Another You

by Ann Beattie

  I think he had some mistaken notion of punishing me for not doing what he wanted. The closer she and I became, the more he tried to drive a wedge between us. He gave us a book called Generation of Vipers, which caused a scandal in its time—a book about “Momism” ruining male children! We couldn’t take such a thing seriously. He doted on Gordon and never wanted Martin out of his sight, yet the book said that siblings were essential because women would dote unhealthily on infants!

  The next child, Marshall, was her child with him: a beautiful boy born in 1944. This time she showed off her pregnancy, friends gave her showers, and only toward the end did she wonder aloud whether she should have allowed Miles to persuade her that three children were not too many. In a magazine I flipped through today in the activity room, I read about a woman who was already a grandmother giving birth to her daughter and son-in-law’s child after having been inseminated with the embryo, begun in a test tube. I mentioned the article when Sonja was visiting, and she said: “Don’t worry. We won’t ask that of you.” Such a sense of humor. She also seems to have come to terms with her inability to have children. “You’re not supposed to say such things, but I think I’m happy to be spared the pain,” she said. I almost agreed with her, automatically, but then I remembered that I had had a child, that it would not be respectful to his memory to state otherwise. Bad enough not to have set the record straight after so many years, but why say I knew just what she meant, why compound the lie? In her eyes, I am another version of her: a childless woman. Whereas, I had a child in 1941, and he died in 1943, walking toward us on the porch in Maine, having gotten out of bed because the noise of the Fourth of July fireworks had frightened him, the fireworks in the distance, lighting up the sky. At first we thought he had tripped. He was walking toward us in the dim light of the porch, carrying a toy he’d brought from bed, and then he went down, with our arms outstretched and Gordon calling his name, he went down, struck by a cerebral aneurysm, a weakness in the brain that might well have been present at birth. From the time he recovered from colic as an infant, he had never been sick, and there he lay, with all of us so stunned that little Gordon was the first to actually reach him. I fell apart, seizing Gordon, in my panic, as if he’d done something wrong, refusing to acknowledge my child lay on the floor. Apparently, after riding with him in the ambulance to the hospital—I am told Alice jumped in with me, and wouldn’t budge—apparently, after insisting to the doctor that what had happened was because of something I had done, while Alice insisted otherwise, I blacked out, and when I came to, I said nothing for two days. Before I did speak I apparently hiccupped nonstop, while the doctors discussed further sedation and Alice begged them not to do it. The next thing I knew, I was out of the hospital, in their bedroom. For some reason, they had put me in their room, as if I were a frightened child who could be soothed by being taken into the adults’ bed, and when I awoke I had the terrifying, confused sense that a war had begun; that the house had been hit by a bomb, which would account for the darkness, for the sheets tangled on the floor, the discarded clothes, and for Alice’s body, dead in the chair. She was asleep. Not a sound in the house, and not a sound I could bring forth. I kept working backward, fixating on the war, trying to remember when the war had begun. December 1941, a voice said inside my head. Then I skipped ahead to the porch, to the fireworks, the bright explosions in the sky. I saw Martin walking toward us in slow motion, not a gun in his hand, but a toy tiger, the tiger on the ground, Martin dead—actually dead—beside it.

  We lived, all of us, in a trance. I would look down and expect to see him, take a nap in the rocking chair and awaken to feel a pressure on my thighs as if a small child had just sat there, and got up to go elsewhere. Certain colors reminded me of toys he had loved; the color yellow saddened me because he had slept in yellow pajamas. I became convinced Martin’s death was punishment for our sins. They tried to reason with me. If it would make me feel better to declare that the child had been his and mine, Alice said, she would understand completely. It was making her miserable, the way people rushed first to comfort her before turning to Miles or to me—she, who was least important. Miles became angry, telling her to stop dwelling on what he called “biology.” Did he not want the secret told, or did he—quite probably, he did—think that the child’s parentage was hardly an important issue, we had all loved him so much? It did not seem that any of us would ever be happy again. We could not even sit on the back porch. We turned inward, became cross with one another, went to bed ourselves as soon as Gordon was tucked in. And do you know what saved us? I thought of it when Sonja visited, bringing little presents with her. We were saved, looking back, by butter. In his blundering but insistent way, Ethan Bedell arrived at the house with a bottle of French cognac, which, when uncorked, smelled to Alice and to me like nausea itself, and with a large crock of butter. Bread and butter had become such a delicious treat, because we almost always used our red stamps for meat. But there was Ethan, with a large quantity of butter and the promise of an almost endless supply. Eating our buttered bread, we began to cheer up. That tells you how desperate we were.

