Herself (3 page)

Wives meanwhile, are to conform, up the ladder of the country clubs, which are churchgoing and hard-drinking, in the obsessive way of the American on the rise, who has no other release. As a New Yorker I am out of it in one way, as a Jew in another (almost all engineers at this time were, like my husband, Christians). And as a secret artist (for I continue writing poems in between the housework) in a third way, perhaps the most significant. Except for a “sport” like my husband, whose family was musical, and for certain foreigners in his class at school, like his friends Viscardi and Khrennikoff, all these men, met from city to city, have passed through the college mill with scarcely a trace of “the humanities” to show for it; respect for those is not yet a part of this sector of American life. (As that sector’s resurgence, in each war, and in almost every President, clearly shows.)

“Art” is the property of their wives, who paint the furniture à la Peter Hunt, read the gentle
Babar
books even to their boychildren (before dreams, if not before school), press for whatever theater tickets are bought, and fill their houses with a flurry of handcraft. … If ever I am brought to agree that the “fine” arts and the art-crafts are the same, it will not be the art-gallery weavers and potters who have persuaded me, but the memory of those women—and myself—bent over, flecked with wool and paint and yearning, in the middle of baby’s naptime, in middle America. …

I am not writing yet—except for those poems, flung off in brief single seizures, in trances of regret for the intellectual life I seemed to have lost. I never send the poems out. I am paralysed, not only by the house-and-child life—which is a total-flesh-draining, a catatonia of rest for the beaverish brain, that in a way is craved—but by this immersion in a society where I feel not superior to it, but at first fatally out-of-step Susie, then submerged, and ultimately lunatic-wrong. (And by my immurement in a marriage where I cannot talk of these things to a husband, however kindly, who, brought up in just this sort of life, mildly subscribes to it unless argued to otherwise, which no doubt was
his
immurement.) Again I am learning what “society” is—and again, how different.

Knowledge gotten like that, unconsciously and unphrased, unrecognized even as misery, is the deepest there is. On the surface, I remember the succession of towns by whatever oddities happened to us in them. In Wilmington, the “corporation” lawyer who lives across from us on a country road just recently shaken by the wedding cortege of the two opposing clans united by a President’s son and a du Pont heiress, has himself just been married late and for the second time, to Mattie X, an elegant lady, with white hair à la Recamier, whom, however, my mother-in-law, a Wilmingtonian, recognizes as the town milliner—a world of difference in that phrase! (Which Mattie herself—busy faking a lineage for herself via a French grandmother who had eloped here with the gardener and had expired on her deathbed when just about to point out her true patronymic in the
Almanach de Gotha
—is forever trying to repair.)

In her husband’s pure white office, the walls bear column after column, goldleafed in Old English—the names of those nationwide companies who have incorporated themselves in Delaware, because of its favorable tax laws, and use his office as attestation. This was the “law” by which our neighbor lived, and the only way he practised it, allowing him to collect old glass, to serve us tomato juice in Napoleon’s champagne cups—and his wife of sixty summers to embarrass him by buying a modern “bride’s chandelier” out of
American Home
. Through her we are ratified for Lammot du Pont’s private dairy-list—the question startlingly put as “Would you like, my dear, to get cream from Lammot du Pont?”—who had by the way been present when she and her husband were churched.

We were learning what a feudal name meant anywhere it sounded, in all the ranges of house and home beneath it, in a state it utterly owned. And how under the pseudo-hometownliness, the tycoons of Winterthur could make this visible. “Up at Henry Bielan’s,” (the du Pont brothers and cousins being thus called by their forenames), my husband, going with other staff at the Experimental Station, to the home of the du Pont who bosses it, is served drink in Moscow Mule mugs like those at any bar, but of a yellow metal; one gauche experimenter, inquiring of his host what the alloy is, has to be told it is high-carat gold.

I “saw” no blacks that year; in the habit of the country there one did not “see” them, though they were everywhere. Besides, I am busy learning to live in houses with furnaces (of which I ultimately will know every variety from coke to gas to wood to coal) instead of in apartment houses; to can strawberries from our acre of them the night my first child is born, and to live two months alone with her, speaking only to her, just after (all our few friends being summer-absent), while my husband, having lost the chemist’s job his training hadn’t fitted him for, goes to other towns to find one. Later, in a story of mine, “Mrs. Fay Dines on Zebra,” those Negroes would appear briefly in a line or two, turtling on the Brandywine it would appear that I had seen them after all.

