Superior Women (16 page)

In that way she could clarify her connection with Lavinia, once and for all; they would have it out, as the girls sometimes did in the old boarding-school books that she and Cathy talked about,
those
four girls—and at that moment beautiful rich Lavinia would be exposed for the wicked person that she truly is.

However, Megan does not tell Lavinia anything about Jackson Clay; they do not have anything out, and the moment passes, or nearly, but not before clever (rich and beautiful, wicked) Lavinia has read a little of Megan’s mind. “You’re not telling me something, baby Megan,” Lavinia croons. “Mustn’t keep things back!”

“Really, there’s nothing to tell. Honestly, I haven’t done a thing but study lately. I’m turning into one of those grinds. Soon I’ll look just like Vince.”

As usual, in her way Lavinia has been right: even apart from (well, quite aside from) Jackson Clay, there is something else that Megan is not telling, which is her increasing obsession with the works of Henry James.

She began, as in academic circumstances so many do, with
The Portrait of a Lady,
which she liked very much, but no more, perhaps, than many favorite novels. Then, though, she read all the later novels, starting with
The Ambassadors,
and from then on everything by James that she could find, the stories, introductions, notebooks, travel notes—a considerable undertaking, even an impressive one.

And that obsession, that literary mania has for Megan the magnitude of an actual move to another culture; it has, in her life, an impact comparable to that of moving from California to New England. This is a move to the climate of Henry James. Her mind has become filled with vistas of perfectly smooth green lawns, large houses, long conversations at tea and over formal dinners, and everywhere manners so exquisite that the slightest deviation from that perfection has the force of an earthquake. Gilbert Osmund
seated, as Mme. Merle is standing. And what is more exhilarating even, to Megan, than the perfection of lawns and the length and frequency of conversations, the perfection of manners—more thrilling still is the Jamesian exaltation of personality, the infinitude of human possibilities, the personal capacity for grandeur. Very heady stuff, to a girl from Palo Alto High.

But, to see the world in Jamesian terms, or rather, to imagine that one lives in such a world, can impose some fairly strange distortions on ordinary life—and so it is with Megan. Certain people, including Cathy and her grimy new friends, and certain circumstances, such as not having five dollars for a new sweater that one wants, must be simply and absolutely ignored.

Lavinia, however, in a Jamesian way becomes considerably more interesting. She is perfect for a certain sort of antiheroine: richly evil, infinitely manipulative. Megan now spends more time with Lavinia than formerly she did, thus (possibly spuriously) motivated. They have long conversations; Megan notes Lavinia’s perfection of manner.

And Megan, as a friend for Lavinia, at this particular time in Lavinia’s life, her “free” pre-engaged senior year, works out well too. Megan is interested, admiring, noncensorious (or so Lavinia believes), and undemanding. Almost anyone else would expect to be included in Lavinia’s life, at various lunches or teas at the Ritz, for example; Megan seems to like to hear about such occasions, but she would never imagine or presume her own inclusion. Or so Lavinia imagines.

Thus, with their somewhat conflicting, erroneous but convenient ideas of each other, the two young women become even closer friends, that spring and summer of 1945, and from then on into another vibrantly beautiful New England fall, during which Lavinia continues her clandestine connection with Russell Finnerty, but manages to preserve both her virginity and her engagement to
Potter Cobb. And Megan discusses Henry James with her tutor, and the thesis that she intends to write, on the significance of private incomes in Henry James. Megan, the ardent disciple, fears that this is rather a vulgar choice of topic, but her tutor, a young Marxist, assures her that it is both original and of great potential interest.

Meanwhile, the war in Europe ends, the bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, then Nagasaki, and then that war is over too, and the end of the world has quite possibly begun.

Megan plans not to go home for Christmas, that winter of 1945. She will stay in Cambridge and work on her thesis for most of the time, and then of course she will be going down to Washington for at least a few days, for some of Lavinia’s announcement Christmas parties.

She also spends Thanksgiving in the dorm, and very much alone, Lavinia having gone home to begin arrangements for the coming season, and even Cathy off to Somerville, with Vince. But Megan’s thesis, just begun, is going well, excitingly, and the weather is golden and lovely. She is less lonely than she might have been, in fact hardly lonely at all. She looks forward to Christmas and then more distantly to June, the receiving of Honors.

Soon after Thanksgiving, though, when Lavinia is just back from D.C., Lavinia and Megan have what is to Megan a curious conversation. It has to do with Peg, big Peg, who of course is married now, and the mother of twin daughters. She is living in a place called Midland, Texas.

“Poor Peglet,” Lavinia sighs. Once more, she has just come in from a late encounter with Russell Finnerty, and she is a little tipsy. Conveniently for her, Potter is spending a lot of time down in New York, being interviewed up and down Wall Street, as Lavinia in her amused, pleased way likes to put it. “Poor poor Peglet,” Lavinia repeats. “She thinks she just may be preggers
again. Honestly, that Cameron must be some kind of a stallion.” Lavinia giggles sexily. “I’ve told her she absolutely can’t be, though. I can’t have a pregnant matron at my wedding.”

Peg, then, is to be matron of honor? Not knowing how to respond to what seems startling news, Megan is silent.

Slightly tipsier than usual, Lavinia fails to notice this silence, or to find it significant. She giggles again, and then she says, again, “Honestly, that Cameron must be a real stallion. They must do it all the time. But just wait until next summer, little Megan. I can tell you all about married love, and I will, I promise.”

