Family Happiness (11 page)

Now Wendy was faced with two utter strangers. They looked perfectly well turned out, but how did you tell with Europeans? She felt as if Paul had been taken over by extraterrestrials. Who
were
these people? What, precisely, was their background? Several things had been made clear: their parents were in their eighties and lived in Berne—too old and, it was implied, too noble to travel. The implication was that if Wendy and Henry wanted to meet the von Waldaus they would have to fly to Switzerland to do so. Father von Waldau had been a professor of theology at Berne. Their mother had been the administratrix of a small, experimental hospital that rehabilitated amnesia victims. Had they been Americans, Wendy would have known exactly what all this meant, but the rules and forms of life in Europe were different and it was impossible to tell what sort of daughter-in-law she was getting. This made her cross; when cross, she became fretful and spent her fretful attention on small details, such as the two forsythia petals that had fallen from the Chinese vase onto the black marble mantel. Polly knew that from this point on, her mother would have very little left in the way of an attention span.

“I think we should toast Paul and Beate, and welcome Beate and Karlheinz to the family,” Henry, Sr., said. He did not feel that Klaro was anybody's name.

Paul stepped into the center of the family circle, drawing the unsmiling Beate with him. “An announcement must be made,” he said. “We are not engaged. We have been married for five months.”

There was an appropriate hush of pure silence.

“We must tell the other thing as well, Paul,” said Beate. She had a rather deep, lilting voice.

“Yes,” said Paul. “We are expecting a child. By the time we go to Maine, Pete and Dee-Dee will have a little cousin to play with.”

The family was struck dumb. How mean of Paul to spring this on them, Polly thought. She glanced at her mother, who looked as if she had been slapped, thrilled, and dazzled all at once. It would never occur to Wendy how weird a gesture on Paul's part this was, for she had waited all these years to hear this news. As soon as she got over her surprise, she would be wildly pleased. Paul's marriage and impending fatherhood made everything fit. With the exception of one minor irritant—two daughters-in-law she did not fully understand—Wendy's life was now all of a piece.

Polly could not help noticing how lofty Paul and Beate looked. She tried to repress the desire to kick them, but she was too tired. The only news she had to spring on her family was bad news. Her love affair with Lincoln was about as old as Paul and Beate's marriage. The contrast between these events made Polly feel like a pariah.

Henry, Sr., was not at all shocked. Rather, the horse he had bet on all his life had come in a winner. It made perfect sense that Paul should be married and now he
was
married. It seemed right to Henry, Sr., that Paul would break the news of his marriage and his future child in one sitting. It gave the family two good things to react to at once, and it put the whole thing into context. After all, Paul was too old for frills, young love, elaborate weddings.

As for Henry, Jr., and Andreya, they looked about to fidget. They had always regarded Paul as a married person, and the fact that he was now actually married made absolutely no difference to them at all. But soon, they knew, they would be the only childless Solo-Miller couple, and they both flinched as they anticipated the subtle pressure that would be brought to bear on them.

Henry Demarest always did the right thing. He had never understood Paul's unmarried state, and he was pleased to see that Paul had found a wife who matched him so well. He got the bottle of champagne that had been sitting in a silver bucket on the sideboard and popped the cork.

“This certainly calls for a toast!” he said.

At dinner Polly could hardly concentrate on the conversation, so anxious was she that everything go well, and so completely entranced by the thought of Paul in love. She could not imagine it, nor could she imagine Paul in bed, especially with Beate. Their mating, she imagined, might resemble the slow movement in one of those grave, serious modern ballets that take a Great Theme, such as The Freedom of the Individual, or Suppression of the Dissident Artist Behind the Iron Curtain, as their inspiration. Paul was neither a laugher, a grinner, nor even much of a smiler. He was an occasional head-nodder—this was as far as affirmation took him. Beate matched him in stately cheerlessness. They did not look joyless—Polly felt it was impossible to be totally joyless and wear such expensive clothes—but they looked stern and separate from the feckless lot of mankind that wiggles, tells jokes, and has fun. They were very much in the higher mind, Polly felt.

