Cambridge (15 page)

“Why did you hate it?” I asked.

“First off, I was sent to Switzerland, far from home. And then, just the sorts of things, I’m sure, that you don’t like. The regimentation, the uniform, being bored by classes. That school was very keen on proper behavior, and your school probably isn’t as concerned with that aspect of life.”

“They want you to sit still,” I said.

Delilah smiled at me. “I think all schools want you to sit still. I mean things like the correct way to serve tea. We had posture class: walking around with two books on your head. I don’t imagine you have to do that.”

“No. We have to play dodgeball.”

“Is that so terrible?” She was surprised.

“It’s stupid,” I said. “I hate dodgeball. But I guess it isn’t any more stupid than the math class with the stupid sticks.”

My mother was glaring at me. She mouthed, Enough.

“What sticks?” Delilah asked.

My mother stood up before I could answer. “Frederika,” she said, “will you help us clear?”

With me, my mother, and Frederika all absent from the table, Delilah at one end and Ingrid at the other were adrift in a small sea of men, none of whom was paying attention to either of
them. Delilah was absorbed by her lap again and didn’t seem to care, but Ingrid looked put out. Though I didn’t like to give him credit for it, Jagdeesh was the person who noticed this situation.

“Annette tells me you are both psychoanalysts,” he said to Ingrid.

“Yah,” said Ingrid. It wasn’t an encouraging answer.

Jagdeesh fiddled with one of his rings. “Have you different, ah, specialties?”

“I trained as an analyst, but my first job was at a school for mixed-up children,” Ingrid said. She appeared to have made a decision to be friendlier.

“Not now?” Jagdeesh persisted.

“It’s tough to psychoanalyze children, and I realized I was more interested in the problems of the parents,” she said. “After I was a parent too. Then that was the side I was on, you see.”

“Aha,” said Jagdeesh. “I didn’t know you could take sides in psychoanalysis.”

“Oh, sure,” said Ingrid. “Like sometimes you just hate a patient. That’s no good!”

“What happens then?”

“Don’t take them,” said Ingrid.

“And if you already did take them?”

“Nah,” she said. “You know right away about people.” As usual, she said
pipple
, not
people
.

“If that’s the case, it’s rather an argument against the practice of psychoanalysis, isn’t it?” Jagdeesh looked pleased with his idea.

“But you don’t know
why
. And they don’t know why either. Why they’re bothersome. So, you could have a lot to talk about. Still, better not to take them.”

I was lurking behind Frederika’s empty chair with a dirty plate
in each hand, listening to them. I’d never heard Ingrid say things about work before, and I was interested.

“What are people trying to do with psychoanalysis?” I asked her.

“A very important question,” said Jagdeesh.

I wondered if he was giving me a compliment, then decided he wasn’t.

“Just to understand themselves better,” Ingrid told me. “So they don’t feel so nervous and jumpy with themselves.”

“How does it work?” I asked.

Jagdeesh nodded. “Another important question.”

“Everybody likes to talk about themselves,” Ingrid said. “If you get to do that for a couple of years, you feel better. You might even get bored with yourself—that’s the best.”

“You’re watering this down considerably for her benefit, aren’t you?” said Jagdeesh.

Ingrid shrugged. “It’s basically true. Neurotic narcissists feel better when they get a lot of attention. So give them some!”

“I want to do psychoanalysis,” I said.

Ingrid squinted at me. “You don’t need it,” she said. “You misbehave and then you get the attention you want.”

“But I want nice attention.”

She shook her head. “Who says psychoanalysis is nice attention? You’re just assuming it’s nice.”

“You refer to the labor of achieving insight?” Jagdeesh asked.

“Hunh?” Ingrid was now squinting at him.

Frederika appeared beside me and whispered, “Your mother wants you in the kitchen.”

My mother didn’t even look at me. “Set these dessert plates,” she said. “And don’t interrupt grownups.”

“I wasn’t interrupting,” I protested.

“Set those dessert plates.” She pointed at them.

“I wanted to know—”

“Plates.”

I set them. Jagdeesh and Ingrid had come to a standstill on psychoanalysis, but my father and Delilah were talking—rather, he was talking and she was looking at him, at least, and not at her lap. I set my plate last and sat down beside her. Her leg was jiggling; it made my chair jiggle too.

