The Small Room (20 page)

“Do you have to commit suicide?” Lucy asked aggressively, because she felt compassion for and also impatience with the old child beside her.

“I like driving fast. It's a relief.”

“I didn't mean the driving.”

“What did you mean?”

“What drives you to cut yourself off from Appleton and from Carryl. Why must you do it?” Lucy trembled before the storm sure to come. But there was no answer. Only the hands gripped the wheel like claws; the jaw was thrust forward.

“My father would never have countenanced such a thing.”

“As a resident psychiatrist?”

“Yes. Inherited money presents certain problems, responsibilities if you will. Perhaps that had never occurred to you, Miss Know-It-All?”

“I don't know anything,” Lucy stammered, touched to the quick. “But life does go forward. If people only did what their fathers would have done, the world would stand still!”

“And a good deal more sensible than whirling toward its own destruction, you must admit!”

It's hopeless, Lucy thought, gripping the door-handle as they swung dangerously round a curve at seventy miles an hour. I'm a fool to have tried. After all, perhaps Carryl Cope really wanted this break, and it was Carryl she cared about.

“You're too wise for your own good,” Olive Hunt gentled unexpectedly. “You take it all in, listen, make the perfect ear. But what do you do with it? You
did
fight with that John of yours, after all.”

“
Touché,
” Lucy admitted, swallowing hard. “It's easy to be wise about other people. And anyway, I'm not.”

“Oh yes, you are. You used the word ‘suicide.' Right on the beam. If I go through with that change in my will, I lose Appleton and Carryl, the two loves of my life. Clear as crystal. Why do I have to do it, you ask? Pride, Lucy, pride. Without it, I'd be committing suicide too. I'm not a person to make idle threats.”

They shot through a red light, bypassed an oncoming truck by half an inch, and then heard the sharp, commanding whistle of a policeman as he roared up beside them on a motorcycle.

“Now I've done it!” Olive said, drawing up to the curb with a flourish.

“Listen, dame …” (The cap, the goggles, the firm chin; were they turned out on a conveyor belt, Lucy wondered.) “You are a public hazard. Seventy miles an hour through a red light. You go to court, and no argument.”

Olive was fidgeting about in her purse, and finally extracted her license, while he waited, unsmiling, pen poised. “My name,” Olive said icily, “is Olive Hunt.”

“I don't care what your name is. Either you've been drinking or you're crazy. Tell it to the judge.”

“Now?” Olive Hunt asked and Lucy detected a slight quaver.

“Tomorrow at ten A.M. at the District Court. This is a Summons. Now, lady, you drive home at twenty miles an hour and pay attention to the stop lights.”

Olive started the car and stalled it; Lucy noticed that her hands were shaking. She said a five-letter French word and began again. This time the car crept forward in perfect control.

“That was bad luck,” Lucy said. She was rather tense now herself, as if the car had become the symbol for murderous drives within Olive and might run them into a tree.

“My fault,” the old lady muttered. “Damn fool! Time I was dead,” she added, full of self-hatred and something like despair, Lucy felt. Everything's so ragged and unfinished. Does life really go on tearing at people's vitals forever like some cruel bird of prey? Is there never to be rest or peace, no final and abiding wisdom or fulfillment? Did those who stayed as alive as Olive and Carryl do so because of some flaw, some open wound that never would close? Need? Hunger? Do we die still like hungry babies at the end?

But the car was now drawing to a stop in front of the club.

“Well?” Olive Hunt was impatient to be off. “Here we are. Journey's end …”

“Yes,” Lucy said absentmindedly, “we have arrived. I must go.”

“You could hardly wish to stay incarcerated in this dangerous machine with a daft old woman!” and Olive laughed her mirthless laugh.

“Don't,” Lucy said quietly and got out. Then she stood at the curb and watched the car shoot off, throwing hard pieces of snow in her face.

She waved, as one waves to a plane, with no hope that she could be seen but as a form of salute: one could get very fond of impossible people, she thought.

