What is love? I don't know. Do you? I don't know because it is so many things and because in reality I have had so little experience. Is it sentiment? Is it mere lechery? Does it involve tenderness? Yes, but it also involves cruelty and jealousy and treachery. Is it the calculated sensuality of the voluptuary or the frustrated sublimations of a gelded Abelard and an intellectual Heloise? Is it something to be set on one side, formed, made rigid by convention or fear? It is certainly the most carelessly used word in the English language. It is used for God, for women, for heterosexual and homosexual relationships, for children, for mothers, for wives, for mistresses, for pets. The French are much better in their definition of love. When you say amour in French you know what is meant with no nonsense, but "love" is a meaningless word in English. Odd too, because English is the richest of all languages but curiously also the least definite and the most vague. Perhaps that is why it has produced the richest and finest poetry in the world. Fine poetry is always like a beautiful structure partially enveloped in mist.
Love is so changeable and so shifting. There are times out here in the islands when I feel greater affection or even love for the dog I left behind than I do. for my wife and children. Sometimes I speculate on what member of my household I should like most to have with me here in order to keep me company.
Nearly always the answer comes out, "Why, Sandy, my dog. Of course!" I think what I miss most is having him come to me and put his head between my legs, looking up at me with eyes which speak and yet cannot speak. Perhaps it is vanity, the satisfaction of being worshiped. But it is not altogether that. The extraordinary thing is that I feel closer to him than to my own wife and children. He is a wonderful companion. I think we understand each other completely. I think he understands each of us in the family better than we understand each other. He regards Ronnie as an equal with whom he romps and rassels, never hesitating to take a good bite if Ronnie is unfair or too rough. Esther he simply ignores, I suspect because he thinks her rather prissy and no fun. If, as sometimes happens, we forget to put him out and he lifts his leg somewhere below stairs, Esther screams and behaves as if the house were burning down, rushing to her mother and screaming, "Mummy! Mummy! Sandy's done it again!"
He will go to Enid when she calls him and will submit to being stroked and petted. He is very polite about it, but he understands, I think, that the petting is not spontaneous. It is an act, a performance in which she finds far more pleasure than he finds. She is thinking without thinking, "What a pretty picture this makes!" The odd thing is that at times she is jealous of the dog, that at times she hates him because he reaches me, something which she has not been able to do for a long time, if indeed she was ever able to do it. He is a not very good Irish setter and a terrible tramp at heart, but I am more worried about him than I am about Ronnie's doing badly at school. I am always troubled lest Enid turn him out at night. I know that the moment I left the house she shut him up each night in the cellar. He had always been permitted to sleep on a special chair in the rumpus room while I was at home, and I always wanted secretly to have him in the bedroom but I never quite dared, any more than for years I dared demand a separate room for myself. Enid is one of those women who puts the neatness of her house above the happiness and welfare of her husband, her children, or any pet. She would have made an unholy row at having a dog in the bedroom. Fortunately, as an experienced tramp he probably knows how to take care of himself.
I haven't had much experience with love, but I have read a great deal about it, mostly in the two or three years before I came out here. I learned to read a whole book in college because I had a good professor in literature it was the only thing I did learn but after I left I slipped back again. I read nothing but mystery stories until a few years ago. It was about the time I found out that the endless running about in crowds, usually well loaded with liquor, had become unendurable. Save for the rose garden I had no hobby, and I had to find something to do with my time, especially during the long winter months. Also I found that reading, after a time, became a defense against Enid's endless talking and gossip. If I concentrated so that I could not hear what she was saying, she would eventually give up the struggle and sulk. I did not mind the sulking so long as she kept quiet.
She did not like reading herself. There are so many women and men too like her back in the States. They have been through school and college without ever having learned to read or to enjoy the peculiar pleasure of ideas; people who can really talk about nothing whatever but their immediate occupations and activities. The most they ever read is the more sensational items in the newspapers, the comics, the sports, and easily predigested things out of the Readers Digest and similar publications. It is a fault perhaps of our mechanical, materialist, complex, rushed civilization, but it is a fault too of our colleges and universities,
So many men and women I know seem to have learned or at least retained nothing whatever from the experience of having gone to college. Some of them even leave college without being able to spell or to write or speak grammatically. At times it seems to rne almost impossible that they have been to college and have learned so little. They must have gotten good enough marks to have remained in school, yet the residue of learning appears to be nothing. They seem to believe that education ended on the day they left the university, that there is something magical about a college degree, and that there could not possibly be anything more to be learned. The job is over and they can relax.
Enid is like that. She graduated from a great and famous women's college but she seems to know nothing and to be interested in little beyond the daily activities of her life. She is always fussing about. Most of her friends are like her. They have, most of them, had all the advantages of prosperity and education, but the result has been nil. It has always been impossible to discuss anything with Enid which required any concentration or any thinking. She seems to have no background of history or economics or politics. Her reactions are almost entirely emotional. In the beginning she was all for Roosevelt as a second Jesus Christ and now she hates him because taxes are high and she can't get butter when she wants it. The idea that he might be something in between or a charlatan or a demagogue is much too complex for her consideration. She belongs to the League of Women Voters and is active in the Association of University Women, and periodically she comes home from one or the other, all steamed up about some new idea World Federation or the W.P.A. or something else about which some woman has given a speech, but she never understands what it is all about and after a few days the enthusiasm dies away.
