The Four Temperaments

by Yona Zeldis McDonough

  “You don't?” he asked, sounding surprised. There was a commercial on now, for the kind of industrial-strength detergent whose residue Penelope was sure would forever taint the waters, the soil, the very air they were required to breathe.

  “No. You have a problem with them.” She got up. News be damned. “I think I hear Isobel,” she said, retreating to the baby's room. Isobel had not stirred, but remained peacefully asleep. See a therapist. As if Penelope actually wanted to stop washing. Or tapping.

  Still, she realized after her conversation with Gabriel that she needed to be more careful. She didn't want him or anyone to know the full extent of her rituals. Or her preparations, which was how she liked to think of them. Preparations for the world, and all the terrifying cruelty it could contain. So she washed when he wasn't there, tapped only on the piece of wood that she kept in a pocket.

  After Gabriel returned from that trip to New York, Penelope decided to buy a new car. She had never trusted the sleek green sports car Gabriel bought after he was selected to build the new extension of an important northern California museum, and so she had been driving their old Toyota. But the Toyota, in perpetual need of repair, was faltering. Penelope thought it was time for a change.

  “What did you have in mind?” Gabriel asked when she told him her plan. But they both knew the money—and therefore the decision—was hers.

  She began to research cars. Their safety and their fuel emissions. Their gas consumption and their maneuverability. She logged on to the Web site of Consumer Reports, downloaded and printed back issues. The Insurance Institute did crash tests that simulated cars hitting walls; she studied their reports as if committing them to memory. As Gabriel sat watching the evening news, Penelope spread the pages around her, forming a giant fan on the living room floor. She crouched in the center, marking and cross-referencing. Gabriel offered his comments and occasionally a suggestion, but mostly he seemed happy to let her select whatever she wanted.

  Then there were the visits to showrooms, the protracted conversations with car salesmen, the numerous test-drives. Gabriel had offered to watch Isobel during this process, but Penelope insisted on taking the baby with her to each and every test-drive. Securely strapped into her car seat, Isobel enjoyed the activity. Her hands, clenched into small fists, beat the air around her; her feet in their white cotton socks kicked merrily.

  Although Penelope told this to no one, she felt certain that Isobel could actually help her choose the right car. Not that the baby would be able to articulate her choice in words. But Penelope was convinced that when Isobel's energy was right, she would be able to feel it. They were that much in tune with each other.

  Early on a cold, foggy Sunday morning, she dressed Isobel warmly in a knitted cotton sweater and cap, tucked a soft blanket around her legs. They had an appointment to test-drive a Volvo station wagon. Penelope was closing in on her target; it was either this or a Mercedes. She didn't really think she would buy a Mercedes, though. Too expensive, too ostentatious. But she hadn't fully settled on the Volvo yet either. She had read some good things about the Subaru Outback, a vehicle known for its modest gas consumption and overall reliability. But the Volvo had the side curtain air bags, to protect that tiny skull, in the backseat. She would have to see.

  Gabriel drove them to the dealership. “Do you want me to go with you? Or to wait?” he asked.

  “That's all right,” she said. “The salesman promised to drive me home.” She had talked to this particular salesman on the phone four times already; sometimes, she woke up in the middle of the night with a question that she wrote down so she could ask him as soon as it was morning. He was eager to make this sale, and the offer to drive her was part of that eagerness. But there was also something else that Penelope didn't want to tell Gabriel. If Gabriel was in the car with her, she was afraid that she wouldn't be able to sense Isobel's energy. The connection between mother and child might be somehow impeded or clouded. So she leaned down to the open window of the car, where his breath made soft, white puffs in the chilly air, and lightly kissed him. Then he was gone.

  “Mrs. Kornblatt?” Penelope turned around, and there was the salesman, arm already outstretched, ready to wring her hand in greeting. They were all this way; they must have studied at the same school. “Be firm, yet friendly,” she could imagine them being instructed. “Make the customer feel confident in your confidence.” This one was a bit older than she was used to, with strands of thin, graying hair hopelessly combed and plastered over his mostly bald head. His glasses had thick, black frames. His nose was shiny.

