Other Men's Daughters

by Richard Stern

  “Bobbie, call if there’s anything we can do.”

  “Goodby, Max.”

  Like an agitated prophet, Merriwether tried to read his dishonorable discharge on the faces of old friends. He felt a terrible weakness in Cambridge. A solidarity of timidity. Yet collective morality here was probably higher than that of most of its members. Aerated by the world’s great texts, taught every year, alluded to with more than urbanity, refined by worldliness (sometimes beyond application). But ironic self-deprecation was in many a Cambridge face. Like worldly Catholics who keep both sinning and in the fold by constant confession of unworthiness, Cambridge citizens could profess the texts of heroism, sacrifice, nobility, charity, grandeur and humility, and yet systematically defect from them with only a ripple of self-criticism. The average Cantabrigian probably acted and voted right in causes which did not make too many demands on convenience, yet, in some ways, Cambridge was more depraved than many communities whose texts were fewer and more remote. Simpler, poorer communities, in the country, in the ghetto, showed a solidarity with the troubled that put Cambridge to shame. The noblesse oblige here was more public than personal. Or so thought Merriwether in these strange, turnover days of his life. His view was outward, inside he was a chaos, and seldom realized that was part of what he discerned outside.

  He began writing letters to friends and relatives about his divorce. Making his case. The responses cheered him; his friends were friends; everyone who wrote back was sympathetic. Timmy Hellman and George Nyswunder responded with the warmth of inside knowledge. They were bricks. But even the letters that were hardest to write drew decent responses. The hardest of all was to his Aunt Emilia, his mother’s maiden sister, the last close relation in what to Merriwether was the judgmental generation. Emilia had hardened into an eccentric spinsterhood. After retirement—she taught English in the Lawrence public schools—she’d begun reading Marx, and now, at eighty-odd, conducted Marxist seminars in her house. She wore red hats with stickpin and feathers and long dresses of her mother’s day. Her face was sharp and whiskery, the jaw, long, flat, fishy, the nose cubist. Looks and habits made her a local celebrity. Fame made her even dizzier: she indulged what she’d suppressed, lifted her skirts to show legs she’d been told—sixty years ago—were beautiful. The pictures of Aunt Emilia showing her gnarled walking-stick legs beside a grinning Boston outfielder made Sarah suggest he have her committed. But within this coral of display, there was a person of older, more parochial habits, the family guardian, historian, genealogist, the family memory and conscience. Every once in a while Aunt Emilia spent a night or two with the Merriwethers. She told stories she’d rehearsed for months, cooked her family-famous Indian pudding and mutton stew, visited an ancient lecturer in English who had been cast as her girl-time lover (fifty years ago they had gone to concerts together) and lapped up the children’s laughter as homage and love (which, in part, it was). Her favorite was her niece-in-law—who despised her. He wrote:

  Dear Aunt Emilia,

  I have some very difficult news to tell you, news which is still very difficult for me to think about, but which I must. There is nothing to be done about the situation, it has been in the making a long time, perhaps from the beginning, and though I could tolerate a continuance of it as it is going now for the children’s sake, Sarah cannot.

  He tore it up; too indirect. Even with the very old, a cushion was only more knife.

  Dear Aunt Emilia,

  I have sad news. After years and years of attempting to hold together, Sarah and I have decided to get a divorce. It is in many ways heartbreaking. The thought of not living with the children, the guilt of failing them are almost intolerable to me. But there is no alternative. Sarah and I have been impossible for years. As always, there is a great deal of fault everywhere. I, surely, am most to blame. In her view, I have dominated her and left her no room to be a person. She responded in her way to this some years ago. The result was a physical hell. This led to other things.

  Her answer came in two days. It was an Emilia new to Merriwether.

