by Marge Piercy
“We haven’t found him yet. So, Fay, you bring me evidence for a crime you don’t believe in?”
“Just in case you’re right for once. Go on, kids, have fun. I’m leaving now. I promised Mikey a hot game of Scrabble.” Orlando was already out the door with the last two pieces of cake, but Fay leaned on the doorframe, winking at Daria. “We all don’t know how you did it. That the dead should walk again. This guy’s been sitting around sucking his thumb since Andrea ran off. Sour? Nasty? Sorry for himself? Don’t mention it.”
“Oh?” Tom lowered. “If your ex-husband had taken your kids to California, you’d be out dancing the next night?”
“Anyhow, when you get tired putting up with him, I got a waiting list from the neighborhood.” Fay eased herself down the stairs.
“Enough,” Daria said. “Before I’m ambushed by somebody who wants your body, read me whatever is on those cards.”
He fanned out the cards again. “I shouldn’t have done this. I thought of it as sort of a present.”
“Get on with it! You’re making me nervous.”
“Well, you have this obsession with the woman Walker’s with.”
“I wouldn’t call it an obsession,” Daria said dryly. “It isn’t irrational to want to know. If I represent a set of values he’s rejecting, then she represents what he wants now.”
“So you really want to know?”
“You think I’m some dreamy adolescent who prefers bad fantasies?”
“Okay, so I ran her to ground for you.” Closing the cards into a neat pack again, he fixed his gaze on the top card. “Gail Abbott-Wisby. That’s a hyphenated name. You screwed me up thinking her last name was Wisby. It’s Abbot-Wisby. When the Wisbys married into the Abbots, they were taking no chances on anyone forgetting that feat.”
“What does she do? Is she a writer? Or an artist?”
“What does she do indeed? Not much.” Tom traced the empty plate with his index finger, licking it delicately. She remembered that she had had a dream about him the night before in which he had merged with Ali as one large pantheresque tomcat. “She came out, of course, at the appropriate time—”
“Came out?”
“As a debutante, not as a lesbian.” Tom grinned. “I wish I hadn’t given away all the cake. She went to Wellesley with some appropriately vague major. She married right after college. He was the one who came out in our current lingo. Messy divorce, rumors of nervous breakdowns. She seems to have been institutionalized in a fancy nut farm for a while, but who can prove it?”
She realized she was holding her breath and made herself inhale. “How old is she?” Her voice emerged tiny, high.
He riffled his cards. “Thirty this past May. She’s the ugly duckling between two swan sisters—”
“Cesaro said something like that. At first he thought Ross must be involved with her younger sister.”
“But older and younger sisters married men richer than they are and spawned oodles of toothy and I’m sure nasty children. The Abbot-Wisbys seemed to have broods of three to five, never less. Overpopulation, a family custom. Rowena, the oldest: society designer with a couple of boutiques where you can buy a snappy eight-hundred-dollar shift off the racks. Philippa, the youngest, was a deb beauty and modeled briefly and not all that successfully. But it entitled her to be referred to as Mrs. Charles Rutherford III, the former fashion model Flip Abbot-Wisby. Gail is the ugly duckling, the middle sister who pretty much fucked up.”
Daria brooded. “Is he saving her? I can almost see that. Ross thought he was saving me—I was pregnant, not that I needed salvage, thank you. But I think he was saving me from being pregnant and unmarried, from being Italian and from being lower middle class.”
“That means working class, doesn’t it? With pretensions.”
“I suppose it means you expect to move up a bit. We all did, then.”
“Did you, now?” Tom turned over a card and skimmed it. “That was your peers. Mine expected to start a revolution. So the expectations of your lot were the more accurate …”
“Read me more about Gail.”
“Gail may or may not have married again three years ago. She breeds dogs—”
“That I know. German short-haired pointers.”
“She got involved with one of the help. The rumors are they were married and then her family trucked her off to Happyville Sanatorium for an encore and had the marriage annulled. Anyhow he disappeared—he seems to have been Australian—with his pockets bulging and Gail was once again her family’s problem. In danger of becoming an old maid, in danger of marrying the gardener or the gamekeeper, or going off her rocker altogether.”
