Peter rubbed his towel across his toes, the rounded knob of his ankle, feeling the abrasive cloth against his damp skin. Caroline came into his mind; she did often. Her image was indistinct, her outline hazy. He could no longer exactly remember her face: he held the sense of it, what it was like to look at it, but he could not conjure up the individual features, the whole.
She was no longer his wife. His marriage was over. Each time he thought that phrase, that word—over—something in him lowered, mourned. He had not meant this to happen. He had believed that his marriage lay before him, a vast, unknown, fertile territory stretching out ahead. It was there, he had believed, to be explored, mapped, to be understood, slowly, over the course of his life. He had abandoned the expedition. How had he done it? How had he managed to become divorced? But he had made it happen; he had insisted. He thought of Caroline, and at the thought of returning to her, taking up his life with her again, he felt his heart snap closed. No; he would do it again, he would leave.
These feelings were continual and befuddling, like simultaneous existence in two separate universes: grief at the loss of his marriage, grim determination to end it. He saw again Amanda’s face as she stood by the elevator. He saw Caroline in the bedroom, weeping, enraged.
Peter stood upright and set his other foot on the bathtub. He dried the other leg, the sharp edge of his shin, barely submerged beneath the shifting surface of the skin, the long solid slope of his calf.
He could see Caroline’s contorted face, her clenched fingers. That day she had screamed at him, and cursed; it was not the first time. Angry, impatient, contemptuous: this had been more and more how he had seen her. It was strange: the first thing that had struck him about Caroline was her good humor.
He had first seen her on the beach. It was early summer, the end of his first year at law school. Peter had spent the weekend with a classmate, in Nonquitt. They had taken a picnic to a nearby private beach with the wonderful name of Barney’s Joy. They parked, and walked staggering through the heavy white sand, laden with towels, sandwiches, beer. As he remembered it, the smooth wide beach was endless. A flat shingle stretching out forever, rising on one side into high swooping dunes. It seemed no one was there that day except their group, exuberant, alone in that radiant, limitless vista. (Though how would he know, he thought. In your memory, your table is the only one at the restaurant.)
The day was bright but chilly, windy. Caroline wore a sweater over her bathing suit. A big hat, Peter remembered, dark sunglasses. He couldn’t really see her face, concealed by the wide straw brim, the dark glamorous lenses. Still, he had a sense of her: smiling, charming. Beautiful. She acted beautiful. Then someone, pouring from a thermos, spilled on her sweater. Caroline whooped and jumped up. Her arms and body were loosely muffled by the sweater, her long legs beautifully bare. She capered on the sand, dancing at the shock of the liquid—was it hot or cold? She was excited, hilarious. She had squealed, but with delight, it seemed, anyway without temper. Peter had been struck at how little she minded; she brushed at the stain on her sweater, then began to laugh. He could see her face now. The wind struggled with the wide brim of her hat. Strands of long streaked blond hair blew across her mouth, and she drew them away with her fingers.
Peter scrubbed the towel at his thighs, his buttocks, his back. He moved more slowly, now that most of him was dry. He put the towel over his face, enclosing himself in its damp rough darkness. He molded hard his own features, rubbing deeply into the sockets of his eyes, scouring with his toweled fingers, as though he could scrape off some late, undesirable layer, and return himself to some earlier phase. It was over, he thought. Again, at that word, he felt cast out onto a dark turbulent place. Where was he? What had he done with his life? A part of him, his lost marriage, ached, like a severed limb, still sentient.
When Peter had met Caroline he was not yet ready to marry, not looking for a wife. He had a plan, linear, orderly: after law school he’d move to New York, find a job. He would settle these things before he took on marriage. A wife should be looked after; she was a responsibility. He wasn’t ready for that. In those days, what drew and held him fixed, an invisible beam commanding the landscape, was fear about money.
At night, on the edge of sleep, Peter was visited by a scene from a nightmare. He watched from outside, mute, paralyzed, while his parents, trusting, unworldly, settled slowly and unwittingly into an inexorable slide toward poverty. He saw the pair of them, sitting comfortably before the fireplace; he saw the house begin, perilously, to tilt, the floor buckling in horrible silence, the foundations giving way, the mossy shingled roof caving in. The image came often, quickening his heart with anxiety.
