Either Side of Winter

by Benjamin Markovits

  A strange thing happened in the course of the evening. Perhaps it was inevitable, at least, foreseeable. Annie and Howard took on the mantle of parents, exchanged looks, got slowly, quietly drunk. Tomas and Francesca, after an initial stiffness, an insistence on their right to equal and adult respectability, played like kids. Tore through their presents, leaving a papery nest behind the flown eggs (which Howard, with a kind of physical pedantry, carefully collected, and stored away from the fire): a fountain pen for Frannie, gold-nibbed, with a leather diary for her freshman year; a book for Tomas, on film noir. This brought on a slight relapse of mawkishness. ‘I’m sorry,’ Frannie explained, quick to bring awkwardness into the open, ‘we didn’t know what you wanted. Which was hardly our fault (glance at Father): we didn’t know you.’

  ‘It is exactly what I like very much,’ Tomas said. Annie was touched by his unsuspected human grace – began to think she ‘understood’.

  Later, they sat cross-legged together in front of the fire. Tomas wound and unwound a loose branch of pine from the skirts of the tree, till it snapped, and threw it on the flames. Frannie leaped back at the gritty crackle, the sparks and smoky gunshot of the needles. ‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘watch out.’ Another stiff minute. ‘I’m not one of those girls who sees anything funny in trying out stupid little dangers.’ Anne looked at Howard and smiled into her glass of red wine. Her daughter had no sense of occasion; no restraint. She always dressed up her annoyance, her fears, embarrassments, as matters of principle. Howard looked back at Anne, blankly, met her eyes. Perhaps he lifted his brow: as much as he would grant the conspiracy of their indulgence, of their parenthood. Then Tomas stood up, stretching, a long-armed yawn that lifted his shirt above his belly-button; and eased down a box of Monopoly from a stack of large photography books laid on their sides. Francesca sat down again, smoothing away her huff, her blouse across her glittering ‘party’ belt, the knees of her black jeans. ‘Everyone has to play,’ Tomas said, in deep Germanic frowning tones that made even Howard smile, but shake his head.

  ‘No, I’ll clear up. You kids have a game. I like to watch.’

  ‘Everyone has to play,’ Tomas repeated, louder, more childish.

  Howard began stacking dishes. ‘The goose’, Howard said at last, to prove his good nature, his willingness to stand aside, ‘was a tremendous success. Except of course for the goose.’ A remark characteristic of his warmest ironies, of his best, most loving manner.

  And yet when he was through – the plates rinsed and dripping in the dishwasher, roasting pan soaking in the sink – he couldn’t quite bring himself at first to sit and watch. He stood above them by the fire, the print of his hands on the skirt of his apron, even that well-worn piece of cloth a slight protection against joining in. Annie had got on the floor to muck in; cards, paper bills, the jumbled hats of houses and hotels, lay all around. She was losing badly; he could tell: that angry hot strip of red ran across the tip of her nose. Nobody, in fact, seemed very happy; apart from Francesca, who sat content with her back against the fireside bricks and ordered Tomas to roll for her, shift her little Park Avenue dog across the board, collect her rents, buy, buy, buy; and Tomas, in a gentle fury Howard knew well, obeyed. Whatever couldn’t be solved by bulk, by effort, by energies and enthusiasms, afflicted Tomas like a neurosis, a system failure; he developed little tics, hair tugs, nose pinches, ear scratchings, anything to alleviate his excess of useless vital forces. It usually charmed Howard to see him – turned in upon himself in that way, fretful. An object of sympathy for a man always turned upon himself, more accustomed to the stresses and strains, better balanced for them. But now he couldn’t repress the slightest twinge of jealousy: they would all love him now, his funny German lover. They would all take a piece of Tomas to their hearts. The gulf between him standing and them sitting seemed impassable; he kept his apron on.

