“Dear Mr. Werner,” she read. “My husband and I thank you for the picture. We were sorry to learn that your father died. Sincerely, Anna Friedman.”
What a queer, curt note! Written on cheap white paper in a sloppy scrawl, with a blot on the page! Not at all like the pretty notes Mama wrote to her friends with black ink on crocus-yellow paper, in her pointed European script like the marks of birds’ feet.
Queer!
It had taken almost a week for her to feel normal again. My God, Anna thought, he must have gone out of his mind to call our house. And to talk to Iris! That night at the dinner table when the child had told of the call, it was a wonder she hadn’t gone faint with the shock.
A wonder, too, that Joseph had taken it so easily. That argument over Mrs. Werner’s funeral—she would never forget his jealous rage. For that was what it had been, although he would never have admitted it was. This time he had merely asked a few questions and then accepted, or seemed to accept, her explanation that the gift was a gracious gesture from Paul Werner and his sister.
But Joseph was changed from what he had been five years ago. He had lost the firmness with which he had ruled the house when things were going so well. Sad to see. He reminded her in a way of the wistful, poor young man she had first known.
She was thinking all this one afternoon on her way home from neighborhood errands, thinking too that the apartment was growing shabby, and how it didn’t take long for misfortune to make itself visible when, half a block away from home, someone called her name. Turning, she saw Paul Werner standing there, tipping his hat.
“I got your note,” he said.
She could hardly speak. For an instant her heart seemed to pause and then it began to shake in her chest. “Why are you doing this?” she cried. “Why did you send that picture? And now you’ve come here and if anyone sees you—”
“Don’t be frightened, Anna! I telephoned openly and left my name. There’s no subterfuge, no reason for anyone to be suspicious.”
As she walked he kept pace with her. She had turned down the side street toward the river, away from the apartment house. Iris would be coming home from school any minute and Iris had watched her so warily the other night—
“Please go!” she pleaded. “Please go, Paul!”
But he persisted. “Your letter was so unlike you, Anna! I surely didn’t mean to offend when I sent the Mallard. It was simply that I hadn’t seen it in years—Father had stuck it away somewhere—and when I came upon it I was thunderstruck by the resemblance. And I wanted you to have it.”
They reached Riverside Drive. Cars streamed by, glittering in the lemon-colored light. The air wavered, its radiance trembling before Anna’s dizzy eyes. She stood there beside the river of cars, clutching a bag of groceries, frozen as if the curb were a precipice and the avenue an abyss.
Paul took a strong hold of her arm. “We have to talk. Cross over. Well find a bench under the trees.”
Her legs moved. This could not possibly be happening! One minute walking home from the market on a bright, windy afternoon of early spring; the next minute sitting on a bench with this man whom she had thought never to see again! How could it be happening?
“Anna, I had to come,” he said. “You’ve never been out of my mind. Never. Can you understand that?”
She was afraid to look at him. “I can,” she whispered.
“I think of you sometimes in the middle of a conference, or when I’m driving the car or reading a newspaper—suddenly, there you are. I wake up and remember you, even when I had been dreaming of something entirely apart from you. But—there you are. And when I saw that painting, the memory of you became so vivid that I had to do something about it.”
Her breath had begun to calm. She turned her face to his. “It’s a beautiful thing and I felt so—so stirred. But it’s crazy of you to be here, all the same. Don’t you know it is, Paul?”
“Anna, I had to. That’s all there is to be said.”
He took her hand, his fingers twining in hers. In spite of the thickness of glove leather she could feel the force, the heat, the life of his flesh.
“Don’t,” she murmured.
But neither of them withdrew and the entwined hands lay on the bench between them. The world went by: children rolling on their skates and bicycles; dogs pulling at their leashes; young women pushing baby carriages. All of these were oblivious to the man and woman on the bench.
After a while Paul said, “Tell me how you are.”
She felt a great weight, she felt entranced. “No, I find it hard to talk. You tell me.”
“Well,” he began obediently, “I’ve just come back from Europe for the firm. From Germany. Things are going bad there and they’re going to get worse with this Hitler fellow. I’ve been trying to rescue some investments for our clients before it’s too late.”
There were chords in his voice that Anna would have recognized if she had heard them among strangers on the other side of the world. From her room at the top of that house the music of his voice had carried up the stair well while she had lain in her bed, listening for it—
Now, because he saw that she was unable to speak, he tried to find something more to say. “Other than that—well, I’ve been collecting art and I go to a sculpture class. I’m not very good at it, but it’s a challenge. And I’ve kept up with Father’s charities. He was a great benefactor, an efficient manager, and it’s hard to fill his shoes. But I’m trying.”
She heard a smile in his voice and turned back from where she had been gazing at the river. Those large, hooded eyes under heavy, rounded lids—brilliant eyes, like dark jewels—his mother had had the same, as well as the high arched nose. And Iris had them.
“You’re staring at me, Anna!”
“Am I? I didn’t mean to.”
“I don’t mind if you do. Look at me some more.”
Flushing, she looked back at the river. Her heart began to race again; she could hardly breathe.
