As they rose to leave, Ben said, “I think we all agree that the selection of the paintings in private collections should be left entirely to Mrs. Foster. She is the best qualified of us to judge.”
“Of course,” said Charles. “Remarkable piece of research you’ve done. Just remarkable.”
“I guess you have a lot of free time in the country where you live. No distraction. Nothing to see, no other shows. No place to go. Just you and your children in that small, sweet town. It must be very peaceful,” said Cressida.
Was she trying to understand or deliberately misunderstanding? Anne felt she outweighed the girl by fifty pounds.
“Really great work you’ve done,” said Jill. “First-rate. Going to be a major show.”
“Thank you,” said Anne. She felt that they despised her.
In the cab on the way to her apartment Jane said, “That’s what I call a nasty piece of work, those four affected sillies.”
“They didn’t say a word about Caroline’s work,” said Anne, feeling close to tears. She felt they’d slighted Caroline; it was as if they’d slighted one of the children.
“They’re afraid to in front of you,” said Ben. “They don’t know anything, and they’re afraid to reveal themselves before an expert.”
“I see how you would frighten them,” said Anne.
“Not me, dear. You.”
“Me?”
“You know more about Caroline Watson than anybody in the world.”
Anne looked out the window. Afraid of her? No one in her life had been afraid of her.
“Where are the children?” Ben asked.
“In my apartment,” said Jane.
“Who’s looking after them?”
“Betty.”
“Betty the Basher?”
“Ben,” said Jane angrily. “You’re much too old to be puerile.”
“Giving her a second chance with Peter and Sarah, are you? Well, I suppose Peter’s old enough to look out for himself and his sister.”
“Of course he is,” said Jane haughtily. “When she hurt her children they were
much
smaller.”
“Hurt her children?” asked Anne with anxiety.
“She had a few unfortunate incidents at a time when she was mentally unstable. But she’s much better now. Anyone can see that.”
Alarmed, Anne sat up straighter. “Jane, did you leave my children with a child abuser?”
“You say the phrase, Anne, as if that were all there was to her identity. There is much more to her besides. She’s a brave person, with tremendous loyalty.”
“Besides, darling, Jane’s rehabilitating her. So we must all be part of the experiment.”
“Of course, I wouldn’t have done this if I weren’t quite sure she was trustworthy. I met her last year, when I was volunteering to teach people to read.”
“She can’t read?” Anne said, as if that made the woman more unreliable.
“Well, she can now. I’ve taught her. She’s had a most dreadful life. She got pregnant at sixteen. Her boyfriend married her, then joined the army, impregnating her twice more, then vanishing without a trace. Her mother was an alcoholic, her father half dead of emphysema. They told her they couldn’t help her anymore. Imagine, they simply said they were tired of helping her. She got on a bus with her children—three days she was on a bus with them. When she arrived in New York, she knew no one. She lived in a single room in the West forties and worked as a waitress in a donut shop. The one man she met who was kind to her left her eventually because he couldn’t stand being around her children. One day, after she’d picked up the children from a wretched day care center, her four-year-old, in a fit of temper, knocked over a gallon of milk. Before she knew what happened, she’d broken his arm. Well, she was absolutely undone by it. She called the child abuse center, and they set her up with a counselor. Her life’s infinitely better now, I’m sure she never beats children anymore. But her children are in foster homes now—if I told her she couldn’t take care of your children, it would be a terrible blow to her confidence.”
“Jane, you might have asked me first,” said Anne.
“Well, my dear, I knew you’d feel just as I do. We’re terribly alike; we could be mother and daughter.”
All Anne’s anger melted at the intimacy Jane implied. It was absurd, of course; she was nothing like Jane; she could live a hundred years and never would be. But it was an honor even to have Jane imagine it. She couldn’t say now what she wanted to say: How could you have put my children in danger? Child abuse was understandable; one could easily see why it happened all the time. In the three years when she had been home all day with the children, her own frustration had shocked her, the boredom that led to irritation at the smallest thing. But she thought of the flesh of her children, and the flesh of the woman who had abused her children took on the odor of contamination. You did not hurt your children. You kept them from harm. That was what you did in the world if you were a mother.