It occurs to Megan to say what Lavinia must know, that you don’t have to “do it all the time” to get pregnant. She does not say that, however. She has just been struck full force with the fact that she herself has in no sense even been asked to be in Lavinia’s wedding. There has been no mention, actually, of her possible attendance, even. Nor has Lavinia made any mention of Megan’s coming down to Washington at Christmas. Engagement parties.

So much for Henry James; I do not belong to his novels, Megan concludes.

Later, lying in bed, in the chilly Cambridge dark, Megan tries to fight off a deep, sharp pain that is somewhere in her chest. You are being ridiculous, she tells herself. Why would you even want to go to a bunch of parties with people you never saw before and very likely would not like? Why would you spend all that money, which you don’t even have, for train tickets and new clothes? And wherever, even, did you get this idea about going down to Washington? Lavinia never said any such thing—it was all in your head, not in hers.

But she is hurt, and it takes her longer to recover from that hurt than she believes it should.

“My mother told me a long time ago,” says Cathy to Megan, “that if you don’t expect very much you’ll never be disappointed.”

This conversation occurs sometime in the middle of the following
spring, the spring of 1946. Christmas has come and gone, Lavinia is back from Washington and is officially engaged. Somehow she and Megan have little time for each other, these days, at least in part because Lavinia, true to her own social rules, no longer goes out with Russell Finnerty; she no longer comes home tipsy, for a final cigarette with Megan on the stairs.

These days, again, Megan and Cathy have schedules that perfectly coincide; they both are writing theses, both studying for finals. Cathy and Vince are still friends too, but they seem to see each other less.

Megan has of course got over her hurt about not going down to Washington—of
course
Lavinia would never have asked her to. She has even been able to tell Cathy about that ludicrous fantasy, which has become another joke between them, and the occasion of Cathy’s remark about her mother’s theory of disappointment. To which Megan responds, “Of course your mother’s absolutely right.”

“Lavinia lives strictly by rules of her own,” Cathy adds. “But of course I guess we all do?”

“I guess. It’s just that hers are really far from mine,” answers Megan, at the same time thinking that very likely Cathy’s (Catholic) rules are also unlike hers, whatever “hers” are. But very likely Cathy and Phil-Flash never actually did it?

Telepathically, it seems to Megan, Cathy then asks, “Can you guess what I got in the mail from Phil-Flash?”

“No.”

“An invitation to his wedding. Can you believe it?”

“No. Oh,
no.
”

This sets them both off laughing, possibly because there is no other available reaction; they literally shriek with laughter, they almost cry, until finally Megan gets out, “I think you should go! We both should go, I’ll go with you. It’s so wonderful, not being invited to Lavinia’s wedding—I wasn’t even invited to George Wharton’s, come to think of it. And going instead to Phil-Flash’s. Whatever shall we wear?”

“Oh, I think both of us in black crepe, don’t you?”

They go on laughing.

•     •     •

In June, both Megan and Cathy graduate with Highest Honors, both Summas, whereas Lavinia is only Cum Laude. But the following week Lavinia, in Washington, is splendidly married to Potter Cobb, unattended by any of her college friends. Her old friend Kitty is her maid of honor, Kitty being only six weeks pregnant, which no one knows, or could possibly see.

Two letters, from the summer of 1946:

One, from Megan Greene, in Palo Alto, to Janet Cohen Marr, in Paris:

Adam Marr, in Paris, to Megan Greene, who is still in Palo Alto:

Megan does just as Adam bids: she takes the day coach, exhaustingly but without adventure to New York, where she does not call anyone she knows: not Simon, who is now married to Phyllis; not Lavinia, who is married to Potter and living in the East Sixties (of course). She does not even call Jackson Clay, who is probably off somewhere on a tour.

From New York to Cherbourg she takes a converted troopship, which is filled with college kids like herself, all off for their first look at Europe, postwar. Megan has three foolish, fairly unpleasant roommates, Holyoke girls, and so she spends most of her nights up
on deck, necking near the lifeboat station with a rather handsome (though chinless) blond boy whom she knew at Harvard, though not very well: Price Christopher, from Toledo, Ohio. Price is going to study at the Sorbonne, something quite grandly called
Cours de la civilisation française.
You just sign up for the course and that way you can collect the G.I. Bill, Price explains. (Which is what Adam Marr must be doing, Megan reckons.) Price has heard that you can get a room on the Left Bank for twenty or thirty dollars a month, and the student restaurants around there are very cheap.

Handsome Price, however, being of an exceptionally calculating nature, has another plan, which he confides to Megan; he has correctly gauged her relative lack of interest in himself, beyond a certain fleeting sexual attraction. He plans to cruise the expensive bars, he says, and he will take in most of the better concerts, check out bookstores, until he meets an attractive French girl, preferably a rich girl, of course; he will move in with her for the duration of his stay in Paris, thus both saving some money and at the same time improving his French. He is so convinced of the feasibility of this plan that Megan believes in it too; of course he will meet such a girl. Megan can almost see her.

The room that Megan herself finds, at last, is three stories up, in the Hotel Welcome, on the Rue de Seine. Its shape is peculiar, trapezoidal. It contains a very wide, low bed, two chairs, a desk, a sink, and a bidet: the French essentials. Its long shuttered windows look out and down on that narrow street, its fishmarkets, galleries, bookstores, and flower stalls, and over to the wider, grander Boulevard St. Germain.