  “Car's right here,” he told her. Penelope turned to see the car—white, of course, with a tan interior—that was waiting on the lot. As it happened, white turned out to be the safest color for a car. Statistically speaking, that is. Even Gabriel seemed impressed when she showed him the figures. “Are you and the little lady ready?” She looked down at Isobel and extended her finger for the baby to grasp.

  Penelope liked the feeling the car had in her hands; solid, yet pliable. “Mind if I take it outside the city a little ways?” she asked the salesman, whose name was Burt.

  “Anywhere you want,” Burt said affably. “You're in the driver's seat.” He chuckled at his own wit. Penelope kept her eyes on the road. The traffic was light and she was able to leave the city behind quickly.

  She liked how the car handled on the highway; the acceleration was smooth and quiet. Now she wanted to find a winding back road, so she could get a sense of the way it handled the curves and dips of a more circuitous route. Burt kept up a steady stream of patter; Penelope caught certain phrases like sunroof and fully loaded. He had obviously been schooled on what features appealed to the gals. Penelope gave him an occasional tight smile or nod, but mostly she concentrated on the car and the road as it ribboned out in front of her. The fog drifted down through the still-bare tree branches. At the side of the road, Penelope saw a large male deer and although she slowed down, her heart accelerated, as if she, or the animal, were in great danger. But the deer remained immobile until she passed.

  Burt twisted his head around. “Smart buck,” he said to himself as much as to her. “Just a few seconds earlier and he'd have been roadkill for sure.”

  “Why did you say that?” Penelope asked quickly. The deer startled her; his antlers looked like beseeching, bony arms.

  “This baby is built like a truck. You don't want to get in its way.”

  Penelope checked the rearview mirror. She could just see the deer as he moved, slowly, sedately, into the group of naked shrubs at the far side of the road. Isobel's eyes caught hers in the small rectangle of reflective glass. The baby wrinkled her nose and let out a squeal of laughter when she saw her mother's face. The deer. The child. Yes. The signs she was waiting for—there they were. Everything was right with the world. The car, pure and gleaming white, was built as sturdily as a ship. It would glide through the swirling waters of their lives, keeping them safe.

  “We'll take it,” she said, turning her beautiful and radiant face to the salesman.

  OSCAR

  Oscar and Ruth had been coming here, to this isolated New Hampshire lakeside, for about five years. When their sons were young, they always rented places on Cape Cod. The boys had loved the ocean and they did too. But when the children no longer accompanied them and the Cape grew more and more crowded, they began to look for something else. The alternative they found pleased them both and the weeks they spent here were idyllic, even for a couple married as long as they had been. True, this past year had been harder than most. All the more reason, then, to look forward to the restorative powers the place had always had.

  It was the water that had originally drawn Oscar to the spot; the cottage itself was modest, even cramped, and though the surrounding woods were pleasant enough, they lacked any real character. But outside the cottage was an ambling wraparound porch, punctuated with several large, heavy glass windows that extended nearly from its floor to its ceiling. No matter
where he sat, he could see the open expanse of the lake, and there was always something to see. In the morning, he and Ruth brought their breakfast out to the porch to watch the water, which was sometimes smooth as glass and other times animated by small, noisy waves. Since the sun rose on the other side of the cottage, the morning light was cool and muted—shades of gray, silver, blue—on the water's surface. As the sun climbed higher in the sky, the light spilled down over the water, turning it first gold, then bronze and, as the daylight faded, silver again. Morning was a good time for birds too: there were loons, herons and ducks, and Oscar liked to watch them. Some nights when the moon was low and full, the water threw back its radiance, making everything around it seem impossibly bright.

