The War Between the Tates: A Novel (3 page)

The Tates, however, refused to choose sides. They announced that they still loved and respected both the Zimmerns and intended to remain friends with both of them. This high-minded and generous impartiality naturally irritated everyone. Each party suspected that the Tates were really on the other side, and were only pretending sympathy for theirs. Possibly they were even conscious spies. At the very least, Leonard finally admitted, he was hurt and surprised that Brian and Erica could still feel the same toward Danielle after what she had done to him and the children. Danielle thought the same in reverse; and she said so whenever they met, which was beginning to be rather less often.

The attachment between Erica’s and Danielle’s husbands, which had once helped to cement their friendship, now threatened to drive them apart. The continual recital by Danielle of Leonard’s many faults and crimes did not move Brian. Leonard was his friend, he finally told her outright, and he refused to judge Leonard’s character and behavior—or, presently, even to discuss it.

There were also social difficulties. If the Tates had Danielle to a party, they could not have Leonard, and vice versa. Moreover, if it was a dinner party, there was the problem of finding an extra man whom Danielle would not resent being paired with, or suspect of having been asked “for” her, or both. Danielle despised the idea of her friends’ matchmaking: she could take care of that problem herself, she declared. It became easier to have her alone, or with her children, to family suppers where such suspicions could not arise.

If Leonard was invited to dinner, on the other hand, he usually asked if he might bring along some girl always a different and hateful one. Most of these girls were not intrinsically hateful; but the way they sat in Danielle’s place at the table all evening, their eyes fixed proudly upon Leonard as he spoke about politics and the arts—just as Danielle’s once had been—was horrible to Erica. She ceased having Leonard to dinner at all, and only asked him to large parties where she would not have to notice his girl friends.

But when Danielle heard of these large parties from mutual acquaintances she became upset, and since it was not her nature to conceal her feelings, the next time she came to supper she mentioned them. She also asked what Leonard’s current girl friend was like, which was not quite fair. On one occasion she remarked bitterly that she understood quite well why the Tates had asked Leonard to their last such party instead of her: it was because he was an important professor and literary critic, while she was just a deserted housewife and underpaid French instructor.

That night after Danielle had left, Brian announced that he was tired of seeing her. Erica replied that she was tired of seeing Leonard and his girl friends. After considerable discussion, it became apparent that it might be better to let both relationships cool off for a while.

In effect, this turned out to mean that Brian went on seeing Leonard and Erica went on seeing Danielle, but both avoided mentioning it. A fog of silent discomfort settled over that area, and was not much dissipated last fall when Leonard went back to New York alone.

Erica and Danielle are still best friends, but their friendship now is full of Swiss-cheese holes in which sit things which cannot be discussed, which have to be edged around. Brian is in one of these holes, a rather large one. He has moved onto Leonard’s side: he resents Danielle because her obstinate and promiscuous behavior has driven his friend out of Corinth. Erica, on the other hand, sympathizes with Danielle’s view, which is that Leonard had taken her and the children to a distant provincial town and abandoned them there, probably on purpose, to live on macaroni and cheese, while he has returned to New York and eats every night in gourmet restaurants.

Danielle breaks the silence. “Is there more coffee?”

“What?”

She repeats the question.

“Yes, of course. I’m sorry.” Erica stands up. In slow motion, she tests the white Pyrex pot with her slim pale hand, lifts it, and pours, off-center. An umber lukewarm stream runs across the blue-sprigged oilcloth. “Oh, how clumsy. I’m sorry.” She reaches for a sponge and slowly wipes the table, wrings the sponge out into the sink, and sits down again.

Danielle looks at Erica, registering her appearance, which is dim today, even washed-out. Characteristically, she meets the problem head-on. “Hey. Are you feeling low about something?”

“Not especially. Sort of betwixt-between. I think it’s the weather, and ... Erica pauses. The local climate, the encroachment of Glenview Homes, the fact that she has been asked to do elaborate artwork without remuneration, are too familiar to explain her mood. “And Brian’s being away, that—” She swallows the rest of the phrase, recalling that Leonard is now always away; that from Danielle’s point of view she has little to complain about. “And the children.”

“Oh?”

