The Upstairs House

by Julia Fine

  Everywhere was somewhere and everywhere there they were women children dogs cows wild pigs little rabbits cats and lizards and animals. That is the way it was.

  —Gertrude Stein, The World Is Round

  The World Is Round featured a little girl named Rose, and as such, Stein thought it should be printed on rose-colored paper. “We are having a terrific time locating a Rose colored paper,” wrote John McCullough. “Next time we hope you will name your heroine Peach or preferably Snow White.”

  (Michael didn’t appreciate Gertrude Stein in the way that Margaret did. Michael liked Whitman, and Byron. She liked passion and Romance and interesting verbs. But at least I wasn’t writing about Margaret’s work. At least I was getting a crack in at old Gertrude. She let me continue.)

  Margaret sent Gertrude Stein the galleys for The World Is Round alongside forty single-spaced pages of minor editorial suggestions. Almost every revision involved the proper placement of the comma.

  The word comma comes from the Greek—komma, a single coin, a cut-off piece. When Aristophanes of Byzantium proposed the idea, komma was a term for the clause itself, and not the mark that distinguished it.

  How many clauses might you have in a sentence? How many beads on a string? How many days in a week in a year in a lifetime? How many mosaic tiles of fact to piece together a truth?

  And what does a comma do a comma does nothing but make easy a thing that if you like it enough is easy enough without the comma. A long complicated sentence should force itself upon you make you know yourself knowing it and the comma well at the most the comma is a poor period that lets you stop and take a breath but if you want to take a breath you ought to know yourself that you want to take a breath.

  —Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America

  Gertrude Stein did not know about Margaret’s involvement with The World Is Round—while Margaret bore the brunt of the work, John McCullough signed his name to every letter. In 1940 Margaret wrote to Stein off the record, a note praising her work, pulsating with desire for connection. No correspondence was established. A year later, Margaret wrote under her own name a second time, laying bare her literary aspirations, her foray into oil painting, her thoughts on fairy tales, her ideas for Stein’s next work. At the end of the letter she sent her best to Stein’s dog, and mentioned her own terrier’s new puppies.

  Stein responded this time—on a postcard. She congratulated Margaret on the birth of the dogs.

  Margaret did not reach out again.

  I sent this newest chapter to my dissertation advisor. Two days later, he wrote back: “Megan, I’m not sure how this integrates into the rest of your project. Perhaps you should take a bit more time. We’ll speak in the spring.”

  Michael would have told him that a true poet is rarely understood. She was pleased, so I was pleased.

  September 1942

  New York in early autumn: grimy with residual summer not yet rinsed by rain. Too hot under the duvet, too cold with just the top sheet; the clock creeping toward midnight. Margaret starts when the phone rings. She hasn’t heard from Michael since that week in late June on Long Island Sound—not even a note declining Margaret’s invitation to come summer at The Only House, her cottage in Maine—yet she is not shocked to hear Michael’s voice now:

  “You must come get me.”

  Embarrassing, how quickly Margaret’s resolve can melt at the sound of Michael’s voice, at the idea that Michael needs her. At The Only House last month, Margaret thought that she had finally given up Michael. She wants children, and cannot have them with Michael. She wants reassurance, and will not get it from Michael. And though her former beau Bill Gaston—who has a home across the water—is still married, any day his divorce will come through. If Margaret can be patient, she can have him. She knows Bill’s children, loves his dogs—no matter that he’ll never be faithful. She has decided to move on from Michael, who wants Margaret not as she is, but in Michael’s idealized form. Better to marry and let your husband’s eye wander, knowing eventually it will wander back to you, than be a piece of coal forever failing as a diamond.

  But now, Michael:

  “You must come get me immediately. Harry found proof of us, and he’s sent for his doctor.”

  Proof—most likely letters, or perhaps the household staff. Harry wouldn’t have Michael arrested—he wouldn’t risk such a scandal—but he would put her on medication. Margaret imagines Michael, bleary-eyed and drugged to dullness. Michael, forced into an institution. She sits up in bed, pressing the telephone closer to her ear.

