Other Men's Daughters (23 page)

Fairleigh, leaping—a trunk with wings—turned coat and fell on Albie, Tim summoned general attack. Albie and Fairleigh rolled into snow men, Priscilla fell on them both. A free-for-all. Merriwether retreated and watched from the steps. They were charging like miniature Panzers, breath came in spumes, they were wearing down. From the Hawthorne end of the street, they walked back, a snow line of Teutons. Faces lit like holly balls. They desnowed on the porch, stamping, slapping hats, mittens, and scarves against the pillars. “Acorn Street is going to be mighty quiet next year,” said Albie.

They drank cider and glühwein. The fire was still going on a mix of logs and Christmas boxes. It lit eyes, cheeks, the silvery tubes of George's model cars, the brass pokers and shovels; never had it seemed so beautiful to Merriwether. Sarah, happy in the moment, as Merriwether could not quite be, wore an African djellabah Priscilla and Albie had given her. White with red trim, it lengthened her, relieved her plumpness, brought out her Christmas coloring, red cheeks, black eyes, fair skin. “She'll be able to find someone,” thought Merriwether suddenly, happy in the thought, then uneasy. When she's good, he thought. He went for more glühwein so he could pass her, to pat her arm. She smiled, sweetly, sadly, but did not look at him.

Tim got Priscilla's guitar from her room—Merriwether was always surprised at the young people's unquestioned ease of access—and plunked out carols, French ones, which he sang alone, German ones he sang with Fairleigh, ones in English with everyone. Merriwether tended the fire, filled glasses, passed Christmas cookies, Pfeffernüsse, sugary almond crescents, flat yellow stars with jellied nuclei. Esmé went upstairs to play new albums, George to read
The Hobbit
. Two more boys—arcs in what Merriwether called “Fairleigh's Circle”—arrived, there was loud discussion of not, happily, pro bowl games, but the demerits of the mighty. Tim talked of the wasted decades of Einstein and Newton, Fairleigh of the low IQs of painters. Each boy seemed to have a specialty he riddled. “Sons of professors,” thought Merriwether. Evangelical, paternal, he suggested they'd grown up too familiarly with men of accomplishment. “You take them on their parlor behavior, which, at best, is par. What counts in these people is the work they do in private, stuff they can do over and over until it is right. That's why they say tenacity's so important.”

“So you're saying there's really no special talent.”

“No. Only that an ingredient of it is the hunger for solution. And a nose for half-baked solution. An unwillingness to stop before the result looks, sounds, or works right.” He was talking for Albie: the straight and narrow.

“Trial and error is what mice do going for cheese in lab traps.”

“You're exalting mice, not degrading humans. But the mice live only in the present. Humans try until the painting looks right, till the economic policy reduces inflation, till the tumor disappears.”

Sarah, making domestic application of this patient tenacity, said it was beginning to seem like a seminar. “I'm for carols.”

“Mother,” said Albie.

“I agree,” said Merriwether. “Fewer words, more tunes.”

But connubial “conciliation” was patronage at this date. There was a small chill in Sarah, and in a few minutes it spread. The boys went upstairs, Sarah and Merriwether sat alone, dead meat between the racket upstairs and the small fire noises in the parlor. Each was on the edge of speech. But what was there to say? Merriwether got up to spread the logs. The motion released Sarah. She went upstairs. He managed to call out, “It's been a nice day.” She managed a “Yes.”

fourteen

As Sarah's February Court Day came on, Merriwether felt suspended in nostalgia and melancholy. “This is the last Monday of my married life.” And the day itself: “So it's really here. It's all over.” That morning he lectured his undergraduate class about the evidence for thinking the genetic nucleus had been formed out of the symbiosis of two organisms. “As, say, the word ‘another' is independent of both ‘an' and ‘other' yet is clearly their product. So the older, rather inflexible transmission capacity of cytoplasm gave way to this superbly organized method.” The analogy in his notes was marriage, but today he couldn't talk of the “family unit of transmission.” There was a fly in the analogy. Divorce was not meiosis, not division for reproduction, it was not death. It would be the separation of symbiots into independent creatures.

