The Oriental Wife

by Evelyn Toynton

  “I don’t know,” Otto said sadly, the pickle still in his hand. “But you haven’t tried yet.”

  Rolf went on looking at the lettuce curling out of his sandwich; he was not sure he’d be able to eat the thing. He wanted no more of Otto’s wisdom, if wisdom it was, not when it meant the zippered dresses, the bristles of hair, the lopsided mouth. Alone with her that morning, with Mrs. Sprague and Emma in the kitchen, he had felt she was about to say something he would not want to hear; he had begun talking about the snow they were expecting, about Emma’s checkup next week, about the Congress, the UN. And she had sunk back into herself again, successfully warded off, her eyes full of misery.

  What was Otto telling him, if not that he must live like an old man, resign himself to his duty, which it seemed to him he had been doing for most of his life? (He forgot the joy there had been, the Sunday outings with Louisa, the picnic on Bear Mountain, the night she had told him she was pregnant.) He stared at his hands on the table, remembering Miss Maggiore’s scarlet nails. She had brought him a yellow rose in a water glass when he got back to the office on Monday. “There you go,” she said, without quite looking at him, “the yellow rose of Texas. Except it’s Oregon you’ve been to. But it’s the thought that counts, right? It’s from all the girls, not just me. But it was my idea.”

  “It’s very sweet of you,” he said gravely.

  “Oh, I’m awfully sweet. Sweet is just my middle name.” She seemed to be watching him with a special alertness. “Well,” she said finally, “can’t stand here talking all day. Or not talking. There’s work to be done, right?”

  She was the secret he was keeping from Otto. Nothing had happened between them, apart from those curiously charged encounters, but more and more the thought of her interfered with the workings of his conscience, made him mutinous in the face of reason. And he sensed that she knew this, and was excited by her power; she knew she had awakened in him some avidity that was dangerous. She may even have understood how foreign it was to what he had always believed was his nature. For all her brash innocence, she was shrewder than he was; that too was part of her charm.

  But here was Otto, trying to sell him on Louisa as surely as the man who had come to his office that morning had tried to sell him on a new line of graphite. Delight, adventure, all that would be deferred for one more generation, something for Emma, not for him. Certainly that was Franz’s view of it. At the thought of Franz he knew he was trapped; in a minute he would pick up his sandwich and start to eat, and when he was dead they could write on his tombstone, He saw it through.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  As it turned out, it was Louisa who left him, if a woman with a crippled arm and a pronounced instability to her gait can be said to leave anyone. It happened late on Thanksgiving, after their dinner, prepared of course by Mrs. Sprague, with Otto in attendance, and Emma blowing out her cheeks and making rude noises as Otto had taught her, then shrieking with laughter. Otto had brought two bottles of wine; Mrs. Sprague was too good a Baptist to partake, but the others toasted her with it, complimenting her on each dish in turn. Afterward Sophie and Gustav were coming with Kurt, just for a cup of coffee, and to say hello.

  When they had eaten their turkey and stuffing and sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie Louisa, with the confidence lent to her by the wine and Otto’s presence, had insisted charmingly that they would clean up. Mrs. Sprague had done enough for one day, she should go to the living room and rest. Rolf had put Emma down for her nap; it was just the three of them in the kitchen, with Rolf washing and Otto drying and Louisa wiping the table and high chair and putting things away, maneuvers she managed by a painstaking exertion of effort. She had improved, Rolf saw, she could do more with her right hand than he had supposed.

  Even of old she had never really been graceful; she was too physically careless for that. She might turn around too quickly with a full cup of broth in her hand and spill some on the floor; she might set the jar of cinnamon too close to the counter’s edge and catch it with her sleeve. But her movements had always seemed so emphatic, so swift and certain, that it didn’t matter. He would sit in the kitchen in the evenings and watch her, smiling as much at her lack of method—she was always forgetting things, always having to open the oven door again and add one more thing to the casserole—as at the stories she told him, about something ridiculous that had happened to her that day. Chatting, she called it, a word she had picked up in England; he did not know anyone else who used it. And then she might burn the rice, and have to scrape it off the bottom of the pot.

