Because of Ben, she signed up that fall for a course on nineteenth-century French literature, where she met Michael. As soon as she knew she was in love with Michael, she began mentioning him in her letters to Ben. Two years later, when she married him, Ben sent them a Georgian silver teapot. It was by far the most valuable gift anyone had given them: she wanted to protect it from the toasters, the irons, the electric knives that sat on her mother’s dining room table, waiting for the ceremony, waiting to be of use.
She often wondered if Ben had been in love with her that summer. She understood now, though it had taken her many years to get over feeling grateful to him for his friendship, that she must have been a pleasing companion: she was pretty; she knew enough about painting that he didn’t always have to be explaining himself; she was cheerful, she laughed at his jokes. But they had seen each other every day; it was possible to say he was devoted. But had he been in love? Had he wanted to go to bed with her? Perhaps he was waiting for a sign from her, a sign, being the kind of twenty-year-old she had been, she could in no way have given. If she had been another kind, she would have been able to express her desire: she might have put her hand on his thigh under the dinner table, she might have closed the door to his office and taken off her blouse, she might have sent him—as a student of Michael’s had once done—a pair of her underpants in the mail. At the very least, she might have written him an explicit letter. Now, because she had been the kind of twenty-year-old she had been, she would never know.
She thought of Laura, who was not much more than twenty now.
“What do you and Laura talk about when you have coffee?” she asked Adrian. “I can hardly imagine a more unlikely combination.”
“There’s no such thing as Adrian being an unlikely combination with anything in a skirt,” Barbara said.
“There’s nothing like the bitchiness of approaching middle age,” Adrian said. “I think it’s got to do with a loss of estrogen.”
Anne looked around the table at her friends. She felt she hadn’t missed them. In a few weeks’ time, she had changed. Her generosity was less now, and her patience. She felt she barely had time now for these friends; she felt it was only as a favor to them that she sat there. Was she going to become one of those women who made impossible demands on everyone because they had too much to do? Perhaps what she had thought of in herself as good nature was only youth, leisure, the need to take and give affection because she lacked the work that could engage her heart.
She tried the front door of the house and found it locked. She had told Laura to lock the door if she was alone with the children, although she herself never did. She felt that she was safe in the house but Laura wasn’t. Was it because Laura was younger, a stranger, not connected to the house life by necessity or blood? Was it because Laura seemed to lack discrimination, that she might let in a killer disguised as a Bible salesman? Or, Anne wondered, was she making a point: this is my house; it is not yours.
As she sat in the living room, turning the pages of a magazine under a light too low for actual reading, she felt the luxury of Laura’s absence. She could not enjoy any of the rooms in her house if Laura was in them, and for the hundredth time she asked herself why. The girl had done nothing to earn dislike. She had been careful, punctual, dutiful. She had gone out of her way to make the children happy. Anne knew that it was her fault.
She sat back and looked at her living room in the insufficient light. Only rarely had she been alone in this room so late. The dark, uncut silence pleased her. The clock that had belonged to her grandmother said twelve-thirty. She was not tired. She touched the chairs, the lamps as she turned off the lights. Thank you, thank you, she said to her things, her furniture. They had soothed her, smoothed the scratches that the day had made, allowed her, in the silent hall, to think of walking into her study comforted, quieted, to turn the light above her desk on fearlessly, knowing the house would close around her and the children, sleeping.
In the packet of letters Ben had given her, there were three to Jane and Stephen from Caroline’s apartment in the Rue Jacob, where she had lived from 1920 to 1924. Anne read the first:
Dear Children:
I am worried you are not spending enough money, not eating well, that Jane, with her perverse Yankee pride, is spending her days stewing horsemeat on a gas ring when she ought to be in the library. Here is a cheque; buy yourselves some fruit, some flowers; pretend you are here in a civilized country, where one expects to eat well as one’s due as a human being. I wish Stephen had your health, Jane, which is mine. Of course the two of us could pull a wagon over the prairies after the horses gave out, but we can’t expect that of the rest of mortals.
