So we have met our editor, at least according to Roberts' Earlier History. At the beginning of the modern age, he is the sober scholar who stands between the incapacitated printer and the public, making sure that what comes off the press is both legible and, in the case of difficult works like Shakespeare, the faithful reproduction of what Genius had long ago set down. We have also brushed against a changing circumstance that eventually helped ensure the editor a permanent place in publishing, long after (one hopes) the printer's drunkenness was no longer a constant problem. At some point, perhaps around the time Jane Austen was being asked to pay for the publication of her third novel even though her first two had been well-received, reputable publishing houses stopped helping writers self-publish. "No" didn't mean no, you will have to pony up; no meant No. Oblivion.
But not yet. Before Jane Austen, the editor is not yet rejecting neophytes' submissions on the grounds that, in his opinion, they are unsellable to the public via the publishing firm he represents, the firm which bears all costs and whose financial health he helps guard. He does not yet stand, squarely and unpleased, between the neophyte and money and fame (however slight).
Before Jane Austen, Harrison Steeves noted: "when issues of 500 copies were expected to show a profit, almost anybody could get almost anything published." When John Dryden needed money to print that translation of Virgil in 1695, he arranged for interested and wealthy parties to pay five guineas a head to have their arms printed at the base of the 102 illustration plates. He and the printer, Jacob Tonson, thus were able to cover costs and bring the book out themselves without using the services of a bookseller at all. Later, a printer, or an author, coped with printing costs via the selling of "subscriptions," variously defined. Readers could subscribe to a printer for a soon-to-be-released book. In short, they pre-ordered, paying half the price up front and half at delivery. By Samuel Johnson's day, a subscription could be something different and very nebulous, something a writer sold to his friends himself. All it amounted to was a man asking his friends for a loan, which he lived upon while he wrote. Eventually, he delivered them the book he had finished by way of repayment. One of Johnson's contemporaries wrote a scurrilous poem about it, criticizing Johnson himself for engaging in this practice. Apparently he was late on delivery.
There was money to be made from the demand of the fee-charging circulating libraries -- we recall that printers themselves had once provided this service to a public that did not want to buy -- and naturally, the spread of literacy increased the demand for books, albeit (with time) books of "lower taste." So, Sir or Madam Author wrote, anything, without the imp on their shoulder who sits there now, whispering or stating as plain fact, "this won't fly...." Sir or Madame Author knew, it seems, that they could reach the public at will. And thus, the crazy idea of the Alcotts and the Disraelis, that the cash strapped could "decide" to write for pay. Tracing the disappearance of that extraordinary circumstance is like watching a lizard-tail disappear into its hole.
Friday, August 29, 2008
Thursday, August 21, 2008
The Invention of the Editor, part 2
From the preface to Patrick Dennis' Auntie Mame --from our modern era, when the writer submits and hopes -- comes this testimony from his wife on the book's journey into print:
"Still, in 1955, no editor had much hope for Mame. One editor whose specialty was humor turned her down twice. The book then began waltzing through publishers, in alphabetic order. But no publisher asked her to dance until Julian Muller, representing V for Vanguard, took the big chance. 'The next choice,' said Pat, 'would have been the Yale University Press.' "
Auntie Mame went on to become a huge bestseller, and was of course turned into "a play, a movie, a musical, and a movie of the musical." The People responded to a book that might just as easily have been denied them, that might have lain in an attic moldering and then been thrown out by uninterested great-nephews decades later. Similar stories are told of J.K. Rowling and her Harry Potter. She is said to have only been accepted, by an associate editor taking home a bundle of manuscripts one weekend, on her eighth or ninth try. To my mind, that's terrific luck. I have kept my Pearls and Roses in a drawer ever since losing count after its fortieth denial. (And George Eliot couldn't face any!) All book publishing firms and all magazine editors, in all their submissions guidelines and in all their rejection letters, admit the same thing: many works of great quality have to be regretfully turned down (why?), every house has editorial needs and every editor is only a human being whose subjective judgment is fallible. I sincerely hope someone else will find this right, etc. Best of luck placing it elsewhere.
Yes, thank you. But logically, then, there must be thousands of manuscript books sitting in people's desk drawers right now, very fine books which simply have not had the luck to appeal to one editor at one firm on one weekend. Logically, there is no explanation for anyone's acceptance at all. (They tell us this, but it takes years to realize they mean it.) At some point, the lucky ones had to have joined the queue and then been plucked out of it. I have been, myself, six times, so what I write is not pure sour grapes and disappointment. Logically, if rejection is just a question of an impressed editor sadly turning aside a fine piece now, then an author willing to wait two or three months, or years, ought eventually to come naturally to the head of the queue. But that is never the answer, either. Meanwhile, the gates of publication remain open to all sorts of, ah, product that fits needs and earns money, but constitutes nothing that will render Austen and Tolstoy, or John Doe or -- who knows? maybe even me -- ridiculous. The editor decides who comes in these gates, and it is still his position and his responsibilities, his very existence, that puzzle me.
A charming old book that I found in a college library helps explain his advent. (There are probably lots of books that explain his advent; but here is the one I found.) It's called The Earlier History of English Bookselling and it was written by one William Roberts, and published in London in 1889. Before the age of printing, Roberts explains, when books were hand-written and illustrated and bound in bejeweled covers, they belonged to monasteries, to the first universities, and to kings. The monasteries and universities took especial care that these treasures did not sell to anyone. In 1373 Oxford University decreed that no one might sell any book worth more than half a mark in value. Monks and dons apparently did not want fine, valuable books lost to the medieval equivalent of private collectors.
With the invention of the printing press, things changed. Books could be churned out with a revolutionary rapidity, and bejeweled covers were not particularly necessary anymore. The steps leading to physical publication were still expensive -- printing, binding, and claspmaking -- but far cheaper and more efficient than the age-old necessities of hand-copying in miniscule and majuscule. Once the book was ready to be sold, the bookseller stood ready to make good money.
He made good money because he had so many publication options at his disposal. No bookseller bothered about copyright issues, but re-printed classics, or indeed printed and re-printed anything, including other sellers' pirated material, including any old dreadful stuff, and including new works to whose writers the bookseller paid nothing, and which he then changed, sold, and re-sold. Booksellers also operated as fee-charging libraries. The public could pay a subscription to come and read books they did not intend to buy. Through all this, the poor Authour scribbled in lofty isolation, as usual.
In Roberts' telling, the editor seems to have made his appearance because the expensive physical task of printing a book was often hampered by the physical problem of the printer being "drunken and ignorant." Booksellers did not have it all easy: they, and writers too, became impatient with smeared glug that the printer simply pressed off in a stupor because he knew how to work the machine. Among the first printers to avail himself of sober editorial help, long before Fanny Burney or Disraeli or Louisa May Alcott wrote and hoped and wept for joy, was Jacob Tonson, a business partner of John Dryden's who had printed Dryden's translations of Virgil in the 1690s. Afterward, Tonson published Caesar and Shakespeare, two long-dead authors whose complexities would seem to call for a sharp eye and a steady wit at the fount.
"Still, in 1955, no editor had much hope for Mame. One editor whose specialty was humor turned her down twice. The book then began waltzing through publishers, in alphabetic order. But no publisher asked her to dance until Julian Muller, representing V for Vanguard, took the big chance. 'The next choice,' said Pat, 'would have been the Yale University Press.' "
Auntie Mame went on to become a huge bestseller, and was of course turned into "a play, a movie, a musical, and a movie of the musical." The People responded to a book that might just as easily have been denied them, that might have lain in an attic moldering and then been thrown out by uninterested great-nephews decades later. Similar stories are told of J.K. Rowling and her Harry Potter. She is said to have only been accepted, by an associate editor taking home a bundle of manuscripts one weekend, on her eighth or ninth try. To my mind, that's terrific luck. I have kept my Pearls and Roses in a drawer ever since losing count after its fortieth denial. (And George Eliot couldn't face any!) All book publishing firms and all magazine editors, in all their submissions guidelines and in all their rejection letters, admit the same thing: many works of great quality have to be regretfully turned down (why?), every house has editorial needs and every editor is only a human being whose subjective judgment is fallible. I sincerely hope someone else will find this right, etc. Best of luck placing it elsewhere.
Yes, thank you. But logically, then, there must be thousands of manuscript books sitting in people's desk drawers right now, very fine books which simply have not had the luck to appeal to one editor at one firm on one weekend. Logically, there is no explanation for anyone's acceptance at all. (They tell us this, but it takes years to realize they mean it.) At some point, the lucky ones had to have joined the queue and then been plucked out of it. I have been, myself, six times, so what I write is not pure sour grapes and disappointment. Logically, if rejection is just a question of an impressed editor sadly turning aside a fine piece now, then an author willing to wait two or three months, or years, ought eventually to come naturally to the head of the queue. But that is never the answer, either. Meanwhile, the gates of publication remain open to all sorts of, ah, product that fits needs and earns money, but constitutes nothing that will render Austen and Tolstoy, or John Doe or -- who knows? maybe even me -- ridiculous. The editor decides who comes in these gates, and it is still his position and his responsibilities, his very existence, that puzzle me.
A charming old book that I found in a college library helps explain his advent. (There are probably lots of books that explain his advent; but here is the one I found.) It's called The Earlier History of English Bookselling and it was written by one William Roberts, and published in London in 1889. Before the age of printing, Roberts explains, when books were hand-written and illustrated and bound in bejeweled covers, they belonged to monasteries, to the first universities, and to kings. The monasteries and universities took especial care that these treasures did not sell to anyone. In 1373 Oxford University decreed that no one might sell any book worth more than half a mark in value. Monks and dons apparently did not want fine, valuable books lost to the medieval equivalent of private collectors.
With the invention of the printing press, things changed. Books could be churned out with a revolutionary rapidity, and bejeweled covers were not particularly necessary anymore. The steps leading to physical publication were still expensive -- printing, binding, and claspmaking -- but far cheaper and more efficient than the age-old necessities of hand-copying in miniscule and majuscule. Once the book was ready to be sold, the bookseller stood ready to make good money.
He made good money because he had so many publication options at his disposal. No bookseller bothered about copyright issues, but re-printed classics, or indeed printed and re-printed anything, including other sellers' pirated material, including any old dreadful stuff, and including new works to whose writers the bookseller paid nothing, and which he then changed, sold, and re-sold. Booksellers also operated as fee-charging libraries. The public could pay a subscription to come and read books they did not intend to buy. Through all this, the poor Authour scribbled in lofty isolation, as usual.
In Roberts' telling, the editor seems to have made his appearance because the expensive physical task of printing a book was often hampered by the physical problem of the printer being "drunken and ignorant." Booksellers did not have it all easy: they, and writers too, became impatient with smeared glug that the printer simply pressed off in a stupor because he knew how to work the machine. Among the first printers to avail himself of sober editorial help, long before Fanny Burney or Disraeli or Louisa May Alcott wrote and hoped and wept for joy, was Jacob Tonson, a business partner of John Dryden's who had printed Dryden's translations of Virgil in the 1690s. Afterward, Tonson published Caesar and Shakespeare, two long-dead authors whose complexities would seem to call for a sharp eye and a steady wit at the fount.
Thursday, July 3, 2008
The Invention of the Editor, part 1
I told him that our friend Goldsmith had said to me, that he had come too late into the world, for that Pope and other poets had taken up the places in the Temple of Fame; so that, as but a few at any period can possess poetical reputation, a man of genius can now hardly acquire it. JOHNSON. 'That is one of the most sensible things I have ever heard of Goldsmith. It is difficult to get literary fame, and it is every day growing more difficult.'
