“You’re talking like Beulah,” I objected.
“Because there aren’t any other words to talk with. The uprush from within of something strong and wonderful, something that’s manifestly greater than yourself; the things and events which, from being neutral or downright hostile, suddenly, gratuitously, spontaneously come to your rescue—these are facts. They can be observed, they can be experienced. But if you want to talk about them, you discover that the only vocabulary is the theologian’s. Grace, Guidance, Inspiration, Providence—the words protest too much, beg all the questions before they’re asked. But there are occasions when you can’t avoid them. Here was Katy, for example. When she came back from Chicago, the virtue had gone out of her. Gone out of her so completely that she was useless to Henry and a burden to herself. Another woman might have prayed for strength, and the prayer might have been answered—because prayers do get answered sometimes. Which is absurd, which is out of the question; and yet it happens.
Not, however, to people like Katy. Katy wasn’t the praying kind. For her, the supernatural was Nature; the divine was neither spiritual nor specifically human; it was in landscapes and sunshine and animals; it was in flowers, in the sour smell of little babies, in the warmth and softness of snuggling children; it was in kisses, of course, in the nocturnal apocalypses of love, in the more diffuse but no less ineffable bliss of just feeling well.
She was a kind of feminine Antaeus—invincible while her feet were on the ground, a goddess so long as she was in contact with the greater goddess within her, the universal Mother without. Three weeks of attendance on a dying woman had broken that contact. Grace came when it was restored, and that happened on the night of April the twenty-third. An hour of love, five or six hours of the deeper otherness of sleep, and the emptiness was filled, the ghost reincarnated. She lived again—yet not she, of course, but the Unknown Quantity lived in her. The Unknown Quantity,” he repeated.
“At one end of the spectrum it’s pure spirit, it’s the Clear Light of the Void; and at the other end it’s instinct, it’s health, it’s the perfect functioning of an organism that’s infallible so long as we don’t interfere with it; and somewhere between the two extremes is what St. Paul called ‘Christ’—the divine made human. Spiritual grace, animal grace, human grace—these aspects of the same underlying mystery, ideally, all of us should be open to all of them. In practice most of us either barricade ourselves against every form of grace or, if we open the door, open it to only one of the forms.
Which isn’t, of course, enough. And yet a third of a loaf is better than no bread. How much better was manifest that morning of April twenty-fourth. Cut off from animal grace, Katy had been an impotent phantom. Restored to it, she was Hera and Demeter and Aphrodite gloriously rolled into one, with Aesculapius and the Grotto of Lourdes thrown in as a bonus—for the miracle was definitely under way. After three days at death’s door, Henry had felt the presence of the virtue in her and was responding. Lazarus was in process of being raised.”
“Thanks, at one remove, to you!”
“Thanks, at one remove, to me,” he repeated.
“Le Cocu Miraculé. What a subject for a French farce.”
“No better than any other subject. Oedipus, for example, or Lear, or even Jesus or Gandhi—you could make a roaring farce out of any of them. It’s just a question of describing your characters from the outside, without sympathy and in violent but unpoetical language. In real life farce exists only for spectators, never for the actors. What they participate in is either a tragedy or a complicated and more or less painful psychological drama. So far as I was concerned, the farce of the cuckold’s miraculous healing was a long-drawn anguish of divided loyalties, of love in conflict with duty, of temptations resisted and then ignominiously succumbed to, of pleasures guiltily enjoyed and passionately repented, of good resolutions made, forgotten, made again and once more swept away by the torrent of irresistible desire.”
“I thought you’d made up your mind to go away.”
“I had. But that was before I saw her coming down those stairs reincarnated as a goddess. A goddess in mourning. Those emblems of bereavement kept alive the pity, the religious adoration, the sense that my beloved was a spirit who must be worshiped in spirit. But out of the black bodice rose the luminous column of the neck; between the coils of honey-colored hair the face was transfigured by a kind of unearthly radiance. What’s that thing of Blake’s?
