Disturbances in the Field Read online

  The story opens with the young marquis Walter being chastised by his subjects for not taking a wife to ensure his lineage. The idea of marriage does not thrill him. “To that I nevere erst thoughte streyne me. I me rejoysed of my liberte.” But he bows to the greater good. The wedding day is set, the feast prepared, and still Walter’s choice is kept secret: the lowliest maiden in the kingdom, Griselda, lowly in station but not in virtue. In the home of her father (widowed? no mother is in evidence, and cleverly so), Griselda tends the sheep, picks herbs, and keeps house, never idle, never sheltering a mean thought from dawn to dusk; in the breast of her virginity, says Chaucer, was enclosed “rype and sad corage,” which does not mean ripe and sad courage, as well it might, given the circumstances, but a mature and sober heart. In one of her frequent surges of humility, she hopes to steal a moment from her chores to watch the wedding procession pass by. But lo, the marquis stops at her very doorstep! With some distaste, attendants strip Griselda of her poor garments and outfit her as a fine lady. She makes an excellent and unpretentious marquise, appeasing all discord and rancor with her mature and sober heart. Soon she bears a daughter; well, at least she is not barren, and everyone hopes for a better issue the next time around.

  Now, Walter is possessed of a strange urge (a “merveillous desir,” Chaucer calls it) to test his wife’s sworn obedience. He tells her, falsely, that his people resent her and her daughter for their lowly birth. He sends a sinister man to carry the baby off. Griselda agrees with no complaint. She and the baby, she tells her husband, are “Youre owene thyng; werketh after youre wille.” She asks only to kiss the child, and begs the sinister man to bury the body rather than leave it to be shredded by wild beasts. Four years later she bears a son. Again Walter feels the “merveillous desir” for a test, and the son is snatched away. “Whan I first cam to yow, right so,” says Griselda to her husband, “Lefte I my wyl and al my libertee.” Walter’s third test involves forging a papal bull that permits him to put aside his wife and take another, of more fitting birth and rank. Patient Griselda wishes him luck. But she utters a sentiment of regret:

  O goode God! How gentil and how kynde Ye semed by youre speche and youre visage The day that maked was oure mariage!

  She has one request. Walter has said she may take with her the dowry that she brought him. But all she brought, she reminds him, was her body, and surely he would not wish her to leave the palace naked. In a career of passivity it is her single brilliant moment. What she says, in modern English, is, “You could not do so shameful a thing as to have that very womb where your children lay be displayed all bare, as I walk before the people.” Such moments confounded our indignation. How could it be—a great poet with an offensive theme! In any case, Walter allows Griselda a “smok” in fair exchange for the virginity she brought him but cannot take home with her. Strictly speaking, he was generous—the smock is much bigger than that membrane he punctured. We brooded over the smock at length in the dorm. I thought it must be a kind of nightie, but Esther said it would look more like a slip. Nina saw it as something sack-like to cover the naked body; the defining garments of femininity, bodice, corset, and so forth, would go on top.

  The highborn young bride and her little brother are on their way. Walter needs some woman to straighten up the palace and arrange the bedrooms exactly to his tastes. Who knows his tastes better than Griselda? She comes willingly, glad to be of service. During the wedding feast he calls her away from her sweeping to present his bride: “Griselda … How liketh thee my wyf and hire beautee?” Griselda likes her right well. She has a word of counsel, though: that he not “prikke” this young maiden with “tormentynge” as he has done to others. Others! At last, however faintly, the unmistakable note of wifely acrimony. Because, suggests Griselda, a tenderly bred maiden could not endure adversity so well as a creature of lowly birth. A creature!

  And lo again, Walter’s strange urge, his “merveillous desir,” is satisfied! Perhaps it is satisfied because she diluted her saintliness with that note of wifely acrimony. He embraces Griselda and reveals that the young bride and her little brother (twelve and seven years old) are their children, not shredded by wild beasts after all but raised by Walter’s sister, a countess in Bologna. When she recovers from her faint, Griselda is dressed once more in garments befitting a fine lady. It does not say what becomes of the “smok.” They all live happily ever after. It cannot be without irony that Chaucer opens his Envoi: “Griselda is dead, and her patience with her, And both buried together in Italy.”

