Verena's Case Fiction

For today, the opening of a new case fiction.

Verena was nearly ten when she discovered that she owed her peculiar name to a character in a novel by someone named James.

Her mother had been studying for a masters in English  in Ann Arbor when she discovered that she was pregnant. Immersed in The Bostonians she felt an especial affinity for the central character, Verena Tarrant. 

An incipient feminist Virginia was praying that James would allow the spirited Verena Tarrant to devote herself to the cause of women’s emancipation. When Verena allowed herself to be consigned to housewifely tedium with the mediocre Basil Ransom-- a Mississippi lawyer eking out a living in New York-- she felt betrayed, as though someone had plunged a cold dagger into her throbbing sensibility. 

In naming her baby Verena the fiery graduate student vowed to redeem the promise that the chauvinistic novelist had  betrayed. 

Now the child had grown, developed, prospered and blossomed. Virginia had not bothered to inform the girl’s father, but chose to leave Ann Arbor and to move to the east. 

Thus, Verena’s world had conspicuously lacked male presence. Virginia’s best friend Samantha had confided her doubts at the time, but in an act of singular courage, Virginia renounced convention to provide a woman-friendly environment for her only child.

After quitting graduate school, she moved to the Boston suburbs to be closer to her family. She got a job as a copy editor at a book publisher. Later she advanced to senior editor. 

Since her father was deceased, her widowed mother moved in with them and cared for the child during the daytime. All that Verena knew of her father was that he had abandoned them when he heard of the pregnancy. It was a convenient fiction, and was not the truth.

A near-perfect child Verena racked up a dazzling string of successes. She excelled at Newton High School, attended Emory University on a scholarship and earned plaudits as the best student in molecular biology. She graduated summa cum laude and then attended Emory Medical College, specializing in gynecology. She did her residency at NYU Langone Health Center. At age 31 she found herself an attending physician with a growing private practice.

Impassioned by women’s health problems, she engaged her considerable talents in the great battle against the dark forces of patriarchy. Her vibrant oratory had made her a much desired speaker at women’s health conferences. To say that her mother was proud would be a gross understatement.

Her life coach Horace was listening intently to a story that sounded too good to be true. “So why,” he enquired, had she chosen to consult a male life coach.

Verena was ready with a well-constructed speech, one that largely begged the issue. She had had little difficulty dealing with men within her profession. Besides, her field was becoming a feminist enclave. She did not, despite her upbringing, hate men. Verena was defiantly heterosexual; she maintained a flourishing social life, filled with hook ups, though rarely with relationships. Her problem was that she could never feel close to a man. What she could not grasp, and what was causing her dismay, was that she had never fallen in love.

For a reason she did not want to elaborate, thoughts of having a child were becoming more insistent. And she did not see how she could do it without being in love. “I know it does not make much sense,” she continued, “but that is how I feel.”

Horace remarked in passing that more and more women are choosing to have children outside of marriage-- witness her own mother-- but Verena was not impressed. She remarked that if she were indifferent to a man and her child grew up to resemble him-- not entirely impossible-- she would be horrified.

Horace had been here before. His young female clients saw him as an avuncular presence, someone who could guide them on their journey into the male mind. He also reflected that Verena was perhaps looking to find the father she had never known.

When Horace asked her to explain herself, Verena was more than up to the task. She was a thoroughly sensual being and took considerable pride in her sexual conquests. Considering how attractive she was, finding men to have sex with had never been a challenge.

She had eschewed feminine wiles, flattery or cajoling. She knew what she wanted. She knew what they wanted. Why engage in elaborate deceptions. 

By this point Horace had learned more than he wanted or needed to know about Verena’s sexuality. He offered a brief remark: “It sounds like you have been keeping score.” It was not a very flattering remark and Horace regretted it as soon as it passed his lips.  

Verena was offended. She felt that he was treating her like a tramp, but she accepted Horace’s apology. 

Besides, she expected as much from a man. So, she admitted that she had had sex with nearly two hundred men. She added as an aside that her sexual prowess had earned her the enmity of no small number of women who had crossed her path. So, she had more male than female friends. 

Begrudgingly, Horace found himself admiring Verena’s indomitable spirit. And yet, he believed that such behavior was nothing to be proud of. Obviously, Verena was using sex as a way to avoid falling in love. Given the absence of men in her life, feeling love for a man would have been strange and unfamiliar. 

Verena was a postmodern Aphrodite. Her braggadocio about sex was clearly compensation for her failures at romance. If the sex was so great, why did so few of her hookups call back to see her again. 

