Monogamy

by Sue Miller

  It had turned her to the others in her life too. She had what she thought was a wonderful series of shots of Don and an opinionated friend of theirs named Anders having an argument one evening, the back-and-forth, the impassioned expressions. She shot Jeanne as often as she could, her heavy-lidded, almost exotic beauty. She shot Frieda, holding Claire, her plain face transformed by love. And Edith, whose beauty had begun to fade, becoming more fragile, less remarkable, but to Annie, more moving. She photographed Sarah standing in the bathroom, looking intently at her own reflection in the mirror over the sink.

  She felt she was seeing them all more clearly. That the pictures were a form of intimacy with them. There was no narrative she was trying to shape, no story she was trying to tell. Just these people, so familiar to her, and the different ways she could see them. Her family, her friends, and the camera. She felt invisible. A medium. And that’s what she wanted, apparently.

  Peter was watching her now. “This is different,” he said.

  “What is?”

  “Or maybe it’s not so different. It’s like the old days, actually, when you used to hide behind the camera at parties.”

  “Did I? I didn’t think of it as hiding, exactly.”

  “Yes!” Edith said to Peter. “When she used to shoot all of us, remember? I hadn’t thought of that.” She’d turned to Annie. “So here’s a question. I thought you were through with photographs of people. Didn’t you say you were done with that?”

  “And I was, for quite a while.” She gestured at the big color print on the wall above the table, a stubbled brown field with a distant, collapsing red barn. “But that’s changed.”

  “Yeah?” Natalie asked. “How?”

  “I don’t know. I guess it’s like a way of . . . remembering all of you.” She smiled, almost shyly.

  “Aww,” Lucas said. She made a face at him across the table, and he grinned back at her.

  The conversation broke up again now, people returned to talking by twos—Peter and Don, Natalie and Sarah. In the midst of this, she heard Edith say to Lucas: “Give me the names of a couple of good books, Lukie. I need some Christmas presents.”

  He turned to her. “Sure. I’ve got more than a couple. But a few of them won’t be available until after Christmas. Anyway . . . let’s see.” Lucas’s voice was quick, smooth, a lighter timbre than Graham’s. “Okay, I love this one. It’s terrific. A fictionalized version of the life of Olga Knipper.”

  “Who is Olga Knipper?” Peter asked. He had looked over when Lucas starting talking, and now he was extracting a small leather notebook and an expensive-looking pen from the inside pocket of his suit jacket.

  “Chekhov’s wife,” Lucas said. “But they weren’t married for very long before he died—a few years maybe. Then she lived on and on and on, without him. Well into the Soviet era.”

  “That’s so sad,” Frieda said.

  Sarah looked at her mother, standing behind Claire’s high chair, but Annie’s head was bowed to look down into the camera.

  “She was an actress, actually. He wrote a couple of plays for her. And this story—this book—is wonderful. Wonderfully done. Some of their letters to each other . . .” He shook his head. “Extraordinary. So . . .” He made a fist. “. . . present.” Peter seemed to be writing all of this down.

  After a moment Lucas went on. “Then . . . Then we’ve got a sort of mystery. Better than that, though. Very complicated. Very funny, actually. Very British. The plot isn’t really the point.” He described it, and then leaned forward to give Peter the title, the author’s name.

  He sat back again, frowning, thinking. “Ah, yeah. I’ve also got a wonderful father-son novel coming too. Not until January, I’m afraid. But, boy, a book after my own heart, you might say.”

  “If you were someone who really, really liked clichés,” Sarah said.

  Lucas made a moue in her direction and went on. “It’s written from the perspective of the son, the son as a teenager, at the height of some rebellious behavior. Though the narration jumps way forward in time at the end. The kid as a man, remembering. But it’s so assured, the voice—the teenage voice. And so smart, psychologically. So skillful about what the kid just won’t recognize, in himself, as well as in his father. Then the great leap ahead, long after the father’s death, long after the boy has come to understand it all.”

  Peter asked for the name of the book.

  “That’s the bad part,” Lucas said. “Young and Easy.”

  “Yuck,” said Annie. She was standing behind Peter now.

