This Is Not for You (24 page)

“I really don’t know,” I said. “I think a good friend of mine must be in trouble.”

“Are you involved?”

“No,” I said. “There will be no reflection on the office.”

“I didn’t mean that,” she said. “Surely I don’t have to tell you…”

“No, you don’t. I was making a bad joke.”

“Be careful you don’t pick up any of my other bad habits,” she said. “You owe me a cigarette.”

“I’ll write it down.”

I stood, watching Mrs. Woolf walk toward me as if she were the arresting officer, for I was sure that whatever had happened to you was somehow my fault. It was a natural guilt your mother had carefully nourished in me. She looked more like a lady lawyer than a policewoman in her elegant suit and short fur cape, but she was neither calm nor aggressive. She had been crying and she was relieved to see me there, even grateful, so candidly so that she didn’t offer to pay for cab fare, time off, or our drink in the bar before we had lunch.

“She’s in jail, charged with possession of drugs. Or was this morning, anyway. Bail’s being arranged. And there’s a young man involved, a person named—”

“Charlie,” I said.

“That’s the one. You know him, then.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Katherine, I don’t want you to betray any confidence that you feel you can’t, but it would be a great help to me to know as much about this as I can before I arrive. Esther and I haven’t had a very easy relationship over these last few years. I don’t blame her. I blame myself. I have tried, but obviously…”

She couldn’t go on talking for a moment. I waited, oddly expecting small paper animals and flowers to appear on the table. Your mother had never reminded me of you before, and she didn’t really now, but, however badly and ordinarily she put it, she was your mother; this was hard for her.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“How much do you know about the circumstances?” I asked.

“Nearly nothing. She and this young man were picked up by the police.”

“Where?”

“At her apartment.”

“What kind of drugs?”

“Marijuana.”

There was a lot I didn’t know, and I told her so. What I did know or could guess was hard to say. If you had been experimenting with drugs, you would not easily be persuaded to deny it. And, since stealing from a church had seemed to you sensible, a little marijuana certainly could fall within the range of your morality. But even if you hadn’t been tempted to extensions of perception, you would probably want to share the blame with Charlie or even take it to yourself. And Charlie was not the sort to turn down that kind of sacrifice. He lived on it. I didn’t tell your mother that.

“Charlie lives downstairs,” I said. “In fact, they’ve been living together, so it’s possible that he can be charged alone. It’s not his first arrest. If Esther is involved, the worst is probably a suspended sentence.”

“It will ruin her life,” Mrs. Woolf said.

Now that a jail sentence has become a status symbol in the civil rights movement, some of the general, social horror has been dissipated. In 1956, a record hadn’t the same reality. We were too far away from the suffragette movement for it to be anything but an academic reference; nevertheless, I used it. I used everything I could think of to show that your life might not be entirely razed by such an experience.

“She won’t ever be able to hold any position of responsibility She won’t be able to vote.”

“It’s not good,” I admitted, “and maybe it won’t happen, but Esther hasn’t ever wanted to be anything but a sculptor, and she wouldn’t know how to vote anyway, I’m sure never has…” but I faltered because such penalties seemed dreadful to me. “Look, the point is to try to understand her view so that you can persuade her to take the advice of the best lawyer available.”

“I brought her up… I brought both my children up to respect the law.”

“The trouble with that is, if she has broken the law, she ought to accept the punishment.”

“Not while I can fight it. I’ll take it to the Supreme Court!”

“That won’t be Esther’s notion of respecting the law,” I said, and I could just hear the kindergarten logic which would allow you to break the law but not to use the legal loopholes to set you free of it; your sort of creative morality would stop at avoiding consequences.

“I don’t understand her. I simply don’t understand her.”

“Try, Mrs. Woolf.”

We looked at each other.

“You blame me, don’t you, Katherine?”

“What would be the logic of that? You could as easily blame me.”

“And in a way I suppose I do. You could have protected her.”

“How?” I demanded.