“Why don’t I put out a few feelers,” he was saying. “Just to get a sense of the situation.”

“Please, don’t go to any trouble,” Delilah mumbled.

“It’s no trouble at all,” said my father. “Anything I can do. Because, you know how much we treasure Jagdeesh.”

“That’s the problem, you see,” Delilah cut in. “It’s the whiff of—‘nepotism’ is incorrect, but you get my drift.”

“No, no,” said my father. “I don’t think that’s right. I think that’s absurd, really.” He leaned back in his chair.

Delilah winced. In her fascinating lap, her right hand clenched. “I believe that Jagdeesh has already spoken to someone, and I think it’s rather a no-go.”

“Who?” my father demanded.

“Was it Quine?” Delilah asked the air.

“Quine’s no good,” my father said.

Delilah raised an eyebrow. “He’s awfully good,” she said.

“For this,” said my father. “He’s not the one for this. Dreben, I think. Dreben would be the one to talk to.”

Delilah stopped twitching and clenching and jiggling. “I appreciate your concern, truly. It’s extremely kind of you to bother with this. But it’s far better for me to pursue this on my own. It just would not do, otherwise. It wouldn’t look right. It wouldn’t be right.”

“Would look or wouldn’t be?” My father smiled. “I think
you’re overpunctilious. But, as you wish. I certainly don’t mean to press you. If you change your mind, though, I’d be delighted to help.”

“You’re ever so kind,” Delilah said. “Thank you.”

If Jagdeesh had said, You’re ever so kind, I wouldn’t have believed one word. Delilah seemed to mean it. She seemed also to be done in by this conversation, paler than ever, slumped, too tired to wriggle or jiggle.

I wanted to say something nice to her, to cheer her up a bit.

“You like that Other Cambridge?” I asked her.

This wasn’t the right thing to say. She quivered.

“Because when I went there, I didn’t really like it,” I went on, blundering and smashing around as if I were my father coming in the front door. Unable to stop, I said, “It looked funny to me. You know? I thought it was going to look just like home. It looked nice enough, I guess, I mean if you liked it. But it wasn’t …” I petered out. I stared down at my empty dessert plate. I felt very bad.

Delilah put one of her strange, long, chilly hands on my arm. “You’re right,” she said. “That’s my Cambridge, and this is your Cambridge, and they’re not the same.”

The chocolate roll had been eaten down to a dark stub now melting on the Ginori plate. That “softy for sweets” Jagdeesh had taken two pieces. The coffee cups were empty and stuck to their saucers, the ashtrays were filling up, and the atmosphere was gritty and acrid from smoke and chocolate.

This was the moment I liked best at a dinner party, though I was not often up late enough to see it. It was when the structure of grownup life began to falter and the grownups became different, as if they were all Cinderellas turning into pumpkins at
midnight. Except they turned into real people—people I could make some sense of.

They’d drifted back to their original partners, Vishwa beside Frederika, A.A. in Vishwa’s old seat beside Ingrid. Jagdeesh had taken his chair from one end of the table and parked it at the other between my father and Delilah to assert his oversight of them both. He had his arm around her shoulder, and now and then dipped his hand down into her fuzzy jacket to stroke her sharp white collarbone. Even my mother had loosed her hold on the proceedings. She’d propped her feet in my father’s lap and stretched back in her chair, smoking and pursuing the question of Delilah’s future, single-handedly, for the most part, since Delilah wasn’t contributing much.

“Fall semester there, spring here,” my mother was saying. “Or maybe the other way around, so you can avoid the snow.”

“Mmm,” said Delilah.

“You could try a year, to see how you like it.”

Delilah looked down at Jagdeesh’s hand, which was on its way into her jacket again. “We would have to discuss it,” she said.

“I know Jagdeesh wants you to come,” my mother said.

Delilah looked up. “You do?”

“Don’t you know that?”

Delilah shook her head. “I find it difficult to know what Jagdeesh wants, in any given situation.”

“What’s this?” Jagdeesh asked, leaning over toward my mother. “I hear my name.”

“Annette is trying to convince me to come here, maybe on a fellowship year,” Delilah told him. “I doubt they’d have me.”

“Oh, they’d have you,” Jagdeesh said.

My mother and Delilah looked at him, waiting for a further comment. But he made none. Delilah sighed and glanced at my mother.