She ran up the stairs of Jane’s building. The children were sitting happily on the floor with Betty doing a jigsaw puzzle.
“We had a great time,” Sarah said.
Anne hugged them, dizzy with relief. Looking at Betty, she thought of Laura with gratitude. She was boring, she was irritating, but she was utterly dependable. However much she intruded on the peace of Anne’s inner life or, Anne thought unhappily, upon her own self-love, she never had to worry if her children were unsafe when they were with Laura.
The sky was zinc-colored that morning. Anne leaned her cheek against the windowpane; the cold glass reminded her how lucky she was to be indoors, it made her happy to get back to work. She heard Ed Corcoran working downstairs. He’d asked if he could bring his son Brian on days when something went wrong at home and his sister couldn’t baby-sit. Anne had been happy to say yes.
She thought of Ed’s wife whenever she watched Brian Corcoran sitting on the floor, playing seriously with his toys, out of his father’s way, but never allowing himself to move too far from the protective nimbus cast by his father’s body. How were children attached to their father’s bodies, where they had never lived, she wondered. Michael’s attachment to the children had always seemed so different from hers. When they were babies, she physically ached for them if she was away from them. At night before she went to sleep, she had to restrain herself from lifting them out of their cribs, she wanted so much to have them near her, to put her mouth against their cheeks, their hair. She knew their bodies better than Michael did, for she tended them more, and they had lived closer to her body. They had lived in the curves her body made while she nursed them; she had felt their small, primitive fingers tapping, running up her torso. Flesh of my flesh. Did it go for fathers too? She hadn’t thought so. Michael’s passion for the children was a remove farther from the body. There was a kind of nostalgia about it, as if in holding his children he was holding the child he wished he had been. He never saw himself as once the flesh that housed them; he didn’t see it as a miracle that they got through one whole day of their lives alone. This made it easy for him to give their natures a moral credit she always had to strain after.
But it was different for Brian Corcoran. Safety to him was his father. A mother’s safety was a bolster this poor child would never know. But was he a poor child? He seemed happy. Anne admired him; it didn’t seem inappropriate in his case to use the word “admire” for a three-year-old. He took part in the world of work. He was a serious person. She could never have left her children with as little attention as Ed left Brian when they were his age. He was happy with his father, but happy nowhere else. He played shyly for brief periods with Peter, who loved small children and was talented with them, but always his glance flicked nervously toward his father. She could see the child’s eyes lift with alarm when his father left the room, then drop down again in peace when he could see his father near him. She watched them eat their lunch together, heard Ed talking to his son as she talked to her children, but most men did not, familiarly with an element of gossip and confiding.
Ed Corcoran was very tall; six three, she guessed. It was a pleasure for her to stand near him; he made her feel—a thing she rarely felt with men—not oversized. She remembered Barbara’s flirtatious giggles over the blue pages of his estimate and realized she was attracted to Ed too. Were all the women he did work for secretly in love with him? Because he was a nice man, and there were so few nice men? Because they were alone in those big houses?
It was strange to her, this feeling of being attracted. She had felt it before, of course. It was a scintillating feeling, but always before, Anne had been stopped by the solid presence of her husband and the physical life of marriage.
Was she in danger, alone in the house with a man she found desirable? No, Ed Corcoran wasn’t the man she would betray her husband with. There would always be, in her coupling with Ed, something comic; they were both so large, so shy, so lacking in the ease of quick seduction. She would have to be taken over by someone, and Ed was much too nice for that. He would allow her hesitation, and in hesitating she would always choose fidelity. And what would they talk about? He was an electrician. Yet they seemed to have a lot to say. They talked about their children.
He asked if he could work some nights from ten to midnight. His children were in bed then and his wife asleep as well. If something went wrong, his older son, who was ten, could telephone him here. He asked her that after she had confessed that she worked till midnight. How could she refuse him? She had no inclination to. It was peaceful, knowing everyone in her house was asleep except the two of them, who stayed up working. Soldiers on watch, nurses in a battle hospital. At midnight she came down and offered him a cup of tea. So it had come to that: every night at midnight she drank tea with a man nothing like her husband. It was a good thing Michael was coming home soon. He would be there in ten days. But she was in no danger from Ed Corcoran. He would never make the first move. Largely, she supposed, for reasons of class. Still, she enjoyed talking to him every evening; she was sorry that that would stop. She would tell him that when her husband came home he would have to do his work during the day, as he did for everyone else.
