“You read it through to yourself,” Anne said. “You’re the one who’s going to have to edit it.”
It was the morning after the last page had been tentatively assigned to a chapter, and the chapters put in what seemed a probable order. Nothing was certain, but Kate felt some confidence that they had come close to a reconstruction of Gabrielle’s novel. For yes, clearly, it was a novel.
“I could read it to you,” Kate suggested, “and we could both decide on whether or not we find the story coherent. Or you could read it to me; or we could read it to each other.”
“I’ll leave it to you now, if you don’t mind,” Anne said, staring into the garden. “That is, if you have accepted the editing job together with the writing of the biographical portrait. I know it must seem odd to you, my not being more curious after all this work, but I have a strong sense of wanting to hand it over to you and let you cope. I want to quit thinking about it now. I look forward with great eagerness to reading the book when it emerges, but I really don’t want to deal with it anymore. No doubt a psychologist could tell me why if I really cared to know, but I don’t. I hope I haven’t offended you.”
“No offense in the world,” Kate said. Strangely enough, she understood Anne’s feelings without understanding why, a case of muddled conviction. “But before I fly home with the manuscript, leaving you to have a decent vacation in this nice house, there is one more task I need your help with.” The cat was sitting before the French windows, blinking in the sun, and there seemed promise of good times to be had here without the endless shuffling of papers.
“What task?”
“We need to make copies,” Kate said, patting the stack of papers beside her. “The thought of losing this or, worse, having to start sorting again, is not to be contemplated.”
“Probably the English have copying shops the way we do.”
“Probably, but we can’t use them. We’ve got to do this ourselves, by hand.”
“Are you planning to buy your own copying machine and leave it as a house present for Lavinia?”
“If we have to. I rather thought of calling Reed and asking him to locate a law office in London with a copying machine which we might use on Saturday or Sunday. I did think of asking Simon Pearlstine to ask a publisher or agent here for the favor, but I realized I don’t want to explain to Simon on a transatlantic basis what it is I’m copying and what has happened to his cherished idea of a biography. That sort of thing goes down better face-to-face and with the material to hand. Will you help with the copying?”
“I can’t think of a reason to refuse, though I would if I could. How many copies do you want to make and what do you plan to do with them?”
“I’ve gathered you’d rather not have Gabrielle’s papers, even photocopied, on your hands at this point. I don’t know why but I have the sense that you’ve made the right decision. That means that I shall keep one copy, mail one copy to myself in New York, send one copy by some other means to another address (yet to be determined) in New York, and leave the original here with a law firm or again in a bank, whatever Reed advises. I’m rather into taking advice at this moment, and, as you can see, I’m doubling my protection, outwitting even the most malevolent intentions of ill chance. Also, I’m sure Reed will feel as I do that the original belongs here, at least until you and Nellie decide what to do with it. It may, if the publication of Gabrielle’s novel is a success, bring quite a bit of money when auctioned off.”
“I know,” Anne said. “You’re scattering so many copies because you don’t wish to give the gods any chance to do easy mischief. That doesn’t sound any more bonkers to me than to you.”
Anne smiled, and Kate knew it was going to be all right, that she and Anne were still on the same side, that Anne was still a friend and likely to remain so. So Kate went off to consult Reed by long distance, and to ask him, as she liked to put it, to pull strings to get her what she wanted. Reed had often pointed out that he didn’t pull strings, he called in favors, but Kate found that view of things uncongenial. She knew, nonetheless, that Reed was good to people, generous with his help, and many considered it a pleasure to help him in his turn, even for the sake of his nosey-Parker wife.
Reed’s strings were as effective as ever. He found a law firm willing to lend out its photocopying machine and happy to keep in safety the original manuscript once a copy had been made. He suggested a New York law firm to whom a copy might be sent, and urged Kate to carry the remaining copy home with her on the airplane, contemplating it the while. He would meet her at JFK Airport when instructed about her flight. He looked forward to seeing her very soon. “Mutual,” Kate assured him, wanting very much to get all this over, to go home to Reed and a life that had come to seem charmingly calm and sane, with most of its activities not taking place on the floor.
