Glory sidestepped him and moved closer to Edgar. “I’ve got a stash in my bra. Oh, wait, no bra. Guess it must be somewhere else.” She winked.
“You shouldn’t drink. It’s bad for the soul,” the man said.
“Men could stand to be reinvented. Men are due for an update,” she said. “But you seem okay,” she told Edgar. “I like you.” She looked him over—he was all sinew and blue eyes, his day in the sun made obvious by the color in his cheeks.
“Thank you,” he said. She made him feel small in a way that he liked.
“Don’t worry. I’m married too.” Glory pointed out her husband who was sitting in the corner wearing a button-down shirt with a big collar, high-waist brown pants and loafers and smoking a long, thin cigarette. He looked like someone trying to sell something for less than it was worth. She half loved him for it. He was real, at least. Dumbish, and no way would he be there when a revolution swept them all away, but honest and fair. He was probably talking about human evolution, which was one of the topics Glory had approved for social situations. That and political corruption in southerly nations, or food. He was not allowed to discuss anything about Glory or her family, his family. Their wedding was unmentionable. Everyone knew that they were husband and wife and that this had been a decision made by other people and that Glory tolerated while John waited at the gates of her broad and lush paradise. It was obvious, to look at them.
At 11:00 p.m., drunk and stoned, Glory said, “Do you want to get some air?” and Edgar took Glory out to his sports car, which was either a brave or disgusting car for someone who had just claimed to believe in socialism. Glory admired the pale blond leather seats and the wooden gearshift.
“You’ve never had an affair, have you?” she said.
He said, “I’m sorry. I should go home.”
She leaned over and kissed him well, like it was enough, not a short and irritating detour on the way to the good part. Edgar had never kissed someone he did not love.
He pulled his head back and closed his eyes.
Glory looked out the window at the party. Everyone inside was enjoying the trap they had set for themselves. They were in the process of making the exact mistakes they had hoped for. Edgar saw John’s leg in the window, in the same chair he’d been in all night. There were people near him. Smoke swirled around him. “I worry about him like a mother,” Glory said. “I always hope he’s gotten enough to eat and made friends.”
“My wife—” Edgar started, but she interrupted him.
“I shouldn’t have brought up spouses again. Let’s not.” She reached out to his thigh. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” she said, teasing him.
“I’m feeling very confused right now.”
Then a knock, and Glory and Edgar looked out his side to see who it was. A woman with long pale hair that looked like it had been carefully matted and a headband. “Are you leaving? I can’t find a place to park.” It was too dark to see the woman’s face, but Glory knew the voice immediately because it was her mother’s. Her mother, double-parked in her comfortable luxury station wagon and clothes a few years out of date that even Glory was too old to wear. She looked like she was in a play. “Mother,” Glory said. “Mother, mother, mother? You can’t be here.” Glory’s mother edged away. The outfit was worse than Glory could have imagined: her midriff was exposed (and very perfect, which made it all the worse) and her skirt was a mere strip of denim. She had silver anklets and no shoes on, and hers were the scrubbed and painted feet of a princess.
Glory’s mother recognized her daughter at the same instant and, without trying to defend her right to stay or offer an excuse, she began to run. She passed her own car, the lights still on and the door open, and she ran. Glory ran after her and Edgar ran after Glory. They rounded a corner, sprinted the straightaway. Glory’s mother was surprisingly fast. She took another turn down a dirt road and Glory let her go. She watched her little mother whip away like a rabbit and Glory collapsed onto someone’s lawn and Edgar fell beside her. They panted. They started to laugh. They had each hated their parents but had forgotten the surprising pleasure of being embarrassed by them. It made Glory feel young. Like they were living on the inside and the grownups were on the outside, and she half wanted to thank her mother.
“This is already better than other affairs,” Glory said.
