This Is Not for You (29 page)

“And John left with his mother?”

“What else could he do? Mother said if he tried to contact me, she’d call the police and do what she could to ruin his ‘little career.’ The minute they were gone, Mother and I had a great row of our own. She hasn’t appeared since.”

The chauffeur opened the car door for us, the butler the front door, and a maid was waiting to take me to my room. You were more or less ordered into the library where tea would be served when I was ready for it, after I had given and taken instructions about my personal habits and wardrobe. There was a note from Mrs. Woolf, apologizing that she was not able to greet me, advising me to comfort and reassure and advise you. She would hope to join us for dinner. In other words, I was to make it possible for her to join us for dinner. I didn’t feel like it. I should have gone and had a good shout at your mother myself, but I didn’t feel like that, either. There had been no satisfaction in my last experience of being rude to her. And, though it seemed to me that she had behaved inexcusably, she’d been badly provoked. I turned to the maid who was unpacking my suitcase.

“Will people be dressing for dinner?”

“No, Miss George, not tonight. But everything will be pressed. Is there anything you’d like me to lay out?”

“The black wool, I guess. Thanks.”

“Would you like your bath drawn at six?”

I smiled at her. “I really prefer a shower.”

She returned the smile, offering just the degree of conspiracy I had invited. I wondered how people like Mrs. Woolf trained servants in the tact she was incapable of. Of course, she didn’t. The housekeeper would take care of that. Yet no matter how much professional kindness she bought, Mrs. Woolf couldn’t protect herself from the Mrs. Kerrys of this world or even from her own daughter. Or from me. I’d better choose to be kind to her.

“Your father used to say,” I heard my mother’s gentle, uncertain voice, “guest and host share the burden of hospitality, but each carries the whole weight.”

You sat, sulking at the tea tray in the library, too tired and despairing to cope with ritual weight.

“I can’t stand tea,” you said.

“What would you like?”

“A Coke—in a bottle.”

“So would I.”

“Oh dear.”

“E., ask for it,” I said firmly “You don’t have to be a victim.”

“But that’s just what I am, Kate. I should have left here last night, just gone, but you were coming. Anyway, I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“No money, not a penny of my own. I signed everything over to Mother after California—for my own protection, she said. I’ve got nothing but charge accounts and pocket money.”

“That’s not the real problem, anyway, is it?”

“I don’t suppose so,” you said.

“What about John? What’s going to happen?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will he get in touch with you?”

“I don’t know.”

You began to pour out the tea.

“Do you want to marry him?”

“Of course I do,” you said, energy in your voice for the first time.

Then gradually you began to tell me about him, how you’d met aboard ship, he on his way home from two years at an eye clinic in Barcelona, staying over in New York for a convention where he gave a paper, staying on after that, postponing his return to Louisville first a week, then a month, until he’d asked you to marry him.

“He was going to go back with his mother, anyway. There’s a practice in Louisville pretty well ready for him to walk into. We were going to be married here around the first of the year. and then I’d go to Louisville.”

“Did you have any idea about his mother?”

“You know me, Kate. After the fact, sure. I mean, I think now about things he said, and I should have known or had an inkling. He’s an only child without a father. She’s a southern lady. She’d hate all Jews, ‘niggers,’ and Catholics on principle, and if one, both, or all three wanted to marry her son, well, she wouldn’t like it. Isn’t it a good thing I finally chose to be an Episcopalian?”

“Shouldn’t John have known?”

“Well, I didn’t know my mother was going to call him a gold digger and poor white trash, did I? I think he hoped my being a Christian—he was glad I was baptized before we were engaged—would do it. The ‘nigger in the wood pile’ bit caught him off guard. I wonder if there is one. But it hasn’t seemed exactly the right time to ask Mother a disinterested question.”

“The mongoloids,” I said. “This is no time to feel tired of it, right at the beginning of the battle, but I do. I must have been born tired of it.”

“I’m not,” you said.

“How would you live in Louisville, anyway? How would you be a southern lady?”

