THUS the natural craving to love and to be loved turned itself into something else and found its miracle of satisfaction in my poetry and his praise, and it seemed to me that we were everything to each other. But he was a healthy vigorous young man and he needed exercise for his muscles as well as for his mind. He used to tell me about wrestling matches he took part in in Cambridge, and beer-drinking parties in Boston taverns. I listened eagerly and adoringly. It seemed to add to his distinction and importance in my eyes to know that he was living partly in a world so unknown to me. In spite of myself I was romantically curious about his new friends, those young men who reflected the masculine and convivial side of his nature, and soon he began to bring them home for week-end visits. The presence of these solemn, handsome, young strangers in our house brought me unexpected pain.
When they were introduced to me their discomfiture was as much of a shock to me as if each of them had held up a mirror for me to look at. Warren’s magic cloak was snatched off me by their embarrassed glance. It showed me very plainly that there was something the matter with me, and that I was not their idea of what a friend’s sister should be. If one of them happened to be left alone in the room with me for a few minutes he would hastily pick up a magazine and become painfully absorbed. While for me on the opposite side of the room those minutes seemed to expand to enormous size because of their sudden emptiness, blown up like huge, dry, empty seed pods. As my brother’s favorite I felt the urgent need and desire to make an impression on his friends. I wanted to be lovely and enchanting as all sisters are in stories. I had read that when men and women are together it is the woman’s part to entertain and be amusing, and if the man is shy to overcome his shyness and draw him out. My inability to play this skillful feminine role was so complete that instead of being a negative thing it was like a destructive force in Nature, it was like a dust storm or a tornado. It shriveled and exterminated any ease or charm or spontaneity which might have been in the room if I had not been there. Sometimes, however, one of the Harvard visitors would be a young man of more social experience than the others or perhaps of an inborn sympathy, and he would make an attempt to be nice to me. He would try to brighten me up with a little polite badinage, treating me as if I were a sort of interesting curiosity, a strange and intelligent child. But whether my brother’s friends were embarrassed with me or kindly avuncular, I knew that when they were in the room with me they were only passing as best they could a stagnant interval until my brother should come and take them to call on the girls who lived up the street.
It was then that I first became painfully conscious of girls, when nearly every week end two or three Harvard boys came to our house. I had already begun to have longings for an intimate girl friend, and I had tentatively begun to seek acquaintance with one or two of the priggish bookish ones in our town. Now with the advent of the young men I became conscious of girls in a new and disturbing way. With my excruciatingly observant eyes I saw their long slender backs, their narrow waists, and their fascinating, mysterious little bosoms. I saw their prettiness and stylishness and the way their clothes fitted their slender womanly bodies.
I also noticed another thing, which was possessed by all girls who were what girls are expected to be. This thing was a mysterious source from which flowed an endless supply of silliness. It came in the form of lively, tireless, aimless, joking talk, about the young men, and about themselves, and about nothing. Real girls, desirable girls, I found, all were gifted with that capacity for saying whatever came into their heads and making it seem to the young men like rare entertainment. I envied everything about those lucky, delectable girls, but most of all I envied this wonderful silliness. Even though I knew it was not really amusing or witty at all by any other standard except theirs, nevertheless it was that strange silliness more than anything else which made girls correct and acceptable to the difficult and solemn young Harvard students and to that side of my brother which did not belong to me.
My brother, sauntering up the street with his friends in search of girls, had turned my new values upside down. Left at home alone now, I lay on the window seat in the room at the top of the house where he and I often spent our intimate hours, where he had discussed my poetry, where he conferred magic upon me. Now that he had deserted me the magic he had given me was not enough. Poetry became like dust in my mouth. Cruel, stupid poetry! It was only a fraud and a cheat that had deceived me into thinking that I was important, even that I was wonderful, and that nothing else mattered except poetry. Poetry was contemptible dead stuff compared with the girls who lived up the street, compared with living girls, foolish joking girls, idiotic bewitching girls. I didn’t feel angry or rebellious against my brother. I accepted my lot without any question, and I went about in a state of stupid wistfulness, uncritical and uncomprehending. But I suffered consciously from a starved and desolate feeling, as a person must who is living on a diet which is very good yet which lacks one vital element that his system needs and craves. I felt starved without really understanding what I lacked. I felt starved and dumb and alone, because as usual I could not speak of my suffering to anyone.
I knew that afterward my brother would tell me scornfully how idiotic the girls were and how they bored him, and how he had only gone to see them because he had to in order to entertain his more frivolous friends. But I knew that there was something about the girls that was more important to him than he ever told me, and I would have hurled away all our sacred friendship and his great dreams for me if only I could have had instead the mysterious allure that those girls had, an allure so powerful and so mysterious that it could be utterly drenched in boring silliness and still hold my brother and his friends enslaved for hours. It was so powerful it could even transform those solemn dignified young men who were so shy with me into groveling flirtatious boys.
