Other Men's Daughters (6 page)

Cynthia's ambition was huge. She'd wanted to be the most beautiful, most renowned, most brilliant, most accomplished … whatever. Everything.

Boys were there to be used, to be loved, to be lost in, to be surmounted. Virginity was the first obstacle. Between that and marriage was the Era of Exploration: boys-men were to be explored, tested.

For Cynthia, the spring of Sixty-Nine had been a sexual pageant. Behind Jamie's back, she'd slept at least once with eight boys. Weej and Dinah claimed she wanted to sleep with every boy at Swarthmore, Penn and Haverford. “I'm no hick. Why stop there?” But it wasn't that interesting. She was curious about sex as she was about genetics and French poets; naturally, there was more. She loved her power to excite and the pleasure of excitement. For a girl who'd spent years in the shadow of a prettier older sister, who didn't wear a bra till the tenth grade and who periodically feared that she was ugly, the pleasure of being told she was beautiful (and occasionally seeing her own beauty) was finer than anything else in her life.

Alone in bed, she rolled out the names and bodies of her lovers; a Homeric catalogue. “Am I a whore?” Knew she wasn't, yet knew the curiosity of early sex, the variety of those concealed male tools. Jamie and Benjy, Tommy, Will, Chip and Petto, Doug, and Deny. It was Chip who'd raped her. Or tried. (He couldn't get in, she was so tiny then.) Two weeks before her seventeenth birthday, the summer before college. They'd made love every week; he never got in very far. He was huge like Gerald in
Women in Love
, but gentle, funny. They'd take his Volkswagen out to the airport, stick a surfboard through the back windows, drive out to the Shallot runway and radio in for take-off instructions. He sent her a poem a day her first year; awful poems. Then Jamie, a sculptor and dancer, nobody had a body like his, he wanted to make love every minute, any time, he walked around with a hard-on all day, he had to wear baggy pants, and she would have to help him beat off three or four times a day, taking it in her mouth, no great joy, though she loved him, still loved him a little. When he came home to Carolina with her, they made love all night. Within earshot of her father. Of course. She'd been using foam; she'd given up The Pill in March after she kept fainting. In the middle of July though, she was sick of the foam, it kept leaking out of her, she could never tell when it would. Which was when she went to Holyoke Center to get a prescription for The Pill.

four

Cynthia came up to Cambridge the last weekend of September and stayed in the apartment of Dr. Merriwether's friend, Thomas Fischer, who was, as usual, off somewhere.

The visit had been arranged in midnight telephone calls which, for Merriwether, had some of the excitement of love-making.

“So this is what the phone means to the girls.” Once Sarah had taken the receiver from Esmé's hand as she poured school gossip into it. Esmé screamed. Merriwether came downstairs, pacified and dispatched her. “The phone's part of her flesh. Like a limb.”

“She hasn't done her French, she hasn't begun her social studies report, she's been on that phone since seven-fifteen. I'm not going to live behind Esmé's Telephonic Chinese Wall.” Sarah wore silvered eyeglasses which slipped down her nose; the rims made horizons in the black eyes.

“Perhaps we should get the children their own phone.”

“I think that would be criminal indulgence. A phone is not a decent substitute for human intercourse.”

Merriwether related an anecdote Thomas Fischer had told him about walking with Bohr in the woods near Copenhagen the year Fischer won his Nobel. “Bohr touched the trees with his cane and told Tom how odd it was one could
feel
the tree through the cane. There must be interactions that can be literally felt.”

Sarah's head bobbed angrily, the glasses slipped down, she shoved them back. She could not bear his lectures; he stood over her as if she were an auditorium. “Esmé's indolence has nothing to do with subtle interactions.”

“You're right as rain. I didn't mean she shouldn't do her homework. But I do think adolescents animate all sorts of things with their feelings. You know how the girls are with their little doo-dads. Telephoning is like that.”

“I suppose you do know about telephoning.”

Were the creaking backstairs significant for her? He got up. “I'm sorry, Sarah. If I call someone again at night, I'll try to talk more quietly.”

Snort. Sarah had never been a facial actress, she didn't pout, didn't wink, but in recent months, she'd developed a variety of sub-verbal grunts, plus a few eye-narrowings and lip-pursings which broadcast her discontent. In the emotional husbandry of the Merriwethers, they were as telling as curses.

