by John Irving
I admit that my own sense of family suffered from our foursome. I remember the children least of all, and this bothers me. Of course, we all had other friends, too, and our own lives with our children. But I forget where the children were. Once when I was with Edith, Dorabella knocked weakly on the bedroom door. I flinched; I thought it was Severin coming home early, though I couldn't imagine him knocking so softly. There was a hasty confusion of knees and other limbs, and I know Edith was worrying that Severin had heard her.
'Mommy?' Dorabella said. I got down under the covers and Edith let her into the room.
There had been a dream; the child described it in flat, unbroken tones, her hand nervously plucking and patting the lump beside her mother which was me. 'Ssshhh,' said Edith gently, 'don't wake up Daddy.'
The child poked me. 'Why is Daddy sleeping like that?' She started to lift the covers but Edith stopped her.
'Because he's cold,' Edith said.
In the child's dream there were howling dogs and a pig squealing under a car whose wheels 'had folded under itself,' she said, 'like the wheels on an airplane'. The pig was crushed, but not dead; the dogs were howling because the pig's squeals hurt their ears. Dorabella ran around and around the car, but there was nothing she could do for the pig. 'And then it was me who was under the car,' the child said, her voice trembling with the injustice of it. 'And it was my sound that I heard and was making the dogs howl.' She was punching my rump like dough, her little fists rolling her knuckles over me.
'Poor Fiordiligi,' Edith said.
'It's Dorabella, Mommy!' the child cried.
Edith turned on the light, 'Oh, Dorabella,' she said. 'What a terrible dream.'
'That's not Daddy's shirt, is it?' Dorabella asked, and I knew whose clothes she was staring at.
'Well, Daddy traded something for it,' Edith said. She was very quick; there wasn't a pause.
'What did he trade?' Dorabella asked, and I remember the silence.
Fiordiligi and Dorabella were the Winters' children, of course. My own children I hardly remember at all, and I used to know them quite well.
'What did he trade?' Dorabella asked again. I forget the children, but I remember that silence.
6
Who's on Top? Where's the Bottom?
ONCE, WHEN ALL of us were together, I looked at my boys and announced, 'Look at that Jack' (my older one, lean and lithe, with a face even prettier than Edith's). 'Look at his back; see the graceful bend to it? That isn't what they call "sway-backed", is it? He looks like a Renaissance print I once saw of an archer; he was bent like his bow. Jack is the delicate one. He likes music. I hope he'll be a painter.'
And Severin answered, 'If he ever develops any strength in his arms, he might be a 142-pounder.' Severin liked Bart, my younger boy. He was brick-shaped, and all he inherited from Utch was her breadth of cheek and her shortness. In fact, if we had known the Winters back then, I might have suspected Severin of engendering Bart because the boy's body was nearer to Severin's than to mine. And as to the source of Bart's genes which gave him a turtle's pain threshold, I could only guess. 'From Utch, of course,' said Severin. 'She had a pain threshold like a planarian's.' How did he know? What did he mean?
Jack was the older but the last one in the water; he was bigger, but in close combat Bart would sink his teeth into him and hold on. When Bart ran at a door, he ran at it as if the door would open for him. I winced to see the child move; a potential collision seemed to precede him like a prow. Neat, graceful Jack was curious, careful and shy. He woke up slowly. He said to me, 'Sometimes are you ever sad and feel like crying even when nothing bad has happened to you?' Yes, of course! He was my son; I knew him well. He could spend an hour brushing his teeth because of the mirror - looking at himself as if it would help him figure out a way to be.
But Bart was born a bludgeon, with the ankles and wrists and insensitive cheerfulness of the good peasants in the orchards of Eichbuchl. He woke up breathing deeply, bleating for his breakfast.
When we took the children to the city, Jack looked up, scanned rooftops, hunted for gargoyles, girls waving out windows, spirits in the sky. Bart scuffed along, looked in the gutters for what got dropped there.
Severin's girls dressed up for Jack, wrote him bawdy notes and said, 'Sit down, Jack, and let's play "What Can We Get You?"' They wrestled with Bart, playing with him as they would with a pet. Dorabella told Edith that she was going to marry Jack; Fiordiligi laughed and said, 'Then I'll be his mistress!'
