Men and Angels (19 page)

The green challis dress she wanted for Laura had caught her eye in the store window because of its brilliant colors. It was a shapeless dress, with long sleeves and a plain collar. Like everything in Lorilard’s, it was overpriced, but on this occasion, that, too, pleased her. She thought it was perfect for Laura. She bought, as well, a pair of green wool tights and a long royal-blue wool scarf. Laura could wear the tights with the dress, they would be warm and pretty; she could wear her sandals with them indoors. And, for a while, she could wear the wool scarf with her shapeless brown sweater. When Anne asked Laura if she had a winter coat, she had said she didn’t need one.

At eleven o’clock, Anne asked Laura to come into the kitchen.

“I want to give you your present,” she said.

Slowly, as if she were in a trance, Laura unwrapped the package. She lifted the dress out of its wrappings, held it up, folded it, and put it back into the box.

“It’s very nice, Anne, thank you,” she said, without expression.

Anne panicked. “If you don’t like it, I can take it back.”

“No, I wouldn’t do that.”

“You could wear it with the green tights. It would be nice and warm. I thought you could wear it for the party if you wanted to.”

“All right.”

“Only if you want to,” Anne said.

“Should I try it on now?”

“If you want to, sure, yes, that would be fine.”

Alone in the kitchen, Anne felt clumsy and embarrassed. Had she offended Laura? Had she bought her something she hadn’t liked? Laura’s response was so peculiar that she had no way to understand it. It made her feel hot, apologetic, as if she were about to be sick at the dinner table. It was rare in her experience to so miscalculate, and she didn’t know where she had gone wrong.

In a minute, Laura was in the room again. She was wearing the dress, the green tights. But she was also wearing the hiking boots that Anne had bought her. Anne felt the color rise in her face. The boots made the dress look ridiculous. Any grace it might have lent to Laura’s body the boots caricatured and made grotesque. Cruelly, deliberately, Anne felt, they mocked the idea of the gift. Laura stood there in the kitchen, staring ahead of her with a perfectly blank face. She looked like a farm wife coming into town to have her teeth pulled.

It was not possible to imagine that Laura was doing this to punish her, to let her know that she knew that Anne fantasized her improvement. She had to watch out for this new tendency, this suspiciousness that kept rising up in her. Was it living without Michael that was doing it to her? Was it the pressure of her work? Was she fulfilling the dire prophecies about women whose work took over their lives?

She was glad she’d decided to take Laura to the Health Food Restaurant rather than to Marcel’s before Laura had managed to annoy her. Otherwise she would have suspected herself of choosing the less expensive restaurant as a punishment. But really, it would have been absurd to spend thirty dollars on a lunch for the two of them. It wasn’t the sort of thing Laura cared about, she’d made that very clear.

Resentment made Anne feel she had to force the conversation. They talked about the children; Anne could see that Laura understood them very well, for Laura did not fall into the clichés about her children that so many other people did, and Anne was grateful. By the time the lunch came, she was feeling sympathetic.

“When did you lose your parents?” Anne asked, over dessert.

“I didn’t. They’re still living,” Laura said, looking at Anne and smiling, as if her mistake were a minor faux pas.

“I’m terribly sorry, Laura. I thought you’d told the children you had no parents.”

“Well, I’m estranged from my parents. So I thought I’d just say it that way to the children. I thought they’d understand it better.” She smiled again. “Do you think I should tell them the truth?” she asked, in a way that made Anne feel it made very little difference to her one way or another, it was Anne’s responsibility to decide.

“I’m not sure now, Laura,” Anne said, her small reserve of goodwill depleted by the strangeness of what Laura had done and her strange response to it. “I’ll have to think about it. On the whole, I try not to lie to them.”

“I wasn’t really lying, Anne,” said Laura, smiling. “I was trying to make it easier for them to understand.”

Anne felt the pointlessness of pursuing the topic. With every sentence the problem loomed larger. It was best to let it drop.

