Mrs. Beneker

NOW it was Father O’Flynn’s turn. The last icon Professor Serota had smashed was Jewish, and he was careful to keep class outrage in balance. Being Christian, however—“I hope,” Mrs. Beneker, now precisely attuned to the nuances of faith, said to herself—Father O’Flynn did not react like a bearded teenager from the Jewish Theological Seminary in response to a pedagogical “Moses was the greatest man who never lived.” His face did not turn thunderous, and his arm did not dart up with a demand that he be heard at once in refutation. Father O’Flynn’s cars merely flushed.

Father O’Flynn sat at Mrs. Beneker’s right, like an honored guest, in Religion G 9874y, Tuesdays, 2:10 to 4 P.M., Bent. The class was a typical General Studies stew: sallow Barnard girls in loden jackets, Columbia boys in jeans, the rabbinical students in embroidered beanies and their Union Theological Seminary counterparts in buttoned-down shirts, a urologist who had dug at Ras Shamra, a square-shouldered librarian with a fixed smile and no lipstick—altogether, Mrs. Beneker felt the most rapport with Father O’Flynn, even though their only communication had been a polite nod.

Mrs. Beneker first noticed Father O’Flynn’s ears when Professor Serota called the Crucifixion a myth. Then, the priest’s ears turned pink. Now they were bright red. If she was not careful, Mrs. Beneker realized, she was going to spend the entire course watching Father O’Flynn’s ears give a running Thomist commentary on Near Eastern religion. Enough of that. What had invoked the current flush? Professor Serota had said, “And so we have Da Vinci painting an ethereal Mary, a culturally apt Mary, while Rubens, for the same reason, makes her look like a president of Hadassah.”

“… president of Hadassah,” Mrs. Beneker dutifully put down in her stenographer’s notebook. Father O’Flynn kept his notes in a small black leather-bound book that looked like a prayer book. He wrote sparingly, unlike Mrs. Beneker, but that, she supposed, was because he knew more about religion than she did. Her page started off with a sentence, underlined twice, which read: “ The history of religion is man’s educating his gods.”That was the last entry of the previous Tuesday, and now Mrs. Beneker could not remember if the statement was hers or Professor Scrota’s. It was provocative enough to be the professor’s, but the grammar, she saw, was weak. It was probably hers. That was what Mrs. Beneker liked about the course, she had explained to her husband; it made her mind go.

Mrs. Beneker thought in metaphors. Now she saw her mind as a machine, a shiny English bicycle, oiled, polished, being pedaled cheerily. Usually, however, Mrs. Beneker thought of her mind as a bookish friend, dear but impractical, dependent upon her for its everyday necessities, lake a Babylonian temple god, it required a priest to wash it, dress it, feed it, and wake it up in the morning.

She rarely took her mind out in company, for it was a little odd, given to making inappropriate remarks. Not, fortunately, quite as bad as the statement Mrs. Beneker once overheard a woman make loudly at a cocktail party — “I feel as if I have swallows running up my skirt” — but peculiar enough. Just that Saturday, for instance, while Mrs. Beneker was at a large dinner party in Pound Ridge, her mind had brought a travelogue on Greece to an abrupt halt.

The travelogue was being given by another guest, a local real estate broker whom the Benekers knew slightly. “And then we got to Epidaurus,” the broker said happily. “That was just before we took that boat that took Edith Hamilton to Delos. We were going to — ”

“Epidaurus!” Mrs. Beneker’s mind interrupted in pure joy. It had a sudden vision of hills of silvergray olive trees, the flat slate-colored apron stage, and tiers of white-robed Athenians gravely intent on catharsis. “Did you ever stop to think that the villain of Prometheus is actually Zeus? Isn’t it amazing how liberal they were in those days? Can you imagine a hundred thousand people packing Yankee Stadium to see a play in which God plays the heavy?”

No one could, the travelogue staggered to Salonika, and Mrs. Beneker felt rather like an elephant wearing a ruffled skirt for the first time.

