The Bleeding Heart (22 page)

“Then maybe you’d have had six or seven children to care for. A real communal family,” Dolores said drily.

“Yes. They had this really great old house, lots of little rooms full of books. Books everywhere. And records. He must have had a thousand records. There were back staircases and little back bedrooms. Nothing like
our
house. And I’d go and have dinner there and then he and I would go into the living room and he’d play me Bartók or Hindemith, or somebody else I’d never heard of, while she put the kids to bed, and I was enthralled, but I was uneasy, I wondered what she was thinking, why she wasn’t jealous…. She used to look at me with a certain expression in her eyes. I thought it was pity, and I hated her for it. I thought she was saying: yes, I know you think he’s God, but I have him, he belongs to me. Now I’m not so sure….”

Vickie sat back and was quiet for a moment,

“When I found out I was pregnant, he was furious with me. He said it was my responsibility to take care of things like that and to teach me a lesson, he wasn’t even going to help me pay for an abortion. And I cringed, I apologized, I insisted I wasn’t asking for money, if he’d only go with me. But he wouldn’t. I got the money together, that wasn’t a problem, but I had to go alone, and that felt awful. And after that, I was just … well,” her eyes filled with tears, “I was
craven
, Dolores! He was annoyed with me, and I was terrified of losing him. And I was about to get my degree, and I just … I was like a slave. I’d do anything he said, I dangled on a string he didn’t even seem to want to bother to pick up. I got the job in Boston, and I said I’d keep a weekend place near him, so I could still see him, he said that was ridiculous, I had my whole life before me. I found out later he was already involved with another grad student, a really brilliant girl. And then I understood his wife’s eyes.” She turned and blew her nose.

“Looking back, the thing is … it was so humiliating! I can’t imagine I’d ever do a thing like that again. But still,” she looked imploringly at Dolores, “I think I’m still in love with him. Even though I know what he is. Or, I’m not in love with him, but with what I thought he was. Which I know now he isn’t. But which I go on feeling he is. Or that someone is. Or that, if someone isn’t, I can’t bear to go on living!” She turned her head swiftly again, but Dolores heard her cries. “Am I going to go on like this all my life?” Thick voice, nasal. “Wanting something that doesn’t exist?”

Victor came striding back into the room, pleased with himself, glowing. “Well, don’t ever say your father isn’t a miracle worker! Getting a hotel room over Christmas with no advance warning at all! Come on, ladies! Let’s go! Fast, before they change their minds. Besides: I’m starving.”

V
ICKIE’S PRESENCE—AND HER
confidences—totally changed their mix. Dolores found herself talking to Vickie more than to Victor, being solicitous of the young woman, pointing things out to her, touching her hand in silent messages of sympathy, support, affection. And although Victor too pointed out certain things to Vickie, and teased her benevolently, and although it was his arm she clung to as the three of them tramped the streets, increasingly it was Victor who was left out, as if the two women had something between them, something he had not been initiated into.

As was indeed the case.

Is this how it begins, Dolores wondered, mothers and children against the fathers? She didn’t like it. After all, she wasn’t the mother. When Victor went to pee one lunchtime, Dolores suggested to Vickie that she tell her father her story.

“Oh, I couldn’t. He’d be horrified. He’d go off and shout about killing the bastard or something. I know he would.”

“I don’t think so,” Dolores demurred gently. She could not be sure she knew the real Victor better than his daughter did. “Look, tonight, why don’t I stay home and the two of you go out to dinner alone, and you talk to him?”

“On Christmas Eve? I wouldn’t do that to you, Dolores. But thanks.” Vickie eyed her even more gently, trustingly.

Which made it all the harder for Dolores to discover that she was jealous of Vickie’s presence. Even though
she
was the one giving Vickie her main attention. It made no logical sense, but there it was. She wanted Victor all to herself, and all of herself for him: with no distractions. She felt abashed, wry: so this is what it’s like, jealousy.

