Couples (41 page)

“Well,” Foxy said, “mostly the women, sad to say. Terry Gallagher, she’s the tall one with straight dark hair who couldn’t be coaxed into playing her lute even though she brought it, and in a way Janet Appleby. She’s the plump one who toward the end got quite drunk and did the impersonation of her psychiatrist.”

“I thought she should be happier than she is.”

“She thinks that too. And of the couples, I quite like the Hanemas and don’t mind the Guerins. I can’t communicate with Roger but Bea, even though she’s a show-off about it, I think is genuinely affectionate.
Their
tragedy is, they can’t have any children.”

“The Hanemas. Not that horrid little redheaded man who ran around slapping everyone’s behind and doing handstands?”

“That is Piet, yes. His wife is lovely. Very kind and serene and amused.”

“I didn’t notice her. But I must say, as a group, you all seemed
very
sympatico with each other. You’re fortunate to have found friends you can have
fun
with. Your father and I had no such circle. We were alone; alone with you. It’s good, to be able to let off steam.”

“Ken thinks we
make
steam. Ken thinks we know each other
too
well. It’s true, one man of a couple we know has lost his job because of their involvement with another couple.”

“Which was he?”

“They don’t come any more. His name was Ben Saltz. They were Jewish.” Helplessly, incriminatingly, Foxy blushed.

Her mother gave no sign of remembering, with her, Peter. Rather, she said, tidily dousing her cigarette in her slopped coffee saucer, “It must have been a combination of circumstances.”

“The woman he was in love with was there last night. Carol Constantine. Piled red hair with dark roots and a very thin waist. She paints. I’ve been thinking of buying a painting from her, after your chilling remarks about our bare walls.”

“I noticed her. Stunning now, but she’ll soon go brassy. She knows it, too. And she can expect precious little mercy from that dandy little husband of hers.”

“Eddie? We don’t take him very seriously.”

“You should. He is a very vain and ruthless young Italian. I told him to his face, I’d be happy to ride in any airplane he was piloting; he was too conceited to crash.”

“Mother! Aren’t you wicked, flirting with these men young enough to be your sons?”

“I wasn’t flirting, I was alarmed. And so is his poor emaciated wife.”

“Speaking of couples,” Foxy asked, homesick for Washington, “how are the Kennedys?”

“People say, better than they used to be. He used to be notorious, of course.”

“She looks less anxious in the newspapers lately. At her Greek beach.”

“A
dreadful
misfortune, their premature child. But I suppose being Catholics they have some way of turning it all to the good. One more angel up there, tra la.”

“You don’t think we Episcopalians have these ways.”

“Dear good Elizabeth.” Her mother’s hand reached tentatively
to touch hers, and their wedding rings lightly clashed, gold to gold. “I must confess I’ve stopped thinking of myself as anything. Roth scorns it all, of course. It was mostly a navy thing with your father.”

“Does he still go to church?”

“I’ve never thought to ask him, and now it’s been years since I’ve seen him. He’s in San Diego, I may never see him again. Think of that.”

Foxy refused to think of it. Carefully she asked, “Is it true, what everybody said, they almost got divorced?”

“The Kennedys. We don’t see many government people, but yes, you do hear that sort of thing. Not divorced, of course; they’d have to buy an annulment, I suppose from Cardinal Spellman. Of course, with his back, he’s
not
as active as apparently he was.” Mrs. Roth rested her elbows on the table edge and wearily smoothed the skin beneath her eyes. “Why do you ask?”

Foxy said, “I’m curious about divorce.” In turning her head to mute this admission she read the banner headline of the newspaper left neatly folded at Ken’s empty place:
DIEM OVERTHROWN
. Diem.
Dies, diei, diei, diem
. “I wonder sometimes if Ken and I shouldn’t get one.”

The planet turned while Foxy waited to hear which woman would respond, her mother or Mrs. Roth. “Seriously?” Which was it?

Foxy sought cover. “Not very,” she said very lightly. “The thought comes and goes. Since coming out here I have too much time to myself. Once the baby arrives I’ll be all right.”

“Well I wonder,” her mother said. “But if you’re not happy why didn’t you end things when there was no one else involved? You lived alone with Ken how many years was it?

Seven?”

“I didn’t
know
I wasn’t happy till I moved here. Oh mother, it’s such a mess—so
sad
. He’s everything I could want but we don’t make
con
tact.”

“Oh, child. Cry, yes. I’m so sorry.”

