The Women's Room (67 page)

They were delighted with themselves and with each other. The evening began quietly, with drinks and talk and Segovia playing Bach on the record player. Harley looked beautiful in a black velvet dinner jacket and a white ruffled shirt that softened his severe pale face and heightened his white-blond hair. Duke looked elegant; formal clothes suited him. His weight disappeared inside the dark jacket. Tad looked as if his arms were a little too long for his jacket, and Ben looked uneasy, like a mechanic at a wedding, but a sense of elegance touched them all, and their gestures showed it. Everything felt graceful.

The women had much to talk about, because most of them had made Christmas visits to their parents or a relative, and they talked intimately, almost as they would if the men had not been there. Mira talked about her conversation with the boys, omitting the discussion of Iso and their fascination with sex; she described the hatefulness and vindictiveness of her relatives. Kyla and Harley had had a similar experience; the rage of their elders against the young, against war protesters, seemed excessive, seemed, Kyla thought, to have a different source. The men listened, speaking rarely, but they did not withdraw. Their interest could be
felt: they were
there
, and the activeness of their participation made the conversation rich with a vibrating intensity. Harley suggested that what the elders were feeling was rage at the freedom of option open to young people: ‘It’s a luxury to refuse to go to war. They wouldn’t have dared. They imagine everybody young is gaily shacking up with everybody else. They’re jealous.’ The whole room got into it: everyone had some personal experience with a parent or relative that illuminated the situation. Everyone agreed that the feeling in the air ‘out there’ in the ‘real world’ was dire, full of hate and anger. ‘I wonder what will happen when they explode,’ Duke said ominously.

But they were too happy to feel threatened. Clarissa, whose family was also angry, had done some investigating of family history on her visit. ‘I was asking so many questions my mother brought out an old family album I’d never seen. It shows five generations of my forebears, farm people mostly, from North and South Dakota. Their faces are fascinating; they’re so strong, worn and lined, and you can tell they’re tanned from working outdoors, and their mouths are a little grim. But so strong! You just don’t see faces like that now. My parents don’t look like that – well, of course they don’t farm – but neither do my aunts and uncles, who do keep up the farm. They are America, those faces. They’re what people mean when they talk about moral virtue and the backbone of America. They were tough. My great-grandmother had twelve children and lived to be eighty-seven, working on the farm right up until the end. My grandmother is ninety and still does the cooking for the aunts and uncles who live on the farm, and all their kids. But my forebears weren’t like the image we have. One relative was run out of town on a rail for embezzling money from the bank to spend on his fancy woman, who lived right there, over the dressmaker’s shop. One uncle was an atheist and the town scandal. He’d stand outside the church on Sundays, on a big flat rock, and when the congregation came out, he’d start ranting and sermonizing on the evils of religion. He died at eighty-three by falling into a pigpen and the town said it was the judgment of God. My great-great-grandfather had three wives at once, one of them an Indian, a Kiowa. I like to think I’m descended from her. There’s a little confusion about the children, who belonged to whom. There are no pictures of her, but there’s one of him looking very prosperous and respectable in a black suit and a gold watch chain. Hardly your image of a trigamist.

‘They were utterly bourgeois; they kept their butteries clean and their pantries in order, and their barns full of hay, and I imagine the women
walking around with clean white aprons and a ring of keys hanging at their belts, feeling very contented because of the bacons and hams hanging in the larder, the fresh eggs, in the white bowl, the vegetables stored in the root cellar, enough to get them through the winter, and them all sitting at the round parlor table doing needlework while the men carved wood or read aloud to them, and the fire blazed, and the lamp hanging over the table swayed slightly when the wind blew fiercely. They were bourgeois, but they weren’t like our picture of them. Morality meant something different to them. They accepted the peculiarities of the people they lived with.’

‘The men,’ Val interrupted.

