Men and Angels (4 page)

Michael, too, had wanted to close a chapter of the past, which had wounded him, though he was gallant about it. You never would have known what he’d come from. He’d waited a year before he’d brought her home, to the shambles of a house, the nearly ruined mother tipsy every night by eight, so he never felt safe inviting people for dinner. He’d got a motel room for Anne that first visit, and kept her there as much as possible, bringing her to his house for breakfast and lunch only, bringing hamburgers to her room in the motel, in Akron, near the airport so he wouldn’t run into anyone he knew, making love to her over and over, hungrily, gratefully, for he was grateful to her for still wanting him after she’d seen his home, and she was grateful that he’d shown her, grateful for the trust. Grateful for allowing her to understand him, for there was no knowing him without his mother. Poor Lucy, whom she’d genuinely loved but whose death, she must be honest, had been a relief.

Lucy, too, had been gallant, in her way, but her way wasn’t sufficient, not for the mother of a son. Abandoned by her husband at thirty, left with a four-year-old boy, she’d simply turned her back on domestic life, or turned over in the face of it, like a wounded animal, declaring itself helpless, out of the running, everything in its posture expressing its desire to be left alone, simply to be allowed not to take part. Anne often wondered how Michael had physically survived his early childhood. As early as possible, Lucy had abdicated; at eight, Michael had told her, he’d done all the shopping, the cooking such as it was, the little cleaning that got done. She’d thought of him so often, that bookish little boy, going down to the corner store, buying bologna, white bread, iceberg lettuce, Kraft French dressing. Having the sandwiches and salad ready for his mother when she walked in the door, home from work, from the beauty parlor where she was astonishingly successful (her house was a hovel but she was always perfectly manicured, impeccably coiffed). She was greatly charming, and her specialty was brief encounters. To the women whose hair she fixed she was a bolster, a beacon, a tower of strength. And to her son she gave much that was important in a mother’s love: a steamy, rich affection, redolent of the cave. Always he knew she loved him; always he knew himself first in her heart. And for that Anne loved her, was able to see her charm, her virtues. It was lucky that she did; Michael would never have been able to marry someone who didn’t like his mother, who didn’t appreciate her, who was shocked at her domestic chaos or interpreted it as a lack of regard. It was all right for him to lament her failures, to call himself an orphan, but had Anne joined him in condemning his mother, he would have drawn away. What he needed was someone who could be different from his mother yet assure him that his mother had not, as a woman, failed.

It wasn’t difficult for Anne to ignore or see through Lucy’s domestic chaos. She, too, had been brought up in a home bereft of ordinary graces, though its tone was vastly different from the cluttered, sexy, female mess of Lucy’s den. Her mother hadn’t liked home life, so she had not been good at it. Only recently Anne had realized that her mother must have been depressed for years. Only depression could account for her thorough failure, the spiritless performance of a woman of spirit, the gross blundering of a woman whose whole talent was for fineness, for distinction. She thought of the elaborate meals her mother had planned and burned, the dresses she had made and then ruined with her iron, the wallpapers that cried out horribly against the brocade chairs. Then it had changed: she had gone back to school, had got her degree. It was too late for Anne; she was in college by then.

Anne thought of her mother’s wedding picture. Susan Holliwell, Mount Holyoke, class of ’41, looking more the honor student than the bride, holding her bouquet over her head like a basketball or a torch. She was laughing, and one could see the joke: this dashing girl was going to pretend to settle down. How had that girl turned into the mother Anne remembered, covering her ears and begging her children not to fight, crying when her younger daughter refused, for the fiftieth time, to drink her milk? Seeing her mother like this, it had early become clear to Anne that she had to be the mother in the house.

That was the secret of her bond with Michael: they had both been, as children, mothers, both involved in the conspiracy at the center of the lives of children of deficient parents, the conspiracy to keep from the world this shame, this failure, above all to make it appear that the life inside the sorrowing house was the same as any other.

They had married early because they wanted to reinvent domestic life. It was a romance dear to both of them. They never could understand, really, their friends who wanted to live in purposefully ugly places: bare mattresses on the floor, empty tuna cans for ashtrays, posters stuck to the wall with thumbtacks, half falling down. For them a vase of living flowers was a miracle, a loaf of bread they’d made together was a precious vessel holding all they wanted for their lives.

