Constance (5 page)

What she saw in me was less flattering. I am a tall man, perhaps
a little on the heavy side, but I dress well. I should also tell you that I am a sentimental man. I feel too much, I always have. It is no accident that I am an authority on Romantic poetry. It was a warm evening. I was in my light seersucker and apparently there were beads of sweat on my forehead. The effect, she said later, was that of an obscure consular official going quietly mad in a far-flung outpost of empire. But there was, too, without question, she said, some force of personality there. She also said I was panting in the heat like a dog.

I suggested we go somewhere quiet where we could talk. She asked me what I wanted to talk about and I said I wanted to talk about her. Why? Why not? We both knew she was about to leave the party with me. When we were out on the street I proposed a quiet French restaurant in the Village. Then we were in the back of a checker cab and I kissed her and she let me, she wanted me to, she liked me, I was so much older than her, at least forty, she thought, and she felt that with me she’d be safe. I only wish I’d kept her safer. I should have kept her under lock and key.

When I kissed her I held her cheek and chin in my fingers. Her skin was like a child’s and her lips were soft and cool although they wouldn’t part for me. I felt her body stiffen in involuntary protest at first but I paid no attention to that and after a moment she relaxed, and draped a long thin arm around my neck, and briefly kissed me back, but again without involvement of the tongue. For that I’d have to wait. Then she disengaged herself and stared out the window of the cab.

At dinner we talked, as I said we would, about her. I figured her to be about twenty-three. But for some reason she sustained the chilly hauteur I’d seen at the party and I soon began to feel
she had no right to it, not having earned it. I persevered, however, still bewitched, or fired up at least with strong emotions loosely rooted in lust. Then as we lingered over our coffee and cigarettes she at last started to open up. I don’t know why. Perhaps she took pity on me. Or perhaps she thought I was harmless. I’d asked her about her childhood, and she told me she’d grown up with her sister, Iris, in a falling-down house in the Hudson Valley complete with a framed verandah and a tower. It had been in her family for generations, she said, but when I asked her how many generations she was vague. Oh, two at least, she said. Daddy grew up there. It stood high on a fissured bluff, and on the south side of the property a steep wooded slope descended to a wetland meadow by the railroad tracks and the river. This was the view she’d had from her bedroom window, she said, the sweep of the mighty Hudson far below her, with the Catskills in the distance. It was called Ravenswood.

It was all too good to be true. The old house with its tower on a bluff above the river, and this beautiful girl, clearly in flight from who knows what horrors she’d suffered there, it was a Romantic cliché, the whole thing. But for that I liked it all the more. In fact I hadn’t spent much time in the Hudson Valley. There was nothing up there apart from a few small liberal arts colleges, none of them of any interest to me. But this I kept to myself. It hadn’t escaped me that this girl got dreamy when she talked about Nature.

She then produced a photograph and pushed it across the table. It was herself aged twelve sitting with her sister on the porch of that old house, which was as she’d described it and every bit as shabby as I’d imagined. It had a long porch, a tower, several steep gables, and what looked like a screened verandah,
a kind of American villa with Gothic additions, and pretty run-down. And there she was in the foreground, clutching her school books and frowning at the camera, visibly nervous, her hair pinned up and her slim legs pressed tight together at the knees but splayed at the ankles. She wore white socks and brown sandals with a buckled strap. What a geek, she said as I studied the photo. I said I was sure she grew out of the awkward stage, all children do, but she said she didn’t, not for a long time. Had she yet, I thought.

But Iris, the younger sister, looked like trouble even then: a tooth missing, hair all adrift, scabby knees, a true hoyden in the making, and those eyes!—even in that creased black-and-white photo there was no escaping those big dark liquid pools of shining life. Behind the two girls stood an eccentric-looking woman in faded corduroy trousers and a man’s shirt, and an old straw hat, and a trug, with a cigarette between her teeth, and I thought at once: English. I knew the type. And behind her, in the shadow of the doorway, a tall indistinct figure who reminded me of the pitchfork man in Grant Wood’s
American Gothic.
As I slid the photograph back across the table she told me, as though in answer to a question I hadn’t asked, that she wasn’t an extrovert like Iris but she didn’t believe she was
frail
, psychologically. She was a solitary, yes, and Harriet—this was the mother—hadn’t tried to make her otherwise—she hadn’t tried to make her anything—but she
had
encouraged her to love her little sister and always look out for her. In this way she’d helped create a bond between the sisters that was supposed to never come undone.

