Constance (6 page)

My own thoughts were running on different lines.

—I still don’t understand this anger of his, I said.

—What anger?

—At you.

But she hadn’t said he was angry at her! I’d inferred it, then asked the question that had obsessed her for years. I saw her sudden alarm. Then she looked down at the table and shook her head.

—I don’t know. I wouldn’t study medicine but I guess it’s more complicated than that.

So I asked her if she resented the loss of her childhood. In fact I said
theft.
She’d had to take on her mother’s role when she was barely in her teens and look after Iris.

—Daddy never appreciated me, that’s what I resented.

Not even as a small child had she enjoyed anything like the gruff affection Iris apparently got from him. He was crazy
about little Iris. He’d lunge for her and lift her high, holding her in his big hands, and shaking her as she shrieked with pleasure. Constance saw a softness in his face then, and a warmth in his cold pale eyes that she’d never known.

—Is that why you hate him?

I was on what Ed Kaplan would call a fishing expedition here. It was unfair of me but she didn’t seem to mind.

—I do hate him. Whatever I do, I feel I’ve failed. He never tries to hide his contempt.

—Contempt! I cried. Isn’t he a doctor?

Suddenly she was angry.

—Yes, he’s a doctor, so what?

She practically shouted it. Heads turned. She lowered her voice.

—You think doctors don’t know about cruelty? You think they’re
benign?

I sat with an elbow on the table, my chin in my palm. I gazed at her. I enjoyed seeing her all stirred up like this. I liked that the impeccably constructed facade could be so easily disordered by a stray remark from out of left field. She thought I was accusing her of exaggerating the whole thing, of saying, in effect, she only hated him because he held her to a higher standard than her sister. She said it was more complicated than that. Sometimes she thought he wanted to kill her and she didn’t know why. Feelings like that don’t come from nowhere, she said.

She stared at me with fierce intensity. She lifted her chin.

—I’ve read Freud, she said.

—Oh you have, have you? Shall we get out of here?

There was a third date, and this time she wasn’t abandoned,
inflamed, in the lobby of her building. She let me take her home. It was a memorable night for many reasons. I think we pleased each other, I know she pleased me. Very late that night, in the darkness, in my bed, she told me she didn’t know what love was but it occurred to her that this might be it. She’d never expressed her feelings so plainly before. But me, I
did
know what love was, and I knew that this was it, oh yes, this was it all right, so the next morning I made a bold suggestion. I told her I had to go to London for a few days and did she want to come with me? I said that since she’d read so many English novels I could use her help as an interpreter. It wasn’t altogether a joke. She worked in the editorial department of a publishing company called Cooper Wilder, which had its offices in one of the old Madison Square skyscrapers. She needed no persuading.

—Sure, she said.

So we flew Pan Am to the UK. I was doing research for the book and I needed to look at some papers in the Bodleian. I planned to stay in the small hotel in Pimlico I always used and make side trips to Oxford. Constance had been to London once, in her junior year, but on a tight budget. I won’t say I wasn’t anxious about the trip. Despite growing up over there I still found it difficult at times to penetrate the bland curtain of conformity behind which my countrymen like to conceal their true selves.

But I didn’t want to sour Constance on the place. She claimed to love London, or she loved the idea of London, and I feared I’d have to pretend to be the same, and admire everything as though I’d just got in from Pittsburgh.

It didn’t work out that way. For once it wasn’t raining. It was springtime, there was color in the streets, daffodils in Hyde Park,
love in the air. London seemed a different city from the one I’d known. This was due to Constance. From the moment we arrived at our hotel she was sharply alert to the absurdities of English life. The fact that a grown man in a uniform addressed her as “madam”–as in, “Would madam care for some tea?”–this amused her. She said primly that madam would care more for some gin and tonic. When the man bowed, she bowed back. I was sitting nearby in the small comfortable lounge. She turned to me and I saw a schoolgirl who’d been mistaken for a lady and had no intention of correcting the error. From then on she conducted herself not as a lady but as an heiress from Texas seriously considering the purchase of anything her delighted eye fell upon. At those times she might seize me by the arm and gasp.

