Other Men's Daughters (19 page)

“My God,” said Merriwether. “I understand you can get a divorce for under fifty dollars.”

“A kind of divorce. No guarantees. No counsel. That might be all right when there are no assets, or when there is perfect agreement. But Mrs. Merriwether has already consulted me. So there's already a fee. But I am not going to charge you what the court would award me. I am going to charge you half-fee. If there is a stipulated settlement, the fee will be eight hundred dollars. You couldn't match that anywhere in Boston.”

He'd come in here, breathless, running to be on time, sweating, taking off his rubbers—it had looked like rain—this odd-limbed box of a man had been waiting for him by his secretary's desk, perhaps ready to file charges if he'd been a minute late, and from that human moment, he was now buying—what?—the end of his domestic life, it was called “freedom.” Sarah was buying it. It was a product of the machine. A bill of divorcement,
a vinculo matrimonii
. Had the American machine been made in Rome? Sumeria? Each state had its own. His sausage was made by Massachusetts. Divorce—
di-vertere
, to turn from.
A litus et thoro
. From bed and board.

He put on his rubbers, Sullivan helped him on with his raincoat, and they walked through crowds to the Civic Plaza, and took an escalator up to an enormous room, where scores of people behind windows took and distributed papers. Sullivan joked with a black woman who stamped a paper Sullivan told Merriwether to sign. “It's nothing. Read it. It just acknowledges that you were served. You save ten dollars by not needing an officer of the court.” Merriwether made out a check for fourteen dollars, accepted the papers, and saw that he and Mrs. Sarah Wainwright Merriwether, Plaintiff, had a long file number. While Sullivan read other papers, he noticed that the papers he'd signed were full of mistakes: the wrong date for their marriage was given, the wrong name of a Savings Bank, his own middle name misspelled (“Stil” instead of “Still”). Good. Grounds for appeal. But what kind of appeal? He and Sullivan went down the escalator, and at the bottom shook hands warmly. “I'll be in touch with Sarah as soon as I have a court date. The whole thing'll be over by March. God be with you, Doctor. Don't worry. Everything is going to work out.”

The sun had come out, the sky was a profound, a thoughtful blue. He and Sullivan parted and the lawyer went off in the direction of his office; Merriwether followed his long, scissoring forks and apish arms till he was lost in the crowd.

Amidst the people fanning out of buildings toward restaurants, Merriwether walked vaguely toward the MTA. Ahead was Old South Church. For some reason he walked over and stood by it, taking in the sun, the chill, the gaseous air, the sense of the crowd. Shards of sensation stuck on odd thoughts. Had there been a Merriwether at the meeting Adams had called in the church? A Still? A Wainwright? Abigail Adams wrote her husband about a Merriwether who overcharged for coffee, and was besieged by infuriated women. John Hancock was in Sarah's mother's family. He'd wanted to be president. His insurance building strutted in the skyline the way his signature did on the Declaration. Mental dazzle: Sullivan's overcoated back, Esmé's, Back Bay, Marblehead, boats, sails, the longest journey. His marriage was over.

On the train back to Cambridge, he fixed on the almostempty car, the iron rattle, the plank seats, the white poles, the underground hole; this train headed him toward displacement. Nothing was going to be familiar. What to do? He had to talk with someone. Not Cynthia. Sarah. (The old Sarah.) Almost funny. A friend. Maybe a lawyer, but he knew no lawyer well. Maybe Stuart Benson. They were close friends again after a bad time a few years ago. And Stuart had been through divorce. He was probably at home; he worked there mornings.

At the Square, he ran up the escalator and called Stuart from the phone outside the Cambridge Trust. “Of course, Bobbie. Come right on over. If I'm in the bath, I'll leave the door unlatched.”

“I'm very grateful, Stuart.”

“I'm grateful you think of me, Bobbie.”

They'd had a serious, almost adolescent estrangement. Benson was not an easy man. A brilliant one, an immensely learned one, and not only in science. His library was one of the great private collections of Cambridge. Some professors of English Literature, even specialists in the nineteenth century, knew less about the Victorians than Benson.

