Family Happiness (2 page)

“If we just had breakfast, how come we're going to have more breakfast?” said Pete, who asked this question every week.

“It isn't really breakfast,” Polly said. “It's lunch.”

“Then how come Nan and Papa call it breakfast?” Dee-Dee said.

“Because they do. It's their first meal of the day, and breakfast means to break the fast.” She handed Dee-Dee a napkin and watched her fold it carefully.

“What fast?” Dee-Dee said.

“Fast is what it's called when you don't eat,” Polly said. “Bring the plate over here so I can get these pancakes on it. Pete, you pour the coffee and, Dee-Dee, pour the milk
very carefully
into that little jug. Okay, thank you very much. Now, git!”

Henry was asleep when Polly appeared with the tray. She put it on the reading table and closed the window—Henry liked to sleep with the window open all night, and in the morning, once Polly was out of bed and off to make the coffee, he liked to hog all the pillows and take all the bedclothes for himself. It was November and the air was very chill. Polly smoothed the quilt over him and kissed him on the forehead. He had dark, wavy hair and hazel eyes. His features were regular and fine, and somewhat old-fashioned. He opened his eyes and stretched.

“Good morning, darling,” Polly said. “Here's your tray. I'll go and see if the paper is here.”

The paper had been delivered and was lying in the foyer by the elevator. As Polly walked down the long hallway to the bedroom, she heard Pete and Dee-Dee playing in Pete's room. They had invented an elaborate game called Cows and Hedgehogs which incorporated their favorite animals. Dee-Dee had been brought up on English children's books and craved a live hedgehog more than anything in the world. She felt it unfair that she lived in a country to which they were not native, and to compensate she was given hedgehogs made of every possible material. Many of them had been sent to her by Henry's sister, Eva Demarest Forbes, who was married to an English banker and lived in London. She had been Polly's roommate at college.

Polly felt fortunate in her children. She and Henry actively adored them but they were not spoiled. They fought as siblings will, but they really did love each other. Pete's main goal in life was to scare his little sister, but she was afraid of nothing, while Pete was skittish about a variety of animals and objects. Because Dee-Dee was kind, she often pretended to be scared, since this made Pete feel braver. Never, when the family went to Maine for the summer, did she put snakes or worms or spiders, which she did not mind picking up, down the back of his shirt.

She and Pete were being brought up under the old order, which required that parents inspire all manner of good habits in their children. If parents sat quietly and patiently with children to supervise their play, excellent study habits would flower from the seed of a long attention span. Games that fired their imaginations were encouraged—playing with clay, for instance. Wendy had once given Dee-Dee all her old perfume bottles, and with these Dee-Dee and Pete spent hours making processions. The time you spent with children paid off, Polly knew. It was on this account that her mother was fiercely against her having a job. Wendy, who conveniently forgot all the civic projects she had worked on during Polly's childhood, remembered herself as a sacrificial mother and felt that Polly should do as Wendy misremembered herself doing. The first time Pete had gone to stay overnight at a friend's, Wendy had become alarmed.

“You are farming your children out,” she said. “I never did that to you and your brothers. You were not brought up to farm your children out.”

Polly had then recounted for her mother the hundreds of times she and Paul and Henry, Jr., had gone to visit friends.

“They came here,” Wendy said. “But you never went there.”

In her unreconstructed heart of hearts, Wendy did not believe that women should work. When she thought of working women she thought of the lingerie fitters at Saks Fifth Avenue or the heads of large cosmetics companies such as Madame Rubinstein. Among her friends were some quite distinguished women: a prominent pediatrician, the head of the Society for Legal Aid to Orphans. Wendy herself sat on several committees having to do with abandoned, abused, and otherwise homeless children. She believed that a mother's having a paying career harmed young children, but volunteering was quite another thing. You could spend hours at it and harm no one. This, Polly said, was “Wendy's logic.” Wendy understood jobs that were glamorous or noble or involved power and intellect, but Coordinator of Research in Reading Projects and Methods—Polly's job—stumped her. And besides, Polly's salary was not crucial: she did not need to work for money, as less fortunate people did.