  “Young and Easy?” Peter said. He sounded incredulous.

  “I know. A really shitty title. I tried to talk him out of it. It makes it sound like some kind of . . . teen porn, really. But he was adamant. And if you know the reference, it does make perfect sense.”

  “What is the reference?” Edith asked.

  “Dylan Thomas, ‘Fern Hill,’” Lucas said. He made his voice incantatory: “‘Oh as I was young and easy, in the mercy of his means, Time held me green and dying, da-dat, da-dat, da-dat . . .’”

  “Oh, I knew that once!” Edith said. “Once.” Her voice was rueful. She nodded her head several times. “But you’re right—it is a bad title. It’s awful, really.”

  “You could call it Green and Dying,” Frieda said. She frowned. “Or not, I guess—that’s pretty bad too, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Lucas said. “I’d have preferred something that emerged from the text. Still, he’s the boss. . . . But here’s the interesting thing. He came to the office to meet me—this was after we’d taken the book—and I was expecting this young guy. Or youngish, anyway, the voice of the novel was so convincing. And I was astonished. He’s old. Older than Dad was, for sure.”

  “Oh, ancient,” said Annie. She was sitting at the table again. She’d set the camera on the kitchen counter.

  “Well, you know what I mean,” Lucas said. He grinned. “But he is, he’s really old. He had a couple of books when he was a whole lot younger that did very well then. Critically, anyway. I’d never heard of them, but I guess I was too young to have read them. Then this long, long hiatus, until now.”

  “What’s his name?” Edith asked. “Mister Young and Easy. Not that I’ll remember. You’re writing it all down, Peter?”

  Peter nodded, and Lucas said, “Pedersen. Ian Pedersen.”

  Sarah was looking down the table at her mother then, about to signal that she wanted her to pass the wine. She saw Annie’s face shift, her mouth open, just slightly.

  “Peterson,” Annie said to Lucas, frowning.

  “Yeah.”

  “How do you spell it?” she asked Lucas.

  “With a d. Pe-der-sen.” He pronounced it more carefully this time, so you could hear the d, and the final e.

  “Ah,” Annie said. Her face had changed again, Sarah thought. She looked frightened. Was that it? Frightened? White around the gills, her father used to say.

  “Have you read him?” Lucas asked, leaning forward to meet Annie’s eyes.

  “I did,” she said. “A long time ago. Those early books.” She nodded. “Actually,” she said, “I knew him.”

  “Oh, you knew him?” Lucas said.

  “I did,” she said.

  “From the store?” Peter asked. “Did he read there?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” She shook her head. “No, he didn’t. I’m certain of that. No, I knew him from MacDowell.”

  “What is this—MacDowell?” Jeanne asked.

  Annie turned to her. “An artist colony.” She gestured dismissively. “It’s like a summer camp, but for adults.” She laughed, self-consciously, it seemed to Sarah. “Adults in the arts. Writers, photographers, painters. One composer during my time, as I remember it.”

  “I don’t recall your going to a colony,” Sarah said.

  “No, it was long ago. Before you were born, actually.”

  “Damn it, everything interesting happened before I was born,” Sarah said. “I’m sick o
f it.”

  “For instance, all the rest of us were born,” Lucas said, smiling his teasing smile across the table at her.

  “Well, now I have Claire,” she said. “At last, somebody younger.”

  “No, I have Claire,” Lucas said. He’d made his voice like a schoolyard taunt. “Get your own somebody younger.”

  There was a little silence. Lucas heard in it what a possibly cruel thing he’d said.

  But Sarah rescued him. “Maybe I just will,” she said, squinting her eyes at him. The room seemed to let out its breath, she thought.

  Annie pushed her chair back to start to clear, but Lucas insisted she sit, and when he got up, Peter and Don joined him, as if by agreement, ferrying the dishes to the kitchen sink.

  When they were done, Annie got up again and brought Peter’s cake and then the mousse she’d made to the table. Sarah got bowls and plates. Annie took orders, and the dishes went up and down the table in the scattered conversation.

