An Anthropologist's Arrival: A Memoir

A Marriage Begins and Ends

117 A Marriage Begins and Ends he Was a mexican, delicately pretty as a pussycat. On leaving my hotel room in Mexico City, he asked, “Must I go?” I said, “No, stay.” He was like no man I had ever known or ever wanted, just something in a foreign land, out of a fairy tale. He did know how to make love, as I had calculated, and he said he knew how to be careful. Nevertheless, when I got back to New York, I was pregnant.* I regret that part of it. It seems to me that going into that strange, wild darkness, one should have the purpose of bringing back a child, and I feel sure that the complete loss of self that a mother must experience comes to a woman in no other way. I have not had it. I fear I have never been completely, suicidally unselfish, and at this point, I had no pity for the unborn. I did not want a child by Carlos. I was bathed in horror and ready to die, but a woman friend helped me get an abortion. After that, I was out of the glass case. You see, I took freedom. Nobody gave it to me. I just took it! I sometimes kissed men, sometimes accepted them for a night. Usually the pleasure was very mild. The only one who really stirred me, “made the earth move,” as Hemingway has it, was Fred, a sign painter.† I liked his descriptions of taking a ladder from the top of a thirty-story building and standing up against the sky to splash out the call for someone’s whiskey. We had fun in restaurants to which * It is unclear exactly when this trip to Mexico occurred. However, one suggestive piece of evidence is a report of a Quaker meeting that notes, “Ruth M. Underhill brought a most vivid picture from her recent visit to various mission fields, describing our work in Jamaica, Cuba, and Mexico” (Minutes of Nebraska Yearly Meeting of Friends, Thirteenth Annual Assembly. 1920. Pg. 17). If this transpired around 1920, it also fits Underhill’s conclusion at the end of this section about now being ready for marriage. † From Underhill’s notes for her draft memoir, it is unclear but possible that Fred’s last name was Salter. For the quote, see: chapter 13 of Ernest Hemingway’s 1941 book For Whom the Bell Tolls. Becoming ruth underhill 118 I would never have gone. Our temporary absorption in each other was delightful. Usually I did not criticize him, but once when he kept saying “specie” instead of “species,” I corrected him. “How do you know that, dear?” he asked in childlike wonder. Then I realized that I had been using on him my social worker technique. For with my “cases” I left my world and dwelt completely, for a time, in theirs. I have been, in that way, an Italian factory worker, an Irish laundress. I could understand such a girl’s fears and hatreds, why she could not do the normal, reasonable thing the “office” recommended. I was comfortable and happy in this other life, as the girls were with me, and as I was with Fred. Of course, though, it was only for a few hours a day. In the evening, I snapped with relief onto another level. So I snapped finally away from Fred. He gave me too many hours’ work a day. “Cato,” the college professor, was in my world, but he couldn’t be bothered with me long. Hubert, the middle-aged lawyer, would Figure 17. Ruth in the years just before her marriage, circa 1915. A Marriage Begins and Ends 119 have acceded to a permanent, part-time arrangement, but none of these was very satisfactory. I decided to marry, and immediately he was there. Handsome. Good mannered. Able to quote, though not Shakespeare. A little like my lost love, though he was a paperback copy. And he was willing to marry, so we did. • Yes, I guess then I decided I could marry. If it was a nice enough man, marriage would be possible. It was just this kind of other love that I felt was not real love at all, was just a physical excitement, and I didn’t want it. I had good relationships with many men at this time, but none wanted to sleep with me, nor...