Benson was smallish, red-faced, green-eyed. He worked enormously, published several papers every year. A neurophysiologist, he'd lately done pioneer work in prostaglandins. He also kept up with more work in the biological sciences than anyone on the faculty. Unlike Tom Fischer, though, he had little sympathy for other men's work. He was vituperative to both pupils and friends; he had very few of either.

His two best friends were Merriwether and Fischer. Fischer's genius, accomplishments, industry, even his fine appearance, filled Benson's talk. He considered himself unattractive and was enormously sensitive to good looks, especially the good looks of young men, but he'd neither had nor seriously thought of a homosexual experience. He had married once, a graduate student, but it hadn't lasted. He had dominated her, even with his tenderness, which was proprietary. A non-stop talker, his tongue darkened her thought and life. One day, she ran off with another graduate student.

Benson was terrified of criticism; his life was ingeniously, though unconsciously, fashioned to escape it. As a professor in a great university, he was subject to no one but his scientific peers; the few peers he had, he'd recruited to his side by offers to lecture at Harvard and the company of his wonderful friends, Fischer and Merriwether.

It was a dinner for a visitor from Berkeley and his wife that led to Merriwether's year-long estrangement from him. The visitor was a friend of Merriwether's named Roger Trimpi. He and Merriwether had been graduate students together, and they had seen each other at occasional scientific meetings. They got along very well. Trimpi was a mild, good-humored man. A few years ago, he and his wife had divorced and he was now married to a woman twelve to fifteen years his junior. Mrs. Trimpi was along.

They went out to dinner in Boston. (Sarah was not cooking that month for his friends.)

The evening turned into a Benson monologue on the decline of every institution and virtue, the rise of ignorance, bad manners and minority violence. When Merriwether interposed that the Victorian era had had its share of social malaise, Benson extended the decline to Merriwether's own recent work. “Bobbie here's been making an idiot of himself trying to work out dipsologic models for cytologic pathogenesis.”

Merriwether said, “I don't think you've kept up with what I'm doing, Stu. I'll show you in detail some time.”

“I'm not interested in your showing me, Bobbie. I know every man has to eat a peck of dirt in his time, but I've eaten mine.”

Merriwether turned away to an embarrassed Mrs. Trimpi and asked how her children and her husband's got on together. The meal passed without his talking again to Benson.

When they met on campus a week or so later, Merriwether nodded coldly and passed by. The next day he received a letter in Faculty Mail.

Dear Bobbie—

Why were you so cold to me yesterday? Have I done something awful?

As ever,

Stu

Merriwether wrote back that despite his affection for Benson, he could no longer tolerate his rudeness.

We began, I suppose, on the wrong footing. I the junior expecting correction, you the senior, expecting to give it. But twenty years have passed. We are, if not equals, at least equal as friends, and we must put ourselves on a new footing. I very much hope we can.

Benson didn't answer this letter, the summer intervened, and the habit of association was broken. In the fall, Tom Fischer had tried to act as peacemaker, but left town without bringing them together, and the adolescent pride which American life fosters kept them apart. They worked in different laboratories, there was seldom occasion to see each other. Now and then, they sat across from each other at the semester meetings of the biological sciences faculty; they nodded, even smiled at each other, and then, one day, about a year after they'd quarreled, Merriwether went up, shook Benson's hand and asked him to have dinner with him. A new version of the old cordiality began: Benson was careful of Merriwether's feelings, Merriwether tender of Benson's.

Now he sat in Benson's small living room, comforted, rather than subdued by what Tom Fischer had once called “Stuart's mortuary of authority.” “If there were a literal book worm,” Fischer said, “Stuart's walls would be its gut.” In the corridors, in every room but the kitchen where he ate, Benson's books were the walls. Merriwether sat under a massif of diaries, letters and memoirs of lesser Victorians. His
pot-au-feu
took in the names even as he talked of the divorce (Henry Rawlinson, Moncton-Milnes, Tom Taylor, Hartley Coleridge, Thomas Arnold, A. J. Munby). He showed Benson the onionskin indictment.

Benson's green eyes covered the pages in seconds. “Who wrote this? Jonas Chuzzlewit? It's a monstrosity. Call your lawyer.”

“I don't have one.”

“Get one today. Go to your bank, now. Take out half your money and put it under another name. They've got you by the balls. This is a terrible document. Sarah's gone and got herself one of these mick sharpies. He's going to eat you alive.”

