There was something enchanting about Marietta as she grew up. She was light and very stylish, and her movements were graceful in an entirely unselfconscious way. Everything about her was unselfconscious: because she really didn’t think about herself but about higher, abstract things; about ideas, in the platonic sense. When she wanted to be a dancer—that was her first ideal—it was not for personal ambition, not even for personal expression: it was to forge herself into an instrument, or to contribute herself as a medium, through which everything that was beautiful could pass.
She believed of course in love, but had not much time for men. That aspect of love was for her embodied in Leo and was detestable. When she married, her husband Tim was predictably as different from Leo as anyone could be. Less predictably—for she loved her parents—his ancestry and background were far removed from her own. But perhaps this was a need of her nature, the same need that afterward drove her to India to immerse herself in different forms of life and enthuse over different expressions of it; to glory in variety.
When she was first married, Marietta loved to accompany Tim on visits to his family in the country. She read everything she could about the land and its history, reaching back to the time when the Indians had owned it, and its first Dutch and British settlers, and all the families, including Tim’s, whose names recurred over and over on the gravestones in the two cemeteries. At that time, what was later the house Mark wanted to buy (the burned house) belonged to someone very rich connected with films who used to give big weekend parties. Tim’s family did not attend these parties and always referred to the place as the Van Kuypen house, as though Van Kuypens were still living there. In fact, they had lived there for hardly two generations. The first Van Kuypen, a hosiery manufacturer as well as landowner and influential politician, had built it for himself during the early years of the nineteenth century. When he died, the property as well as the hosiery business were both flourishing, but within a decade his sons, who lacked his ability to make money but surpassed him in spending it, had run both into the ground. By the time the grandsons came of age, the house had passed into the possession of another local manufacturer and potentate—the owner of a sawmill—but his family repeated the history of the Van Kuypens, and the taste for pleasure exceeding that for business, had to sell off within another generation. All this time Tim’s family were industrious tenant farmers leasing their land from whoever owned the Van Kuypen estate. While the landlords went down, the tenants went up. They became judges, bankers, one senator, one of the wives an ardent abolitionist. Toward the last quarter of the century they themselves acquired the Van Kuypen house and land: but that was their high-water mark from which they receded after another generation, for the same reasons as the previous landlords—that is, the sons proving more sophisticated and less industrious than the fathers. They had retained their former farmhouse, and it was here that they remained when the mansion swam all too soon out of their possession; and it was here in this commodious, converted farmhouse—where no evidence was left of the family’s farming activities but only of their sophisticated city living—that Tim’s mother lived with her two daughters at the time of Marietta’s marriage.
After the first few months Marietta ceased to enjoy her visits there. Each member of the household except her appeared to be totally engrossed and enclosed in a separate pursuit. There was Tim in his chair in the front parlor, with a glass and decanter beside him, his legs crossed and swinging one foot as he listened to his favorite records on his phonograph. His mother spent the day in endless domestic activity, polishing the silver, bottling fruit from the garden, sorting out her linen closet. The older sister, Mary, tramped around the yard in rubber boots, deciding which trees needed pruning and which spraying; or she would roar off in the ancient family pickup and return with some old door or mantel to lug off and store in the barn. The younger sister, Evie, went for long walks by herself, sometimes stooping to pick up a fallen leaf to take home and press in her book of poems or memoirs. If the three of them happened to encounter one another around the house, they never failed to exchange a friendly comment, even though for the most part each was too preoccupied to hear the other.
They met at dinner, a formal meal in the dining room for which the three women changed from their old skirts and cardigans into dowdy frocks. They were tall women with big limbs and sagging bosoms; they looked alike and also had the same ringing voices speaking in accents that were more English than American except for certain characteristic flat and elongated vowel sounds. And indeed they all, including Tim, seemed very English—but English of a bygone age, even of the eighteenth century, when women were mannish and eccentric, and men, pretty as girls, dissipated themselves into an early grave. Marietta could find no place for herself in this family group. Nothing was more boring to her than the conversation around that dining table—except perhaps the food. She was accustomed to Louise’s lavish meals, and it was extraordinary to her how sparsely they ate and how satisfied they seemed to be with this economical fare. “Hm, good, Mother,” Mary would comment, chewing on the tough meat and vegetables boiled long in water; whereupon the mother expatiated on how much she had paid for what they were eating, and from there generally on the high prices everyone charged, and from there on every prosaic triviality that came into her head. No one else talked much, but she talked ceaselessly.
Later it occurred to Marietta that she was doing it to keep up the appearance of a solid family at dinner around that solid table laid with the family china and silver, and the portraits of ancestors—the senator, the abolitionist—looking down at them from the walls. Tim was already quite drunk by the time they sat down to dinner; and as the meal progressed, and he filled and refilled his glass with the wine which was much better than the food, he became cross-eyed and disheveled to the point of disintegration. But he continued to sit bolt upright and to smile without cease like a well-bred dinner guest. If he mumbled something, his mother immediately answered him as though it made perfect sense. In the same way, if Evie acted strangely, or even if—as sometimes happened, quite suddenly and unexpectedly—she threw a tantrum, the mother would handle that too as though it were something entirely ordinary that went on every day of the week at every dinner table around the land.
