I came upstairs—it was two or three o’clock by now—and was dialing B again when I heard a key turn in the lock. I rebuked her; I told her she had frightened me, I told her it was dangerous out there. But mine was the impotent squawk of one who can no longer find words or voice or even passion. There was no way any longer to keep her off the dark streets and in the light of the house, so in the fall she went away to a boarding school in the Berkshires that B had heard of, for decades a kind of therapeutic salon des refusés for the children of the literati, and now also a place to which the state of Massachusetts sent the occasional delinquent in lieu of juvenile hall. She kissed Fred and her sister goodbye, nodded to me, and left.
On Saturday nights when I walked up a nearby street toward the newsstand and the Sunday Times, past a wire-fenced cement playground and its complement of teenagers giggling and groping in the dark, and, once, past a man in the doorway of a warehouse who, on seeing me, exposed himself, I would think of my elder daughter. She was safe now, in the country, and somebody else’s responsibility. She was not out wandering through the city, in and out of a life about which I knew nothing, and I was not sitting up in bed waiting for the click of the lock downstairs, unable to look at her when she came in.
People say, “No matter what your pain, remember the child’s pain is worse.” I’m not sure. One is willing to die for one’s child, and the hardest trial is that one is not allowed to do so. Dying is often easier than worrying, especially when the greatest worry is that one will stop worrying. Then one will die anyway, but of guilt, which murders slowly.
Parenthood, I realized, was a life sentence. My children could run away from home. I could not. My children were free to hate me. I was condemned to love them. When I was in the balding man’s room, I was out on parole. With him, I was what I had been before I became barnacled with a husband, house, and children: a student, bookish, with a terrible crush on her teacher. I don’t know what, during those dark strolls to the newsstand, I missed the most: the student, her teacher, or the room. No. I am lying to myself. I missed the man.
The winter Snow White was away, Rose Red’s godmother died. We had met as college freshmen and as adults lived on adjoining streets. For many years we baked our Christmas fruitcakes together, she, a better baker than I, working the dough with her strong freckled hands while I greased the pans. The week before she died we were planning to have tea, but chemotherapy had tired her, and she forgot. A few days before Christmas, her house cleaned, her baking done, the presents wrapped, and the tree trimmed, she got into bed and went to sleep.
At her memorial service I sat far to the rear of the church, because I knew myself and my tears. I had tried hard to emulate my family’s granitic stoicism, the calm and graceful faces they turned to the world when they were sick with sorrow, but the attempts were useless. When I got home the phone was ringing. It was the balding man, and he had no patience with my nose-blowing and my stuttering monologue. “What must be, must be,” he kept saying. “You cannot fall apart like that.”
But I can. When friends or family die, I leave a space for them, and not until that space closes of itself can I move on. If I try to rush the process with crowds and busyness, I am laying a thin sidewalk over a crevasse, and someday I will tumble in again.
A few days after the service I dreamed Rose Red’s godmother came to the house, and together we went for a walk around the Village. As we walked she grew frailer and frailer and leaned into me so that I was half-supporting her, but we kept moving until two men arrived and picked her up, the size of a small child now, and carried her away on a silver tray. “It is funny,” I wrote in a letter to Snow White, “but sometimes we say goodbye to people more finally in dreams than ever in real life.”
“That dream you had,” she said the next time I saw her, “that’s the way I felt about Lillian.”
“I wish you could see Bristol,” I say to the balding man, who is sitting on the red couch at Number 83. It is the only time he has been here since the night we first slept together, four years earlier. Snow White is home from school for the weekend and is wary of him. But Rose Red, who would rather love than not, ran into his arms when he held them out to her.
Like a little girl who’s brought home a new playmate, I am showing him all my treasures. We have been to my favorite Italian restaurant and he has liked his lunch, and since he is not an eater I am as pleased as a mother whose finicky baby has just finished every scrap. We have one of our favorite books, The Journal of a Disappointed Man, with us and I read aloud to him while we eat. The rest of the restaurant’s customers are staring at us, but I am so used to his flamboyance and to concentrating on him, never mind what people think, that I have at last lost the self-consciousness that made me miserable in public places.