Clarissa nodded thoughtfully. ‘That may be. I don’t know any legends of atheistic or polygamous grandaunts. But Grandaunt Clara – I was named for her – was a crack shot with a rifle and ran her farm alone for thirty years after Uncle Tobias got his foot caught in a cart wheel and died of gangrene. I think because they were tougher, because they had fewer choices, because they worked so damned hard, they could afford to be freer in some ways …’ Her voice drifted off. ‘I don’t know. I can’t quite articulate what it is I feel about them. They were, most of them, very religious. But their eyes – the eyes in those photographs – the eyes in those grim, worn, stern faces – are like the eyes of visionaries. And the vision wasn’t of hams and bacon sides hanging in the larder, and a full root cellar.’ She breathed in deeply and threw back her head. ‘OH! They took me to this crazy place, unbelievable! It’s in West Bend, Iowa, and it’s called the Grotto of the Redemption. It’s supposed to be a Christian monument, some priest started it in 1912. It’s quite mad, it is made up of tiny stones piled on each other, and it’s a cross between a monastery, a Buddhist temple, and Disneyland. It has twisting towers and carvings and grotesqueries like Victorian houses. It is crazy, wild, but
it
came out of them too, along with the plowed fields, the silage nicely stored for winter, the fat cows out in the meadow. They made it.’

‘And you wonder what they were seeing.’

Clarissa nodded.

‘You should know,’ Iso said softly. ‘What do you see?’

Clarissa just stared at her.

‘You have the same eyes. I often wonder what it is you’re looking at. As if your eyes were so filled up with vision you didn’t have room to look around. Your dreams are prophetic. You’re always finding coincidences in things. Remember the day we were walking on Quincy Street and
you found a feather and said that meant you should be an Indian at the costume party. And then the costume shop had exactly the same Indian headdress you’d dreamed about?’

‘You think that’s mystic?’

‘Well, it sure isn’t old-fashioned pragmatism. You’re always having strange dreams.’

Clarissa considered. But Kyla leaped up then and dragged in a giant alarm clock set for midnight, and Harley and Ben fetched the champagne, and they pretended it was the week before and all counted out the countdown and poured out glasses and at the ring everyone toasted the new year.

‘Happy 1970! Happy 1970!’

And everyone kissed everyone else, and everyone glowed because they were all happy and the future did seem good. They loved and were loved; they liked their work; they loved their friends, and they celebrated life, just being alive, in what they all believed, despite their intellects, to be the best of all worlds past and a new decade that was the beginning of a better one.

More dancing, drinking, food, louder music. They were sitting in a circle made of the couch and some chairs, with the center space cleared for dancing. Kyla put a Joplin record on, then stood up and began to dance mildly, gracefully, swaying and turning. She was dancing to them, at them; her dance was an invitation to all of them at once. Her face glowed, her red hair flew, the white gown swung out widely when she turned. In a few moments, Clarissa got up and stood behind her, putting her hands on Kyla’s waist, adding to the picture her own shining dark hair, her own blue eyes full of vision, her sea-green dress. They danced together, Clarissa following Kyla’s movements almost as if the thing had been choreographed; they were two people dancing to the same spirit. Then Iso rose and joined them, and they were three steps; Iso the tallest, with her honey-brown hair, the red dress, put her hands on Clarissa’s waist, and followed their rhythms and movements easily, then Mira too, not knowing what moved her, got up and attached herself to the chain and the four of them glowed and moved and snaked around, all radiant, smiling, speaking to the room. And a sound came out of a throat – it was Tad’s, and sounded choked: ‘My God, how beautiful! How beautiful you are!’ The others sat watching without moving, and the women smiled at Val, who sat there gazing enraptured, and finally she got up and joined them too, and called Tad, and the men joined on and they snaked around the room and into the kitchen and back,
then formed a circle and made up a dance that had pieces of the hora, of old square dance motions, and much sheer invention. They weaved and wound, and everybody glowed with love toward everybody else, and clasped hands and felt clasped, and faces sometimes brushed together, and the room whirled, the green plants, the red hangings, the blue cushions, the blue and green chair, red, green, blue, green, red, the whole world was color and motion and love. When they were exhausted, they stopped and hung on each other, all at once, arms around backs, together, accepted, joyful to be part of such beauty.

The group was silent in the car going home. Only Mira, midway there, suddenly said, ‘I think that was the most beautiful night of my life.’

10

Val said: ‘It was a vision.’

The women were gathered at Val’s one afternoon, chatting after the long hours of silent study up in Child, drinking coffee, Coke, beer, gin. They were all still bathed in the feeling of the party, still glowing: they could feel it still around them. They fell silent when Val said that, waiting for her to continue.

