The Beggar Maid (17 page)

A
t first the party was easier than Rose had expected. She had been afraid that she would be too dressed-up; she would have liked to wear her toreador pants but Patrick would never have stood for it. But only a few of the girls were in slacks. The rest wore stockings, earrings, outfits much like her own. As at any gathering of young women at that time, three or four were noticeably pregnant. And most of the men were in suits and shirts and ties, like Patrick. Rose was relieved. Not
only did she want Patrick to fit into the party; she wanted him to accept the people there, to be convinced they were not all freaks. When Patrick was a student he had taken her to concerts and plays and did not seem overly suspicious of the people who participated in them; indeed he rather favored these things, because they were detested by his family, and at that time—the time he chose Rose—he was having a brief rebellion against his family. Once he and Rose had gone to Toronto and sat in the Chinese temple room at the Museum, looking at the frescoes. Patrick told her how they were brought in small pieces from Shansi province; he seemed quite proud of his knowledge, and at the same time disarmingly, uncharacteristically humble, admitting he had got it all on a tour. It was since he had gone to work that he had developed harsh opinions and delivered wholesale condemnations. Modern Art was a Hoax. Avant-garde plays were filthy. Patrick had a special, mincing, spitting way of saying avant-garde, making the words seem disgustingly pretentious. And so they were, Rose thought. In a way, she could see what he meant. She could see too many sides of things; Patrick did not have that problem.

Except for some great periodic fights she was very docile with Patrick, she tried to keep in favor. It was not easy to do so. Even before they were married he had a habit of delivering reproving lectures, in response to a simple question or observation. Sometimes in those days she would ask him a question in the hope that he would show off some superior knowledge that she could admire him for, but she was usually sorry she had asked, the answer was so long and had such a scolding tone, and the knowledge wouldn’t be so superior, either. She did want to admire him, and respect him; it seemed that was a leap she was always on the edge of taking.

Later she thought that she did respect Patrick, but not in the way he wanted to be respected, and she did love him, not in the way he wanted to be loved. She didn’t know it then. She thought she knew something about him, she thought she knew that he didn’t really want to be whatever he was zealously making himself into. That arrogance might be called respect; that high-handedness, love. It didn’t do anything to make him happy.

A few men wore jeans and turtlenecks or sweatshirts. Clifford was one of them, all in black. It was the time of the beatniks in San Francisco.
Jocelyn had called Rose up on the phone and read her
Howl.
Clifford’s skin looked very tanned, against the black, his hair was long for the time and almost as light a color as unbleached cotton; his eyes too were very light in color, a bright gray-blue. He looked small and catlike to Rose, rather effeminate; she hoped Patrick wouldn’t be too put off by him.

There was beer to drink, and a wine punch. Jocelyn, who was a splendid cook, was stirring a pot of jambalaya. Rose make a trip to the bathroom to remove herself from Patrick, who seemed to want to stick close to her (she thought he was being a watchdog; she forgot that he might be shy). When she came out he had moved on. She drank three cups of punch in quick succession and was introduced to the woman who had written the play. To Rose’s surprise this woman was one of the drabbest, least confident-looking people in the room.

“I liked your play,” Rose told her. As a matter of fact she had found it mystifying, and Patrick had thought it was revolting. It seemed to be about a woman who ate her own children. Rose knew that was symbolic, but couldn’t quite figure out what it was symbolic of.

“Oh, but the production was terrible!” the woman said. In her embarrassment, her excitement and eagerness to talk about her play, she sprayed Rose with punch. “They made it so literal. I was afraid it would just come across as gruesome and I meant it to be delicate, I meant it to be so different from the way they made it.” She started telling Rose everything that had gone wrong, the miscasting, the chopping of the most important—the
crucial
—lines. Rose felt flattered, listening to these details, and tried inconspicuously to wipe away the spray.

“But you did see what I meant?” the woman said.

“Oh, yes!”

Clifford poured Rose another cup of punch and smiled at her.

“Rose, you look delicious.”

