Vicky and I could probably manage Postumus and the new baby. We could without doubt manage the new baby alone. But the truth is, we should be a childless couple. I always sensed this, I think, and that’s why the liaison seemed such a good idea. Mother and Cornelius may be dewy-eyed at the thought of the new baby, but Vicky and I deep down are running scared.
These are taboo thoughts. Not wanting children is abnormal. Acknowledging that some couples are better childless is offensive to society. So Vicky and I keep our doubts to ourselves and pretend we’re pleased, a married couple signaling “NORMAL, NORMAL!” to everyone we meet.
“You’re sure you don’t want an abortion?” I say to Vicky more than once.
“I couldn’t. I believe women should always have the right to choose whether they want an abortion or not, but I don’t think I could ever face it unless the pregnancy was the result of rape or the doctors swore the child would be born a monster. It’s the guilt. It frightens me. I’d be too terrified of cracking up.”
She’s right. Vicky’s been overloaded with guilt for so long that even though I’ve helped her shed some of it, she’s still in no fit state to risk taking on more. Of course some women see no need to feel guilty about having an abortion, but if you’re guilt-prone or if you’ve been reduced to the brink of suicide in the past because you feel so inadequate and ashamed, you don’t go asking for trouble by aborting a fetus. That’s common sense, and if Vicky can see that, then surely I can see it too.
“You want me to have an abortion, don’t you, Sebastian?”
“No, I want whatever’s best for you, and as far as I can see, you’ve made the only possible decision under the circumstances. But I had to make sure you didn’t want to change your mind while there was still time.”
“I couldn’t … couldn’t …”
“Then don’t. You’re right. I’m glad. We’ll manage.”
“I’ll love him when he comes,” says Vicky, falling back on a platitude to keep our distress at arm’s length.
“So will I.”
It’s true. We’ll love him. But that doesn’t alter the fact that his conception was a big mistake which is bound to have far-reaching and perhaps disastrous consequences.
We decide not to set up a home of our own before the baby comes, so we stay on at Fifth Avenue, and whenever we can’t stand life in the Van Zale mansion a second longer, we escape to the blessed privacy of our apartment.
It’s good to be back there again. Vicky’s pleased too, but soon she’s miserable, knowing I want sex, feeling inadequate because she can’t face it, crashing emotionally from inadequacy to guilt to shame.
“Look,” I say, “it’s okay. I’ll get along. I’m not going to die. I had to live a celibate life at school, and I’ll live a celibate life again for a while, that’s all. It’s no big deal. Don’t feel there’s any pressure on you.”
She looks at me with troubled gray eyes and says, “Will you be unfaithful?”
“Not interested. Other women don’t exist.”
“But how will you manage?”
She’s so innocent sometimes that I’m reminded of the diaphragm disaster. I explain how I’ll manage behind a locked bathroom door.
“Sam probably did the same and didn’t tell you,” I say, shrugging it off to show her how unimportant the subject is, but even as I reassure her, I’m thinking that it would be just like Sam Keller, smart-aleck man-of-the-world Sam Keller, to kid himself that her aversion gave him a legitimate excuse to two-time her.
I can feel Sam’s shoes sliding onto my feet again, and this time they’re pinching a bit, but with an effort I can still kick them off. I’ll not stand in Sam Keller’s shoes because I love Vicky, and no matter what happens, I’m going to save her; I’m going to give her back that life which Sam went so far to destroy.
I call Elsa. It’s stupid, but I can’t help myself. I’ve got to know how Alfred is. Mother says he’s fine, but she hasn’t seen him since Vicky and I went to Reno, because Amy Reischman took Elsa and Alfred on a trip to Europe and they’ve only just returned.
“Hi,” I say. “Don’t hang up. How is he?”
“Fine.” She hangs up.
I get mad. Anger’s healthy. I call back.
“I want to see him.”
