The War Between the Tates: A Novel

by Alison Lurie

  The cashier rings up their money; Danielle and Erica move on toward a counter where individual portions of cream and sugar are heaped in plastic bins.

  “Sanford Finkelstein,” Danielle repeats. “Listen, isn’t he the one that ostrich is based on, in your books?”

  “Well, I suppose in a way.” Erica smiles. “It was the name mostly. Sanford seemed like a good name for an ostrich.”

  “He looked sort of like an ostrich. Those long skinny legs and neck. And the way his red hair stuck up on top of his head.” Both women laugh. “If it’s really him, it’s funny he should come back here and run a crank bookshop. I thought he was teaching philosophy out in California somewhere.”

  “The last I heard, he was in Japan.”

  The coffee shop is crowded; Erica and Danielle end up sitting on a window ledge. Danielle would have been content to share a table, but Erica prefers this, both because it provides more privacy and because it gives a better view of the room, thus furthering the real purpose which has brought her onto campus.

  “We ought to go down to that bookstore sometime and see if it’s really Sandy Finkelstein,” Danielle says, pouring a paper trapezoid of cream into her coffee.

  “Mm.” Erica stirs sugar into hers with a plastic stick. “Speaking of identifying people,” she adds. “Do you happen to notice that girl here?”

  “What girl? Oh.” Lowering her cup, Danielle scans the room. “No, I don’t see her. She was here the other day, though,” she adds unhelpfully.

  Erica controls a sigh of impatience. This is the third time in as many weeks that she has had coffee with Danielle in order to identify Brian’s nameless new mistress. Once she has seen her (ideally, in Brian’s company) she can confront him, and she is eager to confront him. The pleasure of being secretly in the right has worn thin for Erica over the past weeks. She is in the right, and Brian in the wrong, but he doesn’t know it, or rather he doesn’t know she knows. He goes on smugly believing he is getting away with something. And, in fact, as long as she doesn’t speak, he is getting away with something.

  Besides, concealing what she knows from Brian is a kind of lying, and Erica hates lies. She has sometimes told polite fibs, but she disapproves even of this, and avoids it when she can, She has not lied seriously since junior high.

  Therefore she has sought the girl, both in Danielle’s company and alone, even more conscientiously than she had hunted for Wendee last spring. Again her search has been vain, but this time for the opposite reason. The moon-faced graduate student she is seeking now, with her “stringy bleached hair” is as much uglier than the real Wendy Gahaghan as last spring’s quarry was more beautiful.

  But though she hasn’t been able to identify Brian’s mistress, Erica has plenty of circumstantial evidence of her existence. There is Brian’s continued air of uneasy, preoccupied self-righteousness; his phony concern for his wife’s mental and moral health—intended, she believes, simultaneously to disarm her suspicions, keep her on the defensive, and cover his own guilt. There is his disinterest in making either love or serious conversation. Above all, there is the evidence of his new sideburns.

  To Erica’s knowledge, Brian has had hair on his face only once in his life before: in the summer of 1952, when he grew a mustache while they were on Martha’s Vineyard. After a rather slow start it came in well: glossy, full, seal-brown. He took it back with him to Cambridge for the fall term, where his friends agreed with Erica that it made him look much older, and more serious. But three months later a student organization published a guide to freshman courses illustrated with caricatures of faculty members. In this guide, Brian appeared as a very small man attached to a very large mustache. Over the Christmas vacation he shaved it off.

  The mustache had been a deliberate effort; the sideburns appeared deviously. Brian did not at any time declare an intention to grow them; they merely began—as if on their own momentum—edging down the sides of his face a fraction of an inch at a time, like some geological formation. When they reached the level of his mouth they began to put out a sort of horizontal extension or spur on each cheek. They are an announcement to the whole world that Professor Tate wishes to appear younger, and less serious—to be seen as a “swinger.” To Erica, their message is as plain as if her husband had been branded across the face: ADULTERER.

  “The vet was over again last night,” Danielle says, breaking into these thoughts.

  “Oh?”

  “He turned up about nine-thirty, said he wanted to take another look at Roo’s sick turtle. But I don’t think that was what he really wanted.”

