Three Continents (6 page)

An instant change came over Barbara. She had been lying there in a heap, making no attempt to hide her tears, but now she shot up on her bed and sat very upright, arranging her dress to cover her thighs and knees. She held her head high, and though her cheeks were still wet and swollen, she put a prim, distant, disapproving look on her face, like a matron with an uninvited, undesired guest. I was amazed—I didn't think she could be like that; I had never seen her with anyone she disliked. Crishi felt it immediately, and he moderated his smile and said he hoped he wasn't in the way, or anything? He looked from one to the other and especially warmly at Barbara, who became more prim. Then Crishi raised one slender finger at Michael, meaning one moment, very politely, but also meaning come here, now. And Michael went at once; without one glance at me or Barbara, he obeyed as he would a master's call. When they had gone, Barbara said “He's the worst, Harriet. No,” she said as though I had contradicted her, “he's a bad person.” I didn't think he was a bad person, on the contrary; but I guess I still didn't feel strongly enough one way or the other to stick up for him with Barbara.

I must have wiped out the incident with Paul; or allowed myself to put a different interpretation on it—at any rate, I no longer held it against Crishi. I hadn't seen Paul around for some time, and assumed he was gone wherever it was Crishi wanted to send him. I didn't ask about him; it wasn't important enough. And they were always coming and going, all the followers—there were so many of them and so many
different missions they had to fulfill and different centers to liaison with. I was used to seeing them tramping up and down the stairs, but it was a shock to Manton. In his day, if there was a crowd in the house, it was one that had come for a dance or a party. “What are they—hippies?” he asked me, hippies being the latest thing he had heard of. But Manton was adaptable, and it took him no time to get used to them—or rather, fail to notice them, the way he never had difficulty ignoring people he didn't need. As in a restaurant, he would make a point of being terribly friendly with the waiter who served him and the maître d' who gave him a good table, but everyone else might as well be plants and stones. It would be untrue to say he was a snob because it had nothing to do with class, only with whether a person impinged on his life or not. So he would brush past the “hippies” on the stairs, genuinely not seeing them; and would sit for hours with Else Schwamm in the kitchen, telling her how he was falling in love with the Rani, and what should he do about it; and she, without for one second interrupting the kneading and rolling of her pastry, face red, arms pumping, would give him the benefit of her life's experience, the two of them convinced that it was the most important topic in the world.

The rest of us knew better. I say “us,” including myself, for I was now in a position where I wanted to believe—that is, believe with Michael that it was all for some high purpose, and not with Barbara that it was a fraud. I knew Michael wouldn't have been taken in by a fraud. He had spent too much time—all his life practically, and mine—examining truth and faith and every other fundamental principle. He wouldn't compromise any of that on account of his own feelings—for Crishi, that is. He had been in love before, and whereas it may have made him suspend his quest for a while, it had never led him away from it. And it couldn't be so now, when he felt more strongly than I had ever seen him do before. I believed in him, which was how I was ready to believe in everything else.

It was being made clear to me that we were very fortunate to have been chosen as one of the spearheads of the movement. The Rawul's followers felt it strongly—that they were pioneers, leaders of a mission, apostles or whatever; and this
was brought home to me one day in a quarrel I had with one of the girls over the use of a bathroom. The bathroom was mine—anyway, the one adjoining my room—and while I had accepted the fact that the Rawul and his party had more or less taken over everywhere else, I continued to think of this one room and bathroom as exclusively my own. But once when I tried to go in, I found the door locked. I wasn't pleased but I had lived enough in dorms to take it philosophically and just wait. Whoever was inside didn't come out and didn't come out, till finally I banged on the door and yelled a bit. A yell came back—it was one of the girls and she was very rude, so I banged some more and was very rude to her, and we had this shouting match through the door. When she came out at last, she was livid; she was holding a book, which she must have been reading in there. She waved it in my face—it was the Dhammapada, and I understood that it was very bad to disturb anyone in the reading of that. I calmed down and said that there were plenty of bathrooms in the house without her having to come in here to use mine. As soon as I uttered the word
mine
, I realized I had made a mistake. I had played into her hands and she could take off from there, about possessiveness and ego and all the rest of it. It so happened I agreed with her, though under the circumstances I couldn't say so; and anyway, she didn't give me a chance to—she just went on and on. She was a very thin, pale girl, who looked as if she were suffering from amoebic dysentery; but if she was physically debilitated, mentally she was very fierce—that is, in her convictions. She asked me did I have any idea what it meant that this house had been chosen, and we with it? In case I didn't, she explained that, whatever we might have been before, we now had to live up to the responsibility of our position. By the time she finished, she seemed to have mellowed toward me and to be really on my side; she even pressed my arm to show me she knew how difficult it was to live up to something greater than oneself.