After the honeymoon a husband and wife begin to have need of something besides bed to hold them together. Was it St. Simon who said that great mistresses, wielding great power and maintaining their positions, were rarely beautiful women in the accepted sense? They were always clever and entertaining and more often than not plain. A man cannot stay in bed twenty-four hours a day.
So after our own honeymoon I found our mutual intellectual life a pretty sterile affair. It was impossible to discuss anything with Enid ideas or anything important or politics and economics. The discussion promptly became so muddled and eventually so emotional that it ended in a quarrel or with some bitter and savage remark on my own part, not that I am an intellectual genius or in any sense brilliant, but because I suppose most men axe more logical and more thorough and more objective than women. Not many women find pleasure in the workings of logic or the mere fact of knowing. I suppose that is one of tie reasons why even the greatest dressmakers and cooks are usually men, "because they employ these elements even in fields which are popularly regarded as belonging to the female sex. More maddening than any other qualify was her capacity for inevitably turning every discussion into a personal affair. Eventually everything, even the weather, became related to her own ego. If during the period of hero worship of Roosevelt I uttered even the faintest criticism, it became a personal insult to her.
In any case I took to reading as a defense and a refuge from the sterility and superficiality of my home life and indeed of all the life which surrounded me. And as I read I began to rediscover the immense pleasure of reading, the pleasure of losing myself in a good novel in which from the first page I entered a world as real to me or perhaps more real than the life all about me, or the pleasure of following an idea, skillfully and meticulously worked out to the very end. I even began to read books on philosophy. And all this tended to isolate me and make more unendurable those excursions into suburban society which began to be actual incursions upon my solitude and my own inner life. I could not enjoy myself, even after I had drunk a half-dozen strong martinis which at one time in my life had helped enormously. I only grew sullen and resentful, thinking always, above the clatter, that I wanted to be at home exploring title new worlds which I was discovering. It was all a part of the same trouble... which began that morning long ago with my actually seeing myself for the first time in the bathroom mirror.
We are coming back now to love, for it was out of these books that I began to discover how complex and varied a thing love could be. I should properly use the word amour because that is the kind of love I am writing about, not love of God or children or the Parent-Teacher Association or love in any of its careless Anglo-Saxon, Protestant connotations... just good old Greek and Latin amour.
I began to discover that there were things far beyond my own experience which had properly to do with love or amour, I began to make the amazing discovery that love could be a thing in itself, justifying itself as an art or even a career, that love and the vigor and vitality which it engendered could in itself become a creative force of great fertility. And I began to discover the variety of love and to understand many things about myself which I had not understood before, why I experienced certain emotions, why I did certain things, why I had felt warm and eager rushes of affection toward certain girls and even certain boys during my adolescence, why some pretty women attracted me and others, equally pretty, did not, why I had never loved my own mother and resented the fierce proprietary interest and even desire to possess and control me which went on in the very face of her obvious neglect of me in the role of mother. I began to understand why an act which I had once enjoyed with Enid had become in fact an act that was distasteful and could only be carried through because of my own vitality, mechanically, and somewhat as I would take liver pills when I felt bilious. This indeed was a long way from love or amour, and I began to see that actually the whole act in relation to Enid was degrading and worse perhaps than any act of perversity. At last, of course, it became intolerable and came to an end but not before I had come close to a real nervous breakdown and lost a great deal of weight.
And I began to understand what it was that drove some of the men of my acquaintance to what could only be described as sordid debauchery and lust on the occasions when they went to places like New Orleans or Chicago on conventions. In short, I began to understand too many things for my own good and perhaps for the good of those about me. I began to see in the men and women with whom I associated things which they believed hidden and perhaps were hidden to most people and to see things in them which they did not even know or recognize and admit about themselves. And that only widened the gulf between me and them. If there had been someone with whom I could have talked about these things, frankly and with interest and in confidence, it would perhaps have been all right. But there was no one, least o all Enid.
When I first took to reading she thought the whole thing was just a phase and would pass quickly enough, as a great many former enthusiasms of mine had passed because they were only a part of the restlessness I did not understand and the search for something on which I could take a strong hold, something to which I might attach myself and find both interest and stability.
But when the passion for reading grew and there was no sign of its passing and I refused now and then to go to the eternal barbecues and cocktail parties that were always exactly the same, she decided she would try to share .my passion and so bring us more closely together. But despite the fierceness of the original purpose to possess me and to have us share everything as if we were one person, she could not follow me into that world which I had discovered without her. Reading bored her, indeed so much that she could not even get through a fairly readable good novel in order to be able to discuss it afterward. If she did attempt a discussion I discovered that she had missed the whole point of the book, partly because she had read it in a hasty, bored, and superficial way, but mostly because she was always identifying herself with one of the characters, usually the one the author had satirized. She did not see the satire. She was as calloused to an understanding of satire as a hundred-year-old turtle. She simply looked upon the satirized character as maligned and abused, and sometimes she observed that the author must be a horrible, degenerate person without any standards or morals.
But it was above all the boredom and the necessity and effort of a moderate degree of concentration which defeated and prevented her invasion of the world I had discovered. Of all things, she took a shot at reading Proust, and of all books, Sodom and Gomorrah, called in translation The Cities of the Plain. This was at the height of her effort and she stuck to it stubbornly, but she managed to read most of the book without the least understanding of what was going on or the faintest perception of the true character of the Baron Charlus. I did not enlighten her because I knew she would only say, "I don't like to discuss such dirty things," and that would have been the end of it.
