Homecoming (8 page)

For Ellen and Mark had need to prove themselves. When people marry each other in stubborn defiance of a hundred earnest objections and dire warnings of failure, they must go it alone. They must show—and always she had to smile at the old, trite, true slogan—that “love conquers all.” Well, of course, sometimes it did not. And she would think, then, of her poor cousin
Cynthia. But for Mark and herself, love had conquered.

And she looked over at her children. Born of love, they were blessed besides with intelligence and good looks. Their savory dinner of chicken pie and vegetables was baking in the oven. Their father would soon be coming home. What more could anybody ask for?

Her ears, as evening approached, were always alert to the sound of the rising elevator, which had once, when this building was a warehouse, carried freight and was slow. Mark’s footsteps would rush through the outer hall; he seldom walked, but almost always ran to any of his destinations. She would open the door, and there he would be with his kiss, his smile, and his tie already torn off.

He was the kind of person who was most comfortable in jeans and sneakers. Anybody who knew him well would be amused to think of him or to see him at work in that uptown gallery, wearing the fine dark suit and striped tie of a banker or Wall Street lawyer. But he loved the work, and as he said, “The clothes go with the territory.” As it happened, he wore them very
well. He was tall and slender, with a serious expression; he was cordial and serious, with a well-modulated voice. In a word, he was elegant.

Gran said that they made a handsome couple. No one but Gran had told them that; friends do not usually make such comments among themselves; and from their respective families, given the circumstances, they could hardly expect such a compliment. Nevertheless, Ellen knew it was true. They did make a handsome couple.

She also was tall, and had once been as blond as Lucy now was. She wore her tan hair with its few clever streaks in a ballerina’s upsweep, revealing her long neck and graceful profile. On her various errands around the neighborhood, marketing, walking Lucy to and from school, and taking Freddie to play in the pocket-sized park, she wore jeans as almost everyone else did. Otherwise, she wore simple clothes in vivid colors, for she loved color: aquamarine, apricot, and lapis lazuli. She wore little jewelry, inexpensive earrings that she bought in novelty shops, the plain wedding band that matched Mark’s wedding band, and, on appropriate occasions, the splendid pearl necklace that his mother had given to her. It
had been in essence a kind of peace offering from Brenda when Lucy was born. She liked Brenda, who had, in spite of all, a fundamental tolerance and heart.

Her own mother’s jewels, which had naturally come to her, were in a safe deposit box at the bank. They were too formal and too precious to fit into Ellen’s life as they had into Susan’s. Lately she had come to think and speak of her mother as “Susan”; it made her seem young and filled with the happiness she must once have had. People had always described her with the word
sunny
before the long illness that filled Ellen’s memory of her as “Mother” or “Mom.”

If Susan had lived long enough to see us married, Ellen thought, I would have asked her some questions. And I believe I know what she would have answered. Or maybe, given the pressure that Dad would have put on her, she would not have answered. Yet I do think she knew what was happening and simply did not have the physical strength to take a stand for me. I really sensed that, didn’t I? And wasn’t that why we waited, Mark and I, until she died? She had enough to
bear without the addition of a social scandal, absurd and minor as it was.…

After working hours, or on a free Saturday that first year after her graduation from college with a degree in fine arts, she used to tour the art galleries from the tail end of Manhattan to the treasure houses of the Upper East Side. Sometimes she merely glanced into a window and, seeing nothing to tempt her, walked on. At other times when tempted, she went in without any intention of buying, merely of satisfying her avid eye.

In particular she loved old landscape paintings or current works that gave the feel of a quiet world without industry—although such a fondness reflected only an impractical nostalgia—a world of greenness and space, of domestic animals, and crops and changing seasons. This nostalgia had probably to do with long summers in her childhood at Gran’s house. No matter. And so it happened one spring day that she walked into a certain gallery on Fifty-seventh Street.

A very nice-looking young man came forward and addressed her. “May I show you anything?”