—But Sidney darling, it’s too lovely, we must have it at once!

She was peering at an oil painting black with smoke and age that hung over the fireplace in the dining room.

—Honey, I don’t think it’s for sale.

—Everything’s for sale. Daddy told me.

The hotel staff humored her. They behaved with ludicrous formality solely to elicit more of what Constance considered her masterful imitation of a rich American girl. It was hard to say who took greater pleasure in the charade. It helped seal the deal. On our last night, in a restaurant in Piccadilly, after the theater–we’d seen a play by Harold Pinter, an unpleasant, immoral thing, Constance loved it–I made a proposal.

—Do you know what’d be the smart thing for you to do? I said.

She was fond of me that day. She cleared aside the silverware, placed her hands flat on the table, and rested her chin there, gazing up at me.

—What’d be the smart thing for me to do?

I reached over and took her hands in mine.

—The smart thing for you would be to marry me.

She pulled back at once and sat with her arms folded tight across her chest, staring at me, her eyes wide with shock. At times I forgot how young she was. She told me she barely knew me.

—That’s not the case. You’ve just spent five days with me. I don’t slap you around, do I? I’m not a lush. I’m a fascinating thinker and I love you. What’s not to love back?

She was utterly taken aback. She was deeply embarrassed. She couldn’t look at me. It was extraordinary. She’d have laughed if she hadn’t known I was serious. But no, she was bewildered. Her father had as good as assured her she’d die a desiccated virgin but apparently not. I didn’t tell her I’d brought her to London with this idea already in formation in my mind but I did tell her again that I loved her. But she couldn’t even discuss it then and only much later that night did she tell me that five days in a smart London hotel wasn’t enough, as a prelude to marriage, and that the idea terrified her, and anyway to make rapid intellectual strides was one thing but this was a direct threat to her autonomy, and anyway she didn’t like me. Then she repeated that she barely knew me.

—You know me intimately.

It was true. We’d achieved an impressive degree of intimacy in those few days. I believe I
awakened
her, or aroused her, at least, from a persisting distaste for any kind of sexual contact with a man. But she had such a tricky psyche, all turned in on itself like a convoluted seashell, like a
nautilus
, and at times I caught her
talking to herself
as though in response to what she
heard in that seashell. When I asked her who she was talking to she’d all at once startle and wouldn’t tell me.

—But what’ll happen when we get back to New York?

—Like what?

—I don’t know! How can I know until I know you better? You’ll get bored with me. I’m not a real intellectual! I’m a cretin. You teach me stuff now, but there’s nothing I can teach you.

—That’s not true.

I sat up and switched on the bedside lamp. I gazed down at my cretin. She was more lovely at that moment than I ever remembered her, this pale and troubled child. She struggled up and wrapped her arms around her knees.

—What do I teach you? she said, with petulance.

—Yourself.

She stared across the dark room, frowning.

—That’s easily mastered, she said.

This was disingenuous. She didn’t believe it.

—I don’t believe that either, I said quietly.

Tears welled, of course. She nearly surrendered right then and there. But she rallied her resources, I saw it happening. She tried to remember who she thought she was.

—All the same, she said at last, I’m not going to marry you.

She held me off for as long as she knew how but in the end she acquiesced. She didn’t know what to do and had no friend she trusted well enough to discuss it with other than Ellen Taussig, a senior editor at Cooper Wilder. Ellen was an austere woman of fifty who’d taken Constance under her wing when she’d first arrived in the city two years before. But Ellen had never married
and was a fierce believer in the idea that Woman must work, Woman must rise, Woman must challenge Man. We both knew what she’d say:
Don’t do it.

But I’d arrived at an understanding of Constance by then. For in the long still reaches of the night she’d allowed me a glimpse of her various terrors, childish fears of abandonment mostly, and I had a good idea where they came from. It was the usual tedious story, a failure of approval from the parent. I’d soon put that right, I thought. I’d give her all the approval she wanted.

