Men and Angels (8 page)

To her father, she was baiting, forced, bullying of him and of herself. Her passions were “feminine artistic feelings,” in which he would not be interested. She was right, no doubt; he never wrote a word to her about her work. Yet she could say to him what she could not say to her sister, “I am one of the best in my class.” The proud daughter of a proud father. Was there any residue, Anne wondered, of what was siphoned off by pride, by dull, domestic tyranny, hurt feelings, spirits quenched? Some durable tough skin that kept love safe and fresh and lively? As a young woman, Caroline had been proud of her father, with a pride only remoteness could inspire. Something in her drew up straighter in her love for him, this successful lawyer, club member, community face. He was a Philistine, a despot, yet he gave her the money to go abroad and study. From him she learned her love of sailing, of the sea itself; it was he who taught her to ride. She wrote him, after a bad fall from a horse in the Bois de Boulogne: “For this I have you to thank. The one skill you saw fit to impart to a daughter has not left me with a broken neck only through God’s grace and the stubborn stuff I’m made of, for which, I suppose, I am also in your debt.” Did Caroline know her father? He was the only member of the immediate family whom she never painted. The lovely early Impressionist canvases recorded a universe exclusively female.
The Breakfast Party
implied a summer world of women left in the country with their children, while the men sat, hot in their wool suits, unable even to strip to their shirt sleeves, traveling on the weekend to the husband’s and the father’s role.

Anne thought of her own father, that loving and yet vague man whom she felt she knew, even now, as a figure of romance. What was his place in the mess of the family life? She could never cast him as a villain. Even to call his face into her mind made her smile. His face had something goofy about it: his cheeks were round; his chin disappeared into his neck; he was six feet four, two hundred and fifty pounds. He’d been bald as long as she had memory of him. She was sure that his success as a lawyer was due to his goofy look: he appeared too simple to be planning something underhanded. Yet in court he could be eloquent. She had heard him plead, had watched him, overcome with pride. He believed in justice and reason; he lived justly, reasonably. He had defended blacks in the segregation years, demonstrators, draft evaders at the time of Vietnam. She’d always been proud of him in a way she couldn’t ever have been proud of her mother. There was distance between them; he left the family in the morning, bringing them at night, as if they were in quarantine, news of the world.

That romance of the distant father, which in their different ways both she and Caroline had shared, would be utterly foreign to her children. Would they have lost anything, never having lived beside a stranger in the family? Michael had tended his children in illness, changed their diapers, fed them, come home, when they were little, every day for lunch. She could have wept, sometimes, at his tenderness toward the children when he performed for them what to her were ordinary tasks. He had no memory of a father’s tenderness; his father was a cipher, less than that, a hole, a wound. Impossible to know if he was even living. Michael had no memory of him, and his mother kept no pictures. Her descriptions of him Anne always believed untrustworthy, rendered as they were in the language of fan magazines or romance novels. Could he really have been so perfectly the stage villain? Was “tall, dark and handsome” really the way to describe him? Did he really twirl a black mustache? She would never know, and more important, neither would Michael. But his success as a father was a product of his history; whether he was successful because he had no model for paternity, or because he was trying to overshadow one, she never knew.

She put Caroline’s letters away. Now she would go down to her family. She could explain to no one that opening the door of her study (Michael’s study, really), she reentered the temperate climate, walked again on land. She felt as if, opening the door, walking into the hallway, she should shed some clothing or equipment, like an astronaut. Walking into the hallway, she put on weight; one foot went in front of the other. Only when she was out of it could she realize her different life behind the door. She was with Caroline there, a woman dead for forty-five years. She knew, she felt, a tremendous amount about her. Yet she knew nothing, or it could all be wrong. She didn’t know, for instance, how her voice had sounded. Had Caroline Watson walked into the house and, standing at the bottom of the landing, called her name, she would not have known who was calling. She would have come out fearfully, expecting a stranger.

