Terms of Endearment

  “He is, Momma,” Emma said. “The two things aren’t mutually exclusive.”

  “Please don’t be philosophical, Emma,” Aurora said. “It makes no impression on me at all. It says in the paper he is to be here tonight, autographing his book. You might have married him, you know.”

  Both bolts were from the blue, and Emma flushed, half with embarrassment and half with anger. She looked out the window at their little snatch of back yard, half expecting to see Danny sleeping in it. He had a habit of passing out in back yards, particularly theirs. He also had a habit of catching her in her nightgown, and the news that he was around made her feel immediately shy. At the same time she was furious with her mother for having found out about the autograph party first. Danny was hers, and her mother had no right to know things about him that she didn’t know.

  “You shut up,” she said fiercely. “I married who I wanted to marry. Why would you say that? You always detested him and you know it. You even liked Flap better than you liked Danny.”

  “I certainly never cared for Daniel’s attire,” Aurora said placidly, ignoring her daughter’s anger. “That much is undeniable. He dressed even worse than Thomas, which is hardly conceivable. Still, facts are facts. He’s proven himself a man of accomplishment, and Thomas has not. It may be that you chose unwisely.”

  “Don’t say that to me!” Emma yelled. “You don’t know anything about it. At least I chose! I didn’t let five or six men trail me around for years, like you’re doing. Why are you criticizing me? You can’t make up your mind about anything!”

  Aurora promptly hung up. There was clearly no point in continuing the conversation until Emma had had time to cool off. Besides, André Previn had just stepped onto the Today show and André Previn was one of the few men alive to whom she immediately yielded her undivided attention. Vulgarly put, she was mad for him. For the Today show he was wearing a polka dot shirt and a broad tie, and he twinkled and kept his dignity at the same time. Aurora sipped her coffee and had another cruller while hanging on to his every word. The crullers came to her airmail every week in a white box from Crutchley’s of Southampton, the gift of her second-dullest suitor, Mr. Edward Johnson, the vice-president of her bank. Edward Johnson’s only redeeming feature was that he had grown up in Southampton and knew about Crutchley’s; arranging for her weekly package of crullers was, as far as Aurora knew, the most imaginative thing he had ever done in his life.

  André Previn was a fish of another water. He was so adorable that at moments Aurora found herself envying his wife. A man who possessed both dignity and a twinkle was a rare find—it was a combination for which she herself seemed fated to look in vain. Her husband Rudyard, through no fault of his own, had had neither. The very fact that his name was Rudyard was no fault of his own; his ridiculous mother had never gotten over a schoolgirl crush on Rudyard Kipling. Indeed, looking back on her twenty-four years of marriage to Rudyard—something, admittedly, that she seldom did—Aurora could not remember a single thing that had been his fault, unless it was Emma, and even that was questionable. Rudyard had been without the slightest capacity for insistence; he had not even insisted that they marry. A plant could not have been easier to relate to, or less exciting. All he really needed was a tub of water to soak in at night—Aurora had often told him as much, and he had always agreed. Fortunately, he had also been tall, handsome, beautifully mannered, and possessed of a patent on a minor chemical for which the oil industry paid him comfortable sums of money. Had it not been for the minor chemical, Aurora felt quite sure they would have starved; Rudyard had been much too well mannered to hold a job. His approach to existence had been to decline comment whenever possible; if he had a genius for anything it was for minimums. Even while he was alive Aurora had sometimes found herself forgetting that he was alive, and then one day, without a word to anyone, he had sat down in a lawn chair and died. Once he was dead, even his picture didn’t serve to call him to mind. Twenty-four years of minimums had left her only a scattering of usable memories, and, in any case, in her heart of hearts she had long since given herself up to thoughts of others—singers, usually. If she were ever forced to put up with a man again she intended to see to it that he could at least make noise.

  André Previn’s great appeal was that he was both musical and dimply. Aurora herself was devoted to the Bach Society. She watched him closely, determined to get some fresh movie magazines and find out how things stood with his marriage. She had never been able to keep away from movie magazines; they seemed to accumulate in her grocery bag. Emma heaped much contempt on her for reading them, so much that she was forced to keep them in her laundry basket and read them behind locked doors, or in the dead of night. The minute the show was over she called her daughter again.

