by Mary Gordon
Anne loved children’s performances if her children weren’t performing, but when Peter or Sarah was involved, she was in agony. As the curtain went up on Sarah’s number and she heard the first notes of “The Sugar Plum Fairy,” she gripped Michael’s hand in terror. Every time she touched him now, she wondered if the other woman touched him in that way. He smiled at her, patting her other hand. “Sarah will be fine,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
Six little girls dressed as snowflakes knelt in the middle of the stage, their noses to their knees. They were supposed to be sleeping. The angels came onstage. Sarah was the smallest of them, and the last. Her wings were much too big for her, and she looked not magical but comic. Her body was implacably earthbound; her halo sat on her head like a helmet. When she came to the middle of the stage to touch her snowflake with her magic wand, sprinkling her with spangles, she tripped and fell. Overbalanced by her wings, she couldn’t get up. Everyone onstage giggled, and the audience began to laugh. The little girls froze into their positions as the music ticked away. Suddenly Terri Blake lunged onto the stage and picked Sarah up roughly by the arm. The audience applauded. The music had stopped, but the dance was only half over. Taking her bow, Sarah was shaking with sobs. The great applause only made her cry more.
Let the theater blow up, let us all be buried alive in tons of rubble, Anne prayed, crying in her seat. The audience went on laughing and clapping. Sarah couldn’t get hold of herself. The more she sobbed, the more the audience clapped. Finally, the curtain was pulled roughly down.
Anne got up to go backstage.
“Stay here a minute,” Michael said. “Don’t let Sarah see you crying. I’ll go. You come later.”
He got out of his seat and disappeared into the darkness. On the stage was a young boy in a skeleton costume dancing to Saint-Saens. Anne couldn’t stop crying. She was glad that Peter, who had come later than they, was sitting with the Greenspans. Her child had been exposed. People had laughed at her. It was Sarah’s first experience in humiliation, and Anne felt the sting in her own body. But she must go to Sarah; it was Sarah who was important. She got out of her seat and walked backstage.
Sarah was on her father’s lap; he was wiping her eyes with his handkerchief. She had taken off her wings but not her halo. Michael smoothed her hair. They were both silent. Sarah still cried, but the shame was gone. She had her head on her father’s shoulder and they sat on in silence.
“Let’s go home,” said Michael. Anne put on Sarah’s coat. The three of them walked out into the cold, bright afternoon, like Union soldiers coming home from Shiloh.
They were driving to Jane’s. The trees, covered with icicles, shone unnaturally in the brilliant sun. The snow, which had melted, then re-hardened, glistened on the surface, the freezing air enlivened the plain slab of hard blue sky and even the most undistinguished shrub was interesting. Anne loved winter with its forced speed of the blood, since she saw herself as naturally indolent. At the center of her being she perceived a sleepiness, a torpor, a passivity, that in a climate always warm she knew would take her over, once and for all. She thought it was this passivity that had brought her to the decision to give up the hard thing she’d been cherishing, suspicion of her husband and the isolation it had forced her into. Simply, she couldn’t bear it anymore. She felt, when she breathed in or walked too quickly, a sense of wounding. But had she inflicted the wound herself, or had it been inflicted by her husband? She would never know. And what she had decided, seeing Michael with Sarah on the day of the recital, was that it was better that way. If she asked him, something real with solidity and mass would grow up between them. Better a vapor, which allowed at least the possibility that one of them could keep his honor. It was the way she wanted it to be; perhaps it was all she had courage for. She had done one courageous thing, had lived without him, had stayed at home to live a separate life while he went away. Why had she imagined that nothing would be risked and nothing lost in the arrangement? It was what her generation always did, expected everything and was always shocked, like children, when something had to be given up.
There was no model for her to consult. Of course she knew that there were marriages where infidelity was practiced and concealed, but what was missing there was intimacy: they were couples contracted to each other for some reason having to do with the outside world. And the marriages where everything was dragged out, discussed, where neither partner was allowed a private life, where any unshared thought was seen as a betrayal, lacked, in Anne’s mind, the dignity and the respect that she thought marriage called for and ought to bring forth. To know a person, to need him yet to leave him occasionally alone: this is what, she felt, they’d both believed in as the ideal for their marriage. It was what had made them able to agree to keep infidelities to themselves. So perhaps that was how Michael had acted. He was more consistent than she, and more stalwart. Perhaps he kept silence about what he had done to honor the ideal of their marriage. Perhaps he suffered now, knowing she had removed herself, but knowing that if he spoke he could only do damage to their idea of what they were. Sitting beside him, she felt infinitely sorry for both of them. Their position was so fragile and so tentative. Their absence from each other required that they live in an economy of scarcity, and scarcity took its toll. There they were, she and Michael, married, parents, living apart from each other, at the end of the twentieth century. Their marriage had no historical or social and certainly no religious significance. If it broke up, it was only a private misfortune, and not a rare one. It wouldn’t even be the worst thing; any bad thing that happened to the children would be much, much worse.
