Constance (22 page)

The next day we returned to New York. Constance was eager to leave Ravenswood and I took this as a good sign. Already she’d told me that she intended to sell the house but there was no urgency, the old man’s will had yet to be read. Mildred quietly told us that she would stay on. I wasn’t happy about it. She was a bereaved woman and it was an old house in an isolated location. It seemed a morbid situation and I feared that her grieving would take a morbid turn. Morbidity clung to that place and to that family like dank river fog. Constance brushed my reservations aside.

—Mildred’s tough, she said.

She remained dangerously exalted. There was a curious incident at the graveside. After she’d tossed the wild rose onto the coffin she’d turned to me and, seizing my lapel, produced what
sounded like a muffled shout of laughter. She buried her face in my shoulder. Her whole body was shaking. I put my arms around her. I don’t believe any of the others realized what was happening, but this was no access of strong grief. I was the only one who knew it, but Constance was in the grip of uncontrollable laughter. I put it down to hysterical stress. She was a sick woman. The previous night she’d again asked me to call her Iris.

Our return to the city was delayed by a mechanical malfunction. Coming into Staatsburg, the Jaguar began to lose power. I suspected a blockage in the fuel line. I eventually found a mechanic but it was humiliating to have to drive that big car down Main Street at five miles an hour, as though we were part of a funeral procession.

Howard was happy to welcome Constance home. That night we ate together at the kitchen table and no mention was made of Daddy. But still I anticipated the backlash. I was troubled by her refusal to talk about him, and indeed about Iris.

The backlash never came. She awoke each day in a state of zeal for life. There was a light in her eye from morning to night. She seemed to feel neither fatigue nor anxiety, and for sure not grief, not for Daddy, not for Iris. Her sister’s name was only heard at night, in bed, during intimacy. My own theory: She thought I’d married the wrong sister and she was trying to make amends. She was allowing me to make love to Iris so as to atone for what she’d put me through. How wrong she was. But I didn’t know how to say this without demeaning her lavish sexual generosity.

Meanwhile she attended to the running of the household as she never had before. Poor Gladys grew sullen as she was put to work clearing out obscure closets, opening windows and airing
rooms, throwing stuff away. Eventually even Howard grew weary of her relentless spirited briskness. After ten days of so-called spring cleaning, she went back to work. In the evening she explained to me the ways in which Cooper Wilder must modernize.

—The world’s changing and if you don’t change with it you die, she said.

I’d begun work on
A Scream in the Night.
The progressive tendency in Constance’s thinking didn’t chime with my own outlook. The transformation of Manhattan into a so-called modern city was to me a bad joke. New York was breaking down. I catalogued its death throes on a daily basis. People told me that living here was a nightmare. Those who could afford to were moving out. The city in its decline was not only more dangerous and more squalid, it was becoming of all things
mediocre.

Constance was unaffected by any of this. I stood in the doorway of our building one morning and watched her as she walked up the block to the subway. The sidewalk was strewn with trash where garbage cans had been kicked over in the night. There was broken glass underfoot from the smashed streetlights. The sidewalk was cracked and uneven. There were potholes in it, potholes in the sidewalk. Constance was oblivious. She held her head high, and in her yellow coat, with a small matching pageboy hat perched at a jaunty angle on her piled blonde hair, she looked like royalty as she effortlessly, gracefully strode on, untouched by the filth through which she moved.

As the weeks went by I watched her attempt to sustain the appetite for life she’d discovered in the immediate aftermath of Daddy’s death. That her energy issued from an unwholesome
place in her psyche was made clear to me one night after we’d been to the theater. I don’t remember what we saw, but afterward Constance decided we must have a cocktail. I’d have preferred to go home but instead we went to a bar at Forty-fifth and Eighth. It was called the Flamingo or the Ostrich or some damn thing. It was full of smoke. It was crowded and hot and loud. We found a table and ordered highballs. Constance was eager to have a good time. She was shouting at me but I couldn’t hear what she said. Just as the waitress was setting our drinks down a man lurched against our table. There was spillage, and Constance at once stood up and threw what remained of her highball in the man’s face. Then she seized him by the lapels.

