The War Between the Tates: A Novel

by Alison Lurie

  Controlling his own voice, Brian replied that she did not mean that.

  “I do too,” Wendy asserted. “I don’t care if I’m an unwed mother. I mean, so what? I mean if people don’t like it, screw them.”

  Brian gave a sigh of exasperation at these counterculture histrionics. Wendy had managed to conceal her condition so far by wearing loose clothing, notably the garment she had on then: a huge, heavy, tentlike Indian poncho made out of an old red blanket with orange and black zigzag designs. But she was growing larger, and the weather warmer, every week. Soon she would have to take off her wigwam, and the coming papoose would be visible to everyone. And when it came to that, he explained to Wendy, she would care. She would suffer from embarrassment and from social censure, including that of her own family of origin.

  Wendy denied this. “I can hack it,” she insisted. “I may be a little uptight about what Ma will say, but I can hack it with her too, and the whole family if I hafta. I’m not freaked out over what your neighbors and the department will think.”

  “You say that now.” Brian smiled, trying to lower the temperature of the discussion. “But even if it were true, it’s not the only consideration. We can’t be concerned only with you. Or me.” He smiled even harder. “We have to think of the baby, of what it will mean for him or her to be illegitimate.”

  “Lots of kids in this country are bastards, and they don’t always—I read this article—”

  “No doubt,” he said impatiently. “Lots of kids are also undernourished, and neglected, and un-educated. I wish them all well. But I have no intention of placing that sort of handicap on any child of mine.”

  “Yeh, but—” Wendy had given up all pretense of eating; she shoved her plate aside and leaned over the table. “I mean, isn’t that just going along with everything that’s fucked up in this society? If you just do it because you’re afraid of prejudice,” isn’t that sort of helping to perpetuate it?”

  Brian groaned silently, and rebuked himself for having provoked a theoretical argument with someone who was constitutionally (in both senses, now) incapable of logical thought.

  “Anyhow,” she went on, “why should it be so important that it’s your child? I mean, like Zed says: it’s a karmic hangup to think of kids as mine or yours, as if they were private property. All children belong to God, really, and we’re just appointed their guardians, the way it’s written in The Prophet.

  “Lo, your children are not your children, but the sons and daughters of God”

  she recited in a trembly, emotional voice. “That’s a really beautiful saying. And it’s true, too.”

  Third-rate poetry, Brian thought to himself; mystical crap. Then another interpretation of Wendy’s babbling, far-fetched but even less agreeable, occurred to him. “It is mine, though, I assume, this baby?” he said in a tone he tried to make pleasant. “Technically speaking, that is.”

  Wendy’s reaction to this question—the mug-shot slump of her shoulders, the red, slapped expression on her face—should have been answer enough. But Brian, determined to know the worst, forced first an admission and then the sordid details out of her.

  She wasn’t really, absolutely sure, Wendy finally admitted. Because, you see, at the end of last year, when Brian was at those meetings in New York, and she came back to college early to finish a paper, “there was this guy Ahmed that Linda knows, this grad student in Engineering. He’s really a nice dude, sort of shy and sensitive, you know? He writes prose poems.” Ahmed was spending the holidays alone in his dormitory. “He couldn’t go home for vacation because he’s from Pakistan, and he had all this dumb work to make up, these crappy engineering problems. He was feeling really lonely and down, thinking how he was stupid and had no friends and would be a disgrace to his country and he might as well jump down the gorge ...So I like gave myself to him for Christmas.”

  The night that followed this revelation was the worst Brian has ever had. Hour after hour he tossed and twitched, while Wendy, worn out by sobbing and self-justification, lay sleeping heavily beside him.

  He could see no way out: it was like a multiple-choice test in which none of the answers were right. Marry Wendy? Abandon her? The odds were in favor of the child’s being his, and certainly the moral responsibility, for he had lain with her a hundred times to the Pakistani’s one. There was no chance of that character’s assuming the burden, according to Wendy. (“Oh, Ahmed can’t marry me; he’s been betrothed to a girl back home since he was fourteen. He hasta marry a virgin anyhow, because of his religion.”)

