Other Men's Daughters (24 page)

There were seven other things, including “some wedding china.” (Did this mean she would be giving no dinner parties?) He would refuse this memento, although there'd been a hundred wonderful—in his view—dinners, after which he and she had done the dishes in the kitchen, congratulating each other on the dinner's success, recalling the choice moments, the best remarks.

“Some extra pots.” He would take these. Another world. He would buy a cookbook. Did she give him the pots as a reminder of all that she'd relieved him of for twenty years? Too much? Nothing was too much. Maybe it was a burst of thoughtfulness. A way of getting him out of mind and conscience.

He went downstairs; she was playing the piano. He stood by, waiting for her to look up. “Well?”

“There are a few other things that mean a lot to me. If you want to live among my family ghosts, all right, but otherwise I would like Grandpa's desk and the glass cabinet in the upstairs hall.”

“Take them. I don't want them.”

“And I want you—or the kids anyway—to have at least half the books. I want them to have books around.”

“They have plenty of books. We can work details out later. The main thing is for you to get out.”

“Is it so unbearable for you?”

She looked up from the piano, took the cigarette from the ashtray on the mahogany shoulder (she'd begun smoking constantly) and took a deep drag; he could see her drawing strength and peace from the—to him—repulsive cylinder. Then she said, quietly, “It is unbearable.”

The nights, with their insomniac bloat and cardiac pounding, were the worst for him. He fought them with Sominex, music on the transistor by his bed, books. In daylight, there was his routine, now charged with his awareness of its transience. The house felt luxurious, the coffee and newspapers in the breakfast nook were a small heaven. Going down the steps, up Acorn and Ash Street, across Brattle to Agassiz, crossing the Common, skirting the Physics Labs, and entering the quadrangle of his own labs. Much of his life was in that walk.

He saw little of Cynthia these days. The energy of love, the sexual energy, the excess which made for tenderness and generosity dried up in anxiety; his feelings circled George and Esmé. Luckily Cynthia had an enormous amount of work. She studied Japanese seven or eight hours a day. Yet loneliness crept in. She felt Merriwether's need to stay close to what he was going to leave, but the very feeling evoked a counter-feeling of resentment that she was secondary. This opened her mind to blackness. She could not think, only felt the nausea of emptiness. In this pit, she called him, he rushed over, comforting, holding, lying beside her. Mostly, she suppressed desires to make him demonstrate more, but now and then, she could not endure the resentment she felt he felt for her weakness. In such a mood, she saw his smile as stretched muscles and bared teeth, his tenderness a matter of pressure and gesture. Unbearable. “It's only a transition, darling. It's just these awful weeks.” But time made no sense to her. Time wasn't weeks or minutes. It was outside the terrible blank that was all she was. “Weeks don't mean anything to a dead person.” He didn't understand, or pretended not to.

Usually, though, things were easier. He'd come, they would drink wine, play cards, go over the day's events, the boys coming on with her in class, the stuff of lectures, hers, his. They almost never went out. He brought wine and delicatessen meats, they drank and ate, watched the news, and sometimes wove fantasies around it. She said, “Kissinger's having an affair with Madame Mao.” (Kissinger had been a distant Harvard colleague, a rolypoly who ran the Summer Seminar for foreign students. Merriwether had eaten with him once at a committee meeting which did little more than decide to dissolve itself.) “I know that's what's behind all this China-visiting. He's setting her up for Nixon. When we see them rolling around together, we'll know good relations are restored. All this diplomatic stuff is a cover-up.” Cynthia sat bare-bottomed in her blue denim shirt, her hair tied back with a black fillet. She held him, and they rolled around in her sofa-bed. “‘Nixon and Mao's Wife Tussle Lovingly Before World's Love-Starved Billions.' That's what east-west intercourse is about.” She spun out networks of world-orgies, the late De Gaulle and Jackie Onassis, Martha Mitchell and Jomo Kenyatta, Spiro Agnew “tied naked, front to front, with Pat Nixon,” pictures taken, mailed to
Life
and
Paris-Match
, “unless Nixon stops the bombing.”

