Reflections In a Jaundiced Eye Read online

  To the memory of my mother,

  Louise Ruding King

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  1 - AUTHOR’S NOTE

  2 - CONFESSIONS OF A BLOOM & HIRSCH GIRL

  3 - GOOD KING HEROD

  4 - SPINSTERHOOD IS POWERFUL

  5 - FROM CAPTAIN MARVEL TO CAPTAIN VALIUM

  6 - DOES YOUR CHILD TASTE SALTY?

  7 - NICE GUYISM

  8 - DEMOCRAZY

  9 - THE AGE OF HUMAN ERROR

  10 - DÉJÀ VIEWS

  11 - THE COLOR PURPLE: WHY I AM A ROYALIST

  12 - TWO KIDNEYS IN TRANSPLANT TIME

  13 - UNSPORTIVE TRICKS

  14 - THE STATE OF THE FUNNY BONE

  15 - SUPERGOY

  16 - SEX AND THE SAXON CHURL

  17 - PHALLUS IN WONDERLAND

  18 - WOMEN’S LITTER

  19 - LAND OF HOPEFULLY AND GLORY

  20 - EPILOGUE

  Also by

  Copyright Page

  1

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  If suicide notes can be said to possess nationality, surely the most American one was left by historian Wilbur J. Cash: “I can’t stand it anymore, and I don’t even know what it is.”

  In 1964, rightwing maven Phyllis Schlafly published a book called A Choice, Not an Echo in which she condemned President Lyndon B. Johnson for awarding the Medal of Freedom to the leftwing literary critic Edmund Wilson. Among her objections to Wilson, Schlafly noted: “Edmund Wilson revealed his lack of patriotism in these words from his latest book (The Cold War and the Income Tax): ‘I have finally come to feel that this country, whether or not I continue to live in it, is no longer any place for me.’”

  It’s time Schlafly knew that Alexander Hamilton said it first. In a letter to Governor Clinton of New York he wrote: “Every day proves to me more and more that this American world was not made for me.” Moreover, in another letter to Rufus King, Hamilton said: “Am I a fool—a romantic Quixote—or is there a constitutional defect in the American mind?”

  Like all members of the God ‘n’ Country Club, Schlafly thinks that only leftwing teeth are set on edge by America. She’s wrong. I’m slightly to the right of Baby Doc, but life in America has the same effect on me as “The Morton Downey, Jr. Show.”

  Alexander Hamilton was neither a fool nor a romantic Quixote. According to the laws of logic, A is A; a thing cannot be other than itself; parallel lines cannot meet. Except in America, where the movement of Birnam Wood to Dunsinane is a regular occurrence in the lumberyard of our national psyche. Unstrung Americans are found in both political camps, and our common motto is: “My nerves, right or wrong.”

  This book is about my nerves and the lumberyard. That’s not a good title, however, so I called it Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye.

  2

  CONFESSIONS OF A BLOOM & HIRSCH GIRL

  In the summer of 1987 millions of Americans devoured two nonbeach books, Cultural Literacy by E.D. Hirsch and The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom. You know what that means. We are in for a fad of massive proportions. Culture is in the Green Room, practicing its sound bites while waiting to take a whack at our gross national attention span.

  I was a Bloom & Hirsch girl before Bloom & Hirsch were cool. It all started in Washington, D.C. in 1940. At four, I was at that familiar stage when children discover scissors and cut out pictures from newspapers and magazines. Like all kids in the throes of this craze, my preferences were eclectic—a racehorse from the sports page, a Jiggs and Maggie comic strip, a dictator on a balcony—until our long-suffering family doctor gave me sudden direction.

  Unwrapping his blood pressure cuff from my grandmother’s arm, he signaled my parents into the kitchen. I followed and listened to the verdict.

  “I won’t be responsible if she doesn’t stop reading that column,” he warned. “They’re all on the verge of a stroke. I treated three of them last week.”

  “They” were Granny’s cronies in the Daughters, and “that column” was My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt.

