This weekend, between the World Series and Halloween, I’m alone. Ellen’s in Buffalo for our daughter Annie’s thirty-sixth birthday. Friday, I drove her to Midway, then went downtown to my one-room office on Adams, checked the markets, bought a Kansas City municipal, faxed a letter to our insurance agent, sent copies of our living wills to our granddaughter—old enough now to be in on it; who knows, she might be the one to unplug the tubes—and walked five blocks to the Pub Club for the best hour of the day, lunch at the Round Table on the eleventh floor looking over the silver river and the blue bulge of the State of Illinois Building.
I’ve been a club member 35 years. It’s more important than ever now that I’ve retired. I used to ridicule my Uncle Bert’s New York life, a shuttle between the City Athletic Club and his rooms at the Hotel Warwick across the street. I thought that 25-yard shuttle the icon of his narrowness and ignorance. Now my Chicago life resembles his—I arrive early enough—11:45—to ensure a seat at the Round Table. (It’s gauche to turn up earlier, but if you come as late as 11:50, the table’s full and you take your chances with less congenial company.) The table doesn’t have the best view, but I’ve had enough scenic views in my life. I hunger for the day’s stories, for jokes, for the latest aches, grandkids, market tips, slants on the news.
We usually start with stories in the Wall Street Journal, the Trib, and the New York Times. Mike Royko’s column gets a big play from us. International, national, local news, the latest this or that. We’ve got fellows who follow science, books, and arts—we’re all readers and TV watchers. Mondays we go over the Bears’ game. We cover restaurants, travel—we’re a worldly bunch. We know each other’s form sheet, we have roles: I’m the left-winger; three or four of us are political Neanderthals basically unhappy that Gorbachev changed the old game. Two regulars have been Assistant Secretaries (one of State, one of Commerce) and one of us was on Reagan’s Economic Council; we feel we’re privy to inside dope. Anecdotes about politics in Washington and Chicago are one of our stocks-in-trade.
The talk I prefer is personal. Friday, we talked about fathers: time has cleared mine of wrong, translating his naiveté into honesty, his timidity into modesty. I told how he read the morning Times, so lost in it he flicked cigarette ash into his coffee and drank it without blinking. No one laughed. I described his going down the elevator in his pajamas, forgetting his address in a taxi. I drew another blank: the Round Tablers know what’s around our own corners. We’ve all had operations. Bill Trask’s back curls with osteoporosis, Harlan Schneirman’s lip from last year’s stroke. Death bulletins are a regular, if unstressed, feature of our talk.
Of his father, Harry Binswanger says, “I shcarcely knew him.” Though he’s been in America more than 40 years, German phonemes pass in and out of his speech. Till he retired, he was my dentist, a good one, though Dr. Werner, my dentist since, says my mouth was in poor shape when I came to him. Harry—it used to be Heinz—is large, clumsy, thick-fingered. I felt secure with the heft of his fingers around my jaw, though they may have handicapped the delicacy of his bridge and canal work. I’ve heard something of his history for 25 years, but there’s always more to know. Nor do I mind listening to what’s familiar. (I’d have to leave the Round Table if I did.) Harry’s parents divorced when he was eight. He visited his father in Mainz every Christmas. “Muzzer sent him my presents. He unwrapped zem, showed me vat they vere, zen mailed zem back.”
Harry shook his head, a semaphore of passed anger. “He vass eggcentric, eggcitable, unshtable, couldn’t make a living. Muzzer’s fazzer said she deserfed vat she got, marrying ‘a hergelaufenen Juden,’ ‘a Jew from God knows vere.’ Fazzer had a farm near zuh Neckar Riffer. He bought turkeys; zey drowned; he bought marigolds—he luffed flowers; zuh riffer flooded zem; he bought pigs; zey broke out of zuh penss. Grandpa said, ‘Not even pigs vill stay wiz him.’ He became a portrait photographer, but vass no good wiz children. He vanted a picture uff me on zuh river, crying. I vouldn’t sit on zuh raft. He tied me zere, slapped my face: ‘Now cry.’
