I used to think that when people communed with photographs of their dear departed, it was the last refuge of a senile mind, locked in the prison of agonized memory. Now, I'm not so certain. It's a futile occupation, talking to photographs. Still, I keep a large framed photograph of my mother within easy talking distance, and another of my husband.
"Close the mouth", my mother used to say. "Who's gonna like you? What self-respecting boy you think's gonna put up with it?" Her speech was tinctured with an immigrant's awkwardness but she believed in carrying herself "like a lady".
"Myra, keep the head up when you walk, like a lady."
"Ma", I used to tell her, "I find stuff on the sidewalk. If I keep my head up I'll miss everything." Stuff. The sidewalks offered up a collection of pennies, nickles, interesting bits of pieces presumably fallen out of careless pockets; even a gold ring, once. Wrong initial. I wore it anyway until it fell off my finger. Too loose to be worn on my little finger, but I'd thought a pinky ring was tres elegant. I consoled myself with the thought that someone with the right initial, with the correct finger size, who also had the right idea of walking face down, would discover it.
There's an analogy in there somewhere, I know there is, but you can figure it out without my help.
Howard used to say, "Tact, you never heard of tact?" When I put certain people off. Not that he cared particularly in a personal way, but it was bad for business. "Be subtle", he insisted, "you can still come out ahead. Your trouble is you barge right in. You even believe half the things you say?"
We did a lot of entertaining. A misnomer, that. We did a lot of social catering to people as venal as we must have seemed.
Howard's dead. Business pressures. High blood pressure. A fatal combination. I warned him. "No, I don't believe it", he'd groan. "You sound exactly like your mother." That always shut me up. "I need the money so you and the girls will be secure, independent."
A lie, of course. I told him so. And so it came to pass ... the girls have their careers, so have I, and we're securely independent of his money. Ah verity, there lies the sting of thy compulsion; no compassion, late compunction.
Unlike my mother, I have no trouble expressing myself lucidly, employing a robust and eclectic vocabulary. And I don't particularly care what kind of impression I make on people. And no one who knows me personally would call me a lady. Not to my face.
You could perhaps liken our marriage to that enjoyed by Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitane. Stormy. But interesting, very. I had no vast land holdings but my mother had been wrong, in that as in so many others of her observations. Howard did of course, lack a certain kind of self-respect otherwise he'd have thrown the 'business contacts' he brought into our house out on their larded bottoms, but he was attracted to my loose-hinged mouth. Among other attractions.
The disputatiousness, the polemics of our arguments were all-encompassing, invigorating and frustrating. Spirited verbal jousts. There was no topic, no subject of conversation, no controversy, that we did not touch on, and take apart. Throwing the ball of contention one to the other.
"Myra, you're doing it again", Howard offered from time to time. "You're contradicting yourself. Never let your opponent rattle you so you forget which side you started out on."
Much later, when our discourses, discussions, distempers reached a point where the outcome was necessarily inconclusive, neither he nor I able to swerve the other; prove, as it were, a point, drive home the finishing nail on the lid of 'proof', he switched tactics. "Howard!" I wailed once in sheer frustration, "You're arguing my side!"
"Right", he acknowledged, "and doing it better than you, aren't I?"
He began to practise a kind of verbal- and opinion-dexterity that I couldn't match, sometimes couldn't even catch him at the turning-point either, when the point of departure from one view to another left me breathless and apoplectic with fury.
"Tch, tch", he'd reproof, "refrain, my Dear, from emotional outbursts. They cloud your reasoning prowess as well as the issue at question." Then he'd quote Yeats: "An excited voice, and an intellect without self-possession".
"Remember", he cautioned, "you've got to maintain an emotional, even a subjective indifference, a good distance, to be effective. Once you become involved you've lost your advantage. Be dispassionate, cool, possessed."
I used to envision us in faltering old age, minds still nimble, crossing arguments from wheelchairs to the consternation of the nursing staff of those atrocious places where worn-out bodies and anachronistic minds are relegated by loving families.
Oh God, I miss him. Although sex has never been a problem, there's been no discussions worth a damn in longer than I care to think. No one uses their cerebral function any more. When one of the women at the lab, just yesterday, asked me to sign a petition designed to remove abortion from the Criminal Code I asked her why should I? I mean, when someone makes a suggestion to me I feel they should be prepared to offer a reasonable enticement. Not cant, offered like a litany straight out of a Women's Lib manifesto and not the "Every child a wanted child", that she quipped at me. "I'm all for family planning", I snapped.
