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The Anvil - Part III


CHAPTER 21
Perceiving that a romance was developing, Kegan poisoned Ray's mind against Clare behind her back.

page 288:


Her greatest fear was that Ray might turn on her. He could be the gentlest of men, but he recognized no middle degrees and might attack in someone else's defence with what I can describe only as brutality. This would be more than she could bear, especially when contrasted with his usual consideration for women. His tenderness was the treasure she had craved in a past life during which care in handling had been noticeably absent.

He did say something odd during house meeting. Some athletic activities were planned and Clare mentioned that she couldn't do some of them, having little experience with sports.

"What can you do, Clare?" he asked calmly, his gaze unwavering.

She was taken aback. And instead of saying she could keep a civil tongue in her head, she answered in a small voice, "Nothing, I guess".


CHAPTER 22
At Ray's rejection, Clare left Hempstead. But life at home was intolerable.


pages 298 to 300:


The party fell on a day when Clare happened to be in the most abysmal pit at the bottom of the deepest valley, in a prolonged crisis during which she paid for her impulsiveness by facing the fact that she'd never again see Ray or anyone else from Hemps. At first she had been too busy running to feel the impact. It was really hitting her now that her life there was over.

Mummy's explanation for the party was the argument that Clare's problems had turned the house upside down. After the winter's optimism, Mummy felt a need to put her life together. Strangely enough, her way of doing this was organizing a project designed to impress people who were not of fundamental importance to her. As if the family did not exist unless other people saw it.

Mummy, who (like all of us) was wise in matters known to her, had a blind spot (like all of us) regarding those which were beyond her experience. She had suddenly decided upon this party with the stubborn resolve of someone making a stand in the darkness, with the feeling that something assertive must be done but with no idea what it should be.

Unfortunately, her decision could not possibly have been more mistaken. As the party had been postponed several times, Mummy was resolved that it must go on, Clare or no Clare. Her reasoning was that otherwise when Clare emerged from the profundity of her mental condition there would be no family up there waiting for her.

Clare could scarcely believe her ears when she heard this. Years later, Lisa commented to her that it was evidence of their mother's shallow viewpoint that she could consider such a thing as a party to decide the fate of a family.

That day Clare was physically ill and exhausted. Pain racked her body as she lay on the spare bed at the far end of her parents' room. This was at the top of the house. She had been parked there in order to keep her embarrassing presence away from the guests.

Clare had already told her mother sharply that it was a sin to expect that, in her pain, she should cater to a casual guest. Not a starving itinerant, who would doubtless have been turned away, but someone looking forward to a pleasant diversion. Who would have been hurt had the party been cancelled?

Clare's tears had been flowing for twelve hours, following a full day of somewhat less constant crying. She was physically drained, but even now sudden convulsions would rack her body.

The words "Clare is ill," emerged from the murmur downstairs at regular intervals. Mummy had on her party voice, artificially amiable. The act she put on for parties turned Clare's stomach. The top of the house had been newly decorated, and Clare was not going to stand, or rather lie in the way of this opportunity to show it off.

The apologetic explanation, delivered in a singsong voice, accompanied the sound of footsteps going up the stairs. It was inevitably followed by the hated appearance of a guest, politely nodding at the crumpled figure on the bed.

One guest knew something was very wrong, a former business associate of Daddy's who looked sad when he saw her. Clare would always be grateful to him for showing the compassion which was lacking in her own family.

The worst display of callousness occurred during a conversation between Mummy (with her party voice) and a friend of the family (with her party voice) who had inquired after Clare. Mummy's reply was clearly audible.

"Oh, she had an unhappy love affair. You know."

And both women said to each other consolingly, "She'll get over it".

Even the slightest unpleasantness must not be allowed to tarnish the perfect superficiality of a party, which was achieved by a flippant glossing over of anything inappropriately profound. However, on various ordinary occasions Clare was to hear the same tone of voice making little of other people's traumas. She came to realize that her mother really did not understand a great deal of what went on in the world.


CHAPTER 23
After a violent episode, Clare's parents refused to keep her at home, and appealed to Hempstead.
(Dr. Flugg was Clare's therapist.)


page 304:


Distraught and frantic, Clare's parents accompanied her to a special meeting at Hempstead with Mrs. Jolson and Dr. Flugg. Daddy was openly contemptuous. Clare had lapsed into silence since her attack on Dian.

"She's worse than ever," moaned Mummy. "She upset our wedding anniversary, a day we had planned for ourselves. I'm sure it was no coincidence, and she chose that particular day."

Clare sat immobile, her face cast in stone. Not a word would come out of her for many days. Mummy just sat in a dejected posture and dripped tears. She had given up hope, and had no more to say.

