Family Happiness (5 page)

When she went into the library to kiss her children, she found them crumpled in a heap, fast asleep on the couch pillows. The sight of them brought her almost to tears. She was so lucky to have them. That she had actually produced these beings was a constant source of wonderment to her. And they were so
good
, and so kind to each other. They had fallen asleep like a pair of puppies.

Polly felt rather exhausted herself. In the elevator, she was careful not to reveal to the elevator man, who had known her since she was a teen-ager, her intense relief.

Three

At precisely three-thirty Polly stood at a pay telephone several blocks from her parents'. She dialed a number, hung up, and dialed again. It was her signal. The person on the other end picked up instantly.

“Yellow Dog.”

“Hello, Linky,” said Polly. “It's only me.” Link was Lincoln Bennett. He was a painter, and to Polly's initial confusion and constant pain, she found herself in love with him. They had been having a love affair, after negotiating having one, for several months. He was her secret treasure and her secret friend.

“Only you, huh?” Lincoln said. “I kept getting telephone calls all day long, none of which were only you, if only they were. Are you at a pay telephone or is traffic now being routed through your parents' study?”

“Pay phone,” said Polly.

“Well, get down here, girl. I can't bear it another minute.”

“Okay, Linky. I'm on my way.”

“And how did you manage this time, beautiful darling?” Lincoln said.

“I'm afraid I used the fictitious-seminar ploy again.”

“It's a good thing no one understands what you do for a living,” Lincoln said. “I hope you copped me some leftover salmon.”

“I tried.”

“Get down here, Dottie. Your poor friend requires you.”

Lincoln was the only person who called Polly by her given name of Dora. He called her any number of things as well—he made them up as he went along—all corruptions of Dora: Doe, Dottie, Dorrit, Doreen, and Dot, and on the telephone, Yellow Dog. Lincoln was not given to nicknaming or being nicknamed. No one but Polly had ever called him Linky. He was not particularly whimsical, and this fountain of strange endearments surprised even him. His feelings for Polly brought it out, he knew. Polly was the truest, safest, and most loving person he had ever known, and he felt entirely free to say even the stupidest thing to her.

Lincoln was exactly Polly's age. They had been born in the same hospital a week apart. It was Lincoln's theory that their infant cribs had been side by side and that they had been imprinted on each other.

Paul, Henry, Jr., and Lincoln had all gone to the same school, and the Solo-Millers were not unknown to Lincoln. He had been in their house several times, as a child and as a young man. Now that he was a painter, and generally thought to be a very fine one, attempts had been made by Wendy to collect Lincoln: he himself was very collectible and Wendy knew that he came from such a nice family. But Lincoln was not much of a fan of families in general, and in specific he found the Solo-Millers rather antipathetic. He disliked the idea of a family front. He found the Solo-Millers, with the exception of his beloved one, smug, thrilled with themselves, self-enclosed, and so secure in the superiority they radiated that it was hard not to feel that their goal was to make other people feel inferior, less handsome, less well behaved, and certainly less contented in their family life. Most people admired the Solo-Millers; Lincoln did not. What others admired as their strength, cohesiveness, and family felicity, Lincoln saw as snootiness, snobbery, repression, and plain luck. But other people felt the Solo-Millers were exempt from mortal status, and the fact that Wendy was scatty, that Henry, Sr., was aloof and somewhat cracked, that Paul was a stick, and Henry, Jr., an ape, only made them more appealing.

Lincoln felt that they did not properly appreciate their remarkable Polly. Polly was different. Catering to those quirky temperaments had made her mild and kind, sensible and tenderhearted.

Lincoln had had a spectacular show—the show at which Polly had met him—and Wendy was anxious to get him to one of her parties. One met so few painters, and he was after all a friend of Henry, Jr.'s. Besides, Wendy knew his nice aunt Louise. “That Leonard Barton,” she would say, and Polly had often quoted this to Lincoln, “so attractive and so well behaved, for a painter.”

