“Her prices are disgraceful,” Iris complained. “I haven’t been there more than three times since we got my trousseau and my wedding dress.”
“But she does have lovely things, you have to admit,” Anna said. “And what’s more, she doesn’t push things on you the way most places do. No high pressure at all. She’s such a friendly woman too.”
“I never liked the way she looks at us,” Iris said. “She’s too curious.”
“For goodness’ sake, what could she be curious about?”
“I don’t know. There’s just something that bothers me. Anyway, I was ashamed to look at the price tag again when I opened the box.”
“Iris,” her father remonstrated, “there are certain times when a little extravagance is called for. God knows your mother wastes nothing. But she doesn’t mind dressing herself. I like to see my wife dressed up. And I’m sure Theo does too,” he finished somewhat sternly.
Iris was conscious again of her dress, which had gone baggy from wear.
And again Anna changed the subject, asking Joseph whether they expected to open the Home in the summer. It was as if she had sensed Iris’s discomfiture, almost as if, Iris thought, she could have guessed that money was another very uncomfortable subject.
Yet she could not have guessed, certainly not from the way the Sterns lived, how uncomfortable it actually was. Who would believe that their checkbook balance was so low that Iris was sometimes wary of writing a fifty-dollar check for the household?
She worried about what or whether Theo could be saving. When she asked him, he would smile and answer, “Enough. Let me worry about it. That’s the husband’s responsibility.” He would kiss her cheek or pat her head as if she were a child and she would be left with resentment. And, as if she were a child, she thought, he brought unexpected gifts—adult toys—a blond alligator purse he had seen in a shopwindow, or a pair of gold cuffs studded with lapis lazuli and turquoise that they could not afford. Iris was careful about expenses; she had probably been made that way. When Papa’s partner gave her as a wedding gift a complete flatware service of hand-wrought silver from Italy, she exchanged the heavy, oversized pieces for something lighter and easier to maintain.
“It would take hours to polish,” she had explained. “We can’t afford to pay someone to do it, and I have better things to do.”
“What a pity,” Anna had remarked. “I can’t understand you.” She had marveled at the magnificence of the chasing and swirling and would gladly have spent hours caring for it if it had been hers. But Iris wasn’t Anna.
Joseph was leaving. “I’m sorry to run off, but I’ve got a two o’clock appointment. This was a real treat, a luxury.” And he bent to kiss his wife and daughter.
When he was out of sight and hearing, Anna asked, “Are you feeling all right, Iris?”
Could one hide anything from those clear eyes?
“I’m fine.”
“You’ve eaten practically nothing.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I don’t think you do feel all right.”
Anna’s thoughtful gaze went to the grass, where pigeons strutted, picking up fallen seeds. After a moment she spoke quietly.
“You can postpone your work or study for a few years, you know. It won’t be too late for it then if you still want it.”
“I’ll want it.” Fragmentary phrases, subliminal messages, flashed before Iris’s eyes. Be somebody.… Show him.…
And she said firmly, “Things are changing, Mama. When I was in college, the dean told us that the first purpose of a liberal arts education was to make you a better wife and mother. In fact, I was just reading the same thing before in a magazine.”
Tactful as always, smoothing and soothing, Anna replied, “Of course there has to be more in a woman’s life than that. Yet there is a little something to be said for—what I mean is, an educated woman like you should offer herself first to her children. After all, you’re not an immigrant like me.”
“Don’t say that about yourself. You were a good mother, always.”
Anna’s eyes filled suddenly. For a moment she did not speak. Then she said, “You did so much for your father and me when we lost Maury. I remember—” She stopped.
Remember.… Yes, how the storm had rattled the windows that night when the police came to tell them that their son was dead in a car wreck. The rattle of winter wind and rain.…
“And all that long sad time you understood how it was for us.”
Iris wanted to say, but did not say, Yes, I can always feel for the lost and lonesome. I relate to them.