Confronted by this situation, Daddy reacted to his panic, hastily and breathlessly forcing words out of himself which were best left unspoken.

He kept referring to his daughter as 'the child'.

"The child is just doing it for effect. She's very immature," he retorted. "And as you know, the child is disturbed," he added testily. "That's all there is to it. We have to see what can be done with her. We'll have to put her in some sort of institution, because she can't stay at home." He was speaking very fast.

"Mr. Worthing, don't you–"

"That's final. Of course we see that something must be done with the child. She can't go on like this. We won't allow it. We've had enough."

Mummy sat enveloped in her own private misery.


CHAPTER 24
Clare returned to Hempstead, glad at least to be in Ray's company.
('Man-in-the-moon Bob' was a staff member there.)


pages 332 & 333:


The common room became increasingly deserted. Things had stagnated there, partly because of the fine weather and partly because all the old cards were marked and the new ones were too slippery to hold properly.

Duane was bored. And whenever Duane was bored he grew more and more restless and moved around a lot. Not enough, you understand, to join the other boys at baseball. But he didn't mind contributing a running commentary on their game from his comfortable perspective at the picture window.

"Look at that one," he remarked. "The way Kegan's throwing that ball, it's going to land on the roof." And a minute later, "There it goes. Now what's he going to do?" And another minute later, "He's on the roof. I wondered what he was going to do."

Duane became restless again and crossed the room, knocking on objects with his hands. Man-in-the-moon Bob regarded him with silent amusement.

"Your mother dresses you funny," said Duane sociably.

"Why don't you go outside, since you're so interested in the game?"

Clare was sitting on a sofa, studying for her exams. Duane turned to her. "Do you know that the windows here are shatterproof?" he asked abruptly. His previous irritation with her was a thing of the past.

Duane never held a grudge. Grudges were no fun.


CHAPTER 25
We flash forward to the time when Clare confronted her father regarding the fact that he had sexually abused her for years.


page 361:


The unfortunate are sacrificed to feed the fortunate, the poor to feed the rich, the sick to feed the healthy. So that everyone can nurture an ideal which is held up to us as an example. Those tainted by suffering must give way to promote this example of perfect happiness. They have fallen short of the perfectionist's dream. They are the refuse by the side of the road which must give way in admiration to a flawless work of art.


CHAPTER 26
Meeting nothing but resistance, Clare appealed to the law, to Hempstead, and even to another psychiatric institution. She was not believed. The triple bind of incest victims is analyzed in detail, the solitude in which they live, and the hypocrisy of lip service to their cause.


page 372:


In order to tell the whole story here I have to let you know that when Mummy had been ill before Clare went to Hempstead, after all the fake suffering and absurd sympathy in her life, it had been breast cancer. This was now several years later, but Mummy had never forgiven Clare for breaking down only a year after the worst of it, and now she was taking revenge upon her daughter. Of course Mummy didn't want to give up her husband, because he had been her support through the horrible sickness and gut-wrenching terror. And with cancer, the fear of death lingers for many years.

Do not think that Mummy's illness had prompted her husband to abuse Clare. He had begun that many years before. But decades later, this woman would continue to side with her husband against her daughter, jealous of her own offspring. That's just how it was.


CHAPTER 27
We begin a flash forward to Clare's life in New York after leaving Hempstead.


page 384:


She met an artist who owned a loft in SoHo. She had tea with him and his cat.

"You have a ballet barre on the wall," she remarked.

"Oh, that's one of my pieces," he said.

She politely paid no attention to the hole in the opposite wall. He pointed it out to her carefully.

"That's another of my pieces," he said.

Clare fingered a hammer lying on the piano, and suddenly knew what she was going to hear.

"Oh, that's one of my pieces too," he told her. After that she didn't touch anything.


pages 385 & 386:


She liked to remember the angels. You couldn't miss them. Only sometimes the angels became saddened by what they saw every day, and one of them called out to her plaintively, a total stranger in a crowded subway, "Don't change. Please don't change."

Ah, the subways. After a while you get to know them. You learn to descend with an open mind and take the next train still in service. Never mind that it will probably miss its proper route. So many alternative connections can be made when it goes the wrong way that you're bound to end up at your destination sooner or later. You just need to carry a mental map of the labyrinth, the only kind available since the paper ones are permanently out of stock.

And of course she pursued her career. She loved the touring, the theatre air, the inexpressible joy of dancing roles she had always dreamed of. Ordinary behaviour from the ballet world was considered strange elsewhere. Clare might stop in the middle of the street and say calmly, "Oh, there goes my tendon again". Or squish her pointe shoes in door hinges and deposit them in the freezer. Or hold conversations upside down on the floor with her legs splayed out in front of her. It was a relief to be among other people who did that, to be among dancers again.