It was only after they’d done it all, bought the house, had the babies, that they realized that others who’d done what they had done thought they were reinventing domestic life. But by that time it was no longer an invention, it was simply their life.

Now all that was interrupted. Michael was four thousand miles away. He’d been gone three weeks, and she felt it still, that hesitancy, that waiting, almost as if she heard him, as if, any minute, she might see him in another room. All her ordinary actions seemed unreal and incomplete, as if she were doing them for the camera.

Three weeks he’d been gone and she still slept badly each night. For sixteen years she had held him every night, and now the bed was vacant, a lot abandoned with a half-finished house. Her relation to the children was different too; the rhythm she and Michael heard that told them when the other had become inadequate, impatient, unreasonable, tyrannical or lax was silent. She was alone with the children now; she was alone.

She could hardly believe that they had done it. She tried to remember exactly how it had all started. It had been in a New York City restaurant. Benedict Hardy, whom she’d known since she was twenty and in London with a grant to study the Elgin Marbles, had taken them out to dinner as he did once a year, when he came to New York. He was an eminent British art historian, self-consciously aristocratic and fantastical, whose specialty was nineteenth-century French painting. Each year their night with him stood out from the rest of the year like a secret national holiday in a community of illegal immigrants. This year, when they’d finished their meal, Benedict leaned back and luxuriously lit a cigarette, without a hint of apology, as if it were another course. “I don’t suppose you’d like a job writing a catalogue for me,” he said to Anne, assuming the laconic expression he felt it his duty to adopt whenever he said anything of importance.

He was arranging an exhibit at a gallery in New York of the works of Caroline Watson, a woman whose paintings had been neglected since her death in 1938. She was one of those painters, he explained, who had painted the wrong things at the wrong time. In the late twenties, when Cubism was the rage and Surrealism was following hard on it, she was doing dark Fauve studies of women and children. And landscapes, he said, which no one in fashionable circles considered anything but a genre to induce a blush. “Her misfortune was to be a merely first-rate painter in an age of geniuses,” he finished, leaning back, proud of his aphorism, which he could not just then have invented. He had known her in Paris and London in the twenties. Her daughter-in-law, the heir of the estate, was someone, he said, “to whom I am very much in the nature of being devoted.

“Caroline left America for Paris in the 1880s, never really to return. At thirty-six, to everyone’s astonishment, particularly her father’s—he was very Philadelphia, a banker, right clubs and all that sort of thing—she produced an illegitimate child. A son. Stephen Watson. Poor soul, one of those born miserable. Caroline’s father said he’d cut her off if she brought the boy up anywhere but in Philadelphia. She tried to stick it, but she couldn’t and left the child behind. She said she had to live in France. Stephen drank himself to death at twenty-eight. Everyone said it was pneumonia, but one knew, really. He’d married Jane, and Jane and Caroline were inseparable. They lived together, greatly devoted, until Caroline died. You see, one of the reasons I thought of you, darling Anne, is that Jane, much as I adore her, can be difficult. Would not be everyone’s dish of tea. But you, of course, will be able to see her greatness and to get round the difficult bits. And then there’s your lovely thesis on Mary Cassatt and Eakins. So you’re a natural. It’s a marriage made in heaven.”

He brought them to the gallery to look at some of Caroline’s paintings. It was exciting, in a charged, theatrical way, to enter the building at night, to be cleared by a guard, to watch Ben press a series of numbers on a keyboard at the gallery door, and, magically, to have the door open before them onto the pitch-dark room. Conscious of the potency of his gesture, Ben turned on the lights. He quickly showed them to a back room, not giving them a moment to look at the pictures currently on exhibit, and unlocked the large closet where Caroline’s paintings were stored.

The first two he brought out meant nothing much to Anne; she made polite, graduate-student comments on the landscapes and still lifes. Then he brought out one called
Flowers.
The background was a brownish red; the flowers, on a dark green table, still wrapped in blue paper, seemed hastily laid down. They were full of the energy bestowed on objects by a just completed motion: they had been put down almost carelessly, angrily. And the colors of the flowers, purposely almost unnatural—magenta, cobalt, scarlet—effaced the notion of flowers as things that were in the world to decorate, or to domesticate. They thrummed with an almost animal life; they might be dangerous.