“Perhaps you don’t realize what a comfort you were. We took strength from you.”
Iris thought: She sees beneath my skin. She’s worried about me. She’s reminding me that I can be strong, which I know well enough.
“I’m glad I could help you, Mama.”
“I think men take sorrows harder, don’t you? Your father especially took strength from you.”
“I think it depends on the man. Papa is very, very soft. He only likes to seem tough, isn’t that so?”
Anna smiled now. “Yes, yes. Soft as custard inside. You and your children … you’re his whole life, Iris!”
She’s pleading with me to be happy, not to give them any trouble.
“Not his whole life. You’re forgetting yourself.”
“I’m not forgetting.”
Perhaps unconsciously, Anna looked down at the hand on which the diamond flashed. Joseph had brought it home, Joseph made her wear it. The ring was the symbol of his achievement; the young man from the tenements had labored and risen high. Yet sometimes Iris wondered whether, under the serenity, the competence, and the devotion, her mother could be totally satisfied with the man she had married. They were so different! But that wasn’t fair, she would think at once, ashamed of her doubt. No man would worship a woman as her father did if the two did not satisfy each other entirely.
How beautiful she is, Iris thought now. Men still linger near her even when younger women are in the room. How must it feel to be adored as Papa adores her?
Anna was very serious. “Iris, I ask you again, is everything all right? I don’t want to intrude—”
But you are intruding, Iris said silently.
On the lawn a swooping crow startled the feeding flock, which rose and scattered. Feigning interest in the birds, Iris blinked and, before tears could start, turned in her seat to watch them.
“I’m fine. I’m just feeling quiet. You know how I am.”
“You’ll work everything out. All in good time. Believe me, you will. Be patient. A woman must make a home for her husband. Life is hard for men, struggling for a place in the world. A woman must be his refuge.”
And where does the woman find refuge? Iris asked herself, resenting the trite, simplistic counsel.
“You are of your time,” she said only, as they rose to go.
“And you, I think you are ahead of yours,” Anna replied.
They walked to the parking lot. A vivid girl in a pleated tennis dress, with red ribbons on her long black ponytail, waved to Iris.
“Who’s that?” asked Anna.
“She plays doubles with Theo at the club. He thinks she’s stunning.”
“Well, she is very striking.”
Anna stood for a moment at the window of the station wagon before Iris put it into gear.
“Iris, darling. Just remember Theo loves you.” Very carefully, Anna looked away. “You must forget that old business. I do hope you’re over that nonsense. You remember what I told you then? Jealousy can eat you up.”
Canny woman! She had guessed that more than a teaching career was troubling her daughter today. But whatever could Mama know about jealousy? Papa wasn’t a flirt. Papa wasn’t out riding around town with another woman at noon.
“Don’t worry, Mama. Please, I’m fine. And I have to rush. The kids will be home any minute.”
The car sped back through the main streets of town and out
through its fringes. It passed the Reform temple to which the family belonged, a handsome modern structure of brown brick set in an evergreen garden. On the highway it passed a desolate string of bowling alleys, pizza parlors, strip malls, and gas stations before turning off on a side road into another world. There, through a tunnel of old trees, it rolled on curving roads flanked by large colonial houses, with here and there a French provincial, or what passed for French provincial in suburbia, and slowed at the blunted tip of a quiet dead-end drive.
The house was framed by an autumn splendor of maples, still partially in emerald leaf but tipping now into gold. Built almost entirely of glass and slender redwood pillars, the house seemed almost to float on a lake of sunlight. Or else it was a crystal box lying lightly on a table of grass.
