She replied, “I think I’ll get some ivy for the window box.”
She seemed mysterious and elusive to Fennie. She became pregnant again and announced the news to Fennie, and added, with her eyes large and in a calm voice, “We have to get a house.”
Fennie said, “Ann, it’s too soon for you. You know the doctor said it was too soon.”
“I’m not going to do anything to this baby!”
Fennie said, “The baby, the baby. Women don’t care about their husbands. Only their toys, their dolls … that’s what Lawrence says a baby is to a woman.”
“There’s always suffering in a marriage,” Ann said in a strangely light tone. “Everyone has it, Fennie,” she said. “We have to buy a house.”
She chose one across the river in Alexandria. It cost thirteen thousand dollars and was made of peach-colored brick; it had white stone windowsills. An old woman had lived her last years in it and it was shabby. Ann cleaned it room by room. The house possessed, Ann thought, an undeniable goodness.
Ann tried to be a better companion to Fennie. She read the newspapers: “Hitler is insane,” she said; “you can tell by his face” and she sat down when Fennie came home and had a drink with him and tried to get him to talk about the office. He could not get over how much having children had changed Ann. He did not trust her. “Don’t bother your little head about the office,” he said.
“The Germans bomb civilians, you know,” Ann said vaguely, glancing around at her backyard. “People’s houses …”
She bought almost no furniture; many of the rooms in her house remained empty, filled with sunlight during the day but empty. “This is not a time to become attached to material possessions,” Ann said. Her house and her babies, the one born, the one not yet born, had to be taken care of and appreciated, but they could lead her astray. “People lose their moral judgment and turn into appeasers because of possessions,” she said with a kind of grief.
The doctor said she was doing too much housework, going up and down stairs too often.
She said, “I look like a dope fiend. I’m letting everything slide.”
France was falling. Ann was in her seventh month. Fennie came home early one afternoon and told her the Germans had entered Paris. “The French didn’t stop them at the Marne this time?” Ann asked. She said, “We’ll have to fight now, won’t we, Fennie? Are they bombing refugees?”
She did not like to complain or be self-indulgent during a time of crisis. It was a difficult and premature birth. The baby, a girl, was healthy but very small. Ann did not recover properly, and the doctor said she would have to have an operation. “You won’t be able to have any more children.”
Ann refused to permit the operation. “I’m strong as a horse,” she said to Fennie. “I’ll be all right. Don’t be a worrywart.”
Fennie told her their elder daughter kept asking for Ann. He had tears in his eyes, and he was angry, too. “Why are you so stubborn? You’re the stubbornest person I ever knew.” He said, “Children aren’t everything.”
The doctor said to her, “You are a very high-strung, unreasonable woman.”
“Doctor, look at your peasant woman,” Ann said. “She—”
The doctor said, “Do you know anything about the death rate among peasant women?”
“Is it high,” asked Ann, the statistician, “if the women aren’t overworked?”
“All women are overworked,” the doctor said dryly. “If they’re not, they become hypochondriac. I can’t let you go home,” the doctor said. “You can hemorrhage at any time.”
Ann said to the doctor, “My husband always wanted a son.”
The doctor shrugged.
Ann thought of her house and the two waiting children. She said, “I guess he will just have to do without.”
The doctor said, “You just keep your sense of humor, Ann, and everything will be all right.”
Five days after the operation, Ann went home.
I
T SEEMED
to Ann that Fennie was as stirred and uplifted by the excitement of the war as he had once been by her. He was distended with excitement: “People don’t realize that
this
is
Götterdämmerung,”
he said. He drank at the office to keep himself going. It tired her that Fennie felt important because he was involved behind the scenes. She
wanted to tell Fennie to watch the way he spoke; she needed to draw from him—she put no name to it—a sense of being worthwhile, because she could no longer draw it from herself.
She often did not make sense when she talked. She said tactfully, “You know, the children see you when you talk as if you
like
the war.…” She halted. He’s a good husband, she thought. It seemed to her silly suddenly to blame him, just as it was silly to blame children—everyone knew what children were like. Goodness was not something people talked about, and anyway, she had lost her sense of moral direction. Nothing in marriage was ever settled. Marriage was not a completed state.
