Men and Angels Page 2

  But even knowing all this, Anne couldn’t like her, for Hélène’s presence in her life hardened her own position and made it false. In Hélène’s presence she became a figure in a drama of Hélène’s invention. She had to become Michael Foster’s pretty wife, imaginatively raising Darling Peter, Darling Sarah. She had to give up her intellectual and conversational place beside her husband. Hélène pushed her off, past the horizon, a rowboat nosed away by a tanker. In willfully inventing her awry—but only just—Hélène cut off her life. For it was a struggle for a woman in Selby to feel she had a genuine existence. Maleness shaped the town; it had for two hundred years. Since the eighteenth century, young men had come to Selby to be educated into their fathers. Women had only recently been admitted into the college; there were, as yet, the president kept saying with uneasiness, no female full professors. And if the college didn’t quite know what to do with women students and faculty, it knew even less what to do with faculty wives. They were like the people who worked in the dark basement offices handling money or records behind doors marked COMPTROLLER or PERSONNEL—words that had nothing to do with the rest of college life. Their function was acknowledged to be necessary, but it was much better if they lived unseen.

  Anne knew she had been luckier than most. Four years after they’d arrived at Selby, she’d been made assistant director of the college gallery, a job her Harvard Ph.D. had shamed the college into giving her. But it was the director’s job she’d applied for, and that was given to a stranger, someone whom no one in the administration would ever have to imagine making the bed for one of the male faculty, washing his underwear, wiping the noses of his children, mopping the floor he walked upon on his way out her door to their real life. When the president told her she hadn’t got the director’s job she’d applied for, and offered her the assistant’s job, he said he knew she’d be happy that they’d offered the job to a woman, as if he believed she were applying for the job only as a gesture, as a member of a class, interchangeable with any other member, and so it didn’t matter that she didn’t get the job herself, since it existed for her only symbolically.

  If Hélène had done merely what so many others in Selby had done, if Anne could simply say that Hélène needed, for her own self-love, to make Anne insignificant and dull, the inferior wife of a superior husband, she would have been able to pass it off. But Hélène did more than that. She upset Anne’s moral balance. To dislike someone so publicly acknowledged as embodying everyone’s ideal of goodness made her doubt herself. For when she wasn’t around Hélène, she could think that goodness was of great importance to her; and she could believe in its force. But with Hélène before her she had to acknowledge the limits of goodness, and its weakness, to recognize that in itself it could do nothing to win love. Without the grease of accident—looks, wit, a deft hand or a quick eye—the machinery of affection never started. You could try to like someone you merely admired for his goodness—she had tried with Hélène—but you rarely succeeded. Whatever examples of changed lives and fortunes resulting from Hélène’s acts she’d brought to her mind, she hadn’t been able to stop herself from flinching when Hélène had embraced her once and said, “I think you do the most important work in the world. Making a man and children happy. This I could never do. I am too greedy, too impatient. You are so good.”

  The minutes she waited for Hélène loomed and thickened, a small corridor of solitude she could inhabit but could not enjoy or use. She was a mother, and she had a job; time was a precious object: it had mass, extension, force that formed themselves in relation to her work and to her children’s lives. Always she’d treasured solitude, and now, in its rarity, her time alone in her house shimmered with instinct value. Alone, she could collect herself; she could smooth herself until she felt her spirit gather and fall in, till she could feel herself once more entire, sheathed. She could watch her life, see how it lapped like a wave against a lakeshore, slow and noiseless, coming from a place that couldn’t be determined, not even landing, finally, but starting out again, back to its source. But this morning, her time alone did not shimmer; it was broken up and muddied by the image of Hélène.

  And every minute that she waited was filled with anxiety: each might be her last alone. At any moment her hoard of silence would be broken into; all she had gathered in would be spilled out; she would be with someone she disliked. And then it happened: she could see Hélène and the girl walking up the sidewalk. Something closed down with a sharp, excluding sound. It was over; they were at the door.