The city pulled her like a magnet. She loved dropping off for a pita pocket on her way from the Lincoln Centre library. She loved being able to buy tickets to the world's greatest performances on a momentary whim. And she loved the derelicts, because derelicts in New York were the sweetest, most courtly gentlemen anyone could ever wish to meet. They were almost all men, not women, at rock bottom. The women could always sell their bodies. It really says something about a city when its derelicts are breathtakingly beautiful. When the nicest people in the whole city are the ones sleeping on the street.

She managed to keep a roof over her head, and she managed to keep her health no matter how sick she actually felt, since the debilitating nausea which had brought her to Hempstead persisted for ten years. People said that she was fortunate to find drugs not at all tempting. Some theorized that this was because by nature she was high all the time. But it was just a matter of physical type. She had some idea of her good fortune when she saw alcoholics bending over their inert brothers in exile, generously pouring down their throats the precious liquid they would soon be needing themselves. The derelicts, as I said, were beautiful.

There was something everyone in New York had in common, the openness of those who have nothing to lose. It showed in their easy laughter, their irritation and their desperate pleas for help. It showed in the listless camaraderie of prostitutes warming their hands at fires in garbage bins on the vast expanse of Tenth Avenue. They were beyond the laughter, beyond the irritation, beyond the pleas for help which would never come.


CHAPTER 28
In New York, the longterm effects of sexual abuse came to light. Also revealed was the politically motivated racism that lay behind everything Clare had suffered, a triple bind which matched her treatment as an incest victim and left her in a state of solitude on two fronts.


pages 388 to 391:


The week she arrived in New York, Clare met her first husband and fell in love, hardly believing that her dreams could come true. And he wanted her very, very much, although he always found something to criticize. He used to insist that she choose her own wardrobe so that he could find fault with her taste. This was before he started beating her. The morning after he first beat her she found out that roach killer wasn't lethal. This began a cat and mouse game in which he alternated between literally kicking her out the door and begging her to return amid torrents of very convincing tears.

Women's shelters get the same stories coming in day after day with uncanny consistency. These men will do anything to force their wives out of the house, then will do anything to get them back again. He beat her for rattling the pots in the kitchen. He beat her for eating a snack between meals. He beat her for imagined slights from other people which he thought she had incurred. He used to take her out to dinner and beat her afterward for not eating everything on her plate, so that for years she would feel nervous in restaurants. And after throwing her out the door he was a sad and lonely figure, apparently prostrate at the thought of what he had done, and full of contrition.

It was after she lost two pints of pitch black blood and spent an unpleasant night in the hospital that she realized he was going to kill her. It had escalated from cuffing her in private to public assaults, and was now at the stage when he would throw her on the floor and laugh brutally while he kicked her in the stomach. He liked to sing when he did this. But she guessed that the loss of blood might have been because he sodomized her with brutal regularity. While some people may not find this fact particularly alarming (even though they should), it is pertinent to note that on the previous day something in her torn body had snapped, forcing her to crawl around on the floor. This had amused him greatly.

She particularly minded not having privacy in which to cry. Her tears were a reproach to him. He didn't like to think of himself as an abusive person. It stung his low self esteem. And while at first Clare wanted to punish him by displaying her pain, it was not worth the price.

He was a genuinely sadomasochistic person, someone you could not be nice to. He made her wonder how many people engaged in consensual sadomasochism as a sort of therapy for their inability to trust, and whether their deliberate abuse was preferable to the uncontrollable illness that she had suffered. But he was never in control of his impulses.

No one could have been more different than a dear friend Clare met at this time, who outlasted all the men who never deserved her. Honestly gay but with a great fondness for women, he had hated her at first, and had cultivated their friendship in order to find out how he could hurt her. One day he told her about it.

"I did all that, and then I found out that I liked you," he said.

But there was no possibility of Clare's husband similarly rising above his own history of childhood abuse, the details of which he never divulged. She returned to him over and over again because she believed that his remorse was real. She never guessed that the desperation which characterized his promises to reform was nothing more than the frenzy of a man in terror of losing his scapegoat, without whom he would have to face the fact that it was himself he really hated. To him she was an appendage, which he criticized endlessly in place of himself. Without her he would have been shattered.

She never wanted to fight back because it would have been like admitting that it was acceptable for them to be like this. He was supposed to be her protector. Everything he did was a complete reversal of all that should be. It was for the same reason that when she submitted a request for a raise she refused to ask for more than she expected, and insisted upon writing a letter suggesting a modest amount, stating that this was her final word on the matter and she would not alter it. And in the same way, when her husband flirted openly with other women, she refused to conspire against them. If other women were a threat, then he wasn't worth the effort, and she had no intention of wasting her life looking suspiciously around her. She would not employ against her husband a strategy reserved for enemies.

