The Marriage Plot (50 page)

The rickshaw wallah bent down to pick up the long wooden handles of the rickshaw. As quickly as a runner at the starting gun, he darted into traffic.

For a long time they moved sideways through the jam. The rickshaw wallah snaked his way between the vehicles. Whenever he found a seam alongside a bus or a truck he plunged forward until he was forced to cut back again against the grain. The rickshaw stopped and started, swerved, sped up, and abruptly halted, like a bumper-car ride.

The rickshaw seat was throne-like, upholstered in bright red vinyl and decorated with a portrait of Ganesh. The awning was down, so that Mitchell could see the big wooden wheels on either side. Every now and then they came abreast of another rickshaw, and Mitchell looked across at his fellow exploiters. A Brahmin woman, her sari exposing the roll of fat on her stomach. Three schoolgirls doing their homework.

The honking and shouting seemed to be happening in Mitchell’s mind. He clutched his duffel bag, putting his trust in the rickshaw wallah to get him where he was going. The driver’s dark-skinned back gleamed with perspiration, the muscles and sinews working beneath it as taut as piano strings. After fifteen minutes of zigzagging, they left the main thoroughfare and picked up speed, passing through a neighborhood largely without lights.

The red vinyl seat squeaked like a diner booth. Elephant-headed Ganesh had the sooty eyelashes of a Bollywood idol. Suddenly the sky brightened and Mitchell gazed up to see the steel supports of a bridge. It rose into the air like a Ferris wheel, ringed with colored bulbs. Down below was the Hooghly River, pitch black, reflecting the red neon sign of the train station on the far bank. Mitchell leaned out of his seat to look down at the water. If he fell out of the rickshaw now, he would plunge straight down hundreds of feet. No one would ever know.

But he didn’t fall. Mitchell remained upright in the rickshaw, carried along like a sahib. He planned to give the rickshaw wallah an enormous tip when they reached the station. A week’s salary at least. Meanwhile, he enjoyed the ride. He felt ecstatic. He was being carried away, a vessel in a vessel. He understood the Jesus Prayer now. Understood
mercy
. Understood
sinner
, for sure. As he passed over the bridge Mitchell’s lips weren’t moving. He wasn’t thinking a thing. It was as if, just as Franny had promised, the prayer had taken over and was saying itself in his heart.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

And Sometimes They Were Very Sad

W
hen Alton Hanna had become president of Baxter College in the mid-sixties, leaving his position as dean of faculty at Connecticut College to move to New Jersey, his daughters hadn’t come along willingly. On their maiden voyage to the Garden State, the girls had begun holding their noses and shrieking as soon as they saw the “Welcome to New Jersey” sign, long before the car passed any actual oil refineries. Once they were installed in Prettybrook, their homesickness increased. Alwyn complained about missing her old schoolmates. Madeleine found the new house creepy and underheated. She was scared to sleep in her big bedroom. Alton had moved his daughters to Prettybrook thinking they would enjoy the spacious house and the verdant backyard. The news that they preferred the family’s cramped town house in New London, a place that was basically all stairs, hadn’t been what he wanted to hear.

But there had been little nice to hear in that turbulent decade. Alton had come to Baxter at a time when the school’s endowment was shrinking and its student body in florid revolt. His first year in the job, student protesters had staged a sit-in of the administration building. Armed with a comprehensive list of demands—for the elimination of academic requirements, the establishment of a department of Afro-American Studies, the banning of ROTC recruiters on campus, and the divestment of endowment funds from corporations involved with military or oil production—they had camped out on the Oriental runners of Alton’s outer office. While Alton met with the student leader, Ira Carmichael, a clearly brilliant kid dressed in army fatigues with his fly ostentatiously open, fifty hirsute undergrads chanted slogans outside the door. Partly to send a signal that this kind of thing wouldn’t be tolerated on his watch, and partly because he was a Republican who supported the war in Vietnam, Alton finally had the borough police remove the students forcibly from the building. This had the predictable effect of further inflaming tensions. Soon an effigy of “Hiroshima Hanna” was burning on the college green, his bald head hideously enlarged into the shape of a mushroom cloud. Beneath Alton’s office window a swarm of protesters formed each day, baying for his blood. At six o’clock, when the students dispersed (their commitment to the cause didn’t extend to skipping dinner), Alton made his nightly escape. Crossing the green, where the charred remnants of his effigy still dangled from an elm, he hurried to his car in the administration parking lot and drove home to Prettybrook to find his daughters still loudly protesting the move to New Jersey.

