The War Between the Tates: A Novel (42 page)

But this gain is as nothing to the loss—to the realization that the fate Brian had amused himself by imagining for Dibble is to fall instead on him. It is due in part to a journalistic accident: the fact that one of the shots of Brian struggling with the protesters happened to come out well. In a week rather low on news, this striking photograph was seized upon by the editor of the Corinth
Courier
and reproduced across four columns on page one. It was almost a classic image of the women’s liberation threat, at once comic and symbolic: a small middle-aged man, his face expressing fear and outrage, being wrestled to the floor by long-haired young Amazons.

The following day the picture appeared in the
New York Times,
accompanied by a photograph of Dibble’s escape and an account of the crisis. The story was picked up by a news service, and by the end of the week had been carried nationwide—though in most cases the photo of Dibble, which only showed a man climbing up or down a rope against a building, was printed much smaller or not at all. Several papers, apparently finding the facts too complex, omitted mention of Dibble entirely, giving their readers the impression that it was Brian Tate who had offended so many young women. And such is the power of the graphic image that even those who were able to read something like the true story laid down their papers thinking of Tate as a violent opponent of the new feminism—otherwise, why were all those girls attacking him?

Already the effects of all this are beginning to manifest. Brian has been claimed as an ally by Corinth antifeminists, several of whom have telephoned to congratulate him on his stand. Encouraging letters have begun to arrive from persons he has never met, both in Hopkins County and elsewhere. A few of these letters are brief and rational; but most are long and hysterical, expressive of fanatical misogyny. (“Jesus will Bless you for your Sufferings at the hands of those Filthy Bitches, those Foul Jades of Satan’s Womb—for they are not True Wombmen but Barren Whores ... predicted one such letter, typed on the stationery of an Oldsmobile agency in southern New Jersey.)

Not all Brian’s fans are male; he has received many sympathetic letters from self-styled “old-fashioned” women, some of them members of an organization he had not known existed called Happy American Homemakers. Two of these hinted strongly that if Brian were ever to-find himself in Cape Neddick, Maine, or Wichita, Kansas, they would be happy to make him at home.

All these letters Brian has been able to read with ironic detachment, if not with indifference. What he finds harder to take is what he calls his hate mail, all from women. It ranges from the hurt queries of former favorite students and female relatives (including his mother and aunt) to ugly postcards and thick letters from angry feminists, abusing and cursing him—sometimes in language far stronger than that of the Oldsmobile salesman. These letters and cards come to the political science department, where the cards at least can be and probably are read by Helen Wells and her three assistants before they are placed in Brian’s mailbox. Because of the story in
Time,
where Brian’s name was irritatingly modified by the adjectives “small, square-jawed, recently separated,” they often remark that it is no wonder his wife threw him out. Another frequent theme is the supposed insignificant size or absence of his sexual organs. Reading this mail, Brian often thinks that if he were not already convinced of the basic aggressiveness and coarseness of women, he would be so now.

Apart from this unpleasant correspondence, Brian has had to endure many inquisitive telephone calls and proposals for interviews (“My Woman Problem” was the title suggested to him by one free-lance journalist who had a “connection” and hoped to get the resulting article into
Penthouse
); also the mock jovial remarks of colleagues, the glances and whisperings of students, and the sniggering recognition of people in local stores and gas stations (“Say, aren’t you the professor who ...).

Other wars end eventually in victory, defeat or exhaustion, but the war between men and women goes on forever. Now, through a journalistic accident, it is as if Brian has stepped in front of J. Donald Dibble on that perpetual battlefield, deflecting onto himself both the jeers of the public and the armed wrath of the American bitch-goddess in all her forms. Meanwhile Dibble, the real enemy, escapes. He has received many fewer letters, almost none of them abusive; soon he will be on some other campus, his part in the crisis forgotten.

But Brian must remain in Corinth, where recent events will pass into university history, and that garbled news story, that vulgarly comic photograph, will haunt him for the rest of his life. In a horrible way, he has got his wish; the spell spoken over his cradle has come true, and after trying for forty-seven years he has become a famous man.

