—I didn’t hear you come in, I said.
—That was Eddie?
I walked to the table. How much had he overheard? I replayed the conversation in my head. I heard myself saying:
Don’t torture me.
—Constance.
—He’s Iris’s boyfriend, or he was.
—I know who he is. So what was that all about?
—I have a life of my own, you know.
—I’m curious. Why do you need to know when he finishes?
—He’s trying to get her back. He wants my help.
—This is the man who broke her heart.
—So she says.
He sat frowning. He was thinking it through. I stood at the window. I picked up a book on the sill and opened it. Then I closed it and put it on the table.
—Constance.
—What is it now?
—Tell me something. Why are you mixed up in your sister’s love affair?
—It’s what sisters do. If you had one you’d know.
—If I had a sister like Iris I’d keep her in line.
—Like you keep me in line.
How to describe the tone here? It wasn’t serious. He was still worried about me. He understood I wasn’t strong. His concern was paternal. I was his wife. I was safe.
—Like I keep you in line? he said. As if!
I lifted my shoulders and opened my hands. I suggested we
have a drink, but no, he had work to do. He went off to his study. I poured myself a scotch and stood at the window as darkness fell and the streetlamps came on. He so easily could have guessed the truth. But I decided he’d heard nothing to arouse his suspicion. He never intruded on my private life, and anyway his own life was of intense interest to him at this time. He thought he’d found a way to make a coherent book out of the mess
The Conservative Heart
had turned into.
I went to the hotel the following afternoon. I told Eddie what had happened. Sidney worried him. Sidney was smart, he said. He asked me what he’d heard of our conversation and I tried to reassure him. But I managed instead to arouse my own anxiety. I was suddenly filled with a profound unease.
Constance almost destroyed our marriage for the sake of this affair but she’d never speak about it again. It was too damaging to her self-esteem, what little of it remained. Of course, she knew nothing about love. She knew something about pain, however, and she was soon to know more. A week had passed since that last difficult conversation and at times I was convinced she’d invented the whole thing, and that rather than punish me by having an affair she’d punish me by making me
think
she’d had an affair. And do it in such a way that I suspected it wasn’t true but couldn’t be sure of it. This is the hell of sexual suspicion. It wasn’t the first time.
I watched her talking quietly to Howard at the kitchen table. He’d started to teach her to play chess. They seemed oblivious to the darkly brooding figure who paced frowning about the apartment attempting to spread gloom and menace, but failing: no Heathcliff I. It occurred to me that in this time of radical uncertainty I could believe whatever I chose to, and for some minutes I entertained the idea. But that way madness lay. I decided instead to attempt to accept uncertainty, yes, but only until the truth was revealed. This didn’t trouble me because I
knew the world to be constructed of stronger material than that, I mean the flimsy stuff peddled by the relativists, a shabby bunch more disreputable even than the determinists. No, there were a number of ideas about which I could be certain.
Name three.
Free will. Death.
The call came about five in the afternoon. I heard the telephone as I was leaving my study. I couldn’t know, when the phone first started ringing, that forever after there’d be a cleft in time: what came before, what came after. It was Mildred. She asked me if I was alone. I thought, it’s the old man. It’s Morgan. I listened in silence. I told her we’d drive up to the house tomorrow. I hung up. I found Constance and Howard at the kitchen table, both staring intently at the chessboard as Howard removed Constance’s queen with a pawn.
—Check.
—Howard.
—Can it wait? said Constance.
—No.
I took Howard into the hall and closed the kitchen door. I was finding it hard not to cry. Quietly I told him what I’d just heard from Mildred. His eyes grew wide. This was going to be very difficult for Constance, I said, did he understand that? He nodded his head. I told him please to go into the kitchen and ask her to come to my study.
When she came in I asked her to sit down. She was frowning. Then I gave her the bad news. At once she rose to her feet and spread her hands across her mouth. She stared at me for several
seconds. Then she began to push her fingers through her hair. She turned away from me and went to the window. She turned back.