Oh, she’d begun to talk now. The floodgates were opening, and I advanced with care.

—Your mother looks like an interesting woman, I said.

—Harriet’s dead.

She lifted her head and stared at me as though to have me look upon her suffering and tremble. Her mother always wanted to be called by her first name, she told me, not
Mommy
or
Mom.

—How old were you?

—Twelve. Iris takes after her. I don’t know who I take after. Not Daddy, that’s for sure.

She said this with a fierce light in her eyes and an angry little laugh:
Not Daddy, that’s for sure.
Oh ho, Daddy’s a problem. Then she said it was her mother’s presence in the house that gave the place a sense of home. A child takes this for granted, she said, that the mother’s the living heart of the home. It was all lost when Harriet died. This was said dispassionately, carelessly, but the child’s grief was not hard to detect. What’s happened to this girl, I thought. Why has nobody looked after her?

As for the father, Morgan Schuyler, the doctor, she had no difficulty describing him: a terrible, lank, tousled, frowning man in a baggy gray suit with wide suspenders and big dusty brogues on his feet, and long clever fingers stained yellow at the tips by nicotine—

She shivered, describing this monster. A house like that, there had to be a wicked father figure. The restaurant was almost empty but I wasn’t calling for the check just yet. The waiters stood by the end of the counter in long white aprons, talking quietly. The bartender was polishing glasses. It was pleasant to be there at that hour. It was
intime.
I sometimes thought New York did Europe better than Europe did Europe.

—Go on, I said.

—In he’d come, she said, her eyes on the table and her voice low and dramatic—and Harriet would at once be on the alert. I wasn’t disturbed by it, not at the time. I’d watch him sit down and rub his face, then he might raise his head and gaze at her with lifted eyebrows, as though to say: Tell me something that doesn’t involve an ulcer, or a tumor, or an
inflamed bowel.
Tell me something about
life!

A pause here. She was running a fingernail down the seam of the tablecloth, smiling to herself. I think she was amused by the inflamed bowel.

—Go on. He wanted to be told something about life.

—Oh, but some days he’d stand at the window and Harriet would catch my eye and put a finger to her lips, and he’d just stare out at the river and his back was all we’d have of him until it abated, I guess it was tension from some decision he’d made about one of his patients and he didn’t know if he’d done the right thing. I’d heard him talk like that, I heard it through the door of the sitting room, or from outside on the verandah, when I’d creep under the window so they couldn’t see me. Then I’d hear those soft murmuring noises I knew from when I woke up in the night and Harriet came into my bedroom—

Another pause. She could be histrionic, this girl, and she was barely conscious of the impression she made. She was engaged exclusively with her own experience. She frowned, as though she was trying to undo some sort of tricky mental knot. A lick or two of that fine blonde hair had worked free and she brushed it back impatiently. I offered her a cigarette and she took it. Then she stared straight at me and spoke as though she were delivering a shattering revelation.

—Or she didn’t! There was no knowing! She might ignore me, and sometimes I thought she wasn’t my mother at all, and I was just some girl Daddy found in a ditch and brought home for his wife to look after! You think that’s silly. You think I’m exaggerating. You think I’m a fool.

—I don’t think you’re a fool.

Quieter now, smoking her cigarette, she turned slightly in her chair to cross her legs and give me her three-quarter profile. She said she’d often heard voices raised in anger in the sitting room, and then her mother weeping, after which her father stormed out and the door slammed. When that happened she knew to keep out of their way.

—Where was your sister in all this?

She became guarded now. She briefly closed her eyes.