Edgar thought of Fern in their bed with their children nearby. She would be reading a book and checking her watch. She would be waiting to talk about a future that had been suddenly upended. Maybe she would tell him that she was willing to give it all up, the houses and the cars and the comfort. Or maybe she was waiting to thank him for being the man he had always tried to keep from becoming. He felt like an impossibility—how could he do what was needed and continue to exist as himself? To Fern, Edgar silently said, “I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m almost completely yours,” and he leaned over and kissed Glory. She kissed him back, reached up and tried to take his glasses off.
“No,” he said, grabbing them. “I’m too blind.”
“Four eyes,” she teased, but he did not give in. He only took his glasses off to sleep. He felt unmoored enough without being sightless too.
Eventually, they walked back. Edgar pulled his car out and Glory parked her mother’s and turned it off. She put the keys under the seat and left it unlocked and then she got into his passenger seat and said, “I’m taking you home. I’m taking you home and I might not ever let you leave.” Later, he would look back at the unraveling and see that this instant was the point of departure. Edgar decided: once. And just like that, he set his life aside. He set his husband-self, his father-self, his son-self, aside. He was all body, all sensation. His heart was a flapping wing. He was simultaneously jealous of himself for what he was about to do and scattershot with regret. They drove a mile to her house, grey shingles and a big porch, a thousand paperbacks on the shelves. The bedroom looked out at the windward side of the island where waves battered and crashed.
As Glory undressed him, Edgar felt like he had a new body. He appreciated her hip bones and shoulders because he was a man with good taste and these were beautiful prizes, but the stronger drug was the version of himself he was meeting. This woman had never in her whole life, in the history of everything she knew, run her hand up this chest. He was the entire westward migration, the whole untrodden prairie, the shaggy peaks, the snow, and the cold sloshing Pacific on the other end.
Glory knew what he was feeling because she had felt it before. She also knew it never lasted. Everyone became familiar. There was no time, pretty soon, to bother kissing the ankles, the knots of blooded veins underneath the wrist. It was neck, ears, lips. Even lovers got tired. They had families. They had nothing to wear for the big fundraiser. They had a million things to do before school started and husbands or wives to lie to and love, and the empty mouth of nighttime.
When they were done, Glory put two cigarettes in her mouth and lit them, handed one over. “Where do you live?” she asked.
“Cambridge.”
“No shit. Me too. Then we can do this again sometime.”
A beat of terror in Edgar’s pulse. This woman would not vanish into the summertime haze.
“How do you deal with the guilt?” Edgar asked. His heart was pumping it out all through his system. Fern, his heart seemed to say, Fern, Fern.
“Eh. I make it worth his while.”
John came home later and slept on the couch without bothering to knock on the bedroom door first.
Edgar drove back to his summer family in the dawn, the twin highs of sex and grass wearing off together. A doe leapt out of the blackberry brush and stood in the middle of the road, looking at Edgar. Still as a photograph. She watched him, her eyes reflecting the headlights. It was too late for Edgar to go unseen, to slide back in without a mark.
He told his drowsing wife he loved her and it was tru
e. Things were blooming outside that had not been blooming a week ago and other things died on the branch that had been luscious. Edgar grabbed Fern hard around her waist. She was his wife; their pleasures, their troubles, belonged to both of them. Edgar wanted to implicate her.
Fern lost her nightgown easily. Edgar was a hot wind and everything loose was swept up. Fern bent. She felt as if she was just meeting this man, that she was in bed with a foreigner. She pulled her head up like a person coming out of the water. “Edgar?” she asked, looking for magnetic north.
“It’s me,” he said. “Who else?” He glanced around the bed, because he’d felt it too, a new presence.
“No,” she told him. “No one else. I got confused. Where were you all night?” she asked.
“Just a party.”
“What party? I’m sorry that I called your mother. I’m sorry we need money to survive.” But her eyes were not sorry. Her eyes said, Time to grow up now. Time to earn and support.
