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by Wendy W. Fairey

  He had announced that he was contemplating marriage to an American, but was undecided whether the match fulfilled his standards of wisdom and self-esteem. He offered his ex-mistress a two-card choice: he was prepared to marry the American unless Jocelyn should feel impelled to offer herself as an alternative. Anyone less kindly than Jocelyn [opines Osborne] would have kicked this pear-shaped Don Giovanni down the stairs and his cruel presumption. She could find nothing to say except, “But Freddie, it’s too late.”

  I never noticed that Freddie was pear-shaped (though, indeed, I am more pear-shaped than was my bosomy, slim-hipped mother), but without doubt in later years he was physically inactive. Freddie didn’t drive a car. He didn’t know how to fix anything. He did nothing in a house. He read and he wrote and he talked, and he expected other people to take care of other matters. I can easily imagine a scene in which he would be sitting in a drawing room and Dee or my mother would be standing. In The Portrait of a Lady the “impression” Isabel receives of Osmond sitting and Madame Merle standing is the visual trigger to her discovery of their connection.

  There is a way, though, that Freddie was nothing like Gilbert Osmond. Osmond, ultimately, for all that he allows Madame Merle to do for him, is the opposite of passive. He is fierce in his desires and detestations. Freddie wasn’t like that. He was almost always amiable, just sometimes shockingly unfeeling.

  My mother becomes Madame Merle, and, again, this seems an imperfect fit. How can a woman of my mother’s courage and vivacity, someone I’ve already cast as the zestful Becky Sharp, also be the smooth and duplicitous Serena Merle? Isn’t sharp the opposite of smooth? James describes Madame Merle as “not natural” in that “her nature had been too much overlaid by custom and her angles too much rubbed away.” She is “sympathetic and subtle,” “a worshipper of appearances,” “a woman of strong impulses kept in admirable order.” Serena Merle is all concealment and calculation; my mother, notwithstanding her secrets, seemed open, impetuous, and innocent.

  But my mother was also someone who assiduously concealed her past and who used people to further her own ends. Madame Merle says, “I don’t pretend to know what people are meant for. . . . I only know what I can do with them.” That’s chilling, but I wonder if it’s any less chilling than the way my mother used Trevor Westbrook, a man for whom she had no love; or the way, even, she used the movie stars as fodder for her column. “My paragraphs,” I have said she called them. It’s interesting to me, however, that when she had the scoop about Ingrid Bergman’s running off, pregnant, with Roberto Rossolini, she didn’t print it. I like to think this was a show of scruples, that my mother felt compassion for Bergman, perhaps arising from her own experience. I don’t think my mother would ever have run off with a Roberto Rossolini and defied the world for love. She did, however, break her engagement with the Marquis of Donagal to take up with the married and debt-ridden Fitzgerald. But my mother also had a healthy respect for convention. If not as zealous as Madame Merle to be “the incarnation of propriety,” she detested being referred to as Fitzgerald’s mistress and would stress how throughout her three-and-a-half years with him, she had always maintained her own apartment. No less intently than Madame Merle, my mother craved respectability. It bothered her that Fitzgerald had died in her living room, and she made sure the world knew his fatal heart attack had not occurred in her bedroom. Some of her concern for respectability was surely for her children. But then isn’t Madame Merle devoted to the advancement of Pansy?

  We come to my role in the story. And here I’m torn. I want to be both Pansy and Isabel Archer. I am both the child who doesn’t know her parent, the “blank page” who submits to being shaped by others, and I am the “engaging young woman” whose drama of consciousness is the central interest of this tale.

  It is tempting to be Pansy, the victim of others’ aspirations and conspiracies. A friend to both my mother and me once noted that I was her product. Just as Pansy is sent to the convent to be “finished,” I had been sent to Rosemary Hall and Bryn Mawr. The analogy does no justice to Bryn Mawr’s fierce secularism and intellectual rigor. But to my mother these schools were the route to occupying a certain place in society. Scottie Fitzgerald had gone to Ethel Walker and to Vassar and had married a Washington lawyer. My mother hoped I would have a similar kind of life, one more privileged and protected than her own.

