On Keeping Women (26 page)

“In a family,” James says “the same spoken lines come in over and over. Intimacy exhausts. Don’t tell me Ray that you still thrive on it.”

Yet over the years, even James has grudgingly reversed his position—on her position. No, she’s not off her head or out of it—my sister-your-wife. She’s incontinently, stubbornly on edge—on the swerving edge that’s inside all of us. But this James will only privately admit. And never to her.

“Most family women are like her,” he’ll say, porch-lolling. “You call us ‘family women’—” she interrupts through the window “—the way cows are called ‘ruminants.’” He ignores her. “Mentally, they’re much more obviously creatures of their environment, than their men.” For them, he said, life was—whatever happened. And in any argument of mind—even if they had mind—most shared one great position. They were all wavering on top—“Streamers to any wind”—and immutably fixed, down below. Like birds who followed the migration patterns, shrilly criticizing all the way. “Lexie makes emotional argument of it. And longs for an intellectual one.” She philosophized as she flew, almost as if she knew where. “Driving us mad, though, in the process. Because everything they do is outsize.” James’s cheeks have taken to reddening when he talks so. She came out on the porch that day, and linked arms with him. “Yes, James. Inside us, all inmates are.”

At times he sides with both of them.

“Women’ll do anything to make themselves memorable,” James said gloomily last time they saw him, opening his hall closet on his last wife’s wallpaper, which bared its orchid fangs at him. “Anything. From their execrably floral house-keeping—to poetry.” Grinning, he’d handed Lexie the poncho she’d worn into town straight from her class, reaching around her to tap the notebook protruding from its pocket. “Yah, they’ll hang their damp psyches out to dry anywhere. They’ll do anything, Ray, to stick in our hearts.”

“Men write poetry,” she’d answered, clutching the notebook to her.

“Right,” her brother said, “but for a man, Lexie—poetry’s a deed.”

He himself’s bringing her the town leather-worker’s triumph, a portfolio polished to the tortoiseshell glint she loves; surely this time he’s hit it right. Maybe the gold tooling’s too much. But it’s on the inside, a discreetness he can point out. When he says, with careful malice, “Only your poems will see it,” Saying it—as her flickering eye will tell him at once—almost in her style.

It hurts him, that she’s so aware. It puts the burden of being the denser, colder person always on him. It bores him. Like having in the house an aquatic plant which must be forever fed, so that the rest of the family may see the dark waters swirling this sea-anemone that lives with them. It kills him. Like the air around a mushroom that may or may not be malignant, which keeps casting its spores. But her awareness doesn’t fright him for
her,
as it does James. No, he admires the cellar-strength of her, hanging onto her own being as if it’s a kind of toolkit. Or will turn into one. Keeping her little miseries for a rainy day. But flashing out in an evening tarantella, with a Carmen smile, if you will just take her somewhere. It touches him.

Why does he have to get away from it? Grinding in Hector’s left shoe, he stares up Ricer Street, only a hillpath meandering down to meet this road and mark the townline. Why? Because she can always tell him—why.

She keeps their story. Ever rehearsing and improving it, like one of those caretakers who live in the basements of famous-family houses which are now museums on view. Had she really suffered from less opportunity, or from wider expectations than his—right from the start? Had the chicken come before the egg there?—no one will ever know for sure. But why had she crossed the road to him? When she came under his wing she was frightened stiff of her own demon demands, glad enough to huddle there, and grow. Sure, they pushed her to. Pushed him. Who hadn’t a story—he’d been reared to think—but merely a road. Both of us—we pushed ourselves. If couples were born with premonitory heraldic mottoes on them—branded in like genes (instead of acquired, like his college-plates, like her initialed ring from her father) then what would their escutcheon be? It’s under the skin, maybe, and comes out in the marriage, to twine above their heads like a garland slowly sinking with the years to thorn their linked necks: Frightened Young.

Some marriages along the road here were homeopathic cures; a little of the same disease on each side permitted the couple to jog comfortably, as in a Siamese-twin truss—or to drown like Hero and Leander, in company. Others were allopathic unions; the mutual sight of a partner’s diseased acts induced a sharp refraction into health—sometimes on both sides. At which point the cure for all diseases of coupling—to separate—came as a surprise.

