The story falsifies her anyway, makes her frivolous and empty-headed, a flirt, loose and wanton. An unfair distortion. And now she is seventy-one. On our last evening, when I took her to the play, in the New York restaurant recommended by a friend of my father’s (a bachelor who knew the best places), we sat dressed up in an elegant room with green velvet hangings and a golden chandelier. The menu had a black velvet cover and gold tassel. I thought, I am here with Penny. But the inside of the menu was a shock. I was betrayed by my father’s friend, who didn’t know how limited my resources were. Perhaps she was shocked too, though she said nothing, but when the waiter came she ordered the sweetbreads. How kind of her that was. I didn’t know what sweetbreads were, only that they were several dollars less expensive than anything else and were probably disgusting. Perhaps I should have urged her to get the salmon or the prime rib, but I did not. I ordered the sweetbreads too and relied on the sauce to conceal them.
CHARLES WESTERLY: To Greta Cordage
Written by flashlight in my tent pitched in the backyard of Grandfather’s house. Shared with David, whose back is turned, crowding. A lot of people here. Came by bus and ferry, Beatrice and kids also on the ferry. Greta. Sat around most of the afternoon. Missed Beatrice’s walk with the kids and Greta. After dinner walk with Greta, harborside by the fishing docks. Dumb, though, stupidity growing through evening. Board games. I the big winner, Greta quit. Fat lot of good. Now Greta in the Inn with Lucy Realm. Blown it for good, sure this time. Unless a sweet-talking letter?
Dear Greta,
You’ll be surprised to get a letter from me, I guess. I’m writing cramped in a tent by flashlight almost crowded out by my brother, who’s sleeping with his back turned. I feel stupid. You must think I’m stupid too. When I took that walk with you this evening, I thought we could start talking naturally and sooner or later we’d get back to the last time we were together. I wasn’t counting on my stupid shyness. I assume your shyness too, unless you really meant we shouldn’t remember anything. But if you didn’t want us to remember, then I guess you wouldn’t have agreed to take a walk, and since you did agree I guess you must be disappointed that I was so stupid as if nothing had ever happened between us.
So I’m writing to let you know I haven’t forgotten, and when we went for that walk I fully intended one or the other of us to bring it up, so we could decide what to do next. I didn’t write before because it seemed more natural to talk but here I go writing after all, because I didn’t have the guts to talk.
So I want you to know I have forgotten nothing. I remember not only the snow outside the car, and the light on the house down the street where we were parked, I remember also I mean especially your sweet gesture when you undid your blouse, and I remember your nipples in the street lamp, and I remember also your pants, and my fingers and yours too, yes, your magical fingers, and the panic when the time came and your laugh and the washrag. And I remember also how we talked about our mutual virginities, how sweet you were not to ridicule me (even though I’m already nineteen years old and you are seventeen) and how we decided not to go all the way because it was all too quick. Nor have I forgotten what you said about your boyfriend and how we must not get too serious talking about love or anything beyond the natural love of stepbrother for stepsister and I agreed with you, which is why I haven’t written you love letters in the interval.
On the other hand, as I said, I haven’t forgotten what happened then, and there are one or two other things I also intended but didn’t tell you on our walk this afternoon. For instance, I have rectified the virginity problem in my case. No emotional involvement, just a little girl in college, which has improved my confidence. (Not the one I called my fiancée by the way. No one knows what’s become of her.) I presume by now you have probably done the same, for I remember you were going to start the pill, and a lot can happen with a boyfriend in five months. I suppose if you do happen to be emotionally involved with him in a heavy way you won’t be interested in my present thought, but that’s a chance I have to take, and I’m sure you won’t mind my bringing it up. For what I really wanted to say this afternoon was that after long and careful consideration, I think it’s time to complete what we started but did not finish last Christmas. It would be the most natural thing (unless you are too deeply tied to your boyfriend by now), especially after what we have already done, and it would so to speak correct our truncated and rather perverted memory of the other occasion.
