“You know, I loved my father. He was a charmer, very affectionate, and fun. But a drunk, the kind who goes on periodic binges. My mother couldn’t bear it—well, I don’t blame her. He was drinking up her salary as well as his own. And she left him when I was twelve. He’d always loved me, or seemed to. I was his baby, he said. But after Momma left him, he never once came to see us, never came to see me. He never even called me up, never sent me a birthday card—nothing. I never saw him again until he was in a casket, when I was twenty-one, dead of cirrhosis.
“And one reason I loved Anthony in the beginning was that I had this sense that he’d never abandon me, never absent himself the way my father had. He’d stay tight, forever. And he did. Hah!
“Life is ironic, isn’t it?” she said in a high thin voice. “When I was married to Anthony, I used to wish he’d go away.”
Victor was silent, gazing at her. They sipped wine.
“But still,” she went on almost as if she were talking to herself, “no matter how much I blame him, I can’t escape. Because I wasn’t good enough, I couldn’t deal with her, I couldn’t turn things around. I did fail.”
“You did your best,” he said, stroking her.
She sighed. “Yes. That’s what we all say. It’s our favorite Band-Aid, my friends and I. One has a kid in a schizophrenic ward; one had a son who OD’d.
“We say that and we sigh. The words are there covering up the wound, but they don’t make it go away. You may even get to a place where you forgive yourself for the failure—I thought I had, until recently. Until that night in Manchester. But even so, the fact of failure is with you, you live with it. It becomes part of your identity.”
“Yes,” he said quietly.
“W
HEN I WAS A
young man,” Victor said, moving his palm for the first time, to light a cigarette, “married just a few months, and for years afterwards, while the children were small, I had the feeling—you can’t call it thought, because it wasn’t conscious, it was a
sense
—that I was supposed to be able to fix everything. Everything. The leaky faucet, the kids’ bikes, a scraped knee, Edith’s depressions. And I wasn’t very good at any of those things. I could manage the faucet and the scraped knee, but not much more. I can hammer a nail in a wall, but not straight. And I’d act a lot like … Anthony, I imagine. I’d throw down wrenches and hammers, storm around slamming things. I’d bark at Edith. Because—and even then I didn’t know why—I blamed her for all of it.
“I think what was going on in my unconscious was that I believed that Edith expected me to be able to fix everything, and I found that an unfair demand. Not that Edith ever
said
she did. And maybe she didn’t even feel that. But
I
felt she did.
“And maybe Anthony felt that too. And that must have been especially hard, being married to you. You’re so competent yourself. You say he complained about your driving, but you’re a good driver. It sounds as though he was looking for something he could look down on in you. Maybe he felt your competence prevented him from being a hero.”
“I never expected him to be a hero. I wanted him to be stable, emotionally
there.
Something he seemed to be before we were married. He was emotional, which most men aren’t. I mean, which most men hide. He didn’t.”
“Well, maybe Edith didn’t expect me to be a hero either, but she sensed that I thought I was supposed to be one, and so she made me one. She’d say things like: ‘Well, if you couldn’t fix the bike, at least you found out what was wrong with it.
I
couldn’t have done that.’ Or: ‘Oh, Victor, that’s good. At least I’ll know what to tell the mechanic so he won’t think I’m a perfect fool. You know how they rook you in these garages if they think you don’t know anything.’ All of which was a crock because I don’t know beans about cars. It used to infuriate me when she did that, and I’d yell at her. Which must have confused her terribly—here she was doing what she thought she was supposed to do to keep my ego from damage, she was thinking of me before herself and I barked at her for it. She would get all teary.”
“Do you feel like a failure about Edith?”
“Of course.”
She was silent.
He put his head up. “You don’t believe that,” he said.
“Yes.” Doubtfully. “But I don’t think you feel that as deeply as I feel about Elspeth. Of course it’s different, a child…. But I know families who have lost a child, and the mother feels it far more. The fathers say, yeah, what can you do, we did our best but the kid was mixed up. The mothers don’t say much, they sigh and the corners of their mouths droop down, and their eyes are full of sadness, it never departs, that sadness.