“He put his photographs in—vat-do-you-say?—a cabinet wiz a glass front. Vitrine. Tough kids—Nazi toughs—broke it. He said, ‘It’s time to get out.’ He vanted to go to Brazil. He’d been born in Bukovina, the Romanians lost his papers. At zuh emigration office zey said, ‘Für uns, bestehen Sie gar nicht.’ ‘For us, you don’t exist.’ He vass shtuck. Somehow he made it srough zuh war. I saw him after, vonce. He lived in a basement room, zuh rest of zuh block was wrecked. Outside his vindow were a few inches of dirt wiz zree zinnias.”
Driving back home, along the Lake by the Museum of Natural History, it struck me that Harry’s in-and-out German accent was his mind’s way of preserving that hergelaufener father of his, even as his stories turned him into comic relief.
_____________
Ellen called at eight o’clock. “How’re you doing?”
“Fine. I warmed up the chicken. Delicious. How’s Annie?”
She was fine, so were Chuck and little Anne, the Buffalo weather was being its notorious self; the plane was an hour late. “Take care, dear,” she said. “I’ll see you Monday.”
“You’d better.”
Though it was nice to be alone, a hue of freedom I hadn’t noticed that I hadn’t noticed, at the same time, the house felt loose around me, slightly spooky.
In my leather armchair, I read a new book about an escaped prisoner and stopped at a German phrase I didn’t really understand. (The second time today.) “Die Unlesbarkeit dieser Welt.” “The illegibility of this world.” But the German pleased me, and I repeated the words till they felt at home on my tongue. Their author, a poet named Celan, was born—another coincidence—in Romania. His mother was killed in a death camp—the phrase suddenly made sense—and, decades later, he drowned himself in the Seine.
There’s a quiver in my pleasant self-sufficiency; but I am comfortable, I am snug, taken care of. (Because I’ve taken care?) Who knows, maybe Harry’s father, in his basement, looking out at his zinnias, felt the same; having survived what so few had might have been his comfort. Harry himself had been sent to Amsterdam, and, like Anne Frank, hidden. After the war, unlike Anne, he’d gone to a Dutch school. Had I forgotten, or never known, how he’d gotten to America, this man with whom I’d spent five or six hours a week for 25 years, whose hands had been in my mouth, to whom I’d paid thousands of dollars?
_____________
Saturday morning, I drove up to see my son, Peter. He’d moved again, the third time in five years. He gets bored with a neighborhood, seeks what he calls “action.” A large, rangy boy—I shouldn’t say boy, he’s thirty-two—with lots of energy, he’s chosen to be a salesman because he can’t sit still. He sells polyvinyl traffic cones and is on the road three weeks a month. He doesn’t much like the job, or any other he’s had. The routines of money-making, the hierarchy of business authority, the cheerleading and critiques of salesmanship, the ups and downs of sales, go against his grain. And grain he has. As a boy, he was exceptionally gentle; in adolescence, he assumed a roughness which I felt contradicted his nature. He’s still rough, argumentative, sarcastic, but now he mocks the roughness and regards it as a comic scurf he can remove at will. Deep down—whatever this means—is the gentle boy he was at five and six; very lovable.
A year after he graduated from the University of Illinois in Champaign, he married a girl he met in a singles bar; a year later they divorced. He asked his mother and me why we hadn’t stopped him from marrying. “Couldn’t you see it was a mistake?”
His mother said she’d suspected it, but what could she do? I said, “I liked Louise.”
Ten years and many girls later, he’s still unsettled. I ask him, “How long can you go on being Casanova?”
“Envious?”
“A little. Mostly worried. Not just about disease. This is a critical decade of your life. Squander it courting, you’ll end up like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, just where you are.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“I don’t mind, but I think you do.”
His new apartment is on the first floor of a redbrick six-flat on one of the thousand tree-lined, quiet streets which root Chicago in a domestic independence which gets it through bad times better than the other industrial cities around the Lakes, Cleveland, Detroit, Erie.
The front door is open; he’s been watching for me. I follow him into a bright room with an old couch, an armchair, a stack of pictures leaning against the wall, boxes of books and dishes. There’s a stereo, no TV. “I don’t want to get addicted.” His addiction is bars, music, girls, cigarettes. There are four rooms, all in more or less the same tumbled shape, though the kitchen has a built-in orderliness. “Nice,” I say. “It’s light, the rooms are a good size, it’s a pretty street. How much’re you paying, may I ask?”
