To Sail Beyond the Sunset (40 page)

I said briskly, “Tell them yourself.” I was not feeling overly sweet-tempered, as I had been up late the night before, arranging shake-downs for late arrivals, such as Briggs himself—he was one of the cheerful idiots who had arrived in Chicago oblivious to the fact that for this period all hotel space as far away as Gary, Indiana, had been booked solid months earlier. Then I dragged myself out of bed early and ate in the kitchen in order to cook and serve breakfast to a dozen other people.

Briggs looked at me as if he could not believe his ears. “Aren’t you the housekeeper?”

“I’m the housekeeper. But I’m not your servant.”

Briggs blinked his eyes, then turned to Brian. “Mr. Smith?”

Brian said quietly, “You have made a mistake, Mr. Briggs. This lady is my wife. You met her last night but the lights were dimmed and we were whispering because others were asleep. So apparently you did not recognize her this morning. But I am sure Mrs. Smith would be happy to send your laundry out for you as a favor to a guest.”

I said, “No, I would not.”

It was Briney’s turn to look startled. “Maureen?”

“I won’t send out his laundry and I will not cook his breakfast tomorrow morning. His only comment this morning was to complain about his eggs; he did not even say thank-you when I put his breakfast in front of him. So he can go out for breakfast tomorrow. I imagine he’ll find something open on Sixty-third Street. But I have this announcement for all of you,” I added, looking around. “We have no servants here. I am just as anxious to get to Convention Hall on time as you are. Yesterday I was late because I was making beds and doing dishes. Only one of you made your own bed—thanks, Merle! I’m not going to make beds today; if you don’t make your own bed, you will find it still unmade when you get back. Right now I want volunteers to clear the table and do the dishes…and if I don’t get them, I am not going to cook breakfast for anyone tomorrow.”

An hour later Brian and I left to go to the convention. While we were walking to the El station he said to me, “Mo’, this is the first time I’ve had a chance to speak to you privately. I really did not appreciate your failure to back me up in dealing with another trustee.”

“How?” I asked (knowing quite well what he meant).

“I told Mr. Briggs that you would be happy to send out his laundry, and then you flatly refused, contradicting me. My dear, I was humiliated.”

“Briney, I was humiliated when you attempted to reverse me after I had told him to send out his laundry himself. I simply stuck by my guns.”

“But he had made a mistake, dear; he thought you were a servant. I tried to smooth it over by saying that of course you were happy to do it as a favor to a guest.”

“Why didn’t you say that you would be happy to send out his laundry?”

“Eh?” Brian seemed truly puzzled.

“I can tell you why you didn’t offer to do it. Because both you men regard sending out laundry as women’s work. And it is, when it’s your laundry and I am the woman. But I’m not Rufus Briggs’s wife and I will not do servant’s work for him. He’s a clod.”

“Maureen, sometimes I don’t understand you.”

“You’re right; sometimes you don’t.”

“I mean—Take this matter of making beds and washing dishes. When we are at home we never expect house guests to wash the dishes or to make their own beds.”

“At home, Briney, I always have two or three big girls to help me…and never a dozen house guests at a time. And our women guests usually offer to help and if I need their help, I let them. Nothing like this mob I’m faced with now. They are not friends; they aren’t relatives; most are total strangers to me and all act as if we were running a boarding house. But most of them at least say thank-you and please. Mr. Briggs does not. Briney, at bottom you and Mr. Briggs have the same attitude toward women; you both think of women as servants.”

“I don’t see that. I don’t think you are being fair.”

“So? Then I ask you again: If you wanted to be gracious to a guest, why did you not offer your own services to take care of his laundry? You can use a telephone and the yellow section quite as well as I can, then you can arrange for or do whatever is necessary. There is nothing about sending out laundry that requires special womanly skills; you can do it as easily as I. Why did you see fit to volunteer my services in the face of my stated opposition?”

“I thought it was the gracious thing to do.”

“Gracious to whom, sir? To your wife? Or to the business associate who was rude to her?”

“Uh—We’ll say no more about it.”