  When at last the sauterne was served, Lucas ticked his fork gently against the delicate glass. “Ahem, ahem,” he said. Then, when everyone was quiet: “Let’s drink. Let’s drink to the missing member of our gathering.”

  “Oh yes! To Daddy,” said Sarah, and Lucas smiled and reached across the table to touch his glass to hers. They made the lightest of pings.

  “The one who’s always here, in spirit,” Peter said.

  “To Graham,” Edith said, raising her glass.

  “To Graham,” said Natalie.

  “To Graham,” said Frieda.

  “To Graham,” Jeanne echoed, raising her glass and turning to Annie, sitting on her left.

  Annie’s fingers were resting on the stem of her glass, but she quickly raised it too and clicked it gently against Jeanne’s. “To Graham,” she said.

  Frieda was watching her. And Sarah.

  Shortly after this, Jeanne and Lucas got up and began to assemble Claire’s things. Jeanne laid the little girl on the living room couch to put her into her snowsuit, which made her protest. She didn’t want to go, she said over and over. Frieda got up too, and Natalie and Don, who had a long drive home, back up to Rowley.

  The front hall was full of people then, people putting on their coats, people moving around to embrace one another. Claire stood in her snowsuit, almost in the center of a rough circle that had formed. She was looking up at all these grown-ups in her life, smiling her openmouthed smile. When a little silence fell, she clapped her hands and shouted, “Ebbrybody JUMP!” her hands rising, opened, at the command.

  For a second no one knew what to do, though they were laughing, delighted with Claire, with her having thought of this. Then Jeanne took Peter’s hand in hers on her left side, and Annie’s on her right. Quickly they all started to hold hands, Frieda’s hand in Lucas’s, Edith’s in Don’s. When they had formed a circle, Peter counted to three, and they all jumped.

  As they went out the door and down the walk, they were all talking, laughing with one another. Annie and Sarah stood at the door, calling goodbye over and over, and then came back to the table, where Edith and Peter were sitting down again.

  They sat too. They talked about Claire for a moment, how bright she was, how much fun. Then Sarah rested her arms on the table and dropped her head onto them dramatically. “Pffff,” she said. She raised her head again. “I am so wiped out.”

  “The holidays will do that,” Edith said.

  “Yeah,” said Sarah. She looked over at her mother. “If only we had Daddy here to help us clean up. Remember, Mother? In that crazy old apron of his?”

  “Yes,” Annie said.

  Sarah stood up to start to clear the table.

  “Oh, wait a minute for that, sweetie,” Edith said. “We’ll help. Let’s just sit for a little longer. Do you want some more sauterne?”

  Sarah shook her head. “No. No thanks.”

  They were all quiet for a moment. Sarah turned to Annie. “I was thinking—do you remember this funny time, Mom, when Daddy was in that apron and we were all shouting, ‘No!’?”

  “I do,” Annie said.

  Sarah frowned. “So what was that about? What were we doing?”

  Annie lifted her hands. “We were saying no to an imaginary molester, of course.”

  There was a second or two of silence. “You could enlarge on that,” Peter said.

  “Oh, it was just this thing at Sarah’s day care,” Annie said. “We—we parents—were supposed to be teaching our kids about how to protect themselves in case some evil person tried to do horrible, sexual things with them.”

  “Well, that’s really crazy,” Sarah said.

  “It was crazy,” Edith said. “It was utterly nuts. It had to do with this whole recovered memory thing then,” she said. “With little children.”

  “Oh, yeah, we all know about that,” Sarah said. “Recovered memory. As in, Catholic priests.” She frowned. “But here’s what’s interesting, I think. Why is it always the bad stuff? Everything you recover.”

  “Interesting,” Peter said. “I hadn’t thought of that. Yeah. Why don’t we ever work on recovering memories of the good stuff?”

  “Because you don’t forget the good stuff,” Edith said.

  “Sure you do,” Sarah said. “There are people who specialize in that. Only the memory of everything awful. Gloom and doom.”

  “Well, in this case,” Edith said, “these very dubious child psychologists were working exclusively on the bad stuff. They got the kids to testify that they’d had terrible things done to them by their day-care teachers.”