“He’s so good, Mother, he’s so goddam
good
. He doesn’t
see
me, he doesn’t
know
me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Oh, yes, yes. I’ve been seeing another man and Ken doesn’t have a clue. A
clue
.”

“What other man?” Mrs. Roth asked sharply. “Truly seeing?”

“It doesn’t
matter
what other man. A man. Oh, God, yes, seeing to sleep with.”

“The child is his?”

“No, Mother, the child is
Ken’s
.”

This admission was the worst; as Foxy sobbed into crumpled whiteness, sobbed toward her own lap beyond the pinkness of her fingers supporting her face, she saw that this was the worst, that had the child been Piet’s there would be a rationale, she would not be so purely beyond the pale.

“Well,” the other woman at last found tongue to say, “it must stop.”

Foxy felt the power of tears; behind the silver shield of them she advanced against her mother, refusing her an easy victory, demanding to be rescued. “But if I could
stop
I wouldn’t have started. It was so wrong in the first place. It wasn’t his idea it was
mine
. What I’m most afraid of isn’t hurting Ken it’s hurting
him
, of using his love for me to make him
marry
me.”

“The man, I take it, is married also?”

“Of course he is, we’re all married out here.”

“Has he expressed a wish to marry you?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know. It’s not possible.”

“Well, my advice is certainly to break it off. But I’d be the last person to say that divorce is always catastrophic.”

“Oh, but it would be. He loves his wife.”

“He says this?”

“He loves us both. He loves us all. I don’t want to be the bitch who took advantage of him.”

“Such elevated morality. In my day it was the woman who was taken advantage of. If it’s the man I think it is, he’ll land on his feet.”

“Who do you think it is?”

“The contractor. The tall Irishman, I forget his name, who danced with you last night.”

“Matt Gallagher?” Foxy laughed. “He’s a good dancer but, Mother, he’s just like Ken, only not as bright.”

Connie blushed, hearing in her daughter’s laugh how wrong her guess had been. She said, weakly, “He’s the only one tall enough for you,” and then, stronger, having found the right line, “Sweetheart, I don’t
want
to know who the man is. If I knew the man, I’d be obliged to tell Ken. I’d rather know what dissatisfies you. To me, Ken seems perfect.”

“I know he seems that to you. You’ve made that clear.”

“And he
adores
you. Is it the sex?”

“The sex is all right.”

“You have climaxes?”

“Mother. Of course.”

“Don’t be so short. I didn’t begin to enjoy my body until I was past thirty.”

“Well I must say I don’t much enjoy my body in this condition. I can’t bend in the middle and my legs hurt.” She abruptly stood and swept back and forth carrying plates and cups, making her mother call to her on the fly.

“How can this other man have continued with you when you are carrying this child?”

Foxy shrugged. “He never knew me when I wasn’t carrying this child. It didn’t seem to matter that much. He’s very tender about it. His wife has stopped having children. She believes in overpopulation.”

“Oh, Liz, he sounds
so
unstable to me. You have
such
unfortunate taste.”

“You ask me about Ken. I think what’s wrong with him is that I didn’t choose him. You chose him. Daddy chose him. Radcliffe and Harvard chose him. All the world agreed he was right for me, and that’s why he’s not. Nobody
knew
me. Nobody
cared
. I was just something to be bundled up and got out of the way so you and Daddy could have your wonderful divorce.” The accusation was so grave she sat down at the table again. Beneath her crowded heart there was an unaccustomed burning.

Her mother massaged the moist red spaces below her eyes, and answered huskily, “Is that how it looked to you? It wasn’t that way, we didn’t think, but I’m so sorry, Liz, so sorry. We both loved you so, you had always been so brave for us, all those dull years your bright voice, your prettiness, we were terrified over what you were doing to yourself with Peter.”

“But, Mother”—their hands on the table avoided touching, remembering the grotesque click of wedding rings—“I knew that. I knew Peter. I knew it would end of itself, you shouldn’t have stepped in. I lost all dignity. This other man and I. I know it will end. He’ll leave me. He’ll move on. Don’t tell Ken about it. Please.”

“I never
thought
to tell Ken. He wouldn’t know what to do with it; he might panic. You know, Liz, I’m not totally a garish old fool. I can see Ken’s limits. He’s like your father, he needs
a form for everything. But within the rules, I think he’s remarkable. He’s worth treasuring.”

