The War Between the Tates: A Novel

by Alison Lurie

  “But it was my fault really. For months I kept coming around to his office, and he always wasn’t having any. He tried to help me get over it, he was beautiful about it, and so patient and intelligent, well you know how he is, but I couldn’t. I just cried all the time and kept saying how I was going to have a nervous breakdown if he didn’t love me.”

  “I see,” Erica remarks, rinsing two pieces of lettuce in the sink under an unnecessarily hard flow of water.

  “But that was straight, you know,” Wendy insists. “I figure I would have flipped out pretty soon.” She makes the gesture of someone exhausted or insane flipping a pancake, in demonstration. “I was really flaky.” Erica takes a loaf of whole-grain rye bread out of the bread drawer. “I’m not getting across to you,” Wendy says anxiously. “You’re not listening to me; you’re just angry.”

  “I’m not angry, at you,” Erica corrects, opening the mayonnaise jar. “I think it’s very honest and decent of you to come and see me like this.” In her head, she contrasts the natural whole-grain honesty and decency of Wendy’s conduct, her willingness to accept blame, with the slippery opaque homogenized mayonnaise behavior of Brian.

  “I had to, because I probably won’t be back here for a long while.” Wendy shrugs wearily, and leans against a cupboard. Her raincoat has fallen open; under it she is wearing a leather vest and skirt trimmed with long untidy leather fringe.

  “You’re leaving Corinth for good?” Erica asks, thinking that according to Brian, Wendy had already left town in June. Either he has neglected to mention that she has returned for a visit (by the look of the suitcases, a lengthy visit) or he does not know it.

  “Yeh. I hope it’s for good.” Wendy grins, sighs. “I’m taking the bus to New York this afternoon.”

  “Ah.” In all their years here Erica and Brian have never used the bus, which takes six uncomfortable hours to reach New York, but always a car or the more rapid and expensive plane. “Have you seen Brian?”

  “No; not since last Friday. He doesn’t want to see me again.”

  “But he knows you’re going to New York?”

  “He knows I’m splitting.” Wendy’s voice rises and wobbles as if she were going to cry. “It’s what he wants.”

  Splitting = leaving town, Erica translates. But Wendy also appears to be splitting in another sense, of which her fringed and shredded clothes are the visible sign. Though Brian has long since lost interest in this miserable girl, she still has a crush on him—is even now being cut into shreds and torn apart by this crush.

  “And do you want to leave town?” she asks, trying to speak gently.

  “I hafta leave town.” Wendy gasps, swallows. “Not just on account of what’s happened, but if I stay I know I’ll hassle Brian and keep him from working on The Book. That’s the really heavy thing.”

  “How do you mean, heavy?” Erica arranges her sandwich on a willow-patterned plate.

  “You know—serious. Important: I mean, compared to The Book, none of us are important, you know? Not even Brian, maybe.”

  “I don’t think I follow you,” Erica says, turning up the flame under the coffee pot.

  “You know his book, on American foreign policy?”

  “I know about it, naturally. I haven’t read any of it yet.”

  “But you know what it’s about, and that he’s going to show how this really beautiful plan Kennan had after World War II was shucked because of selfish establishment politics and intrigues. He’s going to explain the whole thing, and if The Book is published in time, and the right people in Washington read it, it’s going to really zap them. And that could have a fantastic effect, you know? Like once they realize what happened before, they would reverse their strategy, and stop trashing the rest of the world.” She looks at Erica with absolute, almost hysterical sincerity. “There’s no way of predicting for sure, but it could happen, you know?”

  “I suppose it possibly could,” Erica admitted, wishing that Wendy would stop asking her if she knows things.

  “Well, then. Say The Book wasn’t finished, and so our policy wasn’t changed and the world was destroyed, all because I wanted so bad to see Brian and get fucked?” Erica flinches at the term; Wendy, not noticing, moves nearer, gazing at her with intensity. “I mean, what I believe is if you really love somebody you hafta want what’s right for them irrespective of if it hurts you personally. Like what my roommate Linda says about Madagascar. The way you know you really love a guy is, suppose he was to get a telegram saying he could have whatever he wants most in the world if he would move to Madagascar, and suppose you got this telegram first. Would you rip it up and destroy his future, or would you give it to him?”

