Family Happiness (13 page)

The women in her office, the people in the elevator when she left to go home, on the street, and on the bus all looked like solid citizens making the most of their peaceful lives. As Polly waited at the bus stop she felt as isolated as one of the tragic heroines she had read about in college—set apart from the ordinary throng of men and women, who did not expect perfection, who were happy with what they had, whose inner lives and outer selves matched nicely. On Polly's desk at work she had three framed photographs: one of Henry, one of the children, and one of Henry and the children. These days she often looked at those photos and had cause to reflect that her inner and outer lives did not match at all.

She stood in the back of the crowded bus surrounded by men and women going home, reading their newspapers. As the bus crawled up Madison Avenue, Polly thought of a story Lincoln had told her, a story she frequently reflected on.

Between college and art school he had taken a summer job as a building inspector—miserable work that paid very well. He told Polly that he had once gone to inspect the sub-basement of an old tenement and heard an eerie noise from behind a door. He opened the door slowly and shone his flashlight. Confronting him was a wall of yellow eyes: the basement was infested with rats.

Polly felt that admitting your unhappiness to yourself was very much like opening a door and being confronted by a wall of yellow eyes. Her problem was not that she had fallen in love with Lincoln, or even what had made it possible for her to fall in love with him: her problem was herself. It was the yoke she put herself under, the standards she chose to adhere to, and the fact that underneath all the service, cheer, care, and nurturing was some other Polly she had not quite confronted.

Henry was not her problem either.
She
had chosen him. She had picked someone whose ways she knew: someone generous, kind, intelligent, and good, who loved and honored her for the excellent qualities he had come to expect and take for granted, and whose neglect, whose immersion in work, whose abstraction when engaged in work she was expected, as she had been trained, to accept, accommodate, and lighten when she could. Could it be that she had never been happy doing this? That this role had always been a burden? That she had never felt at ease in her family or cherished by her husband?

When the bus stopped at her street she was so tired she ached. She dragged herself from home to work, down to Lincoln, back to work. Her children had taken to patting her tenderly. The most ordinary details of life—lists, plans, menus, schedules—at which she was an absolute wizard—had begun to throw her. She had forgotten to leave Concita's check. She had forgotten to take Henry's two suits to the cleaners. She had forgotten a lunch date with her mother.

Once home she had the disturbing sense of having forgotten something else, and when she found Henry shaving in the bathroom she was sure she had, but she could not remember what.

“You're home awfully early,” she said. “Do you have a dinner meeting?”

“Don't you remember?” Henry said. “Tonight is Klaro's concert.”

“Klaro's concert,” said Polly. “What concert is that?”

“It's not like you to forget,” Henry said. “Haven't you and Wendy been on the telephone all morning? Klaro's premiere is tonight.”

“It is?” said Polly. “Where is it?”

“Stringed Instrument Society,” Henry said. “Afterward we're invited to Paul and Beate's to see what they did to Paul's apartment and to inspect the nursery.”

Polly sat down on the edge of the bathtub. Henry was wearing only a pair of shorts—blue-and-white-striped ones. He had long, strong legs and a big, well-made torso. Watching him shave brought back her childhood, when she had sat on the edge of the bathtub and watched her father shave. How she had revered him! And how carefully she had been trained to revere her husband.

“I'm sorry I forgot,” Polly said. “I'm just tired. Mum didn't call me all day, so it went right out of my head.”

“Don't be sorry,” Henry said. “There isn't any need for you to be.”

Polly felt there was. She felt that she ought not to forget things and that any little slip made Henry angry.

“For God's sake, Polly,” Henry said. “Don't look as if you're about to be shot. I'd give anything not to have to go. I've got a ton of paper to go through.”

Polly buried her face in her hands. “I feel as if I deserve to be shot,” she said.

“Come on, Polly, don't be melodramatic. Come over here and hug me. Then you ought to take a cat nap. You look wiped out.”

“I can't take a nap,” said Polly. “I have to sit with Pete and Dee-Dee.”

