Jenny and the Jaws of Life

by Jincy Willett

  She was almost as tall as I, and big-boned, like Father. A big healthy girl, narrow-hipped, full-breasted, with broad, straight shoulders. Her face was wide and bold, with pale green eyes, large and set in deep above high, sharp cheekbones, and a long, fine-drawn, ironic mouth. At fourteen she had already the proud carriage and aggressive, slightly mannish good looks of the movie stars of our day. She experimented with clothes, wearing bulky, boxy schoolgirl outfits one week, stockings and tailored dresses the next, but I never got the impression that anything important rode on the experiment. Even in puberty she seemed at perfect ease.

  “Do you know about sex yet?” I asked her once, with some trepidation, but no embarrassment.

  “Pop gave me the lowdown. What do you want to know? Ask me anything.”

  “Watch your mouth.”

  She grinned and handed me a dish to dry. She tucked in her chin and deepened her voice in a wicked, unsentimental parody of Father’s oracular style. “I am, though I am not aware of it, a strikingly lovely young woman. While I innocently play with my dolls and whatnots, and dream my childish dreams, I stand, all unknowing, at the very brink of a strange and wonderful—ouch! You goon.”

  “Julie, I’m serious.”

  She clasped my hands in her soapy ones and fixed me with a solemn, hypnotic stare. “I should be informed that young men—and older ones too—have certain urges, terribly powerful imperatives of the blood, and they are going to want to, well, hug me, and—”

  “The point is—”

  “The point is…,” she sighed and turned back to the dishes. “The point is that you’re both ridiculous. The whole thing is ridiculous.”

  “There’s a girl at school, Hermione Felcher. She lets everybody.”

  She turned her head toward me but did not look up. “You?” she asked, in a small voice, and then blushed.

  It was so satisfying to see her off balance that I stopped worrying, and somehow forgot to start up again. There was so much else to worry about: college, and the war, which was winding down but still lethal; and the future, in general; and whether or not I had the right to have a family of my own. I was still obsessed with my tainted origins.

  When she was sixteen, the year before our parents died, she took lovers. Other girls her age petted, gave in, did things they shouldn’t. Julie took lovers. Two, that I know of: Charlie Metz, humble and likable as ever, still crazy about her, and who never knew I knew; and a married algebra teacher named LaMott. He gave her a bad time, I think.

  When Father didn’t have the living room, which was much of the time—he spent most evenings upstairs now—we often read together after supper sharing the rosy light of a single hand-painted globe lamp, and one night there, and for the first time, I saw her cry. I looked up at the flat sound of a tear falling on a page—no outsider can imagine the quiet in our house—and she suffered, wet-faced, while her eyes scanned the page, across and down, across and down, as though the tears were no concern of theirs. It frightened me badly, and pleased me, too: I myself had, by then, made a woman cry. And in the unnerving confusion of my emotions, and at the sight of her, I knew that we were separable, not just in theory but in fact, and that the process of farewell was implacable and smooth and well underway. Though I had for as long as I could remember been planning and fretting on this very assumption, this was thrilling, terrible news to me, and a moment as brilliantly lit as the one she had brought with her to my lonely bed so many years before. Though not as fine.

  She looked up and saw me watching, and returned to her book again, with a cool, languid blink that sent new tears down both her cheeks, but she had stopped reading. Silence stretched between us like a thick rope. “Men are bastards sometimes,” I said, and felt immediately like a colossal fool. She looked up again, slowly, and smiled at me, the old sudden, reckless smile, for me alone. “You dirty dog,” she said.

  Many times that last summer, long after nightfall, we slipped outside together, to our similar, separate destinations. I drove her, usually, and let her out at the places she designated. A large white house, unlighted, flanked by tidy rows of azaleas and lilacs; the motor hotel in the center of town; an empty dirt road in the county park. And much later, I would come back, at the time agreed upon, and wait for her. We had always made our own law. And sometimes we went out on foot, and met again without a word of greeting, and drifted through the heavy, fragrant darkness and the precious time, and past monuments and deep ravines, and one time she took my arm like a bride, not mine, but mine, to give away. And we walked together toward the proud old house where our parents slept.

