“He was just being polite.”
“Never again.”
“We can wait for weeks. Even a month. Before we have them back.”
“I’ll divorce you. I swear to God I will.”
“God?”
“I swear I will.”
* * *
—
TWO WEEKS WENT by and they had finally stopped talking about the dinner. Claire’s visit, however, remained very much with them. It was getting close to Claire’s birthday and they would have to send her the usual check.
“Why does she hate us?” Maggie said, not really expecting an answer.
“She doesn’t hate us. She hates you.”
“That’s what I meant.”
“Poor old thing. Don’t take it so hard. Nobody sane could possibly hate you.” He put his arm around her and gave her a peck on the cheek. “She’s just a tad crazy.”
“Is that the answer, then? We’ve made her crazy?”
“Look at her life. The causes, the commune, poor little Gaius”—it was still hard for him to use the name of Claire’s baby—“not to mention the lesbian alliance with Weeping Willow.” He paused for a moment when he saw tears coming. “Don’t,” he said, “don’t cry. You’ve done everything you could.” And then, when he felt sure the tears had passed, he said, “Do you think the lesbian phase caused the interest in religion? Or vice versa?”
But the tears had not passed and, still weepy, she said, “Can you just see her as a nun!”
“The righteousness.” He pulled himself up and made a righteous face. “Fighting for justice against charity.”
“She’s a terrorist,” Maggie said in the easy parlance of that day.
“A domestic terrorist,” David said. “And none the less scary for that.”
* * *
—
REGINALD HAD TEA ready for Helen when she returned from Walmart. It was one of the things she enjoyed most about life with Reginald: he would sometimes surprise her like this. Earl Grey was steeping in the pot and he had placed miniature éclairs on a china plate and he greeted her at the door with an embrace that reassured her that Walmart was behind her and she was safely, warmly, home.
Writing was his life, he always said, and his day built up to and away from those hours at the computer. Moreover he was aware that those hours were made possible by Helen’s willingness to sacrifice herself at Walmart, and so preparing her tea and making a small fuss about every month or so seemed to him an equitable trade-off.
Over time Reginald had become sincerely devoted to Helen and it was a fact they both accepted that she was simply unable to meet all of his needs. But that was not surprising. Reginald was an intellectual with secrets of the mind and heart that he must keep for his writing. It was a rare person with whom he could share that part of himself out of which he created and it was Helen’s ill luck that he found that rare person in Claire. Helen, as a matter of religion, never inquired about Reginald’s writing—his privacy was sacred to her—nor did she so much as glance at his computer. If she had, she might have found his cache of emails to and from Claire, the first of them dated that Monday afternoon of messy and fevered lovemaking.
Implicitly Helen understood that what she did not know could not hurt her.
* * *
—
“I’VE DECIDED I CAN’T DO IT,” Maggie said.
A month had passed since the ghastly evening at the Parkers’ and still she had not worked up the courage to invite them to dinner.
“Can’t do what?” David asked. He was sitting at the kitchen table with his battered copy of The Odd Women waiting for his cup of tea.
“Can’t invite Reginald to dinner.”
“Thank you and thank you and thank you. You are the love of my life. You make the sun come up. You are Venus and Athena and Diana rolled into one. You are wisdom incarnate. If there were a God, she would be you.”
“It’s not the work. It’s the agony of the conversation. Because without Claire, we’d have to talk about personalities or books. And the Parkers don’t have personalities, any of them except maybe little Iris, and if we talk about books, they’ll ask you about your work on Gissing and you’ll have a hissy fit and it will be the dinner party from hell all over again.”
David considered objecting to “hissy fit” but saw that the best outcome of this exchange lay in confirming her decision not to invite them to dinner. Period. “That’s it,” he said. “C’est ça. E giusto. Certum’st.”
“Certum’st?”
“Latin. Silver age. Plautus.”
“You’re such a smart man!” She poured him his tea then and he was perfectly content that the matter was settled at last, and peacefully, too.
And so the next morning David was dumbfounded and dismayed when they encountered Reginald on their walk and, to cover a momentary silence, Maggie said, “We must have you and Helen to dinner one of these days.”
* * *
—
BUT BEFORE ANY DATE could be found to invite the Parkers to dinner, an email came from Iris asking—on behalf of her father—for a loan of four hundred dollars. It was urgent and embarrassing, she wrote, but her father promised to repay them in full and promptly. She signed the email, “Your Friend, Iris.”
PART TWO
6.
A terrorist from Nigeria was arrested on Northwest Airlines with a bomb in his underwear, a Christmas surprise. The panic level went to bright orange. Fortunately the FBI and the CIA were keeping the homeland safe for lesser, domestic terrorists. It was 2009 and health care was the big political issue and the Tea Party was saying no.
Meanwhile, at the house of Maggie and David, the sum of all issues foreign and domestic was Iris’s request for a loan.
