Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (6 page)

“You spend two hours a day commuting,” Meg added.

“I do. So they’ve got to,” Jack said.

“Got to what?” she said, laughing.

“Play chess.” And he laughed, too. “What do you think, Peter?”

“What do I think about what?” Peter hedged.

“About our three hooligans. About the worth of private education. About the country life.” Jack breathed deeply. Generations of farmers and ministers expressed themselves in that pleased inhalation. The house had always been in his family; some ancestor had built it. A century ago he would have farmed the land with his sons and a few hired hands. They would have made a genteel go of it. The boys would have gone to Harvard as a matter of course. Now he had to weary himself every day as a schoolmaster, and his children would have to compete for college places against the grandchildren of longshoremen and Pullman porters. To strengthen them for the fight, Meg drove them to their Cambridge school every morning and home again in the late afternoon. In the interval she worked as a programmer, also in Cambridge.

Peter said, “I think the house is its own reward.”

The stone wall in the garden was reddened by the afternoon sun. The kitchen windows gleamed like water. Roses bloomed with a soft fire—there would be one or two still glowing as late as Thanksgiving, Peter remembered—and zinnias and asters flourished along the path to the door. It was a house to come home to. That the young Wrens were inside watching television seemed not hopeless, just sad. Meg’s modesty and Jack’s busyness perhaps did not perfectly serve their offspring.

“Children tend toward the mean,” Peter suggested.

“The mean and nasty,” Jack said.

“The mean between Jack and me?” Meg said, doubtfully.

“The mean of their own generation,” said Peter, smiling.

“Is that unavoidable?” she said, not smiling.

He didn’t like to drive, didn’t own a car, but if he lived here he could drive the kids to school and back, and Meg could work at home. She was a valued programmer; her company would allow her that privilege. These days any arrangement was possible. And eventually his aunt’s legacy, unexhausted, would go to the children.

I
N THE MORNINGS
the young of Congdon Street went off to school, the bigger ones shepherding the smaller. Even the smallest had pilgrim backpacks. Some mothers walked along behind, not interfering, just watchful. Peter wondered if the women took turns as monitors. The daytime danger was from traffic. Peter, too, kept an eye on the children from his window. Sometimes, out early to buy the paper, he found himself in their midst; a little crowd of small Asians and Central Americans would divide briefly for his sake and then reunite behind him. He felt like a maypole. The children wore every shade of corduroy. How were they faring in the Land of Opportunity? he wondered. The manager of the Cambodian building, N. Gordon, was being brought to court because of his failure to maintain the building properly. The failure was not his fault, his lawyer had countered. The place was overcrowded; these people kept subletting to one another.

Peter went out every day. He now recognized some of the slow-moving white-haired women, and smiled at them. He used the main library downtown. He read a book about Dickens and Sabbatarians and another about Dickens and Jews. Sometimes he met a former colleague or student for lunch. He went to afternoon movies and sat in the back row with his long legs on the seat in front of him. He went to friends’ houses for dinner, or fixed himself healthful meals at home.

T
HE
W
RENS
gave an annual afternoon party on the Sunday after the Game. Meg did the work herself, with some assistance from the family and from Peter. She baked cheddar cheese puffs. She twisted salami into flutes and arranged crudités around a bowl of yogurt. Peter remembered his aunt’s cook’s zealously constructed trifles, each layer less edible than the one before. Meg’s canapés were at least tasty.

That morning Peter stood at the kitchen counter, spreading fish paste onto little squares of pumpernickel and admiring the view out the window. A stand of spruces made him think of Christmas. Beside him, Meg sliced cucumbers. They were both wearing jeans; both had a birch-tree litheness. He might have been her older brother.

The crowd at the party was, as always, varied—local gentry, old friends, coworkers, a pair of ancient female cousins of Jack’s. Also there was a group of parents from the children’s school, including two notables, both Jews: a psychologist who was also a TV commentator, and Geronimus Barron, Peter’s former neighbor. Their wives were not particularly attractive, just assured. A generation ago, Peter reflected, Jewish wives had been well dressed and cultivated and full of leisure. Now they were all practicing medicine. You couldn’t keep up with people like that.

