Other Men's Daughters (15 page)

“Ann showed me a squib about you in
Newsweek
. Did you see it?”

“Yes, I did. Did it upset you?”

“I don't know. It looked harmless enough. I guess we'd guessed you were with a girl.” Merriwether grabbed at the manful equality but missed the effort under it. “Is it something serious?”

“I don't know, Albie. What counts, I'm afraid, is that Mother and I have been having trouble for years. I guess you know that.”

“I guess so. You didn't let it out, but Pris and I have talked about it. It must be very hard. For both of you.”

“People become machine-like about trouble. The other parts of life take over. Though you pay a toll. Usually without knowing.”

“Mother knows.”

“Yes, she does. And she started remaking her life. I admire her. Terrifically. But she needs more than my admiration. And I need more. More than the laboratory, more than you and Pris and George and Esmé. In some ways, you're the center of my emotional life, but there was a big empty place there too. Now someone's there.” Merriwether kept his eyes on the road.

“Are you going to divorce Mom?”

Merriwether breathed heavily. “I don't want to, Alb. I hate the idea of it, hate the fact of it. Nobody ever divorced in our family. The word's like barbed wire to me. I know it's silly; but I don't want to take anything from those I love. The girl doesn't care about marrying. But if Mother saw the thing in
Newsweek
—”

“She saw it. Mrs. Bowen showed it to her.”

“That's what friends are for. I'm going to tell her anyway.”

“Maybe it'd be better not to. Maybe it'll all pass away.”

“Maybe. But we've not been
really
married for so long now. And now there's this.” What a fossil he felt. Yet he
felt
, and feeling was not fossilate. “We separated emotionally years ago. Probably my fault. Without meaning to I dominated her. That was the way of things.
My
schedule,
my
friends, and though it's hard for young people to understand—”

“I understand.”

“—
my
money, even. And the house, she didn't get the chance, or didn't make the opportunity, to make the house into whatever she wanted. The house was an expression of the life. For women especially, the house is like part of their body. Like a fiddler's violin. Mother doesn't think too much of me anymore.”

“Mother respects you. I know she does.”

“I respect her. Very much. For all our differences. And you know how different we are.”

“I'm different from Ann, too. And I'm like you, I guess. I dominate her, tell her off. She takes my guff.”

Dr. Merriwether was rather annoyed to get shoved off center stage. Albie, however, had had as much of his father's confession as he could take. He did not want to hear any more. He drove over the bridge and swung into Memorial Drive. Sailboats filled the basin, blue, red, ivory. The summer gestures of Boston: the Esplanade, the grass banks, the cyclists, the patches of old meadow, the shells with bare-chested strokers in the Charles; cars, boats, trees, highrises afloat in the particled glitter. They drove by Hinham, Akron, Peabody Terrace, swung past the white-belled redbrick Georgian strut of Dunster, the glassy rise of new Leverett, up Boylston. Thought Merriwether, why hadn't Albie come here? Why hadn't he tried a little harder? Wouldn't he have been more at ease with himself, less distrustful of the world? No, that sort of view was out of date. Strong, solid, red-gold, wheeling the car, talking of their comparative problems with women—one his mother—Albie was someone who understood the world. Maybe too much. If that was possible.

They were into Ash Street. The old stillness, the emerald heaviness of the trees.

“Thank you, Albie.” In the driveway, Merriwether shook his son's hand.

Albie blushed.