  Marshall was born in 1944. Alice said to me—prefacing it by saying that although she was about to overstep her bounds, she still had to tell me what she was thinking—that she hoped it was not lost on me, the fact that quite soon after Gordon’s birth, Miles had gotten me pregnant with Martin, and now, so soon after Martin’s death, she had given birth to Marshall. Next he would want me to have another child, and then he would turn to her again. It was the beginning of her becoming unbalanced. I remember also, that she read, that summer, a book by Wilkie Collins called The Woman In White, and that she imagined that her finding it on a bookshelf was no coincidence, and she became profoundly depressed at the actions of the dastardly Sir Percival Glyde. Miles gave away the book, and also The Moonstone, by the same author. He even got rid of books by Charles Dickens—as if that would protect us from any further misery! I think he did not get her help as soon as he might have because she had also had mood swings after the birth of Gordon—that, and naturally he did not want to think about the serious implications of her behavior. I can remember him telling me, quite sincerely, it seemed, that paranoia was in the air, and he later reminded me that he had seen this trend long before others did. When later the nation got caught up in the Communist scare, he saw Nixon’s persecution of Hiss for what it was, deplored the irrational witch-hunt, became angry at a zoologist he had known years before for publishing a book called Our Plundered Planet, about the alleged dangers of DDT. He thought there was much unfounded paranoia in America, the paranoia of certain fame seekers who knew how to capture the media’s attention, so that their mass paranoia had seeped into sane minds, polluting them.

  Actually, he was the one who never recovered. She and I adapted, had our highs and lows, but he became entrenched in his ideas. Americans became worse than fools for believing stories about microfilm hidden in pumpkins—why, next they would believe that the stork would be scared off from delivering babies by people prowling through pumpkin patches. In 1941, when I first went to Maine, he was already raving about Thomas Hart Benton’s having said he hated museums, which Miles saw as a subversive plot to keep people away from culture. He later became furious at the appearance of Abstract Expressionism, saying that now there was a Communist plot, if people had to have their Communist plots: Pollock was only a madman, according to him; his so-called action painting a farce he meant to put over on credulous critics, while pandering to the lowest common denominator of Americans’ credibility by dripping paint on enormous canvasses and claiming that what Miles called “skunk sprayings” were works of art, important personal statements controlled by unconscious forces.