And somewhere along this procession of towns and wildly various houses (huge ones no one else would have, or small ones which “everyone” had) as I see all the social classes in our so-called one-class America, and myself do a servant’s work—out of this comes what I am to write in “The Hollow Boy” about servants in America, black or white. As I brood over, and feel in my very knees—in the “housemaid’s” place there, and in my shoulders, in the yoke’s place there—the peculiar, self-levitating dreams and nonseeing rope tricks which are the diversionary morale of a money democracy.

… Oh, I was seeing. But I still did not write. In Rochester, where the scarce job has been found (through a vice-president of Symington-Gould who is my husband’s godfather) I go to Forman’s, the best fashion-department store, and asking for a job myself on the basis of two post-graduation prior Relief-Bureau years as a Macy “executive trainee,” am told they do not employ married women—“Besides, why would a nice girl like you want to work?” I couldn’t tell him the whole truth, because I didn’t know it yet, about women, husbands, society or writers, so I said, “We need the money”—godfather didn’t pay very much. And am told, after being asked where my husband works and in what capacity, that it would do his status there no good, if I “tried to work.”

Businesswomen, in the American provinces of those days, are not college graduates (who go into teaching if they stay single) but of a lower class; since they are perforce single, and have to “keep themselves up,” they are often also “racy” and “hard,” the kind of company a married man often goes looking for. Proper provincial girls might still not find it necessary to go to college; the bland, local Junior Leagues take care of what they had been reared for. Daughters of the new industrial rich want to be just like them—a young scioness of the Fruehauf Trailer-Truck Company, taking us and her husband to lunch at the Downtown Club (on her father’s membership) says, with sincere effort, when she finds out I already
have
worked, “Well now, it’s nice to be able to, like if you was a nurse, and your husband got sick. Or if you’re left a widow.” Then she smiles, with her sharp little muzzle, at her father’s employee, her husband.

Half the conversation of these women of the middle industrial society I am meeting comes from venoms and satisfactions of which they are unaware. In their social evenings, sitting across the livingrooms from the men, they speak of their husbands as “He” to their faces, swapping their intimate habits, always barring the sexual ones: “Oh Jim, he always, Dick, he doesn’t like to, Bill, he won’t ever, for him I have to—” speaking more often of what regrettably isn’t than of what is, and never knowing how, in this coy chat, they take their revenge. Or for what reason it is taken. Sometimes, though, when a display of uxorious feeling is required, or even truly felt, they flirt with their husbands in a kind of sorority badinage. One never talks to another’s husband except by the way, and of the most womanly preoccupations; indeed the safe topics for either sex, and the great ones, are schools-for-the-children, and redoing the house. Or the cost of dental care. But it is at a presidential election-eve party that I first learn to the full how, as a woman in this society, I am what the employment agencies call “overqualified.”

We are in a large group of doctors, dentists, engineers, lawyers and Kodak executives—not “old” Rochester (meaning old industry, a few of whose grandes dames I had met) but the heart of its middle sampling. All are upstate New York Republicans; we are Democrats. My husband is teased for it. The provincial, if he has to be polite to difference, doesn’t know what else to do.

“And I suppose you vote along with him?” The nearer truth was that he voted with me; I’d converted him. But when I begin to explain, want to discuss (as all the men around us have been doing, to be sure unilaterally) and which, since I am young, supple, vague, doe-eyed, must sit less shrilly on me than it would later—a quiet coverlet is drawn over my attempt, first with kidding, then with ridicule, and at last stopping me short, with the kind of brute snarl, that we now call “redneck”—meaning workers who haven’t had the benefit of the “humanities.” Professional men of the time got it in the eye—reddened. Women didn’t have views. All they really had, in a case like mine, was hot pants. … It is confusing, I suppose, that women of energy, men too, often have both.