I have no convictions either way, actually. But you cannot propose solutions to cover each and every contingency. I hold no brief for or against abortion per se; I don't consider a first-trimester foetus sacred, nor do I particularly relish the thought of aborting a potentially viable six-month foetus. What it all comes down to is the Golden Mean. Middle ground. I snapped at the poor dolt because my patience with idiocy is wearing thin. A late menarche.
There was a precedent Howard admired. He planned his life to parallel Baconian logic. Howard intended to pursue Mammon for the first two-thirds of his life then devote the rest to the gentle pursuit of philosophy. "The Vicar", that was my pet name for him. Of course so many plans go awry. The world will never revere the late musings of one, Howard Levitsky, as it does that of Francis Bacon, turncoat extraordinaire.
Reminiscing doesn't do good things to me. At the moment, my stomach feels as though I've swallowed a compacted Mexican hot-dish and like an imp, it's nestling uncomfortably close to my breathing apparatus; with luck I'd up-chuk, get some relief, but no. And my back, the small of my back is so intramuscularly sore I cannot move my head without pain. Tension. Doesn't help much to know it's all psychosomatic. Old girl, I keep telling myself, you're a nervous wreck.
"You'll be a nervous wreck, end up like mine sister, your Auntie Hannah ... wait, I'm telling you", my mother would say with a touch of evil satisfaction. Deliciously dolorous, her prediction. The incarnate pessimist. She died a nervous wreck. Worrying about anything and everything, me included.
"You're tearing pieces from mine flesh!" she shrieked, voice a rising crescendo of absurd accusation. Even a mild disclaimer to the effect that I had to live my life as I saw fit, would send her off again. Her speech took on a heavier accent as she indulged in her wistful maledictions; they're untranslatable, become innocuous in another language.
My aches, my pains, they'll pass ... as the old philosopher said, though he meant all things in perpetuity.
One other thing. More background. Children, we had two. And one almost-third. Almosts don't count but I've often fantasized interesting possibilities.
When the girls were small I looked after them full time, knew I could always pick up my career again. When a colleague said pityingly that it was too bad I was tied down to my biological imperatives (he could have been sarcastic, now I think of it; we were both in line for a promotion and with me gone he had a clear lead) I piously declaimed: "I intend to give my children full emotional support, encourage them to learn in a stable environment and out of this experience I shall reap countless intangible joys" ... etcetera, ad nauseum.
But you get the picture. I wanted to be a good mother, was determined our children wouldn't have the experience of being guided by a neurotic woman like my own mother. Looking back, I've got to admit that unless a woman manages some outside stimulation, maintains some interest besides raising children, she's either a mental blob to begin with, or becomes one by the very virtue of shutting herself away in the sterility of home-and-hearth.
It's very nervous-making too, encouraging stubborn little bundles of arms, legs, whining maws and dripping bottoms into their final shapes somewhat resembling of human beings. I began to place a new interpretation on the charge of Antiphon the Greek who claimed that "Services for which no charge is made, may fairly be presumed to be worth nothing", and I was as close to becoming a raving nag as my mother before me, before I decided to opt out and finally return to the real world of people, leaving the girls to shift around until they found their own niches. Antiphon may have been a jealous sophist and Socrates the noble genius of logic, but there comes a time when the attempt to stuff knowing and experience at unready ectomorphs begins to assume proportions of futility beyond the capacity of any dedicated mother.
By now you're wondering what this is all about.
Let's talk about conspiracies, and that will neatly take us into the incident I'm leading to.
I know it's a time-worn cliche that sympathetic friends become reckless matchmakers when a married becomes, horrors, a single, but I know too there's another dimension behind some of the binary-generating activity.
Permit me to spell it out in simple language. Fear of competition. Single, ergo mystically threatening. As though the state of singleness post-coupledom has thrust one through a crucible of purification and the result is a formerly attached middle-aged frump suddenly becomes transformed into an irresistible nymph. Friends daydream their husbands into satyrs, letching for an 'experience' with this suddenly desirable creature who formerly gave no cause for second thought. That's a generalization, mind. I've never been frumpish and if any of my friends' mates really did appeal to me they might have due cause for worry.
