Iris tried harder. She was dismayed by the chill that had sprung up between us. But any sympathy I may have felt for her, I crushed it out. I had no intention of letting her down easy. And when she looked at me in that imploring way I felt the anger rising and I didn’t trouble to stem it. I was more hurt by my sister’s complicity in Daddy’s deception than anything else.
—We all washed up?
I was in the bedroom, packing. I was catching a train back to the city and Iris was driving me to the station. I didn’t trouble to straighten up and turn around.
—I don’t know, are we?
—I hate this, said Iris quietly. You don’t even know if it’s true.
I didn’t respond to this. My mind was made up. It made sense of everything. Iris left the room, saying she’d be out in the truck when I was ready. I went downstairs. Daddy stood in the hall. He was angry now.
—Constance.
—
Daddy
.
—I’m very disappointed you won’t try to see this from my point of view. I did what I thought was right.
—But you got it wrong, didn’t you?
I was at the front door. In the driveway Iris sat in the truck with the engine running. She was resting her forehead on the steering wheel. I seized the old man’s arm. I gripped it hard. I drew close to him so he wouldn’t be in any doubt as to what I was telling him.
—You’ve always hated me and now I know why. You bastard.
I walked out to the truck and tossed my suitcase in the back and climbed in. As we drove along the river I saw tears suddenly spill down Iris’s face and I was glad.
—You were glad, said Sidney.
—Yes, Sidney, I was glad!
I glared at him, my face pushed forward and my hands laid flat on the table. He moved to the chair beside me and I let him hold me for several minutes. Then I stood up from the table
without looking at him. I left the room and went down the hall, then into the bedroom and closed the door quietly behind me.
It was grotesque, what Sidney proposed. My life had been devastated by a doctor and he wanted me to see a shrink. Even to suggest it—! The idea that he should hand me off in this way, commit me to the care of a
doctor
, it showed the limits of his imagination. I told him it would do more harm than good. Shrinks, doctors, I said, they do more damage than anyone. I was sick at what Daddy did to me. Why would I give myself over to a psychiatrist? Sidney said he understood. He said sometimes there’s virtue in not knowing. I let him think it. He had to think something.
For several days after my return he didn’t mention what had happened upstate. Then one night he apparently thought I might be receptive. As we sat at the kitchen table he suggested in a studiously offhand manner that my father was at an age when he wanted to get last things cleared away. It was a primal human need, he said, to put matters in order before a journey. He meant death. I’d been distracted earlier but hearing this I became at once alert and angry.
—Yes, but why didn’t he figure out what it would do to me? And Sidney,
he’s not my father.
—Are you sure?
He wasn’t sure. He didn’t think the old man was reliable anymore.
—
Yes.
We sat in silence. I’d cooked us a couple of steaks and opened a bottle of wine. Howard was asleep and Gladys had gone home.
—So what about Iris? he said.
—I don’t know.
—I don’t think you’ll be estranged over this.
It was important to him that we not be estranged. He thought Iris was one of my very few sources of support and he didn’t want me to lose her. Sidney liked Iris. He wanted to get her in bed. I think he felt he’d married the wrong sister but he was too repressed to do anything about it.
—Listen, I said, how many times have I said something about Daddy and Iris thought, Constance still doesn’t know. It must have happened a thousand times. Her silence was an act of betrayal
every single time.
—She’s young to face a dilemma like that. Her father tells her one thing, her heart tells her another.
I shrugged.
—That’s not my problem.
Then I said I didn’t know what Iris could say to make it right, and it would have to come from Iris.
—It’s not my responsibility, I said.
He let this pass. I grew bored. I was getting nowhere. I could see he wasn’t on my side.
—Oh, let’s not talk about it, I said. What’s up with you?
He told me
The Conservative Heart
was still unfinished. He was rewriting it again. He showed perseverance, at least. He wasn’t going to give up. He’d put too much time into it already. But why he thought that another year would solve his problems was a mystery to me. I knew this much about it, that he’d taken for his text those lines from Wordsworth:
Sweet is the lore which nature brings; / Our meddling intellect / Misshapes the beauteous forms of things; / We murder to dissect.