Meanwhile, she and Anne trundled off late the next afternoon, each of them carrying half the manuscript with the wonderfully mad conviction that if one was run over, at least half of Gabrielle’s endeavors would survive, unbloodied, unscattered. Kate had been told by older colleagues of the days when there was no photocopying at all, and the single typescript of a precious dissertation, representing perhaps a decade’s work, would be carted about by its frenzied creator. One might have made a carbon copy, but, too often, one hadn’t. Those were indeed parlous times, here repeated at least for a few hours more. After tedious hours of feeding Gabrielle’s pages into the copying machine, Kate would be ready to leave London and Anne to their mutual enjoyment.
But at the last minute, a reprieve marvelously presented itself, first in the form of an English lawyer who knew and admired Reed, was delighted to meet Kate, honored to meet Anne, eager to be helpful. He had work and would remain in his office until they finished: he would then see to the proper stowing away of the original manuscript. Meanwhile, the copy machine operator, Mr. Martin, known to all as Phil, was here to help them feed the pages into the modern copier which not only could make four copies at a time but could collate and staple them into the bargain.
The expressions of both Kate and Anne, who had been beaming with gratitude, changed to alarmed apprehension. Telling Reed about it afterward, Kate saw how funny their two horrified expressions must have been, but at the time she and Anne feared, sharply and simultaneously, Phil Martin’s chance to read Gabrielle’s words. The English lawyer, whose name they had in their anxiety missed the first time and felt unable, from awkwardness, to have repeated, sensed the reason for their alarm. He ushered them into this office, each of them still hugging to her chest her half of the manuscript, and shut the door.
“Don’t worry about Phil’s having any interest in your manuscript,” he said. “Phil wouldn’t be interested unless it were about a soccer game or a rock group and probably not even then. He’s happy to make overtime staying to help you, but you probably couldn’t pay him to read a word of what you have there, and between us, I’m not even sure that he could read much of it. Phil’s got a knack with machines, but for him the written language is something that had its place only in antediluvian times. If it isn’t electronic, mechanical, or athletic, Phil doesn’t trouble with it. Anyway, you can stay there with him while he makes his copies, and grab each sheet of the original as he removes it, if that will make you happy.”
“You must wonder what this is all about,” Kate said. After all, he was an associate, perhaps a friend, of Reed’s, and one might be well advised to stop being the nervous editor and become a civilized woman and professor.
“Reed told me enough to let me know what we are copying and keeping,” the lawyer said. “Go and have it copied, and I’ll be waiting here for the original when you’re done. Perhaps you would both like to have dinner with me?”
“How kind,” Kate said, glancing over at Anne who shook her head. “I have to make a plane early tomorrow and Anne is rather tired, as we both are. But thank you for asking.”
And they returned to Phil, impatiently awaiting their task which was keeping him after hours, however well paid. Kate and Anne placed the manuscript in proper order near to him—they had by now tentatively numbered the pages from beginning to end—and watched him work with a speed and efficiency that was quite breathtaking. Before their eyes, Gabrielle’s precious papers were transformed to something now readily available to anyone, now somehow part of the permanent record of the twentieth century’s last decade.
Phil was careful, but once he grabbed a sheet a bit roughly, and they heard it slightly tear; they both gasped as though he had struck them. “Easy does it, love,” he said in an extraordinary accent but with a certain kindness. Clearly, he thought them two mad biddies, one old, the other getting there, carrying on about a heap of paper as though it were real money. Phil shrugged. Women much over the age of twenty held neither interest nor possibility for him: you paid him, he did his job, and on to the rear world.
He finished with amazing speed. Anne had brought mailing envelopes for the copies destined for New York, one via the post office, the other via Kate. The original was carefully wrapped and handed over to the nice English lawyer, in whose office they made their farewells. Kate once again clutched her copy to her chest, but with less anxiety. They thanked the lawyer profusely, relief rendering their gratitude near to fulsome, and departed into the London evening.
