The Age of Reason. Marian Birch
whispered her poems, in secret meetings at Moscow subway stations, line by line, while he memorized them. Later, stationed in New York, he had transcribed from memory the verses Kitt was now trying to translate. Harrowing stuff, that poetry. Kitt had quit the Party years before, almost as soon as she’d joined, indignant at the nonagression pact with Hitler, but this poetry would have made her do so now if she hadn’t already.
She pulled the sheet out of the typewriter, crumpled it, and tossed it on the floor, then scrolled in another. “My dear Nancy,” she wrote,
Oh how I wish you were here—no, far far better, that I were there sharing the pleasures of a Paris spring with you and sipping pernod in a warm café. Massachussets just now is still coldish and dampish, though new grass, croci, and daffodils offer faint hope of impending warmth. But really, as I seem to say each time I write, perhaps to discourage you from following in my (staggering) footsteps, no one in her right mind would ever marry or have children. The children are good-enough sorts, viewed from a distance I think. Edith is grave and wise beyond her years and has always been able to entertain herself since she played with her fingers and toes as a baby. She has quite an independent spirit and a manner I can only call “imperious.” She reads so much, I fear for her eyesight and her posture. And when she’s not tyrannizing or torturing him, she helps to keep Marcus cheerful and out of danger. Marcus is sturdy, lively (!! as in dervish!) and he is finally starting to talk comprehensibly. But oh my lord, the upkeep they require, and the attention they crave, are enough to drive one mad, which for “moi,”as you know, is not a long ways off at best. Why don’t I have a wife? Which brings me to the second part of my warning. I can distinctly recall finding Arthur terribly attractive, even before Big BrotherTeddy’s death thrust me suddenly into his arms. But now the unending whirl of laundry, cooking, bedtime-story reading, nose-and-bottom-wiping, etc. is scarcely aphrodisiac, as you can (or perhaps—I hope—you can’t) imagine. And although I think he’s more helpful than most men, and thinks heought to be ( he, not I, managed to plow through The Second Sex when the Parshley translation came out this year), there’s so much, being a man, he simply doesn’t notice, or else thinks is unimportant.
That’s enough complaining. I’ve become one of those women who talk about nothing but their domestic affairs, something I always loathed and despised. I love to think of you in your little garret on the Ile St. Louis, or meandering over medieval bridges and cobblestoned streets to your lectures. Maybe seeing Camus, De Beauvoir, or Sartre as you go. I’m so glad the Sorbonne no longer makes students sit on bales of hay for lectures as they did in Aquinas’s day. And speaking of Sartre, does it feel to you as if you’ve reached “the age of reason” yet? I feel as if I’ve skipped right over it to what the brother character (forgot his name) calls “the age of resignation.”
Our little college here is buzzing with intrigue this spring—the usual love affairs, drinking scandals, and much political fuss. Arthur will never give up his faith in the Revolution—no matter what terrible things he hears about Stalin, he thinks it’s all a CIA disinformation campaign. I think I may have seen his eyes water when his darling Uncle Joe died in March. Arthur remains a devoted member of his “cell,” is trying to organize a faculty union, and peppers his lectures to students with the (ever-changing) party line. Remember when we joined up at Smith? It seemed so exciting and romantic then, but the pact with the Nazis was enough to disenchant me. That wasn’t CIA disinformation! Though I have to admit when I fell in love with Arthur, I almost became a believer again. Lust is not good for thinking, is it? Or ethics. Ike’s anti-Red minions, the unsavory Dulles brothers, and the insane and very unsavory Senator from Wisconsin foster a dismaying atmosphere that may threaten our Massachusetts academic idyll. I honestly don’t know whether to hope for that or fear it. I really am a city person, for all my fondness for scenic views of the countryside. Of course, if we couldn’t go on here, we’d go to New York.
I’m sending you a poem I’m working on; tell me honestly what you think. Is it too melodramatic? How I’d love to have one of our grand typewriter races, speeding down the page in iambic couplets. Hope to hear from you soon,
Love
Kitt
The ravell’d sleeve again unstrung
And still we’ve not come home.
Love’s taste still lingers on the tongue,
The songs of homecoming unsung,
An ache deep in the bone.
The spirit gate is open wide
The hungry ghosts pour in.
They suck the heart’s receding tide,
They mutilate the unborn child
And scream in bitter pain.
A life’s not long enough to reach
The final row, the final stitch.
We are cast off before we’re done.
And leave the pattern just begun.
She knew that Shakespeare’s ravelled sleave was a skein and not part of a sweater, but she was a knitter and her poem reflected that.
Kitt’s longing for Paris was ingrained. She had been born there and had been brought to America at the age of eight speaking only French and Russian. She rapidly made herself an absolute master of a somewhat archaic form of English by reading all the novels and stories of Dickens, some of them repeatedly, before she was twelve. Lewis Carroll was another influence on her style of expressing herself; she learned much of his verse by heart and now would recite it to her children.
Kitt recalled how when she arrived at Smith College in western Massachussetts in 1938, she had lost her virginity at the earliest opportunity and begun what would be an extensive collection of paramours. Sex, she had decided, was better than ballet or music or poetry, and her appetites were both deep and broad. She’d met Teddy Brynn, a scholarship boy at Williams, the summer after her sophomore year when they were both tutoring the children of textile workers in nearby Pittsfield. Teddy was now only a memory, but her desires were still with her.
Pushing her chair away from her desk, Kit stood, put the cover over the Smith-Corona, and rolled her shoulders. At nearly five feet ten inches, she was almost exactly the same height as her husband, but thanks to early ballet training, she had better posture and looked taller. She knew that breastfeeding and lugging babies around had not been good for her posture, but she believed in the health benefits of breastfeeding, much as she disliked it. She retwisted her wispy brown hair severely into a knot at the nape of her neck, adding to her ballerinalike air, and smoothed her navy-blue skirt. It was one of three identical skirts that she rotated throughout the term. Today it was paired with other perennial garments—a saggy blue cardigan over a man’s tailored shirt. When she remembered, she put on a bit of lipstick, though she always seemed to put it on crooked and get some on her teeth. But by this time of day—midafternoon—the lipstick was long gone. She wore round tortoiseshell glasses that magnified her already large and very myopic blue eyes. Overall, since her head was rather small for her height, she worried that she had a vaguely newt-like appearance. She had never worn high heels—she was too tall and besides they were stupid devices to make women into sexual playthings—and this June afternoon she was sporting a favorite pair of deerskin moccasins with thongs that laced up her lower leg, footwear that she had acquired on her prenuptial trip to Mexico with Arthur eight years before. She paused to remember that thrilling and awful year when, after Arthur drove up to Smith to tell her that Teddy had been shot down in Occupied France, they had fallen into each others’ arms and one thing had rapidly led to another. Their month in Acapulco and San Cristóbal was magical, she recalled, and the moccasins always made her think longingly of tequila and of the powerful corn liquor the Indians drank and poured over the saints in their church. Under the thongs, her legs were bare, pale, and stippled with razor bumps, for she assiduously shaved her legs (though not