Anger (24 page)

“We're way out somewhere on a limb,” Ned extricated himself and blew his nose. “Good heavens, Anna, we have to dress for dinner … we'll be late!”

“Just a second! We're not out on a limb, Ned. Or if we are, we're out there together.”

“O.K., but I'd rather be safe.” Ned had resumed his shell, but it didn't matter. And Anna, getting into a red dress, felt strangely at peace. She realized that they had become friends in the last hour. And even if this moment of truth didn't last, could not be sustained, it was there like a touchstone. Ned had let her in at last.

Chapter XV

The day after Anna left for Dallas, Ned made a sudden decision, as he walked across the Common to his office. Why analyze, he told himself when the voice of conscience suggested that he had no business cancelling a meeting. Does a squirrel analyze why he feels compelled to gather nuts for the winter? The squirrels on the Common that morning had been in a frenzy of activity; one had made him laugh aloud as it used a cigarette wrapper to cover a cache, and stamped on it, with furious energy. Had Ned ever followed an impulse with as little regard for appearances as this impulse he was about to follow? Yes, he smiled at himself, when I asked Anna to marry me.

“Miss Prior,” he said briskly, “get me a flight to Dallas for tonight after work. Dinner on the plane if possible, to return Thursday afternoon. Get me a hotel, too, central—I don't want to be somewhere in the suburbs.”

“Very well, Mr. Fraser ”

“Oh yes …” Ned said, putting on his glasses and scanning the morning mail, opened and waiting on his desk. “That meeting tomorrow. It's a nuisance, but you'll have to tell the board it has to be delayed till Friday. Something has come up.”

“Anything else?”

“No thanks.”

When Miss Prior had left, Ned sat there for a moment wondering whether he was crazy. But he hadn't heard Anna sing for over a year—wasn't it natural to be pulled toward seeing her—and hearing her—where nothing jarred and all was composed, whole, and full of magic? The Anna who entranced and consoled? His Anna—and at the same time, Anna Lindstrom, not his at all? Perhaps the impulse felt so strong because he needed to see her again at a distance … but that was enough analyzing for Ned and he plunged into the day's affairs and, the decision made, worked with an extra edge of excitement and pleasure.

Miss Prior heard Ned whistling and was quite astonished. He was a considerate employer, was almost never out of temper, had a wry sense of humor which she enjoyed, but otherwise was extremely reticent and reserved. After five years in his employ she knew next to nothing about him. He didn't even have a photograph of his wife in the office and had never mentioned her name. But he had seemed excited about Dallas. What could be happening in Dallas?

Meanwhile Ned had suddenly remembered that something must be done about Fonzi and called Teresa. “I am called away on business and Anna, of course, will be in Dallas. Could you possibly take Fonzi for twenty-four hours? Don't tell Anna—I don't want anything to make her nervous on this trip, and she might worry.”

“I won't say a word.” It did cross Teresa's mind that it was all a little odd. Was Ned meeting another woman somewhere? But Teresa had to admit that for all the tensions in this marriage, neither Ned nor Anna had ever looked at anyone else, as far as she knew. They seemed pretty much absorbed in whatever was going on between them, even when it was chiefly rage.

On the plane Ned leaned back and closed his eyes. He felt he had been running all day. His mind was brilliantly lit up and he couldn't stop thinking, stop running, even now safely on the plane and on his way. It seemed as though memory was a ribbon flying backward at incredible speed, back through the flotsam and jetsam of the day (he had gone home to pack his suitcase at lunchtime and hand Fonzi over to Teresa), back through the week to the long talk with Anna which he had laid aside deliberately, not allowed himself to think about until this moment in limbo, back through thirty-years, to his father. There was no stopping the unrolling of the ribbon now. And the double Scotch he ordered only accelerated it.

It came to a full stop with the word “suicide.” “My father committed suicide. My father committed suicide. My father committed suicide.” It was such an explosive sound in his head that Ned looked around nervously as though the intensity of it must be heard by the other passengers, the bearded young man reading Vonnegut in the seat beside him. But of course only he, Ned, could hear those words or say them. He closed his eyes. Why was he so sure that that was the truth? At ten years old what had he seen or sensed that made him know it, and then bury it until the other night when it sprang out, sprang out to Anna? For years he had chosen to remember his father only as “so alive” as he always said, as what could only be called a father figure, splendid, all powerful, wise, and always making good things happen for Ned and Paul. What had he buried? Something positively known or seen?