She was agitated and resentful through the afternoon. There were more of Caroline’s letters she wanted to read, she was anxious to organize her impressions of the paintings she had seen at Jane’s. And instead she stood in her kitchen, tracing petal shapes on the top of a yellow cake. It made her feel ridiculous. She had done this for the children; they had liked it so much that she extended the ritual for Michael’s birthday. Like so many things one did for children, it was absurd but pleasing, and the pleasure came from the anticipation of their pleasure, and from the quality of symbol one bestowed on an act foolish in itself but capable of being, one imagined, the vessel of memory.

Making a cake for Laura was a parody of all that. She probably didn’t want it, it wouldn’t make her happy, and instead of the accessible and simple feelings of affection she would feel had she been doing this for the children, Anne felt her movements grow jerky with irritation and uneven with dislike. She had to admit it; she didn’t like Laura. Liking—you couldn’t will it: it wasn’t a quality like courage or fair-mindedness that you could work for. And things could only get worse. Living with Laura, every day there would be new opportunities for annoyance. Love grew through observation, she thought; the habits of her husband, her children, had grown dear to her; her knowledge of these habits made up the particulars without which all the feelings they aroused in her would hang on air. But with Laura, each repeated act formed a pattern she watched for evidence, hoping to find some justification for the hardening over, the heaviness she felt when Laura walked into the room.

She was afraid she would ruin the cake from ill-feeling, so it took her three times longer to make than it usually did. The children’s excitement made her jittery; they kept popping into the kitchen to see how she did. Even their determination not to steal small bits of icing, even their praise of her—to them—incredible craftsmanship, annoyed her. When she heard her name called at the kitchen door and realized it was Ed Corcoran, who’d been working upstairs, she jumped, like an embezzler who late at night hears the boss’s key.

“I’m going to be switching the lights off and on in the kitchen, so I thought I’d warn you. I didn’t want you to think you were going crazy, or anything.”

She smiled at him self-consciously. “Yes, I know what I’m doing looks like the work of a crazy person, but really I’m quite sane.”

She explained to him about the shape cakes, and as she spoke she saw him grow entranced.

“You’re a really nice person, to do that, all that work, you know, for somebody who just works for you. Almost nobody would do that. People treat the people who work for them like things. You’re really thoughtful. I bet she feels alone, away from her family on her birthday and all.”

Foolishly, Anne began to blush. Her pleasure at what the man had said was absurd, she told herself. She washed her hands and invited him to have a cup of tea.

“You know, it’s something, birthdays,” Ed said. “Before my wife was sick, she used to go all out, for our oldest, you know, Ed Junior. But Brian’s never even had a home-baked birthday cake. She’s just not up to it anymore. I just buy one from the bakery. I feel bad, though. I feel like a kid should have a home-made birthday cake. Maybe I’ll try it, next year. I never baked anything, though.”

“Oh, it’s not hard. I could show you,” Anne said.

He’d told her about his wife’s sickness. When she’d been pregnant with Brian, she’d developed a brain tumor; they’d been told it would be fatal. But instead it had sentenced her to a life of incompetence, with periods of madness, with the constant presence of headaches and the knowledge that the life she lived would always be out of her control.

“Imagine me baking a cake. I’d have to wear an apron. Imagine me in an apron.” He laughed. “Here, let me try yours on for size.”

Laughing, she untied her apron and handed it to him. He was such a large man, an apron could only make him look ridiculous. And he played up the ridiculousness, did a little dance around the kitchen, flicking the apron skirt like a cancan girl.

“Well, back to work, I gotta get out of here before your company comes.”

He handed her her apron. Slowly she put it on, pleased it had just come from him. She worked happily now, sensing that he watched her, feeling that each thing she did to make the cake look good was winning his regard. She felt herself enlivened by her time with him; he’d turned an act of drudgery into a pleasure. And what was wrong with that? Life was hard enough, she told herself; it was silly to be suspicious of a pleasure so completely innocent.

Adrian was the first to arrive for the party. He walked into the kitchen and embraced Anne as she tried to set out the plates.

“I feel I haven’t talked to you in a year,” he said. “The other night was worse than nothing. You know how Barbara and I have to be unbearable children in front of you.”

She hadn’t thought of that, but of course he was right. “Why do you do it?” she asked.