In a wife I would require
What in whores is always found,
The lineaments of gratified desire.
“But the lineaments of gratified desire are also the lineaments of desirability, the lineaments of the promise of future satisfactions. God, how frantically I desired her! And how passionately, from the depths of my remorse, the heights of my idealism, I loathed myself for doing so! When I got back from the lab, I tried to have it out with her. But she put me off. It wasn’t the time, it wasn’t the place.
Beulah might come in, or Nurse Koppers. It would be better in the evening, when we could be quiet. And so that evening she came to my room. In the darkness, in the perfumed field of her womanhood, I tried to tell her all the things I had been unable to tell her that morning—that I loved her, but we mustn’t; that I had never been so happy, nor so utterly miserable; that I would remember what had happened with the most passionate gratitude, all my life long, and that tomorrow I would pack my bags and go and never, never see her again.
At that point my voice broke and I found myself sobbing. This time it was Katy’s turn to say, ‘Don’t cry,’ to offer the consolation of a hand on the shoulder, an encircling arm. The outcome, of course, was the same as it had been the night before. The same but more so—with fierier pentecosts, visitations not from mere angels, but from Thrones, Dominations, Powers, and the next morning (when, needless to say, I did not pack my bags), remorses to match the ecstasies, woodpeckers proportionately ferocious.”
“Which Katy, I gather, wasn’t pecked by?”
“And absolutely refused to talk about,” Rivers added.
“But you must have talked about them.”
“I did my best. But it takes two to make a conversation. Whenever I tried to tell her something of what was going on in my heart and mind, she either changed the subject or else, with a little laugh, with a little indulgent pat on the back of the hand, gently but very decidedly shut me up. Would it have been better, I wonder, if we had come out into the open, courageously called a spade a phallic symbol and handed one another our quivering entrails on a silver platter? Maybe it would. Or maybe it wouldn’t. The truth shall make you free; but on the other hand, let sleeping dogs lie and, above all, let lying dogs sleep.
One must never forget that the most implacable wars are never the wars about things; they’re the wars about the nonsense that eloquent idealists have talked about things—in other words, the religious wars. What’s lemonade? Something you make out of lemons. And what’s a crusade? Something you make out of crosses—a course of gratuitous violence motivated by an obsession with unanalyzed symbols. ‘What do you read, my lord?’ ‘Words, words, words.’ And what’s in a word? Answer: corpses, millions of corpses. And the moral of that is, Keep your trap shut; or if you must open it, never take what comes out of it too seriously. Katy kept our traps firmly shut. She had the instinctive wisdom that taboos the four-letter words (and a fortiori the scientific polysyllables), while tacitly taking for granted the daily and nightly four-letter acts to which they refer. In silence, an act is an act is an act. Verbalized and discussed, it becomes an ethical problem, a casus belli, the source of a neurosis.
If Katy had talked, where, I ask you, should we have been? In a labyrinth of intercommunicating guilts and anguishes. Some people, of course, enjoy that sort of thing. Others detest it, but feel, remorsefully, that they deserve to suffer. Katy (God bless her!) was neither a Methodist nor a Masochist. She was a goddess and the silence of goddesses is genuinely golden. None of your superficial plating. A solid, twenty-two-carat silence all the way through.
The Olympian’s trap is kept shut, not by an act of willed discretion, but because there’s really nothing to say. Goddesses are all of one piece. There’s no internal conflict in them. Whereas the lives of people like you and me are one long argument. Desires on one side, woodpeckers on the other. Never a moment of real silence. What I needed most at that time was a dose of justificatory good language to counteract the effect of all that vile-base-foul.
But Katy wouldn’t give it me. Good or bad, language was entirely beside the point. The point, so far as she was concerned, was her experience of the creative otherness of love and sleep. The point was finding herself once again in a state of grace. The point, finally, was her renewed ability to do