The first phase in the resurrection of Gabrielle’s papers was finished. Kate wondered if she had pictured it this way, not the copying machine, of course, but the first stages of the journey to publication. Anne, upon being asked, said she had imagined Gabrielle there the whole time Phil was carrying on, in spirit of course.
“Of course,” Kate said, hailing a taxi which, by a miracle, was depositing a customer near them. After stowing their copies in the house and letting the cat out, they walked around for a final drink together at “their” Hampstead pub. Kate had offered a proper restaurant dinner, but Anne wanted to stick with the by-now-familiar routine, and Kate agreed with her. It would, in any case, be a considerable time before Kate ate another steak and kidney pie, to say nothing of a glass of bitter.
As Kate and Anne drank and were having their final pub meal together, the London lawyer called Reed, catching him about to retire, to report that all had gone well, they would guard the manuscript with their lives, but Kate had not quite been as anticipated. She seemed quiet, nervous, not at all the sort of person he had been led to expect, didn’t look as though she would say boo to a goose.
“She’s never been in charge of an original manuscript before,” Reed said, laughing. “You must have dinner with us when next you’re in New York and meet her in her true form. It’s worth a transatlantic flight, I assure you.”
“It’s a date,” the English lawyer said, practicing his Americanese.
Kate treated herself to a first-class seat on her return. Sitting like a baby in a high chair, usually in alarming proximity to some overweight neighbor, had lost its appeal; she had also lost her faith in sufficiently light traffic to permit her to sleep in three adjoining seats, as on the outward journey. Alone, she relaxed and enjoyed the pleasant service, accepting a glass of champagne as they awaited the flight.
“To Gabrielle,” she said, startling the stewardess, to whom she explained that this was a toast rather than a request or comment. The stewardess smiled, but Kate noticed her saying something to the steward, who served her from then on out. I must be turning into a typical batty traveler, she thought with some pleasure. So long as they left her to herself, she didn’t mind.
Well before the airplane had filled up, taxied into the runway line and been assigned its order for takeoff, Kate had settled down with Gabrielle’s novel. She had adamantly restrained herself from any judgment, any careful contemplation of the novel, while she was in London, preferring to keep her attention on the physical task to hand. She would have to decide about the edition—whether or not she wanted to do it—and she would have to decide what to say to Simon Pearlstine. It was possible to imagine both delight and dismay as his logical reaction, and Kate wanted to be certain of her ground before she even broached the subject with him.
Kate contemplated the top page of Gabrielle’s manuscript: “He is coming tonight, she thought; one more day of waiting,” read the opening sentence, the first sentence now of both Emmanuel’s and Gabrielle’s novels. But while Emmanuel’s first sentence had indicated anticipation, eagerness, a wild desire, Gabrielle’s rendition of her heroine’s thought was ironic, fearful, and desperate. The intruder was about to appear. Ariadne, as Foxx’s Artemisia was called in the beginning of Gabrielle’s novel, had been advised by Daedalus to give Theseus, when he should come, the thread of the labyrinth; he would then kill the Minotaur but not, it was to be hoped, her or her mother or sister. Greek men were violent: rapists, triumphant over women and weaker men whenever possible. Thwarted, Theseus might kill her whole family, seize the holy double ax, and murder everyone along with the Minotaur. Her only chance was to appear to have anticipated, with the fullest possible girlish glee, his coming. This was the only chance of escape, for her, for her mother, Pasiphaë, her sister, Phaedre, and the priestesses.
“I thought the labyrinth was a double ax, the sign of the priestesses of Crete, and therefore not a labyrinth at all,” Kate muttered, inviting a quick glance from the steward and confirming his worst fears. Kate laughed to herself I am becoming dotty, she said. Gabrielle’s influence. I must try and collect myself before we arrive.
