For My Daughters

by Barbara Delinsky

  I heard footsteps behind me, then Annette asking, “In what ways was your marriage weak?”

  But I was taking in the sights. “Just beautiful. And so inviting.” I walked around the kitchen, touching the wood cabinets, the granite counter, the shiny stovetop. “She did a wonderful job. I’m pleased.”

  “In what ways was it weak?” Annette repeated.

  As I swung around to see the rest, I said, “We weren’t of the same mind, Nick and I. We couldn’t communicate. We were awkward in each other’s presence.” I spotted the chair I wanted in the family room and headed for it. It faced the others but was slightly apart, which was fitting. I was the guest of honor, the main attraction, so to speak. I settled into it, folding my hands in my lap.

  Annette and Caroline faced me from behind the buffer of the sofa. In the kitchen, Leah set to making a pot of tea.

  “You’re both looking well,” I told them.

  Caroline made a face. “That’s irrelevant.”

  “Not to me. I care about you girls. I care deeply.”

  “You’ve never shown it very well.”

  “No.” I took a breath. “I haven’t.” My heart thudded for an instant, during which I felt every one of my seventy years. Guilt was a natural ager. Regret, too. I wallowed in both just then.

  But I had imagined this moment too many times in my life to want to postpone it any longer. Quietly, I said, “In order to understand what happened, you have to remember what my life was like as a child. My brothers and I were fourth generation money, and our lives reflected it. We had beautiful clothes and cars. We had a summer house and a winter house, and hired help to do everything we didn’t want to do. We were listed in the Social Registry; we belonged to the country club; we went to all the best parties. I was raised looking forward to my debut—all my friends were—and once the parties were done, we turned our sights to marriage.”

  “What in the world then,” asked Caroline, my feminist daughter, “was the point of college?”

  But I wasn’t a feminist. Nor were my friends. Indeed, feminism wasn’t something we knew existed in those days. “College,” I stated unabashedly, “was for people like me who hadn’t found a young man to our liking from within our own social circle.”

  “With no thought to the education?” cried Annette, the mother of near-college-age children. “Do you know how many girls would die to go to Harvard?”

  “In my day,” I pointed out, “girls didn’t go to Harvard. They went to Radcliffe, and the major entrance requirement was the ability to pay. I never claimed to be a genius. Yes, you may say I’ve wasted my life, with an education like that and no career, but women didn’t have careers in those days, not as women do now. I’m not arguing the right or the wrong of it. I’m simply telling you how it was.

  “I am a product of my age. If I couldn’t understand why you wanted to be a lawyer, Caroline, it was because women didn’t become lawyers in my day. We either became wives, or spinsters, and the latter was a harsh sentence, indeed, or so we thought. We couldn’t imagine women finding reward in a man’s profession.”

  “Can you now?” Caroline asked.

  “Some. I’m not oblivious to the world around me. I see women doing things that once only men did. I’ve gotten used to it. That isn’t to say I completely understand. Certain ideas are deeply ingrained in me. A major one of those is that there is security in marriage.”

  “A professional woman doesn’t need that security,” Caroline argued.

  “Maybe not,” I conceded, though I wasn’t being further diverted. “But I wasn’t a professional woman. I met your father when he was finishing up at the business school, and he was a very nice man. There were no fireworks between us, simply a strong social compatibility. His background was similar to mine. His goals were similar to mine. And he was acceptable to my parents. Not all the men at Harvard were.”

  “Had you dated others?” Leah asked from the kitchen.

  I smiled. “Times haven’t changed all that much. I was living in a dormitory, away from home, and even though we had rigid curfews, there was some freedom.”

  “I can’t picture you making the rounds of fraternity parties,” Caroline remarked.

  “I didn’t. Nor, though, did I sit home every Saturday night.”

  “Had you fallen in love with any of the others, ones who might have been less acceptable to your parents?” Leah asked.

  “No. Never. That’s why I was unprepared for Will.” I’d had no idea that it was possible to be swept off one’s feet that way.

  “But how could you let it happen?” Annette cried. “You were already married. You had a responsibility to one man. How could you have become involved with another?”

  “I didn’t plan to,” I said without apology. I had paid a price for what I’d done. I refused to be the chastised child. “It just happened.”

  “Didn’t you think? Didn’t you say to yourself, ‘I can’t do this. I’m married’?”

  I sighed. “Annette, what would you have done if your father and I had hated Jean-Paul on sight?”

  “That wouldn’t have happened. He was too right for me in too many ways.”

  “But he was foreign-born. He didn’t speak English well. He didn’t know anyone in this country. If we had been short-sighted enough to let those things bother us, and we had forbidden you from marrying him, what would you have done?”

  “I’d have married him anyway.”

  “What if we had warned you that you’d be a social outcast, marrying a foreigner?”

  “I wouldn’t have cared.”

  “What if we threatened to disown you?”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered. I was in love.”

  “Precisely,” I concluded.

  “You’re saying,” Caroline put in with obvious skepticism, “that you weren’t thinking about right or wrong when you became involved with Will Cray?”

  “No. I’m saying that I had stumbled onto something so strong that right or wrong simply didn’t matter.”