But that day at Barney’s Joy, watching Caroline caper on the white sand, with her smooth long legs, her hat, he found himself thinking of the word companion. It startled him. It wasn’t what he thought he wanted in a wife, a woman. What a good companion was the sentence that came to him.
Now, in the small bathroom, Peter remembered his frantic anxiety about money. He could not call the feeling up again, it was like remembered pain. Now what he felt was different. He had achieved what he had wanted—security—and the things Caroline wanted: the apartment on Park Avenue, the clubs, the private school, the nanny. Now he knew what he could do, the achievement itself was not so frightening. He felt like a horse in harness, setting his shoulder against a load he knew he could pull.
Peter was a partner in his law firm, which was midtown, midsized. He had specialized in intellectual property, at a time when few people were interested in it. Now, with the rise of the electronics industry, intellectual property was hot. Young associates crowded around him like young bullocks, eager but wary, jockeying for attention. His division had expanded. His parents would elude the poorhouse.
Peter toweled his chest and stomach, liking the abrasive drag against his skin. He was dry, clean, ready for his dinner with Emma. The glowing point at the end of his day. He stuffed the towel onto the rack, where it hung in damp crumpled folds. At home, at the place he still thought of as home, the towel would be folded neatly the next time he saw it. The next time he saw this towel it would look exactly the same: drooping, slatternly. Right, he thought.
In his bedroom Peter was surrounded by familiar objects. Here they were, companions in his flight, his exile, his liberation: the worn red Persian carpet from his library, its fringe uneven and fraying. Here was his leather wing chair, his grandfather’s mahogany bureau, ponderous and gleaming. The polished wood was dark reddish brown, its fine grain like a weather map, full of drifting swirls, deep subtle currents. The top drawer bellied boldly outward, then back in again, like a half-round column laid horizontally across the chest. Below, the other drawers were soberly perpendicular, starred with a double line of crystal pulls.
Caroline had been glad to get rid of the bureau. She had called it “the Victorian horror.” Peter could not tell, himself, what it looked like. To him the chest was not a piece of design but a piece of his family. It spoke to him of his grandfather. Peter had never known his grandfather, but the bureau had been in Peter’s bedroom as long as he could remember. In the early mornings, when Peter lay barely awake, he looked through half-closed, slowly blinking lids, and imagined that he saw his grandfather as a boy. He wore those strange stiff clothes, the high restraining white collar, the rusty black knee-length trousers. In the dim light he stood motionless, looking into an open drawer. He never turned; Peter saw him only from behind. His shadowy imagined presence was benign, comforting.
Peter’s parents still lived in Marblehead, in the house where he had grown up. It had originally been the carriage house on Peter’s great-grandparents’ place. All the buildings on the property had been remodeled. The laundry, the stables, the carriage house were all cottages now, occupied by cousins, aunts, uncles. The big house, Axminster, was the only one unchanged. It belonged to Peter’s uncle, also a lawyer, and the only one who could afford to keep it up.
Axminster was dark an
d massive. Outside, it was unpainted shingle, with small-paned windows and huddles of narrow chimneys, in the Arts and Crafts style. Inside, the rooms were high ceilinged, spacious and gloomy, with vast shining oak floors and somber wood paneling. In the living and dining rooms there were enormous rustic fireplaces made of granite. The majestic staircase rose to a half landing before continuing to the second floor. The banisters were not columns but thin flat panels, with heart silhouettes carved out of them. There had been a springer spaniel named Caesar who used to sit on the landing and stick his muzzle out through a heart-shaped cutout. Peter could not now remember if he had ever known Caesar, or only heard of him, but he could see him clearly, sitting on the landing, the small brown snout protruding, the stumpy tail trembling.
When Peter had brought Caroline home to meet his parents, she’d made much of the carriage house. “Oh, it’s charming,” she said, over and over. “I just love it.” She was effusive, Southern.
