Constance (8 page)

—Twelve.

—You have to say that but I’m serious. How would you fix the problems of New York?

—No, Iris, don’t do this to him, said Constance.

—How long have I got? I said.

—Iris is eager to be mugged, said the doctor. We could put her down in an alley on the way back to the hotel.

—I’m not afraid of New York, she cried. When I live here I’ll never be mugged!

This bravura statement provoked various reactions all at once. I asked her how she’d achieve invulnerability where so many before her had tried and failed. For it was becoming apparent that nobody was safe here anymore.

—Sidney, she said, laying a hand on my arm, trust me.

When the meal ended and we rose to our feet, that section of the tablecloth controlled by Iris resembled the sort of blighted neighborhood she was confident she could survive in. It was a mess of salt, crusts of bread, ash, spilled coffee, burned-out tenement buildings and broken government. She moved at once to her father’s side and slipped her arm in his.

—I’ll take this old man home, she said. Constance can have the other one.

—You’re such a child, said Constance.

When I kissed Iris good night, she murmured in my ear.

—Sidney, with Constance it’s important to wind her up regularly, otherwise she runs down.

As I hailed a cab I thought it a not unperceptive remark. But a woman isn’t a clock! A clock can’t decide what time it is, its movements are determined by its mechanism. And I asked myself, not for the first time, if the same could be said of Constance, and was that what Iris meant?

We were all subdued in the morning when we met outside City Hall. It was a clear, cool day. City Hall is a fine old public building in the classical manner. It has a white portico with pillars. Inside, there’s a rotunda with a grand marble staircase. Abraham Lincoln lay in state there. As did Ulysses S. Grant. In the park over which City Hall presides stands the statue of one of my heroes, Nathan Hale. He was hanged by the British early in the War of Independence. On the gallows he said he regretted having but one life to give for his country. He was a foolish boy but he certainly showed courage at the end, but when I told Constance the story she yawned. She said she’d heard it already.

We were shown into a large waiting room to join the other
prospective brides and grooms and their families. It was as richly diverse a cross section of the city’s grand mosaic as you could hope to see. We sat on hard benches until we were called in to go before the judge. Constance clung to me, and not for the first time I felt a whisper of anxiety. She was a mystery to me, this pale serious girl, she was opaque, oblique—what was I thinking of? Iris was watching me. She knew what I was thinking of. Grinning that toothy grin of hers, she made a small private solidarity gesture with her fist, and from that moment I loved her like a brother.

When it was all over we walked to the old Italian restaurant on Chambers Street. My mother had arrived from Long Island earlier that morning. She was dressed all in black for reasons nobody understood. She’d acquired many eccentricities over the course of her long widowhood. It was oddly wonderful to see the doctor, in his dark suit, himself a reserved and formal man, loom over my equally reserved and formal mother and bend to shake her tiny hand. At the restaurant Iris succeeded in doing what she’d been prevented from doing the previous night, she made a fool of herself, not being accustomed to champagne. I had to take her outside and help her throw up in a parking lot.

Later that evening Constance was depressed. She said Daddy had once told her she shouldn’t have any illusions about New York. He said she’d last a few months in the city, a year at most, and then come home to Ravenswood and look after him. But she’d made her way in publishing and found a husband. She was now Mrs. Klein. But she couldn’t help comparing herself to the other Mrs. Klein, the diminutive black-veiled widow, my mother. She said she felt like a variation on a theme: my mother
at an early stage of development, like a chrysalis, a little black widow in the making.

—For god’s sake, I said, it’s our wedding night.

—I’m sorry. It’s how I feel.

Constance was unfamiliar with the old prewar apartments of the Upper West Side. Mine, though dark, was large. After we were married I watched her drift through my rooms, nervous and hesitant, glancing into shadowy corners as though they concealed malevolent intruders. She told me she was easily spooked. She also felt that at any moment she’d be unmasked as a trespasser and evicted. She said that after her mother died she hadn’t felt at home in her father’s house either. I did what I could to make her feel welcome. I told her that the apartment was her home now. I wanted her to get used to her new surroundings in her own time, as you would a cat. Eventually I realized that her reluctance to settle masked a persisting unease not with the apartment but with me. Of course the only man she’d lived with before me was her father. One day she told me she was still mystified as to why I’d chosen her. I remember I gazed at her fondly. I told her she’d looked so helpless at that book party I knew I had to do something about it.

