Other Men's Daughters

by Richard Stern

  “You looked like old pals to me. I felt like a stain on the tablecloth.”

  “You’re a gorgeous stain,” said Merriwether. “If we’d looked at you too much, there might have been knifeplay.”

  “We’ll have to introduce him to Priscilla.”

  Merriwether drove on the wrong side of the road until she said she was sorry.

  “Chaque homme porte la forme entière de L’humaine condition,” Merriwether copies from a Livre du Poche Montaigne. His last day in France, he’s walked down to the épicerie for rolls (they wouldn’t use up a whole loaf of bread), shaken the patron’s hand (Yes, he and Madame will return some day), and said his goodby to church and state (the reopened post office). The morning is like almost every other here: a sun burst—jots of which star the timbers of the arbor—the morning tune-up of the bugs and birds, the snuffling, prowling, micturating hounds, the raking Mademoiselle, the sleeping Cynthia. This afternoon, London, a week later New York, then he flies north, she south, and in a month his shuttle-life begins again. Somewhere in the schedule sits life. Yesterday, a letter came from Mr. Ryder. “About the third I’ve had from him my whole life. I don’t know why he hates to write.”

  “Lawyers are word-cautious. Letters are potential traps.”

  “No. He just feels he’s wasting them on me. He loves all of us to call though. Every week. Maybe not the calls themselves, but the fact of the call.”

  “You’re too sensitive for social life.”

  She was too sensitive for Mr. Ryder’s letter. He suggested she get some psychiatric therapy in the fall.

  Not because their version of the world is foolproof, but because you shouldn’t build a long relationship without using everything available to drain the foundation land. No matter how strong your feeling, if it’s feeling that seeps out of old fears, it will poison any relationship based on it. You and Robert are splendid people. And together you seem to have a special splendor, but so does an apple tree on the edge of a desert. It’s set apart and glows, but the soil is in danger of baking out, and when it does, the tree dies. The difficulties in your relationship are the desert. You need extra strength. I say this to help, not to test you. I love you, and I send you and Robert warmest greetings. Though where the warmth comes from I don’t know: there’s a chill rain in Paris that’s like December at home. Still, I’m off to walk in the Tuileries.

  Cynthia put the letter down and her arms around herself—she was in the yellow bikini. “Why can’t he just trust me? It’s not as if you were something inhuman. A horse. A turnip. Should Jackie Kennedy go to a shrink for marrying Onassis?”

  “Every rich American’s entitled to mental clarity.”

  The privileges of the forme entière. Mademoiselle shuffled up the path, humming the day’s dirge—its ground bass the departure of her tenants. Merriwether scribbled the final entry in his French journal: fathers, gardeners, rectors, therapists, scientist-arsonists, all of us deluded with our “improvements” of each other. Fantasists posing as realists.

  “Quel cauchemar, monsieur,” said Mademoiselle. In her nightmare, she was alone in the house all winter, tenantless, penniless, without food. “You could cook the dogs and live for months,” thought wicked Merriwether. “Vous trouverez quelqu’un, mademoiselle. N’inquitiez-vous pas.” He tossed a merri-witticism into his final entry: My rod can’t comfort her.

  part three

  nine

  Dr. Merriwether had written home his probable New York-Boston arrival time but didn’t expect anyone to meet him; every Merriwether ran his own circus. He was surprised to spot Albie waiting at the gate. They shook hands, still, after some years of no kissing, an artificial chore for the affectionate father. “How well you look.”

  “You too.” Albie took his father’s bag, patted his elbow for reinforced affection and unnecessary guidance. (Merriwether was not unpleased by this filial paternalism.) “The others are buying school clothes.” They walked through the esophagal plaster corridors.

  “This gives us time together. I only see you about two days a year.” Merriwether, looking at Albie with his note-taking care, saw, if not a stranger, another metamorphosis. There was an intense finery about Albie. His color was theatrical, a sun tan that made a leather case for his dark eyes and brought out maple-gold stains in his hair. The hair fell thickly toward his man’s neck and over his forehead. A luxuriant, compact human tree. But an athletic one. Albie walked springily, his steps almost hops. It relieved the stockiness which he carried as if it were a public nuisance, sufferable only until it came to use in a football game. But Albie had a look of reserved power, like a president on vacation. Merriwether who enjoyed a chameleon’s unobtrusiveness for himself, also enjoyed his son’s vividness. It was an assertion of independence, a signal to parents they’d done a good job.

