Constance

by Patrick Mcgrath

  He let this pass. I grew bored. I was getting nowhere. I could see he wasn’t on my side.

  —Oh, let’s not talk about it, I said. What’s up with you?

  He told me The Conservative Heart was still unfinished. He was rewriting it again. He showed perseverance, at least. He wasn’t going to give up. He’d put too much time into it already. But why he thought that another year would solve his problems was a mystery to me. I knew this much about it, that he’d taken for his text those lines from Wordsworth: Sweet is the lore which nature brings; / Our meddling intellect / Misshapes the beauteous forms of things; / We murder to dissect.

  I agreed with the sentiment, how could you not? But Sidney didn’t, and this was the problem. He was working against the idea. Thinking murders nothing, he said. So why was he having so much trouble finishing the bloody thing, as he now referred to it?

  But I wasn’t in the mood for Sidney’s knotty vexations. He sat turning the salt cellar in his fingers.

  —Let’s just get back to this business of yours, he said.

  —Why?

  I didn’t like it. I’d told him I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. It was making me anxious now. My memories of my childhood were a mess. I’d barely slept since it happened. What was the point? It was bad for me. When my emotional equilibrium is disturbed my skin shows a kind of reddish bruising around the eyes. Sidney told me once I was an occluded young woman, but that in the purely physical aspect of my being I was transparent. He said he hated to see these blemishes on my face.

  —I can imagine how confused you are.

  I knew he’d do this to me. Was he deliberately trying to make it worse? I got up and stood at the sink with my back to him.

  —Don’t you think we should talk about it? he said.

  No. I did not. I felt like a block of crystal. One more tap of his hammer and I’d shatter into a thousand pieces. He then said I was in crisis and that I ignored it at my peril.

  —If you won’t talk to me, he said, I think you should see someone.

  I fled. I locked myself in the bathroom and sat on the side of the tub with my hands on my knees and my head down. He’d started a voice going in my head and I’d been doing so well. He thought I was going mad. Why else did he want to take me to a psychiatrist? After a while I got control of my breathing. I washed my face in cold water and brushed my hair. I went back to the kitchen. He was clearing up the dinner things. I’d made him angry. He was like Daddy that way: If I defied him over the smallest thing I was a bad girl, willful and obstructive.

  —It’s a suggestion, he said. Think about it, Constance, that’s all.

  Then he told me he was my husband. I think it was supposed to remind me of my place in the order of things. Clearly a lowly place. I nodded. I was holding on for dear life. He’d almost undone me. Didn’t he understand, I said, that that’s what I wasn’t going to do? I wasn’t going to think about it and I was going to try never to talk about it again, and whatever he was thinking, I said, whatever chains of reasoning were unspooling in that big murdering intellect of his—I didn’t want to know.

  So he opened his hands, a gesture of submission.

  —We’ll leave it for now, he said. Here, give me a hug.

  It had to be done. I stood there like a statue in marble while he put his arms around me. He rubbed his cheek against my hair. He kissed the places where my skin was red. Getting no response he stepped back.

  —Constance, I’m your husband, he said again. Please remember that.

  I wasn’t a happy woman in the morning but what I’d most feared was that he’d insist on telling me about my real father, I mean this faceless man who’d committed suicide before I was even born. There were times, later, when I embraced that faceless man so comprehensively I felt him to be a living presence in the apartment. But right then I didn’t want to know. I wasn’t even interested in why I didn’t want to know. I think I felt that it wasn’t for Sidney or Iris or Daddy to tell me what I had to deal with.

  For some days this remained my attitude. When I touched the wound the pain flared anew. I didn’t seek out company: Instead after work I wandered the galleries of the Met. I liked the ancient Egyptians. Their artifacts and sarcophagi aroused in me a mood of unthinking tranquility and, more important, a silence that could last for hours. I felt that Daddy had turned my mind into a crypt. In it he’d buried the truth about my father. Now the crypt had been opened but the truth hadn’t set me free, the reverse.

