Evergreen (62 page)

She did not want him to touch her
. Don’t come to me with this face of mourning, she wanted to scream at him; she screamed it silently, even while she put her arms around him. You’ve shut me out.
Me, me
, don’t you understand? Keep away until you can be what you were again. But can you ever be?

She knew this sort of emotion was dangerous. If she didn’t bring it to a stop soon, it would go out of control. But how to stop it? In the eye of the hurricane lies a lonely hollow where nothing moves, where panic lies still. The darkness rustles and morning is an eternity away. After such nights, there were hollows under her eyes. Her face was sallow at best; the hollows gave her a look of tragedy. People ought to look pink and cheerful in the morning, and the awareness that she did not depressed her. That, and Theo’s haunted face. There was a tired silence now at the breakfast table, filled by the crackle of the newspaper.

Little by little, inch by inch, a wall is built.

Then one afternoon he came in and told her they had joined the country club. She was astonished. They had both agreed that club life wasn’t something they would enjoy enough to warrant the expense. It was true that Theo was a good tennis player, but he had been satisfied with the public courts in town. Iris was clumsy at sports and wouldn’t have used any of the facilities at the club. Some of their friends belonged, but most of them did not. Many of their closest friends were Europeans, random doctors and others in the musical groups who played in quartets at each other’s houses. So she was astonished.

“I want to get out among people who aren’t so serious,” Theo said. “People who like to dance and laugh.”

Well, she loved to dance! What did he mean? For a moment she felt that he was accusing her. She felt a rush of
quick anger which subsided as quickly. He was only trying to escape his thoughts by changing his routine! She who prided herself on her “understanding” ought to understand that much, oughtn’t she? Poor man! Rightly or wrongly he thought that crowds, new faces and “jollity” would bring forgetfulness and ease.

Yet there was something else behind his jollity: Anger? Bitterness? Defiance? Something has eluded us, Iris thought; slid out of our hands.

She remembered thinking, a long time ago when she had first known Theo, that he was a man who could have any women he set his mind to wanting. At the club, all through this past summer, he had gathered women to him without effort: young girls and women much older than Iris. He would stand at the bar holding a long drink—he drank very little, one tall glass sufficing for an hour or more—and the women would be drawn to his knowing eyes, his barely promised admiration. Then, of course, there was his accent, the faintly foreign, faintly British accent. He really did nothing she could blame him for. She felt sometimes like slapping him, all the same.

Once at home again his sadness came surging back. It was never expressed in words—for Theo had caused the subject to be closed—but in tone and gesture and above all in silence. The sadness was a presence, like a tiny draft from a forgotten window that has been left open a crack: just enough to chill the air. His friends at the club would not have recognized him if they had seen in his home.

He had become two people.

If she could have talked to somebody about what was happening in their house! But it was too intimate: She had never been able to be intimate. Iris knew herself and knew she had too much pride—false pride?—to disclose anything as close to the bone as this. Perhaps in absolute extremity she could talk to Papa. He was the only one. Yet she couldn’t talk to him about this, wouldn’t let him know that his daughter’s life was troubled or less than perfect. He needed to believe that it was perfect. Papa wore blinders. He had a
picture in his head of the ideal family of tradition. That’s the way it’s supposed to be; therefore it must be. There’s no other possibility.

She stood in the center of the bedroom trying to make up her mind what to do with the morning. It was Saturday and Theo had gone to the club for tennis. Downstairs on the lawn she heard the creak of the swings; Nellie was outside with the children. Really she ought to go downstairs and be with them, letting Nellie do her work indoors. She ought to take Laura shopping, for all her clothes were too short. And Steve was a worry: surely he was much too solitary? Thrusting up the hill alone after school, with his shoulders hunched and head down, whereas Jimmy tore along with a crowd of friends? But she had no energy to deal with these things; she felt so great a lassitude. It was hard to make a decision to move.

The telephone rang.

“Why don’t you and Theo come over for lunch? I just thought of it,” Mama asked.

“Theo’s having lunch at the club. Besides, you just got back from Mexico! Do you have to start entertaining already?”

“Having you at lunch isn’t entertaining. And Eric’s coming down from Dartmouth. He phoned last night that he’ll be here by noon. So come, and Theo can drop in after lunch. Bring the children, too.”

