by Cecelia Frey
“Even so, we must keep up our end of things. It will make you feel more a part of it. It will make you feel more like a father.”
George had not considered that he might want to feel like a father.
“We’ll just have to manage two households,” Esther cheerfully announced. “We’ll all have to work it out so that everyone is happy.”
“What if she marries and the fellow wants us out of the picture?”
“I suppose that might happen.”
“I’m not saying it will or won’t. My point is, we can’t take the whole thing over.” George meant “you,” but he decided to be tactful. “It’s her child. Her life.”
“Well, every child needs and has the right to know both its parents. To have a sense of identity.” Esther straightened in her chair. She seemed to brace herself. “Oh, I admit when she came to the door, when I first found out, I was thrown for an absolute loop. Last evening, too, I just wanted it all to be over, the pain and confusion. But at some point during the night my thinking started to change. Or maybe my subconscious started thinking. But I dozed and woke and dozed and woke, and finally woke up fully knowing that I must decide what is the best thing to do, the right thing to do, and then keep that thought firm in my mind and not let other thoughts in. The thing that came to me is that you are an adult human being and I shouldn’t be telling you what to do. I don’t want to be your jailer. Perhaps you shouldn’t stop seeing her. I mean, whatever she decides about the child. Until the child is born, she’ll need your support, I mean emotionally, to keep her spirits up. You can’t just leave her … them. Aside from the child, you’ve been friends. What right do I have to destroy that friendship? Friends are not easy to find. No, you must continue to see her.”
“You wouldn’t mind?”
“As long as you don’t love her, as long as the affair is over … I’m not sure I could deal with that, it not being over I mean, although I understand some people do. Some people, some women, don’t mind. Nowadays, people have all sorts of strange relationships. But I think I would. Mind. Yes, I’m sure I would. But as long as you’re just friends, well, then, I don’t see why we can’t work it out so that we all get along. Oh, I’m putting this all badly, but you know what I mean.”
George looked at his wife’s bright face, pink and screwed up from the effort of trying to accurately relate her thoughts and intentions. “You astonish me,” he said quite sincerely.
“She loved you. I can’t be against someone who loved you. And it seems to me she deserves some consideration. All these months, she’s the one who’s suffered. She’s the one who knew about another woman — me.”
“What if she objects?”
“I don’t see why she should. We’re all intelligent adults.”
“What if she wants to be done with the whole business? Cut her losses and get out? Give the child up and start over? Perhaps we shouldn’t interfere with that.”
“I can’t see how she could possibly want to do that.” Esther looked at him, an expression of pained bafflement on her face. He could see the futility of trying to get her to understand a situation not of her own devising. He got up from the table and took his dishes to the sink.
George walked briskly along on the rather cool late spring morning swinging his briefcase. He couldn’t believe it. He was to have it all. Everything. Both women, his career, his comfortable home and lifestyle. Esther had decreed it. She had insisted on it. He was to continue to visit Veronica, but now with Esther’s knowledge. Everything was to be out in the open, open and above board. It would be good to be done with the lying, at least most of it. It would be good to make things up to Veronica, at least to a certain extent, since he had made her so miserable. Bless Esther for thinking it all up. It did seem a little hard on her but, after all, she had volunteered. Volunteered to take on the task of helping him. He knew he was a bit of a heel. He was not exonerating himself. It was a terrible business. But it wasn’t his fault any more than it was Veronica’s. And Esther’s, for letting him get away with things, for spoiling him. What is a man to do? Any man will let himself be spoiled if a woman insists on it. What was he supposed to do? But imagine! After all these months of worrying about Esther, what she would say, what she would do, she was willing to share. A qualified sharing, to be sure. Still, he was to have Veronica with Esther’s sanction. Veronica, of course, would be livid. To have Esther in control of their relationship, to have Esther deciding when they should see each other, allowing their happiness, their sex life, for George had no doubt that the sex part of it would ultimately be resumed since he couldn’t even imagine a sexless relationship with Veronica. Veronica would find this insufferable. And yet she would have to put up with it. Otherwise, she would be out of the picture entirely. Well, she had certainly boxed herself into this one. She had underestimated the force of goodness, specifically, Esther’s goodness. But, then, how could she have done otherwise? She had had very little experience of goodness in her life.
At the end of the street, he turned. He could see Esther standing on the front step. He waved his briefcase. He saw her raised arm in the distance. “What will you do today?” he had asked as he kissed her good-bye.
“I don’t know,” she had answered.
“Perhaps you should get out,” he had said, for it unsettled him to think of her alone in the house all day thinking up ever more complicated scenarios for him, for the three of them, to act out on a stage of her own creation.
For some reason that he could not understand, he felt sad. Why should he feel sad when he was to have it all? But there was something about the way Esther stood on the step of their home, something about the passing of time and happiness, and Esther waving in the distance as though she were sailing away from him, the space between them ever lengthening. There was something about loss, for they had lost each other. The old George, the old Esther, those two who could never lose each other, had done just that. Their young selves were lost to each other. For a moment, George felt something quite profound. He shrugged off his sadness and turned and continued on his way.
