“You’re still making fun of me.”
“Oh, now, that’s too easy an out. It’s beside the point whether I’m making fun of you or not. You’re begging the question.”
No answer.
“Now I’m coming to dinner at six o’clock, whether I want to or not, and if you aren’t ready to answer my argument by then, I’m going to tell Joe.”
“Six-thirty is when the kids go to bed,” Rennie said in a slightly injured voice, and hung up. I went back to my rocker and rocked for another forty-five minutes. From time to time I smiled inscrutably, but I cannot say that this honestly reflected any sincere feeling on my part. It was just a thing I found myself doing, as frequently when walking alone I would find myself repeating over and over again in a judicious, unmetrical voice, Pepsi-Cola hits the spot; twelve full ounces: that’s a lot -- accompanying the movement of my lips with a wrinkled brow, distracted twitches of the corner of my mouth, and an occasional quick gesture of my right hand. Passers-by often took me for a man lost in serious problems, and sometimes when I looked behind me after passing one, I’d see him, too, make a furtive movement with his right hand, trying it out.
At four-fifteen Dr. Schott telephoned and confirmed my appointment to the faculty of the Wicomico State Teachers College as a teacher of grammar and composition, at a starting salary of $3200 per year.
“You know,” he said, “we don’t pay what they pay at the big universities! Can’t afford it! But that doesn’t mean we’re not choosy about our teachers! We’re a pretty dedicated bunch, frankly, and we hired you because we believe you share our feelings about the importance of our job!”
I assured him that I did indeed share that feeling, and he assured me that he was sure I did, and we hung up. I was not pleased at being asked to teach composition as well as grammar-I was supposed to be strictly a prescriptive-grammar man—but, pending advice from the Doctor, I thought it best to accept the job anyway.
As a matter of fact I drove out to the Morgans’ place at five-thirty, for no particular reason. My day was no longer weatherless, but I was quiescent. I found Joe and Rennie having a leisurely catch with a football on the lawn in front of their house, although the afternoon was fairly warm. They showed no great surprise at seeing me, greeted me cordially, and invited me to join their game.
“No, thanks,” I said, and went over to where their two sons, ages three and four, were throwing their own little football at each other—adeptly for their age. I sat on the grass and watched everybody.
“I didn’t mean to get upset on the phone today, Jake,” Rennie said cheerfully between passes.
“Ah, don’t pay attention to what I say on telephones,” I said. “I can’t talk right on telephones.”
I’ve never seen a girl who could catch and throw a football properly except Rennie Morgan. As a rule she was a clumsy animal, but in any sort of strenuous physical activity she was completely at ease and even graceful. She caught the ball with her hands only—so as not to injure her breasts, I suppose—but she threw it in the same manner and with the same speed and accuracy as a practiced man.
“What have you changed your mind about that you said, then?” Joe asked, keeping his eyes on the ball.
“I don’t even remember what I said.”
“You don’t? Gosh, Rennie remembers the whole conversation. Do you really not remember, or are you trying not to make her uncomfortable?”
“No, I really don’t remember at all,” I said, with some truth. “I’ve learned by now that you all don’t believe in avoiding discomfort. The fact is I can never remember arguments, my own or anybody else’s. I can remember conclusions, but not arguments.”
This observation, which I thought arresting enough, seemed to disgust Joe. He lost interest in the conversation and stopped to correct the older boy’s way of gripping the football. The kid attended his father’s quiet advice as though it were coming from Knute Rockne himself; Joe watched him throw the ball correctly three times and turned away.
“Here, Jake,” he said, tossing me the other ball. “Why don’t you pitch a few with Rennie while I put supper on, and then we’ll have a drink. No use to wait till six-thirty, since you’re here.”
