The War Between the Tates: A Novel (4 page)

Erica did not excuse Lena because of her financial difficulties. She would rather have had one plain ordinary American sweater and skirt than all her elaborate dowdy hand-hemmed and silk-lined foreign dresses, and she said so. But Lena could not bear to waste money on “shoddy factory stuff”—besides, it was against her principles. Determined to go on living in her nice house on the nice street, but on half the income, she had made the discovery that foreign things do not so easily proclaim their price. The Mexican equivalent of wicker chairs and dime-store china, the Indian equivalent of badly printed bedspreads and thin frayed rugs, can be seen as bohemian and chic rather than cheap. A French name and some squares of dry toast will disguise vegetable soup as a meal, and costs even less than hot dogs.

Visitors praised Lena to her daughters for the marvelous way she managed, and called her a remarkable woman—meaning among other things one about whom remarks are made. Erica hated these remarks, and the men who made them. They were mostly foreign too, often from obscure stamp-album countries like Guatemala and Estonia, refugees from what her mother called The Fascist Persecution. They ate the vegetable soup and sat on the wicker furniture. Some borrowed the clothes Erica’s father had left behind and did not bring them back, and one from Albania who smelled of onions tried to hug her in the corner behind the piano.

Erica was also embarrassed by the fact that her father had left home and her mother worked in a store. The hours after school which she and her sister Marian spent in the cluttered back room at Manon’s, because Lena did not trust them alone at home and could not afford a sitter, were among the worst she had ever passed. She hated everything about it: the backside of the beige velvet curtains, like the belly of a scruffy old cat; the stained and scratched plywood of the cutting table, on one end of which she did her homework; the racks of dresses which crowded against her like pushy women (it was the sort of shop where most of the clothes are kept hidden, to be brought out a few at a time with dramas of appreciation).

Marian, being some years younger and of a more docile temperament, did not mind Manon’s. She played on the floor among the cartons of painted wooden hangers, the piles of bags printed with beige and pink roses, and the stacks of cardboard glazed” beige and pink on one side, ready to be folded into dress boxes; she dressed her dolls in the scraps left from alterations. Marian did not mind going into the showroom to be displayed like a dress to some favorite customer, being introduced to them as “Marianne.” But for Erica it was shameful, hideous, to have her name called out in Lena’s penetrating phony-foreign voice; to try to pretend not to hear; finally to be dragged, or pushed from behind by Lena’s assistant, through the scruffy cat-fur curtains—lanky, awkward, silent, in her traditional junior-high saddle shoes and knee socks and one of those wrong, awful, tucked and scalloped dresses. “
Voyez,
this great overgrown child,
si jolie,
but I can do nothing with her!” Lena would cry—mock despairing, false—while Erica glanced rapidly around the room to see if the worst thing of all had occurred and some girl she knew was there watching the scene.

During those hours in the back room Erica resolved to become as much unlike her mother as possible. Whatever happened to her in life, she would be honest and straightforward about it. She would avoid and suspect everything and everyone foreign.

This prejudice persisted for years, and had far-reaching effects. It was partly responsible for her initial coolness to Danielle, who was legitimately half-French. And it was certainly not the least of Brian’s original attractions’ that his family had been in this country for generations and that he was studying American government. Moreover, he had not (like so many of Erica’s other friends) been charmed by Lena or found her remarkable. It was even in his favor that Lena was not charmed by him. She pretended to be, of course: she smiled and flattered and posed and deferred to his opinion, as she did with all men; and after Erica announced her engagement she did so even more. But Erica knew that her mother disliked in Brian exactly the qualities she liked: she thought him humorless, solemn, unsympathetic, overcritical.

Her true opinion came out the morning of the wedding day. It suddenly started to pour, so that they could not have the ceremony under a striped awning in the garden, but would all have to crowd inside among the shabby wicker furniture and burlap curtains. Erica, standing in her long white satin slip looking out the window into the heavy rain, just as she is doing now, began to weep with nerves and vexation. And Lena, who was already dressed for the occasion (apricot pleated silk and real lace), put her hand on her daughter’s bare shoulder and said, “Don’t cry. Suppose it doesn’t work out, you can always get a divorce.”

