Her Mother's Daughter (110 page)

He spoke just above a whisper, afraid to move the air. He told me. And in that instant I knew it all, saw it all.

Or did my sense of it impel me into making it happen the way it did?

Screenplay. Hollywood. Money. Fame.

I didn't move immediately to embrace him, sensing his need to be inviolable just then. I waited until my exclamation, the congratulations, the felicitations, all that was over, before I embraced him. But he wasn't there. His body eluded me. It was inside my arms, but he was not present in it, it was living on some other plane. Although a second later he hugged me back, he tried to hug me back, he tried to be present. But I knew.

How long? I wanted to know. I asked this with trepidation, not wanting him to perceive the ground of my fear. It wasn't separation from him I feared: he'd been gone from me for a long time. I was terrified I was going to lose Franny. But I didn't want him to know this, I didn't want to ruin his moment of exaltation by intimating that his leaving would not devastate me, nor to give him any more weapons than he already possessed. There is, after all, vengeance in every heart, and I knew he had never forgiven my betrayals. My guilt was weapon enough for him.

A couple of months, he thought. Not long. And he'd be making so much money, we could afford to pay someone to take care of Franny when I traveled.

I turned away so he could not see my face. I pretended to be looking for my cigarettes, I was looking for my cigarettes, but I couldn't find them because my eyes were blurred. He had told me what I was afraid to ask:
he was not going to take her with him.
This late child, this burden, this baby I had not raised completely as I had the others, this almost unwanted young life in the house: I could not have borne losing her.

I yelled enthusiastically, “I want to hear all about it! I just have to pee, I'll be right back!” And ran into the bathroom and blew my nose and washed my face with cold water and tried to calm down. He wasn't going to take her. I wasn't going to lose her.

When I came out, he was pouring champagne into two glasses, grinning, full of delight in himself. He was himself again, and I could hug him more spontaneously, and he could hug me then the same way, we could be children giggling in pleasure. And sit down across from each other in the breakfast nook, two people who love each other, or who live on the memory of having loved each other, and talk about plans and hopes and break in with congrats and self-congrats and all the excesses of elation, and smile at each other until we wore down into silence, only our hands clasped across the table. In the stillness I saw us as a photograph, framed by the window, the afternoon light tinged green by the shrubs beyond, our heads haloed with sun, the softening colors, yellow and red burnishing the trees in the garden, a portrait of something momentous, what is happening in this photograph? an arrangement mysterious, unreadable, opaque.

I was happy for him. It was the right fate for him, the right future, although I had not realized it before. I could see now it was what he had always really wanted. And why not? The austere dedication to art alone comes late, after the realization that the ability to make art is all one is going to be given; that the acclaim and the reward, the world-hand stretched out to receive what one knows one has to give are not contained within one's portion, that in the eyes of the world, except for ten or a hundred people, one is a failure. Who wouldn't want everything, if it were available?

The slight, beautiful, poignant book about his youth had cost him much and given him little beyond the satisfaction of making it. And I thought: drop your snobbery, Anastasia. You know by now what you never learned in school, that art is what nourishes, what feeds: art is food. The oversweetened or overspiced food that is most of popular culture makes a society sick, thin-blooded and vacant; but the wan delicate work of the self-engrossed nourishes not at all, is papery dry as communion wafers offered as body and blood. Maybe Toni's story would make a wonderful movie, maybe it was in its way art.

And maybe he did not have another book in him like the one he'd written. What could he write about the last nine years of his life that would not be received as a joke? A diary of a house husband, like accounts of housewifery, offering the tragicomedy of the quotidian in the self-deprecating humor of those who realize their insignificance? Could he lavish pathos on the last years of Pani's life? On learning to love someone else's children? On having, finally, his own baby? On what it is like to take care of them, every day, every day, what it costs, what is repaid, what it really feels like to hear a child scream in the middle of the night, or the other feeling that comes after they've been crying on and off all afternoon? Fear and rage and absolute love are matters for tragedy, but how could the man write tragedy with no prince or king, no sword or gun, no castle or palace but only someone wearing an apron with a diaper thrown over one shoulder, only the dailiest of scenes, the kitchen, the nursery?

