Anger

by May Sarton

  “You really live, don’t you?” he had answered, “You appear to be aware of everything, the taste of the wine … I did order something rather special but it is quite rare to have a good wine appreciated.”

  “Do I live? I sometimes think I don’t … or no more than a bird who lives to sing. But that’s not it, either,” she amended, again giving him that intent look he was beginning to hunger for like some food he had needed all his life and never eaten before and at the same time made him extremely afraid of being found out, so he lowered his eyes. “It is that everything matters too much.”

  And for the first time, they dared to be silent for a few moments.

  “Tell me about your childhood,” she said then.

  “Most of the time I was bored, bored or in revolt …” It was strange, Ned thought, rehearsing the extraordinary evening, how much he told Anna, partly because she listened so intently, and asked him such probing questions, so it all poured out: the early childhood of summers in Maine, of sailing wih his father, of reading aloud around the fire, Dickens and Scott, Nils Holgersson. He told her about his father’s haunting voice, about his capacity for fun … and then how all that was closed down by the tragic death. He told of the years of imposed mourning, “Dreadful,” she kept murmuring, “dreadful for you.” More than once he saw the tears in her eyes.

  “I took refuge in music,” he told her. How all through college he played the piano, went to the opera whenever he could, concerts, played records, shut life out by immersing himself in music. “So when I heard you sing,” he remembered saying … what a confession! How had he dared say it? “it released something I had held back for years. It was as though a whole world were opening inside me, the world before my father died, the world where anything is possible, where it is all right to feel …”

  And she had reached over the table inviting a handclasp.

  “Dear Ned … that is a very great compliment.”

  Then she had talked about herself and her own childhood. “In a way we are at opposite ends,” she had begun. “You lost the parent you needed most, but I was able to keep my mother. So for me everything opened when everything for you closed.” She told him about her father, stern, unable to express anything except anger, a man of tight control, “a sort of genius, they tell me, but all I saw was the gauleiter at home. He never understood anything about me, and of course I suffered for mother. You will love my mother,” she had added.

  And he had felt he must warn her that she would hate his.

  “Yet there are similarities,” she had gone on with whatever she was saying about herself, “I too took refuge in music, took refuge in a talent, I suppose.”

  The bottle of wine was finished, and they had come to lemon sherbet and coffee, when she finally asked, “Why did you become a banker?”

  He remembered now how that question seemed to trouble the hours of intimacy, how it stuck out, and hurt a little.

  “Laziness,” he had answered, on the defensive. “Because of my grandfather the way was open. He had been president, you know, and I was a member of the tribe.” Ned felt more was demanded, more than he would have usually put into words. He was quite aware that for a person like Anna for whom art was possibly the only reality, the financial world must seem irrelevant, outside the pale. So after giving her one of his shy darting looks, he plunged in.

  “Rather to my own surprise I found the Harvard Business School a very enlightened place, in some ways more enlightened than Harvard College appears to be.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “More aware of what is going on in the world, more ‘with it,’ as they say.” He smiled his quizzical smile. “Perhaps I shall disappoint you when I say that I find my job extremely interesting, that I am never bored … and then, as I was promoted rather quickly I began to understand the fascination of power, its risks. The financial world is full of risks and guesses. You stick your neck out.”

  “But you don’t actually risk your neck, do you? The critics are not lying in wait with their machetes, are they?” He remembered Anna asking with an edge of antagonism in her voice.

  “Of course they are. People can become very savage indeed when their income fluctuates. We handle hundreds of trusts, small and large. And these are often controlled by fairly eccentric wills, which the heirs are out to break. That sort of thing.”

  He had become aware that Anna’s mood had changed and she was reacting, as he had feared she might, with a certain amount of hostility, so he tried teasing her a little by suggesting that there were just as many myths about the financial world as there were about artists and performers and their world. She had considered that statement quite some seconds, frowning, and then suggested that the banker had power and the artist never did.

  “We are so vulnerable, Ned. All our lives, from concert to concert, from year to year, vulnerable to attack, vulnerable to our own frailties … a bad cold can mean ruin. A bad review can halt a career in mid-flight.”

  “You’re exaggerating, surely …” but as soon as he had uttered the words Ned knew he had made a mistake.

  The warm, compassionate look she had turned on him while he talked about his childhood blackened. Literally the very blue transparent eyes turned black. She appeared to be angry and close to tears at the same time.

  “You talk about risks, but you are not risking your own body and soul … you are risking other people’s money. So how can you know, how can you understand what I am talking about?” She had raised her voice and Ned felt horribly embarrassed, only wanting somehow to make her stop, to change the subject, to get out of the prickly pear tree. Luckily the waiter brought the check for him to sign, and Anna excused herself for a moment.

  “I’ll meet you in the hall,” he murmured, rising as she did, watching her walk out of the room, apparently unconscious of the stares that followed her. But then he had thought, she must be used to that.

  And he had not been surprised when old Mr. Goodspeed stopped him as he passed that table, and they chatted for a moment about this and that. Ned remembered how relieved he had felt to be back in his own world where nothing is said of any importance on social occasions, and one can feel safe.