“The man's not like that, Stu. He seemed very decent.”

“You're a baby. You don't know. They're all in cahoots, judges, lawyers. They work it all out. You're a minnow. They'll snuff you up without knowing they've had a snack.
Decent. Indecent
. They're in business. They
appear
to be whatever is going to get results.
Be?
They don't exist as beings. They're functions of their bellies. This mick saw you there, mouth open, he could have drawn out your appendix with a lump of sugar. But they want your heart. Sarah's going to eat you. Take my advice. I've been through this. Get yourself the toughest lawyer in Boston. Call Wally Archer at the law school. Ask him to get you an iron man. This isn't the lab, Bobbie. This isn't your rats bleeding. This is you. These lawyers are going to strip your corpse.”

Merriwether felt himself pounding. Sure Benson had taken off on his own rhetoric, his dough-ball face was streaked with excitement. All that Dickens had technicolored life for him, his hands balled in the air, gaveling, hammering. But maybe it was true. Maybe the lawyers gorged on Dickens too. They went for broke. Sarah was no Goneril, but he had seen the tiger in her. She'd given Sullivan the stuff of the document; it was not the “nothing” Sullivan said it was.

“It's hard to believe, Stu.”

“It's hard to believe a nanogram of PG can leash a cell, but you know it's so.
Hard to believe
.” Out of his rolled-up blue workshirt, freckled forearms hoisted in a mime of incredulity; the right one swept up a wall of books. “What's all this about? The documentation of what's far more astonishing than that an injured wife wants to pound her husband into glue. What runs the world, Bobbie? Are you an eighteenth century biologist? It's the 1970s. Neuro-enzymatic labyrinths. Labyrinths? Helical tsunami. You and I have spent half our lives omitting everything but what we want to pinpoint in a tube. Professional life tries for the same simplicity: Three square meals, a comfortable chair, chamber music, journals, wife on call, now and then an aspirin for trouble out there. We know it's not even that simple in a macro-molecule. The damn proteins don't behave; it's a bleeding miracle when we find something to spank them with. Bobbie, you and Sarah are in the snake pit. Don't pretend it's Disneyland.”

Merriwether mumbled some sort of assent and walked home. Dizzied, heart bumping arhythmically, sweat in eye sockets, breath irregular; vasoconstriction, arterial distension, glycogenic riot. In his head, visions of a stripped life, no children, no house, no money. Stripped. He walked through the Commons. The sun lay a gold blade on the cannon.

Sarah was in the kitchen. “I saw Sullivan,” he said.

“Well?” she said, quietly. She'd heated a can of soup, and got a second bowl, poured, and set it at his place.

“He gave me this terrible thing here,” he handed the sheets to Sarah, “then said it didn't mean anything, that you and I could work everything out together, I wouldn't even need a lawyer.”

“That's what he told me.”

They sat at the table. “I went to Stu Benson. He said Sullivan was a crook, that you wanted to eat me alive, that I'd better get a lawyer.”

“Do you believe that?”

“No. I liked Sullivan. He's probably capable of shystering with the best of them, but I guess this is an easy eight hundred bucks for him. He feels we can do it together.”

“Eight hundred?”

“Eight-fifty.”

“I've paid him three already.”

“Anyway, I don't think I'll get a lawyer.”

“I don't think you need one, Bobbie.”

At this use of his name in a tone that was nothing but sympathetic, Merriwether put his head on the table and cried. It had been decades since he'd done that. “Just shock,” he said, still crying. He went into the sun parlor and tried to get hold of himself. Sarah came in. “It'll be all right,” she said. “It's the best thing.”

After a bit, he said, “What a waste.” He touched her cheek with the edge of his palm. Plump, white, scraped cheek. He went upstairs. When he came down, he came down with pencil and paper.

They sat in the breakfast nook. He loved this room, the shelf of blue Meissen, the silver-point engravings of Assisi and Pisa. It was a bay, polka-dot curtains were on the circle of windows. A room of cheer to smooth out night's wrinkles. The chairs were battered, scratched, not of a set, but they belonged together. He sat in his usual one, a low, unupholstered armchair; Sarah's was higher—as Sullivan's had been.