Men and Angels (24 page)

Perhaps the error lay not in what people thought about women, but in what they thought about men. Perhaps there was no such thing as simple physical sex, or at least no affair that was simply physical. People needed all sorts of things from one another, and sex was, in some ways, the most straightforward way of getting them. Michael, for example, must have been missing home; his easiest entrée into someone’s domestic life would have been through a love affair. Charlotte Mistière: a great hostess, aged forty. Of course she could understand the appeal of it—a Frenchwoman, only just older than Michael, with her potpourris in Sèvres dishes and the perfect lunches she would have dreamed up in her seventeenth-century bath—how could he resist it? After all, they’d both known it was partly what he went into French for: that fantasy of a people who knew how to live a daily life with elegance and warmth. It was perfectly easy to understand, when you thought about it; it needn’t seem so terrible. But thought had nothing to do with the stab she felt at the center of her body, the primitive ache, as if a crude stone weapon had been driven through her. It was easy to understand his reasons for doing it; she had some of the same reasons herself. She understood how desire made things seem possible. She, too, felt desire. Only, she was faithful. But possibly he was too. Her feelings about Hélène might have pushed her over some self-invented precipice. But at the center of her body was the wound. Whatever the nature of the weapon, whoever’s the hand that drove it, it had been driven through. She had been violated. Even if she had done it to herself, it had been done. Surely Michael must know something had happened. Knowing her so well, how could he not have seen she was distressed, that she had moved away from him. Perhaps that was the greatest sorrow to her: he hadn’t noticed, or if he had, he’d turned his back. But she had said to him, “Don’t tell me.” So there was nothing he could do.

Anne’s parents came out to greet the car. It saddened Anne to see the children so polite with their grandparents, so held back. She felt the children’s shyness as her own reproach: she should bring them here more often. They were only three hours away. But she had always felt that her parents didn’t take particularly to being grandparents. They weren’t very good at it, not exciting and indulgent as Ben was, or Jane. She wondered if they had liked being parents. It occurred to her that one couldn’t simply say someone was a good parent: one had to be a good parent to
someone.
So her father had been a wonderful father to her, but with Beth he had always bungled. And her mother did far better with Beth than with her. What would Sarah and Peter think as they grew older? She didn’t see her failures as they would.

When they took their coats off, Anne’s mother said defensively, “Things will be quite a bit later than we had hoped. Beth and Richard are snowed in, and they were bringing the turkey.”

“They have access to the only pure turkeys in the world,” Anne’s father said. “You know, turkeys from really good families. Turkeys that don’t fool around.”

“Don’t mock Beth’s concerns, Les. She certainly has a point about all the dreadful things we put in our bodies.”

“If they don’t get here soon, we’re not going to put anything in our bodies,” said Anne’s father. “How long does it take to cook a turkey?”

“It’s not a very big one. And a fresh-killed bird is much faster than a frozen one.”

“You’re hedging, Susan,” said Les Elliott.

“Well, Les, it shouldn’t take more than five hours or so. We’ll have a nice late dinner. It will be European.”

“We’d be glad to help with anything,” said Peter. “Our mother lets us dry the lettuce.” The way he said “our mother” to her own mother made Anne sad.

“Well, why don’t you children help your grandmother, and I’ll take this opportunity to invite my elder daughter on a walk. Michael, you can catch up with the last ten issues of the
New Republic
.”

“That’s terrific restraint, Les,” said Anne’s mother sharply. “You actually let Anne be in the house for five minutes before taking her away.”

Anne was glad that Beth wasn’t there. She could take pleasure in her father’s pleasure in her without worrying about what it was doing to her sister.

“What would you like to do, dear?” Anne’s mother said to Laura.

“I have needlepoint to do,” said Laura, smiling.

“Well, then,” said Anne’s father, “we’re all squared away. Come, fair and tender maiden, I want to show you my latest folly.”

Les Elliott had built a greenhouse. He had a place for vegetables and ferns, but his passion was dwarf irises. It was her father who had taught Anne to garden. She remembered with poignant pleasure the look of his large hands covered with earth, the wet knees of his gardening pants after he weeded. He opened the greenhouse door, and she gave herself over to the sourish, humid air. It was a place, she thought, where no moral act was possible: one could be neither good nor bad in a greenhouse. She didn’t have to worry about being fair to Michael, kind to Laura. She was simply happy in the warm air with her father, touching soil and leaves, following as he praised and muttered and despaired.

