by Belva Plain
But whether or not, he was on his way.
11
At the front desk a pleasant young man told him that Mrs. Friedman had just gone to read on the side lawn. He walked out again into a green-gold afternoon, the middle period, when all is somnolent, even the birds gone out of sight and hearing. The only sounds were the long-drawn late summer rattle of locusts and the chirp of crickets from the meadow beyond the split-rail fence that divided it from the lawn. People were talking under the broad shade of maples.
At the far end of the slope he saw her sitting with a book propped on a small rustic table. As she was partly turned away, he could not see her face, but he recognized her at once by her posture; there was something Edwardian, he had always thought, about the grace with which she moved or sat, about the long fluid lines of her legs and her neck and the very folds of her skirts. “Her serenity,” Theo Stern had said, only yesterday.
His steps were soundless on the grass and he took his time to reach her because part of him wanted to flee. And then he astonished himself by hearing his own whisper: “I knew her when she was eighteen.”
As if she had sensed that she was being observed, she turned and saw him, rose from her chair and sank back. An expression of alarm came over her face; her eyes widened and her lips parted, so that he had to speak quickly.
“Don’t be upset, I haven’t come to bother you anymore.… That’s past. May I?” he asked, indicating the second chair.
“Please do.”
“I’ve come for Iris’s sake. No, don’t be afraid. It’s nothing bad.”
She said somewhat sternly, “What do you know about Iris? What can you know about her?”
He saw that her breathing was rapid; the strand of pearls around her throat moved in and out.
“I only know what I heard from her husband. I went to his office yesterday for a checkup. You probably don’t know that he operated on my shoulder a while back.”
“I knew,” she said, still sternly, “and I wondered why you had chosen him out of all the many you could have gone to. I tried to hope it had been a coincidence.” And when he did not answer at once, she said, “Or else I thought you were playing a dangerous game and it made me very, very angry.”
“Anna,” he said, “I hope you won’t stay angry. I have never made any trouble before, have I?”
“No.”
“Well, then, I’m not going to make any now.”
She gave him a long, quiet look and, apparently satisfied, asked him what he had come to tell her.
Confronted now with the actual moment of truth, he realized he had not sufficiently prepared himself. He had a quick flash of himself as a spy or diplomat, juggling his words, trying to keep separate the things he must tell one person while concealing them from another, all the time guarding against any fatal slip and disaster.
“As I told you, I went to the office. I found Dr. Stern alone there in a bad state, severely depressed. He’s hurt his hand. He said you knew.”
“Yes. He caught it in a door. But I didn’t think—he didn’t say it was anything much.”
“He didn’t want you to know how bad it was. He’s lost three fingers. He won’t be able to go back to work. The office is being closed.”
Her hand went to her throat in a gesture of dismay.
“And the truth is,” Paul continued, feeling, as he spoke, the full brutality of what he must say, “it was Iris who slammed the door.”
“Oh, God,” Anna whispered. And over her face there passed a look of piteous fear.
Paul spoke softly, rapidly now, to get it over with. “Of course they both understand it was a horrendous accident. But she”—and he thought again of himself as a diplomat or juggler who must keep all the balls in the air without letting any one touch another—“but she is filled with guilt in spite of it. It has torn them apart, it seems. He has left the house and is living in his office.” He slowed down, having gotten safely past the attempt, if such it had been, at suicide. “They need help badly. Someone must talk to them, and of course, I—obviously …” He put out his hands palms up, almost in supplication. “That’s why I’m here. I would never have come otherwise, you understand.”
“Oh, Iris. Oh, Theo,” Anna said. She looked fully at Paul. “And he will never work? That will kill him. What will he do?”
“He will study for two years.” It was a relief to have something positive to say. “He wants to become an oncologist.”
“I see.”
“But it will entail big changes. He has no savings.” And as her forehead creased in surprise, he asked, “I suppose you had no idea of that?”
“None at all!”
“Well, it seems that the money went out as fast as it came in. I have offered to lend him whatever is needed until he can get on his feet.”
Almost imperceptibly, Anna’s back stiffened. “That won’t be necessary. I can help. I will go to him now.”
“Anna, he won’t accept anything from you. You are, after all, alone now.” And in the sudden realization that something of the sort should be said, he said it: “I was sorry to read of your husband’s death.”
With a slight nod she acknowledged his sympathy. “Thank you.”
He continued, “Forgive me, but although you are obviously not in want of anything, you are still not—”
“Not a rich woman, you’re trying to say? No, but—”
“I, however, happen to be a rich man. I have never done anything for Iris, and you know how I have always felt about that.”
She interrupted him with a low, frightened cry. “You haven’t, have you? Haven’t said anything to Theo—”
“No, no!” He was juggling again, balancing the words in thin, in very thin, air. “Of course I haven’t. It’s a business deal. Grateful patient, and all that, you see. It’s unusual perhaps, but entirely plausible.” And Paul managed a smile, as if to bring Anna along with him into a neat little conspiracy. “I had a hard time convincing him, I can tell you. As low as his spirits are, he’s stiff-necked with pride.”
“He always was. Although I am very fond of him,” she said quickly. “He has been a son to me.”