  The sight of them made Anne suddenly feel the weather. It was September, but it was still summer. A moist and downcast heat hung close above the ground. It was a heat that no one could take joy in; summer had gone on too long, and limbs grew heavy yearning for a hint of cold. Yet Hélène wore wool, and Anne felt she did it to make some sort of point. And the girl who was with her—Hélène introduced her as Laura Post—was dressed too warmly as well, in brown corduroy pants and a green pullover sweater that had been carefully, expertly darned. The sweater marked her instantly as not a Selby student; no Selby students mended their clothes. They wore them with holes, or they threw them away. And her sandals weren’t the kind that students had; they looked as if they might belong to a Presbyterian missionary or an English nurse on holiday in the tropics. But Laura Post had not crossed that mysterious bridge into the world of finally assumed adulthood. She was young, and wanted to be seen so: tentative, experimental, ready to take on whatever might come up. That, though, was why she was there: to see about working for Anne as a live-in baby-sitter. If her life were fully settled, she wouldn’t be free to do, at a moment’s notice, the kind of work Anne needed done. Thinking of her in this way, Anne tried to study her face. She had the light blue watery eyes of many redheads, which her thick glasses clouded and enlarged. There was something opulent about her skin: it was white, translucent, like an Ingres nude’s. But as if she’d guessed that, and wanted to offset those implications, she’d clipped her thick red hair to the back of her head in a way that unnecessarily, puritanically, revealed her large, protruding ears.

  Anne felt herself move away from Laura Post because she found it difficult to place her. But that was the problem with living in Selby, she thought; everyone was so easy to place. She’d often felt that it was like living in a mill town or a sanitarium. Everyone was recognizable, by caste or type. Everyone took an identity from his relation to the college: childish, resentful, rebellious, cringing, proud, servile, workmanlike, enraged. It affected even their postures and the set of their mouths.

  Laura and Hélène sat on the couch. Hélène took out of her bag the presents she had brought the children: Swiss chocolates beautifully wrapped in colored foil, an Elizabeth I cutout book for Sarah, and for Peter a model of Nelson’s ship.

  “How are you surviving Selby?” Anne asked Hélène.

  “Oh, if there were only twelve more hours in the day!” Hélène said, fluttering her hands. “So many students wanting to talk, so hungry for conversation. Always in my office! Always I am there in the office till seven o’clock in the evening, hearing about their so terrible lives. I make them speak to me in French; I tell them it is educational.”

  Immediately, Anne felt for every member of the faculty who left his office before dark, the blow of unspoken reproach.

  “And how do you like Selby?” she asked Laura.

  “I’m very happy,” said the girl.

  “The children are not here,” Hélène said. “But they are in school, of course. How silly of me. And you, you were doing your lovely work with them out of the house.”

  The way Hélène said “lovely work” made Anne feel she put it in the category of needlepoint or macramé. She answered noncommittally; she didn’t want to talk about her work to Hélène. It was too fragile, too newborn; she felt unwilling to expose it to any but the most friendly gaze. She explained to Laura that she had a new job writing the catalogue notes to accompany an exhibit of the work of Caroline Watson,
an American painter of the early twentieth century whose work had been neglected for years.

  “I need to be in New York now a few days a week, which is why child care has become a problem.”

  As she looked at Laura she thought again what a problem it was. Her present arrangements were as bad as they could be and still be considered functional. The girl whom she’d hired in the spring to live in, beginning in September, had decided, over the course of the summer, not to return to school, and as a last resort, Anne had turned to Mrs. Davenport, a woman in her sixties whom people employed only when no one else was available. Peter hated her. He said her bad breath made him sick. He said she wouldn’t let him keep his night light on and she told Sarah that if she looked in the mirror too long the Devil would appear. Peter and Sarah hadn’t been told anything about the Devil, so Sarah was riveted; she sat at Mrs. Davenport’s knee, asking questions about the Devil every night. Peter said those are the nights she has nightmares. Every night that you’re home late, he added, looking at his mother as Cotton Mather might have looked at a Salem woman in the stocks. Besides her personal shortcomings Mrs. Davenport refused to stay after nine o’clock; she wanted to be home to feed her husband his dinner, which he’d had, she told Anne—suggesting Anne’s instability, her own permanence—at five-thirty every night of his life.

