But I was interested in the story of Rennie’s first encounter with the Morgan philosophy, and the irresistible rhetoric Joe had employed to open her eyes to the truth about apologies. It demonstrated clearly that philosophizing was no game to Mr. Morgan; that he lived his conclusions down to the fine print; and Rennie became a somewhat more interesting figure to me. Indeed, I should say that that particular little anecdote was doubtless the main thing that made me amenable to a proposal that Joe made later on, after Rennie had joined us out on the lawn.
“Do you like horseback-riding, Jake?” Rennie had happened to ask.
“Never rode before, Rennie.”
“Gee, it’s fun; you’ll have to try it with me sometime.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Yes, I suppose it would be better to do that before I tried it with a horse.”
Rennie giggled, whipping her head from side to side, and Joe laughed loudly, but not, I think, enthusiastically. Then I saw his frowning forehead suddenly illuminate.
“Hey, that’s an idea!” he exclaimed to Rennie. “Teach Jake how to ride!” He turned to me. “Rennie’s folks have riding horses on then: farm, down the road, but I seldom get a chance to ride and Rennie hates to ride by herself. I’m busy nearly all day reading for my thesis before school starts. Why don’t you let Rennie teach you to ride? It’ll give her a chance to get outdoors more, and you all will be able to do some talking.”
I was embarrassed both by Joe’s deliberate enthusiasm for his project and by his poor taste in implying that talking to me would do Rennie good. It pleased me, perversely, to see Rennie squirm a little, too: she was apparently not yet so well educated by her husband that his ingenuousness did not sometimes embarrass her, even though she was careful to conceal her discomfort from Joe.
“What do you think?” he demanded of her.
“I think it’s a swell idea, if Jake wants to learn,” Rennie said quickly.
“Do you?” Joe asked me.
I shrugged. “Doesn’t make a damn to me.”
“Well, if it doesn’t make a damn to you, and Rennie and I think it’s a good idea, then it’s settled,” Joe laughed. “In fact, whether you want to learn or not it’s settled, if you’re not willing to refuse, just like this dinner business!”
We all chuckled, and the subject was dropped, Joe explaining to me happily that as a matter of fact my statement on the telephone (that I would come to dinner whether I wanted to or not) was unintelligible.
“Rennie would’ve told you if you hadn’t flustered her by making fun of her,” he smiled; “the only demonstrable index to a man’s desires is his acts, when you’re speaking of past time: what a man did is what he wanted to do.”
“What?”
“Don’t you see?” asked Rennie, and Joe sat back and relaxed. “The idea is that you could have conflicting desires—say, the desire not to have dinner with us and the desire not to offend us. If you end by coming to dinner it’s because the second desire was stronger than the first: other things being equal, you wouldn’t want to eat with us, but other things never are equal, and actually you’d rather eat with us than insult us. So you eat with us—that’s what you finally wanted to do. You shouldn’t say you’ll eat with us whether you want to or not; you should say you’ll eat with us if it satisfies desires in you stronger than your desire not to eat with us.”
“It’s like combining plus one hundred and minus ninety-nine,” Joe said. “The answer is just barely plus, but it’s completely plus. That’s another reason why it’s silly for anybody to apologize for something he’s done by claiming he didn’t really want to do it: what he wanted to do, in the end, was what he did. That’s important to remember when you’re reading history.”
I observed that Rennie colored slightly at the reference to apologizing.
“Mmm,” I replied to Joe, non-directively.
5
The Clumsy Force of Rennie Was a Thing That Attracted Me
THE CLUMSY FORCE OF RENNIE WAS A THING THAT ATTRACTED ME during the weeks following this dinner of shrimp, rice, beer, and values that the Morgans had fed me. It was a clumsiness both of action and of articulation—Rennie lurched and blurted—and I was curious to know whether what lay behind it was ineptitude or graceless strength.
