Families and Survivors Read online

  “Now, Maudie,” says her father, who has been eating as he talked, “your mother says to try.”

  “No!” She bursts into tears.

  Which is what Louisa would like to do. Instead she says furiously, “In that case you leave the table! You go to your room!”

  For several minutes the two adults (are they that?) sit trapped in the sounds of their daughter’s diminishing sobs.

  Then Michael says, “I’ll finish the meat loaf,” and he helps himself.

  Louisa lights a cigarette.

  Is Michael an appalling person, whom Louisa should rightfully despise? No, and as yet she does not despise him, nor has she any idea of the crippling extent of her own misery, the devastating depression she is in (and that he is in). She doesn’t dare think about it because (she is sure) there is no way out.

  They have no money. Both are children of rich and successful fathers who fear that indulgence will “spoil” them, those two wounded and literally spoiled offspring. (This is the one area of agreement between Jack Calloway and Saul Wasserman.) Sometimes a parental check will come, which immediately goes for either bills or a blowout, an expensive and often unenjoyed restaurant meal—“But we haven’t been out for so long.” They say of themselves that they are broke (it sounds better); the truth is that they are poor.

  Or, if not poor, they are economically lower middle class, and they suffer some of the injustices and indignities of that group. Since they did not have enough cash (around a hundred dollars) for a refrigerator, they had to buy one on time—thus, with interest, paying around two hundred. And, having discovered the forbidden delights of time payments, they are also buying a vacuum cleaner and a sewing machine. The garbage collector stops their account, and they have to take their own big rusty cans to the dump. Their lack of money is a constant presence, a weight on their spirits.

  Louisa is terrified of her own despair. Michael is afraid of his parents. He married Louisa, having mistaken hysteria for strength; she would protect him. But now he is afraid of her, too, and she is no protection at all. His professors are horrendous and irrational giants, to be laboriously placated. With Mrs. Cornwallis, the local enemy, he is apologetic, which increases Louisa’s panic.

  The evening now looms ahead of them.

  “I have a sort of stomach ache,” Louisa says. “I think I’ll lie down for a while.”

  “Okay. I have to work.”

  “I’ll clear up later.”

  “I’ll check on Maude,” he says.

  And so with small promises they separate.

  In their bedroom Louisa lies across the bed. She hears Michael reading to Maude. (He loves to read aloud.) He reads for a long time, half an hour or so, and then Louisa hears him leave Maude’s room (quietly; she must be asleep, thank God) and go into the bathroom. To avoid the sounds he makes there (he spends hours in the bathroom), she quickly gets up and goes into the kitchen, where inefficiently she does most of the dishes; she is never quite able to finish them all.

  Michael comes into the kitchen. “Honey, can I read you something?”

  Drying her greasy hands on a damp towel, she turns to face him.

  “In effect, the dichotomy between—”

  He goes on, but Louisa has stopped hearing. She is thinking about Andrew: his bare brown feet with strong tendons, long toes with a few black hairs on them. His amused, perked-up thick eyebrows. She thinks: I long to kiss him.

  “So what do you think?” asks Michael.

  “It’s really good. It’s—uh—terse, isn’t it?”

  He likes the word. “Terse. Yes. Very. Not a wasted word. That’s why it takes me so long. But what do you think? Maybe it should be expanded. Maybe even a few dull patches?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  This is as close to communicating as they come, these days.

  Later Louisa will get into bed with a pile of paperback mysteries (limp, thumbed volumes: she forgets and sometimes reads them several times). By the time Michael comes to bed, she will be pretending to be asleep.

  When did they enjoy love together? Louisa can hardly remember, but with an effort she recalls lunches urgently pushed aside in a rush toward bed, in those early married months. In the terrible Boston attic. More recently (and more clearly) she sees herself reaching, touching his warm soft flesh, and she hears his sympathetic voice: “Do you feel very sexy, honey?”

  And the frantic doomed attempts they make. Michael thinks that he is impotent; she thinks that she is frigid. At this stage neither blames the other.