‘It was a vision of community. Of the possible. Of the person merged with the group, yet still separate. Of harmony. Not order, unshakable order at least; everybody was moving in a slightly different way. Everybody was dressed differently, looked different. Even the men had a little individuality – Harley’s ruffle-front shirt, Tad’s tie, Ben’s red lapels. And we made the group because we wanted to, not because we had to, not because we were afraid …’

‘Why didn’t you join sooner?’

‘Because I wanted to
see
. I wanted to join, very much, but I had to
see
first.’

‘And what did you see?’ Clarissa sounded intently curious.

‘The way things could be,’ Val said abruptly, sadly, and stood and went for another beer. On the table near where she sat was a report on conditions in prisons for political prisoners in South Vietnam. She was helping a group that was trying to put it together. More and more, Val was neglecting her schoolwork.

‘I don’t understand,’ Iso said when she returned. ‘What did that have to do with people apart from us?’

Val shrugged apologetically. ‘Well, you know, I have a lot of visions. I grew up in the late forties, the fifties, when the best minds believed you couldn’t make it as a person if you got too involved with the world. Oh, there were the socialists too, and they had a dogma, at least, but they’d been fairly well silenced by the early fifties. My generation grew up reading Joyce and Woolf and Lawrence and those crummy poets of the fifties. And granted maybe Lawrence wanted a community of three, and Woolf tried to get beyond the isolated self, still all of them felt the world was grimy and power was disease, death itself. And in everyday culture too. All the lovelorn columns gave the same advice: if you’re having trouble, get away from your mother-in-law, move out of town where all those acid aunts and pompous uncles can’t get at you.’

‘It’s true. We all learned to live emotionally alone,’ Mira put in.

‘Yes. Salvation was a personal affair. But look at us! We have a community, a real community. We share almost everything but still have our privacies. We can love and nourish one another without oppressing each other. It’s fantastic to realize that it can be done. It makes me think my vision can come true.’

‘Which vision is this?’ Clarissa smiled.

‘Okay.’ She lighted a cigarette and sat back looking like the chairman of the board about to deliver the annual report. We all settled down for what we knew would be a lecture.

‘Wait!’ Kyla giggled. ‘I want to get my pad and take notes!’

‘The old neighborhoods didn’t work. The Italians hated the Irish and the Irish hated the Jews, and neighborhoods warred with each other. But the breakdown of the neighborhoods also meant the end of what was essentially an extended family: only blacks still have it. With the breakdown of the extended family, too much pressure was put on the single family. Mom had no one to stay with Granny, who couldn’t be depended on not to set the house on fire while Mom was off grocery shopping. The people in the neighborhood weren’t there to keep an idle eye out for the fourteen-year-old kid who was the local idiot, and treated with affection as well as tormented – I’m not saying the old neighborhoods were all good. So we came up with the idea of putting everybody in separate places. We lock them up in prisons, mental hospitals, geriatric housing projects, old-age homes, nursery schools, cheap suburbs that keep women and the kids off the streets, expensive suburbs where everybody has their own yard and a front lawn that is tended by a gardener so all the front lawns look alike and nobody uses them anyway. Did you ever see a family using their
front lawn? Anyway, the faster we lock them up, the higher up goes the crime rate, the suicide rate, the rate of mental breakdown. The way it’s going, there’ll be more of them than us pretty soon. Then you’ll have to start asking questions about the percentage of the population that’s not locked up, those that claim that the other fifty-five per cent is crazy, criminal, or senile.

‘We have to find some other way. The kids who go off to communes have a good idea, but the idea isn’t usable in that form because most communes reject technology. And we can’t do that. We need it and we have to learn, somehow, someday, to love technology, to live with it, to humanize it. Because not only couldn’t we live decently without it, we’re not going to live without it. That’s not a possibility. It’s second nature – I mean that – it’s our environment now, and no more artificial than the first cultivated ground, the first domesticated animals, the first tools. But communes are a good idea. People criticize communes because they don’t last, but why in hell, will you tell me, should they last? Why does an order have to become a permanent order? Maybe we should live one way for some years, then try another.