At least this was my attitude when we began my riding lessons. My mood was superior, in that I regarded myself as the examiner and her as the subject, but it was not supercilious, and there was a certain sympathy in my curiosity. That I felt this special superiority is fortunate, because it got me through the first lessons on horseback, which otherwise would have been difficult to face indeed. I hated not the work but the embarrassment of learning new things, the ludicrousness of the tyro, and I can’t imagine ever having learned to ride horses (for I had only the most vagrant interest in riding) without this special curiosity and special superiority feeling to salve my pride.
Rennie was an excellent rider and a most competent teacher. We rode mostly in the mornings, fairly early, and occasionally after supper, and we rode every day unless it was raining very hard. I would drive to the Morgans’ place at seven-thirty or eight in the morning, sometimes earlier, and have breakfast with them; then Joe would begin his day’s reading and note taking, and Rennie, the boys, and I would drive the four miles out to her parents’ farm. Mrs. MacMahon, her mother, took charge of the children, and Rennie and I went riding. Her horse was a spirited five-year-old dun stallion of fifteen hands (her description) named Tom Brown, and mine a seven-year-old chestnut mare with a white race down her face, sixteen hands high, named Susie, whom both Rennie and her father described as gentle, although she was plenty lively enough for me. Rennie’s father kept the two horses for his own pleasure but rarely had a chance to exercise them properly, and so he was quite pleased with Joe’s project. The first thing he said to Rennie when he saw us approach in our riding outfits (Rennie had insisted that I purchase cotton jodhpurs and riding boots) was “Well, Ren, I see Joe recruited you a companion!”
“This is Jake Horner, Dad,” Rennie said briskly. “I’m going to teach him how to ride.” She was quite aware that her father’s remark had told me something I wasn’t especially intended to know—that Joe’s project hadn’t occurred to him on the spur of the moment, but had been premeditated—and being conscious of this made her awkward. She moved off immediately to the paddock where the two horses were grazing, leaving her father and me to shake hands and make pleasantries as best we could.
There is no need for me to go into any detail about my instruction: it is uninteresting and has little to do with my observation of Rennie. About the only prior knowledge I had of horses was that one mounted them from the “near,” or left, side, and even that little piece of equine lore I found to be not so invariably true as I’d believed. I was introduced to the mysteries of Pelhams and hackamores, snaffles and curbs, of collected and extended gaits, of the aids and the leads. I made all the mistakes that beginners make—hanging on by the reins, clinging with my legs, lounging in the saddle—and slowly corrected them. That I was at first very much afraid of my animal is irrelevant, since I’d not under any circumstances have shown my fear to Rennie.
She herself was a “strong” rider—she applied the aids heavily and kept frisky Tom Brown as gentle as a lap dog—but most of her abrupt instructions to me were aimed at making me use them lightly.
“Stop digging her in the barrel,” she’d blurt out as we trotted along. “You’re telling her to go with your heels and holding her back with your hands.”
Hour after hour I practiced riding at a walk, a trot, and a canter (both horses were three-gaited), bareback and without holding the reins. I learned how to lead a horse who doesn’t care to follow; how to saddle and bridle and currycomb.
Susie, my mare, had a tendency to nip me when I tightened her girth.
“Slap her hard on the nose,” Rennie ordered, “and next time hold your left arm stiff up on her neck and she won’t turn her head.”
Tom B
rown, her stallion, liked to rear high two or three times just out of the stable. Once when he did this I was horrified to see Rennie lean as far back as she could on the reins, until Tom was actually overbalanced and came toppling over backwards, whinnying and flailing. Rennie sprang dextrously out of the saddle and out of the way a second before eleven hundred pounds of horse hit the ground: she caught Tom’s reins before he was up, and in a few seconds, by soft talking, had him quiet.
“That’ll fix him,” she grinned.