It was this kind of thing that had brought her to Religion G 9874y. She was eager to discourse on matters of interest to her without ending up feeling foolish. She was dipping her toe in the great muddy harbor of General Studies to see if its waters were congenial. If they were, if General Studies proved to have a mooring from which Great Thoughts could set forth, sails billowing, she would undertake to get a master’s degree. Then perhaps she would “get somewhere.” She was not entirely clear where the “somewhere” she intended to get was, but then General Studies didn’t offer a master’s, anyhow. For the present, it was enough that she had offered up $165 in tuition as token of serious intent, and she was back in school again, a quarter of a century after she had walked out of college into the frail young arms of Mr. Beneker. Statistically, Mrs. Beneker supposed, she was a cliché. Children grown, empty nest, time to be filled, that sort of thing. Not true at all. She had been just as lonely when the children were home, and her days were not long enough for all that she wanted to do.

MRS. BENEKER yearned to hold the world in close embrace. She walked in a daze of wonder which she felt impelled to communicate. But when she tried to do so, she sounded to herself like someone giving a grocery order — “One pound of Mazola margarine (‘I spent nearly the whole morning watching two little moths fighting over a female — it was the most heartrending, passionate triangle !’); one loaf of Pepperidge bread, white, sliced (‘She was the kind of person you would have expected to wear tweeds, from Best’s, and instead she had on this silver disk in the center of her forehead, like a Siamese dancer’); and so on, through one pound of peaches (‘He actually cried, he was so happy!’), four baking potatoes (‘There were three rainbows, crisscrossing’), and a package of paper napkins (‘Goethe didn’t visit his mother once in fifteen years, even though they lived in the same town, and yet she wrote him a note every single day’).”

So far, there had not been much communication in Religion G 9874y, either. For the first two classes, Professor Serota suffered having hands waved like banners before him. Even Mrs. Beneker had been heard. “Don’t we,” she said, numb with embarrassment, “fill Time with History?” Professor Serota had not agreed. “You don’t know what you are talking about,” he commented impersonally. “Time and history have nothing to do with each other. Next?” Mrs. Beneker didn’t mind the rebuff in the least. “That’s what I’m here for,” she assured herself, “to learn to think clearly — before I speak.” The third Tuesday, however, Professor Serota announced he was tired of having his train of thought constantly interrupted. “No more questions,” he said, rapping his desk sharply with his three middle fingers. “This is not a seminar.”

The trouble with no questions was that Mrs. Beneker’s mind wandered. Without interruptions, Professor Scrota’s voice was like a power drill outside an apartment house, insistent and piercing at the start and then likely to fade away as the assaulted ear fought back and blocked it out. Mrs. Beneker’s fingers continued to write after she stopped hearing Professor Serota, thus proving that lecture note-taking was a skill like roller-skating. Once you had it, you never lost it. Now she took careful notes while her mind explored byroads, just as it had so long ago when she sat in the smudged ivory-walled classrooms of Goldwyn Smith Hall at Cornell. Her fingers wrote “of Hurrian-Hittite origin,” while she tried to face up to admitting she was growing old without becoming sidetracked into admiration of the thought process that had brought her to the subject of age in the first place.

It had started with the realization that she was taking notes without actually listening. Then she had thought of the roller-skating analogy, proceeded from there to wondering whether one really could roller-skate at any age. Wasn’t there the danger of legs buckling eventually because of osteoporosis, an ailment to which older women were prone; then, shouldn’t she have prepared herself by drinking two glasses of milk a day, for calcium, years ago; hormone pills, the women’s magazines she read under the hair dryer all said, would prevent osteoporosis — and a lot of other things, too — shouldn’t she ask her doctor about them, was it a good idea, aside from the physical aspect, was it morally right, was there not an obligation to face life, including age, without props, honestly and directly? If she took estrogen, who would be the real she, Mrs. Benekercum-estrogen, or Mrs. Beneker bare, before she took a pill along with a glass of water from the Fountain of Youth? What would happen in bed?