  In fact neither of these intelligent hyper-educated people has any idea of the extent to which they are damaging to each other. Michael is now as afraid of Louisa as he used to be of his parents—she is both parents. No wonder his asthma is worse; no wonder he is impotent.

  Louisa still sees her psychiatrist twice a month. Dr. Chernoff. And sometimes, in moods of strength, she says that she thinks she should leave Michael. They should divorce.

  Chernoff, who is a shy, kindly, and unimaginative man, thinks not. The idea seems to upset him (but of course this is not true; psychiatrists do not become upset). In fact at moments Louisa imagines that Chernoff identifies with Michael, that they are somehow linked—two intelligent and kindly Jewish men against an evil gentile.

  But she does not trust her (accurate) perceptions of Dr. Chernoff, and he is another reason for not leaving Michael.

  A few weeks later (and as though by telepathy), Caroline sends Louisa a pair of black velvet pants, with a note that sounds apologetic.

  Louisa and Michael believe that Caroline is apologizing for a gesture that could be construed as “spoiling.” (“She has identified with your father,” Michael explains. “Incorporated.”) But actually there is a terrible failure of understanding between Caroline and her daughter: the truth is that Caroline, as though with a mysterious foreknowledge of a relatively early death, is obsessively devoting her efforts (involving secret sessions with lawyers) to a trust fund for Louisa, one untouchable by Jack Calloway—who, with some reason, Caroline does not count on for justice. Thus Caroline does not often send money to Louisa, and she feels that she must apologize for presents. (A misunderstanding indeed, and sad: but eventually that trust is one of the things that is to save Louisa.)

  In the meantime, wearing her new pants to a party, getting very drunk, Louisa tells Andrew Chapin that she is in love with him.

  A dance, in fact. One of the graduate students is house-sitting in the expensive fake-adobe of one of the more successful professors (from the Education Department). The host provides the space, and a stack of records (a sentimental fellow; his collection specializes in the forties). Guests bring their own bottles, which is an arrangement that does not work out very well: those who brought “dago red” are seen drinking the “good Scotch” of others—and besides people are getting drunk in uneven, disparate ways.

  Louisa is getting drunk on the Scotch that Andrew brought and pours for her, although she has never liked Scotch. The nostalgic music (Glen Miller, T. Dorsey, Benny Goodman) reminds her of her early adolescence, those Tin Can dances, and Richard (and Kate, and John Jeffreys). Drunkenly she sees it all as beautiful, as golden, and she clings to Andrew as they dance—she is in love!

  They go out onto the patio for air; they walk slowly toward a huge concealing clump of shrubbery. Abruptly they stop—they kiss.

  Their bodies grind together, and their mouths—they grasp and reach. They come apart, and Louisa is first to speak. “Andrew, couldn’t we go somewhere in your car—to get ice—anything?”

  “Louisa, I wouldn’t dare.” He is just sober enough to tell the truth. The notion of extramarital love is as frightening to Andrew as anarchy would be (where would it end?); he is both orderly and ambivalent.

  “But, Andrew, I love you. I have for months—”

  “Now, Lou,” he admonishes her. And he tries to joke: “I don’t want you to hate me in the morning.”

  “I love you!”

&n
bsp; (Love?)

  But as she understands what he has said, and that he meant it, she is overwhelmed by a violent wave of nausea.

  She is wretchedly sick, and hung over the next day. And miserably embarrassed.

  The memory of that evening becomes a source of acute discomfort, mingled with the taste of bile. (“Andrew, I love you—” How could she have said it?)

  For days and weeks after that, she and Andrew avoid each other, he out of a shy inability to tell her that, after all, they are friends (or, better, to tell her he’s changed his mind, to take her to a motel on El Camino Real, on the way up to San Francisco: he gives that a lot of thought). And Louisa avoids him out of shame. So at last they both (incorrectly) assume disapproval on the other’s part.

  Six / 1958

  The scalloped neckline of Louisa’s flowered taffeta dress is coyly designed to half reveal breasts; Louisa fumbles at it, her fingers pleat the gaps. She has come to have lunch with Kate, in Kate’s sprawling Victorian flat on Potrero Hill. Taffeta—at lunch, on Potrero Hill? She must have been crazy (she must be crazy).

