by Belva Plain
Voices floated from downstairs. Donal was playing with the boys. He would have taken up the Oriental runner in the long hall and they would be playing ninepins, a baby version that he had bought them.
He led two separate lives. He never talked about his business, but things filtered through the screen of secrecy all the same. There were telephone conversations, overheard from an adjoining room. Things were said when colleagues came with papers or messages. When there was a crisis, she knew of it, as when a convoy of trucks had been ambushed on the road. She knew, and kept the knowledge to herself, that numbered accounts had been opened in Switzerland—as they were for many so-called respectable businesses. But the amount of money, the sheer ease and flow of it, astounded her, even though in her father’s house she had been accustomed to the best of everything. Yet her parents, her mother especially, had paid attention to the prices of things and had kept careful checkbooks. Never had there been so much cash lying freely in a man’s pocket.
Guilt beset her. This bed in which she lay, this house and the help who kept it, the clothes she had bought this afternoon, all came to her in a way she did not want to think about.
Then she rationalized: Donal wasn’t harming anybody.… True, he wasn’t out working for causes, as were Dan and Hennie. He affected scorn for their kind of “do-gooders.” “All talk,” he would say, “beating the air and getting no place.” But with his charities, not just the public ones that gave him a touch of grudging prestige, but the private gifts out of his generous pocket, was he not in a way a do-gooder himself?
Suddenly she remembered Paul. She would have to do something about him and Donal. She couldn’t lose Paul.…
Donal was coming down the hall. She got up quickly and switched on the light at the dressing table. The Cartier box with the earrings lay there; he had taken them out of the safe for her. They were magnificent, splendid as sun on dew, she thought, letting them lie on her palm. She leaned toward the mirror and fastened one in her ears. Her face was flushed, not weary as it had looked in Leah’s mirror. That was what lovemaking did. She fastened the other earring. They swung halfway down her neck, and were sensational, and all wrong for the occasion. But he had ordered her to wear them.
Seven
Early in the spring of the year 1929, Paul’s father died. Since the death of his wife, the elder Werner had faded and seemed actually to grow smaller. Paul wondered whether his parents had had a deeper attachment to each other than he had supposed. But such analysis was superfluous; it was enough to regret that one had not done more, said more, or left some things unsaid. That was always true after a death, no matter how tranquil the relationship had been. These were his thoughts during one of those days on which the possessions of the dead must be sorted and disposed of.
Two shelves in a back hall closet were piled with photographs. Here they were, the whole family, having an outing at Uncle Alfie’s place sometime before the war. The women were sitting on the porch steps and the men were standing behind them. Here was a somewhat thinner Alfie, beaming as usual. Here was his father, sedately buttoned up in a city suit, and here he was himself, wearing his Yale blazer. Right in front of him sat Marian; apparently his mother had invited her for the weekend, laying her plans even then when Marian was barely sixteen.
And holding the browning snapshot to the light, he examined the face he had forgotten, the face of Marian in early youth. Proud and cool she was; could he have foreseen the dry, neutered woman she had become, fussing over a stain on her white kid gloves?
She called to him now. “Paul, come help me with these things, they’re heavy.”
He followed her voice into his father’s dressing room, where she was emptying another closet.
“All these boxes! We’ll just have to call someone—Paul!”
For he had stopped still and was staring at a picture on the farther wall.
She looked over his shoulder. “Duval. That’s valuable, isn’t it?”
“Yes, fairly so.”
It was a watercolor of a little girl with huge eyes. She was sitting with a copybook on her lap, and the tip of a pencil in her mouth. “The Multiplication Tables,” he read on the label. A sentimental title. A sentimental piece. But the eyes … They were the eyes he had memorized.
Is this how you look now, Iris?
“Why on earth are you staring like that, Paul?”
“I’m not staring, just looking.”
“But you look shocked, as if you had recognized somebody.”
“I was only thinking, it’s odd that I never saw it before. Father must have just hidden it here to fill a space between the windows.” He managed to laugh. “Somebody must have given it to him. He’d never have bought it. One thing my parents didn’t have was any taste for art.”
“I liked your parents,” Marian said. She paused, and when he did not reply, added with a certain wistfulness, “Funny … they liked me, too.”
“Why funny?” he said lightly. “Why shouldn’t they? You’re a likable person.”
“Funny because you don’t like me the way you once did, and they still did up to the end.”
He felt a pain around his heart. A sad conversation loomed, one that would lead nowhere.
“I don’t know why you say that, Marian.”
“You do know. Don’t you think it’s time we talked?”
“What about?” he said, staying calm.
“About ourselves. I’m not attractive to you anymore.”
Her neck, poked forward, brought to his mind the sudden image of a goose’s neck; the image was pathetic. He flinched from it in shame. Her mouth twisted. Lord, don’t let her cry. Poor soul, don’t let her cry.
“That’s silly,” he said gently. And repeated, “I don’t know why you say that.”
“Because … you haven’t made love to me.” She turned her face away and he saw what humiliation these words had cost her.