We have reached the stage where, because we have been together so seldom over the years, we keep bringing out and brushing up the times we have been so that we can say, “Remember when we were at the movies and you . . .” and “Remember the night it rained and we were going . . .” thus creating the illusion of a shared past. He has met the neighbors, about whom I had written him so much, and now we are listening to “Dill Pickle Rag” on the stereo. We had been in the garden, he picking burrs out of Fred’s surprised eyebrows, I watching and wishing it would last forever: the man and woman in the garden, the man playing with the woman’s dog, and a spring night coming down. He felt chilly, however—he felt the cold more than I did—and we had moved indoors.
We have been together for the last three days. As usual, he has wanted me to believe that he is having nightmares about World War II, and as usual I have put my arms around him and said, “No, no, you’re here with me now. Go to sleep.” It is a little game he plays, but he doesn’t know I play it, too.
As usual, we have had breakfast at the delicatessen near his hotel, and as usual the owner, the man with the concentration camp number tattooed on his arm, has said, “Still taking care of your girl, I see, Mr.———.” And he has said, “Still takin’ care.”
We have sat at opposite ends of the big hotel bathtub, unconscious of our nakedness, reading. First, though, I have run the tub for him and shampooed his hair with a bar of Ivory soap. He won’t rinse the soap out—he says it makes his hair look thicker—and later, immaculate, hair battened with Ivory, he has gone to sit on a platform with a lot of distinguished people while I sit in the front row wondering if, at the end of the speeches, I can leave by the family exit, the designated exit for the first three rows, since I am not family.
Behind me are assorted literati, all of them talking about grants and fellowships and applications to artists’ colonies like Yaddo and MacDowell. Listening hard, I decide there is no angle they don’t know how to work. Finally, as the ceremonial begins, they hush—all but the wife of a very famous writer, who is talking loudly to herself. Up on the stage Agnes Neel, who has just received a medal, is gesturing to the audience to applaud more! more! more! We laugh. An elderly critic, whose name is now more often in textbooks than in the newspapers, makes a speech about the Fugitive poets and sets everyone to yawning. A few more people get medals, and at last it is over. Daring the family exit, I walk outdoors and into a garden party, where the distinguished guests are attempting to mingle, although mingling does not appear to be among their talents. I think I am on Parnassus, and they know they are.
The balding man introduces me to a lot of people, and I am proud that I can introduce him to a lot of people. On the long cab ride back to his hotel, however, it happens, what I have seen happen so many times before. He is running down and, cold sober but exhausted, has put his head in my lap. I stroke the high, rounded forehead and the soap-stiffened hair and think to myself that if I die on the spot I’ll be going out happy.
Tonight we are going to a dinner party, and I, tired of pretending to the children to be staying with a friend, have told them that I will not be home because I will be with him. Snow White is not surprised; she guessed long ago. At thirteen
, however, Rose Red cannot bear to think of her mother being with a man. But I have told her that he makes me very happy and that I hope she can be happy for me. Too, Lucille, the babysitter who has kept us bemused for many years (once, when my daughters were ten and eight, she took them to a speech at City Hall, heckled the speaker, and landed the three of them at a police station), has told her, “Your mother is not an ordinary woman and you can’t expect her to lead an ordinary life.” I know I am a very ordinary woman, but Rose Red likes definitions and sliding things into their proper slots. Lucille has provided her with one for me. Also, she is an old-fashioned child, and, quite simply, she likes having a man around the house, if only for a short time. It makes her house more like other people’s houses.
We go to the dinner party and in walks a woman with whom the balding man had had an affair. I think she is nice, and since the East Coast, not to mention the West Coast, is littered with his one-night stands, and I don’t know much about his activities in the Midwest but assume he has maintained the same high standards, I am friendly and we chat. Later, though, she giggles and slides her eyes at him when we hear on the radio a song he always sings to me during my morning tub, one I thought was ours alone. Suddenly I am sixteen again, and my boyfriend has just stuck a knife in my ribs.