Two or three times a week now, Sarah wrote notes to him. He'd find them on his bed, written in pencil on his stationery. (She was too distraught for delicacy.) Mostly they were defenses of her conduct and indictments of his. She was unable to say these things to him, could not trust her voice in his presence; she felt he always got the better of her.

One note was a defense of her years of sexual refusal. She said she was a naturally warm woman, but it had been clear to her that he didn't want her as a person, only as the nearest woman available. He wrote on the bottom of the note, “I understand. Naturally you couldn't be intimate with someone you felt didn't respect you.” He brought it down and handed it to her. After supper—he cooked himself a hamburger, but ate with her and the children in front of the television set—she handed him another note: “Perhaps I should have been able to tell you what was bothering me. But it wasn't my way to open up like that.” He wrote in ink over the penciled sentence: “How I wish it had been.” Her note went on: “If sex is the basis of your relationship with your girl friend, it doesn't seem enough to me.” In ink, he crossed out “is the basis,” and wrote “was the origin.” He gave her the corrected note and said, “Every time you say ‘girl friend,' you make it sound like a curse.”

“I pity her,” she said.

Another note asked him to pay the taxes on the house. He told her the house was hers now, and she had more money than he. She said she'd call the lawyer.

“What did Sullivan say?” he asked her after the call. “He said I was legally responsible for the taxes. But while you're here, you should pay rent. It better not be long.”

“I've been paying the bills; but I'll pay half the taxes.” She took this with grace for a few days, then tracking him to the TV set, she said, “You were clever to transfer the property to me. Making me responsible.” He saw the chemical rhythm behind her muted fury, but muttered something about his legal obligation to make the transfer.

“Then why are you here?” She was in a floor-length flannel nightgown, an outfit which made her seem especially vulnerable and could almost evoke his pity for her unhappiness. The drained face above the little lace collar of the gown was streaked with red, the eyes glowed with the battle she sought, the pain felt, the hatred for him; he felt something close to fear. Who knows what she'd be capable of in this state? “Why are you here? Get out.”

“I haven't even told the children.”

“Tell them.”

“I thought we agreed it should be in two weeks.”

“You assume I agreed. When it's to your advantage. Tell the children Sunday. Anything you want. I'll tell them I was on the edge of a breakdown and would have had it if you'd stayed. Everyone says it's unheard of for you to be here.”

“It is unusual. I only thought we'd decided we would manage it to keep the children as fine as they've been so far.”

“You can't keep using the children to kill ME.”

“Whatever it is that has made you a monster, I hate. I pray to God that if there's a hell, you and I will burn for what our monstrosity does.”

“Does? To whom?”

“George and Esmé. Less to the others.”

“It's not them involved. It's—” and she managed “US,” though shaking at the inclusion with him, even as she made this last claim on it under the roof where they lived the last days of their joined, if long unbedded, long uncongenial, and, for six weeks, unwedded life.

The Sunday morning Merriwether had looked forward to with dread for months, which he'd rehearsed at night for so long, was a mild, beautiful one. They'd decided they would speak to the children at the same time, but Esmé had gone out after breakfast, and Merriwether thought it might be best to tell them separately anyway.

“George, want to come in here?”
Here
was their old room. Sarah lay in bed. Merriwether sat on the edge, George came in and jumped between them. “Mommy and I want to speak with you about something important.”

The little boy's head sprouted a tense smile. This was not the usual bill of goods. He started doing push-ups on the bed, but Merriwether put his hand on his shoulder as he talked and George listened. “What I'm going to say may sound hard for a little, but Mommy and I have talked it all over, and we are sure it is the best thing for all of us.” George looked up, the smile still there, but fading. “You know Mommy and I have our arguments, our troubles. Well, we've decided that we can be better friends and better parents if we don't have to live together as husband and wife. That's a terrific strain on people, especially those like Mommy and me who are so different from each other.” George's head was down. “So in a little while, we will live in separate places. But, and this is what counts, we both love you and Esmé and Albie and Priscilla completely. We will always be your parents, we will work together for you.” George cried. Sarah's and Merriwether's hands were on his head and back.

