—I can’t find him!
We went through the house. Every room was empty. Only when we got up into the tower did we see him. From the high window we made out a tall dappled figure in pajama pants moving through the trees far below. He was making for the river. We ran downstairs and out through the back door.
As we scrambled down the hill we heard the Albany train approaching. He was in clear view now, splashing through the sedge, his pajama pants soaked, his long arms and legs pumping. The white head was lifted to the sky and he was shouting. He floundered on, losing his footing and pitching forward, then recovering, moving inexorably toward the shallow bank that ascended to the tracks. He was in bright sunshine now, and beyond him the river glittered like a heaving bed of jewels as the locomotive came on. The old man’s pace didn’t slow or falter. He wanted only to get to the railroad tracks.
On came the train. It shimmered in the heat. We were moving through the sedge as he clambered up the bank on the far side. We saw him glance over his shoulder. We were screaming at him now and he had to hear us even with the noise of the train but our voices seemed only to quicken his progress toward the tracks. We saw that in the next seconds he and the locomotive would at the same moment arrive at the same place. He didn’t waver, he didn’t flinch. He didn’t know what hit him.
Chapter 11
I heard about Morgan Schuyler’s death in the late afternoon and drove up to Ravenswood early the following morning. The front door burst open and Constance ran down the porch steps and flung herself into my arms. For a few seconds she clung to me and I felt through her blouse that her heart was beating very fast. Then she put her lips to my ear and breathed the words, Thank you. I remembered her telling me once, a lifetime ago, that she’d only be well again when the old man was dead. We walked across the driveway to the house. Her arm was around my waist and mine around her shoulder. Three months had passed since she’d moved back to Ravenswood and her dream was realized: Daddy was dead.
As soon as we entered the house the shadows descended. How dark it was. The verandahs blocked out much of the daylight and the stained oak paneling absorbed what little else filtered through. Where was Mildred?
We sat in the kitchen. The back door was open and the air was sweet with the scent of fresh-mown grass and trees in blossom. Far below us the Hudson sparkled in the sunlight. The railroad tracks were gleaming. Constance sat facing me, her hands clasped together. I tried to detect in her some sign of shock but there was none. She did, yes, seem to be at peace but I wasn’t convinced that the old man’s death could have swept away her extensive structure of neurosis so fast, and I watched her carefully. I couldn’t tell if she was acting or not and she clearly didn’t know either.
—How’s Howard? she said.
—He talks about you every day.
She grew more animated.
—Soon he’ll have me every day! Sidney, we can start over, can’t we? When I woke up this morning I felt as though it was the first day of my life.
—You’re not devastated?
—He wanted to die. But now I can live! There’s so much I want to do! We’ll take Howard to Europe. It’ll be educational. We’ll go to all the great museums. We’ll sit in outdoor cafés and see how other people live.
I felt a distinct whisper of foreboding. I was right. She’d assimilated nothing.
—Let’s bury your father first, I said.
This intrusion of brute reality failed to deflate her.
—Yes of course, let’s bury the dead, but let’s celebrate the living too!
Did she seriously imagine I could be drawn into this bizarre mood of exultant affirmation? I’d come to make funeral arrangements. She knew what I was thinking. We’d speak of it in some more sober hour. But she wanted a sign from me now.
—You’re relieved it’s over, I said.
I took her hands in mine. I had to tell her what I felt, or what I feared.
—It’s not just a passing thing, is it? I said. You won’t come crashing back to earth and decide you hate me again?
She gazed at me through a glaze of tears. She pressed a fist to her mouth and shook her head. She came around the table and pulled up a chair next to mine. We sat close together and she was smiling as the tears ran down her face. I wanted her to melt the ice in my heart but it couldn’t be done in an instant. I was too old for that.
Then Mildred came into the kitchen and everything got dark again. Constance rose from her chair to fill the kettle. I stood up and faced Mildred, who stared at me from haunted, startled eyes. She was dressed all in black. She looked as if she hadn’t slept.