Her question was soon cleared up: the labyrinth was the whole palace of Cnossus. That was how it was built, and the famous dance floor and place of acrobatics over the horns of bulls were all part of the labyrinth, part of the palace, all in the shape of the double-sided ax. Kate admired the skill with which Gabrielle embodied this in the novel: she must have read every morsel by Evans about his discoveries of the ancient Cretan civilization.
Her Crete was a civilization that feared the violence and brutality of foreign men. Crete was a matriarchy in the sense that the priests and the queen were women; but its men flourished as well: they were neither slaves nor concubines nor housekeepers nor mere objects of affection or desire. Their life was full on Crete, athletic, artistic, gentle, and vibrant. Gabrielle was careful to demonstrate that maleness was not confirmed by violence, certainly not by violence against women or those weaker than themselves. By the beginning of Gabrielle’s novel, the civilization on Crete knew that other nations, and particularly Greece, honored male brutality and cruelty, and sent its men to find their rewards for war in the rape and carnage and destruction of other lands.
Years earlier, Crete had demanded as price for passage through its waters a yearly tribute of youth—seven men and seven women—to emigrate to Crete and live among its people. These youths were not sacrifices; they were warmly welcomed strangers to the life and genetic stock of Crete. The need for new blood, what we would call a new gene stock, was known by the rulers of Crete, if not properly named. Those youths, women and men, the bull leapers who did their acrobatics on the horns of bulls—the male symbol of renewal on Crete, the original animal god and spouse of the queen—developed skills and confidence. They were not destined for destruction, nor a mindless tribute, as all the Greek myths recounted.
Now the ancient Cretan culture at the palace of Cnossus faced destruction from violent Greek forces, to be led by Theseus. Could Ariadne outwit them? While Emmanuel’s modern plot had depended on but neither admitted nor expounded its Greek original, Gabrielle’s began with the exact prehistorical moment at which the Greek myth began. Kate had, meanwhile, glanced at enough of the manuscript to know that, after its beginnings in those prehistoric times rediscovered and reconstituted about a century ago by Evans, the main part of the novel moved to the mid-twentieth century when Ariadne, now renamed Artemisia, again waited for the character Emmanuel Foxx had modeled on Theseus.
But at the beginning of Gabrielle’s novel, the Cretan Ariadne, aware through her prophetic powers of the imminent destruction of her home and her civilization, consulted Daedalus as her mother had before her. Daedalus wanted no part in the emerging Greek male-centered world. His son, Icarus, had found the possibility of patriarchy and war exhilarating, and Daedalus had had to watch his son, swollen with his new-learned manly pride, fly too near the sun and melt the wax wings he had stolen from his father. Daedalus had known he had stolen them, had known that Icarus, allowed to live, would betray them all. The lesson Ariadne learned from this was that Greek men and their ilk would, in time, destroy themselves, but not perhaps until they had destroyed the whole earth with them.
Daedalus did not have much time to tell Ariadne all he knew. Crete would be conquered; there was no chance of avoiding that. The old ways were gone, women would be enslaved or made into objects of male desire, largely powerless. Other races too, believed to be of less valor and worth than Greeks, would likewise be enslaved. Listening to him, Ariadne despaired.
Daedalus explained that there was no present help, except to let Theseus believe that he had conquered easily, conquered because of Ariadne’s lust for him. He would take her and Phaedre away. Phaedre’s part would come soon enough; she would cause Theseus to kill his son, the embodiment of masculine self-aggrandizement, thus preventing much suffering and avenging Hippolyta, whose son he also was. Hippolyta, too, would await the future, in spite of any story Greek myth might tell of her.
Ariadne must pretend lust for Theseus, and allow him to take her away. But once on the ship, she must sufficiently horrify him to force him to put her ashore at Dia, a Cretan island, where Dionysus would come to her rescue and assure her survival and her eventual return. Very eventual, Daedalus said, but certain. Not certain to succeed, but certain to try.