Here her thoughts made an abrupt detour.

Mrs. Beneker’s sex life had improved with each advancing year. That, at least, bore out the nitwit optimism of those ominous last chapters in marriage manuals. Time brought relaxation. She did not expect each night to bring a ritual re-enactment of Tristram and Isolde parting at Cornwall, she took pleasure in the familiar textures and planes of Mr. Beneker, she was gratified when her mind did not wander even in the act of love, but she accepted the fact that it often did. That was how she was. In the early days of their marriage, Mr. Beneker had implored her to speak her love, but she had only smiled and patted him. She could not tell him — had not yet — that often she was not there beside him. Transports—how apt a word!—literally took her away. Ardor might find her at marblepillared Lindos, a sweep of lonely Montauk beach, a tree-shaded old Provencal cemetery, a Shaker parlor glowing with polished wood, a pine forest in the Sierras, even — she blushed — in the lusty, laughing, smoky cellar of the Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris. Her destination was always a surprise, like one of the “mystery” ferry rides they used to have on Long Island Sound.

Some sixteen hours earlier, Mrs. Beneker — salaams to Mr. Beneker — had found herself in no less an aerie than the Universe, a dark expanse churning with galaxies, like a black and white version of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. No, Mrs. Beneker decided now, smiling slightly at the recollection, it was not a Van Gogh at all. It was rather like the sky in that Wilbur Daniel Steele story, “The Man Who Saw Through Heaven.” “The Man Who Saw Through Heaven” had been a favorite of Miss Marguerite A. Greene, Mrs. Beneker’s first, and best, English teacher. Miss Marguerite A. Greene had had a profound influence upon her students, all of whom were romantic young girls. Her handwriting, angular and elegant, set the pattern for their own mangled scrawls. Her literary tastes, Willa Cather and Mary Ellen Chase, were theirs; and at her behest, they all memorized “Renascence.” Miss Greene found the Wilbur Daniel Steele story reassuring, and she told it often to her classes. As best as Mrs. Beneker could recall, it was about a minister who had come to New York City for a vacation, comfortably secure in his preCopernican notion of a world that was the center of God’s creation. (Mrs. Beneker herself firmly believed the legend that even while Copernicus recanted, he had muttered under his breath that the earth did so move.)

In the course of his visit, the minister had taken a walk down Forty-second Street and been attracted to the large telescope standing outside Stern’s department store. The minister paid a dime to look through the telescope, gazed upon the heavens as they really were, lost his faith, and fled in horror to the very depths of Africa. There he died, but not before he had regained his faith, as an examination of certain artifacts he had left revealed. He had, it appeared, worked his way back to worship of stone and fetish, and then struggled upward again, to an acceptance of the one and only God, so that his death had been triumphant.

WITH a pang, Mrs. Beneker turned to Father O’Flynn. His ears were pale now, but he was blinking as if his eyes hurt. She wanted to put a hand on his black mohair sleeve and tell him she understood. How difficult life must be for him! She had no idea why he was exposing his faith to Professor Serota’s barbs. Had he been assigned to the course by his superiors? Was he a teacher required to do advanced study? Or was he there only because of an interest in religion? Was a priest, in fact, allowed to be interested in religion? Was it permissible for him to laugh, as he had just that moment, at an anticlerical anecdote about a scholar-priest who had jumped over the wall in his old age, married an Arab girl, and become a professor at the Sorbonne?

Mrs. Beneker ached over Father O’Flynn. To have to reconcile Osiris and Jesus! To have to believe in the actual presence of God at the moment of consecration in the Mass and yet know that once people called Marduk the Almighty! How much simpler not to sec through heaven (“or people, Father O’Flynn”), how green was the Garden of Eden when the sun circled the earth and the moon outweighed the stars. “Don’t be afraid, Father O’Flynn,” Mrs. Beneker wanted to tell him, “just don’t be afraid. Everyone is searching for an answer, not only you. Even Einstein did. When someone asked him how he worked, he said, ‘I grope.’ Don’t be afraid to let go, Father O’Flynn. We don’t have that kind old man sitting on a throne in the sky anymore, but we have infinity instead.”