W
E all continued to attend the Rawul's evening talks, which were getting to be like a family get-together with the same internal strains and the same sense of cohesion, of not being able to get out even if one wanted to. But now the Rawul said the time had come to reach outward—after all, we were not a private group, a personal club, but were there to reform the world. The Rawul could make these sort of statements absolutely without blinking, because they were so utterly serious to him; he really felt himself to be on this mission. Up till now, he had what he called “reached outward” only through the mail—that was what most of the activity in the house was about, getting publicity material together to send to government agencies in Washington, the U.N., the press, to schools, sponsors, donors, foundations, and generally responsible citizens. The Rawul now called for more direct contact with the outside world. It was the way they had operated previous campaigns—in England, Holland, and India so far—and had no doubt that it would work here too. The first step was to be a big party on the grounds of Propinquity for people from the town and from the adjacent houses—a sort of open house, like Lindsay's family traditionally had on July Fourth. And in fact it was the July Fourth weekend that was chosen for this opening campaign.

I had doubts about it from the first, which I told Michael. He disagreed with me—we disagreed often nowadays; it made
me sad, but he didn't seem to notice. He said everybody used to love Grandmother's parties and was eager to come—all sorts of different people, the bank manager and the real estate agent, the families from the big houses, the plumber, Grandmother's favorite butcher, the package-store people, the garage owner—it was the event of the season for the neighborhood. Yes, I said, but hadn't he noticed the neighborhood had changed: For one thing, it was much poorer; the rail service to the nearest town had been discontinued, the yellow-frame houses with white porches and hanging plants had been taken over by families on welfare, and the big houses had either been torn down or bought up and restored as weekend homes by lawyers and decorators from the city. And quite apart from the neighborhood changing, what about us? Didn't he think, I asked Michael, that we—he and I, Lindsay and Jean, Manton and Barbara—were quite a change from our grandparents? Michael brushed me aside. He said I was proving his point—of course the neighborhood had changed; We had changed, two generations had passed, and didn't I see that it was the moment for a real, a conscious change? In fact, for a new world movement to cohere this changed society in a new way? Michael was getting to be as persuasive as the Rawul.

In the years when Lindsay and Jean were alone in the house, living mostly in the kitchen, it seemed to rain almost all summer. But I never remember a wet July Fourth weekend when Grandmother had her open house, and this time too, for the Rawul, the weather held. Yes, the weather, the grounds, the house, these were all unchanged from our grandparents' time, all glorious. And, just as in their time, the preparations for the party started days ahead and involved the whole household. The Rani and Crishi were in charge. Both were very good at giving orders and getting things done; they might have sounded a bit ruthless when it came to the followers, but they could be very tactful, as with the local tradesmen, who would later be guests at the party, and with Mrs. Schwamm. It was an achievement to get her to hand over her kitchen to the general maneuver and to participate in it. She outdid herself in the creation of Viennese tidbits, while the Rani supervised the preparations of
various kinds of kebabs and fritters with exotic fillings—not quite Indian but a sort of mixture, like the Rani herself. It was very different from Grandmother's hot dogs, spare ribs, and potato salad; but so were the Oriental rugs and bolsters spread on the lawns from her garden furniture; and most different of all were the principal hosts.

These were undoubtedly the Rawul, the Rani, and Crishi. Even though the family who owned Propinquity—after all, we hadn't yet signed it over—were still there, the three of them completely overshadowed us. The Rawul had exchanged his English suit for white leggings worn under a high-collared coat of white silk and jeweled buttons. Stout and handsome, he looked what he was—an Indian prince. The Rani wore a kind of Parisian adaptation of the North Indian costume of long shirt over trousers, in heavy silk with elaborate gold embroidery over her bosom. The two of them did not move around among the guests; it was left to Crishi, lithe as a ballet dancer in velvet pants and silk shirt, to lead them up to the royal couple, who generated, besides their glamour, grace and benevolence.

