In Passing Judgement

Herewith, the latest selection from dusted-off published poetry and short fiction, circa 1970s vintage and beyond....

I saw her for the first time at my mother's house where she had been invited with the rest of her family, to meet mine. It had been an occasion for celebration, according to my mother. My sister had finally met her future husband. The date was set for the wedding and there we were, both sides as it were, taking each other's measure.

On meeting them and talking with them I began to feel just a trifle superior. We all have our prejudices and dull people always struck me that way; social inferiors. This family was undistinguished; physically attractive, with a bovine touch. The men particularly offended me. They were so obviously unlettered. All the outward manifestations of material well-being there, but there existed an unforgivable paucity of intellect. And wit.

I'm of the opinion that if ever extraterrestrials did visit this Planet and took away a specimen - say someone of their ilk - they would come away convinced, as Frederick II of Prussia did when he placed a man in a sealed jar, waited for him to expire, then poked about inside the death chamber looking for that elusive theorem, the soul - that there is no such excuse for the human being.

"He's nice", Dorothy told me when she first began to go out with her future husband. "He's good looking and he's ... nice." Lamely, she said that. What word after all, is more tepidly insipid than that one; 'nice'. The word says it all. But not quite all, because she continued, preparing me.

"He has this funny way of talking, like a holdover from another time. You'd call it crude, probably."

"Is he halfway intelligent? Can you have a reasonable conversation?" I pressed. My mother was anxious for Dorothy to get married, not to have her end up like me. But I liked to think that when my younger sister did marry she would at least choose someone who might challenge her intellectually. Dorothy is a smart girl.

"Well ... sure. I guess. I mean, it's hard to tell. He doesn't say too much. Anyway, he drives a new car, has a good job." It was at that juncture that I began to wonder why I'd always thought my sister was fairly intelligent. Because she had a good academic record, that's why. Which, of course, means little, come to think of it.

My mother's concerns of potential spinsterhood running in the family had obviously begun to rub off. Had in fact, rubbed the sharp edges off my sister's fine sense of discrimination. Dorothy, despite professing not to care, it became evident, had been experiencing her own panic of uncertainty about her future.

This is all background, you understand; the story isn't about my sister and her husband. It's her husband's sister-in-law, his brother's wife, who was at the bottom of all this 'family mess'.

But they were cut from the same cloth. Actually, that's a fairly accurate metaphor since the family was in the business of manufacturing wearing apparel. They were cultural philistines, but they knew their fashion. They owned several boutiques and employed skilled people to handcraft their original designs.

I'd never shopped in one of their places myself. Couldn't afford to. You know the type of establishment - in a high-rent district. Yorkville, the Colonnade. Decorator-appointed rooms with no racks. You asked a member of the sales personnel to display garments for you and if you wished, live mannequins were available to model items of your choice.

When you saw them at a soiree they'd be dressed to the hilt. Talk of your sow's ears. The men were louts who drank too much and spoke too loudly. the women were only slightly venal by comparison, and probably were easily led, dominated by the men. Not being aware of anything that might be different than what their life experience had led them to.

But back to that initial setting. I can only speak for myself. I can imagine what they thought of 'our' side. My parents' house is shabby. Books have always been of more importance than material objects. So probably we impressed them as minutely as they did me. But Miriam, the woman in question here, appeared more promising than the rest of them. Perhaps it was only because her connection was not one of consanguinity. She seemed brighter than the others, chattering unaffectedly, like a friendly parrot.

Then, at Dorothy's wedding, her new husband looked pale and serious. No wise-cracking that day and evening. His brother however, made up for that lapse, obnoxious enough for two. Have you ever seen that painting by Jan Brueghel the Elder, the one called 'Peasant Wedding'? It's full of dissipated burghers, gross-looking and crude. The festive music of Leopold Mozart, when it's played as it was meant to be, is like that, too. Loud, brashly vulgar, common.

"Have 'nother drink!" Dorothy's brand-new brother-in-law kept urging me, following me like a trained seal all evening. Heaven knew why.

"Look't thim", he'd said, leering at my poor sister who always hated social gatherings and was now the focus of this one. "Just look't thim - they can't wait to get going."

Actually, I knew more than he did, the idiotic sot. I knew they'd already 'got going', that my sister was stupidly pregnant. But that's neither here nor there.