While it was building, and for a few years afterward, people had come by to look at it, some to marvel and some to scoff at the strange new “modern” structure. Under mild bewildered protest Papa had built it to his daughter’s taste. Theo had truly never liked it, either, that she knew. The mullioned Elizabethan windows and nooks that he had lived with in England or the overstuffed central European comfort with which he had grown up were far more to his liking, although he did appreciate the very evident cost of this house. Ironically, its cost was the one thing about the house that bothered Iris. It could have been just as airy and modern, it could have given her just as much pride and joy, if it had been half the size. The enormous rooms, some of which were still being furnished, were almost grandiose, as was the enormous yard with its elaborate ornate shrubbery and garden. Long walls called for paintings, and while it was certainly delightful to make selections at the galleries on Madison Avenue or on Fifty-seventh Street, she always had a sinking sensation while Theo wrote out another check and blithely carried yet another costly treasure to the car. It was he who had failed to object, indeed had encouraged her father when he had increased the scale of the house plan. It was he who had added the terrace and the tennis court, he who had brought in the expensive landscape designer. A simple lawn and the natural woodland would have been pleasing enough, she reflected again.
Steve and Jimmy, with three of their sixth- and seventh-grade friends, were shooting baskets in the side yard. They gave their mother a second’s pause for greeting as they whirled.
For a minute she stood watching her boys. Such nice kids, they were. Naked to the waist, sweating in the heat, brown from their summer at camp, they were the products of their parents’—and their grandparents’—care and good fortune. Lucky kids. They couldn’t know how lucky they were. God bless them, she thought suddenly. She would have liked to hug them both right there in front of everyone.
There were only ten and a half months between the two. In the first year of marriage Theo and she hadn’t been careful at all; he had been a passionate, careless lover, and she on her part hadn’t minded. A little smile touched her mouth at the recollection. Indeed, she had not minded at all.
Now here were the brothers, close and in most ways quite alike. Neither was yet, she thought, as strikingly handsome as Theo, but they would become so. The shape of the men to be was already clear, and those men were manly, supple and tall, broad of shoulder and narrow of waist. Their eyes were clear and honest. Steve’s, gold-brown and large, were filled with light.
They both did well at sports, at friendships, and in the classroom. Jimmy, the younger, had to work much harder to accomplish what Steve did fast and easily. Perhaps that was why Jimmy could sometimes seem to be the older, the more sober, of the two. Sometimes he could even be protective of Steve; Steve retreated from physical fights—never out of cowardice, but only because of some deep-seated horror of violence that Jimmy, although he did not share it, understood. Jimmy, if need be, used his fists, while Steve’s weapon was his tongue. Filled with ideas, he would argue to the death for them. So curious about the world, so alive, Iris thought now, that he almost sparkles!
And, leaving the boys to their game, she went into the house.
In the kitchen Laura, wearing a borrowed apron that fell almost to her ankles, was cutting out ginger cookies. She bent over the dough with a concentrated expression, her underlip tucked in. Her russet hair fell loosely over her cheeks; she was a replica of Anna. Even strangers remarked about it whenever the two were together. The model had simply skipped a generation.
At the far end of the counter Ella Mae was shelling peas.
“All the cooking going on around here this afternoon! I’ll make a good cook out of this girl yet,” she said fondly.
Laura was domestic already. Anna’s genes again! Her room was a pink chintz nest; for her ninth birthday this year she had asked to have her room redecorated, and Theo, to Iris’s dismay, had agreed to start from scratch with new furniture, carpet, lamps, and curtains. Theo would give Laura the moon if she were to ask for it. Laura had a dressing table with a perfume tray. When I was nine, Iris thought, what did I know about perfume? And she marveled about the variety of human experience. Thank heaven, Laura also had a mind, though, and shelves of books that she really read.
“Laura was a big help with the apple pie, Mrs. Stern. A big help.”
“I peeled half the apples,” Laura said, looking important.
“Pie? What’s the occasion?”
“Nothing special. Just, Dr. Stern is awful fond of pie.”
Even Ella Mae adored the man! And Iris said suddenly, “You’re so good to us.”
“Why not? You’re good to me. You’re my family.”
