Other Men's Daughters

by Richard Stern

  Benson was terrified of criticism; his life was ingeniously, though unconsciously, fashioned to escape it. As a professor in a great university, he was subject to no one but his scientific peers; the few peers he had, he’d recruited to his side by offers to lecture at Harvard and the company of his wonderful friends, Fischer and Merriwether.

  It was a dinner for a visitor from Berkeley and his wife that led to Merriwether’s year-long estrangement from him. The visitor was a friend of Merriwether’s named Roger Trimpi. He and Merriwether had been graduate students together, and they had seen each other at occasional scientific meetings. They got along very well. Trimpi was a mild, good-humored man. A few years ago, he and his wife had divorced and he was now married to a woman twelve to fifteen years his junior. Mrs. Trimpi was along.

  They went out to dinner in Boston. (Sarah was not cooking that month for his friends.)

  The evening turned into a Benson monologue on the decline of every institution and virtue, the rise of ignorance, bad manners and minority violence. When Merriwether interposed that the Victorian era had had its share of social malaise, Benson extended the decline to Merriwether’s own recent work. “Bobbie here’s been making an idiot of himself trying to work out dipsologic models for cytologic pathogenesis.”

  Merriwether said, “I don’t think you’ve kept up with what I’m doing, Stu. I’ll show you in detail some time.”

  “I’m not interested in your showing me, Bobbie. I know every man has to eat a peck of dirt in his time, but I’ve eaten mine.”

  Merriwether turned away to an embarrassed Mrs. Trimpi and asked how her children and her husband’s got on together. The meal passed without his talking again to Benson.

  When they met on campus a week or so later, Merriwether nodded coldly and passed by. The next day he received a letter in Faculty Mail.

  Dear Bobbie—

  Why were you so cold to me yesterday? Have I done something awful?

  As ever,

  Stu

  Merriwether wrote back that despite his affection for Benson, he could no longer tolerate his rudeness.

  We began, I suppose, on the wrong footing. I the junior expecting correction, you the senior, expecting to give it. But twenty years have passed. We are, if not equals, at least equal as friends, and we must put ourselves on a new footing. I very much hope we can.

  Benson didn’t answer this letter, the summer intervened, and the habit of association was broken. In the fall, Tom Fischer had tried to act as peacemaker, but left town without bringing them together, and the adolescent pride which American life fosters kept them apart. They worked in different laboratories, there was seldom occasion to see each other. Now and then, they sat across from each other at the semester meetings of the biological sciences faculty; they nodded, even smiled at each other, and then, one day, about a year after they’d quarreled, Merriwether went up, shook Benson’s hand and asked him to have dinner with him. A new version of the old cordiality began: Benson was careful of Merriwether’s feelings, Merriwether tender of Benson’s.

  Now he sat in Benson’s small living room, comforted, rather than subdued by what Tom Fischer had once called “Stuart’s mortuary of authority.” “If there were a literal book worm,” Fischer said, “Stuart’s walls would be its gut.” In the corridors, in every room but the kitchen where he ate, Benson’s books were the walls. Merriwether sat under a massif of diaries, letters and memoirs of lesser Victorians. His pot-au-feu took in the names even as he talked of the divorce (Henry Rawlinson, Moncton-Milnes, Tom Taylor, Hartley Coleridge, Thomas Arnold, A. J. Munby). He showed Benson the onionskin indictment.

  Benson’s green eyes covered the pages in seconds. “Who wrote this? Jonas Chuzzlewit? It’s a monstrosity. Call your lawyer.”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “Get one today. Go to your bank, now. Take out half your money and put it under another name. They’ve got you by the balls. This is a terrible document. Sarah’s gone and got herself one of these mick sharpies. He’s going to eat you alive.”

  “The man’s not like that, Stu. He seemed very decent.”

  “You’re a baby. You don’t know. They’re all in cahoots, judges, lawyers. They work it all out. You’re a minnow. They’ll snuff you up without knowing they’ve had a snack. Decent. Indecent. They’re in business. They appear to be whatever is going to get results. Be? They don’t exist as beings. They’re functions of their bellies. This mick saw you there, mouth open, he could have drawn out your appendix with a lump of sugar. But they want your heart. Sarah’s going to eat you. Take my advice. I’ve been through this. Get yourself the toughest lawyer in Boston. Call Wally Archer at the law school. Ask him to get you an iron man. This isn’t the lab, Bobbie. This isn’t your rats bleeding. This is you. These lawyers are going to strip your corpse.”