More to the point was Frank's - that was his name - wife Miriam following him following me around. "Frank, I wanna have a dance", she kept insisting, and he would shrug her off, obviously annoyed. "Come on, Ruthie, let's dance", he said to me every time she approached him, and she would regard me reproachfully. Well, I didn't want him. One dance with him had been enough, and I kept begging off, trying to lose myself in the crowd.

I finally, almost belatedly, made the discovery that if I threw enough little verbal puzzlements at him, expecting him to respond intelligently - that is looking as though I did - with questions like: "Wouldn't you agree that Pavlov's behaviour experimentation closely parallelled, pre-dating though it did, B.F. Skinner's boxes?" Or: "Ardrey and Lorenz aren't so far off the mark, are they?" His disingenuous and vacant smile changed gradually to one of offended incredulity, then doltish annoyance. Finally, he trudged off, leaving me free of his overtures.

But all that is history. Stale. My sister had been married to her dullard for five years and in that time we had become somewhat alienated. Me never wanting to visit with them, feeling uncomfortable in their company. They glad I didn't, knowing how I felt. Jack likely reciprocating. Then Dorothy telephoned one day to tell me: "Miriam's staying with us."

"Oh?" The extent of my interest.

"Yes. Her husband won't let her come back."

"Back?"

"Didn't I tell you? She went away. To Mexico, for a trip. Didn't even tell him. Just left him and her two kids and off she went."

"So?"

"So he won't let her come back. So, she's staying with us until he changes his mind."

A week later she called again. "She's still here. He refuses to see her, still."

"If I were her, I'd celebrate."

"Ver-ry funny! She wants to be with her children."

"Why'd she leave, then?"

"He's not easy to live with."

"I'd have guessed as much." Unsaid, she seemed no bargain either.

"But neither was she. Moody and possessive", my sister remarked. "Anyway, he had her committed once and he's threatened to do it again. She's terrified of electric-shock therapy."

"Nice family you married into."

"Ruth, my husband's family has nothing to do with the kind of life I lead."

Oh yes, of course. "So what's going to happen?" I asked. Not really caring, but making the effort. Regretting what I had said, attempting to divert her.

"We're ... Jack ... is talking to Frank. He'll have him see reason."

Not likely. Where there is no sign of intelligence there is no reason. But there is a passionate devotion to self. If the woman had had the good sense to take off, to leave the stupid bugger, she should have been smart enough to make a complete break. But then, there was that tangible element that I couldn't relate to personally, her children. I did, after all, feel sorry for her.

When Dorothy next called, she said she was getting tired of having her sister-in-law around. I reminded Dorothy that Miriam was, after all, her sister-in-law, and a troubled person, and as such she was her sister's keeper. Rubbing it in, maybe.

"Anyway, what happened? You sounded so optimistic last week. Said Frank had agreed to take her back. Though God knows why she'd want to go."

"Her children, remember?"

"I remember. What happened?"

"He changed his mind. Said no. She'd been ready to go back, packed and everything and then he called, said don't bother bringing her over."

"Just like that, eh? Does he expect her to stay with you until he changes his mind, eventually?"

"I don't know", she admitted dispiritedly. But then, that's how she always sounds. Since she married Jack, anyway. "All I know is that she walks around here like a living corpse. Getting quieter all the time. At first she played with the kids. Now she doesn't do anything but stay downstairs in the recreation room, just sitting there. Brooding, I guess. Or she goes out for long walks, alone. It's creepy."

"How about her family?"

"She's only got us. And the rest of the family. Her parents aren't alive."

"Well, one of Frank's sisters. How about one of them taking over, making a tiny personal sacrifice, if for nothing else but a sense of humane obligation?"

"You know what they're like. They say because she left their brother and the kids they won't have anything to do with her. They pass harsh judgement on her. She knows that, and doesn't expect anything from them."

"If she's as distracted as you say, maybe she needs some professional help."

"Don't I know it! But I've tried to talk her into seeing a doctor, a psychiatrist ... going to a social help agency ... she won't listen. She's fearful they'll put her away again."

Dorothy had my sympathy too. People have their troubles. People, but not me. The only time I've had any trouble was when people imposed upon me. So I've always felt the less I became involved with anyone the better. I almost told her, "that's what you get for being such a good soul", but I didn't. I didn't because I thought she was right, looking after the woman. I mean, what is right for me is not necessarily right for someone else. Is it?

