Other Men's Daughters

by Richard Stern

  It was no longer her business or concern. What concerned her now was destruction. She was being destroyed, this life could not go on, she was not a mat, she was not a maid, she was not going to clear up his messes, she was finished. She didn’t need Kate Millett and Germaine Greer for strength. This was simple recognition of humanity. She’d done a paper on the droits de la femme of 1793 passed after the Convention had proclaimed the droits de l’homme. She was no revolutionary, she did not believe it demeaning to raise children or stay at home. There was dignity there too. But she was not going to be made a human vacuum cleaner. She would not live five years this way, she could not live two years like this. Not for the children. No, she’d lived so much for children, and happily, but she was not going to die for them. She was only fortytwo, she had twenty-three years of official working life, and if she lived like her parents, she would live beyond eighty; that was half a life.

  “H’loo everybody.” The steps, the voice. Please don’t come out here.

  But here he was, the European traveler. “How are you, Sarah?” Kiss on the cheek. “How good to see you.”

  “So the traveler returns. I missed the arrival. It wasn’t in Time.”

  “Oh,” he said. “That was a foolishness. How’s everything?”

  “Just fine, thank you. Everything ran smoothly. I see by the magazines you had a fine time too.”

  Did he think he could walk in from the French stews and have her trumpeting “Welcome Home”? What perversity. He had left her chewed bones for years. No more. This was it.

  Shaking, then shaking off this frozen greeting, Dr. Merriwether went up to his room, washed up, and went up to the third floor to talk with Priscilla. They had kissed and talked a bit at the door, he’d given her perfume and a handful of postcards, and gone out to the kitchen. She’d gone upstairs and talked with Albie.

  When her father knocked and came into her room, she was flushed and scared.

  For years, she had loved talking with him. He so clearly wanted her to be something special and believed she was. When she and Albie were younger, he would read over paragraphs of Thoreau or Spinoza to them and ask what they made of them. Then they went over them word for word. Years after, she decided things on the basis of those sessions.

  She was in shorts and blouse. She’d put on a little weight this summer, but she was still lovely. Merriwether felt an almost illicit pride in being her father. She had a purer, a simpler beauty than Cynthia, more familiar, more natural, less intense, less dramatic. Despite the dressing table and bathroom crammed with beauty aids, the rigor of Cynthia’s concentration on beautification wasn’t here. Perhaps because there was no imminent battle. Priscilla had boy friends, but she seemed untroubled by them. Now and then she went with one boy for months, but what they did together was not much concern of Merriwether’s. He imagined that when Priscilla was ready for sexual love, she would have it without much fuss. At least, it helped him to think so. He guessed she was still a virgin; that too didn’t displease him, though he believed he had no moral scruples on that score. At least, she knew about contraceptives—he had talked to her about their mechanisms and chemistry—she had enough money to buy them and, he supposed, at Oberlin, as at most schools, she could get a prescription when she needed it. Merriwether examined Priscilla medically only when she had something like a sore throat; if anything, he was less medically sensitive to his children than non-medical fathers to theirs.

  “I talked with Albie about something on the way in, Pris. I thought I’d say something to you too.”

  “He told me, Daddy.” The stereo was on, a girl’s clear voice over a guitar.

  “May I turn down the stereo?”

  “Are you sure you want to talk with me?”

  He saw now that Priscilla was pale and trembly. “I think it’s better, dear.”

  “For you or me, Dad?”

  Whew, thought Merriwether. “As long as you know, I want you to hear what you also know, but still hear it from me. You and the other children are the most important things in my life. That’s all. If you want to talk with me about”—a hand tossed into the air, a sound that stood for “this thing”—“this or anything else, please do. As for now, maybe you’re right. I may be easing myself rather than you.” Priscilla picked up a book, which made Merriwether shiver. Was she trying to hurt him, or to show him he’d hurt her? He turned to leave, and she said, “One thing, Dad.”

  “Yes, Pris?”

  “Does Mom know? About, what’s her name?”

  “She saw the thing in Newsweek. Anyway, I was going to speak with her shortly.”

  “Do you think that’s wise?” Priscilla’s voice slipped out of its groove. “Or necessary?” She hadn’t cried in front of him for years.

  Merriwether turned away from her. “I don’t know, darling. Mom knows better than anyone how far apart we’ve been. I think she’s thought I’ve had much more elsewhere than I have. She suspects a good deal now. I think it’s time to say something.”

  “All right, Dad,” said Priscilla. He left quickly, to miss what she wanted to do by herself.

  Sarah was sitting up in the double bed.

  “It’s about time one of us slept upstairs,” she said. “Preferably you.”

