Behave

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  “Wouldn’t it be funny,” he said, “if little Albert here showed up in an analyst’s office someday with a mysterious fear of sealskin coats? They’d turn it into something sexual about a hidden early memory. Maybe they’d think he’d gotten smacked for playing with his mother’s pubic hair.”

  No, it wouldn’t be funny, I should have said. But I didn’t. Just as I hadn’t said that John must do something, anything, to take the unfair burden of deception off Polly’s shoulders. Just as I hadn’t insisted that we couldn’t let Albert leave without making some attempt to decondition him. Just as I hadn’t said, about Mary and me: choose, simply choose, never mind your theories about a more enlightened future. Before anyone else gets hurt.

  In response to John’s vulgar quip, there was minimal uneasy laughter in the room. Albert—so big now, head tottering, face stained with tears—was being carried away on the hip of a nurse, sparing all of us any formal farewells, aside from the self-congratulatory banter. I didn’t think John’s final statement was appropriate. But I was even more surprised when he wrote that same jesting comment—pubic hair and all—into our final published scientific paper, released to the world just a few months later.

  One of the only honest men in the world. If he had a thought, he seldom censored it. As I knew. As Mary knew. As poor Polly, the only innocent one among us, was forced to know as well.

  Chapter 15

  Mary arrived at our house on the first Sunday in April in a wound-up state, which persisted even after we’d sat down to a simple supper of leftover beef brisket, horseradish, and new potatoes.

  “Oh, don’t apologize,” she said, stabbing a piece of beef without bringing it to her lips.

  If anyone should’ve apologized, it was Mary. My parents hadn’t wanted extra company during Passover, but she’d called several times that weekend, suggesting how much she wanted them all to see each other. Because of the holiday, they’d already sat through one enormous four-hour dinner and attended a repeat version at my Uncle’s house the very next night, and by now, even my father, Mary-besotted as he was, would have preferred to sit in his favorite wing chair with Bromo-Seltzer and a copy of Harper’s.

  John ate without speaking. I matched him bite for bite, stealing looks, trying to judge whether he knew something he hadn’t told us.

  Finally, Mary pushed away her plate and said, “To tell you the truth, I have a rotten headache.”

  My mother leaned forward, reaching out to touch Mary’s wrist while babbling consoling words. Mother was a well-meaning but not effortless hostess, and when someone seemed off or odd, she immediately took the blame, and became even more inelegant in her attempts to put every last thing right. Mary had seemed off from the moment she entered the house, and I could see the wheels in Mother’s head turning: Should we have invited her to the Friday Seder, even though she isn’t Jewish? Is the cold brisket insufficient? Is it an insult we haven’t brought out any wine?

  It did occur to me that Mary was an alcoholic, and that wine was actually the headache “cure” she was trying to acquire, by hinting, fretting, and ignoring her food. So perhaps it was a little heartless of me to suggest, “Why don’t you go lie down for a little while, and see if it goes away?”

  To my surprise, she practically leapt up and out of her chair, napkin dropping over her plate.

  “That would be just the ticket. And then I’ll be, I’ll be”—she seemed to be stammering from happiness, or nerves, or both—“I’ll be right as rain.”

  Mother summoned Annie and asked her to guide Mary to a resting couch in the opposite parlor, and to bring her a glass of fresh water, if that would help.

  “It’s quiet I need,” Mary insisted. “You’ll all be holding back your conversation if I’m napping right next door.”

  John, who hadn’t spoken once since dinner was served, looked up and cocked an eyebrow. No one had been talking. What animated conversation would be interrupted?

  “Don’t trouble yourself. I know the way. Twenty minutes is all I need,” Mary said, scooting to the hall and then up the stairs, quick as a scale on a xylophone, toward the bedrooms above.

  She should know the way, I thought, since she had been here—was it possible?—nine or ten times in just four weeks.

  After a few minutes, Mother addressed John. “I do hope she feels better.”