  “Mm,” Erica says, moving back from this outburst. “It’ll be easier for you both if you’re in New York,” she says, trying to speak in a calming voice.

  “It’s like the only way. I mean, we both realize if I’m here I won’t be able to leave him alone, because I tried that already last summer. I swear to stay away but then I get racked up about something and telephone, you know? Or I freak out completely and go to the office. And even when I’m seeing him it’s no good: I want to see him more, all the time, and there’s bad scenes, like last month in the coffee shop. It’s a bummer, really.”

  Reminded by the word “coffee,” Erica turns off the flame under the pot, pours a cup, and sits down at the kitchen table. But she is also reminded of something else. Coffee shop. Last month. Last summer. A few moments ago she had a vision of Wendy as splitting, torn apart. Now, instead, she begins to see her as several figures coalescing. It is as if she, Erica, had been stunned or drunk for months and was just coming out of it. Like a cartoon character she sits frowning, watching the stars and asterisks fade; three images blend into one. The beautiful blonde she was seeking last spring; the pudding-faced ugly one she has sought all fall; and the weary, overwrought young girl who now stands in her kitchen—can they all be the same person?

  Erica shakes her head slowly, to clear it, and looks at the single image. “Let me ask you something,” she says, speaking carefully. “Are you a psychology graduate student?”

  Wendy takes a moment to register this. “I guess not, not any more,” she says then, looking at Erica with a dazed, bitter expression. “I didn’t tell them yet, but starting today I guess I’m just a grad-school dropout.”

  Returning to consciousness, the animated-cartoon cat sees her several vibrating, threatening enemies reduced to one small, almost, pathetic mouse—a mouse who has taken her request for information as a catty remark. Brian has had only one affair, and that affair is now over. Both Erica’s invisible rivals are simultaneously defeated, rejected.

  Erica has always been a good winner: generous, modest, charming. (She is less a good loser, but fortunately she has seldom since childhood been in that position.) She realizes that she does not wish to cause Wendy any more pain than she is obviously suffering now—that she is in fact sorry for her.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean—Listen, please, Wendy. If you don’t want any lunch, at least sit down. You look exhausted.”

  “I am sorta spaced out.” The mouse slumps into a kitchen chair, “I didn’t sleep last night. I figure maybe I’ll get some sleep on the bus.”

  “Are you going home?”

  “Uh uh. Not right away. Ma’d be too psyched if I was to just walk in and tell her I quit school and the whole bit. She comes on enlightened, but she’s really a pretty square type. I’m going to stay with a married girl friend in Jersey City, she’ll lend me some money. And I’ll try to get some kind of job when this hassle is over.” Wendy puts a hand on her stomach and grins oddly. “Then maybe I’ll break the bad news to Ma.”

  “Mm,” Erica says, not listening, trying to arrange her new information. All this time, Brian has had only one affair; but he has had it all this time. When he promised to end it last spring, when he said it was over, he was lying. Only now, only since Friday in fact, is it really finished. And
when he blamed her for still brooding about it last summer; when he wondered audibly if she was mentally unbalanced, this fall—Erica feels as if she were being poured full of boiling soup; a hot furious bubbling and trembling in her chest and arms. What lies Brian has told, what hypothetical pomposity he has shown; what guilt, what awful waste of energy and feeling he has caused her!

  Now phrases Brian has used in the past about his affair begin to return. “It meant nothing ...I don’t think about it ...It just wasn’t that important.” To him, that is. To Wendy it was important, painfully important—and still is, though Brian evidently is tired of her.

  “Why don’t you have a cup of coffee,” she suggests gently.

  “Well. Okay. I mean if it’s no trouble.”

  “Would you like sugar? Cream?”

  “Everything you’ve got, please.”

  Erica sets her blue enamel sugarbowl and cream pitcher before Wendy, who proceeds to dilute her coffee into a sort of hot ice-cream soda; perhaps it is more comforting that way. And Wendy obviously needs comfort. Brian has refused to see her any more; he is tired of the feelings he has aroused in her. In order that he need not be reminded of them, Wendy is leaving town, dropping out of college. On Brian’s recommendation, no doubt.