I agreed with the sentiment, how could you not? But Sidney didn’t, and this was the problem. He was working
against
the idea. Thinking murders nothing, he said. So why was he having so much trouble finishing the bloody thing, as he now referred to it?
But I wasn’t in the mood for Sidney’s knotty vexations. He sat turning the salt cellar in his fingers.
—Let’s just get back to this business of yours, he said.
—Why?
I didn’t like it. I’d told him I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. It was making me anxious now. My memories of my childhood were a mess. I’d barely slept since it happened. What was the point? It was bad for me. When my emotional equilibrium is disturbed my skin shows a kind of reddish bruising around the eyes. Sidney told me once I was an occluded young woman, but that in the purely physical aspect of my being I was transparent. He said he hated to see these blemishes on my face.
—I can imagine how confused you are.
I knew he’d do this to me. Was he deliberately trying to make it worse? I got up and stood at the sink with my back to him.
—Don’t you think we should talk about it? he said.
No. I did not. I felt like a block of crystal. One more tap of his hammer and I’d shatter into a thousand pieces. He then said I was in crisis and that I ignored it at my peril.
—If you won’t talk to me, he said, I think you should see someone.
I fled. I locked myself in the bathroom and sat on the side of the tub with my hands on my knees and my head down. He’d started a voice going in my head and I’d been doing so well. He thought I was going mad. Why else did he want to take me to
a psychiatrist? After a while I got control of my breathing. I washed my face in cold water and brushed my hair. I went back to the kitchen. He was clearing up the dinner things. I’d made him angry. He was like Daddy that way: If I defied him over the smallest thing I was a bad girl, willful and obstructive.
—It’s a suggestion, he said. Think about it, Constance, that’s all.
Then he told me he was my husband. I think it was supposed to remind me of my place in the order of things. Clearly a lowly place. I nodded. I was holding on for dear life. He’d almost undone me. Didn’t he understand, I said, that that’s what I wasn’t going to do? I wasn’t going to think about it and I was going to try never to talk about it again, and whatever he was thinking, I said, whatever chains of reasoning were unspooling in that big murdering intellect of his—I didn’t want to know.
So he opened his hands, a gesture of submission.
—We’ll leave it for now, he said. Here, give me a hug.
It had to be done. I stood there like a statue in marble while he put his arms around me. He rubbed his cheek against my hair. He kissed the places where my skin was red. Getting no response he stepped back.
—Constance, I’m your husband, he said again. Please remember that.
I wasn’t a happy woman in the morning but what I’d most feared was that he’d insist on telling me about my real father, I mean this faceless man who’d committed suicide before I was even born. There were times, later, when I embraced that faceless man so comprehensively I felt him to be a living presence in the apartment. But right then I didn’t want to know. I wasn’t even interested in
why
I didn’t want to know. I think I felt that
it wasn’t for Sidney or Iris or Daddy to tell me what I had to deal with.
For some days this remained my attitude. When I touched the wound the pain flared anew. I didn’t seek out company: Instead after work I wandered the galleries of the Met. I liked the ancient Egyptians. Their artifacts and sarcophagi aroused in me a mood of unthinking tranquility and, more important, a silence that could last for hours. I felt that Daddy had turned my mind into a crypt. In it he’d buried the truth about my father. Now the crypt had been opened but the truth hadn’t set me free, the reverse.
Then one night when I was alone in the apartment I made an important discovery. I found I could begin to confront the one piece of information Iris had given me about my father.
I was taking a bath. There was a drop of blood in the water and it set off a string of associations. I got out of the tub. I sat at the kitchen table in my bathrobe smoking a cigarette. I had a towel wrapped around my head like a turban and I was sitting very still. I was absorbed by an idea that until that moment I’d suppressed, the idea, I mean, of a man in such anguish that suicide was the only way out. I began to feel pity for him. Then it seemed I’d never felt such pity for anybody ever in my life before.
