The Genius and the Goddess

  “Did she suspect anything?” I asked.

  “She probably suspected everything,” Rivers answered.

  “But I thought you were being sensible.”

  “We were. But Ruth had always been jealous of her mother. And now her mother had hurt her, and at the same time she knew—theoretically, of course, but in terms of the most violent and overblown language—the sort of things that happen when men and women like one another. Ache of purple pulses; lips intertwisted and bitten. Etcetera. Even if nothing had ever happened between Katy and me, she’d have believed that it had, and hated us accordingly, hated us with this new, more implacable kind of hate. In the past her hates had never lasted for more than a day or two. This time it was different. The hatred was unrelenting. For days on end she refused to talk to us, but sat there, through every meal, in a black silence, pregnant with unspoken criticisms and condemnations. Poor little Ruth! Dolores-Salome was, of course, a fiction, but a fiction founded on the solid facts of puberty. In outraging the fiction Katy and I, in our different ways, had outraged something real, something that was a living part of the child’s personality. She had come home with her perfume and her make-up, with her brand-new breasts and her brand-new vocabulary, with her Algernon’s notions and Oscar’s sentiments—had come home full of vaguely wonderful expectations, vaguely horrifying apprehensions; and what had happened to her? The insult of being treated as what, in fact, she still was: an irresponsible child. The outrage of not being taken seriously. The hurt and humiliation of finding herself rejected by the man she had chosen as her victim and Bluebeard, in favor of another woman—and, to make matters worse, the other woman was her own mother. Was it any wonder that all my efforts to laugh or cajole her out of her black mood were unavailing? ‘Leave her alone’ was Katy’s advice. ‘Let her stew in her own juice, until she gets sick of it.’ But the days passed and Ruth showed no signs of getting sick of it. On the contrary, she seemed to be enjoying the bitter tastes of wounded pride, of jealousy and suspicion. And then, about a week after the children’s return, something happened that turned chronic grievance into the acutest, the most ferocious animosity.

  “Henry was now well enough to sit up, to walk about his room. A few days more, and he would be fully convalescent. ‘Let him spend a few weeks in the country,’ the doctor advised. But what with the bad weather in early spring, what with Katy’s absence in Chicago, the week-end farmhouse had been closed since Christmas. Before it could be lived in again, it would have to be aired and dusted and provisioned. ‘Let’s go and do the job tomorrow,’ Katy suggested to me one morning at breakfast. Startlingly, like a prairie dog popping out of its burrow, Ruth emerged from the depths of her malevolent silence. Tomorrow, she muttered angrily, she’d be at school. And that, Katy answered, was why tomorrow would be such a good day for doing the necessary chores. No work-shy poetesses mooning around and getting in the way. ‘But I must come,’ Ruth insisted with a strange kind of muffled violence. ‘Must?’ Katy echoed. ‘Why must?’ Ruth looked at her mother for a moment, then dropped her eyes. ‘Because…’ she began, thought better of it and broke off. ‘Because I want to,’ she concluded lamely. Katy laughed and told her not to be silly. ‘We’ll get off early,’ she said, turning back to me, ‘and take a picnic basket.’ The child turned very pale, tried to eat her toast but couldn’t swallow, asked to be excused and, without waiting for an answer, got up and ran out of the room. When I saw her again that afternoon, her face was a mask, blank but somehow menacing, of controlled hostility.”

  From outside, in the hall, I had heard the creak of the front door being opened, then the bang of its closing. And now there was the sound of footsteps and low voices. Rivers broke off and looked at his watch.

  “Only ten after eleven,” he said, and shook his head. Then, raising his voice, “Molly!” he called. “Is that you?”

  Open on a square of smooth white skin, on pearls and the bodice of a scarlet evening gown, a mink coat appeared in the doorway. Above it was a young face that would have been beautiful, if its expression had been less bitterly sullen.

  “Was it a nice party?” Rivers asked.

  “Stinking,” said the young woman. “That’s why we’re home so early. Isn’t it, Fred?” she added, turning to a dark-haired young man who had followed her into the room. The young man gave her a look of cold distaste, and turned away. “Isn’t it?” she repeated more loudly, with a note in her voice almost of anguish.

  A faint smile appeared on the averted face and there was a shrug of the broad shoulders, but no answer.

  Rivers turned to me.

  “You’ve met my little Molly, haven’t you?”

  “When she was so high.”

  “And this,” he waved his hand in the direction of the dark young man, “is my son-in-law, Fred Shaughnessy.”

  I said I was pleased to meet him; but the young man didn’t even look at me. There was a silence.