  And now it occurs to Erica, with a black bitterness like her own coffee, that twice this autumn Brian has separated women from their chosen work, merely for the sake of his own selfish male convenience and peace of mind. First, through emotional and moral blackmail, he prevented her from taking that job in the psychology department. Now, presumably by the same means, he is forcing Wendy to leave graduate school.

  “Do you have to quit school right now,” she asks, sitting down again. “The term’s only half finished. You’ll lose credit for your courses.”

  “Yeh,” Wendy agrees dully.

  “Can’t you wait until the end of the semester? Till Christmas, at least.”

  “Uh uh.” Wendy shakes her head. “I should, maybe; I thought about it, but I know I’m not strong enough to stay here without bugging him. Anyhow I can’t afford it now.” She takes a breath, then lets it out, seeming to collapse inwardly.

  Erica picks up her tunafish sandwich, looks at it, and puts it down. Rage at Brian, who has caused this collapse, pity for herself and for Wendy, rise in her throat, almost choking her.

  “Please, have some of my sandwich,” she says, moving her plate across the kitchen table toward Wendy.

  “I better not ...Well; if you’re sure you don’t want it ...Thanks.” She smiles weakly, childishly.

  “You’re welcome.” Erica smiles back. She thinks that she is behaving rather well to Wendy, better than Brian has behaved. Brian has acted very wrongly, with deliberate and unprincipled selfishness. This idea does not completely displease her. In a husband, active is always preferable to passive misbehavior. It is not nice to think that Brian has callously and casually seduced and then rejected Wendy, but what is the alternative? The alternative is to think of him as a passive victim of circumstances, the sort of weakling whose life can be pushed around by sad pale little girls.

  “You know, you’re a lot different from what I expected,” Wendy remarks, looking up from her coffee.

  “Oh? How?”

  “I thought you’d be much—I don’t know—bigger and madder.” She takes another bite of sandwich. “I mean, you know, I used to wonder all the time about what you were like. Brian would never rap with me about you. The only data he ever gave out was that you were taller than him. And then one time he was telling me about some fraternity party where these boozed-up guys knocked over a punch bowl on you, and it sounded like you never even lost your cool. So I got this idea you were some kind of frozen lady giant eight feet high.”

  “I see.” Erica begins on her own sandwich. “I thought of you as rather formidable too,” she says.

  “Really? That’s pretty funny.” Wendy smiles a pale, distracted smile. “I guess you’re the first person who ever ... thought that. Mostly—” She slows, then stops speaking, drops the crusts of her sandwich, and puts her hand on her stomach with an expression of great unease.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I d’know.” Wendy shoves her chair back and stands up. “I guess maybe not. I better—” She looks around the kitchen, takes two steps toward the door, another step back.

  “Uh—Can’t—” Bending suddenly over the drainboard, she throws up into Erica’s kitchen sink, at first in a continuous loud rush, then more intermittently, punctuated with choking gasps of apology. “Oh, shit—Jesus, I’m sorry—”

  Erica stands a few feet off, wincing as her whole-grain bread, lettuce, tunafish salad, coffee and cream reappear in the sink, much the worse for wear. I have poisoned her just as she feared somehow, magically, she thinks. But how? “That’s all right,” she says distantly several times.

  Slowly, Wendy leaves off and straightens up, still holding on to the sink. Erica hands her some paper towels, and then a garbage bag; finally she removes the drain basket from the sink and turns on the hot water hard.

  “God, how gross. Hey, I’m really sorry,” Wendy says, looking at Erica like a sick puppy.

  “That’s all right.” Erica puts the top back on the trash can. “How do you feel now? Would you like to lie down for a bit?”

  “Well. Okay, for a couple of minutes, maybe I better,” Wendy says blurrily. Leaving go of the sink, she staggers after Erica into the sitting room. “Wow. I’m really dizzy.” She slumps onto the sofa and collapses sideways in a small heap. Erica hands her a pillow; then she unfolds the crocheted afghan from the rocker and covers Wendy with an elaborate pattern of blue, green and red geometrical flowers.

