by Belva Plain
“You must have won the popularity contest,” Iris remarked one afternoon when, on arriving home from school, she found a ladies’ meeting just breaking up. The way she said it, and she had said it before, was odd: in part it was an accusation, in part a question.
Anna had tried the simple answer often enough: When you’re friendly to people they’re friendly to you. But it had produced no results, except perhaps irritation on Iris’ part And anyway, it sounded like some scout maxim or else one of those pious declarations that used to be embroidered on samplers or printed and hung over the boss’s desk in an office. So she fell back on lame humor.
“My red hair, no doubt.” And kept it at that.
If it hadn’t been for all these friends or acquaintances, whatever you wanted to call them, the house would have been unbearably empty. Empty rooms were the hazard of middle age. After the birds have flown the nest, et cetera. And if there had never been a nestful at all?
Mary Malone was distressed about her son Mickey, who’d been in Hawaii during the war and had gone back there to live. But she still had the rest of them nearby, not to speak of the grandchildren already born and yet to come! While I, while we—
More than once Anna had thought of getting into the car with Joseph, driving up to that town and knocking at the door: “We’ve come to see our grandson,” they’d say. And then what? No, it couldn’t be done in the face of those people’s refusal. The child would be the one to suffer. It couldn’t be done. Someday, when he is older, people said, someday hell want to see you. Yes, after all the lovely years of his childhood were past, he might, perhaps, come to them. A stranger, come out of curiosity or God knows why else.
On days like that Anna would need to be active, to work with her hands. She would go down into the kitchen and help Celeste with the cooking. Celeste had represented herself as a “good plain cook,” but had turned out to be more plain than good. Anna was just as glad that the cooking hadn’t been taken out of her own hands.…
She hadn’t wanted anyone living in the house in the first place. With three adults, two of them gone all day, they could have done very well with a woman to come in once or twice a week to clean.
But Joseph had been firm about it. “This enormous house? No, you’re to get someone and without delay. I insist,” he’d said.
And so Celeste had come to them. She was a large, dark brown woman whose presence was marked by a loud voice that laughed whenever it wasn’t singing sorrowful hymns. She had come north from Georgia for no reason that she ever disclosed, leaving behind her a vague family: children? Husband? She never told them and, after one unsuccessful attempt, they never asked her.
She was to live in their house as long as they did and know them perhaps better than they knew themselves.
During their second autumn, before full dark, Joseph came driving home from the railroad station and was startled by something at the side of the road not far from his house. He backed the car up to look again.
It was a small dog, lying in tall grass. He leaned out of the car. The dog raised its head an inch or two and fell back. Its chest and one of its legs were soaked in blood.
He’d never been very useful around blood or pain and he knew it. Maybe he ought to leave the dog and telephone the police when he got home. But in the meantime some other car might come along and kill it or just mangle it some more. He shuddered and looked again. It was a little white dog with a sheep’s face, the Lovejoys’ dog. He knew nothing about dogs and really didn’t like them. But he remembered this one because when they had seen it on the Lovejoys’ lawn Anna had exclaimed over the sheep. Then Iris had looked in a book—leave it to Iris to look things up—and told them it was a dog, a Bedlington terrier.
Would it bite if he were to pick it up? He couldn’t leave it there like that. It raised its head again, or tried to, and he heard its whimper. No, he couldn’t leave it there like that. He got out of the car. There was no cloth, nothing to lay it on. He took his coat off. If the spots didn’t come out it couldn’t be helped. The dog whimpered again when he picked it up, feeling clumsy and sick with pity for it.
He drove up the hill and turned into the double driveway of the Lovejoy house. A maid answered the bell, and in the hallway behind her he heard a woman’s voice.
“Who is it, Carrie?”
“It’s Tippy, Mrs. Lovejoy. He’s been hurt.”
“I found him on the side of the road,” Joseph said. “I’m Friedman, your neighbor.”
Mrs. Lovejoy gave a little scream. “Oh, my God!”
Joseph held out his arms and she took the little bundle of dog and coat. “Carrie, tell Bob to get the car and call Dr. Chase, tell him we’re on our way.” She whirled back to Joseph. “How did this happen?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and, suddenly understanding, added, “I didn’t do it. I found him on the road.”
She turned away. He saw that she didn’t believe him. “My coat, please. May I have my coat?”
And when it was dropped upon the floor he picked up his bloodied coat and let himself out the door.
At dinner, having said nothing about the incident to Anna, he heard himself asking her quite suddenly, “Tell me, do you ever think this house is too far from your friends?”
She looked surprised. “Well, everyone does seem to live twenty minutes or so away, but I don’t really mind. What makes you ask?”
“Just wondering. We’ve been here awhile and I wondered whether you liked it as much as you thought you would. We can always sell and get another place.”
“Oh, but I love it here! You must know I do.”
Yes, true. The way she stands in the doorway after we’ve been out, and walks around touching things. At night when it’s warm she sits on the steps, watching the stars. She used to do that when she was a child in Poland, she says.
The doorbell rang and after a moment Celeste came in. “There’s a gentleman to see you in the hall.”