And yet, one thing that Verena did not want was some man invading her space, impinging on her hard-won independence. On those rare occasions when she spent the night with a man she would yearn for the magic moment when he would leave and she would be able to breathe again.

Feeling that he had heard rather too much about Verena’s sexuality, Horace chose a different tactic. It was time, he thought, for her to cover up, to regain a minimal sense of propriety and decency. 

By their third meeting Horace cut to the heart of the matter. Relying on an intuition that Verena was far more distressed than she would ever admit, he asked: “When did you begin to think that something was seriously wrong?”

The young woman was slightly taken aback; she almost appeared to flinch. And yet, in an instant she recovered her composure.  Then she allowed the words: “Three weeks ago? It began as an ache, an insistent painful throbbing that I know was more emotional than physical. I felt numb and empty, as though there was something dead inside me. I started having trouble sleeping and I thought that sex would cure it, but it did not work. And then I had a dream. My father was standing over me; he was looking down at me, stern and cold. I woke up in a sweat.”

Verena blanched visibly as she told this story. Her body seemed almost to wilt. Now Horace asked her the obvious question: “How did you know that the man in the dream was your father? Was his picture displayed prominently in your home?

Verena explained that she had not told him everything. So she recounted a vacation she had taken with her mother when she was twelve. She had just gotten her period  and her mother thought that the event required a public celebration-- a weekend in New York. They went to see the Easter pageant at the Radio City Music Hall, and later walked over to Saks to do some window shopping. 

They were dilly-dallying in front of Saks when all of a sudden her mother grabbed her hand, squeezed it hard, and dragged her into the store. Her face was ghastly; she was breathing heavily. But then a man walked up to them from behind and called out: Ginny. 

He looked at the twelve year old and declared: “She’s beautiful.” Her mother was panicked and said that she wanted him to leave them alone. Later Verena asked her mother to explain what had happened, and she only said that it need not concern her. 

“And yet,” Verena continued, “as I gazed at his face I  saw that he resembled me. I had a fleeting thought: He’s my father. I could not imagine that my mother had been lying to me all these years, but I  became compulsively curious. I would sneak off and rummage through my mother’s mementos. That was the face I saw in the dream.”

When they got home after the trip to New York, Verena confronted her mother. Virginia sloughed it off, calling it a mistake, like a wrong number.

Verena was not deterred. She concluded that her mother had hidden her pregnancy from the man who shared responsibility for it. Perhaps he would have insisted on an abortion. Or perhaps she did not know who the father was.

Verena had been brought up thinking of men exploiting women. They were evil figures, and she had acted accordingly, to reduce their malevolence. She had also learned that they were unnecessary; with the exception of providing seminal fluid, they had no essential roles in a woman’s life.

But then, another thought intruded on Verena’s consciousness. What if her father had never even been offered the chance to see her, to hug her, to provide a positive image of the male sex? What if he did not know that she existed? Had her mother deprived her of someone who would have made a substantial difference in her life. 

For never having known her father Verena has suffered an emptiness, a feeling of being different. And she had never seen a couple living together, working together, sustaining a relationship. And yet, wanting children of her own she refused to deprive them of a father’s love. To accomplish that goal she would have to marry and, to marry, she would have to be in love.

Evidently, she did not need to relive her childhood. She needed to learn experiences that her childhood had not taught her, and that she had not witnessed in her own home. Evidently, there is a gap, even an abyss, between being in love and knowing how to conduct a marriage.

Verena believed that once she was in love, the rest would come naturally. In that she was grievously wrong. On the other hand, her mother’s lesson was that falling in love with a lowlife barrister would necessarily cause her to abandon her career. That meant, falling in love and marrying a man would feel like betraying her mother. And, for most of her life, her mother was all she had.

Moreover, as Verena asserted forcefully, the truth of the matter is that she has something of what they call a reputation. Why would any man fall in love with a woman who has had hundreds of lovers, whose reputation precedes her. And why would he trust her to remain faithful?

After all, when she goes to work and when she goes out with friends, she has developed the habit of looking for men, for trying to find the latest hookup. And she knew, better than most of us, that a man who was a great hookup was likely not going to be a great husband.

Obviously, the love/marriage story was only part of the problem. Verena was looking for redemption. She was looking to find a love that would redeem all of her sins. And she was looking for a man who could love her despite her past, who could forgive her past, who would ignore her history.

Whether such a creature actually exists is one story. The other story is that Verena had no idea and no skills needed to conduct a long term relationship with one man.

One might say that she was prone to repeat in any relationship the patterns she had seen as a child. And yet, precious few men would tolerate such treatment for very long. One might say that she was simply repeating the past, but the truth was, she did not know anything else.

To be continued.

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