It shouldn’t be hard to manage. I can borrow the car tomorrow, and we can go down to North Point. It’s warm enough, we could go out into the dunes and have all the privacy we need. I really hope you’ll be willing. It’s been growing on me all spring. I’ve been kicking myself for not arguing more strongly last Christmas—I didn’t argue at all in fact and I’ve often wondered if you would have done it if I hadn’t put you off with my serious talk about responsibility and all that crap. At any rate, I sure as hell am for it now, and not with just any girl (I got that from the little girl I mentioned at college) but particularly with you. And I can’t help thinking, remembering how sweet you were, that you share the feeling at least a little, or at any rate are not totally averse. I won’t ask you to decide in advance though. If you go for a drive with me tomorrow, we can talk it over.
I’ve given hard thought to the stepbrother question and have totally altered my position. The simple fact is that you and I are not related in any way, no more than any white Anglo-Saxon boy and girl are related. My father married your mother, but your father was not my father and my mother was not your mother. They call us brother and sister, but it is stepbrother and stepsister, which is different from half-brother and half-sister. There is no relationship between us.
Besides, I’m not suggesting a love affair. We’ll see enough of each other for the rest of our lives because of our parents. You can have your lovers and I fully expect to have mine. Maybe we’ll find that one little try on the beach tomorrow (tomorrow! My God, is it possible?) will be enough to last us a long time. Maybe on the other hand, we’ll want a replay now and then when we meet on vacations and other family occasions. Who knows how we’ll feel? Only let’s give ourselves the opportunity, let’s not kill it off because of timidity, embarrassment, or superstition.
I’ll need to get this letter to you without attracting attention. At breakfast. I guess I’ll simply tell you that I have a letter. That shouldn’t surprise you too much.
THOMAS WESTERLY: As read by Philip
One last thing to read tonight, when everybody else had gone to bed, found accidentally by Philip in a file labeled UNIVERSITY FINANCES. It bore the title, “Things to remember.”
At that time obsessed with sex, though I’d never had any, which was why I was obsessed. Graduate school, Chicago after the war. Lucy Sycamore, little sister of my friend Fred who had once lived in Sherwood Forest. She was an undergraduate who seemed younger than she really was. She ate with us in the Commons and would look at me. With soft hair, bangs, oval face. She looked up from under her bangs with large eyes. Not a candidate for sex, off limits because of age and who she was.
Everybody was serious in 1946. I studied geology but had literary friends, Fred Sycamore’s group. Slightly scornful of my scientific narrowness, pressuring me to broaden myself humanistically. To be profound. Undergraduates in Chicago read Aristotle, Plato, Heroditus, Thucydides. The sublime and the tragic vision. Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War. We ate in the Commons, carrying the cafeteria trays to the long tables under the gothic roof and vast English space.
She joined me with her tray one day at noon. Okay? We had a nice awkward little conversation. Repeated two days later. Our schedules created a routine. I played a role. My supposed years gave me an advantage with her which I did not have with my more sophisticated friends, enabling me to tutor, suggest readings, critique her responses, show off. She liked me. I didn’t want to lose that, which hooked me before I knew it.
They invited me to family dinner in November, B
rookfield near the famous zoo. Why me? Ostensibly because of Fred and the Sherwood Forest connection, but I suspected Fred of inviting me for her. We rode out in Fred’s car with her between us that Sunday morning, bright and sunny and cold, the suburban house with leaded window panes, small rectangles. The professorial father, sherry before midday dinner, questions about geology and my career, with slightly condescending approval of people like me whose well-limited specialties combine for the general advancement of knowledge. She with the blue eyes, chaste sweater with collar tips folded over, listening more than speaking. After dinner she played the piano, Schumann and Bach. We walked in the woods with Fred in the bleak leafless late of autumn, talking of T. S. Eliot.
A new excitement henceforth in our lunch chats in the Commons. Imagined eyes on me, Fred’s, parents’, friends’, her own. Was I now expected to ask for a date? Was it permitted? Think. Obsessed with sex, twenty-four and nothing to show for it, against her innocence, youth, connections (Fred’s kid sister), and all my intellectual graduate friends scornful (probably) of my interest in one so young like a child. Who had no idea what lustful thoughts I tried not to have about her in secret.
