Mazes and Monsters

by Rona Jaffe

  It was not that she had a low opinion of herself; quite the contrary. She knew she was attractive, bright, had a good character, and boys seemed to like her personality. But she knew she couldn’t stand to live with a man who wasn’t better than she was—not just as good, but better. How else could she respect him? How else could she defer to him? How else could he take care of her? If she were going to settle for a man who was the same as she was, then she might as well take care of herself.

  She met Harold at college. She knew right away he was better than she was, but he never acted as if he knew it, which was fine with her. “Conceited” was definitely not on her list of attributes. They were married right after she graduated, and they had Andy while Harold was in graduate school. They were of that group of people who met at college, stayed at college, and simply never went home again. If she hadn’t met and married Harold she would have gone to graduate school; as it was, she never stopped taking courses.

  It was the early 1950s, and so Ellie always had an excuse for taking the courses so she wouldn’t seem to be thinking of deserting her husband and baby for a career. Harold was a professor so her courses were free. She’d have to be a fool to waste that opportunity. She took art appreciation, painting, sculpture, pottery, and psychology. When Harold got appointed to Harvard she certainly couldn’t give up a chance to study there, so she began working for a Master’s. Andy and Daniel were both in school so she had enough free time. Her friends worried about the effect on her children’s mental health, as if she had deserted them.

  “I’m not going to work,” Ellie told her friends. “It just seems a shame to waste all those credits.”

  When she had her degree in Art Therapy it seemed not only silly but a sin to waste her education, so she got a job working with emotionally disturbed children. The children were a mix of rich and poor, so in a way she could claim she was really doing social work even though she was being paid. She loved all the children, even the ones who bit her.

  When Andy got his degree in Recreational Therapy and his own apartment, and Daniel went away to Grant, Ellie was ready to tell her friends that she had entered a career as a way of letting go of her sons less painfully. But by then her friends had been through the women’s movement, and they told her they admired her for knowing what she wanted all along. She stopped making excuses.

  Here she was, married twenty-seven years, a very different person from the unformed creature who had married Harold Goldsmith because he was better than she was—and now she knew he was better than she was only because she loved him and chose to think so. They had never had a fight that was bad enough for them to think of a divorce, she had never cheated and was sure he hadn’t, and they still had a good time together. The fact that she and Harold had been responsible for creating two adults who would live after them and do good things in the world made her feel immortal, a part of eternity.

  The discovery that one of those adults—Andy the meshugge—had chosen to betray her immortality by refusing to have a child of his own filled her with horror. It wasn’t that she wanted to play Grandma. She had enough little children to worry about at the hospital. It was that Andy was ending the greatest thing in life she had been able to do.

  How could she explain that to him? How could she tell him what a family really was? Even if your children and grandchildren went to the four corners of the earth and you never saw them again, a part of you was walking somewhere on that earth and that mattered. Otherwise you disappeared. Did Daniel know? Could he understand? She didn’t have to worry about Daniel finding a nice girl; the phone never stopped ringing when he was home. The girls called the boys today, not like when she was young. Harold joked and said he wished he were nineteen years old now instead of back then. But she worried about what was going on in Daniel’s head. The sensitive, tender, loving little boy who had told her everything, shown the most amazingly mature perceptions, had grown up and away from her.

  All the psychology courses she’d taken didn’t help her when she tried to understand her own child. You couldn’t, after all, read someone’s mind. Maybe Daniel was just going through the natural searching and separating that teen-agers had to do. You couldn’t even call them “teen-agers” anymore—they had to be “young adults.”

  Then that made her a middle-aged adult. The time had gone by so fast she couldn’t stand it: a blink of the eye and it was over.

  CHAPTER 7

  The mixed feelings Robbie always had when he walked into his parents’ house in Greenwich were intensified when he came home for Christmas vacation. Holidays, particularly Christmas, were supposed to be joyful times, but the home in which these holidays were celebrated was tumultuous and filled with anger. Home, as he had always believed other people’s were, was a refuge of warmth and love. In his he felt torn apart, his loyalties going first to one parent and then the other, and sometimes even—as if it were a selfish and unworthy thing—to himself. To protect himself he had adopted a surface calmness. It went with his all-American good looks, his good manners, his gentle ways; so he almost seemed to have erased himself. There was no one who did not like the Robbie Wheeling he had created. His parents’ friends said he made up for the tragedy of the older son.

  There were pictures of Hall junior on the piano in the living room, just as there were pictures of Robbie: the happy babies smiling in the sun, the proud young boys with their huge baseball bats, and finally the teen-agers. Robbie’s photos were always the same; he only got older. Hall’s changed a great deal. In his last photograph he seemed almost paranoid, startled by the camera, ready to spring. Cat and Hall senior, his parents, had not seen how extraordinary this photograph was or they would not have put it on display for people to see—but how could they have noticed, when the real Hall junior had looked exactly the same way and they saw him all the time? Robbie himself had only noticed it later, when Hall was gone and he was trying to understand.