“Tom, how sure are you? You’re trying to make me feel better. Handing me a line of propaganda.”
“I’m surely trying to persuade you that imagining yourself less glamorous and less attractive than Gail Abbot-Wisby is a waste of time. But I haven’t told you right out what Gail has that you lack.”
“What?”
“Connections, kid. Money, honey.”
“Money?”
“You haven’t asked the right questions. Who are the Abbot-Wisbys, that they hyphenate their silly name?”
“So tell me. You’re squirming in your chair.”
“Bad little boys squirm. Adult men like me simply move suggestively. It’s daddy who’s interesting. Roland Abbot-Wisby is the president and believed to be one of the principal stockholders in the Allston Savings and Loan—as well as two other banks on whose boards he sits as director.”
“The Allston Savings and Loan,” she repeated. Then she saw a page. Know all men by these presents that Robert Realty being a trust duly established under the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts via its trustee Ross V. Walker, for consideration paid hereby unto the Allston Savings and Loan Association, a corporation duty established under the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts with Mortgage Covenants to secure payments of Two hundred fifty thousand dollars, with interest thereon and principal payable as provided. She shook her head slowly as if to clear it. “But Ross has mortgages with them.”
“Have you any more questions, my child?”
“What do you think it means?”
“A business deal. He’s so far into that bank by now he’s way overextended. They believe the neighborhood will gentrify, which is why they let him get so overextended. But it’s not happening fast enough. He’s buying in on a different level. Taking the troublesome daughter off their hands and promising to settle her down steady.”
“I don’t believe it. I can’t accept that Ross would sell himself that coldbloodedly.”
“All evidence suggests Walker is a pretty cold fish when it comes to money decisions. Besides, with the right dowry, she could look attractive.”
“But that’s not the only bank he’s into.”
“It’s the primary one. It’s a wonder he hasn’t put out a contract on you. The Abbot-Wisbys are not going to pay for an affair. It’s marriage or nothing.”
“No wonder he keeps pestering me.” She shook herself, rising in her seat. “We could be making all this up. Where did you get your suppositions? I won’t call them facts.”
“I’ve done power structure research in my day—part of my lurid but sometimes useful past. Besides, you have to understand people have many strange hobbies. On all the local rags and local media, there’re people whose pleasure it is to watch the moneyed. To watch the real estate operators. To observe the politicians at work and play gobbling up the till. There are people who keep an eye on big machers and finaglers. All passions like any other. I ran down the essentials in the BPL. Then I got the gossip from my old buddy Stan at the Globe. Instead of bird-watching, he watches Brahmins.”
She let her head down on her propped hands. “It’s sad. If it’s true, it’s so depressing!”
“Why? Because you still care for Walker?”
“I hate him. At times. But I can’t stand to see someone I cared for so much and so long turn into
someone who can be bought.”
“You couldn’t be bought?”
“Could you?”
“I used to worry about that a lot. Haven’t thought of it in years. Nobody’s bidding any longer.”
“What’s power structure research, exactly?”
“Oh, it was a thing we did a lot during the antiwar years—”
“We? I don’t remember doing any myself.”
“The political we, the movement.” Tom shrugged. “It involved the attempt to demystify who owns and runs corporations. Who makes decisions, in whose interests? Who controls banks, insurance companies, how they interlock. How decisions get made—like invading a country or backing some sleazy dictator or breaking a particular strike.”
“It sounds like the same thing you do with local fires—blaming people for things that happen. Finding villains. Don’t you think it’s a little like tribal people who think a god is behind every storm? The gods are angry. The rich are plotting.”
“And you want to go on believing neighborhoods change like the weather. My, it’s getting white around here, isn’t it?”
From under lowered lashes she regarded him. She had blundered into caring for him and she stayed because he was such a completely vulnerable passionate man in bed, tender, open, wholly physical, that she dropped her inhibitions with her clothes. She could give vent to her sexuality with him as she had been able to do only during the very best of times with Ross, if ever, but at moments like these, with his theories of universal conspiracy, she wondered what she was letting herself in for.