The season rushed on, aiming at Christmas. Thanksgiving dinner in Brookfield, old school friends, tinder for jealousy I thought too proud to feel. Stamp out jealousy by forestalling its occasions. Touch football. This time I walked with her alone, leaving Fred and cousins, to the village center, railroad tracks, bridge. She asked, was Fred as smart as he thought he was? I replied generously. And justified my career in paleontology along with promises not to forget the humane and artistic values that separated me from ordinary paleontologists. She swallowed that, believing me superior to her brother’s intellectual but scientifically ignorant friends. I took her to a movie, momentum and surge, dinner. Late evenings at the University Tavern. The word Love came up with two sides: what would her parents think, Fred, my parents? And what would she think? Pretty good notion of that by now. Walk to her dormitory late at night, first kiss, dared in perfume, cool air, heart near collapse, while she clung with surprising strength and said, God. Do you really? I think so. How long? Ever since I saw you with Fred in the Commons. Did you suspect? Is it okay? Love, love.
Does love necessarily lead to marriage? What people do in marriage, do you think we’re compatible? If we get married. When we get married. Numbers of children, where and how to live. How people make children, do you think about that? I think about it all the time. Conversations in the dormitory, you should hear what they say. If we’re going to get married, shouldn’t I visit your family?
The long overnight ride on the train, head on shoulder asleep in the dark dawning Hudson Valley. The strangeness for her of returning to the town where she grew up, and for me of not having known her then. Five days before Christmas where Mother put her in the extra little bedroom next to Beth’s, with the sights of New York and Westchester, an opera, a play, the Empire State Building.
The reason we were holding hands, yes, it means. In effect, Mother, we’re engaged. In effect? The intent is there. Time, place, wherewithal, yet to be decided. She seems like a sweet girl, dear, I’m sure you’ll be very happy.
Is there something we can do besides kiss? Late in the living room after the parents had gone to bed. Well, there are lots of things some people do. It depends, do you object? Nobody’ll come back downstairs will they? The hook’s in the back. I was afraid you’d be disappointed. I always felt inferior, men make such a fuss about such things. Not me, I like them just the way they are.
That was a start. Are you curious? Just so long as we have limits and don’t go too fast. You can’t go backwards, you can’t retreat. Should we stop here? I don’t know. Not necessarily. What else would you like to do? Maybe tomorrow we can drive out into the countryside. What do you want to do there?
In the car in central Westchester stopped on a stretch of country road next to woods. What? Nothing, I just gasped. Your fingers so cold. I approve of masculine restraint, I feel I can trust you. Now what happened? A little too much excitement. Are you all right? I’m just fine.
Another night, another country road, ending in a patch of woods near the skating pond in the night dark without moon. The secret species reality of this person I had picked or been picked by, linked to the corresponding secrecy of half the world’s population assumed to be identical, therefore no secret yet secret for all that, endlessly repeated secret though known to me only in imagination and fantasy. Okay? Fine. How much further can we go? Let’s go into the back seat.
What happened in the back seat. An experiment. We need to agree on a limit. Must we? Since we’ve come this far, be careful. It’s hard not to, though. Oop. Did you intend this to happen? My lord, it’s close, I never thought I’d be doing this so soon. I never thought, I never dreamed. Wow. As long as we’re going to get married, maybe we ought to get married soon.
We can’t go back, that’s one thing. Therefore. Winter in Chicago, turning into spring. Difficulties for students living in dormitories. Cold winter nights. Dangerous campus bushes, the dangerous park. Radical adventure in the spring break in a hotel room over the lake, blowing a graduate student’s budget. Naked for the first time in the sunshine through the afternoon window, protected by the drugstore.
Obsessed by sex in charge of everything now that it was out. The importance of opportunity, the insatiable quest for opportunity. She moved into an apartment with a roommate in order to improve opportunity. Visits to families full of conspiracy in search of opportunity. Cape Cod and Maine, beaches, sand dunes, scrub woods.
Drugstore failure in August 1947. My mother said, Wouldn’t it be more sensible to wait until next year and let her finish her education? No. At the wedding just before Thanksgiving in a chapel on the campus, she looked great in her slim white wedding gown with a flowery tiara over her bangs. When March ended in 1948, no one commented on the date.