  Merriwether felt himself pounding. Sure Benson had taken off on his own rhetoric, his dough-ball face was streaked with excitement. All that Dickens had technicolored life for him, his hands balled in the air, gaveling, hammering. But maybe it was true. Maybe the lawyers gorged on Dickens too. They went for broke. Sarah was no Goneril, but he had seen the tiger in her. She’d given Sullivan the stuff of the document; it was not the “nothing” Sullivan said it was.

  “It’s hard to believe, Stu.”

  “It’s hard to believe a nanogram of PG can leash a cell, but you know it’s so. Hard to believe.” Out of his rolled-up blue workshirt, freckled forearms hoisted in a mime of incredulity; the right one swept up a wall of books. “What’s all this about? The documentation of what’s far more astonishing than that an injured wife wants to pound her husband into glue. What runs the world, Bobbie? Are you an eighteenth century biologist? It’s the 1970s. Neuro-enzymatic labyrinths. Labyrinths? Helical tsunami. You and I have spent half our lives omitting everything but what we want to pinpoint in a tube. Professional life tries for the same simplicity: Three square meals, a comfortable chair, chamber music, journals, wife on call, now and then an aspirin for trouble out there. We know it’s not even that simple in a macro-molecule. The damn proteins don’t behave; it’s a bleeding miracle when we find something to spank them with. Bobbie, you and Sarah are in the snake pit. Don’t pretend it’s Disneyland.”

  Merriwether mumbled some sort of assent and walked home. Dizzied, heart bumping arhythmically, sweat in eye sockets, breath irregular; vasoconstriction, arterial distension, glycogenic riot. In his head, visions of a stripped life, no children, no house, no money. Stripped. He walked through the Commons. The sun lay a gold blade on the cannon.

  Sarah was in the kitchen. “I saw Sullivan,” he said.

  “Well?” she said, quietly. She’d heated a can of soup, and got a second bowl, poured, and set it at his place.

  “He gave me this terrible thing here,” he handed the sheets to Sarah, “then said it didn’t mean anything, that you and I could work everything out together, I wouldn’t even need a lawyer.”

  “That’s what he told me.”

  They sat at the table. “I went to Stu Benson. He said Sullivan was a crook, that you wanted to eat me alive, that I’d better get a lawyer.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “No. I liked Sullivan. He’s probably capable of shystering with the best of them, but I guess this is an easy eight hundred bucks for him. He feels we can do it together.”

  “Eight hundred?”

  “Eight-fifty.”

  “I’ve paid him three already.”

  “Anyway, I don’t think I’ll get a lawyer.”

  “I don’t think you need one, Bobbie.”

  At this use of his name in a tone that was nothing but sympathetic, Merriwether put his head on the table and cried. It had been decades since he’d done that. “Just shock,” he said, still crying. He went into the sun parlor and tried to get hold of himself. Sarah came in. “It’ll be all right,” she said. “It’s the best thing.”

  After a bit, he said, “What a waste.” He touched her che
ek with the edge of his palm. Plump, white, scraped cheek. He went upstairs. When he came down, he came down with pencil and paper.

  They sat in the breakfast nook. He loved this room, the shelf of blue Meissen, the silver-point engravings of Assisi and Pisa. It was a bay, polka-dot curtains were on the circle of windows. A room of cheer to smooth out night’s wrinkles. The chairs were battered, scratched, not of a set, but they belonged together. He sat in his usual one, a low, unupholstered armchair; Sarah’s was higher—as Sullivan’s had been.

  “We’ll go over everything,” he said. “We’ll do it right.”

  “All right,” said Sarah. She was calm, her eyes did not glitter, her hands, slender, veined, those of a thinner woman than she was, a pianist’s hands, were folded on the table. He wrote, “The House.” The asking price, seventy thousand dollars, seemed high, but there’d be less problem disposing of it than a thousand dollar bill in Harvard Square. “We can split the money,” said Sarah. “I’m sure each of us can find an adequate apartment with what we’d get.”

  To his surprise, Merriwether found himself once again in tears. “I’m sorry. Pay no attention. It’s strain. The house,” he had to stop. “You and the kids.” It wasn’t necessary to go on, but he let himself go on, even relished her surprise at seeing this husband who had such little feeling for her show what he was showing. Again he left the room, partly to control himself, partly to let her see he was ashamed of breaking down, partly to have a little more of the relief of tears.