  She wore a long cotton nightgown. Her face was matted with fury, the cheeks scraped with a kind of whitish scurf—had she been using an astringent soap?—her black eyes were especially, unpleasantly brilliant. “You’re a terrible person,” she said. “You’re a terrible, miserable man.”

  This was it.

  “I’m not much, Sarah,” he said quietly, “but I couldn’t go on the way we’ve been going on. It was just too hard. All these years I’ve lived on sexual fantasies. You’ve seen the embarrassing marks. I found something else. I’m too timid for whores. I tried once or twice. It was absurd.”

  “You’ve found something. Aren’t you fortunate?”

  “It became impossible for me, Sarah. I’m not a cactus. I couldn’t endure without intimacy. You know I don’t just mean intercourse. I may be incapable of having an adolescent affair, but I’m not going to shrivel away. I’ve been driven to the wall.”

  “Everybody in Cambridge knows. You couldn’t even keep it from reporters. You reek with your cradle-theft. You preen, you sneak, you connive, you perfume yourself. You’re pathetic and grotesque. You join the notorious, except you have no excuse. You’ve been ‘driven to the wall’! You drove for the wall, your ego drove you, your emotional failure drove you. You need some soft girl who’ll croon to you how marvelous you are. Who is the lucky what’s-her-name? I should write her a note of warning.”

  He got his pajamas from his drawer. “I thought we were civilized enough to be straight with each other.”

  “Straight? You straight? You don’t know what straight is. Get out.” Sarah was shouting.

  “The children. Lower your voice.”

  “The children. The children. How about ME?”

  He had never in his life wanted to hurt her, but he felt something close to it rising in him. Before it went further, he left, closed the door behind him, and went upstairs to the third floor guest room.

  ten

  From that first night home until he went out to Colorado the next summer, Dr. Merriwether had very few full night sleeps. Until he moved out of the house in spring, he lived on the third floor. He and Sarah seldom talked to each other, except when the children were around. When they did talk, fillets of lightning fury broke from her; and often drew corresponding flashes from him.

  “When are you going to see a lawyer?”

  “Isn’t it best if you go?”

  “Isn’t it best? Naturally. For you. If it’s something unpleasant, isn’t it best for me to do it.”

  “Go to hell, Sarah.”

  They would pass each other on the stairs and exchange grunts. Two adult Americans trained in one of the centers of human fluency, grunting. Twenty years in one bed, and the contrafaction of their lives issued in grunts. />
  The children had long ago stopped expecting their parents to kiss or even touch each other. Their parents no longer went out together, and there were almost no adult guests. The contrast between the comedies they watched on television while eating supper—for Sarah could not bear to hear his dinner talk—and the polar divisions in the room brought awkward silence when the taped laughter was loudest.

  A year ago, George had asked Merriwether, “Do you and Mommy love each other?”

  “Love is complicated, George. Mommy and I are very different sorts of people, we disagree about many things. We’ve been married a long time, and people change. It isn’t the same as it was ten years ago, when you were born, or twenty when Albie was. Human beings—”

  “I see, I see,” said George and left the room.

  One night Merriwether came home at nine after supper with Cynthia. Sarah caught him in the living room and said she had put the house up for sale. “I should have done it years ago. I never wanted to live here. This was your house.”

  “I always thought you thought it one of the nicest in Cambridge.”

  “It could have been. If you’d helped care for it. If the whole weight of it hadn’t been on me. Nobody lives in a house like this without servants unless the husband’s willing to lift a finger every now and then.”

  “I’ve always wanted you to get people in, Sarah. I wanted the cleaning woman to come more often, wanted you to get carpenters in to do what you wanted.”

  “You didn’t want an inch of it altered. If there’d been outdoor privies here when we’d moved in, they’d be here now.”

  They hadn’t heard George come in. Blue eyes wide, red-faced, forcing a smile, he stood at the door of the living room. “You two better get a divorce if you have to argue.”

  Merriwether heard himself say, “We’re not there quite yet, George.”

  George ran out. Merriwether followed him to his room. The door was shut. Merriwether knocked. There was no response. He went in anyway. George was crying on the bed.

  “I don’t think it will happen, George. But you know the way Mom and I have been. It hasn’t been all roses for us lately.”

  George shook his head, wouldn’t let his father approach, picked up one of his sports magazines and put it in front of his face. “It’s all right,” he said.

  Merriwether looked at the little room, the walls plastered with the elongated cartoon figures of the Yellow Submarine and posters of football players. The tool bench, the games, the books. George. What in this world was worth bringing misery to this precious person?

