Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [28]
But also – said the poem – hers wasn’t any old kind of smiling. Her smile had “depth and passion” and was “earnest.” I could see – now I was considering it at length – that a wife who went around smiling earnestly to left and right could have been annoying. There were girls at school who smiled at everyone in the same earnest, humourless way. In the school yearbook, it usually said about them, “Terrific personality” or “Our Miss Sunshine,” but I’d never liked these girls very much. Their gaze slid over you, smile and all, usually coming to rest on some boy. Still, they were only doing what the women’s magazines said they should do. A smile costs nothing! A smile: the best makeup tip! Get smile appeal! Such girls were too eager to please. They were too cheap. That was it – that was the Duke’s objection: the Duchess was too cheap. That must have been his point of view. The more I thought about the Duchess and about how aggravating she must have been – aggravating, and too obliging, and just plain boring, the very same smile day after day – the more sympathy I felt for the Duke.
But there was no point in dwelling on the Duke’s grievances: for the purposes of the final exam, he had to be the villain. Miss Bessie had told us to expect questions like, “Compare and contrast the characters of the Duke and the Duchess.” For that, she said, we should prepare a list of opposites, arranged in acceptable pairs. I’d started on my own list:
Duke: ruthless, stuck-up proud, oily falsely polite, self-centred, shows off his money, greedy experienced, psycho art collector.
Duchess: innocent, modest, smarmy sincere, earnest, sickly sweet kind to others, humble, stupid inexperienced, art object.
A list like this would be a help to Bill. He’d be able to understand it, as long as I drew arrows from each of the characteristics on the Duke side to the corresponding characteristics on the Duchess one. My real, confusing thoughts I would keep to myself.
Bill’s question about the envoy had stayed with me. It troubled me. Why indeed had the Duke spilled the beans in such a witless manner to a complete stranger if he was trying to convince the envoy to clinch the deal? So, I want to marry the Count’s daughter and this is what I did with the last Duchess I got my hands on. There she stands, as if alive. Wink, elbow in the ribs of the envoy, get it? Oh. Right, says the envoy. As if. Good one.
The Duke wasn’t an idiot. He must have had his reasons.
What if the arrangement had already been signed and sealed? If it had – if the wedding was a certainty – everything in the poem became clear. The Duke hated to explain things in person because explaining was beneath him, so he was using the envoy as a way of sending a message to the next Duchess, and the message was: This is how I like my Duchesses to behave. And if they don’t behave that way, curtains. Curtains literally, because if this next Duchess got out of line, she too would end up as a picture with its own curtain in front of it. Who knew how many other pictures the Duke was keeping behind curtains, up there on the second floor?
The Duke was merely showing consideration by saying all this to the envoy: he wanted his likes and dislikes to be fully understood ahead of time – only this much smiling, and only at me – to avoid unpleasantness later. “ ‘Just this/Or that in you disgusts me …’ ” he’d said. Disgusts: pretty strong language. He’d found the Last Duchess disgusting, and he didn’t want to be disgusted by the next Duchess.
This was not the accepted view of the poem. The accepted view was that the envoy was horrified by what the Duke had told him and had tried to rush down the stairs first in order to get away from such a twisted nutbar. When the Duke said, “Nay, we’ll go together down, sir,” he was stopping the envoy from barging in front. But I didn’t think so. I thought it more likely that the envoy had motioned the Duke to go ahead of him – probably he’d made a brown-nosing little bow – and the Duke had courteously set them on an equal footing. “We’ll go together down, sir” –