I entertain my girls sometimes, acting out for them little scenarios that all too often take place at social gatherings. Clarisse, married and practising law in a husband-wife partnership takes it all so seriously. Oh, she laughs, but regards me with covert suspicion, as though there was indeed, cause for alarm. Caroline, in her final year at McGill (Podiatry; that girl's got to have a sense of humour) whoops with laughter, feeling exactly as I do about the silly cows I've called my friends over the years.
So now, merely for amusement, because things have been, as I mentioned, rather quietly narrow, I play the game. It's not that I so much enjoy watching friends twitch in self-generated agony, but despite anything, they'll believe what they will. Fact is they'd be dreadfully hurt if I ever told them the truth; that none of their precious partners do a thing for me. I've had them all at one time or another; just in passing of course; so I know whereof I speak.
Shirley, Howard's sister, invited me over to one of her little soirees. I'd been begging off lately but she mentioned this was more of a business thing, there'd be new faces and my presence, she said archly, would lend a bit of weight. "Come", she said, "as a favour to me". From a misguided sense of familial obligation I agreed to attend.
Just a hint of malice, too, since Morley's always admired me and Shirley's always resented his attentions to me. Surface though; I do have some scruples. Yet I feel almost challenged to see her squirm, now and again. I went even though I knew she'd have invited an unattached male, with the idea of throwing fresh meat at the ravening beast.
I left home early. Morley looks after my legal work and there was something I wanted to discuss, beforehand.
The streets were congested with the last storm's dumping. Last Saturday night, remember? But the highway work crews still hadn't cleaned up adequately and traffic seemed a creeping caterpillar of lethargy. Passing a large new motel built last summer to relieve the downtown area's tourist and convention congestion, I smiled, recalling pointing the building out to Caroline when it had been newly completed. 'The Harbourmaster', it was called - "The Best Port In Town", read the hype.
"Its front was designed to resemble the prow of a ship", I told her. The edifice jutted obliquely over the street corner on which it squatted, like a floundering leviathon. "Yeah", she commented. "It does look like a pile of shit." My mother's residual damage; no lady, but I still wince at some street language.
The Harbourmaster's neon flashed 'vacancy', stuttering its invitation, minus one 'c'. Also touted air conditioning, a swimming pool. I try to visualize people flopping around a swimming pool in this weather. Anyone who can enthuse over winter-time swimming suffers, to my way of thinking, a demonstrable frailty in their comprehension of the Fitness of Things.
Large puffy snowflakes loomed at me, rushing illuminated to the headlights, threatening to pass through the windshield; finally almost obscuring vision. I switched the wipers on, and shivered, thought of my nice warm apartment, compared that thought to that of the evening ahead and felt instantly miserable.
**********************************************************************
At Shirley's, Morley greeted me warmly. He enjoys tactile contact and I don't begrudge it him. He's a handsome man, virile, with a friendly magnetism that Shirley would love to ground.
We discussed my business over a Scotch and soda. Oh, I miss a nice fireplace, that's the one big failing in apartment living. It made me feel even worse, sitting there in front of the fire, trying to make conversation when I didn't really feel like it, felt like sitting there, not saying anything, just staring into the fire, watching it lick cozily around maple logs. Morley asked if there was anything wrong, and I said no. I looked great, as usual, he said, but tired. What had I been doing with myself, lately?
"The usual. working late at the lab. Tied up in paperwork. Add to that the delightful challenge of justifying a request for another research grant, and there you are."
"You need to relax a little more", he murmured, a flattering show of concern. "I've mentioned you to a friend of mine. Wife left him last year. Apparently she wanted to be liberated of old ties that no longer bound. No children."
I couldn't believe it. "You too? I thought that kind of busyness was the prerogative of women, Morley."
But, he explained, it "wasn't like that at all". He was worried about his friend; at loose ends. "Look, Sweetie, be nice to him. He deserved better. I
knowyou have no obligation to be anything, I'm just asking a favour. I like the guy and he needs a lift. Give him a chance, huh?" Again that infectious smile. But I wasn't buying any, this time. I felt the unmistakable signs of a foul mood settling in nicely.
"He's tall and handsome. Not as much hair as me, but intellectual. I thought you'd like that", he grinned, so obviously pleased with himself.
Intellectual, I'd give him intellectual.
******************************************************************
I can't recall his name, that tall handsome friend of Morley's who was pining for companionship. It never fails, soon as introductions are made I produce the involuntary smile and hand-press, then forget. A temporary state, if I meet the person again and he is at all memorable. This one was a dud. As it turned out he was merely incidental to my memory of the little gathering; an evening which was in some ways memorable, not quite like most of them.