His father had been absolutely self-assured, in command of himself—so it had seemed to a boy of ten. But now Ned was a man of forty-two, the same age his father had been when he died, he realized suddenly that the man was aware of things the boy sensed but could not quite understand … for one, his mother's irritation when his father sat up night after night with their sick dog. He felt that was rather mean of his mother, he remembered, but what came back now was the violence of his father's reaction. The fury and pain with which he said, “I'm just not adequate, Pauline. I'm not what you need,” and walked out to the office without his breakfast.

Not adequate? Could a human being have this feeling about himself even when the facts proved it quite untrue? “Not adequate.”… For the first time in his life Ned began to think about his father not as his father, but as a man in the midst of a life that his son could know very little about. Under the genial, fun-loving, life-enhancing man had there been despair? Once in a while the boys were told that their father was sick in bed and must not be disturbed. “He has a migraine headache,” their mother explained. “Please don't make any noise when you come back from school.”

But was it a migraine or was it an attack of excruciating self-doubt? Self-doubt why and about what? What made Ned suddenly remember that he had heard that his father started out after college at the bank where Pauline's father was president … he must have gotten out when the boys were quite small, and become business manager then of a small firm, really a one-man show, which made stained glass windows for churches and public buildings. The “one-man” of the show was an eccentric geniusy craftsman who was in love with the Gothic and designed and worked with three or four workmen he had trained. Apprentices came and went. As a business it was distinguished enough but rather small potatoes. Ned imagined now that it must have been a kind of escape hatch for his father, something valid from a professional view but far from the center of power the bank had represented. Had his father somehow not measured up at the bank? Or had a fight with his father-in-law? At forty did he feel he was a failure? Had he wanted to be a writer or an artist of some sort himself, but felt pressured by marrying a fortune into a semblance at least of success in the business world? Oh, Ned groaned inwardly, if I only knew.

What he did know was that under the surface his father was locked up inside. The whole business of “measuring up” had to do with not complaining, with never imposing personal matters on anyone even, Ned surmised, on his wife. Ned had learned quite early on that any talk of being cross or depressed or in any way unable to cope, was treated as a sin. You had to be amused, have fun, enjoy … and his father had been so good at inventing ways to have fun that it seemed quite natural to put down any soul searching as self-indulgent. Now Ned began to see that
that
, just that was self-protection and under the surface may have lived a man in pain, an excruciatingly lonely man, in the end a mortally sick man.

“Are we very rich, Papa?” he had asked his father once when they were climbing Mount Monadnock on the October 12th holiday. “Johnny says we are.”

His father had walked on without answering, he remembered, and only later when they were eating a sandwich at the top, had closed the subject with the words, “I wouldn't worry, Ned. We have enough to live on.”

“I wasn't worried,” Ned said, throwing pebbles one by one.

It seemed a little strange that money was never talked about. Only vulgar people expressed any interest in it, Ned learned and when later on he complained that other boys at school were given far larger allowances than either he or Paul his father had expressed surprise. “I don't see what you need money for at school, except to show off.”

“I want ski boots, Father.”

“Well, save up for a few months.”

Ned had sensed that it would be wiser to leave it at that.

But suicide? None of all this explained it. Except … the idea came to him with force like an explosion … if no deep feelings find a way of expression, if anger is taboo, if admitting depression is a sin, if even love is expressed only by things done, never things said—then what happens to a human being? “Does it have to go on from generation to generation?” he heard Anna's voice in his head, “The closing off? The fear of feeling?”

How did she know when he did not know himself? Had his father's sense of impotence cut him off finally even from his wife? Ned winced. No child can imagine his parents in bed and even now at forty he screened off what he had just imagined. A man cut off from everything except nursing a sick dog … so when the dog died, the death had become an immense hazard, gone the only love that could be expressed, gone the only way out for tenderness and compassion. That at least explained his mother's irritations. Oh no, Ned told himself, that's crazy. Absolutely crazy. People don't commit suicide over a dog! No, he told himself, people kill themselves when they are so cut off from whatever their real life is or could be that there is nowhere else to go.