This reminds me of a story that will amuse you, Jane. A very rich American whose husband’s fortune, I believe, was made in the rendering of lard (which explains his taste in wives) stopped by the studio with the view to adding one of mine to her collection. She saw nothing to suit her fastidious tastes; my mothers and children, she said, looked as if they didn’t like one another, and my fruit looked not quite fresh. She kept coming back to the picture of you in your black Worth suit. “Your model,” she said, “is unworthy of her clothes.” “Go on,” I said, “tell me what you mean. What do you make of the model?” “A peasant,” said Mrs. M. “Now, I know, Miss Watson, you go in for health and strength and all that, but it’s ridiculous to imagine a girl like that in such an elegant getup.” I was interested in letting her hang herself. “Not everyone,” I ventured, “has the same criterion of beauty.” “Yes, but this girl’s beauty is of the coarsest type,” said my guest. Only then did I tell her that the model was my daughter-in-law, that while she was posing she was reading Thucydides in the original, that she was Radcliffe College’s most brilliant student, that the only reason my son was able to win her from the hordes of young men of America’s first families who would have died for her hand was that he stole her from the cradle while the rest of them waited to make their move.
The months are slow until I see you. How do you bear it in that barbarous country, and especially the odious Boston which sits on its haunches like a great stuffed bear? But I have been told I do not understand the young. Jane, do not overwork. Perhaps you could pass some of your ambition to your husband. Stephen, are you still trying to paint? Give it up, it’s a mug’s game.
Anne put the letter down and thought of Stephen, of Caroline’s letters to Stephen in comparison to this one. Her letters to her son had been perfunctory and short. None of the pride, the private jokes, the motherly concern, she showered on Jane had come through when she wrote to her son.
Whenever Anne thought of Caroline’s treatment of Stephen she came upon a barrier between them that was as profound as one of language. She could speak of her feelings about her children in sentences they themselves might have formulated: they are the most important things in all the world, she could say; there is no one I care more for. Some deep encoded pattern drew her to her children and made her circle them: her body itself was a divide between them and the rest of the human world. She couldn’t imagine Peter or Sarah marrying anyone she would prefer to them, as Caroline had preferred Jane to Stephen.
You have done wrong, she always wanted to tell Caroline. Caroline, the ghost who had taken over her life, hovering, accepting worship. She had made Anne feel that veil after veil had been removed; seeing what Caroline had seen had made her feel she lived on the underside of a wave that furled and revealed treasures. But then she came upon a letter such as this one, which the woman she worshipped had written, in perfect cruelty, to her son. And she drew back, and the drawing back made her doubt everything she did. Only if she lived with Caroline as a beloved presence could she come close to her in understanding. To do justice to the dead required an intimacy in which justice had no part. So far away they were, and so removed: you needed to embrace them with the unquestioning love with which you embraced an infant. You needed to be always on their side.
And even as she wanted to tell Caroline, “You have done wrong,” an anger rose up in her as if the accusation had come from someone else. No one would have pored through a male artist’s letters to his children as she had through Caroline’s to Stephen. It was that Caroline was a woman and had a child and had created art; because the three could be connected in some grammar, it was as though the pressure to do so were one of logic. Then she wanted to defend Caroline from the accusation she herself had laid against her. What did it matter, she wanted to say to the shivering ghost whom she had left unsheltered. You were a great painter. You did what you had to do. Yet even as she shielded the ghost, she could not still the accusation: “You should not have let your child die young.” For as a mother, she felt it was the most important thing in the world. You did not hurt your children. You kept your children safe.
Stephen had died at twenty-eight, miserable, a failure. Yet Jane at seventy-eight was magnificent. The heat of Caroline Watson had come close to both of them, warming one of them, leaving the other ashes. Dead at twenty-eight, Stephen had left nothing. No, she thought, that wasn’t true. He’d left his wife and mother to themselves.
She had promised the children a walk in the woods. The morning flared, quick, solid, there was no gradualness to the sun’s progress. The sky was flame-blue after dawn, the light, hard-edged at seven, was at nine a sheet of pure and potent color. It was not possible to linger over breakfast, although it was Saturday and that was an established family luxury. Only action could satisfy; Anne no less than the children yearned to move through the exciting air.
