Other Men's Daughters (3 page)

“It'll be ok. Thank you. For everything.”

Wolf's book on thirst had an epigraph from
Psalms
: “My strength was dried up like a potsherd; and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws; thou hast brought me into the dust of death.”

After Miss Ryder left, Dr. Merriwether felt a little dust in his own body. “Foolish,” he thought. He found his eyes on themselves; in the small mirror over the sink. For a man of forty the face was remarkably ungrooved. Did the smoothness stand for emotional triviality? Shouldn't forty years of New England snow and sun have ground the flesh against its bones? What had he avoided? The hair too was a younger man's, dark gold, with silver grain. The eyes, blue-green, smallish.

A long, ordinary, blue-eyed face. Younger than its years. Had it been left aside for engagements with a later crop of faces? As if it were being given a second human trial?

Dr. Merriwether's life was surrounded if not filled with women. A distant, formal husband, a loving, distant father of two daughters. As for women lab assistants and graduate students, he was seldom aware of them except as amiable auxiliaries. Many such women felt their position depended on masculine style, which had meant brusqueness, cropped hair, white smocks, low shoes, little or no make-up. Fine with him. No woman was so despised here as the occasional student who strutted her secondary sexual characteristics. (The buried axiom was, “Don't foul your professional nest.”) Though the women's movement had begun to touch the biology labs, it went slowly, perhaps because there was a greater awareness of the complex spectrum of sexuality, the hundred components of sexual differentia.

As for women encountered in doctoring, they were clearly more outside the emotional pale. Even part-time doctors know the danger of patients' sexual invitations. The act of disrobing turns many a woman into her idea of a vamp. Miss Ryder's quick strip was a familiar variation. Yet a gleam was with her; and left with her. Dr. Merriwether wished the day were over.

There was another hour to go, a fractured rib, a case of jaundice—which he rushed into the hospital—and another Drawer Three, a fat, hypomanic girl from Davenport, Iowa, who had discovered her sexual potential in the infamous Interpersonal Relations Seminar in William James Hall. Dr. Merriwether understood—or misunderstood—that the routine included LSD on weekdays, penile massages on the weekends. “You feel that you are prepared to deal with the emotional consequences of this grave step, Miss Wongerman?”

“I certainly do.”

“Good luck then.” And God pity the ambitious lad who tried those alpic gorges.

He saw Miss Ryder twice before he realized it was because she wanted him to see her. In a great straw hat ringed with blue and gold flowers, she stood in front of the old Wadsworth House across from Forbes Plaza. She wore blue levis and a flowered blouse, and was eating an ice cream cone. She might have been waiting for a bus.

The third time he saw her, she waved. If she'd waved the first times, he hadn't noticed. (Though who knows. Stu Benson had found that courtship activity continued in the decorticate cat with no observable alteration.) At any rate, he saw her this time, and instead of turning left and crossing the street at Billings and Stover, he crossed toward her. “Hi there.”

“Hi, Doctor. How are you?”

That modest southern speech, the least chiseled American speech, though in Miss Ryder's mouth, exceptionally clear. He put his left hand to his right pulse. “I seem ok.”

“Want a lick?”

Dry as dust, Merriwether licked. “Thank you.”

“You off to operate?”

“I'm off to shower and play tennis.”

“Can I walk with you?”

“Glad to have company, Miss Ryder. I'm all alone this summer.” This small excess hung between them for a bit.

Close as his house was to the Square, it was out of sight to all but Cambridge initiates. Once past the Loeb Theater, Cynthia Ryder was in strange territory. The country quiet of Ash Street, the romantic old moss of Cambridge, surrounded them.

Dr. Merriwether's uncle, Griswold Tipton, had been Professor of Geology, a pupil and successor of Alexander Agassiz, son of the great Louis. He'd built and died in the Acorn Street house. When Aunt Aggie's son, Griswold III, was killed on Guadalcanal Island in the Second World War, Merriwether, an undergraduate then, left Eliot House and moved in with his widowed aunt, partly as caretaker, partly as companion. Mr. Stonesifer's installation on the third floor relieved him of both chores. By then he was a graduate student and spending most of his time in the labs. In 1950, he married Sarah Wainwright, a graduate student in Romance Languages. They moved into an apartment on Ellery Street. When Aunt Aggie died in 1954—she'd left him the house—they moved in with three-year-old Albie and one-year-old Priscilla. (Mr. Stonesifer dismantled his electric toys and went off to New Hampshire.)

