The Rebellion of Yale Marratt (67 page)

 

 

"Some people feel being married by a justice of the peace doesn't amount
to much," Cynthia said, feeling strangely happy, enjoying the discussion
with Anne. "Who is this man we married, now?"

 

 

"Yale has changed, hasn't be?" Anne said, startled. "He was always
gentle. But in just a year he has become so darned positive. Almost
reckless. In India he didn't seem to know where he was going. I'm not
sure what he's planning, but he gives me a feeling of dead certainty
. . . as if nothing is going to stop him." She sighed. "Without his
admitting it in so many words, I'm convinced that he is egotistic enough
to think that we will both want him and stay with him."

 

 

"I agree. But you haven't told me why you didn't write Yale in China,
or try to locate him when you got home."

 

 

Anne leaned on her elbow, looking at the shadow that was Cynthia's face.
"For nearly five months last year, I saw Yale almost every day. We lived
together as secretly as you can on an Army base. Yale's Indian bearer,
Chatterji, built us a basha, a bamboo house, in his village. We were
married by a Hindu priest named Sundari. I don't think the ceremony was
so important to Yale. He just felt that it gave me something to cling
to. Something to make it less like an Army shack-up affair. But gradually
I came to feel that somehow in me he was trying to find you, Cynthia."

 

 

Anne stopped talking. She tried to recall the days in India with Yale.
"It wasn't as if he ever told me much about you. Just once. One entire
evening, while we sat drinking hot orange soda and gin, he told me about
your college days in detail. I felt that night when he took me in his arms
that he thought he was with you. Nothing obvious, just a feeling. After
that every once in a while I would have the same feeling. Then I found I
was pregnant." Anne told her about the wedding and Colonel Trafford.
"O, God, Cynthia, I don't know what happened. I just went to pieces.
Yale was gone. I didn't know where. Then Colonel Trafford had me
transferred. I knew in the bright light of day that Yale loved me, but at
night I'd get crazy ideas. Maybe Yale thought I was on the make. I asked
him about you once and he said of course he loved you. He implied that
he would always love you. It made me feel funny somehow. I didn't want
to bind him to me just because I was pregnant. Then I wondered whether
he had really grown up. He seemed pursued by a demon. I knew he had to
prove something to his father. Still has to prove it, I guess. Do you
know Pat, Cynthia?"

 

 

Again Anne shied away from revealing to Cynthia that she was sure that
Yale loved Cynthia more than he would ever love her. In India, she had
come to believe that Yale had given his love completely once, and the
shadow of Cynthia would remain forever between them. It never occurred
to Anne that Yale felt he was, in a sense, an inadequate substitute for
her husband, Ricky.

 

 

"I know Pat," Cynthia told her. "I think you are right that Yale is
trying to prove something to him. Whatever he proves, he won't do it
in a way that will make Pat happy. All his life Pat has tried to own
Yale. Some day he will have to realize the impossibility of it. They
really are two sides of the same coin. It frightens me, Anne. I think
Pat would destroy himself to make Yale heel to his ideas."

 

 

Cynthia told her about the day Pat had ordered her to come to his office.
Anne listened with a feeling of horror, deep sympathy for Cynthia
flooding through her. Vividly she realized Cynthia's fears and her
courage, and beneath it all Cynthia's love for Yale.

 

 

"You must know, Anne, I'm Jewish. Oh, I'm not an orthodox person, but
I do have a love for our traditions. No Jew can ever escape . . . ever
really wants to escape his heritage. You know, Anne . . . lying here
with you in bed, I can't help but wonder how you feel. So many people in
the world have such a deep hatred of the Jews. It's strange . . . but if
the three of us managed to live together successfully, and we were very
happy among ourselves . . . nevertheless some day . . . someone like Pat
would find that we were living together, defying the mores and morals
of our society. Then, you can be sure . . . the fact that I am Jewish
would inevitably be excoriated. In some subtle way people would be told
that only the Jews would dare to set up a new pattern of marriage. That
the Jews were trying to destroy a monogamous society. Honestly, Anne,
people would even try to prove you were Jewish!"