“He is, I do treasure him. It’s just so devastating, to have a husband whose job is to probe the secrets of life, and to feel yourself dying beside him, and he doesn’t know it or seem to care.”

“He cares, I’m sure.”

“He cares about his equipment and I’m part of it.”

Mrs. Roth came to attention again. “You honestly believe,” she said, “that you and this other man can end it? It hasn’t gone too far?”

The breakfast debris on the table, orange rinds and eggshells and newspaper, seemed to Foxy to epitomize the contents of the world. Small wonder the child was reluctant to emerge. Its weight within her—the fetus had dropped over a week ago, and its movements, once a faint fluttering, had grown tumultuous—felt leaden, panicked, betrayed. Foxy answered her mother. “It may be ended already. We’ve hardly talked since you came. We haven’t—been together really, for five weeks.”

Mrs. Roth’s fingertips crept up her face and now stroked, as if treasuringly, the shape of her eyeballs beneath shut lids. “Dear Libby,” she said, not looking. “What I most remember from that terrible Bethesda house was the radio dial glowing, and your lovely flaxen hair, that I combed, and combed.”

“Gone, Mother, gone,” Foxy airily stated, rising and startling in the small of her back an untypical, musical phrase of pain.

Just ten now, still stocky yet dawningly comely, Ruth was given to placid self-communings in her room, which she kept
extremely neat. For her birthday Piet had given her a full-length mirror, a doorway to vanity, a father’s doting and perhaps intrusive gift. He had grown shy, wary of intruding on her. When he ventured into Ruth’s room, he glanced at the mirror to detect signs of its use and surprised his own sharp reflection, looking pouchy and thievish. Surrounded by her mirror, by the splashy flowers of the wallpaper she had chosen herself, by collections, each to its shelf, of books, seashells, bottlecaps, and the foreign dolls sent to her by Angela’s parents from the harbors of their winter cruises, by a turquoise-oceaned map of the world and a green-and-white Tarbox High football banner, by Scotch-taped Brownie snapshots she had taken herself of her parents arm-in-arm, of the hamster who had died, of the lilac hedge in bloom, of her friends at the beach but none of her sister—so surrounded, Ruth would sit at the fold-down desk Piet had built for her and do her homework, or make entries in her laconic diary of weather and excursions, or maintain her scrapbook of figures carefully scissored from
Life
and the
National Geographic
, an assortment including Sophia Loren, Queen Elizabeth II of England, a Russian spacedog, a huge stone Pharaoh threatened with immersion by the Aswan Dam, a naked Nigerian bride, a Pakistani mother bewailing the death of her child by earthquake, Jacqueline Kennedy, a vocal group called the Beatles.

On days like this Monday when Piet returned home before Angela, he felt his daughter busy above him; she was bused back from school by four. The silence behind her closed door, broken when she rearranged objects or crooned to herself hymns learned at choir, intimidated him; he had scrubbed her diapers and warmed her bottles and now his only function was to safeguard her privacy, to make himself unobtrusive. He reread the newspaper and considered replacing the rotten
boards of his own barn and instead made himself an early gin-and-Bitter-Lemon. Now that the tavern addition was completed, and christened with a formal banquet attended by all three selectman and fire chief Kappiotis, who fell asleep, there was not enough for Piet to do. Gallagher had sold the estate in Lacetown to the nuns, but a Watertown firm whose director’s brother was a priest had been awarded the fat reconstruction contract. They were told the bids had been considered blind; all Gallagher’s charm with the sisters had been wasted. They were down to a single job, converting the old Tarbox house on Divinity into offices and apartments suitable for rental. Old Gertrude Tarbox, having constructed for herself a paradise of hoarded paper and tin, was in September carted off to a nursing home, at the command of cousins living in Palo Alto, through the agency of a New Bedford bank. Piet’s job—replacing clapboards, removing partitions, sanding floors, dressing up ratty surfaces with decorator panels of vinyl surfaced to counterfeit wood—was scarcely enough to occupy Adams and Comeau and Jazinski, who, being employees paid by the hour, were entitled to work first. So Piet was often idle. He drank deep of the sweetened gin and tried not to think of Foxy; since she had hidden behind her mother she was in his mind like a canker that memory’s tongue kept touching. The summer seemed dreamlike and distant. She had vanished—the slam of a car door after church. He missed the thrift of a double life, the defiant conservation. Faithful, he was going to waste. Attenuated hours spread lifeless around him. He drank to kill time.