Other Men's Daughters (14 page)

“Robert,” he said. “Maybe we should save the rest of this. I better go take a nap back at the hotel, or I'm not going to be up to much. I only have five days here in Europe, and I'm planning to see a few things. Maybe you and Cynthia will come down to the hotel”—the accent was on “ho,” one of the few remnants of his family speech—“and have dinner with me.”

They said goodby using, a bit self-consciously, first names—“William,” “Robert”—Merriwether pulled the Peugeot out of the Citroen's way and pointed it down the road to Nice.

They met Mr. Ryder on the dining terrace of the Negresco. Cynthia wore a scarlet dress with brocade collar, Mr. Ryder a navy blazer and white tie; Merriwether was slightly askew in olive turtleneck and tan polo coat. Thirty yards away, cars whirred Cannes-or-Menton-ward, six or seven yachts lit up in the bay, a band of red moon glowed on the palms, there was glitter, mildness, poly-lingual babble, and then lobster stuffed with crab meat, a
salade Niçoise, crêpes flambés
, showtunes of the American Thirties and floods of anecdote, Harvard, Carolina, legal and medical cases, travel stories, family jokes. Mr. Ryder was now completely at ease with Dr. Merriwether. He even had the added pleasure of being a proprietor: this was almost a son-in-law.

Cynthia felt excluded. “They have me here like those flowers,” but, after all, this was the solution to her worst fear, that her father would hurt Bobbie or take her away.

Mr. Ryder was going off to Rome, Paris and London, and he felt much better than he had hours ago. “I want to help,” he said, at the end. “I'm afraid you're going to have bad times. I'll do my best to stick with you.” He wasn't at all drunk, but the remark came out of a general, blurred delight to which a few glasses of wine had contributed. Mostly, though, it was the beauty of the place, the beauty of his daughter, and the distinction of the man who was a kind of brotherly son-in-law, a man who, almost as inexperienced as himself, had somehow fallen into a new life.

Driving up the St. Vetry road at eleven o'clock, Cynthia could barely believe that what she'd so dreaded had come and passed, that her father and lover had met and somehow gotten on and that she was going back not with her father but—with his implied consent—to her lover's house.

It was a lovely night; once they'd left Nice, the air was fresh.

“Did you like him?” asked Cynthia.

“I liked his control. I liked the way he treated me, I liked his courtesy, his manner. I don't know that we'd ever be friends.”

“You looked like old pals to me. I felt like a stain on the tablecloth.”

“You're a gorgeous stain,” said Merriwether. “If we'd looked at you too much, there might have been knifeplay.”

“We'll have to introduce him to Priscilla.”

Merriwether drove on the wrong side of the road until she said she was sorry.

“
Chaque homme porte la forme entière de L'humaine condition
,” Merriwether copies from a
Livre du Poche
Montaigne. His last day in France, he's walked down to the
épicerie
for rolls (they wouldn't use up a whole loaf of bread), shaken the
patron's
hand (Yes, he and Madame will return some day), and said his goodby to church and state (the reopened post office). The morning is like almost every other here: a sun burst—jots of which star the timbers of the arbor—the morning tune-up of the bugs and birds, the snuffling, prowling, micturating hounds, the raking Mademoiselle, the sleeping Cynthia. This afternoon, London, a week later New York, then he flies north, she south, and in a month his shuttle-life begins again. Somewhere in the schedule sits life. Yesterday, a letter came from Mr. Ryder. “About the third I've had from him my whole life. I don't know why he hates to write.”

“Lawyers are word-cautious. Letters are potential traps.”

“No. He just feels he's wasting them on me. He loves all of us to call though. Every week. Maybe not the calls themselves, but the fact of the call.”

“You're too sensitive for social life.”

She was too sensitive for Mr. Ryder's letter. He suggested she get some psychiatric therapy in the fall.

