The Four Temperaments (28 page)

RUTH

R
uth's best
friend in high school was a girl named Mary Grace O'Halloran. Having a Catholic friend was unusual because the Catholic girls in her Brooklyn neighborhood didn't socialize with the Jewish girls. They didn't have much opportunity. The Catholic girls went to the Immaculate Heart of Mary parochial school, while the Jewish girls went to Erasmus Hall on Flatbush Avenue. But Mary Grace had been thrown out (her words) or asked to leave (her parents') because of repeated infractions, on school property no less, that involved boys. Instead of punishing her, her parents had decided the problem was that the Immaculate Heart of Mary's code of behavior was too strict. Maybe with less to rebel against, Mary Grace wouldn't need to be so rebellious.

They were right, but only to a point. Mary Grace's behavior didn't change nor did her curiosity about boys diminish while she was at Erasmus Hall. It was true, however, that these qualities no longer made her stand out. She was assigned the seat next to Ruth's in homeroom, and within a week, they were friends. Ruth loved Mary Grace. Although she knew she could not hope to aspire to Mary Grace's brand of daring, Ruth was still exhilarated in its presence. Mary Grace showed her how to light up cigarettes in the girls' bathroom, and then carefully exhale the smoke out through the open window. Ruth only tried this once, because the hot smoke burned her throat so much she couldn't sing afterward, but she took vicarious pleasure in watching Mary Grace. Mary Grace also taught Ruth how to apply eyeliner and lipstick, set her hair, make a martini and even convince the boy selling tickets at the Loew's Kings movie theater to let them in for nothing.

“Why did you do that?” Ruth asked later. “I had enough money for both of us. And for popcorn too.”

“It's good practice,” Mary Grace said. “You need to learn how to get boys to do what you want. It'll come in handy.”

The other thing Mary Grace tutored Ruth in was Catholicism. Before the two girls had become close, Ruth had never spent any time with a Catholic and was as curious about her friend's religion as Mary Grace was about boys. Mary Grace let Ruth try on the tiny gold crucifix that she wore around her neck, taste the thin, round wafers that she took from church, hold the amber and silver rosary her grandmother gave her when she took her first communion. Not that Ruth actually wanted to be a Catholic. But hearing about it gave her the same illicit thrill as watching Mary Grace smoke or hearing her describe what French kissing really felt like.

So it was Mary Grace who taught Ruth about heaven, hell and purgatory, the names of the saints and their distinctive, spectacular forms of martyrdom and the seven deadly sins. Mary Grace said the nuns showed slides of old paintings to dramatize the sins. Pride. Lust. Greed. Sloth. Anger. They both frightened and fascinated her. She must have known inchoately that to some degree, she possessed them all.

Mary Grace's family moved to the suburbs during their senior year, and though the girls tearfully exchanged snipped locks of hair and swore eternal friendship, Ruth lost touch with Mary Grace once the other girl was out of her immediate range. Ruth's mother wouldn't let her travel on the train out to Long Island (though she had no problem with letting Ruth take the subway into Manhattan for voice lessons). Mary Grace's mother decided the old neighborhood was a bad influence, and so wouldn't let her daughter visit it again. Ruth finally got her mother to agree to her spending a weekend on Long Island; Mr. O'Halloran was in the city and drove Ruth out there himself.

But Mary Grace seemed different. She had a new best friend, a Catholic girl named Lorraine, and somehow her special kinship with Ruth had dissolved. Mrs. O'Halloran served baked ham for dinner, and though Ruth's family wasn't kosher, it still made her uncomfortable. She said she had a stomachache and went without eating; on Sunday, when the family was in church, she walked to the train station herself and caught an early train back. Ruth never told her mother what happened but she could tell she was glad that Ruth's friendship with Mary Grace was over.

Now, all these years later, Ruth thought about Mary Grace, wondering where she was. She found herself having imaginary conversations with her girlhood friend. Ruth would ask her which of the seven deadly sins she thought was the worst. And why. Because if back then Ruth somehow intuited their presence in the soul of every person on earth, now she was sure of it.

After Ruth and Oscar returned to New York, she could see that Oscar was still wary, still waiting for her to vanish every time he turned away. And she couldn't blame him. From his perspective, what she had done was such an aberration, it would be easy for him to believe that it might happen again. If Ruth left the room, he was right there behind her. When she was in the bathroom, she felt his presence outside the door. And when she went out—the questions. The grilling. But she couldn't blame him. If your wife suddenly upped and left right before your daughter-in-law's funeral, and took your granddaughter with her, what were you to think?