Fennie broke the silence. He said, “Dearest, what are you trying to tell me?” She turned away; he was being patient with her. He was a more successful human being than she was; he was a good bureaucrat. She was not certain if she liked him anymore. She stuck out her lips. Fennie said again, “Dearest, what are you trying to tell me?”
“I’ve forgotten,” Ann said, and gave a small, placating laugh.
She rarely mentioned her feelings, but when she did—“I’m sad,” or “Fennie, I don’t know why I go on living”—she spoke almost lightly so that it would not cause a quarrel. Fennie would say, “You should get out more. You think about yourself too much.”
It was as if there had been a long, long struggle between them and Fennie had won it and she didn’t care much.
She followed her Negro maid from room to room. She said, “Last night I had the oddest dream. I was in China. I was a little, tiny, doll-like,
perfect
Chinese woman—” She meant one who had never undergone an operation, who was pretty and hopeful and high-spirited. “I think you missed a dust kitty under that chair, Mary Lou,” Ann said.
Mary Lou turned a sad, furtive, half-psychotic gaze toward Ann, toward a spot to the right and above Ann’s ear, so that Ann remained an unseen, bleached presence. “Nobody ever said I wasn’ a good clean-in’ woman. I don’ lie, I don’ steal, I don’ owe a dollar to no man alive—”
“I’ll do it. Hand me the broom. Let me tell you about my dream,” Ann said as she swept. “I had a terrible husband. I was a slave. I was black and blue from head to toe, all my children died of impetigo or beriberi except one, so I ran away. I took my baby with me. I left it in a railroad station, just for a moment. Then a bomb fell—I saw it like a tear falling. It exploded; the air rang and rang like a crystal glass when you tap it. A man was on top of me, but it wasn’t a man, it was a piece of wood—you know how dreams are. And my baby was crying in the
ruins of the railroad station—have you seen that famous photograph—” Mary Lou denied having stolen any photograph. “No, no,” Ann said, “I’m talking about a photograph that was in all the newspapers years ago.”
“I wouldn’ want one of your photographs noway,” Mary Lou said, smiling richly. “I got photographs of my own.”
“Mary Lou,” Ann said. “Don’t you understand? I would never accuse
you.
” Ann trembled with sympathy for Mary Lou, whose sorrows had cramped her mind. “But listen to my dream: The railroad station was burning, but the
Panay
was coming to rescue us, and Wallace Beery was the captain, only it wasn’t Wallace Beery, it was Mussolini.… Mary Lou,” Ann said, “you never tell me your dreams.”
“I has only religious dreams,” Mary Lou replied.
Mary Lou’s skin was rough, black, exotic; she had a foreign, sweet odor, like soap. Ann followed Mary Lou with her eyes. One day Ann stubbed her toe; she cried out, lifted the hurt foot, stood, her eyes closed, her leg lifted, balanced like a heron on one foot. Mary Lou said, “Did you hurt you’self?” She uttered a low, crooning noise, “Ooo-lee-doo, oo-lee-doo, did you hurt you’self,” and put her arms around Ann. Ann leaned against her, but then she said, “I’m not going to be one of those women who turn into parasites on their maid. You have a life of your own, Mary Lou.” She pulled away from Mary Lou. “Oh, we in America owe the Negro so much!” she said.
Mary Lou grew more careless after that; in one day, she broke a dish, a glass, a rung off the back of a dining-room chair. She was rude and shouted at the children; she pilfered Ann’s sheets. Ann told Fennie, and Fennie fired the maid. He said, “We’re doing this for
your
self-respect, Mary Lou.”
S
OMETIMES
, on the street in Washington, Ann saw the new Selective Service inductees, freckled farm boys among them, a few with reddish-yellow hair; she could imagine what the smell of such a boy’s body would be like, the naivete of his conversation.
Ann and Fennie went to parties, informal parties, usually held outdoors, in someone’s backyard. Often, at these affairs, the men in the earlier, soberer portion of the evening would congregate at one end of the yard to discuss the war and the government. The women chattered about servants and prices.
Ann drank a lot because she wanted to be drunk. Then, when it grew late and the moon had risen and the men rejoined the women and boozy versions of friendliness, nostalgia, innocence, and seduction appeared, she hinted at her despair to whoever approached her. She often sat alone, bleak-eyed and erect.
