There was an autumn melancholy in the burning sun as she drove through the town. It felt hotter than summer, yet yellow leaves were falling, floating down in windless air. The main street was crowded with station wagons. These were loaded with dogs and children, and adorned with the stickers of prestigious colleges: Harvard, Smith, Bryn Mawr. On the sidewalk in front of the bank women sat behind rickety tables selling raffle tickets for cerebral palsy, mental health, Our Lady of Sorrows and B’nai Brith. All these things were now unimportant.
She passed the school where next year she would move up to the presidency of the P.T.A.; then the temple, and Papa’s handsome wing outlined in autumn flowers, marigolds and zinnias, burnt yellow and dark red. Unimportant.
“I can’t go to temple anymore,” Theo had said last week.
Iris had stopped in the center of the room. She didn’t mind so much that he didn’t want to go. He hadn’t come with them in the last few months anyway. If only he had said it differently! There had been argument in his tone, a throwing down of the gauntlet. And she had picked it up.
“No? Why can’t you?”
“I wonder that you need to ask me. Can you really expect me to sit there listening to all that talk about God? God, who allowed Dachau to exist?”
“It’s not for us to judge what God allows. There are reasons for things that are beyond our understanding.”
“Bosh! Rubbish! I only see that your God destroys. I’m more merciful than he is: I spend my days rebuilding.”
“One might say it’s God’s work that makes you want to rebuild.”
“Come, come, you’re too educated to believe that! Your parents I can understand, but not you! Mount Sinai and the Torah given to Moses, carved on stone! You know better than that. You don’t really believe those legends!”
“Don’t I? Then why do you think I go to services every week?”
“You go because it’s a lifelong habit. Nice people are supposed to go. And besides, the music is beautiful. You take an emotional bath in it.”
“I could be furious but I won’t be. Theo, more to the point, when are you going to get over all this? I don’t mean to be unfeeling, heaven knows, but after all, Liesel isn’t the only human being who died cruelly. Look at my brother, don’t you think that my parents—”
“I don’t want to talk about Liesel,” he’d said coldly.
“I was only trying to help you.”
“There is no help. ‘We are born, we suffer and we die.’ I forget who said that, but it’s the truest thing that anybody ever said.”
“I don’t know about that. It sounds more profound than it really is, once you think about it. And it’s awfully, awfully bitter.”
“Iris, there’s no point in this conversation. I’m sorry I started it. Go to your temple, if it makes you happy. It isn’t even kind of me to take it away from you when it makes you so happy.”
“You couldn’t take it away from me. But thank you anyway.”
At what point, Iris thought now, reliving that particular conversation, at what point, on what day, had they begun to talk to each other like that? With irony and coldness, like debaters sparring cautiously? Whence this distance, this semi-courteous enmity?
Her heart beat heavily all the time. Driving the car through the quiet streets, turning into the driveway of her parents’ house, she was aware of its slow, steady thudding and of the chill in her flesh. It was a sensation she remembered from school when you entered the room where finals were being held: the same chill and thudding as the unknown loomed.
At the front door she arranged her face into a standard welcoming smile. “Hello, hello, Papa! Mama, you look marvelous! Eric, how are you?”
The house smelled of furniture polish and fresh air; the table in the dining room was set with pink linen mats; Mama’s hair was perfect. She was aware of her own hair, which she hadn’t brothered with in a week, and tucked the untidy strands behind her ears.
“Too bad you didn’t bring the children,” Papa said. “We’ll have to run over later this afternoon, after Laura’s nap. Has she grown any, my doll?”
“I can’t tell, Papa, I see her every day.” Papa’s doll, red-haired, lucky Laura who had skipped a generation and looked like Mama.
“So,” Mama sighed, when they were at the table. “So I got my wish, I saw Dan and I’m satisfied. It’s a fascinating country. They took us all over.”
“Did you see the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán?”
