In Search of Love and Beauty (11 page)

Marietta used to like coming home from school at this time because she knew Louise would always be there. She adored her mother. Louise was a tall woman, but for Marietta she had absolutely mythological proportions: in fact, when she learned about Juno, Minerva, Ceres, all those goddesses,
it was always Louise she saw in her mind. Louise had a firm tread and a ringing voice, so when she was home, she filled that apartment, big as it was. And she always had plans, she always knew what to do, and Bruno and Marietta followed. When she felt like hugging them, they stood still and smiled while she squeezed them with all her might. They tiptoed around her when she wept; and when she raised her head and wiped her eyes and said “Let's go and see the tapestries at the Metropolitan,” they fetched her hat and coat and put them on her and then got ready themselves as fast as they could. Even at her most miserable—and this she was during these weeks—she might at any moment sit down at the grand piano which she couldn't play and bang out enormous chords and sing arias, out of tune but as if she were the greatest diva in the world.

During this period of compulsory Disappearance from Sight, Louise realized that it wasn't her work with the group that she missed but only Leo himself; and that it was her attachment to him which was the cause of the imperfections she had to struggle against. Helped by Bruno and Marietta, she did struggle, and felt herself becoming calmer and happier. When members of the group began to phone her to ask whether she felt ready to rejoin them, she was short with them; and when they tried to argue, she slammed down the phone.

However, when one afternoon Leo rang the bell of her apartment in his unmistakable way—in a series of short buzzes like electric shocks—she realized she had been waiting for him. Also, that she had long ago decided what to do. She went to the door and called to him: “Go away—I'm through,” He went on buzzing.

Afraid that he would disturb Bruno's afternoon nap, she opened the door a few inches; only to have Leo push from the other side till he got in. He walked straight into the salon
while she followed him, protesting. He said, “These are for you”—presenting her, for the first and last time in their life together, with a bouquet of flowers.

“Leo, it's no use talking: I'm not coming back to your group.”

“I don't want you for the group. I want you for myself. You'd better put those in water, I paid good money for them.”

She was glad of something to do and when she returned with the vase, she kept her back to him while she arranged the flowers. She was in a storm of emotion—but at the same time she felt like laughing because his bouquet, which was very thin and straggly, looked so incongruous in the tall cloisonné vase in which she was arranging it. He came up behind her and pressed her closer against the table where she stood. He murmured down the back of her neck: “I've missed you.”

“No, Leo, leave me alone. Let it end now.”

“You're warm like a bed with a woman in it. What a relief after Regi.”

“Go away, Leo. Please.”

Stepping back to release her, he said, “On one condition.”

“What?” She turned around to look at him.

“Here,” he said, indicating his lips for her to kiss; so she turned back again to the flowers. After a moment's silence, she said, “Wherever did you get them? They're half dead.”

“Oh, really? Cheated again. Turn around.”

“No.”

So he came close again and began to tickle her. She screamed, as he knew she would; she was terribly ticklish. She gasped, “Bruno's asleep—no, Leo, stop. You—must—stop.”

He retreated, but when she turned to look, there he stood with his finger pointing to his lips again.

“No,” she said.

He crooked the fingers of both hands and wiggled them at her in a tickling motion so that she screamed before he even touched her.

“You'll wake Bruno,” he warned; and again pointed to his mouth.

She felt she had no choice—she had to go to him and press her lips where he indicated; and as soon as she did so, he grasped her tight, and she groaned; though before going under, she murmured, as if to save herself by deprecation, “It's only physical, that's all it is.” “Oh, yes,
only,
” he murmured back.

