Constance

by Patrick Mcgrath

  —What about Howard?

  —He’ll go to my mother’s.

  I thought of Queenie Mulcahy with her cigarettes and her gin, and her phlegmy cough, and her endless stories about her life as a showgirl—

  —He could stay with us, I said.

  —What about Constance?

  Barb summoned for this question a spark of friendly malice.

  —She’d like to get to know him, I said.

  —That’s not what I heard.

  She gazed at me with lifted eyebrows and the ghost of a smile. For a second she was her old self. How do women know these things about one another? I told her it was time Constance and Howard met. Barb shouldn’t worry. It would all be fine.

  —Your funeral, she said.

  She wasn’t the type to try to protect her boy from life’s complications. She knew, too, what sort of a boy he was, nothing if not self-sufficient. So I called him in from the yard.

  We were to meet Iris and the doctor off the train at Penn Station. Tarpaulins hung like great dirty curtains obscuring the high spaces of the roof from view. We picked our way through heaps of planks and scaffolding. There was dust in the air and the place was raucous with shouting men and jackhammers. Constance was tense. She could barely speak to me. Her anxiety about the wedding was aggravated by the prospect of her father’s arrival. She’d spent the previous night in my apartment. She’d paced the floor, twisting her hands together as I sat reading. I understood how difficult this was for her. She was a high-strung immature young woman about to take a large step into the unknown with a man she’d known for less than a year. Also, her father, that stern and bitter man, whom she felt she’d always disappointed, would be watching her. She stopped pacing and stared at me.

  —Aren’t you frantic? she cried.

  I had her sit on my lap and I put my arms around her. She clung to me like a child.

  —No.

  —But why not?

  How was I to tell her that my impulse to protect and nourish her was as vital for my own welfare as it was for hers? I didn’t think she could understand this yet. My love was grounded as much in moral conviction as it was in affection and desire, but she didn’t know me very well. She didn’t know what she had in me. She was very young. I asked her to trust me.

  —I don’t think I can, she whispered.

  It was starting to get dark outside but we didn’t turn the lamps on. I put my book down. She sat on the floor beside the chesterfield, and as the shadows gathered around us she reached up and slipped her hand in mine. We sat in silence. She gripped my hand tight. She grew calm at last. I wanted her to feel that she’d never be exposed to danger again, not as long as I was there. I couldn’t explain what I was afraid of, but I feared for her, and that was why I was marrying her. If I didn’t do this I felt I had no business being around her. I didn’t know what more I could offer her.

  I saw the doctor before she did. Two figures emerged from the rear of the train and paused for a few seconds on the platform, engaged in what looked like a quarrel. The girl was about twenty, the man much older. It could only be them. Then they were advancing upon us, and when the girl saw Constance–she was Iris, of course–she dropped her suitcase and ran toward us with her arms spread wide, shouting. Constance, laughing and blushing, was crushed to the body of her sister, and it was for me to step forward and greet the father.

  —Doctor Schuyler. Sidney Klein, I said.

  He was a tall man, as tall as I, and he looked me up and down as we gravely shook hands. I was impressed with his gravitas. A man of the old school, I thought, salt of the American earth. It takes a couple of centuries to make one of these. What did he make of me? I had money, yes, and I had tenure, but I was an Englishman and he wouldn’t know if I was to be trusted. High above us pigeons fluttered in the iron trelliswork and the locomotive released a prolonged hiss. On the platform the last of the passengers streamed around us, leaving the sisters clinging together, and myself with the father. Stranded between us was the suitcase Iris had abandoned in the middle of the platform.

  —You’d better call me Morgan, he said.

  —Sidney, I said.

