The Stork, the Goose, the Eagle, and the Swan: Some Notes on Adultery

ANONYMOUS

How old,’ said the visiting European pleasantly, as we sailed the dinghy down a quiet New England creek between walls of rice-green grass, ‘were you when you first committed adultery?’

He was an intelligent and widely traveled man, used to getting straight to the core of a situation or a people. It was his first visit to the United States, and at the moment, to while away the time until the wind should get up, he was investigating the American women of, say, the type one meets at dinner round the world. My answer would form part of his comments and convictions as a man who had seen the country and really known the people. It would be as casual, but as positive, as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s observation on the breasts of Viennese women, so prominent in youth, so deflated by childbearing.

I looked across the placid landscape and thanked the lunatic semi-divinity who tosses incongruities to those for whom they may be the only tidbits of delight. During a war this juxtaposition of the totally unrelated may become the mainstay of our humor. Incongruities lie in the cheek and under the tongue. In a voice I tried to make suitably casual, I said that I had never committed adultery.

He ceased to be the amateur anthropologist and looked at me with personal concern, indignation, and, I recognized, missionary zeal. I have seen missionaries confronted with opposition, and I know the gleam which presages a determined effort to lecture another human being into a complete reversal of all he has been trained to believe.

‘Do you mean,’ he began very sternly, to spare himself the strain of proselytizing in case I had lied, ‘that you have lived for thirteen years with one man, and for two without him, and have never committed adultery?’

As it happens, I do not smoke, and for much the same reasons: I have never wanted to and my husband, now away in the war, likes it better not. I could see I was about to be put through one of those tiresome discussions when smoking friends demand to know just why I deny myself their heartening form of stimulation.

I said that such was, indeed, the case, and I refused to let myself add defensively that I was very much in love with my husband. This seemed a more intimate flag to raise than the situation warranted. I let out the mainsheet a bit and put my feet up on the seat, to brace myself against the flow of reason I saw was about to be loosed.

The first point of attack was my upbringing. Surely something somewhere had gone wrong and I was obeying an outworn taboo imposed by the Victorians or a maiden aunt. The assumption was that I could not realize what I was missing, and I saw we should return to that point later. We had a bitter little essay on the tyranny of the Victorians and the fact that, as preservers of Hebrew thought, they ranked as the last surviving tribe. Obviously the hand of that stern little chaperone at Windsor had lain heavily over more than England in the last century. He had just managed not to let it ruin his early life, and he was prepared to do what he could to keep it from ruining mine.

The wind freshened and, as we slid along a little faster, the wonder grew if I could possibly be typical of my age, race, class, and sex.

The Gallup polls must have brought the suspicion to even the most narcissistic individual that he is but the product of his immediate environment ; but I could remember no Gallup polls on this subject. Our sociology class at college had tried a timid questionnaire on the exchange of evidences of esteem and passion before a formal announcement of the engagement, and had been frowned on officially. For me to speak generally for my countrywomen would have been quite unfair. I said I did not know if I was typical, that I had never really talked it over with my friends.

I should have known this would bring us to what is wrong with Anglo-Saxon love-making. I had been prepared for that, but not so soon. There is something about being on the water which induces a formal statement, from even the least talkative of men, on the subject of emotional accomplishments. It may be the sight of so much water, universally a symbol of fertility, which precipitates this preoccupation with romantic experience. I had always assumed that vibration from the ship’s engines had something to do with it, creating an artificially throbbing world which vanished as soon as the ship docked, and yet here we were, in a small sailboat in a placid creek, determinedly if onesidedly embarking on a long voyage of mutual exploration. I have had to spend rather long stretches of time on the sea as a passenger, and I know that the story of successful love can be very charming and impersonal, as in those long dissertations on one’s wife’s pluck as well as her beauty, illustrated by snapshots of all the children. Even so, it is a statement of the way one has spent one’s time and powers emotionally. Usually, however, the account takes the form of long and vibrant tales of state balls in Warsaw where widows crawled through windows at dawn to dance one more mazurka with the narrator.

I watched the shore for a moment and so did not pick up the trail again until he was attacking the last of his reasons for the initial coldness of Anglo-Saxon women — ignorance, censorship, doltish men, economic fear, and lack of frank discussion. I rearranged the picnic basket and decided to let him have the argument his own way.

He said that if we were all more open about our experiences, if we confided more in each other (I could see widows beginning to crawl through his windows), we should be able to turn our secondhand experience into firsthand skill. Perhaps, he sighed, it really was a national matter. (I heard a muted orchestra striking up a Viennese waltz.)

I am one of those doubting souls who can never really enjoy another’s full and boastful confession for fear I have simply not read enough and it may all come out of Pushkin. And I resist titles, so that the minute the countess opens the window or cuts her way through the hedge I am determinedly unimpressed. So I stopped listening and looked at the grasses flattening in the sunlight, and wished I could preserve all this to divert my husband, cooped away from such relaxations in an atmosphere alternating between extreme dullness and the smell of high explosives.

