The Marriage Plot

  As little as she had in common with Meg and Anne, Madeleine couldn’t remember having a better time. The entire weekend, they didn’t once ask if she had a boyfriend. They just wanted to talk about literature. The last morning of the conference, the three exchanged addresses and phone numbers and had a three-way hug, promising to stay in touch.

  “Maybe we’ll all end up in the same department!” Anne cheerily said.

  “I doubt anybody’d hire three Victorianists,” Meg said matter-of-factly.

  On the way back to Cape Cod, and for days afterward, Madeleine felt a rush of happiness every time she remembered Meg Jones calling them all “Victorianists.” The word made her fuzzy aspirations suddenly real. She’d never had a word for the thing she wanted to be. At a rest stop she put four quarters into a pay phone to call her parents in Prettybrook.

  “Daddy, I know what I want to be.”

  “What?”

  “A Victorianist! I just went to the most incredible conference.”

  “Do you have to specialize already? You haven’t even started grad school.”

  “No, Daddy, this is it. I know it! The field is so wide open.”

  “Get in somewhere first,” Alton said, laughing. “Then we’ll talk about it.”

  Back at Pilgrim Lake, at her desk, she tried to get down to work. She’d brought most, if not all, of her favorite books with her. Her Austen, Eliot, Wharton, and James. From Alton, who still had connections at the Baxter library, she’d managed to score a huge stack of Victorian criticism on long-term loan. After doing the requisite reading and making additional notes, Madeleine began trying to condense her thesis into a publishable size. Her Royal typewriter was the same one on which she’d typed her honors thesis. It was the same typewriter on which Alton had typed his college papers. Madeleine loved the black steel machine, but the keys were beginning to stick. Sometimes when she was typing quickly two or three keys would glom together and she’d have to separate them with her fingers, gaining a new understanding of the term manual typewriter. Unsticking the keys or changing the ribbon left her fingers ink-stained. The inside of the typewriter was repulsive: there were dust balls, eraser filings, bits of paper, cookie crumbs, and hair. Madeleine was amazed the thing still worked. Once she became aware of how dirty her typewriter was, she couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was like trying to sleep in the grass after someone mentioned worms. Trying to clean the Royal wasn’t easy. It weighed a ton. No matter how many times she managed to lug it to the sink and turn it over, it never stopped leaking detritus. Bringing it back to her desk, she put a sheet of paper in the roller and set to work again, but the nagging thought that gunk remained in the typewriter, as well as the constant sticking of the keys, made her forget what she’d been writing. And so she took the typewriter back to the sink and got the rest of the gunk out with an old toothbrush.

  In this manner, Madeleine tried to become a Victorianist.

  She hoped to get her abridged essay rewritten by December, in time to include it as a writing sample in her grad school applications. To have the article accepted by The Janeite Review by then and list it as “forthcoming” on her résumé would be an additional boon. Yale’s rejection, like that of a boyfriend she wasn’t sure she liked that much, had predictably increased its allure. Nevertheless, she wasn’t going to stay home waiting for the call. She was going to play the field this time, and therefore had been flirting with rich old Harvard, urbane Columbia, cerebral Chicago, and trustworthy Michigan, as well as giving face time even to lowly Baxter College. (If Baxter didn’t accept her into its mediocre program in English, despite her being the daughter of the former president, Madeleine would take this as a sign to give up the idea of becoming an academic altogether.) But she didn’t expect to go to Baxter. She prayed that she wouldn’t have to go to Baxter. To that end, she began studying for the GRE again, hoping to raise her scores on the math and logic sections. To prepare for the English literature test, she filled in her gaps by reading through The Oxford Book of English Verse.

  With none of this, however—with neither the writing nor the reading—did she make much headway, for the simple irrefutable reason that her duty to Leonard came first. Now that they were on Cape Cod, Leonard didn’t have a local therapist to talk to. He had to make do with telephone therapy, once a week, with Bryce Ellis in Providence. Additionally, he’d started seeing a new psychiatrist, Dr. Perlmann, at Mass General, with whom he had no rapport. Under pressure to perform at the lab, Leonard came back to the apartment every night and began telling Madeleine his troubles. He treated Madeleine like the next best thing to therapy. “I was shaking like a madman today. I can barely make media anymore because of my tremor. I keep dropping stuff. I dropped a flask today. Agar broth all over the place. I know what Kilimnik’s thinking. He’s thinking, ‘Why did they give this guy a fellowship?’”

