Honeydew: Stories Part 14

"Hawthorne is grateful," Ben muttered.

"What are you going to say about Fanshawe?" asked Frieda.

"I wish I could tell you," Ben said. In truth he wished he knew. "But reticence is essential to the scholar. Ideas have to be nurtured in the dark silence of the mind before they can live in the bright light of discourse. When they can bear your intelligent scrutiny I will reveal them." He went on in this vein for some time, unable to stop. Finally Amanda called him to dinner.

"Will you stay, Frieda?" she said with her beautiful smile. "Your aunt's at the store tonight."

Frieda did not have to be asked twice.

In the kitchen hung some plant that had been in beautiful condition a few weeks ago. The framed squares of needlepoint on the walls were the work of Mrs. Cunningham, from whom, through the proxy of Frieda's aunt, Ben and Amanda had subrented the apartment. Mr. and Mrs. Cunningham, both schoolteachers, had gone to Iowa for the summer.

"What are the Cunninghams like?" Amanda asked as she served the tuna fish salad.

"I arrived only a week before they left," Frieda said cautiously.

"Tell us your impressions."

Frieda cleared her throat. "Clean and tidy and traditional."

"All of those china cats in the living room," Ben agreed. He helped himself to a carrot. "Couldn't you have sc.r.a.ped this, Amanda? When it's my turn to do dinner I always sc.r.a.pe the carrots."

"I forgot."

"I never forget."

"But you often forget to flush the toilet," she reminded him sweetly.

Ben addressed Frieda. "The Cunninghams, I am persuaded, never argue-"

"I don't know."

"-for she has her needlepoint, and he has his Time. Such mutuality. Theirs is a marriage of two minds. Did you remember to pick up some strawberries, Amanda?"

"Have a pickle," Amanda said. "Mutuality is exactly the point I was trying to clarify last night. Mutuality isn't the least bit important in marriage, Ben. It counts only in romance. Marriage has no truck with the smarmy mutual gratification that you just attempted to extol by sarcastic, by sarcastic..."

"Implication?"

"Implication. The idea in my article, 'Connubis,' is that-"

"Will the idea bear scrutiny?" Frieda asked. "Will it live in the light of day?"

"Of course I'm beginning to realize that conventional wisdom about the reasons for marriage is out-of-date. Like most conventional wisdom. People do not marry for security anymore. Security is provided by the welfare state."

"But we live under capitalism," Frieda said.

"Maybe you do at the Brearley School. The rest of the country is on welfare. In some form. Where was I? Oh yes, security. Security is out. And people don't marry for status either, because marriage no longer confers it. Nor do they marry for s.e.xual satisfaction, because anybody can attain that at any time-"

"I hadn't noticed," said Ben, looking hard at her.

"-as easily single as wed," she blandly went on.

"So why should a person get married?" Frieda asked.

Amanda considered the question. Ben meanwhile thought of Hawthorne's wedded contentment.

Finally Amanda answered, "There are two creditable reasons to get married. Financial and dynastic."

"Financial?" Frieda said. "You told me we were already secure."

"Secure isn't prosperous."

"Dynastic?" Ben wondered.

Amanda turned on him one of her shining gazes. "Think of it! To raise a family a couple need not be pa.s.sionate. They need not even be compatible."

"Need they be of different s.e.xes?" Ben asked.

She waved an impatient hand. "They must be, as a pair, complete. Whatever they want for themselves and their progeny has to be provided by one or the other. If my family has influence, yours had better have cash. If I am worldly-wise, you had better be empathetic-"

"Empathic," Ben said.

"-and so on. We choose each other on the basis of the needs of the future family rather than on our personal desires. Those we satisfy elsewhere...the mariage de convenance! That's it, in a word."

"In a phrase," Ben corrected. "The old mariage de convenance had nothing to do with love."

"Neither will the new," Amanda said.

Ben gave his pretty paramour a long look. Did she believe this stuff? Or were she and her sidekick playing some deep, female game? He knew he would not marry her. He was proud of her, and he enjoyed her company, but she was not what he had in mind as a lifetime partner.

For her part, Amanda claimed loftily that she was employing him to guide her through earthly delights. They would emerge from the summer as warm friends, nothing more. After college she intended to embark on an adventurous career. She would live amid palaces, and also dung.

"'Life is made up of marble and mud,'" he had quoted softly.

"Hawthorne?"

"Hawthorne."

"Hawthorne was right."

She was in some ways as green as Frieda. Now he looked across the table at the two sweet faces, Frieda's still vague under a cloud of hair, Mandy's excited. Her dancing eyes showed that she considered her new theory to be revealed truth. He knew she would not rest until she had revealed it to others. It had been base of him to suspect her of clever falseness. Oh, her Yankee honesty! And, oh, his Brooklyn suspiciousness. Such a misalliance. And what on earth were the two of them doing here, messing up the Cunninghams' place and overstimulating the worshipful Frieda? His stomach rumbled, as if in protest.

"What have we for dessert?" he formally inquired.

"For dessert," Amanda told him, "we have nothing."

The summer wore on. Amanda went every day to her typist's job at the offices of G.o.dolphin's weekly, the Gazette. Then she came home to work on her article, which was going better. Ben taught his two courses at the university, and then came home to work on his article. Frieda continued to hang around their doorways.

"Connubis" got ret.i.tled "Mariage de Convenance." Amanda had conceived of it as an intelligent young woman's guide to marriage customs past and present. But it was now a manifesto, a call to common sense. "If marriage does not confer an advantage," she declared one night, "it would not be undertaken. The new woman must not wed for sentimental reasons."

"I think the dinner is burning," Frieda said.