She thought of Caroline and even Jane and how different life was for them. The shape of things had meaning; they expected things to last. What would Caroline have done had she suspected infidelity? Perhaps it wouldn’t have bothered her, perhaps she thought it was simply the nature of things, of men. Or would she have indulged in some operatic accusing scene, which left after it the great blank peace of reconciliation?
Anne knew nothing of Caroline’s sexual history; she never spoke about sex or even romantic love in her journals. Was it because she thought it unimportant, or too important to commit to writing? She’d never mentioned anyone who might have been Stephen’s father. Neither Jane nor Ben had a clue. For all anyone knew, Caroline might have been ravished one night in an alley; or might have secretly been carrying on, for years, a liaison with her dearest friend. She kept her secret to the end, and her keeping it meant that she thought it was either of no importance or of the greatest. But whatever she thought, she’d acted, as she so often had, clearly, consistently, and with great force. Would she have despised Anne for being equivocal? Would Jane? But then, neither of them was really married. Jane was wedded, really, not to her husband but to his mother.
She tried to predict Jane’s response to Michael, but she couldn’t fix on one that would please her. She wondered if most wives wanted the people they admired to believe that their husbands weren’t good enough for them, the implication being that no one was. She supposed she didn’t actually want that. What she did want was for Jane to like her best. What a child I’ve turned into, she thought. But Jane’s regard for her was like a brilliant shield in which she saw herself enlarged and noble. She didn’t want to see the image of herself diminishing to a well-drawn miniature of the perfect couple, decorative and minor.
Nevertheless she was part of a couple. There were things she wanted to say only to Michael; things she could say only to him. She’d imagined a rich, figured cloth she would weave for him while they were together again; she could tell him about Caroline, about Jane. She could let him know what had happened to her life since Caroline had entered it. She could ask him things about the artistic climate of Paris in the early teens. She could explain to him the odd set of feelings she had about Caroline as a mother; how on some days she grieved for Stephen and her heart for Caroline became a heart of stone, she felt herself the accuser, bristling with justice. But on
some days, when she’d looked at one of the paintings or read a particularly engaging letter, she forgot about Caroline’s inadequacies as a mother. The image of the suffering Stephen faded in her mind, as it had so easily done in Caroline’s. What does that mean about me as a mother, as a scholar, she wanted to ask. And Michael was the one person she could ask, himself a scholar and the father of her children. But now, having felt all that she did toward him, she was shy. She didn’t know how to begin a conversation with him. She couldn’t pick up the thread. It occurred to her, though, that they had to talk about Laura. That was a practical issue; it affected, immediately, all their lives. Whatever the state of their relationship, they inhabited a family. And she needed his help.
Laura’s Christmas present had shown her that she would have to work hard to keep distant from her, yet to maintain a smooth relationship. She saw that her kindness to Laura—if it was that; more properly, she thought, it should be named cowardice—had been misinterpreted. It had happened to her all her life. She had been kind to people when they had wanted her to love them, so they felt betrayed. But it was worse with Laura. What she had felt for people, what they mistook for love, could have been anything from mild affection to disregard. But every day that Laura lived beside her in the house, she disliked her more. Some days, even the simplest civilities were grueling to her. Yet every time she turned away from Laura, she felt Laura’s yearning, like a furnace left on in a summer house. She knew that Laura craved love. But the best Anne could do was to keep herself from being cruel.
How could you keep yourself from wanting to do damage to the spy, the watcher at the window? For his knowledge could only be theft. She had to stop thinking that way. She needed Michael’s help.
“Tell me what you think of Laura,” she said.
“I think she’s kind of pathetic. Lonely, empty in some dreadful way. But that emptiness makes her good with the kids. She has a terrific amount of patience. People whose lives are really full aren’t the best with children. They don’t have that endless time that children need.”
“What a terrible thought. It can’t be true that children should be brought up by old people or idiots. They’d all grow up dreadful bores or greedy for attention.”
“I know. But I’m trying to make you feel better about living with someone who gives you the creeps.”
“Is it that evident?”
“To me it is.”
“What about to her?”
“Of course not. She’s in love with you.”
“Oh, Michael, don’t say that. That really gives me the creeps.”
“Don’t worry about it. I don’t think she lies awake dreaming of your sweet flesh. I’m sure it’s on a much higher plane.”
“That’s almost worse. Besides, I think she’s sleeping with Adrian. Should I get rid of her?”
“Who would you replace her with? And what would you do while you were finding someone? It wasn’t easy to get her.”
“The truth is I need her. I can’t get this work done without her. And she is good with the kids. They seem fine, don’t they?”
“Never better. They’re much more independent of you. Which is great by me. How about you?”
“I don’t notice it, so it must be all right.”
“In any case it’s only another five months. Then you’ll have me to contend with.”
“That will be awfully nice,” she said, wishing she could have said it purely.
She moved toward him. Give me a sign, she cried out to him silently, let me know that you haven’t been with anybody else. But his eye was on the rearview mirror; they were about to be overtaken by a truck.
“Have you met any nice people working at the gallery?” he asked.
“No, they’re all horrible. They think I’m Ben’s mistress and that’s why I’m doing the catalogue.”
