Honest Philomena
by Jeffrey Greene
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
The birth of Philomena Kent, in the autumn of 1967, was not one of the notable events of that clamorous year. Those who came of age in the late Sixties can still be heard tritely expressing, with a sop of irony to their disbelieving children, that there was something in the air that year, a sense of raw possibility available to all, that hadn’t been there the year before and was already gone by the end of the decade.
Philomena’s parents felt it, too, even deep in the corn country of central Iowa. Naming their daughter after a fourth-century Catholic saint seemed an odd choice for a pair of lapsed Methodists, but Mrs. Kent was a frustrated free spirit, languishing, she felt, on a farm half a continent away from her birthplace in Northern California. The name Philomena, though a bit archaic even to her own ear, seemed to denote purity of soul, a condition she valued above all things, mainly because no one she knew, especially herself, possessed it.
Their daughter gave no precocious hints of any special nature. Her development until the age of ten was that of a bright, normal child and, except for the unusual steadiness of her gray-green eyes and a way of listening closely to anyone speaking to her, with furrowed brow and a solemn expression on her pale, pretty face, she fit in easily with her playmates. She could invent games and take part in someone else’s. She laughed easily, cried rarely, could behave well or badly, be both bully and victim according to the strength of her adversary, sulk, brood and disobey.
What she could not do, her parents soon realized, was lie. For Philomena, telling the truth was neither a moral choice nor a social defect. It was, instead, something inborn, possibly genetic but, in any case, as fundamental to her nature as her straight blonde hair or her aptitude for mathematics. In all situations, regardless of consequences, she could only tell the truth.
Since most children are blunt and guileless to the point of brutality, Philomena’s basic difference was hardly noticed at first. It was only when she entered adolescence and rather dramatically failed to develop those adaptive skills involving either the kind or politic lie, or just as importantly, the many uses of silence, that her parents became concerned.
A series of minor incidents reached their ears: from the parents of her friends and schoolmates, from teachers and school officials, that seemed to demonstrate — at least to those reporting it — Philomena’s almost pathological meanness and insensitivity, her strange willingness to hurt other people’s feelings. Always, however, after questioning her, they learned that their daughter had merely spoken when it would have been better to keep silent, or said something self-evidently true when she should have told a white lie.
In the space of one school day, to cite an example, she managed to make enemies of, respectively, a rich, popular boy who was also a budding football star, her math teacher, and the principal. The boy had asked her to a dance, and she had politely refused. Unused to being turned down, he asked if someone else was taking her.
“No,” she replied. “No one else.”
“Then why not go out with me?” he asked, flashing his dimpled smile.
“Because we have nothing in common. And I don’t like you.”
Stunned, he asked why not.
“You expect girls to want you because you’re good-looking and popular, your father’s a lawyer, and you play football. But none of that interests me, Trent, even your looks, which remind me of a husky. You should ask one of the cheerleaders. Most any of them would be thrilled to go out with you.”
As a salve to his wounded pride, the boy loudly called her a bitch and stalked off. Somehow this got back to Philomena’s math teacher, Mrs. Cantor, who, although she admired her student’s exceptional ability and championed it, was a little afraid of her and consequently disliked her, and probably because of that, she made the mistake of wading in.
“I hear Trent Logan asked you to the dance,” she said to Philomena in a tone meant to sound playful but coming off as arch, just as students were filing in for class.
“Yes, ma‘am, he did,” Philomena replied.
“And you said no.”
“And I said no.”
“Hm. Are you planning to go at all?”
“No, ma‘am, but I might if someone I like asks me.”
“May I ask who that someone is?”
“Yes ma‘am, you can ask, but I won’t tell you.”
“I understand, Philomena,” she said, disliking her more than ever and feeling guilty about it. “Gossip gets around like a forest fire in this school.”
“Yes, especially when a teacher lights the match,” Philomena replied evenly. “Why do you care who asks me out, Mrs. Cantor?”
Offended, Mrs. Cantor said, “Just curious. You’re my best student.”