“Huh! What a hope!” is her first reaction, but then she relents and I see Alfred. He remembers. His little face lights up. He runs over and chatters to me. He still doesn’t talk too clearly yet, but I can understand what he’s saying. I stay ten minutes and watch him play. I never see Elsa. Nurse meets me when I walk in, and Nurse shows me out when I leave.
I feel much better after seeing Alfred.
Christmas comes and goes. The new decade dawns. Vicky and I no longer attempt sex, but one good aspect of our marriage is that we can now go out frequently without having to worry about Elsa’s detectives. We go to plays, galleries, and concerts—even to Presley’s most recent movie, King Creole, which keeps reappearing to give sustenance to all the Elvis fans gasping for their drafted hero’s next venture on the screen. We have a lot of laughs, a lot of interesting conversation, a lot of fun. It almost makes up for the sex being hopeless, but even that should pick up after the baby’s born. All I have to do is endure a schoolboy’s sex life until March—no, April or early May. The baby’s due in March, but Vicky’ll need time to recover from the birth.
God, it seems a long time to wait.
March 21, 1960. Vicky gives birth to our son. I feel happy, but Cornelius and Mother are happier. I hope they don’t upset Vicky, who’s looking pale and tired.
“I’m all right,” she says when I see her, but she’s not. Something’s going on in her mind. She’s thinking, thinking, thinking. She’s a million miles away.
I’ve taught her how to think. I’ve shown her the view from a different window on the world. I’ve encouraged her to believe she’s an individual with a mind of her own. Is the ultimate irony going to be …?
But no, I can’t let myself consider that. I won’t.
Come back, Vicky. Please come back. I love you and I truly believe we can make it together.
Maybe Sam Keller said those words once. I’m right back in his shoes again, but this time they’re stuck and I can’t kick them off. Have I really done no better than Sam Keller? Maybe not.
But surely I must have done better! Because I love Vicky I can see her with such vivid clarity that I can not only identify her suffering but also unhesitatingly locate its source. I understand her. I know exactly what she’s been through and I’ve helped her survive. How could I improve on that?
Yet something’s wrong. Perhaps after all it’s I, not Elsa, who resemble the “idiot savant” who can’t write his name although he can calculate logarithms in his head. I may be an expert on Vicky, but I’m no expert on women in general—the way I underestimated Elsa proves that. In certain favorable circumstances I can show prodigious talent as an amateur analyst, but what’s really going on at the back of my mind behind the overwhelming drive of my love and sympathy and concern?
Perhaps I want to cure Vicky not so much for her sake as for mine. Perhaps, like Sam, I’m trying to make her over into what I want her to be—an intellectual companion, an exciting partner in bed, a mistress who can enable me to enjoy life to the full. But what does Vicky want? I think she would have enjoyed the role I wanted to assign to her; I think the liaison could have worked very well. But that’s not the point. The point is, first, that Vicky’s still not running her own life, and second, that the liaison itself is no more. Vicky’s no longer my mistress. She’s my wife, and I don’t think she’s any more suited to be a wife than Sam Keller was suited to be a husband.
Do I seriously think Vicky’s going to enjoy running a big household and dealing with a shoal of kids any more now than she did when she was married to Sam? No, I don’t. And do I seriously think that after performing these herculean domestic duties she’ll have any more energy left over for me than she had left over for Sam? No,
I don’t. And never mind me, either—forget me for a moment. The truth is, Vicky won’t even have enough energy left over to live any kind of life of her own, the one destiny I’ve advocated for her all along. She’ll just be getting bogged down all over again in the kind of life she’s not at heart interested in, and she’ll never have the chance to find out what kind of life might suit her better. In other words, despite all I’ve done, she’ll be right back at first base.
If only we could have maintained the liaison! I can see more clearly than ever now that we were meant to be lovers, not a married couple as defined by our plastic society, and yet here we are, a married couple with a baby plus five other kids waiting in the wings, and it’s all wrong for both of us, and both of us secretly know it.
I’m in such pain that I can’t analyze the situation further, can’t work out what the answer is—if there’s an answer at all, which I doubt. All I know is that the trouble’s getting bigger, like the pain, and our relationship’s falling apart.
