “We thought we'd have to hold the revolution without you!” “Can't we,” said Miles, “get on with the speeches at once? The party is getting out of hand, they'll never listen if we wait much longer.” “Well, if our assistant editor prefers fornication to revolution,” said Bruno (Norah was talking kindly with Al Middleton). “Just a minute, just a minute,” said Jeffrey testily; “let me get my breath. Oh—Elizabeth: I didn't see you.” “Ah, the lone wolf at our door again,” said Elizabeth dryly. Jeffrey flushed. “But we haven't told him,” Firman cried, “about the ultracomradeliness of Comrade Fisher.” “Fisher?” Jeffrey said, “I saw her.” “Yes, but not in her true colors,” cried Little Dixon raucously. They told him. He was embarrassed; undecided whether to show surprise or attempt to protect her. “Fish-er is-n't ko-sher any mo-ore,” sang Bruno and Elizabeth. “My God,” said Al; “tell me,
is
there a communist party?” “
Is
there a Magazine?” said Miles with gloom. “Is there an object to this game?” said Bruno. “
Is
there another drink,” said Elizabeth. “How about shutting off the band, Mr. Middle-ton,” Cornelia said, “and
making
them start the speeches?” “My speech,” cried Bruno, waking; “Emmett's got it, where is Emmett?” “Emmett,” said Al, “didn't he find his mother, Blake?” And two Black Sheep were despatched to look for Emmett.

Fisher a worse-than-bourgeois, Jeffrey thought; Fisher a downright counter-revolutionary—the Black Sheep had it straight. He hated Fisher for letting him down; but in his heart he knew she had not let him down—she was a woman and had taken him for a man, but being the kind of man he was he had grown utterly tired of her, he needed something new, someone to look at him through fresh eyes, someone through whose eyes he could see himself. “Elizabeth,” he said, “I've been wanting and wanting to see you.”

“I know,” she said. “You're a lone wolf and I'm ‘nice' and everybody else in the world is neurotic and you're the only communist. You'll have to think up some other way of wooing me.” Nevertheless he squatted beside her on the floor, his head against her knee; and after a moment she allowed him to hold her hand. Rhythms beat faster in her ears at the familiar touch of an unfamiliar hand (
the express train is leaving . . . oh Jeffrey, oh stranger, you know me, you know me as though I were naked
); all right Jeffrey, she thought wearily, you don't want me, I don't want you, and in the end we'll have each other. She felt a wan kinship with him, knowing him to be the same thing as herself, a weary Don Juan whose impulses having lost their freshness were the more compelling therefor. The ballroom buzzed about them, the whole of it in her ears. She thought she would never again be rid of the noise and confusion circling in her head. She looked at Bruno now, sitting a large and helpless man, abandoned both by Jeffrey and herself; even by Emmett who had gone to seek his mother. His blurred and kind face hurt her. The perennially bright and vulnerable face of the precocious child aging much to its own incredulous hurt. Long nose, grown for fifteen years in a sheltered society (oh Longview, dear childhood) where long noses did not matter; and then projected into the world where it longed to shrink and because it could not, grew sharp and disdainful, but humble, and—longer than ever. It was a predatory nose, she thought, reaching out bold and eager for its prey; yet its tip was suddenly blunted, stunted, as though it would never dare seize all it could reach. It was a noble nose, arrogant—and yet it was futile, impotent. When he wore glasses on its bridge its length was foreshortened, lending him a peculiarly benign and harmless look. The glasses tamed it, kept it in its place, caged it, and when it reached, angry but helpless, out of its cage, it resembled an elephant's foreshortened trunk, pointing madly toward his enemies the zoo-gazers; and forever deprived of its prey. But the pain of looking at Bruno bulged inside her temples and her breast till she had to look away, till to quiet her own nerves she patted Jeffrey's hand: and knew that it was understood between them; and understood too by Bruno though his eyes were turned away.