Shirley was her usual scintillating self. She tends to forget her age, that the calories don't work off as easily now. "Not fat", my mother liked to say of people like Shirley. "Ample." The word pleased my mother, for its lady-like rectitude. I never did discover where she picked it up.
There she was, impressing us all with her newest 'find', a fawning lean-faced man in sandals and crumpled blue suit, the guest of honour who was designing the artwork to embellish Morley's new business-venture, a spanking new suburban upscale shopping concourse. A few guests stood about trying to read significance into a sample of the artist's work; a gunmetal blue construction poised before the bow windows, while the artist held forth, articulating gibberish with suitably expressive gestures, as though hoping to impress the authenticity of his creation through a show of enthusiasm, and just incidentally generate some new business contacts.
Howard felt I should be more tolerant toward that kind of non-representational art but I've always refused to give credence to artsy creeps trying to pass lack of talent off as creatively-talented inspiration.
"Daaarling, this Spanish modern is just gorgeous!"
"What's this pattern called? Keen Lung? This Indian or Chink work?"
"Jeez, Harry, how's the old man, getting kind of loose on top, full on the bottom, eh?"
The eruditely sparkling conversation thrilled me as it always does, and when Morley's friend made a few tentative stabs at "my line of work" and "the state of the dollar" I mumbled responses, felt like glaring and stomping out. What the hell kept me there anyway - glutton for punishment?
As often happens, halfway through the evening I found myself circled by a small group of men, thought foolishly things were going to take an upturn, I'd rise above the blue funk I was in, dazzle them all. I listened glumly as a colleague of Morley's inveighed on Capital Punishment.
The lawyer, a man I'd met before, was the type who compensates for a handicap - in his case a physical deformity - with confident hyperbole. What he was saying, coming from anyone else, probably wouldn't have bothered me as much, I'd be able to dismiss it calmly, but there was something about him that threw me off. His arrogance, maybe, his confidence, the handsomeness of his dark head contrasting with his wretched handicap. My attention was drawn iirespective of his efforts to the weighty dark oppression of the prosthetic anchoring his left leg. Another Lord George Gordon.
" ... the temper of this country is against continuing the moratorium on capital punishment. Those stupid bastards on the Hill are so far from public temper they're in for a shock. They're supposed to represent the electorate's wishes, instead they're indulging in power plays", he was emoting forcefully, comfortably at ease with his assertions, as though he knew he couldn't be wrong and no one in this gathering would dream of opposing him. Then he spoke of a brief he was preparing for the reinstatement of capital punishment.
"I'm personally going to do my best to see that those effete nits who voted abolition know where they stand when they run for office again, and that'll be soon. I'm heading a delegation of concerned professionals planning to lobby every MP we can get on the appointment sheet. Any of you interested in coming along, lending some extra weight?" One eager acquiescence; my shadow mumbled he hadn't quite made up his mind where he stood, the third that he'd think about it. The lawyer turned to me.
"Good idea", I said. "Lobbying, I mean. I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me before. Up to now all I've done is write letters to the Solicitor-General, the P.M.O., the Minister of Justice, et al. I imagine that seeing them in person might be very effective indeed." Ah, Myra, you liar!
He beamed. "That's what I like to hear! Someone who believes in taking a stand and doing something concrete about it. You'll come, then?"
"I think not", I responded. "It somehow goes against the grain of my personal sense of accountability. To empower my public representatives to commit murder on my behalf. I may just form my own pressure group. For retention of abolition." I turned to the two who'd expressed ambivalence, lifted my eyebrows. That elicited a nervous laugh from Morley's friend. The lawyer looked at me uncertainly, not quite certain perhaps, whether I was serious. I wasn't sure, myself.
What the hell, I thought. I've always been curious if it were true, what the feminists claim; that the retentionists are also women-punishers. "Where do you stand on the issue of abortion?" I asked him.
A broad smile. And a long wait, before replying. Deliberately took me in, as though seeing me for the first time; appraising. Men can be so swinishly insulting in the way they size up a woman's physical presence. It's times like these that make me think of that old canard "Hell hath no fury ..."
Finally he turned, with a peculiarly fixed smile on his face, and directed his reply at Morley's friend, sitting beside me: "As I understand it, there
isno issue with abortion". The man coloured violently; for a moment I thought he was going to be sick, but he recovered his composure and nodded amiably at the lawyer. Some special bitchiness, I thought, and wondered what the background was. The reply had brought a guffaw of appreciation from the lawyer's seating neighbour.