That night, Dr. Merriwether found himself checking her breathing before he went downstairs. Cynthia asked if she could bring some hash for the weekend.

“Hash?”

“Yes.”

“I don't get it. Why?”

“Because it'd be nice.”

“Oh. You mean hashish.
Cannabis
.”

“Won't you take it with me?”

“I don't know.”

Actually, he was astonished. He'd first thought Cynthia was talking about corned-beef hash. When he caught on, he felt as he'd felt when she'd danced for him, “out of it”; and then, depressed. Did the girl think their relationship needed this kind of bolstering? Couldn't she enjoy herself without it? “Yet it's their sign,” he told himself (
their
assigning her to “The Young”). Was part of his feeling for her the joy of learning about a new species? Terrible idea. Had laboratory life so deformed him that even intimacy was heuristic? Though love and learning
were
old associates. (Maxim Schneider told him Sappho's love poems came at her pupils' graduations.) But he wanted Cynthia, not her bulletins.

At least not her hash.

“Don't bring it. If we need it, there's even less sense to all this than we know there is.”

“I just thought it might relax us.”

“I'm paranoiac about exposure here, Cynthia. You're a minor, this is my town. Your hash might, well, settle mine.”

“All right. I won't.”

“It's so easy for someone like me to subvert his pleasures. I'm such a proper, cautious type. You'll soon see what a swamp you're letting yourself into.”

“I love you. I won't bring it. I'll just bring this little book I have for you.”

“What's that?”

“
Nineteen Ways to Sodomize a Minor
.”

The next day, Cynthia called him at the university to say she couldn't come that weekend; her father was coming to see her between legal meetings in Philadelphia.

“Can't you tell him you're going out of town? I fixed Tom Fischer's apartment for you.” He'd put sheets on the bed and orange juice in the freezer.

“I just can't. You don't know him. He'd be deeply offended.”

“I guess I'm not deeply offended.”

It was worse than that. A week before, she'd canceled the trip because a photographer had invited her to a party in New York where she might meet people who could use her as a model. “I'd get all this money, then things would be easy for me. I could visit you whenever I wanted without dunning you or Daddy for money.” Merriwether felt trapped by her whims. He was disappointed, jealous, anxious, enraged. “Let's just call it off,” he'd told her. “Have a fine time in New York. We'll be in touch some day,” and he'd hung up and left the office to avoid a return call.

The rest of that day was awful. There were no classes to distract him, no committee meetings, he couldn't work in the lab. He went home early and played one-on-one with George in the backyard, and that night went with Sarah to a movie, one of the few times in the year she'd been willing to go out with him anywhere. The movie was an unlucky choice,
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
. In it, a teenaged girl, after listening to her mad teacher's spiel about “middle-aged Dante” falling in love with “child Beatrice” (“they were both nine years old,” said Sarah, edifying two rows of patrons), becomes the mistress of the teacher's own lover. Merriwether flushed. Here he was, exhibited in the cage of the film, listening to the audience laugh at the young girl telling her lover—five years younger than he—that he was over the hill. Was the situation so comic? Over and over, the same situations, the same warnings, the same conclusions.

He had to force himself not to telephone Cynthia. Instead, he wrote her a letter denouncing her frivolity, denouncing himself for being “taken in” by what he'd mistaken as a “deeper seriousness,” for being so foolish to think any twenty-year-old girl could be anything more than briefly diverted by “an old laboratory grub.”

“I shouldn't mail it.” But he put on the stamp and walked to the mailbox. Yet he knew he would tear it up, knew it, almost knew, almost, and then, before he could let himself think, he'd opened the blue lid and tossed in the letter.

Why not? It was forcefully written; it would effectively
bar the door
.

Friday, Sarah drove Priscilla back to Oberlin. He planned to stay home with George and Esmé, then couldn't. Cynthia would be in Someone's Bed, he could not wait that out at home. Hanson, an epidemiologist, was lecturing on the degenerative disease, kuru. He'd go to it.

First, he took George and Esmé to dinner at the Wirthaus. They had a spat about who spilled the 7-Up, he was firm with them, and at home told them to stay apart, he had to go to a lecture. “Take any messages, sweetheart,” he told Esmé. “Be sure you write them down. Don't forget. Put the messages on the bed-table.”

