Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (24 page)

She said, “I have sandwiches. Two kinds. Swiss cheese,” she said, “and lettuce and tomato.” She felt the tension in the room focus on her—then the tension broke.

“The idea of food is relaxing to worried men,” Ann said to the doctor. “I’m a help to Fennie now in a way that he understands.”

The doctor said, “It is a beautiful moment when a patient achieves objectivity in her self-evaluations.”

Ann said, “Fennie still sees that girl occasionally.” She decided on Fennie’s motives: “He doesn’t want to give in too easily.… He wants to punish his mother for needing her.…” She spoke with triumph, like a successful detective in a murder mystery, and in psychoanalytic terms, like the doctor: “Fennie’s highly Oedipal—”

“An excellent insight,” the doctor said.

Ann said with good-natured malice, “I see through Fennie, but I don’t mind.” She said to the doctor, “I owe my new maturity to you.” Her warmth was tempered by open irony now, life being what it was.

Early in November, she told the doctor, “He doesn’t see the girl anymore, but he hasn’t confessed it. He spends two nights a week out. He wants me to think he’s still seeing her.”

“How do you know he’s not?”

“I can tell in bed,” Ann said triumphantly.

Ann said, “Fennie and I might place our libidos more firmly if we had a grand get-it-off-our-chests reconciliation scene, but I’m afraid Fennie’s telling me how he felt about the girl might cause me to have a violent ego reaction.”

She was enthusiastic about psychoanalysis, evangelical. But she did not like to think back over her analysis; she did not want to remember the agony. “You woke me from a living death.” She said, “My chief pleasure comes from my home life. My children mean more to me than anything.” She said, “Fennie is the keystone of the family hearth.” She said, “I can live in and cope with real-life situations.”

Ann said to the doctor, “Analysis is the first relationship I have ever carried through.” She said, “The way I threw myself at you—I completely misunderstood transference.” She laughed. She said, “This is a little like it was after Walter, except that all the neurotic patterns have been broken.” She said, “You were always as much a Walter figure to me as a father figure. Of course I realize Walter was a father figure.” She said, “Life is war, I guess. Affection makes it bearable.” She said affection itself was one of the cruelties, like death—one of the perils, along with the egos of other people. She said, “I ought to write a novel about men.”

The doctor said, “Patients never forget what they think are their doctor’s blunders.”

“Reality is reality,” Ann said.

The doctor sighed. “You are handling yourself very well,” he said.

Ann said, “Perspective is what matters.… I try to be objective and amused.… I am very fond of my husband. After all, that’s the point of analysis, isn’t it—if you can be fond of your analyst, you can be fond of anyone?”

The doctor said, “Talking to you, seeing you so
womanly,
makes me wonder how some people can think Freud was mistaken.”

He said in a voice that imparted parental reassurance while at the same time establishing a lack of faith in her, “You can always come back and see me when you get into trouble.” He said, “I want to make you a little present: there will be no charge for this hour.”

“You’ll make me cry,” Ann said—she wasn’t afraid of ambiguity.

Later, she found that she missed the doctor and Walter both.

F
OR A
long time after analysis, Ann thought of honesty as being the ability to admit the paramount importance of toilet training in the formation of character. She thought of herself as having a “relationship” with Fennie and “relationships”—necessarily “ambivalent”—with her daughters. She said to herself, “I think things through.” Ann did not find that analysis had prepared her for life—it had been a tunnel out of the shadows into the here. She was forceful. She imitated a woman from Philadelphia who served with her on three charitable committees and had a way of imposing her will. “Hoo-de-hoo hooey to that!” the woman would say forcefully. Ann took it up: “Hoo-de-hoo hooey!” she would cry.

She avoided mental intimacy with anyone. She became bored and restless and then angry if Fennie talked about ideas or her mind too much. She did not like to talk about ideas; she and Fennie were bohemians and liberals. She who had rarely gossiped when she was young gossiped now. She liked only to talk about people. She was delighted by anecdotes. She wanted her daughters “free to develop themselves,” she said—“healthy.” She tried not to invest too much emotion in them.