One night Marietta ran away from the house. She had had to help Tim undress and go to bed, and afterward she couldn’t bear to lie next to him. She felt trapped with him in their bedroom—narrow and sloping like all the upstairs rooms and too small for the furniture in it: the high mahogany four-poster, the carved chest-on-chest, a walnut armoire that had a strange smell in it as of dead people’s clothes. She sat by the window and looked out over the landscape: the fine tall trees, the handsome houses separated from one another by respectful acres, in the distance the Episcopal church with Tim’s ancestors in its graveyard. It was all as alien to her as this room with Tim slumped on the bed; so that suddenly she jumped up and, not even bothering to pack her clothes, she went downstairs and let herself out the front door. She got in her car and drove straight to New York, not stopping till she came to her parents’ apartment where she went up in the elevator and rang the bell, once, twice, and when she heard Louise come out of the bedroom, she called softly, “It’s me”—shutting her eyes with relief and impatience as she waited for her mother to unlock and unbolt the door. She didn’t know it yet, but she was already pregnant with Mark.
Marietta had a tendency, which got worse as she got older, to brood. She lay awake at night doing it, and it continued all day and washed like turgid water through all her activities. She was good at what she did—dealing with buyers and manufacturers, attending fashion shows and business lunches—but she wasn’t engrossed by it. It was all just a skill she had, a sleight of hand, like her social manner which was charming and serviceable but had really nothing to do with her. By nature she was solitary, and most of her evenings were, in fact, spent alone. She didn’t feel like talking to anyone, except that there was usually something
very urgent she had to say to her son. Often Mark wasn’t home, but she didn’t leave any message on his recording machine, she only hung up in disappointment. Occasionally, another man answered and then she would hurriedly say “Tell him his mother called,” mumbling somewhat in embarrassment. Once or twice she said nothing but hung up like a secret caller.
She brooded about Natasha’s absence. She didn’t know why Mark had chosen to place her with Leo, nor why Natasha chose to stay there when Marietta wanted her at home. And now Mark kept going out there too and was even thinking about buying a house in the area. Marietta was very much opposed to this idea. She didn’t know what he needed a house for, and when she fought with him about it, she said “And why there, of all places?” She had made this same objection when he was buying the house for the Academy. She thought they had finished with that part of the country—Tim’s family’s—and couldn’t understand why Mark should want to start the whole thing again.
Thinking about all this, Marietta couldn’t sleep and she paced up and down, smoking many cigarettes. Little pulses beat inside her, all through her body and also inside her head, and she didn’t know why: she had always felt intensely but not like this, with these physical symptoms which made her twitch as with electric currents running through her.
As usual when she couldn’t bear to be on her own, she took a cab across town to be with her mother. It was past midnight, but she found Louise as awake as she was. Day and night were really the same in Louise’s apartment. With the chandeliers blazing, Louise was walking around making tall pots of coffee for herself, as absorbed in her own thoughts as Marietta was in hers. In her youth Louise had resembled a Wagnerian singer, but now in her late seventies she was more like a French tragic actress: tall, stately, draped in dark silk, her white hair disheveled, she appeared always to have heard some terrible tidings. Yet at the same time there was also something cozy about the way she sat there drinking coffee as though it were the middle of the afternoon.
“Of course, no use arguing with him,” Marietta was complaining about Mark. “No use asking him anything. Impossible even to talk to him. I tried to call him; no answer, just that idiotic machine; one of these days I’ll go over there and kick it to bits.”
“Child, child, darling,” Louise murmured.
“And who are all these people he hangs around with? I mean, if they were decent, nice people he’d want us to meet them . . .”
Louise stood over her and stroked her hair. Marietta laid her head against her mother and shut her eyes. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” she said. “Do you think it’s the menopause? Blood pressure? I feel like I might split apart, blow up. What is it? I don’t know.”
Louise laid her hand on the twitching pulse in Marietta’s cheek. “It’s nothing. It’s nerves. You’re so highly strung, darling, it’s your temperament.” Louise was a strong, healthy woman herself, and she was confident that Marietta was the same. All that milk Louise had drunk while she was carrying her! All those fried potatoes she had eaten! It was almost fifty years ago but the effect of it, she was sure, was built into her daughter’s bones.