“Your curiosity makes me curious. Do you like Trent Logan?”
“Like him? I don’t feel one way or the other about him. He’s not one of my students.”
“When you were in eighth grade, Mrs. Cantor, did the quarterback of the football team ever ask you to a dance?”
Mrs. Cantor’s chubby face was reddening with anger and embarrassment. Other students had pricked up their ears. “I don’t think that’s any of your business,” she said.
“Exactly,” Philomena replied, and turning her back, she headed for her seat.
For that she was sent to the principal’s office, where, during a sit-down with Mr. Hightower, as he leaned in closely to make a point about respecting one’s teacher, Philomena was compelled to inform him, as politely as she knew how, that his breath was probably the foulest she had ever smelled. The whole incident was reported to her parents, who, beginning to sense the pattern of their daughter’s future, tried their best to impress upon her the importance of developing what her father called “diplomacy,” and her mother, “kindness.”
Philomena promised to try not to hurt people’s feelings or make them angry, but also told them that she would probably have as much luck controlling the weather as she would her tendency to say precisely what she thought. Even at fourteen, she foresaw a life spent mostly alone, maybe in a cabin deep in the Alaskan wilderness or on a desert island somewhere in the Pacific, and began preparing herself emotionally for solitude.
If she had been born with a plain face and a dull mind, her behavioral tic would have earned her simple pariah status. But because she was not only very pretty but unusually self-possessed and far less needy of peer approval than most of her classmates, she often found herself in the eye of a storm of powerful emotions. She had become something of a challenge, a dare, even, for nervous young men lured by her beauty but fearful of her candor and, long before entering high school, she found herself unfairly lumped among the stuck-up girls in the popular crowd, who in fact shunned her as vigorously as most people did.
Her few real friends had, each in his or her own way, painfully learned to accept Philomena’s implacable frankness, and each tried to instruct her in the art of friendship, which — as everyone knows — can be destroyed by too much honesty as easily as shade plants by too much sunlight. And she genuinely tried to heed their advice, struggling as mightily with her own nature as one imagines a person with Asperger’s Syndrome struggles with his social impairment, or an obsessive-compulsive tries to limit repetitive habits in front of others.
As she got older and more self-conscious of her difference, she sometimes wondered if she might have some rare form of Tourette’s Syndrome, the way socially devastating comments seemed to burst out of her like involuntary curses, tainting all her relationships, even those closest to her. One might suppose that she opted for silence as frequently as etiquette allowed, and it’s true that if no one actually spoke to her, she was not compelled to volunteer information. In this respect she was a little like the Sybil of Cuma: one had to speak to her, or ask questions, in order to activate the mechanism within her. After that, as her mother and father knew better than anyone, it was swim at your own risk.
Although her grades were excellent throughout junior high and high school, Philomena was only drafted or accepted into those clubs that recognized her abilities — Honor Society, Latin, math, chess — never into any clubs based on popularity, where she was systematically blackballed. All this she accepted, realizing, as most bright children do, that the humiliations of high school are ephemeral, and that it is college where the most lasting friendships are made.
Which is not to say she wasn’t lonely. Nor was she naïve. She knew herself by now, and how people responded to her, and didn’t think things would be any different at the University. And they weren’t. The same cycle of attraction and repulsion occurred over and over again, as if she were one of those butterflies beautiful to look at but poisonous to eat, and rarely did a first date lead to a second.
Up until this time she had been only loved or desired, never in love, maybe because young love thrives on self-deception and she was as incapable of lying to herself as she was to others. A fairly presentable male student — usually a math major like herself, with limited social skills — captivated by her light hair, eyes and skin, challenged by the directness of her stare and misled by her apparent availability, might take his whole heart into his hands and declare his devotion, as more than one did during her four years at Princeton. She chose her replies more carefully than she had in grade school, trying to minimize her suitor’s pain, but also accepting its inevitability.
“I wish I felt the way you do, Phan,” she might say. “I really do. But the truth is, I don’t. And nothing would be more unfair to both of us than pretending that I could love you.”