But “It’s your own fault,” she told me when Susie once tried the same trick. “She knows you’re just learning. No need to flip her over; she’ll behave when you’ve learned to ride her a little more strongly.” Thank heaven for that, because if Rennie had told me to flip Susie over, my pride would have made me attempt it. I scared easily; in fact, I was extremely timid as a rule, but my vanity usually made this fact beside the point.
At any rate, I became a reasonably proficient horseman and even learned to be at ease on horseback, but I never became an enthusiast. The sport was pleasant, but not worth the trouble of learning. Rennie and I covered a good deal of countryside during August; usually we rode out for an hour and a half, dismounted for a fifteen- or twenty-minute rest, and then rode home. By the time we finished unsaddling, grooming, and feeding the animals it was early afternoon: we would pick up the boys, ride back to Wicomico, and eat a late lunch with Joe, during which, bleary-eyed from reading, he would question Rennie or me about my progress.
But the subject at hand is Rennie’s clumsy force. On horseback, where there are traditional and even reasonable rules for one’s posture every minute of the time, it was a pleasure to see her strong, rather heavy body sitting perfectly controlled in the saddle at the walk or posting to the trot, erect and easy, her cheeks ruddy in the wind, her brown eyes flashing, her short-cropped blond hair bright in the sun. At such times she assumed a strong kind of beauty. But she could not handle her body in situations where there were no rules. When she walked she was continually lurching ahead. Standing still, she never knew what to do with her arms, and she was likely to lean all her weight on one leg and thrust the other awkwardly out at the side. During our brief rest periods, when we usually sat on the ground and smoked cigarettes, she was simply without style or grace: she flopped and fidgeted. I think it was her self-consciousness about this inability to handle her body that prompted her to talk more freely and confidentially during our rides than she would have otherwise, for both Morgans were normally unconfiding people, and Rennie was even inclined to be taciturn when Joe was with us. But in these August mornings we talked a great deal—in that sense, if not in some others, Joe’s program was highly successful—and Rennie’s conversation often displayed an analogous clumsy force.
One of our most frequent rides took us to a little creek in a loblolly-pine woods some nine miles from the farm. There the horses could drink on hot days, and often we wore bathing suits under our riding gear and took a short swim when we got there, dressing afterwards, very properly, back in the woods. This was quite pleasant: the little creek was fairly clean and entirely private, shaded by the pines, which also carpeted the ground with a soft layer of slick brown shats. I remarked to Rennie once that it was a pity Joe couldn’t enjoy the place with us.
“That’s a silly thing to say,” she said, a little upset.
“Like all politeness is silly,” I smiled. “I feel politely sorry for him grinding away at the books while we gallop and splash around.”
“Better not tell him that; he hates pity.”
“That’s a silly way to be, isn’t it?” I said mildly. “Joe’s funny as hell.”
“What do you mean, Jake?” We were resting after a swim; I was lying comfortably supine under a tree beside the water, chewing on a green pine needle and squinting over at Susie and Tom Brown, tethered nearby. Rennie had been slouched back like a sack of oats against the same tree, smoking, but now she sat up and stared at me with troubled eyes. “How can you possibly call Joe silly, of all people?”
“Do you mean how can I of all people call Joe silly, or how can I call Joe of all people silly?”
“You know what I mean: how can you call Joe silly? Good God!”
“Oh,” I laughed. “What could be sillier than getting upset at politeness? If I really felt sorry for him it would be my business, not his; if I’m just saying I feel sorry for him to be polite, there’s even less reason to be bothered, since I’m just making so much noise.”
“But that kind of noise is absurd, isn’t it?”
“Sure. Where did you and Joe get the notion that things should be scrapped just because they’re absurd? That’s a silly one for you. For that matter, what could be sillier than this whole aim of living coherently?”
Now I know very well what Joe would have answered to these remarks: let me be the first to admit that they are unintelligible. My purpose was not to make a point, but to observe Rennie. She was aghast.
“You’re not serious, Jake! Are you serious?”
“And boy oh boy, what could possibly be sillier than his notion that two people in the same house can live that way!”