  To hope such things for one’s daughter is not criminal. It’s just that certain inconvenient truths were suppressed in her plans for me—the Jewish heritage I might have shared with her and the identity of my father. At least, though, I knew my father and I liked him. Pansy doesn’t like Madame Merle, but Freddie charmed me from our first encounter. I even told myself I had always loved him, but it was, at best, “post hoc” love that had a kind of backward formation after I knew the truth of his relation to me.

  Pansy, though, does not take me far enough. Among the many brilliant metaphors and insights of Chapter 42 of The Portrait of a Lady, a passage that has always struck me with special force is the one in which Isabel notes of her feelings for Osmond:

  There were times when she almost pitied him: for if she had not deceived him in intention, she understood how completely she must have done so in fact. She had effaced herself when he first knew her; she had made herself small, pretending there was less of her than there really was.

  I, too, understand the notion of making oneself small, when someone one admires seems dazzlingly large. It’s an act of mistaken generosity and perhaps a strategy as well for coping with outsized personalities. For me, the first and foremost of outsized personalities has been, of course, my mother. She liked to feel she could do anything but needed others to be lesser than herself. You took a seat in my mother’s carriage—James would like that metaphor—and went along for the ride. In one of her books she wrote that her children “had to learn [she] wasn’t God.” In truth I think God was a role she was loath to relinquish. She enlisted me as her votary, and I performed my obloquies with all due diligence and awe. Often I felt like Pansy—small and dependent—but this was a role I had assumed, and I knew that, too.

  My more important role, however, is as Isabel Archer. I have wished too fervently to be the hero—or heroine—of my own life to settle for the part of Pansy. I claim the position of the “young woman affronting her destiny,” a bit afraid, as Isabel is, to look into “unlighted corners,” but nonetheless a seeker of freedom and of understanding. Henry James knew that freedom consists of understanding, however painful. When, to borrow the words of the novel, I came to know “something that so much concerned [me] and the eclipse of which had made life resemble an attempt to play with an imperfect pack of cards,” I doubted, reassessed, and ultimately forgave my deceivers, marveling, though, how others could play so fast and loose with me.

  But to have the experience of my discoveries has also stirred new energy. Like Isabel, on the way to the bedside of her dying cousin, Ralph Touchett, in England, I have felt “deep in my soul . . . an “inspiring, almost enlivening” conviction that life will be “[my] business for a long time to come.” I felt this when I first learned about Freddie, and I feel it now. As a woman now over seventy, I don’t have the span before me that a youthful heroine does. Yet my assent to Isabel’s stubborn strain of optimism comes from a part of me untempered by age and undaunted by experience, some fundamental, abidingly innocent core of self that, paradoxically, is all the hardier because it knows the weight of experience. James suggests this possibility when he writes of Isabel:

  To live only to suffer—only to feel the injury of life repeated and enlarged—it seemed to her she was too valuable, too capable for that. Then she wondered if it were vain and stupid to think so well of herself. When had it ever been a guarantee to be valuable? Wasn’t all history full of the destruction of precious things? Wasn’t it much more probable that if one were fine one would suffer? It involved then perhaps an admission that one had a certain grossness; but Isabel recognized, as it passed befo
re her, the quick vague shadow of a long future. She should never escape; she should last to the end.

  That James envisions a long future for his heroine is intriguing in light of the links critics and biographers have made between Isabel and James’s beloved cousin, Minny Temple, who died so young. “It is the living ones that die, the writing ones that survive,” James wrote famously in a 1870 letter. But in Portrait, Ralph dies, not Isabel—Ralph the hands-in-his-pockets observer, a stand in, surely, for one of the writing ones. And Isabel is left with “the vague shadow of a long future.”

