Constance (7 page)

We were in the sitting room a few nights later, she and I, and the apartment was almost dark. I was lying on the chesterfield, Constance was stretched out on the carpet. She liked to lie on the floor with a cushion under her head. She’d been talking about the painting. Then she was telling me about a flat un-moving expanse of black water that opened off a creek a mile downstream from Ravenswood called Hard Luck Charlie’s. This gloomy pond was surrounded by marshland for half a mile, and according to Constance it was haunted by the ghost of an old man who’d had a cabin in the woods nearby. On a hot summer afternoon you could drift for hours in a skiff with only the splash of a fish or the cry of a bird to break the stillness of the
place, or a heron wading through the rushes. Daddy had apparently forbidden the girls to take the skiff out on their own but often they disobeyed him. This was around the time Harriet first got sick, she said.

I could all too easily picture it, this pleasant stagnant backwater, the two dreamy girls drifting in a skiff, a drowsy summer afternoon, insects buzzing and the water rank with rotting plant matter. But one day, Constance said, they discovered they’d been observed, and not just observed, reported. It was very bad. Daddy confronted them at breakfast the next morning and asked them if they’d forgotten the rule. Iris had asked him what rule.

—You know what rule, he’d said.

Constance was silent for a few moments. Her mood was somber now. Here it comes, I thought. When they next went down to the boathouse, she said, the skiff wasn’t there. Then Iris was kneeling at the end of the dock, gripping the planks and peering down into the water. Constance joined her and she saw what Daddy had done. The skiff was on the bottom of the river. Through the shifting sunlight on the moving water they saw it there, lying on its side in the weeds, rocking slightly in the current. He hadn’t told them, he’d let them discover it for themselves. It was an
evil
act, said Constance, so aggrieved you’d have thought it happened yesterday.

—Hardly evil, I said mildly. You’d been told not to take it out.

—For that you scuttle a boat? He took out the bung plug and just let it
sink!

—He was concerned for your safety.

This made her more angry still.

—No, Sidney, he wasn’t, all he wanted was to deprive us of a pleasure. Whose side are you on?

I told her I was always on her side. Then why was I supporting Daddy? I said it’s not
supporting—

—Oh yes it is!

She then told me what it meant. When Daddy scuttled the skiff he was really drowning
her
. Why? Because that’s what he’d wanted to do with her ever since she was born, just drown her like an unwanted kitten. Like a needy dependent, she said, some kind of a stray creature who required the shelter of his house but was entitled to none of its warmth, and for damn sure none of its
love.

—Oh for god’s sake, I said.

I found it hard to take her seriously. The story of the scuttled skiff told me more about Constance than it did about him. It was obvious that she didn’t understand him. She didn’t realize he was only concerned for her welfare. Any father would do the same.

—Sweetheart, I said, he didn’t want to drown you.

She sat up and stared at me.

—Oh yes he fucking did, she said.

When she started to swear at me there was no point continuing the conversation. It was very discouraging. And an earlier conversation hadn’t helped, when she’d told me I was too old for her. I couldn’t seem just to shrug it off. I found it all too easy to imagine her meeting a younger man and, yes, being tempted to stray. This was probably foolish thinking on my part but entirely predictable. It’s an ancient simian anxiety, no man is exempt. I’d become not
suspicious,
exactly, but alert. In those days I liked to bring my graduate students home and the apartment
would often be full of vigorous young men conducting boisterous arguments about Byron or Goethe or the divine afflatus of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Here life was noisily lived, and although Constance was usually too tired to take part in my informal seminars, when she did join us I’d take notice of which of my students she responded to more warmly than was strictly necessary.

This would provoke another argument. Once again I was accused of various crimes of the heart and had to defend myself. There were tears and screams and even the breaking of glassware and crockery. It was exhausting but it ended, as before, in bed, where all was forgiven and a tentative peace accord established. I soon abandoned the informal seminars. So yes, she kept me vigilant. She also kept me at a pitch of anxious exhilaration that I hadn’t known since the early days with Barb. Ed Kaplan saw the difference in me. He told me I looked ten years younger.