  He had just forked a parsley-covered new potato into his mouth. It stuck in one corner of his cheek, which went still for a moment, and then he resumed chewing, focused on the food, not at all concerned about his wife, who—it seemed, based on the silence over our heads—had made herself comfortable quickly.

  In response to his utter lack of response, Mother gave John a look that told me she was beginning to wonder, at last, what kind of husband he was. She had asked him many times about Polly and Little John. He’d supplied some anecdotes about the golden “Stoney Lake days,” especially those first years when he’d built a cottage up in Ontario, practically by himself. But no doubt she noticed how quickly the tales turned from children to his own interests in country life, building things, gardening, being self-sufficient, and his belief that the children—any children, in the abstract, for now the names of his actual children had vanished under the swift-moving waters of his perpetual self-congratulation—really should do physical tasks, use their hands, do more and think less. I rationalized that he was simply nervous. Nerves generally sent him into a more grandstanding mode, just as they did for my father, who was otherwise the sweetest man on earth.

  If Mother was beginning to question, it was a shame, because she had been so confident in the beginning, and that confidence had made her infinitely more happy. After that very first dinner with the Watsons, Mother had confided that she would no longer worry about me in a professional setting, now that she’d met the wife of the man I was working for. “You can judge a man by his wife,” she’d said that day. “And I know that Mary Watson wouldn’t settle for just anyone.”

  I didn’t know whom or what Mary Watson would settle for. I knew only that she was in my bedroom, and I could just barely hear, above the sounds of halfhearted dinner conversation, some sort of scraping and scuttling that no one else seemed to notice.

  “John,” I said. “I mean, Dr. Watson . . .”

  “No formalities required, Rosalie. Your parents have probably guessed that we go by first names around the lab.”

  “John,” I said, “do you think that perhaps you might consider checking on your wife?” Drawers opened and closed in quick succession. I recognized the familiar squeak of my wardrobe door. Something, perhaps a hanger, clattered as it fell. “Maybe she’s looking for an aspirin or a washcloth, or about to be sick . . .”

  “Oh, I think she’s probably fine.”

  Another few minutes passed, interminably, as I made a mental inventory of everything I owned and every reason Mary would have for going through my drawers and pockets.

  “John,” I said again.

  At last he caught on to the urgency in my voice. His self-assurance melted. He stood and headed for the dining-room door, with me behind him, followed by Mother. Father barely turned in his chair, confused about the fuss, before turning back to his plate.

  At that moment Mary came flying down the staircase, taking the steps so quickly, she missed one, grabbed the rail, lurched, and kept leaping downward in a half-galloping, half-cascading motion, skirt billowing. None of our reactions could keep pace with her. She was at the landing, eyes fixed straight ahead, and out the door with her spring wrap over one arm—but without her umbrella, still sitting in the stand. Mother called out just as Mary yanked on the door handle, but Mary didn’t turn, didn’t explain. There was a little grunt of satisfaction as the door opened, unless I imagined it and it was only the hinges groaning, and then only the open doorway, and a spring breeze blowing into our faces, with the smell of damp, fresh-tilled soil from the gardens at the center of
the boulevard, and Mary gone, and all of us turning, Mother’s mouth open, my hands over my face, John frowning, and Father still pushing up slowly, up and out of his chair, finally facing the right direction, toward the hallway, having missed Mary Watson’s final theatrical performance.

  Chapter 16

  Two horrible weeks later, I was in New York City, in the apartment of Mary Cover, with two suitcases parked next to the arm of the sagging, floral-patterned sofa. Mary’s fiancé, Harold, handed her a cup of tea and hitched up his trousers, revealing eight inches of black sock as he wedged himself into a comfortable position, fully attentive. In truth, I’d been hoping for a private female audience, at least for the first hours of my stay. But I could see from the moment that Mary opened the door with Harry standing behind her, his bushy-haired head floating above her smaller frizzy-haired one, that they were one of those couples joined at the hip—finishing each other’s sentences, sensitive to each other’s slightest cough or sniffle. It made me feel more depressed just sitting next to them.

