Men and Angels (27 page)

Nevertheless she was part of a couple. There were things she wanted to say only to Michael; things she could say only to him. She’d imagined a rich, figured cloth she would weave for him while they were together again; she could tell him about Caroline, about Jane. She could let him know what had happened to her life since Caroline had entered it. She could ask him things about the artistic climate of Paris in the early teens. She could explain to him the odd set of feelings she had about Caroline as a mother; how on some days she grieved for Stephen and her heart for Caroline became a heart of stone, she felt herself the accuser, bristling with justice. But on some days, when she’d looked at one of the paintings or read a particularly engaging letter, she forgot about Caroline’s inadequacies as a mother. The image of the suffering Stephen faded in her mind, as it had so easily done in Caroline’s. What does that mean about me as a mother, as a scholar, she wanted to ask. And Michael was the one person she could ask, himself a scholar and the father of her children. But now, having felt all that she did toward him, she was shy. She didn’t know how to begin a conversation with him. She couldn’t pick up the thread. It occurred to her, though, that they had to talk about Laura. That was a practical issue; it affected, immediately, all their lives. Whatever the state of their relationship, they inhabited a family. And she needed his help.

Laura’s Christmas present had shown her that she would have to work hard to keep distant from her, yet to maintain a smooth relationship. She saw that her kindness to Laura—if it was that; more properly, she thought, it should be named cowardice—had been misinterpreted. It had happened to her all her life. She had been kind to people when they had wanted her to love them, so they felt betrayed. But it was worse with Laura. What she had felt for people, what they mistook for love, could have been anything from mild affection to disregard. But every day that Laura lived beside her in the house, she disliked her more. Some days, even the simplest civilities were grueling to her. Yet every time she turned away from Laura, she felt Laura’s yearning, like a furnace left on in a summer house. She knew that Laura craved love. But the best Anne could do was to keep herself from being cruel.

How could you keep yourself from wanting to do damage to the spy, the watcher at the window? For his knowledge could only be theft. She had to stop thinking that way. She needed Michael’s help.

“Tell me what you think of Laura,” she said.

“I think she’s kind of pathetic. Lonely, empty in some dreadful way. But that emptiness makes her good with the kids. She has a terrific amount of patience. People whose lives are really full aren’t the best with children. They don’t have that endless time that children need.”

“What a terrible thought. It can’t be true that children should be brought up by old people or idiots. They’d all grow up dreadful bores or greedy for attention.”

“I know. But I’m trying to make you feel better about living with someone who gives you the creeps.”

“Is it that evident?”

“To me it is.”

“What about to her?”

“Of course not. She’s in love with you.”

“Oh, Michael, don’t say that. That really gives me the creeps.”

“Don’t worry about it. I don’t think she lies awake dreaming of your sweet flesh. I’m sure it’s on a much higher plane.”

“That’s almost worse. Besides, I think she’s sleeping with Adrian. Should I get rid of her?”

“Who would you replace her with? And what would you do while you were finding someone? It wasn’t easy to get her.”

“The truth is I need her. I can’t get this work done without her. And she
is
good with the kids. They seem fine, don’t they?”

“Never better. They’re much more independent of you. Which is great by me. How about you?”

“I don’t notice it, so it must be all right.”

“In any case it’s only another five months. Then you’ll have me to contend with.”

“That will be awfully nice,” she said, wishing she could have said it purely.

She moved toward him. Give me a sign, she cried out to him silently, let me know that you haven’t been with anybody else. But his eye was on the rearview mirror; they were about to be overtaken by a truck.

“Have you met any nice people working at the gallery?” he asked.

“No, they’re all horrible. They think I’m Ben’s mistress and that’s why I’m doing the catalogue.”

“It’s only because you’re beautiful,” he said proudly. “Men suspect a woman if she’s beautiful.”

“And hate her if she’s not.”

“Actually, men prefer their colleagues plain. It’s part of Hélène’s great success.”

It was the first time Michael had said anything even mildly negative about Hélène. Was it his gift to his wife? Was he acknowledging that Hélène had done mischief? Was he, with great tact, telling her he knew she had suffered, and that he was sorry? Even the imagination of his act brought her closer to him. And it had pleased her to hear him call someone she disliked plain. It was so complicated, it was almost comic—all that life between the sexes, all that must be left unsaid. She looked out the window. They had crossed a river. Icy patches broke and moved across the water like slow gray boats.