  Leonard kept his diagnosis a secret at Pilgrim Lake. He knew from experience that when people found out he’d been hospitalized and, especially, that he was taking a drug twice a day to stabilize his mood, they treated him differently. Sometimes people wrote him off, or avoided him. Madeleine had promised not to tell anyone, but in August, in New York, she’d confessed to Kelly Traub. She’d sworn Kelly to secrecy, but Kelly would inevitably tell one person, swearing her to secrecy, and that person would tell one person, and so on and so on until Leonard’s condition became general knowledge.

  Madeleine couldn’t worry about that now. The important thing, on this October day, as she waited for the puddle-jumper carrying Phyllida and Alwyn from Boston, was to keep them from finding out. Hopefully, Alwyn’s marital crisis would deflect attention away from Madeleine’s own relationship, but just to be sure, Madeleine was planning to keep her family’s face time with Leonard as brief as possible.

  The tiny airport consisted of a single runway and Quonset-hut-like terminal. Outside, in the fall sunshine, a small crowd of people was waiting, either chatting or staring into the sky for the arriving airplane.

  To meet her mother, Madeleine put on a pair of khaki linen shorts, a white blouse, and a navy sweater with a white striped V-neck. One good thing about being out of college—and living on Cape Cod, not far from Hyannisport—was that nothing now prevented Madeleine from dressing in the Kennedy-esque style in which she felt most comfortable. She’d always been a failed bohemian, anyway. Sophomore year, she’d bought an electric-blue satin bowling shirt with the name “Mel” stitched on the pocket and began wearing it when she went to parties at Mitchell’s apartment. But she must have worn it once too often, because one night he made a face and said, “What? Is that your arty shirt?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You wear that bowling shirt whenever you hang out with me and my friends.”

  “Larry has one just like it,” Madeleine defended herself.

  “Yeah, but his is all pitted out. Yours is in perfect condition. It’s like Louis the Fourteenth’s bowling shirt. It shouldn’t say ‘Mel’ on the pocket. It should say ‘The Sun King.’”

  Madeleine smiled to herself, remembering that. By now, Mitchell was in France, or Spain, or wherever. The night she’d run into him, in New York, had begun with Kelly’s taking her to an off-off-Broadway production of The Cherry Orchard. The ingenuity of the production—baskets of cherry petals had been piled up between the seats, so that the audience could smell the fragrance of the orchard the Ranevskys were selling along with their estate—and the interesting-looking faces in the crowd put Madeleine on notice that she was in a great city. After the play, Kelly had taken Madeleine to a bar popular with recent Brown grads. No sooner had they walked in than they ran into Mitchell and Larry. The boys were on their way to Paris the next day, and in a celebratory farewell mood. Madeleine had two vodka tonics, while Mitchell drank tequila, and then Kelly wanted to go to Chumley’s in the Village. The four of them piled into a cab, Madeleine sitting on Mitchell’s lap. It was well after midnight, the windows open onto tropically warm streets, and she
didn’t seem to be minimizing physical contact with Mitchell but leaning back against him. The fact that they ignored the sexual component of her sitting on his lap increased its excitement. Madeleine looked out the window, while Mitchell talked to Larry. Every bump conveyed secret information. All the way crosstown on East Ninth Street. If Madeleine felt guilty, she rationalized that she deserved one night to cut loose after her virtuous summer. Besides, no one in the cab was playing cop. Certainly not Mitchell, who, as the cab ride continued, did a brazen thing. Reaching under her shirt, he began stroking her skin, running a finger along her rib cage. No one could see what he was doing. Madeleine let him continue, both of them pretending to be absorbed in talking to Kelly and Larry, respectively. After a number of blocks, Mitchell’s hand moved higher. His finger tried to slip under the right cup of her bra, at which point she clamped her arm down, and his hand retreated.

