“It’s about our house, you see,” Meredith told Angie.
“My house,” Constance said.
“The last time I was here, she didn’t remember that the house was unoccupied.”
Angie straightened the papers in the small portfolio she’d brought into the meeting.
“I see. Ms. Maynard, how long has it been since you’ve been in touch with your home’s property manager?” she asked Constance.
“Not since the last tenants left. There’s no reason for her to be in touch with me unless there’s a problem I need to know about. The next morning, I did remember the house was empty, but by then Meredith had gone back to California. We didn’t speak about it after that.”
Angie closed the portfolio.
“I’m satisfied that Ms. Maynard’s affairs are being handled properly. I’m concluding the meeting.”
Meredith put the tissue back in her purse. She didn’t look upset, as far as Constance could tell, but she’d always had a good poker face.
Back in Constance’s room, Meredith read email messages on her cell phone. Constance sewed several rows of the tapestry. The light softened. Eunice came to say she was going off shift. Would they come down to the dining room, or would they prefer something brought to them there?
“You always go out of your way,” Constance said. It had taken a few minutes to replace her thread. It was long enough that she had to extend her arm quite a bit as it moved in and out.
“It’s no trouble.”
“We’ll make our way down.”
“Good night, then.”
Meredith continued to stare at her phone. She stepped out into the hall to make a call. Her voice receded as she strolled further away from Constance’s door. Constance wondered if she’d just keep going, right through the exit and into her rented car. It would make things easier, really. But then Meredith returned, looking a little happier.
“My house sold,” she told Constance.
A house Constance had seldom been invited to, though it was less than a mile from the home Meredith had grown up in. Extravagantly decorated with gilded mirrors and French provincial furniture. Fussy décor, so at odds with Meredith’s severe demeanor.
“Congratulations,” Constance said.
“After I finish everything up, I’ll be back here in a couple of weeks.”
“Looking for a new place?”
“I’d still like to have your old house for a while. Give myself a chance to settle in.”
“I’m turning it into a community center for women.”
“A community center?”
Constance explained. She suggested that Meredith might volunteer her time, teaching the fundamentals of money management. Meredith appeared stricken.
“Is such a suggestion beneath your dignity?” Constance asked.
“Of course not.”
“Then why all the gloom?”
“I just wish you thought I was doing the right thing.”
“By moving here? That’s not for me to say, is it?”
There they were again, Meredith needing approval and Constance maintaining a neutral position. In the last year of her life, Lois had told Constance she needed to give Meredith more guidance.
“Look, I don’t know what you hope to accomplish by living in Dunston. It’s a charming little town, and I’m sure you could make some friends if you tried. It just seems like such an unnecessary upheaval,” Constance said. She ran the needle in and out, in and out. As always, it calmed her. She felt optimistic. She might complete the tapestry, yet!
Meredith stood and closed the door. Constance continued to sew. Meredith sat back down. She removed a silver flask from her purse. Constance stopped sewing. Meredith saw where she was looking and explained that she had learned the value of having a small amount of whiskey on hand for difficult moments. Constance wondered what sort of moments she meant.
“You’re upset that they’re not going to put you in charge of my money,” Constance said.
“No.”
“Isn’t that why you’re moving here? To try again, once you’re closer?”
Meredith unscrewed the lid of the flask but didn’t take a sip. Constance could see her mind wander. She was far away.
“Do you remember that blue dress? The one you bought me for my high school graduation?” Meredith asked.
Constance thought hard for a moment. She recalled pretty little stars around the waist.
“I don’t know why they held it inside. It was stifling. I could see you fanning yourself with the program, way up in the bleachers,” Meredith said.
“Strange thing to remember.”
Meredith took a sip from the flask.
“Everything changed for me that day,” she said.
They’d gone to lunch after the ceremony, in a private dining room at the Beverly Hills Ritz-Carlton. They ordered champagne and lobster, which required tucking the heavy white linen napkins into the necks of their dresses. Meredith had been accepted to Berkeley that spring, and was saying she wasn’t sure any longer that she wanted to leave L.A. She had one friend who was going to defer college for at least one year, though the girl’s mother was against the idea. Meredith had had a manicure the day before, and her fingernails were perfectly round and polished with pale pink that reminded Constance of a hue her own mother had worn years before. The color hadn’t suited Constance’s mother at all, nor did it suit Meredith. It was a frivolous shade.
Meredith went on talking about the friend and the friend’s mother who apparently wanted her out of the house for reasons Meredith didn’t understand. They’d never gotten along, but the friend didn’t make a lot of demands and was no doubt easy to live with. It was the mother who caused problems by insisting on strict behavior and firm routines, which the friend accepted and performed faithfully. Meredith’s conclusion was that the mother was just plain mean, probably frustrated with her own life, as so many women were seeming to be then (this was 1966), and took out her unhappiness on the friend.