I must confess that I did not find Proust easy reading, but I will say that he is the only author I have ever read who is able to keep boredom and fascination both in the air at the same time. And despite all the complications and complexities of his style and content I was fascinated for a wholly unliterary reason. I was fascinated by a world so different from anything I had ever known that I might have been reading a book about people living on Mars or the moon a life which, however decadent, seemed as rich and exciting as my own daily life was mechanical and sterile and empty from the day I looked at myself in the mirror.
I got most of the books from the Crescent City Carnegie Public Library with the advice of Miss Pritchard, a middle-aged and rather attractive spinster who must have led an intense inner life unrevealed to the patrons of the library. She seemed to have read everything or at least to be able to tell you what kind of book it was and whether it was difficult or easy reading. Outwardly her life revolved entirely around books and the library, with occasional excursions to library conventions or to the Rocky Mountains on holidays, and I think she was a little astonished when I first appeared and asked for some good reading. She advised me, and after a little while she began to discern what it was I liked and steered me in the proper direction. She led me into getting the New York book reviews and out of them I found books which I wanted especially to read. Twice when I asked her about specific books she laughed and said, "We couldn't carry those here. If some of our more respectable readers took them out, there would be an awful row with the library board. It isn't always what you or I might think was the dirtiest book. It's the kind of book that rubs their noses in what they don't want to see. That's what always stirs up trouble. A lot of them rather like what you or I might think were really dirty books. It's the ones that stir them up that they hate and consider dirty."
I think it was that remark which revealed to both of us that we understood a good many things in the same way. The books which she dared not suggest to the library board I ordered by mail from New York. These became, therefore, virtually the only books I owned and the nucleus of a library decidedly of an erotic nature, which infuriated Enid and I must confess did give a wholly false picture of reading tastes which otherwise were fairly catholic. If I died suddenly by my own hand and someone took to investigating he would probably come to the conclusion, on finding that pitifully small library, that I had been obviously deranged through an obsession over sex, which would not have been true at all since such books were only a small proportion of the sum total of my reading.
However, I did develop a lively interest in the substance and the technique of love, partly, I think, because I had been until then comparatively innocent and each discovery came to me with surprise and even with astonishment. What I had known or even suspected dimly had before then come into my consciousness as facts which were suppressed, dirty, dimmed, and generally regarded as shocking and as exceptional in practice as murder. Generally speaking there was a rabbit-like act and that was all. Anything else was dirty. It was tragic but true, and I think that the same attitude was shared by most of the men I knew. It was only when they became older, brutally unfaithful, and went exploring at convention time that they ever extended the borders of love-making, and by that time there was not much beauty and no tenderness in it but only an animal-like quality of lust and rutting. That too is tragic but true.
As for the women I cannot speak with so much authority, but many of them at middle age or after developed the same air of urgency and desperation and promiscuousness and lust as if at last, too late, they had discovered desire but not love or tenderness or beauty. By instinct and sometimes through the greater knowledge of some more experienced partner they discovered the technique of love so late that it could only be practiced with a land of harsh and indiscriminate animality. Too many times there was in our world in Crescent City the spectacle of a man and woman who had lost interest in each other and drifted apart, practicing separately and promiscuously, witli virtual strangers, a love-making which in the beginning when they had first come together would have been beautiful and full of satisfaction but once they had drifted apart became merely a sensual exercise which left them afterward perpetually cold and exhausted and sometimes filled with shame and remorse like the men coming home on a cold gray train from a convention.
How then could this come about? The root of it must lie deep in the puritanical Protestant past of all that is our culture, wherein for generations the idea of sex has been looked upon as shameful and even by some as distasteful. What a preposterous and pretentious business is such an attitude! that man (or woman) should think himself stronger than the forces of the universe or to believe that he (or she) was so vastly different from his fellow animals. The belief has in itself corrupted the very word "love" and diffused its meaning, making it at once silly and trivial, gross and sordid. Silliest of all perhaps are those who profess to believe that a man and woman should cohabit only with the purpose of having children. I think that Enid perhaps had that idea dimly in mind when we were first married, and then presently she found out that few practiced so rigorous and absurd a doctrine and that she must "give in" in order to hold me. She was always reading articles in women's magazines and "sob sister" columns on how to Tiold" a husband.
I know that I got enlightenment neither from my mother nor my father save in a roundabout way. My father was always so remote from me that to have discussed such a thing as the facts of life would have seemed to him like corrupting a strange small boy. My mother did it by books, leaving a "modern" pamphlet recommended by one of her women's organizations on the table in my room where I would be certain to find it. By then it was too late, for I already knew more than the pamphlet contained and knew it with a detail and sureness which certainly the pamphlet did not contain. It was hazy about everything and very dull reading. By that time (I think I was thirteen) I already knew from haymow experience how little girls were made and had even had with Eva Smart (one of those local bad girls three years older than myself) a fumbling experience in which I found little excitement or pleasure. And of course at Hargreaves" farm I had long since learned the facts of breeding and birth and learned other things from the naked little boys at the swimming hole.
If I had been let alone I should have approached the whole question with a fair degree of simplicity and naturalness, but I was not permitted either simplicity or naturalness. The very attitude of my parents, the silence of my father, and the placing of the pamphlets by my mother where I might find them implied that the whole thing was shameful and must not be mentioned. At the same time that the whole campaign sought to suppress the whole idea of sex, it actually served only to give it an exaggerated and distorted importance.