James Boswell, The Life of Johnson -- 14 April 1775
In junior high school, a girl in my English class gave a report on Little Women's author Louisa May Alcott, in which she said that Louisa's family had given the young scribbler a set of pencils for her birthday when she was a teenager. The family's gift carried a message. Start writing for money, to help the Alcott finances.
Now my junior high school classmate's research may have been faulty. (It appears, from reading biographies of Alcott, that the standard story is that one day at the age of fifteen, after witnessing some domestic crisis, she went out to her favorite wild place in the woods or fields near her house and vowed "I'll become rich and famous by and by -- I'll write, sew, teach, something -- anything to help the family, see if I don't!" See Alcott in her Own Time, edited by Daniel Shealy.) Regardless, that day in eighth grade marked the first time I had ever heard the idea of anyone's turning to writing for an income. Even then it seemed as absurd an idea as sewing would have been.
But the idea has puzzled me ever since, because I have seen slight evidences here and there to confirm that other people, before the modern era, also surmised that they could earn money writing. Writing books, literary books, not going out and getting a job at a newspaper or magazine and earning money that way. Surely, deciding to write art for money can't ever have been possible. Surely it's the editor who has always decided if you'll publish and earn, not you.
But here are a few tales I can verify: Benjamin Disraeli, a generation earlier than Louisa May Alcott and of a completely different sphere and country, did turn to writing to earn money after plunging himself into serious debt. "He had failed to acquire wealth or power, but he might still acquire fame -- and some much-needed cash -- by the use of his pen" (Robert Blake's Disraeli, St. Martin's Press, 1967). A generation before Disraeli, Jane Austen's father, having read her novels, thought they were worthy of publication. He also believed she should "earn her keep" if she intended to remain unmarried. Her brother agreed (Jane Austen: A Life, by David Nokes). They made inquiries at London publishing firms as to how much it would cost to print Jane's books as, later, Charlotte Bronte would do with regard to her own. Charlotte found out that printing Jane Eyre would swallow up L31,three-quarters of a governess' yearly salary (see The Brontes by Juliet Barker).
Choose another famed nineteenth-century English author: George Eliot. Her men friends submitted her work to the most prestigious magazine of the day, Blackwood's, for her -- they were accepted -- and she enjoyed "long employment as a reviewer," plus work as a translator of up-and-coming books in German. She worried about forwarding her career by "leaning upon a man," but protested to her sister, at the age of thirty-five, that "I cannot bring myself to run the risk of a refusal from an editor" (Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot). Eventually that risk must have been nil, for she went on to produce such gigantisms as Middlemarch, which I doubt any writer would have the valor to set down if publication were not at least half guaranteed. Only Tolstoy would, perhaps.
The confusions of money, submissions, earnings, and fame in the nineteenth century literary world trip up and tangle each other. After Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility made Jane Austen famous, she remarked with relish that she "had written herself into L250" in royalties, not to mention having attracted the attention of the Prince of Wales as a patron. But later her publisher would not buy the copyright of Mansfield Park because he thought the book "too serious" -- he would take it only on commission, meaning she would bear the costs of printing like any newcomer. To sell the copyright to one's novel must have been a joy, the equivalent of a phone call announcing acceptance today. It was also a simple transaction. One sold the copyright forever, but one also made no promises to "market" the book as if it were a small business venture in itself, and the sale may have brought in serious money. Pride and Prejudice earned Austen L110; twenty years earlier, The Mysteries of Udolpho earned Mrs. Radcliffe L500. These sums put a governess' salary, which Charlotte Bronte would have had to raid ruthlessly to offer Jane Eyre to the public at her own expense, into some perspective.
James Boswell, The Life of Johnson -- 14 April 1775
In junior high school, a girl in my English class gave a report on Little Women's author Louisa May Alcott, in which she said that Louisa's family had given the young scribbler a set of pencils for her birthday when she was a teenager. The family's gift carried a message. Start writing for money, to help the Alcott finances.
Now my junior high school classmate's research may have been faulty. (It appears, from reading biographies of Alcott, that the standard story is that one day at the age of fifteen, after witnessing some domestic crisis, she went out to her favorite wild place in the woods or fields near her house and vowed "I'll become rich and famous by and by -- I'll write, sew, teach, something -- anything to help the family, see if I don't!" See Alcott in her Own Time, edited by Daniel Shealy.) Regardless, that day in eighth grade marked the first time I had ever heard the idea of anyone's turning to writing for an income. Even then it seemed as absurd an idea as sewing would have been.
But the idea has puzzled me ever since, because I have seen slight evidences here and there to confirm that other people, before the modern era, also surmised that they could earn money writing. Writing books, literary books, not going out and getting a job at a newspaper or magazine and earning money that way. Surely, deciding to write art for money can't ever have been possible. Surely it's the editor who has always decided if you'll publish and earn, not you.
But here are a few tales I can verify: Benjamin Disraeli, a generation earlier than Louisa May Alcott and of a completely different sphere and country, did turn to writing to earn money after plunging himself into serious debt. "He had failed to acquire wealth or power, but he might still acquire fame -- and some much-needed cash -- by the use of his pen" (Robert Blake's Disraeli, St. Martin's Press, 1967). A generation before Disraeli, Jane Austen's father, having read her novels, thought they were worthy of publication. He also believed she should "earn her keep" if she intended to remain unmarried. Her brother agreed (Jane Austen: A Life, by David Nokes). They made inquiries at London publishing firms as to how much it would cost to print Jane's books as, later, Charlotte Bronte would do with regard to her own. Charlotte found out that printing Jane Eyre would swallow up L31,three-quarters of a governess' yearly salary (see The Brontes by Juliet Barker).
Choose another famed nineteenth-century English author: George Eliot. Her men friends submitted her work to the most prestigious magazine of the day, Blackwood's, for her -- they were accepted -- and she enjoyed "long employment as a reviewer," plus work as a translator of up-and-coming books in German. She worried about forwarding her career by "leaning upon a man," but protested to her sister, at the age of thirty-five, that "I cannot bring myself to run the risk of a refusal from an editor" (Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot). Eventually that risk must have been nil, for she went on to produce such gigantisms as Middlemarch, which I doubt any writer would have the valor to set down if publication were not at least half guaranteed. Only Tolstoy would, perhaps.
The confusions of money, submissions, earnings, and fame in the nineteenth century literary world trip up and tangle each other. After Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility made Jane Austen famous, she remarked with relish that she "had written herself into L250" in royalties, not to mention having attracted the attention of the Prince of Wales as a patron. But later her publisher would not buy the copyright of Mansfield Park because he thought the book "too serious" -- he would take it only on commission, meaning she would bear the costs of printing like any newcomer. To sell the copyright to one's novel must have been a joy, the equivalent of a phone call announcing acceptance today. It was also a simple transaction. One sold the copyright forever, but one also made no promises to "market" the book as if it were a small business venture in itself, and the sale may have brought in serious money. Pride and Prejudice earned Austen L110; twenty years earlier, The Mysteries of Udolpho earned Mrs. Radcliffe L500. These sums put a governess' salary, which Charlotte Bronte would have had to raid ruthlessly to offer Jane Eyre to the public at her own expense, into some perspective.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Diary of Midsummer Day
4:30 am – The sky in the east has barely begun to turn oyster-gray, and the trees are black, lush cutwork before it. Already the robins are singing, that bell-like, lilting trill with which they greet every dawn from March to about mid-July, and every sunset from perhaps mid-April to September. One window, in one house down the street, is a lit gold square. Someone is up.
Around the country, right now, I have thirteen cousins – twelve, if I do not count the one I have never met – some of whom I haven’t seen in a year, or three years, or in thirty – who I suppose must be approaching their new morning’s work right now, as I am doing. Or rather, no. In California it is 2:30 in the morning. Barbara is asleep. So must be Tim and Becky in Oregon. In Florida the dawn must be even closer to breaking, and in Boston it must be full light. And behind me to the west in Iowa, a four hour drive away across the farmlands if I were to start now, the sky is, I suppose, beginning to be almost as oyster-gray as it is now.
My cousins, the children of my parents’ siblings, come in three sets: the five Smiths, the five Joneses, the three Coopers. I think of my small sets of cousins because two of the sets have lost all their parents – my aunts and uncles – in just a few years, and a cousin in the third set has just become a grandfather. One generation passes away, and the next has no pressing reason to keep in touch. To send an annual thank-you for an annual birthday card, or an announcement of the grandchild’s birth, is all that has preserved the illusion that we four families "were always so close" and always "had so much fun." When I hear the robins trill I wonder if robins live there, too, where my cousins live, elsewhere apart from the midwest. If they don’t, I wonder if my cousins have heard them sing since they left. How could you live without robins?
5: 00 a.m. The sky gradually glows into the palest orange tint. Before it the trees are silver-green. Sparrows and blue jays take over singing duties from the robins. Grackles run about the empty street, looking for something. According to the newspaper almanac, the sun will rise at 5:17, but here the suburban houses and trees stand so thick that I will not see it. I look, expecting to see an especially bright center to the amber-pink haze behind the trees, but that’s not it. At about five-thirty or a quarter to six, there is a smudge of yellow glowing on the street, and then in the trees the yellow sparkle of the sun.
It is June 24, Midsummer Day, the dawn after a midsummer night’s dream. (Rather like dutiful Lucy realizing she’s met a novelist in A Room With A View, one feels "one should read" that play now.) This is the day which Cassandra greets with shouted vowels – "Aaeeiioouu" – on a hilltop in the English countryside in Dodie Smith’s delightful novel I Capture the Castle. ("We first held the rites when I was nine – I got the idea from a book on folklore.") Robert Graves, in The Greek Myths, agrees with her. All the thirteen months of the pagan calendar and the four seasons, he says ("implicit in Greek and Latin myth and in the sacral tradition of all Europe"), are associated with the alphabet and with corresponding sacred trees: for June he gives the letter D and the oak, and for the summer solstice, U and heather. His researches appear impeccable: Hyginus, Isidore of Seville, Philostratus, Pliny, Plutarch.
For the modern person, gazing confused at the newspaper pictures of new American "pagans" holding midsummer rituals in their suburban living rooms – a large man wearing a little mask topped with undersized, fake deer antlers holds up a basket of bread toward the ceiling; the other people in the "coven" look on politely – for the modern person, it is a triumph of insight only to realize, groggily, that our remote forebears must have been more literate than we thought. They associated strange things. Trees, and the passing months, and the breaking dawn – and being able to read.
The sacral tradition of all Europe; one ought to read it, if one’s met her. Summer is for me the great time for associations with ghostly and distant Europe. The tales of Robin Hood and Maid Marian always take place in the timeless greenwood of summer. One imagines jousts and tourneys and all their waving pennons, blue skies, and smiling ladies with scarves fluttering from their conical hats, all being held in summer. One imagines princesses making their marriage journeys amid trains of palfreys and laden baggage-carts in summer. One imagines senators in togas, walking about Rome and discussing politics or Greek myth, in the heat and stately marble columns of a Roman summer. Charlemagne’s fantastic horse Bayard, of incredible swiftness, "is still alive and can be heard neighing in the Ardennes on Midsummer Day" (according to Bulfinch’s Mythology).
