Other Men's Daughters (20 page)

“We'll go over everything,” he said. “We'll do it right.”

“All right,” said Sarah. She was calm, her eyes did not glitter, her hands, slender, veined, those of a thinner woman than she was, a pianist's hands, were folded on the table. He wrote, “The House.” The asking price, seventy thousand dollars, seemed high, but there'd be less problem disposing of it than a thousand dollar bill in Harvard Square. “We can split the money,” said Sarah. “I'm sure each of us can find an adequate apartment with what we'd get.”

To his surprise, Merriwether found himself once again in tears. “I'm sorry. Pay no attention. It's strain. The house,” he had to stop. “You and the kids.” It wasn't necessary to go on, but he let himself go on, even relished her surprise at seeing this husband who had such little feeling for her show what he was showing. Again he left the room, partly to control himself, partly to let her see he was ashamed of breaking down, partly to have a little more of the relief of tears.

When he came back, they went over each child's needs: tuition, maintenance, summers. Sarah, in a dignified and decent way, moved toward a constricted, economical life, one that made her secure but which Merriwether, even in admiration of her decency, also feared as a constriction of the children's life. Why should they have their skies cut in half? He upped her figures.

In this spirit, each giving the other more than either would have wanted in a contest of bitterness, they avoided the war Benson's strategy would have started.

twelve

The Merriwethers had their usual Thanksgiving Dinner with the Calenders, Dev, Tina and their daughter Tibbs (babble-version of Clementina). The Calenders knew the Merriwether situation, only George and Esmé knew nothing. (Sarah had agreed they should have as much “solid family time” as possible. “We'll tell them after the holidays.” Merriwether hoped to wait till the end of the school year.) At Thanksgiving, it still seemed remote; they didn't even have a court date.

They'd had Thanksgiving together in this house for over twenty years, the last eight or ten with the Calenders. The dinner was one of their ceremonial measures. Each year the children announced what had been best and worst in the year, and Merriwether worked up some Massachusetts story from Bradford's history, or the Mathers'; though he told it with deprecating irony, that was but easement for the pleasure in continuity he felt he could not, in this day and time, exhibit directly. The meal itself was the American marvel, the stuffed, trussed bird, the squash and beans and marsh-mallowed yams, the fresh cranberries, tureens of giblet gravy, platters of celery and black olives, the mince, pumpkin and pecan pies, the white wine and hot cider, all spread under the brass chandelier a nineteenth-century slave trader had brought back from Brussels. The dining room walls were oak-paneled; between the frames hung portraits of Merriwethers, Stills and Tiptons, old insurance men and merchants, preachers and professors. Thanksgiving in this room seemed the great American payoff to the children of New Jerusalem.

This year, neither Albie nor Priscilla came home. Priscilla was cooking a turkey for foreign students at Oberlin. Albie wrote that he had a Thanksgiving-to-end-of-term job writing papers for delinquent students. Merriwether telephoned him in Williamstown and asked him not to take the job. “I'd rather have you lying about detergents on television.” Albie bristled, said everyone had the right to do his own work. “I'm just helping some kid who's got to write six papers in two weeks. I'm pretty good at it, and I learn something; if he reads it, so will he.”

“I don't feel much like an example these days, Albie, and I don't want to impose my standards on you, but I feel this is so direct a repudiation of my life. I have to say something.”

Albie's voice rose on the phone, became boyish. “It has nothing to do with you, Dad. I just want to earn a little money.”

“I'll send you more money. I didn't know you needed it.”

“I didn't want to bother you. I still think you're being hypersensitive. These guys have helped lots of people over rough spots.”

“I don't want to argue, Albie. The heart of education is ripped by this kind of thing. I know you'll agree with me when you think it over.”

Up in his study, writing out a check for Albie, it struck Merriwether that Albie's choice could have something to do with the invisible poison of the household. Underneath the civility, Albie had suffered the decay; and now he was attacking another part of the moral structure. That Merriwether was enforcing his own moral authority with fifty dollars did not strike him as a moral matter. It simply removed a burr from this celebration.