  “So let me get this straight,” Harold said. “She’s willing to divorce, is that right?”

  “Most likely, yes.”

  Harold caressed his chin thoughtfully, as if he were a lawyer I was trying to hire—which he most certainly was not.

  “But Rosalie,” Mary said, leaning forward, “What do you want? Have you had any time to think about that?”

  Mary made me a bowl of rice pudding and a cup of chamomile tea—“Do you have anything stronger?” No, she did not—and loaned me a pair of mint-striped pajamas, which I accepted, even though of course I’d brought everything I needed to live in the city for a month or two, or at least until things settled down in Baltimore. After saying goodnight, she disappeared into a back bedroom with Harold, and I tried to find a position between the springs, inhaling Mary’s clean and comforting, astringent witch hazel smell—faint on the pajamas, stronger on the pillow. Breathing in, I could picture our dorm rooms at Vassar, that simpler time. I could picture sitting under a great oak tree, with her head in my lap, looking up at the sky, talking about a future we couldn’t begin to imagine, which made it fairly boring, but also problem free.

  Mary had accepted my desperate plea for help with few questions, had offered me a small stipend out of her own pocket for helping her teach a few weeks of a psych course at Columbia until the semester was finished, and given me a place to stay, on top of it all. Kind, practical, nonjudgmental Mary. Falling asleep that first night, I found myself on the cusp of dreams, puzzling: Where had that little charm bracelet gone? When had I last taken it off? I couldn’t remember.

  What had happened, two weeks earlier, was this.

  John had waited for me to walk into the lab the morning after Mary’s frenetic escape from our house that dreadful Sunday night, and then he’d immediately requested a ride in my car over to Homewood Campus, a subterfuge so that we could be alone, discussing what had happened, and what he would do, or rather—I had to remind him twice—what we would do.

  “She knew what she was looking for,” he said. “She found the letters in your wardrobe, and she gave them to her brother Harold, and he’s already photographed them. He’s trying to blackmail me.”

  I didn’t know where to begin. What do you mean, blackmail? How long did she know? Was she planning to search for the letters from the first moment she befriended my parents?

  But the question that came out first was: “Who has the letters now?”

  “We had a loud quarrel. I got them back.”

  “And then?” I was having a hard time juggling talking, driving, and smoking—yes, I was smoking in earnest these days, the cigarette stamped red with the lipstick I was determined to wear, when I felt like it, with or without my mother’s approval. And yes, in a sense, Mother had been right, as she’d discover in even more awful detail all too soon. Harlots wear lipstick, and I was a harlot, a trollop, a moll.

  “And then what?” John repeated back to me. The more worried or excited I sounded, the more he responded by withdrawing, lips thinned and brow furrowed, eyes slitted as we drove.

  “And then what happened to them? You wrote those love notes and letters to me. They belong to me.”

  I took my eyes off the road to look at him. He was facing me squarely, a bland, annoyed expression on his face, questioning my priorities.

  “He’s tried to control me before,” John said. “Now, he’s got some powerful ammunition. The man is a professional scold. And he’s very good at it, don’t you forget.”

  Harold Ickes had wanted Mary and John to divorce years ago, back in Chicago, when John was having an affair with Vida Sutton. At the time, Harold had been having his own affair with a married woman, but no matter. Harold, a lawyer with political ambitions, still jumped to the moral high ground whenever he could. Sparring with Chicago politicians had given him hubris. It irked him that he could be a thorn in the side of mayors and business leaders but still have failed to get John Watson out of the family. Once and for all, he wanted his sister to get a divorce, under the best possible financial scenario. Basically, John should be forced to give Mary anything she asked for. Given that John had always been plagued with financial problems, this would reduce him to abject poverty. I think Harold got the most pleasure from imagining John limping back to South Carolina, begging for occasional work as a farmhand, or living the life of a moonshiner perhaps.

