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(2) You say you are not only taking the fall term off but may likely
never
come back to Yale and finish your degree. I can’t
tell
you how much of an utter mistake this is. Your doubts about your major—whether or not this M. Derrida and his deconstruction are actually anti-phallic and whether or not this Mr. Bloom twiddles too much when he lectures—are really beside the point; you can major in chemistry or basket weaving or home economics (which used to be a course seriously offered to young women—how to sew and cook, mostly—wifemanship with sex left out) for all I care, but you
must get your degree
. If you don’t you can never hold your head up; a college degree is the invisible tiara a woman must wear now, otherwise people write her off as a bumpkin, an ignoramus, a throwback, an archaic creature. Look at Princess Diana, how people snicker even at her. Look at me, whose greatest mistake in life was to leave Radcliffe at the outset of my junior year to marry your father—
how
I secretly suffered all these years, how I
cringed
whenever the subject of colleges came up in conversation. I vowed you would never make my mistake. Well, you
did
get through one more year than I did. So close! You say that in Europe it really doesn’t
matter so much and if so that proves my point that Europeans are at bottom grotesquely primitive cavepeople who believe that everything comes down to entitlement by birth. The ones who stayed there chose to hang back from the great spiritual adventure America was and is and I fear I can’t
bear
to think of my Pearl wasting her precious life among them. The Europeans here at the ashram, most of whom have been deported or gone into hiding, were a fascinating study in how intelligent and attractive people could go through all the correct motions and yet all the time be
missing the point
. They kept trying to make a formal church or a military organization out of it all; the
delicacy
of our American reality keeps escaping them, the way our whole lovely nation is founded on the edge of a dream, on the edge of purusha. I don’t include the Arhat; he is not European but Indian, an Aryan with something else added—sun, centuries of terribly much sun, and also something religious from the Dravidian South, with its murderous worship of femaleness, like a wonderful gluey dark honey poured into milk. Jan sounds
totally
milky to me, and his parents too, though they’ve curdled into butter—little square pats stamped with some phony armorial seal. Darling, believe me, not going through with Yale, however much of an awkward bother it seems now, will destroy your life—you’ll limp forever, my dear tall-striding beauty.

(3) You tell me your father, who has flown over again, likes Jan very much and finds the van Hertzogs jolly fun and wholeheartedly approves of your engagement. Don’t you
see
he’s doing exactly what my father (whom I loved too—how can we
help
but love these fathers, the way the sides of their necks smell of sweat and aftershave when they pick us up off the floor and give us that squeeze that knocks us breathless?) did—pass you on like a manacled slave to another
man?
Men
don’t much like other men—all organic things intrinsically hate one another, except as food—but they’re used to them and they’re
not
used to free women—women standing upright and having ideas and walking up the middle of the sidewalk with unpinned hair bouncing and flowing behind, the way I’ve always pictured you. You can say I was trying to live my life through you in a way I never lived it myself; but that is what women must do when they knuckle under as I did through not knowing any better—and now as
you
are doing
though knowing better
and having other alternatives but spurning them. Of
course
your father would think it very cute having this bogus nobility with their unicorn and lion or whatever it is on every bottle as kin and connections over there so he can casually drop word to his posh surgeon pals of his jetting back and forth. New England snob as he is he imagines he always
did
have a foot still in the Old World. But what he
really
likes is that European dungeons are deeper, divorces are harder, and you are more securely locked in where he
can get at you
. There is no escaping Daddy once the van Hertzogs sink their claws in, and of course (you’ll all say) poor Mother—she can’t manage to leave her dreadful guru and always was a bit of a misfit.… Sweet little Pearl, this is our goodbye. Those round blurry spots in these “wiggles” of mine (remember, your calling them that?), are tears, actual tears.

I’m making such a mess, I had to lean back with folded hands and let them drop into my lap. The tears. I’m wearing the silk sari, in case the Master comes in. Water is bad for silk and saltwater must be worse. But it felt good to cry. The Master has given me so much of his own peace I’d almost forgotten how to manage a good old Occidental convulsion—a
Schmerzfest
, a purgative
déluge des larmes chaudes
. So, then, to continue,

(4) You are pregnant. After wounding me in these various other ways you want to make me into a
grandmother
. White hair, trifocals, rocking chair, crewel work. Passing down wooden toys and family lore before winking out like a frosted light bulb. And I have
never
felt younger—the bride I was at twenty was a timid hidebound crone compared with the woman I feel myself now to be. And you’ve decided—though I don’t see how anybody of your age and position, with all the contraceptive gadgets and creams and foams they have now, not to mention all the non-procreative ways of “getting off” that were terribly hush-hush and taboo in the dark age when
I
was young, could
decide
anything of the sort; you both must have been stoned or coked or whatever out of your fuzzy heads—to make me an
ancestor
, ashes and bones in a sacred urn, some yellowing photographs in the family album, a filled-in slot in the genealogical chart, a sad old story buried amid the rubbish in the custom-house attic. I’m not ready, I’m still learning how to live, to
be
. I’ve reached the solarplexus chakra and I’m still climbing. I’m having
fun
, honey.