Just inside the door was Mr. Lovejoy. He stood somewhat uncertainly.
“I came over to thank you. My wife was terribly upset about the dog. She realized afterward that she hadn’t thanked you.”
“No, she hadn’t. But that’s all right.”
“He had cut himself on a broken bottle. The vet said he would have bled to death in a short while if you hadn’t picked him up.”
“I don’t like to see anything suffer. Not animals or human beings, either.”
Anna had come into the hall. “What’s this all about, Joseph? You didn’t tell me!”
“There was nothing to tell,” he answered shortly.
“Your husband was very kind. The dog means a lot to us, like one of the family.”
“Then I’m glad he could help,” Anna said. “Won’t you come in for a minute?”
“Thank you, I’d better be getting back. You’ve made some changes in the house,” he added, addressing Anna. “I’d hardly recognize it.”
“Anytime you want to see it you’re welcome.”
“Thank you again.” Mr. Lovejoy bowed and the door closed behind him.
“Well! You weren’t very gracious to that man, Joseph. I’ve never seen you so rude.”
“What did you want me to do? Kiss him?”
“Joseph! I don’t know what’s got into you! Such a nice man, too.”
“What was nice about him? What could you tell in half a minute? Sometimes, Anna, you talk like a child!”
“And you talk like a nasty, insulting crank! I don’t mind, but I should think you’d want to be nice to the neighbors. We might get to be friends, for all you know.”
“Sure! They’re waiting for us!”
“Well, we’re friends with the Wilmots down the street, aren’t we?”
“Okay, okay, have it your way.” He patted her on the back.
Friends? Hardly. But something human had come through, all the same. He stood a moment looking through the door down the length of the living room where the fire sparked under the mantel a
nd Anna’s portrait hung above it. No, he wouldn’t sell, wouldn’t leave this house. It was his house. It was—home.
29
At the last minute her parents remembered that they had been invited out to dinner and Iris would have to be hostess alone to Theo Stern. It was a clumsy trick. They might have thought of something more clever.
As if it would make any difference! It was just one more humiliation and this one worse than most, because Theo was so un-ordinary and would see right through it. They were always praising his brilliance, so how could they think he would be stupid enough not to know what they were doing?
She was afraid. What to say to him during the long meal and the longer evening, knowing he would be wishing himself away and back in New York? He came to their house to see Joseph and Anna, not her. She had really never been alone with him, unless one could count four or five polite invitations to theatre by way of repaying her parents’ hospitality. And one time at the beach with two of the Malone sons and their wives.
Celeste was coming upstairs, humming. Did she know she was constantly singing, or was it by now an unconscious habit? Iris came out of her room.
“Celeste, there’ll only be two at dinner.”
“Your ma told me. What I wanted to know was, shall I make a pie? There’s time enough.”
“Good heavens, anything. I don’t care. This dinner tonight is the last thing I wanted.”
Celeste looked sly. Sly and merry. “You shouldn’t oughta say that. He’s a real nice man, Dr. Stern. I taken a liking to him the first time I opened the door and him standing there asking if this was the Friedman house. I knowed right away I liked him.”
“I like him, too. That’s no reason why I have to entertain him, is it?”
“He likes you, I see that.”
“Of course he does! He likes all of us. You, too.”
“Then I’m going to make the pie. And biscuits with the chicken. He ate four biscuits last time we had them.”
Even Celeste was captivated by his Viennese charm! But it wasn’t fair to be sardonic about that: there was so much else beneath the courtesy and wit, including one’s awareness of what the world—the Nazi fury—had done to Theo Stern.
He had traced them down last year upon arriving in New York. The last they had heard before then was a letter written from England just after the United States had entered the war. Mama’s eyes had run with fresh tears, reading all over again about the Uncle Eli family, all destroyed: the old people and the young, Theo Stern’s wife Liesel and their baby—all annihilated. Horrible, horrible! Like one of those ghoulish fairy tales in which ogres devour children and people are thrown into furnaces. But this had really happened. You looked at Theo and, remembering, were so moved—you wanted to put your hand on his, you wanted to say I know, I know. Except that you didn’t know: how could you, unless you had been there?
He never spoke of himself directly. His story had been drawn out of him in short sentences, answers to questions tactfully and obliquely put.
He’d had friends in England, made in the years he’d spent at Cambridge, and these had taken him in, had given him a base from which to reconstruct himself. When he enlisted in the British army it was not as a doctor. He had wanted to fight, to be used in a less passive way than healing wounds. He had wanted, he said, to work “vengefully,” and that’s how they had put him to use. As a child Theo had lived four years in France while his father opened a branch of his business there. Because of that he spoke colloquial French, slang and all. So he had been enlisted to work with the underground, and had been parachuted into France, complete with a French identity. He was supposed to have been born in a provincial town, son of a teacher; to have gone to school and church there and prepared for the university; all this was in case of capture by the Nazi occupying forces. He had seen, Iris reflected, seen in the flesh all the things that made you shudder and turn away when you saw mere bits of them in the newsreels. Theo had lived through them.