As for the blacks, I never see them now. “We” never do. When they riot in the streets of Rochester in the 1960s, I will remember that. … Of how, once in a while up there, seated in a bus, I would see one, riding equally with us “up north here” on the aboveground railway, some old figure, dark, starched and Seminole among the white dishclout faces. … At the time, the ethnic resemblance of everybody to everybody up there takes my breath away; my heart is homesick for those dirty, spit-tied caravans where a half dozen flaming nations jostle each other at breakfast time. All riding in that New York indifference, which I now see as dignity. Into one of whose buses a lama might enter, pushing like peace against that weirdly resisting middle door (and no one will help him, nor no one comment) to stand between a bitten-off, baby-face old Sally of a theater usher in her round white stock, and an eyelashed goldfish of a garment-center chick, in her racing silks. …

Up here where I am, in the outland of the real country, not a stone is cosmopolitan, or pied beyond nature. The bus is for the pieced mornings of spinsters, idlers, housewives, cripples, or the evening bird-talk of stenographers. Each person who can, rides his own vein of life, in a car. Sundays, we do it also, driving to Palmyra and Joseph Smith’s Mormon dream—only a hillside, to Painted Post—only a crossroad garage, to the Oneida community—a silver Utopia tarnished into a factory for sterling, and to the dying reservations where the squat Indians sit unfeathered, plaiting their fingers in the sullen, wampum-colored air. So we ride on like everyone else, for the standard cheap Sunday with the children in the back, while the old names: Ticonderoga, Canandaigua, lash our faces with history, and the small rain of the present scours the lakes. Transportation is the psychic skein of existence here; it is how the people here hunt whatever lyric winds that blow.

Twenty years later, riding the whole of New York State through the Ontario region to Michigan, I will understand these people
back then
, in their lamaseries of kitchen and field, their strange spas and mountain follies, their stiff springtimes—the men all the time so sexually delicate of finger, in the finite distance between them and the machine. I will see enough at last to write in
The Last Trolley-Ride
about that inland-outland transportational dream, always dying and resurrected, from barge to wagon to rail to car to plane, brought up short only by the easy horizons of the coastal cities, and of mixed peoples.

All this time, back there, there is a war. In the last years of it, we move to Detroit, arriving on the day of the race riots which have erupted at Belle Isle. At the luxe hotel on Lake St. Clair where the U.S. Rubber Company has temporarily quartered us, the management, joining with the permanent guests, decrees that the Negro domestic staff is to be quarantined at the hotel, since if these “good” ones go back the long route to their homes in the slums of Paradise Alley, “it might be dangerous for
them
.” Now at last, I too can see those others, the “bad” ones, as in their mythic violence and their real, they hang invisibly from the roof-tree of every white inhabitant.

In Grosse Pointe, we find a huge house for rent, almost the only one anywhere. Not lake-front—only a six-cylinder-fortune house (as we joke to one another)—whose heirs will rent it cheaply until sold. The lease, when it comes, is “for occupancy by three persons only, of Caucasian race.” When I ask what will happen when we become four, as is plainly to be, Mr. Sutter, the heir, says that when the baby comes, the lease will be so amended. I haven’t the will to ask, “And what if it’s black?”—not from fear (though that does exist—where else would we go?)—as from a deeper depression. I am living, possibly for always, among people for whom the words I use as acids and reliefs, the possibility even of verbal solutions to life, mean nothing. “Even in the hat salon at Hudson’s—!” Mrs. Sutter, a suburbanly pretty woman, adds “—you can’t be sure what you try on hasn’t already been on one of their greasy heads.”

Detroit itself is in the midst of another twenty-buck silk-shirt war; gas rationing, because of which we had let be carted away our beloved nine-miles-per-gallon classic old Packard, means little here; the lake buzzes with motorboats. Big-wig restaurants and company-clubs serve filet; meat-rationing is for the poor supermarket fools. I now think of the East as more moral; it will take another war, and richer friends, to teach me that bank profiteering is merely more hidden. We are meanwhile meeting the blatant “new” machine-tool-and-electronic rich; by this time I know that there are always these new ones—as opposed to the more elegant, older industrial rich, who have had their “humanities” and sometimes make use of them. Suppliers to the war, these new ones are a thick-psyche’d breed, with the terrifying animal sureness of those who know themselves to be the wave of what is—and do not reflect on it. Fighting a happy, redsnouted, clambake “operation,” they have the fat, satined-up wives of men who go to whores, and the expensive, anemic houses which come out of first-generation military contracts. One of them spends thousands to illuminate the local church like a ballroom for the one night of a daughter’s wedding—and the church allows it. But all the Grosse Pointes, Park to Farm, ring with anti-reform, anti-Roosevelt “sick” jokes, and the Detroit Symphony goes out over the air under the sponsorship—all it could get—of “Sam’s Cut-rate Store”—until an older industrialist (chemicals) rouses the new money to civic-mindedness.