Other Men's Daughters (5 page)

These days, the talk was of platelets and “genetic noise,” DNA errors caused by overheating, background radiation, chemical agents. The new jargon said that one source of aging was improper handling of input: the most efficient intelligence eventually succumbed to the silt of data.

The physiological chatter covered Dr. Merriwether's confusion. He took up his rowing on the Charles, ate “correctly”—no whiskey, no butter, no steaks, and yoghurt, in case Metchnikoff had something. It was for Cynthia. At night, he walked with her along the river, arm around her waist, happy at the sight of other lovers a quarter of a century younger, lying on the banks, “making”—as the chilling expression had it—“out.” In another foul label of the day, he was “a dirty old man,” the usurper of a trusting young beauty who should, in classic propriety, be the partner of a hairless-chested, sex-tormented, draft-eligible poet-in-the-egg. Instead, here he was, the well—happy, if nervous, quarry of this southern beauty.

And no longer sexually evasive. They went into the creaky old marriage bed and, after a few awkward sessions, learned how to please each other.

For a week, they met at night, walked at night, and went to bed without being at least publicly recognized.

But the Summer Session was ending; their time was over. “We can meet weekends,” said Cynthia. “I'll come up every weekend.”

“Impossible.”

“Why?”

“Summer is special. Life starts again in fall. Everyone is here. Every inch of life is mapped out. There's no room. Anyway, Cynthia, you're going to forget it all within a week of getting home.”

“I don't think so.”

“Tell you what. You go home, no letters, no calls. You go back to school in a month. Wait another week. Ten days. Wait ten days. If absence, time and the Swarthmore boys haven't diverted you from this”—shoulder shrug—“of ours, then write me. Or write anyway. Just say what you feel. We'll both be relieved. We'll have had a strange, fine time. We'll have been temporary outlaws. It's everybody's fantasy. We'll have had this time. It'll help us endure the Usual. It'll be stuff for memoirs. For getting to sleep on.”

Their farewell was full of that strongest romantic glue, amorous torment. Cynthia left Acorn Street, Dr. Merriwether watched her out the window. The long, gold hair, badge of the young, of summer, of the end of romantic love and its paranoiac radiance.

A week later, he, Sarah and the children were in Vermont woods. They spent two weeks with the Schneiders in the geodesic dome Maxim had built with his sons.

The Schneiders were The Happily Married Couple of Dr. Merriwether's experience. Most couples could be mapped on the graph of marital wither (which often shows revival in aging couples who become each other's thermometers and medicine chests). Not the Schneiders.

They endured amorously. Merriwether studied them. They looked alike, large-headed, big-eyed, round-faced, Jeanne taller, a bigger smiler, Maxim, eye-glassed, rapid, full of gesture, of theatric flash. They'd met in high school, were lovers before Maxim knew what a clitoris was. They remained lovers. Of the two sorts of marriage, the partner-centered and the child-centered, the Schneiders were the former. Jeanne was her husband's center, her intelligence flowed only as far as unquestioned support for him. Dr. Merriwether thought her a marvelous woman, had thought she must be marvelous to sleep with. (This was speculation, not desire; he censored even mental treason.) He liked or even loved her as part of a couple; he cared for them both this way.

Maxim had begun in biology, but in his thirties, he'd sat in on George Sarton's seminars and one summer decided to become an historian of science. Now, in his forties, he thought of himself as an historian; he'd learned Greek, Tamil and Chinese, and had worked out a poly-lingual glossary for herbals. He had the comparatist's lust for analogies, unexpected symmetries, historical metaphors. It went beyond medicine. The return of Vietnam veterans
reminded
him of fifth-century Greek tradesmen coming from summer naval battles with the Persians to demand new power in the state. “War does even more for democracy than it does for technology.” Such overstatements ignited most of their discussions. With no one did Merriwether relax more.

The families too relaxed with each other. The children were almost exactly paired. It made for jokes, mutual support, ease.

In the woods, near a beautiful pond full of fallen birches, with loons and hawks surfacing up or down, Schneiders and Merriwethers sailed, shot popguns at cans, walked trails, picked berries. At night, within the heat of the stove, they played recorders, flutes, piano. Sarah and Tommy Schneider sang lieder, the rest Gershwin, Porter, Kern, those lyric mendacities which had sealed their domesticity. Merriwether felt part of a human burrow. Nude against the plasticene skin, the pine boards spelled the logic of habitation. The construction point was how little one needed.

