Men and Angels (3 page)

The way Hélène said “lovely work” made Anne feel she put it in the category of needlepoint or macramé. She answered noncommittally; she didn’t want to talk about her work to Hélène. It was too fragile, too newborn; she felt unwilling to expose it to any but the most friendly gaze. She explained to Laura that she had a new job writing the catalogue notes to accompany an exhibit of the work of Caroline Watson, an American painter of the early twentieth century whose work had been neglected for years.

“I need to be in New York now a few days a week, which is why child care has become a problem.”

As she looked at Laura she thought again what a problem it was. Her present arrangements were as bad as they could be and still be considered functional. The girl whom she’d hired in the spring to live in, beginning in September, had decided, over the course of the summer, not to return to school, and as a last resort, Anne had turned to Mrs. Davenport, a woman in her sixties whom people employed only when no one else was available. Peter hated her. He said her bad breath made him sick. He said she wouldn’t let him keep his night light on and she told Sarah that if she looked in the mirror too long the Devil would appear. Peter and Sarah hadn’t been told anything about the Devil, so Sarah was riveted; she sat at Mrs. Davenport’s knee, asking questions about the Devil every night. Peter said those are the nights she has nightmares. Every night that you’re home late, he added, looking at his mother as Cotton Mather might have looked at a Salem woman in the stocks. Besides her personal shortcomings Mrs. Davenport refused to stay after nine o’clock; she wanted to be home to feed her husband his dinner, which he’d had, she told Anne—suggesting Anne’s instability, her own permanence—at five-thirty every night of his life.

“I’ve just come back from England,” Laura said. “I was working for two professors, from Syracuse, taking care of their two children. They were on sabbatical. I could give you their name and address.”

Anne wrote down the information. “I was in London for a summer, when I was about your age,” she said. “I still think of all those wonderful places: the Tate, the British Museum, Kew Gardens. I was enormously happy there.”

Laura smiled blankly at Anne, as if Anne were talking about a place she’d never been. Her patient smile, her silence, made Anne feel foolish, inexpert and young. She talked about her children.

“Sarah is six,” she said, “and Peter is nine.” She spoke about her children to Hélène and Laura in a way that made her feel that she was betraying them at every word. She presented the image that the outside world saw: Sarah is independent; Peter is intellectual. She heard herself reduce them, flatten them out. But that was all she wanted to give these women, a reduced image, not the intimate full figures, breathing, vulnerable, that she saw. So she stopped talking about them; she did the other thing she did when she was nervous, she offered them food.

“No, no,” said Hélène, fluttering her hands. “It is Thursday, you see. Each Thursday Laura and I participate in a program run by the Student Christian Center. We fast, then contribute what we would have spent on food to a fund for world hunger. It is a way of feeling the problem in your gut.”

Hélène pronounced the word “gut” as if it were the German for good. Anne felt herself encased entirely in flesh.

“It’s a wonderful idea,” Anne said. “Really admirable. But you must come back when the children are here, someday that’s not a Thursday. A weekend, perhaps. One Saturday you could come for lunch.”

At the door, Hélène kissed Anne on both cheeks. “
A bientôt
,” she said. “I must see these terrible children of yours soon, before they are off for college.”

“I’ll see to it,” Anne said, realizing she’d decided not to hire Laura. She knew her own unfairness. The girl had done nothing, said almost nothing. But something about her—her too heavy, too carefully darned sweater, her large feet and disproportionately delicate hands, and probably, in fact, her friendship with Hélène had made Anne feel that Laura wasn’t a person she wanted to share her house with. She wondered what excuse she’d give to Laura and to Hélène for not hiring her when, after all, she really needed help.