When he arrived on campus, the place he thought of as the boundary between his two worlds, he felt himself to be in a new landscape where he was not sure of the rules, where he did not know how to act, how even to think. The barrier that had kept things separate and in order was no longer there. His two mutually exclusive lives had been brought together. What had formerly been unacceptable to him, to him, to who he really was, had become acceptable. His inner reality had been compelled to embrace a formerly unacceptable outer reality. The wall had been pulled down. He felt a great deal of discomfort, his mind confused to the point where he felt physically uncoordinated. He wondered if this condition was one from which he would ever recover.
XI. BENJAMIN AND ESTHER
THAT SAME AFTERNOON BENJAMIN RECEIVED a telephone call. “Is Helena there?” Esther’s voice came through the receiver.
He had not seen Esther since Amanda’s funeral and, before that, only a few times in as many years, but he knew her voice immediately, sweet and light with a musical lilt, but now strained and anxious, high and thin. He was on the alert. “No,” he said and waited.
“Ben?”
“Yes.”
“This is Esther.”
“Esther, how are you?”
“I need to talk to Helena.”
“She’s not here. Have you tried her apartment?”
“Yes. She’s not there. I thought she might be with you.”
“No. I’ll be seeing her later today.”
“You wouldn’t happen to know where she is?”
“No.” He was beginning to suspect that this was not a casual call. However, his antenna for trouble was directed toward Helena rather than Esther. Helena seemed to be stronger with every passing day, but there was still the possibility of a relapse. “Is anything wrong?” He held his breath. “Is a
nything wrong with Helena?”
“No, no. I shouldn’t be worrying you like this. I just wanted to talk with her about Reuben and the children, you know that he’s planning on marrying again. Helena was concerned about the children. We were talking about it just the other day. She…,” the voice broke off, then reasserted itself. “I need to talk with her. She doesn’t have a job yet?”
“No. She may be at the university. You know she’s decided to finish that PhD?”
“Yes, that was wonderful news.”
“Do you want me to give her a message?”
“I need to see her. I need to see her right away.” The voice changed in tone to one of frantic intensity.
He heard a hollow flap, like the wind taking a sail, and then a series of gasps.
“Esther. Esther, what is it?” He made his voice stern. “Esther, tell me, what is all this about?” The command brought a howl from the other end of the phone. “I’ll come over,” he said. “Are you at home? I’ll be right over.”
This got a response, a loud “No!” then, lower, “No, I can’t stay here another minute.” She got it out between sobs, “I’m going mad. I have to get out of this house.”
After some disjointed negotiation they settled on meeting in a park that was close to Esther. “Are you sure you can drive?” Benjamin asked.
“Yes, I’ll be all right,” her voice had fallen to a thin whimper.
“You’re sure? I can pick you up.” This past month, feeling that he and Helena needed a car, Benjamin had taken on the responsibility of ownership. He called it caving in to middle-class capitalism. Helena’s response was that buying a ten-year-old Toyota was a slight bow, not a cave-in.
“No, it’s all right. I’ll be careful. Don’t worry.”
The park was beside the river, down the hill from the university, below George’s jogging path. When Benjamin arrived from his place on the other side of the valley, Esther was already there, wandering about in a daze at the edge of the parking lot. When he got out of his car, she didn’t seem to notice, although he slammed the door soundly behind him. He approached her and touched her elbow. Slowly, she turned her head, slowly looked up at him. Her eyes were red, her complexion splotchy. Still, he detected the old Esther, cute and perky, with dark brown curls and what he had always considered a doll-like face, a face of the fifties, although that was a little before her time, but she retained an innocence that seemed to get lost in the sixties. In stature, too, she seemed an earlier product, petite, dainty, even though she’d put on weight.
She stood in confusion, like a child waiting for direction. “Here, let’s walk a bit,” he said, guiding her shoulder with his hand. “We’ll find a bench.”
Whether it was the walking or his presence, she seemed to recover somewhat and so he kept her walking. They talked about the old days. “We were so close for a while.” Her eyes narrowed into the distance and he recalled with fondness her myopic squint. “We were so close and then we all drifted apart.” Her voice was a lament. “Life is cruel the way it does that to people. We were three sisters. When we were children, when we were growing up, we were complete. A circle. Three men joined our circle. We thought we would live happily ever after,” she said. “What happened?”
They gravitated toward a bench. They sat. Apart from a city crew cleaning out a nearby swimming pool, they were alone. The day was blustery. Esther was wearing a heavy coat, something woolly and dark. Still, she shivered. Her hand was resting limply on her thigh. On impulse, Benjamin took her hand in both of his to warm it. Her hand was plump and soft. His was thin and bony. “Esther,” he said, “how very nice to see you.”