“Perhaps you want to know more about me? I—we have no children. Never will have. Marian had an operation a couple of years ago.”
“I’m sorry,” Anna responded automatically.
“So am I. So is she. But we shan’t adopt. And she keeps busy with her charities, too. She’s very generous with her strength and time, not just with money.” He stopped again, then said, “So that’s my life. Now will you tell me about yours?”
She drew a deep breath and began. “An ordinary life. Like women everywhere. Keeping the house and children. Coping with bad times.”
“Have they hit you very badly?”
“We’ve lost almost everything,” Anna said simply.
“Do you need money? Can I help you?”
She shook her head. “No, no, we manage. And anyway, you don’t think I could take it from you, do you?”
And, suddenly overcome by a wave of chill reality, she withdrew her hand, clasping her own two hands together in her lap.
“I suppose you couldn’t,” Paul said bleakly. There was a long silence. Then he cried out, “I should have married you, Anna! Would you have married me?”
“Oh,” she said, “you know I would have, the way I felt then! But what’s the use of talking about it now?”
A little boat sped down the river. A cloud darkened the spring green on the Palisades. Anna saw them through a curtain of tears. How different everything might have been! You take one path and it leads you here and you become this kind of woman; another path leads you there, and you become another kind of woman. The same body but another life, and therefore another woman. She thought she had forgotten—well, almost forgotten—how it might have been. Goodness knew she had tried to forget.
She turned on him almost fiercely. “Why didn’t you marry me? You see, I’m not proud anymore. I don’t want to be proud. So I ask you, why didn’t you?”
Paul’s eyes looked straight into hers and through them. “I was a boy then,” he said at last, “not yet a man. While you already had
the spirit of a woman. I didn’t have courage enough to marry someone I—wouldn’t be expected to marry.” His voice grew rough. “Can you understand that and not despise me for it? Can you?”
Something sprang alive in Anna, a singing, a flowering, a tenderness of joy and vindication. “Oh,” she said, “I was so terribly hurt that I wanted to die! And after that, so angry. So bitter and angry.… But I could never ‘despise’ you, never.”
And she thought, Perhaps, after all, I should tell him now? Hasn’t he a right and a duty to know that my daughter belongs to him?
Paul said abruptly, “I haven’t told you everything. There’s something else.”
“What is it?”
“Do you remember the time we met on Fifth Avenue a few years ago? I keep thinking of the way you stood with your hand on your little girl’s shoulder. I don’t know why that moved me so, but it did. And the child’s face haunts me. You’ll think I’ve gone mad, but I had—and have had—a revelation that she was mine. My child. And I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.”
It did not surprise Anna that he had come upon the truth. That rare, discerning mind, those far-seeing, through-seeing eyes—not much eluded them! No, it did not surprise her. Her lips parted to speak, but he interrupted.
“It’s true, then, isn’t it?”
“It’s true.”
“I’m not stunned. I’m not shocked. It’s as though I’d always known it.” He lit a cigarette with an effort at calm control; but she saw that his hands were shaking. “And Joseph?” he asked after a moment.
Anna shook her head. “Only I know.”
There was a long, long silence, while the pungent smoke drifted. Paul’s eyes closed and he did not move. After a while he opened his eyes and spoke again. “How you must have suffered, Anna!”
“I was so guilty, I thought I wasn’t fit to live,” she replied, very low. “But then my strength came back, thank God. I suppose human beings can endure much more than they think they can.”
“You’ve had to endure too much! Losing your parents, poverty in a strange country and then this! Why didn’t you tell me, Anna?”
She looked at him ruefully.
“All right, I shouldn’t have asked that. I know you couldn’t have. But will you let me do something for her, at least? I could open a trust account so that she would never be in want.”
“No, no! That’s not possible! You know it’s not! The best thing you can do is to stay away from her. Can’t you see that?”
Paul sighed. “Tell me, please, what she’s like.”
Anna considered how best to sum up a complex, aloof and sensitive little girl.
“Iris is very intelligent, very perceptive. She knows music and books; she has your feeling for art, I think.”
He smiled faintly. “Go on, please.”
It became easier to speak. Her words, hesitant at first, began to flow. She was, after all, a mother talking about her child. And this listener wanted to hear. So she told about food and school and amusing remarks, searching her own mind for words that might make Iris live in Paul’s mind.
“And does she love you very much? I hope so. It’s not every child who has a mother like you.”
“We have no great problems, she and I. But she’s more attached to Joseph. He adores her, she’s the heart of his heart. But then, that’s the way it is between fathers and daughters,” Anna concluded, immediately sorry to have been so tactless.
But Paul quietly agreed. “That’s true.”
“I’m not really good with her!” Anna cried suddenly. “Not what I ought to be, Paul! I’m good to her; I love her just as much as I love Maury. It’s just that I’m not at ease with her. It’s—different,” she faltered.
“Of course. It would be.”
“When I look at her I try to think of her as having been born—” she was about to say, “as Joseph’s and mine,” but said instead, “differently. And most of the time I can do it. I’ve put you away at the back of the past, you see. And now today the past is here, and whenever I look at Iris I shall think—” She was unable to finish.
