Other things were, however. Mira was not sure whether she had never really listened to them before, whether they had changed, or whether her being at Harvard gave a focus to their attacks. People seemed very upset these days. These people, familiar aunts, uncles, cousins, seemed united in a most virulent hatred. They talked with outraged contempt about drug addicts and hippies, about ungrateful spoiled kids who grew beards and long hair and did not appreciate their parents’ sacrifices. Jews seemed to have become more evil than ever in the past year or two, but they did not occupy center stage anymore. It was the niggers. When Mira complained, that was changed to the coloreds. They, the coloreds and the hippies and the war protesters, were ruining the country. ‘They’ were getting in everywhere; ‘they’ got scholarships to colleges while poor Harry, who earned only $35,000 a year, had to pay to send his children to college. And then, when the coloreds and the hippies got in, not on merit, you can be sure of that, they tried to overturn the school. Harvard kids were the worst. They were the most privileged group of kids ever known, and still they complained. ‘We’ had to work for what we got; ‘we’ didn’t get anything and didn’t dare to protest; but ‘they’ were still unsatisfied.
Mira listened. She tried to muster arguments against them, although she saw bits of truth in what they said.
‘You can’t judge them by the standards of a past world,’ she said, but they leaped on her in fury. Those standards were eternal. Hard work, frugality, suppression of desire: that was the recipe for success and success was goodness and virtue. And one stayed faithful to one’s wife, and one made one’s mortgage payments, and one created a semblance of order because if one did not, the world would fall apart.
‘Do you know,’ asked a cousin, a woman almost Mira’s age, married and with three children, ‘the students in my school, the Negro students – there are all of ten of them in a school of two hundred and thirty – had the gall to ask the principal for a course in Black Studies? Can you imagine? I was flabbergasted! As soon as I heard it – and that idiot
of a principal, he was thinking about giving it to them! – I marched right down to his office and said that if they could have a course in Black Studies, I wanted to give a course in English-Irish Studies! If they could have theirs, I want mine!’
‘That’s pretty much what they’ve gotten up until now,’ Mira said, but her cousin did not hear.
‘And the teacher in the room down the hall from me is French. I told him she could give a course in French Studies! Hah! How would he like that? Sixth graders learning
that
sort of thing!’
‘What sort of thing?’
‘Well, for heaven’s sakes, Mira, she’s
French!’
She glanced around the room and saw the boys. ‘You can imagine!’ she said, with a sarcastic smile.
It went on like that. Through dinner and afterwards, it went on like that. Mira probed her memory: had it always been like this? At some point in the evening, she poured herself a rye on the rocks. Norm was pouring Coke for himself, and noticed.
‘Switching drinks?’
‘I can’t seem to get drunk enough on gin and tonic.’
‘Why don’t you have a brandy?’
‘That’s for later. For sitting up late with.’
‘Can I have some tonight? If we stay up late?’
‘Sure,’ she smiled, and slipped her arm around his waist. He put his around her shoulders, and they stood there for a time.
They did stay up late, long after everyone had left. They each had a brandy snifter, although the boys had only a drop each and did not like it and were soon gulping Coke again. Mira asked them, was it me, or were they worse this year?
They didn’t know. Apparently all three of them had been not listening all these years. Mira blasted her family. She took their politics apart and damned them, she blasted their bigotry. The boys listened. When she asked for their opinions, they did not have any, not even on bigotry. They knew, they explained, that prejudice was supposed to be bad, but they heard it everywhere they went. And they knew scarcely any Jews, and no blacks at all, so how could they judge?
‘I mean, it sounds crazy,’ Clark explained. ‘But I don’t know. Maybe black people really are what they say. I know you say all that’s not true, and I believe you, but I don’t know. For myself I don’t know.’
Mira shut her mouth. ‘Yes,’ she said finally. ‘You’re right. Of course. You have to wait until you know for yourselves.’
But the boys had other complaints. There had been so much hate. They had never before seen so much hate, so much anger.
‘She was so bitter.’
‘He seemed so mad.’
‘Is he that mad all the time?’
‘Does Uncle Harry always sound that way?’