But it all balanced out on Christmas Eve, when they decided to have a banquet in, and went to Harrod’s and bought pâté and cheeses and wine and a stuffed goose and cakes. And ate before the electric fire, and went out near midnight, to hear a choir sing in a nearby church. And next morning—after all three had secretively and furiously rushed around buying gifts for the others—Victor’s original presents for Vickie having been mailed to the States, Dolores not having bought one for Vickie, nor Vickie for her—with Christmas music on the BBC, and the electric fire warming them, and good coffee and pastries, they unwrapped hurriedly the lavishly wrapped boxes. “I made out like a bandit!” Vickie said. “Double presents!”

Dolores and Victor had had their own private Christmas the night before, after Vickie returned to her hotel, with champagne and lots of other warming things.

And Vickie was sensitive, under that bland and giggly exterior. At least, so Dolores concluded when she came tramping into the apartment late in the afternoon the day after Christmas and announced that guess what, she’d been walking down the Strand past Charing Cross and who should she meet but Toad and Vee and Boo and Ram and they were all going to fly to Paris and if Victor would “lend” her the money, she’d like to go with them, it sounded great, didn’t it?

“Damn it, she conned me,” Victor said after she’d left. “She did, that kid,” he chuckled. “It’s the old quarter routine they used to pull in the comic strips. You know, boy sits on the—what did they call them then—the davenport! waiting for girl and kid sister or brother comes slithering around offering privacy for a dime. Or a quarter. And gets it, of course.”

Dolores eyed him reproachfully. “That’s one way of looking at it.”

“There’s another?”

“You might consider it this way: the poor kid comes ‘bopping’ in, as she puts it, expecting a nice week with Daddy, seeing the sights of London, and doing the poor old man a favor, keeping him company over Christmas. And finds herself an intruder, and broke to boot. She knows that as long as she stays, both of us will feel obligated to spend our time with her. She knows I’m visiting you for the week, and that that is special,
our
holiday. What is she to do? I thought she carried it off bravely. I only hope there really are a Toad and Vee and Boo and Ram,” she concluded, laughing.

Victor gazed at her without smiling, thoughtfully. “It could be,” he said finally. Then, vigorously, hugging her, “But I am damned glad to have you back! It’s, as Vickie would say, something else to find myself jealous of my own daughter!”

“Well, if it’s any consolation to you, I was jealous too. Poor Vickie: she must have felt that.”

“Well, I don’t know.” He leaned back comfortably, his arm around Dolores’s shoulders. “Sometimes I get to feel there’s some kind of conspiracy among women.”

“There is, of course,” she smiled. “Rather like the one among men.”

“What did it?” He was smiling at her, but there was something hard in his smile. “What brought the two of you together so fast?”

She shrugged. “You saw. Just our experience of being women in a male world. And talking about feelings, I suppose.”

“No. There’s something you’re not telling me. There was something between you, something more….” He was still smiling, but the smile was fixed, there was an edge to it that frightened Dolores a little. She thought she would not like to be an employee of his, facing a smile like that.

“There is something I’m not telling you, but I can’t.”

His whole body seemed to rigidity, although he barely moved.

“Why?”

“It’s Vickie’s story. Her … secret, I guess. Shell tell you, I know she will. She wants to, but I think she’s a little intimidated by you.”

His muscles loosened. “Oh,” Then tensed again. “She’s not pregnant?”

She laughed. “Not that I know of.”

He sat back again, looking grouchy. “Some man, I suppose.”

“I suppose.”

“You
know!
It’s not right.
I
’m her father! What did the bastard do?”

“How can you be so sure he’s a bastard?”

“All men are bastards.”

“That’s what Anthony used to say, too.”

“Well, it’s true.”

“Why should any of us get involved with you then?”

“I didn’t mean
me
, Dolores!” And took her in his arms. Later, he said, “Don’t go back.”

“To Oxford? I have to.”

“No you don’t. You could just as well work here. At the museum.”

She considered. It had been a wonderful two weeks. She tried to remember her objections.

“I couldn’t answer the telephone. If one of my kids needed me …”

“Christ, we’ll get another phone!”

“And where will you hide me when visiting eminences descend who aren’t your daughter? And what will you do with me when you have to go to Oxford? Take me to the Randolph with you?” A little nasty tone in that last. He heard it. An eyelash flickered, or a hair in his nose. Something.

