Family Secrets (56 page)

His life was more than half over and it meant nothing. Each morning it was harder and harder to drag himself out of bed, so wrapped in misery that he seemed swaddled; he could hardly move. He stared at the wall for twenty minutes, then forced himself to take a shower and go to the breakfast table, where he would stare unseeing at his cup of coffee until it grew cold. He no longer took the subway to the office because the subway was a frightening maze full of strangers who meant him harm; he took a cab. But the cabs gave him as much claustrophobia as the subways did. The apartment was the only place where he felt safe.

On weekends the family always went to the country, but this winter Andrew did not feel up to the trip, even though Cassie always drove the station wagon to spare him because he had worked hard all week. The apartment was safe.

The kids enjoyed the country but they didn’t mind staying in the city this winter because they had an active social life and many places to go with their friends. They had always brought friends up to the country, but they were freer here, with buses to take them anywhere they wanted to go. Besides, they loved to watch television, and most of the time they sat with their friends in the den watching football games and anything else that was on. His sister Lavinia thought that was terrible.

“Your children are going to grow up to be illiterate,” she often told him. “They never read. Do you have a book in the house?”

Cassie liked to be with the children and watched television with them. She had even become a football fan. Andrew sat in his bedroom, thinking and worrying, or not thinking of anything at all. How could he afford all this? His expenses were enormous. All right, his salary was enormous too, but still, the cost of living was going up, and in ten years he would be an old man. What would he have done with his life? Who would remember him? Where was the young artist who was going to study and paint in Paris, where were all his young dreams? They were silly dreams, but still, he might have made paintings that people would care about after he was gone. He never drew or painted any more. His pool house, his landscaping, the little details of the new office buildings the family built, working along with the architect, that was his art. So what? If he had been a painter, probably he would have been a failure and have starved. He needed all the material things he had in his life; he wanted them. One had to make money to have them. Money was essential. One had to work to earn money. Andrew could not leave the house any more to go to work.

His misery was all-encompassing and mysterious. He really wasn’t sure why he felt sad, only that he did, that life seemed hopeless, each hour an eternity spent in fear and sorrow and loss. He had heard of men his age who had nervous breakdowns, jumped out of windows, had to be sent away, just because they were approaching middle age. Hadn’t Nathan Seltzer, only forty-six, a year younger than he, spent a year sitting in a chair in his apartment, watched every minute by his frantic wife and sister so he wouldn’t commit suicide? Male menopause, they called it. Menopause! That was for women.

He was sweet with Cassie and the children, but he moved like a robot. He could force a smile, a word, but his heart was breaking and he didn’t know why. What would happen to them if he became incapacitated? He couldn’t even think about it, and yet he couldn’t stop thinking about it. All his life had been spent in responsibility. For pleasure you have to pay. You don’t get something for nothing. But was it worth it?

Papa called him from the office.

“So, Andrew, you’re still sick?”

“Hello, Papa.”

“You haven’t been to the office for two weeks. Last week you said you had a virus. You’re sure it isn’t worse?”

“No, Papa, it’s better.”

“Did you see a doctor?”

Andrew sighed. “No.”

“Why not?”

“It’s getting better.”

“I’m coming to see for myself.”

That afternoon, after work, Papa appeared. Andrew had not even been able to force himself to dress. Wearing his silk robe, unshaven for the past five days, he sat on the chaise longue in the huge bedroom he shared with Cassie. The maid had made the bed and put the bedspread on. After all, he wasn’t sick. Papa gave his coat and hat and scarf to the maid and went into the bedroom. Cassie, who had greeted him at the door, stayed outside the bedroom, eavesdropping, hoping Papa might have more success with Andrew than she had had.

“Hello, Papa,” Andrew said.

“Such a sad voice, like the mewing of a cat. Who died?”

Andrew forced a smile. “I’ll be better soon.”

“You have a headache, a stomach ache, what?”

“I don’t know.”

“You look terrible. Have Cassie call the doctor.”

“All right.”

