If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Saturday morning, and Central Park free for human beings to move at the speeds they might have attained at the turn of the century: horses, bicycles, and the almost forgotten pleasures of walking. Kate and Reed, whenever they considered the incredible series of disasters to which living in New York City regularly exposed one—strikes, garbage uncollected, snow unremoved, no transportation, no heat, no safety in the streets—or whenever they heard others complain of city living, would always think: they have taken the automobiles out of Central Park on weekends. It was the one urban blessing the decade had conferred.
“To return,” Reed said, “to the conversation of last night, why has misrule and horseplay brought you to such a state of discombobulation? Or, since it has, may I offer my help in recombobulation? Does the University matter that much?”
“On Thursday, when the semester began,” Kate said, “I asked myself that question—not, perhaps, whether it matters, which it so clearly does, but why?” Kate stopped to pat a puppy who came loping up anticipating admiration. “I can remember many stages of the revolution or insurrection or whatever it might be called. The exhilaration of the week when the buildings were occupied, the sense of absolute aliveness which, despite all the problems, one did so ringingly feel. I remember being shoved against a building by a plainclothesman with a club and thinking, this is it. I remember hearing the endlessly repeated obscenities from the students who stood about on the ledges and roofs of the buildings like acroterium, and wondering if indeed, as one of the characters in one of Forster’s novels notes, they were out of fashion. I remember watching the flowers and grass being trampled, distinctly noticing as the last tulip was crushed. I remember, on the first day when they occupied the President’s Office, walking by the administration building and thinking: so that’s where the President’s Office is, and never wondering, then, why in all the years I had been associated with the University I had never learned where the President’s Office was, nor cared to learn. Later on, of course, we heard that the guards had entered the office, not to try to bounce the students but to rescue a Van Gogh which hung there, and I did muse then to think that I had never known the University possessed one of the world’s great paintings.
“But none of that was the worst, you know; it only seemed the worst to those on the outside, who were appalled at the actions of the students, or appalled at the actions of the police—when what I became so suddenly struck with was the fact that there had never really been a university. That a bunch of half-baked, foul-mouthed Maoist students could bring a great university to a standstill, could be followed in their illegal acts by nearly a thousand moderate, thoughtful students, but above all could reveal that the University had never really been administered at all. We had a president whom no one ever saw, whose understanding of the true condition of the University could not have been more inaccurate if his job had been running a yacht club in East Hampton; we had a Board of Governors who had never, literally never, spoken to a student nor visited the University except for the monthly meetings, when their chauffeurs drove them to the campus; we had a faculty so busy with its own affairs that it had not troubled to observe that there was no university, only separate egos, departments, schools, programs all staking claims.
“Do you know, Reed, my brothers, who needless to say were outraged to the last degree that a bunch of unwashed radicals could be allowed to wield such powers, could never understand that there was any fault at work but that of the students and perhaps their overindulgent parents. They could not understand that a fumbling, withdrawn administration and a self-indulged, indifferent faculty were as much to blame as a youthful generation’s failure to observe ‘law and order.’ There were students in those buildings, students I had known in class, who were no more Maoist than I was, who said that the communal life inside the “buildings was the first vital experience they had had since they entered the University. We let it all go dead on us, Reed. Whatever may have happened in other universities, whatever may have been the destructive glee of radical groups at other places—Berkeley, Columbia, or wherever—the blame for what happened to my university was mine—mine and my associates.”
“Those kids were an outrageous group—the radical core.”
“They were. But to blame them for everything that followed is to blame the First World War on the assassin at Sarajevo. I am not, of course, very good at historical analogies. Auden says that:
at any hour from some point else
May come another tribal outcry
Of a new generation of birds who chirp
Not for effect but because chirping
Is the thing to do.
I know all that; I know it is true of student rebellions at other universities now. But not of my university.”
“Are you going ahead with the University College crusade then in an attempt to grab some stones from the wreckage and build them into a more lasting edifice?”
“Sorry if I’ve been going on. All the same, it does intrigue me that the University College was the single unit in the University where the students, faculty, and administration did not automatically, or even eventually, assume they were working at cross purposes. The faculty at The College went about either in open disgust or like fathers who have done everything for their sons only to be sneered at, treated with disdain and ingratitude. The graduate students revealed that they had long suffered agony from the outworn structures and grading systems of their schools. But Frogmore’s little domain held off chaos and went on with its work. That interests me.”
They stopped by the lake to watch the rowing. “Shall we rent a boat?” Reed asked. Kate shook her head.
“Sorry to run on so,” she said. “I keep trying to put it all into place. All right, I want to say, we were wrong; O.K., we were wrong, we will rebuild. But what a job! All the easy relations of the faculty, one with the other, gone. People have each other tagged now: radical, conservative, untrustworthy. Reed, I wanted to ask you something.”
“I know.”
“You do? How do you know?”