Well, there is no use being angry about that now. Lena has been dead for seven years. Erica takes the cookie dough out of the refrigerator, arranges it on a baking sheet, and puts it into the oven. She is going into the other room to start the ironing when her glance falls on Brian’s letter from the university. Probably what she should do is open it now and see what they want so that when he calls tonight she won’t have to waste any time.

Inside the long official-looking envelope, marked
URGENT
—
PERSONAL
in mercuròchrome red, are several awkwardly folded sheets of typing paper covered edge to edge with large round manuscript, written with the same vermilion marking pen.

Saturday

Dear Mr. Professor Tate!

I came round to see you this a.m. before I left town but no answer too bad. I mean bad. I left yr. J. S. Mill with Mr. Cushing next door, sorry not to return it sooner.

I keep thinking of you, how are you doing up there? I am not doing that well here; this scene is really bringing me down. It was juicy the first couple days with me and Ma, the Good Relationship, but neither of us could keep it up. Friday night Linda & Ralph came by with a couple of friends and kind of took over the place. Ma went upstairs which I thought showed real understanding but next morning we had the whole generation drama again. Of course she wouldn’t admit she was pissed at being turned out of Her Own Living Room, and how grungy we left the kitchen, we had to talk about Larger Issues. You know Wendee Ma says to me smiling anxiously I am worried about the kind of boys you are seeing so much of these days, and Linda too, I wonder what her parents think of them. Their long hair no I don’t mind that she says smiling tolerantly as long as they keep it washed. It is the rudeness the loudness the total lack of consideration for Others and well their unkempt dirty appearance that too. I sometimes try to imagine how it must be for your professors having to face a class full of students looking like that, I really feel sorry for them she says, smiling pityingly.

By now Erica has determined that the red letter is neither official nor urgent—merely the chatter of some eager, confiding student, such as Brian frequently receives. She reads on only out of inertia, plus mild curiosity and some sympathy with Ma.

I guess you would like it better if I was seeing a professor, I said. Well maybe Ma said smiling ruefully. I am a mother after all and naturally I want to feel that my child is safe and well taken care of. You may laugh now but you just wait until you are a mother and you will see. Okay, I said, I can wait. Mother! I thought, what if I told her. Don’t worry Ma I have already taken your advice and I am seeing a professor. Oh good Wendee are you seeing a lot of him. Oh yeh I am Ma I am seeing his face and his arms and his legs and his ass and his cock. But not right now, which is a big drag. Dear Brian, I just hope it is for you too. I want to lie down on your floor again. I need very bad to be with you and talk and argue with you and think and learn and grow and fuck.

yours yours yours yours you

Erica returns to page one and reads this letter over again. She begins to feel hot and cold as she reads, as if she were running a fever; she holds the contagious paper farther from her, by its extreme-edges, not touching the writing. The last blood-red word has been written over the margin so that part of it is missing. Erica supplies the rest: rs yours yours yours” ... an endless train of this word, streaming off the page into her kitchen and out the window across space and time; over the wet snow-crusted front lawn, the ice-pocked road, the cold fields and hills beyond.

Slowly, methodically, she refolds the letter and replaces it in its envelope. There is a peculiar burning odor in the room; like explosives. For a moment Erica thinks she is having a hallucination. Then she opens the oven door: at once the kitchen fills with smoke and the hot, sweet, ashy smell of scorched cookies. The war has begun.

M
AY 11. BRIAN IS
sitting in his office at the university waiting for Wendy Gahaghan to come in so he can tell her that their affair is over. The script for this scene has been worked out in advance in his mind, the significant speeches written and rewritten. Twice already he has spoken the opening lines—but without success. Wendy had not responded as she should have responded; she is in another play, or film.

For instance, the statement “My wife has found out” did not, to Wendy, constitute a sufficient reason for ending the affair. That was a heavy scene, she admitted, but it was not her scene. And his suggestion that the relationship was bad for her education had been met with eager denials. Her interest in learning and her grades had both risen, she insisted, since they started making it together—didn’t he know that? And in fact, Brian did know it.

