Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [111]
O’Connor’s niece Mimi Papurt, now married and called Mimi Sutton, hadn’t made her way to California. But she and Rand wrote letters to each other. Mimi’s father, A. M. Papurt, the man who had once loaned the O’Connors money for an abortion, had died a few years earlier, leaving the young woman’s mother and two younger sisters impoverished—so much so that the elder of the two, Marna, had quit high school to help support them. Mimi had been badgering Marna to finish school, and in the spring of 1946 she asked Rand for help in bringing Marna to Boston, where Mimi and her husband lived, to earn her high-school diploma. She and Frank agreed to pay fifty dollars a month, plus the cost of transportation from Ohio, plus school clothes.
The arrangement led to a misunderstanding. Marna had dropped out during the second semester of her junior year. To graduate, she had to complete three semesters. Rand was under the impression that the girl was supposed to graduate in one year. Marna re-entered school in April and finished her junior year in June. But she was forced to leave school again the following April, because Rand stopped sending money. The writer, who didn’t understand, or wouldn’t make allowances for, the traditional school-year calendar, was furious with Marna. “She said, ‘You promised me you’d finish,’” the niece recalled. Marna found a job with a traveling magician, whom she married, and eventually earned an equivalency diploma and attended college. But a strain developed on both sides.
Readers familiar with Rand’s disapproval of institutionalized altruism often assume that she frowned on private charity. This is not so. She seems to have had a fairly conventional approach to helping others and was personally generous in the years before a cult following increased her tendency to be self-protective and suspicious. She made small gifts and loans and offered professional help and hospitality to relatives and friends whom she saw as deserving—that is, as competent, energetic, and capable of getting on their feet. But she did not see it as a moral duty, and her style of expressing her views on the subject could seem self-serving as well as immoderate and harsh. Charities focused their attention on the old and the lame, she complained in a letter to the director of the Studio Club in 1936, rehearsing a theme that she developed richly in The Fountainhead. Why didn’t anyone help the ambitious and gifted people? Who deserves help, the above average or the “subnormal”? Who is more valuable to humanity? she asked. In early notes for Atlas Shrugged, she observed, pithily, “Charity to an inferior does not include the charity of not considering him an inferior.” Years after the high-school misunderstanding, when Marna asked her why she had contributed to her education, Rand answered, “I considered it an investment.” Similarly, when discussing Thaddeus Ashby’s long residence at the ranch, she explained that she had been trying to spare a promising writer the hardships she had faced. Whatever her rationale for helping, she was often disappointed.
If O’Connor was bothered by the dustup over aid to his niece or by the comings and goings of younger men, he didn’t show it openly. Ashby remembered him as placid, unconcerned, cheerful, and friendly. On warm afternoons when Rand had spent a productive morning writing, she would sometimes walk outside to find him in the fields and call him in for sex. “She had a certain tone of voice when she called him for sex,” Ashby recalled. O’Connor, he added, always came. The young man was aware that they were having sex because “they made a lot of noise.” But Rand wasn’t fully satisfied, he thought. “Frank was an undersexed person. He was very sexy in the sense that he was one of the most handsome men I ever knew. He could just look at you and project sex. But he never initiated anything.” Once, Ashby asked Rand if she wished O’Connor would be rougher with her in bed, and she admitted that, yes, she did.
Ashby himself was madly in love with her, he claimed, but too timid and polite to try to