The Four Temperaments (6 page)

“I think she's lonely, you know,” he had said. “No family and no friends either.”

“The family part I understand,” Ruth said. “But why no friends? Doesn't she have friends in the company?”

“Not really,” said Oscar, looking uncomfortable. “She hasn't had an easy time of it. Anyway, you've done a good deed.”

“A
mitzvah
?” Ruth smiled.

“Yes, a
mitzvah,
” Oscar agreed, and he smiled too.

The morning
of Thanksgiving Day was unseasonably mild and bright. Ruth opened the windows in the dining room and refrigerated the flowers, so they wouldn't wilt too soon. The turkey had been in the oven since dawn; she still had to make the salad, the rolls and the gravy but almost everything else—vegetables, pies, chocolate torte that came from the recipe book Lilli had received when she got married—had been done in advance. She set the table the night before, using her wedding silver, china and crystal. She even bought a new dress—navy crepe, with a V-neck and kick pleats along the bottom. Wearing a big white apron to protect it, she headed for the kitchen. It seemed that in no time at all, the doorbell was ringing and her guests—her family—had arrived.

Ruth's sister, Molly, came in first, dumping her mink coat on the living room sofa. “God, am I hot!” she complained.

“Who wears a fur coat when it's almost sixty degrees out?” said Oscar jovially.

“Who knew? I always wear my fur on Thanksgiving.” Oscar hung the offending garment in the hall closet; Ruth kissed Molly and her niece Gwen; she shook hands with Gwen's roommate.

“Come in, come in!” Oscar loved playing master of ceremonies. The bell rang again, and it was William and Betsy and the cousins Oscar hadn't seen for at least five years. Ginny followed soon after, clutching two bottles of wine that she pressed into Ruth's hands. Even in her distraction, Ruth had to notice how Oscar beamed when he looked at her.

The apartment quickly filled up with voices and laughter and music—Oscar put on a Mozart CD—and the bell rang again. Here, finally, were Gabriel, Penelope and Isobel. “Let me hold her!” Ruth said as soon as she had kissed them all.

“Not now,” said Penelope, arms tight around the baby. “She's overwhelmed by all these people.” Ruth looked into Isobel's clear blue eyes and saw nothing that looked like alarm or confusion. Still, Penelope was her mother, and Ruth knew better than to interfere. So instead of cradling her granddaughter in her arms, she turned to greet Penelope's mother, Caroline, a tall, elegant woman with cheekbones that could have carved the turkey.

It was only when they had all moved inside and were somewhat settled that William said loudly, “So where's Ben?”

“He'll be here,” Ruth said, as she moved briskly around the room, making sure there was a small bowl next to the olives for the pits, arranging the hard candy into a pleasing little mound in its glass dish. “He said he was coming home for Thanksgiving.”

“Yeah, but did he say this Thanksgiving or next year?” William said. Everyone laughed, William and Gabriel loudest of all. Ruth didn't know why Ben had such a bad reputation with his brothers, but then, as if on cue, the bell rang again, and this time, it was Ben. Ruth rushed to the door to hug him. Could it be that he was taller? Look how tanned he was; there were even streaks of blond in his brown hair. She was so busy gazing up at him that it took her a moment to realize he was not alone. There was a woman with him.

“And this is . . .” Oscar, ever the gentleman, said kindly as he came to embrace his boy.

“The newest Mrs. Kornblatt,” Ben announced proudly. “Mom, Dad, I'd like you to meet my wife, Laura.”

Oscar and Ruth looked at each other in astonishment. But there was Ben, holding the hand of this small woman with reddish, curly hair and a constellation of freckles across her face. William started to clap first. Then everyone else in the room joined in.

The story
unfolded over the course of the meal. It seemed that they had met in Delhi, though in fact Laura was from London. She had been visiting the family of an Indian schoolmate during a break when she met Ben. . . . Yes, it was all very sudden; yes, they had surprised the family totally, bowled them over would have been more like it; no, they hadn't told anyone they were getting married. They had just gone and done it, in London, one Monday morning just two weeks ago. But as she watched her youngest boy hold the hand of this girl, now his wife, Ruth felt a sense of maternal completion and fulfillment. She knew how her own mother must have felt when she and Molly were both married: the job was done and now there was someone—husband, wife, the children you hoped would follow—to take your place. Amen.

