“Will we see you next weekend?” he said, as if it were easy. As if we came from two towns over.
“I hope so,” I said, looking back at him for a change.
He kissed my forehead, and we stood still for a minute, pressed against each other in that landscape I never dreamed I’d see and which I suddenly loved because of him, not Fowler.
He said, “You be careful, Leigh.”
I always wanted to take Isaac to him, but I didn’t want to run into her. I didn’t want her withering commentary anywhere near my son because he wouldn’t have been able to fathom its cruelty, to ignore it.
Back we walked to the foreign civility of the house, J.T. at times guiding me by the elbow in instances of mud or steepness.
The breakfast room was empty. Fowler and Evelyn were in the sitting room. (I couldn’t help loving the house, its sitting rooms, servants’ wings on each of three floors.) They were going through drawers, looking at documents. Evelyn was putting papers in piles, first showing each as a treasure of family history. I learned that she was submitting Fowler’s genealogical papers to several patriotic societies, which couldn’t have better fed his need for nuggets for the film. His take on the Southern belle, that she was by no means a dying breed but was instead alive and biting and scratching to keep her place against any nouvelle arrivée daring to attempt entry into the Southern upper class, would be revealed through interviews with debutantes and their mothers, all of them unsuspecting as to his purpose to render them idiotic and remote. He’d do the interviews in the summer, leaving me in a sweltering apartment for days on end. He was determined to expose how such a creature as the Southern belle could thrive in contemporary society, which seems so hostile to exclusion, the answer being: by exploiting the downtrodden, by persisting in outlandish comfort habits, by literally taming the hell out of their men.
I had one on her there. She hadn’t tamed hers. But with Evelyn around, Fowler had his hands full. I may as well not have been there at all, so it was wonderful to have J.T.’s occasional focus. Every time there was a polite opportunity I kissed him and he’d give me a squeeze.
Fowler said on the plane, “J.T.’s got his eye on you.”
His amusement indicated that this was not unusual, for J.T. to take a shine to one of his women. I was more upset about J.T. walking Fowler’s other women through the kudzu than I was about Fowler having them in the first place.
And Evelyn’s got her eye on you, I wanted to say but couldn’t. You didn’t do that with Southern men, I was discovering. Maybe you didn’t do that with any man, take him to task about his mother.
So I just said, “He’s a handsome man.”
“It’s no wonder Mama’s got her talons out.” He was looking away, entering the private tragedy that was to mutate and become something public in the film, House Afire, although only a few hundred college students saw it, as far as I know. He completed it the summer we lived in New York. We showcased it up and down the East Coast in the fall, shortly before I had Isaac. Because of it, because we were peddling it and not some other work of his, I always felt Evelyn was between us, pulling at him, not even entertaining the notion that he could have a true connection with another woman. If there were anyone to blame for this mess, if blame had a rightful place among the forces that have synchronized to bring us, me and my husband and my children, here, I’d put a little of it on her.
“Jimmy’s got a new girl.” As long as she could keep saying this into her telephone, keep believing in the turnover, I couldn’t be a threat. Jimmy’s got a new girl pregnant! I wanted to scream. Get over yourself!
The film bombed. No one cared. Why would they have, watching rich debs bemoaning their loneliness and boredom, their quicksand marriages, their empty, elegant lives? But Fowler had conviction. Enough not to pay attention, to go on working and assuring himself, through the obsession, an escape from me and his baby. I don’t think Evelyn has been told about Isaac. And since she would only rely on him to ring her, she didn’t have a phone number for us. She never had occasion to call and hear infant wailing in the background or wake us from desperate naps or know that I was Fowler’s, that Isaac was ours, that for a brief time we had a home.
What he’d be charged about here, in my home with Simon, is the oppression, the suspension of will, the allowance of the disturbance to tyrannize rather than enliven the one who has acted in good faith to her own nature. Rage! he’d urge. Go ahead. Sharpen your teeth. Find out how deep the hurt goes. Come what will.
