This Is Not for You (19 page)

Perhaps it was the long strain of the year that had passed which had become too much of a habit for me. I couldn’t accept the reassurance of Mother’s continuing quietness and clarity. I was more reluctant than ever to be away from the house for long, and I was, in dozens of small ways, nervously overprotective until Mother herself grew mildly impatient with me.

“You do hang about, Kate. Haven’t you got work to do? Don’t you want to go out to see some of your friends? Or have Esther in for dinner.”

I did go out then, walked as far as your apartment, but I remembered the story about Charlie, and I didn’t want to be greeted by the interrupted Christopher Marlowe Smith. Even if you were involved in no more than one of your long, incoherent arguments which never had a focus narrower than the nature of Man, I didn’t want to join it. I would like to have found you alone, but really alone as you had been before his vocabulary, even his voice stress and gestures became your own. I certainly didn’t want to know how the lessons were going now. I didn’t want to go to the library, either. I knew where I would have gone if I had been any place but in the town where I had grown up. Nearly two years away from that. My hand felt the still unaccustomed thickness at the ridge of my nose. What I really needed was an evening with Monk or Andrew. Monk and Andrew. I walked the quiet blocks home and went to my room to write them a letter.

It crossed one from Andrew, in which he tried to speak of work and the haphazardly happy domestic life he shared with Monk in Cambridge, but the central fact of the letter was Peter Jackson’s suicide at the hotel where we had all stayed on Mallorca. “Nobody who knows anybody else well ever needs to ask why,” his letter said.

“Why?” you asked.

Nobody who ever loves anybody else well can help asking. Christopher Marlowe Smith sat very still. For all his boisterousness, for all his sharing of other people’s wealth, he had an instinctive delicacy about emotions not his own.

“And why there?”

For some reason I suddenly thought of Sandy Mentchen and her meadow. It was not the first time Peter had gone to Mallorca. In the years between he might have stayed several times in that hotel, but I wasn’t much comforted by the fact that we only numbered among his griefs… that Andrew and I only numbered among them. Surely you were…

“Stupid,” you said. “Why was I so stupid?”

“You weren’t, E. You were the only one who wasn’t.”

“Do you remember what he said about those children? ‘Why do they have to be ugly with our greed?’ I’d never thought about it. I still haven’t. I haven’t even thought about Pete for months. He needed other people to keep him alive. He needed that.”

“What was he like?” Christopher Marlowe Smith asked.

How eager we were to make him up again in words, to bring him back to life, flinging himself up mountains, playing his harmonica, being priest in a row boat—but not crying in the night, not nearly drowning himself, not declaring his hard love. We spared ourselves those things, as we had tried to at the time, you in ignorance and I in anger. We were giving him a proper burial, until you did say, “He was queer.”

“Oh,” Christopher Marlowe Smith said.

That doesn’t explain it, I wanted to protest, but I was probably the only one among us who really was afraid that it did. And I felt a returning, almost soothing anger for Peter Jackson. It honored him better than my attempt at guilt. With it came an impatience with your wanting to have a share of the responsibility. It was his own life; he took it, helped himself to the lot. We ended our conversation in unspoken disagreement.

That night I tried half a dozen ways of writing to Andrew. There was nothing decent to say. We had never talked about Peter Jackson except as a way of talking about ourselves. A moment’s silence then, a moment’s shutting up. I stood, deciding to get a drink. When I opened the door, Mac took a step back.

“Is something wrong?”

“No. She’s asleep.”

“Then…?”

“I’ve been wondering about how much longer you… she’ll really need me. I thought we probably ought to discuss it some time soon. Your light was on…”

“Yes, I suppose we should. Come in.” She did and stood awkwardly, looking at the crumpled paper on my desk. “I was trying to write a letter. Sit down.”

“You’d hear her if she called,” Mac said without moving.

“If the doors were both open… Mac, don’t go. I couldn’t manage it.”

“Manage what?”

“I’m nearly out of my mind now,” I said, beginning to shake. “At least I know you’re there.”

“As a possibility?”

I didn’t answer.

“Kate.” She took my head in her hands.