But it did not end there. At the Y.M.C.A., where we went to swim and had as payment to listen at times to the lectures by the physical director on sex hygiene, the subject was dragged up and made not only shameful but hideous through dreadful warnings about venereal disease and even revolting colored slides depicting the horrible price paid by those who "sinned." The whole process was one of creating horror and of making everything connected with sex or even love as revolting as possible.
I wonder how many suicides, how much wretchedness, how much homosexuality was created out of the sessions on sex hygiene. And sitting out here in the jungle, I wonder what they are offering to boys today, now that antibiotics have reduced the wages of sin to the level of a cold in the head, only more quickly and easily cured.
I never have been able to discover how much Enid knew when I married her. It was one of those things which you could never possibly discuss with her because she was incapable of detachment or objectivity in anything you discussed and because there was in her none of the merriness which in some women makes of the marital relationship a laughing and satisfactory affair. Her mother was a prim woman whom it was impossible to imagine in any such situation as an accouplement. Yet she and her husband occupied a double bed throughout their existence* Very likely she pretended to herself that it was not happening.
Concerning Enid I only knew that she was awkward and submissive in the beginning and I was not much help since the only experience I had had might have been classified as mechanical. I was of course, by many standards, experienced, for many an American husband goes into marriage a virgin with a textbook in one hand, but I was certainly not a lover calculated to make a woman happy or to create out of the contact anything more than a conventional act brought about quickly and awkwardly through the pressure of vitality and good health.
I think I understood the whole of our life together in one flash when, after I had taken to reading a great deal and years after we were married, I attempted to put into practice a caress of which I had read. I felt Enid's body stiffen and heard her say, "Don't! Where did you learn such a filthy trick?"
That was the end and we were never together again- Yet in that single episode there lay the seeds of long and deep tragedy and the bitter sterility of that life together in which there was never any real satisfaction or pleasure for either of us. After that something died completely in me, and I knew that even when she kissed me in public for show there was no feeling behind it and that the gesture was the falsest of all the performances she gave.
Why was it all like that? I don't know. It is one of the things I am trying to discover in writing this all down. I am trying to discover why two people who, until they were married, had been treated kindly by life should have made such a dull and empty mess of things. It would have been better, I think, if we had quarreled violently, if I had beaten her, even if we had separated and divorced. In that way each of us might have had another chance before it was too late. In that way, through quarrels and violence and passion, we might even have broken down the things which paralyzed us and kept us apart. In that way I might have roused something in her which in the end would have brought us together so that we really shared each other. That was the one thing she most desired and the one thing at which she always acted, yet which she prevented by every thought and action. It never occurred even for a second in all our lives together.
In the beginning it started off all right. We married each other because it was the thing to do what might be called a "natural." On my own side I was a young and vigorous man who needed either marriage or some relationship which might act as a release both physically and emotionally. It is bad for a young man of average vigor to hold himself in for too long (see St. Paul). And this urgency became translated in mind and even in my body into the delusion that I was in love with Enid. She was at hand. She was fresh and young and pretty. The idea pleased both sets of parents. We would marry and start our lif e together in a small but luxurious house. I would inherit an excellent business and she would come into some money if everything went well. I had been already two years out of college when she was graduated.
I was one of the few young men who had an automobile of my own, and in that first summer the courtship was largely carried on in the automobile and on picnics and sometimes on the golf course of the country club. All this is considered ideal, yet I see now that we had no special fun out of it Some uninhibited pair of Slovenes or Italians from the Flats along the river would have had infinitely more fun and pleasure and they would have been a great deal closer both to God and nature, from which our middle-class Protestant upbringing had shut us out Once or twice when I was aroused I had put my hand on her thigh while driving, but each time she pushed it away and afterward she had sulked. Once she said, "Let's not put it on that vulgar basis." On what other basis ought a young couple about to marry put such a relationship? What but that basis was the fundamental purpose of marriage?
If I had had any experience I would have known then that what came afterward was inevitable, or if I had had enough experience I might have changed her afterward. But young men of my age did not have experience or often enough, if they had it, it was of the wrong kind. Of course if we had been like Paul and Virginia, simply two children of nature coming together spontaneously as we reached the age of ripeness, everything would have been natural and simple and playful, but it was not like that. We had both been wrapped in cocoons, different yet alike, of inhibitions, of shames, of hearsay, of convention, of actual horror, and she, of course, had had hammered in her since birth the idea that a girl must not only be a virgin if she ever expected to make a proper marriage but that she must behave even as if the touch of a man's hand on her thigh might make her pregnant. It would be funny if it did not lie at the root of so much suffering, so many divorces, and even on occasion of murder.
You see, what I am trying to get at is this where did all this come from and why did such superstitions and nightmares and shames exist? Perhaps it will be different with many of the young people in the future and I have been told that it is different with the boys and girls now growing up. Certainly they are all far more mature for their ages than we were when we married. Young people and indeed all people are to some extent the products of the forces of the generations and times in which they live. These young people coming up in a distraught and trying world are perhaps like the young people of the eighteenth century when Pitt at twenty-one was Prime Minister of the British Empire and men and women assumed responsibilities before they were properly of age. Most men of my acquaintance and age, whatever the number of their years, have in reality never reached the age of twenty-one.
