The Love Children (29 page)

I don't know how Brad felt. Six months earlier, he would have
been crushed if Bishop left; but now he was more buddy-buddy with Bert, siding with him in family conflicts. There was something different in the way the two of them heard this news from how the rest of us took it. Having an ally had softened Bert a little, made him a little less rigid and insistent on doing things his own way. Maybe the two of them felt a bit relieved that their new bond would not be strained by Bishop's magnetism. Brad seemed to me to react with an edge of bitterness, as though he were a rejected lover. But maybe I was imagining it. Bert didn't seem to care, one way or another. Both of them turned away with something cold in their hearts, while the rest of us congratulated our favorite members, inwardly grieving and sympathizing with each other at losing them.

As for Bishop himself, I don't know if he was upset about the Brad-Bert alliance, but I was willing to bet he was relieved. He and Rebecca were so close, so loving, they really had no room for anyone else. And of course he had me too; I would take Bishop's side on any issue.

Bishop and Rebecca worked especially hard that summer, as if to prove that their hearts were still with us. They carefully avoided discussing their college plans, until after supper on a Monday night at the end of August. Then they went around the table telling each of us how special we were, then said good-bye, having quietly packed the night before. They took Rebecca's truck, leaving one less vehicle at the farm (that hurt), kissed us all, and promised to see us later in the week. We all stood out in front of the house. Tears streamed down my cheeks and Bernice's.

Bishop was resuming college in his sophomore year, Rebecca in her junior year. They were taking what was considered three-quarter time and planned to do their library research in Amherst, so they would bring almost nothing of college back to Pax with them. They tried to arrive in time for supper on Thursday evening,
after which they worked and talked only of Pax matters. Their ambition was hopeless, of course, but they were as discreet about their schooling as if it were a love affair.

They both did well enough that UMass offered them full scholarships for the following year if they would attend full time. By then they had scouted the job market down there and found work. They could join the collective where they rented the room—of course the other commune had counted on that. They were such adorable people, everyone wanted them. They would have to leave Pax.

Bernice, Cynthia, Lysanne, and I cried, and even Stepan had wet cheeks on the Saturday morning in August 1974 when Bish and Bec packed their gear into the truck and left us for the last time. We had lost our sanest member, Rebecca, and our sweetest, Bishop. But in April that year, a new woman had arrived, Lolly Hunt, a southerner with great charm and with some knowledge of farming—she'd lived on a farm in Alabama as a youngster. So we went on.

During the year Bish and Bec were part time in Amherst, we finally had phone service installed. We needed it with them gone, to ask them things only they knew, like where the honing blade was and what medication to give the stallion when he was in a fit. Having a phone was great: Mom and I could now talk as well as write. I'd call and let the phone ring three times, then hang up. She'd know it was me and call back and we'd talk for an hour. I'd been writing her ten- and twelve-page letters since I'd arrived, but I missed hearing her voice. She drove up to see me the first summer I was away and stayed with us for a weekend; the next time she came she stayed at a motel in Great Barrington.

In 1974, soon after Nixon resigned, Mom got involved with a new man, Moss Halley, a divorced lawyer who practiced in Cambridge and had an apartment there and who, she said, had great
humor. I was glad she had someone in her life, but his presence unavoidably became another wedge separating us. I was forgetting Mom!

I forgot Dad too. I hardly ever heard from him, although I wrote him every once in a while. He wrote me once, to tell me they were giving him a retrospective in New York, at the Guggenheim. That was a triumph for him and even Mom went to see it. Julie wrote me a sweet letter about nothing. Then, in 1975, I got a letter in which she apologized to me for leaving Dad, as if I would be angry with her for it. She said she had to leave because she couldn't make him happy. Irene Templer, Mom's friend from Vermont, told Mom that Julie had divorced him on the grounds of “abusive behavior.” I didn't know exactly what that meant. By now,
sexual harassment
and
abusive behavior
were terms frequently seen in the papers, popularized by the women's liberation movement. But I didn't know what they meant specifically. Did she mean that Dad had gone completely off his rocker and hit her? Or that he was just his old yelling self, exploding every night over some imagined betrayal? Or was it that he retreated into sullen silence for days at a time? Whatever, she'd already left him. She was in New York, where her sister lived, and was taking a course at Pratt. She was a lighthearted person, and I knew she'd be fine wherever she was. I meant to answer her, but somehow never got around to it.