Of all the lovely tales, I saw one thing was true. The women had all committed adultery. He was making his point by enumerating instances where all had been gained and nothing lost. They had all remained countesses, and grateful to him. If all these truly grand creatures could so easily adjust their lives to circumstance, the implication was why should I, whom no one, we both kindly if silently felt, could consider at all grand, hesitate so to commit myself?

The beauty of our sort of sailing is that, whenever the elements fail, one can always use one’s legs. The wind had dropped and we had drifted against the green bank where the water was just washing over the roots of the grass. I stepped out, gave the boat a push, and jumped in again. To make sure we did not leave his chosen subject, he remarked that he would grant that American women had very nice legs. But I was not allowed to think my European sisters would yield anything else to us.

I asked if his love did not interfere with his work.

That, of course, was an extremely ingenuous question and a great mistake. The true artist and great man, naturally, allows nothing to interfere with either. It showed I had no idea how to arrange anything except the most primitively simple form of existence.

We were going to have to picnic on an island at high tide and return in a long afternoon. It seemed likely that this would be our subject for the day, so I allowed myself to be drawn into the argument from an anthropological point of view. It was he who had first mentioned savages. Actually, I began affably, if one takes a bird’s-eye view of the whole subject, the one thing on which we could both agree is that husbands universally do not think highly of adultery. I admitted that there are tribes where it is a mark of hospitality to offer one’s wife to a stranger, and where it is legitimate for the wife to add to the family income and hasten the day of retirement to the little hut in the jungle. I even granted him that in more complicated and civilized societies one sees some complacent husbands who fortify their self-esteem with their wives’ extramarital triumphs. But I made him admit that there is a common reluctance on the part of most husbands to share their wives with others. Some of them, I submitted, were even violent about it. I gave the boat another push to get it around the island.

Quite, he said, and that was exactly what made it all the more exciting and worth doing — that husbands did not like it. He was not in the least impressed by anthropological proof. I had been about to toss in the point that, in some warring tribes, the women whose husbands are fighting conduct themselves with extra circumspection lest any careless behavior on their part darkly and magically impair the chances of victory. But that seemed stressing a point too near home and I decided to make a fuss far from my own nest.

Trying to lead him away from my personal hodgepodge of unreasoned convictions brought back a bird lecture I had attended through some wild error of judgment, but from which I had extracted what I thought would make a good refrain for an old English ballad. A stout little man had pursed his lips and announced with unintended lyricism that the commonest birds known to stay with one mate for life are the stork, the goose, the eagle, and the swan. A strange assortment , but a good refrain. But my passenger did not look as if he would be more nearly convinced by birds than by aborigines. He was talking about Moses.

As I seemed fond of bringing in primitive peoples to make my points, he said, surely I must have considered the outmoding of some of the prohibitions imposed upon the early Hebrews — for instance, those against the eating of the flesh of swine and hares. We know now that in countries where these creatures do not eat offal there is no reason for abstaining from their flesh. Similarly today there is no practical or economic objection to adultery.

The Biblical words reminded me of my sister’s discovery, at an early age for such things, that he who dares to say what others hesitate to pronounce may pass for wiser than he is. Frighten people a little, she had said sagely, and you will get good marks. When her Latin and history teacher, who always made classes skip the description of Dido on her couch, would ask the causes of the fall of the Roman Empire, she would call quickly on my sister, who would immediately reply, ‘Fornicationandadultery,’ thus proving her value to the class. But we were landing on the island for lunch and I did not want to hear either how Rome did not fall because of the defections of her matrons, or how she did. If one wishes a good example of how Americans prefer to avoid the words as well as the subject, one has only to attend an American Episcopal service, armed with a Church of England prayerbook. The British still face up to sordid facts in church rituals, but Americans prefer not to probe beyond the demands of ideal and romantic love. Whenever the desire to avoid the sins of the flesh is about to be expressed, the American prayerbook says Amen quickly before they can be named, leaving one with the feeling of running on asphalt in one’s rubbers.

Of course there was no Polish countess for lunch, but I shall never see that spot without thinking of her. The way home was devoted to telling more beads, sadly now, because one cannot remain forever young and some of them must be dulled and dimmed by age. I looked at the foreigner, who had seemed completely middle-aged to me at the start and had now assumed a universal agelessness, like a real old man of the sea, and wondered why it is always the women who fade. Men so seldom worry and fret about what age will do to them. With them it is all or nothing, yet they bewail the least falling off from adolescent perfection in the objects of their esteem. I remembered a very old Dutch ship’s doctor on a freighter between Soerabaja and Hong Kong. Every morning he took Pills of Youth to the gusty laughter of the ship’s captain, who had not seen beyond his own waist for twenty years. The subjects of the little doctor’s thoughts and critical appraisal were always young and fair, and yet we used almost to assist him from his chair at table.

The memory of the little doctor made me decide to give up any attempt to think clearly upon the subject. A sense of fitness, I told myself as we came up to the mooring — that is all it is.

Our guest rowed us to the dock, and as he helped me out he said a little irritably, ‘I should like to see this man of yours. When I go back I shall try to find him and see what he can be like.’

‘Do,’ I said. ‘He will love to see you. Tell him what a nice picnic we had. Tell him I am working on that ballad about the birds.’