  “What did he want?” Erica turns from contemplation of the entrance to the coffee shop, where Brian’s mistress might at any moment appear.

  “Sex, I think.” Danielle laughs briefly. “Not that he made any move, or said anything. He just sat there drinking beer and telling me animal stories for a couple of hours. But he kept looking at me. You know how it is—you can usually tell.”

  “Mm.”

  “Of course I suppose he’s lonely too. His wife died last year; or passed away as he puts it. He practically never talks about her. I guess it still hurts him a lot. And both his sons have left home, and all his friends are respectably married. I feel sorry for him in a way. I mean, he’s a nice guy, and not bad-looking, if he weren’t so dumb and slow. I feel like I ought to tell him he’s wasting his time at my house—barking up the wrong tree, to use his phrase. He ought to go after one of these hot little bitches who are just asking for it, like my husband always did.” Danielle smiles sourly and gestures around the coffee shop.

  “Mm.” Reminded, Erica looks again toward the door, in case a pudding-faced bleached blonde of the sort who is just asking for it should enter. Then she looks back at her friend, frowning slightly. Ever since the separation she has followed Danielle’s emotional life with anxious concern. First, directly after Leonard moved out, there was a period of stunned despair. This was followed by several months of flagrant and indiscriminate misbehavior with an overlapping series of unsuitable men. (Erica and Brian had divided them into two types: Scavengers and Weaklings. The former were like those gulls which follow in the wake of large departing ships, where it is traditionally easy to pick up leavings; the latter of the doglike variety, drawn to any woman who recently belonged to a successful man by the magical belief that if they rub against her some of his power, his mana, will rub off on them.) This period was especially hard on Erica, who found it difficult to hide her disapproval when she dropped in on her friend and found some man she hardly knew—or worse, knew quite well—in a position of temporary intimacy.

  Finally, there was a long, severe reaction. Danielle was “through with all that, thank God,” as she declared many times with a stoic grin which made Erica want to weep—or possibly go to New York on the next plane and assassinate Leonard Zimmern. If she could help it, Danielle announced, she wasn’t going to have anything to do with love, or men, or any of that garbage, for the rest of her life. (“If it really starts bothering me, I can always masturbate.”) This dismal state of mind, which shows no sign of letting up, has lasted nearly a year.

  “I think he has some idea that I might come across because I’m so weird by his standards. I mean, I’m forty-one, but I have long hair and wear arty clothes and I read books in foreign languages, so I might do anything, even sleep with him,” Danielle continues with a half-laugh. ‘You’re kind of a hippie, aren’t you?’ he said to me last night. ‘I didn’t know that when I saw you up at the clinic. The way girls dress these days, you can’t tell them apart.’”

  “You know, that’s true,” Erica says, looking around the Blue Cow again. “It’s not like when we were in college. When somebody wore jeans and no make-up, instead of the standard plaid skirt and sweater set, and didn’t have her hair set, you knew instantly that she was one of us.”

  “That’s right.” Danielle drains her coffee cup and sets it down. “It was the men you couldn’t tell apart then. They all had short h
air and button-down shirts and chino pants. You had to talk to them to find out if they were interesting, or kind of spooko, or just club boys or sheep.” She smiles reminiscently, and so does Erica. “Now everything’s reversed. I know exactly how antiestablishment my male students are by the length of their hair; but the girls all look alike, whether they’re Delta Jello or SDS.”

  Yes, Erica thinks as she backs her car out of the lot and starts home, it was different then. Better. But it isn’t quite true that all the men looked alike. Sandy Finkelstein, for instance, who is now possibly in Corinth—there was always something peculiar about him. He wore ordinary clothes, but they never fit right, perhaps because he was so thin. His pants flapped around his legs, his socks sagged, and his shirts ballooned and fluttered in the slightest breeze, as did his untidy red hair. She remembers him best in Greek class, struggling over sight translations in a room on the third floor of Sever Hall, raising his pale eyes to the ceiling in a pantomime of despair.