  Molly drew a jeweled hand across her eyes.

  “I’ve got a splitting headache,” she muttered. “Guess I’ll go to bed.”

  She started to walk away; then halted and, with what was evidently an enormous effort, brought herself to say, “Good night.”

  “Good night,” we said in chorus. But she was already gone. Without a word, as though he were a gunman on her trail, the young man turned and followed her. Rivers sighed profoundly.

  “They’ve got to the point,” he said, “where sex seems pretty dull unless it’s the consummation of a quarrel. And that, if you please, is little Bimbo’s destiny. Either life as the child of a divorced mother with a succession, until she loses her looks, of lovers or husbands. Or else life as the child of two parents who ought to be divorced but can never separate because they share an unavowable taste for torturing and being tortured. And there’s nothing in either eventuality that I can do about it. Whatever happens, the child has got to go through hell. Maybe he’ll emerge all the better and stronger for it. Maybe he’ll be utterly destroyed. Who knows? Certainly not these boys!” He pointed with the stem of his pipe at a long shelf of Freudians and Jungians. “Psychology fiction! It makes pleasant reading, it’s even rather instructive. But how much does it explain? Everything except the essentials, everything except the two things that finally determine the course of our lives, Predestination and Grace. Look at Molly, for example. She had a mother who knew how to love without wanting to possess. She had a father who at least had sense enough to try to follow his wife’s example. She had two sisters who were happy as children and grew up to be successful wives and mothers. There were no quarrels in the household, no chronic tensions, no tragedies or explosions. By all the rules of psychology fiction, Molly ought to be thoroughly sane and contented. Instead of which…” He left the sentence unfinished. “And then there’s the other kind of Predestination. Not the inner Predestination of temperament and character, but the Predestination of events—the kind of Predestination that lay in wait for me and Ruth and Katy. Even through the wrong end of the opera glasses one doesn’t like to look at it.”

  There was a long silence, which I did not presume to break.

