Exposition, Chapter 9 (p. 167-173)

"So have there been women here before?" D. interrupted.

Steinbeck smiled at the innuendoed tone of her question. "But of course. You don't think that in a world of such diversity only men would find their way here, do you? Or did you think that we would turn women away to some other house in the wilderness with doors closed to men that would give women their equal due to solitude in the mountains? To my knowledge, no such counterpart exists. Well, perhaps there is one, at that, because, though we have had women, we haven't had nearly enough of them. What do you think, Huck, should we send out a troop to find our female counterparts?"

"Not at my age, Steiny, not at mine."

Steinbeck laughed at a joke that he did not share.

"Well, old man, you remember Charlotte, don't you?"

"I ain't so old that my mem'ry can't go back that short stretch."

Steinbeck laughed again. "Not to discredit your youthful vigor, but I suspect that there are men who have taken a memory of Charlotte to the grave, no matter the disrepair of their minds toward the end."

"She must have been pretty," guessed D.

To this comment, Steinbeck responded with a quizzical look that conveyed perfectly the thought that women should not think so little of men that a pretty face alone will procure deathbed remembrances. "No," he said. "In fact, at certain angles and certain lights, she was downright ugly. Her eyes and hair were black, but of an ordinary sort, and her skin was sallow and a little too loose on her body. But usually there was something about her that made you want to look more closely. Something was just off about her appearance, and the same was true about her personality. I think men might remember her after all else has become shapes in the dust because she caused a subtle disruption, like an ambiguous insult, or a puzzle that seems to have a solution that you don't want to figure out.

"Or maybe it was just that she was our first woman and we didn't know how to react to her. Sometimes I've felt, and maybe you could tell me better, that it must have taken great courage for her to stay amongst a crew of men cut off from society for such a length of time."

"We're not helpless, you know. Besides, almost everybody's been friendly and cordial to me."

"Oh, believe me, I know. I often think that women are the stronger half of the species, almost to the point of being unstoppable when they've got their minds set on something. But I think that I'd be uncomfortable, to say the least, in a detached mansion with a mob of strange women. Men may profess to fantasize about such scenes, but it's a rare fellow who wouldn't avoid the chance were it to arise, I believe.

"But in our situation here, I guess it helps some that we're not always cut off from the world. Some of us, I'm sure, lead very productive lives when we're not here."

Huck chuckled to himself.

"It's never comfortable to be different," suggested D.

Steinbeck nodded and then responded, "That it is not. But Charlotte," he said, bringing them back to his story, "always seemed to enjoy the extra attention and the leverage that came with it. I don't know what she did in real life, but I don't think that it fulfilled her or made her feel important or significant. When she came here, she must have discovered something inside herself that she didn't know existed, and she let it loose with a fury.

"I wouldn't say that she was bad, but... well, wait a minute... yes I would. She was a bad girl in every way that title can be made to apply reluctantly, and I understand that some people find that very attractive. Not to say that she drank excessively, or anything of that nature; in fact, I think she may have been a little afraid of what might come out of her mouth if she did. I guess what I'm trying to say is that she overacted. She took a role that didn't seem to be a perfect fit and stretched it out and damn near broke it.

"Take her name, for instance. She chose it from some children's novel either out of laziness or a fine-tuned sense of irony and took to calling Nathaniel 'Wilbur' and John 'Old Farmer Bill.' Only she didn't know if she had the right name, so she'd say, 'Old Farmer Homer or Joe or Bob or whatever.' John wasn't amused by her, but she must have hit some warm spot in Nathaniel, because he would blush when she called him names and would defend hers because the book from which it came often has a powerful influence on children."

"If it's the one I'm thinking of, I remember that it made me cry when I was little," D. offered.

"You're not alone in that," Steinbeck consoled, "but you have to admit that from a certain perspective it can appear to be an easy way to hide from the entire name choosing process."

"A little like yours?"

