Superior Women (22 page)

Peg does not mail this letter; she shoves it into a pigeonhole in her desk, as just at the instant of writing her husband’s name two things happen simultaneously: one, Kate begins to cry, and outside the sweeping rain begins again, dark sheets of it slapping the windows.

And so it is not clear to Peg what she had meant to say about Cameron, surely something, some explanation to Megan, about her life? Something that might catch Megan’s attention, interest her?

The twins are in nursery school, and this year Rex too, thank God, none of them home until three. But it is now only two thirty, and Kate is not supposed to be fed again until four; suppose she is still screaming when the other children get home? How to
explain such screams? If Peg can’t bear to hear them, how about the children, who understand medical advice and “pyloric stenosis” even less than she herself does?

The screams are sharp, animal outcries.

Peg’s breasts ache, and her stomach knots.

And outside the rain is so thick and dark, so hot and terrible. Everywhere in the house she can hear the screams. The screams. The screams.

She is wearing a loose old cotton dress, one that fits in the early months of pregnancies and the first few months after a birth. Or, perhaps it never fits. Anyway, in that dress Peg hurries through her house, to the kitchen, to the back door, back porch. She rushes out into the warm, lashing black rain, in her barren backyard. So new, nothing growing, no time to plant. And the soil is terrible, now all wet and slick.

She stands there in the rain, raising her face up to it, her clothes all soaked through, instantly soaked, and she thinks: I am having some sort of a breakdown. I am not all right. I am too exhausted. As she thinks the word “exhausted” an image comes to her of old elastic, all dingy, worn out. No give. Exhausted.

This new subdivision where they live in Midland is raw and flat. And expensive. The houses are not close together, and now in the heavy rain Peg can see only rain, no other house, or bush or tree or road. But she can hear acutely, unmuffled by all that intervening, falling, falling water—she can hear the screams of her smallest, newest child.

In an instant, moving far more quickly than when she ran out into the rain, Peg rushes back into the house, all soaking dripping wet; she rushes into the baby’s yellow nursery. She opens her clothes to her breasts, and she snatches up the bright red, screaming baby, who for several minutes still breathes and gasps from all that screaming, who cannot at first seize the nipple.

Peg thinks two things: she thinks that she is wrong, she is doing just what the doctor said not to do, when Kate screams—and she thinks too that she is saving her child.

•     •     •

By the time the older children get home from school, Kate is mercifully asleep, and their mother is herself again, in old Levi’s from college and a big clean shirt, one of their father’s discards. She is big jolly Peg again, their mom.

She gets out crayons and fingerpaints for Candy and Carol, the twins, and books for Rex. She goes into the kitchen and begins to cut up a chicken for dinner; she and Cameron will have steaks later on, since he gets home late and does not like to have meals with children, not really. He likes to see them all clean and already fed and ready for bed, and not quite conscious.

Peg goes back and forth between the playroom and the kitchen; if she doesn’t watch the children the room will be hopeless. She makes their dinner, and then she gives them all baths, all the time praying that Kate does not wake up again. She cleans up their dinner. She puts in potatoes, makes the salad for her dinner with Cameron. Then she goes in to read to the children for a while.

Miraculously, tonight it all works out. By seven thirty, which is Cameron’s coming home time, Peg is on the sofa with Rex on her lap, one twin on either side of her. Reading
Winnie-the-Pooh,
which is Cameron’s favorite book. A perfect scene for him to walk into, or maybe she should have changed her dress? Peg (too late) wonders. Put on lipstick? However, why? Cameron after all married “good old Peg.”

He comes in hurriedly, his hair distraught. He looks tired, with his worried eyes. He smiles at them all. “Well, old girl. And young ladies. Rex, how’s my boy?”

The next day, for no reason that she can understand, Peg again tries to write a letter to Megan.

Cathy hates California, or rather, she hates the portion of it that she finds at Stanford, around Palo Alto. She hates it more than she could admit to anyone, even to Megan. And she now recognizes that in some curious way she had anticipated that her sojourn in California would be somehow parallel or akin to Megan’s in New England. She had imagined that she would experience the exhilaration that Megan often spoke of, as Megan described her own migration from one coast to another. Too late, Cathy perceives that this was a literary possibility, not to be actualized. For why indeed should California prove exhilarating to a prospective economist, an Irish Catholic from Philadelphia, who is secretly literary?

It does not; California fails to exhilarate. What Cathy feels is acute isolation, and deprivation. Depression. And she blames herself, of course: who else? Undoubtedly the capacity for enlightenment and for pleasure lay within Megan herself, the evident virtues and beauties and excitements of New England notwithstanding. Megan is an essentially joyous, receptive person, one happily open to new experience (slightly indiscriminate, one could possibly say, of Megan; Lavinia said it quite often, but was that really, in any final way, accurate?). Whereas she, Cathy, is just the opposite. She is withdrawn, and enclosed. She is generally hostile to new impressions, new ideas, and heaven knows hostile to new people, generally.

