by Belva Plain
“I don’t draw papers. Lawyers do that. I’ll get in touch with Mr. Pierce about it.”
“So that’s all for today?”
“That’s all for today.”
It was good to get out of that office where money was king, Hank thought as he walked down the street toward the subway.
Clever! Leave it to Paul. I could read his mind: Stubborn, hotheaded fellow, he was thinking. Thinking he tricked me, the way you trick a child into taking his medicine.
But I have to admit, he was right about the house. The way she walks around on a Sunday morning, watering the flowers, the way she fusses with the bric-a-brac on the shelves …
He must have cared about her to protect her interests like that. But why the hell didn’t he marry her instead of letting another man have her? He can’t give much of a damn about his wife. What’s the matter, isn’t my mother good enough for him?
The subway rumbled uptown. He needed to divert his thoughts from Paul. Things that can’t be changed mustn’t be allowed to rankle. Look ahead to your own life. Concentrate on becoming a doctor.
See that young girl sitting there in the corner with her eyes closed? She’s about nineteen, much too thin, with dark rings under her eyes. She’ll have tension headaches when she’s older. I’ve seen the type before. She’ll imagine she has heart disease.
And in his mind, Hank continued to examine the unconscious stranger as if she were a specimen in a text. She probably works in a department store, a low-priced store in the basement. She isn’t fashionable enough to work upstairs. She couldn’t work for my mother.
I wish I weren’t so easily saddened by people like her, or by the streets I have to pass through. I think of my street, so quiet, with its fanlights and green, potted shrubs. And then of the mean, cluttered streets I saw those summers when I rode the ambulance. I remember a flat over a bar on Tenth Avenue … that’s where Donal Powers came from … Ben told me years ago, and Donal used to be proud of telling how far he’d risen, that incarnation of evil … But after a while he stopped talking about it …
When he got out on Lexington Avenue, the girl was still asleep. At the subway exit sat a legless beggar. Everybody rushed by him; they were accustomed to him and his kind. Hank fumbled in his pocket for a coin and dropped it to the man, avoiding the touch of his unclean hand. Then, ashamed, he wanted to go back and say something, forcing himself to look at the man in a human way. But he didn’t know what to say, and anyway, he was barely in time for the train back to Philadelphia.
I can feel so sorry for people, he thought, and when I do, I know, I really know, what’s meant by the brotherhood of man. But at other times I’m a self-centered bastard, thinking about myself and where I’m going. Top of the class. Nobel prize for medicine. All that stuff.
Seventeen
“You’re a damn fool,” Donal said. “What chance do you think you stand in a divorce court? You left our home. Took my children and left our home.”
They were in Alfie’s office at the back of the house. It was a small room, part of the original farmhouse, with a low ceiling and a single diamond-paned window. Donal, although he was quiet in his chair and spoke softly, seemed to fill the whole room. Meg had to turn away from him, toward the window and the orchard where a thin snow was blowing, to get her breath.
“I had a reason,” she said, still not looking at him. “What you did to me …” The recollection of that night, the humiliation and the feeling of being helpless, of being worth nothing, robbed of the freedom, the privacy of her own body—the recollection suffocated her.
“Reason. Who would listen to that? You’re my wife. I had every right. Reason! It’s laughable.”
“The time will come when it won’t be. When a marriage license won’t entitle a man to rape.”
“Rape! The time will come! Yes, and I suppose the time will come when we’ll go walking on the moon, too! No, give up, Meg, you don’t stand a chance in a divorce. You haven’t a single valid complaint against me. Anything you ever wanted, you got.”
“I never wanted ninety percent of the things you gave me.”
“That’s neither here nor there. You left my bed and board. That’s the sum total and that’s what counts.”
“I’m not going back.” They were approaching the third hour of argument and she was tired. Perhaps it was her awareness of her own fragility, in contrast to his vigor, that roused her strength. “I’m not going back. There’s nothing, there’s no one in the world to make me.”