Between Ben's wonderful news and the delirious pleasure of finally getting to hold Isobel in her arms, Ruth was fairly distracted most of the day. She didn't pay much attention to Oscar or Ginny or any of the other guests either. Instead, she settled on the sofa while Betsy and Penelope cleared the table; her three sons had not been in one room together for at least two years and they had plenty to say. Only at some point it seemed that Gabriel had disappeared and Ben, in the midst of some complicated story he was telling about a night he spent in Calcutta, noticed his absence. “Where did he go?” he asked, looking around. “I want him to hear this.”

“You sit,” Ruth instructed. “I'll find him.” She stood up. Isobel still seemed content to be in her arms and Ruth could hear the voices of Penelope and Betsy in the kitchen. “Come,” she said to Isobel, “let's go see where Daddy is.”

Gabriel wasn't in the dining room or the bedroom. Had he been in the kitchen, Ruth would have heard him. He must have gone to the bathroom. Then she noticed that the door to the guest room was closed and she knew how stuffy that room could get, especially on such a mild day. Without thinking, she reached for the knob and opened the door.

There, wrapped in each other's arms, Gabriel and Ginny stood kissing. And what a kiss: their eyes were closed, their bodies welded together. Because she was so much shorter, Ginny had to rise up on her toes and tilt her head back. So intent were they that they didn't even notice Ruth, who was too shocked to move or to say anything, in the doorway. It was only when Isobel uttered, in her lilting, baby way, some gurgling sound in response to having seen her father that Gabriel finally lifted his face from Ginny's and returned Ruth's horrified stare.

GABRIEL

T
he first
time Gabriel saw Penelope, she was sitting in front of the Avery Library at Columbia University, eating an apple. She had been wearing a rose-colored dress of a lightweight material (in those days, she still wore colors) that left her shoulders and throat bare. As Gabriel approached, he found himself mesmerized by her skin, so pale and beautiful, as if cream swirled through her veins, lending both texture and color to its pigment. Her hair—dark, thick and shining—seemed to gleam against her pallor. Her large, dark eyes appraised him coolly. Gabriel stood there, transfixed. The red, interwoven bricks of the walkway seemed to glow with an unnatural incandescence; the sky grew brighter and more brilliantly blue; the green leaves of the shrubs were animate and electric.

“I have another one,” she said finally.

“Another what?” he said, confused but willing to be drawn in.

“Apple. It's right here.” She reached into her canvas carryall, and handed him the fruit. When he bit into it, he thought he had never tasted anything so delectable. And later, much later, when he had brought her to his apartment on Amsterdam Avenue, removed her clothing and pressed his lips—gently, reverently—to her face, her throat, her soft, smooth belly, he thought the same thing.

Gabriel was studying architecture at Columbia. He knew that he was a disappointment to his father, Oscar, who hoped he would become a musician. “You have the talent,” Oscar had said, many times, when Gabriel was growing up, “I know you do, I can feel it in you.” The talent, maybe, thought Gabriel, but the drive, never. Oscar had been Gabriel's first music teacher, just as he was William's and Ben's. He actually bought Gabriel a half-sized violin—most people rented rather than purchased these tiny instruments—when he was so young that he still sucked his thumb. “Do you really think he's ready?” Ruth had said, stroking Gabriel's hair.

“Do you know how it's held?” Oscar asked, handing Gabriel the violin. Gabriel had seen his father do this hundreds of times; he had heard the sounds that the instrument made. He wanted to please Oscar, so he reached out his arms and held it in the way he had observed.

“He's a natural,” beamed Oscar, and the matter was settled. Every afternoon that he was available, Oscar gave Gabriel a music lesson. On the days when there was no lesson, he was to practice: Ruth saw to that. And at first it seemed to work fine. Gabriel was a shy, serious child who sought to please; pleasing meant holding the violin, and manipulating the bow in just the right way, so that the sounds emitting from it were ones that made Oscar smile rather than frown. It wasn't so hard; he could do it.

