Joel came to the house, of course, but the fact that he was a Jew gave him a position of peculiar if wary privilege, like a eunuch. But this young man Charles Bessemer affected them conventionally. I had made a point of mentioning him to them although I had not spoken of others, unconsciously, I believe, as a kind of compensation: he was a Protestant Gentile, like themselves, and in addition, a doctor. — This I had discovered from Isa; it was typical of him that he should have preferred to let me go on thinking he was a medical student. — I offered him as the only thing I had that might please. He must have roused hopes in them that my withdrawal from the life and opportunities of the Mine was not a deviation after all, or if it had been, was merely the clever short cut to a life on the same safe pattern, but a higher level. A doctor from Johannesburg. I could see that the possibilities of this pleased them. And for the first time I saw a similarity between them and Joel’s parents, whom I had long ago resigned myself to accept as irreconcilable strangers to everything in my mother and father. But now I saw that the idea of a doctor in the family pleased them in exactly the same way as it would have done the Aarons. I recognized in their questions the tone of the discussion when it had been suggested, that night at Aarons’, that Joel might have studied medicine.
Now there was no cold pretended lack of interest expressing disapproval when I said I was going here with Charles, or there with Charles. “Did you have a good time?” my father would beam, as if there could be no doubt about it. (I often wondered what he visualized when he said this — the Masonic dances of his youth, I am sure, with young ladies dangling silk-tasseled pencils from their little programs.) “I’d give you my pendant,” said my mother, “but I know you wouldn’t wear it. …”—The women I knew longed for the strange, monolithic rings and heavy beaten silver jewelry made in the style of Berlin in the thirties by a German refugee, and because they could not afford his work, wore Zulu beadwork that in its primitive gaiety gave them the look of peasants.
My excuse for not bringing Charles home was the demands of his job. How he would have thrown his head back and laughed his explosive laugh if he had known. And how horrified he would have been at their picture of him as a rising suburban G.P. in a blue suit; Charles who wanted so much to be free (of quite what, he did not know) that the moment his good work — and he was good at his work — brought him promotion or the chance of permanency in a hospital, he resigned and went somewhere else. “What does he do, is he in private practice…?” my father asked. I told them that he was assistant medical officer at the big tuberculosis hospital outside Johannesburg. My mother got the look on her face she had had when there had been a whooping-cough outbreak at school. “Well, I hope he’s careful,” she said, “but I don’t suppose you could get it, just going about with him.”
I felt suddenly forlorn. I had a sudden flash of this young man and me, lost in each other’s mouths, utterly mindlessly mixed in the drunken secretions of love-making, our faces faintly sweaty and smeared with passion like a bee mazed and messed with pollen. And as I looked at my mother and father I seemed to see them as if they were actually receding from me, in the blur and strain of irrevocable distance. It was a floating, drifting feeling, with the powerlessness of dreams.
Our life at home went on, touching at fewer and fewer points. Charles Bessemer, like the hope of a sail, passed. They regretted him more than I did, I am sure. After a few weeks he moved on, whether because of a new job or a new girl I no longer remember, or perhaps never knew. I think he must have tired of me because the promise of my passion in our encounters in his car came to nothing; when he began to consider where we might go to conclude our love-making, he saw me brought up short, like an animal galloping toward an abyss. In my eyes he saw the contradiction between my headlong passion and a prohibitive fear that survived the moral code of my parents which I believed I had rejected. To satisfy both sides of my nature, I contrived to cheat them both. By denying myself the final act of love, I kept to the letter of the moral prohibition, and by allowing myself all intimacies short of the act itself, gave a kind of freedom to my natural self. He was probably disgusted with me. In any case it did not matter; there were others. The important thing was the knowledge of being desired that brought me to a consciousness of myself as a woman among the women I knew, that looking around me among my friends, made me feel myself received into the fullness of life, the revealed, and the hidden.
More and more I longed to leave the Mine and live in Johannesburg. The very comfort and safeness of home irked me. I felt I was muffled off from real life. I wanted the possibility of loneliness and the slight fear of the impersonality of living in a strange place and a city; the Mine oppressed my restlessness like a hand pressed over a scream. Often I wanted to call out to my mother: Let me go and you will keep me! But it would have been no use; would only have started another cold argument of offense and hurt. Now my parents were planning a visit to England and Europe, the visit of a lifetime which every Mine official waits for, and it was assumed that we should all be going together. When I suggested that they should go, and that I should perhaps like to go alone, or with a student tour, less elaborately, later, gloom fell like a blow on our house. The pleasure had drained out of anticipation, for them. I became guiltily distressed at what I had done, and began to pretend that I wanted to go with them, after all; and all the time resentment that they should force me to feel guilty toward them grew to match my desire to show them love.
The simultaneous experience of a longing for warmth and closeness and a wild kicking irritation to be free bewildered me and made me moody. I seemed to have nowhere to lay my bundle of contradictions, and so I stood a kind of touchy guard over them. To my mother and father I seemed more and more withdrawn and self-willed. They pressed to themselves the sharp belief that I no longer needed them; my mother retaliated with the pretense that she no longer needed me, my father with a gentle sadness of self-blame, a kind of timidity at my distance, as if conceding me a right to it.
Yet with the peculiar power of the inadvertent, the innocent, it was to be Mary Seswayo who blew up this no man’s land between my parents and me. Like a stray dog she ran across it and set off a mine field that threw up depths and plowed chasms which would be there forever.
Chapter 17
It was toward the end of the year, when the heat and examinations came together. We all grumbled about the strain but I believe that in a way, I enjoyed it. It caught me up at least temporarily in a sense of urgency and purpose that discounted the strain, and it meant that at home I could shut myself up with my books and, living apart from the household, be respected for it. I do not think there was a home anywhere that did not invest its student with a sense of importance and special consideration at this time.