"Of course! But I'll be getting to that in a moment." Steinbeck brushed a strand of his chestnut hair away from his temple and pushed up the corner of his mouth as if deciding where to resume his story. "So it was a mystery, if not a surprise, when it became evident that Nathaniel and Charlotte, who was nearly twice as old as him and not half as good a person, were in the midst of a fling. I think it was Huck who said... "

"Oh it was, was it?"

"... that once the first bits of innocence are toppled, it's difficult and maybe foolhardy to try to stop the chain reaction. Not that Charlotte began the process in Nathaniel, but perhaps she came to represent the next blockage in the flow of his progression, and the fact that she took away the need for him to overcome an inherent shyness made the advent of their having sex almost inevitable.

"From what I've been told, the love affair seemed to renew Nathaniel. He had been sullen and now began to cheer, as many of us do when we find ourselves in a new position, regardless of its virtue. Perhaps it was a sort of bravery that came from the promise of new stages and new experiences. It's always a flashing moment when that happens, and it sometimes kills people who rush headlong in a search of continued euphoria through newness. You can see it in our heroes: the live-fast-and-die-young waifs. It's hard to not question whether they know something that the rest of us don't. But since the rational far outnumber the impulsive, I wonder if there isn't a certain wisdom in shrewdness."

"So are the great people that you mentioned earlier the same as the impulsive ones?" D. asked.

Steinbeck seemed a little surprised by the question, so he rolled it around in his head for a while and then responded, "Great men are virtuous, and in our time maybe impulsiveness has taken on the mien of a virtue in popular thinking. I think they're similar in that the majority never understands what drives either, but it's a fine distinction. The difference is that great men act out of compassion for others, and impulsive people are selfish and act primarily for themselves."

D. noticed that Steinbeck used the word "men" in reference to greatness and "people" in reference to impulsiveness but decided to put her observation aside for the time being.

"This distinction is very close to what happened in the minds of Nathaniel's companions when the affair became public knowledge: everybody knew Nathaniel to have the potential for greatness, and they did not understand the impulsiveness of his actions. They where congratulatory and thankful that he had found something to bring him out of what had looked like a downward spiral, but they were also worried.

"More importantly, though, I think everybody was a little jealous, especially Nick. Whether of her or of him I don't think matters. It was the jealousy that friends feel when one becomes somebody else's lover. Friendships can never come to those burning moments of intense physical passion. A friend's passion is vague, cerebral, and thinly laid out across a spectrum of interactions. Perhaps a friend will last longer for this reason — a section of the blanket can tear and be mended by a hasty job of patching. Amorous relationships tear deep and long and often leave a couple disconnected. Who's to say which is the better. Of course, at the time Nathaniel would have insisted that he had both with Charlotte, because his strange feelings toward her prevented him from seeing her as she really was.

"I think the whole arrangement fell the hardest upon Jake. For some indiscernible reason, Jake sank into a flaccid silence. It might have been nothing more than Jake's tendency to be huge in everything, both vigorousness and morbidity, or maybe there was something more involved for Jake than the rest. But whatever his reasons, Jake hid behind his painting and took what solace he could from the company of others. But I can only attest to this as a guess, because he kept these two comforts so separate that they almost became contradictory. While he painted more, he hid his work from the world until Huck, who hates for things to be hidden as if they are shameful lies, found him out and hung the collection, really only two paintings, now that I think of it, in the northern hallway. Armed with the compliments of the rest of his 'family,' Jake came out of the closet, so to speak, and back into the fold."

Feeling that he had reached a cadence of sorts, Steinbeck left a pause for symbolic effect. D. could hear the gurgle of water in the near distance. "Mind you that everything that I've told you this far has been put together from bits and pieces of conversations that I've had, because this is the state of affairs into which I arrived. I told you that I'd get back to the 'cheating' of my name, and, as with greatness, I don't believe it to be cheating if one has the well-being of others in mind when one acts. Remember that I was the first new stranger since Charlotte, and it might not seem fanciful that I stirred something in Nathaniel that he had put to nap when he allowed Charlotte to assuage his troubled thinking. In part, the name that I picked and the game involved in contemplating its implications were meant to break Nathaniel out of the slave chains of sex. He had been caught up in a bodily temptation and had transferred the authority that it had over him to the flesh of the matter rather than the soul.