It was the shank of winter. The tiny lawns of Ash, Acacia and Acorn were streaked with snow filth, the neighborhood dogs dropped their excrement in steaming cylinders—why didn't Cambridge adopt London's system of doggy pick-ups with fines for delinquents?

Tomorrow, a new life. He was ready. He'd had the joys and difficulties of family life, he'd still have some of them, and always, always he would watch the children to see if he could fix whatever went wrong because of what he and Sarah had done. But now, fresh fields. Last night, he'd tried to drug himself watching television. He'd lasted through half the Late Late Show, could remember nothing after the MGM lion. He was just eerily conscious of this night, this last night as a husband, of George and Esmé sleeping yards away from the television set. They still didn't know. He and Sarah had agreed to tell them during the April Easter break.

He went to sleep, head a swirl of inarticulate trouble. He replayed the Super Bowl, himself a hero, blocking pass rushes, rifling passes, then on defense, laying linemen out, and throwing, literally, taking up the quarterback in one hand and throwing him twenty-five yards back. He got some sleep.

Sarah and he sat across the breakfast table. They did not say but felt, “The last breakfast in our married life.” Twenty-two years. She called George and Esmé, they bundled up, he kissed them off and, at the door, touched Sarah's arm, “I hope it'll go all right, Sarah.”

“It's been a long time.”

Her court hour was two o'clock. He came home early.

“How did it go?”

“Quick and horrible. The worst was before. Sullivan read all the things I had to say about you. I didn't know if I could go through it. Tina too. Dev just had to confirm. The court hardly mattered, it was an assembly line. I suppose the judge was all right.”

“What was he like?”

“I can hardly remember. I didn't look at him. The whole thing in court took ten minutes.”

“So, we're not married anymore.”

“The final decree doesn't come through for a while.”

“I suppose I'd better get on the ball about finding a place.”

“What about the Schneiders' garage?”

“I don't think they want me around. A domestic death's-head for their kids.”

“I hope you can find a place soon.”

“I'm trying hard, Sarah. The Faculty Housing Office says places show up around March first. The leases start coming in.”

“I guess we can make it till then.”

“I'd thought we could make it till the kids' school ends.”

She shook her head and went into the kitchen.

Except for the astonishing fact that he was no longer married, after having been married since Albie's age, there was no further sense of change.

Though the next day, when he came home from work, he came home to the house that no longer felt his. It was now—at least till June—Sarah's. Yesterday it had been his. He was here now on her sufferance, she could tell him to get out, legally, as three or four times she had told him to get out emotionally. It was a strange feeling for him. “Maybe this is what women feel.” He hadn't even felt this way when he was competing for tenure.

“I'm free without being free,” thought Sarah. “Once again he's got the better of me.” She went on cooking (or going out to supper with him and the children), she threw his dirty shirts and underpants in the washer and dryer and sorted them out; each throw, each sorting was a humiliation. He was home much of the time, and never had he been so sweet with the children. George and Esmé clung to him when he came in the door. “He's trying to cripple me with their love for him. He always has.” She could not bear it, could not bear the sight of him reading in his leather chair, couldn't bear sitting next to him on the sofa when they ate in front of the television set. With the domestic tribulation of Dick Van Dyke barely ruffling the bliss of television domesticity, there he sat laughing and eating her food (a heated Stouffer's Salisbury Steak; she didn't have the strength for anything else). Every other day he suggested they eat downstairs. “I'm too tired,” she'd say, or “I want to see the Olympic figure skating.” She would take no more dinner seminars.

She could not bear to see him drinking wine and watching the news. “Some people don't have time to watch the news.” (Looking at the children.) “Or even read the newspapers.” When she took them to school in the morning, he would be finishing the
Times
in his torn blue bathrobe, which she knew he wore as an indictment of her lack of wifely—unwifely—care. (The symbols they threw at each other's heads.)

