Men and Angels (7 page)

“Darling, it’s this brain-damaged child they’ve hired to replace you,” Ianthe was saying. “I don’t know where they found him, the state hospital, no doubt. He’s probably the latest experiment in community care. I know they dope him up and let him out in the morning and send him to me to help me run the gallery.”

“Jack is really very good, Ianthe. If you’ll calm down and explain things to him, I’m sure he can handle everything.”

“There’s no use explaining things to him, my love. He doesn’t have a brain. Simply, physiologically, he doesn’t have one. So there’s no use wasting each other’s time. You speak to him; you’re used to your adorable children. Speak to him as you would to Peter. Or to Sarah, perhaps. Draw him pictures.”

“I’ll speak to him, Ianthe. Only not right now.”

“He’s right here, darling. At my elbow, as usual; he’s free to talk.”

“But I’m not. I’m working. I’ll come over in the afternoon.”

“Oh, excuse me. I forgot that you’d suddenly joined the ranks of the illustrious. Forgive this poor day laborer for daring to interrupt.”

“I’ll come to the gallery this afternoon. I’ll see you at three.” Ianthe’s insults disturbed Anne not at all. It was part of the texture of their friendship. Ianthe felt free to say perfectly dreadful things to Anne, but, unlike the things that Hélène said to her, they were never really disturbing because either they were so far off the mark as to have no wounding power, or they were clearly true, something she’d known about herself forever. And with Ianthe, she had access to a life that had nothing to do with Selby. Ianthe left town on the first bus she could on Thursday afternoons to spend the weekends in New York, where she had an apartment. She was the only person in the town, Anne reckoned, not to own a down coat; in the winter she pushed through the snow in her mink, ruining pair after pair of Charles Jourdan shoes while the rest of the community made its wholesome unbeautiful way, every inch puffed out, protected and concealed. And in Selby, where everyone behaved well, where even homosexuals kept up a premise of solid and undangerous monogamy, Ianthe had flamboyant, public love affairs. Each of her affairs was like a brilliant, terrible child she brooded over—now Medea, now the Angel of the house. It was one of the things Anne admired her for; it took real courage, she felt, at forty-eight to give oneself over so wholeheartedly—the quick rush of initial faith, the brief
luxe
of the heyday of a love affair, the bitter unraveling, and with Ianthe, the long period of diamond vengeance. Her vengeances were splendid. She ended her affair with Adrian Rosen—who was, of all the people in Selby, Anne’s closest friend—by throwing all his clothes into the wood stove and falling asleep in his bed while they burned.

Anne would always be grateful to Ianthe for returning to her her faith in her own abilities. After she’d lost her job at the Gardner Museum in Boston, she’d been convinced she had no talents and no right to the world of work.

It was 1974 when she’d lost the job. The Arabs had raised the price of oil. Of course people would take their money from museums. Nothing to do with you, they reassured her, those silvery administrators telling her that they must let her go. Your work is excellent. It’s just our funding’s been cut way back. And we have to get rid of a few of the younger people.

But how could it not reflect on her, that great exposing beam they cast upon her? Nine other people had been let go, people she respected, whose work she knew had been praised. But three had been kept on, and she hadn’t been one of them. For months, she’d reviewed her performance and her work: what had she failed to do or done too much of? In the end, she felt she simply lacked distinction, that she was the sort of person no one would be afraid to let go: there would be no need to feel uncomfortable, to feel afraid.

She had felt shame then, as she had never in her life felt it before. Always, she had been the one who got the prizes, was accepted into the right schools, earned the high honors. For the first time then, she understood the pain of all the children sent down after missing a word in the spelling bee while she had stood on the stage, triumphant; she understood the desire to hide that friends of hers who hadn’t been let into the right schools had felt. She knew, for the first time then, that failure made you feel like a criminal; that it became a part of your physical life, like the convict’s shaved head. For years she’d felt marked by it, and only Ianthe had allowed her to enter the world again, almost naturally. In praising her—particularly since she praised so rarely—it was as though Ianthe had bought her new clothes and allowed her to leave behind her convict’s suit; it was as if she’d built her a house in which she could grow her hair so that she could, once more, walk out into the street unmarked and common.