  Now here she was, picking up a wine glass laboriously with her good hand, wrapping the fingers of her other one around the stem, using her free hand to open the cupboard door, then prizing the crippled fingers off the glass to set it down.

  “Look at her!” Otto cried, flinging out his arms, the dish towel snapping. “Isn’t she wonderful?” Rolf turned around for a moment and then went back to wiping the sink.

  “Stop it, Otto,” Louisa said, her voice rising.

  “But you are, you’re wonderful.”

  “You’re embarrassing Rolf.”

  “Then damn Rolf.”

  “Oh, no,” she said, “you mustn’t say that, you can’t damn Rolf. Rolf is … he’s the model citizen. And I, you see, I’m no earthly use to the state. To nation-building.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Rolf told her, turning around fully now. “Nobody’s ever suggested such a thing.”

  “No,” she said hysterically, “of course not. Nobody would ever say a thing like that. But then nobody talks to me much, nobody talks to me at all. Except Mrs. Sprague, she tells me lots of things. While you were away she told me about a widow lady who lives in a house on Park Terrace West, and rents out rooms to invalids. Such a very nice lady, she said, she just happened to strike up a conversation with her in the supermarket one day. Mrs. Rafferty is her name, she’d love to take me to meet her. Why do you suppose she said all that?”

  “I presume because she was trying to make conversation.”

  “Oh, God,” she said. “God. What a coward you are. Even Mrs. Sprague is more honest.”

  He stalked out without looking at either of them. In the living room, Mrs. Sprague had fallen asleep on the sofa, her head lolling on her flowered apron. For a few minutes he sat opposite her, taking deep breaths, and then the doorbell rang. Sophie and Gustav had arrived with Kurt.

  Afterward, Rolf could hardly remember a single thing that had been said. They must have spoken of the usual subjects—the political situation, Kurt’s studies, Franz and Jeannette (they had come that morning, Otto was going to see them later). Gustav must have asked him about his trip out west. But only Kurt, a stocky untidy young man with a cowlick, spoke to him with normal kindness; the others all seemed to sit up straighter when he talked, they were stiffly correct, tight-lipped, while bestowing all their warmth and smiles on Louisa. He and Mrs. Sprague were cast out.

  She tried to press her pumpkin pie on them, but they refused even that. Sophie had also made a pumpkin pie, Gustav told them proudly, patting her hand, a magnificent concoction; she was becoming a real American now. Rolf had never seen him so cheerful, or Sophie so girlish; only when they addressed themselves to him did the old severity return. Louisa, meanwhile, was part of the general radiance—Louisa, who a few minutes before had been shouting insults in the kitchen, beamed at them, leaned forward excitedly on her chair, told a funny little story about Emma with the old breathlessness. Mrs. Sprague got up and disappeared in the direction of the room she shared with Emma.

  A few minutes later, when Sophie, too, rose and said they must be going, Louisa pushed herself off her chair and went over to her. “I’m so glad,” she said, clutching Sophie’s hand. “I’m so glad for you both.” It was the sort of thing people said to a young couple who’d just announced their engagement, but neither Gustav nor Sophie seemed at all embarrassed; their faces were alight.

  Then it was just the three of them again. Otto announ
ced to Louisa—he still had not looked at Rolf—that he must be going, Jeannette and Franz were expecting him. Louisa told him to bring them the rest of the pumpkin pie. “Perhaps we should ask Mrs. Sprague about that,” Rolf said, with careful mildness.

  “Leave a piece for her,” Louisa said to Otto. “Cut a piece and put it on a plate.” The whole time Otto was in the kitchen, busying himself with the pie, she did not speak, though she stared fixedly at Rolf, forcing him to meet her eyes. Only when Otto had left, promising to come in from New Jersey again on Saturday, did she break the silence. “Please sit down,” she said sharply. Just at that moment there was a wail from the bedroom.

  “Mrs. Sprague must be asleep,” he said, when it did not stop right away. “I’ll go get Emma.”

  “Not now. She’ll wake up in a minute. I need to talk to you alone.”