After a few days of this, however, Oscar seemed to settle down. The fall season was about to begin and he started practicing the Bach violin concerto again. The apartment was drenched in the sound.

Gabriel and Isobel were staying with them now. That too was a small triumph of sorts. When Ruth first got back, Gabriel was furious with his mother. “How could you? How could you?” he kept asking, controlling his voice only because the yelling made Isobel cry.

“How could
you
?” she had finally said in return. That seemed to quiet him. For a while anyway, and then he would start all over. “I can't trust you,” Gabriel said. It was Oscar who had convinced him not to move to a hotel, but to remain with them, at least while he looked for a job and an apartment of his own.

So here
he was, Ruth's full-grown son, sleeping in his old room along with Isobel; since her birth Ruth had kept a Port-a-Crib stowed away in the closet. She knew full well this arrangement would not last, nor should it. But how she loved being so close to Isobel, picking her up a dozen times a day, feeling the baby's arms around her neck, the small face pressed next to her own. Ruth held her close and they looked in the mirror together. Isobel touched Ruth's nose, hair and cheeks. “Gray,” she said. “Gray.” Ruth realized she was trying to say “Grandma.” Isobel was giving her a name. In turn, Ruth found herself uttering the half-forgotten endearments from her own childhood
—tochter—
which meant daughter, and
katzelah,
little cat. She had never spoken this way to her sons, though surely she must have had other baby names for them. Why didn't she remember what they were?

Gabriel seemed
more attached to Isobel than Ruth remembered. He insisted on feeding and diapering her. He took her to Central Park in the stroller, held her on his lap while he talked on the phone. It was as if, Ruth remarked to Oscar, Gabriel was getting to know her, perhaps for the first time. Whether Gabriel had been seeing that creature, Ruth didn't ask. It was not her business. She finally and truly understood that. When Gabriel left that morning in San Francisco, she was so angry that it blinded her. Anger was her sin, just as lust had been Gabriel's and Oscar's. Because of her anger, Ruth had endangered Isobel, taking her on that crazy, improvised flight. Ruth had frightened her, frightened her husband. And when she thought of the tag Isobel had almost choked on—well, look at where Ruth's anger had nearly brought them. She had been as heedless, as impetuous, as her son, her husband and her daughter-in-law. Who was she to judge them?

While Gabriel was out of the apartment, Ruth made calls to William and Ben, to reassure them that she was all right. She told them that her sudden departure was brought on by the shock of Penelope's death. Everything was fine now. She didn't mention Ginny; she didn't feel she had a right. Neither William nor Ben questioned her much; they both seemed happy to accept this. Ben. His wife was pregnant, and they had learned it was a girl. Ruth could not get over the symmetry of this: to have borne three sons, who in turn would bless her with three granddaughters.

“Where will you live?” she had to ask. “Are you going to keep traveling? Will that be good for Laura now? And for the baby?”

“Don't worry,” Ben told her. “We're going to settle down. For a while, anyway.”

“In New York?” Ruth asked hopefully.

“London.”

“London.” Ruth was pleased. London wasn't as far as some of the places he could've picked. “Your father and I will come. As soon as the ballet season is over.” Her mind began the planning: the calls to the travel agent, the list of gifts she would bring with her, and the ones she would buy while there.

Ruth also called Caroline, and one morning, she and Isobel took the train from Grand Central Terminal to Greenwich, Connecticut. Caroline met them at the station, and from there, they drove to the cemetery. For Isobel, there was no sorrow in this visit; Ruth and Caroline took turns following after her as she haltingly toddled over the grassy plots, playing peek-a-boo behind the older headstones. There was no stone at Penelope's grave; it was still being carved. But Ruth laid a bunch of white gardenias that they had stopped to buy on the plot of newly turned earth. Weeping, Caroline came to join her, and for a moment, they embraced. Had they done this when Gabriel and Penelope got married? Ruth didn't think so. She felt no sense of guilt over not telling Caroline about Ginny and Gabriel. That might have seemed important before, but it no longer did. To tell her wouldn't mend or heal anything; it wouldn't bring Penelope back. All it would do was alienate Caroline from their lives and, more important, from Isobel's. And Isobel had lost enough already; Ruth would not be responsible for her losing Caroline too. She was no longer so arrogant as to think she could raise her alone: Isobel needed all of them, flawed as they were.

Ruth tried to explain some of this to Oscar the night after she and Isobel made the trip to Greenwich. Gabriel was out and Isobel was sleeping. It was Friday night and she decided to cover the table with a cloth and lay out her company dishes. Lilli's candlesticks were on the table, along with a challah bread. Even though the weather was still warm, Ruth had roasted a chicken with rosemary and garlic; the aroma filled the apartment.