“Do you know what I told her? That she should have a mother like mine.”
“I’m not your mother.”
It should have been more gracefully handled. She’d planned to tell her for a while. Why had she been so blunt? Because the moment arose, and she took it.
Meredith seemed suspended, her lifted glass in hand, as the color drained from her face. Constance could see a thought taking shape. She’d just been told a joke, and the punchline was about to come. There was also understanding, her entire life finally making sense, an explanation of why their relationship had been so formal and cold, why it had never felt right.
Constance began at the beginning. Her mother—Meredith’s mother—had a history of mental illness. She’d been away for a huge part of Constance’s own childhood. After remarrying and finding she was pregnant, she thought—hoped—she might be able to take care of a child the second time around. And she tried hard, she really did, but babies are demanding and soon it was clear that she couldn’t take the strain. Constance wanted Meredith to know that it broke her mother’s heart to give her up. The truth was that she was relieved, as she no doubt had been the first time when she went away and Constance got packed off to Lois’s.
The husband—Meredith’s father—didn’t think he could cope on his own. What really happened was that he begged Constance to get involved. He came home from work every day to a wailing baby for whom his wife had done little, if anything. Sometimes she wasn’t there, and the baby was all by herself, her diaper filthy, she hungry and miserable. He didn’t know anything about how to take care of her.
“And I do?” Cons
tance had asked him. He’d assumed, of course, that because she was a woman she possessed solid maternal instincts. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Constance was just as at sea but refused to let the baby suffer any longer. With Lois’s help and assets, a series of competent nurses and nannies came to populate Meredith’s childhood.
Not long after, the legal formalities were seen to and Meredith was formally adopted. Her father called from time to time but offered no help and never asked to visit. The parallel to Constance’s own life was both marked and painful. History was repeating itself. Meredith and Constance were not only connected by blood, but by a sad thread of Fate that determined that they both would be abandoned and overlooked.
The champagne glass was still aloft, the bubbles gently rising. So was Meredith’s color. Constance thought she might cry, but Meredith was too well bred to cause a scene.
After a moment, Meredith said she was grateful for her explanation, and telling her such an important fact on this momentous occasion. The steely cynicism in her voice sounded so natural, as if it came easily, that Constance felt suddenly that she didn’t know Meredith at all. She’d been calm and quiet her entire life. Her few outbursts had been caused by ordinary things: a bee sting, breaking a doll, falling off of her bicycle. One incident, though, when Meredith was ten years old, came unexpectedly to mind.
Lois, then 85, was frail physically, though not mentally. Her words had become sharper than before, her patience, which had grown over time, vanished. Meredith had roller skated over the bare living room floor on her way to the back door, where she planned to go carefully down the short flight of stairs to the concrete path that ran from the back of the house to the front and then met the wider sidewalk where she could sail along freely. Constance didn’t know if she’d done this before—skate in the house. Lois apprehended her, grabbed her by the shoulders, and told her she was a rude, clumsy, stupid girl. Lois and Meredith typically avoided one another. The house was large enough to make that easy. Lois was often in her own room, watching television. Sometimes she joined them for dinner; usually she didn’t. And here she was, shouting at Meredith, holding her in place. Meredith shouted back, called her an “old witch,” and then spat in her face. Lois had been too shocked to do anything further at that moment, though a number of things would have occurred to her. Smacking Meredith across the face with her cane, which she’d left propped against the wall, perhaps. The cane rested. So did Lois.
Meredith, meanwhile, skated for a long time to calm herself down, then snuck silently into the house passed the cook and housekeeper and hid in her room until Constance knocked on her door. She’d come home to a changed atmosphere—something thicker in the air. She looked in first on Lois. The hallway of her private wing was lined with heavy carved pieces, offset with several Van Gogh replicas and their brilliant, racing colors. Constance opened her door after one quick, soft knock. Lois was watching television. She nodded pleasantly, benignly, yet with a deeper light in her eyes that Constance knew meant, You should go see about Meredith. When she turned back to the television abruptly, Constance knew something unpleasant had taken place, which she had seen coming for a long time. A young girl, an old woman, an uneasy warp and woof.
She made her way along the long sunlit hall, and turned the corner to the one containing both her and Meredith’s room. The sorrow and rage in Meredith’s face as she lay on her bed, and pretended to be engrossed in her comic book, were clear. The moment soon forgotten. Until then, over that elegant lunch.
Meredith asked Constance why she’d pretended, why she hadn’t just told the truth. Constance had asked herself the same thing many times. So had Lois. In fact, Lois had cautioned her against playing the part of Meredith’s mother.