Immediately, she began to wail, not cry, not sob, but wail, a long keening wail. He put an arm around her shoulders and drew her to him. The tears streamed down her face and fell unheeded into her lap. Her face was a rigid grimacing mask. She did not attempt to hide it. A jogger glanced their way, then quickly turned his head and jogged on. After some minutes, the wail subsided into low guttural gasps and heaves. Benjamin turned her head to his shoulder where she shuddered and convulsed a few moments longer. After a while she was still. Then in a thin voice punctuated by stops and starts, she told him the whole story.
In the silence that followed, Benjamin felt suddenly tired. It’s a good thing we met in a park, he thought. Esther was right to want to get out of the house. This was a story that needed fresh air and space and the light of day. In the night and the dark, such stories became frightening.
Although he had heard countless renditions of suffering, this one struck him profoundly. He still thought of the six who had formed such close ties in a smoky den so many years ago as his family, their lives and his inexorably intertwined. He had been an outsider and they had drawn him into the warmth of their circle, three sisters who had been so eagerly and innocently seeking experience, embracing life, throwing themselves into the causes of the downtrodden, the dispossessed of the planet. The Cave, he could see so clearly yet, walking through the door and there they had been, three laughing faces, Esther’s fresh and pretty, Helena, tempting and provocative, Amanda the naive blue-eyed blonde. It was her first year and her sisters were introducing her to the sophisticated life of a university student. In spite of what had happened between him and Helena, the other two couples had set a standard of behaviour and values against which he measured his own. Amanda’s death had destroyed something important for him, not only because he loved her but because she, and she and Reuben as a couple, were part of his mental life. He admired them for taking a difficult road. They had done it for each other without regret. As for Esther and George, during his bad years, it had been a consolation to think that they were still here, an intact entity on the planet. Now, it appeared that that belief was an illusion.
“I shouldn’t have burdened you with all this,” Esther’s voice threatened further tears. “But I had to say the words. I had to speak them out loud to someone. I was fine this morning. I couldn’t believe how well I was taking it. I was full of plans and optimism for going on. Of course, I was deceiving myself, holding myself together with some sort of manic glue that was bound to come unstuck. Which it did shortly after I waved George off. While he was there, in the house, I could keep catastrophe outside myself. But then I was alone with my thoughts and the catastrophe got inside me. I was plunged into the blackest hole. My mind was plunged into it. I couldn’t get out. It’s hard to explain. I felt frantic. I couldn’t stand it one more minute without telling someone, someone who could say some words to me, some sensible words. I needed another mind to share my thoughts with. That’s when I picked up the phone. You happened to be at the other end. Well, at least you saved Helena from having to hear it all.” By now Esther was sitting with her face forward, staring at the ground. “Please don’t tell her any of this. I’ll tell her another time. Soon. But I should be the one to tell her. I don’t want her to get it second-hand.”
Benjamin stared at the men cleaning out the swimming pool. Later, he could not have described what they were doing. His mind was busy. He did not want to be the one entrusted with this knowledge. He did not want to be the one chosen to be here, in Esther’s path. He did not want to keep things from Helena. He did not want to have to find words, consoling words, helpful words for Esther, not here where he was personally involved. He feared his words would sound insincere because his feelings around the situation were so strong.
He waited for her to speak again, to give him some direction for his words. “I would have been a much more interesting person all these years if I’d had a career,” she said, her voice empty of tears but weary.
“I don’t think you can assume that,” he said, cautiously.
“It’s true. I’ve spent my life cooking and cleaning and running a household. No wonder George took up with a younger woman, a more interesting woman. I’m so boring.”
“I doubt it very much.”
�
��Dull, boring and unattractive.”
“That’s simply false.”
“Smelling of garlic and onions.”
“I certainly find you attractive.”
“You do?”
“You were always attractive. You had so much energy. You used to remind me of Debbie Reynolds in Singing in the Rain.”
“I did?”
“Yes. You had Delores by then. You were finishing up your degree. You had that big house to manage. And George was an upcoming young professor, which demanded a lot from you. And you were so young. Yet you managed it all. I admired you very much.”
“I should have carried on with teaching. By letting that go I became too much the dull little housewife. Not like Veronica.”
Benjamin felt instant alarm. “Veronica?” There could not be many Veronicas around. It was an unusual name.
“That’s the name of the girl. Oh, when I first heard the name it hurt so. But I must get used to it. I must say it.”
Benjamin sat stunned, staring straight ahead. Only his mouth moved. “What’s her last name?”
Esther turned to him, her forehead creased. “I don’t know. I just realized, I don’t know.”
Benjamin’s mind felt like it had collapsed in on itself. He could think of nothing to say. But, Esther’s voice continued. “She’s terribly attractive, tall, blonde, very slim….”
Oh, sweet Jesus, thought Benjamin. “I spoke to that relative of yours today,” he could hear Veronica’s sad voice. “He’s kind of cute.”’ Had she done this deliberately, in a fit of pique at being rejected by him? He must not think that. Good Christ! What had he been called to do? He couldn’t continue with her if he didn’t have feelings for her. Was it his fault if he had not had such feelings? He should never have slept with her in the first place. Okay, he admitted that. But once that fault was committed, was he supposed to put himself in bondage to a woman he did not love?