by Susan Isaacs
I turned to her then. She was scrunched up in a corner of the couch, clutching the arm. Her head was lowered too, but in terror, quivering, as if expecting that any second I’d pull a gun or rush over and start to pummel her. “Oh, stop it!” I said. She looked up. I thought to myself: All she inherited is good bones. Not her father’s guts, not her mother’s spirit. Her face was ashen—a close match to her perfectly cut beige linen dress. I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I jerked my thumb toward the door and said to her, “Out!”
John lifted up his head. “Please,” he said. “Don’t be angry with Nan. It’s all my fault.”
“No,” Nan interrupted. “It’s my fault.” She had her father’s eyes, and though they weren’t as black or as brooding, they were compelling—bright and dark at the same time. “I know I can’t ask your forgiveness, Linda…May I call you Linda?” I just glared. That shut her up for a minute, but then she said, “The last thing I want in this world—and I know I speak for John too—is to hurt you. This entire situation—”
“I want you to leave now,” I told her. Somehow I was polite. Like in the movies, when you say: Madam, would you please remove your hat. “Now.”
“Please. Hear me out. I know all three of us are in a state of shock, but personally, I feel a…a moral imperative—”
The politeness evaporated. I bellowed, “You’re pushing your luck!” I took a step toward her, around the coffee table, which had their two cups and saucers and the morning papers spread on it. My shin smashed into the table, but I didn’t feel a thing. The dishes rattled hysterically. Then I took another step.
And Nan Leland Etc. Etc. was out the front door in five seconds flat.
For me, there were no tears, no screaming, no enraged slamming of doors. As for John, he just sat there. I stared down at the cups; there was just enough left in them to reveal that she, too, took her coffee black.
“I’m sorry,” he finally said.
“Sorry for what? Being caught? Or betraying me?”
“Both, I suppose,” he said softly.
“Sorry that you didn’t go chasing after her when she ran out the door? You want to run down to the corner? She didn’t have a chance to call a taxi.”
For a second, he shifted and glanced out the front window. But then he looked back to me. “Could you sit down? We have to talk.”
I sat in the rocking chair that was across from him. I waited, but he just looked at the rug. “You asked me to sit down. You said we have to talk.” John didn’t say a word. “Look, you’re trying to come up with a brilliant presentation of the facts in your case. Forget it. You don’t have a case. You’re a cheat and a liar and a first-class son of a bitch. Those are the facts.”
He looked up. “I won’t argue with you.”
“When did it start?”
“In May. She came to Washington the end of May. But it wasn’t what you think.”
“Come on. I bet it was. She came to visit Daddy and cry about Quentin, but maybe Daddy got a little impatient with her. And so she called you because she needed a friend. A sympathetic friend. Neither of you had any intention whatsoever of letting it go any further than that.” All of a sudden, I reached out and swept the cups and saucers off the table and onto the rug. A cup hit the table leg and the handle broke off. John pretended nothing had happened. “How am I doing, John? Did I guess right?”
“I suppose…” He said, staring at the handle. “If you want to look at it superficially.”
“How am I supposed to look at adultery? Deeply?”
“What I mean is, it’s not as simple as you make it out to be.”
“So tell me, what is it? Go ahead, be profound, if that makes you happy. But I want you to try and understand one thing—something you’ve never understood before.”
“What?”
“I’m as smart as you are. Probably smarter. So don’t try handing me a line of bull about poor motherless Nan or about two intellects that beat as one. I just want to know what happened. Who, what, where and when.” I kicked a saucer away from my shoe. “I don’t care about why.”
“We had drinks a couple of times.” He rubbed his hands together as if he was warming them over a fire. “She just talked about her marriage.”
“Which one?”
“Please, Linda. She was unhappy with Quentin right from the beginning. He treated her like…like some…some object he’d purchased for his collection.”
“That must be some prize collection.”
“You’re not making it easy for me.”
“I’ve made it very easy for you. Keep going. When did you start playing house?”
“Do you have to put it that way?”
“What would you rather have? A word starting with f?” My heart was racing, and once again, I couldn’t get enough air.
“Ed went up to New York for a weekend the first week of June. I stayed with her. Is that what you want to hear?”
“But you came home every night.”
“Yes.”
“And you never stopped…You were having sex with her and with me?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” He didn’t answer. “Okay, I’m asking. Why?”
“Because I didn’t want you to suspect.”
“So you did it to me out of kindness?”
“No.” He stopped rubbing his hands and began to wring them. “I didn’t want to…to give up everything I had with you.”
“Which is what?”
“Sex.”
“Sex and what else?” He didn’t answer. My heart, which had been pounding much too fast, suddenly skipped a beat. I thought: Wouldn’t it be funny if I had a heart attack and died? But I made myself go on. “What else do you have with me besides sex that you don’t want to give up?”
“Nothing.” He swallowed. “I’m sorry, but you seem to want the truth.”
“Yes.” The truth, I’d been positive, as we held hands over a bowl of oyster stew in Maryland, and later that same evening, when he lit the hurricane lamp in our room so we could watch each other’s pleasure by candlelight, the truth was that he was falling in love with me. I could have sworn I’d seen it even in that dim, flickering light.