  When he came back, they went over each child’s needs: tuition, maintenance, summers. Sarah, in a dignified and decent way, moved toward a constricted, economical life, one that made her secure but which Merriwether, even in admiration of her decency, also feared as a constriction of the children’s life. Why should they have their skies cut in half? He upped her figures.

  In this spirit, each giving the other more than either would have wanted in a contest of bitterness, they avoided the war Benson’s strategy would have started.

  twelve

  The Merriwethers had their usual Thanksgiving Dinner with the Calenders, Dev, Tina and their daughter Tibbs (babble-version of Clementina). The Calenders knew the Merriwether situation, only George and Esmé knew nothing. (Sarah had agreed they should have as much “solid family time” as possible. “We’ll tell them after the holidays.” Merriwether hoped to wait till the end of the school year.) At Thanksgiving, it still seemed remote; they didn’t even have a court date.

  They’d had Thanksgiving together in this house for over twenty years, the last eight or ten with the Calenders. The dinner was one of their ceremonial measures. Each year the children announced what had been best and worst in the year, and Merriwether worked up some Massachusetts story from Bradford’s history, or the Mathers’; though he told it with deprecating irony, that was but easement for the pleasure in continuity he felt he could not, in this day and time, exhibit directly. The meal itself was the American marvel, the stuffed, trussed bird, the squash and beans and marsh-mallowed yams, the fresh cranberries, tureens of giblet gravy, platters of celery and black olives, the mince, pumpkin and pecan pies, the white wine and hot cider, all spread under the brass chandelier a nineteenth-century slave trader had brought back from Brussels. The dining room walls were oak-paneled; between the frames hung portraits of Merriwethers, Stills and Tiptons, old insurance men and merchants, preachers and professors. Thanksgiving in this room seemed the great American payoff to the children of New Jerusalem.

  This year, neither Albie nor Priscilla came home. Priscilla was cooking a turkey for foreign students at Oberlin. Albie wrote that he had a Thanksgiving-to-end-of-term job writing papers for delinquent students. Merriwether telephoned him in Williamstown and asked him not to take the job. “I’d rather have you lying about detergents on television.” Albie bristled, said everyone had the right to do his own work. “I’m just helping some kid who’s got to write six papers in two weeks. I’m pretty good at it, and I learn something; if he reads it, so will he.”

  “I don’t feel much like an example these days, Albie, and I don’t want to impose my standards on you, but I feel this is so direct a repudiation of my life. I have to say something.”

  Albie’s voice rose on the phone, became boyish. “It has nothing to do with you, Dad. I just want to earn a little money.”

  “I’ll send you more money. I didn’t know you needed it.”

  “I didn’t want to bother you. I still think you’re being hypersensitive. These guys have helped lots of people over rough spots.”

  “I don’t want to argue, Albie. The heart of education is ripped by this kind of thing. I know you’ll agree with me when you think it over.”

  Up in his study, writing out a check for Albie, it struck Merriwether that Albie’s choice could have something to do with the invisible poison of the household. Underneath the civility, Albie had suffered the decay; and now he was attacking another part of the moral structure. That Merriwether was enforcing his own moral authority with fifty dollars did not strike him as a moral matter. It simply removed a burr from this celebration.

  Tibbs Calender brought a boy friend from Cornell. Tibbs was an ugly duckling who’d found her style two or three years ago. The Merriwethers had watched her grow from big-thighed awkwardness into grace. Physically a queen, tall, big-featured, black-haired, her nature was gentle and curious. Her presence was a kind of holiday for all the Merriwethers. Her boy friend was a thirty-year-old graduate student in physics. She’d met him when they made love for a pornographer’s camera. The film, A Little Bit of a Lot, hadn’t been released, but the pornographer was going to film another with them. “You’re a great sexual team.” Theo, the physicist, was wiry, big-eyed, he had a dark, sharp-angled Greek face. He’d answered the pornographer’s ad in the Cornell newspaper, and he’d stayed for the sex, not the money. Now he and Tibbs lived together in Ithaca. They were both good musicians. Tibbs sang, Theo played the flute.