So it wasn’t difficult once she started to waver even a fraction, and I reeled her in with comparative ease. I was patient. I was careful. She came to depend on me. Time spent with me was nourishing, and it was the kind of nourishment she required; this was clear from the first night when we’d sat up talking in that empty restaurant. I offered water, in effect, to a child dying of thirst, although she didn’t see it that way at the time. For how do you identify the sickness in yourself, she asked me much later, when we were deep in crisis, and the joking was over, if you’ve never known a state of health?

I wasn’t blind to the responsibility I was assuming. I’d recognized this so-called sickness in her from the start, the impression she gave of an inner fragility, of there being no foundation, or if there was, whether or not it could hold up under pressure. And this was what aroused my love, or my need to protect her, and nourish her, and if this isn’t all of love then it’s a large part of it, for this was how I’d failed both with Barb and with my first wife, a Frenchwoman I’d met in Oxford when I was a young man and about whom I’d said nothing to Constance. So yes, we decided to get married. She wanted it simple and so did I. We’d do it at City Hall. I think the license cost ten bucks.

We invited only immediate family, which meant my mother, who lived on eastern Long Island, having emigrated with her second husband, an American, soon after my father died, and Constance’s father, the doctor, and also her sister, Iris, who both came down from Rhinecliff on the train. Constance said she wished Harriet could have been there, to see her.

I was curious to meet the father. Constance hated him, this was abundantly clear. She felt he’d both neglected and punished her and she was obsessed with him. I asked her once about his reaction to his wife’s death, this heartless monster, this
doctor
. Did he grieve? He was distraught for months, she said. He’d arrive home late in the evening and sit up drinking. The first she knew of it was one night when she was awakened by a noise and thought a raccoon was in the house. So she went downstairs and tiptoed along the corridor to the kitchen.

She saw him sitting in deep shadow, his long legs stretched out crossed at the ankles and his head on his arms on the table. He was sobbing. That was what she’d heard, her father sobbing. It was pathetic, she said. Not until they were older did she tell her sister about it. Iris was upset by the incident.

—What did you do? she said.

—I went back upstairs.

—You didn’t try to comfort him?

—It didn’t occur to me.

—Oh, poor Daddy.

They were at another kitchen table when they had this conversation, in New York, and I was present. Something had got them on to Daddy, it never took much. There were times Iris
seemed the older of the two, particularly when I saw these sporadic flashes of compassion. I remember she was gazing at Constance with what seemed a kind of compound sympathy both for Daddy’s plight, his misery after Harriet’s death, and Constance’s own, her not knowing how to comfort him. In fact she was never able to. She couldn’t reach him, she told me, he was too remote. He rebuffed all attempts she made to get close to him.

She understood this much at least, she said, that he needed to discharge some anger she’d provoked in him. But she hadn’t yet learned what she’d done, or what she
was
, what she represented to him, other than a stray girl who happened to live under his roof: a foundling.

—Constance, honey, Iris had said, you’re not a foundling. Just trust me, will you? You’ve had problems with Daddy, god knows we all understand that. So have I. But you’re not a foundling.

I was glad she said it: she spared me having to. For some time I’d been aware of a sort of passivity in Constance, a persisting silent claim for sympathy in the face of what she saw as her father’s cruelty. It troubled me. I detected no resistance, no defiance, none of the refractory qualities I associate with a healthy spirit. I asked myself if I was unreasonable to think this. I decided I wasn’t. The Romantics still have this to teach us, that it’s imperative to act and not be acted upon. Constance remained a kind of work in progress. She was unformed and indistinct as yet, and I saw it most clearly when her sister was around. She was still shackled to the conviction that her father had wrecked her life.

Soon after she agreed to marry me I gave Constance a small river view by the nineteenth-century landscape painter Jerome Brook Franklin. It was my first serious gift to her. I wanted her to hang it in her bedroom in New York so she’d see it in the morning when she awoke and be reminded of the view from her bedroom in Ravenswood. It was supposed to arouse happy memories of her childhood. I still believed she must have
some
happy memories.