by May Sarton
“I can’t see that I made a joke,” Ned said stiffly. “But I’m always happy to amuse you.”
“You are the joke,” Anna said, still smiling. “You are such an absurd man.” She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. “But you are quite right. The piano does need tuning.”
Chapter XIII
Anna’s moment of rage and acute grief on the weekend had released pent up powers. Even Protopova was for once pleased with her work on the Kindertoten lieder. The Fauré songs she had sung many times and they hardly needed work. And at Anna’s suggestion they spent two mornings trying out some works she might consider for future concerts: three Beethoven songs, a setting by Duparc of Baudelaire, and finally Glück’s Orpheus.
There were fittings for a new dress. The question of dress for the morning musicales did present a problem. Anna felt more at ease in a long dress, but this time she had found a cocktail dress, panné velvet of a rather subtle shade of lavenderish blue that she could feel at ease wearing at eleven in the morning … if only Dallas was not in the middle of a heat wave!
It was one of those weeks when Ned had several business or professional dinners, as well as a game of tennis with Johnny, so Anna invited Teresa over one evening for a homey meal at the apartment, fettucini and a salad. Getting it ready was rather fun. Fonzi, who had a neurotic fear of the slippery kitchen floor, lay at the doorsill with his nose just over the edge, hoping for a taste of something before she was through. And Anna talked to him while she worked.
“Aren’t you glad we don’t have to go to a boring dinner and talk about money, Fonzi? Poor Ned! But why do I say that, Fonzi? You and I know that he loves it. It’s his life, after all. It’s what he knows everything about and people come from all over the world just to find out what Ned thinks is going to happen. Will we have a recession? What is to be done about bonds? Imagine knowing the answers to all that, Fonzi!”
Fonzi looked rather anxious, not about the market, but as to whether the piece of cheese he knew was still on the counter would vanish before he had a taste.
“I haven’t forgotten you!” And Anna cut the cheese into five little pieces, “even though we have to admit you are a stout little dog and hardly in need of food!”
Anna and her mother were apt to meet at lunchtime so it seemed quite an occasion to be having supper together here in the apartment. And Anna, who rarely thought much about such things, enjoyed setting the table with beautiful Chinese plates, the best Steuben glasses, and as centerpiece a few tiny yellow roses.
“There, Fonzi, we are ready.”
Anna was standing at the window looking out at the Common and its twinkling lights far below, wondering if the apartment would ever really feel like home. After two years it still felt unlived in, unloved in, she found herself saying. And she knew the warmth had to come from inside … would it ever? There was love—she didn’t doubt that—but it was in a strange way not operative.
“Oh, Mama,” she opened the door to Teresa’s buzz and enfolded the slight figure in a bear hug. “I’m so glad to see you!”
Teresa extricated herself and laughed. “You don’t have to strangle me to tell me that, do you?”
Anna lit the fire, for Teresa was shivering, and explained that there was an icy wind outside. “There, sit in the little chair and warm your hands while I make the drinks. The usual for you, Mama?”
“Oh, any old wine you might have open—you know me!”
While Anna was in the kitchen Teresa patted Fonzi and looked around. For some reason this room had never felt like Anna and she had often wondered what was missing. Of course it was all in frightfully good taste, but where did Anna really live? In the music room, maybe. They had sacrificed a guest room so that Anna could have her baby grand and a place to work.
“Well, you are looking like yourself, I’m glad to see,” she said when Anna came back.
“And that means like a tramp?” For Anna had on an old pair of slacks and a blue turtleneck sweater.
“No, darling one, I meant looking on top of things for a change, less like a beaten dog, more like …”
“Not like a beaten dog, Mama, surely not,” Anna broke in. “I’ve never been a beaten dog!”
“You looked dimmed … I don’t know … it made me quite anxious. Did that knockdown fight you mentioned really help? It puzzles me that you seem to think anger is a good thing.”