“Of course, of course! I’m glad I read The Conquest of Mexico. Otherwise it would have been a heap of stones, an engineering feat and nothing more. But this way it really meant something. I could see it all in my mind, the way it had been when Cortez came. Such brutes!” Mama exclaimed.
Iris half heard. Dan. Dena. Their children and grandchildren. Stone house with a wrought-iron fence. Shop in the Zona Rosa. Wholesale operation with seventy employees.
“And Dan said your mother looked beautiful, she had hardly aged at all,” Papa finished. “Yes,” he said, “I made a good choice, I did. You do as well as I did, Eric, and you’ll have it made. Oh, I had plenty of girls, but none of them ever worth more than ten minutes of my time until I met this one.”
Iris drank the coffee with downcast eyes. Her husband couldn’t say that about her.
“Theo in better spirits?” Papa inquired. He shook his head. “What he’s been through!”
“I imagine,” Mama said, “the club does him good. Tennis and all the exercise. It’s therapeutic.”
“I must say,” Papa observed, “it was a surprise to me when you joined a country club.” He shook his head again. “There’s a very fast crowd up there. Do a lot of drinking.”
“Oh, nonsense,” Anna contradicted. “You pick and choose wherever you go! We’ve loads of friends who belong and they’re hardly what you’d call fast.”
“All the same,” Papa insisted, “there’s a lot of hanky-panky going on. I shouldn’t have thought the atmosphere would appeal to Theo.”
“He plays tennis, takes a swim and comes home,” Iris said briefly.
“You don’t enjoy the club, do you?” Papa asked now. For some reason he seemed determined to pursue the subject.
“I don’t mind it one way or the other,” she replied.
“A whorehouse. Pardon me for the expression. Morals like alley cats.”
Eric laughed and Mama raised her eyebrows. “My goodness, Joseph! Those are strong words!”
“Maybe they are. I had lunch a while ago with a crowd of men who belong. Some of them my age, one even older. I think I and two others were the only ones there who were living with their first wives. I got dizzy listening to them: three sets of children; stepchildren; one guy married to a girl younger than his own daughter; another shacked up with some other man’s wife. Crazy! Crazy!”
“So, Grandpa? What can be done about it?” Eric asked.
“I don’t know. Tell you one thing, though, we’re too easy on that sort of thing. There won’t be any whole families left, at this rate. You know what the Bible says you do with an adulteress? Take her out and stone her, that’s what!”
“Surely, Joseph,” Mama said very quietly, “you don’t believe in that?”
“Of course not. That was speaking figuratively. But I’ll tell you one thing you don’t do; you don’t invite her to your house to sit at your table and meet your wife. People like that should be dead to the community! All these divorces and shenanigans,” he grumbled.
“You sound like Mary Malone!” Mama said. “Like a good, old-fashioned Catholic!”
“The Malones and I are very close together on most things. You ought to know that by now. Hi, here’s Theo!”
Theo stood in the door of the dining room carrying his racket, with his tennis sweater tied around his shoulders. He had such easy grace as he stood there; Iris wondered how many other women saw it too. He took a seat at the table.
“We were talking about the club,” Papa told him.
“I know. I heard you as I was coming in.”
“Yes. Well, our people are becoming assimilated, aren’t they? All the dirt of modern civilization clinging to their skirts as they pass through.”
Theo laughed. “They seem to be enjoying it.”
“Oh, they enjoy it well enough! But they’ll pay for it, you can be sure. Some fellow wrote an article in the magazine section last week about Rome, all the filth masquerading as pleasure. They paid too, in the end.”
Theo stirred uncomfortably. He always said that his father-in-law had just one flaw: he moralized like an Old Testament prophet. He turned to his mother-in-law.
“How was your trip? What did you think of Mexico City?”
Anna began to go into raptures over the Reforma as compared with Fifth Avenue, the Champs-Elysées and the Graben. Then Theo joined in with word-pictures of Vienna, which for years he hadn’t mentioned or wanted anyone else to mention, Iris thought angrily. Why, Vienna had been wiped off the map, as far as he was concerned! And now he was talking to Mama about the Prater and Grinzing; Mama was joining in as though she were an expert on the city, after having spent two weeks there a quarter of a century ago … Theo was laughing. It was almost like flirting, what he was doing, and he was doing it, she knew, only to irritate her.