“You must bring Beth and Richard when they come. They’ll be impressed with the solar operation,” she said.

“Yes, but they’ll want to talk about it, and they’ll know so much about it and tell me everything that I’ve done that’s wrong. I’m bound to feel like a failure within ten minutes. Come, my dear, let me show you to my irises.”

It was a joke they’d had for years, the stock-in-trade of their mock courtship. “I want to show you to my roses,” said an eighteenth-century gallant to a young beauty, implying the treat would be theirs. Her father said it every time he brought her to his flowers, and she laughed each time.

With pride he showed her the new varieties, purple, veined in lavender, the pale yellow with its definite golden spine, the violet with its center of evening sky, the dreamy white with the hint of pink under the bowl.

“Beautiful, Daddy. You must be so proud of what you’ve done.”

“Are you all right? You and Michael?”

“Fine,” she said. More than anything, she wanted to put her head on her father’s spongy shoulder to say, “I’m afraid my husband’s been unfaithful to me,” to weep for an hour, then to have him stalk into the house and accuse her husband in a flourish of paternal eloquence. But he must never know; he was the last person she could talk to. Long ago, she had stopped telling him when she hurt herself. As a child, his grief for her had made her worry and feel guilty about her own pain. He would never forgive Michael. And she didn’t even know if there was anything to forgive. As it was, his and Michael’s relationship was distant, amicable: two tall men who respected each other as men of principle and hard work. But it was a frail alliance. She sat looking at her father, wanting his protection, protecting him—from the truth of her own nature or of the events, she couldn’t quite be sure which.

“We’re fine,” she said. “It’s hard being separated.”

“Worth it?”

“Daddy, this is the most wonderful thing, this work. I hadn’t realized how much I missed it.”

“Don’t slip back now. Keep it up.”

“I will if I can.”

“You must, darling. You’ve got a first-rate mind. Don’t try to make a lifework of your children. They’re no one’s magnum opus. It would be wonderful if your mother and I could take credit for you. But it seems to me you’ve always been your own invention.”

“I wonder if Beth and Richard are here. You really must bring them out here, Daddy.”

“Yes, I must,” he said. “I’m doing better with her now, I think.”

“You mustn’t favor me so in front of her. You must work at it.”

“I’ll try,” he said, sighing, “but you’re my favorite person in the world. I don’t see nearly enough of you.”

“Come visit
me
sometime.”

“Maybe I will.”

But he wouldn’t, she knew. He was never comfortable in her house; he didn’t like her cooking for him. She thought that probably he didn’t like the idea of her living with another man.

When they walked into the living room, Peter, Sarah and their cousins Liam and Sam were sitting on the couch with their grandmother looking at pictures of their mothers as children. Sam and Liam were eleven and twelve; they seemed enormously adult to Anne, compared to her two children. Beth was carrying her baby, Ariel, in a front pack sling. Anne could hear the baby sucking as she came close to her.

She had always been afraid to touch Beth’s children too fondly, afraid that if they responded to her too warmly their mother would see evidence of a new generation of betrayals.

“I believe someone was just about to say, ‘Wasn’t Anne a beautiful child and wasn’t Beth sturdy-looking.’”

Anne was about to demur that it was Beth who was the lovely child when she saw that Beth and her mother were laughing. She saw that that was what had happened: her mother and sister had absorbed the bitterness they felt toward her, built it into a safe, durable structure that excluded her and made her foolish, while they sat inside, women of the world trading wisecracks. She was hurt for a moment, then relieved. Her sister was no longer quite alone.

“Hello, Daddy,” Beth said, standing on her toes to kiss her father.

“I was hoping you and Richard might take a look at the greenhouse with me. I’d like your advice on the vegetables.”

“Give it a rest, old man,” said Beth. “Just because I caught you with your hand in the cookie jar, you don’t have to do a ballet of liberal guilt.”

“I’d love to see your father in tights,” Susan Elliott said, “the premier danseur in the new production of
The High-Minded Lawyer,
or
You Can Trust Me Even Though I’m a WASP
.”