  Esther’s wrath was not focused: Chaucer, Walter, God, Griselda, and Professor Mansfield all came in for a share.

  Professor Mansfield tried to placate her. “Didn’t you read the Envoi, Miss Brickman? Chaucer clearly dissociates himself from the story. ‘Don’t let humility nail your tongues,’ he tells all noble wives. ‘Don’t give anyone cause to write this kind of story about you.’” He smiled in a conciliatory way. “Now isn’t that enough?”

  “Too late, too late,” she grumbled. “By that point the damage is done. And the poetry’s better in the main part anyhow, isn’t it?”

  “Miss Brickman, the entire tale illustrates a moral thesis. These are not real people. You must try to read with the sensibility of Chaucer’s age and suspend your modern judgment.”

  Esther said fiercely, “I will never suspend my judgment!”

  In the privacy of her room she vowed revenge. In the privacy of her room we all vented our disgust. Walter was unspeakable, but it was Griselda who mortified us. I still had the quote from Spinoza tucked in my mirror: “The effort by which each thing endeavors to persevere in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself,” and I blamed Griselda for neglecting to persevere in her own being. I was wrong, however. The essence of Griselda was what Chaucer calls Patience and we call self-abnegation. She persevered. Not that it makes her any more appealing.

  It was Esther’s turn to recite her memorized stanzas in class. She was flushed and jittery as she walked to the front, but that was not unusual. She hadn’t spoken more than two lines when I began to pay closer attention. I watched Professor Mansfield to see what he would do. He sat at his desk with his customary wys and wel ytaught expression, spinning his swivel chair gently from side to side. His glasses were pushed up and resting on a receding hairline, his fingers raised in a little church steeple, softly tapping, as Esther recited:

  Whan that Grisilde’s doghter was ytaken She silently devysed hire a planne

  For to revenge swich deed she wold not slaken Though Walter bynne a markys and a manne. Whil in hir veynes the fury swifte yranne, To Walter’s chambre stoleth shee by nighte, And whispred, “Yor dere wyf namoore I highte.”

  Up reysed she hir axe as up he sterte

  And cleved she his manhood righte in tweyne.

  “Ye be nat fitte to lyve, withouten herte,”

  Said she, whil Walter clutch’d himself in peyne.

  “Next comes your nekke; the blood will flow like reyne!

  Me liketh not to soffre as ye heste.

  Yor kyngdom now is myne!” She axed his breste.

  When the applause died down, Professor Mansfield rose to the occasion. Genial, Chaucerian, he praised Esther’s near-faultless iambic pentameter and Middle English delivery. He asked to see her verses and she went and fetched a ragged notebook page. She was awesome standing in front of the class, thin this week, her hair pulled back and lashed into a long ponytail, two splotches of pink on her broad cheekbones—the stance of a martyr to conscience facing the gallows.

  Professor Mansfield inspected her paper and put a few errors in spelling and diction on the board for the edification of us all. Writing Chaucerian verse was a fine way to understand the poet; he recommended it. He also recommended a dictionary and handbook of Middle English usage, of which he was one of the four compilers. However, we must try to understand the spirit as well as the letter. The spirit of Chaucer was not vindictive.

  “And now the two
stanzas you memorized, if you would, Miss Brickman.” She wouldn’t, couldn’t, having stayed awake for two nights preparing her revenge. He marked her down as unprepared. Esther’s mouth opened in shock but she did not protest.

  After class she was surrounded. A genius! And she had never let on! Wasn’t he a bastard to mark her unprepared! She shrugged that off. As the girls drifted away the boys approached in a phalanx, at the center their evident spokesman, who looked a bit older, with a clever, bearded face. George.

  “That was a wonderful addition to a moral tale,” began George. “Deeply affecting. But poor Walter. After all, he was only a personification of higher powers.”

  “Oh yeah?” said Esther curtly and breathlessly. Her chest rose and fell, she was pale now, and her eyes were like emeralds. “Tough luck, then.”

  So we laughed together, and they induced us to cross to the other side of Broadway, to a retreat called the Lion’s Den, where they entertained us with coffee and doughnuts and the brand of wit Columbia men were known for—sharp and supercilious. Great names wafted through the air like badminton birdies. They were mostly seniors, with a year of Contemporary Civilization, CC, behind them—every great book since the world began. A man who has taken CC at Columbia, rumor had it, is, like Odysseus, never at a loss. We kept up as best we could. Our initiatory course, The Individual and Society, had been gossipy, personal, feminine. But we knew our Greeks, and we relied on pure mother wit.