Somehow it seems all right for our American winters to be full of cars, stores, and bustling people shouldering their way through the wind and snow. It seems all right even for the summers to be association-less, Europe-less, if they are hot and American, chrome shining on baking cars, air conditioning thrumming, swimming pools glinting in the blinding sun, and radios blaring and children shrieking across the water. But today’s midsummer dawn is cool and fresh. No locusts yet buzz. There is, this morning, even the smell of distant things, the smell of cool asphalt and earth on the first day of school. It’s as cool as an eighteenth-century morning in a Georgian country house, the servants up and milady perhaps ready for a breakfast and a morning with Alexander Pope. A hundred years later Florence Nightingale is up and writing letters to government ministers in London, dated "before it is light." On Midsummer Day, here in a vast land where nobody stays home and we imported no rituals from the old world – or at any rate we have forgotten them – in a land whose aboriginal rituals we did not adopt, one greatly misses the most ancient things. One misses what used to be known. Poor modern pagans, do they know that their counterparts thousands of years ago sacrificed boys a few times a year, among other interesting rituals? Of course I don’t want them to do that, but do they know it?
Daisy sighs fecklessly in The Great Gatsby: "Don’t you always wait for the longest day of the year, and then miss it?"
8:30 a.m. – The duties and rituals of a modern household begin, really should have begun quite some time ago. Beds to be made, dishes washed, baking for a party planned, and groceries bought. Milady has no servants. One must look at the garden. Already I have seen a large rabbit ostentatiously eating a large weed beside the garage. He chewed and chewed, and looked at me as if to say, ‘here I am eating this awful-looking thing. I wouldn’t touch your garden.’
9:00 a.m. – If my children were not home on summer vacation and thus receptive to a bad example, I would turn on the television, as I sometimes do at this hour, to see what Oprah’s doing today. She fascinates me because she has made her unfathomable fortune by understanding and feeding the passions of a large and wealthy clientele: the middle-class, young-middle-aged, usually white American woman. Her morning television show is perfect in its weekly balance of tragedy, degradation, humor, moral uplift, celebrity gossip, and fantasy housekeeping, shopping, and personal grooming. One day she interviews a once-beautiful young woman, rendered monstrous by injuries in a car crash. The next day a homeless woman wins the lottery, and the next, a nice married couple have their ugly home redecorated and their ecstatic reaction filmed, and shown, and laughed with.
Milady in her Georgian house on a cool summer morning, or for that matter milady’s servants, up at dawn with their pots and rags, did not have this option with which to fill their time. Would they have availed themselves of it, if they had? We do. Yet there is a nagging feeling that, somewhere in the tangled cross-webbings and ruts and puddles at the beginning of the modern age, human nature changed as it poked across a new landscape. We became, unlike our busy and confident ancestors, the sort of people who would look at television. And we seem to look forward to a day when our descendants will be cured of the habit. How many characters in futuristic science fiction movies and television shows watch television? Few. If anything, they are shown outdoors, or conversing, or even reading. The beautiful young people in the latest Star Wars: Attack of the Clones romp and smile, wearing imperial robes in a grassy, stupendous landscape – Italy gone mad. They talk politics, and morals. We seem to have hope. Perhaps milady in the future will know that this strange entertainment existed, but will wonder What on earth, &c., and thank God her own generation and society have shaken off the peculiar habit. Perhaps she’ll be busy reading Pope.
10:25 am – the full blaze of morning sun, in the robust childhood of the day. A goldfinch sings, tiny and yellow in the mulberry tree. There is an elderly man running a lawnmower down the street, and American flags flying from three or four houses. The patient dog next door, "the golden dog" my children call her, has now been outside and tied up alone for two hours. It will go on for hours more. (Her name is Autumn, as it happens.) These are the neighbors we don’t speak to because of it.
12:30 p.m. – noon in the garden, or near it. Like the Titaness Rhea on Mt. Lycaeum in Arcadia, one casts no shadow (Robert Graves again, in The Greek Myths: "a fire sacrifice was probably offered there, when no creature casts a shadow – that is, at noon on midsummer day").
This is my garden’s third year. I used to call it "my pathetic little garden," while secretly being proud of it. I trusted that this year, when according to the proverb it should "leap," it would be tidy and spectacular. In fact I have learned that what I am doing is not so much gardening, as establishing a perennial garden, which is a different task entirely and will take years of nurturing before the proverbial pattern of "sleep – creep – leap" gets underway.
I have learned from experience not only what plants will not survive a Zone 5 winter (pampas grass will not, neither, evidently, will carnation or delphinium), and what will not survive any season at all in sandy soil (wandflowers and freesia will not), but more importantly I have learned what is too delicious for even the shrewdest rabbits, squirrels, and possibly deer to resist. I have an Asiatic lily, hardy to 30 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, which is being stripped down to its skeleton by someone. Dense blazing star, a native and wonderful for difficult soils – the same. Coreopsis, yellow and cheerful, the same. Violet foliage, rather too large actually, but at least alive, the same. All that has managed to thrive have been the simplicities of Jacob’s ladder and Shasta daisy, poppy, and – I must admit one triumph – foxglove. Milady in her cool Georgian house, with her gardener to tend the gardens, would not be impressed.
A mass of white cloud, as thick and tattered as winter, approaches from the north and west, shoveling away the blue sky. An ice-cream truck makes the rounds of the silent neighborhood, idiotically playing "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." There are no children anywhere in sight, except my own, who make up games, read, listen to music, or play chase all day. Though it is scarcely past noon, I notice how simply planning the day’s work and events can make the day seem shorter: I must do this, and that, and then in a little while it will be time to start dinner. And then evening sets in, and the longest day of the year, almost, will be over.
3 p.m. – A blanket of gray cloud seems to have settled over the world, and it grows continually cooler and quieter. Birds have ceased to sing. A neighborhood that is always peaceful (and one ought to count one’s blessings) seems, this afternoon, positively grim. I know the houses contain two sorts of people: the elderly, with nothing much to do, and no one to talk to since their elderly neighbors have moved away; and the grim young families who have replaced them, and who seem not to emerge from seclusion except to take the children to some lesson or duty, and then grimly return. (And which sort am I?)
There has been a breath of rain. A full and nourishing shower would have been more cheerful. Thou visitest the earth, and waterest it: thou greatly enrichest it with the river of God, which is full of water (Psalm 65:9).
4:30 p.m. And what of the greater world? I have missed the 4:00 news on the radio. I lack the time to sit in front of the television, and have not yet seen the day’s paper, which will only contain yesterday’s news. I know that the South Korean man was beheaded in Iraq the day before yesterday.
But I am not sure how healthy it is anymore to know all the tragedies and griefs, most of them private, that it is possible to know through the news, or what use it is anymore to contribute, through one’s attention and money, to the clamoring and clacking organs of news that spread before us a salacious banquet made of other people’s suffering. Every moment spent reading a newspaper is not only no use to them, but is also a moment spent away from what might be much more eternal things. Including not just reading Pope, but doing some kind of local good. It’s not that one wants to escape the responsibility of knowing about human trouble; one wants to escape the pornography of knowing it all. So Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (V,i,9): "One sees more devils than vast hell can hold: That is the madman."
But then, without the news, my world might be as pastoral as ------shire in a Jane Austen novel. Which in turn might be fine except that, while the great world carries on with its news as it did then, we lack her people’s habits of local gaiety – imagine adults in America, organizing a dance for themselves – and their ability to write letters out toward the greater world, and inward, to each other. So we have a mental world full of the pornography of too much news, but boasting no local fun. Now I could, for example, write letters to my twelve cousins, who live all over the country, as far as I know without robins. I have done so, once or twice, as a child eager to keep up with adult relatives, and as an adult, rather shyly proud of my own children. They would never dream of writing back, nor have I ever pursued the correspondence beyond one letter. It’s no one’s fault. We simply don’t do that, any of us. It would be so queer and cold, like dancing. The habit of response has been lost. We watch the news.
8:30 p.m. After a gray lowering day, I had an object lesson in keeping up with relatives. I went to a restaurant to buy some pies and was surprised to see my husband’s nephew come out to greet me, a young man whom I might speak to once every two years, at a family gathering, at best. It was kind of him to bother.
The sunset was a clear and fiery pink mist, all over the broad northwest sky. A handful of red geraniums on my neighbor’s porch garden turned a dusky ruby color before it, and before all the dark trees. One mourning dove whistled, and a few robins gave their last, loud chips. It was too cool for crickets to ring, or for fireflies to light up.
My cousins, I suppose, will soon all go to bed, my parents’ siblings’ children of forty and fifty years ago, whose childhood homes in the nearby suburbs I could go and look at in thirty minutes or an hour if I wanted to. Places bound in the warp and woof of their memories, which they have not seen in years. All within the sound of robins. Another day has passed without our seeing each other. It doesn’t matter so much, except when I think with what unbelieving delight and what peculiar ease we would greet each other – family – if a reunion were planned, or a special trip, or something. And how rarely that is done, increasingly rarely in proportion to the speeding years. When they pulled away from the curb in 1974 – or when we did – the barbecue smoke from the food we had eaten still lingering in the summer afternoon air, it seemed plausible that we might "get together" as soon as not. It seemed as likely as that tomorrow would come. After all, here we all were today, right? Soon I had other things to think about, like starting fourth grade. Now my children draw conclusions and ask, "So if your cousins all have kids, then we’ve got second cousins we don’t even know? So, like if we moved there, we could marry our cousins, and not know it?" Yes, in theory you could. "Eee-ew."
How nice if this midsummer day could have been crowned by a full moon, holding the place of the winter sun. Instead the moon was a crescent, hidden behind clouds in the west, and near it lay Jupiter, king of the gods, shining high above the trees, as he has been all spring. In ancient Europe we would have rolled burning wheels down hills tonight, to mimic the beginning of the decline of the sun from its highest point of the year; to remind ourselves of what we know.
Around the country, right now, I have thirteen cousins – twelve, if I do not count the one I have never met – some of whom I haven’t seen in a year, or three years, or in thirty – who I suppose must be approaching their new morning’s work right now, as I am doing. Or rather, no. In California it is 2:30 in the morning. Barbara is asleep. So must be Tim and Becky in Oregon. In Florida the dawn must be even closer to breaking, and in Boston it must be full light. And behind me to the west in Iowa, a four hour drive away across the farmlands if I were to start now, the sky is, I suppose, beginning to be almost as oyster-gray as it is now.
My cousins, the children of my parents’ siblings, come in three sets: the five Smiths, the five Joneses, the three Coopers. I think of my small sets of cousins because two of the sets have lost all their parents – my aunts and uncles – in just a few years, and a cousin in the third set has just become a grandfather. One generation passes away, and the next has no pressing reason to keep in touch. To send an annual thank-you for an annual birthday card, or an announcement of the grandchild’s birth, is all that has preserved the illusion that we four families "were always so close" and always "had so much fun." When I hear the robins trill I wonder if robins live there, too, where my cousins live, elsewhere apart from the midwest. If they don’t, I wonder if my cousins have heard them sing since they left. How could you live without robins?
5: 00 a.m. The sky gradually glows into the palest orange tint. Before it the trees are silver-green. Sparrows and blue jays take over singing duties from the robins. Grackles run about the empty street, looking for something. According to the newspaper almanac, the sun will rise at 5:17, but here the suburban houses and trees stand so thick that I will not see it. I look, expecting to see an especially bright center to the amber-pink haze behind the trees, but that’s not it. At about five-thirty or a quarter to six, there is a smudge of yellow glowing on the street, and then in the trees the yellow sparkle of the sun.