  “Guess who was on the Today show?” she said.

  “I don’t care if Jesus was on the Today show,” Emma said. “What do you mean, hanging up on me? First you wake me up, then you insult me, then you hang up. Why should I even talk to you?”

  “Emma, do be civil,” Aurora said. “You’re much too young to be so difficult. Besides, you’re going to be a mother.”

  “I don’t even want to be one now,” Emma said. “I might turn out like you. Who was on the Today show?”

  “André,” Aurora said.

  “Groovy,” Emma said sulkily, not very interested. She had gotten dressed but had not been able to calm down. Flap was sound asleep, so there was no real point in cooking breakfast. If Danny would only turn up she could make him some pancakes and hear all about the trouble he had managed to get himself into; she was dying to see him, dying to hear what had happened to him, but at the same time the thought that he might suddenly be standing outside the door filled her with apprehension.

  “Why are you so nervous?” her mother asked, keying in on the apprehension instantly.

  “I’m not nervous,” Emma said. “Don’t you start prying into my life. You shouldn’t be talking to me now anyway. It’s time for your suitors to be calling.”

  Aurora observed that that was true. None of her suitors would have dared call before eight-fifteen, nor would they dare neglect her past eight-thirty. In various parts of Houston, at that very moment, men were fidgeting because her line was busy, each wishing that he had been bold enough to call at eight-fourteen, or even eight-twelve. Aurora smiled; all that was satisfying knowledge. Still, she was not about to let the fact that her fellows were calling stay her from her maternal investigations. Her daughter was being much too secretive.

  “Emma, I smell a rat in your tone,” she said firmly. “Are you contemplating adultery?”

  Emma hung up. Two seconds later the phone rang again.

  “Even Stephen,” Aurora said.

  “I’m contemplating murder,” Emma said.

  “Well, we’ve never had a divorce in our family,” Aurora said, “but if we have to have one, Thomas is a good place to start.”

  “Goodbye, Momma,” Emma said. “Speak to you tomorrow, I’m sure.”

  “Wait!” Aurora said.

  Emma waited silently, chewing a nail.

  “Dear, you’re so abrupt,” Aurora said. “I’m eating, you know. It can’t be very good for my digestion.”

  “What can’t?”

  “Being spoken to abruptly,” Aurora said. She would have liked to sound despondent but was so perked up from seeing André that she couldn’t manage it.

  “It’s a very disappointing way to start the day,” she went on, doing her best. “You seldom let me finish and you never say kind things to me anymore. Life is so much pleasanter when people say kind things to one another.”

  “You’re wonderful, you’re sweet, you have gorgeous hair,” Emma said tonelessly and hung up again. Once she had tried to write a short story about herself and her mother; she had described the world as one vast udder from which her mother spent her life milking compliments. The figure hadn’t really worked, but the basic premise was accurate enough. It had taken her years to get t
o the point where she could hang up when she didn’t feel like being milked.

  She went outside and sat on the steps of her little porch in the bright sunlight, waiting for Danny. It was his hour—he loved to come for breakfast and would sit in the kitchen quietly ogling her while she cooked. He always pretended to be deeply exhausted from his various adventures, but he was never too exhausted to ogle—as she knew and as Flap knew too. They were all one another’s best friends and had been for three years, and they inspired one another to heights of talk they were otherwise seldom inspired to; still and all, there were romantic nuances in the friendship, and the fact that Danny had gotten married didn’t seem to affect the nuances at all. No one with a grain of sense expected his marriage to last, or even to count particularly. He had married on a typically feckless impulse, and it might have already stopped lasting, for all she knew.