I thought he was going to hit her. I was on my feet too. More shouting. The man’s wife appeared. Now there was screaming. Others became involved. I tried to get Constance out of there. She was cursing the man, cursing his wife, the air was blue with her curses. A waiter tried to calm her down. The man told me to control my daughter.

Some minutes later we were out on the street and Constance was still enraged. I put my arms around her, there on the sidewalk at Forty-fifth and Eighth. The crowd surged past us, bumping into us, swearing at us, while Constance broke down and wept on my shoulder. Grief, I thought. Here it is at last. Then I thought: This is what we’ve come to. On one of the busiest intersections in Manhattan a woman weeps for her dead and nobody gives a damn. Nobody even notices. I once thought it the mark of an advanced civilization when one’s private life could be conducted in public. Not anymore. Now it was just another chance to be humiliated.

—My darling, I whispered as she sobbed into my shoulder.

She lifted her head then and stared at me, tears streaming down her face.

—Call me Iris! she cried.

But the incident revealed what I already suspected: Constance wasn’t free of the old man yet, her rage was ample proof of that. I think she realized what had happened, for in the morning her mood was subdued. She couldn’t meet my eye. But there were other matters I had to discuss with her. I told her we had to talk through what had happened to us.

—Why?

We were in the sitting room. I did what I could to not antagonize her. I stood by the empty fireplace, leaning against the mantel. She paced the floor, smoking cigarettes.

—For Howard’s sake. And for our own.

I was disturbed to see she’d lapsed again into a sort of tic I’d first observed when I brought her home from the motel in Montauk. While she talked to me she seemed to be listening to another voice, and this other voice caused her to frown and make facial expressions unrelated to the conversation. It was disconcerting, but when I mentioned it she smiled in a knowing way that irritated me acutely. I suppressed my anger however, not wishing to quarrel with her. I told her that without Howard the marriage would have fallen apart long before this. He needed us both, I said. Just as we needed him. She didn’t dispute it. I knew she would listen to me if I prefaced my request this way.

—Go on, she said.

I told her I had to make sense of what had happened to us so we could go forward with no lingering doubts, or resentments, or forebodings about the future. Was that an unreasonable request?
Wasn’t it the least we required as a foundation for a working marriage, even a happy marriage? Or what was the same, a
not unhappy
marriage?

Constance was never good at thinking about marriage in the abstract. She saw no moral dimension in it. For her, marriage was fluid, transient, a provisional arrangement, and if it didn’t seem to be working then there wasn’t much point, was there?

—Do you want Howard to grow up like you did?

This got her full attention.

—I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.

—Then let’s create a real home for him.

—We have.

—No, Constance, we haven’t.

Again I tried to explain to her that without clarity and candor she and I could never be at peace with one another. She was standing at the window with her back to me. Perhaps I was asking the impossible. This woman hadn’t known a minute of clarity or candor her entire life. Without turning around she asked me what I wanted to know.

—Everything.

She was alarmed now.

—Like what?

But when I told her she flew into a rage. She wasn’t ready for candor, perhaps she never would be.

—Is that what all this candor crap is about, so you can punish me some more? I thought it was over when Daddy died but it’s not, is it, it’s never over. Well, I’ve had enough. I won’t be punished anymore!

She ran out of the room. I sat on the chesterfield with my head in my hands. It was I who was being punished. Apparently
I hadn’t suffered enough yet. All I’d done was ask her if she’d told me the truth about the affair with Eddie Castrol. It tormented me, the possibility she’d allowed him to have anal sex with her. I wanted to hear her say it wasn’t so. I suspected that when I called her Iris in bed, in her heart she called me Eddie. Then I heard the sound of breaking glass from the kitchen. I found her throwing plates and wineglasses on the floor. She was weeping. She was barefoot. She was bleeding. I heard Howard’s voice. I took him back to his bedroom and told him to go to sleep, there was nothing wrong. Then I returned to the kitchen. Constance was sitting on a chair amid the broken glass and china, still weeping. I would have to wash her feet.