She reflected how little, at best, she had to do with her own destiny. She lived in a frame of men's reactions, building herself over from one man to the next; her character seemed compounded on what various men had told her she was. What Denny had said, what Wheelwright had said, what Jeffrey's look requested, what last year and this year and the year after next Bruno had said and would say. . . . She rose up each time, perhaps hurt, perhaps newly hopeful, presented herself each time as a target—and each time, it seemed, some accident, some small arbitrary fact . . . like a toothbrush clasped unwittingly too tight in a lover's hand, like the presence of Emmett (now slowly and fatefully approaching, between his Black Sheep captors) always with Bruno, like the fact that her eyes and Bruno's always, by the fraction of a second, failed to click. . . . But the accidents matched, the patterns matched; and much as she dreaded, she welcomed, the identical disastrous ends. In a sense one stood in line for all the kind of things that happened; one stood inevitably in one line or another. It was the same with Elizabeth's drawing as with separate incidents in her life: which started each time large and fine but which she never let go until she had spoiled it, apparently without volition, by some comic touch. Still one could ask why? Success perhaps was insupportable; somewhere along the line she must, she felt, have missed out badly and forever after would take no substitutes. And so she ran away or laughed accidentally at the wrong moments or stopped her ears with a roar when some truth battered for entrance; and so she would go on until she had laid the ghost of what she missed, or found the magic number; or else she would come face to face one day with the main issue, in some narrow passage, where she could not turn aside or make a joke.

“I'm sorry, Bruno,” Emmett said; “I was m-m-mad for some reason, or drunk I guess, I almost threw away your speech.” He stood like a pale ghost who has come to his senses again, and handed the envelope to Bruno. “And I'd like to ap-p-pologize to Elizabeth, I think I was very rude.” “Well for God's sake,” Al said, “if you were rude to someone, stick to it, I'm glad to hear it, Emmett.” “To hell with that,” cried the Black Sheep, “stop the music, Mr. Middleton before they discover something else to fight about. Come on, let's get front row seats!” “If you can tear yourself away from Elizabeth, Jeffrey,” said Bruno coldly. “I'll s-s-stay with Elizabeth,” said Emmett pleasantly, “and hold her hand; didn't you tell my father you were my g-g-girl, Elizabeth?” “Well, I guess the revolution's happened,” Al remarked, bewildered, and started off to tell Teresca.

In spite of himself Bruno felt the solemnity again, and walked proud and firm with Jeffrey, toward the draped-off place beside the buffet where the speeches would take place. Elizabeth's painted Hunger Marchers formed the back-drop; already the Black Sheep, eager, had spread themselves before it, dragging chairs to the astonishment of the dancers. The speech felt good in Bruno's hand, the familiar envelope was reassuring—even its surface had not been spared: there were sentences and half-sentences scribbled in his and Jeffrey's, Miles' and Emmett's hands.

Al spoke briefly to Teresca. The dancers sensed nothing because they were lost in each other's arms and rhythms; but the sitters noticed something, felt something in the air, wondered where the change would fall from. “Something's going to happen,” muttered Mrs. Whitman to Mrs. Draper. “Something's going to happen,” said Miss Titcomb and Miss Milliken. “Oh jolly jolly jolly,” Mr. Crawford said, “the entahtainahs ayah assembling.” Arturo closed off his music, jogged his knee, and sat, smiling to his audience, the Boys, himself, his absent wife. “Whut's it for, this benefit, Mr. Middleton,” called Miss Ermine-tails, giggling, “whut's it for?” “The blind, I think,” said Al; and moved on down the room. Mr. Graham Hatcher could bear it no longer: “I am
not
the entertainment,” he exploded, “God damn it, I am Vice President of the C.F.S.U.S.—The Colored Folks' Social Uplift Society.” “Some little Magazine they're starting,” Merle explained to Mr. Ballister who could hear and old Miss Ballister who couldn't.

Jeffrey stood forward, handsome and nervous, and on the other side of the room Norah clasped her hands over her heart to still its beating, to send a message of help to Jeffrey.

“FRIENDS AND COMRADES”:

(Ruthie Fisher leaned across the buffet to catch his eye, to smile, to encourage him with all her heart.) “All of us could not be present at the Hunger March today. We have our separate reasons, and all of them are valid. For one thing, thanks to our gracious hostess,” he waved a gallant hand toward Mrs. Middleton, “we are not hungry.” A pretty ripple of laughter flowed out from somewhere. (That kind of humor, said Miles unhappily, is what will sink us in the end.) “But the main thing is, we are not needed there; we are wanted on the outside, to lead, direct . . . keeping watch at the pivot, at the helm.” (I'm going to be sick again, Cornelia said. Wait for Doctor Leonard, this doesn't count, Firman whispered back; Blake is a sop to the aristocrats.)