Acorn Street was eleven houses each of whose windows were part of Dr. Merriwether's inner landscape. The neighbors knew him, his gait, his clothes, his habits. When the
Times
mentioned his election to the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, they congratulated him. He could borrow lawn mowers from these houses, perhaps even money—if there were no real need of it. The houses were his scene, what was permanent for him. Walking there with a twenty-year-old beauty, the familiarity became accusation.

Merriwether talked fast, against the puerility of his feeling. He told Miss Ryder of the houses and their owners. This summer the street was a center of anti-ABM activity. His neighbors, George Bowen and Warren Defries, testified in Washington about the expensive futility of the system; in the
Times
letters columns, they countered the arguments of weapon-lovers; at night, walking dogs, they met under acacia trees to discuss interceptor rings, recognition patterns, megatonnage, silo costs. Defries, huge and bulbous as a parade balloon, spread over chain-smoking little Bowen. “It looked as if he were knighting him. He was just pushing off the smoke.”

Miss Ryder asked him what ABM was.

Summies
.

This was the affectionately contemptuous term for the Summer School Students. Miss Ryder was a Summie, not Harvard, not Radcliffe. The Summie Myth is that the girls are beautiful, ignorant, available. (The summer catalogue advanced the fiction.) Dr. Merriwether found Summies no different from what weren't called Wintries; only barer. (The real Cambridge shift came when December released the gloom of New England's winter.)

Miss Ryder's ignorance was easily repairable: Dr. Merriwether said, “It's the acronym for anti-ballistic missile. It's not a millionth as important as
Macbeth
. Though I suppose it could wipe out every copy and every reader of
Macbeth
.”

“I do know
Macbeth
,” said Miss Ryder.

They were in front of the little oval lawn, under the acacia tree. Miss Ryder had enormous, almost-black eyes, rounder and denser than Sarah's. He put out his hand and thanked her for walking him home. No facial subtlety hid her disappointment.

Dr. Merriwether felt a jolt of pleasure: he counted with this lovely person. Of course, students love to come into faculty homes, any faculty member, any home.

“Can I come watch you play tennis?”

“If I were good. Or even gracefully bad, yes. But I'm a hacker. Do you play?”

A little. She'd been junior doubles champ of Eastern Carolina.

“You certainly can't watch. It would hurt your game and my vanity.”

“You're such a nice man, Doctor.” She leaned and kissed his mostly unprepared mouth, spun on her hard-to-spin-on sandals and walked off. A stunning sight in her flared blue pants, the only sight of that sort on Acorn Street since Priscilla went off to Maine.

Dr. Merriwether's tennis opponent, John Davison, was one of those fellows who come late to Harvard and can't forget what it was like in the non-Harvard world. Half their life's satisfaction came from the ever-astonished self-gratulation of being in Cambridge. Dr. Merriwether had watched a television “special” on the Royal Family of England. What amazed him was that most of the Royal Conversation had to do with royalty, with stories of Queen Victoria or of the surprise at other people's surprise at the humanness of royal persons. He compared this odd provincialism with Davison's.

Dr. Merriwether had “discovered” Davison in the
Journal of Experimental Physiology
. A first-rate microscopist, Davison had worked out a scope which resolved features 2000 angstroms apart. His aim was to edit the genetic ribbon, and he was now working on the hemophiliac determinant. It was a job fit for a scientific Lancelot. It should carry its dignity to every part of a man's life. It didn't. Outside of the laboratory, Davison was childish. His only other modes of affection were tennis and Harvard. Harvard was his wife—though he had a fattish official specimen—and children—the world had been spared a junior Davison. Dr. Merriwether had thought of inquiring if there were a gene for Harvard-mania. (Its linkage would be with repressant narrowness. Perhaps Davison could edit it out of any future Davisons.)

Davison was bald, thin, taller than Merriwether and a few years younger. He had an open, quizzical face. Puzzlement seemed its permanent set. When he aced Merriwether, or when he'd done something especially fine in the lab, the face spread into childish triumph. Merriwether felt a gap of attendance in Davison; but that afternoon he needed someone to talk with and Davison was the only one around.

