The Lone Pilgrim (23 page)

Polly had remet him at one of his openings. She and her husband Henry and her brother Henry had gone to Lincoln's fancy gallery and sipped white wine while admiring his paintings. He was, in fact, very talented. Furthermore, he was very attractive: tall, lanky, boyish, with an unsmiling face, plain glasses, and a thick shock of straight hair that hung over his forehead. He had a big, almost pouty mouth and, when he smiled, an extremely silly grin. He was wearing the sort of clothes a young fisherman might wear, or they might have been painter's clothes: a turtleneck sweater, heavy tweed trousers, and heavy shoes that seemed to be oiled and which laced. Polly could tell at once that he was rather loony. And, she was not surprised when, upon introduction, he kissed her on the mouth.

“Oh, I'm sorry,” he said. “I thought you were someone else.” He smiled a rattled smile.

Polly had been married to Henry Demarest for eight years. He was big and handsome. His short hair waved no matter how it was cut, and he was traditional in his clothing on which he liked to spend a lot of money His underwear was made for him of pima cotton. He was a perfect husband—so like the rest of Polly's family that she had little to get used to. Her present home was a slightly less grand edition of her childhood dwelling. Her children's childhood was a replica of her own. Henry's sense of what life was like was very Solo-Miller-like. She had moved from one family to another and often hardly noticed the difference. Lincoln's kiss had rather a dramatic effect. She felt it all the way to the bottoms of her feet.

Before she left she went right up to him.

“I want to buy one of those oil on paper pictures,” she said.

“I'm afraid you'll have to come to my studio,” Lincoln said. “Would you like to come this minute, or you could come tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” Polly said. “What time?”

“As soon as possible,” he said. “I'm always there. Here's my card. The address is on it.”

The next day she appeared at his studio at noon. It was the only time she had, but it troubled her to appear at lunchtime. When he opened the door, Polly suddenly kissed him on the mouth.

“Oh, I'm sorry,” she said. “I thought you were somone else.” Her heart was pounding. She could not imagine what had taken possession of her.

“I knew you'd be here for lunch,” Lincoln said. In the back of his big, neat studio were his living quarters: a bed, a wooden table, six chairs, a desk, and an armchair. The table had been set for lunch, which melted Polly's heart. Lunch consisted of bread, cheese, a bottle of wine, a bunch of grapes, and a plate of cookies. After lunch they went directly to bed as if everything had been arranged beforehand.

They spent the afternoon in bed. Polly called her office and invented an excuse. It amazed her with what perfect ease she lied. She called her housekeeper and invented another excuse. By the end of the afternoon, they were both in love. They giggled and laughed and played like children, and when it was time for Polly to go home, they immediately set up a schedule. Both of them were orderly. Polly would call Lincoln at a certain time on the three days a week she went to her office. On her home days she would call him a little earlier, after Henry and the children had gone off to work and school. They would meet as often as possible and, if they were ever seen, Polly would say that Lincoln was painting her portrait as a present to either Henry or her parents and, if it was ever necessary to produce such a work, Lincoln would dash one off.

Polly was, in fact, a demon organizer. How else could she have tended two children, run her household, organized her housekeeper, run a social life, pleased a husband who required some attention, participated in her family life, and had a lover, too?

As to Polly's job, her mother could never keep straight what it was. She could understand “lawyer” and “professor” and “designer” or even Henry's and Andreya's jobs, which were “aeronautical engineers.” But “Assistant Co-Ordinator for the Evaluation of Pilot Reading Methods” stumped her. What Polly did was to survey and evaluate every new reading project available to schools and assess them. She worked for an educational corporation that produced information for the Board of Education. Wendy thought this was a very strange job, but then she did not understand jobs that were neither glamorous nor power producing, or, at the very least, interesting to describe. Furthermore, Wendy was old school, and in her unexamined heart she did not believe women should work—unless they were, say, the head of a large cosmetics company. Nice women
volunteered.
When she thought of women who actually worked for a living, Wendy thought of librarians, or the lingerie fitters at Saks Fifth Avenue, or of Madame Rubenstein. That Polly had gotten herself what sounded like a boring, bureaucratic job puzzled her, but then Polly had always been the stolid member of the family.