“I don’t understand it, a man who has everything—a good family, a good life, good health—he should let himself get like this.”

“I have headaches, Papa.”

“Headaches? Good. You see the doctor. A headache can be cured.”

Oh God, how could he betray this man who had been so good to him? How could he lie to his father, and worse, not be there when his father needed him, pretending to be sick? But he
was
sick. Not all sickness meant virus and fever. How could he explain his pain that lodged in no particular part of his body and yet seemed to pervade all of it? He hadn’t been able to explain it to Cassie, who would fuss over him and cater to him, how could he explain it to his father who only expected the best of him?”

Papa went to the bedroom doorway. “Cassie! Call the doctor now and make an appointment.”

Cassie entered the room, glanced at Andrew, and went to the phone. She spoke quietly, then she turned and said: “He’ll see you at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”

Maybe it would be good to go to the doctor. Maybe he had a brain tumor, or thyroid trouble, or even cancer. Who knew? Andrew felt a slight relief. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of going to the doctor before, and then he knew. He had been afraid the doctor would find out there was nothing wrong with his body, that it was his mind which was sick.

“See he goes,” Papa said to Cassie. He went to the hall closet to find his coat and hat.

“You’re not going so soon?” Cassie said. “You just got here! Let me give you some tea, at least. The children will feel very badly that they missed you.”

“Where are they at this hour?”

“Chris has football practice, Paul has a date with some boys in his class, and Blythe has her ballet lesson.”

Papa smiled. “Ballet. Melissa was a dancer too when she was a little girl. Greek dancing, with veils.”

“Oh, this week it’s ballet, next week it might be the recorder. Blythe never knows what she wants to do.”

“That’s good too,” Papa said. “When you’re young you should try to learn everything. When you’re old you don’t have time.”

You don’t have time
, Andrew thought.
You don’t have time. You don’t have time
. The words sounded like a death knell in his head. There would never be any more time for anything.

He went to the doctor the next morning and had a complete physical examination. The results came back at the end of the week; he was fine. Occasional migraines, as always, but that was nothing new, and he had pills for that. The doctor suggested that Andrew see a psychiatrist. He gave him the names of three he knew, and recommended one as his first choice.

“Psychiatrists are for crazy people,” Andrew told Cassie.

“Don’t be silly. Everybody’s going nowadays. You might as well see him once, it can’t hurt.”

“I don’t want anybody to know.”

“They won’t know if you don’t tell them,” Cassie said cheerfully.

He called the first-choice psychiatrist from the list and made an appointment for the following week. It would be a month that he had been sitting in the apartment by the time he saw the psychiatrist. Beyond that fact, and the fact that he could not bring himself to go to the office or do anything else but sit in the apartment, he had nothing to tell.

The psychiatrist’s office was on Park Avenue, in a large, old, dignified building with a doorman. The office was as dignified as the building, with thin, old, Oriental carpets on the floor. The doctor seemed calm and unthreatening, older than Andrew, with gray hair. There was a leather couch with a clean little linen cloth on the part where a patient would lay his head, but Andrew had no intention of lying on that couch and trying to remember something horrible from his childhood that he had forgotten. He knew about psychiatrists. You lay on that couch for years and years, talking about anything that came into your head, and then suddenly you remembered some trauma from your childhood and you had a breakthrough and went into hysterics and then everything was different from then on. He’d seen
that
movie.

“Sit down, Mr. Saffron,” the psychiatrist said. To Andrew’s great relief he indicated a comfortable armchair facing the desk behind which he was sitting. Andrew looked at the chair, the desk, the psychiatrist, and the door through which he had just entered and through which he intended to escape. He remained standing.

“I’ll tell you one thing, Doctor,” Andrew said. “If you tell me that I hate my wife or my father, I’m leaving.”

