by Amanda Cross
Kate settled into her seat anticipating a certain pleasure in listening to this scholar, but without any marked expectations. She had just dug out a notebook, located her pen, and prepared herself to listen with attention when she was shocked into a state of stunning awareness. The man was speaking of fathers and daughters, of their role in these late plays, and of the centrality of the father-daughter bond.
There were lovers in these plays, he said, whose separation and reunion was central to the story. But it has not always been noted how few if any daughters in Shakespeare can be said to encounter their lovers without at the same time being closely involved in a struggle with their fathers; it is as though the lover is but a surrogate for the daughter’s bond to her father, and his to her. This, while a more minor point in Othello (Desdemona’s father warns Othello: “she has deceived her father and may thee”) is overwhelmingly present in the late plays. There, the daughters are essential to their fathers’ redemption. The fathers, cruel or dangerously undiscerning, ultimately achieve forgiveness only through their daughters. The daughters are often banished, or banish themselves in search of the lovers their fathers have brutally rejected; it is only in the rediscovery of these daughters that the fathers are redeemed.
The lecturer continued in this vein, discussing Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and perhaps others. Kate had stopped listening closely, and was awakened from her reverie by a question from the audience, most of them students, some faculty. “Isn’t Lear one of the best examples of your theory?” a student asked.
“Certainly,” was the answer. “A prime example. I did not allude to it since Cordelia and the end of Lear are so well known to us, as the late plays are not. Lear is a tragedy, and Cordelia pays for her father’s earlier arrogance and newfound sanity with her life. In the late plays to which I wished to call attention the prevalence of this theme is paramount; in the late comedies, that is, the daughter and the plot that surrounds her encompass the whole process of redemption. These plays are, of course, called comedies because they end happily, not because they are humorous or trivial or farcical.” There were other questions, but Kate had tuned out.
She had been invited—ordered would be the more accurate word—to attend the dinner always offered a lecturer. She had intended to duck off from the dinner if there were a sufficient number of diners—that is, members of the department—available, but she changed her mind. Offered a seat immediately to the right of the lecturer, she accepted it willingly; this was not always the case. The deference one paid to lecturers in these circumstances did not lead to animated conversation. Rather, the lecturer seemed inclined to continue holding forth. But Kate was eager to speak with this man. She waited until he had ordered a drink and his dinner before engaging him in conversation. The male faculty member to the lecturer’s left was in any case explaining in some detail his own interpretation of the late comedies.
With some relief, Kate thought, the lecturer turned to her. She told him how much she had enjoyed, indeed been enlightened, by his lecture (or the part I heard, she said inwardly) and asked if he thought that daughters today, or in the modern world altogether, could be said to play, or to have played, a similar part in the redemption of their fathers. In contemporary or recent literature did fathers ever feel reclaimed by daughters, or was this ultimately a metaphor rather than a reality, and not a modern metaphor at all?
“An interesting question,” he said. “I have read stories from the last century and this in which daughters do redeem the father. But it is less powerful, and lacks Shakespeare’s incisive use of metaphor. The daughter, I don’t like to say represents, but she does stand in for, she enables, the father to receive grace, to pass into a state of grace. Whether in what we call ‘real life’ that ever happens is doubtful, but not impossible. The power of the daughter’s role in regard to the father, however, is definitely metaphoric; it is always literary, I suspect, rather than actually enacted in the world. Which is another way of saying that ‘real life’ is so complex, so complicated, that the dramatic essence of what has occurred is rarely perceived.”
“Suppose,” Kate said, “one were to write a story where the father felt impelled to search out a daughter he had lost or perhaps never known, somewhat as in The Winter’s Tale. Might the author be able, though only feebly in comparison with Shakespeare’s plays, to suggest that while the father sought his daughter, he was really, though unconsciously, seeking redemption, forgiveness for other blunders in his life?”
“Is what you mean that he wished for grace, but did not know how to seek it and, in ignorance of the actual object of his search, pursued the lost daughter as what we might call an instinctive substitute? I’m afraid I haven’t put that very clearly.”
“I think it’s very clear,” Kate said, “and I thank you for a most illuminating lecture. I look forward to reading it when it is published.” And she turned to the person on her right, whom she had been rather assiduously ignoring. She was not, even now, willing to lend a conscientious ear, but she would listen as far as courtesy demanded. Knowing the man, she doubted that he would perceive the exact quality of her attention. Part of her mind was free to think about the question of daughters as metaphor.
For reasons she could not explain even to herself, Kate did not tell Reed about the lecture or the dinner conversation with the lecturer. It seemed to Kate that he had appeared as an oracle, a soothsayer, and that she needed to digest his message. Reed, on the other hand, had had an idea about Kate’s mother.
“Has it ever occurred to you that she might have left some evidence behind, some reference in a diary or appointment book, whatever, of her affair with Jay?”
“No,” Kate said. “She left me her pearls and a ring my father—I mean her husband—had given her on some anniversary, I forget which one. The ring is in the safe-deposit box at the bank; I wear the pearls, as you may have noticed.”