  “Virginia McMartin,” Annie said. “Remember her?” she asked Edith. She turned to Peter and Sarah. “This dumpy, elderly day-care person. A Satanist, if ever there was one.” She looked at Edith again. “And around here, there was the clown.”

  “Yeah, the wicked clown.”

  Annie explained to Sarah. “This was a day-care teacher, a man, who was supposed to have dressed up as a clown and taken the children into a mysterious room—a room which, by the way, no one could ever find—and done nasty things to them.”

  “I remember the clown,” Peter said. “Somewhere in Medford, I think.”

  “Yes, I think that’s right,” Edith said.

  Sarah said, “I knew there was a reason I didn’t like Medford.”

  “Anyway,” Annie said emphatically. “We had these instructions, the gist of which was to teach you kids to say no to people like these clowns. So we made a game of saying no one night after dinner, and Graham was there, cleaning up in his famous apron.”

  “What kind of game?” Edith asked.

  “Oh, nothing really. It was dumb. Just, we shouted out every word for no we could think of. Sarah loved it.”

  “I did,” Sarah said. “That’s what I remember. Just that part of it.”

  Annie was thinking of how odd it was that this had come up again, this memory that had also come to her the day after Graham died. The connection it had to her remembering the man in Jackson Park. She thought of telling Edith and Peter and Sarah that story now, the story from her own past that she’d forgotten and then recovered. The story of Sofie Kahn, of Sofie and the molester.

  But Edith was expanding on the recovered memory phenomenon and how insane it was—her word—to rely on little children for accuracy. She began to explain the way memory worked in young children, its pliability, its responsiveness to adult expectation.

  Annie wasn’t really listening. She was recalling the night of the no game. Remembering that later, after she and Graham and Sarah had finished playing it, after Sarah was in bed and the kitchen cleaned up, she and Graham had gone to the living room to sit, each with a glass of wine, and out of curiosity, he’d gotten up to look up the derivation of the word molester. She remembered watching him cross the room. He had turned on the lamp and bent over the dictionary they kept open on one of the shelves. The thin pages had made a faint fluttery noise as he flipped through them. The lamp was behind him, and he was in profile to Annie,
almost silhouetted. After a minute or two, he had stood straight and turned to her, grinning, his whole face alive with delight.

  “It comes from the Latin,” he had said.

  “The Latin for what?”

  “For the verb to irk.”

  They had both laughed. “I’ll say,” Annie said.

  He shook his head slowly, and said, “You’ve got to admire the understatement there.”

  He had turned the light off then and come back to sit across from her in the slightly sprung wingback chair she’d sometimes called his throne. They still had that chair. Peter had been sitting in it before dinner.

  She felt an unfamiliar pang, a feeling she hadn’t had—hadn’t allowed herself to have—in a long time. Not since Rosemary.

  She missed him, suddenly. She missed Graham.

  28

  When everyone had finally gone home and only Annie and Sarah were left, Annie went out the kitchen door and across the yard to bring Sam back.

  “And here he is,” she said to Sarah as she came in. She set the cat down. While she was opening the can of his food, Sam circled her legs, his tail twining around them—as it used to twine around Karen’s, Sarah thought, looking carefully at her mother, thinking of her as old in a way she didn’t often. Annie set Sam’s bowl on the floor under the tall windows, and he hunkered over it to eat, his head moving down and then quickly up as he tossed the chunks of food to the back of his mouth.

  They both watched him, Annie leaning her butt against the kitchen counter, Sarah still sitting at the table.

  After a moment, Sarah said, “Does this bring it all up again?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The cat. Karen’s death. Does it remind you of Daddy dying?”

  “Oh!” Annie shook her head. “Not in the least, sweetie. I’m sad about her death, of course. And sorry. Sorry that she was so . . . alone, it seems. Mostly that.” Annie came and sat opposite Sarah. “But she was old. And she was failing. I’m sure you’d noticed. I was glad things hadn’t gotten worse. And I was glad for her that she’d more or less managed things on her own up until she died. That’s an achievement. One I hope I’m capable of.”