  “Maybe if your relationship with Daddy had been stronger, you would have had more strength to resist,” Annette suggested.

  “Maybe.”

  “Why wasn’t it stronger?” Caroline asked.

  “Something was missing.”

  “For both of you?”

  “Mostly for me. We’d been married for four years and nothing was happening. Children weren’t coming. We weren’t growing closer. The love that was supposed to be budding wasn’t. I was frustrated because your father worked so much. I was convinced that there should have been something more.” It had been a romantic notion that had crept under my skin and was chafing. “So we rented Star’s End for the summer.” A romantic notion, indeed. “It seemed the perfect place to concentrate on each other. Unfortunately, we only had the weekends.”

  “Then it turned out to be a dumb idea.”

  I answered Caroline’s comment with a sharp look. “Sometimes the best laid plans go awry. Life isn’t always black or white, bad or good, guilty or innocent. Sometimes we have to compromise.” I caught a breath, closed my eyes for a minute, recomposed myself. Gently, sadly, as the memory moved me, I said, “We were indeed hoping to have more than just weekends, but it didn’t work out that way. That summer the business made unexpected demands on your father. Four-day weekends became three-day ones, and then two-day ones. I was disappointed. I had wanted much more.”

  “Was it revenge then, your taking up with Will Cray?”

  “Caroline,” Annette said, giving her elbow a squeeze. “Let her tell her story.”

  Caroline, the lawyer, was leading the witness, while Annette, the mother and middle child, was making peace. Their personalities certainly suited their occupations, I had to say that.

  I also had to say, because it was important that they know the truth as I understood it, “It wasn’t revenge. It was sadness. And youth. And loneliness. And too much time to think about things that should have been but weren’t. I used to spend
hours walking the bluff. It was soothing, the ebb and flow of the tide.” Even remembering it was soothing, though, of course, I didn’t have to remember it. It was here and now, the hypnotic rhythm of the waves, out beyond the deck and the pool and the bluff. It was muted where we sat inside, yet its soft beat was unmistakable. It steadied me, sweeping me back to the day that so changed my life.

  “I had seen him from time to time, working around the property. I knew that he was the groundskeeper, though, of course, since we were only renters, it wasn’t my place to know more. Nick had talked with him several times, but I had never come close enough to see what he looked like until one day, when I had gone into town and come back with bundles, he materialized at the car to carry them inside.” I paused, searching for words, desperate to describe what that moment had been like, but nothing fit. I looked from one face to the next, even to Leah’s across the room, trying to convey the helplessness I had felt. Finally, reliving that moment so long ago, I whispered, “I lost my breath. It just went. I felt that I’d been hit by something large and powerful, something totally beyond my understanding.”

  Leah’s eyes widened. So she had experienced it, too. I was pleased enough to laugh—which gave nothing of Leah’s secret away. For all outward purposes, I was mocking myself.

  “Here I was,” I said on the tail of that laugh, “trained from birth to know just the right thing to say at just the right time, and I was speechless. I’d had experience with businessmen and politicians, even a prince once. I knew how to handle plumbers and butchers and the man who filled my car with gas. But I had never met anyone like this man before.”

  “Daddy was good-looking,” Annette argued in her father’s defense.

  “Very. But it wasn’t Will’s looks that hit me. It was the way he looked at me. It was what was in his eyes, what was coming from deep inside. There was an instant feeling.”

  “Physical attraction” Caroline said with a dryness I ignored.

  “Yes. But the attraction was emotional and intellectual, too.”

  “Intellectual? He was the groundskeeper.”

  “Caroline.” It was Leah protesting this time, and I could understand why.

  “It’s all right, Leah,” I said. “Caroline, does Ben have a law degree?”

  “Of course not. He’s an artist.”

  “Do you consider him intellectually inferior to you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Because he’s a brilliant artist?”

  “And because he grew up in an intellectually enlightened environment. He doesn’t need a law degree to understand my cases. He has natural grasp of things like that.”

  “So did Will. He was self-taught. He had a natural curiosity, and he knew how to satisfy it. He was a voracious reader. He knew far more about many things than you or I.”

  “You were attracted to his mind?” she asked, dryly again.

  “I was attracted to the whole of him.”

  “In that one instant, when you saw him up close for the very first time.”

  “As improbable as it sounds, that’s how it was.”

  “So you jumped right into bed with him.”

  “Caroline!”

  “Caroline.”

  Caroline turned on her sisters. “Are you actually believing this?”

  “I’m wanting,” Annette stated as she rounded the sofa to sit down, “to hear the rest of Mother’s story without your cross-examination. Can’t you save it for later?”

  I held my breath, fully expecting Caroline to lash out at Annette and make things worse. How well I remembered their bickering—all three of them—and not only as children. They had bickered their way into adulthood, defining each other in terms of their own grievances. It strikes me now that those grievances were with me, but at the time I couldn’t see it. I simply turned a deaf ear to their squabbles.

  Caroline didn’t lash out. Nor, though, did she join Annette on the sofa. I was startled when Leah came to her side and put a reassuring hand on her arm—and even more startled when Caroline let that reassuring hand stay there.