That incident was not unusual; it was exceptional only in that I refused to accept the conventional subordinate role under which a woman, any woman, was expected to wait on men. Repealing laws does not change such attitudes because they are learned by example from earliest childhood.

These attitudes can’t be repealed like laws because they are usually below the conscious level. Consider, please, who makes the coffee. You are in a mixed group, business or quasi-business: a company conference, a public interest group, a PTA meeting. As a lubricant for the exchange of ideas, coffee is a good idea, and the means to make it is at hand.

Who makes the coffee? It could be a man. But don’t bet on it. Ten to one you would lose.

Let’s move forward thirty years from the incident of Rufus Briggs the soft-starched clod, from 1940 to 1970. By 1970 most legal impediments to equality between the sexes were gone. This incident involved a board meeting of Skyblast Freight, a D. D. Harriman enterprise. I was a director and this was not my first meeting. I knew all the directors by sight and they knew me or at least had had opportunity to know me.

However I admit that I was looking younger than the last time they had seen me. I had had my pendulous baby-chewed breasts reshaped, and at the same Beverly Hills hospital I had tucks taken up under the hairline to take the slack out of my face, then I had gone to an Arizona health ranch to get into top condition and to lose fifteen pounds. I had gone next to Vegas and splurged on ultra chic, very feminine, new clothes—not the tailored pantsuits most female executives wore. I was smugly aware that I did not look the eighty-eight years I had lived, nor the fifty-eight years I admitted. I think I looked a smart forty.

I was waiting in the foyer outside the boardroom, intending not to go in until called—board meetings are dull rituals…but a crisis is sure to come up if you skip one.

Just as the light outside the boardroom started to blink a man came slamming in from outside, Mr. Phineas Morgan, leader of a large minority bloc. He headed straight for the blinking light while shucking off his overcoat. As he passed me, he chucked it at me. “Take care of it!”

I ducked aside, let his coat land on the floor. “Hey! Morgan!” He checked himself, looked back. I pointed at the floor. “Your coat.”

He looked surprised, amazed, indignant, angry, and vindictive, all in one second. “Why, you little bitch! I’ll have you fired for that.”

“Go right ahead.” I moved past him into the boardroom, found my place card, and sat down. A few seconds later he sat down opposite me, at which point his face managed still another expression.

Phineas Morgan had not intentionally tried to use a fellow director as a servant. He saw a female figure who, in his mind, must be hired staff—secretary, receptionist, clerk, whatever. He was late and in a hurry and assumed that this “subordinate employee” would as a matter of course hang up his coat so that he could go straight to roll call.

The moral? In 1970 on time line two the legal system assumed that a man is innocent until proved guilty; in 1970 on time line two the cultural system assumed that a female is subordinate until proved otherwise—despite all laws that asserted that the sexes were equal.

I planned to kick that assumption in the teeth.

August 5, 1952, marked the beginning of my bachelorhood because that was the day on which I resolved that from that time on I would be treated the way a man is treated with respect to rights and privileges—or I would raise hell about it. I no longer had a family, I was no longer capable of childbearing, I was not looking for a husband, I was financially independent (and then some!), and I was firmly resolved never again “to send out the laundry” for some man merely because I use the washroom intended for setters rather than the one set aside for pointers.

I did not plan to be aggressive about it. If a gentleman held a door for me, I would accept the courtesy and thank him. Gentlemen enjoy offering little gallantries; a lady enjoys accepting them graciously, with a smile and a word of thanks.

I mention this because, by the 1970s, there were many females who would snub a man unmercifully if he offered a gallantry, such as holding a chair for a woman, or offering to help her in or out of a car. These women (a minority but a ubiquitous, obnoxious one) treated traditional courtesy as if it were an insult. I grew to think of these females as the “Lesbian Mafia.” I don’t know that all of them were homosexual (although I’m certain about some of them) but their behavior caused me to lump them all together.

If some of them were not Lesbians, then where did they find heterosexual mates? What sort of wimp would put up with this sort of rudeness in women? I am sorry to say that by 1970 there were plenty of wimps of every sort. The wimps were taking over. Manly men, gallant gentlemen the sort who do no wait to be drafted, were growing scarce.