“They were rather tiresome this morning. So loud. And rude too, really. It used to be fun getting up and having breakfast with them, but now—Whatever I cook, they don’t like it; they want something else. They’re so awful to each other; and they don’t like me much either. And I don’t always like them. Sometimes I think I hate them.” Erica laughs to take the weight off this declaration, which she had not intended to make. The fact that she hates her own children is her darkest, most carefully guarded secret. Even to Danielle she has never fully revealed it. In public she speaks of them as everyone else does, with proud concern or humorous mock despair. Her acquaintances protest that on the contrary they have always found Jeffrey and Matilda most polite (as apparently they can sometimes pretend to be). Then, in a light, humorous tone, they complain amusingly of John’s room or Jerry’s attitude toward homework, which makes Erica wonder if they too might be harboring monstrous lodgers. When Susan says, smiling, that her children are “quite dreadful,” does she mean in reality that she dreads them? When Jane exclaims that her daughter is “hopeless,” has she indeed lost hope?

“Adolescents ought not to be allowed to live at home. There ought to be a law against it,” she says, hopping back into the convention.

“You’re telling me. I thought last night, when we were arguing about what to do with those mud turtles, how I’d love to give Roo to Reed Park along with them, and the hamsters and the chameleon and Pogo. They could all live in a cage there together and kind people could feed them through the bars.”

Danielle, unlike Erica, can afford to be frank about how awful her children are. It is self-evident, at least to Danielle’s self, whose fault it is: that of their father, who has deserted them and given them neuroses, so that now Roo prefers animals to people, including her former best friend Matilda Tate, and Celia, age eight, has become shy and withdrawn.

Erica laughs. “I’d like to send mine there too sometimes. Both of them.” She looks around guiltily at the kitchen clock, but it is only three: Jeffrey and Matilda won’t be home for half an hour. “It’s not really that I don’t like them any more,” she lies. “It’s just that I don’t know how to cope with them. And I know it’s my fault if they’re difficult.”

“Your fault? Why shouldn’t it be Brian’s fault?”

“Well, because I’m their mother. I must be doing something wrong—Oh, I know I am. This morning, for instance. They were late for school and they started shouting at me, and I shouted back at them.”

“Hell, everyone loses his temper sometimes. You can’t always be right.”

“Mm,” Erica replies, not expressing agreement. Her greatest ambition is to be right: seriously and permanently in the right. Until recently, that was where she usually felt she was. “It’s the same with the house. Lately, it’s as if everything I do goes wrong.” She laughs consciously.

“But you’re the best housekeeper I know.”

“Not any more. I keep forgetting to buy detergent and I leave the parking lights on in the car and I lose the library books. Brian keeps asking what’s wrong with me.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Danielle pronounces, “Everyone forgets things like that sometimes. Brian’s just making you feel guilty.”

“Oh, I don’t think so. Certainly not consciously.”

“It doesn’t have to be conscious,” Danielle says impatiently. “Men can make you feel guilty, and stupid and incompetent, without even trying. Because that’s how they really believe women are.”

“Uh.” Erica makes a deprecating noise. She wishes she had never mentioned Brian. But it is too late: Danielle is already off again on her new hobby-horse, the awfulness of men. Erica sees this horse as a large gray-white wooden nag mounted on red rockers, unattractively and aggressively female.

“It’s the truth. And what’s worse is, we accept that judgment. They get us to believe at one and the same time that we can’t do anything right and that everything is our fault because we don’t.”

“You make it sound like an international conspiracy.” Erica smiles.

Danielle shakes her head. “There doesn’t have to be any conspiracy. It’s all been going on so many hundreds of years that it’s automatic with them.” She leans forward; Erica imagines her urging the old gray mare on, its coarse white hair and tail, and her own dark mane, flowing roughly in the wind. “You know that conference I had Monday with Celia’s teacher? Well, at first, like I told you, I felt Mrs. Schmidt was being overanxious. Celia didn’t mind her nickname, I thought. She knew we meant it fondly, that nobody thought she was really silly, any more than they thought her sister was a kangaroo. But yesterday I was talking to Joanne—you know, the woman I met at that last WHEN meeting ...

“Mm.” Recently Danielle has been going to a campus discussion group called Women for Human Equality Now; Brian refers to them as the Hens.