  And Howard remembered what it was he hated so much about the company of friends, of equals, had hated ever since his mother died, had despised in his school mates, his college friends, his graduate colleagues: the constant skirmishing for intimacies, never being sure of your place in others’ affections. Not to mention the petty, petty greed of the social instinct, always hungry for more flattery, interest, love, at the expense of everything he held dear: independence, clarity of thought, a fundamental honesty regarding what mattered in your life and what didn’t. It seemed to him, you were either born into family life or you weren’t. You couldn’t acquire the knack. You couldn’t want to. Annie got up, slowly after all, on old knees, to find the bathroom; Howard leaned against the mantle, observing. Tomas, having landed his lead pipe on Broadway, threw its hotel, in mock annoyance, at Francesca, who flinched with surprising violence and said, ‘I don’t like it, don’t throw things, I don’t like it’. Tomas refused to back down; he was an angry loser. Anne whispered to Howard on her way back, ‘Look,’ with her hand lightly on his shoulder – she remembered how little he liked to be touched – ‘our family.’ Her hand still somewhat wet from the bathroom sink; it took him most of his self-command not to shrug it off.

  After it was all over, that spring, after it all went wrong, after Howard had managed to drive each of them away, Tomas looked back on this first night as the high point, the first best instance of their brief family life; but even then, the seeds of disunion had been sown. Howard, whether he knew it or not, was plotting a way out.

  *

  They had the usual fight that night after the Rosenblums left – said their goodnights, their merry christmases, their happy hanukkahs, put on dripping boots, cold and achy now around their hardened, fire-dried socks, stomped themselves warm or numb and out into the white world again. Their absence instantly changed the atmosphere within, damped the fire, unplugged the white noise of social good humour. The usual fight, after the last clear-up, the face washing, tooth brushing, the climbing up to bed. Lying side by side below the ceiling:

  You should have joined in.

  I liked watching.

  You could have played along, if only for my sake.

  I couldn’t have, if you must know, I didn’t want to.

  You could have without wanting; you might have liked it.

  No – this angrier now, sharper – that’s not how wanting works; that’s not what could means.

  None of it needed to be said; both sides of the argument, well rehearsed, would have echoed around their separate thoughts in any case, unspoken. The usual fight; only it left them unhappier than usual, given the uplift of the occasion, the distance fallen. Tomas felt particularly desperate, far from home: and thought, if ever there was a chance, if ever there was a chance, of breaking through, it is now, it was tonight. Howard suffered only the usual, hereditary low spirits, baffled pride, habitual self-loathing.

  *

  Afterwards Howard couldn’t remember exactly when he realized this was a way out, a chance. There were times of course when he considered the matter differently, but more and more as the weeks passed, the new year began with its inevitable repetitions and its added burdens, he realized something had to be done about both situations, lover and daughter, the press of people against him, the reproach implicit in their intimacy. It occurred to him, at last, that the two situations could be used to solve each other. The conviction slowly formed that he had been going about the problem, for years now, the wrong way round. Tomas had always struck him, in spite of his arguments to the contrary, as an escape from his own unhappiness, a hand-up. He had let himself be seduced by Tomas’s insistent enthusiasms, easy contentment; it seemed so obvious that the answer lay in more not less of whatever stores of joy his lover possessed. But perhaps the problem was really Tomas’s; Tomas couldn’t accept life for what it was, the necessary valuations. All his talk of joining in was really a coded way of saying, Don’t look. Let’s pretend. Howard’s great virtue was that he had the courage of looking. He could do without palliative habits. He could do without other people, just as he had learned to do without his mother –
whose image was never far from his thoughts at the dark turning of the year.

  A slight incident from that dinner party stuck in his mind. Francesca, like her mother, had a habit of lying down after a meal on hard floor. She was rather heavy-handedly making herself at home in this manner, when she suddenly let out a sharp, almost fearful cry of ‘Oh, my God’, in a rising cadence, which turned in the end to laughter. She had just seen Tomas’s mountain bike suspended above her, from its hook in the ceiling; the bristled black tyres turning slowly above her head. Tomas followed her glance and laughed too. That bike had always irritated Howard; it seemed so aggressive, heedless; but before he could get out a sharp word, the moment had passed.