“Talented me, from the District Attorney’s Office. I’ve known you awhile, Kate. I always know when you have a speech ready, and I know that you do not proceed through martinis and champagne to Cherry Heering because Auden did. You couldn’t make the speech sober or, we now know, drunk. How about on a lovely fall morning? Shall we rent bicycles?”
“You have suggested everything but horses. And I haven’t ridden in—oh, since another lifetime. We could of course take one of those horse-drawn carriages.”
“Shall we?”
“Let’s walk. We can get a beer at the boathouse.”
They got the beers, walking in silence, and took them to a spot on a hill where they could watch the bicyclists, most of them pushing the bikes but a few riding, straining to reach the top. Kate liked to watch the moment when those who had struggled up on their bicycles let the wind catch them, going down.
“We may someday need very much to
Remember when we were happy.
The life before last spring seems to have been a time of innocence. I am no longer certain of anything. Reed, but I think that in my uncertainty, I would like to live with you, if you will have me.”
“Live with me. What does that mean?”
“Even words don’t mean anything anymore. Live with you. Occupy the same premises, have the same address. Pretend to be married.”
“Pretend?” Reed leaned against a tree, with his hands in his pockets. “The one word I never expected to hear you use. I’ve asked you to marry me often enough; I don’t mind if you ask me.”
“I don’t believe in marriage; not at my age, anyway.”
“Kate, what I cannot pretend is that this University turmoil has improved you. You’ve developed all sorts of alarming symptoms, not least of which is a constant reference to yourself as on the brink of total decrepitude. People get married at your age, as you very well know, and indeed at twice your age. At any rate, if you are doddering, I am doddering even more, and do not find myself in the slightest inspired, as you seem to expect me to be, by the thought of a wife twenty years my junior, however luscious she might be.”
“Reed, I—even Auden wrote a Dichtung und Wahreit about love, and not a love poem. There are no words for the words I want to say.”
“May I suggest some? Simple, straightforward, unmistakable?”
“They would not be for what I want to say. I’ve funked it. Why the assurance of being me should be affected by the occupation of a President’s Office which I would not, in any case, have been able even to find, I can’t say. I don’t know. Now, being a woman alone doesn’t seem as easy as it has been. I need, for a time anyway, the sense of being part of a partnership; oh, I mean every petty thing you may wonder about: all the confidence of having a man. But none of that seems to me grounds for marriage.”
“What a very odd idea of marriage you must have. The only people who could possibly have lived up to it were Tristan and Isolde, and all they could do was die. In fact, now I come to think of it, all great lovers cannot choose but die because marriage is essentially mundane and quotidian and useful.”
“A game, like war, that calls for patience, foresight, maneuver, for those with their wander-years behind them,’ Auden once said.”
“He has said a good deal, I’ll grant him that. Do you know what I think? I think you would have changed anyway, even if your university had not come falling down like London Bridge. It’s simple enough; all we do is find a pig with a ring on the end of his nose, his nose, and get married.”
“Reed, I do want a ring, from a pig or merely from Tiffany’s, I want to be half of a pair, as though the world and every dinner party were Noah’s ark and one could not attend except in pairs, but I don’t want actually, legally to get married. I want you to be legally free.”
Reed laughed. “You want a sham, a plain, unadorned sham, because you won’t allow yourself to be someone’s wife, like any other proper woman. You can’t share my apartment unless you marry me, so there!”
“It seems to me shameful to turn to you now and say let’s get married because I now need a security I didn’t in the least mind scorning before. What I meant about all the luscious young women is simply a recognition of the fact that it is easier for men to marry.”
“I am not ‘men,’ and I doubt that I should find it easy at all to marry. Shall I tell you what worries you? No, don’t stop me. I’ve never known you to balk at the truth, and you shan’t now. From some new-found weakness, like one recovering from an illness, you are seeking to belong—to me, as it so fortunately happens. Not only does it seem unfair to you to capitulate in weakness to what you refused in strength, but you know that the love you have for me is not of the same timbre, not even of the same scale, as the love I have for you. Don’t protest. I know it makes little sense. I agree it makes little sense. I a handsome, talented, affable man in the prime of life, you an aging, argumentative, irrational spinster. But sense or not, I love you, and if we marry it shall be properly, with a ring and a judge and a license so that if you decide to leave me or I you I shall at least not be cheating some lawyer out of the chance to arrange a divorce. Do your brothers have to come to the wedding? I’m glad to hear they don’t, because frankly the thought of your brothers terrifies me. Kate, let’s get married on Thanksgiving. That way, we don’t have to remember the date even, we can just celebrate on the last Thursday in every November—which will be a holiday, so much more convenient if you stop to think about it. Aren’t you going to say something?”
“I was thinking,” Kate said, “that I never really asked the daisies, and they never told me, but this fall, all the asters knew.”
“I am willing enough to put up with Auden,” Reed said with lapidary phrasing, “I am even willing to quote a bit of Auden now and then on my own, but I want to make quite clear that I will not put up with the poetry of Sara Teasdale.”