“Does it?” Anna frowned. “I guess I think anything open and played out is healthier than anything closed off and buried.”
“I wonder …”
“Ned said awful things to me, Mama. He said I was selfish.”
Teresa smiled. “Sometimes you are selfish …”
“Mama!”
“Well, aren’t you? You put your music first, after all. I can see that a husband might feel that was selfish.”
“Damn it, Mama, he knew that when he married me!” Anna got up. “It is not selfish to serve an art! You sound like Mrs. Fraser!”
“God forbid!”
“Never mind,” Anna pushed her hair back with an impatient gesture and sat down again, “What I wanted to say when I got sidetracked was that—this will shock you, but I can’t help it—I was glad he said all the things he did. There was a real excitement in our shouting at each other. It cleared the air, and the proof is that we are not as irritated as we were. When he got so angry I really loved him.”
“Well, all I can say is that you are a strange woman.”
Teresa had always been honest with her daughter. The strength of their relationship rested partly on that. Anna knew exactly where she was with her mother; she knew that she was accepted totally, but also that her mother was quite clear about faults and shortcomings.
“What I can’t stand is the way Ned hides from me and from himself. I feel so baffled, Mama, when he is cold and I don’t know what I have done!”
“What you have done is to be critical and angry. Isn’t that so, my little dragon?”
Anna looked up, met her mother’s perceptive eyes, and smiled a rueful smile. “Maybe so. Sometimes I think I should never have married. I’m such an impossible person.”
“Possible, but improbable,” Teresa chuckled and Anna laughed.
“What makes the anger, Mama? Why am I so angry?” Anna regretted the question as soon as she had uttered it. Why go naked? “Why am I so vulnerable?” she whispered.
Teresa was silent for a moment. “I often asked myself that question when you were small … it seemed then as though whatever you wanted you wanted almost too intensely. You reacted to any frustration so fast, like lightning.”
“I know. That rabbit at Filene’s. I made an awful scene when you wouldn’t get it for me.”
“It was five-feet high, Anna!”
Anna couldn’t help laughing and Teresa laughed too, till tears streamed down their cheeks while she spoke in gasps “You lay on the floor, screaming …” then she pulled herself together. “Why are we laughing? It was appalling, an unforgivable scene. I was dreadfully embarrassed.”
“Poor Mama, I was a handful …”
“A handful? You were an armful! More … a trained elephant could not have controlled your passion at times.” She drank the end of her wine and set the glass down thoughtfully. “Your father diagnosed it as a kind of illness, a fit, as it were.”
“Did he? Oh dear …” This Anna had not heard before. “Cold, angry people can never understand hot, angry people. Father hadn’t the foggiest idea what I was all about. What I needed was love not punishment.”
“Yes, I think I knew that—but darling, it is quite hard to love someone who screams at you! And your father was such a reserved man himself.”
“The screamer is always wrong,” Anna felt a burning shame inside. “I suppose that is why I am so vulnerable … I know I am awful but I can’t help it. It’s part of me, don’t you see? Without it I couldn’t sing as I do.”
“When you are angry your eyes are black, black, not blue.”
&
nbsp; “Are they?”
“And I have sometimes imagined that blackness was the daimon in you taking over, the daimon you can’t control.”
“And never expect.”
“Should the daimon be tamed? Can the daimon be tamed?” Teresa said gently. “It’s not easy to be you, is it, Anna?” She reached over and took Anna’s hand and held it in her two.
“Compassion, Mama,” Anna had tears in her eyes. “You feel it because you are my mother. Ned can’t.”
“When you are attacked it is not easy to feel compassion for your attacker, Anna. Do you feel it for him?”
“Sometimes I do. I do when I see his mother and realize how awful his childhood was. I do when he says he can’t give … it seems so terrible not to be able to give.”
“He does, Anna. In his own way.”
“Mama,” Anna sat up straight, severe suddenly. “He can’t say a loving word. He has never given me a lover’s present. He can’t even wish me luck before a concert!”