  For a while, though, things went along. Marshall was born, and he was a joy to us. Things went along until Alice became too incapacitated to really function, and then he did what men think to do: he took her on a trip to New York, and when he sensed that hadn’t done the trick, he hedg
ed his bets by contacting the doctor she and I had seen, briefly, after Martin’s death, yet he also kept her in New York, far enough away that the doctor could not do her any good, which to him meant any harm, and where I also could not exert any influence. I could shame her into stopping drinking, and he knew it. But he enjoyed it himself. Didn’t want to be told it was harmful. He thought he could re-create the past simply by cutting her off from the present, but she was too smart for that. Still, she must have felt very vulnerable, very uncertain about her own capabilities, if she let him convince her for so long that she should be apart from her children. It wasn’t until she was actually hospitalized that any of my letters to her got through. She wrote back and said she’d heard nothing while they lived for that long time in the hotel. Who would prosper, when they were upset, by living out of a suitcase, being dragged to business dinners, kept away from their children and from everything that provided them with stability? It was wartime. The entire nation was upset to begin with. He had always been so overbearing, but through time he also became smooth. As he aged, people began to think him a charming, if slightly out-of-touch, gentleman of the old school, which of course implied he was an upstanding fellow. It was no different from the way he had first appeared to me, clasping my hand meaningfully and then kissing me discreetly on the cheek, so as not to frighten me. He seduced me sexually, and he proceeded to seduce anyone else he wanted, in any area in which he wanted to seduce them, whether it be for business or for pleasure. Amelia, for example, was a gratuitous seduction. Did he think I’d be flattered he wanted me so much more? Did he think he’d take her to bed and buy her silence? Amelia and I sat together in Dr. St. Vance’s office, during that long time he kept himself and Alice exiled from Maine, and I heard what she had to say. I had guessed there was something between them, just as Alice intuited he still slept with me from time to time, of course. What he hadn’t counted on was how much Alice meant to him. How much his own wife meant. Because when she faltered, when Amelia couldn’t reason with her, when my obvious devotion couldn’t quell her anxiety, he started to realize he had quite a problem on his hands, and that it was a problem none of us would be likely to want to help with: his further subjugation of his wife. She was the one he was reluctant to let go of: not his little children; not his secret affairs on the side. That she had become capable of doing the things he did almost killed him. A woman, having an affair! Drinking! For a long time, he refused to see it. I think he thought that if he could make their world anonymous enough, she would change her behavior, cling to him. So he set up housekeeping in the Waldorf Hotel, exiled both of them from their familiar world that he realized, too late, had caused her such pain, and tried to pretend a different context would allow them to begin a different life. I think he wanted us to vanish: for the boys to disappear; for me to return to Montreal. I did go there, briefly, though I understood he did not really approve of my leaving. My father had had surgery, and my mother seemed disproportionately upset. How strange that the sight of me was not so much soothing in its own right, but that he was reassured I was prospering. That was what he saw, in spite of the fact that my hair had grown long and straggly, I had lost weight, I was at wit’s end, really. Yet when my father looked at me he saw only the prosperous child he had sent to New England. He wanted to see the pictures of the children I carried in my wallet. He showed me their Christmas card, as if Miles’s signature, alone, ensured that all was well. My mother would hardly meet my eyes: she offered me her prettiest dresses, in spite of my description of rural Maine; when I hinted that Miles and Alice had been gone much too long, she equivocated, suggesting that she and I could not understand the complexities of business. I stayed three days. I felt too guilty about leaving Amelia, who knew nothing about children, alone to care for Gordon and Marshall. I think I also feared she might stay. Her staying would validate the desperate circumstances, I felt. On the plane, I actually thought about accepting Ethan Bedell’s proposal of marriage—not because of any feelings toward him, but because … God—there was a time when I cared deeply what people thought. I had internalized my guilt so much that I wanted no one to have anything objective to latch onto with which to criticize any of us: Wouldn’t they be astonished by two women raising children, as opposed to a woman and a man? Now I read about lesbian communities, festivals celebrating modern-day witches, single parents, businesses owned exclusively by women. Then, I would have felt like Hester Prynne. I would have felt entirely conspicuous, and certain that people’s eyes would have followed me wherever I went. Curious, when I think back on it: that I would have gone to a party at the Cocoanut Grove, where everyone would have known I was not merely an au pair, yet nothing would have convinced me I could live alone, or with the help of another woman, in raising Miles and Alice’s children. The simple difference, in my mind, was that if Miles was there at my side, whatever he said would get us through, but anything I did alone, or with Amelia, would be a transparent masquerade that would inevitably disgrace me.

  “Mail call!” Patty the nurse always says, when she pokes her head in the door and has a catalog for me, or a postcard from Sonja of some pretty scene she knows I’ll enjoy seeing. Or in the days when Ethan was still able to write. I said to her that it was as if one snow-flake made her herald a snowstorm! I shouldn’t have, because she, herself, seems cheered when she has mail to deliver. So different from years ago, when I didn’t know what to hope for: more lies, about Alice’s progress, letters announcing his or their imminent arrival, or an empty mailbox, no boot tracks leading to it, no false promises inside, flap closed, like a trap empty of animals. They can be quite beautiful, if you come upon them in the snow: a trap transformed into some harmless igloo, pleasantly insulated by whiteness. You forget what it might contain—what terrible pain. What bad luck. The other day a young woman, a new person, a social worker, came to see what she could do to “facilitate my adjustment,” as she put it. Is one supposed to adjust to loneliness, to old age? I found the question quite stupefying. Well: if it had been years ago, she could have helped by being Amelia, and she could have stood her ground, and stayed in spite of my protests; if the social worker had been Ethan she might have construed my puzzled silence as wavering—a sign she might insinuate herself with me. If she had been Madame Sosos, a woman who was as oddly charismatic as she was lunatic, she might have flattered me and then played poker for my soul with the doctors. I think about that, sometimes. Ethan not knowing what to do, sending his fortune-teller into Alice’s hospital with instructions to look at her palm and predict a long and happy life. She must have been so happy to see any outsider that she wanted to believe what she heard: a full recovery; good health; a quick return to her loved ones. Apparently, the doctor in charge was willing to buy Ethan’s lie that Alice had consulted Madame Sosos for years. Alice was responding so poorly, and indeed she did manage to cheer her: she knew her devoted husband’s name; where she lived; where she’d grown up. Madame Sosos’s mistake was to name only two children, Gordon and Marshall, which devastated Alice because then she was certain that Martin did not even live in the spirit world. Before leaving, Madame Sosos was lured into a game of poker by some of the doctors—who could imagine how or why?—and won every game she played. They never let her in again. The second time she went there she had a special message from Martin, but she couldn’t get into the hospital. Miles had made an enormous fuss. The doctors who’d been beaten at poker pronounced her a charlatan. Alice would never have heard from her again if Madame Sosos hadn’t been clever enough to have flowers delivered, with the gift card saying she’d been contacted by Martin, who was fine, and who sent invisible kisses on each pink petal of the roses. She said she touched them to her lips—not so crazy she believed it true, but liking the idea of holding soft, fragrant rose petals to her lips. After her shock treatments her lips were always parched. Long after she got out of the hospital, she kept jars of Vaseline around the house which she’d dip into to moisten her lips. All day, we would sip tea.

