My Kitchen Wars Page 8

  But learning to cook or play hostess was the least of what I wanted to do. Yes, I wanted to be a lady, but not a lady of leisure. I had a mind and the beginnings of a well-trained one, and why had I gone to college if not to gain knowledge of something more important than stoves? Paul had converted me all too successfully to the seriousness of humane letters, but I’d only begun to study seriously. Through him I saw daily how stupid I was. I decided to take a master’s degree at Radcliffe while Paul took his orals and wrote his thesis.

  I couldn’t pay the tuition without help from Paul’s parents. Father Fussell was always my ally. He knew I had brains and he enjoyed them. It was Mother F. who had problems with me. I was too much like her sons, whose learning had far outstripped her own. Later, in her sixties, she went back to college and drove everybody crazy when she fell in love with her TV-actor Shakespeare teacher and couldn’t stop raving about him. But now she asked me, “What do you want an M.A. for?” My function was to breed as soon as Paul graduated. I used the excuse that even when we had children, once they were old enough I would want a job, and I would need an M.A. to teach.

  Paul was mixed in his feelings about what I should and shouldn’t do because he mistook education for intelligence. He actively hated his mother “for being so dumb,” without perceiving that she was plenty smart, she just didn’t have his or his brother’s or his father’s education. He was establishing his own world of absolutes and the relatives of social history were irrelevant. He demanded a mate smart enough and educated enough to understand his discourse, but he also demanded, Victorian that he was, subservience. He believed in the natural inferiority of women and felt that his mother fully substantiated that faith. So why hadn’t he married a woman like her, I asked him in one of our ongoing arguments about the sexes. He could never marry a woman like that, he replied. Who would he have to talk to?

  I knew it would be better for both of us if I went in for art history, but I’d have to start from scratch, with a slew of undergraduate courses. English it would have to be, but I hoped that as long as I stayed three steps behind, like a Chinese wife, I wouldn’t crowd him. I was also careful to keep focused on drama, which to him was a vulgar and inferior genre. Shakespeare’s poetry by definition rose above drama, as the printed Folio rose above the rabble at the Globe. Even so, when I started to write some plays of my own on my portable Corona, he said, “What do you know about dialogue, stagecraft, plot? What makes you think you can just sit down and write a play?” Nothing made me think so, nothing but the wish, so I stopped. I tried to find some local theater to join, but I didn’t know amateur groups in Boston or Cambridge, and the Brattle Theater Company, which occasionally picked up undergraduates for its choruses, was a galaxy above anything I’d ever done or seen. In fact, the Brattle, with its company of Harvard vets, was so brilliant that Paul made it an exception to his general rule that Shakespeare should be read and not played.

  While Paul spent every day in his library carrel studying for the dreaded orals, I spent every day in the black hole learning German and Latin with the help of Paul’s boxes of word cards. I had to learn in a year enough to pass the triple-headed language exam that had driven Paul to the brink of the Charles. German was doing the same for me, with its Gothic lettering and barbaric syntax. But Latin was a language I’d wanted to learn since junior high, when my parents decided against it because I was working too hard without it and they feared for my health. The logic of Latin appealed to me, and I memorized vocabulary by sounding words aloud for hours on end, until the black hole began to close in, and I started to hear voices coming through the walls.

  I entered Radcliffe with trepidation and determination. Boston and Cambridge still belonged to the Brahmin, and I looked with a Scots dissenting eye on that Establishment as on others. I seemed to be constantly violating unwritten rules of behavior, like wearing sandals on campus or saying “Hi” to my professors with a cheery California smile. I was a yokel again, twice over, a hick from Riverside and a hayseed from the West who nearly froze my toes in Boston snow before I traded in my sandals for boots. But as I walked into the green oasis of the Yard and up the library steps and into the high-ceilinged silent reading room and through floor after floor of open stacks, I felt lucky to be alive in such a place at such a time.