Not because their version of the world is foolproof, but because you shouldn't build a long relationship without using everything available to drain the foundation land. No matter how strong your
feeling
, if it's feeling that seeps out of old fears, it will poison any relationship based on it. You and Robert are splendid people. And together you seem to have a special splendor, but so does an apple tree on the edge of a desert. It's set apart and glows, but the soil is in danger of baking out, and when it does, the tree dies. The difficulties in your relationship are the desert. You need extra strength. I say this to help, not to test you. I love you, and I send you and Robert warmest greetings. Though where the warmth comes from I don't know: there's a chill rain in Paris that's like December at home. Still, I'm off to walk in the Tuileries.

Cynthia put the letter down and her arms around herself—she was in the yellow bikini. “Why can't he just trust me? It's not as if you were something inhuman. A horse. A turnip. Should Jackie Kennedy go to a shrink for marrying Onassis?”

“Every rich American's entitled to mental clarity.”

The privileges of the
forme entière
. Mademoiselle shuffled up the path, humming the day's dirge—its ground bass the departure of her tenants. Merriwether scribbled the final entry in his French journal:
fathers, gardeners, rectors, therapists, scientist-arsonists, all of us deluded with our “improvements” of each other. Fantasists posing as realists
.

“
Quel cauchemar, monsieur
,” said Mademoiselle. In her nightmare, she was alone in the house all winter, tenantless, penniless, without food. “You could cook the dogs and live for months,” thought wicked Merriwether. “
Vous trouverez quelqu'un, mademoiselle. N'inquitiez-vous pas
.” He tossed a merri-witticism into his final entry:
My rod can't comfort her
.

part three

nine

Dr. Merriwether had written home his probable New York-Boston arrival time but didn't expect anyone to meet him; every Merriwether ran his own circus. He was surprised to spot Albie waiting at the gate. They shook hands, still, after some years of no kissing, an artificial chore for the affectionate father. “How well you look.”

“You too.” Albie took his father's bag, patted his elbow for reinforced affection and unnecessary guidance. (Merriwether was not unpleased by this filial paternalism.) “The others are buying school clothes.” They walked through the esophagal plaster corridors.

“This gives us time together. I only see you about two days a year.” Merriwether, looking at Albie with his note-taking care, saw, if not a stranger, another metamorphosis. There was an intense finery about Albie. His color was theatrical, a sun tan that made a leather case for his dark eyes and brought out maple-gold stains in his hair. The hair fell thickly toward his man's neck and over his forehead. A luxuriant, compact human tree. But an athletic one. Albie walked springily, his steps almost hops. It relieved the stockiness which he carried as if it were a public nuisance, sufferable only until it came to use in a football game. But Albie had a look of reserved power, like a president on vacation. Merriwether who enjoyed a chameleon's unobtrusiveness for himself, also enjoyed his son's vividness. It was an assertion of independence, a signal to parents they'd done a good job.

Albie also looked expensive: the vents of the red sport shirt showed not flesh but underwefts of red; thin leather thongs criss-crossed the v-neck. Double-knit slacks, soft leather shoes. He cost himself a fortune. Merriwether studied his son's squareness, his tan, the broad forehead covered with fox-hair, the narrow shoulders, surprising on such a powerful thorax. Hard to think he had held other metamorphoses of this a thousand times, baby, child, boy. (The mystery of development; not just its process but its
why
.) Five years ago, no, six now, sitting in the stands with Sarah and the other children, he'd watched Albie playing football. Stands, cheerleaders, benches, a PA system, and there was his Albie built-up like a blue bunker in helmet, padded sweater, gold kneepants. The students cheering like lunatics, a band,
his
Albie, part of a public occasion, kneeling on a line, shoving at a bigger boy, tackling a runner, the public voice announcing “Tackle by 37, Merriwether.” He'd watched with tears—he didn't know why. What was a father's stake in a son? His dissociating head flashed a bloody, literal version of this phrase. Odd. (Optical agnosia, momentary ‘fatigue' in the stellate cells?) His feelings were
proper
, love, surprise, admiration, but he was thinking as an experienced tourist: “Don't be taken in.”

“What was summer like, Alb?”

“Ten thousand two-by-fours.” He'd worked with a master carpenter in Williamstown.

“No fun?”

“I met a girl. We put up her father's garage.”

“Are you good friends?”

“We haven't slept together.”

