From that time on they got to work on me, again in their different ways. Jean started it, maybe because she was the one who felt the strongest. That night she stood waiting for me outside Lindsay’s bedroom door; “Come in here,” she said. Lindsay was lying with her head buried in the pillows, the way she did when anyone involved her in an argument, not wanting to hear or see anything. Jean said “You’re not going to go along with this nonsense, are you, Harriet?” I said “I don’t want to.” “No I should say not,” Jean said grimly. She looked at Lindsay’s slender form on the bed. “Turn around,” she said. Lindsay didn’t stir. I could see that Jean was tempted to grab hold of her and make her turn around. I had witnessed physical fights between them before and had not liked them; so I really wanted to get out. But Jean looked at me with her pathetic dog eyes: “Try and talk some sense into your mother, if you can, Harriet.”
Then Lindsay tossed around to face us: “That’s all I ever hear from you, Jean. Sense. Good sense. Common sense. I despise common sense.”
“Listen to her,” Jean said to me. “Now we are too mundane for her. She wants to get onto a higher plane: a world movement, no less.”
“You’ve been as involved as the rest of us,” Lindsay said.
“Involved with who?”
“With who: That’s all you can ever think of. Everything with you is personal; as if nothing exists beyond your own little ego. You can’t—rise.”
She made a vague movement with her hand, indicating some lofty height to rise to. It made me laugh—the idea of Lindsay rising. Jean laughed too. Lindsay spoke to both of us in a genuinely hurt voice: “I thought we were all agreed that it was something extraordinary. And isn’t it about time that there was a Fourth World—that all these different elements got together—I mean us here, with all our—materialism,” she said, gesturing at her crowded dressing table, “and they with their—”
“Oh yes,” Jean said. “They’re very spiritual. Especially her; that Rani. With all her spiritual jewelry.”
“It’s absolutely no use talking to you, Jean Potts. I’m not going to say another word.”
There was something so appealing in the way she clamped her pretty lips together that Jean couldn’t resist sitting beside her on the edge of the bed. Lindsay went on pouting—but flirtatiously now, in the reproachful little-girl way that she knew would get her anything she wanted from Jean; and Jean, her voice gruff with tenderness, said “I know I’m a bore.”
“You’re not a bore—but you are so stubborn and contrary. You make me so mad. I want us to do everything together, as a couple, and how can we when you say no to me all the time.”
Jean brought Lindsay’s hand up to her lips and turned it over and kissed her palm. By this time neither of them cared about me, whether I wanted to donate our house to the Rawul’s movement or not.
And I didn’t, not one bit, and it amazed me the way both Lindsay and Michael were so ready to toss it away. It was not that it was a beautiful house—it wasn’t—but it was one of the few big houses in the area that was still intact and still with the original owners. Lindsay’s great-grandfather had built it as a summer house for his Victorian family, which of course was very large and included a whole establishment of servants; and then her grandfather had installed things to suit his life-style, like a squash court and a billiard room, and had converted the stables into garages; and her father had built on another wing in what was the latest in modern comfort in the thirties; so architecturally the house was a mess. The grounds, however, were beautiful. The site was that of an early nineteenth-century Federal-type house, which the great-grandfather had torn down to rebuild to his Victorian taste; but he couldn’t ruin the grounds—the magnificent maples and oaks and elms, which were much older than the house and as huge, the line of white birches at the edge of the lake, the lake itself stretching to the wooded shore opposite, the waterfall, the many nooks and arbors with little dead fountains where Michael and I used to hide, pretending not to hear the voices calling us in for meals. But Michael no longer seemed to care about any of it himself, and made me feel bad for caring as much as I did.
He took me for a midnight row on the lake. We always did that when we had something very special to discuss. Since it was our way to commune in silence, these discussions usually took the form of gliding on the dark water, breaking up the moonlit reflections scattered over it, one of us rowing, the other brushing aside the overhanging branches where the lake began to flow between narrow overgrown banks on its way to the river into which it finally merged. We halted under a willow and lay there, splashing the water around a bit to see if we could disturb any fish.
Michael said “It’s a good idea.” I didn’t say anything—by which of course he knew I didn’t agree. I hated to disagree with him, and especially here on this lake where we had spent such hours of our deepest communings. Nor did I really have any right to disagree, because the very subject of these communings was that of nonattachment. We both thought to be absolutely pure you had to be absolutely nonattached, not wanting anything for yourself—not possessions, not position, not even the love of another person. Yet here was I, unable to give away something as ordinary as a house. I felt ashamed; so that when Michael, in reply to my silence, said “What’s up?” I said “No it’s okay. If you really want to.” “Well don’t you?” he said, and I knew he was frowning in the dark, stretched out on one side of the boat while I was on the other.
There was always something dictatorial about Michael in his relation to me. He was so used to my being in complete agreement with him that when I was not, he got irritated. In the past, on the rare occasions when it had happened that I wasn’t 100 percent with him, I would just say “If you want it, I do.” It was true, but he didn’t like to hear it: because he thought agreement had to spring out of inner conviction and not out of love for another person. So it was useless to argue.
I said “I’m surprised about Lindsay though.” Michael laughed. It was strange—normally, when you wanted something from Lindsay, she would have very good reasons why she couldn’t possibly give it. I knew what was in his mind—if Lindsay of all people was ready for it, surely I wasn’t going to fall behind. Well, I didn’t say anything, but I agreed. At least, I brought forward no objections, though my heart was full of them—my God, on this beautiful summer night, alone in a boat with him, our house visible in the distance, shining by moonlight through the dark trees: but I didn’t stick up for it, because more than anything else, more than any house, I wanted what he wanted. That was how it was between us then.
Next morning the Rawul was having breakfast alone in the dining room; when I came down, he lifted the napkin from his lap so he could courteously rise from his chair for me. His mouth was full of Mrs. Schwamm’s terrific pancakes, and he could only gesture hospitably toward the sideboard to invite me to help myself: as if it were his house already, I thought. But in a way it was; for when could we ever have had a stately breakfast like this in the dining room, with the silver-topped dishes all polished and laid out on the sideboard? Before his arrival, we used to make do with instant coffee and frozen doughnuts, eaten while perched on a corner of the kitchen table. But the Rawul lived in style, and having a whole entourage with him, he could afford to. They might be called his comrades, his helpers, his followers, but they also functioned very effectively as his servants; so that for the first time in our generation, and even in Lindsay’s, there was a staff large enough to run the house as it was meant to be.
I expected him to start getting at me about donating Propinquity, but he was too subtle and too well mannered for that. Also perhaps too shy—for that was also there in his character; he was a shy person who found it difficult to make conversation with people, though out of courtesy he always tried. The one topic he really had a lot to say about was his Fourth World movement—whenever that subject came up, he spoke volubly and with passionate conviction; and even if you felt dubious about the whole thing, you could have no doubt about his sincerity. There was something fanatical about him. The whole idea was fanatical; grandiose—but also grand, on a grand scale: just to think up such an idea