The carriage house was also dark inside, with high wainscoting and ceilings that were, literally, lofty. Some of the floors were narrow wooden boards and some flagstone, varnished but uneven. The house had a rustic aura, a subtle leaning toward its past. You felt there might be a chain cross-tie hanging against some wall, ready still to clip onto a brass halter ring, or in some corner a nest of worn winter horseshoes, ready to be reset with the ringing blows of the blacksmith’s hammer. The Chatfields occupied the house lightly. Things were as they were, it didn’t occur to them to make changes.
That day, Peter took Caroline for a walk after lunch. It was late fall, and the afternoon darkened early. They walked across the mossy lawn, crunchy with early frost. Ducking around a shrubby wall of forsythia, they met the flat gravel drive of the main house. They followed the drive around the curve to face the great dark facade and heavy porte cochere of Axminster.
Caroline’s eyes enlarged. “Whose house is this?” she asked.
“Uncle Punch and Aunt Judy,” Peter said.
“Punch and Judy?” Caroline repeated.
“Her name’s Sarah, but everyone calls her Judy because of Uncle Punch.”
“And his name is really Punch?”
“Hubert.”
There was a pause. Caroline said, “God, it’s huge.”
Peter grinned and put his arm around her. “Too bad,” he said. “You picked the wrong cousin.”
Caroline smiled winningly and shook her head. “Don’t be silly,” she said, but Peter could see she was disappointed. At the time it had amused him.
Peter’s family had been in Boston since the early eighteenth century. They had been comfortable, though not rich, until the late nineteenth century, when someone had turned fortunate in the textile industry. Axminster was the name of a successful carpet. But by the time Peter was born, most of the money had trickled away, at least in his own family. Like his father, Peter had gone to St. Paul’s and Harvard, but unlike his father, he had gone on scholarship.
Now Peter pulled on clean boxer shorts, snapping the waist, feeling the silky ironed cotton against his damp skin. The luxury of being clean, he thought, cool stuff against your skin. Emma came into his mind, her creamy skin. Her smooth arms. Her hands, the narrow, flexible fingers, like a lemur’s, some kind of clinging prehensile creature. Her pointed chin, so neat and precise, elfish. He loved her narrow greenish eyes, bright, slanted beautifully downward, in an elegiac droop. When she smiled they narrowed, turned radiant.
Peter opened a drawer of folded shirts in plastic-fronted envelopes. He chose deep blue, with narrow white stripes, and shook out its stiff folds, sliding his arms into the sleeves.
On the bureau, on the white linen scarf, were his things: his grandfather’s pair of worn ivory hairbrushes; a silver tumbler which had been an usher’s present at his roommate’s wedding; his leather wallet—limp, dark, packed. There was also a little silver dish, its provenance now forgotten, where he kept his change. A dizzy-looking small clay bowl, unglazed, leaned hard to the left. Amanda had made this in first grade and given it to him for Christmas. Peter kept his cuff links in it.
He slipped the links through the holes in the heavy French cuffs. The links had been a present from his father; they too had belonged to Peter’s grandfather. They were small brass ovals, engraved with his grandfather’s initials: PSC. The surface was worn and nicked, the engraving now blurred at the edges. His grandfather’s name was Paul, not Peter, but the initials were the same. Peter was an only child, and he would inherit all the family objects, no matter what the initials. By the time his parents died, that would be all there was left: the furniture and the house. His father spent capital every year, not lavishly, but steadily.
Peter would have to sell the house. The family would be outraged if he sold to outsiders, and trying to sell it inside would become a nightmare of negotiations, recriminations, sullen silences, furious letters sent by hand, family members cut dead in the street. All these things had happened when his grandmother died and the property was distributed. One uncle had moved to Santa Barbara in a rage and had never spoken to Punch again.
Peter could not keep the carriage house. He would never find himself settled in Marblehead again, his life would not take him there. He had never talked to his parents about this, about his selling the house. Peter was forty. His mother was seventy-two, his father seventy-five. His parents were both still healthy, forcefully alive.