  The drive back to Brookline had been safe enough but Anna seemed withdrawn and this had the effect on Ned of making him feel rather cross as though he had been allowed into a secret garden and now found himself outside. He simply did not know what she expected of him or for that matter what he expected of himself.

  Life for the past few years had been fairly plain sailing. Did he really want to risk whatever it was she had told him she risked at every performance? “Body and soul,” she had said. It seemed a little melodramatic somehow. But when they reached the door of her mother’s house he took her hand and held it hard in his for a moment as he had ages ago in the Public Gardens.

  “Have dinner with me tomorrow night,” he said, astonishing himself.

  “Oh Ned, I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well … Oh, you know—next week maybe.”

  “I’m for seizing the moment. ‘A little madness in the spring is wholesome even for the king.’”

  “But it’s autumn, Ned!”

  “So it is. Have dinner with me tomorrow night.”

  And she had capitulated, on condition “that you take me somewhere simple where no one will recognize you … or me.”

  Having rehearsed the whole evening, Ned was still wide awake, impatient to be alive again, for he had felt so alive all that evening. Not at all his usual self, circumspect, an observer rather than a participant—and yet more himself than he had been for years. His comfortable shell had been broken open … but did he want that?

  Chapter IV

  “You appear to be falling in love, my child,” Teresa said.

  “Am I?” Anna who had been pacing about after breakfast turned suddenly. “Is that it? I feel quite ill, as a matter of fact.” Then she sat down at the table and drank a third cup of coffee in one
gulp. “What would happen if he asked me to marry him?”

  Teresa looked across at her daughter, sitting there, her elbows on the table, her head in her hands, her dressing gown falling open to show the magnificent throat, and felt that Anna had changed in one night, had flowered, in fact, like a night-blooming cereus.

  “I expect you would say yes.”

  “Stick my head in the noose?”

  “You could do a lot worse, Anna.”

  “Oh, I know. That’s the whole trouble!” And she knew that no more explanations were needed as they exchanged a smile and then burst into laughter. “He’s a little too good to be true … and besides, we are as different as fire and water.”

  “Water could put fire out, you mean?”

  “Oh,” Anna said, clenching one hand, “I never thought of that!” It did give her pause. “But Ned can’t really dim my fire, can he? Could he?” Anna got up and put her arms around Teresa’s neck. “Give me some good advice, mother,” she said, kissing the top of her mother’s head. “Tell me what you really think.”

  “I think it’s time you got married. I think Ned Fraser is a rather shy, sensitive creature and maybe it’s time he got married, too. But for heaven’s sake, daughter, don’t rush into this.”

  “I know. How could I ever fit into his sort of life? And he has an awful mother, a monster of a mother from what he told me last night. How did I ever get into this? It’s not what I want. Already I feel like a tiger in a cage!” She was pacing the room again, wanting as much to escape all this feeling that had her in its grip as to let it take her wherever she was destined to go, then sat down and looked her mother straight in the eye.

  “Were you absolutely certain when you married father? Didn’t you have any doubts?”

  “I didn’t have a career, Anna. I had no special talent. I think perhaps I felt the greater risk for me at that time would have been not to marry … I was not swept off my feet by your father, but I was flattered—he was already a very well-known physician—and, well, I did come to love him. Partly because he was such an orphan, so in need of tenderness, so bereft inside himself—and those awful depressions—he needed me, I felt.”

  “Yes,” Anna sat down again. “Women are always falling for that … mothering their poor forlorn husbands. I could never mother Ned!”

  “Ah, that’s what you think, but tigers make very good mothers I have heard.”

  “Ned is formidable because he is so controlled, mother. Deep down inside I feel a coldness. Or perhaps an inability to give, to pay real attention to another human being.”

  “He seems very attentive to you, for heaven’s sake … he has been sending flowers for a year and trying to get to know you.”

  “That’s different. Besides I feel when he gets to know me—not the singer whose voice has touched him, but me the human being—he may not even like what he finds!”

  “Well, he hasn’t asked you to marry him yet. Give him time to know you. By the way, I don’t want you to imagine that a temperament like yours is a flaw … not at all. It would be a shame if you let some old Bostonian take away your fresh response, your quick passionate reactions!”

  Teresa did not often praise her daughter, but when she did, Anna listened. This time she heard praise as a warning. “You brought up a tiger not a mouse,” she laughed. “And tigers don’t change their stripes!” Anna looked at her watch. “Good heavens, it’s after nine. I must go and practice!”

  As usual talking with her mother had put everything in proportion again. She worked hard all morning, full of her own powers, hardly thinking of Ned. Work is the only fruitful passion, after all, she told herself. It’s what I’m all about. Let no one try to take that security from her!

  But in the five minutes after she had dressed that evening and was waiting for Ned—her mother had gone out to a concert—Anna experienced a storm of nerves. She went to the long mirror in the hall for the tenth time and looked not at her dress, a plain dark blue one with a dramatic white flaring collar, but at herself, the self that looked out from her eyes. “Don’t forget who you are,” she admonished the blue eyes, “Anna Lindstrom, the singer, not a thirty-four-year-old woman who feels inadequate half the time. Remember you are a tigress,” she said, smiling at herself now, “not a mouse.”