“Be careful of my face. Be careful of me.”

“You’ll fire me in the morning.”

“Yes, I will.”

But I was asleep when she left in the morning. There was a note at my place at the breakfast table giving a formal week’s notice. During that week, we exchanged only a few words. After she had really gone, I found her card with address and phone number on my desk. Across the back of it was written, “As a possibility.” I never saw her again. But I kept the card.

“What are the dates of your spring vacation?” Mother asked one morning.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Why?”

“It’s time for me to see Doris, and I want her to be here so that you can get away for a week or two.”

“I don’t really need a holiday.”

“You do. Anyway, it would make me feel better.”

“I wonder where I’d go,” I said, trying to be agreeable.

“Why not Carmel? You haven’t been there in years.”

“No,” I said.

“Well, begin to think about it.”

“All right.”

“I’m going to talk to Doris about finding myself a companion. There’s no hurry about it. You want to be here until you finish your work in June, but after that we must make some other arrangement.”

“Mother, don’t send me away.” I was appalled to hear tears in my voice.

“My dear child!” Mother said. “I had no intention of
sending
you away, but you must want to go. You have things to do with your life. I know I won’t live forever, but I don’t want you to think it’s forever. Now, go get your calendar, and let’s think about Easter.”

You and Christopher Marlowe Smith had also been thinking about Easter. He wasn’t sure he shouldn’t go east to visit his wife and child since he’d not managed it at Christmas. He hadn’t the money to go, of course, but perhaps he could borrow it.

“You’re not going to pay for his trip, are you?” I asked, as we sat over coffee in a shop just down the street from your apartment where we now often met.

“I think I should,” you said. “I think he ought to go, and he can’t afford it himself. The only thing is that I don’t want him to feel indebted to me. Do you think he would?”

“No more than he already must,” I said.

“A clean break in the summer is important. It’s what we agreed on at the beginning. But, if I just give it to him… yes, that’s the way to do it.”

Christopher Marlowe Smith didn’t agree. In fact, he was uncharacteristically adamant about it. Borrow, yes. Take, no.

“I can’t have that,” he said to me. “I’d rather steal it from her—or anyone.”

I made myself leave my purse sitting within his reach, but I advised you later that you’d better let him have the money on the terms that made him comfortable.

“Otherwise I think he might steal it from you,” I said, trying for lightness of tone.

“Maybe he should. Then I wouldn’t be involved at all.”

“Just leave two hundred dollars or so lying around for him to pick up?”

“Oh, no. He’d have to figure out how. That wouldn’t be my affair.”

“E., you don’t really take this stealing thing seriously, do you?”

When you hesitated, I terribly regretted having asked the question.

“I stole these saddle shoes,” you said, moving one foot out from under the table to display a shoe that looked at least five years old.

“When?” I asked with bored irritation.

“A couple of weeks ago at a church bazaar.”

“Have you gone right out of your mind, Esther?”

“I don’t know. At first I thought I might just shift the price tags. That’s what I’ve done before, but this time I thought, no, I must take them outright. They were marked at twenty-five cents. They fit perfectly.”

“But why?”

“I’m not a Christian,” you said. “It would be hypocritical to support a church bazaar.”

“But there’s a difference between supporting something and… and that!”

“Yes. There’s being passive. I’ve always been passive. Now I’m learning to make real choices, to admit my condition…” Your voice had begun to sound very like Christopher Marlowe Smith’s. “To act.” You were nearly rubbing your hands together.

“I don’t even know where to begin to disagree,” I said.

I saw your eyes rim with tears. “Then you know how I’ve felt with you for all these years.”

“But, E.—”

“Morality is creative,” you said. “Each of us makes his own.”

I didn’t point out that you were begging, borrowing, and stealing yours. I did not know how to attack from my own indefensible position. I was also suffering from a failure of imagination. It was so difficult to believe that you actually had carefully worked out a principle for stealing rummage. After you had drawn my attention to the saddle shoes, I began to take nervous notice of all your clothes. Those worn that I hadn’t before seen you wearing were obviously part of your growing moral wardrobe. It was not handsome. You looked more like a penitent than a crook.