  Father died that winter of a massive stroke, on the day after Christmas. Mother found him in the woods, where he took his afternoon walks. He had not been gone long, and we never knew what made Mother come downstairs that day and go search for him. She put on Julie’s old rabbit fur coat, gently shut the door behind her, and walked out to him, straight-backed, on slippered feet, across the crusty snow. She died of cancer seven months later. When she was dying, Julie and I kept scrupulous vigil in her hospital room, spelling each other like sentries. We did this without talking about it. I don’t know to this day if we were moved by duty, love, or pity. She was kind to us, and uncomplaining, and one morning early she tricked us, sending me out to the nurses’ station for a glass of milk; she died while I was gone. “Sometimes they prefer it that way,” the doctor said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  Our parents’ room was small and stark under the dim overhead light. We could not remember having ever seen it so well exposed, for on those few occasions we had been invited in, or had reason to intrude, or happened to look past the briefly open door, the light there had been murky even at noon, the shadows thick and blue. There was a single long window, with a northern exposure, draped in faded brown velvet; the walls were closely patterned with crimson flowers against a gray background, like the inside of an old sewing case; the floors bare, of unvarnished oak. There were only three pieces of furniture, all mahogany: an armoire and matching bureau, and the great four-poster, sagging badly beneath a spread of snowy chenille. A ghost ship, wide and pale, in dark harbor.

  We had had six weeks since the funeral to come here, to go through our parents’ possessions. Tomorrow I would head north to Tufts, leaving Julie behind to see about selling the house before sailing for Europe in October. Because it really couldn’t be put off another day, we had tried to make an occasion out of it. We had drunk too much wine at dinner, and banged on the piano, and acted hilarious and sophisticated and false. For the first time in our lives we were self-conscious together, and painfully young.

  And we had miscalculated, waiting too long to come up here. A late summer storm, which had encouraged our suppertime theatrics with thunder and flickering lights, had moved north, stranding us under a windless spout of loud, depressing rain. The room was formidable, claustrophobic. Our heads were pounding. “Why are we afraid?” she asked.

  “Because we have no business here.”

  “That’s not it,” she said. She opened the armoire and handed me a stack of business shirts. “It’s not as though they would mind. We’re not snooping.”

  This was an unfortunate, unguarded choice of words, and we worked stealthily, folding and sorting with careless speed until the wardrobe and the largest bureau drawers were empty and their contents in two shapeless mounds on the floor, one for discard, one for Goodwill. We recognized most of Father’s clothes, but Mother’s were a small shock. She had so many beautiful old dresses, spring-colored and delicate, trimmed with satin and ivory lace. Julie held against herself a tea gown of pale lemon silk and sighed mournfully. “God, she was tiny.” She crumpled the gown and let it fall. There was a brief, still moment, at once poignant and stagy, while we thought about our mother as she must have been at one time, and the pathetic waste of their two lives. Then Julie slid open the narrow drawer in the top middle of the bureau, and found the photograph.

  It was sandwiched in a stack of white linen han
dkerchiefs and silk scarves, in a drawer that was obviously, inarguably, for Mother’s use alone. Father stood on what looked like a dock, in front of what appeared to be some sort of bathhouse, a small out-house-sized enclosure fitted with an abbreviated swinging door. He stood with his feet well apart, hands on hips, facing, smiling, into the camera and the sun beyond, which bleached his face and the length of his body. He was naked. We stared at the picture, and then at each other, with identical expressions of amazed stupidity. “This isn’t possible,” I said.

  “It was taken recently,” she said. “It’s not old. Look, even with the overexposure, his hair is definitely white—” I snatched the photograph from her in a sudden access of prudery. “Don’t be an ass,” she said, giggling nervously. “Give it back.”

  “It’s grotesque,” I said.

  “It’s wonderful,” she said.