It was later that all the battles came. Gabriel resented the practicing, time when he could have been riding his bicycle, or drawing or hanging out in Riverside Park with a joint and his friends. Then William and Ben had to have lessons too. First violin lessons, with Oscar, although later, William settled on the piano—“A lowbrow instrument, but better than nothing,” observed their father—and Ben, the flute. The apartment was filled with music; between the various lessons and practice times of the boys, and Oscar's own practicing, there was scarcely a quiet moment. When there was, Oscar would play one of his records—he had a collection of nearly one thousand albums—on the stereo system that dominated the living room. And if Oscar wasn't practicing or listening to music, he was talking about the superiority of the stringed instruments in general and the violin in particular; his reverence for Bach and his ambivalence about Beethoven. His dissection of some piece of music that he had heard when he was—mercifully—somewhere else. Gabriel longed for silence, silence that he could see and feel as well as hear.

He began to avoid his practicing, not so hard to do when his father wasn't there, as his mother didn't goad him in the same way. “You didn't practice today, did you?” she would say, knowing the answer but feeling obligated to ask, to try.

“Not yet,” he'd tell her. “I'll do it after.”

“But don't you have homework?”

“I did it in study hall,” Gabriel would lie. He could see that she was wavering.

“Oh, all right,” she would say. Gabriel was relieved and grateful in his escape. “See you later,” he would tell her. He could hear Ben's flute from down the hallway; his playing wasn't bad, but Gabriel couldn't stand the sound. He had to get out of there. He found his silences in different places throughout the city: in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he liked to visit the galleries that housed early Renaissance paintings or archaic Greek sculpture. In Central Park, all the way uptown, where his parents distinctly forbade him to go. As time went on, he sought the eloquent silence of buildings, from the great to the ordinary. The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. The New York Public Library. A row of brownstone houses in Brooklyn, the symmetry of their façades as gratifying and alive as faces. These edifices seemed to soothe and console him, in a way that music, mere sound, could not. By the time he was ready for college, all the subterfuge was gone, and he openly defied Oscar. He had made it clear that he would not attend Juilliard, no matter how Oscar tried to bribe him, no matter how many phone calls were made on his behalf. He wanted to go to Columbia, and eventually to study architecture. It was the only way he was going to get any peace.

“You're throwing away your gift,” said Oscar sadly, defeated but still kicking.

“He has other gifts.” This from Ruth, the mediator, the peacemaker.

“That's the most important one, though,” said Oscar.

“Come on, Dad,” said Gabriel. “There's still Willie and Ben. You might make musicians out of them.”

“Your brother William thinks the highest form of musical expression is the Broadway show tune,” said Oscar gloomily. It was true; William's natural facility with the piano turned to popular forms that everyone could sing to. Whenever there was a family gathering, he would inevitably find his way to the polished upright piano in the den and start improvising, letting his fingers roam the keyboard easily.

“Well, what about Ben?” asked Gabriel, not too sympathetic.

“You mean the Pied Piper of Hamelin?” Oscar said. But Gabriel didn't care if his father was disappointed in him, or in his brothers, or in the way that his own career had worked out. He had his own life to live, and it was not going to be such a goddamned noisy one. The handcrafted violin of spruce and flame maple Oscar had purchased and presented to him with such a flourish remained mute, locked in its unassuming black case. After a while, he didn't see it anymore, though he never asked what had become of it.

Once playing the violin was behind him, Gabriel attended Columbia, living first at home, and then finally in a dark but otherwise pleasant apartment on the ground floor of a building on Amsterdam Avenue and 118th Street, the very apartment where he first made love to Penelope.

Although he imagined that he would have some competition when it came to winning Penelope, he was wrong. Despite her astonishing beauty, Penelope was not at all confident or poised; she had little idea of what to do with herself. While a student at Barnard, she changed her major three times: first it was art history, then classics and then, in an abrupt turn away from the Occident, Asian studies. Eventually, she gave up everything, failing to get her degree at all, and was content to orbit around the quiet, steady star of Gabriel's ascension. For ascend he did.

Though he was neither talkative nor charismatic like his father, he nevertheless excelled in his chosen field, impressing first his teachers and later his clients, with the finely trained beam of his vision. He was not radical or iconoclastic in this; rather there was something conservative and even classical about his approach to buildings and the spaces within them. But he seemed to have a way of digesting and reinterpreting the past that was, as a senior architect in the firm where he first went to work put it, harmonious. “Gabriel designs a suite of rooms like he's composing a concerto,” the man said of him, “everything is rhythmic.” Oscar would have liked to hear that, Gabriel thought; then his father could imagine that Gabriel was the musician he had always dreamed of his being, a composer of space and light, dimension and form.

