Sometimes, at night, behind closed doors on the third floor, rehearsing future solitude, he’d wake, loneliness so thick in him, he found himself calling out, “No, no, no, no, no.” It was going to be this way. What would happen if he had a heart attack and couldn’t reach the phone? This must be why people went into nursing homes. And then, George and Esmé, they’d wake up and know he was not there, Dad, the Fire-Douser, Burglar-Chaser, Blood-Stancher, Hugger-and-Soother. His first memory of his own mother was waking with some dream terror, desperate for her, calling out, and she’d come in from guests, he remembered her dress under his cheek, scalloped flops of silk, her softness, oh Mama. He’d been spared loneliness. Sometimes Tom Fischer called, voice hoarse from disuse, embarrassed at his helplessness; it was that. Now he understood the eagerness of the bachelors and widowers at the Faculty Club for the company lunch.
He had Cynthia, yet, as much as he loved her, delightful as it was with her (playing gin rummy, reading aloud, watching the midnight television interviews with transvestite lawyers and lady blacksmiths, watching her draw off her shirt, the soft half-moons of her body, making love), they could not live in the same apartment; their systems were contrary. They liked different music, different breakfasts, were different about heat—she turned radiators on, he off—about mealtimes (he was leisurely, she ate where she cooked, standing up at the stove). And she was still so fragile, she suffered so from the slightest slight or suspicion of it, the classic girl of high intelligence rocked by, well, yes, males like himself—and worse. He noticed the studies of Radcliffe girls of high intelligence doing worse than girls at Bryn Mawr or even Vassar. The fear of success. Broken girls. Who—half the time—broke those who broke them. “I’ll be rattled on that emotional roller coaster. I’ll be cackling in her road show.” Yet, without Cynthia, he would enter the lists of Cambridge hostesses, be hung on the local Availability Hooks. Impossible. He couldn’t endure the deferrals, the expense, the stupidity of courtship. No matter how minimal the sexual signal system, it would be consumptive, humiliating. He came back to Sarah, the pre-furious Sarah, decent, straight, generous; to the idea of growing old beside her, every event dipped into memory. The deepest feelings grew down where the nerve foliage reddened, the dendrite thicket. No new relationship could ever have that. It would take twenty years with Cynthia, though she was a girl of exceptional emotional depth. Even now, twenty-two, her memories were the richest part of her life. Her dream life, her fantasy life, was the past; the scenes were Carolina beaches, her grandmother’s room (helping braid her hair, smelling her sachet); her memories of school triumphs were more powerful than her ambitions. Was it because love for him deflected them? Or because she had that poetic temperament which early accumulates so much that most of life is just finding a way to spend it. Or was this the wish of a benevolent tyrant? Maybe she’d only become what she could if he’d leave her. If she left him. She said that would kill her. It wouldn’t. Yet people hardened around their wounds; abandoned and abandoning women turned into the belles dames sans merci, their children into Lola-Lolas.
A silvery comma of moon hooked in the capillary thorns of the acacia. His tree. His view. His street, his house. He’d wanted to die here. The children’s children to die here. This time next year, a young Devereaux would be looking at this tree-hooked moon.
Where would he be? Sarah had already looked at places. He’d been to one apartment she’d picked out. A condominium on Temple Street. He’d insisted on seeing where the children would be living. “That’s fine with me. Come along.” They drove over together one snowy afternoon to a long chocolate box of a building with the shameful-secret look of a nineteenth century shoe factory or prison. There was a scrub lot across the street, and some old, washed-out, Ashcan School frame houses. The apartment was on the top—fourth—floor. (There was no elevator.) The present tenant was either a masochist or a Spanish priest. The place was dark, velvety, the walls filled with yellowy Christs, hung in angular wooden misery on long crosses; the tables were covered with missals, rosaries, monographs with red crosses on them, teak figurines of deformity and mouth-twisted transcendence. Three small bedrooms, a half-kitchen, the velvety living room, a sunless sun parlor. Merriwether felt impaled. “You want the children to do penitence for us?”
