On Keeping Women (10 page)

This is Billie La Barbara, a worker for the welfare department, who as yet has no children but is majoring in child psychology, for the inevitable. “It’s my job makes me sterile,” she tells them bitterly. “All that fulfilling of other people. It has to go.”

“Yeah, saw him on campus the other day,” she says now. “With that wife of his. She gets any more pregnant, he’ll have to put her on wheels. He looks terrible.”

Odd, how they all automatically hate the wife because she’s his, and hold her responsible for his decline. Sagging weight that she must be, and irritable, while he’s outside on a pearly day trying to teach us the objective correlative—don’t we all know how those months go? But now we’re outside, with him. Lexie herself has seen Plaut walking alone, faded and disheveled from already feeding two.

“He looks like one of those Russians,” she hears herself say.

They all turn to stare at her. With reason. From being too much alone, her thoughts often elide, or express themselves truncatedly in her own code. In the lunch-sessions, she’s discovered that this has now and then happened to all of them. Except to Mrs. Bidwell, who commented
“We
are never alone”—they didn’t know whether from religious impulse or anti-white contempt—and never lunched with them again. But Lexie feels herself to be the worst. “Ray’s away” she mutters, immediately flushing. Why should she need to excuse herself via him? “I meant like in those novels Plaut has us reading. There’s always one man who’s going down, down, down. He looks like one of those. Like something dreadful is going on in him.”

“Haha,” Cee-Cee says. “He liked Lexie’s poem; that’s what.”

Cee-Cee’s jealous. So far, Plaut has kept her work in the dark of the conferences she’s always nagging for. Where, by her own report he stolidly corrects the grammar and won’t be chivied on doctrine.

Yet ever since he read aloud Lexie’s poem, even the others haven’t been quite the same to her. Maybe she’s let down their side.

“Leave Lexie alone,” Jean says. “Maybe she’s talented.”

Jean’s still against them, but today she scarcely has time for it. She’s showing off her daughter, a tall rose-and-amber girl in full bloom, who is visiting from Hawaii where she has a state job—and a husband who is a professor. The girl looks somewhat like Chessie. But will Chessie ever have the assurance to look like her?

“No I’m not. Not yet,” Lexie hears herself, hotly. “I, was born in the Village, where artists live. I know the difference.”

“So what’s wrong with the Boroughs? Edgar Allen Poe lived in the Bronx.” Elaine adjusts her hat at them, in the spirit-of-fairplay manner which makes candidates. “Gee, but I saw them too, Plaut and his wife. Even for eight months, that girl he married is a slop.”

“Not a girl, a woman,” one of the timider vanguarders says. They are of varying tint, after all. Or beginning to be. This one giggles. “She’s older than him, by about eight years. She was his last year’s student,
this
class.”

“So she has to wear shorts, with the front end sticking out like a canoe, and gold mules—to show the undergrads?” Elaine beams at them. “Do I or do I not know my psychology, girls? And I tell you, I never saw a less connected couple dragging around.” Family Court, Elaine’s going to try for—she’s told them—and she’ll make it. A Judge. “Why these days, they didn’t abort. He’s working his doctorate, poor guy; here he’s only part-time. Plus one course at City College. In his real subject.”

La Barbara sits up. “He’s an aborter all right, I bet. Like all of them. But don’t you remember what he said?
We
changed their relationship.”

Nobody answers her sneer. The three younger ones she’s been bossing hang their heads. Is it that they’re beginning to understand her? Or to understand that they too are various?

The girl, Jean’s daughter, watches them all, open-mouthed.

Billie looks at her watch. “Part-time, what do you know. What a raw deal we got. From the college that has Arthur Ocker the sociologist; he even gives advice to Washington; why couldn’t they give us him? Or Chickie Whatshername—the poet. Continued Education, blah. I move we petition to have him removed. Chickie Marcella, that’s it—the black poet. She sings too; she’s a gas. Let them give us somebody worth
wild
.” She leans toward their scholar. Who sits apart from them, they now know, not because they’re white but because she’s matriculated, and so of finer grain. “How ’bout that, Mrs. Bidwell?”

“He’s my subject. I’m satisfied.”

Plaut appears in the doorway. Billie’s conjured him up.

Even more battered than before. His eyes are circled red, his sweatshirt spotted; his pants, always a sign of a man’s spirit or competence, decline around his shoes. Incredibly, a rope threaded through the waist-loops, holds them up. Clothesline, knotted in front. Perhaps he’s saving it for his neck. Where’s his belt? Has his wife beaten him with it? Some fury has raked his hair into horns. In this quiet court-of-brains, the campus, he sways in the eye of elements. In Westchester County, how can this happen to a man?