Sarah Merriwether's bad time was before supper. The blood sugar was low, the demands on her were high. And then he would come home—unless there were a call at five-thirty saying he would not be home—and after a loud hello into this dust-magnet of a house (in which he'd embalmed her for twenty years without a glimmer of feeling for her feeling about—and without one single attention to—its headlong disintegration), he would strut upstairs to the news, stopping in the sun parlor for a glass of red wine, or the kitchen for some Gorgonzola and cold white wine. The classic lord's life, which for years she had not minded. He had worked, and worked hard, winters, summers, weekends, and she had gone along with his work, tried to follow it, tried reading the offprints in the technical journals, tried hard to read the little book he'd done for Timmy Hellman, tried harder and often succeeded in enjoying the departmental gossip, the international gossip about the great figures, Haldane, Linus, René, Jacques, Francis, Josh; she could have passed an exam in the biographical history of modern biology. An apparently quiet man, he was really a teacher to his bones, instructing, pointing out, “clarifying”; and it was she he mostly clarified. How many thousands of clarifications had she undergone, and in the presence of every friend they had, let alone the children. She must look like Moron Numero Uno. And she went on cooking suppers and doing the cleaning, and the wash, and the children grew up and out, and his frugality leashed them to his desires for them, so that Albie could not take it any longer, and though still polite, even respectful and affectionate, paid absolutely no attention to the quiet directives, the “eyes to the future,” the hints about hard work, about reading this, or staying summers in the lab.

She had one year of course work beyond the M.A., and, for almost twenty years, she'd forgotten that she too was a person of expert training. Then, before she broke down she'd converted a few of those credits and was doing her Master of Arts in Teaching; within a year she'd be qualified to teach French and Spanish in the schools. She would have her place and that meant new life. He had apparently approved, there were speeches about her excellence, her good grades, her fine study habits; he sometimes read her texts, and for a few months, she'd sensed a revival of sympathy, she almost felt she could not only endure life with him, but that if this Merriwether mausoleum were sold and they were installed in a manageable apartment, it might be a good life.

And then what? He took off for Europe, and his disgusting affair.
Advertised
in a national magazine. Madness. All spring, night after night he had gone out, she could hear the door clicking despite his care. He would be off, the secret prowler. While she kept the home fires burning.

And he blamed her. As if her body could be purchased by three daily meals, and this leaky hutch which she alone kept up. (He couldn't hammer a nail.) As if he really cared to make love to her. Frigid? No, no more than any woman with a husband who saw her as an interior broom. By no means frigid. Despite her weight, the wrinkling belly, the veins showing through the flesh he had cursed with contempt and now infidelity—though God knows he'd been unfaithful, at least in thought, with half a dozen other women, some who claimed to be her friends. (She could see him look at Jeanne Schneider.) Despite all she'd gone through, anemia, bad teeth, a D. and C., a lustrum of disinterest, she had her desires; and no outlet for them. Men had flirted with her for years. Despite her chunkiness she was in better shape than most women her age. But she wasn't capable of being unfaithful; and besides it was the husbands of her friends she cared for—who else did she see?—Max, with his devotedness, his decency, his political force—he was the first of their friends to see what the war really was—and he cared for her. When he kissed her in front of Jeanne with the usual flourishes of academic passion which denied passion, she knew there was more there, he cared for her as a person, he respected her. And Dev Calender, severe, ugly (“a gargoyle looking for a cathedral,” said Stu Benson, “a stain without a glass”), decent Dev, one of their few non-scientist friends, Professor of American History, husband of her closest friend, Tina. Another profound sympathy which had no physical expression but the goodby kiss. A kind man, a man who did things, who was neither mastered by his work nor his ambition, yet who was first-rate. She'd sat in a course of his on the New England Mind; the names of her own family and childhood worked in mind-boggling debates on governance and church; too much, but somehow something that belonged to her. She'd given him some letters her grandmother had left her, and he had done a piece for the Massachusetts Historical Society Bulletin on a Wainwright who had fought Jonathan Edwards's heresies in Western Massachusetts. Not that ancestral piety was a piety for her. God knows, part of Bobbie's weakness was that New England tightness and secretiveness which came out in such things as this affair. There'd been little real affection in his family. The Merriwethers had come out of New Bedford, they'd been insurance tabulators, penny-counters, there was no real joy of life in them. Joy was something done out of sight, in the dark. They were really made for sin. Morton, who'd practiced the black mass, had been in their family. Then there was German blood and maybe Indian. Racial nonsense, yes, but somewhere were the fuses for their repressed English rage. Bobbie had a
mestizo
's uneasiness; if he'd been surer, more patient, maybe his scientific work would have been what he'd hoped it would be; but he could only buckle down when fired up. God knows he had a high enough I.Q. Why didn't he become top rank? There was something deeply unsettled and unhappy there, some profound indolence took hold of him.