Klaro, on second glance, looked positively mischievous. The features that were imposing on the female twin looked foxlike on the male. He was seated next to Andreya. Wendy had planned this without a thought in her mind, but had worried all during cocktails: Germany
had
done awful things to Czechoslovakia in the war. Of course once she knew that Beate and Klaro were clean, efficient, neutral Swiss there was nothing to fret about. Klaro and Andreya were deep in their own conversation. Andreya listened closely while she attacked her lovely plate of vegetables, eggs, and cheese.

Klaro, it was revealed during dinner, was a composer, much respected in Europe but less well known in America. His visit to New York had accidentally coincided with his sister's marriage announcement. Actually he had come to perform in the American premiere of one of his compositions, which the family was duly invited to attend. His composition was an unstructured motet for piano and string trio and would be performed by the Manhattan String Trio with Klaro at the piano. This set off an exchange between Paul and Klaro about harmonics and the hexachord. But mostly the talk was about the baby, although Beate did not look five minutes pregnant. She was tall and flat and lean. Polly thought she had perhaps arranged to somehow carry the baby outside her body.

“We will have the child according to the most felicitous method,” Beate said. Like Klaro's, her English was stiff but close to perfect. It was rather like listening to someone who had learned the language by reading
The Origin of Species
. “This baby will be born in accordance with the methods of one of my former teachers, the great doctor Rudolph Ping. There will be soft music and muted lighting. There will be calm and lull. We would have this child at home but this is not possible, so I have found a young Swiss doctor who will conform to the method of Dr. Ping in a hospital. This young doctor will birth us.”

Polly looked at Paul. So he was having the baby, too.

“And you'll be with Beate in the delivery room,” said Polly.

“Certainly,” said Paul, as if attacked. “The birthed infant knows if the father has been there.” The idea of the birth process and Beate did not jibe in Polly's mind. She looked so much more like someone who would be interested in having a baby in a test tube. But the idea of these two unsmiling, spotless people married and having a baby was preposterous anyway, so the rest, no matter how farfetched, followed.

“We've remodeled the apartment,” said Paul. “While I was in Paris, Beate oversaw the construction and we camped out at Beate's. We now have a proper nursery, painted the color recommended by Dr. Ping: peach, but on the pink end of peach. Dr. Ping feels that a peach color reassures the recently birthed infant.”

“I can't believe you're actually going to watch,” said Henry, Jr. He and Andreya found the idea of birth disgusting. Sex was fun for children, but having babies was work for adults and of no interest to them at all. They did not connect the appearance of children with sex in any way.

The dinner plates had been taken away. The salad was consumed. Coffee was brought to the table along with an enormous apple pie. Polly had decorated the top, right before it went into the oven, with leaves and flowers cut out of the leftover dough. It was brought to Polly to serve while Wendy, at her end of the table, poured the coffee. Out of the corner of her eye Polly could see that Klaro and Andreya had reconnected. They were chatting away, in German. Henry, Jr., looked at them as if they were a pair of talking chipmunks—interesting for about five seconds. He was about to tuck into his dessert, ignoring the warning flash of his mother's eye. Henry, Jr.'s approach to any meal was that of a ravenous truck driver. Andreya had explained one afternoon at breakfast the difference between the German words
essen
and
fressen
.

“
Essen
is to eat as people eat. It is to dine,” she said. “
Fressen
is to eat as an animal eats. It is to feed.” Henry's great smile of recognition made it clear to all what side he was on. The quantity of food he could pack into his lean frame was amazing to almost everyone. He also liked to make a mess when he ate if he could, and favored things like shrimp boiled in the shell, pizza, French fries with catsup, and crabs. If he ate at a roadside stand he liked to have the hot sauce or mustard drip down his arm, and he liked for French fries to fall onto his shirt. Wendy had stopped putting out unshelled nuts when Henry came to dinner, because he left every surface, and the floor beneath him, littered with shards. He was good with chopsticks since they were a great aid in shoveling your food, a method Henry embraced heartily.

Suddenly Andreya laughed. It was a beautiful laugh—light, melodious, and girlish. From the looks this sound produced it was clear she would have to explain.