People are supposed to rejoice at a pregnancy, however inconvenient it is. At least the Pope wants us to. I wonder why. You were always a healthy normal girl so this event physiologically is no triumph against the odds. You would have been able to pull it off at thirty, at forty even. Why so early? Naturally I blame myself. My running off—deserting my biological post—made you think you had to man—why isn’t there a verb “to woman”?—the ramparts, the reproductive barricades. Or am I giving myself and the old riddle of mother-daughter relations too much credit? Most pregnancies, like most wars, are totally
silly
, and aren’t intended at all—they come about in a long blink while the mind is essentially asleep. With so many of these teen-age pregnancies
now it’s obviously a childish way of punishing the world. Consider me punished.

Consider me cheated of every woman’s most harmless fantasy—to stage-manage a wedding, to be the mother of the bride. I suppose that the van Hertzogs and your father have the situation heavily in hand. By even the fifth month you might get by with an A-line tulle-and-satin gown, and if it’s only the fourth you could even have the dressmaker give you a bit of a waist. I
love
the look of a lace bodice, and a long stiff train, and a garland of real flowers that will wilt in an hour, and a veil with the bride’s head obscured and vague like that of a goddess, a sacred statue, or a corpse—the
menace
of a bride coming down the aisle, to gobble up the quaking groom and, for dessert, his best man. It breaks my heart not to see my daughter married. But I disapprove so thoroughly of this particular ceremony whereby your lovely erect and shining womanhood bows low to this callow spoiled Dutch boy (his finger in quite the wrong dike) and his obese parents that my presence there would create a spiritual irritant if not a vocal objection ringing off the scandalized church rafters. You don’t say what kind of church the vain Warthogs favor; my intuition says not the sturdy Reformed faith that gave us all those gorgeous Rembrandt blacks and tidy tiled interiors but sneaky snobby Catholic, so watered down by these Dutch theologians one reads about being nearly excommunicated all the time that you’ve never
noticed
your in-laws’ Papism until now that it’s too late, and no doubt they’ll want you to convert, smilingly assuring you that it’s just a formality and doesn’t mean a
thing
. Thus the Old World reclaims the New and rescinds its beautiful promise of liberty. What Catholicism means to you, my dear, is incessantly more pregnancies—Jan is himself the baby of six, you told me—until by
mutual understanding your husband wanders off to deposit his sperm in the famous red-light district or else in some querulous but spermicidal mistress whose progeny are no priest’s business. And you, my poor Pearl, where will you find happiness then, as the little warthogs swarm around you and their paternal grandparents, smelling of rancid hops, lower over you like two rainclouds and all around you the air is thick with the ugliest language in Christendom? If you ever seek to vary your entertainment as Jan does his, you have a world of flat-headed Dutchmen to choose a lover from. You will be saddled with
respectability
—respectability more oppressive and muggy than any form of bourgeois self-enthrallment that has ever taken root in America, where at least one can always go west or make a wisecrack. No wisecracks in Holland—just boors and beers and burghers and bores.

Let’s hope I’m quite wrong. Have a lovely wedding. At some point in life a woman becomes her own mother and you have reached it sooner than I did. Even if I could stomach the jet lag and Lowlands humidity I by no means wish to encounter your father, who might slap a subpoena on me before giving the blushing and bulging bride away. He imagines all sorts of legal wrongs from his helpless old helpmeet. So let this be his circus, while I watch my gallant circus here slowly fold its tents and put its elephants to bed. The ashram’s days feel numbered. Do drop a note to your grandmother to tell her she’s becoming a great-.
She
is being romanced by some antique fraud the Navy let out of mothballs and may have some rude news of her own. For the baby’s sake, take lots of vitamin B-complex and
zinc
—zinc for all life-changes that involve metabolism.