This job gave her considerable leeway. It produced a number of fictitious seminars in Lincoln's neighborhood and once produced an actual business trip—three days away with Lincoln in Vermont. Her colleagues were not the sort of people Henry Demarest would ever have socialized with, so he would never discover that she had not been on a business trip.

After her call to Lincoln, Polly sat down to her parents' table with a light heart. The fact that she loved Lincoln and Lincoln loved her had the same effect a secret and longed-for toy has on a child: she could not get over that it was now hers.

Nothing had deviated on the table for as long as Polly could remember. At each person's place was a small glass of fresh orange juice. There were breakfast plates decorated with cornflowers, pheasants, and vines. There were heavy white plates of smoked salmon, sliced tomatoes, onion, and lemon wedges. There was a plate of cream cheese that had been molded in an ornamental pudding mold; and silver baskets of toast points; and cobalt blue glass dishes of capers. At Wendy's end was the big silver coffee pot, the silver pot of hot milk, and the big silver sugar dish filled with lump sugar that was served with silver tongs. The cups they drank from on Sunday mornings were eggshell porcelain decorated with birds. These cups annoyed Polly and always had. She liked a great big cup of coffee, a like that was not shared by any member of her family except Lincoln whom she included, because she loved him so, in her family feelings. Those fragile cups kept the coffee too hot to drink at once, but if you dawdled at all, the coffee became instantly stone cold.

Around the table were Wendy, Henry, Sr., Pete, Dee-Dee, Henry Demarest, and three blank places for Paul, Henry, Jr., and Andreya. Then there was Polly.

As he did every Sunday, Henry, Sr., began by disapproving of the smoked salmon.

“The exact equivalent of smoking cigarettes,” he said. “Polly, I really can't imagine how you can feed that stuff to Pete and Dee-Dee.”

“Daddy, this salmon is very lightly smoked. Mother and I have been all over New York comparing, and this salmon is the most lightly cured and the most lightly smoked. It's barely smoked at all.”

“That's worse,” said Henry, Sr. “Fish flesh is the ideal breeding ground for parasites. At least smoking kills them.”

“Yes, Daddy. But this is adequately smoked, although not smoked enough to be harmful.” She passed the silver basket to her children. “Don't grab, darling,” she said to Pete. “When something is passed to you, you take it gently.”

“I am a woolly beast,” said Pete. “Woolly, woolly, woolly.”

“Even a woolly beast can take a piece of toast without grabbing,” said Polly.

“No, they can't,” said Pete. “They have great big woolly paws and they have to grab. Woolly, woolly, woolly.”

“Stop that at once,” said Polly, but sweetly. She could not help it but she loved when her children got out of hand. In her secret heart, she was on their side and she longed for Henry Demarest's business trips so that she and the children could eat nursery food around the wooden kitchen table. Polly liked to make shepherd's pie, lamb stew, mashed potatoes, junket, stewed figs with cream, hush puppies, hermits, and rice pudding. For Henry she served a more elaborate cuisine. He liked complicated food: stuffed breast of veal, carpetbagger steak, fresh ham with pistachio, all of which Polly was happy to provide, but her favorite time of the year was late February, with lots of sleety, messy weather, Henry in Boston or Dallas or San Francisco, and she and the children being silly and having dinner. Her children knew instinctively that their mother was almost helpless to stop them, so when they misbehaved, they did so delicately.

“Woolly, woolly, woolly,” whispered Dee-Dee, whose real name was Claire.

“That's quite enough, you two,” said Henry Demarest. He loved his children dearly, but he found them trying at meals. On the weeknights Polly sat with Pete and Dee-Dee while they had their supper and then had dinner with Henry. Henry liked to apportion time: an hour after he came home—if he was not working late—to have his drink and let his children crawl all over him. Then he liked to put them to bed, kiss them goodnight, and sit down to a good meal in the dining room with Polly.

Pete and Dee-Dee always obeyed their father, but whenever Polly looked at them, she saw that they were mouthing the word “woolly” over and over again, and dissolving into soundless giggles.

