Rivers was silent; and suddenly, as though to elucidate what he had been saying, there was only the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece, and the whispers of flames among the logs.
“How can anyone seriously believe in his own identity?” he went on. “In logic, A equals A. Not in fact. Me-now is one kettle of fish; me-then is another. I look at the John Rivers who felt that way about Katy. It’s like a puppet play; it’s like Romeo and Juliet through the wrong end of the opera glasses. No, it’s not even that; it’s like looking through the wrong end of the opera glasses at the ghosts of Romeo and Juliet. And Romeo once called himself John Rivers, and was in love, and had at least ten times more life and energy than at ordinary times. And the world he was living in—how totally transfigured!
“I remember how he looked at landscapes; and the colors were incomparably brighter, the patterns that things made in space unbelievably beautiful. I remember how he glanced around him in the streets, and St. Louis, believe it or not, was the most splendid city ever built. People, houses, trees, T-model Fords, dogs at lampposts—everything was more significant. Significant, you may ask, of what? And the answer is: themselves. These were realities, not symbols. Goethe was absolutely wrong. Alles vergängliche is not a Gleichnis. At every instant every transience is eternally that transience. What it signifies is its own being, and that being (as one sees so clearly when one’s in love) is the same as Being with the biggest possible B. Why do you love the woman you’re in love with? Because she is. And that, after all, is God’s own definition of Himself: I am that I am. The girl is who she is. Some of her isness spills over and impregnates the entire universe. Objects and events cease to be mere representatives of classes and become their own uniqueness; cease to be illustrations of verbal abstractions and become fully concrete. Then you stop being in love, and the universe collapses, with an almost audible squeak of derision, into its normal insignificance. Could it ever stay transfigured? Maybe it could. Maybe it’s just a question of being in love with God. But that,” Rivers added, “is neither here nor there. Or rather it’s the only thing that’s either here, there or anywhere; but if we said so, we’d be cut by all our respectable friends and might even end up in the asylum. So let’s get back as quickly as possible to something a little less dangerous. Back to Katy, back to the late lamented…”
He broke off.
“Did you hear something?”
This time I distinctly did. It was the sound, muffled by distance and a heroic self-restraint, of a child’s sobbing.
Rivers got up and, thrusting his pipe into his pocket, walked to the door and opened it.
“Bimbo?” he called questioningly, and then to himself: “How the devil did he get out of his crib?”
For all answer there was a louder sob.
He moved out into the hall and a moment later there was the sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs.
“Bimbo,” I heard him saying, “good old Bimbo! Come to see if you could catch Santa Claus red-handed—was that it?”
The sobbing mounted to a tragic crescendo. I got up and followed my host upstairs. Rivers was sitting on the top step, his arms, gigantic in their rough tweed, around a tiny figure in blue pajamas.
“It’s grandpa,” he kept repeating. “Funny old grandpa. Bimbo’s all right with grandpa.” The sobbing gradually died down. “What made Bimbo wake up?” Rivers asked. “What made him climb out of his crib?”
“Dog,” said the child, and at the memory of his dream he began to cry again. “Big dog.”
“Dogs are funny,” Rivers assured him. “Dogs are so dumb they can’t say anything but bow-wow. Think of all the things Bimbo can say. Mummy. Weewee. Daddy. Pussycat. Dogs aren’t smart. They can’t say any of those things. Just bow-wow-wow.” He put on an imitation of a bloodhound. “Or else bow-wow-wow.” This time it was a toy Pomeranian. “Or else wo-o-o-ow.” He howled lugubriously and grotesquely. Uncertainly, between sobs, the child began to laugh. “That’s right,” said Rivers. “Bimbo just laughs at those dumb dogs. Every time he sees one, every time he hears that silly barking, he laughs and laughs and laughs.” This time the child laughed whole-heartedly. “And now,” said Rivers, “grandpa and Bimbo are going to take a walk.” Still holding the child in his arms, he got up and made his way along the corridor. “This is grandpa’s room,” he said, opening the first door. “Nothing of great interest here, I’m afraid.” The next door stood ajar; he walked in. “And this is mummy’s and daddy’s room. And here’s the closet with all mummy’s clothes. Don’t they smell good?” He sniffed loudly. The child followed suit. “Le Shocking de Schiaparelli,” Rivers went on. “Or is it Femme? Anyhow, it serves the same purpose; for it’s sex, sex, sex that makes the world go round—as, I’m sorry to say, you’ll find out, my poor Bimbo, in a very few years from now.” Tenderly he brushed his cheek against the pale floss of the child’s hair, then walked over to the full-length mirror set in the door of the bathroom. “Look at us,” he called to me. “Just look at us!”