—Do you know how many predators there are in this town? I said.

She was faintly displeased.

—You make me feel like a gazelle.

—You
are
a gazelle.

There was more than a grain of truth in this, and when I’d convinced her I was joking it briefly became a game we played in the bedroom. She was the graceful leaping antelope, I was the greedy lion. She couldn’t escape me, and our tussles were vigorous. Then one night, as we lay panting in tangled bed sheets, she sat up and told me that because I was the one she woke up with in the morning, and the one she went to bed with at night, it was true, she couldn’t escape me,
ever.

—Not ever, Sidney! she cried.

Then she delivered the bad news.

—I don’t think it’s working.

—What isn’t working?

—The marriage.

I stayed calm. I’d anticipated this. It was taking longer than it should have to get her established in my home but I believed it would all come good given enough
time.

—Sweetheart, why not?

—I think I’ve made a mistake.

I asked her quietly what the mistake was. We’d moved to the kitchen for this conversation. She’d made herself a pot of tea. Her answer was unsatisfactory. She spoke slowly, as though reciting a lesson learned in class. I remembered her once claiming to have read Freud. Now she told me she understood why she’d agreed to marry me. Her father never gave her what she needed, she said, and she’d always felt it was her fault.

I understood the argument. She’d lost her mother at a time when a girl most needs a mother, and was then given charge of her younger sister. Daddy hadn’t been supportive. He was more
often absent than present. He’d actively discouraged her from moving to New York. When he saw that he couldn’t stop her he told her she wouldn’t succeed. He was overly critical and he made her feel worthless. But unlike most of the population of New York City she wouldn’t see a psychiatrist. She said she already knew what was wrong with her. So how was she going to get better? She’d get better, she said, when Daddy wasn’t in the picture anymore.

—You’re waiting for your father to
die?

—He can’t go on forever.

Constance and I have been over this material in depth and in detail. At the time I said to her that her anger toward her father was childish. It was too easy to blame the father. Everyone blamed the father. It was lazy liberal thinking, I told her. I didn’t see him as a monster, I said. He and I got along fine. I liked the man.

But Constance was indifferent to my opinion. Instead she said that from the moment she’d met me she’d wanted
me
for her father, so that she could start over. So that she could
make good
, by which she meant repair whatever it was she’d got wrong with Daddy. She said it was a
repetition compulsion complex.

She peered at me anxiously. My first reaction was one of amused disbelief, but I showed her nothing of this. Instead I nodded as though I took the idea seriously.

—A
repetition compulsion complex?

But she was never at her best in theoretical discussion. She didn’t have that kind of a mind. What kind of a mind she
did
have, this I hadn’t yet discovered.

—Yes.

—And it means the marriage won’t work?

—Please don’t look at me like that.
I can’t be your wife! I can’t be anyone’s wife!

—Why not?

—I don’t know!

—You want me to explain it to you?

She regarded me with suspicion. I remembered Iris’s remark: It’s important to wind her up regularly, otherwise she runs down. She was run-down now. She had to be run-down to tell me I was her father. She sat there in her bathrobe, her hair tousled, her skin very clear, her lips moving just a little as though in silent colloquy with some unseen being. She was bewildered by the turn the conversation had taken. I was warm, gentle, solicitous.

—Constance, honey, I’m not your father.

—I know that—

—
I’m not your father.
I’m your husband. Your father abandoned you emotionally because he was grieving. It’s not so unusual. But I’m not him. I’ve made a commitment to you and I won’t let you down.

—You let Barb down.

—All the more reason.

—You let Howard down.