He walked slower as he neared his house. One more bend now and he’ll see the old tower he’d had so many plans for, until the wasps and the children took over. With Lexie ever-ready with her romantic poultice, saying loud for the neighbors, and to everyone’s applause except his, “Plans are what a tower is for.” Maybe so, if you can remember daily, with the same incisive pain, what the plans were. She’d had her inner monologue from the beginning. With women, as he knows from his practice, it doesn’t wait for middle-age. “It’s how I live!” she flashed once at James. “It’s my way of—getting in.” To what he only wanted to get out of. His whole life with her had been a conversation, it seemed to him. In which he knew she thought he never said anything.

In a way she preferred that. Having him—the provider who couldn’t provide the life she must get for herself—to thrash against, meanwhile. Alongside James, their interlocutor. Between the two of them, she was honing herself to a finepoint of readiness. She had the blunt, weaving strength of an animal on its way to a geneimprinted task, or niche or mate; she herself didn’t know which, yet. But against that, he and James showed up as the weaker ones, who’d “found” themselves too early.

Does she know by now that she’s going to leave him?

He won’t say even to himself how long he’s known. To Charles, once in a Chinese restaurant, in Boston where they’d gone college-hunting, he’d said, after their day and a half together, “When you three older ones leave … your mother and I—.” Bear witness that I’ve told you, he wanted to add, couldn’t. The restaurant had a violently painted almost bas-relief ceiling—a great wheel of the Chinese zodiac, intertwined with dragons in parrot-green and carmine, and mandarins with fleshy porcelain faces. Charles handled chopsticks well. Small expertises came easily to his son’s long, intent frame; he was a craftsman. Of people as well, Lexie said. Like any mother, she felt she had her children’s personalities on rein—if lightly. As if created for her interpretation. All mothers felt that, or most. Yet the world had misunderstood women’s possessiveness, she said. They didn’t so much want to own their children, as to interpret the world to them.

But their own long, sibylline days worked against them, giving them certain powers they oughtn’t to have had. They ended up understanding the non-domestic world, the “worldly” one, with the finicky patience of onlookers who didn’t function there. Because Lexie hadn’t, she took on the job of understanding him instead; if no children had come, that might have been her life. He’d had childless men patients, husbands who were strangled by that, and some who were supported by it. But children take your place there.

“If you do—” Charles had said, nipping a sliver of black mushroom between his sticks, and not waiting for his father to say “Do what?” “—will
you
keep on the house?” The boy was trembling, for all his show of control. “For us?”

Such a jolt. All these years that he’d thought himself behind her, there. All that time, their allegiance had been to him.

Aha, that lioness of understanding, your mother—we’ve passed her by. But what do I dare say to you?

“That ceiling,” he’d answered. “Put together in some crummy factory gets joblots from Hong Kong.” And yet it looks so wise. “It’ll work out,” he says, craven. And sees in Charles’ face that he’s lost him. Because, as Charles’ mother often tells him, his father won’t confront.

She wants him to confront what confronts her—that’s it. How dependent she is—even yet! A little melt of tenderness is still in him though, for the lovely gawk she was at Chessie’s age. Or a year or two beyond; he always loses track of Chessie’s age. Those two have the same deep scowl, almost malevolent. On Lexie’s plump, rainwashed skin at that age, looking almost humorous. Chess is a rod, unbendable. With the sallow skin of a Spanish heroine.

He put his bag down on the road. That’s who the girl in the military portrait reminded him of. The thought of Chess weighs. “I carry her around in my mind like iron,” Lexie says. “And she knows that, Ray. When
I
don’t—this house takes over. The old house cooperates with us all—with me, God knows, but especially with Chess. It’s her dungeon, which is safe. And the other kids, they cope—Charles the most. When I see them at it, Ray, I die—for I don’t know what. Not for pity, not even for love; no, it’s beyond that. For youth and its terrors, maybe—seen once again. Ray?—do you ever see your youth and its terror any more? No, you don’t; I can see you don’t—do males escape it young?”