I wonder whether there was less morality and less suffering in a bawdy time like that of the Restoration than in a dull respectable hypocritical age such as the Victorians knew. I doubt it.
You see, I keep fumbling and fumbling, trying to unravel the tangled skeins that lie behind my own personal emptiness and the futility of my life as a family man and a member of a community and, indeed, that lie behind so much of the hysterical futility of all middle-class American life. And how little of our life is not middle class, in one way or another?
Our wedding was conventional and fine with bridesmaids and ushers and banks of white flowers and long articles in the society columns of the newspapers as was befitting the marriage between the "scions" of two of the first families of the town. There was even champagne to drink which was considered rather daring, and rice and confetti were showered on the young pair as they drove off in the new automobile that was the gift of the bridegroom's father.
I asked Frank Saunders to be one of my ushers, but he wrote a polite letter saying that unfortunately he expected to be in Europe at the time of the wedding. He sent us a handsome silver card tray. I blushed when I got his answer because I knew all the time that he would never accept the invitation. I had blushed even when I wrote inviting him to be an usher. I knew somehow that he was through with me, bored with me, and would never see me again save by accident, but I wanted him to come. In my heart there was, I suppose, still a kind of hero worship for him because there was in him something dark and wicked and free, and I would never be any of these things. And there was no doubt that he would bring a certain "class" to the wedding which none of the others could possibly contribute. The girls would all fall in love with him, as girls usually did. And I still wanted to be friends with him. He would have made a difference to the whole of the occasion. There was a radiance and a dash about him which would, I knew, lift the whole tone of the thing. But I knew all along that he would not come. He had better things to do.
We drove away from the wedding in the late afternoon to spend the night in Kentucky, and most of the way Enid talked about how well the wedding had gone off and how well the bridesmaids looked in the dresses she had herself designed and how Mary Everly had had too much champagne and so on, as if nothing had happened that was to change both of us, to bring us happiness or suffering, as if the greatest thing that can happen to two young people had not occurred at all. It was as if, instead of being married, we had just left the Saturday-night country club dance and were driving home and I would presently stop the car in front of her house and come in and sit for a little while and then leave her and go back to my own home.
But I was scared. While I listened to her talk there were even moments when I doubted that I had done the right thing in getting married. It meant that I would have to settle down and now perhaps would never have a chance to do all those things, travel and visit far exotic places which I had dreamed of in more romantic moments. At any rate I now had the right to place my hand on her thigh and I did so, as if to claim possession of her. This time she did not withdraw or stiffen. She simply went on talking about the wedding as if the hand were not there at all. And I found myself thinking, rather bitterly at so early a stage, "Yes. She has got her man. Everything is settled and she doesn't need to worry any more." Because this was for good. That was the way we were brought up. It was for good.
There is something frightening about that thought, and it must have come to hundreds of young bridegrooms just as it came to me at just that moment. Oh, I was impatient. I was anticipating what was to happen that night when we reached the inn but I realize now that the impatience, and even whatever desire I experienced, was a kind of abstract desire not especially for Enid but for women or any woman and as such was somehow detached from the workings of my mind. If suddenly we had been drawn together spontaneously and kissed with no holding back, with no shyness or fear, everything would have been different. But it did not happen that way, and I am afraid that in our world it seldom does save with the Blessed who have a whole and frank delight in each other with no hypocrisies and no deceits and cocoons of convention.
Ronnie was born three years after we were married and Esther arrived two years later. There was no effort to arrange this. It merely happened that way, and it happened that we never had any more children because at Esther's birth something went wrong. It could possibly have been repaired, but neither of us did anything about it or even discussed the matter. I don't know whether Enid would have liked more children and I don't know even about myself. I think that very probably in Enid's planned scheme of things two children was just about right. It made what she considered the perfect family.
As the children grew older they went to the Oakdale kindergarten and the right school and were taken to the country club to run about or splash in the swimming pool. They played with the other children in Oakdale and became accustomed at times to the spectacle of parents their own and other children's parents, respectable model parents who had had too many cocktails and grew rather noisy and bawdy even before it was bedtime for the children. They grew accustomed to the idea of their parents moving about only in crowds and they listened to the hogwash on the radio at certain fixed hours. Once or twice I tried reading to them at bedtime, but they were only bored and restless and, without perhaps enough perseverance, I gave up the whole thing.
By the time Ronnie was fourteen and Esther twelve (just before I went into the Army) they were perfect average children belonging in such a suburb as Oakdale with parents who were well-off with two cars in the garage and beginning to think about a third for the children. In the same year my mother arranged, with a good deal of political conniving, I suspect, that we were chosen as the State "Family of the Year" by the Federation of Women's Clubs. It happened at exactly the period in which for the first time I was planning the Perfect Crime.
The "award," I must say, rather startled me, first because, as I well knew, it had been maneuvered by my mother despite her dislike for Enid and her jealousy of her. I could only guess that she wangled it because it gave her ego a reflected glory. It startled me too because it seemed incredible that it had never occurred to anyone that our home life was something far from perfect and that the people around us had never suspected from an exchange of glances between Enid and me or a bitter word or phrase passing between us how false was the conception of our "perfect life** together. Could it be that people saw or understood so little? Could it be that there was among the women a kind of mutual conspiracy in which they were joined with Enid to make all their lives seem perfect? Could it be that there was a conspiracy of silence never broken by any of them? Or could it be that none of them expected more than we had and that marriage with most of them had become merely an endurance test involving the "quiet desperation" of which Thoreau writes? Or perhaps the fault was in myself that I was too idealistic, that I expected more than most men had any right to expect, not only in my own personal and family life but from life in my own small world and indeed from life in general. Could it be that our lives, merely by comparison with those of the others, appeared happy and complete?