  That night we dined together in a steakhouse on Lexington Avenue. It was a noisy, steamy place, all bustle and meaty smells: I thought the doctor would like it. I was aware of the momentous nature of the occasion and I think he was too. He was a reserved man in his late sixties, spare, deliberate, and quietly amusing, particularly in response to the more extravagant claims of Iris, who was excited to be in New York and in particular in this large room full of loud talk and quick-witted waiters with whom she bantered happily. She was a college senior, majoring in biology at a school upstate, but unmistakably the same grinning, gap-toothed girl I’d seen in Constance’s photograph. I kept an eye on the sisters but I reserved my close attention for the father. Constance wanted me to believe that his antagonism toward her had made her the unhappy woman she was, but having now met the man I didn’t buy it. He was gruff, but he was a man of the old school. They’re supposed to be gruff. But he was also tender, and he was watchful. When Iris let out a shriek that had other diners turning in our direction, he laid a finger briefly on her wrist and she grew quiet at once. When the waiter approached to refill her glass, not for the first time, Dr. Schuyler caught the man’s eye and silently voiced the word no. I saw this, and he saw me seeing it, and we exchanged not so much a smile as a mutual glance of amused understanding.

  —Daddy, will you please tell Constance that a virus is a germ?

  —Constance, your sister believes that a virus is a germ.

  —Yes, but what sort of a germ? She doesn’t know!

  —Of course I know!

  Then, in a low voice, pleading: Daddy, I’d like another glass of wine.

  —I know you would, but you won’t get it.

  I watched Constance at times react to Iris like a mother, with impatient shakes of the head and a lifting of her eyes to the ceiling. At other times she was drawn into the girl’s restless stream of talk. When Iris amused her she’d lean forward with her jaw falling in disbelief.

  —Iris, you can’t say that!

  —I just did.

  Daddy might or might not adjudicate the matter. Halfway through the meal I realized I was no closer to answering the question that concerned me: how Constance got to be so helpless and at times so very numb. I no longer believed her father was a cruel man, or that he’d done her irreparable harm. I’d seen nothing to support that idea. It occurred to me that Iris might in her carelessness have done her a more subtle injury although I couldn’t imagine what it might be. Constance told me once that her sister wanted her to die, but every younger sibling feels that way. She said her father wanted her dead too. It occurred to me that one day she’d think the same of me.

  While I watched them, they watched me. The doctor’s manner toward me was affable but undemonstrative. I’d passed some kind of a test–I wasn’t an out-and-out cad–and he was in no hurry to force the acquaintance. Time would serve us in that regard. I was of course much older than Constance, and this counted in my favor. As for Iris, she was eager to see some display of prowess from the man about to marry her sister.

  —So Sidney, how smart are you, scale of one to ten?

  Elbows planted on the table, leaning in, gazing at me with bright-eyed, vinous warmth, clearly she’d been told by Constance that I was a brainy chap.

  —Twelve.

  —You have to say that but I’m serious. How would you fix the problems of New York?

  —No, Iris, don’t do this to him, said Constance.

  —How long have I got? I said.

  —Iris is eager to be mugged, said the doctor. We could put her down in an alley on the way back to the hotel.

  —I’m not afraid of New York, she cried. When I live here I’ll never be mugged!

  This bravura statement provoked various reactions all at once. I asked her how she’d achieve invulnerability where so many before her had tried
and failed. For it was becoming apparent that nobody was safe here anymore.

  —Sidney, she said, laying a hand on my arm, trust me.

  When the meal ended and we rose to our feet, that section of the tablecloth controlled by Iris resembled the sort of blighted neighborhood she was confident she could survive in. It was a mess of salt, crusts of bread, ash, spilled coffee, burned-out tenement buildings and broken government. She moved at once to her father’s side and slipped her arm in his.

  —I’ll take this old man home, she said. Constance can have the other one.

  —You’re such a child, said Constance.

  When I kissed Iris good night, she murmured in my ear.

  —Sidney, with Constance it’s important to wind her up regularly, otherwise she runs down.

  As I hailed a cab I thought it a not unperceptive remark. But a woman isn’t a clock! A clock can’t decide what time it is, its movements are determined by its mechanism. And I asked myself, not for the first time, if the same could be said of Constance, and was that what Iris meant?