During those years, Penelope moved in with Gabriel, and spent her time cleaning and organizing the apartment. He had always been neat, but Penelope was obsessively, compulsively neat, from the very smallest aspect of household management—spices and foods must be arranged alphabetically in the cupboards, socks lined up evenly in the drawers—to the largest, like the ritual cleaning of windows, walls, rugs and even ceilings. He probably should have realized then that there was something slightly amiss in her focus, that her desire for external order sprang from a deep dread of the chaos that lived inside her. But, at the time, he was dazzled by her loveliness, and her apparent devotion to him. And it was nice to live in a place where the floors were always mopped and waxed, the bedsheets pressed, the windows, for what little light they admitted, sparkling. She placed fresh flowers in the rooms twice a week—never mind that they were always white, this thing about color was starting even then—arranging the blossoms, the petals, the stems, just so. She made their life hers, and it seemed to satisfy her. She accompanied him to the firm's Christmas party, a slim-fitting, scoop-necked velour dress accentuating the impossible whiteness of her neck, the swell of her breasts, and he knew the other men in the firm were envious of the beautiful, attentive woman at his side.

“You'd better marry her,” one of the firm's partners said jokingly. “Or I may beat you to it.” Gabriel just smiled, but something inside him clicked. He and Penelope had lived together for three years; it was time to make a more formal arrangement.

His parents were, of course, delighted. Oscar kissed Penelope on both cheeks, grabbing her hands tightly in his. Ruth wept openly. “I'm so happy for both of you,” she said, wiping her wet eyes with her fingers. “So very happy.” They had little to do with planning the wedding; Penelope's mother, Caroline, handled everything and they were married in the backyard of her big house in Greenwich, Connecticut. Penelope wore a long Victorian dress of a fine, fine cotton she told him was called “lawn” and a crown of gardenias in her upswept hair. Their heavy, sweet scent, as he leaned to kiss her before the rabbi and the minister who jointly officiated, actually made him feel a little light-headed, even nauseated, but he chalked that up to natural wedding-day jitters. The bride was radiant, the families and friends enthralled; the weather spectacular. Everything was perfect; wasn't it?

And for a time after the wedding, he continued to think so. Penelope returned to her cleaning and organizing with a new vigor. She scraped, plastered, sanded and painted—by herself, with no help from him or anyone—the walls of the 118th Street apartment where they still lived. She bought new sheets, pillows, a comforter and towels, mostly in pale shades of ivory, wheat or celadon. She dabbled with ideas for renovations—using river stones to re-cover the bathroom floor, or refacing the kitchen cabinets with hammered aluminum, while her mother urged that they move somewhere else entirely. And then the offer came from the firm in San Francisco. So leaving most of their furniture and other household possessions behind, they headed out west.

Gabriel had
never been to San Francisco before, but when he got there, he was immediately captivated by the lyrical way the streets careened and ascended, the views of the Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge cropping up at odd moments, when he least expected them. He and Penelope moved into a large apartment on the top floor of an elegant, expensive 1930s apartment house in Pacific Heights, thanks to the sizable inheritance she had received when they married.

The building was made of limestone, with intricate metal Art Deco detailing at the top and base. There were steel casement windows that swung out, into the open, unfettered sky. The only thing he didn't like was the persistent rush of traffic from the street below; after living in New York, and on the ground floor besides, he wouldn't have guessed that it would have bothered him so much. Still, he considered the apartment an enviable piece of good fortune and, for a while, it seemed that Penelope felt the same way.

She resumed her decorating schemes, this time on an even grander scale: the walls were hung with textured Japanese rice paper; the floors sanded and bleached a color as pale as the moon. Furniture arrived, ordered from decorator showrooms, and was arranged, rearranged and then shrouded in linen slipcovers of a dozen shades of white. After a while, all the pale tones began to irritate Gabriel.

“I'm tired of all this white. Can't we have some other colors in here?” he asked her peevishly one night, after she had brought home a bunch of ivory silk brocade pillows and arranged them, with careful artlessness, on the couches and chairs. The discarded paper and shopping bags littered the floor until she scooped them up in her arms.