Free The Scarlet Letters by Louis Auchincloss Page A

sense of right or wrong."
    "But she knows she's doing a wrong thing when she burns that manuscript," he objected. "She gives her husband a false excuse to explain what she's done."
    "That's just to shut him up. She recognizes that other people know right from wrong. She even despises them for it. You must see her as a wild creature caged in a zoo of Victorian morality."
    "Victorian? Is it Victorian to disapprove of destroying works of genius and handing loaded pistols to depressed alcoholics?"
    "Well, call it man-made morality."
    "Man-made! As opposed to what, Vinnie?"
    "Oh, I don't know." She waved a hand vaguely in the air. "Maybe Ibsen is saying that other systems and values exist beside the frail ones that man has put together to separate himself from the beasts. They aren't necessarily what we would call nice ones."
    "Well, if he means that, why doesn't he say it?"
    "Because he's dealing with imponderables. With mysteries."
    "Well, all I can see is that he's dealing with a wicked woman who gets what's coming to her in the end. There's your moral, I suppose. But wouldn't it be better to redeem her? To make her see the error of her ways? Isn't it rather crass the way he handles her? Sets her up and then knocks her down?"
    "Certainly, the way
you
put it."
    "I don't see any other way to put it. I can't see that it's any halfway excuse for her to say she was worshiping Dionysus or Bacchus or whoever, if that's what Ibsen
is
saying. There was a minister at school who used to preach a sermon about what he called overtolerance. 'Boys,' he used to say, 'you'll hear a lot of excuses these days for the bad things people do. You will hear that they are manic, or neurotic, or obsessed, or whatever. Don't forget, boys, one useful little word in your vocabulary. Wicked. Those people are wicked.' That may sound harsh to you, Vinnie, but it's really not. It's really kinder. Because the wicked can be redeemed. Isn't redeeming them better than explaining them?"
    It struck Vinnie that his features had none of the dark, comminatory look that his words might have conjured up in another. He took no visible pleasure in the idea of stern judgment or punishment. If he was a knight, he was a knight like Galahad, more intent on rescue than revenge.
    "I suppose if we go to
A Doll's House
next week—it's alternating with
Hedda
—you'll say that Nora should have stayed home and raised the children. And you might be right, too. Poor little things, look at the father she leaves them with."
    And she came to the happy conclusion that he was not a man to slam doors but to open them.
    But then, all at once, everything changed for her. Rod's roommate's family had a house in Glenville not far from the Vollards, and when Rod came down for a weekend visit there Vinnie drove over to join him at their pool. He was clad in tight white swimming trunks, and for one blinding moment as she caught sight of him she thought he was naked. His skin was an ivory white, unlike the tanned bodies of the others at the poolside, for unlike them he had been cloistered in the city, but his torso, his shoulders, his thighs, finely sculpted, were splendid. She was confronted no longer with an overworked law student, a pale library product, but a magnificent man. She noted the sizable bulge in his pants where they covered his genitalia.
    What now crawled over her like a massive skin itch was such a lust as she had never conceived herself having. She felt giddy, shocked. She was not only confronted with a new Rodman Jessup but a new Lavinia Vollard. She was going to have to reckon with a totally new force within herself.
    Sitting beside him at the far end of the pool to which they both repaired, she found her mind so stuffed with sexual images that she had to find an outlet in a subject somehow related. She found herself telling him of a Vassar classmate who, finding herself pregnant at the termination of a wholly clandestine love affair, had availed herself of an abortion,