Secrets & Surprises (11 page)

She said nothing, wanting to look at the ballerina again, but not wanting to shut him out, either.

“That was quite a scene back in Rye, New York: my father always pretending to be happy when the Yankees had home games, my mother always pretending excitement about the different shows at the galleries in Manhattan, the dog probably pretending she enjoyed playing tug of war with the stick.”

She said nothing. She was wondering if she could have been wrong—if he might have not liked roller-skating.

“It’s freaky,” he said. “That I’d end up taking a dive into the table of Horace Cragen’s daughter.”

She hated being spoken of as Horace Cragen’s child. Her image of her father, which was always in the back of her mind when she was not actually thinking of him, dimmed a little. She moved her head to get the picture back: her father, in his baggy slacks and cardigan, smiling down at her, poised on the edge of her bed with his large hands turning the pages of a book as delicately as if the paper were feathers.

Her eyes came to rest on the sculpture.

“You like it,” he said, looking at her looking at it, “because you were an aspiring ballerina when you were little. Right?”

“No,” she said. “I never took dancing lessons.”

“What did you do? You didn’t have a treehouse and play touch football, did you?”

She laughed at the notion. No—her father had always seen to it that she wore a ribbon in her hair and that she was a feminine little girl; if she had taken dancing lessons, she would have been like the statue. But she told him that she had taken lessons in nothing. She had belonged to the Brownies, until she got sick of it, but you could not really call that taking lessons.

“Then tell me what you did,” he said.

“Oh—I didn’t do so much. I was very shy when I was a child. I stayed home a lot of the time.” She smiled at him. He continued to look at her, not challenging, but interested: he wanted more. “I went sleigh-riding in the winter and I roller-skated a lot—sometimes at roller rinks. My father and I used to play tennis.”

“But you weren’t a little ballerina, huh?”

“No,” she said.

“They made me go to dancing class. Ballroom dancing. Can you imagine that? They wanted me to be a proper gentleman. My father always used to wear a jacket to dinner. He even painted in an old paint-smeared corduroy jacket. We went to the ball game and I’d wear my baseball cap and he’d sit beside me in his sport coat, with one of those porkpie hats on. It used to embarrass the hell out of me. He must have been embarrassed, too, to have been so handsome and to have such an ordinary-looking son. What he wore looked stylish, and whatever I wore looked wrong. At the time, I thought his hat was embarrassing, but he looked good in it—he was the sort of man who can look
more
serious because he’s wearing something silly and it doesn’t look funny on him. Do you know what I mean? He was six feet tall, and here I am, not even as tall as you.”

She felt uneasy again; she hated to have her height talked about. She had been a tall child, and that was part of her reason for being so shy. What she had always wanted was to fade in, to be like everybody else.

When they left the museum he talked no more about his father, or her father. She was glad, because some of the things he had said had disturbed her. And then when he kissed her, at the bottom of the museum steps, she smiled widely. She had started to be depressed, and then he had made her forget it.

Neither of them was sure it was not a mistake, but still they decided before Christmas to live together. Louise, who suspected it would happen, already knew a person who would share the apartment. Diana had made it clear that she would not move out until Louise could find someone to take her place, but that was accomplished quickly, much to Diana’s joy and Louise’s dismay. Louise had even spent a Saturday loading books into cartons and taking them by car to Griffin’s apartment.

When Diana and Griffin got back from New York, where they had gone to the wedding of Griffin’s good friend Charlie to a girl named Inez, they were going to stop at Louise’s and pick up Diana’s clothing. Everything else had been moved out. Driving back, Louise felt sure that Griffin would send Diana alone. It must be, she thought, that he knew she disapproved of his leaving school and drinking, that she did not like it when he called her when he got to town, and then saw her once and never called again. She did not think he was a nice person anymore, and she hoped that he would not be unkind to Diana.

