Other Men's Daughters (8 page)

Sunday was difficult for Merriwether. Tomorrow he'd be back in his own rectangle: home-class-lab-club. The boxed life. Though not an empty box. A box which held his children, his house, his books, his work, and, like prizes in Crackerjacks, dinner parties, jokes, music, movies. A good, steady, lucky life.

Cynthia was preparing for school, thinking of papers she had to write, of “waitressing”—she earned money in the dorm so she could dress for him and taxi to the airport.

“Can't you stay an extra day?” Not that he could.

“I've got to get this Vergil paper in. I can't write a line when I'm with you.” She suggested a solution: he should come back and live in her room. “When I'm finished with classes, we can make love.”

Splendid sight: lining up with the twenty-year-olds in the john. “Thank you.”

“I've got to have some independence.”

From him? Ok. A relief. The mania was over. In this city independence meant more than “give me room.” Cynthia's meant freedom to have a lover and be unhampered by him. His meant freedom to get out. Be independent. You're free. But he only said, “I understand.”

The next time they saw each other was a week before Thanksgiving. Merriwether spoke at Columbia, then met Cynthia at the Plaza (which offered educator-discounts in its smaller rooms).

It was not the sort of hotel Merriwether usually stayed in. A burlesque of high style, it made capital of its own creakiness. Ozark motels had more efficient comforts. The Plaza had marble corridors spooked with funereal light globes, massy, groaning radiators and toilets, brocade on stiff chairs, fresh roses in finger vases, gold-wrapped chocolate circlets on the dresser, and, out the Fifth Avenue windows, the waterless fountain with Diana bare-rumped to November. Breakfast came to the bed at seven dollars; corky wine and dessicated turkey sandwiches closed out the day at thirteen-fifty. Cramped, stale, leaking phony
luxe
. But in Cynthia and Merriwether's gonadal flush, neither absurdity, discomfort, nor wild prices subtracted from net pleasure. Anything short of humiliation was grist for the sexual mill. In their love, like Stendhal's Italy, anything went because
somewhere it gave pleasure
.

Merriwether and Cynthia roamed Central Park, checked out the zoo, the Frick, the Metropolitan, walked the east-west streets, read the bronze markers (where Grant wrote the
Memoirs
and died, where Franklin Roosevelt lived house-by-house with his mother). Three days filling in the sketch of
coupleness
which isolation, flattery, need, and boredom had drawn in Cambridge. Familiarity was as pleasing as novelty: they knew the look of each other's toothbrushes, each other's sleeping habits (Merriwether snored, Cynthia slept on the bed's diagonal so that he, yielding to the sleeper's
force majeure
, curled into one of the triangles).

Cynthia looked terrific. She wore fun furs bought in thrift shops, soft scarves, great-brimmed hats, thigh-length boots of kid and leather. And, as if some effluent of the gentled beasts which clothed her seeped into her system, she gamboled on the avenues with her foot-out walk. In an area where women gave each other the most critical eyes in America, Cynthia's beauty, inventiveness and flare went into a thousand envious inventories. Walking with the trim, middle-aged juvescent who held her arm, pulled out her chairs, brought her trays in bed, played her games, and even adopted her comic voices and obscenities, she felt absolutely terrific.

Their last evening, they were coming back from seeing
The Blue Angel
at the Thalia when a compact man in a tweed cap and checked suit walked toward them and said, “Bobbie.”

Merriwether, discovered, flushed. “Timmy. What a surprise. Cynthia, this is my cousin. Timmy Hellman.”

Timmy Hellman was actually Sarah's cousin; his father had married Sarah's aunt. Timmy had been Merriwether's roommate in Eliot House, had introduced him to Sarah. He'd studied geology at Harvard, then gone into scientific journalism, worked for UPI, then the New York
Herald-Tribune
. The year it folded, he went to Basic Books as a science editor. Knowledgeable, sympathetic, careful, he was one of the finest scientific editors in the world. He'd persuaded Merriwether to do a semi-popular book on thirst and had helped him make it a good one. For ten years, Merriwether had received small royalty checks for it.