I came and stood beside him. There we were in the glass—a pair of bent and sagging elders and, in the arms of one of them, a small, exquisite Christ child.
“And to think,” said Rivers, “to think that once we were all like that. You start as a lump of protoplasm, a machine for eating and excreting. You grow into this sort of thing. Something almost supernaturally pure and beautiful.” He laid his cheek once more against the child’s head. “Then comes a bad time with pimples and puberty. After which you have a year or two, in your twenties, of being Praxiteles. But Praxiteles soon puts on weight and starts to lose his hair, and for the next forty years you degenerate into one or other of the varieties of the human gorilla. The spindly gorilla—that’s you. Or the leather-faced variety—that’s me. Or else it’s the successful businessman type of gorilla—you know, the kind that looks like a baby’s bottom with false teeth. As for the female gorillas, the poor old things with paint on their cheeks and orchids at the prow…No, let’s not talk about them, let’s not even think.”
The child in his arms yawned at our reflections, then turned, pillowed his head on the man’s shoulder and closed his eyes. “I think we can take him back to his crib,” Rivers whispered and started toward the door.
“One feels,” he said slowly, as we stood looking down, a few minutes later, at that small face, which sleep had transfigured into the image of an unearthly serenity, “one feels so desperately sorry for them. They don’t know what they’re in for. Seventy years of ambushes and betrayals, of booby traps and deceptions.”
“And of fun,” I put in. “Fun to the pitch, sometimes, of ecstasy.”
“Of course,” Rivers agreed, as he turned away from the crib. “That’s what baits the booby traps.” He switched off the light, softly closed the door and followed me down the stairs. “Fun—every kind of fun. Sex fun, eating fun, power fun, comfort fun, possession fun, cruelty fun. But there’s either a hook in the bait, or else when you grab it, it pulls a trigger and down come the bricks or the bucket of bird lime or whatever it is that the cosmic joker has prepared for you.” We resumed our seats on either side of the fire in the library. “What sort of traps are waiting for that poor little shining creature up there in the crib? One can hardly bear to think of it. The only comfort is that there’s ignorance before the event and, after it, forgetting, or at the very least indifference. Every balcony scene turns into an affair of midgets in another universe! And in the end, of course, there’s always death. And while there is death, there is hope.” He refilled our glasses and relit his pipe. “Where was I?”
“In heaven,” I answered, “with Mrs. Maartens.”
“In heaven,” Rivers repeated. And then, after a little pause, “It lasted,” he went on, “about fifteen months. From December to the second spring, with a break of ten weeks in the summer while the family was away in Maine. Ten weeks of what was supposed to be my vacation at home, but was actually, in spite of the familiar house, in spite of my poor mother, the most des
olate kind of exile. And it wasn’t only Katy that I missed. I was homesick for all of them—for Beulah in the kitchen, for Timmy on the floor with his trains, for Ruth and her preposterous poems, for Henry’s asthma and the laboratory and those extraordinary monologues of his about everything. What bliss it was, in September, to regain my paradise! Eden in autumn, with the leaves reddening, the sky still blue, the light turning from gold to silver. Then Eden in winter, Eden with the lamps lighted, the rain outside the windows, the bare trees like hieroglyphs against the sunset. And then, at the beginning of that second spring, there was a telegram from Chicago. Katy’s mother was ill. Nephritis—and those were the days before the sulfas, before penicillin. Katy packed her bags and was at the station in time to catch the next train. The two children—the three children, if you counted Henry—were left in charge of Beulah and myself. Timmy gave us no trouble at all. But the others, I assure you, the others more than made up for Timmy’s reasonableness. The poetess refused to eat her prunes at breakfast, couldn’t be bothered to brush her hair, neglected her homework. The Nobel Prize winner wouldn’t get up in the morning, cut his lectures, was late for every appointment. And there were other, graver delinquencies. Ruth broke her piggy bank and squandered a year’s accumulated savings on a make-up kit and a bottle of cheap perfume. The day after Katy left, she looked and smelt like the Whore of Babylon.”
“For the benefit of the Conqueror Worm?”