There were very few people anywhere with whom he could talk. Formerly, there was Sarah, and, for a few years, Albie and Priscilla (though the talk was mostly of Albie and Priscilla). There was Thomas Fischer, a pal of twenty years, but Fischer tended to fix their relationship as it had once been, that of wise senior to Merriwether's amusing but respectful attendant; that did not always make for ease. There were Stu Benson and Maxim Schneider, but they were off for the summer. Which left Davison.

Dr. Merriwether offered him his case. “Johnny,” he said, as they were putting their rackets into canvas covers, “you ever fooled around with a student?”

“Fooled around with a student?”

“Yes.”

“I try to be completely straight with them. I don't see your point.”

He was tempted to say, “Davison, old prince, didn't you ever tell yourself, ‘This girl is driving me wild,' think of taking down her pants and popping her on the lab table?” The response would probably have been, “What for?”

The physicist Wigner wished there were studies of the diversity of intelligence, plants to Shakespeare. He said that when he talked with John Von Neuman, he felt that he was asleep and Neuman awake. High I.Q. or not, Davison was asleep to the world beyond his microscope.

More than sex, more than drink, it might be company that human beings needed. Conferences, faculty meetings, towns, churches, sex itself might be ways of satisfying it. The most hermetic hermit had the company of those he feared or hated, the company of the absent. At Walden, Thoreau walked into Concord every few days, his chairs were set for visitors. Company was the true human climate. Socrates returned to the cave prematurely from loneliness, not compassion. “Why hast Thou deserted me?” means “Why have you left me alone?”

Or so thought Merriwether, home, in the bathtub, soaping his right foot, knee to chin, the fleshed antebrachium rubbing his genitals. Then, into mind, came the faceless body of the boy for whom Miss Ryder was preparing herself. Why? One kiss? Lips together amidst the old symbolic perfume. Plus one view of a tanned, mesomorphic body, a few hundred words, a sense of fifty traits and ten or twelve accomplishments (junior doubles champ, student,
Macbeth
-reader, ice-cream eater, hat-wearer).

Two days later, he looked across Mass Avenue and, seeing no Miss Ryder, felt sick. “So,” he thought, “
disappointment
.”

But its roots were shallow, there was oblivion in the walk home. “I should do the lawn.” Davison couldn't play today, maybe Fischer was in town, maybe they could have supper.

He walked toward nothing, so walked slowly, vacating himself to heat, looks in windows, the customers in ZumZum's, the pleasant half-image of breakfast—bacon rolls, the small, fruity tear-segments of the orange juice, the first inroad on the
Times
, the sweet shock of the obituaries—round the bend, the grocer, the wine shop, the Brattle Theater—a Marx Brothers Festival, neither camp, amusement nor nostalgia for him—the grilled fretwork of the Loeb Theater.

And there she was.

Ahead of him, walking slowly, golden head bent, long, dark, bare legs out of scarlet mini-skirt, an odd slowness in the spreadfoot, springy, unusual gait; awkward and athletic both. Dr. Merriwether doubled his pace, came abreast and touched her elbow. “Miss Ryder.”

“You.”

“Hi.” And into her deep, unsmiling relief—his happiness—another “Hi.”

“I'm so glad to see you. I was trying to find your house. I couldn't remember how to get to it.”

“You were doing pretty well.”

They walked by the Graduate Center, down Ash, past Acacia, into Acorn Street, up to his house across from the Japanese urns and the gingkos of his millionaire neighbors, around his little oval lawn, up the squeaky, red steps and in through the door where Miss Ryder said, “I like you so much. I feel so foolish, but I like you so much.”

Not looking at her. “I like you too, Miss Ryder. And I am ten times as foolish, without the license you have.” Meaning neither young—though inexperienced—nor free—though freed by intellect, will, abandonment.

Miss Ryder twirled from sun parlor to dusk parlor, dining room, kitchen, stairwell, touching chairs, old mirrors, oil lamps (feebly bulbed, pathetic conversion). Ill at ease, he remembered the modern innocent's “thing to do,” went into the kitchen and made drinks, Dubonnet, lemon juice, soda, ice; new combination—awful—for new combination.