  Albie also looked expensive: the vents of the red sport shirt showed not flesh but underwefts of red; thin leather thongs criss-crossed the v-neck. Double-knit slacks, soft leather shoes. He cost himself a fortune. Merriwether studied his son’s squareness, his tan, the broad forehead covered with fox-hair, the narrow shoulders, surprising on such a powerful thorax. Hard to think he had held other metamorphoses of this a thousand times, baby, child, boy. (The mystery of development; not just its process but its why.) Five years ago, no, six now, sitting in the stands with Sarah and the other children, he’d watched Albie playing football. Stands, cheerleaders, benches, a PA system, and there was his Albie built-up like a blue bunker in helmet, padded sweater, gold kneepants. The students cheering like lunatics, a band, his Albie, part of a public occasion, kneeling on a line, shoving at a bigger boy, tackling a runner, the public voice announcing “Tackle by 37, Merriwether.” He’d watched with tears—he didn’t know why. What was a father’s stake in a son? His dissociating head flashed a bloody, literal version of this phrase. Odd. (Optical agnosia, momentary ‘fatigue’ in the stellate cells?) His feelings were proper, love, surprise, admiration, but he was thinking as an experienced tourist: “Don’t be taken in.”

  “What was summer like, Alb?”

  “Ten thousand two-by-fours.” He’d worked with a master carpenter in Williamstown.

  “No fun?”

  “I met a girl. We put up her father’s garage.”

  “Are you good friends?”

  “We haven’t slept together.”

  Dr. Merriwether didn’t like this. He had never talked to his children about this sort of thing. Even when it came up indirectly, theoretically, it overburdened domestic discretion.

  “It’s not necessary to sleep with every girl friend, is it?” They’d just pulled out of the lot—Albie had paid the parking fee before Merriwether got his hand to his wallet.

  “I’m not intimidated by this statistical crapola, if that’s what you mean. Though Ann had a terrible time freshman year. Half the girls talking her into bed with the first available cock.” Another parental twinge. “She thinks she’s ugly and doesn’t have much choice. Which made it worse. She’s still a virgin. I’m the first boy she’s confessed that to. Imagine having to confess the sin of not being autographed by a sexual pencil. It’s disgusting.”

  “D’accord. But we don’t have to live like our neighbors.”

  “Saints don’t.”

  “I hope Priscilla isn’t intimidated. One way or another.”

  “Don’t worry about Priscilla. She’s got the nervous system of a computer.” Albie and Priscilla were close but competitive. “And better not ask me about her virginity. I have no idea, and don’t care.”

  “I feel as you do, Albie. Still, fathers worry about their children’s happiness.”

  “You used to tell us happiness wasn’t the human goal.”

  “Did I? I meant pleasure.”

  “What you said always meant more than anything.”

  “I wish I’d said better things then.”

  “They were good things. I wish I lived up to more of them.”

  This was almost too much of a go
od thing; Merriwether felt the skeptic’s fibrillations. Against his will. Keep to the surface. That’s what makes social peace. You have a fine son. Hold to that. For years, Merriwether had felt Albie’s stony opposition. Necessary springboard, he’d told himself, but it was painful. Albie had gone around with a group of what Merriwether thought of as “displaced boys.” Many dropped out of colleges or never went. They drifted over the United States, coming back to Cambridge to see their fellow drifters. They took odd jobs at the post office or Jordan Marsh’s. They pursued neither careers nor official learning. Life was an extended summer for them. They took up such things as scientology, Hopi culture, stained glass windows. When they lived at home, they got high, went to movies, and, above all, played games and watched them on television. Football, basketball, hockey. The Merriwether house was a center for them: the comparative merits of the Bruins’ slap-shots and the subtleties of first-round draft choices were great topics. Passing themselves off as Harvard students, they used the Harvard gym. None of them played on teams; training was repugnant to them. In the long pauses between jobs or returns to school, they stayed up late and slept late. Sleep was their refuge, sports was a refuge, life itself was a campaign of refuge from the insistence of their fathers and mothers to do something worthwhile. Meanwhile their old classmates went through college and readied themselves for professions; each year separated the two groups more. Albie’s friends collected the complaints of the other boys (“What else is there to do?”; “I’ll suffer a few years, and then it’s a hundred thousand a year just spreading butter”) and worked them into their ideology of contempt for the ordinary, running world. They were not going to be corporate sucker-ups, legal toads, hating their wives, their lives, their towns, they were going to take things slowly, in the world’s rhythm, they weren’t going to be ironed by the System. Touch them anywhere—clothes, music, anarchic politics—laissez-moi poured out: “You’re so hung up with production and rut-greasing, you don’t even know the idea of spontaneity.”