Donal got up and stood over her, regarding her with a new curiosity, as if she were some puzzling creature he had never seen before. “Why, if you hate me so much—”
“I don’t hate you, Donal.”
She thought, hatred is wishing someone were dead. She merely wished him away. Let him prosper, as he was doing and would do. He was a foreigner. Everything about him had suddenly become foreign; his rumored crimes, his politics, and his appetite for money.
“You’ve always been odd … different,” he mused.
“That’s why you chose me in the first place. Because I was different from the women you knew.”
He walked to the window. A group of boys was in the orchard, having a snowball war. He watched them for a moment.
“Who are those kids with our boys?”
“They go to school together.”
“I would have guessed that. Who are they? What sort of boys are they?”
She understood what he wanted. “One of them is a minister’s son, the others come from the village. Jimmy’s father mows lawns in the summer and does odd jobs in the winter. Angelo’s family just came from Italy. The father’s a barber.”
She saw Donal’s anger coming on with a twitch of his cheeks.
“You took them out of a first-class private school and dumped them in no-man’s land to associate with barbers!”
“You went to school in Hell’s Kitchen, for heaven’s sake. What are you talking about?”
Donal slapped his fist into his palm. “And do you think I want them to go back and start scrounging all over again where I began? No! I want them to start where I left off! Not that I’ve left off yet, not by a long shot. I want my sons to compete with the best and to come out on top of the best. It’s all caste and class, don’t you even know that much? The best schools, the contacts—it goes all through the business world and up into government. No, they can’t stay here. That’s final.”
The snobbery disgusted her. And yet, there was something to what he said. She herself had been given the best education.
“Listen, Meg, while I go over it once more. There are two ways we can handle this. We can have a quiet, decent divorce. I don’t want one and you do, so you’ll start it in spite of me. I know that. But if you ask for too much, I’ll fight. In that case it will be a dirty divorce and I’ll win anyway. So which is it to be? That, or a quiet compromise?”
“What kind of a compromise do you want?”
“I want to keep a father’s authority over my children. Timmy and Tom to go away to a fine prep school. They’re twelve and thirteen, so it’s time. The girls are young enough to stay as they are for the present. I’ll support you adequately.” Donal’s mouth twisted in a semblance of amusement. “There’ll be no ermine wrap and no chauffeur, though, as there used to be.”
“I never asked for either one. Remember? The ermine wrap was against my principles. I don’t believe in torturing some poor creature in a trap so I can wrap myself with its fur.”
“A good thing I saved this place for your father,” Donal said, ignoring the answer. “Lord knows it’s big enough for the lot of you. Unless you’d rather move back to our house with the girls—with me moved out, of course. I’m already looking at an apartment for myself in New York. On Fifth Avenue.”
“We’ll stay here,” she said. “I grew up here.” An echo sounded in her head. There was something elegiac in the words I grew up here, something far and sad and also peaceful.
“You’re s
ure you don’t want the house?”
Meg shook her head. That ornate suburban house, his house, his choice—no. Besides, he would feel free to come into it whenever he wished, up the stairs and into the bedroom. She had no faith in any law that would forbid him to. He would do what he wanted to do. He always had.
“The apartment will be large enough for all the children. We will share them. I will be fair.”
She thought: They will be more his than mine anyway, the older they grow. It’s clearly to be seen. Even strangers have remarked on it. All except Agnes. He knows that too. He’s disappointed in Agnes already, although he would never admit it. He sees too much of me in her.
Someone knocked at the door. “Oh, excuse me,” Emily said, entering into the silence. “Excuse me, I thought you would be finished by now, ready for a little something to eat. An early supper, Donal, before you ride back.”
“Thank you, Mother, that’s very kind, but I’m not hungry.”
“Mother,” he says so pointedly, and Emily is so humbly cordial. Of course, with her only income being Dad’s salary from managing Donal’s properties! The Depression is far from over. How many millions unemployed? And it won’t be over, Paul says, until the war comes.