Polly put the paper down on the bed and riffled through it. She and Henry split the Sunday paper equitably. The sections she liked best were the sections he liked least. They sat reading in silence.

“How were the pancakes?” Polly asked.

“Terrific,” said Henry.

“There's one left. Are you going to eat it?”

“No,” said Henry. “You eat it.” Polly leaned over and speared it with the fork. If she had been alone she would have eaten it with her hands.

“Who's coming today?” Henry asked.

“Paul isn't,” said Polly.

“Too bad.” Henry liked Paul. “But the astronauts are coming, aren't they?”

Henry did not mind his brother-in-law and sister-in-law, but he did not understand why adults would want to be so underdeveloped. Henry and Andreya, when not wearing each other's clothes, liked to wear clothes that matched. Polly thought they looked like a pair of those ornamental salt and pepper shakers that are made in the shapes of Scottish terriers wearing tams, or of smiling tomatoes with hands and feet.

They seemed happiest in the company of their dog, or with Pete and Dee-Dee, who Henry Demarest felt were their rightful friends. Each Sunday when the weather was good, Henry, Jr., and Andreya took the children kite-flying. This meant that Henry Demarest could read happily under a tree, or talk to his father-in-law, until the children were brought to him.

“They're coming, and they're taking the children kiteflying,” Polly said. “They'll bring a kite for you, if you like.”

“If they'll take the children, I'll take some work with me,” Henry said. “I'm so jammed that anything I get done helps. Any interesting others coming?”

“Mum said yesterday that Henry said something about somebody but she thought she might have gotten it wrong.”

“Typical Wendy,” Henry said.

Polly and Henry were so right for each other, so unified in their feelings about life, family, and children, and, in addition to loving each other, were so terribly fond of each other that Polly hardly knew when she had first noticed her relief if a conversation with Henry went smoothly. They were not the sort of couple who fought, nor did they bicker or argue. Mostly they discussed things, and there had never been a serious fracture between them. Their few disagreements were the sort well-matched people have.

Henry was having a bad time in his professional life. He loved his work; he was patient and dogged, but he expected results. One big anti-trust case was not going well; another was on appeal. These cases had dragged on and on, and when they came to no satisfactory end, Henry was first furious, then frustrated, and then dark. In the past year Polly had noticed how much oxygen in the atmosphere of home Henry's job used up. Had he always been so moody? So unresponsive? So snappish? So abstracted? So preoccupied?

Polly had grown up in a household in which a father's work was paramount. It was not easy to be the child of a distinguished parent, Polly thought, but it certainly taught a girl her place. In Polly's household, Henry's job was not so much paramount as catered to. Polly had two occupations: her real job and her job of lightening her husband's darkness, if she could. She could not get incompetent judges off the bench, or dig up expert witnesses, or ease the burden of document research, but she could make Henry's home a happy fortress. That, she felt, was her true skill, and if Henry did not particularly notice his well-run and happy fortress these days, he would when the pressure was off him, Polly felt. If he had to be asked whether his pancakes were all right, instead of spontaneously thanking Polly for them, he must at least find consolation in having a loving wife to sweeten his morning. It was hard to be angry at a man as fine as Henry for what Polly considered second-rate complaints. Her goal was to be good and forgiving—that was the mission of people with level and happy temperaments, as her mother had often reminded her. And as the only member of her family who was not moody, quirky, or willful, she had had plenty of practice.

The Solo-Millers dressed for Sunday breakfast. This meant that you could not show up in your old blue jeans, and in the days when Polly had gone for a Sunday-morning ride in Central Park, she was made to change out of her riding clothes and into a skirt. She had spent hours of her adult life wondering what a child could wear that would be formal enough for breakfast and rugged enough to be played in. Polly hated the sight of a child dressed up. She remembered her own childhood clothes as scratchy—Wendy believed that in public a child should look starched. Polly's children were taken to their grandparents' wearing corduroy, and she had insisted that Dee-Dee be permitted to wear trousers.