If my heart hadn’t been thudding against my chest and if I hadn’t been breathing deeper and deeper until I was dizzy, fighting for air, I would have thought I was dead. Because I felt nothing. Absolute emptiness. I said, “So what happens now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you move out? Do I move out? You’re the lawyer. What’s the next step?” I couldn’t believe part of me was still able to talk. “Do I hire a private detective? Or do I just go upstairs and find Nan’s nightie on the bed and bring it into court?” He looked toward the stairs. I waved an imaginary frilly thing in the air. “Here’s Exhibit A, Your Honor.” I thought he was going to faint; I felt a little better. “Come on, John. How do we get divorced? You must have talked to her about”—I deepened my voice—“the Future. She must be waiting. She’s not hanging around Washington all summer because she’s crazy about humidity.”
“She’s waiting.”
“For what?”
“For me to come to a decision.”
I broke out into a loud laugh. Who could help it? “You’ve been stringing her along?”
“It’s not a matter of stringing anyone along.”
“Sure it is. You’re playing with her. You’re getting back at her for leaving you. ‘Nan,’” I imitated him, “‘you left me. Did you truly believe your unmitigated insensitivity to be without consequences?’ How’s that?”
“Not bad.”
“Tell me what to do, John. Do I go to a lawyer?”
“Only if you want to divorce me.”
“And what do you want?”
“I don’t know. I love Nan. I’ve never stopped loving her. I know how that must hurt—”
“It’s wonderful how you’re both so worried about hurting me. Look, just tell me what you want, for God’s sake. Do
you want to marry her again?”
“Part of me does.”
“Which part? The top part?” He put his hands in his lap. “But the bottom part still’s got the itch for me. Is that it?”
“I suppose so.”
“It’s that good with me?”
“I think…that’s fairly obvious.”
“Is it that bad with her?”
“Linda, I won’t discuss that.”
“That wouldn’t be honorable.”
“That’s right.”
“And you’re a man of honor.” He turned and peered out the window. “Now listen to me. I’m a fool for you. We both know that. But I’m not a complete fool. I won’t wait around while you resolve the conflict between your top and your bottom halves. If you really love her, then marry her.” I smiled. “She’s what—twenty-three? And she’ll be Nan Leland Berringer Dahlmaier Berringer. I can’t wait to see her notepaper when she’s thirty.”
“Oh,” John said. “Do you think she’d leave me again?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know.” He took a deep breath. “But I do know I’m not…quite ready to leave you.”
“Why not? For twenty bucks, you can get someone to do whatever I do, and you won’t have to take them to dinner parties.”
“It’s not just sex.”
“Two minutes ago you said it was.”
“I feel a moral obligation to you.”
“It’s canceled. And listen: I know half the reason you’re even thinking of staying is that you’re worried you’d look bad—a heel, or a patsy for Nan. But don’t worry. Just tell them I was this grasping, conniving bitch who broke up your marriage and that when you didn’t give me a mink and a diamond tiara I ran off with a cardsharp from Canarsie. You know what the beauty of it is? All your friends will believe it!”
“Linda, stop.” He gave me one of the tender looks he’d given me on the shores of the Chesapeake, and in the cemetery in Brooklyn. “I know you love me.”
“So? What does that mean? Did it stop you from going to bed with Nan? From telling her you loved her? Did my loving you ever once get you to look at me like I’m a human being who has meaning outside the bedroom…who has dignity, goddamn it!” I stood up. “You make love to her. You talk to her.” I started to get a picture in my mind, John and Nan, afterward, draped with sheets, conversing, smiling, nodding at each other’s astuteness. In my imagination, the bed was so vast it went on into infinity. “Where did you do it?” I demanded.
“I don’t think it’s an appropriate—”
“Here?”
“Just these past few days. Two or three times in a hotel. But usually in her father’s house.”
“Oh, that’s terrific. I’m breaking my back working for her old man till nine, ten, every night so you can have plenty of time for hot stuff in Georgetown.” Suddenly, I felt horribly sick, as if I was going to start to heave and heave and not be able to stop. “Was Ed in on this?” I managed to say. John didn’t answer. “Damn it, was he keeping me there nights so you and his little girl—”
“No! Of course not. But he knew, naturally.”
“Oh, naturally.”
“Linda, he’s a man of the world. He suspected early on—”
“He’s known since when? Late May?”
“I don’t know. Since early in June, anyway. He made it clear to Nan then that he disapproved. More than disapproved. And last week, he asked her to leave his house, practically ordered her to go back to her…”
“Her husband.”
“Yes. The…situation has soured my relationship with him. More than soured it. Destroyed it, I think.” If John had looked uncomfortable and unhappy before, he looked miserable now. There was a catch in his voice when he talked about Edward, almost like tears in his throat. “Not that he’s said anything about me. But it’s obvious he thinks it’s all…unseemly. He’s very distant to me.”
“Do you think she’ll listen to her father, go back to Quentin?”
“Only if I…”
I finished his sentence. “If you don’t want her back.”
“Yes.”
“Well, you have a week to decide.”
“A week? It’s my life you’re talking about.”