Merriwether had always found it hard to fuse Timmy's editorial meticulousness with his terrific vivacity. Timmy was a musician, an athlete, a gourmet cook; he was crazy for painting—he couldn't live a week without a few hours in a gallery—he was an adventurer who dove for Spanish gold; he'd spent a month with a tribe of Paraguayan headhunters. Yet he once told Merriwether that he had more energy than personality. “I'm not much of anyone. It's what makes it easy for me to take what other people call ‘risks.' I feel danger, even fear, but I don't feel protective about whatever it is I am or have.”

Timmy lived with a series of terrific girls who showed up on lists in
Harper's Bazaar
and
Town and Country
(“New York's Fifty Most Beautiful Women”), yet he had none of the strut or wariness of the sexual showman. Charm and decency animated him. He had a wonderful smile, one without presumption, suspicion or curiosity. His face was squarish, rosy without being boyish. The features were large, he would have been a natural for caricature except that caricature fixes, and the distinction of his face was expressive fluency. The eyes had a blue density that suggested mental power, as the rest of his features, the great nose and ears, suggested sensuous power.

“Can you have dinner with me?”

He always took people to dinner. This was not an extension of his editorial habit; if anything, he was an editor because over the old board of intake/output, food-and-ideas, he functioned so well. Merriwether was delighted to serve him up to Cynthia. Hellman would meet them in an hour. He was on his way to the Palm Court Lounge to have tea with “an old woman of genius,” an accountant for Hallmark Greeting Cards in Kansas City who'd written a brilliant work on the perception of curves. (Timmy's world was mined with such hidden gold.)

“He's the happiest man I know,” said Merriwether.

“It radiates from him.”

They were warm from the minute's encounter. “He always has this effect. It's so clear life entrances him. I don't know why I didn't call him. Maybe I was afraid you wouldn't like me once you'd seen him.”

“The only thing he can do for me is to take you to his tailor.”

“Oh, what's wrong?” Merriwether had bought a suit especially for the New York trip. Daltonic, he didn't trust his color sense. For years, Sarah picked out his suits. It was only in the last year that he realized that the dull blues and raw liver browns were the register of unconscious animosity. He'd let the salesman at Stonestreet's guide him into this modest tan. Surely it was an improvement.

“You're perfect. Only a little staid.”

“I'm too gray to be a peacock.”

“You're crazy as a loon. You should see how Daddy's bloomed since men got color. And he's at least as stiff as you.”

“Nobody is. I just want to look like this room.” They sat in the Oak Bar, which, at dusk, was a place of dim sedation. “Quiet background for you. You're the tropical fish. Color's great for you. I'm just a rocky coast. Old New England anfractuosity.”

“Whatever that means. Where do I look fishy?”

“From
ambi
and
frangere
, “broken” and “around.” Tortuous. In the feet.”

“And the New England coast is beautiful.”

“But it doesn't doll up like the Pacific. That's a young coast, quaky, mountainy, a showboat coast.”

“You are one anfractuous loon.”

Timmy took them to Lutece. “The best for the best.” They sat under the greenhouse glass; it was like being in a garden. A marvelous meal, a marvelous evening. Cynthia had never heard such a talker. In Timmy's talk, the somberest detail glittered. Yet he never tyrannized, never interrupted, never corrected. His talk fed on itself, he enjoyed it, was surprised at what came out of himself. The talk was driven by the desire to connect things: Indochina linked with the lost fortune of Franklin Roosevelt's grandfather, the nineteenth century's search for energy, the chemical nature of energy substance, the colonial nature of men, animals, plants, with a wind-up about a Vermont farmer who ran his cars and farm machines on gas from dung and created—except for “a small perfume problem”—the perfect eco-systematic day, rising, teeth-brushing, emptying intestines into the fuel tank.

When Cynthia went off to the bathroom, Hellman changed gear. “She's a fine girl, Bobbie. May I ask if she's your vacation? Or are you and Sarah finished?”

Merriwether said he hoped not, although for years he and Sarah had little but an address in common. “I hope this won't compromise your feelings toward me, Timmy.”

“I am loyal to those I like. I like you both, I'll care for you both. I'm not a family necrophiliac.”

