Eleemosynary
By Lee BlessingDorothea is a brilliant and bizarre woman who never got to go to college because her father arranged a marriage for her. She had three sons and a daughter, who she named Artemis. She talks here about how she discovered the joys of eccentricity.
DOROTHEA
People wonder about me. I realize that. They don't say anything of course - because of the money. My husband was very comfortable. He owned most of the state, by the time he died. He always treated me... civilly. He didn't really know what to make of me, except a wife.
I was an only child. After me, my mother couldn't have any more. As for my father - well, the only sentence of genuine interest he ever uttered about me was, "Is it a boy?". I became my mother's daughter, by default. It gave me such a feeling of worthlessness. It was like an asthma of the soul. I could never take a deep breath of who I was.
Girls really weren't worth much then. Mother told me not to think about it. But thinking was the only thing I felt confident doing. I read every book I could find. I read for escape. I felt guilty. In those days, a girl did. Can you imagine? Feeling guilty for learning?
The day I graduated high school, my father smiled at me, and said he had a wonderful surprise - which turned out to be an arranged marriage between me and John. John was, I admit, a sort of boyfriend - and I had thought about marrying him, perhaps, in four years. But what I thought didn't concern my father. I said, "What about college?" and he said, "John's going directly into his father's business." "No, no, what about college for me?" I said. My father just laughed. He laughed at the idea that I might prefer college to marriage. He laughed and laughed.
My father - and John, too - made vague promises that I could go to college sometime if only I'd get married now. On June 2nd I graduated high school; three weeks later I was married; two weeks later I was pregnant. John and I had three boys and a baby girl. I liked the girl.
After our third son was born, I asked John if I could go to college. He said no. I reminded him of his vague promises. He said that's what vague promises were for.
Then I met a very strange person. A very strange person indeed. He was a guest at a summer party. This was in the forties. Normally our guests were financial types. But he was a friend of a friend, and he was a spiritualist. I'd always thought such people were weird, funereal sorts, but this was the happiest man I'd ever met. He talked to me for a long time about his investigations into the supernatural. He didn't make these eccentric journeys for any dark, compelling reasons. He simply enjoyed the possibility of an entirely different world within our reach. I asked him if that didn't seem like escapism. "Look around you," he said, "Don't you just itch to escape?"
But what would my husband think? I wondered. And this man - as though he'd been reading my thoughts - said, "The best thing about it is, no one holds an eccentric responsible." And suddenly a great breath of happiness went down into my lungs. "Eccentricity," I thought - "What a relief!" From that day on, I never felt the need to listen to a thing my husband said - or anyone else.
When Artie is 18, she becomes pregnant. Dorothea fears that all of her daughter's intelligence will go to waste if she becomes a mother.
DOROTHEA
You can't be pregnant! You can't! You're eighteen! You're about to go to college! You can't be a mother. You don't have to be. If your father knew about this, he'd have you married to someone in five minutes - and no college. You have to do something. Something else.
It's that life or yours. Think a minute. If you keep it, none of our plans, none of your potential - do you see? You'll spend the next twenty years of your potential - do you see? You'll spend the next twenty years of your life trying to catch up with yourself. You won't be you anymore. You'll just be something a child needs. You could be so much more. We can't help what God made us. If you hadn't been born the way you are, I could've waved letters over your crib forever and nothing would have come of it.
If you have a baby now, your father will think, "Fine. She's just a woman, like I said all along. I'll find her a husband." He will, too. And we won't be able to stop him.
When a soldier in battle suddenly has to kill someone, we say that's all right. It's his life or someone else's - that's the choice, no matter how regrettable. You only get to make that choice once. And you have to choose now.
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