The balding man has started the evening booming and boisterous, but again he is running down. He is tired, too tired to eat, and if I don’t leave with him right now, he hisses, embarrassing two guests who can hear him and not caring because he has a child’s disregard of his tantrums, he is leaving with her, because “she always delivers.” We leave.
He is quiet and I am angry, knowing that he is both a four-year-old who has had too much cake, ice cream, and excitement at the party and a grown man who has spoiled my golden day. I don’t know which to speak to, so after he has crawled into bed I sit on the floor, leaning against the footboard, smoking and talking aloud to myself. “I don’t know why you had to do that. I did nothing to provoke that attack. It was cruel. But what’s worse is that I don’t know why I left with you, why I’m here now.”
He is quiet throughout the monologue, the cigarette, my later, stubborn silence. I move to the window embrasure and sit there, watching the headlights of cars driving through and past Central Park, turning to look around the room, at my clothes piled on the slipper chair, and the long mound on the bed. There is no air in this room—the windows cannot be opened—and I want very much to be out of it, out on the street, smelling the late spring that is wafting over the wall from Central Park and mixing with the curious meld of gasoline fumes and low-tide decay that is peculiarly Manhattan’s. I love that scent because it is my city’s scent, just as I love my city’s rump-sprung taxis and the familiar bounce when they hit a pothole.
Oh, God, how much I want to be back in my clothes and out of this room and hailing a cab to take me home. I want to feel complete unto myself again. But I am not complete unto myself anymore. Something like an umbilical cord is connecting me to a man whose favorite jest is, “Well, I’ll be a nigger aviator,” and who, after once praising B, had said, “But I don’t see how you could have done it.”
“Done what?”
“Marry a Jew.”
I am ashamed not of his speech—it is, after all, his sin—but of my silence. That, my moral cowardice, is the greatest sin. “Through my fault, through my fault,” I am saying silently to myself, “through my most grievous fault.”
The only sound is of the traffic fourteen stories below the window, and I think he has passed out until I hear him say, “Maybe it’s because you love me.”
I get up then and slip into bed beside him. Both of us are speechless and stiff as effigies. “I feel so alone,” I say at last. “So do I,” he says. We turn to each other and he drifts into the serene sleep of those who can, and always will, get away with murder.
Seven
Once, when I was still married, I had a strep throat and, thinking it cured, stopped taking my penicillin. A day or two later I found nodes on my shinbones, was sent by a nervous dermatologist to a heart specialist, and was told I had something called erythema nodosum. I had never heard of it before, have never heard of it since, and perhaps I have the wrong words for it. All I know about the ailment is that it can indicate rheumatic fever, nephritis, or, as in my case, the foolishness of cutting back on one’s penicillin.
For several weeks I stayed in bed, because walking was close to impossible, while Rose Red, too young for school, sat on the floor beside me and played her toy xylophone. She had also arranged what she called a “comfort table”—one of a stack of TV tables, draped with a dishtowel and equipped with a glass, a comb, and a book chosen at random because she couldn’t read—and put it within easy reach. Despite the pain in my legs, I had never been so happy.
While our Jamaican nurse, Hoppy, fetched Snow White from nursery school, Rose Red napped on my chaise longue, and when her sister got home neither could bear to leave the bedroom because, for once, they had me to themselves. To this day, I am saddened by the speed of Rose Red’s speech. Talking fast, she figured, was the only way she could cram what she wanted so much to tell me in the little time I had to listen.
But now, the office being out of the question, there was time to hear about what Snow White had cooked on the toy stove at nursery school and where Rose Red had gone on her morning walk with Hoppy. There was time to hear them chattering downstairs while Hoppy gave them their baths, time to listen to Lucy and Desi, although I was too far away to hear anything but Desi’s occasional “Looo-cy!” Illness had sentenced me to a term as their mother and my husband’s wife, and I loved my prison.