—I’m sorry, Mildred.
She nodded. She pushed past me to the sink. If there was coffee to be made then she would make it. Her back was bent now. She’d aged a decade in a night. She was a widow once more. Constance had lost them both, Iris and Daddy, but so had Mildred, and Morgan Schuyler, her true love, the love of her maturity, for whom she’d performed silent service all these years, had died before her eyes. I thought: She won’t last long.
Constance was standing in the doorway looking out toward the mountains with her back to us.
—Come out for a moment, she said.
Mildred was washing out the coffee pot. Humped, intent, her eyes hooded, her hands busy, she absorbed no light and gave none out. I stepped through the back door and Constance turned to me and took my face in her hands. With careful tender delicacy she kissed me on the lips. I tasted a flicker of her wet tongue, quick as a viper. How long since she’d done that? If she could sustain it, if she could only make me warm with her kisses again, then I’d soon lose the resentment and mistrust all silted up inside me. I wanted nothing more.
—We must look after her, she said.
Once again arrangements had to be made. I was busy on the telephone for most of the afternoon. I spoke to Hugo Friedrich. I’d antagonized him once but it didn’t seem to matter now. He was brusque in his sympathy but he was a practical man. He told me what was going to happen and what I had to do.
That night we all retired early. It had been a long time since Constance and I had shared a bed. I asked her if she’d prefer that I sleep elsewhere.
—Where would you sleep? she said.
There were only two possibilities. Daddy’s room was empty but it seemed faintly indecent to suggest it.
—I could sleep in Iris’s room, I said.
She was turning down the quilt. I stood on the other side of the bed. My suitcase was by the door. She gazed at me. Suddenly she seemed very frightened and very young, and I glimpsed again the fragility I’d seen when we’d first met and fallen in love. How very long ago it all seemed now.
—I’ll sleep here with you, I said.
From opposite sides we entered the bed. We turned aside to switch off our respective bedside lamps. We turned back. We moved toward each other in the darkness. The world was very still, very silent. Such a profound silence, in every sense, whenever I arrived from the city.
—I’m cold, she whispered.
To hold her in my arms, to touch her even through the nightgown, was like an electric shock to my poor dry body, inert these many months. We kissed, and again I tasted her flickering wet tongue. Then there was some urgency to the proceedings and it all got rather turbulent, and I had no opportunity to reflect on what it meant for us, nor did I think much of it when after a very few breathless moments she whispered her strange request, that I call her by her sister’s name.
Morgan Schuyler was buried next to his wife and daughter later that week. Constance stood at the graveside with a wild rose she’d picked in the garden that morning. Not yet thirty and the only survivor, the last of the line. But I feared the aftermath. I feared that having climbed so fast and so high from the depths in which she’d been sunk there must be a collapse eventually. She’d seen her stepfather die under the wheels of a locomotive. She’d seen his body burst apart like a bag of blood.
The next day we returned to New York. Consta
nce was eager to leave Ravenswood and I took this as a good sign. Already she’d told me that she intended to sell the house but there was no urgency, the old man’s will had yet to be read. Mildred quietly told us that she would stay on. I wasn’t happy about it. She was a bereaved woman and it was an old house in an isolated location. It seemed a morbid situation and I feared that her grieving would take a morbid turn. Morbidity clung to that place and to that family like dank river fog. Constance brushed my reservations aside.
—Mildred’s tough, she said.
She remained dangerously exalted. There was a curious incident at the graveside. After she’d tossed the wild rose onto the coffin she’d turned to me and, seizing my lapel, produced what sounded like a muffled shout of laughter. She buried her face in my shoulder. Her whole body was shaking. I put my arms around her. I don’t believe any of the others realized what was happening, but this was no access of strong grief. I was the only one who knew it, but Constance was in the grip of uncontrollable laughter. I put it down to hysterical stress. She was a sick woman. The previous night she’d again asked me to call her Iris.