M
ID-APRIL; THE HARD
bright cold has broken, and it has been raining for nearly a week. The ditches and creeks and gorges are full of churning milk chocolate; the new grass is plastered flat against muddy lawns; clouds hang low to the ground. In the house on Jones Creek Road cold water streams down the windowpanes; water drips through the roof of the back porch, just as it did last autumn. Brian promised to fix the roof then, but he did not. He Will probably never fix it now.

Erica cannot afford to have the porch roof repaired, or the electric frying pan; she cannot pay to get the fender of the station wagon straightened out where some clumsy and dishonest person backed into it in the university parking lot last month, and then drove off without leaving a note. She is barely able to meet expenses on what Brian gives her, although she is now working twenty hours a week at a very demanding job. She cannot afford anything nice any more: roast beef or a new novel, or trips to New York, or tickets to the concert series; she hasn’t bought a new dress in months.

And except for the children, who complain about how dull meals are, nobody notices. Nobody seems to think it strange that Erica doesn’t have her car repaired or wear a new dress or go to concerts any more. She is no longer one of their company, a member of the local academic aristocracy, but a leftover housewife and ill-paid editorial assistant. Brian, however, has kept his position as a professor, and become in addition a man-about-town. Also, since a week ago Thursday, a national hero of reactionary antifeminism, with his photograph in every newspaper in America.

In a way it is unfair that Brian should have this reputation. He had gone beyond his obligation to the political science department in trying to rescue Dibble, who is a very disagreeable person and has never done anything for him. Besides, it is bad for Brian’s or anyone’s character to be punished for doing the right thing, while they are rewarded for, or at least get away with, their misdeeds.

But in another sense it is only poetic justice that her husband should take Dibble’s place as a feminist scapegoat; for Brian has also injured women, not in the abstract, but specifically and personally. It is only right that they should take revenge on him; and that everyone should see what he is really like under his mask of rational virtue.

And in fact, judging by the remarks made to Erica by her acquaintances, everyone does see—with the single exception of Wendy Gahaghan. Although her former roommate and best friend, Linda Sliski, received an ugly bruise on her leg while struggling with Brian, Wendy remains loyal to him. Of course Wendy’s capacity for dumb devotion was apparent from the beginning. There was a time when Erica thought Brian deserved such devotion; when she felt guilty for not providing it herself, and eager to pass on the task to someone else. She still feels guilty; but now because she had encouraged Wendy to believe in a false god, and thus given Brian what he had always wanted and no longer deserved—what in the long run can only be bad for him, and worse for her.

With a sigh, Erica drags the pail out from under the kitchen sink and fills it with hot water. It is her day off, but since she cannot afford help, she usually spends most of it cleaning house. She has to hurry today, because she is meeting Sandy at noon. She adds detergent and scouring powder to the pail, wondering why she is doing this, when nobody will care if the floor is dirty. The children never notice; and Sandy isn’t coming here, and if he were wouldn’t notice either. This is discouraging, though in a way nicer than Brian—who always noticed, and sometimes complained.

Sandy is nicer than Brian in many ways, Erica thinks, lifting the pan out of the sink. He is kinder and more considerate, with a better sense of humor, and he knows much more about gardening and carpentry and art and music and old children’s books. Though he has refused to attend any more parties, he will go with her to places and events Brian used to scorn: an art opening or a tour of the new fire station or a house sale or a bird walk. This is important, now that Jeffrey and Matilda are rudely unwilling to accompany her, and Danielle more and more often busy with her boring Dr. Kotelchuk.

Sandy is an agreeable companion on all such excursions. His work at the Krishna Bookshop seldom seems to get in the way—though he has warned her that it may do so this summer, when he and his students begin working on their “meditation center.” They have already bought land about twenty miles from Corinth in a barren wooded area, and are planning to clear it and build a cabin with their own hands, including Sandy’s hands. For a moment Erica gazes out the kitchen window across the fields to the west, in the direction of the proposed meditation center, frowning. Then she opens the cellar door to unhook the sponge mop from the wall within, and shuts the door quickly so as not to be reminded that the cellar also needs to be cleaned.