Early evenings were the only part of the day in which I was alone, and then I would put down my book and turn toward the bedroom window, to watch the dog in the window of a red brick building across the street. The dog was a small white poodle, and along about five o’clock, it would climb onto the sill, wriggle itself in front of the Venetian blind, and stare up the street toward Eighth Avenue. Twenty or so minutes later it would commence a barking that, of course, I couldn’t hear, then wriggle past the blinds again to jump from the sill. A minute or two later a light would go on behind the blind; a woman whom I could see only in silhouette would raise it and vanish into what must have been the kitchen.
The kitchen was beyond my sight, but the table at which she sat was not. Every night I noticed the care with which she set it for her solitary meal and invariably lit a pair of candles. I admired that woman, whose face I never saw and whom I could not have recognized had I passed her on the street. Left to dine alone, I would probably live on ends of salami and sardines on crackers. But I didn’t have to dine alone; I would never have to dine alone. B would be with me, as he was about an hour later, sitting on the chaise longue and telling me about his day. Like the children, he too wallowed in my undivided attention. “I like to play with my mind,” I had once told Dr. Franklin in explanation of the captiousness of my attention span. “No, Mees Cantwell,” he said. (His Mitteleuropa accent was as adhesive as Krazy Glue.) “Your mind likes to play with you.”
For years thereafter I was never again physically sick, although during the time beween B’s leaving and our divorce I prayed for pain, for an illness that would hurt so much that it would erase the illness in my head. It didn’t come. Often I longed to faint, to be deaf and blind and unknowing. But the heart pumped, the blood traveled, the engine drove without a stutter. Eventually, I learned to love my body, the way my fingernails, drawn lightly across the skin, could erase an itch and the way the bone seemed to rise to meet the palm I laid on my cheek. My legs could cover miles of ground with the regularity of an automaton’s; my hair grew without orders. How could anyone wish to transcend the body? Three score and ten was far too short a time to explore the cosmos bounded by my skin, and eternity a terrifying word. But one Saturday in June the engine finally faltered.
My head had ached for three days, but that was nothing new to a veteran of migraine.
By Friday night, though, I had a fever that left me dry and burning one minute, cold and wet the next.
My sole doctor was my obstetrician, and he was away. So was Rose Red’s pediatrician, the only other doctor we could think of. The doctor suggested by a neighbor was away, too. The children called Lucille, who knew everything, and she suggested a medical student who lived nearby and who might have reached a chapter in his studies that covered whatever I had, and a chiropractor who was a faith healer and who worked through the feet. Eventually Rose Red telephoned for a cab—the taxi services were just beginning to make house calls—but when the dispatcher heard the destination, St. Vincent’s Hospital, he sent no one. Maybe he feared a birth in the back seat of the car or, worse, a demise.
At last I got out of bed, and, wearing a bra, underpants, a wrinkled green caftan, and Dr. Scholl health sandals, carrying a bag with a lipstick, a hairbrush, and my Blue Cross—Blue Shield card, I walked through the Village’s steamy streets to St. Vincent’s emergency room.
There I lay for a long time on a cot in a cubicle while my sweat soaked the mattress, listening to a young girl on the other side of the curtain who’d come in with a venereal disease. She had a sweet, soft voice and seemed shy, and she cried and moaned as a doctor, who spoke gently and kindly, cleaned out her vagina. And I, with little else to think of, thought of how the body declares a moratorium on sex, how the body itself proscribes promiscuity.
I lost track of time and didn’t know that the children, teenagers now and nervous because I hadn’t returned home, were sitting in the lobby outside the emergency room. A nurse pulled the green caftan over my head, pausing to ask, “Is this a Carol Horn?” referring to a designer of medium-priced sportswear, before tossing it into a garbage bag along with the underwear and the Dr. Scholls. Then she tied me into a hospital gown and called an orderly, who wheeled me out of the emergency room and through the lobby. Dripping wet, whiter than the sheets, a garbage bag holding my clothes and purse plopped by my right hand, I lacked only a tag on my big toe to proclaim me a corpse. Tired, I closed my eyes, and a moment later opened them to see a muddled, almost incredulous Snow White standing beside the gurney. “You can come and see your mother in a few minutes,” the orderly said.
Speaking with Strangers Page 9