Donal took his overcoat, which he had thrown across a chair. “Are we pretty much agreed, then, Meg? If so, I’ll be going.”
“Yes indeed.”
Emily looked from one to the other, questioning.
“We’re getting a divorce, Mother,” Donal told her, “what they call an ‘amicable’ divorce. But you and Dad have nothing to worry about. He’ll keep his job.”
“Thank you, Donal. You’ve always been very kind.”
“I’ll just see the kids before I go.”
“They’re playing outside.” Emily hurried after him. “I’m so sorry things have turned out this way, Donal.”
“Roll of the dice. You can’t win everything. So long, Meg. I’ll be in touch.”
The two women watched through the half windows on either side of the door as the little girls, who had been pulling each other up and down the driveway on a sled, came running to their father. Whooping and screaming, they climbed all over him.
“Look, they don’t want to let him go,” Emily said.
The remark was an oblique accusation: A woman belongs with her husband, keeping the family together. Don’t tell me about your personal problems, they’re between the two of you. A clever woman puts up with things, solves things. No one could be more generous than he has been.
“Of course, you’re welcome, dear, all of you,” she had told Meg. “We’ll manage somehow.” She had cried and put her arms around Meg in pity and sympathy. But she had also been doubtful and confused. “It’s really rather embarrassing, though, isn’t it? I mean, your leaving so suddenly, just walking out like that? People will wonder.”
I wonder myself, Meg thought now. Such a long, long path from the instant I saw him leaning against the mantelpiece in Leah’s house and wanted him more than anything in the world, wanted him to love me … such a long path up till now. Is it possible that he, too, sees how sad it is?
“Look at them!” Emily cried again.
They were trying to pull him on the sled. And Meg turned away, saying, “I’ll go help Elsie in the kitchen.”
Elsie was old, the last of the servants; it wasn’t fair to bring six more people into the house and expect her to do all the work herself.
After the supper had been eaten and cleared, after the children had gone upstairs to do their homework and go to bed, came the hard times. Now questions lurked in the four corners of the room, sometimes unasked, but visible in the set of Emily’s lips while she worked her needlepoint. Questions lay in Alfie’s troubled glances which, mistakenly, he thought were hidden behind the newspaper.
The hall clock, one of Emily’s antique finds, rattled as if it were clearing its throat, then resonantly bonged nine times. It was a signal to fold and put away the needlepoint. A few minutes later, the rush of water in the old pipes would be heard downstairs as Emily ran her bath.
Alfie lowered the paper. “Your mother’s pretty upset. Worried about you. What’s going to become of you.”
“She thinks I should go back to Donal.”
Alfie didn’t deny that. “Well, you haven’t explained things very much, Meg, have you? But then, between husband and wife—” he fumbled. “I don’t suppose that ugly business at Leah’s party is the whole reason, is it?”
“Of course not. But it certainly told a lot about the man, didn’t it?”
The dogs, who had been asleep at Alfie’s feet, jumped suddenly and raced to the back of the house. He got up to collar and quiet them.
“Raccoons. There’s a family in the orchard. I put scraps out every night.” He looked at his watch. “Half past. They’re early this evening. They don’t usually come before ten.”
Over his head, where he stood holding the dogs, hung a deer head; it was a young buck, with graceful antlers. Undoubtedly, he had bought it; he, who fed raccoons, could no more handle a gun than a Stradivarius. He wanted it to appear that he had taken up the sport of a country gentleman. It was spurious, a deception like his halfhearted attendance at church with Emily.
The dogs had broken the thread of his thoughts. He came over and stroked his daughter’s head.
“I’m glad you’re here, Meggie. I mean, I’m sorry you’re having so much trouble, but I’m glad you came here. The house has been lonely. It’s good to have it filled up with children, five little ones and now my big one again.” He kissed her forehead. “This is your home, remember that.”