Putting the mop into the pail to soak, she sets the kitchen chairs on top of the kitchen table, thinking that in spite of his odd beliefs Sandy is easier to talk to than Brian. He does not, as she had feared he might, try to convert her to his faith; he never lectures her or tells her what to read or what to think. He listens much better than Brian; also he has a wonderful memory and can tell amusing stories about his childhood and his adventures in California and the Far East.

Erica sloshes the mop up and down in the sudsy water and begins mopping the floor in shiny overlapping strips. For the hundredth time in six years she thinks what an expensive mistake it was to buy these red vinyl tiles, which looked so good in the store but faded to a dirty pink within the first year and showed every spill and speck of dust from the start. Then, for the hundredth time in six weeks, she thinks of something Danielle said about Sandy: that he is not only nice but “too nice to be a man.”

Recently Erica has had proof of the truth of this statement, though perhaps not yet conclusive proof. But she might have suspected sooner—even on that first snowy evening in the bookshop, when Sandy did not press his advantage as most men would have. Or she might have guessed in the following weeks, when he seemed quite content with gently enthusiastic kisses and hugs of the sort an affectionate child might lavish on a new pet.

Erica noticed this hesitancy, this childish diffidence—but it pleased rather than troubled her. She thought that Sandy was too much in awe of her to hope or expect that she would sleep with him; that he wanted to spare them both the embarrassment and pain of a refusal. No doubt he had suffered refusals before; had, perhaps often, been laughed at and rejected. Certainly something like that must have happened to make him hesitate, even turn away from life. But knowing what men are like, Erica knew that instinctively Sandy must want more. It was her duty to give it to him—to convince him that her friendship and charity were real. Nor would hers be a shallow, soup-kitchen kind of charity: she did not mean merely to fill a temporary need, but to deconvert Sandy, to bring him back into the world in every way and show him that it was real and good, so that he would give up his pathetic empty asceticism.

With all this in mind, Erica chose her time and place carefully. She had given Sandy his unexpected birthday present impulsively and under poor conditions. Now that he was, in both senses, going to receive the present of his life, it should be under the best possible circumstances and in the most attractive gift wrapping. It must happen in her own house, for motels were sordid and the Krishna Bookshop grungy and cold—and when there was no chance of interruption. Therefore she waited until the children had gone to Connecticut with Brian for spring vacation, and the place was empty.

Erica, like the rest of the nonacademic help at Corinth, had no spring vacation to speak of, but she did have Good Friday off. She made a light but elegant lunch (avocado salad, shrimp bisque, white wine) and cleansed the relevant parts of the house. She changed the bed in the spare room, putting on fresh sheets with a pattern of wild roses, and drew down the blinds three fourths of the way, so that parallelograms of sun fell on the carpet and a warm, watery light suffused the rest. She did not dress up—it seemed too obvious, and she had nothing really nice to wear anyhow—but she took a shower and put on a clean garnet-colored sweater and black wool slacks, and under them her best lavender-lace bra and panties. Then she got out her diaphragm, which had become quite stiff and dry with neglect under its coating of talcum powder, but seemed on inspection to be intact—at least it didn’t leak under the faucet—and put it in with an extra large helping of jelly, bought with some awkwardness the day before at a drug store where she was unknown.

Everything was ready. And for the first hour, everything went as she had planned. She kissed Sandy even more affectionately than usual when he arrived, though his face was unpleasantly blotched with cold from the time he had spent trying to hitch a ride out to Jones Creek Road. She served lunch, turning the talk lightly toward love, teasing, reminiscing. There was a significant moment when she made some generalization about men, and Sandy, smiling, protested, “You can’t say that.”

“I can too,”

“Speaking from wide experience, I suppose.”

“I’ve never had any experience, except Brian,” Erica replied. “But a woman just knows.” And she laughed gaily, glad to have told Sandy what would make the gift he was about to receive more valuable.