She went to the refrigerator to choose what she would have for lunch. Before Hélène and Laura’s visit, she’d thought she’d have an orange, half an avocado, and a wedge of
chevrotin
left over from a piece she’d treated herself to the day before. Had her family been with her, she would have had to eat things that were more substantial, more communal, less expensive: she’d looked forward to her imagined lunch. But now she’d just been with people who were fasting the whole day. How could she eat such an enjoyable, such a constructed meal? She fixed herself a peanut butter sandwich, and, while she ate, read a book she’d just got from the Selby College library, a biography of Inigo Jones. After lunch she mopped the floor, thinking how strange it was that every summer everyone in Jacobean London but the poor left the city, as a matter of course, to preserve their lives.

She looked at the clock. It was two-thirty; soon the children would be home. She waited for the sound of their arrival as if she were dressed for a party, listening for a taxi. No one had told her what it would be like, the way she loved her children. What a thing of the body it was, as physically rooted as sexual desire, but without its edge of danger. The urge to touch one’s child, she often thought, was like, and wasn’t like, the hunger that one felt to touch a lover: it lacked suspense and greed and the component parts of insecurity and vanity that made so trying the beloved’s near approach. Once the children were in the house, the air became more vivid and more heated: every object in the house grew more alive. How I love you, she always wanted to say, and you can never know it. I would die for you without a thought. You have given to my life its sheerest, its profoundest pleasure. But she could never say that. Instead, she would say, “How was school?” “Was lunch all right?” “Did you have your math test?”

They ran into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator. Peter began telling her about his science project. He and Daniel Greenspan were going to build a solar clock. It had begun already, that queer thing: her son knew more about some things than she did. He was trying to explain something about a pendulum; she didn’t understand. Impatiently he shoved the cookie he was eating into his mouth and fiddled in his school things for a pen and paper. He began to sketch: here is the sun, here is the clock, this is the force of gravity. For years, she felt, males had been impatiently making sketches of the world for uncomprehending females. But his sketch was good; he made her see something, and he was proud of her pride in him, she could see it: his teaching had given him a courtliness so he could drop favor over his mother’s shoulders like the mantle of a king. He was impatient to get on with things, to leave her. He ran when he heard Daniel knocking at the door.

It shocked her when she’d learned how much she could like or dislike other children, depending on their treatment of her own. She’d always adored Daniel, she’d known him all his life. He shared with Peter a precocious, dry intellectuality, a pointed energy, and an unpopularity with other children, but he added to it an irony that Peter could never approach.

“I’m going to get dressed for ballet class,” said Sarah. Then she was gone, they were both gone. Anne was alone again, but this time she felt lonely. No one would ever know the passion she felt for her children. It was savage, lively, volatile. It would smash, in one minute, the image people had of her of someone who lived life serenely, steering always the same sure, slow course. As it was, as they would never know, she was rocked back and forth, she was lifted up and down by waves of passion: of fear, of longing, and delight.

It was such an odd thing, motherhood. She didn’t understand how people could say, “She’s a good mother,” in the same way they said, “She’s a good neurosurgeon,” or “She sings well.” It wasn’t a skill: there was no past practice to be consulted and perfected by strict application and attention to detail; there was no wisdom you could turn to; every history was inadequate, for each new case was fresh—each new case was a person born, she was sure of it, with a nature more fixed than modern thought led people to believe. She loved that, that her children were not
tabulae rasae
, but had been born themselves. She loved the intransigence of their natures, all that could never be molded and so was free from her. She liked to stand back a little from her children—it was why some people thought her, as a mother, vague. But she respected the fixity of her children’s souls, what they were born with, what she had, from the first months, seen. She admired, for example, Peter’s fastidiousness—it wasn’t only physical, although it had its roots in the physical—she admired it even when it exhausted her and made her feel quite futile. Since he could talk he had come to her in positions of outraged justice with questions that had no answers, although she agreed with him they should have had: “Why did Jessica’s father go away and never see her?” “Why does Amanda like to play with Oliver better than me when I share all my toys and he hogs his?” He was always ardent; he took things to heart, and she was proud of his seriousness, his suffering, his fine, inflexible standards, but she wished she could protect him from himself. He would not be easily beloved, she could see that, but perhaps he would be honored. Perhaps, she had often thought, with a thrill of atavistic pride, an ancient, probably ignoble pride open only to the mothers of sons, he would one day be feared.