It is June 24, Midsummer Day, the dawn after a midsummer night’s dream. (Rather like dutiful Lucy realizing she’s met a novelist in A Room With A View, one feels "one should read" that play now.) This is the day which Cassandra greets with shouted vowels – "Aaeeiioouu" – on a hilltop in the English countryside in Dodie Smith’s delightful novel I Capture the Castle. ("We first held the rites when I was nine – I got the idea from a book on folklore.") Robert Graves, in The Greek Myths, agrees with her. All the thirteen months of the pagan calendar and the four seasons, he says ("implicit in Greek and Latin myth and in the sacral tradition of all Europe"), are associated with the alphabet and with corresponding sacred trees: for June he gives the letter D and the oak, and for the summer solstice, U and heather. His researches appear impeccable: Hyginus, Isidore of Seville, Philostratus, Pliny, Plutarch.
For the modern person, gazing confused at the newspaper pictures of new American "pagans" holding midsummer rituals in their suburban living rooms – a large man wearing a little mask topped with undersized, fake deer antlers holds up a basket of bread toward the ceiling; the other people in the "coven" look on politely – for the modern person, it is a triumph of insight only to realize, groggily, that our remote forebears must have been more literate than we thought. They associated strange things. Trees, and the passing months, and the breaking dawn – and being able to read.
The sacral tradition of all Europe; one ought to read it, if one’s met her. Summer is for me the great time for associations with ghostly and distant Europe. The tales of Robin Hood and Maid Marian always take place in the timeless greenwood of summer. One imagines jousts and tourneys and all their waving pennons, blue skies, and smiling ladies with scarves fluttering from their conical hats, all being held in summer. One imagines princesses making their marriage journeys amid trains of palfreys and laden baggage-carts in summer. One imagines senators in togas, walking about Rome and discussing politics or Greek myth, in the heat and stately marble columns of a Roman summer. Charlemagne’s fantastic horse Bayard, of incredible swiftness, "is still alive and can be heard neighing in the Ardennes on Midsummer Day" (according to Bulfinch’s Mythology).
Somehow it seems all right for our American winters to be full of cars, stores, and bustling people shouldering their way through the wind and snow. It seems all right even for the summers to be association-less, Europe-less, if they are hot and American, chrome shining on baking cars, air conditioning thrumming, swimming pools glinting in the blinding sun, and radios blaring and children shrieking across the water. But today’s midsummer dawn is cool and fresh. No locusts yet buzz. There is, this morning, even the smell of distant things, the smell of cool asphalt and earth on the first day of school. It’s as cool as an eighteenth-century morning in a Georgian country house, the servants up and milady perhaps ready for a breakfast and a morning with Alexander Pope. A hundred years later Florence Nightingale is up and writing letters to government ministers in London, dated "before it is light." On Midsummer Day, here in a vast land where nobody stays home and we imported no rituals from the old world – or at any rate we have forgotten them – in a land whose aboriginal rituals we did not adopt, one greatly misses the most ancient things. One misses what used to be known. Poor modern pagans, do they know that their counterparts thousands of years ago sacrificed boys a few times a year, among other interesting rituals? Of course I don’t want them to do that, but do they know it?
Daisy sighs fecklessly in The Great Gatsby: "Don’t you always wait for the longest day of the year, and then miss it?"
8:30 a.m. – The duties and rituals of a modern household begin, really should have begun quite some time ago. Beds to be made, dishes washed, baking for a party planned, and groceries bought. Milady has no servants. One must look at the garden. Already I have seen a large rabbit ostentatiously eating a large weed beside the garage. He chewed and chewed, and looked at me as if to say, ‘here I am eating this awful-looking thing. I wouldn’t touch your garden.’
9:00 a.m. – If my children were not home on summer vacation and thus receptive to a bad example, I would turn on the television, as I sometimes do at this hour, to see what Oprah’s doing today. She fascinates me because she has made her unfathomable fortune by understanding and feeding the passions of a large and wealthy clientele: the middle-class, young-middle-aged, usually white American woman. Her morning television show is perfect in its weekly balance of tragedy, degradation, humor, moral uplift, celebrity gossip, and fantasy housekeeping, shopping, and personal grooming. One day she interviews a once-beautiful young woman, rendered monstrous by injuries in a car crash. The next day a homeless woman wins the lottery, and the next, a nice married couple have their ugly home redecorated and their ecstatic reaction filmed, and shown, and laughed with.
Milady in her Georgian house on a cool summer morning, or for that matter milady’s servants, up at dawn with their pots and rags, did not have this option with which to fill their time. Would they have availed themselves of it, if they had? We do. Yet there is a nagging feeling that, somewhere in the tangled cross-webbings and ruts and puddles at the beginning of the modern age, human nature changed as it poked across a new landscape. We became, unlike our busy and confident ancestors, the sort of people who would look at television. And we seem to look forward to a day when our descendants will be cured of the habit. How many characters in futuristic science fiction movies and television shows watch television? Few. If anything, they are shown outdoors, or conversing, or even reading. The beautiful young people in the latest Star Wars: Attack of the Clones romp and smile, wearing imperial robes in a grassy, stupendous landscape – Italy gone mad. They talk politics, and morals. We seem to have hope. Perhaps milady in the future will know that this strange entertainment existed, but will wonder What on earth, &c., and thank God her own generation and society have shaken off the peculiar habit. Perhaps she’ll be busy reading Pope.
10:25 am – the full blaze of morning sun, in the robust childhood of the day. A goldfinch sings, tiny and yellow in the mulberry tree. There is an elderly man running a lawnmower down the street, and American flags flying from three or four houses. The patient dog next door, "the golden dog" my children call her, has now been outside and tied up alone for two hours. It will go on for hours more. (Her name is Autumn, as it happens.) These are the neighbors we don’t speak to because of it.
12:30 p.m. – noon in the garden, or near it. Like the Titaness Rhea on Mt. Lycaeum in Arcadia, one casts no shadow (Robert Graves again, in The Greek Myths: "a fire sacrifice was probably offered there, when no creature casts a shadow – that is, at noon on midsummer day").
This is my garden’s third year. I used to call it "my pathetic little garden," while secretly being proud of it. I trusted that this year, when according to the proverb it should "leap," it would be tidy and spectacular. In fact I have learned that what I am doing is not so much gardening, as establishing a perennial garden, which is a different task entirely and will take years of nurturing before the proverbial pattern of "sleep – creep – leap" gets underway.
I have learned from experience not only what plants will not survive a Zone 5 winter (pampas grass will not, neither, evidently, will carnation or delphinium), and what will not survive any season at all in sandy soil (wandflowers and freesia will not), but more importantly I have learned what is too delicious for even the shrewdest rabbits, squirrels, and possibly deer to resist. I have an Asiatic lily, hardy to 30 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, which is being stripped down to its skeleton by someone. Dense blazing star, a native and wonderful for difficult soils – the same. Coreopsis, yellow and cheerful, the same. Violet foliage, rather too large actually, but at least alive, the same. All that has managed to thrive have been the simplicities of Jacob’s ladder and Shasta daisy, poppy, and – I must admit one triumph – foxglove. Milady in her cool Georgian house, with her gardener to tend the gardens, would not be impressed.
A mass of white cloud, as thick and tattered as winter, approaches from the north and west, shoveling away the blue sky. An ice-cream truck makes the rounds of the silent neighborhood, idiotically playing "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." There are no children anywhere in sight, except my own, who make up games, read, listen to music, or play chase all day. Though it is scarcely past noon, I notice how simply planning the day’s work and events can make the day seem shorter: I must do this, and that, and then in a little while it will be time to start dinner. And then evening sets in, and the longest day of the year, almost, will be over.
3 p.m. – A blanket of gray cloud seems to have settled over the world, and it grows continually cooler and quieter. Birds have ceased to sing. A neighborhood that is always peaceful (and one ought to count one’s blessings) seems, this afternoon, positively grim. I know the houses contain two sorts of people: the elderly, with nothing much to do, and no one to talk to since their elderly neighbors have moved away; and the grim young families who have replaced them, and who seem not to emerge from seclusion except to take the children to some lesson or duty, and then grimly return. (And which sort am I?)
There has been a breath of rain. A full and nourishing shower would have been more cheerful. Thou visitest the earth, and waterest it: thou greatly enrichest it with the river of God, which is full of water (Psalm 65:9).
4:30 p.m. And what of the greater world? I have missed the 4:00 news on the radio. I lack the time to sit in front of the television, and have not yet seen the day’s paper, which will only contain yesterday’s news. I know that the South Korean man was beheaded in Iraq the day before yesterday.
But I am not sure how healthy it is anymore to know all the tragedies and griefs, most of them private, that it is possible to know through the news, or what use it is anymore to contribute, through one’s attention and money, to the clamoring and clacking organs of news that spread before us a salacious banquet made of other people’s suffering. Every moment spent reading a newspaper is not only no use to them, but is also a moment spent away from what might be much more eternal things. Including not just reading Pope, but doing some kind of local good. It’s not that one wants to escape the responsibility of knowing about human trouble; one wants to escape the pornography of knowing it all. So Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (V,i,9): "One sees more devils than vast hell can hold: That is the madman."
But then, without the news, my world might be as pastoral as ------shire in a Jane Austen novel. Which in turn might be fine except that, while the great world carries on with its news as it did then, we lack her people’s habits of local gaiety – imagine adults in America, organizing a dance for themselves – and their ability to write letters out toward the greater world, and inward, to each other. So we have a mental world full of the pornography of too much news, but boasting no local fun. Now I could, for example, write letters to my twelve cousins, who live all over the country, as far as I know without robins. I have done so, once or twice, as a child eager to keep up with adult relatives, and as an adult, rather shyly proud of my own children. They would never dream of writing back, nor have I ever pursued the correspondence beyond one letter. It’s no one’s fault. We simply don’t do that, any of us. It would be so queer and cold, like dancing. The habit of response has been lost. We watch the news.
8:30 p.m. After a gray lowering day, I had an object lesson in keeping up with relatives. I went to a restaurant to buy some pies and was surprised to see my husband’s nephew come out to greet me, a young man whom I might speak to once every two years, at a family gathering, at best. It was kind of him to bother.
The sunset was a clear and fiery pink mist, all over the broad northwest sky. A handful of red geraniums on my neighbor’s porch garden turned a dusky ruby color before it, and before all the dark trees. One mourning dove whistled, and a few robins gave their last, loud chips. It was too cool for crickets to ring, or for fireflies to light up.
My cousins, I suppose, will soon all go to bed, my parents’ siblings’ children of forty and fifty years ago, whose childhood homes in the nearby suburbs I could go and look at in thirty minutes or an hour if I wanted to. Places bound in the warp and woof of their memories, which they have not seen in years. All within the sound of robins. Another day has passed without our seeing each other. It doesn’t matter so much, except when I think with what unbelieving delight and what peculiar ease we would greet each other – family – if a reunion were planned, or a special trip, or something. And how rarely that is done, increasingly rarely in proportion to the speeding years. When they pulled away from the curb in 1974 – or when we did – the barbecue smoke from the food we had eaten still lingering in the summer afternoon air, it seemed plausible that we might "get together" as soon as not. It seemed as likely as that tomorrow would come. After all, here we all were today, right? Soon I had other things to think about, like starting fourth grade. Now my children draw conclusions and ask, "So if your cousins all have kids, then we’ve got second cousins we don’t even know? So, like if we moved there, we could marry our cousins, and not know it?" Yes, in theory you could. "Eee-ew."
