Other Men's Daughters

by Richard Stern

  When Mr. Merriwether himself retired, he also “took to the pen.” The Memoirs of a Harvard Man began with an epigraph from Lowell’s poem on the Harvard dead,

  Those love her best who to themselves are true,

  And what they dare to dream of, dare to do …

  and finished with the amalgamation of the family firm with the Traveller’s Insurance Company of Hartford. For some reason, the memoirs were written in red ink and on the lefthand pages of six ledger books. The stiff, upright, scarlet script rolled on like a healthy cardiogram. No blots, no cross-hatched words. Merriwether had read the ledgers in the weeks after his father’s death. Or read at them, for they were tedious; though remarkable, considering that his father had never written an article, let alone a book. The chronicle was as regular as the script. And all uphill: tragedies were exercises in fortitude, triumphs exemplifications of principle.

  One night in Cambridge, he read Cynthia his father’s account of his own birth day.

  On that frosted March morning, after twenty-one-and-one-half hours of what even a coal miner might agree was labor, our son Robert entered this life. If strength of character be measured by the endurance of pain, my Hattie must be regarded as a veritable Gibraltar; if it be measured by strength of lung, then my dearest Robert’s first seconds in the world gave ample promise of what he has proved to be. Character is the tenacity with which a man fulfills what he knows is expected of him. Endurance does not suffice; strength does not suffice; ability does not suffice. Two things count: intelligence, which knows what is expected, and will, which moves to fulfill expectation.

  “Family and duty,” said Merriwether. “Do you wonder I’m such a cautious cookie?” (In the three months since Cynthia had moved to Cambridge, he had never gone shopping or seen a local movie with her.)

  “That’s your Merriwether fourmisme.”

  “Concern for good form?”

  “No. Ant-ism. La fourmi, hoarding and hoarding against perpetual winters. I was hoping I’d convert you to cigalisme. Grass-hopperism. Motto: it’s winter now. Live it up, and not behind shades. Accept yourself.”

  “When you’ve lived through as many New England winters as I, you’ll change that tune.”

  “‘No season’s harshness was his Wether, the godlie Robert Merriwether.’ You’ve perverted the tradition.”

  On the phone to Timmy Hellman, Merriwether said he’d think hard about it, there was lots of undigested stuff in his head, he might be able to make sense of it in a book.

  six

  For years, Thomas Fischer’s apartment on Ellery Street was little more than a storage bin for his few possessions. His real home was his overnight bag. Chelonia cambridgiensis, he called himself, the Cambridge turtle. Childless, abandoned by his second wife after a year of marriage, he made a virtue of solitude. “There’s a certain wastage in solitude, but as Einstein said, if it’s frightening at the beginning, it becomes delicious. Of course, Einstein didn’t live alone.”

  Fischer’s life was work, the first half in biochemistry, the second in scientific policy. In his twenties, he’d synthesized a pituitary hormone, and received a Nobel for it. When he was forty, he joined the National Science Foundation. The politics of science replaced the chemistry of macro-molecular synthesis at his center. In 1965, he formed an independent, international group of scientists whose aim was to designate crucial research areas. “It’s like Wells’s Open Conspiracy. The hope is to set policies which these ballot-Punchinellos will execute. Who are they to speak for national, let alone world needs? Tinkerers, liars, showmen, posturing crooks.” But Fischer knew how to manipulate the tinkerers. “You do their work, then congratulate them for it.”

  In 1966, he resigned his Harvard professorship and lived on a small subsidy from the Rockefeller Foundation. His chief expense was air travel; he wore the same clothes year to year, ate little, drank inexpensive wine, and stayed in small rooms which bore the marks of permanent transience: the opened suitcase, empty refrigerator, a pile of 24-hour-service laundry. His Cambridge and Washington rooms were somewhat homier. He owned the books, the television sets, the beds; domestic leavings of his wives were in closets and cupboards.

