Victoria Benning asked her guests for quiet, for she had an important announcement to make - Jenny Lent was going to read from her latest poetic works, all dedicated to America. Not this America, Victoria emphasized with an ironic smile, this apostasy of a country led by a fool, but the real America, the good America, the proud America, and with that she introduced her old friend, the poet.
Now, Jenny was only a poet in the eyes of those in the mood for a certain kind of springy uplift, a summer breeze, an apple blossom, or a ripe peach; and those at Victoria's Christmas open house were among them. Jenny's poems would dispel, at least for a few hours, the dark night of the American political scene. She would offer a glimmer of hope where none seemed possible, a ray of inspiration when all heads hung down, a moment of renewal in a climate of desperation.
This treacly description of the woman's poetry, of course, came directly from her in her yearly seasonal greeting cards all handmade and illustrated with fanciful Petit Prince-like drawings, embroidered with sparkles, and scented with pine oil.
She, for a woman fast approaching her dotage, had never forgotten others- friends, family, and the less privileged; and in her later years had taken up the cudgel for civil rights, gay rights, and the environment as passionately as any.
She literally glowed when she spoke of social justice, the coming utopia, and the betterment of man. She was a woman possessed - or rather infused with the very essence of goodness, the spirit of doing good, and the passion of righteousness. Again, this rather overblown, adulatory description came from a self-penned sketch she sent to her alumnae magazine.
It was fitting that this bit of flattery appear in her college publication, for it was at college that Jenny had found what she thought was her true self. A child of proper, devout, Midwest Methodists, she attended college on a scholarship; and although her parents were pleased that she had been so honored, they, like many simple farm people thought that going East for college was a spiritually dangerous affair.
The college was ample enough for a modest girl like Jenny, not Ivy League or the Seven Sisters but serviceable, especially with its generous scholarship; and she reassured her parents that she was in good hands, had always been a dutiful, responsible girl, and would continue to be.
Her roommate was a Jewish girl from Long Island, at eighteen already a tarted up thing made up with eyeliner, blush, lipstick, scented with a cloying perfume and wearing a flouncy outfit more fitting for Grossinger's than their modest New England college.
The girl, primped and primed for social and professional success, had only one thing on her mind - sex, and lots of it. She had had quite enough of seders, the high holidays, and marrying well, and was here to have some fun.
This was all quite new to Jenny who had never met anyone like Risha and took everything in stride. Here was an Eastern girl out to make the best of a marvelous opportunity, make her way professionally and socially; and she would be a model for Jenny's coming maturity.
Little did she know that this crass little comer from Bethpage would be such an influence, but without Risha's aggressive sexuality, Jenny might have whiled away her four years in library carrels and biology labs.
The school year had hardly begun when Risha said, 'We're going to Yale'; and on that football weekend they were courted by 'gentlemen from New York, bankers' and industrialists' sons who summered in Gstaad.
Jenny 'gave it up' to Hetherington Lodge and was surprised how easy it was. Whether because of Risha or some long-suppressed sexual identity she never knew she had, she had rolled over and cavorted with Hatty Lodge as though it were the commonest thing ever. 'Had by a Yale man', she smiled as they returned to school late Sunday night, and 'virgin no longer'.
Her life after college was a desultory affair. Neither motivated nor smart enough to pursue a graduate education, she went to New York and like many young women found a job in 'publishing', secretarial work for the most part, low-paid, long-hour affairs with no future or promise; but the right place to meet eligible men. It was there that Jenny found her true calling. Well, 'calling' makes her sexual availability sound too professional, and it was nothing of the kind, at least not the cash-on-the-dresser variety.
She was what one might have described as an 'adventurous' woman interested in sexual variety, conquest, and calculated indifference rather than profit; and deftly and cannily avoiding the Puritanical censure of the times, she never, for all her sexual profligacy, became undesirable. In fact men were even more attracted to her, wanting to know what the fuss was all about.
Incidentally her sexual favors did pay professional dividends, and before too long she had moved up into the editorial department of Ambrose & Phipps, Publishing and became known for her intuitive ferreting out of the most marketable manuscripts.
Her life in New York - the clubs, the weekends in the Hamptons, skiing in New Hampshire, summer on Nantucket - was fine. She married twice, divorced well, had no children, and entered her late middle age and encroaching later years with few regrets.
Except one - her sexual passion, by no means muted, had become increasingly unrequited. Younger men were uninterested in a woman of a certain age, and older married men wanted sexual epiphany with twenty-five year olds, not a woman of maturity.
Sigmund Freud wrote of 'transference', a term he used to describe the sexual feelings patients had for their therapists as treatments became more and more intimate. He also wrote of 'sublimation', the transference of powerful sexual longings to other non-sexual aspects of life.
In the general population transference and sublimation often occurred together, and women who were troubled by irresistible sexual urges but afraid of or unable to share them, expressed their passion in other ways.
Jenny Lent was one of these women. After a life of sexual pleasure, one in which sexual gratification had always been front and center, and now faced with the prospect of a dry, unlubricated, passionless future, she needed something to replace or displace her sexual energy.
As sociologists know well, progressivism, especially the modern, utopian kind, produces a political passion akin to the most powerful emotional urges. Progressives not only promote the interests of the black man but are passionately, uncontrollably, intemperately demanding of his rights.
They are not only concerned with the warming of the climate, but disproportionately, madly, feverishly demanding that it be reversed. They not only suspect the predatory greed of capitalism, but burn with a feverish hatred of Wall Street.
And so it was that Jenny, increasingly advanced in years, took up the cudgel for all causes liberal. As her physical energy waned, and her eyesight dimmed, she turned from the barricades to her home where she began to write verse. It was in her words that she would express her love of the black man, her hatred of Donald Trump, and the insidious, corrosive nature of capitalism.
A girl in a bonnet, captured by the floral scents of Spring
Beauteous harmony stilled by the crack of a rifle
Soullessness incarnate, the White House a dark house of evil
The guests at Victoria's gathering nodded in agreement, moved by the simple words of the poet. Jenny did not disappoint but went on for what seemed endlessly with her poetic harangue,
'Seditious words', said one guest, 'but high time they were said’. When she had finished, the guests gathered around her, congratulating her on her artistry, her insights, and her courage. She beamed with pride and satisfaction and even felt the inner stirrings of something vaguely familiar. The political passion in all its transference and sublimation had done its job. Jenny felt like a woman again.
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