“Of course I’ve noticed. Did you ever ask if she left any papers, and private memoranda—that sort of thing?”
“Really, Reed, this sounds like all those detective stories where evidence turns up at the last minute, because nobody had thought to look for it before, or if they knew of it, to bother mentioning it to anyone. Do you really think I’m going to find something of importance at the top of a closet somewhere? And where?”
“Why not ask Laurence? It can’t hurt. As I remember, you said you didn’t want anything of hers when she died, except the pearls and the ring. You just turned your back.”
“That’s putting it rather harshly. My brothers all had homes and could use furnishings and so forth; their wives could use anything of my mother’s they wanted. I didn’t think there was anything there that I could use at the time. You make it sound as though I just tidied my mother away. Well, maybe I did. She had been ill, and we hadn’t been what you could call close for a long time.”
“I meant no recriminations, and justifications are not called for. Why don’t you just give Laurence a call. After all, he’s perfectly aware of the latest events which do evoke certain questions about your mother.”
“And while I’m calling Laurence, will you be preparing to tell me your plan? I’ll postpone Clara, but we have got to get Jay out of here, preferably without getting him killed in the process.”
“Don’t postpone Clara. I’ve almost worked out a plan. Give me till tomorrow, please Kate.”
“All right. But you do realize that we haven’t kept secrets or plans or cogitations from each other before. You don’t think Jay’s having a sadly negative effect on our relationship?”
“No, I don’t. It’s an unusual circumstance, and will not end in my keeping anything from you. Go call Laurence. I’m going to take Banny for a walk.”
Laurence, upon being asked about their mother’s “personal effects”—the term Kate had come up with for what she was after—immediately turned Kate over to his wife. This sort of question was in a wife’s domain; Janice would know if there were any of his mother
’s personal effects around, and if so, where they were. Kate called Janice, not without some misgivings. She and Janice had never taken to each other. Put more bluntly, they had disliked each other from the moment they met; their ideas were utterly disparate, their values at opposite ends of any spectrum of values. An absolute break had been avoided only by their mutual refusal to let it happen, never to remain together long enough for any disruptive subject to rear its head and set off a confrontation.
Janice, however, by now having learned of Jay’s amazing appearance in their lives, and imagining Kate’s horror at discovering her mother’s infidelity, was not inclined to make difficulties about this present request. Apart from furnishings and personal belongings, Janice told Kate, Louise had left a set of notebooks which she, Janice, would retrieve from their storage room in the basement if Kate cared to come over and examine them. Janice frankly admitted she had no idea why she had kept them, except that Laurence did not seem happy about throwing away any of his mother’s possessions. Did Kate want to come tomorrow afternoon when Janice would have brought them up from the basement?
Kate suggested that tomorrow afternoon both she and Janice could descend to the basement; there Janice might leave Kate to examine the notebooks. If Kate did not wish to borrow them, they could then be left in the storage room; no need to bring them up to the apartment. They would certainly, at the very least, be dusty.
And so it was settled. Kate had been fairly sure that Janice would not wish to hang about the basement, and she was right. The box containing the notebooks was found; one of the porters in the basement helped Kate to get them down. The box was indeed dusty, though, to Kate’s relief, not nibbled by rats. Janice left.
Kate had no idea what she could expect to find. The notebooks were nicely bound volumes with blank pages on which their owner, presumably, was free to write poetry, a diary, or an explosive narrative in code. Each book had a date on its first page. Kate took up the earliest. Its date was some years before Kate was born; had Louise met Jay yet? If not in this notebook, perhaps in a slightly later one.
Kate turned to the first page on which Louise had written. What she found was an account of a dinner party; its date, its menu, its guests, and what Louise had worn. Well, Kate thought, if one gave dinner parties, perhaps one needed to record what was served, what one wore, who attended. Otherwise, Kate supposed, one might commit the frightful social gaffe of giving guests the same food to eat as they had been given the last time they came.
Kate turned the pages. Each page recorded the details of a dinner party; occasionally of a cocktail party; each page was the same, in format and in subject. Kate put that notebook down, and looking through other notebooks, all of which appeared to have identical entries, found one the year of her birth. This notebook was in no way different from the others. There was a record of a birthday party for William, Kate’s middle brother, listing the games played, the favors given, the children asked. Otherwise, it was all dinner and cocktail parties.
Kate took each notebook from the box and examined it. There was nothing else, no paper with writing on it between the notebook pages, no indication that what was here had provided its author with anything but details about occasions of entertainment. Not even the weather was worthy of note.
Kate slowly returned the notebooks to the box, arranging them in their original order; there were often several years covered in one notebook, and the last of them, from the year when Louise fell ill, was mostly vacant. There was a last dinner party of Louise’s life, and that was that. Kate beckoned to the porter, who put the box back where it had been stored; Kate went upstairs to thank Janice.
“Did you find anything of interest?” Janice asked.
“No,” Kate said. “Only details about dinner parties.”
“What sort of details?”
“What was served; what she wore; who came.”