Dr. Merriwether didn't like this. He had never talked to his children about this sort of thing. Even when it came up indirectly, theoretically, it overburdened domestic discretion.

“It's not necessary to sleep with every girl friend, is it?” They'd just pulled out of the lot—Albie had paid the parking fee before Merriwether got his hand to his wallet.

“I'm not intimidated by this statistical crapola, if that's what you mean. Though Ann had a terrible time freshman year. Half the girls talking her into bed with the first available cock.” Another parental twinge. “She thinks she's ugly and doesn't have much choice. Which made it worse. She's still a virgin. I'm the first boy she's confessed that to. Imagine having to
confess the sin
of not being autographed by a sexual pencil. It's disgusting.”

“
D'accord
. But we don't have to live like our neighbors.”

“Saints don't.”

“I hope Priscilla isn't intimidated. One way or another.”

“Don't worry about Priscilla. She's got the nervous system of a computer.” Albie and Priscilla were close but competitive. “And better not ask me about her virginity. I have no idea, and don't care.”

“I feel as you do, Albie. Still, fathers worry about their children's happiness.”

“You used to tell us happiness wasn't the human goal.”

“Did I? I meant pleasure.”

“What you said always meant more than anything.”

“I wish I'd said better things then.”

“They were good things. I wish I lived up to more of them.”

This was almost too much of a good thing; Merriwether felt the skeptic's fibrillations. Against his will. Keep to the surface. That's what makes social peace. You have a fine son. Hold to that. For years, Merriwether had felt Albie's stony opposition. Necessary springboard, he'd told himself, but it was painful. Albie had gone around with a group of what Merriwether thought of as “displaced boys.” Many dropped out of colleges or never went. They drifted over the United States, coming back to Cambridge to see their fellow drifters. They took odd jobs at the post office or Jordan Marsh's. They pursued neither careers nor official learning. Life was an extended summer for them. They took up such things as scientology, Hopi culture, stained glass windows. When they lived at home, they got high, went to movies, and, above all, played games and watched them on television. Football, basketball, hockey. The Merriwether house was a center for them: the comparative merits of the Bruins' slap-shots and the subtleties of first-round draft choices were great topics. Passing themselves off as Harvard students, they used the Harvard gym. None of them played on teams; training was repugnant to them. In the long pauses between jobs or returns to school, they stayed up late and slept late. Sleep was their refuge, sports was a refuge, life itself was a campaign of refuge from the insistence of their fathers and mothers
to do something worthwhile
. Meanwhile their old classmates went through college and readied themselves for professions; each year separated the two groups more. Albie's friends collected the complaints of the other boys (“What else is there to do?”; “I'll suffer a few years, and then it's a hundred thousand a year just spreading butter”) and worked them into their ideology of contempt for the ordinary, running world. They were not going to be corporate sucker-ups, legal toads, hating their wives, their lives, their towns, they were going to take things slowly, in the world's rhythm, they weren't going to be ironed by the System. Touch them anywhere—clothes, music, anarchic politics—
laissez-moi
poured out: “You're so hung up with production and rut-greasing, you don't even know the idea of spontaneity.”

Albie had felt with them, he sometimes talked as they did, he played poker and basketball with them, but from inside he'd learned their fear and their sadness. Even when he agreed with articles of their contempt, he wasn't part of it. He had a big hunk of conventional ambition. Which Merriwether, without verbal evidence, somehow knew; and was relieved by.

“I'm really glad you came alone, Alb. I'd like to talk to you about something.”

Albie was an excellent driver, cool, careful, with excellent reflexes and driving manners. He kept his eyes on the road but his head, the Sarah-ish head, bent politely fatherward.

“It's something difficult for me to talk about.”

“Is it about you and Mother?”

“Yes. I don't know quite how to go about it.” Ahead, Merriwether saw the insurance skyscrapers. Mineral lint on the old splendor of his child's memory. But it was a grand day, one of those designer's preview shows of autumn that New England stages around Labor Day. The air's polleny white and gold had a holophotal intensity. An urban migraine, yet beautiful, the sky's dense chemical blue.