  We were all subdued in the morning when we met outside City Hall. It was a clear, cool day. City Hall is a fine old public building in the classical manner. It has a white portico with pillars. Inside, there’s a rotunda with a grand marble staircase. Abraham Lincoln lay in state there. As did Ulysses S. Grant. In the park over which City Hall presides stands the statue of one of my heroes, Nathan Hale. He was hanged by the British early in the War of Independence. On the gallows he said he regretted having but one life to give for his country. He was a foolish boy but he certainly showed courage at the end, but when I told Constance the story she yawned. She said she’d heard it already.

  We were shown into a large waiting room to join the other prospective brides and grooms and their families. It was as richly diverse a cross section of the city’s grand mosaic as you could hope to see. We sat on hard benches until we were called in to go before the judge. Constance clung to me, and not for the first time I felt a whisper of anxiety. She was a mystery to me, this pale serious girl, she was opaque, oblique—what was I thinking of? Iris was watching me. She knew what I was thinking of. Grinning that toothy grin of hers, she made a small private solidarity gesture with her fist, and from that moment I loved her like a brother.

  When it was all over we walked to the old Italian restaurant on Chambers Street. My mother had arrived from Long Island earlier that morning. She was dressed all in black for reasons nobody understood. She’d acquired many eccentricities over the course of her long widowhood. It was oddly wonderful to see the doctor, in his dark suit, himself a reserved and formal man, loom over my equally reserved and formal mother and bend to shake her tiny hand. At the restaurant Iris succeeded in doing what she’d been prevented from doing the previous night, she made a fool of herself, not being accustomed to champagne. I had to take her outside and help her throw up in a parking lot.

  Later that evening Constance was depressed. She said Daddy had once told her she shouldn’t have any illusions about New York. He said she’d last a few months in the city, a year at most, and then come home to Ravenswood and look after him. But she’d made her way in publishing and found a husband. She was now Mrs. Klein. But she couldn’t help comparing herself to the other Mrs. Klein, the diminutive black-veiled widow, my mother. She said she felt like a variation on a theme: my mother at an early stage of development, like a chrysalis, a little black widow in the making.

  —For god’s sake, I said, it’s our wedding night.

  —I’m sorry. It’s how I feel.

  Chapter 4

  Constance was unfamiliar with the old prewar apartments of the Upper West Side. Mine, though dark, was large. After we were married I watched her drift through my rooms, nervous and hesitant, glancing into shadowy corners as though they concealed malevolent intruders. She told me she was easily spooked. She also felt that at any moment she’d be unmasked as a trespasser and evicted. She said that after her mother died she hadn’t felt at home in her father’s house either. I did what I could to make her feel welcome. I told her that the apartment was her home now. I wanted her to get used to her new surroundings in her own time, as you would a cat. Eventually I realized that her reluctance to settle masked a persisting unease not with the apartment but with me. Of course the only man she’d lived with before me was her father. One day she told me she was still mystified as to why I’d chosen her. I remember I gazed at her fondly. I told her she’d looked so helpless at that book party I knew I had to do something about it.

  —Do you know how many predators there are in this town? I said.

  She was faintly displeased.

  —You make me feel like a gazelle.

  —You are a gazelle.

  There was more than a grain of truth in this, and when I’d convinced her I was joking it briefly became a game we played in the bedroom. She was the graceful leaping antelope, I was the greedy lion. She couldn’t escape me, and our tussles were vigorous. Then one night, as we lay panting in tangled bed sheets, she sat up and told me that because I was the one she woke up with in the morning, and the one she went to bed with at night, it was true, she couldn’t escape me, ever.

  —Not ever, Sidney! she cried.

  Then she delivered the bad news.

  —I don’t think it’s working.

  —What isn’t working?

  —The marriage.

  I stayed calm. I’d anticipated this. It was taking longer than it should have to get her established in my home but I believed it would all come good given enough time.