  Worlds that I had barely glimpsed opened like sea anemones, worlds that had been fully formed and stabilized centuries before pioneers discovered gold in California. No war had ever intruded here, or so it seemed, to disturb the quiet pursuit of scholars tracing the loss of the umlaut in Anglo-Saxon or the rise of the octosyllabic couplet in Chaucer. Everything looked so old, the trees, the buildings, the people. I had longed for history and here it was, bound into leather-covered volumes, expounded in classrooms, visible in the bottle-glass windows on Boston Common, weighting the very air of Louisburg Square.

  Schoolwork wiped every other slate clean. Truman had sent U.S. troops to fight in Korea, and even though I was strongly pacifist after the war we’d just got through, I had no time or energy to protest. Besides, we thought Truman a bumpkin and Bess a joke and politics in general a waste of time. And after I got my first grad school paper back, I had more pressing things on my mind. I had to learn to write all over again, and fast. Paul had no patience to help. He was a skilled essayist and had got through it on his own, and I would have to do the same. After glancing at my draft of a paper on Spenser’s imagery, he said, “If I ever find out that you know as little about literature as you know about painting, God help you.” He also pointed out that I had misspelled Faerie Queene throughout. In grad school a B was the equivalent of an F, and how I labored for those A’s. I couldn’t sleep before exams and couldn’t eat breakfast because of dry heaves. Before the year was up my stomach was in such knots I was sure I’d acquired an ulcer.

  And yet it was probably the single most exhilarating year of my life. Despite Paul’s admonition nil admirari, I was full of wonder at my professors, whose apprehension was so godlike but whose persons were so weirdly eccentric. The hands of Harry Levin, as he expounded Renaissance and Jacobean drama, trembled so violently he could scarcely turn his three-by-five lecture cards. Douglas Bush, explicating the sources of Renaissance Humanism, was so shy that when he tucked his head into his chest to recite from memory not only Spenser’s Epithalamion but all of its Greek and Latin progenitors, you could scarcely hear him. As Walter Jackson Bate illuminated the elegance of Pope, he would often extend a long arm over his head to dig in a nostril on the far side of his nose.

  The pantheon of Cambridge gods—Alfred North White-head, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Lyman Kittredge, James Russell Lowell, William Cullen Bryant—was regularly evoked, George Santayana the only name falling short of a three-gun salute, but what could you expect of a Spaniard? To feel the breath of such Tradition humbled you in your successes, sustained you in your failures, and let you feel connected to something larger and more significant than yourself, the way the Church once did. Tradition could make your small individual life meaningful, and former Harvardian T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” was our credo. We knew The Waste Land by heart, and Eliot’s Anglophilic conservatism in literature, politics, and religion had shaped our own. The night he came to lecture, Memorial Hall was jammed to the rafters hours before he was scheduled to speak and, once he’d started, crowds of students who’d been shut out shouted and pounded on the doors, like revolutionary rabble at the Bastille. It felt as if history was being made, and we were inside it, in a sure Place.

  Paul pretended not to be worried about the orals, although he came down with an attack of the runs that went on for weeks. When he got the word that he’d passed, he telephoned me in a tone that implied “Natch.” We celebrated with martinis at a local bar. Only later, much later, did he confess that he’d barely squeaked through because one professor had voted against him for not answering a single one of his questions. Where did Matthew Arnold as a child go to school?
William Wordsworth? Samuel Coleridge? Samuel Butler? And on through the list of worthies. In a crisis, it was typical of Paul to pretend the opposite of what he felt. At our wedding, kneeling before the minister, his body shook so hard I put my hand out to steady him. Afterward, he claimed the service had been a breeze and a bore. His favorite word then, and for a long time, was “boring.”

  He wrote his thesis in a year, which was quick work for Harvard. We studied seven days a week. On Saturday nights we drank three or four martinis at a good bar, like the one in the Copley Plaza Hotel, then ate cheap Italian or Chinese and ended up in a neighborhood joint that served beer in pitchers at wooden tables while a country-and-western group twanged. They reminded us that we were Westerners beneath our button-down collars and gray flannels.