Our return to the city was delayed by a mechanical malfunction. Coming into Staatsburg, the Jaguar began to lose power. I suspected a blockage in the fuel line. I eventually found a mechanic but it was humiliating to have to drive that big car down Main Street at five miles an hour, as though we were part of a funeral procession.
Howard was happy to welcome Constance home. That night we ate together at the kitchen table and no mention was made of Daddy. But still I anticipated the backlash. I was troubled by her refusal to talk about him, and indeed about Iris.
The backlash never came. She awoke each day in a state of zeal for life. There was a light in her eye from morning to night. She seemed to feel neither fatigue nor anxiety, and for sure not grief, not for Daddy, not for Iris. Her sister’s name was only heard at night, in bed, during intimacy. My own theory: She thought I’d married the wrong sister and she was trying to make amends. She was allowing me to make love to Iris so as to atone for what she’d put me through. How wrong she was. But I didn’t know how to say this without demeaning her lavish sexual generosity.
Meanwhile she attended to the running of the household as she never had before. Poor Gladys grew sullen as she was put to work clearing out obscure closets, opening windows and airing rooms, throwing stuff away. Eventually even Howard grew weary of her relentless spirited briskness. After ten days of so-called spring cleaning, she went back to work. In the evening she explained to me the ways in which Cooper Wilder must modernize.
—The world’s changing and if you don’t change with it you die, she said.
I’d begun work on A Scream in the Night. The progressive tendency in Constance’s thinking didn’t chime with my own outlook. The transformation of Manhattan into a so-called modern city was to me a bad joke. New York was breaking down. I catalogued its death throes on a daily basis. People told me that living here was a nightmare. Those who could afford to were moving out. The city in its decline was not only more dangerous and more squalid, it was becoming of all things mediocre.
Constance was unaffected by any of this. I stood in the doorway of our building one morning and watched her as she walked up the block to the subway. The sidewalk was strewn with trash where garbage cans had been kicked over in the night. There was broken glass underfoot from the smashed streetlights. The sidewalk was cracked and uneven. There were potholes in it, potholes in the sidewalk. Constance was oblivious. She held her head high, and in her yellow coat, with a small matching pageboy hat perched at a jaunty angle on her piled blonde hair, she looked like royalty as she effortlessly, gracefully strode on, untouched by the filth through which she moved.
As the weeks went by I watched her attempt to sustain the appetite for life she’d discovered in the immediate aftermath of Daddy’s death. That her energy issued from an unwholesome place in her psyche was made clear to me one night after we’d been to the theater. I don’t remember what we saw, but afterward Constance decided we must have a cocktail. I’d have preferred to go home but instead we went to a bar at Forty-fifth and Eighth. It was called the Flamingo or the Ostrich or some damn thing. It was full of smoke. It was crowded and hot and loud. We found a table and ordered highballs. Constance was eager to have a good time. She was shouting at me but I couldn’t hear what she said. Just as the waitress was setting our drinks down a man lurched against our table. There was spillage, and Constance at once stood up and threw what remained of her highball in the man’s face. Then she seized him by the lapels.
I thought he was going to hit her. I was on my feet too. More shouting. The man’s wife appeared. Now there was screaming. Others became involved. I tried to get Constance out of there. She was cursing the man, cursing his wife, the air was blue with her curses. A waiter tried to calm her down. The man told me to control my daughter.
Some minutes later we were out on the street and Constance was still enraged. I put my arms around her, there on the sidewalk at Forty-fifth and Eighth. The crowd surged past us, bumping into us, swearing at us, while Constance broke down and wept on my shoulder. Grief, I thought. Here it is at last. Then I thought: This is what we’ve come to. On one of the busiest intersections in Manhattan a woman weeps for her dead and nobody gives a damn. Nobody even notices. I once thought it the mark of an advanced civilization when one’s private life could be conducted in public. Not anymore. Now it was just another chance to be humiliated.
—My darling, I whispered as she sobbed into my shoulder.