Ned was jolted out of his strange state of awareness by the physical jolt of the plane landing. It was quite a relief to get out of that cocoon where he had been so close to his father, when he had seen him for the first time since his death as a person in his own right, to be on his way back from so far, toward life lived at full intensity—Anna!

Chapter XVI

Anna woke next morning to a fine day in Dallas. She felt well, for once not too nervous, but she had worked on this concert as hard as she ever had on anything, and maybe, she thought, I am at last learning to trust myself, my voice, and go into a concert happy and assured. Was that possible? It was easier to sing at eleven in the morning, not have to live through a whole nervous day, get it over with while she had the morning freshness still about her … it would not be too hot, she had heard on the radio, and that, too, added to her sense of well-being. So she called Dan in his room, and could not help laughing when he confessed that he had slept badly and was a bit panicky. “Dan! For once I'm not … it went so well last night. Are you still bothered about the piano?”

“Maybe,” he said. “I couldn't feel a quite perfect rapport with it, I must say.”

“But you played beautifully!”

“Oh well, I expect it will be all right. I won't make an ass of myself, Anna. I promise.”

“I wonder whether it will be a good house … they said they were selling tickets but couldn't be sure ahead of time of a sellout. Apparently it's rather rare for the club to open its doors to strangers, and I presume they did it this time because we have become rather expensive.”

“Well, your name should pull in a crowd … I wouldn't worry.”

“I don't have a name, Dan. How would anyone in Dallas know I exist?”

“Come on, Anna, I refuse to flatter you. Did you see the piece in the paper this morning? That should pull them in!”

“It was quite surprisingly impressive,” Anna said. Indeed she had read it with astonishment. “Someone did a lot of sleuthing. I hardly recognized myself.”

“You're either very modest or quite stupid. Take your choice,” Dan teased.

“Let's have fun, Dan! I'll meet you downstairs at ten. They are sending a limousine to take us over.”

When she put the phone down, Anna was tingling all over with excitement. Now if she could just hold onto it, walk the tightrope until she was on the stage! Not fall into a panic.

She poured herself a second cup of coffee and sipped it slowly, sitting up straight. One of her anxieties had always been choking on something just before a concert—that, or slipping in the shower and breaking a leg. Anxiety came in all shapes and sizes, but today she was able to keep it at bay. And that, she realized, was because she did not feel as acutely alone as she often did just before a performance. Whatever had happened between her and Ned was giving her a new sense of support, of his being there at her side. So new that she was afraid to think about it for fear it would vanish.

Meanwhile, an hour later, Ned was making his way into the auditorium through a bevy of talkative women, as far as he could see, the only man among them. He thought of Ernesta Aldrich and wished devoutly that she were there at his side to give him at least the appearance of belonging. His seat was on the aisle in the tenth row. Perhaps he could pretend to be a critic? And with that in mind he took out a pen and studied the program attentively. He imagined Anna and Dan waiting nervously in the wings—that last fifteen minutes, Anna had often told him, was the real hell.

Someone came out and opened the grand piano, turned on the keyboard light, and arranged the music. It was a rather charming stage, not too big, with a background of beige velvet curtains and, as he looked around, Ned was impressed by the elegance of the auditorium, and smiled at his own provincialism, the Bostonian idea of Dallas being something a little more showy and less distinguished. But then the women all around him were pretty distinguished-looking themselves, with the exception of a few college students, not members of the club, he surmised, in the usual boots, blue jeans and ragged bulky sweaters. What would it be like to step out and meet an audience like this, buzzing with excitement? How to bring it together and silence it like some wild animal to be tamed with a glance? Ned looked at his watch. It was past eleven. It occurred to him that this was a very different occasion to that day three years ago when he had expected nothing much and did not know that in five minutes his life was to be radically changed. Now his expectation was high but also he was nervous
for
Anna and with her … he was involved. And the involvement made him impatient and critical. Why didn't they get on with it? Every seat appeared to be taken. He felt Anna's tension inside himself.