If we were the model family and our life perfect, how wretched a world must it be of which we were a part. But perhaps it was merely a matter of discernment that the others never stopped long enough or were alone long enough to know how wretched they really were, how empty, how time-killing, how dead. What we do not know does not hurt us. Perhaps I, myself, would never have known but for the hateful glance in the mirror. Perhaps I would never have known if, each time life seemed without savor or a dull and dreary thing, I had merely taken another drink one magic drink or two which would make tilings seem bright again and make me seem brilliant and entertaining to myself. Perhaps that was why there was so much drinking in Oakdale that they could not face a single evening without the alcohol which at once blurred and made brighter their existence.
Everyone seemed pleased about the honor, and if there were any catty or vicious comments I did not hear them. Everyone congratulated us and Enid's friends kept saying, "Darling, it's wonderful! They couldn't have made a better choice!" I suspect that some of them said, "I don't see how she can put up with such a dull fellow as Wolcott Ferris" and "Now that he's cut down on his cocktails lie's worse than ever." But I never heard them.
The whole thing was a good deal of a bore. There were photographers and newspaper people and pictures in the papers and with all the material Enid started a scrap book in which, she said, she meant to put "everything interesting that happened to us." After tikis first burst of publicity there was nothing much to put in the book but eventually the fact that I had won a commission in the Army or the society-column accounts of the meeting of the garden club at our house or the listing of our names as among those present at the New Year's dance at the country club.
These garden clubs themselves were a curious manifestation of the life in Oakdale. There were several of them in Crescent City, all carefully graded in their membership according to income and what was known as "social status." At the top on both scores stood the Green Thumb Club of Oakdale, although what the green thumb had to do with it I do not know, for not one woman in ten had any knowledge or even any contact with gardening. Most of them had no garden at all or their gardens were entirely planted and cared for by working gardeners. It appeared that they simply used the name "Garden Club" as an excuse for one more huddling and an opportunity for gossip, and some of them regarded the whole thing with a point of view colored by snobbery. I even discovered that there was nationally a "right" garden club organization and a "wrong" one. The "right" one dominated the East and New England and the "wrong^ one flourished in the South and the Middle West There were undoubtedly a few women who really loved gardening and worked at it and had an abundant knowledge about soils and plants, and these were the ones who arranged the programs and got the speakers, but when the moment came for the speaker the ladies had great difficulty in suppressing the general chitchat which the others found far more interesting than the speaker or anything she had to say. Once I was asked to talk to them regarding the growing of roses because I had done a good job at it and had the best roses in Oakdale. Enid was a leading member of the Green Thumb Club although she had no interest whatever in gardening.
My mother came to visit us during all the hubbub about the honor of being chosen the "Family of the Year" and was of course included in all the photographs as the perfect mother-in-law and grandmother, something which exasperated Enid to the point of fury so that for two days life at home was very nearly intolerable, not because of any open quarrel, but because of what was much worse the vicious backhanded digs which they made at each other.
And all the time I was planning the Perfect Crime.
I don't know exactly how it began, but I think it came out of the daydreaming which seemed to increase the more I read. In the daydreaming I found myself thinking what life would be like if Enid were suddenly killed in an accident or died of some chronic complaint. Reading had fertilized my imagination, and in periods of daydreaming I even lived through the whole thing.
Someone would call the office asking me to come at once to the hospital, giving me the news that my wife had suffered a bad accident. And I would experience a sudden mixture of emotions involving annoyance and some slight concern plus a secret repressed hope that it might be fatal. And then I would go to the hospital and find that she had been struck by a speeding car and had died in the ambulance and they had not told me the whole truth in order to soften the blow. I would pretend to be overcome and to be taking it very well and people would say how splendid I was, never breaking down. They would say, "It would be better if he gave way. It will be all the harder for him later on," and all the time the heart inside me would be like a stone except for the small flicker of a flame, a flame which, if it could speak, would say, "Now we are free! . . . Ronnie and Esther and I. Now when the funeral is over we can go away and take the dog with us. We'll stay away a long time and then sell the house and get out of Oakdale for good. Well go off to Florida or buy a ranch. We'll start out again some place where nobody will be watching you from the window of the next house, where there is air and space and there won't be a dance every Saturday night at the country club where everybody goes and gets drunk because there isn't anything else to do."
I thought that somewhere, away from Oakdale, the children might have a chance to be something more, to be perhaps like Frank Saunders' family and the people I had seen there on the one occasion I had ever strayed away from the reservation.
In all that daydreaming, I know now, it was not only Enid from whom we escaped; it was also Oakdale, because the two were inextricably associated and mixed together. Once or twice when I had mentioned the possibility of moving away from Oakdale and indeed Crescent City itself, Enid had looked at me in astonishment.
"What's the matter with Oakdale and Crescent City?" she had said. "They're about as nice communities as it would be possible to find anywhere in the world. Where else could you find so many nice people all leading nice happy lives? Why should we want to go somewhere and have to make friends all over again? The children have roots here. So have both of us. The children couldn't have a better future than in a place like this. Sometimes I think you must be crazy. Certainly you get the craziest ideas of any person I've ever known. What is it you want? What's the matter with Oakdale? Most of the human race would be only too delighted to be as well off as we are and live in as fine a place as this."