The Rawul considered the occasion a great success, achieving everything he had aimed for. As he had explained to me one morning, when he and I had again been alone at the breakfast table, what he especially valued in using our house as his headquarters was that it placed him right at the heart of American society, at the very center of those traditions he wished to merge with his own. He was right, in a way. The guests who came to his Fourth of July party were the inheritors of those traditions—the interior decorators who had bought up and refurbished the big houses, and the antique dealers who sold and resold their contents. There were the traditional local people, like the Pickles family, who had lived here for over two hundred years and had once been prosperous tenant farmers. Nowadays they proliferated in a variety of jobs as cashiers at Shopwell and counter hands at Dunkin' Donuts; and there was Mrs. Pickles, who cleaned some of the big houses, including ours, and had eight children, of whom six had emigrated to jobs in California and Florida, leaving only the younger two, one of whom was deaf and dumb and the other slightly retarded.

Mrs. Pickles herself came, dressed very smartly in a pastel-colored pants suit; other guests included Ernest and Robert, who had bought the van Kuypen estate; and Tom and Stanislav, who ran a mail-order business from the Old Mill; and Henry and Lucy Rabin, whose antique business in their restored historic house could be visited by appointment only; and jolly Mr. McKimberley, who gave out loans at the bank; and the painter Kenneth Lyon and his friend Jerry; the poet Meriel Pitts; the two potters Pete Davidson and Jenny Fine; and many others who milled around the grounds and around the shining figures of our royal family. These three cast their radiance on all alike; and to them everyone probably was alike—not individuals but the populace who were there to be won over to the Rawul's cause. This was certainly how the Rawul regarded his guests, as he beamed on them. One could be less sure of the Rani and Crishi, for while they too beamed, they were not as open as the Rawul, and it was not possible to guess what they were really thinking.

In their way, Lindsay and Manton were almost as royal as those three—in the sense of as remote. Lindsay never particularized anyone either; she chattered away or was silent, as it suited her. Since she never looked at or thought of anyone except herself, it didn't matter to her whether she was addressing Mrs. Pickles, Mr. McKimberley, or Meriel Pitts; she spoke to each in the same way—that is, in the girlish tone and idiom she had used with her mother's guests. And Manton too did not discriminate as to the recipients of his social manner; as on every such occasion, he turned on the tap of his charm and left it running. Michael and I always hated this characteristic in both our parents but realized that it was as natural to them as its opposite was to us. For us, every person we encountered was so individual, made so strong an impact that, far from having too much manner, we had none whatsoever and remained frozen with shyness. I guess that was how we got our reputation of being cold and aloof, arrogant too, and were contrasted unfavorably with our parents, who were, everyone said, so warm and friendly.

I don't know if everybody would have agreed with the Rawul that the party was a great success. He probably never noticed that many things were going on that had nothing to do with his movement but were just our own self-centered emotions. Although everyone, both from the Rawul's family and from ours, was expected to turn out and contribute to the success of the day, there were two among us who wanted nothing to
do with it—Barbara and Jean. They didn't even come out of their rooms, except at one point Jean could be seen making her way determinedly through the crowd on the lawn to where Lindsay was in a little group around the Rani. I was alarmed when I saw Jean; and one couldn't help seeing her, she was conspicuously not dressed up for the party but in her everyday jeans and crumpled shirt; and she was frowning too, and looked miserable. I tried to get to her before she could get to Lindsay. Other guests stopped her on the way—the people from the neighborhood who liked her for a decent, nice person. Even now, though obviously overwrought, she was decent and nice and made the right responses to Mrs. Pickles, who told her about someone permanently paralyzed from having been given the wrong injection in the hospital, to Lucy Rabin, who had been successful at an auction with an eighteenth-century pair of fire tongs, and to Mrs. McKimberley, who invited her to join a tour, with picnic lunch, of a newly restored ex-President's house. With all these people Jean did her best, in spite of her swollen eyes, to be her usual caring self—until she got to Lindsay, and then she hissed “Come inside,” and gripped her arm.