“You do
not
have to sit with Pete and Dee-Dee.” There was a note of frustration in Henry's voice which was as good a warning as Daddy's Horizontal Flicker of Disapproval. “Pete and Dee-Dee are sitting quite happily with Concita, and since we're going out, they don't have much interest in us.”

“I'm sorry I behave so badly,” said Polly, who was still sitting on the rim of the bathtub. If her husband wanted to be hugged, why didn't he come to her? Why did she have to go to him? Why, when she put her arms around him at night, did she feel she had to beg him to make love to her? Why did she feel that she was getting in the way of his precious rest? Her response to Henry was the most profound feeling she had—the feeling that she was entirely given over to him—but even that, she felt, was parceled out to her by the demands of his work. Lincoln, on the other hand, simply wanted her: nothing got in the way—an affirmation was so essential that the thought of doing without it made her weak. She looked at Henry and all she saw was someone she had to fight to get to.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

Henry pulled her up by the elbows and held her close.

“Are you going to cry?” he said into her hair. “Don't cry, Polly.”

She did not cry. She pressed her head against his big, consoling chest and did not feel consoled.

“My poor Polly,” Henry said. “My poor darling Polly.”

“I want you to love me,” Polly said. Tears slid down her cheeks. Henry smelled sweet, like someone who had been lying out in the sun.

“I do love you,” Henry said. “I love you with all my heart.”

At this Polly wiped away her tears.

“Go take a nap,” said Henry. “I'll wake you in half an hour.”

Instead Polly went down the hall and sat with Pete, Dee-Dee, and Concita. That the sight of her children didn't cheer her struck her as rather grave. She imagined them sitting at the table with another woman—Henry's new wife, a better edition of Polly, or if not more providing of comfort and cheer, then better suited to him in temperament, someone less needy and less angry. It was not fair to sit with your children and not give yourself to them entirely. How she had hated it as a child when Henry and Wendy's attention had drifted away from her, and now she was doing the same thing to Pete and Dee-Dee. She got up.

“I'm going to have my shower now,” she said. Like her father, both her children could raise their eyebrows. They gave her a pointed look.

“You're not any fun,” said Pete.

“I'm your mother,” Polly said. “I'm not supposed to be fun all the time.”

“Flower Bernstein's mother is lots of fun,” said Dee-Dee placidly, without taking her eyes off her dinner.

Polly wheeled around. “Who is Flower Bernstein?” she said.

“A friend,” said Dee-Dee airily. “They always have fun at her house.”

“Then go live at Flower Bernstein's,” said Polly. “I'll help you pack.”

“I made her up,” said Dee-Dee. “She isn't a real person.”

“Then I guess you'll have to stay here with your no-fun mother.”

“Oh, Ma,” said Pete and Dee-Dee and they turned back to their dinner.

Henry was dressing when she came into the bedroom.

“I thought you were going to take a nap,” he said.

“I just went to sit with the children.”

“Come on. Into the shower with you,” Henry said. “It's getting late.”

In the shower, Polly meditated. She and Henry dovetailed, as married people ought. They had everything the books say marriages need in order to thrive: a commitment to family, identical feelings about truth, honor, children. They had similar backgrounds. They agreed on the way life should be lived. Perhaps, thought Polly, they had married because they had found each other to be so familiar, and had never given it another thought. She knew Henry loved her. His love for her was manly and grown-up. He approved of her so fully it went without saying, and that was at the bottom of her distress.

She thought about their courtship and the feeling of sweet correctness it had conferred on her. To be loved rightly, to love the right person ardently, seemed to her the most complete bliss; and it meant she could take her place in a long family line, producing, she hoped, excellent children, creating another family within her own family. What had all this excellence covered up? Even during their courtship Henry had been away, had had to work late, had not been able to meet her for a concert, had not had the luxury of time to loll, meander, or dreamily do nothing. A Sunday afternoon spent simply walking around was a treat, not a commonplace. An evening free of work was a rarity. She had always lived under the firm conviction that Henry's time was sacred. His attention was properly focused on the children or family or work. Polly, good sturdy citizen, who had been so carefully brought up by her mother to do without, thought she
could
do without, as long as it was clear she was loved and honored. Well, she was loved and honored, and she could
not
do without.