They gave her a new perspective. She thought of all those faces, faces she had known since childhood, faces she never thought of in terms of beauty or lack of it, and which she never looked at anymore, never tried to see the character under the familiar. But as the boys spoke, she saw them again: hard, lined, angry faces, with deep bitter lines, eyes furiously popping out of heads, mouths tight and hateful. And she remembered her first days at Harvard, looking in the mirror and noticing the bitter thin scar of her mouth.
‘Do I look like them?’ she asked her sons with a trembling voice.
They hesitated. Her heart constricted. She knew they would find a way to tell her the truth.
‘You used to,’ Norm said. ‘But you got fatter.’
She wailed. It was true.
‘You got softer,’ Clark said. ‘I mean your face is like – rounder.’
Her vanity would not let it pass. ‘I look fat?’
‘No!’ they both insisted. ‘Really, no. Just … rounder,’ Clark repeated, searching for words.
‘Your mouth isn’t so hurt,’ Norm said, and she raised her eyes to him.
‘My mouth looked hurt?’
He shrugged. He felt incompetent. ‘Yeah, sort of. You looked as if you had to be mad or otherwise you’d cry.’
‘Yes.’ Then she glinted her eyes at them. ‘You want me to tell you how you’ve changed?’
‘NO!’ they shouted, laughing.
She reverted to the evening. She wanted to emphasize certain things. She did not want them to grow up unthinking, echoing the words they had heard that night. She wanted to underline a moral. But they would have none of it. They could not, they insisted, judge the opinions, the positions taken that evening.
She was a little liquorish, down to basic impulse. She wanted to pound the table with her fist, to insist vehemently on the evil of bigotry,
stereotyping, prejudice. She wanted to insist on her rightness. She began angrily, ‘Yes, that’s all fine, you won’t prejudge, that sounds wonderful. Except as you yourselves have admitted, everything and everyone around you is infected with bigotry and stereotyping, and by the time you actually meet and know some of its victims, you won’t be able to see them except through the lenses you’ve been handed.’
They continued to demur, to argue. ‘Why should we let you brainwash us?’ Norm demanded.
She wanted to rise up like a Victorian father and proclaim THE TRUTH, to boom and pound them into submission. How dare they refuse to submit to her greater knowledge, her larger moral experience!
Suddenly she crumpled; she sat staring at her drink, her throat full of tears. They didn’t trust her moral judgment because she had forfeited her right to be their guide by letting them know she was a sexual being. She sniffled, engulfed in self-pity. Never again would they look up to her; never again could she guide them gently with a mother’s firm but loving hand. She blew her nose. They, however, paid no attention to her. They were talking to each other, repeating remarks made that evening, giggling together.
‘Yeah, and the look on Uncle Charles’s face when he leaned forward and sneered at Mommy and said how would she like it if her grandchildren all had slanty eyes!’ They both roared.
She listened.
‘And Mommy said slanty eyes might be better than some she saw around her, and his popeyes nearly popped right out of his head!’
They continued, laughing through most of their survey. They were talking about ugliness. That was what bothered them: the people were ugly. They would not like to be like them. The boys perceived there was something wrong with their lives, with their thoughts, with the world, if it made people as ugly as that. She let out her breath. The boys were all right.
9
Mira and Ben spent New Year’s Eve alone. There were parties going on, but they had not seen each other since before Christmas, and wanted only to be together. Ben brought over his TV set and plugged it in in the bedroom. They sprawled on the bed half-dressed, drinking bourbon – Ben’s drink – talking over the family visits. The subject was profoundly interesting to both of them. Both had noticed a difference in atmosphere in their families, an increase in anger, hate, and fear. And each felt that they had been somehow different, and that had been noticed.
‘After thirty-four years, my mother just stopped calling me Benny.’
Mira recounted at length her discussions with the boys, and Ben, far from being bored at hearing about mere children who were not even his own, listened intently and asked serious questions. He recalled his own youth, and drew comparisons; he offered suggestions. He wondered if they were feeling this or that which he had felt at their age. It was beautiful talk and made them both feel rich and full and close.