“You want to be blind.” He was scowling. “That’s the thing I resent most about you. You think there’s virtue in pretending not to notice, like a lady who just stepped in dog shit.”
“And you! You think somebody bought a dog just to make it shit,” she snapped back. “Rich people have dogs just so they can bring them to shit on your lawn!”
On the drive back to Lexington, she could not figure out if she was more annoyed with him or with herself. She lost her temper with him easily, too easily perhaps. After years of being mild and even-tempered with Ross, after years of living with the volume control turned way down, she began to remember the adolescent who had made scenes in the kitchen, the girl who shouted back at her brothers, a stormier more passionate Daria who had sunk into the wife as into a stagnant pool but now emerged, apparently intact. She and Tom fought often without ending their relationship or even threatening it.
Torte was not waiting at the door. He would be upstairs in Mariela’s room, where he seemed to have moved. Mariela took him walking every day around and around the block, for she was not allowed to cross the street. Torte waddled gravely in front of her and she pattered behind holding tight to his leash, as if anything could have persuaded him to take a step without her. As Daria watched them together, she felt a great relief. Perhaps Torte would never stop missing Ross, but he was no longer grieving.
The light was still on in Sandra María’s room. As Daria climbed, she paused to listen. When she heard the uneven rattle of the typewriter keys, she went on to her own room without knocking at Sandra María’s closed door. The cats followed her, chasing each other over the furniture as she undressed and climbed into bed.
She did not feel drowsy and could summon no desire to read the manuscript of a Rumanian cookbook her publisher had asked her to review. She had a large knot in her belly that could easily have been loosened. She had jumped at him, ready to defend Ross. How casually she had overlooked the hours Tom had put into trying to dissolve her obsession. She had not even thanked him.
Finally she reached for the phone. “Tom, I’m sorry. I took it out on you, what you found out.”
“I shouldn’t have bothered. You don’t want to know facts. I give you credit for too much genuine curiosity.”
“I’m glad you found out. I just didn’t like what you learned. It hurt.”
“That’s ridiculous. What I proved is that you have no reason whatsoever to envy Gail Abbot-Wisby.”
“Tom, when I feel bad about Ross, it doesn’t mean I’d rather be back with him than with you.”
He grunted. Still sore. She tried another approach. “When Andrea left, did you ever feel she was choosing a different set of values?”
“She didn’t leave me for another man. It was for a job.”
She could sense him fending her off, but she doubted she would make progress probing on the phone. She made up her mind, however, to ask more questions, a great many more. Her life was supposed to be a subject for study and controversy, while his past remained off limits. She smiled at the dumpy plastic phone standing in for his presence. “When you loved someone a long time and that person makes a choice you find mean, it calls into question your whole previous life.”
“Was Walker your whole life?” he asked sullenly.
“Of course not. I had the children. My work. But the bulk of my life was him, Tom.”
“It sounds to me as if the bulk of your life was things you liked to do, your books, the garden and cooking and futzing around the house, all of which had nothing whatsoever to do with one Ross Walker. I don’t garden here, but I cook and futz around the house. You thought it was being married to him that made you enjoy those things. But what I discovered is that they have nothing to do with being married. You had a classic low input, low output relationship. He dealt with money and occupied space. When I ask for more than that, you push me back.”
After the conversation, she lay under the covers fuming. That was what she got for trying to apologize. “Low input, low output”—what a creepy mechanical way to describe a love relationship.
That phrase reminded her of Ross’s accusation that her life was only adjacent to his. For the first time, except in a mood of self-hatred when she felt fat, middle-aged and frumpy, she wondered if Ross might not have had good reasons for leaving her. Certainly she possessed severe drawbacks as the wife of a landlord hip deep in manipulating his tenants, shutting off services, trying to evict illegally, pyramiding mortgage on mortgage for the acquisition of ever more properties for speculation in the hopes of expelling present populations for more affluent ones. She must have been a nuisance to him when she had acted as rent collector at her parents’ old home, constantly fussing about what the tenants wanted and how the neighbors were reacting.