"Of course, it wasn't entirely my arrival that offered Nathaniel the pill of reality. Whatever it was, in its entirety, it was a bitter medicine and a strychnine revelation for him. If he had trusted himself, if he had believed in his own virtue, he may not have been so ruptured by his conflicting emotions. He struggled between his potent desire to grasp for the headboard of vice and his disgust with himself for being so distracted. It was as if he had woken from a dream and didn't know whether or not he should go back to sleep. Of course, we all were ready with pans, whistles, and shakes to pull him out to us. Well, not all of us. John seemed encouraged in a way by the turmoil that boiled in Nathaniel, because it proved that he was not perfect. There are such men who can only be vindicated by the shortcomings of others."

The churning of the brook was louder now, and D. was beginning to catch glimpses of the water as it rolled over stones and cast sparkles between the trees.

"Because I had come so late in the summer, it seemed as if the party dispersed soon after I had arrived, and I went home, as well. The following summer, Nathaniel got here early and was restless for Charlotte's appearance. During the break, he had braced himself to look his demons in the eye and reclaim his soul, but the experience was stolen from him because his devil did not return. Maybe Charlotte had fallen back into the patterns of her life and forgotten our house in the woods. Or maybe when the expectations of those who knew her out in the world forced a recrudescence of her docility she shivered at the role that she had played.

"Either way, she did not make a dramatic, or any, entrance. Her failure to do so was another mystery to us all, but this time a welcome one for most. Again, Jake's reaction, I remember noticing, was sad relief. Perhaps he felt as if his friendship had won a battle by default or something. Despite his priming and the number of times he had rehearsed the scene, Nathaniel was also relieved that he did not have to discover his real visceral and emotional reaction to Charlotte.

"The house was in disrepair that spring. How John manages to make anyone believe that he does much more than sit in his chair and drink is what my namesake called 'a triumph of insinuation.' There were leaves and twigs everywhere, interspersed by animal droppings and a thick coat of dust over everything. But it was good that the house was in such a state because Nathaniel returned from his recovery needing something to do. Most of the late spring that year was spent fixing things and cleaning. It gave Nathaniel time to think productively, just as he was doing productive labor. He and I were finally wiping the last pane of windows in the ballroom when Nathaniel turned to me and said, 'I should have seen her for what she was and shielded my mind from thinking more of her than she deserved.'

"'You've hit the mark there,' I said. 'But you've grown tremendously from the experience.'

"'I know. But I often wonder if growth must always be so difficult. It doesn't seem to be true for everybody.'

"With these words, I realized that, while I was only a year or two younger than him, my maturation had been simple. In fact, I hardly knew that it had happened at all. But then, compared to him, I only had to climb to a slighter level. Perhaps that is why he's always seemed so much older than me."

Almost as if Steinbeck had been subtly pacing their walk, just as he spoke these last words, the trio broke out into the meager river bank. D. thought she could make out in the distance, down the gradual slope of the hill, the rock from which she had fallen to begin her adventure.

From behind, Steinbeck, watching her follow the stream with her eyes, said, "Well, here's our grand river. It's not much of one, but it's all that we have, so we make it fill whatever pridefully symbolic purpose we need. Since everyone else has declined the privilege and shirked the duty of naming it, I've decided that it should be called Philus."

"Why?" D. asked.

Steinbeck laughed and Huck said, "He won't tell ya. Seems ta me he thinks it'd ruin the game."

"Yes, it would," Steinbeck confirmed.

D., having thought of something similar, changed the subject, but only slightly, by asking Steinbeck, "What do you think of that stained-glass window in the entrance hall?"

"I haven't worked it out yet," Steinbeck responded with perfect seriousness.

Huck glanced down the brook's length. "Will ya be able t'say where you came 'cross the river?"

D. nodded, "I think it was at that big rock in the distance. And it took me about forty-five minutes to get there from my car. Of course, it may actually be very close, because I was just wandering that day."

"Well, we're just wand'rin now."