Ah, yes. Maury dead at twenty-three. I know, I know, Paul said silently.
“And a good husband and father. Oh, but Iris! Where is she?”
“At home. She sits in her room, he said. They have nothing to say to each other.”
“It’s so strange that he told you all these things.”
“Not really. I’m old enough to be his father. I’m a stranger, and he needed desperately to talk to someone. It’s always easier to talk to a stranger.”
“That’s true.”
She gazed out across the lawn. A small wind stirred the leaves above her head, so that for an instant the sun broke through the dense shade and, dazzling in her eyes, revealed tears brimming on her lashes. He stared and blinked; he had forgotten that her lashes were gold.
She took out a handkerchief and wiped her eyes. “I have to go to them,” she said.
“That’s why I came, so that you would.”
“And it’s that bad between them?”
“It seemed so to me.”
Then neither spoke. She was looking away again across the lawn. He was free to examine her. Her sheer cotton dress was the clear cool yellow of a crocus. Her hands lay gracefully in her lap. In this summer of 1968, this noisy year of shaggy hair and unwashed, sandaled feet, she seemed to have been left over from another time.
But her speech was quite current and modern. To Paul’s surprise, she mused.
“There’s something childlike in Iris. An innocence.” And even more surprisingly, she said, “I’m no psychologist, but, you know, I always thought perhaps it was Joseph who kept her that way. I don’t know. Before she was married, she wanted to teach slum children. She has great feeling for people whose lives are hard. She has talent. But he wouldn’t allow her to go into those neighborhoods. They were what he came from, he said, and there was no reason f
or her to return to them.”
“Her husband mentioned that she always wanted to go back to teaching. I gather he didn’t approve either.”
“I know.” Anna frowned. As she seemed to be thinking, Paul waited until she spoke again. “It’s odd. Has he no disability insurance?”
“I asked the same. Yes, but the wrong kind. The policy doesn’t say that he must be unable to practice his specialty. As long as he can earn a living at anything else, selling cars or whatever, he’s not covered. It was the insurance agent’s careless, stupid mistake.”
“And Theo’s,” she acknowledged sadly. “He was never a businessman. It’s too bad he would not let Iris handle these things for him. She has a head for them. But he never would let her.”
A waiter came with a pad and pencil. Anna asked, “Will you have some tea, Paul?”
His name was round on her lips. It echoed in his head. Paul.…
“Please. I’d like that,” he replied, wanting only to prolong the time.
When the tray came she poured milk into his cup. She had remembered that he drank tea like an Englishman. He would have liked to comment upon her memory, but the remark would have been too intimate, and he did not make it. So he stirred and kept stirring the milky tea, while he watched her hands move over the tea things, the pot and the little plate of cakes. A fine ring glittered on her finger. Her husband’s gift. He wondered how her hands would feel, touching him with love. Her skin was still silky; he could tell by her neck and her chest, where the pearls lay just above her breasts. Her body would still have kept some of youth’s strength. Then he braked his thoughts. He hadn’t known such thoughts were still in him after so long. And he felt a rise of something that was almost anger. If it had been Ilse in Anna’s position all those years before, she wouldn’t have had such scruples! She would have come to him with their child, no matter what. It’s true she had left him for Israel. But a country wasn’t a child, after all. Yes, Ilse would have come to him. Still, maybe that wasn’t being fair to Anna.… How could he really know what she had felt for the man she had married? It was all too complex. He mustn’t let his mind wander.
Anna was speaking. “Things began so well for them. And now this folly, this ruin. I remember the day they were married.”
Yes, Paul thought, I remember it too. Ilse and I were hidden on the sidewalk, watching them drive away. That was the day I rid my soul of you, Anna.
He steadied himself, saying gently, “Perhaps it needn’t be ruined after all. Perhaps you can reason with them.”
“They’re stubborn, both of them. Theo even more so.” She seemed about to add something else, but stopped.
From behind a hedge came a clear, exultant cry and the ping of tennis balls. Ping! Ping! they went. And he thought how queer it was that they two were sitting here in this place on a summer afternoon, having tea together.
“You see,” she said after a minute or two, “in a way, Theo still lives in prewar Vienna. He was a very rich boy. He grew up in elegance. They had a mountain lodge in the Arlberg, and his mother took the children with her to a suite in a Paris hotel while she ordered her clothes twice a year. He loves beauty and order, perfection in everything, while Iris …” Anna gave a small rueful laugh.
Paul waited until she resumed. “He wants to run a family like an operating room, too. Luckily for him it works with the children, all except one.”
“I know. He told me.”
“Steve was an unusual child, gifted, really. He could do anything well, from tennis to chemistry. He read the newspapers and formed his own opinions, often”—and here Anna gave the rueful laugh again—“often not his father’s opinions. And so there were sometimes tensions.”
That fine, proud man with his Old World memories, and the young man of the sixties, young man in a hurry and sure that he’s right, Paul thought; it was easy to see how those two might clash.
“He thinks Iris has been too indulgent of Steve, but that’s not so. She has a wonderful way with children. She understands them. They loved her as a teacher. She’s very competent, and they’ve asked her again and again to come back.”