  On New Year’s Day the four of them went ice skating in Central Park; the thaw had set in again, and the ice puddled over – there weren’t many people about. The perfect unreflecting snow had melted into browns and gleams, a dispiriting lapse from pristinity. Howard and Frannie sat out most of the time, drinking hot chocolates on the terrace above. Both felt little twitches of envy: it seemed possible to be happier than they were; the evidence was below them. The soft collapse of air in the rush of watery skates just reached them there, like a sound muffled by memory – as Tomas wheeled Annie about from hand to hand. ‘So what do you think of him?’ Howard asked, playing the father. ‘Is it very strange for you?’

  ‘I like him,’ she smiled rather sweetly into a corner of her mouth, her mug; embarrassed, a girl telling the truth to an elder, practising confession, adulthood. ‘He’s so – happy and – blond. Not what I expected, no offence.’ Then more quickly, ‘You know what I mean. Blue-eyed, gung-ho.’

  Perhaps she has a crush on him, he thought. Quite likely, girl like that, so proud and plain, allowed to play sister to a handsome boyish stranger who’s out of the question. They parted at the first glow of dark in the sharpening cold; mother and daughter, lover and lover, each to their own side of the Park. That natural sinking of spirits in the set of the sun; a retreat beneath the surface. Tomas kicked a leftover hunk of ice into the road; enquired if Francesca had said anything – about him that is. Mainly he wanted to know if Howard had asked – if Howard had been curious, considered it important, to know how the two halves of his life, old and new, were knitting.

  ‘Yes, she did.’ Howard couldn’t remember the exact phrase. ‘She said you were very charmingly… not quite what she expected of me. Aryan.’ Now he was teasing; perhaps she had said something along those lines, he couldn’t be sure. It’s the impression she left behind: of the natural surprise a nice Jewish girl from New York City might feel at discovering an old Wasp father, his German lover. He hadn’t really meant to be untruthful, or even unkind. But it shocked him how quickly Tomas went into his shell, the slapped look of his red face. ‘She liked you, Tomas’; he added, making amends, ‘I think she has a little crush.’ But the deed was done: Tomas’s embarrassment could not be soothed, lifted; he had been caught out for an offence he had nothing to do with, could do nothing about; a sin like the sin of class, accent, both too deep and ungrounded to admit expiation. It was a cold walk home; they couldn’t shake off the cold of it even when they got in.

  *

  Not long after, something rather unpleasant happened at lunch. The school cafeteria separated teachers and students by a glass wall; most of the faculty didn’t really dare to look on the far side of it, at the wilderness of youth. They made the most of every civil interlude. Howard had no real intimates among his fellow teachers; rather, he played the part of Eiron, or Greek commentary, on the general action, regardless of company. In short, he sat down to lunch wherever there was an empty seat; but rarely had the feeling of intruder. His conversation, he thought, was sufficiently ornamental. Mr Englander the English teacher – a tall smooth pink man, who looked genially inflatable rather than fat, and was rather a favourite among his female pupils – held forth one day about Slaughterhouse Five, the text being discussed by his senior elective. Howard had read the book, many years ago; never thought much of it, and began gently to bait Mr Englander in his presumption of its genius. The conversation quickly lost tone; Mr Englander had begun to puff. Much as he disliked these little vanities of the English department, Howard decided to pour oil over the waters.

  ‘I should say now, I don’t remember much of the book; of course, Mr Englander, you’re in a better position to rate it. But one passage struck me in particular as very fine. It had to do with Lot’s wife, praised her for turning back to look at the ruins of Gomorrah. How “human” it seemed of her to look; I believe that was the word. I remember thinking at the time: it was a neat emblem for a kind of mercy, or sympathy, necessary in any judgement about the Third Reich. For example, and there are others that occur to me, the doctors who experimented upon the incarcerated Jews. They are often held up as the bogeymen of the clinical instinct; but it has always seemed to me a very human ambition, rather fine and self-sacrificing in its way, to wish to experiment upon man. A natural progression of the desire to know, to look; without flinching, or pretended delicacy –’