&n
bsp; That was what we were doing, sitting and sipping tea, Marshall with his paperdolls, Gordon with his book of fairy tales, with the stories printed on the left side of the book and the right-hand page to draw on. He would draw pictures that were improvisations on what he’d read, drawing mountains when there were no mountains in the story, or drawing the world underwater, though he didn’t even have a snorkel mask. To my knowledge there were no such things for children in those days. He would read the fairy tales and leave the pages empty most of the time, but sometimes, to amuse his brother, he’d demonstrate his skill with drawing, and then we’d see some of the fairy-tale figures in imaginary landscapes, along with a fox, say, that simply hadn’t appeared in the story, or an enormous tarpon he’d decided to put on land, underneath the castle under which Rapunzel had let down her hair. He was always adding to the fairy tales, not just illustrating what he’d read, and Alice and I would be so fascinated: What was that crow, sitting on the bonnet of the wolf in “Little Red Riding Hood,” or the snake peeking out of the shoe in “Cinderella”? They were very original drawings, quite well done, but Miles didn’t like them; he always wanted Gordon to stick to the facts, and he took it personally, as if all those stories he’d read aloud so many times had been misunderstood by his son, or as if the boy must have been bored, if he felt the need to add to what was there. This reaction, if you can imagine, from the same person who so admired Magritte. Fine if a train was rushing out of a fireplace, or if an apple floated in front of a man’s face, but let his son draw a bird sitting on a wolf’s bonnet and he was absolutely at a loss to understand what such a thing could mean. I think it’s possible he saw Alice as unbalanced, and he greatly feared it might also be true of his children. At any rate, that day in the kitchen, where he’d come to sit with us as she was knitting and I was making a list of things we needed to buy to make raisin pudding, he saw the book open on the table and he picked it up and started flipping through, asking us questions about what Gordon had intended, as if we had any idea. Alice said that perhaps Gordon actually was illustrating the characters he read about, but they were in a different form; she thought it possible that he might be including creatures that existed in their reincarnated forms. Alice had come to believe in reincarnation. If only she could have lived to hear authorities on dying: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, for example. Well: Miles didn’t want to hear about religion, so he certainly didn’t put any stock in reincarnation. She was needling him by mentioning it. He’d come into the kitchen and we both could tell the call he’d just hung up from had upset him—business was his deity—and poor thing, she had nothing but vague reports from the doctors, she was no fool, she knew the news was bad, knew more than I did, certainly, because I never believed she was so terribly ill, I thought it was just taking time for her to mend, and what use was he, coming into the kitchen, where we sat peacefully, suddenly starting an argument about his son’s very nice illustrations in a book? Now I think I should not have been so unrealistic as to believe that any surgery simply cured the problem, but he was so insistent that this was so: he claimed to be stating the doctors’ certainty, too. She had been through so much—who could believe there was anything worse in store for her? We were having tea when he pulled up a chair, sat backward in it—which was always a sign he was going to start in on some serious topic—and he said to her, “Tell me that you do not have delusions of an afterlife.” Imagine: she was terminally ill, and he was intent upon disabusing her of the notion there would be an afterlife. I wonder what would have happened if the whole subject could have been turned aside. If we hadn’t taken everything he said so seriously. Sonja tells me the expression “Get a life” is popular now. I wonder: what if one of us had had the nerve to tell him to get a life, if we’d gone on with what we were doing. But she was having none of it that night. She looked so frail in her white nightgown. So haggard. And yet, she had already forgiven so much. She said: “I won’t come back as a person, Miles. I’ll come back as an animal.” She fingered Gordon’s drawing of the fox. “You can marry Evie,” she said, “and I can be your cat. Or your dog. I could be a bird, in a birdcage you could put over there, in the corner. It could be like the secrets we keep now, but then everyone would be thinking how sad that I’m dead, not just sorry