How nice if this midsummer day could have been crowned by a full moon, holding the place of the winter sun. Instead the moon was a crescent, hidden behind clouds in the west, and near it lay Jupiter, king of the gods, shining high above the trees, as he has been all spring. In ancient Europe we would have rolled burning wheels down hills tonight, to mimic the beginning of the decline of the sun from its highest point of the year; to remind ourselves of what we know.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Pearls and Roses -- chapter 3
Pearls and Roses, chapter 2
The rest of that Saturday, Alice tried to go about her business as if she had forgotten the minor events of the morning, as if they were worth only a shrug. It would not have occurred to her to go to a clergyman and ask why people are so awful, but she did run the scene through her mind again and again, and the more she considered it the more she wished that sheer, righteous rage had taken possession of her and made her order the woman from her home. Alice was a great one for tamping down instincts Perhaps that was her strongest instinct – to deny that any reaction to anything is ever valid, because you had to consult the other person’s feelings first. Even in a crisis like this, even while she was being berated in her home, Alice’s first feelings ran toward the other person’s heart, assumed the other person’s delicacy of feeling. She felt, inarticulate, while it was going on: this woman must be mortified at having to berate me in front of my unkempt, bed-smelly son, in my unkempt apartment. She must long to get out of here. I’ll bet she regrets coming. I must be kind.
And she controlled herself and the woman left, and only after that, all day, could Alice begin to think as a normal human being again and not as her own assumption-driven, instinct-tamping self. How free and wonderful it must be to have roaring, rage-filled reactions to immediate events. Trish had them, obviously – she came here, Alice thought – and so did Pat ("quite upset"), and look what power rage gave them. The power to act. Alice didn’t feel rage until it was all hours over, by which time the fact of rage’s delay was itself enraging. She had truthfully been more fascinated by Trish as a specimen, and more concerned with Polly and Jill’s safety, than she was outraged by Trish’s causing the whole situation. And there was shock, undoubtedly. The paralysis of shock. Shock at the effrontery of other people’s rage. Where did they get it?
Well, she couldn’t help what she had done. She told herself that at eleven o’clock that day, and at noon and at one, and two-forty and three, and five-fifteen and midnight and beyond. If she had reacted weakly, strongly, badly, or otherwise, it was over now. Now all that remained was to work with this woman beginning again Tuesday morning, and going on indefinitely. And who knows? Perhaps she had wounded Trish much more than Trish let on. Alice enjoyed that thought, and was troubled by it as well. Was that, then, proper rage?
She told Pam the story of Trish’s morning invasion of her house when Pam came to pick up Jill and Polly, and Pam told her husband, Alice’s brother John, and so the family were all ready to hash it out at their customary New Year’s Eve brunch the next day. For the McNamara family it was a delightful afternoon as usual, everything exactly the same as last year and the year before, which is exactly what the family looked forward to. There was the usual champagne, and the mushrooms and pilaf and the perfect roast, and Nan’s vegetables and Claudia’s eggnog cake and Jason’ s eternal contribution of a box of cashews and another of dark-chocolate buttercreams; and everyone circulated easily and excitedly, picking up, without preliminary, the threads of conversations last dropped perhaps at the summer picnic of half a year before, or maybe of the last New Year’s brunch itself. They were a family neither close nor estranged, but simply normal, as far as Alice was concerned. She had not slept much the night before.
"So what’s this about some awful woman who came to your house to yell at you last week?" Alice’s mother asked – coincidentally named Pamela also, though always Pamela and never Pam – while she and three brothers, two sisters-in-law, and their father all sat around the ancient family table.
"Oh! Yes, this was yesterday," Alice corrected her. "Yes, she came to tell me how awful I am. Right in front of Jilly and Polly and Hunter, of course. He was eating cereal."
"What was this dame’s problem?"
"Oh, she had a bee in her bonnet about this letter I wrote about our company’s excursion to Europe. Remember I told you what a disaster that was?"
"Oh yes, didn’t they tell you never to come back or something?"
"Not quite, but it was quite a fiasco and I had to go and apologize to this bar-owner in France whom I had never met and everything. Thank God he spoke English. But I felt like such an imperialist for that, too."
"Don’t you?" Jason put in parenthetically. "I did too, all the time I was in Italy. Asking directions in English and everything."
"Oh, apologizing, you’d be good at that," Mrs. McNamara said, glancing a little sharply at her daughter out of the corner of her eye. "So she didn’t like you apologizing?"
"I don’t think it was that. I think she would have loved for me to apologize to her yesterday. In fact she demanded it, and I said no. In Europe, it had to be done. No, yesterday – I’m not sure what she didn’t like." Alice’s face turned hot as she felt everyone around the table quieting down and paying attention to her. "I think she felt that I had wounded everyone’s self-esteem by explaining what had happened, and how I thought we might be getting a terrible reputation among professional circles."
"And are you?" Dave asked.
"If we’re not, it’s not through lack of trying."
"She asked you to apologize?" John added, also parenthetically. "And you said no?"
"I said no."
"Huh."
"How bad was this letter?" Claudia asked, and their father said, "That’s what I would want to know. How bad could it have been?"
"Apparently horrible, although I thought I was being the soul of tact," Alice said. "I just wrote that we had really, uh, stubbed our toes in Europe this time around and that maybe we should face up to doing things the way our poor old ancient bylaws say we should. If we had been doing that, we never would have been at a party, we never would have been in Europe, to begin with."
"Oh, really," Dave continued. He lowered his head like a bull and stared at her over his glasses.
"Yes, I heard about this party. Mom was telling us one night. The police were called to some bar?"
"Almost, from what I heard. I wasn’t there." I was at the opera with a distinguished older man, she wanted to say. "One of our employees had gotten a few too many under her belt and decided to, well, shake things up, or have a good time, I guess."
"This self-esteem nonsense is going to be the bane of everybody," Alice’s mother said. Alice felt both relief and disappointment at the evident change of subject. "Look at the schools. It’s ruining the schools."
"Oh, I know, but people are raised on it."
Then John spoke, slowly. "Does this lady have kids?"
"Yeah, she has two."
"Did she bring them with? Yesterday?"
Alice shook her head, majestically. "No."
He stared at her, himself the father of the toddlers Jilly and Polly. "So she left her kids at home – what does her husband do? I assume she’s married."
"Oh yes, she’s married. Her husband’s in construction or heating and air conditioning or something. One of those jobs every guy has now, servicing those huge cardboard houses out in the boondocks that only they can afford to live in. I read somewhere that a housing boom feeds on itself like that."
"Really," Dave began with interest, but John resumed, again slowly: "So she left her kids at home, so – how old are they?"
"I’m not sure. Elementary school, I think."
"She left her kids at home so she could come to your house and berate you while you were watching kids. My kids."
"Yes."
John contemplated this as though it were a deep philosophical problem. He took a breath then and said, "That bites. She’s got a nerve. Were my kids good?"
Everyone laughed. "They were fine. Yes, she’s got nerve. It was hilarious in a way. Hunter had just gotten up, and of course he’s got the bleary eyes and the bed hair and everything." Alice’s mother began to laugh. "Meanwhile Polly and Jill are wandering around tripping over things. This lady’s house is always House Beautiful and of course mine’s a disaster – "
"You’ve been to her house?" John interrupted.
"Oh yeah, for meetings and stuff."
"What’s it like?"
She smirked dismissively. "Huge. Gorgeous. She’s in interior arts consulting, so of course there are white leather sofas and all these bizarre paintings all over the walls."
"Art consulting, what does that mean?"
"She teaches people how to – how to – " Alice groped for words, and turned to her mother and Claudia.
"How to arrange furniture, lighting, paint, interior decorating, that kind of thing, right?" Claudia said.
"Oh, so she’s an interior decorator."
"Well, sort of," Alice said, but then wanting to be fair, she went on. "She also teaches classes in fine art, and the history of packaging, how to combine things so they look nice, I guess. That’s her background, anyway. I swear what it amounts to is that she tells people what to do. In their own homes." She wanted the conversation to resume its light and laughing tone.
"So how long did whoo-sie, this dame, stay?" John asked.
"Oh God. Close to an hour."
"Cripes." He looked up at her. "But my kids were good."
"They were fine. They were terrified, but they were fine." Everyone around the table laughed anew. "They ended up crouching behind the TV until she left. I was terrified."
"I think I’d crouch behind the TV, too," Mrs. McNamara said, laughing. "Did you, ah, think of showing this woman the door?"
"I came very close to it."
"I think I would have pointed it out and said, ‘Ah, lady, this works both ways. In and out.’"
"Shoot," Jason spun out carefully, "I would have kicked her down those stairs you’ve got. That’s a good long flight, isn’t it?"
Alice was laughing happily. "Fourteen," she said, "I counted, back when I was carrying a baby up and down them every day."
"Sure. I’d say, ‘Here, bitch, here’s some self-esteem, right here!’" And their mother said, "Oh, Jason!" and everyone laughed. The conversation moved on. No one asked what would happen next. "Anyway. I’m glad you stuck to your guns," Mr. McNamara said privately to Alice later.
The brunch went on until about seven at night, when the family broke up to attend to their various plans for the real, black-and-silver New Year’s Eve. Mr. and Mrs. McNamara looked forward to a safe quiet evening with each other and the television, and savoring the pleasurable memories of the little party just passed. Thank God none of their children had ever yet moved out of town. John and Pam had plans with friends, Jason and Claudia with Claudia’s family. David had a co-worker’s party to go to and even Hunter had somewhere to go. Like her parents, Alice looked forward to the safety and privacy of home. She would relax tonight with her favorite things, a pot of tea, bread and butter, and a fresh book. And her thoughts her own, not Trish’s, she hoped. "Resentment is letting someone you hate live rent-free in your head." She had surely earned better than that.
Pearls and Roses, chapter 4
The rest of that Saturday, Alice tried to go about her business as if she had forgotten the minor events of the morning, as if they were worth only a shrug. It would not have occurred to her to go to a clergyman and ask why people are so awful, but she did run the scene through her mind again and again, and the more she considered it the more she wished that sheer, righteous rage had taken possession of her and made her order the woman from her home. Alice was a great one for tamping down instincts Perhaps that was her strongest instinct – to deny that any reaction to anything is ever valid, because you had to consult the other person’s feelings first. Even in a crisis like this, even while she was being berated in her home, Alice’s first feelings ran toward the other person’s heart, assumed the other person’s delicacy of feeling. She felt, inarticulate, while it was going on: this woman must be mortified at having to berate me in front of my unkempt, bed-smelly son, in my unkempt apartment. She must long to get out of here. I’ll bet she regrets coming. I must be kind.
And she controlled herself and the woman left, and only after that, all day, could Alice begin to think as a normal human being again and not as her own assumption-driven, instinct-tamping self. How free and wonderful it must be to have roaring, rage-filled reactions to immediate events. Trish had them, obviously – she came here, Alice thought – and so did Pat ("quite upset"), and look what power rage gave them. The power to act. Alice didn’t feel rage until it was all hours over, by which time the fact of rage’s delay was itself enraging. She had truthfully been more fascinated by Trish as a specimen, and more concerned with Polly and Jill’s safety, than she was outraged by Trish’s causing the whole situation. And there was shock, undoubtedly. The paralysis of shock. Shock at the effrontery of other people’s rage. Where did they get it?
Well, she couldn’t help what she had done. She told herself that at eleven o’clock that day, and at noon and at one, and two-forty and three, and five-fifteen and midnight and beyond. If she had reacted weakly, strongly, badly, or otherwise, it was over now. Now all that remained was to work with this woman beginning again Tuesday morning, and going on indefinitely. And who knows? Perhaps she had wounded Trish much more than Trish let on. Alice enjoyed that thought, and was troubled by it as well. Was that, then, proper rage?