At these brunches the family was encouraged to speak of family matters, current events, and to share moments of their professional lives. As children, Paul, Polly, and Henry, Jr., had been taught the art of dinner table conversation, but it was practiced only by the senior Solo-Millers, Polly, and Henry Demarest, who was a master at it.

Before the conversation got underway, the front hall door was heard to open, and Paul, Henry, Jr., and Andreya appeared with Henry and Andreya's dog. They were all red-cheeked from the cold. A great deal of kissing and handshaking took place and then all got down to eating and talking.

As always happened, the table divided into the silent half and the legal half, with Polly in the middle. Henry Demarest and Henry, Sr., discussed a point of law, referring to Paul from time to time. Paul nodded, said yes, or no, or quite—a term he and his father employed for noncommittal response—and buttered his toast.

Henry and Andreya's dog was a Bluetick Hound which Wendy had thought for several years was called a fleahound. Then she had thought that the dog had ticks and had banned it from the house. When it was explained to her that this was a breed and not a condition, she relented, but she did not like dogs except in the country when they belonged to other people. Both she and Henry, Sr., felt that they brought awful things into the house from the street on their paws. This dog was called Kirby. Wendy, of course, called it Kelly.

That Henry, Jr., fed this animal bits of smoked salmon under the table made Wendy want to scream, and when Andreya did it, it made her want to jump up and down, but she was silent. Andreya could be spoken sharply about, but not sharply spoken to. Both Henry and Andreya knew this, and so Andreya mostly did the under the table feeding. Henry was too intent on eating to notice his mother trying to get his eye. He was doing something else she found objectionable. He and Polly called it “building a sandwich.” They liked to put layer upon layer upon layer of things on a piece of toast and then eat it in two bites. Wendy, Henry, Sr., and Paul found this disgusting. Polly adored it. When she was alone she did the same thing, but never in front of her children who might easily pick it up, as dogs pick things up on their paws, and bring it to disturb their grandmother's house.

Soon the legal half of the table extended to the table at large. Henry, Jr., spoke at length about a glider he and Andreya were going to build. A good part of this recitation was numerical. Andreya nodded energetically, her eyes bright with the effort to understand. Paul asked two direct questions about the economics of the aerospace industry and Henry Demarest told a complicated anecdote about one of his firm's aerospace industry clients. Wendy misreported something she had read in the paper about what she called “the jet promotion engine” and then Pete and Dee-Dee who had been giggling silently all through lunch became crazed with boredom and were excused from the table. They were sent, as they were sent every Sunday, into the library where they could read picture books or take all the cushions off the chairs and sofas and build fortresses. On Sunday mornings Wendy took everything breakable out of the library so that the children could play to their hearts' content.

To open up the conversation, Wendy asked Henry, Jr., about someone she had met roughly six dozen times.

“And how is that nice friend of yours, Bill Friedrich?” she said.

“Tom Friedrich,” said Henry, Jr.

“I said Tom, didn't I?” Wendy said.

“You said Bill.”

“Well, I think of him as Bill, but I always try to say Tom,” Wendy said. “Are you feeding Kelly under the table?”

She knew that Andreya was in fact feeding Kirby under the table and every Sunday she used this method to get her to stop. It never worked.

“Kirby,” said Henry, Jr. “And I'm not feeding him. Poll, pass the toast. And pass the cream cheese. No, wait a second. It's all on your side of the table. Build me a sandwich, will you?”

As Polly layered Henry's sandwich, the conversation came her way: equal attention was a firm Solo-Miller rule. Pete and Dee-Dee figured as her part of the conversation. Polly had used to wonder if no one ever asked her anything about herself because she was just a girl, and the answer was no. No one ever asked her anything because she was so normal. She had graduated near the top of her class at a good school, had worked for a year as a reading teacher, gotten engaged and married to Henry Demarest, taken a honeymoon trip to France, set up house seventeen blocks from her parents, gotten a master's degree, and eventually produced Pete and Dee-Dee. She had not stayed unmarried nor had she married someone who would not speak English. She had not gotten divorced, or disagreed violently with anyone, or entertained an odd idea or notion. She had never given anyone the slightest pause.