—Drowned? she whispered.
She doesn’t have the equipment to deal with it, I thought.
—Oh no. Oh dear god.
I waited for the grief to burst through. It was a long time coming.
—
Drowned?
she whispered again.
Where?
She sank onto the daybed.
—Who called, Mildred?
I sat at my desk and watched her. She was in a state of shock. I knew what it looked like now. I’d seen it after Morgan told her he wasn’t her father.
—How did it happen?
—It wasn’t an accident, I said.
—What are you saying?
With wild streaming eyes she stared at me. It hadn’t occurred to her that she was responsible.
—I told Mildred we’d go up tomorrow.
—Yes. It’s too late now.
Shocked, distracted, stupefied almost, she wandered out of the study. I didn’t know how long it would take her to assimilate this news.
It was raining in the morning. We left around ten. She’d taken a pill when she went to bed and she was still half asleep. I’d called Mildred and said we were both coming. She said she hadn’t yet told the doctor and asked me could it wait until we got there. I said that would be the best thing. I told her I’d look after the formalities. Constance heard me and said there were times it was good to have an adult around.
We were slow getting out of the city because of the rain. It got easier on the Taconic. She began to wake up.
—What did you mean, it wasn’t an accident? she said.
—Don’t you know how unhappy she was?
—What woman isn’t? We don’t go drown ourselves.
I glanced at her. She was staring straight ahead. She didn’t want the conversation yet. I decided to say nothing more. I put my foot down and the big Jaguar surged past the traffic and soon we had the road to ourselves.
It was a strange uneasy house we came to. The rain had stopped and the sky was clear. Mildred heard the car and came out on the porch. In the cast of her face, in the tight lips and steady eyes, I read sorrow like a ghost beneath the skin. Mildred never embraced others, although Iris used to fling her arms around her, to Mildred’s awkward pleasure. Now we performed formal clasps, body to body like distant relatives come together after years apart.
—I haven’t told him yet, she said.
—I’ll do it now, I said.
—Better later. He wasn’t well this morning.
I knew what she meant by that. He was demented.
—Where is she? said Constance.
—Poughkeepsie, at the morgue.
—Sidney, I want to see her.
Mildred said she had the number we should call.
We went into the house. A kick to the heart: hanging off a hook by the door, Iris’s denim jacket. Unopened pack of cigarettes in the top pocket. I’ll have those, said Constance. Where was her fur coat? She’d gone in the water in it, I thought. It would have dragged her down, no second chances in a coat like
that. I left our suitcases at the foot of the stairs and we went along the corridor to the kitchen. Constance sat at the table and lit one of Iris’s cigarettes. Mildred had one too. They stared at each other across the table. No trite expression of mutual condolence necessary. Constance reached for Mildred’s hands and tears came, yes, even from Mildred. The two women sat silently weeping as the cigarette smoke drifted upward. I went into the sitting room to use the telephone there. The old man was still asleep upstairs.
I went out the back door and walked down through the pines and across the tracks to the river. I’d imagined her standing at the end of the dock in her fur coat, in the darkness, with a bottle in her hand, unsteady, swaying, shouting, weeping, then tipping forward into the chill water, her arms outspread, and in her heavy coat she was lost at once and the river carried her to the haunted pond they knew so well from their childhood—
The dock had largely disintegrated. A section of the planking had given way and the pilings were sticking up out of the water at wayward angles. So she must have been plunged into the river without warning and couldn’t claw free of the current. She’d have been carried swiftly away, so no, I was wrong, she didn’t give herself to the river, unless of course she’d wrecked the dock herself, to make it look as if—
No. No.
But if she
had
organized it to look like an accident it would have been typical of her, to be so considerate. I stood by the river for some time trying to think it through. What troubled me was this. The man she loves abandons her. He starts an affair with her sister. She discovers the affair. She confronts the sister. She drowns in the river soon after. What is the obvious
inference? Unless that wasn’t it. But I couldn’t believe it. It made no sense. Iris was resilient. She loved life. She had so much to give. She wanted to be a doctor.