Delicious seemed an odd word for Clifford to use. Perhaps he was drunk. Or perhaps, hating parties altogether as Jocelyn said he did, he had taken on a role; he was the sort of man who told a girl she looked delicious. He might be adept at disguises, as Rose thought she herself was getting to be. She went on talking to the writer and a man who taught English Literature of the Seventeenth Century. She too might
have been poor and clever, radical and irreverent, for all anybody could tell.

A man and a girl were embracing passionately in the narrow hall. Whenever anybody wanted to get through, this couple had to separate, but they continued looking at each other, and did not even close their mouths. The sight of those wet open mouths made Rose shiver. She had never been embraced like that in her life, never had her mouth opened like that. Patrick thought French-kissing was disgusting.

A little bald man named Cyril had stationed himself outside the bathroom door, and was kissing any girl who came out, saying, “Welcome, sweetheart, so glad you could come, so glad you went.”

“Cyril is awful,” the woman writer said. “Cyril thinks he has to try to act like a poet. He can’t think of anything to do but hang around the john and upset people. He thinks he’s outrageous.”

“Is he a poet?” Rose said.

The lecturer in English Literature said, “He told me he had burned all his poems.”

“How flamboyant of him,” Rose said. She was delighted with herself for saying this, and with them for laughing.

The lecturer began to think of Tom Swifties.

“I can never think of any of those things,” said the writer mournfully, “I care too much about language.”

Loud voices were coming from the living room. Rose recognized Patrick’s voice, soaring over and subduing everyone else’s. She opened her mouth to say something, anything, to cover him up—she knew some disaster was on the way—but just then a tall, curly-haired, elated-looking man came through the hall, pushing the passionate couple unceremoniously apart, holding up his hands for attention.

“Listen to this,” he said to the whole kitchen. “There’s this guy in the living room you wouldn’t believe him. Listen.”

There must have been a conversation about Indians going on in the living room. Now Patrick had taken it over.

“Take them away,” said Patrick. “Take them away from their parents as soon as they’re born and put them in a civilized environment and educate them and they will turn out just as good as whites any day.” No doubt he thought he was expressing liberal views. If they
thought this was amazing, they should have got him on the execution of the Rosenbergs or the trial of Alger Hiss or the necessity for nuclear testing.

Some girl said mildly, “Well, you know, there is their own culture.”

“Their culture is done for,” said Patrick. “Kaput.” This was a word he was using a good deal right now. He could use some words, clichés, editorial phrases—
massive reappraisal
was one of them—with such relish and numbing authority that you would think he was their originator, or at least that the very fact of his using them gave them weight and luster.

“They want to be civilized,” he said. “The smarter ones do.”

“Well, perhaps they don’t consider they’re exactly uncivilized,” said the girl with an icy demureness that was lost on Patrick.

“Some people need a push.”

The self-congratulatory tones, the ripe admonishment, caused the man in the kitchen to throw up his hands, and wag his head in delight and disbelief. “This has got to be a Socred politician.”

As a matter of fact Patrick did vote Social Credit.

“Yes, well, like it or not,” he was saying, “they have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the twentieth century.”

“Kicking and screaming?” someone repeated.

“Kicking and screaming into the twentieth century,” said Patrick, who never minded saying anything again.

“What an interesting expression. So human as well.”

Wouldn’t he understand now, that he was being cornered, being baited and laughed at? But Patrick, being cornered, could only grow more thunderous. Rose could not listen any longer. She headed for the back passage, which was full of all the boots, coats, bottles, tubs, toys, that Jocelyn and Clifford had pitched out of the way for the party. Thank God it was empty of people. She went out of the back door and stood burning and shivering in the cool wet night. Her feelings were as confused as anybody’s can get. She was humiliated, she was ashamed of Patrick. But she knew that it was his style that most humiliated her, and that made her suspect something corrupt and frivolous in herself. She was angry at those other people who were cleverer, or at least far quicker, than he was. She wanted to think badly of them. What did they care about Indians, really? Given a chance to behave decently to
an Indian, Patrick might just come out ahead of them. This was a long shot, but she had to believe it. Patrick was a good person. His opinions were not good, but he was. The core of Patrick, Rose believed, was simple, pure and trustworthy. But how was she to get at it, to reassure herself, much less reveal it to others?