  Hall’s room was waiting for him exactly as he had left it. The cleaning woman dusted it, and there were fresh sheets on the bed. It was a way of saying he might come back. And what if he did come back and discovered his room had been turned into something else: a den or a guest room for instance? He might become angry and leave again.

  Whenever Robbie walked past his brother’s room, which was next to his along the upstairs corridor, he could hardly bear to glance inside, and yet something drew him to look. The past always came back when he saw that plaid bedspread, the maple dresser, even the pile of old magazines, their pages yellow now. They had been old magazines when Hall left; he just hadn’t bothered to throw them away. Merry Christmas.

  The house had been quite nice once, done in traditional style with a great deal of flowered chintz. The fabric was faded now and worn down to the stuffing on the arms of the chairs, but his mother never got around to doing anything about it. They did not entertain anymore anyway, except for a few very close friends. His father took people to the country club. He went to the city early and came back late, by which time his wife, who had been drinking alone and storing up the grievances of over twenty years, would fight with him. There was no need to redecorate their environment; the feelings would be the same.

  During the holiday Robbie saw his friends from high school, went to parties, called Kate every day, and swam. He wanted to keep in practice, and since the high school was closed for vacation (he knew the coach would have let him in for old times’ sake) he went early every morning to the YMCA. The large, damp, echoing tiled room that smelled of chlorine was empty during the time he chose to go. The diehards who had to get in their laps before the commuter train were gone, and it was too early for the lunch-hour fitness freaks. Robbie warmed up, sprinted, cooled down, and then just did leisurely laps, reluctant to leave. He found swimming hypnotic. Back and forth, turning, moving with careful, endless strokes through that walled, tiled maze that looked like the little squares on graph paper. He was in the maze, and in his dream of the maze; Robbie, Pardieu …

&nbs
p; When he had to go home eventually, after his swim, he always felt more relaxed. Still, he was counting the days until he could get back to college, to Kate and his friends, and to the game.

  His mother was cooking Christmas dinner for him and his father and her father, who was eighty years old and widowed. Cat, his mother, was the youngest child. There were no aunts, uncles, and cousins this year: some were on holiday in warm places, lying in the sun, others were far away in other states with their own families. The four of them seemed a pathetic little group somehow. His father was in the living room watching football on television, on the new set he’d bought, with a screen that looked like a movie screen. He was drinking martinis. Dinner was not for several hours, and Robbie knew there would be trouble by then. His mother was in the kitchen drinking vodka with her father. She no longer bothered with martinis. Robbie could smell the turkey in the oven. It smelled good, and she had made his father’s favorite chestnut and oyster stuffing. Everybody hoped she wouldn’t burn the dinner as usual, and she knew what they were thinking, so she was sitting in the kitchen even though there was a long time to go and she had set the timer.

  “Tell your mother to put out some cheese,” his father told Robbie. “Didn’t we get a wheel of that nice black-rind cheddar from the Pattersons? Sure we did. What’s she doing, waiting for it to spoil?”

  Robbie looked at his father. Even at his leisure he was well dressed, like a country gentleman: navy blue blazer, open-neck shirt, black velvet slippers with his initials on them in gold, on his wrist one of the seven watches he had replaced with identical ones. Lean, tall, slightly tanned, a fifty-dollar haircut. His mother hated those black velvet slippers. She called them “his royalty shoes,” and laughed when he wore them.

  “Dad wants cheese,” Robbie said, entering the kitchen.

  “I am getting it ready for him,” she said. There were so many things going on in her tone that Robbie couldn’t begin to think about it. If her words were glass and shattered on the floor in a hundred pieces each one would be an emotion.

  She sliced a wedge of the black-rind cheddar and put it on a cheese board with some crackers and a small knife. She was wearing a dark red party dress. She was still so beautiful, his mother; tall and slim and blond with aristocratic bones. Liquor had not made her puffy or smudged her features. It made her face melt, but only when she was very drunk, and right now she was only partly drunk. She looked like her father. At eighty he looked much younger, and he drank a lot too. He smiled at Robbie.

  “Have a steady girl?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Living together, I bet. Young people today …” His voice was pleasant, conversational. He took a sip of his vodka. “The old people are getting like the young people. New morality. The old widows at the club, always chasing me. Come over to say hello, how are you. I suppose they want me to take them out, go to bed with them. Not that I can’t still do it, you understand. But I don’t want to get involved. You go to bed with a woman, next thing she wants you to move in, marry her. Am I right, Cat?”

  “I don’t know,” Robbie’s mother said. She gestured wearily at Robbie to take the cheese to his father.

  “Is she drunk?” his father asked.

  “Not very.”

  His father looked at his watch and grunted.

  “Grandpa’s talking’ about sex,” Robbie said. “He’s funny.”

  “Jesus,” his father said.

  He sat down and watched the game with his father for a while, and then he went back to the kitchen. His mother’s mood had changed. Now she was getting angry. He knew the phases so well he could anticipate them. The level of vodka in the bottle had gone down considerably.