Lincoln had been a prodigy. Now he was a lone wolf. His talent had manifested itself when he was very young, and he had been carefully encouraged. It had never occurred to him that he would make a living painting, so he had gone to college first and then to art school. In his late twenties, when he found himself spending weeks alone without talking to anyone, he began to panic. Surely he was meant to share his nest. He had grown up in a relaxed, casual household. Now his parents had retired to the country. His brother, Gus, and sister-in-law, Violet, were both architects. They had a daughter, Daphne, who was five, a dog, and a Persian cat.

His childhood had been a normal one, and his parents had given him freedom and encouragement. Furthermore, his parents were happily married, as were Gus and Violet. He could not account for his need for solitude. He knew this need to be excessive, but only when he was alone did he feel really comfortable and authentically himself. The fact that art requires solitude did not console him. The older he got, the less able he felt to deal in the real world—the world in which people socialized, went to parties, fell in love, and got married.

Lincoln was not a heartbreaker. He knew he wanted love, but he did not see how he could successfully get it, and he was uncomfortable with the conventional methods of finding it. Everyone was settling down around him. One day he had fallen in love with a girl named Audrey Warren. He and Audrey had gotten engaged and set up housekeeping together. It was a disaster for Lincoln. Domesticity rubbed against him like a hair shirt. How he could be so much in love and so miserable at the same time amazed him. It seemed overwhelmingly clear to him that he could not live with another person, and this made him feel unknown to himself. Audrey said his problem was psychological and had suggested to Lincoln that he go and talk to a psychiatrist. Dutifully he went, to a cultivated, sympathetic old Italian psychoanalyst who saw him twice a week. In the course of a year he learned a great deal about himself, and he came to see that his need to be alone was at the bottom of everything about him. He saw it as a problem: after all, he had the heart of a faithful husband. The rest of him did not feel at all complicated. He felt that he was moving through a dense thicket of psychological vegetation and that if he cut it all down with a machete, he would still be left with his problem: that he needed love but could not bear to live constantly with another person. He and Audrey arranged to be together on weekends. For a while this worked very nicely, but what Audrey wanted was to be married to Lincoln. When it was clear this would never occur, she left him.

Lincoln had taken it stoically. He deserved to have Audrey leave, since he could not change enough to get her to stay. He felt that he had not been made for the chaos and tumult of early adulthood—of romance and mating and nest-building and childrearing. He had been born to be in his early seventies: peaceful, wise, and immersed in slow, painstaking work. In the meantime, he thought it would be immoral for him to have a social life. He did not want to fall in love or to be fallen in love with, since it led to such disappointment and pain. He was not interested in anything casual—he was not a bounder or a flirt—and eventually he got used to being lonely. He felt that since he was looking for love, he should stay by himself, lest he actually find it.

Polly was the answer to his prayers. Her marriage made everything possible. He had love and he had solitude, both guaranteed. He never had to wish that Polly would leave. She
had
to leave.

Lincoln's studio was on a little side street in a row of studios that had been built for artists in the 1920s. On the other side of the street were warehouses. It was impossible to walk down this street without coming upon a homeless cat. Some of the cats were feral and raced away. Some were lonely and followed you, throwing themselves against your legs and crying mournfully. These lonely cats brought Polly almost to tears. They reminded her of herself: so willing, so hungry for love.

Lincoln was waiting at the door for her. Seeing him, Polly realized, felt the same as coming home might to a sailor after a long voyage. She did not mean to feel this way but it was undeniable to her that she did. She saw him and her heart turned over. Once she had divided the world into the sort of women who had love affairs and the sort of women who did not. But now she, a woman who did not, did, and with considerable expertise. In her gravest moments she gritted her teeth and said to herself, “I deserve this.”

“Hi, Linky,” she said.

He took her into his arms and kissed her all over her cold cheeks.

“I am a woolly beast,” Polly said.

“You are the most gorgeous, swell person that ever lived,” Lincoln said. “Get your coat off. Where's my salmon?”

Polly took a sandwich wrapped in thick waxed paper from her handbag.

“That's not Solo-Miller salmon,” Lincoln said. “That's from the delicatessen, isn't it?”

“Oh, Linky, I tried.”