“It’s only because you’re beautiful,” he said proudly. “Men suspect a woman if she’s beautiful.”
“And hate her if she’s not.”
“Actually, men prefer their colleagues plain. It’s part of Hélène’s great success.”
It was the first time Michael had said anything even mildly negative about Hélène. Was it his gift to his wife? Was he acknowledging that Hélène had done mischief? Was he, with great tact, telling her he knew she had suffered, and that he was sorry? Even the imagination of his act brought her closer to him. And it had pleased her to hear him call someone she disliked plain. It was so complicated, it was almost comic—all that life between the sexes, all that must be left unsaid. She looked out the window. They had crossed a river. Icy patches broke and moved across the water like slow gray boats.
Jane stood with Ben in the doorway blinking, for the sun on the snow was dazzling, dropping rich disks like jewels onto the flat whiteness of the yard. No one, it seemed, had walked there, not an animal or a bird; it was a stretch of surface and of light. Anne envied Caroline and people who could understand, in an instant, the implications of that small space, who could make relations come to be where she saw none, and could do it without ever searching after language.
Coolly, Jane surveyed Michael. It was as Anne’s husband she surveyed him first. Anne saw Jane’s eye flick from her to Michael, back and forth, like a bird choosing branches. She cast on them her searching intelligent look, the look that always surprised Anne when she met it, for it was the look of a dark-eyed person, yet Jane’s eyes were in fact a light gray-brown. Looking at those eyes directly, you could imagine them easily weeping. But looked at by them, you had the impression of being fixed by a sharp, precise instrument. Having looked at Michael as Anne’s husband, Jane, Anne could see, encountered him simply as an attractive man. She must always have known herself to be a beauty, must always have known—it would have marked the end of childhood for her—that the glance she directed toward a man would be returned with pleasure. Anne watched Michael smiling back at Jane with no fear in his eyes. She saw the gallantry, which must have something of relief in it, bestowed on a beautiful old woman by a young man. The relief because they knew nothing was expected of them as the hale, prize animals they were, that their power would not be put to the test. She pitied the situation of men; no wonder they were so often vengeful.
“My dear boy, what a fine sight you are,” said Ben, embracing Michael. “This is Jane, whom you have doubtless heard of.”
Jane gave her hand to Michael and welcomed him to her house.
“I feel like a bit of an interloper here, as if I were the only one who didn’t speak the language,” Michael said.
“How did you come by such becoming modesty?” said Jane, cocking her head flirtatiously. “Handsome young men don’t usually see the need of modesty. There’s no profit in it for them. It must be that living with Anne has brought out your finer instincts. Let me show you my house.” She took Michael’s arm, leading him through the door in a way that told the others clearly that she did not want them to follow.
“How was Christmas, darling?” Ben asked, pouring her a glass of wine.
“I’m a fool about Christmas. I get caught up in it every time. Isn’t it funny how some ages were good at some holidays, like Christmas in the Middle Ages. The Renaissance was better at Easter. The nineteenth century had marvelous Fourth of Julys.”
“What are we good at?”
“I don’t know. Nothing, really. Did you have Christmas with Jane?”
“Oh, yes. The two of us and Betty the Basher and her children. Very edifying.”
“What was she like with her children?”
“Afraid to cross them. They’ll obviously grow up tyrants. She’ll never be able to correct them, she’s so appalled at what she’s done.”
“How do you go on, knowing you’ve done something unforgivable?”
“Oh, darling, I don’t know. I’ve always been put off by the workings of human beings. That’s why I went in for paintings. All that marvelous surface.”
“Were you in touch with your family on Christmas?”
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br /> “Yes, certainly. They all sent cards. Of course, my children have been middle-aged for years: they’ve been on their own for ages.”
Anne could never comprehend Ben’s detachment from his family. It saddened her, frightened her, perhaps most of all disoriented her that a man so richly, fully human, such a splendid friend, could be entirely devoid of family feeling. When Ben spoke of his family, she always wondered if one day her children would speak of their family like that. She had thought it would be Peter, but as the children aged, it became clear that Sarah was in far less need of her family than her brother was. Sarah never presented her mother with a soul open and bleeding; always there was some reserve. Some self-protection, some self-nourishment. If anything happened, it would be Peter who would remember and mourn.
“In working on the diaries,” she said, “I’ve found a reference to an article Caroline wrote for a magazine that Stephen briefly published.”
“My dear, I’m utterly astonished. How unlike her to write something for public consumption about her painting. I wonder why she did it.”
“Well, it was Stephen’s magazine.”
“Ah, yes, Caroline always loved mixing generosity with some project that smacked of self-reliance.”
“Come and have lunch,” said Jane, bursting into the room. Her ten minutes with Michael had made her ten years younger. Laughing, she poured soup, cut bread, served salad, drank her wine. How nice it all is, Anne thought, the four of us together. Perhaps we should all live together. The children would love it, and the older people wouldn’t have to be afraid of a future of boredom and loneliness. Quickly she ate a piece of bread. Whenever she drank too much, she contemplated asking people to move into her house.