She heard the back door close and was afraid that Jocelyn had come out looking for her. Jocelyn was not someone who could believe in Patrick’s core. She thought him stiff-necked, thick-skulled, and essentially silly.

It was not Jocelyn. It was Clifford. Rose didn’t want to have to say anything to him. Slightly drunk as she was, woebegone, wet-faced from the rain, she looked at him without welcome. But he put his arms around her and rocked her.

“Oh Rose. Rose baby. Never mind. Rose.”

So this was Clifford.

For five minutes or so they were kissing, murmuring, shivering, pressing, touching. They returned to the party by the front door. Cyril was there. He said, “Hey, wow, where have you two been?”

“Walking in the rain,” said Clifford coolly. The same light possibly hostile voice in which he had told Rose she looked delicious. The Patrick-baiting had stopped. Conversation had become looser, drunker, more irresponsible. Jocelyn was serving jambalaya. She went to the bathroom to dry her hair and put lipstick on her rubbed-bare mouth. She was transformed, invulnerable. The first person she met coming out was Patrick. She had a wish to make him happy. She didn’t care now what he had said, or would say.

“I don’t think we’ve met, sir,” she said, in the tiny flirtatious voice she used with him sometimes, when they were feeling easy together. “But you may kiss my hand.”

“For crying out loud,” said Patrick heartily, and he did squeeze her and kiss her, with a loud smacking noise, on the cheek. He always smacked when he kissed. And his elbows always managed to dig in somewhere and hurt her.

“Enjoying yourself?” Rose said.

“Not bad, not bad.”

During the rest of the evening, of course, she played the game of watching Clifford while pretending not to watch him, and it seemed
to her he was doing the same, and their eyes met, a few times, without expression, sending a perfectly clear message that rocked her on her feet. She saw him quite differently now. His body that had seemed small and tame now appeared to her light and slippery and full of energy; he was like a lynx or a bobcat. He had his tan from skiing. He went up Seymour Mountain and skied. An expensive hobby, but one which Jocelyn felt could not be denied him, because of the problems he had with his image. His masculine image, as a violinist, in this society. So Jocelyn said. Jocelyn had told Rose all about Clifford’s background: the arthritic father, the small grocery store in a town in upstate New York, the poor tough neighborhood. She had talked about his problems as a child; the inappropriate talent, the grudging parents, the jeering schoolmates. His childhood left him bitter, Jocelyn said. But Rose no longer believed that Jocelyn had the last word on Clifford.

T
he party was on a Friday night. The phone rang the next morning, when Patrick and Anna were at the table eating eggs.

“How are you?” said Clifford.

“Fine.”

“I wanted to phone you. I thought you might think I was just drunk or something. I wasn’t.”

“Oh, no.”

“I’ve thought about you all night. I thought about you before, too.”

“Yes.” The kitchen was dazzling. The whole scene in front of her, of Patrick and Anna at the table, the coffee pot with dribbles down the side, the jar of marmalade, was exploding with joy and possibility and danger. Rose’s mouth was so dry she could hardly talk.

“It’s a lovely day,” she said. “Patrick and Anna and I might go up the mountain.”

“Patrick’s home?”

“Yes.”

“Oh God. That was dumb of me. I forgot nobody else works Saturdays. I’m over here at a rehearsal.”

“Yes.”

“Can you pretend it’s somebody else? Pretend it’s Jocelyn.”

“Sure.”

“I love you, Rose,” said Clifford, and hung up.

“Who was that?” said Patrick.

“Jocelyn.”

“Does she have to call when I’m home?”

“She forgot. Clifford’s at a rehearsal so she forgot other people aren’t working.” Rose delighted in saying Clifford’s name. Deceitfulness, concealment, seemed to come marvelously easy to her; that might almost be a pleasure in itself.

“I didn’t realize they’d have to work Saturdays,” she said, to keep on the subject. “They must work terribly long hours.”

“They don’t work any longer hours than normal people, it’s just strung out differently. He doesn’t look capable of much work.”