again, she came alone. When she had been younger, divorced, it took courage, real determination, to walk by herself into a room crowded with couples, but now that was the easy part, for there were so many people who were glad to see her. It was the leaving that was difficult—not awkward, for no one noticed, but simply painful, because she was alone and had no one to gossip with about the evening, no one to ride with through the dark night: no one to cuddle up with in bed.
Daphne found her straw summer purse where she’d left it on a blanket. Everyone else, in couples or groups, was engaged in intense conversation, it seemed. Pauline and Douglas had already left. There was no one for her to call or wave good-bye to. She left the party in silence, trailing up the lawn past all the people like someone unseen, like a ghost.
Ghosts. They were everywhere. They materialized all over: from a piece of jewelry or a piece of furniture or a wisp of song curling from a radio or a nightmare. They sprang up like geysers, right out of the top of Daphne’s head, and spilled down all around her, enclosing her in their falling fluid silvery sheen so that she became a ghost herself, trapped in the past, in her past.
Daphne, in her teens and early twenties, had lived in a dream world. She had been held back. Hindered, indeed, by her times, by her parents, by her religion, and by the nature of her own personality. Slowed down, and, later, demented.
If she were to tell Cynthia, her sixteen-year-old daughter, who had friends taking the pill (who might even now herself be taking the pill out there in fast-paced, action-packed California, for all Daphne knew), that she had been a virgin at
twenty-three,
Cynthia would fall off the sofa with laughter. Or, more likely, these days, when Cynthia was so bound and determined that she and Daphne would
not
get along, Cynthia would seriously, with the deadly earnest patience of a true martyr, point out that this was justone more sign of the difference between mother and daughter, the proof that there was no way Daphne could ever understand Cynthia, ever
come close
to understanding Cynthia.
But the twenty-three-year-old Daphne, still a virgin, had been a happy one—actually, an oblivious one—drifting along in a world all her very own. Since then she had seldom been as happy, certainly not as peaceful.
She had been an English major. She had finished her bachelor’s degree and was working on her master’s, with every intention of going on for her doctorate in medieval literature. Her body made the necessary motions of going through ordinary life in the town of Amherst, where she was a student at the University of Massachusetts, but her soul and mind and imagination belonged to the literature of the Middle Ages. It was 1962, and her world was peopled with knights and faeries and dragons and sorcerers and love stories of mythic dimensions. The legends of King Arthur and the Round Table.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Aucassin and Nicolette. Tristan and Isolt!
What in modern life could compare with the romances of ancient times, especially those romances with pure and noble and faithful and chaste and yearning lovers?
While her friends were lying in their apartments listening to Johnny Mathis, Daphne lay on her bed truly lost in another world, swooning as she read for the fiftieth time the poem
The Nut-Brown Maid.
While her friends were twisting to Chubby Checker, Daphne’s mind was full of medieval ballads sung in a high clear voice, accompanied by lute.
She was, really, just a little bit nuts. Something in her then longed for the romantic, the epic, the impossible, wanted love in the twentieth century to be like love in the Middle Ages. She wanted a knight, she wanted true, pure, superior love.
Her wish had come true, as wishes sometimes have a way of doing. Oddly enough—humorously enough—it had been a cock that had brought her love, true love. It had been her naive and romantic handling, so
Daphne found her straw summer purse where she’d left it on a blanket. Everyone else, in couples or groups, was engaged in intense conversation, it seemed. Pauline and Douglas had already left. There was no one for her to call or wave good-bye to. She left the party in silence, trailing up the lawn past all the people like someone unseen, like a ghost.
Ghosts. They were everywhere. They materialized all over: from a piece of jewelry or a piece of furniture or a wisp of song curling from a radio or a nightmare. They sprang up like geysers, right out of the top of Daphne’s head, and spilled down all around her, enclosing her in their falling fluid silvery sheen so that she became a ghost herself, trapped in the past, in her past.
Daphne, in her teens and early twenties, had lived in a dream world. She had been held back. Hindered, indeed, by her times, by her parents, by her religion, and by the nature of her own personality. Slowed down, and, later, demented.
If she were to tell Cynthia, her sixteen-year-old daughter, who had friends taking the pill (who might even now herself be taking the pill out there in fast-paced, action-packed California, for all Daphne knew), that she had been a virgin at
twenty-three,
Cynthia would fall off the sofa with laughter. Or, more likely, these days, when Cynthia was so bound and determined that she and Daphne would
not
get along, Cynthia would seriously, with the deadly earnest patience of a true martyr, point out that this was justone more sign of the difference between mother and daughter, the proof that there was no way Daphne could ever understand Cynthia, ever
come close
to understanding Cynthia.
But the twenty-three-year-old Daphne, still a virgin, had been a happy one—actually, an oblivious one—drifting along in a world all her very own. Since then she had seldom been as happy, certainly not as peaceful.
She had been an English major. She had finished her bachelor’s degree and was working on her master’s, with every intention of going on for her doctorate in medieval literature. Her body made the necessary motions of going through ordinary life in the town of Amherst, where she was a student at the University of Massachusetts, but her soul and mind and imagination belonged to the literature of the Middle Ages. It was 1962, and her world was peopled with knights and faeries and dragons and sorcerers and love stories of mythic dimensions. The legends of King Arthur and the Round Table.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Aucassin and Nicolette. Tristan and Isolt!
What in modern life could compare with the romances of ancient times, especially those romances with pure and noble and faithful and chaste and yearning lovers?
While her friends were lying in their apartments listening to Johnny Mathis, Daphne lay on her bed truly lost in another world, swooning as she read for the fiftieth time the poem
The Nut-Brown Maid.
While her friends were twisting to Chubby Checker, Daphne’s mind was full of medieval ballads sung in a high clear voice, accompanied by lute.
She was, really, just a little bit nuts. Something in her then longed for the romantic, the epic, the impossible, wanted love in the twentieth century to be like love in the Middle Ages. She wanted a knight, she wanted true, pure, superior love.
Her wish had come true, as wishes sometimes have a way of doing. Oddly enough—humorously enough—it had been a cock that had brought her love, true love. It had been her naive and romantic handling, so
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