Coverly tried to throw a ring of light around her figure and saw or thought he saw that she might be heartlessly overburdened by a past of which he knew nothing. We are all, he thought, ransomed to our beginnings, and the sum in her case might have been exorbitant. This might account for that dark side of her nature that seemed more mysterious to him than the dark face of the moon. Were there instruments of love and patience that could explore this darkness, discover the wellsprings of her misery and by charting it all draw it all into the area of reasonableness; or was this the nature of her kind of woman to stand forever half in a darkness that was unknown to herself? She looked nothing like a moon goddess, sitting in front of the television set, but of all the things in the world her spirit with its irreconcilable faces seemed most like the moon to him.
One Saturday morning when he was shaving he heard Betsey’s voice—strident and raised in anger—and he went downstairs in his pajamas to see what was the matter. Betsey was upbraiding a new cleaning woman. “I just don’t know what the world’s coming to,” Betsey said. “I just don’t
The cleaning woman had dark hair and olive skin. Her eyes were wet with tears. Coverly got the vacuum cleaner and carried it up the stairs, admiring the stranger’s ample rump. There was between them the instantaneous rapport of unhappy children. Coverly plugged in the cord and turned on the motor but when he smiled at the stranger things took a different turn. “Now we put it in here,” Betsey heard him say. “That’s right. That’s the way. We have to get it into the corners, way into the corners. Slowly, slowly, slowly. Back and forth, back and forth. Not too fast . . .” Downstairs Betsey thought angrily that Coverly had at last found something useful to do on Saturday mornings and that at least one room would be clean. She went into the bathroom where she had a vision—not so much of the emancipation of her sex as the enslavement of the male.
Routine progress—a feminine President and a distaff Senate—did not appear in Betsey’s reverie. Indeed, in her vision the work of the world was still largely done by men, although this had been enlarged to include housework and shopping. She smiled at the thought of a man bent over an ironing board; a man dusting a table; a man basting a roast. In her vision all the public statuary commemorating great men would be overthrown and dragged off to the dump. Generals on horseback, priests in robes, solons in tailcoats, aviators, explorers, inventors, poets and philosophers would be replaced by attractive representations of the female. Women would be granted complete sexual independence and would make love to strangers as casually as they bought a pocketbook, and coming home in the evening they would brazenly describe to their depressed husbands (sprinkling Adolph’s meat tenderizer on the London broil) the high points of their erotic adventures. She would not go so far as to imagine any legislation that would actually restrict the rights of men; but she saw them as so browbeaten, colorless and depressed that they would have lost the chance to be taken seriously.
