Terms of Endearment

  “Honey, you’re a tonic for that man,” Angela said, blithely noting how much happier her boss looked than he had looked that morning. She had no use for the yappy little Dottie anyway and thought it was sweet that a nice young woman like Mrs. Horton took some interest in her hen-pecked, neglected boss.

  “HUMPH, BEARLIKE. Yes, I know the appeal,” Aurora said a few weeks later. It had taken only two calls for her to perceive that her daughter was no longer so depressed, and a third for her to worm an admission out of Emma.

  “Money may have something to do with it too,” she added. “Handling it sometimes gives even rather dull men something of an aura. My goodness. Hector is ill and now I have to adjust to your sinfulness. That’s rather a lot to ask of me, isn’t it?”

  In fact she was not in the least disturbed by Emma’s action. She had been waiting for it to happen for several years, but she had nursed the hope that when it did happen it would be some suitable and if possible available man who might take Emma away and give her a marriage that was worthy of her. That, evidently, had not happened.

  “You’ve a penchant for the disadvantageous, my dear,” she said. “If you hadn’t, you’d not have chosen a grandfather. Obviously the possibilities of this liaison are short-lived.”

  “What’s wrong with the General?” Emma asked, to change the subject.

  “Nothing I can’t cure,” Aurora said. “He inhaled too much pollution on his stupid runs. His runs are little more than crawls these days anyway. Meanwhile Vernon’s been gone for a month to Scotland and I’m quite put out about that. If he’s going to stay much longer I may require him to have me over. Alberto’s quite sunk too. Alfredo’s taking over the store. I tell you we’re all falling apart down here, and what do you do to help? You seduce a grandfather. I shall have to keep it from Rosie. Since Royce’s death the slightest thing upsets her.

  “Little Buster’s been caught stealing again,” she added. “I don’t expect that boy to avoid reform school very much longer. Which reminds me to advise you to be careful. I imagine they still stone adulteresses in places like Des Moines.”

  SAM BURNS took almost that pessimistic a view of their future. He was sure they would be discovered, and that when they were he would have to divorce his wife and marry Emma; then, in order to survive the disgrace, they would have to leave town. He had gone so far as to decide that the move would be to Omaha, where an old army buddy of his was president of a solid little bank.

  “Honey, I never got away with nothing in my life,” he told Emma, tugging at one of his large ears. “I mean it. I can’t scheme worth a damn.”

  Yet he was adept enough at finding reasons to visit the several empty houses the bank needed to sell. One night while Flap and the boys were gone to a basketball game Emma stuffed an old secondhand mattress in the station wagon and hid it in one of the houses. She told Flap she had donated it to a charity bazaar. For the next year and a half, as the houses slowly sold and were replaced by other houses, the mattress got moved around from one bare development neighborhood to another. All the houses were empty, and always unheated; and once some of the new wore off Sam Burns, Emma began to wonder what it would be like to have a love affair in a warm place, perhaps in a grand and grandly furnished hotel room, or at least in a place with chairs and toilets that flushed.

  Once, in fact, they thought they had managed to plan a trip to Chicago, which would have been a nice change, and elegant enough, but Dottie managed to screw it up at the last minute by falling off a parade float and breaking her hip. The fact that he was screwing around while his loyal wife lay in the hospital with her leg in traction increased Sam Burns’s guilt to an almost intolerable degree, and Emma decided at several points that she ought to let him go back to the safety of Dottie, Angela, and his work.

  She would have let him, out of kindness and affection, had he really wanted to go, for she knew that half the time the affair was a kind of moral torture for him. Yet, for all his suffering, Sam didn’t want to go. In his way he had been even more desperate than Emma. Dottie had never been interested in sex anyway, and when she turned forty-five her disinterest quickened, as it were, and became an active dislike. She was not the sort of woman to entertain that which she didn’t enjoy either, and Sam’s sexual future, insofar as he could imagine it, consisted of occasional call girls at occasional conventions.

