Rose snorted. “Seeing is believing.”
“We’ll go, maybe,” he said. “Maybe we’ll take Anne and all the kids and make an outing of it.”
“Of course, in the summer, my husband will be home,” Anne said quietly.
“It must be very hard on you, being separated from your husband. Physically, I mean. Of course, I don’t know if you and your husband have a very sexually passionate relationship.”
“I miss him very much,” Anne said. “Would you like to look at this book on Renoir while I’m fixing lunch?”
“Can I help?” Ed asked.
“You can open the wine.”
Ed followed her into the kitchen and closed the door. “She’s not embarrassing you, is she?” he asked.
“Oh, no,” Anne lied. “I think she’s doing very well.”
“She is. When you consider what she’s gone through. She had to learn to walk all over again; she couldn’t even dress herself. Still, she upsets most people; there aren’t many places we can go without me worrying she’ll get someone upset. But I knew you’d understand.”
“Of course, Ed. Everything’s just fine.”
“I knew it would be. I knew this was a place where we could all relax and have a good time. Not worry.” He gave Anne a hug that was over as soon as it began.
Laura came into the kitchen sullenly when Anne called her for lunch. She greeted Ed with the air of a headmistress ready to dismiss, at the slightest sign of infraction of the rules, the scholarship pupil reported to be of great promise. Anne tucked a napkin under Brian’s chin and kissed the top of his head. She pushed his chair into the table. She liked Brian for himself, liked him as much as any child she’d known, but he received, deflected, the tenderness she felt for the person of his father. That he was Ed’s child softened the boy’s lines, blurred him beautifully, as if he were a child in a picture or a story she had loved while she was still a child.
“What a nice boy you are, Brian,” she said. “I’m always so glad when you come to visit.”
He rolled his eyes to the top of his head so that his irises disappeared.
“I almost died having him,” said Rose. “I was fine before I got pregnant with him.”
“I made my mommy very sick,” he said to Anne. He spoke seriously, but he didn’t seem disturbed.
“No, Brian, that’s not right. Something in Mommy’s body made her sick. Like when you get a sore throat or a cold,” said Ed.
“You know, Anne, I’ll never be all right,” said Rose confidingly.
“You’re fine, Rose,” Anne said, taking her hand.
“No, I’m not. I know what it’s like to be like you. Pretty and happy and on top of things. I remember that.” She began to cry.
Ed gave her a handkerchief from his hip pocket. “Look at how much better you are than last year, Rose. We were afraid you’d never walk again.”
“It would be better if I died. That’s what you think. That’s what everybody thinks.” She began to sob audibly—choking, gasping sobs that whipped the air like a storm.
Laura put her hand flat on the table, as if she had only to move her hand to make the storm stop. “If the Lord wanted you to be dead, you’d be dead in the blink of an eye,” she said, looking stonily at Rose.
Anne felt shocked and frightened. It was a terrible thing to say; she was sorry for Ed, for Rose, that Laura had said it. But she felt frightened because some curtain had been opened, some thick veil removed. It was the first time she had ever heard Laura mention the word “God.” If Hélène hadn’t told her, if she hadn’t seen Laura reading her Bible every night, she might never have known that Laura was religious. It was a secret she guarded, like royal birth. Now it was open, now Anne must look, for she had given it to Anne, like a spy who purposely leaves crude clues to his identity.
Rose turned her head to Laura. She had stopped crying, a final, complete stop, as if she had no sense that she had just shed tears. “That’s what the priest says. He says I’m alive for a reason. You’re lucky to have a boy and a girl,” she said, turning pleasantly to Anne. “I was hoping little Brian would be a girl. I love the clothes. They’re so much fun to dress up. Like little dolls.”
Anne was so relieved that Laura hadn’t offended Rose that she began to feel light-headed. “Unless you have a little girl like Sarah,” she said, “who has to be tied down to have a dress put on her. My mother sends her beautiful dresses with smocking. They just hang in the closet. Sarah says they’re creepy. She likes jeans.”
Ed laughed. “Sarah’s always involved in some enterprise. She’s afraid dresses will slow her down.”