  Albie had felt with them, he sometimes talked as they did, he played poker and basketball with them, but from inside he’d learned their fear and their sadness. Even when he agreed with articles of their contempt, he wasn’t part of it. He had a big hunk of conventional ambition. Which Merriwether, without verbal evidence, somehow knew; and was relieved by.

  “I’m really glad you came alone, Alb. I’d like to talk to you about something.”

  Albie was an excellent driver, cool, careful, with excellent reflexes and driving manners. He kept his eyes on the road but his head, the Sarah-ish head, bent politely fatherward.

  “It’s something difficult for me to talk about.”

  “Is it about you and Mother?”

  “Yes. I don’t know quite how to go about it.” Ahead, Merriwether saw the insurance skyscrapers. Mineral lint on the old splendor of his child’s memory. But it was a grand day, one of those designer’s preview shows of autumn that New England stages around Labor Day. The air’s polleny white and gold had a holophotal intensity. An urban migraine, yet beautiful, the sky’s dense chemical blue.

  “Ann showed me a squib about you in Newsweek. Did you see it?”

  “Yes, I did. Did it upset you?”

  “I don’t know. It looked harmless enough. I guess we’d guessed you were with a girl.” Merriwether grabbed at the manful equality but missed the effort under it. “Is it something serious?”

  “I don’t know, Albie. What counts, I’m afraid, is that Mother and I have been having trouble for years. I guess you know that.”

  “I guess so. You didn’t let it out, but Pris and I have talked about it. It must be very hard. For both of you.”

  “People become machine-like about trouble. The other parts of life take over. Though you pay a toll. Usually without knowing.”

  “Mother knows.”

  “Yes, she does. And she started remaking her life. I admire her. Terrifically. But she needs more than my admiration. And I need more. More than the laboratory, more than you and Pris and George and Esmé. In some ways, you’re the center of my emotional life, but there was a big empty place there too. Now someone’s there.” Merriwether kept his eyes on the road.

  “Are you going to divorce Mom?”

  Merriwether breathed heavily. “I don’t want to, Alb. I hate the idea of it, hate the fact of it. Nobody ever divorced in our family. The word’s like barbed wire to me. I know it’s silly; but I don’t want to take anything from those I love. The girl doesn’t care about marrying. But if Mother saw the thing in Newsweek—”

  “She saw it. Mrs. Bowen showed it to her.”

  “That’s what friends are for. I’m going to tell her anyway.”

  “Maybe it’d be better not to. Maybe it’ll all pass away.”

  “Maybe. But we’ve not been really married for so long now. And now there’s this.” What a fossil he felt. Yet he felt, and feeling was not fossilate. “We separated emotionally years ago. Probably my fault. Without meaning to I dominated her. That was the way of things. My schedule, my friends, and though it’s hard for young people to understand—”

  “I understand.”

  “—my money, even. And the house, she didn’t get the chance, or didn’t make the opportunity, to make the house into whatever she wanted. The house was an expression of the life. For women especially, the house is like part of their body. Like a fiddler’s violin. Mother doesn’t think too much of me anymore.”

  “Mother respects you. I know she does.”

  “I respect her. Very much. For all our differences. And you know how different we are.”

  “I’m different from Ann, too. And I’m like you, I guess. I dominate her, tell her off. She takes my guff.”

  Dr. Merriwether was rather annoyed to get shoved off center stage. Albie, however, had had as much of his father’s confession as he could take. He did not want to hear any more. He drove over the bridge and swung into Memorial Drive. Sailboats filled the basin, blue, red, ivory. The summer gestures of Boston: the Esplanade, the grass banks, the cyclists, the patches of old meadow, the shells with bare-chested strokers in the Charles; cars, boats, trees, highrises afloat in the particled glitter. They drove by Hinham, Akron, Peabody Terrace, swung past the white-belled redbrick Georgian strut of Dunster, the glassy rise of new Leverett, up Boylston. Thought Merriwether, why hadn’t Albie come here? Why hadn’t he tried a little harder? Wouldn’t he have been more at ease with himself, less distrustful of the world? No, that sort of view was out of date. Strong, solid, red-gold, wheeling the car, talking of their comparative problems with women—one his mother—Albie was someone who understood the world. Maybe too much. If that was possible.

  They were into Ash Street. The old stillness, the emerald heaviness of the trees.

  “Thank you, Albie.” In the driveway, Merriwether shook his son’s hand.

  Albie blushed.