And yet I know her, Anne thought; I know her almost as I know my own children. I know her eighteen-year-old drawings, her watercolors of her dogs, her sisters, her charcoal sketches from antique casts, her first dark oils. I feel, although I cannot say it, what would have pleased her in this room, what on the street would have caught her eye. I understand what happened, how her blood raced, when, seeing the canvases of Manet, she felt the nature of light had been revealed. How, later, looking at Japanese prints like everybody else in Paris, she believed she had been wrong to crowd her canvases, learned something of the airiness of simple space. I know what she felt seeing the colors of Kandinsky, of Matisse. I know why she envied her friend Bonnard: his calm exuberance, his simple joy. I know all this, and looking at a painting, at the curve of a girl’s neck, I am drawn to this woman. I am connected. Because alone, like someone on the moon, I have looked again and again in silence. I have read her handwriting, learned the names of her friends. Because alone in silence slowly I have thought about her many hours, putting from my mind all other things I love. And now we are connected. In the bone. This woman, whom I know and do not know at all, is part of my life like my own children.

Yet, she thought, walking down the stairs of her house, hearing her heels on the wooden floor as if they were somebody else’s, it is nothing like life with the children. In the room with Caroline she was weightless. Sometimes it frightened her, the speed of her blood, the giddy sense of being somewhere else, in some high territory, inaccessible. With the children, there was never any flying off, flying up. A mother was encumbered and held down. Anne felt that she was fortunate in that she loved the weighing down, the vivid body life the children lived and gave her. Yet it was always a shock—walking into her kitchen, seeing her stove, her pots, real fruit in a real bowl, not one of Caroline’s still lifes. There was a moment always, when she saw the children, when her body gave a start as if she had missed a step. Then there was a click, and her mind slipped into a smooth familiar track. She thought about meals, about laundry; the names of her children’s teachers appeared, replacing the names of Caroline’s friends in Paris. The children came to her, and in a still, heavy heat she entered once more the life of their bodies, her body. She put back on her skins; she embraced, was embraced. She put on, once again, that other life, beautiful and heavy-scented as a dark fruit that grew up in shadow, the life of the family.

But that day when she came downstairs, no one was in the kitchen. Laura had left a note saying she had taken the children for a walk to look for leaves. It was November now. She worried that the children weren’t warm enough. But Laura was entirely dependable. She knew she ought to be glad that the children were with her, doing something enjoyable, something interesting. Yet she felt let down. She wanted the presence of her children, their voices, the feel of their skin, their clothes. The house seemed too large, and chill and damp. She made herself a cup of coffee she did not want.

Suddenly she felt a failure. She ought not to want the children now. If she were really gifted, really meant to do distinguished work, she wouldn’t be missing her children. She’d feel freed to go back to work. But for her it was impossible. Having thought of the children, having desired them, she couldn’t now go back into the room to Caroline. She sat at her kitchen table watching the sky turn vivid, turn colder. She walked over to the window, listening for voices.

The children came in with Laura, already beginning, as they saw their mother in the kitchen, to fight over the leaves they had collected, over who saw what first and who owned which specimen. Laura hung back as they strove toward Anne: grievance flickered round their heads like haloes.

“The thing is,” Peter said, “I saw this copper beech leaf in the book, and we don’t even have any in the neighborhood. It’s a
miracle.
She doesn’t need it. She doesn’t have a real collection like I do. I’m the one that needs it.”

“I saw it first,” said Sarah.

“Tell her I’m the one that needs it.”

Need. Would he always be saying that to women? “
I’m the one that needs it.
” And would Sarah, stuck in the track of a useless justice, always be saying no through pride of claim? And now they turned to her.

“Peter,” she said, “part of having a collection is the difficulty of completing it. It’s the satisfaction of getting something after you’ve waited for it.”

“But I need it, and she doesn’t.”

“But I saw it first.”

“Couldn’t you trade her something for it, Peter?”

“I don’t want anything else,” said Sarah.

“Well, then, Peter, if you’ve found
one
, surely there must be others.”

“No. There are no copper beeches around here. It’s a
miracle
that it was there. I’ll never find another one.”

“It’s awfully important to Peter, Sarah. Couldn’t you give it to him this once?”