She no longer felt fat or frumpy and she had forgotten about dieting. No doubt she had lost fifteen pounds during the late wars with Ross, but she had stopped fretting about her weight. Low input, low output. Tom was accusing her of a kind of wifely opportunism, not intruding on Ross’s choices and failing even to notice her husband had become someone who operated on the margin morally and financially. Sort of Mrs. Albert Speer.
Still she was convinced, whatever Tom might think, that Ross had talked himself into believing he was saving Gail. She could see them at the restaurant table, Gail huddled as if a cold wind blew on her rangy hunched back. Daria herself had obviously not seemed in need of more salvation. In their early years when he had been the liberal government lawyer righting wrongs and she had been the dull comfortable substitute teacher, housewife, mama, he had been the center of attention always in family, among friends, out among strangers—as he had been with his parents, the only child, the son they adored and expected to do great things.
Maybe she should just get on with the divorce and forget grappling for position. No. She could not give up the house, especially when she had just populated it to her satisfaction. She liked living with Sandra María and Mariela. In spite of being furious with him at the moment, she liked Tom. It was all satisfying and interesting, she realized, sitting up abruptly in the dark. I like my new life, she thought with astonishment, as Sheba purred beside her.
20
Daria would have liked to question Dorothy about Tom, but she did not dare. How had she got into a position where she had to withhold information about an affair from her lawyer, lest she arouse her jealousy? she asked herself. Ross, after fallin
g silent for a week, was pressuring Dorothy: “The bank is going to foreclose if she doesn’t start paying off that mortgage, or turn it over to me. It’s my building.”
Daria along with her research downtown was compiling a dossier in her head on Tom. She questioned Sandra María openly and tried to pry information from Fay with seemingly casual chatter. Tom had been born in 1947 in the old whaling port and textile town of New Bedford in a working-class Portuguese neighborhood, mixed white and Cape Verdian Black, although his father’s parents had been Russian Jews who had both worked in the Wamsutta mill. Tom’s father had been apprenticed to an electrician. His mother was a librarian, still unmarried at twenty-eight, four years older than his father. She had a college education acquired with difficulty during the Depression. She had grown up in Chelsea and moved around the state from job to job, liking the adventure of independence and exploring new places, until she met Tom’s father at a 4th of July picnic. They were married within six months and over the next decade had four children, of whom Tom was the youngest.
His parents had been strongly in love. Tom had grown up with the same admiration for his mother that his father felt. She was smart, adventurous and then dead too young in that freak swimming accident. During the Vietnam War, Tom had quarrelled with his parents and still felt distant from his brother, who was in the Army Corps of Engineers. At Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur he went to see his father; on Passover his married sister in New Bedford made a seder, but the only sibling he was close to was his next older sister Sharon. She had also bounced around the landscape and now lived on a farm near Woodstock, Vermont, raising apples and goats with her female lover and the children of two broken marriages. Tom spent part of every summer there with his girls.
He had been called up to serve but had not gone; Fay said she heard he had had himself tattooed with a heart saying HARRY AND TOM AND BUTCH, but Daria knew that Tom was not tattooed. Whatever he had done, he had not gone into the Army, but his life had suffered total disruption. He had become involved in something called Vietnam Summer that involved door-to-door political work in Dorchester. In the fall he had simply not returned to college for his senior year. Dorothy said that when she met Tom, he had been confused and angry. He had cast himself into whatever the enthusiasts around him proclaimed was important at the moment (We must organize in the factories! No, we must take to the streets! Now we must create our own media!). He lived out the slogans and emerged dazed and without center, guilty still, guilty for whatever he did with his life. The war went on. Friends of his childhood, guys he had played football with, guys he had fished with, guys he had drunk beer with down by the water and smoked dope with in old cars, came home in boxes or came home junkies or came home with an arm missing or simply disappeared as if they had never been. He could not talk to the survivors. They could talk to each other, but they too could not understand the language of his friends. His life had been torn loose. He spoke the language of his army and they of theirs.