  Nonetheless, we weren’t in a hurry to head back West. Paul’s brother had gone to teach at Berkeley but was one of the handful who refused to sign the loyalty oath inspired by McCarthy’s rabid anticommunism. The moral and political battles this caused in the Fussell family, added to the hopelessness of my own, kept us East. Paul took a job at Connecticut College for Women, in New London. The town was a mix of grand houses of the sort Eugene O’Neill had lived in when his father got rich and low-down saloons of the sort he’d haunted when he wanted to get drunk. It was the kind of port town where women who walked the streets at night were arrested for “lascivious carriage” and where babies occasionally were eaten in their cribs when the port suffered an influx of rats. The college was isolated from all this on a bluff high above the river Thames, the “th” pronounced, American style, as in “thanks.”

  We were given half of the second floor of a two-story house that had been converted into cubbyholes for faculty, within walking distance of the college. The kitchen at the rear had a fold-down shelf that doubled as a kitchen table and had to be folded up in order to open the oven door. The living room doubled as dining room and the bedroom doubled as study, with two desks side by side, acquired when the English Department found itself shorthanded and hired me to teach half-time. My title was Assistant in Instruction, for which I was paid $800. Paul’s title was Instructor, for which he was paid $2,700. The academic hierarchy was as rigid as the Army’s, and faculty wives were treated as camp followers, even while they were exploited as cheap labor.

  When a young Instructor revised his thesis for publication, his wife, as was the custom, typed it in triplicate, proofreading the manuscript aloud, antiphonally with her husband, line by line, bracket by bracket, semicolon by semicolon, and crumpling up the carbons and starting over with each mistake. A wife was meant to be a helpmeet, and in the academy the first duty of a faculty wife was to do the onerous secretarial and editorial chores that were beneath her husband’s notice. Her second duty was to appear, well groomed, on the arm of her husband at all faculty social occasions and at the annual post-Christmas slave mart of the Modern Language Association, where, by giving evidence of his taste and intelligence, she might increase his hirability.

  These were the smiling Eisenhower years, in which Ike ran the country and Mamie turned the lamb chops with the same nauseous cheer. His blandness, her bangs were class-coded, and we scorned the class. Yet the codes of dress and behavior that governed institutions of higher learning in those years were as strict as military ones. We once learned that a candidate for a job as an English professor had been turned down because a member of the hiring committee had observed that his fingernails were dirty.

  What was curious about these caste codes was that this was a women’s college, with a woman president and a mostly female faculty. But these women had done their graduate work before the war, at Oxford or Tübingen or the Sorbonne, and had chosen monastic service over marriage and the family, dedicating the rest of their lives to elevating the one over the other. No American university would hire them, certainly none of the Eastern Ivy chain, so they turned their women’s colleges into secular monasteries where they hoped to initiate a few—very few, because few were worthy—acolytes into the sisterhood.

  They were brilliant women whose scholarship was as formidable as their intelligence: Rosemond Tuve, the explicator of Renaissance allegory and symbol; Dorothy Bethurum, the medievalist and Shakespearean; Pauline Aiken, the Blake scholar. They gave Paul a hard time, because he was male and “professed” to be an academic. A man had to prove his worth triply with this gang, who treated the latest young novitiate from Harvard or Yale (they never stooped as low as Princeton) to a dose of what Pentheus got among the Maenads. They dangled the bait of promotion over the head of their victim while they tore his work apart, whether that of the budding novelist Richard Stern or the young poet John Hollander or the essayist-to-be Paul Fussell, all of whom passed through their hands. I learned not to be surprised at how fiercely these women identified with American soldiers fighting in Korea and how sorry they were not to be in combat themselves.

  I had never seen their like. I was in awe of their learning even as I chafed at being relegated to Pot Girl, no matter what my actual tasks. I worshipped at the feet of Roz Tuve especially, and was constantly hurt that I mattered as little to her as the box of fresh raspberries and the bowl of cream I left in homage at her door, across the street from ours.

