The Bride of Catastrophe (3 page)

“We'll make our own world,” he thought, feeling he'd fallen into this movie too. He kept from speaking it, though, thinking that he'd just met her, how could his feelings run this high? Her breasts moved him to tenderness as much as lust. That she was willing to let him touch her: she was so terribly kind. He would return the favor, would rescue her. He recast her mother's flat in his mind, from shabby to truly squalid, so the deliverance would mean more. In bed beside her, in the incredible luxury of it, he tried to confide the deepest things in himself, how his father died just after the first pictures came back from Auschwitz—as if his ancestral people had turned to monsters, his pride turned to shame, and it killed him.

“Cancer, cancer,” she said, holding him tight, keeping her own horrors swallowed. “Not divine retribution.”

“I know,” he said, squeezing her breast to remind himself, love and warmth were right there.

And she, arching up to say, “Take, take of my love and warmth”—she had infinite warmth to give, to him who would otherwise have so little. The sterility of that house, these people embalmed in their own wealth. They wanted fresh air, did they? Well, here she was. (Coming to “Tyger, tyger, burning bright” in her anthology of English poems, she'd felt a thrill of recognition. She would burn bright too.) She'd save him from his own stolidity. Behind him, on his mother's piano, stood a globe, colored the hallowed gold of old documents, that showed the earth as men had once imagined it. It was encircled in a double ring of iron, as in the hands of a benevolent god—it must have belonged to his grandfather. The ambition that showed there, the intention to possess! Yes, she would take her part in this tradition, beside this boy; she could see how soft he was, how he needed her. She leaned in toward him …

He was beyond speaking. After all, they had things in common: the same loneliness, the same longing. Now it would be fulfilled. And they slipped together into the forest of the night and lost the sense of the outer world.

*   *   *

TWO YEARS
later he was drafted and woke out of the ether of that love.

It was 1955; he was stationed in Verona, which was more than she could bear. Her father had been there in the war; she could still see the red pushpin on the world map that she used to fix her eyes on to keep her balance, as she practiced her pirouettes. Eyes on that pushpin, she kept steady for three years, until the day his ship returned to New York. She was eleven years old: her dress had a red bow at the collar; her gloves buttoned at the wrist. A thousand soldiers streamed past her—all of them in the arms of their families by the time her father came sheepishly down the gangway. He had a new baby daughter, in Europe; he was going to return there. All the time he was away and she was tending his image in her heart, keeping him alive there with memories and prayers—he had simply allowed himself to forget her.

If my father had been sent to Berlin, or the Philippines—who can say? But this struck too deep a nerve. Every day she wrote to him, and every night took the day's letter, ripped out the abject parts, and worked the rest until it showed her with castanets flashing. This was how it worked: you created a magnificent self so a man could fall in love with you, then you'd have to keep that self up, so as not to lose the man. And that way you'd never disintegrate.

But when he didn't write back, she found herself begging. “You're all that matters to me,” she wrote.

It was the abjection that moved him—she needed him so badly her life depended on him, so he could dare to count on her. And she'd given herself so easily, so fully, she deserved something in return. He went home on leave, half thinking to reassure her and escape, but just being near her he felt the old drowsy warmth overwhelm him. When he left she was pregnant. They were married; then came the rabbit in the road.

And the sense they were damned to each other, and to this child, the indelible proof of their shame. He hadn't really loved her, had married out of duty. She knew this by the instinct that taught her everything. He'd rather she were dead, rather he
himself
were dead, than yoked to her. He denied this, of course, but without real feeling. And there
had been no
rabbit! What more was there to say?

By the time I was born, they were living with his parents and he'd started his own business, raising praying mantises in his mother's greenhouse.

*   *   *

“
HIS FIRST
venture,” I told Philippa, shaking my head with a rue I barely noticed, so completely was
venture
linked with
failure
in my mind.

“You feel sorry for him!” Philippa said. “It has never occurred to me to feel sorry for either of my parents.” She squinted into the distance, trying to imagine it. “They'd be mortified,” she said, with a shudder.