I was, as I said before, quiescent. I would not voluntarily have joined the game, but neither would I go out of my way to avoid playing. Joe went on into the house, the two boys following close behind, and for the next twenty minutes Rennie and I threw the football to each other. Luckily—for as a rule I dreaded being made to look ridiculous—I was no novice at football myself; though not so adept a passer as Joe, I was able to throw at least as accurately and unwobblingly as Rennie. She seemed to have nothing special to say to me, nor did I to her, and so the only sound heard on the lawn was the rush of passing—arms, the quiet spurts of running feet on the grass, the soft smack of catches, and our heavy breathing. It was all neither pleasant nor unpleasant.
Presently Joe called to us from the porch, and we went in to dinner. The Morgans rented half of the first floor of the house. Their apartment was very clean; what furniture they owned was the most severely plain modern, tough and functional, but there was very little of it. In fact, because the rooms were relatively large they seemed quite bare. There were no rugs on the hardwood floors, no curtains or drapes on the polished windows, and not a piece of furniture above the necessary minimum; a day bed, two sling chairs, two lamps, a bookcase, and a writing table in the living room; a small dining table and four metal folding chairs in the kitchen; and a double bunk, two bureaus, and a work table with benches in the single bedroom, where the boys slept. Because the walls and ceiling were white, the light pouring through the open Venetian blinds made the living room blindingly bright. I squinted; there was too much light in that room for me.
While we drank a glass of beer, the children went into the bedroom, undressed themselves, and actually bathed themselves without help in the water that Joe had already drawn for them. I expressed surprise at such independence at ages three and four: Rennie shrugged indifferently.
“We make pretty heavy demands on them for physical efficiency,” Joe admitted. “What the hell, in New Guinea the kids are swimming before they walk, and paddling bamboo logs out in the ocean at Joey’s age. We figured the less they’re in our hair the better we’ll get along with each other.”
“Don’t think we drive them,” Rennie said. “We don’t really give a damn. But I guess we demand a lot tacitly.”
Joe listened to this remark with casual interest.
“Why do you say you don’t give a damn?” he asked her.
Rennie was a little startled at the question, which she had not expected.
“Well—I mean ultimately. Ultimately it wouldn’t matter one way or the other, would it? But immediately it matters because if they weren’t independent we’d have to go through the same rigmarole most people go through, and the kids would be depending on all kinds of crutches.”
“Nothing matters one way or the other ultimately,” Joe pointed out. “The other importance is all there is to anything.”
“That’s what I meant, Joe.”
“What I’m trying to say is that you shouldn’t consider a value less real just because, it isn’t absolute, since less-than-absolutes are all we’ve got. That’s what’s implied when you say you don’t really give a damn.”
Well, it was Rennie’s ball—I watched them over my beer much as I’d watched them out on the lawn—but the game was interrupted by the timer bell on the kitchen stove. Rennie went out to serve up the dinner while Joe dried the two boys and assisted them into their pajamas: their physical efficiency apparently didn’t extend to fastening their own snaps in the back.
“Why don’t you have them snap each other up in the back?” I suggested politely, observing this. Rennie flashed me an uncertain look from the kitchen, where she was awkwardly dishing out rice with a spoon too small for the job, but Joe laughed easily and immediately unsnapped both boys’ pajama shirts so that they could tr
y it. It worked.
Since there were only four chairs in the kitchen, Rennie and the two boys and I ate at the table while Joe ate standing up at the stove. There would have been no room at the table for one of the sling chairs, and anyhow it did not take long to eat the meal, which consisted of steamed shrimp, boiled rice, and beer for all hands. The boys—husky, well-mannered youngsters—were allowed to dominate the conversation during dinner; they were as lively and loud as any other bright kids their age, but a great deal more physically coordinated and self-controlled than most. As soon as we finished eating they went to bed, and though it was still quite light outside, I heard no more from them.