“It's your Shabbat meal,” Oscar said as he observed her preparations.

“I thought it was time to get back to normal,” she said. “Sit down. Dinner is ready.” He did and Ruth filled the plates. They ate in silence until Ruth said, “Oscar, there's something I didn't tell you about that day in San Francisco. The day I left.”

“What?” He jerked his head up from the chicken he was cutting. “What didn't you tell me?”

“It's about Gabriel. He was on his way to see her. Ginny. That's what finally made me snap.”

“He told me. Just after the funeral. But he didn't actually come out and tell you back then, did he? He said that you just knew.”

“That's right. I just knew. And it made me so angry I couldn't see straight. Angry at him. Angry at you.”

“Are you still angry?” He stopped eating, though he held his fork and knife suspended in midair. It looked as if he were conducting.

“No,” Ruth told him. “No.” He set down his silverware and got up from the table. “Oscar . . .” she began as he came around to where she sat and awkwardly knelt down beside her. He wrapped his arms around her legs and buried his head in her lap. “Oscar, what are you doing?” Ruth was bewildered.

“Thanking you,” was his muffled reply.

GABRIEL

H
e was
not sure why he had come tonight, but here he was again. Sitting in the orchestra of the New York State Theater. Waiting for the curtain to rise. Waiting to see Ginny dance. The experience felt familiar, as if he had been doing it forever. Of course this was not accurate. There had only been two nights on which he had watched her dance—once in New York and once in San Francisco. But what fateful nights they had been. On one, he and Ginny had become lovers; on the other, Penelope had been killed. Now there was really nothing left that could happen. But if that were entirely true, why was he here?

Since that Sunday afternoon in the park, the one where he told her good-bye and still went back to her apartment, he had not attempted to contact her. Not that he hadn't thought of her. But her image was always twinned with Penelope's in his mind, and it was that more than anything that had kept him away.

He dreamed of Penelope now, almost every night. At first, the dreams were violent, reconstructing the awful scene in the street when she was hit, the scene he never saw because he had been watching, transfixed, while Ginny peeled off her clothes in the backseat of his car. He would wake in a sweat, reaching quickly for the sleeping pills he had been keeping on hand lately. But then the dreams began to change, becoming less violent: Penelope stood in front of him, her naked body wound in some kind of filmy veil. She took his hand, pressed it to a breast; she wanted to make love but he couldn't, even in his dreams, bring himself to look at her. Although these dreams were not as alarming, in some ways they were even worse.

Still, he got up every morning, showered, shaved, consumed several cups of coffee and forced himself to begin the cycle of making calls, sending résumés, meeting and interviewing that finally landed him a job in a midtown architecture firm. It was a big place, much bigger than the firm he had left in San Francisco. He would have to try harder to get noticed here. But maybe that was good. It would give him something to work toward.

Not that he had been idle. In addition to looking for a job, there had been the apartment search, about which everyone, even virtual strangers, seemed to complain and sympathize. But Gabriel was not fussy. For the first time in his adult life, he didn't care about the available light or the way rooms were laid out. He just wanted to find a place in a hurry and he did: a small but adequate two-bedroom in the West Village. The price astounded him, but after selling his San Francisco apartment and his car, he had enough money for the down payment. Maybe he could have found something less expensive if he had been willing to keep looking. But he wanted to move out of his parents' apartment, out of the room he had grown up in, as soon as possible. And since he had inherited a large share of Penelope's money, he could manage the mortgage payments. Penelope's money. It was a bitter comfort that this money, which he had never quite felt he deserved, was now in part his.

The first
days after his mother reappeared were the worst. He had yelled at her, pounding his fists against the goddamned bed in his goddamned room, until he saw that all his anger did was to upset Isobel. Ruth seemed more saddened than perturbed by his outbursts. There was something almost patronizing about her attitude—as if he were a kid having a tantrum that she knew how to wait out—which only angered him more. But in the end he had to recognize that he had no more been able to control himself than she had.

Still, he wanted to get away from his parents and take Isobel to some neutral place. It was Oscar who persuaded him to stay for a while longer. “How do I know she won't do it again?” Gabriel said to his father.

“You just have to trust her,” Oscar had said. Gabriel snorted in response and Oscar looked at him as earnestly as Gabriel could ever remember. “Just like she—we, I mean—have to trust you.” Gabriel was quiet then. He didn't need to ask what his father meant.