The principal problem in closing the house lay in the books: what to store, what to give away, what to take with me. The furniture and the small stuff, from pots and pans to sheets, would mostly be given to Good Will. We had been in that house twenty-three years, 1929 to 1952; most of the furniture was that old, or nearly so, and, after being worked over by a swarm of active children all those years, the market value of these chattels was too low to justify placing them in storage—since I had no intention of setting up a proper household in the foreseeable future.

I hesitated over my old upright piano. It was an old friend; Briney had given it to me in 1909—second (third?) hand even then; it was the first proof that Brian Smith Associates was actually in the black. Brian had paid fourteen dollars for it at an auction.

No! If my plans were to work out, I must travel light. Pianos can be rented anywhere.

Having resolved to give up my piano other decisions were easy, so I decided to start with the books. Move all books from all over the house into the living—no, into the dining room; pile them on the dining table. Pile them high. Pile the rest on the floor. Who could believe that one house could hold so many books?

Roll in the big utility table; start stacking on it books to be stored. Roll in the little tea table; place on it books to take with me. Set up card tables for books to go to Good Will. Or to the Salvation Army? Whichever one will come and get the stuff, soonest, can have the lot—clothes, books, bed clothes, furniture, whatever. But they’ve got to come get it.

An hour later I was still telling myself firmly: No! Don’t stop to read anything! If you just must read it, then put that book in the “take with” pile—you can thin it down later.

When I heard the mewing of a cat.

I said to myself, “Oh, that girl! Susan, what have you done to me?”

Two years earlier we had become catless through the tragic demise of Captain Blood, grandson of Chargé d’Affaires—sudden death from a hit-and-run driver on Rockhill Boulevard. In the preceding forty-three years I had never tried keeping house without a cat. I tend to agree with Mr. Clemens, who rented three cats when he moved into his home in Connecticut in order to give a new house that lived-in feeling.

But this time I resolved to struggle along without a cat. Patrick was eighteen, Susan was sixteen; each had received his Howard list. It was predictable that each would be leaving the nest in the near future.

Cats have one major shortcoming. Once you adopt one, you are stuck for life. The cat’s life, that is. The cat does not speak English; it does not understand broken promises. If you abandon it, it will die and its ghost will haunt your nights.

At dinner the day Captain Blood was killed none of us ate much and we were not talkative. At last Susan said, “Mama, do we start watching the want-ads? Or do we go to the Humane Society?”

“For what, dear?” (I was intentionally obtuse.)

“For a kitten, of course.”

So I laid it on the line: “A kitten could live fifteen years, or longer. When you two leave home this house will be sold, as I have no intention of rattling around in a fourteen-room house, alone. Then what happens to the cat?

“Nothing. Because there is not going to be a cat.”

About two weeks later Susan was a bit late getting home from school. She came in and said, “Mama, I must be gone a couple of hours. An errand.” She was carrying a brown paper sack.

“Yes, dear. May I ask why and where?”

“This.” She put the sack on my kitchen table. It tilted and a kitten walked out. A jellicle cat, small and neat and black and white, just as described in Mr. Eliot’s poem.

I said, “Oh, dear!”

Susan said, “It’s all right, Mama. I’ve already explained to her that she can’t live here.”

The kitten looked at me, wide-eyed, then sat down and started pin-pleating its white jabot. I said, “What is her name?”

“She doesn’t have one, Mama. It wouldn’t be fair to give her one. I’m taking her down to the Humane Society so that she can be put to sleep without hurting. That’s the errand I have to do.”

I was firm with Susan. She must feed the kitten herself. She must clean and refill its sand box as long as it needed one. She must train it to use the cat door. She must see to its shots, taking it back and forth to the veterinary hospital at the Plaza as necessary. The kitten was hers and hers alone, and she must plan on taking it with her when she married and left home.

Kitten and girl listened to this, round-eyed and solemn, and both agreed to the terms. And I attempted not to get friendly with this cat—let her look entirely to Susan, bond only with Susan.

But what do you do when a square ball of black and white fluff sits up on its hind legs, sticks out its little fat belly, waves its three-inch arms beside its ears, and says, plain as anything, “Please, Mama. Please come fight with me.”