  “Lock yourself in your room and pack your things,” Margaret says. “I’ll bring a car.”

  Outside her apartment cabs crawl the street, waiting for the Café Society crowds to disperse for the evening. Cigarette smoke spirals down from fire escapes along with snippets of conversation about Camus and La Guardia, Sinatra and sex. Men gather under neon signs, the storefront canopies too small to contain their revolutionary fervor. When nightclub doors open, applause and alto saxophones waft through. Margaret barely notices. Walking down Sixth Avenue, she has the feeling she’s forgotten something—the keys in the door, to turn off the oven. Whatever it is no longer matters. She’s left behind the quotidian world, as she always does with Michael.

  When the taxi reaches 10 Gracie Square—that pristine Upper East Side castle with its limestone rooftop loggias, its plush lobby and bay windows and quiet river view—Margaret has the driver honk. Michael appears not long after with a monogrammed suitcase. She has taken the back stairs, assisted by her maid, and slides in next to Margaret in a cloud of expensive perfume.

  Margaret clasps Michael’s shaking hand and says, “Go, go!”

  “Where to?” the driver asks.

  “Just drive,” says Margaret. “Don’t worry, we’ll pay you.”

  Where to take refuge? The women huddle together, fingers laced. Margaret’s apartment in the Village is too easy a target, and Michael’s sons’ homes both too far. Besides, they cannot know whether the boys will even welcome their mother. Robin takes men to his bed, but he is fickle. Leonard’s wife is cold.

  Margaret has never seen Michael so flustered, so clearly in need. Her eyes dart frantically. She grasps Margaret’s hand with an unprecedented strength. She ignores the sudden stops and starts of traffic that usually afflict her; she sucks at her teeth, her breath unsteady. But as the taxi takes her farther from the prospect of the law or an asylum, Michael slowly comes back to her body.

  “My back,” she says, wincing when they reach Lexington.

  “Can you drive slower?” Margaret asks the driver.

  “More slowly,” Michael says, but does not harp.

  By the time Margaret has deposited Michael at the Colony Club—the exclusive Park Avenue social club of which she is a member, where men are forbidden, so they knew she will be safe—Michael is wearing the face that she so often wears, the face that makes her Michael: confident and glamorous and wronged, but forgiving. “I’ll see you soon, my dear,” she says to Margaret, and climbs out of the cab, sails through the clubhouse door—an avenging goddess framed by marble pediments and vast Corinthian columns.

  IN THE MORNING, Michael calls her lawyer. One week later she is back at Gracie Square, her husband gone after issuing a formal apology. The separation is officially under way, and Margaret spends her nights in bed with Michael, planning a future together. She uses Diana’s old bedroom as her office. She abandons Greenwich Village for Carl Schurz Park, bohemian literary gatherings for yacht moorings and doormen. Harry gets the Gracie Square penthouse in the divorce settlement, so Michael rents two neighboring East End Avenue apartments for herself and for Margaret, who gives up her downtown claims. They dine at a table set with silver, the candles melting.

  14

  When’s the last time you had a really good cry?” Ben asked me on the drive over to my father’s. It was Thanksgiving Day. He’d jump-started the car after it finally died in the garage, and ever since, it hiccupped whenever we
went over a pothole. I kept checking back to make sure Clara hadn’t split from us, that the back of the SUV hadn’t broken off.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe in labor?”

  “Mmm, I don’t think so.” Ben turned left, headed north toward the highway. “I’m pretty sure you didn’t cry. Just sort of yelled. Maybe that first week home from the hospital?”

  “Why?” I didn’t know what he looked like, in this moment. I couldn’t look at him because I had to be looking at Clara—if I took my eyes off her, she might unbuckle herself from the car seat. We might hit ice. She might float away.

  “I was wondering if you want to try to get it out now. Instead of while we’re at your dad’s place. Or just after.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not making any judgment, just noticing a pattern of behavior,” Ben said. “This isn’t going to be a . . . cakewalk. And it’s normal for you to still be balancing the hormones, getting back to equilibrium.”