See? For all your naughtiness I am still

Your loving Mother

Nov. 22

Dear Mother,

Your daughter has been most cruelly deceived! Thinking I was achieving vidya, I have been floating in a sea of avidya. My disillusion came about in this way:

There have been officials of all stripes and flavors hustling in and out of here legally picking the bones of our beautiful disintegrating Buddha Field. Prominent among them have been these men from the Immigration and Naturalization Service of the Department of Justice accusing us of immigration fraud. Our dear U.S., as you in South Florida know, has gone from being a global void that had to bribe people to come or else drag them here on slave ships to being a kind of last chance in a world of economic misery. Maybe the world has always been economically miserable—why would anyone
work
otherwise?—but people didn’t use to know it and now they do. Rather close as distances go out here is the border with Sonora in Mexico and apparently a number of our sannyasins were wetbacks of this utterly dry kind, since they’ve come in across the desert, smuggled in trucks and boxcars and some of them fried to death, poor souls. Also, from the India days, the ashram has a number of Europeans—mostly West Germans, Swedes, Danes, and Walloons—somehow Mediterranean Catholics don’t need Buddha, maybe because they have the Virgin Mary with
her
sweet smile—who evidently pretended to be married to American sannyasins or who really
were
married but the INS claims insincerely, just to get by immigration. How they measure the sincerity of a marriage I’d love to know. So as all these people were being grilled and weeded out and tagged for shipment back to place of national origin I began to wonder why the Master himself, the Arhat,
seemed immune from deportation even though he was from India, which I am sure is near the bottom of the list of the Immigration Service’s favorite countries.

Well, I was with my dear friend Alinga—I think I wrote to you or somebody all about her: from Iowa, lanky, spacy, pretty in a willowy pale way, very supportive to me back in the days when I was being promoted from the backhoe and the artichokes—and I mentioned this minor miracle to her and the corners of her lips turned up in a provocative way she has and she said she’d assumed I knew by now. Knew what?
Knew that the Arhat’s real name was Art Steinmetz
, and that he was from
Massachusetts
—Watertown, to be exact.
Watertown
, Mother!

Actually I make it sound as if she told me on the spot but it took several days of campaigning on my part, playing it cozy and not pressing until we were really relaxed together and it could kind of slide out. Evidently he
did
go to India and did learn Hindi and Sanskrit and some Pali and study yoga but this was all from about 1965 and then all through the Seventies, but before that he was just one more bright good Jewish boy, who even put in a few terms at Northeastern studying sales engineering and business administration before the peace movement got to him and he took off. Just think, all those times I rode the Green Line out to the MFA to be ravished by the Impressionists once more I might have passed him in that crowd of sullen-looking students always clustering there on Huntington Avenue! Though I’ve always revered him as this ageless rishi he’s actually not quite my age, a year younger if he was twenty when he went to India the year after I was married, which might explain certain things about our relationship—the way he somehow looked
up
to me as well as down, and brought out my mothering instinct as well as being
my Master. I’m all confused. He’s not even Jewish, technically, since his mother was Armenian—you know there’s that big Armenian community in Watertown, just as you cross the Cambridge line along Mount Auburn Street, past the Cemetery—and that might give him that Asiatic quality I was so sure he had. Unlike Daddy, I never was much good at identifying ethnic types. Remember how he could tell all the way across a ballroom an Irishman from a Yankee, and spot Jews where nobody else saw them, without really being nasty about it (Daddy) but just factual, by his lights? I’m truly confused but as Alinga says,
Ko veda?
The Arhat either opened us up and got rid of our ego garbage or he didn’t, and if he did (and he certainly did in my case) who cares about race or place of national origin?—it’s all maya anyway. I know she’s right intellectually but still I feel
deceived
. I gave myself to him
totally
and where I thought there was this great everything, this mahat, there was nothing
—shunya
. Of course one of the truths of the Eightfold Way is that the void is the plenum and vice versa, but you probably don’t want to hear about that. Maybe thanks to you and Daddy I’m such an incorrigible snob it’s simply the idea that he’s from Watertown—if it were Newton or Belmont or even Arlington I might not mind half so much. But I can’t believe I haven’t burned away even that much petty prejudice in these seven months. I still love him, of course. Maybe it’s the idea that in all our intimacy—I’ve been seeing him nearly every day, composing letters and consulting and lately just commiserating—he kept up this pretense and said everything to me in this funny high-pitched singsong accent. While I was responding with my whole heart, with my honest voice. I mean, how big a fool can your daughter be?