“You should bring Delilah to the department party on Sunday,” she said to Jagdeesh. “Give her a taste of Harvard life.”

“Ah, yes, the party,” he said. “I’d forgotten.”

My mother made a face.

“You hadn’t mentioned it to me,” Delilah said to him.

“I thought it would be a bore for you, darling,” said Jagdeesh. “I thought I would just pop in and out.”

“I see,” said Delilah. She looked grief-stricken.

“I think you would enjoy it,” my mother said. Turning to Jagdeesh, she said, “I hope to see you both there.”

I wanted to remind my mother about Indian records at the Bigelows’ on Sunday, which I was looking forward to, but I knew this wasn’t the moment. These sorts of situations were tricky. If I asked, or reminded, at the wrong time, she was likely to say no, but if I left it too late, too near the event, she would say that I hadn’t told her, that I couldn’t just expect to go off and do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. Another reason to say nothing (at this moment) was to avoid attention, nice or not, because attention might result in her telling me to go to bed.

I didn’t want to go to bed. I wanted to figure out what was going on. Jagdeesh was lying—I could see that, and so could my mother and Delilah. He hadn’t forgotten about the party at all. It was the Lucy person, I supposed. She would be there. What I didn’t understand was my mother’s plan. She was up to something, but it was mysterious.

“We might give it a miss,” said Jagdeesh. “After all, Delilah is here such a short time.”

“Oh?” My mother looked at her.

“I leave Tuesday,” she said. “It will have been ten days.”

“Eleven,” said Jagdeesh.

Delilah made a small throttled noise and slipped out from under Jagdeesh’s meandering hand. “But who’s counting?” she
said, and then she laughed—at least, it was a stab at a laugh. She stood up. “The lavatory?” she asked my mother.

“First right upstairs,” my mother said.

As soon as she’d left the room Jagdeesh leaned over to my mother: “This is making terrible trouble! I don’t understand.”

My mother took her legs out of my father’s lap and sat up straight. “You think she doesn’t know about Lucy? She knows. She knows.” She jabbed her cigarette into the ashtray, killing it over and over.

Jagdeesh put his hands on the table. “You’re wrong,” he said.

My mother said, “Pshaw.”

“Even if you’re right,” he said, “I don’t see how this idea of going to the party helps anything.”

“Throwing a little light on the situation,” my mother said.

“But for whom?” Jagdeesh gripped the table. “If, as you assert, everybody knows, then who will be enlightened?”

“You, I imagine,” said my mother.

To Fall in Love with Old Cape Cod

Third grade was finished. Now June and July stretched out ahead. I could loll in the creamy thick grass again and barrel around town on my bike. In August we were going to Cape Cod, to a cottage the Bigelows had found us down the road from the one they rented on the bay in Wellfleet. Frederika wasn’t coming. She and Vishwa were going to drive across the country in a black Nash Rambler Vishwa had bought for a hundred dollars from Ed Barkey.

What my father referred to as the Enlightenment Crisis had produced mixed results. Delilah changed her ticket and went back early to England to avoid the Sunday-night party, seeming to forfeit the game. Then Jagdeesh stayed away from our house for many weeks. More than a month of unmitigated Lucy, though, had done him in, and he was back, complaining that he missed Delilah.

“We spoke on the telephone every week, you know,” he said. “Like family.”

“I didn’t know,” my mother said.

“And we wrote letters.” Jagdeesh closed his eyes. “She’s been part of my life for nearly fifteen years. It appears that she is necessary to my existence.”

“Oh,” said my mother.

“This is what you wanted, isn’t it? This is why you muddied the waters, to prove that I am a cad.”

My mother looked taken aback. “I think the waters were muddy already,” she said. “And I don’t think you’re a cad—exactly.”

“So exactly what do you think?” Jagdeesh asked.

“I think the situation wasn’t tenable,” said my mother.

“This is what’s untenable!” Jagdeesh said. “Everything was fine.” He considered that for a moment. “Well, it took some dexterity, but I managed.”

“I don’t think you can have them both,” said my mother.

“I had them both,” Jagdeesh pointed out. His tone was cool.

“That’s true,” my mother said, “but now you don’t.”

“Why did you do it?” Jagdeesh asked—not for the first time.

His question was rhetorical, like asking God why he’d inflicted the flu on you. He didn’t expect an answer.