Tibbs Calender brought a boy friend from Cornell. Tibbs was an ugly duckling who'd found her style two or three years ago. The Merriwethers had watched her grow from big-thighed awkwardness into grace. Physically a queen, tall, big-featured, black-haired, her nature was gentle and curious. Her presence was a kind of holiday for all the Merriwethers. Her boy friend was a thirty-year-old graduate student in physics. She'd met him when they made love for a pornographer's camera. The film,
A Little Bit of a Lot
, hadn't been released, but the pornographer was going to film another with them. “You're a great sexual team.” Theo, the physicist, was wiry, big-eyed, he had a dark, sharp-angled Greek face. He'd answered the pornographer's ad in the Cornell newspaper, and he'd stayed for the sex, not the money. Now he and Tibbs lived together in Ithaca. They were both good musicians. Tibbs sang, Theo played the flute.

After dinner they went into the sun parlor for music. Sarah played the piano, Esmé turned pages for her, Tina for Theo. George lay on the floor by his father's chair: Merriwether could feel the body warmth against his leg. The music—Rameau, Purcell, Bach—was beautiful. Merriwether let himself sink in it, and in the old beauty of the parlor with its wallpaper of gold spindles and the little what-not tables covered with silver holders and dishes. Beyond dark drapes, dusk fell in the street. He watched George, chin in his hands, floating, large-eyed, in some George world, and Esmé, serious and unobtrusive, eyes on the music, reaching to turn, her arm hair—which she hated and habitually depilated—trapping fuzzy pockets of light. It was lovely, the delicate arm in the velvety funnel of laced sleeve. On the tip of one sort of beauty, ready to fall through adolescence into another. Soon Esmé would be telling her friends, one by one, that she was moving and that her parents were divorced, she'd be trying to figure out what it was that hadn't worked, comparing it with models in magazines and TV shows. Merriwether sank into a swamp of foreboding, half-sybaritically, half in the superstition of people who believe life's so strange that by imagining its worst turns, you force it into better ones. The melancholy beauty of farewell came through the music. Tibbs sang
Bist du bei mir
in her quavering, heartrending contralto. Vibrato was a feedback system to keep on pitch. Was all trembling, all melancholy so useful?
Geh ich mit Freude
. Beautiful.

Later, helping Sarah scrape dishes and stack them in the dishwasher, he thanked her for the dinner. “It was a lovely day.”

“It was. A lovely family day. I know how you must feel. It doesn't really alter things.”

He went upstairs and called Cynthia. “How are you, dear?”

“Fine. I celebrated with a double portion of cole slaw. How was your dinner?”

“It was very nice for the children. What are you doing?”

“Reading Saikaku. A contemporary of Madame de Lafayette.”

“General Lafayette's wife?”

“No, creep. The first French novelist. I'll read you the opening sentence from this one, ok?”

“Sure.”

“I'm not sure of anything.” This was her first book in Japanese.

“‘A beautiful woman, say the old men, is an axe that cuts down a man's very life.'”

“Well, well.”

“Am I so dangerous?”

“You're a beauty. I'll tell you a line Priscilla used to recite. I forget who wrote it. ‘A wandering beauty is a blade out of its scabbard. You know that, gentlemen of four score. (May you know it yet ten more.)' You like it?”

“Do you love me?”

“Yes, I love you.”

“Then I'll go to sleep. I'm tired of Saikaku. And Thanksgiving. And cole slaw.”

In these days, Merriwether, like some drunken Aeolus of feeling, could not control his emotional comings-and-goings. One minute, he felt he could give up Cynthia, could even go back to Sarah—that possibility had fallen out of her in one of their sessions, though he felt she made it only to assure herself she'd
tried everything
. Yet he could never be more than an uncomfortable brother to her, could never go to bed with her. When he hinted this, the black eyes turned in, the nostrils took in extra air. “I'm afraid I need more than that.” What did he expect?