At this moment, nearly seven o’clock, his parents would be in the kitchen. Peter’s father, Jeffrey, was a pediatrician, semiretired. He had stopped working altogether on weekends, and cut back during the week. Right now he would be sitting in the rocking chair at the end of the kitchen table. In one hand would be his sole drink of the evening, Scotch and water. In the other hand would be the newspaper. He bought the paper on his way home from work, and read it at night. He was always one day behind on the news. While his wife cooked dinner he would sit beneath the standing lamp, reading out loud to her things that amused or incensed him.
Peter’s father was tall and thin, balding. He wore rimless glasses over his bright blue eyes. His cheeks were deeply lined, with long furrows, and there were tufts of wild white hair in his ears. In the winter he wore a hand-knit wool vest, and heavy tweed suits that never wore out. In the summer he wore ancient linen suits, glossy with ironing, and blue sneakers. At all times Dr. Chatfield carried an old pair of metal binoculars, dark, weighty, serious, suspended from a fraying leather strap around his neck. He was an intent and dedicated birder, and would pull over to out side of any road in order to lift and focus his binoculars. His life list was lengthy and impressive.
Polly, Peter’s mother, would be moving from sink to counter to stove. She wore tweed skirts and solid-color sweaters. She dressed in dull colors, browns, grays, slate blues. She was small and comfortable, with a large sloping bosom and no waist. There was a short perpendicular crease between her hazel eyes, and small flattened pouches beneath them. Her hair was bright white, short and straight, parted on one side. She made brief replies to her husband’s announcements.
When Peter told his parents that he and Caroline were separating, his mother raised her eyebrows and said nothing.
Dr. Chatfield rocked silently, thinking, looking at Peter over his rimless glasses. His mouth was puckered into angry folds.
“What did you expect?” he asked finally, the chair creaking.
Peter felt a spasm of anger himself. He waited for a moment before he answered. “I made a mistake,” he said. “Caroline and I want very different lives.”
“Everyone does,” said his father rebukingly.
Peter did not answer, and after a while Dr. Chatfield opened his newspaper, his mouth still pursed, his eyes narrowed.
Peter, sitting across from his father, took a swallow of his own drink in the silence. He leaned his head against the stiff high-backed wooden chair, feeling its perpendicular clasp. He understood he had disappointed his parents, but why did they ask him nothing more? He resented their silent j
udgment. He had received no credit for his efforts to make the marriage work, no credit for any of his successes, not even the material success that was for them, too. It was never discussed again.
Afterward, often, he wondered what his father had meant. If there was an unrevealed passage in his parents’ lives, Peter didn’t ask about it, didn’t want to know it. Its presence loomed outside his vision, hidden, like a black reef known only by white surf above it, too dangerous to approach. Everyone does. The phrase did not leave him.
Now half-dressed, his shirt buttoned and linked, his legs bare, Peter pulled on his socks. They were cashmere. Again he felt a deep sense of luxury, of gratitude to the world. Cashmere socks. It had not been until boarding school that he had realized how odd and idiosyncratic his family was. He had assumed that everyone could find their family name in public places: graveyards, lists on church walls, libraries. He took this for granted, though with a certain sense of entitled pride. It was not until boarding school that he realized, to his surprise and shame, that his family was poor.
The winter he was an awkward, testy seventeen-year-old, he had sat in the kitchen one night before dinner. His father was reading the paper.
“Why can’t we go to Vail for spring vacation?” Peter asked, challenging, clumsy.
Dr. Chatfield raised his eyes from the paper. “Do what?”
“Why can’t we go skiing in Vail?” Peter asked again, at once irritated by his father’s response.
The Chatfields had always skied. The family had, for decades, owned a farmhouse near Mad River. Everyone had used it—aunts, uncles, cousins—according to increasingly complicated rules of occupancy. But the house was old, and the arrangements had become impossibly snarled and entangled, and when Peter was twelve, it had finally been sold. Since then Peter had only gone skiing when he was invited by friends.
This Is My Daughter Page 6