“Well, it’s hard for you. I can see that. You are such a verbal person and it’s so easy for you to express your feelings, but that is the way he is, Anna. He is not going to change.”
“I know. I know that. That is why I am in pain so much of the time, beating my head against a wall …”
“Let me say just one thing, Anna, and then we must have something to eat. I’m starving.”
“Go ahead … improbable I may be, but I have made you a delicious supper.”
“I have sometimes thought that you need someone to battle, that your nature demands someone to be pitted against. And that is why, perhaps, you fell in love with Ned. Would you want to be married to an adorer who gave you all you wanted without question?”
“He says all my friends are sycophants! He thinks that is what I do want—and because he thinks that, he buttons himself up against ever praising me. It’s mean.”
“I wonder …” Teresa was thinking this over. “I think you forget, Anna, what a powerful personality you are. Perhaps he is afraid he will be simply taken over altogether if he yields, even a little.”
At this Anna laughed, it seemed so preposterous. Most of the time she felt if not weak exactly, so set outside what anyone could love or want. Powerful? But she had come to the end of what she could say to her mother and went out into the kitchen and got the meal together, and for the rest of the evening it was a little bask of pleasure, pleasure in the fettucini, in the wine, and in sharing it for once.
Over coffee by the fire, Anna said, “It’s awful how I never see you, Mama! I seem to be always running these days … there’s never time for anything except work. I’m on a roller coaster—after Dallas the same program in San Francisco ten days later!”
“It’s all beginning to happen, isn’t it? All you have worked for, all you have dreamed.”
“What I dream of now is singing Orpheus, in London, maybe Glyndebourne.”
“In the past two years you have grown—you seem to be in touch with greater powers, deeper. I think Ned is good for you.”
“A healthy struggle—if we don’t both die of it!” Anna laughed.
They talked a few moments then about Dan Weaver, Anna’s accompanist, a young man just emerging from years at the conservatory.
“I think he rather enjoys these concerts, at least as an interim. He needs the money. And one of these days he’ll be off and away on his own career. Meanwhile I am lucky to have him.”
“And Ned is not jealous?”
“Of course not. Dan has a friend, a tenor. He’s quite safe, Mama.”
“Good.”
“And he’s very courteous and helpful. Besides we laugh at the same things, play scrabble—he’s a charming companion.”
It was time for Teresa to go. Anna called a cab and went downstairs with her to see her safely off. “Thanks, Mama,” Anna said, kissing her mother goodbye.
Fonzi looked very disappointed when she got back. He wagged his tail furiously and barked. Anna picked him up and kissed his nose, “You have to wait, little dog, I wish I could take you for a walk but I can’t. It’s too dangerous. So we just have to be patient.” She set him down and went into the kitchen to tidy things up. It was nearly ten and Ned should be home soon.
Anna, as usual when she had had a talk with her mother, was feeling happy, at ease with herself, and when Ned came home she ran to the door and kissed him.
“Cold outside,” he said, slipping his coat off. “Let’s put another log on the fire. I could do with a brandy.”
“Let’s have one. Let’s talk. I want to hear all about your dazzling dinner party!”
“Dazzling, it was not. No all male dinner party is ever dazzling,” and Ned lifted his glass to Anna. Then he threw a log on the fire making a shower of sparks as it landed. Anna waited for him to get settled and put his feet up. She sensed that he too was feeling cheerful.
“It was rather an interesting evening, I must say. With the world economy in such a state, there’s room for a lot of theorizing, a lot of speculation …”
“Do people ever come into it—the speculation—or is it all about gold?”
“It’s all about people, Anna. The Third World is made up of millions of people existing way below the poverty level. And this has to be changed or we will all eventually go under. But try to tell that to the South Africans!”
“You really are powerful, aren’t you?”
“Oh, we’re small potatoes, and we have no overseas capital.”
“Then why do these German banks and English banks come into the picture?”