“Five hundred.”
“I should move down here myself.”
“Too much action for you.”
“Not that I can see. Except for the hurricane that hit your place.”
“Come back in two weeks, it’ll be immaculate. Ready to play?”
_____________
Now and then he consents to play tennis with me. I’ve been playing over half a century, and still get around pretty well. I know where the ball’s coming and get it back. Peter has speed and power, and when he’s playing well, doesn’t give me any points, but I can frustrate him with tenacity and junk shots. Then he starts slamming balls out, or laughs so hard he misses them altogether. Now and then he gets angry—“Hit the goddamn ball”—but rarely, and I enjoy playing with him. Since I had a hernia operation a couple of years ago, the old sweetness of his boyhood comes through, and he’s been easy on me. There’s also some—I suppose classic—resentment. As we drive a few blocks to the public courts on Montrose, he tells me what a lucky life I’ve led. “You retired early, you’ve had a good marriage, you’ve got a granddaughter, and except for that hernia, you haven’t been sick; you still play tennis, you liked your job, you’ve got some dough, you haven’t been hassled—”
“The demographics were in my favor. No baby boom.”
“Right. I’m one of too many.”
“I wasn’t much of a boomer.”
“Two’s more than enough.”
There’s some sibling resentment, though he and Annie are very good friends.
It’s a bit chilly. I keep my windbreaker on, but play well, serve hard, and hit good backhands. I run Peter around the court, which he needs. He sets up the game so he has to chase around. Life cramps him. He spends too much time in cars, writing reports, closed up in his apartment, in bars. On vacations he goes to national parks where he climbs or paddles through white water. A few times he’s gone to the Alps and the Pyrenees. But it’s not enough for him.
Sometimes I feel that I stand in his way, a wordless—usually wordless—rebuke to his life. Then too I was off a lot on sales trips—neckwear, accessories—when he grew up; he missed me and I think he thinks I sacrificed him. The travel seemed more romantic to him than the chore it was. He thinks I’ve seen much more than I have, know much more than I do. I feel that he hardly knows me at all, which I don’t mind. Should fathers and sons know each other? Or love each other? Well, I love him, though there are gaps of cold in all affection. Yet if the love isn’t constant, it is recurrent. That should be enough for security, shouldn’t it?
I win the set, 6-3. A rarity. We play another, and I don’t win a game. I’m delighted. I always either try hard or appear to try hard, but it’s been years since I’ve wanted to do better than Peter at anything. I want him to have what I’ve had and more. Above all, I want him to have—to want to have, and have—a child.
_____________
Back at his place, I clean up in the bathroom, he washes himself at the kitchen sink. He comes into the living room, the towel working over his wet body. I haven’t seen him naked for years, and I’m a little shocked. He’s very hairy, has a bit of a belly. This man, who as a boy looked like an angel, is into middle age. I look away. I don’t want to see him this way. There’s a book open on the beaten couch, I move it and sit down. “What’s this?” I ask. He’s got on his jockey shorts. His legs are enormous, they should be running up and down basketball courts or hills.
“Kafka,” he says.
“Never really read him. Good stuff?”
“Not exactly.” He’s buttoning a blue shirt. “You ought to read that one.”
“‘Ought to’?”
“You’d understand me better.”
“Maybe that’s not a good idea. What’s it about?”
“Read it. Take it home. But return it. I need it for my sessions.”
“Your doctor’s paid to understand you. All I have to do is love you.”
He’s put on blue jeans. “What’s to love?”
“I’d better read it.”
He’s putting on white socks and sneakers. “How do you know it’s me you love if you don’t understand me?”
“That’s too complicated. Do you have to understand me to love me?” As soon as I say this, I feel the discomfort of presumption. Maybe he doesn’t love me. Love’s too big a word anyway. It’s used much too often. Morons in front of microphones hold out their arms to millions they have never met and cry, “I love you.” All they mean is, “How wonderful to be shining up here.” I never talked about love with my wife or children, my parents didn’t with me, and I’m grateful. Love was assumed. A million feelings were bunched up in it.