  Then one night when I was alone in the apartment I made an important discovery. I found I could begin to confront the one piece of information Iris had given me about my father.

  I was taking a bath. There was a drop of blood in the water and it set off a string of associations. I got out of the tub. I sat at the kitchen table in my bathrobe smoking a cigarette. I had a towel wrapped around my head like a turban and I was sitting very still. I was absorbed by an idea that until that moment I’d suppressed, the idea, I mean, of a man in such anguish that suicide was the only way out. I began to feel pity for him. Then it seemed I’d never felt such pity for anybody ever in my life before.

  Then I stopped. It was enough. I hadn’t lost control. I hadn’t been overwhelmed. Instead I’d made a first step but toward what I couldn’t yet say. But I was no longer so frightened. I was in possession of a piece of my true history, this is what it felt like. I resolved to go on at my own halting pace until I’d reclaimed the whole. I thought that then I might be whole. Meanwhile I’d carry with me this fragile ghost, the shadowy outline of my father. Soon I heard what I imagined to be his voice and felt then that he was becoming mine, where before he’d belonged to Daddy and Sidney and the rest.

  Life was a little easier after that. This ghost of mine, I couldn’t call him a memory, didn’t provoke grief but instead a sort of tenderness. When Sidney got back from Atlantic City he said he recognized a change in my mood. I knew that he knew more than I did about my father but it wasn’t his knowledge I wanted. I didn’t want to know what Daddy had told him. It would have gotten skewed in Daddy’s telling. Daddy hated my father. So I didn’t take Sidney into my confidence, not yet. Instead I continued to hold my father like a sort of egg inside myself. I was afraid that if I talked about him some contained essence would evaporate in the air and leave me again bereft and with nobody to talk to. All this had to be concealed from Sidney, of course. He said I’d had a nervous shock, that was how he described it. I told him again that what upset me was the deception, Iris’s more than Daddy’s because Iris I’d trusted.

  He backed off for a while. One night I asked him if he knew how my father died. Daddy thought I wasn’t strong enough to hear the truth. I was sure Sidney was asking himself the same question, I could see him thinking it. They were right: I wasn’t strong enough, but he told me anyway because I asked him to. Sidney didn’t believe in shielding people from the truth.

  —He fell under a train.

  —Oh no. Oh Christ.

  I hadn’t expected this. I don’t know what I’d expected but not this. It was a bad shock. I felt sick. Silently we sat there. I didn’t leave the room because I had to show him I was strong enough. I wasn’t having it, this assumption of my weakness. They didn’t assume Iris was weak. He said the driver of the locomotive didn’t see him but he felt the impact.

  —You want a drink?

  I nodded. He made me a drink.

  —It was suicide, wasn’t it?

  —I think so.

  A thousand questions were swarming in my brain but the one I still avoided asking was, Who was he?

  —Do you know where he’s buried?

  —He was cremated.

  —There’s no grave.

  —No.

  —Was he a handsome man?

  —Yes, he was.

  Of course he had no way of knowing this. He had no way of knowing any of it for sure, but he did know what I wanted to hear and he thought it couldn’t do any harm.

  —Sidney, was he a cri
minal?

  —No.

  A long silence here. Then at last I asked the only question that really mattered.

  —What was his name?

  Here it got complicated.

  Later that night I woke up. I was angry with Daddy again. I started to cry. Sidney hadn’t been asleep. He took me in his arms and held me until it passed. He didn’t know what hit him: Where did those words come from, who said them? It was starting to torment me. I’d heard them spoken after Harriet’s funeral. They’d made me sick and I felt sick now. What did it mean that a stray phrase associated with a secret from which I’d been excluded provoked nausea? I turned on the lamp beside the bed. He asked me what was wrong and I said it was time. He had to tell me.

  We went to the kitchen. We sat at the table. I was in my silk bathrobe and my hair was loose. He later told me that the redness around my eyes made me look like a child who’d been crying and rubbed too hard at the tears she’d shed.

  —Mildred Knapp has never once spoken to me about her husband, I said.