It was the wrong tone. Sarah, a bulge in an ugly herringbone suit under her tackiest cloth coat, had had too many years of such repudiation. Her plump, scraped cheeks went red, the eyes were black nails. “This is what we can afford. You made it clear we’re not going to be millionaires.”
The place was dense with heat. The penitent didn’t reserve his suffering for the walls; it was a rehearsal for hellfire.
“You’re going to be well off, Sarah. You can afford almost any place in Cambridge.”
“I’ve heard that little aria for years. Then I buy a dishwasher, and you shake like a leaf.”
“I didn’t realize that. But it’s your money now.”
“You’re darn right. I’ve earned it.”
“Ok. And we owe it to the kids. They’re used to something special. And Albie and Priscilla have to have places to stay when they come home.”
“Lots of people put up with bunk beds. Or we can get rollaways. We’re just not going to be as comfortable as we were. The sooner everybody knows this, the better they’ll be.”
“I won’t let them live here, Sarah. If I had any say, I wouldn’t want you to live here. Please don’t even show them the place.”
She turned and went down to the car. But he knew her; she’d changed her mind.
One minute helplessness, the next minute the Efficiency Queen herself. “When are you getting those papers signed? If you’re going to sell the garden to the Bowens, you have to do it before January first. Get on the ball.” Sullivan was at her—telephonic—side, the real estate agent was on the wire half the day. “You better quit dragging your feet.”
Then he would hear her on the phone with Albie, asking absurdly naive questions—“How do you go about getting a mover, dear?”—to show she was a weak woman in need of help. She leaned on the children while pretending to support them.
In his way, he did the same thing. So he’d keep George on his lap, explaining things to him beyond his capacity or patience. “The anthropologists—they study human societies—have found out that people who treat babies gently, feed them on demand, hold them against their bodies, turn out completely different from people who make babies cry a long time before feeding, keep them on hard floors—” till George would wriggle off. “I’ve got to finish my model before supper, Daddy.”
There was no pattern in their feelings. They’d be alone in the breakfast room, he reading the Times and eating the instant oatmeal with the lump of maple sugar (he made it himself now). He would look up from an account of IRA bombs in a Belfast theater and find her eyes on him. “You’ve dehumanized me.” It was shivering, he had not heard the internal monologue out of which it spilled, he couldn’t speak, managed only to grip the paper hard and get out of the room.
He discovered he could hate her. Forty-two years old, he’d never felt genuine hatred before. Except, perhaps, once, as a boy, when it was mixed up with fear of a squat hater-fighter he’d finally fought, the only real fight of his life. Derek Lobel, a mean, bespectacled rich boy, now he’d classify him as a psychopath, then he was just a terrible-tempered, resentful sac of fat and hatred. But that was brief, without meaning; now, inside, he felt a kind of metallic hollow which something struck. The throb was hatred. The feeling Hitler had for Jews, a black boy for the white boy who insulted him. He hated Sarah who hated him. He wanted her hurt. She was driving him from everything he loved, she’d sent him into the sexual desert—Sarah was Sahara, he’d never thought of it before. When he found water, she pounced, her chance to revenge herself. For what? His tyranny. The whole culture of tyranny. Merriwether felt the hatred leaking out in the rhetoric, but he felt weak with it, shriveled up, the room was airless, he opened the window, then the storm
window, and took in cold air. Monsters. They were both monsters. Inside them both was every animal in the zoo. Out of each other they brought tigers, wolves, baboons. How could he have thought for a minute they could live together? The one relief of it all would be freedom from her. This was what divorce was about.
