Roger's Version (38 page)

“So poor little Paula is being held for her own protection against her own mother in the hospital.”

“That’s a way of putting it.”

“But Verna, how did she take that? I would be devastated; any mother would be, good or bad.”

“She cried,” I agreed, cautiously, for the untold part of the evening loomed under me like a tiger trap covered with loose thatch. “But I think she expects to get the child in the morning and that things will go on as before. I’m not so sure they will.”

Esther wasn’t quite listening; she was looking at my face. “It happened, didn’t it?”

“What? What happened?”

“Whatever it is has been building between you and Verna ever since you went calling on her the first time last autumn. That was quite uncharacteristic of you, Rog—playing the uncle. You hate those Cleveland people. You couldn’t even stand it about Lillian that she reminded you of them. At least that’s what you used to tell me.”

As if her sensation of my lying now made me a liar then and always. I counterattacked blindly. “It was that damn Dale Kohler,” I said. “He came around with his lugubrious face and told me I should try to help her. That’s the trouble with these holy rollers, always stirring things up.”

“Don’t change the subject, you’re always doing that. We’re not talking about Dale, we’re talking about Verna. Did you just drop her off, at the project?”

“Actually,” I said truthfully, trusting my face, that thin-skinned traitor, to back me up, “I suggested she might come back here and sleep somewhere. Maybe on the third floor.”

Esther’s eyes narrowed a bit, and her lips with them. “There’s nothing on the third floor,” she said. “Just those old paintings I never work on any more.”

“You should paint again. You were really loosening up, I
liked
those big angry abstractions you were doing last summer. Verna’s evidently taking art lessons now; she has one tomorrow, that was the reason she gave for not coming back here. So”—I sighed, genuinely exhausted—“I just dropped her off.”

“You didn’t tuck her in? You let her go into that dreadful place unescorted?”

“Baby”—where did I get the “baby”?—“she
lives
there, she’s the big white queen. That project is to her as water to a fish, as the briar-patch is to Br’er Rabbit.” Even I, I did not say, was feeling more at home there; like any ecological niche, it was more accommodating than one might at first think. Cocky,
light in the balls, I pressed my luck: “As to the third floor, I seem to remember an old mattress up there. She wouldn’t have minded that; she sleeps on what they call a futon. The kids now, they think it’s more spiritual than a mattress.”

Esther’s eyes sparked, making unspeakable connections. She said, “I don’t want that slutty girl in the house, I don’t want Richie exposed to her any more than absolutely necessary.” She angrily turned, giving me my favorite view, that iconic view of a woman from the rear.

I went into my study and rescued poor Tillich, another fool for love, from his undignified position face down on the armchair arm beneath my still-burning bridge lamp. Esther and I have different territories within the house, and our estrangement is such that she had left the library in its evident disarray untouched. Since it might be an aeon before I looked into this volume again, I glanced at the last pages, strident with concluding italics.
“The salvation of European society from a return to barbarism lies in the hands of socialism.”
This had been written in 1933, when Hitler came to power and I had just learned to toddle. Like so much Tillich says, it seemed both true and false. Barbarism had come, and some of it had called itself socialism.

In bed, Esther’s slender, scratchy hands sought me out, to inspect and test me; but though I felt such cheerful lust for her as not for years, I did not trust my elderly body and feigned a sleepiness that insensibly became true sleep, freighted with atrocious dreams of garbled, slashed, babyish bodies displayed on flat surfaces, under strong light.

V

i

I
n a stable society, traditions accumulate; it has become our custom, Esther’s and mine, to give a large cocktail party in the second week of May, at the juncture where classes give way to the looser travail of final examinations. She insisted that Dale be invited; I did not ask that Verna also be included. She was not an academic—indeed, not even a high-school graduate, for all my guidance and advice—and would have felt ill-at-ease amid our brilliant company. Her comportment at Thanksgiving had not impressed me as discreet, and now we had an achieved small secret to protect.

