The Maples Stories (21 page)

The proceeding was scheduled for early in the day. Picking her up at a quarter after seven, he had found her standing barefoot on the lawn in the circle of their driveway, up to her ankles in mist and dew. She was holding her high-heeled shoes in her hand. The sight made him laugh. Opening the car door, he said, ‘So there
are
deer on the island!’

She was too preoccupied to make sense of his allusion. She asked him, ‘Do you think the judge will mind if I don’t wear stockings?’

‘Keep your legs behind his bench,’ he said. He was feeling fluttery, light-headed. He had scarcely slept, though his
shoulder had not hurt, for a change. She got into the car, bringing with her her shoes and the moist smell of dawn. She had always been an early riser, and he a late one. ‘Thanks for doing this,’ she said, of the ride, adding, ‘I guess.’

‘My pleasure,’ Richard said. As they drove to court, discussing their cars and their children, he marvelled at how light Joan had become; she sat on the side of his vision as light as a feather, her voice tickling his ear, her familiar intonations and emphases thoroughly musical and half unheard, like the patterns of a concerto that sets us to daydreaming. He no longer blamed her: that was the reason for the lightness. All those years, he had blamed her for everything – for the traffic jam in Central Square, for the blasts of noise on the mail boat, for the difference in the levels of their beds. No longer: he had set her adrift from omnipotence. He had set her free, free from fault. She was to him as Gretel to Hänsel, a kindred creature moving beside him down a path while birds behind them ate the bread crumbs.

Richard’s lawyer eyed Joan lugubriously. ‘I understand that, Mrs Maple,’ he said. ‘But perhaps I should have a word in private with my client.’

The lawyers they had chosen were oddly different. Richard’s was a big rumpled Irishman, his beige summer suit baggy and his belly straining his shirt, a melancholic and comforting father-type. Joan’s was small, natty, and flip; he dressed in checks and talked from the side of his mouth, like a racing tout. Twinkling, chipper even at this sleepy hour, he emerged from behind a pillar in the marble temple of justice and led Joan away. Her head, slightly higher than his, tilted to give him her ear; she dimpled, docile. Richard wondered in amazement, Could this sort of man have been, all these years, the secret type of her desire? His own lawyer, breathing heavily, asked him, ‘If the judge does ask for a
specific cause of the breakdown – and I don’t say he will, we’re all sailing uncharted waters here – what will you say?’

‘I don’t know,’ Richard said. He studied the swirl of marble, like a tiny wave breaking, between his shoe tips. ‘We had political differences. She used to make me go on peace marches.’

‘Any physical violence?’

‘Not much. Not enough, maybe. You really think he’ll ask this sort of thing? Is this no-fault or not?’

‘No-fault is a
tabula rasa
in this state. At this point, Dick, it’s what we make of it. I don’t know what he’ll do. We should be prepared.’

‘Well – aside from the politics, we didn’t get along that well sexually.’

The air between them thickened; with his own father, too, sex had been a painful topic. His lawyer’s breathing became grievously audible. ‘So you’d be prepared to say there was personal and emotional incompatibility?’

It seemed profoundly untrue, but Richard nodded. ‘If I have to.’

‘Good enough.’ The lawyer put his big hand on Richard’s arm and squeezed. His closeness, his breathiness, his air of restless urgency and forced cheer, his old-fashioned suit and the folder of papers tucked under his arm like roster sheets all came into focus: he was a coach, and Richard was about to kick the winning field goal, do the high-difficulty dive, strike out the heart of the batting order with the bases already loaded. Go.

They entered the courtroom two by two. The chamber was chaste and empty; the carved trim was painted forest green. The windows gave on an ancient river blackened by industry. Dead judges gazed down from above. The two lawyers conferred, leaving Richard and Joan to stand awkwardly
apart. He made his ‘What now?’ face at her. She made her ‘Beats me’ face back. ‘Oyez, oyez,’ a disembodied voice chanted, and the judge hurried in, smiling, his robes swinging. He was a little sharp-featured man with a polished pink face; his face declared that he was altogether good, and would never die. He stood and nodded at them. He seated himself. The lawyers went forward to confer in whispers. Richard inertly gravitated toward Joan, the only animate object in the room that did not repel him. ‘It’s a Daumier,’ she whispered, of the tableau being enacted before them. The lawyers parted. The judge beckoned. He was so clean his smile squeaked. He showed Richard a piece of paper; it was the affidavit. ‘Is this your signature?’ he asked him.