  “A cakewalk? Like musical chairs where you win cake? Since when do you say cakewalk?” Clara was stirring, and I’d have to unbuckle my seat belt and reach over the headrest to get to her pacifier. Her crinkle toy had already fallen.

  Ben ignored me. “I know you, babe. You like to act like it doesn’t matter to you, but I know it does.”

  “This seems like a strange time to be having this conversation,” I said. It was an easier critique than pointing out that I did not think Ben knew me. There was a ghost in our house with whom I was intimately involved, and he hadn’t said a thing. I said, “I’ll be fine.”

  Still, he was right that I never liked visiting my father. I always went in with subconscious expectations; reminding myself he wouldn’t have changed, still harboring hope that he had. Why was it so hard to harden myself against the inevitability of my father? Why, time after time, did I think that I would arrive in a parallel universe in which he was no longer himself, sixty-two and stolid and uninterested in me? At least I wasn’t like Annie, forever disappointed that he hadn’t called. At least it was only when we walked in the door that the unfairness of it hit me and I’d scoot off to the bathroom for a minute to collect myself, leaving Ben to small-talk alone. I’d cried into Jeanie’s embroidered pink hand towels more than once.

  I could look at his home and know exactly who my father was, exactly what my father valued. I could look at the books on his shelves and the art on his walls and the pillows on his couch and understand the way he thought he’d be remembered. He read business books, the type that reaffirmed what he already thought of himself, certain passages underlined with “YES!!” as marginalia, “keep doing what you’re doing.” He’d trained entry-level telephone sales representatives at a mid-level auto insurance company for the past twenty years. Every six months came a new crop of adoration, recent college graduates eager to learn how he’d risen in the company, how they themselves could make such good money. In truth, he’d come in as a sales trainer from an entirely different field, but he’d told the story of his ascendency from humble t-sales rep to demigod so often, I was sure he now believed it. Just as he believed that Mom had forced his hand in leaving us, that Annie and I didn’t need him, that he’d been a good father. It isn’t possible to reason with that level of delusion, that level of narcissism. When he died, he’d likely keep on like Michael—a machine so entirely comprised of ego, it wouldn’t matter once the meat of it was gone.

  On the walls in Dad and Jeanie’s living room: their marriage license, Sam’s graduation photo, a picture of my father as a seventeen-year-old swimmer. Kelsey’s homecoming pictures, a framed poster of Klimt’s The Kiss that could have come straight out of someone’s freshman dorm room. All Jeanie’s doing, I imagined, and also how I knew that their marriage was nearing its end. He didn’t care enough to make the house his home. He was probably sleeping with somebody at work.

  “SIT, SIT, SIT!” said Jeanie when we walked into the living room. No mention of the baby, who let out a massive burp and then smiled. At home, when Clara burped, Michael made her displeasure known to me—knocking over a candlestick, rattling a box of wooden blocks. Here, my twenty-two-year-old half brother Sam just laughed and offered her his finger.

  “Cute kid,” he said. I sat. Kelsey came in from the kitchen carrying a beer and a glass of red wine. She offered the beer to Ben, who took it, and then sipped the wine herself. A sidelong glance at Jeanie showed she either didn’t care or hadn’t noticed. I adjusted Clara on my shoulder and awkwardly cleared my throat.

  “Oh!” Kelsey blinked at me. “I thought that because you were breastfeeding . . .”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  Annie was sitting in the corner, her own glass almost empty. She said, “Megan doesn’t need to be drinking.” She was glaring at me, though I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong.

  “Where’s Dad?” I asked, and no one answered.

