by Ann Beattie
As it was, he didn’t hear it. It was chitchat, chitchat. He sat there assessing me. In that, he was like his bride-to-be.Like a buzzard on a branch, Frank used to say about her, unkindly, and I’d say:They’re just little piggies, rooting around in the mud. What I meant was that when they misbehaved, they were just doing what they were programmed to do. The genes explain so much of it. Nina was programmed to be shy. Andrew was also shy, but shyness in men is called charming, and as he matured, he became more self-assured. You always sensed the conflict going on inside Nina’s head: should I; shouldn’t I. It was difficult to know what she really wanted. I don’t know ifsheknew, half the time. She knew she wanted to marry Mac—that she was definite about. And, as I might have expected, she did not want a big wedding. Who would she have invited? And there was to be no white bridal dress. She did everything she could to make the occasion as joyless as possible. She did not even consult her mother about her wedding. It wasn’t just Frank; she disliked me every bit as much. She looked down on me—her own mother—as if I was extraneous. She might have suggested the chrysanthemums to Mac. Why not? Why not have him bring extraneous flowers? I remember trying to talk to her. Unlike Andrew, when I tried to remind her of pleasant things that had happened during her childhood, she would look at me as if I was crazy. Who can believe that a child hated every moment of her upbringing? Even Dickens’s orphans didn’t have that bleak a life. Every day contains so many small, happy moments. Even when I dwelled in my mother’s fussy dollhouse of a bedroom, I had my rag doll under the bed, and I loved her.
Though I suppose that what Nina had was Andrew. More sibling rivalry might have given Nina some instruction about how better to get along in a complicated world, but she was no feminist, my daughter: she went from Andrew to Mac. They even looked alike.
Mac and Nina at their wedding, their expressions so radiant, as the cliche goes. They thought they would be together, always.
Andrew, intent upon finding someone to sleep with that night. You think I have a dirty mind? That the mother of the bride should notice only the loveliness of her daughter’s wedding day? Nina later said I embarrassed the family with my drinking—a few celebratory glasses of champagne! It was Andrew-on-the-prowl, not me, who took the whole ceremony down a notch. Nina was his Molly, I think.
She hardly ever contacted me after the wedding. The one time I saw their house was after the reception. The reception was held in some restaurant in the suburbs, but afterward a chosen few returned to Nina and Mac’s house. Wasn’t I lucky, to be selected? Maybe I wouldn’t have been, except that Andrew—tipsy as he was; I wasn’t the only one drinking—was always so attuned to my feelings. He was the one who extended the invitation. Such a small place. Their living room reminded me of my own childhood room, the way my room became empty and purely functional, after I’d rejected my mother’s clutter. It made me nostalgic. No—it made me sad. I went outside to get a breath of air. I was thinking of Molly, discarded by my insensitive mother. I only stopped being teary when I remembered that after all, there had been a good outcome: I had rescued her. But then what had happened?She had been in my hands, and then somewhere I had lost her. That was when Mary Catherine came down the path that separated Mac and Nina’s house from her own. She registered my sadness immediately: my sadness, amid such happiness. Her husband continued on to the party, and she and I stood for a while, talking. She had only been married a year or so, herself. I found it much easier to talk to a stranger than to my own daughter. In fact, meeting her made me realize what I had never had in a daughter. We just connected immediately. Naturally, she assumed I was so sad because I was losing a daughter, and she rushed to reassure me about what a nice man Mac was. As we went back into the yard and down the walkway, I had a strong premonition that it was the last time I would see her. That she was an angel—not really an angel, but some angelic presence that I would not be blessed with again—so that it seemed important to say a meaningful good-bye. I said that in my experience, it was rare to find a kindred spirit. “Don’t be sad,” she said. “You’ll visit often.”
I knew I would not.
“And I’m a good letter writer,” she said, taking my hand, as if she, too, knew that I would not be a welcome visitor.