“Worms were out,” he answered. “Poe was as old-fashioned as ‘Over There’ or ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band.’ She’d been reading Swinburne; she’d just made the discovery of the poems of Oscar Wilde. The universe was quite different now and she herself was somebody else—another poetess with a brand-new vocabulary…. Sweet sin; desire; jasper claws; the ache of purple pulses; the raptures and roses of vice; and lips, of course, lips intertwisted and bitten till the foam has a savor of blood—all that adolescent bad taste of Late Victorian rebellion. And in Ruth’s case, the new words had been accompanied by new facts. She was no longer a little boy in a skirt and with pigtails; she was a budding woman with two little breasts that she carried about delicately and gingerly as though they were a pair of extremely valuable but rather dangerous and embarrassing zoological specimens. They were a source, one could sense, of mingled pride and shame, of intense pleasure and, therefore, of a haunting sense of guilt. How impossibly crude our language is! If you don’t mention the physiological correlates of emotion, you’re being false to the given facts. But if you do mention them, it sounds as though you were trying to be gross and cynical. Whether it’s passion or the desire of the moth for the star, whether it’s tenderness or adoration or romantic yearning—love is always accompanied by events in the nerve endings, the skin, the mucous membranes, the glandular and erectile tissues. Those who don’t say so are liars. Those who do are labeled as pornographers. It’s the fault, of course, of our philosophy of life; and our philosophy of life is the inevitable by-product of a language that separates in idea what in actual fact is always inseparable. It separates and at the same time it evaluates. One of the abstractions is ‘good,’ and the other is ‘bad.’ Judge not that ye be not judged. But the nature of language is such that we can’t help judging. What we need is another set of words. Words that can express the natural togetherness of things. Muco-spiritual, for example, or dermatocharity. Or why not mastonoetic? Why not viscerosophy? But translated, of course, out of the indecent obscurity of a learned language into something you could use in everyday speech or even in lyrical poetry. How hard it is, without those still nonexistent words, to discuss even so simple and obvious a case as Ruth’s! The best one can do is to flounder about in metaphors. A saturated solution of feelings, which can be crystallized either from the outside or the inside. Words and events that fall into the psychophysical soup and make it clot into action-producing lumps of emotion and sentiment. Then come the glandular changes, and the appearance of those charming little zoological specimens which the child carries around with so much pride and embarrassment. The thrill-solution is enriched by a new kind of sensibility that radiates from the nipples, through the skin and the nerve ends, into the soul, the subconscious, the super-conscious, the spirit. And these new psycho-erectile elements of personality impart a kind of motion to the thrill-solution, cause it to flow in a specific direction—toward the still unmapped, undifferentiated region of love. Into this flowing stream of love-oriented feeling, chance drops a variety of crystallizing agents—words, events, other people’s example, private fantasies and memories, all the innumerable devices used by the Fates to mold an individual human destiny. Ruth had the misfortune to pass from Poe to Algernon and Oscar, from the Conqueror Worm to Dolores and Salome. Combined with the new facts of her own physiology, the new literature made it absolutely necessary for the poor child to smear her mouth with lipstick and drench her combinations with synthetic violet. And worse was to follow.”
“Synthetic ambergris?”
“Much worse—synthetic love. She persuaded herself that she was passionately, Swinburneishly in love—and, of all people, with me!”
“Couldn’t she have chosen someone a little nearer her own size?” I asked.
“She’d tried,” Rivers answered, “but it hadn’t worked. I had the story from Beulah, to whom she had confided it. A tragic little story of a fifteen-year-old girl adoring a heroic young footballer and scholarship winner of seventeen. She had chosen someone more nearly her own size; but unfortunately, at that period of life, two years are an almost impassable gulf. The young hero was interested only in girls of a maturity comparable to his own—eighteen-year-olds, seventeen-year-olds, at a pinch well-developed sixteen-year-olds. A skinny little fifteen-year-old like Ruth was out of the question. She found herself in the position of a low-born Victorian maiden hopelessly adoring a duke. For a long time the young hero didn’t even notice her; and when at last she forced herself on his attention, he began by being amused and ended by being rude. That was when she started to persuade herself that she was in love with me.”
“But if seventeen was too old, why did she try twenty-eight? Why not sixteen?”