  “I wouldn’t do it now,” she said. “I wouldn’t marry the first man I fell in love with. Or the second, either. I’d go out and live first. Find out who I was. Did you ever try to live with a man who doesn’t talk?”

  “You ought to have a cook,” his grandfather said.

  “I don’t mind.”

  “You should have people waiting on you. He’s successful. I don’t like to see you dragging heavy bags of groceries from the market.”

  “What do you think I’ve been doing my whole life?”

  “It isn’t right,” he said.

  “I’d rather he talked to me,” she said.

  “You talk to each other a lot,” Robbie said.

  “Fighting isn’t the same as talking,” she said. “Maybe it is. But just once I’d like to have a conversation where I didn’t end up hoarse.”

  “Can I help with anything?” Robbie asked.

  “We should have eaten at the club,” she said.

  Dinner was late. His mother put Christmas carols on the stereo and lit candles on the dining room table. She had covered the table with the white linen cloth she used for parties, and was using the dishes with Christmas trees painted on them.

  “Turn that down, Cat,” his father said, annoyed. “How can I hear this?”

  “It’s Christmas and we’re going to have music and conversation,” she said. She was very drunk now. “Turn that thing off. We’re going to act like a goddamn family.”

  “You’re drunk,” he said.

  “I have plenty of reasons.”

  “When the hell are you going to have dinner ready?” He was none too sober himself. “Everybody’s starving except you.”

  “It’s ready now,” she snapped, and turned off his beloved new TV.

  The turkey was overcooked. Robbie could tell the moment he saw the dark, leathery skin. His father was carving it angrily. “I need an ax for this damn thing,” he said. “You get drunk and you burn the Christmas dinner, as usual. I should have eaten at the club.”

  “Oh, you should?” she said. “Alone with all the families?”

  “I wouldn’t take you in that condition.”

  “This is my home and I can be in any condition I like,” she said, her cheeks flushed with rage. “I am a talented, well-educated woman, and I could have been someone, I could have had a life. You made me drink. I drink so I can get through the day. All my life, it was always duty. What you wanted. What everybody else wanted. Not what I wanted. Nobody ever asked me that.”

  “I hate when you drink,” he said. “You act like a hostile bitch.”

  “And I hate oyster stuffing,” she said. “Those disgusting little fishy gray things.”

  Robbie closed his mind to their fight and ate quietly. He knew they were not fighting about dry turkey or oyster stuffing, or about how much liquor had been consumed that day, or even a wasted life ending in a lonely house with no guests and no laughter—they were fighting about something so deep they could not speak of it. He knew what it was, and it frightened him, because there would never be any end unless Hall came back. Even now, drunk as she was, she did not say: You called the police. And he did not say: He would have left anyway. Your fault, they were both shouting; your fault, yours … Robbie wondered if he would ever be old enough so these arguments did not make him cringe and want to leave.

  His grandfather sat quietly, chewing his food, used to this chaos. Like Robbie, he had no other choice. But unlike Robbie, he had no guilt to share either …

  After dinner Robbie drove his grandfather home. As he came back to his parents’ house he could see the lighted tree through the living room window, the fire in the fireplace burning merrily, and his mother in her dark red party dress sitting in front of the flames drinking, all alone. A party should never end with someone all alone, and yet they all were: his grandfather with his dreams of old widows, his father in bed, his mother by the fire, and himself. He wondered if each of them felt as lonely as he did.

  At least his sentence was not indeterminate. He would be going back to school soon.

  CHAPTER 8

  No one remembered who had first nicknamed Catherine Forsythe “Cat.” Her father said it was he because she was so agile and quick. Her mother claimed it was she, because Catherine was so quiet, sneaking up on you, watc
hing with round green eyes. Nobody ever thought to call her “Mouse.” She was much too big.

  She was one of the tallest girls in her class at school, but slender and graceful; athletic, aesthetic, and bright, and always with that cool aristocratic beauty that made boys write poems to her. Hers was an old, eastern family, and she was brought up to be what her father called “a gentlewoman.” A gentlewoman, she thought, had more character than a lady—a lady languished in a hammock, but a gentlewoman could handle anything. She went to boarding school, and then she went to Vassar, because her mother and grandmother had gone there. Her great love was music—she dreamed of becoming a professional pianist—but her parents would not hear of sending her to Juilliard. It was necessary for a gentlewoman to have a well-rounded college education, preferably at the school which had smoothed the edges of her forebears. Cat’s music was an excellent choice: she could play the piano at home while taking care of her husband and children. It would bring pleasure to her family and herself. Her becoming a professional was only discussed once, and dismissed immediately. Professional musicians had to practice eight hours a day, and then they had to travel. They could not have a normal life.

  Cat met Hall Wheeling at a party. She was a Senior in college. He was different from the other men who wanted her; his ambition burned so brightly it was like sexuality. He radiated sparks. When he spoke to her of what he would become, the great things he would do, she felt her throat close as if she were going to cry—his life would be a wonder. He was working in New York, so they had weekend dates. She married him gratefully a week after she graduated. She was a virgin. Eleven months later she was a mother.