Fennie gardened and played bridge twice a week with men from the Department. Ann joined a bird-watching group. “Ann’s a whizbang at warblers,” Fennie said; he talked like an Ivy Leaguer more and more the older he grew, and it was never clear how much or how little irony he intended. “Fennie has the touch when it comes to delphiniums,” Ann said; she retained her Middle Western accent; it took people a while to realize she, too, was ironic.

Fennie never talked about love. Ann said, “We’re not like people who have been psychoanalyzed and talk of nothing else.” She said, “Fennie and I fulfill each other’s needs.”

She was ambitious for Fennie’s sake. She angled to advance his interests and the interests of her family. She used her plainness; people trusted her. She spoke dryly of “life’s combats—blood on the teeth.” She was a dry woman—that was her own opinion of herself. She had no daydreams.

Something they did constantly, she and Fennie, was to measure themselves
and the way they lived against other couples’ methods; a large part of living consisted of convincing themselves that they deserved to be the better part of any comparison. She said, “I’m as happy as any woman has a right to be.”

When Ann was forty-five years old, she began to feel unwell, angry, and oppressed. “I’ve been a servant all my life,” she said. She argued, “Women are the true lower classes.” She consulted a gynecologist. Ann had expected to enter old age without difficulty because of the operation she’d had before the war, but the gynecologist told her she had been mistaken. “You mean I have to go through the whole song and dance?” Ann said angrily.

Fennie told their daughters to be careful of Ann—“Your mother isn’t herself.”

One morning when an autumn light filled the kitchen, and the maid, an Austrian immigrant (a telephone lineman had broken her heart, or, as Ann believed, her ego), was scurrying tragically between the stove and the back porch—the back porch had been, Ann put it, “fixed up as our eating area: it’s not just a dining area,” she would explain; “we breakfast and lunch there, too” her wit was of that sort that year—and her daughters were quarreling, Ann thought she could not bear to be in despair again.

Ann said to the maid, to her daughters, to Fennie, “Be big! Be big! Be big!”

She walked out of the kitchen, out the front door of the house and down the street. Fennie told the maid and the girls to stay where they were, and he hurried after Ann. He caught up to her before she reached the corner. He said, “Do you feel nervous today?”

“It’s not all just in my mind, Fennie!” Ann cried.

Fennie mixed a touch of complaint with solicitude: “You don’t feel well?”

Scornfully, Ann said, “Nothing’s ever just in the body, either, Fennie!”

Fennie murmured, “The neighbors.”

Ann said, “I mean it, Fennie. I’m tired of being small. I don’t care about the neighbors.”

Fennie chewed on his lip. “No one’s had any breakfast,” he said.

“Be big,” Ann said. “Fast. Fasting’s good for you.”

Fennie smiled. “Come back to the house. We’ll all be big.”

He was joking, but to placate Ann he tried being bolder and larger;
so did the girls. Nobility became a family style; Ann worried that her family seemed foolish and doomed. “Why can’t you be realistic?” she would cry. If it was not the younger girl’s refusing to mention the pains in her stomach that turned out to be appendicitis, it was the elder’s confessing the following year that she was not a virgin: “Mother, he was so sad.” That was when Ann cried, “Why can’t you be realistic?” The children continued to quarrel: “Mummie,” said the younger, “Louise is being small and won’t lend me her blouse.” The nobility of soul Ann longed for appeared, came into focus, grew frail, transparent—was it there or not? She did not know. She thought, Once I was a woman; now I am objective and amused. But at moments the souls of her daughters and of her husband did seem to blossom into largeness of feeling.

Ann would burst out laughing, seemingly for no reason.

“What’s funny?” Fennie would ask.

“We are,” Ann said. “I am. Everything is.” At first, she laughed alone, but after a while Fennie laughed with her.

They drank, the two of them, together, heavily. Ann had two martinis before dinner, and then a succession of highballs until bedtime. She would become benevolent or quarrelsome—Fennie could not predict her mood.

Ann went to see an endocrinologist. She said, “Actually, my condition is mild, but lately I’ve developed an upsetting symptom. I have—ah—desires for men in public life.” She spoke quickly: “It used to be particularly Anthony Eden but now it’s Nehru.” She said, “I don’t like upsetting my husband.” The doctor gave her an injection. Ann said, “It’s so silly.” After the injection she felt faint. “Being a woman isn’t easy,” she told the doctor. He was not a bad-looking man.