“I always do, Dad.” Esmé was very responsible, he kissed her, she stroked his cheek. “You didn't shave too well today.”

“I'm only going out for a bit, darling. But don't worry if I'm not back at nine-thirty. Though maybe you ought to go to bed in our room, in case the phone rings.”

Which puzzled but also delighted her.

“And please, children, be very good with each other. Don't let anyone in unless you know them. But don't use the chain, or I won't be able to get back in.” He always repeated instructions when these two were left without a sitter. It was a recent arrangement, they enjoyed the independence and the run of the house.

The lecture was first-rate. Hanson was a youngish man from the Rockefeller Institute. He'd gone to New Guinea and encountered the Foré, a neolithic people of remarkable metabolism. Their potassium-sodium balance was incredible; lactating women suffered potassium poisoning, the urine output was as little as 200 ccs, yet there was no uremia. The Foré were cannibals, they had no numbers over ten, had no conception of themselves as a tribe or group, couldn't swim, had no boats or bridges, knew nothing of the world beyond a hill and thirty or forty other people. As for kuru, it was a virogenic, pre-senile dementia without inflammation and with a median incubation period of ten to fifteen years. After a year's work, Hanson realized it was a variation of the Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease: it derived from the Foré's cannibalism. (As a mark of endearment and respect, the Foré cooked, ate and ornamented themselves with the flesh of dead relatives; their “how do you do” was “I eat your buttocks.”)

After the lecture, Merriwether joined Hanson and Fred Matthias, the department chairman, at Matthias's house on Kirkland Place. Mrs. Matthias had furnished this jewel of Cambridge Georgian like an office. Matthias was a genial emptiness. Merriwether thought that his wife, a smart neurotic woman, had set this Naugahyde stage to advertise the vacancy.

Hanson was hawk-faced, intense, knowledgeable about everything connected with his work, ethnography, epidemiology, genetics, medical history, even the politics and economy of the area. He had not only taught the Foré about kuru but about steel, swimming, boat-building, salt, arithmetic, and the great world outside their hills. “I felt Promethean.”

Merriwether walked home through the Yard. What human variety there was. Was it only last night he'd been damning human sameness?

Back home, it was George not Esmé, asleep on the bed. The reading light was on, his son's little arm was over his eyes. On the telephone table was a note in George's unsteady script. “Sinthea called. Two times. She will call tomorow.”

Relief foamed in him. His darling George. The taker of this message. Please God, may it not harm him.

The weekend went well. He told Sarah he had to stay in the lab with his rats. “I can't tell when they're going to pop off.” He and Cynthia stayed in Fischer's room, watched television, played chess and read
Anna Karenina
to each other. Saturday night, they went to Boston, getting on the train at Central Square, sitting a few seats apart in case they met anyone he knew. A trial for both of them. Merriwether, in his tie and tweed jacket, Cynthia in her black stockings, mini-skirt and boy's sweater smiling nervously, foolishly over three seats. He moved next to her. “It's too silly.” Yet he was so nervous in the restaurant, she said, “Let's just go home.” They didn't feel at ease until they were back in Fischer's bed.

The next week Cynthia wrote him a letter in the love code of Kitty and Levin. “Bd,” it went

i  d  of  l  f  y  
w  y  1)  l  w  m  or  2)  m  m

C  o

In the laboratory he worked it out to “Bobbie dear” or “darling” “I'm dying of love for you. Will you 1) live with me or 2) marry me.” He had to get “C o” explained on the phone.

“‘Check one,'” she said.

As for “dying of love,” it was hyperbolic, but he understood the feeling in it. Love-need was a crab-grip in the intestines. But if the grip was Cynthia, why did he scarcely think of her? At times, his sense of her was more her name than anything else. Not quite the name, but the idea of Cynthia within it. It made no physiological sense. The Love-Grip. Why not the Love Goddess? What did
missing her
mean? Costive tension? He missed her. He wanted her in bed. Ankle bones, hips, her—yes—all of it, moving, on, in, above, below. “I love you.” Up in his study, head on his typewriter case. “I love you.” The dark window beaded with drizzle. Books, note cards, goose-neck lamp, pictures of Albie, Pris, Esmé, George, of Sarah—he looked away.
Cynthia. Que je vous adore
.