For a few seconds he didn’t know how to answer. He made quick calculations: two months maybe, or more. Now that the firm had a branch in Chicago, he was there almost every month. Often there were one or two casual women—never yet a repeat of Ilse, he thought ruefully—but eager and decent women nevertheless, who needed, as he did, whatever was missing in their lives. He certainly wasn’t taking anything away from Marian that she wanted, except not to feel humiliated.
“You don’t really care about it that much,” he said, still gently.
“But you must,” she said. “It’s different for men, I know.”
Ignorance! A most revealing, pitiable ignorance! And yet there must be millions of women like her.
“Come, sit down,” he said, taking her by the arm. “We’ve done enough for today.” He led her into the living room. “You see,” he said, “a man doesn’t always need what you may think. It’s not anything to do with you. I work hard and I’m getting older.”
Getting older! And he not yet forty! If she could understand the longings in him, she would know how absurd a remark that was. Older!
She smiled weakly. “Perhaps I’m too sensitive. I guess I am. I’ve been reading things … there’s so much being written. Perhaps I’m neurotic, I sometimes think I am. Do you think I’m neurotic, Paul?”
“I think you shouldn’t think so much about yourself.” He patted her hand. “As long as you’re happy. You’ve a busy life.” He was spewing words without meaning; it was like pouring a soothing syrup. “All your charities, and you’ve so many friends.”
“You don’t even like my friends.”
She was reminding him, he knew, of the bitter argument they’d had a while ago, one of the very few really angry arguments they’d ever had. As usual, she had wanted him to go to Florida for a month, this time with a group of friends, and he had refused to go. The friends were agreeable people, but not the kind with whom he cared to spend a whole month. They’d be playing cards all day and, again as usual, would consider him clearly unsociable because he wouldn’t. So there had been an argument, and h
e had said things he was later sorry about. He had said that her friends were dull and they bored him, and he couldn’t stand their cold, frozen faces. He remembered exactly what he had said.
“I do like some of them, most of them,” he told her now. “But anyway, that’s not the point. You have a right to like whom you like, and I have the same. We needn’t argue about it.”
“There’s a little house in Palm Beach on the ocean that I could buy. I’d love it and I can afford it,” Marian said.
“You said ‘I.’ You don’t mean ‘we’?”
“Well, you don’t want to go.”
“That doesn’t matter. I can still buy the house for you.”
“Would you really do that?”
“I would buy you anything you want, Marian.”
“You are good to me, Paul.” Her eyes were wet. “You won’t mind my going down by myself, then?”
“No. I guess I can manage to take a little time off for a winter visit, too.”
She was silent. The silence hummed in the dead room, with sheets flung over the chairs and dust already gathered on the tabletops. Then she asked him surprisingly, “Are you unhappy, Paul? I sometimes think, I don’t know why, that you’re not a happy man.”
“No,” he said. “Of course I’m not unhappy. I’m a very lucky man. I think we’re both lucky.”
“But things do turn out so differently from what one expects when one is sixteen or twenty-one.”
“Yes,” he said, persisting in cheerfulness, “and sometimes they turn out a lot better.”
She was making an effort to match his smile. For an instant, standing there in the dimming afternoon, he saw her face under the bridal veil and her face on the hospital bed after that dreadful surgery. He thought, you suffer, and I want to be kind to you, and I will be kind to you, but we are strangers.
He put his arm around her shoulders and kissed her cheek. “Come, dear. This is enough for today. Let’s lock up and go home.”
Later that evening, he sat up alone smoking his pipe, watching the smoke rise and disappear. It had been a melancholy day, sorting his father’s things, having the conversation with Marian, and finding that picture.
Iris. It was not a name one heard very often, but it was pretty enough. He wondered why Anna had chosen it. It made him think of a tall woman dressed in lavender, with an Edwardian sway and slenderness, and a dark, sleek head.
Iris.
He went to bed and saw the name hovering in the air above him. He knew nothing about her, having kept his promise and stayed away. But she was his. His. Had he no rights at all?
Turning in the wide bed, his leg brushed Marian’s. Peacefully asleep now, she was unaware of the heat and turmoil on his side of the bed.
I cannot endure this another day. I have to find out and damn the consequences.
He waited in the morning until half past nine, an hour when surely a man would have left his house for work. Pausing for a minute with a heart that leapt around in his chest, he finally took the receiver off the hook.
“Number, please,” the operator said.
He heard the telephone ring. He imagined the room in which it rang. A hall, probably. Those West Side apartments had large square foyers, as big as a room. Most people kept the telephone on a table there. The table would have a lamp; a pinkish light would shine through a pleated silk shade; a shelf under the table would hold the telephone book; there would be Oriental scatter rugs on the floor with spaces in between, so that a woman’s heels would move without a sound over the rugs and click on the bare floor in the spaces. She would be in the library, for Anna, with her love of books, would by now have collected enough of them to fill some library shelves.
Or maybe the child would answer? All this went through Paul’s head in the few seconds it took for the receiver to be lifted at the other end.
“Hello?” The voice was hers.
His lips moved without making a sound.
“Hello? Who is it?” Questioning, a trifle impatient.