‘It is,’ Richard said.

‘And do you believe, as this paper states, that your marriage has suffered an irretrievable breakdown?’

‘I do.’

The judge turned his face toward Joan. His voice softened a notch. ‘Is this
your
signature?’

‘It is.’ Her voice was a healing spray, full of tiny rainbows, in the corner of Richard’s eye.

‘And do you believe that your marriage has suffered an irretrievable breakdown?’

A pause. She did not believe that, Richard knew. She said, ‘I do.’

The judge smiled and wished them both good luck. The lawyers sagged with relief, and a torrent of merry legal chitchat – speculations about the future of no-fault, reminiscences of the old days of Alabama quickies – excluded the Maples. Obsolete at their own ceremony, Joan and Richard stepped back from the bench in unison and stood side by side, uncertain of how to turn, until Richard at last remembered what to do; he kissed her.

THE FORMER MAPLES
had been divorced some years before their oldest child, Judith, married and had a baby. She was living with her husband, a free-lance computer programmer and part-time troubadour, on the edge of poverty in Hartford. Joan Maple, now Joan Vanderhaven, told Richard Maple over the phone that she and Andy, her husband, were intending to go down from Boston for the birth, which was to be induced. ‘How ridiculous,’ said Ruth, Richard’s wife. ‘The girl’s over thirty, she has a husband. To have her divorced parents both hovering over her isn’t just silly, it’s cruel. When I had my first baby I was in Hawaii and my mother was in Florida and that’s the way we both wanted it. You need
space
when you’re having a baby. You need
air
, to
breathe.’
Remembering her own, efficiently natural child-births, she began to pant, demonstratively. ‘Let your poor daughter alone. It’s taken her ten years to get over the terrible upbringing you two gave her.’

‘Joan says Judith wants her there. If she wants Joan she must want me. If I let Joan go down there alone with Andy the baby will think Andy’s the grandfather. The kid will get – what’s the word? – imprinted.’

Ruth said, ‘Nobody, not even an hour-old infant, could ever think Andy Vanderhaven is one of your family. You’re all ragamuffins, and Andy’s a fop.’ Richard had long ago grown used to Ruth’s crisp way of seeing things; it was like living in a pop-up book, with no dimension of ambiguity.

But the thought of letting his first grandchild enter the world without him near at hand was painful. Judith had been born in England, and had been tightly swaddled when he first saw her – a compact package with a round red face. She was the first baby he had ever held; he had thought it would be a precarious experience, shot through with fear of dropping something so precious and fragile, but no, in even the smallest infant there was an adhesive force, a something that actively fit your arms and hands, banishing the fear. The hot wobbly head, the wandering eyes like opaque drops of celestial liquid, the squinting little face choleric and muscular with the will to live.
We’re in this together, Dad
, the baby’s body had assured him,
and we’ll both get through it
.

And they had, through diapers and midnight feedings, colic and measles, adolescent tears and fits of silliness, flute lessons and ski lessons, grade school and high school, until at last, ceremoniously attending an entertainment by the graduating seniors, Richard had been startled by how his daughter, one of a leggy troupe of leotarded dancers, had in synchrony with the others struck a conclusive pose and stared unsmiling out at the audience. All their eyebrows were raised inquisitively. They were asking,
What are we?
And the answer, from the silently stunned audience, had become:
Women
. Richard had never before quite so distinctly seen his daughter as a body out in the world, competing, detached from his own. And now her body was splitting, giving birth to another, and he’d be damned if he’d let Joan be there having their grandbaby all to herself.

Driving down Route 86 into the blinding splinters of a sunset, he heard the disc jockey crow, ‘Get your long johns out of the mothballs, Nutmeg Staters, we’re going to flirt with zero tonight!’ It had been a dry January so far, but what little snow had fallen had not melted, because of the cold;
tonight was to be a record-setter. The station played country music. Hartford had always struck him as a pleasantly hick city, a small forest of green-glass skyscrapers on the winding road to New York; when you descended out of the spaghetti of overpasses, there was a touching emptiness, of deserted after-hours streets and of a state capital’s grandiose vacancies. It was a city with nobody in it, just a few flitting shadows, and some heaps of plowed snow. The hospital complex included a parking garage, but he circled the inner-city blocks until he found a free meter. Not yet six o’clock, it was quite dark. Richard hurried through the iron air to the bright lights of the warm hospital spaces. He was the last of this particular extended family to arrive, and the least. A receptionist and her computer directed him to the correct floor, and after he had sat in the waiting room long enough to skim the cream from two issues of
Sports Illustrated
, Joan hurried out to him from some deeper, more intimate chamber of the maternity wing like a harried hostess determined to make every guest, however inconsequential, feel welcome.