In truth, it was no life for a man, the life he'd been living for the past nine years.

That's what I thought, sitting awake in the dark living room that night, Toni in the deep sleep of the drunk. He'll have a hangover tomorrow: champagne. Thought—and then caught myself. If it was no life for a man, then why was it an acceptable life for a woman? Everyone thought it was, even women. Not me, though, I'd always hated it. I'd evaded it, scrunched down along hedges, shimmying through sewer pipes, finding ways to avoid the main highway. But it was crazy, all mixed up, because partly I liked it. But wasn't everything like that? I loved my work and my worklife; I loved being away from home, traveling, photographing, meeting people, carousing, going to bed with whom I felt like, living “like a man.” But I hated it too, often—the tedium of travel, the anonymity of most hotels, the need to wind yourself up like a mechanical toy to meet new people, to converse, to impress, to act alive when you simply want to feel at rest. You can't feel at rest when you are traveling, even when you sleep. For that you need home, the kids, Toni, the contentment of tedious eternal recurrences.

No life for anyone, maybe, stuck in one or the other. And Toni deserved his chance, any chance. Still: a part of my heart petrified that day, even as I congratulated him and he congratulated himself, as we celebrated, as he crowed, pouring more champagne. As if I'd had a stroke and a part of me ceased to feel, stopped moving.

What I couldn't understand was
How could he do it?

I didn't say a word, I didn't show a thing on my face, I didn't question or challenge. Because if I did, he might feel guilty and decide to take her with him. And then I would die.

So
how could he do it?

I hadn't really wanted her, a child twelve years younger than my youngest, a baby when the older ones were almost grown. I hadn't had her fully voluntarily, I had had her as a gesture of love to Toni. For Toni.

She was his. But he could leave her.

How could he do it?

Oh, I know how he managed it on the surface—claiming he was going only for a few months, that he would be back by Easter, maybe even by Christmas if things went well. But how could he not know that he was lying? He even talked about it, explained that he'd thought of taking Franny with him, but had decided against it. She had just started first grade—he had walked her to school himself that first exciting day; in California he would have to find a place to live fast, maybe just a small apartment or even rooms somewhere, it would not be a home for her. And he would be gone all day every day, working at the studio, she would be left with strangers, she would be lonely, frightened, she would miss her sister and brother, her mother. It would be bad for her. I agreed. But still I wondered how he could stand the pain of the wrench of the unbearable loss of…and the even worse pain, the knowledge of her agony in losing him….

How could he pack his bag and load his car and drive off leaving her behind? She watched him pale-faced, in shock, her little six-year-old body stiff and aghast on the sidewalk, waving furiously even after his car had turned the corner. I knew he would never come back: did she? Did he?

Yes, Toni packed his J. Press suit, his silk shirts, some new Italian shoes and a new Brooks Brothers blazer and slacks with the best of his remaining clothes into the back of the Corvette: his plan was to drive to California and see the country. He made a point of the fact that he was leaving behind his old manual Royal, as if that were proof he planned to return. He took a thick envelope of photographs of all of us but mainly of Franny. I felt sure, although he didn't mention it, that he'd make a stop in Dayton, Ohio, to show off that Corvette and maybe the clothes. He left at the end of October, when the kids were supposed to be at school, but both of them came home for two days, to say good-bye, to hug him one last time. Arden cried, and even Billy had tears in his eyes at the parting, but Toni was hearty in his assurances that it was only for a couple of months, that he'd be back before they realized he was gone. They chose to believe him, or act as if they believed him, and they were used to separations, so they did not mourn. Except Franny, who had never before been without her father. Then Arden and Billy went back to school and Franny that night crept up to bed bereft in the deserted house.

So what I had to think about, that night in October one month before my fortieth birthday, the night I sat up in the cold living room smoking, thinking about long ago when I used to do that while Brad slept the sleep of the blessed, the dense, or the drunk, was what was I going to do? what was I going to do about Franny? With whom I would not willingly part. But whom I had unwillingly to care for.