And he did try to earn their trust, spending as much time with Isobel as he could. In the mornings, Gabriel patiently fed her a bite of toast, a slice of apple, some Cheerios. When he came home in the evening, he took off his good jacket and slacks, put on some worn chinos and an old shirt so he could kneel down and give her a bath. How she loved the water, this glad girl of his. She spread out her arms and smacked the surface, sending water up into her laughing face, the floor and Gabriel. Isobel. Her dark brown hair and white skin would forever remind him of Penelope, but he had begun to accept that. Now he had to get to know her for herself. Just as she would get to know him.

Gabriel looked
at his watch. Just a few more minutes before Ginny came onstage. He didn't really understand this urge. He simply knew that he needed to see her again, to finally and completely put her, and all she had meant to him, in the past. In his lap was the program the usher had handed him, as well as the large, glossy booklet he had purchased in the lobby. Each of the dancers in the company was listed; the principals had a full page, in color, the soloists a half page and the corps de ballet a group picture in black and white. Now that Ginny was a soloist, her picture was in color, at the very end of the section, because the dancers appeared alphabetically. It was a new picture. In this one, her blond hair had been pulled to one side, and it fanned out, like a spray of water, from the side of her head. He didn't recognize the costume, and before he could place it, the curtain rose on a bare stage lit only by a celestial blue light.
Concerto Barocco
was on the program, and as the music began, Gabriel was engulfed by it.

He was very familiar with the score—his father had played it in the past, and he had wanted Gabriel to learn it as well. There was a difficult violin passage that Oscar made him practice over and over again. Gabriel didn't want to; he was already chafing under his father's pressure and he found the piece too demanding. But instead of coming out and saying that, he instead played it badly on purpose, making mistake after sloppy mistake, until Oscar, fed up and furious, yanked the violin rudely out of his hands.

“Enough!” he had shouted. “You're murdering it!”

“Better it than you,” Gabriel had muttered, hating his father's insistence that Gabriel share his vision, his musical passion. Ruth had hurried in and intervened then, and somehow the ugly incident was put behind them. Until now. Odd that Gabriel never noticed before how sad the music sounded, almost like a lament, or a dirge. He realized with a start that it was Oscar playing this music right now, that Oscar was performing the violin duet tonight. He had been so caught up in thinking about Ginny that he had totally forgotten.

Ginny. The row of dancers parted, and there she was, center stage. Her hair was slicked down and tightly wound into a bun; her costume, the simple white tunic that all the dancers wore. Only somehow, on her, the white seemed to glow, as if it were a color as vibrant and brilliant as red or chartreuse, amber or cerulean. “White is all the colors,” Penelope used to say. He suddenly understood what she meant. Gabriel watched intently. If the music was sad, Ginny's dancing was not. It was joyful and exuberant, expansive and lyrical. It seemed to him that she was almost mocking the sorrow of the sounds around her, daring the music to be dolorous when she herself exulted. He was seated close enough so that when he used his opera glasses, he could see the sweat coating her arms and throat, staining the tunic front and back.

When the ballet was over, and the applause thundering around him, there was another surprise in store: Oscar walked out onto the stage, holding his violin away from his body a bit awkwardly as he lumbered toward Ginny. There was another violinist with his father, though Oscar was the one who took Ginny's hand. More applause, more cheers. There they were—dancer and musician—hand in hand, to share their triumph. Through the crystalline lenses of the glasses, Gabriel could discern his father's face, smiling but still sorrowful. He did not look at the audience. He looked at her. He must still love her, Gabriel thought as he finally put the glasses down in his lap. Poor bastard, he thought as he momentarily placed his head in his hands. Poor bastard.

The wind was biting as Gabriel waited by the stage door. He didn't know if he would speak to her, and if he did, what he would say. The performance had stirred him in all sorts of ways, but none of them erotic. No, she was beyond that now, at least for him. He turned up the collar of his overcoat and pulled it tightly around him. He saw a few of the corps members emerge, all talking at once. They were followed by another group, and then he caught sight of a few of the principals as they walked out the door, up the stairs and into the night. More dancers came out, and he began to think he had missed her when there she was, talking to someone behind her as she pushed the door open with her shoulder. She was wearing the fuzzy black coat he remembered from that night at the hotel. He just was about to move forward into her path when he saw that she was walking with someone. A man. So instead he stepped back.

The man was blond and walked with the slightly splayed gait that all the dancers had. Gabriel realized that this was the man who had partnered Ginny tonight in the ballet. Something he said made her laugh. The man grinned too, pleased, no doubt, that he had pleased her. He took his large hand and draped it casually over her shoulders, pulling her close. They strolled together out into the cold November night. Gabriel watched them go. She hadn't even known he was there.