“No, they’re playing nicely. Nellie can watch them. I’ll come alone.”

She had so little patience with the children lately. She seemed to have lost her strength for nurturing and comforting; she wanted those things for herself. Thought of the luncheon table in her parents’ house brought now a total recall of childhood when, after a bad day at school, she had fled to the warmth of home. She needed her parents—her father—and was terribly ashamed of having the need.

There was an autumn melancholy in the burning sun as she drove through the town. It felt hotter than summer, yet yellow leaves were falling, floating down in windless air.
The main street was crowded with station wagons. These were loaded with dogs and children, and adorned with the stickers of prestigious colleges: Harvard, Smith, Bryn Mawr. On the sidewalk in front of the bank women sat behind rickety tables selling raffle tickets for cerebral palsy, mental health, Our Lady of Sorrows and B’nai Brith. All these things were now unimportant.

She passed the school where next year she would move up to the presidency of the P.T.A.; then the temple, and Papa’s handsome wing outlined in autumn flowers, marigolds and zinnias, burnt yellow and dark red. Unimportant.

“I can’t go to temple anymore,” Theo had said last week.

Iris had stopped in the center of the room. She didn’t mind so much that he didn’t want to go. He hadn’t come with them in the last few months anyway. If only he had said it differently! There had been argument in his tone, a throwing down of the gauntlet. And she had picked it up.

“No? Why can’t you?”

“I wonder that you need to ask me. Can you really expect me to sit there listening to all that talk about God? God, who allowed Dachau to exist?”

“It’s not for us to judge what God allows. There are reasons for things that are beyond our understanding.”

“Bosh! Rubbish! I only see that your God destroys. I’m more merciful than he is: I spend my days rebuilding.”

“One might say it’s God’s work that makes you want to rebuild.”

“Come, come, you’re too educated to believe that! Your parents I can understand, but not you! Mount Sinai and the Torah given to Moses, carved on stone! You know better than that. You don’t really believe those legends!”

“Don’t I? Then why do you think I go to services every week?”

“You go because it’s a lifelong habit. Nice people are supposed to go. And besides, the music is beautiful. You take an emotional bath in it.”

“I could be furious but I won’t be. Theo, more to the point, when are you going to get over all this? I don’t mean
to be unfeeling, heaven knows, but after all, Liesel isn’t the only human being who died cruelly. Look at my brother, don’t you think that my parents—”

“I don’t want to talk about Liesel,” he’d said coldly.

“I was only trying to help you.”

“There is no help. ‘We are born, we suffer and we die.’ I forget who said that, but it’s the truest thing that anybody ever said.”

“I don’t know about that. It sounds more profound than it really is, once you think about it. And it’s awfully, awfully bitter.”

“Iris, there’s no point in this conversation. I’m sorry I started it. Go to your temple, if it makes you happy. It isn’t even kind of me to take it away from you when it makes you so happy.”

“You couldn’t take it away from me. But thank you anyway.”

At what point, Iris thought now, reliving that particular conversation, at what point, on what day, had they begun to talk to each other like that? With irony and coldness, like debaters sparring cautiously? Whence this distance, this semi-courteous enmity?

Her heart beat heavily all the time. Driving the car through the quiet streets, turning into the driveway of her parents’ house, she was aware of its slow, steady thudding and of the chill in her flesh. It was a sensation she remembered from school when you entered the room where finals were being held: the same chill and thudding as the unknown loomed.

At the front door she arranged her face into a standard welcoming smile. “Hello, hello, Papa! Mama, you look marvelous! Eric, how are you?”

The house smelled of furniture polish and fresh air; the table in the dining room was set with pink linen mats; Mama’s hair was perfect. She was aware of her own hair, which she hadn’t brothered with in a week, and tucked the untidy strands behind her ears.

“Too bad you didn’t bring the children,” Papa said.
“We’ll have to run over later this afternoon, after Laura’s nap. Has she grown any, my doll?”

“I can’t tell, Papa, I see her every day.” Papa’s doll, red-haired, lucky Laura who had skipped a generation and looked like Mama.

“So,” Mama sighed, when they were at the table. “So I got my wish, I saw Dan and I’m satisfied. It’s a fascinating country. They took us all over.”

“Did you see the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán?”