Rennie stood up. Her expression, I should guess, was that of the Athenians on the morning they discovered that Alcibiades had gelded every marble god in town. She was speechless.
“Sit down,” I said, laughing at her consternation. “The point is, Rennie, that anybody’s position can be silly if you want to think of it that way, and the more consistent, the sillier. It’s not silly from Joe’s point of view, of course, granted his ends, whatever they are. But frankly I’m appalled that he expects anybody else to go along with him.”
“He doesn’t!” Rennie cried. “That’s the whole idea!”
“Why did he cork you once for apologizing, then—twice, I mean: just for the exercise? Why wouldn’t you dare tell him you felt sorry for him even if you did?”
I asked these things without genuine malice, only as a sort of tease, but Rennie, to my surprise, burst into tears.
“Whoa, now!” I said gently. “I’m terribly sorry I hurt your feelings, Rennie.” I took her arm, but she flinched as if I too had struck her.
“Whoops, I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Jake, stop it!” she cried, and I observed that the squint-eyed head-shaking was used to express pain as well as hilarity, and this it did quite effectively. When she had control of herself she said, “You certainly must think our marriage is a strange one, don’t you?”
“Damnedest thing I ever saw,” I admitted cheerfully. “But hell, that’s no criticism.”
“But you think I’m a complete zero, don’t you?”
Ah. Something in me responded very strongly to this not-especially-moving question of Rennie’s.
“I don’t know, Rennie. What’s your opinion?”
By way of answer Rennie began what turned out to be the history of her alliance with Joe. Her face, chunky enough to begin with, was red and puffy from crying, and in a more critical mood I would have found her unpleasing to look at just then, but it happened that I was really impressed by her breakdown, and the curious sympathy that I’d felt from the time I first heard of her knockout—a sympathy that had little to do with abstract pity for women—was now operating more noticeably in me. This sympathy, too, I observed impersonally and with some amusement from another part of myself, the same part that observed me being not displeased by Rennie’s tearful, distracted face. Here is what she told me, edited and condensed:
“You know, I lived in a complete fog from the day I was born until after I met Joe,” she said. “I was popular and all that, but I swear it was just like I was asleep all through school and college. I wasn’t really interested in anything, I never thought about anything. I never even particularly wanted to do anything—I didn’t even especially enjoy myself. I just dreamed along like a big blob of sleep. If I thought about myself at all, I guess I lived on my potentialities, because I never felt dissatisfied with m
yself.”
“Sounds wonderful,” I said, not sincerely, because in fact it sounded commonplace: The Story of American Youth. It interested me only because it fitted well with the unharnessed animal that I had sometimes thought I glimpsed in Rennie.
“You shouldn’t say that,” Rennie said flatly. “It wasn’t anything, wonderful or otherwise. When I got out of college I went to New York to work, just because my roommate had a job there and wanted me to go along with her, and that’s where I met Joe—he was taking his master’s degree at Columbia. We dated for a while, pretty casually: I wasn’t much interested in him, and I didn’t think he saw much in me. Then one night he grinned at me and told me he wouldn’t be taking me out any more. I asked him why not, and he said, ‘Don’t think I’m threatening you; I just don’t see any point to it.’ I said, ‘Is it because I don’t sleep with you?’ and he said, ‘If that was it I’d have gotten a Puerto Rican girl in the first place instead of wasting my time with you.’ ”
“A good line,” I remarked.
“He said he just didn’t feel any need for female companionship in itself: companionship to him meant a real exchange of everything on the. same level, and sex meant sex, and I wasn’t offering him either. You’ll have to take my word for it that he wasn’t just feeding me a line. He meant it. He said he thought I could probably be wonderful, but that I was shallow as hell like I was, and he didn’t expect me to change just for his sake. He couldn’t offer me a thing in return that would fit the values I had then, and he wasn’t interested in me like I was, so that was that.”