Edgar suddenly felt hungry, very hungry. “Do we have any blueberries? I could make pancakes.” Edgar was putting on his pants. He did not have time for a shirt. “Let’s squeeze orange juice,” he said. “I’m in the mood for fresh.” The sun came over the hill and sent a razor of light into the room.
“I don’t think we have oranges.”
“We don’t?” As if this made no sense.
“It’s not one of the things I buy.”
“The only thing you don’t buy,” he scoffed. All around them was the evidence of her material desire: the fat headboard of the bed, holding her up; the rug from a faraway, sandy nation carried by camel and freighter; the pale butter-colored sofa with thin, modern arms that Fern had had made for this particular spot, to fit the dimensions of the stained glass above it; the stained glass itself, three deer in tall green grass, their long necks bent towards sleep. The modern house, all glass and view, and outside, grass and water.
“Don’t pretend you don’t care about any of this,” she said.
Edgar ignored her and went into the kitchen and assembled the ingredients, began to measure and pour, a mess accumulating quickly around him.
The children woke up to the sound, stood in the doorframe, their father in a sunlit stream filled with flour dust and their mother watching him with narrow eyes, as if he had arrived without invitation. Edgar said, “Pancakes!” and the twins were gleeful, but Cricket saw how angry her parents were, felt the treacherous space between their two poles and refused to enter the room or eat the breakfast. She sensed that something big had been upset.
—
They packed up a day early and the children cried all the way home, flat furious to be taken away. The ferry ride back to the mainland was pain itself, their beings and their bodies pulled in opposite directions. “Promise that someday we’ll stay on the Vineyard all year,” the twins pleaded to their parents. “We’ll go to the one-room schoolhouse and we’ll swim even when it’s too cold to swim.” Why didn’t they? Fern wondered. There was no good reason not to, except that their house was made of wood and glass and they would have frozen by December. Edgar thought of the house, the sea, the island and the fact that he only got to love the place because he could afford to. If he became Keating Steel, they could come every summer of their lives and their children’s children would grow up with the same saltsmell in their rooms as they fell asleep, the same blackberry stains on their fingers, the same memorized feeling of utter peace after having jumped into the cove and stayed under as long as their lungs would allow. And if he did not become Keating Steel? Edgar could not imagine selling the house, not only because it would have been devastating (to think of telling the children made his throat cinch) but because it seemed impossible—the place was not real estate but body part, heart part, something beyond ownership.
“Someday,” Edgar said. How long before the magic of a quiet winter island in an uninsulated house wore off? The first snow? What absurd indulgence, he suddenly realized, to build a beautiful house that was only habitable half the year. If they walked away from the money, sold their Cambridge colonial and all their things and retreated to the island, this house would make them immensely happy from May to October and then spend six months trying to kill them. Love, Edgar thought, good old love.
“Someday,” Fern repeated. The same seagulls the children had fed from the ferry happily in June now seemed predatory. The children closed their cracker boxes tight. “Shoo!” they said, flinging their arms.
1965
EDGAR’S FATHER, Hugh Keating, had always stood in his office in front of big windows high above the fog-sketched city of Chicago, knowing that in every building were rods of steel with his name etched on the side, the skeleton tattooed with the name of its maker. From that vantage point, from that height, he told the story—to board members, visiting businessmen, friends—of his family’s humble immigrant beginnings, of the new metal city rising out of the ashes of the old wooden one. He thought again: thank goodness for poverty. It’s much easier to be rich when your people were once poor. Sleep too comes easier, the mind peaceful with all that balance: a pile of gold and the counterweight of past hunger. This comfort was earned.