He rose abruptly. “I’m going to go home and shower. By the way,” he said, addressing Iris directly for the first time since he had come in, “I made a reservation for dinner with some people at the club tonight. Seven-thirty.”
“All right,” she said and became aware of her mother’s eyes, examining her. She dropped her own eyes, feeling a blush prickle on her neck. Mama was too sharp; she saw too much.
* * *
She stood with the cold glass in her hand. There seemed to be no place to set it down. She was squeezed into a corner talking to an elderly lady, a Mrs. Reiss, who knew her mother. Always she seemed to end up talking to old people! Yet, she had to admit, it was more comfortable and easier to talk to them. But now her mouth ached from having smiled for the last hour, and she wished they would serve dinner so she could sit down and stop talking.
Gusts of perfume, smoke and whiskey poured on her as people squeezed by. She couldn’t move, couldn’t wriggle out of the corner where she was pinned against a topply vase of roses on a table at the small of her back.
“—seven hundreds in the Boards, he’s always been an outstanding student, but the competition is murderous, you never—”
“—offered them a hundred twenty-five thousand for the house without the adjoining lot and really I would consider it a mediocre neighborhood. Ray says—”
“—everybody admits the course at Shadyvale is far superior, if you want to put up with the class of people they’re taking in. We’re quite comfortable here at Rolling Hill.”
“I see they’ve got those little water chestnut things,” Mrs. Reiss remarked, raising her voice above the noise. “Shall we get some?”
“No, thanks,” Iris said.
“Well, I think I’ll just go try to find some. Will you excuse me?”
Even an old lady like that is bored with me. I’ve the personality of a clam. No poise. When Theo married me I began to have it. I know I did, because I never thought about it anymore and when you don’t think about it, that means you have it. I just knew I was somebody when we were married, and now I don’t know, I’ve lost it again.
She found Theo in the middle of a jovial group, almost all of them new to her. She had hoped they might be sitting with Jack and Lee, their neighbors, or with Dr. and Mrs. Jasper, good, solid people with whom there would be things to talk about. These were all new people, his tennis friends probably, and she saw at once that they had sized her up and found her wanting.
They went in to dinner. She felt a frenetic activity in the room. Everyone seemed—she sought a word—feverish; yes, that was it; their alert eyes looked past and beyond to the next table; the people at the next table are always more important. How can I get myself invited to sit with them next time? That’s what they’re thinking. How can I get to meet the So-and-so’s? Not that there’s anything wrong about wanting to know people and be liked. But they’re so intent on it, using all their energies, like a runner sweating to the finish line. And then, the crafty cruelties that go with this sort of climbing! The flattery and snubs!
Only Theo doesn’t need to climb; he’s already there. He lures and captivates without even trying. He ought not to have a dull wife like me. He ought to have an equal.
He ought to have a wife like Liesel.
Theo leaned toward her. “You’re a thousand miles away,” he said.
“I? I’m just watching everyone, enjoying the scene.” Her lips were dry. Why can’t I say I’m uncomfortable and I want to go home? “Who’s that, that woman in red? I seem to know, but I can’t place her.”
“Oh, that’s Billie Stark. She’s a great tennis player. We played doubles today and I really had a workout.”
Oh, Lord, another of those vivacious types! The agitated red bird comes swooping in our direction. One heard her approach from the far end of the dining room, her little animated squeals and whoops and shrieking mirth. Her mouth stretches from an ellipse for a smile to a circle for astonishment. “No, you can’t mean it!” Eyes blinking, popping, batting, scrunched in a nest of fine dry wrinkles, or stretched in ingénue affectation. Tossing hair, flung arms, pelvic twists. Never quiet, never still for more than a second or two. Exhausting to watch her gyrations. No peace where such people are.