So it was that, when Marietta returned from school a few hours later, she found Leo there again. He was on the sofa with one arm laid along the back of it and his legs stretched out before him. His thighs bulged in English pinstripe; he wore silk socks with clocks on them, and white and tan shoes. He was holding forth about something or other, and Bruno was nodding in his polite way and also throwing in little affirmative comments to show he was listening attentively; and Louise was standing near the sofa with her hands clasped before her and her eyes fixed on Leo sprawled there. She didn't even see Marietta come in—not till Leo turned his head; and Leo looked at Marietta in the way he had that always made her wish her skirt were longer or her legs less long and bare. And he greeted her—again in his usual way, as though they were the same age. Marietta didn't answer, she went straight across the carpet and stood by her father's armchair. Bruno put his arm around her and told her to curtsy—he always told her to curtsy when there were visitors, automatically using the exact same German phrase and intonation he had heard his mother use with his sisters. He kept his arm around her and continued to make polite listening sounds to Leo, apparently unaware of how stiffly Marietta held herself within his embrace, or how she glared across at Leo. Louise didn't seem to notice either—only Leo did, and he
smiled at it. He went on talking to Bruno and Louise, but the smile on his full red moist lips was for Marietta.

There was something enchanting about Marietta as she grew up. She was light and very stylish, and her movements were graceful in an entirely unselfconscious way. Everything about her was unselfconscious: because she really didn't think about herself but about higher, abstract things; about ideas, in the platonic sense. When she wanted to be a dancer—that was her first ideal—it was not for personal ambition, not even for personal expression: it was to forge herself into an instrument, or to contribute herself as a medium, through which everything that was beautiful could pass.

She believed of course in love, but had not much time for men. That aspect of love was for her embodied in Leo and was detestable. When she married, her husband Tim was predictably as different from Leo as anyone could be. Less predictably—for she loved her parents—his ancestry and background were far removed from her own. But perhaps this was a need of her nature, the same need that afterward drove her to India to immerse herself in different forms of life and enthuse over different expressions of it; to glory in variety.

When she was first married, Marietta loved to accompany Tim on visits to his family in the country. She read everything she could about the land and its history, reaching back to the time when the Indians had owned it, and its first Dutch and British settlers, and all the families, including Tim's, whose names recurred over and over on the gravestones in the two cemeteries. At that time, what was later the house Mark wanted to buy (the burned house) belonged to someone very rich connected with films who used to give big weekend parties. Tim's family did not attend these parties and always referred to the place as the Van Kuypen house, as though Van Kuypens were still living there. In fact, they had lived there for hardly two generations. The first Van Kuypen,
a hosiery manufacturer as well as landowner and influential politician, had built it for himself during the early years of the nineteenth century. When he died, the property as well as the hosiery business were both flourishing, but within a decade his sons, who lacked his ability to make money but surpassed him in spending it, had run both into the ground. By the time the grandsons came of age, the house had passed into the possession of another local manufacturer and potentate—the owner of a sawmill—but his family repeated the history of the Van Kuypens, and the taste for pleasure exceeding that for business, had to sell off within another generation. All this time Tim's family were industrious tenant farmers leasing their land from whoever owned the Van Kuypen estate. While the landlords went down, the tenants went up. They became judges, bankers, one senator, one of the wives an ardent abolitionist. Toward the last quarter of the century they themselves acquired the Van Kuypen house and land: but that was their high-water mark from which they receded after another generation, for the same reasons as the previous landlords—that is, the sons proving more sophisticated and less industrious than the fathers. They had retained their former farmhouse, and it was here that they remained when the mansion swam all too soon out of their possession; and it was here in this commodious, converted farmhouse—where no evidence was left of the family's farming activities but only of their sophisticated city living—that Tim's mother lived with her two daughters at the time of Marietta's marriage.

After the first few months Marietta ceased to enjoy her visits there. Each member of the household except her appeared to be totally engrossed and enclosed in a separate pursuit. There was Tim in his chair in the front parlor, with a glass and decanter beside him, his legs crossed and swinging one foot as he listened to his favorite records on his phonograph. His mother spent the day in endless domestic activity, polishing the silver, bottling fruit from the garden, sorting out
her linen closet. The older sister, Mary, tramped around the yard in rubber boots, deciding which trees needed pruning and which spraying; or she would roar off in the ancient family pickup and return with some old door or mantel to lug off and store in the barn. The younger sister, Evie, went for long walks by herself, sometimes stooping to pick up a fallen leaf to take home and press in her book of poems or memoirs. If the three of them happened to encounter one another around the house, they never failed to exchange a friendly comment, even though for the most part each was too preoccupied to hear the other.