Besides all that, Ianthe made her laugh, and she loved to laugh; that was the common thread among her three best friends in town, Ianthe, Adrian and Barbara Greenspan. They made her laugh. She had always known herself to be the perfect straight man; she was like her father in that. It was fine; she enjoyed her friends enormously. And now she could endure Ianthe’s insult, for, after all, she had got her way. She would
not
go to the gallery until afternoon. She could go back to work.

She’d taken over Michael’s study. For days she’d hesitated. The room was his; it was the one room in the house set apart, exclusively owned. Even the air seemed of a different quality: cooler, lighter, as if the children’s flesh, the smells of cooking, the fog of argument, the quick dense breath of sex had not come near it. The books were Michael’s, and the furniture; he had chosen the color of the walls—Williamsburg blue—and the Turkish carpet, light blue and red, the best in the house. On the walls were his pictures, the photograph of Colette, a page from an eighteenth-century edition of
Candide
, the Daumier print she had saved for six months to buy him. She fingered the raised letters on the spine of the bound copy of his dissertation:
The Image of the City in Balzac, Zola, and Proust.

She had been working at the dining room table. That was all right as long as the children were in school or asleep in the evenings. But Laura was around now, and she didn’t feel it was right to limit her free access through the dining room. With Laura around she never felt that she was unobserved.

Yet she had to admire the job Laura was doing; she was wonderful with the children, marvelous around the house. On one of Anne’s days in the city, the refrigerator stopped running. Laura took care of the melting ice cream, running to the floor like a sticky cartoon rainbow; she saved the stews and casseroles and vegetables Anne had spent days cooking and freezing. She scrubbed the floors and moved the refrigerator, stowed the perishables next door at the Greenspans’, kept the milk safe for the children by filling the sink with bags of ice. When Anne got home, there was only the report of a crisis averted, not the desperate physical evidence. Laura had even called the electrician Barbara had recommended, for she saw that the lights were dimming and there had to be a problem with the wiring. The electrician had come and had concurred; he could fix the problem temporarily, but the house would need complete rewiring. Laura had made an appointment with him for Saturday, when Anne would be around to talk to him at length.

Everything was working out extremely well. It was simply that Anne didn’t want a stranger in her house. She was ashamed at her own unreasonableness. She needed help, and certainly Laura did not intrude. She was quiet; she spent a great deal of time reading. Anne knew she had no right to ask her to read in her bedroom instead of the living room.

She sat on the couch and read the Bible. In Anne’s inner life there were no grounds that could allow her to accept her unease about this. Nevertheless it made her uneasy, and she was afraid that Laura sensed it. Laura was sensitive, Anne knew, for she was homeless, and she had the sharp or, rather, limpid understanding of the thoroughly displaced who earn their place by knowing what will be the next thing to occur. What had happened to her parents? Anne knew there must have been something, some clear damaging event, for Laura didn’t speak of her family.

It was hard to say what interested Laura. She was devoted to the children. No one, Anne felt, had ever before satisfied Peter’s enormous craving for attention, had given him so much that there was enough for Sarah’s more modest appetite without making him feel starved. And Laura was fond of doing needlework. She was making a pillow cover; she was duplicating, on her own, the pattern of the pillow on the couch, a Shaker tree of life, which Anne loved and whose ragged dull condition she had, in Laura’s presence, mourned. Yet she was also working a large and simple pattern of Minnie Mouse on a shirt of Sarah’s. And she gave no indication that one piece of work pleased her more than the other. She’d seemed surprised when Anne suggested it was only out of kindness that she did Sarah’s shirt, that the Shaker pattern must be a particular pleasure, a particular satisfaction. Work, beauty, those abstractions one can apply to tasks only after reading many books—what did they mean to a girl like Laura? And what was in her mind as she sat reading the Bible?

Anne knew that it was like no reading she had ever done; what Laura was doing wasn’t really reading. She was doing what she did not to get information, or for pleasure, or to get ahead. She was reading, Anne could see, to keep her place. Or perhaps there was something more to it. Anne had never understood the religious life. She could be moved by it when it led to some large public generosity—the worker priests, the nuns in El Salvador. But there was another side to it she couldn’t comprehend. People had religious lives in the way that people wrote poetry, heard music. She had read, in the course of her education, since she had been interested in medieval art, the writings of the mystics. She understood that they lived in the desire for something like beauty, and that they had experienced something like creative inspiration. But it was something like and something like. What it was, finally, she could come in no way close to.