PHILIP WESTERLY: To Thomas
Father, I read you unwillingly. I don’t want to know about your coming of age. If what I love and mourn is the father you created, this story is irrelevant. It has nothing to do with him. It caught my attention and held me rapt, but only through the wantonness of my curiosity and the narrative qualities of your writing. I followed and bore it by separating the written you from the person I knew as you.
What your story ignores is that my father and mother founded an institution forty-seven years ago with engraved names, along with bonds, insurance, education, and history. The sexual goose laid her golden eggs in a back room out of sight and the sexual capital accumulated like compound interest. No one needs to know where you found the goose nor how you trained her, as long as she did her work, which she did.
From this institution eventually emerged five more establishments, similarly endowed with stock and insurance. They too shelter generative mysteries in the back rooms. The master company is now going out of business. That’s a good and powerful reason to mourn, though inevitable. But the company was well established and its subsidiaries have a strong tradition to guide them.
LUCY WESTERLY
Dear Mother,
Tonight at dinner we used two tables. We used the wedding china, supplemented by Aunt Madie’s, and your two lace tablecloths. We had a roast, and I was helped in the cooking and preparations by Mrs. Jordan as well as Patty, Melanie, and Beatrice.
We had seventeen people. At the main table, going around from me at the head were Philip, Beatrice, Henry, Melanie, Patty, William, David, Greta, Charlie, and Edna. At the second table were Tommy, Angela, Betty, Nancy, and Minnie. I must be forgetting somebody, but I can’t think who.
Dear Thomas,
I thought it was you I forgot at dinner, but I know we had seventeen, and I can only add up sixteen names, so it must be somebody else. Because if I forgot you too that would make eighteen.
PART EIGHT
THURSDAY (2)
LUCY WESTERLY: Composed in bed
I thought I was traveling with Mother to
Europe and you were waiting to hear from me. When I opened my eyes and saw the sunlight, thinking it was London, I thought everything I wanted is scheduled to come true. Then I heard the rain. The window had moved, which was why I had mistaken the sunshine, and I didn’t know where I was. I woke up all the way and saw the sloping walls around the dormer window and the wallpaper of dogs and cats and I thought, what child’s bedroom is this? I recognized the furniture, the bureau and table, the cover on the table, but couldn’t remember what part of my life I was in—plus rain out the unfamiliar window and the foghorn which I did know was down at the point—all this before I remembered where they had moved me last night and what had happened to you.
HENRY WESTERLY: Narrative
No, the nakedness of Angel Vertebrate, I did not make that up. It was reported by the deputy Axel Gunner, as told to him by an occupant of the house across the street, looking into the lighted window from her own second story window—that Angel Vertebrate was sitting handcuffed in a chair in Sam Truro’s living room and that he was naked. And what follows too, what she saw, into which the rest with the words spoken and the thoughts all fall into place.
Another day of the stalemate has passed, stalled because the hostage-taker has still not determined how to use his power. Fewer watchers out front now, and today in the rain only the pro forma deputy in the sheriff ’s car sitting with his rifle, trying to keep awake, his drooping eye on the silent blank house.
By now Sam Truro has surely considered the alternatives—all the political ones, at any rate—and has discovered the melancholy fact that there are, apparently, no alternatives at all. What to ask in exchange for the freedom of his hostages? A safe conduct? But safe conduct to where? And what would he have when he got it? In what way would his world be better than before, what could he be said to have gained? The conventional rewards for hijacking and hostage-taking—if not for a political cause then for a load of money, improve your standard of living under an assumed name in a foreign country? How strange the whole conception seems to Sam Truro, who knows that no one will give him money for his wife and son, nor even for Angel Vertebrate, and even if they did, it comes to the same question, what would he do with it, what difference would it make to the great pain, the great wound with which this all began? To cure the pain, heal the wound, that’s the only outcome that could repay him, since it was the burn of that wound that first made him do it—but what could soothe or cool now, beyond what he has already done, the gesture he has already made? He can ask for an acknowledgement, that is all that remains, the most he can hope for, but who has the authority to acknowledge, whose acknowledgement would count, and what is it that must be acknowledged?
Telling Time Page 15