  No escape. The pursuing forces of blind female error and blind female nature had finally caught up with and defeated him. Because Of his own religion, duty, he would still have to wed Wendy, knowing that she had deceived him in every sense. There was also a good chance of his becoming the butt of a savage irony: that having paid over a thousand dollars to have his own child destroyed, he would have to bring up as his the child of a wog graduate student. Very likely it would be brownish in color and interested in machines.

  But in that case, surely he would be justified in getting a divorce? A second divorce: more public scandal, more lawyers’ fees, more alimony payments and child support. For legally the child would be his; economically he would be responsible for it until its twenty-first birthday. At which time, if he hadn’t yet succumbed to these multiple pressures, Brian would be sixty-eight. How would he be able to afford it? Even if he were to teach summer school every year, move into an even smaller and nastier apartment, give up the idea of going abroad not only this summer but any summer, or on his next sabbatical, perhaps of even taking his sabbatical ...

  All night these thoughts ran through Brian’s head. In the roar of trucks climbing the hill below Alpine Towers, the screech of planes overhead, the cackle of a radio next door, he heard the sound of laughter—the laughter of a monstrous regiment of women. He dozed briefly and was awakened by nightmares (mares, he noted with a crazy clarity, not stallions) in which the principal sound effect was a loud horselaugh.

  When dawn, late and gray, bleached the window, he rose from beside Wendy and went to make himself a cup of tea, the solace of childhood illnesses and wakeful nights. In suppers and robe he stood before the stove waiting for the water to boil, feeling old for the first time in his life. He would be forty-eight at the end of this year, getting on for half a century. No age to play around with freaked-out college students, argue with abortionists, climb out of college buildings on a rope, wrestle with hysterical women, and become the father of a bastard.

  Yet he had in a way chosen to do all these things, Brian thought as the electric coils reddened dully under the kettle. It was not only bad luck, but rash ambition, sensual greed and egotistic hubris which had led him onto these battlefields—finally into a labyrinth of trenches where he would wander for the rest of his life, mocked and harassed, clawed and bitten by female monsters. If only it were not too late to find a way out! He would ask nothing more; he was cured forever of wanting fame, power and the love of unbalanced schoolgirls:

  Astonishingly, his prayer was heard. Two days later when he walked into his apartment at the end of a long day, Wendy stood up out of her chair by the window and announced that she was leaving him. It wasn’t anything personal, she insisted. She loved Brian, but she just couldn’t hack the idea of marriage, or of living in Corinth the rest of her life. Also, she didn’t want her baby to be brought up here. “You see,” she explained, “the stars can’t do it all. I hafta figure out how the kid can have the best developmental experiences. If I stay here and get into this academic life style, he’s bound to pick up some of its hangups and shitty mental sets.” Therefore, Wendy continued, while Brian stood stupefied by the door holding his briefcase and that evening’s newspaper, she was planning to split after finals for a far-out commune she’d heard of in an unpopulated part of Northern California. Pressed, she admitted that she would be accompanied on this journey by an old friend named Ralph. And how did Ralph feel about her pregnancy
? According to Wendy, he was tolerant, even enthusiastic. “Ralph wants to work out a total relationship. He really digs kids. He doesn’t care whose kid it is; he hasn’t got your thing about possessions. He lives completely in the Now.”

  Brian’s reminiscences are interrupted by the sight of someone coming toward him, picking her way among groups of sitting and squatting peace marchers; someone he is, for the first time in over a year, very glad to see: Erica Tate.

  “Oh, there you are,” Erica says. She is looking well, though too thin; her hair is brushed back from her face, accentuating this. She is wearing a green sleeveless dress, and her paper arm band with its blue peace symbol is fixed high on a slim bare arm. “I left the station wagon down on Tioga Street, across from the orthodontist’s. So I can drive you back here all right.”