When he left her, she roamed the room in search of something to do. An enormous photo album lay open on a table. She guessed that her father was the one who had been looking at it, for Emily was not given to nostalgia or soft sentiment. But I am, Meg thought, and she took the album on her lap.
They were old, old pictures, twenty-five years ago and longer. Here they are on the front porch, sitting in wicker chairs under the scrolls and curlicues of the roof: Carpenter Gothic. The women are wearing what looks like white; the colors are very pale and the fabric is lawn or handkerchief linen; the buttons are tiny crocheted knobs that elude the buttonholes. The men are wearing knickerbockers, knitted socks with argyle cuffs and, in all that heat, their jackets are double-breasted wool. But it is Sunday, and Alfie likes to make a proper tradition out of Sunday.
They’ve had their dinner. There is an afternoon torpor in the picture. The dinner was heavy with starch and sugar; butter dripped from the corn and gravy from the yams; ice cream, churned that morning on the kitchen steps, stood like a dome or derby on every slice of pie.
Meg flipped the pages. Here is her first pony. Here is Dottie the Jersey, who took second prize at the county fair. Here are Paul and Marian before their marriage; Paul looks the same now, but how she has changed! Here is the cat who had twelve kittens, of whom the extras were given to Meg to feed with a dropper; every one of them lived.
The photos are fading, yet still there rises from them the feel of summer, the trembling heat of August, of beloved summer.
The clock struck ten and Meg closed the album. She put on a coat and went out. Moonshine glimmered on the whitened earth. Packed snow on the path toward the barns squeaked underfoot as she stepped through her father’s footsteps.
After the first greeting to Donal that afternoon, her father had stayed discreetly away and gone out to the barns. He made a daily check there anyway, as if overnight the roof could have developed leaks or the floors begun to rot. She knew why he went. It was to remember the fine herd of Jerseys in their stanchions, munching grain, and the riding horses, now long gone, in the stalls. It was to remember these things and to tell himself that one day he would have them all back again. The foolishness of all this made her tender.
And she climbed on up the slope through neglected fields now turning back to scrub growth, into the woodlot. Through the bare trees, the pond, barely vis
ible, was an oval of dark glass; through those same trees, in the extraordinary ignorance of her fifteen years, she had had her first realization of human desire when she had caught Leah and Ben in a passionate embrace.
All past and over. Ben dead and Leah married now to a man as different from him as night is from day. Who could have foretold that then?
Change and flux. A flowing river, a rapid river that you can’t hold back.
Alfie would like to hold it back. He’d like to live everything over. He wants me to stay here as a child again, the eldest child among my own children, belonging to him, as in an entirely other and terrible way, I was supposed to belong to Donal. My father’s would be a loving ownership and I would be safe here, like the little girl on the front steps that Sunday long ago. That would be the only difference.
So Meg stood, leaning her back against a birch trunk. For a long time she stood there thinking, searching for an answer. Then clouds came up to darken the moon and, still with no answer, she made her way over the downhill path back to the house.
Eighteen
Nineteen thirty-nine sped by. Only a few months ago Paul had sat at the Pathé News Theater in Grand Central Station and watched Mr. Chamberlain—black stork with black furled umbrella—return from Germany with “Peace for our time.” He had read Churchill’s speech to the House of Commons: “We have sustained a total unmitigated defeat … all the countries of Mittel Europa … one after another, will be drawn in the vast system of Nazi politics.… And do not suppose that this is the end. It is only the beginning.”
And there was no peace. The beginning was here, and Paul was feeling a tremendous sense of urgency. These were the last days, the last chances of escape from the boiling cauldron that Europe was soon to become. It was too late for his cousins, and the only other people he personally knew were also beyond his help. A letter from Ilse had given another brutal shock to his shaken sense of human decency: Mario and she had become citizens of Italy last year, but now their citizenship had been nullified and they had been ordered to leave the country. They were going into hiding until they could find a country that would take them. This would be her last letter, therefore, until—until when?