The queer, displaced, luxury needs of his Cambridge summer passed into air, movement, family gabble; the bitterness which made life with Sarah claustrophobic faded.

He thought of Cynthia only three or four times. Indeed, a month later, back in Cambridge, he was completely surprised by a postcard in his box. A postcard written in purple ink, the script clear and elegant, a calligraphy which called up summer, the obituaries, the solitude, her beauty.

But a postcard. In his box where Campus Mail and Miss Weeber could feast on it.

I've been here a week. You asked for this. Here it is. Here I am. Thinking about it now, I must admit I love you madly. I'd like to see you and tell you back every word you've told me. Then I will ask you if you love me. If you smiled, I would understand.

And then, not wasting an inch, curled around “Edgar Degas (1834–1917) Dancers Adjusting Their Slippers-Pastel-Cleveland Museum of Art”

Today was a day for waving hello to people you didn't know. The newest flavor here is called Awaawa Ukelele. I shouted & danced around the corner until I got one free. The flavors before that were Gullywasher, Fulla Bulla Olé, and Kiss Me Stupid. I got them all. Love to you.

How many other letters of his life counted as this one? One from Sarah on Duck Island saying she was pregnant, another from the
JEP
accepting his first article, one from Wolf congratulating him about the piece on serum osmalality. Not many.

What is it, he wondered. What is this feeling?

It used to be thought the body was more “sensitive” as it got deeper. But no, it's like the earth itself, the vividness is at the surface. You can crush an organ and get no pain, but look at the skin. One cm. of human skin contains two sensory machines for cold, twelve for heat, three million cells, ten hairs, fifteen sebaceous glands, a yard of blood vessels, a hundred sweat glands, three thousand sensory cells at the end of nerve fibers, four yards of nerves, twenty-five pressure apparatuses for tactile stimuli, two hundred nerve cells to record pain. This fantastic factory is our
surface
. No wonder our feeling is so exposed. Our hearts are on our sleeve.

At ten minutes to twelve, he'd stooped for his mail, low-keyed, middle-aged prof softened by American life and Harvard cream, and, at five minutes to twelve, he was once again the Burgher Outlaw gripped by passion for a girl a year older than his son, poeticized, transfigured, en route to restatements of the statements he'd lived by, a grotesque, a dirty old man, a standard character for story, a Jolyon Forsyte (Galsworthy's delicate, latherless soap opera had begun to dominate the Sunday evenings of university communities).

He answered the postcard on Department of Physiology stationery, a mistake from which New England propriety shrank. He rewrote it on plain bond, and bought a plain envelope for dispatch.

Your card was the most beautiful of my life. This even as I trembled at the possibility the secretary would read it. In the
Essay on Human Understanding
, Locke writes, “Any one reflecting upon the thought he has of the delight which any present or absent thing is apt to produce in him has the idea we call love.” I delight in you, I fear that delight, I fear what I fear, and
that
I fear, but who knows, maybe you are the way out of the prison of my feelings. Or do I propose another prison for us both? I know nothing. You are my patient, and a pupil, I a doctor and professor, but here, in love, it may be that you will be more tutor than I. I foresee nothing for us. But, dear Cynthia,
je vous adore
. B.

three

Like half the college girls of America, Cynthia Ryder wanted to spend a summer in Cambridge. It was the new center of manageable excitement. Europe was back-packs, hostels, sore legs, sexist pinchers, museums. Berkeley—as Eastern talk had it—emptied in summer of all but freaks, heads and Panthers. The other choices were jobs-for-bread, resorts or family; these were for the needy or intimidated. No, Cambridge was it. Those that didn't settle there came through.

Cynthia told her father the Harvard Summer Session had a great program. That was enough; Mr. Ryder would subsidize an expedition to the Arctic if his daughters suggested there was a solid educational reason for it.

Cynthia and her friends, Weej and Dinah, took a semi-furnished apartment on Irving Street. Cynthia's boy friend, Jamie, lived with her and worked at an Amoco Station in Boston; the other girls changed guard every few weeks. Boys and girls on their way to and from the Cape, Maine, and Canada, were in and out of the place—the floor space was good and there were sleeping bags and old quilts for mattresses.