Fortunately she knew nothing about my first wife, about whom the less said the better. But as long as she wanted to hurt me I felt I had something to work with. It was indifference I dreaded, and I knew she was capable of it.

—Why won’t you let me introduce you to Howard? I said.

—He already has a mother. Don’t change the subject. You treat me like I’m one of your students. Have you got any cigarettes?

By this time she was pacing the floor. It was early October and still warm outside. The window was open and the mayhem on the street was getting started, a few random screams, a burst of manic laughter. There was a pack of cigarettes on top of the refrigerator, Ed Kaplan had left them. I gave her one and threw the rest in the trash.

—I try not to treat you like a student but if I do it’s only because I want to teach you what I know. There was a time you liked that.

—I’ve been educated already.

I may have made a brief display of the mildest skepticism, some tiny reflex of an eyebrow, perhaps. But she saw it. She stopped pacing and glared at me. Her eyes filled with tears. I was on my feet at once, then she was trembling in my arms. Then she pushed me away.

—I won’t back down! she screamed. You like students who argue with you and then back down but I won’t!

There was more of this. She was angry, first, that I was an unsatisfactory father, and second, that I was an overbearing professor. She told me I had no interest in who she was, only in how she conformed to the image of her I’d constructed in my mind. Only in what I could make her
into.

—You’re too old for me! You were
selfish
to make me marry you and I can’t believe I was such a fool!

I turned away. I lifted my arms, I shrugged my shoulders. Later there were tearful apologies and she clung to me in bed, appalled at what she’d said. I relented. I comforted her. I told her that her urge to cause me pain was really an expression of love. I said she wouldn’t go to all the trouble if she didn’t care about me. She seized gratefully on this idea. Then there was
more sex and it was always better after that. No postcoital
trist-esse
in my bedroom.

And so the fall passed, and then we were driving up to Ravenswood for Christmas and Howard was with us, poor kid, and missing his mother, for Barb was again in the hospital. The day was cold and clear but traffic was heavy and the journey was slow. By the time we got to the house he was tired. He’d been in the car too long. Constance said she hoped we’d be given a drink on arrival but Daddy didn’t like her to ask before it was offered. Once he’d withheld it until dinner so as to punish her. It never happened with Iris, she said. Hearing this I knew why I was dreading the next days. It wouldn’t be much of a Christmas for Howard, with Constance in such a foul state of mind, and so very antagonistic toward her father.

There he stood on the porch between those peeling Corinthian pillars, a tall, sparely built figure in a thick black cardigan and baggy corduroy trousers. He could have been an American poet, one of the mad grand old men just beginning his decline. The light spilled out from the open front door behind him and was reflected off the snow. The tower on the southwest corner stood out sharp against the dusk, and beyond the house the pines were a mass of blackness. Constance had once told me her heart always quickened at the sight of the river far below and the mountains beyond, where the last of the day made a thin band of red in the sky, but she seemed indifferent to it now.

The old man bent down to greet Howard as he climbed the steps of the porch. He took the boy’s hand, then turned back
into the house. The stoop in his posture had worsened since we’d last seen him over the Labor Day weekend. I felt a sudden tenderness for him. It was clear that his strength was ebbing, and that soon he’d be frail.

I got out of the car and unloaded the suitcases from the trunk. Constance wore an expression of such sour and weary resignation that I told her to please make an effort, for her father’s sake if not for mine. Together we walked across the icy driveway and up the steps of the porch.

Two days later came the doctor’s shattering revelation, and that’s when everything properly went to hell.

All that fall my sister Iris put on a brave face in public but when she was by herself she drank. I was the only one she talked to about Eddie Castrol but I soon grew impatient with her and then she didn’t confide in me anymore. What a relief that was. Sidney and I had a quiet period. He was busy with his book. I think he was having a good deal of trouble with it. With writers it’s best to leave them alone at times like this. They only snap at you if you try to help. No one can help me now, he’d say, like a drowning man. My only real pleasure in life was his boy, Howard. He was with us for Thanksgiving and again for the Christmas holiday. We were going up to Ravenswood. I wasn’t looking forward to it.