“Oh, because we know you’re so much better than we are, and it drives us crazy. It makes us itchy to torment each other so that you can step in and save us from ourselves.”

“Well, whatever you thought about me, these days I’m barely decent.”

“Anne, your idea of bad behavior is like Peter’s idea of great wealth.”

She laughed but took his hand so he would know she was serious. “You don’t help me by thinking I’m better than I am.”

“I don’t think you’re better than you are. I think you’re perfect. What’s worrying you that you’ve done?”

“It’s Laura,” she said. “I can’t make myself like her. I’m grateful to her for her help, I think she’s fine with the children, but I can’t make myself feel warm toward her.”

“So you’re having a birthday party for her?”

“It’s her birthday.”

“It’s Hitler’s birthday in April. Maybe you could have a few people over.”

Anne laughed. “She said she never had a birthday party. And the children wanted it. She’s really had such a sad
life.”

“What happened to her?”

“I don’t know exactly, but I just feel it. She seems so unloved, so unmothered. So tremendously unhappy.”

“It’s not your responsibility to make her happy.”

“But she lives in my house. She takes care of my children. And if I
can
make her happy, I should try.”

“What makes you think you can?”

Anne shrugged. “I don’t know. Vanity, maybe.”

“Listen, you’re not her mother. You’re her employer. Your responsibility is to pay her a fair wage and not to overwork her. You don’t have to save her life. Look, you’ve got to do your work, raise your children, vote in the local elections, and be faithful to your husband. You don’t have to take in strays.”

“But who will take them in?”

“Someone who needs them. You have more people in your life already than you can handle.”

“I hate that,” Anne said. “It’s like everybody else in Selby. The wife, the husband, the boy, the girl, the house, the lawn, the college. And there’s all this life outside, never taken in.”

“So take it in, if that’s what you want.”

“But I don’t want
her.
I wish I could get someone else.”

“Now, don’t start that. She does a good job for you. That’s all you have to worry about. The kids are doing fine with her, the house is spotless. She never goes out; she’s not freaked out on drugs or screwing her boyfriend in the living room. Just don’t expect too much from the relationship and you’ll be fine.”

“I’ve already done too much,” said Anne. “I don’t see how I can change it. Look,” she said, pointing to the loaded table.

“All right, so this is her birthday. But after tonight, be a little more reserved. Maybe she’ll make more friends and be less dependent on you; that will ease the burden.”

“Maybe,” said Anne doubtfully.

“What you need is more time with me,” said Adrian. “I’ll show you what it is to be ungenerous. Come and have lunch with me.”

“I’d love it.”

“All right, Tuesday.”

Peter ran into the kitchen. “Hélène’s here,” he said, like a master of ceremonies. “And now we can begin.”

In her green dress, in the candlelight, Laura looked prettier than Anne had ever seen her. She laughed when she had blown the candles out; she made appreciative comments about Peter’s model and Sarah’s turkey. She sniffed happily the lavender soap the Greenspans had bought her, and she tucked one of Adrian’s flowers behind her ear. She propped against the candlestick the framed photograph Hélène had given her. It was a beach scene, and on the sky was printed, “Don’t walk ahead of me, I may not follow; don’t walk behind me, I may not lead; just walk beside me and be my friend.” Lastly, she wrapped the blue scarf Anne had bought her around her neck. At nine o’clock Howard said he would take the children home to bed.

“I just want to thank you all for the happiest birthday of my life. Most of all, I want to thank Anne. For everything. Everything,” she said, kissing Anne’s cheek.

Everyone clapped and raised a glass. “To Anne and Laura,” they shouted.

A
NNE LOVED HER VERY
much; Anne loved her more than anyone had ever loved her. At first she had been frightened to wear the dress. It was beautiful. Too beautiful for you, she thought. “You might as well let your sister have all your clothes, you’ll never be anything but ugly.” Was this a trick to make her uglier? Did Anne want her to say, “This is too pretty for me”? Was she making fun of Laura by giving her the dress?

Picking it up to put it on for the first time, she held it to her. The bright green, like leaves, the bright small dark flowers. And green tights. They will keep you warm, Anne said.