Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

She had learned early on that insistent, preternatural dignity can often give offense, and so we must manufacture, often from nothing, the most problematic aura of all: warmth. The Goddess does not revel in her gash; she knows no chthonic mystery lies there. She knows that the only power that matters is power doubled, power to the second power, energy squared, the power of the pair. By mixing the dresses of different thoughts, the Goddess ought to encourage perspicuity, and by reinstituting reticence into everyday relations, prevent the eclipse of Familyland. The perfect wife is one who does not believe in either her husband’s fortune or his ruin. Just as there was no point in apologizing for being a goddess, there was also no point in being legendary if it just made one unhappy. She knew she was no more primal than she was a finished item; only a hasty blend of antiquity with the ever-receding present.

“Do you have any idea,” she warned Father when his courting took on a lucid measure, “do you have any idea at all, how hard it is to please a woman?” And when I brought home an unsatisfactory school report, she would nod and smile, and drawing it across my palm, leave a paper cut, as a feathery tongue of flame appeared in my head.

It would not heal until the grasses came up.

Mother loathed all political beliefs, and as a result never felt impelled to acquire the German language. “The continual presence of a fixed idea,” she insisted, “forces the jaw muscles to overdevelop and the visage to age prematurely,” and she believed fervently that devotion of the heart is good for the complexion. She also insisted that Astingi skulls were so constructed that a scalp wound received in any ideological struggle would completely heal in no more than fourteen days. She could divert the most hysterical of political arguments by simply laying a plump bare forearm upon the table, rendering the warring gentlemen speechless.

And if Father had his love-hate affair with Germans, hers was with the French. She saw all their talk of Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité as Paternalism, Nationalism, and Alcoholism, a nation that left its dogs to starve in the woods after a hunt. If she had a program, it was to replace the weak Western reading of liberty with discipline, equality with solitude, and fraternity with the tenderness of unlike creatures.

Anyone with a cursory knowledge of ancient history knows that the goddesses were no less whimsical or debauched than the Gods, and nothing amused Mother more than the project of gentrifying the goddess. For having observed a thousand litters and their parents, no one can deny that the gene of ambition, like that of baldness, is carried by the female. “A woman is clearly the equal of any man, even a mean man,” she often said, “but a woman cannot become a gentleman, that is, be stoical and fair.” She preferred the company of men, and she frightened women in the same way that Father frightened men, with the gay fatalism of the soldier. Just as some women find men who are indifferent to them irresistible, Mother was attracted to the sort of man who struggled to keep his baser instincts under control, acknowledging that they were transitional figures in a game which threatened to explode into a pointless, murderous brawl at any moment. She knew you could get anything out of a man by questioning his courage, and so avoided it at all costs. Strong men for her were no particular problem. It is the strong man suddenly grown weak who is truly dangerous; yet it is the particular pathos of their species that men are truly fascinating only in their weakness. “It is men’s nature to run away,” she told me early on, no doubt alluding to Priam, “for men, if not victorious, prefer to disappear without a trace. But women leave traces, and the right woman,” she observed with a saturnine grin and revealing her foot tightly covered in black silk like a serpent’s head, “can ruin anything!”

She did not want “a man,” nor all men; she wanted Man.

I believe the only aspect of her role she regretted was as Patroness of Arts. To conquer the artworld did not strike her as much of a conquest, and while she did her best to reluctantly champion peoples’ rights to alienation and unending originality, she found the peculiar combination of exhibitionism and sullen introspection of the literary world something of a bore. Indeed, she was interested in those few areas of experience which lie totally outside art. Struggling with the muse, like sexuality, were for her quite recent and unexamined nouveaux conventions. “If you must wait for inspiration,” she often said, “you may as well give up.” And there were days, in the presence of the many artistes who frequented our home, when she could be Jocasta, Lady Macbeth, and Clytemnestra rolled into one, while she took their measure. Mother knew several things about art and none of them had to do with sanity or happiness. She was not fooled by the sort of people who hijacked the word “creative” from theology, and who claimed the rights of patronage without subserving to any of their patron’s purposes. “A work of art, like an oyster, mon chérie ,” she once remarked to a drunken poet, “can come up as easily as it went down.”

Her only interest in art, other than origami and collecting garden statuary, was a diary, strictly descriptive and dispassionate: addresses, places, the exact name and catalog number of a piece of music she had heard, the drawing of an architectural detail, and almost never a single use of a personal pronoun. But she gave up on it early, discovering a diary is the last place you look for truth. The final entry reads: “Oh, I’ve botched it terribly, dear diary; forgive me, but you are not my genre. Why do people write so much?”

Ainoha would rather be read about than write — the most human condition.

The florid precision of her voice was unforgettable. It was as if her respiration had a physical weight and location, a sculpted sound of air enveloping each individual word. When put out, her pitch was tinged with flatness, and perfections of the upper range had to be smoothed over with deceptive tailoring. Yet so winning was her personae that she could turn flatness into an expressive device and make frailty a source of appeal. The dogs gathered round her while she practiced, and her occasional stepping on their paws produced a less than dulcet chorus of high E’s and F’s. Her breathing was inextricably bound up with her sentences, and when she mentioned my father’s name in public, it was surrounded with extended sighs and mesmerizing melismas. On the other hand, one of her more distressing habits was, when at concerts, to tap out the underlying beat on Father’s forearm, the tempo just slightly off. It drove him absolutely crazy, but he never said a word. Yes, she was the major blurry triad, the Tristram home Chord, from which all music issues and returns. But the muse cannot herself sing.

If not precisely pure, Ainoha was intellectually delicate, and would, like any blue chip, have to be held for years to perform. She had only one fear and that was the signing of documents. She had only one weakness. She did not believe in savings. Like Beatrice, she was prone to lecture and was knowledgeable only about Heaven. And serenity is an expensive business. Certainly, she would defend beauty and attractiveness beyond all things, but she was absolutely determined that beauty should not be her downfall, and this constant vigilance encouraged a certain straining for effect and invisible wear and tear upon the soul and parts. And so her syncopated curls and tender nuances often turned with delayed resolutions into a kind of magisterial musical hiccups.

I stood erect in the long bright hallway of my life, staring out at the fogged-in river, my larynx falling toward my heart, the gorge of a word upon my lips. I had finally started speaking, and felt immediately that something stupid had happened to me. Mother asked innocently, incuriously, “where are you going?” I hadn’t really thought about it, but I knew that I should stay calm, appear to cooperate, and create a good rapport, so that I could lie through my teeth. For she was made to lie to, and men will do anything to get women out of their minds. Then I heard a voice. But it wasn’t me that was speaking, or at least I did not listen to what it said to me, in the same way I heard what others said. For there comes a point in life where everything invested in you and expected of you no longer matters and you become a kind of Third Person — and nothing can be understood apart from this.