“Well, Joanne said that if Celia were a boy, nobody would dream of calling her Silly. Men don’t have nicknames like that. Even in college they aren’t called things like Bubsey and Ducky and Sliver, the way our friends were.”

“No,” Erica agrees.

“But you know, our names, yours and mine—they’re just as bad. They’re not real names, only the feminine diminutives of men’s. Little Eric and Little Daniel.”

“I never thought of it that way,” Erica says.

“No, neither did I. But once I had, it really bothered me. I don’t like the idea of being called Little Daniel all my life.” She laughs. “I was thinking, maybe I should change my name.”

“What would you change it to?”

“I suppose to Sarah. My middle name.”

“I don’t know if I could get used to that. I have a conviction that your name is Danielle.”

“I don’t know either ... Oh damn. I’ve got to go, Silly’ll be coming home. I mean Celia: You’re right: it’s not going to be easy. Well, we’ll be over later.”

As she stands by the kitchen window, watching her friend drive off into the wet, chilly afternoon, Erica thinks of Leonard Zimmern with irritation. It is one more thing to hold against him that he has turned Danielle against men in general—since women judge men in general by the behavior of their husbands.

But, after all, Danielle’s open dislike of men is better than what Erica had grown up with: the lies and subterfuges with which her own mother tried to cope with the same situation, the desperate playacting, the feinting and flattery—Erica, frowns, staring out into the empty yard. She does not think of her mother very often any more; Lena Parker has been dead for seven years. Even when she was alive Erica thought of her as seldom as possible. She thinks of her now: a tall, slim, bony woman with a distinguished face and slightly protruding eyes; always well-dressed and carefully made up; unconventional, intelligent but ill-read, impulsively and effusively affectionate. Since adolescence Erica had not cared for her very much. Perhaps that was unfair: Lena Parker certainly had her troubles; perhaps Erica’s old dislike is now being dreadfully revenged through Jeffrey and Matilda.

It had not always been like that, of course. For the first ten years of Erica’s life everything was peaceful and ordinary. Like Dick and Jane in the reader, she lived with her Daddy and Mommy and her baby sister and her dog Brownie in a nice house on a nice street in Larchmont. Things began to change in 1940 when Daddy, motivated perhaps as much by restlessness as by political sympathy, enlisted in the Canadian Army. He revisited Larchmont in the following years, but less and less often. Presently he did not revisit at all. He had not been killed in the war, reported missing, or even injured—although Lena Parker later sometimes allowed these things to be supposed. Actually he had married a Canadian lady and gone to live with her in Ontario, though it was some time before Lena admitted this even to her own daughters. She never admitted to anyone, possibly including herself, that she had been unilaterally deserted, but took equal or greater responsibility for the separation (“Harold agreed with me that it would be best ...). Even now Erica is not absolutely sure that it had not been Lena’s idea, or at least her secret intention.

In any case, her adjustment was rapid. Within a month of her divorce she had a job at Manon’s, a local dress shop; in two years she was assistant manager, in five manager. She developed a special effusive manner—half ingratiating, half domineering—which was successful in flattering or bullying well-to-do women into buying clothes. She learned to suggest that the imported blouses and scarves and “frocks” in which Manon’s specialized were at once more fashionable and more timeless, more delicate and more durable than American-made goods. She learned to believe this, and also all that, in the largest sense, it implied.

As time passed, Lena Parker’s preference for the foreign increased and spread, like an exotic imported plant which at first merely survives, then flourishes, crowds out the native flowers, and at length jumps the garden wall to become a pestilential weed. As they wore out, Lena replaced first heir own and her children’s clothes, then her books and furnishings, and finally her friends with those of alien origin. She began to sprinkle her professional conversation with French phrases
(“Magnifique!” “Mais non!”)
and ended by speaking English, even at home, with a foreign intonation.

To Erica, entering junior high school in a mood of “Ballad-for-Americans” patriotism and in the wrong sort of clothes, it was all false, disgusting and hateful. Her mother made Erica wear shopworn rejects, but she hoarded sugar and canned goods in a cupboard in the basement. She collected extra gas coupons; she cheated her customers in small ways, cutting off labels and passing part rayon as pure silk—Erica had heard her boast of it. Worst of all, she justified herself for doing all these things. If she only hadn’t justified herself, it wouldn’t have been so bad.