by Belva Plain
Iris’s voice came with unexpected emphasis, making a declaration. “My mother said I must do what I want now.”
“What is it you want?” he asked.
“You know what. You’ve always known, although you never understood how much I wanted it.”
“Perhaps I didn’t.”
“You never understood a lot about me.”
“I thought I did, Iris. Haven’t I always been loving to you?”
She made a small sound that might have been a swallowed sob. “That morning after I came back from the hospital, I woke up early, and the first thing I saw from the bed was the oak at the window. It was so beautiful, so alive.… And I thought, Oh, I don’t want to die. I never did want to.”
“I believe that,” he said softly. “Listen, you will do whatever you want with your life. Go to work, get a master’s degree, even a doctorate, if you will. Everything will be different, I promise you.”
“My mother said, and I see she’s right, that you must speak out, you must insist. It’s strange that she didn’t always talk that way. It was as if something or somebody had opened her eyes, and so she opened mine too. I’ve been so jealous of you, Theo, and she always used to tell me I must never let you see it. I can’t imagine what changed her.”
Iris moved in the chair so that the beam of light from the window crossed her face, and he saw in it an earnest, passionate expression that was completely unfamiliar.
“All my life I was a second choice. I was nothing compared with my brother. Mama was so proud of him. And even Papa … I used to feel that he was giving me all that lavish love to console me for being less of a person than my brother was. Then you came with all your women and the wife you lost in the Holocaust. And I knew you longed for her. Liesel … she was so beautiful, people said.”
A bird, uttering a single cry, left in the stillness an echo of its alarm. And Theo wanted to flee, to go into the safety of the house, to sleep and think no more. But “You must be truthful with each other. You must hide nothing,” Paul had said.
So he answered steadily, “I didn’t long for her in the way you put it. It wasn’t what you think. I’ve never told you.”
“Secrets, Theo! Don’t keep secrets. Tell me now.”
He lay back on the chair. It was queer that, with this sudden challenge, his hand, which had not bothered him all day, should start throbbing again. Psychosomatic. He had to clear his throat before he began, as if the very words themselves, words never before spoken to another soul, had sharp, rusty edges.
“You see, there was something that happened in the week I was to leave for America to arrange to bring the family over. Somebody sent me two dirty, anonymous letters about—about her. They said she was meeting a man in her chamber-music group, a violinist. I knew him, of course; I knew them all. He was young, poor, and good-looking, rather touching in his shabby jackets. I couldn’t believe it. Those dirty letters—and my wife. I was ashamed to mention them to her. And maybe—no, not maybe—I was also afraid. Suppose there was some truth in them? I began to reflect. We had had a very short engagement because her parents had pressed for a quick marriage, which had delighted and also surprised me. And so, when this happened, it came to me that possibly they could have been in a hurry to get her away from an unknown musician with small prospects, and safely into a marriage with a doctor of good family and with the best prospects. Wouldn’t it have been only natural? I knew enough, as young as I was, about the way the world works. So I tortured myself, while at the same time despising myself for having such vile suspicions.
“But I had to know. And so I waited down the street from the place where they had their rehearsals and watched them come out together carrying their music. I followed them quite a distance into a poor district of the city and saw them go into a house, very probably his house. I felt—I cannot tell you how I felt … so angry that I suppose I could have killed, but at the same time sick and exhausted from the shock. For a while I waited on the street, but then it became too shameful, too degrading, to be standing there like a spy, and I turned about and went home.
“It was much later, almost dinnertime, when she came in. I had been busy the last days winding up affairs, so she was surprised to see me already home so early and quietly reading. I asked her about her day. She said she had taken the baby for a walk and gone shopping. I said I thought I had seen her walking toward the Ringstrasse—where I had not been all that day. ‘Could it have been you?’ I asked to trick her. ‘Why, yes,’ she said, ‘I bought you a heavy sweater to wear on the ship.’ I asked her, feeling sicker and uglier with my lie, to let me see it. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘they didn’t have your size. I’ll have to go back and pick it up tomorrow. Why didn’t you stop if you saw me?’ ‘I was on the tram. And what was your day?’ I asked, smiling. ‘Well, I went to rehearsal. We worked on the Mozart, which made us very late, and here I am.’ She looked straight at me with clear, honest eyes. But when you are lying, it’s usual to affect simplicity and candor. Oh, I wanted to say much more, but I was afraid to. I didn’t want to believe, you see. I wanted to find some excuse for her. Besides, I told myself, there was no time because I was going away; it would have to wait until we had both left Vienna behind. Perhaps there was nothing serious to it after all.… Musicians are often loose living.… And she would never be seeing the fellow again.
“So then I left, and I shall never know.”
A long, heavy silence fell, as when a fairy tale has bewitched an audience of children, or a dream has revealed things ancient, hidden, and astonishing.