With Alwyn and Madeleine, Alton was willing to negotiate. He bought Alwyn off with riding lessons at the Prettybrook Country Club. Soon she was sporting jodhpurs and a riding jacket, had formed a near-sexual attachment to a chestnut mare named Riviera Red, and never mentioned New London again. Madeleine was swayed by interior decorating. One weekend, Phyllida took Madeleine into New York. Arriving home on Sunday night, she told Madeleine there was a surprise for her in her room. Madeleine ran up the stairs to find the walls of her bedroom covered by reproductions from her favorite book in the world at the time, Ludwig Bemelmans’s
Madeline
. While she’d been in Manhattan, a wallpaper installer had steamed off the old design to replace it with this new one, which Phyllida had had custom-printed at a wallpaper manufacturer in Trenton. Stepping into her bedroom was like entering the pages of
Madeline
itself. On one wall was the austere dining room of Madeline’s convent school, on another, the girls’ echoing dormitory. All around the room multiple Madelines were doing brave things, one making a face (“and to the lion in the zoo Madeline just said ‘poo poo’”), another balancing like a daredevil on a bridge over the Seine, still another lifting her nightgown to show off her appendicitis scar. The deep, squiggly greens of Parisian parks, the repeated motif of Nurse Clavel “hurrying faster and faster,” steadying her wimple with one hand, her shadow elongating with her premonition that “something is not right,” and, over by the light socket, the one-legged soldier, on crutches, beneath the caption that said, “And sometimes they were very sad”—the sense conveyed, by the illustrations, of Paris, a city as orderly as the girls’ “two straight lines,” as colorful as Bemelmans’s pastel palette, a world of civic institutions and statues of military heroes, of cosmopolitan acquaintances like the Spanish ambassador’s son (a dashing figure, to Maddy, at six), the storybook Paris that wasn’t without hints of adult error or misfortune, that didn’t candy-coat reality but faced nobly up to it, the singular victory for humanity a great city represented, and which, though vast, didn’t scare Madeline, who was so small—somehow all of this had communicated itself to Madeleine as a little girl. And then there was her name, so similar, and the familiar signs of class, and the sense she had of herself, then and now, as being the one in a troop of girls a writer might write a book about.

Nobody had wallpaper like hers. Which was why, as she grew up on Wilson Lane, Madeleine had never torn it down.

It was sun-faded now, and peeling along the seams. One panel, showing a Bouvier in the Luxembourg Gardens, was stained yellow from a roof leak. If moving back in with her parents didn’t feel regressive enough already, waking up in her old bedroom, surrounded by the storybook wallpaper, completed the process. Therefore Madeleine did the most adult thing she could do now, under the circumstances: she reached across the bed with her left hand—the one bearing the gold wedding band—and patted the bed to see if her husband was lying next to her.

Lately, Leonard had been coming up to bed around one or two in the morning. He found it difficult to sleep in the double bed, however—he was having insomnia again—and often moved to one of the guest rooms, which was probably where he was now. The space beside her was empty.

Madeleine and Leonard were living with Madeleine’s parents because they had nowhere else to go. Leonard’s fellowship at Pilgrim Lake had ended in April, a week before the wedding. They’d lined up a sublet in Provincetown for the summer, but after Leonard had been hospitalized, in Monte Carlo, in early May, they’d had to give the place up. Returning to the States, two weeks later, Madeleine and Leonard had moved down to Prettybrook, which, in addition to being a peaceful place for Leonard to recuperate, was within reach of top psychiatric care in Philadelphia and New York. It was also a good base from which to start looking for a Manhattan apartment. In mid-April, while Madeleine had been honeymooning in Europe, letters from graduate admissions programs had made their way, via the Pilgrim Lake post office, to Wilson Lane. Harvard and Chicago rejected her, but Columbia and Yale sent letters of acceptance. Having been turned down by Yale the year before, Madeleine took pleasure in returning the favor. She didn’t want to live in New Haven; she wanted to live in New York. The sooner she and Leonard found a place there, the sooner they could begin putting their life—and their eight-week-old marriage—back together.