  “Well,” he said at last, “let’s get back to Ruth; let’s get back to that afternoon of the day before the picnic. I came home from the laboratory, and there was Ruth in the living room, reading. She didn’t look up as I came in, so I put on my breeziest bedside manner and said, ‘Hullo, kiddums!’ She turned and gave, me a long, unsmiling, balefully blank look, then went back to her book. This time I tried a literary gambit. ‘Have you been writing any more poetry?’ I asked. ‘Yes, I have,’ she said emphatically, and there was a little smile on her face more baleful even than the previous blankness. ‘May I see it?’ To my great surprise, she said yes. The thing wasn’t quite finished; but tomorrow without fail. I forgot all about the promise; but the next morning, sure enough, as she was leaving for school, Ruth handed me one of her mauve envelopes. ‘Here it is,’ she said. ‘I hope you’ll like it.’ And giving me another mena
cing smile, she hurried after Timmy. I was too busy to read the poem immediately, so I slipped the envelope into my pocket and went on with the job of loading the car. Bedding, cutlery, kerosene—I piled the stuff in. Half an hour later we were off. Beulah shouted good-bye from the front steps, Henry waved at us from an upstairs window. Katy waved back and blew a kiss. ‘I feel like John Gilpin,’ she said happily as we turned out of the driveway. ‘All agog to dash through thick and thin.’ It was one of those lyrical days in early May, one of those positively Shakespearean mornings. There had been rain in the night, and now all the trees were curtseying to a fresh wind; the young leaves glittered like jewels in the sunlight; the great marbly clouds on the horizons were something Michelangelo had dreamed in a moment of ecstatic happiness and superhuman power. And then there were the flowers. Flowers in the suburban gardens, flowers in the woods and fields beyond; and every flower had the conscious beauty of a beloved face, and its fragrance was a secret from the Other World; its petals had the smoothness, under the fingers of my imagination, the silky coolness and resilience of living skin. It goes without saying, of course, that we were still being sensible. But the world was tipsy with its own perfections, crazy with excess of life. We did our work, we ate our picnic lunch, we smoked our cigarettes on deck chairs in the sun. But the sun was too hot and we decided to finish our nap indoors; and then what anybody could have told us would happen duly happened…. Happened, as I suddenly discovered between two ecstasies, under the eyes of a three-quarter-length portrait of Henry Maartens, commissioned and presented to him by the directors of some big electrical company that had profited by his professional advice, and so monstrous in its photographic realism that it had been relegated to the spare bedroom at the farm. It was one of those portraits that are always looking at you, like Big Brother in Orwell’s 1984. I turned my head, and there it was in its black cutaway coat, solemnly glaring—the very embodiment of public opinion, the painted symbol and projection of my own guilty conscience. And next to the portrait was a Victorian wardrobe with a looking-glass door that reflected the tree outside the window and, within the room, part of the bed, part of the two bodies dappled with sunlight and the moving shadows of oak leaves. ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ But here, what with the portrait and the mirror, there was no possibility of ignorance. And the knowledge of what we had done became even more disquieting when, half an hour later, as I put on my jacket, I heard the crackle of stiff paper in a side pocket, and remembered Ruth’s mauve envelope. The poem, this time, was a narrative, in four-line stanzas, a kind of ballad about two adulterers, a faithless wife and her lover, before the bar of God at the Last Judgment. Standing there in the huge, accusing silence, they feel themselves being stripped by invisible hands of all their disguises, garment after garment, until at last they’re stark naked. More than stark naked, indeed; for their resurrected bodies are transparent. Lights and liver, bladder and guts, every organ, with its specific excrement—all, all are revoltingly visible. And suddenly they find that they are not alone, but on a stage, under spotlights, in the midst of millions of spectators, tier on tier of them, retching with uncontrollable disgust as they look, or jeering, denouncing, calling for vengeance, howling for the whip and the branding iron. There was a kind of Early Christian malignity about the piece, which was all the more terrifying because Ruth had been brought up completely outside the pale of that hideous kind of fundamentalism. Judgment, hell, eternal punishment—these weren’t things she’d been taught to believe in. They were notions she had adopted for her own special purposes, in order to express what she felt about her mother and myself. Jealousy, to begin with; jealousy and rebuffed love, hurt vanity, angry resentment. And the resentment had to be given a respectable motive, the anger transformed into righteous indignation. She suspected the worst of us so that she might be justified in feeling the worst. And she suspected the worst so vehemently that, in next to no time, she wasn’t guessing any more, she knew that we were guilty. And, knowing it, the child in her was outraged, the woman felt more bitterly, vengefully jealous than before. With a horrible sinking of the heart, a mounting terror in the face of an incalculable future, I read the thing to the end, read it again, then turned to where Katy was sitting before the mirror on the dressing table, pinning up her hair, smiling at the radiantly smiling image of a goddess, and humming a tune out of The Marriage of Figaro. Dove sono i bei momenti Di dolcezza e di piacer? I had always admired that divine unconcern of hers, that Olympian je m’en foutisme. Now, suddenly, it enraged me. She had no right not to be feeling what the reading of Ruth’s poem had made me feel. ‘Do you want to know,’ I said, ‘why our little Ruthy has been acting the way she has? Do you want to know what she really thinks of us?’ And crossing the room, I handed her the two sheets of purple notepaper on which the child had copied out her poem. Katy started to read. Studying her face I saw the original look of amusement (for Ruth’s poetry was a standing joke in the family) give place to an expression of serious, concentrated attention. Then a vertical wrinkle appeared on the forehead between the eyes. The frown deepened and, as she turned to the second page, she bit her lip. The goddess, after all, was vulnerable…. I had scored my point; but it was a poor sort of triumph that ended with there being two bewildered rabbits in the trap instead of one. And it was the kind of trap that Katy was totally unequipped to get out of. Most uncomfortable situations she just ignored, just sailed through as though they didn’t exist. And in effect, if she went on ignoring them long enough and serenely enough, they stopped existing. The people she had offended forgave her, because she was so beautiful and good-humored; the people who had worried themselves sick, or made complications for others, succumbed to the contagion of her godlike indifference and momentarily forgot to be neurotic or malignant. And when the technique of being serenely unaware didn’t work, there was her other gambit—the technique of rushing in where angels fear to tread; the technique of being gaily tactless, of making enormous bloomers in all innocence and simplicity, of uttering the most unmentionable truths with the most irresistible of smiles. But this was a case where neither of these methods would work. If she said nothing, Ruth would go on acting as she had acted up till now. And if she rushed in and said everything, God only knew what a disturbed adolescent might do. And meanwhile there was Henry to think of, there was her own future as the sole and, we were all convinced, the utterly indispensable support of a sick genius and his children. Ruth was in the position, and might even now be in the mood, to pull down the whole temple of their lives for the sake of spiting her mother. And there was nothing that a woman who had the temperament of a goddess, without the goddess’s omnipotence, could do about it. There was, however, something that I could do; and as we discussed our situation—for the first time, remember, since there had been a situation to discuss!—it became more and more clear what that something was. I could do what I had felt I ought to do after that first apocalyptic night—clear out.