by May Sarton
“What could happen?”
“Anything could happen … a truck could run into us on the way home. Or I could lose my voice.”
“You seem to build up anxiety as a necessary part of any performance. And the worse it gets the better you perform!”
“Let’s drop it. I’ve said I’d go …” but as he picked up the Times for a glance at the business section, she added, “You’ve never realized, Ned, what these social occasions take out of me. I feel out of place and then it’s such an immense effort … the energy expended in five or six hours of small talk!”
“I had an impression that the conversation at the Faulkners was exceptionally good. He has quite a flair for drawing people out …”
“Drawing you out, you mean!”
Ned smiled. “I guess I have to grant you that he isn’t especially good at talking with women …. Well, I must be off. Take it easy.”
“I have a lesson, you know.” He was crazy to think she could take it easy these days.
But by then Ned was at the door. “See you at fiveish …” and he was gone.
He had gone out in a light overcoat and it was freezing out there, Anna thought. She sometimes imagined that Ned liked to be uncomfortable. It was part of the Bostonian ethos, not to coddle oneself even if a bad cold was the result!
“But you shall wear your coat, Fonzi, when I take you out. We can’t have you catching a cold, can we?” and as Fonzi got out of his basket and wagged his tail hopefully, she patted his head. “And you believe in all the coddling you can get, don’t you?
When Ned came home, Anna had tea ready and the fire lit. “Lovely—we don’t have to dress for an hour. Lesson go well?” he asked.
“Soso.”
“That tea was a splendid idea, Anna!”
“Ah,” she stretched. Then lay on her back on the floor, her arms behind her head. “I’ve been thinking about you,” she said.
“Possibly you might refrain from telling me what those thoughts were.”
“But I want to tell you,” Anna sat up. “It might even be interesting,” she pleaded, reaching out a hand and touching his foot.
“Maybe I’m that five-foot rabbit you want and can’t have.”
“I can have it. I have to have it!” She was laughing now, too. But then she sat back on her heels, rocking back and forth. “You never answer when I ask you what made you angry as a child and why you couldn’t let the anger out.”
“And now you think you know, Dr. Lindstrom?”
“Yes. I think I do know. I think you were terribly angry with your father for dying … and that was an anger you couldn’t face. It had to be buried …”
Ned sipped his tea in silence. His face was a blank.
“Don’t you see, that was the poison in your family … your mother was so angry at his death that she punished you and herself for years. It wasn’t grief, Ned. You’ve never let the grief in. None of you ever did. Paul tried to kill himself he was so angry … you told me you didn’t even cry!”
“Mother cried. She cried for years on every holiday! Mourning made me sick,” Ned said coldly. “I can’t see the point of this.”
“But true mourning isn’t self-pity and isn’t anger,” Anna said, amazed that all this had come into her head while she slept in those hours of the night when she had curled herself around Ned and knew that the union was real and deep. As though simple feeling had opened a door, had brought her closer to him than she had ever been.
“What is true mourning then? Can you tell me that?” The tone was irritable, but Anna paid no attention.
“Mourning?” She shook her head. “Perhaps I don’t really know because I am only beginning—since we married—to be able to mourn my father.”
“Since we married? What has that to do with your father?”
“Because, in some ways, I think you are rather like him.”
“You are nothing like my mother, thank God!”
“Some day you will have to mourn her, too.”
“Maybe, but I’m afraid my chief emotion will be relief.”
“Ned!”
“Well, you talk about honesty all the time. I’m being honest.”
“Mourning is letting the grief in … letting it happen. You loved your father and he abandoned you by dying. You used anger to shut the grief out, don’t you see that’s what you did?”
“Why are you so hell bent on digging all this up now?” Ned said. “We have to dress for dinner.”
“We have an hour … I’ve got to get it straight, Ned. It’s terribly important!”
“To you, maybe. But what makes you think I’ll start mourning my father at this late date? He’s been dead for years!”
“And you’ve buried your anger against him for years. So you talk about him as though he were a myth—and you almost never talk about him.”
“It’s too painful.” Ned frowned and shook his head. “And you can’t make me do it now.” Anna reached over and held onto his foot. “Please let my foot alone.”
“I want to hold some part of you, Ned. I want to touch you.”
“You want to break me apart and take me over. You want to make me into you.” He was in acute pain, breathing hard, Anna could see it. Once more anger was taking over from grief.
“What do you remember most clearly about your father?” she asked gently.
“That he said once that I didn’t measure up—didn’t measure up, Anna. That’s what I remember now,” and his voice sounded strangled.
“What had you done?”
“I hit Paul. He made me take the blame for letting the dog run away and I hit him hard.”
“That must have been some satisfaction.”
“Paul always baited me. He wanted me to break out. He was older, you see, and he always managed to win.”
“But it’s quite preposterous, Ned … can’t you see? Your father didn’t know what had really happened.”
“No, he didn’t. But he would have said the same thing if he had, ‘You don’t measure up.’ I’ve spent years trying to forget that, bury it. Why did you make me say it?”