A man, his face a lopsided plate swimming in the broken dark, put his hand on Ann’s knee. Ann saw it was Fennie, and he was drunk, too. He said in his Harold Ickes voice, “How’s life treating you, sweetie pie?”
To Ann’s right, a voice said, “For my money, far and away your best right-handed pitcher in the major leagues today is Bucky
Walters.
…” Ann said, “Life is black. The Fascists are coming. I wish I was dead.”
“Oh, you’re in a bad mood,” Fennie mumbled, and made his way off into the seesawing flurry, the feathery, flapping geese wings of voices at the party.
A
FTER
Pearl Harbor, Fennie worked so late at his office that he had a bed moved in and sometimes slept there. Ann never contemplated infidelity; it would make Fennie unhappy. On a cold Thursday night, he telephoned her and said he was in love with his secretary.
A
NN THOUGHT
it was bureaucratic of Fennie to break the news to her over the telephone, and she meant to be rude. She said—Fennie shared his secretary stenographically with a man named Aswell—“Doesn’t Aswell mind?”
Fennie said, “You don’t care. You never cared.”
“Me?” Ann said, but he had already hung up.
He telephoned back to shout that he was nearly forty years old and had high blood pressure and deserved a little happiness before he died.
He telephoned a third time: He wanted to bring the girl to the house; there was no reason why he, Ann, and the girl should not discuss the situation like civilized human beings, he said. Ann said, “All right, Fennie. Anything to give you a little happiness before you die.”
Ann had not realized to what extent despair had wrapped itself around her spirit until the girl came to the house that evening with Fennie. She was Southern, young, and timid, and Ann minded terribly that the girl was brainless and had soft, plump legs—“But her legs are neither here nor there,” Ann said to herself—and she minded the girl’s compliments on the house and furniture. “What a truly lovely old house this is,” the girl said tensely. “This is the girl I love,” Fennie said. Ann said she was perfectly willing to divorce Fennie. He said—in front of the girl—that Ann was in no fit condition to make a decision. Ann said, “Then why are we talking? Why did you bring the girl here?” Fennie said Ann was making a scene, and the recriminations began.
T
HE PSYCHOANALYST’S
office was not far from the Mall. Ann said, her hand partly shielding her eyes, “My life’s in pieces. I’m married to a bastard. I don’t know why things have turned out so badly for me. I was happy once. There was a man—he was a golden-haired working-man in Illinois.… It was the only love I ever knew.” She went on about Walter.
The analyst said, “I think we can say you have problems that need, that
deserve
treatment.” He was an affluent-looking man, not very tall, with a full body, not very fat, with gray hair, not very thick. He suggested, somehow, childhood; he shed an aroma of it—the darkened room, the leather couch, the privacy suggested those secret places, under beds, in garages, inside a closet, where children met. He spoke slowly and warmly: “I think we can say that no one should be as alone as you are.”
The second time she saw him, she was uncomfortable, and he said, “Analysis is not easy; it is not for everyone.”
Ann began to cry. “Neither is love,” she said.
Session after session, for the first dozen weeks, she cried. She apologized for crying so much.
“It is all right if you cry here,” the doctor said over and over, with the same little smile.
One day, Ann cried, “But I was happy
once!”
The doctor said, “You were happy—the happiness you refer to, was it more in your body or in your mind?”
“Why—it wasn’t in my mind!” Ann cried. “I knew in my mind it couldn’t last!”
The next day, she said to the doctor, “You’re very, very sensitive.”
The doctor said, “There is a sympathy between us. We are congenial.”
He dressed like a social climber, but Ann liked him, and told him so.
The doctor told her he hoped she was making a transference. “Your feelings about me are a major part of your analysis—because
they
are not in the past.”
She said her feelings toward the doctor were warm. He said yes, that was a step toward transference, and smiled.
Ann did not talk about Walter anymore. She did not sleep with Fennie. When the doctor asked her if she ever thought about taking a lover, she said, “Where would I get the time?”
The doctor asked if there was no one she was attracted to, and Ann said there was a man who ran a filling station in Alexandria—“But I don’t want to make a habit of the working class.” She said, “I’m attracted to you—mildly. As a matter of fact,” she added, “no one ever seduces
me.
” She broke off. “I’m not the sort of woman who gets crushes on her doctor.” She said, “Why aren’t you a famous psychoanalyst? Is there something wrong with you?” she whispered.