  After class Erica occasionally had coffee with him on Mass. Avenue; and once Sandy, who was rather pathetically stuck on her for a while, took her to hear The Magic Flute. At the end of that year he left Cambridge, but he came back now and then for a visit. He had been at her wedding on one of those trips; not that she’d invited him, but somebody had brought him along. He was rather sweet, really, Sandy—amusing to talk to, and intelligent—but sort of a lost soul even then. It wasn’t so surprising that he should end up out of a job, involved in Eastern mystical nonsense. But it was a little sad.

  Erica turns north at the edge of campus onto the main road. A hard, high wind is blowing across it, shifting banks of cold-looking clouds. The last she’d heard of Sandy was a picture postcard of some Japanese temple; a shiny color photograph—on the reverse no address, no message, only his name and a haiku he’d copied out, something about crickets. That was several years ago ... three, four? She tries to recall whether the card was mailed directly here, or forwarded from Cambridge. In other words, does Sandy know the Tates are in Corinth? Were it anyone else she would have assumed not, otherwise they would have called. But with Sandy you couldn’t be sure—especially if he has turned into some kind of superstitious eccentric.

  If she goes to the bookstore with Danielle, and it really is Sandy, then she will have to invite him to the house, to dinner, whatever he has turned into. But there is no need to do it instantly. Next week would be soon enough, or next month. If he has joined one of those vegetarian religions, it means a special meal, too. Well, that egg curry from the United Nations cookbook is quite good, with walnuts and chutney. Danielle can come, though Brian will not like that; nor will he like the vegetarian curry. He always demands meat for dinner. And Sandy himself will probably annoy Brian, or at least bore him. But perhaps it would not be unpleasant to bore and annoy Brian a little. And when you learn that an old friend is in town, the right thing to do is invite him to dinner, for instance next weekend.

  Out on Jones Creek Road the wind is blowing even harder, scraping down the grass in the fields, pulling the few remaining wrinkled leaves from the oaks. As Erica comes up the hill past the latest Glenview Homes, which always look particularly exposed and vulgar from now until the first snowfall, she sees that there is someone, a young girl, sitting on the top step of her front porch next to two suitcases. From her attitude—body huddled against the wind beside a post, head down, eyes shut—it appears that she has been sitting there a long time; or is very cold, or very tired, or both. As Erica’s car enters the driveway, however, the girl hears it, and sits upright.

  Erica turns off the ignition and sets the brake. Her thought is that this person is at the wrong house; that she has come to visit someone in a Glenview Home. Her suitcases, which are of molded plastic, pinkish tan, suggest this. She has yellow hair, most of which is pulled into braids that hang limply on either side of a round, ordinary Glenview Homes sort of face, while escaped shreds blow across it.

  Erica gets out of the car with her books, and walks around it. “Can I help you?” she asks in a neutral, pleasant voice.

  Slowly, the girl stands up. She is short—hardly taller than Erica though she stands a step higher—and not quite as young as she first looked. Her eyes are red-rimmed, worn, as though she had a bad cold, or had been weeping.

  “Are you Mrs. Tate?”

  “Yes.” Erica smiles encouragingly, not puzzled, since the name is within view, painted by her in script on their mailbox.

  “Mrs. Brian Tate?” she repeats, with a sort of tired eagerness.

  “That’s right.”

  “I’ve come to apologize to you, before I leave town. I’m Wendy Gahaghan.”

  “Wendy Gahaghan?” Erica shields her chest with the facsimile edition of the Book of Kells. Wendee? But she’s not beautiful; not even terribly pretty. She’s just ordinary.

  “Uh huh ...You know who I am?”

  “Yes.” Erica has a sense of speaking with difficulty, through her teeth. “I know all about it.” She grips the books tighter. It is for this limp, snuffly, ordinary girl that Brian has behaved so atrociously, caused so much pain, so much rage! Wendy looks at her blankly, waiting; it is not clear for what. If she is to be scolded, insulted, even struck, her stance suggests she will not have the energy to defend herself. Her head hangs sideways. You miserable, cheap, nondescript—But Erica has not been brought up to insult strangers; she cannot voice the words. Besides, if she does insult Wendy, she will be jumping back into the wrong-hole. Wendy came here at last to apologize, and I—

  “You’d better come inside,” she says.