That was what disturbed her, watching Laura read the Bible with the same expression on her face as she had when she embroidered the tail of Minnie Mouse. Was she experiencing something great, something profound? What made Anne uneasy was that she didn’t know
what
Laura was doing, sitting there appearing to read. Some other life was going on, and Anne had no access to it. So it disturbed her. Yet she couldn’t ask Laura to read in her room. Finally she wrote to Michael. He answered the moment he got the letter, teasing her for her hesitation, telling her of course she must use the study, it was foolish for the best room in the house to go to waste.

How unsatisfactory both those letters had been, like all the letters between them. How much had been left out! The feel of the room, its air and weather, the physical truth of her sense of usurpation—it was in her shoulders that she felt it; if she had been with Michael and moved her shoulder half an inch, he would immediately have understood. And there was no way of writing about sexual desire, no proper words for body parts that felt drawn up, stretched, emptied out. There was no such thing, she thought, as an honest letter for a modern. We no longer need wait months, years, for the sound of the actual voice, the glimpse of the actual body. Therefore we cannot sit without self-consciousness and write a letter.

It was very different for Caroline’s age, she thought, turning to a packet of her letters. At twenty-four, Caroline was writing to her father from Paris. Dissatisfied with her instruction at the Pennsylvania Academy, she had battled for two years to go abroad, to work at the Académie Julian.

You can save your fears about my debauched life for your friends at the Atheneum. I arrive at the Academy at eight, where I work all day beside a Miss Oglethorpe of Bangor, Maine, with the demeanor precisely of a boiled owl, and a character to match. On the other side is Mlle. Dubuffet, of a good Norman family, whose complexion is, I assure you, the shade and grain of a raw beefsteak. I work till the light fails, what there is of it, and dine in a heatless
pension
with the inestimable Aunt Addie, on a soup and meat. For which you ought to envy and commend me, for reasons at once gustatory and economic.

At night it is so cold that we retire early to our beds, unless we are invited out by one of the ubiquitous Americans, tipped off, one supposes, by you or your minions, to keep an eye out for the health and safety of two American ladies from the right sort of family. I assure you, our family tree takes on a stature here it can in no way aspire to in Philadelphia. But then the soil is poorer here, the forests thinner, the branches less leafy and the leaves less lush. This, of course, applies only to American species. Of the native nothing can be said yet, since this correspondent has dined out only with Americans!

That I have discovered Rembrandt in the Louvre, that his
Christ at Emmaus
made me reach for the excellent linen of my pocket handkerchief, so awash was I on the flood tide of feminine artistic feelings, cannot, I know, interest you in the least. Yet since I have crossed the ocean on the magic carpet of your banknotes, I feel you’ve a right to know of my doings. I am one of the best in my class.

Did she love her father? Did she hate him? Such a letter made it impossible to know: the tone made the question seem irrelevant. The weak concerns of a weakly spirit. On the same day she had written to her sister:

Dearest Magpie,

I have only now begun to live. I am excited as a baby. From the moment I got off the boat at Antwerp, everything entranced me: impressions cling to my skin like sea spray. Just off the boat at Antwerp I saw the Rubens on the ceiling of the Cathedral. Maggie, there was never painting like it—blues and reds of richness indescribable. All the canvases in America have been painted with mud. Everything inspires me here: the rooves, tawny, alive as sleeping animals, the faces, the girl who does my laundry with the arms of a goddess. That I can see my breath in my bedroom, that we have had no sun in a fortnight, means nothing. I work all day and sleep like a farmer, unless I have spent the night being dined by some odious Yankee. I speak less French here than I did at Miss Thwaite’s. I long to meet the natives. Come join me, dearest mouse, there is nothing to look at in America. I miss you all, though I haven’t much room in me for that sort of thing right now, so stuffed am I with the joy of this new life. Yet I wish to know that you all cannot do without me, including our Reverend Father.