Everyone at Stanford appears to be so large, even oversized, and everyone is blond; Cathy has never felt so thin and dark. The boys all wear tight Levi’s and clean tight white T-shirts; the girls wear pastel cashmere sweaters and matching flannel skirts. The girls’ white socks are neatly folded down, as opposed to the gym socks they all used to wear at Radcliffe, turned up to their calves. These girls wear mocassins or saddle shoes (saddle shoes!), and strands
of pearls, always pearls, a whole industry of pearls, offsetting those fresh California skins and pearly upper-middle-class teeth.

There are no Negroes. A few people might be Jewish but they just as well might not be. The same with Irish Catholics, except for a priest in Cathy’s Milton class (she allows herself a few literary indulgences, from her strict economics diet); that priest, with his white hair and red face, is the most familiar-looking person around.

By contrast to everyone else, Cathy feels herself more Irish, more Catholic than ever, as well as scrawnier, darker.

Cathy comes gradually to realize that not only had she hoped to duplicate the excitement of Megan’s going-East experience, she had also hoped to duplicate Megan, in a way. Not in her own person, no hope of that, Cathy turning into voluptuous, chattering, happily laughing Megan—but in California Cathy had hoped to find another Megan as a friend, someone bright and funny and offbeat. And naturally, no such luck. Just cashmered blondes, as bland as they are fair.

Even the architecture at Stanford is depressing to her. All that Spanish tile and brownish stucco. And the trees: huge dry ugly dusty palm trees, that rattle like snakes. The palms have the look of prehistoric birds, Cathy decides, in a state of terminal disease.

She especially hates the fall, in Palo Alto, everywhere dry blond grass, and warm winds. Nothing brisk in the air. No red leaves.

In the winter of 1905, William James, who was teaching at Stanford, wrote to his brother, Henry:

Cathy copies out this passage, and she sends it to Megan, retaining James’s original emphases, and she adds a few of her own, in red pencil; she underlines both instances of “simple,” and also with two fierce lines she underlines “the historic silence, social insipidity.” Another red line under the last phrase, “and with God’s blessing.” She simply signs the whole thing, Love Cathy—and that is her first letter to Megan from California.

The housing situation in Palo Alto, in and around Stanford, at that time is terrible, and has been for some years, particularly with the influx of World War II veterans, often with their wives. A low-cost housing development is too small to do much to alleviate this situation, and is of course out of the question for Cathy, who is neither a veteran nor married. Childless. A woman.

Many local homeowners have cannily appraised the situation and have turned it to their own considerable advantage. A well-off widow, say, with a too large house, and perhaps one guest room that she has not used for years, can rent out that room; if it has its own bath, she can get as much as seventy-five dollars a month. If she can divide that room in half, and somehow put in a vestigial kitchen, she can advertise an apartment for rent, plenty of room for a studious young man and his working wife, if they are careful not to have children or noisy parties, and if they can pay ninety dollars a month, or sometimes more.

And that is what Cathy has, a divided room, which was formerly an attic, with a hot plate and an icebox and a “separate entrance”: rickety stairs which were once a fire escape. All this is on College Terrace, just south of the Stanford campus. For ninety dollars.
Paying that much rent is a little hard, since Cathy is trying to live on two hundred a month, which is what her father sends her. (What she guiltily accepts; she knows that he is opposed to graduate schools, for girls, and she plans to repay, as soon as she gets a job.) Next year, maybe she can get a couple of freshman sections to teach. Although there too, as with the cheap housing, the preference is to veterans, and to men. Girls can usually get money from home, that is what girls are supposed to do, according to the current line of thought. And Cathy has to concede that it may be to some extent true, but then she thinks, Suppose you can’t? Suppose your family is seriously poor? Well, the answer to that one comes easily: a girl from a truly poor family goes to work or she gets married very young, she does not go to graduate school, and surely not to Stanford.

Not being given to self-pity, lonely is not a word that Cathy would use, as applied to herself, but that is what she is; she is acutely, excruciatingly lonely. She almost never has a conversation with anyone, only a few short occasional dialogues with some other student whom she encounters in the library, or in what is called the quad. Or in the Stanford Bookstore, where Megan said she worked, one high school summer. “Where I met my great love, George Wharton,” is how Megan, laughing, in her way, has put it.

The only person whom Cathy meets in the bookstore is that priest, from her Milton seminar. Standing behind him in line, she hears him say a few words to the clerk (he has never spoken in class, so far) and she is then unable not to say to him, “Oh, you’re from Boston!”

He turns and smiles quickly, his smooth face a shade more red. “Dorchester. How’d you guess? Are you from around there too?”

“Uh, no, but I went to school—I’m from Philadelphia. Ardmore, actually. Father.”

Cathy feels her own face reddening, at the sheer impossible stupidity of this exchange. And how rude of her to remark on his accent. She is obviously out of touch, she thinks; isolation is making
her more than a little nutty. (And then she does think the forbidden word, lonely.)