Theo, having come to the end, now waited for Iris to speak. But his unburdening and the very cadences of his voice had touched her too sharply for immediate speech. As if through an old-fashioned stereoscope or through a telescope, she was seeing another Theo, very young and rather tender. She had never been in Vienna, but had seen enough pictures to form one of her own: He was standing on a street of old houses with narrow windows; it was a raw gray afternoon in March, and he was facing the wind, looking up at one of the windows. Rejected and grown somehow smaller, “Can this be happening to me?” he would have been asking himself. Had he felt just then as I so often have? Iris wondered. And she saw him differently from any way she had ever seen him before, not diminished, only more vulnerable and not very different from herself.… Not very different from the self who, in precarious balance and for petty revenge, had weighed her own worth by the cheap flattery of a stranger.
“I’m sorry, Theo,” she said at last. “I’m very sorry.” And she thought, For the first time we have seen each other really naked, underneath the skin.
He raised his voice. “I mourn for the little boy I lost, my first child. I don’t know how he died. And sometimes I think that has something to do with the anger I feel toward Steve, because Steve is alive and ought to do better with his life. Strange, isn’t it?”
“Not really,” she said, because in a way she really understood. Yet at the same time she said to herself, It’s your pride too, Theo, quite apart from the child you lost. It’s because you’re ashamed that Dr. Stern’s son should be one of the bearded rebels.
And then she told him, “I am always more worried about him than I am angry.”
“I know. Don’t you think I worry too? Perhaps, though, I should worry a little less, and you should be a little more angry.”
“You must have seen in yesterday’s papers some more about that professor he has attached himself to, that Timothy Powers. We have to get him away from those people, Theo. Don’t you see that we have to?”
“But we can’t do it. No one can change him or help him until he wants to change.”
She did not agree, but seeing no sense in going back again over trodden ground, did not argue the point, just said with irony, “He certainly shatters our middle-class respectability, doesn’t he? When I think of the things that have happened to us in these few days to shatter this image we’ve had of ourselves!”
How abrupt the descent, she
thought: Theo’s affair at the office that night; her own absurd fiasco with Jordaine; her own attempt, or what surely looked like an attempt, at suicide.
Theo had been having a different thought. “This is a community where appearance counts for almost everything. Retrenching won’t be easy for you or for the children, I’m afraid.”
“We’ll manage,” she answered firmly.
The moon had broken through clouds and the garden was suddenly illuminated. At its far end the long row of arborvitae stood like black spears, unmoving in the windless night. The ground shone like opals, and the pool was silver. Theo had designed a small, perfect haven, expecting to stay here forever. Glancing over at him, she saw that he, too, was feeling the enchantment of moonglow and with it the wrench of loss. How often had she looked at the richness of this home and found it a worry, an unneeded burden! Yet now that it had to be given up, she was not as accepting as she would have predicted.
Enormous changes awaited them, and the very physical effort to make them all was daunting, or could be if one let it. She was not going to let it. For the first time in her life she was looking into a future of confusion and struggle; she was tired already, and yet sure of being able to cope with it.
At least there would be no parting. She was suddenly too weary now to analyze her immediate emotions toward Theo except to feel a deep relief. He had come back refreshed and as if renewed after those few days at the office, when she had thought all was lost between them. Something extraordinary had happened to him. It was mystifying.…
A cooling ripple of wind shook the air and stirred the leaves.
“It must be near dawn,” Theo said. “Let’s go in.” At the door he leaned down and kissed her cheek lightly. “It’ll be all right, Iris. Trust me.”
“Yes,” she told him. “Yes, I will. And trust myself too.”
A beginning had to be made.
12
Then the long climb began. After the house was sold, the darkest day came when the movers arrived. It was then that reality took final shape. There is something about the dismantling of a house, Iris thought, especially when one is not leaving it because one wants to and is going to a better place, that is unutterably sad; it is a hundred little deaths as one object after the other is hoisted on indifferent shoulders and carried out. There went the enormous piano, once Theo’s treasure and now Philip’s, which was to be squeezed into a living room where it would take up almost half the space. There went the portrait of a dark-haired woman that Theo had brought home to surprise her on one sunny anniversary, their ninth, she remembered; he always insisted that it looked like her, although she herself had never seen any resemblance. Cartons of fine English china were carried away, wedding presents and gifts from Mama, who for some reason could never resist china; it would surely find no place anymore in the Sterns’ house, not only because there would be no room to store it all, but also because they would no longer be living the life for which such things were intended. Since the new house had only a crawl space for attic, they were to be stored in Anna’s house. It made absolutely no sense to Iris that these things which, with the exception of the piano, she had never particularly wanted, now seemed to be protesting as though they were alive, at being taken from their home.
Theo had walked out to the rear garden and was standing alone with his back to the commotion going on inside. She knew he must be memorizing the scene: white rhododendrons—he had specified white because of its coolness against dark grass; the small reflecting pool in the corner, overhung with a lavish weeping willow; it had been a thin wand, only shoulder high, when he had brought it home and placed it exactly where it ought to go, turning the earth for it himself; she could still see him making his decisive calculation, predicting the height that it had now attained. Other eyes after today would watch its long, limp branches sway in the faintest summer wind, Iris thought, knowing that he was thinking that too; but those other eyes would not see it in its loveliness as he would. Yes, that was sure, for these new owners were not the kind of people who would stand still to contemplate a branch moving in the wind. And she felt Theo’s loss as her own.