* * *
—
BUT IRIS HERSELF was a dear. You could not—you must not—confuse Iris with her father. She was only doing what he wanted her to do. What he insisted she must do. And so she did it. That’s what was so offensive. The coercion of a minor. No child takes it upon herself to write an email requesting a loan of four hundred dollars. It was preposterous. It was horrible. But Iris herself was a dear. You could not blame Iris, the poor thing. Or that mother, Helen. Two innocent women taken advantage of by a cold, lazy, calculating malingerer. Are we making too much of this?
So went the discussion of Iris’s request for a loan, Maggie and David outdoing each other in mild, rather good-natured indignation.
And then there was the swing back to sweet reasonableness.
What after all is four hundred dollars? Either of them would immediately write a check for four hundred dollars to Second Harvest or to the Alzheimer’s fund or to those nice people at the Southern Poverty Law Center who were always going after racists and anti-Semites and whatever new bigots appeared in the land, the Muslim haters most recently. The Hollisses recognized their duty as citizens and academics to pay taxes and support worthy charities.
And God knows—Maggie insisted—they had squandered as much and a great deal more as patrons of the opera and the symphony and the Stanford art museum. Not to mention what went out on birthdays to the three grandkids in England and don’t forget the Princeton wonder, Gaius, now joyously employed. That tuition! Four hundred dollars? They had put down a hundred thousand on houses for Sedge and Will and, during the post-commune, early-Willow period, for Claire as well.
To be fair, those hundred thousands were taken from stocks at a time in the eighties and nineties when the market was singing a heroic tune—they had added a good million or more to their portfolio—and so the Hollisses suffered no permanent damage to their initial two million. At least not then. They had lost some thirty percent, however, in the disasters of 2008 and 2009 and recovered very little of it since, so they weren’t flush anymore. Not really. Not flush enough to be giving away four hundred dollars. To strangers.
But for that matter the Southern Poverty Law people were strangers, weren’t they? To be honest? And the Alzheimer’s people? And Second Harvest?
Oh, God—Maggie again—sometimes it was impossible to think clearly. And suddenly, for no reason whatsoever, it came to her that this was all Claire’s fault. Which made no sense, really, and she was ashamed of herself. No wonder Claire hated her so. But—she tried again—the money was not the point. It was the borrowing that was the point. It was the fact of being asked, and asked in this outrageous way, that made the request so offensive. Using the child, Iris. Isn’t that it? Isn’t that right?
Yes, the request was offensive and having Iris do the asking made it doubly offensive, but what bothered David most of all was the intrusion into their privacy. Asking for the loan of money was an intimate act. It depended on a level of trust and affection and, well, intimacy. An intimacy, he was happy to say, that simply did not exist. And would never exist between the Hollisses and the Parkers.
Why not just write him the goddam check and have done with it?
But David was caught up in his intimacy theory and spent some time developing it. He didn’t appreciate unasked-for intimacy any more than he appreciated talk about religion. And on. And on. When he was done, he poured himself a drink and sat back, satisfied and a little embarrassed.
“Well, what shall we do?” he said. “I’m fed up with thinking about it.”
“I’m getting one of my headaches.”
“Maybe we’re making too much out of this.”
“After all, it’s only four hundred dollars.”
“Why not just write him the check and have done with it?”
“Good idea.”
“You write it and sign it from both of us.”
“What a lot of fuss.”
“Over nothing. Still . . .”
7.
My sense of obligation is all that holds this family together, Maggie said to herself. She had decided not to say it to David even though it was true. Perhaps because it was true. She was thinking of her children and how disappointing they had all turned out, except for Will, who was the perfect son. But he had moved to another country, probably to get away from them. Still she was determined to love them as David loved them, though she secretly suspected that he, too, was exasperated at the fecklessness of Sedge and the mindlessness of Claire and the isolation of Will’s family in Essex. Well, she was obliged to love them and so she did.
“We love them because we’re obliged to,” she said to David. He was undressing for bed and was sucking in his belly to conceal how much weight he was putting on.
“And because we’re guilty. Of having so much and having each other,” he said.
“Stop holding your breath like that,” she said. “You’ll injure yourself. Anyhow, I quite like your new rolls of flesh. They make me feel less bad about my own advancing decrepitude.”
“It’s all guilt,” he said. “Life is.”
“And a sense of obligation,” she said.
* * *
—
DAVID WAS NOT EASILY persuaded of anything except by the exercise of his own good powers of reason and, in most other cases, by Maggie. All that fuss about the loan of four hundred dollars was the effect of being a scholarship student who married a woman with two million dollars. You had to remember that there was a time in America, even in California, when a woman with two million dollars was thought to be rich. Oh, the guilt of having so much.
Maggie did not look particularly rich when David first met her, perhaps because she hadn’t yet come into Aunt Sedgwick’s trust fund, and so it was a pleasant surprise—and in some ways dismaying—to discover that they could bypass graduate student housing and live in apartments like their professors. Their money made for comfort and the efficient use of study time since they didn’t have to teach freshman comp to pay the rent, and by the time they had their first child they were able to afford a full-time nanny. The dismaying aspect was their distance from the problems and needs of other graduate students. They were largely alone, with the two other couples who also came from money. These were friendships of convenience that did not outlast the drive toward the PhD, and Maggie and David were from the start thrown largely upon each other. They found this sufficient, but for David in particular there was always the nagging fear that Maggie’s money left them isolated and more dependent on each other than was good. He came very quickly to resent her money.