Fowler has always known luxury, has trusted in excess. But I have to do this my own way. Short of screaming out that I liked it, fucking Fowler, that it stirred me, moved me out of the haze that’s settled between me and Simon, I can only dream of action. I can only imagine other women in my place, know that they’d behave more resolutely, more admirably. Gillette wouldn’t give staying a thought. Kirsten would go on fucking Fowler in secret. Pam? Who would know anymore? Catherine, I know what she’d do. She’d go find him and bring him here. She’d sleep with him in the garden.
• • •
Daisy’s door is wide open. She’s asleep on her side, her hands enmeshed in a pink blanket I knitted. I squirrel some diapers and clothes into my shoulder bag and lift her up. Her weight stuns me. She settles her head just below my chin, and I remember playing the violin as a child, having to pad the chin rest with my father’s handkerchiefs to get the instrument to fit the space offered by my long neck, struggling unsuccessfully to soften the violin, to make the whole process of my playing it enjoyable. In her heavy sleep, Daisy finds the right place for her head, the place I could never find for the violin.
Without incident, I get us out on the front porch, where the open stroller rigged with diaper bag waits, and we’re out of there, walking in a cool wind to the train. You would think that a person such as myself, doing what I’m doing, would know enough not to allow herself to think of the biggest heartbreak. But I allow it, and she is everywhere, in the moving branches, the still houses, the long gray road, the hill: Jane, my Jane, my record keeper, spine of our family. Again, unthinkable.
• • •
At the station I park us as far as is possible from a hissing radiator, something someone ought to attend to, now that it’s summer. Daisy stretches luxuriously in half sleep, and I panic that she’ll wake in this well-lit, unpeopled purgatory of a place, where the ticketmaster doesn’t darken the door until after seven and it’s up to the solitary commuter to purchase tickets in book form or just singly from the conductor once on the train and zooming into Manhattan. To anyone I do not know, it would appear I’ve stolen this baby.
“Waff?” she says.
Waffles. She wants waffles. I unbuckle her, draw her up.
“We’ll get you waffles. When we get to Grandma’s.”
I fish out half a stack of Ritz crackers from the diaper bag, then carry her to the water fountain to fill her bottle.
“Waddey.”
I drink too, with a vicious thirst, as if the more water I get down, the easier my future will be.
We settle back into our niche by the radiator. Daisy eats happily. She shakes her bottle.
“Jay?” she asks me.
I hug her. “Yes,” I say, but no sound comes out.
• • •
I have forgotten to mention Paris.
After my expulsion from Hastings, Fowler and I went there. J.T. and Evelyn had given him some money for graduate school, so we used some of that. In Paris I learned to ride trains the way I’m riding this one, aching with love for my traveling companion and with sadness for those absent, to places threatening in their decay, their beauty.
Our first train was out of de Gaulle airport. We were sleepless, speeding on coffee, taking in as much of the whizzing in-between of suburb and city as we could. The Défense stood out, monolithic, horrible in contrast to the miles of clay roofing of nearly all of Paris. It was June, and I was four months along with Isaac, just over the nausea, and I felt no exhaustion
, only the fluttering stomach that could have been his heart beating or just anticipation of all that lay ahead: Europe, the birth, the baby, a lifetime of Fowler and joint-effort films. The only sadness was for my parents and their aging, their being out of this stage of life and having made peace with their particular estrangement.
Fowler said that the tiles of the clay roofs, long, rust-colored half-cylinders, were, before French roofing became industrialized, molded on women’s thighs.
“What,” I said.
“Really!” he told me. “The long legs of beautiful women who sat under the wet clay until it dried.”
“Beautiful, patient women,” I said.
“Yes,” said he, squeezing my hand, leaning back in his seat, exhaling satisfaction.
I had a baby with a man who could almost convince me of a story like that. I had two more with a man who would take in those roofs without making mention of them. My mistake: I love both of these men.