Two men had come around to the back and were picking up some furniture that stood at the far end of the garden beyond the pool. These were fine teakwood chairs, a table and a gracefully rounded bench, all weathered into a soft silver gray. They had come from England and were Theo’s choice. On sunny, chill fall days, he had liked to read on that bench while wearing his sheepskin jacket.
“You’ll freeze out there,” she had always said, and he had always replied that he liked the cold on his face as long as his shoulders were warm.
Defeated, he asked now as she came toward him, “Why are we taking those things? We’ve no room for them. Ought to sell them, that’s all.”
“No. We’ll make room. I’ll figure out a way.”
It had taken only a few months to sell the house and go through the formalities of the closing. Iris had expected some money to put by, the difference between the value of this house and that of the new one, which was merely a cramped imitation Tudor with nooks, corners, leaded windows, gables, and false Elizabethan beams, standing in a small yard on a street of similar houses at the old, unfashionable end of town. Within walking distance of the train station and the shops, it was a world away from these quiet, open spaces. But to her astonishment there was nothing to put by, for a few years before, Theo, without telling her, had mortgaged this house.
“Why? Why?” she had demanded, keeping her anger and dismay under control.
“Because,” he had explained, “everyone said it’s smarter to invest than to let money lie idly tied up in a house.”
But he had not invested; instead he had spent. She saw that he was ashamed, and spoke of it no more.
Action was the thing. There was a shortage of teachers in the community, and Iris’s application was accepted almost as soon as the words were out of her mouth. A full-time position would be available for the coming fall, while in the meantime she was kept busy working as a substitute.
“Well,” Theo said now, “this is it. Are we ready to go?”
“Ready,” she answered.
So they drove away. The new owners came for the keys, exchanged polite good wishes, and watched the Sterns go down the drive for the last time, Theo went first, following the van. Iris went in the station wagon with the dog and Laura’s cat.
“But this place was never really ours, was it?” She spoke aloud to the animals on the backseat. “I never knew that all the time it actually belonged to the bank.”
She would miss it nevertheless, the Japanese calm of the glass walls that brought the summer indoors, as well as the white shine of winter, blue on the crusted drifts and powder on the holly.
And, too, she thought wistfully, I prided myself on being so practical with all the built-ins. I never thought about moving, did I, and not being able to take them with us?
Fortunately, Anna had several unused bedrooms and had given them enough bureaus, cabinets, and bookshelves to furnish the new rooms. She had provided curtains too, beflowered “cozy” prints that went with the nineteenth-century furniture that Iris disliked and Theo admired.
A little cluster of neighborhood children stood on the sidewalk watching the van being unloaded as Iris drove up. Among them she recognized some of her “own” sixth-graders.
“My mother’s bringing over a pie, Mrs. Stern,” called one of the boys.
Theo will hate this place, she thought, as she watched him maneuver his Mercedes into the narrow garage at the end of the short driveway. In the yard next door half a dozen children were whooping on a swing set. He would surely hate that too. And she had a mental picture of him reading on his English bench in his private corner back of the quiet pool.
Pearl was in the kitchen. She had offered to stay and help straighten out the house, after which she would look for another position. There was no room for her here, nor was there money to pay the rather handsome wages she
had been earning. Now, with sleeves rolled, she was scrubbing the kitchen counters. She looked up and smiled.
“They left it nice and clean, Mrs. Stern.”
“It’s a bit different from the other one, isn’t it, Pearl?”
Dim and dingy, with worn linoleum and old-fashioned wooden cabinets, it was a contrast to the airy space where Pearl had rolled dough and tossed salads on marble countertops.
“With a coat of paint it’ll be pretty,” Pearl said, giving stout comfort. “Yellow would be nice.”
Weakly she made herself agree. “You’re right, Pearl. It’ll bring the sun in.”
And Pearl, still comforting, continued, “Dr. Stern, now that the bandages are off and he can move his fingers, he’s more like himself.”
“That’s true.”
“And working again in the hospital.”
For Theo had begun a two-year training program in oncology at a New York hospital, an undertaking vast enough and new enough to be daunting.
“That’s true.” And suddenly, overwhelmed with everything, Iris’s eyes filled and she put her arms around Pearl. “Oh, we are going to miss you,” she cried. And then, laughing a little, “And I don’t mean your cooking, either.”
“I know, I know that, Mrs. Stern.”
The back door opened and Laura appeared, carrying her schoolbooks. She stood staring about the kitchen.
“It’s so queer to be coming home here,” she said slowly.
“You don’t like it, Laura, I understand.”
“Well, Mom, what do you expect me to say?”
Iris’s throat ached with the effort to sound brave. “I expect you to say we’re going through a bad time, but at least we are together.” She thought: You can’t know how bad a time or how close we came to not being together. “Come. I’ll show you the upstairs,” she said.