  Whenever we came over to Jeanie’s, she acted as if we were strangers, international travelers she was hosting on some exchange program, incapable of helping cook or clean up, of finding the bathroom or comprehending basic requests. The first time I brought Ben to her house, she’d stared laser beams at his shoes until I finally asked if she wanted him to take them off, at which point she laughed nervously and said of course not and then continued to glare at the rubber soles until we were gone. She had a way of looking at you and blinking and cocking her head just enough to the side to make you feel like you were some sort of circus freak, some cabinet curiosity she neither approved of nor cared to understand. She’d never made any effort to mother us, which was just as well. In the past, she’d called our actual mother “that woman,” even as Mom called Jeanie “that woman” in an ouroboros of passive aggression that made it clear why I’d felt I had to go away for college, why I’d felt I had to move to New York.

  “Sit, sit, sit!”

  At a certain point, I could sit no longer. My butt was numb, and Clara was squirming. Kelsey offered to hold the baby, but her teeth were red from merlot. Sam and Ben were having some stereotypical Thanksgiving football conversation—half yard? full yard?—and Kelsey kept trying to chime in and getting bulldozed. Eventually she refilled her glass and sank into the couch.

  My dad, I imagined, was smoking cigarettes outside some bar, steeling himself to head home.

  I walked Clara around the living room, past the blond wood piano and the business books and The Kiss, past the fireplace tools and the decorative empty birdcage and the basket of throw pillows and woven blankets. It wasn’t a bad house. It felt lived in. Jeanie had done a decent job with it. She brought out the cheese and crackers and some sort of vegetable dip, sans vegetables, and while everyone else dove in I carried Clara down the hall, past the pictures of Sam and Kelsey as babies, past the pictures of Dad and Jeanie on vacation. We slipped through the glass doors of Dad’s rarely used home office, and I spun Clara around on the desk chair. She didn’t like it. I bounced her on my hip, and wiped a little web of drool from her chin.

  The front door opened loudly, Dad arriving and greeting the group, I guessed, with spearmint on his breath, a spindly redness to his eyes. I could hear him briefly say hello to Annie, clomp in to Jeanie in the kitchen, come back out to join the men. Kelsey’s voice was up an octave, whining. The television on, the crunch of chips. Something was overcooked, or burning. I licked my finger to wipe a film of dust off the top edge of the computer monitor and heard Annie behind me.

  “We thought you were nursing,” she said. I shook my head. “Or at least that Clara was asleep.”

  Clara would be asleep soon. She was going slack in my arms, nuzzling and then pulling back, making a sound like the creak of a body releasing its last breath.

  Annie stood in the doorway, holding her wine. Blinking.

  “Come in,” I said. “Close the door.”

  Annie set her wineglass down so hard on the desk that some sloshed out the sides and onto the plastic blotter. She was watching me with hard eyes, eyes that didn�
��t belong in her body. Animal eyes: brown and round and glassy, like something had taken off my Annie’s skin and slipped into it like a dressing gown, tying her up around them. She was drunk.

  “Careful,” I said, which was a word spoken so often it had escaped its own meaning. From the Old English cearful, meaning mournful. Careful bed used to mean sick bed. I tried to use it in the way I would use a comma in a sentence, a way to acknowledge the clause that had passed, a way to ask for the next one. But careful was really a period, an acknowledgment of an ending. I only said “careful” once there was no going back, once the glass had already been broken, once the toe had been stubbed. Once I was mourning.

  “This has gone too far,” said Annie. She had closed the door, finally, her face so close to mine that I could feel the heat of the wine on her breath. I wanted to ask her what had gone too far, to be specific. I couldn’t defend myself against something I couldn’t see or understand. But the words got lost somewhere between my synapses and nerves, and I couldn’t form them. Chilly, I held Clara close.

  “I said something to Ben just now. I know you haven’t talked to him. It’s all still happening, isn’t it?”

  “What did you say to him?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t matter. Nothing major. Enough to know you’re lying.”

  “You’ll upset the baby,” I said.

  “Jesus, Megan, stop pretending you’re this perfect virgin mother. I know that something’s going on.”

  I was in my father’s chair, Annie perched atop the desk, looking down on me. I felt like a misbehaving child called in for punishment.

  “Megan, you’re not taking this seriously.” Annie slid down to kneel by the swivel chair, her hand on my knee. A new tactic. “I’m worried about you,” she said.

  “I thought you were mad.”