“Why put yourself in a bad light? You know how people are. Do you want them thinking you’re a common strumpet?”
In fact, she did. Accepting condemnation was her way of protesting the narrow roles women were allowed to play. She’d dug very deeply into the life of Margaret Beaufort and other noble women of her day. Once married, their use was reproductive. If they were barren, or didn’t produce sons, they were discarded. Here was a chance for Constance to stand against the notion that a woman’s highest and best use was as a wife and mother. Twentieth century mores didn’t emphasize the value of sons over daughters as much, but women were still tightly slotted and controlled.
Some of her colleagues were more understanding than others. A few regarded her with suspicion and contempt, but in time that faded. She was a good scholar, an excellent teacher, thorough and dedicated. She was often excluded, however, from social gatherings. Those she hosted herself were occasionally avoided, but less so. She knew how to give a good party. Lois could always be counted upon to be gracious, even charming. When Meredith was presented, always briefly, right before her bedtime, her shyness was appealing, even winning.
Constance wanted Meredith to be strong and refuse to be defined by anyone else. The trouble, she then saw, was that she had defined her, given her a false identity. The truth she’d clumsily shared now required her to assume a new one. It occurred to her that if Meredith were a stronger person, less frail, she might have walked out of Constance’s life and never returned. Maybe she had considered it for a moment. Maybe she wished she had. Maybe she still did.
“And you’re about to tell me that this change was for the worse,” Constance said.
Meredith shrugged. She capped the flask and put it back in her bag.
“Who knows what life would have been like if I’d never known?”
“No point in speculating on a thing like that.”
“Can’t help it. I remember things at odd moments. A lot more these days. Since I retired, I guess.”
“You need a pastime, a new avocation. Which is why the community center is such a wonderful idea, if you’d only deign to consider it.”
“Stop it, please.”
“All right, all right. But you see my point.”
Meredith looked at the tapestry. Her expression turned sour.
“It’s absurd, isn’t it? This notion of the ideal woman’s life,” she said.
“I think of it as an irony. Especially in my hands.”
“Because none of these roles applies to you, is that it?”
“Only Motherhood. And please don’t say what you’re thinking.”
Constance looked closely at the sewn images. Each face was serene, pleasant, bland. That was the real role history wanted women to assume—the embodiment of peace. Women should be passive, and wait to be asked. Women who asked first were thought to be unfeminine, unnatural, predatory.
“What on earth are you thinking about?” Meredith asked her.
Constance shook her head. She was tired then. It would take too long to explain.
chapter five
Darren Stiles was a colleague. He was also a widower. His wife had died years before, when she was still a young woman. Childbirth took her. Within only a few days, the child died, too. He relayed these facts without an ounce of self-pity, and Constance admired him for that. She told him about the difficult lunch she’d had with Meredith the week before. And then, once again on impulse, she told him her true relationship to Meredith. He looked into the glass he’d been sipping from, which held one of Constance’s excellent martinis. Rather than asking why she’d taken on such a burden, he said, “That must have been very hard.”
Constance realized she’d expected praise, not sympathy. She wasn’t used to sympathy. Darren, it turned out, had loads of sympathy, always offered quietly, gently. At the moment, Meredith was up in Berkeley for the summer, in advance of her autumn enrollment. She was staying with a friend. Her departure had been abrupt. Constance wondered if the rift would become permanent. With Lois gone, sh
e had no one to confide in. Despite her popularity in her department, with her students and her colleagues, she had a hard time making and keeping friends. She confided easily in Darren. He never seemed unsettled by it, as she was sure any number of other men might have been.
He didn’t think Meredith would remain silent. She needed time to absorb what she’d learned, that was all. Constance should find a way to occupy herself in the meantime. Darren was sailing to Europe the following week. He took Constance completely aback by inviting her to go with him. He’d reserved a state room. It was expensive, but he couldn’t bear smaller quarters. There need be nothing physical between them, if that were her preference. Sharing the bed might be pleasant enough.
He smiled at her. He had dash. Her opinion of him shifted entirely in his favor. Her affairs with men tended to be short-lived and sordid. She usually sought professors in other departments, the most passionate of whom had been Saul Frank, a physicist. After him, she slept with a number of other scientists, met in the faculty dining hall, the university country club, even the paddock where, on a mad whim, she learned to ride horseback. One of her conquests had been married, and the wife voiced her suspicions loudly enough so that for a brief, difficult time, Constance had feared for her job. Though she wasn’t let go, it was suggested by her own department chairman, a kindly man who wore a three piece suit even in warm weather, that she was doing herself no favors having that kind of liaison, given the circumstances of her daughter’s birth.
Women Within Page 5