  ‘Goodness me,’ Mr Englander interrupted, ‘what a silly thing to say.’ In fact, their little argument had a history behind it. Howard had taken Mr Englander to task, a few years before, over defending a colleague who had gotten himself into difficulties with one of the students. Well, Howard didn’t have any compassion for the guy – the sex instinct wasn’t something he sympathized with; he knew the harm it could do, especially to children; and didn’t have much trouble controlling it himself. But Mr Englander was glad of the chance to cast a shot back at him from higher ground. Neither one of them ever guessed how much they had in common. Mr Englander’s sleek full face suggested a gentle greed that was easily satisfied. Howard’s own excesses, his pock-marked hanging cheeks, the spill of fat at his hips, seemed evidence of the fact that he’d gotten more than he wanted from the world. This, in his way, is what he had been trying to describe: the refinement of curiosity that can dispense with natural feelings or appetites.

  Rachel Weintraub, the History teacher, a pretty young woman with a sickle-moon-faced shape, and a chin with a very definite point to make, added with heavy smiling civility, ‘You’re a sick man, Howard; a real Connecticut Nazi.’

  Howard felt the blood go thin in his face; he struggled for wind. Perhaps he hadn’t made himself clear; perhaps the words had somehow got in the way, as they do, proved too big and clumsy for the thought. He had offered them, foolishly, recklessly, his most intimate and delicate nature – that centre or core of being, in which alone he could judge himself with mercy. While all the rest; just look at it, just look at his life, that great expanse of cruelty, neglect, impoverished affections. A human weariness – worse, that laziness with which he excused himself to Tomas, so blighting and unforgivable, the sheer waste of it seemed wider in its way than any millions of deaths, of days. Yet in spite of all that he possessed a certain fineness, thin as a knife’s edge, barely discernible to the naked eye, but vital, even noble, undulled, uncompromised, at his heart. Just this once, and briefly, he had unsheathed it; he felt as if the tip had been snapped.

  ‘I don’t like to think, Ms Weintraub,’ he said, breathing slowly, carefully choosing the words, ‘of your state of mind when you come to regret that remark.’

  And yet he himself rather felt the sting of it; their reproof lingered with him all week and awakened a miserable sense of guilt. He hadn’t for years felt so childishly rebuked, and remembered that first winter after his mother died. He used to run around with a couple of glue-sniffers from junior high, real wits, real high-rollers. His father sat him down after he found out: they’d been breaking windows, smearing a few funny words on the school walls, nothing much. Once, perhaps, a swastika; it was a statement of style, no more. ‘I want you to understand that it was evil,’ his father said – it or him, Howard couldn’t exactly remember. ‘I don’t know where you pick that kind of thing up. Not from me, not from me,’ he insisted, adding, ‘I just thank God your
mother isn’t around to see this.’ His father seemed more worked up about it than he was; broke into tears half-way through, and Howard left him there, listened to him from the stairs. He wanted to be able to get away if the old man came out, belt in hand. Still, Howard listened; pity comes hard to sons. Even at that age, he thought he should have the guts to listen. This is what he meant to praise in Lot’s wife: the courage heartlessly to observe.

  *

  He wanted to put himself at the center of their lives – if only to feel them pulling at him, to feel his power of disappointing them. The desire seemed harmless enough, at least at first. He was the centre, the link; it would have been cruel to see the others get on without him. And yet – already he sensed alternative currents running between the three of them; gossip seemed to reach him at one remove, whispery with the distance travelled. He heard, from his periphery, the hum of a central life, felt its warmth. There were phone calls Tomas answered in low tones, taking the handset with him up to bed. Later, calls on the cell; unexplained. It seemed to Howard beneath his dignity to enquire. Pieces of news echoed strangely; reverberated with the little distortions of the twice-told tale. False surprises. Frannie heard from Harvard; she was in. Tomas only nodded his head. Maybe Howard was being paranoid, understandably jealous; maybe the ordinary passage of any life, closely attended to, yields these strange muffles and clanks, unexplained noises. When he said, I’m going over to the Rosenblums to celebrate, Tomas let him go. That little remark might have done its job; such embarrassments have a way of sticking. In any case, working life had begun again: everyone was busy, that quiet shadowed calm cast by Christmas and New Year had passed. Perhaps he was only disappointed at how his ordinary, unsurprising weeks revived, went on.