  All through the day, the lake was their beacon, their touchstone. They swam in it, of course, pushing back the water with their legs and arms, spraying it out of their mouths. They took their lunch down to its edge and late in the day, their cocktails, which they consumed while seated at the rusted little table and chairs that had sat there for years. The cottage came equipped with a canoe, so they frequently took rides across the lake before dinner, paddles dipping into the water as they moved peaceably along its surface.

  When he was feeling lazy, Oscar skipped the swimming and boating and instead took a book or the local newspapers to read, positioning his chair on the narrow strip of a dock that extended outward into the lake, so that everywhere he looked he was embraced by water. And one afternoon, he took his music stand down to the dock, where he played the violin solo in Bach's Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins; this was the score for Balanchine's Concerto Barocco, which he knew the company would be dancing in the fall.

  He hadn't played this music in a long while, and he needed the practice. There were two solo violin parts, and although Oscar knew that he would be playing the first, he decided to practice both. The relationship between the two was so quicksilver, so cunning; the first violin began a melody that the second might echo, in another pitch, only a split second later. If he were familiar with both parts, he would have better command of the intricate, even breathtaking pace of the timing.

  Ruth came down from the cottage to listen. She sat in a chair, facing the lake rather than Oscar; still, when he finished, he saw that her face was wet with tears. He reached out his arms to her as she rose from the chair and they stood there together for a few minutes, looking out at the water, whose silent approval seemed to have blessed them both. He felt he had never loved her so much.

  “We should invite the boys up here some year,” Ruth said later that day. She always said this while they were at the lake. “I think William and Betsy would love it, don't you? And what about Ben and Laura?” Oscar nodded but knew she would not do anything about it, for which he was grateful. He thought she—they—were too immersed in their sons' lives, and he had come to enjoy this bit of forced separation. Did he really need to know about Gabriel and Ginny? Was anything in his life made better for the knowledge? Although Gabriel had done his best to reassure his parents that whatever happened with Ginny was totally and completely over, Oscar didn't believe him. Not that he would say this to Ruth—after all, what could he do about it and why worry her?—but he knew Ginny better than that. She never said that things were finished with Gabriel. Quite the opposite. Oscar remembered that night in her apartment, the stripped-down bed as naked as he had wanted her to be, and he shuddered—in disappointment and in shame.

  Oscar tried his best not to think of Ginny. It was as if the water, and the mellow tenor of his days in its company, pushed all thoughts of New York and his life there to the periphery of his mind. Of course, when he started playing the Bach, that brought him back, mentally at least, to New York, for he was aware that it might occasion a moment when he and Ginny—as musical soloist and leading ballerina—were onstage together. He knew of her promotion within the company—that much hadn't escaped him. And she might be given that role. But even this thought didn't trouble him much. What could possibly happen if they were forced to take the stage together? The entire company, orchestra and audience would be watching. It was only when they were alone that his good intentions receded, overpowered by the perplexing, dismaying tide of feeling he still, despite everything, had for her. So pushing those thoughts away, he instead focused on the music—mournful, complex, beautiful—and tried to find his peace within it.

  Oscar could remember the first time that he heard George Balanchine had actually choreographed a ballet to what had to be one of the most sublime pieces of music ever written. He couldn't believe the audacity, the arrogance of it. Forget about Bach rolling over in his grave—Oscar imagined the great man tearing out his hair and banging his head against the carved, wooden coffin in vexation. But then he calmed down and actually watched the ballet, and he had to admit the thing had a power commensurate with the music it so skillfully employed. The stage was bare, lit only by a deep blue light, a color that made Oscar think of the sky over the Mediterranean. As if to continue the classical mood inspired by the light, the dancers wore sleeveless white leotards with short white skirts; they might have been the figures on a Grecian urn, come suddenly and stunningly to life. Apart from that, no costumes, no scenery attempted to compete with the music, or the choreography that articulated it so fluidly. Oscar was transfixed. He had never understood the Bach score so deeply as when it was danced by Balanchine's dancers; he had been wrong and the knowledge humbled him. He would never complain about Concerto Barocco again.