Riding this train, my youngest draped over me in silent wonder, the gray Hudson on our right, attempts at permanence on our left, I come to this: I have always been this person, the one I am, who sees this way, whose actions connote a vision of the world as enormous, capricious, ultimately sacrosanct. The current leave-taking alters none of this for me.
Later that morning I sat in a double bed in a pension on the left bank, drinking espresso and crying behind a section of Le Monde, willing myself to stop, failing.
Now tears darken my daughter’s fuchsia sweatshirt, and I feign a coughing fit. She shifts against me, a familiar turning, as of the fetus in the later months, dragging me back. She’s a perfect size for this posture, and she turns her head so that we both face the river, our cheeks aligned, and we ride into the city, watching.
Mother is upon us as I push open the door (I always carry a key), stroller on one arm, Daisy on the other. Of course, instant alarm.
“Leigh! My goodness!”
It seems to me that a woman who can manage to be in a skirt and blouse by seven in the morning and has no office to get to should be able to field an interruption like this one without so much as raising her voice. But there is the other, umbilical, consideration
She takes Daisy, whose delight is immediate.
“I was just on my way out for the paper,” she explains frantically, “but let me get you some coffee and breakfast. What on earth is going on. Poor Daisy, is she all right. Where are Jane and Isaac.”
In her haste over most things, Mother forgets to inflect. Statements are questions, questions statements. Discourse in general is muddled. “Only a linguist could translate,” my father says fondly, now that he deals with this on a less regular basis.
I both adore her mania and hate it. It has given me the ability to stand apart from things and to brood to the point of cruelty.
“Mother, we’re all right. I was hoping we could stay here for a little while. Simon and I are having some differences. Jane and Isaac are with him, and I have Daisy. Please don’t mind.”
Out with it’s been my method with Mother for a long time. Otherwise we’ve got an eternity of circumlocution and non sequitur to decode.
“Well, I couldn’t possibly mind. But what about Jane, then, and Isaac. Will he be able to manage them. What will they do all the day?”
“They’re in camp, Mother. I haven’t been kidnapped. I’m still their mother. Daisy needs me more right now. And I need you to be calm.”
“Well of course I’ll be calm. But you can hardly expect an unannounced visit to go unnoticed, particularly when half the family is missing. Where one earth did you find to park at this hour.”
I tell her about the train.
“Good God. You could have taken the yellow car, Leigh, and not bothered with all that.”
Sometimes I think our differences could be summed up in the matter of nomenclature. She calls our jalopy “the yellow car”; I call it “the mustard bomb.” She calls her arrangement with Dad “an experiment”; I call it “separation.” Pas comme il faut is her way of describing unacceptable behavior, whereas I would simply say it was crude or unacceptable. Occasionally I yearn for that gentility, but most of the time I mourn its impracticality. Still, it is easy, with Mother, to get swept up in the flourish of her idiom.
“I don’t know,” I say. “There’s something about a train.”
She ignores me.
“Nama,” Daisy says, and she squeezes my mother’s long cheeks, arranging her face horribly. But Mother allows it.
“You’re my little fatty,” she says. Then, turning away from the glory of Daisy, “Well, in any event, you’ll need some breakfast and something to put on for a few days. And I want to hear all about this business when we’re settled. Do you want your father in on it yet?”
“No.”
“He’s expecting all of you on Saturday.”
“We’ll be there, in some form.” I hear myself fading out, voice trailing away as it does when I’m overwhelmed. Dad loves Simon and he loathes conflict, which he considers unnecessary and luxurious given the state of our world. If I don’t find some way to assure him that this is temporary, another of my aberrant responses to what is surely a paradise of a life, he’ll be crushed.
I sit at the kitchen table and welcome her coffee, thick as diesel. Mother has always ignored the proportion advice as far as coffee’s concerned. One heaping tablespoon of grinds for every six ounces of water is the way she does it. Daisy waits in the old high chair, the one sans safety strap (“Such a lot of rubbish, all these accoutrements,” Mother says of such things), for her food. Mother fixes her a boiled egg and toast dripping with butter and strawberry jam, which does nicely in lieu of waffles. She admires Daisy’s appetite.