With that end in mind, Madeleine got out of bed to call Kelly Traub. She used the phone in Alton’s upstairs office, a small beige room, at once cluttered and highly organized, that looked down on the back garden. The room smelled like her father, even more so with the June humidity, and she didn’t like to stay in there long; it was almost like pressing her nose into one of Alton’s old bathrobes. As she dialed Kelly’s office, Madeleine looked down at the gardener, who was spraying a bush with a bottle of something the color of iced tea.

The secretary at Kelly’s office said that “Ms. Traub” was on the other line and asked if Madeleine wanted to be put on hold. Madeleine said she’d wait.

In the year since graduation, while Madeleine had been on the Cape, Kelly had been pursuing an acting career with limited success. She’d had a small part in an original one-act, staged over a single weekend in a church basement in Hell’s Kitchen, and had also appeared in an outdoor performance piece by a Norwegian artist that involved semi-nudity and paid nothing. In order to support herself, Kelly had gone to work at her father’s real estate company on the Upper West Side. The job was flexible, paid reasonably well, and allowed her plenty of time to get to auditions. It also made her the perfect person to call if you needed an apartment near Columbia.

After another minute, Kelly’s voice came on the line.

“It’s me,” Madeleine said.

“Maddy, hi! I’m glad you called.”

“I call every day.”

“Yeah, but today I’ve got the perfect place for you. Are you ready? ‘Riverside Drive. Prewar one-bedroom. Hudson River view. Office possible second bedroom. Available August first.’ You have to come see it today or it’ll be gone.”

“Today?” Madeleine said doubtfully.

“It’s not my listing. I made the agent promise not to show it until tomorrow.”

Madeleine wasn’t sure she could do it. She’d gone apartment-hunting in the city three times in the past week already. Since it wasn’t a good idea to leave Leonard alone, she’d had to ask Phyllida to stay with him each time. Phyllida claimed she didn’t mind this, but Madeleine knew that it made her mother nervous.

On the other hand, the apartment sounded ideal. “What’s the cross street?” she asked.

“Seventy-seventh,” Kelly said. “You’re five blocks from Central Park. Five stops to Columbia. Easy to get to Penn Station, too, which you said you wanted.”

“That’s perfect.”

“Plus, if you come up today, I’ll take you to a party.”

“A party?” Madeleine said. “I remember parties.”

“It’s at Dan Schneider’s. Right by my office. There’ll be a ton of Brown people, so you can reconnect.”

“First let’s see if I can even come up.”

The potential obstacle was no mystery to either of them. After a moment Kelly asked in a quieter voice, “How’s Leonard?”

This was difficult to answer. Madeleine sat in Alton’s desk chair, casting her eyes to the white pines at the end of the yard. According to Leonard’s latest doctor—not the French psychiatrist, Dr. Lamartine, who’d taken care of him in Monaco, but the new specialist at Penn, Dr. Wilkins—Leonard didn’t have a “pronounced risk of suicidality.” This didn’t mean that he wasn’t suicidal, only that his risk was relatively low. Low enough, anyway, not to warrant his being hospitalized (though this was subject to change). The previous week, on a rainy Wednesday afternoon, Alton and Madeleine had driven down to Philadelphia to meet with Wilkins alone, in his office at the Penn Medical Center. Madeleine had come away from the experience feeling that Wilkins was like any other knowledgeable, well-intentioned expert, an economist, for example, who made predictions based on available data, but whose conclusions were by no means definitive. She’d asked every question she could think of about possible warning signs and preventative measures. She’d listened to Wilkins’s judicious but unsatisfactory answers. And then she’d driven back to Prettybrook and resumed living and sleeping with her new husband, wondering every time he left the room if he was going to do violence to himself.