  Granny’s political opinions defied the entire body of Western rational thought—i.e., she was a Southern Democrat. To her way of thinking, Franklin Delano Roosevelt could do no wrong except when he did something wrong, and since that could not happen, someone else must have done it.

  She knew perfectly well who that someone was. That woman made Mr. Roosevelt invent Social Security because she was a Socialist. That woman made Mr. Roosevelt recognize Russia because she was a Communist. The colored were forgetting their place because that woman was stirring them up. Lazy actors were being paid good money to put on Federal Theater plays because that woman was planting secret messages.

  If the subject was over her head, like the gold standard, she issued her all-purpose explanation.

  “That woman drugged him.”

  Each day that Mrs. Roosevelt’s column ran in the Washington Daily News, Granny watched at the window for the delivery boy and made a beeline for the paper when she heard the thump at the door. She always turned directly to the fatal page. Soon she started turning red. By the time she got to the end of the first paragraph, the faint pink birthmark between her eyebrows had darkened until it burned like a scarlet brand. As she read on, she turned lethally glorious shades of maroon, magenta, and vermilion, just like the contents of my Crayola box. Her bosom, which would have put Dolly Parton to shame, heaved like multitudinous waterwings incarnadined as the flush spread down her neck and chest, which were one and the same.

  When she could stand no more, she dropped the paper and emitted a strangled cry.

  “Bring me my digitalis!”

  After the doctor’s ultimatum, my parents discussed the problem. Herb, my British father and the only intellectual in our family of pseudo-genteel Yahoos, came up with a solution calculated to save his mother-in-law’s life and give me a head start on reading.

  “Florence likes to cut things out of the paper,” he said. “Let her cut out Mrs. Roosevelt’s column before Mrs. Ruding sees it.”

  Granny reluctantly agreed, and censorship became my first household chore. I got into it in a big way. I had just seen one of those crusading newspaper movies starring James Gleason as the tough-talking editor who slashed at copy while wearing a green eyeshade. I fell in love with the idea of the eyeshade, so Herb bought me one to wear while I slashed Mrs. Roosevelt. Several afternoons each week, while Kate Smith belted out “God Bless America” on the radio, I sat in our grim, windowless kitchen ell (which I called my “ministry” after seeing another movie) and rolled back constitutional guarantees.

  I had no trouble finding Mrs. Roosevelt’s column because her picture was on it. Soon, though, encouraged by Herb, I began noticing other things. Often the lead sentence was one she had made famous: “My day has been a most interesting one.” It was the punchline of countless Eleanor jokes I had heard at family gatherings, delivered in imitation of her high-pitched, singsong voice.

  Herb had already taught me the alphabet, so he challenged me to sound out the letters. To our mutual delight, I managed to decode the sentence all by myself.

  “Let’s try another,” he said, leaning over my shoulder. “Here’s one. ‘I weep for the colored people.’ You know I. Now, weep. W is wuh-wuh, e is eee-eee, p is puh-puh.”

  A few minutes later, everything except the diphthong in people made sense to me. I could not contain my triumph.

  “I weep for the colored people!”

  “Bring me my digitalis!”

  My career as the Littlest Censor ended the day Granny suffered another seizure while bending over the waste basket to sneak out the discarded clippings. After that, we decided it was the better p
art of wisdom to let her read the column.

  My tomboy mother never read anything except the sports page, but she gave me a memorable spelling lesson one night as we listened to the radio. When the European news came on, the announcer repeated one word so many times that I could see it in my mind.

  “I know how to spell Jew,” I said. “J-U.”

  “No,” said Mama. “It’s J-E-W.”

  It was too much for my fledgling hubris. “It can’t be!” I protested.

  “Well, it is. It’s like few and new.”

  “I want it to be J-U.”

  “Tough shit,” said Mama. Like Phyllis Schlafly, she taught her young at home.