“My friends Carol and John have a couple of … well, problem children. Barefoot kids, like mine, only more so. And Carol blames herself for the way they are, she was a screaming meemie when they were little. Well, her own childhood! …
“One day we were sitting around on their patio and I was happy, feeling very fulfilled, you know? My book had just come out, the reviews were fine, my kids were doing well. And I felt the way I sometimes do, that I’d done everything I wanted to do in life, that I’d fulfilled my childhood images of what I wanted. And I asked them, if they were to die tomorrow, what would be their greatest regret.
“I wasn’t thinking seriously at all. My own greatest regret—right at that moment—was that I had never danced to the waltzes from
Der Rosenkavalier
in a crystal-chandeliered, mirrored ballroom, wearing a white ruffled gown with a hoop skirt. But they took it seriously.
“And John, who’s a good man, said: ‘Oh, a few redheads and a blonde.’ I thought he meant something serious: love, the love he’d missed having, giving. I thought he meant he didn’t really know how to love, faithful as he was. And I thought he was unusual, that most men’s regret would have been about their career: never having made it to vice-president, or president, never having earned forty thousand a year—or ten thousand a year. I know what Anthony would have said: never having played football for Army. And he would have meant it.
“But Carol answered in a thin dead voice: ‘That I wasn’t a better mother,’ she said. And we all sat there, silent.
“It’s strange.”
Victor pounded the grass with his good hand in a fist. “Jesus, you women! No wonder you suffer so much. You define your children’s existences in terms of yourselves and make yourselves responsible for everything they do and don’t do, everything they are and aren’t! It’s crazy!”
“Society has done that, Victor, not us. Everybody, from the psychiatrists to the kids, blames the mother.”
“But it’s crazy! You just don’t have that much control over kids. It’s not like directing a project that doesn’t come off. You can feel bad about it, but you can also walk off it and start another. No one person has that much control over children, and you can’t just wipe them off when they go over the edge. You can’t draw up a little chart, as I can, showing wins and losses—projects completed and successful, projects abandoned or failed. And end up with a nice little edge, feeling proud of yourself. It isn’t like that. Even if the kids survive, even if they’re healthy and successful … I know that my mother,” his voice became hard, firm, and cold, “my mother died feeling she’d failed with me. Because she didn’t like me very well after I was grown. So even if the kids seem to be all right in the world, mothers blame themselves.
“It’s a fucking self-indulgence, Dolores, feeling that way. It’s self-indulgence in responsibility, in guilt, in sorrow, in pain, and finally—that’s really it, isn’t it?—in power.”
She sat up and gazed at him. He examined her face.
“Are you angry?”
“No. I’m thinking that you’re right, but that the raising of children is the only power society allows women. I suppose we do grab it whole hog. But the thing is, Victor, the children are our job. They are.”
He sighed and lay down again. “They’re all our jobs.”
“No. They should be, but they’re not.”
“Well, they’re an impossible job,” he said.
She lay down beside him again, and was silent, listening to the leaves turning, the water flowing, the air playing around them.
“Ah, Victor, how am I ever going to let you go?”
Victor found out in May that he would have to go to Plymouth for a few days. If she wanted to go with him, he would take some time off and they could spend ten days touring Devon and Cornwall.
She wanted to go but she was alarmed. The time had sifted away so, it was almost June and she had much to do yet and only two more months.
“Three,” Victor said.
“June, July: two.”
“August. You have August.”
“No. I go home on July twentieth.”
“A year!” he shouted. “We said we had a year!”
She put her hand on his arm. “Victor, I
had
a year. I came in July.”
“Okay. That’s okay. No reason you can’t stay another month, just change your reservation. If your grant money’s run out, that’s okay.”
“Well, I was worried about money. I knew I’d be broke after a year here, as I am, almost….”
“Darling, why didn’t you tell me? How much do you need? Will three thousand tide you over?”
She laughed. “Victor, I can live for four months on three thousand dollars. But that’s not the point now.”
“Well, what is?” He pulled himself away from her, stood, and began to pace the room. His voice was harsh.