  The dress was a present from Mrs. Wasserman, who occasionally goes rushing through Filene’s Basement propelled by some curious grab bag of emotions toward Louisa—possibly guilt, less probably generosity. The result is a large box of clothes: dresses, sweaters, once a coat (but a size 8, not much help, and of course these bargains cannot be returned, even if Louisa dared complain). Louisa writes letters of profuse thanks (her ineradicable Southern training, from Caroline) and she wears the clothes. For all she knows, they are terrific, and becoming to her. So faulty at this time is her own sense of herself that she has no idea what she looks like, much less what she should wear.

  Kate is wearing a blue denim skirt (a wraparound—she is four months pregnant), a pink oxford-cloth shirt, small pink scarf. She looks wonderful; she always does. “Louisa, you’re so dressed up,” she has inevitably said. But added, “Your hair looks marvelous. I love it long.”

  (Her hair?)

  This long-planned and often postponed visit (Louisa and Michael have been living in San Francisco, “The City,” for a couple of years now) is not going terribly well. Kate’s second child, a little girl, is at home with a cold, which makes her cross, and demanding of her mother—so much so that Kate, the affectionate friend, is divided. And this pregnancy is more difficult than the other two: Kate feels queasy a lot of the time, and she worries about the baby (who will be a beautiful blond girl, to be named Louisa).

  Louisa keeps eying the phone. She has to call someone, a man named Dan, to say that she can meet him this afternoon. (Kate will be her excuse.) But Dan drives a cab; he is almost never at home—when should she call? Also it is not entirely certain that he will want to see her. (It never is—she must be crazy.)

  Kate’s flat has a look that Louisa finds striking, and that she cannot at first define, but then it comes to her that the rooms look like Kate herself: Louisa could almost have come in and named this place as Kate’s. Vigorous and forthright colors, dark greens in the living room with a little orange, a lot of white. A bowl of daisies, a vase of dark green leaves. A bedroom of red and pink. (A sexy room: if she had a room like that, for love, would Dan be in love with her? She doubts it.)

  “I have to make a phone call,” Louisa says.

  “It’s right there. How about a Bloody Mary? I think we ought to celebrate. I haven’t seen you forever!”

  “Swell.”

  Dan is not at home.

  The little girl comes into the room sniffling. She is a redhead, like Kate and like her brother Stephen. (“It’s really embarrassing,” Kate has said. “Like those dumb ads about never underestimating a woman’s power, or something.”)

  “Mommy, I want you to read to me.”

  “Darling, I can’t. You see I have company.”

  “But I want you to read!”

  “Darling, I’ve told you, I can’t read right now. Louisa and I are talking.”

  Maude by now would have been screaming, and Louisa watches with interest for what will happen next.

  The small girl scowls and goes off toward her room. And Kate says, “Honestly, don’t you sometimes wonder about being a mother? Why did we do it?” And she laughs.

  Louisa senses that she is seeing something that in her experience is quite new. Whereas Grace Magowan always seems an “ideal mother” (and thus more than a little unreal), Kate comes across as simply honest: a mother who is uncertain about motherhood, and who (remarkably, for that pious period, the Eisenhower years) can say so.

  But all this is only half-consciously perceived. Louisa is really thinking about Dan. Will he be at home? Will he want to see her?

  Then—banging and pounding on the door, yelling “Mom!”—Stephen (whom Louisa has not seen before) arrives home. A big and sturdy five-year-old, who looks remarkably like Kate. He gazes coolly at Louisa, then says, “Hey, Mom, what’s for lunch?”

  (Stephen has one of those faces that change very little over the years: much later, at a party given by her daughter Maude, Louisa is to see Stephen—Stephen with Jennifer Magowan—and to know instantly who he is.)

  Kate goes into the kitchen to feed her children, and Louisa tries Dan again. “Well, I’d counted on doing some work this afternoon,” he tells her. He is writing a novel; he will not let her see anything that he has written, but it is important that she respect his effort.