“I didn’t. You chose to remember that, you chose anger and pain rather than love. But you don’t have to. You have measured up. If your father were here with us now he would be bursting with pride. You are far more successful than he ever was.”
“Success didn’t interest him. Character did. You had to be a good person.”
“And what is a good person?”
Ned closed his eyes. “A good person,” he said as though he had learned the words by heart, “is self-controlled, does not indulge in self-pity, is cheerful, and harder on himself than on others.”
“Everything negative, except cheerful,” Anna murmured. “And a good person always has to be right.”
“You are right if you behave well.”
“Yes,” Anna thought this over for a moment. “But maybe a good person has to be vulnerable enough to be wrong sometimes.”
“Would your father have agreed with that?” Ned shot back.
“Of course not.” Anna was close to tears herself. “My father didn’t understand anything about people, about himself or anyone else.”
“Yet the marriage worked, you tell me.”
“It worked because my mother gave in, never fought for what she believed, just did whatever would make him happy.”
“She seems very serene.”
“She made her peace, but is that what life is all about? Peace at any price?”
Ned smiled a grim smile. “Not to you. You want war at any price.”
“I want understanding. I want to grow. I want to let the pain in and use it. I won’t build walls. I won’t hide behind walls!” Anna said passionately.
“But do you mourn your father now? And has it really something to do with me, with us?” In spite of himself, she could see that Ned was interested, more stirred up than he wanted to be, himself now needing to talk. Was it because he sensed a change in her? She was not att
acking him this time, not at least in the same way as before, as though she needed to break him down to be herself. He had ceased to be the enemy. She lifted her eyes and met his.
“My father was hard on me,” she said, “but I’m beginning to see that I was hard on him, especially after I was grown up. I used to fight him about nearly everything and I hurt him, Ned.”
“Yes, I imagine you may have … you are powerful when you are angry, more powerful than you know.”
“I have hurt you, too.”
“Yes, you have.”
Tears poured down Anna’s cheeks and she brushed them off, too concentrated to care. “I think what I am beginning to see is that someone as strong and controlled as my father was, is in some way helpless and so terribly afraid of being found out …”
“How helpless? A neurologist has to be pretty tough … and awfully sure of himself.”
“He seemed sure of himself,” Anna murmured. “But with me as a child he fumbled and he must have known that he did. If you arouse hatred in your child, something must boomerang back onto you, inside you. Oh Ned, I couldn’t forgive him—even when he was dying. Why am I telling you all this?”
“Because …” Ned found it difficult to put what he was sensing into words, “mourning is forgiving … is that it? I mean, all this began about mourning, how anger shuts mourning out.”
“Oh darling,” Anna reached across and clasped Ned’s hand, “Thank God I don’t have to mourn you!”
“So you don’t have to forgive me?” he smiled.
“Please talk about your father now,” she said. She sensed that the time had come for Ned, for them both, when he could.
Ned leaned back then in his chair, looking up at the ceiling. “He was so alive, Anna! Every bit of him was so alive … just the way he built a fire for a picnic, just the way he laughed. Everything seemed possible when he was there. As a boy I felt his challenge like a spur. He taught me to sail when I was only seven and terrified of scrambling around in a rough sea. But when I was seasick he held my head while I threw up … I’ve always remembered that, for some reason … I guess because he wasn’t affectionate in the usual way. He was very shy. But when he was pleased with me, he used to ruffle my hair.”
“He was a real father,” Anna said.
“I think he was lonely,” Ned sat up. “He tried so hard to make us a happy family, reading Dickens aloud around the fire, things like that, but …” Ned rubbed his forehead as he did when he was troubled, “but I guess the best times we had were outdoors when he could do things with us alone.” There was a silence. Then something broke. Ned didn’t sound like his usual self. He was almost shouting, and as he spoke he pounded the arm of his chair with his fist. “He shouldn’t have died so young—he was only forty. How could he go like that? How could he do it to us?”
“It was an accident, surely?”
“That is what we were told.”
“You don’t believe it?”
Ned stared at her, a blank stare of amazement. This is what he had shut out all those years, refused to admit. And now he was saying it quite coldly. “I feel certain that it was suicide.”
“Why? Why believe the worst? Cars do go out of control.”
“Not my father’s car.” Ned pulled himself up and walked up and down. Was he aware that he was shouting? “He left us in total darkness, Anna! How could he do that? He knew what Mama was … he knew he was leaving us alone, horribly alone! The door was closed on us two little boys, forever! Oh, Anna, the darkness!”
Anna got up and went to him and held him in her arms, while Fonzi, who had never heard Ned shout, ran round and round barking. But for once Ned paid no attention to the dog. “I’ll never get over it, Anna,” he was weeping. “I’ll never be well.”
“Maybe that’s what your father felt—maybe that’s why …” Anna wiped his tears with the palm of her hand very gently. “Does it have to go on from generation to generation, the closing off, the fear of feeling?”
“We’re way out somewhere on a limb,” Ned extricated himself and blew his nose. “Good heavens, Anna, we have to dress for dinner … we’ll be late!”
“Just a second! We’re not out on a limb, Ned. Or if we are, we’re out there together.”