  Ned seemed to sense her constraint and tension. He got lost trying to find the Italian restaurant—it turned out to have moved some blocks away—and clearly found it difficult to make small talk.

  “I had a rotten day,” he said quite crossly, as he manoeuvered the car into a small parking space. She sensed that he felt she was to blame.

  It did not help that she was greeted effusively by the maitre d’, “We are honored, Signora,” who paid no attention to Ned’s murmured, “a corner table, please,” and led them to a table in the center of the room.

  “No, not in the middle of the room,” Anna said. And at last they were settled in a corner at the back. “He wanted to show me off,” Anna whispered, smiling.

  “Have you been here before?”

  “No.”

  Ned then buried his nose in the menu, obviously still on edge.

  “A cocktail, sir?”

  “Of course. The same as last night?” he asked Anna and as she nodded, “two Johnny Walker Black on the rocks … and the wine list, please.”

  “So you had a rotten day, poor Ned.” Anna was startled by hearing herself say “poor Ned” … so I am already mothering him, she thought. Don’t do it. “I had a very good one.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I worked well, for an hour more than usual and in that hour I achieved something. It sounds like nothing, but I found a way to make a difficult transition sound easy. I’ve been trying to find the key for ages. You have to think your voice into doing things it may not want to … and this was a matter also of breathing.” She was speaking intently and looking straight at Ned but she felt he was not there.

  “I sat through a long director’s meeting doodling,” he said and laughed with what sounded like a trace of bitterness. “I’m afraid you are a bad influence,” he now looked boldly at Anna, with unconcealed irritation.

  “I don’t see how I could be a good one,” she was teasing him now and enjoying herself.

  “Why not?”

  And now she was serious. “You know, Ned, my work comes first for me. When I can sing I can be fully myself, give all my gifts, such as they are. I feel whole. Do you see?”

  “I see,” he said somberly. He took a swallow of Scotch and set the glass down. “And yet your voice is not a detached voice, singing or floating somewhere up in the air, it has blood in it. That’s what is so moving … it has the earthly paradise in it, Anna.”

  “Does it, really?” She opened her eyes wide.

  “You must have been in love many times.”

  “Oh,” Anna gave her sudden fresh laugh, “I suppose so, now and then.” But she was not in the mood to talk about that, the irrelevant past. “It’s very mysterious, isn’t it? I mean, what is a voice after all? An instrument, and if you have a voice, you become the servant of that instrument. You learn to guard it, to use it well … in a way to honor the gift, I suppose.”

  “I envy you,” Ned said.

  “What an admission! But Ned, you surely have a gift. Good heavens, you play around with millions of dollars, throwing flotillas of gold pieces into the air like a magician!”

  And so at last the ice was broken between them. Ned clearly enjoyed ordering a good dinner and a good bottle of wine.

  “You can alter the course of events, I suppose, as I never can,” Anna went on.

  They had not been able to recapture the intimacy and exhilaration of the evening before. And she had been quite mad to imagine that he would make a proposal … how foolish can I be? she asked herself. This is a cool character who doesn’t want marriage with anyone. What do I see in him anyway, she asked herself, lifting her eyes to his face and by mistake meeting his probing glance full on.
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br />   “A penny for your thoughts,” he said.

  “Not worth a penny.”

  “I’m sorry I’m such a grouch … I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”

  But at that moment fettucini was placed before them and the wine was poured. Anna fell to with enthusiasm.

  “Mmmm,” she murmured, “this is wonderful. Taste it, Ned. I bet you’re hungry. I always feel cross and don’t know why when I’m hungry!”

  Ned obviously did feel better almost at once, and he seemed to enjoy watching Anna eating with such pleasure.

  “Thank goodness you’re not a woman who picks at her food and says she’s on a diet!”

  “I think this is simply delicious, don’t you?” Anna caught his glance and laughed happily. “I love food!”

  Ned gave a sigh of relief, then laughed with her and at her. “A devourer of life itself … that’s what you seem to be.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “It’s marvelous, you goose!” Anna noted that a half glass of wine had loosened Ned up a little at last. “You said that I can change events as a banker. I can’t really. I can only use events as they happen. I’m a manipulator I suppose one might say. It’s quite disgusting, isn’t it?” But somehow he seemed happy saying these things, and Anna observed his self-destructive joy with amazement.

  “The arts, you see, change lives,” he went on, smiling at her now, inviting her response.

  “Do they? What lives have I changed, I wonder?” She was caught by the idea, but tossed it aside then. “No, it’s not that, Ned. What the arts can do, it seems to me, is take people out into a pure world, a world outside time, and also untouched by the sweat and sordidness of ordinary life, give them a kind of peace, a sense of harmony—I don’t know. I’m saying it badly.”

  “No you’re not. You are frightfully articulate. It terrifies me,” and he laughed, apparently pleased to be terrified. “What astonishes me is how simply you can talk about yourself, your voice, for instance, almost as though it were apart from you. You appraise it quite coolly and give yourself full credit.”