It was no longer her business or concern. What concerned her now was destruction. She was being destroyed, this life could not go on, she was not a mat, she was not a maid, she was not going to clear up his messes, she was finished. She didn't need Kate Millett and Germaine Greer for strength. This was simple recognition of humanity. She'd done a paper on the
droits de la femme
of 1793 passed after the Convention had proclaimed the
droits de l'homme
. She was no revolutionary, she did not believe it demeaning to raise children or stay at home. There was dignity there too. But she was not going to be made a human vacuum cleaner. She would not live five years this way, she could not live two years like this. Not for the children. No, she'd lived so much for children, and happily, but she was not going to die for them. She was only fortytwo, she had twenty-three years of official working life, and if she lived like her parents, she would live beyond eighty; that was half a life.

“H'loo everybody.” The steps, the voice. Please don't come out here.

But here he was, the European traveler. “How are you, Sarah?” Kiss on the cheek. “How good to see you.”

“So the traveler returns. I missed the arrival. It wasn't in
Time
.”

“Oh,” he said. “That was a foolishness. How's everything?”

“Just fine, thank you. Everything ran smoothly. I see by the magazines you had a fine time too.”

Did he think he could walk in from the French stews and have her trumpeting “Welcome Home”? What perversity. He had left her chewed bones for years. No more. This was it.

Shaking, then shaking off this frozen greeting, Dr. Merriwether went up to his room, washed up, and went up to the third floor to talk with Priscilla. They had kissed and talked a bit at the door, he'd given her perfume and a handful of postcards, and gone out to the kitchen. She'd gone upstairs and talked with Albie.

When her father knocked and came into her room, she was flushed and scared.

For years, she had loved talking with him. He so clearly wanted her to be something special and believed she was. When she and Albie were younger, he would read over paragraphs of Thoreau or Spinoza to them and ask what they made of them. Then they went over them word for word. Years after, she decided things on the basis of those sessions.

She was in shorts and blouse. She'd put on a little weight this summer, but she was still lovely. Merriwether felt an almost illicit pride in being her father. She had a purer, a simpler beauty than Cynthia, more familiar, more natural, less intense, less dramatic. Despite the dressing table and bathroom crammed with beauty aids, the rigor of Cynthia's concentration on beautification wasn't here. Perhaps because there was no imminent battle. Priscilla had boy friends, but she seemed untroubled by them. Now and then she went with one boy for months, but what they did together was not much concern of Merriwether's. He imagined that when Priscilla was ready for sexual love, she would have it without much fuss. At least, it helped him to think so. He guessed she was still a virgin; that too didn't displease him, though he believed he had no moral scruples on that score. At least, she knew about contraceptives—he had talked to her about their mechanisms and chemistry—she had enough money to buy them and, he supposed, at Oberlin, as at most schools, she could get a prescription when she needed it. Merriwether examined Priscilla medically only when she had something like a sore throat; if anything, he was less medically sensitive to his children than non-medical fathers to theirs.

“I talked with Albie about something on the way in, Pris. I thought I'd say something to you too.”

“He told me, Daddy.” The stereo was on, a girl's clear voice over a guitar.

“May I turn down the stereo?”

“Are you sure you want to talk with me?”

He saw now that Priscilla was pale and trembly. “I think it's better, dear.”

“For you or me, Dad?”

Whew, thought Merriwether. “As long as you know, I want you to hear what you also know, but still hear it from me. You and the other children are the most important things in my life. That's all. If you want to talk with me about”—a hand tossed into the air, a sound that stood for “this thing”—“this or anything else, please do. As for now, maybe you're right. I may be easing myself rather than you.” Priscilla picked up a book, which made Merriwether shiver. Was she trying to hurt him, or to show him he'd hurt her? He turned to leave, and she said, “One thing, Dad.”