  “Go on,” Leah urged me quietly.

  I studied her, before broadening my study to include Caroline and Annette. Something had indeed happened during my absence. I was relieved by that, too.

  I breathed more easily. My heart was behaving. Gratified, I slipped back into thoughts of Will again, and that first moment of realization. “The rapport was instant. He was my second half. But, no, we didn’t fall right into bed. Women didn’t do that in those days, at least, not women like me. It didn’t even occur to me that Will and I might do something like that. I was innocent. Unawakened, you might say. Besides, I was married to your father, and I took those vows seriously.”

  I directed the last at Annette, because I did, indeed, know what made her tick. She had set out in life to be a woman totally devoted to her husband and children. But so had I, in my way. I had given my family all I could, considering the hole that was inside me. I wanted her to understand that. I wanted her to see that I had indeed tried, and to give me some credit for that. I wanted her to know what made me tick, too.

  I wanted them all to know. I hadn’t chosen to cheat on my husband. I had been drawn to it by a force so strong that all the resistance in the world was for naught.

  “Will and I started slowly. We talked, mostly about things here at Star’s End. He showed me parts of the estate that I hadn’t seen. He showed me parts of Downlee that I hadn’t seen. He understood that I was married, and respected it. So did I. I looked forward to your father’s arrival each weekend.”

  I frowned and studied my hands. “Your father arrived late Friday and left early Monday, but those weekends weren’t what I had hoped. We weren’t communicating the way we should have been. Our relationship wasn’t improving. And then there was Will. I was starting to look forward to seeing him more than I should. We were talking about everything by that point. We always had so much to say to each other, even though we came from such different worlds.” It had amazed me then. It amazed me now.

  “That was the magic of our relationship. Then, too, there was the physical part.” I looked up. Three pairs of eyes were glued to me, three pairs of ears hung on every word. I might have laughed, had the situation been less poignant. How did an old woman tell her grown daughters about the wildly passionate person she had once been?

  “Will did something to me,” I said, embarrassed but pushing on. “He unlocked wonderful little impulses. When I was with him I was free. I wasn’t someone’s daughter or someone’s wife or someone’s friend. I was a woman. He gave me confidence and courage. There were neither rules nor taboos. When I was with him, I was as uninhibited and adventurous as he was.”

  We were in the woods that first time. He had been showing me the mushrooms that grew in the moist darkness there, when it started to rain. We were protected, but only to a point. Hand in hand, laughing, we ran along the path, emerging nearer his shed than my house. He suggested we stop there for raincoats. I would have stopped in hell with him, so in love was I with him by this time.

  Our clothing was soaked by the time we arrived, and it made more sense to wait out the storm there. He started a fire in the small potbelly stove, then removed his shirt and hung it nearby. He helped me out of mine, then my slacks.

  I felt a tingling all over, remembering it now. Will’s eyes on me were wondrous things. They dried me, heated me, lifted me. They caressed my body until it was aching all over, and that was before he had ever laid a hand on me—and when he was naked himself, any other reality that might have been simply faded away.

  I took a shaky breath, emerged from the reverie, and whispered, “I shock myself still.”

  All was silent, save the muted coastal sounds. I blotted the tears that surprised me with their presence, and looked at my daughters. They were stunned.

  I smiled. “It was a most beautiful time. But there was pain, right from the start. Everything about it was right, but it was very, very wron
g. I loved Will more than I had thought it possible to love someone, Only I was married to another.

  “I never forgot that fact. It’s important that you girls understand. I never forgot that I was married. I could put it aside during those moments when I was in Will’s arms, but it was never gone for long. We didn’t talk about it, at first. We were both thinking that what we had might just wear itself out by summer’s end. But that didn’t happen. It got stronger.”

  And stronger. And stronger. Even now, I felt the pull as though Will was over at the door, rather than in the graveyard way down along the bluff. He was, indeed, my second half. I had never been as whole before, or after.

  I swallowed, reliving the quandary and tiring under its weight. “I had two choices. I could either stay with Will, or return with Nick. To stay with Will meant giving up everything—my husband, my name, family, friends, reputation. Nothing could be carried over. No one from my life with Nick would understand, much less accept my life with Will. To stay with Will meant renouncing everything I had been raised to value and expect.”

  I closed my eyes, feeling the pain so very freshly. I pressed two fingers to my heart, where the pain was centered. It eased, but slowly.

  “Mother?” Leah asked.

  I smiled. “I’m fine.” Still, I took another minute to gather myself. “It was a difficult decision.”

  “What was it based on?” she asked.

  “All of the above. At the time, I added duty. I told myself that I owed it to Nick and our marriage to return with him and try to make it work. I liked Nick—didn’t love him, certainly not the way I loved Will—but I felt a responsibility to him. I told myself that staying with him was the right thing to do.” I raised my chin, not in pride but in self-reproach. “Yes, that was what I told myself, but time has told me more. The fact is that I liked the kind of life your father and I had. I liked the approval of my parents. I wanted my children to have the finest and the best, all the advantages I’d had growing up. Will could offer me none of that. I imagined myself staying with him and coming to hate the limitations.”