And yet the thing has to be done. He realizes now that letting Wendy into his office had been like trying marijuana (not that he has ever tried marijuana). From the mild, pleasant stimulant of her conversation he had gone on to stronger drugs: her admiration and finally her passion. Before he becomes addicted, he has to give her up. Just thinking and worrying about it has begun to exhaust his energy to the point where he is functioning only in second gear as a teacher and is completely stalled on his current project, a study of American foreign policy in the Cold War period.

Moreover, Erica believes the thing has been done. Indeed, without actually lying, Brian has implied that the affair was almost over when she read that unfortunate letter. Actually lying, he has said it was as brief and unimportant as such an affair could be.

He would much prefer to wait until the end of the term, but the danger that Erica may make another such discovery is too great. He might lecture Wendy for hours on discretion, she might fervently promise to be careful; but she is impulsive, given to sudden romantic gestures. Only last week, seeing him unexpectedly in the hall, she ran toward him and embraced him. Since it was late afternoon, the hall was empty; but the door to one of the other offices was open, and a colleague of Brian’s was sitting in this office, observing them. “I just raised the grade on her exam,” Brian had lied afterward to this man, with a phony grin. And this was a double lie: Brian has never raised the grade on a student’s exam—he is against that sort of thing on principle.

How has he, Brian Tate, got into this tangle of phony grins and lies? How has he, who for years was a just, honorable, and responsible person, become involved with someone like Wendy Gahaghan?

Or let’s look at it from the other end for a change. Why hasn’t he become involved with some girl like Wendy long before this? Not through lack of opportunity: he can remember many occasions over the last twenty years when students—some of them much more his type than she is, a few almost as attractive as his wife Erica—had made it apparent that they would welcome a more personal relationship with him. Among his colleagues he knows many who have admittedly, or by repute, taken advantage of such welcomes. But for sixteen years he had privately scorned these colleagues. He had even rather looked down on his friend Leonard Zimmern, who had the excuse of an angry, impossible, unfaithful wife. He, Brian Tate, had no time for such hole-and-corner games. He loved Erica, and he had serious work to do.

But during the last year or two this work has changed. The wrong way of putting it: his work has not changed, and he has recognized that it never will. He is forty-six, and according to local criteria a success. His students think him interesting and well informed. His colleagues think him competent and fortunate; many of them envy him. He holds an endowed chair in the department and is the author of two scholarly studies in his field and a widely used and profitable text; he has a beautiful intelligent wife, two attractive and intelligent children, and a desirable house in Glenview Heights. They are not aware that internally, secretly, he is a dissatisfied and disappointed man. He bears the signs openly: a sharp W-shaped frown between his neat dark eyebrows, a pinched look round the mouth. But those who see these signs assume Brian is disappointed not by his own condition, but by the condition of the world.

Whenever he speaks in public, as he often does, on American foreign policy; or when an article by him appears in some journal, his students and colleagues are reminded of his success. Brian is reminded of his failure. Why, he asks himself sourly, is he speaking on foreign policy instead of helping to make it? Why does he still discuss other men’s theories, instead of his own?

He cannot blame his failure on ill fortune. He had been born with all the advantages: the son of a well-known professor, nephew of authors and lawmakers, grandson and great-grandson of ministers and judges; healthy, handsome, intellectually precocious, well-loved, well-educated. But after all these gifts had been bestowed, some evil fairy had flown in through the delivery-room window and whispered over his crib, “He should be a great man.” All his life, that imperative has haunted him. His colleagues, born into cultural or economic slums, the ugly, clumsy sons of provincial neurotics or illiterate immigrants, might be proud of having become Corinth professors—not he.

As if symbolically, when he reached adolescence Brian did not grow as fast as his peers at Andover, nor in the end as far. When he entered Harvard (at sixteen) he was still small for his age. He would catch up, his relatives said, and he believed them; but he did not catch up. He remained, though not a very short man, considerably below the average in height: five feet five, if he stood up straight and held his neck in a certain way. Erica was nearly three inches taller. When she married him, she gave away to a Congregational church rummage sale all the high-heeled shoes which showed her spectacular long legs to such advantage, and accepted a lifetime of flat soles, because he was going to be a great man.