Sarah was nothing like him. She stood back from life, found it amusing, looked on it with a slant, ironic gaze that judged, particularly the actions of adults,
de haut en bas
, with kindness, but with condescension. She had more hidden life than Peter, her dramas were inward, sometimes only to be guessed at or eavesdropped upon.

Anne worried that Sarah’s evenness excluded her from too much maternal concern. Perhaps in apportioning her worries toward her son, she was depriving her daughter. But when she thought of Sarah’s future she could only imagine the two of them—she and her daughter—sitting across from each other, drinking coffee, having wonderful conversations, full and calm and rich. She could only imagine a good life for her daughter; it was for her son alone she feared. But it was absurd, these fears and these imaginings. There was no way of knowing what would happen to them, and, she often felt, not much that you could do to influence the course of things determined so much by their natures and their fates. All you could do was, while they were still children, keep them safe.

With the children gone, she sat down at the kitchen table and tried to pay bills. But Laura Post’s face kept swimming up, past numbers and receipts and postpaid envelopes, to the top of her mind. She hadn’t liked her, although she tended to like most young women. They interested her; their position was so unreal. It was assumed by everyone but them that they were easily desired, that they held some power in their skins, that they had merely to walk down a street, to turn a shoulder, to have laid down before them whatever they wanted. But it wasn’t like that for them at all. They were nearly always unhappy. Young men were timid or voracious; they were afraid to talk. And young women had been made to feel that they must engage in the most intimate of physical acts with whoever was their current lover but must never ask, “Do you like me?” “Does this make you happy?” or even “Will we see each other again?” And what of the ones outside the circle of desirability, by choice or nature, the ones who weren’t beautiful or who felt for the young men beside them only coldness or contempt? Suppose they were ambitious; suppose their greatest passion went toward some clear, consuming work? Suppose they were naturally ironic or depressed?

She wanted to tell them, Michael’s students who came to the house, who talked to her as if they were looking for clues to a crime or buried treasure, that it would be much better for them in ten years. That they could get married if they wanted to (for it was marriage, still, that worried them, though they weren’t allowed to say so now) and that the marriages would probably be happy. She wanted to say that, though she knew it was not at all likely: young men didn’t seem much interested in marriage, and most marriages were bad.

But Laura was unlike any of the young women she knew. It was her fault for not liking Laura, she told herself. If she felt reproached by someone wearing a darned sweater and fasting one day a week, it was something in her that was amiss. Yet she really couldn’t hire her. She’d have to make do with Mrs. Davenport. And Sally Devereux, who worked in the college employment office, had told her that if she would just hang on, something would turn up. People were always deciding they hated their roommates, or they went broke or their fathers lost their jobs. It was just a matter of time, Sally had assured her. Meanwhile, she could hold off going to the city more than one day a week; there was still a lot she could do at home.

She wondered what she would have done about Laura if Michael had been home. The decisions about the course their lives would take had always been made jointly, so their individual positions had been concealed, as the parts of a machine are concealed when it works. Married at twenty-two, they’d had no experience in dealing with the outside world separately as adults.

You’d done nothing yet at twenty-two, she thought, knew nothing. And yet, she thought, they’d been right to marry. What else could they have done? Gone off somewhere, each separately? Taken up with others? They’d thought of it, of course, for it was unfashionable, highly unfashionable, what they’d done: one simply didn’t get married at twenty-two in 1968. But anything else would have been false. They were in love; they were going to be in the same graduate school; it would have caused some unease to her family if they’d lived together. And so why not marry?

For, ashamedly, she’d recognized that what she wanted went with marriage. She’d wanted a home not her parents’ and yet not quite a student’s either. She wanted to be an adult. And since she had no money, no profession, only a student’s status, which she was weary of, marriage was a way that she could feel she had closed a chapter of her life—childhood, you could have called it—that she was eager to be rid of and that otherwise she might feel she had indecorously prolonged.