  “That’s fine,” Brian replies; like his wife he speaks in a careful, almost formal manner. “Thank you.” He smiles cordially, as if they were on opposite sides of a conference table, negotiating some important treaty. “I’ll meet you there after all this is over.”

  “I’ll probably be later than you are, though,” Erica says. “I mean, if my group starts—”

  “That’s all right. I’ll wait.” Brian smiles again in the same manner. “I don’t have anything to do this afternoon. Classes have been canceled, so I won’t have to meet my seminar.” He is conscious of deliberately elaborating his point, as if anticipating simultaneous translation. “If you’d like to walk with us, though, that would be fine.” The Peace March is to be led by prominent representatives of the University, the Church and the Army (the wheelchair veteran, plus two of his buddies who will carry a banner).

  “No, thank you,” Erica says with careful good will. “I promised Danielle and the WHEN people I’d go with them.”

  “Ah.” Attempting not to convey annoyance Brian smiles some more—but briefly, for he also doesn’t want to seem relieved at not having to march beside Erica. In fact, he feels neither relief nor annoyance—only a desire that she shouldn’t be hurt or offended in any way.

  Yet some emotion, some tension at least, must have shown on his face, for Erica frowns slightly, then smiles slightly, and finally offers:

  “If you’d like to—I mean, would you like to come back to the house afterward for some lunch?”

  “Thank you; that would be a help. The Faculty Club’s sure to be jammed by then.”

  “Yes.” She opens her mouth as if about to add something, then shuts it. “Well, I’ll see you later,” she says. “I’d better get back to the Hens.”

  Erica sets off in the direction of Danielle’s party, but before she reaches it she consults her watch, and finding that the march will not start for fifteen minutes, turns toward the washroom—not because she needs to, but in order to think over what has just happened and organize her mind. In inviting her to walk with him, Brian was in effect proposing that they appear together in public for the first time in over six months. She had declined, not in order to reject all that this might imply, but merely out of surprise and confusion of feelings. Whenever something sudden happens, her first impulse is to withdraw, consider the situation, regroup her forces.

  Of course in a way she isn’t surprised, Erica thinks, shoving open the door of a long bare crowded room painted battleship-gray and smelling of pine antiseptic. There were signs of what might be coming when she spoke to Brian two days ago—even last Sunday evening, when after returning the children he came into the house, and upstairs to the study where Erica was working on drawings for the Art Festival. He shut the door behind him and told her, in a tight, strained, self-mocking voice, that Wendy was probably pregnant; not by him, but by a Pakistani engineering student, and that she had just left him for an unemployed Chicago film maker.

  Erica’s first reaction to this earth-shattering announcement was compassion for Wendy. The poor girl, she thought; the poor, silly, confused child. But during the next few days some of her sympathy began leaking out through the cracks. It was reasonable that Wendy should grow disillusioned with Brian. It was forgivable, though very careless of her to have got pregnant again, and understandable that she should try to conceal the fact for a while. But that she should have been so casually unfaithful; that she should have so calmly planned to present Brian with someone else’s baby—that was hard to understand. Had she been lying to herself, then, or only to Brian and Erica, when she said last fall that she would “always belong to him completely”?

  Erica found it all even harder to understand when, three days later, Wendy appeared in her campus office, on an afternoon when Erica was busy trying to get the files in order for her successor. She is moving next week to a better job at nearly twice the salary with the Department of Horticulture, working on their journal and—best of all—illustrating a book on ornamental grasses. Couldn’t they meet later? she suggested.

  “But I got to talk to you now,” Wendy protested, clutching Erica’s desk and knocking over a stack of three-by-five cards. “I hafta ask you—to explain—I mean, you know about the baby and everything?”

  “Yes, I think so,” Erica admitted, gathering the cards and starting to resort them.

  “I guess you’re feeling sort of negative toward me,” Wendy remarked.

  “Well, I—”

  “Brian told me,” Wendy interrupted, pushing back the pale wisps of hair which covered her face. “He said you thought I was irresponsible. I know there’ve been some bad vibes, but I’ve got my head together now, and everything’s going to work out.” She smiled eagerly and sat down on the corner of Erica’s desk, knocking over the cards again with the fringe of her red wool poncho.