"Let me ask you", he countered, looking straight at me this time. "Where do you stand on the issue?" Grins all around.
"Like you, I don't plan on having one", I smiled. "But if you want to, it's none of my business. That's personal, the other's public."
To my left, a longtime acquaintance, Theodore Kaminsky, physician, reacted. He is mild-mannered, speaks with a faint European accent, soft spoken. One of those people who wears such a deathless smile you're never quite sure whether he's laughing with you, at you, or if he's only a harmless imbecile. "Myra", he chided avuncularly, "I'm surprised at you! That's tantamount to condoning murder on the one hand, condemning it on the other. That's not rational, it's plainly contradictory!"
"Teddy", I mocked, none too subtly, "I'm surprised at you! I've always thought of you as a scientist, not a moralizing bigot. How, pray tell, can one murder that which does not exist?" I could almost hear my mother's gasp, appalled at my shocking social manners. And she never could become accustomed to the idea of women talking openly of such things in 'mixed company'.
"Upon conception there exists a human being", he explained gravely, enunciating carefully, as though he were dealing with a wayward and none-too-bright child.
The others looked on with interest. Two women joined us, murmuring hellos, isn't this a cozy group, mind if we join? The men gallantly gave up their chairs, hurried off to find replacements. One of the women was familiar to me, the other a stranger. Teddy continued, turning alternately from me to the other women. "To destroy the zygote is to take a living, breathing child and end its life", he intoned solemnly, pronouncing the word 'zee-god'; the fault of his accent, but, I felt, quite revealing.
"I can't for a moment believe that. Or believe that you really do", I protested, tailoring my voice to match his, paced and reasonable. "An embryo is nothing, no more sacred than a mushroom spore. The heart of a foetus begins beating discernibly around three months, and it's not until about five months that there is any detectable brain-wave pattern. How can a foetus be a human being when it's incapable of sustaining life on its own?" The soul, I urged him silently, give me that bit about the sacredness of the soul.
"You are very wrong, my dear", Teddy corrected me gently, God's emissary on Earth. "You play with words. You use the nomenclature of 'foetus' and 'embryo' to strengthen your argument - when in fact you mean 'baby'. You are talking about the destruction of a baby. Whether you destroy a baby immediately upon conception or immediately after birth it is the same thing. Murder."
The other women listened, shifted uneasily, but said nothing. The man sitting next to the lawyer chimed: "It's immoral, what you propose! It is irresponsible to give life and then criminally destroy it. Reprehensible! He's right, you're wrong", he said, extending his hand palm side up to me, emphatically, a disgusted look on his face. "It's as simple as that! You can't escape the logic of the argument. Your statements are simply excuses for the heartless destruction of a helpless life. We have a duty to preserve life, not destroy it." He sat there, glowering.
"And who are you to know so much about it?", I asked finally, throwing what was left of social niceties into the trash heap of polite exchange. "If you are so concerned with the preservation of life how is it you found yourself able to agree with our friend here, about the need for the retention of capital punishment? Why not concern with the life that presently exists - not the unwanted potential?"
A silence enveloped us all, seeming to stretch time impossibly, almost stifling me with its inert weight, the accusation that seemed to reach me from all of them. For the briefest of thoughts I imagined my mother's horror at this unacceptable breach of conduct: "I diden' raise you to be a bore!" echoed down the corridor of memory. I almost smiled, remembering that, how she would say bore when she meant boor, not realizing the difference. And there was Howard on the other side, needling me on over my shoulder, whispering in my ear.
A deep and oh-so-hurt intake of breath from the little man. "I", he finally managed with ruffled aplomb "am a philosopher". Dragging the word out for plenty of mileage and the concomitant respect inherent to the discipline: "Phel-O-soPHer!" "and this being a highly emotional issue" he continued "and women tending to become very irrational when they are dealing with the emotive, I really do feel I am in a far better position, with my training, to assess the situation."
Teddy nodded smugly. The other women, still silent, swivelled from one to the other of us, fascinated as by an odious drama being enacted before their helpless eyes.
"So, abortion equals murder, hmmmm?", I asked.
"Certainly!"
"What about war?"
"What about it?" he countered edgily. Just like a woman, always entering a distracting element into any controversy. His attitude infuriated me. I knew mine did him. We were quits.