I’m against all domestic analysis, I’m against understanding. That word also means too much. You understand a request, a situation, but how do you understand a person? You reduce him, that’s how. Do I understand myself? Does Harry Binswanger understand his father? In a way, yes, because he hardly knew him. That is, he turned his father into a little vaudeville act, a comic handle which lets him carry the hot pan around. Why did he remember “For us you don’t exist”? Because of his own fright that his father didn’t exist for him, except as some snapshots of intimidation and pathos. Not enough, he knows it’s not enough. Peter and I have had thousands and thousands of moments with each other, many of them, maybe most of them, charged with something you can call love. But the word itself is just a convenience, a pigeonhole that can’t really hold the complexity of it all.
His blue-shirted arms lie on the seamed, brown arms of the chair; he looks as big as Lincoln in the Memorial. He says, “I’m paying through the nose to find out if I’m capable of loving anyone.”
_____________
That night, back in my armchair, I sat down with the book. Of course I’d heard about it often enough, but I’d never actually read it. And I had to force myself through it, though it’s short, sixty or seventy pages, a story about a salesman, the support of his parents and sister, who wakes up one morning transformed into a huge bug. He can’t go to work, they pound on his door, the chief clerk of the office comes to fetch him. (It’s rather ridiculous.) Naturally he astounds, terrifies, and disgusts his parents and the young sister who for a while takes care of him, bringing him the rancid leftovers he prefers to fresh food. In time he annoys them so much, they want him to die; when he does, they’re released and happy.
Now what in God’s name makes Peter think that this story has anything to do with him? In the kitchen, I open a bottle of red wine, pour a third of it into a water glass, clip and light a cigar, and go back to my chair to think it out.
In the first place, Peter’s never supported us. Au contraire. In the last three years he’s made a point of not taking money from me at Christmas and his birthday, but he knows I’m there, ready to help him. “I helped your sister when she and Chuck bought the house, and I want to help you when you’re ready to buy.” I wouldn’t dream of his sharing, let alone, taking, a check in a restaurant. All right, then, what’s the similarity? Does he feel like a bug? Have his mother and I made him feel like a bug? Does he disgust us? Do we want him dead? Absurd. I sit puffing, sipping. Beyond this lamplit circle, it’s dark. Here, it’s warm, comfortable, charged with the pleasure of the wine, the special, bittersweet fullness of the smoke; yet my heart’s hammering away. Clearly, Peter feels that he’s inadequate, repulsive. What’s askew in this boy of mine?
Or is he putting it on, dramatizing himself, using the author’s own self-dramatics as his crutch? (But Kafka invented these things, and, I think, thought they were funny. There is something funny about it.)
I went to the desk and wrote a note:
Dear Peter,
Your’re no bug, and I hope I’m not a bit like that pompous, cringing, bullying, self-righteous father. I don’t see this story as a key to you. Maybe you can explain it to me. You can do it over the best lunch in Chicago, or in one of your bars. You choose.
Love—if that’s still a permissible word—Dad
I’m on my way upstairs to draw a bath when I wonder what the word actually means. Metamorphosis. I go down again, lift out the heavy—eight pounds, I once weighed it on the bathroom scale—first volume of the compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, for which we joined the Book-of-the-Month-Club about 20 years ago. I polish the big magnifying glass on my pants and read. Change of form, from the Greek.
_____________
Upstairs, as I unbutton my shirt, I feel restless. I need a walk. I button up, put on a sweater, exchange my moccasins for the springy walking shoes Annie gave me last Christmas, and, downstairs, put on the black leather jacket young people on the street or in stores look at in surprised approval. (Sometimes they say something like “Nice.”) I pat my pocket to make sure the key’s there—I don’t want to be stuck outside with Ellen in Buffalo, and I hope she doesn’t call when I’m out, getting the answering machine and worrying that I’m looped around a lamppost on the Outer Drive.
The relief of the air, the dark. There’s moonlight after the early evening shower, the oak tree on the lawn had shed its last leaves, they’re thick on the lawn, a sea of shapes. The branches are transformed by bareness, a pre-death bareness. Lucky, in a great city, to live on a street that registers the seasons so clearly.