“And she would like to?”
“Oh, yes, if it were up to her—”
“Then you must tell her to do it,” Paul said promptly. “We have one life and we must do what we want with it,” he added with emphasis.
“It’s not always possible to do what we want to do,” Anna said, in a low voice with his same emphasis.
For the first time since they had started speaking, she looked straight into his eyes. He returned the look, but it became suddenly too difficult for him, and he turned away from it.
Then she, too, turned away, saying, “She has never been sure of herself, Iris hasn’t. I used to think she felt different in the family, unsure of her place, for no reason that I can figure out, because I never …” She did not finish.
“Of course not,” Paul said.
“And somehow it carried over with Theo. I know it, but I never knew why.”
He spoke soberly. “It is just one of many things one never knows.”
The sun had fallen behind a great sailing cloud, dimming the day as if in accord with the fall of their voices. With effort Paul reenergized himself.
“So you will go to the rescue?”
“I shall leave tomorrow morning. I’ll say I got bored being away so long.”
“Then I’ve done what I came to do.”
“You have, and I thank you. I’m sorry if I wasn’t very cordial when I saw you coming toward me.”
“Understandable.” He stood up and gave her his hand. “I shall of course be wondering and hoping that peace will follow all of this. No doubt I’ll be hearing from Dr. Stern, since”—and here Paul gave a small, self-mocking smile—“since, after all, I am his creditor.”
Her hand was alive in his; he felt the narrow bones and the padded, warm palm. He dropped it quickly and walked away.
Before driving off, he turned to look. She had moved from the chair and was standing with her back to a hydrangea bush. We called them snowballs, he remembered. The last thing he saw was the blooming white bush and her arm raised in farewell.
Their talk, interspersed with long, strained, apprehensive silences, had been going on for an hour or more, and it was now past midnight. A band of eerie light from a lamp at the library window lay on the grass. Beyond it the darkness was a comfort, making their faces almost invisible to each other and making it easier to say things that would have been almost unsayable under revealing light. And Theo, after his habit of feeling an event from the utmost depth of being while at the same time watching it as an inquisitive onlooker might do, thought with painful irony that this prosperous pair, sitting on a terrace on a quiet summer night, would make an attractive advertisement for lawn furniture or a fashionable drink—except that the hand so conspicuously resting on the chair’s arm would have to be airbrushed out of the picture.
“I suppose it could be possible for me someday to see your hand without flinching,” Iris said.
Thinking, This must be the hundredth time since the accident that she has said it, he answered patiently, “I don’t know how many ways I can tell you that it will be.”
In a way, to a very different degree, he was reminded of his own avoidance of that woman at the office; he had been using another entrance ever since because he couldn’t bear to look into her face. And this thought led him to Iris’s aborted adventure and her poor little humiliated admission, which two weeks earlier, would have brought him to a jealous fury and outrage, but now brought him only to pity and sadness. Perhaps that was because of what he had learned about her, although surely it was not pitiable to have Paul Werner as a father—had the circumstances been the right ones. Down these twisted, connecting paths his mind traveled.
Iris spoke again abruptly. “I’m looking up at the roof. I should expect it to have caved in from all that’s been happening beneath it. But there it is, still solid, as if it didn’t know o
r didn’t care.”
“It hasn’t caved in,” Theo said, still patiently, “because we are not going to let it. I’ve told you, and I will tell you again, I’ve already inquired about a residency in oncology. I’m well known in the medical world, and I’m almost sure to get a good one. In a few years we’ll be on our feet again. This family is going to hold together. God help us, it is.”
“And the money for all this?”
“Oh, I had some put away.” He made his voice light and casual. “And the bank has agreed to a loan. When we sell this house and tighten our belts, we’ll pull through.”
“You’ve seemed so hopeless. You wouldn’t talk about anything. Now where have all these ideas suddenly come from?” she asked, wondering.
“I needed some time to think, that’s all.”
His confidence increased with the words. It was like what is said about a smile: The more you do it, the more you feel like doing it. The more confident he made himself sound, the more confident he felt.
She sighed. “So you have it all planned out.”
“One has to try.” Theo made acknowledgment, thinking, It was not I; I was floundering, I was dying in that chair when he came in. A quiet power, the man had had. One would never think of him as old; there was a kind of shining to him. I’ve been surreptitiously searching ever since for what there may be of him in Iris. They’re both dark and aquiline, but then, so many people are. And one finds what one wants to find. I think also of Anna, and I feel a vague aching. Yes, they would have gone well together. Yes, I can see that. For with all his solid virtues, the husband was far less the man for her than Paul Werner would have been. I am a romantic at heart; God knows, that has been my trouble.
And as he sat there in the stillness, his mind went on puzzling. Without meaning to or knowing that she was doing it, had Anna treated this unwelcome child in some way differently, more kindly, perhaps too kindly, to compensate? He had to remark the contrast between the mother and the daughter; yet was it a fundamental one, or only the natural contrast between a foreign woman, reared in want, and another reared softly in America? It is too complex for me, he thought, and anyway it is all done and over with and cannot be altered.
