“I love taking care of the children. They’re wonderful.” She said that because she knew that was what Anne’s mother wanted her to say.
“I suppose I never had the talent for it,” Anne’s mother said. “I would get very bored. Neither of my daughters takes after me in that. They’re both more domestic than I ever was. I guess every generation of daughters has to reinvent family life.”
Laura didn’t know what she meant. She smiled, because the mother wanted her to smile.
“Anne was lucky to get you,” said the mother. “But then, Anne’s always been lucky. Not like poor Beth.” “Poor Beth” meant the mother loved Beth only.
“What will you do when you’re finished with this job?” the mother asked.
They all asked that, not knowing. I will never be finished. I will be with your daughter through eternity.
“Something will turn up,” she said.
“I admire people of your generation who aren’t burdened with anxieties about the future. Perhaps it’s your faith. Anne says you’re interested in religion. My daughter Beth is the religious one in our family. Some mix of Buddhism and Transcendentalism with a drop of pantheism, from what I understand. I don’t think Anne’s thought about it much, one way or the other. They were both brought up quite irreligiously. I went to convent school for twelve years and had all I could take. Perhaps that was rash.”
Anne will abide in the Spirit. She will be taken up, consumed in a garment of shining flames.
“I don’t know what she tells the children about God,” the mother said.
“She tells them God is love,” said Laura, smiling.
“True enough and vague enough, I guess, not to give them any trouble later.”
They are safe with me. Together we will all be carried up. I will lift up Anne and her children. You will never hurt them; you will never touch them. Stay with your other daughter, whom you love.
The sister said, “I suppose my sister’s quite the taskmaster with her Mrs. Dalloway fantasy that you have to bring to life. Only, now she thinks she’s Mrs. Dalloway and Virginia Woolf rolled into one. Very handy, with you to pick up the pieces.”
Laura didn’t know what they meant, what the words said. Except the words were saying, “I have always hated my sister.” I will save you from this hate, she said to Anne in her heart. I will lead you to the Spirit, where there is no hate or sorrow.
And the father did not love her either. Did not say to the sister, the mother, “Do not hurt my child.” Stood by, gaping, laughing, while they made a fool of him. Took the other daughter’s side, said it was she who was important. Said to Anne (the murmur underneath the words), “I will always desert you. I will always leave you alone.”
I will save you, Anne. Only in the Lord is safety, Laura was saying in her heart as Anne stood in the center of her parents’ living room alone. When her father said, “If this planet survives, it’s because of the energy and responsibility of people like you.” Meaning, I do not love Anne, my daughter. See, I leave her alone in the center of the room. See, I cause her tears to flow. Should she fall to the floor from the weight of her sorrow I would do nothing for her. Should they all surround her, trying with their hands to kill her, I would stand and watch them.
Anne could hear her father saying that, Laura knew she could. Could hear the murmur underneath the words. Why couldn’t she hear the words of Laura’s heart to her heart: I, only I, can lead you into safety. She could not hear those words that day because her husband was there, her children. Because she looked out at the white sun in the clouds. The white sun in the clouds was not her safety. Or the strength of her husband’s arms. Or the sweetness of her children’s bodies. That was the error that Anne lived by that the Lord would teach her in the proper time. The day was coming when Anne would know herself alone, unsheltered, and would turn to Laura, who would lead her to the Lord.
S
ARAH’S CHRISTMAS DANCE RECITAL
had been canceled because of snow; it was rescheduled for January sixth. The cancellation had caused in her that dark, late-morning storm of despair that children can’t know is merely disappointment. Early on in motherhood, Anne had learned the truth of children’s moods: postponement, as an idea, meant nothing to them; the future stretched ahead like death. Empiricists to the bone, faith was to them unimaginable. What was not present wasn’t possible.
On that day three weeks before, Anne had watched her daughter suffer, knowing the suffering would lift, but that while it hovered, there was nothing she could do. She offered her diversions, feeling even as she did that she insulted Sarah’s grief. Sarah sat at the kitchen table crying. Peter, who couldn’t bear to see her unhappy even when he had worked to make her so, kept popping in and out of the room with toys, books, card tricks, jokes. His desperation only burdened Sarah further; she had her own unhappiness to deal with, she could not bear his sense of failure. Wearily, she put her head in her mother’s lap, a shipwrecked survivor holding for a moment to a soggy plank. Anne felt her breathe deeply. “Oh, well,” she said, “at least Daddy will be able to see it now.”
