The Love Children

by Marylin French

  Bishop and Rebecca had gone back to Cambridge, where Rebecca was in med school. She planned to do her residency in pediatrics at a hospital in Boston that catered to a largely black population and they were buying a house on the fringes of Roxbury, where Bishop had opened a children’s book store. He also sold toys—high-quality, educational toys—and was in his element. They were obviously not rich, but someday they would be comfortable. And they too were very happy in their lives. Bec intended to get pregnant when she finished her residency. I didn’t know if Bishop ever saw his mother and father; I wanted to ask, but because we spoke only on the phone, I felt hesitant bringing up possibly uncomfortable subjects.

  Dolores, who had finally written to Mom, was in New York, going to graduate school at NYU. She was becoming a therapist specializing in incest, and had already published a paper. She was elated about that.

  Philo—my Philo, not Mom’s Philo—hardly ever heard from Debbie, and he never called her, which made him feel guilty. I tried to sympathize, but the truth was, I was pleased. I seldom spoke to Stepan; we called maybe twice a year, and when he visited, it was to see Isabelle. He was involved with a new woman at Pax, Elissa, who was also from the Soviet Union. For the first time in his life, Stepan was overwhelmed with passion and thinking of marriage. This was fine with me, and Isabelle was not jealous when on one visit, he brought Elissa with him. They brought a tent and sleeping bags and stayed out in the woods, which gained Dad’s respect, and he stopped sniping at Stepan.

  There was a problem, however. Stepan had decided he wanted partial custody of Isabelle and spoke about going to court to obtain it. I was outraged and furious with myself for ever telling him about her. I was prepared to fight him to the death over this, but Philo, calmly, rather sweetly, persuaded me that it would not be so bad. It wasn’t, he said, as if Stepan wanted her every other weekend; he wanted her for a weekend once in a while and for a month in the summer. Philo said it might be good for her to live on a farm for a month in the summer, and I had to concede that he was right. And Isabelle liked Stepan. He was kind to her, affectionate. The first time she went to stay with him, she was five. Philo and I drove her out to Becket. She took one look at the farm and ran, wide-armed, into paradise. By then they had a couple of dogs and cats, besides the horses and chickens, and Isabelle made herself at home. She loved the animals, and the smell of hay, and all the folk about, and the two older kids, whom she followed around on their chores.

  After we’d known each other for a few months, I asked Philo to come up on a Monday night to meet Dad. I made an everyday sort of dinner, purposefully; I didn’t want Dad making snarky comments on the bloody artichokes he had to eat because we had company or Isabelle crying and refusing to eat the skate or bream she wasn’t used to. So I made a dish I knew both Dad and Isabelle would eat with gusto, the plainest possible meal, spaghetti Bolognese—pasta with chopped beef, tomatoes, garlic, and basil. I also made Mom’s salad: lettuce, avocado, and red onion, with a vinaigrette. All the vegetables and herbs came from Kathleen’s garden.

  Philo showed up exactly on time, at seven o’clock, and Isabelle ran to the door when the bell rang. We sat outdoors on the porch looking at the lake. Dad offered Philo a gin and tonic, which he accepted. It was hot, but there was a breeze off the lake, which was beautiful, framed by pine trees. Dad talked about the horrors of Harvard; Philo talked about the horrors of Penn. I did not even bring up Andrews.

  Isabelle sat on the floor, coloring, looking up every once in a while at me or at Philo. I know I was looking at him more often than at her or Dad, and after a while she stood up and climbed into Dad’s lap, a rare event. He was thrilled, and he put his arms around her, cuddling her, and she lay against him, sucking her thumb. I talked about gardening, which interested Philo. When he talked about mushrooms, Dad listened and asked questions. Isabelle then slid off Dad’s lap and walked off, as though in a huff. I called her but she ignored me. I followed her indoors. I grabbed her hand. “Want to help me make dinner, Isabelle?”

  This thought delighted her; she loved to help her mommy. I fastened her tiny apron around her, then put on my own and started dinner. It didn’t take long—I’d made the sauce earlier, and set the table. I just had to boil the pasta and put the salad together. I found things for Isabelle to do—I had her put napkins at each place, and she put rings of red onion on each salad plate with great care, concentrating.

  The food warmed everybody up. We all began to chatter. I poured more wine. I gave Isabelle a drop, with water. I said it was a special occasion. Her mood improved even more. By the time dinner ended, she would look at Philo, and when I took her off to bed, she hugged her grandfather and let Philo kiss her on the cheek. Warily.

  Success.

  Philo and I got married the next year. Philo wanted to have a child, and we thought we should be married, for the child’s sake. We started out living in his house in Springfield. We had a guest room for Dad to stay in, but he never came to stay. He’d come for dinner once in a while, then scurry home. Mom did stay, though, and often. The next year, I had a son, whom we called William, after Philo’s brother who had died.

  By that time Isabelle was five and going to kindergarten. I had to take three months off from the restaurant; William was born in January, so once again I was away only in the slow winter months.