“Sarah's just had too much Merriwether. She feels like the caretaker of a museum nobody visits. And she doesn't like the chief exhibit. I suppose I'm responding.”

“No defense necessary, Bobbie. In New York, monogamists have to defend themselves. You were thirsty, and you went to the well.”

“I was thirsty and someone delivered a case of champagne to the door. I hardly knew I was thirsty till it came.”

“She's lovely, modest, doesn't advertise her youth, doesn't conceal it. A winner. And you look years younger, happier.” Timmy put his hand on Merriwether's arm; a felicitation.

“Except for the fear of hurting the children and Sarah—I still care for the part of her that doesn't detest me—I feel all right.”

Timmy looked to see if Cynthia was coming. “Will you let me say something, though? About young girls?”

“A warning?”

“In a way. I know the danger of classifying human beings, but I've known a lot of these girls. That's been my companionship. Sex and tenderness. Nothing more, not even friendship. So I have to meet many women. The last few years I've felt a terrific drive in them. They want, they want, and it's we not-quite-graybeards who give them the most the quickest. We teach them, we spend on them, we show them off, we tell them what everything means. We're their Graduate School. Which means they're closer to graduation through us. And that means there can be lots of tears when Graduation Day rolls around.”

The next day, back in Cambridge, Merriwether got a call from Timmy. “I may have let myself go on too long and far, Bobbie. I'm so used to spinning off I sometimes make a case just for the drama of the talk.”

“I appreciate it, Timmy. The call too. I haven't had anyone to talk to.”

“I really meant to talk with you about doing another book. I never got around to it.”

Merriwether said he was having a hard enough time keeping up his research. Nonsense, said Timmy, he should do a book in the summer instead of his medical work. “Do a theoretical book, one that would force you to think through a number of things. It would help your research.”

Merriwether knew the invitation was Timmy's attempt to divert him from his “diversion.” He wasn't ungrateful for it. “I like to be asked, Timmy. Especially by such a decent judge as you. But I just don't know.”

Timmy talked about the books of Dubos, Monod, Rostand. “They do very well; and they're valuable. Why not think about it?”

Why not?

Now and then, Merriwether had felt the impulse to vault the laboratory world, to do something that would get written up in the medical, even the news sections of magazines. It was, perhaps, a vulgar impulse, but there it was. The children would enjoy seeing him better-known. They grew up with children whose parents' pictures were in the
Times
. It was a special security for children; maybe he owed them something like that.

He was not the first Merriwether to
thirst for fame
. The day after his grandfather retired from the family insurance firm he'd gone out and bought a typewriter, ten pounds of onionskin, a thesaurus and a rhyming dictionary. He'd begun putting in the same number of hours at poetry that he'd put into the firm. He wrote about anything, the “grand men of wisdom” who had “instructed my youth” (Lowell and William James had been his teachers), the opening of the Mass Transit Station in Harvard Square—“Oh Swift Tempter of Young Harvard's Blood”—about Cuba, about McKinley's funeral. In his last years he'd worked on an epic poem about marine insurance,
The Riskiad
.

Sing, American Muse, of those who backed the sea,

And guaranteed our vessels through its watery threat.

Sing of those Heros of the Everyday

Whose schooners were their desks, whose 'poons their pens.

Merriwether had often been summoned to “the Muse's Seat,” his father's unfilial characterization of his grandfather's study. His ivory-headed, thin, unsmiling grandfather counted out the lines he had written that week. In his second year, he'd exceeded the combined production of Vergil and Homer. “I'll be up to Dante by Christmas.” His grandfather's will enjoined his heirs to see if “there might not be some matter of public interest in his verse” and “to take steps toward modest publication of what was so deemed.” Merriwether's father had taken
The Riskiad
to a friend at the Harvard University Press who said that scholars interested in the development of marine insurance might find it of some interest and that Mr. Merriwether should see about depositing a copy of the work with the Massachusetts Historical Society.

When Mr. Merriwether himself retired, he also “took to the pen.”
The Memoirs of a Harvard Man
began with an epigraph from Lowell's poem on the Harvard dead,