The weeks passed, and Anne had forgotten about the recital until January second, when she met one of the other mothers at a party. Sarah was in a dance class called pre-ballet, for girls aged five to seven. She had wanted to join it because her best friend, Margaret, was in it. Ambivalently, Anne had agreed. The ballet school daunted her. It was run by a woman, Terri Blake, who at forty-five had a better figure than anyone Anne knew at seventeen. She walked around her studio in leotards. To receive checks she put around her a silk wrap skirt. She wore her hair pulled tight on the top of her head so that her eyes, ringed heavily with liner, looked a bit Chinese. A whole cadre of mothers paid her homage with a sycophantic devotion born of their sense of the inadequacy of their own slow bodies. Gratefully, these women sewed costumes, painted posters, passed out leaflets, printed tickets, raised money through bake sales and raffles, so that Terri Blake could save their daughters from the fate of their mothers’ lives. Anne was glad that she had the excuse of her work not to participate, even though it was well known that the best parts were given to the daughters of mothers who “cooperated.”
Anne could see that Terri didn’t like to teach younger children, but pre-ballet was her most profitable class. She had had ambitions as a ballet dancer. She had had a short and vaguely unsuccessful career in New York. She drove her talented older students mercilessly, determined that some of them would make it into a company. How could she enjoy the clumsy, boneless bodies of the five-year-olds, their simple portrayals of angels and snowflakes, when what she wanted was to put her older dancers through her adaptations of Jerome Robbins’ later works? Still, she worked hard with the little girls on “Angels and Snowflakes” to “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.” And the children adored her, for some reason Anne couldn’t understand. She had learned that it was quite impossible to predict the adults that her children would be drawn to.
Anne loved children’s performances if her children weren’t performing, but when Peter or Sarah was involved, she was in agony. As the curtain went up on Sarah’s number and she heard the first notes of “The Sugar Plum Fairy,” she gripped Michael’s hand in terror. Every time she touched him now, she wondered if the other woman touched him in that way. He smiled at her, patting her other hand. “Sarah will be fine,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
Six little girls dressed as snowflakes knelt in the middle of the stage, their noses to their knees. They were supposed to be sleeping. The angels came onstage. Sarah was the smallest of them, and the last. Her wings were much too big for her, and she looked not magical but comic. Her body was implacably earthbound; her halo sat on her head like a helmet. When she came to the middle of the stage to touch her snowflake with her magic wand, sprinkling her with spangles, she tripped and fell. Overbalanced by her wings, she couldn’t get up. Everyone onstage giggled, and the audience began to laugh. The little girls froze into their positions as the music ticked away. Suddenly Terri Blake lunged onto the stage and picked Sarah up roughly by the arm. The audience applauded. The music had stopped, but the dance was only half over. Taking her bow, Sarah was shaking with sobs. The great applause only made her cry more.
Let the theater blow up, let us all be buried alive in tons of rubble, Anne prayed, crying in her seat. The audience went on laughing and clapping. Sarah couldn’t get hold of herself. The more she sobbed, the more the audience clapped. Finally, the curtain was pulled roughly down.
Anne got up to go backstage.
“Stay here a minute,” Michael said. “Don’t let Sarah see you crying. I’ll go. You come later.”
He got out of his seat and disappeared into the darkness. On the stage was a young boy in a skeleton costume dancing to Saint-Saens. Anne couldn’t stop crying. She was glad that Peter, who had come later than they, was sitting with the Greenspans. Her child had been exposed. People had laughed at her. It was Sarah’s first experience in humiliation, and Anne felt the sting in her own body. But she must go to Sarah; it was Sarah who was important. She got out of her seat and walked backstage.
Sarah was on her father’s lap; he was wiping her eyes with his handkerchief. She had taken off her wings but not her halo. Michael smoothed her hair. They were both silent. Sarah still cried, but the shame was gone. She had her head on her father’s shoulder and they sat on in silence.