  Thus, to him, Emma was a miracle. He knew he had been given one last chance to love, and frightening and troubling as it was, he had to have it. He had known no one so kind or so tender as Emma, and he adored her. The empty houses and the odd hours, the cold, the unadornedness of their surroundings made him sad. He wanted to give her all the conventional comforts. Sometimes he even imagined that Dottie had passed honorably away, perhaps of heatstroke at the Jaycees’ barbecue, the cooking of which she always supervised all day long in the broiling July sun; if that happened, then he could, as he put it, do right by Emma, take her away from her negligent husband and give her a decent house, nice clothes, a good kitchen, perhaps even a child. It never occurred to him to think that Emma might not want such things, and as it turned out it didn’t matter, for Dottie outlived Sam Burns by exactly the length of their marriage—twenty-nine years.

  When Emma heard of Sam’s death she was pregnant by Flap and she and her family were living in Kearney, Nebraska, and had been for nine months. Flap had been offered the chairmanship of the English department of a little state college there, and after much indecision had taken it. Emma and the boys had been for staying in Des Moines, but he overruled them; in fact, the dynamic of the family was such by that time that had they wanted to go to Kearney he might well have decided they belonged in Des Moines.

  When he was told she was going, Sam Burns was bereft. He sat on the mattress for a long time looking at his huge feet in despair. He would not get to give Emma those comforts. He brought it out haltingly, his most illicit fantasy. Dottie might die; they might marry. He looked at her mournfully, wondering if such a wonderful woman would laugh at the mere notion of marrying him.

  Though she would never have married him, Emma didn’t laugh. She saw that he did not understand that he had already given her a great comfort. All his life he had been too big, had been treated as a bumbler—and in truth he was a bumbler, had never been expert with her, yet she had enjoyed him deeply.

  “Of course, sweetheart,” she said. “I’d marry you in a minute,” hoping as she said it that Dottie Burns enjoyed a very long life, so she would never have to take it back.

  Sam looked at his feet with less despair. His whole large body shook with sorrow the day they parted. “Don’t know what I’ll do,” he said.

  “Well, maybe you can improve your golf,” Emma said, hugging him. She kissed him and tried to make it a joke, because he hated golf. Shyly, he had admitted it one day. It was on the golf course that he endured the worst ridicule about his bumbling. He only played the game because it was expected of him.

  Emma didn’t know what she would do, either.

  It was Angela, remembering young Mrs. Horton’s kindness, and having no one to talk to, who called Kearney and told Emma of Sam’s death.

  “Oh, not Mr. Burns,” Emma said, remembering to be formal even in her shock.

  “Yes, he’s gone,” Angela said. “Had a heart attack right in the middle of the golf course. Naturally he would get out there an’ play, hot as it was …”

  Emma sat at her kitchen table for days, chewing napkins, or else slowly tearing them into little strips. Napkins were her new neurosis. It wasn’t just that Sam was dead—it was that she had let him die unhappy. Truth was, her energy had failed for the affair. She had begun to lose the courage for all the hiding, the lies, the empty houses. And another fear had crept in: the fear that Sam was getting too much in love with her. If she fed him much more affection he would start wanting to leave Dottie. It wasn’t going to stay nice, or manageable, she knew, and she didn’t fight hard for Des Moines when the time came. She thought they had
had the best of it, she and Sam, and Kearney was a natural way out.

  If he had died in bed, or in an accident, she might not have grieved too deeply, for he didn’t understand his life or love it. He had considered himself a Big Fool for fifty-some years, and the fun had gone out of the joke, if there had ever been any fun in it.

  It was the fact that he had died on a golf course that haunted her. Maybe he had misunderstood her last remark. He was not a man with an ear for irony. Maybe he had thought she really wanted him to improve his golf game, or even thought she was making little of him at the end.

  The heartbreak in that possibility was too much. She chewed napkins and had nightmares in which she saw a large body being dragged off a golf course. Flap and the boys walked well clear of her. He had no idea what was wrong; he told the boys it was pregnancy. Fortunately he had a department to run, which meant that there was always more to do than could be got done. He need never come home, and he seldom did. Tommy took to his upper bunk and his collection of Heinlein. Teddy, desperate, tried to get his mother back to herself. He hugged, he did all his tricks, he told jokes, he played cards, he cleaned up everything, he hung up his clothes, he even offered to make breakfast. Emma couldn’t hold out against him. She got up, shook it off, helped him make the breakfast. Then she broke down and told it all while talking to her mother.