  “I’ve just come back from England,” Laura said. “I was working for two professors, from Syracuse, taking care of their two children. They were on sabbatical. I could give you their name and address.”

  Anne wrote down the information. “I was in London for a summer, when I was about your age,” she said. “I still think of all those wonderful places: the Tate, the British Museum, Kew Gardens. I was enormously happy there.”

  Laura smiled blankly at Anne, as if Anne were talking about a place she’d never been. Her patient smile, her silence, made Anne feel foolish, inexpert and young. She talked about her children.

  “Sarah is six,” she said, “and Peter is nine.” She spoke about her children to Hélène and Laura in a way that made her feel that she was betraying them at every word. She presented the image that the outside world saw: Sarah is independent; Peter is intellectual. She heard herself reduce them, flatten them out. But that was all she wanted to give these women, a reduced image, not the intimate full figures, breathing, vulnerable, that she saw. So she stopped talking about them; she did the other thing she did when she was nervous, she offered them food.

  “No, no,” said Hélène, fluttering her hands. “It is Thursday, you see. Each Thursday Laura and I participate in a program run by the Student Christian Center. We fast, then contribute what we would have spent on food to a fund for world hunger. It is a way of feeling the problem in your gut.”

  Hélène pronounced the word “gut” as if it were the German for good. Anne felt herself encased entirely in flesh.

  “It’s a wonderful idea,” Anne said. “Really admirable. But you must come back when the children are here, someday that’s not a Thursday. A weekend, perhaps. One Saturday you could come for lunch.”

  At the door, Hélène kissed Anne on both cheeks. “A bientôt,” she said. “I must see these terrible children of yours soon, before they are off for college.”

  “I’ll see to it,” Anne said, realizing she’d decided not to hire Laura. She knew her own unfairness. The girl had done nothing, said almost nothing. But something about her—her too heavy, too carefully darned sweater, her large feet and disproportionately delicate hands, and probably, in fact, her friendship with Hélène had made Anne feel that Laura wasn’t a person she wanted to share her house with. She wondered what excuse she’d give to Laura and to Hélène for not hiring her when, after all, she really needed help.

  She went to the refrigerator to choose what she would have for lunch. Before Hélène and Laura’s visit, she’d thought she’d have an orange, half an avocado, and a wedge of chevrotin left over from a piece she’d treated herself to the day before. Had her family been with her, she would have had to eat things that were more substantial, more communal, less expensive: she’d looked forward to her imagined lunch. But now she’d just been with people who were fasting the whole day. How could she eat such an enjoyable, such a constructed meal? She fixed herself a peanut butter sandwich, and, while she ate, read a book she’d just got from the Selby College library, a biography of Inigo Jones. After lunch she mopped the floor, thinking how strange it was that every summer everyone in Jacobean London but the poor left the city, as a matter of course, to preserve their lives.

  She looked at the clock. It was two-thirty; soon the children would be home. She waited for the sound of their arrival as if she were dressed for a party, listening for a taxi. No one had told her what it would be like, the way she loved her children. What a thing of the body it was, as physically rooted as sexual desire, but without its edge of danger. The urge to touch one’s child, she often thought, was like, and wasn’t like, the hunger that one felt to touch a lover: it lacked suspense and greed and the component parts of insecurity and vanity that made so trying the beloved’s near approach. Once the children were in the house, the air became more vivid and more heated: every object in the house grew more alive. How I love you, she always wanted to say, and you can never know it. I would die for you without a thought. You have given to my life its sheerest, its profoundest pleasure. But she could never say that. Instead, she would say, “How was school?” “Was lunch all right?” “Did you have your math test?”