  Fischer was solid, red-faced, blue-eyed, handsome. Dr. Merriwether—who had been his only real friend for years—had seen him tender, grim, furious. He had a feared wit, he had grown conscious of other people’s fear of—or delight in—it, his earlier directness was now frequently a performance of what had been “natural.” As he became surer of his own powers and of other people’s lesser ones, he indulged himself more and them less. He interrupted his friends when thoughts or jokes occurred to him; in front of them he seldom bothered to control his contempt or fury. Capable of extraordinary courtesy, responsive to fine work in ten or twelve areas of science, he also could be one of the finest of listeners and critics. Still, even here he had blind spots. He was excessively strict about scientific genres. He disapproved of Merriwether’s recent interest in dipsologic models for certain cancers. “It’s fanciful, trivial. You’re wasting yourself, Robert. Leave cancer to virologists and geneticists. You’ve got plenty of important work in your own bailiwick.” His own research had applied crystallography to hormone synthesis in what was then a totally new way, but Fischer was not one to see himself as a model. In rare moments of self-examination, he swung from modesty to manic conceit. Continuous work pushed aside self-doubt, increased self-absorption, narrowed his tolerance for innovation. Since most new work was unimportant, Fischer’s self-righteousness increased; but the increase was more in density and narrow fierceness than in strength. His few friends moved away from his tyranny; regretfully, for they acknowledged his bravery, intelligence and basic dignity. They had the option of telling him to stop his egoistic poaching or to stop seeing him.

  Merriwether was the only friend who cautioned him about his excesses; and he remained Fischer’s closest friend. For years, he’d recognized and even suffered Fischer’s growing narrowness, but he still treasured the intervals of thoughtfulness and responsive intelligence.

  Merriwether was one of the few harbors in Fischer’s life, his house the one in which he most relaxed, perhaps the only one he loved. The Merriwethers embodied his sense of family worth. The four children, the attentive parents, the fine old house seemed to him a domestic expression of noble intellectual and spiritual traditions.

  Two days after Thanksgiving, Fischer stopped off in Cambridge. Thanksgiving Day he’d been in a plane. (He often traveled on the holidays, piecing over the emptiness of such times with the official convivialities of stewardesses.) He came to Acorn Street directly from Logan Airport. His suitcase was in the hall, the Merriwether children, seeing it, called “Hi, Tom,” and went in for handshakes and shoulder squeezes. Priscilla kissed his cheek, the first lips that had been there since she’d last kissed him. The children were interrogated and joked with. When they left, Merriwether told Fischer about Cynthia.

  Fischer was less innocent about international than personal complexity, but he had not been married twice without knowing something of human grit. It had been years since he had felt anything like love for anyone. Abstinence and activity had kept him from all but occasional twinges of need, but he met many men and women all over the world, and he saw that as many as one in three was kept from doing his best work because of emotional trouble. At least, such trouble usually incapacitated them; now and then, a new emotional involvement was connected to a burst of achievement. Fischer had shaken hands with many new loves shortly before or after extraordinary work was announced. He had enough evidence of this sort and had heard enough intimate talk to think of himself as “a scientific confessor.”

  In the familiar old parlor, with the glass-and-silver knickknacks deflecting the firelight in ways that stirred what sense of home he had, Fischer listened to his decent, thoughtful old friend speaking in the same voice with which they had for so many years talked of politics, enzymes and the NSF. Now, though, Merriwether spoke of a domestic ari
dity which Fischer had never suspected. This was the only household in the world in whose workings he took an interest comparable to his interest in the scientific policies of government, and he had known nothing about it. He watched his old friend’s long face grooved by perplexity. “I had no idea, Robert. I knew Sarah suffered from not going on with her intellectual work; but I thought she had accommodated herself to it. There’s so much of that. Danica”—Fischer’s second wife—“complained of it. I don’t know why. She never cooked a meal; we were out every night, except when I cooked. I certainly never suggested she leave the laboratory.”

  “I’m afraid we did,” said Merriwether. The sidetrack was relief.

  “Of course you did. I was always amazed that you admitted her. I’ll never forget her little talk on membrane permeability. I think she thought the cell was made of cardboard. She never did find out what a lipid was, though I occasionally touched her at their cumulative points. Her permeability was as indifferent there as elsewhere.”