Everyone laughed, and Anne pretended to, so as not to appear conspicuous. People thought it was all right to laugh at her father. He was a nice man; he was so successful.

“You’ll all be sorry when I install a barre and a full-length mirror in the living room. And lots of pretty ballerinas.”

Don’t, Daddy, Anne wanted to say. You haven’t the knack, and it makes it worse.

Sarah said, “I know the five positions.”

“Will you do them for us?” Anne asked.

With tremendous seriousness, Sarah did the five ballet positions she had learned in school. Her little-girl belly stuck out in a most unballerina-like way, but her arms were in perfect alignment.

Everyone clapped for her, and Beth’s baby began crying.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with her today,” said Beth. “I guess she’s picking up on my uptightness. It’s incredible, the symbiosis.”

“I envy you, nursing another one. I was brokenhearted when I weaned Sarah,” said Anne.

“You could do it if you really wanted to, Anne. It doesn’t take brains, you know,” said Beth.

“I think it takes more patience and generosity than I have left at this point,” Anne said.

“Well, I hear you’re very grand now with your lady painter,” Beth said.

“She was a wonderful painter, a very courageous woman. I think her life would really interest you, Beth.”

“It probably would, if you weren’t the world’s expert,” Beth said.

Beth was in therapy; she was being counseled to be “up front in her aggressions.” She had told Anne that it was very important, “for my life” she had said, that Anne put up with her aggressiveness and not try to defend herself. For a couple of years she said to Anne, “That isn’t much considering what I’ve had to put up with from you for thirty-two years.” Anne had agreed; Beth could insult her publicly, she would be silent. But she found the process dispiriting and exhausting. She didn’t believe it would ever end; besides, there was nothing new in all of it, it had been years since she had said a word when Beth attacked her, and Beth had attacked her ever since she’d learned to talk.

“I had almost caught up with you,” said Beth. “Then you pulled this out of the hat.”

“It was pulled out of the hat for me,” said Anne apologetically.

“I almost impressed Daddy with the farm and our antinuclear activity. He almost thought I was a person with a mind. Almost. But now I’m back at the bottom of the class.”

“Beth, dear, if the planet survives, it will be because of the energy and responsibility of people like you and Richard,” Lester Elliott said, putting his hand on her shoulder.

Anne felt tears start at the back of her eyes. Quickly, she was able to stop them. She could bear her mother’s nudging her out into the cold, but she couldn’t stand her father’s leaving her there while he made his way to the fire. In the middle of her parents’ living room she stood, a large ungainly child, friendless and wordless in the company. She knew that Michael knew what she was feeling and would help her if she walked across the room to him. But she had forfeited her right to his help, or he had forfeited his right to give it to her. One or the other, depending upon whether he’d in fact been unfaithful, or she’d imagined it.

It was late when they left; they wouldn’t be home till two in the morning. Yet Anne liked the feeling of them all there in the car, warm and tired and not talking. It was the first time all day she felt family comfort. No, she thought, that wasn’t true. There had been the time with her father in the greenhouse, there had been the children on the floor with their presents. Michael had been kind and helpful, but there was something between them. That it might be of her own invention made it no less real.

So now, with the children asleep in the back of the car, with speech impossible for a while, she allowed herself, out of sheer hunger, to feel some closeness to her husband. She was grateful for the way he had behaved to Beth. He had been silent when Beth accused him of taking money from a CIA-based operation. It was something Michael had researched scrupulously; it was simply untrue. She saw the effort that it took him to look down at his plate, to say it was hard to figure out who the villains were, and then to have Beth reply, “Not if you have nothing to gain from the villains.”

She was sorry that Laura had been left out of things, but Laura hadn’t done much to change the situation. The children spent very little time with her, Anne’s mother had tried to talk to her but had quickly given up, and Anne’s own attempt to have Beth and Laura talk about handicrafts—Beth wove—was a failure. Beth kept trying to make a point about the alienation of modern man from craft, from ordinary objects. She wanted Laura to agree with her on the superiority of natural dyes and the excellence of the craftsmanship of “so-called primitive peoples.” There was no entry possible into this conversation for Laura, and Beth lost interest in her when she realized that Laura was working on a design of Minnie Mouse for Sarah’s winter jacket.