She lifted her head then and stared at me, tears streaming down her face.
—Call me Iris! she cried.
But the incident revealed what I already suspected: Constance wasn’t free of the old man yet, her rage was ample proof of that. I think she realized what had happened, for in the morning her mood was subdued. She couldn’t meet my eye. But there were other matters I had to discuss with her. I told her we had to talk through what had happened to us.
—Why?
We were in the sitting room. I did what I could to not antagonize her. I stood by the empty fireplace, leaning against the mantel. She paced the floor, smoking cigarettes.
—For Howard’s sake. And for our own.
I was disturbed to see she’d lapsed again into a sort of tic I’d first observed when I brought her home from the motel in Montauk. While she talked to me she seemed to be listening to another voice, and this other voice caused her to frown and make facial expressions unrelated to the conversation. It was disconcerting, but when I mentioned it she smiled in a knowing way that irritated me acutely. I suppressed my anger however, not wishing to quarrel with her. I told her that without Howard the marriage would have fallen apart long before this. He needed us both, I said. Just as we needed him. She didn’t dispute it. I knew she would listen to me if I prefaced my request this way.
—Go on, she said.
I told her I had to make sense of what had happened to us so we could go forward with no lingering doubts, or resentments, or forebodings about the future. Was that an unreasonable request? Wasn’t it the least we required as a foundation for a working marriage, even a happy marriage? Or what was the same, a not unhappy marriage?
Constance was never good at thinking about marriage in the abstract. She saw no moral dimension in it. For her, marriage was fluid, transient, a provisional arrangement, and if it didn’t seem to be working then there wasn’t much point, was there?
—Do you want Howard to grow up like you did?
This got her full attention.
—I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.
—Then let’s create a real home for him.
—We have.
—No, Constance, we haven’t.
Again I tried to explain to her that without clarity and candor she and I could never be at peace with one another. She was standing at the window with her back to me. Perhaps I was asking the impossible. This woman hadn’t known a minute of cla
rity or candor her entire life. Without turning around she asked me what I wanted to know.
—Everything.
She was alarmed now.
—Like what?
But when I told her she flew into a rage. She wasn’t ready for candor, perhaps she never would be.
—Is that what all this candor crap is about, so you can punish me some more? I thought it was over when Daddy died but it’s not, is it, it’s never over. Well, I’ve had enough. I won’t be punished anymore!
She ran out of the room. I sat on the chesterfield with my head in my hands. It was I who was being punished. Apparently I hadn’t suffered enough yet. All I’d done was ask her if she’d told me the truth about the affair with Eddie Castrol. It tormented me, the possibility she’d allowed him to have anal sex with her. I wanted to hear her say it wasn’t so. I suspected that when I called her Iris in bed, in her heart she called me Eddie. Then I heard the sound of breaking glass from the kitchen. I found her throwing plates and wineglasses on the floor. She was weeping. She was barefoot. She was bleeding. I heard Howard’s voice. I took him back to his bedroom and told him to go to sleep, there was nothing wrong. Then I returned to the kitchen. Constance was sitting on a chair amid the broken glass and china, still weeping. I would have to wash her feet.
There was no more sex after that. She didn’t even want me in the bedroom. I could have insisted, but I hadn’t the heart to impose my will on her anymore. I moved into the small spare room behind the kitchen. I accepted then that I couldn’t do it on my own. But I couldn’t make her see a psychiatrist, I’d tried and failed more than once. I talked to Ed Kaplan. He knew much of Constance’s story although I’d told him nothing about the affair. Ed was sardonic and wise. This was what I wanted from him. He told me he was frankly astonished that things weren’t worse at home.
—What do you mean by that?
—All she’s been through?
We were sitting on a bench in Central Park. It was a pleasant day in July. A heat wave was forecast. Ed had grown a beard. It was to frighten his daughters, he told me. They were running wild. They respected no form of authority. It was a familiar theme. If the beard didn’t work he planned to prosecute them.
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