Three Continents. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
one could look as sullen, when she wanted to, as warm, dimpled Barbara; and she wanted to now. She had a fleeting “Hi” for Jean; she disregarded Crishi completely; and she said to me, “Come in for a minute, Harriet. I want to say something.”
“Hey! No!” Crishi protested and became very active. He took Jean’s hand and made as if to pull her up. He also waved getting-up gestures at me and motioned his hand at Barbara to come on, let’s get going: “The Rawul’s waiting—he says where are those three daughters of the American Revolution—I can’t hoist the flag without them, it wouldn’t be proper.”
“What flag?”
“Ours,” Jean replied; she was wiping her eyes, was amused.
Not so Barbara: “Ours? Our flag? You mean he’s actually going to fly the American flag? I can’t believe it. Who is he to fly our flag? You wouldn’t let him, would you, Harriet? The Stars and Stripes—on the Fourth—in your house? Yours and Lindsay and Michael’s house?” She was really sincerely deeply shocked. I was amazed; I had no feelings of that kind and would never have dreamed she had. Now I saw that Jean was beginning to look a bit shamefaced; she too assumed a serious expression and murmured “It’s not right.”
“It’s outrageous,” said Barbara.
Crishi lowered his eyes; he bit his lip. “I’ve put my foot in it. I don’t know how but I’ve done it.” He looked up again, from Jean to Barbara and back, appealing to be forgiven for whatever it was he had done wrong.
But Jean, sitting there heavy and blowsy, had begun to look grim; so did Barbara, though pink and disheveled and still wearing her baby-doll robe. Both seemed formidable matrons at that moment, upholders of virtue and tradition: making Crishi, standing between them, elegant and foreign, throw up his hands in a good-natured, giving-up gesture. He turned to me: “You’d better come. Michael wants you.” This, spoken straight, was far more personal and intimate than the wanting-to-please tone he had been using; and it put me in his camp immediately—I didn’t have to think a moment, didn’t have to choose, I simply accompanied him without a glance at Jean and Barbara.
Two flagpoles had been erected between the barns and the lake, and all the guests had assembled there, to watch and to listen to the Rawul’s address. Now that everyone was assembled in one spot, they formed a sparse and straggly group: probably because the grounds were so large, with the lawns and tall trees; and the old barns, almost as tall as the trees; and the lake with the sky reflected in it, making both sky and water seem twice as deep and full of light. It turned out there were two flags to be hoisted—the Stars and Stripes, and the flag of the Fourth World. Before the ceremony the Rawul gave a little address, which wasn’t in content different from what he said every evening under the tree. He seemed to be very moved—not that he wasn’t always moved when he spoke of his Fourth World, his high Idea.
He said it was a great moment in history when the two flags were for the first time to fly together over American soil, for the first time to flutter freely here in the clear pure air of this land of freedom. His audience listened in silence; it was difficult to know how he was being received—they were such a diverse group, it was impossible to think of them as united in anything. Certainly, everyone stood very still—there was no fidgeting, no movement at all anywhere except for the light breeze fluttering around among the tops of the trees. The local people looked solemn the way they were used to looking in church and at other Fourth of July or generally patriotic gatherings. Great principles were nothing new to them. What was surprising to me was the sight of my parents. Not by design, I’m sure, but accidentally, in the forming of the group, they had got next to each other. They both stood very straight—both had fine, tall figures—and with their chins raised, they looked ready to dedicate themselves to something higher than themselves. Their eyes—and these, in spite of everything they had done or left undone, had remained very clear—were fixed on the Rawul; or it may have been on the Rani, who stood a few paces behind him. She too looked solemn—in a practiced way, as though she were used to putting on this expression whenever necessary.
Three followers carrying instruments struck up as the Rawul hoisted the two flags. The music must have sounded strange to everyone except the Rawul’s party, for it was a most original mixture of baroque, Oriental, and atonal. Its main purpose was to stir and rouse, and it certainly did that to the three players themselves. I had seen them often but never noticed them much: two young men and a girl, pale, blond, undernourished—I would have said anemic, but there was nothing bloodless in the way they played. One strummed, one blew, one played a kind of drum—all three of them giving it everything they had, pouring themselves into the music as they swayed and swung and bent and rose with it; and when the flags went up the staff, they seemed to go with them—actually rose on tiptoe: until it wasn’t possible to go up any farther, and the music stopped in that abrupt way a certain kind of music does, as if recognizing its own limits. Complete silence followed, except for the birds in the trees, which carried on as usual, and everyone looked up to see where the two flags—the Stars and Stripes and the wheel-within-the-diamond of the Fourth World—had taken off in the breeze and flew together side by side. It was the perfect gesture or symbol the Rawul had intended—or would have been if it hadn’t been slightly marred by those two unhappy figures in the distance, Jean and Barbara, watching the proceedings from the porch and making them seem dubious.
The flag-raising ceremony was the climax of the party but not the end of it, for the guests stayed on. Perhaps they were reluctant to leave our beautiful house and grounds; or perhaps they were waiting for something more to happen. I had always been aware that our household raised expectations, and that people speculated about us. When I was still quite small and biked over to the farm produce store for their homemade caramels, the old Mrs. Walters who was then in charge of it would keep me talking, trying to extract some information about “your folk up there in the house, your mom and dad,” though she knew perfectly well that Manton had moved out years ago. Before he did, in the brief time that he and Lindsay had been together, it was said that what went on at Propinquity outdid the most squalid area of the town, down on Fourth Street, where wives were calling nightly for the police as protection against their husbands, and sometimes for the ambulance as well. After Manton left, there was a lull for a while. The house was empty, and people used to look at it longingly, wanting for it to come alive again. They were only partly satisfied when Lindsay stayed for weekends with different lovers and finally moved in with Jean—none of this was unusual, and interest had begun to shift to some of the other big houses (weird weekend parties had started up in the Tyler house, now owned by the daughter of a Texas oilman). But when the Rawul and his group came in, we moved to center stage again, and our cleaning lady, Mrs. Pickles, with her inside information became sought after even by people who had never had much time for the Pickles family. With this party—at which not only the Rawul and his retinue were on display but also Lindsay and Jean and Manton and Barbara—we were reinstated as the principal family, leaving the Texas heiress just simply nowhere, where she belonged.
But if anyone was waiting for a fight to break out between Manton and Lindsay, they would have been disappointed. I think it was not until the ceremony was over that the two of them discovered they had been standing side by side; instead of turning their backs on each other as they might have done under normal circumstances, they exchanged some pleasant words and even walked away together. I saw Mrs. Pickles nudge Mrs. Walters of the farm produce store—this was the daughter-in-law, old Mrs. Walters having been put away in a home some years ago—to draw her attention to this handsome all-American couple strolling side by side toward the house, engaged in conversation. I watched them too; I wondered what they could have to say to each other so amiably. They veered sharply away—away from the house where Jean and Barbara still stood on the porch, watching them—and moved off together toward the orchard; but before disappearing in there, Manton turned around and called me, and when I joined them, he hooked one arm into mine and the other into Lindsay’s, and anyone watching was rewarded by the sight of this happy family group, father, mother, and daughter, strolling under the ripening apple trees of their own orchard.
“I’ve been telling Lindsay,” Manton said to me in the warm voice he had when at peace with himself and the world. “I think it’s wonderful: the whole