Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (21 page)

It took Ann and Fennie a week to pack; Fennie had a special system for packing their books in alphabetical order so they could easily be arranged on shelves in Washington. Ann said, “I feel a great burden has been lifted from me. I think I’ve been afraid the whole time we’ve been here. Well, I won’t be frightened anymore. What we must remember, Fennie, is that the past is dead.”

She thought it strange that there were so many beginnings in the beginnings of a marriage.

A
NN SAID
of Washington, “It feels like a Southern town.”

She worked as a statistician and earned eleven hundred and fifty-five dollars a year. Fennie, at the Department of Commerce, as a junior member of its panel of legal advisers, earned three thousand. Fennie had nine hundred and fifty dollars a year from a trust fund. His mother had said she would send him fifty dollars a month, but she sometimes forgot. Ann’s share of her family’s business was eleven hundred dollars a year. Ann and Fennie knew themselves to be prosperous.

They took a three-room apartment near Dupont Circle. Ann thought the apartment beautiful; she dreamed about it in her sleep and woke to find herself there. Fennie sometimes said to her in the morning, “You’re my s-wheatie, my breakfast of champions.”

Ann believed that Fennie should share in the work of running the apartment. “Men and women are equals,” Ann said; Fennie agreed. “There’s a lot of dead lumber to be cleared away in these matters,” he said.

In those early months, they would meet after work and drive home together and shop together. At the grocery, Fennie was excited and unreliable. He would hurry to Ann’s side while she studied two cans of green peas and did the complicated weight-price figuring necessary to determine which was the best buy—Ann felt American industry should be policed by intelligent consumers—and he would whisper, “Honey” (he had started to pick up bits of a Southern speech), “the butcher says he has Virginia smoked ham, the real McCoy.”

“How much is it?” Ann would ask.

Fennie was inclined to take Ann’s frugality as a criticism of his masculinity.

Sometimes Ann and Fennie would be stiff and silent in each other’s company after the difficulties of shopping together, depressed at the differences there were between them. Ann would be the one to break the silence: “Why are all the lights in the windows so yellow, Fennie? Is it because of the dust in the atmosphere?” He had once explained to her that dust in the air caused the brilliance of sunsets. It was her way of making peace.

Relieved, Fennie would say something silly like “Because chickens cross the road.” Ann thought Fennie’s humor was surrealist; the silliest of his remarks could plunge her into hilarity. She would laugh. Fennie would laugh at the sight of her laughing. Giggling, laughing, and sighing, they would continue home, their laughter following them like tame birds.

Fennie did not go on very long helping her shop. He did not help her with the apartment, either. Exhausted in the evenings, after a long day of being a new man in the office, he would collapse and ask Ann to make him a drink. “You like to baby me,” Fennie said. “You like to do it because you love me,” he said to her.

She did not contradict him.

Ann found it hard to get used to—that people thought of her as fortunate, young, and happy. And interesting. She wanted to be left alone and not have men make suggestive remarks to her or put ideas into her head, and she did her hair in a bun and wore loose-fitting clothes to hide her figure, which was considered in Washington to be very good-looking—long-limbed and slender.

Fennie pressed on her volumes of Havelock Ellis to read, and
Ulysses,
and
Women in Love,
and popular accounts of Freudian theories; Ann grew angry and said he was silly and she would not read them. She knew more about sex than any book, she said.

On those occasions when Fennie would say that he knew she did not love him as much as he loved her, Ann would say angrily, “That’s stupid, Fennie. Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

In some ways—so it seemed to Ann—Fennie was simply an overeducated, overtalkative, middle-class male who overcomplicated things. She was menaced by what she felt in him to be a destructive male element: “Don’t think too much,” she would say to him. She did love him, but
she did not want her feelings examined. She sometimes thought of Walter. She would be pale and worn out and sprawled in a chair. “You’re tired,” Fennie would say.

“No, I’m not,” Ann would cry, and jump up and start cleaning out ashtrays. He did not know everything.

Sometimes it brought her close to terror when he spoke of her moods, as if he had lunged out at her in a dark hallway and said, “Boo!” in a ringing voice. Her heart would take several minutes to settle down.