“I knew I’d be broke, so I signed up to teach a summer school course at Emmings from July twenty-first to August twenty-fifth. I have to go back.”
Pacing. “Cancel it! Quit! Get someone else to do it! Christ, all the unemployed academics around—surely they can get someone else!” He whirled on her. “You
could
get someone else if you wanted to!”
She looked at him with a firm face and he turned away and went to the window. He stood there looking out, his hands in his pockets, his head bowed.
She went to him and turned him around and led him to a chair and made him sit in it. Then she sat on his lap and kissed his eyelids. They were damp.
“Two months,” he whined. “It’s so short.”
“Yes,” she said, rubbing her cheek against his.
He put his arm around her. “I can’t bear to let you go.”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“You have to,” he said sadly, accepting it.
“I have to.” She sat up and gave him a high-and-mighty look. “Listen, man, I live in a small world, it’s true, but I want you to know that in my little pond, I’m a bit of a star.”
He smiled.
“It’s my books, you see. Emmings used my name as sort of a drawing card, to get students to sign up for the summer school. So they can make money, of course. But I agreed. I said I would. And now I have to.”
“Surely people have not shown up sometimes. Even stars.”
“I suppose. But I couldn’t do that. I’d feel too wrong. Wrong towards myself. Oh, if I had a heart attack, or broke my leg….”
“Let’s do it!”
“What?”
“Break your leg. I’ll carry you everywhere. Promise.”
They laughed, but the image lingered in Dolores’s head: break your leg, become paralyzed, so I can carry you everywhere and never lose you. I promise to visit you nightly with books and flowers and booze in a brown paper bag….
She did not tell him this, however. He did not like her forcing him to examine his acts, his words. He thought she was trying to change him. Besides, they had so little time.
“I’ll work straight through for the next two weeks,” she said. “I’ll get to the Bod when it opens and won’t leave until it closes. Maybe I can get enough done.”
He assented reluctantly and was a little sulky all evening. But made love to her that night with a passionate hunger that was limned with desperation, so strong, so insistent that she could only surrender to it, couldn’t herself play an active part. She was, for that night, the ultimate object of his desire, and his desire, that night, was to arouse hers and fill it.
And in fact it was wonderful, the engulfment, the encompassing, feeling like a cherished treasure, a musical instrument played upon, made to sing lyrical phrases, now in the violin section, now in the woodwinds, and oh, now, the basses!
Appassionato
, then a new tempo, the horns come riding in and violins swirl in a tempest, with a little flute riding in and out of it. Then the whole thing rises to dissonance, climactic chords rushing in disagreement to some resolution, not yet, not yet, then a thin high note on the oboe, then the whole orchestra smashing, smashing, smashing into resolution, harmony, as the peak note holds and the chords soften, slowly, grow silkier, still the tender note as the rest dies away, fades, is gone, but still the one note,
sostenuto
, lingering on the ear, reverberant.
She lay there as Victor slept, thinking that was what an accomplished courtesan did for her clients, and that there ought, there really ought to be, brothels for women.
S
HE WORKED HARD THE
next two weeks and tried not to think, no, tried not to feel anything about their impending separation. She tried also not to think about the broken-legged phrase that lingered in her mind. And tried not to feel anything about that, too.
Time enough later, when she was back home in Cambridge, alone with her books, her course plans, and a stack of themes. “Henry V and the Idea of Kingship.” “Shakespeare’s Two Whores: Cressida and Cleopatra.” “Nature in
The Winter’s Tale
.” Ugh. Impossible to grade papers in which you found, not ideas you disagreed with, but an entire way of thinking you found immoral. You could hardly mark down students because their morality didn’t agree with yours, especially since they
did
reflect the ideas of the rest of their culture. But it made you tired. When will people start to think something else?
Received ideas were so tiresome and so impregnable.
Anyway, in the long evenings at her desk, when she took off her reading glasses and rubbed her eyes, she could think about Victor and find him wanting, then. And she would, she would.
Still, it had been an idyll, despite all that was nonidyllic in it, despite … But it was a fact that one forgets idylls, except for moments. And moments she had, tens of them.