  Awkwardly, she holds open both the screen door and the front door, while Wendy, weighed down lopsidedly with suitcases, plods past her, and stands dumbly in the hall.

  “In here.” Erica leads Wendy toward the sitting room, where last night’s paper still lies on the sofa, and the curtains are due to be cleaned. The kitchen, where she usually sits with Danielle and other friends, is tidier; but Wendy is not a friend, and probably will not notice anyhow.

  Abandoning her suitcases in the middle of the rug, Wendy takes the nearest chair, which happens to be Brian’s—something she could not have known, but which makes Erica shiver nevertheless. I must not be mean or hysterical, I must behave well and do the right thing, Erica tells herself, sitting down formally opposite Wendy on a straight chair which she has not sat in for three years. A pause; but she is not obliged to break it.

  “I’m not going to take up that much of your time,” Wendy finally begins, moving forward to the extreme edge of Brian’s chair as if to demonstrate this. “All I wanted to tell you is, I’m sorry for the hassle I’ve caused around here.” She takes a breath.

  “Yes,” Erica says neutrally. Since she will probably never see her again, she is cataloging Wendy’s appearance for future reference: pale round face, conventional childish features, bitten nails.

  “I mean, it’s racked me up all along what I was laying on you, somebody I never even met, you know?” Wendy’s hands are clutched together in her lap; her voice is high, uncertain. A faint New York accent—lower-middle-class. “I used to think how you were living right here in town and you knew all about it. And if you wanted you could probably report me to the grad committee and get me thrown out of school. Or you could come over someday and shoot me. Only you never did, you know?” Wendy’s voice catches again. Erica realizes she is not merely guilty and nervous, as she ought to be, but actually frightened.

  “No,” she agrees, trying to ease the tension a little. “It never occurred to me.”

  “I mean, what I did to you, it was shitty. Some of the professors around here, their wives probably wouldn’t give a damn. But BRIAN.” She pronounces his name with a special exhalation of air, of awe. “I mean, if you did shoot me, everybody who knew him would say, ‘Well, okay,’ you know?”

  The idea that Brian is of such unique importance and value that infringement of rights in him would justify murder annoys Erica profoundly, although (or even becaus
e) she might have subscribed to it in the past. Naturally, she does not show this annoyance. “I wouldn’t know how to shoot anyone,” she merely says, smiling briefly.

  Wendy smiles back; her smile is timid, grateful. She has small uneven white teeth, like a child.

  “The other thing I wanted to say, it’s that you shouldn’t blame Brian.” She takes another breath. “I mean the, uh, you know, relationship wasn’t his idea. I like persecuted him into it. If it wasn’t for that, I bet he wouldn’t have ever got off with any chick.”

  “Perhaps,” Erica says, thinking that Wendy is deceived, for Brian is off with another chick even now, and one reportedly much inferior to her. Her defense does not persuade Erica of Brian’s relative innocence, but rather the reverse. It demonstrates that Brian had not only seduced this girl last spring, but had somehow managed to convince her that it was all her fault. Just as he has so often tried to convince Erica that everything was hers. She’d like to tell him—

  And she will tell him. I had a visitor today, she will remark calmly after supper tonight, when the children are out of the way, when Brian is fed, relaxed and expecting no unpleasantness. Who do you think it was? she will ask. A visitor to lunch. And then bring up the other one, because it is time for that. Yes.

  “Look,” she says aloud, speaking for the first time in a normal conversational voice. “Would you like a cup of coffee? Or something to eat, perhaps. Have you had lunch?”

  “Oh no, no thank you.” Wendy looks frightened again; can she suspect that Erica, having neglected to shoot her, now intends to poison her?

  “I haven’t eaten lunch yet myself,” Erica continues reassuringly, standing up. “I’m going to make myself a tuna-fish sandwich, and you could have one too if you like.”

  “No thanks, really. I better not.” Wendy also rises. “Hey,” she adds, trailing Erica toward the kitchen. “You hafta believe me, you know. I mean about Brian. That he’s not responsible.”

  “Brian is a grown man,” Erica says, opening the refrigerator to remove milk, lettuce and a bowl of tunafish-salad mix; and shutting it again with the emphasis her tone lacks.