  My general sense is that death intrudes discreetly in the fiction of Henry James. Yes, Daisy Miller succumbs to the bad Roman air, Daniel and Ralph Touchett die in The Portrait of a Lady, and Milly Thrale turns her face to the wall in The Wings of the Dove. But none of these deaths, however arbitrary, seems the work of a capricious a/Author—small or capital “A.” And certainly James would never free his characters from their entrapments the way George Eliot kills off inconvenient husbands. Death serves in his stories as a spur to greater awareness. The living are left to reflect on their shortcomings with merciless clarity.

  But sometimes death is important for the way it cuts everything short. And here is a thought that turns me back to Thomas Hardy. In Hardy’s last two novels, the deaths of Tess and Jude leave us with a sense of tragic completion—indeed the final section of Tess is called “Fulfillment”—but also of incompletion and wasted promise. Tess and Jude suffer and die young. Affected survivors are left not so much to gain new insight as to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives and go on as best they can.

  When Freddie Ayer died six weeks after I visited him for the first time as his daughter, I felt that fate had played a brutal trick on me. It’s hard to call his death tragic—it brought no enlightenment for him or for me—but it did seem cruel, an example of the sport of the President of the Immortals. When I try to reconcile myself to it—and perhaps it’s the survivor’s “grossness” that propels me that way—I am thankful I learned who he was before he died. And also that I went to see him. I knew he was ill with emphysema but had no idea he would die so soon. My visit wasn’t easy, probably not for anyone involved. Freddie and I were both very circumspect. No one wanted to make a “fuss.” But he did tell me, one morning, as we breakfasted together, that he was proud of me. I hold that moment as precious, if not sacred. It’s not on the order of Ralph’s dying exclamation to his cousin, “. . . you’ve been loved. Ah but, Isabel, adored!” But it is what it is, and it helps to round out our story. I think it shifts the emphasis from what wasn’t to what was. I marvel at the ways our narratives serve to console us.

  ii

  TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES and The Portrait of a Lady have helped me to think about my father in ways that are harder to do more directly. The subject numbs me; I falter even in asking myself why. But through indirection I try to find direction out. I feel almost as if I have borrowed these books for that reason, but now it’s time to put them back in their proper section of my library and reading history. If I do this, it’s also a way of keeping Freddie contained, of showing the life I had without him.

  I first studied The Portrait of a Lady in that freshman English course in college. I revisited Tess in a semester-long graduate seminar on Hardy, in which I made a presentation on his array of vibrant heroines. I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but by reading these books, I was becoming the person Freddie would say he was proud of: a person whose outlook, aspirations, and stamina were honed in the study of English literature.

  It was the early 1980s, with graduate school a decade behind me and the adventure of discovering a new father still ahead, that Hardy and James came to figure most vitally in my teaching and academic writing. Second-wave feminism was at its crest, and I, in my thirties, could embrace it as my generation’s movement. Noting the ways more feminist heroines emerge in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English fiction, women who resist, and even reject, marriage and men, I developed a new course to teach that I called “The Heroine’s Progress: Studies in the Novel, 1880-1910.” James and Hardy were both on the syllabus.

  The course examined a group of novels of this period—texts that coincided with the first wave of British and American feminism—in terms of their options for female characters that depart from the traditional plot in which the heroine either marries as a happy culmination of her quest for selfhood or fails to marry and dies. The feminist critic Nancy Miller, my colleague at Barnard College, where I first taught this course, named these the euphoric and dysphoric marriage plot endings in her book The Heroine’s Text. These trajectories get established in the eighteenth-century novel and extend into the nineteenth. But as the status of women began to shift in the society, with philosophers such as John Stuart Mill questioning women’s “subjugation,” laws being passed to protect married women’s property, marriage as an institution coming under critical scrutiny, women’s colleges being founded (think what George Eliot might have been like if she had gone to Girton!), and the suffrage movement gaining momentum, to name just a few of the heated questions and causes of the day, the established narratives in fiction could hardly remain unchanged. While Jane Eyre can sum up her married life as ten years of unadulterated bliss with the “bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh,” George Eliot, even in her earliest stories, dating from 1858, is drawn to exploring marriage as a suffocating trap. Still, she never turns completely from the marriage plot ending. Remember Dorothea gets, if not greatness, at least ordinary happiness in her second chance with Will Ladislaw, and Daniel Deronda weds small-voiced Mirah without a shred of the author’s potent irony. But in 1879 when Nora of her own volition leaves the “doll’s house” at the end of Ibsen’s play to seek some yet undefined fulfillment beyond the scope of marriage, it seemed to me an important step had been taken to expand narrative possibilities for women characters. I thought of this as the heroine’s progress.