  “Don’t blame it all on Chaucer,” said Ray Fielding. “Griselda started in Boccaccio.”

  “And then she turns up in Petrarch,” said another.

  “Evidently,” remarked Esther, “she had a certain appeal for all the fellows.”

  I watched Victor Rowe. In his light eyes was the most critical expression I had ever seen. Anybody who scanned the world that way, I thought, must be the most clever, the most supercilious. And if he knew how striking he was, it would be so much the worse. He was tall and rangy and moved with the coordinated, weird grace of a giraffe. His hair was straight and sandy, his forehead high, and his eyes bluish-ivory and liquidy. Did they weep with disdain?

  “The only profitable way to read Griselda,” he said, “is as comedy. Chaucer’s answer to medieval soap opera. Or a takeoff on Job.” His tone was not at all disdainful, only detached in a way I found intimidating.

  “Female version,” I said. “He ranted to heaven and she keeps her mouth shut.”

  “Yes,” said Victor, “but they both get it all back in the end. That’s why it’s comedy.”

  There were hollows around his cheekbones, and a feeling of impatience around his mouth. His whole face was a study in planes and shadows, extra shadows because he needed a shave. He had clean white sneakers on, and red wool socks, and tiny flecks of paint studded his tan chino pants. His hands were flecked with paint too, especially the cuticles: large, hairy hands, strongly articulated. They looked older than he did.

  We talked about courtly love, and Victor said the vestiges of courtly love were still with us. “Unfortunately. Knights and ladies, sacred virginity, tests of devotion. It’s all part of a structure to maintain the status quo. Falling in love. You don’t think falling in love is natural, do you? It’s a learned response. Every society in history had lust, sure, but not too many have had falling in love, the way we do.”

  My pride was offended. I took it as a proclamation of invulnerability. I would have liked to appear invulnerable that way too.

  George, on the other hand, loved the idea of courtly love. He was ready to do anything for a lady, he said, provided someone gave him a good horse, and a sharp sword, and a pretty coat of arms. The other boys all laughed, but I wasn’t sure why. They were pleasant boys behind the show of cleverness, and George was something more: not quite a boy, for one thing. He had been in the army before college, so was a few years older than the rest. George’s cleverness was ingratiating and inclusive. He liked to joke about his shortcomings: couldn’t master Latin case endings, couldn’t learn to dive, couldn’t have three drinks without falling asleep or throwing up. When our little party dispersed he drew Esther aside and asked her to go to a movie that evening.

  Once we crossed Broadway all was changed. We made friends, we accepted the company of men. Esther’s stanzas inspired a spate of Griselda parodies, recited aloud and with hilarity in the Lion’s Den. Steffie Baum published them in the student paper in a special box near the editorials, one at a time for two weeks running. In Ray Fielding’s, Griselda chopped up her daughter herself rather than yield her to the sinister man. When Walter reveals that he meant merely to hide the child at his sister’s, it is too late. He rends his royal garments. In another, Griselda went mad in the manner of Ophelia, drifting through the palace in her smock, intoning lyrical non sequiturs in Middle English. But these evaded the point. The best, though I hated to admit it, was Victor’s. Five stanzas long—he must have labored for days. After the kidnapping of the children, Victor had Walter chop pieces off Griselda—her toes, one each day, then her fingers, hands, arms, legs. In a few weeks she is a stump. With each blow of the ax she repeats, “I am youre owene thyng; werketh after youre wille.” Victor asked me to have a beer in the West End Bar, but I was afraid my own cleverness wouldn’t fill an hour alone with him. I said I was busy.