  “Sarah has not been a case for diffusion either.”

  “No, no I imagine not. Well, I’m older than you, Robert, and I’ve found the chief metabolic product of these years is callous. I simply don’t feel anymore. I guess my hope for you would be the same. In a few years, you won’t care about what disturbs you now. Your young girl or your troubles.”

  The friends had remarkably little experience of personal talk. There were always inquiries about health and progress, but neither man enjoyed confession. After Danica had run off with a technician in the Zoological Laboratories, Fischer opened up for the first and last time. “She doesn’t know what she’s doing. That clown’s bewitched her. If she’ll come back … I won’t say anything.” Danica was a surly, chesty talker, a clumsy, persistent flirt. Yet Merriwether had liked her for her doggedness and then pitied her for being left alone so often. Fischer was gone more than half the year. When he was around, he was tender and devoted, but he had an old Germanic contempt for women. He said he had married Danica because of her learning, sincerity and what he took for sweetness. “Camouflage,” he’d said in his confusion and rage that day. “She was skittish, nervous, a troublemaker. Born to cheat and connive. I’m well rid of her,” but for a year he wasn’t. Then he dreamed one night that he’d smashed her face, and never again thought of her coming back to him.

  “I’ve had sheaths on my feelings for years, Tom. An old Massachusetts man is taught to think old from age six.”

  Partially true. For conversational ease, for brevity, Merriwether, like most people, simplified himself. In the age of analysis, personal integrity is an antiquated term, Catos are shredded into pathology. Honest, modest men pretend to be something else. Merriwether was somewhat more innocent than most alert, modern men, but he was alert enough to his ploys and disguises; he could feel under his own sincerest moments other selves criticizing his omissions. He detested these simplifications, these posings, yet, to protect his special, deep, yet limited relationship with Fischer, he exaggerated his unhappiness. His wife and children read poems and novels full of comic self-abuse and hatred; they were so frankly narcissistic, he too enjoyed them; but to do it oneself was despicable. Yet, for Fischer, he found himself playing the minor poet, darkening the view in order to conceal the shame he would or could not shake that he had gone against the grain of good sense and decency. “It’s better than thinking of yourself as a child,” said Fischer. “I’m only sorry you couldn’t have found a thirty-year-old widow who liked time to herself.”

  “Anesthesia would also solve my problems.” He pressed the familiar lumps of the leather chair. So much of his life was habituated to discomfort. “I don’t believe in fatal attractions, Tom. Isn’t there a book called Elective Affinities? Cynthia was not elected by me. But like most of us around here, I haven’t chased women since my teens. I don’t know any. Children, work, the pleasant life here; you know it. Sarah, in many ways, was a marvelous wife.” He spoke softly. She was upstairs. “Probably not suited for marriage with a scientist. I think she’d have been happier with someone whose work she could have affected. Or shared. She read at my articles, she read histories of science, God knows she’s heard a lot of scientific talk over the years, but now it appears it’s been something she suffered because of me. I’m not the narrowest of men, I read pretty widely, have always read. Perhaps more than she. This too became matter for resentment.”

  “I’ve seen so many men used up attempting to satisfy the insatiability of women.”

  “Better not let Priscilla hear that. Or even Esmé.”

  “The main problem is your friend. Does she leave you enough time for your life?”

  Strange disjunction, thought Merriwether. So alert to some things, so childish about people. Yet it was good to talk. It put his troubles out there, where other people’s troubles were. “I feel about her the way Galileo did about the telescope. My feelings for her enlarge my feelings for other things. I suppose that’s a well-known phenomenon. As for the children, I don’t know. I sense their worry. It’s inchoate for the little ones, but it’s there. Though Sarah and I don’t argue around them. But it’s in their air. I feel it so for them. Maybe I transfer my anxiety to them. They become more and more precious to me.”

  “You’re not recommending your mode of life as a domestic vaccine?”

  “I recommend nothing. I envy your insulation. Every step away from the familiar is damn lonely. At least, in our little society. These days every event has a new inflection for me. A kind of ionization. Letters, telephone calls, stray remarks. So little is casual now. As for Cynthia, she’s my responsibility too.”