  The fact that Danny had actually managed to get his novel published seemed more astonishing to Emma than the fact of his marriage. It was an equivocal, ambiguous thing, and her mind nibbled at it while her legs grew hot from the sun. Almost everyone she knew had hoped at one time or another to become a writer. It had been Flap’s only ambition when she first met him. She herself had written fifteen or twenty vague, girlish short stories, but she had never let anyone see them. Most of their college friends had poems or short stories or fragments of novels secreted away. Danny even knew a janitor who wrote screenplays. But Danny actually was a writer, and it made him different. Everyone treated him as if he weren’t quite a normal person, or the same as they were. It was probably true, and Danny probably knew it was true, but it bothered Emma a little. She was the only person, so far as she knew, to treat him as if he were the same as everyone else, which was why they were such special friends. But being married to Flap and treating Danny as if he were the same as everyone else weren’t simple things to combine, she had discovered. Areas of the friendship and areas of her marriage had become almost all nuance.

  The sun got too hot to sit in pleasantly, and she scooted back into the shade of the eaves to brood about it. While she was waiting for Danny, Flap appeared. It didn’t surprise her. She knew perfectly well that he could feel her thinking about things. He opened the screen door about a foot and looked at her with no great friendliness.

  “What about breakfast?” he asked. “Are we married or aren’t we?”

  Emma kept sitting in the shade. Only her toes were in the sunlight. Her toenails were getting hot. “I don’t think you should bully me,” she said, not moving. “No one was awake to cook breakfast for, so I didn’t cook it yet.”

  “Okay, but Dad and I are leaving after a while,” he said. “You don’t want to send me off on an empty stomach, do you?”

  “I didn’t know you were leaving,” she said quickly. “I don’t really want to send you off at all. Why are you leaving?”

  Flap was silent. He was in his underwear and couldn’t come out on the porch.

  “You didn’t tell me you were leaving,” Emma repeated. “Why didn’t you say something about it last night?”

  Flap sighed. He had hoped she would be cheerful about it so he wouldn’t have to feel guilty for two days, but it had obviously been a forlorn hope.

  “Well, we wouldn’t buy a new boat and not go try it out, would we?” he asked. “You know us better than that.”

  Emma pulled her toes in out of the sun. She had been extremely happy for a few minutes, with just herself and the warm boards and a few vague thoughts of Danny. It was such happiness to be alone on her porch that she had been quietly expecting the whole day to be complete delight. Perhaps warm boards and cool shade were the best parts of life, after all. Flap had only to open the screen door to tip everything out of kilter again. All the life that went on in the house itself came out on the porch, and Emma felt cornered. She also felt angry.

  “I didn’t know I married Siamese twins,” she said. “Can’t you two go anywhere without one another?”

  “Now don’t start that,” Flap said.

  “No, you’re right, why should I?” Emma said, getting up. “I haven’t got the paper yet. What would you like for breakfast?”

  “Oh, anything,” Flap said, greatly relieved. “I’ll get the paper.”

  He was very guilt-ridden during breakfast and talked constantly, hoping he could somehow manage to atone for what he was doing before he did it. Emma was trying to read the classifieds, and his attempts to mollify her with conversation began to irritate her more than the fact that he was deserting her to go fishing with his father.

  “Look, just shut up and eat,” she said. “I can’t read and listen, and you can’t taste your food when you’re talking like that. I’m not going to divorce you because you prefer your father’s company to mine, but I might divorce you if you don’t quiet down and let me read.”

  “I don’t understand why you read the classifieds anyway,” Flap said.

  “Well, they’re always different,” Emma said.

  “I know, but you never do anything about them,” he said. The sight of her patiently going down the columns of ads always annoyed him. It was hard not to feel intellectually superior to someone who spent half her morning reading classified ads.

  “You see things you want but you never go buy them,” he added. “You see jobs you want but you never go get them.”

  “I know, but I might sometime, if I feel like it,” Emma said. She did not intend to be bullied out of her pleasure, and in any case she had once bought a beautiful pale blue lamp at an estate sale she had noticed in the classifieds. It had only cost seven dollars and was one of her greatest treasures.

