Rite of Passage

I didn’t talk to Mother because I didn’t know what I could say about it. I cannot really talk to her. The only person besides Daddy that I talked to was Jimmy and he made a comment that was perceptive, whether or not it was accurate. He said that maybe I hadn’t remembered because I hadn’t wanted to, at least until now, and that “finding” the record of my brother wasn’t as much of an accident as I thought. To tell you the truth, that got me mad at first, and it was my getting mad that later made me think that there might have been some truth to it. The cost was that Jimmy and I didn’t speak for two days.

Thinking in psychological terms got me to thinking about my mother, about her keeping me at arm’s length and about her becoming unhappy when I was nice to her. I finally came to the conclusion that maybe it wasn’t me, Mia, the individual, that bothered her, but just me, the physical fact, and I proceeded on that basis. I can’t say that I liked her any better, but we did manage to deal together more pleasantly after that.

Something else changed that winter — what I thought I wanted from life. It came as a direct result of the papers on ethics that Jimmy and I did.

We met in Mr. Mbele’s apartment and talked about our conclusions over the usual refreshments provided by Mrs. Mbele. She was a very comfortable person to have around. Very nice. It was our regular Friday night meeting.

My paper was a direct discussion and comparison of half-a-dozen ethical systems, concentrating on what seemed to me to be their flaws. I finished by saying that it struck me that all the ethical systems I was discussing were after the fact. That is, that people act as they are disposed to, but they like to feel afterwards that they were right and so they invent systems that approve of their dispositions. This was to say that while I found things like “So act as to treat humanity, whether in your person or in that of another, in every case as an end and not as a means merely,” quite attractive principles, I hadn’t run onto any system that exactly fitted my disposition.

In his discussion, Jimmy took another tack entirely. Instead of criticizing ethical systems, he attempted to formulate one. It was humanistic, not completely unlike some of the others that I had considered. Jimmy started by saying that true humanity was an achievement, nOt an automatic inheritance. There were things that you could pick at in what he had to say, but his system did have one advantage and that was that he spoke in terms of a general attitude toward living rather than in terms of exact principles. It is too easy to find exceptions to principles.

As I listened, I became increasingly bothered, not by what he was saying, which fit Jimmy’s disposition quite closely, but by the sort of paper he was giving. I was the one who was supposed to be intending to be a synthesist, assembling castles from mortar and bricks, only that wasn’t what I had done. It came to me then that I had never done it — making pins or building cabins, putting things together, none of this was really in my line, and I should have seen it long since.

I am not a builder, I thought. I am not a tinkerer. It was a moment of pure, unheralded revelation.

When Jimmy was done, Mr. Mbele said, “Let’s have a discussion. What comments occur to you? Mia?”

“All right,” I said. I turned to Jimmy. “Why do you want to be an ordinologist?”

He shrugged. “Why do you want to be a synthesist?”

I shook my head. “I’m serious. I want an answer.”

“I don’t see the point. What does this have to do with ethics or what we’ve just said?”

“Nothing to do with ethics,” I said. “It has a lot to do with your paper. You didn’t listen to yourself.”

“Do you mind explaining yourself a little more fully?” Mr. Mbele said. “I’m not sure I follow you.”

“After a while,” I said, “I wasn’t listening to Jimmy’s points. I got thinking about what sort of paper he had put together and about what sort of paper I’d put together. We had our own choice. It just struck me that if Jimmy really wanted to be an ordinologist, he would have written a paper like mine, a critical paper. And if I were really cut out to be a synthesist, I would have written a paper like Jimmy’s, a creative paper. But neither of us did.”

“I see,” Mr. Mbele said. “As a matter of fact, I think you’re right.”

Jimmy said, “But I want to be an ordinologist.”

“That’s just because of your grandfather,” I said.