She wrote with a fountain pen on cream-colored stationery. As with Helen Fox, something passed between us—in this case, a very pleasant, reassuring thing—that I did not completely understand, though I knew the bond was exceptional. I think we could have really become friends if Nina had not told Mary Catherine that she and I were not close. I can only assume that’s what happened, because pretty abruptly, the letters stopped. They were notes, really, not letters—more a flourish of handwriting, on her part, than realcommunications—but she never failed to say that Nina was well and happy. Maybe Mac brought his bride chrysanthemums, and they made her very, very happy. Maybe he was as wonderful as everyone said. I’m sure he did not interrogate Nina, in the guise of getting closer to her. All those questions about Nina’s childhood . . . who did he think he was? A psychiatrist? She was an ordinary child. Or, all right, she wasn’t an ordinary child. She chose to keep her father and me at a distance.
And then Mac died. For a long time, Mary Catherine didn’t write, though eventually she did write, to express her sorrow. She said that she felt guilty. That it made her uncomfortable that we’d written to each other behind Nina’s back. “What was the impulse that made me want to whisper behind her back, as if she were a child?” she wrote. I knew what it was. It was the message Nina secretly communicated, herself: that she was weak; that there were things she didn’t care to confront. She was both weak-and strong-willed: she never minded implying that she was a victim, while actually she schemed to have things on her own terms.
I didn’t answer Mary Catherine’s question. I didn’t write back and beg her to keep contact with me. Somehow, Nina had poisoned her, and I knew things would never be the same. If she wanted to break off contact, so be it. I did not weep, or take a drink, or try to make her feel guilty by pretending that without her letters, I would be bereft.
Though I did save her letters. Every one. As I had Frank’s. As was my way. Six or seven months after Mac’s death, I bundled them together and returned them to her. The returned letters must have made an impression, because soon afterwardshe did write, saying that she hoped I hadn’t thought she’d been hinting for their return. I responded, saying only that I wanted her to know that I had kept and valued them. Months passed and then, eventually, came a note, making no mention of Nina. I assumed the omission was her way of justifying our continued correspondence. Spring was beautiful in Cambridge, she said. Why do otherwise intelligent people think that mothers want to hear about the weather? Her husband had gotten a new job. She didn’t say what his job was. She was keeping things neutral, skating on the surface. At least I lived with some intensity; at least I didn’t make pointless remarks. Mary Catherine wrote that as soon as they saved a little more money, they planned to vacation in France.
Nina changes people. She makes them neutral. She makes them put on a false front. Well: I wouldn’t do that. If I wanted to have a drink, I had a drink, even if Miss Carrie Nation was present. If I had something to say, I said it.
It was just that I had so little to say. I wasn’t going to say, “How was your day, dear?” to a man who’d been screwing his nurse.
I never wrote back. As I see it, I broke off contact with Mary Catherine, not she with me. If someone is not interested in you, let them go, is my philosophy. Before I met Frank, the boy I intended to marry, Richard Crane, married, instead, a woman he hardly knew. We went to the jewelers to pick out my engagement ring and the next thing I knew, there was a tearful scene—don’t tellmemen don’t cry, not after the life I’ve led—and my fiancé was telling me that he’d fallen in love with the saleswoman. If you saw that as a scene in some Woody Allen movie, you might believe it. Butthen?The clerk called to tell him that the ring had been sized sooner than we’d expected. She was
laying a trap. When he returned for the ring, she made eyes at him. He admitted to me that she did. But how did she flirt so effectively that my future changed, without my even being present? You have such a thing happen once in your life, and you’ll always look at women in a different way. I tried to tell Nina that she needed to be on guard against other women. All she thought was that I was trying to instill paranoia. I suppose the advice was given too soon, and by the time she might have used it, she’d dismissed it from her mind. Nina was always more male-oriented, to tell the truth. I had to encourage her to make friends with other girls. Even a girl who needed a girlfriend so desperately, like poor Patty Arthur, wouldn’t have even had a visit from Nina, if I hadn’t insisted.
