Kinflicks (31 page)

I heaved open her massive oaken door and found myself alone in the echoing alcove, the glaring portraits lying in wait for me in the hall beyond. Squaring my shoulders, I walked bravely into their collective stare. I had failed them so far. I had squandered my personal resources, yearning only to be loved and protected and defined by a man. I would not fail them in the future, however. I strode confidently up the hall under their gaze, past the antique high-backed wooden bishops' chairs that lined the dim corridor.

The topic I chose for my paper for Miss Head was the following: ‘Who made the world and why?' I sat down that night and wrote until four o'clock on Christmas morning. I had finished fourteen pages and had dealt with the first half of the topic. Using the Cartesian method, I had constructed an elegant proof of the existence of God, based on the postulate that it was impossible to conceive of something unless it existed in the first place. I read what I had written, and I saw that it was good, and I went to bed as well pleased as God Himself must have been after that sixth day on which
He
had conjured man into existence.

On Christmas morning I leapt out of bed and threw on a bathrobe and sat down at my desk and set to work finishing it. But the Why had me stumped. Every string of interlaced theorems I unveiled collapsed like a house of cards. Finally I chopped the ‘why' off the topic and submitted a fourteen-page paper.

A couple of days later, Miss Head returned it to me with a big red C and a note saying that she was giving me a break because I'd missed so many classes. I had posed my topic incorrectly. My argument suffered from circularity. The wording of the topic implied its answer. ‘Who' presupposed an anthropomorphic creator of some sort. Likewise, ‘made' implied a specific process of bringing the world into being, whereas it may in fact have come to be what it is through a number of other processes. As for my use of the word ‘world,' well, no one could possibly take my question, thus stated, seriously enough to attempt an answer. ‘World' contained an ambiguity that rendered the question untenable. By ‘world' did I intend to indicate the total complex of entities and occurrences that have existed in the past and will exist in the future and are existing in the present? Because if so, such a ‘world' includes all beings who have ever made anything and all things ever made, and therefore could not be the subject of the erroneously used verb ‘to make' anyway. Or did I intend to indicate some fragmentary portion of the above-mentioned totality; and if so, what portion? In spite of my false start, I had handled my proof of the existence of God skillfully. My grasp of the mind-body dichotomy was sound. My improvement over the semester had been striking and would continue to be, she was certain. I must not be discouraged by my C. I was clinging to sentimental assumptions, conditioned into me by my upbringing. She had marked the points at which these assumptions had surfaced with a red pencil. I should work at rooting out such subjective emotional reactions.

I was very discouraged, not the least by the fact that I couldn't fathom the meaning of her remarks. She might just as well have been talking in Urdu. I sulked around and thought about re-enrolling in the infirmary.

Instead I went out and bought Clem and Maxine a wedding gift — a salt shaker in the shape of a bull's head and a pepper shaker in the shape of a cow's head. These I mailed with a friendly note apologizing for my tardiness and wishing them many years of great happiness. In the package I included Clem's patched windbreaker and his bracelet.

Then I went to a beauty parlor and had my hair done. I was letting it grow out so as to wear it in a bun. In the meantime, I wanted it as flat and unobtrusive as possible. After a year and a half of hefting around a lacquered bouffant, like a plastic space helmet, a close-fitting coif was a considerable relief.

I also bought half a dozen wool suits and some high-necked nylon blouses, an antique cameo brooch, and some low-heeled simple shoes. I now wore a size smaller than upon entering the infirmary with my broken heart. It was good to have less of me to keep track of.

Dressed in a new outfit, I descended to Miss Head's chambers. The Christmas vacation was ending the next day, and the other students would begin returning in early evening. I wanted to gobble up Miss Head's undivided attention while I could.

She opened her huge door, looked me up and down, and exclaimed, ‘Why, Miss Babcock! I scarcely recognized you. You have a new suit. It's perfectly lovely.' She invited me in, and I perched on the overstuffed horsehair loveseat. ‘I was just making myself some tea. Would you like some?'

I was by now well hooked on tea. I required it, fix-like, every afternoon. ‘Thank you. Yes.'