“I could begin somewhere. John isn’t like that. He says it’s only a question of time because it’s a question of economics. He’s very practical and unemotional about everything, like you. It’s funny. He’s the first sort of ordinary man I could ever feel attracted to, ever really like. Love. Maybe it’s because I feel surer of myself. He’s polite and responsible and all the things I used to be afraid of, except in you, of course. When I told him I just wasn’t interested in sex any more, that I wanted to be a Christian, he accepted that. He said he respected it. He said everybody our age had some experience, and that didn’t have to be discussed. Now we should take things seriously. You know, from the minute I decided that I could become a Christian, it really was like being born again, a new life, and there was John to share it with…”

As you talked, you obviously forgot for a moment what had happened the evening before.
Your
voice was full of a child’s happiness. I had time to notice the new design of your hair, the quietly expensive dress that allowed for your taste for large, sculptured jewelry, the absence of your father’s wrist-watch, your engagement ring, but, when the picture was complete, the catastrophe reoccurred to you.

“What am I going to do, Kate?”

“I suppose you’ve got to wait for him to do something.”

“But Mother’s threatened him with the police.”

“She likes him, doesn’t she?”

“She did.”

“Well, you need to deal with her.”

“How?”

“Shall I?”

“I wish you would. Would you mind? Even when I try to be decent, I’m not.”

When we had finished the tea neither of us wanted, I sent up a request to see Mrs. Woolf. I was invited to her apartment at five. I had expected to find her in operatic decline. Instead, she greeted me at the door of her sitting room with a firm voice and hand that drew me into a formally affectionate embrace. She had aged since I’d last seen her. Her makeup was less strained and really more becoming. It was a tired, sad face, but I liked it better.

“I’m sorry to include you in another crisis, Kate,” she said, as she led me to the chair she had chosen for me. “It was planned to be a very pleasant weekend. Will you have a drink?”

“No thanks. We’ve just had tea.”

“Do you mind if I do?” She poured herself a whiskey and soda. “Last time we met, you gave me some rather blunt advice. It may surprise you to know that I took it. Tried to, anyway. Before last night, I think Esther might have given a better account of me than you would have expected. However, that can’t be undone.”

“It must have been grim,” I said.

“Yes, it was. The only thing to be said for me is that I didn’t start it. The only thing. I lost my temper. It was more than that. I felt really quite out of my mind until this morning.”

“I would have, too,” I said.

“No, Kate, I don’t think so. But it’s nice of you to say so. Esther and I have now said things to each other that aren’t new but should be old, should be passed. How many times can people begin again, do you suppose?”

“May I change my mind about that drink?”

“I’d be grateful,” she said and poured me a scotch the way I like to drink it without asking.

“What are you going to do if John tries to get in touch with Esther?”

She didn’t answer at once. “I don’t see how he could,” she said finally.

“You don’t want him to.”

“Does it make any sense to you, with all this in his background? Oh, I know. John isn’t his mother. Esther shouldn’t have to bear my sins either, but, if Mrs. Kerry is the worst example of Louisville—and I’m afraid she’s not—what could it be like for Esther? And for John himself? After all, he’s going to practice there. He has to have patients. I just can’t conceive of it.”

“But what if he and Esther can?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know. What do you think, Kate? Loyalty aside.”

“I don’t know either, but I think you should let them decide if they want to.”

“And how do I do that?”

“You write a letter of apology to John. You don’t have to invite him back. You don’t have to encourage him. But you can let him know that you spoke in anger.”

“Does Esther want me to do that?”

“We didn’t agree to terms before I came up,” I said, grinning.

“What if they did marry and it was awful?”

“I don’t see how you can protect her from that. She knows what the circumstance is. She may decide, or John may decide that it isn’t a good thing. But it ought to be their decision, not yours.”

“All right. I agree. I’ll write the letter. You were a great comfort to your own mother, I know. You are to me. I spoke of it to Doris—”

“Don’t give me a good conduct medal just now, Mrs. Woolf,” I said. “I don’t feel up to it. You could do me a favor instead.”

“Anything,” she said, frankly, without gesture.