Ellen hated that. She had simply wanted to look, and she said so.

“Very well. I’ll be happy to answer any questions you may have.”

She walked around. The walls were hung with superb paintings, sparkling out of exquisite gold frames that in themselves cost more than Ellen could afford. At home they had expensive paintings, but they were not her taste. And anyway, they belonged to her parents, not to her. Standing in front of a woodland brook under falling snow, she thought: Now, I would give my eyeteeth to own that—or better still, to be able to paint it.

There were two rooms. After she had slowly and carefully passed around all their walls, she returned to the brook and was still standing there absorbed in the winter light and the stillness through which she seemed to be hearing the trickle of water over rocks, when a voice in back of her spoke.

“That really talks to you, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, and I’m answering it,” she said.

He laughed. It was a small, discreet laugh, professional sounding as befitted his role. There was a dignity about him, a bit formal, a quality that she took to be British. She knew very little about things British except for what she had seen on her
only visit to Britain, and, naturally, what one saw on television or in the movies. Later she learned that indeed he had been wearing an English suit, bought for him by his parents on their trip to Britain. But that was another story.

“Is there anything you would care to know about it?” he asked.

“Well, yes, the price,” she said, which, having been a fine arts major and having recognized all the names on all those walls, she could easily estimate.

“It is thirty-five thousand dollars. An exceptionally fine example of his work. He died last year, you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

“His prices are bound to go up, so this is actually a remarkably good investment.”

She did not reply. The young man had lovely eyes, extraordinary eyes, brown, but yet almost gold around the pupils. Or perhaps it was the light slanting in from the street?

“Of course I understand that you would only purchase a work like this out of love for it, but still, it is always nice to know that your investment will hold up.”

He wanted so much to sell it! Naturally; they worked on commissions. The place was hardly busy, either, and there were two other men standing and sitting, the latter idly turning the pages of the catalog. It must be a difficult life, very frustrating.

“I’ll think about it,” she told him, aware that he must, hundreds of times, have heard the same words from people who were only looking.

For an indecisive moment they stood there; she saw his glance fall to her hand, to the dazzle of Kevin’s four-carat round-cut diamond engagement ring. When he spoke, there was a touch of hope in his tone. After all, a young woman who owned such a ring—might she not also do more than just think about that snow falling in the woodland brook? Bowing almost imperceptibly, he gave her his card.

Mark Sachs
, she read.

“Ellen Byrne. I’ll think about it,” she repeated. “And thank you so much.”

She walked slowly home up Fifth Avenue, where there were no shops, only the summery park on the left with its carriages, beautiful babies in fashionable strollers, and beautiful dogs
being led by professional dog-walkers. On the right, all the way to the museum and beyond, rose the limestone walls of apartment houses with green awnings and doormen in maroon uniforms. In one of these she still lived with her parents, there being no sense in setting up an apartment of her own when she was so soon to be married anyway.

It occurred to her that most likely she would be spending her life in just such an apartment, spacious, quiet, and filled with valuable possessions in simple good taste. Her children would be reared as she had been, sledding in the park and sailing a marvelous boat, given for her seventh birthday, in its pond. Late in the afternoons they would do their homework in their little bedrooms above the side street; the important rooms, living room, library, and master bedroom, would face the park.

The master bedroom. The term had a masterful sound, almost patriarchal, when you thought about it. And thinking further, it seemed to fit Kevin, who was authoritarian, competent, and very kind, as well.

On first meeting him her father had observed, “That young man will go far.”

He had already done so. Although not yet thirty, only four years out of law school, he had been offered a place in the firm’s Paris office. At this moment he was in Paris getting some orientation, after which he would return, they would be married, and go abroad to live for two or three years; then after that, following the usual track, he would return to the New York office and a promotion.

The prospect of living in France had thrown Ellen, as in a sudden analytic mood she now saw herself, into a kind of rapture. An adolescent rapture. Ever since having been there once with her parents, she had sustained a long love affair with France. She had also sustained a love affair with Kevin.