  In my own life I was doing my best to expand possibilities as well. My marriage had stabilized after the turmoil of Donald’s affair in Hawaii, at least well enough for us to hold together and go along, and it was also becoming evident that I might build a good career. From 1976 to 1980 we had lived in Maine, where Donald got a job organizing hospital workers and I taught at Bowdoin College. After a year there I was asked also to serve as Dean of Students, and suddenly from lowly assistant professor, I was elevated to one of the college’s top administrators, a member of the “President’s Council.” In 1980 I applied for a position as Associate Dean of Faculty at Barnard back in New York, and I got the job. Donald was able to transfer to his union’s New York headquarters. We seemed off and running.

  “And how many people applied for your job?” my eight-year-old son would ask as his requested bedtime story.

  “Over three hundred.”

  “And you got it!”

  “Yes,” I would answer, pleased at his pride in me and happy myself to think about the meaning of this long-shot chance.

  My duties were chiefly administrative, but I also had the option each term to teach a course. “The Heroine’s Progress,” co-listed by Barnard’s English department and the new Women’s Studies Program, centered on the figure of the “new woman”—that creature of the 1880s and 1890s who was eager to defy convention: Lyndall in Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm, who voices an ideal of women’s liberation even though she then dies in childbirth; Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure, who lives and breathes a new kind of equality between the sexes, though she, too, finds the conflicts within her own nature and the tyranny of convention too strong for her; Rhoda in George Gissing’s The Odd Women, hardier than the others, who turns down marriage to continue running her typing school for women. It went forward as far as Helen and Margaret Schlegel in Forster’s Howards End (1910), who find different ways of challenging Victorian patrimony. And it began it with The Portrait of a Lady. Isabel Archer shares with other of these heroines a dissatisfaction with th
e idea of marriage as her female destiny and also a certain sexual skittishness that leapt out for me as something I, too, had struggled with. I had been wary, always, when men I had dated pressed me too hard, quick to feel trapped and quick to bolt to regain my freedom of choice. So I appreciated such conflict in Isabel as well as in Eliot’s Gwendolyn Harleth and in Hardy’s brilliant portrayal of Sue Bridehead. In later renditions of the course I have begun with Daniel Deronda and gone forward as far as Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927).

  Isabel Archer seemed to me a bridge figure between nineteenth- and twentieth-century protagonists. She may be an orphan, but she has none of the standard problems of orphanhood such as poverty, loss of status, and social and emotional isolation. (Interestingly, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, who is not an orphan, has these problems.) What Isabel gains by being an orphan is freedom: there are no parents to restrict her; she seems free of obligations to others; she can be swooped up by her aunt and brought to Europe. The legacy Ralph arranges for his father to leave her further frees her to go anywhere she likes and do anything she chooses. But, as James puts it in the preface to the 1908 edition, defining his novel’s central dramatic interest, “What will she ‘do’?”

  James admits that Isabel’s external adventures are “mild,” but he calls her inner life “exciting.” Her friend Henrietta Stackpole works as a journalist, but there is never any consideration of Isabel adopting a profession. Unlike Tess, the poor dairy maid, she doesn’t have to support herself. As I think about my course “The Heroine’s Progress,” I am struck by how minimally the notion of work enters into any of the middle-class heroines’ destinies. Rhoda Nunn has her typing school and Lily Briscoe her painting; one assumes that Nora, having left the doll’s house, will get a job. But by and large energies are consumed in extricating from old situations rather than in entering new ones.