“Because we have some of the same problems. The French banks are about to be nationalized—that has sent a shiver through the financial world.”
For once Ned was willing to talk and Anna listened, happy to be included, happy that he would even try to explain his preoccupations. This was the Ned she rarely saw and hardly knew. He spoke quietly but she sensed the intensity of his commitment, as though thinking for Ned became a kind of electricity, an electric current, joining him up to a whole world. This was where he could feel fully himself as she did when she sang. He talked for quite a while, then he poured himself another brandy. “That’s enough about that,” he said. “How was Teresa? Did you have a good talk?”
“Yes, we did, Mama is the most truthful person I know.”
“She’s certainly a contrast to my mother,” he said grimly. “You know I think a lot about your childhood.”
Then Anna suddenly laughed, “Mama reminded me that I had thrown myself on the floor and screamed in Filene’s when I was about eight because she wouldn’t give me a five-foot stuffed rabbit!”
But Ned didn’t even smile, and Anna was stopped short.
“What puzzles me,” he said, “is why you think that’s so funny. It seems to me absolutely appalling—what did your mother do?”
“Dragged me away.”
“But what I can’t understand is what made you think you could have such a preposterous present? What made you feel you had the right to ask for it, and to be furious when you were denied it?”
“I wanted it so much … can’t you see?”
Then Ned did smile. “You have the lowest threshhold of frustration I have ever encountered! It seems to be a little mad. I mean, after all, most people don’t expect to get what they want. Most people learn when they are very young that life is not like that.”
“I suppose they do,” Anna said meekly.
“Life is apt to punish those who demand too much of it.” This time Ned was not angry and not cold, he was interested. For him, Anna saw, it had become a philosophical question. “Weren’t you punished?”
“I felt terrible afterwards thinking of how I had upset Mama and how ashamed she was of me. I can’t remember whether I was punished or not.”
“Wild hopes were always dashed for me as a child … I learned to be very wary.”
“Because if you let anyone know, the joy would be taken away?”
“I guess so.”
“Ah,” Anna said, smiling at him, “that explains why you are so secretive.”
Once more they were on the brink of a real talk but Ned withdrew with the excuse that it was high time he took Fonzi for a walk. “Want to come?”
“I don’t dare, Ned … that icy wind! I can’t risk catching cold with Dallas ahead.”
“Very well, see you later,” and Ned went off into the night with the dog.
When he got back Anna was still sitting by the dying fire.
“I thought you’d be in bed,” he said, hanging up his coat. “It’s after eleven.”
“Is it?” Anna said. “I’ve been thinking …”
Ned winced. “We’re not going to have a scene,” he said, “I’m going to bed.”
This, Anna recognized, was the climate she had created, a climate of fear if not actual antagonism. How would it ever be changed? And she heard her mother saying “Neither of you is going to change.” What then? A lifetime of living on the surface, never talking about anything real? “Can’t we keep the surfaces pleasant?” Ned had said plaintively long ago. But Anna knew that she could never accept that. What then? A lifetime of angry arguments that ended, at best, in a passionate “making up” in bed and at worst in withdrawal on both sides? Marriages are not made in heaven, Anna said to herself firmly, they are made in hell. When she finally slipped into bed in the dark, Ned was asleep. Fitting herself under his arm, feeling her breath drawn in and out in rhythm with his, and feeling Fonzi’s warm body with her foot, Anna knew that, in spite of everything, because of everything, the union was ineluctable.
Chapter XIV
When a scene had been avoided, tension built up in Anna about whatever it was that had not been allowed to erupt. In the first year, Ned had seemed totally unaware of this, and taken by surprise when anger finally broke out. Now he had learned to be wary. He managed to leave for the office the next morning without more than a few casual words said.
Anna had been reluctant to accept a dinner invitation so close to her departure for Dallas, but had finally agreed to go out to Milton that night to the Faulkners. “It’s not that I don’t like them, Ned, it’s only that I’m so close to that concert and don’t want anything to happen.”