They had been casually introduced on the campus of the university at which she was an undergraduate senior and he a graduate of its law school. He had come back that day on a visit. A group of five or six, Ellen’s roommate among them, was on its way to the coffee shop, and she went along. Beside Kevin there was one other
man, but he was uninteresting. It was Kevin, blue eyed and bold of feature, who held attention, not only the women’s, but even the men’s in the class.

He had already entered the world, that world which often, at worst, appeared like a dangerous jungle, or at best, like a game of musical chairs, where everyone scrambled, knowing that there were not enough seats to go around and that somebody was bound to be left out. Looking at Kevin, you felt almost certain that he would not be one of those left out.

Ellen had never expected to be noticed. She had indeed gone out a great deal with many differing types of men on the campus—fraternity men, athletes, and poetic loners—but they had all been her own age or close to it, so it was with a little well-hidden gasp of surprise when, under cover of some loud general conversation, she heard Kevin ask for her telephone number.

Her roommate was equally surprised. Her quick, appraising glance at Ellen seemed to be saying: Why you? What is it about you that’s so special? She was, however, in possession of some interesting facts about Kevin, which she gave to Ellen. He came from an Ohio family that had
something to do with steel. In New York, where he lived alone, he had an apartment near the World Trade Center.

“He will probably never call you,” the roommate predicted. “He’s too full of himself to bother with an undergraduate. You’re too young for him.”

But he was not “full of himself”; he was, as it turned out, most modestly understated, and he did call. When the telephone rang a few days later, it was to ask her when she would be back in the city. For Christmas vacation, she told him, and gave him her number there. Her father noted with unusual approval that he did not “pick her up” in the lobby downstairs, but came straight to the apartment to introduce himself to her parents.

“Which is what a man was always expected to do, you know.”

Things moved with remarkable speed after that. On the first time they went to a Broadway show. On the second they danced in the Rainbow Room. On the third time they had dinner quite far downtown in one of the newest French restaurants that had gone to the top of the critics’ list. The lights were hazy, the murals transported you,
depending on where you looked, to the shores of Brittany, or southward to the Alpilles, and the tables were far enough apart for intimate conversations to be held in private.

It was not that their conversation was what you would necessarily call “intimate.” It was explanatory. Ellen learned that he was already fluent in three languages and was trying to find time for the study of Mandarin, because China, whether we liked it or not and he did not, was sure to become the dominant force on the planet. Kevin learned that she was hoping to get a wonderful position in a major museum of art somewhere, practically anywhere, because such jobs were hard to get. At any rate, she was bound to enter the world of art; she loved it ardently, and though really she had no talent to speak of, had even tried drawing and painting on the side. They had kindred interests and some acquaintances in common.

All these things in an odd, vague way made him less a stranger, so that when they could no longer keep sitting at table drinking wine, of which Ellen was not particularly fond because it made her sleepy, followed by coffee, which woke
her up—when they positively had to leave to stand outdoors in a blast of icy wind and he suggested that they warm themselves in his apartment, it seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

In those years, she often thought later after she was married, people had been amazingly casual about having sex. Quite simply, going to bed together after a few days’ acquaintance was expected, even if you did not especially want to do it. Ellen really did not want to; no one had moved her deeply, as you were supposed to be moved; she wondered whether possibly no one ever would.

Kevin was gentle, yet not too gentle. He thought she was absolutely beautiful, absolutely wonderful, and told her so, over and over. Then he took her home in a taxi, saw her to the door, kissed her, and the next day sent her a magnificent bouquet of two dozen roses.

Maybe the roses were really too obvious. If I were a parent, she thought, I would put two and two together. But her mother had just had another chemotherapy treatment and was too miserable to notice anything, while her father, she
guessed, was so taken with Kevin Clark’s person and status that he would question nothing. Anyway, there was nothing he could do about the situation, and undoubtedly he knew it.