“Anna,” he said.
“Oh!”
“I had to talk to you.”
“Oh,” she whispered, “you promised me. What if—if someone else had answered the phone, or was in the room now? You promised.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. But I had to, this time.”
She said anxiously, “Why? Is anything wrong? You’re not ill?”
“No. But terribly troubled. Anna, I want to see the child.”
“Oh, my God! What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that she’s nine years old and I don’t know her.” He forced himself to speak very quietly, very reasonably. “I don’t know one thing about her, and it’s not fair to me, Anna. It’s cruel.”
He heard her sigh. “My heart’s broken for you. But how can it be any different?”
“In a different world where we might all be honest with each other, we would tell the truth. I could claim my own daughter and provide for her.”
“Oh, my dear, that’s an impossible world! A fairy tale. What’s the use of talking about it?”
“We come back to that word again. It seems as if everything that involves you and me has always been impossible, as if there were some conspiracy against us.”
“That’s not sensible,” she said gently.
“Sensible be damned! Listen, I want to see Iris. I want to talk to her. You owe it to me and I’m going to insist on it.”
“Paul! Are you crazy? Do you want to destroy the child? What is she to think?”
“What, do you really think I would destroy either one of you? I can’t believe you could have such a thought! All I’m asking for is a casual meeting. She’ll have no idea who I am.”
“But she’ll tell her father. She tells him everything, including what she had for lunch. And you know he’s always had vague suspicions about you and me. I don’t have to tell you again, do I?”
“Listen here, we’ll meet accidentally, you’ll report it all quite honestly at home. How could anyone object to that? Take Iris to Schrafft’s or some such place for lunch next Saturday. Don’t you ever do that?”
“Not often.”
“But you could once, couldn’t you?” Paul insisted.
“I suppose so,” she said fearfully.
“All right, then. You’ll come in and I’ll already be there. I’ll walk up to you, greet you with great surprise, and insist that you let me buy your lunch. It will be all my doing, all perfectly natural and open.”
She didn’t answer.
He said desperately, “It will be completely innocent! And Iris can tell it all at home just like that. Is it too much to ask for an hour in an ice-cream parlor so that my daughter can be a little more to me than a name and a face in an old photo? Please, Anna. Please.”
“Oh, my God,” she said. “It’ll be so hard to sit there with the two of you.” There was a long silence.
“Hello?” he said. “Are you there?”
“I’m here, Paul. I’m here.… All right, I’ll do it. Just once. I see that I must.”
His heart was racing. Surely under her graceful composure, hers must be too.
“This is Iris,” she said, and to the child, “Mr. Werner is an old friend. I knew him before you were born.”
The child was staring up at Paul. She had a small, peaked, earnest face, an old face, not a pretty one, except for the dark and curiously prominent eyes. He smiled and was given a shy smile in return. Something struck him, something familiar in the face: wide cheekbones and a conspicuous cleft in the chin. Also, the startling, outsized eyes, like the ones in the picture the other day.… And like his mother’s. He was looking at his mother’s face!
She was dressed the way children were dressed in London, in tweed with a velvet collar. Anna’s coat was a violet woolen, thick and soft as cashmere; she wore a fur hat and gold in her ears. Her husband was evidently faring well in the building boom. He didn’t want to be reminded of the husband. All this passed through
Paul’s head in the first few seconds.
They found a table and took their coats off. Anna’s dress was dusty pink. She removed her hat, saying that it felt too hot, and revealed what he had been waiting for, the hair with the myriad reds of grained mahogany. She no longer wore it as long as he remembered it, but it was still massed, curving below her cheeks.
“You broke a rule,” he said lightly. Someone had to open the conversation. “Redheads are never supposed to wear pink, are they?”
“On the contrary, they should. A woman taught me that in Paris, where Joseph bought me an evening dress, a pink one.”
Joseph again …
It was necessary to keep up a dialogue. No, they weren’t building houses anymore like the old ones off Central Park West, those fine old brownstones. Yes, the election had been tense with a Catholic running for president. Yes, things looked bad in Germany; Paul’s cousin had written about the National Socialists, who were gaining every year.
He was too conscious of the passing minutes. This was an occasion that would not recur, he knew that. And how much could one prolong the eating of a sandwich and a dish of ice cream? And he was aware, while talking about inconsequential things, that Iris was searching him. She would remember every word. He must be very careful to let nothing slip.
Suddenly she spoke. “Do you know my father, Mr. Werner?”
“I think,” Paul said quietly, “I saw him once. A long time ago, that was.”
The workman in the cap, going down through the basement entrance, the servants’ entrance. Anna murmuring an embarrassed introduction. The cap being tipped.
Paul took a long drink of water, while Anna fumbled in her pocketbook. They had run out of small talk.
“Tell me about your school,” he ventured, adding fatuously, “I have a young cousin, a little older than you. He likes to come to me with his school problems, what courses to take, things like that.”
The girl gave a small shrug, a delicate gesture. “I don’t really have any problems except with math. Daddy has to help me with it. He never even went to college, but he can figure almost anything right in his head.”
