Men and Angels Page 6

  Everything was working out extremely well. It was simply that Anne didn’t want a stranger in her house. She was ashamed at her own unreasonableness. She needed help, and certainly Laura did not intrude. She was quiet; she spent a great deal of time reading. Anne knew she had no right to ask her to read in her bedroom instead of the living room.

  She sat on the couch and read the Bible. In Anne’s inner life there were no grounds that could allow her to accept her unease about this. Nevertheless it made her uneasy, and she was afraid that Laura sensed it. Laura was sensitive, Anne knew, for she was homeless, and she had the sharp or, rather, limpid understanding of the thoroughly displaced who earn their place by knowing what will be the next thing to occur. What had happened to her parents? Anne knew there must have been something, some clear damaging event, for Laura didn’t speak of her family.

  It was hard to say what interested Laura. She was devoted to the children. No one, Anne felt, had ever before satisfied Peter’s enormous craving for attention, had given him so much that there was enough for Sarah’s more modest appetite without making him feel starved. And Laura was fond of doing needlework. She was making a pillow cover; she was duplicating, on her own, the pattern of the pillow on the couch, a Shaker tree of life, which Anne loved and whose ragged dull condition she had, in Laura’s presence, mourned. Yet she was also working a large and simple pattern of Minnie Mouse on a shirt of Sarah’s. And she gave no indication that one piece of work pleased her more than the other. She’d seemed surprised when Anne suggested it was only out of kindness that she did Sarah’s shirt, that the Shaker pattern must be a particular pleasure, a particular satisfaction. Work, beauty, those abstractions one can apply to tasks only after reading many books—what did they mean to a girl like Laura? And what was in her mind as she sat reading the Bible?

  Anne knew that it was like no reading she had ever done; what Laura was doing wasn’t really reading. She was doing what she did not to get information, or for pleasure, or to get ahead. She was reading, Anne could see, to keep her place. Or perhaps there was something more to it. Anne had never understood the religious life. She could be moved by it when it led to some large public generosity—the worker priests, the nuns in El Salvador. But there was another side to it she couldn’t comprehend. People had religious lives in the way that people wrote poetry, heard music. She had read, in the course of her education, since she had been interested in medieval art, the writings of the mystics. She understood that they lived in the desire for something like beauty, and that they had experienced something like creative inspiration. But it was something like and something like. What it was, finally, she could come in no way close to.

  That was what disturbed her, watching Laura read the Bible with the same expression on her face as she had when she embroidered the tail of Minnie Mouse. Was she experiencing something great, something profound? What made Anne uneasy was that she didn’t know what Laura was doing, sitting there appearing to read. Some other life was going on, and Anne had no access to it. So it disturbed her. Yet she couldn’t ask Laura to read in her room. Finally she wrote to Michael. He answered the moment he got the letter, teasing her for her hesitation, telling her of course she must use the study, it was foolish for the best room in the house to go to waste.

  How unsatisfactory both those letters had been, like all the letters between them. How much had been left out! The feel of the room, its air and weather, the physical truth of her sense of usurpation—it was in her shoulders that she felt it; if she had been with Michael and moved her shoulder half an inch, he would immediately have understood. And there was no way of writing about sexual desire, no proper words for body parts that felt drawn up, stretched, emptied out. There was no such thing, she thought, as an honest letter for a modern. We no longer need wait months, years, for the sound of the actual voice, the glimpse of the actual body. Therefore we cannot sit without self-consciousness and write a letter.

  It was very different for Caroline’s age, she thought, turning to a packet of her letters. At twenty-four, Caroline was writing to her father from Paris. Dissatisfied with her instruction at the Pennsylvania Academy, she had battled for two years to go abroad, to work at the Académie Julian.

  You can save your fears about my debauched life for your friends at the Atheneum. I arrive at the Academy at eight, where I work all day beside a Miss Oglethorpe of Bangor, Maine, with the demeanor precisely of a boiled owl, and a character to match. On the other side is Mlle. Dubuffet, of a good Norman family, whose complexion is, I assure you, the shade and grain of a raw beefsteak. I work till the light fails, what there is of it, and dine in a heatless pension with the inestimable Aunt Addie, on a soup and meat. For which you ought to envy and commend me, for reasons at once gustatory and economic.

  At night it is so cold that we retire early to our beds, unless we are invited out by one of the ubiquitous Americans, tipped off, one supposes, by you or your minions, to keep an eye out for the health and safety of two American ladies from the right sort of family. I assure you, our family tree takes on a stature here it can in no way aspire to in Philadelphia. But then the soil is poorer here, the forests thinner, the branches less leafy and the leaves less lush. This, of course, applies only to American species. Of the native nothing can be said yet, since this correspondent has dined out only with Americans!

  That I have discovered Rembrandt in the Louvre, that his Christ at Emmaus made me reach for the excellent linen of my pocket handkerchief, so awash was I on the flood tide of feminine artistic feelings, cannot, I know, interest you in the least. Yet since I have crossed the ocean on the magic carpet of your banknotes, I feel you’ve a right to know of my doings. I am one of the best in my class.

  Did she love her father? Did she hate him? Such a letter made it impossible to know: the tone made the question seem irrelevant. The weak concerns of a weakly spirit. On the same day she had written to her sister:

  Dearest Magpie,

  I have only now begun to live. I am excited as a baby. From the moment I got off the boat at Antwerp, everything entranced me: impressions cling to my skin like sea spray. Just off the boat at Antwerp I saw the Rubens on the ceiling of the Cathedral. Maggie, there was never painting like it—blues and reds of richness indescribable. All the canvases in America have been painted with mud. Everything inspires me here: the rooves, tawny, alive as sleeping animals, the faces, the girl who does my laundry with the arms of a goddess. That I can see my breath in my bedroom, that we have had no sun in a fortnight, means nothing. I work all day and sleep like a farmer, unless I have spent the night being dined by some odious Yankee. I speak less French here than I did at Miss Thwaite’s. I long to meet the natives. Come join me, dearest mouse, there is nothing to look at in America. I miss you all, though I haven’t much room in me for that sort of thing right now, so stuffed am I with the joy of this new life. Yet I wish to know that you all cannot do without me, including our Reverend Father.

  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 o
nly 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.