Ben opened the champagne as the countdown began, and when the balloons broke in Times Square, they wrapped their arms together and drank it from wide-mouthed, stemmed glasses. But the position didn’t work. They spilled champagne on each other and themselves, and giggled, and ended by laughing and kissing, with champagne spilled all over the bed. A change of linen was necessary if they were not going to sleep on a damp mattress, and they went about it gazing more at each other than at what they were doing, loving each other’s every bend, every motion. Then they had to bathe themselves, their skin sticky with the sweet drink, so they filled the tub and poured in half the box of bubble bath Mira’s aunt had given her for Christmas. It stunk: it was acid sweet and lavendery, but that seemed funny too. They took the champagne bottle into the bathroom with them and set their glasses beside the tub and immersed themselves. They bathed each other, loving every limb, every curve and angle, the jut of neck muscle and the knob of collarbone, the sheen of flesh, the fine lines under the eyes, the sad ones around the mouths. They poured water on each other, and every handful was a handful of love.
‘It’s like bathing in warm sperm,’ Mira laughed.
‘No, it’s like bathing in what comes out of you. Something does. What do you call it?’
Mira did not know. ‘Lubricant,’ she decided finally, and that struck them both as hilarious.
‘Mira,’ Ben said suddenly, ‘I have to tell you something.’
He was serious, and she felt her heart slow: thinking how terror always lurked just under the surface of joy.
‘What?’
‘I hate champagne.’
She giggled. ‘So do I.’
He picked up the bottle. ‘I christen thee Mira Voler,’ he said, pouring it over her head. She wailed and mock-cried and grabbed her glass and poured its contents over his head, and they wrestled rather weakly in the slippery tub, their bodies already intertwined, but ended in an embrace. Then they dried each other vigorously, with some rump-slapping and bear-hugging, and padded naked into the kitchen and got out the feast they had prepared earlier, and carried overloaded plates of food back to the bed to stain the fresh bed linen. And talked and talked, exchanging, interrupting, arguing, laughing, and suddenly Ben said, ‘I meant it, you know. Let’s get married.’
Mira stopped. She realized that for some time now, they had rarely spoken of the future in terms of the singular personal pronoun: it was almost always ‘We.’ It might be ‘when I get my degree,’ but it would be followed with ‘we can take a trip.’ Their vague plans included taking a cottage in Maine with the boys, going to England and driving through the countryside, applying for travel grants for the same year.
‘We don’t have to get married. We’re wonderful as we are. Maybe marriage would spoil what we have.’
‘We could be together all the time.’
‘We could do that now if we wanted. We seem to prefer being together only some of the time.’
He bent toward her. ‘We don’t have to do it right away. But someday – I’d like to have a kid of my own.’ He touched her fingertips lightly. ‘And you’re the only person in the world I’ve ever felt I’d want to have it with.’
She did not answer then, could not have answered then, nor the rest of that night. And next day the subject seemed to be forgotten, as Ben returned to his card files, his blank paper, and his typewriter, and she to the joyful abandon of seventeenth-century sermons.
After the holidays, the friends decided to have a second New Year, together. Kyla offered her house, the finest of the graduate student residences. Kyla had hunted, in her swift, unerring way, and had
found the bottom floor of an old mansion, all parquet floors, carved moldings, high painted ceilings, and a fireplace in every room. There were stained-glass windows over window seats, and old-fashioned, heavy sliding doors between the rooms. The kitchen had a separate breakfast nook which looked out on an overgrown garden full of wild flowers.
Kyla had hung plants at the sunny windows, had sewn brilliantly colored hangings for the others, and covered the window-seat cushions with the same fabric. The bedroom, a corner of which was Kyla’s study, held a huge fur rug before the fireplace. They had turned the dining room, which was large, into the living and dining room, and the living room proper was given over to Harley for a study. The couple had collected prints and paintings done by friends who were artists, and the walls were covered with witty and elegant designs.
The group decided to dress formally: they all got into it, and the men went so far as to rent dinner jackets. The women shopped the ‘reduced’ racks and found swishy, low-cut things. Kyla wore a white Grecian dress and a rhinestone-studded band around her hair; Clarissa wore sea-green chiffon; Iso came in flame red satin long and narrow, with a slit up the side. Val wore low-cut black velvet with a feather boa, and Mira found a pale blue bare-backed gown which was the sexiest thing she’d ever owned.