Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [44]
Weeks passed in this way without his making any significant progress. Rosemary had to be courted in the old-fashioned manner, and over a length of time that most of Fred’s friends back home would have found irrational. Roberto Frank, for instance, would have roared with disbelief if he knew that it had taken Fred nearly two weeks to get to first base with Rosemary and that after over a month he still hasn’t scored. Yeh, well, he isn’t in Convers playing sandlot baseball now, Fred says to the imaginary grinning figure of Roberto. This is England; this is the real thing.
Though he was often frustrated, Fred didn’t become discouraged; instead the principle of cognitive dissonance began to operate: the very difficulty of the undertaking ensured its value. Since he had gone through so much for Rosemary Radley, she must be worth the effort; his feelings must be serious. And indeed, the more he saw of her the more entrancing, the more attractive she seemed.
Part of Rosemary’s attraction, Fred realizes, is her being in every way the opposite of his wife. She is small, soft, and fair; Roo large, sturdy, and dark. She is sophisticated, witty; Roo—relatively—naive and serious, even a little humorless by London standards. In manner and speech Rosemary is graceful, melodious; Roo by comparison clumsy and loud—in fact, coarse. Just as, compared with England, America is large, naive, noisy, crude, etc.
As he persisted in the chase, and slowly began to gain on his quarry, other national—and possibly class—differences appeared. Fred’s courtship of Roo could hardly be called a pursuit, since she was galloping just as fast in his direction. They circled each other, snuffling; then rushed together just as the horses they had ridden that first memorable afternoon might have done. What had happened in the abandoned orchard on the hill wasn’t a seduction, it was a collision of two strong, sweaty, eager young bodies, rolling and panting in the long grass and weeds.
The images Rosemary suggests are not animal but floral. Recalling their first meeting, Fred imagines her as a pot of hyacinths, or some other more exotic flowering plant: fragile, fine-leaved, of some species that quivers and folds up tight at any clumsy touch or cold breeze, but if tended gently and patiently, opens at last into full glorious bloom. And in fact, only two days ago, after six weeks of trial and error, Fred’s efforts were almost wholly rewarded: the last soft, creamy, many-layered pink-and-white petals unfurled, revealing the delicate calyx. Tonight, if all goes well, he will have his desire.
As he paces impatiently in the theater lobby, thinking of Rosemary and of Roo, Fred understands for the first time the power of what at Yale is referred to as retrospective influence. Just as Wordsworth forever altered our reading of Milton, so Rosemary Radley has altered his reading of Ruth March. In his mind he sees Rosemary standing on a height that is probably the city of London. In one hand she holds a powerful arc lamp of the sort used in the theater, and from it a cone of white light streams back across time and space three years and more to Corinth, New York.
In this light, Fred’s memory of Roo under the apple trees, with the imprint of twigs on her sweaty brown back and butt and bits of dried grass in her thick untidy chestnut hair, seems crudely staged, garishly colored, hardly civilized. Roo’s rapid and enthusiastic sexual surrender—which he once believed a warranty of passion and sincerity—seems unfeminine, almost uncouth. Compared with Rosemary’s delicate lingering butterfly kisses, Roo’s embraces had a greedy animal urgency that should, Fred thinks now, have warned him of her lack of control, of the exhibition—to make a sour pun—that was