Mrs. Beneker turned to a fresh page in her notebook. Professor Serota was back on myth again. “The myth is real in context,” he said, and she wrote it down. She had no idea what that meant. Father O’Flynn snapped his notebook shut, deposited it on the arm of his chair, and yawned. Was he bored? Troubled? “ ‘Ruth amid the alien corn,’ ” Mrs. Beneker decided. “He must think nothing bothers us. We must look so ordinary.” She glanced around. “You could pluck us at random from any subway car, we’re so nondescript.”

“But you are, too, Father O’Flynn,” she added. “Turn around that collar of yours, and you look just like the rest of us. Don’t be so quick to judge !”

Suddenly Mrs. Beneker felt very tired.

“My father-in-law, whom I like very much, has cancer,” she told Father O’Flynn silently. “My youngest brother committed suicide four years ago. When I was seventeen, I was desperately in love, and scared of sex, and I slept with the boy just once in the back of a car because he begged me to. I had to have an abortion in a Harlem hotel room. A friend’s mother took me. I have never gotten over it.

“I have a daughter who works in a museum in Baltimore. When I know she is coming home for a weekend, I break out in a rash.

“My son is at Harvard. He says he is going to leave as soon as he has figured out where to go instead. He spent last summer in Mississippi, but he feels now that his motives were suspect. He did not go to help so much as to be helped. When there was no mail from him again this morning — that makes five weeks exactly since I last heard from him — I decided I couldn’t wait anymore. I telephoned. I woke him up, but he was very nice about it. “It’s not Harvard, Mother, I know that,’ he told me, ‘it’s me. Most of it anyhow. It would be the same thing wherever I went. But I can’t stand being a card in an IBM machine anymore. I can’t stand eating out of a tray. I can’t stand all the stupid geniuses around here. I’m sick and tired of having to read books and vomit back everything. It would be different if I really were interested in anything, I guess, but I’m not. I don’t care about a damned thing, and I don’t want to do a damned thing.’

“So I asked him what he intended to do, Father O’Flynn, and he said he was hoping he could find a cave somewhere and crawl in. ‘The world is shit, Mother,’ he said. Just like that.

“Oh, I know he won’t leave school. Not now. He knows he’ll be drafted if he does. I don’t think he’s about to go to jail instead, either. Vietnam does more than Milton can to justify Harvard’s ways to man. But I walk around with a stone in my chest all the time. Sometimes I can’t breathe thinking about him, wondering why. I wasn’t like that, Father O’Flynn, none of us were. We did what we were supposed to do, we didn’t ask questions that had no answers. When we saw the world was wrong — it was a terrible world then, too — we knew just what to do about it. Change it. Simple. Remold it to everyone’s heart’s desire. We were early primitives. We knew the totem for happiness. It was the same for everyone, it stood outside the door, it kept the demons away, and God knows what went on inside the hut. But my son has been spoiled rotten, Father O’Flynn. He has absolutely everything, and he isn’t satisfied. He has to be given meaning, too.”

At the front of the classroom, Professor Scrota turned to the blackboard and erased the few words he had written on it. “That will be it for today,” he said. “Next week I will give you a reading list.” He had been promising a reading list for the last six weeks. Mrs. Beneker closed her notebook and reached for her coat. Father O’Flynn got up, and as he did so, knocked Mrs. Beneker’s pockctbook off the arm of her chair. “Sorry,” he said. Mrs. Beneker retrieved it and smiled up at him. “Very interesting teacher, isn’t he?” Father O’Flynn remarked pleasantly. “A very interesting class, don’t you think so?”

“Very interesting,” Mrs. Beneker assured him, in her brightly cheerful suburban voice. “I just love it.”