  And yet, these women of high standards and high intelligence were also high-spirited and sociable and lovably human once the cassocks were put aside. To our wee apartment they came one New Year’s Eve to drink French 75s of cheap brandy and cheaper champagne and to play Sardines. We turned out the lights and, like braille readers, felt our way through the darkness. We touched Pauline first, half stuffed beneath the sofa. Roz, whom we stumbled over crouching in a closet, let out her usual North Dakota whoop upon discovery. But our boss lady, Department chairman Dorothy, had utterly disappeared. We searched in vain and she might lie undiscovered still, had not a hiccup given her away, squashed flat between the box springs and the mattress of our double bed.

  These were women from whom I learned by osmosis what I’d begun to learn by lecture at graduate school. My mind was still like the empty bowl of the blender, begging to be filled, and what ingredients were to be had! From Roz, metaphor as a mode of perception, a way of knowing. From Dorothy, Shakespeare’s insight into human character. From Pauline, Blake’s creation of an entire water-colored cosmos. From others, because I could audit courses free, I discovered Virgil and Catullus. Under Suzanne Langer, I explored semantics and aesthetics and the roots of symbol and art. From an ad hoc team of historian-philosophers, I dug into the history of Christian thought from Augustine to Tillich. I had two years of intellectual bliss, in which I sopped up indiscriminately every drop that spilled from those overflowing brains.

  Paul and I had been married five years by now and the constant question on all lips, from our parents to our colleagues, was: “When are you going to have children?” Neither of us had been ready when we married, at twenty-one and twenty-five. We weren’t ready now, but for a woman to have children after the age of thirty was to risk deformities and moonfaced idiots. Every doctor told us so.

  Once we’d made up our minds to it, we had trouble conceiving. Someone suggested we take a vacation. We decided to follow the coastline north all the way to Quebec in our little yellow Volkswagen, the purchase of which had outraged our Jewish friends. The night before we were to go, a terrific hurricane hit the coast of Connecticut. Electricity was out, water was off, trees were down everywhere, but none had hit our car parked on the street. So in we hopped and followed the hurricane’s path north through Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and on into Maine. As California transplants, we’d endured our share of earthquake jokes and it was rather comforting to find that the East, too, had its faults. Our baby must have been conceived in a deserted motel just this side of the Canadian border. I liked the romance of starting new life after a high wind in Bangor.

  Pregnancy was lovely, because while my womb was filling my mind was already so full. We were lucky to have at New London Hospital an obstetrician who h
ad transposed the revolutionary Lamaze method into American lingo and medical practice. He was my doctor, and because he had written a book on the subject, I soon became adept in the exercises of strengthening and relaxing, of training the mind to listen to the body. That was the only work I read on the baby to come. I was too busy translating the Aeneid and writing an article on Four Quartets and, during a paradisal week in a snowbound inn at Concord, Massachusetts, reading the collected works of Wallace Stevens. That was my preparation for motherhood. Paul’s preparation for fatherhood was simply to deny that anything was happening at all.

  Mother Fussell offered to come help with the baby the week following delivery, but we knew that spelled disaster. Her last visit, when she’d slept on the couch in the living room and clucked that she certainly didn’t want to be a bother while we graded endless papers side by side in the bedroom, had ended in an outburst of tears and temper before she packed her bags for California and vowed never to return. Paul and I vowed as fervently to our drinking companions that after the baby came nothing would change.

  Our favorite colleagues in drink and gossip were an oddly suited couple, a Wordsworth scholar from Yale who’d married a much older Anglo-Saxon scholar from Harvard. We were so naive we didn’t know he was an alcoholic, although he outlived his wife by many years after he went on the wagon and became no fun. We just thought he really enjoyed the excellent martinis with double olives he prepared for us at five o’clock sharp for what we called, after some Eliot poem, the lavender hour. Nobody then was the least bit worried about smoking and drinking during pregnancy. I simply stopped both around the fourth month because neither tasted good, and I was listening to my body, which said, “Forget it.” This meant that the lavender hour got increasingly boring for me, as I stayed sober and the rest got drunk. But I was also curious to see how easy it was for others, and how hard for oneself, to recognize the slurred speech, wobbly knees, intensified hilarity or gloom, and incremental repetitions of being sloshed. I knew Paul had hit his limit when every other word was “bad, bad, bad.” The words in between were “boring, boring, boring.”