"But, the children," I had started to say once or twice. "There's so much more for them in life than..."
But I seldom got farther than that. She simply dismissed the subject with a snort, adding, "I don't know what you're talking about," which was true, God knows, and in all honesty I cannot say that I knew myself what it was I wanted except that it would be better and at least different.
In the daydreaming my mother would come on for the funeral and we would both go through the mockery of grief and she would take care of all the funeral arrangements, something which she liked to do and at which she excelled, and there would be a big funeral, and maybe when I returned from the cemetery and was seated opposite her with the children at supper, our eyes would meet and there would be a single glance in which everything would be said, but even then she would be saying one thing and I would be saying another.
And beyond the funeral there were the days and weeks that followed when, in the daydream, the children and I packed up and went away looking for the place I had in mind. It was a vague place, but there was sunlight and there was the sea and the children ran around dressed in rough clothing and sometimes we went fishing and at night we came back to a house that was little more than a shack where inside things were comfortable and untidy with a big fire burning that was not lighted by a jet of gas which sometimes burned on and on while the bought, neatly cut logs refused to take fire. And the ashes would be allowed to sift out onto the floor instead of always being swept up neatly every half hour or so. And the logs would be driftwood and you could put your cigarette ashes anywhere at all. And Sandy 3 the setter, would sleep comfortably on the best chair. And we'd cook our own supper and wash up the dishes afterward and cook on a real fire instead of the electric rings of a shining enameled white stove. And presently the kids would go to bed because the day had tired them out and they wanted to go to sleep and not because they had to be sent away at a fixed hour whining for the last trashy radio serial.
But most of all Enid would not be there at all and the telephone wouldn't ring and a neighbor's voice say, "What are you doing? Come on over and play some bridge," or "Let's go out to the club for a few drinks." And in the daydreaming there were always a lot of vague people about, as faceless as the dream was vague and confused. They were salty characters and knew about fishing and trapping and hunting and woke every morning with excitement in their blood because it was a new day. And we'd raise our own food and have some animals like cows and pigs around and faceless people would come to stay with us out of another world, people who could really talk and had ideas and even the children would listen to them fascinated.
And always in the daydreaming there would come that day when somewhere, perhaps on the beach among the dunes, I would come across a woman and we would speak to each other and then I'd discover that she lived somewhere near by and I'd go to help her repair something or other and presently we'd become friends and then more than friends so that I couldn't sleep for thinking of her, not only because she was desirable, but because we understood each other in a thousand small ways, so that we conversed without the need of talk, and when at last I took her in my arms a kind of flame would envelop us so that there were no longer two beings, separated and querulous, but only one. And afterward we would run into the sea together laughing and... and... we would be... I would search for the word, but the only word I could find was "happy" and that was not adequate. No word, I think, is adequate for the thing of which I dreamed. Those who have attained it, those few, know that there is no word.
All this, of course, began as daydreaming with the supposed accident in the street, and then week after week and month after month the daydream presently passed into something else. In moments of reality I knew that I was approaching forty, that I was old enough by this time to have sense (which I still do not have) but that I was still young enough to make a warm and satisfactory husband or lover. The dream was all very well, but I couldn't delay forever waiting for Enid to be hit by an automobile while I grew older and more cynical and despairing. And one morning the idea came to me that I might hurry things up by actually bringing about the "accident** myself before it was too late.
At first I thought of the whole thing in terms of an accident and worked out ways in which we might have an "accident" in which Enid was killed and I survived. There were mountains not far from Crescent City with roads cut into the steeper sides of the hills. The car might go over or I might be standing outside the car when mysteriously it started moving and plunged over the side with Enid in it. Or I might shove her of! the peak at Lookout Point. Oh, I thought of a hundred "accidents," but always there was something wrong with them. She might not be killed and would live and "know," or I might be killed with her or be maimed so that the daydream could never be realized.
So in the end I thought of poison and I went further into all sorts of complicated plans, but always there seemed to be something wrong with them. This or that might go wrong and I would be found out. One after another I rejected the plans until I came to the one that concerned the sleeping pills. This seemed to me to be the perfect crime.
Enid sometimes took capsules of stuff to make her sleep, I do not know what they were, but the mere fact of her taking them indicated that she too was unhappy, perhaps in her heart as wretched as I was, although she would never admit it, least of all to herself. She would push the thought away from her and blame other things for her sleeplessness and her "nerves." She was the kind of woman who was determined to make a go of it, and by now the whole performance had become so dominant that she herself had become the character she was forever acting. She had imprisoned herself in a net from which she could not escape. She was caught in a web of illusion and self-deception and dishonesty from which she could not free herself.
You might ask, "Why did you not get a divorce? Why didn't you just run away and never come back?" But if you have ever been in such a situation you would know that it is not as simple as that. Many people have been in such a situation and they will understand. For everyone who has run away there are a hundred who stayed behind and stuck it out until at last, through drinking or mere calloused dullness or simply age and weariness, it did not matter any longer. It was not merely that I was tired of Enid and that whatever pleasure there had been in our marriage was done with... That often happens to married people and they find ways of going their own ways while still remaining together and manage to lead fairly civilized and decent lives as individuals. That kind of thing could never happen with Enid or many female monsters like her.