'His mistress?' Edith said. 'You don't know what a mistress is.'
'Yes, I do,' said Fiordiligi. 'You get the presents.'
Severin said, 'That Bart, he's my boy. He's going to be a great cook; he'll eat anything.'
'He's built like a bookend,' I said, 'but not like a writer.'
'He's going to be at least a 177-pounder,' said Severin. 'Would you look at the chest on that kid!'
'He's got the sweetest temper,' Utch said. Bart was a boy only a mother and a wrestler could love.
'That Jack,' said Edith. 'He's going to kill more women than the plague.' I hoped he would be a good son and show some of them to me. His eyelashes were longer than Utch's and Edith's together.
'Why did you give your children such American names?' Edith asked Utch.
'They're simpler,' said Utch, 'and the boys like them. What kid in America wants a name like Helmut or Florian?'
'I love Italian names,' said Edith. 'After I called my first one Fiordiligi I had to call the second one Dorabella.'
'It was going to be Dante if it was a boy,' said Severin. 'But I'm glad they're girls. Boys are such selfish shits.' He was always trying to make the girls read. 'You've got to be smart,' he'd tell them, 'and you've got to be kind. But if you're kind without being smart, other people are going to make you miserable.'
'I love everything Italian,' said Edith.
'You've never been there,' Severin reminded her. And to us, 'Edith is most attracted to things that are unfamiliar to her.'
'Not true!' Edith said. 'And when I'm familiar with something, do I throw it away?'
'Wait and see,' said Severin. Of course, he was looking at me, but I kept my eyes on Jack and Bart. I was impressed that two people I loved so much could be so different.
'That's not surprising,' Edith said.
'No,' Utch disagreed. 'There is one that you always love more.'
'Here we all are again,' said Severin Winter, 'stumbling toward profundity.'
Well, he could be funny. But at whose expense?
'He is not cruel,' Edith said once; she was angry. 'You should just stop trying to understand him. I stopped trying, and now I enjoy him much more. I hate it that men feel they have to understand everything.' She was depressed, she said, that Severin and I would never be friends.
Also, her writing was taking a turn. An off-turn, I thought, but she defended herself with surprising calm. In the beginning she had responded to my criticism; now she seemed to be going off on her own, and I felt it was due to his brainwashing - his 118-pound theorizing, his disparaging remarks about so-called historical novels.
I often heard Severin tell his wrestlers, 'If you can't get off the bottom, you can't win.' But that's another story.
I remember once when the four of us stayed overnight at the Winters' - all the children, too. We hauled mattresses into the TV room and parked the children there to be mesmerized by various Late Show horrors; they ate potato chips all night. In the morning, we couldn't find Severin. I was alone in one of the children's rooms; I'd crawled off from someone's bed to sleep by myself.
We looked and looked. Finally Edith discovered Severin in the TV room, all four children sleeping huddled round him, wedged against him, sprawled on top of him. He had appeared there in the early dawn hours when some Late Show ghoul had convinced my youngest son of another reality, and his howls had convinced the other children. Severin had staggered away from one of the warm women, grabbing the nearest garment handy, and had fallen among
them and promised not to leave until daylight. The garment was Edith's mauve dressing gown, a sheer, flowered, ankle-length thing. Edith called us all to come see. The groggy children were slowly waking; they curled and snuggled against him as if he were a large pillow or friendly dog - and Severin Winter lay among them in Edith's gown, looking like a transvestite weight lifter dropped through the roof of an elementary school like a benign bomb.
We drove our sons home, Utch wearing Edith's long wrap-around skirt because she'd been unable to find her own.
'I'm sure it'll turn up,' I said.
'I remember where I took it off,' Utch said, 'but it's not there.'
I drove with my hand on Utch's leg, on Edith's skirt. Everywhere, comparisons pleased me! But that was another time.