The Morgans had an arrangement with their first-floor neighbor whereby they could leave open a door connecting the two apartments and listen for each other’s children if one couple wished to go out for the evening. Taking advantage of this, we went walking through a clover field and a small stand of pines behind the house after the supper dishes were washed. The Morgans tended to walk vigorously, and this did not fit well with my quiescent mood, but neither did refusing to accompany them. Rennie, apparently an amateur naturalist, remarked on various weeds, bugs, and birds as we bounded along, and Joe confirmed her identifications. I can’t say I enjoyed the walk, although the Morgans enjoyed it almost fiercely. When it was over, Rennie went inside the house to write a letter, and Joe and I sat outside on the lawn in the two sling chairs. Our conversation, by his direction, dealt with values, since they’d come up earlier, and I went along for the ride:
“Most of what you told Rennie on the phone this afternoon was pretty sensible,” Joe granted. “I’m glad you talked to her, and I’m glad you told her it was beside the point whether you were making fun of her or not. That’s exactly what she needs to learn. She’s too sensitive about that.”
“So are you,” I said. “Remember the Boy Scouts.”
“No, I’m not, really,” Joe denied, in a way that left you no special desire to insist that he was. “The only reason I caught it up about the Scouts was that I’d decided I wanted to know you a little bit, and it seemed to me that too much of that might stand in the way of any sensible talking. It doesn’t matter at all outside of that.”
“Okay.” I offered him a cigarette, but he didn’t smoke.
“What really pleases me is that in spite of your making fun of Rennie you seem willing to take her seriously. Almost no man is willing to take any woman’s thinking seriously, and that’s what Rennie needs more than anything else.”
“It’s none of my business, Joe,” I said quiescently, “but if I were Rennie I’d object like hell having anybody so concerned over my needs. You talk about her as if she were a patient of yours.”
He laughed and jabbed his spectacles back on his nose. “I guess I do; I don’t mean to. When Rennie and I were married we understood that neither of us wanted to make a permanent thing of it if we couldn’t respect each other in every way. Certainly I’m not sold on marriage-under-any-circumstances, and I’m sure Rennie’s not either. There’s nothing intrinsically valuable about marriage.”
“Seems to me you put a pretty high value on your marriage,” I suggested.
Joe squinted at me in disappointment, and I felt that had I been his wife he would have corrected me more severely than he did.
“Now you’re making the same error Rennie made a while ago, before supper: the fallacy that because a value isn’t intrinsic, objective, and absolute, it somehow isn’t real. What I said was that the marriage relationship isn’t any more of an absolute than anything else. That doesn’t mean that I don’t value it; in fact I guess I value my relationship with Rennie more than anything else in the world. All it means is that once you admit it’s no absolute, you have to decide for yourself the conditions under which marriage is important to you. Okay?”
“Suits me,” I said indifferently.
“Well, do you agree or not?”
“Sure, I agree.” And, so cornered, I suppose I did agree, but there was something in me that would have recoiled from so systematic an analysis of things even if I’d had it straight from God that such happened to be the case.
“Well,” Joe said, “I’m not a guy who needs to be married under any circumstances—in fact, under a lot of circumstances I couldn’t tolerate being married—and one of my conditions for preserving any relationship at all, but particularly a marriage relationship, would be that the parties involved be able to take each other seriously. If I straighten Rennie out now and then, or tell her that some statement of hers is stupid as hell, or even slug her one, it’s because I respect her, and to me that means not making a lot of kinds of allowances for her. Making allowances might be Christian, but to me it would always mean not taking seriously the person you make allowances for. That’s the only objection I have to your making fun of Rennie: not that it might hurt her feelings, but that it means you’re making allowances for her being a woman, or some such nonsense as that.”
“Aren’t you regarding this take-us-seriously business as an absolute?” I asked. “You seem to want you and Rennie to take each other seriously under any circumstances.”
This observation pleased Joe, and to my chagrin I noticed that I was unaccountably happy that I’d said something he considered bright.