For Christmas, Diana and Griffin went to Rye to stay with his parents, and on Christmas Day drove into the city to have dinner with her parents. Both places were loud and festive, with relatives from both sides sizing up the new person; Chopin waltzes were played at Griffin’s house as the family sipped afternoon wine, and at Diana’s parents’ apartment in the Village the radio was tuned to the
Messiah
, and Caroline—her favorite aunt—gave them a bottle of champagne and tall etched pink glasses and made them promise that they would visit her at her farm in Pennsylvania.

Above the mantle hung a poem of Horace Cragen’s, hand-lettered on parchment and framed in an old walnut frame—a gift to Horace from Diana’s mother. The poem was lovely, but as she admired it she also had the uneasy feeling that her mother should have given her father something else. Was it appropriate to—in a sense—give someone back what he had already given?

She wondered, at dinner, what her family thought of Griffin. She knew that her mother did not approve of her living with him, but she also knew that her mother would not allude to it. And her father? She looked at him across the table, eating roast goose, seeming happy but preoccupied, as he so often did. He had asked if the Griffin Berridge she was dating (he called it “dating”) was Joe Berridge’s son. He had called him Joe, so naturally she had asked if he knew him. “No,” he had said. “Know of him.” In conversation he did not mind speaking bluntly; his poems, though, were full of surprises and confusions. No matter how many poems were framed and hung in the house, she understood that where her father really lived was not there, but somewhere in the cloudy, starry world of poetry. “How is the roast goose?” her mother asked. “It’s fine with me,” her father replied. She and Griffin and Caroline nodded assent. “Very good,” Griffin said. Her mother nodded approval, and again they cut their meat and ate. The meal was more restrained than usual—because Griffin was there?

“What was wrong?” she asked. They were walking down Fifth Avenue, having wandered far from the apartment after dinner. She had asked it not so much because she was convinced that Griffin was bothered by something, but rather because she was wondering aloud.

“Nothing’s wrong. You don’t like it when I’m moody, and when I’m not you act as though I am.”

“I didn’t mean to criticize you. I was wondering aloud, really. That’s all I meant.”

“Was it like other Christmases?”

“No. It was quieter.”

“Do they usually get along?”

“Who?” she said.

“Your mother and father.”

“They’ve always gotten along.”

He was swinging her hand, answering but not paying too much attention to the conversation.

“They’re always like that?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Then they don’t get along. Or they get along, but there’s something wrong.”

“What’s wrong?” she said, trying to remember if it was true that they always acted that way.

“It’s obvious, isn’t it? He’s a famous man and she’s his wife, and she’s in awe of him but also resents him.”

For the first time she lifted her head from staring at the sidewalk to look at him.

“Let’s not be serious on Christmas,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Later, on the walk home, she thought uncomfortably about her response to Griffin. It had been too deferential. Her mother, all her life, had been too deferential to her father. As they walked farther she thought that there was some logic to that at least: her father was Horace Cragen. But Griffin was only Griffin, and he shouldn’t declare her moods. Sorry that she had said she was sorry, she eased her hand out of his and plunged it into the deep silk-lined pocket of her coat.

They had just begun to live together.

In February her father sent her a new poem. Much of it she did not understand, but the allusions to their days roller-skating—the parts of the poem about her—she understood well. She left it on the table, with the morning mail, along with the letter from her father.

“What’s this?” he said, sitting at the kitchen table and trying to rub some life into his body. He had gotten little sleep, in spite of the fact that it was almost eleven o’clock, because he had gone to a jazz club with his friend Tony and then gone drinking at another friend’s apartment after the bars closed.

“Go ahead and read it,” she answered.

When he had come back at four in the morning, drunk, they had quarreled: hadn’t he said he wouldn’t drink to get drunk anymore? Didn’t he think she might worry—couldn’t he have called? He picked up the poem and read it, and then the letter, too. The letter asked her if she would come to her father’s favorite cousin’s remarriage on February 25—just the time she and Griffin had planned to visit friends up north.

“So what are you telling him?” he said. He shook the coffee jar but did not get up to make coffee.