We returned from Cape Cod in a flood of headlights of other weekenders bathing our faces. Edith and I were in the rear seat; under my shirt, her fingers were cool against my stomach. There was a comfortable noise, tire-hum and engine-drone, so that I could speak to her in a normal voice without Utch and Severin hearing. Not that there was anything I wanted to say which wouldn't have been suitable for them to hear; the point is, it was intimate, riding at night that way. The impersonal quality of the flickering headlights illuminating us and leaving us in darkness made me feel isolated, overlooked, special. In the front seat, Utch and Severin sat chastely apart - more due to the design of his car than by choice, I was sure; it had bucket seats. Also, Severin insisted that everyone wear seat belts. In the back, Edith and I had slipped ours off so that we could sit closer together; he must have known. I could hear the singsong tones of his voice, occasionally rising above the engine, the tires, and my own voice, but when I strained to listen to him, I realized he was speaking German. A story? Another tale of Old Vienna? What did they talk about?
'Nothing,' Utch told me once. I thought she sounded bitter. 'Whatever Severin and I have in common is your idea. If you met another American when you were living, say, in Vienna, and the other American was from Cambridge, Massachusetts, would you assume you'd have much more in common than the English language and some regional characteristics?' Whew. Ask a simple question, receive a speech.
But I saw our bedroom after he left it; I saw my wife after he left her. I have seen their communication in the twin apple cores, empty bottles, bitten hunks of cheese and bread, the stems stripped of grapes, the sheets knotted like a great balled fist which I imagine pounding the mattress askew! I have found pillows in distant corners of the room, and once I found the frail chair I usually throw my pants on stuffed upside down in the laundry hamper. On each of the chair legs dangled a shoe (my shoes), so that it resembled a four-legged creature with human feet, perhaps murdered violently and inverted to bleed among our dirty clothes.
'It looks like you two have some rapport,' I said to Utch.
She laughed. 'I think,' she said, giving me a soft poke on the nose, 'that you should think what you want to think' - interrupted by a gentle punch on the arm - 'because you will anyway.' She had never indulged in those damn locker-room physicalities, those chin-chucks and rib-pokes and ear-cuffs, until she met him.
Past Boston the traffic thinned out, and we were driving for the most part in darkness. I stopped talking. Severin's German was music. I could tell we were both listening though Edith never understood the language any better than I did. Utch wasn't answering; he was just going on and on. I couldn't remember when he had turned the radio off (to listen to what I was saying to Edith? To make us listen to him?), but Edith asked him to turn it back on. She had to lean forward to make him hear, and she kissed the back of his neck.
'Put your seat belt on,' he told her.
'Can we have some music back here?' Edith asked, ignoring him.
'No,' he said. 'Not unless you put your seat belt on.'
Utch did not turn in her seat.
After a while, Severin turned the radio on; Edith had waited as if she knew he would, but she didn't settle back against me until the music was playing. She didn't put her seat belt on. Severin stopped talking at last. I touched Edith's breasts very softly, I pinched her nipples; I was trying to make her laugh, but she sat stiffly against me as if she were still waiting for the radio. The music was terrible and the station wasn't coming in well. Finally Utch fixed it. She had to take her seat belt off to fiddle with the dials, and when she started to put it back on, Severin spoke a little German to her. She answered and he argued with her; she left her seat belt off, and he took his off, too. Edith squeezed my hand; she was rigid. Severin spoke again to Utch. 'Nein,' she said.
We were driving faster. I looked between their shoulders at the lengthening red tongue on the speedometer. When he dimmed the dashboard lights, I felt Edith tense against me and heard Utch quietly say something in German. I found myself thinking of Severin Winter's psychological coaching method, his tunnel-walk in the imposed darkness. I felt we were moving at great speed and at any moment would burst into harsh public light and the roar of a crowd. Utch repeated whatever she'd said in German. I felt Edith was about to reach forward - and do what? Tap his shoulder, kiss his neck, fasten Utch's seat belt?
When Severin Winter spoke again, this time Utch didn't say 'Nein.' She lay across the front bucket seats and put her head in his lap. I saw her soft green sweater flow past the space between the seats like water. The dashboard was black. The speed felt the same. Edith pulled away from me, found her seat belt and clamped it shut around her waist; the metallic joining seemed exaggerated. Did Utch have him in her mouth? She wouldn't! Not with Edith and me right there. But did Severin want us to think that she did?