I lived so far outside the world that I had no interest in it. I was immersed in my plants and the people I lived with and I was completely satisfied, except for an occasional pang of guilt about selfishly cultivating my garden and ignoring my civic responsibilities, whatever they were. The only mirror at Pax was the small, cloudy one over the bathroom sink, and I rarely really looked at myself. But I felt that I radiated virtue. I believed that the commune was an innocent, pure world. Our virtue lay in our poverty,
which was voluntary, and in our exercise of democracy in its truest form in our daily life. We were pure because we lived so austerely. My hands were calloused and red, I was sunburned all spring and summer (my face and neck and forearms at least), and maybe I looked older than I was, but I was utterly contented. I was living the life I had longed for when I was a little girl reading the Little House books. I remembered my satisfaction at helping to build a latrine one summer when I'd gone away to camp. Our life gave me that same joy. When you're encompassed by necessity, you don't suffer from ambiguity and doubt. They are luxurious diseases not caught by people who don't have leisure. I didn't miss them any more than I missed furs and jewels—which I'd never had or wanted.

 

From the first, even before they definitively left, I knew that Bishop and Rebecca were doing the right thing. They were too smart to spend their lives at Pax. It was a waste of their intellects. So what about mine? I had continued to write poetry, but with increasing dissatisfaction: I felt I didn't know enough to do it well. I decided to learn something about it.

My time could not be spared in the spring and early summer, but I had plenty in the winter. I didn't want to drive all the way to Amherst, so I signed up for a course in modern American poetry at a community college in Pittsfield, which was only about half an hour away. I went several times in the fall of 1974, but the class was poor. The level of teaching was too low, even for me. So in the spring semester I transferred to Simon's Rock in Great Barrington, a longer drive but not as far as Amherst.

Simon's Rock was designed for young students and I stuck out. But the teaching was better. We read Frost and Stevens and Williams and Moore and Lowell and Bishop. I decided that I would continue and study Yeats and Pound and Eliot. I took
only one course at a time. Getting a degree was not important to me.

Meanwhile, as time went on, the impact of Bishop and Rebecca's departure became more evident. The mix had changed, and that seemed to change all the relationships. The two new people, Bert and Lolly, were so different from the people they replaced that we became a different community. Brad, who had the cachet of an original founder, and therefore maybe some more authority than the rest of us, had always been tempered by Bishop, softened by Bish's sweetness. Bert had the opposite effect on Brad, bringing out all his hard angles. Bert's silences were powerful; he didn't speak, but he looked a lot—and how he looked was askance. It was as if he disapproved of everything, all the time. But when I studied his eyes, I saw a life I wouldn't want to live; I saw a person who, when I thought of how he spent his days, I couldn't imagine. It was as though he was in hell and I could see it but couldn't reach him there, couldn't help to pull him out.

Bernice and Cynthia, who were rather dull, had been brightened by Rebecca's intelligence and kept in balance by her sanity. Lolly had neither; she had been wandering for years, and soon after she arrived it became clear that what she was seeking was an attachment to a man. I wondered if I had been like her once—just like Sandy had suggested. But whereas a man meant to me a center for my affection, a home, men meant power, even survival, to Lolly. This was the single piece of wisdom she'd filtered out of whatever her past had been. I watched her in fascination. Without a man, she would drown; you could see this in her empty blue eyes, the desperation of her carmine mouth—even on the commune, she was never without her dark red lipstick. She didn't attach herself to the women, but floated from one man to another. She tried Bishop first, but that was a waste of her time: he was impervious to flirtation, being as guileless as
a three-year-old and utterly in love with Rebecca. So she tried Stepan, who was the most accessible of the others. He was flattered, wary, guilt-ridden, and afraid that I would explode. She played with him for a while, considering, but I gave her pretty strong competition, and besides, once she saw how the land lay at Pax, she moved to the hard men, who presumably had the power—whatever power she endowed them with in her mind. She didn't approach them directly; she hovered, observing them. They knew it and were flattered, but too steeped in steely manhood to respond.