  I was. I spent hours working on Beethoven sonatas and the prescribed Haydn and Mozart trios. On my own I was practicing Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet, which the Chamber Music Society would present at its spring concert. The auditions were not till April; I had begun preparing in September, trying to make it an inseparable part of me. I wanted to be chosen with a passion. The quintet entranced me, most of all the fourth movement, a theme and variations using the melody from Schubert’s song about a trout. Aside from its sophisticated pleasures, the melody pierces the heart, and the variations, like prisms, candid and relentless, flash the heart’s exposed facets. It may be nothing more magical than the symmetry of the intervals—a fourth up, third up, third down and fourth down, the unexpected fifth, and then the descending, syncopated scale, like someone skipping down a flight of steps. But that explanation sounds like Nina, decanting magic.

  A pianist needs another instrument, and the only free time I had to learn the oboe was late at night. Music did not touch Melanie; play away, she said. So, many evenings I sat on my bed piping halting scales, while Melanie slept curled in her Dr. Dentons. We continued peacefully to coexist. And for comic relief I had joined the Gilbert and Sullivan Society, a suitably zany bunch that needed an extra accompanist for rehearsals. The regular accompanist, Henrietta Frye, was a slender senior with milky skin who resembled the lovesick maidens Gilbert and Sullivan immortalized. In fact she was a hiker and tennis player as well as an excellent pianist, better than I. Only if something happened to Henrietta Frye—not something awful, I hoped, but something minor and incapacitating, like spraining a finger on the courts—could I get to play for the performances, Patience in the winter and The Yeomen of the Guard in the spring. But I suppressed my visions. Henrietta was deserving and I was a bit superstitious, like my mother.

  “George is okay, he’s very nice,” said Esther, “but he’s not right for me. Or me for him, either. Lots of times we just kind of miss each other. You know what I mean? Like paper airplanes. At home we used to try to make them crash but it’s hard, they’re so light.”

  We were swimming in the college pool, nearly empty at five in the afternoon. Esther swam daily to stay thin, but she found it too boring alone. Nina and Gaby and I took turns. I swam laps to set a good example, but Esther mostly treaded water and talked.

  “Too clever. Always has a ready word.” She swam a few lazy yards and returned. “He’d be much better for you, Lydia. Much more your type.”

  I frowned and swam away.

  “Oh, and there’s another thing,” she called after me. “All he cares about, mostly”—she dove underwater to tantalize me, and rising, shook droplets from her face—“is going to bed.”

&nb
sp; “Aha! Well?”

  “What do you mean, aha, well?”

  “Esther, you know exactly what I mean.”

  She giggled, floated on her back. “I did, once.”

  “Just once?”

  “Yes. He’s a little distressed about that, understandably. You remember Fecundity, in the Calculus?” Since Gaby’s outburst of last year, Bentham’s Hedonistic Calculus had become a dormitory joke. Everyone knew it by heart. Intensity, Duration, Certainty or Uncertainty, Propinquity, Fecundity, Purity, and Extent, how far can the pleasure be shared with others? “It seems if you do it once it’s supposed to lead to the next time, and the next, ad infinitum. But frankly, I don’t like him that much. Oh, he was all right. He did quite well, actually.”

  She was so blithe—I could hardly believe it. “How do you know? You have nothing to compare him to.”

  “That’s true, but I could tell he put on a good show. Interesting. I just don’t have that feeling for him.”

  “And what makes you think I would?” What did a good show consist of, anyway? Interesting? I swam four laps to seem indifferent, but she waited, paddling around.

  “I know you, Lydia. You’re so restless. And you could fit him very easily, ha ha, into your busy schedule, I mean. He’s diverting. Like in Pascal. A divertissement.”

  “You have to do at least six laps or else it’s a complete waste of time. Come on, Esther, your fat cells are multiplying.” I swam furiously to elude my fantasies, vivid now that they contained a specific person. Last week she had handed me the new loafers that squeezed her instep. And now this. A friend was another self indeed.

  Early December, a still-mild day, a bunch of us were finishing a paper-bag lunch on the boys’ campus. One by one people straggled away until only Esther and George and I were left. I gathered up my debris. “Don’t rush off, Lyd,” she said. “You don’t have your quartet till three.” George told us how he had enlisted in the army to feel distinct from his father and uncles, who were all rabbis, but now he was a pacifist. “How could you ever think a uniform would confer distinction?” Esther asked. “And now I’ll leave you two to your own devices. I have an appointment with my French teacher. Good-bye!” George watched her run down the steps and across the campus till she was out of sight. Then, like a salesclerk shifting to a new customer, he turned his attention to me.