Mandy took the pot off the stove and served the baked beans. When they were all eating she continued. "The Roman custom of concubinitas might have demeaned the inst.i.tution of marriage, but it didn't demean the partic.i.p.ants. However, dignitas, despite its name, was exploitative. The woman was expected to bear children, and she and the children were under the potestas of the male. As for the trustee marriage in the Dark Ages, it is being revived today in the much-touted 'extended family.' But the eager beavers who want to restore and strengthen the extended family don't realize that the trustee system involved blood vengeance, bride purchase, and sometimes bride theft."

Silence from her companions. Finally Ben said, "Take out eager beavers."

"What? I was just making conversation."

"You were quoting nonstop."

A hand fluttered to her curls. "Oh, was I?"

"These beans are awful," Frieda said.

United for once, her hosts glared at her.

"I was just making conversation," Frieda protested. "Listen, tomorrow night I'll do the cooking."

Soon she was making their breakfasts as well as their dinners, running up early in the morning to start coffee. Amanda and Ben enjoyed sleeping late. Frieda cleaned up too. Ben liked coming home to a well-kept apartment. Each afternoon he sat down at his dusted typewriter with a vigorous feeling. Worthy pages began to pile up on the table beside the machine. He felt more and more benevolent toward Hawthorne's first novel. The great author himself had repudiated Fanshawe-had even cast all available copies into the flames-but he, Dr. B. Stewart, would rescue the work, would reveal it as the precursor, however flawed, of the later masterpieces. It was a help on these afternoons to know that there was a bowl of strawberries in the refrigerator, and a pound cake on the counter. Frieda herself was never in the way.

"All daughters should be like you," Ben said one night.

Frieda flushed. Amanda frowned at him.

"All younger sisters, I mean," he said, getting the same response. "Silent partners? What do you consider yourself, toots?"

"A helpmeet," Frieda said.

"Like Phoebe in Seven Gables?"

"Yes." She had been doing her homework.

Every Friday the three of them went out for pizza and a movie. Every Tuesday Frieda went off with her aunt to visit another aunt, and Amanda and Ben were left to amuse themselves. They took the girl's absences with the same good nature as they took her presence. Sometimes they talked about her devotion to them.

"She adores you," Amanda said.

"She adores you," Ben returned politely.

"She adores us both. My exuberance. Your scholarly wit. It's wonderful, being adored. But whatever will Frieda do back on West End Avenue with those two aesthetes her parents?"

"I'll call her every so often," Ben said. "I'll come up from the Village and treat her to a concert. I'll buy her tea afterward, like an uncle."

"Where?" Amanda asked.

"At the Palm Court," said the expansive Ben.

"Will you really do that for Frieda?" Amanda asked unjealously.

It was midnight. They had just made love. Mandy in a long nightshirt sat on the porch glider looking at the moonlit streetscape of three-decker houses, each with its maple tree. Ben kissed her, then stood up with his back to the scene and leaned against the railing. "I don't know if I'll really do anything for Frieda." He yawned. "I can't look past this moment."

But that was untrue. He was looking past this moment at this moment. Gazing at the tumbled young woman before him, he could see clearly another version of that young woman, wearing a cap and blazer as befitted a college girl. The maples were yellowing. Amanda waved good-bye. He saw himself, also purposefully clad, headed back to New York and the intense, exophthalmic psychiatric social worker whom destiny no doubt had in store for him. He groaned.

"We'll always be friends," Amanda soulfully promised.

It became Ben's turn to do the dinner-table lectures.

"Hawthorne had a surprisingly gloomy view of life, considering how conventionally domiciled he was. That supportive wife, those devoted children. Yet his point of view remains tragic. Especially in The Marble Faun, with its plot of murder and paganism, its theme of sin and suffering, does he-"

"Supportive wife?" Amanda sniffed. "Sophia Hawthorne was a milksop, if you ask me. Letting him wallow in free love at Brook Farm while she waited celibately in Salem."

"There is no indication of s.e.xual irregularity in the Brook Farm doc.u.ments."

"I can read between the lines."

"Nathaniel considered himself saved by his marriage."

"Sophia knew herself ruined."

"They went off to Italy, didn't they?" Frieda said. "What a pair of nitwits. Please have some more bouillabaisse."

Ben considered arguing further but chose the bouillabaisse instead. Mandy's sa.s.sy comments did serve to illuminate the novels, in which placid arrangements within the house were threatened by the turbulence without. Only away from the hearth could the moral order be upset. This seemed particularly true of Fanshawe, which was now revealed to him as a morality tale: domestic continuity triumphing over unregulated pa.s.sion. Afternoons, sitting in the Cunninghams' dining room, Ben felt the rightness of his position. In their comfortable place it was possible for him to gaze long and hard at Hawthorne's devils. Frieda's lemonade helped too.

The summer was drawing to a close. Late one hot August night, Ben and Amanda sat on the porch drinking wine and watching the stars over the three-deckers. Amanda was on the glider, Ben on a canvas chair.

For a while they were silent. Then: "We've been happy here," Amanda began.

"Of late we have not been miserable," Ben allowed.

"So happy," she said again.

He refrained from further comment.

"But would you mind terribly if I left a bit earlier than we'd planned? Say, just before Labor Day weekend? Because I have an invitation."

He examined his heart. Certainly there was a twinge. "An invitation? From that self-centered jacka.s.s you see at school, I suppose. He's back from abroad?"

"His family has the loveliest house at the Vineyard. Would you mind, Ben?"

Well, would he? Her eyes glittered at him. Oh, the darling. "I'll mind a little," Ben said truthfully. "But I myself have an invitation to Fire Island," he lied. "So go, sweetheart."

"Come sit beside me," came her soft voice.

He found his way to the glider. He slipped an arm around her shoulders. "'What we did had a consecration of its own,'" he whispered.

"Poor Hester."

"We have been happy here," he said.

"Like an old married couple," she said.