“Well, of course she kept a record of that. It’s only sensible, if you entertain a lot. Wasn’t there anything else?”
“No. That was all. Did she leave any other writing that you know of?”
“Nothing. I remember Laurence and David looked to see if she had written any special letters when they were born, letters that might have been returned to her. Nothing. She wasn’t a writer, you know. She was a proper lady, a good hostess. I really can’t believe this about, you know, your ‘father.’ I just can’t believe it.”
“Before DNA, we would have been free to disbelieve it,” Kate said. “I find the facts about this romance as unlike my mother as you do, but she was my mother and Jay was my father. If you notice, I don’t really look like my brothers.”
“I noticed that long ago. You didn’t act like them either. But the fact that you were female seemed to explain it all—plus the dreadful times then, of course, which encouraged the worst in young people, and still do. What’s become of your father by the way?”
“We aren’t quite sure,” Kate said, she hoped not too untruthfully. She could hardly tell Janice that Jay was hiding out in their maid’s room. Well, she could hardly tell anybody.
“Thank you for letting me see the notebooks,” Kate said. “If you don’t want to be bothered keeping them, probably some library would be interested in that record of what was served by hostesses of Louise’s class at that time.”
“I’ll ask Laurence about it,” Janice said. And with that Kate left, politely refusing the offer of tea.
Kate needed two drinks before she could bring herself to hold forth about the contents of her mother’s notebooks.
“What did you expect to find?” Reed asked when he had heard her out. “What did you hope to find? A journal recording her passion and its renunciation; the birth of her lover’s child?”
“I can’t believe she’s my mother. That’s the answer. Jay got some other woman with child and dumped it on my mother.”
“If you will calm down and think a minute,” Reed said, “you will recall that we also tested Laurence to be assured that he and you had the same mother. I fear there will be no surprises in ‘the dark backward and abysm of time.’ You better be impressed; that’s one of the three quotations from Shakespeare I know by heart.”
“What are the other two?” Kate could not help asking.
“ ‘Dressed in a little brief authority’; I think of that at least three times a day. Also ‘the readiness is all.’ ” As I was saying, the solution to the problem occupying our maid’s room is not in the ‘dark backward and abysm of time,’ but very much present, now, immediate.”
“For which you have a plan.”
“I do. And you shall hear it. But I’m wrong. I do have another Shakespearean quotation. ‘Men have died, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.’ ”
“You may be wrong about that, when it comes to Jay,” Kate said.
“And so your mother, to keep from dying of love, went on with her scheduled social life as she had always done, to keep regret, longing, misery at bay. Do not be too hard on your mother.”
“Maybe,” Kate said. “I don’t think she was wrong not to run off with Jay. I’ve told him so; love which is not tested by time and extreme proximity lasts far better. And she was good at the life she led, particularly now that Jay had provided the only thing she had lacked: physical passion. No, I don’t blame her for not abandoning the life she knew and was good at. I don’t know what I’m sad about. I guess I hoped for something written, something testifying to the experience she had had.”
“What you mean,” Reed said, “is that you wish Edith Wharton’s mother had written Edith Wharton’s novels.”
“Touché,” Kate said.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Imagination gives to any nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Early the next morning Reed, who usually walked Banny at that time, suggested to Kate that she come along, too. Kate, who drinking coffee and reading the New York Times was sunk in her usual and necessary solitude for that time of day, stared at Reed i
n startled bewilderment.
“Please,” he said. He had put on his Irish hat, as he called it, a brimmed tweed favorite that could be crushed in a pocket, drowned in a storm, and still retain its gentlemanly insouciance.
“Since when have you taken to wearing a hat for Banny’s walks?” Kate asked. “Have you been feeling chilly about the head?”
“The last few days,” Reed said, ignoring the last part of the question. “Are you coming?”
With a sigh, Kate abandoned her coffee and the paper, catching in Reed’s tone a sense of urgency.
When they had reached the park, and released Banny from her leash, as was legal before nine in the morning—although, unlike most dogs, Banny rarely wandered far away from them, or (illegally) pursued squirrels—Reed told Kate his plan.
“Tomorrow morning,” he said, “this same trio—man, woman, and dog—shall set out on this walk. Only, the man won’t be me. He will be Jay, wearing my hat and a pair of glasses like mine. You and he will walk and talk exactly as we are walking and talking now. The idea, if you haven’t guessed, is that he will be taken for me.”
“I had got that far,” Kate said. “And where will you be? Remember, tomorrow is Tuesday; Clara is coming, since you vetoed my postponing her.”
“Exactly. I shall be in the maid’s room. As we agreed, Clara never goes in there. But if, by some perverse chance, she should go in there, she will find me lying on the cot, ready with a reason for that uncharacteristic exercise.”
“Jay and I, meanwhile, will . . . what?”
“You’ll keep walking and talking, eventually putting the leash on Banny and wandering over to our local precinct.”
“I haven’t a clue where it is.”
“Of course you haven’t. Every citizen should know where her local precinct is, but we’ll take that subject up another time. When you get to the precinct, you will ask for a police officer named Ringley.”