"Would you participate actively in a war? Would you kill in combat?"
"Well, now that's a deep philosophical question. Let me sort it out for you", he said obligingly. "There are positives and negatives. In a war situation there is you, and there is the enemy. Naturally, you would like to live, despite all odds. You are aware that if you kill, it is a moral negative. On the other hand, you are also aware that if you do not kill - in self-defence of course - you will die. You must weigh the good against the bad. Bad: you take the life of another human being. Good: you live. If the good outweighs the bad you take the initiative and kill." I wondered where he professed to teach his brand of logic, but didn't ask in which halls of academe his pronouncements rang through students' stunned heads.
"That's murder", I said baldly, felt like chortling at his expression, the ass. "What you're describing is planned murder", I added. He looked at me, nonplussed.
"You quite simply are not listening! That is not murder. It is self-defence. Would you permit yourself to be killed instead of attempting to save yourself?"
"I would remove myself from the theatre of war. Why be there to begin with? Why is your life worth more than someone else's? Abolish war and there would be no need to save your life at the cost of another's. Simple, isn't it?"
He turned away, shook his head disbelievingly. Easy to read his mind, same thing going through all their minds.
"Typical female logic", the lawyer said, locking glances with the philosopher. Teddy laughed outright. The two women did not. They looked extremely uncomfortable. I wasn't, though. I prefer having things out in the open. And under the circumstances I wasn't about to reveal my thought that there are times when war is inevitable and unavoidable, and there are no other moral options but to engage.
One of the women, Helen, cleared her throat. Everyone turned to look at her. She hiccoughed and colour suffused her face, spread down her neck. She looked down at her hands, fumbled in her lap with a glass-beaded purse. She wanted to say something, obviously she wanted to say something and I could have throttled her. God help me for all these withdrawn women intimidated by men, indoctrinated by life and societal convention to defer endlessly.
"Helen ...?" I prodded.
"I ... just wanted to say ... I mean, aren't there special cases? What I mean is, if a child is deformed ...?" she glanced down, took in, as though for the first time, the lawyer's crippled foot, and a chagrined look creased her face. "I mean, a terrible deformity", she amended, lamely, her voice losing its first watery conviction. "... physical or mental; wouldn't that be ... different?" She finally faded out, her voice breaking in mortification.
The lawyer, with a sardonic grimace, sat looking down at his feet, lifted the shorter one with obvious intent, crossed it casually over the other. The thing hung there, a large dark blob, looking as though it must surely be too heavy for the other leg to endure its presence for long. Teddy's smile froze. The other woman looked sympathetically at Helen. No one seemed prepared to continue. I found myself wishing I were somewhere else ... and the lawyer spoke, to me.
"If I were to ask you to imagine yourself, or any one of you here, a Down Syndrome child, or let's see, with Multiple Scleroris - to fantasize the power of life and death for yourselves, which do you think you would choose?"
"That's ridiculous!" I objected. "We're all healthy people, we can't begin to imagine what life for a severely handicapped person is like. And that's begging the issue anyway. You're discussing a living entity now, not a foetus."
He turned around, shrugged. The message obvious. He tried again, regardless of a pleading cough from the hitherto silent woman who ventured timidly "Ralph dear, don't you think this has gone..."
"All right then", he went on, ignoring her, his voice weary with the effort of trying to talk intelligence to another fool woman; offering me redemption. "Imagine yourself to be just as you are, a beautiful young woman of thirty-five. Would you, knowing what life is like, have wanted your mother to abort you?" He sat there waiting. I sat there, repelled by him, struck by the knowledge that no matter what I said, how right it sounded to me, it would never be right to him, to them; wondering too what life must be like for that demure hair-bunned woman who so obviously didn't exist in her own right; a mere appendage, and could even see her cowering under his scathing contempt. Thirty-five and beautiful. Yes, ineded. Myra, he's waiting. Give.
The others had turned to me too, like noxious little weeds turning their faces to the sun; fascinated.
"That would have had to be my mother's concern, her decision, not mine", I said, reasonably, I thought. And they like to think women are the only ones capable of stupid suppositions. Anyway, I know my mother didn't have the mental resources to think something like that out for herself; the relief of an abortion, the burden of unwanted children swept away - besides, it was patently unladylike behaviour.
But then, who would she have been able to rail at, complain to, threaten, cajole and curse? Her life, without me, might have been a void, a great big zero. Ah, Mama!