There was no more sex after that. She didn’t even want me in the bedroom. I could have insisted, but I hadn’t the heart to impose my will on her anymore. I moved into the small spare room behind the kitchen. I accepted then that I couldn’t do it on my own. But I couldn’t make her see a psychiatrist, I’d tried and failed more than once. I talked to Ed Kaplan. He knew much of Constance’s story although I’d told him nothing about the affair. Ed was sardonic and wise. This was what I wanted from him. He told me he was frankly astonished that things weren’t worse at home.

—What do you mean by that?

—All she’s been through?

We were sitting on a bench in Central Park. It was a pleasant day in July. A heat wave was forecast. Ed had grown a beard. It was to frighten his daughters, he told me. They were running wild. They respected no form of authority. It was a familiar theme. If the beard didn’t work he planned to prosecute them.

—What can I do? I said.

He pondered this. He was silent for a time.

—She won’t see a shrink?

—No.

—Get her to talk about it. Don’t let it fester. But Christ, Sidney! One man under a train is bad enough—

—Tell me about it.

A group of teenagers on the grass nearby was singing folk songs and strumming guitars.

—How are you holding up? he said.

I shook my head.

—So, Ed, make her talk about it, that’s your advice?

—She keeps acting out. That thing with the guy in the bar. Then smashing all the plates.

—Not all the plates—

—She represses it, Sidney, it only gets worse.

We sat there nodding in the sunshine. Like a crippled sparrow, a song of peace and love struggled past us in the warm summer air. That’s as far as we got, Ed and I, that time: talk good, repression bad. When I arrived home I found Constance at the kitchen table reading a novel and eating sardines from the tin.

—Why aren’t you at work? I said.

—I quit.

I didn’t believe her. She’d been showing up at Cooper Wilder only sporadically and I knew Ellen Taussig was concerned about her, more than concerned, disappointed. Let down. She didn’t jump. She was pushed.

The heat wave lay on the city like an incubus made of steam. I looked the word up: a male demon who has sexual intercourse
with women in their sleep. If this was how the English mama conceived Constance it would explain a lot. And now she’d quit her job. I asked her why.

—Time to move on.

No commitment. I told her she’d laid the foundations of a good career at Cooper Wilder. But no. No loyalty. No tenacity. She’d have abandoned our marriage if I’d let her. Daddy had at least provided some kind of focus for her flailing emotions. As an institution, the family provides structure for women like Constance. But our own small unit couldn’t give her what she needed.

I took on Daddy’s role as best I could. I tried to be the source of order in her life. I knew she wouldn’t leave me, not while we had Howard, for our one source of stillness and peace, our one opportunity to be
not unhappy
, lay with my son. And her chess game was improving. They played every evening now. It gave me respite from my anxiety. It gave me a micron of hope. I thought that if she could only extend to me the simple trust and affection she felt for my son then we could climb up out of this dark place. I would ask her no more questions about the past. It was time to look forward.

Thinking this, I left my study. They were in the sitting room, at the table, silently staring at the chessboard. I saw total engagement, utter concentration, and I was encouraged. We’ll get through this, I thought. I collapsed onto the couch and pressed my fingers hard against my temples. I’d been troubled by headaches lately. My nights were disturbed. I got no sleep in the spare room. There hadn’t been any sex since she smashed the crockery and I missed it. I heard a small clicking sound, one chess piece making contact with another as it was removed from the board.

—Check.

It was said so quietly I didn’t even know whose voice it was. The city was peaceful. Late sunlight drifted in through the bay window overlooking the street, motes of dust dancing in it like germs. It was still very hot. Gladys had brought flowers that morning, I smelled them now, what were they, tulips, lilies? In a moment I would get up off this chesterfield and identify the flowers and then quietly pour myself a drink. I began to float away. Click. Check. A man is running toward a locomotive—

I awoke with a start. Constance and Howard were standing over me where I lay sprawled on the couch with saliva running down my chin. I struggled up, wiping my face with a handkerchief.