Richard Crane never delivered the ring to me, and when Frank proposed that same year, I refused to let him buy me an engagement ring. A plain platinum wedding band was fine. He was taken aback that I didn’t want a diamond, though secretly he must have been relieved. He was just starting out, and didn’t have much money. He probably thought I declined out of consideration for him. I look back, and I think my rejecting the engagement ring signified more than I knew. It also signified a more general reluctance—though my ambivalence made me even more captivating to Frank. My mother had become his biggest advocate. She thought he was a gift from heaven: the perfect mate for her daughter—in part, because she’d been so embarrassed about my broken engagement. She was so worried about what people would think. I could have told themwhat to think about a man so fickle, but everyone avoided the subject. No one asked me what went wrong.
There was a boy who all but asked me. He lived next door, with his mother. He was the person I felt most at ease with, so why didn’t I tell him the truth? He said that if I wanted to talk about it, he would keep anything I said secret. But I thought it best not to indulge my unhappiness, and to say only that Richard hadn’t been the man I thought. Steven was such a kind person. He gave me such a significant look when he said that he understood. Poor Steven: he’d always had delicate lungs and had never been able to play sports at school. He had a job as a clerk at the drugstore, though he didn’t go out on cold winter days. He didn’t have to, because his uncle owned the drugstore. Steven died of pneumonia the winter of my broken engagement. It made me so sad that I hadn’t told him what had really happened. It was as though I’d deceived him, and then he’d gone to the grave. I had nightmares. I’d be with him somewhere—that didn’t make any sense, because we never went anywhere: we only visited on his mother’s sun porch, or sometimes, on sunny days, in the backyard. In my dreams, he and I would be dancing, or walking in a field, and I would feel warm and good, because he and I had romantic feelings for each other, but that made no sense, either, since he only liked girls as friends. As we danced, Richard would always appear. I would see him far away, coming toward us, and in order to stop him from approaching, I would make up some lie, do whatever I needed to do to end the dance and say good night. But then Richard would reappear, somewhere along the way: he’d be looking out from behind a tree, or through the crack in somedoor. I would have to change my route, knowing all the while that I risked getting lost. No matter how lost I was, he would find me: once again I would see him in the distance, once again I’d take another path. It would go on for what seemed like hours—the same dream, the same anxiety, the same repetitive rerouting. I asked Frank what the dream meant, and he went on a tirade against Sigmund Freud! Frank did not want to analyze my dreams. He did not want to hear about any of my aches or pains, either—though of course it’s common for doctors not to treat members of their own family.
Poor Steven. He didn’t have much of a life. I’d cheated him by not telling him my story. My story was not very different from so many people’s, since broken engagements are as common as broken bones. I never told Frank about Steven. I just said that he was some person—some man I danced with in my dreams, but I never gave him a name. I’ve always regretted omitting his name. I read in the newspaper that Richard Crane died in a fire, and I didn’t even finish reading the obituary. Since I never knew the clerk’s name, I don’t know whether he married her, or someone else. I didn’t really care. Good riddance to a bad man.
Eventually, when he was old enough, I told Andrew about my past. That I married his father on the rebound; that I was drawn to him because he was more smitten with me than I with him. He really did want me to have a diamond ring, but after what happened to me, I didn’t even enjoy seeing engagement rings on other women’s fingers. It is interesting that Nina did not have an engagement ring, either.
Nina always shut me out. She’d mock me by telling mewhat my response was going to be before I even made it. Imagine having a child that impertinent and sarcastic. I’d take one drink, and Nina would leave the room. So what was she doing, off in somebody’s basement, photographing nude girls? What else could she have been doing, but pimping? I said to Frank: Do you think Nina was excited about naked girls? Do you think Miss Prim and Proper would have been there at all, if her brother hadn’t led her astray? I was astonished, myself, but unlike Frank, I realized that no girl would instigate such a thing. Why did Andrew want her so involved in his private life? She wanted him involved in the stories she wrote as a little girl; he wanted her involved in the enactment of his adolescent fantasies. And both of them, always happiest nestled in the same bed at night—though that’s what so many children do, drawing near each other for comfort.
So Frank was seeing that woman, too. That woman in whose basement our children were misbehaving. He got what he deserved for that. Maybe worse than he deserved. That was such a terrible time, when he was threatened with that lawsuit for attacking a child. I believed him when he said he harmed no one; that the daughter was lying just to cover her humiliation.