  Returning to it all these years later, he found that the feeling it inspired had not deserted him. He practiced the Bach to the exclusion of anything else. Around it, his days unfolded calmly and cleanly. He and Ruth took the canoe out the whole length of the lake early one morning; they stopped at one of the tiny islands that interrupted its surface and picked two pails of wild blueberries and added some of them to pancake batter for their breakfast. Another day, they reluctantly pulled themselves away from the lake and drove to Portsmouth. They spent the morning walking through its well-tended streets and playing a game from their early married life: they each picked their favorite house, the one they would like to live in, without telling the other which one it was. Only later, over a lunch of steamers and cold lobster salad eaten at Newick's (big picnic tables covered with torn red-and-white oilcloth, paper napkins and plastic bibs), did they discover that the house each had selected was the same one, a fine old Federal at the crest of a hill, its warm red bricks so well and seamlessly joined that they looked like cloth.

  Near the end of their stay at the cottage, Oscar decided to look at some of the other music he had brought. Opening up the old leather case, he began to sift through the white sheets with their black notations; in his mind, he could hear the music while reading the score. But then another piece of paper fluttered loose from the pile, and this one was typed with words rather than notes. It was a schedule for the ballet company, something that must have been handed out before he left and which he had not looked at since. He saw that there was a break after the spring season, after which the company went upstate for its month-long stay at Saratoga. Oscar had never been to Saratoga. Its association with the ballet was too strong for him, and he never wanted to go. After Saratoga, the dancers were traveling to another city. And since the musicians never accompanied them, Oscar seldom paid much attention to where they went. He scanned the sheet quickly, and then stopped, reading over the destination San Francisco several times. The company would be in San Francisco in August.

  Although he had not looked at a calendar in days, Oscar knew that it must be August already. Which meant that the 120-person ballet company—including Ginny Valentine—would be in San Francisco any day now. Why did this thought fill him with apprehension? Gabriel might not even have known the ballet was coming to town.

  A sound distracted Oscar from these thoughts. Ruth had walked over, carrying a plate of blueberry muffins and a pitcher of iced tea on a tray. The ice cubes tinkled like bells. “Oscar, darling, wha
t's wrong?” she said. Oscar looked at her tender and trusting expression and said nothing. Instead, he handed her the schedule. Ruth set down the tray. Then she herself sank heavily to the flowered wicker sofa, fists clenched tightly around the sheet of paper.

  GINNY

  Ginny liked Saratoga. She would take it over New York City any day. Saratoga reminded her, just a bit, of the town in Louisiana where she grew up. Old houses, old trees. Porches, lots of them, with rocking chairs, swings or wicker settees, and pots of flowers that someone watered every day. Clean sidewalks, without any dog shit.

  Ginny had been in Saratoga with the company last year, and she liked it then too, but this year, she was sharing a room with Althea Johnson and that made it even better. Since they arrived in July, Althea had taken Ginny to all of her favorite spots, like the store that sold the secondhand clothes—Althea called them “vintage”—where they spent three solid hours.

  Now these were the kinds of clothes Ginny had always liked, only she had never been able to put a name to them. She found a silk robe with great big orange poppies all over it; a tight red dress with bugle beads sewn up and down the front and a short, tight red bolero jacket to match; black platform shoes that looked as if they were new when her Grandma Virginia was young, with more bugle beads, cut-out toes and a sexy strap that wound up and around her ankle. Ginny also bought a long, magenta silk scarf with marabou trim and a rhinestone necklace, star-burst earrings and bracelet that came in their original black velveteen box. Althea approved of everything and Althea was a person whose taste she could trust.

  Another day they went to the spa, where they were dunked in Saratoga's famous mineral water and taciturn old ladies in sweat-stained uniforms gave them massages. Althea even convinced her to have a mud wrap, which consisted of being smeared all over with some very suspicious-looking brown stuff and then rubbed off with salt and a big, stiff brush. Afterward, though, Ginny's skin did seem positively dewy, so she went back to have her face done, which she hadn't agreed to the first time.