Up in the third floor room, fatigued beyond ability to sleep, Merriwether felt a kind of pride: he was feeling things people were supposed to feel. Forty-two and emotionally he was a fetus. “About time I felt something more than hunger for dinner.” Not that he hadn’t felt tenderness, sorrow, passion, love, even despair, but if he’d been asked if he’d felt the feelings of the people he read and heard about or watched on newsreels of the war, he’d have answered, “Of course not.” He’d never married his mother or ripped out his eyes with a brooch, or, thank God, lost a child (though fear of that brought him as close to the depths as anything). He’d regarded the feelings of the Lears and Antonys as emotional frenzies, seizures, hallucinogenic discharges in the pre-frontal lobe, overflows unrelated to real life. There were physiological checks and balances to protect the system from such feelings (the delayed manufacture of angiotension without which there’d be permanent hypertension, a killer in every heart). Yes, but now he’d felt for a minute what Hitler was like, and there was strange, maybe compensatory pride in it. Surely the Lears came out of such moments. Who knows if they wouldn’t light his way into some bio-chemic equivalent. This was too much. Ridiculous. “I’m prescribing divorce for the comfortable: turn in your misery and collect the Nobel Prize. The scientist’s Las Vegas.”
Sarah found an apartment above the Davisons’. She was registered with all the agents in Cambridge; it got around the science circuit, and Mary Davison told her about the apartment upstairs. “It’s a nice place,” Sarah told Merriwether. “You won’t feel the children are degraded by it.”
Merriwether knew the Davisons’ place, it was pleasant and in the heart of Cambridge, that is the Harvardian heart. He refused the casus belli in “degraded.” “That’s a big load off us. I’m very happy.”
“It’s a bargain. You’ll enjoy that.”
“It’s your money anyway, Sarah.”
“Well, you can have some for your place.”
The old decency. “Thank you, Sarah. I think I’ll manage, but thank you.”
The idea of an apartment, the word itself, had a claustrophobic aura to one who’d almost always lived in houses, but the children would adapt rapidly. And it was a comfort to know Davison was near by. If not an absolutely whole part of the continent, he was at least peninsular; he could dial a phone.
A few days later, Davison came up to him in the laboratory. There was an Olympian throat-clearing, the blue eyes went over Merriwether’s head to some Davisonian horizon point (it probably looked like a ribosome belt and Merriwether himself like some amino block to be hoisted onto the difficult building process of Davison’s daily life). After a relishing moment, a bit cruel, Merriwether wound up the pulley. “Sarah told me Mary told her about the apartment. I’m very grateful, John.”
This pumped Davison free of his tension. “Yes, we heard about you and Sarah splitting the—the blanket.”
Could a good heart have such foul discharges? Merriwether conceded to it, conceded to his own relief at talking with someone else about the business. “Yes, we’re getting a divorce.”
“That’s tough.”
“Yes it is, John. But there it is. We’re not telling people yet because the younger kids don’t know.”
“I understand that. I’ll keep it close to the chest.” Whom could Davison tell? He was the least gossip-prone man in Cambridge.
“I’d appreciate it, John.”
“Count on me.” Davison was getting restless. They were both in white smocks, it meant work, there was much to do. Davison arched a giraffian neck, his scopes called. Still, he didn’t know how to get loose. “You found a place?”
“Not yet,” said Merriwether. He was having a little trouble now himself. “Any ideas?”
What a question. Davison looked hammered. Still, questions were questions. The eyes turned back from nucleotidal graphs to the exotic subject of housing. For a moment, he remembered something about the apartment upstairs, then remembered more. There was quite a pause. Merriwether said, “If you or Mary hear of a nice, smallish place, let me know.”
“Sure will, Bobbie. I’ll tell Mary tonight.” Then a marvelous tunnel opened up to him. The long face lit with intelligence. “Seen that report on microtubular protein in Science?”
“No, I haven’t. Good stuff?”
“First rate,” and Davison launched into colchicine-binding, axoplasm, vinblastine precipitates and phosphate buffers. Merriwether had to interpose, or rather, withdraw. “I’ll look it up, Johnny. Thanks for mentioning it.”
“Yes, tell me what you think.” He was off, but a vestige of the social worm must have nipped him. The long white back spun around at the door. “I’m awfully sorry, Bobbie.” He scooted off. It was a terrific thing; Merriwether—mentally—embraced him.