  “Wonderful? Who took this picture? Where is this place? I don’t recognize any of it. It looks like some kind of summer camp. He couldn’t even swim! Don’t you remember, those times he took us to the lake and paced back and forth on the shore, shouting at us when we went out too far?” I was furious, a trial attorney rendered foolish by an inappropriate confession.

  Julie flopped on the bed and clasped her hands behind her head. “He used to give her back rubs,” she said. “I saw them sometimes in the afternoons. She would lie here in her nightgown, untied in the back, and he would bend over her. He had such big hands. And her hands reaching out, gripping the bedstead. I always thought she was in pain, you know? I felt so sorry for her.” Julie laughed. “The wonderful part is, they were as happy as we were, all these years.”

  I stretched out beside her. “Did she leave it for us to find?”

  “Don’t be silly.” Without looking at me she caressed my cheek with cool fingers. “Let it go,” she said.

  “I will.”

  “No you won’t. You’ll let it get to you, the way you always have.”

  “We never knew them,” I said, after a long while.

  She raised up on one elbow and watched me cry. She was ageless, and thought herself wise, and I used to believe she was. I don’t know. “We were lucky,” she said.

  The front bell rang some hours later, revising and resolving my nightmare, so that I sprang awake, in my parents’ bedroom where she had left me, convinced of disaster in progress. The house was burning and we were trapped outside. I was shaky going down the stairs, stumbling and grasping the rail like an old man, and opened the door with the full expectation that no one was there.

  His name was Willoughby, Samson Willoughby, and he was sorry as hell, but his car broke down in the storm, and could he please use the phone. He was a little older than I, and taller, broad-shouldered, husky, with coarse, handsome features. An apparition absurd and fitting, dripping rainwater on our faded oriental carpet. Sorry as hell, he said, and I liked him. He smiled the way honest salesmen do, irresistibly. And his eyes widened and he hushed, respectfully, at the sight of Julie, standing at the top of the stairs in her long blue nightdress, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

  She is buried under a hot white sky, in a small graveyard at the top of a hill not far from the old house. There’s a large crowd: news people, officials, a few mourners. Julie’s children stand on the other side of the grave from me, within a cluster of uniforms. I wouldn’t know them otherwise. The expressions of the older two are identically bored and wary; only the young one seems to have any real sense of the occasion. He looks confused. The girl, Samantha, catches sight of me and nudges Michael with her elbow. They stare together, talking, standing a little apart and not looking at each other, like movie spies. She decides something, and after a short, animated discussion with two uniformed matrons, walks toward me by herself, her fists jammed into the pockets of her gray jacket. The suit is dowdy. She wears it like a joke. “You must be my Uncle John,” she says. She smiles like a little girl, or the closest approximation she can manage. “You look just like her.”

  “You don’t,” I say. I lie. She’s Julie in a cheap, concave mirror. Julie in the funhouse. Attractive enough, by standards I don’t share: lanky, pale, with long narrow bones; poorly nourished, by design; face like a lazy drawl, knowing and unsurprised.

  She smiles again, ruefully this time, still for my benefit. “Are you staying around after? Are you coming back for the trial?”

  “I have a plane to catch. I am not coming back for the trial.”

  “Because there are some people back there, from a publisher, and a guy from Newsweek. Maybe they’d like to talk to you.”

  I laugh, flushing laughter from her as purely ugly as my own. “They can burn in hell,” I say.

  She nods slowly and drops the mask. “She used to talk about you, once in a while. When she got smashed. She said you were a lousy businessman.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s true,” she says, shrugging. “She said you blew a big chance to buy into some drugstore franchise.”

  “I don’t believe you exist.”

  “Hey, Uncle J! That’s exactly what she said to me. Lots of times. Her own daughter.”

  “Go away.”

  “She was a marvelous businesswoman. See those jerks over there?” She points to a huddle of men and women in navy blazers. “Her co-workers. They used to call her The Shark. She specialized in newlyweds. You know, looking for their Dream House. Man, when she got ahold of them, they didn’t—”

  “Why don’t you go rehearse somewhere else.”