“O.K., but I’d rather be safe.” Ned had resumed his shell, but it didn’t matter. And Anna, getting into a red dress, felt strangely at peace. She realized that they had become friends in the last hour. And even if this moment of truth didn’t last, could not be sustained, it was there like a touchstone. Ned had let her in at last.
Chapter XV
The day after Anna left for Dallas, Ned made a sudden decision, as he walked across the Common to his office. Why analyze, he told himself when the voice of conscience suggested that he had no business cancelling a meeting. Does a squirrel analyze why he feels compelled to gather nuts for the winter? The squirrels on the Common that morning had been in a frenzy of activity; one had made him laugh aloud as it used a cigarette wrapper to cover a cache, and stamped on it, with furious energy. Had Ned ever followed an impulse with as little regard for appearances as this impulse he was about to follow? Yes, he smiled at himself, when I asked Anna to marry me.
“Miss Prior,” he said briskly, “get me a flight to Dallas for tonight after work. Dinner on the plane if possible, to return Thursday afternoon. Get me a hotel, too, central—I don’t want to be somewhere in the suburbs.”
“Very well, Mr. Fraser ”
“Oh yes …” Ned said, putting on his glasses and scanning the morning mail, opened and waiting on his desk. “That meeting tomorrow. It’s a nuisance, but you’ll have to tell the board it has to be delayed till Friday. Something has come up.”
“Anything else?”
“No thanks.”
When Miss Prior had left, Ned sat there for a moment wondering whether he was crazy. But he hadn’t heard Anna sing for over a year—wasn’t it natural to be pulled toward seeing her—and hearing her—where nothing jarred and all was composed, whole, and full of magic? The Anna who entranced and consoled? His Anna—and at the same time, Anna Lindstrom, not his at all? Perhaps the impulse felt so strong because he needed to see her again at a distance … but that was enough analyzing for Ned and he plunged into the day’s affairs and, the decision made, worked with an extra edge of excitement and pleasure.
Miss Prior heard Ned whistling and was quite astonished. He was a considerate employer, was almost never out of temper, had a wry sense of humor which she enjoyed, but otherwise was extremely reticent and reserved. After five years in his employ she knew next to nothing about him. He didn’t even have a photograph of his wife in the office and had never mentioned her name. But he had seemed excited about Dallas. What could be happening in Dallas?
Meanwhile Ned had suddenly remembered that something must be done about Fonzi and called Teresa. “I am called away on business and Anna, of course, will be in Dallas. Could you possibly take Fonzi for twenty-four hours? Don’t tell Anna—I don’t want anything to make her nervous on this trip, and she might worry.”
“I won’t say a word.” It did cross Teresa’s mind that it was all a little odd. Was Ned meeting another woman somewhere? But Teresa had to admit that for all the tensions in this marriage, neither Ned nor Anna had ever looked at anyone else, as far as she knew. They seemed pretty much absorbed in whatever was going on between them, even when it was chiefly rage.
On the plane Ned leaned back and closed his eyes. He felt he had been running all day. His mind was brilliantly lit up and he couldn’t stop thinking, stop running, even now safely on the plane and on his way. It seemed as though memory was a ribbon flying backward at incredible speed, back through the flotsam and jetsam of the day (he had gone home to pack his suitcase at lunchtime and hand Fonzi over to Teresa), back through the week to the long talk with Anna which he had laid aside deliberately, not allowed himself to think about until this moment in limbo, back through thirty-years, to his father. There was no stopping the unr
olling of the ribbon now. And the double Scotch he ordered only accelerated it.
It came to a full stop with the word “suicide.” “My father committed suicide. My father committed suicide. My father committed suicide.” It was such an explosive sound in his head that Ned looked around nervously as though the intensity of it must be heard by the other passengers, the bearded young man reading Vonnegut in the seat beside him. But of course only he, Ned, could hear those words or say them. He closed his eyes. Why was he so sure that that was the truth? At ten years old what had he seen or sensed that made him know it, and then bury it until the other night when it sprang out, sprang out to Anna? For years he had chosen to remember his father only as “so alive” as he always said, as what could only be called a father figure, splendid, all powerful, wise, and always making good things happen for Ned and Paul. What had he buried? Something positively known or seen?
His father had been absolutely self-assured, in command of himself—so it had seemed to a boy of ten. But now Ned was a man of forty-two, the same age his father had been when he died, he realized suddenly that the man was aware of things the boy sensed but could not quite understand … for one, his mother’s irritation when his father sat up night after night with their sick dog. He felt that was rather mean of his mother, he remembered, but what came back now was the violence of his father’s reaction. The fury and pain with which he said, “I’m just not adequate, Pauline. I’m not what you need,” and walked out to the office without his breakfast.
Not adequate? Could a human being have this feeling about himself even when the facts proved it quite untrue? “Not adequate.”… For the first time in his life Ned began to think about his father not as his father, but as a man in the midst of a life that his son could know very little about. Under the genial, fun-loving, life-enhancing man had there been despair? Once in a while the boys were told that their father was sick in bed and must not be disturbed. “He has a migraine headache,” their mother explained. “Please don’t make any noise when you come back from school.”