The door downstairs opened. “Esmé,” called Merriwether. “Could you please come up for a moment? Mommy and I want to speak with you.”

George scrambled off the bed and ran, head down, into his room.

Sarah and Merriwether looked at each other, their war forgotten. She had tears in her eyes. “It's hard now,” she said. “It'll be all right soon.”

Esmé came upstairs. “What is it?” The delicate face looked puzzled, but there was control in it, a dignity of preparation.

“We've just been talking with George, darling,” said Merriwether. “You see even more clearly than he that Mommy and I have been having a lot of trouble getting along lately—”

“You're getting a divorce? Is that it?”

“We're going to live apart, yes. Because it's even best for those we love most in the world, you and George and—”

“That's all right,” she said. “I guessed you would. I understand.” She paled, the lips pursed, the eyes glistened, the muscles tightened in the cheeks.

“We wanted to talk about—”

“You don't have to say anything. It's all right with me,” and she turned, went downstairs, and out the door.

Merriwether went into George's room. He was on his bed, under the yellow submarine, head in his pillow, crying. Merriwether took him up in his arms, George's back against his chest. The boy looked around and saw his father crying—something he had never seen—and reached around and held him.

Sarah, in her djellabah, came to the door, saw them, watched for a second, came in, touched George's head, and went back to her room.

“I better see about Esmé, George. I'll come back.”

Esmé was sitting in the sun on the porch step, arms around herself, face dense with thought.

Merriwether, feeling her dignity, did not sit next to her. “It'll be all right, darling.”

She turned away. “It isn't as hard for me at my age, Daddy. It's harder for George. I'm taken up with things.”

“I love you so, Esmé, dear. I'll always be here. I'm glad it's not that hard for you. But you may have hard moments. Mommy and I will do everything we can to help you.”

“Thank you. I think I'd better be alone.” The voice led to the edge of the tears she did not want him to see. Feeling a depth of love absolutely new in his life, Merriwether resisted lifting her into his arms. “I love you, darling,” he said and went back into the house, up to George. They stayed together without talking for a few minutes. George cried off and on. Then, spent, he smiled. Merriwether said it was time for a bit of good time now, they'd had the bad. They got out baseball gloves and had a catch in the street.

A week later, the thought came to Merriwether that the moments holding each other on the bed were the best he and George would probably have together; it was as strong a love as two human beings could have for each other without sexuality (stronger for its absence). “You who are made of me, formed from—and against—me, you whom I've seen grow from bulge to this, you George Merriwether, whom I named and who will—please God—have me in mind years after my death, you my beloved child …” Nothing in Merriwether's life had come close to the love behind this unvoiced invocation.

part four

fifteen

The doormat was off to the side, not in place before the front door. It was not the only sign of withdrawn hospitality. The rubber cleats stippled into WELCOME had worn down: a splotched ELC remained, “as if some antlered mutant lived here,” thought Dr. Merriwether, who was, for the summer anyway, the actual tenant.

The fifth or sixth day there, the first and only visitor showed up. Dr. Merriwether was glooming in the easy chair behind the picture window, eyes more or less on two hummingbirds sucking at a bottle of amber nectar hung from the pine tree. “The smallest things in nature make the greatest show.” (This out of his Latin School days.) Out of the pines, came a young, Moses-bearded man in knee-high boots. He and Merriwether eyed each other through the glass. Merriwether beat him to the door, and the young Moses grumbled a social phrase: “I'm Bill Bender.”

“Better than Bill Collector.” Amiable Merriwether put out his hand.

No smile lit the beard. “I got to get something inside.”

Merriwether had rented the place from a former graduate student, Henry Bender, so he stood aside, perhaps half a second before young Bender entered, then moved fast to catch him before he got to the bedroom. As much to assert Tenant's Rights as to protect Cynthia, he said, “There's somebody in there.” Bender looked but did not quite say, “What are we going to do about that?”