Paul took her hand back, stroking it gently.
Then Anna said, “I wonder how much she feels of all this, poor Iris. She must feel something!”
Neither of them knew what to add to that.
Presently he said, “I’ve not been fair. I’ve not asked you to tell about Maury.”
“You’re only being kind. You can’t really be interested in Maury.”
“Yes, I can. He belongs to you, he’s a part of you. Tell me.”
“Maury is the son everyone wants, the son you think of when you imagine having a boy. Everyone loves him, he—” Anna stopped. “I can’t, Paul. I’m brimming over. There’s been—too much—this afternoon.”
“I know. I feel that way myself, Anna dearest.”
And taking the hand between both of his he removed her glove, raised the hand and kissed it, the palm, the fingers, the pulse that fluttered and jumped in her wrist.
They became aware of stir and movement in the park. Mothers began calling to their children and gathering scattered toys. The afternoon was coming to its end.
Paul put Anna’s hand down and stood up, startling her. He walked a few paces away with his back to her, facing the river. He seemed so solitary there in his velvet-collared coat, a stranger among the pigeons and the children playing hopscotch on the walk. This tall, powerful man who could command almost anything he might want, this man was also vulnerable through her. He was separate from her and yet bound to her for as long as either of them might live, or as long as Iris lived or whatever children Iris might have, or—
He came back and sat down. “Listen to me, Anna. Life is short. Just yesterday we were twenty, and where’s the time gone? Let’s take what we can, you and I.”
“What do you mean?”
“I want to marry you now. I want to take our little girl and give you both what you ought to have. I want to stop waking up at night wondering how you are. I want to wake up and have you next to me.”
“As simply as that?” There was faint bitterness in her tone; she could hear it. “And what about Maury? And Joseph? What about the small fact that you already have a wife?”
“It wouldn’t destroy Marian if I were to ask for a divorce. Trust me, Anna. I am not a destroyer. I don’t hurt people if I can help it.”
“Hurt? Do you realize what it would do to Joseph if he knew I was sitting here with you now? He’s a devout, believing, strait-laced man. A puritan, Paul! This would be past his forgiveness. Divorce? He would be ruined!” Anna’s voice rose. “I sit with him in the evening, I look across the room at this man who married me when—when you wouldn’t have me, who takes care of me, who gave me every material thing when he had it, and gives me loving kindness now when he has nothing else to give. Sometimes I can’t bear the thought of what I’ve already done to him.”
“Everything has to be paid for,” Paul said gently. “I understand what you’re saying and I understand that it would be very, very hard in many ways. Still, you have to weigh all that against your own life, what you want to do with your own life. And I know—know, Anna!—that you want to come to me.”
The blood poured into her cheeks. “Yes, yes I do! I can’t deny that I do!”
“Well, then, you see?”
“But also, we’ve been through so much, Joseph and I!” She seemed to be musing, recollecting, almost as if she were alone, letting her thoughts run. “Struggling uphill, then sliding almost all the way back down again. And he works so hard! I think sometimes it will kill him. And he never wants anything, never takes anything for himself. It was all for us, for me and the children.”
“For my child,” Paul said.
Anna sighed, a long quivering breath like a sob. “So how can I, Paul? Can I put a knife into a man like him, can I? And besides, I love him! Do you know what I mean when I say that I love him?”
He didn’t answer.
“Bu
t you do see, Paul, you do see the way it is?”
He cried out, “I’m so sorry for us all! Oh, my God, how sorry I am!”
Anna began to cry.
“Ah, don’t,” he whispered then, and took out a handkerchief. “Here, you mustn’t go home with red eyes. Then you’d really have some explanations to make!” He began gently to dry her eyes. “Anna, Anna, what are we to do?”
“I don’t know. I only know I can’t marry you.”
“You think so now. But things change. I’ll wait. It will look different to you after a while.”
Anna shook her head. “We shouldn’t see each other anymore. You know that.”
“And you know that’s impossible. Neither of us could stand it.”
“I told you before, people can stand a whole lot more than they think they can.”
“Perhaps so. But why should we torture ourselves to prove we can? I want to see you again, Anna, and I’m going to. Surely I have a right at least to hear about Iris now and then?”
“All right,” she said softly. “I’ll figure out some way. I can’t think right now. But I will.”
She took a mirror from her purse, anxiously examining her face.
“You look fine. Can’t tell a thing. Except that you’re still an entrancing woman, even in that coat.” He flushed. “I didn’t mean there was anything wrong with your coat. I only meant—well, it doesn’t do for you what black velvet and a pair of diamond earrings would do.”
She laughed and he said, “That’s better. I love to hear you laugh. It’s a long time since I first heard that laugh.”
“I’d better go back, Paul. It’s awfully late.”
“Go ahead, Anna darling. But I’ll telephone in the morning around ten. Will that be all right?”
“Yes. At ten.”
“You’ll have had time by then to decide how we can meet again.”
* * *
“You stored the picture away,” Joseph said that night when they were in bed.
“Yes. Since neither of us liked it.”
“I wonder why that fellow sent it to you?”
“Rich people like to give things, that’s all. It makes them feel powerful.”