There were times when Polly was prey to the most elemental loneliness, even in the midst of all her good things. She had felt it for much longer than she knew, and it had helped to throw her straight into Lincoln's arms. Lincoln simply loved her. Her family
had
to love her—they were tied to her by blood. Henry had chosen her for all the right reasons: for her attractiveness and charm, for her good sense and high ethical standards, her love for children, her kindness, her sense of fun. To have been chosen thus, and then to be neglected, had hurt her badly. As a young bride she had not dared to suggest to Henry that if he loved her he might make more time for her, but she had felt it. Henry Demarest, like the rest of her family, relied on her pliant nature and understanding heart. It was not Polly's role to be praised but to praise, not to be singled out but to single out. Excellence in her
was
a commonplace, nothing to get excited about.

But something had happened—Polly did not know what. She felt as if she had woken up one morning after a profound and lucid dream whose content she could no longer remember but which had changed everything. A gate had opened up and through this gate walked Lincoln, who singled her out and praised her for her excellence, and wanted to know everything she thought and felt.

Could everything she had always believed be wrong? That her life with Henry was essentially flawless, that she had no grounds for complaint, that she could accept his absences since she so cherished his presence, that his frequent abstraction was more than compensated for by his focus? She knew that people were often unkind, selfish, petty, ungenerous, small-minded, gutless, and untruthful. How could she be angry with a person who was none of these things, simply because she had suddenly discovered that she was starving for attention? Wasn't that a very second-rate thing to long for compared with the excellent things she had? Did she have any right to be angry? She was riddled with every feeling she had been taught to believe petty and unworthy: shame, remorse, confusion. But it was safe to feel these things in the shower, where the water drowned out the sound of a person who was crying hard.

The family took up an entire row at the Stringed Instrument Society. They looked unified and splendid out in public, like visiting royalty. Only Wendy, who always sat beautifully straight, turned to see who else was there: a purely music-loving and mostly badly dressed crowd.

The two works on the program were Klaro's
Unstructured Meditation for Piano and String Trio
and the Brahms Piano Quartet in C Minor. Klaro was pianist for both, but his composition was to be played first. Polly thought this brave of him. In the program notes he was quoted as saying: “Most audiences have traditional ears, so I wish to approach them before the great traditionalists get to them. In this piece I strive to have a melodic line emerge from structured formlessness, rather as a statue emerges from stone.” Of his music in general, the esteemed music critic Julian Dretzin had said: “Von Waldau likes to ambush his listeners with beauty.”

Polly was a little frightened of this concert. In her present state, music went off like a depth charge, and Brahms was the composer she loved best. She did not need to be afraid of Klaro. His music was of a highly cerebral sort, gorgeous and remote. Polly knew you were meant to listen to music purely as music and not have it remind you of other things, but the melody—austere and rather mournful—made her think about herself, about her present sadness, her fear that her life would never be innocent again, and about Lincoln, who was an artist, too. As for the others in the Solo-Miller party, with the exception of Henry, Jr., who looked slightly moronic, and Henry Demarest, who was a plain, old-fashioned music-appreciator, the look of the higher mind was all over them. Beate seemed absolutely elevated. Music to them was philosophy, mathematics. They liked to be challenged by brain food of a very sublime order. And best of all was criticizing the performance at dinner. Wendy adored a bad performance, especially of anything written for the flute, an instrument she loathed. A bad flute player was all her joy: “So breathy and
spitty
,” she liked to say. From the expressions of mathematical rapture on the faces of her family, Polly knew they realized Klaro for the real thing. How nice to have a first-rate composer to show off! Underneath that rapture, of course, was pure relief.