Certainly, though, today she could ask him and his little boy to join her for lunch. There couldn’t possibly be anything wrong with that. But she wouldn’t allow herself to go downstairs and greet them yet. She made herself finish transcribing the passage in Caroline’s journal she was working on.
June 15, 1920
Arques-la-Bataille
So I am an “older painter.” A troop of trousered English girls arrive at the door, expecting lunch and the freest of accesses to my studio, to say nothing of my life. They imagine they are not vain, but they are as vain as courtesans about their trousers. How they horrify me; yet they are the culmination of all my dreams. If only I, at twenty, had been able to bicycle through the countryside with painting chums, visiting the studios of “older painters,” what could I not have done! Yet freedom has only coarsened them; they paint like demented children. If they distort a figure, they imagine they have understood Matisse. To them I am elderly, in long skirts, with thick ankles. And how the
demoiselles
can condescend: “Such attention to drapery,” “Such a finely modeled ear.” Dear God, that Stephen may not marry one of them. But he is much too fine for them. What they want in their hearts is a brute who’ll throw them down the stairs and sweat above them in a drunken stupor.
What an odd letter that was. It always pleased Anne to see Caroline display any fondness for Stephen; it made her feel she could relax her vigilance, he was not quite alone. But it made her sad to see Caroline so vindictive about the young women painters. Her response to them meant, of course, that she was beginning to get old. Why did it always happen, the rebellious young turned punitive in middle age? Perhaps, Anne thought, since she’d been conservative in youth, in age she’d be expansive, even radical. But now she was a woman with young children; she couldn’t possibly do anything remotely dangerous; anything dangerous she did would be dangerous to them. The whole shape of her life must be constructed to make her children safe. She couldn’t even have an affair with her electrician! Almost reluctantly, she went downstairs to invite Ed to lunch.
They were waiting for Michael in the airport. The plane was an hour late, and the children could hardly bear the excitement. She gave up trying to keep them close to her; she told them where their father would be coming out and said they mustn’t stray too far from that spot. Peter, who was nothing if not farsighted, had brought a month’s allowance with him, simply to squander. This made Sarah cry; she hadn’t brought any money, and Anne, pitying her exclusion from so sumptuous and meaningless a feast, gave her a two-dollar advance on her allowance. Then Peter was angry; he stamped his feet, accusing his mother of her perennial sin, injustice, saying if his sister had forgotten the money she should suffer. Suffer was the word he used, and it made Anne shiver. Sternly she said to him, “There’s enough suffering in this world.” Peter took her statement for an august utterance, and it chastened him into silence. He always liked, she knew, the runic generalization; it suggested to him that adults were opening the curtain, letting him into a truth he always knew was there but that they had kept from him. Sarah walked ahead of her brother, occasionally hopping. Money had bestowed its grace on her; she had no need of conversation.
Anne had asked Laura to stay home. She didn’t want her with the family for their first glimpse of Michael.
She knew that no one else was as bothered by Laura as she was. Barbara made fun of her, but Barbara made fun of everyone. Adrian had lunch with her, he took her to the movies. Did he sleep with her? She didn’t want to think about it. Jane disliked her, but Anne suspected Jane of snobbery, of class or of religion, she couldn’t be sure which. Anne was anxious to learn what Michael’s response to Laura would be. She depended upon him for justice. It wasn’t because he was a man; she didn’t believe men had born in them a greater capacity for justice. It was that Michael valued reason more than she did, and that justice in their lives was as real and valuable, solid and living to him, as it was vague, impalpable, to her. His justice had helped them again and again. His reasonableness, like a simple bridge, had carried them over nights of babies crying, through financial crisis, through the cruelties of friends, the failures of sex. If it were not for his justice, she wouldn’t have been able to have this year, to do her work.