“Your father will have a fit,” said Wendy. Henry, Sr., of course, cared chiefly that his grandchildren did not shout; he hated a shouting child. But on this point Wendy was right: he did not like to see girls in trousers. Andreya was an exception. She did not own a skirt and there was nothing to be done about it.

“I can't think why you want your daughter to look like a hooligan at breakfast,” Wendy said.

“I don't want her to have to sit for forty minutes feeling strangled by her clothes,” Polly said. “Besides, they're mostly not at the table. They're mostly playing in the park. Why should she have to worry about getting her nice dresses dirty?”

“Modern life!” Wendy said. “I just don't understand it. Everyone wants to look like everyone else. This notion of being
casual.
No sense of decorum or occasion.”

Polly favored soft, old, sober clothes. She usually wore to her mother's a cashmere sweater and a tweed skirt. She wore her old blue jeans only in Maine, where that was acceptable dress, and even then, her father flinched a little. “Going around looking like a fright” was his description of the appearance of most young people.

Polly finished browsing through the paper and took Henry's tray into the kitchen. Henry roused himself and went to shower and shave. It was time to get the children dressed and to make sure all their cows and hedgehogs were put away.

“Is Papa going to say about the food?” Dee-Dee asked.

“Yes, darling,” said Polly.

“Is he going to say how the eggs are
very, very
old?”

“Yes, darling,” Polly said.

“Is Uncle Paul going to be there?” asked Pete.

“No.”

“What about Uncle Henry and Andreya?”

“They're coming and they're taking you kite-flying after lunch.”

“Goody-goody,” said Pete. “Is Kirby coming?”

“Certainly Kirby is coming,” said Polly.

“Ma,” Dee-Dee said, “will you and Daddy get us a dog?”

“No, for the ten thousandth time,” said Polly. “If you get a dog, I will end up having to walk it. You can have a dog when you're sixteen. Now, please go wash your hands and put on your clean corduroy pants.”

By eleven-thirty the children were dressed, Henry was shaving, the beds were made, and the Demarests were ready to go. Polly, who was always ready first, sat in the living room, which was speckled with silvery November light.

Her living room resembled her parents', or her Demarest in-laws'. The old Turkish rug was from a Demarest grandmother. The walnut side table had been Wendy's mother's. The two big black vases flanking the fireplace had been made by Henry's sister, Eva, who, in addition to illustrating children's books, was a potter. The sofa was big enough for all four Demarests to plop onto of a winter's night to watch the fire. At each of the three windows was a table that held a flowering orange tree in a big terra-cotta pot. Polly and her mother disagreed about house plants. Wendy hated them and felt only fresh flowers belonged in the house, but Polly loved flowering plants. The children had a hanging pot of jasmine in each of their rooms. In Polly and Henry's bedroom were two pots of sweet bouvardia. In Henry's study was a long copper tray of African violets.

It would have been lovely to stay home, but Polly had never stayed home on a Sunday except when the children had been infants and Sunday breakfast had been briefly transferred to the Demarests'.

Both Polly and Henry had been brought up on tradition. The Solo-Miller family met not only for Sunday breakfast. They observed two Jewish holidays: Passover and Yom Kippur, the latter being the only occasion on which the family made an appearance at synagogue. The ancientness and austereness of this day had a great appeal for Henry, Sr., although Polly could never imagine her father atoning for anything. At Passover they had their own idiosyncratic Seder at which Henry, Sr., delivered himself of a lecture on the meaning of the holiday and its relevance to the American spirit. They celebrated Christmas and Easter as secular holidays, with Christmas trees and Easter baskets. In addition to these and Thanksgiving, they gathered on April Fool's, which was observed by a meal that had almonds in every course for reasons lost in the mists of Solo-Miller history; and on March the twenty-fourth, Henry and Wendy's wedding anniversary, for a simple dinner—soup and Cornish pasties, cake with sugar flowers, champagne, cheek-to-cheek dancing on the living-room rug to the songs of Henry and Wendy's youth. Halloween was always celebrated at the Demarests': Henry, when he was not away, produced a meal of stew served out of a large pumpkin. Nowadays the whole family trooped off to Pete and Dee-Dee's school for their Halloween pageant, and then back to the Demarests' for dinner.