  “Like I’m really happy I didn’t marry Brian,” she continued. “It would’ve been a big mistake: we don’t actualize each other’s potential at all. He’s got this set against social psychology, for instance. Well, in some ways he’s right, a lot of the professors in my department are off the wall, but I still hafta pass their courses.” She drew her legs up and sat on the desk with them folded under her, forming, in her poncho, a pyramidal shape.

  “What got me most was I wasn’t any help to him in his Work, which was the whole idea you know? I really tried, but all I ever did was make him angry. Like when he read parts of his book to me he would get uptight because I never had any criticisms. It always sounded fine to me. Sometimes I tried to think up criticisms, but that just made him more angry on account of they were so stupid. He got so pissed once because I never heard of the Nazi-Soviet Pact that he started throwing his books onto the floor. I guess I should have heard of it; I realize now it was a big deal, but I wasn’t even born then.” A complaining tone had entered Wendy’s voice.

  “Brian takes that sort of thing very seriously,” Erica said noncommittally, feeling obscurely unwilling to join her ex-husband’s ex-mistress in a discussion of his faults.

  “Yeh.” Wendy sighed exaggeratedly. “He really does. Ralph, this guy I’m going to California with, he says there’s occupational diseases you get from being a professor, the way workers in asbestos plants get fibrous lungs. He says professors catch that kind of lecturing manner, you know, like Brian has, from talking in public too much. And they start organizing everything into outlines. Like one day he said to me, ‘Could you bring me the newspaper? It’s either a) on my desk, or b) in the bathroom.’ I told him, ‘Please don’t talk to me in outlines, okay? I’m not a class.’ Only he didn’t hear me.”

  “No.” Erica could not prevent herself from smiling.

  “It was that way the whole time, really, you know. That’s why I decided I’ve got to get out of this environment, before my kid catches the same disease.”

  Now Erica frowned. It was this plan which had made her call Wendy “irresponsible”; for surely any child would be better off brought up legitimate in Corinth than fatherless in some squalid mountain cabin, miles from the nearest doctor or school. As moderately as possible, she expressed this view, concluding with the, suggestion that it was really not nec
essary to go to Northern California; that there must be some good commune nearby which would welcome a young married couple and their baby.

  But Wendy shook her head, making wisps of pale hair fly. This place in California was special, and anyhow she wasn’t planning to get married.

  “The way I feel now, I don’t ever want to be married to anyone,” she explained. “I figure it’s a bum trip. I mean if you’ve just got a relationship with a guy, that’s cool; you can be really straight with him. Like Ralph says, you know either of you can split any time, so if you stick it out it’s because you really dig each other. The world isn’t telling you you hafta stay with that dude whether you feel like it or not; in fact it’s probably making some hassles for you.”

  “But that’s one reason why—” Erica interjected, while an unfavorable and suspicious opinion of Ralph began to form in her mind. “If you were to marry him, you’d have some security—”

  Wendy shook her head even more vigorously. “That’d make me more insecure. Once you’re married you can’t ever tell if the guy comes home on account of he wants to, or on account of he has to. I mean, who wants to have somebody fuck you just because it’s his job?”

  “I see your point,” Erica replied gently, but with some restraint, thinking that again—and probably not for the last time—Wendy was repeating as her own sincere opinion statements made to her by some man for selfish ulterior purposes. “But marriage isn’t only sex: it’s a social contract. If everyone thought like your friend, families would break up; parents would desert their children—”

  “That’s different,” Wendy interrupted. “I couldn’t ever desert a kid. Like this baby.” She put a pink stubby hand, stained with ink, on the front of her poncho. “It’s really heavy; not like some guy you’re not even related to. I know already I’ll never leave him; I’ll always belong to him completely.” And, brushing aside some shreds of hair, she looked at Erica with an expression of fervent sincerity.