"ANSWER THE QUESTION!", he thundered, taking me completely by surprise, making me jump, interrupting as he did, the flow of sweet memory.
"Certainly, certainly I would have approved of her decision", I said, without hesitation.
"That's absolutely abhorrent!" the philosopher shouted, almost leaving the chair in the heat of his agitation, poor thing. He glared at me with loathing as though I were the universal spider in his pleasant garden of ideas. "To tear from your flesh, as though it were garbage, a child! How could you live with yourself?"
I turned to him, regarded him carefully. What, I wondered, could I say that would bother him even more. God help me, I couldn't think of anything, not yet. Teddy smiled, waiting for me, but then he's always smiling, stupid of me to imagine he thinks I'm disconcerted and that's giving him some pleasure. And then the lawyer echoed the question, insisting on a reply: How could I live with myself.
"Has it never occurred to any of you that the criminal element you're so eager to punish by death probably started life as unwanted children? I'd find it more difficult to live with myself, knowing I'd brought an unwanted unloved child into this world to become a social misfit, a vicious misanthrope, a violent psychopath, than had I aborted a foetus."
"When?" Teddy prodded softly. "When would you abort?" He had me, but I wasn't about to give him even that little satisfaction.
When embattled, and subterfuge hasn't worked, pull out all the jokers, Myra. Howard's advice; deathless.
"In the first trimester, of course."
"Why?" he pressed.
"Well, because it's ... safer for the mother." Ah, you men. You've turned me into a public abortionist.
Glum silence. Idiot, Myra. Remember, when the wise man argues with a fool, he becomes himself a fool. Stupid, Myra, stupid. What are you, the devil's advocate? But fun, while it lasted, wasn't it?
"What of the trauma?" I turned to look at him. It was Morley's friend, the deserted husband.
"Trauma? You mean feelings of guilt? Oh, in some cases, say where a guilt syndrome has been inculcated, as in the instances of some religious women perhaps. But you know, those are the women who usually grit teeth and bear ...?
Teddy coughed, busily began fastening the few buttons on his suit jacket, stared at me. No smile. "Statistics ..." he began.
"Don't give me that crap, Teddy! There are no reliable statistics. Just theories. Listen" ...I felt, why not? "I had an abortion and I felt no shock, no guilt." A collective in-drawing of breaths. Consecutive blank, shocked, then angry faces.
Helen sat stiffly, a strained look on her face. Oh, she had my sympathy. I know she's had an abortion, years ago; that kind of thing goes the rounds. Hers, of course, was for purely medical reasons, but here she is, trying to justify that long-dead decision, still. The albatross society places lovingly on our shoulders; guilt for having managed to evade 'responsibility'. As for myself, I'd lied; had a spontaneous miscarriage, no abortion, but as far as I'm concerned it's all the same.
"Well!", the philosopher smacked his open hands flat on his fat little knees. I smiled, as sweet a smile as I could muster.
I should leave now, I thought. A glance at my watch told twenty after one. Then Shirley happened over, stood before us, a bright peahen, the perfect hostess, assessing the situation. She asked about the "WONDERfully animated conversation" she had noticed from across the room. Helen smiled weakly at her. The men sat silently, ungiving, a curmudgeonly group. Shirley retreated, in understandable confusion.
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Upstairs, I entered the spare bedroom, for my coat. Shirley hangs family photographs in the bedrooms. On one wall are old pictures taken when she and her sister in California, and Howard, the youngest, were children. A photograph of Howard, standing beside a potted palm, wearing a sailor suit. Shirley beside him, arm about him as though protectively. Two attractive children.
Shirley don't you ever wonder, when you look at that photograph? Do you ever look at it?
Some quirk of light, some odd circumstance of the angle perhaps, was responsible for the peculiar shading on Howard's trousers. As though he'd relieved himself, darkening the inside seams of his sailor suit. He stands there, in perpetuity, a happy carefree child; perhaps even then viewing the world as a monumental farce. I'm convinced it's no mere quirk of light, that darkness. It's Howard, uncaring for the seemly, even then; urinating for the camera.
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God, my head's splitting! No, it's not true, Howard didn't feel contempt for the world. I'm colouring him as I thought he should have been, not as he was. That's the good thing about photographs, they can't talk back.
I complain to Howard about my mother, and tell my mother, confide in her now as I never did then, what a roaring tyrant Howard was, still is.
c. 1979 Rita Rosenfeld
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