“I was only teasing, Doe.”

“Next time,” said Polly, “I'm going to make up a huge sandwich, wrap it in my napkin, and stick it into my bag—right in front of everyone. When they ask what I'm doing, I'll say: At these seminars I perform the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. This one sandwich is going to feed forty reading technicians.”

“They'd never ask,” said Lincoln.

“Probably, they wouldn't,” said Polly. “That's the bliss of it. I never even have to lie. Nobody ever asks me what I do.”

“Well, come over here, Dora,” said Lincoln. “Put your arms around me and tell me everything you've thought or felt since Friday.” He held her close. “I really do love you to pieces.”

“I love you to pieces, too,” said Polly. “Isn't it sad?”

Polly and Lincoln had met once the year before, at a group show that included a series of his landscapes in oil, and then again at Lincoln's one-man show the first week in September. Of course, they had met, long ago, as children.

Henry, Jr., and Andreya had taken Polly out for an evening when Henry Demarest was away on business. Their friend Lincoln Bennett was having a one-man show and they took Polly to it, since she had been so entranced by the group show they had taken her to. She had just come back from Maine.

At the gallery, Polly put her glasses on. She was slightly nearsighted but Henry, Sr., believed that unless you were almost blind, spectacles weakened the eye muscles. Polly had always worn her glasses on the sly and still felt sneaky about it.

The show consisted of portraits and still lifes, all oil on paper. They were all so beautiful that she was glad Henry and Andreya did not feel obliged to stick with her. She wanted to react privately to these pictures.

She realized, as she moved from picture to picture, that Lincoln Bennett had been in the back of her mind since she had met him in the spring. She had had an impulse to send him a letter—a fan letter—and she had composed it over and over in her mind but had never written it. She had thought of him as she had sent the children off to their grandparents in Maine for the summer, and as Henry's schedule invaded the time they had set aside to be alone together in June and July. She had found herself reflecting on every scrap of information Henry, Jr., and Andreya had given her about Lincoln—chiefly that he was antisocial and that he lived alone in his studio. She imagined a studio. She imagined being constantly alone. She remembered the pictures from the show and wondered what sort of person would have painted them.

That August Henry had spent his Maine vacation on the telephone. It was impossible to be angry with him: his holiday was being spoiled, too. Polly was used to canceling appointments, juggling dates, and having to turn up at the last minute by herself. She was used to being by herself, after all, even when Henry was around. What, she had wondered, would it be like never to have to switch anything in behalf of anyone?

To be in a room full of Lincoln's paintings gave Polly a sense of intimacy with him, and she wanted to savor it. She suddenly realized that she had been thinking about Lincoln all summer long, more or less unconsciously. A little shiver of guilt went through her: she did not believe it right to think, consciously or unconsciously, about someone who had no connection to you.

But of course, she told herself, it was not Lincoln she had been thinking about, but clean, lean lives of solitude and work—Henry and Andreya had told her how very solitary Lincoln was and that Lincoln had been through some awful time or other (awful times were not in Henry, Jr.'s emotional range, so he could not imagine what would cause one) and had painted in white for a year. The past year they had hardly seen Lincoln at all. He had begun to paint in color again. The paintings in the group show, and this one-man show, were the result. They were not like anything Polly had ever seen and she wanted one fiercely.

Henry and Andreya caught up with her. “Look,” said Henry. “There's Lincoln.” Polly looked around and saw him at once: a tall, well-made man with an unsmiling boyish face, and a thick shock of straight hair that fell onto his forehead. He had a big, pouty mouth and, when he smiled, a crooked grin. He was wearing the sort of clothes an Irish fisherman might wear: a briary sweater, a pair of tweed trousers, and heavy laced shoes. He cut through the crowd toward Henry and Andreya, and when he saw Polly, he stopped and kissed her on the mouth.

“Oh, I'm sorry,” he said, stepping back. “I thought you were someone else.” He smiled a rattled smile. “Why,” he said, “it's a little pack of Solo-Millers. Hello, Henry. Hello, Andreya.” He turned to Polly. “You must be the Solo-Miller sister.”