  “Well, okay.”

  “Christ,” Dan says. “If you could just get out sometimes at night! I’m so tired of this married-woman shit.”

  So is she, as she cannot say. She says instead, “I’ll try, I’ll think of something.”

  “Okay, kid. See you later.”

  Kate puts both her children down for naps, and then in the yellow kitchen she serves lunch to Louisa (a delicious shrimp curry).

  “I always remember that marvelous chicken you made when I came to see you down on the Peninsula,” Kate says, smiling.

  Louisa can barely remember that evening; it is a discolored blur, among other blurs.

  “Do you still see those people?” asks Kate. “Andrew something and his wife?”

  Louisa makes an effort at recall. “Oh, the Chapins. Well, not really. Not since we moved up here.”

  “He called me once,” Kate says. “It was strange.”

  And she tells Louisa.

  Andrew called Kate, and reminded her of their meeting; he said that he had an appointment in town, and would she have lunch with him? (“Well, David had been away for so long, and I was so lonely that I would have had lunch with almost anyone.”)

  Andrew seemed excited, and much more animated than Kate remembered. He talked a lot about writing, about wanting to write, and preparing himself for that. All the novels in his mind. (“I had a terrible feeling that they would stay right there, inside his head.”) A pleasant lunch, really, at a good French restaurant. Nothing untoward, nothing that could be construed as a pass (except the fact of the lunch itself, which was a pass, of course).

  At the end Andrew thanked her for coming, and asked if they could meet again, and Kate said, well, perhaps not.

  “I was really scared,” Kate now tells Louisa. “I knew that I was very attracted to him, and I hadn’t seen David for so long. If he’d really made a pass—I wonder. And later I thought about it; suppose we had gone to a motel and made love, would that have been so terrible? I mean if no one knew?”

  Louisa murmurs something indistinct.

  “He’s very attractive. He reminded me a little of John.”

  “John?”

  “John Jeffreys. Louisa, really.” Kate muses, “But John was more definite, and God knows less serious, really. That fucking Southern charm. I don’t think Andrew even knew what he wanted. And he kept talking about his children. Such a father!”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “I don’t see John as a father, somehow, do you? He’d manage to get out of it.”

  “I suppose.”

  For ev
ery reason this story, this conversation, has made Louisa very uncomfortable: it reminds her humiliatingly of Andrew (“Andrew, I love you,” and then the taste of bile). Also how can she talk about making love? (It is a phrase that she does not use, not yet in her life: Michael has always talked about fucking, and that is what they do. Dan sometimes says, “Okay, kid, care to screw?”) And how can she discuss the possibilities of unfaithfulness?

  But for a wild moment she imagines telling Kate about Dan, how awful he is, how he doesn’t love her at all. How terrible she feels, how worried about Maude. How she flinches from Michael’s slightest touch.

  She is too far gone, too sick (colitis was nothing to this depth of hopeless malaise) to realize that this would be a possible conversation; she is with a permanently affectionate friend. Who possibly could help.

  Instead she begins to feel irritable with Kate, at what seems such a simple, pleasant, and unquestioning life.

  And in a mean way she describes the visit to Michael. (The put-down of others is one of their few remaining sorts of conversation.)

  “Well, Kate’s become so ordinary. Another mother. I’m sure she hasn’t opened a book for years. I don’t know—she used to have a lot going, even a kind of originality. Or maybe I just thought so.”

  They smile at each other, momentarily united in their superiority to Kate and her boring life.

  Dan leaves town, and Louisa finds a man who likes her even less than he did: a beautiful bisexual black man, a painter, named King.

  “Can’t you see that I despise you? To me you’re an ugly white cunt, with no tits. Christ! I’m used to beauties.”

  Thus is Louisa addressed by King on a day near her thirtieth birthday, a time that she feels to be the bottom of her life. (She is right.)

  They are in King’s apartment, a series of low dingy rooms, a basement. “Of course,” he says. “I would have to live in a basement. Where else, outside of the Fillmore district?” King’s color is golden bronze. In exchange for his room he does janatorial chores in the building, which he loathes.