  By the time I started school I could read. I don’t remember how or when it happened; it was a gradual process more like digestion than an intellectual endeavor, and just as natural to my way of thinking. When I encountered a new word, the phonic juices flowed over it until it passed through my eyes and emerged from my brain fully formed.

  Showing up at school already able to read is like showing up at the undertaker’s already embalmed: people start worrying about being put out of their jobs. America’s most dedicated enemies of culture are the Education majors who dominate our public elementary schools. In Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Judith Rossner identified Ed majors as the college students who always ask, “Is this going to be on the exam?” whenever the professor goes off on an interesting tangent. Brain-dead themselves, their goal is to keep children as dumb as possible for as long as possible so they can get a raise for taking “Principles and Practices of Remedial Education” in summer school.

  My first-grade teacher, a classic example of the breed, got mad when I used the word prostration—I got it off the label of one of Granny’s snake-oil tonics—and sent a note home about the dangers of precociousness to peer group adjustment.

  Family reaction was mixed. My stalwart champion was Herb, the only bona fide male feminist I have ever known. Mama was neutral, yet in an odd way on my side. As an unfeminine Southern woman, she had endured so much disapproval herself that she supported any offbeat behavior. Her motto was “Do what you goddamn please,” even if it was something sissy like reading.

  My cross to bear was Granny, who harbored both an American dread of intellectuals and a Southern dread of female intellectuals.

  “If you keep reading, your eyes will fall out and go plop at your feet. They’ll just go plop! You’ll have to stand on the corner with a white cane and a little tin cup, and everybody will say ‘There’s the poor little blind girl who wouldn’t listen to her grandmother.’”

  Whenever she caught me reading the National Geographic she said, “East, west, home’s best.” Whenever Herb and I played our version of Scrabble—seeing how many words we could get out of disestablishmentarianism or Constantinople—she warned us of our likely fate.

  “I used to know somebody who made lists all the time. Poor soul, they had to put her away.”

  The first time I skipped a grade, she was so upset that she even did a little reading of her own to marshal evidence against it.

  “I saw in the Reader’s Digest about a little boy who went to Harvard at thirteen. Brilliant though he was, being around all those older boys and not having any friends his own age made him get downright peculiar. He’s a famous professor today, but he wears his clothes inside out and won’t have a lamp in his house. He reads beside ajar full of lightning bugs.”

  The article inspired her “brilliant but not very bright” theory. The more brilliant you were, the more trouble you had performing ordinary, everyday tasks like crossing the street or changing a razor blade. When she caught me peeling potatoes toward me, she cried “Brilliant but not very bright!” with such fervor that I jumped and cut myself, thereby proving her point.

  But that wasn’t all. The more brilliant you were, the more closely you had to be “watched,” and if you got really brilliant, you would have to be “put away.” Every Saturday when we drove over to Stephenson’s pie factory in Anacostia, she pointed to the redbrick pile of St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital and said, “That’s where they keep the brilliant people.”

  This attitude is conventional wisdom in America. We will never have a nation of cultured and reflective citizens as long as the press keeps printing that cautionary sentence: “Neighbors described the gunman as a quiet man who kept himself to himself.”

  A seafaring movie inspired my first dip into adult literature. Reap the Wild Wind had everything, including the interruption of a deep-sea dive by a giant squid. Constructed by Cecil B. DeMille from enough rubber to win the war, it was bright pink with malignant, unblinking black eyes and a talent for making riveting entrances. Suddenly the sunken ship cracked open and there was the squid in all its tentacled glory.

  “Here comes Mrs. Ruding,” Herb whispered.

  I asked him to get the book for me at the adult library. As it turned out, it was not a book but a long short story by Thelma Strabel that had appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. He looked up the back issue and we both read it.

  In the 3A I read Kings Row, which an Ed-major teacher confiscated when I made the mistake of taking it to school and reading it during recess. I was also charged with occupying a swing without swinging. She sent a letter home, the third that semester.

  “She’s spelled precocious wrong again,” said Herb.

  “She can read what she goddamn pleases,” said Mama.