  My dear Bobbie—

  So the best was not good enough for you both. I am so sad. Without reproach. I have had no experience of marriage, I have always been told of its bliss—and its troubles. You and Sarah seemed to have so much more of bliss than trouble. I must have been blind. I believe in process that dominates individual life. My way was solitary, abstention; I didn’t choose it, or want it. I’ve read Frederick Engels on the family, I understand through him some of the contradictions families in societies like ours have. Reason is but the shadow of feeling—did someone say that?—it’s true. I feel so for you, for Sarah, and your wonderful children. Your parents have been spared this sadness, a small warmth in this wintry news. If I can be of help in any way, remember I am your loving, grieving but almost-understanding,

  Aunt Emilia

  Merriwether showed the letter to Sarah. “I’m so surprised,” she said. “It’s so surprising what people have in them.”

  Merriwether also wrote to Sarah’s sister in California.

  Dear Pris,

  I want to write you myself, because whatever pain and difficulty exist between Sarah and me is complicated by the affection I have for some like you who were part of the life we had together. Nobody could be better in-laws than you and James. You are wonderful people, losing you is a special sadness. The fault in our marriage is mostly mine, but that is not the concern. Sarah is so close to you that I know your love and support will be an important part of her restoration. If in any way, I can ever help you or your—to me very dear—children, I am still, in heart, anyway, their loving uncle. I don’t know if it’s customary to write such a letter as this, but I wish to. It needs no response.

  Robert

  But a response came.

  Dear Bobbie,

  Thank you for your wonderful letter. James and I have suspected for some time it wasn’t all roses for you and Sag. That doesn’t make us any less sorry. You’re fine people; you’ll both be happier and lead better lives. The children will be happier when they see you are. If there’s anything we can do—let us know. I imagine you feel unique in a kind of spotlit disaster area. If it’s any comfort, know that in Peter’s class, there are more children from “broken homes” than so-called “whole” ones.

  Bless you for writing.

  Love from us both to both of you,

  Pris

  thirteen

  Almost everything now was ticked with the valence of last things: the last Christmas of his marriage, the last in the house.

  Albie and Priscilla came home, the house which had been so bare of company—the house Tom Fischer had called “the social center of American biology”—filled with the children’s friends. Merriwether could see George and Esmé (who brought their own friends home) flower under the ins-and-outs, the telephoning, the door bells, the walks, car rides, games. It was civilized life, not the gloom of television loneliness. Not that Merriwether couldn’t bear isolation—he believed it essential—but the coldness of Sarah’s house—he thought of it that way—was an airlessness for the children.

  He bought a great tree, they all decorated it with ancient ornaments, the house flamed with colors, mistletoe, snowy balls, gold stars, scarlet berries, green needles, peppermint canes, blue and sapphire robes on the Magi in the old crêche. The windows of Acorn Street were full of wreaths and angels, and the Meltons’ gingko trees were fitted with Christmas lights. They made eggnog and glühwein, packages piled in downstairs closets. Christmas Eve, Merriwether filled the old hand-made family stockings with oranges, nuts, puzzles and checks; Sunday, they came downstairs in pajamas at seven. Merriwether turned on the tree lights, the carpet sheet was covered with a hundred packages, everyone giving to everyone. (The year before Albie had given no one anything, and his shame hung on for days, prodded by George’s frequent proclamation of the meanness. This year, Merriwether had put a—superfluous—bee in his ear.) There was a slow, pleasure-deferring, pl
easure-doubling opening of the presents, everyone marveling at everyone else’s games, clothes, books, gewgaws. Sarah gave Merriwether a bright green cardigan—the year before she had given him nothing—he gave her the Pléiade Mérimée, and pecked her on the cheek; she’d smiled “thank you.” He went around with an Instamatic camera flashing pictures—said Albie with a sliver of the wit that made him a success with the Bowen Group, “Commemorating last rites?”—he gathered wrapping papers and boxes and fed the fire with them. George studied the assemblage plans of his rockets—no manufacturer assembled anything anymore, the entertainment was in the assemblage—Sarah cooked up a hill of eggs and bacon and warmed a coffee cake. The children piled their own loot, Albie regarded his checks with a little disdain, pointed out the virtues of the presents he gave, was kidded by Priscilla, then sweetly recognized his excess and gave himself over to George’s blueprints. Esmé played her new recorder, Priscilla tried on her new clothes, and began talk of exchanging them. The phone started ringing, new records were played, and Merriwether did his annual reading from the notebook of the children’s sayings he’d kept for twenty years, “Better than photographs.” For this, the children sat around his leather chair. He and Sarah drank coffee, the others orange juice. The children knew the stories, but loved this annual reminder of their old innocence and wit.