  They ran into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator. Peter began telling her about his science project. He and Daniel Greenspan were going to build a solar clock. It had begun already, that queer thing: her son knew more about some things than she did. He was trying to explain something about a pendulum; she didn’t understand. Impatiently he shoved the cookie he was eating into his mouth and fiddled in his school things for a pen and paper. He began to sketch: here is the sun, here is the clock, this is the force of gravity. For years, she felt, males had been impatiently making sketches of the world for uncomprehending females. But his sketch was good; he made her see something, and he was proud of her pride in him, she could see it: his teaching had given him a courtliness so he could drop favor over his mother’s shoulders like the mantle of a king. He was impatient to get on with things, to leave her. He ran when he heard Daniel knocking at the door.

  It shocked her when she’d learned how much she could like or dislike other children, depending on their treatment of her own. She’d always adored Daniel, she’d known him all his life. He shared with Peter a precocious, dry intellectuality, a pointed energy, and an unpopularity with other children, but he added to it an irony that Peter could never approach.

  “I’m going to get dressed for ballet class,” said Sarah. Then she was gone, they were both gone. Anne was alone again, but this time she felt lonely. No one would ever know the passion she felt for her children. It was savage, lively, volatile. It would smash, in one minute, the image people had of her of someone who lived life serenely, steering always the same sure, slow course. As it was, as they would never know, she was rocked back and forth, she was lifted up and down by waves of passion: of fear, of longing, and delight.

  It was such an odd thing, motherhood. She didn’t understand how people could say, “She’s a good mother,” in the same way they said, “She’s a good neurosurgeon,” or “She sings well.” It wasn’t a skill: there was no past practice to be consulted and perfected by strict application and attention to detail; there was no wisdom you could turn to; every history was inadequate, for each new case was fresh—each new case was a person born, she was sure of it, with a nature more fixed than modern thought led people to believe. She loved that, that her children were not tabulae rasae, but had been born themselves. She loved the intransigence of their natures, all that could never be molded and so was free from her. She liked to stand back a little from her children—it was why some people thought her, as a mother, vague. But she respected the fixi
ty of her children’s souls, what they were born with, what she had, from the first months, seen. She admired, for example, Peter’s fastidiousness—it wasn’t only physical, although it had its roots in the physical—she admired it even when it exhausted her and made her feel quite futile. Since he could talk he had come to her in positions of outraged justice with questions that had no answers, although she agreed with him they should have had: “Why did Jessica’s father go away and never see her?” “Why does Amanda like to play with Oliver better than me when I share all my toys and he hogs his?” He was always ardent; he took things to heart, and she was proud of his seriousness, his suffering, his fine, inflexible standards, but she wished she could protect him from himself. He would not be easily beloved, she could see that, but perhaps he would be honored. Perhaps, she had often thought, with a thrill of atavistic pride, an ancient, probably ignoble pride open only to the mothers of sons, he would one day be feared.

  Sarah was nothing like him. She stood back from life, found it amusing, looked on it with a slant, ironic gaze that judged, particularly the actions of adults, de haut en bas, with kindness, but with condescension. She had more hidden life than Peter, her dramas were inward, sometimes only to be guessed at or eavesdropped upon.

  Anne worried that Sarah’s evenness excluded her from too much maternal concern. Perhaps in apportioning her worries toward her son, she was depriving her daughter. But when she thought of Sarah’s future she could only imagine the two of them—she and her daughter—sitting across from each other, drinking coffee, having wonderful conversations, full and calm and rich. She could only imagine a good life for her daughter; it was for her son alone she feared. But it was absurd, these fears and these imaginings. There was no way of knowing what would happen to them, and, she often felt, not much that you could do to influence the course of things determined so much by their natures and their fates. All you could do was, while they were still children, keep them safe.