  “Rehearse! You old creep, you don’t know anything! Don’t you sit in judgment on us!” She has forgotten herself. “Does this scene look rehearsed to you? Do you think we planned all this?” She’s shaking badly, rousing me at last to pity, to sorrow, and I turn away and start down the hill.

  She follows, shrieking, indiscreet in her rage. “She was a dead woman, mean and vicious and dead already. She hated everybody.” I put on speed but she catches up with me, grabbing my arm. “Dad, us, everybody. Especially you. Look at me. The only thing she loved was when one of us would screw up. She loved that. Look at me. She saw us standing there, and she loved it.”

  “Here you are,” I say. “I can’t doubt you.”

  She is All Too True. What contempt Julie must have felt toward these needy children. How she despised their mediocrity, the ordinary stupid mess they made of their freedom. We were lucky, she said.

  No, Julie. No, we were not. If we were lucky, then this girl is fortune’s child, and your death is the wonderful part, and there was justice in it. And your life makes a story after all. The heartless, ironic type of thing that so pleased you.

  That so suited you.

  Inevitability. Destiny. Cause and effect, seeds of destruction, sense. We make sense, like a feather bed, and take comfort there. We tell ourselves stories at bedtime. But I loved you too much. Sleep is just not that important to me.

  “She was going to send Michael to military school. Dad told him he had to go, but it was her idea.” She’s breathing hard. “They think Michael did it.” She has Julie’s eyes.

  “Good-bye, Samantha,” I say, and this time she doesn’t follow me.

  But calls out bravely, her voice proud and true. “Uncle John? Uncle John, do you want to know who pulled the trigger? Do you want me to tell you a secret?”

  “No,” I say. “No more.”

  The Haunting of the Lingards

  The Lingards were not a flashy couple, but people admired and envied their marriage, the symmetry of their mutual regard, their serene and constant intimacy. This perfect marriage was often held up as a standard against which other couples disparaged their own. In a typical argument the wife would say, “Kenneth never cuts her down in public,” and the husband would perhaps reply that “Maybe that’s because he respects her, because Anita doesn’t get bombed and blab her husband’s private remarks at parties. And even if Anita couldn’t hold her booze,” he might add, with somewhat more fervor, “she’d find some subtle w
ay to let him know that they ought to leave early”; “And if she did,” his wife would shout, “he wouldn’t pretend not to notice her”; and so on.

  Marital tension was high in their close-knit community, where most of the husbands and some of the wives were research immunologists, and the nonprofessional half of the couple (for there was no profession but medicine) was often lonely and alienated because the professional half worked hard and played hard, or worked hard and fell asleep. Had the Lingards not been so amiable, they would have been widely resented, like the one brilliant student who ruins a bell curve.

  Common wisdom in the group (especially those on their second marriages) held that, while opposites may attract, they repel in the long run, and here again the Lingards were often cited, this time as the exception that proved the rule. He was lean and fair and austere, and she was plump and dark and voluble. To relax, he devised cryptic crosswords, and she practiced her violin, which she played, semiprofessionally, with a local quartet. His intelligence was disciplined and objective, hers unruly and bluntly intuitive.

  They were absolutely unalike, and yet no one ever wondered what one Lingard saw in the other, or if each Lingard sometimes yearned for the company of its own kind. They had never been known to disagree on any issue of substance, and almost never even on trifling matters of fact. When they spoke, recounting some story, arguing some position, consecutive paragraphs, sentences, even phrases within a single sentence flowed seamlessly between them. And their spontaneous behavior was so often identical and synchronous that, for instance, the Lingard Laugh, sudden and coincident, was a generally recognized phenomenon, and one not too well understood, as the occasion for amusement was often impossible for others to detect. Talking to the Lingards, as Saul Goldberg said, you often felt as though you addressed one person with two faces, like the perfect multilimbed creature of Platonic myth, or the Lingards’ own freakish child. (The Lingards were childless.)