  Sometimes Merriwether could not bear the thought that the children were sinking into the bewitched passivity of television-watchers. In the commercial intervals of the suppertime comedies, he’d try to interest them in something, tell them about “a colleague”—Sarah grimacing, you could never tell if his “colleague” were at the adjacent lab bench or in Tokyo—who had trained a house cat out of killing, stalking and capturing mice. “Could they do it with humans?” asked George. Tiny snort from Sarah.

  “Yes, they can. Our colleague Skinner had some famous results. And Delgado in New Haven. But the instincts are tough. They can be revived like that,” snapping fingers. “There’s a permanent battle readiness. It’s like the Pentagon. No matter how serene the world, they’re always stirring with belligerence. Making contingency war plans.”

  “Shh,” said Sarah. The program had started again.

  It was not undeviating misery. Now and then, to his enormous relief, Sarah talked kindly, reasonably. It was inexplicable. Perhaps she’d just run out of the chemical fuel. Or did she believe it was worth another try? He wasn’t sure, but usually these gentle intervals seemed to come after he hadn’t gone out for two or three evenings (he’d seen Cynthia before supper or she was busy, studying for an exam).

  Cynthia had moved out of the Commonwealth Apartments into a little apartment on Cambridge Street. “What a relief to get away from that morgue.”

  “I miss those old ladies.”

  “Visit them. They always said what a nice young man you were. There’s no other place in Cambridge you could hear that remark.”

  Cynthia also found out that Radcliffe was giving her less credit for her Swarthmore work than she’d understood. It meant still another half year for her B.A. She was furious. “My G.E.T.s are as high as you can get. My I.Q. is a million, I have close to an A-minus record, what do they want? And not giving me credit for all that French and Sociology. I’ll graduate and be eligible for social security the same year.”

  “All for love.”

  “For a piece of sheepskin. Do they call it B.A. because it sounds like baaa? I want an S.A. I’m going to write Gloria Steinem.”

  “Sheep of Arts?”

  “Sister of Arts. Creep.”

  Cynthia feels the high costs of her love for Merriwether. She spends hours and hours alone in her little apartment. On permanent tap. He tells her to go out with people in her class. “I know you don’t mean that. If they’re boys, you’re jealous, and the girls are creepy.”

  “I do mean it. I don’t want you to be alone. I won’t be jealous. You know how to act.”

  “They’re creeps. Anyway, I can’t stand young boys.”

  They start out for a movie, he sees an old professor coming down the street and holds her back in the doorway. She tears her arm away and goes back upstairs.

  “I’m sorry, Cynthia. That’s Tryptiades, an old teacher of Sarah’s. There’s no point in shoving ourselves in people’s faces. No point in gratuitous humiliation of Sarah.”

  “Sarah? What about me? Have I no presence at all? Aren’t I a person?”

  It is misery. He doesn’t introduce her to anyone. Once Tom Fischer comes through town, they go to dinner at Japan Gardens. After perfunctory questions about her “studies,” he and Merriwether talk about the cuts in the National Science Foundation grants. She feels like a misplaced comma. It is a human wasteland, a one-person concentration camp. Except the guard is her lover and usually there’s nothing but him she wants.

  Merriwether agonizes with her. Sometimes he feels his life is little more than holding her together, salving, bandaging, amusing. There are ups-and-downs in his love. Sometimes it’s a gaping ache for her, her intelligence, her alertness, her charm, her beauty, her taste, her sadness. They do get along marvelously, joking, confiding, and their time in bed is usually wonderful.

  When he comes in the evening, they read, often aloud, or watch television programs. In the fall, they read Colette; male-dominating, male-charming, male-resenting Colette; earthy, Dionysian, inventive; perfect female poetry. Cynthia feels Colette’s freedom, she’d give anything to be like her.

  “I have erotic dreams with her.”

  “You have them with everyone. You’re healthy. To have them and to talk of them.”

  “I’m more voluptuary in dreams than in bed. No, I’m not. There’s nothing like this. But it’s so brief. I could go on forever.”

  “That’s my fault,” he said. “You need one of Master’s vibrators.”

  “Lovely.” Playfully, truthfully.

  He finds a passage in Colette: “‘Women allow us to be their master in the sex act, but never their equal.’”

  “Let’s see. Sure, she’s quoting a man. Baloney. Men don’t realize sincerity isn’t spontaneous. It’s only after women master ‘passionate dupery’ that we strip to sincerity.”

  “Toi? Sincere? You don’t know the difference between ‘fall for’ and ‘tumble to.’”

  They lie naked under the patchwork quilt he has brought her from home, “Granny Merriwether’s lust-cover,” she calls it. Their shoulders touch, their legs, their feet. Colette’s book, The Pure and the Impure—a Penguin bought at Heathrow and begun on their flight to New York—passes between them. “Where’s that part about the woman for whom other women were too salacious. ‘They never allow you to stop.’”