“I think I should go, if you don’t mind delaying the trip a week.”

“Charlie and Inez will have to be out of the house then. They only rent it for February. The weekend after that is March.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I still think I ought to go. I haven’t seen them since Christmas, and he’s been depressed because his back has been bothering him.”

“I haven’t seen my parents since Christmas either.”

“I get along with my parents, and you don’t get along with yours.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he said. “I sit like a stone with my parents, and you sit like a stone with yours.”

“That’s untrue! What are you talking about?”

“Forget it,” he said. “Go to the wedding. I’m going to Charlie and Inez’s.”

“Since you prefer getting drunk to being with me, I don’t see why you’re sulking.”

“Because I’m sorry for you, goddamn it. Because he’s ordering you around, and I don’t like that. Because he sent that sentimental poem about his baby girl, and after stroking her with the pen stabbed her in the heart and told her to come home.”

She looked at him to see if he could be serious. He looked very serious.

“You’re wrong,” she said.

“You are,” he said.

He went into the bedroom and dressed, and left the apartment without saying goodbye. Either he was crazy, or she was crazy. And
she
was sorry for
him
—he had looked so sick when he came into the kitchen. He had been sick from the night before. Since he was not there to talk to, she talked to herself. Through clenched teeth she said, “They are a poem and a letter.” She took them both with her when she went back to the bedroom and stretched out on the still-unmade bed. She did not go to class.

March was a good month for them, and April was, too, until late in the month when he lost his job at the library. His friend Tony got him a job selling shoes, and he needed the money (he no longer would accept anything from his parents), but he found the job unbearable. All day women would come in and try to fit into shoes that were too small and that the store did not have in their size, and Griffin was supposed to tell them that he would take the shoes in the back and put them on the shoe stretcher. The shoe stretcher was a mop handle which he inserted in the shoe, then whomped down hard: the pressure would break the lining in the toe, and the women would have a fraction of an inch more room. Tony, who worked in the store part-time and was always stoned, thought it was hilarious. But after a week Griffin was miserable and began to drink again—this time topping off the evening by smoking grass with Tony. He went back to the apartment and fought with her, and she went into a rage, throwing clothes into a suitcase, saying that she was not going to live with him any longer. But she looked back and saw him, pale-faced and probably sorry for what he had said—he told her so often that he was sorry for blaming her for things she couldn’t help and to please forgive him—and she threw the things from the suitcase to the floor, shaking her head at him and at herself: if she was leaving, why would she take the Equadorian sweater but not a nightgown? Throwing things so randomly into the suitcase, she could not even have appeared serious to him about going.

“I think about what my father did to me—about how he implied it was all right not to consider women’s feelings—the way he was to my mother, taking her along, taking her hand the same way he took mine—on
his
outings. And it’s no wonder it’s taking me so long to know how to act.”

He lit a cigarette. When he drank, or was hung-over, he had begun to smoke cigarettes.

“You’re obsessed with your father,” she said. Before, she had screamed that, but now it was such a familiar line that she said it quietly, perturbed but stating the obvious. “Forget about your father and live your life.”

“You know that can’t be done,” he said. “You know it. You know it when you pick up a magazine and read your father’s poetry, or when you see his picture in a bookstore window. And I know it when I read interviews with my father, when he sends me brochures about gallery openings and I read about the facts of his life. You know that you can’t forget that.”

She stood amid the scattered clothes, wondering if it could be true.

They broke up in May, but it didn’t last. Griffin went to stay with Tony but came back at the end of the week, and she agreed to try again. He came back sober and, he said, sorry for being the cause of so much of their unhappiness. She could tell even as he spoke that he still believed she did not realize how much her father had her under his thumb, but if he would only not say that, then she knew she could stand it.

She was surprised when, in June, he told her he wanted to marry her. Their relationship had always been up and down, and when he came back after their separation they did not come together with the closeness they had had early on. So she tried to tell him no as gently as possible.