  “I knew I should never have eaten that sandwich,” Wendy says meanwhile. “How could I be so stupid, stupid, stupid!” She hits her forehead weakly with one fist.

  “I don’t see how it could be the sandwich,” Erica defends herself. “I had the other half myself, and I don’t feel ill. Unless you’re allergic to fish.”

  “It’s not that. Anything would have done it, the way I am now.”

  “Mmhm,” Erica murmurs sympathetically, though the phrase which has begun to run through her head is hysterical psychosomatic vomiting. “Of course this is a difficult time for you.” Perhaps Wendy ought not to go to friends in New Jersey. Perhaps instead she should go home to her family and a good psychiatrist.

  “Yeh. It’s really been a bummer, these last couple weeks. I mean I thought, all right, morning sickness; I can hack it until I get to the city. Nobody told me it could go on all day.”

  “You. Have. Morning. Sickness,” Erica hears herself say in a very cool high voice, the voice of an ice giantess eight feet tall.

  “So-called. With me it’s not so bad in the morning. It starts about noon and lasts like practically till bedtime. Did you ever have that?”

  “No. Not really,” replies the high voice. “You’d better rest for a while now,” it adds, with what strikes Erica as great aplomb. “And I think I’ll go and finish my lunch.”

  “Okay.” Wendy closes her eyes obediently.

  For a moment Erica stands looking at her. “You’re sure you’re pregnant, I suppose,” she says. Wendy opens her eyes. “Sometimes people imagine—”

  “Yeh, I’m sure. I had a test at the clinic. You know, that test where they kill the rabbit.” She shuts her eyes again; then she pulls Erica’s afghan up over her head and snuggles down into it, disappearing completely. A casual observer might not have suspected there was anyone but Erica in the room, were it not for the two dull-pink plastic suitcases, still standing in the center of the rug where Wendy had dropped them—how long ago?

  Walking carefully around the suitcases, Erica returns to the kitchen, where she is surprised to find it is not yet two o’clock. She finishes her lunch by pouring the coffee down the sink and putting the remains of her sandwich into the garbage. Then she sits down, rests her chin on her hand, and tries to order her ideas, which are no
w tangled together like frozen garden hose, or one of those complicated designs knitted out of snakes in the Book of Kells.

  Wendy is one person, not three

  Wendy is here, in her house.

  Wendy is pregnant.

  This last idea explains several things: why Wendy threw up into the kitchen sink, why she is leaving Corinth, and why she needs money. It shocks Erica because of what it reveals about her husband: that Brian Tate, that serious, righteous man, that well-known liberal professor and household moralist, has knowingly and deliberately seduced, impregnated, and abandoned a child.

  Wendy is leaving town.

  Wendy is going to Jersey City, where a friend will lend her money.

  Now a new, terrible idea strikes Erica. She thinks that Brian has not only seduced and abandoned Wendy, he has in effect delivered her into the hands of a Jersey City abortionist. She recalls horror articles in Brian’s Village Voice in which that very city was mentioned as a center of the illegal abortion racket; descriptions of filthy makeshift operating rooms, bloodstained tables; callous and venal doctors whose names have been struck from the Medical Register because of drink or drugs.

  But this cannot be allowed to happen. It must be stopped. If it is not stopped, in a few days Wendy may be lying dead in some slum cellar or alley.

  Wendy must not be allowed to go to New Jersey. Probably she ought not even to leave town until she feels better, stronger—until a good, trustworthy, sympathetic doctor has been found to help her.

  But who is going to find such a doctor, and how? And where is Wendy going to stay meanwhile? Who is going to take care of her? Her Ma is apparently no use; and it is clear that Brian has no intention of taking any responsibility; that he has made no move to do the decent, civilized, generous, right thing.

  Erica looks out of her kitchen window. The strong cold wind is still blowing, bending the trees between her yard and that of the new Glenview Home next door. Heavy flat clouds slide by rapidly, slate-gray, smoke-gray. Time is passing, and somebody must do something. She, Erica, must do something. She must do the right thing.