She had put on weight with her contentment as Mrs Vanderhaven – Andy evidently didn’t impose the slimming stress of her first marriage – and wore a beltless yellow dress, with small flowers, that seemed old-fashioned, a back-to-nature dress from the Sixties. Her face, broader than he remembered it, was rosy with the event overtaking her – she was becoming a grandmother – and the tropical warmth of the hospital air. ‘We didn’t know if you’d be coming or not,’ she explained.

‘I said I would,’ Richard protested, mildly.

‘We didn’t know if Ruth would let you.’

‘How would she stop me? She thought it was a terrific idea. “Give them all my love,” she said.’

Joan shot him a quick, blue-eyed glance, uncertain, as she
often had been, of how ironical he was being. She seemed in the years since they were married to have lost her eyelashes, and her hair had turned gray above her wide brow. Factually she said, ‘They broke the waters an hour ago, and now we’re just sitting around waiting for the contractions to take hold. Judy is in good spirits, though a little apprehensive.’ This last description seemed to fit Joan as well; she was shy with him. Their telephone conversations, which on the excuse of the children had persisted long into their second marriages, had dwindled these last years; months of silence between them went by now, and he did not know when he had last been as alone with her as he was in this hotly lit waiting room, with its rows of plastic chairs in alternating colors and its yammering television set up near the ceiling. It was the Sunday of the Super Bowl, and the announcers were revving up; even the female members of the news teams were supposed to be excited. Joan had been bending over awkwardly, to look him in the face, with her hands braced on her thighs, and now, perhaps in response to a pang in her back, she suddenly sat down, in the plastic chair next to his. His chair was dirty cream in color, hers scuffed orange. The molded shapes were for narrow people, and Richard and Joan had to edge away to avoid touching rumps.

‘Who wouldn’t be apprehensive?’ he asked. ‘And who is “we”?’ He had taken off his overcoat but was still wearing a tweed sports jacket, and uncomfortably felt the heat of her proximate body.

But Joan seemed to be rapidly relaxing. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Paul, and Paul’s sister – she’s a nurse, as you know, but not at this hospital, but they let her come sit with us, in the pre-delivery room – and Andy and me. And of course Judy and the little stranger.’

‘Some crowd,’ he said. ‘How’s Paul acting?’

His son-in-law, whose blond hair was already thinning in front, wore a pony tail, and had always seemed to Richard insolently tall, as if he had just drawn himself up a few extra inches in a kind of full-body sneer. Richard had never quite known what the word ‘weedy’ meant, applied to a person, but Paul Wysocki had helped him to understand. A weedy person was a tall dry stalk you wanted to pull up and throw away. Richard was surprised the marriage had lasted five years. ‘
Won
derfully,’ Joan said, with defensive emphasis. ‘
Very
tender with Judy, and very confident. He didn’t miss a single birthing class, you know, and is all set to breathe with her. He brought her favorite book of poems, E. E. Cummings, to read to her as a distraction if she needs it.’

‘How do you read E. E. Cummings aloud? All those staggered letters and open spaces.’

‘We heard him himself do it, don’t you remember? The year he gave the Norton Lectures.’

Cummings had been a small, quite bald man in a tuxedo, very precise in manner, reading everything – Wordsworth, Dante, his own prose and poetry – in a fluting voice that never faltered or slipped, up there on the cavernous stage of Sanders Theatre. Richard and Joan had stood together in line in the Cambridge winter to get into the theatre, whose vast neo-Gothic space was murmurous and steaming with student excitement. For an instant he and this plump elderly woman beside him had become a pair of worn binoculars focused on that animated bright-headed homunculus lodged deep in the transparent mass of lost time. He was jointly and privately theirs, fluting Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode, stanza after stanza, while the student audience around them grew restless, wadded in place with hundreds of overcoats.