“Klaro knows the songs of my childhood,” Andreya said. “He has put them into a composition. These are the songs my German nurse used to sing to me.”

It became obvious that there would soon be singing at the table. Wendy looked around helplessly to see whether anyone might help prevent it.

“What songs?” asked Henry, Jr.

“Very silly ones,” said Klaro.

“Well, sing one,” said Henry, Jr.

“Yes, please!” said Polly.

Klaro's voice was a sweet tenor, Andreya's a contralto. They sang in the affecting, unassuming way of amateur singers. Polly felt the hair on the back of her neck lift. These days music brought her to tears.

“Was müssten dass für Bäume sein

Wo die grossen

Elephanten spatzieren gehen

Ohne anzustossen.”

“This means,” said Klaro, “What sort of a tree is it that the big elephants can promenade beneath without hitting their heads?”

Then they sang:

“Karbonade, marmelade

Eisbeinschnitzel

Blumen Kohlsalate
.

O! Mayonnaise! O! Weisskäse

Rote Grütze, Bratkartoffel

HUNGER HUNGER HUNGER HUNGER.”

“There is no translation for this,” said Andreya. “It is merely some incoherent ravings about food.”

The party moved into the living room, where Henry, Sr., stoked up the fire. There was more coffee, brandy, and hard, spicy little cheese biscuits—Wendy clung to the old-fashioned notion that all dinner parties should end with a savory.

At the far end of the room was the baby grand piano Henry, Polly, and Paul had taken lessons on. Paul could play, but he was only interested in reading music, and he used the piano in his apartment for picking out themes in symphonic scores. Polly could play well enough and would help Pete and Dee-Dee when they took lessons on the upright the Demarest and Solo-Miller parents had given Polly and Henry for an anniversary present. Henry, Jr., had hated the piano as a boy and had asked for a tuba. This instrument had been rented for him, but it was soon clear that his chief interest in it was its nuisance value and it had been taken away. Nowadays the music he liked best was the loudest and most atonal of rock and roll, or the sort of modern compositions that sound as if a piano is being hacked up with an ax while someone in the background is smashing glasses.

Klaro sat down at the piano and played quietly. He was fond of twentieth-century French music and he played Satie. Instantly savage breasts all over the room were charmed. Klaro played exclusively as background, but the expression on his face was that of an ingenious veterinarian who had quelled a room full of anxious schnauzers. Everyone sat a little more comfortably. Henry moved closer to Polly, and stretched his arm out on the back of the sofa. Polly's spirits had not been calmed. Music made her feel excessively emotional and she had been anxious all night that this party be a success, and worried that this family party took up Henry's time when he was so pressed at work. Klaro's playing had smoothed Henry out. He stretched out his legs in front of him. Polly could feel him relax. Her heart seemed to twist. How she loved him! And as she looked at him relaxed on the sofa, how distant and remote he seemed to her. How odd to have the source of her deepest and most profound feelings at such a remove. Had she changed? Or had Henry? Or was it simply that life changes things?

She sipped her coffee and turned her attention to Paul and Beate.

There was something about them that Polly could not quite define. Whatever it was, it was making Wendy nervous: exaggerated formality was one sure sign of stress in her, and she was speaking carefully to her family as if translating into English from a foreign language. Paul and Beate were not like one of those couples madly in love who have no attention left for anything else. Rather they were like mutant cells that had broken off from the larger organism.

Then it struck Polly: Paul and Beate were now their own tribe. Paul was soon to be a patriarch in his own right. All his secretiveness, his silence, his rigidity was nothing more than a preparation for forming his own club. Polly and Henry Demarest still belonged to the senior Solo-Millers, and Henry, Jr., and Andreya had set themselves up as mascots. And although Thanksgiving dinner had gradually been shifted over to the Demarest household, Henry, Sr., and Wendy were still the center, the monarchs of the family. But soon there would be a pull toward Paul's family, and into Paul and Beate's orbit. Wendy would know that the deference paid her was of the empty, formal variety and there would be nothing she could do or say about it. Paul and Beate would be treated like emissaries from a colonial nation that was now richer than the mother country. Wendy knew that Paul would take the family over, after she was dead.