  Reluctantly, he sat down. “I really can’t concentrate while she’s crying.” But just then the crying stopped; they could hear Mrs. Sprague cooing to her. In a minute, he knew, she would appear in the living room with Emma, on the way to the kitchen to heat up a bottle. He willed her to come soon, to rescue him.

  “What are we going to do?” Louisa asked him, her voice low, and then, desperately, “Look at me.” But he could not do even that much; he was too full of dread. He was only waiting for Mrs. Sprague to emerge with Emma in her arms; otherwise it could not be averted, something terrible was going to happen.

  “Very well,” Louisa said, harsh with contempt. There were no more sounds from the bedroom, Emma must have gone back to sleep. “There’s nothing we can do, that’s what you mean, isn’t it?” And still he could not answer.

  “Look at me, for God’s sake, can’t you even look at me?” Finally he raised his eyes; he stared at her, growing more and more frightened, waiting. This was the moment when he had to beg her forgiveness, when he had to swear he would be different. Only he could not do it.

  “All right then,” she said fiercely, “that’s that, isn’t it,” and shut her eyes. When she opened them again she told him she was leaving. She would go to Mrs. Sprague’s friend, she would do whatever she had to, go anywhere. She could not stay there any longer. He knew he should say Don’t go, he should cry, or cry out, he should stand and put his arms around her, but he could not manage any of those things. All he could do was sit there, with limbs heavy as stone and molten heat deep in his belly; his mind was stripped of words. There was silence for a long minute.

  “What are you thinking? Tell me.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t say that. You must be thinking something.”

  But he wasn’t. With immense effort, he ran his tongue around his mouth.

  “Maybe …”

  “Maybe what?”

  “Maybe you can come back after a while.”

  She laughed shrilly, rocking back and forth, her bad arm folded across her chest. But just when it seemed she might lose her balance and topple over, she straightened up and met his eyes, her face full of such bleakness he had to turn away. The door to the bedroom opened; Mrs. Sprague was emerging. In the few seconds before she appeared, his brain woke up again; realization came like jolts of black lightning. He saw that some failures, some cruelties, were irrevocable; some harm could never be undone. That he was nothing like the man he’d thought himself to be. That he would carry this knowledge for the rest of his life.

  PART III

  CHAPTER ONE

  Her daughter came every Saturday. All week she longed for these visits, as she had longed for the arrival of her first lover when she was young; every morning she told herself how many days it would be until Emma came. But as with her long-ago lover, whatever she was hoping for never happened; afterward she always felt bewildered, with a heavy sense of having failed. Sometimes she remembered her mother, twisting her hands helplessly in her lap, and thought she finally understood.

  Weather permitting, they went walking in the scruffy park across from Mrs. Rafferty’s house, where a row of benches overlooked the water. They headed for the farthest one, next to an abandoned boathouse, and sat looking out at the Palisades while Emma entertained her with little stories she had saved up during the week: the landlord’s wife had shown up at her door again, to complain of her husband’s stinginess (he had given her a can opener for her birthday); a fat man had chased a bald little dog back and forth across East Tenth Street, crying, “Come to me, my angel.” Emma told her nothing about her real life, the things she reported were never what mattered to her. Louisa suspected there might be complicated troubles with a man. On one of those Saturdays in the park some months before, she had announced, in a brisk summary way, that she had quit the graduate program at Columbia and taken a job. Her boss was a Cambodian, a refugee, with slightly mysterious funding for publications about his country, which Emma was to edit. “You will detect many missing articles in these manuscripts, both definite and indefinite,” he had told her at the interview, and said she must be firm with his authors, who would try to gain her sympathy by describing their sufferings. “They are lucky to be published at all,” he’d said, adding, “Is good you are an American. They will behave in more civilized fashion, because of feeling intimidated.” He had studied at the Sorbonne and wore extremely elegant ties. All these things Emma had told Louisa in the first few weeks, sounding amused, but now she never mentioned him.