Jane stood with Ben in the doorway blinking, for the sun on the snow was dazzling, dropping rich disks like jewels onto the flat whiteness of the yard. No one, it seemed, had walked there, not an animal or a bird; it was a stretch of surface and of light. Anne envied Caroline and people who could understand, in an instant, the implications of that small space, who could make relations come to be where she saw none, and could do it without ever searching after language.

Coolly, Jane surveyed Michael. It was as Anne’s husband she surveyed him first. Anne saw Jane’s eye flick from her to Michael, back and forth, like a bird choosing branches. She cast on them her searching intelligent look, the look that always surprised Anne when she met it, for it was the look of a dark-eyed person, yet Jane’s eyes were in fact a light gray-brown. Looking at those eyes directly, you could imagine them easily weeping. But looked at by them, you had the impression of being fixed by a sharp, precise instrument. Having looked at Michael as Anne’s husband, Jane, Anne could see, encountered him simply as an attractive man. She must always have known herself to be a beauty, must always have known—it would have marked the end of childhood for her—that the glance she directed toward a man would be returned with pleasure. Anne watched Michael smiling back at Jane with no fear in his eyes. She saw the gallantry, which must have something of relief in it, bestowed on a beautiful old woman by a young man. The relief because they knew nothing was expected of them as the hale, prize animals they were, that their power would not be put to the test. She pitied the situation of men; no wonder they were so often vengeful.

“My dear boy, what a fine sight you are,” said Ben, embracing Michael. “This is Jane, whom you have doubtless heard of.”

Jane gave her hand to Michael and welcomed him to her house.

“I feel like a bit of an interloper here, as if I were the only one who didn’t speak the language,” Michael said.

“How did you come by such becoming modesty?” said Jane, cocking her head flirtatiously. “Handsome young men don’t usually see the need of modesty. There’s no profit in it for them. It must be that living with Anne has brought out your finer instincts. Let me show you my house.” She took Michael’s arm, leading him through the door in a way that told the others clearly that she did not want them to follow.

“How was Christmas, darling?” Ben asked, pouring her a glass of wine.

“I’m a fool about Christmas. I get caught up in it every time. Isn’t it funny how some ages were good at some holidays, like Christmas in the Middle Ages. The Renaissance was better at Easter. The nineteenth century had marvelous Fourth of Julys.”

“What are we good at?”

“I don’t know. Nothing, really. Did you have Christmas with Jane?”

“Oh, yes. The two of us and Betty the Basher and her children. Very edifying.”

“What was she like with her children?”

“Afraid to cross them. They’ll obviously grow up tyrants. She’ll never be able to correct them, she’s so appalled at what she’s done.”

“How do you go on, knowing you’ve done something unforgivable?”

“Oh, darling, I don’t know. I’ve always been put off by the workings of human beings. That’s why I went in for paintings. All that marvelous surface.”

“Were you in touch with your family on Christmas?”

“Yes, certainly. They all sent cards. Of course, my children have been middle-aged for years: they’ve been on their own for ages.”

Anne could never comprehend Ben’s detachment from his family. It saddened her, frightened her, perhaps most of all disoriented her that a man so richly, fully human, such a splendid friend, could be entirely devoid of family feeling. When Ben spoke of his family, she always wondered if one day her children would speak of their family like that. She had thought it would be Peter, but as the children aged, it became clear that Sarah was in far less need of her family than her brother was. Sarah never presented her mother with a soul open and bleeding; always there was some reserve. Some self-protection, some self-nourishment. If anything happened, it would be Peter who would remember and mourn.

“In working on the diaries,” she said, “I’ve found a reference to an article Caroline wrote for a magazine that Stephen briefly published.”

“My dear, I’m utterly astonished. How unlike her to write something for public consumption about her painting. I wonder why she did it.”

“Well, it was Stephen’s magazine.”

“Ah, yes, Caroline always loved mixing generosity with some project that smacked of self-reliance.”