Too late. she would realize that her last sentence undid all the good intentions of the first three. She might add, flailing now, a cool hand laid consolingly on his fevered flesh, “Once you got to know me, you wouldn’t like me anyway. Take my word for it.”
Such scenes were repeated many times, until one day in the spring of her senior year, she finally seemed to have met her match, in the form of a tall, charming young man with black hair and blue eyes, a student in her tensor analysis class, who, in his spare time, played guitar and sang songs of his own composition. She was smitten, and finding no fault in him, she told him nothing but what he wanted to hear — that he had in spades everything she was looking for in a man: brains, beauty, grace, gentleness, imagination, humor.
The honeymoon was unfortunately brief, since it turned out that her young man was as allergic to the truth as she was to a lie. She’d had much experience turning men down but hardly any at accepting them and, as she would soon learn, a woman is often rewarded for her adoration by neglect, indifference, and finally, contempt. He wearied of her compliments, and as soon as he had tired of her body, he began courting other women, and since lying came as naturally to him as breathing, it was some time before Philomena learned the truth.
Shattered, humiliated, hollowed out by misery, she found it difficult to eat, much less study, and her grades began to slip. She contemplated suicide and, being a serious, decisive sort, might actually have done it if, after going to her doctor six weeks later for a missed period, she had not discovered that she was pregnant.
She waited only a day before calling her mother and father with the news, and was shocked by the intensity of their reactions. Her mother cried, her father raged, but both agreed that she should immediately terminate the pregnancy. “Bone-headed dropouts have children at your age,” her father told her. “You have a brilliant career ahead of you. Plenty of time for the usual stuff later.”
Philomena told them she would think about it and let them know her decision as soon as she had made it. They urged her not to deliberate too long, offered to pay for everything, and told her that her old room was ready any time she needed it. In forty-eight hours she had made her decision: she would finish her degree, she told them, then have the baby. There was no point in trying to talk her out of it, and she had no intention of informing the father or of seeking anything at all from him. What had come to her by mischance and her own folly would not be sacrificed to academic ambition. She was to be a mother, and that was that. Her parents, knowing the futility of argument once their daughter’s mind was made up, had little choice but to acquiesce.
It was probably fortunate that the pregnancy occurred at the beginning of her last semester, and she was able to finish her degree and graduate with honors before her condition became obvious. Her professors, eager to sponsor her admission to graduate school, were disappointed to learn that she was leaving the university for an indefinite period and moving back to her home town. She gave no reason for this withdrawal, though she doubtless would have if someone had asked the right question.
Mindful as never before of other peoples’ feelings, she didn’t rule out the possibility of recommencing, sometime in the near future, her honor-strewn path to what her mentors agreed would be a promising career in pure mathematics. Privately, she felt that her parents were right and that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to be both a good mother and a Ph.D. candidate, at least not without considerable help from a dutiful, well-employed, and regrettably non-existent husband.
More like a fissure than a fork had opened in what had seemed a well-marked road to academia, and Philomena found it necessary to adjust her own and others’ expectations. To support the child still months away from birth, she would have to settle for something less exalted than the University, maybe a job as a public school teacher, though when she thought of her inborn flaw — hard at this point in her life to call it anything else — and the political realities of virtually any job in the public or private sector, each a minefield of hypersensitive personalities, and her inevitably lead-footed galumphing into PTA meetings, break rooms, and faculty evaluations, it would have been foolish to predict any other outcome than disaster.
She stayed in her apartment in Princeton for a while longer, tutoring math students for modest pay, but otherwise keeping to herself. After two months of near-seclusion, morning sickness and the almost unbearable feeling that life had reared up and envenomed her with a slow-acting poison of malaise and disgust both at herself and her species, she finally gave in to her mother’s pleas and moved back to her hometown in Iowa, where she hid out like a fugitive in her old bedroom until late December, when the baby, a healthy girl, was born. She named her Enid, after deciding that no one should be burdened with a four-syllable first name, especially one like her own, which offered no dignified path to abbreviation.
Copyright © 2021 by Jeffrey Greene