“Aphid control,” I said, feeling sorrier, wishing I could go back there to that first failure and flip the switch to set my father on the right track. He'd put an ad in the Sunday
Times
, which should have left him two weeks of incubation to take orders and make deliveries, but Saturday morning they started hatching and by afternoon there were thousands of them, advancing in phalanxes across the glass, cocking their eerie little heads.

I had the story, like all stories, from Ma. And her stories existed to illustrate why she didn't, and why I shouldn't, love him. “The praying mantises were infinitely more important to him than
you
were,” she'd explained, telling how, when her waters broke (how
like
her, to go into labor like that right when he was in the midst of a disaster), he'd insisted she hold on until he herded the mantises to safety.

But, here came the great moment of her life—the advent of motherhood, with its absolute authority.

“You have to take me to the hospital right now,” she'd said, amazed at the quiet certainty of her voice, and anger had flashed over him. Who was she, to tell him what to do? Then he remembered: she was the mother of his child. He'd wrought this change, he would have to live with it. The deep, lush world she'd taken him into that first night, that he'd dreamed of swimming off into forever—where had it gone? He'd meant to rescue her from her fears and rages; instead, he'd found her mad stare fixed on him.

“It's the whole investment, gone,” he said, and she, incensed, lifted the perfectly wrought latch and smacked the greenhouse door open with her flat hand. She was sorry it didn't shatter, the fine old thing with its row of wrought-iron fleur-de-lys along the ridgepole to keep the pigeons away. The emblem of wealth, comfort, and enervation. People would ask: “What does your husband do?” “Why, he raises praying mantises,” she'd have to say. The creatures marched out, turning their cold, curious faces toward their liberator, and streamed away. They'd have baked to death before the Sunday
Times
ad came out in any case.

So, his project sputtered as hers was born. With each contraction, she loathed him more violently, until he seemed to be the force that convulsed her, the author of all her pain. And then the storm was past, the room was quiet, there were a few soft clouds in the sky, and in her arms, the baby. Seeing it, red and wrinkled, eyes screwed tight, fist up in futile defense against the light—she was overwhelmed with tenderness, for everyone, even for him. She remembered how badly they'd wanted each other, how their first touches seemed to be sacred. Here I was, whole, like the love that produced me: their new life, their real life, could begin. There
had
been a rabbit; from now on they would believe in this rabbit together. Exhausted, proud, filled with feeling, she smiled up at her husband, she forgave.

“Retarded, indeed,” she said. “Look at her. She's brilliant!”

He recoiled. Yesterday she'd known the baby would be an idiot; now it was brilliant before it opened its eyes. For months she had despised him, and he'd believed she was right: never mind his intent, he
had
nearly killed them, and this child would shamble beside him for life as the visible proof of his guilt. Now she'd changed her mind, and he was to forget his anguish, dance and sing? To agree would be to consign himself to the fire of her madness.

“Don't be ridiculous, Claire,” he said, and she, her bubble of hope burst, turned away.

“Brilliant,” she repeated, though what her imagination conjured in my scrunched little face was more than brilliance: some kind of supernatural talent that would prove her own hidden genius and so resolve all her torments, sing her demons to sleep finally, make her whole. She held me closer, she kissed my forehead with that smile of infinite warmth that must certainly have reminded him of the way she had loved him once, showed what he'd be missing from now on.

*   *   *

“
A HUSK
,”
Philippa cried, “the inseminator cast aside! A mother is red in tooth and claw. Praying mantises indeed.”

I couldn't help laughing. It was so good to see them as pawns of nature—if this were true, I wouldn't have to go back and back over their story in my mind, trying to understand what poisoned their love, so I could look for the antidote.