The cold air feels so wonderful. The small lights of the small houses, the interrogative iron curl of the lampposts, the pools of moonlight on the metal skin of the cars; beautiful. I don’t want to leave this. After my operation, I was so fatigued I didn’t care about living or dying. Only the idea of leaving Ellen kept me going. Now I understand what I’d laughed at in the obit column this week, the eighty-nine-year-old mogul, William Paley, asking people why he had to die. I know life usually wears you down and you’re ready to go. Not with him. Not with me.
A Trib piece said Paley was a rat, sold out everyone who loved or helped him, took credit for everything; in short, a perfect dead horse for newspaper whips. Is egomania what keeps you alive? Maybe for tycoons. I don’t need an empire. Leaves are enough, the moon, the air.
I walk through the bank parking lot, then left on Dorchester. The maples are half-full of pumpkin-colored leaves. (Are the ones still there the Paleys?) Pumpkins are lit on porches. The confidence in these houses. Chairs, lamps, bookshelves, the purple flare of TV’s.
I’m the only one on the street. No, up ahead, someone’s coming. Should I turn? No. Courage. A black man in a raincoat, eyeglassed; a fellow burgher. We should say “Good evening,” the way they do in small towns, but we don’t. We just pass each other, relieved. I round the brick six-flat on the corner. Back on my block. A couple I know stands on their porch, white man, black woman. I don’t know their names. I wave, she waves.
My block.
_____________
In the bath, my body looks heavy, fattish knees big, dingus floating in soapy foam. God, man is ugly. No wonder people write about metamorphosis. My body. Peter’s. My body forming his, my mind—whatever that is—his. Chromosomes, genes, strings of sugar and protein generating versions of themselves which somehow become others. There’s some of Uncle Bert in me. Is it why I live as he did? Transmission. This floating dingus rose to Ellen’s innards and generated Annie, and later Peter. Annie’s Anne has my stuff in her, and when she signals doctors to turn off my life, she shuts off her own spigot. Thought. Ghosts. Spooks. The world, so clear and snug, isn’t. Metamorphosis. A rational man turns verminous. A rational country declares some citizens verminous and kills them.
I soap arms, armpits, the side where my scar begins, the left leg, the right, the crack, the ankles, the toes. Lovely. The mind lolls. What is a thought? Form without bulk. “For us, you don’t exist.” How could he not exist? He was there. But existence meant a paper, a name, a class. Citizen, father, uncle, niece, son, President. Tuesday’s Election Day. Men and women run to be, to be entitled. I’ll push a stylus through numbers on a card to make a governor, a senator. (Later, they could make or unmake me.) The father in Metamorphosis becomes a bank messenger, has a uniform with brass buttons, and, like the doorman in the old film The Last Laugh, swells with pride. Fired, uniform taken away, the doorman shriveled away.
If I died here in the tub, Ellen would be a widow. She wouldn’t know it till she came home. Knowing changes things. That’s why you have to remember, especially those who did nothing memorable, had no children, planted no trees, wrote no books, carved no stones, left nothing but lines in old telephone directories, on stones in suburban cemeteries. Where is Bert buried?
_____________
What’s the sense of remembering the unmemorable? Can’t be helped, it’s involuntary. Why hasn’t evolution weeded it out? What does it have to do with survival? On our bedroom calendar, the November quotation (in blue letters beside the ironic, ethereal face of Albert Einstein) is: “What I value in life is quality rather than quantity, just as in Nature the overall principles represent a higher reality than does the single object.” But isn’t quality in the single object? What’s worth more, the singular jerk, or the genetic dictionary which formed him?
“Don’t foul your own nest.” Uncle Bert.
That was what he told me 40-odd years ago back in New York. My parents and sister had taken off for a month, to Banff, Lake Louise, the Rockies, California. I was left in our apartment alone, very happy. I worked in the Paramount Films Sales Trainee Program on 43rd and Broadway. Weekends I went up with my cousin Andy—who had a car—to Quakerridge, my sister’s club. I played tennis, swam, ate hamburgers, and signed her name to the chits. One Saturday I saw Lynette Cloudaway lying by the pool. Two months before there’d been a feature spread about her in Life, an Arkansas girl who’d come to New York to be an actress. A photographer followed her around snapping pictures, at work, shopping, taking a bath, kissing her boyfriend goodnight. I’d fallen for her in Life, and here she was, in the flesh, by the pool. I could hardly speak. “May I sit here?”