For a year, at Swarthmore, the girls had lived with boys in their dorm rooms, but none of them had lived as couples for weeks on end. Cambridge was domesticity without chains. It was great to come back to the apartment and never know who you'd see or in what state of undress. Everybody walked around half nude. There were always talk and music. If something clicked, you went into one of the bedrooms and made out.

Jamie had been Cynthia's boy friend for a year, but it was wearing thin. He was beautiful, he was sweet, but he was a baby. Besides he was always horny, she wasn't. She'd just about get to sleep on the quilted floor when he'd be tickling her for service at one end or another. She blew up, he turned infant, then asserted himself, said she was breaking him down, told her he was moving, then moved. She didn't miss him; she was already in love with the doctor.

Cynthia had grown up in a Xanadu house her father had built on the inland waterway below Shallot in Eastern North Carolina. It was an endless, golden house set amidst stables, courts, pools, gardens; outside and inside interlaced through glassed patios, boxwood corridors, rose gardens, game, gadget and play areas, photography rooms, machine shops. There was a runway for the plane the four girls learned to pilot when they reached sixteen, a pier for motorboats to draw them water-skiing, a five-hole golf course. There was a trophy room, each year fuller of silver shine as the girls won horse shows, tennis tournaments, Latin Competitions.

Much triumph, but not much gaiety, although the girls enjoyed family life, respected each other's wit, believed their father the most remarkable man in Eastern Carolina and their mother, although hickish, the best there was. There was, of course, much competition. Its source was need for Mr. Ryder's favor, fear of his disapproval. There was much of the last; the first was scarce.

Mr. Ryder was a driven man, a self-made son of a religious woman who owned Shallot's hardware store. He'd won a baseball scholarship to Elon College, then went on to Chapel Hill for his law degree. A great lawyer in a state renowned for great lawyers, he had, in his time, seen nearly everything in the way of domestic and institutional deformity. In a way, his house sheltered his disgust with the world which financed it.

Like many men of the late Sixties who derived general opinions from popular magazines and television, Mr. Ryder believed there was next to nothing bright American girls would not do. Sexually, politically, pharmaceutically. This even went for the four girls he'd raised in what he called “disciplined liberty.” Like another nineteenth century phrase revived in the nineteen sixties, “benign neglect,” Mr. Ryder's coupled apparent opposites in the interest of carefree policy. He had trained his daughters to question everything, to tolerate anything intellectually, even to try out anything that tested intelligence and physical skill; but not their morals. That area they could leave to the deprived and disordered. They should be content with mental and sportive adventure. His intelligence had created a special world for them. Their bodies were fine, their teeth straight, their clothes whatever they wanted; they went to the best Eastern preparatory schools and colleges, there was nowhere on earth they couldn't go. All he asked was that they should avoid the moronic license of their contemporaries who blew themselves up in revolutionary cells, fornicated with the casualness of gorillas, mindlessly advanced their mindlessness with crazing chemicals, and ululated into loudspeakers against the complex arrangements brilliant men had worked out over centuries.

Mr. Ryder was not unaware of tension in his daughters, even saw how competition for his favor created it; but he did not guess how deeply it had formed them. In his time he'd seen every sort of family mess, fathers and daughters at each other's throats or in each other's beds, brothers closer than man-and-wife or fixed in a hatred even murder couldn't appease; but these were disordered, untrained, miserably unfortunate people. His daughters' lives had been worked out as well as lives could be in such times.

“Let them alone,” he frequently told his wife. “They know what they're doing.”

They
was the sacred pronoun. Cynthia's mother had learned to bear with it, as she had learned early how to bear or slide off, if not resist, her husband's petty tyranny and mockery. “What kind of a roast is this, Mary Jane? Somethin' you ordered from the Sears catalogue?” Her packs of cigarettes would be piled in the fireplace and publicly—daughters, Jimbo, the carpenter, and Emy, the cook—burned. Mrs. Ryder's humor bolstered her passivity. Her good spirit, decency and sweetness gave her daughters one sort of security, but subservience to her husband deprived them of another, a sense of equality. They fastened on their father's values: good looks, good bodies, winning; public distinction, private delight.