Miss Head performed the intricate tea rite in exactly the same way as the day of my interview. Only this time, wiser, I said, ‘With lemon, please. But no sugar.'

Nodding with satisfaction at my acquired finesse, she handed me my cup. Then she looked at me questioningly.

‘I wondered,' I explained, ‘if you could help me with my schedule for next term. I have no idea what to take.'

She looked at me, perplexed. ‘Well, what are you interested in, Miss Babcock?'

‘That's just it. I don't know. I didn't have enough of any one thing in high school to
know
what I'm interested in.' Other than kinky sex and motorcycles and flag swinging and moonshine, which I knew I
wasn't
interested in any longer. ‘There's so much I should take that I don't know where to start. My education is one big gap.'

‘Well!' she said briskly, her Galatea sitting ready to be molded in front of her. ‘To start with, you'll certainly want to take the last half of my philosophy course.'

‘Of course.'

‘More Descartes and Spinoza. Some Locke and Berkeley, Hume and Hegel. It should be a
most
exciting spring!'

‘Hmmm.'

‘And you're required to finish English 102. So that leaves just three courses. Science or humanities?'

I shrugged, indicating that I was putty in her hands.

‘All right I'd suggest beginning chemistry and physiology, maybe some introductory physics, to balance out the English and philosophy. Then next year perhaps you'll have the basis for a choice between science and humanities.'

‘Great,' I said, rapidly filling out my form and handing it to her to sign, as my adviser and current exemplar.

‘Now! What else?' She peered at me through her lenses with her head resting back on her neck.

“That's all. Thank you.' I set down my cup and prepared to leave.

‘Don't rush off,' she said, glancing at her watch. ‘I was just working on my book. But I'm in no great hurry to get back to it.'

‘What's your book?'

‘I haven't named it yet. It's a comparison of the methods of the eighteenth-century empiricist philosophers to Newtonian mechanics.'

‘Oh,' I said in a daze. ‘Sounds interesting.'

‘Oh, quite. I've been working on it for seven years.'

I gulped. ‘And it's almost done?'

‘Oh, another two years ought to do it,' she said with satisfaction, thrusting forward her lower jaw in a friendly smile. ‘And now tell me what
you've been
engaged in, Miss Babcock?'

‘I've been catching up on my reading. And I've written a make-up paper for History 103 on the use of the astrolabe in fifteenth-century Portuguese exploration in the southern hemisphere.'

‘Indeed.'

‘I'm sorry, by the way, about my Descartes paper. I did try on it.'

She waved her hand grandly. ‘Never mind. You'll catch on. You display a remarkable ability, Miss Babcock, to adapt yourself to your surroundings — a sort of protective coloration, as it were. I'm certain, Miss Babcock, that you'll pick up the philosophic method in no time if you decide to.'

‘Do you really think so?' It seemed unlikely. I could dress like Miss Head, but thinking like her was another matter altogether.

‘I'm sure of it. Have you called your parents?'

I scowled.

She laughed. ‘Oh, come now, Miss Babcock. Must you be so insistently melodramatic?'

‘Yes, I called them.'

‘And are you on speaking terms with them now?'

‘I suppose so.'

‘Good.' She sighed and poured herself another cup of tea. I handed her my cup for a refill. ‘I remember the battles I used to have with
my
parents,' she said with a smile, removing her glasses so that they dangled from their chain and knocked against her chest. She had blue eyes, weak and watery. ‘It seemed so crucial at the time. But now they're dead.'

My
indomitable parents dead? Never! They would rust or corrode, but they would never expire. ‘What did you and your parents fight about?'

Miss Head was staring absently out the window, where the winter sun was burning cryptic patterns into the snow. Huge gleaming icicles hung halfway down her windows. She hadn't heard my question. I repeated it.

She looked up, startled. ‘Oh yes, ah, let me see.' She shifted her position and settled back in her fragile chair. I took the opportunity to shift in my unfamiliar suit to a spot where there wasn't a spring poking insistently into my buttock.

‘Well, Miss Babcock, like you I grew up in a small town — Morgan, Oklahoma.'

‘You're kidding? Where's your Okie accent?'