  “She’s going to be just like that crazy professor who went to Harvard at thirteen,” said Granny. “Next thing we know, she’ll be running around with a butterfly net.”

  “It was fireflies, I believe,” Herb corrected.

  I got rid of the Ed-major teacher when our traditionalist principal took my side in the dispute and skipped me into 3B. I loved my new teacher. When I began to love school as well, Granny, upset over the second skip, exchanged mere nagging for outright terror.

  Each morning when she walked me to the door, she told me to watch out for cars with diplomatic tags—an old Washington warning—and described in lurid detail the special dangers they presented to scholars.

  “Diplomats always run over little children walking to school,” she said. “They’re always around early in the morning because they stay up all night at embassy parties. They’ll squish you flat until there’s nothing left of you except a little grease spot, but they’ll never get arrested for it because the police can’t touch them.”

  She waited for me to whine “I don’t wanna go to school,” but I never did. Given all my peer problems, I wanted to study even harder so I could grow up to be a diplomat.

  I looked forward to junior high. Having a different teacher for each subject, instead of one teacher all day long for a whole semester, would spread the risk of that elementary school game of American roulette wherein the loaded chamber contained an Ed major who hated bookworms.

  Having gym instead of recess would reduce the Christians versus Lions aspect of what Ed majors called “Principles and Practices of Playground Dynamics.” I didn’t expect to enjoy gym but at least it was a class, and having heard that you got extra credit for having a clean gym suit, I figured I could wash and iron my way to a passing grade.

  Best of all, people said that junior high “fostered maturity,” so I figured I was headed for bookworm heaven.

  “God, it’s just the most fun!” said the girl I sat next to in homeroom. “It’s almost like not being in school at all, the way you can get up and go somewhere else every forty-five minutes. The bells at the end of each period are something to look forward to, and the five minutes between classes really help to break up the day. You can go out in the hall and scream your head off!”

  If being a bookworm in elementary school was bad, it was fatal in junior high. “Fostered maturity” turned out to be a Head Start program for femininity. Suddenly we could wear lipstick without being sent to the principal’s office, and from there everything went down the drain—literally. The only thing most of the girls
wanted to study was the toilet bowl to see if there was any blood in it. Somebody was always jumping up and down and screaming “I started! I beat you!”

  In this atmosphere I soon exchanged my mark of Zorro for a mark of Cain. The teachers were fine; this time my problem was other girls. Girls were supposed to play dumb for the boys but I, used to Herb, didn’t do it. Each time I gave a correct answer in class, the Fostered Maturity clique reacted with the panicky fury of patriots confronted by a traitor. In the cafeteria they had no trouble reciting the wives of Tommy Manville and Artie Shaw, but when I recited the wives of Henry VIII in history class, they turned around and made faces and gagging sounds at me.

  As usual, I compounded my problems by taking refuge in books, specifically the Modern Library series. When I told Mama that Crime and Punishment was a detective story, she looked dubiously at the jacket.

  “He ought to change his name to Ted Dost.”

  Next came Fathers and Sons, followed by War and Peace.

  “When are you going to get to Shit and Piss?” she asked.

  I got so deeply into the Russians that I began signing myself “Florence Herbievna.” My favorite was Turgenev’s On the Eve, which contained aspects of interest to Granny. She loved a good terminal illness. Cornel Wilde had just starred in a movie about the life of Frédéric Chopin called A Song To Remember and she had gone to see it three times just to watch him spit blood on the piano keys, so I decided to tell her about On the Eve.

  “It’s about a Russian girl named Elena who falls in love with a Bulgarian revolutionary named Insarov, but he has TB.”

  “She better watch out. You know what they say about men with consumption. When their fever shoots up, it makes them oversexed.”

  Turgenev must have been raised on the same old wives’ tale because that’s exactly what happens when Elena visits Insarov in his room.

  “He dies in the end, and Elena becomes a nurse in the Crimean War.”

  “Did she catch another husband?”