Anne looked lovingly at him. He understood her children. He appreciated them, not as genre pieces but as complicated people, just as she did. So few men did that.
“Eddie, let’s go home now. Lunch is finished and I want to take my nap.
“Will you stay for coffee?” Anne asked, the pot in her hand.
“I want to go now,” said Rose.
Ed picked Brian up and walked Rose to the living room, where he helped her with her coat. In seconds they were out the door.
“I’ll be back next week,” he said to Anne over his shoulder. “I have a rush job I can get done in a few days.”
Anne waved good-bye. Don’t leave my house. Come back quickly, she wanted to say. She walked into the kitchen. Laura had already cleared the table and was doing the dishes. The set of her back was grim.
“I’ve had an idea, Anne,” she said, keeping her eyes on the sink. “I’d like to give the house a good spring cleaning. Top to bottom. The basement. The attic. Turn the mattresses, wash the curtains, clean out the closets, straighten all the drawers, shampoo the rugs and furniture.”
“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” said Anne.
“But I want to. I enjoy it. It’s the time of year.”
“I was thinking that since the nice weather was coming you might want a few days off,” Anne said.
Some shelf dropped over Laura’s eyes, as if a shutter had been closed on a summer pavilion where the dancers still danced, the music went on, but to the outside there was a presentation of only darkness and a silence so severe it could be meant only as reproach.
“I thought it would be a good thing to clean the house,” she said, looking straight at Anne.
Anne felt as if the girl held a gun to her head. It was ridiculous, what she was feeling. Why should she refuse to have her house cleaned? There was no sense being absurd about it. If Laura wanted to clean the house, why not?
“All right, Laura,” she said. “That’s very nice of you.”
The next five days were beautiful, ideal for Laura’s purposes. Cool and fresh, the wind flew as if from the sea. On the clotheslines, the perfectly hung sheets snapped, the curtains billowed like sails, the house all day was redolent of polish and soap. Laura seemed, for the first time since Anne had known her, happy for a long, extended period. The vacant smile was gone; she wore, all day, the calm straightforward face of one in love with her vocation. She barely spoke, she left things on the table with crisp notes. Anne left the house early in the morning and did her work in the library. There was no quiet anywhere; doors banged, rugs were beaten, water gushed from faucets and was poured down drains, drawers slammed, windows were shot up like rockets and shot down like the gavel of a firm and certain judge.
Laura’s hand touched every object in the house. From the health food store she bought dried lavender, and at night she made the sewing machine whirr for hours of short spurts as she made sachets for every clothing drawer, for each shelf of the linen closet. She took out the wedding presents that were never used—the fondue set, the cocktail shaker—washed and dried and polished them and put them in some new, efficient place: in the cellar, in the steamer trunk Michael had from college. In the attic she opened the cartons of the children’s outgrown clothes. Anne had given away most of them, but she had saved some because she loved them, because they marked some season, some event of happiness. They kept the past in a shiny husk, like the shell of a nut. And now the husk was opened, now Anne had to say, “I want to keep this dress, this shirt, this pair of boots.” She had to justify to Laura—who looked judgingly at her, as if she were refraining from reminding her of the poor who needed clothing—her need to hold on to these objects to keep the past from flying away. So the past was no longer the dark contained thing it had been: now it was cracked; the inside, duller, chambered, never whole, was picked at and consumed. Anne put things back that Laura touched and questioned, but they were not the same. Even as she successfully rescued something, she felt that she might as well have given it away.
The house was cleaner now than it had ever been. How could she turn the girl out for this? Barbara told her every day how she envied her. The children weren’t disturbed. Peter was annoyed to find that something he had left out was put in some new place, but he had always been like that. Any change had always seemed to him an affectation. Sarah was swept up in the tremendous wave of energy: she dusted and polished with Laura, she ran up and down stairs, she interrupted her mother’s work to say, “Laura wants to know if we really need this, or if we can throw it out.”