Then I stopped. It was enough. I hadn’t lost control. I hadn’t been overwhelmed. Instead I’d made a first step but toward what I couldn’t yet say. But I was no longer so frightened. I was in possession of a piece of my true history, this is what it felt like. I resolved to go on at my own halting pace until I’d reclaimed the whole. I thought that then
I
might be whole. Meanwhile I’d carry with me this fragile ghost, the shadowy
outline of my father. Soon I heard what I imagined to be his voice and felt then that he was becoming mine, where before he’d belonged to Daddy and Sidney and the rest.
Life was a little easier after that. This ghost of mine, I couldn’t call him a memory, didn’t provoke grief but instead a sort of tenderness. When Sidney got back from Atlantic City he said he recognized a change in my mood. I knew that he knew more than I did about my father but it wasn’t his knowledge I wanted. I didn’t want to know what Daddy had told him. It would have gotten skewed in Daddy’s telling. Daddy hated my father. So I didn’t take Sidney into my confidence, not yet. Instead I continued to hold my father like a sort of egg inside myself. I was afraid that if I talked about him some contained essence would evaporate in the air and leave me again bereft and with nobody to talk to. All this had to be concealed from Sidney, of course. He said I’d had a nervous shock, that was how he described it. I told him again that what upset me was the deception, Iris’s more than Daddy’s because Iris I’d trusted.
He backed off for a while. One night I asked him if he knew how my father died. Daddy thought I wasn’t strong enough to hear the truth. I was sure Sidney was asking himself the same question, I could see him thinking it. They were right: I wasn’t strong enough, but he told me anyway because I asked him to. Sidney didn’t believe in shielding people from the truth.
—He fell under a train.
—Oh no. Oh Christ.
I hadn’t expected this. I don’t know what I’d expected but not this. It was a bad shock. I felt sick. Silently we sat there. I didn’t leave the room because I had to show him I was strong enough. I wasn’t having it, this assumption of my weakness.
They didn’t assume Iris was weak. He said the driver of the locomotive didn’t see him but he felt the impact.
—You want a drink?
I nodded. He made me a drink.
—It was suicide, wasn’t it?
—I think so.
A thousand questions were swarming in my brain but the one I still avoided asking was,
Who was he?
—Do you know where he’s buried?
—He was cremated.
—There’s no grave.
—No.
—Was he a handsome man?
—Yes, he was.
Of course he had no way of knowing this. He had no way of knowing any of it for sure, but he did know what I wanted to hear and he thought it couldn’t do any harm.
—Sidney, was he a
criminal?
—No.
A long silence here. Then at last I asked the only question that really mattered.
—What was his name?
Here it got complicated.
Later that night I woke up. I was angry with Daddy again. I started to cry. Sidney hadn’t been asleep. He took me in his arms and held me until it passed.
He didn’t know what hit him:
Where did those words come from, who said them? It was starting to torment me. I’d heard them spoken after Harriet’s funeral.
They’d made me sick and I felt sick now. What did it mean that a stray phrase associated with a secret from which I’d been excluded provoked nausea? I turned on the lamp beside the bed. He asked me what was wrong and I said it was time. He had to tell me.
We went to the kitchen. We sat at the table. I was in my silk bathrobe and my hair was loose. He later told me that the redness around my eyes made me look like a child who’d been crying and rubbed too hard at the tears she’d shed.
—Mildred Knapp has never once spoken to me about her husband, I said.
—Now you know why.
I became distracted. I was thinking about Harriet’s predicament, stuck in that big house miles from anywhere, Daddy at the clinic or out on house calls all hours of the day and night, a cruel situation to put any woman in. So she’d found some comfort with Walter Knapp, and who could blame her? It was Daddy’s fault. It’s always the man’s fault. He’d neglected her, just as he’d neglected me. I tried to remember if Mildred had ever mentioned our connection. Had she ever tried to see Walter in me? No. Mildred Knapp never even looked at me. I was surprised how calm I felt. I thought: I’m not Constance Schuyler Klein, I’m
Knapp
. I asked Sidney where he’d died. If there was no grave, if I couldn’t visit his grave, I could at least visit the place where it happened. But Sidney didn’t know. He said it was near Ravenswood but not on the property.