  “I’m surprised she’s willing to divorce you,” I said.

  John hesitated. “She’s mentioned it before.”

  “She has?”

  John was honest, yes, but that didn’t mean he volunteered every detail. I’d been under the impression Mary would never let go, no matter what she knew of John’s affairs. But now I was getting the impression that she had always planned to let go, and only wanted the best timing and the best deal—and proof that would stand up in court, just to make sure he didn’t pull any rabbits out of his hat.

  “She’s not just trying to scare you? She won’t be trying to win you back?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past her,” John said. “That could be her plan. She’s not entirely stable.”

  The next morning, cloistered again in the apartment of friends I probably did not deserve, I moped about, allowing Harold Jones to serve me over-easy eggs, potatoes, and toast. Mary Cover refilled my coffee. Glancing at each other purposefully, like dancers in a Broadway show, they each pulled out a chair and sat down.

  “We’ve been talking about this, Harold and I,” Mary said.

  Harold added, “We’re only thinking of what’s best for you.”

  “You know I respect John’s work,” Mary said. “In fact, we’ve been discussing conditioning and your infant trials and all sorts of things. It interests Harold and me, very much.”

  Harold nodded and tipped his head forward shyly, and I could see the hair thinning atop his head, a round patch that would soon meet the receding hairline a few inches to the front. “Do you realize that I very nearly almost came to work at Johns Hopkins last fall, just when you did?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “I was supposed to work with Knight Dunlap,” he said. “You know Knight. And then something happened, I got rejected at the last minute, or they couldn’t make room for me, or something.” It still stung him a little. But he put an arm around Mary and squeezed. “Of course, look what I would have missed. These two ships would have passed in the night.”

  “I can’t imagine,” I said, marveling for the hundredth time that I’d gotten my position when someone like Harold hadn’t. “Funny, how things work out.”

  “A shame missing the chance to work with John, though,” Harold added kindly. “He’s a pioneer. Good questions. Important work.”

  “The most important,” Mary said, putting her hand over Harold’s. “But about the personal matter. About the letters, and the divorce. I’m just not sure you’re think
ing through all the options and all the consequences.”

  I hadn’t said a word, not that they’d given me a chance.

  Mary glanced at my plate. “Aren’t you going to eat?”

  The two perfectly paired yellow yolks sat, dully shining, each covered by a rapidly cooling, opaque film. Harold had blackened the potatoes. I was sure that Mary adored his burned potatoes, but I could pass on them, especially this morning. Really, I wanted nothing more than the coffee, a cigarette, and a walk through Central Park.

  “So what we’re thinking,” Harold said—and I noticed, only then, that he had an apron tied around his waist. It made me want to giggle, irresponsibly. To sober myself, I looked past him to the fire escape—backed window, and to the dirty windowsill, where a long line of small, ugly figurines sat in pairs: two little pigs, and two little lighthouses, two little haystacks, and two little railroad cars. They’d collected them together—slowly, methodically, agreeably, purchasing whatever pair was on offer at Cape Cod or colonial Williamsburg—on every weekend and holiday vacation away from Columbia. John would never collect salt and pepper shakers. Thank goodness.

  Harold seemed to notice my inappropriate smile and tried to sally past it, toward the conclusion he’d worked up in the night, talking with Mary, the two of them part of a single hive brain, androgynous and fully fused. “What we’re thinking,” he tried again, in his crisp New Englander’s accent—no honeyed drawl when he delivered the bad news—”is that perhaps you break things off. Stay in the city a year. Pursue some opportunities in the field. We have some promising suggestions.”

  “What he’s trying to say,” Mary said, running out of patience, “is that John Watson has a reputation. You’re not the first, you won’t be the last, and for all you know, they’ll both simply drag your name through the mud, and your family’s name, and they’ll stay together, for the sake of the children, and he’ll have more affairs, and get away with it, since men always do, and then what do you have? Nothing. There. I’ve said it.”