I begin to doubt if the pain can get any worse, but it does. The baby becomes sick. We’ve decided to call him Edward John. He weighs eight pounds, two ounces and is pink and white with no hair. I like him very, very much and when he’s sick I’m very, very upset. He lies in an incubator fighting for breath.
The doctors say it’s cystic fibrosis.
Babies don’t live if they develop cystic fibrosis.
Edward John dies after six days in the world.
I’m drinking too much. I’ve asked Mother if she could take the kids away for a while, and she and Cornelius somehow pull themselves together sufficiently to ship everyone, including themselves, to Arizona. Cornelius has recently bought a winter home there, not only because the air is good for his asthma but because he’s still kidding himself that he’s building up to an early retirement among the cacti.
I sit alone at Fifth Avenue and drink. Presently I have to see a social worker at the hospital, and with her help I organize a very, very small funeral for that very, very small coffin. I’m the only mourner, and the service is over in minutes. Then I drink some more and go to the hospital to see Vicky.
Difficult to talk, but I must try.
“It’s been hell, hasn’t it?” I say. “What do you think’s the best way out? I can take you away somewhere … or we can stay at the apartment if you don’t want to travel.”
She stares down at the sheet. Finally she manages to say, “I want to be alone, Sebastian.”
This is what I’ve been afraid of.
“To think?”
“Yes. To think.”
“Okay.” Sam Keller’s shoes are nailed to my feet and they’re the tightest possible fit. I’m hurting all over. I don’t know how I’ll live with the pain.
I take her to the apartment.
“Call whenever you feel ready to see me,” I say, kissing her briefly on the cheek.
She nods. I go away.
I return to the Van Zale mansion and wonder how long I’ll have to wait.
She calls. She’s been alone for two weeks. Cornelius keeps phoning in a frenzy from Arizona to say she’s been mentally unhinged by the loss of her child and may kill herself. Since it’s impossible for me to hold a rational conversation with him, I ask Mother to explain that Vicky wishes to be alone and that no one, least of all Cornelius, has any right to intrude. To her great credit Mother appears to understand and promises me she’ll restrain Cornelius from rushing to Vicky’s side.
I’m about to leave the bank when Vicky calls.
“Sebastian, can you meet me at the Plaza?”
When I arrive she’s waiting in the lobby. She’s wearing a drab coat and she hasn’t set her hair, so that there are no curls, only waves. This makes her look younger, and unexpectedly I remember her as she used to look long ago before she unconsciously played Juliet to my disastrous Romeo at Bar Harbor.
We have a drink in the Oak Bar.
“How are you doing?” I say to her.
“Better. Everything seems clearer at last.”
We’re sitting in a corner and I’m drinking Scotch too fast while she’s stirring but not touching a Tom Collins. Her voice is calm and her eyes are dry, but she keeps stirring and stirring and stirring. She can’t look at me.
“It was terrible about the baby, wasn’t it?” she says at last. “It seemed so pointless to put a baby in the world just for six days. The pointlessness upset me. I felt there had to be a point. I just couldn’t believe we went through all that for nothing.”
“Yes. Futile. No God. Obvious. It makes me mad.” I drink nearly all my Scotch and signal for another. “But it doesn’t matter now—nothing matters so long as we can get back together again.” I don’t mean to say that, but it slips out, and now I’m the one who stares down at my glass and can’t look anyone in the eye.
I hear her voice. “Sebastian, I do love you in many ways, and I’ll never forget how much I owe you for standing by me when I was in despair, but—”
“Don’t say it. Don’t. Please.”
“I’ve got to,” she says. “I’ve got to face up to the way things really are. It’s a question of survival.”
I look at her, and for the first time in my life I see Cornelius behind her eyes. She’s never reminded me of him before. There’s a physical resemblance, but nothing in her character or personality has ever reflected him to me, and for a second I see the new Vicky—no, not the new Vicky but the real Vicky, the person no one, not even I myself, has truly tried to know.