Ella Mae had two children who lived with their grandmother in South Carolina. At Christmas she visited them for two weeks, and that was all the contact she had. So she could call these strangers “family.” This touched Iris in the heart of her heart.
At the first interview Iris had addressed Ella Mae as “Miss Brown.” But Ella Mae had corrected her.
“She calls me Mrs. Stern,” Iris had told Theo that night. “It doesn’t seem right not to do the same to her.”
Theo had been a little amused. “That’s the way things are. You can’t change the world. And anyway, if she doesn’t mind, why should you?”
“Philip’s at his friend’s house,” Ella Mae now reminded Iris. “They phoned to say you needn’t go get him. They’ll bring him home later. And your mail’s on the hall table.”
On a narrow marble slab in the hall lay schoolbooks, Jimmy’s new sweater, torn already, and a pile of bills at the base of a vase of red anthuriums. Their stiff-angled branches and flat red petals were repeated in the mirror above the table, but her face, mirrored as it was between the angled branches, was fragmented as in some cubist painting, the features nervously separated and disjointed. And abruptly, a memory seized her, a startling recollection of her own familiar childhood’s face, and then a recall of fragrance, the same as that which now came from the kitchen, the salty smell of roasting meat that had filled the apartment on that winter evening when she had stood outside a door and heard her mother’s soft, pitying voice: “But you must admit, she isn’t a pretty child, Joseph.”
She turned away from the mirror and, crossing the hall into the living room, stood still there, drawing a deep breath as if to fill her lungs with something pure and calming.
The room was hers, of her, spare as a Japanese graveled garden, gray and cream and still. The blond Danish furniture stood on dove-colored carpet. The draperies were of crisp, self-patterned linen. Tall lamps of Swedish crystal caught the afternoon light and threw it back in rainbow colors onto the floor. A red lacquered screen—how well the Scandinavian and the Oriental went together!—drew the eye as to a point of fire toward the courtyard where, on the other side of the glass wall, a Norfolk pine grew in a large stone tub. In October it would be brought indoors to flourish over the winter.
In a far corner stood the piano, the Steinway baby grand that she had brought from home when she married. On the wall, facing her when she played, hung two rows of etchings, also brought from her room in her parents’ house;
there were sandpipers running along an empty beach at low tide; there were far, cloudy hills; there was a hemlock under snow.
The contemplation of all these things was comforting.
She ran her hand now over the keys. Their tinkle was loud in the silent room. Philip’s lesson book stood open on the rack. Last year, when he was four, he had stood next to her watching her play, and this year she had begun to teach him. As fast as she could teach, he could learn.
“Like mother, like son,” Theo had said just last Sunday afternoon when Philip had played for them. She had been happy last Sunday afternoon, and ever since then until this morning, until old fears had come back to plague her.
She walked down the hall toward her bedroom. At the end, where the light could fall upon it, hung a photograph in an ornate frame. Mama had bought the frame and Theo had put the picture in this place of prominence.
“What a wonderful face your brother had!” he had remarked. “I’d like to have known him. Blond. That must be the strain from your mother’s side.”
The golden child, she thought now. That’s what Mama had always said; the neighbors on the block had given that title to Maury. Iris had seen the street on which they had lived when her parents were poor. The women brought their camp chairs to the sidewalk, rocked their babies, and watched the older ones play.
“He was the most popular boy in school,” Iris had told Theo, holding nothing back. Poor dead Maury. Give him all the credit he deserved. “He was on the basketball and the tennis teams.”
“Ah! I would have had a tennis partner in the family,” Theo had replied.
And she had thought, Yes, I know I’m clumsy at games. I know.
She stood before the picture. The eyes were radiant, eager, as though they were looking out at something new and wonderful. And then it struck her: That’s Steve!
Faces and voices merged and overlapped the generations, dissolving and reappearing. All, all a mystery, why we are who we are. What made a person grow to be like Maury, the golden child, or Steve, or Theo? Or me?