Anyway, the next week she sounded more hopeful again. Said they were expecting Frank over on Wednesday. He had agreed over the telephone to bring their children over. To let them see their mother. The chance of a reconciliation, she said, looked brighter.

Soon these back-and-forth calls began to resemble something uncannily out of a grimly warped rendition of the "Keystone Kops"; on again, off again. And the strain was beginning to show.

"He didn't come. He just didn't show up. Here we were, all of us, waiting, and he didn't bring them over! When we called he said he'd changed his mind, again!"

"Didn't think he had one."

"Can't you be serious? It's a damn serious thing! Miriam is more depressed than ever. She's become almost paranoid. He said he promised to see her if she went to a psychiatrist first. She's torn with indecision. Doesn't trust him. Thinks it's a ploy to have her committed."

"Well?"

"Well, she won't! I told you before, I've tried and tried. She won't go! And really, I don't know what we're going to do. She's become a millstone. And it costs money to feed another person, too."

"Since when were you short of money for food?" The cheap bastard, Jack. That was him speaking through her. She never used to be like that.

Dorothy was miffed, said she wouldn't bother calling again since I was so unhelpful, so obviously hostile. I believe in telling the truth, so I said that suited me quite well.

Anyway, when she called again her voice was firm; decided. "She's got to go", she stated baldly.

"About time", I said. "Where to?"

"Anywhere, just out of here." A significant pause. "She's pregnant."

"Oh. Women do get pregnant, you know. You know."

"Goddammit! you're subtle. Not by him, not by Frank. It must have happened on her trip."

"I see. Well now, she does need help, doesn't she? He still wants her committed?"

"No. Now he says he doesn't give a damn what happens to her"

"So, what'll it be? Just throw her out? That'll be good for her in the state she's in, won't it? Positive action, that's what it is. If that doesn't make her put her life into perspective, nothing will, eh?"

"Look, don't come off so pious on me! Would you do differently?"

I dislike hypothetical questions. "She's not my family, remember?"

The upshot was that they rented a room somewhere downtown for her. She was being assisted by a social worker, and got a job. She tried, apparently, to convince her social worker that she should have her children with her. The worker told her that it was obvious she couldn't provide well for the children. So what the poor woman did, was go out and buy all kinds of expensive furniture on time payments. She put them in a nice apartment, and brought the worker back to have a second look. It was so pathetic, so transparent.

I didn't go to the funeral home or the service. Dorothy told me that Miriam looked 'serene'. "Her hands were tucked in under the bottom half of the casket, so nothing looked ... wrong", Dorothy said. "She looked at peace."

I had, though, gone out to the cemetery and stood apart from everyone, watching. I heard the pastor quote from St.Paul: "You have no excuse ... when you judge another; for in passing judgement upon him, you condemn yourself." Its meaning not lost on me.

It was a cold autumn day and there was a wind, enough to keep the dry leaves on the maples shushing in the way they do, like a monomial elegy. It had earlier rained, so the ground was muck. Where the earth had been dug into, it looked reddish and clay-ey,and there was a grass-like carpet over the open plot, waiting for the casket.

They were all there, looking grim, but elegant. Everyone appropriately attired in mourning black. The garments exquisitely cut in their own shops, draped just so. The men's shoes brought to a dull lustre, clots of mud clinging to the edges of the soles. Ah yes, clots of dirt clinging to the edges of their souls.

I saw, at one point, Frank flick some fallen seed-pods off the shoulder of his jacket. Later, he surreptitiously flicked a tissue over the back of his shoes. Their old mother, wearing her mink early this year, snuffled becomingly into a lace handkerchiefs. Appearance is crucial.

There were so many people. Obviously, a large number of business contacts and clients had attended. Out of respect for the deceased. Someone they'd never met. There had been a black-bordered notice in the paper.

When Dorothy called me the following week, she told me how upset the family had been. Oh, not what you're thinking. They were annoyed, she said, at my lack of concern for their collective sensibilities. Why me? Well, I had worn a plum-coloured pantsuit to the cemetery, number one.

And number two, I had managed to commiserate with Frank, in a loud aside, congratulating him for having solved the nuisance of 'that problem', so neatly.

The hell with what you're thinking. I haven't condemned myself. Look, that's life. Isn't it?

c. 1996 Rita Rosenfeld