“If another eminence descends, I’ll introduce you. I’ll invite you to dinner with us. Boy, will you be sorry!”

She smiled, took his hand. “Sweetheart, I think it’s better if I have my own place. Where I don’t ever have to hide from anybody. A place to go if I happen to get mad at you.”

“Are you planning to get mad at me?”

“No, but it is conceivable. I have felt anger at you.”

“When?”

But she could not remember. She searched her mind. “Well, that first time, when you left….”

He dismissed that. “That was early. I didn’t know you then.”

“And you do now.”

He gave her a look that said: don’t be so uppity. I realize of course that you are immeasurably mysterious. But I know you well enough for all that.

“I have to have my own place.”

He sighed.

“It’s better this way. Really.”

“Better for whom?”

“For both of us. For
us
.”

“Somehow that sounds suspiciously like a parent telling a kid he’s spanking him for his own good.”

“But it stands to reason, doesn’t it? that if
I’m
happier, we’ll be happier?”

“Umm. And
that
sounds suspiciously like what I used to tell Edith when I wanted my own way.”

D
OLORES WENT BACK TO
Oxford. The sun rose late and set early; the sky looked grey and about-to-rain most of the time; and not a snowdrop appeared, poking its white fresh head above the tarnished grass, until the very end of January. But between Victor and Dolores, rainbows shimmered. They went cycling and for tramps through the woods; they ate out or in; they went to hear music in the Oxford chapels; they sat before the fire, holding hands; they talked; they made love. Their lips stayed wine for each other.

She was inclined to glint I-told-you-so at him; he was inclined to suggest that more of a good thing could only be better. But, he said, it certainly wasn’t drab. Drabness and boredom were the two great curses, he said. Coming home night after night to the same old things—same old food, same old conversation, same old questions. Same kids having the same old squabbles, same old gossip about the same old neighbors, same TV blaring the same vapidities.

Nothing was worse than drabness and boredom, Victor said.

Dolores thought about worse things: death camps; gulags; torture cells in Iran Chile Brazil the Philippines Argentina Cambodia. Identification passes and black encampments in South Africa Rhodesia.

Boredom and drabness, Victor said, were the things he dreaded most.

Dolores tried to think what she dreaded most. Not death, not pain, bad as those were, because there was no point in dreading them, they were inevitable. Not natural catastrophe, bad as it was, because there was no point in dreading it since it was unpredictable. She knew what she dreaded most: the complete take-over of the world by a mentality she privately called Nazi. No relation to any political party in any country; found everywhere, indigenous on planet earth. And gaining every day.

The Nazis, after all, were only the epitome, the egregious example in her own lifetime of a common enough tendency, found on your own block, found maybe in your own house. Started from the belief that some people were inherently better than others, were by birth entitled to what they called rights, but were really privileges not extended to others. Color them legitimate. The “in” group then made nice neat (or not so neat) demarcations among the others: some people were more entitled to respect by the legitimates than others. Color most of them white, and all of them male. There were even a few white Jews and some almost white niggers, if you looked hard. Not for some Nazis, of course. Some Nazis were more fastidious.

But everybody, and in time, everything, was ranked, And even the legitimates in one place became less so in another. The department head strode around like a martinet until he went up in the elevator to the top floor and met the president, and quavered. And the man on the assembly line had to take all kinds of shit from his foreman, but when he was with his buddies in the bowling alley, he was king of the hill. But all men had one unfailing area where they were legitimate, and that was with their women. Maybe with all women. Used to be, social class kept some men from daring to approach some women, but not anymore. Democracy had made all women open to anything from all men.

And the way you run this shop is through the brain: everybody is convinced that the people who say they are legitimate
are
legitimate. So everybody runs in fear, abject to authority. And everybody who has any hope at all aims for the top floor where the chairman lives. The chairman has no face and no body either. He has a uniform with a blank on top of it and he lives always at the tops of high buildings, or in fortresses on islands in warm waters. He goes up and down in private elevators and never encounters anything unfriendly, anything untamed—not people or weather or a hostile editorial. His underlings make sure of this.