  Fischer said he thought that a serious mistake. “Everyone takes care of himself, Robert. You mustn’t let this girl turn you into a parent or a doctor.”

  “That was something I might have thought about early. In fact, I did. Knowledge isn’t always contraceptive.”

  Fischer said human relationships were mostly mess, one had to make up one’s mind to amputate or suffer. “I’m sorry, Robert, but I think it will get worse. At least for a while. Then the girl will find something else. And fatigue will overtake your affection. I wish I could help you.”

  Merriwether fetched a drink for them. When he came back with two glasses of scotch, he told Fischer about Cynthia’s using the apartment.

  He was not entirely surprised that Fischer minded this. He said “fine,” but it was clearly not fine. Fischer had felt a piece of grit under his shell. For a man who lived in suitcases, he was fanatic about clean dishes, spots on rugs, rings on his coffee table. Knowing this, Merriwether had gone around after Cynthia’s visits and tidied up. Well, he might as well let him have everything. “Tom, I’m not capable of carrying on an affair. I mean long distance. Sneaking off for weekends, sneaking away to telephone. That consumes, it humiliates.”

  Fischer’s rosy, big-nosed face took on once again the depth of a friend. He pushed off his annoyance. “Give it up, Robert. It will be painful for a bit. But you know as well as I how much easier everything else will be. There might even be another chance with Sarah.”

  “Even if I could, the girl is committed. She’s deeply involved. And she’s not the steadiest sort of person. Just imagine what could happen.”

  “Nothing will happen.”

  “This girl could do herself an injury.”

  “They say that. They feel that. But people can take a great deal more than they know. It will be hard for her, but then she’ll feel the terrific relief of being out of something unsuitable. After all, she’ll have had the experience of having known a superior person.”

  “She’s at least my equal, Tom. I’m going to have her come here. She’s tired of her school, she’s exhausted the professors there. She’s extremely intelligent, her record is superb, she’d benefit here academically. She wants to take up Japanese, they have next to nothing down there. She can do serious work here. I can do my work. She can get an apartment. Not yours. I am sorry about that.”

  Fischer sh
ook his head, grimly, even angrily. “You’re making a foolish mistake. For her, as well.”

  “If she comes here, I think it’ll burn itself out. Maybe I’ll have had my fill of whatever it is I’ve needed.”

  “Maybe.”

  “And she’ll be with young people, first-rate young people. She’ll leave me before I get tired of her. I can take that. It’ll be the proper punishment for me. It’ll be misery to see her around with others, but this is a big place. I don’t have to see her. She doesn’t have to flaunt her conquests.”

  “So you say.”

  “Maybe she can leave as soon as she gets her degree.”

  “Robert, I will do what I can. I wish I could dissuade you, but it’s clear I can’t. You want something, and your actions suit your want. Just consider this,” and Fischer waved his arms around the old room, the chairs, the books, the fire, the couches, the upstairs noise of children. The paraphernalia of comfort. But there was a force here that destabilized everything. Fischer was no guide in these questions of feeling. “If this isn’t enough, well, I pity you.” Fischer had an odd smile, small teeth, small eyes. A cat’s smile. He got up. “I hope you’ll be in better shape when I come through again.” He went to the stairwell and called goodby to Sarah, Priscilla, Esmé and George—Albie hadn’t come home for Thanksgiving.

  part two

  seven

  From Marseilles to Menton, the Midi is on fire. The Minister of Coasts and Forests proposes massive reforestation with less inflammable vegetables, but meanwhile, the coast blazes. Driving up the hill in his rented Peugeot, Dr. Merriwether sees flames and smoke in the Var Valley. A strange excitement for him. A student of one of the four elements, perhaps he has a feeling for the others. “You’re a natural firebug,” Cynthia tells him. “You’d better watch yourself. They arrested a creep yesterday up in Levens. A pharmacist from Genoa. Claimed he was satisfying un besoin naturel. Naturally. Everybody likes fires. So watch your step. I think Mademoiselle’s got her eye on you already.”