“I want a job, and I think you know the head of the agency I’m interested in. I’ve met him, and I think he’d hire me, but I want the job right away.”

I left Mrs. Woolf making a phone call and went to my room to shower and change. While I was dressing, you came in.

“Word is that the Lady herself will be down for dinner,” you said. “Drinks at six-thirty.”

“She’s offered to write a letter to John, apologizing.”

“White of her,” you said. “Doubt must be on my father’s side.”

“She is sorry, E.”

“Oh, I know she is,” you said tiredly “So am I. We do try, you know, but there’s just so little to work with on either side. Can you face her and turkey?”

“I think so.”

“I made us all Pilgrim hats. Then I thought better of it.”

“You’re growing up into a very subtle woman, little dog. What happened to your watch?”

“John and I had a discussion about femininity, and we decided I ought to try it.”

“Very becoming.”

“Remember when I never thought I could make it? I’m not bad, really, am I?” You were quite ordinarily admiring yourself in the mirror.

“For hell too fair; for earth too wise,” I said, smiling.

“You remember that. That’s odd. But sex isn’t being wise, is it?”

“I don’t suppose so. Sometimes it seems to me downright stupid.”

“I’m so glad you’re here, Kate. Nothing’s ever too awful if I can talk to you about it.”

And I was back to being too good to be true, which was guiltily all right with me.

I spent that Friday at interviews your mother had arranged while you waited at home for some word from John. By the end of the day, I had the job I had been uncertainly moving toward for nearly a year, in which I could gather up all the scattered interests and talents that I had, from the languages I had almost inadvertently learned to the painfully acquired knowledge of governmental procedure.

“Little dog,” I said with almost as much candid excitement as you might have had, “I’m going to be in New York from the first of the year with a trip to Europe before the summer’s over. I’m going to help save the world after all.”

“Not if it’s nonsectarian,” you said.

“Why?”

“You should be doing missionary work.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!”

“Then where’s the moral responsibility? Money doesn’t bless anything if God isn’t involved. What good is a hospital without a church?”

“Plenty.”

“But it’s a man’s soul—”

“I don’t give a damn about a man’s soul. It’s his own business, and I want no part of tempting him to sell it for bread or medicine or education. I think it’s immoral.”

“Only if the faith isn’t true,” you said.

“And yours is the true faith?”

“Yes,” you said firmly “You’re the one who said there was no point in being a nominal Christian.”

“Right. That’s why I don’t go to church.”

“I pray for you, Kate.”

“Well, don’t,” I said angrily “I don’t want to be prayed for.”

“Don’t you believe in anything any more?”

“I never did, E., not in your sense. I’m no good at extremes.”

“You think I’m being extreme, don’t you?”

“No more than you’ve ever been. I don’t want to fight with you about God. Belief isn’t really a thing to fight about.”

“Why not? It seems to me the only thing worth fighting about.”

“Onward Christian soldiers,” I said.

“But I believe that activity not rooted in prayer is mere bombast and flurry”

“Don’t quote at me.”

“Why not?”

“Well, then quote decent English, something like, ‘How many other things could be tolerated in peace and left to conscience had we but charity…”

“No point in quoting that. It supports your argument.”

“You used to like Milton.”

“You’re playing, Kate. I’m serious. You never really talk any more. You never really settle down with an argument.”

“I never did,” I said defensively “I’ve always been frivolous and irresponsible. You’re just seeing me in the new light of faith.”

“You make fun of me.”

“Not really I just don’t want to be bullied. I want you to be pleased with me about the job. I want to be able to talk about it without getting into a religious argument.”

“I’m sorry,” you said.

“And don’t sulk, please.”

But you were crying.

“Didn’t he call?” I asked.

“No.”

“He will, E. I’m sure he will.”

“I don’t know what I’ll do if he doesn’t. I’m marooned in this house. When you go, there won’t be anyone.”

“Monk’s here, and I’ll be back after Christmas.”

“No, she’s not. She took Lissa to Calgary on Wednesday.”

“Oh, good,” I said.

“Is it? Is that marriage any good at all by now?”