  —Sweetheart, why not?

  —I think I’ve made a mistake.

  I asked her quietly what the mistake was. We’d moved to the kitchen for this conversation. She’d made herself a pot of tea. Her answer was unsatisfactory. She spoke slowly, as though reciting a lesson learned in class. I remembered her once claiming to have read Freud. Now she told me she understood why she’d agreed to marry me. Her father never gave her what she needed, she said, and she’d always felt it was her fault.

  I understood the argument. She’d lost her mother at a time when a girl most needs a mother, and was then given charge of her younger sister. Daddy hadn’t been supportive. He was more often absent than present. He’d actively discouraged her from moving to New York. When he saw that he couldn’t stop her he told her she wouldn’t succeed. He was overly critical and he made her feel worthless. But unlike most of the population of New York City she wouldn’t see a psychiatrist. She said she already knew what was wrong with her. So how was she going to get better? She’d get better, she said, when Daddy wasn’t in the picture anymore.

  —You’re waiting for your father to die?

  —He can’t go on forever.

  Constance and I have been over this material in depth and in detail. At the time I said to her that her anger toward her father was childish. It was too easy to blame the father. Everyone blamed the father. It was lazy liberal thinking, I told her. I didn’t see him as a monster, I said. He and I got along fine. I liked the man.

  But Constance was indifferent to my opinion. Instead she said that from the moment she’d met me she’d wanted me for her father, so that she could start over. So that she could make good, by which she meant repair whatever it was she’d got wrong with Daddy. She said it was a repetition compulsion complex.

  She peered at me anxiously. My first reaction was one of amused disbelief, but I showed her nothing of this. Instead I nodded as though I took the idea seriously.

  —A repetition compulsion complex?

  But she was never at her best in theoretical discussion. She didn’t have that kind of a mind. What kind of a mind she did have, this I hadn’t yet discovered.

  —Yes.

  —And it means the marriage won’t work?

  —Please don’t look at me like that. I can’t be your wife! I can’t be anyone’s wife!

  —Why not?

  —I don’t know!

  —You want me to exp
lain it to you?

  She regarded me with suspicion. I remembered Iris’s remark: It’s important to wind her up regularly, otherwise she runs down. She was run-down now. She had to be run-down to tell me I was her father. She sat there in her bathrobe, her hair tousled, her skin very clear, her lips moving just a little as though in silent colloquy with some unseen being. She was bewildered by the turn the conversation had taken. I was warm, gentle, solicitous.

  —Constance, honey, I’m not your father.

  —I know that—

  —I’m not your father. I’m your husband. Your father abandoned you emotionally because he was grieving. It’s not so unusual. But I’m not him. I’ve made a commitment to you and I won’t let you down.

  —You let Barb down.

  —All the more reason.

  —You let Howard down.

  Fortunately she knew nothing about my first wife, about whom the less said the better. But as long as she wanted to hurt me I felt I had something to work with. It was indifference I dreaded, and I knew she was capable of it.

  —Why won’t you let me introduce you to Howard? I said.

  —He already has a mother. Don’t change the subject. You treat me like I’m one of your students. Have you got any cigarettes?

  By this time she was pacing the floor. It was early October and still warm outside. The window was open and the mayhem on the street was getting started, a few random screams, a burst of manic laughter. There was a pack of cigarettes on top of the refrigerator, Ed Kaplan had left them. I gave her one and threw the rest in the trash.

  —I try not to treat you like a student but if I do it’s only because I want to teach you what I know. There was a time you liked that.

  —I’ve been educated already.

  I may have made a brief display of the mildest skepticism, some tiny reflex of an eyebrow, perhaps. But she saw it. She stopped pacing and glared at me. Her eyes filled with tears. I was on my feet at once, then she was trembling in my arms. Then she pushed me away.

  —I won’t back down! she screamed. You like students who argue with you and then back down but I won’t!