In his months of analysis, lying on the couch and discussing his dreams, both his sleeping and waking ones, five mornings a week, Andrew began to learn things about himself. He learned that no one is perfect or “normal,” and that it was normal to worry, but one should not have to worry overmuch. He was relieved to find that remembered traumas and hysterical breakthroughs occurred much more often in movies than in real life. He learned that it was quite normal at his time of life to reassess what one had accomplished and where one was going, and often to feel depressed. He learned also that there was no reason for him not to have his cake and eat it too: so he started to take painting lessons with a private teacher every morning after he went to the psychiatrist, before he went to the office. He got up at seven, went to the psychiatrist at eight, had his painting class at nine, and was in the office at half past ten, just a few minutes later than he used to get there when he had nothing to do in the morning but choose which suit to wear.

The doctor said it was probably going to take five years. That was the usual length of time for a successful Freudian analysis. The den in Andrew’s apartment was no longer just the television room for the children; now it was also his artist’s studio, where he could paint all evening while the kids were in their rooms struggling with their homework. At first Andrew had been ashamed to paint at home, fearing he wasn’t good enough, but his teacher told him he had talent, and finally he dared. Cassie thought he was brilliant, and soon framed oil paintings by Andrew Saffron replaced all the ones he and Cassie had bought through the years. Everyone in the family wanted one, but Andrew couldn’t bear to give any of them away. They were his, and all irreplaceable. He made some for his children’s rooms, but that was different, because they remained in his house. He had a studio in the country too so that he could paint on weekends and not miss the two days. Cassie began buying art books, and she and Andrew went to art galleries and to museums. Then they stopped going to other people’s exhibits; Andrew’s painting was his own expression of his own feelings and he didn’t want to compare them with anyone else’s. His analysis would take five years, but his painting would continue forever.

After a while he wasn’t even embarrassed any more about going to an analyst. It was the thing to do, everyone was going, and many of those who didn’t go needed it most. The family knew. It wasn’t something to be spread around, because there were ignorant people in the world who thought you were crazy if you sought help, but still it was more something to be proud of than ashamed of. A man who would go to a doctor for his problems was a wiser man than one who would seek no help at all when he was sick. Yes, you had to be intelligent to go to a psychiatrist. And you had to be rich; it cost a fortune. That was one expediture Andrew was not going to worry about at all.

SEVEN

Frankie and Everett’s baby was a boy and they named him John. John: a good, solid, Anglo-Saxon name, a little old-fashioned. Frankie had gone to public school with twelve boys named John, but Everett had never even known one. An active, nervous baby from the start, he looked a little like Everett. Frankie was sorry he looked like Everett; she had hoped he would look different from both of them, better, but certainly she would have preferred he look like her, because she had started to dislike Everett heartily and it was no pleasure to have a tiny facsimile of him in the house.

Melissa doted on John. “He looks just like Everett did at that age,” she kept saying.

Frankie was waiting for the presents Jewish husbands were supposed to shower on their wives for presenting them with precious heirs. From Everett she got nothing, but her mother-in-law gave her a pearl necklace and a gold bracelet. Her mother-in-law always gave her nice presents for her birthday and just for no reason at all: a new coat, a set of decent dishes, a new carpet for their bedroom. She also bought all John’s baby furniture. Frankie had painted his room herself. She saw no reason to waste the money, and besides, she was bored.

She didn’t want to nurse him because no one did that any more unless they were a fanatic, so she gave him a bottle, which he usually spit up. Everett said he had done the same thing as a baby and Paris had been worse. It was some kind of allergy. Fine, Frankie thought grimly, he’s even got the Bergman-Saffron allergies, but what has he got from me?

John was going to be her entree into the family. Precious gift of her womb, she brought him to Windflower and waited. Buffy’s old crib was set up in the downstairs library, and all the relatives trooped in to observe this wonder, this curiosity, ahing and cooing at him. John looked at them out of his huge blue eyes and spit up. The family fussed and fawned and told Frankie what to do, criticized her, admonished her, warned her, and she waited. He was so little, it was only natural. Soon she would get the attention and the love. As soon as he was older and they saw how good he was, how much he loved her, then they would realize how important a mother was.