  Cecil came while Flap was shaving, and Emma put aside her paper and got him some coffee. She managed to press some toast and jam upon him, every crumb and speck of which he ate. Watching Cecil eat always fascinated her, because his plates ended up as clean as if they had never had food on them. Her mother had once observed that he was the only man she knew who could wash a dish with a piece of bread, and it was true. Cecil was a kind of Japanese farmer of eating: he concentrated on his plate as if it were a tiny plot of land, every millimeter of which it was up to him to utilize. Left with one bite of toast, one bite of egg, and one bite of jam, he would first put the egg on the toast, then put the jam on the egg, and then carefully wipe the plate with the bottom side of the piece of toast before putting the bite in his mouth. “How’s that for making things come out even?” he would say with a touch of pride. Usually he would even manage to wipe his knife and fork on the edge of the toast at some point, so that everything would look exactly as it had looked when the meal began. When she and Flap had first married, Cecil’s ability to make things come out even had often disconcerted Emma badly. In those days she had been too shy to watch anyone eat her cooking, and she would look up at the end of a meal and see Cecil’s shining white plate and be unable to remember whether she had fed him or not.

  Flap came in while his father was finishing his coffee. He looked so miserable that for a moment Emma was touched. Being torn between a wife and a father obviously wasn’t much fun. Why he had to be torn was a mystery to her—she had certainly never been torn between him and her mother—but clearly he was, and there was no point in her making things worse for him. She lured him into the bedroom so she could give him a nice kiss, but it didn’t work. He was too miserable to be interested, and he didn’t really like being kissed anymore, anyway. Thwarted, Emma tried rubbing his stomach to show him she had no hard feelings.

  “Would you please try not to look so woebegone?” she said. “I don’t want to have to sit around here feeling guilty because I’ve made you feel guilty. If you’re going to desert me you might at least learn to be arrogant about it. Then I could hate you instead of having to hate myself.”

  Flap just looked out the window. He couldn’t stand Emma when she tried to analyze things. The only thing that he was really miserable about was that the fact that he was married to her made him feel obliged to ask her to co
me with them.

  “You could come if you really wanted to,” he said unemphatically. “You don’t really want to float around all weekend arguing about Eisenhower and Kennedy, do you?”

  “No thank you,” Emma said. “I certainly don’t.”

  By dint of much hard work she and Cecil had hacked out Eisenhower and Kennedy as their subject of conversation. In Cecil’s view, Ike had been the only good president since Abraham Lincoln. He loved everything about him, particularly the fact that he had risen from humble beginnings. It took a thrifty man to rise from humble beginnings. Those Kennedys, as he called them, offended him at every turn. It was clear that they wasted money, and the fact that some of it was their own mitigated nothing, in Cecil’s eyes. He doubted that those Kennedys could even be trusted to clean their plates.

  Emma didn’t care. She was frankly glamour-struck, and she adored the Kennedys. Her mother, who paid no attention to presidents at all, had grown so tired of hearing the two of them argue about Eisenhower and Kennedy that she had forbidden them to so much as mention a president at her table again.

  “Well, maybe we’ll bring home some good fish,” Flap said lightly.

  Emma took her hand off his stomach. His face had lightened as quickly as his tone. All it had taken to cheer him up was her polite refusal of his little pro forma invitation. He turned and bent over and began to drag his fishing gear out of the bedroom closet, and he began to whistle “The Wabash Cannonball.” One or another of her dresses was always getting snagged on his fishing gear, but it was their only closet and he had no other place to keep it. When he bent over to get his tackle box the T-shirt he was wearing rode partway up his back. Emma stood looking at the bumpy lower part of his spine. It was a place her hand loved, at certain times. But she felt chilled and sullen. She would have liked to have a heavy chain in her hand, and if she had had one she would have hit him with it, right across the lower part of his spine. If it broke his back, so much the better. He had somehow made her betray herself by refusing her own right to go with him; then he had offered her the possibility of a fish to cook as a reward for refusing her own right. She had done nothing really honest all day, and she stood looking at him, feeling that she didn’t know how to begin to do anything honest. Only a chain would have made it possible for her to do something honest, and she didn’t have one.