—Iris is younger than me. She’s my kid sister. She wants to be me. She’d like me to die and get out of her way. She’s always been much better with Daddy. She knows how to talk to him about his work. I always thought this was the problem between us, I mean me and Daddy, my indifference to medicine. He’s always wanted one of us to be a doctor and I’ve made it clear
it’s not going to be me!

She glanced at me to see if I was impressed with her independence of spirit. I was more impressed, or astonished rather, by her frank revelation of primal sibling rivalry:
She’d like me to die.
Then I saw that wild light in her eyes again, and a smile appeared. She leaned forward and whispered:
I’d rather walk the streets!

Where did
that
come from! It was exciting. For a second I glimpsed her standing in a doorway, in an alley, on a wet night—

—So what happened?

She frowned. She was serious again.

—But Harriet was very lonely, this was before she got sick. She’d come into my bedroom in tears. She’d tell me Daddy was so mean. Then she’d have me stand behind her at the dressing table and brush her hair. She’d watch me in the mirror.

Here she pretended to be her mother and spoke in a languid, singsong voice.

—That’s lovely, darling, please don’t stop. A little harder. I shouldn’t come to you like this but there’s nobody else I can talk to. It’s all right. He’s tired. He doesn’t mean it.

Constance looked at me as if to say: You see what he did to her? Outside in the street some madman was cursing Jesus Christ. She then remarked in an offhand manner that of course Harriet was English. So I was right. I understood then that the mother had transmitted something of her Englishness to Constance, and it partly accounted for the attraction she’d aroused in me. Not that I made a fetish of it, being English, I mean, but I did own an English car, a Jaguar. A black Mark VIII four-door sedan with a straight-six engine and twin carburetors. They’re quite rare. Barb hated it. She said it was like riding in a hearse.

But Harriet would apparently make Constance stand very straight and inspect her. She’d trace the line of her eyebrow with her finger. Sometimes she told her to undress, then examined her as though she were a specimen of some kind. She never told her why. All this I learned that first night, in these brief bursts of revelation. Meanwhile it took some effort on her part to learn anything about me. But when she found out what I did for a living she was surprised.

—All the smart women at that party and you came after me?

I lifted my hands, palms outspread. I told her I couldn’t figure out what she was. That made her laugh.

—You and me both, she said.

We found a cab and I let her out in front of a small apartment building on East Fifty-sixth Street near the intersection with First Avenue. I had the cab wait until she was in the door. Then I went on uptown to this big gloomy place of mine on the West Side. Same thing the next time we met, meaning that after more talk largely concerning her family we parted with some kisses in the back of a cab before I left her, inflamed and abandoned in the lobby of her building, or so she told me later. That wasn’t how I remember it–I’d have taken her home with me that first night, if she’d let me– but here was the point, she said she was warming to me and it was a “not unpleasant sensation.” I was growing accustomed to her ironic, not to say caustic, not to say occasionally foulmouthed turns of phrase and “a not unpleasant sensation” was I suppose the best I could hope for then. But it did disturb me, the aloofness she communicated at times, the bland detachment, although it never put me off her: the reverse. I wanted to know where it came from. What damage had caused it? How could I make her warm again? She was far more bitter than she had any right to be at her age.

A few days later I took her to the seafood place in Grand Central. It was crowded. At a table littered with empty chowder bowls and clamshells and beer bottles, amid a clamor of voices, and beneath a timbrel-vaulted ceiling of Guastavino tiles, I asked Constance to tell me more about her father. I consider it
a mark of an advanced urban civilization when one’s private life can be conducted in public.

—Daddy sounds like a depressive, I said. How did your mother deal with that?

She didn’t mind my intrusive curiosity now. She willingly offered her experience. She said I made her feel interesting.

—She ignored him. He was always working anyway.

She then told me something she said she hadn’t told anybody, not even Iris. She told me she thought Harriet was really a very lonely woman, and that Daddy didn’t understand this until she was dying, by which time of course it was too late. Then he was overcome with guilt. He’d been eaten up with guilt ever since. That was why he was such a sour man.