“Come and have lunch,” said Jane, bursting into the room. Her ten minutes with Michael had made her ten years younger. Laughing, she poured soup, cut bread, served salad, drank her wine. How nice it all is, Anne thought, the four of us together. Perhaps we should all live together. The children would love it, and the older people wouldn’t have to be afraid of a future of boredom and loneliness. Quickly she ate a piece of bread. Whenever she drank too much, she contemplated asking people to move into her house.

“I see you have a lot of Simone Weil,” said Michael to Jane. “I’ve been trying to write about her in the tradition of French classicism. Her essay on the
Iliad
, particularly.”

“How splendid that is,” said Jane. “‘Most of the world has gone by far from hot baths.’”

“Perfectly ghastly,” said Ben, “like every word out of that neurotic’s mouth. Michael, be a dear boy and don’t go on about Mademoiselle Weil. It’s bound to make Jane and me come to blows. All that hatred of the flesh. And any moment Jane will declare she must sell all her goods, give them to the poor and work in a blacking factory.”

“That’s Dickens, darling, not me,” said Jane, prepared to ignore him. “It was Simone Weil who brought me to a religious life. Well, she and George Herbert.”

“How so?” asked Michael.

Anne was embarrassed. She thought that religious people shouldn’t talk about such things in public; it was like a libertine bragging in front of virgins. But Michael, she knew, had no such qualms. To him a religious disposition was only one more example of odd human traits quite randomly bestowed, like buckteeth or perfect pitch. Anne felt it was something powerful and incomprehensible. It made people behave extraordinarily; it made them monsters of persecution, angels of self-sacrifice. How could it be talked about at lunch?

“Well, you see,” said Jane, “I was overcome with the sense that there was no forgiveness for me. That in not loving my husband I had killed him. That I couldn’t make it up to him, I could only live doomed.”

“Jane, I beg you. When you talk like this I begin to get the most dreadful headaches. Stephen always had weak lungs. He was always depressed. He drank too much before you ever met him. Do let’s stop. At Oxford there’s a rule: No serious conversation at table. Very sensible, I always thought.”

“All right, darling,” Jane said, taking Ben’s hand. “Let’s talk about something perfectly trivial. Let me tell you how the bread you’re eating now is baked. I shall open to you the secrets of my oven. Perhaps I’ll write a cookbook. What d’you say, Anne? Let’s collaborate. We’ll call it
A Cookbook for Literate Women.
”

Anne smiled. She wished Ben hadn’t stopped Jane as she was beginning to move away from the topic of religion to the topic of her marriage. Why was Ben like that? And why had Jane given in to him so easily? Was it because they were lovers? Was it because she feared that in crossing Ben, in revealing the secrets of her heart, she would be less attractive to Michael? Anne was sure that it was one of those female silences, one of those feints and dodges called good manners that had everything to do with sex.

Michael left on January seventeenth. The children behaved badly. His leaving again frightened them. His having gone away and then come back, rather than suggesting his eventual return, only stressed in their minds the precariousness, the unpredictability, of adult life. In the days before her father’s leaving, Sarah spilled her milk at every meal and then whimpered and trembled as if she were about to be whipped. Peter grew fanatical. He went over his collections of coins, leaves, rocks, toy dinosaurs, convinced that someone had been tampering with them. He accused his mother several times of getting his things out of order when she cleaned his room. Only Laura carried on as she always had, wiping up Sarah’s messes, answering Peter’s accusations calmly, as if they were reasonable. The children reserved their keenest anger for their mother, knowing she wasn’t leaving. When Peter’s tears stopped in the car on the way home from the airport, and he noticed that his mother wasn’t crying, he furiously accused her of hardness of heart. “You don’t even care that he’s alone in that airplane. He’s putting his life in the hands of
strangers
.”

Where had Peter learned so early the rhetoric of pulp fiction? She didn’t find
True Confessions
under his bed; he didn’t spend his afternoons watching
The Guiding Light.
And yet he had always seen life painted in the tones of melodrama: railway accidents, false promises and sudden final partings were the landscapes of his dreams. “John Barryless,” his father called him; she saw him as Henry Irving in
The Bells.
But his fears, however overexpressed, were real. He couldn’t sleep the night his father left. Anne understood, she felt something like it. His walking away from them at the airport meant the end of something: the dull, potent life of holiday was over, the long afternoons of food and talk, the mornings with the children, the late nights lingering over a drink.