Ann’s and Fennie’s new friends, men and women alike, condemned dishonesty—dishonesty of emotion, of fact, in sex, and in government. They disliked snobbery but could not help thinking that people who were unlike them were unfortunate, foolish, or greedy. The couples spent what money they had on war relief for Spain, Ethiopia, or China, on books, whiskey, superior dentists, and cleaning women; they paid three dollars a week for their cleaning women. They agreed that the world was not fit for people to bring children into and that the men should not be distracted by more responsibilities. Yet an alarming number of Ann’s friends became pregnant as the months went by, especially when the stock market went up. Ann read the stock-market news and did not admit that she wanted to be pregnant. Fennie did not want children just now. Ann said, with a little laugh, “You want to be the only baby in the family.” Fennie said, “Be reasonable,” and Ann bit her lip and tried to be reasonable.

It became a point of honor not to think of Walter anymore, and his honesty and his dignity. She was not disloyal to Fennie.

She thought it almost comic how soon after marriage Fennie stopped respecting her mind. Sometimes he asked her what she was thinking of when they made love; lately he complained. He would say, “Concentrate on me more.” He did not have so much interest in making Ann happy. It was as if love were a long board and he could not carry it from his end and wanted to lay it down, although he loved her sadness—only he could ease it. Suddenly he was interested in his own life again, that part of him that was not attached to Ann.

“There’s an intelligent man at the office,” Fennie said. He said Clerkenwall Franklyn came from a distinguished Quaker family, was brilliant, was a genuine Philadelphia lawyer. “Franklyn,” Fennie announced, “says we have to come to terms with the bourgeoisie. We can use them and steal the country back from them at the same time! We can do it just the way they stole it from us—
legally!”

“Oh,” said Ann, her lips disapproving, “how can you think you can compromise with the
bourgeoisie!”

“We have to!” Fennie said enthusiastically. “Who else can run local enterprises?”

“The brighter workingmen,” Ann said, breathing irregularly.

“My dear wifey-ifey, the brighter workingmen
are
bourgeois, only without the broader commercial imagination,” Fennie said.

“No, no, no, no, no,” Ann said.

“Well, let’s talk about it some other time,” Fennie said.

When Ann was certain she was pregnant, she went to Fennie and told him that if he thought it was a bad time to have a child she would, of course, as three of her friends had, get an abortion. Fennie reminded her of their dream of working for the good of the country. “First things first,” he said. “Am I right?” he asked, omitting to ask if she wanted the child.

Ann took an afternoon off from work and went to Baltimore by train to have her abortion. Very weak, she took a train back to Washington. Fennie was frightened, when he came home, to see her so pale; she was on her feet, her mouth set in an unreal smile; Fennie had the impression that Ann hated him.

She refused for a long time to speak of what had happened; sometimes her hand would creep to her stomach and rest there as if to warm it.

She and Fennie quarreled. Fennie suddenly complained that Ann had a piercing, Wisconsin accent.

“You never complained before!” Ann said in just that piercing voice.

“I never noticed it before.”

Ann said, “I’ll tell you what, Fennie. I’ll kill myself. Will that make you happy?”

Fennie said, “Oh, shut up.” Then he looked amazed. He said emotionally, “You can’t let things fester.… I think you’re still upset about the—er—abortion incident. But what’s happened to our ideals, Annieannie? You know we’re not after the ordinary things in life. We’re after big game.”

There was something sexual and slatternly about Ann as she stood there in her despair; Fennie felt himself fascinated by her anew.

Two months later, she miscarried. The doctor said her system had been weakened by the abortion. Ann said, “I didn’t tell you I was pregnant, Fennie, because I knew it would be all right.” She talked as if she were proud of herself, but she would drop suddenly into soliloquies
of self-accusation: “I’m a terrible fool—stupid, stupid.…” She was often apologetic: “I don’t know if I’m coming or going. I’d lose my head if it wasn’t fastened to my shoulders.” When she drank, she would turn on Fennie: she twisted up her face and said, “You’re a rat, Fennie. You’re a genuine rat.”

Fennie, quite pale and patient, said, “I know you’re not yourself.”

Ann replied, “No, I’m not myself. I’m your mother, Fennie, you rat.”