“No, because I found it. And you’re always on his side.”

Was it true? Did she favor one over the other? For her, each incident was discrete. But for them, the decisions were a Persian carpet, the Bayeux tapestry, mercilessly telling some complicated sibylline tale.

“There are no sides, Sarah,” she said.

“Yes there are. There’s his and mine.”

Exasperated, Anne took the leaf and put it in the high cabinet where she hid things from them.

“You’re both being awful. Neither of you can have it.”

“You stink,” said Peter to his mother.

Sarah began to cry. Anne took Peter by the shoulders and shook him. “You may not speak to me like that. Go upstairs until I call you.”

Sarah sat on the floor, rubbing her eyes with her fists; Laura was still holding back, holding the children’s coats, watching their mother. Ashamed, aware that she was being watched, as if she had been caught in some indecent petty crime, Anne smiled at Laura, granting her the complicitous look she hated: adults locking eyes in knowing, close agreement over the deficiencies of children, their injustices, their wrong proportions. She hated it because she understood how children thought, what it was that cut their issues out for them, a diamond knife on glass. Justice. Property. What they fought for was not trivial. Yet it could not be allowed. They couldn’t keep their knife-hard edges or all life would be impossible. And it had an astonishing power to ruin life for her, when her children fought. It broke up everything, destroyed all hope. Alone with the children, she could understand all this, her part in it, their part. But it was a business like an adulterous love affair that should never be made public; opening it to outsiders could only coarsen the grain. She smiled at Laura, and Laura smiled back at her, that odd smile with its mixture of amusement and unamusement, with its cool, withholding certainty, and, just possibly, with its contempt.

Anne bent over and took Sarah in her arms. She must stop attributing these complicated things to Laura, finding messages in her looks like a soothsayer examining birds’ entrails. To make up to Laura for her crabbed surveillance, she offered her a glass of wine.

“I never drink, Anne, thank you,” Laura said.

Anne felt herself blush, as if the girl had accused her of being both a drunkard and a boor. “Of course you don’t. How stupid of me. Would you like cocoa?”

“Wonderful.”

“Cocoa?” Sarah said. “Can I get Peter?”

“Yes,” said Anne. “We’ll all make it together.”

Peter came down the stairs with his sister, both of them chastened, loving, guilt drawing them together like a weak magnetic field. Sarah got down the measuring cup. Peter took out the cocoa. They took turns measuring the cocoa, the sugar, the milk, the pinch of salt. They took turns stirring the mixture. There are my children, Anne said to herself, these are the ones I missed. She could smell their thin high sweat; they should have taken off their sweaters. But it was autumn and she understood their feelings: woolen clothes on such a day were a pleasure in themselves.

She brought the cocoa to the table on a tray. The children sat next to her, showing her their leaves. The thickish light fell on their hair. She touched the heads of her children, feeling the texture of their hair. Then she looked up at Laura. She was standing back and smiling. They had excluded her; she sat outside the frame, outside the circle of the light. Guiltily, Anne said, “You must thank Laura for the wonderful expedition.”

“Oh, yes,” Peter said.

“Why don’t you give her a thank-you kiss?” Anne said to Sarah.

The children got up and walked out of the circle of the lamplight. How sweet they were; how hungrily the poor girl took their kisses. She was a girl who had not, it was clear, been held enough, been treasured. So it was a fine thing: she was good for the children, the children were good for her. Things were really working wonderfully. Anne knew she was very lucky. She was sure that when she got more used to living with a stranger, her unpleasant feelings would just disappear. She brought the cups to the sink, ashamed of herself for wishing Laura were not there.

It was a clear day early in November. That morning as she’d come down on the bus, the mist had risen. Gradually it revealed the road. A little at a time it burned away and left behind it hills and mountains. Trees appeared where seconds earlier a white fog seemed a permanence, like earth or stone. But it was lunchtime now; she walked the forty-five blocks from the Columbia library to the restaurant that Ben had chosen. The streets she walked on were struck by sun. She watched it glance off buildings, fall in solid bars upon the sidewalks and the streets.