I couldn't let it go on. But I know the value of obliqueness. I said, 'How do you think the children are doing?' Edith smiled; I knew I had him. 'Does it bother you to leave them overnight, to be so far away from them? It gets easier as they get older, but don't you worry even so?' The questions were for Severin; Edith, of course, didn't answer me. Utch glided back to her bucket seat and sat up. Later she said, 'I should have rolled down the window and spat right after I sat up. That would have fixed you. That's what was on your mind, wasn't it? If that's what you were thinking, I should have let you really think it.'
I yelled, 'Then why'd he ask you to do it?'
'He just asked me to put my head in his lap.'
'So what did he want us to think?'
'Think what you want to think,' she said.
Jesus! It serves him right - the way he threw up the children so often to Edith, as if they were sacred objects she didn't adequately worship. His idea of love was always tangled with his idea of guilt.
In the car, he said stonily, 'I think the children are all right. But of course I worry about them, I always worry about them.' The dashboard glowed again; the red tongue of the speedometer shrank.
'I just asked because I knew that at first you hadn't wanted to go on this weekend - you didn't want to leave the children,' I said. 'And I wondered, provided they're OK - and I'm sure they are - if you'd feel better about doing this kind of thing more often now? I mean, I think it's good to get away. It's been a great weekend, don't you think?' Edith and Utch didn't say a word, and Severin must have already known about the new laws - or his new version of the same old laws that he would lay down to Edith as soon as they were alone. He must have been already rehearsing it. That he didn't want her spending time with me unless he was spending equal time with Utch simultaneously. And that we would always arrange ahead of time - so that he could be 'prepared' for it (he didn't like surprises). And that being away from the children for such an extended time wasn't an experience he cared to repeat. Without the children we lacked a certain perspective, as he liked to call it. But what was he afraid of? Oh, I know: the children. But what else?
He drove Edith from Vienna to Greece in a 1954 Zorn-Witwer, crossing the Yugoslavian border at Jerzersko because, he told her, the name of the place appealed to him and he wanted to see it. No other reason; I've looked at a map, and Jerzersko certainly isn't the best pl
ace to cross if you're en route to Greece. The point is, he didn't always need to plan out everything in advance. When they went to Greece, they just went.
I have tried to visualize them as young lovers, and, of course, Edith has told me a lot about their romance, but Winter's car eludes me. A 1954 Zorn-Witwer? Edith said the gearshift slid in and out of the dashboard like a plumber's helper. I've never heard of such a thing. There were places where the floor was rusted away and you could see the road running beneath you. It was some sort of primitive convertible; it had a roll-back canvas roof which leaked. The last year the car was ever made was 1954. Severin has told me that Zorn was a military manufacturing company which turned to farm and road construction machinery after the war. Witwer, he claims, was a failed motorcycle firm. They made unicycles on the side, no doubt. Can anyone believe anyone else? Who the hell ever heard of a Zorn-Witwer? Edith knew nothing about cars. Severin Winter went too far; they drove to Greece in some mythical car.
The weather grew warmer. Winter had a nose for water; he knew where to turn off the main road and find a lake. He found villages the instant they were hungry. When they got to talking about folk art, he would find them a room with an engraved wardrobe and a great feather bed - one with farm animals embroidered on the quilts and pillowcases. In a tiny pension in Thrace, he showed Edith a rare folk toilet: the flush handle was a perfectly carved penis.
They discovered sex in the cradle of democracy. They kept track of the different beds. For a while, Edith favored the bed in Ljubljana, but Severin liked the one in Piraeus - it was so warm there, and they were in sight and sound of the harbor; all night they heard the boats flapping on the water 'like thighs slapping together', Severin told Utch. In the morning a fish market opened below their window. Edith lay in bed and heard the fish knives hacking and slitting, the bartering tongues. The suction sound of removing the innards seemed magnified; the garrulous haggle rose and fell. She knew the fishmongers like to behead a fish at the exact moment they were making a point about the price. Thok! for emphasis. After that, who could argue?