  Isabelle fought Philo off as long as she could, but by the time we were married she had given in and was glued to him like his shadow. She fought me for his attention. She cuddled the new baby and played with him the way the dog played with her. Philo adored her, while his own son terrified him—for the first year, anyway. I had to teach him not to provoke power struggles with William, and he had to teach me to let him have his own relationship with him. The two of us had to deal, once in a while, with the kids’ jealousy of each other. We were, in other words, a relatively happy family. And this had happened without my consciously doing anything.

  Soon after I married Philo, Dad went to New York for an opening and met a rich woman from the art world and married her. He moved to a New York loft and became part of the art scene in the city, and I didn’t see him anymore, but would see his name in newspapers and magazines. He left the cabin empty, saying he would come up summers. He probably did, once in a while, but he didn’t call me. Mrs. Thacker still went in one day a week to clean the place and make sure nothing had leaked or broken or exploded, and Philo and the kids and I went over occasionally to swim or canoe in the lake. We’d wash in the outdoor shower and sit on the porch, and put our soda in the fridge, but we didn’t disturb things in the house.

  We were mostly happy. Philo did housework along with me, automatically. He was used to it, having lived alone. Sometimes I felt frustrated with him because he had trouble being interested in anything but mushrooms; he didn’t make much conversation and I was often parched for it. I couldn’t get it from other women, because with the restaurant, the children, and the housework, I didn’t have time for friends. Only after the kids were older did I have time to form friendships with smart local women who were fun to talk to.

  The zest went out of our lovemaking after some years, but by then I wasn’t as hot as I had been and the longing for something more was rare. I think Philo still felt the same longing, which of course made me feel terrible. But once in a great while, we’d have an intense desire for each other, and those times made up for a lot. One evening at the restaurant when dinner was over, Mildred, Artur’s girlfriend, came out to the kitchen as we finished cleaning up and caught me and Philo looking at each other. That was all—we were just looking at each other across the kitchen table, both tired after a heavy night, me of cooking, Philo of delivering—and thinking what we’d do in another hour or so. When Mildred appeared it broke the connection, and Philo went to take the garbage out. Mildred came over to me and said softly, “There is nothing sexier in the world than a mature couple as handsome as you and Philo looking at each other with lust.” She stepped away with a secret smile, then
grabbed Artur’s arm as he walked past her with some pâté to be refrigerated, and he stopped and kissed her.

  Philo and I both developed some fame in the food community. I was often mentioned in the same breath as Alice Waters and Chez Panisse in San Francisco, which she founded in 1971. I was asked to be on panels and was written about, and I wrote articles about organic foods and farmers’ markets. Philo was famous for his mushrooms. He now had a large farm and several helpers; he no longer made his own deliveries, and he turned over huge sums of money every year. But none of that translated into great personal wealth. We had enough to live on without worrying, that’s all. And that’s enough. Having too much money ruins your children and spoils you for life. The kids were my deepest source of satisfaction. The kids grew, our house was comfortable, we loved our work, and we felt that was the most people could get from life. It was enough.

  It still is enough. I am now fifty-one, still cooking at Artur’s, which I now own, poor Artur having succumbed to lung cancer a few years ago. I suppose it was to be expected—he smoked so heavily. He lived into his early seventies. Dad died at fifty-nine, from the same disease, in 1985, right after he left his third wife. He left most of his money and paintings to this woman, who already had everything. Mom was the most distraught person at the funeral. She stayed downstairs; she couldn’t stop crying. Yet when he was alive, she’d hated him.

  I felt terrible, not because I missed him—I’d hardly seen him in recent years—but because I felt that he had never lived the life he’d wanted. Many people came to his funeral, but none of them knew him at all, really. Only his family knew what he was like. I’m not sure that even he truly knew himself.

  He left me the cabin in Vermont, and everything in it, and the three meadows, and the sailboat and the rowboat. Philo and I added rooms onto the cabin so we had four bedrooms and baths, a dining room, and two offices, one for each of us—a far cry from the old cabin. We put in a huge kitchen and a greenhouse. Dad’s paintings and pre-Columbian sculptures were all in places of honor.

  Mom died of cancer too, in 1992. I cried, but at least I felt she’d had a full life, had done what she wanted, become who she wanted to be. When she got sick, I stopped smoking and made Philo stop too. I tried to get Artur to stop, but he couldn’t. It might not have made any difference—it seems to get you even years afterward. It was hard for me when Artur died; after all, I saw him every day. A lot of customers came to his funeral, which was nice and would have made him happy. His only relatives were his sister and her kids. He and Mildred never married, although they were together for years. She came up for long weekends almost every week, staying in his apartment over the restaurant. They took a cruise together every winter to some warm place where French was spoken. Artur used to say that the last twenty years of his life had more than made up for the first fifty. Mildred wept at his graveside, and so did Philo and I and Isabelle and old Loren Rosenberg from town, who had played chess with him on Monday nights.