She told Pam the story of Trish’s morning invasion of her house when Pam came to pick up Jill and Polly, and Pam told her husband, Alice’s brother John, and so the family were all ready to hash it out at their customary New Year’s Eve brunch the next day. For the McNamara family it was a delightful afternoon as usual, everything exactly the same as last year and the year before, which is exactly what the family looked forward to. There was the usual champagne, and the mushrooms and pilaf and the perfect roast, and Nan’s vegetables and Claudia’s eggnog cake and Jason’ s eternal contribution of a box of cashews and another of dark-chocolate buttercreams; and everyone circulated easily and excitedly, picking up, without preliminary, the threads of conversations last dropped perhaps at the summer picnic of half a year before, or maybe of the last New Year’s brunch itself. They were a family neither close nor estranged, but simply normal, as far as Alice was concerned. She had not slept much the night before.
"So what’s this about some awful woman who came to your house to yell at you last week?" Alice’s mother asked – coincidentally named Pamela also, though always Pamela and never Pam – while she and three brothers, two sisters-in-law, and their father all sat around the ancient family table.
"Oh! Yes, this was yesterday," Alice corrected her. "Yes, she came to tell me how awful I am. Right in front of Jilly and Polly and Hunter, of course. He was eating cereal."
"What was this dame’s problem?"
"Oh, she had a bee in her bonnet about this letter I wrote about our company’s excursion to Europe. Remember I told you what a disaster that was?"
"Oh yes, didn’t they tell you never to come back or something?"
"Not quite, but it was quite a fiasco and I had to go and apologize to this bar-owner in France whom I had never met and everything. Thank God he spoke English. But I felt like such an imperialist for that, too."
"Don’t you?" Jason put in parenthetically. "I did too, all the time I was in Italy. Asking directions in English and everything."
"Oh, apologizing, you’d be good at that," Mrs. McNamara said, glancing a little sharply at her daughter out of the corner of her eye. "So she didn’t like you apologizing?"
"I don’t think it was that. I think she would have loved for me to apologize to her yesterday. In fact she demanded it, and I said no. In Europe, it had to be done. No, yesterday – I’m not sure what she didn’t like." Alice’s face turned hot as she felt everyone around the table quieting down and paying attention to her. "I think she felt that I had wounded everyone’s self-esteem by explaining what had happened, and how I thought we might be getting a terrible reputation among professional circles."
"And are you?" Dave asked.
"If we’re not, it’s not through lack of trying."
"She asked you to apologize?" John added, also parenthetically. "And you said no?"
"I said no."
"Huh."
"How bad was this letter?" Claudia asked, and their father said, "That’s what I would want to know. How bad could it have been?"
"Apparently horrible, although I thought I was being the soul of tact," Alice said. "I just wrote that we had really, uh, stubbed our toes in Europe this time around and that maybe we should face up to doing things the way our poor old ancient bylaws say we should. If we had been doing that, we never would have been at a party, we never would have been in Europe, to begin with."
"Oh, really," Dave continued. He lowered his head like a bull and stared at her over his glasses.
"Yes, I heard about this party. Mom was telling us one night. The police were called to some bar?"
"Almost, from what I heard. I wasn’t there." I was at the opera with a distinguished older man, she wanted to say. "One of our employees had gotten a few too many under her belt and decided to, well, shake things up, or have a good time, I guess."
"This self-esteem nonsense is going to be the bane of everybody," Alice’s mother said. Alice felt both relief and disappointment at the evident change of subject. "Look at the schools. It’s ruining the schools."
"Oh, I know, but people are raised on it."
Then John spoke, slowly. "Does this lady have kids?"
"Yeah, she has two."
"Did she bring them with? Yesterday?"
Alice shook her head, majestically. "No."
He stared at her, himself the father of the toddlers Jilly and Polly. "So she left her kids at home – what does her husband do? I assume she’s married."
"Oh yes, she’s married. Her husband’s in construction or heating and air conditioning or something. One of those jobs every guy has now, servicing those huge cardboard houses out in the boondocks that only they can afford to live in. I read somewhere that a housing boom feeds on itself like that."
"Really," Dave began with interest, but John resumed, again slowly: "So she left her kids at home, so – how old are they?"
"I’m not sure. Elementary school, I think."
"She left her kids at home so she could come to your house and berate you while you were watching kids. My kids."
"Yes."
John contemplated this as though it were a deep philosophical problem. He took a breath then and said, "That bites. She’s got a nerve. Were my kids good?"
Everyone laughed. "They were fine. Yes, she’s got nerve. It was hilarious in a way. Hunter had just gotten up, and of course he’s got the bleary eyes and the bed hair and everything." Alice’s mother began to laugh. "Meanwhile Polly and Jill are wandering around tripping over things. This lady’s house is always House Beautiful and of course mine’s a disaster – "
"You’ve been to her house?" John interrupted.
"Oh yeah, for meetings and stuff."
"What’s it like?"
She smirked dismissively. "Huge. Gorgeous. She’s in interior arts consulting, so of course there are white leather sofas and all these bizarre paintings all over the walls."
"Art consulting, what does that mean?"
"She teaches people how to – how to – " Alice groped for words, and turned to her mother and Claudia.
"How to arrange furniture, lighting, paint, interior decorating, that kind of thing, right?" Claudia said.
"Oh, so she’s an interior decorator."
"Well, sort of," Alice said, but then wanting to be fair, she went on. "She also teaches classes in fine art, and the history of packaging, how to combine things so they look nice, I guess. That’s her background, anyway. I swear what it amounts to is that she tells people what to do. In their own homes." She wanted the conversation to resume its light and laughing tone.
"So how long did whoo-sie, this dame, stay?" John asked.
"Oh God. Close to an hour."
"Cripes." He looked up at her. "But my kids were good."
"They were fine. They were terrified, but they were fine." Everyone around the table laughed anew. "They ended up crouching behind the TV until she left. I was terrified."
"I think I’d crouch behind the TV, too," Mrs. McNamara said, laughing. "Did you, ah, think of showing this woman the door?"
"I came very close to it."
"I think I would have pointed it out and said, ‘Ah, lady, this works both ways. In and out.’"
"Shoot," Jason spun out carefully, "I would have kicked her down those stairs you’ve got. That’s a good long flight, isn’t it?"
Alice was laughing happily. "Fourteen," she said, "I counted, back when I was carrying a baby up and down them every day."
"Sure. I’d say, ‘Here, bitch, here’s some self-esteem, right here!’" And their mother said, "Oh, Jason!" and everyone laughed. The conversation moved on. No one asked what would happen next. "Anyway. I’m glad you stuck to your guns," Mr. McNamara said privately to Alice later.
The brunch went on until about seven at night, when the family broke up to attend to their various plans for the real, black-and-silver New Year’s Eve. Mr. and Mrs. McNamara looked forward to a safe quiet evening with each other and the television, and savoring the pleasurable memories of the little party just passed. Thank God none of their children had ever yet moved out of town. John and Pam had plans with friends, Jason and Claudia with Claudia’s family. David had a co-worker’s party to go to and even Hunter had somewhere to go. Like her parents, Alice looked forward to the safety and privacy of home. She would relax tonight with her favorite things, a pot of tea, bread and butter, and a fresh book. And her thoughts her own, not Trish’s, she hoped. "Resentment is letting someone you hate live rent-free in your head." She had surely earned better than that.
Pearls and Roses, chapter 4
Pearls and Roses -- chapter 2
Pearls and Roses, chapter 1
Trish was too upset by this interview to try to go on and accomplish the neighborhood errands she had mentioned. She drove towards home, sniffing back the tears – incredible, tears – alone in her car. She did not know who on earth to talk to about this. Of course she could telephone Pat, but they had been through this already, so much, and Trish felt she needed to tell this story fresh, to someone new. Besides, though a good friend, Pat was so much tougher than she was; she really did shrug Alice off. And it was not a Gallic shrug. It was just Pat, big and clanking and right, with tiny brown eyes like spearpoints in barbarian firelight that saw everything and had no doubts, and a big raspy laugh that laughed at everything. Trish could confide in her husband, but he already knew the story, too. He was the one who asked her to leave the computer and come to bed last night. And anyway men were so obtuse about women’s things. They didn’t seem to fight, ever, among themselves. They had no morals about delicate things, and didn’t care.
Trish wanted to speak to someone entirely new. As she waited at the stoplight to turn into her beautiful neighborhood – there was the splendid community center on its hill, where Miranda and Rory had art lessons and she and Dan saw Shakespeare in the theater-in-the-round every spring, and there was their huge church among the oaks, its roof sweeping up to a point like a pair of praying hands – it occurred to her that she would very much like to talk to Father Mike. Suddenly she wanted to talk to a professional with a key to the infinite, to kindness, who would understand petty problems, petty squabbles, and yet be upbeat, holy, and sympathetic about them. She wanted to try to understand the brutality of Alice, and why people are like that and why this was happening to her.
She made her turn when the light went green and then pulled up short right into the church’s parking lot, such an unaccustomed maneuver for her, especially on a Saturday, the day usually given to errands. It was an unaccustomed maneuver for the driver behind her too. He blared his horn at her angrily and then sped on. She became more upset and was astonished to feel herself sweating, she, normally so self-possessed. Perhaps she was being silly in coming here unannounced on a Saturday morning. Perhaps there was a mass going on and Father Mike was not available. What could a priest tell her, what did he know about the world? Maybe he had gone to visit his family for the New Year’s weekend and the place would be locked. In chagrin at her own indecision she almost gunned the engine and sped right on through the parking lot and out to the side street that led to her street by another way. But she remembered the delight and relief she had just felt half a minute before at the idea of confiding in a new person, an eternal person, and with some nervousness she parked the car after all, turned off the ignition, undid her seat belt, and got out. She felt a little giddy. Talking to a clergyman, just for her own reasons? Not to plan a wedding or a communion or something? Who was she trying to kid?
Luckily the glass doors to the foyer were unlocked and she passed in and found Father Mike simply sitting in the secretary’s office as if everything were quite ordinary. How foolish she felt. She was going to have to intrude upon this man’s day and burden him with some overwrought emotional problem, when perhaps he was merely thinking of watching football this afternoon, or expecting her to drop off a little check for the sharing parish and then be on her busy way again. She felt cruel and pointless, she normally so sure of her decency, she whose mother had enrolled her in years of etiquette lessons as a child. She had even learned how to get out of the back seat of a car while wearing a formal gown, and she still got out of her car that way, all the time.
Father looked up and smiled. He was typing on the computer. "Trish! Good morning. Happy New Year."
"Happy New Year, Father," she smiled weakly.
"How are you?"
She blew out a sigh. "Well, not good, actually."
His attention had been half with her but now was fully with her. He looked at her face. "Really, why is that?"
"Have you got a minute to talk? Are you busy?" Exactly what she had asked Alice on the phone. And look how that had turned out. She was frightened.
"Sure, I can talk." He closed out whatever he was doing on the machine and turned to her, complete attention at the ready. "Do you want to go in my office?"
"Oh no, let’s not bother," she answered as she loosened her coat and dropped her bag on the floor beside a chair. Alice was not worth the high seriousness of a priest’s office, with the crucifix and all the books. She sat down. "I won’t keep you only a minute."
"Keep me as long as you like. How is everything? Are the kids all right?"
"Oh, yes, yes, we’re all fine. Believe me, this is nothing serious. I just had this miserable experience this morning, and I want you – well, I want you to explain human nature to me, I guess!" She laughed, as she did so many times each day, that beautiful bell-like laugh which echoed against her straight square teeth and then seemed to double back and double-echo again, that laugh that reminded you of singing, that made you wonder if Trish sang professionally. Surprisingly, it was the one characteristic of hers whose effect she was unaware of.