“Sure.” The smile I recognized, the throaty voice was new, devastating.
“I recognize you.”
“It’s me.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m with Will.” The guy she kissed goodnight. “Not exactly ‘with,’ he’s playing golf.”
“Good. You can marry me.”
“What name will I have?”
“Mrs. Larry Biel.”
“Set the date.”
We talked schools, jobs, where we lived, siblings, boy- and girlfriends, movies, books, songs, the works. How confident Will must be to leave this perfection by herself; he didn’t deserve her.
“Leave him.”
“I haven’t had my swim yet.”
From the diving board, she jumped into the water. I paddled after her, dodging kids and dowagers. Beyond the flagstones, cigar-smokers played bridge. On umbrellaed lounges, bodies toasted. Lawns, blue sky, the rich, Lynette, a Jewish Fitzgerald scene (the madness and cruelty evaporated).
Andy showed up. “Time to go.”
To Lynette: “I better not miss my ride.”
“You coming to the dance next week?”
“I will now. If I have to walk.”
But I talked Andy into driving up again, white jacket and all.
Bare-shouldered, breasts under lace, Lynette was in another gear of beauty. On the dance floor, I kissed her ear, her cheek, her mouth.
“We shouldn’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“I like it. And Will would see.”
“Let him,” I mouthed. Tough guy, who’d melt at a leer.
“Let’s not dance for a half hour or so.”
“If you think so.” Snootily. But before she went back to Will I got her phone number.
Monday I called her office from mine. “Lunch?”
“Tomorrow.”
We met at Toffenetti’s, the glittery restaurant a block from the Paramount. I brought her the Viking Portable Fitzgerald, told her to read Tender Is the Night, and asked her to go out with me Saturday.
“I spend weekends with Will.”
_____________
Thursday night she called me at home where I was working off my passion for her by myself. “Will’s going fishing in the Adirondacks. I’ve got to get my shoes fixed on 82nd and Amsterdam. I could come by your place after if you like.”
Would I like. I bought the first bottle of wine in my life, got whitefish and rye bread from Barney Greengrass, stacked records on the phonograph, and by noon was lathered out of my mind. When the doorbell rang, I nearly fainted. Again, she looked different, playful, subtle. How many selves was she? I trembled too much to kiss her, could hardly talk. I managed to unscrew the bottle and trot out the sandwiches. We listened to Bing Crosby sing “Moonlight becomes you, it goes with your hair, you certainly know the right thing to wear.” I had to go to the bathroom. The phone rang.
“Shall I get it?”
“Yes.” Proud to show whoever called what I had going here.
“It’s your Uncle Bert. He wants you to call him back. He sounded funny.”
“He’s a laugh a minute. What’s he want?”
“He didn’t say. Better call’m.”
I did.
“Larry,” he said, “Don’t foul your own nest.”
Old sap. Foul. Even then I felt its comic pathos. Yet also sensed the stupid debris of something brought down in stone. “She’s my friend Al’s wife,” I said. “We’re just going out.”
“All right, but don’t forget what I said.”
The condom I’d gotten from the bathroom was ready, and I was getting there when the phone rang again. I didn’t answer but thought, “The bastard’ll probably come up here.” It was nervousness talking. Despite my reading, despite six months’ fornicating with my first girl between rows of boxwood near the stadium at Chapel Hill, I knew nothing. (Six years after Lynette, a week before Annie’s birth, I still believed children were born through the—enlarged—navel.)
Don’t foul your own nest. You fouled it for me, you old jerk. Wednesday, Lynette called my office. “I have something to show you.” At lunch, she held out her left hand with the diamond ring.
I never saw her again. In person. Two years ago, Life published an anniversary issue, and there was Lynette as she’d been, mouth open gawking at a Broadway street scene on her way to work. Ravishing, perfect, the girl of my life. Under the 40-year-old photograph was one of a crinkled granny: Lynette today. I tried to see the young Lynette in the old face; couldn’t, not a molecule. A caption said that she and Will lived in Seattle near their grandchildren. I thought of writing her. But why? I didn’t want this grandmother. I wanted, still want, the girl who’d come to the apartment.