“Let’s go home,” said Michael. Anne put on Sarah’s coat. The three of them walked out into the cold, bright afternoon, like Union soldiers coming home from Shiloh.
They were driving to Jane’s. The trees, covered with icicles, shone unnaturally in the brilliant sun. The snow, which had melted, then re-hardened, glistened on the surface, the freezing air enlivened the plain slab of hard blue sky and even the most undistinguished shrub was interesting. Anne loved winter with its forced speed of the blood, since she saw herself as naturally indolent. At the center of her being she perceived a sleepiness, a torpor, a passivity, that in a climate always warm she knew would take her over, once and for all. She thought it was this passivity that had brought her to the decision to give up the hard thing she’d been cherishing, suspicion of her husband and the isolation it had forced her into. Simply, she couldn’t bear it anymore. She felt, when she breathed in or walked too quickly, a sense of wounding. But had she inflicted the wound herself, or had it been inflicted by her husband? She would never know. And what she had decided, seeing Michael with Sarah on the day of the recital, was that it was better that way. If she asked him, something real with solidity and mass would grow up between them. Better a vapor, which allowed at least the possibility that one of them could keep his honor. It was the way she wanted it to be; perhaps it was all she had courage for. She had done one courageous thing, had lived without him, had stayed at home to live a separate life while he went away. Why had she imagined that nothing would be risked and nothing lost in the arrangement? It was what her generation always did, expected everything and was always shocked, like children, when something had to be given up.
There was no model for her to consult. Of course she knew that there were marriages where infidelity was practiced and concealed, but what was missing there was intimacy: they were couples contracted to each other for some reason having to do with the outside world. And the marriages where everything was dragged out, discussed, where neither partner was allowed a private life, where any unshared thought was seen as a betrayal, lacked, in Anne’s mind, the dignity and the respect that she thought marriage called for and ought to bring forth. To know a person, to need him yet to leave him occasionally alone: this is what, she felt, they’d both believed in as the ideal for their marriage. It was what had made them able to agree to keep infidelities to themselves. So perhaps that was how Michael had acted. He was more consistent than she, and more stalwart. Perhaps he kept silence about what he had done to honor the ideal of their marriage. Perhaps he suffered now, knowing she had removed herself, but knowing that if he spoke he could only do damage to their idea of what they were. Sitting beside him, she felt infinitely sorry for both of them. Their position was so fragile and so tentative. Their absence from each other required that they live in an economy of scarcity, and scarcity took its toll. There they were, she and Michael, married, parents, living apart from each other, at the end of the twentieth century. Their marriage had no historical or social and certainly no religious significance. If it broke up, it was only a private misfortune, and not a rare one. It wouldn’t even be the worst thing; any bad thing that happened to the children would be much, much worse.
She thought of Caroline and even Jane and how different life was for them. The shape of things had meaning; they expected things to last. What would Caroline have done had she suspected infidelity? Perhaps it wouldn’t have bothered her, perhaps she thought it was simply the nature of things, of men. Or would she have indulged in some operatic accusing scene, which left after it the great blank peace of reconciliation?
Anne knew nothing of Caroline’s sexual history; she never spoke about sex or even romantic love in her journals. Was it because she thought it unimportant, or too important to commit to writing? She’d never mentioned anyone who might have been Stephen’s father. Neither Jane nor Ben had a clue. For all anyone knew, Caroline might have been ravished one night in an alley; or might have secretly been carrying on, for years, a liaison with her dearest friend. She kept her secret to the end, and her keeping it meant that she thought it was either of no importance or of the greatest. But whatever she thought, she’d acted, as she so often had, clearly, consistently, and with great force. Would she have despised Anne for being equivocal? Would Jane? But then, neither of them was really married. Jane was wedded, really, not to her husband but to his mother.
She tried to predict Jane’s response to Michael, but she couldn’t fix on one that would please her. She wondered if most wives wanted the people they admired to believe that their husbands weren’t good enough for them, the implication being that no one was. She supposed she didn’t actually want that. What she did want was for Jane to like her best. What a child I’ve turned into, she thought. But Jane’s regard for her was like a brilliant shield in which she saw herself enlarged and noble. She didn’t want to see the image of herself diminishing to a well-drawn miniature of the perfect couple, decorative and minor.