  Sarah Merriwether’s bad time was before supper. The blood sugar was low, the demands on her were high. And then he would come home—unless there were a call at five-thirty saying he would not be home—and after a loud hello into this dust-magnet of a house (in which he’d embalmed her for twenty years without a glimmer of feeling for her feeling about—and without one single attention to—its headlong disintegration), he would strut upstairs to the news, stopping in the sun parlor for a glass of red wine, or the kitchen for some Gorgonzola and cold white wine. The classic lord’s life, which for years she had not minded. He had worked, and worked hard, winters, summers, weekends, and she had gone along with his work, tried to follow it, tried reading the offprints in the technical journals, tried hard to read the little book he’d done for Timmy Hellman, tried harder and often succeeded in enjoying the departmental gossip, the international gossip about the great figures, Haldane, Linus, René, Jacques, Francis, Josh; she could have passed an exam in the biographical history of modern biology. An apparently quiet man, he was really a teacher to his bones, instructing, pointing out, “clarifying�
��; and it was she he mostly clarified. How many thousands of clarifications had she undergone, and in the presence of every friend they had, let alone the children. She must look like Moron Numero Uno. And she went on cooking suppers and doing the cleaning, and the wash, and the children grew up and out, and his frugality leashed them to his desires for them, so that Albie could not take it any longer, and though still polite, even respectful and affectionate, paid absolutely no attention to the quiet directives, the “eyes to the future,” the hints about hard work, about reading this, or staying summers in the lab.

  She had one year of course work beyond the M.A., and, for almost twenty years, she’d forgotten that she too was a person of expert training. Then, before she broke down she’d converted a few of those credits and was doing her Master of Arts in Teaching; within a year she’d be qualified to teach French and Spanish in the schools. She would have her place and that meant new life. He had apparently approved, there were speeches about her excellence, her good grades, her fine study habits; he sometimes read her texts, and for a few months, she’d sensed a revival of sympathy, she almost felt she could not only endure life with him, but that if this Merriwether mausoleum were sold and they were installed in a manageable apartment, it might be a good life.

  And then what? He took off for Europe, and his disgusting affair. Advertised in a national magazine. Madness. All spring, night after night he had gone out, she could hear the door clicking despite his care. He would be off, the secret prowler. While she kept the home fires burning.

  And he blamed her. As if her body could be purchased by three daily meals, and this leaky hutch which she alone kept up. (He couldn’t hammer a nail.) As if he really cared to make love to her. Frigid? No, no more than any woman with a husband who saw her as an interior broom. By no means frigid. Despite her weight, the wrinkling belly, the veins showing through the flesh he had cursed with contempt and now infidelity—though God knows he’d been unfaithful, at least in thought, with half a dozen other women, some who claimed to be her friends. (She could see him look at Jeanne Schneider.) Despite all she’d gone through, anemia, bad teeth, a D. and C., a lustrum of disinterest, she had her desires; and no outlet for them. Men had flirted with her for years. Despite her chunkiness she was in better shape than most women her age. But she wasn’t capable of being unfaithful; and besides it was the husbands of her friends she cared for—who else did she see?—Max, with his devotedness, his decency, his political force—he was the first of their friends to see what the war really was—and he cared for her. When he kissed her in front of Jeanne with the usual flourishes of academic passion which denied passion, she knew there was more there, he cared for her as a person, he respected her. And Dev Calender, severe, ugly (“a gargoyle looking for a cathedral,” said Stu Benson, “a stain without a glass”), decent Dev, one of their few non-scientist friends, Professor of American History, husband of her closest friend, Tina. Another profound sympathy which had no physical expression but the goodby kiss. A kind man, a man who did things, who was neither mastered by his work nor his ambition, yet who was first-rate. She’d sat in a course of his on the New England Mind; the names of her own family and childhood worked in mind-boggling debates on governance and church; too much, but somehow something that belonged to her. She’d given him some letters her grandmother had left her, and he had done a piece for the Massachusetts Historical Society Bulletin on a Wainwright who had fought Jonathan Edwards’s heresies in Western Massachusetts. Not that ancestral piety was a piety for her. God knows, part of Bobbie’s weakness was that New England tightness and secretiveness which came out in such things as this affair. There’d been little real affection in his family. The Merriwethers had come out of New Bedford, they’d been insurance tabulators, penny-counters, there was no real joy of life in them. Joy was something done out of sight, in the dark. They were really made for sin. Morton, who’d practiced the black mass, had been in their family. Then there was German blood and maybe Indian. Racial nonsense, yes, but somewhere were the fuses for their repressed English rage. Bobbie had a mestizo’s uneasiness; if he’d been surer, more patient, maybe his scientific work would have been what he’d hoped it would be; but he could only buckle down when fired up. God knows he had a high enough I.Q. Why didn’t he become top rank? There was something deeply unsettled and unhappy there, some profound indolence took hold of him.