you had such a crazy wife. Wouldn’t that be fun, with only you two knowing the cat was really me? I could bring a dead mouse to your doorstep. Or come back as a dog that’s rolled in carrion. I could enact what you really think of me. If I come back as a bird, be sure he clips my wings, Evie. Have it be the same way it’s been in this life.” We were astonished, of course. I understood, though I’m sure he did not, that she was imitating the manner of Madame Sosos. Ethan had insisted I meet her and I’d agreed, intending to put my foot down if she was too obviously crazy and would be sure to upset Alice. He’d driven to Maine with Madame Sosos. The boys were out of the house, which I thought was better. I expected someone in a turban, with a crystal ball. Instead, she had on the prettiest sterling-silver earrings from Georg Jensen. I’d seen them in a magazine, and I recognized them immediately. She had on those earrings, and a little rouge and lipstick, and all she wanted to talk about was how far away Maine was from New York. The car trip had really tired her, and of course she must have been slightly hostile: she was going to see Alice, at the hospital in Connecticut, so why did she first have to see the woman who took care of Alice’s children? We had tea together, while Ethan very kindly fixed a shelf that had fallen in the basement. She’d examined the palm of my hand, lit incense, and found meaning revealed in the rising twines of smoke. There Alice sat, some time later, doing a perfect imitation of the dreamy voice of Madame Sosos, whom Ethan had sent to see her, after all, not Miles, though I don’t blame her for being angry she was condescended to. I think I let out a little laugh—a sound, anyway—but Miles was too astonished to react for quite a while, so we were both shocked when he swept his hand across the tabletop, knocking everything to the floor, our tea, the saltcellar, the book, the ashtray. It made me sure, in that moment, I didn’t want to ever be married to anyone. I was thinking that I was so glad I wasn’t married, I was so glad I was not a person who might say such things, or another person who might react as he just had. I’d witnessed too many such scenes between married people. That was what I thought, sitting there with the smell of ashes in my nose, my ankles wet from toppled teacups. It had started to rain. Gordon stood in the kitchen doorway, having rushed from the living room to see what had happened. He looked confused, then stricken. The book was upside down in a puddle. He rushed to pick it up, but Miles got there first, opened the book, and shook it at Gordon, demanding that Gordon explain the made-up animals. Gordon was speechless. Miles was not a violent man. Even Miles recovered himself the instant he saw the expression on his son’s face. Miles blotted the book with his sweater. Apologized for his outburst. Held out the book to Gordon with one hand and held out the other hand hoping Gordon would put his hand in his, forgive him. But nothing was explicit, and Gordon simply turned and walked out of the room. Marshall had run upstairs. Gordon was very protective of his brother, and he was probably setting out to talk to Marshall, but Alice got up and called him, asked him to come back. She went up and got Marshall. He was too heavy for her to carry, but she did anyway. I put my hand on Gordon’s shoulder and guided him into the living room, hating Miles. Hating him, but at the same time sorry that Gordon had not taken his hand. I knew what that emptiness felt like: it was as if emptiness had weight, and texture. There had been so many times I’d looked down, thinking I felt Martin’s little hand in mine again, only to see nothing. The air. Yet my fingers tingled. My palm was warm. It was as if he’d clasped my hand and vaporized, leaving his bodily warmth. Of course, I never, ever, would have mentioned this to either of them. Her most recent hospitalization had been a terrible time for everyone. We were not up to such a scene as had just exploded. He had tears in his eyes. Things from the tabletop were strewn everywhere. Miles bowed his head and said he was going out. Out in t
he rain? It was a storm: thunder; lightning. I wanted to take his hand myself, not so much for his sake, but out of sympathy for all of us. Instead, I got the umbrella from the stand and handed it to him, and that was what he used to sweep away everything else in his path on his way to the door, pushing Marshall’s paperdolls off the table, breaking a vase, scattering paper. It was the baby she thought of constantly, he said. She lived in the past, cared only for the baby, who was she kidding by talking about the future, when she was fixated on the past?