He was popular at this party. People remembered him from year to year. A friend of Meg’s whose husband was leaving her had once wept on his shoulder in the pantry. That couple seemed to have reconciled, he noticed. The Wrens’ dentist fancied himself a devotee of Dickens, although Peter was under the impression that he had read only
Oliver
Twist
. The cousins made much of him. “We’d like to talk to you more often than once in a blue moon.”

“Would be lovely,” he said.

“We’ll have to get Peggy to arrange it.” Peggy?

“Happy families are
not
alike,” someone was saying.

“More to be pitied than censored. She snoops to conquer.” Who was that punster? Oh, the TV psychologist … And somehow Geronimus Barron was at his side. How long had he been standing there?

“It’s nice to see you again, Mr. Loy.”

“Peter,” Peter corrected. “I didn’t hear you come up, Geronimus. You were as quiet as a tiger.”

“Is that what a corporate takeover feels like?” asked one of the cousins.

“I don’t know,” Geronimus said. He had a habit of answering as precisely as possible whatever question had been posed. This gave him an obedient air. “I don’t want to take you over, Mr. Loy—Peter—but I wish you were part of my staff. Margaret says that you’re the last of the lucid thinkers.”

Margaret? Geronimus, hands in pockets, smiled a courteous refusal to the teenager passing a tray of wine. The cousins, as if to make amends for so abstemious a guest, took two glasses each. How old was this quiet tycoon? Peter wondered. Forty? You could put him naked and empty-handed on a desert island, and in five years he’d be chief minister to the native king. Maimonides had risen to court physician in record time … “What else does Margaret say?”

“Peggy never talks much,” said one cousin.

“Still waters run deep,” said the other.

“She and I serve together on the scholarship committee,” Geronimus said, and the talk turned to minority recruitment. Peter had just received the latest bulletin from the boarding school he himself had attended. The school had recently invited two South Bronx boys to study there, and two unhappier faces had never before been immortalized on high-quality vellum. Entrapment, Peter called it. Geronimus listened.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
Meg said that she would drop the children at school before leaving Peter at Harvard Square. Peter was pleased to be part of this family ritual. A curved line of automobiles humped forward slowly. Only one car at a time was allowed to disburden itself. The students getting out of the cars had the ragamuffin look of the rich. Meg wore a ski sweater and did not look rich, just wholesome. “Think of Jack’s long drive every day,” she was saying as they left the school grounds. “It’s no wonder he can’t finish his doctor-ate—he spends all his time on the highway. Sometimes I think we should splurge on a chauffeur. It would give Jack two more hours a day to work on his thesis. He could sit in the backseat with a laptop. Is that mad?”

“On the contrary. It’s innovative. It’s the sort of solution Geronimus Barron would think up.”

“Is it? Jack won’t hear of it.”

“Give him time.” He glanced at her worried profile. “Jack is flexible,” he said. But that was a lie. Jack was rigid. He, Peter, was the flexible one. His was a flexibility achieved late in life, after unhappiness and disappointment, and he was proud of it. Postponed achievements were perhaps the best. Maimonides had married for the first time in late middle age, and had even sired a son … Meg turned toward him with a warm, even a marital, smile. “I wish I could take you all the way to your apartment, but I have an early conference.”

“I have to go to Widener,” he lied again.

She pulled up near one of the Yard gates. Peter opened the door.

“My dear,” he said.

“
My
dear,” she said, charmingly. She waited for him to get out and slam the door. Then she drove away.

O
NE NIGHT IN
D
ECEMBER
there was a fire in the Cambodian building. Some woman had created a makeshift barbecue on her kitchen floor because the stove no longer worked or the gas had been shut off. Not much damage resulted, and nobody was forced to relocate, but for an hour all of the building’s inhabitants stood in the street like the little band of refugees they were. When the firemen announced that it was safe to reenter the building, they filed in. Peter, watching from his window, would have liked to invite some of them for a cup of tea, but which ones? He wished Meg were beside him in her quilted robe.