She didn't mind making a statement, though. The green lamb was the most famous. Clare's husband had told her that he was passionately in love with a former girlfriend whom he still saw but who did not return his regard. She took an interest in Clare, and he invited her to dinner. This sort of thing did not seem inappropriate to him. For this occasion Clare served lamb cooked in creme de menthe. Bright green is fine for vegetables, but on meat the effect is not quite the same. Clare thought it was delicious, and three enemies heedlessly surveyed each other over the corpse of an animal whose life had been sacrificed to feed theirs.

It turned out that this woman was attracted to Clare, whose husband proceeded to use his heterosexual wife as bait. Every time Clare refused to share her marriage bed with this woman she was savagely beaten. Between beatings she was compared to the object of his admiration, unfavourably and in detail, and learned all about how boring she was. It is interesting to note that this may actually have been due to a perverse desire in her husband to dissuade her from complying with his wishes, since unknown to himself, his main object was not to have two women in his bed. His main object was to drive away the wife whom he had identified as the self which he hated.

Actually Clare had the last laugh one evening when the woman had appeared and, afraid of being killed this time, she quietly arranged to walk out with their guest, leaving him alone with his demons. It is wise to remember that, bad as things were, she was able to avoid death. We must keep our sense of proportion.

Over and over in later years Clare would hear the words, "I can't respect someone who would let a man treat her like that," from people who didn't realize that they were themselves being sadomasochistic, though they professed to follow the Christian religion. The worst part of it was Clare's knowledge that these very people, upon meeting her husband, would have been fooled by his apparent remorse just as she had been. They would have reproached her for breaking the heart of someone so sweetly appealing, and she would have been regarded as a cruel woman.

When she ventured to remark in a letter to her mother that her husband's ethnic origin had a lot to do with all this, since he'd always felt bad about it, she received a stern reply admonishing her not to be a racist.

She would never forget the time she was in a record store with her husband, and a salesman asked her whether she needed any help.

"No, I'm with him," she replied.

The salesman, who was a solid, brusque, tough and good hearted New Yorker, looked her straight in the eyes with his sad ones that had seen so much and said, "Does he beat you, honey?"

And she looked away because her eyes had suddenly filled, and if that showed she would be in trouble.

But years afterward she still asked herself how, how had he known? How had he known?


CHAPTER 29
We return to the last weeks before Clare's dismissal from Hempstead, for she was regarded as being 'in remission'. The only joy in Clare's life was her proximity to Ray. Finally she made a last effort to break through Kegan's lies and establish contact with him.


page 403:


Once you have loved from the heart in gushes of your own blood, you live in the sunlight beyond the open door. And from that time onward you will look at people differently. You will see each one as the centre of her personal world. And all mysteries will become clear to you.


page 415:


When Ray was ready he came into the vacant room and sat on the desk.

"Well, what do you want to talk about?" he asked with the same characteristic abruptness he had shown before the bus trip. And she feared that her timid delay in getting around to her subject, since it required some digging, would try his patience since he didn't know what she was going to say. Especially since Kegan had probably told him she was full of tricks. He would wonder what she was up to now.

"I know this is very forward, and perhaps not something that society says I should do," she began, "but I feel that it's the only honest way to tell you. And I hope you understand that I feel it necessary, and more important than those things."

And then she had no choice. She had to say it. "I love you," her lips said for her quietly. And as they did, she found the truth simply came out like the live thing it was. Her trepidation slipped away, and the words spoke themselves.

In the momentary silence that followed while their perfect beauty hovered in the air above the two, Ray did not move.


CHAPTER 30
Clare's last days at Hempstead are described.


pages 429 & 430:


Up to the final second she was to be taunted. She moved along the platform. Soon she would be away from the stream of insults that had been heaped upon her grief.

With the self revelation which makes the saddest moments our greatest, Clare realized that it was no use pretending he had made a bad choice. Susanna had never done anything wrong. Clare could not claim that her rival was worse than she in any way, had fewer fine qualities, had less to offer.

They all got off at the next station, except for Clare. With some disjointed idea of catching a last glimpse of Ray, she peered as though aimlessly at the cluster of people around the exit. She missed her last sight of him, and sat as if nothing had happened while the train went on from station to station.

Her shining star. Her heart of gold.




graphic courtesy of Shapiro Webgallery
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OR:

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No Skin
the expose drawn from Chapters 25 and 26