“I’m not blind, Katherine,” your mother said. “Haven’t I made that clear from the beginning? She needed someone like you, someone responsible.”

“That’s hardly fair,” I said and heard, from all those years ago. “To a mother, there are things more important than being fair,” without the Yiddish accent but with its emotional rhythms still.

“Well, it’s past in any case. I have to decide what I’m going to do with Esther once I’ve gotten her out of this mess. I think perhaps we’ll take a trip, and then she’d better come to live with me. As soon as I have her with me, I’m going to telephone. I want you to talk with her and tell her that you agree with me about what she’s to do. Will you do that much?”

“No,” I said. “I’ll listen to what she has to say and try to understand her point of view. And you’d better do the same thing, Mrs. Woolf, if you want to be able to help her at all. Excuse me, but you’ve been an aggressive fool with her long enough to know that doesn’t work. Now it’s time you were practical.”

“Why Katherine!”

I had gotten up from the table as the waitress came with the check. I took it from her.

“I can’t allow—” Mrs. Woolf began.

“It’s good practice,” I said. “Give Esther my love.”

On the way back to the office I was having a conversation in my head with Monk. There now: I don’t have to be pleasant to people, and, if it doesn’t save the world, what’s the point? But I knew that being rude didn’t save the world, either, and I couldn’t shut off first embarrassment and then shame. Under both of those, of course, was the pain of her accusation. She had made her arrest after all.

“I’m not guilty,” I said aloud, but what a comfortless thought that was when the heart also required, “Forgive me, E.”

Joyce was just back from her luncheon and taking a long-distance call from her husband when I got to the office. I went to my own desk and pushed papers from one side of it to the other until Joyce called me in. I took her a lighted cigarette.

“How did it go?” I asked.

“The other end of the table went a bit thin and competitive without you there, but I got more or less what I wanted. Can you have dinner with me tonight? I’m going to stay in town to get some work done.”

“Sure. I can come back with you if you like.”

“I like,” she said. “Now get hold of these five people for me for an afternoon meeting some time next week.”

“Robertson’s out of town until the first of the month,” I said.

“We’ll do without him then. Get his assistant.”

“Anything else?”

“Not just at the moment.”

I find it very difficult to concentrate on things that don’t require it. I spent the rest of the afternoon with at least three stations of my mind turned up full volume, and I not only listened to them all but did a good deal of talking back while I also made telephone calls, proofread reports, and added a few memos of my own to external communications. At five-thirty Joyce was standing by my desk ready to go.

Over a drink a few minutes later, she asked, “How did your lunch go?”

“A bit thin and competitive, too,” I said, “and I didn’t seem to be much help.”

“Does it matter?”

“I don’t know. Is a new commission going to be set up, do you think?”

“You’re usually smoother at changing the subject than that.”

“It’s just a boring story with an unhappy middle.”

“Tell it to me, anyway,” Joyce said. “I don’t want to talk shop.”

“Once upon a time,” I said, “there was an ugly, little rich girl with a mean, real mother and a make-believe father who looked like a wristwatch. She was kept in a tower at the top of the house along with the second-best dining-room furniture and her ugly little brother until they both grew tall enough to be mistaken for beautiful grown-ups. They even fooled their mean, real mother, so she sent them out into the world to be fallen in love with, and they were.”

“Who fell in love with them?” Joyce asked.

“I fell in love with one of them.”

“Which one?”

“For the story it doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s just to establish authenticity. Anyway, the ugly, little rich girl who looked like a beautiful grown-up wasn’t really interested in being fallen in love with, not at first, anyway. She wanted instead to understand the nature of the world. Then she wanted to be a great sculptor. After that—but maybe I haven’t got the order straight—before she was thirty, anyway, she wanted to marry and have a child to fulfill herself as a woman. And after that she wanted to be a nun and serve God. The plan went pretty well for a while. She read some books, and she went to church, and she made some faces and other things for the world, but somehow the one, two, three of it all got multiplied. There were some giant steps to be taken, and, since she was really an ugly, little rich girl with a mean, real mother and not the beautiful grown-up she seemed to be, she landed once or twice a little short—short of understanding, short of being great, short of marriage into bed, and just now, in what ought to be the middle of the story, short of the nunnery into jail, not being wise enough or great enough or fulfilled enough to know the real difference between cells. And now her mean, real mother, who should have explained it to her in the first place, is looking for someone else to blame.”