She walks back and forth when she goes on like that, but always homing back to him. And always finally forgetting Chess.
Sensibility,
she’ll say—lovely word, isn’t it? Such a fluttering—we think too much, and go on about it after. Our teacher at the college says we’re all suffering from it. God knows, I want to get rid of mine—I think. And then (she’s looking at him, dreamily)—
And then, Ray—I think not.
She’ll walk over to him, on the lapsing rhythm of that. He always knows the rhythm; maybe that’s
his
sensibility: Knowing what to expect. And getting ready to pay for it. She’s smiling by now, seductively.
Ray,
you don’t know whether I’m raving, do you—or whether I dam-well know what I’m about. Maybe it’s both, hmmm?
Ray
—she says in that beautiful gut-voice of hers, the one that knows it’s making conscious echoes but would slam you for remarking it:
Ray,
when I rave like this, what,
what
am I dying of?

A car of teenagers jumbles past him.
Damned old fool.
He’s in the center of the road. I hear you. I hear her. Always have. I hear you, Lex—but you won’t admit it. To yourself. Because you’re speaking, growling—praying—to more than yourself. Or us. The family’s the only stage you have, that’s all. But we’re not your true audience. “My rages?” you said, when I scolded you for the children’s sake. “They’re my dowry, Ray. The girls’ll inherit them. And the boys will marry them. Even that little faker, Lord Fauntleroy. I already see it coming, in Charles.”
Think back, Ray,
she said, in that diagnostic voice they all hated for its smug roundup of their privacies—and for which she often begs their forgiveness, afterward. “Think back, Ray. Didn’t you marry it yourself?”

She was wearing a puffed gown with long dripping sleeves that last night, looking as she had for the last year or so of their bedroom crisscrossings, no longer a wife domesticated to flannels or silk gone unmended, but newly lithe and bodily composed—though not for him. Newly imaged in self-respect (due to diet, she said)—but not because of him. She took hold of his coat, that last night. He was just in from a late hospital-call; no time in his schedule for loungerobes, if that’s what she wanted. He can still hear her. “Forgive me, Ray. I’m still such a goddam amateur.”

At what?—he could have asked. Your days or your nights? But didn’t dare, and had gone on to the study, where he then slept. The formal nightgown, too elaborate for her, not her crazy-pretty style of daffiness, had been a replica of one Betsy wore incessantly. Did she know it? Or not? Or know without knowing in that way she had, which he could attest was not put on, but inborn.

This time, for once, she’s answered him. In a postscript to the last letter he’d had from her before leaving for here. By now there may have been another. Since he wants no waiting fiesta, he’d sent no notice ahead. Even though lately her letters have warmed a little. Not into love, but as if she’s posting him her half of a dialogue. Which they must now agree to agree—does exist.

“On that nightgown. Women in my—setup—have their closet cruelties. We do unto one another what we would do unto ourselves. But I’m learning.” She no longer said “Forgive.” As for the house-news—she’s having the tower shored up, on her own initiative. “Chess’s taken to going up there. When I asked if she wanted it for a studio to draw in, she wouldn’t say. It was after she got the job in town. She really did you know; she looked wonderful. But when she came home, she went up there and didn’t come down. The kids went after her, made a game of it, and finally got her to come down. But she didn’t take the job.” The warmest parts of her letters are often about Chess. Or the arrangements for Royal’s foot.

Whenever he handed Sister Isaac one of Lexie’s letters, she immediately sat, laid it in her lap, patted her coif and clasped her hands over it before she began—exactly as she had come to do for one of their medical conferences. While Sister read, she bowed rhythmically to the privilege. He imagined each sentence as deposited in her store of them—kept for him. For though she never commented on the letters themselves, it became her custom at this time to render him her opinion on the progress of his own health—as if the whole procedure was in fact a medical rite. After this last letter, only six days ago, she’d folded her hands. “You are really ready now,
non M’sieu
le
Docteur?
To leave.” Then blushed dark, as over a breach of hospitality.
“Cha, Isabela!”
Hector muttered. But they must have talked. The mountains ever at the window had a way of moving into the room at these moments, active participants. As a river might be.

From over their peaks, his own people speak to him, without benefit of telephone, in the nightsmoke. She in particular never stops. Over here he measures them all incessantly with the invalid’s egg-cup eye—reversible to large or small serving, soft-boiled or hard. To know people, they say, you have to know yourself. To know yourself—know them. A paradox blowing in the window from a mountain-top. But not dispelling the smoke.