"Explain human nature," he repeated, "all right, I’ll give you two minutes."
"Thank you so much," she laughed.
"So what happened this morning?"
"Oh, I had an altercation with this woman I work with. She’s extremely difficult, and I just want to know what to think." Father Mike nodded, and Trish went on. She first gathered her thoughts, swallowed, and then laid her small, plump hands, like the small paws of a gentle white dog, a Samoyed, gracefully on the desk in front of her.
"My company took a business trip to France a couple weeks ago. I work for Monique-Boyd, you know, it’s a foundation and a studio that films architectural restoration projects? We’re on public television sometimes."
"Of course, I’m familiar with it. Quite prestigious, isn’t it?"
"Well, rather prestigious, yes," Trish nodded. "And I’d like to keep it that way, as a matter of fact. Anyway we went, about ten of us, to film some work that’s being done on an old medieval abbey in France. Okay, so far so good. Well, this woman I’m talking about, she has had a bee in her bonnet for some time about the way the company operates, its expenses, its bylaws, all this picayune stuff that nobody has thought of in years. The company’s foundress, late foundress, hasn’t thought of it in years, we’re making money, we do wonderful work, we’ve heard through the grapevine that the Peabody Awards people may be interested in us, I mean - we’re doing fine."
"Okay."
"Okay, so back to France. We’re there for only a week, filming this highly important abbey restoration project that Frank – Mr. Boyd, the founder, had arranged for us to do years ago, and a couple things happen. Monique Boyd, Mrs. Boyd, died, so of course we’re pretty upset even though she was eighty – at least, I was upset – and then after I and a couple other staff had left Europe early to attend the wake back here, there’s this little party, on our last night, everybody’s last night there, in a little cafe in the town where we were staying. Where they were still staying. Okay? Do you follow me?" She put her hand on her heart. "I personally was gone."
"Okay."
"All right, so apparently this dinner party got out of hand. I don’t know. There was no reason it should have gotten ‘out of hand,’ whatever that means. We always arrange a little dinner out on the last night of all our field trips because – well, because we work hard and we want to attract good people to our staff and reward them, and it’s never caused a problem before. So there was this little party, something went wrong, two executive board members were not there to deal with this – I mean myself and my vice-president – and the person who does deal with it, she’s the treasurer, is this woman who I then dealt with this morning."
In fact Father Mike was having a hard time following this and Trish sensed she had not really reached him. It was so different with the women who knew the story. By this point in the narration, they were already mesmerized and, very probably, indignant.
"Okay," he said, squinting a little. "Are you sure you don’t need a lawyer instead of me?"
She smiled, again wearily. "No, although I know it sounds like that. No. What this woman did was to go, first of all, and apologize to the bar owner, in France, where things evidently went wrong, which is fine. She was the correct person to have done that and I salute her for it. But then she took it upon herself to write this incredibly nasty letter to the whole staff about how terrible we all are, and we do everything wrong, and we have to change, we personally, you know, like we’re not good enough? Because she thinks so? It was just unbelievable. And without a word of consultation with anyone, just – out it goes. I think she fancies herself way too intellectual for all us little nobodies, and I think she was just waiting for a chance to berate us all. You’re lucky if she speaks two words to you in a year, normally, and then there’s this. I mean she’s totally insufferable. I’m sorry, that’s not nice and it’s Christmastime, but that’s what I think." She paused and waited for him to speak.
"Well," Father Mike began, "all right. We can’t help our experiences. And what we learn from them. I suppose sometimes when our feelings are deeply engaged, we think we have to reach people, shake them up somehow."
Trish did not quite understand, at first, whom he was speaking about, but when she realized he meant Alice she had her opening and went on. "Oh, she succeeded. This shook me up. It shook everyone up. I was so hurt. And I just – I couldn’t let it go. And I have friends, my vice-president, who couldn’t let it go. Don’t you think it’s wrong to let a person just be mean like that? Don’t you think they have to be stood up to?"
He leaned back in the chair and looked out the window, puffing out his cheeks with breath. "Well ... if you’re talking about absolute injustice, yes."
"Well, to me, this was. You’re right. Absolute injustice. That’s a good way of putting it." Father Mike drew a breath to intervene but she rushed forward. "So, I went to this woman’s house this morning. I tried to talk to her. I called her first to ask if I could come. I tried to be positive. I brought her a little pamphlet which I made on the spot last night, on the computer, detailing all the history of the company, all the places we’ve been, our work, our awards, our growth. I tried to talk to her about people skills. And I didn’t even use that expression, so I wouldn’t offend her. To me, I don’t know where she was raised, but she is an absolute retard about people skills. I mean, no sympathy at all, just in her own world, totally cold. I felt she owed everyone an apology, and she refused it. I felt she should at least acknowledge she had made a mistake, even just to me, and she refused that. What kind of person doesn’t understand that when you do something wrong, when you hurt people, you apologize? What kind of person is like that?"
And with that, Trish had abruptly finished. Father Mike missed a beat while this sunk in.
After a moment of thought he said, "I suppose she simply doesn’t think she has hurt anyone."
"How could she not? That’s what I’m asking. How could you not know?" Trish’s nervousness had vanished and she was feeling better and better. She loved Father Mike.
"Motivation, intent, is a mysterious thing," he answered. "That’s why it’s taken into account both in terms of sin and in law, I believe. If she meant well, or at least meant no harm ...." He knew that he was approaching taking the other woman’s side and that Trish had not come here for that. She wanted counseling, and that does not always mean the truth, or even a search for truth.
"If her motivation was genuine meanness, however, then – I mean if she has not committed an actual crime and is not a threat to anyone, in which case you would need to contact other authorities – if she overreacted and her motive was meanness, then you have probably a damaged, unhappy character on your hands and I’m not sure what else there is to do except perhaps have pity and stay out of her way. There are always people in this world who are hurt and unhappy, you know. We see them all the time. That’s why the saying goes that the church is a hospital for the sick, not a choir for the anointed."
Trish looked grim. "Well. I don’t doubt she’s damaged and unhappy. My problem is just...I don’t know." She reached down for her bag.
"Can you avoid her?"
She speculated a minute, and then broke into her bell-like laugh. "Not as much as I need to. She’s, well, I suppose evil is too strong a word, but she’s so weird and tense and masculine and out of control." Trish had never before paused to analyze another person’s character, and the words that spilled out now struck her as alien and sophisticated at once. She was startled, yet impressed with herself. She went on.
"If I really wanted to avoid her, and I really think I may need to, I would have to quit my job. That’s what it amounts to and it infuriates me. I hate her having that kind of power. Over all of us. I’m sure I’m not the only one. That’s not right. That’s why I went to speak to her this morning. She cannot have that kind of power, to drive good people away and ruin something nice. Something functioning. It’s unjust."
"Well. I doubt she can actually ruin a corporation, a business, on her own authority. That’s another thing lawyers are for," he smiled. "To prevent that kind of thing, to – to protect ...." He looked at her, hedging, and then decided to take a chance. "Unless you think she has actually hit a nerve and has uncovered some issue that is vital. Could that be what hurts so much?" Trish shook her head.
"Even if she had," she answered quietly, "she’s so scary no one would listen to her. No one is listening to her now, so the story is already over. Whatever she wants to do is already impossible. That’s what’s so ironic. All she can do is be mean. No. All she’ll do is drive people away who were doing a good job and who have no reason to be bogged down in scary stuff that would prevent them doing a good job." Her bell-like laugh returned. "Prevent them solving any problems. It’s really twisted. No."
He remembered he was her pastor. "Did you get the impression you affected her at all? Was she open to criticism, constructive criticism I mean, was she reasonably pleasant? Human?"
"No. Absolutely not. She was horrible. I felt like I was in a dragon’s den. It was almost surreal, like talking to a robot. Her place was a mess, kids all over. I was crying in the car on the way here, afterwards. I don’t cry easily. That’s why I stopped in here." She paused. "Why are people like that?" she pleaded. "What do I do? I feel I have no purpose. That’s it. I couldn’t reach this woman, and I have to work with her, and all she can do is harm. I feel I have no purpose."
Father Mike was looking at her with his face propped up on his knuckles. "It’s a quandary," he said, typically. "Would it help if I talked to her?"
"She would never come near you," Trish said, inwardly surprised at how quickly this answer had surged into her. "She would never come near anyone who offered help. And I wouldn’t even want you to have to meet her. There’s no need to burden you with that." Father Mike was on the point of making another suggestion when Trish sighed and continued, "Well, okay. You’re right. She is a damaged character and the answer for the moment is just to stay out of her way. I mean who knows, maybe she’ll quit."
He laughed. "That’s possible."
"That would be a godsend. Can you pray for that, or is that, like, rude or something?" And she laughed.
"I don’t know if we should pray for other people to act a certain way, to do a specific thing." ("For our benefit," he almost added, but did not.) "You can certainly pray for strength and wisdom to solve your problems, or to cope with problems that are insoluble. You know, like the Serenity prayer?"
She nodded, sniffing. "I know it. It’s beautiful."
"I’m sure God understands the heart, even when we’re not feeling sacred and angelic. Especially then. You could even pray for her."
"Oh, no." Trish looked up quickly, and they both laughed. "No, I’m not ready for that yet."
"Okay."
"Okay. Well, this helped. Thank you for letting me vent for a while." Trish rose, smiled rather tightly, shook hands with him, and left.
Trish was too upset by this interview to try to go on and accomplish the neighborhood errands she had mentioned. She drove towards home, sniffing back the tears – incredible, tears – alone in her car. She did not know who on earth to talk to about this. Of course she could telephone Pat, but they had been through this already, so much, and Trish felt she needed to tell this story fresh, to someone new. Besides, though a good friend, Pat was so much tougher than she was; she really did shrug Alice off. And it was not a Gallic shrug. It was just Pat, big and clanking and right, with tiny brown eyes like spearpoints in barbarian firelight that saw everything and had no doubts, and a big raspy laugh that laughed at everything. Trish could confide in her husband, but he already knew the story, too. He was the one who asked her to leave the computer and come to bed last night. And anyway men were so obtuse about women’s things. They didn’t seem to fight, ever, among themselves. They had no morals about delicate things, and didn’t care.
Trish wanted to speak to someone entirely new. As she waited at the stoplight to turn into her beautiful neighborhood – there was the splendid community center on its hill, where Miranda and Rory had art lessons and she and Dan saw Shakespeare in the theater-in-the-round every spring, and there was their huge church among the oaks, its roof sweeping up to a point like a pair of praying hands – it occurred to her that she would very much like to talk to Father Mike. Suddenly she wanted to talk to a professional with a key to the infinite, to kindness, who would understand petty problems, petty squabbles, and yet be upbeat, holy, and sympathetic about them. She wanted to try to understand the brutality of Alice, and why people are like that and why this was happening to her.
She made her turn when the light went green and then pulled up short right into the church’s parking lot, such an unaccustomed maneuver for her, especially on a Saturday, the day usually given to errands. It was an unaccustomed maneuver for the driver behind her too. He blared his horn at her angrily and then sped on. She became more upset and was astonished to feel herself sweating, she, normally so self-possessed. Perhaps she was being silly in coming here unannounced on a Saturday morning. Perhaps there was a mass going on and Father Mike was not available. What could a priest tell her, what did he know about the world? Maybe he had gone to visit his family for the New Year’s weekend and the place would be locked. In chagrin at her own indecision she almost gunned the engine and sped right on through the parking lot and out to the side street that led to her street by another way. But she remembered the delight and relief she had just felt half a minute before at the idea of confiding in a new person, an eternal person, and with some nervousness she parked the car after all, turned off the ignition, undid her seat belt, and got out. She felt a little giddy. Talking to a clergyman, just for her own reasons? Not to plan a wedding or a communion or something? Who was she trying to kid?