  After dinner they went into the sun parlor for music. Sarah played the piano, Esmé turned pages for her, Tina for Theo. George lay on the floor by his father’s chair: Merriwether could feel the body warmth against his leg. The music—Rameau, Purcell, Bach—was beautiful. Merriwether let himself sink in it, and in the old beauty of the parlor with its wallpaper of gold spindles and the little what-not tables covered with silver holders and dishes. Beyond dark drapes, dusk fell in the street. He watched George, chin in his hands, floating, large-eyed, in some George world, and Esmé, serious and unobtrusive, eyes on the music, reaching to turn, her arm hair—which she hated and habitually depilated—trapping fuzzy pockets of light. It was lovely, the delicate arm in the velvety funnel of laced sleeve. On the tip of one sort of beauty, ready to fall through adolescence into another. Soon Esmé would be telling her friends, one by one, that she was moving and that her parents were divorced, she’d be trying to figure out what it was that hadn’t worked, comparing it with models in magazines and TV shows. Merriwether sank into a swamp of foreboding, half-sybaritically, half in the superstition of people who believe life’s so strange that by imagining its worst turns, you force it into better ones. The melancholy beauty of farewell came through the music. Tibbs sang Bist du bei mir in her quavering, heartrending contralto. Vibrato was a feedback system to keep on pitch. Was all trembling, all melancholy so useful? Geh ich mit Freude. Beautiful.

  Later, helping Sarah scrape dishes and stack them in the dishwasher, he thanked her for the dinner. “It was a lovely day.”

  “It was. A lovely family day. I know how you must feel. It doesn’t really alter things.”

  He went upstairs and called Cynthia. “How are you, dear?”

  “Fine. I celebrated with a double portion of cole slaw. How was your dinner?”

  “It was very nice for the children. What are you doing?”

  “Reading Saikaku. A contemporary of Madame de Lafayette.”

  “General Lafayette’s wife?”

  “No, creep. The fir
st French novelist. I’ll read you the opening sentence from this one, ok?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m not sure of anything.” This was her first book in Japanese.

  “‘A beautiful woman, say the old men, is an axe that cuts down a man’s very life.’”

  “Well, well.”

  “Am I so dangerous?”

  “You’re a beauty. I’ll tell you a line Priscilla used to recite. I forget who wrote it. ‘A wandering beauty is a blade out of its scabbard. You know that, gentlemen of four score. (May you know it yet ten more.)’ You like it?”

  “Do you love me?”

  “Yes, I love you.”

  “Then I’ll go to sleep. I’m tired of Saikaku. And Thanksgiving. And cole slaw.”

  In these days, Merriwether, like some drunken Aeolus of feeling, could not control his emotional comings-and-goings. One minute, he felt he could give up Cynthia, could even go back to Sarah—that possibility had fallen out of her in one of their sessions, though he felt she made it only to assure herself she’d tried everything. Yet he could never be more than an uncomfortable brother to her, could never go to bed with her. When he hinted this, the black eyes turned in, the nostrils took in extra air. “I’m afraid I need more than that.” What did he expect?

  “Of course you do. We both do.” But the neural hyperbole of these days churned out a meaner version: The hangman thinks he’s a surgeon; he wants his victim’s gratitude, his adoration. He could not live with her except in a “live-and-let-live” house, this house. And it was already too late for that. Leslie Devereaux, a new Radcliffe Dean, a topologist, had made an offer for the house, too low in Merriwether’s opinion, but Sarah, impatient, even fearful, had accepted it. The only good thing about it was that Devereaux was black and a woman. That was a perfect redemption: the house had been partly built on slave-trade money. Historical irony was the classic consolation of defeat. All those Harvard war-makers of the sixties should be bathing in it. (He remembered the general relief when Mac Bundy was passed over for the Harvard Presidency, though he’d made a damn good Dean. Sic transit gloria Bundy went the joke, supposedly Finley’s, the Thucydides translator. There was historic irony.) That brilliant, brittle, problem-making, problem-not-quite-solving Bundy-Harvard touched Merriwether here and there, but it wasn’t his. That was English Harvard, the Peabody-Groton world (“to rule is to serve” transposed into “to serve is to rule”), the top grades, the top marriages into the old mill and banking families, the rouge et noir routes (law and social science these days) into Running Things. Into the ground. The intellectual motors rolled too fast, the world hardly had drugs enough to calm those fellows. He knew—slightly—and liked—slightly more—a few of them, Chip Boyd, Mac Frothingham. They made him feel dowdy, slow, even while catering to him, drawing him out. Great Drawers-Out. Perfect Foundation men. He was glad the house wasn’t going to them.