‘You forget that I've been away from Oklahoma for many years. Anyway, my father drilled wells for people — water wells, not oil wells, alas. I went to school there — twelve grades in four rooms. And I lived a normal stifling small-town life. But for some reason, I don't know why, I always harbored a secret ambition to go to an Ivy League women's college. Well, even
college
for a girl was a difficult concept for my parents. They didn't have much money, certainly not enough to send me to college. It was during the Depression. Nevertheless, for years I wrote off for catalogues to all the fanciest schools. I hid them in my closet and sometimes locked myself in with a flashlight and fantasized over my future as a student at one of those places.

‘Well, when the time came, I somehow managed to wrest a scholarship offer out of Vassar. After all, I'd been in correspondence with them for years. And then their geographical quota had a lot to do with it, no doubt.' She said this with a wry glance at me.

‘But my parents wouldn't hear of my going so far away. Why couldn't I marry some nice Oklahoma boy and settle down and raise a family like a normal Oklahoma girl? Why did I have to go around puttin' on airs?' Remarkably, as she talked, her cultivated eastern accent started slipping, and the nasal Oklahoma twang appeared ever so faintly around the edges of her discourse.

‘So we fought and we fought and I eventually allowed them to win. I renounced my scholarship. But secretly I had applied to Emory in Atlanta, which was just barely near enough to defuse their distance argument. Emory came through with a scholarship, and I took it.

‘And then they didn't want me to go for my Ph.D., and they didn't want me to go to New York to do it. And so it was one continuous struggle with them. Until, as I say, they died.'

‘But how could they possibly object to your getting a Ph.D.?'

She shrugged and sipped her tea. ‘I dare say they wanted a son-in-law and lots of grandchildren. There was a man I was — involved with about that time. A graduate student in chemistry. He was going overseas to fight. He wanted me to marry him and to start on a baby before he was shipped out. But I had just begun my Ph.D. program at Columbia and had all these other things I wanted to do. So I turned him down. It was viewed as a very unpatriotic thing to do at the time, heartless. And especially by my parents, who had met him and were crazy about him. Well, he was killed. In Belgium. But that's beside the point.'

I looked at her questioningly. If the fact of her lover's being killed in Belgium was beside the point, what was the point?

‘All parents — the exceptions should be enshrined — view their offspring as reincarnations of themselves,' she continued. ‘If those children veer too sharply in either direction from the path staked out by their parents, the parents feel rejected, become offended. But what is one to do?' She smiled tolerantly. ‘What are
they
to do? What are
any
of us to do? We're all trapped. However, one dies.'

I sipped my tea thoughtfully, fondling these new insights into the character formation of my mentor. ‘But if your parents were impoverished, where did all that beautiful china and stuff they left you come from?'

‘It had been in my mother's family — relics of better times. My mother doted over it. My father didn't know the difference between Waterford crystal and Welch's grape jelly glasses. Or care. I remember he used to sit in the kitchen in his dirty T-shirt, with the wind blowing dust through the cracks around the door; and he'd tease my mother by picking up one of those goblets in a huge grimy hand and pretending that he was going to tighten his grip and crumble it to powder. She'd sit there weeping and pleading with him to put it down, and she'd call him an ignorant clod and a crude dolt and anything else she could think of to hurt him. And it did hurt him. He was very aware of the fact that Mother had married beneath herself, as it were. Finally, as she kept needling him about what a great hulking hick he was, he'd set the goblet down and leap to his feet with his eyes bulging and his face purple; and he'd stomp over to her and slap her. She'd scream, and he'd hit her some more and start yelling things like, “Just remember, Maude, why you married a stupid ox like me! None of them fancy fellers you used to run with could put it to you like I done, and thas a fact.” And she'd hiss at him, “The child, Raymond! The child!” I'd usually be cowering behind a chair somewhere. And eventually, after he'd slapped her around some more, and she'd pounded him on his huge chest, and they'd both called each other horrible names and had tears streaming down their faces, he'd drag her off to the bedroom and lock the door. They'd reemerge several hours later — she prim and regal, and he humble and gentle.'