  In Chumley’s, Mitchell entertained everyone by telling the story of his own stint as a taxi driver over the summer. Madeleine talked to Kelly for a while, but it wasn’t long before she ended up in the corner next to Mitchell. Despite her vodka haze she was aware that she was purposefully neglecting to mention the name Leonard. Mitchell showed her the marks on his upper arms where he’d been inoculated that afternoon. Then he bounded away to buy more drinks. She’d forgotten how much fun Mitchell could be. In comparison with Leonard, Mitchell was so low-maintenance. An hour or so later, when Madeleine went outside to hail a cab, Mitchell followed her, and the next thing she knew he was kissing her and she was kissing him back. It didn’t go on long, but much longer than it should have. Finally, she broke away and cried, “I thought you wanted to be a monk!”

  “The flesh is weak,” Mitchell said, grinning at her.

  “Go!” Madeleine said, punching him in the chest. “Go to India!”

  He was looking at her with his big eyes. He reached out to take her hands. “I love you!” he said. And Madeleine had surprised herself by replying, “I love you, too.” She meant that she loved him but didn’t love love him. That, at least, was one possible interpretation, and, on Bedford Street, at three a.m., Madeleine decided not to clear up the matter further. Kissing Mitchell once more, briefly and dryly, she hailed a cab and made her escape.

  The next morning, when Kelly asked her what had happened with Mitchell, Madeleine had lied.

  “Nothing.”

  “I think he’s cute,” Kelly said. “He’s better-looking than I remember.”

  “You think?”

  “He’s sort of my type.”

  Hearing this, Madeleine received another surprise: she felt jealous. Apparently, she wanted to keep Mitchell for herself, even while denying him. There was no end to her selfishness.

  “He’s probably on the plane by now,” she said, and left it at that.

  On the train back to Rhode Island, Madeleine began to suffer pangs of remorse. She decided that she had to tell Leonard what had happened, but by the time the train reached Providence, she realized that this would only make things worse. Leonard would think that he was losing her because of his illness. He would feel sexually inadequate, and he wouldn’t be wrong, exactly. Mitchell was gone, out of the country, and soon Madeleine and Leonard would be moving to Pilgrim Lake. With that in mind, Madeleine refrained from confessing. She threw herself back into the task of loving and caring for Leonard, and after a while the experience of kissing Mitchell that night began to seem as though it had taken place in an alternate reality, dreamlike and ephemeral.

  Now, over the bay from Boston, picking its way among small cottony clouds, the ten-seater commuter plane appeared in the Cape Cod sky, descending toward the peninsula. Among the other greeters Madeleine watched the plane land and taxi along the runway, the force of its propellers flattening the dune grass on either side.

  Ground personnel rolled a metal stairway up to the plane’s front door, which opened from inside, and passengers began disembarking.

  Madeleine knew that her sister’s marriage was in trouble. She knew that her job today was to be helpful and understanding. But as Phyllida and Alwyn emerged from the plane Madeleine couldn’t help wishing that she was waving not hello but goodbye. She had hoped to delay any parental visit until Leonard’s side effects had subsided, which all his doctors insisted would be the case soon. It wasn’t so much that Madeleine was ashamed of Leonard, but that she was disappointed at having Phyllida see him in his present state. Leonard wasn’t himself. Phyllida was bound to get the wrong impression. Madeleine wanted her mother to meet the real Leonard, the boy she’d fallen in love with, who would be showing up any day now.