—I was right about you, he said.

—What do you mean by that?

—You need a wife.

We were crossing an uptown campus, I remember, on our way to lunch. I asked him to explain himself.

—Sidney, where else besides marriage can you find yourself in a moral predicament on a daily basis? You’re one of those men who’s got to be forever choosing to do the right thing so as to silence the voices in your head.

—What voices?

—Guilty voices.

—What am I supposed to be so guilty about?

—Your controlling personality. Your inability to tolerate criticism—

—Okay, Ed, that’s enough.

He’d missed the point. As for voices in the head, that wasn’t my problem. We walked on in silence. We crossed Broadway. We were too slow with the light and a taxi driver screamed insults at us out the window of his cab. The death of urban civility was one of my preoccupations at the time. I saw it as another symptom of the city’s deepening malaise.

—Ed, that may all be true but it doesn’t change the fact that sometimes I feel like I’m dealing with a—

I couldn’t finish the sentence. I was going to say
paranoid hysteric.

—Relax. It’s good for you.

But at times I was starting to wonder if I hadn’t made a mistake, and once or twice I even thought of the quiet years with Barb with nostalgia. And regarding Barb, there was a new development, not a happy one, and it did nothing to improve my state of mind. The last time I’d seen her she’d told me there was something wrong with her. She had to go into the hospital for a few tests.

We’d been sitting in the kitchen of her small rented house in Atlantic City, not far from the beach. I was alarmed. She was lethargic. There was puffiness around her eyes. Her skin was sickly looking. She’d lost weight. Wearily she pushed a hand through her hair.

—What about Howard?

—He’ll go to my mother’s.

I thought of Queenie Mulcahy with her cigarettes and her gin, and her phlegmy cough, and her endless stories about her life as a showgirl—

—He could stay with us, I said.

—What about Constance?

Barb summoned for this question a spark of friendly malice.

—She’d like to get to know him, I said.

—That’s not what I heard.

She gazed at me with lifted eyebrows and the ghost of a smile. For a second she was her old self. How do women know these things about one another? I told her it was time Constance and Howard met. Barb shouldn’t worry. It would all be fine.

—Your funeral, she said.

She wasn’t the type to try to protect her boy from life’s complications. She knew, too, what sort of a boy he was, nothing if not self-sufficient. So I called him in from the yard.

We were to meet Iris and the doctor off the train at Penn Station. Tarpaulins hung like great dirty curtains obscuring the high spaces of the roof from view. We picked our way through heaps of planks and scaffolding. There was dust in the air and the place was raucous with shouting men and jackhammers. Constance was tense. She could barely speak to me. Her anxiety about the wedding was aggravated by the prospect of her father’s arrival. She’d spent the previous night in my apartment. She’d paced the floor, twisting her hands together as I sat reading. I understood how difficult this was for her. She was a high-strung immature young woman about to take a large step into the unknown with a man she’d known for less than a year. Also, her father, that stern and bitter man, whom she felt she’d always disappointed, would be watching her. She stopped pacing and stared at me.

—Aren’t you frantic? she cried.

I had her sit on my lap and I put my arms around her. She clung to me like a child.

—No.

—But why not?

How was I to tell her that my impulse to protect and nourish her was as vital for my own welfare as it was for hers? I didn’t think she could understand this yet. My love was grounded as much in moral conviction as it was in affection and desire, but she didn’t know me very well. She didn’t know what she had in me. She was very young. I asked her to trust me.

—I don’t think I can, she whispered.

It was starting to get dark outside but we didn’t turn the lamps on. I put my book down. She sat on the floor beside the chesterfield, and as the shadows gathered around us she reached up and slipped her hand in mine. We sat in silence. She gripped my hand tight. She grew calm at last. I wanted her to feel that she’d never be exposed to danger again, not as long as I was there. I couldn’t explain what I was afraid of, but I feared for her, and that was why I was marrying her. If I didn’t do this I felt I had no business being around her. I didn’t know what more I could offer her.