And Ariadne did as he advised. To frighten Theseus and make him desert her, she pretended a frenzy, such as he had heard women were prone to, and pleaded for male flesh to feast upon. Her act was good; so good it frightened even her. He sailed near to the shore at night, carried her onto the island of Dia, and told his crew that he would return for her next day. Next day, he pretended to have forgotten her. The crew, equally horrified at what they had seen, or at what others had described, did not remind Theseus. Was it Ariadne who made him forget to change his black sails to white to tell his father he was returning alive? No, it was not Ariadne, it was Theseus himself, eager to take his father’s place, eager to sail under the colors of manhood.
So ended the first part. Kate plunged immediately into the second part, which began again as Emmanuel’s novel had begun, with the modern heroine awaiting the arrival of the Theseus figure. Gabrielle’s modern heroine, Artemisia, knew that the time for the revival of the Micean civilization had come. Like Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, Artemisia prayed: “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.” She borrowed Joyce’s words to say: “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
Gabrielle had read Joyce too.
Some days after Kate had returned home, taken up the strands of her former, by now quite strangely unfamiliar, life, answered countless letters, returned time-consuming phone calls, devoted days to restoring some sort of order to her affairs, she settled down to tell Reed all about the decision before her. She had by now reread all of Gabrielle’s novel and felt strangely empowered by it. She tried to explain this to Reed.
“I’m probably gaga, a sensation I have become quite used to since encountering Gabrielle and her connections however far-flung. I mean, even Simon Pearlstine seemed like a figure out of nowhere, a visitor from another planet.”
“Conclusions first,” Reed said. “Explanations and excuses later.”
“Conclusions are what I don’t have. If I leave out explanations and excuses, all I have left is a question.”
“Ask it.”
“Ought I to edit this crazy book and write a biographical portrait and what shall I tell Simon?”
“That’s three questions. Do you want to edit the book? No, let me ask it differently. What do you think the book is about?”
“I hate people who ask what novels are ‘about,’ ” Kate rather irritably responded.
“What is it about the novel that strikes you as either brilliant or terrifying or ridiculous depending on your mood and state of sobriety?”
“It’s so incredibly ahead of its time. It’s a book written after all at the height of high modernism, or not long after—we can’t really know when she wrote it, except not before the 1920s, when Emmanuel Foxx was working on Ariadne, and not after 1955, when Anne visited her and spirited the papers away. My guess is that it was mostly written in the thirties and forties, maybe with time out for the war, maybe not. She may have polished it up in the early fifties in London. What was your question?”
“Kate, you grow wordier and less coherent by the minute, the very second. You are often this way when your cases show signs of reaching a solution which is usually, in the way of solutions, a compromise and unsatisfactory, but I’ve never known you to babble on like this when it was merely a matter of literature. Sorry: I withdraw the ‘merely.’ When it was a matter of literature. My question was: what about the novel disturbs you?”
“Good novels are supposed to disturb you. All right, I’ll stick to this one, don’t go into your prosecuting-attorney act, leaping to your feet to object every time I open my mouth.”
“It isn’t just prosecutors who do that,” Reed mildly said. “Go on.”
“Look here, as you may have noticed, being a feminist or at least suggesting that patriarchy is not the most divinely perfect scheme ever devised hardly leaves me unassaulted and unridiculed even in these more or less feminist times. It’s clear that Gabrielle had no illusions about remaining unattacked at worst, or ignored at best, if she published anything as radical, as revolutionary, as her novel. She might have published it and hoped to be ignored in her lifetime and rediscovered at a later date if she had not been Foxx’s wife. As it was, she was sure to be discovered, if only because her novel so clearly took off from his, and maybe she wasn’t a watching-the-shit-hit-the-fan type, to put it crudely.”
“At least it’s clear,” Reed acknowledged. “But that was then. Won’t the novel be seen now in an altogether different light, won’t its importance be obvious! And since you’re in no way connected with Gabrielle, what onus can be ascribed to you?”