  “What did Priscilla say about the wheel, Daddy?”

  He found the page. “I’d asked Priscilla—she was five—how she thought the wheel was invented, and she said, ‘Somebody tried to make a square and goofed.’”

  “What did I say about the apeman, Dad?”

  “It was New Year’s Day, 1968. There was a story in the paper about another primate find of Leakey’s, and I asked George, ‘If you found a creature and could not determine for sure whether he was an ape or a man, would you keep him in a cage or let him vote?’ George said, ‘Why not let him vote in a cage?’”

  “That’s what they’re going to do with Albie,” said George.

  Albie lifted George on his head, “Penny for your thoughts, George.”

  “Here’s Esmé in 1964. June 20. She was disappointed we weren’t going to Marblehead. I said, ‘Sorry, dear, that’s life.’ Esmé: ‘Everything bad is life.’” Laughter.

  “Read the one about the baseball cards.”

  “That’s way back.” He thumbed the old ink-doodled book, a Royal Composition notebook bought 25 years ago to take notes in Human Pathology (the first page was headed “General Phenomena of Disease”). “Albie and Pris were trading baseball cards. You got a square of bubble gum with every picture. Pris: ‘I gave him McDougall for the baddest player.’ Albie: ‘She choosed it.’ Mom: ‘Chose it.’ Pris: ‘I don’t even know the names.’ Alb: ‘Either do I.’ Pris: ‘You knew McDougall.’ Here’s one, July 16, 1958. We were on Duck Isle. Albie (calling downstairs): ‘Doesn’t de nada mean “You’re welcome?”’ Dad: ‘Yes.’ Alb (to Pris): ‘See.’ Pris: ‘Well, you don’t have to hit me!’”

  “What’s so funny about that?” asked George.

  “I don’t know. They all mean something to me.”

  “They’re great, Daddy,” said Esmé. “George doesn’t get them all.”

  “I get exactly what you get. I know what’s funny.”

  “They’re not always funny, George. Like snapshots. They just remind you of different times.”

  “See, I’m right. You just said they’re not supposed to be funny.”

  In the afternoon, Fairleigh Bowen came over with Tim Frothingham. The Bowen Christmas was a rapid affair; Fairleigh spent most of his Christmases at the Merriwethers. A hearty, quick, bulky boy, full of strange knowledge, he was both skeptic and open. “Hyponastic” was the word that came to Merriwether for his physical type: Fairleigh’s bulk was in his legs and rear, his torso curved almost delicately from it; his head was a small, dark, bright-eyed bloom, a Beardsley surprise on that lower trunk. He was, again surprisingly, a fine athlete, clumsily rapid with a great instinct for the play of the ball. He reported the family Christmas. “The table’s covered with presents, there must be a hundred for the three of us. We come in from breakfast, we don’t say anything. We open our own stuff. Without a word. Now and then there’s a grunt from Dad. In five minutes, the room’s a blizzard. Ribbon, boxes. We give one ‘Thank you’ to the air and take off with the loot. It’s the way we eat too. We’re a graceful lot.”

  “You just like farce,” said Merriwether.

  “No, sir, it’s more maniacal than I say. We gobble, we burp, we split. And that’s it for Mr. C’s birthday.”

  Tim was another semi-permanent holiday guest. A long, fair, taciturn boy, he came to life only when he played the guitar.

  It had been snowing since noon, densely; the streets were Siberian. George wanted a snowball fight. Muffled and booted, everyone but Sarah went out. Four o’clock, the light off the snow was the strange, sad, half-bright light of snow-days.

  While the others cossacked up and down, packing, hurling, chasing, Merriwether looked from the steps. Receding into the rectangle, they looked like silhouettes, their voices bodied in the cartoon balloons of their breath. The street lights went on in the iron lamps. Bluish fluorescents under iron caps. “I love you, Acorn Street,” said Merriwether.