*   *   *

THEY BROUGHT
me home, stood over me terrified, working up their courage to change the diaper. How did you avoid hurting such a tiny, fragile thing? It needed them every second; Claire would barely fall asleep after a feeding before it woke crying again. Its diaper was dry, it wouldn't take her nipple, what was wrong? Claire held it—her daughter—tight, rocking her, saying, “It's all right, it's all right, your mama's here,” waiting for maternal grace to take effect, for the baby to relax and sleep. But fretting turned to screaming, until Claire was sobbing too in the fear that she couldn't give what the child needed, that she was not a natural mother.

Ted slept through untroubled; she'd have liked to smash his skull. He'd rather have killed her than marry her, now her daughter had been born under an evil star. The baby whirled its arms like propellers, and Claire cried so deeply, she sounded to herself like an animal baying, low and angry and hopeless, in pain.

“Wake up, wake up, can you be so deaf?” she asked her husband, shaking his shoulder.

He sat up, bleary and irritated. Wasn't this supposed to be
her
job?

“I can't, I don't know how to do it, I don't know what to do!”

“Well, what do you expect
me
to do?” he asked. Why had she
had
to have this baby, if she couldn't take care of it?

But just then, Claire rested her head on his chest, and her crying calmed; she seemed to be consolable suddenly. Knowing how she'd have felt if she could have comforted the baby, she'd thought to give
him
this satisfaction. This was her instinctive intelligence, and she used it in this secret way.

Ted had never seen himself have such an effect. He took the baby to his chest and made a low, manly sound, like an engine. And the baby was quiet, his little Beatrice, and Claire kissed him right over his heart. They were a family, it was like a miracle.

They were alone together in the desolate dark … they held each other, and each promised, silently, to do better, to make it all work. Warm and drowsy under the feather quilt with him, she remembered a library book she'd loved as a child, about an orphaned girl raised on a farm, where privation and satisfaction went somehow hand in hand. The farm family awoke before dawn, stoked the fire, fed and milked the cows, cut the hay or tapped the trees, ate heartily and simply, and in the evening, settled back at the hearth while grandfather read aloud. Their floor was always swept, herbs dried in the rafters, days of work led to evenings of satisfaction, their children grew healthy and strong.

The next weekend they took the Saw Mill River Parkway north into Connecticut, and when they arrived at the old house at the end of the long dirt road, she knew they belonged there. It had been somebody's folly—built of fieldstone and heavy timber so the walls were two feet thick, surrounded by a “formal garden” utterly overgrown, and fifty acres of marsh and bracken, two wide meadows full of brambles, a brook running along at the base of the hill, an old root cellar with potatoes and squash still piled. They could see the sky through the barn roof, and it smelled sweetly of hay, of the farm in the library book where wishes came true. They crossed the brook on a log bridge and walked up the hillside. Claire bent down to touch the flowering blueberries, lifting the wax bells with her fingertips so he could see how many berries they'd have.

Ted looked out over the fields, thinking of the work it would have taken to build the stone walls between them. Work makes the man. To go forward, in work, in marriage, one needed to be able to forget the past. He would begin by forgetting that day when he'd seen life coming at him with all its terrible decisions and had driven off the road. He'd been afraid of having a child who needed his guidance. If he had no answers to give, if he failed at fatherhood—that would be more than he could bear. But here was his wife beside him, and his little daughter, and it gave him courage: yes, he'd like more children, more soft little things like milkweed fluff, who flew to their parents for love. He'd borrowed against his inheritance and bought the place that day.

*   *   *

THESE WERE
the people I was doomed to love! She, seething with an ardor entirely unfocused, smoking, smoking, her eyes narrow, her silence terrible: my first glimpse of beauty. And he, in one of those bursts of optimism that punctuated his despairs, was fitting the coop with chicken wire—his old T-shirt, faded red, my favorite color then and now. I squeezed into their embraces, to feel them wanting each other. Or, at least, how desperately they wanted what they couldn't get from each other. Their passion swam along underneath us, we felt it move there, we never knew when it would rise up and flick our little boat over with its tail. He went to Agway for chickenfeed. She rocked back and forth on a kitchen chair, biting her knuckle to keep herself from sobbing.