They met at dinner, a formal meal in the dining room for which the three women changed from their old skirts and cardigans into dowdy frocks. They were tall women with big limbs and sagging bosoms; they looked alike and also had the same ringing voices speaking in accents that were more English than American except for certain characteristic flat and elongated vowel sounds. And indeed they all, including Tim, seemed very English—but English of a bygone age, even of the eighteenth century, when women were mannish and eccentric, and men, pretty as girls, dissipated themselves into an early grave. Marietta could find no place for herself in this family group. Nothing was more boring to her than the conversation around that dining table—except perhaps the food. She was accustomed to Louise's lavish meals, and it was extraordinary to her how sparsely they ate and how satisfied they seemed to be with this economical fare. “Hm,
good,
Mother,” Mary would comment, chewing on the tough meat and vegetables boiled long in water; whereupon the mother expatiated on how much she had paid for what they were eating, and from there generally on the high prices everyone charged, and from there on every prosaic triviality that came into her head. No one else talked much, but she talked ceaselessly.

Later it occurred to Marietta that she was doing it to
keep up the appearance of a solid family at dinner around that solid table laid with the family china and silver, and the portraits of ancestors—the senator, the abolitionist—looking down at them from the walls. Tim was already quite drunk by the time they sat down to dinner; and as the meal progressed, and he filled and refilled his glass with the wine which was much better than the food, he became cross-eyed and disheveled to the point of disintegration. But he continued to sit bolt upright and to smile without cease like a well-bred dinner guest. If he mumbled something, his mother immediately answered him as though it made perfect sense. In the same way, if Evie acted strangely, or even if—as sometimes happened, quite suddenly and unexpectedly—she threw a tantrum, the mother would handle that too as though it were something entirely ordinary that went on every day of the week at every dinner table around the land.

One night Marietta ran away from the house. She had had to help Tim undress and go to bed, and afterward she couldn't bear to lie next to him. She felt trapped with him in their bedroom—narrow and sloping like all the upstairs rooms and too small for the furniture in it: the high mahogany four-poster, the carved chest-on-chest, a walnut armoire that had a strange smell in it as of dead people's clothes. She sat by the window and looked out over the landscape: the fine tall trees, the handsome houses separated from one another by respectful acres, in the distance the Episcopal church with Tim's ancestors in its graveyard. It was all as alien to her as this room with Tim slumped on the bed; so that suddenly she jumped up and, not even bothering to pack her clothes, she went downstairs and let herself out the front door. She got in her car and drove straight to New York, not stopping till she came to her parents' apartment where she went up in the elevator and rang the bell, once, twice, and when she heard Louise come out of the bedroom, she called softly, “It's me”—shutting her eyes with relief and impatience as she waited for
her mother to unlock and unbolt the door. She didn't know it yet, but she was already pregnant with Mark.

Marietta had a tendency, which got worse as she got older, to brood. She lay awake at night doing it, and it continued all day and washed like turgid water through all her activities. She was good at what she did—dealing with buyers and manufacturers, attending fashion shows and business lunches—but she wasn't engrossed by it. It was all just a skill she had, a sleight of hand, like her social manner which was charming and serviceable but had really nothing to do with her. By nature she was solitary, and most of her evenings were, in fact, spent alone. She didn't feel like talking to anyone, except that there was usually something very urgent she had to say to her son. Often Mark wasn't home, but she didn't leave any message on his recording machine, she only hung up in disappointment. Occasionally, another man answered and then she would hurriedly say “Tell him his mother called,” mumbling somewhat in embarrassment. Once or twice she said nothing but hung up like a secret caller.