“There were several reasons. The rebuff had been public, and if she’d chosen some pimply younger substitute for the footballer, the other girls would have commiserated with her to her face and laughed at her behind her back. Love for another schoolboy was thus out of the question. But she knew no males except schoolboys and myself. There was no choice. If she was going to love anybody—and the new physiological facts inclined her to love, the new vocabulary imposed love upon her as a categorical imperative—then I was the man. It started actually several weeks before Katy left for Chicago. I had noticed a number of premonitory symptoms—blushings, silences, abrupt inexplicable exits in the middle of conversations, fits of jealous sulking if ever I seemed to prefer the mother’s company to the child’s. And then, of course, there were those love poems which she insisted, in the teeth of her own and my embarrassment, on showing me. Blisses and kisses; Lips and whips; yearning and burning; Best, blest, pressed, breast. She’d look at me intently while I read the things, and it wasn’t the merely anxious look of a literary novice awaiting the critic’s judgment; it was the damp, large, lustrous regard of an adoring spaniel, of a Counter-Reformation Magdalen, of the willing murderee at the feet of her predestined Bluebeard. It made me feel exceedingly uncomfortable, and I wondered sometimes if it wouldn’t be a good thing, for everybody’s sake, to mention the matter to Katy. But then, I argued, if my suspicions were unfounded, I should look pretty fatuous; and if I were right, I should be making trouble for poor little Ruth. Better say nothing and wait for the foolishness to blow over. Better to go on pretending that the poems were simply literary exercises which had nothing to do with real life or their author’s feelings. And so it went on, underground, like a resistance movement, like the fifth column, until the day of her mother’s departure. Driving home from the station I wondered apprehensively what would happen now that Kat
y’s restraining presence had been removed. Next morning brought the answer—painted cheeks, a mouth like an overripe strawberry and that perfume, that whore-house smell of her!”
“With behavior, I suppose, to match?”
“That was what I expected, of course. But oddly enough it didn’t immediately materialize. Ruth didn’t seem to feel the need of acting her new part; it was enough merely to look it. She was satisfied with the signs and emblems of the grand passion. Scenting her cotton underclothes, looking at the image in the glass of that preposterously raddled little face, she could see and smell herself as another Lola Montez, without having to establish her claim to the title by doing anything at all. And it was not merely the mirror that told her who she had become; it was also public opinion—her amazed and envious and derisive school fellows, her scandalized teachers. Their looks and comments corroborated her private fantasies. She was not the only one to know it; even other people recognized the fact that she had now become the grande amoureuse, the femme fatale. It was all so novel and exciting and absorbing that for a time, thank heaven, I was almost forgotten. Besides, I had committed the unpardonable offense of not taking her latest impersonation with proper seriousness. It was on the very first day of the new dispensation. I came downstairs to find Ruth and Beulah in the hall, hotly disputing. ‘A nice young girl like you,’ the old woman was saying. ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’ The nice young girl tried to enlist me as an ally. ‘You don’t think mother will mind my using make-up, do you?’ Beulah left me no time to answer. ‘I’ll tell you what your mother will do,’ she said emphatically and with remorseless realism. ‘She’ll give you one look, then she will sit down on the davenport, turn you over her knee, pull down your drawers and give you the biggest spanking you ever had in all your life.’ Ruth gave her a look of cold and haughty contempt and said, ‘I wasn’t talking to you.’ Then she turned back in my direction. ‘What do you say, John?’ The strawberry lips wreathed themselves into what was intended to be a richly voluptuous smile; the eyes gave me a bolder version of their adoring look. ‘What do you say?’ In mere self-defense I told her the truth. ‘I’m afraid Beulah’s right,’ I said. ‘An enormous spanking.’ The smile faded, the eyes darkened and narrowed, an angry flush appeared beneath the rouge on her cheeks. ‘I think you’re absolutely disgusting,’ she said. ‘Disgusting!’ Beulah echoed. ‘Who’s disgusting, I’d like to know?’ Ruth scowled and bit her lip, but managed to ignore her. ‘How old was Juliet?’ she asked with a note of anticipated triumph in her voice. ‘A year younger than you are,’ I answered. The triumph broke through in a mocking smile. ‘But Juliet,’ I went on, ‘didn’t go to school. No classes, no homework. Nothing to think about except Romeo and painting her face—if she did paint it, which I rather doubt. Whereas you’ve got algebra, you’ve got Latin and the French irregular verbs. You’ve been given the inestimable opportunity of some day becoming a reasonably civilized young woman.’ There was a long silence. Then she said, ‘I hate you.’ It was the cry of an outraged Salome, of Dolores, justly indignant at having been mistaken for a high-school kid. Tears began to flow. Charged with the black silt of mascara, they cut their way through the alluvial plains of rouge and powder. ‘Damn you,’ she sobbed, ‘damn you!’ She wiped her eyes; then, catching sight of the horrible mess on her handkerchief, she uttered a cry of horror and rushed upstairs. Five minutes later, serene and completely repainted, she was on her way to school. And that” Rivers concluded, “was one of the reasons why our grande amoureuse paid so little attention to the object of her devouring passion, why the femme fatale preferred, during the first two weeks of her existence, to concentrate on herself rather than on the person to whom the author of the scenario had assigned the part of victim. She had tried me out and found me sadly unworthy of the role! It seemed better, for the time being, to play the piece as a monologue. In that quarter at least I was given a respite. But meanwhile my Nobel Prize winner was getting into trouble.