“The injustice of hunger,” continued Jeffrey, “is something we can all appreciate . . . driving mothers to despair . . . fathers to militant objection . . .”

(“When you come right down to it,” said Mrs. Stanhope, “horses are more intelligent than people. Ever hear of a horse taking up a gun and going to shoot another horse? Ever hear of a horse marching to Washington because there were more oats in some other horse's stable? Ever read in the papers about
that
, Mr. Tevander? Wh-hy!” All her group politely whinnied.)

“and now the times are dangerously bad for everybody, we all must have our eyes open to the common suffering which tomorrow may be ours. . . .”

(“
That's
no joke,” sighed Mr. Draper, “I've been thinking of starting a colony of ex-bankers in the South Seas on an island.” “And think of poor Jim Fancher,” Mrs. Draper said behind her hand.)

“I attach no labels . . . speak to no class-consciousness . . .”

(“He says there are no classes in America,” said Merle to old Miss Ballister who could not hear.)

“but to a sense of justice, of intelligence, and even, in the last analysis, of self-preservation . . . I ask for hunger-consciousness . . . before it is too late . . .”

(“he says we've got to protect ourselves against the lower classes,” Merle said to Mr. Ballister who
could
hear.)

“it is not that the bins of this country are empty . . . that the houses of this land are full . . .”

(“When you come to think of it,
why
should the Ballisters keep that big old empty house,” said Mr. Tevander thoughtfully, “I mean, I wonder . . .” “Wh-hy!” said Mrs. Stanhope incredulously.)

“but they are closed, the food-bins, and the houses . . . to our unemployed . . .”

(“A little serious, I think,” said Miss Hobson, “for a party, don't you think?” “Still,” returned Mr. Terrill—who had lost a fortune since 1929 and was living on half a one now—“it's a pretty serious problem, even
at
a party.” “I know so little of these things,” said Miss Hobson femininely; “art means so much more to me.”)

“as intellectuals, it's time we took our stand. It is with this purpose that Dr. Bruno Leonard, whose liberal views have long made him an important figure at his College . . . who has espoused the cause of students who held minority opinions . . . who wishes now to aid the larger cause, not this time of a minority, but of the great majority: the working-class . . . is founding now this Magazine . . .”

(“What Magazine?” said Ermine-tails restlessly; “I thought
now
they'd let Paul Robeson dance.”)

“to establish a Forum for the radical intellectual, for the puzzled upper-classes, sympathizers with the plight . . . I have the honor to introduce to you: Doctor Bruno Leonard.”

There was a scattered round of applause and heads were craned toward Bruno. Humph, said Mr. Ballister who could hear. Oh very good, ve-ry good, said ancient Miss Ballister who could
not
hear; and when she clapped her hands together it could be seen that they did not meet or made no sound: as though whoever pulled her strings was very, very tired—after all these years—and couldn't be bothered any longer with making a thorough job of it.

“I'm going home, Lydia,” said Ruthie Fisher suddenly through the applause; “I'm going home,” she said, and was amazed at her own dignity. For Jeffrey was bowing and bowing and his bright eyes were never turned in her direction; she saw the object of his gaze, the girl in lettuce-green, to whom he looked (though Ruthie Fisher had composed his speech) for approbation now. It was all too plain. She had taken her chances and lost—lost again; and she must hurry, hurry home, hurry to where she lived for independence (so she wrote her father), where she lived for love—hurry to the little room and weep all night, for Jeffrey Blake, for William Turner, on that narrow cot under Lenin's eye. “Cheerio,” she said to the astonished Lydia; and rapidly collected the man's wallet she carried for a purse; and a crumpled pack of cigarettes; and started (terrified lest bourgeois tears burst from her aching heart before she reached the end), started on her own private hunger march, an agony of bright self-consciousness, across the mile-long ballroom (begging the pardon of an iceberg clad in pearls who collided coldly with her) . . . under Jeffrey Blake's indifferent eye.