“Of course you do. We both do.” But the neural hyperbole of these days churned out a meaner version: The hangman thinks he's a surgeon; he wants his victim's gratitude, his adoration. He could not live with her except in a “live-and-let-live” house, this house. And it was already too late for that. Leslie Devereaux, a new Radcliffe Dean, a topologist, had made an offer for the house, too low in Merriwether's opinion, but Sarah, impatient, even fearful, had accepted it. The only good thing about it was that Devereaux was black and a woman. That was a perfect redemption: the house had been partly built on slave-trade money. Historical irony was the classic consolation of defeat. All those Harvard war-makers of the sixties should be bathing in it. (He remembered the general relief when Mac Bundy was passed over for the Harvard Presidency, though he'd made a damn good Dean.
Sic transit gloria Bundy
went the joke, supposedly Finley's, the Thucydides translator.
There
was historic irony.) That brilliant, brittle, problem-making, problem-not-quite-solving Bundy-Harvard touched Merriwether here and there, but it wasn't his. That was English Harvard, the Peabody-Groton world (“to rule is to serve” transposed into “to serve is to rule”), the top grades, the top marriages into the old mill and banking families, the
rouge et noir
routes (law and social science these days) into Running Things. Into the ground. The intellectual motors rolled too fast, the world hardly had drugs enough to calm those fellows. He knew—slightly—and liked—slightly more—a few of them, Chip Boyd, Mac Frothingham. They made him feel dowdy, slow, even while catering to him, drawing him out. Great Drawers-Out. Perfect Foundation men. He was glad the house wasn't going to them.

Sometimes, at night, behind closed doors on the third floor, rehearsing future solitude, he'd wake, loneliness so thick in him, he found himself calling out, “No, no, no, no, no.” It was going to be this way. What would happen if he had a heart attack and couldn't reach the phone? This must be why people went into nursing homes. And then, George and Esmé, they'd wake up and know he was not there, Dad, the Fire-Douser, Burglar-Chaser, Blood-Stancher, Hugger-and-Soother. His first memory of his own mother was waking with some dream terror, desperate for her, calling out, and she'd come in from guests, he remembered her dress under his cheek, scalloped flops of silk, her softness, oh Mama. He'd been spared loneliness. Sometimes Tom Fischer called, voice hoarse from disuse, embarrassed at his helplessness; it was that. Now he understood the eagerness of the bachelors and widowers at the Faculty Club for the company lunch.

He had Cynthia, yet, as much as he loved her, delightful as it was with her (playing gin rummy, reading aloud, watching the midnight television interviews with transvestite lawyers and lady blacksmiths, watching her draw off her shirt, the soft half-moons of her body, making love), they could not live in the same apartment; their systems were contrary. They liked different music, different breakfasts, were different about heat—she turned radiators on, he off—about mealtimes (he was leisurely, she ate where she cooked, standing up at the stove). And she was still so fragile, she suffered so from the slightest slight or suspicion of it, the classic girl of high intelligence rocked by, well, yes, males like himself—and worse. He noticed the studies of Radcliffe girls of high intelligence doing worse than girls at Bryn Mawr or even Vassar. The fear of success. Broken girls. Who—half the time—broke those who broke them. “I'll be rattled on that emotional roller coaster. I'll be cackling in her road show.” Yet, without Cynthia, he would enter the lists of Cambridge hostesses, be hung on the local Availability Hooks. Impossible. He couldn't endure the deferrals, the expense, the stupidity of courtship. No matter how minimal the sexual signal system, it would be consumptive, humiliating. He came back to Sarah, the pre-furious Sarah, decent, straight, generous; to the idea of growing old beside her, every event dipped into memory. The deepest feelings grew down where the nerve foliage reddened, the dendrite thicket. No new relationship could ever have that. It would take twenty years with Cynthia, though she was a girl of exceptional emotional depth. Even now, twenty-two, her memories were the richest part of her life. Her dream life, her fantasy life, was the past; the scenes were Carolina beaches, her grandmother's room (helping braid her hair, smelling her sachet); her memories of school triumphs were more powerful than her ambitions. Was it because love for him deflected them? Or because she had that poetic temperament which early accumulates so much that most of life is just finding a way to spend it. Or was this the wish of a benevolent tyrant? Maybe she'd only become what she could if he'd leave her. If she left him. She said that would kill her. It wouldn't. Yet people hardened around their wounds; abandoned and abandoning women turned into the
belles dames sans merci
, their children into Lola-Lolas.

A silvery comma of moon hooked in the capillary thorns of the acacia. His tree. His view. His street, his house. He'd wanted to die here. The children's children to die here. This time next year, a young Devereaux would be looking at this tree-hooked moon.