  When they reached their usual bench that day, there were two skinny young men in sunglasses standing in tense attitudes beneath the tree opposite, seeming to argue in low voices. They glanced briefly, contemptuously, at the women and went back to their conversation. “Dope dealers,” Emma said, in the brittle voice she assumed for making such statements. Then she began adjusting Louisa’s scarf, a plaid woolen square left behind by some former resident (all the residents were former now, except for Louisa). Mrs. Rafferty had given it to Louisa, as she gave her many things that nobody else wanted. Emma was trying to make it cover Louisa’s ears without slipping down onto her forehead. The longer she fiddled with it, chiding Louisa to keep still, the surer Louisa was that something was wrong. Emma never fussed like that: she hated fuss almost as much as her father had. “Stop now,” Louisa begged her. Emma’s hands stopped moving.

  “Listen,” she said. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  • • •

  He had waited too long.

  The doctors told him this outright, to show their respect. They had served with him on the steering committee of the local hospital; at his urging—it was a nice irony—plans were under way for a state-of-the-art oncology unit. He knew all about Betatrons, cobalt-60 machines, orthovoltage. He knew too about the special, rarefied toxins they were using now at Johns Hopkins and Dana Farber. But it seemed that in his case the prospects for halting the disease were clouded. Already the cancer was in his lymph nodes. They would do what they could, they were ordering some of those very toxins to be shipped to the Connecticut suburbs in refrigerated cars, but they would be honest with him. He must not expect too much. He must be prepared for the worst.

  What he never said was that he had to stop himself from hoping for the very thing they were warning him of. In that first moment he heard the news, he had felt a surge of relief, a lightening of the spirit such as he could hardly remember experiencing before. Of course he repressed this immediately.

  And so he dutifully took up the job of staying alive.

  For years Louisa had been tormented by thoughts of him, there was no room for anything else. Every morning, when she opened her eyes, the storm of grief and shame and disbelief began all over again, knocking her back with the same force. She imagined him at his desk, working his way methodically through stacks of papers, wholly absorbed in the world’s business; at night, sitting in her airless room, with the birdcage and the ancient dressing table and the window overlooking the alley, she thought of him in their old bedroom, six blocks away, waiting for Connie to come to bed. At least, when they moved to Connecticut, she no longer
had to know what their bedroom looked like.

  It was at about that time—when Emma too was removed from her, to that house in the suburbs she had never seen—that something had given way, she seemed to have shed the self she knew, and other people became vivid to her again, in a different way from before. The people themselves were different from the ones she had known: the woman who came with the mobile library van, whose daughter had spina bifida; the wife of a former resident at Mrs. Rafferty’s, who came to tea sometimes, and told Louisa, in an anguished voice, of wishing her husband would die. At about the same time, as though to make up for the loss of Emma, who would henceforth come only on alternate weekends, Rolf had a television installed in her room, word of its delivery having been sent her by his secretary. The people on the screen, victims of earthquakes, tornadoes, racial hatred, came to fill her thoughts. When she lay awake at night—since her operation she slept badly—she grieved not for herself but for Korean orphans, cerebral palsy victims, lepers in India. She adopted, through a charity, an impoverished child in Peru; she shopped for toys for her at the Woolworth’s on Dyckman Street and used her typing skills to write long encouraging letters when the little girl began learning English in order to correspond with her. She even volunteered to work at the charity once a week, typing up envelopes with her good hand. Her sorrow had become vast, impersonal, and then she understood that in some sense she had come through, though there was no point to it.

  But since the news of his cancer she’d been remembering him again, the gruff child he had been, the early days in New York, his struggle not to look at her. And then when they were married, and she had brought him tea in bed on a Sunday morning, and sat there chatting to him in the green brocade dressing gown he had bought her: she had been heady with the weight of his desire, savoring it, until he had pulled her down beside him. Maybe she had loved him only for wanting her so much, maybe what had happened was a punishment for that. There was the Sunday she had coaxed him into going to Bear Mountain for a picnic, when he wanted to stay behind and work: she had dropped the lunch she’d brought for them into a muddy stream, and the mosquitoes had assaulted them, but instead of being angry with her he had found it charming, as he found everything about her charming then. She had believed she would always delight him like that.