“I thought you hated it.” I interjected sourly. But Terence was adjusting his seat belt and asking Mary another question. I sat back and stared out the window, attempting to control my irritation.
A little later Mary was craning her neck trying to find me in her mirror. “You’re very quiet back there,” she said gaily.
I fell into sudden, furious mimicry. “That’s a really good way of putting it, yes, yes.” Neither Terence nor Mary made any reply. My words hung over us as though they were being uttered over and over again. I opened my window. We arrived at George’s house with twenty-five minutes of unbroken silence behind us.
The introductions over, the three of us held the center of George’s huge living room while he fixed our drinks at the bar. I held my flute case and music stand under my arm like weapons. Apart from the bar the only other furniture was two yellow plastic sag chairs, very bright against the desert expanse of brown carpet. Sliding doors took up the length of one wall and gave onto a small backyard of sand and stones in the center of which, set in concrete, stood one of those tree-like contraptions for drying clothes on. In the corner of the yard was a scrappy sagebrush plant, survivor of the real desert that had been here a year ago. Terence, Mary and I addressed remarks to George and said nothing to each other.
“Well,” said George when the four of us stood looking at each other with drinks in our hands, “Follow me and I’ll show you the kids.” Obediently we padded behind George in single file along a narrow, thickly carpeted corridor. We peered through a bedroom doorway at two small boys in a bunk bed reading comics. They glanced at us without interest and went on reading.
Back in the living room, I said, “They’re very subdued, George. What do you do, beat them up?” George took my question seriously and there followed a conversation about corporal punishment. George said he occasionally gave the boys a slap on the back of the legs if things got really out of hand. But it was not to hurt them, he said, so much as to show them he meant business. Mary said she was dead against striking children at all, and Terence, largely to cut a figure I thought, or perhaps to demonstrate to me that he could disagree with Mary, said that he thought a sound thrashing never did anyone any harm. Mary laughed, but George, who obviously was not taking to this faintly foppish, languid guest sprawled across his carpet, seemed ready to move onto the attack. George worked hard. He kept his back straight even when he sat in the sag chair.
“You were thrashed when you were a kid?” he asked as he handed around the Scotch.
Terence hesitated and said, “Yes.” This surprised me. Terence’s father had died before he was born and he had grown up with his mother in Vermont.
“Your mother beat you?” I said before he had time to invent a swaggering bully of a father.
“Yes.”
“And you don’t think it did you any harm?” said George. “I don’t believe it.”
Terence stretched his legs. “No harm done at all.” He spoke through a yawn that might have been a fake. He gestured towards his pink carnation. “After all, here I am.”
There was a moment’s pause then George said, “For example, you never had any problem making out with women?” I could not help smiling.
Terence sat up. “Oh yes,” he said. “Our English friend here will verify that.” By this Terence referred to my outburst in the car.
But I said to George, “Terence likes to tell funny stories about his own sexual failures.”
George leaned forwards to catch Terence’s full attention. “How can you be sure they’re not caused by being thrashed by your mother?”
Terence spoke very quickly. I was not sure whether he was very excited or very angry. “There will always be problems between men and women and everyone suffers in some way. I conceal less about myself than other people do. I guess you never had your backside tanned by your mother when you were a kid, but does that mean you never have any hang-ups with women? I mean, where’s your wife…?”
Mary’s interruption had the precision of a surgeon’s knife.
“I was only ever hit once as a kid, by my father, and do you know why that was? I was twelve. We were all sitting around the table at suppertime, all the family, and I told everyone I was bleeding from between my legs. I put some blood on the end of my finger and held it up for them all to see. My father leaned across the table and slapped my face. He told me not to be dirty and sent me up to my room.”
George got up to fetch more ice for our glasses and muttered “Simply grotesque” as he went. Terence stretched out on the floor, his eyes fixed on the ceiling like a dead man’s. From the bedroom came the sound of the boys singing, or rather chanting, for the song was all on one note. I said to Mary something to the effect that between people who had just met, such a conversation could not have taken place in England.
“Is that a good thing, do you think?” Mary asked.
Terence said, “The English tell each other nothing.”
I said, “Between telling nothing and telling everything there is very little to choose.”
“Did you hear the boys?” George said as he came back.
“We heard some kind of singing,” Mary told him. George was pouring more Scotch and spooning ice into the glasses.
“That wasn’t singing. That was praying. I’ve been teaching them the Lord’s Prayer.” On the floor Terence groaned and George looked around sharply.
“I didn’t know you were a Christian, George,” I said.
“Oh, well, you know…” George sank into his chair. There was a pause, as if all four of us were gathering our strength for another round of fragmentary dissent.
Mary was now in the second sag chair, facing George. Terence lay like a low wall between them, and I sat cross-legged about a yard from Terence’s feet. It was George who spoke first, across Terence to Mary.
“I’ve never been interested in churchgoing much but…” He trailed off, a little drunkenly, I thought. “But I always wanted the boys to have as much of it as possible while they’re young. They can reject it later, I guess. But at least for now they have a coherent set of values that are as good as any other, and they have this whole set of stories, really good stories, exotic stories, believable stories.”
No one spoke so George went on. “They like the idea of God. And heaven and hell, and angels and the Devil. They talk about that stuff a whole lot and I’m never sure quite what it means to them. I guess it’s a bit like Santa Claus, they believe it and they don’t believe it. They like the business of praying, even if they do ask for the craziest things. Praying for them is a kind of extension of their… their inner lives. They pray about what they want and what they’re afraid of. They go to church every week. It’s about the only thing Jean and I agree on.”
George addressed all this to Mary, who nodded as he spoke and stared back at him solemnly. Terence had closed his eyes. Now that he had finished, George looked at each of us in turn, waiting to be challenged. We stirred. Terence lifted himself onto his elbow. No one spoke.
“I don’t see it’s going to hurt them, a bit of the old religion,” George reiterated.
Mary spoke into the ground. “Well, I don’t know. There’s a lot of things you could object to in Christianity. And since you don’t really believe in it yourself we should talk about that.”
“OK,” said George. “Let’s hear it.”
Mary spoke with deliberation at first. “Well, for a start, the Bible is a book written by men, addressed to men and features a very male God who even looks like a man because he made man in his own image. That sounds pretty suspicious to me, a real male fantasy…”
“Wait a minute,” said George.
“Next,” Mary went on, “women come off pretty badly in Christianity. Through Original Sin they are held responsible for everything in the world since the Garden of Eden. Women are weak, unclean, condemned to bear children in pain as punishment for the failures of Eve, they are the temptresses who turn the minds of men away from God, as if women were more responsible for men’s sexual feelings than the men themselves! Like Simone de Beauvoir says, women are always the ‘other’, the real business is between a man in the sky and the men on the ground. In fact women only exist at all as a kind of divine afterthought, put together out of a spare rib to keep men company and iron their shirts, and the biggest favor they can do Christianity is not to get dirtied up with sex, stay chaste, and if they can manage to have a baby at the same time, then they’re measuring up to the Christian Church’s ideal of womanhood—the Virgin Mary.” Now Mary was angry. She glared at George.