She sees Jean and her daughter thinking that. Afterwards, her own shame will be that she’s merely thought in a circle, with each of them.

“Got your papers, girls.” Plaut’s voice, surprisingly firm out of such a joblot creature. Saying “girls” of course helps. “I’ll hand them out.” Plaut does so. As usual to each with a terse comment. Where briefly, he shines.

Cee-Cee is first.

“You’re supposed to be writing
about
a policeman, Mrs. Morland. Not
like
one.”

To Billie La Barbara: “‘The World of Welfare,’ eh? A large title, Miss La Barbara. Unfortunately, alliteration alone is not a summing-up. Also, you seem to think that your job makes you automatically generous. How wrong you are, Miss La Barbara. How wrong.”

One by one, the vanguarders get theirs.

“Ah yes,” he snarls, shuffling and dealing like a cardsharp. “‘Lady Murisaki: Novelist with Bound Feet,’ eh? … ‘Florence Nightingale: Nursing as Slavery’ … ‘Eleanor Roosevelt, The Voice Behind the Power’… ‘Whale Chauvinism in Moby Dick.’”

His smile is pulling him together, even lifting the pants. “How dainty your humor is, girls. Humor takes weight. See you found your subject, though. Whether it’s a major one is still arguable.”

Four of the vanguarders have written a collective journal. He parts his teeth. “When your whole struggle, my dears, should be—to try to be separate.”

As he picks out Jean’s, she nervously introduces her daughter, on whose account, she adds, they have to leave early. For the daughter’s plane.

“You look like your mother must have. When she—er—came out.” He twiddled Jean’s scrupulously typed paper. They all know what’s in it. Jean’s youth, from which she has surgically removed the entire era, except for the Court of St. James’s at which she was presented to the world, and the Paris Beaux-Arts Ball at which she embraced it—meeting the man who now has Parkinson’s.

“‘An American Girl Abroad—’” he reads “‘—In Nineteen-Thirty-Nine.’” He smiles with the daughter, over that golden snob back there is her featherheaded dressingroom, under her Arc de Triomphe of rainbow events. “Nineteen-Thirty-
Nine
” he says then, stiffening. As if somebody’d turned on a lightbulb inside him. A rib of brainlight runs down his very nose.

Lexie shudders, knowing what he’ll be saying. He’s going to kill Jean’s youth, swamp it—with a slice of their objective reality. Does it belong only to them?

“Nineteen-thirty-nine,” he says again; yes, this repetition belongs to him, is bred in him like a horizon, Lexie thinks.

“Hitler entered the
Sudetenland
that year,” he says, hushed. “Freud died.” Plaut wasn’t even born then. But yes, it belongs to him.

Because of that, he can even be kind. When it suits him. “Mrs. Fackenthal… the English—is excellent.”

“Osmosis.” What a funny word to blush on. “My husband was—is a journalist.”

Is that virtue of her, or poise?—not even to know she’s being swamped? Or is it the faintest touch of what in Plaut would be called political? What a bridgegame Jean must play with herself. With much practice in company, at the country club. For she and the daughter aren’t really going to the plane. She’ll display her achievement where she can. And the class, watching the two of them go off, is now almost fondly on Jean’s side.

Women’s enmity had so little lasting weight—why? And what is an era—that we don’t wholly belong to it?

He’s now handing her back her poem. This is the moment I hate, she thinks, screwing up her eyes for the dive into it. The moment when what I exuded in pure longing must come under judgment. There’s something dirty about that, they all really think—to exude. And I myself can now barely remember the little birth it was. Then why’ve I handed it in? Why didn’t I stay on my ledge? Eyes lowered, she pretends to be there, safe against the window-frame. She can smell its comforting soot.

“‘My Children’—” he reads out. “It’s only two lines. Here they are:

“You are the branches I stretch toward poetry.

Then why do I toss you these small bouquets of rage?”

She opened her eyes. A dignity recalled, urged back by the poem, allows it. He’s staring at her. The rest of them hang their heads, unsure of the wind to come.

“Know what a pseudopodium is, Mrs… er … ?” He can never remember her name. “I looked it up especially for this poem of yours.” He pulls out a slip of paper. “‘In certain protozoa’ it says here. ‘Each of a number of processes tem-po-ra-rily formed by protrusion of any part of the protoplasm of the body.’” He clears his throat meaningfully. “‘And serving for locomotion, prehension or ingestion of food.’”

