Renata Adler - Pitch Dark

What do you tell the Sanger people? Lily asked.

Let me just mention people’s expression when they are bored by a confidence, or when their minds are elsewhere, or when they have been told it once already. Let me mention, too, a confidence of long ago, an intimacy, completely, as it turns, out, misunderstood.

A rowboat, without oars. An outboard motor. As you can sit there for years, forever, with that outboard motor, pulling again, and yet again, that rope, or cord, or wire, or whatever it is, and winding yet again, and each time, every single time, the motor, though it may give a cough or two, will fail to start, though if it starts, and when it starts, you are, at whatever speed you choose, within the engine’s limits and the hazards of the course, well on your way, until it starts you are no nearer where you were going on the fifteenth try than on the first; the enterprise may last forever, and yet never quite begin. The fact seems to be, however, that unless some apparently unrelated event should intervene — a bullet, a heart attack, a loss of interest, a cry from shore that dinner’s ready, or company has come, or junior’s run away — the engine will eventually start. In the meantime, though, while you have been intensely busy, it is difficult to account for how the time is spent.

What do you tell the Sanger people? Lily asked, late one afternoon in those years. We were well educated, certainly. We had read widely. And there was no “we,” of course, except in retrospect, since it’s just an I, alone, who reads. We had, all the same, failures of information. The books which determined to such a large extent what we would become were, well, sure, Beatrix Potter, Little Women , Dickens, war and frontier novels, Albert Payson Terhune dog books, Kipling; then, suddenly, poetry, great classics, any or all of them, Dostoevski, Conrad, Melville. With a transcendent, though far from complete comprehension. Hemingway, Salinger, Fitzgerald; then lastly, oddly, in some ways pre-eminently, John O’Hara. How could he have known that? He could not possibly have known it. For some, at an impressionable age, Ayn Rand. Also, inevitably, mountains of trash. The Amboy Dukes , for instance, forbidden in all schools and read by everybody. Forget it. Don’t think about it. There were the other interdicted books, God’s Little Acre , even Sanctuary ; but we didn’t understand them. We may have read and reread, with curiosity, D.H. Lawrence. But if we were, in the end, as young adults and in sexual matters, anybody’s creatures, we were also, though we would never have mentioned it to one another, John O’Hara’s. Highly educated. Even original or finely tuned. But his creatures all the same.

That year, finally, in those years, we knew it was absurd. We had been adamant about how our lives would be, not like the stereotype daughters of left-wing urban parents, not like the fallen woman in all of letters, not even like the adulterous women in O’Hara. So few of us anyway were married, as his women seemed to be. But, apart from everything else, we were beginning to sense in ourselves the creation, if not of another stereotype, at least of another predictable pattern. Unmarried. Waiting. Studiously cooking dinners. Going out. Working, on that carpet, or blanket, or tapestry perhaps, in any event, that piece of weaving. Keeping alive the sense of high romantic possibility. That possibility which, educated and even worldly though we were, we knew, from all of letters and from our generational respect for institutions, was a matter of not going to bed with people unless you were going to marry them. That year, finally, it became absurd. What do I have this apartment for, Maggie said, after a few months of her first job in the city, if I’m never going to sleep with anybody in it? We were drinking gin. We had been talking about people it seemed we were not going to marry. Confronted, then, with a lack of information, we remembered Margaret Sanger. So we took out the phone book, and found what turned out to be the Sanger Institute. At that moment, at that very moment, the phone rang. It was Lily, and she said, What do you tell the Sanger people? But she was not that close a friend, and she was younger than we were. So Maggie replied in a way that, though worldly enough, was noncommittal. Anyway, we didn’t know what you told the Sanger people.

The next morning, Maggie called them to arrange for an appointment. And they asked her when she was getting married. Maggie paused. Then, with great presence of mind I thought, she said December ninth. And they said, they honestly really said this, that they were sorry but they didn’t make appointments earlier than five weeks before a wedding day. Maggie said, I see. Two hours later, she called and, not thinking she could use her own name again, made an appointment in my name. The next day, in a seizure of cowardice or paranoia, I called the Sanger Institute. The voice I reached had a German accent. I thought, oh my God, I know these refugee voices, this person is probably some immigrant doctor’s wife, some friend even of my own parents. So I didn’t cancel the appointment, or say anything at all. Since I hadn’t canceled, though, I felt obliged to go. When I got to the waiting room, there were so few people, nobody looked like me, my courage failed. I left. I called Maggie from a phone booth and we met for coffee. So that we were only able, after all, to inform Lily that what you told the Sanger people was that you were getting married in five weeks.

Twenty years later, I again spoke to the Sanger people. I was looking for a worthy, touching charity to receive a check on my behalf. The check was in settlement of my own suit for libel. Nothing like Teagarden v. Denneny. Libel actions, I knew, had always been one of the real slums of Anglo-Saxon law. From Oscar Wilde through Alger Hiss, they seemed almost always grim, misguided, profoundly tainted, in some way, at the source. The grounds for my own suit, however, against a rich sensational publication, had occurred to me, one afternoon, in a state of high hilarity, as the first sound and witty libel suit of which I had ever heard. I thought it only required just the right charitable beneficiary for a check in settlement.

Worthy, the Sanger people. Maybe. But touching?

Well, I know. I was looking for a home for babies, unwed mothers. Something on that order. I even called the Foundling Hospital, which I’d walked by a hundred times, and asked them if they really were for foundlings. They said, Yes, but please hold, Sister Elizabeth would discuss it with me. And I thought, I can’t, in view of the present state of things having to do with abortion and birth control, send this check to a Roman Catholic institution. I called the Sanger people, and I said, I can’t tell you why, but I need a worthy, touching charity to have a check sent to. What is it exactly, apart from Planned Parenthood, that you do? And the voice said, Well, abortions. I said I didn’t think that was what I had in mind. She said, If you came down here, you would see some very touching, moving abortion cases. I said, I know, I know, but what is required in this case is something more like babies, foundlings, a home for unwed mothers. She said, Well, we have our fertility institute. And we do have a place for unwed mothers. I said fine. Worthy and touching. And they got their check.

Is he not going to call, then? I don’t know. I guess he’s not. I seem to be having a harder time with this than I thought or it was worth.

In France, they have the story of a ballet dancer so moved by her role that, in a scene in which she was supposed to be dying, and touchingly reunited with her mother, she actually blurted Maman, and her career was ruined. It seems you have to keep, you just have to keep a distance.