“Which of these characters did you have lunch with today?”

“The mean, real mother.”

“And?”

“That’s all of the story there is,” I said. “Are we going to have another drink?”

“Sure,” Joyce said. “But which one of the characters are you?”

“I’m the author,” I said. “Authors have no place in their own stories, except to admit authenticity, and I did that.”

“It’s not much to admit,” Joyce said, signaling a waiter for two more martinis.

“I’m not guilty,” I said.

“What a limited way to live,” Joyce said. “You know, I haven’t played this sort of game for ten years, not since I was your age. I wasn’t very good at it then, either.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just trying to be entertaining.”

“Do you have a mother?”

“No,” I said. “She died last year.”

“Father?”

“No.”

“Do you have any friends here?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably I’m resting. I’m not very good with people.”

“No, of course not.”

“I’m really not,” I said, “except at a distance.”

“All right,” Joyce said, smiling. “I should have kept mine, but you are entertaining. Shall I tell you a story now?”

“You don’t owe me one. They’re not like cigarettes or working days.”

“You’d better explain what that means,” Joyce said sharply.

“Nothing,” I said, feeling frantic and miserable.

“You had a rotten day, didn’t you?”

“Yes, the sort of day that makes it unbearable to be around people… people I care about, anyway.”

“Do you want to go home?”

“If we could just not—” I tried to explain.

“Not talk? Not risk anything? I’m not as good at that after five-thirty. Why don’t we have dinner some other night?”

“But what about the work?”

“Katherine George, you didn’t really think—”

“I’m told I’m a good cook,” I said, finishing my drink.

I did cook dinner that night but not until after midnight. Joyce, in my robe, was looking around the apartment. She was curious about the hi-fi equipment, the books, and the paintings.

“You’re not going to be with me for long, are you?” she asked.

“Why?”

“You don’t need the job. You’re using it. I’m not surprised. Not exactly. Oh, I do regret the last six months. This isn’t going to be a one-night stand, is it?”

“What about your husband?”

“He’s away a lot. We spare each other details.”

I did not make up my mind; a decision didn’t really seem relevant, or the time for it had passed. It was not a circumstance I was accustomed to. The despairing rebellion of my appetite hadn’t ever before resulted in this kind of midnight snack, in conversation which could accommodate problems at the office, personal history, physical intimacy. I had come near it only once before with Sandy, but the minute we began to talk we stopped considering each other as sexual objects. For Joyce it was natural enough, for most people probably. For me, it was very awkward at first, politeness and crudity in comic collision in the same sentence or gesture. I felt as embarrassed as I might if I’d found myself serving chocolate milk and brandy with rare roast beef. And sometimes as much put off. But being put off helped in a way just as the fact of Joyce’s husband helped. It was slower and less physically painful than a broken nose but no less punishing finally. I don’t mean to suggest that I suffered. My own clumsiness and occasional distaste more often interested than frightened me. And I was more simply impatient than jealous when Joyce spent time with her husband. When I built him an amplifier, guilt had nothing to do with it. I was glad of ways to kill time. It was, like all my other experiences, one I could afford, but I speak only of the price. That’s all that should interest me now.

That and the connection there obviously was between those first hours I spent with Joyce and the hours you were waiting for bail. The telephone call your mother had suggested was not put through. I didn’t really expect it, but I did send off an urgent note to you, asking you to phone when you could. As the days passed and there was no news, I tried to think what else I could do.

“Isn’t there anyone else you could get in touch with?” Joyce asked.

“No one I know well enough or Esther knows well enough.”