I thought she would end up with Bert eventually, but I lost interest in the drama in all the activity of my poetry course and the impending departure of Bishop and Rebecca. And nothing changed until after they left. Then Lolly, I noticed, started to do more than her share of kitchen duty, seeming to show up when either Bert or Brad was on the roster. At first I assumed they had switched with her; later I decided they paid her to do their work (they both hated kitchen duty). She was penniless when she joined us and Brad suggested she pay a little more into the kitty every week than other people in lieu of an investment. Brad and Bert always had more spending money than other people, I never knew exactly how. But if they were paying her, they were subverting the principle of a commune, and Bernice and Cynthia and I called a meeting to complain.

Lysanne was (as always) apathetic, but the men said they had the right to do with their private money what they liked, that Lolly didn't mind doing this work and they did, so they would no longer do kitchen duty and that was that.

We were incredulous. “Brad!” Bernice protested, “You of all people to undermine commune principles! Everybody shares equally in work and reward, remember?”

“Marx said it: from each according to his ability, to each
according to his need,” Brad intoned. “
Critique of the Gotha Program
, 1875. Kitchen work is not one of my abilities.”

“And carpentry is not mine, but I do it!” Bernice exclaimed in fury.

“We all do everything!” Cynthia yelled. “We always have! Now that Bishop's gone you think you can ram things down our throats!”

Brad sat back and folded his arms. “Like it or leave it.”

Bert looked on with a small smile on his face—Bert, who never smiled. Then Bert the Silent spoke: “What difference does it make to you?” he sneered. “You're not having to do extra work.”

Everyone looked at Lolly, who was in part responsible for this coup. She sat looking up from under her eyebrows like a naughty child and said, in her child's voice, “Girls, I can't help it, I don't have any money and I don't have any skills except kitchen work. This is the best way I can pay for myself. Don't be mad at me, please.”

We were, but we couldn't do anything about it.

The men won that battle, but they had unknowingly set in motion events that would lose them the war. It didn't happen right away. Brad savored his victory and what it meant to him. We women knew that he considered kitchen work women's work, and that was why he hated it so much. Once he no longer was subjected to the humiliation of the duty roster, he began to see himself in a new light and, gradually, began to carry himself differently. By January 1975, Brad was swaggering around like Big Daddy, and Bert had fallen into sidekick position, his enforcer. At family meetings, Brad was now acting as though he was in charge, when the whole principle was that we were all equal. But with Bert's support and the only other man weak-spined Stepan, trained by the USSR to obey in passive silence, he felt unthreatened. He had no respect for women, and no matter what we said,
he treated us like unimportant servants and acted like a patriarch.

It was no longer pleasant to be there, and we women lived and worked under a cloud. Cynthia left: Mr. Howard had divorced his wife and Cynthia moved with him to California, where he bought a ranch they would manage. We got two or three letters from her before we lost touch. Stepan and I were still together but uneasy about it. I didn't trust his feelings for me, and he felt unmanned and blamed me for it. The sexual division at Pax was the same as it had been when I joined, three men, four women. But now one of the women was Lolly.

It was winter and I was deeply involved in my courses at Simon's Rock. I was reading Wallace Stevens and, in a philosophy course, Plato's dialogues. I went to school and worked at the market and did my kitchen chores at Pax, but I was as engaged with the kids at school and the people I worked with at the market as I was with the folks at Pax. There I was a fire down to the embers, barely present. In another month, I would have to plant seeds for my herb garden, but I couldn't even muster up the heart to look at catalogs. I kept putting it off. I rarely went to Stepan's room at night, preferring to read late and smoke in my room. Stepan had quit smoking, and he preferred I smoke elsewhere. If he entertained Lolly in my absence, I didn't know it.