  Aurora listened gravely. “Emma, I have only one word of comfort,” she said, “and that is to remind you that men seldom listen to women. Even at the moments when you think they must be listening, they often aren’t. I don’t know what they’re doing—I’ve often wondered—but it’s not listening. I’m sure poor Mr. Burns had better things to remember than your last remark.”

  “I wish I could be sure,” Emma said.

  “I’m sure,” Aurora said. “You’re lucky if you meet one in your life who’s really attentive.”

  “Have you met your one?”

  “No, and if I did meet him now, he’d probably be so old he’d be deaf.

  “I wish you’d come here to have your baby,” she added. “Rosie and I could take care of you both, for a while. Nebraska’s no place to have a child. I thought you weren’t having any more, by the way. What changed your mind?”

  “I don’t know,” Emma said, “and I don’t want to speculate.”

  INDEED, THERE were times when what she had done seemed almost insane, Things were no better at home, and she thought constantly of divorce as she was growing bigger. It seemed absurd to be pregnant by a man she no longer felt any connection with. Someday she would be a divorcee with three strange children rather than two. It didn’t make sense.

  Then she had a girl, Melanie, a little creature so immediately happy with herself that it seemed to Emma she had been created just to make everyone feel better.

  Emma refused to allow anyone to call her Mellie. From the first she was called Melanie, and she was born with the ability to charm everyone who came near her. Within six months Emma realized that what she had done was to recreate her mother. When she thought about it, in certain ways it was an appalling realization, one more trick life had played on her, for she realized it meant she herself would always be upstaged, if not by her mother, then by her child. Melanie even had gorgeous golden curly hair, so fine that half the light in the room seemed to gather about her head. In another sense the trick was merely amusing, particularly so when grandmother and grandchild got together and attempted to outdo one another in gaiety or willfulness.

  The wonder of Melanie, though, at least in her first years, was that she made Teddy happy. Perhaps that was the explanation of her, Emma thought: it was the only thing she could think of to do for Teddy, the only way to bring love back into the house. For a while it seemed to work beautifully. Even Flap couldn’t remain aloof from Melanie; for a year or two he came home more often in order to be charmed by his daughter. Tommy never said much about Melanie, but he took a shy, nervous, protective interest in her and was very critical of anyone who let anything bad happen to her—which was usually Teddy, if only because he was with her more than anyone else.

  Watching them, Melanie and Teddy, Emma felt rewarded. It was worth a great deal to have two children who loved one another so completely. Indeed, Melanie and Teddy were almost like lovers, constantly lying around in one another’s arms. Melanie seemed to live in Teddy’s lap—from the time she could toddle she made a beeline for his bed first thing in the morning—and Teddy’s behavior was oddly loverlike, for sometimes his very attachment to her seemed to make him perverse. He treated her like a two-year-old girl friend, and when he wasn’t smothering her with hugs and affection he was taunting her and teasing her, hiding her toys, driving her to furious heights of anger and pique. Yet always, after storms of tears on Melanie’s part, they made it up, they forgave, they forgot, and ended the day in a bunk bed reading one another stories.

  Often it was Melanie who did the reading, or at least the telling; for her first vanity was the belief that she could read. When she first began to make words she also began to snatch books from people. “Me can read,” she insisted, nodding eagerly, hoping for agreement. Teddy allowed her to think she could, and everyone else, for some reason, denied her her claim. He would listen to her explanations of her picture books for hours, while the rest of the family tried to bully her into being read to. Melanie resented it—she resented seeing people sitting happily with books that had no pictures in them, books that shut her out or forced her to absurd lengths of pretense. When she could she snatched such books and dashed them in the nearest waste-basket. In fact, when no one was watching her, she often went about the house hiding the books people were reading, sliding them under beds or cleverly stuffing them in the backs of closets, where they were not found for months.