Sometimes I fiercely scorned and despised the girls because, having the bodies of young goddesses, as it seemed to me, their behavior was so ungoddess-like. They took for granted their physical perfection which seemed to me so unattainably and infinitely precious, and by their silliness and by their taking it so for granted they made even that perfection seem cheap and ordinary. If I had their chance, if my body had risen up, like theirs, higher each year like a young tree and blossomed finally into a miracle of completeness, dramatically prepared like theirs for great experiences, what would I not have been, I thought. My mysterious anger blazed in me furiously again, in behalf of the pride and mystery of life and against what seemed to me an insult to it.
After I came to know the girls a little my brother sometimes took me with him to their houses. I used to watch and listen, sitting on one side of the room, an onlooker, never a participant in the dancing, fooling, flirting, piano playing, singing that went on. They sometimes referred to me, or asked my opinion in one of their joking arguments, and they acted toward me as if I were a mysterious little sage, a highbrow, and a very special person, never as if I were a young human being like themselves. And instead of feeling proud and scornful toward them when I was among them, I felt painfully awkward and ashamed. When they drew me into their inconsequential talk no spontaneous suitably frivolous answer ever came to my lips. I felt laborious, and heavy and unbearably solemn. But I must have sometimes said something that was funny because of its naïveté, for often they surprised me very much by laughing uproariously at some stiff shy speech of mine, which I could not see anything funny in at all. Their gaiety made me feel hideously ungay, awkward, pedantic, and utterly worthless. This feeling troubled me because it seemed to be wronging something inside me. I felt that somewhere underneath my disguise there was imprisoned a spirit even more gay and pleasure-loving than theirs.
Yet when I found that the only social success I could possibly hope for among the girls and boys of my own age consisted in my being thought cute and funny and childish, in my thirst and hunger to mingle with them and to be accepted I began to cultivate in myself for these social needs the character of the appealing little clown. I slipped into the ancient role that is always expected, it seems, of the imperfect ones of the world. I was Punch, the queer little human toy, the jester at court, respected and beloved in a way in which no other kind of person is respected and beloved.
When I first began to make the boys and girls laugh by some shy burst of wit or even by an unconscious piece of naïveté I felt an outrageous glow of triumph. I was getting on. They liked me. At the same time I felt a passionate angry rebellion and shame because of my return to the childish part which I had already fiercely despised and rejected when I first felt the enormous pride and seriousness of becoming mature. If I could ever have stood up, just once, and been revealed in what I thought of as my true shape, then how my behavior would be altered! How I would show them and teach them the secret that I knew!
For I felt as if I were instinctively acquainted with a splendid style of behavior that was suitable to the beautiful perfect members of the human race, a dignity and significance in conduct and manners that these foolish boys and girls were absolutely unaware of. In my meditations that behavior reached its height between men and women in their friendship and love. What did those boys and girls know about that? I thought. I felt like a hidden burning Sappho or a Phedre who could have taught them. They might have their secret knowledge of the art of silliness that was beyond my understanding, but I felt in myself the secret knowledge or instinct that makes life a wonder and a miracle. But in order to express it in myself and in my own behavior I would have to wait, I thought, until another life and another incarnation.
My feeling of despair grew much worse as Warren’s acquaintance at college grew wider. I had suffered chagrin and shame in the presence of his first rather heavy girl-fancying friends. But they had no particular charm themselves with which to arouse me to a knowledge of what a strange young man’s charm could be, and their interest for Warren certainly consisted only in their talent for beer-drinking and wrestling. But I learned a new and more poignant suffering when he began to bring home men like Ben Hodges, and Henry Sheahan. In these romantic figures I recognized the same quality that I felt in myself, but not hidden, not frustrated. They expressed it as naturally as they breathed, in every gesture, every tone. They were brilliant and talkative like my brother, but they were more strange and fascinating than he could ever be. They had an adventurous and wildly romantic sense of life, and a gift for building up fantastically humorous narratives out of the smallest episodes; so that they gave the impression as they sat at our dinner table and enchanted us all that their life consisted in going from one exquisitely funny experience to another. Their play with words, their effervescent mingling of sophistication with absurdity, in the manner typical of Harvard, absolutely ravished me.
These fortunate young men not only seemed to feel the excitement and charm of life themselves but they could impart it to others, with an absurd rich gurgle of laughter or an eager turn of the head. They were tall and beautiful as well, and I suffered then more than I had ever dreamed of suffering before as I fell in love first with one and then with the other. The intense pleasure that I felt while I watched and listened and adored was equaled by the bewilderment and distress of knowing that I was locked and hidden away in a prison where they could never see me or know that I was there; for I thought of myself as a responsive, gay and brilliant woman who was sitting in front of them disguised as a little oddity, deformed and ashamed and shy.