“That’s a good point,” he grinned, and began his harangue. “The usual criticism of people like me is that somewhere at the end of the line is the ultimate end that gives the whole chain its relative value, and this ultimate end is rationally unjustifiable if there aren’t any absolute values. These ends can be pretty impersonal, like ‘the good of the state,’ or else personal, like taking your wife seriously. In either case if you’re going to defend these ends at all I think you have to call them subjective. But they’d never be logically defensible; they’d be in the nature of psychological givens, different for most people. Four things that I’m not impressed by,” he added, “are unity, harmony, eternality, and universality. In my ethics the most a man can ever do is be right from his point of view; there’s no general reason why he should even bother to defend it, much less expect anybody else to accept it, but the only thing he can do is operate by it, because there’s nothing else. He’s got to expect conflict with people or institutions who are also right from their points of view, but whose points of view are different from his.
“Suppose it were the essence of my nature that I was completely jealous of Rennie, for instance,” he went on (I did not see how this could be possible, frankly; she didn’t have that much on the ball). “Now it happens that that’s not the case at all, but suppose it were true that because of my psychological make-up, marital fidelity was one of the givens, the subjective equivalent of an absolute, one of the conditions that would attach to any string of ethical propositions I might make for myself. Then suppose Rennie committed adultery behind my back. From my point of view the relationship would have lost its raison d’être, and I’d probably walk out flat, if I didn’t actually shoot her or shoot myself. But from the state’s point of view, for example, I’d still be obligated to support her, because you can’t have a society where people just walk out flat on family relationships like that. From their point of view I should be forced to pay support money, and I would have no reason to complain that their viewpoint isn’t the same as mine: it couldn’t be. In the same way, the state would be as justified in hanging me or jailing me for shooting her as I would be in shooting her—do you see? Or the Catholic Church, if I were officially a Catholic, would be as justified from their point of view in refusing me sacred burial ground as I’d be in committing suicide if the marriage relationship had been one of the givens for my whole life. I’d be a fool if I expected the world to excuse my actions simply because I can explain them clearly.
“That’s one reason why I don’t apologize for things,” Joe said finally. “It’s because I’ve no right to expect you or anybody to accept anything I do or say—but I can always explain what I do or say. There’s no sense in apologizing
, because nothing is ultimately defensible. But a man can act coherently; he can act in ways that he can explain, if he wants to. This is important to me. Do you know, for the first month of our marriage Rennie used to apologize all over herself to friends who dropped in, because we didn’t have much furniture in the house. She knew very well that we didn’t want any more furniture even if we could have afforded it, but she always apologized to other people for not having their point of view. One day she did it more elaborately than usual, and as soon as the company left I popped her one on the jaw. Laid her out cold. When she came to, I explained to her very carefully why I’d hit her. She cried, and apologized to me for having apologized to other people. I popped her again.”
There was no boastfulness in Joe’s voice when he said this; neither was there any regret.
“What the hell, Jake, the more sophisticated your ethics get, the stronger you have to be to stay afloat. And when you say good-by to objective values, you really have to flex your muscles and keep your eyes open, because you’re on our own. It takes energy: not just personal energy, but cultural energy, or you’re lost. Energy’s what makes the difference between American pragmatism and French existentialism—where the hell else but in America could you have a cheerful nihilism, for God’s sake? I suppose it was rough, slugging Rennie, but I saw the moment as a kind of crisis. Anyhow, she stopped apologizing after that.”
“Ah,” I said.
Now it may well be that Joe made no such long coherent speech as this all at once; it is certainly true that during the course of the evening this was the main thing that got said, and I put it down here in the form of one uninterrupted whiz-bang for convenience’s sake, both to illustrate the nature of his preoccupations and to add a stroke or two to my picture of the man himself. I heard it all quiescently; despite the fact that I was accustomed to expressing certain of these opinions myself at times (more hopefully than honestly), arguments against nearly everything he said occurred to me as he spoke. Yet I would by no means assert that he couldn’t have refuted my objections—I daresay even I could have. As was usually the case when I was confronted by a really intelligent and lucidly exposed position, I was as reluctant to give it more than notional assent as I was unable to offer a more reasonable position of my own. In such situations I most often adopted what in psychology is known as the “non-directive technique”: I merely said, “Oh?” or “Ah,” and gave the horse his head.