“I teach literature. This novel attempts to subvert, hell, to show up Emmanuel Foxx’s masterpiece, to say nothing of bringing into question the whole masculine bias of high modernism. And by the wife and inspiration of one of the highest of modernists. My God, Reed, it will probably make People magazine. I can hear all the critics already. Don’t you see?”
“I think you ought to present it. Edit it where necessary, write a snappy but elegant account of her life, leaving out the steamy bits, and send it all off. If Simon Pearlstine doesn’t want to publish it, somebody will for certain. Give him back his advance, the part you’ve already received, and Bob’s your uncle.”
“Do I want to be the center of a maelstrom, an academic and literary debate that will probably go on for years? It will make the question of whether the governess in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw was fantasizing look like nothing.”
“That is a question I seem to have managed to live a not uneventful life of many years without confronting. I’m the sort who might even not notice Gabrielle’s novel if I weren’t married to you. All right, I know that’s not the point. Are you afraid, Kate? Is that what it comes down to?”
“I’m the retiring type, though you may not have noticed.”
“I have noticed. Types who seem retiring usually resemble Uriah Heep. You see, a literary allusion.”
“Suppose I don’t do it?”
“Get someone else to. I’m sure it would be the making of most on-the-make academic careers.”
“I would have to persuade Anne and Dorinda and Nellie.”
“No persuasion would be necessary. You have only to persuade yourself You can tell Anne and Dorinda and Nellie. Now tell me I’m not being helpful.”
“You’re being horribly helpful, like a Spartan mother telling her son to come home with his shield or on it.”
“I always understood you had no interest in men who told you what you wanted to hear if they didn’t agree with it.”
“So glad you know what I want to hear; do you mind telling me?”
“You want to hear that you must do this, are under a moral obligation to do it, have no choice.”
“And you believe?”
“I believe you have a choice. I think you should estimate the risks and the benefits, and decide on that basis. If you want to be shoved into doing it, let your obvious desire shove you. If you want to be prevented by fear of the brouhaha, don’t look for comfort from me. I think there probably will be a wild brouhaha, Gabrielle will be accused of Utopian, ridiculous schemes to undermine the patriarchy, to say nothing of every religion in sight, and you will be seen as an unfeminine, man-devouring, balls-crushing, lesbian, strident, shrill women’s libber.”
“No one uses that phrase anymore.”
“Then they’ll reinvent it, or worse. If that all sounds rather terrifying, which it does, let someone take the rap for whom the academic and media rewards of success and fame will be welcome, even desired.”
“But Anne and Dorinda and Nellie . . .”
“I don’t even believe they exist, if you want to know the truth.” Reed marched into the kitchen to gather the makings of drinks. “Single-malt scotch?” he asked, rattling ice trays.
“They exist.”
“Not for the purposes of this decision.”
“They trusted me.”
“The number of people who have trusted you since we met, and no doubt before, challenge enumeration. That didn’t entice you into publishing lost manuscripts and writing truncated biographies. Damn it, Kate, sleep on it. When you wake up you’ll know what you want to do. Now, we’ve kicked it around enough to satisfy anyone’s unconscious and conscious scruples. Do you want to hear about my day? Law students are beginning to doubt the value of the Socratic method. The world as I knew it is fast passing away, and a good thing too.”
“My governess used to read me a fairy story in which a woman keeps saying: ‘Morning is wiser than evening,’ ” Kate announced.
“I knew your governess would agree with me,” Reed said. “We got you at different times of life, but we both knew the right thing to say. Don’t worry. You’ll know in the morning. Skoal!”
And he raised his glass to hers.
He was right. In the morning Kate called Simon Pearlstine and said that she had to see him immediately. He was booked for lunch, but agreed to meet her for a drink at six at The Stanhope. Kate spent the day girding her loins in a manner she hoped Ariadne and Daedalus would have approved. And Gabrielle.
And Anne and Dorinda and Nellie. Who, Kate decided, she would have to see together and all at once before much more time had passed. Nellie would have to be enticed to New York and away from Geneva as soon as possible.
Simon first.