Alison Lurie - The War Between the Tates - A Novel

Two hours after he had entered Dibble’s office, Brian was released. He had, and still has, the small satisfaction of having his strategy adopted; and the greater though more private satisfaction of knowing that his old enemy is about to abandon the field—for J. Donald Dibble, overruled and as he thinks betrayed by his chairman and dean, has tendered his resignation from the university.

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.

16

MID-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.