CHAPTER 16

Now everyone flung himself into work with relief; they had all been tossed about enough on the storms of the last weeks. The people who had been most involved even felt an aversion to seeing each other; twice Lucy passed Jack Beveridge crossing the campus—as if by mutual accord they waved, but made no attempt to converse. Jane sent a little note from the sanitarium where she was to stay at least until the beginning of the spring term in February, and for once that articulate nature seemed to be at a loss for words. The careful schooled print marched effortfully across the page, and, after thanking Lucy for “all you have done,” ended, “They say I shall get well, and I am trying.” Lucy answered this with an affectionate note, and then tried to put Jane out of her mind, though she found that the ironic smile, the lock of fair hair falling over one eye, often swam up between her and the page of a student paper she was correcting, a persistent ghost. It was a relief to be confronted with the fact that the price of excellence could, at least sometimes, prove to be tough-minded balance and hard work: Pippa's paper on Emerson and Thoreau turned out to be more than creditable and Lucy was delighted to be able to tell her so.

“I got so absorbed in it, I forgot about everything else,” Pippa said, blushing to the roots of her hair with pleasure. “Though for a while it was like being in a thicket. I had so much material I didn't know how to get out, how to make a plan; I used to sit at my desk and think my head would burst.”

“What did you do then?” The way people thought things out had always interested Lucy, how a mind works, process.

“I did what you said. I kept making outlines, discarding wonderful stuff because it wasn't necessary. You said, ‘Keep the center clear.' And you said, ‘If you get into a panic, spell things out 1, 2, 3.'” The solemnity with which Pippa repeated these simple pieces of advice made Lucy smile. “You smile, but all that helped. Sometimes people take those obvious things for granted, professors, I mean.”

“I suppose there's some value in not being brilliant. I can't take anything for granted.” Lucy was thinking aloud, at ease with Pippa now. What a long way they had come together in a few months!

“You've taught me a lot.”

“Thank you.”

“Of course the other thing …” Pippa sat on the edge of the chair in the musty-smelling office, as fresh as a daffodil. “The other thing is that somehow doing it for you, I could do it better. It gave an extra edge. I wanted it so much to be good, for you …”

“Oh Pippa,” Lucy groaned. “Do it for the thing itself, not for me.”

“For you as well,” Pippa answered with surprising firmness. “Teaching is more than just a subject, you know. It's a person, too. You can't get away from that, even if you want to.”

“I do want to—outside the classroom,” Lucy said sharply. She had spoken out of her own edginess, out of all that had happened lately, and she had spoken too sharply, for Pippa's eyes filled with tears.

“Come on, Pippa, don't be a goose. I want you to read this paper in class tomorrow. Take it with you. And try to speak up!”

Pippa had risen in response to the tone of dismissal and stood there with the paper in her hands. If she is preparing to burst into tears, Lucy thought grimly, she can jolly well go and do it somewhere else.

“See you tomorrow in class,” she added more cordially to Pippa's back as it disappeared down the hall.

You can't win, Lucy thought, taking out a cigarette and puffing furiously at it. There was no avoiding the issue: the most detached teacher in the world infused her detachment, and if one student or another received this as a personal message, well, maybe one had to accept that that was one way of learning. No wonder teaching was called an art, the most difficult kind of art in which the final expression depends upon a delicate and dangerous balance between two people and a subject. Eliminate the subject and the whole center collapses …

At this point in her thoughts, Lucy suddenly remembered that she had promised to go to tea in one of the dormitories with a group of freshmen. It was the sort of occasion she most dreaded; but she had accepted at the height of the crisis when she felt that it was important to keep up what contact one could between the faculty and the rebellious student body. Oh well …

And a half-hour later she was sitting in one of the parlors that seem to have been designed for just such preposterous occasions—the fancy satin-covered armchairs more suitable for a boudoir in an operetta, the gold-framed mirrors, the old copies of magazines arranged on little tables as in a dentist's office; an atmosphere of being in a waiting room where the shades of all the young men who had sat nervously waiting for a date to come down, the shades of uncomfortable parents falsely jovial, the shades of all the faculty who had been tortured here by feeling themselves under the circumstances neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring, gathered and presided.

“Yes, lemon please and no sugar,” she heard herself saying. “Thank you, Nell.”