“Esther doesn’t look well to me,” Mother said after you had been to dinner one night.

“She’s just in a seedy mood,” I said.

“Why don’t you take her along with you when you go off next month?”

“I might,” I said, not really having thought about it. “I’ll ask her.”

We agreed to take a trip, but neither of us could decide just where to go.

“Why don’t we just drive?” you suggested.

“We might have trouble with reservations.”

“We could put sleeping bags in the car.”

That kind of vagueness reminded me too much of our summer in Europe. Having to make a dozen decisions a day for want of having made one before hand would put me in a restless, bad temper the whole time. When I read in the paper that Sandra Mentchen was giving a concert in Los Angeles, she provided the arbitrary destination we needed.

Doris arrived conveniently just an hour after Christopher Marlowe Smith left the same airport with borrowed, not stolen, funds. She had an album full of photographs of Ann’s wedding which, for all the months it had dominated her letters, hadn’t really occurred to me until I caught quick glimpses as you and Doris handed the photographs back and forth across the front seat on the drive home.

“Were parts of it appalling?”

“Oh, yes, but Frank and Frank got on surprisingly well, and Ann was amused and relaxed about it.”

“What’s he like?” you asked.

“Like the young men Frank wanted you to marry—tall, proper, responsible.”

“Don’t you like him?”

“Very much,” Doris said, smiling. “He’s just the sort of person Ann should have married. She’s orderly that way, always has been.”

“I admire that,” you said. “She looks beautiful, doesn’t she?”

Your shyness about and obvious interest in Ann’s wedding made me wonder how uneasy you might be with your own circumstance.

“A woman shouldn’t be over thirty,” you said in a decisive tone.

“Ever?” Doris asked.

“To marry,” you clarified. “I’ll marry before I’m thirty.”

“How are all your other projects going?”

“All right,” you said. “I read a poem the other day about Persephone who was called, ‘for hell too fair, for earth too wise.’ It made me wonder if certain kinds of knowledge do disqualify.”

“Disqualify for what?” I asked.

“Life,” you answered.

I felt Doris watching me, and I knew the question in her mind was how far changed the relationship between you and me might be.

“ ‘Whose mortal taste brought death into the world, and all our woe,’ ” I recited.

“You two leave me behind,” Doris complained.

“I was teasing E. about Milton,” I said. “She thinks so much pure doctrine for an anti-Christian. Do you want to be dropped off at your place, E.?”

When you had left us, Doris said at once, “How can she dress like that?”

“It’s a new sort of costume—stolen sack cloth and ashes.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know, Doris. The character she’s living with has some odd ideas.”

“Who’s she?”

“He. Christopher Marlowe Smith.”

“You’re making him up!”

“That sometimes occurs to me, but only when I’m trying to comfort myself.”

“Is she going to marry him?”

“Oh, no. She’s taking him like a course, that’s all.”

“Passing or failing?”

“I’m not sure.”

“How are you, Kate?”

“Pretty well. But I’m afraid Mother’s about to fire me. She wants to talk to you about finding a companion.”

“How marvelous! Here I am braced for a long argument, and there’s not going to be one.”

“I guess not,” I said.

This time I wasn’t prepared for Doris’ shock when she saw Mother, who seemed to me so very well.

“She looks a hundred years old, Kate! And she’s so slow and so vague. I hardly recognized her. How do you manage? What can it have been like for you?”

I checked my first reply which would have been, “But she’s so much better,” and said instead, “She’s really no trouble. She can do almost everything for herself.”

“But she’s turned into a vegetable!”

There was anger in this, which I could have met with an anger that startled my own nerves. I didn’t risk a reply Doris was too caught up in her own emotion to notice mine, or perhaps she took my silence as a sharing of how she felt. She was sympathizing with me guiltily. I went into the kitchen for drinks before the housekeeper wanted me to. The hot clam snacks weren’t ready.

“Aren’t you going to have your cocktail upstairs with your mother?”

“Not this one,” I said. “We’ll have several.”

“You’ve had no tea,” she said, which was as much reproof as she dared.