Fennie said, “You haven’t been your real self since the babies.”

“Don’t talk to me that way, you crypto-Fascist!” Ann cried. “Well, the honeymoon is over,” she would say by way of apology. “I’m sorry. I said a lot of true things I shouldn’t have said.”

She would be silent and devoted for days. “Marriage is not easy,” she would say to friends. “Fennie and I have made a good adjustment.” She thought of Fennie as Men. “You know what men are like,” she would say. She had been married four years. To have given a specific description of Fennie would have made her weep:
He is a smallish man who had a bad mother. He drinks too much because he’s self-centered. He gets overexcited. He isn’t always easy with me. He’s tempted to bite his nails but he wants to believe analysis cured him and so when he starts to bite a nail he stops. But every couple of months he gives in and bites a nail or two. He is not very good with people. The skin over his chest is almost blue and there is a reddish-blue mark on his paunch where his belt rubs. His collarbones stick out.
If she had been asked to list his defects, she would have cried, “We have values! We don’t look at people that way!”

If asked to describe herself, she would have said, “I’m something of an intellectual. My mind is very erratic, but I’m not ashamed of being a woman.” If pressed, she might have added, “I’m a good wife to my husband. I don’t bother him with my moods. I know when to say goodbye.” She would have said that she and Fennie labored to “bring to birth” better “conditions” for the country. Her life and Fennie’s were not at all meaningless.

Fennie’s mother fell ill. Fennie went out to Milwaukee. When he returned to Washington, he said to Ann that his mother would like to see a grandchild. “Why don’t we have a child?” Fennie said as if it had been Ann who had not wanted one.

“Fennie, a child?” Ann ran her finger across an invisible veil in front of her eyes. She smiled haltingly, one hand covering the corner of her mouth. “Is it fair to bring a child into the world just now, Fennie?” Her hands dropped into her lap. “I wouldn’t mind having a child,” she said.

She carried to term and gave birth to a daughter, named Louise, after Fennie’s mother.

A
NN CALLED
the child Baby. She felt inside herself the baby’s moods, her rages, appetite, sleepiness, and comfort; these feelings in Ann were like a model of an unusual solar system: blank and primitive, very unreasonable and private, an enormous space and a sun and a moon. Light leaped from the sun to the moon. She played—she did not fully know what she meant by the phrase—the sun-moon game with the baby, each taking turns being the sun, being the moon.

She was with the baby all the time; she never said goodbye to the baby. During the day, a colored maid came in; the maid was affectionate in a false and distant way, was proud, thought people were plotting against her. Ann hardly knew the maid was there.

Fennie was rarely home; he worked late at the office; he did not get in Ann’s way. He said war was coming; he had lately begun to admire Harold Ickes and he modeled his speech on that of the secretary of the Department of the Interior. He said, “War is coming just as sure as God made little green apples.”

The baby was colicky, and cried at night; Fennie would wake—he was not as tired as Ann and did not sleep with her desperate unconsciousness—and he would nudge Ann awake; at the thin edge where her mind met the night world was the baby’s cry. Ann would leap out of bed—sometimes Fennie would laugh—and bound across the room, rebounding from chairs, even from-the wall, to the baby’s crib, her senses dulled, her pride dissolved in a preoccupation with digestion and infantile excrement.

It frightened and pleased her that motherhood was difficult. She looked into the mirror at her harassed face, her undone hair: she was doing all she could.

Fennie and Ann could not talk together as they had. They did not make love for three and a half months. Fennie was pale, his stomach was acting up. His best tenderness had an undertone of sarcasm. In a burst of concern, Ann, half asleep one evening, struggling to stay awake, gave herself to him. Since the baby came, she often thought Fennie was difficult—if not childish; he did not bother his head to understand how important it was for her to concentrate on being a good mother.

She wondered if Fennie would ever give up talking about the “male” and the “female” and D. H. Lawrence. He said, “It isn’t good to fight
the life of the instincts.… I don’t think you read enough anymore, Ann.” He thought she was not being a good sport. Ann no longer listened to Fennie when he spoke. He would say, “I heard about a book called
A New Look at Female Happiness.
Should I get hold of a copy? Will you read it?”