I
T WAS THE
F
RIDAY NIGHT
before Christmas. Weak electric candles burned in some windows, and the hopeful young couple with the matching briefcases had installed a tree in their living room, but they were in Stowe, at the mountain resort, and the tree’s lights were out. The rest of the street was unfestive. Peter’s apartment, the exception, was glowing—he loved Friday nights; even though he no longer had a job he still felt an end-of-the-week release—but the shivering presence of Jack Wren was robbing his place of warmth. The man had stayed late at school to make sure everything was in order before vacation, like a proper principal, and then he had driven straight into Boston with all the Friday-night traffic, straight to Peter. He had arrived at seven o’clock. It was now after eight. Peter kept idiotically offering him food. Jack kept refusing. He would go home soon, he kept saying. He and Meg had not separated yet. They had not told the children. They were still man and wife. Meg was expecting him. “It’s unbelievable,” he said.

Not to mention unseemly, Peter thought. Also untrustworthy. And what was Geronimus Barron planning to do about his own wife? But he knew the answer to that question. Mrs. Barron—properly, Dr. Barron—was a distinguished immunologist; plenty of scientists were no doubt eager to keep her company. Geronimus, too, seemed to like her. Theirs had been a good marriage, Peter realized. They would part as friends.

But what about the Wren children? he asked himself, rattled. How would they fare on the inevitable vacation when they were forced to share a villa or a yacht—or, more likely, a tent and a latrine—with the overachieving Barron kids? Well, maybe the Barron children, too, tended toward the mean. Jews were subject to the same Mendelian laws as everybody else, Peter reasoned. Jews were …

Jack said, “They take our jobs, our money, our positions at schools. They take over our towns. Now they are taking our women.”

“Not our houses,” Peter murmured. “Not all our houses.”

“Meg never liked our house.”

“No, Jack. Maybe she says that now, but—”

“She always said it.” Jack pressed his nose against the window like one of his sons. “She would have preferred to live in some split-level in the boonies and send the kids to public school. Now I wish we’d done that. She wouldn’t have met any Geronimus Barron at the Nothingsville PTA.”

Peter had to agree. Which proved, he supposed, that Meg and Geronimus had been destined for each other. She had once told him that she wasn’t meant to be gentry; that she wasn’t aristocratic, just simple; and that, despite her ease with computers, she wasn’t particularly bright. Nor was she ambitious. They had been alone under the apple tree with her sleeping daughter. When he opened his mouth to argue with this unexpected and certainly inaccurate disclosure, she put her finger over his lips. “Just an ordinary prairie girl,” she whispered. He remembered now the blinding beauty of her pale, freckled face and her blue eyes, and he understood that what she felt for Geronimus was a prairie love, irresistible as the wind.

He moved to Jack’s side and put an arm around the younger man. In the supportive embrace, Jack held himself straighter.

“You’ll never get over her,” Peter said, “but the rage will ease, and the sorrow.”

“Yes,” Jack said. Peter wondered without much interest who would marry Jack. Some nice woman. She would appreciate the house but would not realize that its furnishings included a retired teacher with a bee in his bonnet about Dickens and Maimonides. Peter would be invited to visit perhaps once a year. As for Geronimus and Meg, they would live in a penthouse overlooking the redeveloped harbor. A caterer would take charge of their hors d’oeuvres. He hoped they would keep him on their party list.

Along the sidewalk below hurried a large man and a tarty-looking woman. On the other side of the street two young men walked, arguing. Though they had left their bookbags at home, their beards and their parkas identified them as law students. They would be gone after commencement, Peter predicted; they would decamp for Charlestown or the South End. The hopeful young couple, discovering themselves pregnant, would sell their folly and flee to a western suburb. The students’ places, the couple’s house, would be taken by other people. Homes allowed themselves to be commandeered by whoever came along. Not like cats; cats remain aloof. Not like dogs; dogs remain loyal. Like women, he made himself think, willing misogyny to invade him, to settle in, so that in another few years everybody would assume he had been in its possession forever.