Anne found it difficult to work. She couldn’t banish Laura’s peaceful, triumphant face, exhausted at the day’s end from righteous labor, to concentrate on Caroline’s paintings; she could not still the noise of tearing, casting down and casting out, the machines that roared and sucked, the objects placed down heavily, the bottles clanked together. And she was coming to the end of the letters and the journals. The last years of Caroline’s life were unhappy. She stopped to weep when she read Caroline’s letter to her dealer in New York:
You write and ask for something new. But you see, dear Frederick, there is nothing new, and will not be. It is all over. My eyes are gone; the cataract operation was botched, and I see well only in memory. And so, what now? People come and pay me homage, as if I were a statue. And my darling Jane is imprisoned by my state; she is my only joy, and knows it, so she does not leave me. I say I think she should, but if she did I would simply die. It is interesting, really, the people who become valuable when one’s senses give out. The foolish wife of a foolish landscape painter comes and sits, sews while she talks nonsense, brings her puppy. And I am grateful! I do not like this new emotion, gratitude, but it is better than the nullity that is my common lot. We dine out every night; and search for gardens. To taste, to smell seem miracles. But seeing was my life! My life is a useless old woman’s, worse than useless. For I steal life from Jane.
How she loved Jane, reading that letter, Jane, never patient, nursing an invalid, searching out gardens, restaurants. She wanted to see Jane. She longed for Jane’s wholeness and her sanity. Life now seemed to Anne made up of impossible situations: Michael, Ed, Laura; she felt, in trying to make sense of it all, as if she were trying to braid branches of thorns. But Jane had courage, she had that adorable detachment Ben had spoken of—“like an admiral walking the deck of a ship.” She had encountered dreadful things, in life and in herself, and had come through. Life brimmed in her. She never responded to it, as Anne felt herself doing now, with the conviction simply of her own fatigue that clung like the memory of illness and left her with the invalid’s incompetence. She wanted to see Jane; she wanted to be out of her house. So she contacted Ben and told him to set up an appointment with Jane and the gallery owners. It was earlier than she would have liked, but she had to be involved in something. She had to be away from her house.
On the bus down she felt sick and short of breath. I am an unjust person, she kept having to come back to herself to say. I am a person who hates. She knew that she could have gone through her whole life not having to say these things about herself if she hadn’t known Laura. And now Laura had touched every object in the house. It would never be free of her impress.
She thought of Ben and Caroline, how they inhabited a world of sense rather than of morals. “Is it beautiful, is it pleasurable, is it interesting?” These were the questions that came to them, not “Is it good, is it important, is it true?” She knew how Caroline would walk into a room, into a town. In Spain once, she had stayed in one small village for six weeks because she said the girls had faces the color of aloes. She wrote about meals as if they were operas, about a piece of cloth as if it were a book. Ben did the same thing: he spent evenings with dreadful empty people because they dressed well, served wine that was superb, had beautiful furniture. She didn’t understand this, it was an instinct she did not possess. Beauty couldn’t move her to action: when her heart filled and she shed skin after skin, she didn’t assume the experience was connected to the rest of life. She might choose to vacation in a small town because of its view of the mountains, but she couldn’t settle in if the natives seemed unhappy with her presence.
She thought of Ed Corcoran, whose life had so little in it of beauty or of pleasure. The worst thing in the world had happened to him, a cruel random fate, a nemesis. There would be no relief from it, and there could be no explanation. He was never free of it; like the Furies, it buzzed always near his head, and it was never silent. He was like the victim of tragedy, but unlike the spare heroes of the Greeks, Ed had to live on day to day, looking after things: the house, the children, medicines and doctors. He had always to worry about money; Rose’s illness had put them eighty thousand dollars into debt, he told her once. He couldn’t rest for a minute; he had to work to keep up with his payments, his children needed him, his wife at any time could thrash out at him like the wounded creature that she was, saying he didn’t love her, he didn’t care for the family, that one day when he wasn’t there she’d kill herself and kill the children too. Each day the path he’d cleared the day before grew up around him. And he hacked and cut the vines and branches without anger, without rancor, as if he had all the time in the world, as if it was all not less than what he had expected. Pressing her face against the green glass of the bus window, she thought what an extraordinary person he was. She’d never known anyone like him; he was one of the most admirable people she’d ever known.