  —Now you know why.

  I became distracted. I was thinking about Harriet’s predicament, stuck in that big house miles from anywhere, Daddy at the clinic or out on house calls all hours of the day and night, a cruel situation to put any woman in. So she’d found some comfort with Walter Knapp, and who could blame her? It was Daddy’s fault. It’s always the man’s fault. He’d neglected her, just as he’d neglected me. I tried to remember if Mildred had ever mentioned our connection. Had she ever tried to see Walter in me? No. Mildred Knapp never even looked at me. I was surprised how calm I felt. I thought: I’m not Constance Schuyler Klein, I’m Knapp. I asked Sidney where he’d died. If there was no grave, if I couldn’t visit his grave, I could at least visit the place where it happened. But Sidney didn’t know. He said it was near Ravenswood but not on the property.

  I was alone in the apartment one evening. I was again thinking about my father. Until I knew where he died he remained somehow adrift in space and time, and not at peace. Nobody cared about him. No one cherished his memory, no flowers were left, no words spoken. I heard someone knocking. Who shows up unannounced at ten at night? A wild idea flickered to life in my mind. I went to the door but I didn’t open it.

  —Who is it?

  Silence. But someone or something was outside the door. There’d been a knocking. I’d heard it distinctly. With racing heart I asked again, louder this time. I am not a superstitious woman, but there are more things in heaven and earth—

  —Who’s there?

  I am a superstitious woman—

  —Your sister.

  Relief. Disappointment. She knocked again. I feared what would happen if I let her in. I wasn’t strong. I’d be overwhelmed. She knocked a third time.

  —Iris, go away. Just fuck off, please.

  —Let me in for a minute.

  I was once her mother. I didn’t have it in me. I waited for a few seconds more, then I opened the door an inch or two. I saw her as though for the first time. She was showing the ill effects of sustained drinking. Her eyes were watery, her cheeks were puffy. I was still angry with her but before I could stop her she’d pushed her way in and taken hold of my face, her fingers spread across my cheeks and her thumbs pressed into my jaw. We stood there in the doorway and I smelled the liquor on her breath. We were both tall women, tall, angry women. She slapped me on the cheek and walked into the sitting room and threw herself down on the chesterfield.

  —So why didn’t you call me?

  —Iris, you have to make this right between us. I’m not going to.

  She didn’t hear me. She sprang up and crossed the room to the drinks table. Her hair was in copious disarray. She was wearing a man’s tweed jacket and blue jeans, also those stupid cowboy boots. She asked me where the master was.

  —Atlantic City.

  —Wanna get stinko?

  I knew what was happening. She was making it right between us. This was how she went about it. A normal explanation or even an apology was out of the question. Fortunately for her I didn’t want to discuss it either. An hour later the talk was starting to get loose. Iris was sitting on the floor with her back against an armchair, rolling a cigarette. She wanted to know if I thought she should move to Vermont. It was a dumb idea. I told her she had to go to medical school. I asked her if she’d talked to Daddy about it.

  —No.

  —But that’s why you went up there.

  —I think he knows anyway. But listen, something’s happened.

  She lit her ragged cigarette then busied herself picking tobacco off her tongue. What was the matter with this family, I thought. Why were they incapable of telling me the truth?

  —I think he’s had a stroke.

  She’d noticed it the morning after I left. He’d slept later than usual and when he came downstairs his speech was slurred. After a few hours it cleared up.

  —What else?

  —Tremor in the fingers of his left hand. That cleared up too. You know he hardly drinks at all now.

  —So what does it mean?

  —It might be dementia, first signs. It might be nothing.

  Mildred Knapp was going to let her know if anything else occurred. I was skeptical. I thought it was a play for sympathy on Iris’s part. Get me worried about the old man, I might forget I hated him. She’d always had his interest at heart, not mine. Then I thought: Did I cause that stroke? I didn’t ask her. I wasn’t going to confide in her. But she’d read my mind. She told me I was killing him.

  —Don’t be absurd, I said.