Lady in red, Billie Stark, why the hell don’t you shut up or go away?
“Of course I remember you, you’re Billie Stark. How are you?” Iris said, holding out her hand.
Why don’t I like anybody; why do I feel they don’t like me? I used to have compassion, used to try to understand people. Maury always said I understood so well. At least, I used to try. I know I’ve helped Eric.
Somebody asked Billie Stark to dance. Then everyone got up to dance.
“Aren’t you having a good time?” Theo asked, as they circled the room. “You’re so quiet.”
“All right,” she said. It was on the tip of her tongue; she tried to hold the question back but could not. “You like that woman, Billie Stark?”
“Well, she’s lively. She certainly knows how to enjoy herself.”
Was that meant for me, I wonder? I could enjoy life too, if you were—
“Don’t you feel well, Iris? Are you coming down with something?”
He knew perfectly well she wasn’t. “I’m well. But I feel like a stranger here. I don’t belong with the Billie Starks. And I’m trying to figure out what makes you think you do. Do you belong? Which is you, Theo who plays in Ben’s quartet on Thursdays, or this one?” There was pleading in her voice. She could hear it.
“Which am I? Must I be either one or the other? Can’t I go wherever I choose whenever I want to?”
“But one has to fit somewhere, to be something.”
The music beat and stabbed. It was absurd to be jiggling there in the middle of the floor, feeling the way she did.
“You read too much junk popular psychology,” Theo said with annoyance.
She allowed herself to be annoyed in return. “Do you know what I really think of your new friends? They’re full of crap. Racing around outsmarting and outdoing each other. They have to see your Dun & Bradstreet report before they decide whether it’s worth their while to say hello to you.”
Theo didn’t answer. She knew he didn’t entirely disagree with her. He had made similar comments often enough himself. But they drove home without speaking. He turned the radio on and they listened to the news as if it were the most important thing in their lives.
She knew that, while she was having her bath, he would go to the drawer in his dresser and take out the picture. Tonight she got quietly out of the bathtub and put on her robe. By opening the door very quickly, she was able to catch him holding the photograph up to the light. She caught a fami
liar glimpse of the Madonna pose, the long hair curving, the child on the lap, before he put it back in the drawer.
They stood there looking at each other. “You should never have married me, Theo,” Iris said at last.
“What are you saying?”
“You don’t love me. You never have. You’re still in love with her.”
“She’s dead.”
“Yes, and if she had lived you’d have been happier than you are with me.”
“At least she wouldn’t have nagged me!”
“There, you see? Well, it’s too bad, isn’t it? Perhaps I should accommodate you by dying. Except that that still wouldn’t bring her back, would it?”
He slapped his fist into the palm of his hand, making a loud crack in the room. “Of all the stupid, childish—Iris, how long is this going to go on? I shouldn’t have said that about nagging, I really didn’t mean it. But I don’t know why you’re so insecure. You value yourself so little! It’s pathetic.”
“Maybe I am insecure. If you think I am, why don’t you help me?”
“Tell me how. If I can, I will.”
She knew she was burning bridges and yet she couldn’t refrain.
“Tell me that if you had known she was alive you would still have chosen me. Tell me you love me more than you ever loved her.”
“I can’t say that. Don’t you know that every love is different? She was a person, you’re a different person. That’s not to say that either one was better or worse than the other.”
“That’s an evasion, Theo.”
“It’s the best I can do,” he said gently enough.
“All right, then. Answer the other half of my question. If you had known she was alive would you have left me and gone to her? Surely you can answer that.”
“Oh, my God,” Theo cried. “Why do you want to torture me?”
She knew she was beating him like a helpless dog on a leash. Once on the street she had seen a man doing just that and had been sickened by it. But she couldn’t stop.
“I ask you, Theo, because I have to know. Don’t you see it’s a matter of how I am to live, to exist?”
“But this is brutal! I simply cannot, I cannot answer these pointless questions.”