Since our joint immersion in despair after depositing broken little Paula at the hospital, our communications had been perfunctory, restricted mostly to the enlarging shadow of the Department of Social Services over our tenuously connected lives. The department had been that next morning informed of the curious nature of Paula’s green-stick fracture, and when the diligent art student did show up at the hospital—closer to two o’clock than at the promised noon—to retrieve her child, she
found there her “worker,” who had been described to me as big and black and very smart and stuffy and who was by no means amused at having missed her own lunch while Verna dawdled over hers. In her panic at seeing access to her daughter barred, Verna invoked my respectable name, for which I did not thank her. Messy depths had opened under me, where poverty and government merged. You sleep with somebody in a moment of truth and the obligations begin to pile up nightmarishly.

Esther, bless her, accompanied me to our conference in the big brick city building across from the adult-pastry shop, and it was she, unusually animated and authoritative, who proposed the acceptable compromise to the two executors of welfare present: Verna’s plump but muscular worker, her gilt-and-ruby half-glasses attached to a velvet cord that drooped regally from either ear, and a fretful gaunt white man with skin as dingy as paper shuffled with carbon paper. A Form 51A had been filed by the hospital, he informed us, and it couldn’t be filed away without notation of action.

Esther had worked for a lawyer and they, of course, like social workers and clergymen, dwell in that chiaroscuro where our incorrigible selves intertwine with society’s fumbling discipline. The board that sat behind Verna’s social worker, much as the Nicene Council sat behind the barefoot and bibulous village priest in
those
imperfect centuries, had recommended that Verna seek psychiatric counselling along with her parents. Esther pointed out that her parents were many states away and that the father, as a resolute Christian, had turned his back on his daughter.

I chuckled at that, but no one else even smiled; they saw no paradox. Nor did our Saviour:
He that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me
.

There also was the embarrassment, from the standpoint of
social order, that (as Esther further pointed out) no one had admitted or could prove that Verna had injured her child. Paula herself, Exhibit A, sat there in her mother’s lap, in a leg cast upon which Verna had painted in watercolor some realistic flowers and idealized hearts. Perhaps these hearts softened the social workers’; or perhaps it was Esther’s firm-sounding offer that Verna would voluntarily seek counselling. And we, she and I, she unexpectedly volunteered, would promise to share the guardianship of Paula with her mother; the day-care center already had
de facto
custody of the child for much of most days, and we would be willing to take the child for as many nights as Verna felt she needed to recover her poise and take possession of her life. These last pretty phrases startled us all and gave a kind of glistening frame to what had seemed a rather shabby picture.

In the end, warily and wearily, Esther’s assurances were accepted, with due notations clipped to form 51A, as the best deal the system could strike until Paula’s next leg was broken and the state could move with due process to assume custody and place her in an official foster home. This threat was delivered by the male worker, whose smudged features were eerily mobile: his lower lip kept sliding into prominence with a kind of rubbery preening as he chewed his melancholy, chastening words.

I watched to see if Verna and Esther made eye contact at any point in these transactions. The chemistry between two women we have fucked fascinates us, perhaps, with the hope that a collusion will be struck to achieve our total, perpetual care. Though Esther in her animated gestures several times reached out to touch Verna as one would Exhibit B, I saw no actual contact occur; rather, Esther’s long-nailed fingers froze an inch above the skin of Verna’s forearm, whose fine hairs responsively rose up, bristling. The girl was holding Paula on her lap with the stunned obstinacy of one who resists having a tooth pulled even though it hurts. Her short-lashed, slightly
slanted eyes pinkly filled with tears from time to time and then dried, emptying down her cheeks, at which she bumped ineffectually with the back of one hand. In her lap, Paula—lighter in tone than Verna’s worker by three notches, yet with an identically shaped, bridgeless nose—prattled, cooed, solemnly stared in mimicry of our grown-up solemn stares, and gave friendly pats to the knee of her cast, where the stem of a rather skillfully rendered purple iris curved with the plaster. Verna’s art lessons were paying off.