I wasn't sure I wanted Toni back. Not that I didn't love him, not that we didn't have, together, a sweet intimacy and acceptance that kept us both warm. But I had broken his trust in me, and he had remained but withdrawn from me—I could feel his furious need to get out. I don't believe he doubted my love for him, no matter what my sexual habits. I don't believe my sexual habits even really bothered him. I think he felt that a real man, a man as men are supposed to be, would not accept such behavior from a wife. So the sight of me made him feel diminished, less of a man. And he already felt unmanly.

We live in a world that requires something other of men than that they raise a family and love a woman and write sensitive delicate prose in a small back room of the house. At the beginning, when he chose that course, he was still a boy and thrilled by his rebellion against the world of men: it made him feel strong. But whatever either of us might think or feel privately, we could not escape the world's judgment. As the world judged us, against our will, willy-nilly, we judged ourselves and each other. The world gets you. It got Brad, it got Toni, and through them, it got me.

It was time for Toni to move on. If he had not, his contempt for himself would have spilled over onto me and he'd hate me for his jailer. And I would in time—did I already?—feel contempt for him for passively accepting himself as a failure.

It seemed strange to me as I sat there, cold, a blanket draped over my shoulders, that neither of us had mentioned the possibility that we would remain together, he in California and I in New York, occasionally commuting across the country. Or that I could move to California. “It Never Entered My Mind”: I began to hum that song, always a favorite. No. It had reached its full organic growth, our union, and had to end. I had no right to quarrel with whatever he did, I had forfeited that right. He was young, unimpeded by children now, he would find a new woman—he had to have a woman—and make a new life.

My fortieth birthday came and went. Toni called and sent flowers. Billy called the following day—he'd forgotten under the pressure of a chemistry exam. Arden called a week later saying thanks for the sweater, but she was no longer celebrating her birthday, she was renouncing bourgeois occasions like that. She didn't mention mine.

Without realizing it, I settled into a permanent state of woundedness. Toni had phoned the night he left (from Dayton, and the bastard reversed the charges); then four days later, from someplace in Indiana, two days later from Wyoming, and two days after that from a hotel in Los Angeles. A week went by before he called to announce he'd found an apartment. After that he called every week, Sunday evenings. I will never forget the first Sunday he neglected to call. I let Franny stay up very late—she was so anxious, so sure something terrible had happened to him, that she was afraid to go to sleep. I put in a call to his apartment, but there was no answer. I let her sit on my lap and I turned on television to distract her. Around eleven, she finally fell asleep, her body heavy against mine, damp, sodden with sorrow.

Franny got in the habit of sleeping in my bed. I didn't have the heart to forbid it, but I worried about what would happen when I had to go away again. I ran ads in newspapers and interviewed people, but every woman—only women applied—seemed wrong. Franny nestled beside me on the couch when I interviewed them, and I could feel her reactions, feel her body tense or withdraw. I trusted her. The women were either puritanical, cranky, sloppy, mean, or unreliable. I worried.

Russ called me with an assignment to go to Belfast to do a photoessay on Bernadette Devlin, and I still had not hired a housekeeper. I asked my mother. She came. She and my father lived in my house for a week: he went to work as usual and she took care of Franny. Mother seemed really happy when I came back and an idea lighted in my head. But every time I spoke to her in the days after my return, she told me how tired she was after a week with a six-year-old, and I knew there was no hope even though having Franny with her would have made her happy. I kept looking for a housekeeper, and finally found a kindly responsible woman, Mrs. Czepiel (another Pole! It was amazing).

Franny turned my heart. She was so brave, so sweet. She'd apologize for waking me up by crying out in her nightmares. She was pale and seemed to be holding herself together by will. She had, after all, lost three people—her father, her brother, and her sister—in a space of two years. She grew inward, quiet. She had no friends. She sat at home and read, or played the piano. She was taking lessons. When I was away for more than three days, my mother would drive over one afternoon and take her back to their house for dinner and the evening, then drive her to school in the morning. She was very good when she was at Grandma Belle's house—angelic.