At the time when the furor over Communists in Washington was very great, Ann said, “Fennie, will they dig up my old membership in the Party? Will they hurt you?”

Fennie said, “It was a long time ago and you changed your name—when you married; it isn’t likely anyone would remember such a marginal member as you were—”

Ann said, “I’m glad I was a Communist! I didn’t just talk. I tried to do something for mankind!”

Fennie said crossly, “You were an idiot then, you’re an idiot now, you’ll always be an idiot, and you can’t hold your liquor worth a good goddam.”

When they were tired of quarreling and of being defiant—safely,
with each other—they went up to bed and, frightened, fell asleep holding hands.

After the Army-McCarthy hearings, Ann’s youthful dereliction not having been discovered, Fennie took Ann to New York City for a four-day vacation. They stayed at the Biltmore and went to the theater and to a few museums. Fennie laughed at himself; he said, “We’re on a real spree.”

He said she was a pretty good wife for him.

They always walked to the theater. Ann fussed that Fennie would catch cold. She was an unpretentious, odd-looking, ugly-handsome woman. She admired New York; it seemed to her to be a city where people did things for amusement.

When she and Fennie returned to Alexandria, to the empty house—the girls away at college—and Ann was alone and began to think, she felt a mild carelessness; she was not young anymore, not cautious. Her thoughts more and more dwelt on Fennie. At first, Fennie was taken aback by the new warmth—not quite indiscreet but not discreet, either—of her interest in him. He said she surprised him.

Ann said, making a joke of herself, “I’ll tell you my thinking on the subject, Fennie. At our age, we’re obscene anyway. We may as well enjoy ourselves.”

In bed, Ann was sometimes shaken by alternate fits of laughter and weeping.

One evening she and Fennie went to a dinner party. Afterward, Fennie accused her of drinking too much and sitting with her skirt above her knees. “A woman your age with her skirt rucked up,” he said.

Ann said nothing. She wore a vacuous look and would not speak. Fennie came home from the office early the next day; he was fascinated by her mood. He kept touching her, not in a gentle but in a restless, edgy way; Ann responded with taut, difficult glances. It was the maid’s day off. Ann was washing up. Fennie said, “Let me help with the dishes.” He and Ann worked with a silent efficiency and familiarity with each other that slowly revealed itself to be erotic.

Ann felt that she cultivated her days and the nights with Fennie, a little Netherlands.

She wished she had a good memory for jokes. She wanted to make Fennie laugh. She thought, He really is a very masculine man.

She did not want to be honest; she wanted to be sympathetic. She wanted him to enjoy himself; she admired him. He was good-looking
in a heavyset way; his opinions were important in the affairs of the Department.

Fennie said, “Ann, what are you up to? A little middle-aged romance?”

Charlotte, the younger daughter, home for Thanksgiving—Louise was visiting her roommate’s family in Vermont—said of Ann and Fennie to her friends, “They’re very close. They’re very unclinging as parents.”

When Ann or Fennie forgot and was selfish or too casual, Fennie, susceptible to doubts now, and Ann, sensitive again, hated each other. But then the atmosphere between them would shift into a familiar comfort, somewhat apologetic in tone—as if they were humbled by a sense of the compromises each knew the other was making.

If Fennie was worn out or restless, Ann might be sulky or she might be patient. Fennie became exasperated if Ann paid him too much attention, or if when he was home she gave too much attention to her reading and not enough to him. It was roulette.

At moments when the responsiveness of herself to Fennie and his, reluctantly, to her became intense, Ann would experience an indefinably numbing, even shameful happiness; she would think, My God, it’s still going on.

She did not really expect it to happen, the excitement, the somewhat dry, angular passion of argument, of companionship, and of sensuality. When it did happen, its recurrence struck her like the rattle of a drum. The passions of the middle-aged were strong, she thought, because the middle-aged had an empty space inside themselves; inside, she was as empty as a parade ground across which the shattering rattle could resound without obstruction.

Fennie began, only a little at first, to show traces of a Middle Western accent again in his speech. He took to calling the house from the office, once or twice a day, never at the same times; he would ask Ann what she was doing and she would tell him. In the evening again he would ask her what she had done during the day, checking up on her.