And so it was that some afternoons and evenings and nights Paula came to stay with us on Malvin Lane, while Verna exercised elsewhere her constitutional right to pursue happiness. My sexual jealousy roused itself only after midnight, in that casket of an hour, the clock’s weest, wherein she and I, poppets ever smaller with the passage of time, had copulated. Esther, drugged by her dose of synthetic motherhood and noisily converted to mouth-breathing by this May’s onslaught of pollen, snored steadily at my side. Even then, I remembered my niece’s unscrolling, fatty, yet tightly valved white body with more dread than desire; two weeks had passed and I had night and morning checked myself by the bathroom glare for signs of any of those new state-of-the-art venereal diseases that have nipped the sexual revolution, so to speak, in its buds. No intimate pimple or furtive urinary burning had yet shown, but I did not feel safe, would never feel safe. I had been contaminated, if not by herpes or AIDS, by DSS; from my corbelled limestone academic precincts I had been dragged down into that sooty brick parish of common incurable muddle and woe from which I had escaped twice before, in leaving Cleveland, and in leaving the ministry. Now I had an illegitimate mulatto child under my roof, along with an adulterous wife and a son with learning disabilities. By what you use, you are used,
per carnem
. I have filed as mere psychological
data the sublime buoyancy, the joy of release with which I had driven home from Verna that moonless misty night, through the wheatfield of waving skeletons while dead-as-dust Scarlatti jubilated on and on.

Indeed, it has occurred to me that in my sensation of peace
post coitum
, of sweet theistic certainty beneath the remote vague ceiling, of living
proof
at Verna’s side, I was guilty of heresy, the heresy of which the Cathars and Fraticelli were long ago accused amid the thunders of anathema—that of committing deliberate abominations so as to widen and deepen the field in which God’s forgiveness can magnificently play.
Más, más
. But
thou shall not tempt the Lord thy God
.

ii

To the party came Closson with his shrivelled little pretty wife, Prudence, her clear blue eyes as hard and intense as enamelled beads baked in her lifetime regimen of health foods, spring water, militant pacifism, and illusionless goodness, and the Vanderluytens, to give our gathering the factitious jolly racial mix of a Coca-Cola commercial on television, and Ed Snea, who was “working things out” these days with Mrs. Snea and brought in her stead a flaxen-haired, starry-eyed, and utterly hipless graduate student in problematics to whom his relationship had evidently ceased to be purely advisory. Rebecca Abrams brought a female lover, a rosy-cheeked square-built Englishwoman who knew all about Mochica and Nazca pottery shards, and Mrs. Ellicott a middle-aged son by one of her many fatal marriages, a tall bald person with a rapid eye-blink and a tic that caused his mouth, every minute or so, to shoot sideways toward one of his ears. Though quite nicely spoken, he had an odd, ineradicable air of not having dressed himself,
of other hands having done up his buttons. Rebecca’s escort, on the other hand, plainly put herself every day into the same impenetrable plaid suit, equally sound for a dig or a party, its wool so thick and tangled as to awaken envy in a tweedy type like me.

Some of my graduate students came, but no one could imagine my having an affair with Corliss Henderson; she instantly gravitated toward the bushy Englishwoman to quiz her on the issue of whether, in pre-Columbian cultures, pottery had been the product of (as patriarchal doctrine had it) male or (as she firmly believed) female hands. The Englishwoman, in her boxy skirt and mud-colored flat shoes, stated with loud relish that the Inca woman was a beast of burden, pure and simple. The wife of a tall economist famous for his readiness to appear on talk shows begged to differ, on the strength of last winter’s trip to Machu Picchu. The husband of a Bolivian poetess
persona non grata
with the present regime had his own slant on that, the Latin-American feminist question. Has North America, for all its vaunted suffrages, ever had a figure like Eva Perón? Or Gabriela Mistral? And so it went. The party brimmed with guests to remain nameless in this narrative yet all with some claim, via beauty or brains or birth, to be considered exceptional, to be among what in an earlier New England would have been called the elect.