“I don’t know what went wrong with Jane. She eats so poorly, always has. But look at this one!”
I know how I’m supposed to take this: you ruined her (Jane) with all that breast milk. She never got used to other food.
“Jane gets what she needs,” I say, horrified at the hollowness of that statement, given where I am. Mother doesn’t respond, just goes on with the feeding.
• • •
Outside Macy’s, where, Mother’s convinced me, we’ll find a few sale items for Daisy and me to tide us over, she says, “I do think Jane ought to be with you, you know. Isaac is old enough now for a few days of this sort of thing, but Jane isn’t.”
As I haven’t yet told her about Fowler, I can’t fathom her ability to understand what “sort of thing” she means. All I said, over toast and eggs, was that I had some loose ends to tie up.
“Jane chooses her father.”
Mother lifts the stroller, without meaning to, and slams it on the pavement. Daisy screams to get out. “How can you say such a thing? Of an eight-year-old?”
The comfort of her help, of her company, gives way, and now I am helpless, a child myself, certain that the rough deal I’m facing is completely my fault. It’s familiar, terrible, this certainty.
I kneel. “I’m sorry,” I say to Daisy, but she bats me off, screaming for her Nama. I get up, defer, watch my mother gather her up, give her the Paddington rattle, shield her from me.
• • •
We pick up some playclothes and Portacrib sheets, then move on to women’s sport clothes. Mother insists on a pair of summer slacks and a skirt for me.
“You need things, for God’s sake,” she says. “Don’t tell me you don’t.”
Daisy is her phenomenally good-sport self until we get to the cash register. I leave Mother to pay, at her insistence, and head for the cafeteria to wait for her via the lavatory, where I change Daisy and fill a basin with cold water to dunk my head in.
“Wake up, asshole,” I whisper to my reflection. I’m haggard and fleshy, like a much older woman who has given up on something huge, living happily, for starters. Daisy starts into an empty stall, then backs out.
“Ick-y,” she says, smiling.
I remember that I shirked toilet repair before we left. This
fact, on top of the others, fills me with grief. To have left two of my children in a house with a broken toilet . . . I imagine each of them cursing me, venting, Jane just screaming primally, Isaac doing his own sort of nonverbal damage to the doors and walls. Fist. Baseball bat.
I’m an hour away, but I may as well be in Siberia. What I’ve done, I just now realize, is to alter their lives, making their home unrecognizable, their parents fools. I’ve done the unutterable, predictable thing: exactly what my parents did to me.
• • •
Mother has found some way around the cafeteria line and to a table, probably with a graceful lie about a sick grandchild in the restroom, witness the stroller full of accoutrements for the child’s recuperative period. Mother’s tired beauty and her eloquence enable her to circumvent the most pedestrian of processes, which makes the fact that she’s married to a Marxist all the more perplexing.
“They’ve got some lovely-looking soup. Vegetable, I think. Daisy loves soup. I hope it’s all right with you that I ordered us some.”
“Of course,” I answer, Dad’s formality creeping in. “But isn’t it a little warm for soup?”
“Oh,” Mother says, flustered. “Now that you mention it.”
“No,” I say, softening. “Whatever. She does like it.”
“Good. Because here it comes.”
Mother has actually gotten a server to leave her station behind the steaming chrome architecture of the kitchen to bring us three bowls of soup and two sodas.
“Here we are,” the woman says. She’s about Mother’s age, but thick in the middle and lavish in her gestures toward our comfort, setting us regular places with napkins and silver and asking, “How’s the baby feeling?”
I should pinch Daisy’s thigh to get a proper noise out of her, but too late: she smiles cunningly, and the woman takes this as a compliment.
“See that? Rose’ll make it all better.” She brings fat hands together. She’s got a rich landscape of a voice, one to get lost in. “She’s a beauty.”
“Thank you, Rose,” Mother says.