He never hurt our children. He would talk to them. He felt that it was necessary to let them know that there were certain expectations in our house.
One of which he didn’t talk about. That was that he could cheat on his wife.
The time finally came when I realized that I simply wasn’t valued for my contributions at home, so I thought: Why shouldn’t I go out and earn a paycheck? That was part of mythinking. The other part was that if I became a nurse, I could force Frank to get rid of his hussy. We could run our little mom-and-pop doctor’s office, with me at the front desk, and Frank in his office behind the examination room with its bay window and its grand mahogany desk. He kept a picture of me and the children on his desk. Most people do, but Frank selected the oddest picture: one of me, cutting the lawn, with Andrew doing something on the front step, playing with something, or repairing something, and Nina bending over, so you couldn’t see her face. I replaced it with a photograph I had taken at a department store, of the three of us smiling into the camera. He thanked me and took it to the office, but one time when I’d locked myself out of the house I went there, and he hadn’t put it out. But something told me not to ask, and as it turned out, it was good I didn’t: it had been displayed on his desk, but apparently fell to the floor when the office was being cleaned. The cracked glass cut the picture. After Frank died, someone sent me the photograph in the mail, and explained what had happened. Frank must have been brokenhearted, so he had taken it to be restored, but then he had forgotten to pick it up. It was so unexpected, receiving the photograph after his death. You hear of postcards from abroad that show up after the sender has died, but getting a photograph left behind in a store for—what? twenty years?—was quite amazing. The restorer must have called and told him to pick it up. Knowing Frank, it was amazing that he dropped it off; going to collect it would have meant running a second errand, and Frank didn’t do errands. I suspect they did call, and he just didn’t go.
I gave the picture to Andrew, when he visited. He listenedto my story and took the photograph in its envelope without even looking at it, and without comment. He was still sulking, after so many years, about being made to dress and pose for a professional photograph! And Nina: Nina had had to be d
ragged, kicking and screaming. She was so self-conscious. She always hated to look at pictures of herself. There was no photographer at her wedding. If one of the bridesmaids hadn’t had a camera, I would have no keepsake of that day.
Peter O’Malley, who taught the nursing course I took, was a charismatic teacher. He gave the instruction straightforwardly, but he picked his favorites in the classroom and indulged the select few. I was so pleased to be among them. Peter had spent fifteen years in nursing before he turned to teaching. I have always thought that to teach is a noble occupation. Frank, though, looked down on Peter because becoming a nurse was so much easier than becoming a doctor. Anyone I liked, Frank found fault with. He was always jealous, though I gave him no reason for jealousy. I did, however, love my time away from the house; I liked school because it had nothing to do with my family. I got off to a good start and was a dedicated student, but not too far into the course Andrew got sick with bronchitis, and my own bad stomach—my curse; it began to occur soon after Frank and I were married—forced me to miss more classes, until finally, even though I’d done the reading, I fell farther and farther behind. Reluctantly, I decided it was best to drop out and to take the class the following fall.
A gloom descended over me when I quit, though. I put the textbook in a drawer so I wouldn’t have to look at it. For a while, I let Frank think I was still attending school. When Idid explain, it was obvious that he was secretly gratified. It surprised me, though, to find out that Frank had phoned Peter to find out why I had fallen behind. Peter had never before received such a call from anyone’s husband. I’m not sure if Peter would have stayed in touch with me, if he had not called to report on Frank’s request, so at least, inadvertently, Frank did me a service. I was humiliated to have been checked up on, but I was happy to hear my teacher’s voice again. He was calling to ask if my inability to keep up had anything to do with his teaching. I told him that it did not. It was as I’d said: my son had gotten sick, and then I’d had some bad days, myself. I reassured him that I had enjoyed the classes. He didn’t want to get off the phone, I could tell. He persisted in asking if anything else was wrong. I reassured him that it was not, and told him that he could expect to see me the following year. We hung up, but he called back almost immediately and invited me for coffee the next day. He wanted me to come to a restaurant across from the school. He was such a nice, conscientious person. It was obvious that he had some lingering doubt that my dropping out might have been because of some inadequacy of his.