  He was called. In his plaid lumberman’s jacket and high boots, he ran the street, packed snow, hurled, was pelted, pelted. Esmé came to his defense, then Priscilla. They made a Custer nucleus within the flickering, snowballing Indians. Priscilla tossed like Albie, Esmé with the pivoting elbow and limp wrist of the classic girl. Merriwether, dodging and getting hit, pondered the difference. (Bone structure? Estrogen supply? Early tutelage by Albie?) So much in his daughters was signaled by these throwing styles, Esmé the scorner of games, the dreamer, poet, lover of fairy tales, Priscilla the competitor, a runner, a puncher (judging from Albian boasts and George’s complaints), matter-of-factly feminine, hardly using make-up.

  Fairleigh, leaping—a trunk with wings—turned coat and fell on Albie, Tim summoned general attack. Albie and Fairleigh rolled into snow men, Priscilla fell on them both. A free-for-all. Merriwether retreated and watched from the steps. They were charging like miniature Panzers, breath came in spumes, they were wearing down. From the Hawthorne end of the street, they walked back, a snow line of Teutons. Faces lit like holly balls. They desnowed on the porch, stamping, slapping hats, mittens, and scarves against the pillars. “Acorn Street is going to be mighty quiet next year,” said Albie.

  They drank cider and glühwein. The fire was still going on a mix of logs and Christmas boxes. It lit eyes, cheeks, the silvery tubes of George’s model cars, the brass pokers and shovels; never had it seemed so beautiful to Merriwether. Sarah, happy in the moment, as Merriwether could not quite be, wore an African djellabah Priscilla and Albie had given her. White with red trim, it lengthened her, relieved her plumpness, brought out her Christmas coloring, red cheeks, black eyes, fair skin. “She’ll be able to find someone,” thought Merriwether suddenly, happy in the thought, then uneasy. When she’s good, he thought. He went for more glühwein so he could pass her, to pat her arm. She smiled, sweetly, sadly, but did not look at him.

  Tim got Priscilla’s guitar from her room—Merriwether was always surprised at the young people’s unquestioned ease of access—and plunked out carols, French ones, which he sang alone, German ones he sang with Fairleigh, ones in English with everyone. Merriwether tended the fire, filled glasses, passed Christmas cookies, Pfeffernüsse, sugary almond crescents, flat yellow stars with jellied nuclei. Esmé went upstairs to play new albums, George to read The Hobbit. Two more boys—arcs in what Merriwether called “Fairleigh’s Circle”—arrived, there was loud discussion of not, happily, pro bowl games, but the demerits of the mighty. Tim talked of the wasted decades of Einstein and Newton, Fairleigh of the low IQs of painters. Each boy seemed to have a specialty he riddled. “Sons of professors,” thought Merriwether. Evangelical, paternal, he suggested they’d grown up too familiarly wi
th men of accomplishment. “You take them on their parlor behavior, which, at best, is par. What counts in these people is the work they do in private, stuff they can do over and over until it is right. That’s why they say tenacity’s so important.”

  “So you’re saying there’s really no special talent.”

  “No. Only that an ingredient of it is the hunger for solution. And a nose for half-baked solution. An unwillingness to stop before the result looks, sounds, or works right.” He was talking for Albie: the straight and narrow.

  “Trial and error is what mice do going for cheese in lab traps.”

  “You’re exalting mice, not degrading humans. But the mice live only in the present. Humans try until the painting looks right, till the economic policy reduces inflation, till the tumor disappears.”

  Sarah, making domestic application of this patient tenacity, said it was beginning to seem like a seminar. “I’m for carols.”

  “Mother,” said Albie.

  “I agree,” said Merriwether. “Fewer words, more tunes.”

  But connubial “conciliation” was patronage at this date. There was a small chill in Sarah, and in a few minutes it spread. The boys went upstairs, Sarah and Merriwether sat alone, dead meat between the racket upstairs and the small fire noises in the parlor. Each was on the edge of speech. But what was there to say? Merriwether got up to spread the logs. The motion released Sarah. She went upstairs. He managed to call out, “It’s been a nice day.” She managed a “Yes.”