These days, it was as if there were ten thousand slivers of glass between them. Instead of air, glass. The glass was pain. That is, if they moved, if they said anything to each other, the glass moved, and it was painful. Impossible; but not impossible, for there he was; and every day put more glass in the space between them. It was not so long ago that there had been nothing, a neutral space, if not comforting, not discomforting. And before that, a warm space: how good to have you there across the lazy susan, the coffee cups, his, hers, the same as they used now, his blue with the gray vines, hers striped green, bought in the same store at the same time. By her. With “his” money. That old division of labor or of love had turned to glass and nails. Everything that had allied them separated them. Here in the breakfast nook off the bright kitchen off the wood-paneled dining room off the hall, the living room, the sun parlor, the bottom floor of the old house, here in this safe nook, cold and glass.

Pain found expression in money; money was the medium of hatred. Much that's said to begin in passion begins in money; and almost every human conclusion has a monied superstructure.

Sarah had never been greedy. If anything, she thought goods were tainted; growing up, she had battled the comfort of her own home, and since, especially since working in the poverty centers, tutoring poor children, her shame at comfort had an ascetic's force. Now, she faced the problem of permanently accounting for her own bed and board; she felt money as threat, means, as weapon, one that had been used against her, one she could use in defense.

When she and Merriwether had sat down to work out the settlement, the main thing for her had been quick, easy, reasonable division. Now she felt the weight of goods as things which could be replaced only with money. The money was her—proper—share of his income (plus whatever she could earn as a middle-aged woman teacher in a world that was not lavish with such people). One day, she'd have a little money from her parents, that other kind of money that meant you could afford to despise it, but now she had to carve her economic life, her ability to live, out of his. And he was no Rockefeller, either for quantity or charity.

It looked as if she could make it on the settlement; but you never knew, equipment could break down; the condominium's insurance covered only space, not goods, she would have to insure household goods, and then car insurance, and health insurance. What if the car broke down? If she broke down?

It was a time of fierce worry for her, and meanwhile she had to keep going, her degree was almost in hand, and beyond that was a job, some job or other. Her exams were the month before the household move; she did not know if she could make it.

Merriwether saw only the harsh outside, Sarah hardening, cursing. “That's full of shit,” she said once after he told her she'd have no money troubles. She'd never used that word. She belched and passed wind, without apologizing. Once, when he frowned angrily at George for doing the same thing, she snapped, “How dare you. A person can't help that.”

“I don't believe an eleven year old's sphincter muscle is beyond control,” he said. “If there's a lapse, the tongue can atone for it.”

“It's your calling attention to it that makes him uneasy.”

Whacked up at every orifice, Sarah went on cursing, farting, belching. Merriwether connected it with what he thought of as her new greed. “Perhaps as she tightens in one way, she has to let loose in another.” (He had not read the psychoanalytic literature on money and excrement.) The worst was at breakfast. Low blood pressure made it difficult for her to get moving. He supposed he was her morning coffee. She went after him about household money—he'd questioned her about a check, and said it was about time they had separate bank accounts—about his cheapness, about the pauper lives he'd made them lead all these years.

“Couldn't we live these last weeks in peace?”

“Easy for you to say. But you dog me for every nickel.”

“Just for an occasional two hundred bucks.”

“We've been needing a new dryer for a year.”

“Wouldn't it have been simpler to wait till you moved?”

“I notice you're still putting your shirts in the hamper.”

“That is unfair, I know. I'll do the laundry every other time.”

“You better get used to it.”

“Is it so hard?”

“Nothing's hard for you when I do it.”

“Until now, no. I'm grateful.”

“You're grateful. Go to hell.”

When he got home that night, he found a note from her on his bed. (It bore neither salutation nor signature.) “You'll have to get out, whether you find a place or not. You can have till March 20. Here are the things you can take with you: your books, your grandmother's bed (this was the one he now slept on), your mother's oriental, any presents the children gave you, your desk and desk lamp, etc., the Brueghel baboons (a print of the two apes chained to a barred window which he'd bought at the Albertine Museum as a joking anniversary present at a time when it was a joke), the blue vase …” (a crusted blue mug from Sicily which held his pencils: she had given it to him for his thirty-fifth birthday and had dropped it on presentation; he'd glued it together; badly).