Once her father had risen and put his arm around Theo. He had been deeply affected, and Theo had been too. For that instant, standing there, they had seemed to the others in the room like a father and a son. As if, Iris thought, as if my brother Maury had come home.
She moved quickly, choosing her dress and shoes, then ran the water in the bathtub. She had never gotten over the need to ease herself in hot water and her mother had never ceased to warn her that she might one day fall asleep in it and drown.
She sank into the burning heat and laid her head back. She would have liked to stay in this deep comfort, then get into bed and read the evening away.
Papa was making a—a project out of Theo! He’d talked him into opening an office here in the suburbs rather than New York, had even helped him find office space.
“If you really want the Grosvenor Avenue building I can help you, I know the owner. I might be able to get a good deal for you on the rent,” he’d suggested.
And if Theo was short of money for equipment, which came high, why, Joseph would be glad to advance him some. No, Theo wasn’t short. Money was no problem. But he would never forget the offer; they were being as good to him as family. Well, they were family! He felt that way toward them. They were all he had.
Iris’ flesh prickled with embarrassment. Papa came on so strong! Yet, if Theo minded, he didn’t show it.
He was a good-looking man, too thin now and older looking than his age. His features were what is called “strong.” He had attentive eyes that searched you when you spoke to him: Iris had had to turn her own away sometimes. Women would be attracted to him. Probably he would get anyone he wanted badly enough. He would want, she guessed, someone like the one he’d had before. “A beauty,” her mother said. “She had a brightness like my brother Eli.” And like Maury, because Maury was like Eli.
Men. What do men want? Beauty like that, naturally, if they can get it. But not only that, and not always. The mothers of the children she taught came in all shapes and sorts, with every kind and degree of tenderness, intelligence and manner. Yet must they not all have had something in common to have been chosen? What? What?
If you talk too much, that’s not good. If you’re too quiet, that’s not good. You lie in bed at night thinking about it and trying not to. You are surrounded by sex, the man-woman thing. The movies, the embraces that will end in bed, even though they don’t show it. But you know that’s what it’s all about. Always. Even the women’s magazines with their preachy articles and stories. Educated women should have more children, they tell you. Motherhood and wifehood are the most rewarding careers. Decorate the house, drive the station wagon, work on the school board, campaign in community politics and make your town a better place for your children to live in. Charities are obligatory (making the world a better place for other people’s children to live in). But it all starts with the bed. Man-woman. Sex.
I feel sometimes—I feel so cheap. As if, when people look at me, they must know what I want and can’t have, will probably never have. My mother tries to be so tactful. She talks to her friends and sometimes even to me, so seriously, so respectfully, about my “career,” as if she wasn’t at the same time putting out her feelers for every stray man who passes. Papa brings a widower to dinner, thinking he must be needing a mother for his children. Not me, Iris, for what I am. No, a mother for his children.
Why don’t I give up? Give up in my mind, I mean. One more birthday after the next, and I’ll be thirty. It’s time to settle for what I have. A job with tenure in another year, so if I want to I can plan to go on teaching for the next forty years in the pleasant brick school with the old trees and the nice lady teachers. Papa says I’ll never have to worry about money. I’ll have a nice home full of good books. I’ll listen to good music in the evenings and maybe take a trip to Europe now and then with a group of teachers.
That’s living?
“What’s that plant I smell?” Theo asked. “It’s a little like perfume and a little like burnt sugar.”
&
nbsp; “It’s phlox. My mother planted a bed of it under this window.”
She turned on the outdoor light, picking the phlox out of darkness. The cream and lavender domes were bent with the weight of the rain. The trees dripped in a forest stillness.
“My mother’s become a country woman. Those are raspberries by the hedge. We had them for breakfast.”
Theo said quietly, “It seems centuries since I knew people who were able to plant something and wait peacefully for it to grow.”
No answer seemed to be called for. He went on, “Do you really know how wonderful this home of yours is?”
“Oh, yes. Most of the years of my growing up were depression years. We’ve only been living like this a very short time.”
“I didn’t mean the house. I meant the family. You have wonderful parents. Warm people. Gentle people. I have a feeling they seldom argue with each other. Am I right?”
“I think because my mother anticipates whatever my father wants. Not only that, of course. But that’s part of it.”
“A European woman!”
“She was born in Europe. I don’t know how European she still is.”
“But American women are different, aren’t they?”
“It’s a land of variety here … who can say what ‘American’ is?”
“Tell me, are you like your mother or your father?”
Those attentive eyes! As if her answer were really important. As if it were even possible.
I don’t really know, she thought, what my parents are “like,” let alone myself. No, that’s wrong. Papa is relatively simple. But my mother has hidden places. I think Papa knows she has, too, and can’t puzzle them out. He teases her about being mysterious, yet he means it, it’s more than teasing. It’s true that they love one another; one feels their devotion; also, though, one feels a tension. Sometimes I have odd thoughts: Could Mama really be keeping some great secret from us both? I remember that man, Paul Werner, as if in some way, I don’t know how, he were involved with us. With her. Then I’m so ashamed of my thought. Mama, so moral and honorable and—how can I think such things? Yet I do think them.