“Of course, of course! I’m glad I read
The Conquest of Mexico
. Otherwise it would have been a heap of stones, an engineering feat and nothing more. But this way it really meant something. I could see it all in my mind, the way it had been when Cortez came. Such brutes!” Mama exclaimed.

Iris half heard. Dan. Dena. Their children and grandchildren. Stone house with a wrought-iron fence. Shop in the Zona Rosa. Wholesale operation with seventy employees.

“And Dan said your mother looked beautiful, she had hardly aged at all,” Papa finished. “Yes,” he said, “I made a good choice, I did. You do as well as I did, Eric, and you’ll have it made. Oh, I had plenty of girls, but none of them ever worth more than ten minutes of my time until I met this one.”

Iris drank the coffee with downcast eyes.
Her
husband couldn’t say that about
her
.

“Theo in better spirits?” Papa inquired. He shook his head. “What he’s been through!”

“I imagine,” Mama said, “the club does him good. Tennis and all the exercise. It’s therapeutic.”

“I must say,” Papa observed, “it was a surprise to me when you joined a country club.” He shook his head again. “There’s a very fast crowd up there. Do a lot of drinking.”

“Oh, nonsense,” Anna contradicted. “You pick and choose wherever you go! We’ve loads of friends who belong and they’re hardly what you’d call fast.”

“All the same,” Papa insisted, “there’s a lot of hanky-panky
going on. I shouldn’t have thought the atmosphere would appeal to Theo.”

“He plays tennis, takes a swim and comes home,” Iris said briefly.

“You don’t enjoy the club, do you?” Papa asked now. For some reason he seemed determined to pursue the subject.

“I don’t mind it one way or the other,” she replied.

“A whorehouse. Pardon me for the expression. Morals like alley cats.”

Eric laughed and Mama raised her eyebrows. “My goodness, Joseph! Those are strong words!”

“Maybe they are. I had lunch a while ago with a crowd of men who belong. Some of them my age, one even older. I think I and two others were the only ones there who were living with their first wives. I got dizzy listening to them: three sets of children; stepchildren; one guy married to a girl younger than his own daughter; another shacked up with some other man’s wife. Crazy! Crazy!”

“So, Grandpa? What can be done about it?” Eric asked.

“I don’t know. Tell you one thing, though, we’re too easy on that sort of thing. There won’t be any whole families left, at this rate. You know what the Bible says you do with an adulteress? Take her out and stone her, that’s what!”

“Surely, Joseph,” Mama said very quietly, “you don’t believe in that?”

“Of course not. That was speaking figuratively. But I’ll tell you one thing you don’t do; you don’t invite her to your house to sit at your table and meet your wife. People like that should be dead to the community! All these divorces and shenanigans,” he grumbled.

“You sound like Mary Malone!” Mama said. “Like a good, old-fashioned Catholic!”

“The Malones and I are very close together on most things. You ought to know that by now. Hi, here’s Theo!”

Theo stood in the door of the dining room carrying his racket, with his tennis sweater tied around his shoulders.
He had such easy grace as he stood there; Iris wondered how many other women saw it too. He took a seat at the table.

“We were talking about the club,” Papa told him.

“I know. I heard you as I was coming in.”

“Yes. Well, our people are becoming assimilated, aren’t they? All the dirt of modern civilization clinging to their skirts as they pass through.”

Theo laughed. “They seem to be enjoying it.”

“Oh, they enjoy it well enough! But they’ll pay for it, you can be sure. Some fellow wrote an article in the magazine section last week about Rome, all the filth masquerading as pleasure. They paid too, in the end.”

Theo stirred uncomfortably. He always said that his father-in-law had just one flaw: he moralized like an Old Testament prophet. He turned to his mother-in-law.

“How was your trip? What did you think of Mexico City?”

Anna began to go into raptures over the Reforma as compared with Fifth Avenue, the Champs-Elysées and the Graben. Then Theo joined in with word-pictures of Vienna, which for years he hadn’t mentioned or wanted anyone else to mention, Iris thought angrily. Why, Vienna had been wiped off the map, as far as he was concerned! And now he was talking to Mama about the Prater and Grinzing; Mama was joining in as though she were an expert on the city, after having spent two weeks there a quarter of a century ago … Theo was laughing. It was almost like flirting, what he was doing, and he was doing it, she knew, only to irritate her.