  I had a letter from Dolores around Christmas in 2000. She said she always thought about me at Christmastime. Her practice was really satisfying, she wrote; she felt she was helping so many girls, and she was writing a book about girls who’d been raped by relatives and what they needed to heal. She felt she was of use in life. Maybe that’s all there is.

  All this looking back caught me in the throat in 2002, when I found out that Sandy had died—the first death in my generation. She had died of breast cancer. Her mother had died of it just a few years after her father’s suicide; Rhoda had died of it, and Naomi was in treatment for it. It was as though a massacre had occurred in her family. I kept feeling as though Sandy was sacrificed, but I couldn’t get my mind around by what or to whom. I vaguely blamed the government, which hadn’t done enough research on breast cancer, and I vaguely blamed her father. Sandy had never gotten over her father’s suicide. It just undercut everything in her life. She seemed to feel that his killing himself had made their lives together as a family meaningless.

  I was really down after I heard about Sandy. September 11, 2001 had happened, and now Sandy, cut down in midlife. She who had dedicated herself to helping others, to alleviating poverty, and to other good deeds.

  Philo tried to make me feel better. He made me strong tea and put whiskey and sugar in it and made me drink it. He offered to go out and try to find some weed for me. I told him not to bother. I was crying all the time. The kids weren’t there, so I could let myself cry openly. Isabelle was in England, doing graduate work in biology, and William was at college in Amherst. Philo and I were alone again after all those years and I had been thinking about writing a cookbook. But not that night.

  “It was the war that doomed us,” I cried. “My generation has never gotten over that war—the protest against it, the anger against the protesters, the fear of another one.”

  “I think our generation was great,” Philo said. “Greater than our fathers’.” Philo called the so-called “greatest generation”—our parents—the alcoholic generation, the heavy-smoking, heavy-drinking generation, the angry men.

  “Look what they did. Sandy spent her life helping poor women get medical care. She didn’t try to become famous or rich; she did real good in life. It’s hard to do good. You start out wanting to do something good but somewhere along the way your dream twists into something profitable, something that serves your ambitions. But she stuck with it, all her life. She chose that way over a conventional life, over seeking money and status, over being wild and druggy and having fun, over being an artist, over . . . anything else!

  “And look at Bishop and Rebecca. She’s a pediatrician in a poor neighborhood: what a great thing! Pediatrics is not a branch of medicine that makes you rich, like surgery or dermatology or oncology. It’s good.And he—what could be better than selling books for children? What a great thing to do! Good people do it.

  “And Dolores. She tries to heal girls who’ve been abused. That’s a heartbreaking job, imagine how many failures you must encounter. And there’s certainly no money in it.

  “You spend your life trying to make people feel good through food that you make sure is as healthy as it can be. You make just enough money to get by, but you foster an ecologically healthy world. I do too in my way.

  “Our generation chose these things. A lot of my friends from college who started out working in corporations, the way I did, dropped out, the girls especially. And they started to do things that don’t pay a lot, that help other people, that make life better.

  “All those things we shouted back then, Make love not war, peace and brotherhood—or sisterhood—whatever. We meant them.”

  I sat up. Philo never talked much, and this was extreme eloquence for him. It surprised me.

  “You think we produced a generation of saints? Then how come the world is worse than it ever was?”

  I sat back and sipped the tea he’d made me. It did make me feel a bit better. I loved what he was saying about Sandy and Bishop and Dolores—and me. I loved thinking about us that way. It’s true, we had lived our lives so as to do some kind of good. Even me, just cooking. In articles in fancy cooking magazines they talked about me as if I were some kind of prophet who had brought health back to the American diet. But all we’d done was what we loved doing: we cooked what we loved to eat. It was selfish, after all.

  But the world is as terrible a place as ever.

  The most famous of any of the people I knew was still my father, who never even thought about doing good or doing anything for anyone else, and who, poor broken soul, hardly even did anything for his own pleasure, much less profit, as far as I could see. He’s so famous now that they’re talking about building a museum just for his work. The paintings of his I own give me a great sense of security—I know I’ll be okay in old age because I can always sell them if I’m in need. And they are there for Isabelle and William. As a chef, I have no retirement plan except my own savings, and they are sparse after putting two kids through college. But I have a
dozen of Dad’s canvases.

  And here we were about to be at war again, bogged down in a country we had no business being in, with no clear way out. Again! This time they would take us to war after huge protests. The shots of the antiwar marches in London and Berlin and other cities, everywhere in the world, would be the most inspiring photographs I’d ever seen.

  I think about the millions of people starving, working for starvation wages, or dying of AIDS in faraway places; I think of millions of people in my own country who work hard but have no place to live, have no health insurance, spend their lives sick with worry. And then I think of my friends and me, and Philo, and poor dead Sandy, and Bishop and Bec and Dolores, and how we found a way to live in contentment, to have the thing I wanted so much when I was a girl: happy lives. And I wonder: Does it matter? Is it important in the scale of things that a few people achieve happy lives? Does it change the balance for the rest? Does it create a usable example? I only know that I want my happy life, I want to keep it, I want it more than anything. And that if I were to live again, fifty times over, that is what I’d want.

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