Ben showed her another one, called
Jane.
A woman in a black suit sat in a restaurant. Before her on the table were a cup of coffee and a book. Reading, she leaned her head on her hand—she was wearing an emerald ring. Her hair was the center of the composition; wound around her head, a dense curve, definite and tender, its line shaped the foreground. Around the woman sat the other diners, sketched in lightly, as if they were figures in a dream.

Seeing those paintings, something grew in Anne, something she’d lived with since but hadn’t known before, a push or a desire, like the hunger for a definite but hard-to-come-by food. The paintings made her greedy to be with them, to speak of them: they belonged to her. She saw in her mind a catalogue with the early and late paintings next to one another on the page. She imagined all that she could say, all that could be said by simply comparing them slowly, painstakingly, using everything she knew now, and all that she would learn.

Then she heard Michael and Ben talking behind her. Michael walked toward her, took her hand. “We’re going to be in France next year,” he said.

Michael had a Strafford grant. He was going to change places with Hélène.

Anne looked at Ben. “I’d forgotten,” she said. “We’ll be in France next year.”

“Think about it for a while,” he said. “You could see each other at Christmas. The whole separation would be only eight or nine months.”

“No,” she said. “You’ll have to find someone else.”

“Take this to look at, just for fun,” said Ben, handing a morocco-bound book with the word
Diary
stamped on the front in gold.

That night, while Michael, exhausted by the drive from New York, slept, she read the journal for the first time.

“I must leave, and I will,” Caroline had written at twenty in her journal:

I know what I want to paint, the miracle of atmosphere, invisible, and pure, yet full of conduct, action. And the clarity of water, now the color of pebbles, then suffused entirely with the mood of blue summer. This cannot be seen, only revealed by a film of reflected sky. And the long line of grassy pasture, great trees without undergrowth, snowy geese, bending necks here and there, spreading wings or lowering yellow bills. All this I must set down—but how? Now I paint like an ignorant farmer’s wife, or worse, a lady. But what have I to look at? Pictures of gravy-colored skies with leaves the shade and textures of Brussels sprouts, birds like mashed potatoes, utterly unanimated, without the slightest sense of creatures drawing breath. I will prevail over Papa; I will not relent.

In the back of the diary, Ben had taped an envelope of photographs. The first picture was formal: at sixteen, Caroline stood over her father’s left shoulder, a daunting, judging girl, taller than her brothers, her foot ready to tap impatience on the carpet, or to walk away. The father, in the center, dominated the scene with his serious, formal whiskers and his broad manufactured chest. Next to the father was the mother, looking as if every other word her family spoke might do her injury. On either side of the father and the mother sat small brothers, ready to take the father at his word. Over the mother’s left shoulder stood the other sister, holding her body still, making her shoulders an apologetic curve to keep the family from fighting till the photographer, probably no gentleman, had done his work.

The second photograph showed Caroline on the deck of a ship, laughing with her sister, who looked cold. You could see Caroline thought it a joke, her sister’s coldness, she would make her walk the deck a hundred times. The third picture was Caroline beside a car, clearly her treasure. A stout leg peeked uncomfortably beneath a modern skirt. In the last photograph Caroline stood with her son, looking reluctant and about to walk away. And Stephen’s eyes looked off, with the attitude of someone always ready to accept reproach.

“I will prevail over Papa; I will not relent,” Caroline had written at twenty. And she had done it: had not relented, had prevailed. What was that hard shining thing in the center of Caroline Watson that had never lodged in Anne? All her life she’d been a good girl; all her life she had been pleasing. At the center of her was not something hard and brilliant, but something soft and flat. But as she thought of Caroline, read the diary, looked at the photographs, above all when she thought about the paintings, something embedded itself, dug in, and sharpened. Caroline entered her life. Intrusive, overwhelming, siphoning attention, like a new lover, she entered and took over. She cast her light on everything and colored it, or revealed it as bleak. And, like a lover, she was the vehicle of infidelity, for as Anne felt her longing turn toward Caroline she felt herself more and more distant from Michael. And she felt his perception of her distance, as if he were on a ship anchored at shore, watching her sail out to sea, small, fading out, away from him. It had happened before; it happened, she imagined, in all good marriages, this sailing in and out of intimacy, this removal to a private realm. For privacy, she felt, was one of the important benefits of marriage. It was much easier to have privacy in a marriage than as a single woman; there was time for it, and time to come back out of it, a place to come back to. It didn’t rip the curtain through; it didn’t bring the house down.