“I could go on kidding myself,” she says. “I could say Edward John lived and died to bring us together in holy matrimony so that we could live happily ever after. I did say that for a time, because otherwise his life and death seemed so pointless, but then gradually I began to realize the point was not to encourage me to go on living the same old lies. The point of his life and death was to bring me face to face with the truth, and the truth is, of course—”
“I know we should never have had Edward John, but—”
“No, probably not, but that’s not the main issue. The main issue is that I should never have married you. It’s true I’ve had a much more successful relationship with you than I ever had with Sam, but that hasn’t stopped us from ending up in exactly the same mess, has it? You’re so sweet and kind and understanding that I let you make love to me not because I want to but because I feel I ought to—can’t you see the familiar pattern recurring? And let’s be honest—our sex life’s been a disaster, hasn’t it? You probably had better times with Elsa than you ever had with me.”
“No, Vicky. The most wonderful times of my life were with you.” My new drink arrives. I take a big gulp of it but can hardly swallow. “Vicky, I think we can get this to work. I’m sure we can solve our problems. We’ve got so much else going for us.”
“Yes,” she says, “we have, but the sex is just no good. There are two reasons for this, not just one. If there was only one, maybe we could work something out, but …”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I say. But I do.
“Well, the obvious reason is the physical one—we just don’t seem to fit together well. You must know this—you can’t be unaware of it. We’re physically mismatched.”
“Only in your mind, Vicky.”
“But—”
“What you’re saying is anatomically impossible. It’s just one of those old sex myths which everyone believes but which has no basis in medical fact.”
She shrugs. “If you want to take that line, I can’t stop you.”
I have another gulp of Scotch. She still hasn’t touched her drink. I’m reminded of Cornelius toying with a sherry glass the size of a thimble while he conducts an interview requiring all his skill and concentration. “If you want to take that line, I can’t stop you.” I hear the pragmatism echoing behind the terse, ruthless monosyllables, and again I glimpse the stranger who’s so unnervingly familiar to me, the stranger with a mind of her own.
“Vicky …”
“All right, you disagree. Then let me give you the other reason why the sex is just no good. It’s because my motives for going to bed with you are all wrong. They were all wrong with Sam too. What I was really saying to you both was: ‘Help me, take care of me, I can’t handle life on my own.’ I said that to you when I got pregnant and panicked, although the words which came out were: ‘I want to marry you.’ Sebastian, I’ve got to learn to stand alone. If I keep seeking out men to take care of me, I’m always going to end up in the same mess, can’t you see, because what I’m really doing is trading my body in return for paternal care. I’m prostituting myself all the time—no wonder I so often suffer from a revulsion toward sex! It’s a miracle I can bring myself to go to bed with anyone at all. So I’ve got to end this cycle, Sebastian. I’ve got to get out and set myself free.”
I don’t answer, can’t answer. She’s probably right, I know she’s right, but where does that leave me? How do I survive in a world where Vicky never wants me to make love to her again?
“I didn’t always hurt you, did I, Vicky?”
“Usually.”
“No pleasure? None at all?”
“None.”
How brutal the truth can be. No wonder we all spend so much time lying to each other and deceiving ourselves. It’s dangerous to look directly at the sun with the naked eye. The sun can blind you. You can be maimed for life.
“Sebastian …”
“No, don’t say any more. No point.”
What more is there to say? I love her; I’ll love her always, and perhaps one day she’ll come back to me. But meanwhile all that matters is that I can no longer help her and that if I love her I’ll let her go.
I take a five-dollar bill out of my pocket and leave it on the table for the waiter.
Suddenly she starts to cry, and then she’s the old Vicky again, lost, muddled, and unhappy, turning to the nearest protective male for the care she’s been mainlining on for years. That’s some habit Cornelius gave her, and I know now I’ve got to do all I can to help her break it.
“Forgive me, Sebastian—I hate hurting you like this … I do love you very much. … Oh, Sebastian, I didn’t mean it, let’s go to the apartment, let’s try again. …”
Sins of the Fathers Page 53