The missus, Mary, had made an intricate study of how to belong. There were such things as lower-class flowers (geraniums, chrysanthemums, poinsettias) and upper-class flowers (rhododendrons, tiger lilies, amaryllis, columbine, clematis and roses, though never red ones). She learned that the slower one drove, the higher his class. Cocktail wise, sweet was always low. Scotch and water (not even soda) was the highest. When they went to parties, she ordered two and then slipped into the ladies’ room to sweeten them with packets of sugar she kept in her handbag. She made sure her husband’s shirts did not gap at the neck—a sure sign of misbelonging. She practiced, with index cards, renaming everything in her home: formalwear, footwear, leisurewear, stormwear, beachwear, neckwear, tableware, flatware, stemware, barware, glassware. Edgar’s mother’s nightmares did not involve being chased or drowned but of someone catching her trying to eat an artichoke with fork and knife, of wearing floor-length to an afternoon affair, of everyone knowing that class for this family was not bred-in but a choice, or worse, a purchase.
—
Mary bore a boy, as hoped, and she gave her husband, seated in a wooden chair at the side of her hospital bed, a short list of names: Edgar, John, Henry. “What about Hugh?” he asked, liking the idea of a tribute to himself.
“Hugh was never King of England.”
“Neither is our son.” The boy squalled like a brief, violent summer storm, then fell asleep.
“There can’t be anything bad about having the name of a monarch,” she said.
“I seem to recall an Alfred,” Hugh said, joking,
“Edgar then,” she told him. “I don’t need your help if you don’t want to give it.”
The idea was to have four children. Either two boys and two girls, or three boys and one girl. A big family was one of the socially acceptable indulgences and it justified a bigger house, more cars, a stable full of horses. Giving anything for one’s children, even if that something was a Thoroughbred chestnut mare that cost as much as a small yacht, was an act of generosity and selflessness. Mary and Hugh both silently looked forward to the purchases they would be able to make in the name of good parenting. Neither of them cared whether the children would actually want horses or sailing lessons in the British Virgin Islands.
During her pregnancy, the veins in Mary’s legs had swelled into thick, raised ropes. Her calves were less pale skin and more twisting strands of blue. The doctor instructed her to keep them elevated above her heart, to massage them with particular oils. She would spend the rest of her seaside summers with a towel over her legs, the rest of her sundress days in thick stockings. Mary had wept over these things. She felt as if she had aged seventy years in the space of nine months, like the growing baby had detonated something poisonous
inside her.
The doctor joined Hugh and Mary in the hospital room. “We’ve named him Edgar,” she announced.
“That’s a fine name,” the doctor said. “Stately and proud. He’ll go on to great things.” This seemed like an official pronouncement and Mary logged it as fact. “May I?” he asked, pulling the blanket down from her lap. Her legs were dark with bruises, the blood gathered in underskin pools. Her veins were high and fat. “I would feel worse about this if you’d just had a daughter,” the doctor started, “but with such a beautiful son to carry on the family name, it’s easier for me to tell you that you can’t have any more. The risk of a blood clot is too great. You could die.”
Edgar was asleep in his bassinet and both of his parents looked at him. Wrinkled little monkey-faced newborn, still looking halfway like a water creature. The ghost of the family they had intended to become, the fleet of them in matching Christmas outfits, matching tennis outfits, matching riding outfits, dwindled to a quiet three. Neither Hugh nor Mary cried while the doctor was still in the room, but for the first months of Edgar’s life, as he slept less and looked around more, as he fattened up and learned to grab things in his dimpled fists, their eyes were red-rimmed and swollen.
—
Edgar had to live the childhoods of all his brothers and sisters who did not exist. He took fencing, tennis, rowing and ballroom dance lessons. He learned to jump horses, sail boats, speak French and Latin, and recognize the architectural features of each great era. At age ten, he was enrolled in a figure drawing class in which he sat with a herd of older women and rendered the slack necks and falling breasts of a variety of models. His mother wanted him to play an instrument but his father vetoed most of the options: violin (too screechy), saxophone (too black), piano (too feminine), flute (homosexual), until he was left with a clarinet, an instrument that none of them could even remember having heard. All through his school years Edgar was busy from seven in the morning until he fell asleep. There was no time for friendships and he found himself talking to peers only while they were all otherwise occupied with something that their parents hoped would make them better, rounder adults.
Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty Page 2