He folded the slip and handed it to her. “Only that first sentence applies here. Though I suppose the second could, at times. Because—look at those lines of yours, will you, godammit? Anybody ever see a more mixed metaphor? The children are your
arms.
Yet the next minute your
hands
are tossing them something. From where? Where’s the distance? Branches to bouquets? … And yet I did think … it does make me think—.” His voice sinks, for the shameful. “—Maybe that’s the way motherhood feels?” He’s sidling a look at her, her face, her belly even; is she supposed to answer? “Well. Hah, Nemmind. Maybe motherhood is an art, hmmm?—and that’s something
I’m
—hmm. But anyway, Miss. Madam. The best metaphors, the good ones that last, are so firmly locked that you CAN’T disentangle their parts. Can’t chop them up, eh. Like I did yours… If I did, that is.”

He’s almost back to being their kindly, hardworking prof of last term, sweating to make them see what he liquidly calls “l-
lit
-ratyooah,” poking it toward them like a diamond they blindly won’t pick up, or can’t see. “Reason I develop this; it’s because you all think like that, seems to me. No chain of logic that I can recognize. A sort of plasma-budding, more like. Really strange. To me, that is. A sort of amoebic process; that’s the nearest. In
all
of you. And we can surely see it alright alright, in that poem.” He hands it back to her. “Not that it isn’t even sort of good, you know. And yet it’s only good—because of the way it’s bad. I tell you what—” He rubs his teeth at the enigma of her, “It’s a poem by an invertebrate.”

The class sat up in outrage. Oh stop being so collective, she felt like telling them. He’s right.

“I know maybe there’s something dirty about it,” she mutters. “You don’t have to say.”

He jumps, as if she’d skinned a pea at him. “About motherhood, you mean?”

A hopeless conversation. Between transliterates. She shrugs.

He brings his shoulders forward as if he’s never glimpsed them before. “Well. Girls. Mothers. Gotta go. Sorry. Had to come by the office, you know.” A hayseed laugh blurts from him. He tightens his rope. “So I dropped those papers off—whyn’t you round-table on them, spend the rest of the hour on that?”

“Hour?” Billie half-rose. “This is a three-hour class.”

“I’m aware of that. Unfortunately, I have to go.” He nods at his colleague-for-the-Renaissance. “See you next week instead, huh, Gloriana. Usual conference time.”

She wondered if the rest of the class thought Gloriana was Mrs. Bidwell’s own fancy name.

“Come by to pick up your check, huh, Plaut? Don’t you think we want our money’s worth?”

“Look for it intangibly, Miss La Barbara. That’s the only way you’ll get it.”

Ah poor boy. Spouting his schooltalk as if it’ll hold him up. Yet that’s just how I found out who Gloriana was. Intangibly. Nosing in Spenser because I’m curious. Oh, what issues there are here. And why do I feel sorry for him?

“Looky here.” Cee-Cee’s voice, a daub of bright American mustard on those porcelain cheeks. “There are crumbs in your beard, Mr. Plaut. That’s tangible enough.”

“My wife’s ill. Sorry.”

“Oh-h, too bad. You have Major Medical?” Elaine. Her hat is wonderful. A sympathetic umbrella, a matriarch’s portico—and she is only forty-five.

“No,” the wretch has to say. “I don’t have the plan yet.”

“Ah-ah—” Elaine moaned, “—what a world. Because you’re only part-time.”

“They’re fixing to petition you off, Plaut.” Mrs. Bidwell. Uncle Tom or not, she’s immobile. One will never know just how her motives are mixed. “They have a yen to try Chickie Casella. She sings.”

He and she laugh, scholars together.

“Let them. Let her continue her education with
them.”
Turning to go, his pants, hitching along with him, have a kind of spirit after all. Or are regaining it.

When just then she, Lexie, is foolish enough to speak. Meditatively. “Ill? Do you mean—your wife’s in labor?”

He gives them a sheepish—salute.

Their own howling burst deafens them. Running him out of the room. Shrill waves of it rise and renew. “Ay-yah—
ill
for Chrissake,” somebody says, exhausted—and they are off again.

Someone recalls to Cee-Cee—“Sitters!” Sardonic shouts ring from all corners, all ages.

Are they various at all, really? Oh never think that, never doubt that we are, she thinks piously; that’s to go back to hell-bottom, the low road of the former slave. Former until the end? She’s puzzled. This laughter, this group-tone with its grunty
ayee
—it is certainly interchangeable.