Nell, who did very poor work but always giggled in conference as if she considered herself hopelessly funny, had now assumed the air of a very stiff hostess who did not know her guests very well.

“It is so kind of you to come, Miss Winter. We have been looking forward to this all week. Oh, I don't think you have met Mary Macaulay.”

“How do you do,” Lucy said, shaking hands. “Are you enjoying this first year? I expect it must be quite frightening at times …”

Mary stammered something and sat down beside Lucy. Two or three girls from the freshman section came in and settled themselves on the floor. Lucy launched one balloon after another—the Christmas vacations and where they would be spent; the snow; the skiing weekend at Dartmouth in prospect, but all these balloons floated off after a second's response and in sheer desperation she asked for another cup of tea, another dry biscuit, and looked at her watch. She couldn't decently leave for another half-hour. What did one do? She was aware that she had been asked to tea because the freshmen enjoyed her class and wanted to know her better. But not one seemed capable of asking a question that might make for adult conversation; as good manners prevailed over life, they sank into a deafening silence. Lucy felt like some sacred gilded animal or relic that is wheeled out on occasion and expected to perform a miracle. What miracle and how? Whatever she was occasionally able to do in class—those moments when she and they were lifted up together on a wave of excitement—was quite impossible here. Here she was simply a rather plain older person saying “yes, thank you” “no, thank you” and deprived of her only valid function in relation to them.

She felt their expectant and already disillusioned eyes upon her; unlike her they had, in their inexperience, looked forward to the occasion, and now they were being disappointed. She was being as natural as she could, but this, she suspected, was just what they did not want. They wanted an intimate contact with the slightly-larger-than-life-size figure who confronted them on the raised platform and through whom (as if she were a Greek oracle) the voices of the gods could be heard. The image made Lucy smile; she caught Nell's amused eyes, and decided to plunge in from there.

“I was smiling because I think this sort of thing is so hopeless,” she said. “Don't you agree? It simply doesn't work. Hasn't it ever happened to you—if it hasn't, it will—to invite some really great professor to a social occasion like this, and then have it go flat?”

Two girls exchanged a startled look, then burst into laughter.

“Ah, I see it has,” Lucy said, with relief. Now perhaps something could be salvaged, at least the way prepared to save herself and her colleagues from these fatal decrescendos.

“We asked Professor Cope to dinner, and we were so scared no one said a word. She talked the whole time about politics in the Middle East, and none of us knew a thing about it. Oh dear,” and they collapsed into delighted giggles.

“What did you expect?” Lucy asked. “I mean, how in hell could she behave under the circumstances? She was probably much more uncomfortable than you were, as a matter of fact. Here I've been making small talk for nearly an hour and all you do is sit and stare at me as if I were a ludicrous animal. Don't you think you could manage to ask some question that might lead us into a real conversation?” The smiles vanished from the faces and a terrible look of concentrated effort took their place. “No,” Lucy said gently. “For one thing we are not brought up in these United States to have the faintest idea of what conversation is. You have led me here like a dancing bear and now expect me to dance without any music—look, we could talk about what has been wrong with the course this semester. That would be really interesting to me.”

“We love it!” two girls cried out at once, in alarm.

“You make it all seem so real,” Mary said earnestly. “Really, Miss Winter!”

“But you hated Thoreau,” Lucy needled them. “Why did you?” At once the atmosphere had become that of a classroom. Oh dear, Lucy thought, there really is no way out. “You know,” she said, lighting a cigarette and so giving herself a second's time to think, “I think what you want and think you can get by inviting us to tea and supper with you, just can't be accomplished that way. What you want, I would guess, is to make contact with the human being, with me myself, not Professor Winter. And this is possible sometimes between a student and a professor, but”—Lucy paused and realized that she had now their full attention, and all the masks, the social masks, had been quietly laid aside. “Maybe it can only be done
after
that particular relationship has ended. In the classroom, you see, there are three entities present, you the class, me, and a third far greater than we who fuses us at moments into a whole. When that third is absent, our real relationship falls apart. What we have felt for the last half-hour is that absence, don't you agree?”