Later Mildred told us they’d taken a boat out to look for her.
—Where did they find her?
—Hard Luck Charlie’s.
We drove to Poughkeepsie. The morgue was on Main Street. Dr. Friedrich met us there. Nothing could have prepared us. We were taken in a metal elevator to a large cold windowless room in the basement with fluorescent lighting and a wall of big steel drawers. It smelled bad down there. Constance at once clapped a handkerchief to her nose. A steel table with drainage gussets stood close to an industrial sink. Iris was naked on a metal gurney. She wasn’t swollen or discolored, she hadn’t been in the water long enough. She was pale. You’d have thought she was asleep but for the pallor.
We came away in a state of shock and distress. I didn’t know if Constance regarded me as her husband anymore, or even if her unhappiness was my responsibility. But I put my arm around her as we walked back to the car. She shook me off. Later, at the house, she sat in the kitchen with a cup of coffee and Iris’s cigarettes. Morgan appeared and was surprised to find her there. He asked her why she’d come. Constance called me in from the sitting room and then went out through the back door so I could do what I’d promised to do.
She stood staring down through the darkness to the boat-house and the dock. Time passed with excruciating slowness.
What was going on in there? Then she heard what sounded like the sudden cry of an animal in pain. But it wasn’t an animal, it was just an old man who’d been told that his child was dead. It was the most painful duty I’d ever had to perform.
In the morning I went back to the city. I needed to get home for Howard. I asked Constance if she was coming with me but she wanted to be near Iris, to commune with her in some manner I didn’t even attempt to understand. Her sister was gone but the house and the property were alive still with her presence, she said, and she wanted to breathe that air as long as it carried the faintest trace. She believed that Iris wanted her there. I think she also believed that Iris didn’t go in the river by accident. As for the old man, it wasn’t hard to be with him because he was broken. He sat in his chair in the kitchen abstracted and silent, uninterested in whatever was put in front of him or said to him. He couldn’t be alone for more than a minute or he began to panic. Before I left I talked to Mildred in the sitting room, out of his hearing.
—He’ll die if he doesn’t eat, she said.
—Mildred, I said, he’ll eat. Give him time. It’s a shock. He’s not strong now.
She nodded. She wanted reassurance.
—You think she did it on purpose?
—No, I said, I do not.
I learned later that Constance went down to the broken dock that night and told Iris she was sorry. It was a clear night and the river was quiet. She gazed out across the water and heard nothing but a distant train. Other than that there was silence. I don’t know what else she’d expected. There was nothing out
there. Iris wasn’t out there. It made no difference to anything, her saying she was sorry.
We buried her in the Rhinecliff cemetery next to her mother. The weather was clear and cold. Mildred got the doctor into his dark suit. He’d allowed himself to be led out to the funeral limousine, and a few minutes later into the church, where many more people showed up than we’d expected. Iris had touched a lot of lives, both here and in the city. I brought Howard up for the funeral. When he saw Constance, the boy grew shy. He couldn’t look at her. Mildred and Constance stayed close to the doctor and after the service they helped him to the graveside, one on each arm. He barely responded to the mourners who offered him their condolences. It’s a travesty of Nature, a father having to bury his child. Constance told me she wasn’t given the chance to bury her father, she didn’t even know what happened to his ashes. Mildred said they probably went in the river.
We were sitting in the kitchen afterward, exhausted by the events of the day. The old man was asleep upstairs. Constance asked me to come outside. She had something to tell me. She’d decided to stay on and look after him. Someone had to. Mildred couldn’t be expected to do it all. So I asked her if she felt she had to make amends, if she had to
atone.
It made her angry. No, she said, she didn’t have to atone for anything. Then why?
Someone has to
, she hissed, and I left it at that. I believe she felt she’d driven Iris to it. I wasn’t so sure. But whatever the truth of the matter, there was certainly enough she
should have
been guilty about, and I felt no obligation to lighten her load.