  —Just come up with me for a night.

  —Why?

  —Clear the air.

  —It’s too soon.

  —Then when?

  —I don’t know. Never.

  —I’m going up for the weekend.

  —I’m glad, Iris.

  —So if you change your mind—

  She was at the table, freshening her drink. I was afraid she was going to start talking about Eddie Castrol. I dreaded another maudlin session with her telling me how her love was like a tree. She sat down on the floor again, spilling whiskey on the rug. That night in the fall when I’d gone to the hotel by myself Eddie had told me about his daughter, and I’d seen a different man, I’d seen a father. I’d told him I was surprised Iris hadn’t mentioned that he had a daughter. He said he’d never told her, but he thought I’d understand. I did understand. None of this could I say to Iris, of course. Fortunately she wasn’t finished with Daddy yet and I was spared a dirge. A little later she decided she loved me after all. She lifted high her glass and I poured her more scotch. I wanted her drunk. I wanted no more tricky questions and no soggy rambling.

  —To life.

  —Yeah.

  She left soon after that and I gave her the cab fare to get downtown. I went back into the sitting room. I was still preoccupied with the glimpse I’d had, when she’d first knocked on the door, of the visitor I’d imagined waiting out there in the hallway.

  She called me from upstate two days later. I asked her what was wrong. There was nothing wrong, she said, she just wanted to hear my voice. I stood at the window in my office as the rain came streaming down. The skyscrapers all around me were lost in mist. Their lights were mere bleary smudges in a kind of damp gauze and I felt that I was high in the mountains of that dreamy German painting, Sidney would know the artist. I let her tell me what she was doing. Not much, it was clear. She was bored. There was snow on the ground. Daddy’s tremor had returned but not the slur. Mildred said he’d forgotten her name a few days earlier. I thought of how he’d made us stay in a cold house at Christmas. That was part of it, an early sign. And him telling me he wasn’t my father, that was another.

  —He talks about you all the time, she said.

  —Oh sure.

  She knew not to labor the point. If Daddy was in pain I felt no obligation to give him comfort. She did, but she loved him. Anyway she was a better woman than I. She was a more messy woma
n than I, with her drinking and her men and her feckless abandonment of a career in medicine, but she had a big heart and I didn’t. It matters. Iris didn’t have to make an effort at sympathy or warmth or generosity, it came naturally. It takes courage to stay receptive like that. It’s much easier to sour. All the world’s a sour. But now at least I knew who my father was.

  I’d become obsessed with this one question. I wanted to know where he’d died. It was so I could let him rest in peace. I’d had the idea he was knocking on my door the night Iris came. He wasn’t there, of course, I wasn’t mad yet, but what the idea represented, what it meant, was that I had to let him in. I owed him more than I’d yet admitted, out of fear of being overwhelmed. I talked to Sidney again. I asked him why he fell under a train. We were in the kitchen. It was again late at night, it seemed the proper time to talk about these things. I remember being aware of the ticking clock above the stove, the apartment otherwise silent. I heard the hum of the refrigerator, and outside, a city bus starting up. I felt as though we were the only two people awake in all of Manhattan.

  —Shame.

  But what was he ashamed of? Sidney was evasive. He was like a lawyer now. He said that Daddy could no longer give reliable testimony about the past.

  —I think he accused him of something, he said at last.

  He reached across the table for my hand. I didn’t want to be touched. I just wanted to know what happened.

  —He said he attacked your mother.

  I pushed my chair back and went to the window. I spoke without turning around.

  —Sexually?

  —Yes.

  I didn’t believe it. This was Daddy’s doing. I asked Sidney if he thought Daddy was telling the truth.

  —Do you? he said.

  I turned to face him. I was furious suddenly. I remember I stood glaring at him, leaning forward a little, with my arms folded tight across my chest. There couldn’t be any doubt about it. It was an ugly, contemptible lie. I saw no reason to think Harriet was coerced, nor would I accept that I was a child of rape, if that’s what he was telling me. After a while I came back to the table.