 

 

Anne shook her head angrily. "Cindar, may I call you by Yale's name . . . ?
I would never have married Ricky or Yale if I could hate a person because
of his religion. If we stay together, and I'm beginning to hope we do,
then when Yale Richard is thirteen, we'll have a Bar Mitzvah for him!
By that time, because I'm curious . . . because I think you have the same
god-given curiosity as I we will have blended the Judaist and Christian
traditions so thoroughly no one will be able to tell in this family who
is Christian, who is Jew -- or Hindu or Mohammedan for that matter."

 

 

Cynthia laughed. "You know something? I think we're talking right through
the night. Look, the sky is getting lighter."

 

 

"It's good to talk. Words are so incomplete. We will have to use trillions
of them in our lives to stay close to each other and convey our real
feelings. I want to tell you about yesterday."

 

 

Anne explained that when she had left the Red Cross, she had visited with
her father's sister. "She's a very jolly person. She and her husband have
a little suburban house. No children. John, her husband, teaches math at
the high school. Of course, she saw at once that I was pregnant. I told
her that my husband was missing. You don't have to tell Hazel much. She
immediately started to talk about war widows and how dreadful it was to
be alone. It was a welcome nest she offered. I had the baby at the local
hospital. They have been wonderful. John found an opening at the high
school in the English department this fall. I have a certificate to teach
English, or sociology . . . So I have spent the days studying. Up until
yesterday it seemed the best way. I felt I would never marry again.
I wanted too much from a husband, a Yale or a Ricky combined. Yesterday,
I went shopping for Hazel. When I got back Yale was in the living room
bouncing the baby on his knees. Hazel was beside herself with joy.
I nearly sank to the floor. I was trembling so much that I had to excuse
myself and run to the bathroom

 

 

"I know how you felt," Cynthia interrupted; "like the impossible suddenly
became possible, and it was so frightening you couldn't believe it."

 

 

Anne nodded. "He said he wanted to talk to me alone. Hazel followed
us out to his car as happy as a cupid. We drove to a little roadhouse,
and we talked and drank manhattans."

 

 

"Yale's favorite drink for silent tongues," Cynthia murmured sleepily.

 

 

"Honestly, Cindar, we talked steadily from two to five o'clock. By that
time we had to eat in order to sober up. We stayed in that booth until
seven-thirty. When he told me about you I wished him luck. He had nothing
to worry about. Our marriage wasn't a Christian marriage. It didn't mean
a thing in the United States. I would bring the baby up. He needn't worry
himself. He kept begging me to meet you. Finally, somewhere in the afternoon
I agreed. Maybe it was the fifth manhattan. Maybe he would have persuaded
me anyway. He had some fantastic arguments. He felt that a marriage such
as the three of us would be attempting would be equivalent to the world
. . . a microcosm. He quoted Pascal to me . . . you remember, Cynthia,
where Pascal in
Les Pens&eactue;es
discusses the infinitely great and the
infinitely small . . . Yale quoted it all to me word for word in French,
and then ended with
toute notre dignité consiste donc en la pensée
.

 

 

"In our little world we would discover the ultimate of how people could
live together harmoniously. The conflicts we would naturally have would
have a wider pattern of meaning for man as a whole.

 

 

"Cindar, Yale is a super salesman. He is so darned sincere when he talks
to you, so convinced that you must feel the way he does, that you are
caught before you know it. Anyway, I told him I'd have to think it over.
I made him take me back to the Terrences'. In the morning he returned.
I asked Hazel if she would help me by not asking any questions, that I
might want to come back. Poor Hazel, she was bewildered. You could see
the questions leaping out of her eyes. I had found my husband. Why would
I ever want to come back? . . . Cindar, are you still awake?"

 

 

"Mmm, but I am sleepy," Cynthia said. She touched Anne's shoulder. "Don't
go back, I like you, Anne.

 

 

 

 

When Cynthia awoke the room was filled with sunshine. Anne was standing
over the bed, already dressed. "Gee, I hated to wake you, Cindar. I had
to get up with the baby. Come on, sleepy-head, our married life has begun.
The house is bustling with men from the telephone company. They are
stringing a line in from the highway. One must be a local superintendent.
He told me that Yale was the most insistent person he had ever encountered
in his life." Anne grinned. "A telephone and an extension phone must be
installed today. Yale must have given them a bad time. The man thinks
it's a matter of life and death or something. Yale told them that he
was negotiating an important financial deal and he must be in constant
contact with his home while in New York. Come on, we've got to decide
where to put the phones."