“Listen to me. If you walk out on me, do you know what you’ll have? A wife—and you don’t even have to buy new monogrammed pillowcases. A profession. Friends with country houses and sailboats. A roof over your head. A place in the world.”
“Linda, there would be alimony.”
“John, alimony is money. If you walk out on me, what else will I have?” He looked down, to his summer-white shoes. “So do you think I’m going to sit around for six weeks or six months watching for hopeful little signs? Praying that maybe you’ll find something of value in me? And do you think I’m going to be able to stand having you touch me when you get home late, not knowing if what you’re doing to me is the same thing you did to her a half hour before?”
“I wouldn’t—”
“You would. You have. Okay, you’re a stylish kind of guy. You probably took a shower in between. But there’s not going to be any more in betweens. It’s her or me. Choose.”
He chose me. He chose me because two days later, Nan chartered a plane and went back to Quentin. I asked myself, did she do it because the whole episode was so tawdry and not to her taste, or because she’d had her fun playing off one husband against the other, or because she’d had enough passion for the time being and wanted to go back to a man with three houses, a dozen servants and a seat on the board of trustees of the New York Philharmonic?
It was pretty easy to figure she hadn’t flown back to Southampton, Long Island, because she was afraid John would choose me. Even in her panic she hadn’t lost her wits, and I guessed that huddling in that corner of the couch, she’d still been able to appraise me—and to determine there wasn’t anything much beyond my face value.
Listen, I said to him the night she left. Even if she’s gone for good, you’re not stuck with me. It’s like what they say in car advertisements: Now’s the perfect time to trade me in for a new model. Or just unload me.
Linda, please don’t talk like that. We’re married.
We’ve been married for two years, I said. What if she changes her mind again? What if she wants you back?
It’s over, he assured me. His voice was quiet, firm, sincere. Well, at least he had the sense not to swear on his honor.
I didn’t go back to work until the following Monday. Officially, I was in mourning. Unofficially, I was sad about my mother and, even more, depressed that I was alone, with no more family. I didn’t count the Johnstons, because they appeared so infrequently, and only in black. And when I read the letters I’d found in Olga’s room and brought back to Washington with me, I knew I’d probably never see the writers. They were two sisters, Liesl and Hannah Weiss. They’d never married. They lived in the same apartment in Berlin and wrote interminably long, misspelled, ungrammatical letters about events like Cousin Manfred’s wedding to one of the Geist girls, with unending descriptions of the bride’s dress and how chewy the hen was.
The correspondence had probably lasted over thirty-five years, and in that time, Liesl complained about the weather a lot, and Hannah about her teeth—eventually, her dentures. But in none of the letters was there any clue that they were Jews, and no indication that Hitler’s coming to power had any effect on their lives—except for one sentence. In Hannah’s last letter, postmarked February 23, 1937, she wrote: “As you can imagine, our life is not so happy as it once was.”
I knew it wasn’t. On Sunday night, John glanced up from a report he was reading. Listen to this, he said. After the end of the year, Jews won’t be permitted to own pets anymore; they’ll have to turn them in to dog pounds, and they’ll be destroyed because they’re tainted by Jewish blood. I couldn’t speak. John didn’t notice. He just went on: There’s no limit to this insanity. I mean, I can understand someone not wanting to live ne
xt door to them, but this…And to kill dogs. He shook his head. Then he went back to the report and asked me to make him a glass of iced tea.
And also unofficially, I didn’t go back to work because I didn’t want to face Edward. That whole week I kept waking up three or four times during the night. I’d relive walking in on John and Nan, and think about all the clever or brutal things I could have said. Eventually, I’d fall back asleep. But when I thought of Edward’s knowing about the two of them practically from the beginning—and how all that time I’d been talking to him so privately, giving over my life—then I’d be up, shivering in the Washington heat, for the rest of the night.
I knew, unofficially, that he’d talked to me in a way he’d never talked to anyone else—about Caroline, and about other things: How he felt like such a hick when he first went to Yale and no one wanted to bother with him, and how he had to force himself to stay and not run away, back to the farm. And how when he was recuperating in the hospital after all the operations on his face and shoulder, he couldn’t understand why he didn’t hear from his kid sister; he wrote and wrote, but it wasn’t until he got home that his mother told him she’d died from polio a year before. He said he’d felt deceived in the cruelest way; someone who hadn’t wanted to hurt him had caused him the greatest pain.
Well, old buddy, I wanted to tell him now, I know just what you mean. Because in this whole world, you were the closest I had to a friend—and you deceived me in the cruelest way.
“Linda,” Edward said. He stood, walked around his desk and came up beside me. He put his hand on my shoulder. “I was so sorry to hear about your mother.”
I pulled myself back, so his hand dropped off. “Thank you.” I thought: For a whole month you knew, and you didn’t give me a clue. You could have said, I’ve been pretty busy lately, with Nan in town. Or if you’re telling me the whole damn story of your life, forget the economics professor who took you into the bosom of his family and gave you warmth and sherry in New Haven, and instead drop me a hint that your daughter and Husband II may have had a bit of a tiff. That’s all it would have taken, Ed, my friend.