Not everyone came through so well. In his skinned, semi-paranoid alertness, Merriwether reassessed everyone by the reactions to his news. Maxim Schneider was the first disappointment. The Schneiders had a garage thirty feet in back of their house. Its second floor was a lovely apartment. A graduate assistant had lived there five years and Merriwether had learned at a faculty meeting he was going off to Chicago. That night he called Max.
“I’ve got some news, Max.”
“You’ve won the Nobel Prize.” Max was a telephone boomer. Though under the boom, Merriwether’s radar sensed a Max-ish fear. Since he’d moved into the history of science, Max became exceptionally alert to and nervous about his friends’ scientific accomplishments. That wasn’t rare, of course; but nearly everyone succeeded in training himself out of resentment at friends’ triumphs. Max, however, remained particularly alert to Merriwether’s not lengthy list of honors. (Perhaps he was one of Max’s coordinates of accomplishment.)
“Not yet, Max,” but said with enough gravity to penetrate the boom.
“Something wrong, Bobbie?” This was the warmth of friendship.
“I guess you’ll feel that way. It’s about Sarah and me. We’ve been having trouble for quite a while. We’ve decided to get a divorce.”
“Whew.” A good pause. They had spent so many happy times together, almost always as families. “I’m overcome, Bobbie. I mean we knew your style was, well, New England, you weren’t demonstrative people. We just thought you a measure of our vulgarity. Still do. I’m just thrown.”
“You never know about people inside their walls. We weren’t phony with you. We always had good times with you and showed it. But we’ve not been the way you and Jeanne are. As I think you are.”
“I guess not. I’m so sorry, Bobbie. I don’t know what Jeannie will say. We’ll do anything for you.”
For years now, as his marriage unglued, Merriwether was conscious of the marital “we.” He thought of it as an American shield against suspicion (of loneliness, debauchery, homosexuality, eccentricity). “We went,” “We saw,” “Josie and I,” “Jeanne and I.” Was it a proud flag of dependence or did the connubial pair exist only as a pair, as colonial animals exist only as colonies? Maybe it stood for genuine need for the absent partner. He had certainly used it, perhaps years after there’d been small love behind it.
“We can take the children for a while, Bobbie. Maybe you and Sarah would like to go off by yourselves to think things over. Whatever.”
“That’s wonderful of you, Max. I think we’re beyond repair. There is, though, something you might be able to help with. You know, we’re both going to have to have places to stay. Sarah’s found a condominium, right above the Davisons’, but it occurred to me that with Mitchison leaving for Chicago, your garage apartment might be free. It’s so lovely there, and set apart—we wouldn’t need to be in each other’s hair. And there’d be room for the kids to stay over.”
“That’s right, Mitch is leaving. Not till September though. He’s going to finish up his phage stuff this summer. That would be quite a wait for you.”
Merriwether felt, or thought he felt, a negotiating briskness imposed on the sympathy. “I could hole up in a motel for a while.” He was pushing now, against his grain, for it was suddenly clear to him that it would be an embarrassment for the Schneiders to have the shorn Merriwether living right there as a kind of memento of domestic death for their children, or themselves. “Maybe it would be a mistake, Max.” Another crudity.
“I don’t know, Bobbie. I do think Jeanne has people asking for it. I think the graduate students consider it a sort of plum. But I’ll ask her tonight and let you know. I do wish we could make this business easier for you. Both of you.”
It was a decency, but Merriwether felt it as an embellishment, more as a wall between Acceptable Merriwether and Merriwether-Pariah. A paranoid (he’d grant that) Pariah. He felt angry, he felt low, he felt betrayed, and all these even as he felt his own unreasonableness. Would his children feel the breeze of subtle pariahdom? This wasn’t Beverly Hills were almost every child had step- and double stepparents. All right, maybe it would save his children from unthinking ease. Though contemporary life was fuller of stories about The Children of Broken Homes, “It’ll work out, Max. Thanks anyway.”
Other Men's Daughters Page 16