  On top of this, seeing Alwyn was likely to be unpleasant. In the days when her big sister had sent her the Bachelorette’s Survival Kit, back when Alwyn had been in step with the sixties and the birthright that came with them to denounce whatever she didn’t like and to respond to whatever whim she pleased—dropping out of college, for instance, after her first year to drive around the country on the back of her boyfriend Grimm’s motorcycle, or having a surprisingly cute pet white rat named Hendrix, or apprenticing to a candlemaker who insisted on following ancient Celtic methods—Alwyn had seemed to be blazing a trail of antimaterialistic, morally engaged creativity. But by the time Madeleine reached the age that Alwyn had been then, she realized that her sister’s iconoclasm and liberationist commitments had just been part of a trend. Alwyn had done the things she had done and voiced the political opinions she’d voiced because all her friends were acting and talking the same way. You were supposed to feel bad about missing the sixties, but Madeleine didn’t. She felt as if she’d been spared a lot of nonsense, that her generation, while inheriting much that was good from that decade, had a healthy distance from it as well, saving them from the whiplash that resulted from being a Maoist one minute and a suburban mother, in Beverly, Massachusetts, the next. When it turned out that Alwyn wasn’t going to spend her life riding on the back of Grimm’s motorcycle, when Grimm left her in a campground in Montana without even saying goodbye, Alwyn called home to ask Phyllida to wire money for a plane ticket to Newark, and, a day and a half later, she moved back into her old bedroom in Prettybrook. She spent the next two years (while Madeleine was finishing high school) working a series of service jobs and going to community college, studying graphic design. Over that time, the allure Alwyn had had in her younger sister’s eyes dimmed considerably, if it didn’t disappear altogether. Once again, Alwyn adapted to her surroundings. She hung out at the local pub, the Apothecary, with friends of hers who hadn’t managed to get out of Prettybrook, either, all of them reverting to the scruffy, preppy clothes they’d worn in high school, cords, crew necks, L.L. Bean moccasins. One night at the Apothecary she’d met Blake Higgins, a reasonably nice-looking, medium-dumb guy who’d gone to Babson and lived in Boston, and soon Alwyn started visiting him up there, and dressing the way Blake, or Blake’s family, liked her to, fancier, more expensively, wearing blouses or dresses from Gucci or Oscar de la Renta, preparing herself to be somebody’s wife. Alwyn had been married for four years, in her most recent incarnation, and now this attempt to form a cohesive self was coming apart, too, apparently, and Madeleine was being called in, as the more together sister, to help shore it up.

  She could see her mother and sister descending the staircase from the plane, Phyllida holding the banister, Alwyn’s Janis Joplin mane, the one vestige of her former hippie self, whipping in the breeze. As they advanced over the tarmac Phyllida called out brightly, “We’re from the Swedish Academy! Here to see Diane MacGregor.”

  “Isn’t it amazing that she won?” Madeleine said.

  “It must have been thrilling to be here.”

  They hugged, and Phyllida said, “We had dinner the other night with the Snyders. Professor Snyder is retired from Baxter, in biology, and I had him explain Dr. MacGregor’s work to me. So I’m fully up to date! ‘Jumping genes.’ I’m looking forward to talking to Leonard all about it.”

  “He’s pretty busy to
day,” Madeleine said, trying to sound casual. “We didn’t know you were coming until last night and he has to work.”

  “Of course, we don’t want to take up his time. We’ll just say hello for a minute.”

  Alwyn was carrying two little bags, one over each shoulder. She’d put on weight and her face looked more freckled than ever. She allowed herself to be hugged for a moment before pulling away.

  “What did Mummy tell you?” she asked. “Did she tell you I left Blake?”

  “She said you guys were having trouble.”

  “No. I left him. I’ve had it. The marriage is over.”

  “Don’t be dramatic, dear,” Phyllida said.

  “I’m not being dramatic, Mummy,” Alwyn said. She glared at Phyllida but, perhaps scared to confront her directly, turned to deliver her argument to Madeleine. “Blake works all week long. Then on weekends he plays golf. He’s like a fifties dad. And we have hardly any babysitting. I wanted a live-in nanny but Blake said he didn’t want someone in the house all the time. So I told him, ‘You’re never in the house! You try taking care of Richard full-time. I’m out of here.’” Alwyn grimaced. “The problem now is my boobs are going to burst.”

  Out in the open, within view of other people, she took hold of her engorged breasts with both hands.

  “Ally, please,” Phyllida said.

  “Please, what? You wouldn’t let me express any milk on the plane. What do you expect?”

  “It was hardly private. And the flight was so short.”

  “Mummy was worried the men in the next row would get their rocks off,” Alwyn said.