The Van Kuypen house had been on the market when Leo and Mark were looking for a place for the Academy. But Leo had rejected it: “I get bad vibes,” he had said (he liked using the slang of whatever generation was current). The late-Victorian house they eventually bought suited him much better. When Mark said that that gave him bad vibes—because it was so ugly—Leo said no, it was a healthy place. It had been built as a summer home by a wealthy New York wholesale grocer, and there were still photographs in the house of the whole family arriving for their annual vacation in carriages overloaded with children in sailor suits, nursemaids, pets, steamer trunks, and leather hatboxes. The pleasant aura of these summers had remained intact in the house because, according to Leo, nothing worse had happened to the family than that they had gone out of business and died of natural causes.
When Mark proposed to buy the Van Kuypen house for himself, Leo was another person who tried to discourage him. He shook his big head and pushed out his underlip: “Leave it alone, Mark,” he said. “Let it rest.” He didn’t approve of people trying to buy back their own or someone else’s ancestors. “That’s not the way it’s done,” he said. There were, however, a growing number of people in the area who were trying to do it. Rich and restless women from New York bought up dingy cabins and spent a fortune refurbishing them and restoring the fittings to the exact period detail, down to the locks and hinges, and hiding their stereos inside seamen’s chests. But when their labor of love and ingenuity was finished, they still found themselves with plenty of money and energy left over; and it was then that, eager to work on themselves instead of their houses, they turned up at the Academy to put themselves in Leo’s hands. But he wasn’t, as he put it, having any. “First get rid of all that shit,” he said—and they did, cheerfully sold the refurbished cabins to other rich New Yorkers and moved themselves up into Leo’s attic.
But Mark was not to be dissuaded. He was raising part of the payment on the Van Kuypen house by taking out a mortgage on the Academy, and for this he needed Leo’s signature. He didn’t want to burden Leo with the details, for he knew how much Leo hated and feared all business matters. There was a scene every time Mark came to see him, with Leo complaining—about the house, the expense, the repairs to be made. Leo said he was an old man, he couldn’t cope with any of it, it wasn’t fair to saddle him with these problems. Mark calmed him. He asked to see the contractors’ estimates and bank papers and bills and everything else that was disturbing Leo. As a matter of fact, Leo had laid it all out ready for him to see. Leo was very methodical about papers, especially those relating to money matters. He was also cautious but not shrewd—at least not shrewd enough. He had never quite understood the terms under which he had acquired this house, nor how much of it belonged to Mark’s firm and how much to Leo’s movement. He watched Mark run his expert eye over all the papers, and after a while he asked, “You’re not cheating me, are you?”
Mark looked up. Their eyes met. Leo’s were sunk in flesh, wise and ancient as an elephant’s, whereas Mark’s were green and beautiful, a lover’s eyes. Mark looked away first; he smiled. “What if I were?” he said and turned over another paper.
Leo sighed with a great shudder. “I know,” he said. “It shouldn’t make any difference to me. But it’s the way I grew up. Everyone forgets that I grew up too—yes, pardon me, I’m human too, I have my conditioning. Why shouldn’t I be my father’s son, just like everyone else? My papa was a clerk in the mayor’s office and naturally he thought a great deal about his pension and his savings. He had to have them, like lung and liver, and so do I. I’m a petit bourgeois, Mark, I worry about these things. And something else that’s worrying me is that I may have to live forever—don’t laugh! Sometimes it looks like I may have to go on and on, and how can I, without pension and savings.” He appeared entirely serious; but next moment he became playfully rueful: “And I’m in love again. Isn’t it terrible? Really shocking, not to say ludicrous. No wonder she laughs at me.” He smiled, thinking of Stephanie’s laughter. “Yes, yes, ludicrous,” he went on, “but also, Mark, a little bit beautiful I think. Isn’t it beautiful to see a very old tree with a big fat gray trunk and out of it sprouting the greenest, the tenderest little shoots; shy little harbingers of spring,” he said, and lay there on his leather couch, smiling like a German uncle.
Mark took out the mortgage papers. At once Leo collapsed and became a mass of weary old flesh: “Must you, now? Must you spoil my mood? . . . What is it, anyway?”
Mark tried to explain, and for a while Leo tried to follow, but Mark went into more and more detail and quoted higher and higher figures, with complicated calculations which Mark loved to do, which were easy and joyful to him, but which addled Leo completely, so that he gave up and cried out for Mark to stop. “Well, just sign here, then,” Mark said.
“I don’t have a pen, Mark.”
II
Usually when Mark arrived at the Academy, it was after a fight with Kent. His heart was breaking, but he was used to that; ever since he could remember, he had suffered in this way from the boys he loved, and he had developed a stoical front with which to cover up. His lips were set, his eyes rather cold as he drove himself the two hundred miles from the city to the Academy.
His manner when he got there showed no trace of inner turmoil. He was, as always, jaunty, courteous, and alert. But there was no fooling Leo. It was dark inside his den and he lay inert and sagging like some superannuated circus animal on his leather couch. But with only one look at Mark—“Ah,” Leo said, “love trouble again.”
In Search of Love and Beauty Page 9