Everyone but Laura had a knapsack. The children packed sandwiches and fruit in theirs, convinced of the seriousness of their charge as if they were bringing serum to a plague-infested town. Anne worried about Laura’s shoes. She had only sandals, and even with thick socks, they would not be protection enough for the walk with its muddy spots, jumping from stone to stone if the brook was high, tracking through the undergrowth. All through breakfast, Anne worried about Laura’s feet. She could see her sandals, her wool socks caked with mud, twigs and cockleburs sticking to them, poking through the cloth into the flesh. By the time she backed the car into the driveway she was convinced that they would have to stop and buy Laura a pair of hiking boots—she would need them for the winter anyway. And since the boots were a need that Anne perceived, a concern that Laura would not share (she was curiously impervious to her own physical comfort), Anne saw that she would have to pay for them.
She knew it would be frustrating to the children to delay, however briefly, beginning their walk, and so she told them they could have a dollar each to buy nuts at the health food store three doors down from the shoe shop. She, too, resented the delay, and she knew she would have to work particularly hard not to convey her resentment, not to rush Laura, or to make her feel in any way deficient. It was, after all, admirable to be as unencumbered as Laura was. Hadn’t Anne often lamented in herself her terrible attachment to things, her almost superstitious need to place herself in the world with heavy objects as if, without them, she might fly off into some unknown, identityless sky? Every year in the springtime, she tried to make herself give things away. Michael laughed at her agonies, her pitiful show of goods, culled after enormous labor, to give to the Salvation Army. She should admire this girl who was, after all, quite brave in the way she lived her life.
But Anne felt herself grow irritated as Laura tried on pair after pair of boots, unable to make a decision, not out of fastidiousness but because she was incapable of finding a basis upon which to choose one over the other. The children had fallen to fighting: they had spilled a bag of sunflower seeds on the floor amid the empty boxes and sheets of tissue paper that lay at Laura’s feet; the harassed clerk shot Anne a look of pure hatred, which Anne could only accept as just. Laura simply sat there smiling, taking shoes off, putting them on, as if someone had ordered her to kill as much time as possible so as not to arrive too early at a party. Anne felt she had to do something or they would be there all day.
“Don’t you think these are the best?” she said to Laura, pointing to a pair of boots that Laura had tried on more than some of the others.
“If that’s what you want, Anne,” said Laura, smiling a smile that Anne found, in the circumstances, incomprehensible.
Anger was an emotion Anne had rarely; when it came, she felt it in the way she felt a headache, a sensation unusual but not entirely unfamiliar, reported on enough by others so as not to be a shock. She picked the boots up quickly and walked with the clerk to the checkout counter. She had to get away from Laura quickly, so that she wouldn’t say what she wanted to say, “This is a favor to
you.
I am doing
you
a kindness. I get nothing out of this. I’m giving you my time, my money, for your comfort. How dare you suggest that you’re accommodating
me
.” She rubbed her forehead, as if she could rid herself of these thoughts by massage. Blindly, she signed the charge slip, not taking in the amount on the bottom line.
The children tumbled out of the car like colorful birds. They had forgotten their bad temper; they ran ahead of Anne and Laura, looking for a spot where they could have their lunch. Seeing them ahead of her, Peter slowing himself down so Sarah could keep up, she felt love rise in her like mercury. What nice children she had! She could take no credit; they were born with their natures, and their natures were fortunate. That Peter might find life arduous, that Sarah might grow stubborn or vague with age, did nothing to disturb a truth that was lovely: her children were people that she liked. She thought of Stephen Watson, whose existence was a reminder to his mother of the cheat of her sex.
Walking beside Laura, she watched her looking up at the sky as if she had been told she ought to see something there. Perhaps it was part of her religious life; perhaps she thought of the sky as the home of God. Clearly, the girl had no home. She carried her homelessness about with her, an almost ignorable congenital disease, a slight deformation of the spine. That was why she had so much trouble buying the shoes: no one had asked her preference, given her the leisure of her own taste, her own choice. Guiltily, Anne put her hand on Laura’s shoulder.