Enid would never give me a divorce and there could be no possible grounds on which I could divorce her since, if the matter ever came into court, she would merely appear there as the perfect wife and mother who lived only for husband and children.
There was no possibility whatever of her falling in love with another man and wanting her freedom to marry him. All that was outside the picture of Oakdale and the picture she had created. I might have beat and kicked her save that the means was not in my nature and to attempt it halfheartedly would only have ended in deeper and more dismal confusion and failure. I might have said more cruel things than I did say many times and have killed her *love," but the catch there was that she had and has no love to kill. It is something else that held her to me... and if I ever return it will still hold her to me to the very end when it will become a bitter contest between us to see who dies first.
And there were the children. Sometimes they seemed very remote to me, as if they were strangers, and sometimes they were very close and I was sorry for them and afraid. I suppose it will be all right if they never know," if they just go on being like the others in Oakdale. They will never be happy or unhappy. They will never know any depths or any heights. And presently as they grow up and marry... There is always a chance that something may happen to awaken them and there is always a chance that as they grow old enough to understand what I am talking about I might be able to get through to them and make things different and teach them the difference between automobiles and civilization, between plumbing and Me, between perverse prudery and morality so that they can live.
Here in the jungle I realize that up to now I have failed them completely, for I have never tried to save them from the numbness that will engulf them and has already begun to do so. I have given them as yet nothing to live by, no dreams, no values, no reality. They are moving about in a world of unreality, like tropical fish in an aquarium from which they cannot escape, with the water a proper temperature, fed every morning the right amount and kind of fish food, with the proper amount of air bubbling through the tepid water to keep it well aerated. And there is a little porcelain castle in the tank which might be labeled the Country Club in which the fish congregate, their mouths opening and closing without end and without meaning. I would like to free them from the aquarium but I don't know how, and even if I found the way Enid would thrust them quickly back again if it were possible.
I could have run away and made a clean getaway but I wasn't that kind of man. I was not strong enough or reckless enough or selfish enough or whatever you might call it, and in that I am like a million other husbands and fathers. I am no Gauguin, nor are most of the men I know, and the women are not female Gauguins. If I had been, everything would have been changed from the very beginning. I am, as you might say, "Mr. Smith" or "Mr. Jones." The only difference is that I happened to look in a mirror one morning while shaving and saw myself.
But to get back to the Perfect Crime. I worked it out in every possible detail. I would go to New York and buy poison, perhaps arsenic or strychnine, in a drug store in the heart of the city on the pretext that I needed it to kill rats, and I would never go into that neighborhood again as long as I lived so that no one could possibly remember me. And when I came home I would 11 some of the capsules with the poison and make small scratches on the ones I had filled so that I could identify them later. Then I would burn the paper in which the poison came and then one night she would wake up in pain and by morning she would be dead. Probably the doctors would diagnose the illness as some sudden chronic organic failure, or if they had an autopsy and discovered the poison, the discovery would lead nowhere. There would be no trace. I would be shaken and bewildered and overcome with grief. If there was an investigation the little capsules with the scratches on them would not be found because they had been removed and destroyed. Only the genuine capsules would be left in the little box. The death would be a complete and fathomless mystery. After all, were we not a model husband and wife? Was not our family the perfect example of a happy middle-class home? Were we not the "Family of the Year"? There could be no motive. Even if the children were questioned, they could not say that they had even seen a real quarrel between their parents. They had never seen me strike her. Enid did not believe in quarrels. As she put it, "My mother always told me never to let the sun go down on a quarrel with your husband."
If we ever had a disagreement or I spoke to her sarcastically, she would come up behind my chair in the evening, put her arms about my neck, and say, "It's all right, darling. I forgive you." It was in such moments that I came nearest to translating my plot into reality. It was in such moments that I did not even consider the agonies of poisoning by strychnine.
But I never did and I never would act. Despite the fact that in all the daydreaming I never felt the least remorse over having killed her a hundred times, the act in reality was something else again. Plenty of other husbands and plenty of wives have undoubtedly plotted as I plotted, but the number of those who have ever acted is one in a hundred thousand. But there are the few who have acted. Some have been discovered but some have not been. There is a line between the daydreaming and the act, the business of quietly putting out of existence another human being. There is a line which, no matter how many have considered it, few have crossed. Those who have killed and been discovered have usually done so carelessly and recklessly, in passion or when tihey reached that point where things became beyond endurance and temporarily the killer became mad.
The puzzling thing is why people find themselves caught in such a web and why they do not tear it apart and escape. I cannot tell you why I did not smash everything and run off except that it was not only Enid who was unendurable. It was the whole of my life from the moment I rose in the morning and went to the office until at last, almost painfully, I fell asleep. In a sense I, with my weakness, was actually a part of the very web which imprisoned me. And so are many of us who are merely killing time until we die.
The odd thing was that I had only worked out the complete details of the Perfect Crime at the very moment that we were chosen as the "Family of the Year'* and my mother descended upon us along with tihe photographers and the newspaperwomen. It seemed to knock the idea out of my head for the moment, and after that came the business of Mary Raeburn and in the end the chance of escape for a time at least into the Army. That was an easy way out and a conventional one in which I would betray nothing but merely seem to have volunteered for the good of my country. And so at last I have ended up in the desolate extravagant empty beauty of this island, alone but for four men in whom I have little interest and almost nothing in common, save that all of us are, men.