Luckily the glass doors to the foyer were unlocked and she passed in and found Father Mike simply sitting in the secretary’s office as if everything were quite ordinary. How foolish she felt. She was going to have to intrude upon this man’s day and burden him with some overwrought emotional problem, when perhaps he was merely thinking of watching football this afternoon, or expecting her to drop off a little check for the sharing parish and then be on her busy way again. She felt cruel and pointless, she normally so sure of her decency, she whose mother had enrolled her in years of etiquette lessons as a child. She had even learned how to get out of the back seat of a car while wearing a formal gown, and she still got out of her car that way, all the time.
Father looked up and smiled. He was typing on the computer. "Trish! Good morning. Happy New Year."
"Happy New Year, Father," she smiled weakly.
"How are you?"
She blew out a sigh. "Well, not good, actually."
His attention had been half with her but now was fully with her. He looked at her face. "Really, why is that?"
"Have you got a minute to talk? Are you busy?" Exactly what she had asked Alice on the phone. And look how that had turned out. She was frightened.
"Sure, I can talk." He closed out whatever he was doing on the machine and turned to her, complete attention at the ready. "Do you want to go in my office?"
"Oh no, let’s not bother," she answered as she loosened her coat and dropped her bag on the floor beside a chair. Alice was not worth the high seriousness of a priest’s office, with the crucifix and all the books. She sat down. "I won’t keep you only a minute."
"Keep me as long as you like. How is everything? Are the kids all right?"
"Oh, yes, yes, we’re all fine. Believe me, this is nothing serious. I just had this miserable experience this morning, and I want you – well, I want you to explain human nature to me, I guess!" She laughed, as she did so many times each day, that beautiful bell-like laugh which echoed against her straight square teeth and then seemed to double back and double-echo again, that laugh that reminded you of singing, that made you wonder if Trish sang professionally. Surprisingly, it was the one characteristic of hers whose effect she was unaware of.
"Explain human nature," he repeated, "all right, I’ll give you two minutes."
"Thank you so much," she laughed.
"So what happened this morning?"
"Oh, I had an altercation with this woman I work with. She’s extremely difficult, and I just want to know what to think." Father Mike nodded, and Trish went on. She first gathered her thoughts, swallowed, and then laid her small, plump hands, like the small paws of a gentle white dog, a Samoyed, gracefully on the desk in front of her.
"My company took a business trip to France a couple weeks ago. I work for Monique-Boyd, you know, it’s a foundation and a studio that films architectural restoration projects? We’re on public television sometimes."
"Of course, I’m familiar with it. Quite prestigious, isn’t it?"
"Well, rather prestigious, yes," Trish nodded. "And I’d like to keep it that way, as a matter of fact. Anyway we went, about ten of us, to film some work that’s being done on an old medieval abbey in France. Okay, so far so good. Well, this woman I’m talking about, she has had a bee in her bonnet for some time about the way the company operates, its expenses, its bylaws, all this picayune stuff that nobody has thought of in years. The company’s foundress, late foundress, hasn’t thought of it in years, we’re making money, we do wonderful work, we’ve heard through the grapevine that the Peabody Awards people may be interested in us, I mean - we’re doing fine."
"Okay."
"Okay, so back to France. We’re there for only a week, filming this highly important abbey restoration project that Frank – Mr. Boyd, the founder, had arranged for us to do years ago, and a couple things happen. Monique Boyd, Mrs. Boyd, died, so of course we’re pretty upset even though she was eighty – at least, I was upset – and then after I and a couple other staff had left Europe early to attend the wake back here, there’s this little party, on our last night, everybody’s last night there, in a little cafe in the town where we were staying. Where they were still staying. Okay? Do you follow me?" She put her hand on her heart. "I personally was gone."
"Okay."
"All right, so apparently this dinner party got out of hand. I don’t know. There was no reason it should have gotten ‘out of hand,’ whatever that means. We always arrange a little dinner out on the last night of all our field trips because – well, because we work hard and we want to attract good people to our staff and reward them, and it’s never caused a problem before. So there was this little party, something went wrong, two executive board members were not there to deal with this – I mean myself and my vice-president – and the person who does deal with it, she’s the treasurer, is this woman who I then dealt with this morning."
In fact Father Mike was having a hard time following this and Trish sensed she had not really reached him. It was so different with the women who knew the story. By this point in the narration, they were already mesmerized and, very probably, indignant.
"Okay," he said, squinting a little. "Are you sure you don’t need a lawyer instead of me?"
She smiled, again wearily. "No, although I know it sounds like that. No. What this woman did was to go, first of all, and apologize to the bar owner, in France, where things evidently went wrong, which is fine. She was the correct person to have done that and I salute her for it. But then she took it upon herself to write this incredibly nasty letter to the whole staff about how terrible we all are, and we do everything wrong, and we have to change, we personally, you know, like we’re not good enough? Because she thinks so? It was just unbelievable. And without a word of consultation with anyone, just – out it goes. I think she fancies herself way too intellectual for all us little nobodies, and I think she was just waiting for a chance to berate us all. You’re lucky if she speaks two words to you in a year, normally, and then there’s this. I mean she’s totally insufferable. I’m sorry, that’s not nice and it’s Christmastime, but that’s what I think." She paused and waited for him to speak.
"Well," Father Mike began, "all right. We can’t help our experiences. And what we learn from them. I suppose sometimes when our feelings are deeply engaged, we think we have to reach people, shake them up somehow."
Trish did not quite understand, at first, whom he was speaking about, but when she realized he meant Alice she had her opening and went on. "Oh, she succeeded. This shook me up. It shook everyone up. I was so hurt. And I just – I couldn’t let it go. And I have friends, my vice-president, who couldn’t let it go. Don’t you think it’s wrong to let a person just be mean like that? Don’t you think they have to be stood up to?"
He leaned back in the chair and looked out the window, puffing out his cheeks with breath. "Well ... if you’re talking about absolute injustice, yes."
"Well, to me, this was. You’re right. Absolute injustice. That’s a good way of putting it." Father Mike drew a breath to intervene but she rushed forward. "So, I went to this woman’s house this morning. I tried to talk to her. I called her first to ask if I could come. I tried to be positive. I brought her a little pamphlet which I made on the spot last night, on the computer, detailing all the history of the company, all the places we’ve been, our work, our awards, our growth. I tried to talk to her about people skills. And I didn’t even use that expression, so I wouldn’t offend her. To me, I don’t know where she was raised, but she is an absolute retard about people skills. I mean, no sympathy at all, just in her own world, totally cold. I felt she owed everyone an apology, and she refused it. I felt she should at least acknowledge she had made a mistake, even just to me, and she refused that. What kind of person doesn’t understand that when you do something wrong, when you hurt people, you apologize? What kind of person is like that?"
And with that, Trish had abruptly finished. Father Mike missed a beat while this sunk in.
After a moment of thought he said, "I suppose she simply doesn’t think she has hurt anyone."
"How could she not? That’s what I’m asking. How could you not know?" Trish’s nervousness had vanished and she was feeling better and better. She loved Father Mike.
"Motivation, intent, is a mysterious thing," he answered. "That’s why it’s taken into account both in terms of sin and in law, I believe. If she meant well, or at least meant no harm ...." He knew that he was approaching taking the other woman’s side and that Trish had not come here for that. She wanted counseling, and that does not always mean the truth, or even a search for truth.
"If her motivation was genuine meanness, however, then – I mean if she has not committed an actual crime and is not a threat to anyone, in which case you would need to contact other authorities – if she overreacted and her motive was meanness, then you have probably a damaged, unhappy character on your hands and I’m not sure what else there is to do except perhaps have pity and stay out of her way. There are always people in this world who are hurt and unhappy, you know. We see them all the time. That’s why the saying goes that the church is a hospital for the sick, not a choir for the anointed."
Trish looked grim. "Well. I don’t doubt she’s damaged and unhappy. My problem is just...I don’t know." She reached down for her bag.
"Can you avoid her?"
She speculated a minute, and then broke into her bell-like laugh. "Not as much as I need to. She’s, well, I suppose evil is too strong a word, but she’s so weird and tense and masculine and out of control." Trish had never before paused to analyze another person’s character, and the words that spilled out now struck her as alien and sophisticated at once. She was startled, yet impressed with herself. She went on.
"If I really wanted to avoid her, and I really think I may need to, I would have to quit my job. That’s what it amounts to and it infuriates me. I hate her having that kind of power. Over all of us. I’m sure I’m not the only one. That’s not right. That’s why I went to speak to her this morning. She cannot have that kind of power, to drive good people away and ruin something nice. Something functioning. It’s unjust."
"Well. I doubt she can actually ruin a corporation, a business, on her own authority. That’s another thing lawyers are for," he smiled. "To prevent that kind of thing, to – to protect ...." He looked at her, hedging, and then decided to take a chance. "Unless you think she has actually hit a nerve and has uncovered some issue that is vital. Could that be what hurts so much?" Trish shook her head.
"Even if she had," she answered quietly, "she’s so scary no one would listen to her. No one is listening to her now, so the story is already over. Whatever she wants to do is already impossible. That’s what’s so ironic. All she can do is be mean. No. All she’ll do is drive people away who were doing a good job and who have no reason to be bogged down in scary stuff that would prevent them doing a good job." Her bell-like laugh returned. "Prevent them solving any problems. It’s really twisted. No."
He remembered he was her pastor. "Did you get the impression you affected her at all? Was she open to criticism, constructive criticism I mean, was she reasonably pleasant? Human?"
"No. Absolutely not. She was horrible. I felt like I was in a dragon’s den. It was almost surreal, like talking to a robot. Her place was a mess, kids all over. I was crying in the car on the way here, afterwards. I don’t cry easily. That’s why I stopped in here." She paused. "Why are people like that?" she pleaded. "What do I do? I feel I have no purpose. That’s it. I couldn’t reach this woman, and I have to work with her, and all she can do is harm. I feel I have no purpose."
Father Mike was looking at her with his face propped up on his knuckles. "It’s a quandary," he said, typically. "Would it help if I talked to her?"
"She would never come near you," Trish said, inwardly surprised at how quickly this answer had surged into her. "She would never come near anyone who offered help. And I wouldn’t even want you to have to meet her. There’s no need to burden you with that." Father Mike was on the point of making another suggestion when Trish sighed and continued, "Well, okay. You’re right. She is a damaged character and the answer for the moment is just to stay out of her way. I mean who knows, maybe she’ll quit."
He laughed. "That’s possible."
"That would be a godsend. Can you pray for that, or is that, like, rude or something?" And she laughed.
"I don’t know if we should pray for other people to act a certain way, to do a specific thing." ("For our benefit," he almost added, but did not.) "You can certainly pray for strength and wisdom to solve your problems, or to cope with problems that are insoluble. You know, like the Serenity prayer?"
She nodded, sniffing. "I know it. It’s beautiful."
"I’m sure God understands the heart, even when we’re not feeling sacred and angelic. Especially then. You could even pray for her."
"Oh, no." Trish looked up quickly, and they both laughed. "No, I’m not ready for that yet."
"Okay."
"Okay. Well, this helped. Thank you for letting me vent for a while." Trish rose, smiled rather tightly, shook hands with him, and left.
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