Maggie’s money made it possible for them to finish their obligatory coursework in only two years and to write their PhD dissertations in three, and so David’s resentment of her money was unfair, unreasonable, and the source of all their early quarrels. Nonetheless when David was offered a job as an assistant professor at Stanford, it was naturally assumed that Maggie would accompany him and teach the odd course in freshman comp when and if there was a course open. It was the 1960s and that’s how things were then, that’s how lives were disposed.
They bought a house in Old Palo Alto with four bedrooms and three baths—they had two boys by now—with a study for David and a grand piano for Maggie so she could keep up her playing while she waited for that call asking her to teach freshman comp. They were not quite unique among assistant professors in being able to buy a house. There were still a few of those odd sons of rich families who felt it a duty to teach for one dollar a year, and one of these—Gene Stockman—was an assistant professor in the English department. He was smart and funny and, best of all, he was still single and therefore useful as the odd man at dinner parties. In the campus revolutions of the late ’60s, however, he heard the call of social justice and left to marry an African American woman and teach at Howard University. The Hollisses were left alone with their grand piano and their guilt.
Worse than the guilt was the insecurity it inspired, an insecurity that carried over from David’s marriage into his professional life. He doubted he would ever get tenure because he seemed unable to turn his doctoral dissertation on Thackeray into the published book required for tenure. This was especially hurtful since Maggie’s dissertation on Charlotte Brontë had been published—with almost no revision—by the University of Chicago Press. Since then she had come to regard scholarship as a thing of the past, at least for her, something she had tried, succeeded at, and then given up to be a faculty wife. But David was not able to give up and he felt unable to go on.
“Just do a page a day,” Maggie said. “Take Saturday and Sunday off.”
He was persuaded by this—after all, it had worked for her—and found that, once he got rid of all the excess filler proper to a dissertation, there remained a nice sturdy core of research he was able slowly, so slowly, to turn into an acceptable academic study. He did his page a day and finished the book in his sixth year and got tenure in an unremarkable seventh. It was pointed out to him by an unhappy chairman that most assistant professors earned tenure a year earlier. Nonetheless they were happy to welcome him—and his lovely wife and children—as permanent members of the department family.
Fuck you, David thought, but he said only that he was pleased and honored, and so were his lovely wife and children.
That evening over drinks, a little downcast, he told Maggie what the chairman had said.
“And what did you say?”
“I said, ‘Fuck you and thanks very much.’”
“No, not really.”
“Really. I did. ‘Fuck you,’ I said.” But later that night before they fell asleep he said, “I didn’t really say it. I just thought it.”
“I was glad you said it,” Maggie said. “And I’m glad that you didn’t say it. But what I’m really glad about is that you told me the truth. I have the failed academic’s preference for the truth.” And then they made love.
Making love was very fine, of course, but afterward there was reality to face. David was convinced it was Maggie’s money that was the
problem. The department chair didn’t have any; he lived in a cheap condo in the poor people’s section of Palo Alto on the far side of El Camino and it gratified him to make life difficult for somebody like David who always had things easy.
It was a common enough attitude. It was probably Reginald Parker’s attitude. And why not? From Reginald’s point of view David had nothing to feel guilty about except being rich. But in fact David had enough guilt for both of them. Moreover his guilt affected everything he did and everything he thought. It was why, in exasperation, he had said, “Why not just write him the goddam check and have done with it!”
And so Maggie had written the check and signed it from both of them and popped it in the mail. It was the right thing to do. And to hell with the money.
* * *
—
A WEEK PASSED and then another and then one Saturday morning Reginald Parker appeared at their front door with Iris by his side. Dickens snuffled his way through the partly open door and nuzzled Reginald for a pat and then gave licks to Iris. It was a full doggy welcome and it broke the tension.
“I have to apologize,” Reginald said. He shifted from one foot to the other while Iris concentrated on petting Dickens. It was clear that the child was embarrassed.
“We were about to walk Dickens,” Maggie said, just to say something, though she and David had only now returned from the dog park. “Iris, you’re looking so lovely with that red-gold hair.”
Iris smiled in response.
“I’m afraid I owe you an apology,” Reginald said, and he held out a small white envelope bulging with money. “I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea. The truth is that I borrowed money from you that time when I was in a financial bind—could I come in for a moment? It’s embarrassing to be talking about money out on the front step—but I don’t want you to think I make a habit of it.” They all moved indoors and were standing awkwardly in the foyer, where David joined them to see what was going on. Reginald still held the envelope in his hand. “Anyhow, I wasn’t the one who asked for this loan, although I did need the money. It was my sweet little Iris. She heard me saying to Helen that I was in a bind and she knew you had loaned me money before and so she wrote that email all on her own. Didn’t you, Iris?” He sounded almost proud of her.
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