_____________
Remembering acts on you, not you on it.
Why remember Bert? That sterile neatness, that concupiscent propriety? Immaculate in his blue suit, white silk handkerchief in the lapel pocket, gold tie and collar pins tucking him into himself, black silk socks taut in black garters, black shoes and hair gleaming with different fluids. So clean. His sister, my mother, another acolyte of cleanliness, was, in womanliness, beyond that. You wouldn’t say she was immaculate. There was flow to her, dress over breasts and rear.
Arms hooked, she and Bert strolled on Fifth Avenue, mirrored paragons, proud to be with each other, going into Saks and Sulka’s, Bert commandeering the service that was the chief source of his self-satisfaction. That and his Packard, his annuities, his neckties, his opinions, the blondes whose signed portraits—“To Bert with love, Jocelyn”—stood on his chifforobe.
I’m unfair. I’m repaying the resentment he felt for me as mother’s baby. There was decency and generosity in him. I needed $5,000 to put down on a house—it would be $50,000 today—and he gave it to me. Every winter, he sent Ellen and me a crate of grapefruit and oranges from Boca Raton. Isn’t he in that generous gold fruit as much as in the Sulka ties and antique injunctions? (The last crate of it arrived a week after he keeled over in a Florida pool.)
_____________
Driving downtown Tuesday, I recover from the small dislocation of Ellen’s return. Spend so many years with a person, seeing her again after even a brief absence is like seeing her in closeup. Many unnoticed things are noticed, lines in the face, white in the hair, a rawness in the voice, dents and discolorations in the body. The least strange person in the world is, for an hour or two, a stranger. Perplexing, a little frightening.
Then the indispensability of the familiar returns, feelings of reliance, confidence, the identity and accepted disparity of views. There are habits of self-restraint as well as of self-expression. It’s one package.
I enjoy the grace and ease with which Ellen unpacks; her reports on the trip. At supper it’s mostly about Annie, Chuck, and Anne. New problems, the resolution of old ones; the death of the big oak across the street; Chuck’s worry about the recession—though a pharmacist should be almost recession-proof; the new Medicare regulations.
“Are things better with Bostorf?” I ask. This is Chuck’s assistant, who Annie thinks is swindling him.
“He’s still trouble. At least, Annie’s worry about him is troublesome.”
We’ve been worried about Chuck and Annie. They express their difficulties with each other obliquely; Bostorf is one of the targets of this indirection. “And Anne?” We worry a lot about the dangers to which so decent, open, and, we believe, innocent a girl can fall into in an American high school. For someone as much concerned as I am about the future of my seed, my fear about Anne’s fall into womanhood—the antique phrase that comes to me—is puzzling.
I tell her about Peter, omitting Metamorphosis.
_____________
Some afternoons are hard. After the Round Table, I play cards, or billiards, or read magazines, then walk back to the office and check the market close. I get going at 3:30, before the rush hour, and am home by 4:15. We eat at 6:00 in front of the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, then watch one of the scandal programs—people abusing, deceiving, molesting, kidnapping, killing: the human works. Then we read, watch programs, occasionally go out, or have friends in for bridge; then bath and bed. Beside Ellen’s familiar warmth and fragrance, I go to sleep. Sometimes feelings bunch and we’re active; afterward, we express gratitude to each other.
I don’t sleep as I used to, and often go to the guest room to read till my eyes tire. I’m conscious of aches in the palms of my hands, my feet, my chest. Sometimes I read fear into these aches. After all, how much longer is there?
I’ve been a bystander, done nothing memorable. I’ve had no real trouble, have lasted six-and-a-half decades, raised—whatever that means—what will live after me, and live in my paid-up house with someone I love. I’m lucky. Still, now and then, it comes to me that I don’t understand anything. As if the world’s speaking a language I can’t follow. Fear gets so loud, I can’t sleep. Once in a while, I go back to our room and hold on to Ellen. Sometimes this helps—like finding a dictionary—but sometimes it doesn’t.