  She was an extremely clever child, and the spirit of vengeance was strong in her. If she could not get her way she was quite willing to commit her entire energy to seeing that nobody else got their way either, using her great charm shamelessly to divert them from whatever had been in their minds, but resorting to temper instantly if she saw that all else was going to fail.

  On visits to Houston she demonstrated a strong preference for Rosie and Vernon, both of whom adored her beyond words. She treated General Scott rather offhandedly, although she liked to poke at his Adam’s apple and try to figure out why his voice was so scratchy. He told her he had a frog in his throat and she believed it and was always commanding him to make the frog jump out.

  With her grandmother she was generally cool, though now and then the two of them flung themselves into an amorous tussle. Aurora contended at once that Melanie was outrageously spoiled, and she contended it the more vehemently when Melanie rejected her efforts to contribute to the spoiling. She would allow Vernon to trot her on his knee for hours, but the minute Aurora picked her up she became a terrible wiggle-worm. What she loved about her grandmother was the jewelry she wore, and she was always pulling off Aurora’s earrings or trying to persuade her to let her wear her necklaces. Sometimes, when the two of them were feeling friendly, they sat on Aurora’s bed and Melanie got to try on all her jewels in the jewel box. It amused Aurora to watch her tiny golden-haired grandchild bedeck herself with all the jewels she herself had managed to accumulate, the relics of the passions of her lifetime, or of her own whims—mostly the latter, for, as she frequently lamented, none of her loves had been talented gift givers.

  “Me put it on,” Melanie said, reaching up for whatever Aurora might be wearing. She loved the amber and silver necklace above all else, and as often as she was allowed traipsed around with it hanging just below her knees. Most of her traipsing was done in pursuit of Rosie, whom she totally adored.

  “Lord, it breaks my heart to think of this child growin’ up in Nebraska,” Rosie said, watching her poke oatmeal in her mouth.

  “It breaks mine to consider what will happen to whatever men are around when she grows up,” Aurora said.

  “She can’t be no harder on ’em than you’v
e been,” Rosie said.

  “Possibly not, but men were tougher in my day. They were brought up to expect difficulty.”

  “Don’t talk,” Melanie said, pointing her spoon at Rosie. She was quick to note that people were always talking to her grandmother, and it didn’t please her.

  “Talk to me,” she said a moment later, holding out her dish for more oatmeal.

  “Can’t be much wrong with a kid that’s got an appetite like she has, can there?” Rosie said happily, hurrying to the stove.

  Aurora buttered a croissant and Melanie immediately stretched out a hand for it.

  “Not much,” Aurora said, and ate the croissant herself.

  FOR A time after Melanie was born Emma felt free. She had done something right, or so it seemed to her, and she rather contentedly sat back and watched Melanie pull the family together. There were even moments when she felt some solidarity with Flap once again; but they were only moments, and the period of grace didn’t last. For one thing, Melanie seemed a finality, in a way. Emma felt that she had delivered what she could deliver. In a few months she began to feel lost again. She told herself it was silly, but at thirty-five she had the persistent feeling that nothing remained for her to do. Everything left was a repeat, and, past a point, she didn’t like repeating.

  Then there were times when she felt that even had she been happy she would have had to become unhappy in order to live in Kearney. She had become accustomed to the Midwest. The people there were unfailingly courteous, and she had come not to mind their practicality, their gracelessness, their lack of imagination. All that went with the landscape, in a way, yet she could not get across the courtesy into real friendship with anyone. The landscape was meant for loneliness, it seemed. She took long walks along the banks of the Platte in the keen, strong wind—and the wind seemed to her the dominant thing, the eternal thing about where she lived. It was what the plains had instead of beaches, waves, and tides; the wind was her ocean while she lived in Nebraska, and though the natives all complained about it she loved it. She could lean against it almost; she liked to hear it sighing and roaring at night when only she was awake; she didn’t mind it. The summer calm and the occasional winter calm were what she minded; then in the stillness she sensed her own lack of balance. When the wind died, she felt herself falling; only the falling was not something taking place in a dream. It was taking place while she was wide awake.