 

 

Cynthia dressed hurriedly. "What are these men going to think, when they
see two of us?" she asked nervously.

 

 

"Stop fretting," Anne laughed. "We aren't going to introduce ourselves!"

 

 

 

 

 

 

6

 

 

Yale arrived in New York Tuesday night and took a room at the Hotel New
Yorker. Before going to bed he located Sam Higgins by telephone. Sam lived
on Long Island. While Yale talked with him he could hear the sounds of
a party. "The place is jumping, Yale," Sam said, "My wife is throwing
one of her cocktail parties. Why don't you come out?"

 

 

Yale refused. He made an appointment to see Sam in the morning. Yale had
a quick picture of the way Sam probably lived. A wealthy suburban home,
probably brick, flanked with large lawns and decorated with a pretty
but somewhat calculating wife. He knew Sam had married into a wealthy
family. Coupled with his father's wealth, it would mean a marriage without
denial. Sam had been married the summer after graduation from Harvard
Business School and somehow had managed to stay out of the Army. He had
now experienced five years of uninterrupted connubial arrangements. If he
knew Sam and the world he travelled in, a minor boredom had set in. At this
moment, Sam was probably holding a Scotch with one hand and the fanny of
somebody else's wife with the other. His wife would accept this as natural
so long as someone else's husband was available to pat her fanny with a
suggestive gleam in his eyes and the interest to back it up.

 

 

Once, Yale reflected, he would have been shocked by the casual sexual
contacts of the middle-to-wealthy class. He had witnessed plenty of them
in his own home and at the Midhaven Country Club. He didn't doubt that
Pat had wandered into more than one escapade on his many business trips,
and he guessed that Liz had stumbled into at least one affair. with
Frank Middleton. For all he knew Liz might still be quite involved
with Middleton.

 

 

But now instead of being shocked he was only sadly amused. At Harvard,
and even more in the army years, he had come to wonder what essential
element was missing in the average marriage. He discussed it once with
Mat Chilling in India. He remembered Mat's surprise when he insisted that
whether Mat knew it or not the ideas embodied in "Seek the True Love"
pointed to a more flexible marriage system. He told Mat that, logically,
an abandonment of the taboos that society had used to regulate monogamous
marriage would be a freer exchange of marriage partners on the basis of
established custom. He quoted Bertrand Russell's views to Mat.

 

 

"I think," he remembered telling Mat, "that modern suburban marriage is a
deadly form of poison. A man and woman have to be practically vegetables
to expect happiness as they live out their narrow lives in what amounts
to little more than solitary confinement. Years ago people lived in bigger
homes, surrounded by grandparents and aunts and uncles. Marriage was based
on a community of larger interests. Today, two people marry and by the
time they are middle-aged they live a life circumscribed by the walls
of a small house and the only slightly larger world of the man who paces
wearily back and forth to a dull, uncreative job. Over it all hangs the
religious threat and man-made taboos on sex. It's a life you wouldn't
prescribe for the already insane.

 

 

Mat had smiled. "Maybe you both overstate the particular problem and
understate the wider problem, Yale. I feel the problems that bother you
are simply the byproduct of a larger problem; the vast increase in the
populations of the world, and the frightening slowness of educating this
new mass. Established theological religions, or, even worse, state and
nationalistic religions, capture these groping minds at an early age
and dogmatize the masses. The problem varies from country to country
depending on the extent of industrialism. Here in India the religious
domination will give way to a state domination. Nevertheless, the sexual
and teleological life of the individual Hindu or Moslem has an affinity
with the plight of the American suburban marriage that worries you. I
see the basic affinity to be the emotional and intellectual immaturity
of millions upon millions of people. The leaders some day will find
that a kind of Gresham's law has occurred among the populations of
the world. The governing heads of the world will come, by their very
predominance, from these masses. At a time when the world will need men
that are educated with a wide cultural-historical perspective, we will
have leaders whose very narrowness of outlook will presage a return to
tribal, non-individualistic living."