I saw the doctor before she did. Two figures emerged from the rear of the train and paused for a few seconds on the platform, engaged in what looked like a quarrel. The girl was about twenty, the man much older. It could only be them. Then they were advancing upon us, and when the girl saw Constance–she was Iris, of course–she dropped her suitcase and ran toward us with her arms spread wide, shouting. Constance, laughing and blushing, was crushed to the body of her sister, and it was for me to step forward and greet the father.

—Doctor Schuyler. Sidney Klein, I said.

He was a tall man, as tall as I, and he looked me up and down as we gravely shook hands. I was impressed with his gravitas. A man of the old school, I thought, salt of the American earth. It takes a couple of centuries to make one of these. What did he make of me? I had money, yes, and I had tenure, but I was an Englishman and he wouldn’t know if I was to be trusted. High above us pigeons fluttered in the iron trelliswork and the locomotive released a prolonged hiss. On the platform the last of the passengers streamed around us, leaving the sisters clinging together, and myself with the father. Stranded between us was the suitcase Iris had abandoned in the middle of the platform.

—You’d better call me Morgan, he said.

—Sidney, I said.

That night we dined together in a steakhouse on Lexington Avenue. It was a noisy, steamy place, all bustle and meaty smells: I thought the doctor would like it. I was aware of the momentous nature of the occasion and I think he was too. He was a reserved man in his late sixties, spare, deliberate, and quietly amusing, particularly in response to the more extravagant claims of Iris, who was excited to be in New York and in particular in this large room full of loud talk and quick-witted waiters with whom she bantered happily. She was a college senior, majoring in biology at a school upstate, but unmistakably the same grinning, gap-toothed girl I’d seen in Constance’s photograph. I kept an eye on the sisters but I reserved my close attention for the father. Constance wanted me to believe that his antagonism toward her had made her the unhappy woman she was, but having now met the man I didn’t buy it. He was gruff, but he was a man of the old school. They’re supposed to be gruff. But
he was also tender, and he was watchful. When Iris let out a shriek that had other diners turning in our direction, he laid a finger briefly on her wrist and she grew quiet at once. When the waiter approached to refill her glass, not for the first time, Dr. Schuyler caught the man’s eye and silently voiced the word
no.
I saw this, and he saw me seeing it, and we exchanged not so much a smile as a mutual glance of amused understanding.

—Daddy, will you please tell Constance that a virus is a germ?

—Constance, your sister believes that a virus is a germ.

—Yes, but what sort of a germ? She doesn’t know!

—Of course I know!

Then, in a low voice, pleading: Daddy, I’d like another glass of wine.

—I know you would, but you won’t get it.

I watched Constance at times react to Iris like a mother, with impatient shakes of the head and a lifting of her eyes to the ceiling. At other times she was drawn into the girl’s restless stream of talk. When Iris amused her she’d lean forward with her jaw falling in disbelief.

—Iris,
you can’t say that!

—I just did.

Daddy might or might not adjudicate the matter. Halfway through the meal I realized I was no closer to answering the question that concerned me: how Constance got to be so helpless and at times so very
numb.
I no longer believed her father was a cruel man, or that he’d done her irreparable harm. I’d seen nothing to support that idea. It occurred to me that Iris might in her carelessness have done her a more subtle injury
although I couldn’t imagine what it might be. Constance told me once that her sister wanted her to die, but every younger sibling feels that way. She said her father wanted her dead too. It occurred to me that one day she’d think the same of me.

While I watched them, they watched me. The doctor’s manner toward me was affable but undemonstrative. I’d passed some kind of a test–I wasn’t an out-and-out cad–and he was in no hurry to force the acquaintance. Time would serve us in that regard. I was of course much older than Constance, and this counted in my favor. As for Iris, she was eager to see some display of prowess from the man about to marry her sister.

—So Sidney, how smart are you, scale of one to ten?

Elbows planted on the table, leaning in, gazing at me with bright-eyed, vinous warmth, clearly she’d been told by Constance that I was a brainy chap.